One of my dear friends and fellow memo readers sent me this after Obama's petulant and contumacious act: "I just figured it out we now have Jimmy Carter in color!! J----"
I will give him two clues.
a) Hillary wanted to rise to power on the backs of the little people. Virtually all demagogues use the little people's plight as their elevator to greatness and power.
b) Once gained, power was a method by which the Clinton's could continue to fill the coffers of their Foundation. (See 1 below.)
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Obama wants America to remain dependent on Middle East energy sources as he allows Russia and Iran to control the region. Does anyone find this sinister and/or dangerous? (See 2 below.)
Obama refuses to equate unemployment with clean air.
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Long but right on the mark. It is far easier to negotiate when your adversary is not propped up by unfounded obstinacy espoused by bleeding hearts. (See 3 below.)
Can Trump establish a new world order? (See 3a below.)
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Obama's mind set from the beginning. (See 4, 4a and 4b below.)
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Twas the night before Christmas and all throughout The White House
Not a creature was stirring not even a mouse.
The first family was in Hawaii, while the world was aflame
Less than thirty days marks the end of the lame.
After 8 years we are told we are all better off
I think otherwise and at that I do scoff
We have a paid a price that may prove irredeemable
For electing a man so completely incapable
There always is a price to pay
For ignoring the warnings of what others say.
And finally at the end. Obama showed his true animosity
And did it with his usual pomposity
So after shafting Israel in the U.N
He defended by supplying Israel weapons again
I have likened it to giving bigger gloves
As a demonstration of showing his love
I, for one, reject his pathetic explanation
'Cause it is evident Israel is not one of Obama's favored nation.
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Christmas Eve finds the world in pitiful shape, as man's inhumanity to man continues to plague the world and American weakness encourages the worst of the worst..
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Dick
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Biden: Clinton never figured out why she was running
Vice President Biden believes Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election in part because she never figured why she was running for the nation’s highest office.
“I don’t think she ever really figured it out,” Biden told the Los Angeles Times in an interview published Thursday. “And by the way, I think it was really hard for her to decide to run.”
As evidence, the vice president pointed to similar concerns raised privately by Clinton allies in hacked emails that were published by Wikileaks in the midst of the campaign.
But he said it was unfair to solely blame Clinton for her loss. He said Clinton saw a noble purpose in her campaign, feeling an obligation to help pave the way for women in politics just as President Obama did for black people.
“She thought she had no choice but to run,” he said. “That, as the first woman who had an opportunity to win the presidency, I think it was a real burden on her.”
Still, Biden’s comments contain some of the most direct criticism of Clinton’s campaign from a high-ranking member of the Obama White House.
The vice president stumped for Clinton dozens of times throughout the course of the campaign.
But Biden said he had a sneaking feeling that Donald Trump could pull off a victory by the way he energized crowds in white, working-class areas, like near Biden’s birthplace of Scranton, Pa.
“Son of a gun. We may lose this election,” Biden recalled thinking. “They’re all the people I grew up with. They’re their kids. And they’re not racist. They’re not sexist. But we didn’t talk to them.”
He said the Democratic Party as a whole suffered because “we were not letting an awful lot of people — high school-educated, mostly Caucasian, but also people of color — know that we understood their problems.”
There is “a bit of elitism that’s crept in” to party thinking, he said.
At the same time, he said Trump did not do a better job than Clinton on offering solutions for working-class people.
“I don’t think he understands working-class or middle-class people,” Biden said. “He at least acknowledged the pain. But he played to the prejudice. He played to the fear. He played to the desperation.
“There was nothing positive that I ascertained when he spoke to these folks that was uplifting.”
The vice president considered challenging Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary, where he would have coupled his middle-class message with his everyman appeal.
But Biden ultimately opted not to run, saying he couldn’t build a winning campaign while mourning the death of his son, Beau.
Biden, 74, has refused to rule out a future run for office, although he has downplayed the possibility on several occasions.
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2) Obama Oil Drilling Ban on Thin Ice
President Obama apparently wants his legacy to be one of energy starvation for the United States and dependence on foreign energy from friendly places like Saudi Arabia and Iran. His ban on offshore drilling in federally owned waters off our Atlantic and Arctic coasts makes no sense, either environmentally or economically. As the Washington Times notes, Obama thinks he can get away with it:
Vowing that his successor won’t be able to reverse his actions, President Obama on Tuesday used executive authority to permanently ban new offshore drilling in federally owned waters off the Atlantic coast and in the Arctic Ocean.Mr. Obama used authority in a section of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, a 1953 law, to ban the drilling. The law includes a provision that allows a president to put certain waters off-limits to oil and gas production.
The presidential authority was used in conjunction with similar actions by Canada, which also moved to prohibit drilling in its own Arctic waters. The U.S. move will ban drilling in the vast majority of American waters in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, in addition to areas off the Atlantic coast stretching from New England to Virginia.
It is ironic that a president who has used executive orders to get around laws now cites a 63-year-old law to justify an offshore drilling ban. Executive orders can be overturned with another executive order. And a 1953 law written when offshore and deep water drilling technology was in its infancy can be amended or repealed. Technology has advanced a lot since 1953. Hydraulic fracturing or fracking didn’t exist six decades ago. Oil drilling technology is safer, more advanced and requires a smaller footprint.
America needs this offshore energy, unless Obama wants us to be permanent vassals of OPEC. According to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas off Alaska contain an estimated 23.6 billion barrels of oil and 104.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. According to the American Petroleum Institute’s website Energy Tomorrow, offshore drilling could create 840,000 American jobs and generate @200 billion in revenue to the federal government by 2035. As the Daily Caller reports:
Offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean has the potential to produce 1.3 million barrels of oil and natural gas per day while generating nearly 280,000 jobs and contribute up to $23.5 billion per year to the U.S. economy, according to a 2013 study by the American Petroleum Institute.
And what about the environmental impact to these allegedly fragile ecosystems? What about the polar bears and the caribou? We heard this apocalyptic song before, when oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was built to carry it southward. When oil exploration began in Prudhoe Bay, 60 miles to the west of ANWR, environmentalists claimed it would yield only a "few months' supply" of oil and would wreck the ecosystem. Prudhoe Bay turned out to be the largest deposit of oil ever found in North America. As Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation writes in the Daily Signal:
Would oil and gas drillers kill off the eagles, caribou, and polar bears, as the White House warns? These were the arguments made more than 40 years ago against building the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System -- which carries oil from Alaska’s North Slope to the port of Valdez for shipment to the lower 48 states. Over the last 35 years it has carried more than 17 billion barrels of oil, a quantity worth nearly $1 trillion in today’s dollars. At the time, the Sierra Club moaned that the pipeline would mean “the wilderness is forever broken,” while the Wilderness Society said the project would lead to “imminent, grave and irreparable damage to the ecology, wilderness values, natural resources, recreational potential, and total environment of Alaska.” No bird or caribou would be safe from the carnage. Sound familiar?Instead, the impact on Alaska’s wildlife and natural beauty has been almost nonexistent. A study delivered in 2002 to the American Society of Civil Engineers found that “the ecosystems affected by the operation of TAPS and associated activity for almost 25 years are healthy.” Today the size of the caribou herd in Alaska is estimated at about 325,000 -- four times the number before the pipeline was built.
Despite those photos of polar bears clinging in seeming desperation to small pieces of ice, they are in no danger of extinction, whether from oil drilling or from climate change, as reported in the Daily Caller:
“They appear to be as abundant and as productive as ever, in most populations,” Dr. Mitchell Taylor, a polar bear expert with more than 30 years of experience who teaches at Lakehead University in Canada, told the Roy Green Show….Today, there are significantly more polar bears than there were 40 years ago, despite the animal being listed under the Endangered Species act in 2008 over fears global warming would destroy its Arctic habitat. Official estimates put the total number of bears between 20,000 and 25,000, but this number is really just a “qualified guess” and the actual number is likely higher…
“[T]hey’ve said that polar bears were declining in Western Hudson Bay, subsequent surveys showed they were wrong … said polar bears were declining in Western Hudson Bay and polar bears are not declining there, polar bears are staying about the same,” Taylor said. “They’re -- they’re warning that this will happen, that no-one is seeing it happen yet.”“And for us, living up in the north, where 365 days a year – you know, climate has been evolving over a number of years, bears have been around for hundreds of thousands of years and they’ve gone through various cycles of climate change,” echoed Gabriel Nirlungayuk, the Deputy Minister of the Environment in Nunavut.
“But in my lifetime, anyhow, we haven’t -- I have yet to see declining of polar bears, of climate change,” Gabriel told the Roy Green Show. “And one is Western Hudson Bay, which was projected to be in decline 20 years ago -- up to now, it should be less than 300 bears but we’re seeing that the numbers have not really changed.”
Obama’s Arctic drilling ban has nothing to do with polar bears, caribou, or fragile ecosystems. They are fine and are not threatened. It has everything to do with ideology and an irrational animus towards fossil fuels. It is about climate change zealots clinging on to their inconvenient falsehoods as desperately as those polar bears were said to be clinging to their ice.
Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
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3) The Way to Peace: Israeli Victory, Palestinian Defeat
by Daniel Pipes
Originally published under the title "A New Strategy for Israeli Victory."
The idea that peace can be best achieved through military victory is hardly new.
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Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy sadly fits the classic description of insanity: "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." The identical assumptions – land-for-peace and the two-state solution, with the burden primarily on Israel – stay permanently in place, no matter how often they fail.
Decades of what insiders call "peace processing" has left matters worse than when they started, yet the great powers persist, sending diplomat after diplomat to Jerusalem and Ramallah, ever hoping that the next round of negotiations will lead to the elusive breakthrough.
The time is ripe for a new approach, a basic re-thinking of the problem. It draws on Israel's successful strategy as carried out through its first 45 years. The failure of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy since 1993 suggests this alternative approach – with a stress on Israeli toughness in pursuit of victory. This would, paradoxically perhaps, be of benefit to Palestinians and bolster American support.
I. The Near Impossibility of Compromise
Since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Palestinians and Israelis have pursued static and opposite goals.
In the years before the establishment of the new state, the mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, articulated a policy of rejectionism, or eliminating every vestige of Jewish presence in what is now the territory of Israel.[1]It remains in place. Maps in Arabic which show a "Palestine" replacing Israel symbolize this continued aspiration.
A 2016 UNRWA textbook assignment instructs Palestinian schoolchildren: "I will color the map of my homeland with the colors of the Palestinian flag."
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Rejectionism runs so deep that it drives not just Palestinian politics but much of Palestinian life. With consistency, energy, and perseverance, Palestinians have pursued rejectionism via three main approaches: demoralizing Zionists through political violence, damaging Israel's economy through trade boycotts, and weakening Israel's legitimacy by winning foreign support. Differences between Palestinian factions tend to be tactical: Talk to the Israelis to win concessions from them or not? Mahmoud Abbas represents the former outlook and Khaled Mashal the latter.
On the Israeli side, nearly everyone agrees on the need to win acceptance by Palestinians (and other Arabs and Muslims); differences are again tactical. David Ben-Gurion articulated one approach, that of showing Palestinians what they can gain from Zionism. Vladimir Jabotinsky developed the opposite vision, arguing that Zionists have no choice but to break the Palestinians' intractable will. Their rival approaches remain the touchstones of Israel's foreign-policy debate, with Isaac Herzog heir to Ben-Gurion and Binyamin Netanyahu to Jabotinsky.
These two pursuits – rejectionism and acceptance – have remained basically unchanged for a century; today's Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Labor, and Likud are lineal descendants of Husseini, Ben-Gurion, and Jabotinsky. Varying ideologies, objectives, tactics, strategies, and actors mean that details have varied, even as the fundamentals remained remarkably in place.
Formal agreements, such as the 1993 Oslo Accords, have only increased hostility to Israel's existence.
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Wars and treaties came and went, leading to only minor shifts. The many rounds of fighting had surprisingly little impact on ultimate goals, while formal agreements (such as the Oslo Accords of 1993) only increase hostility to Israel's existence and so were counterproductive.
Palestinian rejection or acceptance of Israel is binary: yes or no, without in-betweens. This renders compromise nearly impossible because resolution requires one side fully to abandon its goal. Either Palestinians give up their century-long rejection of the Jewish state or Zionists give up their 150-year quest for a sovereign homeland. Anything other than these two outcomes is an unstable settlement that merely serves as the premise for a future round of conflict.
The "Peace Process" That Failed
Deterrence, that is, convincing Palestinians and the Arab states to accept Israel's existence by threatening painful retaliation, underlay Israel's formidable record of strategic vision and tactical brilliance in the period 1948 to 1993. Over this time, deterrence worked to the extent that Israel's Arab state enemies saw the country very differently by the end of that period; in 1948, invading Arab armies expected to throttle the Jewish state at birth, but by 1993, Arafat felt compelled to sign an agreement with Israel's prime minister.
Deterrence underlay Israel's formidable record of strategic vision and tactical brilliance from 1948 to 1993.
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That said, deterrence did not finish the job; as Israelis built a modern, democratic, affluent, and powerful country, the fact that Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and (increasingly) the left still rejected it became a source of mounting frustration.
Israel's impatient, on-the-go populace grew weary with the unattractive qualities of deterrence, which by nature is passive, indirect, harsh, slow, boring, humiliating, reactive, and costly. It is also internationally unpopular.
That impatience led to the diplomatic process that culminated with the handshake confirming the signing of the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn in September 1993. For a brief period, "The Handshake" (as it was then capitalized) between Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin served as the symbol of successful mediation that gave each side what it most wanted: dignity and autonomy for Palestinians, recognition and security for Israelis. Among many accolades, Arafat, Rabin, and Israel's Foreign Minister Shimon Peres won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Israelis and Palestinians concur with near-unanimity on Oslo having been a disaster.
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The accords, however, quickly disappointed both sides. Indeed, while Israelis and Palestinians agree on little else, they concur with near-unanimity on Oslo having been a disaster.
When Palestinians still lived under direct Israeli control before Oslo, acceptance of Israel had increased over time even as political violence diminished. Residents of the West Bank and Gaza could travel locally without checkpoints and access work sites within Israel. They benefited from the rule of law and an economy that more than quadrupled without depending on foreign aid. Functioning schools and hospitals emerged, as did several universities.
Yasir Arafat promised to turn Gaza into "the Singapore of the Middle East," but his despotism and aggression against Israel instead turned his fiefdom into a nightmare, resembling Congo more than Singapore. Unwilling to give up on the permanent revolution and to become the ordinary leader of an obscure state, he exploited the Oslo Accords to inflict economic dependence, tyranny, failed institutions, corruption, Islamism, and a death cult on Palestinians.
The UN World Conference against Racism in Durban marked the coming out of leftist anti-Zionism.
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For Israelis, Oslo led not to the hoped-for end of conflict but inflamed Palestinian ambitions to eliminate the Jewish state. As Palestinian rage spiraled upward, more Israelis were murdered in the five years post-Oslo than in the fifteen years preceding it. Rabble-rousing speech and violent actions soared - and continue unabated 23 years later. Moreover, Palestinian delegitimization efforts cost Israel internationally as the left turned against it, spawning such anti-Zionist novelties as the UN World Conference against Racism in Durban and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
From Israel's perspective, seven years of Oslo appeasement, 1993-2000, undid 45 years of successful deterrence; then, six years of unilateral withdrawals, 2000-06, further buried deterrence. The decade since 2006 has witnessed no major changes.
The Oslo exercise showed the futility of Israeli concessions to Palestinians when the latter fail to live up to their obligations. By signaling Israeli weakness, Oslo made a bad situation worse. What is conventionally called the "peace process" would more accurately be dubbed the "war process."
The False Hope of Finessing Victory
Why did things go so wrong in what seemed so promising an agreement?
Moral responsibility for the collapse of Oslo lies solely with Yasir Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and the rest of the Palestinian Authority leadership. They pretended to abandon rejectionism and accept Israel's existence but, in fact, sought Israel's elimination in new, more sophisticated ways, replacing force with delegitimization.
Yasir Arafat, above left with Peres and Rabin sharing the Nobel Prize in 1994, was unwilling to become the ordinary leader of an obscure state.
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This said, the Israelis made a profound mistake, having entered the Oslo process with a false premise. Yitzhak Rabin often summed up this error in the phrase "You don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies."[2] In other words, he expected war to be concluded through goodwill, conciliation, mediation, flexibility, restraint, generosity, and compromise, topped off with signatures on official documents. In this spirit, his government and all its successors agreed to a wide array of concessions, even to the point of permitting a Palestinian militia, always hoping the Palestinians would reciprocate by accepting the Jewish state.
They never did. To the contrary, Israeli compromises aggravated Palestinian hostility. Each gesture further radicalized, exhilarated, and mobilized the Palestinian body politic. Israeli efforts to "make peace" were received as signs of demoralization and weakness. "Painful concessions" reduced the Palestinian awe of Israel, made the Jewish state appear vulnerable, and inspired irredentist dreams of annihilation.
In retrospect, this does not surprise. Contrary to Rabin's slogan, one does not "make [peace] with very unsavory enemies" but rather with former very unsavory enemies. That is, enemies that have been defeated.
This brings us to the key concept of my approach, which is victory, or imposing one's will on the enemy, compelling him through loss to give up his war ambitions. Wars end, the historical record shows, not through goodwill but through defeat. He who does not win loses. Wars usually end when failure causes one side to despair, when that side has abandoned its war aims and accepted defeat, and when that defeat has exhausted its will to fight. Conversely, so long as both combatants still hope to achieve their war objectives, fighting either goes on or it potentially will resume.
Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
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Thinkers and warriors through the ages concur on the importance of victory as the correct goal of warfare. For example, Aristotle wrote that "victory is the end of generalship" and Dwight D. Eisenhower stated that "In war, there is no substitute for victory." Technological advancement has not altered this enduring human truth.
Twentieth-century conflicts that ended decisively include World War II, China-India, Algeria-France, North Vietnam-United States, Great Britain-Argentina, Afghanistan-U.S.S.R., and the Cold War. Defeat can result either from a military thrashing or from an accretion of economic and political pressures; it does not require total military loss or economic destruction, much less the annihilation of a population. For example, the only defeat in U.S. history, in South Vietnam in 1975, occurred not because of economic collapse or running out of ammunition or battlefield failure (the American side was winning the ground war) but because Americans lost the will to soldier on.
Indeed, 1945 marks a dividing line. Before then, overwhelming military superiority crushed the enemy's will to fight; since then, grand battlefield successes have rarely occurred. Battlefield superiority no longer translates as it once did into breaking the enemy's resolve to fight. In Clausewitz' terms, morale and will are now the center of gravity, not tanks and ships. Although the French outmanned and out-gunned their foes in Algeria, as did the Americans in Vietnam and the Soviets in Afghanistan, all these powers lost their wars. Conversely, battlefield losses suffered by the Arab states in 1948-82, by North Korea in 1950-53, and by Iraq in 1991 and 2003 did not translate into surrender and defeat.
When a losing side preserves its war goals, the resumption of warfare remains possible, and even likely. Germans retained their goal of ruling Europe after their defeat in World War I and looked to Hitler for another try, prompting the Allies to aim for total victory to ensure against the Germans trying a third time. The Korean War ended in 1953, but North and South have both held on to their war goals, meaning that the conflict might resume at any time, as could wars between India and Pakistan. The Arabs lost each round of warfare with Israel (1948-49, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982) but long saw their defeats as merely transient and spoiled for another try.
II. The Hard Work of Winning
How might Israel induce the Palestinians to drop rejectionism?
For starters, a colorful array of (mutually exclusive) plans to end the conflict favorably to Israel have appeared through the decades.[3] Going from softest to toughest, these include:
- Territorial retreat from the West Bank or territorial compromise within the West Bank.
- Lease the land under Israeli towns on the West Bank.
- Finding creative ways to divide the Temple Mount.
- Developing the Palestinian economy.
- Encouraging Palestinian good governance.
- Deploying international forces.
- Raising international funds (on the Marshall Plan model).
- Unilateralism (building a wall).
- Insisting that Jordan is Palestine.
- Excluding disloyal Palestinians from Israeli citizenship.
- Expelling Palestinians from lands controlled by Israel.
Trouble is, none of these plans addresses the need to break the Palestinian will to fight. They all manage the conflict without resolving it. They all seek to finesse victory with a gimmick. Just as the Oslo negotiations failed, so too will every other scheme that sidesteps the hard work of winning.
Israel should return to its old policy of deterrence, punishing Palestinians when they aggress.
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This historical pattern implies that Israel has just one option to win Palestinian acceptance: a return to its old policy of deterrence, punishing Palestinians when they aggress. Deterrence amounts to more than tough tactics, which every Israeli government pursues; it requires systemic policies that encourage Palestinians to accept Israel and discourage rejectionism. It requires a long-term strategy that promotes a change of heart.
Inducing a change of heart is not a pretty or pleasant process but is based on a policy of commensurate and graduated response. If Palestinians transgress moderately, they should pay moderately; and so on. Responses depend on specific circumstances, so the following are but general suggestions as examples for Washington to propose, going from mildest to most severe:
When Palestinian "martyrs" cause material damage, pay for repairs out of the roughly $300 million in tax obligations the government of Israel transfers to the Palestinian Authority (PA) each year. Respond to activities designed to isolate and weaken Israel internationally by limiting access to the West Bank. When a Palestinian attacker is killed, bury the body quietly and anonymously in a potter's field. When the PA leadership incites to violence, prevent officials from returning to the PA from abroad. Respond to the murder of Israelis by expanding Jewish towns on the West Bank. When official PA guns are turned against Israelis, seize these and prohibit new ones, and if this happens repeatedly, dismantle the PA's security infrastructure. Should violence continue, reduce and then shut off the water and electricity that Israel supplies. In the case of gunfire, mortar shelling, and rockets, occupy and control the areas from which these originate.
Of course, these steps run exactly counter to the consensus view in Israel today, which seeks above all to keep Palestinians quiescent. But this myopic viewpoint formed under unremitting pressure from the outside world, and the U.S. government especially, to accommodate the PA. The removal of such pressure will undoubtedly encourage Israelis to adopt the more assertive tactics outlined here.
True peacemaking means finding ways to coerce Palestinians to undergo a change of heart, giving up rejectionism, accepting Jews, Zionism, and Israel. When enough Palestinians abandon the dream of eliminating Israel, they will make concessions needed to end the conflict. To end the conflict, Israel must convince 50 percent and more of the Palestinians that they have lost.
Israeli border police guard a group of Israeli tourists visiting Hebron in April 2014.
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The goal here is not Palestinian love of Zion, but closing down the apparatus of war: shuttering suicide factories, removing the demonization of Jews and Israel, recognizing Jewish ties to Jerusalem, and "normalizing" relations with Israelis. Palestinian acceptance of Israel will be achieved when, over a protracted period and with complete consistency, the violence ends, replaced by sharply worded démarches and letters to the editor. Symbolically, the conflict will be over when Jews living in Hebron (in the West Bank) have no more need for security than Palestinians living in Nazareth (in Israel).
To those who hold Palestinians too fanatical to be defeated, I reply: if Germans and Japanese, no less fanatical and far more powerful, could be defeated in World War II and then turned into normal citizens, why not the Palestinians now? Moreover, Muslims have repeatedly given in to infidels through history when faced with a determined superior force, from Spain to the Balkans to Lebanon.
Israel enjoys two pieces of good fortune. First, its effort does not begin at null; polls and other indicators suggest that 20 percent of Palestinians and other Arabs consistently accept the Jewish state. Second, it need deter only the Palestinians, a very weak actor, and not the whole Arab or Muslim population. However feeble in objective terms (economics, military power), Palestinians spearhead the war against Israel; so, when they abandon rejectionism, others (like Moroccans, Iranians, Malaysians, et al.) take their cues from Palestinians and, over time, will likely follow their lead.
Palestinians Benefit from Their Defeat
However much Israelis gain from ending their residual Palestinian problem, they live in a successful modern country that has absorbed the violence and delegitimization imposed on them.[4] Surveys, for example, show Israelis to be among the happiest people anywhere, and the country's burgeoning birth rate confirms these impressions.
In contrast, Palestinians are mired in misery and constitute the most radicalized population in the world. Opinion surveys consistently show them choosing nihilism. Which other parents celebrate their children becoming suicide bombers? Which other people gives higher priority to harming its neighbor than improving its own lot? Hamas and the Palestinian Authority both run authoritarian regimes that repress their subjects and pursue destructive goals. The economy in the West Bank and Gaza depends, more than anywhere else, on free money from abroad, creating both dependence and resentment. Palestinian mores are backward and becoming more medieval all the time. A skilled and ambitious people is locked into political repression, failed institutions, and a culture celebrating delusion, extremism, and self-destruction.
Defeat will free Palestinians to develop their own polity, economy, society, and culture.
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An Israel victory liberates Palestinians. Defeat compels them to come to terms with their irredentist fantasies and the empty rhetoric of revolution. Defeat also frees them to improve their own lives. Unleashed from a genocidal obsession against Israel, Palestinians can become a normal people and develop their polity, economy, society, and culture. Negotiations could finally begin in earnest. In all, given their far lower starting point, Palestinians would, ironically, gain even more from their defeat than the Israelis from their victory.
That said, this change won't be easy or quick: Palestinians will have to pass through the bitter crucible of defeat, with all its deprivation, destruction, and despair as they repudiate the filthy legacy of Amin al-Husseini and acknowledge their century-long error. But there is no shortcut.
The Need for American Support
Palestinians deploy a unique global support team consisting of the United Nations and vast numbers of journalists, activists, educators, artists, Islamists, and leftists. No obscure African liberation front they, but the world's favored revolutionary cause. This makes Israel's task long, difficult, and dependent on stalwart allies, foremost the U.S. government.
For Washington to be helpful means not dragging the parties back again to more negotiations but robustly supporting Israel's path to victory. That translates into not just backing episodic Israeli shows of force but a sustained and systematic international effort of working with Israel, select Arab states, and others to convince the Palestinians of the futility of their rejectionism: Israel is there, it's permanent, and it enjoys wide backing.
That means supporting Israel taking the tough steps outlined above, from burying murderers' bodies anonymously to shuttering the Palestinian Authority. It means diplomatic support for Israel, such as undoing the "Palestine refugee" farce and rejecting the claim of Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital.
Diplomacy is premature until Palestinians accept the Jewish state.
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It also entails ending benefits to the Palestinians unless they work toward the full and permanent acceptance of Israel: no diplomacy, no recognition as a state, no financial aid, and certainly no weapons, much less militia training.
Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy is premature until Palestinians accept the Jewish state. The central issues of the Oslo Accords (borders, water, armaments, sanctities, Jewish communities in the West Bank, "Palestine refugees") cannot be usefully discussed so long as one party still rejects the other. But negotiations can re-open and take up anew the Oslo issues upon the joyful moment that Palestinians accept the Jewish state. That prospect, however, lies in the distant future. For now, Israel needs to win.
Daniel Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum.
3a) Can Trump Construct a New World Order?
by Efraim Inbar
BESA Center Perspectives
BESA Center Perspectives
Donald Trump could bring about dramatic changes in the global arena by aligning with Russia against China.
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US President-Elect Donald Trump lacks foreign policy experience, and during the election campaign did not proffer any comprehensive outlook on global affairs. He offered bits and pieces of ideas (building a wall along the Mexican border, moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, disparaging NATO, and demanding that allies raise their defense expenditures). Overall, he expressed isolationist sentiments alongside inconsistent and unpredictable thoughts. In any case, his focus is likely to be on domestic affairs.
Still, Trump might surprise observers. It is already emerging that he does, in fact, have clear preferences in global affairs. It seems he likes Russia (or, specifically, Vladimir Putin) and dislikes China, the two most powerful international actors other than the US. Trump probably admires Putin as a strong, charismatic leader who is intent on making Russia great again. Trump's nomination of Rex Tillerson, a man with excellent contacts in Moscow, as Secretary of State signals a planned thaw in American-Russian relations.
A rising China is a major challenge to 'making America great again' geopolitically.
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It is possible that these moves are purely tactical, and are aimed at securing a better opening position in negotiations over elements of the US-China bilateral relationship. But Trump will soon hear from his foreign policy and defense advisers that a rising China is a major challenge to "making America great again" in a geopolitical sense.
Acting on his basic instincts, Trump may well be capable of grand Kissingerian diplomacy, without possessing Kissinger's historic, intellectual and strategic baggage. Trump could be aiming for détente with Russia and the enlistment of Putin against China.
Trump could be aiming for détente with Russia and the enlistment of Putin against China.
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The American post-Cold War stance regarding Russia was very problematic. In the 1990s, there was an opportunity to bring Russia into the Western architecture. A Russia characterized by a resurgent Christianity and a desire to modernize could have become an integral part of the Western world, ending a millennium-long schism – or, at least, a valued ally.
But the expansion of NATO and the EU eastward, which ignored historical Russian sensibilities, heightened the threat perception of the Russian leaders who had lost the Cold War. Western attempts to politically engineer Ukraine, so close to Moscow's heartland, and the subsequent imposition of economic sanctions on Russia's moves in Crimea and Ukraine are the most recent examples of Western geopolitical mistakes that pushed Russia away.
Western pressure on Russia also led to a partial Chinese-Russian entente. The Chinese demographic threat in Siberia and the struggle over central Asia were put aside to form an anti-American front.
Trump seems ready to move in a different direction. In July 2016, candidate Trump defied political correctness by saying he would consider recognizing Crimea as Russian territory and lifting sanctions against Russia. He may well accept the return of Ukraine to Russia's sphere of influence.
Trump also seems to have little patience with European allies who prefer that the US bear most of their defense burden. It remains to be seen whether Trump will be able to overcome anti-Russian and anti-Putin sentiment in Congress, particularly among Republicans. Many of them are unforgiving regarding human rights violations by Moscow (while more forgiving about those committed by Beijing).
Can Russia be persuaded to end its cozy relations with Iran and become a true ally in the fight against militant Islam?
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Will Russia be ready to end its cozy relations with the radical regime in Iran to become a true US ally in the fight against militant Islam? Will it settle for a small, Assad-ruled Syria without Iranian and Hezbollah control? Will Russia be flexible enough to end its territorial conflict with Japan over the Kurile Islands to buttress the anti-China realignment?
Trump probably expects Russia to take these steps. Will Putin take a historic gamble and align with the West, as did Peter the Great?
There are no clear answers yet.
Efraim Inbar, a professor emeritus of political studies at Bar-Ilan University, is the director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and a Shillman-Ginsburg fellow at the Middle East Forum.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
4) Perfectly Timed Middle Finger In The Middle East.
President Barack Obama set the tone for his future attitude toward Israel during his infamous June 4, 2009, speech at Cairo University, where he claimed the Palestinians suffer “daily humiliations — large and small — that come with occupation,” and referred to Palestinian terrorism as “resistance through violence and killing.”
Obama would go on to warm to the anti-Israel, anti-Western Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt; repeatedly single out Israeli settlement activity for criticism; and ink a nuclear deal with Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, an agreement that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to as a threat to Israel’s security.
On Friday, as Israelis marked the Sabbath here in the Jewish state, Obama stuck it to Israel, perhaps one final time, when the U.S. abstained from voting on a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a halt to Israeli construction in the West Bank and eastern sections of Jerusalem, thereby allowing the measure to pass.
The move was a dramatic departure from the longstanding U.S. policy of vetoing anti-Israel resolutions.
And make no mistake about it. This was an anti-Israel resolution.
The text of the resolution repeatedly and wrongly refers to the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem as “Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.” This fraudulent language technically places the Western Wall and Temple Mount plaza under the “Palestinian territory” qualification.
In actuality, the Palestinians never had a state in either the West Bank or eastern Jerusalem, and they are not legally recognized as the undisputed authority in those areas.
Jordan occupied and annexed the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem from 1948 until Israel captured the lands in a defensive war in 1967 after Arab countries used the territories to launch attacks against the Jewish state. In 1988 Jordan officially renounced its claims to the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem.
The text of the resolution declares that the Israeli settlement enterprise has “no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-state solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.”
It calls for Israel to “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.”
As I pointed out earlier this week, and numerous times in the past, existing international law does not make Israeli settlements illegal.
What Obama has done by refusing to veto a resolution calling for Israel to “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem” is set the stage for an enhancement of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement around the world.
Indeed, the BDS campaign will now be placed on steroids, since the anti-Semitic campaign can point to the resolution as so-called evidence that products made in the settlements were produced in “illegal territories.”
The resolution also usurps U.S. policy toward Israeli settlements weeks before Donald Trump is slated to be sworn into office.
The UN measure entirely contradicts a Bush administration commitment to allow some existing Jewish settlements to remain under a future Israeli-Palestinian deal. As I documented earlier this week, that U.S. commitment, which the Obama administration has repeatedly violated by condemning settlement activity, was reportedly a key element in Israel’s decision to unilaterally evacuate the Gaza Strip in 2005.
While couched in diplomatic language of “Israeli settlement activity,” the resolution basically exclaims that Jews building in settlements is an impediment to peace, implying that a future Palestinian state must be Jew-free.
The text expresses “grave concern that continuing Israeli settlement activities are dangerously imperiling the viability of the two-State solution based on the 1967 lines.”
Here is my take to that part of the text, expressed in the analysis piece earlier this week:
The UN draft resolution text does not even mention rampant illegal Palestinian construction on Jewish-owned property in eastern sections of Jerusalem, including the construction of dozens of apartment buildings on about 270 acres in the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Qalandiya and Kfar Akev, and about 50 acres in a north Jerusalem suburb known as Shoafat. The land is indisputably owned by a U.S.-based Jewish group. The illegal Palestinian construction has created “facts on the ground” due to which these areas are largely considered to be areas that would become part of a future Palestinian state.What exactly is the problem with Jews building communities in the West Bank or eastern Jerusalem, areas with deep historical and religious significance to Judaism? Condemning Jewish construction in these areas would seem to support Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ extremist position that not a single Israeli can live in a future Palestinian state. “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli — civilian or soldier — on our lands,” Abbas said.
The entire resolution is not necessary to advance a Palestinian state and can only be seen as a diplomatic assault on Israel. The measure singles out Israeli settlements in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem as the main obstacles blocking a two-state solution, farcically ignoring that the PA has repeatedly refused Israeli offers of a state in those very areas.
If the Palestinians wanted a state, they would not have to resort to introducing anti-Israel resolutions at the UN. Israel has offered the Palestinians a state in much of the West Bank and Gaza Strip with a shared capital in Jerusalem numerous times. These offers were made at Camp David in 2000, Taba in 2001, the Annapolis Conference in 2007, and more offers were made in 2008. In each of these cases, the PA refused generous Israeli offers of statehood and bolted negotiations without counteroffers.
The PA has failed to respond to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unprecedented attempts to jump-start negotiations aimed at creating a Palestinian state, including freezing Jewish construction in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem and releasing Palestinian prisoners.
4a) Lame Duck (Schmuck) President Delivers Blow to Israel
Determined to give the nation of Israel one final kick in the butt on his way out the door, President Obama has sided with those determined to put the very existence of the Jewish state at risk.
The United States yesterday formally abstained from a vote on a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning settlement construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem and insisting that existing Jewish settlements there “have no legal validity.”
“Our position is that there is one president at a time,” said Ben Rhodes, the White House national security adviser. “President Obama is the president until Jan. 20, and we are taking this action of course as US policy.”
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, explained that since 2011 when the U.S. used its veto to kill a similar resolution, “circumstances have change dramatically” and that the Jewish settlements “put a two-state solution [with the Palestinian Authority] at risk.”
What has changed, of course, is that back in 2011 Barack Obama was about to run for re-election. Not so now — now he is free to abandon all those phony pledges of friendship and forced smiles.
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, expressed his disappointment at the vote: “It was to be expected that Israel’s greatest ally would act in accordance with the values that we share, and that they would have vetoed this disgraceful resolution.”
Yesterday’s action followed a move Thursday in which the Egyptian delegation, which had initially sponsored the resolution, asked to indefinitely postpone action. That came after President-elect Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued nearly identical statements urging a U.S. veto.
An Israeli official told the Associated Press yesterday, “The U.S. administration secretly cooked up with the Palestinians an extreme anti-Israeli resolution behind Israel’s back which would be a tail wind for terror and boycotts and effectively make the Western Wall occupied Palestinian territory.” He called it “an abandonment of Israel which breaks decades of U.S. policy of protecting Israel at the U.N.”
The resolution is largely symbolic, but in international relations, symbols do matter. And this final bit of international mischief by Obama — even while basking on a beach in Hawaii — was intended to wound Netanyahu in a very personal way.
But it also deeply wounds the region’s only democratic nation and an ally. How is that good policy?
4b) Obama's Anti-Israel Tantrum
It defines this President's extraordinary ability to transform matters of public policy into personal pique at adversaries. And it defines the reality of the international left's implacable opposition to the Israeli state. Earlier in the week, Egypt withdrew the Security Council resolution under pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. President-elect Donald Trump also intervened, speaking with Egypt's government and, via Twitter, urging Mr. Obama to block the resolution, as have past U.S. Administrations and Mr. Obama himself in 2011. As was widely reported Friday after the U.N. vote, the White House decided to abstain thereby allowing the pro-Palestinian resolution to pass in retaliation against the intervention by Messrs. Netanyahu and Trump.
The decision by the United States to abstain from a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel over its settlements on the West Bank is one of the most significant, defining moments of the Obama Presidency.
Mr. Obama's animus toward Prime Minister Netanyahu is well known. Apparently Mr. Obama took it as an affront that the President elect would express an opinion about this week's U.N. resolution.
It is important, though, to see this U.S. abstention as more significant than merely Mr. Obama's petulance. What it reveals clearly is the Obama Administration's animus against the state of Israel itself. No longer needing Jewish votes, Mr. Obama was free, finally, to punish the Jewish state in a way no previous President has done. No effort to rescind the resolution, which calls the settlements a violation of "international law," will succeed because of Russia's and China's vetoes.
Instead, the resolution will live on as Barack Obama's cat's paw, offering support in every European capital, international institution and U.S. university campus to bully Israel with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer implored the Administration to veto the resolution, noting rightly that it represents nothing more than the "Zionism is racism" bias at the U.N. Let Senator Schumer note the true nature of his party's left wing.
House Speaker Paul Ryan called the Administration's action "shameful." Senator Lindsey Graham said he will form a bipartisan coalition to suspend or reduce U.S. financial support for the U.N. That should proceed.
For Donald Trump, meet your State Department. This is what State's permanent bureaucrats believe, this is what they want, and Barack Obama delivered it to them.
Tweets won't change this now-inbred hostility to America's oldest democratic ally in the Middle East. Mr. Obama's pique, however, has made it crystal clear to the new Administration where the lines in the sand are drawn.
The U.N. resolution is a defining act of the Obama Presidency.
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