Obama and the War against Israel

Obama and the War against Israel
If President Obama had been trying to undermine Israel’s security — and ours — he could hardly have done a better job.

No other country in the world faces an array of existential threats such as the nation of Israel confronts daily. The world’s only Jewish state is also its most precarious. Geographically tiny, Israel is surrounded by theocracies that reject its very existence as a “nakba” — a catastrophe — and call for its destruction. To carry out this malignant ambition, anti-Israel Islamists have mobilized three rocket-wielding armies, sworn to wipe Israel from the face of the earth.

First and most aggressive among them is the Gaza-based Hamas, a fanatical religious party committed in its official charter to obliterating Israel and killing its Jews. Hamas is the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, the inspirer of al-Qaeda and the global Islamic jihad, whose official motto declares: “Death in the service of Allah is our highest aspiration.” In Gaza, Hamas has created a terrorist state and a national death cult whose path is martyrdom and whose goal is openly proclaimed: “O, our children: The Jews — brothers of the apes, assassins of the prophets, bloodsuckers, warmongers — are murdering you, depriving you of life after having plundered your homeland and your homes. Only Islam can break the Jews and destroy their dream.”

Given that hatred for Jews is the animating passion of the Hamas militants, their response to Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was not surprising. Far from greeting this as a gesture of peace, Hamas regarded the Israeli withdrawal as a surrender to its terrorist attacks and an opportunity to escalate them. In the days and months following the withdrawal, Hamas launched 6,500 unprovoked rocket strikes on towns and schoolyards in Israel before the Israelis decided to strike back.

On Israel’s eastern border is the West Bank, home to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and other terrorist groups, armed and protected by the so-called “moderate” Palestinian Authority. Like Hamas, the Palestinian Authority officially rejects Israel’s existence and the right of its Jews to self-determination. Like Hamas, the Palestinian Authority provides a curriculum for its schoolchildren that teaches them to hate Jews and hope to kill them, seeking martyrdom in the process. In pursuit of these genocidal goals, all Palestinian schoolchildren study maps of the region from which Israel has been erased.

On Israel’s northern border, in Lebanon, is Hezbollah, the “Party of God,” which is stockpiling tens of thousands of Iranian rockets in anticipation of the war of annihilation it has promised to wage against the Jewish state. Created by Iran’s Republican Guard and supplied by Syria’s (officially) “fascist” dictatorship, Hezbollah is the largest terrorist army in the world. Like Hamas, it makes explicit its hatred for the Jews and its agenda in regard to them — to “finish the job that Hitler started.” Its fanatical leader, Hassan Nasrallah, leads thousands of believers in chants of “Death to Israel! Death to America!” He has said, “If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.” Under the complicit eye of U.N. “peacekeepers,” Hezbollah continues to amass rockets whose sole purpose is the obliteration of Israel. In May 2006, Nasrallah boasted: “Today all of Israel is in our range.#…#Ports, military bases, factories — everything is in our range.”

But it is Hezbollah’s sponsor, the totalitarian — and soon to be nuclear — state of Iran, that presents the most disturbing threat to Israel’s existence. Its blood-soaked dictators have been targeting Israel for destruction since 1979, when Iran became an Islamic republic and its theocratic ruler, the Ayatollah Khomeini, identified Israel and America as “the Little Satan” and “the Great Satan.” Its former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has publicly announced his support for nuclear war against the Jewish state, reasoning that since Iran is more than 70 times the size of Israel, it could survive a nuclear exchange while Israel could not.

Iran’s current leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has also called for America and Israel to be “wiped from the map” — and there was no dissent from the other 56 Islamic states that make up the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Amateur semanticists insist that Ahmadinejad’s words were mistranslated, and that he really meant that both countries should be “erased from the pages of history.” But this is a distinction without a difference. For what can that threat possibly mean if Israel or America should continue to exist? Meanwhile, Iran continues to build long-range nuclear missiles that could be used for just such a purpose, and no serious effort to check that ambition has been made by the international community or by the United States.

Where, indeed, does the international community stand in the face of this brazen preparation to bring about a second Holocaust of the Jews? Since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the Arab states have conducted three unprovoked, aggressive conventional wars against it, along with a continuous terrorist war that began in 1949. Yet between 1948 and 2004 there were 322 resolutions in the U.N. General Assembly condemning the victim, Israel, and not one that condemned an Arab state.

The United Nations today is dominated by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a group that was established in 1969 at a summit convened, according to its official website, “as a result of criminal arson of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem” — in other words, in response to the criminal Jews. The Organization of the Islamic Conference regularly passes one-sided resolutions that condemn Israel, particularly for its efforts to combat Palestinian terrorism and disrupt Palestinian weapon smuggling into Gaza. The U.N.’s most notorious assault on Israel was the Goldstone Report, which was commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council in September 2009 and which condemned Israel’s belated response to the unprovoked Hamas rocket attacks.

Relying on the testimony of Hamas terrorists, the Goldstone Report charged that Israel had deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians and had committed war crimes in Gaza. Outside the precincts of the Islamic propaganda machine, however, Israel’s record is in fact that of a nation that is extraordinarily protective of enemy civilians. In testimony ignored by the Goldstone Report, for example, Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, stated: “During Operation Cast Lead [the Israeli response to the Hamas attacks], the Israel Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.” Hamas, by contrast, is notorious for building military headquarters under hospitals, for placing its military forces in refugee camps, and for using women and children as “human shields” to deter attacks. Hamas’s rockets are known to be so inaccurate they cannot be directed against military targets; they can only be used effectively against civilians. In addition, since Hamas’s war against Israel was a response to Israel’s unilateral withdrawal, it was a criminal aggression responsible for all the subsequent casualties, something the Goldstone Report and the U.N. Human Rights Council conveniently overlooked.

The Human Rights Council was created in 2006. In its first year, the council listed only one country in the entire world as violating human rights: Israel. It condemned Israel despite the fact that Israel is the only state in the Middle East that recognizes human rights and protects them. Not one of the world’s other 194 countries was even mentioned, including North Korea, Burma, and Iran — the last of which hangs gays from cranes for transgressing the sexual proscriptions of the Koran. The reason for these oversights is no mystery. The U.N. Human Rights Council has been presided over by representatives of such brutal human-rights violators as Libya, China, Saudi Arabia, and Cuba, and it was such a travesty from its inception that it was boycotted by the United States until Barack Obama decided this year to join its ranks. This decision by the Obama administration, along with its overtures to Syria, Iran, and other noxious regimes, lent a stamp of legitimacy to the hypocrisy of the council and encouraged its malice.

In these sinister developments, the world is witnessing a reprise of the 1930s, when the Nazis devised a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem,” and the civilized world did nothing to halt its implementation. This time, the solution is being proposed openly in front of the entire international community, which appears unruffled by the prospect. It has turned its collective back on the Jews, and refuses to recognize the gravity of the threat. Moreover, by enforcing the fiction that there is a “peace process” that needs to be brokered between the sides, and ignoring the overt preparation for Israel’s destruction by the Palestinian side, the “peacemakers” lend their support to its deadly agenda.

For decades now, Israel has been isolated and alone in the community of nations, with one crucial exception. That exception has been the United States, a country on which it has relied for its survival throughout its 60-year history. Every would-be aggressor has understood that the world’s most powerful nation was behind Israel and would not let her be destroyed. Every government harboring ill will toward the Jewish state has had to reckon with the fact that the United States was in Israel’s corner. Every vote of condemnation in the United Nations had to confront a veto by the nation that provides its chief financial support.

Until now.

In the words of a recent Reuters dispatch, “Under President Barack Obama, the United States no longer provides Israel with automatic support at the United Nations, where the Jewish state faces a constant barrage of criticism and condemnation. The subtle but noticeable shift in the U.S. approach to its Middle East ally comes amid what some analysts describe as one of the most serious crises in U.S.-Israel relations in years.”

This change first became apparent during an official visit to Jerusalem by Vice President Biden earlier this year. On March 9, the vice president arrived for a dinner at the home of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nearly two hours late. His tardiness was not accidental but a calculated diplomatic slight — specifically, a punishment for Israel’s announcement of plans to build 1,600 new homes in a predominantly Jewish section of East Jerusalem. The vice president was embarrassed by the announcement’s being made during his visit.

In fact, the announcement was a routine step, the fourth in a seven-stage bureaucratic approval process for new construction. While its timing might be construed as inopportune, the building of homes in a Jewish neighborhood in Israel’s capital city was hardly an issue that should have created any sort of problem, let alone caused a rupture between allies. Nonetheless, Israeli officials, conscious of their dependence on their American partners, immediately apologized for any perceived offense.

But the Obama administration would have none of it. As severe reproaches of Israel from top U.S. officials followed, the crisis escalated. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton berated Netanyahu, calling Israel’s announcement a “deeply negative signal” for U.S.-Israel ties. Senior presidential adviser David Axelrod delivered the same scolding message to an American audience, going on cable news shows to vent the administration’s displeasure. Branding Israel’s announcement an “affront” and an “insult,” Axelrod claimed that Israel had made the “peace process” with the Palestinians much more “difficult.”

Whereas Israel’s housing announcement was made without Netanyahu’s knowledge, Washington’s response was dictated by President Obama. When the prime minister arrived in the United States for a meeting with the president that same month, there was no ceremony in the White House Rose Garden and no posing before press cameras — the usual goodwill gestures afforded visiting heads of friendly nations.

The reception in private was at least as cold. When Netanyahu arrived at the White House for what he thought was going to be a dinner with the president, Obama unceremoniously presented him with a list of demands — including that Israel cease all housing construction in East Jerusalem — and curtly abandoned his guest to have dinner with his wife and daughters in the White House residential wing. As Obama left the meeting room, he informed his stunned visitors that he would “be around” should the prime minister change his mind. As the Israeli press reported afterwards, “There is no humiliation exercise that the Americans did not try on the prime minister and his entourage.” Washington Post columnist and Middle East expert Jackson Diehl was even more blunt, writing that “Netanyahu is being treated [by Obama] as if he were an unsavory Third World dictator.”

Contrary to the administration’s insistence that Israel was jeopardizing peace by encroaching on negotiable terrain, the construction site in Jerusalem was anything but disputed territory. Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, and the construction site is in Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish neighborhood. Housing construction had been under way in Ramat Shlomo since the early 1990s, and it would remain part of Israel in any conceivable peace settlement. Consequently, when Netanyahu had agreed under pressure to a partial ten-month freeze on settlements in the disputed territories, he specifically excluded Jerusalem. By its insistence that Israel cease all building in East Jerusalem, it was the Obama administration, not Israel, that was breaking with precedent, and opening up the political center of Israel itself to Palestinian claims.

In opposing Israeli construction in a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem, the Obama administration embraced a version of Middle Eastern history that directly lends itself to the Arab war against the Jewish state. In the Arab narrative justifying that war, Jerusalem is alleged to occupy a central place in the history of Muslims and Arabs. In the same narrative, Jerusalem is claimed as the capital of a future Palestinian state. But the spiritual centrality of Jerusalem for Muslims is in fact a relatively recent claim and dubious on its face, while the religious claims are by-products of Muslim military conquests.

The Prophet Mohammed never visited Jerusalem, and consequently Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Koran. Today even Islamists regard it as only the third-holiest city in Islam, after Mecca and Medina. It was never the capital of any Arab state. Indeed, for centuries, Jerusalem was a forgotten city to most Arabs, and it was allowed to fall into ruin under Ottoman rule, which lasted until the creation of Israel and Jordan in the aftermath of the First World War. On a trip to Jerusalem in 1867, Mark Twain lamented that the city “has lost all its grandeur, and is become a pauper village.” When Jordan occupied Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967, it was treated like a backwater. Only one Arab leader, Morocco’s King Hassan, cared enough to pay a visit to the city that Muslims who are involved in the jihad against Israel now suggest is an essential part of their history.

The sudden fracture in the U.S.-Israel relationship in March caught the Israeli government off guard. But close observers of the Obama administration would have recognized it as the logical endpoint of a series of markers that had been laid down since Obama emerged as a leading presidential contender in 2008. With these markers Obama was signaling a major shift in U.S. policy, moving toward the Muslim world and America’s traditional enemies, and away from allies like Israel.

The first sign of this shift was visible during a February 2008 presidential debate, when Obama sought to differentiate himself from Hillary Clinton, his then opponent and future secretary of state, by announcing that, unlike her, he would be willing to meet with hostile governments “without preconditions.” It was a position he justified by asserting that it was critical for the United States to “talk to its enemies.” This was a rare example of a campaign promise Obama has kept.

On entering the White House, Obama quickly moved to set a new tone toward the Arab and Muslim worlds. His very first call to a foreign leader from the Oval Office was to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, and it was not an effort to dissuade Abbas from his support for terrorism or his opposition to the existence of a Jewish state. One of the first interviews Obama gave as president, in January 2009, was to the Dubai-based television network Al-Arabiya. In it, Obama effectively offered an apology to the Arab world for alleged American misdeeds. He assured his interviewer that with him in charge Arab states could look to America as a friend. “My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy,” Obama said, adding that the United States “sometimes makes mistakes. We have not been perfect.”

It was the precursor of an extensive apology tour for America’s sins around the world. In April 2009, he visited Turkey, a NATO ally that was rapidly — and alarmingly — becoming an Islamist state. Addressing its parliament, he hailed Turkey as a “true partner” and suggested that it was the United States that had been the faithless friend. In a not-so-oblique attack on President Bush, Obama expressed his regret for the “difficulties of these last few years,” referring to a strain in relations caused by Turkey’s refusal to allow American troops to deploy from Turkish soil during the war in Iraq. Obama lamented that the “trust that binds us has been strained, and I know that strain is shared in many places where the Muslim faith is practiced.” In other words, Turkey’s refusal to help America support the Muslim citizens of Iraq and topple a hated tyranny was a response to America’s prejudice against Muslims.

In his review of past grievances, Obama did not mention the millions of Muslims — including Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza — who had cheered the 9/11 attacks on the United States by Islamic fanatics. Nor did he complain about the spread of anti-American and anti-Israeli conspiracy theories concerning those attacks in the Muslim world, including Turkey. As recently as 2008, polls found that as many Turks (39 percent) believed the United States or Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks as believed Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were the culprits.

Even more worrisome, Obama used the occasion of his Turkish visit to break with the U.S. policy of treating countries that harbor terrorists as hostile nations. President Bush had declared that there would be no room for neutrality in the war against terror: “You are either with us or against us.” But Obama now assured his listeners in Turkey and throughout the Muslim world that their governments no longer had to choose between America and al-Qaeda. “America’s relationship with the Muslim world,” Obama said, “cannot and will not be based on opposition to al-Qaeda.”

Obama’s pandering to Arab and Muslim sensibilities had already been embarrassingly on display a few days earlier, when he took the step, unprecedented for an American president, of making a deep bow to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, the ruler of a nation in which it is illegal to carry a Bible or build a church, and where women are not allowed to drive automobiles. The incident took place when President Obama attended the G-20 economic summit in London. When critics decried the president’s subservient gesture to the Arab despot, the administration was caught by surprise and attempted to deny that it had ever taken place. Inconveniently for White House damage control, a video had captured Obama in full obeisant mode.

The shift in Washington’s policy toward the Arab world reached a new level in Obama’s speech in Cairo two months later. On the one hand, the president defended the U.S. military campaigns in the Middle East as driven by “necessity,” condemned the Holocaust denial and Jew hatred that are rife in the Arab world (and promoted by its governments), and called on Palestinians to abandon violence against Israel. But these statements were accompanied by others that appear particularly troubling in the light of subsequent administration moves.

While Obama rightly condemned Holocaust denial, he left the impression that Israel’s legitimacy derived solely from the legacy of European anti-Semitism and the Nazis’ extermination of six million Jews. This echoed the Arab propaganda claim that Israel is a problem created by Europeans and unfairly imposed on the Arab world. Once again Obama was bolstering an Arab myth that serves to delegitimize the Jewish state.

The Holocaust is not merely a European legacy. Middle Eastern states such as Iraq and Iran actively sided with Hitler’s armies; Arab generals served with Rommel, Hitler’s commander in North Africa; and Arab leaders applauded and actively promoted the extermination of the Jews. The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, was an admirer of Hitler and had Mein Kampf translated into Arabic in the 1930s as a text to guide his followers. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and founder of Palestinian nationalism, was an active and vocal supporter of Hitler’s “final solution” and spent the war years in Berlin recruiting Arabs to the Nazi cause. Al-Husseini, a man revered to this day in the West Bank and Gaza as the George Washington of a Palestinian state, organized anti-Jewish pogroms in the 1920s and 1930s, actively planned to build his own Auschwitz in the Middle East, and was thwarted only when Rommel was defeated at El-Alamein.

The Arab canard that Israel is Europe’s attempt to unload its problem onto the backs of the Arabs ignores — as did Obama — the fact that Jerusalem has been the spiritual capital of the Jewish people for nearly 3,000 years and that Jews have lived in their historic homeland continuously for all that time. Jerusalem is at the center of the Jewish spiritual tradition, and Jews have been its largest religious community since 1864. Prime Minister Netanyahu was historically accurate when he admonished Obama, saying that “the Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago, and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital.”

In his Cairo speech, Obama also showed little appreciation of the modern history of Israel, a nation that was not built on Arab — let alone “Palestinian” — land. The state of Israel was created out of the ruins of the Turkish empire.

In 1922, Great Britain created the state of Jordan out of 80 percent of the Palestine Mandate — a geographical, not an ethnic, designation. The territory in the Mandate had been part of the Turkish (not Arab) empire for the previous four hundred years. Then in 1948, a U.N. “partition plan” provided equal parts of the remaining Turkish land to Arabs and to Jews living on the banks of the Jordan River. In this plan, the Jews were assigned 10 percent of the original Palestine Mandate, while the Arabs received 90 percent. None of this land had belonged to a “Palestinian” nation or a Palestinian entity. In the previous 400 years there had never been a province of the Turkish empire called “Palestine.” The entire region out of which Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank were created was known as “Ottoman Syria.”

In what would prove to be a continuing pattern, the Jews accepted the partition’s grossly unequal terms; their portion consisted of three unconnected slivers of land, of which 60 percent was arid desert. The Arabs, who had already received 80 percent of the Mandate land, rejected their additional portion, as they would continue to reject any arrangement that would allow for a Jewish state.

Immediately, five Arab nations launched a war against the Jews, who repelled the Arab attacks and established a Jewish state. When the fighting ended, the parts of the partitioned land that had been earmarked for the Arabs — namely, the West Bank and Gaza — were annexed by Jordan and Egypt, respectively, and disappeared from the map. There was no protest from the Arab world at the disappearance of “Palestine” into Jordan and Egypt, no Palestine Liberation Organization, no complaint to the U.N. The reason for the silence was that there was no Palestinian identity at the time, no movement for “self-determination,” no “Palestinian” people to make a claim. There were Arabs who lived in the region of the Jordan. But they considered themselves inhabitants of Jordan or of the Syrian province of the former Ottoman Empire. The disappearance of the West Bank and Gaza was an annexation of Arab land by Arab states.

Arab and Western revisionists have turned this history on its head to portray the Jewish war of survival as a racist, imperialist plot to expel “Palestinians” from “Palestine.” This is an utter distortion of the historical record. The term “Palestine Mandate” is a European reference to a geographical section of the defeated Turkish empire. The claim that there was a Palestinian nation from which ethnic Palestinians were expelled and which Israel now “occupies” illegally is a political lie.

In 1967, the Arab states attacked Israel again, with the express aim of “pushing the Jews into the sea.” Again they were defeated. And once again defeat did not prompt the Arab states to make peace or to abandon their efforts to destroy Israel. At an August 1967 summit in Khartoum, Arab leaders declared that they would accept “no peace, no recognition, and no negotiations” with Israel. This is the permanent Arab war against Israel. It is a war driven by religious and ethnic hatred, which is the only durable cause of the conflict in the Middle East.

It is hardly surprising, given this historical reality, that Israel should regard with skepticism the Arab demands that Israel surrender territory — which it captured in defending itself against Arab aggression — in advance of a settlement that recognizes the existence of the Jewish state. As Netanyahu has said, “What kind of moral position is it to say that the failed aggressor should be given back all the territory from which he launched his attack?” In fact, of no other nation that has been victimized — and victimized repeatedly — by aggressors is such a concession demanded.

Yet Israeli concessions are precisely what the Obama administration is demanding as a precondition of peace. It is ostensibly doing so on the dubious assumption that if only Israel would make further concessions to the Palestinians, peace would be possible. But this assumption flies in the face of 60 years of continuous Arab aggression, including unrelenting terror attacks against Israeli civilians and explicit commitments to wipe out the Jewish state.

The very idea that Israeli settlements (let alone Jewish houses in Jewish neighborhoods) are an obstacle to peace perpetuates the mythical claims of the Arab cause. There are a million Arabs settled in Israel, and they enjoy more rights as Israeli citizens than do the Arab citizens of any Arab Muslim state. So why are the settlements of a few hundred thousand Jews on the West Bank a problem? The only possible answer is Jew hatred, the desire to make the West Bank Judenrein, and ultimately the 60-year Arab campaign to push the Jews into the sea.

The Obama administration’s pressure on Israel to give up its settlements and to concede that its capital is disputed terrain feeds the inherent racism of the Arab cause and undermines Israel’s ability to resist the genocidal campaign against it. Such pressure cannot promote peace negotiations when the other party is openly dedicated to Israel’s destruction and has already shown that it will reject even the most generous offers of peace.

Directly following the Obama administration’s attacks on Israel’s building project in Jerusalem, the Palestinians invoked Israeli intransigence as a pretext for pulling out of the indirect peace talks that had been taking place. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas went on record as refusing to enter into direct talks with Israel unless it instituted an immediate construction freeze in its own capital city. Palestinians had previously participated in talks without that condition, but, as one observer noted, “How could the Palestinian position be softer on Israel than the American position? Of course the Palestinians would have to hold Israel to the newly raised standards of the Obama administration.” In this way did the Obama administration further the efforts of the Arabs to dismantle the Jewish state.

Observers of this ominous development warned that by attacking Israel over settlements the administration was encouraging a violent buildup that could eventually erupt into a third Intifada. A Hebrew-speaking Arab protester interviewed on Israeli radio called for armed resistance against Israel’s “assault on Jerusalem,” declaring that the time had come for a new Intifada. The call was taken up by Hamas, which declared a “day of rage” to lash out against Israel. Arab rioters protested in the streets, hurled stones at buses, cars, and police, and clashed with Israeli security forces. On Israel’s Highway 443, connecting Jerusalem with the city of Modi’in, Israeli Arabs firebombed passing motorists, wounding a father and his nine-month-old infant. Arab parliamentarians in the Israeli Knesset further fueled the violence. Echoing the Obama administration, one of them said, “Anyone who builds settlements in Jerusalem is digging a grave for peace.”

— David Horowitz is the founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. . . . Jacob Laksin is managing editor of Frontpage Magazine. He is co-author, with Horowitz, of One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America’s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy.