Keep in mind that the following commentary -- which lambasts Israel's
stupidity and defiant behavior -- was written by a British-born, New York
Jew. My point is, there are some fair-minded Jews who do not agree with the
provocative and insane policies of the Israeli government.


The Biden Effect

By ROGER COHEN - NYT

March 15, 2010


NEW YORK -- I'm tempted to see Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Israel as
a parable: Nice guy wanders into mess and truth is revealed.

We've had, for example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clarifying the
fact that, "Israel and the U.S. have mutual interests, but we will act
according to the vital interests of the state of Israel."

Of course, the United States, too, has "vital interests." They include
reaching a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine for which the
physical space erodes daily as Israeli settlements in the West Bank expand.

Peace is a vital American interest for many reasons, including its
inalienable commitment to Israel's long-term security, but the most pressing
is that the conflict is a jihadist recruitment tool that feeds the wars in
which young Americans die.

This is not rocket science. Yet over the past decade the United States has
been facilitating the costly settlements enterprise by pouring $28.9 billion
into Israel. America's strategic goal of Israeli and Palestinian states
living side by side in security has been undermined by its own blank-check
diplomacy.

Well, goodbye to all that -- maybe. Something shifted when Biden ("You need
not be a Jew to be a Zionist") was thanked for his unstinting support of
Israel with a snub: The announcement that another 1,600 apartments for Jews
will be built in east Jerusalem, a pure provocation when restarting peace
talks is the core U.S. aim.

President Barack Obama was furious. In a top-down administration like this
one, you don't get Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lambasting Netanyahu
for 43 minutes and David Axelrod, a senior White House adviser, speaking of
"an affront" and "an insult" and a "very, very
destructive" step if
America's measured leader is not immeasurably incensed. That truth is also
worth knowing.

Obama has reason to be angry.

Netanyahu, betraying the growing Israeli taste for the status quo, torn
between rightist instincts and coalition partners on the one hand and his
ego's sensitivity to the peacemaker's halo and history books on the other,
has been toying with Obama.

A year ago, in March 2009, I wrote that, "Obama's new policies of Middle
Eastern diplomacy and engagement" would involve "a probable cooling of
U.S.-Israeli relations." I believed that Israel had misread or
underestimated a core strategic shift of the Obama presidency: away from the
with-us-or-against-us rhetoric of the war on terror toward a rapprochement
with the Muslim world as the basis for isolating terrorists.

Well, here's the cooling. You can't have rapprochement with Muslims while
condoning the steady Israeli appropriation of the physical space for
Palestine. You can't have that rapprochement if U.S. policy is susceptible
to the whims of Shas, the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox party in Netanyahu's
coalition that runs the Interior Ministry and announced the Biden-baiting
measure.

The Israeli right, whether religious or secular, has no interest in a
two-state peace. I had lunch the other day with Ron Nachman, the mayor of
Ariel, one of the largest West Bank settlements. He told me breezily that
there "can be no Palestinian state," and that "Israel and
Jordan should
divide the land." I liked his frankness. It clarifies things.

It's time for equal frankness from Netanyahu. Do "the vital interests of the
state of Israel" include continued building in East Jerusalem and the steady
takeover of the West Bank, or does his embrace of the airy phrase, "two
states for two peoples," have more than camouflage meaning?

Netanyahu's apology is not enough. The United States is asking for "specific
actions." I'd say at a minimum that would include the annulment of the
1,600-apartments plan. Israel, always ready to mock Palestinian disarray,
might also ensure that its leader knows what members of his own government
are doing.

This is a watershed moment. Palestinian violence, Palestinian anti-Semitic
incitement and jihadist infiltration of the Palestinian national movement
all undermine peace efforts. They are unacceptable; Biden was right to
"ironclad" the U.S. commitment to Israeli security. But it's past time that
Palestinian failings cease to serve as an excuse for Israel's remorseless,
cynical scattering of the Palestinian people into enclaves that make a farce
of statehood. That is "an affront" to America.

In this sense, Biden's foray has been salutary. It brought U.S. "vital
interests" to the surface. It challenged Israel's ostrich-like burrowing
into polices that, over time, will make one divided, undemocratic state more
likely than "two states for two peoples." It asked again the question posed
recently by David Shulman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Are
Israelis, cocooned, still able "to see, to imagine, and to acknowledge the
suffering of other human beings, including those aspects of their suffering
for which we are directly responsible?"

The mass-market daily Maariv had a front-page post-Biden cartoon of Obama
cooking Netanyahu in a pot. It was supposed to illustrate a relationship "in
flames." But the image -- a black man cooking a white man over an open fire
-- also said something about the way Israel views its critics.

Israel is wrong to mock its constructive critics. They alone can usher the
country from the one-state dead end -- a vital Israeli interest.



Jeff Snyder, SysOp - Armageddon BBS  Visit us at endtimeprophecy.org port 23
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