Could this be you?
Dear John,
I know that you won’t be happy to hear this, but as someone who cares, I just had to write this letter.
Don’t do it. Or rather, stop doing it before you look even dumber than you already look.
You are using up valuable time, money and most of all, the reputation of the United States by following your obsession.
You’re not the first, but I have to say that it’s often impossible for me to understand some people’s weird obsessions. Like Anthony Weiner, for example. What could he have been thinking?
But I digress. I’m talking about the so-called ‘peace process’ of course, although I devoutly wish it were just another sex scandal. At least sometimes the sex scandals make sense.
Look, you have two groups of Palestinian Arabs, both of which have written charters calling for the violent destruction of Israel, and one of which even wants to murder all the Jews in the world. Members of these groups hate and kill each other, and the only thing they seem to be able to agree on is hating Israel. They both believe that their lands, livelihoods and honor were stolen from them by the Jews in 1948 and they are prepared to struggle and sacrifice for as long as necessary to get them back.
The last thing that either of these groups want is to live peacefully alongside Israel. If there once were any grass-roots Palestinians that did want that, the two main groups have been ‘educating’ their followers with the vilest anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda for decades. And if a leader were to arise that wanted to change that, he would be dead meat, since the nationalist and religious ideologies of these groups are, above all, violent. There is always an aspiring martyr waiting for his virgins.
So when you come along and say to the nationalistic ones “give up your plan to eliminate Israel and we’ll give you money to set up a state alongside it,” they think you must be nuts.
Maybe after they stop being insulted or laughing at your naivete, they’ll string you along: take your money (and weapons if possible), and promise to talk to Israel — after you get Israel to release a few prisoners, stop building, etc. Why not? Whatever they can get for free, they’ll take. Yasser Arafat got billions of dollars for his Swiss bank accounts, plus fame, a private army and much territory by playing this game.
But for some reason, a deal will never get off the ground, no matter how clever. Because they simply are not interested in what you are selling. And even if the nationalist Arabs were, the religious ones wouldn’t go along with them, and would try to overthrow them.
One of the ironies is that the Israeli side — virtually every Israeli — understands this. If they didn’t understand it in 1993 when a few left-wingers maneuvered the government into signing the Oslo accords that even Yitzhak Rabin wasn’t comfortable with, they certainly did after the Second Intifada and the disastrous ‘disengagement’ from Gaza.
But most Israeli officials won’t tell you that (although there are more that would today than in the recent past). They know how important to you it is that there is ‘progress’, and they want your help dealing with the Iranian threat. They want you to sell them F-35’s. So they, too, will go along with the pretense, knowing that the Palestinians will never agree to anything serious. In the meantime, their job is to keep from giving away the store in ‘confidence-building’ concessions.
So here is how you look, John: you are sitting at a table with two sides, and they both think you are the fish, the sucker, the goat, whatever you want to call it.
Isn’t that embarrassing? Don’t you have real work to do?
Technorati Tags: John Kerry, peace process
A very good and true letter.
The failure to recognize who the Palestinians are, what they really say and believe, is a major Intelligence failure, in both senses of the word. Unfortunately it is not Kerry’s alone but is the common view of most of the ‘enlightened’ Western world.
As long as we have our own “leaders” who persist in talking of “The Peace Process” and a two State solution, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
Anybody ever heard of the phrase “truth to power”?
What is distressing is that I do not believe these people — in Israel or the US or Europe — are really as ignorant as they appear. As Barry Rubin has explained (see his recent PJ Media article) Israeli officials feel they need to play along for various reasons. But in the US, for example, they must know that what they are insisting upon would destroy the Jewish state.
No, Vic, I’m sure they are not anywhere near as ignorant as they appear. You are right.
What drives this insanity has three components.
First, we have to stand back and consider why the U.S., historically, has backed one side versus another in various conflicts throughout history.
Not all of our alliances were bred of the purist motives. Some were for the sake of immediate expeidency, and/or the service of material interests having nothing to do with ideology.
Others are or were based on shared values and institutions.
The former have not tended to last very long, or to bring very good ultimate outcomes for the U.S.
Consider our WW2 alliance with the USSR, for example. Yes, there was a practical need for this in order to defeat Nazi Germany, but did this alliance last? No. What did it lead to? The Cold War and associated conflicts – e.g., Vietnam, Korea – that cost tens of thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Maybe some of this was simply unavoidable – What altnernative did we have in 1941? – but this illustrates my point that alliances that are not based on common values usually don’t work out too great in the long haul.
But for the U.S. to decide to favor a particular side in a conflict based on shared values, such as democracy, etc., the leaders responsible have to themselves genuinely hold these values, to think they are worth something. “American exceptionalism” is a key component in making such a choice; to choose allies based on this idea is to treat them as an extension of this idea.
However, current U.S. leaders – Obama being a very clear example of this but also Kerry – do not believe in American exceptionalism. In fact, they are contemptuous of it…and by extension, it follows that they will not treat as valuable at all any alliance that is based on this.
So, it is very easy to convince such people to only pursue a foreign policy based on perceived immediate material interests. And if you can convince them that supporting a bunch of bloody-minded savages, even against a fellow democracy, is in the immediate material interests of the U.S., then they will.
Now, we reach the second component: The Arab Lobby.
The Arab/Moslems have a very powerful commitment to an ideological agenda. They will spare almost no effort in pursuit of this agenda. At the root of this agenda is the very rational need for a bunch of medieval, perverted clerics to maintain their positions of power and status in the face of the political/cultural threat posed by Western modernity.
It isn’t thier only issue, but high on the list of their “to do list” is expelling the Western “beach head” of Israel – run by followers of that accursed, third-tier religion, Judaism – from “their” land.
Israel had – ostensibly still “has”, but that is open to question – a very powerful friend in the U.S., who supported Israel as the “only democracy in the Middle East”.
But today, starting with the U.S. President, and going down through much of the current serving foreign policy establishment – and the media – we have an America led by foreign policy decision-makers – and opinion makers in academia and the media – who a) don’t believe in ANYTHING except their own narcissism and power, and b) are easily bought by and/or intimidated by those who DO fervently believe in SOMETHING, no matter how backward or horrific.
So, using what can perhaps oversimplistically be described as a “good cop/bad cop” routine, the Arabs/Moslems have co-opted large segments of the U.S. and Western governmental, media, and academic elites into making the Arab/Moslem priority of dismantling Israel THEIR priority as well.
The “good cop” in this dynamic is the so-called Arab or Moslem “moderate” who says that if only Israel will make this or that [massive, mortally wounding] concession, then there will be peace and love forevermore….but if they DON’T force Israel to do this or that, then…
…the “bad cops” – the angry Arab/Moslems – will keep attacking us with terrorism.
Oh, and this all, of course, is backed up and subsidized – both the “good cops” and the “bad cops” – by petrodollars, liberally spread around as needed, funding corrupt academics, think tanks, terror training camps, financially insecure media outfits, and so on.
And the third component? Jew hatred, both of the Gentile and self-hating Jew varieties. I consider this the most minor of the three, but it is still important. The Islamists find fertile ground among Westerners who relish the prospect of “sticking it to the Jooos”, or Jews who are ashamed of being Jewish or who are ashamed/embarrassed by Jewish power and assertiveness as represented by Israel.
As a political culture, we have to rediscover and reassert what the hell we stand for and are about in contrast to competing political cultures, particularly the Moslems world. We have to elect leaders that represent this rediscovery, and support media and academic institutions that are also aligned with this positive agenda. Only then will we have the ability to tell the Petrodollar Pimps where they can stick their checks, and only then will our leaders have the common sense and decency to back Israel against the lynch mob she is facing.
This is a tall order, I know. I lot depends on this, not only Israel.
We are a long way from this. But we have to keep trying, anyway.
Keep up the good work, Vic. We must all do what we can.