By Patrick J. Buchanan
“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.”
With this defiant declaration, to a thunderous ovation at AIPAC, Benjamin Netanyahu informed the United States that East Jerusalem, taken from Jordan in the Six Day War, is not occupied land. It is Israeli land and Israel’s forever, and no Palestinian state will share Jerusalem. Israel alone decides what is built, and where, in the Holy City.
With his declaration and refusal to walk back the decision to build 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem, which blew up the Biden mission, “Bibi” goes home a winner over Barack Obama.
But it is a temporary triumph and hollow victory — over Israel’s indispensable ally. For the clash revealed that the perceived vital interests of Israel now collide with vital U.S. interest in the Middle East.
We have clarity. There is now visible daylight between U.S. and Israeli policy for all the world to see. And America cannot back down without eviscerating her credibility in the Arab and Muslim world
What are the major points of contention?
To Netanyahu, withdrawal from Gaza was a strategic blunder that led to a Hamas takeover and rockets on Israel. That blunder will not be repeated with the West Bank. Israel had a hellish time forcing 8,000 Jews to leave Gaza and will not force 250,000 Jews to leave ancestral lands on the West Bank to create a Palestinian state where the possibility will always exist that Hamas will win at the ballot box and become the government. As for Jerusalem, its city limits are now Israel’s permanent borders. Annexation is irreversible.
The American position?
The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is occupied territory. Building there violates international law. Peace requires a sharing of Jerusalem, return of almost all of the West Bank and withdrawal of the Jewish settlers. And any land annexed by Israel must be compensated for with Israeli land ceded to the Palestinians.
That the U.S. position is not anti-Israel is attested to by the fact that Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert came close to a peace with the Palestinians based on these principles.
Netanyahu, however, does not accept them. For he won office denouncing them, and in his ruling coalition are parties that not only opposed withdrawal from Gaza, they oppose a Palestinian state.
Given the irreconcilable positions, the deadlock, why will Israel not prevail as she always prevails in such collisions? Why would Bibi’s “No” to Obama’s demand for a halt to the building of settlements and a cancellation of the 1,600 housing units in Jerusalem not be the final and irrevocable answer that Obama must grudgingly accept?
Answer: There is a new party to the quarrel: the U.S. military, in the person of Gen. David Petraeus.
According to Foreign Policy magazine, in January, a delegation of senior officers from Petraeus’ command were sent to brief Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen.
“The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CentCom’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israel’s intransigence on the Arab-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that (George) Mitchell himself was … ‘too old, too slow and too late.’”
Mullen took this stark message — that America was seen as too weak to stand up to Israel, and the U.S. military posture was eroding in the Arab world as a result — straight to the White House. Hence, when Joe Biden was sandbagged in Israel, he apparently tore into Bibi in private.
“This is starting to get dangerous for us,” Biden reportedly told Netanyahu. “What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
Yedioth Ahronoth further reported: “The vice president told his Israeli hosts that since many people in the Muslim world perceived a connection between Israel’s actions and U.S. policy, any decision about construction that undermines Palestinian rights in East Jerusalem could have an impact on the personal safety of American troops.”
Biden was saying Israeli intransigence could cost American lives.
Each new report of settlement expansion, each new seizure of Palestinian property, each new West Bank clash between Palestinians and Israeli troops inflames the Arab street, humiliates our Arab allies, exposes America as a weakling that cannot stand up to Israel, and imperils our troops and their mission in Afghanistan and Iraq.
As this message has now been delivered by Gen. Petraeus to his commander in chief, Obama simply cannot back down again. If he does not stand up now for U.S. interests, which are being imperiled by Israeli actions, he will lose the backing of his soldiers.
U.S.-Israeli relations are approaching a “Whose side are you on?” moment. Either Bibi backs down this time — or Obama loses his soldiers.
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Cut Israel loose to survive (or not) all on its own. This parasite is the world’s most ungrateful “ally”. AIPAC controls Washington for Israel and has completely destroyed the U.S. Broke Americans are forced to send billions of dollars to a country where people live better than Americans. American soldiers are dying in Israel’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and soon Iran, so that Israel doesn’t have to fight or even pay for them. Instead Israel uses American weapons to kill women and kids in Gaza. That’s the kind of war Israel likes. American money builds settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem, making the U.S. hated by a billion Moslems. When the U.S. requests Israel to stop building, Israel insults the American Vice-President and President, and then demands more money and support against Iran.
An ally doesn’t insult you. An ally doesn’t rob you. An ally doesn’t spy on you. An ally doesn’t deliberately shoot up the U.S.S. Liberty. An ally doesn’t do 9/11.
Should the EU subsidise Israeli security?
By Ben Hayes
18.03.2010 / 05:15 CET
The inclusion of Israel in the European Security Research Programme undermines the EU’s commitment to even-handedness in the Middle East.
Since the European Community began funding research in 1984, both the amount of funding available and the range of topics on offer have steadily increased (the latest framework programme, FP7, has a seven-year budget of €53 billion). So has the participation of researchers from outside the EU in collaborative projects.
In per capita terms, no non-EU country has received more from the EU’s largesse than Israel. Indeed, the European Commission says that the EU is now second only to the Israel Science Foundation in Jerusalem as a source of research funding for Israeli academics, corporations and state enterprises.
More and more of that funding is finding its way to Israel’s already buoyant security sector. Israeli revenues from the export of counter-terrorism-related products now top $1bn annually, according to the Israeli government.
Since incorporating Israel into the ‘European research area’, the Commission has signed off on dozens of lucrative EU research contracts to the likes of Israel Aerospace Industries (a state-owned manufacturer of drones), Motorola Israel (producer of ‘virtual fences’ around Israeli settlements) and Elbit Systems (one of Israel’s largest private military technology firms, responsible for segments around Jerusalem of, to use the United Nation’s term, the separation wall constructed between Jewish and Palestinian communities).
Some 58 EU ‘security research’ projects have now also been funded under the new €1.4bn ‘security research’ component of FP7. Israeli companies and institutions are participating in 12 of these, leading and co-ordinating five of them. Only the UK, Germany, France and Italy lead more projects.
Among this latest tranche of contracts is a €9.1 million project led by Verint Systems that will deliver “field-derived data” to “crisis managers” in “command-and-control centres”. (These contracts tend to avoid phrases such as ‘surveillance’ and ‘homeland security’, substituting less emotive terms.)
Verint describes itself as “a leader in enterprise workforce optimisation and security intelligence solutions, including video intelligence, public safety and communication intelligence and investigative solutions”. What it primarily provides is workplace surveillance, CCTV and wire-tapping facilities. Verint is now effectively being subsidised by the EU to develop surveillance and communication systems that may ultimately be sold back to the member states.
The raison d’être for establishing the EU security research programme was to enhance the ‘industrial competitiveness’ of the nascent European ‘homeland security’ industry. The Commission argues that funding for Israeli ‘homeland security’ is wholly consistent with this aim (insofar as it will enhance Europe’s “knowledge base”).
But should the Commission be giving more money to Israel’s flourishing security sector than to its counterparts in most of the EU states?
More importantly, should it be subsidising it at all? Israel’s control of what remains of the Palestinian territories now depends as much upon the hardware and software provided by its ‘homeland security’ industry as its traditional military supremacy.
The EU therefore risks complicity in the actions of a military that frequently shows too little regard for the lives and livelihoods of civilians. And the EU’s subsidies make it appear less than even-handed in the peace process.
In the eyes of many Palestinians, it is already fundamentally compromised. Last September, Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief for a decade, told an audience in Jerusalem: “Israel is, allow me to say, a member of the European Union without being a member of the institutions.”
“No country outside the continent has the type of relations Israel has with the European Union,” he said, adding that Israel’s “relation today with the European Union is stronger than the relation of Croatia” (which still hopes for membership in 2011).
Solana apparently did not mind whether the EU appeared even-handed or not, or how its research budget was being spent. But do European taxpayers want the EU’s administrators to allocate their money to an industry at the heart of one of the bloodiest, most protracted and most sensitive geopolitical issues of our time?
Ben Hayes is a project director of the civil liberties group Statewatch and runs a blog on the EU Security Research Programme.
© 2010 European Voice. All rights reserved.
Pat- Please write an article on the recent media criticism on our Pope, Pope Benedict. Im afraid the media has found the trojan horse through which to bring down the church that Christ founded. THE CHURCH NEEDS YOU RIGHT NOW
Bib is not saying anything different than the historical lies the Zionist entity is established upon, such as “A land without people for the people without land”. The city of Palestine existed under different name even before the time of prophet Abraham, and he certaily was not a “Jew”, who according to Shlomo Sand were only invented a few centuries ago. The ancestors of great majority of Western Jews occupying Palestine never lived in Palestine, but in Khazaria region.
The AIPAC 2010 show predictably was yet one more “bomb Iran” special; but it was also a call to arms against the Barack Obama administration, as far as the turbo-charging of the illegal colonization of East Jerusalem is concerned. Corporate media insisted there was a deep “crisis” between the unshakeable allies. Nonsense. One just has to look at the facts….
http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/obama-bibi-kabuki-japanese-dance-drama/
oldschoolconservative – The mainstream media criticism of the Pope is no different than the Bibi-Obama “friendly slap on the wrist”. In 2006, Joanna Francis, a US Catholic women’s right activist wrote this piece after the Pope Benedict attacked Islam:
“It should be obvious to everyone now, that we Catholics who have figured out that the Vatican is under Zionist control, have been right all along. They labeled us “extremists,” “sedevacantists,” “ultra right-wingers,” “fascists,” “Nazis,” etc. But when the Jews and their useful idiots have to resort to hurling those epithets at you, it usually means you’ve hit upon the truth. Well, we Catholic “extremists” have the Zionists’ number and we have been calling them on it for a long time. Now, maybe the rest of the brainwashed Christians will wake up…..”
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2006/09/19/p10875
Rehmat,
The views of the writer of that article (and apparently, therefore, your own) on the media treatment of the Pope are silly. The media almost never reports on the misdeeds of those Protestant televangelists and ministers who are professed Zionists– so how to account for the disparity in treatment?
This Pope has finally unfettered the traditional Latin Mass, which has been historically hated by liberals as an “anti-Semitic mass,” and was pounded for it in the media. In fact, one Good Friday liturgical prayer prays for the conversion of the “blind” Jews. The old mass is full of these “anti-Semitic” sentiments, and this Pope will go down in history as the one that at last unfettered it.
The truth is that the visible Church, since Vatican II, has been infiltrated by progressives who wanted to bring it down and so turned it into a “social justice” organization. But the liberals cannot and will not bring the Church down, because our Lord promised to St. Peter that the “gates of hell shall not prevail” against the Church He established. Thus in truth the Catholic Church will be purged in due time, and this Pope has begun that process of de-liberalizing the Church and the media hates him for it, because they know the Church, unfettered, has always been and will always be the deposit of Truth and Good on earth that evil cannot overcome according to Christ’s promise to the first Pope.
The author of that article you link to apparently believes that the Gates of Hell have prevailed against the Church, and therefore our Lord has been proven a liar by the Zionists. She is wrong. The Church is sick, not dying. This Pope has begun the healing process to restore it to its former glory (as has always happened in history when the Church has grown sick), and the media truly does hate him for it.
I do not defend Zionists OR liberal Catholics– they have brought the Church to these dire straits. But those who say that the Church has failed and the Holy See has been empty for decades despite our Lord’s promise are merely the other side of the same coin.
That article is silly, anyway. What the Pope said about Islam could only be interpreted as insulting Islam by really stretching it. And he immediately apologized anyway and was reconciled. It was no evidence at all that the Vatican is simply a Zionist puppet. Many conservative Catholics were outraged when the previous Pope entered a mosque and kissed the Koran. Did you know about that? Now are you thinking that perhaps that Pope was an anti-Semitic Jihadist?
To a standing ovation of the 4,500 Americans attending the recent AIPAC conference with topic ”Israel: Tell Your Story” – whose loyalties are more toward a foreign country (Israel) than the US – Zionist entity’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi) declared: “The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3000 years ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It’s our capital”.
Now, one doesn’t need a PhD in world history to figure out that Bibi was lying from both sides of his Zionist mouth. Even Israeli professor Shlomo Sand has admitted in his book ‘When and how Jewish people were invented?‘ that modern Jewish people were invented a little more than a century ago. Therefore, Jewish people could not be building Jerusalem 3000 years ago. However, they have been Judeazing Jerusalem city since 1948 when half the Arab Muslim-majority city of Jerusalem (Western) was awarded by the world’s western powers to the European Jews who were not welcomed in the Christian Heartland. The Jews then occupied the Eastern part of Jerusalem with the help of the same western powers in 1967.
Historically, Jerusalem existed under the name “Salem” during the time of prophet Abraham 2000 years ago – and Abraham was certainly not an Israelite or a Jew. The entire city was demolished by Babylonians in 586 BC. and rebuilt seventy-year later by Cyrus, the King of Persia, who could not be a Jew. In 40 BC Romans occupied Jerusalem and incinerated the Temple of Solomon (Masjid-e-Aqsa, mentioned as “the Far-away mosque” in the Holy Qur’an).
Palestine has existed, though not as an independent state, for over 10,000 years. Its inhabitants have been Jebusites (the ones’ who most probably built the city), Cannanites, Phoenicians, Hittites, Aramaeans, Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, Arabs, Franks and Turks. Part of Palestine was ruled by Israelite under the name of “Kindom of Judea and Samara” until they were defeated and taken as slaves or expeled by Babylonians, Greeks, Romans and Persians between 171 BC and 135 CE. The City of Jerusalem was handed over to Muslim Army by the Christian Patriarch Sofronius in a public ceremony. Muslims found out that the ruins of Temple of Solomon were used as the city garbage dump. Under the orders of Khalifah Umar Ibn Khattab (ra), the site was cleaned of garbage and handed-over to the Chaief Rabbi of Jerusalem, who in gratitude declared the Khalifah as the “Promised Jewish Messaih”. Sheikh Imran Nazar Hossein in his book Jerusalem in the Quran exposes the Zionist lies about their Biblical claim on the Holy Land.
http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/who-built-jerusalem/