THE LATEST ROUND OF "PEACE PROCESS" TALKS: WHO'S BUYING IT ANYWAY?

So the farcical negotiations between Israel and Fatah have begun with the expected whimper. As this analytical article tells, there are signs this is not going over well:

WASHINGTON – When the ceremonies cease, when the speech-making ends, when the chandeliers in ornate halls are turned off, when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Abdullah II go home, and when US President Barack Obama’s attention is diverted elsewhere, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will be left – just the two of them – alone in a room.

And, as the two leaders’ speeches at the ceremony in the State Department’s Benjamin Franklin room on Thursday morning to mark the start of direct negotiations indicated, it is then going to get very, very difficult.

The day before, at the White House, in the presence of Obama, Mubarak and Abdullah, Netanyahu said, “I did not come here to play a blame game where even the winners lose. I came here to achieve a peace that will bring benefits to all.”

But at the State Department on Thursday, just as the two men were to get down to the proverbial brass tacks, the blame game already started. It was polite, civilized, not overheated, but it started. It wasn’t direct, but it started.

You can read the rest to get the signs, and wonder what happens behind closed doors to boot. And, here's Caroline Glick's own analysis:

Despite a multi-million dollar media blitz, Israelis are not buying the US-financed Geneva Initiative's attempt to convince us that we have a Palestinian partner. A week after the pro-Palestinian group launched its massive online promotion urging people to join its Facebook page, a mere 634 people had answered the call.

The US-funded agitprop involved ads in which senior Fatah propagandists were featured telling Israelis we can trust them this time around. The reason for its failure was made clear by a public opinion poll taken Tuesday night for Channel 10. When asked if they believed that Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas is serious about making peace with Israel, two-thirds of Israelis said no. Only 23 percent said he was serious and 17 percent said they didn't know.

Moreover, most Israelis have had it with the peace paradigm based on Israeli concessions of land and national rights in exchange for Palestinian terror and political warfare. When asked whether the government should extend the prohibition on Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria beyond its Sept 26 terminus, 63 percent said no, it should not. A mere 21 percent of the public believes the government should respond positively to the US demand that Jews continue to be denied our property right in Judea and Samaria.

In his analysis of the results, Channel 10's senior political commentator Raviv Drucker said that if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu decides to make a deal with the Palestinians, he will have a hard time convincing the public to support him.

Drucker also argued that the results may have been influenced by the Palestinian terror attack on Tuesday night in which four civilians were brutally murdered on their way home from Jerusalem. That is, Drucker implied that the public is driven by its emotions. But what the results actually show is that the public is driven by reason.

When Palestinian terrorists gun down innocent people on the highway simply because they are Jews, the public's reasoned response is to say that the Palestinians do not want peace. The public's wholly rational reaction to this act of anti-Jewish butchery is to insist that Jews should not be denied our basic civil and human rights in a dangerous bid to appease murderers.

I can certainly say that, if Netanyahu fails to bring this as a public referendum vote, he'll be violating the public's democratic right to say what they think.

Even now, we still can't let down our guard as to whether Netanyahu will yet again succumb to the concession virus, as Glick has every right to be worried about. We still need to be very vigilant and on the alert.

Update: there were rallies in New York, in Los Angeles and Israel calling on Netanyahu to just say no to more concessions.

Update 2: John Podhoretz (via The Weekly Standard) estimates that what happened was nothing.