Natanyahu to Obama: Get Off Israel's Back

  Caroline Glick

June 15, 2009

  Caroline Glick writes for the Jerusalem Post and
  her own blog on the Internet

Obama's losing streak and Israel

    Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's speech Sunday evening at Bar-Ilan
    University had one goal: To get US President Barack Obama off of
    Israel's back.

    Netanyahu's speech was an eloquent, rational and at times impassioned
    defense of Israel. For Israeli ears, after years of former prime
    minister Ehud Olmert's and former foreign minister Tzipi Livni's
    continuous assaults on Israeli rights, and their strident defenses of
    capitulation to the Palestinians and the Syrians, Netanyahu's address
    was a breath of fresh air. But it is hard to see how it could have
    possibly had any lasting impact on Obama or his advisers.

    To be moved by rational argument, a person has to be open to rational
    discourse. And what we have witnessed over the past week with the
    Obama administration's reactions to both North Korea's nuclear
    brinksmanship and Iran's sham elections is that its foreign policy is
    not informed by rationality but by the president's morally relative,
    post-modern ideology. In this anti-intellectual and anti-rational
    climate, Netanyahu's speech has little chance of making a lasting
    impact on the White House.

    If rational thought was the basis for the administration's
    policymaking on foreign affairs, North Korea's decisions to test long
    range ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, send two US citizens to
    long prison terms and then threaten nuclear war should have made the
    administration reconsider its current policy of seeking the approval
    and assistance of North Korea's primary enabler - China - for any
    action it takes against Pyongyang. As Nicholas Eberstadt suggested in
    Friday's Wall Street Journal, rather than spending its time passing UN
    Security Council resolutions with no enforcement mechanisms against
    North Korea, the administration would be working with a coalition of
    the willing to adopt measures aimed at lowering the threat North Korea
    constitutes to regional, US and global security through its nuclear
    and ballistic missile programs and its proliferation activities.

    But the administration has done no such thing. Instead of working with
    and strengthening its allies, it has opted to work with North Korea's
    allies China and Russia to forge a Security Council resolution harsh
    enough to convince North Korean leader Kim Jung Il to threaten nuclear
    war, but too weak to degrade his capacity to wage one.

    Similar to Obama's refusal to reassess his failed policy regarding
    North Korea, his nonreaction to the fraudulent Iranian election shows
    that he will not allow facts to interfere with his slavish devotion to
    his ideological canon that claims that no enemy is unappeasable and no
    ally deserves automatic support. Far from standing with the democratic
    dissidents now risking their lives to oppose Iran's sham democracy,
    the administration has reportedly expressed concern that the current
    postelection protests will destabilize the regime. Obama has also
    refused to reconsider his decision to reach a grand bargain with the
    ayatollahs on Iran's nuclear weapons program that would serve to
    legitimize their continued grip on power.

    His refusal to make a moral distinction between the mullahs and their
    democratic opponents - like his refusal in Cairo to make a moral
    distinction between a nuclear-armed Iran and a nuclear-armed America -
    makes clear that he is not interested in forging a factually accurate
    or morally clear-sighted foreign policy.

    ALL OF THIS brings us back to Israel - and Netanyahu's speech about
    the nature and causes of the Palestinian conflict and the conditions
    that must be met if peace is ever to be achieved. His address aimed in
    two ways to lower US pressure while averting an open confrontation
    with a president whose approval ratings remain above 60 percent.

    First, Netanyahu demonstrated that through their consistent rejection
    of Israel's right to exist as the Jewish state, the Palestinians - not
    us - are the side responsible for the absence of Middle East peace.

    Second, Netanyahu tried to decrease US pressure on his government by
    conditionally accepting the idea of a Palestinian state. Clearly, it
    was Netanyahu's acceptance of the idea of a Palestinian state - albeit
    a demilitarized one - that was supposed to do the most to fend off US
    pressure. After all, Obama and his advisers have made the swift
    establishment of a Palestinian state their primary foreign policy aim.

    Irrespective of its impact on the Obama administration, Netanyahu's
    speech was a positive contribution to the general discourse on the
    Middle East and Israel's place in it. He made good use of his
    opportunity to address the nation above the heads of the uniformly
    leftist media to forge a new definition of the national consensus.

    Whereas his defeatist predecessors consistently spoke of the people's
    willingness to make painful concessions for peace, and treated the
    establishment of a Jew-free Palestinian state as their primary duty as
    Zionists, Netanyahu recast the national consensus along patriotic
    lines.

    He echoed the sentiments of the vast majority of Israelis when he
    refused to end building inside of Jewish communities located beyond
    the 1949 armistice lines; when he asserted that he would make no
    concessions on sovereignty over Jerusalem; would insist that we retain
    defensible borders; would refuse entrance of so-called Palestinian
    refugees to our territory; and demanded Palestinian recognition of our
    right to exist as the Jewish state.

    He stridently and eloquently corrected Obama's false characterization
    of this country as the product of the Holocaust during his speeches at
    Cairo and Buchenwald by recalling the 3,500 year old Jewish ties to
    the Land of Israel. And he made clear that the association Obama made
    between the Holocaust and this country's founding was a precise
    inversion of the historical record. It is not Israel that owes its
    existence to the Holocaust. Rather, the Holocaust was only able to
    happen because there was no Israel.

    NETANYAHU'S SPEECH was a much-needed strong defense. But it was not a
    perfect defense. It suffered from two flaws that may come back to
    haunt the premier in the years to come. First, his demand that the US
    lead the international community in guaranteeing that the Palestinian
    state is demilitarized provided the Obama administration with a new
    means to trick Israel into making suicidal concessions.

    The only way to ensure that a Palestinian state is demilitarized is to
    send in forces to demilitarize it. Obviously the Americans won't take
    such a step. In Gaza, a militarized Palestinian state already exists
    and the Americans have no intention of demilitarizing it for us. As
    for Judea and Samaria, today, the only thing the emerging Palestinian
    state has to show for itself is its US-built army.

    The only force that would ensure a Palestinian state (or states) stays
    demilitarized is the IDF. But by appointing the US the guarantor of
    its demilitarized status, Netanyahu is inviting the US to lie and so
    make it impossible for us to take the steps necessary to ensure that
    the Palestinians lack the means to threaten the country.

    In requesting that the US guarantee disarmament, Netanyahu repeated a
    mistake he made in his first term in office. In 1996 he conditioned
    his willingness to move forward with peace talks with the PLO on the
    terror group's amendment of its charter calling for the destruction of
    Israel in line with its commitment under the initial Oslo agreement.

    Netanyahu empowered Bill Clinton to judge Palestinian compliance with
    this demand. In due course, Clinton travelled to Gaza and mendaciously
    announced that the PLO had in fact amended the charter. No such action
    had been taken, but Netanyahu was in no position to accuse Clinton of
    lying.

    While his decision to appoint Obama arbiter of Palestinian
    demilitarization was ill-conceived, things could have been much worse.

    Netanyahu ignored the so-called road map peace plan. That plan is one
    long list of Palestinian commitments that the US is empowered to judge
    compliance on. From terror fighting to ending incitement, the road map
    places Israel in the position of being forced to take America's word
    on issues paramount to its national security. By ignoring the road
    map, Netanyahu managed to avert the need to call Obama a liar
    directly.

    The other problem with Netanyahu's speech is that by accepting the
    idea of a Palestinian state, and embracing Obama's fantasy that it is
    possible to reach a deal with the Palestinian Authority, Netanyahu
    blocked the possibility that Israel will be able to forge a new policy
    that will move it to a more advantageous status quo in the coming
    years. That is, Netanyahu's conditional acceptance of Obama's false
    and ideologically motivated two-state paradigm damns Israel to the
    position of foot dragger in relation to someone else's policy rather
    than trailblazer for its own policy.

    In fairness to Netanyahu, in light of Obama's ideological commitment
    to the two-state paradigm which blames Israel for the absence of
    peace, it is far from clear that he has any choice other than to go
    along with the president and just play for time. Were Netanyahu to
    apply Israeli law to the large settlement blocs and the Jordan Valley
    or establish security zones along Gaza's borders with Israel and
    Egypt, he would likely instigate a full breach of relations with
    Washington.

    At this point, it is up to the public and our representatives in the
    Knesset to pave the way for a better policy in the future. This we can
    do by rejecting the two-state paradigm and conducting a public
    discourse relevant to our national interests. For Netanyahu, however,
    buying time with a hostile administration may be the best he can
    aspire to during his current term in office.

    Of course, buying time in and of itself is no great accomplishment.
    The voters did not elect Netanyahu to lead us simply to buy time. We
    elected him to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. If his
    speech succeeded in blunting US pressure on Israel - even temporarily
    - on the Palestinian front, and in light of the results of the Iranian
    presidential race, Netanyahu has gained the opportunity to act on the
    Iranian front. If during his current term he prevents Iran from
    becoming a nuclear power and makes no concessions in Judea, Samaria,
    Jerusalem or the Golan Heights, he will be remembered as one of our
    greatest leaders and his speech will be remembered for posterity as a
    pivotal event.

    On the other hand, if Netanyahu sits on his laurels, he will be
    surprised to see how quickly Obama - desperate for a foreign policy
    achievement after being laughed out of Teheran and Pyongyang - forgets
    his happiness at Netanyahu's address. In no time flat, Obama will try
    to force Israel make him look like he knows what he is doing. At that
    point, an open confrontation with the White House will become
    unavoidable.

    Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

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