US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton must have given Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu quite a reception. Otherwise it is hard to understand what possessed
him to accept the deal he accepted when he met with her last week.
Under
the deal, Netanyahu agreed to retroactively extend the Jewish construction ban
ended on September 26 and to carry it forward an additional 90
days.
Clinton’s demand was “Not one more brick” for Jews, meaning, no Jew
will be allowed to lay even one more brick on a home he is lawfully building
even as the US funds massive Palestinian construction projects. The magnitude of
this discriminatory infringement on the property rights of law abiding citizens
is breathtaking.
The 90-day freeze is supposed to usher in a period of
intense negotiations between Israel and Fatah. But those negotiations will not
get off the ground because PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas has no interest in talking,
and will never accept any peace offer made by Israel.
But the Americans
don’t care. They aren’t worried about the Palestinians accepting a
deal.
What they want are more Israeli land surrenders.
And Clinton
convinced Netanyahu to agree that the next round of negotiations will be devoted
strictly to a discussion of the breadth and depth of Israeli land
surrenders.
The Palestinians won’t have to recognize that Israel has a
right to exist. They won’t have to dismantle terrorist organizations. They won’t
have to stop teaching their children to aspire to become suicide bombers. They
won’t even have to stop their negotiations towards reconciling with
Hamas.
Netanyahu claims that the Americans agreed to continue respecting
Jewish property rights in Jerusalem. The Obama administration has refused to
confirm this claim. Yet rather than use the US demurral as a justification for
walking away from a bad deal, reports indicate that Netanyahu told his lawyers
to figure out fancy wording to hide the American refusal.
NETANYAHU
BOASTS that he received three major payoffs from Obama in exchange for his
agreement to ban Jewish construction and discuss land surrenders with a
negotiating partner that refuses to peacefully coexist with the Jewish
state.
First, he claims that Obama agreed not to renew his demand that
Jews be denied their property rights. Second, he says the administration agreed
to send Israel 20 more F-35s. Finally, he says Obama agreed to wait a year
before signing onto anti-Israel resolutions in the UN Security
Council.
The first payoff is nothing more than the foreign policy
equivalent of buying the same dead horse twice. Obama led Netanyahu to believe
he had set aside his demand that Jews be denied property rights last November,
when Netanyahu announced the first construction freeze. Yet Obama repeated his
demands even before the last freeze ended. Obama has no credibility on this
issue. Demonstrating this, Obama is now refusing to put this pledge in
writing.
The F-35 deal is simply bizarre. Israel needs the F-35 to defend
against enemies like Iran.
Yet the administration claims that its
agreement to send Israel the F-35s is contingent on Israel signing a peace deal
with the Palestinians. In other words, the Obama administration is now giving
the PLO power to veto American military assistance to Israel by continuing to
say no to peace.
More than anything, the F-35 payoff exposes the degree
to which Obama holds Israel in contempt.
This is a president who is
fighting Congress tooth and nail to pass a $60 billion arms deal with Saudi
Arabia. The administration argues that the arms are necessary to enable Saudi
Arabia to deter Iran from attacking it.
That would be the same Saudi
Arabia that despite its massive arsenal, has never had the courage or the
competence to fight its own battles.
On the other hand there is Israel –
the US’s most reliable, courageous and competent strategic ally in the region,
and even more a target of Iranian aggression than Saudi Arabia.
Rather
than arm Israel with all the means it requires to fight Iran, the Obama
administration is downgrading military assistance by conditioning its transfer
of the F-35s on an Israeli agreement to commit strategic suicide by surrendering
its defensible borders and capital city to its sworn enemies.
Finally
there is the administration’s pledge to support Israel at the UN for a year.
What this pledge actually means is that a year from now, the Obama
administration will present the deal as an excuse to abandon what has been the
policy of every US administration since Lyndon Johnson and stop blocking
anti-Israel resolutions at the UN Security Council.
ACCORDING TO sources
close to Netanyahu, it is his fear of US abandonment at the Security Council
that has convinced him to capitulate so profoundly to an administration so weak
that it couldn’t even get South Korea to sign a free trade agreement with it.
What most concerns Netanyahu these days is that the US will fail to block a
Palestinian bid to have the Security Council recognize a Palestinian state in
all of Judea and Samaria and in large swathes of Jerusalem even if the
Palestinians refuse to sign a peace treaty with Israel.
Since this is
what Netanyahu fears the most, it is important to consider what is at stake.
While harsh, the truth is not as bad as he thinks it is.
If the Security
Council recognizes a Palestinian state in all of Judea and Samaria, in Jerusalem
and Gaza, it would be a diplomatic blow to Israel. But it would only be a
symbolic step. The situation on the ground would remain unchanged.
What
is more problematic is what might happen in the wake of such a resolution. The
worst case scenario would be for the Security Council to pass a subsequent
resolution deploying forces to Judea and Samaria to fight the IDF.
Given
the political maelstrom such an effective US declaration of war against Israel
would cause him domestically, it is very unlikely that Obama would support such
a resolution. He would have to veto it despite the fact that Samantha Power, who
holds the UN portfolio on Obama’s National Security Council, called in the past
for US forces to be deployed to Judea and Samaria to fight the IDF.
The
other two possibilities are that Israel will become the target of economic
sanctions and that Israeli citizens who live beyond the 1949 armistice lines or
who have served in the IDF will risk arrest on war crimes charges if we travel
abroad. The purpose of such sanctions would be to strangle Israel slowly, in a
manner reminiscent of the economic and political warfare that brought down the
apartheid regime in South Africa.
In both these cases as well, it is
unlikely that Obama will risk the domestic outcry that administration support
for such resolutions would provoke. And even if he enabled such resolutions to
pass, Congress would likely block US participation in enforcing them. This is
not to say that Israel should ignore the threat. But such hostile action is best
deterred by working quietly with Israel’s allies in the US to point out the
dangers of a runaway UN campaign against a fellow democracy.
At the same
time, these threats of economic and legal warfare should sound familiar, because
they are already being implemented against Israel. The Palestinians do not need
a new UN Security Council resolution to advance their political and economic war
against Israel.
They just need the EU. And they have the EU.
The
PLO has already convinced several EU member states to establish unofficial trade
boycotts as well as military and academic boycotts of Israel. Israel has been
required to remove goods produced beyond the 1949 armistice lines from its free
trade agreements with Europe.
The legal war is also well under way. Today
no senior military commander or politician is able to travel to Britain, for
fear of arrest under trumped up war crimes allegations. Israeli officials have
been similarly threatened in Spain and elsewhere.
The Palestinian
Authority has filed war crimes complaints against Israeli leaders with the
International Criminal Court at The Hague. It has done this despite the fact
that the Rome Statute which governs the ICC only applies to states, and the PA
is not a state. Europe’s love for international institutions, and readiness to
endorse nearly any diplomatic assault on Israel, has blunted European criticism
of this perversion of law just is it has convinced the Europeans to support
various UN bodies’ unlawful campaigns against the Jewish state.
Clearly,
a Security Council resolution is not required for the Palestinians to engage in
the sort of activities that Netanyahu has just capitulated to the Obama
administration to block.
What all this shows is not that Netanyahu is
wrong to fear such a resolution, but that a resolution will be a symptom of an
already existing problem and blocking it will not end the
problem.
Pathetically, despite the fact that this campaign has been
building for more than a decade, to date Netanyahu’s only strategy for dealing
with it is to beg Obama for short-term protection. Obviously, this is not
constructive.
AN ALTERNATIVE strategy would be based on a three-pronged
approach. First, Israel must attack the source of the problem –
Europe.
Israel should begin making European nations pay a price for
engaging in political and economic warfare against it. For instance, Israel
should suspend the issuance of diplomatic visas to British officials while it
“studies” the British universal jurisdiction statute. It should also pass a law
permitting the filing of universal jurisdiction claims in Israel against
citizens of states that allow Israelis to be sued, and quietly encourage its
supporters to file war crimes complaints for the kinds of acts claimed to be
criminal when done by Israel, such as Indian support for Indian settlements in
Goa and Russian support for Russian settlements in the Kuril Islands. This would
not only point out the double standard applied to Israeli communities, it would
compel the British to amend their obnoxious law.
The second thing Israel
should do is empower its supporters abroad by actively discrediting the UN, the
International Criminal Court and advocates of boycotts and divestiture from
Israel. There is ample grassroots support in the US for actions against the ICC
whose statute places US servicemen and political leaders in its crosshairs and
against the UN whose members seek to curtail US sovereignty and
power.
Finally, Israel must actively pursue deeper economic and
diplomatic ties with Asian nations like India, China, Japan and South
Korea.
Enhancing relations with these states should be a top Israeli
priority. Such a project would diminish Europe’s capacity to harm Israel’s
economy and reduce Israeli reliance on the US at the Security
Council.
Netanyahu made a horrible deal with Clinton.
Leaders like
Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon have acted as patriots by actively
opposing it. It is true that the Obama administration could help us if it wanted
to. But it doesn’t want to. Happily, Israel has the power to help itself, if it
dares.
www.CarolineGlick.com