Say 'no' to Obama.

 

by Yair Shamir

 

Fending off American pressure requires us to alter our tactics but not our goal

 

Ever since Barack Obama was sworn in as president of the United States he has been recognized in Israel as a superstar. To the Israeli media and policy makers every word of his shakes heaven and earth. He is perceived as an omnipotent force and therefore it deters the government from making decisions on building, populating and improving the infrastructure in Jerusalem. It also fears to implement decisions that were already approved by previous left-wing governments. At the same time the authorities are afraid to impose the law against illegal Arab construction that threatens the future of Jerusalem. The Arabs smell this weakness and this emboldens and encourages them to harden their positions towards Israel.

 

However, there is no basis for this fear and overreaction. With all due respect to President Obama he is not that powerful. The polls in recent weeks point to a drastic decline in his popularity in the United States. Support for the Democrats in the Senate and Congress is now at an all time low and the Republican legislators are now perceived more worthy of being elected to Congress. Two thirds of the population feels that America is not heading in the right direction.

 

As the Congressional campaign goes into motion this month and the rate of unemployment continues to rise, the president becomes more and more contingent on Congress. During an election campaign Democratic legislators are attuned to their constituency more than they are to the president. The relative weight of Congress rises during economic crises and the assertiveness and independence of legislators grow as congressional campaign season approaches.

 

Polls in the US show that there is still strong and unwavering support among the American public for Israel. Democratic legislators are aware of this and therefore will not allow the president to break Israel's back by imposing withdrawals from land vital to its security.

 

True leadership understands that saying no and standing up against pressure is vital to attain strategic goals while surrender and acquiescence only leads to abandonment of these goals. At the same time it increases international pressure on Israel. Fending off pressure requires you to alter your tactics but not your goal.

 

My father, former PM Yitzchak Shamir, may he live and be well, knew that defying American pressure would harm his personal popularity and Israel's image in the short run but in the long run would turn Israel into the US strongest ally and strategic partner.

 

 

World has changed in Israel’s favor

Nothing illustrates this better than Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s words in his dedication to the book "Yitzchak Shamir: Firm as A Rock" published last year:

 

"During President George Bush's (the father) term in office while I was serving as the IDF's chief of staff I was once summoned to the Prime Minister's Office to meet with then US Secretary of State James Baker who had been demanding that Israel make far-reaching concessions. Upon the request of Shamir, I briefed our prominent guest with the range of military threats that is facing Israel. Baker did not retract from his demands. Instead, carrying the weight of the only superpower leading the free world today, he insisted that Israel concede.

 

"At one point I noticed Shamir's face became very tense and alert, it looked like a volcano about to explode. He banged on the table and told the secretary of state in a very blunt and undiplomatic manner, in a very sharp but self-controlled tone: 'Mr. Secretary, you can demand what you choose to demand but this is our country and we will not agree to do anything that will harm its interests and future even if our best friend demands it from us."

 

My father's refusal to budge from his principles did not lead to a round of applause and praise in the media but it elicited respect for the man and improved Israel's national security. His heritage now forewarns Israeli prime ministers to stand up to pressure and not to define American pressure as a reason to withdraw from your vision and strategic goal. This will only erode Israel's power of deterrence and that of the US in the Middle East.

 

I'm sure there will be those who will claim that one cannot compare the situation prevailing then to the situation today. They will claim that times have changed, the world has changed and all kinds of baseless reasons aimed at frightening the Israeli public so they would succumb to a strategic withdrawal. True, the world has changed, but in Israel's favor. Israel has been upgraded dramatically in the military, economic, demographic, technological and medical fields etc.

 

The US post September 11th and Europe following a wave of Muslim terror and being faced with a demographic Muslim time bomb constitutes a plausible arena for Israel to stand firm and unapologetic.

 

The US Congress is equal in power and independence to the president. The president initiates and executes policy but Congress controls the American Purse. It has the authority to change, suspend and initiate policy. Congress has always displayed a more hawkish approach than Israeli governments when it came to the security of the state and especially on the issue of Jerusalem. Very prominent and influential congressional figures have made it clear that we now have a historic opportunity to upgrade the Israeli-US strategic partnership regardless of the present disagreements with the Obama government regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict.

 

The present Israeli government has a solid majority and backing of the Israeli public who is hoping for change – it wants to see a strong Israel that stands by its rights and principles and does not succumb to the pressure of international elements that have only their self-interests in mind. 

 

 

Yair Shamir

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

 

Is the U.S. About to Dump Syria?

 

by Michael J. Totten

Hussain Abdul-Hussain reports in Kuwait’s Arabic-language daily Al Rai that the Obama administration has quietly decided not to return an ambassador to Syria as promised. He quotes unnamed officials who say president Bashar Assad is blackmailing the United States and its neighbors while conceding nothing in negotiations.

“Assad had started to count the American eggs in his basket before offering anything in return,” said an administration official, according to Tony Badran’s translation from Arabic. “Assad fires a rocket here or there [in south Lebanon] and expects us to run to him. . . . This kind of security blackmail no longer works on the United States.”

Syrian blackmail, though, has been working for decades. Bashar Assad’s government, like that of his late father, Hafez Assad, is an extortionist gangster regime that demands—and usually gets—the diplomatic equivalent of protection money. “The basic line is ‘Do what we want or we will kill you,’ ” said Barry Rubin, author of The Truth about Syria. “Yet at the same time they hold out the bait of great progress if only their demands are met. They play the West at times like a master fisherman reeling in his victim.”

There’s a case to be made, albeit a weak one, for buying off rogue regimes if they’ll behave. The biggest problem with bribing the Syrians, aside from the fact that it encourages more blackmail later, is that Assad won’t even hold up his end of the deal. “The Syrians,” Lebanese blogger Mustapha explained on his blog Beirut Spring, “try to sell, for a high price, water for fires they cause themselves, then they don’t deliver.”

No matter what the Syrian government is offered—normal relations, a looser sanctions regime, trade agreements—it has never rolled back support for international terrorist organizations. Syria refuses to hold peace talks with Israel or close down the local branches of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Assad won’t stop obstructing the formation of a new Lebanese government nor will he shut down his terrorist pipeline into Iraq.

Lebanese politicians and journalists have been under siege by Syrian assassins and car bombers since 2005. Iraqis have been blown apart by Syrian-supported suicide-bombers since 2003. And Israelis have been under assault by terrorist groups backed by Damascus since the Assad regime came to power decades ago. “This is how Syria negotiates,” Lee Smith wrote in 2007 after Syrian agents blew up a bus on Mount Lebanon, “with its knife on the table and dripping with blood.”

“The impediment to real change in the Syrian regime’s behavior in a manner that would satisfy American decision-makers is structural and systemic,” wrote Tony Badran in NOW Lebanon. “Syria cannot abandon its support for violence and subversion, or its alliance with Iran, because those are the only tools allowing it to bolster its relevance above its political weight.”

Indeed, Assad and his father have made Syria an indispensable nation in the Middle East, despite its utter dearth of economic and military power, by exporting terrorism and suicide murder to neighboring countries. Henry Kissinger’s famous formulation, “No war without Egypt, no peace without Syria,” would be negated at once if Assad ceased and desisted his support for Palestinian, Lebanese, and Iraqi terrorist groups. Syria would become just another failed Soviet-style state with no more geopolitical power than Yemen.

The Obama administration has been a bit more accommodating of Assad than it should have been, but the same can be said for every American administration in recent decades. Barry Rubin warned about this possibility long before Barack Obama was even elected. “The next U.S. president might try to engage Syria and spend a year or so finding out that it doesn’t work,” he told me in 2007.

Bashar Assad does not play well with others, and he never has. Neither did his father. The Syrians, according to a U.S. official quoted by Abdul-Hussain, “don’t know the difference between normalizing relations and behaving like they’ve defeated the US in a world war.”

President Obama’s conciliatory nature meant a temporary rapprochement with Syria was likely, if not inevitable. Assad’s nature all but ensures it won’t last.

 

 

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

 

What happened to the US deadline on Iran?

 

by Dore Gold

Earlier this month, it became clear that Iran was defying the US and its Western allies by once again refusing to open serious negotiations over its nuclear program. After all, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on September 7 that, he believed, "the nuclear issue is finished," adding, "We will never negotiate on the Iranian nation's rights." Days later, Iran's new five-page proposal to the P-5 plus 1 (the US, Russia, China, the UK, France and Germany) did not provide an opening for serious nuclear negotiations, but rather vague formulations for the agenda of any future talks. Indeed, the Iranian document began by asserting that the world was moving beyond "the difficult era characterized by domination of empires, predominance of military powers." It made reference to the need for "complete disarmament," but said nothing about its own nuclear program. In his Friday sermon on September 11, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei further backed the uncompromising Iranian nuclear stance.

 

THIS PAST July, when the G-8 announced that the opening of the UN General Assembly "would be an occasion for taking stock of the situation in Iran," most international observers understood that there was a hard September deadline that Iran had to meet to begin serious negotiations. Obama himself stated at a July 10 press conference after the G-8 meeting: "We've offered Iran a path towards assuming its rightful place in the world. But with that right comes responsibilities. We hope Iran will make the choice to fulfill them, and we will take stock of Iran's progress when we see each other this September at the G20 meeting." The G20 will be convened September 23.

 

Unfortunately, at this stage, there is little evidence that the Obama administration is about to adopt effective action in a timely manner in light of Iran's policy of rejectionism. Engagement was the centerpiece of its Middle East policy and has been hard to abandon. For example, while rejecting the newest Iranian proposals on September 10, State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley reminded reporters that engagement was still official US policy, stating: "We remain willing to engage Iran." Moreover, within 24 hours Crowley announced that the US would negotiate with Iran despite his determination a day earlier that their proposals were inadequate.

 

The hard-line Iranian newspaper Javan noted the dramatic US shift on September 14: "One day after the hasty response to Iran's updated package of proposals, America made a U-turn and announced that because these proposals could become a basis for direct talks with Iran, it accepts the talks over this package." Indicating Iranian understanding of the new US policy, the article was entitled: "The inevitable acceptance of nuclear Iran."

The first meeting between Teheran and the West reportedly will take place in early October when Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, and Western diplomats meet with Saeed Jalili, the chief Iranian nuclear negotiator. According to Solana's office, the meeting will not yet be a "formal negotiation," which presumably will come at a later stage. The September deadline appeared to have vanished and the Iranians have gained valuable time.

 

The consequences of letting the September deadline pass without a decisive response is clearly not understood in Western capitals. Iran will carefully calibrate its next moves on the basis of how it believes the US and its allies will act in the weeks ahead.

 

THERE ARE two very important Iranian considerations that are likely to be affected by what the West does now. Just recently, Glyn Davies, the US ambassador to the IAEA, acknowledged that the Iranian stockpile of low-enriched uranium has already reached a sufficient level so that it was possible to talk about Teheran having "a dangerous and destabilizing possible breakout capacity." What he probably meant was that the Iranians could soon take their low-enriched uranium and put it through a further stage of enrichment to produce weapons-grade fuel. He announced that Iran already has enough low-enriched uranium for at least one atomic bomb.

 

Under the breakout scenario, Iran would refuse any more IAEA inspections, shut down the IAEA cameras that provide a partial picture of what transpires in the Natanz enrichment plant, and manufacture high-enriched fuel.

 

International precedents in this area are not encouraging. North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear reactor was under IAEA monitoring until 2002, when Pyongyang removed the IAEA seals from its stock of spent fuel rods and expelled international inspectors. Since, North Korea conducted two nuclear tests and got away with them: first in October 2006 and then in May 2009. Reportedly, Iranian representatives were present at both. Teheran undoubtedly observed that no serious action was taken against North Korea for its nuclear breakout. Should Iran escape from the September deadline that the West itself instituted, then its readiness to follow the North Korean example will substantially increase.

 

The second area which will be affected by how Iran is handled at present will be deterrence. The common assumption in Washington policy circles is that even if Iran reaches the nuclear finish line, the US can fall back on the same Cold War deterrence that was used against the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

 

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's offer in July of a "defense umbrella" against Iran to worried Arab states foreshadows the coming approach of the administration to a nuclear Iran. But will Iran respond to Western deterrence the way Washington hopes?

 

Indeed, over the last year, Western leaders have repeatedly declared that a nuclear-armed Iran was "unacceptable." But should they subsequently acquiesce to Iran's final sprint to a nuclear capability, what credibility will US deterrence have with the leadership in Teheran after it successfully defies the West's repeated warnings? There is an unwarranted complacency growing in the West about Iran. Some believe that if the world survived the advent of Pakistani and North Korean nuclear weapons, and the sky did not fall, then an Iranian bomb will be no more threatening. The cases are, of course, very different. Iran is a revolutionary power whose aspirations extend into Iraq, Bahrain, and other oil-producing states. It is involved in both the Afghan and Iraqi insurgencies, while its support for terrorism reaches into Lebanon, Gaza, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Now Iran is heavily involved in South America and East Africa, with growing security and economic ties. In short, the nuclearization of Iran has global implications.

 

In dealing with the new Ahmadinejad government, the proposals currently being considered for severe sanctions, including a gasoline quarantine, on Iran must be pursued immediately, despite the start of any negotiations. The West must demonstrate political will, but time is now short. The decision to engage Iran diplomatically has never been cost-free. In 2003-2005, Teheran engaged with the EU-3 (UK, Germany and France) for two years, exploiting the talks to race ahead with construction of key uranium enrichment facilities, while fending off punitive measures by the UN Security Council for three entire years. Iran today is far more advanced than it was then and the time for diplomatic experimentation is extremely limited. The scale of the next crisis with Iran will largely be affected by how the Obama administration responds to the challenge it faces when it meets the Iranians next month.

 

 

Dore Gold is President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Previously, he served as Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations (1997-1999). He is the author of Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism (Regnery, 2003).

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

 

Who is Obstructing Middle East Peace?

 
by  Khaled Abu Toameh

The US Administration is in the final stages of preparing a new initiative that would, according to recent reports in the media, require Arabs and Muslims to embark on a process of normalization with Israel once the government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu freezes construction in West Bank settlements.

However, even if Netanyahu were to announce tomorrow morning that he is suspending all construction in the settlements, it is highly unlikely that the Arab and Islamic countries would rush to normalize relations with Israel.

Many Arab and Islamic countries have already made it crystal-clear that even if Israel would stop the construction, they would not take such a step. In Cairo, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry stated that freezing settlement construction does not mean that the Arabs would offer Israel full normalization.

The Arab and Muslim leaders are using the settlement construction as an excuse to avoid normalization with Israel. The truth is that these dictators are afraid to go against the tide because they know that their constituents would revolt against them if they normalized ties with Israel.

Even the only two Arab countries that have peace treaties with Israel, Jordan and Egypt, have said that they still are not ready for normalization with the Jewish state. Ironically, it is the Egyptians and the Jordanians, along with the Palestinians [whose representatives signed the Oslo Accords with Israel], have long been spearheading the anti-normalization camp in the Arab world. All are vehemently opposed to any form of normalization with Israel and continue to work toward isolating Israel in the international arena.

Moreover, the Egyptians, Jordanians and Palestinians allow "anti-Israel normalization committees" to launch fierce campaigns against any Arab who dares to define the ban on opening up to Israel. Just last week, a group of Jordanian journalists, who committed the crime of visiting Jerusalem, came under strong criticism from their colleagues. The Jordanian Committee for Anti-Normalization called for expelling the journalists from the Jordan Press Association, while others dubbed them traitors and collaborators. Professional Associations representing more than 150,000 Jordanians joined the attack on the journalists' visit, calling it a type of normalization with Israel.

The Western-backed Palestinian Authority has also been active in combating all forms of normalization with Israel. Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki last week warned all Arabs and Muslims against accepting a US offer to normalize relations with Israel. "We should not give a blank check from the current Israeli governments. Some of the Arab states consider steps towards ties normalization with Israel in exchange for only promises," Maliki said. He added that normalization could be made only when Israel withdraws from all and Palestinian territories and recognizes a Palestinian state.

The main reason why the Arab governments are opposed to normalization with Israel is because they know that their constituents are not prepared for such a move. If the issue of settlement construction were the real problem, the Palestinians, Jordanians and Egyptians would not have made peace with Israel: This is because when their leaders signed the peace treaties, Israel was building in the settlements.

Some heads of states and monarchs may be in favor of normalization with Israel, even if the only purpose of appeasing the US Administration. Others don't want normalization not only with Israel, but with the outside world because they don't want their constituents to be exposed to democracies and different cultures.

In any case, it's evident that Arab and Muslim public opinion remains violently opposed to such a "gesture." The real problem lies in the fact in the Arab and Islamic worlds there are still too many people who have not come to terms with Israel's existence in this part of the world. They continue to consider Israel an alien body or a caner that needs to be removed for once and for all.

And that's basically why there still isn't peace in the Middle East.

 

 

Khaled Abu Toameh, an Arab Muslim, is a veteran award-winning journalist who has been covering Palestinian affairs for nearly three decades. He studied at Hebrew University and began his career as a reporter by working for a PLO-affiliated newspaper in Jerusalem. Abu Toameh currently works for the international media, serving as the "eyes and ears" of foreign journalists in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

 

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

 

Stuck in the Middle East.

by Steven J. Rosen

Eight months into his presidency, Barack Obama is fast approaching his first real moment of truth on the Middle East. At the opening of the U.N. General Assembly session next week, the U.S. president will host a ceremonial summit between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in hopes of launching talks to achieve a final resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Then, a week later on Oct. 1, Undersecretary of State William Burns will join representatives of Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China for the first talks with Iran's chief nuclear negotiator to see whether an agreement can be reached to curtail President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's nuclear weapons program.

This is the diplomatic offensive that Obama promised the U.S. public last year -- the investment in "soft power" that the president's supporters deemed lacking during the George W. Bush administration. But the White House is facing tough prospects on both fronts. All that fantastical thinking about the transformative power of diplomacy is now headed straight for the iceberg that is the Middle East.

One immovable object is Abbas, who has participated in hundreds of peace negotiations over 15 years with six previous Israeli governments -- all while Israeli settlement construction was proceeding at a brisk pace. Now, Abbas says that he won't accept the partial freeze that Netanyahu has declared; he'll wait to join peace talks until Israel bows to Washington's unprecedented demand for a total freeze on construction, including in Jerusalem. But that is a condition that no Israeli government is going to accept. Even if Abbas softens his stand and agrees to begin talks, negotiations will still be in their throat-clearing phase when the Palestinian president's term ends Jan. 10. With Hamas controlling Gaza there is no agreed electoral mechanism to empower a successor Palestinian president to make concessions on behalf of the Palestinians. Far from achieving transformative success, Obama will be lucky if he can just keep negotiations alive for more than a few weeks.

The Iranian talks look even more likely to end without resolution. On what seems like a daily basis, Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reaffirm their determination to accelerate Iran's nuclear program and add to the rapidly growing stockpiles of low-enriched uranium. The talks are not likely to throw them off this path.

When both of these diplomatic initiatives grind down, then, and hopes for change fade, the U.S.-Israel relationship will face new strains. Obama can tolerate an impasse on the Iranian front for some time, but Netanyahu cannot. Although Obama and his advisors certainly do not want to see a nuclear-armed Iran, some find the prospect of an attack against the Islamic Republic even more frightening. As the countdown to a nuclear Iran draws ever near, many top Netanyahu advisors have a different view.

On the Palestinian file, the opposite is true: It is Obama who cannot live with an impasse and the Israelis who can. Since 2005, when Israel withdrew every soldier and 8,000 settlers from Gaza, only to be rewarded by a Hamas coup and thousands of Qassam rockets, Israelis have been skeptical that further Oslo Accords-type agreements can enhance their security. The idea of negotiating with the Palestinians to pull the Israeli army out of the West Bank, for example, doesn't inspire much public enthusiasm. Trouble is, many Americans do still believe in the Oslo idea. And a breakdown of Israeli-Palestinian talks would put enormous strains on Washington's relations with Arab countries like Saudi Arabia that need diplomatic movement to quiet domestic tensions. Allowing the talks to fail would also be unacceptable to the European Union and profoundly unsettling to important parts of Obama's own political coalition. Without a peace process, there will be more pressure for anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations, leaving Obama with a bitter choice between using the U.S. veto to prevent them or allowing them to pass, imperiling an ally and inflaming demands for U.S. sanctions against Israel.

There is yet one more wild card in all of this: Obama's door is open to advisors who want to break with Israel. Many on the left of the Democratic Party believe that Israel is the obstacle to peace and that a breakthrough could be achieved if Obama just twisted Israel's arm. Of course, this was always the view of some of the storied Arabists in the State Department, but today, it comes more influentially from Jewish American critics of Israeli policy who depict themselves as pro-Israel and pro-peace. Faced with the reality that only the 3 percent of Israelis who vote Meretz share such views, and that the dovish camp led by Yossi Beilin has no prospect of winning an election in the actual Jewish state, the Beilinist Israeli left has moved to Washington. Their goal is to lobby the U.S. president to "save Israel from herself" by imposing terms on Israel that the great majority of Israelis would reject.

Obama is poorly positioned to reach over Netanyahu's head to persuade the Israeli people to embrace this agenda. A Sept. 12 poll put Bibi's approval rating at 65 percent, while similar polls by Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post found that only 12 and 6 percent of Israelis, respectively, think that Obama is pro-Israel. If elections were held today, Likud would gain five additional seats, and Bibi's coalition would grow at the expense of the left, which has already been decimated by a public rebuff.

Some Netanyahu advisors think that Obama is himself a man of the left and that top aides like Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod are closet J-Streeters in the White House. Instead, however, Obama and his top advisors are instinctively drawn to the center-left, like Bill and Hillary Clinton. He is more likely to take advice from the National Security Council's Dennis Ross than from more-leftist deputy Mideast peace envoy Mara Rudman or the ubiquitous peace pundit Daniel Levy.

In short, all that is clear is that Obama's big Mideast moment is coming. Now the world waits to see what kind of U.S. president he wants to be.

 

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

 

The Times Doubles Down on Goldstone.

by  Jonathan Tobin

 

The UN's investigation of last winter's fighting in Gaza was the farrago that every objective observer expected it would be. Based on the UN Human Right Council's premise that the Israeli counteroffensive aimed at stopping the barrage of rockets at its southern towns and villages constituted a "war crime," the so-called "fact-finding mission" led by South African Judge Richard Goldstone found exactly what it was looking for and regurgitated the avalanche of Hamas propaganda fed by Palestinian witnesses. Though it condemned Hamas missile attacks on Israel, the main focus of the report is to classify Israel's attempt to defend itself from attacks across the Gaza border as an unjustifiable crime. The bias of the committee, one of whose members, Christine Chinkin, had already condemned Israel's actions, was apparent, and Israel was right to refuse to take part in the affair.

The main point of the report was not so much the individual charges but the notion that the entire Israeli campaign was itself illegitimate, and to set an absurd standard of conduct by which Israel's armed forces are judged as criminal for any attempt to root out terrorists who hide among civilians.

What's missing here is any sense of context. Hamas considered itself at war with Israel and used the territory it controlled to attack Israel. But when, after completely evacuating Gaza in 2005 and holding back for years, Israel took the only step any sovereign state could—using its army to try wiping out the terrorists and their bases—Hamas cried foul and the anti-Israel cheering section at the UN has now obliged with a report that treats the attacks on Israel as insufficient to justify a serious military response. The point is that the responsibility for the fighting and all the casualties on both sides rest with those who launched the war and made attacks on Gaza inevitable.

Just as the Nazi regime bears the guilt for all the civilian casualties incurred, not only during their own conquest of Europe, but also killed and hurt during the Allied campaign to liberate the Continent, so too does the Hamas terrorist movement bear the sole responsibility for all the hurt done to the people of Gaza as a result of their calculated decision to wage war on Israel from that area. To provoke a war and then to lament their sad fate as victims of their own aggression is hypocritical on the part of Hamas. For the UN to endorse this stand renders the world body, its Human Rights Council, and the Goldstone committee as guilty as the terrorists themselves. To endorse the principle that Israel has no right to defend itself against attacks across its borders is to delegitimize the Jewish state.

This report will, no doubt, be grist for the mill of Israel bashers but will persuade few notalready convinced that Israel was born in sin and that efforts to protect it are likewise sinful. But almost as interesting as the UN's efforts to besmirch Israel is the way some in the mainstream media have treated this story. Among the most fascinating was the story the New York Times published on its front page yesterday.

Nothing in the piece challenged the extraordinary premise of the report, which views Hamas terrorism and Israeli self-defense as morally equivalent. Even more important, the Times article presented the committee's claims that armed Hamas fighters were not located in the schools, mosques, and other civilian targets that suffered during the fighting, even though the paper's own coverage of the war contradicted this assertion.

But not satisfied with trumpeting the UN attack on Israel on its front page, the  followed up the next day by giving Goldstone space on the op-ed page to further justify his report without giving space to any dissent to this point of view. Titled "Justice in Gaza" (no irony intended), Goldstone continued his campaign of treating the two sides of the battle as morally equivalent. Indeed, in order to justify the UN's attempts to criminalize Israeli self-defense, he goes even further. He believes that since the West has pushed for accountability of Sudan's government for the genocide in Darfur, they "must do the same with Israel." In the bizzaro world of Goldstone's persecution of Israel, Israeli self-defense is now indistinguishable from the mass murder of hundreds of thousands in Darfur, and it's equally indefensible.

Goldstone's premise that all civilian deaths in battle are, in the absence of any conclusive proof, war crimes and subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court is clearly not sustainable. Nor is it one the United States would care to see applied to our own forces. But though the international Left would like to see such a standard applied to the United States, Israel is much more vulnerable a target. With the help of friendly media such as the Times, Goldstone and the UN have advanced the campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state another crucial step.

 

 

Jonathan Tobin

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

 

Civil Fights: How to perpetuate the conflict in one easy move.

by Evelyn Gordon

As of this writing, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is still refusing to meet Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. And given recent media reports about the Obama administration's planned peace initiative, one can understand why: If they are true, he has no reason to bother negotiating with Netanyahu. All he has to do is sit and wait, and in two years, the international community will give him everything he wants on a silver platter.

The plan in question was first broached publicly by the European Union's foreign policy czar, Javier Solana, at a speech in London in July. The international community should set a deadline for negotiations, Solana said, and if no agreement is reached by this deadline, the world should immediately recognize a Palestinian state, admit it to the UN and announce its own solution to all outstanding issues (borders, refugees, Jerusalem, security arrangements), along with a binding timetable for implementation.

Washington never publicly endorsed this idea. But this week, it was reported that Solana floated his trial balloon with backing from "the highest levels of the US administration," and that the US indeed plans to adopt it - with some twists that make it even worse.

Specifically, Washington will announce a two-year deadline for talks that will focus mainly on borders. If no agreement is reached by then, the US and EU - and presumably the rest of the world, too - will recognize a Palestinian state with borders "based on" the June 4, 1967 lines.

IN OTHER words, Abbas will receive international recognition of the borders he has consistently demanded, the 1967 lines - and by implication, also east Jerusalem, which was not Israeli pre-1967. The announcement will say the parties "may" alter the border via territorial exchanges, but that is up to them: The world will not insist.

And in exchange, he will have to concede absolutely nothing - not the settlement blocs, not Jewish neighborhoods of east Jerusalem, not the Western Wall, not security arrangements, not the "right of return," not recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Some of these will be awarded him outright; others, like the refugees and recognition, will be left to future negotiations. But he would obviously have no incentive to compromise in these future negotiations, since the only thing Israel has to trade is land, and the international community will already have awarded him every inch of that.

In contrast, even an EU diktat would have mandated Palestinian concessions on some issues, like the "right of return." Moreover, Solana's original plan stipulated that implementation of the international diktat would constitute a definitive, internationally recognized end to all Palestinian claims. This version does nothing of the sort, since it leaves major issues like the refugees up in the air.

Thus from Abbas's perspective, this is a dream come true: He receives international recognition of a state in his preferred borders without having to make any concessions in exchange. Even Hamas could this embrace this deal. They could simply pocket their gains and move on to their next demands.

But if merely doing nothing for two years would produce such a bonanza, why would any sane Palestinian leader bother negotiating? Granted, the fact that this plan was reported in the media does not mean it is true. First, journalists' sources always have their own agendas, and the European sources behind this report could easily have presented an idea that is merely being considered as settled policy - either with Washington's consent, as a trial balloon, or without such consent, in an effort to pressure the US to adopt it. Second, even if Obama does favor this plan, wiser heads within his administration might yet prevail.

NEVERTHELESS, THERE are reasons to fear it might be true. First, Washington has not denied it. Second, it accords with Obama's known desire to create a Palestinian state within two years, thus assuring him of one foreign policy success in what otherwise looks likely to be an unbroken string of failures. Third, it would appease his left-wing base, which is currently furious at him over issues ranging from the "surge" in Afghanistan to his apparent willingness to make concessions to moderates on health care reform. Fourth, it would please the EU and the Muslim world, and Obama has made better relations with both a major goal of his foreign policy.

Finally, he has even found a way to avoid alienating his big-ticket Jewish donors: The media reports market the plan as being based, inter alia, on ideas presented by Israel's very own president, Shimon Peres. What Jewish donor could possibly object to that? That Peres's proposal actually called for a Palestinian state in temporary borders - which, until a deal was finalized, would comprise only part of the West Bank and would exclude east Jerusalem - is a mere bagatelle.

Indeed, the plan has only one drawback: Far from bringing peace, it would perpetuate the conflict for all eternity. If 16 years of deadly terror combined with refusing to budge an inch on any of their demands could produce such stellar results, why would any Palestinian want to abandon these successful tactics?

Thus they will continue the terror, and Israel will continue its counterterrorism operations. They will continue refusing to make concessions on the settlement blocs, Jerusalem and the refugees, and Israel will continue refusing to evacuate tens of thousands of settlers with no quid pro quo. They will continue teaching their children that the Jewish state has no right to exist, and Israeli attitudes toward the Palestinians and the "peace process" will continue to harden.

It would require massive self-centeredness, and massive short-sightedness, to sacrifice any chance of lasting peace for the sake of a momentary foreign policy "achievement." But that is exactly what this plan would do.

 

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

 

Our irredeemable international system.

 

By Caroline B. Glick

 

Our international institutions are irredeemably corrupted. From the United Nations to the International Criminal Court and their affiliate and subordinate bodies, these institutions are rotten at their core.

 

It isn't that they don't function. They function just fine. The problem is that through their regular functioning, they advance goals antithetical to those they were established to achieve. Instead of promoting global security, human rights, freedom, and international peace, they facilitate war and aggression, human suffering, and tyranny.

 

The UN General Assembly is now convening its 64th session. As they do every year, heads of state from across the globe are descending on the Big Apple to participate in the proceedings. As they convene, their agenda will demonstrate the failings of the UN. On the one hand, they will consider the UN Human Rights Council's latest broadside against Israel which comes this week in the form of the UNHRC's 575 page report of its probe of Israel's behavior in its military campaign against the Hamas terror regime in Gaza this past December and January.

 

On the other hand, they will not give the slightest consideration to the fact that Iran is about to become a nuclear power in contempt of its international obligations, and so is poised to become the gravest threat to international security in the past twenty-five years. Moreover, they will pay no attention to the fact that as it sprints towards the nuclear finishing line, the Iranian regime is engaged in a systematic and brutal repression of its political opponents who since the stolen June 12 presidential elections have been clamoring for freedom and democracy.

 

Both in its treatment of Israel and in its treatment of the Iranian regime, the UN demonstrates that its practices are an inversion of its stated mission. Despite its leaders' and supporters' repeated claims to the contrary, the UN stands shoulder to shoulder with tyrants and aggressors against democrats and democracies seeking to advance the causes of freedom, human rights and international security.

 

Many Israelis reacted angrily to the UNHRC's probe of Israel's prosecution of Operation Cast Lead claiming that its final report presents Israel - a liberal democracy - as the moral equivalent of Hamas - an illegal terrorist organization dedicated to the commission of genocide against Israelis. Yet in their anger, they missed the real problem with the report. As Professor Avi Bell from Bar Ilan University law school notes, Richard Goldstone's report does not present Israel and Hamas as moral equivalents. Rather, it presents Israel as terrorist and Hamas as a legitimate government.

 

The Goldstone report does not accept as fact that Hamas is a terrorist organization and that consequently, in accordance with binding UN Security Council resolutions, all UN member states are required to work to disband it and give no quarter to its members and supporters. Instead it treats Hamas - which is charter-bound to a policy of genocide against Jews and rose to power through a campaign of murder and intimidation- as the legitimate governing authority in Gaza, which, the report's authors irrationally claim is simultaneously governed by an Israeli occupation four years after Israel withdrew its civilians and military forces from the area. In the UNHRC's parallel universe, Hamas is the only lawful actor in town. Israel - and the Palestinian Authority under Fatah - are guilty of illegally persecuting Hamas by arresting its members.

 

Hamas, which is working to establish a terrorist Islamic theocracy in Gaza, is not seen as systematically violating human rights and freedom. Israel is. Since it downplayed the 12,000 rockets, mortars and missiles that Hamas and its terror affiliates in Gaza have shelled southern Israel with during the eight years preceding Operation Cast Lead, the Goldstone commission was unable to understand the overwhelming popularity the operation enjoyed among the Israeli public. Consequently, their report attributed that public support to Israel's abrogation of the civil liberties of the operation's opponents.

In contrast, the Goldstone report downplays the importance of Hamas's systematic persecution of women, Christians and its political opponents.

 

And so it goes. For 575 pages, rather than promote the cause of human rights as one would expect from the UN's Human Rights Council, the Goldstone reports promotes a fiction of Israeli criminality and Hamas victimization. That is, it promotes the cause of human rights abusers against human rights defenders.

 

Many Israelis have expressed disgust with Goldstone, a South African Jew who purports to "love Israel." This is a reasonable reaction, for Goldstone indeed disgraced himself by leading this commission. But the fact is that the report would have drawn the same conclusions based on the same lies regardless of who led the commission. By its very nature, the UNHRC is incapable of doing anything else. Like the UN itself, it is a body dominated by dictatorships and supported by leftist elites who love them. Its political agenda, of supporting dictatorships on the one hand and attacking Israel on the other is indistinguishable from that of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

 

Then there is Iran. Before he flies to New York for his annual visit, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad intends to finish off his political opponents back home.

Friday is Jerusalem Day in Iran. Jerusalem Day is the day the regime organizes mass demonstrations throughout the country calling for Israel's destruction. The regime's democratic opponents who since the stolen June 12 elections have been doggedly maintaining their protests against Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the police state they run are planning to use the day to stage renewed protests. Aware of their intention, Khamenei warned that anyone demonstrating for anything other than Israel's destruction will be severely punished. Reports abound of the regime's plan to use the day to arrest opposition leaders Mir Hossain Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi who both ran against Ahmadinejad in June.

 

Friday would be a good day to arrest them. After all, now that the US has agreed to hold negotiations with Ahmadinejad's representatives next month about whatever Iran would like to discuss, the Americans have lost any residual leverage they still held over Iran. Today it is Ahmadinejad, not the US or the UN Security Council that sets the agendas and conditions for meetings. And Ahmadinejad can be certain that in light of this, no one will utter a peep if on the eve of his trip to America, he arrests or even murders his chief political opponents.

 

In the weeks following the elections, before the regime began its crackdown and arrested, killed, tortured and raped thousands of its opponents, many of the demonstrators held signs demanding to know where the UN was. Why, they wished to know, was no one at the UN supporting them in their demands for democracy and human rights? Why was there no international community standing at their side as they sought to bring down the most dangerous regime on earth - a regime that has made genocide a strategic goal and is steadily working to acquire the means to commit genocide through nuclear war even as it murders its own people?

 

And that's the thing of it. The same UN that appoints a new commission to criminalize Israel seemingly on a weekly basis, has been a major facilitator of Iran's nuclear weapons program. First, for three years from 2003 until 2005, the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency ignored mountains of evidence that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons and refused to refer the issue to the Security Council. Then, after the IAEA finally referred the issue to it, the Security Council failed to pass anything but the mildest of sanctions against Iran. Worse than doing nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, these Security Council sanctions actually facilitated the Iranian program. While passing ineffective sanctions, the council gave the appearance of addressing the issue and so made it impossible for individual states to convince other states to adopt harsher, and perhaps more effective measures - like for instance cutting off trade with Iran or divesting from companies that trade with Iran - outside the Security Council.

 

Due to the UN's unvarnished belligerence towards it, in recent years a consensus has formed in Israel that there is nothing to be gained from cooperating with this openly and dangerously hostile body. Reflecting this consensus, Israel's leaders from former prime minister Ehud Olmert to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to President Shimon Peres are united in their condemnation of the Goldstone report.

 

For a time during former US president George W. Bush's first term in office, the US also recognized that the UN and the UN-based international system is irredeemably corrupt. Bush and his senior advisers spoke of the need to build international coalitions of willing governments to advance the causes of international security, human rights and freedom which the UN and its affiliated bodies are inherently incapable of advancing. Although this policy received public support at home, it provoked fierce opposition among the US foreign policy elites in Washington and in the media and their allies on the political Left.

Due to their criticism, by his second term in office, Bush agreed to give the UN a leading role in dictating US foreign policy. He subordinated US policy to the Security Council on the issue of Iran's nuclear weapons program and cooperated with the UN as it advanced its openly anti-Israel agenda, even increasing US funding of such anti-Israel groups as UNRWA.

Bush's eventual surrender to the establishment set the course for what under President Barack Obama has become a cornerstone of US foreign policy. Unlike Bush, Obama has enthusiastically embraced the notion that the UN should by rights have a leading role in international affairs. He has also accepted the UN's basic notion that in the interest of world peace, the US and its democratic allies should bow to the desires of despots and dictators.

 

So it is that this week he abandoned US allies Poland and the Czech Republic in his bid to appease Russia. So it is that his administration has sided with ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya who with the support of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, sought to undermine Honduran democracy against Honduras's lawful government and democratic defenders. So it is that the administration has sided with the genocidal mullahs in Teheran over their democratic opponents. So it is that the administration has adopted the view that Israel is to blame for the absence of peace in the Middle East and embraced as legitimate political actors Palestinian terror groups that refuse to accept Israel's right to exist.

 

Until Obama came along, Israel could afford not to make too much of the fact that its enemies control the UN-led system of international institutions because it could trust that the US would use its Security Council veto to prevent these forces from causing it any real harm. This is no longer the case. With the Obama administration fully on board the UN agenda, Israel and other threatened democracies like Honduras, Poland, the Czech Republic, South Korea and Japan will have to loudly proclaim the UN based international system's inherent moral, political and legal corruption and seek ways to undermine and weaken its power.

 

 

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.