Tag Archives: Hamas

Where Obama is leading Israel

In the aftermath of US President Barack Obama’s May 19 speech on the Middle East, his supporters argued that the policy toward Israel and the Palestinians that Obama outlined in that speech was not anti-Israel. As they presented it, Obama’s assertion that peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians must be based on the 1967 lines with agreed swaps does not mark a substantive departure from the positions adopted by his predecessors in the Oval Office.

But this claim is exposed as a lie by previous administration statements. On November 25, 2009, in response to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s acceptance of Obama’s demand for a 10-month moratorium on Jewish property rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, the State Department issued the following statement: "Today’s announcement by the Government of Israel helps move forward toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

We believe that through good-faith negotiations the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements."

In his speech, Obama stated: "The United States believes… the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states."

That is, he took "the Palestinian goal" and made it the US’s goal. It is hard to imagine a more radically anti-Israel policy shift than that.

And that wasn’t Obama’s only radically anti-Israel policy shift. Until his May 19 speech, the US agreed with Israel that the issue of borders is only one of many – including the Palestinians’ rejection of Israel’s right to exist, their demand to inundate Israel with millions of foreign Arab immigrants, their demand for control over Israel’s water supply and Jerusalem – that have to be sorted out in negotiations. The joint US-Israeli position was that until all of these issues were resolved, none of them were resolved.

The Palestinians, on the other hand, claim that before they will discuss any of these other issues, Israel has to first agree to accept the indefensible 1967 boundaries as its permanent borders. This position allows the Palestinians to essentially maintain their policy of demanding that Israel make unreciprocated concessions that then serve as the starting point for further unreciprocated concessions.

It is a position that is antithetical to peace. And on May 19, by stipulating that Israel must accept the Palestinian position on borders as a precondition for negotiations, Obama adopted it as US policy.

SINCE THAT speech, Obama has taken a series of steps that only reinforce the sense that he is the most hostile US president Israel has ever faced. Indeed, when taken together, these steps raise concern that Obama may actually constitute a grave threat to Israel.

Friday’s Yediot Aharonot reported on the dimensions of the threat Obama may pose to the Jewish state. The paper’s account was based on administration and Congressional sources. The story discussed Obama’s plans to contend with the Palestinian plan to pass a resolution at the UN General Assembly in September endorsing Palestinian statehood in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

According to Yediot, during his meeting with Obama on May 20, Netanyahu argued that in light of the Palestinians’ automatic majority support at the General Assembly, there was no way to avoid the resolution.

Netanyahu reportedly explained that the move would not be a disaster. The General Assembly overwhelmingly endorsed the PLO’s declaration of independence in 1988.

And the sky still hasn’t fallen.

Obama reportedly was unconvinced. For him, it is unacceptable to be in a position of standing alone with Israel voting against the Palestinian resolution. Obama’s distaste for standing with Israel was demonstrated in February when a visibly frustrated US Ambassador Susan Rice was forced by Congressional pressure to veto the Palestinians’ Security Council draft resolution condemning Israel for refusing to prohibit Jews from building in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

Yediot’s report asserts that Obama refused to brief Netanyahu on the steps his administration is taking to avert such an unpalatable option. What the paper did report was how George Mitchell – Obama’s Middle East envoy until his resignation last week – recommended Obama proceed on this issue.

According to Yediot, Mitchell recommended that Obama work with the Europeans to draft a series of anti-Israel resolutions for the UN Security Council to pass. Among other things, these resolutions, which Mitchell said would be "painful for Israel," would include an assertion that Jewish building in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria is illegal.

That is, Mitchell recommended that Obama adopt as US policy at the Security Council past Palestinian demands that Congress forced Obama to reject just months ago at the Security Council. The notion is that by doing so, Obama could convince the Palestinians to water down the even more radically anti-Israel positions they are advancing today at the UN General Assembly that Congressional pressure prevents him from supporting.

Since General Assembly resolutions have no legal weight and Security Council resolutions do carry weight, Mitchell’s policy represents the most anti-Israel policy ever raised by a senior US official. Unfortunately Obama’s actions since last week suggest that he has adopted the gist of Mitchell’s policy recommendations.

First there was his speech before AIPAC. Among other things, Obama used the international campaign to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist as a justification for his policies of demanding that Israel capitulate to the Palestinians’ demands, which he has now officially adopted as US policy.

As he put it, "there is a reason why the Palestinians are pursuing their interests at the United Nations. They recognize that there is an impatience with the peace process – or the absence of one. Not just in the Arab world, but in Latin America, in Europe, and in Asia. That impatience is growing, and is already manifesting itself in capitals around the world."

From AIPAC, Obama moved on to Europe. There he joined forces with European governments in an attempt to gang up on Israel at the G8 meeting.

Obama sought to turn his embrace of the Palestinian negotiating position into the consensus position of the G8. His move was scuttled by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who refused to accept any resolution that made mention of borders without mentioning the Palestinian demand to destroy Israel through Arab immigration, Israel’s right to defensible borders, or the Palestinians’ refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist.

If Harper had not stood by Israel, the G8’s anti-Israel resolution endorsing the Palestinian negotiating position could have formed the basis of a US-sponsored anti-Israel Security Council resolution.

Israelis planning their summer trips should put Canada at the top of their lists.

THE FINAL step Obama has taken to solidify the impression that he does not have Israel’s best interests at heart, is actually something he has not done. Over the past week, Fatah leaders of the US-backed Palestinian Authority have made a series of statements that put paid any thought that they are interested in peace with Israel or differ substantively from their partners in Hamas.

At the Arab League meeting in Qatar on Saturday, PA President Mahmoud Abbas said the Palestinian state "will be free of all Jews."

Last week the US-supported Abbas denied the Jewish connection to the land of Israel and claimed absurdly that the Palestinians were 9,000 years old.

Equally incriminating, in an interview last week with Aaron Lerner from the IMRA newsgathering website, Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath said that now that Hamas was the co-leader of the PA with Fatah, responsibility for continuing to hold IDF St.-Sgt. Gilad Schalit hostage devolved from Hamas to the PA. And the PA would continue to hold him hostage.

Shaath’s statement makes clear that rather than moderating Hamas, the Fatah-Hamas unity deal is transforming Fatah into Hamas.

And yet, Obama has had nothing to say about any of this.

Obama’s now undeniable antipathy for Israel and his apparent willingness to use his power as American president to harm Israel at the UN and elsewhere guarantee that for the duration of his tenure in office, Israel will face unprecedented threats to its security. This disturbing reality ought to focus the attention of all Israelis and of the American Jewish community. With the leader of the free world now openly siding with forces bent on Israel’s destruction, the need for unity has become acute.

MADDENINGLY, HOWEVER, at this time of unprecedented danger we see the Israeli media have joined ranks with Kadima in siding with Obama against Israel in a joint bid to bring down Netanyahu’s government. Yediot Aharonot, Maariv, Haaretz, Channel 2, Channel 10, Army Radio and Israel Radio’s coverage of Netanyahu’s visit and its aftermath was dominated by condemnations of the prime minister, and praise for Obama and opposition leader Tzipi Livni, who called for Netanyahu to resign.

The fact that polling data showed that only 12 percent of Jewish Israelis regard Obama as pro-Israeli and that the overwhelming majority of the public with an opinion believes Netanyahu’s visit was a success made absolutely no impression on the media. The wall-to-wall condemnations of Netanyahu by the Israeli media lend the impression that Israel’s leading reporters and commentators are committed to demoralizing the public into believing that Israel has no option other than surrender.

Then there is the American Jewish leadership. And at this critical time in US-Israel relations, the American Jewish leadership is either silent or siding with Obama. Right after Obama’s shocking speech on May 19, the Anti-Defamation League released a statement endorsing it. Stand With Us congratulated Obama for his AIPAC speech.

With the notable exceptions of the Zionist Organization of America and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle Eastern Reporting in America (CAMERA), leaders of American Jewish organizations have refused to condemn Obama’s anti-Israel positions.

Their silence becomes all the more enraging when placed against the massive support Israel receives from rank-and-file American Jews. In a survey of American Jews taken by CAMERA on May 16-17, between 75% and 95% of American Jews supported Israel’s position on defensible borders, Jerusalem, Palestinian "refugees," Palestinian recognition of Israel’s right to exist and the right of Jews to live in a Palestinian state.

The refusal of most American Jewish leaders, the Israeli media and Kadima to condemn Obama today makes you wonder if there is anything the US president could do to convince them to break ranks and stand with Israel and with the vast majority of their fellow Jews. But it is more than a source of wonder. It is a reason to be frightened. Because Obama’s actions over the past two weeks make clear to anyone willing to see that in the age of Obama, silence is dangerous.

US Jewish organizations and Obama

President Obama’s speech on the Middle East at the State Department last week, his icy glares at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office last Friday, his address before the AIPAC conference on Sunday, and his subsequent press briefings have all made clear that he is not sympathetically inclined toward Israel, nor does he consider Israel an ally worth defending.

Obama’s advocacy of the 1949 armistice lines as a starting point for negotiations demonstrate his lack of support for Israel’s right to defensible borders. His non-response to the Hamas-Fatah unity deal demonstrates that there is nothing the Palestinians can do that will make him accept the reality that their commitment to Israel’s destruction, rather than Israel’s continued control over Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, is the reason there is no peace between them and Israel.

And yet, disturbingly, major Jewish American organizations took it upon themselves this past week to defend Obama to their members and to the general public. The most prominent example of this was the Anti-Defamation League’s press release following Obama’s State Department speech. After Obama endorsed the Palestinian position that negotiations must be based on the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, and did so in the face of explicit Israeli entreaties that he abstain from doing so, the ADL released a statement applauding Obama.

ADL leaders Abe Foxman and Robert Sugarman congratulated Obama for his support for Israel. Among other things, their statement said, "This Administration has come a long way in two years in terms of understanding of the nuances involved in bringing about Israeli-Palestinian peace and a better understanding of the realities and challenges confronting Israel."

Why on earth did the ADL feel it necessary to defend the indefensible? Why, in the midst of an open fight between Obama and the Israeli government, did the ADL feel it necessary to side with Obama against the government of Israel?

In his speech before AIPAC on Sunday, Obama did not repudiate his attachment to the Palestinians’ negotiating position. He did not mention any objection to the Palestinian demand to overrun Israel with millions of foreign Arabs. He did not announce any steps the U.S. will take to end its support for the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority, despite the fact that continued funding is outlawed by U.S. terror finance laws.

Moreover, Obama’s speech to AIPAC included a barely-veiled threat against Israel when he asserted, "There is a reason why the Palestinians are pursuing their interests at the United Nations. They recognize that there is an impatience with the peace process – or the absence of one. Not just in the Arab world, but in Latin America, in Europe, and in Asia. That impatience is growing, and is already manifesting itself in capitols around the world."

In making this statement, Obama was effectively providing backing to the international campaign to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist. The forces promoting the Palestinian narrative throughout the world are increasingly calling for the destruction of Israel. Simply by mentioning this campaign without explaining that it is inherently anti-Semitic or at least in inherently hostile to Israel’s right to exist, Obama justified it.

And yet, Stand With Us, an organization founded to fight the campaign to delegitimize Israel, endorsed Obama’s AIPAC speech. In a press release issued shortly after Obama concluded his remarks at AIPAC, Stand With Us co-founder and CEO Roz Rothstein praised Obama saying, "We appreciated [Obama’s] repeated assurance that no debate about Israel’s legitimacy will ever be tolerated."

The question is, why are American Jewish leaders defending Obama?

It would seem that there are three possible explanations.

The first explanation is fear. Several American Jewish philanthropists have mentioned over the past two years that they fear Obama. If he is reelected, they worry that since he will no longer need Jewish political contributions, he might strike out at Jewish-owned businesses the way he struck out at Republican-owned General Motors car dealerships when he nationalized GM. If they attack Obama for his positions on Israel, they worry that they will give him further justification for going after them.

The obvious response to these fears, it would seem, is to do everything possible to ensure that Obama is not reelected. If he is hostile enough to even consider going after American Jewish interests in a second term, then nothing American Jews do or don’t do will have any impact on him.

The second, perhaps more plausible, explanation is that Jewish leaders are concerned that their fellow American Jews are more attached to their identity as Democrats than they are to their identity as Jews. True, the overwhelming majority of American Jews express firm support for Israel. A poll carried out last week for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle Eastern Reporting in America (CAMERA) found that support for Israel is nearly unanimous among American Jews.

Yet neither the CAMERA poll nor previous surveys by the American Jewish Committee or Brandeis which had similar findings asked respondents to weigh their support for Israel against support for the Democratic Party. So it is possible that leaders are worried that if they oppose Obama’s anti-Israel positions too strongly, they will lose some support.

Survey information would be helpful for sorting out this issue. But on the face of things, it seems likely that serious donors to these groups care far more about Israel than the Democratic Party. The rest will either leave the organizations or be convinced that supporting Israel is more important than supporting Obama.

The third reason why U.S. Jewish leaders may be defending Obama’s positions on Israel is because the Israeli left defends his position on Israel. In the face of Obama’s latest baiting of Netanyahu, opposition leader Tzipi Livni attacked Netanyahu and accused him of destroying Israel’s relations with the U.S. She and her followers also defended Obama’s policies. Many American Jewish leaders must certainly believe that they cannot be more pro-Israel than the Israeli left.

Clearly, the party most responsible for calling out Livni and her associates for their irresponsible behavior is the Israeli public, which voted for Netanyahu and his coalition to lead the country rather than Livni and her party. But it important for American Jewish leaders to recognize the game being played – namely, Livni and Kadima are trying to exploit Obama’s position on Israel in an attempt to win a partisan battle against Netanyahu and Likud – before they jump into it.

Non-Jewish American supporters of Israel never tire of asking how it is that so many American Jews voted for Obama in 2008. Perhaps the easiest explanation is because the American Jewish leadership papered over his hostility.

 

Originally published in The Jewish Press. 

 

Lessons of Netanyahu’s triumph

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was hoping to avoid his clash with US President Barack Obama this week in Washington.

Four days before his showdown at the White House with the American leader, Netanyahu addressed the Knesset. His speech was the most dovish he had ever given. In it, he set out the parameters of the land concessions he is willing to make to the Palestinians, in the event they ever decide that they are interested in negotiating a final peace.

Among other things, Netanyahu spoke for the first time about "settlement blocs," and so signaled that he would be willing to evacuate the more isolated Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. He also spoke of a longterm military presence in the Jordan Valley rather than Israeli sovereignty along the militarily vital plain.

Both strategically and ideologically, Netanyahu’s speech constituted a massive concession to Obama. The premier had good reason to believe that his speech would preempt any US demand for further Israeli concessions during his visit to Washington.

Alas, it was not to be. Instead of welcoming Netanyahu’s unprecedented concessions, Obama dismissed them as insufficient as he blindsided Netanyahu last Thursday with his speech at the State Department. There, just hours before Netanyahu was scheduled to fly off to meet him in the Oval Office, Obama adopted the Palestinian negotiating position by calling for Israel to accept that future negotiations will be based on the indefensible – indeed suicidal – 1949 armistice lines.

So, just as he was about to board his plane, Netanyahu realized that his mission in the US capital had changed. His job wasn’t to go along to get along. His job was to stop Obama from driving Israel’s relations with the US off a cliff.

Netanyahu was no longer going to Washington to explain where Israel will stand aside. He was going to Washington to explain what Israel stands for. Obama threw down the gauntlet. Netanyahu needed to pick it up by rallying both the Israeli people to his side and rallying the American people to Israel’s side. Both goals, he realized, could only be accomplished by presenting his vision of what Israel is and what it stands for.

And Netanyahu did his job. He did his job brilliantly.

ISRAEL TODAY is the target of an ever escalating campaign to demonize and delegitimize it. Just this week we learned that a dozen towns in Scotland have decided to ban Israeli books from their public libraries. One Scottish town has decided to post signs calling for its residents to boycott Israeli products and put a distinguishing mark (yellow star, perhaps?) on all Israeli products sold in local stores to warn residents away from them.

Israelis shake their heads and wonder, what did we do to the Scots? 

In San Francisco, there is a proposition on the ballot for the fall elections to ban circumcision. The proposition would make it a criminal offense to carry out the oldest Jewish religious ritual. Offenders will be punished by up to a year in prison and a fine of up to $1,000.

Israelis shake their heads and wonder, what did we do to the people of San Francisco? 

It seems that everywhere we look we are told that we have no right to exist. From Ramallah to Gaza, to Egypt, to Scotland, Norway, and San Francisco, we are told that we are evil and had better give up the store. And then Obama took to the stage on Thursday and told us that we have to surrender our ability to defend ourselves in order to make room for a Palestinian state run by terrorists committed to our destruction.

But then Netanyahu arrived in Washington and said, "Enough already.We’ve had quite enough of this dangerous nonsense."

 

And we felt things we haven’t felt for a long time. We felt empowered. We felt we had a voice. We felt proud. We felt we had a leader.

We felt relieved.

The American people, whose overwhelming support for Israel was demonstrated by their representatives in both houses of the Congress on Tuesday, also felt empowered, proud and relieved. Because not only did Netanyahu eloquently remind them of why they stand with Israel He reminded them of why everyone who truly loves freedom stands with America.

It is true that the American lawmakers who interrupted Netanyahu’s remarks dozens of times to applaud wanted to use his presence in their chamber to send a message of solidarity to the people of Israel. But during the course of his speech, it became apparent that it wasn’t just their desire to show solidarity that made them stand and applaud so many times. Netanyahu managed to relieve them as well.

Since he assumed office, Obama has been traveling the world apologizing for America’s world leadership. He has been lecturing the American people about the need to subordinate America’s national interests to global organizations like the United Nations that are controlled by dictatorships which despise them.

Suddenly, here was an allied leader reminding them of why America is a great nation that leads the world by right, not by historical coincidence.

It is not coincidental that many American and Israeli observers have described Netanyahu’s speech as "Churchillian." Winston Churchill’s leadership was a classic example of democratic leadership. And Netanyahu is Churchill’s most fervent pupil. The democratic leadership model requires a leader to set out his vision of where his country must go and convince the public to follow him.

That is what Churchill did. And that is what Netanyahu did this week. And like Churchill in June 1940, Netanyahu’s success this week was dazzling.

Just how dazzling was make clear by a Haaretz poll of the Israeli public conducted after Netanyahu’s speech before the Congress.

The poll found that Netanyahu’s approval ratings increased an astounding 13 percentage points, from 38 to 51 percent in one week. Two-thirds of the Israelis who watched his speech said it made them proud.

As for the US response, the fact that leading Democrats on Capitol Hill, House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, felt it necessary to distance themselves from Obama’s statements about Israel’s final borders makes clear that Netanyahu successfully rallied the American public to Israel’s side.

This point was also brought home with Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s interesting request to Republicans during their joint meeting with Netanyahu. In front of the Israeli leader, Wasserman Schultz asked her Republican counterparts not to use support for Israel as a campaign issue. Her request makes clear that following Netanyahu’s brilliant triumph in Washington, Democrats realize that the president’s poor treatment of Israel is an issue that will harm them politically if the Republicans decide to make it an issue in next year’s elections.

WHILE THE democratic model of leadership is certainly the model that the founders of most democratic societies have in mind when they establish their democratic orders, it is not the only leadership model that guides leaders in democratic societies. This week, as Netanyahu demonstrated the strength of the democratic leadership model, two other leadership models were also on prominent display. The first was demonstrated by Obama. The second was exhibited by opposition leader Tzipi Livni.

 

Obama’s leadership model is the model of subversive leadership. Subversive leaders in democracies do not tell their citizens where they wish to lead their societies. They hide their goals from their citizens, because they understand that their citizens do not share their goals. Then once they achieve their unspoken goals, they present their people with a fait accompli and announce that only they are competent to shepherd their societies through the radical shift they undertook behind the public’s back.

Before Obama, the clearest example of subversive leadership was Shimon Peres. As foreign minister under Yitzhak Rabin, Peres negotiated his deal with the PLO behind the public’s back, and behind Rabin’s back – and against their clear opposition. Then he presented the deal that no one supported as a fait accompli.

And as the architect of the deal that put the PLO terror forces on the outskirts of Israel’s major cities, Peres argued that only he could be trusted to implement the deal he had crafted.

Eighteen years and 2,000 Israeli terror victims later, Israel still hasn’t figured out how to extricate itself from his subversive legacy. And he is president.

Today, Obama recognizes that the American public doesn’t share his antipathy towards Israel. So as he adopts policies antithetical to Israel’s security, he waxes poetic about his commitment to Israel’s security. So far his policies have led to the near disintegration of Israel’s peace with Egypt, the establishment of a Fatah-Hamas unity government in the Palestinian Authority, and to Iran’s steady, all but unimpeded progress towards the atom bomb.

As for Livni, her model is leadership from behind. Although Obama’s advisers claimed that this is his model of leadership, it actually is Livni’s model. A leader who leads from behind is a follower. She sees where her voters are and she goes there.

In Livni’s case, her supporters are on the Left and their main spokesman is the media. Both the Left and the media oppose everything that Netanyahu does and everything he is. And so, as Livni sees things, her job as the head of the opposition is to give voice to their views.

As Netanyahu stared Obama down in the Oval Office and reminded Israelis and Americans alike why we have a special relationship, Livni was telling audiences in Washington and Israel that Netanyahu is a warmonger who will lead us to devastation if we don’t elect her to replace him soon. With Obama adopting the Palestinians’ negotiating positions and with Fatah embracing Hamas, rather than honestly admitting that all hope for peace is dead for the duration, Livni said that Netanyahu is leading us to war by defending the country.

Netanyahu’s extraordinary leadership this week has shown that when used well, the democratic model of leadership trumps all other models. He also showed us that he has the capacity to be the leader of our times.

In the coming weeks and months, the threats to Israel will surely only increase. And with these escalating threats will come also the escalating need for strong and certain leadership.

Netanyahu should realize what his astounding success means for him as well as for Israel.

The people of Israel and our many friends around the world will continue to stand behind him proudly if he continues to lead us as well and wonderfully as he did this week. 

And we will admire him. And we will thank him.

 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

Obama’s diversionary tactics

As the Washington Post pointed out on Friday, US President Barack Obama purposely provoked the current fight with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. He knew full well that Netanyahu does not back the Palestinian formulation that negotiations with Israel must be based on the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, or what are wrongly referred to as the 1967 lines. In the days leading up to Obama’s speech last Thursday, Israel registered explicit, repeated requests that he not adopt the Palestinian position that negotiations should be based on those lines.

And so it was a stinging rebuke when Obama declared Thursday: "The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps." According to the Washington Post, Obama wrote these lines of his speech himself and Netanyahu was informed of them just as he was scheduled to fly to the US on Thursday evening. Obama gave the speech while Netanyahu was in the air on his way to Washington to meet Obama the next morning. It is hard to think of a more stunning insult or a greater display of contempt for the leader of a US ally and fellow democracy than Obama’s actions last week. And it is obvious that Netanyahu had no choice but to react forcefully to Obama’s provocation.

The question is why would Obama act as he did? What did he wish to accomplish by purposely starting such an ugly fight with Netanyahu?

Probably the best way to figure out what Obama wished to accomplish is to consider what he did accomplish, because the two are undoubtedly related.

ON MAY 4, two weeks before Obama gave his speech, Fatah and Hamas signed a unity agreement. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Like its fellow Brotherhood satellite al-Qaida, Hamas shares the Brotherhood’s ideology of global jihad, the destruction of Western civilization and the establishment of a global caliphate. Also like al-Qaida, it is a terrorist organization which, since its establishment in 1987 has murdered more than a thousand Israelis.

In 2005, Hamas subcontracted itself out to the Iranian regime. Since then, its men have been trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and by Hezbollah. Hamas maintains operational ties with both outfits and receives most of its weapons and significant funding from Iran.

The agreement between Fatah and Hamas makes Hamas a partner in the leadership of the Palestinian Authority. It also paves the way for Hamas to win the planned Palestinian legislative and presidential elections that are scheduled for September just after the UN General Assembly is scheduled to endorse Palestinian statehood. It also sets the conditions for Hamas to integrate its forces and eventually take over the US-trained Palestinian army in Judea and Samaria and to join the PLO.

The Hamas-Fatah unity deal constitutes a complete repudiation of the assumptions informing Obama’s policies towards the Palestinians and Israel. Obama perceives the conflict as a direct consequence of two things: prior US administrations’ refusal to "put light" between the US and Israel, and Israel’s unwillingness to surrender all of the territory it took during the course of the 1967 Six Day War.

The Hamas-Fatah unity deal is indisputable proof that contrary to what Obama believes, the conflict has nothing to do with previous administrations’ support for Israel or with Israel’s size. It is instead entirely the consequence of the Palestinians’ rejection of Israel’s right to exist and their commitment to bringing about Israel’s destruction.

Forcing Israel into indefensible boundaries, (which as Netanyahu explained to Obama at the White House on Friday, "were not the boundaries of peace, they were the boundaries of repeated wars because the attack on Israel was so attractive for them,"), will not advance the cause of peace. It will advance the Palestinians’ goal of destroying Israel.

Obama had two options for contending with the Palestinian unity deal. He could pay attention to it or he could create a distraction in order to ignore it. If he paid attention to it, he would have been forced to disavow his policy of blaming his predecessors in the White House and Israel for the absence of peace. By creating a distraction he would be able to change the subject in a manner that would enable him to maintain those policies.

And so he picked a fight with Netanyahu. And by picking the fight, he created a distraction that has, in fact, changed the subject and enabled Obama to maintain his policies that have been wholly repudiated by the reality of the Palestinian unity deal.

By inserting the citation of the 1949 armistice lines into his speech, Obama made Israel’s size again the issue.

The Hamas-Fatah unity deal actually demonstrates that not only is Israel’s size not the cause of the conflict, it is the main reason that Israelis and Palestinians live in relative peace.

Israel’s control over Judea and Samaria and east Jerusalem, and with them, its ability to ward off invasion and attacks on its major cities is what has prevented wars. If Israel were more vulnerable, the de facto Palestinian terror state would not be weighing whether or not to begin a new terror war as its leaders from Fatah and Hamas are doing today. It would be waging a continuous campaign of terror whose clear aim is Israel’s destruction for again, as Netanyahu said the 1949 armistice lines make war an attractive option for Israel’s enemies.

BY PICKING a fight with Netanyahu, since Thursday, no one could have possibly noted this basic truth because the false issue of Israel’s control over these areas – that is, Israel’s size – has dominated the global discourse on the Middle East.

Obama would never have been able to create his diversion from the unwelcome fact of Palestinian duplicity and rejectionism, to imaginary problem with the size of Israel without the enthusiastic support given to him by the Israeli Left.

Led by opposition leader Tzipi Livni, the Israeli Left responded to Obama’s full-scale assault on Israel’s legitimacy by launching a full-scale partisan assault on Netanyahu. Rather than back Netanyahu as he fights for the country’s future, Livni called for him to resign and said that he was wrecking Israel’s ties with the US. In so doing, the Left provided crucial support for Obama’s move to maintain his phony anti- Israel paradigm for Middle East policymaking in the face of the Palestinian unity deal’s repudiation of that model.

The Left’s assault on Netanyahu is not the only way it has enabled Obama to maintain his pro-Palestinian policies in the face of the Palestinians’ embrace of terror and war. In his speech to AIPAC, Obama argued that Israel needs to surrender its defensible boundaries because the Palestinians are about to demographically challenge Israel’s Jewish majority.

As Obama put it, "The number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories. This will make it harder and harder – without a peace deal – to maintain Israel as both a Jewish state and a democratic state."

The demographic time bomb story is a Palestinian fabrication. In 1997, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics published a falsified Palestinian census that inflated Palestinian population data by 50 percent. The Israeli Left adopted this fake report as its own when Palestinian terrorism and political warfare convinced the majority of Israelis that it was unwise to give them any more land and that the peace process was a lie.

Since 2004, repeated, in-depth studies of Jewish and Arab birthrates and immigration/ emigration statistics west of the Jordan River undertaken by independent researchers have shown that the demographic time bomb is a dud. In January, the respected demographer Yaakov Faitelson published a study for the Institute of Zionist Strategies in which he definitively put to rest the tale of pending Jewish demographic doom.

As Faitelson demonstrated, Jewish and Arab birthrates are already converging west of the Jordan River at around three children per woman. And whereas the fertility rates of Israeli Arabs, Gazans and residents of Judea and Samaria are all trending downward, Jewish fertility is consistently rising. Moreover, whereas the Arabs are experiencing consistently negative net immigration rates, Jewish net immigration rates are positive and high.

Faitelson based his multiyear projections on current population numbers in which Jews comprise 58.6 percent of the population west of the Jordan River and Muslims constitute 38.7% of the overall population. Non-Jewish, non-Muslim minorities comprise the other 2.7%. Using assessment baselines for Jewish net immigration well below current averages, Faitelson showed that in the years to come, not only will Jews not lose our demographic majority. We will increase it.

Faitelson’s study, like the studies published since 2004 by the American-Israeli Demographic Research Group show that from a demographic perspective, Israel is in the same situation as many Western states today. Namely, it has to develop policies for dealing with an irredentist minority population.

There are many reasonable, liberal policies that Israel can adopt. These include applying the liberal Israeli legal code to Judea and Samaria and enforcing the laws of treason. It is hard to see why the best policy for Israel is to take some of that irredentist population off its books by establishing a terror state ruled by what Netanyahu rightly referred to as "the Israeli equivalent of al-Qaida" on its border.

ALL OF this brings us back to Hamas, terrorism, the Palestinian rejection of Israel’s right to exist, and Obama’s diversionary moves to facilitate his preservation of a Middle East policy based on a wholly false and discredited assessment of reality and the Israeli Left’s facilitation of Obama’s efforts.

When we realize what Obama is up to, we recognize as well what Netanyahu must do in response.

In his address before Congress on Tuesday and in all of his appearances in the coming weeks and months, Netanyahu should have one goal: to bring the focus of debate back where it belongs – on the Palestinians.

At every opportunity, Netanyahu needs to pound the message that the Palestinians’ commitment to Israel’s destruction is the sole reason that there is no peace.

As for the Israeli Left, it is high time that Netanyahu place the likes of Livni on the defensive. Netanyahu must attack the Left’s doomsday demographic projections that are without factual basis and are indeed antithetical to reality. As long as the demographic lie goes unchallenged by Netanyahu, the Left will continue to argue that by refusing to build a terror state on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, Netanyahu is endangering Israel.

Netanyahu deserves a lot of credit for standing up to Obama on Friday. He showed enormous courage in doing so. It was his finest hour to date and polls over the weekend show that the public appreciates and supports him for it. He must build on that success by putting the focus on the truth.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Obama’s next war

Barack Obama’s tenure as Commander-in-Chief has not exactly been characterized by success.  What comes next, however, may make his record to date look like the good old days.

To be sure, on his watch, an extraordinary intelligence-special forces team liquidated Osama bin Laden and drones have dispatched a number of other "high value targets" in what the President calls our "war on al Qaeda."  These are morale-boosting tactical achievements, but in the great scheme of things are more like whack-a-mole than strategic victories.  Much more important is the fact that Mr. Obama is in the process of losing the two wars he inherited, and making a hash-up of the one he initiated in Libya.

Worse, Mr. Obama is actively encouraging trends that threaten to unleash the next, horrific regional war in the Mideast -a war that may well embroil nations far beyond, including ours.

The President’s mishandling of the present conflicts has set the stage for such dangers:

Mr. Obama’s earlier insistence on withdrawing U.S. combat forces from Iraq and his abiding determination to pull out virtually all others by year’s end has, as a practical matter, made it impossible for the government in Baghdad to ask us to stay on.  Even if the Iranian puppet, Muqtada al-Sadr, were not threatening if Americans are invited to stay to relaunch his Madi army’s sectarian warfare and bring down the coalition government (in which his party is a prominent part), the Iraqis can hardly be more in favor of maintaining an American presence than we are.

The predictable result in Iraq next year (if not before) will be a vacuum of power that Iran will surely fill.  State Department and other Americans left behind, in the hope that the immense investment we have made in lives and treasure in Iraq’s democratic and pro-Western future will not be squandered, stand to become endangered species.  The ironic symbol of our defeat may be the takeover in due course of the immense new U.S. embassy in Baghdad by Iranians – this time by invited diplomats, not the hostage-taking "students" of 1979.

Afghanistan – now no longer George Bush’s war, but Barack Obama’s – is, if anything, in even worse shape.  There, despite the valor of our troops and others trying to build a 21st Century nation out of a backwards 6th Century tribal/Islamist entity, we are in the process of negotiating the Afghans’ surrender to the Taliban.  Again, the President’s insistence that U.S. forces will begin coming out of theater this summer signals to friends and foes alike that we will not stay the course.  The only question now is:  How ignominious will be our defeat at the hands of those we routed after 9/11, and their Pakistani, Chinese, Iranian and Russian friends?

Then, there is Mr. Obama’s first "elective war":  His ill-considered, incoherent, congressionally unauthorized and, to date at least, unsuccessful campaign in Libya.  Mr. Obama has tried to limit the costs and offload responsibility for this fiasco onto the French, British and other NATO allies.  Once again U.S. forces have performed their missions impressively – but, to what end?  We are now aligned with, defending and increasingly supporting "rebels" who, if anything, are likely to be more dangerous enemies of the United States than Muammar Gaddafi.

Which brings us to Mr. Obama’s next war.  In his speech last week to what he calls "the Muslim world," the President made it U.S. policy to support whoever manages to get elected in the various nations of North Africa and the Middle East currently undergoing political upheavals. As a practical matter, that will mean legitimating, working with and underwriting the Muslim Brotherhood, since they are far and away the most organized, disciplined and ruthless of the contenders for power in country after country.  History tells us that such people – from Hitler in Weimar Germany to Hamas in the Gaza Strip – win even "free and fair" elections, which then amount to one-man, one-vote, one-time. (For more on the deadly nature and agenda of the MB or Ikhwan, see last week’s column in this space.)

President Obama’s openness (to put it mildly) to bringing the Brotherhood to power was manifested not only by his pledge to forgive $1 billion in Egyptian debt and to provide it another billion in additional foreign aid.  Just as he did in his last much-ballyhooed "outreach" to Muslims in Cairo two years ago, Team Obama had one of the top Muslim Brothers – Imam Mohamed Magid, president of the Ikhwan‘s largest front group in this country, the Islamic Society of North America – prominently seated in the audience at the State Department.

Beyond his embrace of the ascendant Muslim Brotherhood, Barack Obama has helped catalyze the next Mideast war by declaring that Israel must return to the 1967 borders, whose indefensibility induced the Arab nations to precipitate the Six-Day War of that year.  However much the President may deny it, and point to others as supporting a "two-state solution" based on such borders, the Jewish State cannot survive without the high ground, strategic depth and aquifers of the Golan Heights and West Bank.  Period.

It is in America’s vital interests to deter more wars in the Mideast, not invite them.  If President Obama persists in the latter, his already checkered record as Commander-in-Chief may be best remembered as the man who elected to precipitate World War III.

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy (www.SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Obama’s abandonment of America

I was out sick yesterday so I was unable to write today’s column for the Jerusalem Post. I did manage to watch President Obama’s speech on the Middle East yesterday evening. And I didn’t want to wait until next week to discuss it. After all, who knows what he’ll do by Tuesday? 

Before we get into what the speech means for Israel, it is important to consider what it means for America.

Quite simply, Obama’s speech represents the effective renunciation of the US’s right to have and to pursue national interests. Consequently, his speech imperils the real interests that the US has in the region – first and foremost, the US’s interest in securing its national security.

Obama’s renunciation of the US national interests unfolded as follows:

First, Obama mentioned a number of core US interests in the region. In his view these are: "Countering terrorism and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons; securing the free flow of commerce, and safe-guarding the security of the region; standing up for Israel’s security and pursuing Arab-Israeli peace."

Then he said, "Yet we must acknowledge that a strategy based solely upon the narrow pursuit of these interests will not fill an empty stomach or allow someone to speak their mind." 

While this is true enough, Obama went on to say that the Arabs have good reason to hate the US and that it is up to the US to put its national interests aside in the interest of making them like America. As he put it, "a failure to change our approach threatens a deepening spiral of division between the United States and Muslim communities."

And you know what that means. If the US doesn’t end the spiral of division, (sounds sort of like "spiral of violence," doesn’t it?), then the Muslims will come after America. So the US better straighten up and fly right.

And how does it do that? Well, by courting the Muslim Brotherhood which spawned Al Qaeda, Hamas, Jamma Islamiya and a number of other terror groups and is allies with Hezbollah. 

How do we know this is Obama’s plan? Because right after he said that the US needs to end the "spiral of division," he recalled his speech in Egypt in June 2009 when he spoke at the Brotherhood controlled Al Azhar University and made sure that Brotherhood members were in the audience in a direct diplomatic assault on US ally Hosni Mubarak.

And of course, intimations of Obama’s plan to woo and appease the jihadists appear throughout the speech. For instance:

"There will be times when our short term interests do not align perfectly with our long term vision of the region."

So US short term interests, like for instance preventing terrorist attacks against itself or its interests, will have to be sacrificed for the greater good of bringing the Muslim Brotherhood to power in democratic elections.

And he also said that the US will "support the governments that will be elected later this year" in Egypt and Tunisia. But why would the US support governments controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood? They are poised to control the elected government in Egypt and are the ticket to beat in Tunisia as well. 

Then there is the way Obama abandoned US allies Yemen and Bahrain in order to show the US’s lack of hypocrisy. As he presented it, the US will not demand from its enemies Syria and Iran that which it doesn’t demand from its friends. 

While this sounds fair, it is anything but fair. The fact is that if you don’t distinguish between your allies and your enemies then you betray your allies and side with your enemies. Bahrain and Yemen need US support to survive. Iran and Syria do not. So when he removes US support from the former, his action redounds to the direct benefit of the latter. 

I hope the US Navy’s 5th Fleet has found alternate digs because Obama just opened the door for Iran to take over Bahrain. He also invited al Qaeda – which he falsely claimed is a spent force – to take over Yemen.

Beyond his abandonment of Bahrain and Yemen, in claiming that the US mustn’t distinguish between its allies and its foes, Obama made clear that he has renounced the US’s right to have and pursue national interests. If you can’t favor your allies against your enemies then you cannot defend your national interests. And if you cannot defend your national interests then you renounce your right to have them.

As for Iran, in his speech, Obama effectively abandoned the pursuit of the US’s core interest of preventing nuclear proliferation. All he had to say about Iran’s openly genocidal nuclear program is, "Our opposition to Iran’s intolerance – as well as its illicit nuclear program, and its sponsorship of terror – is well known."

Well so is my opposition to all of that, and so is yours. But unlike us, Obama is supposed to do something about it. And by putting the gravest threat the US presently faces from the Middle East in the passive voice, he made clear that actually, the US isn’t going to do anything about it. 

In short, every American who is concerned about the security of the United States should be livid. The US President just abandoned his responsibility to defend the country and its interests in the interest of coddling the US’s worst enemies.

AS FOR ISRAEL, in a way, Obama did Israel a favor by giving this speech. By abandoning even a semblance of friendliness, he has told us that we have nothing whatsoever to gain by trying to make him like us. Obama didn’t even say that he would oppose the Palestinians’ plan to get the UN Security Council to pass a resolution in support for Palestinian independence. All he said was that it is a dumb idea. 

Obama sided with Hamas against Israel by acting as though its partnership with Fatah is just a little problem that has to be sorted out to reassure the paranoid Jews. Or as he put it, "the recent announcement of an agreement between Fatah and Hamas raises profound and legitimate questions for Israel."

Hamas is a jihadist movement dedicated to the annihilation of the Jewish people, and the establishment of a global caliphate. It’s in their charter. And all Obama said of the movement that has now taken over the Palestinian Authority was, "Palestinian leaders will not achieve peace or prosperity if Hamas insists on a path of terror and rejection."

Irrelevant and untrue.  

It is irrelevant because obviously the Palestinians don’t want peace. That’s why they just formed a government dedicated to Israel’s destruction. 

As for being untrue, Obama’s speech makes clear that they have no reason to fear a loss of prosperity? After all, Obama is going to continue to give them money for bombs and patronage jobs. So is the EU. They have nothing to worry about. They will continue to be rewarded regardless of what they do.

Of course there are all the hostile, hateful details of the speech: He said Israel has to concede its right to defensible borders as a precondition for negotiations; he didn’t say he opposes the Palestinian demand for open immigration of millions of foreign Arabs into Israel; he again ignored Bush’s 2004 letter to Sharon opposing a return to the 1949 armistice lines, supporting the large settlements, defensible borders and opposing mass Arab immigration into Israel; he said he was leaving Jerusalem out but actually brought it in by calling for an Israeli retreat to the 1949 lines; he called for Israel to be cut in two when he called for the Palestinians state to be contiguous; and he called for Israel to withdraw from the Jordan Valley – without which it is powerless against invasion – by saying that the Palestinian State will have an international border with Jordan.

Conceptually and substantively, Obama abandoned the US alliance with Israel. The rest of his words – security arrangements, demilitarized Palestinian state and the rest of it – were nothing more than filler to please empty-headed liberal Jews in America so they can feel comfortable signing checks for him again.

Indeed, even his seemingly pro-Israel call for security arrangements in a final peace deal involved sticking it to Israel. Obama said, "The full and phased withdrawal of Israeli military forces should be coordinated with the assumption of Palestinian security responsibility in a sovereign, non-militarized state."

What does that mean "with the assumption of Palestinian security responsibility?"

It means we have to assume everything will be terrific.

All of this means is that if Netanyahu was planning to be nice to Obama, and pretend that everything is terrific with the administration, he should just forget about it. He needn’t attack Obama. Let the Republicans do that.

But both in his speech to AIPAC and his address to Congress, he should very forthrightly tell the truth about the nature of the populist movements in the Middle East, the danger of a nuclear Iran, the Palestinians’ commitment to Israel’s destruction; the lie of the so-called peace process; the importance of standing by allies; and the critical importance of a strong Israel to US national security. 

He has nothing to gain and everything to lose by playing by the rules that Obama is trying to set for him.

Ehud Barak’s latest Nakba

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have some explaining to do.

On Sunday, Israel was invaded along its border with Syria. More than 100 Syrians successfully infiltrated the country and rioted violently in Majdal Shams for several hours.

The IDF was reportedly surprised by these events. It was more prepared for violent riots along the borders with Lebanon and Gaza. And security forces were deployed more or less effectively in Jerusalem, the Galilee, the Negev, Judea and Samaria on Sunday.

Jerusalem, a focal point of the unrest since Friday, witnessed rioting in several Arab neighborhoods, which reached its peak with an assault on Hadassah Hospital on Mt. Scopus.

But the government and the IDF were surprised by the invasion from Syria.

What can possibly explain this surprise? And what does it tell us about the defense establishment’s ability to cope with the swiftly expanding and changing threats facing Israel?

BEFORE WE consider that issue, we need to understand the nature of the new assault now underway.

Sunday’s events were fully anticipated. In 1998, at the height of the so-called peace process, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and PLO/Fatah chieftan Yasser Arafat invented a new Palestinian holiday – the Nakba.

That year, for the first time, Arabs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza rioted on May 15 – the secular date of Israel’s establishment in 1948. The purpose of Israel’s "peace partner’s" initiative was to escalate anti-Israel sentiments of Arabs on both sides of the 1949 armistice lines. And indeed, the next year, for the first time, the Nakba – or catastrophe – of Israel’s birth on May 15, 1948 was marked by Israel’s Arab citizens.

In the years since, the Palestinians and their brethren throughout the Arab world have consistently escalated their May 15 attacks, with anti-Israel mass demonstrations now common fare throughout the Arab world.

In recent months, Hamas and Fatah have been ratcheting up their incitement and calling for their followers to descend on Jerusalem on May 15. Millions worldwide participated in social media campaigns calling for a third Palestinian intifada to begin on May 15.

Regionally, in recent weeks, as Syrian anti-regime protesters have escalated their calls to overthrow the Assad regime, Hezbollah and the Syrian media have been joining the Nakba incitement efforts. In Egypt as well, as the Muslim Brotherhood consolidates its power, the calls for invading Israel and avenging the Nakba have escalated daily.

Politically, the Nakba campaigns couldn’t be an easier target for an Israeli information counteroffensive.

The assertion that Israel’s establishment was a catastrophe for the Arabs makes clear that the Palestinian leadership has no interest in living at peace with Israel. This goes for both Fatah, which popularized the term, and Hamas, which was happy to adopt it. If Israel’s existence is the Palestinian catastrophe, then obviously, every patriotic Palestinian must seek Israel’s destruction.

Actually, the Palestinian and pan-Arab embrace of the Nakba myth doesn’t merely demonstrate that they aren’t interested in peaceful coexistence. It proves that their true aspirations are nothing short of genocidal.

The declared goal of the Arab armies that invaded the infant State of Israel on May 15, 1948 was to throw every Jewish man, woman and child in the country into the sea. By calling the Arab failure to carry out that plan a catastrophe, today’s Nakba rioters and mourners are saying they support the genocidal purpose of the 1948 Arab invaders.

And of course, by making the issue Israel’s establishment in 1948, the Palestinians and their supporters are showing that the popular myth that they have no problem with Israel existing within the 1949 armistice lines, and seek only the "liberation" of Israel’s heartland of Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem is a complete fabrication. Those areas were lands the Arabs successfully conquered and emptied of Jews in 1948. The Arab occupation of these areas only ended in 1967 because they again invaded Israel with the declared purpose of throwing every Jewish man, woman and child in the country into the sea.

In short, the entire notion of the Nakba is proof that the Palestinians specifically and the Arab world as a whole remain dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the genocide of Jewry.

Netanyahu and the rest of Israel’s leaders have the duty to point out this glaring, yet totally ignored fact. And yet, they have been silent.

The most Netanyahu could muster in the lead up to Nakba Day was a true but irrelevant mention of the fact that as full citizens of Israel, Israeli Arabs enjoy more freedoms than citizens of any Arab state.

As for the IDF, it’s hard to know where to begin describing its failures to understand or prepare for Sunday’s events.

Perhaps the oddest aspect of the IDF’s treatment of the mass infiltration from Syria was the IDF Spokesman’s Unit’s response.

First, IDF Spokesman Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai blamed the events on Iran. He called the events an "Iranian provocation aimed at creating friction."

Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. Certainly Iran is always interested in drawing Israeli blood and weakening the country. But Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad didn’t order the rioters to cross the border. Syrian President Bashar Assad did.

As for Assad, an unnamed military source told the media that Assad ordered the whole thing in order to divert world attention from the fact that he is butchering his citizens. As the official said: "This is a cynical and transparent act by the Syrian regime to create a crisis on the border with Israel in order to distract public opinion from the very real problems at home. Syria is a police state; this sort of thing could not happen without the support of the regime. It is clear they wanted this to play the Israel card in order to silence their own democratic opposition."

Well said. But this brings us to the next question: If the IDF understands why this happened, why weren’t there sufficient forces along the border armed with riot-control gear to block the infiltrators? Not only was the regime’s rationale for the attack easily understandable, the IDF could see the rioters coming. They saw the them get on the buses. They saw the buses coming to the border. There were enough forces along the border to stop a similar penetration from Lebanon.

Why weren’t there enough to prevent the Syrians from entering Israeli territory? Why weren’t there enough soldiers on the ground to prevent them from entering Majdal Shams, vandalizing the village and flying the Syrian flag inside Israel? Moreover, what does its abject failure to deploy adequately tell us about the defense establishment’s ability to properly understand regional developments and trends, and prepare the IDF to protect the country in the face of them?

HERE, TWO aspects of Sunday’s events must be borne in mind. First, in general, the events of Nakba day are simply an escalation of the suicide protest campaign that has been ongoing since 2001. The most famous suicide protester to date is Rachel Corrie. And the most successful suicide protest to date was last year’s Mavi Marmara suicide flotilla.

Suicide protests have two aims. The first is to humiliate the IDF and Israel. If unarmed suicide protesters are able to take control of a military target for any length of time, their achievement will harm the reputation of the IDF. This goal was achieved on Sunday, when Druse villagers in Majdal Shams were allowed to mediate between the Syrian infiltrators and the IDF.

The second aim is to force the IDF to use lethal force against the protesters and so portray the IDF as a criminal army that kills unarmed civilians. This goal was also partially achieved on Sunday along the Syrian and Lebanese borders.

Since the IDF has already faced suicide protests, it is inexcusable that it has not yet managed to put together a coherent doctrine for contending with them. For instance, why weren’t there water cannons along the border with Lebanon?

The other aspect of Sunday’s Nakba riots worth noting is that they were the first suicide protests to have taken place on a regional scale since the popular rebellion began in Syria, and since Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in Egypt.

IDF sources interviewed on Sunday claimed that since the Syrian border has been quiet since 1973, they didn’t expect it to be active on May 15. What this means is that the IDF failed to recognize ahead of time what its officials were able to recognize after the fact. Namely, that the populist upheavals in the Arab world give Assad (and a lot of other Arab leaders who have kept out of the direct fight against Israel in recent years) good reason to attack. And this new impetus to attack should have led the IDF to deploy forces along the border in sufficient numbers to prevent infiltration.

So why was the IDF unprepared?

THE PERSON most responsible for the IDF’s poor handling of events on Sunday is Defense Minister Ehud Barak. And his incompetence is not surprising. Barak is a serial bungler. He is the same man who armed the naval commandos who boarded the Mavi Marmara with paintball guns, even though it was known that the Turkish IHH, which organized the pro-Hamas flotilla, had links to terror groups.

In recent months, Barak has been too busy warning about the widely exaggerated diplomatic "tsunami" at the UN in September, when the Palestinians declare their independence for the second time, to notice events in the Middle East in May.

And that leads to the last disconcerting thing about the defense establishment’s surprise at Sunday’s events. Commentators and military officials alike are claiming that the Nakba day events are likely a dress rehearsal for even larger riots in September. And this may be true. But it is equally likely that they are the beginning of a new campaign that started this week and will escalate in the weeks and months to come. In this vein, of course we should note that a new, expanded Turkish government-organized pro-Hamas flotilla is set to sail next month with thousands of suicide protesters on more than a dozen ships.

This brings us back to Netanyahu and his relationship with Barak. It is hard to explain Netanyahu’s failure to condemn the Palestinians and their supporters for mourning the Arabs’ failure to annihilate the Jews of Israel in 1948 without placing it in the context of his close relationship with Barak.

There are many explanations for why Netanyahu gives so much weight to Barak’s consistently and dangerously incorrect assessments of regional developments. If they serve no other purpose, Sunday’s dismal events must cause Netanyahu to finally reconsiderhis attachment to Barak.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Obama’s newest ambush

It is hard to believe, but it appears that in the wake of the Palestinian unity deal that brings Hamas, the genocidal, al-Qaida-aligned, local franchise of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, into a partnership with Fatah, US President Barack Obama has decided to open a new round of pressure on Israel to give away its land and national rights to the Palestinians. It is hard to believe that this is the case. But apparently it is.

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that while Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is in Washington next week, and before the premier has a chance to give his scheduled address to a joint session of Congress, Obama will give a new speech to the Arab world. In that speech, Obama will praise the populist movements that have risen up against Arab tyrannies and embrace them as the model for the future. As for Israel, the report claimed that the Obama administration is still trying to decide whether the time is right to put the screws on Israel once more.

On the one hand, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told the Journal that Arab leaders are clamoring for a new US initiative to force Israel to make new concessions. Joining this supposed clamor are the administration-allied pro-Palestinian lobby J Street, and the administration-allied New York Times.

On the other hand, the Netanyahu government and Congress are calling for a US aid cutoff to the Palestinian Authority. With Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization, now partnering with Fatah in governing the PA, it is illegal for the US government to continue to have anything to do with the PA. Both the Netanyahu government and senior members of the House and Senate are arguing forcefully that there is no way for Israel to make peace with the Palestinians now, and that the US must abandon its efforts to force the sides to sign an agreement.

The Israeli and congressional arguments are certainly compelling. But the signals emanating from the White House and its allied media indicate that Obama is ready to plough forward in spite of them. With the new international security credibility he earned by overseeing the successful assassination of Osama bin Laden, Obama apparently believes that he can withstand congressional pressure and make the case for demanding that Israel surrender Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to Hamas and its partners in Fatah.

THE SIGNALS that Obama is setting his sights on coercing Israel into agreeing to surrender its capital and heartland to Hamas and its partners in Fatah came in three forms this week. First, administration officials are trying to lower the bar that Hamas needs to pass in order to be considered a legitimate political force.

After Fatah and Hamas signed their first unity deal in March 2007, the US and its colleagues in the so-called Middle East Quartet – Russia, the EU and the UN – set three conditions that Hamas needed to meet to be accepted by them as legitimate. It needed to recognize Israel’s right to exist, agree to respect existing agreements with Israel, and renounce terrorism.

These are not difficult conditions. Fatah is perceived as having met them even though it is still a terrorist organization and its leaders refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist and refuse to abide by any of the major commitments they took upon themselves in precious agreements with Israel. Hamas could easily follow Fatah’s lead.

But Hamas refuses. So, speaking to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius two weeks ago, administration officials lowered the bar.

They said Hamas had made major concessions to Fatah in their agreement because it agreed to accept provisions of the 2009 unity deal drafted by the Mubarak government that it rejected two year ago and because Hamas agreed that the unity government will be manned by "technocrats" rather than terrorists.

Even if these contentions are true, they are completely ridiculous. In point of fact, all the 2009 agreement says is that Hamas will refrain from demanding to join the US-trained and funded Fatah army in Judea and Samaria. As for the "technocratic" government, who does the Obama administration think will control these "technocrats"? And as to the truth of these contentions, in an interview last week with the New York Times, Hamas terror-master Khaled Mashal denied that he had agreed to the terms of the 2009 agreement.

Indeed, he said that Fatah agreed to add annexes to the agreement reflecting Hamas’s positions.

The second pitch the administration and its friends have adopted ahead of Obama’s address next week is that Hamas has become more moderate or may become more moderate.

Robert Malley, who in the past advised Obama’s presidential campaign, made this argument last week in an op-ed in the Washington Post. Malley claimed that by joining the government, Hamas will be more moved by US pressure. A New York Times editorial last Saturday argued that Hamas may have moderated, and even if it hasn’t, "Washington needs to press Mr. Netanyahu back to the peace table."

Adding their voices to the din, Middle Eastern leaders like Amr Moussa, the frontrunner to serve as Egypt’s next president, and Turkish Prime Minister Recip Erdogan, have given interviews to the US media this week in which they denied that Hamas is even a terrorist organization.

Here it is important to note that none of the administration’s statements about the Hamas- Fatah deal and none of the media coverage related to it have included any mention of the fact that Hamas deliberately murders entire families and targets children specifically. No one mentions last month’s Hamas guided rocket attack which deliberately targeted an Israeli school bus. Hamas murdered 16-year-old Daniel Viflic in that attack. No one has mentioned the café massacres, the bus bombings, the university campus massacres, the breaking into homes massacres, the Passover Seder massacres Hamas has carried out and bragged about in recent years. No one has mentioned that when seen as a portion of the population, Hamas has killed far more Israelis than al-Qaida has killed Americans.

The final pitch the administration and its surrogates are making is that the deal needs to be seen as part of the overall regional shift towards popular rule. This pitch too is difficult to make.

After all, the first casualty of the Arab world’s shift towards popular rule is the 30-year-old Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Now that Egypt’s citizens have gotten rid of US-ally Hosni Mubarak, they have committed themselves to getting rid of the peace he upheld with Israel throughout his long reign.

Again, despite the difficulties, the Obama administration is clearly willing to make the case. Regarding Egypt, they argue that the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power is a good. This was the point of Obama’s Passover and Israel Independence Day messages.

As for the regional shift, the fact that Obama reportedly intends to place the so-called Palestinian- Israeli peace process into the regional context signals that he sees potential for an agreement between Israel and Syria as well. His advisers telegraphed this view to Ignatius.

Obama’s advisers made the unlikely argument that if Syrian leader Bashar Assad survives the popular demonstrations calling for his overthrow, he will feel compelled to distance his regime from Iran because his Sunni-majority population has been critical of his alliance with the Shi’ite mullocracy.

This argument is unlikely given that the same officials recognize that if Assad survives, he will owe his regime’s survival to Iran. As they reminded Ignatius, US intelligence officials reported last month that Iran has "secretly supplied Assad with tear gas, anti-riot gear and other tools of suppression."

WHAT IS perhaps most remarkable about Obama’s apparent plan to use the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as an excuse for a new round of diplomatic warfare against Israel is how poorly coordinated his steps have been with the PLO-Fatah. Mahmoud Abbas and his predecessor Yasser Arafat always viewed the US obsession with getting the Arabs and Israel to sign peace treaties as a strategic asset. Anytime they wanted to weaken Israel, they just needed to sound the fake peace drum loudly enough to get the White House’s attention. US presidents looking for the opportunity to "make history" were always ready to take their bait.

Unlike his predecessors, Obama’s interest in the Palestinians is not opportunistic. He is a true believer. And because of his deep-seated commitment to the Palestinians, his policies are even more radically anti-Israel than the PLO-Fatah’s. It was Obama, not Abbas, who demanded that Jews be barred from building anything in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. It is the Obama administration, not the PLO-Fatah, that is leading the charge to embrace the Muslim Brotherhood.

Like his belated move to demand a permanent abrogation of Jewish property rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, Abbas arguably embraced Hamas because Obama left him no choice. He has no interest in making peace with Israel, so the only thing he can do under the circumstances Obama has created is embrace Hamas. He can’t be less pro-Islamic than the US president.

ALL OF this brings us to Netanyahu and his trip to Washington next week. Obviously Obama’s decision to upstage the premier with his new outreach-to-the-Arab-world speech will make Netanyahu’s visit more challenging than it was already going to be.

Obama is clearly betting that by moving first, he will be able to coerce Netanyahu to make still more concessions of land and principles.

Certainly, Netanyahu’s earlier decisions to cave in to Obama’s pressure with his acceptance of Palestinian statehood and his subsequent acceptance of a Jewish building freeze give Obama good reason to believe he can back Netanyahu into a corner. Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s hysterical warnings about a diplomatic "tsunami" at the UN in September if Israel fails to capitulate to Obama today no doubt add to Obama’s sense that he can expect Netanyahu to dance to his drums, no matter how hostile the beat.

But Netanyahu doesn’t have to give in. He can stick to his guns and defend the country. He can continue on the correct path he has forged of repeating the truth about Hamas. He can warn about the growing threat of Egypt. He can describe the Iranian-supported butchery Assad is carrying out against his own people and note that a regime that murders its own will not make peace with the Jewish state. And he can point out the fact that as a capitalist, liberal democracy which protects the lives and property of its citizens, Israel is the only stable country in the region and the US’s only reliable regional ally.

True, if Netanyahu does these things, he will not win himself any friends in the White House.

But he never had a chance of winning Obama and his advisers over anyway. He will empower Israel’s allies in Congress, though. And more importantly, whether he is loved or hated in Washington, if Netanyahu does these things, he will be able to return home to Jerusalem with the sure knowledge that he earned his salary this month.

The PLO’s desperate defenders

By most accounts, the Fatah-Hamas unity deal signing ceremony Wednesday was a grand affair. Hamas terror-chief Khaled Mashaal jetted in from Damascus. PLO/Fatah/Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas flew in from Ramallah.

The ceremony was held under the auspices of the newly Muslim Brotherhood-friendly Egyptian intelligence services. UN representatives and Israeli Arab members of Knesset were on hand to witness the "historic" accord which officially put the PLO in bed with Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and a terrorist organization dedicated to the annihilation of Israel and the establishment of a global caliphate.

No less significant than the pact itself are the lengths the Left is going to obfuscate and belittle the importance of what happened. At home and abroad, leftists have used three means to hide the meaning of the pact from the public.

First, some have upheld the deal as a cause for celebration. On Wednesday, Channel 10’s senior political commentator Raviv Drucker opined that the deal may increase the chance of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Ignoring the fact that the pact paves the way for Hamas’s integration into the PA’s US-trained security forces, and its membership in the PLO, Raviv vapidly claimed that the villain in all of the recent developments is none other than Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who is destroying all chance of peace by pointing out that the Palestinians have opted for war.

On the world stage, Drucker’s case is being made by former US president Jimmy Carter. In an op-ed in The Washington Post on Wednesday, Carter similarly praised the deal as a step forward. Never mentioning the fact that Hamas is a terrorist organization, Carter claimed that the deal will enhance Palestinian democracy. It will also increase chances for a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel and peace between Israel and the Palestinians, he promised.

The second way the leftist establishment is trying to hide the game-changing nature of the Fatah-Hamas deal is by belittling it. Most of the Israeli media, for instance, highlighted remarks by outgoing Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin asserting that the agreement is likely to be short-lived.

The New York Times, too, emphasized the deal’s high chance of failure. But whether it succeeds or fails is irrelevant. The point is not that Fatah and Hamas don’t like one each other. They point is that they are terrorists.

Finally, voices in the Left have sought to hide the importance of the agreement behind bureaucratic illusions. For example, the Obama administration is using the artificial distinctions between Fatah – led by Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO – led by Mahmoud Abbas, and the Palestinian Authority – led by Mahmoud Abbas, to claim that there is no reason to get excited. Since the PLO signs the deals with Israel, and the PA pays the bills, the State Department has argued that the fact that Fatah signed a unity agreement with Hamas won’t have any immediate impact on US aid to the PA.

Abbas himself has gone out of his way to encourage this notion. During his meeting with a delegation of far left, retired Israeli security brass last week, Abbas said there is no reason for concern about the agreement because the PLO, which he leads, rather than Fatah, which he leads, carries out negotiations with Israel.

The reason that otherwise intelligent people are willing to make such obviously absurd statements is because they are in a state of panic. They realize that the Fatah-Hamas unity deal discredits the land-for-peace paradigm. If the public is permitted to recognize the importance of what has happened, then that policy will be abandoned. All Israeli and US support, recognition and legitimization for the Hamas-partnering PA/PLO/Fatah will have to be ended.

The Left’s panic was revealed on Wednesday in a Haaretz report of a classified Foreign Ministry report regarding the unity deal. Written by unnamed officials at the ministry’s leftist-dominated policy planning division, its authors rebuked the Netanyahu government for condemning the agreement. They claimed that the deal represents an opportunity for Israel. They further called on the government to "be a team player and coordinate its response to a Palestinian unity government with the [Obama] administration." Doing so, the authors claimed, "will empower the United States and serve Israeli interests."

Obviously displeased with the government’s failure to heed their ridiculous advice, the diplomats released their cable to Haaretz in a bid to intimidate Israel’s elected leadership into submission before it is too late.

This is not the first time we have been at the point of recognizing the truth – that the PLO/PA/Fatah never turned its back on terror and that all the commitments it has made to Israel have been subordinate to its commitment to maintaining its support for terror. We were here in 1990 and again in 2000.

In 1990, PLO chief Yasser Arafat refused to condemn a seaborne terror attack on Ashkelon and Tel Aviv carried out by the PLF faction of the PLO. As is the case today, Arafat tried to characterize the subordinate group as an independent organization in order to deny his own culpability for their crime.

At the time, the US was engaged in a dialogue with the PLO facilitated by the group’s November 1988 professed recognition of Israel. Faced with this clear breach of good faith, the US Congress and the Shamir government demanded that then-president George H.W. Bush cancel US recognition of the PLO and end its dialogue with the terror group. Although Bush had been a great champion of US-PLO relations, he had no choice but to agree to this obviously justified demand.

A year later, in 1991, Bush rejected the notion of reinstating his recognition of the PLO. Speaking to reporters he said, "To me, they’ve lost credibility. They’ve lost credibility with this office right here."

In 2000, Arafat again lost credibility when he rejected then prime minister Ehud Barak’s offer of peace and Palestinian statehood at Camp David, joined forces with Hamas and launched a terror war against Israel. Upon returning from Camp David, Barak bragged that he had taken the mask of peacemaker off of Arafat’s terrorist face.

But Barak’s peace-crazed leftist voters weren’t interested in the truth. Just as they are condemning Netanyahu now for acknowledging that Abbas’s deal with Hamas proves that the PA is uninterested in peace with Israel, in 2000 the political Left responded with vitriol to Barak’s announcement. From their great leader, he became their worst enemy.

Barak’s supporters’ decision to prefer their ideological commitment to the peace paradigm over their commitment to their country or to the facts on the ground made it impossible for Barak to act on his revelation. If he wished to have a political future, the only thing he could do was obey his voters, and put the mask back on Arafat’s face. After all, the Right, which opposed his massive concessions, would never vote for him.

So Barak dutifully elevated uber-leftist and then-justice minister Yossi Beilin to the head of his negotiations team. He empowered Beilin to make even more far-reaching concessions to Arafat at Taba, even as Arafat’s security forces were lynching IDF soldiers and planning, financing and ordering the suicide bombings.

Today the situation is closer to 1990 than to 2000. As in 1990, the US Congress fully supports ending US funding, recognition and support for the PLO/PA/Fatah. Even before the deal was announced, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairwoman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, had already called for ending US financing of the PA in light of its refusal to negotiate peace with Israel or recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Immediately after the unity deal was announced, Ros-Lehtinen reinstated her demand that the US end all support for the PA. She noted that since Hamas is a terrorist organization, the US government is legally barred from providing it with assistance or recognition of any kind. Sen. Mark Kirk has led efforts in the Senate to end US aid to the PLO/PA/Fatah in light of the unity deal.

If Netanyahu follows the advice of his leftist critics and cooperates with the Obama administration in its apparent bid to ignore the legal and policy significance of the Hamas-Fatah deal, he will undermine Congress’s ability to support Israel. No American lawmaker – or presidential candidate – will want to be more pro-Israel than Israel’s prime minister. And if Netanyahu bends to the will of his leftist critics he will stop these welcome initiatives in their tracks.

So far, Netanyahu has been holding strong. His government’s decision to freeze tax transfers to the PA in response to the agreement with Hamas has sent a strong signal that Israel is withdrawing its acceptance of the PA as a credible peace partner and now views it as a terrorist entity. This move will facilitate swift congressional action to defund the PA and limit the administration’s ability to pressure Israel to make further concessions to Abbas.

From the perspective of US-Israel relations, the Fatah-Hamas unity pact couldn’t have come at a more crucial time. Netanyahu’s speech before the joint houses of Congress on May 24 provides the premier with a rare opportunity to radically alter the terms of reference for the discourse on the Palestinian conflict with Israel at home and in the US.

If he continues to highlight the PLO-Hamas alliance, Netanyahu can drive the political discourse away from the false narrative of Palestinian peacefulness and towards the truth about their devotion to terror and war. With just one address, Netanyahu can potentially do more to strengthen and safeguard Israel than he has in his entire career. And in so doing, he will guarantee his place among the ranks of the great statesmen.

Politically, Netanyahu has much to gain by remaining on offense and much to lose by surrendering. Unlike Barak’s voters, Netanyahu’s voters know that the discredited land-for-peace paradigm has failed, and they will reward Netanyahu for speaking the truth.

On the other hand, if he bows to leftist pressure, and empowers Obama to demand still more Israeli concessions to the Fatah-Hamas government, Netanyahu will place his political future in jeopardy. His voters are liable to transfer their support to Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman or to one of Netanyahu’s Likud ministers. They will not understand why they should vote for Netanyahu only to get Barak’s policy.

International affairs rarely provide the opportunity to correct past mistakes. If Netanyahu does the right thing, he will be attacked viciously by the mindless supporters of endless concessions. But their condemnations will be drowned out by hoots and cheers of enthusiastic support from the overwhelming majority of the public at home, and from Israel’s friends in Congress and throughout the world. They will thank him for freeing us all, finally, from the myth of peace with terrorists.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Competing visions of “Never Again”

In the end, the Holocaust raged until the Allied powers won the war. It didn’t have to be that way. If the Jews had been permitted to leave Europe, the Holocaust could have been averted. But the only place that wanted us wasn’t allowed to take us. The nations of the world closed their gates. Only the Jews in the Land of Israel wanted the Jews of Europe. But the British barred their arrival.

Britain was required by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine to facilitate Jewish immigration to the Jewish national homeland in order to advance the cause of Jewish sovereignty. But legal obligations couldn’t compete with Britain’s belief that its national interests lay with the Arabs. So from 1939 on, the British closed the doors of the Land of Israel to the Jewish people. In so doing, they effectively sealed the fate of six million Jews.

Both the US and Britain were aware of what the Nazis were up to almost from the beginning, but refused to take any effective action to save the Jews. They refused to bomb the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz, or the crematoria at the death camp. They refused to bomb Auschwitz even though Allied pilots were sent on bombing missions five miles away. Likewise, they refused to bomb any of the scores of death camps dotting the landscape of Nazi-occupied Europe.

There were two main reasons that the Allies behaved as they did. First, they were none too fond of Jews. It is not that the Americans or British supported their annihilation, but they weren’t bothered by it sufficiently to do anything to stop it.

Anti-Semitism is not the main reason the Allies did nothing. The main reason was because, love us or hate us, the allies couldn’t figure out why they should care. Dead or alive, Jews weren’t a part of their war plans.

For Britain, the goal of the war was to survive.

For the Americans it was to defend the cause of freedom and pave the way for America’s emergence as leader of the free world. Jewish survival was not considered relevant to achieving these goals, so the Allies stood by as the ghettos were liquidated and the gas chambers began operating at full capacity.

AFTER THE war, world Jewry adopted "Never Again," as our rallying cry. But "Never Again," is just a slogan. It fell to the leaders of the Jewish people to conceive the means to prevent a recurrence of the Holocaust.

These leaders came up with two very different strategies for protecting Jews from genocide, and their followers formed separate camps. Whereas in the early years, the separate positions appeared to complement each other, since the 1970s the gulf between them has grown ever wider. Indeed, many of the divisions in world Jewry today originate in this post-Holocaust policy divide.

The first strategy was based on international law and human rights. Its champions argued that the reason the Allies didn’t save the Jews was because the laws enjoining the Allies to rescue us on the one hand, and prohibiting the Nazis from killing us on the other were insufficiently strong. If they could promulgate a new global regime of international humanitarian law, they believed they could force governments to rise above their hatreds and the shackles of their narrow-minded national interests to save innocents from slaughter. Not only would their vision protect the Jews, it would protect everyone.

The Jews who subscribed to the human-rights strategy for preventing another Holocaust were the architects of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention. They were the founders of the international human rights regime that now dominates so much of Western discourse on war and peace.

Unfortunately, the institutions these idealistic Jews designed have been corrupted by political forces they had hoped to defeat.

Consequently, the international human-rights regime they created has failed completely to accomplish what they hoped it would accomplish. Instead, the regime they created to protect the Jews is now a key weapon in the political war being waged against them.

Jews are not the only casualty of the human-rights policy paradigm’s failure.

Cambodians, Rwandans, Darfuris and others can also attest to its collapse.

There are two reasons that the human-rights paradigm has broken down. The first is because it failed to recognize the adaptability of Jew hatred. Anti-Semitism is one of the hardest hatreds to pin down because it is constantly updating itself to suit the political and social trends of the day. Since Nazi-style anti- Semitism went out of fashion with the defeat of Germany, the human-rights visionaries believed that people would be embarrassed into putting the hatred aside.

Instead, guided by the Soviets, Jew-haters worldwide simply updated their language.

They stopped talking about Jewish control over world affairs and began talking about Zionist control over world affairs.

Unlike the Europeans, Arab Jew-haters feel no social obligation to hide their antipathy for the Jews from their own societies. But recognizing where the West stands on the issue, they have added the post-war, socially acceptable form of anti-Semitism – anti-Zionism – to their repertoire. For instance, alongside its allegations about Jewish and Freemason conspiracies to take over the world, and its citations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Hamas charter also includes a paragraph devoted to Zionist apartheid, genocide, imperialism, and human-rights abuses.

When the Palestinians’ Western sympathizers in the media, foreign service, academia, etc. report on Palestinian accusations against Israel, they eagerly credit as fact demonstrably false allegations by Palestinian spokesmen of Israeli human-rights abuses, genocide and apartheid. Tellingly though, those Westerners are silent when the same Palestinian officials they treat as respectable for alleging Zionist criminal conspiracies also engage in politically incorrect anti-Semitic attacks.

Their claims that Israelis poison their wells and infect their children with AIDS are left unremarked.

This Western cherry picking of Jewish conspiracy theories by politically savvy Western Jew-haters demonstrates the absurdity of the claim that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.

Like old-fashioned Jew-hatred, anti-Zionism inverts the reality of Jewish vulnerability and victimization in order to justify irrational hatred of Jews and deny basic rights of self-defense to Jewish victims.

The anti-Semites’ corruption of the human-rights paradigm in the service of their Jew-hating agendas is certainly a major reason the human rights model for genocide prevention has failed. But it is not the only cause of the failure. The other reason the model has failed is because it is premised on a naïve and incorrect understanding of statecraft.

Champions of human rights and humanitarian law believed that if laws were placed on the books, if international conventions were ratified by democracies, then the world would abide by them. But this is not the case.

Just as the British ignored their international legal obligations to facilitate Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel when they felt it served their interests to favor the Arabs, so today governments routinely ignore their international legal obligations if abiding by them runs contrary to their perception of their interests.

This truth was laid bare last December, with the Nixon Library’s release of a taped March 1973 conversation between then-president Richard Nixon and then-secretary of state Henry Kissinger regarding the prospect of a Soviet genocide of Soviet Jews.

Kissinger opined: "If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern." Nixon responded, "I know. We can’t blow up the world because of it."

Their views were not merely testament to the two men’s indifference toward the fate of Soviet Jews. They are instructive because they show how leaders prioritize their policies.

Nixon and Kissinger probably opposed the genocide of Soviet Jewry, but it was more important to avoid a policy that could "blow up the world."

By the same token, the US opted to do nothing in the face of the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur, among others.

US and European treatment of Jews specifically, and of the incidents of genocide generally since the Holocaust make clear that the twin presumptions of the human-rights paradigm were wrong.

Anti-Semitism is not a curable disease.

Israel is the target of an anti-Semitic, genocidal political campaign that employs the language of human rights to justify itself. And otherwise moral men and women simply ignore evil when they believe their interests are best served by not standing up to it.

A secondary casualty of the failure of the human rights paradigm has been intra- Jewish relations. Faced with their preferred paradigm’s failure and corruption at the hands of anti-Semites, many Jewish human-rights activists have opted to abandon their fellow Jews and Israel in order to maintain their allegiance to the corrupt, anti-Semitic human-rights model.

PARTICULARLY ANNOYING to these human-rights followers is the stunning success of the other post-Holocaust Jewish strategy for giving meaning to the slogan "Never Again."

That policy is Zionism.

Zionism doesn’t concern itself with how people ought to behave, but with what they are capable of doing. Zionists understand that people are an amalgamation of passions and interests. The Holocaust was able to occur because the only people with a permanent passion and interest in defending the Jews are the Jews. And when the Nazis rose to power, the Jews were homeless and powerless.

Jews who embrace the human-rights approach criticize Zionism’s vision as lonely and militaristic. What they fail to recognize is that every successful nation depends on itself, and lives by the sword.

Only those who deter aggressors are capable of attracting allies. No one will stand with a nation that will not stand up for itself.

Holocaust Remembrance Day, which we marked on Monday, is nestled between Pessah and Independence Day for a reason. In both ancient and modern times, the only way for Jews – or anyone else – to protect their freedom and their lives is by being capable of defending them, in their own land.

The pseudo human-rights campaign against Israel being carried out in the name of fashionable anti-Zionist anti-Semitism represents a complete vindication of the Zionist model. Zionism is the only way to ensure Jewish survival. It is the only way to ensure that in the face of growing threats, "Never Again" will mean never again.