Our guest blogger is David Halperin, assistant director of Israel Policy Forum.

With Sunday’s deadline for Israel’s ten-month settlement moratorium fast approaching, both sides are preparing for the blame game should the talks break down. One of the key buzz words being thrown about this week is “precondition.” As in, ‘the Palestinians should not be setting a precondition that Israel continue the settlement freeze in order to keep the talks going.’

In his conference call with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organization this week, Prime Minister Netanyahu told the audience of Jewish leaders “We got rid of the preconditions before the talks. We can’t reintroduce them five minutes after the talks begin.” In an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon echoed the sentiment, stating: “Israel will not accept an all or nothing approach, or any ultimatums or any preconditions.” (Of course, in the same interview, Ayalon effectively stated a precondition of his own, saying: “What I say is that if the Palestinians are not willing to talk about two states for two peoples, let alone a Jewish state for Israel, then there’s nothing to talk about.”)

The precondition message has reached Capitol Hill, where one staffer told Foreign Policy, “Many Capitol Hill office[s] see Abbas quitting the talks over the settlements as him using the same issue he was clinging to when trying to set preconditions for the talks in the first place.”

But certainly when it comes to Hamas, Israel doesn’t think preconditions should be discarded. Israel’s – and the Quartet’s – preconditions for speaking with Hamas, require that it 1) renounce violence 2) accept previous agreements and 3) recognize Israel’s right to exist are currently an unshakeable aspect of Israel’s policy. To note, the PA led by Mahmoud Abbas has, of course, done all three.

When it comes to Syria, Israelis have been mixed on the idea of preconditions. The previous government led by Ehud Olmert demanded Syria cut ties to Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran before direct talks would begin. However, to his credit, Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that Israel is prepared to hold negotiations without preconditions with the Syrians, and Shimon Peres underscored the point in his remarks to the United Nations General Assembly. We may soon see whether actions match rhetoric in this regard.

But whether or not preconditions are helpful – or harmful – to peace processes is one question to be considered. What is not a question is that a settlement freeze is not a precondition — it’s an Israeli obligation.

The Roadmap states:

In Phase I, the Palestinians immediately undertake an unconditional cessation of violence according to the steps outlined below; such action should be accompanied by supportive measures undertaken by Israel. Palestinians and Israelis resume security cooperation based on the Tenet work plan to end violence, terrorism, and incitement through restructured and effective Palestinian security services. Palestinians undertake comprehensive political reform in preparation for statehood, including drafting a Palestinian constitution, and free, fair and open elections upon the basis of those measures. Israel takes all necessary steps to help normalize Palestinian life. Israel withdraws from Palestinian areas occupied from September 28, 2000 and the two sides restore the status quo that existed at that time, as security performance and cooperation progress. Israel also freezes all settlement activity, consistent with the Mitchell report.

The Palestinian efforts to reform their governmental infrastructure, curb terrorism, and strengthen Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation are well documented. They have even been hailed by Israelis.

Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad told an audience of Jewish leaders this week that, while they have made progress on their obligation, more needed to be done, particularly in curbing incitement. “I don’t think one can ever say that we have done everything that could possibly be done… but we are trying,” Fayyad said. “Incitement is a problem and we see it as such.”

The Israeli efforts have also been promising. Israel has enabled the Palestinian security apparatus to function, has eliminated a number of roadblocks and checkpoints, helping to create conditions for significant economic growth in the West Bank.

But Israel’s obligations scorecard has one glaring omission: “freez(ing) all settlement activity consistent with the Mitchell Report.”

The Mitchell Report, drafted in 2001 by the current Special Envoy for Middle East for the previous Administration states: “The GOI [Government of Israel] should freeze all settlement activity, including the ‘natural growth’ of existing settlements.”

The U.S. tried to get Israel to agree to this obligation at the onset of the Obama administration. Netanyahu refused, tensions emerged, and peace talks stalled. Now, the US is asking for an extension of the ten-month moratorium that Israel instituted as a compromise. Even less, the United States has signaled it would support a formula that comes short of a continuation of the partial freeze already in place.

The Palestinians now say that they too would be willing to compromise on the continuation of the not-so-full-freeze, freeze. Recent reports indicating that the United States is working with the parties to develop such a formula provide some hope that a deal can be reached at the last moment.

It’s important to understand that Israel is being asked only to continue a portion of the step it has taken, which only partially meets its obligation under the Roadmap. Yet is claiming that its refusal to do so — and the Palestinians’ subsequently crying foul — amounts to the Palestinians presenting an unnecessary precondition which harms the potential for peace. Or, in other words, the games have begun. Whether they’ll continue past the weekend is less clear.

For more details on the political issues at play in these negotiations, please see Matt Duss’ and my new report, Navigating Political Currents to Achieve Middle East Peace.

Rachel Sladja over at TPM Muckraker has a good report looking into the roots of the Sharia Peril hysteria that, over the past year, has moved from the right-wing fringe into the mainstream conservative discourse, courtesy of people like Newt Gingrich. This nonsense went into a higher gear last week with the neocon Center for Security Policy’s release of a new “Team B II” report, Sharia: The Threat To America.

In addition to being based on a deeply tendentious and unscholarly rendering of Islamic sharia law as a monolithic and singularly interpreted legal doctrine (which Lee Smith picked apart here), Sladja finds that the main piece of “evidence” for the looming sharia threat is a 1991 strategy paper written by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, telling followers they “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”

Twenty years later, I think it’s safe to say that this strategy has not been a smashing success. But it’s worth taking a closer look at the organization that, according to Team B II, is on the cusp of prying the barbecued pork rib from my cold, dead hand.

In an article last week, Carnegie’s Nathan Brown recalled a meeting in which Muslim Brotherhood members struggled to remember the name of their current religious guide. “How disciplined and well-organized can an international organization be,” Brown asked, “when followers struggle to recall their supreme leader’s name?”

In press interviews, personal meetings, and material designed for their own members, Muslim Brotherhood leaders in various Arab countries refer very respectfully to the Brotherhood way of doing things but almost never to the authority or even existence of the international organization. Yet increasingly, awareness of Islamist movements in the West has lead to some dark talk of an international Brotherhood that serves as a cover for all sorts of missionary, political, and even violent activity. From a solid core in the Arab world, the Brotherhood’s tentacles are said to be reaching out from Oslo to Oklahoma City. [...]

At a global level, the Brotherhood is no Mafia. Nor is it a rigid and disciplined Stalinist-style Comintern. It most closely resembles today’s Socialist International: a tame framework for a group of loosely linked, ideologically similar movements that recognize each other, swap stories and experiences in occasional meetings, and happily subscribe to a formally international ideology without giving it much priority. There is every reason to be interested in the Brotherhood’s myriad (and surprisingly diverse) country branches, but there is no reason to fear it as a menacing global web.

This is the organization that Team B II leader Frank Gaffney and his gang would have us believe represent, “if anything, an even more insidious ideological threat” than did the Soviet Union.

Are there Muslim missionaries in the U.S. right now who want to get Americans to adopt Islam? Yes, just as there are Christian missionaries in Indonesia who want to get Indonesians to worship Jesus. Christianity and Islam are both evangelizing religions. Spreading the faith is part of the program.

Are there also radical Muslims in America right now trying to find ways to turn the U.S. into a religious state? Most likely, yes, and we should be on guard against it. It’s worth noting, however, that the Christian Right has failed at this for decades, in a country where over 75% of people identify as Christian. So good luck with that, radical Muslims.

To put it plainly, the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is making “real progress…in insinuating shariah into the very heartland of America through stealthy means,” as the Team B II report claims, is preposterous. And, probably needless to say, it’s utterly unsupported by any real evidence.

But the real goal here, of course, isn’t to accurately describe the threat of Islamic radicalism, it’s to help conservatives regain power. As Gaffney himself wrote earlier this year, “Even if a robust security-policy platform were not, on the merits, the right stance for the right, it has proven repeatedly to be the winningest stance politically, especially in times when our countrymen properly feel insecure.” The goal of “Team B II,” as with the rest of the neoconservative faction, is to make sure that now is one of those times.

Back in June, the United Farm Workers (UFW) launched their “Take Our Jobs” campaign which invites American citizens and legal residents to fill the farm jobs that are mostly occupied by undocumented labor. Comedian Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” traveled to a farm in upstate New York and spent ten hours “picking beans, packing corn and learning about the stark reality facing Americans farms and farmers.”

Today, Colbert testified before the House Judiciary subcommittee on his experience as an entertainer-turned-migrant worker. As part of his testimony, Colbert called for more visas for farmworkers

This brief experience gave me some small understanding of why so few Americans are clamoring to begin an exciting career as seasonal migrant field worker. So what’s the answer? I’m a free market guy. Normally I would leave this to the invisible hand of the market, but the invisible hand of the market has already moved over 84,000 acres of production and over 22,000 farm jobs over to Mexico and shut down over a million acres of U.S. farm land due to lack of available labor because apparently even the invisible hand doesn’t want to pick beans. [...]

Maybe we could give more visas to the immigrants, who — let’s face it — will probably be doing these jobs anyway. And this improved legal status might allow legal immigrants recourse if they’re abused. And it justs stands to reason to me if your coworker can’t be exploited, then you’re less likely to be exploited yourself. And that itself might improve pay and working conditions on these farms and eventually Americans may consider taking these jobs again.

Or maybe that’s crazy. Maybe the easier answer is just to have scientists develop vegetables that pick themselves.

Watch it:

Agriculture is ranked amongst the three most hazardous occupations in the nation. For every 100,000 agricultural workers in the U.S. in 2007, there were 25.7 occupational deaths. That’s because farmworkers are exposed to toxic pesticides, work under the hot sun for 10-12 hours a day, handle hazardous tools and machinery, and live in crowded conditions with poor sanitation. In return, most farmworkers earn approximately $28,040 a year.

The solution to improving farm jobs is two-fold: fixing the immigration system as Colbert mentioned and also improving wages and working conditions in the agricultural sector. Yet, as long as most farmworkers feel that they can’t report abuses and fight for their rights without fear of deportation or retaliation agricultural work will remain a grueling, dangerous, and thankless career that most Americans have no interest in pursuing. As Colbert briefly noted, if the U.S. doesn’t find a way to legalize immigrant agricultural workers, businesses will continue moving their operations to other countries where they can find laborers.

Contrary to what Swain and other immigration hawks suggest, despite a major recession, most farmers and ranchers are still struggling to find the workers they need. “Comprehensive immigration reform is needed, so that America’s farmers and ranchers can continue to produce an abundant supply of safe, healthy food, as well as renewable fuels and fiber for our nation,” writes Ron Gaskill, director of congressional relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation

Initially, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) asked Colbert to leave the room without delivering his testimony. However, Conyers indicated he changed his mind after hearing the testimony of Dr. Carol M. Swain who denied that there is a shortage of agricultural workers and called it “a manufactured crisis.”