by Isi Leibler
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The US State Department has
floated a trial balloon to test the idea of former US Ambassador to
Israel, Martin Indyk, serving as mediator in the forthcoming peace
negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. It is not
surprising that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has signaled his
approval. What is incomprehensible is that Prime Minister Netanyahu has
done likewise.
Unfortunately the prospect of
genuine progress in the negotiations is extraordinarily slim. There is
no evidence that the Palestinian Authority will compromise on a single
issue. In the unlikely event that the weak, corrupt President Abbas does
make even a single concession, his Fatah supporters will immediately
topple him.
Nonetheless, an “honest broker”
is essential to the process. However, Martin Indyk is not that broker.
His track record in presiding over previous peace negotiations indicates
that if re-appointed, he will, in all probability, direct negotiations
in a manner to ensure that Israel will be blamed for their failure.
Indyk has had an impressive
political career. Educated in Australia, he moved to the US where he
joined AIPAC and subsequently held executive positions at prestigious
Washington, DC think-tanks (Executive Director of the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, and Director of Foreign Policy at the
Brookings Institution). He also has assumed key political positions
(Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs in the Clinton
administration). After becoming a naturalized US citizen, President
Clinton appointed him US Ambassador to Israel - the first foreign born
and first Jew to hold the position. He served two terms, from April 1995
to September 1997 and from January 2000 to July 2001.
Indyk’s rise in the political
arena has been ascribed to his talent of adjusting to the prevailing
political climate of the Democratic leadership. When President Obama was
elected, Indyk aligned himself with the new leader, and
enthusiastically participated in Obama’s Israel-bashing and
Netanyahu-snubbing. He was unsparing and, at times, vicious in his
criticism of our Prime Minister, and laid the bulk of the blame on
Netanyahu for the breakdown in Israeli-Palestinian relations.
He has moved further and further
to the left as his career unfolded. He served as International Chair of
the New Israel Fund, an organization that has repeatedly been
castigated for funding rabid anti-Zionist and anti-Israel NGOs,
including several organizations that compiled distorted and false
information for the notorious Goldstone Report accusing the IDF of
engaging in war crimes.
Aside from occasional lip
service to their failings, Indyk became an aggressive apologist for the
Palestinians and at one stage even identified himself with those
defending Arafat’s rebuff of Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s extreme
concessions at Camp David.
Indyk has made outrageous claims
about Israel’s de-stabilizing effect on the Middle East, and the need
for Israel’s to bend to the will of the United States, threatening, “If
Israel is a superpower and does not need $3 billion in military
assistance and protection, and [does not require] the efforts of the US
to isolate and pressure Iran, then go ahead and do what you like. If you
need the US, then you need to take American interests into account…
Israel has to adjust its policy to the interest of the United States or
there will be serious consequences.”
He has also made the obscene
charge that it was Israeli intransigence that contributed to US military
casualties in Afghanistan, accusing Israel of endangering “a vital
security interest of the United States.” The “intransigence” he was
alluding to was the settlement construction then taking place in Jewish
neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.
He stooped even lower when he
stated that Prime Minister Netanyahu should take into account that
President Obama was obliged to write 30-40 condolence letters a week. To
climax his antagonistic attitude towards Israel, in 2010 Indyk publicly
urged Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli government to cede the
Golan Heights to Syria.
Indyk frequently invokes the
memory of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who he refers to as “Israel’s
greatest strategic thinker.” But Rabin would have undoubtedly rejected
an American spokesman or diplomat with the chutzpah to make the demands
on Israel as made by Indyk. He would have dismissed him for his lack of
respect for Israel’s sovereignty and his treatment of it as a vassal
state. Certainly, Rabin would never have endorsed Indyk’s calls to
divide Jerusalem and to make unilateral territorial concessions.
Most of us continue to dream of
peace. However, we recognize that with the current chaos and violence in
the region, the likelihood of moving forward with a peace “partner” who
sanctifies murder and engages in vicious incitement is almost a mirage.
Yet to demonstrate our commitment to leave no stone unturned in our
desire for peace, we have succumbed to pressure and unfortunately
compromised the rights of terror victims and their families, by
releasing hundreds of mass murderers as a “goodwill gesture” to sit at
the negotiating table.
Yet the extraordinary lengths to
which we will go for the sake of peace will not move us forward if the
US mediator is an American Jew, whose recent track record is
indistinguishable from that of J Street in seeking to pressure Israel to
make unilateral concessions. That such a politically jaundiced Jew is
being proposed for this role is cause for grave concern.
Prime Minister Netanyahu would
be well advised to bite the bullet now and resist pressure to accept
Indyk as mediator. Otherwise, we will once again be accused of
intransigency and inflexibility, if not the cause of an upsurge in
violence that President Abbas has already threatened should his demands
go unmet.
He may be contacted at ileibler@leibler.com
This column was originally published in the Jerusalem Post and Israel Hayom
Isi Leibler
Source: http://wordfromjerusalem.com/?p=4748
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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