Leon Vs. Don: A Tale Of Two Secretaries…
by Gerald A. Honigman
Such blatherings out of the Obama Administration have by now become commonplace.
Even before the 2008 election, Senator Obama was on record saying that Israel would be crazy if it did not accept the Saudi Peace Plan.
The two key provisions of this plan require Israel to return to the ’49 armistice lines (not political borders)–which made it 9 to 15-miles wide in its strategic waist, where most of its population, industry, and such are located–and allow itself to be inundated by millions of alleged Arab refugees. Note that at least as many, if not more, Jews fled so-called “Arab” and/or Muslim lands than Arabs who fled in the opposite direction due to the invasion of Israel in 1948 by a half dozen Arab nations.
“Peace” plan, alright…peace of the grave.
And Obama’s own personal ideas and approach to “peace making” between Arab and Jew in the region have indeed set the tone for policies his Administration has pursued in the region.
Like his boss in the White House and his counterparts at the State Department, the United Nations, and elsewhere, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta recently reiterated his predecessor, Robert Gates’, position by joining the chorus in blaming everyone’s favorite victim for its own victimization.
Panetta thus blasted Israel with both barrels at a recent Brookings Institution event, blaming the Jews themselves for their growing isolation and the lack of movement towards peace in the region stating that Israel’s problems with Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, and its alleged Palestinian Arab peace partners were mostly of its own making.
Putting it bluntly, to make such statements requires nothing less than a set of blinders to reality.
Lots has already been written about that reality, so–for the sake of space–I won’t attempt to repeat it here.
But, what I will do is pose an alternative assessment to the Obama-Panetta critique presented by another former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.
While the ever hostile State Department–which fought President Truman over the very recognition and resurrection of Israel in 1948 from the get-go–immediately jumped in to do “damage control,” here’s what Rumsfeld had to say on August 6, 2002 when questioned by reporters at a news conference about the disputed territories Israel came to occupy after it was attacked by Jordan and blockaded by Egypt in 1967…
“If you have a country that is a sliver and you can see three sides of it from a high hotel building, you’ve got to be careful what you give away and to whom you give it to.”
Now think about that a bit…and picture the jaws that dropped among the press corps.
Rumsfeld also elaborated on the nature of the threat Israel faced from its so-called “peace partners.”
It’s probably no coincidence that Rumsfeld’s boss, President George W. Bush (despite some later disagreements he had with Israel himself), gave Israel an important letter upon its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza which stated that it was not expected to return the ’49 armistice lines nor obliged to allow itself to be swamped by millions of Jihadi refugees…just the opposite of what Obama’s beloved Saudi Peace Plan demands. Earlier, when pondering the minuscule size of Israel and the dangers that it faces, he commented that his native Texas had driveways larger than Israel’s width.
Light years difference, here folks…both between the two occupants of the White House and those whom they appointed to key positions impacting foreign policy. And note, Dubya is the man whom Hebrew Lefties (who’ll vote for Farakhan’s messiah yet again in 2012) love to ridicule and hate.
Decades earlier, right after the Six Day War in June ’67, another Secretary of Defense initiated an earlier assessment for President Johnson.
Here’s how Johnson himself summarized the situation on June 19, 1967, about a week after hostilities ceased…
“A return to the situation on June 4 (the day before outbreak of war) was not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities.”
He then called for…
“new, recognized boundaries that would provide security against terror, destruction, and war.”
Here’s a brief excerpt from a document General Earle Wheeler, of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, prepared for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on June 29, 1967…
“Israel would require retention of some captured Arab territory to provide militarily defensible borders.”
As I and others have often written, the final draft of UNSC Resolution 242, adapted in the wake of the war, called for Israel to finally get real, more secure borders to replace the armistice lines which did nothing but invite repeated attacks from Arabs who reject Israel, regardless of its size. Those disputed territories mentioned above had largely become “Arab” due to the latters’ own earlier aggression in 1948.
The Reagan Administration had virtually the same thing to say about these matters.
Here’s Reagan on September 1, 1982…
“In the pre-1967 borders (sic), Israel was barely 10-miles wide… the bulk of Israel’s population within artillery range of hostile armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again.”
And in 1988, Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Shultz, declared…
“Israel will never negotiate from or return to the 1967 borders.”
Please keep in mind that at virtually the same time that Panetta was lecturing Israel that it wasn’t baring the necks of its kids enough for the peace of the grave plan the Obama Administration insists that it accept, yet another colleague of the “moderate” PA chief honcho, Mahmoud Abbas, was swearing that his crew will never recognize Israel as a state of the Jewish people…which Abbas has also stated himself over and over again.
In this region, you see, the score–at the minimum–must always be, Arabs 22, all others 0. And if Israel caves into the demands of Panetta and his boss, the score will likely be Arabs 23 to 0 instead. There is no doubt that that is what the Arabs truly have in mind. Those are indeed the stakes here…
The Secretary stated that Israel must be more forthcoming to those who would see it destroyed–regardless of its size. Translate that to mean that Israel must agree to that total withdrawal to the ’49 Auschwitz/armistice lines, accepting inundation by Arab refugees, and so forth, for those are the “stumbling blocks” which the Arabs insist Israel remove before returning to “negotiations.”
Here’s Panetta’s by now (in)famous words…
“Just get to the damn (negotiating) table.”
The problem, however, for anyone with functioning neurons, is that “negotiations” for Arabs means something very different than what most people think. For Arabs, the Jews are expected to do all of the giving while they just do all of the taking. There is no compromise in this exercise, and that’s why such “negotiations” were doomed to failure from the start.
The real problem now involves an American Administration which supports this one-sided Arab vision about how the game must be played out. The Arabs expect Israel’s suicide as the end result, and openly state this to their people. At least some Jews resist this…but not all.
Even Prime Minister Netanyahu’s own Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, goes far in accomodating most of Obama’s and his Arab buddies’ wishes in this regard. Jews wanting to live beyond the tiny ghetto of a state Israel was left as via the ’49 armistice lines are routinely harassed by Barak’s troops, while Arabs who attack Jews are more often than not simply ignored. There is no doubt that Barak is Barack’s man…and there is no doubt that if The One gets reelected in 2012, he will do everything possible to topple Netanyahu.
Turning to the problems Panetta cites elsewhere, Israel’s issues with Turkey are directly related to the Turks’ own blatant hypocrisy in the region.
The increasingly Islamist Turks expect Jews to cave in to all that the Arabs demand–including not defending themselves from being attacked (that’s what the flotilla incident was all about)–while doing all that they can to suppress and subjugate one-fifth of Turkey’s own native Kurdish population, which pre-dates the Turks themselves in the region by millennia. The Jews have bent over backwards in trying to have good relations with this powerful Muslim, but non-Arab, nation–to the point of providing Ankara with military technology used to further suppress the Kurds…a disgrace. The latter are the truly stateless people in the region–not yet more Arabs seeking their 22nd state.
As for Jordan, ditto the above. But the irony here is that Jordan was carved out of almost 80% of the original April 25, 1920 Mandate of Palestine in 1922.
Since Panetta brought the subject up, it cannot be repeated often enough that there has indeed been an Arab state in “Palestine” for almost 100 years now.
What is therefore being demanded is a second state for Arabs, not first, in “Palestine”–the name the Roman Emperor Hadrian bestowed upon Judea after the Jews’ second major revolt for freedom in 133-135 C.E. The renaming of the land was Rome’s way of trying to extinguish the embers of Jewish national existence once and for all. Roman and Roman-sponsored ancient historians wrote all about this–Pliny, Tacitus, Dio Cassius, Josephus, and so forth.
After the earlier first revolt, Rome issued Judea Capta coins in honor of its victory. Open here to see one of such coins…
http://q4j-middle-east.com And to further commemorate its victory over the Jews, it built the towering Arch of Titus which stands tall in Rome to this very day… http://www.aviewoncities.com/rome/archoftitus.htm
“Syria Palestina” was thus named for the Philistines, the Jews’ historic enemies. They were the “Sea People” of ancient Egyptian records, Samson and Delilah and David and Goliath fame, and so forth. And they were Greeks who came from the islands off of Crete…not even Semites, let alone Arabs. The latter mostly arrived in the land of the Jews in the 7th century of the Common Era during the massive waves of Jihadi attacks launched by Muhammad’s successors as they burst out of the Arabian Peninsula spreading the Dar ul-Islam in all directions.
So, the situation involving “Jordan” is a bit tricky–to say the least.
Its population consists mostly of Arabs who lived, or came to live, in the Mandate in the early 20th century. The Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission and other sound sources recorded vast numbers of Arabs pouring into the Mandate from surrounding countries due to (unlike elsewhere) the economic development going on in Palestine. And many others entered via the porous borders at night, never to be recorded at all.
So many Arabs were recent arrivals–settlers–themselves into the Palestinian Mandate that UNRWA had to adjust the very definition of “refugee” from its prior meaning of persons normally and traditionally resident to those who had lived in the Mandate for a minimum of only two years prior to 1948. By the way, there was no UNRWA or any other organization set up to assist the Jews who were forced to flee “Arab” lands, leaving far more wealth and property behind than Arabs fleeing the fighting in the opposite direction.
The other main part of Jordan’s population are the Bedouin followers of the Hashemite Arab rulers who were gifted with most of the Mandate of Palestine by the Brits while in the process of getting their own derrieres booted out of the Arabian Peninsula by the rival clan of Ibn Saud–hence, Saudi Arabia today.
On more than one occasion, Jordan’s rulers’ derrieres were saved by their Jewish neighbors.
To name just one incident, when Syrian Arabs attacked Jordanian Arabs in 1970 to support the PLO Arabs’ attempt to overthrow Hashemite Arabs (“Black September”), Israel took effective measures which resulted in the swift Syrian withdrawal of its forces.
In short, besides–once again–Israel caving in to all that Arabs who want it destroyed demand, there is not much else that the Jews can do to make the latter happy…and thus make the Jordanians less nervous as well.
What’s really needed is something that won’t happen…a reasonable compromise worked out over the territories, and for the Arab portion to become part of the Arab state which already exists on the lions’ share of the Mandate of Palestine…Jordan. Instead, Arabs demand that a second state be carved out for them in the land at the Jews’ expense–and now have an American Administration strongarming the Jews to make this happen.
That brings us lastly to Panetta’s reference to Egypt.
I guess it’s Israel’s fault that Egypt has allowed huge quantities of munitions and such to enter into Gaza to be used to attack and terrorize Jews in Israel via countless tunnels dug on its side of the border…Imagine if this situation was reversed. Keep in mind that Egypt supposedly has had a treaty of peace with Israel since 1979.
I guess it’s Israel’s fault that the one Arab leader who truly sought peace with his Jewish neighbor–Anwar al-Sadat–was slaughtered by Muslim Brotherhood clones in Egypt–the same dudes now set to take over the country after the recent elections.
I guess it’s Israel fault that a stream of non-stop anti-Semitism pours out of the Egyptian media, academia, mosques, and other sources daily–let alone “anti-Zionism.”
And I guess it’s Israel’s fault that Egyptian military vehicles deliberately squash the heads of native, non-Arab Copts who dare to protest their subjugation.
Egypt, the largest Arab nation which–since the pre-Arab days of the Pharaohs–has millennia of history attacking Jews in Israel (check out the Merneptah Stele http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merneptah_Stele ) and which was handed over oil fields that the Jews developed. Egypt, which was given back every centimeter of land Israel won in a defensive war for its very life in 1967 (after Egypt blockaded it and amassed 100,000 troops on the armistice lines)–including the best tank trap Israel could have ever asked for(the Sinai Peninsula); etc. and so forth…
Yes, that Egypt.
But no, Secretary Panetta, Israel again has nothing to apologize to for. The sad fact here is that for Egypt too, it’s ditto time yet again as per the above assessment.
Israel has been more than a good neighbor, and it has repeatedly been victimized by Egypt for it.
Imagine any other country tolerating tunnels from across its borders by which death and destruction routinely enter into the land. There is no doubt that Egypt has not been held accountable anywhere near enough for this. And there are many other issues as well. Yet, it’s the Jews whom Panetta (read Obama) singles out for chastisement…
Sadat, of blessed memory, made his peace with Israel after the ’73 Yom Kippur War because he finally realized that the Arab goal of destroying it would result–at best–in the ultimate Pyrrhic victory.
The Bible speaks of a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph arising in ancient Egypt, which led to the enslavement of the Hebrews later on down the road.
Unfortunately, those in the ascendancy in Egypt today know not Joseph’s descendants either.
The decades have passed, American billions of dollars in military and other aid have swelled the heads of Egyptians, and the memories of war–except among the upper levels of the officer corps–have all but vanished.
Combine the above with the recent electoral victory of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist forces in the country, and there is indeed much to worry about in Egypt.Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel is all but dead, and the latter now faces a far more powerful Egyptian military than ever before…thanks to America. Also keep in mind that the Hamas rulers of Gaza are another offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
But whatever the future holds in store regarding ever changing developments in terms of Iran, the Arab Spring, and such, one thing is crystal clear–or at least should be–regardless of the propensity of those affiliated with the Obama White House to blame the Jews…or, more specifically, those Jews with their heads still at least partially above the sand, like Netanyahu:
Expecting Israel to simply cave in to all that its enemies demand to further expose itself, a la Panetta and his boss’s prodding, is undoubtedly not the answer.