Posted on 02/13/2009 5:40:41 AM PST by SJackson
Washington: Bibi’s In, “Peace” Is Dead By P. David Hornik FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, February 13, 2009
In the wake of the Israeli elections on Tuesday, it’s reported that many U.S. officials have “privately…expressed concern that Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu might preside over a right-wing coalition.” A “Capitol Hill source” is quoted as saying that would cause “great unease.” Dennis Ross is quoted in his book as calling Netanyahu, in his first prime ministerial stint in 1996-1999, “nearly insufferable, lecturing and telling us how to deal with the Arabs.”
Or as the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, “many key [U.S. officials] have long and difficult memories of dealing with…Netanyahu…when he was prime minister during the Clinton administration. It is no secret that U.S. officials would prefer to deal with [Tzipi] Livni”—Netanyahu’s relatively dovish prime-ministerial contestant whose Kadima Party, while narrowly defeating Likud in Tuesday’s elections, will likely play a subordinate role to Likud in the emergent coalition because of the overall strength of the right-wing bloc.
The Post quotes a “senior administration official” saying “The hope is that there is a government that is really committed to peace with the Palestinians”—and veteran peace processor Aaron David Miller as saying, more darkly, that the election outcome is “like hanging a ‘closed for the season’ sign on any peacemaking for the next year or so.”
Yet, if the memories of Netanyahu’s first tenure at the helm are so “difficult,” should memories of the “peace” government that preceded it, led by Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and their Labor Party, be so pleasant? Many Israelis—if their charred bodies weren’t long ago interred—don’t have such pleasant memories of those years in which 200 Israelis died in terror attacks, a total far beyond any previous comparable period in Israeli history.
But, no doubt, those were heady peace-processing years. President Clinton hosted the famous handshake on the White House lawn between Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat. In December 1994, by which time many of the hapless Israeli terror victims were already dead, bereaved, or trying to recover from injury and trauma, Rabin, Peres, and Arafat received their Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.
Dennis Ross was Clinton’s point man on the “peace process” and was instrumental in reaching the 1995 Oslo 2 Agreement. Aaron David Miller was hard at work in Ross’s office as Deputy Special Middle East Coordinator. Ross and Miller—like Rabin, Peres, and Clinton—never stood up and said that, with all these innocent people being butchered, something must be wrong, perhaps this process should be stopped and the Israeli army should retake the areas from which Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Arafat’s PLO terrorists were now staging repeated savage attacks.
Nor did they raise any objection when in October 1995 the Oslo 2 agreement was hustled through the Knesset by trickery and bribery against the will of a majority of the Israeli people.
But in 1996 a majority of Israelis did manage to elect Netanyahu as prime minister, and these good years came to an end; instead of pleasant peace processing with ever-pliant Rabin and Peres, it was time for “difficulty” and “nearly insufferable lectures.” But while Clinton, Ross, Miller et al. were suffering, Israelis were suffering a good deal less; during Netanyahu’s three years as head of state the terror fatalities went down drastically to a total of 46 or about 15 per year—the same average as in the years before “peace” when the death toll suddenly exploded. But bipartisan, official Washington, Democrat and Republican, remembers these as terrible years for the peace process.
It is easy to continue in this vein—the security calamities under Netanyahu’s successor, Laborite Ehud Barak; the eventual defeat of West Bank terror under Likudnik prime minister Ariel Sharon; Sharon’s turn to the left in 2005 with the disengagement from Gaza and the creation of the Kadima Party—leading to 6500 rockets and mortars on Israel in three years and a war against Hamas that was used to stoke the worst outbreak of world anti-Semitism since the 1930s. The fact that after all this, Israelis have elected a conservative government arouses only contempt in official Washington.
Never have the blinders to reality been so tight; the fact that Israel’s putative peace partners among the Palestinians—Fatah leaders like Mahmoud Abbas, Salaam Fayad, and Ahmed Qurei—openly negate Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state and demand its dissolution through a “return” of “refugees,” while educating their children in hatred, is systematically screened out, while an Israeli leader who is cautious and skeptical after seeing his country racked by waves of death is vilified as an obstacle to progress.
Lurking beneath it is the severest-possible calumny against the Israeli people—as if it is they who don’t want peace enough, and don’t know the cost of phony substitutes for it.
I truly hope you’re wrong.
Ross is a moron. He is complaining about Net...lecturing the US. LOL.
How many times have we subtely compelled the Israelis to negotiate with terrorists and give up land for peace.
The Israelis have make up work to do after Hezzbolah, they need strength and credibility to survive.
Thank, that helps.
I admire people who can get Greek text to diplay. All I get is garbles, even if I copy and paste.
“U.S. Officials”. HAHAHAHAHAH yea, because they’ve done such a great job!
That Likud fell seat short of a plurality could be very bad news. We will see.
Interesting explanation. So who gets asked first to try to form the govt is not without its importance. And by implication, the fact that Peres is the guy that does the asking? It’s very hard for people like us who don’t live in parliamentary systems to grasp the subtleties of parliamentary forms of govt.
As if it’s the Israeli’s fault for “no peace.”
The new adminstration should take its cue from the Europeans, the Italian Europeans who have shaken off the blinders and are now supporting Israel and condemning the Palestinians.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2184659/posts
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Being determined is also a good quality!
Let’s hope Bibi learned from his mistake.
Netanyahu desires "peace with the Palestinians" every bit as much as Tzipi Livni or any striped-pants "senior administration official" and "veteran peace processor".
But he has a different -- and way more effective -- means of achieving it.
Victory.
The Israelis have to live there. The US State Department doesn’t have to live there.
Dennis Ross is an ignorant twit.
Well BIBI should hire Vince Flynn and Brad Thor to communicate to American Leftists why killing Islamofascists is the answer to the ME quandary not negotiating Israel’s freedom to nothingness.
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“Dennis Ross refers to BiBi as “lecturing” the US.”
Oh ... piffle on that.
Has Bibi told us to regulate CO2 like Euro eco-extremists lecture us? Or tell us to change our attitude to Arab world like Iran’s FM just told us? Or UN folks?
No. Bibi just pushes back when WE in the US (Clinton admin) lectured to *Israel*.
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