Michelle Bachmann: “US pressure and demands on Israel to make concessions must stop”

By MICHELLE BACHMANN, JPOST

In his address over a month ago to the UN General Assembly, President Barack Obama said that “Israel’s security as a Jewish and democratic state depends upon the realization of a Palestinian state.” He even inferred it had equivalent priority, while saying that “the United States will never compromise our commitment to Israel’s security.”

Yet, only some weeks earlier, the administration, contrary to public assurances that it supported Israeli-Palestinian peace talks without preconditions, pressured Israel to free jailed Palestinian terrorists to bring the Palestinian Authority to the negotiating table. This pressure is symptomatic of a larger, fundamentally flawed approach that has failed the cause of peace.

The administration rightly expressed concern that among the terrorists released by Israel was Al Haj Othman Amar Mustafa, who in 1989 murdered an American and former marine, Steven Frederick Rosenfeld. However, this begs the question why the administration has pressured Israel to free any terrorists at all.

If it is unwise and unjust to free someone who murdered an American citizen, it is equally unwise and unjust to free someone who murdered non-American citizens.

Indeed, why do we accept PA demands to free people who have committed the war crime of targeting civilians? And why are we pressuring Israel at all? We have frequently pressured Israel to concede, including things it never agreed to in signed agreements, while ignoring the Palestinians’ refusal to fulfill the vital concessions and reforms – arresting terrorists, outlawing terrorist groups, confiscating illegal weaponry, ending incitement to hatred and violence against Jews and Israel – they solemnly undertook in the 1993 Oslo and other signed agreements.

It is not Israel that has declared war on its Arab neighbors since its inception in 1948. It it is the neighboring Arab states which invaded Israel the day it declared independence.

It is not Israel that refused peace talks following the first Arab-Israeli war, it was its Arab neighbors.

It is not Israel that refuses concessions. Under the 1979 Israeli/Egyptian peace treaty, it uprooted 4,000 Israelis and returned all of Sinai to Egypt, including the airfields it had built and the oil fields it had developed.

We can’t recall any other country that ever gave back territory won in self-defense, especially containing a reliable source of oil.

Indeed, since the commencement of the Oslo peace process in 1993, Israel has made far-reaching, sometimes irreversible, concessions. In contrast, the Fatah party of Mahmoud Abbas, which controls the PA, has never even rescinded the 10 articles of its Constitution which call for Israel’s destruction and terrorism against Israel.

This has been the pattern since Oslo: Israel undertakes to withdraw from territory or hand over assets and authority – and does so; the PA undertakes to accept Israel, dismantle terrorist groups and prepare its public for peace – and does not do so.

Under successive agreements – the May 1994 Gaza-Jericho agreement; the September 1995 Oslo II agreement; the January 1997 Hebron agreement; the October 1998 Wye River Memorandum and the September 1999 Sharm el-Sheikh agreement – Israel withdraw from over 40 percent of the West Bank and nearly 90% of Gaza.

In the negotiations of 2000-2001, Israel agreed to the Clinton peace plan for Palestinian statehood in Gaza and over 90% of the West Bank, something not promised or undertaken in any previous agreement.

It agreed to uprooting many Jewish communities in the West Bank and the division of its holiest city and capital, Jerusalem.

[Bidvertisecode]

And it agreed to cede the Jordan Valley, a strategically vital buffer zone protecting Israel’s narrow waist to the east – a massive security risk and unprecedented concession which Yitzhak Rabin himself had explicitly ruled out just before his death.

Yet, the PA did not accept the plan and instead launched a terror wave which claimed the lives of over 1,500 Israelis during the succeeding five years.

Israel still didn’t stop trying. In 2005, it unilaterally withdrew from the remainder of Gaza and four communities in the West Bank, uprooting over 10,000 Jews from their homes and thriving communities. In return, it received exponentially increased rocket attacks from Gaza – over 8,000 since the withdrawal – the results of which President Obama personally saw when he visited Sderot near the Gaza border in 2008.

In 2008, Israel made a further peace offer to Abbas: a Palestinian state in Gaza and on 94% of the West Bank, land swaps of adjacent Israeli territory to offset what Israel retained, and a capital in eastern Jerusalem.

Again, the PA neither agreed to this plan, nor made a counter-proposal of its own.

Palestinian refusal to accept statehood in 1937, 1947, 2000 and again in 2008 suggests that destroying Israel, not building a Palestine, is the Palestinian goal. After all, the terrorist groups’ hate education, glorification of suicide bombers and obscenely anti-Semitic mosque speeches by PA-salaried preachers continue to find a home in the PA.

The Obama administration has not called out this long, uninterrupted record of PA intransigence and extremism. It has, however, leaned heavily on Israel to make concessions.

This is wrong. This is counter-productive. This harms peace prospects. This does not serve American interests.

This is not America at its best. Above all, it is not the America that has declared under successive presidents, including President Obama, that it will stand by Israel when faced with threats, violence, extremism and non-acceptance. Israel faces all these right now.

The time has come for the United States to cease pressuring Israel into unmerited, dangerous, one-sided concessions. The Obama administration must demand Palestinian compliance with all obligations committed to under the signed Oslo agreements, and make future diplomatic and financial support for the PA conditional on their verifiable fulfillment.

We need – right now – a historic change in what has been a fundamentally flawed peace process. A change that would send a crystal clear message to the international community that no longer will the United States serve as a cudgel to beat and pressure Israel.