Last week President Obama gave an address to what he calls the “Muslim world” in Cairo, Egypt. First, the “Muslim world” is no more homogeneous racially, ethnically, or religiously (in ideology/practice) than is the “Christian world.” A Muslim in Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Kenya or Iran has different concerns than say a Hamas leader in Gaza, or the dictator of Egypt. It’s naive and, I would think, insulting to group over one billion people by religion on issues that may not matter to even a majority of them. The majority of Muslims live in Indonesia and near by in South East Asia, does the President really think what the Israelis and Palestinians do about Jewish suburbs in Jerusalem is their most pressing concern?
The President’s change in the US’ relationship with Israel has been coming over the past few months, most importantly with the Obama administrations push for the Saudi “peace plan,” and he only brushed the issue in his Cairo speech. Still, it’s an incredibly important topic.
Although the US has officially been against Israeli settlements in the West Bank, George Freidman from Stratfor.com points out that “the basic understanding between the two sides has been that the United States would oppose settlements formally but that this would not evolve into a fundamental disagreement.”
Well Obama and his administration have made it a fundamental disagreement. Obama said that “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.” The Israeli’s agree that new settlement construction will stop, but refuse to halt “natural growth” in existing settlements, which are essentially the suburbs of Jerusalem. What does halting “natural growth” mean? If residents of the so-called settlements were forced to cease “natural growth” it would mean that they wouldn’t be able to add a room to their house for a new child, moreover, if a child is born in the neighborhood an adult would have to leave. Israel decided to stop the construction of new settlements as part of the 2003 Road Map, because it will seek peace with it’s neighbors even if they will only consider peace when every Jew is forced out of their lands.
Settlements have become a major point of disagreement in the Palestine-Israel conflict since “natural growth” was added to the Bush Road Map in 2003, because as Caroline B. Glick notes in her recent Commentary Magazine article, the recent “peace plans” assume a Judenrein purely Muslim Arab state in the West Bank and Gaza, with a religiously heterogeneous Jewish state that, according to the Saudi Plan would accept millions of Muslim Palestinians as citizens next door.
The settlement issue is a defining shift in the US relationship with Israel because prior to the Obama administration, the US recognized that the burden lay on the Palestinians to cease terror and recognize the Jewish State of Israel before peace could be accomplished; now, the President is clearly laying the burden for peace on Israel’s back. It is either a misreading of history or the administration’s outright hostility towards Israel that has caused this shift.
The Saudi Peace plan which the President has signed on to is the most hostile plan for peace in the history of these misbegotten plans. It seeks to trade Israeli castration, both as a Jewish state and as a militarily defensible sovereign entity, for some sort of recognition that a state called Israel actually exists from the Arab League. A clear reading of history will show that the Palestinian leaders, who are all leaders of various jihadist terrorist groups, have no interest in the creation of a peaceful Palestinian state. A Palestinian state has been roundly rejected since the international recognition of Israel in 1947 until the 2000 Camp David accords which would have given Palestinians 98% of the land they wanted and ended in the second intifada, the most violent terror war sponsored by the Palestinian leaders against Israel since the first intifada in the 1980s, and Palestinians continue to reject it.
Obama and his administration are mistaken in attempting to impose peace in the region by capitulating on the interests of our ally Israel and taking every chance to appease it’s terrorist neighbors. The US’ choice to outwardly approve of the ethic cleansing of all Jews from the West Bank in return for a mass immigration of Palestinian Muslims to Israel is dangerous both for Israel and for democratic nations the US supports around the world. What the President is saying is that the US will no longer accept the moral absolute that all people are entitled to liberty and freedom, and instead will take a morally relativistic approach and appease the world’s most hateful tyrants in exchange for smiles and small talk at public events.
What needs to be worked on in the West Bank is the Palestinian Authorities total lack of authority. The Hamas terror group was rightfully elected by the people in 2006, and it took power from the Fatah terror group. While the President said in his Cairo speech that the Palestinians are living under “the humiliation of occupation,” the ones who are humiliating the Palestinians are their terrorist overlords who care more about destroying the Jewish people than feeding their own.
Peace through internationally imposed regulations may not be likely anytime soon, and definitely not in the next four years. Instead the US should be fighting for freedom from terror, indoctrination and tyranny in the Palestinian territories and in the various tyrannies that border them. The US can help Israel and the Palestinians in the future by refusing to fund a Palestinian “government” that indoctrinates its children in hatred, uses welfare funds to build arresenals of weapons, and refuses to accept the prescence of a free, peaceful, and democratic Jewish state as it’s neighbor. Stability and peace will never be possible as long as the history and facts on the ground continue to go unrecognized by the US, the Palestinians, and the “internationl comunity.”
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