'Nice Little Jewish State Ya Got There..Shame If Anything Were to Happen To It'

 

While Israeli PM Benyamin Netanyahu was already en route to the United States to discuss the Middle East peace process,  President Obama gave an interview at the beginning of last week to a friendly journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg.The shock waves from what the president had to say are still reverberating.

President Obama started by talking about the Israeli-Arab peace process.

The president, to summarize briefly, embraces the tired idea of 'linkage' wholeheartedly. In his view, Israel catering to the demands of the Palestinian Authority, giving up strategic territory in exchange for vague promises from Mahmoud Abbas and accepting the establishment of a hostile state on Israel's borders will magically lead to peace in the Middle East. Israel's Arab neighbors will all immediately become allies and friends, the Iranians will stop their quest for nuclear weapons and stop threatening to destroy Israel every two weeks or so and Hamas and Hezbollah will close up shop, disarm and go out of business.

When Goldberg prompted him, he made a few pro forma remarks about Netanyahu and about the  American 'commitment to Israel being rock solid'. But as he made plain, he wants Israel to comply with all of the Palestinian demands, and quickly. Or else. Because, you see, there are going to be a lot more Palestinians and Israeli Arabs who will overwhelm Israel demographically, the EU and others are going to isolate Israel internationally and the U.S. is going to not be able to defend Israel diplomatically any longer. Unmentioned is that much of any diplomatic isolation Israel faces is a direct result of the animosity exhibited towards the Jewish State by President Obama and his administration.

Even Goldberg, a long time Obama supporter,  evidenced some shock in a subsequent interview with PBS's Charlie Rose and characterized this as a threat.

The president,of course, focused exclusively on Arab rights rather than Jewish ones, and on Israeli security...which of course, he expects Israel to depend totally on the United States to oversee and handle, something that can be changed at the president's whim. He characterizes the Palestinians as ready for peace, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, because to the president, it’s those stubborn Jews who are holding things up.

Just for the record, that demographic threat the president and Secretary Kerry keep focusing on that is supposed to doom Israel as a democratic state unless those Jews do what he wants and fast is pure fantasy. The real truth as I write this is that the trends shows a Jewish majority in Judea and Samaria of well over 60%, because the Jewish fertility rate has increased while Palestinian rates have collapsed. In fact, Jewish fertility rates in Judea and Samaria have already overtaken Arab rates at 3.04 vs. 2.91 children per woman. Israel continues to attract a high rate of immigration, with many more to come, especially from Europe, while Palestinian emigration rates have risen sharply. Time is on the side of Israel, not the Palestinians...which is the real reason for the haste to push through a deal by the White House.

President Obama's fantasy world also includes a portrait of Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority as committed to peace.At one point, the president referred to Abbas as 'the most moderate Palestinian leader the Israelis are ever going to get.'

This could have been the cue for Goldberg to remind the president that this is the same Mahmoud Abbas who has repeatedly said that he will not make any concessions to Israel, who insists on a Jew free reichlet and who recently signed a unity agreement with the genocidal Hamas. This is the same 'moderate' who wrote his thesis at Moscow University on how the Holocaust was a myth and made it a required part of the Palestinian educational curriculum, regardless of what he told a group of hand-picked Leftist Israeli students in Ramallah last week. This is the same leader supposedly  committed to peace and co-existence who sees to it that convicted murderers of Israeli civilians are honored as 'holy martyrs', heroes and role models and rewards them financially.

Instead, Goldberg  merely pointed out that Abbas was "also the leader of a weak, corrupt and divided Palestinian entity that is already structurally semi-powerless. Do you think he could deliver anything more than a framework agreement? Is this the guy who can lead the Palestinian people to say, "OK, no more claims against Israel, permanent peace, permanent recognition?"

And President Obama's reply? "I think it has to be tested. The question is: What is lost by testing it?" The answer, of course is the same thing that was lost because of Oslo and the Road Map - hundreds of Jewish lives and hundreds of others maimed for life. President Obama, to be frank, didn't seem all that put out by the idea of Jewish bloodshed, as long as a Palestinian state the way he envisions it is the result.

Israeli PM Netanyahu probably came to the U.S. prepared to accept the non-binding Kerry framework and to try once more to convince President Obama that the Iranians are committed to obtaining nuclear weapons, that they must be stopped and time is running out. Instead, he was hit with this while in mid air.

Not only did President Obama convince a lot of Israelis that his view of an Israeli/Palestinian peace accord isn't rooted in reality and that they can no longer depend on the U.S. as any kind of honest broker, but the president's remarks had to let Netanyahu know in advance that any attempt to get President Obama to look at reality on Iran was a waste of time.

In the interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, President Obama also did some chest thumping about Iran, saying that the Iranians were cooperating because they were afraid of him! To hear President Obama talk, because they're so scared of what he might do, "they've halted their nuclear program, no centrifuges being installed; the 20 percent enriched uranium being drawn down to zero; Arak on hold."

Absolutely none of this is true. The Iranians say flatly that enrichment is continuing, a whole new crop of advanced centrifuges is being installed , and the Iranian heavy water reactor at Arak,which has no peaceful application is not on hold at all.

In the end, instead of publicly accepting the framework, Netanyahu merely took a copy from the president privately without commenting and left for home. Among other things, this completely sandbagged Secretary of State John Kerry, who was not briefed on the interview in advance and according to one of my sources definitely in a position to know, was left scrambling to do damage control.

The latest indication of this president's disdain for Israel occurred after Netanyahu left the White House. One of Israel's written-in-stone conditions for any peace agreement is the formal acceptance by Abbas of Israel as a Jewish State. Israel wants this because it would signal a final end to the conflict,  terminate the Palestinian fiction that Jews are just 'colonists' who have no connection or rights to the land of Israel and end the idea that thousands of those hostile Arabs whom represent themselves as Palestinian 'refugees' somehow have a right to resettle in Israel.

Abbas has always refused to do this for exactly these reasons, and once this interview was released, he repeated it once again. Not only that, but those Arabs whom represent themselves as Palestinians and whom President Obama claims are ready for peaceful coexistence refuse to accept Israel as a Jewish state either. Because like Abbas, they still cling to the dream of someday driving the Jews into the sea.

 

When Abbas again repeated his refusal, what was different this time is that our own State Department backed him up on it.

In an interview with Al-Quds, the Palestinian Arabic news outlet, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jan Psaki made headlines throughout the Middle East when she said, “The American position is clear, Israel is a Jewish state. However, we do not see a need that both sides recognize this position as part of the final agreement.”

Is it any wonder that after that, the Arab League quickly endorsed the same position of non-recognition, something they haven't seen fit to do before?

Actually, President Obama himself has constantly referred to Israel as a Jewish State as part of his mirage of establishing two states, one Jewish and one “Palestinian'. As recently as his speech in Jerusalem in March 2013, Obama said, "Palestinians must recognize that Israel will be a Jewish state".

As late as a month ago, the U.S. ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro was telling Israelis that Kerry's peace framework would insist on recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

Well, not any more! Things have changed, and the Obama team is essentially backing up Abbas' long time position of no concessions, no recognition and of course, no end to the conflict. To those of you with good memories, this is a mirror image of how the Arab League responded to Israel's attempt to negotiate a peace right after the Six Day War.

Kerry got on board the train fairly quickly, saying that it was "a mistake for some people to be, you know, raising it again and again as the critical decider of their attitude towards the possibility of a state and peace, and we've obviously made that clear."

Well yes, the president and his people have made their attitude clear now. But before the story was different, wasn't it? And to add to the mix, Kerry's rationale for denying the necessity of Abbas and the PLO recognizing Israel as a Jewish State was that it was already done by - wait for it - none other than Yasser Arafat.

Yes, the old rais himself, another 'peace partner' who never ever told a falsehood about anything. There's an old quote of St. Arafat's I'm particularly fond of - "I've killed for my cause. Don't you think I would lie for it?" Actually, Arafat only made a vague nod towards Israel's right to exist, with no mention of it being a Jewish state.

If commitments from Kerry and President Obama are subject to change like that, the Israeli can almost certainly expect to be betrayed on any other commitments the U.S. makes to them,once they give up the strategic areas and put themselves in a vulnerable position. As a matter of fact, there's already a track record on this sort of willful amnesia on U.S. commitments when it comes to President Obama and Israel.

In spite of the Obama Administration's obvious dislike for Israel and Netanyahu, the point of no return beyond which Israel can be pressured has been reached. The recognition of Israel as a Jewish State was supposed to give Netanyahu leverage to compromise in other areas. Instead, President Obama has pretty much stripped away any rationale for the Israelis to trust him or trust Secretary Kerry. The Israelis fully expect that America will abstain from a UN vote giving the Palestinians whatever they want anyway, even a reichlet being governed by Hamas.

In fact, that's fairly likely. There's no guarantee Mahmoud Abbas is going to stick around to implement any deal the Israelis are pressured into signing. As the president himself said to Jeffrey Goldberg, “We do not know what a successor to Abbas will look like.”

But let's do it anyway, because of course, it has to be tested!

Where Secretary Kerry and President Obama might end up being surprised is by a Palestinian 'no'. Since the last thing Abbas will do is to agree to anything that would end the conflict, the recent cave ins on even basic positions by the Obama Administration are a green light to go to the UN anyway after the April 29th deadline and challenge the U.S to veto something the entire Obama team is now on record as supporting.

The way to stop this would be to do something President Obama has never done with the Palestinians; deal with Arab rejectionism and let Abbas know that a refusal this time is going to going to entail serious consequences. He won't.

This is Barack Obama, freed from the necessity of further elections and reverting to his core attitudes and beliefs.He sees himself, above all, as the Palestinian's lawyer and community organizer.

This president, with his long history of associating with anti-semites and Israel haters since his college days came into office announcing that he wanted to create 'daylight' between the U.S. and Israel.He will undoubtedly succeed, at least for awhile. His primary interest is not two states living in peace next to each other but in creating that 'daylight' no matter what it takes.

Just like President Obama's fantasies about Iran, his handling of the relationship with a valuable American ally will not be to America's benefit.Just watch.