Posted on 11/19/2001 9:07:12 PM PST by ouroboros
"Israel controls the Senate," said J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, in 1973. "We should be more concerned about the United States' interests." That nothing has changed was evident this weekend. Secretary of State Powell received a letter, instigated by the Israeli lobby and signed by 89 U.S. senators, directing him not to interfere with Israel's crushing of the Palestinian uprising.
President Bush may have promised the Peace Party, Tony Blair and the Saudis he will use his muscle to broker a just peace. If he did, he made a promise he cannot keep. For the conditions of peace that seemed present when Ehud Barak led Israel no longer exist. The moment has passed, the window has closed.
Real peace requires something close to what Barak offered Arafat: a Palestinian state with full sovereignty over Gaza, the West Bank, Arab East Jerusalem and the Islamic holy places. This would entail a dismantling of Israeli settlements and withdrawal to something like the borders of 1967.
That is impossible now. Sharon not only distrusts Arafat, he detests him and rejects the Oslo formula of land-for-peace. Sharon believes the Arabs will use a Palestinian state as a base camp for a new war of annihilation. He won his office by accusing Barak of pandering to terror and inviting national suicide. Should he offer Arafat a similar deal, his Cabinet would break up and he would be replaced by Benjamin Netanyahu.
More important, with this latest intifada marked by massacres of children at pizza parlors, Israelis no longer believe security can be found cheek-by-jowl with an Arafat-led Palestinian state. Who can blame them?
But if Arafat is considered by Israelis to be a terrorist, among the Palestinians, he is increasingly viewed as a poodle of America and an appeaser of Zion. Palestinians have lost 700 dead in this uprising – including women and children – and thousands wounded. For fighting against Israeli troops, it is Hamas and Islamic Jihad who are capturing the hearts of the young. Arafat's mandate is running out.
Moreover, Bush cannot force Sharon to give up occupied land, for he cannot threaten Sharon with a cut-off in aid. Should he try, he will call down the rage of Congress and the wrath of the Israeli lobby and its Amen Corner. Not since Dwight Eisenhower, safely re-elected, ordered Ben-Gurion to get his army out of Sinai in 1957 has a president compelled Israel to meet U.S. demands.
When Israeli and U.S. policies clash, it is U.S. presidents who back down. For 30 years, the United States has held that settlements in the territories occupied in the 1967 war were "illegal" and impediments to peace. Yet, despite $100 billion in U.S. aid to Israel since 1972 – $20,000 for every Israeli – the number of settlers has risen from 8,400 to 357,000. Israel ignores U.S. pleas and demands, for it knows they are bluster and bluff, designed for Arab consumption.
Should Bush invest his postwar popularity and prestige in a Palestine with its capital in East Jerusalem, he will see both dissipated, while failing, even as his predecessors have failed.
Already, Bush's suggestion that he supports Israeli concessions for a Palestinian state, to draw down anti-American venom in the Islamic world, was met with Sharon's retort that Israel will not play the role of Czechoslovakia to Bush's Neville Chamberlain. In a normal relationship, such a gross and gratuitous insult would have brought a recall of the U.S. ambassador. Instead, it produced a wimpish little peep of protest from Ari Fleischer.
Bush should look over the horizon and ask himself what Israel will demand as the price of a Palestinian state. It is: scores of billions of U.S. dollars to take down settlements, whose building we opposed, and a permanent U.S.-Israeli military alliance, backed up by the presence of U.S. troops. This would guarantee Americans fighting in every future Israeli war. And this we cannot give.
Prediction: Bush and Powell will start up the road to a brokered peace and find they are on a political Highway of Death. Karl Rove will walk into the Oval Office and say, "Mr. President, it is not worth it, it is not working – we are down to 60 percent in the polls. Let's go back to benign neglect."
Israelis will emerge victorious and delighted. The Arabs will be frustrated and outraged, and Bush's prestige in the Arab world will vanish as his father's did after Desert Storm. In Kuwait, they no longer name their children Bush, but Osama. So, the downward spiral toward an Arab-Israeli and U.S.-Islamic war will continue and the enemies of peace, on all sides, will be exulted, and exalted.
Where have you gone, Gen. Eisenhower?
Patrick J. Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party’s candidate in 2000. Now a commentator and columnist, he served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national televison shows, and is the author of six books. His current position is chairman of The American Cause. His newest book, "Death of the West," will be published in January.
You ought to know, Mr. WND cub reporter.
Has any former candidate fallen so far so fast?
I say if Israel must, take another 50 miles as a wider perimeter, as a pre-emptive move for their own security. Arafat had his chance, and refused it. Palestinians are terrorists, and will not stop if given a state.
During the Eisenhower regime, Ezra Taft Benson, his appointee to to secretary of agriculture, enacted federal programs that led directly to over 1,000,000 Southerners being displaced from their farms.
More important, with this latest intifada marked by massacres of children at pizza parlors, Israelis no longer believe security can be found cheek-by-jowl with an Arafat-led Palestinian state. Who can blame them?
And then he rants about the Israeli lobby? So he RECOGNIZES that Arafat wants to destroy Israel, but he complains that the U.S. won't let him!! What nerve!
(The real estate developers of the West Bank settlements are Americans)
Source? ... Explanation? ... the Sec. Agriculture enacted programs?
The truth does not spawn many corporate contributions to political campaigns - but it is still the TRUTH!
I also think that there is more behind the US commitment to Israel than campaign donations from Jewish Americans. For one thing, we would be much further behind on this war on terror than we are without Israeli intelligence. It is nice to have one reliable stable democracy in the MidEast. The Saudis won't be around much longer. Egypt has returned to a barely managed autocracy with a basket case economy. Turkey lurches from crisis to crisis. Kuwait? Oman? Jordan? OK, Pat go have fun with your friends.
He was featured on the covers of Time magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, he and his family were guests on Edward R. Murrow's television show, "Person to Person." Believing that "no real American wants to be subsidized," he urged flexible price supports for agricultural products and called on America's farmers to stand on their own feet. Surprising critics, he survived a full eight years in the cabinet before retiring once more to home and church duties.
Passionately opposed to communism, Benson denounced all forms of tyranny and compulsion. He spoke out frequently advocating conservative positions and themes, and was mentioned as a possible presidential or vice presidential candidate. On one occasion he outlined his own political creed in the following words: "I am for freedom and against slavery. I am for social progress and against socialism. I am for a dynamic economy and against waste. I am for the private competitive market and against unnecessary governmental intervention. I am for national security and against appeasement and capitulation to an obvious enemy."
In 1973 Benson was set apart as president of the Council of the Twelve Apostles. He worked to streamline church politics.
And yet when he's accused of being anti-Jew and anti-Israel he's defended by some who say "Show me the proof". Even odder is the fact that those demanding the proof usually land on the very same sides of the very same issues.
In a time when the avowed enemies of Israel are the avowed enemies of the United States (you may recall the WTC incident) there are still some that support our enemies. Most ironically of all, they call themselves patriots and accuse the rest of us of being un-patriotic.
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