Our World: Obama's losing streak and us
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST Jun. 15, 2009
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Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's speech Sunday evening at Bar-Ilan
University had one goal: To get US President Barack Obama off of Israel's
back.

Netanyahu's speech was an eloquent, rational and at times impassioned
defense of Israel. For Israeli ears, after years of former prime minister
Ehud Olmert's and former foreign minister Tzipi Livni's continuous assaults
on Israeli rights, and their strident defenses of capitulation to the
Palestinians and the Syrians, Netanyahu's address was a breath of fresh air.
But it is hard to see how it could have possibly had any lasting impact on
Obama or his advisers.

To be moved by rational argument, a person has to be open to rational
discourse. And what we have witnessed over the past week with the Obama
administration's reactions to both North Korea's nuclear brinksmanship and
Iran's sham elections is that its foreign policy is not informed by
rationality but by the president's morally relative, post-modern ideology.
In this anti-intellectual and anti-rational climate, Netanyahu's speech has
little chance of making a lasting impact on the White House.

If rational thought was the basis for the administration's policymaking on
foreign affairs, North Korea's decisions to test long range ballistic
missiles and nuclear weapons, send two US citizens to long prison terms and
then threaten nuclear war should have made the administration reconsider its
current policy of seeking the approval and assistance of North Korea's
primary enabler - China - for any action it takes against Pyongyang. As
Nicholas Eberstadt suggested in Friday's Wall Street Journal, rather than
spending its time passing UN Security Council resolutions with no
enforcement mechanisms against North Korea, the administration would be
working with a coalition of the willing to adopt measures aimed at lowering
the threat North Korea constitutes to regional, US and global security
through its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and its proliferation
activities.

But the administration has done no such thing. Instead of working with and
strengthening its allies, it has opted to work with North Korea's allies
China and Russia to forge a Security Council resolution harsh enough to
convince North Korean leader Kim Jung Il to threaten nuclear war, but too
weak to degrade his capacity to wage one.

Similar to Obama's refusal to reassess his failed policy regarding North
Korea, his nonreaction to the fraudulent Iranian election shows that he will
not allow facts to interfere with his slavish devotion to his ideological
canon that claims that no enemy is unappeasable and no ally deserves
automatic support. Far from standing with the democratic dissidents now
risking their lives to oppose Iran's sham democracy, the administration has
reportedly expressed concern that the current postelection protests will
destabilize the regime. Obama has also refused to reconsider his decision to
reach a grand bargain with the ayatollahs on Iran's nuclear weapons program
that would serve to legitimize their continued grip on power.

His refusal to make a moral distinction between the mullahs and their
democratic opponents - like his refusal in Cairo to make a moral distinction
between a nuclear-armed Iran and a nuclear-armed America - makes clear that
he is not interested in forging a factually accurate or morally
clear-sighted foreign policy.

ALL OF THIS brings us back to Israel - and Netanyahu's speech about the
nature and causes of the Palestinian conflict and the conditions that must
be met if peace is ever to be achieved. His address aimed in two ways to
lower US pressure while averting an open confrontation with a president
whose approval ratings remain above 60 percent. First, Netanyahu
demonstrated that through their consistent rejection of Israel's right to
exist as the Jewish state, the Palestinians - not us - are the side
responsible for the absence of Middle East peace.

Second, Netanyahu tried to decrease US pressure on his government by
conditionally accepting the idea of a Palestinian state. Clearly, it was
Netanyahu's acceptance of the idea of a Palestinian state - albeit a
demilitarized one - that was supposed to do the most to fend off US
pressure. After all, Obama and his advisers have made the swift
establishment of a Palestinian state their primary foreign policy aim.

Irrespective of its impact on the Obama administration, Netanyahu's speech
was a positive contribution to the general discourse on the Middle East and
Israel's place in it. He made good use of his opportunity to address the
nation above the heads of the uniformly leftist media to forge a new
definition of the national consensus. Whereas his defeatist predecessors
consistently spoke of the people's willingness to make painful concessions
for peace, and treated the establishment of a Jew-free Palestinian state as
their primary duty as Zionists, Netanyahu recast the national consensus
along patriotic lines.

He echoed the sentiments of the vast majority of Israelis when he refused to
end building inside of Jewish communities located beyond the 1949 armistice
lines; when he asserted that he would make no concessions on sovereignty
over Jerusalem; would insist that we retain defensible borders; would refuse
entrance of so-called Palestinian refugees to our territory; and demanded
Palestinian recognition of our right to exist as the Jewish state.

He stridently and eloquently corrected Obama's false characterization of
this country as the product of the Holocaust during his speeches at Cairo
and Buchenwald by recalling the 3,500 year old Jewish ties to the Land of
Israel. And he made clear that the association Obama made between the
Holocaust and this country's founding was a precise inversion of the
historical record. It is not Israel that owes its existence to the
Holocaust. Rather, the Holocaust was only able to happen because there was
no Israel.

NETANYAHU'S SPEECH was a much-needed strong defense. But it was not a
perfect defense. It suffered from two flaws that may come back to haunt the
premier in the years to come. First, his demand that the US lead the
international community in guaranteeing that the Palestinian state is
demilitarized provided the Obama administration with a new means to trick
Israel into making suicidal concessions.

The only way to ensure that a Palestinian state is demilitarized is to send
in forces to demilitarize it. Obviously the Americans won't take such a
step. In Gaza, a militarized Palestinian state already exists and the
Americans have no intention of demilitarizing it for us. As for Judea and
Samaria, today, the only thing the emerging Palestinian state has to show
for itself is its US-built army.

The only force that would ensure a Palestinian state (or states) stays
demilitarized is the IDF. But by appointing the US the guarantor of its
demilitarized status, Netanyahu is inviting the US to lie and so make it
impossible for us to take the steps necessary to ensure that the
Palestinians lack the means to threaten the country.

In requesting that the US guarantee disarmament, Netanyahu repeated a
mistake he made in his first term in office. In 1996 he conditioned his
willingness to move forward with peace talks with the PLO on the terror
group's amendment of its charter calling for the destruction of Israel in
line with its commitment under the initial Oslo agreement. Netanyahu
empowered Bill Clinton to judge Palestinian compliance with this demand. In
due course, Clinton travelled to Gaza and mendaciously announced that the
PLO had in fact amended the charter. No such action had been taken, but
Netanyahu was in no position to accuse Clinton of lying.

While his decision to appoint Obama arbiter of Palestinian demilitarization
was ill-conceived, things could have been much worse.

Netanyahu ignored the so-called road map peace plan. That plan is one long
list of Palestinian commitments that the US is empowered to judge compliance
on. From terror fighting to ending incitement, the road map places Israel in
the position of being forced to take America's word on issues paramount to
its national security. By ignoring the road map, Netanyahu managed to avert
the need to call Obama a liar directly.

The other problem with Netanyahu's speech is that by accepting the idea of a
Palestinian state, and embracing Obama's fantasy that it is possible to
reach a deal with the Palestinian Authority, Netanyahu blocked the
possibility that Israel will be able to forge a new policy that will move it
to a more advantageous status quo in the coming years. That is, Netanyahu's
conditional acceptance of Obama's false and ideologically motivated
two-state paradigm damns Israel to the position of foot dragger in relation
to someone else's policy rather than trailblazer for its own policy.

In fairness to Netanyahu, in light of Obama's ideological commitment to the
two-state paradigm which blames Israel for the absence of peace, it is far
from clear that he has any choice other than to go along with the president
and just play for time. Were Netanyahu to apply Israeli law to the large
settlement blocs and the Jordan Valley or establish security zones along
Gaza's borders with Israel and Egypt, he would likely instigate a full
breach of relations with Washington.

At this point, it is up to the public and our representatives in the Knesset
to pave the way for a better policy in the future. This we can do by
rejecting the two-state paradigm and conducting a public discourse relevant
to our national interests. For Netanyahu, however, buying time with a
hostile administration may be the best he can aspire to during his current
term in office.

Of course, buying time in and of itself is no great accomplishment. The
voters did not elect Netanyahu to lead us simply to buy time. We elected him
to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. If his speech succeeded in
blunting US pressure on Israel - even temporarily - on the Palestinian
front, and in light of the results of the Iranian presidential race,
Netanyahu has gained the opportunity to act on the Iranian front. If during
his current term he prevents Iran from becoming a nuclear power and makes no
concessions in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem or the Golan Heights, he will be
remembered as one of our greatest leaders and his speech will be remembered
for posterity as a pivotal event.

On the other hand, if Netanyahu sits on his laurels, he will be surprised to
see how quickly Obama - desperate for a foreign policy achievement after
being laughed out of Teheran and Pyongyang - forgets his happiness at
Netanyahu's address. In no time flat, Obama will try to force Israel make
him look like he knows what he is doing. At that point, an open
confrontation with the White House will become unavoidable.

caroline@carolineglick.com