The Knish makes the point that since the West can no longer offer normalization as a carrot to Israel, as if it ever could, there is no benefit to trying to make peace. The Islamists want no part of normalization and Israel wants no part of them. Ted Belman
By Sultan Knish
The “peace process” which created two terrorist states inside Israel may have begun in Oslo, but it ended in Cairo. Normalizing relations with the rest of the Middle East was one of the carrots that got the Jewish state hopping down the appeasement trial– and that carrot is now officially off the table.
The days when Thomas Friedman and his Saudi buddies could talk about normalization have passed. The Arab Spring saw to that and with Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and an unknown number of others sliding into the Islamist camp, and out of reach of negotiations, there’s a New Middle East that has even less in common with the old gentlemanly diplomacy model than the old one did. Some of the dimmer Israeli leaders may still believe that peace is possible with the Islamists of Turkey’s AKP, but not even they think that peace is possible with the Brotherhood.
If Western diplomats could offer regional acceptance twenty years ago, today that has all the credibility of a Rolex sold out of a briefcase just off Central Park. The end of the Camp David Accords has killed the grandaddy of the appeasement through territorial surrender template and with Assad looking shaky, the refusal to give up the Golan Heights to Syria seems downright prescient even to peaceniks.
The Brotherhood’s attitude toward Israel is indistinguishable from that of Iran, and with the Islamist way in ascendance, that attitude will be the dominant one throughout the region, turning back the clock on decades of diplomatic efforts. The Islamists will negotiate temporary truces and ceasefires, but not the peace and brotherhood accords so beloved by the US and the EU.
And even the remaining regimes that haven’t fallen look like poor prospects for paying out peace dividends after even the most stable country in the region, Egypt, melted down into mob violence and religious fanaticism. If Egypt can turn into battling mobs who don’t agree on anything except their hatred for religious and ethnic minorities, including a country full of them living next door, then no Muslim nation in the region is safe.
Without normalization on the table, all that’s left is outside pressure. But for the first time in a long time the Arab Spring has given Western diplomats something to do in the region besides denounce Jews living in Jerusalem. And the usual Arab League chorus that the region’s problems would be solved if only there were a Palestinian state sounds silly even to veteran diplomats who usually funnel this sort of nonsense right back to the White House.
Obama’s hostility toward Israel has paradoxically lessened the pressure by removing the leverage. Condoleezza Rice could get on the phone and warn that another house in XYZ would wreck the positive relationship with the White House. But there is as much of a prospect of a positive relationship with the White House, as there is with Iran, Hamas and the Brotherhood.
Israel still has a strategic relationship with the United States, but relations with the administration are cold, which also means there is less to be afraid of. Netanyahu’s exchange with Obama was startling for a careful diplomat from a country that usually avoids offending its big brother. The only way it could have happened is if Netanyahu had felt that there was nothing to lose. And he was right.
For the first time since Begin, an Israeli leader pushed back against White House pressure and it led to a slight improvement, not because Obama listened, but because the relationship was so toxic that using the confrontational tactics practiced by the Palestinian Authority actually worked. Only when the relationship hit rock bottom, was any attempt made by the White House to salvage it.
The situation is even uglier on the European side, which has not been friendly in a long time, but hasn’t been this hateful either. But all that ugliness also translates into a loss of influence over Israel. You can only slap your allies so many times, denounce them and threaten them before they begin paying a lot less attention to you.
Irrational demands that can’t be fulfilled have brought the situation to that point. It was one thing when the Clinton or Bush administrations were demanding that Israel go to the negotiating table and offer concessions. It was ugly and unfair, but at least it was specific. These days Abbas doesn’t want to go to the negotiating table, and the same demands keep coming out of Washington D.C. and Brussels. Israel is being ordered to make peace when the other side won’t even bother showing up to negotiate.
How can Israel make peace when the Palestinian Authority has been split into Hamas and Fatah run fiefdoms and neither side is even bothering to pretend to negotiate? It can’t and even diplomats know that, which makes every volley of demands look like messages for the Muslim world.
When Helen Clark wanted to sell more New Zealand sheep to the Saudis, her marketing gimmick was a hate campaign against Israel. Clark has gone off to a sinecure at the UN, but most of the West is acting the same way now. Europe isn’t trying to sell sheep, its leaders are acting like sheep in the face of the Islamic demographic destiny spilling across their lands. The Obama Administration lit the fuse of the Arab Spring and is getting nervous as the flames keep rising higher.
Western condemnations of Israel are increasingly no longer directed to Israel, but to the Muslim world, which makes it easier for Israel to ignore them. While the White House claimed that the Biden incident was about the timing of a construction approval announcement in Jerusalem, it was really about showing the Muslim world that this administration really had the knives out for Israel. If it hadn’t been a house in Jerusalem, it would have been a border shooting, a strike in Gaza or a clash at a checkpoint. Something would have been found.
But the more America and Europe have pandered to the Muslim world, the more obvious it has become to Israel that it has no role to play in this exchange, except its time honored position as the scapegoat.
The new normalization is no longer the offer to normalize ties with the Muslim world, but warnings that Israel’s ties to Europe will require the same kind of normalization if Israel’s Prime Minister doesn’t snap his fingers and make peace happen. It would be a more effective threat if the current crop of European leaders didn’t’ make de Gaulle seem pro-Israel.
Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama, three of the slimiest first world leaders, haven’t made their dislike of Israel such a secret that it took a microphone error for it to be discovered. Merkel has dispensed with the usual show of Gemutlichkeit toward the Jewish state and the situation in Brussels is as ugly as it could be. It all blends into one long angry tantrum about peace dispensed by insecure politicians with a wholly different agenda.
All that leaves Israel with fewer reasons to participate. The strategic and economic ties still matter, but they’re more mutual than anyone cares to admit. American and European leaders may kick Israel, but it’s also the only reliable ally in the region. And the Arab Springer is a reminder that there is one country that won’t implode and can be counted on as a point of stability.
Obama is capable of cutting off his nose to spite his face, but the Clinton era foreign policy hands still have enough control that it isn’t likely to happen before the next election– though all bets are off if he gets a second term. European leaders dislike Israel, but they also know that there are times when they need it. It’s a high tech incubator that’s a lot closer than Asia, it’s an arm of the West in the East and if the relationship is sliding under the table, that’s the kind of relationship Israel has with much of the world, from China to Saudi Arabia.
The isolation is a problem, but it’s also liberating. The weight of expectations has nearly broken Israel and the Obama Administration may be one of the best things that happened to it by forcing it to recognize that it was alone. Israeli dependence on the United States is not financial as most people think, it is mainly psychological. Alone in a region full of Muslim tyrannies, the need to believe in a close relationship with an admirable global power was powerful.
Friendship with America wasn’t like friendship with Russia or China. The United States is admired by people around the world for its accomplishments and its standing. For all the anti-war rallies, it is a nation that aspires to a higher standard. A virtuous Rome, an Athens without slaves, a standard bearer for the new age of mankind.
Only the United States could make a call for concessions to terrorists sound noble, when it would have sounded hopelessly venal from any European power. But in the age of Obama the nobility has run out and so has the peace. The illusions are dead and Israel is in survival mode, struggling to avoid any attention from Washington D.C. while keeping the country on track.
The Peace Process, that horrible masochistic program of terrorist empowerment, is a fading mirage that no one believes in anymore. The pretense that the handshake in the Rose Garden overseen by a beaming Clinton was something other than cynicism and bad policymaking mythologized into a transcendent expression of a new age of peace is over and done with. The cost has been high and all of it has been in vain.
As the West follows the Islam appeasement track domestically and internationally, its relationship with Israel will continue to degrade. The Peace Process was an expression of a dying belief in the orderly world of negotiated international peace envisioned by European policymakers for over a hundred years. Now that same world has brought Europe and Israel to the brink of ruin. It’s no wonder that Israel has left the peace process by the side door.
What an idiotic article. There never was a peace process. Anyone familiar with the founding charters of the dominant Palestinian groups would know this.
Speaking of krauts, Read this:
Outrage as Berlin issues tax demands to Belgians deported to Germany in WWII to work as slaves for Nazis
Germans want to tax compensation settlements and pensions agreed in 2005
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2064266/Berlin-issues-tax-demands-Belgians-deported-Germany-WWII-work-slaves-Nazis.html#ixzz1eZ4aekiC
Obama, as Saudi puppet robot anti-Israel political cruise missile, has made things far worse than they have ever been. If a major war breaks out within the next year – and this seems all but certain to me now – I’ll call it “the Obama war”.
After all, for all of our problems, we’re still the most powerful military and economic entity in the world. We are still, even if in a distressed/diminished sense, the “leader of the Free World”. What the president does, means something, sets up a massive “wake” for others to follow in one direction or another. That is the power of that office, no matter who occupies it.
For example, I’ve noticed that Merkel has become particularly obnoxious towards Israel since Obama became president. She was a lot nicer during Bush’s term – and they got on well by all accounts.
Imagine an American president who had a foreign policy world view along the lines of Glenn Beck. Hard as that may be to imagine, a) there really are a lot of Americans who think that way, never mind the impression the local Foreign Service weenie may leave on you, and b) that is not so far removed from John McCain. On domestic policy they were very different, but on foreign policy, I submit to you all that McCain and Beck would have been 90% on the same page. Remember, he picked Sarah Palin, and Palin and Beck are about 99% on the same page.
Now, imagine the effect of an American president who would use the “bully pulpit” he has in THAT direction, as opposed to the direction of Obama.
Obama is leading the Saudi butt-kissing cowardly lynch mob against Israel. That’s what he’s been programmed to do. What do you all expect?
It is a very well thought-out plan. It may not work in the end – it probably won’t work and will likely blow up in their faces – but it is not over yet.
Until recently, I’ve seen the election of 2012 as the “light at the end of the tunnel”. Then I noticed that the “light” in question was an approaching train.
That “train” is Ron Paul. Krauthammer predicted on FOX the other day that Paul would run as an independent, fracture the Republican vote, and hand Obama the election. Saudia’s “plan B”, my friends. I think he’s right.
So, I’m no longer so optimistic that Obama is out of there fourteen months from now. Better than even odds, Ron Paul becomes a Republican political suicide bomber. He’ll screw his own party sideways – he’ll screw the whole country with four more years of the most corrupt and incompetent president we’ve ever had – JUST to ensure that we don’t have a nominally pro-Israel president once again. Just like Pat Buchanan in ’08, who freely admitted that he backed Obama because of Obama’s stand on Israel, Paul will do this for similar reasons. Consider that for a moment….Pat Buchanan vs. Obama…diametrically opposed on just about every other issue you can name, from affirmative action to gun control to social policy to immigration policy…but because Obama was out to screw Israel and Pat Buchanan had two eyes and a quarter of a brain – all that was necessary to see this – he enthusiastically jumped on Obama’s bandwagon just over the prospect of putting those Jooos in their place, and said so up front!
Won’t be the end of the world for Israel, but it will suck. Will probably mean that Israel will have to align with China. At least one principled Western leader – the only one, Harper – probably sees this coming and is trying desperately to single-handedly keep Israel in the “Western” camp and away from China as long as possible, but will that be enough to endure four more years of Obama? That’s a very good question, and I’d say the answer to that is NO.
“It is far safer to be feared than loved”
That of course as it applies to relations between countries, cultures, etc.
The decay of the Jewish State, Israel started when Ben Gurion established normal relations with Germany. Yes! Germany. Just a few years after tthe Holocaust. The world at large registered that destructive step and the rest is here in front of us all.
“If the German people can do that to millions of Jews and soon after the Jews go back to normality, deal done”…
Relations with Germany and collaborators should have never been “normalized”.
They had to be given the perennial status of enemies and while exchanging goods if need be, other wise kept in the know that if any of their actions would be construed as inimical to us, immediate would be the stern response.
Germany is the main provider of advanced military equipments, (submarines), to Turkey and Saudi Arabia, tanks. Siemens support the Iranian nuclear industry. etc.
Enemies must be deal with as such at individual or collective levels.
The Sultan, along with Sarah Honig and Caroline Glick is compulsory reading. He nails it everytime.
This so called but not peace process has not ended–because it never began!
If you are referring to Catholicism–this is not Christianity!
Dear Bland,
Christianity conquered or retained the most souls when it was armed. So too with Islam, in spades. Lenin got it (partially) right: Revolution is always at the point of a gun.
Not even remotely true, Yam. Mohammed, the quintessential armed prophet, managed to conquer the Arabian peninsula. His successors, none of which were prophets, did nearly all the conquering. Jesus is recognized as a prophet by Moslems and Christians. He conquered nothing, and was put to death with nobody to help him. His followers were savagely persecuted by the Roman Empire, and they did not resist. After nearly three hundred years of this, the unarmed Christians won.
Machiavelli… let me see… Did he rule England? France? Spain? Germany? Was he a prophet? Was he armed? What great lands did he conquer? It looks as though he was just another bag of hot air.
Back on the topic of the “Peace Process”: I’ve seen it pronounced dead several times — which is rather meaningless, seeing that it was never alive. If people thought it was “alive” before, when it didn’t even exist, what’s to stop those same people from miraculously “reviving” it?
Mark Twain is dead. There never was a Peace Process.
When self delusion meets reality.
Lessons for Israeli survival.
Niccolò Machiavelli :
“One must be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.”
“All armed prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed prophets have been destroyed”.
“There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others”
“It is far safer to be feared than loved.”
“Politics have no relation to morals.”