John Kerry has never much liked Israel. His constant attacks on Jews leaving in Judea and Samaria as obstacles to peace have become a broken record. As Obama is set to leave office, Kerry has become one of the proponents of forcing a settlement on Israel and the Arabs before Trump takes office.
If you think this is farfetched, Kerry’s speech at the Saban forum this past week will make you think other wise. He did not rule out not using the veto in upcoming UN Security Council resolutions, which would force a “peace” framework on Israel. This ultimately means displacing hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children in order to create another Arab terror state, this time in Israel’s biblical heartland.
“I cannot accept the notion that [settlements] don’t affect the peace process, that they aren’t a barrier to the ability to create peace,” Kerry contended. “The left in Israel is telling everyone that it is a barrier to peace and the right, which supports it, is openly telling people that they support it because they don’t want peace. They believe in Greater Israel.”
John Kerry blamed the failure of the peace process squarely on Israel and Bibi Netanyahu by slamming him for “lacking leadership.”
Will Obama Go For It?
With the Regulation Law passed, Obama may have moved to Kerry’s side on this. Afterall, the President does not have to sponsor a resolution, just abstain. By holding back the veto he creates a de facto Palestinian State and removes Jewish pioneers from their homes.
With a stroke of a UN pen Israel will find itself locked into a paradigm of being in contravention of basic international law by “occupying” another member state’s land. Obama will have his ultimate revenge on Bibi. With 45 days left until Trump, the world is about to change, drastically.
The UN did not wait long to castigate Israel over its initial passage of the Regulation Law, which allows Israel to compensate Arabs in Judea and Samaria for land the State of Israel has been using for Jewish communities. In a nutshell this law legalizes thousands of houses across Judea and Samaria that had previously been in legal limbo while at the same time giving Arabs that no longer wanted to live there a legal way to collect money.
Nickolay Mladenov claimed the legislation “has the objective of protecting illegal settlements built on private Palestinian property in the West Bank,” according to comments quoted by AFP. “It is a very worrying initiative. I encourage Israeli legislators to reconsider such a move that would have far-reaching legal consequences across the occupied West Bank.” This is diplomatic parlance for a threat. After all is Israel is the roadblock to peace then it is going against the international community. If one considers that just a few days ago a resolution Palestinian Statehood arose once again in the UNSC, the threats are becoming more and more real.
No Fear, Just Move Forward
The Regulation Law gives the Israeli government a clearer pathway on consolidating sovereignty in Judea and Samaria without overtly annexing the Land. This is the genius behind the law as it ends Oslo without saying so. The world is changing and the UN’s threats and innuendos are quickly becoming passe.
In the waning days of Obama’s presidency, his grand strategy to wipe out ISIS by taking Mosul has gone from an ingenious weaving of various coalition members fighting under American leadership to a failed slog as the advance of Iraqi forces grinds to a halt. The battle turned after Iraqi forces entered the Golgali neighborhood. They have been stuck there fighting a far more ferocious enemy than they imagined. Each day they take to advance mere inches the American backed Iraqi units’ morale lowers, giving ISIS an increasing edge in Mosul. Before Golgali, experts gave ISIS weeks, but now it looks like months if not more.
Compounding the strategy is the fact Abu Bakr Baghdadi, the self appointed caliph of ISIS is no longer there. Despite his absence he continues to inspire all of ISIS through the airwaves. One mission for coalition forces was to take the Nouree Al Kaber mosque early on. This is the mosque where Baghdadi proclaimed himself the leader of the caliphate 30 months ago. Coalition forces still have a long way to go in getting close to the mosque, a destination that would crush the morale of ISIS if Iraqi troops succeeded in reaching it.
Source: Google Maps
With the multi ethnic coalition collapsing and the Iraqi forces unable to break ISIS, Obama’s waning days in office are a nightmare. Passing off ISIS to Trump is admitting failure, but with weeks to go it has become clear that Trump and Putin will attempt to work together to destroy ISIS in both Al-Raqqa and Mosul. Then again, ISIS may show to be just resilient to the new administration as they have been with Obama.
With a revamped Regulations Law set to be passed in the Knesset, Bibi Netanyahu will have officially ended the Oslo era. For the first time since Israel liberated its ancestral heartland, Israeli government and military powers will invoke the nation’s sovereignty in areas previously not allowed.
The Regulations Law gives power to the Knesset and government officials to decide what to with private Arab land whose owners fled generations ago. Caroline Glick sums it up:
“The settlement regulation bill empowers the military commander to seize privately owned land and compensate the owners. In other words, it provides a means for willing Palestinian sellers to sell their property to willing Jewish purchasers without risking the lives of the owners.”
The law does not make Israel the sovereign, but it gives the government and military the ability apply sovereignty in select cases where in the past it could never do. This alone alters the status of Judea and Samaria to a point where Oslo becomes null and void.
Obama Was Outplayed
Between Kerry’s attacks on Education Minister Naftali Bennett for being disturbing and the Obama administration attempting to play footsie at the UNSC by potentially abstaining during the vote on “Palestine” the common wisdom was that he government would not go ahead with the vote. Obama thought he had set up Bibi to fail, thus putting his government into free fall in time for Trump to be sworn in.
Bibi did the unthinkable, he and his coalition passed the settlement Regulation Bill and by doing so opened the avenu for a new approach to the Arab’s iving in Judea and Samaria. True, Amona will not be saved, but hundreds of other communities will.
For eight years Obama tried to get the best of Bibi Netanyahu. At the end, it is Bibi who has out smarted Obama and given his government the ablity to chart a new course in relation to the “Palestinians.” Naftali Bennett is right to say this is a revolution. With one vote Israel has freed itself from answering to Washington in regards to Judea and Samaria and declared itself sovereign over its ancestral homeland.
As the New York Times dotes on the latest Israel basher, Rachel Kushner, we have to wonder if she and any of the authors writing about the plight of the Palestinian refugees even care that they’ve been pointing their fingers of blame in the wrong direction this whole time. Would they be interested in writing the same stories if they had to tell the world that it was the Arabs — and not the Jews — who leave the Palestinians to languish in refugee camps? That Rachel Kushner’s orphans have been set-up as the “armaments of … Arab nationalism” by the real perpetrators of this atrocity?
“The Israeli government systematically resettled all its refugees as part of its national-home policy. The Arab governments, with the assistance of the UN, kept the Arab refugees in camps …”
From “Issue 170: 60 Years Ago Today: UN Votes for Jewish and Arab States,” (UN Watch, November 29, 2007)
“Once the UN partition vote was taken the Arabs were bent on destroying all the Jewish settlements and began to attack them immediately. Azzam Pasha, secretary-general of the Arab League, said on the radio: ‘This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre.’”
“The Jewish commanders were confident but their resources were small … By March 1948 over 1,200 Jews had been killed, half of them civilians, in Arab attacks … early in April Ben Gurion took what was probably the most difficult decision in his life. He ordered the Haganah on to the offensive to link up the various Jewish enclaves and to consolidate as much as possible of the territory allotted to Israel under the UN plan. The gamble came off almost completely … They established the core of the state of Israel and in effect won the war before it started.” (A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson)
From Wikileaks, Public Library of US Diplomacy, “Codel Pelosi April 5 Meeting with Majlis Al-Shura”
“Ben Gurion read out the Scroll of Independence on Friday 14 May in the Tel Aviv museum. ‘By virtue of our national and intrinsic right,’ he “said, ‘and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, we hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state … Egyptian air raids began that night. The next day, simultaneously, the last British left and the Arab armies invaded. They made little difference, except in one respect. King Abdullah’s Arab Legion took the Old City of Jerusalem for him … By the close of the year the Israeli army was 100,000-strong, and properly equipped. It had established a military paramountcy in the area it has never since lost. Armistice talks were opened in Rhodes on 12 January 1949 and were signed with Egypt (14 February), Lebanon (23 March), Transjordan (3 April) and Syria (20 July). Iraq made no agreement at all, and the five Arab states remained in a formal state of war with Israel.” (continued from A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson)
From Wikileaks: Public Library of US Diplomacy, “Syria Update on Iraqi Refugees” (July 5, 2007)
“The events of 1947-8, which established Israel, also created the Arab-Israeli problem, which endures to this day. It has two main aspects, refugees and frontiers … According to UN figures, 656,000 Arab inhabitants of mandatory Palestine fled from Israeli-held territory … They left for four reasons: to avoid being killed in the fighting, because the administration had broken down, because they were ordered to or misled or panicked by Arab radio broadcasts, and because they were stampeded by an Irgun-Stern Gang massacre at the village of Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948 …”
“From 1920 until this point, the Jews had refrained from terrorist attacks on Arab settlements, though the innumerable Arab ones had sometimes provoked heavy-handed reprisals. When the fighting began in the winter of 1947-8, Deir Yassin, an Arab quarrying village of less than 1,000 people, made a non-aggression pact with the nearby Jerusalem suburb of Givat Shaul. But two Jewish settlements nearby were overrun and destroyed, and the Jewish desire for revenge was strong. The Stern Gang proposed to destroy Deir Yassin to teach the Arabs a lesson. A senior Irgun officer Yehuda Lapidot, testified: ‘The clear aim was to break Arab morale and raise the morale of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, which had been hit hard time after time, especially recently by the desecration of Jewish bodies which fell into Arab hands.’ Begin agreed to the operation but said a loudspeaker van must be used to give the villagers a chance to surrender without bloodshed …”
“The Syrian government is reluctant to vet large international organizations for work in Syria, suspecting that they are serving as conduits for spies from ‘Zionist organizations’…”
From Wikileaks: Public Library of US Diplomacy, “Syria Update on Iraqi Refugees” (July 5, 2007)
“It was at this point that the raiding force moved into the village and went out of control … News of this atrocity, in exaggerated form, spread quickly and undoubtedly persuaded many Arabs to flee over the next two months. There is no evidence that it was designed to have this effect. But in conjunction with the other factors it reduced the Arab population of the new state to a mere 160,000. That was very convenient.” (continued from A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson)
“… they did not want the refugees resettled because it meant the final disposal of a moral asset. As Cairo Radio put it: ‘The refugees are the cornerstone in the Arab struggle against Israel. The refugees are the armaments of the Arabs and Arab nationalism.’”
“On the other hand, there were the Jews encouraged or forced to flee from Arab states where, in some cases, Jewish communities had existed for 2,500 years. In 1945 there were over 500,000 Jews living in the Arab world. Between the outbreak of the war on 15 May 1948 and the end of 1967, the vast majority had to take refuge in Israel: 252,642 from Morocco, 13,118 from Algeria, 46,255 from Tunisia, 34,265 from Libya, 37,867 from Egypt, 4,000 from Lebanon, 4,500 from Syria, 3,912 from Aden, 124,647 from Iraq and 46,447 from the Yemen. With a total of 567,654, Jewish refugees from Arab countries were thus not substantially smaller in number than Arab refugees from Israel. The difference in their reception and treatment was entirely a matter of policy. The Israeli government systematically resettled all its refugees as part of its national-home policy. The Arab governments, with the assistance of the UN, kept the Arab refugees in camps, pending a reconquest of Palestine which never came. Hence, as a result of natural increase, there were more Arab refugees in the late 1980s than there had been forty years before.”
“This contrasting attitude towards refugees itself sprang from a fundamentally different approach towards negotiations. The Jews had been for two millennia an oppressed minority who had never possessed the option of force. They had therefore been habitually obliged to negotiate, often for bare existence, and nearly always from a position of great weakness. Over the centuries they had developed not merely negotiating skills but a philosophy of negotiation. They would negotiate against impossible odds, and they had learned to accept a negotiated status, however lowly and underprivileged, knowing that it could later be improved by further negotiations and their own efforts. The paramountcy of settlement, as opposed to force, was built into their very bones. That was one reason they found it so difficult, even when the evidence became overwhelming, to take in the magnitude of Hitler’s evil: it was hard for them to comprehend a man who wanted no settlement at all with them, just their lives.”
“…about the arrival of Iraq Palestinians … Syrian officials … made it clear that the matter must remain quiet, given Syria’s policy of denying entry to additional Iraq Palestinians …”
From Wikileaks: Public Library of US Diplomacy, “Syria Update on Iraqi Refugees” (July 5, 2007)
“The Arabs, by contrast, were a conquering race whose sacred writings both inspired and reflected a maximalist position towards other peoples, the despised dhimmi. The very concept of negotiation towards a final settlement was to them a betrayal of principle. A truce, an armistice might be necessary and was acceptable because it preserved the option of force for use later. A treaty, on the other hand, appeared to them a kind of surrender.That was why they did not want the refugees resettled because it meant the final disposal of a moral asset. As Cairo Radio put it: ‘The refugees are the cornerstone in the Arab struggle against Israel. The refugees are the armaments of the Arabs and Arab nationalism.’ Hence they rejected the 1950 UN plan for resettlement without discussion. Over the subsequent quarter century they refused even to receive repeated Israeli proposals for compensation. The result was disastrous for the refugees themselves and their progeny. It was a source of instability for the Arab states also.” (continued from A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson)
