Israel never made concessions, according to Eugenio García Gascón.

This time his assertions have been shocking and even insulting. In an article published on Friday, May 20, 2011, under the title Concesiones (Concessions), Público's journalist Eugenio García Gascón wrote about Ehud Barak's statements declaring that Israel is strong enough to make concessions.

According to Eugenio García Gascón, Ehud Barak's intransigence derived on the Second Intifada in 2000, when the truth is that precisely in 2000, the aforementioned Israeli politician, then the Prime Minister of his country, proposed a peace plan consisting of the creation of a Palestinian State with sovereignty over many sectors of East Jerusalem as its capital. The Palestinian response consisted of starting the Second Intifada. Is Ehud Barak responsible for the Palestinian failure to continue the negotiations instead of murdering Israeli civilians as the Palestinians actually did?

The journalist describes how Israel has never made concessions by arguing that Israel's withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000 and the Gaza Strip in 2005 were made in order to avoid casualties to happen within those territories, but he fails to explain why Israel didn't withdrew also from the West Bank (where soldiers and settlers were also killed; just remember the so-called Ramallah lynching or the more recent Itamar killings) or why Israel sent its soldiers to Lebanon in 2006 and the Gaza Strip during the operation Cast Lead at all.

The truth is that Israeli withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000 and the Gaza Strip in 2005 were in fact concessions. The aforementioned peace plan as proposed by Ehud Barak was intended as a concession, as well as Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai in 1957 and in 1982 again were also concessions. And what about Jewish acceptance of the United Nations-proposed Partition Plan of November 29, 1947, intended to create two States for two peoples and to bring Jerusalem's inhabitants the opportunity to decide by themselves what of those States did they want to belong to through a referendum? Was not that a concession, Eugenio?