Israel Matzav: No great surprise here: Canada says Nobama

No great surprise here: Canada says Nobama

Coming just a few weeks after the stunning (due to its margin) re-election of Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Canada is not going to back Barack Hussein Obama's pressure on Israel (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).

“What the government of Canada supports is basically a two-state solution that is negotiated,” a senior federal official said. “If it’s border, if it’s others issues, it has to be negotiated, it cannot be unilateral action.”

Pressed by reporters, federal officials said both the Israelis and the Palestinians have to decide on their bottom lines, which the Israelis have said will not include a return to the 1967 border.

“If the two parties are of the view that this is a starting point, that is fine for them,” said the federal official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Prime Minister’s director of communications, Dimitri Soudas, added that Canada’s position continues to be the search for a two-state solution.

“No solution, ultimately, is possible without both parties sitting down, negotiating and agreeing on what that final outcome will look like,” he said.

Canada under Stephen Harper is a true friend of Israel.


Israel Matzav: No great surprise here: Canada says Nobama

Israel Matzav: Does anyone still believe this?

Does anyone still believe this?

Arab League President Amr Moussa (left) explains why there is so much instability in the Middle East:

"The Palestinian issue is at the heart of instability in the Middle East," Moussa said, calling on the United States to move in "the coming weeks and months towards establishing a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital."

Really? The guy in Tunisia set himself on fire because there's no 'Palestinian state'? Egypt overthrew Hosni Mubarak because there's no 'Palestinian state'? Yemen is trying to overthrow Saleh, Syria is trying to overthrow Assad and Libya is trying to overthrow Gadhafi because there's no 'Palestinian state'? Bahrain tried to overthrow the Emir because there's no 'Palestinian state'?

What a load of bull dung. There's only one person outside the Middle East who's taken in by it: Barack Hussein Obama.

Israel Matzav: Does anyone still believe this?

Israel Matzav: The indefensible 'borders'

The indefensible 'borders'

The map above should show you why Prime Minister Netanyahu said that Israel cannot go back to the 1949 armistice lines. And if you don't get it from there, here's Dore Gold.

The cornerstone of all postwar diplomacy was U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, passed in November 1967. It did not demand that Israel pull back completely to the pre-1967 lines. Its withdrawal clause only called on Israel to withdraw "from territories," not from all territories. Britain's foreign secretary at the time, George Brown, later underlined the distinction: "The proposal said 'Israel will withdraw from territories that were occupied,' and not from 'the' territories, which means that Israel will not withdraw from all the territories."

Prior to the Six Day War, Jerusalem had been sliced in two, and the Jewish people were denied access to the Old City and its holy sites. Jerusalem's Christian population also faced limitations. As America's ambassador to the U.N., Arthur Goldberg, would explain, Resolution 242 did not preclude Israel's reunification of Jerusalem. In fact, Resolution 242 became the only agreed basis of all Arab-Israeli peace agreements, from the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Treaty of Peace to the 1993 Oslo Agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.

How were Israel's legal rights to new boundaries justified? A good explanation came from Judge Stephen Schwebel, who would later be an adviser to the State Department and then president of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Writing in the American Journal of International Law in 1970, he noted that Israel's title to West Bank territory—in the event that it sought alterations in the pre-Six Day War lines—emanated from the fact that it had acted in lawful exercise of its right to self-defense. It was not the aggressor.

The flexibility for creating new borders was preserved for decades. Indeed, the 1993 Oslo Agreements, signed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, did not stipulate that the final borders between Israel and the Palestinians would be the 1967 lines. Borders were to be a subject for future negotiations. An April 2004 U.S. letter to Israel, backed by a bipartisan consensus in both houses of Congress, stipulated that Israel was not expected to fully withdraw, but rather was entitled to "defensible borders." U.S. secretaries of state from Henry Kissinger to Warren Christopher reiterated the same point in past letters of assurance.

If the borders between Israel and the Palestinians need to be negotiated, then what are the implications of a U.N. General Assembly resolution that states up front that those borders must be the 1967 lines? Some commentators assert that all Mr. Abbas wants to do is strengthen his hand in future negotiations with Israel, and that this does not contradict a negotiated peace. But is that really true? Why should Mr. Abbas ever negotiate with Israel if he can rely on the automatic majority of Third World countries at the U.N. General Assembly to back his positions on other points that are in dispute, like the future of Jerusalem, the refugee question, and security?

Mr. Abbas's unilateral move at the U.N. represents a massive violation of a core commitment in the Oslo Agreements in which both Israelis and Palestinians undertook that "neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of Permanent Status negotiations." Palestinian spokesmen counter that Israeli settlements violated this clause. Yet former Prime Minister Rabin was very specific while negotiating Oslo in preserving the rights of Israeli citizens to build their homes in these disputed areas, by insisting that the settlements would be one of the subjects of final status negotiations between the parties.

Read the whole thing.

The Wall Street Journal agrees.

But all attention is now focused on the coda he offered about the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which he said that "the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines." Though he immediately added that those lines should be adjusted "with mutually agreed swaps" of territory "so that secure and recognized borders are established for both parties," it's the 1967 line that is sticking.

And with good reason. At its neck, the distance from the Mediterranean coast to the West Bank is nine miles. Foreign analysts may imagine that strategic depth no longer matters, but Israelis know better thanks to the thousands of short-range rockets fired at their towns from Hamas-controlled Gaza. As candidate Obama said when he toured one such Israeli town in 2008, "If someone was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that, and I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."

Well, exactly. Which is why it was strange to hear Mr. Obama, in a speech otherwise devoted to urging change in the nature of Arab societies, suddenly revert to the tired land-for-peace formula that has so often failed. Since the rest of Mr. Obama's speech borrowed heavily from President Bush's Freedom Agenda, he might also have taken a cue from his predecessor's June 2002 speech, which conditioned Palestinian statehood on renouncing terrorism and liberalizing politics.

That concept is all the more appropriate now that Hamas has joined the Palestinian government, a point Mr. Obama acknowledged in his speech. Most Israelis would not object to a Palestinian state, even on the 1967 lines, if its politics resembled those of, say, Canada. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's problem is that political trends among the Palestinians lean more in the direction of Iran, despite some recent promising economic trends.

Nor does it help that Mr. Obama wants Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territory even before the two sides resolve the issues of the status of Jerusalem and of the 1948 Palestinian refugees, recently in the news with their attempt to force their way through Israel's borders. No Israeli leader is going to give up the West Bank without resolving those existential issues, since it would merely allow the Palestinians to pocket the territorial gains while perpetuating the conflict.

The President's team is explaining the speech as an attempt to restart the moribund Israeli-Palestinian talks, but it will accomplish no such thing.

Indeed.

Although right now, I doubt most Israelis would agree to any 'Palestinian state.' Most of us have had enough.

Israel Matzav: The indefensible 'borders'

Israel Matzav: Beck: Who needs Yasser Arafat when you have the President of the United States?

Beck: Who needs Yasser Arafat when you have the President of the United States?

I was getting emails about this while it was on television.

Glenn Beck rips Obama's sellout of Israel.

Let's go to the videotape (Hat Tip: Cheryl H).



Make sure especially to watch the interview around the 14:00 mark.

Israel Matzav: Beck: Who needs Yasser Arafat when you have the President of the United States?

Israel Matzav: Fisking Abu Bluff's New York Times op-ed

Fisking Abu Bluff's New York Times op-ed

One of the things I did not do on Tuesday was to fisk Abu Mazen's New York Times op-ed. (I did rewrite it to explain what he really wanted to say - you can find that here). Had I chosen to fisk it, here are some of the points I might have made that may not have come through in my rewrite.

1. Abu Mazen tries to create the false impression that the Palestinian refugee issue caused the Arab war against Israel in 1948. The Palestinian refugees were the result, not the cause, of that war.

2. Israel absorbed over 600,000 Jewish refugees who were thrown out of Arab countries in the immediate aftermath of the 1948 war. Another roughly 300,000 Jewish refugees were absorbed in other countries, including the United States, Canada and France.

In contrast, despite the Arab world’s vast territory and wealth, 600,000 Palestinian refugees have never been absorbed by the Arab countries to which they fled. Instead, the refugees and their descendants have been held hostage by the countries in which they live in an apartheid situation, and used by the Palestinian leadership for more than 60 years as pawns against Israel.

3. Abu Bluff’s strategy for the past two years has been to avoid a negotiated settlement with Israel. That’s why he avoided Netanyahu’s continued call for negotiations. That’s why he placed a settlement freeze as a precondition for negotiations, something he and his predecessor never did before in the 18 years of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. That’s why he walked away from peace talks last September. And that’s why he had no qualms about forging a pact with Hamas, which refuses to recognize the existence of Israel and refuses to abandon terrorism (Hamas has fired thousands of rockets at Israel’s cities, and last month, a Hamas terrorist fired an anti-tank rocket at a school bus). Two weeks ago, the leader of Hamas even condemned the United States for killing Osama bin Laden, whom Hamas praised for being a Holy Warrior. For that matter, Fatah's 'military wing' (the 'al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades') agreed with Hamas.

4. Based on this article, one can only conclude that Abbas has abandoned even the pretense of embracing the path of peace and instead chosen a strategy to establish a Palestinian state and use the improved position of statehood to wage a diplomatic and legal war against Israel.

It sounds like the 'peace process' has reached the end of the line.

Israel Matzav: Fisking Abu Bluff's New York Times op-ed

Israel Matzav: The Long Overdue Palestinian State

The Long Overdue Palestinian State

Sixty three years ago, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy left his home in the Galilean city of Safed. His was a family of means. He studied in elementary school, and then came the naqba [calamity, namely, the founding of the State of Israel - ed.]. At night, his family left by foot from Tzfat, to the Jordan River, where they remained for a month. Then they went to Damascus, and then to their relatives in Jordan, and then they settled in Damascus. That child's story, like that of so many other Palestinians, is mine.

Continue reading here.

Note: This post is a rewrite of Abu Mazen's article in the New York Times (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).

Israel Matzav: The Long Overdue Palestinian State