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News item:

US Vice President Joe Biden said Wednesday the Palestinians deserve a “viable” independent state with contiguous territory, seeking to reassure them of US support after the Interior Ministry on Tuesday approved a plan to expand the Jewish Ramat Shlomo neighborhood in east Jerusalem…

“The United States pledges to play an active as well as a sustainable role in these talks,” Biden said. He stressed the Palestinians deserve an independent state that is “viable and contiguous,” meaning the territory should not be broken up by Israeli settlement enclaves.

Although this AP report doesn’t provide the complete quotation, I presume that Biden actually used the word ‘deserve’. Now, I will agree that all human beings, including Palestinian Arabs, deserve a secure existence and to live in an environment that’s not oppressive and where their political, economic and other aspirations can be realized. The question is, “does the Palestinian Authority or Hamas deserve the leadership role in the state that is to be created for them?” and the answer is “certainly not.” And that’s because both of these organizations have, as part of their fundamental self-definition, the violent negation of another state. Nobody ‘deserves’ a murderer-state. How could the logic be any simpler?

Let’s look at another word, ‘contiguous’. I think the AP’s interpretation of Biden’s statement, “the territory should not be broken up by Israeli settlement enclaves,” is misleading at best. In English, ‘contiguous’ means ‘touching’ or ‘connected to’. It means that you can get from any point in a contiguous area to any other point without leaving the area. It does not mean that there aren’t ‘enclaves’, it just means that they don’t break the territory into disconnected parts.

In fact, the use of the word ‘contiguous’ by the US has always referred to the Arab demand for a chunk of Israel to provide passage between Gaza and Judea/Samaria. Is Biden making a new demand, that there can’t be ‘enclaves’ or that the 1949 lines are sacrosanct? Something new that they ‘deserve’?

Biden said that the approval of a plan to build 1,600 new housing units in the east Jerusalem neighborhood “undermines peace efforts.”

Israel never agreed to a freeze on construction in East Jerusalem. Certainly there is no freeze on Palestinian construction there! So why does construction of apartments in an already existing Jewish neighborhood of 20,000 residents, a neighborhood which is located next to the northern boundary of West Jerusalem and other Jewish areas (not really an ‘enclave’), and which will have zero effect on ‘contiguity’, so unacceptable? Simply because the Palestinians say so.

But all this is beside the point. As I wrote yesterday, the bottom line for a Palestinian state which is other than a platform to threaten Israel is that its leadership commits to the basic principles that will distinguish it as a legitimate vehicle for Palestinian Arab sovereignty rather than a murderer-state:

• Recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people
• Agreement that there is no right of return to Israel for ‘refugees’
• Agreement to finally give up all claims against Israel and end the conflict

These principles cannot be byproducts to a negotiation about boundaries. They ought to be demanded by Israel as absolute preconditions to negotiation.

The Palestinian Arabs want a sovereign state; well, so do we. Let’s start from there.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinians, Biden

Nothing irritates Israeli Arabs more than talk of land and population swaps, and it’s interesting to see why.

The idea of a swap, promoted by Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beiteinu party, seems like a practical solution to a difficult problem.

Implementing a partition of the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean — the so-called two-state solution –  by simply returning to the 1949 cease-fire lines would not be acceptable to Israel, and indeed very unfair. Since the Palestinians are not prepared to permit Jews to live in ‘Palestine’, all 300,000 Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria (for the purposes of this article, I’m ignoring the very difficult issue of Jerusalem) would have to be moved. Considering the difficulty and expense of evacuating 8,000 people from Gaza, this kind of population movement is unimaginable.

I am not going to belabor the irony that the Palestinians, who insist that Israel’s policy in the territories constitutes ‘racist apartheid’ find no difficulty themselves in proposing a racist apartheid state!

In any event, UN Security Council resolution 242, generally considered the legal foundation for the two-state solution, does not call for a reversion to the pre-1967 status quo. Rather, it says that in the framework of a peace agreement, Israel will return territories (but not all the territories — see here for interpretations by the original drafters of the resolution) to Arab control in return for an end of the conflict and “secure and recognized boundaries.” Since then many observers have pointed out that the 1949 lines are not at all secure.

Most of the two-state proposals, such as those made at Camp David and by former Israeli PM Olmert in 2007, envision  an agreement based on the 1949 lines, with adjustments for security reasons and to incorporate into Israel large Jewish settlements near the line. In return, Israel has offered to compensate the Palestinians with land west of the boundary. The official Palestinian position has always been that only a strict return to the 1949 lines, along with a complete evacuation of ‘settlers’ would be acceptable, but it’s said that they have indicated a willingness to consider such adjustments in private.

Note that adjustments proposed in the past refer to swaps of land occupied by Jewish settlements for land that’s sparsely populated, from the Negev for example.

The kind of swap proposed by Israel Beiteinu is different: they propose that Israel compensate the Palestinians with land occupied by ‘Israeli Arabs’:

“Israeli Arabs will not lose anything by joining the Palestinian state. Instead of giving the Palestinians empty land in the Negev, we are offering them land full of residents, who will not have to leave their homes,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon in an interview to London-based al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper published [in early February]…

When asked if he was referring to the concentration of Arab towns and villages known as the Triangle region, he said: “Yes. Why not? If the Arabs in Israel say they are proud of being Palestinian, why shouldn’t they be proud of being part of the Palestinian state?

“They will lose nothing by joining it, and in addition, this will be in the interest of the Palestinian state, since they are economically and socially developed and will be able to use their experience to help build the state…”

“…The important thing is to accept the idea that the majority of Jews live in Israel and the majority of Arabs live in Palestine.”  — YNet

The reaction from Arab Knesset members was swift and furious:

MK Ahmad Tibi dismissed Ayalon’s remarks, saying that the deputy FM and his boss, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, “have a basic flaw in understanding the fundamental values of democracy and civil rights.”

“We are not chess pawns. We did not arrive in the country on planes and we did not immigrate here,” Tibi said. “We do not wish to expel anyone…but if someone wishes to expel us, I’ll say this: Whoever got here last will be leaving first. That way, there will be fewer fascists in Israel…”

Hadash’s Chairman, MK Mohammad Barakeh, also slammed Ayalon’s remarks, suggesting that both him and Lieberman move to France and replace ultranationalist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen…

Barakeh added that Israel’s Arabs are residing on their land legally.  “We did not immigrate from anywhere. This land is ours,” he said. “To my regret, most of this land had been robbed over the course of dozens of years. We are no settlers and there is no room for comparison between us and the thieving settlers in the West Bank, including in Jerusalem.”

“Ayalon’s words are yet another chapter in Liebermanism’s new book of racism,” he concluded. — YNet

Keep in mind that Israeli Arabs would not leave their homes under Ayalon’s proposal. The only ‘transfer’ involved would be a transfer of sovereignty over Arab-populated areas from Israel to ‘Palestine’. The Arab MK’s are generating indignation by deliberately misunderstanding, it seems. Why?

After all, if the goal is to end the conflict, one way to do so is to separate the two peoples. That’s been the idea of every partition proposal since the Peel commission of 1937, including the original 1947 UN resolution and the Oslo accord. If it can be accomplished without making anybody leave their homes, isn’t that a win-win solution?

Not from an Arab point of view it isn’t.

There is, of course, the fact that Israeli Arabs prefer the Israeli economy, government benefits, education, health care, etc. to the corrupt, kleptocratic and gangster-ridden Palestinian Authority (PA), but that’s not the main reason for their opposition to swaps.

The real issue is that Arab and Israeli or Western goals for the process are not the same. While the object of Israeli policy has been and continues to be to live at peace with its neighbors — and with its Arab citizens — the Palestinian Arabs have not given up the idea that a sovereign Jewish state anywhere in historic Palestine represents a theft of their property and a blemish on their honor which must be redressed. There is a fundamental asymmetry here which many in the West don’t recognize, tending to see the conflict as amenable to compromise.

From the Arab point of view, the more Arabs who are Israeli citizens, the more effective they can be in the process of changing Israel from a Jewish state into … something else. The Arab goal is not to end the conflict, at least not at this stage and not on the terms offered — an independent Palestine alongside a Jewish Israel. Rather, the idea is that internal pressure, couched in terms of civil rights, democracy and anti-racism, concepts that are very popular in the West, will work together with external forces to bring about the end of the Jewish state and its replacement with an Arab state.

So the PA continues to insist on strict 1949 lines in order to maximize the disruption of Jewish Israel that would be caused by the expulsion of massive numbers of Jews from Judea and Samaria, and of course they refuse to give up the vision of a ‘right of return’ to Israel for millions of Arabs. Meanwhile the various Israeli Arab organizations push for ‘de-Judaization’ of Israel.

Nothing illustrates the Palestinian mindset better than the fact that they will not countenance Jewish ‘settlers’, while they insist on right of return for ‘refugees’. These are not contradictory positions for one who thinks that all the land belongs to Arabs.

Interestingly, ‘progressive’ thought, in the US at least, seems to support the Palestinian project. Recently Rabbi David Saperstein of the Union for Reform Judaism spoke here. He said that two out of the three issues that should be Israel’s top priority were 1) the need to make a deal with the Palestinians while a two-state solution is still possible, and 2) the need to grant ‘civil rights’ to the Israeli Arabs (the third issue was the religious monopoly held by the Orthodox establishment).

My response to the first was was that the worst thing Israel could do would be to make a deal with the Palestinians without a commitment to recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people, to give up the idea of a ‘right of return’, and to end the conflict.  With regard to the second, I have no problem with civil rights for everyone; but ‘civil rights’ do not include the conversion of Israel into a binational state.

Some analysts think that  everything else is just a sideshow and the real issue is the military threat from Iran and its proxies. Without minimizing the external danger, issues surrounding Palestinian Arabs in the territories and inside Israel — especially if their objectives are misunderstood and in effect supported by the US and other external forces — are becoming more and more significant.

Update [10 Mar 1034 PST]: Corrected the number of Judea / Samaria residents to 300,000.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinians

Yesterday I mentioned the phenomenon of Turkey, under the ‘moderate’ Islamist AKP party, distancing itself from Israel and the US. As part of the process, Turkish PM ErdoÄŸan never misses an opportunity to attack Israel:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan on Sunday continued his verbal assault on Israel, according to Saudi paper Al Wattan, which quoted him as saying that that al Aksa Mosque, the Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb “were not and never will be Jewish sites, but Islamic sites…”

Speaking to Palestinian journalists, ErdoÄŸan reportedly said, “Palestine [was] always at the top of Turkey’s priorities.” He expressed his support for the renewal of indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Donning a cloak of pan-Islamic identity, ErdoÄŸan told Al Wattan that he “loves my brothers in Fatah and my brothers in Hamas to the same degree, because they are my Muslim brothers and I cannot distinguish between them.”

Israel in the past enjoyed a close collaboration with Turkey in military matters, but this has been reduced recently. It’s likely that if the AKP continues with its efforts to reduce the influence of the army (by arresting and prosecuting officers for treason), that this trend will continue.

Relations between Turkey and the US have cooled since the Iraq war (which Turkey opposed because it strengthened the Kurdish PKK forces in the north in their desire to establish an independent state partly on Turkish territory) and more recently because of the genocide resolution.

At the same time, Turkey is collaborating more closely with Iran and Syria. Two weeks ago, Iran’s President Ahmadinejad visited Damascus. Barry Rubin noted an editorial in the state newspaper, al-Baath:

The editorial speaks of people in the Middle East who are coming together in an alliance rejecting Westernization, artificial borders, America, Israel, and various conspiracies. What countries are in this new alliance?

“Syria, Iran and Turkey, with their great peoples and their lively peoples and their rejectionist [the Syrian term for radical and anti-Israel, anti-American] policies are moving toward brotherhood….Welcome, President Ahmadinejad, in Syria.”

The Syrian regime is thus publicly trumpeting an Iran-Syria-Turkey alliance. The Turkish government’s policy, in theory, is one of getting along with everyone. But while one should not exaggerate how far this has gone—and, of course, this is a Syrian, not a Turkish statement—the fact is that Ankara is now politically as well as geographically much closer to Damascus and Tehran than to Washington DC.

If this is correct, then Turkey’s traditional Western-looking stance may be coming to an end, because it is not possible to align with the US and Iran at the same time.

My thinking is that ErdoÄŸan has simply asked himself where the regional power is going to reside in the future and made his choice.

This is really a historic moment for the Middle East. After WWII the US took up the mantle of former colonial power Britain, and faced off for control of the region with the Soviet Union. The Soviets lost, and the turning point was when Anwar Sadat expelled Russian military advisers in 1973, later moving Egypt into the US orbit.

Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia were the pillars of US strategy from then on, although American support for Israel was by no means as one-sided as the Arabs suggest. The US neutralized hostile Iran during the 1980’s by supporting Iraq — until Saddam overreached himself by invading Kuwait. But even after that, the US allowed him to remain in power as a counterbalance to Iran.

When Saddam was removed in 2003, Iran and Syria seized the opportunity to foment Sunni-Shiite violence; at the same time, the US had no coherent plan to create a stable government in a country without a democratic tradition, where elections were understood as a sectarian popularity contest, and where bombings are an accepted form of electioneering. It’s hard to see any outcome after the US leaves other than Iraq sliding into Iranian orbit.

At the same time, Iran is moving forward on several other fronts. Israel has been unable to prevent arms transfer to Hizballah in Lebanon via Syria, and the US has failed in getting diplomatic support for sanctions that might prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons (if indeed any form of sanctions could accomplish this). Iran has even bought itself influence on the Sunni Palestinian Hamas movement.

Meanwhile, the US is seriously strapped economically, partly because of the expensive wars it is fighting against radical islamists (although it will not name the enemy). Iran, on the other hand, is moving toward finally fully developing its massive oil reserves with Chinese help.

I don’t know if the US will be able to reverse the trend and reassert its power in the Mideast, or if, like Britain, be pushed aside, this time by Iran. This will be determined by the actions of the present and perhaps the next administration. This administration hasn’t yet shown the ability, will, or even much desire to maintain the US position.

But it looks like ErdoÄŸan thinks he knows the outcome, and has lined himself up with what he sees as the “strong horse” in the race.

Technorati Tags: Turkey, Israel, Iran, Mideast conflict

Today a friend directed my attention to an op-ed in the Boston Globe, “The New American Jew on Israel” by Jesse Singal. Singal asks why Jewish college students are less supportive of Israel than in the past, in the context of a talk at Harvard’s Hillel house by J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami. He does not discuss the question of J Street’s lack of legitimacy as a pro-Israel organization, its funding from sources that are anything but pro-Israel, or its recent embarrassment when Israel’s Ambassador Michael Oren refused to attend its convention because he found J Street’s policies to be damaging to Israeli interests.

But according to Singal, its position meshes closely with that of many students. Here’s one horrifying example:

…when asked about the prospect of Iran destroying Israel, Harvard Divinity School student Kenan Jaffe, 26, said he thought it was “unlikely.’’

“I also don’t think it’s directly related to the Palestinian question,’’ he said, “and it is only to the extent that if Israel comes to a final status solution with the Palestinians, Iran will have nothing to say about Israel and no reason to make threats against it.’’

Whether or not the Iranian regime will succeed in its oft-stated goal of bringing about an end to the Jewish state by means of its Lebanese and Palestinian proxies or even directly is certainly moot — it won’t happen if Israel has anything to say about it — but the idea that a ‘solution’ of the argument with the Palestinian Arabs, if such were possible, would end the Iranian threat is ludicrous. Iran’s quarrel with Israel has to do with its desire to push out Western influence from the region, its desire to dominate the conservative Sunni states (and their oil), and to unify the Mideast under a Shiite caliphate. There’s clearly no room for a Jewish political entity in this picture.

The students are “less likely to see Israel as threatened by its neighbors, and therefore less worried about Israel’s security”, says Singal, and quotes the glib Ben-Ami:

If you’ve had personal experience – if not you [then] at least your parents – with the destruction of your people, you’re more likely to take it as a possibility that it could happen again,’’ he said. “If you have grown up here in complete comfort and safety and no one you know in an immediate sense has been through that, I do think [you’re] going to have a very fundamental[ly] different view, a different take, on how you view the Iran threat.

Ben-Ami seems to be saying that it’s all about the Holocaust, and that older Jews are psychologically scarred by either remembering the time or by hearing firsthand accounts. So they react in a way which is understandable, but according to Ben-Ami, inappropriate. But this is very misleading (and insulting).

What is different about the young Jews, as Ami Isseroff recently said,  is that they have grown up without ever knowing a world without a Jewish state. There has always been an Israel for them; the idea that it could disappear is unthinkable. After all, hasn’t Israel won all of its wars? 62 years is longer than the parents of today’s college students have been around, although in geopolitical terms it’s not very long. Israel and its partisans quite naturally try to present an image of success and permanence, so it’s not surprising that it’s hard for young people to see its very real vulnerability.

Indeed, pro-Arab propaganda always emphasizes the underdog status of the Palestinians, always opposing them to the relatively mighty Israel, while leaving out the relative size of Israel vs. the Arab nations and Iran, and ignoring the military capabilities of all of Israel’s enemies.

While Ben-Ami attributes the difference in attitude to a psychologically damaged older generation, it’s more correct to say that it is caused by a perceptual inadequacy in the younger one.  It’s not that Age is paranoid; rather, Youth is blind. So whose impressions are closer to the truth?

Singal goes on to distill the students’ position, with which he clearly agrees, as follows:

…they were worried about the grim prospects that face Israel if it can’t make peace with the Palestinians. Given the region’s demographic patterns, absent a two-state solution, Israel will soon have to choose between being a Jewish state and a democratic one.

This presupposes that an additional partition of Israel would actually end the conflict, rather than simply provide a platform for more effective attacks against Israel. But there are plenty of indications that this is false. The refusal of Fatah to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and its demand for a right of return for Arab ‘refugees’ is one; the continued incitement to hate Israel and Jews coming from the Palestinian Authority despite its alleged participation in a ‘peace process’ is another; the preeminence of hardliners in Fatah is another; and the fact that at its convention last summer,  rather than moderating its charter which calls for the violent destruction of the Jewish state, Fatah chose to reaffirm it, is yet another. And I haven’t even mentioned Hamas yet!

Saying that the creation of a Palestinian state under the control of Fatah (at best) would provide a solution to the conflict is like saying that a fleet of flying pigs carrying mail would fix the postal service. Perhaps in theory — an entirely uninformed and highly imaginative theory — it would.

The reality is much more difficult, and therefore unpalatable. It’s necessary for Israel to keep doing what it has been doing since 1948, fighting for its existence while trying to maintain its democracy and Jewish character. It wasn’t easy and it doesn’t promise to be easy in the future. But wishing can’t make things so.

The message of J Street is highly dangerous: don’t worry, Israel isn’t in danger (or if there are dangers, Israel shouldn’t defend herself against them in any real way), go to almost any length (i.e., make all the concessions the Arabs demand) to ‘make peace’ (i.e., to weaken Israel and strengthen its enemies).

Both the message and the messenger are suspect.

Technorati Tags: J Street, Israeli-Arab conflict, Jesse Singal

Some recent wisdom from the Iranian President:

Existence of Zionist regime an insult to humanity, president

Tehran, Feb 28, IRNA — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday that existence of the Zionist regime is an insult to the entire humanity.

Addressing International Conference on ‘National and Islamic Solidarity for Future of Palestine’, he said that it is well-known for all that the Zionist regime’s mission is threat, violence and beating drums of war.

Supporters of the Zionist regime who are shouting slogans of human rights and anti-terrorism, support systematic crimes of the occupying regime, the president said.

He said that everybody knows that the regime is seeking hegemony over the world.

He said that the Zionist regime is the origin of all the wars, genocide, terrors and crimes against humanity and that they are the racist group not respecting the human principles.

President: Iranian foreign policy focuses on divine values, justice

Tehran, March 3, IRNA — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday that Iran’s foreign policy is based on divine values.

Addressing foreign-based Iranian diplomats and heads of Iranian missions abroad, he said that without establishment of a global ruling system on the basis of justice and monotheism, peace and security will not be materialized.

“Iran’s diplomacy seeks such an international government,” he said…

Ahmadinejad referred to sincerity and spirituality as the other focus of Iranian foreign policy and said that an Iranian envoy should advocate spirituality, sincerity and justice.

“Iran favors forging ties with all the countries except for the Zionist regime, which is illegitimate,” he said.

Issuing 29,000 billion counterfeit dollars by US is biggest theft

Tehran, March 3, IRNA, — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said issuance of 29,000 billion counterfeit dollars by US Federal Reserve is the biggest theft in the history of human kind…

He added the fact that US has 14,000 billion dollars budget deficit and has issued over 29,000 billion counterfeit dollars during the past 30 years and has bought goods with it, is the biggest theft in the history of human kind.

He was probably out taking hostages on the day they studied treasury securities in Economics class.

Remind yourself that this man heads a nation of about 74,000,000 people, in area the second largest state in the Middle East (after Saudi Arabia), and with a GNP of $820 billion, second only to Turkey. The powerful nations of the world have pretty much agreed that it’s OK for him to have nuclear weapons.

Why do you think he’s so afraid of the tiny country of the “Zionist regime”?

Technorati Tags: Ahmadinejad, Iran