RUTHFULLY YOURS

Many Americans and Israelis are outraged at President Obama for betraying the state of Israel yesterday by refusing to veto a Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank and calling Israel’s settlements and continuing construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem a “flagrant violation of international law.”

By allowing this resolution to pass, Obama broke with a long tradition of the United States standing with Israel on council resolutions concerning the Israel–Palestinian conflict and ignored a plea by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to veto the resolution.

What is the significance of this resolution for Middle East security and U.S.–Israel relations? Absolutely nothing. The world knows this resolution was approved because a U.S. president with just a few weeks left in office chose to abandon Israel. They know this president’s positions — especially his hostility to Israel — are not shared by a majority of Americans and will be quickly reversed by President Trump.

Israelis and the American people know what a cowardly act this Security Council vote was by President Obama since it was deliberately delayed until after the presidential election to ensure Hillary Clinton and congressional Democrats would not pay a political price. The vote also took place on Friday afternoon two days before Christmas to limit negative press coverage.

President-elect Trump called on the Obama administration to veto the resolution and indicated he will ignore it when he tweeted: “Things Will Be Different After Jan. 20.” Democratic and Republican congressmen are already siding with Trump on the vote. In an unprecedented statement, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office directly condemned the Obama administration in response to the passage of the anti-Israel resolution and expressed its eagerness to work with President Trump: The Obama administration not only failed to protect Israel against this gang-up at the UN, it colluded with it behind the scenes. Israel looks forward to working with President-elect Trump and with all our friends in Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, to negate the harmful effects of this absurd resolution.

Last week the Obama administration defied both history and international law to grant Palestinian terrorists a grand victory. At a stroke, the administration purported to declare any Israeli claim to any portion of the West Bank — including the Western Wall — illegitimate, and empowered Palestinian terrorists to press for their next round of concessions. It’s a betrayal that will echo far beyond any arms deals with Israel and could conceivably endanger the Jewish state’s very existence.

To put this staggering betrayal into context, one has to understand the long, bloody history of Arab efforts to destroy Israel, efforts that have been aided at every turn by the eternal anti-Semitism of huge swaths of our much-vaunted “international community.”

For the first 25 years of its existence, Israel endured multiple brute-force attempts at its destruction, as Arab powers mobilized large land armies for direct invasions of Israeli territory. That effort failed on a grand scale: Against all odds, Israeli forces prevailed time and again, leaving Israel in control of far more land than it initially possessed on its birth as a state. Undeterred by its conventional military losses, the Arab world turned to different methods, using a combination of lawfare and terrorism to slowly erode Israel’s ability to sustain its nation and culture. It is through the former tactic — the abuse of international law toward ends not achievable on the battlefield — that the international community seeks to deligitimize Israel’s territory and demography.

In other words, anti-Semites define “true” Israel (the only one they’ll recognize) as a much smaller nation that is swollen with literally millions of Palestinian “refugees” who pose an existential threat to the world’s only Jewish state. An Israel jammed into indefensible borders with a majority-Arab population wouldn’t be Israel at all. It would be Palestine, and its Jewish residents would be entirely dependent on the good graces of their enemies to live peacefully in their own ancestral homeland.

No rational nation would agree to its own extinction, though, so a hammer is necessary — one strong enough to drive a nation to make compromises it would never otherwise make. That hammer is terrorism. Whether it’s rockets from Gaza, incursions from Lebanon, or crazed knife attacks in Jerusalem, terrorism is the force that’s supposed to make Israelis ultimately beg for mercy. Of course it’s all “condemned” by the international community. They tut-tut when Jewish children die, but all that violence has to be “understood.” Oppressed people lash out against their oppressors, you see.

One can’t understand the international community’s anti-Semitism without understanding the three great double standards that together gin up fake outrage against Israel and dupe the gullible into believing the Big Lie that Israel is the oppressor and Palestinians its chief victims.

The first double standard deals with the status of land acquired as a result of waging defensive warfare. Traditionally, when aggressors launch losing wars, they are not permitted to reclaim all the territory they lost without cost or consequence. This truth is uncontroversial and apparent from the distant and recent past. Germany does not control the same land that it did in August 1939, nor does Japan. Yet time and again, the “international community” has taken the view that nations such as Egypt and Syria could and should claim the lands they lost in their own aggressive wars with Israel, including the very lands used as launching pads for those wars. The international community maintains that view in spite of the fact that applying the same reasoning worldwide would cause instability and chaos. Israel, alone among all countries, is thus bound to bear the burden of unwinding its past wars.

Obama Administration’s Betrayal of Israel:

Adding a final shameful chapter to a foreign-policy record that already runneth over with them, Barack Obama on Friday abandoned America’s commitment to Israel’s security, and to the vindication of democracy over sharia-supremacist aggression. In an act of cowardly venom, the president had the United States abstain from — and thereby effectively enact — a United Nations Security Council resolution that condemns Israeli settlement activity. At least, that’s what the resolution ostensibly does. The reality is much more than that. The resolution undertakes to render our ally indefensible. It was a black day in modern American diplomatic history, a flurry of sinister wheeling and dealing while the nation — exhausted by the election, anticipating a weekend of Christmas and Hanukkah celebration — was looking the other way.

Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz calls it “Obama’s ill-advised, lame duck, and undemocratic effort to tie his successor’s hands.”

This is what President Obama has wrought in his ill-advised refusal to do what American presidents have done for decades: exercise their veto in preventing biased, destructive, and one-sided resolutions from being enacted against Israel by the automatic anti-Israel majority that exists in every institution of the UN.

The bad news is that no future president, including President-elect Trump, can undo this pernicious agreement, since a veto not cast can never be retroactively cast. And a resolution once enacted cannot be rescinded unless there is a majority vote against it, with no veto by any of its permanent members, which include Russia and China, who would be sure to veto any attempt to undo this resolution. Obama’s failure to veto this resolution was thus a deliberate ploy to tie the hands of his successors, the consequence of which will be to make it far more difficult for his successors to encourage the Palestinians to accept Israel’s offer to negotiate with no preconditions.

There are a few things President Trump can do to ameliorate the effects of this “bigoted resolution,” Dershowitz says, including “officially recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving its embassy there,” but the damage Obama has done is grievous and will be hard to undo.

There are 22 days left in Obama’s second term. Let’s cross our fingers that there will be no more nasty surprises.