STRATFOR
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Wednesday said that his country was willing to partition Jerusalem as part of a peace deal with the Palestinians. “West Jerusalem and 12 Jewish neighborhoods that are home to 200,000 residents will be ours. The Arab neighborhoods in which close to a quarter million Palestinians live will be theirs,” Barak was quoted as saying. These remarks come a day before the United States hosts a meeting in Washington between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, which will also be attended by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Abdullah II.
While not unprecedented, what makes this offer extraordinary is that, save perhaps Barak’s own Labor Party, every other member of the coalition government led by Netanyahu’s Likud Party is dead opposed to giving up even an inch of Jerusalem, which is seen as the undivided capital of Israel. So what is the purpose of issuing such a statement? The answer has to do with the expectation that this latest round of talks, like all previous ones, will not produce any resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, the second attack by Palestinian militants in the West Bank hours before the much-publicized summit meeting shows that Abbas is not in a position to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians who suffer from a geopolitical divide.
The offer to share Jerusalem, however, allows the Israelis to tell the Americans that they tried once again, and were even willing to consider tough concessions, but the problem lies with the Palestinians where there is no credible negotiating partner to deal with. This allows the Israelis to place the onus back on Washington and return to business as usual. This raises a key question: When peace between the two sides is not achievable, why is the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama pursuing the matter with such enormous optimism?
There is a view within Washington that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict engenders anti-American sentiment in the broader Arab/Muslim world, where there is immense anger because of perceived U.S. favoritism toward Israel. Indeed, in a March 2010 briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee, then-U.S. Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus drew a direct link between U.S. military efforts in the Middle East and South Asia and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arguing that the decades of stalemate on the Palestinian issue constituted a national security threat to the United States. The idea is that if the United States is going to be able to counter radicalism and extremism in the Islamic world, it has to demonstrate that it is serious about resolving the Palestinian issue, and the way to do that is to push both sides toward the creation of a Palestinian state.
“Minor moves on the part of Washington are not going to make any considerable difference in terms of the overall view of the United States.”
STRATFOR on multiple occasions has shown that a Palestinian state is not viable for a whole host of reasons, so we will not get into that discussion here. Rather, we would like to examine the notion that addressing the Palestinian problem can help counter anti-Americanism in the wider Muslim world.
This view incorrectly assumes the Palestinian issue is the central issue driving unrest in the Islamic world, which manifests as extremism and terrorism. Even a cursory glance at the various conflicts in Muslim countries will show this is not the case, as places like Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen have their own unique national and sub-national issues that have nothing to do with the Palestinian cause. Jihadists and other non-violent radical forces in the Islamic world do attempt to exploit Arab/Muslim feelings of solidarity with the Palestinians to further their agendas, but this issue constitutes a very minor portion of the grievances against the United States and the West in any given Muslim country.
But let us assume for argument’s sake that addressing the Palestinian issue can provide some significant measure of geopolitical purchase for the United States in that it does help shape a better operating environment for Washington in Muslim countries. There are still many other factors that will continue to prevent the United States from realizing its desired objectives.
For example, after several decades, there is a significant degree of cynicism among Muslim masses toward any U.S. efforts at solving the Palestinian issue. Minor moves on the part of Washington are not going to make any considerable difference in terms of the overall view of the United States. Of course, periodic diplomatic initiatives on the issue have provided the means by which Muslim regimes allied with the United States can better manage domestic politics, but over time such initiatives offer decreasing marginal utility.
Any diplomatic resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will have to involve compromises that are unacceptable to Hamas, which represents a great many Palestinians. If the Palestinian community is not in agreement on an acceptable solution to the problem, then we can forget about the wider Islamic world. There are many reasons why it is in the interest of the United States to try and address the Palestinian conflict, but doing so will not produce the wider geopolitical benefits that Washington is hoping for in the peace talk efforts.
Yes, everyone wants to put formaldehyde in your tea, Catarin.
An article in the August 30, 2010 New Yorker magazine about the billionaire Koch brothers who make their money in oil shows what Americans are up against this election season.
The Kochs are funding the Tea Parties and teaching them how to rally against the government and Obama.
For years the Kochs have spent millions to fight for Libertarian causes, and they finance many organizations that have patriotic sounding names but which the Kochs’ use to push their conservative agenda and to fight the US government, especially over environmental issues. The Kochs are one of the top ten polluters in the US. Their millions are used to try to prevent the EPA and other governmental agencies from reining them in, suing them, collecting damages, changing EPA laws, etc. And of course they donate to conservative senators and representatives who try to forestall any punitive action against the them.
One company of the Kochs makes billions of gallons of formaldehyde every year, which is used in making plywood and kitchen counters and many other products. Formaldehyde is known to be a cancer causing agent, and the US government efforts to curb this product and others are constantly met with resistance from conservative senators and representatives who like all the money flowing into their reelection campaigns from these renegade companies, who are basically screwing the country.
I wonder if it’s possible today to have a grass roots’ effort that isn’t infected by sinister forces. Of course they’re behind trying to give the boot to Obama and the Democrats. The Tea Partiers think they’re doing good but they’re really doing the will of the Koch brothers. These guys are old and will be gone soon. With all the money they’ve spent on fighting EPA regulations, they probably could have protected the environment and still made bundles of money.
Vinnie seems kind of stupid to fight for your present when you have no future. If we want to view matters from a practical revolutionary point of view, remember that the Torah says: “Among the nations you will know no rest….” meaning, that in the Diaspora, things are going to be bad.
!
Et Mi?
Bunk, from the first word to the last.
And no, I’m not a big fan of Palin’s.
Mah Zeh Ha’shtuyot Ha’eileh!!!
Sarah Palin is not smart enough to be president. Yes, she has devoted followers but not enough to get her elected. I came to the conclusion early that Sarah was not presidential material in television interviews where her answer to the question of how many and what newspapers and magazines does she read, and her answer was All of them. It reminded me of Paris Hilton’s appearance on the David Letterman show after she had spent some time in jail and claimed to have read the Bible. Dave asked her what her favorite books were, and she said All of them.
I back Obama’s peace efforts between the Jews and Arabs. I think many Muslims are sick of the killings and the large number of Muslims killing Muslims. I have studied the making of the Torah, the making of the New Testament and the making of the Quran. My opinion is that when Mohammed died, Islam was usurped by Abu Bakr, one of Mohammed’s Companions and the father of his young wife Aisha. The Quran was also corrupted. Muslims need to be urged to modernize their holy book. I hope the Internet will play a big role in opening Muslim minds. There was a time when Muslim scholars contributed to the body of world knowledge, and I hope Muslims can regain this stature.
Rongrand:
I agree with you 100%, of course, but bear in mind, just knocking Obama out in 2012 – while critical – does not address the problem I describe nearly to the degree it should.
Suppose Palin gets in. She’ll be fighting with a very corrupt civil service bureaucracy, the media will still be against her, and the Saudi beacheads on our universities will still be churning out thousands of Obama clones every year, polluting our media that much more, worming their way into other influential positions, like a cancer. This started with 60s liberalism in the wake of Vietnam, but it has evolved into an open door for Islamist influence, and they will not be rooted out easily.
Obama is a symptom; the Saudis and Friends are the real problem; long term, they are even worse than Iran. They will have to be confronted directly, and their roots are wide and deep. I’m not saying it can’t be done, I’m just saying it is more than removing one president and electing another, much more. So Palin gets in, and if these larger problems are not addressed, the bad guys lay low for four or eight years, and come screaming back in 2020 in some new guise with some new front man.
I think one way or the other they will be addressed, though. The bad guys are at the helm of a dying civilization. This plus all their free money combined with our decadence makes them dangerous, but they are still dying and they are falling farther and farther behind the rest of the world. The logic of the terrorism they support – mostly as a means of letting their neurotic, child molesting, incredibly insecure loony males let off steam in a direction other than the home regime – demands bigger and deadlier attacks in order to get our “attention”. A few more 9-11s, and people will start waking up and the “rooting out” process will begin. This could start with someone like Palin, or it may take 20 years. Depends on how many times we are hit, how hard we are hit, and how stupid we insist on being in the face of the same. You’d think 9-11 would have been enough, but it wasn’t. Don’t know how much more we’ll have to absorb before we really start fighting back.
The popularity of someone like Glenn Beck indicates to me that we are indeed starting to wake up as a country, but we are only starting. Palin’s popularity in the face of all the abuse she gets is another hopeful sign. More and more, the Saudi-corrupted media is simply talking to themselves. In spite of all the regular abuse they heap on Israel, for example, a recent poll indicated that American support for Israel is now the second highest since they’ve been keeping track, the highest since 1991, when Israel was getting hit by Iraqi Scud missiles. Who is attacking Israel now that is motivating American sympathy? OBAMA. Incidentally, however (and as a further indication that it is Obama’s abuse that is provoking this reaction), this American public support for Israel – unlike in 1991 – breaks heavily along party lines. It is now a partisan issue, as Caroline Glick recently said.
At any rate, the national level media outside of FOX/WSJ is increasingly talking only to themselves, just like Pravda in the old Soviet Union.
SO, there are hopeful signs. Don’t mean to be all gloom and doom. But can we turn things around fast enough? How much more damage can Obama and Co. do for the next two years, with the levers of power in their hands? Look what they’ve done so far…and he isn’t even halfway through his term!
Yamit:
Man, you sure do hate BB, don’t you? OK, so let’s say for the sake of discussion that he’s as big a schmuck as you say he is. You know him better than I do. Who is out there, on the Israeli political stage, that you’d support? Would Livni have been better? Lieberman maybe? Who??
If there is ever to be peace with the Arabs of Israel, then the USA, the UN, the EU,and any other group the send money to the Arabs of Israel must cut them off.
When the money dries up and they are forced to fend for themselves then they will become a part of Israel, and stop the hate. I would like to know how much money has be spent in the past 60+ years keeping them going, and keeping so many in the camps.
Everone may give a different reason if pressed but the bottom line is the world wants us gone. Just like they want you gone. Once you scrape away all of the recent Political Correctness you will find some surprising (to you stupid Jews) just how expendable you are. Viewed historically we have been fighting this war for over 3000 years and our conflict with the Arabs is only a current battle in the worlds continuous war of exitiction of the Jewish people and what we represent to them. New Poll: Palestinians Do Not Want a State Next to Israel
From Rav Kahane HY”D
Nice speech but then you went and ruined it all by your statements I blocked above.
How come you are well read up on Islam and a complete self delusional moron in trying to explain BB and Israels corrupt and cowardly leaders?
Shit BB wrote the book on Islamic and Iranian tgerror. His father is a Historian of note. Jews of Spain
How did an unknown not politically affiliated furniture executive in a minor Israeli furniture Chain get to be deputy ambassador in Washington? He was picked by George Schultz a Kissinger flunky, who told Arens then Ambassador to Washington to take him in and give him the Job. Arens admits this. He organized a conference on terror and who came to this unknowns conference? Schultz. Papa Bush< Perle, etc. Anybody who was anybody on the conservative right was there. Remember BB then was totally unknown.
His son just won 3rd place in an international Bible contest. Require Knowing the Tanach almost verbatim. His brother in law is a rabbi professor activist he hates BB's guts and know he is a national Traitor and has said so many times. All one needs to do is look at BB's record from 96' to today and one has to be totally brain dead to still give him credit for honesty and serving Israels cause above all other interests. He has been our greatest appeaser and has allowed and given into terrorism countless times. He gave up Hebron enough said?
Tell me something doesn’t stink. BB is an agent of Kissinger and CFR. He will do their bidding, no matter what.
There is an assertion in this article that begs an obvious question that Stratfor does not raise or answer. The point made is:
The question is if only a cursory glance at the situation would reveal this truth Strafor asserts, why is not even a cursory glance being given?
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Vinnie, well spoken and yes I still have hope.
When the liberals in America wake up and stop fighting over nonsense this country of ours can move to nuclear energy and drill baby drill. We need to and can move off the foreign oil dependency and tell the towel-heads (I love it
and I thought I was the only one to refer to them as the big fat guys with sunglasses and towels on their heads)and tell them where to stick their oil, they really are not our friends.
In addition we need to stand by and support our only trusted friend and ally, Israel and quit giving aid to those Arab nations to terrorize Israel. How stupid are we giving aid and supporting nations who have the worst
human rights violations and turn around and mistreat our trusted friend Israel.
This government with a wimp incompetent president, nothing more than clipboard carrying community organizer who never held a real job an arrogant SOB at that. As my mother use to say, your still wet behind the ears. Well let me tell you look at obama dumbo with those ears and you get an idea he is clueless.
Samuel Fistel:
Bear in mind, the Palestinians are the only people in HISTORY for whom refugee status has been transmitted through generations.
You – most observers – miss the larger picture.
The bottom line is this:
1. Moslem SW Asia, taken together as a civilization, has never separated church and state. All the regimes there are either de facto or de jure theocracies. The dictators and monarchs have weak legitimacy; they only rule at the pleasure of the clerical class. In Iran, the clerics rule outright.
2. In the worldview of this “civilization”, religion trumps everything else. Their religion is the “most advanced” in the world. Judaism was “Abrahamic faith 1.0”, Christianity was “Abrahamic faith 2.0”, and Islam is “Abrahamic faith 3.0”. No one outside of the Abrahamic faiths even count. As the most “advanced” of the Abrahamic faiths, Islam renders “earlier models” obsolete.
3. Following from #2 above, in any instance in which Islam dominates a particular region, said region or country CANNOT revert to the control of an “inferior” faith. This would be like the national/cultural equivalent of apostasy. This is why people like A-jad are always saying that they wouldn’t care if Israel, as a Jewish state, were established in someplace like Alaska or Bavaria, because these were never Moslem lands.
4. Following from #1 above, the national political leaders – i.e., kings, dictators – of Moslem countries in the region cannot openly challenge the agendas of the clerics. If they do, they wind up like Sadat or the Shah or Iran.
The dictators and kings don’t really mind, though, in a day-to-day sense. It makes their jobs a heck of a lot easier when all they have to do to stay in power is appease the clerics, rather than address the challenges of governing responsibly for the betterment of their sorry-ass societies. That would be hard work!
With all of the above in mind, it is easy to see the bogus nature of the so-called “Palestinian problem”. This is a manufactured problem in which the Palestinians are merely the “tip of the spear”, cannon fodder, for the rest of the region’s efforts to reverse the fact of a Jewish state being established on formerly Moslem land (doesn’t matter Jewish historical ties; these predate Islam).
For their part, the Palestinians are indeed treated like crap throughout the Arab world. Kind of like a daughter in one of their families who might have been raped. The Palestinians “lost” Palestine, and are thus the only Moslem people within the Moslem world ruled over by adherents to a “third rate” faith. This is really the source of the “humiliation” they are always whining about. Thus, it is heavily impressed upon Palestinians that the only way they can recover their “honor” is to defeat and destroy the Jewish state.
Unless such ideas as described above can be “reformed” out of Islam, there is no way this region is ever going to accept Israel. The only “peace” they are interested in is one in which there is no more Jewish state of Israel in the Levant, period. There is a small minority of “moderate” Moslems who are capable of accepting Israel, but this really is a VERY small minority. No matter where they are, no matter how much education they have access to, the overwhelming majority of Moslems are virtual intellectual robots on this issue. No amount of fact, logic, history, reason, etc., can change their minds on this one iota. Believe me, I know, I’ve been locking horns with them a long time on this. I’m talking about grad students with genius IQs at top schools, doctors, lawyers, very successful and seemingly otherwise “rational” and “informed” people here in the U.S., a free society (I think); imagine how much worse it is over there!
These talks will not succeed. Even if there is an agreement, it won’t last any length of time before the Palis renege and start fighting again. The problem is huge; it isn’t just Iran, it is pretty much every country in the region. Even the so-called “moderate” regimes are not going to change in this respect for at least a generation, and even then, probably only if it is literally beaten out of them militarily, as we had to beat Nazism out of Germany. This is not only concerning anti-Israel sentiment, this also concerns Islamist terrorism against the West in general, which has similarly deep roots of sympathy and support throughout the region.
In fact, these talks are nothing but a set up. Israel either accepts an agreement which spells slow death – the so-called Saudi “peace initiative” that Obama is, in effect, trying to ram down Israel’s throat, or no matter what actually happens, if BB refuses to commit his country to slow suicide, he’ll be blamed by the Saudi-owned/compliant media for the failure of the talks (i.e., all national-level print and broadcast media outside of FOX and the Wall Street Journal, and even they are partly influenced by the Saudis). Then the matter will be referred to the UNSC, and the PA unilaterally declares a state. If Israel resists militarily – and she will, of course – then she will likely face crippling sanctions, embargoes, complete pariah status aimed at strangling her “Rhodesia”-style. That is the Saudi game plan. It may not work out that way, but that is what is being attempted here.
As for Obama himself, he is simply a vile coward, a Saudi stooge – like many members of our “leadership class” throughout the civil service at the national level, some members of Congress, the military top brass (e.g., Colin Powell, James Jones), the media, the universities. The problem is simply huge. The petrodollar prostitution empire is enormous. These so-called “peace talks” are just one facet of jihad. Another is that stupid Ground Zero mosque, the imam of which is on record as categorically rejecting the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state. Some “moderate Moslem”; they simply don’t exist, or if they do, they keep their mouths shut and the certainly never become imams of triumphalist jihad mosques.
I’m sure BB is aware of what he is up against. I think he is playing for time until he can obtain a major power ally in the U.S. with a president who is not in the Saudi orbit (e.g., Palin, Huckabee), or at least someone who is at least willing to give him the time of day and not completely sell Israel down the river (Romney?).
If I were an atheist, looking at things in a completely “rational”, here and now, material sense, I’d consider Israel all but finished. The bad guys are holding a lot of cards; they may be a bunch of lazy, backward barbarians, but they have a lot of free money to spread around, they are very cunning, they know how to co-opt people, and there are a lot of people in the West willing to sell out and/or are intimidated out of their shorts when confronted by someone who actually believes in SOMETHING. This is our great weakness in the West, such shallow cowards in reponsible positions in so many places, and the towel-heads are exploiting it to the fullest.
But, I’m not an atheist. That’s why I still have hope.
Many of the Arab Palestinians who claim to be refugees are descendants of the tens of thousands of Arab Muslims who came to Israel for jobs after Israel proclaimed its statehood in the late 1940s. They claim to descend from original Arab occupants, but they’re newcomers. The claim for Right of Return works both ways. Would Muslim countries allow the Jews to return to their lands in Arabia, Egypt, etc. from which they were kicked out and their land and property confiscated?
As far as I can understand, Muslims are not very favorable to their Arab Palestinian brothers because they want the Arab Palestinians to fight to continue to return to Israel, so these people suffer wherever they are. I read Lebanon is taking steps to treat their Arab Palestinian refugees more humanely and maybe that will lead to permanently accepting them.
If Israel can be host to over a million Arabs, why can’t the West Bank be host to Jews?
leaving Hillary out of this (she has to follow her boss), I assume Obama actually thought he could succeed where Bill and W failed. NOT being Bill or W is what drives the O, who is the age where he only learned the post-modern ‘blame colonialism on everything’ school of HyStoria.
Which is why I do all sorts of things to keep my mind off the O until we have a new Congress to make his life so miserable he will be chopping wood in Vermont for next summer’s vacation. Not really sure he will be welcome even in Vermont by then 🙂
The refugee issue:
There were 600,000 or so original refugees in 1948. All their male descendants for all generations to come are also considered refugees. There are now 6 million of them. No one who has ever been classified as a refugee has lost his refugee status (there is free money given to you as a refugee, with no real strings attached).
There are 400,000 refugees in Lebanon alone. They are restricted to refugee camps by their fellow muslims, and are denied any rights as Lebanese. The shiite Jew-hating, muslim-loving Nasralla of Hizbolla is among the most energetic in denying the refugees any rights, because they are sunni muslims, and that would dilute the shiite voting power.
One fourth of the population of the West Bank is refugees, and an unbelievable two thirds of Gaza. And even though the non-refugees living with them in the West Bank and Gaza are their brother palestinians, they still restrict many of the “refugees” (their palestinian brothers) to refugee camps.
The refugees left Israel in 1948, so that few, if any, of the current six million refugees were actually born in Israel (or have even set foot in Israel).
The original refugees took the path of least resistance in fleeing Israel, going in the opposite direction of the oncoming Jewish armies, and heading towards their nearest fellow arabs. So the Gaza refugees originated in the Hebron area, and the Lebanese refugees in the northern Galile area, etc. That means they did not even have to go very far (on the order of 40 to 50 miles).
So do you realize the insanity of this situation: the west bank and gaza refugees are the descendants of people who left Israel 60 years ago, who themselves have never set foot in Israel. The are living within 50 miles of their original homes (which no longer exist), and they are living among their palestinian brothers independent of Jewish control. And yet they are still confined in refugee camps, and they refuse to give up their “right of return” from muslim palestine to Jewish Israel. And if Abbas or his successors ever tried to give up on the “right of return”, the so-called refugees would go berserk, wondering why they had to live in refugee camps for sixty years, if in the end they were never to move to Israel.
That doesn’t say much for the prospects of the peace talks. So the real question is, why are Obama and Mrs. Clinton bothering?
The central issue in resolving the Palestinian conflict is not Israel and it is not Abbas. I think what events have shown with the unwarranted terror attacks by Hamas on innocent Israelis in recent days as well as the inflammatory statements by Ahmadinejad is that Iran and radical Islam will continue to be the obstacles that will prevent peace of any kind. Even if a partition of Jerusalem were to be agreed to by both parties, it would only serve to make Israel more vulnerable to terror attacks once again.
The focus of the United States as well as the rest of the world who are interested in Middle East peace is to resolve the issue of Iran. If not, any so-called peace agreement will only be like putting a bandage on a severed artery.
Ehud Barak is a traitor. If it were up to him, he would fly the Arab banner from the Israeli capital. How dare him to declare that he would divide Jerusalem for any reason. I have listen to him and Netanyahu for a long time and gave Netanyahu the benefit of the doubt that he was playing a delaying tactic; however, I now believe that he doesn’t have the cahones to stand up to rab terrorism.