FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

I am not happy to be writing this post. I hope that what I write will turn out to be wrong. But as time passes it seems that the puzzle pieces are falling into place, and I don’t like the picture that is emerging.

One of the hardest things to understand about US policy has been the unrelenting pressure on Israel to cede territory to the Palestinian Authority, which is identical to the terrorist PLO. Following the Arab oil boycott of 1973, it was understandable that the US would want to appease the Arab oil-producers; and in the early years of the Oslo period, policymakers might have believed that they could make the Arabs happy while at the same time get points for bringing peace to a troubled region. They might have actually believed the ‘linkage theory’, that the Palestinian issue was the root of the Israeli-Arab conflict, which was in turn the source of most of the instability in the Middle East.

But the deceptions of Yasser Arafat and his heirs, 9/11, the rise of Hamas, the emergence of Iran as a nuclear power, and most importantly the laughably named ‘Arab Spring’, have laid bare the bankruptcy of this conceptual scheme. It must be clear by now to even the most obtuse of US officials that 1) it is impossible that Israeli territorial concessions will end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and 2) that the Palestinian issue is one of the least important faults in the quake-prone Mideast. This is just as well because the present negotiations between Israel and the PA have absolutely no possibility of success as a result of the Arabs’ maximal demands.

A corollary to 1) is that concessions by Israel will not improve its security, but will damage it, possibly leading to another regional war. It is also true that it is less and less important for the US economy to appease the oil producers by sacrificing Israel — Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are much more concerned about rising Iranian power, and in its response to this the US is disappointing them. And in the mid-to-long run, new oil reserves outside of the region will reduce their leverage.

Another confusing issue is US policy toward Iran. As this analysis shows, Iran is making steady progress toward nuclear weapons. It is very, very close. Yet the US has chosen to go along with Iran’s delaying tactics instead of increasing pressure. It even seems to be about to weaken sanctions without Iran taking real steps away from its goal. This policy directly contradicts the administration’s stated objective that Iran will not be allowed to go nuclear.

What’s going on?

Friday I wrote that the White House and State Department see Israel more as an enemy than as an ally, despite the attitudes of the great majority of Americans. But while the ‘friendship’ of the US with Israel has always been overstated, this administration represents something new. I think that it has moved significantly beyond its predecessors, and that anti-Israel elements, for the first time, are determining the direction of US policy. I believe that part of the overall strategy — which also includes alignment with Islamist regimes in opposition to traditional conservative Arab dictatorships and monarchies — is to oppose the continued existence of a Jewish state.

In my opinion, the President as well as his closest advisers and cabinet members not only see a divergence between US and Israeli interests, but are ideologically disposed to be anti-Israel. This is not really surprising, given the cultural, academic and political (New Left) backgrounds of the major players.

Considering that the American people and the Congress would not countenance outright hostility, they are acting against Israel indirectly, while at the same time giving the impression of support. This is a very serious claim to make and I don’t make it lightly. But it is the only way I can explain the behavior of the administration.

Our approach to the Palestinians can be explained in part by ideology: the administration really believes that, in the President’s words, “the Palestinians deserve a state,” and accepts the narrative of the Palestinian Arabs as an oppressed indigenous minority who ought to be protected. Condoleezza Rice, not a member of this administration but one who shares this point of view, once explicitly compared the Palestinian cause to the US civil rights movement.

Part and parcel of this ideology is to minimize Israel’s security concerns: since the Palestinians are presented as a weak minority, they can’t really threaten Israel. And since Israelis are seen as the ‘bad guys’, their security problems are viewed as their own fault, punishment for being colonialist oppressors. And in the final analysis, the administration’s empathy is with the Arabs, not the Jews. So it becomes possible to rationalize pressuring Israel to make dangerous concessions.

Another cause of the tilt toward the Arabs is simply the desire of the administration to ingratiate itself with the Muslim world — especially including Islamist circles — a program which the President initiated in Cairo shortly after his inauguration, and in which he has persisted. As every Muslim leader well knows, there is no better way to stir up emotions in the street than to attack Israel. What’s new is that now the West, including the US, has caught on and is trying to use this tactic.

Finally the Palestinian issue can be used as a lever in connection with the other major Mideast concern of the administration: Iran.

The administration seems to see a nuclear-armed Iran as a fait accompli, and has decided to make the best of it by aligning itself with the Iranian regime rather than opposing it. The US is not prepared for and cannot afford another war in the Middle East, particularly against a country that specializes in exporting terrorism around the world. So the decision has been made to appease.

From the Israeli point of view, the Iranian bomb is not acceptable. The policy of the Netanyahu government is that it will do whatever is necessary to stop it, including military action if there no alternative. The US, which no longer sees Israel as an ally and is afraid of angering Iran, therefore has adopted a policy of favoring Iran on this issue, acting to restrain Israel and to permit Iran to obtain nuclear weapons or at least a rapid breakout capability.

And this is where the Palestinian issue kills two birds with one stone: hurting the Jewish state overall, and providing a way to weaken PM Netanyahu politically so he can be replaced by a leader who is more compliant, particularly on Iran. This is why the administration chose to pressure Netanyahu to take the very unpopular step of releasing prisoners who convicted murderers.

Caroline Glick has suggested that the leverage the US has over Netanyahu stems from the Iranian situation. According to Glick, the US threatens that if the PM does not do what he is told, the US will “tip Iran off to an impending Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities.” This may seem far-fetched, but it explains the series of leaks from the White House that have followed actions taken by Israel.

Last week, Israel bombed a Syrian military base in Latakia in order (it is assumed) to destroy a shipment of Russian-supplied surface-to-air missiles bound for Hizballah. As happened at least three or four times in the recent past, Israel kept quiet about the operation so as not to force Bashar al-Assad retaliate to save face.  And as happened each time before, American officials leaked the  information that Israel was responsible to the media.

Israeli media reported that officials were angry, but were puzzled by US motives for the leaks. They are not puzzling, however, if they are seen as warnings to Israel that the US is aware of everything it is doing and is prepared to make its secrets public.

I think that the greatest danger to Israel in the coming years is not an outright nuclear attack from Iran — Iran is deterred by the threat of massive retaliation — but rather the more conventional violence of Hamas, the PLO and Hizballah, protected by an Iranian nuclear umbrella. While these forces are probably not capable of overrunning Israel, they are capable of severely damaging its economy and demoralizing the population, causing emigration of its elites and ultimately its end as a Jewish state.

The policies of the US, which aim to force Israel back to pre-1967 boundaries and deprive it of strategic depth, destroy Zionist ideology, facilitate the establishment of a  terror state on the doorstep of Israel’s population center, and permit Iran to develop a nuclear umbrella are exactly appropriate to weaken Israel and make the above scenario possible.

It’s with great sadness that I am beginning to think that this is the deliberate intention of the Obama Administration.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Obama Administration

Psychologists dislike the popular definition of ‘schizophrenia’ as ‘split personality’, but it works well as a description of the relationship of the US to Israel.

On the one hand, there is a large majority of the American population that feels very positively toward Israel, and believes strongly that we should support it. And this is reflected in the US Congress.

On the other hand, there are the State Department and intelligence establishment, which — if they would speak candidly — would say that the creation of a sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East was a mistake, and one that is inconvenient for American interests. As the ‘experts’ in foreign affairs and the source of advisers on these matters, they set the tone for the whole Executive Branch.

While the Obama Administration may be the most unfriendly since Israel’s founding, no prior administration was remarkable for its pro-Israel policies, thanks to the influence of these ‘professionals’. Even when the President himself was very favorable to Israel (Harry Truman, George W. Bush), support was spotty at best.

This position, over the years, has been nurtured by the racist regimes of the Mideastern oil producing nations, who have used their petrodollars effectively to this end. The distribution of energy resources is changing now, with large reserves of oil and gas found in the US, Canada, Australia and even Israel, but much of the damage has been done, with vicious anti-Israel ideologues ensconced in government and universities.

The positive side of the split personality expresses itself in large amounts of military aid (which after all is aid to defense contractors in the US) and pro-Israel congressional resolutions — which, like the one to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, are often ignored or circumvented by the administration.

The negative side is exemplified by the obsessive and unrelenting pressure on Israel to abandon the territory gained in the 1967 war, and, as I mentioned yesterday, the repeated interventions to prevent Israel from obtaining a decisive military victory, something which guarantees a continuous series of wars and skirmishes.

While the Oslo accord was an Israeli mistake — one of the worst in its history — it provided an opening for American support of the PLO, which was previously treated as a terrorist gang. And we jumped right in, even to the point of providing training to their nascent army!

There is plenty of evidence that the Executive Branch sees Israel as an enemy nation. There is the disproportionate sentence given to Jonathan Pollard — disproportionate, that is, for someone spying for an ally rather than an enemy. There is the incredible fact that Israel is listed by the CIA as a “key target” for surveillance along with China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and Cuba (Angela Merkel is way down on the list).

President Obama likes to talk about the “unbreakable bond” between the US and Israel, and his “unshakeable commitment” to Israel’s security, but his actions belie these words.

Update [2355 PDT]: Yet again the US has leaked information damaging to Israel’s security!

Technorati Tags: US, Israel

Last week I spoke to a woman, a senior citizen who reads a column that I write in the local Jewish Federation newsletter. “I enjoy your articles,” she said, “but what I want to know is this: after all these years, when will Israel ever get peace?”

“When we get different Arabs,” I answered.

Of course what I meant was that we cannot reach an agreement with those whose deepest desire is that we be gone from the Middle East, who do not recognize the legitimacy of any Jewish sovereignty regardless of borders, and who encourage murder and venerate murderers in all of their institutions.

This becomes evident in negotiations in which the PLO refuses to recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people, insists upon a ‘right of return’ for the descendants of 1948 refugees, and refuses to consider Israel’s most basic security needs — all the while continuing to glorify murderers and incite young people to become terrorists, even suicide terrorists.

Someday there might be a new Arab leadership, I suggested, that is more interested in economic development than revenge, and then there might be a possibility of peace.

So this morning I was telling “Robman,” who often comments on this blog, about the conversation. And he made an interesting point: there are other ways to get to peace than to make a deal with the Arabs.

There is more to the persistence of Arab terrorism than just hatred and a pathological desire for revenge. There is the belief that if they persist long enough, they will ultimately succeed in getting rid of the ‘Zionist enemy’. To a certain extent, this is part of Islamic ideology — after all, there was a 200-year Crusader kingdom in the Holy Land that was ultimately overcome, something Palestinians talk about a lot.

But that isn’t the only source of encouragement, and the intensity of the struggle is amplified, perhaps even sustained, by the encouragement the Palestinian (and other) Arabs receive daily from the rest of the world, implying that theirs is not a lost cause.

There is the continuous chorus of anti-Israel demonization flowing from  UN bodies and from the EU. There is the ceaseless sniping at Israel from most of the world’s media. But there is also the far more concrete and potent support that the Palestinian Arabs receive from their strongest supporter and closest ally in the world: the United States of America.

Let’s just look at what the PLO entity gets from the US: the great majority of its financial support, both direct aid and training for its army (excuse me, ‘security forces’); money to pay the salaries of PA workers (mostly ‘security forces’) including those in Israeli prisons for terrorism and murder, and those in Hamas-ruled Gaza; and contributions to UNRWA, the agency that maintains the refugee camps where residents are paid to have children that the Arabs will never allow to be resettled anywhere but Israel, and where they are taught to hate Jews and Israel in UN schools.

That’s only money. There is also the unrelenting political pressure on Israel to make concessions like freezing construction, releasing prisoners and ceding land, regardless of the fact that extreme PLO positions on issues absolutely fundamental to peace never change. There is the refusal to acknowledge Israel’s capital, Jerusalem.

And we can’t forget that in the periodic regional wars that the Arab nations and Iranian proxies launch against Israel, the US steps in and stops the fighting when Israel is on the verge of a decisive victory. Each time Israel prevails, but the US always makes sure there will be a next time.

Peace does not only come from diplomacy or agreements. More often, historically, lasting peace comes about because one side defeats the other. Chamberlain and Stalin signed ‘peace’ agreements with Hitler, but peace did not arrive until Russian tanks entered Berlin. And who is preventing Israel from defeating its enemies conclusively? Who is propping them up and giving them hope that they will win in the end? The United States of America.

Recently President Obama announced that he wants to scale down US involvement in the Middle East. Unfortunately, he also said that he would continue to push for an Israel-PLO agreement.

Rather, I suggest that we try a new pro-peace strategy: really support Israel and stop helping her enemies.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Arabs, peace

John Kerry, yesterday:

Obviously, we are now facing a test of that – two tests – in North Korea and in Iran. And we are engaged, as the President has charged me to be and has welcomed, an opportunity to try to put to test whether or not Iran really desires to pursue only a peaceful program, and will submit to the standards of the international community in the effort to prove that to the world. Some have suggested that somehow there’s something wrong with even putting that to the test. I suggest that the idea that the United States of America is a responsible nation to all of humankind would not explore that possibility would be the height of irresponsibility and dangerous in itself, and we will not succumb to those fear tactics and forces that suggest otherwise.

This is quite literally infuriating, on several levels.

He is clearly referring to Israel’s Prime Minister, the ‘some’ who engages in ‘fear tactics’ by telling anyone who will listen that sanctions should not be removed until Iran takes concrete steps toward dismantling its nuclear weapons program.

The ‘test’ Mr. Kerry wants to perform is to weaken sanctions in return for promises and actions that will not materially affect Iran’s progress toward a weapon. That isn’t a test — it’s a capitulation.

I am not sure what Kerry and President Obama think the US will get out of it, but it’s clear what Iran gets — reduced sanctions, which anyway have been leaky enough to only be a minor obstacle on Iran’s path, a moral victory for having faced down the US, and plenty of time to develop its bombs.

One could also ‘test’ Iran by tightening sanctions and seeing if that would persuade the regime to stop development. But for some reason, the most powerful nation in the world (for a while, at least) is incapable of being firm with its sworn enemies.

Not satisfied with its own foreign policy of appeasement, the administration has forced it on Israel as well. How else can you describe the fact that PM Netanyahu was ordered by the US to release convicted murders, unrepentant terrorists who have killed Israelis for the ‘crime’ of being Jewish?

The damage to Israel’s justice system — and to the feelings of the relatives and friends of terror victims — and indeed, the national humiliation that will be felt as the murderers return home to massive celebrations, cannot be undone.

And all this to get the Palestinian Authority (PA), which continues to glorify its murderers and incite more of the same on a daily basis, to engage in a pretense of ‘negotiations’!

I was talking to a friend in Israel today, and the subject was what Obama could possibly have threatened Netanyahu with that would make him do something that an overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews oppose (a poll taken in July before the release of a previous batch of prisoners put opposition at 85%), and which virtually everyone in the region — Jew and Arab alike — knows will not lead to an agreement with the PA.

But that is the price that must be paid, because Kerry and Obama want Israel to test the PA, just as they want to test Iran, despite the fact that both the PA and Iran have a consistent track record of deception.

They have already flunked this test over and over! How many make-ups will we give them?

The truth is that neither the pressure on Israel nor the appeasement of Iran is a test. It is a way to sugar-coat the US policy, which is appeasement of the worst elements of the human race in a naive and doomed attempt to get them on our side.

Partly based on naked fear of terrorism — what if Hizballah were unleashed in the US? — partly on a post-modern sensibility that cannot recognize evil even when it knocks down buildings in our greatest city, and partly on a lack of historical perspective, the policy is simple: give them what they want and they will leave us alone.

For a while.

Technorati Tags: John Kerry, Iran, Israel

Well, they’re at it again.

Releasing convicted murderers, I mean. And they are murderers:

All of the 26 prisoners on the [Israel Prison Service] list were either convicted of murder or attempted murder. Among the most notable cases is Damouni Saad Mohammed Ahmed, who was convicted of involvement in the brutal lynch of IDF reservist Amnon Pomerantz in the Gaza Strip in 1990.

Another Palestinian set to be freed is Massoud Issa Rajib Amer, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who in 1993 was convicted of brutally hacking to death Ian Feinberg, a young lawyer who spent time in Gaza cultivating ties to the local Palestinian community while trying to promote economic projects. Amer was also convicted of killing three Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel.

Israel will also release Tukeman Yusef Suleiman Mahmed, Abu Hanana Zakariya Udia Usama, and Abdel-Aziz Said Kassam Ahmed, three men involved in the 1992 shooting death of Moshe Biton. Biton was shot and killed after entering a convenience store, and his wife was shot after trying to tend to him.

This is the second group of mostly murderers released as part of an agreement that brought Palestinian Authority (PA) negotiators to the table.

Someone recently wrote that “no other country in the world lets murderers go free.” I don’t know how to verify that, but surely no other country would let them go free for less than nothing, which is what Israel has done in this latest deal.

What exactly did Israel get in return for causing immense pain to the family members of victims, making a joke of its justice system and risking the return of these vicious killers to ‘active duty’ as terrorists? Let’s look at the PA’s position in the recent talks:

The Palestinian Authority demands that any land swap with Israel as part of a peace deal not exceed 1.9 percent of the West Bank, less than half of the land necessary to incorporate the lion’s share of settlers, according to details leaked to Channel 2 by a disgruntled Palestinian official on Sunday.

According to the report, the Palestinians are also insisting that they gain control over water, and control at their sides of the Dead Sea and border crossings; that a Palestinian state be able to sign agreements with other states without Israeli intervention; that Israel release all Palestinian prisoners it holds; and that all Palestinian refugees and their descendants be granted the right to choose to live in Israel or the Palestinian territories as part of a final agreement.

To be polite, this is a non-starter. To be impolite, it is a recipe for the end of the Jewish state. Can you imagine ‘Palestine’ inviting Iran to build a base in its territory? Can you imagine flooding Israel with millions of descendants of Arab refugees?

The PA is intransigent because officials do not want to reach an agreement. They know that a high-priority goal of US policy is to get Israel out of the territories, and that the administration in Washington is not sympathetic to Israeli concerns. They know that this leads to continued pressure on Israel to make concessions, like the prisoner release.

Their position gains them points with their constituency — polls have consistently showed that Palestinian Arabs overwhelmingly favor a hard line against Israel — and gets them concessions. By sticking to their maximal demands, they establish a baseline for future ‘peace’ proposals. They employ what I’ve called ‘the divorce court fallacy’ (if one party says X and the other Y, then the truth must be halfway in between) to drive the US closer to their position.

In the meantime, they pursue the parallel tracks of diplomacy at the UN, creating facts on the ground with European money, and of course terrorism.

Neither Israel nor the PA expects these talks to lead to a peace agreement. They do produce benefits for the PA, but what do they do for Israel? Only one thing, which is to get Barack Obama off its back. Maybe.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinian Authority, prisoner release