Obama at the United Nations (Or, Déjà Vu All Over Again)

Mike L.

The very prospect of going through Obama's recent speech at the United Nations is just simply depressing.  Nevertheless, let's have at it.

In the near term, America’s diplomatic efforts will focus on two particular issues: Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Iran clearly has nothing to fear from this administration and the Israelis need to stock up on body bags.  Every time the US inserts itself into the Arab-Israel conflict people start getting blown up.

I believe there is a growing recognition within Israel that the occupation of the West Bank is tearing at the democratic fabric of the Jewish state.

Now that is some kind of sentence!  It's just so diffused with the Oslo Delusion that it becomes hard to know where to start in addressing it.  First of all, the Jewish people occupy Jewish land like I occupy this chair.  That is, I have every right to sit in this chair and no one is going to come into my office and tell me otherwise.  Israel doesn't "occupy" Israel any more than France "occupies" France.  If Israel wishes to give away the heart of its land in order to make room for an anti-Semitic terrorist statelet within spitting distance of Tel Aviv then who am I to quibble?

Also, why do we continue to use the Jordanian term "West Bank" for Judaea and Samaria when the entire purpose of that term is to erase Jewish history on Jewish land?  Wherever anyone may stand on the two-state solution, obscuring Jewish history through using the terminology of our enemies is not a very good idea.  It is, in fact, a sort of desecration of the memory of our ancestors.

Finally, the real growing recognition within Israel is that the local Arabs have no intention of ever accepting a state for themselves in peace and that Obama's pressure on the Jews is both redundant and dangerous.  It's redundant because the Israelis have always accepted the principle of two-states for two peoples.  They do not need to be pressured into accepting that which they've always accepted, but which the Arabs have never accepted.  It's dangerous because not only is the wrong side getting the pressure, but the Arabs will view any failure of the Netanyahu administration to bow to that pressure as a reason to continue killing Jews.

Likewise, the United States remains committed to the belief that the Palestinian people have a right to live with security and dignity in their own sovereign state.

I agree.  The "Palestinian" people, which is to say, the Jews of the Middle East, have every right to live with security and dignity in their own sovereign state which, today, we refer to as Israel.  Arab citizens of Israel also have that right and, in fact, live with greater security and dignity than Arabs anyplace else throughout the vast and bloody Arab world.

I understand, of course, that when most people refer to the "Palestinians" that they mean the Arabs local to the region inhabited by Israel.  What needs to be understood, however, is that anyone born and raised in that region is a "Palestinian" in the sense that the land was once part of the British mandate for Palestine.  This includes Jews, Christians, Muslims, the Baha'i, the Druze, and the non-affiliated.  There's probably even a few Rosicrucians and Rastafarians we can throw into the mix.

"Palestinian" is not a distinct ethnicity.

Prior to the British mandate, Palestine, or Southern Syria as it was sometimes known, was merely one district among many others that comprised the Ottoman Empire.  The Arabs who lived there did not think of themselves as some separate order of Arab or Muslim.  Their self-identification was with religion, clan, tribe, and family.

The rise of an allegedly distinct Arab ethnicity toward the end of the twentieth-century was a political creation, not an organic one.  Furthermore, the very purpose in creating this ethnicity was in order to challenge Jewish rights on Jewish land.  I do not see why, as a Jew, I have any obligation whatsoever to recognize a people who came into being, as a people, about a quarter past last Tuesday, for the sole purpose of robbing my people of self-determination and self-defense on land that we have lived on for well over 3,500 years - long, long before anyone ever heard of this Muhammed fellow on the Saudi peninsula.

The time is now ripe for the entire international community to get behind the pursuit of peace. 

Run for your lives!

This is essentially a threat.  If you read between the lines what Obama is really saying is that unless Israel bows to whatever demands the Arabs make upon that country there's going to be trouble.  The implication, to my mind, at least, is Stan Laurel's John Kerry's "delegitimization on steroids" threat.

Already, Israeli and Palestinian leaders have demonstrated a willingness to take significant political risks. President Abbas has put aside efforts to short-cut the pursuit of peace and come to the negotiating table. Prime Minister Netanyahu has released Palestinian prisoners, and reaffirmed his commitment to a Palestinian state.

So, let me get this straight.  Obama is praising both sides for taking political risks in order to bring about a negotiated conclusion of hostilities.  Netanyahu's political risks include releasing murderers of Jews from Israeli jails.  This may please Barack Obama and Mahmoud Abbas, but why it should please Jewish people is beyond comprehension.

What was Abbas' political risks?  Well, he agreed to negotiate which, I have to say, is mighty big of him.  That was his only concession.  In other words, both sides did not make concessions.  Only Israel did.  Israel released the murderers of Jews for the great honor of sitting with this little dictator who heads up a thoroughly corrupt regime that honors those murderers as heroes.

Of course, his people are already laying the foundation for how they plan to blame Israel for their own subversion of the process in the knowledge that Obama will have their back by laying the blame on Israel and the Netanyahu administration.

Friends of Israel, including the United States, must recognize that Israel’s security as a Jewish and democratic state depends upon the realization of a Palestinian state. 

Yes, that would be true if an additional Arab statelet in the region had any intention of living in peace with Israel, but that is emphatically not what they have told us.  What people like Yassir Arafat told the world is that the purpose of an Arab state within the Jewish heartland is to consume the Jewish state, bit by bit.  Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority, under dictator Abbas, continues to incite genocidal hatred toward the Jewish people on PA television, indicating that he is at least as hostile to us as Arafat ever was.

What's going to happen moving forward will probably look something like this.

The two-sides, over meetings that will last for weeks and, perhaps, months, will fail to come to any meaningful long-term solution.  The Arabs will then blame the Israelis for the failure of talks, probably on the pretense that Jews continue to build housing for themselves in Judaea and Samaria.  The Obama administration will then lead from behind in the delegitimization effort that will be spear-headed by the EU and the Arabs, themselves.

Then the violence will come and when it does you can look for the western left to build itself into a sadistic frenzy as they blame Jewish people, and the State of Israel, for Arab violence against us.

Let's pray that I am terribly wrong - and maybe I am - but I would not get my hopes up if I were you.

I also pray that you will excuse me for my wee bit of skepticism, but we've seen this movie before and it doesn't end well.