RUTHFULLY YOURS

What is commonly called the “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” is, in fact, the “Arab-Israel conflict.”

Jordan illegally annexed the West Bank in 1950, and from that time Palestinian nationalism has been deadly for the Kingdom.

“I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror… to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty. If the Palestinian people actively pursue these goals, America and the world will actively support their efforts…. A Palestinian state will never be created by terror — it will be built through reform. And reform must be more than cosmetic change, or veiled attempts to preserve the status quo.” — President George W. Bush, 2002.

“There’s no way a deal can be made if they’re not ready to acknowledge a very, very great and important country.” — President Donald J. Trump, 2017.

The burden, then, is on the Arab states and the Palestinians.

The optics, certainly, were fine. It was good to see an American president and an Israeli prime minister standing together on the podium with what appeared to be genuine good will. Most important, and promising for the future, perhaps, was how they dealt with the “two state solution” mantra. There was, for the first time in years, nuance in both the American and the Israeli position toward what has become a slogan without meaning.

In 1948, the US State Department’s conventional “wisdom” contended that the reestablishment of a Jewish state would damage US interests, since the Jewish state would be aligned with the USSR, undermine US-Arab relations, intensify regional instability, and would be militarily devastated by its Arab neighbors, thus causing a second Jewish Holocaust in less than ten years.

However, conventional “wisdom” was trounced on the rocks of Middle East reality, as it was when: the State Department appeased Egyptian President Nasser (1950s); facilitated the toppling of the Shah of Iran by the Ayatollas (1977-78); embraced Saddam Hussein, and inadvertently encouraged his August 1989 invasion of Kuwait; proclaimed Arafat as a messenger of peace (1993); welcomed the Arab Tsunami as the Arab Spring, a transition toward democracy (2011); supported the anti-US Muslim Brotherhood offensive against the pro-US Egyptian President Mubarak, and turned a cold shoulder toward the pro-US President al-Sisi (2011-2017); toppled the Kaddafi regime, thus transforming Libya into a major platform of Islamic terrorism (2011), etc.

In 2017, conventional “wisdom” maintains that the Palestinian issue is the crux of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a core cause of Middle East turbulence and a crown-jewel of Arab policy-making. It assumes that the US can reset the Middle East by applying its own values of common-sense, peace and democracy. Moreover, conventional “wisdom” contends that the proposed Palestinian state constitutes an integral part of the Israel-Arab peace process, reducing regional instability, and therefore advances US national security interests.

But, a reality-check of the proposed Palestinian state and its impact upon US national security, drastically contradicts conventional “wisdom,” when assessed against the backdrop of the 14-centuries-old volcanic actuality of the Middle East, the Jordan-Palestinian inherent clash of a zero-sum-game, the systematic track record of the Arab walk – not talk – toward the Palestinians, and the track record of the Palestinians since the 1920s.

For instance, all attempts to introduce democracy and peace to the Arab Middle East have been defeated by deeply-rooted intra-Arab violent intolerance, fragmentation, instability, unpredictability and the tenuous nature of all Arab regimes, policies and agreements, irrespective of Israel and the Palestinian issue. Hence, the failure of all US and international initiatives to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian issue, which exposes the unbridgeable gap between Western and Arab state of minds, further radicalizing Arab expectations and actions, and undermines US interests.

Furthermore, while the US – rightly so – invests billions of dollars to bolster Jordan’s Hashemite regime, a Palestinian state would intensify a lethal threat to the highly vulnerable, pro-US Hashemite regime. It would trigger destabilizing ripple effects into pro-US Saudi Arabia and all other pro-US Arab Gulf states, providing a robust tailwind to Islamic terrorism. Potentially, it could advance the Ayatollahs’ goal of dominating the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Peninsula, much of the Indian Ocean and the military and energy critical waterways of Hurmuz and Bab el-Mandeb. It could produce an Iran-controlled bloc from Iran, through Iraq and Jordan to 10 miles from the Mediterranean.

The United States, even as it seeks to counter UN Security Council Resolution 2334’s flouting of international law and undermining of chances for Arab-Israeli peace, may yet be able to turn elements of the resolution to something positive.

The resolution, choreographed by the Obama Administration and passed with Obama’s abstention, is a relatively short document long on anti-Israel hypocrisy and lies. The most significant lie is the assertion, despite much international law to the contrary and nothing in international law in support of it, that all the land administered by Israel beyond the pre-1967 armistice lines is Palestinian Territory and that Israel has no legitimate claim to any of it.

Among 2334’s many hypocrisies, it declares that it is “Reaffirming… [Security Council] resolutions 242 (1967), [and] 338 (1973)…” In fact, it is an attempt to nullify those resolutions. The first calls for the negotiation of new, “secure and recognized boundaries,” does not pre-judge ultimate disposition of the territory, and makes no reference to any of it being “Palestinian,” while the second, 338, calls for implementation of the first.

SCR2334 also states that it is “Guided by… the Charter of the United Nations…,” but it is in violation of the Charter as the Charter reaffirms Jewish rights in the territory that 2334 asserts to be Palestinian. In addition, the resolution misrepresents the contents of the Quartet Roadmap, claiming Israeli obligations that, according to the Roadmap, were only to become operative if the Palestinians took steps with which they never complied.

But the hypocrisies associated with 2334 extend beyond the document itself. The document, while exclusively attacking, indicting, and demanding action against Israel, does refer to the Palestinian Authority’s responsibility regarding “confronting all those engaged in terror and dismantling terrorist capabilities…” And elsewhere it condemns, in addition to acts of terror, “acts of provocation, incitement and destruction,” and calls for refraining from “incitement and inflammatory rhetoric.” After the passage of 2334, a number of Western leaders justified their support for the resolution, or, in America’s case, its abstention, by noting the resolution’s supposed “balance,” its condemning terror and incitement in addition to its advancing anti-Israel declarations.

Secretary of State Kerry reported that the United States had insisted it would withhold its veto only if the resolution were balanced and that its “references to incitement and terrorism” met that standard. Statements in a similar vein were put forward by Samantha Power, American ambassador to the UN. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson justified his nation’s vote in favor of the resolution by likewise citing its “balance,” and the prime minister and foreign minister of New Zealand defended their nation’s sponsorship of the resolution with virtually the same claim of “balance.”

But the wording in 2334 that provides the transparent fig-leaf of “balance” may yet be put to good purpose. The resolution calls for “the Secretary-General to report to the Council every three months on the implementation of the provisions of the present resolution.” The Obama Administration and the nations that voted for the resolution clearly anticipated that these reports would consist entirely of a catalogue of any Israeli construction beyond the pre-1967 armistice lines as well as updates on the implementation of anti-Israel steps called for in the resolution.

But the United States can insist that these quarterly reports contain a comprehensive review of Palestinian “provocation, incitement and destruction,” “inflammatory rhetoric,” and supporting of rather than “confronting of those engaged in terror” in the intervening months.

There is much speculation about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming meeting at the White House with U.S. President Donald Trump. Typically, rather than waiting to hear the outcome of Wednesday’s deliberation, Israelis have been analyzing a conversation that has yet to take place, and weighing in on the extent to which the Jewish state can count on the new administration in Washington to embrace the policies of the Israeli government, and on the level of personal chemistry that emerges between the two leaders.

The assumption is that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the nuclear deal reached between Iran and world powers in July 2015 — will be on the agenda, and that the issue of achieving a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinian Authority will be raised. The second topic includes several directly related issues, such as the possibility of the relocation of the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and the newly passed Judea and Samaria Settlement Regulation Law, which retroactively grants permits to a number of outposts on privately owned Palestinian land.

Whatever the upshot of the meeting, however, one thing is certain: The Trump administration will not be able to broker an agreement that resolves the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, no matter how talented, smart or well-intentioned Jared Kushner — the president’s son-in-law who is purportedly being charged with this task — may be.

The charade in which Netanyahu has participated since he announced his conditional support for Palestinian statehood in a televised address to the nation in June 2009, is that there is a “solution” to the ongoing war waged by the Arabs in Judea and Samaria, Gaza and east Jerusalem against the very existence of the Jewish state. Netanyahu knows better than anybody else that this is as much an exercise in rhetoric as it is in futility. He is fully aware that the only way for peace to be possible is for the Palestinians to oust their corrupt and evil leaders in Fatah and Hamas and — in striving for the freedom and prosperity they have been denied by the honchos in Ramallah and Gaza City — emulate Israeli society.

If such a day ever comes, no more than five minutes will be required for the sides to agree on the technicalities — maybe 10, if the negotiators get stuck in traffic on the way to the table.

BOSTON (Jan. 21)http://www.jta.org/1976/01/22/archive/cleaver-defends-zionism-israel-charges-arabs-with-being-most-racist-people-says-moynihan-is-too-s

Eldridge Cleaver, the former Black Panther leader now in a California prison, has written an impassioned defense of Zionism against the UN General Assembly’s resolutions defining it as racist and declared that “having lived intimately for several years among the Arabs, I know them to be among the most racist people on earth.”

Cleaver’s article, written from his jail cell, was published in the Boston Herald-American. He said that many wealthy Arab families owned one or two Black slaves. “Sometimes they own an entire family. I have seen such slaves with my own eyes,” he wrote describing his experience in Algeria where he lived after fleeing the United States.

He bitterly condemned the most anti-Semitic, anti-Israel African leader, President Idi Amin of Uganda, as one of the “hired killers” and “the hatchet man of Uganda.” He also declared that the “so-called hard line” taken by the U.S. Ambassador to the UN Daniel P. Moynihan against Amin “seems too soft to me.”
UN RESOLUTION WAS A SHOCK

Cleaver wrote that two aspects of the UN’s anti-Zionist resolution shocked and surprised him. “Shocked because, of all the people in the world, the Jews have not only suffered particularly from racist persecution, they have done more than any other people to expose and condemn racism. Generations of Jewish social scientists and scholars have labored long and hard in every field of knowledge, from anthropology to psychology, to lay bare and refute all claims of racial inferiority and superiority. To condemn the Jewish survival doctrine of Zionism as racism is a travesty upon the truth.

“Secondly. “Cleaver wrote. “I am surprised that the Arabs would choose to establish a precedent condemning racism because it can so easily and righteously be turned against them. Having lived intimately for several years among the Arabs, I know them to be among the most racist people on earth. No one knows this better than the Black Africans living along the edges of the Sahara.”

Cleaver said that he had “the deepest sympathy for the Palestinian people in their search for justice, but I see no net gain for freedom and human dignity in the world if power blocs, because of their ability to underwrite sagging economies for a season, are able to ram through the UN resolutions repugnant to human reason and historical fact.”

The writer charged that “The combination of Communist dictatorships, theocratic Arab dictatorships, and economically dependent Black African dictatorships are basically united in their opposition to the democratic forces inside their own borders. It is not a combination deserving of respect by people from countries enjoying democratic liberties and traditions of freedom.”

Cleaves suggested that “the time has come to re-examine the credentials of all the members of the General Assembly. Why should all these little so-called countries with miniscule populations have a vote equal in weight to that of the United States? When such votes are cast in the reckless manner of the anti-Zionist resolution, it is time to sit up and take notice.” Cleaver observed that “The General Assembly is no longer filled with Mahatma Gandhis pleading the case of the downtrodden, colonized masses. It is now a forum for crude, hired killers like Idi Amin Dada, the hatchet man of Uganda.”

The world still believes that the “Two State Solution” is the way to resolve the Israel-Palestine Conflict. But when the Palestinians invoke this idea, they mean something very different, which has nothing to do with peace.http://mida.org.il/2017/02/12/the-delusion-of-the-two-state-solution/

For some time, the slogan of the so-called “Two-State Solution” has constantly been presented in the media as a desirable goal, one that Israel and the Palestinians should implement in the interest of peace. Whenever one raises this idea, it is implied that Israel should make major sacrifices in exchange for an unclear benefit. During the Obama administration, Secretary of State, John Kerry, bitterly accused the Government of Israel of not being committed to the “Two State Solution,” and even last week in London, Prime Minister Theresa May declared that she favored the “Two-State Solution.” She asked Prime Minster Netanyahu if he were also committed to this formula. For his part, the Prime Minister did not respond directly but stated that Israel is committed to peace.

This slogan completely lacks merit. The PLO first introduced it as a stratagem, and its real purpose has been to conceal their true aims and those of their successor, the Palestinian Authority. Those who launched the idea of the “Two State Solution” intended that it be understood differently by the Israelis — their potential victims — and other well-meaning outsiders who seemingly would want a fair solution to this war.

During the war in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese originally launched the “Two-State” formula in order to hide their strategic goal. They adopted a strategy of phases which, by devoting attention to the intermediate stages of their struggle, would enable them to reach their goal by gradual steps. Their real intention was that North Vietnam would conquer South Vietnam, but they spoke of the “Two-State Solution,” a tactic whose purpose was to disguise their aims and manipulate world public opinion. In the end, Communist North Vietnam subdued and conquered South Vietnam, and in 1975 the last Americans fled from the rooftop of their embassy in Saigon by helicopter. This was a major defeat both for the South Vietnamese and for the United States of America.

During the early 1970s Salah Khalaf, known as Abu Iyad, led a PLO delegation to Hanoi to learn from the North Vietnamese. There, they met the legendary General Vo Nguyen Giap and political advisors who coached them on presenting their case and changing their image of being terrorists in world public opinion. Abu Iyad described this important visit in his book,My Home, My Land (which he published with Eric Rouleau in 1978). Abu Iyad recounted that the North Vietnamese advised the Palestinians to devote attention to the intermediate stages of their war and to accept the need for “provisional sacrifices.”