PDavidHornik

Bush administration kills Israelis

Condi has three generals strong-arming Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak--who is no right-winger but rather an anti-right-winger--into making "security concessions" to the Pals., such as bringing hundreds of Pal. "policemen" into West Bank cities, taking down Israeli roadblocks, etc. Barak raises objections that such measures endanger Israeli lives, then folds, with the Israeli defense establishment defining the measures as "calculated risks." Definition of "calculated risks"--Israelis who don't yet have life insurance better take some out. Ido Zoltan, 29-year-old father of two, was murdered in November by two PA "policemen" armed with Jordanian-supplied weapons as part of Israeli-approved U.S. policy. The next month two young off-duty Israeli soldiers were murdered while hiking by members of Fatah and/or the more "official" PA security apparatus.

Without belittling the difficulty of standing up to a superpower ally, if I was running things the Israeli prime minister, along with, possibly, the foreign minister or the defense minister, and with the chief of staff lurking in the background, would hold a press conference and announce that, with due respect, they cannot keep complying with U.S. policies that force them to forfeit the lives of Israeli citizens. There would be a storm but I believe ultimately, in this scenario, Israel would come out on top. Instead all that sitting-duck Israelis can do is count the days till the Bush administration leaves office and pray that what replaces it won't be even worse. As for the Olmert "administration," we don't even have the consolation of knowing how long it will last.

Accurate analysis

Israeli researcher Jonathan Spyer offers this fine, concise, clear-eyed analysis of the disconnect between the imaginary Fatah and the real Fatah, and its implications. I would just dicker about a couple of things. There is no "coalition of pro-Western states" in the region but rather a coalition of Sunni states that genuinely fear Iran and, in some cases, their own Shiite minorities and may be willing to cooperate with the U.S. if it shows the resolve to confront Iran; if not they'll make their accommodations with Iran. These societies' ethos precludes any genuine pro-Westernism but the regimes are capable of aligning themselves with American power against perceived threats.

Spyer mentions the growing Jordanian presence in the West Bank and its implications as a counterstrategy to the misconceived approach of strengthening Fatah. Letting the Jordanians in could be a promising development but it, too, entails considerable risks. The Jordanian regime is moderate; the society is almost monolithically anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli and mostly anti-Western. Here too "cooperation" could eventually prove to be a pitfall and another evasion of the fact that the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is an integral but very small geographical unit; Israel may not be able to divide up control of this land with any other party.

But trying the Jordanian option is at least a lot more reasonable than the terrible, continuing Fatah-fetish, based on a degree of delusion that by now is inexcusable and immoral.

Nutso U.S. policy

A U.S. monitoring team now officially confirms what every single knowledgeable Israeli could have told them all along--that the PA's supposed efforts to "fight terrorism" are a joke. The U.S. would never have asked other terrorist regimes like Saddam's or the Taliban's to "fight terror" because it would have known this is a contradiction in terms. However,

With regard to Israel's obligations, the Americans recently gave both the government and the defense establishment a list of 10 questions concerning outposts, settlement construction and other issues. Associates of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been harshly critical of Jerusalem's failure to evacuate outposts, remove roadblocks and take other measures to improve the PA's economy, such as establishing industrial parks along the seam between Israel and the West Bank.

Critical of "failure to remove roadblocks"!--roadblocks being one of the absolutely critical measures in Israel's prevention of terrorism! That is, criticize the PA for not fighting terror--criticize Israel for fighting it! And of course, the usual--the world will be better if Judea and Samaria are Judenrein, the U.S. has nothing better to do and no bigger problems than to snoop around checking if some Jews are building homes. And don't forget--if you have a terrorist entity next door, build industrial parks for it!

Et tu, Richard?

Some of us might have hoped for something better out of him, but at a Ramallah press conference with Abbas today VP Cheney laid down the same sort of nonsense.

Cheney said...an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement will require "painful concessions" by both sides, but said with hard work "success will be achieved."

...The US remains "strongly committed" to the establishment of a Palestinian state, Cheney said. Achieving that, he said, "will require tremendous effort at the negotiating table and painful concessions on both sides. It will also require a determination to defeat those who are committed to violence and who refuse to accept the basic right of the other side to exist."

Cheney was referring to Hamas, which took over the Gaza Strip last year and continues to rocket southern Israel.

"Terror and rockets do not merely kill innocent civilians. They also kill the legitimate hopes and aspirations of the Palestinian people," he said.

Quoting US President George W. Bush, Cheney said a Palestinian state was "long overdue," and promised US assistance toward that end. "This can be done, and if all concerned stay at the work, success will be achieved," he said.

Oh, dear. Maybe he didn't see that bit about 84% of Pals. approving the massacre in the yeshiva in Jerusalem. To portray Hamas as an evil force that somehow infiltrated the Palestinian people and kills their hopes, when Cheney knows damn well that the Pals. elected Hamas in January 2006, and should also know, if he bothers paying attention to these things, that the latest poll shows a majority of Pals. continuing to support them; and to maintain the disgraceful lie that Fatah is, any case, any better or less brutal or less intent on Israel's demise--these are deeply discouraging things.

 

Happy Purim

Israel knows how to celebrate despite the tensions.

Fatah goes Islamist

Western diplomats in their cowardice and ignorance cling to a false dichotomy between Islamist Hamas and "secular" Fatah. As Ido Zelkovitz explains in Middle East Quarterly, Fatah has long had religious elements in its ideology and more recently has taken a sharp and irreversible turn toward Islamism. Western diplomats and the more cowardly Israeli leaders can be expected to keep covering up this inconvenient fact in their zeal to preserve the fiction of Abbas as leading a "secular, moderate" Fatah that wants peace with Israel. To this end the Bush administration keeps financing, and providing weapons and military training, to what is actually a religious, jihadist movement with close ties to Hizballah, Islamic Jihad, Syria, Iran, and Hamas itself.

Muslims against Abbas

A website of reformist Muslims posts my Wednesday Frontpage article on Mahmoud Abbas and gives him appropriate honors.

Tyrrell sums it up

Emmett Tyrrell sums up what's happened since Israel's 2005 "disengagement." Among other things he notes:

On the evening of March 6 in Jerusalem, a heavily armed Palestinian terrorist from nearby East Jerusalem entered the Mercaz Harav yeshiva and opened fire on the unarmed teenaged students studying there. Eight died, and eleven were badly wounded before another student and an off-duty soldier shot the terrorist. The atrocity ignited wild celebrations in Gaza.

[According to] findings just published by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research...84% of Palestinians approved of this attack.

Think about it--84% approve of a massacre of teenage boys and young men. "Thou shalt not murder" got lost in the shuffle somewhere....

Moreover, 64% approve of Hamas randomly firing rockets and mortars from Gaza into Israeli communities and 75% favor ending negotiations between their leaders and the Israeli government.... For handing over Gaza to the Palestinians this is the thanks Israel has received. Now Palestinians want further Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank. One does not have to be a student of the late Niccolo Machiavelli to advise against further withdrawals....

Tyrrell could have added that the current U.S. policy, based on an obsessive push for further Israeli withdrawals and granting the Palestinians sovereign statehood, is a disgrace to most of the U.S. conservative movement, its values and insights, and to America itself.

A strange way to show a love of peace

Walter Williams gives as good a summary as I've seen of the problem of "peace-loving Muslims."

There is no way terrorists can carry on their operations, obtain explosive materials, run terrorist training camps, raise money without the knowledge of other Muslims, whether they're government officials, bankers, family members, friends or neighbors. ... those millions of peace-loving Muslims do not speak out and expose terrorists and don't more fully cooperate with domestic and international authorities trying to stop terrorists....

Meretz on the skids

According to this report Israel's far-Left Meretz Party is marked for obsolescence.

The signs are unmistakable: Meretz is a party literally holding a walking stick in one hand and a Filipino with the other. Its position in the polls puts it anywhere between total obliteration and just making the cut for the Knesset....

Nice to start the day with a boost! Meretz people claim that despite the sagging popularity of their party and closely related nonparty movements, their far-Left advocacy of a (second) Palestinian state, once a fringe position, has entered the mainstream. There, unfortunately, they have a point, with former Likud politicians like Olmert and Livni having embraced this noble cause of creating yet another Muslim-Arab dictatorship and making Israel indefensible. Still, it's good to see Meretz's explicit leftist message being rejected, or arousing no interest, among the nation's youth. In addition to the Pal.-state issue Meretz espouses a reflexive, Greenwich Village left-liberalism on all economic and social issues. Israel also has worrisome radical-conservative tendencies on the religious far Right; what it needs is balanced discourse on the issues--something it wouldn't have gotten from Meretz even if Meretz had continued to exist to any substantial degree.