If any doubts remained about Obama’s malignant narcissism, historical ignorance, and geopolitical cretinism, the lame-duck-in-chief dispelled them with his abstention at the Security Council vote on a resolution slandering Israeli “settlements” as the foremost obstacle to peace. Undoing this despicable abandonment of a crucial ally should shoot to the top of incoming president Donald Trump’s to-do list.
Israeli intelligence has demonstrated that this diplomatic drive-by was orchestrated by Obama himself. “From the information that we have, we have no doubt that the Obama administration initiated it, stood behind it, coordinated on the wording and demanded that it be passed,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of what he rightly called a “shameful betrayal.” On the one hand, such back-door machinations are par for the course in the corrupt U.N. When the Bush administration in 2002 was trying to get a U.N. resolution authorizing the Iraq War, Germany lobbied non-permanent Security Council members Mexico, Chile, Cameroon, and Angola to vote against the resolution, which ultimately failed.
But German Chancellor Gerhard Schröeder had grubby political reasons for his meddling. He was running for reelection on a dismal economic record, and found a useful distraction by tapping into German anti-Americanism and reflexive pacifism. So too with France’s machinations and opposition to the war, which were aimed at ending the sanctions on Iraq so that France could get back to doing profitable business with Saddam Hussein, who in 1983 was buying half of all French arms exports.
These actions are bad enough, and are evidence that the U.N. exists to serve the interests of member countries, usually at the expense of other member countries. But Obama has no such utilitarian motives. He’s done with running for office. His reasons for betraying Israel comprise petty spite at Netanyahu for stoutly and publicly resisting Obama’s policies and actions that endanger his beleaguered country; and obeisance to left-wing historical fantasies about “colonialism,” the “two-state solution,” and Palestinian Arab “national aspirations.” In other words, the clichés one would expect from a badly educated university adjunct professor for whom left-wing bromides function as fashion statements and status assertion.
History, of course, tells a different story. There is no “Palestinian” people or “homeland.” There are Arabs whose historical homeland is the Arabian Peninsula. Any Arab living elsewhere is the descendant of invaders, colonizers, occupiers, and immigrants. There are no “occupied territories” or “borders,” but rather contested territories which are bounded by the 1967 armistice line, and the disposition of which will be decided through a negotiated settlement. The “West Bank” is a euphemism for the historical Jewish districts of Judea and Samaria. Jerusalem is not an Arab city, but for three thousand years has been the capital of the Jewish people, who have inhabited it continuously. The “settlements” are not colonial outposts created at the expense of their rightful owners, but towns and cities in the ancient Jewish homeland, most of them on land purchased from Arab landowners happy to make a profit on such barren tracts.
Nor is Israel an “illegitimate” country. Its existence is the result of international law as created by treaties, conferences, the League of Nations, and the U.N. resolution which established an Arab and a Jewish state, the latter comprising one-quarter of the territory mandated for Israel in the postwar settlement. Israel is as legitimate, and in fact even more legitimate, than the other states created in the region like Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, or the states like Hungary, Austria, the Kingdom of Serbs and Croats, and Czechoslovakia created after the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
