For years, Washington has turned the other cheek while Israel pursued a policy of unflinching resistance to any compromise or outright withdrawal from the West Bank. However, the lesson learned from unilaterally pulling out of the Gaza Strip may be affecting continued reluctance to deal with the status of the West Bank.
But with his speech in Cairo, President Obama has on one hand thrown down the gauntlet to Jerusalem to abandon its resistance to a two-state solution with the Palestinians. On the other hand, it has opened the prospect for a permanent peace accord that will dare the Arab world to end its long time animosity toward the state of Israel. Both challenges will require unprecedented courage and statesmanship from Jews and Arabs. Nonetheless, mistrust characterizes the attitudes of both sides.
It has reinforced the Arab world's belief that the United States is irrevocably aligned with Israel and can never expect a sympathetic peaceful initiative that would lead to a peaceful resolution satisfactory to the Palestinians. The Israelis believe that neither the Palestinians or the rest of the Arab world will ever grant them legitimacy by recognizing their status of nationhood. President Obama recognizes this gulf as he explained in a surprisingly candid interview following his Cairo speech that he had with seven journalists from Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia. the Palestinian Authority, Israel, Malaysia and Indonesia.
I have visited Israel innumerable times and talked to Israeli and Palestinian political figures, journalists and academic experts since 1967 when I first walked across the Golan Heights at the invitation of the Israeli Defense Forces. Having seen the ruins of the Syrian army, knowing the fate of the Egyptian army at the hands of Ariel Sharon, I was convinced that a peaceful accord with its Arab enemies was inevitable. That hunch was furthered by a conversation I had with Moshe Dayan, the daring commander of Israel's Defense Forces whom I had met earlier in Vietnam when he went to understand the U.S. use of helicopters in combat. Dayan predicted that the occupation of the territories could not be permanent. "It would be like a cancer around our throats," he said. Unfortunately, according to Israeli historians I interviewed, Dayan never had the clout to convince Israel's political leadership of his conviction.
For decades, unfortunately, friends of Israel in the United States have been telling its political leaders that the continued intransigence with regard to the territories, both in the West Bank and Gaza, was a hopeless impediment to peace. But these voices are by no means in the majority. Other well-funded American friends have encouraged the right wing within the Israeli political system to believe that resistance to withdrawal from the West Bank, as it has from Gaza, is something that can be deferred indefinitely with little consequences.
Obama recognizes the divisions within the American Jewish community. He knows many prominent Jews from his days in law school and his years as a professor at the University of Chicago. David Axelrod, his senior staff advisor, and Rahm Emanuel, his Chief of Staff, are the first Jews ever to hold the two top staff positions in the White House. But he obviously is counting on the dynamics within Israel to have its greatest impact. That is why he has dared the Israelis to walk down paths they have never walked before by having an American president for the first time tell the leaders of Hamas and other violence-prone Arab leaders that they must recognize the legitimacy of Israel's existence as a condition of a permanent peace with the Jewish state. That's tough medicine for the Palestinians to swallow, but perhaps even tougher for Benjamin Netanyahu to believe.
Obama said he had met with Netanyahu several times, first as a senator and then as president. "In each case, I found him a very intelligent person, an excellent communicator.... So I believe (he) will recognize the strategic need to deal with this issue and in some ways he may have an opportunity that a Labor or left leader may not have."
As an unflinching opponent of peace with the Arabs in the past, the odds are heavily against the Israeli prime minister ever shocking world public opinion. But he has the opportunity of reversing course and placing the responsibility for such a daring move on Barack Obama's back. It would give Israel's right wing leader an unprecedented opportunity to strike a Nixon-like pose and reach out to the Palestinians the way the late American president did to the Chinese Communists in 1972 by going to Beijing and Shanghai to shake hands with Mao Zedong to sign unprecedented protocols that changed Sino-American relations in a profound and historic manner. It would be unheard of in Israeli as well as American circles to ever think of Netanyahu as a peacemaker. But then who can forget the Sadat-Begin meeting during the Carter presidency? That was the kind of daring move that altered Nixon's image on China before he was sunk by Watergate.
.....Any time a person or a leader claims "Israel is illegitimate and should not exist". Israeli government and spokesmen scream over and over claims of "anti-semetic raciscm".And insist on their neighbors to claim Israel's right to exist, YET THEY DENY A PALESTINIAN STATE'S RIGHT TO EXIST???
The West bank settlers don't have to move, but they'll need to adjust to several hundred thousand new neighbors.
True, israel will no longer be a "Jewish state," just as South Africa is no longer a nation constitutionally decreed to be white-led. The Israelis need to decide whether they'd rather survive in such an arrangement, or go down fighting in some grotesque, prolonged Masada.
I think these are the only alternatives. The current course will inevitably lead to more war, more fighting and possibly -- nuclear exchanges in the region.
Some Israelis are starting to discuss really crazy actions, such as clearing all the Arabs out of Israel and the West Bank to defuse the "demographic bomb." The idea that Israel could round up and expel millions of people (are they going to just get onto trucks?) without triggering a war is outlandishly absurd -- the "host" nations -- presumably Lebanon and Jordan -- would have to mobilize their armed forces to cope and three hostile armies in close contact with hordes of angry dispossessed people is a sure formula for an explosion. And Israel's nuclear weapons are useless that that range.
None of this needs to happen and if the South African blacks and whites and Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis can reconcile -- so can Jews and Arabs.
Surely he means Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem, that is not recognised by the international community or the US as the capital of Israel and their declared annexation is likewise not recognised. The writer seeks to push pro-Israaeli propaganda with this statement on the status of Jerusalem. East Jerusalem is occupied territory and Israel has for decaeds attempted to ethnically cleanse the area to solidify their control and colonization by Jews, while discriminating and abusing the Palestinian population. Jerusalem was supposed to have been an open city admisistered by an international body.
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/July_2005/0507016.html
Jerusalem has forever been the Jewish capitol city. Ask any Jew if he or she has ever heard or said "next year in Jerusalem" ? We've all been saying it since the Romans threw us out and it won't change because others object. That's a joke.
Others, like the United Nations who invites a Holocaust denier to address an important conference on human rights and is applauded by the Secretary General? Others like the European Union who's members collectively stood by and watched millions of us, then citizens of those countries, carted away in cattle cars and gassed and burned or thrown in pits like animal carcasses?
We're supposed to care that these others object?
And the Israelis got their "revenge" by the liquidation of the Morroccan quarter, destroying property on no notice, resulting in innocent killing, accompanied by the blasphamous act of mosque destruction (something the Israelis have done repeatedly as they stole the land of Palestine.) What comes around goes around.
The selective amnesia here is just out of control
I assume you read Hebrew SIberian Rat because Israelis don't read the English version.
Apparently you're judging Israelis by what only those from English speaking countries and a handful of English speaking Israelis are saying.
Pretty silly to draw any conclusions from any of it don't you think?
- This Gaza point is a red herring. Israel quit Gaza and then proceeded to choke it off from all trade, from getting medicine, food, clean water, and electricity. Israel's blockade essentially created a Warsaw Ghetto. And if I were held like a prisoner in a Warsaw Ghetto, I'd be launching whatever I could into my oppressor's territory at every opportunity as well.
And now Israel has the audacity to act as though the gave freedom to the Gazans and got rockets in return? How disingenuous and misleading!
The entire Israeli perspective seems to be built upon lies, half-truths, and historic revisionism.
The Israelis have F16’s, American battle tanks, and unlimited support from their friends and fellow travelers in New York.
The Palestinians? No high-tech weapons, no rich uncle in the west, no support in the UN. The Palestinians have only people who are ready and willing to give all for their families, their nation, and their God.
The Jews in Israeli are doing to the Palestinians what the Germans did to the Jews 70 years ago, only on a smaller scale. The only difference is, the Nazis did it quick-time, the Israelis are doing their own ethnic cleansing in slow motion, of course censored by American TV.
Some might ask how the nascent Israel defeated the British in Palestine and Trans-Jordan. Guess what they used? Terrorism.
May we have the alternative?
P.s. We might also ask why a Tel Aviv bombing gets top CNN billing, yet the daily deaths of Palestinian children are left in a void – totally absent from the US media.
Well, we know the answer to that one don’t we?
Please instruct, if I'm missing something please illuminate.
It's time for them to do something positive, if they're even capable.
What did Israel do? It rejected it.
Israel accepted a two state deal in 1936, 1948, and 2000. Palestinian Arabs did not.
It was, in other words, another face of an aggressive military act. Not any kind of concession. The current Israeli claims that this amounted to having 'tried peace' and found it sour is laughable.
1. The occupation was too costly.
2. To get Israeli Jews out of harms way for the the planned "cast lead" attack.
3. Israel was drawing water from the Gaza aquifer and the water had turned saline because too much had been taken.
Is anything good enough for you?