RUTHFULLY YOURS

Our new president will have to make the UN pay for what his predecessor has done to Israel.

My college roommate Ed Atkins and I were commissioned second lieutenants in the US Air Force the day before we graduated in June 1970. My eyes were lousy and Ed’s weren’t, so our paths diverged. I went to law school and he went to flight school, the lucky dog. After all, the mission of the Air Force is “to fly and to fight.” He was going to do it, and I was being trained to risk only paper cuts in the law library. I was (and still am) jealous as hell.
Fresh from a combat tour in Vietnam, during which he accumulated a slew of Air Medals and a Distinguished Flying Cross, Ed was stationed in Germany when the 1973 Yom Kippur War broke out. Israeli forces were caught on the ground on the highest holy day of the Jewish year, and things went badly for the first few days. At that point the Soviet Union was moving to intervene on the Arabs’ side. President Nixon ordered our nuclear forces to DefCon 3 and our Air Force to prepare to fly into the fight. Ed and his squadron were arming and fueling their F-4 Phantoms to fly to Israel and engage anything — Soviet or Arab — that stood in their way when Israel turned the tide and won without our help.

That’s the way it’s been since 1948, when Israel became a nation. We’ve always been the big brother willing to deter or defeat Islamic aggression against the only democracy in the Middle East.

That lasted until January 2009, when President Obama came into office and began shunning Israel. Then came last Friday, when Barack Obama ordered our UN ambassador to abstain rather than veto a UN Security Council resolution that declared Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank illegal, and those territories illegally “occupied.” Israel was thus delegitimized and ordered to return to the borders it had before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

President Obama’s enmity toward Israel, though often denied, has been obvious since his inauguration. Through many meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his attempt to force a false peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and his nuclear weapons deal with Iran, Obama has made it clear to anyone who wanted to see that his hatred of Israel coincided with his intention to diminish our national security as well as that of the Jewish state.

The Friday resolution, first offered by Egypt, was withdrawn as a result of hard lobbying by Israel and the statement by President-elect Trump that it should be vetoed. New Zealand, Senegal, Venezuela, and Malaysia picked it up and offered it for a vote. The Obama administration denies orchestrating the resolution and vote, but the Israelis accuse it of doing precisely that. And therein lies an important lie.

Secretary of State John Kerry visited New Zealand in mid-November. In a meeting with New Zealand’s foreign minister, Murray McCulley, Kerry told him that the New Zealand government could play an important role in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

McCulley said, “It is a conversation we are engaged in deeply and we’ve spent some time talking to Secretary Kerry about where the U.S. might go on this. It is something that is still in play.” He added, “I think there are some very important decisions that the Obama administration is going to have to make in its lame-duck period on this issue.” That was the preliminary to Friday.

The resolution, apparently orchestrated by Obama, passed only because the U.S. didn’t veto it to protect Israel as it has on similar resolutions on countless occasions. It was a huge victory for the Palestinians and the Muslim nations — and terrorist networks — which have Israel’s destruction as their principal foreign policy goal.

We were surprised by Obama’s perfidious action, but we shouldn’t have been.

President Obama’s collaboration with the December 23, 2016 UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2334, which condemns Israel’s settlements policy, has defied history and reality, injuring the peace process and US national security.

While President Obama greets the Jewish people upon Chanukah, which commemorates the victory of the Maccabees in a series of heroic battles in the crux of the Land of Israel, the mountain ridges of Judea and Southern Samaria – Beth El, Beth Horon, Hadashah, Beth Zur, Ma’aleh Levona, Adora’yim, Elazar, Beit Zachariya and Ba’al Hatzor – he contends that these are “occupied lands.” When Shimon the Maccabee (who succeeded Judah and Jonathan) was confronted with such a contention, he responded: “We have not occupied a foreign land; we have not ruled a foreign land; we have liberated the land of our forefathers from foreign occupation.”

President Obama’s and the State Department’s support of UNSCR 2334 undermines the peace process and US national security interests in the following manner:

1. It provides a tailwind to the UN demand to halt Israeli construction in Judea and Samaria, while encouraging the thirty-time-larger Arab construction there; an attempt to prejudge and force – not negotiate – a solution.

2. It dis-incentivizes Arabs to negotiate, since they expect further global pressure on Israel. Thus it undermines direct negotiation, which is the most effective way to advance peace, as documented by the Israel-Egypt and Israel-Jordan peace accords. On the other hand, the litany of US and international peace initiatives failed due to attempts to force a solution and by-pass direct negotiation.

3. Just like previous US and international initiatives, this too radicalizes the Arabs, forcing them to outflank the US and the globe from the maximalist side, escalating their expectations and demands; thus, further reducing prospects of resolving the highly-complicated peace process.

This afternoon several non-permanent members of the UN Security Council will submit a resolution that declares all settlements illegal under international law and demands that the country cease construction in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and other territories captured in the 1967 Middle East war. There is nothing new about such wildly unbalanced resolutions at the UN, of course—except this time, the Obama Administration will reportedly refrain from using the U.S. veto and will rather abstain from the vote, breaking with decades of American statesmanship that has protected its strategic Middle East ally from the legal consequences of UN rhetoric.

The resolution was authored by Egypt, which shelved the draft after the Netanyahu government reached out to the transition team of President-elect Donald Trump, which then pressured Cairo to drop the resolution. Venezuela, Malaysia, Senegal, and New Zealand say that if Egypt doesn’t push forward, they will. The resolution will permanently enshrine as a matter of international law that the Western Wall is “occupied Palestinian territory,” and that Jews building homes in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is illegal. One prominent member of the pro-Israel community in Washington called the resolution “a nuclear bomb.”

The Obama Administration is already briefing friendly press organizations that they’re showing no animus toward the Jewish state in refusing to veto the resolution. Rather, it’s “tough love”: for an Israel that seems not to have the will or vision to take chances for peace.

That’s not how Israel sees it. As a senior Israeli official in Jerusalem told Tablet: “President Obama and Secretary Kerry are behind this shameful move against Israel at the UN. The US administration secretly cooked up with the Palestinians an extreme anti Israeli resolution behind Israel’s back which would be a tailwind for terror and boycotts and effectively make the Western Wall occupied Palestinian territory. President Obama could declare his willingness to veto this resolution in an instant but instead is pushing it. This is an abandonment of Israel which breaks decades of US policy of protecting Israel at the UN and undermines the prospects of working with the next administration of advancing peace.”

In a sense, the UN vote is a perfect bookend to Obama’s Presidency. A man who came to office promising to put “daylight” between the United States and Israel, has done exactly that by breaking with decades of American policy. It is also seeking—contrary to established tradition and practice, which strictly prohibit such lame-duck actions—to tie the hands of the next White House, which has already made its pro-Israel posture clear.

No doubt that many of those critical of the U.S.-Israel relationship will defend and applaud the administration’s action, even as the effects of the resolution are obscene. So what if it enshrines in international law the fact that Jews can’t build homes or have sovereign access to their holy sites in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish people for more than 3000 years? Israel, as Kerry said, is too prosperous to care about peace with the Palestinians. Maybe some hardship will shake some sense into the Jewish State—which after all, could easily have made a just and secure peace with the Palestinian leadership at any time over the past two decades, if that’s what it wanted to do. Accounts to the contrary, from Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, say, or left-wing Israeli politicians like former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the late Shimon Peres, are simply propaganda generated by the pro-Israel Lobby, whose wings the President has thankfully clipped.

Ten years ago, a guy from Queens made a trip out during a snowstorm to pay a condolence call to a guy on Long Island on the passing of a Rabbi who was also his father. The guy from Queens is now President-elect and the man he was visiting became his close adviser and his choice for ambassador to Israel.

Last week, Trump gave his pro-Israel Jewish supporters an early Chanukah gift. He picked an ambassador who actually likes the Jewish State and hates Islamic terrorists.

It’s supposed to be the other way around.

Ambassador Dan Shapiro, Obama’s emissary to the country he hated almost as much as America, had denounced Israel on the day that a Jewish mother of six who died protecting her children from an Islamic terrorist encouraged to kill Jews by the Palestinian Authority, was being buried.

Shapiro has warned that our backing for Israel is contingent on Israel’s support for a PA-Hamas Islamic terror state inside its own borders and that Netanyahu’s lack of enthusiasm for that terror state “raises questions about Israel’s real intentions.”

But Trump has decided to go with David Friedman, a friend of Israel, instead of an enemy. And the enemies of the Jewish State are united in their fury against Ambassador David Friedman.

“J Street is vehemently opposed to the nomination of David Friedman to be Ambassador to Israel.” the Soros funded anti-Israel group declared. Friedman has been a longtime critic of the hate group, comparing its support for Islamic terror against Israel to its key funder’s Nazi collaborating past.

The head of J Street is so upset that he appears to have found religion. “Lord help friends of Israel if someone like David Friedman is making US policy on Israel rather than John Kerry,” Jeremy ben Ami whined.

The Lord just might be helping Israel by sending Kerry back to Nantucket and David Friedman to Jerusalem. The anti-Israel media was already sputtering early this month when Friedman skipped Kerry’s rant against Israel to attend an event for the Israeli town of Beit El (Bethel or House of God) where Judah Maccabee had his command center in the battle against Antiochus IV that gave us Chanukah.

Our next ambassador chose the House of God and the Maccabees over John Forbes Kerry.

This article by Anne Bayefsky originally appeared on Washington Examiner.

U.S. companies are in for a shock as President Obama takes aim once again at Israel in the final month of his presidency. In the coming days, he is expected to direct his team at the United Nations to vote for U.S. funding of “BDS,” the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign aimed at financially ruining Israel and smearing the companies with which it does business.

The vote concerns the U.N. budget that is currently being negotiated and scheduled to be finalized this week. One of the line items provides funding for the implementation of a Human Rights Council resolution adopted in March. The resolution calls for the creation of a blacklist of companies around the world doing any business, directly or indirectly, connected to Israeli settlements. In effect, it launches a U.N.-sponsored BDS movement. Since the General Assembly holds the purse strings for the Human Rights Council’s operations, the time has come to allocate the money to pay for it.

With Obama’s U.N. diplomats sitting on their hands while the funding scheme is being hotly debated, American taxpayers can expect to find themselves funding BDS in the very near future, with American businesses caught in the crosshairs.

Israeli settlements consist of Jews living peaceful, productive lives on disputed territory whose ownership, by existing agreement, is to be determined through negotiations. This Jewish presence on Arab-claimed territory is offensive to a deeply anti-Semitic enemy that seeks to guarantee that land swapped in an eventual deal to create a Palestinian state will be Jew-free.

In the context of a Palestinian policy of ethnic cleansing, these Jewish farms, enterprises and schools are an “obstacle to peace,” to use the preferred verbiage of the United Nations and the Obama administration. The fact that Jews have repeatedly been moved in advance of a negotiated end to hostilities by their own government for the sake of peace, only to have those hopes dashed time and again, is simply dismissed.

Palestinian statehood demands should be taken seriously only within the context of bilateral negotiations with the Government of Israel. American attention should be paid to the non-democratic excesses of Palestinian leadership – and U.S. economic support and general support for the PA should be attached to improvements in press freedom, human rights and economic opportunity supported by the PA government.

President-elect Trump’s choice of David Friedman as Ambassador to Israel appears to be an excellent decision. It has already brought howls of protest from people invested heavily in the Oslo and subsequent accords, the “peace process” and the concept of the United States as an “evenhanded” broker between Israelis and Palestinians. Friedman, an Oslo-skeptic, has said he believes that, “Notwithstanding ‘agreements’ reached at Camp David, Oslo, Wye Plantation and elsewhere, neither Yasser Arafat nor Mahmoud Abbas ever had any intentions to observe the minimal conditions required of a two-state solution.”

On the other hand, he said of Israel that he would work “tirelessly to strengthen the unbreakable bond between our two countries,” correcting the relationship between two democratic, transparent, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, free market, countries — one large and one small. Israel goes from an impediment to American interests in the Middle East to a partner in a vital region — innovative, experienced, and successful.

It is worthwhile to review the parameters of the Oslo Process, negotiated in 1993 without the participation of the U.S., but adopted formally by President Clinton, because its underlying assumptions are about to be challenged.