| |
Baked Nuts
By Gerald A. Honigman
January 19, 2004
At any time, the current handwriting on the Middle Eastern wall would be unsettling. But this is an election year, and the man whom many claim to be the most "pro-Israel" President ever seems to have now bought into the State Department's position that Israel must return to the post-'48 fighting armistice lines which left it about as wide as many people travel on shopping trips or to go to work. I imagine Mr. Bush has neighbors whose ranches have more strategic depth.
Armistice lines are not "borders," regardless of how many times the media and others refer to them that way. They simply mark the points where fighting stopped or was stopped-- in Israel's case, where it managed to halt a multi-pronged attack on its reborn life by surrounding Arab states. Those lines were never meant to be permanent borders, as a reading of the comments of United Nations' officials clearly shows.
Living within its nine-mile wide existence before war was forced upon it yet a third time in 1967, Israel constantly received the message that, regardless of how miniscule it was, Arabs would still not accept non-Arabs having national rights in "their" region. Forget about Turks and Iranians for now; they pose substantially different and more complicated stories vis-à-vis their relations with Arabs.
So size was not the issue then nor now. That Israel is has always been the Arabs' problem. Prior to '67, Israel was constantly attacked by fedayeen using surrounding states as staging areas. And it was also attacked by those states themselves. Syria, for example, used the gift that Great Britain gave it of most of the Golan Heights after World War I to rain death on Israelis below. If Arabs have ruthlessly suppressed fellow Muslim Kurds and Berbers who have dared to assert their own identities and political rights (not to mention non-Muslim Sudanese Blacks, Egyptian Copts, etc.), their attitude towards "their" kelbi yahudi--Jew dog--Jews, one half of whom, in Israel, were from refugee families fleeing "Arab" lands, daring to demand a sliver of national dignity in the Dar al-Islam, should come as no shock.
It is one thing for Arabs to wish for a return to the good old days of their own Caliphal imperialism whereby all who stood in the way of their conquests and forced Arabization were given little choice in the matter. That's how most of the twenty-two "Arab" states that now exist became "Arab" in the first place. The often bloody struggle of millions of native non-Arabs for rights in those lands goes on as these words are being written. Go to the Kurdish Media web site for just one example of this much ignored fact. Look up Berbers or the Sudan for a few others. And there's more. This all becomes truly pathetic when the Arabs' racist, domineering attitudes are endorsed by so many other supposedly "enlightened" voices, such as those in academia or the media....the same ones that never cease to demand less than perfection from Israel. If it doesn't involve Israel's reluctance to allow the creation of a murderous good cop/bad cop Arafatian/Hamas state in its backyard, most of those voices are deaf, dumb, and blind to the issue. Justice for Arabs and the hell with everyone else has evidently become the guideline. Oil and other business interests have lots to do with this, but they're not the whole story.
Given all of this, it is worrisome to see the public reemergence of James Baker III on the political scene. He has evidently been appointed as Dubya's personal envoy to the Middle East.
Baker has been in the background for decades, especially since his close friends, the Bushes, gained ascendancy in American politics. His law firm represents Saudi Arab interests in this country and typifies how people move through the revolving doors of businesses tied to Arab interests back and forth into government positions--especially those in Foggy Bottom...the very same institution which opposed President Truman's recognition of Israel in the first place in 1948. Baker's law partner, Robert Jordan, was appointed ambassador to Saudi Arabia by President Bush in 2001. Casper Weinberger and many others have been through these lucrative doors as well. Most often, their influence has spelled trouble for an Israel trying to get a fair hearing.
Baker has consistently showed venom towards both Jews in general and the Jewish State in particular. While his "_ _ _ _ the Jews, they don't vote for us anyway" comments are legendary, they simply expressed, a bit more vividly, his already well known positions. While I have not seen it myself, reliable sources report that in Time Magazine on February 13, 1989, he spoke of Israel as his "turkey" on a turkey shoot...a quarry to be trapped, cornered, and manipulated at will. And then there was his reaction to Israel's surgical strike against Saddam's nuclear reactor. And his promise to Saddam's twin butcher, Hafez al-Assad of Syria, that the latter would receive the entire Golan back from Israel--prior to negotiations. The list goes on and on... Now add to this Bush and State's virtual insistence that Israel must return--contrary to UN Resolution # 242--to the suicidal, pre-'67 armistice lines (that's what the flack over the route of Israel's security fence is all about), and the future does not bode well for those who truly care about arriving at a fair solution to the Arab-Israeli impasse.
If Baker is the man and these are the positions Mr. Bush apparently now endorses during the election year of his likely last term as President, what can we expect once he has been reelected for the last time and has nothing to lose in terms of voters?
Turning to the Democrats, the situation is even worse. The likely challenger, Dr. Howard Dean, has expressed his great admiration for Jimmy Carter, who has never met an Arab disemboweler of Jews he didn't blame the Jews themselves for...regardless of how often the latter showed more willingness to bare their necks for peace than would be expected of anyone else or accepted under an objective definition of fair play or sanity. Dean has espoused Carter's own distorted version of "even-handedness" regarding Arab-Israeli politics.
Note also that Carter's alleged "humanity" and concerns are highly selective. While expecting Jews to cave in to all that Arabs demand for the creation of their 23rd state, he remains strangely silent on the plight of some 30 million stateless Kurds who still have no "roadmap" in their future and whose murderous abusers have largely been Syrian and Iraqi Arabs. But not a peep about this or Arab atrocities against millions of Blacks in the Sudan, etc. from Dean or Peanutland.
While the Baker and Carter choirs insist that the proposed 23rd Arab state (second Arab one within the original 1920 borders of "Palestine") not be a "bantustan," they expect the sole, resurrected State of the Jews--that one needs a magnifying glass to find on a world map--to forsake its own minimum security needs to allow for this. Just how much room do they think there is between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River? Keep in mind Israel's pre-'67, 9-mile wide, armistice line imposed width.
Jews historically lived in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") until they were massacred by Arabs in the early 20th century. Most of Israel's settlements have been built on strategic high ground areas in the disputed territories to give it a bit more of a buffer both envisioned and permitted by Resolution #242 in the latter's call for the creation of "secure and recognized borders" to replace those suicidal armistice lines. These areas were unapportioned lands of the Mandate, not Arab, and many thousands of Arabs from elsewhere moved in and settled here as well. Remember, those armistice lines were never meant to be permanent "borders."
A true compromise must be reached involving concrete and measurable concessions from both sides in order for any semblance of justice to prevail. Israel doesn't want to rule over millions of Arabs, regardless of where they originated from. But Baker and Carter's interpretations of this call for a unilateral retreat by Israel. Poll after poll taken among Arabs have shown that even if Israel did this (as indeed virtually happened in 2000 at Camp David and Taba), most Arabs would still support terrorism and reject Israel's right to exist anyway. So what both camps are demanding is not "justice," but a travesty thereof. While Carter (and thus Dean) is a lost cause in this regard, Dubya-- at least once upon a time--seemed to know better. Perhaps there's still hope. But I suggest that those who care do a lot more than that at this point in time.
Comment on this article using the "Post Reply" button
|
|
View previous topic • View next topic 
); Kerry has railed against Baker.