Bloodthirsty Liberal

The Israelis discover for themselves what it’s like to “go to the mattresses” against Vito Obama:

[T]ensions between Washington and Jerusalem are growing after the U.S. administration’s demand that Israel completely freeze construction in all West Bank settlements.

Interior Minister Eli Yishai on Sunday told cabinet ministers that the U.S. demands on settlement activity were tantamount to “expulsion.”

Israeli political officials have accused the administration of taking a preferential line toward the Palestinians with this regard.

Some officials expressed disappointment after Tuesday’s round of meetings in London with George Mitchell, Obama’s envoy to the Middle East. “We’re disappointed,” said one senior official. “All of the understandings reached during the [George W.] Bush administration are worth nothing.”

…

An Israeli official privy to the talks said that “the Americans took something that had been agreed on for many years and just stopped everything.”

What’s Hebrew for “I won”? Maybe that will get the point across.

What agreement are the Israelis referring to? With the help of Aaron Lerner at IMRA, this one:

Letter from US President George W. Bush to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon

His Excellency
Ariel Sharon
Prime Minister of Israel

Dear Mr. Prime Minister,

…

We welcome the disengagement plan you have prepared, under which Israel would withdraw certain military installations and all settlements from Gaza, and withdraw certain military installations and settlements in the West Bank. These steps described in the plan will mark real progress toward realizing my June 24, 2002 vision, and make a real contribution towards peace. We also understand that, in this context, Israel believes it is important to bring new opportunities to the Negev and the Galilee.

…

The United States appreciates the risks such an undertaking represents. I therefore want to reassure you on several points.

…

Under the roadmap, Palestinians must undertake an immediate cessation of armed activity and all acts of violence against Israelis anywhere, and all official Palestinian institutions must end incitement against Israel. The Palestinian leadership must act decisively against terror, including sustained, targeted, and effective operations to stop terrorism and dismantle terrorist capabilities and infrastructure. Palestinians must undertake a comprehensive and fundamental political reform that includes a strong parliamentary democracy and an empowered prime minister.

Second, there will be no security for Israelis or Palestinians until they and all states, in the region and beyond, join together to fight terrorism and dismantle terrorist organizations.

…

The United States understands that after Israel withdraws from Gaza and/or parts of the West Bank, and pending agreements on other arrangements, existing arrangements regarding control of airspace, territorial waters, and land passages of the West Bank and Gaza will continue.

…

As part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and recognized borders, which should emerge from negotiations between the parties in accordance with UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338. In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.

By pulling back from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, Israel has only opened its citizens to terrorism from the Palestinians, which has continued without abatement for the past five years.

And what do they hear from the Obama administration?

Tensions reportedly reached a peak when, speaking of the Gaza disengagement, the Israelis told their interlocutors, “We evacuated 8,000 settlers on our own initiative,” to which Mitchell responded simply, “We’ve noted that here.”

Gee, thanks, George.

Perhaps when President Obama stands upright and removes the love organ of King Abdullah from his mouth, he can explain where he thought the Israeli refugees from Gaza were going to go? On second thought, maybe we’d rather not know.

Obama has already begun to loosen the domestic constrictions of that “charter of negative liberties”, the Constitution. I don’t see how a few commitments in writing by a former president to one of our closest allies are going to stop him.

She’s right but who will listen?

It is a fundamental truth that while history always repeats itself, it almost never repeats itself precisely. There is always some measure of newness to events that allows otherwise intelligent people to repeat the mistakes of their forbearers without looking completely ridiculous.

Given this, it is hard to believe that with the advent of the Obama administration, we are seeing history repeat itself with nearly unheard of precision. US President Barack Obama’s reported intention of appointing former Senator George Mitchell to serve as his envoy for the so-called Palestinian-Israeli peace process will provide us with a spectacle of an unvarnished repeat of history.

Read all about how Israelis were supposed to abandon their homes, while Palestinians made an effort to stop violence. A 100% effort! Phew! Doesn’t that just sound exhausting, all that effort? It reminds me of all the work I have before me today, hoping. I get tired thinking about it and the sun has barely topped the horizon.

Mitchell of course, is not the only one repeating the past. His boss, Barack Obama is about to repeat the failures his immediate predecessors. Like Clinton and Bush, Obama is making the establishment of a Palestinian state the centerpiece of his foreign policy agenda.

Obama made this clear his first hour on the job. On Wednesday at 8 a.m., Obama made his first phone call to a foreign leader. He called PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. During their conversation, Obama pledged his commitment to Palestinian statehood.

Fatah wasted no time responding to Obama’s extraordinary gesture. Wednesday afternoon Abbas convened the PLO’s Executive Committee in Ramallah and the body announced that future negotiations with Israel will have to be based new preconditions. As far as the PLO is concerned, with Obama firmly in its corner, it can force Israel to its knees.

And so, now the PLO is uninterested in the agreements it reached with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. For Israel to enjoy the privilege of negotiating with the PLO, it must first announce its willingness to expel all the 500,000 or so Israeli Jews who live in Judea, Samaria and the neighborhoods in east, south and north Jerusalem built since 1967 as well as the Old City and then hand the areas over, lock, stock and barrel to the PLO.

This new PLO “plan” itself is nothing new. It is simply a restatement of the Arab “peace plan” which is just a renamed Saudi “peace plan” which was just a renamed Tom Friedman column in the *New York Times*. And the Friedman plan is one that no Israeli leader in his right mind can accept. So by making this their precondition for negotiations, the PLO is doing what it did in 2000. It is rejecting statehood in favor of continued war with Israel.

What is most remarkable about the new administration’s embrace of its predecessors’ failed policy is how uncontroversial this policy is in Washington. It is hard to come up with another example of a policy that has failed so often and so violently that has enjoyed the support of both American political parties. Indeed, it is hard to think of a successful policy that ever enjoyed such broad support.

Apparently, no one in positions of power in Washington has stopped to consider why it is that in spite of the fervent backing of presidents Clinton and Bush, there is still no Palestinian state.

Yes, there is that. Oh well, read it all. I’m tempted to say that she is brilliant, but she’s not, really. She just has common sense and a memory. She recalls what happened yesterday. That’s too much to ask of most people. What is the definition of insanity? Something to do with repeating the same failed actions again and again but expecting a different outcome?

- Aggie

Remember when I wrote how wonderful it would be if we elected John McCain and Israel elected Benjamin Netanyahu?

No? Well, I do.

Way to screw it up America.

Here’s Israel’s once-and-hopefully-future-Prime-Minister:

“I don’t think Israel can accept an Iranian terror base next to its major cities any more than the United States could accept an al Qaeda base next to New York City.”

Or:

“If we accept the notion that terrorists will have immunity because as they fire on civilians they hide behind civilians, then this tactic will be legitimized and the terrorists will have their greatest victory.”

Or:

“We grieve for every child, for every innocent civilian that’s killed either on our side or on the Palestinian side. The terrorists celebrate such suffering, on our side because they openly say they want to kill us, all of us, and on the Palestinian side because it helps them foster this false symmetry, which is contrary to common decency and international law.”

And here’s what you went and done, America. Yes, you did:

[I]t is hard to believe that with the advent of the Obama administration, we are seeing history repeat itself with nearly unheard of exactness. US President Barack Obama’s reported intention of appointing former Sen. George Mitchell as his envoy for the so-called Palestinian-Israeli peace process will provide us with a spectacle of an unvarnished repeat of history.

In December 2000, outgoing president Bill Clinton appointed Mitchell to advise him on how to reignite the “peace process” after the Palestinians rejected statehood and launched their terror war against Israel in September 2000. Mitchell presented his findings to Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, in April 2001.

Mitchell asserted that Israel and the Palestinians were equally to blame for the Palestinian terror war against Israelis. He recommended that Israel end all Jewish construction outside the 1949 armistice lines, and stop fighting Palestinian terrorists.

As for the Palestinians, Mitchell said they had to make a “100 percent effort” to prevent the terror that they themselves were carrying out. This basic demand was nothing new. It formed the basis of the Clinton administration’s nod-nod-wink-wink treatment of Palestinian terrorism since the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994.

By insisting that the PLO make a “100 percent effort,” to quell the terror it was enabling, the Clinton administration gave the Palestinians built-in immunity from responsibility. Every time that his terrorists struck, Yasser Arafat claimed that their attacks had nothing to do with him. He was making a “100 percent effort” to stop the attacks, after all.

…

Mitchell’s plan, although supported by then-secretary of state Colin Powell, was never adopted by Bush because at the time, terrorists were massacring Israelis every day. It would have been politically unwise for Bush to accept a plan that asserted moral equivalence between Israel and the PLO when rescue workers were scraping the body parts of Israeli children off the walls of bombed out pizzerias and bar mitzva parties.

I guess now is the time. He is the change he has been waiting for.

What a [bleeping] travesty.