Peace in our tomb
The British media is reporting the Annapolis meeting with an absolutely stupefying degree of ignorance and blindness. The story pretty well agreed by one and all is that this meeting has the ingredients for a major breakthrough, because never before have the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships been so ripe for compromise and agreement; and yet it is likely to be yet another tragically missed opportunity, because both Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas are weak leaders who are unable to take their people with them.
The truth, as I have been repeatedly saying, is very different. America is putting Israel under enormous pressure to accept conditions which would entail its destruction. As a result, it is strengthening the mortal enemies not just of Israel but of the free world, against which they are currently at war. America is congratulating itself for having brought these rogue states to Annapolis because it thinks this augurs a breakthrough in their recognition of Israel and the beginning of an alliance against Iran. On the contrary, it means instead that these rogue states understand that America is offering them the means to weaken and ultimately destroy Israel — and thus in turn dramatically weaken the west. For these purposes, Iran is an irrelevance (except for the presence at Annapolis of Syria, through which its patron Iran will actually be strengthened). Such is the criminal stupidity of an America that has fallen under the catastrophic sway of the Baker-Hamilton 'new realist' doctrine, which holds that engaging with the mortal enemies of civilisation weakens them and strengthens those defending civilisation. It does not. It strengthens those enemies and weakens their designated victims.
None of this, of course, is reflected in the degraded British coverage, which is focused narrowly upon the Israel/Palestinian impasse and underpinned by a belief that Israel is the problem because of its fundamental illegiitmacy -- a belief based on profound historical ignorance. In the Telegraph Tim Butcher, for example, says inter alia:
…Israel is here to stay. It will stay, mostly, on the land won by Zionist fighters in 1948.But Israel was not created by a Zionist land grab. What happened in 1948 was that, after the UN declared the State of Israel as an internationally recognised legal fact, five Arab states immediately invaded and tried to wipe it out. The land was therefore not ‘won by Zionist fighters’; it was the land of a legally recognised state defending itself against annihilation. The ceasefire lines at the end of that war have served as a de facto boundary of Israel ever since, but they are known in Israel as ‘Auschwitz borders’ because they are militarily indefensible — as was seen from the fact that Israel faced being wiped out in 1967 before the wholly unforseen victory of the Six-Day War. As a result of that war, which showed a shocked Israel just how vulnerable it was to being destroyed, it held onto the West Bank and Gaza until it disengaged from Gaza two years ago. Now the deal on the table at Annapolis — the old Saudi ‘peace’ plan —would force it to return to those ‘Auschwitz borders’.
In the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick points out that the legitimacy of Israel rests not on the UN vote of 1947, whose 60th anniversary falls today, but on the decision in 1922 by the precursor to the UN, the League of Nations, that a Jewish state should be set up in Palestine. (At that time, Palestine included what is now not only Israel but the West Bank and Gaza; when the Mandate to admninister Palestine and set up a Jewish national home within it was originally granted to Britain at the San Remo conference in 1920, Palesrine also consisted of what is now Jordan). This was because it was recognised that the Jews had an inalienable historic connection to that land on account of the fact that the Jews were the only people for whom it had ever been their national home. And that historic claim encompassed far more than present-day Israel -- but as a result of British perfidy, the Jews were finally left with a tiny fraction of the original promise. As Glick records:
As the League of Nations mandate made clear, Britain was supposed to preside over the territory of the Mandatory Palestine and to foster the establishment of a Jewish state which would eventually replace the British mandatory government. Yet almost from the get-go the British did just the opposite. They established the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan on the majority of the land slated for the Jewish state. Moreover, they took all possible steps to prevent the Jews from establishing a state on the remainder of the land. They blocked Jewish immigration and limited the right of Jews to purchase and settle the land to a tiny portion of the territory - which they believed would be too small to sustain a sovereign state.
It was due to the British failure to destroy Zionism and block the Jewish people from establishing their state that the UN partition plan was brought into being. That is, far from establishing a Jewish state, 181 simply accepted an already existing national entity. Despite the best efforts of Britain, the Jews had already established their state in 1947. It would have existed even if the resolution had not passed.
Now the British along with the Americans are continuing that process of throwing the Jewish people to the Arab and Islamic wolves. To get a better idea of the real implications of Annapolis, read, for example,
* David Horowitz, who reports that when he managed to get a question put to the Saudi foreign minister Saud al Faisal:
'What steps are you prepared to take right now toward normalizing ties with Israel?’the answer was:
‘None.’Furthermore, unlike other journalists the Israeli press were not even allowed inside the Saudi security barrier; and the refusal of the Saudis to make any contact whatsoever with the Israeli delegation at Annapolis means that the respective delegations will even use different doors to enter the meeting room. Apartheid, anyone?
* In the Washington Times, here's Frank Gaffney:
The interests of the free world in general and the United States in particular will suffer from what the Saudis and most of the other attendees have in mind for the Jewish State — namely, its dismemberment and ultimate destruction…The gang assembled at the Naval Academy — Europeans, Russians, non-governmental organizations as well as Arabs — will largely insist that the Israelis allow the capital of a new Palestinian state to be established in the section of Jerusalem most holy to Jews (and Christians). Never mind that from East Jerusalem, the Israeli-controlled remainder of the city can be shelled at will with Kassam rockets or even mortars.
At Annapolis, virtually everyone will also agree that Israel must accept some arrangement affording rights to millions of Arabs who have been, as the esteemed historian Bernard Lewis pointed out in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, deliberately condemned to refugee status (in some cases, for as many as five generations) by their regional ‘brothers’ and U.N. enablers. Everyone understands this demand will translate demographically into the end of the Jewish State…
Today, Palestinians can remain in the terror business — can even officially and explicitly refuse to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish homeland — and still enjoy the administration's political support and access to U.S. military equipment, training and vast amounts of taxpayers' funds.
* Professor Barry Rubin of the Interdisciplinary Centre, Herzliya writes:
What most of Washington simply fails to understand is that any real demand for Palestinian or Arab concessions will be fodder for radical groups and frighten Arab regimes, pushing the latter away from support for America rather than toward it. And any Israeli concessions obtained by this process will not satisfy their demands either…
Iraq? Syria is the main sponsor of the terrorist insurgency. It has a deep interest in ensuring that no moderate, stable, pro-Western regime takes root in Syria.
The radical alliance? Syria is a leading factor in the problem, a partner with Iran for twenty years. Anyone who believes that Damascus can be split from Tehran understands nothing about the mutual benefits Syria gets from the alliance, far greater than anything the West could possibly give to its dictator President Bashar al-Asad.
Iranian nuclear? When Iran gets atomic weapons it will be a great day for Syria, ensuring its strategic protection, damaging Western influence, and helping the radical Islamist cause that Syria backs.
American credibility? It undermines years of U.S. efforts to pressure Bashar away from radical adventurism. Syria can now show that it can kill Americans soldiers in Iraq, murder democratic Lebanese politicians, foment Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip, and sponsor Hizballah’s effort to seize power in Lebanon without incurring any serious risk or cost.
On the contrary, Syria is now making demands on the United States for concessions in order to entice it to show up. This is happening at the very moment when plans for an international trial of Syrian leaders for political assassinations in Lebanon is gathering momentum, as Syria’s campaign to install a puppet government in Beirut has just been foiled.
Is the conference’s purpose, however ill-conceived, to make progress on Arab-Israeli peace and strengthen the Palestinian Authority? Having Syria present lets in the main Arab sponsor of Hamas, a state working tirelessly to throw out the current Palestinian leadership and raise the level of Arab-Israeli violence.
* Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal writes:
Yet the fact that Ms. Rice's Syria policy is now a facsimile of Speaker Pelosi's confirms Mr. Assad's long-held view that he has nothing serious to fear from this administration. So look out for more aggressive Syrian misbehavior in Lebanon, including the continued arming of Hezbollah; the paralysis of its political process; the assassination of anti-Syrian parliamentarians and journalists; the insertion of Sunni terrorist cells in Palestinian refugee camps, and the outright seizure of Lebanon's eastern hinterlands. Look out, too, for continued cooperation with North Korea on WMD projects: Despite Israel's September attack on an apparent nuclear facility, the AP reports that North Korean technicians are back in Syria, teaching their Arab pupils how to load chemical warheads on ballistic missiles. And don't hold your breath expecting Syria's good behavior on its Iraqi frontier to last much longer.* And finally, here's David Meir-Levi on the monstrous Big Lie (perpetrated by Israeli leftists no less than their western comrades) by which Palestinian aggressors and Israeli victims have had their roles reversed:
This mendacious narrative is stalwartly bolstered by a growing host of pseudo-academics in Western universities, and by a cadre of Western journalists, who churn out books and articles that effectively rewrite history and archaeology in order to erase Israel’s connection to the Holy Land and thus deny both the Christian and Jewish historic and religious roots in the Land of Israel.
This propaganda campaign to legitimize the 60-year-old Arab war against Israel and to create the fiction of the ‘Palestinian people’ as the poor oppressed victims of imperialist colonialist Israel, illegally occupying ‘Historic Palestine,’ is a veritable war against History. It deals in lies, just the kind of lies Goebbels had in mind. And the biggest lie of all is the existence of a ‘Palestinian People.’…
This ploy was, perhaps inadvertently, revealed to the West in a public interview with Zahir Muhse’in, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, in a March 31, 1977, interview with the Amsterdam-based newspaper Trouw.‘The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.’ (Emphasis added.)
Arafat himself said the same thing, on many occasions, and asserts often in his authorized biography (Alan Hart, Arafat: Terrorist or Peace Maker): ‘[T]he Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasser Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel.’ But such admissions could not stem the enthusiasm with which these fictions were greeted by Western leaders. Within a few years, the USSR's invention of the fictitious narrative of Palestinian national aspirations and rights of self-determination created the facade of morality and legitimacy that the terrorists needed to curry favor with the EU, the UK, and the U.S. This same facade facilitated the Soviet implementation of its takeover, with the Arab bloc, of the UN General Assembly, and UN committees and functions outside of the Security Council.
The cause of ‘Palestine’ has always been a Trojan horse against the west — to which the west, led by a myopic America, has been and remains wilfully blind. The fact that for the past six decades Israel has been left to swing in the violent wind by an America and Britain which pay cynical lip-service to its elementary need for security while sanitising the cause of its would-be exterminators — whom it has repeatedly stroked, flattered, funded and armed instead of holding them to account for their genocidal belligerency — is the single most important reason for the perpetuation of the Middle East conflict and has inspired and strengthened terrorists across the globe.
People are blind to this because they want to believe that conflicts can be resolved without war or further bloodshed. This hope is so powerful that it drives them to swallow several dozen lies before breakfast. It means that anyone who talks about ‘peace’ is automatically fawned upon, however bloody his hands may be; he becomes by definition a middle-of-the-road moderate while anyone who cries foul at this is labelled a hardliner. Standing up for truth and justice thus becomes an extreme position, to be relegated to the margins of debate or excluded altogether. This is the equivalent of saying in the 1930s that those who warned of the threat from Hitler were hardliners as opposed to the sensible moderate people who were hailing ‘peace in our time’.
The supposed ‘hardliners’ are then treated as equivalent to the violent aggressors on the other side; so Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas, for example, are said to be equally ‘hardliners’. Thus the would-be perpetrators of genocide are equated with their designated victims. Those victims are thus lined up for destruction and illegitimate aggression has its victory, courtesy of a ‘peace process’ that is much more likely to lead directly to war – a war in which the bad guys are handed an incalculable advantage by their victims.
Meanwhile, Matthew Kalman reports in the San Francisco Chronicle that fears of a Hamas coup in the West Bank have sent Palestinian Authority officials to Russia to be trained in counter-terrorism, and similar courses are being held in France, Germany and Algeria. For the first time, Mahmoud Abbas has said Hamas will have to be brought down by force:
Palestinian officials have not explained how Fatah might regain Gaza. The accepted wisdom is that Abbas cannot be seen to retake Gaza by relying on Israeli military support. But many Fatah supporters say they cannot overcome Hamas without Israeli intervention and are coming to see it as a lesser evil.One of the Al Himaya Wal Isnad [PA] officers said there is endless speculation among his colleagues that they might be sent to secure control of the territory. ‘We talk about an Israeli invasion of Gaza all the time,’ said the officer. ‘Of course we are training for the day after Israel cuts Hamas in half and then we can go in and clean up.’
The Annapolis farce is at best a sideshow to history; at worst, it will unleash yet darker horrors still.