Let us stipulate two facts;
There is but a single nation that is a democracy in the Middle East; that nation is Israel
There is but a single nation that can be relied on to be consistently pro-Western in the Middle East; that nation is Israel
So why the need for President Obama to put pressure on Israel to freeze the building of new homes?, And why the need for our President to force Israel to make "peace" with the Palestinians, a peace that will only be a way-station on the road to another terrorist state in that part of the world, a peace that the Palestinians don’t want, a peace that will be anything but peaceful?
The Israelis are correctly resisting the suicidal implications behind any imposed arrangement. But why is the impulse to achieve a settlement that will in fact settle nothing, there in the first place?
Lee Smith has an interesting article in Tablet in which he correctly points out that the urgency surrounding the Palestinian issue has little to do with reality. The various Muslim states, including Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and Iran, need to find a way to accomplish two things; divert attention from their own autocratic behavior, and win over the West to support their non-democratic governments. They do this essentially by changing the subject.
The problem, in their formulation, is not their own internal dysfunction, but rather it is the “Zionist entity”. And persons like James Baker in the senior Bush administration, persons like Samantha Powers in the current Obama administration, Europeans like Tony Blair, nod their heads with sage understanding, convinced in their hearts that the problem is Israel and the “Zionist lobby”.
Many American foreign policy gurus and most European diplomats, who should know better, swallow the nonsense that if we can only solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem, all the other problems in the Middle East will magically disappear. When the attacks of Sept 11, 2001, against New York and Washington occurred, Al Qaeda talking little about Israel. Once they realized what a public relations bonanza that could be, the attacks took on an anti-Israel tint.
Now we have a unique phenomenon. The Arab masses are rising up against their autocratic leaders. And not one word about Israel. No one is claiming they are revolting over the “plight of the Palestinians”
It is hard to understand how the takeover of Lebanon by Syria, the killing of the Lebanese prime minister by Bashar Assad, the murder of 25,000 Syrians by Hafez Assad, the Iraq-Iran war, the genocide in the Sudan, or any of the dozens of other problems of the area, have anything to do with Israel . And so the lie has been exposed. Here is a reasonable question: will the Arabists of the State Department, or those like Samantha Powers who surround Barack Obama, change their tune? Not likely. Once stuck with an “explanation”, even the smartest people will tend to focus on those “facts” that support their theses, and ignore those realties that clash with their vision, so-called confirmation bias.
Smith points out that “The fact that a wave of revolutions has shaken the foundations of Arab politics without the slightest apparent connection to popular outrage against Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians should be surprising to most experts and politicians in the West. For over four decades, the driving idea behind the West’s approach to the Middle East has been the supposed centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to Arab popular anger at the West and its key to ensuring the stability of the West’s favored regimes.”
Why is President Obama still pushing for a peace based on old ideas, still pushing for a settlement “freeze”? America should know better. Our government keeps going back to the Middle East with the same proposals, ideas that have never worked. Why are these ideas stillborn? Because the Palestinians have rejected any recognition of a Jewish state, or any solution that does not contain within it the seeds for the destruction of Israel, and Israel has rejected suicide. The result over the decades has been thousands of Israeli casualties resulting from terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, who are doing the dirty work of Syria, Iran and others, and thousands of Arabs killed when Israel responded.
As Lee points out, “ this is no “meaningless” cycle of violence; rather, it is the product of a deliberate diplomatic process overseen by the world’s oldest democracy. It was the United States that kept going back to the well over and over”
Barack Obama, Bashar Assad, Egypt, Iran, George W. Bush, , Hamas, Hezbollah, Hillary Clinton, Jerusalem, John Kerry, Syria, the crisis in Egypt, Israel-Palestinian problem, Samantha Power, Tony Blair, James baker,
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