Those Who Speak of Peace Are Living a Lie, and It’s Our Fault Too
Humor me for a moment.
Israel ought to establish two new settlements. Kfar Obama and Kfar Kerry. As a reminder and as a response – sticking a thumb in the eye of an adversarial president and his secretary of state.
We ought to be angry, but not surprised. First there was UN Resolution 2334, followed a few days later with a foreign policy speech that blatantly equated the construction of apartments in Jerusalem with the murderous acts of Palestinian Arab terror targeting the very Jews who might have one day inhabited those homes. Actually that equation was even worse. It was the former that Kerry referred to time and again in a 71 minute speech that grew ever more hostile to Israel as he justified the American abstention to the UN condemnation of the Jewish State.
With the clock ticking on a lame duck president who will be remembered as the most virulently anti-Israel ever, the inevitable happened. Barack Obama and John Kerry teamed up during a week that will be recorded as the worst assault on the modern Jewish State, well, since the last time they tagged teamed when they delivered the Iran nuke deal only a year and a half before.
Despite the very disingenuous denials, the carefully crafted UN resolution was the work of an American administration, colluding with the enemies of Israel. Never finding the time to address issues slightly more important than the aforementioned construction of apartments, Obama, Kerry, and their occasional UN mouthpiece Samantha Power, stood by while many of the half million fallen Syrians were being slaughtered. The US administration was well practiced. Its foreign policy architects had, after all, stood by while most of the world erupted in multiple regional wars and related atrocities during Obama’s two terms.
The UN resolution was designed to dictate the terms that Obama/Kerry insist, three weeks before they vacate their posts and their power, be used to settle the conflict between Arabs and Jews. More accurately, it calls for Israel’s surrender to its intended murderers as a policy that might – or might not – satisfy the latter. The design brings to mind the old concept introduced by former US Undersecretary of State George Ball in his infamous anti-Israel piece that appeared in “Foreign Affairs” in April 1977 – “How to Save Israel in Spite of Herself.”
Truth be told, no one should really be surprised.
After all, during the negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran less than two years ago, most of which were kept deliberately secret even from Congress, Iranian ‘Supreme Leader’ Ayatolla Ali Khameini spoke to a rally while chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” raged in the background. He paused, and echoed the call as American television cameras recorded the threat that fell on deaf ears in the White House.
Remarkably, two days before the Americans announced a framework for an agreement, Iranian Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Naqdi asserted that “erasing Israel off the map” is “non-negotiable.” And then again, in a stern message to Obama, Ayatolla Khameini said that the West, and the US in particular, are “hallucinating” if they thought that Iran would allow inspection of its military apparatus.
The bomb would be built, and there was little that Israeli opposition could do about it. In fact, the US assuaged Iran and sweetened the pot by directing $150 million to the world’s largest sponsor of international terrorism.
An unlikely source, the former rock star Frank Zappa offered us this: “Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.” That would be hard to dispute, if it were simply stupidity. But there might exist something that is actually in greater abundance. Evil. And its corollary: the failure to confront that evil.
But since when have the matters of good and evil ever had any currency during the Obama tenure?
Consider one of the lessons lost on history.
During the war years that ravaged Europe two generations ago, George Orwell wrote a series of political articles for the left-leaning Socialist weekly Tribune, where he had been named its literary editor. The series of columns, titled “As I Please,” were bold and brazen and never short of controversy. On August 4, 1944, after much of the continent lay in ruins, Orwell wrote: “By shooting at your enemy you are not in the deepest sense wronging him. But by hating him, by inventing lies about him and bringing children up to believe them, by clamouring for unjust peace terms which make further wars inevitable, you are striking not at one perishable generation, but at humanity itself.”
It was, for Orwell, a world where hatred was more dangerous than war.
The players have changed, but undeniably, the comment could be a relevant condemnation of this generation’s Arab assault on the Jewish State and its people. Or the Islamic offensive against western civilization.
The game is fixed. The American administration colludes with the enemies of Zion to force an Israeli diplomatic surrender that is measured by forfeiting – once again – even more territory to those who refuse to recognize its very right to exist.
Ever since September 13, 1993, when Yasir Arafat was coaxed by President Bill Clinton to shake the hand of a reluctant Yitzhak Rabin, the American president and his foreign policy architects have echoed an ignorant disregard for the facts which have produced a failed peace process that is founded on a fundamental misunderstanding of Arab intentions.
Nearly a quarter of a century and many of thousand Jewish funerals later, the obvious is quite obvious.
Those who believe that peace is possible are living a lie.
Bernard Lewis, the preeminent scholar of Middle East history has rightly written: “If the conflict is about the size of Israel, then long negotiations can eventually resolve the problem. But if the conflict is about the existence of Israel, then serious negotiation is impossible.”
Enough said.
On January 20, 2017, the baton in Washington DC changes hands and the president who painstakingly served as an unabashed apologist for Islam for eight years, surrenders a failed foreign policy to Donald Trump, an inexperienced political maverick who has promised to upend the former’s legacy.
Trump has been consistent and quite adamant about his desire to either rework or renege on the nuclear deal that Obama/Kerry worked out with Iran, enabling it to rightfully possess the bomb in less than twelve years. The president-elect’s choice of advisors, vocal opponents of that nation’s sponsorship of international terrorism, reinforces that determination.
Candidate Trump several times boasted during the past year that he hoped to engineer that elusive peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs because of his “deal-making” talents. He doubled-down when he suggested that son-in-law Jared Kushner seemed an obvious choice to lead the effort.
The failure to secure a viable (the operative word here is “viable”) peace treaty between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs is nothing new.
It was a little more than a year ago, in October 2015, when Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas – everyone’s designated “peace partner” – praised the daily Arab violence against Israel and offered: “Each drop of blood that was spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood as long as it’s for the sake of Allah. Every shahid (martyr) will be in heaven and every wounded person will be rewarded, by Allah’s will.” Consistent with the PA honoring its fallen murderous terrorists by naming schools, town squares and soccer stadiums after them, the entire education of its children continues to be predicated on the hatred and dehumanization of the Jews. George Orwell warned us about this level of hatred, but we seemed not to pay any attention.
But despite this Muslim assault on humanity, there is talk of revitalizing a peace process. It is as farcical as it is misguided. And Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu who still takes every opportunity to petition the Palestinians to come to negotiations. Even in his forceful rebuke of the Obama/Kerry duplicitous actions in the UN against Israel, and the subsequent long-winded justifications of it, the prime minister boasted to every camera and microphone that Israel will continue to pursue a negotiated and just peace, if only its adversaries would show up.
Even Israel’s own security apparatus has argued that the maximum that Israel will be ready to offer the Palestinian Arabs in negotiations and still remain secure is much less than the minimum that any Palestinian Arab leader is willing to accept. In any language, it does not bode well for any prospect for peace.
Memo, to anyone who will listen: It is not about territory. It is about Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish State. And the Arabs have offered us the Cliff Notes version: No Jewish State in the Middle East.
The ones who seem most unwilling to understand this elementary fact is the team of Obama, Kerry, Power, et al, and the quislings of J Street, calling for Jewish surrender from half a world away.
Those who believe that peace is attainable are living a lie. Under several successive American administrations, we have been witness to a bogus peace process, and the blame invariably placed at the lap of the Israelis for somehow not making it happen. It mattered not that a peace agreement, founded upon a series of false assumptions (that both parties desire peace) and incomprehensibly unattainable expectations (that Israel be diminished in territory including the forfeiture of Jerusalem), is an Arab Trojan horse (welcomed by a hostile president and secretary of state) leading Israel towards certain disaster.
American foreign policy – until January 20, 2017 – is predicated on an insanely unreasonable expectation that we continue to delude ourselves. But, in a world where hatred is more dangerous than war, the 2016 American presidential election just might have provided the very moral clarity that even George Orwell would have been proud of.
In the end, what is needed is an Israeli prime minister who ceases to pretend that peace with an implacable enemy is really possible. He knows the truth. It doesn’t really matter what the UN nations might think, and even less what the American or European liberal media might report.
What matters is Israel’s unwavering resolve and, of course, an American president who will stand with Israel so that one day there really will exist a Kfar Trump, deep in the heart of Judea or Samaria.
Meir Jolovitz is a past national executive director of the Zionist Organization of America, and formerly associated with the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.