Interview with Caroline Glick of The Jerusalem Post

AIM interviewed deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post Caroline Glick last week in a wide ranging discussion. We covered the current state of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, the impact that President Barack Obama has had on the situation, and the recent so-called Gaza “Freedom Flotilla.” In addition, she talked about how the situation is further complicated by Hamas’s control of Gaza, the increased militarization and lack of moderation by Fatah, and the recent hostilities at the Lebanese – Israeli border. Glick also talked about the nature of the pressure the U.S. puts on Israel, the ongoing demonization of Israel, and the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

At the time of the interview, Glick, who lives in Jerusalem, was in her hometown of Chicago, Illinois—Hyde Park to be specific—on the same day that President Obama was making a rare visit to his home in the same neighborhood.

Caroline Glick is a former officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and was a core member of Israel’s negotiating team with the Palestinians. She later served as an assistant policy advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu during his first term in the 1990s. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, Glick was an embedded journalist with the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division, and was awarded a Distinguished Civilian Service Award from the U.S. Secretary of the Army for her battlefield reporting. She is also a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy, and the author of the 2008 book Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad.

GLICK:

"It’s an illusion—and it’s important to understand that the United States is building a Palestinian army. It calls it a “security force”—it is an army. It is an army, it is trained as an army, it is trained in warfare by the U.S. Army, and Israel’s Central Command, which is basically the center of the country, the commanding general of Israel’s Central Command warned his troops in May that the Palestinian force that is being built by the United States in Jordan, and they’ve already forced Israel to agree to deploy four of these battalions in Judea and Samaria. They’re demanding, over time—that’s 2,000 fighters, and the United States wants Israel—expects Israel to accept the deployment of another 5,000 of these soldiers that the U.S. is training. And the commanding general of Israel’s Central Command warned his soldiers, at a training exercise in the south in May, that this was a Palestinian army unlike any that Israel has seen in the past, that it is an infantry force, that the training that they received at the hands of the United States puts Israel in a situation that it hasn’t been in before, that we can expect that there will be many more casualties on the Israeli side at the beginning of the next round of war with these people—and we also have to remember that there’s massive precedent for Palestinian security forces that are trained and armed by the West to turn their guns on Israel. It has happened in every major Palestinian terror onslaught against Israel since 1996, and the Palestinian terror-war that Arafat began in 2000 was commanded and organized, financed, and trained by Palestinian security services. So the United States is playing with fire—at best—when they’re putting together this Palestinian army. They’ve already spent 400 million dollars of U.S. taxpayer money building this army. President Obama has pledged another 100 million dollars for next year, for continuing to build this army, and this is, quite simply, a hostile act against the state of Israel on the part of the United States government."

GLICK:

"And they wrap themselves in this web of lies that’s based on historical revisionism and outright falsification of the historical record, of the legal record, in order to attack Israel and claim to Israel has no right to exist. And then they say, “No, this doesn’t stem from any sort of hostility towards Jews, only towards Zionism,” but, really, we have to remember what “Zionism” is: Zionism is the Jewish national liberation movement, and all of these people who claim that they’re opposed to “Zionism” have to explain how it is that there’s only one nation whose national liberation movement they oppose. They accept everybody else’s, it doesn’t matter who they are, but the Jews, as Jews, don’t have a right to national self-determination—and you realize how absurd it is when you consider, for a fact, for a moment, the fact that the Jews were the first nation to ever determine who they were by themselves. I mean, the Jewish people did that at Mount Sinai when they said they were going to be a nation under God’s Law. So you have the first nation that self-defined itself—that defined itself as a nation, being told by the rest of the nations that followed it that it’s not a nation, and that it has no right to freedom. And I think that when you look at how absurd the whole argument is, and you see why they’re doing it—they’re doing it because they want to pretend that they’re not bigoted, they want to pretend that they’re enlightened, but really, what they’re advancing is one of the darkest, most barbaric hatreds that the human race has seen in its history, and that is the hatred of the Jewish people."

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