Israel's path to victory

There is something surreal about the coverage of developments this week at the UN. The general tenor is akin to the showdown at the O.K. Corral. Either the Palestinians win recognition of statehood, or they don't. If they do, they win. If they don't, Israel wins.

The problem with this message is that even if the Palestinians don't receive UN membership they still win. There is no scenario in which Israel wins at the UN. The reason is simple. The UN is profoundly hostile to Israel. It has a large, permanent, automatic majority of members that always supports harming Israel.

In the present circumstances, the best case scenario for Israel is that the Palestinians bring their membership resolution before the Security Council and the US immediately vetoes it. If that happens, at least we'll have closure in this particular fight.

But even such a "victory" will have little lasting effect. There is nothing preventing the Palestinians from reinstating their membership request whenever they want. And given the sympathy their current membership bid has won them, the Palestinians have every reason to repeat the process again and again and again.

This brings us to the second lesson of the Times article specifically and the experience at the UN generally. Israel has nothing to lose and everything to gain from going on the offensive. Our friends in the US Congress have shown us a path that lays open to us to follow. And we must follow it. Since we'll be blamed no matter what we do, we have no excuse for not doing what is best for us.

Thanks; Abbas is supposed to be speaking at 12:30pm (A radio announcement implied sooner-—”momentarily” was the word they used.) I am disappointed there is so little TV coverage. If I find any info on Netanyahu’s speech time, I will ping you.

Thank you for posting this thread. I had been looking for her take on the events and was surprised she hadn’t been posting running commentary. Nevertheless, this article is an important and thoughtful one and has been printed also in the JP and on her website.

Glick should have linked the Times article that she said was published on Thursday and “essentially rewrote the history of the last two-and-a-half years...” She scathingly called the article “borderline anti-Semitic historical revisionism and conspiracy theories.” It was a mistake not to have linked it.

I wonder if the Times article you cited is the correct one.

Specifically she said, “By the Times’ telling, Obama is a victim of the combined forces of an intransigent Israeli government and the pro-Israel lobby that holds sway in Congress. These nefarious forces made it impossible for Obama to bring the sort of pressure to bear on Israel that would have placated the Arab world and paved the way for a peaceful settlement. And in the absence of such presidential power, Israel and its lobbyists wrecked Obama’s reputation in the Arab world.

The lesson that Israel should take from the Times’ borderline anti-Semitic historical revisionism and conspiracy theories is twofold.”

http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2011/09/israels-path-to-victory.php

Abbas just finished speaking about 15 min ago.

From CNN: Netanyahu will speak “shortly” — no specific time mentioned.

Drudge headline on Abbas speech:

‘We shall not recognize a Jewish state’...

links to this article:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4126571,00.html

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