The Syrians were unavailable for comment.
By Roger L Simon
Initially, John Kerry seemed entirely copacetic with Benjamin
Netanyahu’s requirement that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a
Jewish state as the basis for any peace agreement. After all, Mahmoud
Abbas had already declared that no Jews would be allowed to live in any
future Palestinian state, although more than a million and a half Arabs
live in Israel. Palestine, like almost all the Middle East but Israel,
would be judenrein.
But then Abbas refused and, first via the State Department’s Jen
Pseki and then through his own words, Kerry started to walk his
agreement back. He even claimed Netanyahu’s insistence on recognition
was a “mistake.” In all probability Obama got to the secretary of State
and changed his marching orders. What went wrong?
To begin with, we can assume the White House is panicked. They are
looking at foreign policy failure in every direction — Iran, Syria,
Egypt, Libya-Benghazi and now Ukraine, and that’s leaving aside Russia
and China, where their ineptitude has been staggering. ”Leading from
behind” has been mocked as an absurd and almost childish show of
weakness.
The administration’s only possible avenue of success in an immediate
sense would be to broker some kind of Israeli-Palestinian peace
agreement. They are, quite literally, desperate. (And the simultaneous
failure of their domestic agenda makes them yet more so.)
Which has led them to get it all backwards. The truth is that the
requirement for Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is
the single most important aspect of a peace agreement. All the
rest pale by comparison. They are details, as Abbas (though not Obama
or Kerry) well knows.
Without formal recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, any agreement
could be construed by the Palestinians as what is known in Islamic
literature as a hudna, a temporary ceasefire in preparation for
the greater war, in this case driving Israel into the sea as Arabs
nations have repeatedly attempted since 1948.
I rather doubt that Obama or Kerry knows that term, and I’d be yet
more surprised if they have spent even five minutes on the MEMRI website
that translates Arab television, vividly documenting the unending Jew
hatred of the Arab world, inculcated literally from birth.
But they do — and here’s the irony in Obama’s case — have the
traditional white man’s view of that same Arab world — to wit, Arabs are
crazy and primitive. (Yes, this is racist. And, in Obama’s case,
undoubtedly leavened with a soupçon of anti-imperialist payback.) Ergo,
pressure can only be put on Israel. This is not unique to the Obama
administration. As was reported in the Jerusalem Post Monday:
Deputy Foreign Minister Ze’ev Elkin told Israel Radio that Kerry’s remarks represented a pattern that had developed over the past 20 years, in which the international community finds it easier to pressure Israel rather than the Palestinians, despite who it believes is in the right.
So Kerry and Obama don’t treat Arabs like grown-ups, demanding of
them the same responsibility they would immediately of a Western
European country. And of course if you treat someone like a child, they
will behave like one.
In addition, to justify this prevarication, some wizards at the State
Department have dredged up some documents signed by Yasser Arafat
acknowledging Israel as a Jewish state, as if the signature of the
deceased terrorist, who never had any intention of making peace with
Israel in the first place, was relevant to the current situation.
So now, with the U.S. behaving like a “pitiful helpless giant” in the
face of Russian aggression in Ukraine and Crimea, we have the spectacle
of college student Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas in a White House
tete-a-tete with our president without the requisite preview interview
with Jeffrey Goldberg to warn the kleptocrat Palestinian leader of any
necessary compromises he might be asked for. Just more demands for
Israel. How morally corrupt. How reprehensible.
