Tag: Bibi Netanyahu

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Bibi Netanyahu: Pardon Elor Azaria

The Prime Minister used Facebook to make the following comment concerning the guilty verdict in the Elor Azaria case:

This is a difficult and painful day for all of us – first and foremost for Elor Azaria and his family, IDF soldiers, many citizens and parents of soldiers, myself included.

I call on all Israeli citizens to act responsibly toward the IDF, its commanders and staff. We have one army which is based our existence. IDF soldidealers are our sons and daughters, and they must remain beyond any dispute.

I support giving amnesty Elor Azeria.

Whether out of sincere conviction that a great injustice was done or a shrewd populist move, the Prime Minister has with one statement dismantled the leftwing of the country. The entire media except for rightwing sites, attacked Azaria from the start.  The incessant interest to smear an innocent soldier was part of the left’s game plan to hold the IDF hostage. The problem is that most of the country has sons and daughters in the IDF and this could have happened to them.  By Bibi being able identify with them, he has given energy to what will be seen in years to come as a movement to take back Israel from the judicial tryaranny it now finds itself in.

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OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SET FOR ONE LAST STRIKE AT ISRAEL

A Paris “peace conference” and a Turtle Bay aftermath.

A week and a half ago President Obama gave the order for the U.S. to abstain on UN Security Council Resolution 2334, thereby—effectively—voting in favor and allowing the resolution to pass.

As I noted, the resolution goes beyond “moral equivalency” by obfuscating Palestinian terror and incitement while branding Jewish life beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines a “flagrant violation under international law” and a “major obstacle…to peace.”

But the administration wasn’t through with Israel. A few days later, with the Middle East aflame from Yemen to Iraq to Syria to Libya to Sudan and Iranian expansionism on the march, Secretary of State Kerry delivered a 75-minute harangue against what he called Israel’s “pernicious policy of settlement construction that is making peace impossible.”

Critics have noted that—in the real world—Israeli construction in settlements under the recent Netanyahu governments has been so modest that it has not affected the Israeli-Palestinian population balance in the West Bank; and that if any and all Israeli presence beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines is “illegal,” then the idea of a “peace process” to settle claims over disputed land appears to be invalidated, since Israel is then nothing but a rapacious thief and the Palestinians its victims seeking redress.

As international-law scholar Eugene Kontorovich notes in the Washington Post:

The…condemnation of any Jewish presence whatsoever in eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank is a unique rule invented for Israel. There has never been a prolonged belligerent occupation—from the U.S. occupation of West Berlin to Turkey’s ongoing occupation of Cyprus to Russia’s of Crimea—where the occupying power has blocked its citizens from living in the territory under its control. Moreover, neither the United Nations nor any other international body has ever suggested they must do so. What is being demanded of Israel in its historical homeland has never been demanded of any other state, and never will be. 

The Obama administration’s stepped-up diplomatic and verbal assault on Israel in the last weeks of its tenure has not gone unnoticed, sparking bitter criticism even from Democratic lawmakers and mainstream American Jewish organizations that are far from any right-wing agenda.

But the extent to which the administration listens to such protests, or can be budged from its wholesale endorsement of Palestinian claims regarding the West Bank and Jerusalem, can be gauged from the fact that the Obama-Kerry team has still more in store for Israel.

It’s set to take place in Paris on January 15, under the aegis of the Hollande government, and it’s expected that some 70 countries will be attending.

The ostensible subject: “Middle East peace.” The translation: more invalidation of any and all Israeli claims to land captured from Jordan (not the Palestinians) in a defensive war in 1967, and more support for what—under present circumstances—would almost certainly be a Palestinian terror state in that territory.

American Jewish leaders have demanded that France call off this “ill-conceived, poorly timed and damaging” event, also pointing to “the impending transition to a new US administration, just five days later.”

But according to The Times of Israel, that—the Obama administration’s exploitation of its last days in office to do more harm to Israel—is exactly what Prime Minister Netanyahu is concerned about.

The Times of Israel cites an Israeli news broadcast saying Netanyahu believes the Middle East Quartet—which includes the U.S., UN, Russia, and the EU—“will coordinate positions at the Paris summit, and then return to the Security Council in the very last days of Obama’s presidency to cement these new parameters on Mideast peacemaking.”

“Cement these new parameters” would, of course, mean another Security Council resolution that is ruinous to Israel’s stance in favor of a negotiated settlement, tars it as a rogue state and international outlaw, and gives another major boost to the ongoing international effort to delegitimize and ultimately dismantle the Jewish state.

The Obama administration that came into office calling for “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel and slamming “natural growth” in Israeli communities, will be leaving office having learned nothing about the real sources of Middle Eastern violence and instability, Palestinian intransigence and outright rejection of Israel in any contours, and Israel’s unique nature in its region as a stable, faithfully pro-U.S. democracy seeking a genuine peace that would not merely imperil it.

Instead the administration appears bent on compounding ignorance and incorrigibility by cementing a lasting legacy of shame.

Originally Posted on FrontPageMag.

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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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What Kerry Should Have Said

When Sec. of State John Kerry delivered his comprehensive statement on the Arab-Israel conflict in front of a safe audience at the State Department, he took over an hour to defend the decision of the United States to in essence allow passage of the recent UN anti-Israel resolution by abstaining from it, rather than adhering to the long standing policy of the US to veto such resolutions.

The general thrust of his message was to chastise Israel for building “settlements” on land defined as “occupied Palestinian territory,” as the main obstacle preventing a two-state solution.

In addition to focusing attention on criticizing Israel Kerry failed to mention some critically important points which are clearly more central to why a two state solution has failed to materialize.

For example, the most obvious is the fact that Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, who is also seen by most of the world as a moderate, has steadfastly said he will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state. As I see it, this alone is the single biggest non-starter for a two state solution. While Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s  consistent commitment to accepting a Palestinian state, demonstrates his desire for mutual recognition, Mr. Kerry conveniently omitted Abbas’s destructive statements on refusing to accept Israel’s right to exist.

How realistic is a two state solution when one side won’t even recognize the other’s right to exist?

Mr. Kerry emphatically stated the US opposition to terror and incitement. However, empty statements like this have been made on numerous occasions by the American administration. What good are such statements if they are not backed up by tangible action?

The PA receives hundreds of millions of dollars in financial aid from many countries, most of it from the US. The PA in turn uses a portion of international aid to line the pockets of terrorists who have murdered Israeli’s with huge salaries. This financial windfall allows their families a living standard which is 5 times greater than the average Palestinian. Did Mr. Kerry say or even hint that the US would suspend all financial aid to the PA to demonstrate how strongly they feel about the need to stop terrorism? He did not. Actions speak louder than words Mr. Kerry.

The constitution of Abbas’s Fatah party explicitly calls for the destruction of the “Zionist entity,” which in plain words means Israel. Did Mr. Kerry make any mention of this? Moreover, one can only imagine what he might say if Israel’s constitution called for the destruction of a Palestinian state. Heaven forbid!

The official emblem of the Fatah party shows one state, not two. The one state covers the entire area of Israel, and shows every square inch of land as one state of “Palestine.” Their emblem also includes weapons of war, suggesting their goal is to destroy Israel through violence. Again Kerry is silent.

If Mahmoud Abbas wants to be seen as a serious peace partner, would it be too much to suggest that he publically condemn the plethora of terror attacks the Palestinians have perpetrated against innocent Israeli civilians? Not only has Abbas failed to condemn such attacks, he and his party have continuously glorified these murderers.

Kerry also downplayed the US role in the anti-Israel UN resolution, suggesting the US was not involved in composing, or sponsoring it. Yet, by abstaining the Obama administration knows full well, it was as if they voted for it, because they chose not to use their veto power, which allowed it to pass.

With its passing the Obama administration has intentionally left the door wide open for the UN to take further action against Israel.  

With only days remaining in the current administration, the timing of Kerry’s speech was more about punctuating the anti-Israel tenor of the Obama administration with one last trumpet blast about land for peace. However, all one needs to do is look at what happened when Israel evacuated the Gaza Strip after 38 years. They were rewarded with 3 wars and 20,000 rockets.

If the Obama administration is truly as concerned about Israel’s security as Kerry states, their failure to hold the Palestinians accountable for their wanton terror renders any statements about understanding Israel’s need for security meaningless.

Since the UN resolution cannot be reversed, the Obama administration has knowingly done two things-
1. They have put the incoming Trump administration in a difficult position.
2. Obama has placed a nail in the coffin of his relationship with Israel. With the door now open for further punitive UN action against Israel, his administration will go down in history has the most anti-Israel administrations ever.

One doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist to recognize the two sides of the conflict have entirely different agendas. Israel desires to have peace, while the Arab Palestinians goal remains p-i-e-c-e, every piece of the land of Israel to be theirs. For not recognizing this and blaming Israel for being the obstacle to peace, the Obama administration has reduced itself to being hypocrites by ignoring their own oft stated commitment to Israel’s security.

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