RUTHFULLY YOURS

In his recent address to the U.N. General Assembly, President Barack Obama denounced Islamic radicalism, and, in the same breath, praised Palestinian statehood. In these oddly contradictory remarks, he then added that too many Israelis are ready to abandon peace. “And that’s something,” he warned further, “worthy of reflection within Israel.”

This seeming afterthought was gratuitous, and way off the mark. Most Israelis are substantially more aware than Obama of the evident similarities and connections between the Islamic State group, al-Qaida, Fatah and Hamas. Unlike the American president, they also understand that a future Palestinian state – any Palestinian state – would quickly become just another institutionalized national source of worldwide terror and jihad. Unlike him, these Israelis can easily recognize the absurd irony of opposing a jihadi Islamic State group, while simultaneously endorsing a jihadi “Palestine.”

At some point, perhaps, at least after they are finally able to stop abducting and murdering each other, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas will proceed to advance a joint plan for establishing Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank (Judea/Samaria), Gaza and East Jerusalem. This announcement, while plainly contrary to certain codified expectations of the Palestinian Authority’s Oslo Agreement obligations to Israel, would nonetheless promptly elicit the enthusiastic support of Obama. Such support, moreover, would severely undermine authoritative international law at several different and important levels. Most obvious, in this jurisprudential regard, would be its consequential indifference to the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, a core document in force since 1934, which remains the governing treaty on statehood under international law, and which stipulates, precisely, certain fixed and indispensable criteria of legal sovereignty.

On Nov. 29, 2012, the General Assembly voted to upgrade the Palestinian Authority to the status of a “nonmember observer state.” This was not, in any fashion, a bestowal of sovereignty or “full legal personality.” Historically, the president ought to be reminded, there has never ever been a state of Palestine, nor was such a state created by the U.N. in 2012 or at any other time.

Regrettably, Obama is still convinced of some sort of creditable symmetry between Israeli and Palestinian claims for statehood. Somehow, still buying into the most elementary and rhetorical misrepresentations of international law obtaining in that region between 1917 (the Balfour Declaration) and 1947 (formal U.N.a General Assembly enactment of a Jewish State), he remains altogether willing to equate an Israeli return to indefensible borders with “peace.” In essence, any willing Israeli surrender to this American president’s vision of a two-state solution would represent little more than a final capitulation to another Final Solution.

All of the Islamic world, “moderates” as well as “radicals,” demand a one-state solution from Israel. This utterly unambiguous demand is for Israel to disappear and to be transformed from what is presently described as “occupied Palestine,” into a larger and uniformly Palestinian state. Cartographically, of course, Israel has already been expunged from the world on all Arab maps, including those of both “moderate” Fatah and “radical” Hamas. Cartographically, at least, Israel has already become the hapless victim of a second Jewish genocide.

These exterminatory Islamist views are not narrowly political or military. Rather, they stem from the doctrinally core notion of umma (community) in Islam, a solidarity entity, one whose foremost and overriding obligation is always to answer the unchanging call of jihad. As had already been declared, forcefully, by all major representatives of the four Sunni Islamic schools of law, on Jan. 9, 1956: “Palestine is a permanent possession of the global Muslim umma, and must therefore be governed in perpetuity by full Islamic law.”

The remorseless physical destruction of a Jewish state existing in the Dar al-Islam (the world of Islam) has always been cited as an immutable Islamic duty. Even if they should somehow be grafted into a so-called unified Palestinian state, the continuously fragmented and fratricidal Palestinian communities would never agree to morph into a generally tolerant, unified and peaceful national society. Instead, they would merely come to define a conveniently augmented venue within the existing jihadi movement, one still obligated to help subjugate and suitably transform the much wider Dar al-harb (the world of war).

Any Palestinian state would also have a profoundly detrimental impact on American strategic interests. In short order, this new and 23rd Arab state would cheerfully harbor the very same sort of jihadi adversaries that we are now trying to “degrade” and “destroy” elsewhere, and who would then vie against each other for control of the new jihadi country. Could anything be more obvious? Has Obama already forgotten the effervescent Palestinian joy displayed all over the West Bank and Gaza on Sept. 11, 2001?

For the clear and overriding sake of U.S. national security, as well as for Israel’s physical survival, Obama should now be insisting that Israel’s borders never be rolled back to pre-1967 lines. In this connection, the authoritative words of Israeli legal expert, former Ambassador Alan Baker, are comprehensive and aptly compelling: “The legality of the presence of Israel’s communities in the area [Judea and Samaria] stems from the historic, indigenous and legal rights of the Jewish people to settle in the area, granted pursuant to valid and binding international legal instruments recognized and accepted by the international community.”

The United States’ accelerating war against the Islamic State group and related jihadi adversaries requires a secure and U.S.-supported Jewish state. Any American effort, however unwitting, to supplant this consistently responsible ally with an enemy Islamist state, would represent the very height of both moral and geostrategic folly.