America’s liberal Jews were ardent supporters of Barack Obama during his campaign for the presidency. These gullible fools were seduced by Obama platitudes of solidarity with Israel and commitment to the security of the Jewish state. Once elected, Obama promised to reach out to the Muslim World. The first foreign leader our new president contacted was Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. And the very first television interview President Obama gave was to Al Arabiya, the Arab Television Network.
Here is what Obama’s Jewish supporters ignored. The Obama campaign’s foreign policy team had a long history of open hostility toward Israel. Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his long-time pastor and personal mentor, had been a strong supporter of Hamas and had condemned Israel time after time from the pulpit of the church the Obamas attended.
Recent declarations by Obama administration officials indicate that U.S. foreign policy is shifting away from Israel and toward the Palestinians. Accordingly, columnist Ben Shapiro wrote a column ("Obama Proves His Anti-Semitism") in which he stated that "Any Jew who continues to support Obama’s foreign policy should turn in his badge as a Jew."
Obama openly supports a Palestinian state along the lines of the pre-1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capitol. That would be suicidal for Israel which, in one part, is only eight miles wide. And with its capitol in East Jerusalem, the Palestinians would be thrusting a dagger into the heart of Israel. Now the Obama administration is demanding a quid pro quo of Israel – concessions to the Palestinians for deterring Iran’s nuclear ambitions. America’s liberal Jews need to wake up and recall the history of Israel, which they have obviously forgotten.
Since Israel’s 1948-49 War for Independence, the Jewish state has had to fight four wars (1956, 1967, 1973-74 and 1982) against combined Arab armies determined to drive the tiny fledging state into the sea. In the Six Day War (1967), Israel defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan and, as a result, occupied the West Bank, the Golan Heights, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula - Israel also captured and annexed East Jerusalem.
Ever since 1967, Israel has been pressured by the international community to return the captured lands, including East Jerusalem, to its enemies. Israel did return the Sinai after concluding a peace treaty with Egypt. In 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat agreed to a Declaration of Principles (DOP) on Interim Self-Government Arrangements which aimed for Palestinian self-rule by 1999..
The DOP, better known as the Oslo Accords, was signed on behalf of the Palestinians by Arafat’s protégé, Mahmoud Abbas. That same day, Arafat told reporters that "Since we can't defeat Israel in war, we must do it in stages, we must take whatever area of Palestine we can get, establish sovereignty there, and then at the right time, we will have to convince the Arab nations to join us in dealing the final blow to Israel."
Israel has made concessions in the past. And how was the Jewish state rewarded for its concessions? Excerpts from yesterday’s Townhalll.com, column by Mona Charen ("Obama's Signal to Israel: Submit") provide answers to that question.
"We have recent history to guide us. In 2000, Israel withdrew from the security corridor it had established in southern Lebanon. The world had long been clamoring for Israel to do this. The Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah movement immediately seized the area -- trumpeting its triumph in driving out the enemy. In 2006, southern Lebanon became the launching pad for Hezbollah's missile campaign against northern Israel.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. The Iranian-backed Hamas movement moved quickly and took control there (not without significant internecine bloodshed with Fatah), and again used the territory not to build a peaceful Palestinian enclave but to launch 10,000 missiles against southern Israel.
Fatah (which is called moderate because it wants to destroy Israel on the installment plan rather than all at once) retains tenuous control of the West Bank. But even Mahmoud Abbas admits that if Israel were to withdraw completely from the area, Hamas would gain control in a heartbeat."
This is how Charen concluded her column: "Next week, Prime Minister Netanyahu will meet with President Obama in Washington. It is hard to see how this relationship can go well. President Obama has sent abundant signals that his foreign policy is 50 percent wishful thinking and 50 percent leftwing mush. There may not be any easy answers to the problem of a nuclear Iran. But pressuring Israel to take suicidal risks is clearly the worst possible approach. Iran will conclude, as its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas at various times concluded, that force and the threat of force work."
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