Category: Politics

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[watch] Journalist Rips Obama For Attacking Israel With Weeks To Go In The White House

Eli Lake has often times defended Obama’s moves with Israel. Now he is out front in slamming Obama and his attacks on Israel.  Watch the interview below:

Lake created a storm with his Tweet before Kerry’s speech

Lake’s column on Bloomberg has been unrelenting in its attacked on Obama and Kerry:

No longer bound by official restraints, Kerry said things in public that U.S. diplomats usually say only behind closed doors.

But Kerry’s speech in a deeper sense was that of a man trapped in the past. Like Republicans and Democrats since the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, Kerry is a prisoner of a peace process from a bygone time.

In this respect he is not alone. Since George H.W. Bush, U.S. presidents have pushed and prodded the two sides to agree that there should be two states for two peoples. Kerry’s speech hit familiar notes. Palestinians must end incitement. Israel must stop building settlements. Time is running out. Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s second secretary of state, could have given the same speech in 1999.

 But 2016 is not 1999. In the 1990s and the 2000s, the Middle East had plenty of problems. But its governments remained largely in charge, even after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Back then the establishment view was that a two-state solution was the key to unlocking stability for the region. The late Israeli leader Shimon Peres used to call this the “new Middle East,” where collaboration replaced conflict. Arab allies would finally cooperate with the U.S. if the Palestinians and Israelis could just share Jerusalem.

Nobody believes this anymore. Today the Middle East is coming unglued. Syria is no longer much of a state at all. Wars rage in Iraq, Libya and Yemen. Iran is meddling. Russia has entered the region for the first time since the 1970s. The jihadist Islamic State has suffered setbacks, but it still has its caliphate in Raqqa. These conflicts are complex, but they have nothing to do with settlements in the West Bank.

With more and more Americans and a majority of Congress attacking Obama and his team over Israel, the final few weeks of his Presidency is creating everything, but a positive legacy.

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What is Obama’s end game on Israel?

President Obama’s decision to engineer passage of U.N. Security Council 2334 in the final weeks of his presidency wasn’t a bid to revive the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process,” a “parting shot” at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or any of the other characterizations splashed across cable news chyrons over the weekend. Rather, it was intended to irrevocably destroy the viability of the very “two-state solution” the president claims to be protecting.

 Obama was widely expected to take some kind of action against Israel, which he blames for both the failure of his Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives and his difficulties convincing a skeptical Congress to back his Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran. Most thought this would come through a public speech in the form of an Eisenhower-type farewell warning about Israeli perniciousness or proposed final settlement terms. The smart money had the president giving his assent to a U.N. Security Council resolution criticizing Israeli settlement policies or recognizing Palestinian statehood in some way.

But no one expected President Obama to directly engineer and coordinate a Security Council resolution condemning all Jewish communities in lands captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War as “a flagrant violation under international law” with “no legal validity” and demanding that Israel “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.”

Resolution 2334 goes far beyond the administration’s previously expressed positions. Its blanket condemnation of “settlements” includes bustling Jewish communities along the east side of the green line — places negotiators on both sides have accepted will be retained by Israel in a final settlement (in exchange for Israeli land west of the green line).

The resolution’s blanket demand for a cessation of “all settlement activities” explicitly bars “natural growth,” which is to say that Jewish communities may not expand their housing stock even to accommodate new births. This would force Israelis living on the wrong side of the green line, many of them religiously devout and aspiring to have large families, to make gut-wrenching choices — a de facto imposition of China’s one-child policy. The “obvious objective” of the demand, as Charles Krauthammer explained early on in Obama’s tenure, “is to undermine and destroy these towns — even before negotiations.”

So extreme a resolution is devastating to the cause of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. Having balked at making compromises before 2334, what Palestinian leader will now drop demands for all territory to which the U.N. says Israelis have no claim?

The White House clearly colluded in the resolution’s language and the timing (right before the Christmas holiday weekend, the most ideal news-dump timeslot of the year in U.S. media markets). Although previous administrations occasionally abstained on Security Council votes against Israel, these were nearly all in response to specific actions, such as its annexation of the Golan Heights and 1981 air attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor. This resolution happened because Obama wanted it as part of a larger purpose.

The only conceivable ends toward which orchestration of this resolution would constitute the most rational means is the reinvigoration of the worldwide anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, at the very moment when international preoccupation with jihadist terror and pushback regarding its rampant anti-Semitism were beginning to limit its growth.

With Israelis and Palestinians largely out of the headlines since the collapse of Syria, the rise of ISIS, and Islamist terror assault on Europe, Obama single-handedly brought about what The New York Times casually called the “return of the Palestinian cause to the world stage.” And what university administrator is now going to crack down on student groups calling for a Judenrein Jerusalem when President Obama himself has done just that?

After spending most of his political life disavowing his far-leftist ideological and political roots, has Obama revealed himself to be the radical Third Worldist progressive his critics always suspected he was? Perhaps, but his willingness to shatter this carefully constructed public façade while still in office — and likely weaken the Democratic Party in the process — purely to take action against a nation of only 8 million people on the other side of the globe suggests there is something even more malevolent at work here.

Originally Posted at the Hill.

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John Kerry is Dead Wrong about Israeli Settlements

United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which describes Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as illegal, should never have passed last week. But the U.S. refused to use its veto power, in part because, as Secretary of State John F. Kerry explained in a speech on Wednesday, the Obama administration believes settlements are an obstacle to peace in the Middle East. In the outgoing administration’s view, extreme criticism is, conversely, necessary to advance the peace process.

This argument is dead wrong. Still, let’s examine it.

Although administration officials have been reluctant to explain the precise reasoning behind their last-minute series of attacks on Israel, as near as I can tell it rests on three assumptions.

The first, as Kerry outlined in his speech, is that a freeze on Israeli settlement growth makes it easier for Palestinian negotiators to make painful compromises at the negotiating table. It supposedly does this by easing Palestinian suspicions that Israel either won’t make major territorial concessions at the negotiating table, or won’t implement these concessions once made.

The main impediment to compromise is Palestinian unwillingness to accept the existence of a Jewish state.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put this assumption to the test in November 2009 when he imposed a 10-month moratorium on new housing construction (East Jerusalem excepted) at the urging of the Obama administration.

What happened? Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas refused to return to talks until the very end of the moratorium and remained every bit as intransigent as before.

The main impediment to Palestinian compromise is not Palestinian suspicion; it is the fundamental unwillingness of Palestinian leaders across the spectrum to accept the existence of a Jewish state alongside their own.

Some settlement growth makes it easier for Palestinian moderates to build public support for compromise.

What’s more, a strong case can be made that some settlement growth actually makes it easier for Palestinian moderates to build public support for compromise by underscoring that a continuation of the status quo is untenable and injurious to Palestinian national aspirations in the long run.

The Obama administration’s second assumption is that pressure from the international community or from the United States will bring about this supposedly desirable settlement freeze.

However, by collapsing the distinction between East Jerusalem and bustling Israeli towns just inside the West Bank — which no major Israeli political party will contemplate abandoning — and the remaining settlements, most of which Israelis are willing to give up, this policy does the opposite.

“It is a gift to Bibi Netanyahu, who can now more easily argue to Israelis that the bad relationship with America these last eight years wasn’t his fault,” notes the writer Jonah Goldberg.

Finally, even if it were true that a settlement freeze would make it easier for Palestinian negotiators to trust Israel and that international pressure would increase the willingness of Israeli leaders to accept such a freeze, these effects would be far overshadowed by the problems created by branding Israeli claims outside the 1949 armistice line illegal and invalid.

Palestinian leaders will have double the trouble compromising now that the UN has endorsed their maximalist demands.

Since Palestinian leaders already have trouble justifying to their people the abandonment of territorial claims to Ma’ale Adumim, the Jewish quarter in Jerusalem, and so forth, they will have double the trouble now that the United States has endorsed these demands. What Palestinian leader can sign away territory to which Washington and the Security Council have declared Israelis have no legitimate claim?

Kerry stated plainly that Israel is to blame for the demise of the two-state process, and that — unless its leaders listen to counsel — Israel will not survive as both a Jewish and a democratic state. Now that the administration’s views are crystal clear, pundits should spare us the back and forth on whether its eleventh-hour obsessions are good for peace – no one as smart as Obama or Kerry can possibly believe that it is.

The more interesting question, sure to be the focus of congressional hearings next year, is why the administration used its last few weeks to damage relations with Israel.

Originally Posted in the Los Angeles Times.

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[watch] Senator Tom Cotton: “Obama is the most anti-Israel president in American history.”

Image Source: Gage Skidmore

Senator Tom Cotton spoke Sunday about Obama’s assault of the Jewish state [7:76].

“At root, the problem that we face in the Holy Land is not Israelites building new neighborhoods around Jerusalem,” said Cotton. “It’s the Palestinians refusal to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in the Holy Land. Until they do that, there won’t be a peace agreement between the two peoples.”

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