In his article of 6 June 2011 in the Jerusalem Post Magazine ‘Above the Fray: Killing peace in the name of peace’ Alon Ben-Meir in support of President Obama’s attempt to isolate and enable the destruction of Israel states:
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s speech to a joint session of Congress brought political theater to a new height-and the State of Israel to a new low. With his unabashed arrogance and demagoguery on display as never before, Netanyahu’s address effectively slammed shut any window of opportunity for a peace settlement. Perhaps he could not hear the windows closing through the deafening applause of more than two dozen standing ovations from the members of Congress. If anything, his speech demonstrated that he has not been listening to the warning bells that have been sounding for months.”
In response:
By calling for a return to the June 4, “1967 borders” (also known as the 1949 Armistice Line or the “Green Line”), with “mutually agreed” land swaps in his May 19, 2011 State Department remarks on the Middle East and North Africa, Obama not only has ignored the fact that the “Green Line” merely is an armistice line with, as insisted by the Arab leaders, no political signifigance and therefore not a real international boundary. Even worse, he has chosen to disregarded U.N. Resolution 242 of 1967, the basis of almost every previous Arab Israeli peace initiative since the Six-Day War, beginning with the Rogers Plan of 1969, which calls for a “negotiated” withdrawal from “territories,” not “the territories” to “secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” In other words, it stipulated that Israel would not be required to concede sovereign land in exchange for any West Bank land it would retain under a future peace accord. More so, a return to the “Green Line” is a clear violation of America’s most recent commitment to Israel’s security as delineated in the 2004 Bush (Sharon) Letter. This committment, backed by a bi-partisan majority in both houses of the U.S. Congress and grounded in the aforementioned U.N. Resolutions, which “In light of new realities on the ground” clearly supports Israel’s requirement for defensible borders and its annexation of the existing settlement blocks such that “it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.”
Not only are the 1967 borders indefensible, but as in 2009, Obama’s adherence to the “Palestinian” position, this time “making the focus on borders in place of the settlement freeze,” which Ben-Meir states was a key objective of the speech delivered by Obama has enabled the PLO to continue to avoid direct negotiations with Israel along with the necessary compromises on settlements, east Jerusalem, refugees, and recognition of the Jewish right to national sovereignty and the respective end to all claims against Israel and thus the conflict. While he did “reiterate” that “Israel is the “Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people,” as with east Jerusalem, he left the refugee issue open and to be discussed only after Israel has agreed to borders along the armistice lines thereby providing the “Palestinians” with a veto on east Jerusalem and the settlements, and no incentive to negotiate or seek to find a solution to the refugee or any of the other above mentioned issues and claims. This is in contrast to even the Clinton Plan parameters of December 2000, which clearly, albeit less unilaterally, embraced the key principles subscribed to by President Bush, those being blocks of settlements in the West Bank and the stipulation that the right of return should apply only to the Palestinian state and not to Israel.
Further, the refusal of Obama since assuming office in early 2009 to publicly endorse the Bush (Sharon) Letter, the failure of the PA to fulfill its commitments under signed Oslo agreements to arrest terrorists, outlaw terrorist groups and end the incitement to hatred and murder that permeates all aspects of “Palestinian” society, and more recently its stated intention to seek a unilateral declaration of statehood at the United Nations later this year in clear violation of the 1995 Interim Agreement, which requires that “neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the Permanent Status negotiations,” it is unlikely that Israel would take much comfort in any “ironclad security guarantees” from Obama or the Americans for that matter. More so, such “ironclad security guarantees” mean nothing when in the very same speech where he purports to support Israel’s need for security he calls for the “full and phased withdrawal of the Israeli military forces,” from a new “Palestinian” state to have contiguous borders with Jordan, thereby eliminating Israel’s “critical presence in the Jordan Valley,” which every Israeli government has regarded as vital to Israeli defense and to which Ben-Meir himself refered to as a “legitimate security concern.” Further, while Obama’s call for coordinating Israel’s military withdrawal with “Palestinian security” is laughable (we saw how that worked under Oslo), whats more unbelievable is his request that “Palestinian leaders provide a credible solution” for how to involve Hamas, a terrorist organization whose declared goal is to eliminate Israel, in any negotiations. This is especially ironic as Obama opened his speech by praising his administrations killing of Osama Bin Laden, America’s equivalent of Israel’s Hamas.
Clearly, the so-called “Palestinians,” be it Hamas or the “moderate” Palestinian Authority, refuse to make concessions to Israel on any of its territorial requirements because they do not recognize its right to exist nor are they willing to accept anything aside from the pre-1967 lines, meaning the entire West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. With such positions, those that led them to reject the generous Israeli offers of statehood in 2000, 2001 and 2008 and Obama’s recent gestures, it is hard to see how the peace process could lead to anything positive. Therefore, there is no point in discussing the possibility of negotiating peace with either “Palestinian” camp.
It is obvious that:
Not only is Israel, including its ancient sovereignty over the Gaza Strip, the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and the Golan Heights, the religious, historical, legal and rightful homeland of the Jews, but it is impossible to negotiate with those bent on its destruction. Neither the so-called “Palestinians” nor their Arab patrons ever have subscribed to a “two-state” solution in which they would coexist peacefully with the Jewish people of Israel. This is made brutally clear by the all too familiar “Palestinian” rallying cry, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Let me be clear, I also do NOT subscribe to a two-state solution both because Israel belongs to the Jews and because a “Palestinian” terror-state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip not only would be a second “Palestinian” state, when one considers that Jordan is a “Palestinian” state given that its population is approx. 1/3 “Palestinian,” but more so that such a state would legitimize terror and the indoctrination of hatred toward the people of Israel.
After all, there was no shortage of Arab aggression toward Israel on behalf of the so-called “Palestinians,” from long before the 1948 War of Independence through the 1967 Six Day War, when the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights were captured in self-defense, despite there not having been a single settlement in any of these territories prior to the war. In fact, the PLO was founded in 1964, three years before Israel regained these territories and the Arab discourse then regarding liberating territory was not in reference to settlements like Efrat, which didn’t yet exist, but instead to Tel Aviv. If the Palestinians and/or the Arabs truly were interested in “Palestinian” statehood, such could have been granted in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank or both between 1949 and 1967, when both Egypt and Jordan, respectively, illegally occupied them.
In fact, the Palestinian National Authority (the “PA”), which under the PLO National Charter, despite numerous written guarantees, including those accompanying the Declaration of Principals (“DOP”) and the aforementioned 1995 Interim Agreement, still has failed to remove the articles of the Palestinian Covenant which deny Israel’s right to exist and which call for the “Liberation of Palestine through armed struggle,” not statehood through peaceful negotiations. As further evidenced by the continuous indoctrination of Jew-hatred among its civilian population and through its recent merger with Hamas, whose 1988 Charter is equally, if not more telling, it is clear that the Palestinian Authority, like its new partner Hamas, seeks the destruction of Israel, to be replaced with an Islamic state, and the worldwide murder of Jews.
More so, if coexistence was their objective they would not have rejected the generous American and Israeli proposals made at Camp David II. It was there that Barack inaugurated a new land-for-peace paradigm, for the first time not rooted in UN Security Council Resolution 242, to which President Clinton acknowledged that while Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak “showed particular courage and vision and an understanding of the historical importance of the moment,” Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasir Arafat “failed to demonstrate a flexibility or willingness to compromise his maximalist positions, particularly on Jerusalem.” Neither would they have rejected the even more generous “Clinton Plan” of 2000 a few months later in December. Despite warnings by the Israeli military establishment and a public strongly opposed to such a dangerous and one-sided proposal, Barack agreed to give the “Palestinians” 100% of Gaza, approx. 97% of the West Bank, the equivalent of 3% of Israeli sovereign territory, including an Israeli withdrawal from the vital Jordan Valley to be replaced by a “reliable” U.N. security force, similar to that which ignored Egypt’s violation of the 1956 cease-fire agreement when Nasser amassed its forces in the Sinai at the start of the 1967 War, a contiguous connection of the two territories under full “Palestinian” sovereignty and sovereignty over the Muslim and Christian sections of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount. Further, as later demonstrated by their rejection of an offer by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who in 2008 resurrected the land swap idea as part of newly proposed Israeli concessions that went even further than those at Camp David and Taba, the concept of “mutually agreed” land swaps never has been central to any peace initiative. Neither is such a concept feasible as the “Palestinians” later indicated that they only are willing to consider a land swap of approx 1.9%, which relates to the size of the areas of Jewish settlement in return for high quality land near the center of Israel, but which does not address Israel’s vital security needs. I believe this is because they do not wish to obtain statehood, but instead to deligitimize Israel and escalate the conflict.
As pointed out by Mordechai Kedar, the “Palestinians” are “turning to the United Nations mainly from despair of an Arab world that” in recent times “does nothing to liberate Palestine or even east Jerusalem for them” given that they “seem to be trying to perpetuate their problem with Israel rather than solving it.” As such, a UN endorsement of statehood, without a declaration of their own and without having to recognize Israel’s right to exist as the Jewish National Homeland, as would be required under any bilateral agreement, would enable the “Palestinians” to achieve these objectives. This intention was made clear in a recent New York Times op-ed where PA President Mahmoud Abbas attempted to re-write history by falsely highlighting “Palestinian victimhood” and emphasized confrontation. According to Abbas, “Palestine’s admission to the United Nations would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal matter, not only a political one. It would also pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Court of Justice.” Clearly, the expansion of “Palestinian lawfare” and other attempts to delegitimize Israel would not further peace and compromise.
Aside from Jew-hatred and a preference to live off charity rather than productive work, the main reason that the “Palestinians” never will be able or willing to conclude an agreement on final status with Israel that produces a “Palestinian” state stems, as Shlomo Ben-Ami stated in his Book, Scars of War Wounds of Peace, from the “ethos of their movement.” He explains that while Zionism never abandoned wider territorial dreams, it would never have occurred to Ben-Gurion to delay the establishment of the Jewish state due to lack of access to the Western Wall or the Temple Mount and thus, “the positive ethos of building a new society was to compensate for the poverty of the territorial solution.” Therefore, it is clear that it is not Israeli intransigence, but rather a consistent failure by the “Palestinian” leadership on behalf of its people, primarily due to a lack of will and/or capacity to process a positive founding ethos in order to assume a reasonable compromise. This, he argues, is due to the nature of the Palestinian national movement, which “has been more about vindication and justice than about finding a solution.” A recent report by Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post demonstrates that the “Palestinian” leadership to this day remains intransigent, based on comments by chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat who, instead of simply agreeing to negotiate based on Obama’s recent outline, which fully endorses the “Palestinian” point of view, has required, as a precondition to any negotiations, that Netanyahu state publicly “two states on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” What the “Palestinians” still refuse to understand is that “peace frequently is not about justice, but about stability.”
In Conclusion:
It should be obvious to anyone who listened to his recent speech, including Ben-Meir, that in addition to his antipathy towards Israel, Obama also is averse to acting against the will of both the UN and the muslim states, most of whom sponsor terror aimed at the US and Israel. As a result, he is trying to force Israel into making dangerous concessions, such as the acceptance of indefensible borders, to the Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority.
As my seven-year old niece so eloquently said, in response to my questioning of her (I like to educate them early) as to if she saw Obama’s “Winds of Change” speech:
“No, but I heard it was bad.”
To which I asked her if she knew why? To which she replied:
“No, why?”
To which I explained that Obama wanted to give away Israeli territory to people who “don’t like” Jews. To which she asked:
“What is Territory?”
To which I explained that it was sovereign land legally owned by Israel. To which she exclaimed:
“Why would he make us [the Jewish People] give away their land to people who don’t like us?”
Hence the point. While incredibly smart for a seven-year old, if she can understand the gist of it, its hard to believe that someone as educated and experienced as Alon Ben-Meir can’t!
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