The End of US-Israel Strategic Cooperation?

The End of US-Israel Strategic Cooperation?

by Shoshana Bryen

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3328/us-israel-strategic-cooperation

Mark 2012, however, as the year the Obama administration took its most overt steps yet to tell the Arab and Muslim World the the US was severable from Israel. How much of what the US and Israel developed over the years was shared with countries overtly hostile to Israel?

"I don't want to be complicit if they (Israelis) choose to do it (attack Iran's nuclear program)," said Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey.

News flash, General Dempsey: You are complicit in the way that counts; you are trapped: the Iranian leadership does not care what we say -- or what we do -- about our military relations with Israel. The Iranian leadership needs the U.S. as its adversary and will not allow you deniability. If there is a strike on Iran, they will need for it to have been the U.S. – will need, General Dempsey, for it to have been you.

It is unlikely, General, that you spoke on your own hook as you are still wearing your stars. The last General who spoke to journalists out of turn and out of the country was Stanley McChrystal – and he lasted only as long as it took to arrive in the Oval Office. Your Commander in Chief appears to have used you to hammer another nail in the coffin of a relationship that had, until he got here, been remarkably productive for more than 30 years.

Since the Reagan administration, US-Israel military relations have generally been buffered from US-Israel political relations. They were not always smooth, but the military establishments were largely left to determine their interests together and separately. The late Caspar Weinberger was not enamored of Israel (certainly he was not enamored of the late Prime Minister Begin nor of the 1982 war in Lebanon), but the designation and early growth of "US-Israel Strategic Cooperation," and the designation of Israel for Major Non-NATO Ally status came in those years.[1] The Sixth Fleet came to Israel and the Haifa USO was built then to handle the enthusiastic crowds of American sailors and Marines.

Israel had the first wartime operational drones in 1982. The war that Weinberger opposed was a catalyst for U.S. thinking about remotely piloted vehicles. I took a small group of retired American military officers (including the former head of DIA, the former commander of US Air Forces Europe and the former commander of NATO's Southern Command) to Israel in September 1982 so they could put their hands on the drones that emerged from an Israeli model-airplane-flying club. The officers compared it to the US Army's then-unsuccessful drone program and the rest is history. U.S. conceived and built drones carry the weight of the Afghan war, but they also carry the history of 1982.

The First Gulf War complicated the relationship when President Bush (41) built a broad Arab coalition to rescue Kuwait. Israel withstood Saddam's rocket barrage without retaliation because that was what the U.S. wanted, setting into motion deterrence difficulties for Israel that played out later as its closer neighbors acquired and used rockets and missiles. But it also set in motion Israel's rapid quest for missile defense capabilities, which became an area of close U.S.-Israel cooperation.

After 9-11, Americans instinctively understood that we had been hammered by something with which the Israelis were familiar. "We Are All Israelis Now" was the headline in a major American paper. The Israelis "opened their closets" to help the US deal with Islamic terrorism, urban warfare and counter-terror operations. Israel taught members of the U.S. Army to train bomb-sniffing dogs. While the work was going on, Israel loaned IDF dogs to the Americans – Hebrew-commanded dogs were in Baghdad.

As the U.S. has become more adept in the ways of Middle East ground warfare, it is the Americans who have technology, tips and training to share with Israel.

"Complicity" is the wrong word for a relationship between countries that was grounded in the most fundamental agreement on democratic governance, civil liberties, minority rights, rule of law, and what constituted the enemy – at least until now.

General Dempsey meant Iran, but there is more than a divergence on Iran going on here. There has been a determined shift of emphasis in the current administration. President Obama has elected to focus on how and where the U.S. might find partners in the Arab/Muslim world – not itself a bad thing, but dangerous if it means a) eroding the definition of an ally to mean anyone with any set of political/religious/strategic beliefs that does not involve killing Americans outright; and b) throwing the Jews down the well (to channel Borat).

President Obama's Cairo Speech showed only a superficial understanding of the Jewish relationship with the Land of Israel. He called Israel's independence a response to the Holocaust and not the establishment of the third Jewish Commonwealth after a 1,900-year interregnum. So doing, he fed into the Arab complaint that Israel was foisted on the region by guilty Europeans rather than as a legitimate and permanent part of the region.

He dispatched NASA administrator (and retired Marine LTG) Charles Bolden to find space exploration partners in the Muslim world (visual evidence of his discomfort can be seen here). The administration accepted the 2010 Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty Review that singled out Israel for condemnation – despite public statements that it would never do that. The U.S. rejoined the UN Human Rights Commission and the UN Alliance of Civilizations, an openly anti-Israel body that claimed in 2006 that global tensions were driven primarily by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and referred to the September 11th attacks as resulting from "a perception among Muslim societies of unjust aggression stemming from the West."

The US declined to support Canada's traditional, once-a-decade bid for a Security Council seat. Canada, an outspoken supporter of Israel, lost to Portugal, a stalwart representative of EU ambivalence. The U.S. voted against the infamous "Goldstone Report," but declined to use its influence to encourage others to do the same. Israel's housing policy was debated by some of Israel's fiercest critics in the Security Council before the US exercised its veto, and the U.S. drove a Security Council "compromise" that allowed Israel to be criticized along with Syria. The administration heaped emergency aid on Gaza – an allocation of $27 million in its earliest days in office and another $400 million in 2010 – aside from the $100 million+ given to the Palestinian Authority, including $115 million this year over the protestations of Congress.

Despite the demand for a "total settlement freeze" that forced the Palestinian Authority to harden its negotiating position, a vision for a "two-state solution" beginning with the 1967 lines and working backward, and a nasty comment about Prime Minister Netanyahu that was supposed to be off-camera, the Obama administration continues to proclaim itself Israel's friend and ally – citing increases in military assistance;[2] the X-Band Radar;[3] Israel's "qualitative military edge";[4] and missile defense.[5]

Mark 2012, however, as the year the Obama administration took its most overt steps yet to tell the Arab and Muslim world that the US was severable from Israel. The NATO-related air rescue operation Anatolian Eagle was canceled because Turkey would not let Israel participate. The administration then touted the bilateral missile defense exercise Austere Challenge as bigger and better -- and more meaningful -- until they canceled it in April, with more than a suggestion that it might give Iran the idea that the U.S. and Israel could use it as cover for an attack (an early sign of the "complicity" argument to follow). In May, the Administration went ahead with Eager Lion 2012, a Special Operations exercise with 19 Arab and Muslim countries, including Egypt, Lebanon and Pakistan. The tactics and training of Special Operations is an important component of Israel's "qualitative military edge." How much of what the U.S. and Israel developed over the years was shared with countries overtly hostile to Israel? Israel was not invited to the May NATO confab, although 13 NATO "partner nations" were invited to discuss terrorism. Two other US-organized and led multilateral counterterrorism confabs excluded Israel as well. When Turkey objected to the sharing of intelligence information with Israel, Secretary of Defense Panetta said no NATO radar intelligence would be shared "outside of NATO." NATO Secretary General Rasmussen rushed to assure the Turks of the same thing.

Finally, the administration announced that Austere Challenge would be reconstituted as the biggest and best missile defense exercise yet. Until this week, when it announced that the exercise would be scaled back – way, way back – so Iran would not think it was cover for a US-Israel attack.

This is where General Dempsey comes in – he is the President's emissary to reassure the Iranians that the US will have nothing to do with an attack on them; that they are safe from us. And he is the President's emissary to tell the Arab and Muslim world that the relationship with Israel is expendable. Too bad he doesn't understand that we are not safe from the Iranians and that dumping Israel will not make Islamist and Islamist-leaning countries -- from Turkey to Egypt to Pakistan to Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan -- our friends.

The United States is trading a long-standing, mutually beneficial security relationship for relations that will be less solid (is anything less solid than the US-Egypt relationship AFTER we've spend $1.5 billion on it annually since the early 1980s and welcomed its Muslim Brotherhood revolution?); less technologically advantageous to the U.S. (the technology relationship with the Arab/Muslim world flows only one way); and less protective of minority and civil rights (as the Egyptians discover we have no leverage).

General Dempsey is the fall guy for an administration that increasingly holds Israel in contempt before Arab and Muslim countries -- which increasingly hold us in contempt.

Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center. She was previously Senior Director for Security Policy at JINSA and author of JINSA Reports form 1995-2011.

[1] When Major Non-NATO Ally status meant something; now it's been applied to Afghanistan – laughably suggesting that the Afghan military has something to contribute to the security of NATO.
[2] Actually negotiated by the Bush administration in a 10-year deal.
[3] Negotiated during the Bush administration by now-Senator Mark Kirk.
[4] A tricky concept when the US is selling billions of dollars worth of equipment to countries at war with Israel.
[5] See "Austere Challenge" below.

Antisemitism Alive and Well in Romania Or How the Holocaust Never Happened

Antisemitism Alive and Well in Romania
Or How the Holocaust Never Happened

by Michael Curtis

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3323/romania-antisemitism

What is significant is that it was not the Nazi policy that triggered the massacre of Jews, but the Romanian government itself with the enthusiastic articulation of the military as well as the the broader society.

The virus of antisemitism is alive and well in Eastern Europe, and so is the denial of the Holocaust. It is particularly disconcerting that a younger generation in Romania, and more than likely everywhere else in the world, should be infected with this virus, and is -- or claims to be -- ignorant of the real treatment of Jews in the 20th century.

Dan Sova, a 39 year old Romanian lawyer and Social Democrat, who has been a Senator in the Parliament since 2008, was promoted to the position of Minister for Parliamentary Relations by the Prime Minister Victor Ponta on August 6 after saying on a television broadcast on March 5, that "no Jew suffered on Romanian territory (during the Holocaust) thanks to Marshal Antonescu." Two days later Sova was removed "temporarily" from office as speaker of his political party. He has also said that "only 24 Jews were killed during the Iasi pogrom (of June 28-29, 1941) by the German army."

Both statements by Sova were false and malicious. Ion Antonescu, the pro-Nazi dictator of Romania during World War II was "leader of the state," prime minister, foreign minister, defense minister, and self-appointed Marshal. He joined the Tripartite Pact of Germany, Italy, and Japan against the Allies in November 1940, two months after it had been signed. He also established close personal contact with Hitler. It was Antonescu who on June 27, 1941, ordered the commander of the military garrison of the town of Iasi, in northeast Romania, to "cleanse" the city of its Jewish population. The action was not instigated by the Nazis but by the Romanian authorities and the Romanian army on their own initiative.

It is estimated that during the two days of the pogrom in Iasi, between 13,000 and 15,000 Jews were massacred in the streets or else died in the death trains on which 100 Jews were herded into each boxcar; most died of thirst, starvation, or suffocation. The actions of the Romanian regime in the Holocaust led to the deaths, not of 24 Jews, but a number estimated to be between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian Jews -- most likely the larger number, in the territories under its control.

It was not Nazi policy that triggered the massacre of Jews but the Romanian government itself -- with the enthusiastic participation of the military, and the endorsement of the broader society, similar to the better-known participation of the French Vichy regime and French authorities during the war.

In the period after World War II, from 1945 to 1989, Romania was under Communist control, first by the Soviet Union and then as an independent country; information about the country's actions during the war was largely suppressed. Few Romanians were aware of the involvement of their country during the Holocaust. Perhaps the kindest thing to be said of Dan Sova is that his schooling did not include any information about the Holocaust. It is difficult, however, to believe that a young lawyer educated at the University of Bucharest could be so ignorant. When criticism arose of his promotion on August 6, four days later he confessed that his remarks on the Holocaust were "completely wrong." It would be nice to take at face value his plans to make concrete actions on the matter, one of which will be a course of lectures on the Holocaust.

No matter the degree of sincerity in Sova's apologies and regrets, a few lessons could be drawn from his case: there is a critical need to keep on discrediting Holocaust deniers, ranging from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran to Ernst Zundel, a German who lived in Canada. Education, especially of the young, about the Holocaust is urgent and essential to put an end to the falsehoods of distortions of history by individuals such as David Irving in Britain, Robert Faurisson in France or Louis Farrakhan in the U.S. Both the young and the old should continue to be informed of the assertions of the deniers -- the allegations that the Diary of Anne Frank was a hoax because parts of it were written with a ball point pen, or that Auschwitz was too small to have been an extermination camp -- to be able to refute them.

The ignorance of Dan Sova shows how important it is to reject the argument that too much attention has been given to the Holocaust, and that 20th century historians have over-emphasized Jewish suffering. On March 17, 1990, for example, Pat Buchanan wrote in the New York Post about what he called "so-called Holocaust survivor syndrome," which he said involved group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics. It is painful that some Holocaust deniers, trying to make the case against the existence of Israel, have argued that Jews should be regarded not as victims but as victimizers. The Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson, who in November 2008 denied the existence of Nazi gas chambers (although he did say that between 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps) also declared that the Holocaust was a Jewish invention so that "we would prostrate ourselves on our knees before them and approve their new state of Israel." As Deborah Lipstadt has written, these people accuse Jews of using "the world's sympathy to displace another people so that Israel could be created."

One can admit that Nazi Germany was not the only perpetrator of villainous and criminal behavior. The twentieth century abounds with similar criminal acts. One should acknowledge and deplore, especially, threats of genocide, the treatment of Armenians, people in Cambodia, Tibet, Mali, Nigeria, the Balkans, Sudan, and the Congo. Yet, the Holocaust was unique in its scope and number of casualties. It remains unique in spite of the cavalier denial or minimization of it by ignorant and bigoted people like Dan Sova.

Eight Reasons Why Containment Is Not an Option Against a Nuclear Iran

Eight Reasons Why Containment Is Not an Option Against a Nuclear Iran

by Yaakov Lappin

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3322/nuclear-iran-containment

It is about Israel's Right to Life.

1. Iran's regime is outspokenly dedicated to the goal of destroying the State of Israel. Iranian political, religious, and military leaders have expressed their desire to annihilate Israel at every opportunity they have received. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, says that the physical elimination of Israel is a religious duty. It would be criminally negligent to disregard Iran's official state ideology, and gamble with the lives of millions of Israelis on the unproven assumption that Iran will behave rationally as a nuclear-armed actor. For Israel, the struggle to keep Iran from going nuclear is not about regional influence or ensuring an edge over its enemies. It is about Israel's Right to Life.

2. The Iranian regime is filled with quarrelling factions that could in the future lead to a destabilization of the government, the military, and the Islamic Republic Guards Corps.

Some factions are influenced by radical Shi'ite ayatollahs such as Mezbah Yazdi, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's spiritual mentor. Yazdi not only says that Israel is the embodiment of evil on Earth, he has also called for the production of nuclear weapons. In any future destabilization of an Iranian regime armed with atomic bombs, a hardline faction could seize control of nuclear missile bases and order an attack. The security of Israel, the region, and the world would be held ransom to the outcome of domestic Iranian power struggles. No country can be expected to accept such a threat

3. Despite all of the above, some commentators continue to insist that facing a nuclear Iran can be compared to the superpower rivalries of the Cold War, which pitted the U.S. and the Soviet Union against one another, and resulted in both sides refraining from resorting to nuclear force, due to the threat of mutually assured destruction (MAD).

The analogy, however, does not work. Ideologically, there is a stark difference between hardline Shi'ite Iranian ideology, which adores the concept of martyrdom, and the secular Soviet ideology, which dismissed with contempt notions of religious war and ideas about divine rewards in the afterlife.

4. Even if we set aside difference in ideology, there are other reasons MAD is not applicable in Iran's case. Moscow and Washington established lines of direct communications that allowed them to deescalate standoffs. The open channels allowed the superpowers to walk away from the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, thereby sparing the planet from a nuclear holocaust. Jerusalem and Tehran have no direct lines of communication whatsoever, and no way to deescalate future crises, which will surely arise.

5. Iran's territory is 70 times larger than Israel, a disparity that will form a constant temptation for Iranian leaders to realize their fantasy of destroying Israel. Iranian former president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, considered an Iranian "reformist," formulated this thinking, when he said in 2001: "If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the… application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world."

With 70% of the Israeli population concentrated in cities on the Mediterranean coastal plain, Iranian leaders face the constant temptation of initiating a nuclear attack based on Rafsanjani's calculation. Israel has a population of 7.8 million. Iran has a population of 74.8 million.

6. Once Iran breaks through to the nuclear arms stage, it would automatically spark a Middle Eastern arms race, as Iran's frightened Sunni rivals would rush to get their own atomic bombs. Sunni states suffering from chronic instability, such as Egypt – already under Islamist rule – as well as other Sunni powers such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia would end up armed with nuclear weapons, too.

With the Middle East at its most unstable phase to date (the dissolution of Syria and concerns about its chemical weapons as a case in point), nuclear armed states could experience severe turbulence that would compromise the security of their nuclear arsenals, putting them within reach of fanatical factions or terror organizations.

7. Iran remains the region's number one state sponsor of terrorism. Operating through its extraterritorial covert elite unit, the Quds Force, Iran provides arms, tends of thousands of deadly rockets, explosives, cash, and logistical support to its Shi'ite proxy Hezbollah, as well as Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and several additional radical non-state actors around the region.

A nuclear armed Iran could in future use the same network to deliver dirty bombs filled with explosives and radioactive material to any of these terror entities. It could also plant an unconventional explosive on a ship, and send it sailing to any port in the world.

8. Future Iranian threats of annihilation against Israel that are backed atomic bomb capabilities could seriously harm Israel's economy, scare away foreign investors, and place Israel's civilian population under an intolerable threat. The threat itself becomes a strategic problem when backed by nuclear capabilities. Israelis having to wake up to images of nuclear tests in Iran, followed by a speech by Ali Khamenei about the need to remove "the cancer of Israel" would regrettably have to cope with unacceptable and levels of anxiety that would most likely be impossible to sustain.

Surrender corrupts the soul of Israel

Surrender corrupts the soul of Israel

This morning, a friend sent me an article by Leonard Fein called “Occupation Corrupts Soul of Israel.”

Fein writes,

Hakibush mashchit — The occupation corrupts.

And so, plainly, it does. But so what? However inadvertent the origins, the poison fruit is today fully ripe. To understand that, it is not sufficient to call attention to the horrific attack in Zion Square the other night, the attack by a mob that threatened the life of Jamal Julani, or even to add to it the firebombing hours earlier of a taxi near Gush Etzion in which six Palestinians, two of them children, were wounded.

He goes on to talk about “settler violence,” the complicity of the authorities (if you ask the ‘settlers’, they will tell you that the authorities in fact protect the Arabs), price tag vandalism, etc.

Is this the “poison fruit” of ‘occupation’?

Or is it simply that some Jews have — after decades of murder, vandalism, no-go zones in Israel’s capital and other places, stonings, lynchings, etc. — learned to act like Arabs?

Did the poison come from Jews living in their historic homeland, or from the Arabs who hate them?

The Left’s solution is to end the ‘occupation’, to withdraw from Judea, Samaria, the Golan, and eastern Jerusalem. In short, give them what they want and everything will be fine. Of course “what they want” is not limited to the territories, and surrendering them will just send the message that we are too weak to resist, and they will redouble their efforts to obtain the rest.

I responded to my friend that if ‘occupation’ corrupts the soul, then withdrawal, with its concomitant rocket attacks and terrorism might well corrupt the body in a very physical way.

But in addition to the security issues, there is something still more important, which is well-understood by the Arabs, if not by the Leonard Feins. Here is a 2009 remark by PLO official Abbas Zaki, which explains it well:

With the two-state solution, in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made – just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward.

Fein is wrong. The corruption of the Jewish soul did not begin in 1967. It began with the adoption of the idea that surrender is pro-Israel, with — as Fein mentions — the birth of Peace Now and the national self-flagellation that followed the Sabra and Shatilla massacres (in which Arabs behaved like Arabs), and culminated in the suicidal decision to allow Arafat and the PLO to return from exile in 1993. Today, it’s fed by a huge influx of money from the European antisemites who support the anti-state NGOs in Israel that are all that’s left of the Left.

It isn’t ‘occupation’ that corrupts — it’s surrender.

http://fresnozionism.org/2012/09/surrender-corrupts-the-soul-of-israel/

Should Israel bet the farm on US promises?

Should Israel bet the farm on US promises?

Recently, Israel’s security cabinet met for 10 hours to discuss, among other things, Iran. Details of  the meeting were secret, but

It is likely that among the issues discussed were the “red lines” that Israel would like the United States to establish as a way of deterring Iran from moving ahead. While Netanyahu has not publicly declared what he thinks those red lines should be, Uzi Arad, the former head of the National Security Council, said that they could include a declaration that any uranium enrichment beyond 20 percent would be a direct trigger for military action.

Arad, in an Israel Radio interview, said other possible red lines could be the discovery of additional uranium enrichment plants – like the once secret facilities at Natanz and Fordow – or the interference with the work of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors.

In addition, Arad said that the US has not yet spoken in “categorical terms” making crystal clear its determination to stop the Iranian nuclear march.

An example of this, he said, would be clearer presidential declarations to the effect that the US will not tolerate or allow a nuclear Iran, and will use all means to prevent it.

Other “categorical” expressions of this determination, Arad said, could be congressional authorization now of the use of force if diplomacy fails to convince the Iranians to halt, and a clear statement that the military objective of any US action would not be to “buy time,” but rather to prevent Iran from ever being able to build a nuclear bomb.

There is also this, from an AP report:

After tense exchanges with the Americans, Israeli political and defense officials said Tuesday that the sides are now working closely together in hopes of getting their positions in sync. Clearer American assurances on what pressure it is prepared to use against Iran, including possible military action, would reduce the need for Israel to act alone, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a security matter.

I hope that this does not represent the thinking of Israeli policymakers. It is imperative to deal with reality as it is, not as we would wish it to be. And reality is 1) that only military action or a credible threat thereof will stop Iran from developing deliverable nuclear bombs, and 2) that an Obama administration, or even a Romney administration, is highly unlikely to provide this.

A strategy of stopping Iran by getting the US to promise to enforce red lines is only a promise; and nations — the US is not alone in this — do not keep promises when doing so is not determined to be in their interest.

Here is an example. In 2004, the US was very interested that Israel carry out its proposed withdrawal from the Gaza strip. President Bush wrote a letter to then-PM Ariel Sharon — I would link to the original, but it has been removed from the White House website — promising that

In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949…

Israeli officials insisted that there was also an informal agreement that this would be understood as allowing construction in settlements located in areas that Israel intended to keep in any proposed agreement with the Palestinians.

By 2008, even the Bush Administration was backing away:

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, at a news briefing in January [2008], suggested that Bush’s 2004 letter was aimed at helping Sharon win domestic approval for the Gaza withdrawal. “The president obviously still stands by that letter of April of 2004, but you need to look at it, obviously, in the context of which it was issued,” he said.

The Obama Administration finished the job in 2009:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejected Israeli assertions that the Bush administration had reached a binding agreement with Israel on Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

“We have the negotiating record, that is the official record that was turned over to the Obama administration by the outgoing Bush administration,” Clinton said Friday at a joint press conference with her Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu.

“There is no memorialization of any informal or oral agreement” concerning the settlements, she said.

Since coming to office in January, President Barack Obama has repeatedly called on Israel to halt all settlement activity in Palestinian areas, a demand rejected by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Israelis say they received commitments from the previous US administration of President George W. Bush permitting some growth in existing settlements.

They say the US position was laid out in a 2004 letter from Bush to then Israeli premier Ariel Sharon.
Clinton rejected that claim, saying any such US stance was informal and “did not become part of the official position of the United States government.”

Is this the kind of promise-keeping that a nation can bet its existence on? I don’t think so.

http://fresnozionism.org/2012/09/is-israel-considering-betting-the-farm-on-us-promises/

Obama’s War on Jewish Jerusalem

Obama’s War on Jewish Jerusalem

By P. David Hornik 

On Wednesday we heard that Jerusalem (along with, no less significantly, the Palestinian “right of return” and Hamas) had been omitted from the Democratic Party’s platform for 2012. On Thursday we heard that Jerusalem had been reinstated—by means of the ludicrous voice vote shown in this already viral video, in which it is not at all clear that the ayes really have a two-thirds majority or even a majority at all.

Whether or not the original omission was President Obama’s doing, it was certainly consistent with the content of another much-viewed video from slightly over a month ago, in which White House spokesman Jay Carney, by refusing to say what city the White House considers the capital of Israel, made perfectly clear that the city is not Jerusalem. It is also consistent with Obama’s failure to visit Israel since being president—which would entail coming to Jerusalem in pomp and splendor and at least tacitly acknowledging it as the capital, a message the president does not want to convey to the surrounding countries.

Back in June 2008, candidate Obama, in a speech to AIPAC, surprised everyone by declaring that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” That drew a sharp rebuff from Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas among others. And one day after his AIPAC statement Obama backtracked, telling CNN: “Well, obviously, it’s going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations.”

If that at least sounded like neutrality, it quickly got worse when candidate Obama became President Obama. In his Cairo speech in June 2009, in which he spent several paragraphs vilifying Israeli communities over the 1967 line to a largely Islamic-extremist audience, Obama said:

All of us have a responsibility to work for the day…when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.

If that too may have sounded like a kind of neutrality, it actually pointedly excluded any reference to the political status of Jerusalem or even part of Jerusalem—in the present or the future—as Israel’s capital. It came, in other words, from the same territory as the Carney press conference and the platform omission; except that it was delivered to an audience all too accepting of the message that—whatever Israel may say—Jerusalem currently has no established political status at all.

It was, of course, nine months later, in March 2010, that all hell broke loose when, during a visit to Jerusalem by Vice-President Joseph Biden, a zoning board announced plans to build apartments for Jews in Ramat Shlomo, an already-existing neighborhood of 20,000 in the part of Jerusalem that was under illegal Jordanian rule from 1949 to 1967. “I condemn,” stormed Biden, “the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in east Jerusalem.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for her part, called the zoning board’s announcement “an insult to the United States” and telephoned Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to excoriate him over the transgression for 45 minutes.

Two weeks later Obama himself got directly into the act. When Netanyahu came to the White House in an effort to calm the winds, he found himself snubbed by Obama in what may have been the most insolent treatment ever meted out by a U.S. president to a visiting head of government.

The next November in Jakarta, asked at a press conference about approvals that had been issued to build 1300 homes—for Jews, of course—in two Jerusalem neighborhoods, Obama replied: “This kind of activity is never helpful when it comes to peace negotiations.” As I noted at the time, Indonesia is a country that forbids Israeli citizens to visit, is one of 19 UN member states that do not recognize Israel as a state, and does not allow overflights by Israeli planes.

Then, in May 2011, Obama said in a speech to the State Department:

The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt…. We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps….

That, in a radical break with previous U.S. policy that left the issue of borders open, meant Israel had no right to any of the territory it had captured in 1967—not the strategically indispensable Jordan Valley and not the liberated parts of Jerusalem including the Old City, the Western Wall, and the Temple Mount—and would have to “swap” parts of pre-1967 Israel for what little it managed to keep.

The consternation was so great that a few days later Obama—in a speech to AIPAC—seemed to backtrack in the other direction, saying that “the parties themselves—Israelis and Palestinians—will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967.” By now, though, the president’s attitudes toward Jerusalem and Israel were clear enough.

The most recent events are, then, just the continuation of a pattern. The fact that there was so much difficulty voice-voting Jerusalem back into the Democratic platform—if it was actually done at all—reflects the fact that the problem goes beyond Obama himself and includes a sizable portion of the Democratic Party.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/obama%e2%80%99s-war-on-jewish-jerusalem/

Left-Wing Historian: Arab Hate the Obstacle to Peace

Left-Wing Historian: Arab Hate the Obstacle to Peace

The obstacle to Israeli-Arab peace is the Arab goal of destroying Israel in the name of Islam, says conflict historian.

The main obstacle to Israeli-Arab peace is the Palestinian nationalist movement’s fanaticism and refusal to compromise, historian Benny Morris has said.

Morris, who was once numbered among Israel’s most staunchly left-wing academics, told Haaretz, “The decades of researching the conflict… left me with a feeling of deep despair,” he said. “I’ve written enough about a conflict that has no solution, primarily due to the Palestinians’ consistency in rejecting a two-state solution.”

He mentioned his most recent book, “One State, Two States,” which, he said, describes a “historic journey” with a political purpose.

“I want to open readers’ eyes to the truth,” he declared. “My goal is to expose the goals of the Palestinian national movement – to wipe out the Jewish national enterprise and to take possession of all of Palestine for the sake of the Arabs and Islam.”

There is no difference in that regard between the Islamist Hamas terrorist group and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, he added. “The Palestinian movement - both of its heads, the fundamentalist led by Hamas and the secular led by Fatah - is ultimately interested in Muslim sovereignty over the entire land of Israel, with no Jewish state and no division,” he said.

Morris first became known for research implicating the fledgling Israeli army in the flight of hundreds of thousands of Arabs from Israel during the War of Independence. In 1988 he refused to serve as a reservist in Judea and Samaria, and he has repeatedly called to create an Arab state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

However, in recent years he has disappointed some supporters by saying that Israel’s expulsion of Arabs in the state’s first months was justified. “When the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide – the annihilation of your people – I prefer ethnic cleansing,” he told a Haaretz interviewer in 2004.

In this week’s Haaretz interview, he was asked if Palestinian refugees descended from Arabs expelled from their homes in Israel during the War of Independence should have the right to “return” to Israel. “The fulfillment of the right of return would, in practice, require the destruction of the Jewish state,” he said.

That is the reason PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas refuses to talk with Israeli leaders, he added. “He has no desire or intention of reaching a solution of two states for two peoples.”


http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/159761#.UEvq6WjyYcg