FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

Until now, I’ve refrained from being sharply critical of President Obama. I’ve wanted to give him time to develop his policies, to learn from his experience that the real obstacle to peace in the Mideast is not Israel. I’ve assumed that his native intelligence would allow him — once he became involved in the process — to get past the unexamined left-wing worldview that came from his educational background and his associations, and to put aside the bad advice that he’s received. I’ve hoped that he would turn out to be a Truman or JFK, someone capable of thinking for himself as soon as he realized that the buck does in fact stop at his desk.

I’ve criticized some of his actions, true. I was upset by his early choice of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samantha Power, Rob Malley, and some others as advisers. I objected to his nomination of Chas Freeman as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. I found his Cairo speech offensive. I was unhappy with his embrace of the phony ‘pro-Israel’ group J Street. I strongly objected to his original call for a settlement freeze. I was dismayed by his treatment of PM Netanyahu when he visited the US recently.

But I kept hoping that he would someday ‘get it’. Not any more:

Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) — Israeli plans to build 900 new homes in Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood, constructed beyond the city’s 1967 borders, could have “dangerous” consequences, President Barack Obama said today.

Obama said “additional settlement building does not contribute to Israel’s security,” according to a transcript of an interview he gave Fox News. “I think it makes it harder for them to make peace with their neighbors, I think it embitters the Palestinians in a way that could end up being very dangerous.”

Obama’s remark was echoed by the European Union, Ban Ki-Moon, and others.

Some background: Gilo is within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem, on the southwest side of the city, next to the Arab town of Beit Jala and not far from Bethlehem. Some Jews lived there pre-1948. In 1967, the area was captured from the Jordanians along with the rest of East Jerusalem, and in 1980 it was formally annexed to Israel as part of Jerusalem. Today, about 40,000 Jews live in Gilo.

Gilo is highly strategic, providing a buffer between Jerusalem and Arab towns. In 2000-2002, Fatah Tanzim (Fatah — our ‘peace partner’) snipers occupied homes and churches in the Christian Arab town of Beit Jala, firing at Gilo daily. IDF response was limited in order to avoid harming the non-hostile population. Here’s a photo of a playground in Gilo — note the concrete barrier to protect the children from sniper fire:

Playground in Gilo. Note concrete barrier to protect children from sniper fire.

The use of the word ‘settlement’ in connection with Gilo is a litmus test of attitude toward Israel’s rights in East Jerusalem. Although the Netanyahu government has indicated that it is prepared to consider evacuating settlements in Judea and Samaria as well as ceding some Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem as part of a peace settlement, it considers neighborhoods such as Gilo an integral part of Israel, no less so than West Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. This is not a ‘right-wing’ point of view. Even Tzipi Livni, leader of the opposition in Israel, has said that “there is an Israeli consensus” on this.

Obama’s remark thus takes the Arab position that the status of East Jerusalem is no different than that of Judea and Samaria. It implies that a Jewish neighborhood of East Jerusalem could well become part of ‘Palestine’ in some imagined agreement. His use of the phrase ‘settlement building’ is a deliberate attempt to blur the distinction between building a new settlement where none existed, and building some homes in a neighborhood of Israel’s capital.

A deliberate attempt, that is, to mislead. A lie.

Right now the Palestinians are focusing on Jerusalem, attacking Israel’s claim to sovereignty. This takes the form of incitement of Arabs to violently riot over nonexistent Israeli attempts to ‘storm’ the Temple Mount, at the same time that they demand — and the Obama administration supports this unprecedented demand — that Israel may not build anything in the eastern part of its capital. The Obama administration denies Israel sovereign rights in East Jerusalem.

Obama’s statement is not only deliberately misleading, it is deliberately threatening: “It embitters the Palestinians in a way that could end up being very dangerous” Obama says, repeating and reinforcing the threats of the Palestinians, who always promise terrorism if they do not get their way.

Although Obama said this building activity “makes it harder to make peace”, he must know that this is not so; practically speaking no peace agreement could call for the evacuation of Gilo — even French FM Kouchner admits this! Therefore it only ‘makes it harder’ because it opposes maximalist Palestinian aspirations. Is his position always going to be that surrender in the face of threats is the best policy?

It’s time now to ‘call the child by his name’ (to translate a Hebrew expression) and admit: Our President is no friend of Israel. Barack Obama is perhaps the most anti-Israel President since Bush I or Eisenhower, and he may turn out to be the worst ever in this regard.

Just like J Street, the only thing pro-Israel about him is his insistence that he is. His primary policy goal in the Mideast is to create a Palestinian state in order to ingratiate himself with the Muslim nations — something, incidentally, that he has so far entirely failed to do — and Israel’s security is very low priority.

Obama has had his chance and he’s shown us that rather than learning from his experience, he’s flying in the face of it. Hopefully, he’ll only be doing it until 2012.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Barack Obama, Gilo

The latest Palestinian threat is that they will unilaterally declare a state:

Bethlehem – Ma’an/Agencies – The Palestinian Authority is mobilizing international support for declaring statehood, chief PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat said on Saturday.

“The idea is clear and understandable,” Erekat told the Palestinian daily newspaper Al-Ayyam. “Now we mobilize.”

Palestinians will bring the issue to a vote before the United Nations Security Council, which would declare a Palestinian state on the 4 June 1967 border with Israel, he explained.

This is supposed to strike fear into the heart of PM Netanyahu and his (not really so) right-wing government. But imagine the conversation:

Saeb Erekat: We are unilaterally declaring a state.

Binyamin Netanyahu: A state? But you could have had one in 2000. Why didn’t you accept it? Or what about the offer that Olmert made last year, supposedly even worse — I mean, more generous — then the Camp David and Taba ideas? He offered you 98.1% of  Judea of Samaria plus  a connecting passage through Israel from Gaza, most of East Jerusalem, and to allow 5,000 ‘refugees’ to enter Israel. Why didn’t you say ‘yes’ to that?

SE: Because we want all of East Jerusalem and all of Judea and Samaria. And we want all 5 million Arab refugees to have the right to return to their homes in Israel even if they never lived in them. And we aren’t going to say that Israel belongs to the Jewish people because it belongs to the Arabs that live there now and the ones who will return.

BN: That’s absurd. We’d never agree to that — it would mean the end of the Jewish state.

SE: Bingo.

BN: Well, declare whatever you want. But then you won’t get any land swaps, we won’t evacuate any settlements, and you won’t get ‘contiguity’ to Gaza. You will be in violation of all the agreements that you signed, and you’ll freeze the map as it is today, with no more territory in your hands. You’ll be Foreign Minister of Ramallah.

SE: But the Security Council will protect our new state. The UN will come and kick all 500,000 Jewish settlers [he’s including the Jewish population of E. Jerusalem — ed.] out of our land!

BN: So you are telling me that even the Obama administration wouldn’t veto a resolution to send UN troops to fight the IDF? Because that’s what it would take.

SE: We’ll have our capital in Holy Jerusalem!

BN: But if you won’t negotiate, you’ll get none of East Jerusalem. Even my administration, which is not as right-wing as some say, would agree to negotiate Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. Declare a state unilaterally and you’ll just make the present status quo permanent. Is that really what you want?

SE: (losing it) What we really want is to end the occupation, from the river to the sea!

BN: Bingo. But you aren’t going to get that. So you can either keep things as they are today — either by unilaterally declaring a state or by just continuing to refuse to talk — or you can finally accept that “two-state solution” means that one of those two states will belong to the Jewish people, and make a deal.

Of course, they don’t accept that, and no member of the PLO — we are not even talking about Hamas — will ever accept it. The fundamental truth of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is this:

No Palestinian leadership can come to power or stay there today which is not committed to replacing Israel with an Arab state. There may be differences in approach — in particular, whether a state in the territories is a useful step on the way to eliminating Israel — but there is no divergence in goals. They don’t so much want a state as they want our state.

PM Netanyahu’s conditions for a peace agreement — that ‘Palestine’ be demilitarized, that Israel must be recognized as the state of the Jewish people, and that refugees may ‘return’ only to ‘Palestine’ — and the idea that boundaries should be drawn to put the Arabs on one side and the Jews on the other,  are intended to make coexistence possible. But coexistence is exactly what the Arabs don’t want, and that is why they insist on impossible preconditions even to return to discussions.

The PLO strategy until now seems to have been to take advantage of the Israeli propensity for wishful thinking, along with the desire of the US to push Israel back to 1967 borders, in order to get a state that could be used as a platform to conquer the rest, possibly with help from other Arabs — the so-called ‘phased plan‘ developed in 1974.

But several things happened to derail this. One was Hamas, which enormously complicated the process of creating the temporary state. Another was the fact that the PLO, following the lead of its spiritual father, Yasser Arafat, simply could not restrain its propensity to kill Jews and incite hatred. The Arafat intifada that began in 2000 and killed about 1,400 Israelis taught the ones who survived a strong lesson, which I expressed above. The wishful thinking that gave birth to Oslo was blown away by the bomb blasts of the intifada.

So now Israel elected a Prime Minister who thinks realistically. The PLO leaders are furious as they see their strategy dissolve, so they’ve come up with a new one. What is remarkable to me is how the media and foreign offices around the world continue to insist that the Palestinians want a state (of their own, as opposed to someone else’s) and that Israel is the obstacle to talks.

Israel can’t stop the PLO from declaring a state. But even if it receives UN recognition, the UN will not enforce its claimed borders any more than it succeeded in internationalizing Jerusalem in 1949. And the Palestinian Arabs will be farther from, not closer to, their goal.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinians, PLO, Palestinian state, Saeb Erekat, Binyamin Netanyahu

One sometimes forgets what a fool Bill Clinton was capable of being. And then he reminds us:

“In the last 14 years, not a single week has gone by that I did not think of Yitzhak Rabin and miss him terribly,” Clinton told a VIP gathering at the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv.

“Nor has a single week gone by in which I have not reaffirmed my conviction that had he not lost his life on that terrible November night, within three years we would have had a comprehensive agreement for peace in the Middle East.”  — Ha’aretz

Oh really? What does Clinton think Rabin would have added to the already over-the-top offers made to the Palestinians at Camp David and Taba that would have caused Arafat to accept them?

Does he think Arafat would have refrained from sponsoring terrorism and educating a generation to be suicide bombers if Rabin had been alive? Does he think that any of the clear messages sent by the Palestinians to this day, that the only ‘peace’ deal that they would accept is unconditional surrender, would have not been sent if Rabin were around?

Either he really is a fool and actually believes this, or he is helping push the current State Department line (after all, his wife is the Secretary) that the reason that there isn’t ‘peace’ is that Israel isn’t giving up enough. Just like the helpful media, Clinton is reinforcing the message that the problem is Israel’s intransigence rather than Palestinian anti-Zionism.

“If you want it, it is no legend,” Herzl said. Unfortunately, this inspiring proposition is only sometimes true. Some people want a peaceful two-state solution next week, but this is one of those times that reality intervenes, and it doesn’t matter how much one wants it, it remains a dream.

Technorati Tags: Bill Clinton, Israel, Rabin, Israeli-Palestinian conflict

On November 1,

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said … at a press conference in Jerusalem that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement on limiting construction in the settlements was “unprecedented.”

A senior government source in Jerusalem said Clinton told the prime minister, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Defense Minister Ehud Barak that she had demanded that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas remove his preconditions and renew talks immediately. — Ha’aretz

But 9 days later,

The United States does not accept continued Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, a senior U.S. state department official has said, adding that Jerusalem’s commitment to restrain settlement activity is not enough.

In an address to the Middle East Institute, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs William J. Burns on Tuesday said that the Obama administration does not “accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.”

“We consider the Israeli offer to restrain settlement activity to be a potentially important step, but it obviously falls short of the continuing Roadmap obligation for a full settlement freeze,” he said. — Ha’aretz

What a difference a bit more than a week makes! During those 9 days, two main things happened. Mahmoud Abbas threw a tantrum and threatened to quit or even to dissolve the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the State Department fell in love with the Fayaad plan to declare a Palestinian state in two years.

Let’s face it, the State Department doesn’t give a rat’s tuchas about security for Israel. Their goal is always stated in terms of “two peaceful states, side by side”, but what they care about  is the Palestinian state. Burns gave the usual meaningless nod toward America’s connection with Israel, but you can see that it’s the Arab state that he’s salivating for:

A Jewish state of Israel, with which America retains unbreakable bonds, and with true security for all Israelis; and a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967, that ends the daily humiliations of Palestinians under occupation, and that realizes the full and remarkable potential of the Palestinian people…

The good news is that he said “A Jewish state” and that he mentioned 1967 — after all, if he had just said “the occupation”, Palestinians would assume that he meant the ‘occupation’ that dates from 1948.

The rest is bad: ‘contiguous’ means that Israel, which has itself been contiguous since 1948, would be cut in half. Ending the “daily humiliations” means stopping the security measures that keep Israelis alive. And what would be the realization of the “full and remarkable potential of the Palestinian people?” I’ve written about that on several occasions, for example here and here and here.

It’s interesting and typical that Israel gets abstract promises about ‘unbreakable bonds’ — what does this mean when the US consistently breaks commitments and modifies its demands in response to Arab tantrums? — and Palestinians get the most concrete thing of all, land.

His mention of the Roadmap is also worth notice, since he conveniently ignores the fact that the PA, too, has obligations under the Roadmap,  like ending anti-Israel incitement. This is a good way to test the PA’s intentions, because it’s easy for them to do — the PA media are tightly controlled by the leadership. But even this they haven’t done.

The way the meeting between President Obama and PM Netanyahu was carried out this Monday night was more evidence that Israel’s “unprecedented” concession was not enough. Caroline Glick described it thus:

It isn’t every day that you can see an American president leaving the prime minister of an allied government twisting in the wind for weeks before deciding to grant him an audience at the White House.

It isn’t every day that a visiting leader from a strategically vital US ally is brought into the White House in an unmarked van in the middle of the night rather than greeted like a friend at the front door; is forbidden to have his picture taken with the president; is forced to leave the White House alone, through a side exit; and is ordered to keep the contents of his meeting with the president secret.

In response to raised eyebrows, statements were issued by both parties that the discussions were “positive”, and the State Department released one photo. But this is not how the Prime Minister of, say, France would be treated.

Although Burns also said the US would put pressure on both sides, it seems that all the Arabs have to do is say ‘no’, and Israel gets the punishment again.

Maybe relations between the US and Israel are not quite at a historic low point as some have suggested, but the “unbreakable bonds” certainly seem to be fraying.

Technorati Tags: Israel-US relations

This is a couple of days old, but it illustrates something important:

France fears that Israel no longer desires a Middle East peace deal, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Tuesday, adding that Paris remained deeply opposed to settlement building in the West Bank…

Speaking on France Inter radio, Kouchner made clear he was not expecting any swift break through in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

“What really hurts me, and this shocks us, is that before there used to be a great peace movement in Israel. There was a left that made itself heard and a real desire for peace,” Kouchner said.

“It seems to me, and I hope that I am completely wrong, that this desire has completely vanished, as though people no longer believe in it,” he added. — Ha’aretz

I can only understand this in one of two ways: either Kouchner and his boss are really, truly idiots who are incapable of perceiving the simple facts of the conflict and recent events; or, they are deliberately presenting a completely false view in order to make political points with foreign and domestic anti-Zionists.

The remark is infuriating, particularly the statement that Israelis in general don’t want peace, and the implication that only the Left is capable of it. The lack of peace is war — does he think Israelis want more war, after 61 years of it? Look at the behavior of Hamas and Hezbollah and ask who wants war!

The “desire has completely vanished”, he says. Something has vanished, but it’s not the desire for peace or even the Left, which is still around. What “people no longer believe in” is the idea that peace will come from giving up land and security to the Palestinians.

This was tested –  how it was tested! — by the Oslo accord, which took on faith the idea that the PLO, too, was interested in a peaceful two-state solution. Thousands of Israelis and Palestinians are dead now, because this false proposition was embraced — with some pushing from a naive US President — by Israel.

It was tested further by the withdrawal from Gaza, which brought even more war. Has Kouchner been asleep since 1993? How else can we understand his shock that Israelis no longer think that there is a Palestinian leadership that will return concessions with peace?

Why, after all this, is he surprised and hurt that Israelis are tired of taking risks, when the payback for it since 1993 has been suicide bombings and Qassam rockets? Kouchner should be glad that Israel’s present government is prepared to say more than “to hell with you” to the Palestinians.

One wants to ask what world he lives in.

Of course, the answer is “one in which 30% of the population of France is Muslim”. And one in which the following is true:

Saudi Arabia is our third-leading oil supplier, after Norway and Russia. In 2004, our exports reached €1.3 billion and our imports stood at €3.1 billion. Our sales are based on intermediate goods, consumer goods and capital goods. With market share moving between 4 and 5%, France is the Kingdom’s eighth-largest supplier. Saudi Arabia is our fourth-biggest customer in the region, after Turkey, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.  — France-Diplomatie

Technorati Tags: Israel, Kouchner, France, Israeli-Arab conflict