By: Roger L Simon
Initially,
John Kerry seemed entirely copacetic with Benjamin Netanyahu’s
requirement that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state as
the basis for any peace agreement. After all, Mahmoud Abbas had already
declared that no Jews would be allowed to live in any future
Palestinian state, although more than a million and a half Arabs live in
Israel. Palestine, like almost all the Middle East but Israel, would
be judenrein.
But
then Abbas refused and, first via the State Department’s Jen Pseki and
then through his own words, Kerry started to walk his agreement back.
He even claimed Netanyahu’s insistence on recognition was a “mistake.”
In all probability Obama got to the secretary of State and changed his
marching orders. What went wrong?
To
begin with, we can assume the White House is panicked. They are
looking at foreign policy failure in every direction — Iran, Syria,
Egypt, Libya-Benghazi and now Ukraine, and that’s leaving aside Russia
and China, where their ineptitude has been staggering. ”Leading from
behind” has been mocked as an absurd and almost childish show of
weakness.
The
administration’s only possible avenue of success in an immediate sense
would be to broker some kind of Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
They are, quite literally, desperate. (And the simultaneous failure of
their domestic agenda makes them yet more so.)
Which
has led them to get it all backwards. The truth is that the
requirement for Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is
the single most important aspect of a peace agreement. All the
rest pale by comparison. They are details, as Abbas (though not Obama
or Kerry) well knows.
Without
formal recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, any agreement could be
construed by the Palestinians as what is known in Islamic literature as a
hudna, a temporary ceasefire in preparation for the greater
war, in this case driving Israel into the sea as Arabs nations have
repeatedly attempted since 1948.
I
rather doubt that Obama or Kerry knows that term, and I’d be yet more
surprised if they have spent even five minutes on the MEMRI website that
translates Arab television, vividly documenting the unending Jew hatred
of the Arab world, inculcated literally from birth.
But
they do — and here’s the irony in Obama’s case — have the traditional
white man’s view of that same Arab world — to wit, Arabs are crazy and
primitive. (Yes, this is racist. And, in Obama’s case, undoubtedly
leavened with a soupçon of anti-imperialist payback.) Ergo, pressure
can only be put on Israel. This is not unique to the Obama
administration. As was reported in the Jerusalem Post Monday:
Deputy
Foreign Minister Ze’ev Elkin told Israel Radio that Kerry’s remarks
represented a pattern that had developed over the past 20 years, in
which the international community finds it easier to pressure Israel
rather than the Palestinians, despite who it believes is in the right.
So
Kerry and Obama don’t treat Arabs like grown-ups, demanding of them the
same responsibility they would immediately of a Western European
country. And of course if you treat someone like a child, they will
behave like one.
In
addition, to justify this prevarication, some wizards at the State
Department have dredged up some documents signed by Yasser Arafat
acknowledging Israel as a Jewish state, as if the signature of the
deceased terrorist, who never had any intention of making peace with
Israel in the first place, was relevant to the current situation.
So
now, with the U.S. behaving like a “pitiful helpless giant” in the face
of Russian aggression in Ukraine and Crimea, we have the spectacle of
college student Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas in a White House
tete-a-tete with our president without the requisite preview interview
with Jeffrey Goldberg to warn the kleptocrat Palestinian leader of any
necessary compromises he might be asked for. Just more demands for
Israel. How morally corrupt. How reprehensible.
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