“When the chips are down, I have Israel’s back.”
— Barack Obama, AIPAC
conference, March 4, 2012
conference, March 4, 2012
The
audience — overwhelmingly Jewish, passionately pro-Israel and supremely
gullible — applauded
wildly. Four years later — his last election behind him, with a
month to go in office and with no need to fool Jew or gentile again — Obama
took the measure of Israel’s back and slid
a knife into it.
People don’t
quite understand the damage done to Israel by the U.S. abstention that
permitted passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning
Israel over settlements. The
administration pretends this is nothing but a restatement of
long-standing U.S. opposition to settlements.
Nonsense.
For the past 35 years, every administration, including a reelection-seeking Obama
himself in
2011, has protected Israel with the U.S. veto because such a Security Council
resolution gives immense legal ammunition to every boycotter, anti-Semite and
zealous European prosecutor to penalize and punish Israelis.
An ordinary
Israeli who lives or works in the Old City of Jerusalem becomes an
international pariah, a potential outlaw. To say nothing of the soldiers of
Israel’s citizen army. “Every pilot and every officer and every soldier,” said
a confidant of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, “we are
waiting for him at The Hague,” i.e. the International
Criminal Court.
Moreover,
the resolution undermines the very foundation of a half-century of American
Middle East policy. What becomes of “land for peace” if the territories that
Israel was to have traded for peace are, in advance, declared to be Palestinian
land to which Israel has no claim?
The peace
parameters enunciated
so ostentatiously by Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday are nearly
identical to the Clinton parameters that Yasser Arafat was offered and rejected
in 2000 and
that Abbas was offered by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. Abbas,
too, walked away.
Kerry
mentioned none of this because it undermines his blame-Israel narrative. Yet
Palestinian rejectionism works. The Security Council just declared the
territories legally Palestinian — without the Palestinians having to concede
anything, let alone peace. What incentive do the Palestinians have to negotiate
when they can get the terms — and territory — they seek handed to them for free
if they hold out long enough?
The administration
claims a
kind of passive innocence on the text of the resolution, as if it had come upon
it at the last moment. We are to believe that the ostensible sponsors — New
Zealand, Senegal, Malaysia and a Venezuela that cannot
provide its own people with toilet paper, let alone food —
had for months been sweating the details of Jewish housing in East Jerusalem.
Nothing new
here, protests deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes: “When we see the facts on the
ground, again, deep into the West Bank beyond the separation barrier, we feel
compelled to speak up against those actions.”
This is a
deception. Everyone knows that remote outposts are not the issue. Under any
peace, they will be swept away. Even right-wing Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman,
who lives in one of these West Bank settlements, has stated publicly that “I even agree to vacate my
settlement if there really will be a two-state solution.” Where’s the obstacle
to peace?
A second
category of settlement is the close-in blocs that border 1967 Israel. Here,
too, we know in advance how these will be disposed of: They’ll become Israeli
territory and, in exchange, Israel will swap over some of its land to a
Palestinian state. Where’s the obstacle to peace here?
It’s the
third category of “settlement” that is the most contentious and that Security
Council Resolution 2334 explicitly condemns: East
Jerusalem. This is not just scandalous; it’s absurd. America acquiesces to a
declaration that, as a matter of international law, the Jewish state has no
claim on the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, indeed the entire Jewish Quarter
of Jerusalem. They belong to Palestine.
The Temple
Mount is the most sacred site in all of Judaism. That it should be declared
foreign to the Jewish people is as if the Security Council declared Mecca and
Medina to be territory to which Islam has no claim. Such is the Orwellian
universe Israel inhabits.
At the very
least, Obama should have insisted that any reference to East Jerusalem be
dropped from the resolution or face a U.S. veto. Why did he not? It’s
incomprehensible — except as a parting shot of personal revenge on Benjamin
Netanyahu. Or perhaps as a revelation of a deep-seated antipathy to Israel that
simply awaited a safe political interval for public expression.
Another
legacy moment for Barack Obama. And his most shameful.