The Audacity of "Nope" and unwoolly thinking by Woolsey

The frilly Valentine is not for friends By Wesley Pruden
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/pruden051909.php3
http://tinyurl.com/qkr852
Benjamin Netanyahu is back in town, and he could make Barack Obama's life easier if he would just go away. The president is trying to concentrate on the frilly Valentine he's taking to the Muslims next month in Cairo, the latest stop on his global blush, bow low and apologize tour.Mr. Netanyahu is an unwelcome reminder of the reality lying in ambush out there, where things go bump not in the night but in midafternoon, and all manner of evil lurks in the hearts of barbarians. Mr. Obama thinks a good shoeshine, a working teleprompter and a pretty speech can transform that ugly reality into something nice that maybe even smells good. Mr. Netanyahu and his countrymen have to deal with an ugly reality that stinks. They understand what Dr. Johnson was talking about with his celebrated observation that "the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully." Survival in the Middle East is a full-time job.
The Israeli prime minister, who grew up in America and has been here before as prime minister, arrived in an Obamaworld he couldn't recognize and where he is not particularly welcome. The War on Terror is over, replaced by an "enhanced" unpleasantness in Afghanistan that we're supposed to call an "overseas contingency operation," where terrorists are "improvisational ideologues" and once captured can be politely called "custodial informants." We lost the War on Drugs, and the new drug czar suggests that we not call it a war. "Dialogue with controlled-substance entrepreneurs" would improve the self-esteem of the drug dealers. We don't do deficits any more; they're "inverted surpluses." No one will be killed in Mr. Obama's "augmented" war in Afghanistan; the dead will merely be "reassigned to operations in a command in another realm."
Once explained to Mr. Netanyahu, the new enhanced road map to a viable settlement in the Middle East through the peace process (are any cliches missing?) was plain and clear. Concessions are for the Jews to make, as he learned Monday at the White House, and rewards are for the Palestinians.
Mr. Obama and his policymakers, not all of whom assign Israeli security a particularly high priority, are determined to impose the Palestinian version of a two-state solution on Israel and freeze expansion of Jewish settlements on territory occupied since the Arabian knights lost the Six-Day War. The Jewish settlers get in the way of the Palestinian gunners firing rockets into villages in northern Israel. Mr. Netanyahu, on the other hand, is more interested in what the West — i.e., Israel and the United States — can do to deter Iran, which is furiously developing nuclear weapons with which to rearrange the topography and demography of Israel. Mr. Obama thinks milk toast and weak tea, which he calls "diplomacy," can make a Christian (so to speak) out of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This in turn will invite normal diplomatic ties between Israel and its Muslim neighbors. Mr. Netanyahu recognizes this as more of Mr. Obama's pie in the sky, which is indigestible when served with milk toast and weak tea."There is a sense of urgency on our side," Uzi Arad, the prime minister's adviser on national security, told correspondents on the eve of Monday's session at the White House. But the only urgency apparent in Washington is for more talk.Authentic peace in the Middle East, which has never known authentic peace, will continue to be elusive well into the outer eons. President Obama thinks endless negotiations on agreements the Palestinians won't keep will encourage the Arab states to join the "pressure," such as it may be, to persuade Iran to straighten up and fly right. The Israelis see getting tough with Iran as the way to exploit Arab fears of Iran as a rogue power, mistrusted by everyone and emboldened by its nuclear weapons.Mr. Obama may be sincere in his confidence that his soaring oratory can make rough places smooth and hard places plain, even persuade Arabs to like Jews, but talk is cheaper in the Middle East than anywhere else on the planet.
In his conversations with Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Obama, comfortable in his bubble of mindless worship and wonder, with nothing to lose but his fading reputation as a messiah, is talking to someone with everything to lose. Israel is surrounded by mortal enemies, heavily armed and getting more so. Israel's enemies can continue to lose the wars they start, and live to rearm and make war again. Israel loses once, and it's all over. Like the prospect of the rope, this, too, concentrates the rational mind wonderfully well.....................................................
Obama approach to Mideast peace makes U.S. less secureBy Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/gaffney.jpg http://www.blogger.com/
This is a lousy time to have a president in the White House who is, apparently, contemptuous of Winston Churchill. President Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, the latest in a series of efforts aimed at weakening Israel and otherwise bending it to the U.S. administration's will — a practice against which an historian/statesman like Churchill would have strenuously warned. In his extraordinary memoir, "The Gathering Storm," the future British prime minister recalled how he had publicly pronounced in the run-up to World War II that he could not "imagine a more dangerous policy" than one then being practiced by the British government. It involved trying to appease Adolf Hitler by encouraging Britain's principal continental ally, France, to disarm -- even as Nazi Germany was remilitarizing in increasingly offensive ways. This practice was subsequently applied by both the British and French as they compelled another powerful ally, Czechoslovakia, to surrender its formidable Western defenses and military-industrial capabilities to the Nazis. The results of these misbegotten initiatives produced not peace, but an unprecedented conflagration. Extreme care should be exercised to avoid a repetition of this tragic history.
Yet, every indication is that Mr. Obama is determined to weaken Israel, America's most important and reliable ally in the Middle East, by forcing the Jewish state to surrender territory and make other strategic concessions in order to create a Palestinian state. As in the past, this weaken-your-friend approach to achieving the so-called two-state solution will not work. It will encourage, not eliminate, the abiding ambition of other nations in the region and their terrorist proxies to "wipe Israel off the map." It will actually exacerbate regional instability, not alleviate it.
Fortunately, another thoughtful student of history and accomplished statesman has come forth in Churchill's footsteps (and follows his example) by laying out a markedly different approach to the idea of creating a second state out of the 22 percent of the original mandate Palestine west of the Jordan River that was not given to the Arabs in 1922. (The other 78 percent became "Transjordan," known today simply as Jordan.) At a Washington dinner hosted on May 6 by the Endowment for Middle East Truth, R. James Woolsey was recognized as a "speaker of the truth." In his brief acceptance address, a man who has served presidents of both parties as undersecretary of the Navy, conventional arms control negotiator and director of central intelligence laid out preconditions that must apply before there is any likelihood of a Palestinian polity with which Israel might actually be able to live "side by side in peace."
Mr. Woolsey's analysis is informed by the status Israeli Arabs enjoy in the Jewish state today. They make up roughly one-fifth of the population of Israel. They are able to have their own places of worship and schools. They are free to own and publish their own newspapers.Israel's Arab citizens are also entitled to vote for real representation in a real legislature. Currently, they have 10 of the 120 seats in the Israeli Knesset. There is an Arab justice on the Israeli Supreme Court. And an ethnically Arab Druze holds a seat in Mr. Netanyahu's Cabinet.Most importantly, as Mr. Woolsey notes, law-abiding Arab citizens of Israel "can go to sleep at night without having to worry that their door will be kicked down and they will be killed" by agents of the Israeli government or others among the majority Jewish population. In short, they enjoy real security as well as opportunities in a society in which Israeli Arabs are a distinct minority.
Regrettably, as Mr. Woolsey notes, the world has a tendency to "define deviancy down for non-Jews." As a result, governments around the world, including the Obama administration, never even mention the possibility that Jews should be able to enjoy the same rights and privileges in any future Palestinian polity that Israeli Arabs exercise today in the Jewish state.
So, instead of what amounts to a Hitlerian program of Judenrein in any prospective Palestinian state — meaning, as a practical matter, if not a de jure one, that no Jews can reside or work there — there could be about twice the number of Israeli Jews as currently reside in so-called settlements on the West Bank. They should be free to build synagogues and Jewish schools. And newspapers that serve the Jewish population in any future state of "Palestine" should be permitted to flourish there.
Jews should also have a chance to elect representatives to a future Palestinian legislature. They should be able to expect to be represented as well in other governing institutions, like the executive and judicial branches.
In order for the foregoing to operate, Jews in the Palestinian state must be able to live without fearing every day for their lives. In Mr. Woolsey's view, "Once Palestinians are behaving that way, they deserve a state."

By establishing full reciprocity as the prerequisite basis for a two-state solution Mr. Obama might just be able to make useful progress toward peace in the Middle East. If, however, he persists in distancing the United States from Israel and otherwise weakening the Jewish state, he will likely get war, not a durable end to hostilities. As Churchill and Mr. Woolsey might attest, no good will come of Mr. Obama ignoring history and his efforts to euchre Israel into doing the same.