An enfeebled Obama.

 

by Caroline B. Glick

If Zbigniew Brzezinski had his way, the US would go to war against Israel to defend Iran's nuclear installations. In an interview with the Daily Beast website last weekend, the man who served as former President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor said, "They [IAF fighter jets] have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch? We have to be serious about denying them that right. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not."

Brzezinski has long distinguished himself as one of the most outspoken Israel haters in polite circles in Washington. Under normal circumstances, his remarks could be laughed off as the ravings of a garden variety anti-Semite. But these are not normal circumstances. Brzezinski served as a senior foreign policy advisor to President Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign, and his views are not terribly out of place among Obama's senior advisors in the White House. In an interview in 2002, Samantha Powers, who serves as a senior member of Obama's national security council, effectively called for the US to invade Israel in support of the Palestinians.

The fact of the matter is that Brzezinski's view is in line with the general disposition of Obama's foreign policy. Since entering office, Obama has struck a hard line position against Israel while adopting a soft, even apologetic line toward Iran and its allies.

For eight months, Obama has sought to force Israel to the wall. He has loudly and repeatedly ordered the Netanyahu government to prevent all private and public construction for Jews in Israel's capital city and its heartland in order to facilitate the eventual mass expulsion of Jews from both areas which he believes ought to become part of a Jew-free Palestinian state.

Until this week, Obama conditioned the resumption of negotiations towards peace between Israel and the Palestinians on such a prohibition of Jewish building and so encouraged Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas to further radicalize his positions towards Israel. Until Obama came around Abbas had no problem negotiating with Israeli leaders while Jews were building homes and schools and other structures in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. But with Obama requiring a freeze of all such construction, Abbas made clear in an interview with the Washington Post in May that he couldn't talk to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu without looking like a sellout.

At the same time, Obama made no equivalent demands of the Palestinians. He did not precondition talks on freezing illegal Arab construction in Jerusalem, or dismantling the Aksa Martyrs terrorist group, or even simply on setting aside the Palestinian demand that Israel release convicted terrorists from its prisons. To the contrary, he has energetically supported the establishment of a Palestinian unity government between Fatah and Hamas - which the US State Department has since 1995 designated as a foreign terrorist organization to which US citizens, including the US President are required by law to give no quarter.

As for Iran, during his meeting with Netanyahu in May, Obama gave the clear impression that the Iranian regime had until September to accept his offer to negotiate the disposition of its nuclear installations. But it is now September, and in its belated response to Obama's generous offer of engagement, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime rejected the terms of Obama's engagement out of hand. Obama did not retaliate by taking his offer to negotiate off the table or - perish at the thought - working to implement the sanctions he pledged would follow an Iranian rejection of his open hand. Instead, Obama announced that he is sending a senior US official to meet with the Iranians on October 1. And with that announcement, any residual doubt that Obama is willing to live in a world in which Iran is armed with nuclear weaponry dissipated completely.

In the meantime, in his address to the UN General Assembly on Wednesday and in his remarks at his meeting with Netanyahu and Abbas on Tuesday, Obama made clear that, in the words of former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, he has "put Israel on the chopping block." He referred to Israeli communities located beyond the 1949 armistice lines as "illegitimate." Moreover, Obama explained that Israel can no longer expect US support for its security if it doesn't bow to his demand that it surrender all of the land it has controlled since 1967.

Apparently it is immaterial to the US leader that if Israel fulfilled his demand, the Jewish state would render itself defenseless against enemy attack and so embolden its neighbors to invade. That is, it matters not to Obama that were Israel to fulfill his demand, the prospect of an Arab war against Israel would rise steeply. The fact that Obama made these deeply antagonistic statements about Israel at the UN in itself exposes his hostility towards the country. The UN's institutional hostility towards Israel is surpassed only by that of the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

So given Obama's positions towards Israel on the one hand and Iran and its allies on the other, it seems clear enough that the logical endpoint of Obama's policies would look something like Brzezinski's recommended course of action. Moreover, Obama's foreign policy as a whole makes it fairly easy to imagine him ordering the US military to open hostilities against a US ally to defend a US adversary - even as that adversary goes out of its way to humiliate Obama personally and the US in general.

Since Obama took office, he has been abandoning one US ally after another while seeking to curry favor with one US adversary after another. At every turn, America's allies - from Israel to Honduras, to Columbia, South Korea, and Japan to Poland and the Czech Republic - have reacted with disbelief and horror to his treachery. And at every turn, America's adversaries - from Iran to Venezuela to North Korea and Russia - have responded with derision and contempt to his seemingly obsessive attempts to appease them.

The horror Obama has instilled in America's friends and the contempt he has evoked from its enemies have not caused him to change course. The fact that his policies throughout the world have already failed to bring a change in the so-called international community's treatment of the US has not led him to reconsider those policies. As many Western Europeans have begun to openly acknowledge, the man they once likened to the messiah is nothing but a politician — and a weak, bungling one at that. Even Britain's Economist is laughing at him. But Obama is unmoved by any of this, and as his speech at the UN General Assembly made clear, he is moving full speed ahead in his plans to subordinate US foreign policy to the UN.

Obama's stubborn insistence on advancing his feckless foreign policy in the face of its already apparent colossal failure is of a piece with his unswerving commitment to his domestic agenda in spite of its apparent colossal failure. Obama's economic stimulus package failed to stimulate the US economy and increased the US's economic deficit to heights undreamed of by his predecessors. His nationalization of major US corporations like General Motors, his cash-for-clunkers program to stimulate the US auto industry and his massive encroachments on the banking and financial industries have done nothing to increase economic growth in the US and indeed, unemployment has reached generational highs. And yet, rather than reconsider his belief in vastly expanding the size of the federal government's control over the private sector, Obama has insistently pushed for further governmental control over the US economy - most notably in his drive to transform the US health care industry.

Both Obama's supporters and his opponents have claimed that his presidency may well stand or fall on his ability to pass a health care reform law in the coming months. But the fact of the matter is that if he succeeds in passing such a law, his success will be a Pyrrhic victory because Obama has promised that his plan will do the impossible, and therefore it will unquestionably fail. Obama has promised that the health care plan he supports will increase access to health services and improve their quality, but simultaneously will not increase the size of the federal deficit or be funded with tax hikes - and this is impossible. Obama's health care plan will fail either to pass into law, or if it becomes law, it will fail to live up to his promises.

Obama's failures in both foreign and domestic policy have weakened him politically. His response to this newfound weakness has been to put himself into the public eye seemingly around the clock. Apparently the thinking behind the move is that while Obama's policies are unpopular, Obama's personal popularity remains high, so if he personalizes his policies, it will become more difficult for his opponents to argue against them.

But alasm this policy too has failed. The more Obama exposes himself, the less he is able to leverage his personal celebrity into political power.

The question for the US's spurned allies in general -- and for Israel in particular — is whether we are better off with a politically strong Obama or a politically weak Obama. Given that the general thrust of his foreign policy is detrimental to our interests, America's allies are best served by a weak Obama. Already this week Israel benefitted from his weakness. It was Obama's weakness that dictated his need to stage a photo-op with Netanyahu and Abbas at the UN. And it was this need — to be seen as doing something productive — that outweighed Obama's desire to put the screws on Israel by preconditioning talks with a freeze on Jewish construction. So Obama was forced to relent at least temporarily and Netanyahu won his first round against Obama.

During a television interview this week Senator John McCain was asked for his opinion of Brzezinski's recommendation that the US shoot down IAF jets en route to Iran in a hypothetical Israeli airstrike against Iran's nuclear installations. He responded with derisive laughter. And indeed, the notion that the US would go to war against Israel to protect Iran's nuclear installations is laughably absurd.

The weaker Obama becomes politically, the more readily Democrats and liberal reporters alike will acknowledge that attacking US allies while scraping and bowing before US foes is a ridiculous strategy for foreign affairs. Certainly no self-proclaimed realist can defend a policy based on denuding the US of its power and forsaking a US-based international system for one dictated by its foes.

It is true that a weakened Obama will seek to win cheap points by putting the squeeze on Israel. But it is also true that the weaker Obama becomes, the less capable he will be of carrying through on his bullying threats against Israel and against fellow democracies around the world.

 

Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

The speech of P.M. Netanyahu at the U.N. General Assembly.

 

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Nearly 62 years ago, the United Nations recognized the right of the Jews, an ancient people 3,500 years-old, to a state of their own in their ancestral homeland.

I stand here today as the Prime Minister of Israel, the Jewish state, and I speak to you on behalf of my country and my people.

The United Nations was founded after the carnage of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust. It was charged with preventing the recurrence of such horrendous events.

Nothing has undermined that central mission more than the systematic assault on the truth. Yesterday the President of Iran stood at this very podium, spewing his latest anti-Semitic rants. Just a few days earlier, he again claimed that the Holocaust is a lie.

Last month, I went to a villa in a suburb of Berlin called Wannsee. There, on January 20, 1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people. The detailed minutes of that meeting have been preserved by successive German governments. Here is a copy of those minutes, in which the Nazis issued precise instructions on how to carry out the extermination of the Jews. Is this a lie?

A day before I was in Wannsee, I was given in Berlin the original construction plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Those plans are signed by Hitler’s deputy, Heinrich Himmler himself. Here is a copy of the plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million Jews were murdered. Is this too a lie?

This June, President Obama visited the Buchenwald concentration camp. Did President Obama pay tribute to a lie?

And what of the Auschwitz survivors whose arms still bear the tattooed numbers branded on them by the Nazis? Are those tattoos a lie? One-third of all Jews perished in the conflagration. Nearly every Jewish family was affected, including my own. My wife's grandparents, her father’s two sisters and three brothers, and all the aunts, uncles and cousins were all murdered by the Nazis. Is that also a lie?

Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium. To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity and you brought honor to your countries.

But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?

A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of six million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state.

What a disgrace! What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations! Perhaps some of you think that this man and his odious regime threaten only the Jews. You're wrong.

History has shown us time and again that what starts with attacks on the Jews eventually ends up engulfing many others.

This Iranian regime is fueled by an extreme fundamentalism that burst onto the world scene three decades ago after lying dormant for centuries. In the past thirty years, this fanaticism has swept the globe with a murderous violence and cold-blooded impartiality in its choice of victims. It has callously slaughtered Moslems and Christians, Jews and Hindus, and many others. Though it is comprised of different offshoots, the adherents of this unforgiving creed seek to return humanity to medieval times.

Wherever they can, they impose a backward regimented society where women, minorities, gays or anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated. The struggle against this fanaticism does not pit faith against faith nor civilization against civilization.

It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death.

The primitivism of the 9th century ought to be no match for the progress of the 21st century. The allure of freedom, the power of technology, the reach of communications should surely win the day. Ultimately, the past cannot triumph over the future. And the future offers all nations magnificent bounties of hope. The pace of progress is growing exponentially.

It took us centuries to get from the printing press to the telephone, decades to get from the telephone to the personal computer, and only a few years to get from the personal computer to the internet.

What seemed impossible a few years ago is already outdated, and we can scarcely fathom the changes that are yet to come. We will crack the genetic code. We will cure the incurable. We will lengthen our lives. We will find a cheap alternative to fossil fuels and clean up the planet.

I am proud that my country Israel is at the forefront of these advances - by leading innovations in science and technology, medicine and biology, agriculture and water, energy and the environment. These innovations the world over offer humanity a sunlit future of unimagined promise.

But if the most primitive fanaticism can acquire the most deadly weapons, the march of history could be reversed for a time. And like the belated victory over the Nazis, the forces of progress and freedom will prevail only after an horrific toll of blood and fortune has been exacted from mankind. That is why the greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction.

The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Are the member states of the United Nations up to that challenge? Will the international community confront a despotism that terrorizes its own people as they bravely stand up for freedom?

Will it take action against the dictators who stole an election in broad daylight and gunned down Iranian protesters who died in the streets choking in their own blood? Will the international community thwart the world's most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of terrorism?

Above all, will the international community stop the terrorist regime of Iran from developing atomic weapons, thereby endangering the peace of the entire world?

The people of Iran are courageously standing up to this regime. People of goodwill around the world stand with them, as do the thousands who have been protesting outside this hall. Will the United Nations stand by their side?

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The jury is still out on the United Nations, and recent signs are not encouraging. Rather than condemning the terrorists and their Iranian patrons, some here have condemned their victims. That is exactly what a recent UN report on Gaza did, falsely equating the terrorists with those they targeted.

For eight long years, Hamas fired from Gaza thousands of missiles, mortars and rockets on nearby Israeli cities. Year after year, as these missiles were deliberately hurled at our civilians, not a single UN resolution was passed condemning those criminal attacks. We heard nothing - absolutely nothing - from the UN Human Rights Council, a misnamed institution if there ever was one.

In 2005, hoping to advance peace, Israel unilaterally withdrew from every inch of Gaza. It dismantled 21 settlements and uprooted over 8,000 Israelis. We didn't get peace. Instead we got an Iranian backed terror base fifty miles from Tel Aviv. Life in Israeli towns and cities next to Gaza became a nightmare. You see, the Hamas rocket attacks not only continued, they increased tenfold. Again, the UN was silent.

Finally, after eight years of this unremitting assault, Israel was finally forced to respond. But how should we have responded? Well, there is only one example in history of thousands of rockets being fired on a country's civilian population. It happened when the Nazis rocketed British cities during World War II. During that war, the allies leveled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties. Israel chose to respond differently. Faced with an enemy committing a double war crime of firing on civilians while hiding behind civilians - Israel sought to conduct surgical strikes against the rocket launchers.

That was no easy task because the terrorists were firing missiles from homes and schools, using mosques as weapons depots and ferreting explosives in ambulances. Israel, by contrast, tried to minimize casualties by urging Palestinian civilians to vacate the targeted areas.

We dropped countless flyers over their homes, sent thousands of text messages and called thousands of cell phones asking people to leave. Never has a country gone to such extraordinary lengths to remove the enemy's civilian population from harm's way.

Yet faced with such a clear case of aggressor and victim, who did the UN Human Rights Council decide to condemn? Israel. A democracy legitimately defending itself against terror is morally hanged, drawn and quartered, and given an unfair trial to boot.

By these twisted standards, the UN Human Rights Council would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth. What a perversion of justice.

Delegates of the United Nations,

Will you accept this farce?

Because if you do, the United Nations would revert to its darkest days, when the worst violators of human rights sat in judgment against the law-abiding democracies, when Zionism was equated with racism and when an automatic majority could declare that the earth is flat.

If this body does not reject this report, it would send a message to terrorists everywhere: Terror pays; if you launch your attacks from densely populated areas, you will win immunity. And in condemning Israel, this body would also deal a mortal blow to peace. Here's why.

When Israel left Gaza, many hoped that the missile attacks would stop. Others believed that at the very least, Israel would have international legitimacy to exercise its right of self-defense. What legitimacy? What self-defense?

The same UN that cheered Israel as it left Gaza and promised to back our right of self-defense now accuses us –my people, my country - of war crimes? And for what? For acting responsibly in self-defense. What a travesty!

Israel justly defended itself against terror. This biased and unjust report is a clear-cut test for all governments. Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists?

We must know the answer to that question now. Now and not later. Because if Israel is again asked to take more risks for peace, we must know today that you will stand with us tomorrow. Only if we have the confidence that we can defend ourselves can we take further risks for peace.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

All of Israel wants peace.

Any time an Arab leader genuinely wanted peace with us, we made peace. We made peace with Egypt led by Anwar Sadat. We made peace with Jordan led by King Hussein. And if the Palestinians truly want peace, I and my government, and the people of Israel, will make peace. But we want a genuine peace, a defensible peace, a permanent peace. In 1947, this body voted to establish two states for two peoples - a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews accepted that resolution. The Arabs rejected it.

We ask the Palestinians to finally do what they have refused to do for 62 years: Say yes to a Jewish state. Just as we are asked to recognize a nation-state for the Palestinian people, the Palestinians must be asked to recognize the nation state of the Jewish people. The Jewish people are not foreign conquerors in the Land of Israel. This is the land of our forefathers.

Inscribed on the walls outside this building is the great Biblical vision of peace: "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. They shall learn war no more." These words were spoken by the Jewish prophet Isaiah 2,800 years ago as he walked in my country, in my city, in the hills of Judea and in the streets of Jerusalem.

We are not strangers to this land. It is our homeland. As deeply connected as we are to this land, we recognize that the Palestinians also live there and want a home of their own. We want to live side by side with them, two free peoples living in peace, prosperity and dignity.

But we must have security. The Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves except those handful of powers that could endanger Israel.

That is why a Palestinian state must be effectively demilitarized. We don't want another Gaza, another Iranian backed terror base abutting Jerusalem and perched on the hills a few kilometers from Tel Aviv.

We want peace.

I believe such a peace can be achieved. But only if we roll back the forces of terror, led by Iran, that seek to destroy peace, eliminate Israel and overthrow the world order. The question facing the international community is whether it is prepared to confront those forces or accommodate them.

Over seventy years ago, Winston Churchill lamented what he called the "confirmed unteachability of mankind," the unfortunate habit of civilized societies to sleep until danger nearly overtakes them.



Churchill bemoaned what he called the "want of foresight, the unwillingness to act when action will be simple and effective, the lack of clear thinking, the confusion of counsel until emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong.”


I speak here today in the hope that Churchill's assessment of the "unteachibility of mankind" is for once proven wrong.

I speak here today in the hope that we can learn from history -- that we can prevent danger in time.

In the spirit of the timeless words spoken to Joshua over 3,000 years ago, let us be strong and of good courage. Let us confront this peril, secure our future and, God willing, forge an enduring peace for generations to come.

Obama to Israel and Palestinians: Make Peace Right Now Cause I Said So!

by Barry Rubin

 

It is difficult to overstate the absurdity in context of President Barack Obama's performance at the Israeli-Palestinian photo opportunity at the UN. The outstanding theme is his commandist style.

We will reverse man-made global warming, he has said. We will have a health-care bill. This is like the style of an Arab dictator, proclaiming that his will is all and that uttering words make something so. It is not the style of someone helping two parties solve a problem or of a mediator .

But let's allow William Shakespeare to explain it:

"Why, man, he stands on top of the narrow world
Like the Colossus of Rhodes, and we little men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves disgraceful graves."

Yet this thundering, you-will-do-this style is combined with an extraordinary weakness, equally self-willed. Giving orders when you are tough is scary; giving orders when you are weak provokes derision. If America won't use force or be tough or face confrontations or define enemies as such, then the gap between such arrogance and weakness is a chasm into which U.S. foreign policy will fall.

This might wow them in elite salons of the United States but in lots of other countries, people have to lean against the wall to try to stop themselves from laughing.

Personal note: I don't want to keep bashing Obama, it's simply that he keeps saying and doing things that defy satire and beg for the harsh criticism and exposure of absurdities that he is not getting in the mainstream media.

But how can one do otherwise when confronted with these statements by him:

"It is past time to stop talking about starting negotiations; it is time to move forward,"
Arab-Israeli negotiations have been going on for sixty years but Obama really seems to believe they have just been waiting for him to give the go-ahead signal.

As I keep stressing the ONLY reason there have been no negotiations for six months—a point the media never points out—is that Obama introduced the demand that Israel freeze all construction on settlements. This issue had never prevented talks before but once Obama raised the anti, well the Palestinians couldn't be less militant than America's president.

Instead, the New York Times tells us rather vaguely: "[Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud] Abbas has in the past refused to return to peace talks unless Israel freezes settlement growth in Palestinian territories." Really? In the past like before January 20, 2009?

"There is a way, I think," said Obama in an interview with ABC, "to relaunch the peace process and not get bogged down with this question, because we've just wasted six months on this issue. We could waste another six months. I think that's not good. I want to move on to peace."

This could be called the stamping my little foot strategy. And incidentally I'd wager that Obama has no idea of any way to resolve the conflict quickly. Those questions he doesn't want to get bogged down with are basic and existential ones. And, again, it is his fault that six months have been wasted (he's also wasted six months on confronting Iran, but that's another issue).

Instead, Obama wants to leap to permanent status. When was the last time that happened? Think back to 2000 when President Bill Clinton advanced to final status talks and that only after more than six years of preparation called the Oslo peace process. At Camp David the talks quickly fell apart and the Palestinians launched massive violence. And for the last nine years those involved have been saying that it was a mistake.

The best way to get the limited progress possible is not through grandstanding and demagoguery but finding solutions on small things that can strengthen the status quo and limit violence for the decades needed by the Palestinians to want to make real peace with Israel.

Yet perhaps Obama thinks he's Alexander the Great who, when faced with the Gordian Knot, rather than untie it merely cut through it with his sword. Obama, who carries no sword, can't do that with a dozen issues that could be listed at this point.

The fact that this man has no real experience in international relations is beginning to tell. No matter how good (or bad) the advisors are cannot fully make up for a president who hasn't a clue of how to deal with an issue like this. I don't want to be unfair but this seems literally to be true.

And then there's his style. Obama makes it sound as if countries must do things not because it is in their interest to do so (with American help, pressure, and even threats being part of that interest) but because he wants it and it will benefit him.

"We cannot continue the same pattern of taking tentative steps forward and then stepping back," Obama said. "It is absolutely critical that we get this issue resolved."

But a man who knows more about these issues, Nahum Barnea, the left-of-center Israeli columnist put it this way: The Americans discovered that they want an Israeli-Palestinian agreement more than the leaders of both sides desire one."

Barnea might have more accurately written, "Should have discovered" because evidently the president hasn't yet found this out.

Instead, Obama stated, "It is time to show the flexibility and common sense and sense of compromise that's necessary to achieve our goals."

Flexibility? Common sense? Sense of compromise? What place is he talking about?

 

 

Barry Rubin

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Hizbullah: still strong, getting weaker.

 

by Michael Young

 

As the permanent members of the UN Security Council, along with Germany, prepare for a dialogue with Iran in October over its nuclear program, Hizbullah is closely watching what happens. The party will almost certainly be at the vanguard of Iranian retaliation for an attack against its nuclear facilities, but it must also be ambivalent, because the political and social environment in Lebanon today does not favor Hizbullah’s entering into a new border conflict.

 

At three levels – the tactical military level in southern Lebanon, that of the Shiite community at large, and Hizbullah’s relationship with the rest of Lebanese society – genuine difficulties are looming for the party, even if it is stronger than ever militarily and its popularity among Shiites is intact.

 

One needn’t be a military expert to grasp that the next war against Israel will be very different for Hizbullah than the last one. By most accounts the party’s arsenal has been upgraded. It may well have anti-aircraft missiles today, some are suggesting the SAM-24 (Igla-S), and the secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, has warned that if Beirut’s southern suburbs are bombed, Hizbullah will respond by firing missiles at Tel Aviv.

Israel, in turn, is training units to enter Lebanon, displaying a greater willingness to engage in a ground war than in 2006. The Israelis are also likely to devastate Lebanese infrastructure, particularly the electricity network, so that what they did three years ago may seem tame in comparison.

 

What would this mean for Hizbullah’s ability to fire rockets at Israel? The party is setting up its main defensive line north of the Litani, near Jezzine. However, some observers point to the fact that Hizbullah relies considerably on short-range rockets for its deterrence capability, rockets it can fire from primitive launching pads south of the Litani. They argue that the party’s military infrastructure in the area has, of necessity, been thinned out since 2006 after the deployment of the Lebanese Army and UNIFIL, so that even once-closed military zones such as Wadi Hujayr are now open to traffic. That’s why, these observers believe, Hizbullah will not have the same capability of firing rockets that it did three years ago, let alone to defend against Israeli incursions to prevent the launches.

 

As for the longer-range missiles, there remains some question of how extensively Hizbullah can rely on them. Given Nasrallah’s threats, these would effectively become strategic weapons, targeting Israeli cities and infrastructure, so their use would introduce frightening military realities that Hizbullah would have to withstand and defend domestically. For example, we can assume that if Tel Aviv is bombed, so too will be central Beirut, and it’s not at all clear that Hizbullah could sustain such an escalation politically and militarily for very long. On top of that, who would be launching these missiles, Lebanese or Iranians? If it’s the latter, Lebanon would be the front line in a regional battle, which neither the Shiite community nor other Lebanese would welcome.

 

 

Which takes us to the second obstacle Hizbullah must face: that put up by its own community. The party still dominates the Shiites, but as a visit to southern Lebanon will show, Hizbullah must address a more subtle challenge to its priorities, that provided by normalcy. Nasrallah dodged a bullet in summer 2006 by containing Shiite discontent following a month when hundreds of thousands of his coreligionists were turned into internal refugees. The secretary general showed psychological flair by declaring that shipwreck a “divine victory,” a notion the Shiites embraced because it lent meaning to their suffering. But Nasrallah can only play that game once.

 

We are almost a decade into the Shiite return to the South after Israel’s military withdrawal, a decade in which its inhabitants have been leading a more or less normal life, or aspiring to do so. Yet the destruction from 2006 is everywhere visible – the market of Bint Jbeil, for example, is still being rebuilt. Hizbullah has placed posters of its martyrs in every village, but even that perennial reminder of the debt owed by the community to the party cannot forever displace a Shiite yearning for a life without fear.

There is an assumption that the way Hizbullah “packages” a war with Israel will determine how Shiites react to it. In other words if Israel is perceived as the clear culprit, the community will remain loyal to Hizbullah, whatever the consequences. Perhaps, but it will not be easy for the party to disguise retaliation in defense of Iran with another pretext. Nor will Hizbullah readily dispel a disquieting feeling among Shiites that the party, for all the advantages it brings to the community, every few years demands a prohibitive blood tax in exchange. 

 

Then there is Hizbullah’s relation with Lebanon in general. The party has perfected a persona of indifference to Lebanese preferences disputing the imperatives of resistance, but it also knows that its countrymen will virulently oppose any new conflict, particularly one on behalf of the regime in Tehran, which could undermine Hizbullah’s status. That was one message from the March 14 victory in the June elections, in many respects a vote against Michel Aoun for his alliance with Hizbullah. But the party is also paying for May 2008, when it overran western Beirut and tried doing so in the mountains. That enterprise may have won Hizbullah a temporary victory against unarmed civilians, but what it really did was sweep away any national consensus in support of its armed struggle.

 

A postwar Lebanon would be nothing like the one that emerged in August 2006, which nonetheless defied Hizbullah for over 18 months. This new Lebanon, battered, impoverished, bitter, could well demand a final showdown with the project of a party that cannot possibly coexist with the project of a sovereign state. This begs the question: Might Israel precipitate a pre-emptive strike to take advantage of the Lebanese contradictions? It’s possible, and we’re not doing the slightest thing to prevent this.

 

 

Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

When Did Anti-Zionism Become An International Issue?

 

by Alex Grobman

 

For more than 20 years after the establishment of the State of Israel, anti-Zionism was a regional phenomenon - a conflict between Arab and Jewish national movements in the Middle East. In the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, the Soviets exploited antisemitism for political purposes, but it was seldom part of international debate until after the Six-Day War in 1967.

By the end of the 1960s, and since 1975, anti-Zionism became international in scope. It first appeared in the universities in the West where the New Left, in cooperation with Arab student associations, attacked Israeli policy. ¹

 

When the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 on November 10, 1975, and declared "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination," it significantly expanded anti-Zionism into the sphere of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and therefore into Third World countries. This was accomplished in collaboration between the Arabs and the Soviet Union that endowed anti-Zionism with legitimacy and official recognition.²

 

After the First World War, the Arabs expected Greater Syria - which included Palestine and Lebanon - to become a vast, united, and sovereign Arab empire. Instead, the French and the British divided the area into what the Arabs considered "irrationally carved out" entities that became the present-day states of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Trans-Jordan (later Jordan), Iraq, and Israel. The Arabs were outraged that a "non-Arab embryo state in Palestine" had been inserted into an area where it would never be accepted. They claimed that this shattered their dreams of unification and impeded their search for a common identity. ³

 

The fight against a Jewish homeland became an integral part of their struggle "for dignity and independence." Israel's existence, they claimed, "implied that not only a part of the Arab patrimony, but also parts of Islam, had been stolen. For a Moslem, there was no greater shame than for that to happen." The only way to eliminate this deeply felt affront - this "symbol of everything that had dominated them in the past" - was to rid the area of "imperialist domination." ⁴

 

Zionism has been branded as the official enemy of the Arab national movement, but Arab governments have long been accused of using the Arab-Israeli confrontation to divert attention from their own critical domestic social and economic problems. When confronted, they respond that if this were not a real concern, it would not resonate so strongly among the Arab masses. ⁵

 

Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton University, the dean of Middle Eastern scholars in the West, says Arab fixation with Israel "is the licensed grievance. In countries where people are becoming increasingly angry and frustrated at all the difficulties under which they live - the poverty, unemployment, oppression - having a grievance which they can express freely is an enormous psychological advantage." ⁶

 

The Israeli-Arab conflict is the only local political grievance that can be openly discussed. If the population were permitted freedom of speech, Lewis believes that the obsession with Israel would become far less important. Like most people, Arabs are concerned about their own priorities. For the Palestinian Arabs, who view themselves as the permanent victims, the main issue is their struggle with Israel. If Arabs in other countries were permitted to focus on their own problems, they would do so.  ⁷

 

For Arabs, the attempt to blame Western imperialism is nothing more than an excuse to attack Israel, as another Hebrew University professor Jacob Talmon asserted: "For decades the Arabs have been obsessed by memories of past glories and prophecies of future greatness, mocked by the injury and shame of having an alien and despised race injected into the nerve center of their promised pan-Arab empire, between its Asian and African halves, just at a time when the colonial powers had started their great retreat from their colonial possessions in Asia and Africa." ⁸

 

To lessen their feelings of shame for losing every war against Israel, the Arabs attributed the success of Jewish settlement in Palestine and the Israeli military triumphs of 1948 and 1956 to Western imperialism. As the representative of the Great Powers, Israel became the Arabs' scapegoat whenever they became frustrated in their attempt to transcend "centuries of social, economic, and cultural development, and catch up" with the West.

 

This anti-Israel fixation precipitated a methodical "Manichean metaphysic, the focus of an entire philosophy of history, with the Jew as the devil incarnate from the days of patriarch Abraham himself till his assumption of the role of the linchpin of an American-Imperialist-Zionist world-plot against the Arab world, the Socialist Commonwealth and all colonial peoples." ⁹

 

The crushing defeat of the Arabs in the 1967 Six-Day War shattered this fantasy and accentuated Arab humiliation, since the Israelis won without the backing of any imperialist nations. Arab rage was exacerbated by the casualty rates in Israel's favor -- about 25 to 1 -- and by the number of prisoners of war Israel captured. At least 5,000 Egyptian soldiers, including 21 generals, 365 Syrians (30 of whom were officers), and 550 Jordanians were taken. Only 15 Israelis were held as POWs. Arab military hardware losses were in the billions of dollars -- most of it coming from Soviet Bloc countries.¹⁰

 

Civilian casualties were minimal: Israelis estimate that 175,000 Arab noncombatants fled the West Bank to Jordan; Jordanians claim that number is 250,000. Though the Israelis did not initiate the Arab exodus, they did not attempt to stop it. The refugees were not encouraged to return, but Moshe Dayan, Israel's Minister of Defense, stopped the practice of preventing them from crossing back to the West Bank a week after the war, after observing ambushes and concluding that they were inhumane.¹¹

 

Israelis wanted to resolve the 1948 and 1967 refugee problem -- to be determined when a comprehensive peace agreement would be negotiated. The Arabs rejected the offer and insisted that the refugees be allowed to return, unconditionally, and receive compensation. Yet, in the summer of 1967, when Israel agreed to allow Arabs to come back to the West Bank, only a handful returned.¹²

 

At the same time, the Arabs persecuted and tormented their own Jewish residents. Jews were attacked in Yemen, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Morocco. Synagogues were burned and Jews were arrested and detained. In Damascus and Baghdad, Jewish leaders were fined and imprisoned, and 7,000 Jews were expelled after their property and most of their belongings were confiscated. Eight hundred of Egypt's 4,000 Jews were arrested, including the chief rabbis of Cairo and Alexandria. The UN and the Red Cross did nothing to intervene on their behalf.¹³

 

Despite this treatment of Jews in Arab lands, the 1.2 million Arabs under Israeli governance did not experience any systematic mistreatment. Looting and vandalism were reported in some areas, but the Israelis repaired whatever damage they found. Though Jordanians had destroyed synagogues in the Old City of Jerusalem and used the tombstones from the Jewish cemeteries on the Mount of Olives to pave roads and use in latrines, Moshe Dayan participated in the Friday prayers at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Perhaps the greatest trauma for the Arabs was that Israel had conquered 42,000 square miles - and was now three-and-a-half times larger in size than before the war. ¹⁴

 

Anti-Zionism entered the international scene when Israel and Egypt reached political rapprochement after the Yom Kippur War by signing an interim agreement on September 1, 1975. That agreement emphasized, "The conflict between them and in the Middle East shall not be resolved by military force but by peaceful means."¹⁵

 

Concerned that this might lead to peace, the Soviets, Syria, and the PLO tried to exclude Israel from international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), like UNESCO, "for having transgressed the United Nations Charter, and having failed to adopt its resolutions." When this strategy failed, they began to question Israel's legitimacy and discredit and condemn Zionism in the UN, and to internationalize their propaganda against her.¹⁶ 
 

1. Yohanan Manor, "Anti-Zionism," (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1984):  8.

2. Ibid.

3. Saul Friedlander and Mahmoud Hussein, Arabs and Israelis: A Dialogue (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975), 6, 18, 21.

4. Ibid., 9, 34.

5. Ibid.

6. "Islam's Interpreter," The Atlantic Online (April 4, 2004), Online.

7. Ibid; Friedlander and Hussein, Arabs and Israelis: A Dialogue, 32-33, 36.

8. Jacob L. Talmon, Israel Among the Nations (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), 169-170.

9. Ibid.170.

10. Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 305-306.

11. Ibid., 306.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., 306-307.

14. Ibid.

15. Manor, "Anti-Zionism," 9-10.

16. Ibid.10.

 

Dr. Alex Grobman is a Hebrew University trained historian. He is a former director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the author of a number of books, including Nations United: How The U.N. Undermines Israel and The West, Denying History: Who Says The Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? and a forthcoming book on Israel's moral and legal right to exist as a Jewish State.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Obama Expresses His Basic Concept of International Affairs: Pollyanna, Yes; Machiavelli, No.

by Barry Rubin

The most important paragraph of President Barack Obama’s speech announces a repeal of all prior guidelines and principles for U.S. foreign policy and a rejection of the basic rules of diplomacy as they have been practiced for centuries. It reveals the fundamental philosophical outlook of the president of the United States.

Of everything Obama has ever said, these 82 words for me are the scariest. One has to go back to first principles to explain to the U.S. government (and to many in Europe) how the real world works.

This should be the lead to all coverage of the speech. First, let’s present the paragraph in question:

“In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world. Nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long gone Cold War.”

Let’s examine this paragraph:

It is true that all the people in the world face certain common problems like disease, poverty, environmental problems, the need to provide sufficient housing and jobs, crime, and the list goes on.

But this is not some twenty-first century revelation. It has always been true, even going back to the time of the Pharaohs and the Sumerians.

Philosophers and the creators of some—but not all—religions have argued that as a result all people should be kind to each other, help each other, work together, etc. Nation should not lift up sword against nation, neither should they war any more.

Yeah, but they still do.

Here’s where politics and international relations come in. Resources, development, wealth, and strength are not evenly spread. There are always people who have argued that power is a zero-sum game. I can take from you more easily than I can work and equal your success.

And if I believe that the only reason you “have” is that you stole from me, then power will certainly be a zero-sum game. This is why, for example, the Arab-Israeli conflict doesn’t come to an end. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin makes clear that he thinks his country's rightful sphere of influence has been stolen by the United States. The rulers of Bolivia, Cuba, and Venezuela say that the United States has stolen their country's wealth.

A second element that makes power a zero-sum game is the fact that different people have conflicting ideas. If there’s a group—say radical Islamists—who believe they are following the instructions of the deity and must put their worldview into rule than power for them is a zero-sum game. Either a country is ruled by Islamic law or it isn't.

Any leader who doesn’t realize that power is at least in large part a zero-sum game is like a man who drives his luxury car into the toughest part of town and with a visible flourish leaves it unlocked.

Indeed, Obama's speech was made at the UN, an institution that’s living proof that these ideas don’t work. It is corrupt and increasingly ruled by radicals who attack democracy and trash truth. The high founding ideals for which the UN was founded have been trampled by the very realities that Obama says don’t—or no longer—exist.

No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation, says the president. Well there are a lot of nations who don’t think that way. So what are you going to do about it? Utopian visions can work only if almost everyone believes them. Or they're nice if you don’t take them too seriously. If a nation acts otherwise you have two choices: stand by and do nothing or defeat them in some way that makes them stop trying to do so.

Note, however, that Obama doesn’t say this is the way the world should be—which is understandable as an idealistic goal—he says that this is the way the world actually is—which is a prescription for disaster.

No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed, says the president. Well, if he means that you shouldn’t try to dominate others that is one thing, but if he means that you shouldn’t try to exercise power which at times forces others to do your will than you are acting in a way that ensures that a group of people is elevated. The only thing you are accomplishing, however, is to make it certain that the group on top won’t include yourself.

And there is another implication here: a renunciation of American leadership in the world, the denial that the United States has a special role to play, has values or ideas or institutions that should be spread to countries that don’t possess them. If everyone is equal, there are no leaders.
But if you don’t lead, how do you achieve your goals: goals that others don’t necessarily share, despite Obama’s apparent failure to realize this. How do you enforce stopping others from dominating, taking, and conquering?

Now there is a positive side to this position. Obama says: you cannot expect the United States to solve all your problems and you cannot blame the United States for the failure to solve them. If this were coupled with a reasonable leadership stance this would make sense and Obama's credibility in this direction would help a bit.

Still, if countries don't believe the United States can do enough to help them they will seek friends elsewhere or appease America's enemies. And of course no matter what Obama does or says lots of groups, peoples, and countries will blame America for problems. Why? Because it is in their interests and many view the United States as an enemy.

He adds: No balance of power among nations will hold. This is absurd. What does it mean? That you cannot have a coalition of forces—say the West and its allies—that can stop another group from doing whatever it wants? Where is the alternative? That you must either reconcile your enemies or give them what they demand?

Of course, a balance of power can hold. And let’s remember the purpose of balances of power: to stop aggressors without going to war. No balance of power, the result has to be settled by surrender or fighting.

The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world. If by this Obama says that the poor should not be in conflict with the rich, it sounds like the usual fare from Western leaders. But in context is he saying that the developed world should give away its wealth to the Third World? And remember this statement comes from a man who favors environmental policies that if adopted would destroy Third World development efforts. No polluting power plants, mass ownership of automobiles, and smelly factories for them!

Nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long gone Cold War. If that means that the West should not look on Russia as an enemy (China was already part of the Western coalition in a sense by the late 1970s), that’s fine. But does this imply that democratic states should not see a kinship as against dictatorships? That liberty and freedom should not unite those against others whose ideas are those of tyranny and oppression?

Again, the point to remember is that Obama did not say that this is the way the world ought to be but that the world actually is like this. To say that one day the lion will lay down with the lamb is admirable. To say that it’s happening right now is a recipe for lamp chops.

What Obama has done in this paragraph is to reject reality and to put a gigantic “kick me” sign on the United States and its allies.

In a sense, it is the extension of multiculturalism to diplomacy. There's no good nor bad. Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan were just expressing their cultural norms. Who can say that the United States is better than Sudan, a country by the way which is chairing the largest bloc in the UN, or Libya, one of whose officials is charing the General Assembly.

Anyone would think he has absolutely no experience in international affairs!

 

Barry Rubin
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.