Israel Matzav: Bibi writes a letter to Obama

Bibi writes a letter to Obama

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has not really written a letter to President Obama. But if he wanted to write one, he might consider printing this one out and signing it.

Mr. President: let us imagine that next year a Palestinian state is founded. Or two, whatever. A Hamas state and a West Bank state. No Israeli military presence anymore between Tel Aviv and the Jordan River. Eastern Jerusalem is the capital of the West Bank state, without walls, open to the western part. Gaza is the capital of the western Palestinian state. A highway connecting these two states? Why not; throw it in the basket. I am requesting that you imagine this happening, and I am requesting you take full responsibility for it.

Because I can’t.

I am interested in one thing and one thing only: security. We Jews have a thing with security. Some nasty things happened recently in our history and in the preceding two thousand years. As a result, we are a bit allergic to danger and we take threats seriously. Hamas states in its founding charter that it wants to destroy the Jews, since the Jews are the eternal enemies of Islam. They are backed by their friends in Lebanon and Tehran, which recently hosted a so-called Holocaust conference regarding whether the Holocaust really happened.

Your friend Rashid Khalidi convinced you that everything will change in the Islamic world when the Palestinians have their own midget state west of the Jordan River and east of Tel Aviv (within three miles of our biggest city). And you bought it.

You really believe that Muslims will be confident and satisfied members of their societies the moment you open an embassy in East Jerusalem, don’t you? You really believe that potential suicide bombers will start studying a Scandinavian language, instead of destroying whole families? You really believe that Palestinians will immediately stop firing rockets at Israel the moment the Palestinian flag is atop the Temple Mount? No more improvised explosive devices killing your military heroes in Afghanistan, no Taliban “students” throwing acid in the faces of schoolgirls. Everything changes the moment Palestine is born … you really, truly believe it, don’t you?

You really believe that Muslims will love you the moment you bring the Israeli Jews to their knees.

You want me to take the risk that you are wrong. I will not do that.

I cannot accept your experiment. Because I am absolutely convinced that violence will continue, will increase. Your men will be targeted in Iraq and Afghanistan by the same enemies. It is not about us, this misnamed Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is about the core values of the Islamic world.

Our problems with Muslims are not due to our treatment of the Palestinians. The injustices in our country — yes, we have them and we try to combat them — and the territories we control militarily are less grievous than the injustices within the Muslim world. And, surprise, less cruel.

Our conflict is about the big scandal that a little nothing country like Israel can patent more inventions and scientific breakthroughs, year after year, than all Islamic countries combined. We have more Nobel Prize winners than the whole Islamic world. A higher standard of living, more liberties, an independent judiciary. Peaceful transitions of elected politicians.

And you really believe that these great Israeli achievements have come at the price of the Arabs?

We stole their liberties, their independent judiciary, their creativity, their Nobels?

We built our land on dry, barren sand without oil money. The Saudi princes chose to build a medieval state of perverts and hypocrites with their great oil wealth.

This is not about us. It is about the soul of Islam. It is about their lack of curiosity, the lack of critical discussions. The lack of liberal arts, free speech, free scientific research, a revolution of free spirits, women’s rights, urban cosmopolitanism — the lack of respect for everything that deviates from the early medieval concepts of Islam.

It is delusional to think that you can solve our problems or create an environment for the Palestinians in which they can transform their society into a modern, open state with a division of powers.

Read it all.

Israel Matzav: Bibi writes a letter to Obama