Prime Minister Netanyahu has announced he will be addressing the AIPAC Conference and a session of Congress in May. The assumption is his speech will attempt to relieve pressure from Washington and elsewhere to accept declaration of a Palestinian State or propose something that will restart peace negotiations with the intransigent and hostile Palestinians.
This is similar to the position in which he found himself in June 2009 when he delivered a dramatic ground breaking speech at Bar Ilan University. In this speech for the first time in his political career Netanyahu agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian State albeit with reasonable and essential conditions. It was dramatic and interesting to Washington and the rest of the world but definitely not to the Palestinians.
The Palestinian Authority dismissed the proposal."Netanyahu's speech closed the door to permanent status negotiations," senior Palestinian official Saeb Erekat said. "We ask the world not to be fooled by his use of the term Palestinian state because he qualified it. He declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel, said refugees would not be negotiated and that settlements would remain."
While Pres. Obama saw the speech as an 'important step forward'."
Netanyahu proposed 2 critical conditions for establishment of a Palestinian state 1. That it be demilitarized and 2. That it recognize Israel as the Jewish state. But this was as far as Israel could go in accepting establishment of a Palestinian state. No one was about to give the Palestinians carte blanche to create an irredendist terror state in the West Bank. Recognition of Israel as the Jewish state is not just a condition, it is a precondition.
But typically the Palestinians had nothing but contempt and calumny for Netanyahu’s offer.
Netanyahu delivered his Bar Ilan speech on 14 June 2009 in direct response to Pres. Barack Obama’s dramatic but hallucinatory address at Cairo University on 4 June, 2009.
In this speech Obama explicitly called for establishment of a Palestinian state
Obama reaffirmed America's alliance with Israel, calling their mutual bond "unbreakable", but also described Palestinian statelessness as "intolerable" and recognized their aspirations for statehood and dignity as legitimate—just as legitimate as Israel's desire for a Jewish homeland.
Obama’s call for establishment of a Palestinian state per se is not the crux of the problem. The moral equivalency of his rationale is the crux of the problem:
"Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust....In a network of camps Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed - more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today.
"Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction - or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews - is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing peace...
"On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead.
"They endure the daily humiliations - large and small - that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own".
Obama above draws a direct equation between the Holocaust and Palestinian “dislocation”. Obama said many things in this Cairo speech that were not based in reality. But his equating the Holocaust with Palestinian “dislocation” and going the extra mile and claiming this equation justifies establishment of a Palestinian state is preposterous.
Jewish rights to the state of Israel do not emanate from the Holocaust but from Jewish heritage in the land of Israel dating back 4000 years.
It is true that a very large number of Palestinians were dislocated during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948/49. But why did this happen? The Palestinians chose to reject the UN Partition plan of two states for two peoples and attempted to drive Israel into the sea in a war they initiated and which 6 Arab armies pursued on their behalf. Israel was victorious in this bitter war and the chips fell where they may. If Israel had not been victorious the world would have witnessed a second Holocaust at the hands of the Jew- hating Arabs.
Benny Morris points this out in his history of the war of independence 1948
“Historians have tended to ignore or dismiss as so much hot air the jihadi rhetoric and flourishes that accompanied the two stage assault on the Yishuv and the constant references in the prevailing Arab discourse to that earlier bout of Islamic battle for the Holy Land against the Crusaders. This is a mistake.
The 1948 War from the Arabs’ perspective was a war of religion as much as if not more than a nationalist war over territory. Put another way, the territory was sacred: its violation by hated infidels was sufficient grounds for launching a holy war and its conquest or reconquest a divinely ordained necessity” (1948 page 194)."
Islamic religious motives point back to the dictates of the Koran. The Palestinian forces and later the invading Arab armies wanted to annihilate the Jewish settlement in Palestine because the writings in the Koran inspired them to perform this divine task.
Netanyahu did not address Obama’s egregious and hostile distortion in his Bar Ilan speech. His objective was to ameliorate the situation with Washington and throw Obama a bone for his claim that Palestinians must have a state to satisfy their needs.
But to some degree it is Obama’s lies and his ignorance and refusal to acknowledge the facts that bring Netanyahu to delivering a so-called Bar Ilan 2 speech in Washington next month.
Obama’s ignorance and lies are compounded by the pro-Palestinian positions of the Quartet and the European Union and the UN.
The Palestinians are threatening to declare a state unilaterally in the UN General Assembly in September. At this moment no one in the government of Israel knows what to do about the Palestinian threat to declare statehood in the UN, and the government is doing nothing.
It is more than likely that no matter what PM Netanyahu says in his so-called Bar Ilan 2 speech in Washington, it will roll off the impenetrable backs of the Palestinians. For figures like Abbas and Fayyad, their machinations on the international arena are comparable to the Third Intifada.
If the Palestinians achieve recognition of statehood and UN Member status it is a horror waiting to happen for Israel.
Defense Minister Barak called this a Diplomatic Tsunami. I call what the Palestinians are doing now in the UN “Diplomatic Terrorism”.
Among other irrational things, Obama said the following in Cairo in June 2009:
"For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It is easy to point fingers - for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel's founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security".
It would be possible to pick apart the above paragraph point by point. But it is irrelevant.
The bottom line is that it is not conceivable in the first place for the Palestinians to live in peace and security with Israel. When the Fogel family was massacred in Itamar, Palestinians in Gaza rejoiced and danced in the streets.
The fact is the Palestinian national ethos is brazen malicious deceit and Jew-hatred. Their aim is not peace with Israel but Israel's resting in peace or Israel piece by piece.This is the reality, but the world’s governments have agreed en masse to vote for recognition of a Palestinian State in the UN in September.
They should all read and internalize the following:
Abbas’s appointed minister of religion, Mahmoud Habbash, has taught repeatedly that the conflict with Israel is not territorial but is in accordance with Islamic law: “Allah has preordained for us the Ribat on this blessed land. We are committed to it by Allah’s command. Let no one be mistaken or under the illusion that Ribat is a choice and nothing more. It is a commandment.”
He has also preached that the conflict against Israel – over all of Israel – is cited in the Koran: “The catastrophe, in truth, did not begin in 1948, but began perhaps in 1917 with the cursed [Balfour] Declaration, which gave a promise to those who did not deserve it... Since that date, resolute people, fighters and Ribat fighters have not ceased upon our blessed land... This conflict is explicit in the Koran and our obligation with regard to it is clarified by the Koran.”
In short, the PA, like Hamas, is telling its people that Islam does not allow for reconciliation with Israel.
Let’s stop pretending.