RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s a siren song no US President can resist: Peace in the Middle East. It’s the Holy Grail, the Golden Fleece, the Excalibur for an American leader seeking an undying legacy. The phantasm of Middle East peace is more illusory than the quests of heroes like Heracles, Jason and Odysseus. It’s a fool’s quest with an incalculable cost in squandered money, national prestige and blood, yet the illusion of this messianic dream continues to draw American Presidents like Homer’s Sirens drew ancient mariners to their destruction.

Leave aside for a moment the delusion that leads us to arrogate unto ourselves the responsibility for the “peace process.” The Middle East is only one of a host of intractable situations in the world that go back into ancient history. Ireland. India-Pakistan-Kashmir. China-Korea-Japan. Africa. China-Tibet. China-Taiwan. Turkey-Greece. Russia-former satellites. Russia-Japan. Russia-anybody in her way. Sunni-Shi’ite. Flemish-Walloon. Cyprus. Argentina-Britain.

The Palestinian Arabs are not the first dispossessed people on earth. Consider the Highland Scots, the Montagnards, Australian and African aborigines, the Baluch and Vlachs, the Cherokee and Choctaw. The Kurdish nation has never had a country of their own. The Druze, who also have never had their own country, have been, like the Kurds, sundered as a people by hermetically sealed international borders. Surely the Khoisan should have the “right of return.” What about redress for the descendants of peoples that are no more? The Picts, the Bo, the Yahi, the Visigoths and Hittites, Mayans and Toltecs, Jomons, Guanches… Whom must we force to pay damages to them? Shall we force Spain to pay reparations to the Aztec? Or the Italians to the Carthaginians?

And consider how our own country cheated and dispossessed the Indian tribes that tried to coexist with the White Man. Consider the treachery by which we gained the states of Florida and Texas. By the standards we apply to Israel, should we not be forced to return Florida to the Spanish or the Seminole? Should we not be forced to give up Texas to Mexico? The Mexicans have never relinquished claim on the Lone Star State. Israel didn’t capture land by deceit or expansionist design as did the United States, and we have the gall to demand of them what we could never apply to ourselves.

So why do we involve ourselves in the Israel-Palestinian issue and do not take up the worthy causes of these others? One word: OIL.

The fact is that the United States is not an honest broker for Middle East peace, and cannot be one so long as we are dependent upon Arab oil. The US is a hostage with a vested interest in appeasing the sworn enemies of Israel, not to mention of ourselves and Western civilization. The so-called Palestinian refugees, themselves Arabs, are simplypawns of the Arab countries, a demographic device in a 64-year campaign to destroy the Jewish state.

Despite the cherished illusion that logic, rationality and good intentions will bring peace to the Middle East, the reality is that the peace process is a fraud. The Israelis are forced to go along with it in order to appease the United States. Other than Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, America has historically been Israel’s only steadfast friend, if at times problematic, and Israel cannot afford to tell Uncle Sam to pound sand.

From the time of the British-administered Palestine Mandate, Jewish blood and treasure has paid for restoring the ancient Land of Israel. In the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 2006, and the Intifadas of 1987-1993 and 2000-2005, and endless rocket and terrorist attacks, the Arabs have attacked Israel with the intention, in their words, of “driving the Jews into the sea.” Israel has gained territory in each war. Then the demands start for Israel to give back the “Arab” land it is “occupying,” and has invested precious resources in lives and money in developing.

The United States Government tends to feel that it has a proprietary interest in Israel. Therefore, the US, which has chosen to be dependent upon Arab oil, feels justified in forcing sacrifices by the Jewish state to appease the Arabs. Every hard-won inch of soil that Israel has been forced by American intervention to turn over to Arabs– “land for peace”– has been turned into a firing position, a platform from which to attack Israel. Every concession Israel has made has cost Israeli lives twice over: first in capturing the territory in a defensive war for survival, and then of those—mostly civilian—killed in rocket and terrorist attacks.

Yet the current President of the United States is undeterred by reality in pressing on, pressuring Israel for more concessions in the name of peace. But this President is not even pretending that he only wants what’s best for little Israel. Obama sent shock waves through the Jewish state on the eve of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s visit last May by demanding that Israel withdraw to the pre-1967 borders, meaning the 1948 borders. With the advanced weapons now in the hands of Arab countries, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Iranians, a return to the pre-’67 borders would mean what the Islamists promise: a reenactment of both the Holocaust and Masada.

This is the president who, when Ahmadinejad’s government was gunning down Iranian citizens protesting a crooked election in the streets, rejected appeals to speak out in support of them, saying it wasn’t his place to meddle in the internal affairs of other countries. But shortly thereafter, Obama did not hesitate to order the Israelis to stop building homes in Jerusalem, despite a critical housing shortage that has resulted in massive demonstrations recently. (A modest apartment in Jerusalem runs about $100,00US per room in a walk-up apartment.)

President Reagan was the first US President to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, yet the American embassy remains in Tel Aviv, denying the legitimacy of the Jewish capital. Now—without precedent–the Obama regime refers to it as “Al-Quds,” the Arab name for it as the capital of Palestine. With his demand that Israel return to the pre-1967 borders, Obama accomplished something that rarely happens in that country: he united every political faction from far left to far right in shouting, “Hell, no!”

When the Germans marched into Denmark and ordered Danish Jews to sew a yellow Jewish star on their clothing, the king is said to have told the Nazis that “we are all Jews,” and that the royal family would lead all Danes in wearing the yellow star. JFK stood at the Berlin Wall and declared himself in ringing tones, “Ich bin ein Berliner!” What has President Obama declared himself?

Just as he catalyzed the American Tea Party movement into being by his attacks on the Constitution, Obama has aroused sharp, sympathetic interest in Israel’s security in the US and abroad by his call, in effect, for the Jewish state’s national suicide. Last May he single-handedly galvanized some of even the most complacent, the self-doubters, the fence-sitters, the indifferent, the self-absorbed, the Socialists, the pacifists—Jew and non-Jew alike– into proclaiming “I am a Zionist!”

The Islamist agenda has no room for a Jewish state in the Middle East. Mahmoud Abbas, Chairman of the PLO and President of the Palestinian Authority, has declared that never will the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and further declared that there will not be one single Jew in the Palestinian homeland. The calls for a Palestinian state have nothing to do with freedom–the only Arabs in the Middle East with civil rights are those who are Israeli citizens. It has nothing to do with prosperity and self-sufficiency. When Israel turned the Gaza Strip over to the Palestinian Authority and evacuated Jewish settlers, a European philanthropist bought their greenhouses and gave them as a gift to the residents of Gaza so they would immediately have a thriving industry and a source of income. The Arabs burned the greenhouses.

Hamas and Fatah both sprang from the loins of the Muslim Brotherhood, that organization which is emphatically not the benevolent, secular community service organization as described by the Obama Administration. At the heavily fortified border Kibbutz Misgav Am overlooking a Hezbollah town on the Lebanon side, a grizzled farmer with a cross-draw holstered revolver on his belt, explains the only difference between Hamas and Fatah:“Fatah would be content with just the destruction of Israel; Hamas along with Hezbollah aims to conquer the world as well as destroying Israel.” That puts one in mind of the differences between the Soviet Socialists (Communists) and the German Socialists (Nazis) in the ’30s and ’40s ; both were Socialist, both were obsessed with wiping out the Jews. There was also the small fact of ethnic differences between the pure Aryan race of Hitler’s dreams and the Russians, who are not Aryans—but Hamas and Fatah are both Arab, ostensibly both Palestinian Arab.

In free elections held in Gaza in 2005, Hamas won and promptly began to slaughter their brother Fatah for control of the Palestinian Authority. Last May, the two Islamist movements suspended their bloody fratricide and formed a “unity” government in the interests of their common goal of destroying Israel, which for the Israelis is a deal breaker in the “peace process.” (This “unity” is an on-again-off-again thing. At this point, late November 2011, they’ve agreed to hold presidential and parliamentary elections next May—and to exchange prisoners.)

This, too, is the result of US Presidential meddling—in this case, a committed friend of Israel, George W. Bush. The Israelis, quite naturally, are bitter about the whole thing, which has resulted in an endless rain of deadly missiles on civilian communities, more terrorism and the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006. Bush, like many in the West, naively mistook elections for democracy. Says Colonel Roni Shaked, former commander of Israel’s Shin-Bet, “Elections are a tool of democracy—it is not democracy itself.”

The Hamas Charter, a lengthy, bizarre muddle of disjointed Koranic passages apropos of little that is comprehensible to the Western mind, rambling statements and mini-essays in language as flowery as deadly nightshade, has one consistent, unequivocal refrain: the complete destruction of the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

No other country in history has been required to return territory gained by war. The United States frowned when the Soviets enslaved the countries they were supposed to have liberated from Nazi Germany. America wrung its hands when the Soviets crushed the Hungarian Revolution when the people of that nation tried to throw off the yoke of captivity. We looked on in silence when a half-million Warsaw Pact troops snuffed out the Prague Spring. Uncle Sam wagged his head in sorrow when Red China seized Tibet. The United States was too upset to watch after abandoning Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to the brutal and bloody Communist takeover. We covered our eyes in anguish over the destruction of Lebanon by the PLO, Syria and Iran-sponsored Hezbollah. Jimmy Carter was so grief-stricken over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that he turned off the national Christmas tree lights and forced our athletes to boycott the Olympics.

But here’s this little splinter of once-wasted land at the far end of the Mediterranean, the object of the world’s mostly hostile attention out of all proportion to the world’s ills. There are only two underlying factors in that obsession: systemic antisemitism and, as aforementioned, oil. Hatred of Jews is a matter of Man’s heart and beyond the scope of this article to address. The second is simple.

Take away the oil, and there will be no motivation for the US to force Israel into suicidal concessions or to give up territory won fair and square at great cost in defensive wars. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union fought a proxy war against the United States by supporting the Arab states in their attempts to wipe out Israel. America therefore reluctantly gave qualified aid to Israel, but quickly pressured the Israelis into breaking off military operations in every conflict before they could destroy the Arab armies and the Arab capacity for war. There could have been no such leverage had the US not been dependent upon Arab oil.

America has the natural resources to supply our own needs indefinitely if we end the crippling sanctions we have imposed upon ourselves. Energy independence would free the United States to be a genuinely honest broker for a real and just peace in the Middle East.

Until that time the “peace process” is a euphemism for a piece-by-piece Israeli “capitulation process” at ultimately fatal cost to the Jewish state.