http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=329003102483820
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
Obama the Humble declares there will be no more "dictating" to other countries.
We should "forge partnerships as opposed to simply dictating solutions," he
told
the G-20 summit. In Middle East negotiations, he told al-Arabiya,
America will
henceforth "start by listening, because all too often the
United States starts
by dictating."
An admirable sentiment. It
applies to everyone — Iran,
Russia, Cuba, Syria, even Venezuela. Except
Israel. Israel is ordered to freeze
all settlement activity. As Secretary of
State Clinton imperiously explained the
diktat: "a stop to settlements — not
some settlements, not outposts, not
natural-growth exceptions."
What's the issue? No "natural growth" means
strangling to death the
thriving towns close to the 1949 armistice line, many of
them suburbs of
Jerusalem, that every negotiation over the past decade has
envisioned Israel
retaining.
It means no increase in population. Which
means no
babies. Or if you have babies, no housing for them — not even within
the
existing town boundaries. Which means for every child born, someone has to
move out. No community can survive like that.
The obvious objective
is
to undermine and destroy these towns — even before negotiations.
To what
end? Over the last decade, the U.S. government has
understood that any final
peace treaty would involve Israel retaining some
of the close-in settlements —
and compensating the Palestinians accordingly
with land from within Israel
itself.
That was envisioned in the Clinton
plan in the Camp David
negotiations in 2000, and again at Taba in 2001.
After all, why turn towns to
rubble when, instead, Arabs and Jews can stay
in their homes if the 1949
armistice line is shifted slightly into the
Palestinian side to capture the
major close-in Jewish settlements, and then
shifted into Israeli territory to
capture Israeli land to give to the
Palestinians?
This idea is not only
logical, not only accepted by
both Democratic and Republican administrations for
the last decade, but was
agreed to in writing in the letters of understanding
exchanged between
Israel and the United States in 2004 — and subsequently
overwhelmingly
endorsed by a concurrent resolution of Congress.
Yet the
Obama State
Department has repeatedly refused to endorse these agreements or
even say it
will honor them. This from a president who piously insists that all
parties
to the conflict honor previous obligations.
The entire "natural
growth" issue is a concoction. It's farcical to suggest that the peace
process
is moribund because a teacher in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is
making an
addition to her house to accommodate new grandchildren — when Gaza
is run by
Hamas terrorists dedicated to permanent war with Israel and when
Mahmoud Abbas,
having turned down every one of Ehud Olmert's peace offers,
brazenly declares
that he is in a waiting mode — waiting for Hamas to become
moderate and for
Israel to cave — before he'll do anything to advance peace.
In his
much-heralded "Muslim world" address in Cairo on Thursday,
Obama declared that
the Palestinian people's "situation" is "intolerable."
Indeed it is, the
result of 60 years of Palestinian leadership that
gave its people corruption,
tyranny, religious intolerance and forced
militarization; leadership that for
three generations — Haj Amin al-Husseini
in 1947, Yasser Arafat in 2000, Abbas
in December 2008 — rejected every
offer of independence and dignity, choosing
destitution and despair rather
than accept any settlement not accompanied by the
extinction of Israel.
In the 16 years since the Oslo accords turned the
West Bank and Gaza
over to the Palestinians, their leaders — Fatah and Hamas
alike — built no
schools, no roads, no courthouses, no hospitals, no
institutions that would
relieve their people's suffering. Instead they poured
everything into an
infrastructure of war and terror, all the while depositing
billions (from
gullible Western donors) into their Swiss bank accounts.
Obama says he
came to Cairo to tell the truth. But he uttered not a word
of that. Instead,
among all the bromides and lofty sentiments, he issued but one
concrete
declaration of new American policy: "The United States does not accept
the
legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements," thus reinforcing the myth that
Palestinian misery and statelessness are the fault of Israel and the
settlements.
Blaming Israel and picking a fight over "natural
growth"
may curry favor with the Muslim "street." But it will only induce
the Arab
states to do like Abbas:
Sit and wait for America to deliver
Israel on a
platter.
Which makes the Obama strategy not just
dishonorable but
self-defeating.
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