Just Peace For Israel

Land for ‘Gestures?’

TO ALL AM ISRAEL

The mother of all extortion rackets – “land for peace” – has given birth to its first permutation.

For want of a better name, call it “land for gestures.” Under the care and feeding of the Obama administration, it is being widely promoted as the heavenly highway to a “Palestinian State” in Judea and Samaria.

It sort of works like this:

Our Arab neighbors “gesture” us a trade office in Dubai, maybe even one in Qatar, and we give them the Jordan Valley.

Or, they “gesture” us the right to overfly their air space en route to dismantling Ahmadinejad’s atomic bomb factories and we make Fatah a gift of eastern Jerusalem, Temple Mount included.

The precise ratio of land surrendered to “gestures” accorded is still to be worked out, but the drift is clear.

Fortunately for us, our neighbors have decided they don’t want to play. President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and Special Envoy Mitchell are all feigning deafness. But Fatah Chief Mahmoud Abbas, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, and even that paragon of Arab moderation, Morocco’s King Mohamed VI, have all declared there will be no “gestures” until and unless Israel hangs a dispossess notice on 120 Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and hauls itself back to the borders of pre-June 1967.

If this leaves the White House with a considerable quantity of egg on its face, it should serve as a textbook exercise in the dangers of appearing to promise what you can’t deliver. Having disappointed our neighbors’ fond hopes of a virtual “free ride” at our expense, Mr.Obama’s chance of now getting them to invest in “gestures” looks like a case of mission impossible. He should expect no help from Israel!

The Folly of an American ‘Peace Package’

TO ALL AM ISRAEL

The misguided actions of the White House, the U.S. State Department and their interlocutors have raised Arab expectations of Israeli pliancy to a point of almost total delusion.

Fatah chieftain Mahmoud Abbas refuses to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahi without a prior Israeli commitment to a permanent freeze on all Jewish housing construction and other development activity in Judea, Samaria and the eastern sector of Jerusalem. Abbas now further insists that discussions with Israel must “resume” at the point at which he claims they were “recessed” with the Olmert government – i.e., with 98 percent of the “West Bank” and half of Jerusalem already in his pocket.

Salaam Fayad, Mr. Abass’ quixotic “prime minister,” has embarked on his own “impossible dream.” Fayad announced he will be devoting himself to forming a mythical “Palestinian State” in Israel, complete with all the trappings of sovereignty, including borders of his own choosing. He plans to present his paper-mache creation to the United Nations for recognition by 2011.

Threatening to exacerbate this antic behavior by our designated “peace partners” is the reported intention of the United States, in the person of President Obama, to regale the UN General Assembly with an American Middle East “peace package” when it reconvenes later this month.

Irrespective of what that “package” might contain, any such attempt by a third party to impose a “solution” to the conflict between Israel and the Arab residents of Judea and Samaria would perforce constitute a breach of all past international understandings, which reserve the conclusion of an agreement to the exclusive domain of the parties involved. Such an intervention, moreover, would not only infringe on Israel’s sovereignty, it would slam the window shut on whatever small hopes remain of bringing an end to the conflict.

The only guarantor of peace in this violent neighborhood is the presence of a strong, democratic Israel governing within defensible borders. Until its neighbors decide that peace is in their interest, the rest is dangerous wishful thinking .