Against all odds and reason

During his recent visit to Israel, rather than face the elected representatives of the Israeli people in the Knesset, the American President – in a pointed departure from all past U.S. presidential visits to Israel – instead chose to lecture a hand-picked group of liberal/left Israeli students on the ‘virtues’ of a peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority.

More recently, Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, has indicated that he intends to pursue a “modified” version of the 2002 Saudi Peace Plan, now known as the “Arab Peace Initiative”.  What modifications he intends to make on this flawed idea, we do not know as yet.  However, given that as written, it demands that Israel withdraw completely to the 1949 armistice lines, and also allow unrestricted “right of return” for Palestinian refugees and their descendants to anywhere in Israel, it is hard to see how this can be made into an acceptable agreement.  When they unveiled it over a decade ago, the Saudis themselves had said that its terms were not open to negotiation; Israel must take it as is or face the prospect of perpetual hostility from the Arab world.

Many fine articles have been written by many fine people describing in great detail why the “two state solution” between Israel and the PA simply cannot be made to work.  As against the overwhelming evidence of recent history detailed in voluminous commentary and responsible scholarship on this topic, it is hard to see how any minimally informed person at all – let alone anyone whose job would require them to judge such things – could still believe that a genuine peace between Israel and the PA is possible at all. 

And so, this writer will not add to the mountain of articles that explain why such policies are doomed to failure.   Rather, I will start from the assumption that American policymakers who continue to harangue Israel in this fashion won’t read these articles anyway, and even if they did, their minds would never be changed.  Instead, I will try to lend some insight as to why, in the face of overwhelming prospects of failure, ostensibly learned and informed people in responsible positions continue to behave as if the moon were made of green cheese, where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is concerned.

Some would explain this behavior as a result of ‘oil politics’.  During the 1970s through as late as the 1990s, this may have been true.  But today, this is largely a myth, at least in terms of the dynamic that existed in decades past.

We really don’t need their oil. While we still import significant quantities from Saudi Arabia, Canada is by far our largest source of imported oil.  With newly discovered resources here at home accessible by new technology such as fracking, domestic oil production has increased to the point where we are now producing more oil than we import for the first time since the mid 1990s.  Between new technology for production of shale-based oil (which the U.S. possesses in massive quantities), increased conventional production within our borders and secure friendly sources such as could be provided by the Keystone Pipeline from Canada – which Obama continues to delay for some curious reason – we could  easily dispense with Saudi and other Gulf Arab oil.

The Arabs know this. The Arabs also have an extremely powerful lobby that, among other things, does not want to lose these income streams, and even more importantly, the political leverage this gives them with the world’s lone (?) superpower and Israel’s key ally. A leading Saudi democracy activist, one Ali Alyami, told me face-to-face in 2009 that “...the Saudis own this town”, referring to Washington D.C. So, they use their massive political clout - as best symbolized by the serving American president who bows to their king – in order to persuade us to maintain at least a partial, artificial dependence on them so as to retain at least some leverage over us, just like in the “good old days”. 

The Arab petrodollar prostitution ring hardly stops at our nation’s capital, however.  It has been widely reported that the Saudi king’s nephew – and the world’s fifth richest man – Sheikh Alwaleed Bin Talal, owns a major stake in Newscorp, parent company of both the FOX cable network and the Wall Street Journal.  We have also seen global warming guru Al Gore sell his “Current TV” channel to Gulf Arabs, with money no doubt gleaned from the ongoing sale of the carbon-based energy sources he claims are ruining the earth’s climate.  These are just the ones we can readily see; given the behavior of most other national-level print and broadcast media, it is clear that similar deals have been cut many times, at many levels.  It is like a cockroach infestation in one’s home:  for every one that comes out into the light to be seen, there are hundreds hidden out of sight. 

I’m sure many reading this right now have happened upon a few of the many “hidden” cockroaches in the media.  How many times have you written letters to the editor, or otherwise complained to media organizations about their anti-Israel bias, backing up your claims with all manner of facts, history, logic, etc…only to see them continue to slam Israel in the same tired old ways, as if they’d never read a single word of what you said?  Isn’t it simply amazing how so many newspapers, magazines, and television programs can be so stubbornly, consistently wrong about this one issue, all in the same direction, all at once?

Finally, there are our universities, awash in Arab petrodollars in the form of “Middle East Studies” departments.  This racket – and that is what it is, a corrupt racket trying to pass for “scholarship” -  ensures that any history or political science major who takes a course concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict will only see the Arab point of view. 

Thus, between the shameful corruption on display in our nation’s capital, the deliberate Arab pollution of our national media with an anti-Israel bias, and the perversion of academic freedom where these issues are concerned, the agenda of the Arab world against Israel is aggressively promoted.  Since they know they cannot defeat Israel militarily, nor cripple them in direct economic terms, they have simply “rigged” the terms of the debate in the public sphere such that one rarely hears any other point of view besides that which the Arabs want us to hear.  And this “correct” point of view, so far as they are concerned, is that Israel must either accept an outrageously one-sided “peace” [read: surrender] deal that will enable Israel’s dismantlement in stages, or Israel must be branded an “apartheid state” that should be strangled via political and economic isolation, in the manner that Rhodesia was in the 1970s.  Any major public figure who represents a major, direct challenge to their proscribed orthodoxy on the matter of Israel – i.e., who unapologetically asserts that Israel is right and her enemies are wrong -  is immediately demonized by the media, the universities, etc., as a “right wing extremist”, or a “pawn of the Israel lobby”. 

Witness, for example, the treatment received by Newt Gingrich during the 2012 primary season, when he correctly claimed that the Palestinians were a “made up people”.  Did anyone in major media venues stop to analyze his claims in a sober, objective manner?  Of course not; national level media commentators roundly dismissed his comments as mere ‘pandering to the Jewish vote’.  

In even more bizarre instances, an eerie “moral inversion” tactic is used against staunchly pro-Israel public figures.  For example, mainstream journalists have, on occasion, accused the singularly pro-Israel commentator, Glenn Beck, of being an “anti-Semite”. In another recent case, an unquestionably pro-Israel congressional candidate was accused of having Nazi sympathies merely on the basis of photos of him during a historical reenactment (strange how the national magazine in question just couldn’t locate photos of this very same individual receiving his Israeli paratrooper jump wings, which in fact he had).

Yet, even beneath the pernicious influence of the Arab lobby, there is a deeper malady among our current leaders that serves to enable the influence of these outside forces.

The more fundamental problem is this:  The consequences of someone like John Kerry genuinely accepting that the Oslo-based two state solution is dead would be more than they could bear.

Those consequences involve, simply put, admitting Israel is “right”, and the Palestinians, along with their assorted Arab and Islamist allies generally, are “wrong”.  And the consequences of that mean that we should back Israel more or less unequivocally, in the same way that we back South Korea in the face of North Korea. Except that there aren’t 1.2 billion North Koreans from which their leaders can recruit people that will fly airplanes into buildings.

In short, if we accept that the Palestinian Arabs and their various and sundry backers are really acting in bad faith and will not be coaxed into accepting Israel in any form, then the only morally defensible position we can take is that we must back Israel in confronting the Islamists directly; the “honest broker”, “even-handed” policy paradigm so favored by the chattering classes then goes right out the window.   From there, it is also a very short line to the realization that if we can’t get the Moslem world to accept Israel and, more significantly, what she represents in terms of Western values and institutions, then the clear message is that their deadly hostility towards us is about far more than Israel.  This obvious fact is demonstrated, among myriad examples, by the manner in which Pakistani authorities hid Osama Bin Laden, and then protested when we killed him.  Can anyone credibly claim that Pakistan’s blatantly treacherous behavior in this instance had anything at all to do with Israel?

The inescapable conclusion we must reach, then, is that we can’t appease them by delivering Israel to them. At this point, the entire rationale behind the foreign policy of the Obama administration starts to completely unravel.

Once we accept this reality in policy terms and act accordingly, the Islamic world will predictably throw a “temper tantrum” for our “defiance”.  In the near term, this may mean more terrorism directed against us, against which we will be compelled to respond by effective military force.

The Moslem world is poor and backward, but they are large and populous. And they have that great lobby, along with their lock on the media and academia. Given the PR “inertia”,  so to speak,  represented by these factors, and the degree to which legions of political, academic, and media figures  have bought into their patent nonsense for so long, the “about face” we’d have to make would be quite radical. I believe it is doable, but it is a very daunting prospect for the U.S. establishment.

To confront the Islamist movement militarily, in an effective manner, could involve significant short-term sacrifices. A conventional war to defeat them would not reach the scale of WW2, but it would probably involve a level of mobilization not seen since that time. We could very well find it necessary to invade large parts of SW Asia/NE Africa, and suffer greater casualties than we have in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. For such measures, we’d probably have to reinstate the draft. 

In response to future terrorist acts on the scale of the 9-11 attacks or worse (e.g., a “dirty bomb” employed against a large American city), we might even be compelled to respond with more powerful weapons in order to establish an effective sense of deterrence in the minds of our adversaries. 

Eventually, I believe that it is all but inevitable that we are going to have to take steps of this nature at some point.  This will be the case unless we are satisfied with the prospect of winding up like the UK, which even today is pretty much an autonomous, self-governing colony of Saudi Arabia on relevant policy matters. I would imagine that the likes of Kerry, Obama, Hagel, and Brennan would be just fine with that, or at least that is what their behavior indicates.

The rest of America won’t be fine with that. Especially after we get hit with more 9-11s, or worse, and we will.

One of the most fundamental lessons of history is that appeasement never works.

Another fundamental lesson of history is that nobody ever seems to learn from it.

Robert Vincent

Contributing Editor

April 16, 2013