As World Order Implodes, Obama Promises to Act... Against Israel
In a bombshell interview with Bloomberg’s Jeffrey Goldberg, President Obama issued his most direct public threats ever against Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
'Bibi’, the President all but said, ‘if you don’t accept
the peace plan that my Secretary of State hasn't even released yet, you
will ruin your country.’ The interview was released for publication
almost the very moment as Netanyahu’s plane departed to meet with Obama
in Washington.
In addition to droning on about the growing dangers posed
by increasing Israeli settlement ‘expansion’, the "rights" of
Palestinian refugees, the historic "moderation" of Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas, and the reasonableness of the Iranian regime,
President Obama used the interview with Goldberg to issue ominous new
threats and dire warnings against the Jewish state if it did not agree
to accept his plan to shrink Israel back inside the 1949 armistice
lines.
Obama tells Goldberg that it isn't really the Palestinians
who need to change. It is Israel. Palestinian terrorism against Israeli
civilians is essentially the result of steps Israel takes to prevent
such terrorism. The best way to change the Palestinian Authority's
incitement to – and celebration of blood curdling violence against Jews –
is for Israel to change its housing policy.
Nothing new here. This has been the President Obama's
basic position since long before he ever ran for public office; and a
position shared by most of the international community.
What is new about Obama's latest interview are his
threats. If Israel doesn't do what Obama decides Israel should do, then
Israel should no longer expect the U.S. to support it: “If you see no
peace deal and continued aggressive settlement construction – and we
have seen more aggressive settlement construction over the past couple
of years – if Palestinians come to believe that the possibility of a
contiguously sovereign Palestinian state is no longer within reach, then
our ability to manage the fallout is going to be limited.”
If Israel accepts that Obama knows best, that his
proposed solutions to Israel's problems are superior to its own, then
Israel will faced increased isolation and threats. On supporting Israel,
Obama says: "It is getting harder every day". He explains that Israel
faces 'increasing international isolation' because there is a "genuine
sense on the part of a lot of countries that this issue continues to
fester and that nobody is willing to take the leap to bring it to
closure."
Back in January, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon
was forced to publicly apologise for comments he made to an Israeli
newspaper stating his belief that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's
all-consuming efforts to forge an Israeli-Palestinian "peace agreement"
might be born out of a "misplaced obsession and messianic fervor". His
comments provoked an unusually ferocious firestorm of outrage from both
the White House and State Department. It was outrageous, the State
Department and White House told the world in strikingly harsh language,
for anyone to question the wisdom of John Kerry's unshakeable belief
that "solving" the Israeli-Palestinian still remains the foremost
challenge of U.S. foreign policy. Rarely, if ever, have administration
officials used such sharp and pointed language towards the actions or
statements of Iran or North Korea.
In the past four days, Russian forces have seized the
Crimean Peninsula, another 150,000 troops are mobilizing on Ukraine's
eastern border. North Korea successfully test fired two medium range
ballistic missiles. Hundreds of Christian civilians in Nigeria have
slaughtered by Islamist terrorists that Obama and Kerry have pressured
the Nigerian government to 'accommodate'; UN nuclear inspectors reported
that Iran is accelerating development of its nuclear program thus
violating last November’s agreement with America. In our own hemisphere,
Venezuela's leftist regime escalated its brutal crackdown against
opposition protestors, Russia announced plans to establish permanent
basis in Venezuela and Cuba. In response, President Obama intensifies
his rhetoric against Israel.
Maybe it is time that somebody important demand that Moshe Ya'alon retract
his apology? If anything, Ya'alon’s "misplaced obsession and messianic
fervor" comments might now subject him to charges of 'understatement'.
The source of all this foolishness is much harder to
accept than it is to identify. The Obama-Kerry (i.e. established
Western) approach to peace in the Middle East is doomed to fail because
it is built upon a false premise. It isn't Israel's current size, nor is
it Israel's current housing policy, nor is it even the current Israeli
Prime Minister that is the source of the problem. The problem is Israel
itself. It shouldn't exist, argue its enemies. Until those who reject
that existence either die off or genuinely accept the Jewish people's
right to a Jewish and sovereign state of their own, there is nothing
Obama, Kerry, the UN or even Israel itself can do to "fix" the
"problem."
The Middle East "Peace Industry" is much too vested to
allow itself to see any perspective other than the one it has spent 60
years constructing. Since it wants peace (and most of it does), then
obviously everyone else must want peace too. Since President Obama and
Secretary Kerry want peace, (and they almost surely do) then obviously
the Palestinian people and the PA and Hamas who claim to represent them
must want peace too. Since the Palestinians want peace, their continued
resorts to violence must be the result of something Israel has forced
upon them. War can not be a goal in itself for Israel's enemies because
it is not a goal for the Peace Industry.
Like Ptolemists struggling to defend geocentrism after
Galileo, Obama can't focus on Palestinian media incitement for the same
reasons none of his predecessors did. Focusing on Palestinian incitement
or terrorism would make those doing the inciting and the terrorising
look bad. That might drive them away from the negotiating table. Without
negotiating partners, there is no need for negotiating tables and the
UN, the EU and the US have bought far too many negotiating tables to
turn back now.
Obama can't remind himself, let alone the world, that it
was President Abbas who urged Arafat to reject Israel's acceptance of
nearly every Arafat demand in 1999 with a gruesome terror war against
Israeli civilians because that would expose the falsity of his premise
that the Palestinians truly want peace. He can't point to opinion poll
after opinion poll that shows an overwhelming majority of Palestinians
reject the two state solution because that might undermine the carefully
crafted image created by the West that Mahmoud Abbas represents a
people who Obama says "yearn for peace with Israel."
The President is hardly alone. Nearly the whole world has
now developed an interest in ignoring Palestinian incitement. None more
so than the world's media. Focusing on Palestinian incitement would
make the media look not just foolish but dishonest. It would threaten
the entire foundation upon which Middle East peace making has been built
over the past 60 years. Jettisoning the current approach to 'Middle
East peace making' would upend an entire industry. It would spell the
end for lavishly funded Washington peace institutes; it would mean no
more glamorous global conferences, no more UN confabs and worst of all,
perish the thought, no more Nobel Prizes for Middle East Peace Making.
The late Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov all but
predicted the consequences of the UN's infamous 1975 "Zionism is Racism"
Resolution when he said: "It will only contribute to anti-semitism by
giving it the appearance of international legality".
Even years after its repeal, the sentiment that resolution
validated lives on. It created a moral and legal justification for
those who seek to destroy the very state created as a consequence of
genocide and an antidote to future race-murder.
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