WarSclerotic

Will Israel Save Hamas and Fatah Again? Gatestone Institute, Shoshana Bryen, April 29, 2014

(How about the United States? — DM)

A better system was the one both sides had before the U.S. intervened. Both were working on day-to-day security issues and employment. That is where SodaStream came from. The Israeli leadership figured that if the next generation of Palestinians had a stake in the system, they would negotiate more seriously. The Palestinian leadership figured that if people were eating, they would not overthrow the current government. It was working before the U.S. demanded an end to the conflict.

It’s an old song, and they haven’t even gotten to the chorus. Hamas and Fatah have not “reconciled.” They appear to have come close to agreeing that they will hold talks to create a “unity government.” After the government is created, there will be talks about elections, and only after that will there be talks about the distribution of portfolios under unified leadership. According to a Fatah spokesman, an interim government could be finalized in the next five weeks, with elections possible by early 2015.

This has been tried five times before. The failure of each attempt appears linked to the circumstance that the only principle they share is the belief that the establishment of Israel in 1948 was a mistake by the international community that needs rectification. In all other ways, they are rivals, not partners.

Ismail Haniyeh (center) speaks at the signing ceremony for the Hamas-Fatah unity agreement. (Image source: Screenshot of AlJazeera video

But in a fit of wholly unwarranted optimism, let us say that this time Hamas (religious, kleptocratic, Iranian-supported, openly bloodthirsty) and Fatah (secular, kleptocratic, U.S. and EU-supported, and formally committed to diplomacy while stoking the flames of raw anti-Semitism in schools and Palestinian media) actually do figure out how to divide the spoils of the West Bank and Gaza.

That is when the problems begin.

U.S. demands of the Palestinians were, essentially two — the requirement that the Palestinians explicitly accept Israel as a Jewish state is not new, it was a clarification of the original language of the 1947 UN Partition of Palestine into an “Arab State” and a “Jewish State.” Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah were asked:

• To concede sovereignty over their part of the larger Arab/Moslem patrimony to the Jews and — perhaps more important — to agree that Palestinian national aspirations would be forever satisfied with a split rump state squeezed in between a hostile Israel and an even more hostile Jordan; and
• To concede that Palestinians who left the areas that became Israel in 1948 (and their descendants) would accept citizenship in the abovementioned rump state instead of having what they believe is their original property restored as promised by the Palestinian leadership. That the leadership had no authority to make such a promise is irrelevant to those who want to believe it, and to those who use it as “code” for destroying Israel.

Abbas could agree to neither — and what he could not do, Hamas certainly cannot do. So either Abbas moves Fatah closer to Hamas and abandons its American and European political and financial backers, or Hamas moves closer to Fatah, abandoning its Charter and its Iranian allies. Considering that each side has an army (Fatah’s is U.S. trained; Hamas’s is Iranian trained) and that there has been no discussion about who will be responsible for security either in the West Bank or Gaza under a “unity government,” a repeat of the 2007 short and brutal Palestinian civil war is a distinct possibility. “Peace” is not a distinct possibility.

The United States and the Europeans claim to be unhappy with the new state of affairs, but the proposal by Rep. Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) and Rep. Ted Deutsch (D-FL) to cut off aid under the Palestinian Terrorism Act was not well-received by the State Department. Secretary of State Kerry said Israeli and Palestinian leaders needed to be willing to make compromises to keep the negotiations alive — as if it was Israel that had joined forces with a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. Spokesman Jen Psaki said, “Well, obviously, there would be implications. I don’t have those all in front of me … but what we’re going to watch and see here is what happens over the coming hours and days to see what steps are taken by the Palestinians.”

And watch what they do with their money.

The total Palestinian Authority [PA] budget for 2014 is planned to be $4.3 billion with a deficit of $1.2 billion. Income from taxes and other fees is estimated at $2.7 billion and another $1.6 billion will come in the form of foreign aid. That would be an expectation of almost 33% of the budget coming in the form of aid, and a deficit planned to be 28% of spending. (The U.S. budget deficit, by comparison was 8.7% of GDP in 2011, and it has fallen with the effects of sequestration and other decisions.)

Where does it come from and where does it go?

In January, the Administration announced that, linked to the “peace process,” American aid to the PA — not including security assistance of approximately $100 million annually — would be increased from $426 million in 2013 to $440 million in 2014. The Europeans, the largest financial backers of the Palestinian Authority, have provided more than $7 billion since 1994. Interestingly, although all other EU aid is tied both to the human rights record and transparency of the recipient, the PA faces no such restraints.

Nearly half of the budget will pay salaries — a 4.9% increase over last year (this may come as a surprise to European government employees who are still in the throes of austerity budgeting). In addition, according to EU auditors in December, the EU is paying salaries for approximately 61,000 civil servants and members of the security forces who stopped reporting for work after the 2007 civil war. In one office, they found 90 out of the 125 staff members absent.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the PA allocates a significant portion of its budget to salaries for Palestinians convicted of terrorism by Israel. These salaries are up to five times higher than the average salary in the West Bank. According to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in 2012 the PA’s payments to convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons and to the families of deceased terrorists (including suicide bombers) together accounted for more than 16% of the annual foreign donations and grants to the budget of the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian minister for prisoners’ affairs announced that [approximately $41 million] would be allocated to current or former prisoners in 2014.

It other words, the Palestinians use an astonishing amount of foreign money to bribe and coerce the potentially recalcitrant.

Despite Palestinian corruption, abuse and support for terrorism, Israel has been unwilling to see Palestinian institutions collapse. While the Palestinians are nominally responsible for social services, Israel has ensured that there is no widespread hunger, disease, or power outages. The examples are legion – at the height of the so-called “second intifada,” when Palestinians were blowing up buses in the middle of cities and shooting civilians, Israel continued to coordinate food aid through a variety of NGOs. In 2012, to help the PA solve its financial crisis, Israel sought $1 billion in loans from the International Monetary Fund, intending to transfer the money to the PA. The IMF rejected the proposal because it feared setting a precedent of making IMF money available to non-state entities even through a state sponsor. Israel has also taken up much of the slack in supporting Hamas with gasoline and electricity since Egypt has been bombing and closing the Sinai tunnels. Israeli medical care has always been available to Palestinians.

Israel evidently believes a) it has a humanitarian obligation regarding Palestinian civilians; b) that should the institutions collapse, so will foreign aid to the Palestinians, leaving Israel with the entire bill for Palestinian social services; and c) at some point, there should be peace with the Palestinians, who will need a capable government to ensure the terms of whatever agreement is reached.

The announcement of “reconciliation” may actually be an attempt to form a united front. Or more likely, it could be a mechanism for Abbas to end negotiations that cannot succeed. If that is so, it could serve as a great clarifying moment in which Israel comes to see that perpetuating the fraud of a competent Palestinian government is more of a losing proposition for Israel than for its adversaries. Perpetuating the fraud of a competent Palestinian government carries no chance of a negotiated peace. There will always be a John Kerry who says the Israelis have to do more, therefore Israel will always be subject to the disapproval of those who expect Israel alone to fix the problem.

A better system was the one that both sides had before the U.S. Administration intervened with its pipe-dreams. Both were working on day-to-day security issues and employment. That is where SodaStream came from. The Israeli leadership figured that if the next generation of Palestinians had a stake in the system, they would negotiate more seriously. The Palestinian leadership figured that if people were eating, they would not overthrow the current government. It was working until the U.S. demanded an end to the conflict.

US vowed support for Israel on talks with Palestinian unity government, source claims, Ynet News, April 29, 2014

(Did the commitment have an expiration date? — DM)

Israeli official tells NYT that White House gave ‘specific commitment’ to back Israeli refusal to talk to PA government that includes Hamas.

Israel has received “a specific commitment from the American administration” that it supports Jerusalem’s vehement opposition to peace talks with any Palestinian government that includes Hamas, the New York Times on Monday quoted an Israeli official as saying.

The official told the Times that the commitment had been given to Israel during US President Barack Obama’s first term, and that it had been given once more following his re-election in 2012.

A senior State Department official refused comment to the Times, saying the administration was “not going to reveal the details of private conversations.”

The US, which has expressed disappointment at Fatah and Hamas’s announcement last week of reconciliation and the intention to form a unity government, said the new government would have to adhere to the same three principles as Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas’s current government: a commitment to non-violence, recognition of the State of Israel and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations between Israel and the Palestinians.

While Hamas is willing to accept a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, it has vowed to never recognize Israel. Recognition, a Hamas official said, would be between two states.

“You don’t need organizations to recognize Israel. It’s enough that the Palestinian Liberation Organization – the representative of the Palestinian people – recognizes the State of Israel. Besides, (Israel) has yet to recognize the rights and borders of a Palestinian state,” Hamas’ deputy foreign minister Ghazi Hamad told Ynet on Sunday.

As for the condition to adhere to non-violence, Hamad said the decision on whether or not to continue the armed resistance against Israel has yet to be made.

“We will discuss this – among other issues – at the negotiations between Fatah and Hamas,” Hamad noted

Israeli envoy in US: Iran doesn’t need a nuclear program | The Times of Israel.

Ron Dermer warns that world powers are on the verge of a bad deal with Tehran, says settlements aren’t main obstacle to peace

By Rebecca Shimoni Stoil April 28, 2014, 11:50 pm

US lawmakers lambaste Kerry over ‘apartheid’ remarks | The Times of Israel.

Sen. Ted Cruz calls for secretary of state’s resignation in wake of comments saying Israel risks following path of South Africa

By Matthew Lee April 29, 2014, 10:56 am

US Secretary of State John Kerry (photo credit: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Israel Hayom | Promoting propaganda.

Ruthie Blum

Israel Hayom | Kerry backtracks on apartheid comment following criticism.

Secret US-Hizballah talks. Washington plans to include Lebanon, Syria deals in Iran nuclear pact.

US in secret talks with Hassan Nasrallah

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’ initiation of a unity pact with the Hamas extremists last week did not come out of the blue. It was prompted by the direct contacts the Obama administration has secretly established with the Lebanese Hizballah. Abbas reasoned that if Washington can start a dialogue with a terrorist organization, so too can his own PLO and Fatah.

debkafile’s Washington sources report that the Obama administration appears to have carried over to Lebanon the doctrine set out by the late Richard Holbrooke for Afghanistan, whereby dialogue with Taliban should be made the centerpiece of Washington’s strategy for US troop withdrawal. Holbrooke’s influence on Secretary of State John Kerry dated back to his run for the presidency in 2004.

In Lebanese terms, Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah has become the equivalent of Taliban’s Mullah Mohammad. Hizballah has scored high in the Syrian war. Its military intervention on the side of Bashar Assad in the last year is credited with turning the Syrian army’s fortunes around from near defeat in 2013 to partial triumph in key areas of Syria this year. Nasrallah is able to boast that his movement’s commitment to the Syrian conflict is its central mission and will remain so until rebel and al Qaeda forces are finally vanquished.

What the Hizballah leader is trying to put across, in terms of the Holbrooke doctrine, is that like Mullah Omar in Afghanistan, he, Nasrallah, holds the key to resolving the Syrian civil war.

The Obama administration bought this premise and decided to apply it to broadening the rapidly progressing dialogue with Tehran to related areas. The plan developed in Washington was to seize the momentum of the nuclear track and ride it to a broad US-Iranian understanding that embraces a comprehensive nuclear accord with Tehran as well as understandings for resolving the Syrian and Lebanese questions.

Administration officials figure that Nasrallah heeds no one but the ayatollahs in Tehran. He may talk big but he knows that his fate is in the hands of his Iranian masters. If Iran decides it is time for him to go, it will be curtains for him. His involvement in the Syrian war is considered to be contingent on the strategic decisions of Iran’s leaders. (He was a lot less confident in the winter of 2013 when Hizballah’s home bases were being smashed in lethal suicide bombings.)

Iran also determines which weapons are supplied to the Hizballah units fighting in Syria, in which sectors they fight and how to respond to his pleas for reinforcements.

In Washington’s view, Hizballah’s involvement in the Syrian war has increased its leader’s dependence on Tehran. He accordingly has little room for maneuver in contacts with US representatives and if he turns difficult, they are sure they can turn to Tehran to force him in line.

It is also believed in administration circles that the secret Saudi exchanges with Tehran (first revealed by DEBKA Weekly) will eventually produce Riyadh’s acceptance of Hizballah as a dominant factor in Syria and Lebanon.

However, many Middle East experts find the US take on Hizballah to be naïve and simplistic and strongly doubt that the path it has chosen will bring Nasrallah – or Tehran – around to serving America’s will or purposes. They draw a parallel with the underlying US assumptions which ultimately led the Palestinians-Israeli talks off track.

But expectations of the Hizballah track are high and strongly guide the actions of President Obama, John Kerry, National Security Advisor Susan Rice and CIA Director John Brennan. And so, in early March, the first secret rendezvous took place in Cyprus between CIA officers and Hizballah intelligence and security operatives.

According to a number of Mid East intelligence sources, two such meetings have since been conducted and initial US-Hizballah understandings reached relating to the volatile situations in Syria and Lebanon.

Our intelligence sources add that US Ambassador to Beirut David Hale has been in charge of preparing these meetings and implementing the understandings reached.

Our World: John Kerry’s Jewish best friends | JPost | Israel News.

By CAROLINE B. GLICK

04/29/2014 09:41

John Kerry’s recent use of the term “Apartheid” in reference to Israel’s future was an anti-Semitic act.

Anti-Semitism is not a simple bigotry. It is a complex neurosis. It involves assigning malign intent to Jews where none exists on the one hand, and rejecting reason as a basis for understanding the world and operating within it on the other hand.

John Kerry’s recent use of the term “Apartheid” in reference to Israel’s future was an anti-Semitic act.

In remarks before the Trilateral Commission a few days after PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas signed a unity deal with the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror groups, Kerry said that if Israel doesn’t cut a deal with the Palestinians soon, it will either cease to be a Jewish state or it will become “an apartheid state.”

Leave aside the fact that Kerry’s scenarios are based on phony demographic data. As I demonstrate in my book The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, Israel will maintain a strong and growing Jewish majority in a “unitary state” that includes the territory within the 1949 armistice lines and Judea and Samaria. But even if Kerry’s fictional data were correct, the only “Apartheid state” that has any chance of emerging is the Palestinian state that Kerry claims Israel’s survival depends on. The Palestinians demand that the territory that would comprise their state must be ethnically cleansed of all Jewish presence before they will agree to accept sovereign responsibility for it.

In other words, the future leaders of that state – from the PLO, Hamas and Islamic Jihad alike — are so imbued with genocidal Jew hatred that they insist that all 650,000 Jews living in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria must be forcibly ejected from their homes. These Jewish towns, cities and neighborhoods must all be emptied before the Palestinians whose cause Kerry so wildly champions will even agree to set up their Apartheid state.

According to the 1998 Rome Statute, Apartheid is a crime of intent, not of outcome. It is the malign intent of the Palestinians –across their political and ideological spectrum — to found a state predicated on anti-Jewish bigotry and ethnic cleansing. In stark contrast, no potential Israeli leader or faction has any intention of basing national policies on racial subjugation in any form.

By ignoring the fact that every Palestinian leader views Jews as a contaminant that must be blotted out from the territory the Palestinians seek to control, (before they will even agree to accept sovereign responsibility for it), while attributing to Jews malicious intent towards the Palestinians that no Israeli Jewish politician with a chance of leading the country harbors, Kerry is adopting a full-throated and comprehensive anti-Semitic position.

It is both untethered from reason and libelous of Jews.

Speaking to the Daily Beast about Kerry’s remarks on Sunday, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki was quick to use the “some of his best friends are Jewish,” defense.

In her words, “Secretary Kerry, like Justice Minister [Tzipi] Livni, and previous Israeli Prime Ministers [Ehud] Olmert and [Ehud] Barak, was reiterating why there’s no such thing as a one-state solution if you believe, as he does, in the principle of a Jewish state. He was talking about the kind of future Israel wants.”

So in order to justify his own anti-Semitism – and sell it to the American Jewish community – Kerry is engaging in vulgar partisan interference in the internal politics of another country. Indeed, Kerry went so far as to hint that if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is forced from power, and Kerry’s Jewish best friends replace him, then things will be wonderful.  In his words, if “there is a change of government or a change of heart, something will happen.” By inserting himself directly into the Israeli political arena, Kerry is working from his mediator Martin Indyk’s playbook.

Since his tenure as US ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration, Indyk has played fast and dirty in Israeli politics, actively recruiting Israelis to influence Israeli public opinion to favor the Left while castigating non-leftist politicians and regular Israeli citizens as evil, stupid and destructive.

Livni, Olmert, Barak and others probably don’t share Kerry’s anti-Semitic sensitivities. Although their behavior enables foreigners like Kerry to embrace anti-Semitic positions, their actions are most likely informed by their egotistical obsessions with power. Livni, Olmert and Barak demonize their political opponents because the facts do not support their policies. The only card they have to play is the politics of personal destruction. And so they use it over and over again.

This worked in the past. That is why Olmert and Barak were able to form coalition governments. But the cumulative effects of the Palestinian terror war that began after Israel offered the PLO statehood at Camp David in 2000, the failure of the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, and the 2006 war with Lebanon have brought about a situation where the Israeli public is no longer willing to buy what the Left is selling.

Realizing this, Barak, Livni and others have based their claim to political power on their favored status in the US. In Netanyahu’s previous government, Barak parlayed the support he received from the Obama administration into his senior position as Defense Minister. Today, Livni’s position as Justice Minister and chief negotiator with the PLO owes entirely to the support she receives from the Obama administration.

Neither Barak nor Livni ever lost sight of the cause for their political elevation, despite their electoral defeats.
Like Barak in Netanyahu’s previous government, today Livni provides Kerry and Indyk with “Israeli” cover for their anti-Israeli policies. And working with Kerry and Indyk, she is able to force herself and her popularly rejected policies on the elected government.

Livni – again, like Barak in Netanyahu’s previous government – has been able to hold her senior government position and exert influence over government policy by claiming that only her presence in the government is keeping the US at bay. According to this line of thinking, without her partnership, the Obama administration will turn on Israel.

Now that Kerry has given a full throated endorsement of anti-Semitic demagoguery, Livni’s leverage is vastly diminished. Since Kerry’s anti-Semitic statements show that Livni has failed to shield Israel from the Obama administration’s hostility, the rationale for her continued inclusion in the government has disappeared.

The same goes for the Obama administration’s favorite American Jewish group J Street. Since its formation in the lead up to the 2008 Presidential elections, J Street has served as the Obama administration’s chief supporter in the US Jewish community. J Street uses rhetorical devices that were relevant to the political realities of the 1990s to claim that it is both “pro-peace and pro-Israel.” Twenty years into the failed peace process, for Israeli ears at least, these slogans ring hollow.

But the real problem with J Street’s claim isn’t that its rhetoric is irrelevant. The real problem is that its rhetoric is deceptive.

J Street’s record has nothing to do with either supporting Israel or peace. Rather it has a record of continuous anti-Israel agitation. J Street has continuously provided American Jewish cover for the administration’s anti-Israel actions by calling for it to take even more extreme actions. These have included calling for the administration to support an anti-Israel resolution at the UN Security Council, and opposing sanctions against Iran for its illicit nuclear weapons program. J Street has embraced the PLO’s newest unity pact with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. And now it is defending Kerry for engaging in rank anti-Semitism with his “Apartheid” remarks.

J Street’s political action committee campaigns to defeat pro-Israel members of Congress. And its campus operation brings speakers to US university campuses that slander Israel and the IDF and call for the divestment of university campuses from businesses owned by Israelis.

On Wednesday, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations is set to vote on J Street’s application to join the umbrella group as a “pro-peace, pro-Israel” organization.

Kerry’s “Apartheid” remarks are a watershed event. They represent the first time a sitting US Secretary of State has publically endorsed an anti-Semitic caricature of Jews and the Jewish state.

The best response that both the Israeli government and the Jewish community can give to Kerry’s act of unprecedented hostility and bigotry is to reject his Jewish enablers. Livni should be shown the door. And the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations should reject J Street’s bid for membership.

Caroline B. Glick is the author of The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.

Kerry’s Regime-Change Fantasy « Commentary Magazine.

Exclusive: Kerry Warns Israel Could Become ‘An Apartheid State’, Daily Beast, Josh Rogan, April 27, 2014

(It might be best if he had kept his mouth shut. However his comments, like other “goofs,” show the bases of his thoughts and actions. They need to be considered in dealing with him. — DM)

The secretary of state said that if Israel doesn’t make peace soon, it could become ‘an apartheid state,’ like the old South Africa. Jewish leaders are fuming over the comparison.

The secretary of state also implied, but did not say outright, that if the governments of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu or Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas left power, there could be a change in the prospects for peace. If “there is a change of government or a change of heart,” Kerry said, “something will happen.”

If there’s no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon, Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state,” Secretary of State John Kerry told a room of influential world leaders in a closed-door meeting Friday.

Senior American officials have rarely, if ever, used the term “apartheid” in reference to Israel, and President Obama has previously rejected the idea that the word should apply to the Jewish state. Kerry’s use of the loaded term is already rankling Jewish leaders in America—and it could attract unwanted attention in Israel, as well.

It wasn’t the only controversial comment on the Middle East that Kerry made during his remarks to the Trilateral Commission, a recording of which was obtained by The Daily Beast. Kerry also repeated his warning that a failure of Middle East peace talks could lead to a resumption of Palestinian violence against Israeli citizens. He suggested that a change in either the Israeli or Palestinian leadership could make achieving a peace deal more feasible. He lashed out against Israeli settlement-building. And Kerry said that both Israeli and Palestinian leaders share the blame for the current impasse in the talks.

Kerry also said that at some point, he might unveil his own peace deal and tell both sides to “take it or leave it.”

“A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens—or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state,” Kerry told the group of senior officials and experts from the U.S., Western Europe, Russia, and Japan. “Once you put that frame in your mind, that reality, which is the bottom line, you understand how imperative it is to get to the two-state solution, which both leaders, even yesterday, said they remain deeply committed to.”

According to the 1998 Rome Statute, the “crime of apartheid” is defined as “inhumane acts… committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” The term is most often used in reference to the system of racial segregation and oppression that governed South Africa from 1948 until 1994.

Former president Jimmy Carter came under fire in 2007 for titling his book on Middle East peace Palestine: Peace or Apartheid. Carter has said publicly that his views on Israeli treatment of the Palestinians are a main cause of his poor relationship with President Obama and his lack of current communication with the White House. But Carter explained after publishing the book that he was referring to apartheid-type policies in the West Bank, not Israel proper, and he was not accusing Israel of institutionalized racism.

“Apartheid is a word that is an accurate description of what has been going on in the West Bank, and it’s based on the desire or avarice of a minority of Israelis for Palestinian land,” Carter said.

Leading experts, including Richard Goldstone, a former justice of the South African Constitutional Court who led the United Nations fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict of 2008 and 2009, have argued that comparisons between the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians and “apartheid” are offensive and wrong.

“One particularly pernicious and enduring canard that is surfacing again is that Israel pursues ‘apartheid’ policies,” Goldstone wrote in The New York Times in 2011. “It is an unfair and inaccurate slander against Israel, calculated to retard rather than advance peace negotiations.”

In a 2008 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, then-Sen. Barack Obama shot down the notion that the word “apartheid” was acceptable in a discussion about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians:

“There’s no doubt that Israel and the Palestinians have tough issues to work out to get to the goal of two states living side by side in peace and security, but injecting a term like apartheid into the discussion doesn’t advance that goal,” Obama said. “It’s emotionally loaded, historically inaccurate, and it’s not what I believe.”

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told The Daily Beast that Kerry was simply repeating his view, shared by others, that a two-state solution is the only way for Israel to remain a Jewish state in peace with the Palestinians.

“Secretary Kerry, like Justice Minister Livni, and previous Israeli Prime Ministers Olmert and Barak, was reiterating why there’s no such thing as a one-state solution if you believe, as he does, in the principle of a Jewish State. He was talking about the kind of future Israel wants and the kind of future both Israelis and Palestinians would want to envision,” she said. “The only way to have two nations and two peoples living side by side in peace and security is through a two-state solution. And without a two-state solution, the level of prosperity and security the Israeli and Palestinian people deserve isn’t possible.”

But leaders of pro-Israel organizations told The Daily Beast that Kerry’s reference to “apartheid” was appalling and inappropriately alarmist because of its racial connotations and historical context.

“One particularly pernicious and enduring canard that is surfacing again is that Israel pursues ‘apartheid’ policies,” Goldstone wrote in The New York Times in 2011. “It is an unfair and inaccurate slander against Israel, calculated to retard rather than advance peace negotiations.”

Yet Israel’s leaders have employed the term, as well. In 2010, for example, former Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak used language very similar to Kerry’s. “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic,” Barak said. “If this bloc of millions of ­Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”

“While we’ve heard Secretary Kerry express his understandable fears about alternative prospects for Israel to a two-state deal and we understand the stakes involved in reaching that deal, the use of the word ‘apartheid’ is not helpful at all. It takes the discussion to an entirely different dimension,” said David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, an organization that has been supportive of Kerry’s peace process initiative. “In trying to make his point, Kerry reaches into diplomatic vocabulary to raise the stakes, but in doing so he invokes notions that have no place in the discussion.”

Kerry has used dire warnings twice in the past to paint a picture of doom for Israel if the current peace process fails. Last November, Kerry warned of a third intifada of Palestinian violence and increased isolation of Israel if the peace process failed. In March, Democrats and Republican alike criticized Kerry for suggesting that if peace talks fail, it would bolster the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

“It’s in the Palestinian playbook to tie Israel to these extreme notions of time being on the Palestinian side, that demographics are on the Palestinian side, and that Israel has to confront notions of the Jewishness of the state,” Harris said.

Kerry on Friday repeated his warning that a dissolution of the peace process might lead to more Palestinian violence. “People grow so frustrated with their lot in life that they begin to take other choices and go to dark places they’ve been before, which forces confrontation,” he said.

The secretary of state also implied, but did not say outright, that if the governments of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu or Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas left power, there could be a change in the prospects for peace. If “there is a change of government or a change of heart,” Kerry said, “something will happen.”

Kerry criticized Israeli settlement construction as being unhelpful to the peace process and he also criticized Palestinian leaders for making statements that declined to recognize the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state.

“There is a fundamental confrontation and it is over settlements. Fourteen thousand new settlement units announced since we began negotiations. It’s very difficult for any leader to deal under that cloud,” Kerry said.

He acknowledged that the formal negotiating process that he initiated and led since last summer may soon stop. But he maintained that his efforts to push for a final settlement will continue in one form or another.

“The reports of the demise of the peace process have consistently been misunderstood and misreported. And even we are now getting to the moment of obvious confrontation and hiatus, but I would far from declare it dead,” Kerry said. “You would say this thing is going to hell in a handbasket, and who knows, it might at some point, but I don’t think it is right now, yet.”

Kerry gave both Israeli and Palestinian leaders credit for sticking with the peace process for this long. But he added that both sides were to blame for the current impasse in the talks; neither leader was ready to make the tough decisions necessary for achieving peace.

“There’s a period here where there needs to be some regrouping. I don’t think it’s unhealthy for both of them to have to stare over the abyss and understand where the real tensions are and what the real critical decisions are that have to be made,” he said. “Neither party is quite ready to make it at this point in time. That doesn’t mean they don’t have to make these decisions.”

Kerry said that he was considering, at some point, publicly laying out a comprehensive U.S. plan for a final agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, in a last-ditch effort to forge a deal before the Obama administration leaves office in 2017.

“We have enough time to do any number of things, including the potential at some point in time that we will just put something out there. ‘Here it is, folks. This is what it looks like. Take it or leave it,’” Kerry said.