Glick:The PLO's desperate defenders

Caroline B. Glick
www.jewishworldreview.com
06 May '11

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0511/glick050611.php3

In Israel and abroad, leftists have used three means to hide the meaning of the Fatah-Hamas pact from the public

By most accounts, the Fatah-Hamas unity deal signing ceremony Wednesday was a grand affair. Hamas terror-chief Khaled Mashal jetted in from Damascus.

PLO/Fatah/Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas flew in from Ramallah.

The ceremony was held under the auspices of the newly Muslim Brotherhood-friendly Egyptian intelligence services. UN representatives and Israeli Arab members of Knesset were on hand to witness the "historic" accord which officially put the PLO in bed with the Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and a terrorist organization dedicated to the annihilation of Israel and the establishment of a global caliphate.

No less significant than the pact itself, are the lengths the Left is going to obfuscate and belittle the importance of what happened. In Israel and abroad, leftists have used three means to hide the meaning of the pact from the public.

First, some have upheld the deal as a cause for celebration. Wednesday, the senior political commentator of Israel's Channel 10, Raviv Drucker, opined that the deal may increase the chance of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Ignoring the fact that the pact paves the way for Hamas's integration into the PA's US-trained security forces and membership in the PLO, Raviv vapidly claimed that the villain in all of the recent developments is none other than Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who is destroying all chance of peace by pointing out that the Palestinians have opted for war.

On the world stage, Drucker's case is being made by former US president Jimmy Carter. In an op-ed in the Washington Post on Wednesday, Carter similarly praised the deal as a step forward. Never mentioning the fact that Hamas is a terrorist organization, Carter claimed that the deal will enhance Palestinian democracy. It will also increase chances for a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel and peace between Israel and the Palestinians, he promised.

The legacy of a teetering peace

Caroline Glick
carolineglick.com
14 February '11

http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2011/02/the-legacy-of-a-teetering-peac.php

One of the first casualties of the Egyptian revolution may very well be Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. The Egyptian public's overwhelming animus towards Jews renders it politically impossible for any Egyptian leader to come out in support of the treaty.

Over the weekend, the junta now ruling Egypt refused to explicitly commit themselves to maintaining the treaty. Instead, under intense American pressure they sufficed with stating that they would maintain all of Egypt's international obligations.

According to news reports, the generals themselves are split in their positions on Israel. One group supports maintaining the treaty. The other supports its abrogation.

Ayman Nour, the head of the oppositionist Ghad Party and the man heralded as the liberal democratic alternative to Mubarak by Washington neo-conservatives has called for the peace treaty to be abrogated. In an interview with an Egyptian radio station he said, "The Camp David Accords are finished. Egypt has to at least conduct negotiations over conditions of the agreement."

For its part, the Muslim Brotherhood has been outspoken in its call to end the treaty since it was signed 32 years ago.

Whatever ends up happening, it is clear that Israel is entering a new era in its relations with Egypt. And before we can begin contending with its challenges, we must first consider the legacy of the peace treaty that then prime minister Menachem Begin signed with then Egyptian president Anwar Sadat on March 26, 1979.

What was the nature of Israel's agreement with Egypt? What was its impact on Israel's strategic vision? What were the strategic assumptions that formed the basis of its component parts? How did all of these issues impact Israel's perception of the long-term prospects for its relations with Egypt?

WHEN BEGIN and Sadat signed the peace treaty, their act was the culmination of 15 months of negotiations catalyzed by Sadat's visit to Jerusalem and his speech before the Knesset on November 20, 1977.

Sadat's visit to Israel's capital was an extraordinary gesture. Here was the man who just four years earlier had waged an unprovoked, brutal war of aggression against Israel that placed the country in mortal danger and killed some 2,600 of its finest sons.

Here was the leader of the country that had fought five unprovoked wars of aggression against Israel in 29 years.

And yet suddenly, here was this man, Israel's greatest foe, standing before the Knesset and declaring that he was not seeking a ceasefire, but peace.

As he put it, "I have not come to you to seek a partial peace, namely to terminate the state of belligerency at this stage...I have come to you so that together we might build a durable peace based on justice, to avoid the shedding of one single drop of blood from an Arab or an Israeli."

The effect of Sadat's visit on the Israeli psyche generally and on Begin's mindset in particular was profound. A new book of the two leaders' correspondence, Peace in the Making: The Menachem Begin-Anwar Sadat Personal Correspondence edited by Harry Hurwitz and Yisrael Medad of the Begin Heritage Center presents readers with a portrait of the Israeli leader enthralled with the belief that he and Sadat were embarking their nations on the road to a peaceful future.


shilohmuse At the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, book launch for 
Peace in the Making: The Menachem Begin - Anwar Sadat Personal Correspondence

But it was not to be. Whether Sadat was purposely deceptive or whether he was simply blocked from implementing his vision of peace by an assassin's bullet in 1981is unclear. True, he committed Egypt committed to peace. The peace treaty contains an entire annex devoted to specific commitments to cultivate every sort of cultural, social and economic tie imaginable. But both Sadat and his successor Mubarak breached every one of them.

As the intervening 32 years since the treaty was signed have shown, in essence, the deal was nothing more than a ceasefire. Israel surrendered the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and in exchange, Egypt has not staged a military attack against Israel from its territory.

Another Tack: No one to trust

Sarah Honig
Another Tack
10 February '11





“We make our fortunes and then we call them fate.”


– Benjamin Disraeli

Disraeli’s sardonic wisdom remains valid despite all of history’s convolutions and revolutions since his day. Nothing is propelled by blind destiny, because it’s foretold, inscribed on some astrological chart and preordaining consequences that cannot be averted.

Inevitably human hands pull the lever that sets cataclysmic geopolitical events in motion. The human hands that unsettled Egypt, and with it the entire Mideast, are primarily those of the American electorate which elevated Barack Obama to the presidency.

At that pivotal point it should have been clear that the end is near for whatever remnants of delicate equilibrium still endure in this region. Obama ushered in chaos even if he chose Cairo as his venue for the 2009 speech in which he sucked up to Islam. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak significantly absented himself from that milestone sham. He could sense the ill-winds blowing.

This is eerily reminiscent of the series of mind-blowing blunders toward Iran during the term of Jimmy Carter, the past president most like Obama, though hardly as radical. In his memoirs, Ayatollah Khomeini’s first foreign minister Ebrahim Yazdi writes that “the shah was doomed the minute Carter entered the White House.”

The novice president indiscreetly sent all the wrong signals, beginning with an exceedingly public cold shoulder to the shah. The mullahs were heartened and exuded confidence. Increasingly shaken, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi sought to ingratiate himself with Carter by relaxing restrictions on opposition agitators. That further emboldened the religious fanatics and spawned unrest. Carter admonished the shah against quelling the disturbances by force.

Willy-nilly, Carter’s bungling was instrumental in installing a reactionary, repressive theocracy in Teheran. Under the banner of freedom, he boosted the forces of medieval darkness. The shah was a goner and the ayatollahs repaid Carter by holding 52 American embassy staffers hostage for 444 days until he was replaced by Ronald Reagan.

(Read full "No one to trust")

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Is Obama Carter, but without the good fortune?

Soccer Dad
14 May '10

In his devastating critique of ex-President Jimmy Carter, Our Worse Ex-President, Joshua Muravchik wrote:

Carter's interest in the conflict is in one sense natural: the agreement he mediated between Israel and Egypt at Camp David in 1978 stands as one of the few solid achievements of his presidency. Yet the intensity of his rhetoric suggests that his absorption with this issue derives from something deeper than the pleasure of returning to the scene of past triumphs.

Generally, the Camp David treaty is considered the major accomplishment of Carter's term in office. Yet, as Jason Maoz recounts, the impetus for Sadat going to the Jerusalem was a miscalculation by Carter.

Standing out among Carter's flubs was his decision to issue a joint statement on the Middle East with the Soviet Union. This totally unexpected document, released on October 1, 1977, marked the first time the U.S. officially employed the phrase "legitimate rights of the Palestinian people."
The communiqué also recommended the conveying of an Arab-Israel peace conference in Geneva, with the participation of Palestinian representatives and with the Americans and the Soviets acting as joint guarantors of any agreement that might be reached.

Reaction in the U.S. was immediate - and furious. "[A] political firestorm erupted," wrote Middle East expert Steven Spiegel. "After American officials had worked successfully for years to reduce Russian influence over the Mideast peace process and in the area as whole, critics could not understand why the administration had suddenly invited Moscow to return."

If there was anyone more incensed at Carter than the Israelis and most American lawmakers, it was Anwar Sadat. It had been just five years since the Egyptian leader stunned the world by unceremoniously expelling thousands of Soviet military advisers and their families from Egypt, his most concrete signal to date of his desire to align his country with the West.

Yet Carter ignored Sadat's break with Moscow. A number of other factors came into play and ...

Eventually, of course, the U.S. would broker what became known as the Camp David accords and oversee the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. But Carter had been blindsided by Sadat, with the compliance of Begin, in response to the American president's inexplicable decision to involve the Soviets in the peace process.

(Read full post)

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Target Israel

Jamie Glazov
Frontpagemag.com
01 April '10

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Kenneth Levin, a clinical instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a Princeton-trained historian, and a commentator on Israeli politics. He is the author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege.

FP: Kenneth Levin, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
I would like to talk to you today about the Obama administration waging war on Israel. Tell us the ingredients of this war and why it is being waged.

Levin: Let’s first consider the elements of policy that are evidence of Obama’s anti-Israel animus. Virtually his first step in Arab-Israeli diplomacy was to demand a total freeze of all Jewish construction beyond the pre-1967 cease-fire lines. This is something which no previous American administration has ever demanded. In addition, it has never been a pre-condition to previous Israeli-Palestinian talks, nor has it ever been undertaken or agreed upon by any previous Israeli government. At the same time, the Obama administration made no comparable demands of the Palestinians or their Arab supporters.

Somewhat as an afterthought, and with much less fanfare, the Administration did suggest the Palestinians ought to refrain from anti-Israel incitement and that Arab states ought to make some gestures of openness towards Israel. The former request was ignored and the latter was explicitly rejected, but the Administration remained focused on pressuring Israel.

Noteworthy in this regard was Jackson Diehl’s article in the Washington Post on an interview with PA prime minister Mahmoud Abbas in Washington at the time of Abbas’s first meeting with President Obama after the president’s inauguration. Abbas conveyed to Diehl that he did not feel the need to make any gestures towards Israel to advance the search for “peace”; that, for example, the Palestinian Authority’s anti-Israel incitement and rejection of compromise on key issues were not problems he had to address. Rather, he could wait until sufficient Israeli concessions were delivered to him. The impression was clearly that this stance derived from what Abbas learned of the Administration’s attitudes: The pressure was going to be focused on Israel and nothing of significance was expected of the Palestinians. Indeed, this was Diehl’s explicit conclusion: “[President Obama] has revived a long-dormant Palestinian fantasy: that the United States will simply force Israel to make critical concessions, whether or not its democratic government agrees, while Arabs passively watch and applaud.”

(Read full interview)
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American Politics (1980)

Today's Golden Oldie is from October 1980.

The cartoon was about Jimmy Carter who was on the campaign trail for a bid at a second term as U.S. President. He lost.

With Obama we now face an American President who treats the repression of Iranian demonstrators as an internal Iranian affair while taking a stern and personal interest in the question of where Jews may or may not be allowed to live in the city of Jerusalem!?!! This Presidency does not feel the need to hide its double-standard support of the "Palestinian" cause behind empty pro-Israel promises.

It will be interesting to see if Obama will, like Jimmy Carter, turn out to be a one-term wonder.