by Daniel Greenfield
Few figures in American political life have been as consistently wrong as often as John Kerry. The former Senator bet on every Communist leader and Middle Eastern tyrant he could find only to watch the wheels of history roll over his mistakes. And now as Secretary of State, Kerry is at it again.
In between peddling a Syrian peace process that no one but him believes in, he took a break to peddle the even more discredited peace process between Israel and the terrorists.
In a speech to the American Jewish Committee, Kerry invoked the litany of failures, “Madrid to Oslo to Wye River and Camp David and Annapolis”, but urged his audience not to pay attention to history and “give in to cynicism”.
“Cynicism has never solved anything,” he said. But then again neither has the Peace Process. And while cynicism isn’t likely to usher in an era of peace or grow money on trees, it offers you the power to extract yourself from bad situations instead of taking refuge in more of the same wishful thinking that got you into them.
If you find yourself mailing your tenth check to that Nigerian prince, cynicism won’t get you a 200 percent return, but it will keep you from losing more money.
“Why should any Israeli start giving in to that cynicism now?” Kerry asked. Perhaps because it’s been twenty years. Or because thousands of Israelis have been killed and wounded. Or because there isn’t a single piece of supporting evidence to show that the other side is interested in any kind of final peace agreement.
The only sure things that have come out of the Peace Process in two decades are terrorist attacks and increased demands by the terrorists. There has been no final status agreement for the simple reason that the terrorists can only get the best possible deal by never coming to an agreement. The longer they hold out, the better the offers that the likes of John Forbes Kerry extract from Israel are. And the offers keep getting better so there is never any reason to actually make a deal.
“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie; deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth; persistent, persuasive and unrealistic,” John F. Kennedy said. The mythology of the peace process is the enemy of the truth. Its “reassuring repetition of stale phrases” prevents what Kennedy called, “the difficult, but essential confrontation with reality.”
Kerry repeatedly calls for hope against cynicism, using stale phrases to perpetuate a mythology of peace with no basis in reality. Out of his mouth fall all the stale promises and threats that have been moldering for decades.
All these are the enemies of the truth. And the truth is a simple thing.
Nearly half of the population of the Palestinian Authority lives under Hamas rule. Hamas is arguably the legal government of the entire Palestinian Authority having actually won elections. Meanwhile President Abbas, the man whom Kerry would like Israel to reach a final status agreement with, was last elected in 2005. He is approaching the eighth year of his four year term.
During his heavily hyped visit to Israel, Obama gave a speech in which he said, “The days when Israel could seek peace simply with a handful of autocratic leaders, those days are over. Peace will have to be made among peoples, not just governments.”
But that’s exactly what Kerry is peddling. A worthless deal with a bunch of autocrats.
If Obama really meant what he said, then he would have insisted that Abbas win a current election to show that he actually speaks for the residents of the West Bank and Gaza. It would also be a matter of basic practice for the entire question of Hamas and Gaza to be settled so that there is one unified Palestinian Authority to negotiate with, rather than two Palestinian states.
Obama’s failure to insist on that means that he knows the negotiations are worthless.
The bigger Arab League peace plan that Kerry is proposing is equally worthless. Not only is it worthless in detail, but it’s worthless because, as Obama said in his speech, it represents a handful of autocratic leaders.
The proposal came from the Saudi King who has never run for anything, except perhaps a dessert tray. The Arab League consists of monarchies, tyrannies and a few elected governments that took a severe beating during the Arab Spring and remain unstable even after elections.
In 2010, John Kerry met with the Emir of Qatar who told him that the best way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be for Israel to give up the Golan Heights to Syria because then Assad could convince Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to come to the negotiating table.
The last time an American leader performed this well, he was sitting across the table from Stalin at Yalta.
A year later, the Emir of Qatar was financing a Sunni war to overthrow Assad. Everything that he had told Kerry proved to be utterly worthless. There was no peace on the horizon. The Emir had only been using Kerry and Assad to weaken Israel, before using Hillary Clinton to weaken Assad. There was no peace here. Just the puppetry of diplomatic war.
Kerry learned no lessons from this. If there is anything that Kerry has learned a lesson from in all his years of being played by everyone from the Viet Cong to the Sandinistas to Assad, it’s impossible to tell.
At the AJC, Kerry talked up the “moderate” leadership of Abbas, who had declared that he was no different than Hamas. And he doubled up on the mythology of hope. “People have spent so much time lamenting what hasn’t worked in the past that I believe we’ve actually forgotten to focus on what the future could look like if we do keep faith,” he said.
But it’s actually the other way around. The creaky process has only dragged on this long because of all the people who insist on taking hope on faith, instead of basing their decisions on the solid ground of history.
The substance of John Kerry’s speech was that he had learned absolutely nothing from the past and that everyone else should join him in not learning anything from the past. That optimistic ignorance is not a luxury that either America or Israel can afford.
At the conclusion of his address, Kerry invoked the oath of Israeli soldiers at Masada. But the very point of the oath is the responsibility of the Israeli soldier not to allow his country to be put into a position where it is so besieged that its only choice is between the depredations of the enemy and an honorable suicide. And Masada, the final last stand in a desert fortress, is exactly where Kerry and the Qatari and Saudi devils whispering in his ear are driving the Jewish State.
Daniel Greenfield
Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/kerry-peddles-the-snake-oil-of-peace/
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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