Spectator: Learning Nothing from History

From the Spectator in the UK:

Learning nothing from history

Tuesday, 12th May 2009

Leave aside for the moment the malice towards Israel that is involved, the attitude of the Obama administration towards the Middle East is well-nigh incomprehensible in its suicidal stupidity. It is trying to make Israel play the role of Czechoslovakia in 1938, when Britain under Neville Chamberlain told it that if it didn’t submit to the Nazis it would stand alone – with the result that the following year, Hitler invaded Poland. Determined to prove that history repeats itself the second time as tragedy, America is trying to force Israel to destroy its security by accepting the creation of a terrorist Iranistan on its doorstep, under the threat that otherwise the US will not help protect its security by defanging Iran (and how, precisely would it do that?). But in doing so, the Obama administration is jeopardising the security of America itself and the free world, not to mention the Arab states which have good reason to fear Iranian regional hegemony. This paper by Efraim Inbar spells out the multiple idiocies of an administration that believes that making nice with genocidal fanatics will turn them into apostles of peaceful co-existence :

Recently, we also learned that the White House is trying to make kosher the transfer of funds to a Palestinian government that includes the radical Islamist Hamas. This is another sign of strategic folly. Hamas, a recognized terrorist organization, is an Iranian proxy, with a clear Jihadist agenda. Hamas has strong ties to the Islamic opposition in Egypt that wants to replace the pro-Western Mubarak regime. Arab moderate states are alarmed by the resilience of Hamas' rule in Gaza and the last thing they want is to aid this radical organization. The struggle against Hamas, just as the quest to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, serves American interests and those of its allies in the Middle East. It is only marginally related to Israel. Unfortunately, Obama’s Washington does not get it yet.

... In the Middle East, misguided American policies, particularly regarding Iran, may have disastrous consequences such as the fall of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey into Islamist hands. Under such a scenario, Israel would remain the only country where an American airplane could land safely in the Middle East; this is not a thought that Jerusalem relishes.

Nor, obviously, should any of us. The question ever more insistently poses itself, not just about the political neophyte Obama but all those hatchet-faced apparatchiks in senior foreign policy, defence and security posts within his administration: how can so many people in such a position be so staggeringly stupid?

Charles Krauthammer: Israel Right to Turn Down Hamas "Peace" Overture

Israel right to turn down Hamas 'peace' overture
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
May 9, 2009, 5:06PM

Apart from the time restriction (a truce that lapses after 10 years) and the refusal to accept Israel’s existence, Mr. Meshal’s terms approximate the Arab League peace plan …
— Hamas peace plan, as explained by The New York Times

Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
— Tom Lehrer, satirist

The Times conducted a five-hour interview with Hamas leader Khaled Meshal at his Damascus headquarters. Mirabile dictu, they’re offering a peace plan with a two-state solution. Except. The offer is not a peace but a truce that expires after 10 years. Meaning that after Israel has fatally weakened itself by settling millions of hostile Arab refugees in its midst, and after a decade of Hamas arming itself within a Palestinian state that narrows Israel to eight miles wide — Hamas restarts the war against a country it remains pledged to eradicate.

There is a phrase for such a peace: the peace of the grave.

Westerners may be stupid, but Hamas is not. It sees the new American administration making overtures to Iran and Syria. It sees Europe, led by Britain, beginning to accept Hezbollah. It sees itself as next in line. And it knows what to do. Yasser Arafat wrote the playbook.

With the 1993 Oslo accords, he showed what can be achieved with a fake peace treaty with Israel — universal diplomatic recognition, billions of dollars of aid, and control of Gaza and the West Bank, which Arafat turned into an armed camp.

Meshal sees the opportunity. Not only is the Obama administration reaching out to its erstwhile enemies in the region, but it begins its term by wagging an angry finger at Israel over the Netanyahu government’s ostensible refusal to accept a two-state solution.

Of all the phony fights to pick with Israel. No Israeli government would turn down a two-state solution in which the Palestinians accepted territorial compromise and genuine peace with a Jewish state. (And any government that did would be voted out in a day.) Netanyahu’s own defense minister, Ehud Barak, offered precisely such a deal in 2000. He even offered to divide Jerusalem and expel every Jew from every settlement remaining in the new Palestine.

The Palestinian response (for those who have forgotten) was: No. And no counteroffer. Instead, nine weeks later, Arafat unleashed a savage terror war that killed 1,000 Israelis.

Netanyahu is reluctant to agree to a Palestinian state before he knows what kind of state it will be. That elementary prudence should be shared by anyone who’s been sentient the last three years. The Palestinians already have a state, an independent territory with not an Israeli settler or soldier living on it. It’s called Gaza. And what is it? A terror base, Islamist in nature, Iranian-allied, militant and aggressive, that has fired more than 10,000 rockets and mortars at Israeli civilians.

If this is what a West Bank state is going to be, it would be madness for Israel or America or Jordan or Egypt or any other moderate Arab country to accept such a two-state solution. Which is why Netanyahu insists that the Palestinian Authority first build institutions — social, economic and military — to anchor a state that could actually carry out its responsibilities to keep the peace.

Apart from being reasonable, Netanyahu’s two-state skepticism is beside the point. His predecessor, Ehud Olmert, worshiped at the shrine of a two-state solution. He made endless offers of a two-state peace to the Palestinian Authority — and got nowhere.

Why? Because the Palestinians — going back to the U.N. partition resolution of 1947 — have never accepted the idea of living side by side with a Jewish state. Those like Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who might want to entertain such a solution, have no authority to do it. And those like Hamas’ Meshal, who have authority, have no intention of ever doing it.

Meshal’s gambit to dress up perpetual war as a two-state peace is yet another iteration of the Palestinian rejectionist tragedy. In its previous incarnation, Arafat lulled Israel and the Clinton administration with talk of peace while he methodically prepared his people for war.

Arafat waited seven years to tear up his phony peace. Meshal’s innovation? Ten — then blood.

Krauthammer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist based in Washington, D.C.

On-the-mark video

This was a final project of a student at the Betzalel school of art:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmfOLl92MrQ