Posted on 12/06/2013 5:29:48 AM PST by SJackson
- FrontPage Magazine - http://www.frontpagemag.com -
Kerry in Israel: Give Up Jordan Valley — Count on Us
Posted By P. David Hornik On December 6, 2013 @ 12:40 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments
Secretary of State John Kerry paid yet another visit to Israel on Thursday. Reports described him as hoping to “salvage” the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Many people, particularly in Israel, had already predicted that, with the Palestinians—just as in 1937, 1948, 2000-01, and 2008—incapable of coming to terms with the Jewish state’s existence, there would be nothing to salvage in the first place.
Kerry’s timing was flawed in a more specific sense as well, with Iran, in recent weeks, having “totally eclipsed” the Palestinian issue in Jerusalem. Kerry was described as reassuring Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu that, despite the interim deal with the mullahs, the sanctions on Iran would not significantly erode.
On that score, there are about as many optimists among Israeli officialdom as there are Fatah members who celebrate Israeli Independence Day.
It was not enough, though, that Israel—like the Sunni states in the region—was stunned and appalled first by President Obama’s highly public flip-flop on Syria and then by the fatally flawed deal with Iran(retired Admiral James A. Lyons has given one of the best analyses of what’s wrong with it). In this atmosphere, Kerry also made it his business on Thursday to outline security arrangements for Israel—after the rise of the putative Palestinian state—in the Jordan Valley itself.
Israel’s Army Radio reported that officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development are already stationed in the Jordan Valley to learn about security arrangements. Kerry, in his press conference with Netanyahu, said U.S. Gen. John Allen had already been offering Netanyahu his “thoughts” on the issue.
If not for the Palestinians’ repeatedly demonstrated inability to reach an agreement even on the most generous Israeli terms possible, it would amount to a sinister attempt to ride roughshod over what Netanyahu—rightly—posits as a fundamental Israeli security need under any agreement: a continued Israeli, not foreign, military presence along the Jordan.
Meanwhile Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, blasted what she called—of course—“U.S. bias in favor of Israel….” Ashrawi also called for another Geneva conference—like the one two weeks ago that served up nuclear-threshold-state status to Iran—to “end the occupation and establish a Palestinian state….”
Anything else, Ashrawi warned, would “plunge the entire region into violence….”
One observation prompted by those words is that much of the region—particularly Syria and Iraq, but with Lebanon and Egypt hardly free of the affliction—is already “plunged into violence” without the slightest input from the “Palestinian issue” that somehow, despite all the slings and arrows reality can deliver, retains such mythic status in Washington.
Another is that, even with Washington already having pressured Israel into releasing batches of convicted Palestinian terrorists from prison, and now pressuring it to contract to a width of nine miles and give up its vital security border, the Palestinian accusation that the U.S. is actually taking Israel’s side, seasoned with a threat of cataclysmic violence, surfaces again in a way that is predictable, inevitable, de rigueur—and, for all that, ignored by those mystically convinced that securing Palestinian goals is a supreme interest.
And so, on Friday, John Kerry again flies off, leaving Israel to cope with regional reality. A reality in which Israel had been muddling through with the Palestinian issue more or less successfully—that is, until Kerry’s recent initiative revived tensions and instability; a reality in which Iran is laughing and gloating its way to a future without sanctions and with all its nuclear capabilities intact.
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Suicide by any other name. The Jordan Valley? Dear G-d.
If I said what should be done to Mr. Lurch and Mr. Zero, I’d be in violation of Nature.
In a completely natural way, since it would involve ants and bee products.
We, the PEOPLE of The United States of America, do not authorize John Kerry to negotiate for us.
We respectfully request you break off all talks and deport him immediately.
Not just no - Hell NO
Charlie Brown reeeeeeeally wants to kick that football, but a word of advice............
DONT!
Israel will never give up the Jordan; it would lead to instant destruction.
Bibi ought to tell Kerry, as soon as you honor all the treaties you broke with native Americans over the last 400 years then maybe we will talke about ceding over land we won in a war. Oh yeah the land you got from Mexico in the 1840s as well...
Freegards
LEX
Mexico to Kerry: Give back the Western United States!
Dividing the land that God restored as promised to Israel (the second time - Isaiah 11:11) is how and why (and when) the end comes when it does,
The nations involved are judged, and the whole earth suffers from that point forward,
“The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.” Isaiah 24:5
How do you negotiate with people that still observe Nakba Day?
I have a solution that benefits everyone.
1. Egypt cedes Sinai to the new country of Palestine.
2. The country has to be 100% green.
3. The new country has to be demilitarized.
4. The new country can have both shipping and an airport.
Israel now has a secured border. The Palestinians have a country. The Egyptians have a secured border. The west has an investment in experimental green technology.
Memo to Bibi: Give up nothing.
I see the Middle East Peace Plan roll-out is moving along about a successfully as the 0bamacare web-site roll-out...
Sounds like an unacceptable proposal from Israel's perspective, to put it diplomatically. Wouldn't be surprised if it was formulated originally by J Street, the pro-Obama, anti-Israel "Jewish" organization based in DC.
thats the best I could find.
I say we give the ‘pals” john kerry and call it even.
The big question is how far west the palestinians would claim it extends. Likely to the Mediterranean.
As THEY say, From the River to the Sea.
Not much room for doubt there.
The key valley that runs North-South between Israel and Jordan (off the top of my head). There was a great “paper” or monograph written on the need for Israel’s retention of key mountain positions on the West Bank which are natural attack passage points, esp. for tanks. Written in the late 1980’s or early 1990’s.
Explains why Israeli settlements there are key checkpoints at chokepoints re an invasion from the East Bank. The photos/maps/diagrams tell it all. My chances of finding it right now are less than nil (if you want to come over and go through about 75-100 file books, and clean out some racoon poop at the same time, come on over, come on it).
However, I’ll Google the topic and see if I can identify it for you.
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