Israel Matzav

Where's the change, Mr. President?

Gil Troy explains what President Obama has to do before Israelis will take any more 'risks for peace.'

Despite the warm words and attempts at progress when President Barack Obama hosted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the “make up summit” Tuesday, Obama still does not get it. Stale ideas and boilerplate rhetoric are not enough. President Obama must learn from history to make history. To rebuild Israel’s confidence in him, and in peace processes, Obama should acknowledge the unhappy history of the last ten years – and explain what will change if Israel takes risks for peace, yet again.

The tone deafness of those who claim to seek peace is astounding. Their inability to see what Israelis see and to feel Israel’s pain blocks progress. Most Israelis are stuck. They feel burned by a decade and a half of peace-making and negotiation which yielded ten years of violence, harsh criticism, and attacks on Israel’s very legitimacy.

Israelis – and their supporters — connect the dots, seeing how Ehud Barak’s hasty, chaotic withdrawal from Southern Lebanon in May, 2000 and Barak’s generous offer during the Camp David negotiations that summer telegraphed weakness, resulting in Palestinian terrorism that murdered over one thousand innocent Israelis –many of whom lived within Israel’s Green Line, the post-1949 border. They remember that the 2005 Gaza Disengagement was supposed to bring peace but instead intensified the rain of rockets on towns and kibbutzim also within Israel’s Green Line. They resent that when Israelis finally defended themselves in Lebanon against Hezbollah attacks in 2006 and in Gaza against Hamas attacks in late 2008 and early 2009, they were pilloried. Just last week, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who supports Israel, made the harsh, ahistorical, inaccurate and immoral comparison between Israel’s acts of self-defense in those two wars, and Syria’s systematic massacre of as many as 30,000 Muslim dissidents at Hama in 1982, by claiming Israel was following Syria’s brutal “Hama Rules.” If peace-making efforts result in war, terrorism, and delegitimization, most Israelis prefer safer stalemates to disastrous breakthroughs.

Yes, that's fair. Most of us (including yours truly) prefer safer stalemates to disastrous breakthroughs. The President's problem is that nothing has changed. In fact, as Troy goes on to show, nothing has changed since the 1930's. At least when it comes to Arab acceptance of Israel. And I don't expect anything to change in the foreseeable future either.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:50 AM