Israel Matzav

Required reading: Anne Bayefsky on Obama's Cairo speech

Obama thought he would prove his even-handedness towards Israel by boasting of Friday’s trip to a concentration camp and rejecting Holocaust denial. In this context, however, the move of doing Jews these supposed favors appears to be cynical political opportunism, especially having just set the Holocaust side-by-side with the “suffering” and “pain” of Palestinians “for more than 60 years.” After all, the president made no emotive references to the “intolerable” “suffering” of Israeli victims of Arab terror “for more than 60 years.” The word “terrorism” never left his lips. Far from bolstering the fight against terror and the anti-Semitism driving it, such maneuvers embolden more hate and violence against Israelis.

Instead, Obama sought Arab and Muslim approbation by drawing a moral equivalence between those who have rejected Israel from the outset (and still seek its outright destruction or a “right of return” intended to terminate a Jewish majority) and the Jews who have kept them at bay since May 14, 1948. In his words: “There has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history. . . . It’s easy to point fingers — for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought about by Israel’s founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks.” Calling the Israeli-Arab conflict a “stalemate” represents an abysmal failure to acknowledge historical reality. The modern state of Israel emerged after an internationally approved partition plan of November 1947 that would have created two states, one Jewish and one Arab; this plan was accepted by Jews and rejected by Arabs. One people has always been prepared to live in peace, and the other has chosen war in 1948 and 1956 and 1967 and 1973 and 1982, and renewed terrorism after its every loss.

Bereft of the most basic understanding of Judaism and Jewish history, Obama claimed that “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied,” for “around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries.” A Jewish homeland in Israel is not rooted in tragedy or in centuries of persecution around the world. It is rooted in a wondrous, unbroken, and spiritual relationship to the land of Israel and to Jerusalem for thousands of years. Coupled with the president’s stress on “European responsibility” for the Holocaust, his words reinforced the lethal belief that Israel is the creature of transplanted, alien Jews.

Obama’s stunning offense to Israel and the Jewish people went farther. Israelis have come to occupy territory in response to Arab-initiated wars of intended annihilation, but Obama analogized Palestinian “daily humiliations . . . that come with occupation” to the “humiliation of segregation” of black slaves in America and the “moral authority” of “people from South Africa.” His Arab audience understood that the president of the United States had just given a nod to the single most potent defamation of the Jewish state today — the allegation that Israel is a racist, apartheid state.

After expressing his belief in a moral equivalence between the claims of Palestinians and the claims of the victims of slavery and apartheid, Obama juxtaposed his admission of Israel’s “right to exist” with his assertion that “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.” Every word of this speech was carefully weighed. It was therefore no mishap that for the first time a U.S. president has denied the legitimacy of Israeli settlements, period. Such an assertion abrogates every agreement between Arabs and Israelis, which have always left the ultimate determination of which settlements will stay or go to a bilateral peace process and final status negotiations. Even the Roadmap reads: “Phase III: Permanent Status Agreement and End of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict . . . a final, permanent status resolution . . . on borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements.”

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:19 AM