Love of the Land: Bullying the neighborhood bully

Bullying the neighborhood bully

Soccer Dad
19 March '10

Well, the chances are against it and the odds are slim That he'll live by the rules that the world makes for him, 'Cause there's a noose at his neck and a gun at his back And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac. He's the neighborhood bully.
Neighborhood Bully - Bob Dylan

Scott Wilson writing on the web for the Washington Post posits that Israeli leaders are not likely to win diplomatic battles with the United States.

Next, think back to 1992. Picking a fight with the Bush administration cost Shamir his job. Who succeeded him as prime minister?
Rabin, who immediately pledged to cease construction of what he called "political" settlements in the territories. Perhaps he, too, remembered 1975.

Of course one could also point to Ehud Barak who did all he could to cooperate with the Americans to the point of making an unprecedented offer to Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000. Arafat rejected the offer and, two months later, launched a war against Israel. None of President Clinton's goodwill towards Barak helped him as months later he went down to the worst electoral defeat in Israel's history.

The two previous paragraphs, though, give a hint to Wilson's premises and the limitations of his analysis.

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Love of the Land: Bullying the neighborhood bully

Love of the Land: Peres’s extracurricular clinchers

Peres’s extracurricular clinchers

Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
12 March '10

So who says you can’t accurately predict the future? admittedly, clairvoyance isn’t realistic in all circumstances, but in some instances not to sense what’s about to occur is to willfully avoid reality. In given situations what threatens to unfold is obvious.

So it was when Shimon Peres campaigned for the presidency in 2007.

I wrote then: “How Peres would exploit presidential office, given his past predilections, boggles the mind. A Peres presidency would be invitation to intrigue. It’s safe to assume he wouldn’t make do with a figurehead role, but would hyperactively preside over a parallel government and spawn an unimaginable surfeit of inventive visions, plans and proposals. Their common denominator would be the increasing Palestinization of this land and dangerous compromising of what Golda Meir called ‘the Jewish national interest.’”

There was plenty over the past few years to vindicate this forecast, but the most recent reports of Peres’s extracurricular activities are the clincher.

GET A load of the following samples from Haaretz (which fully approves of the president’s hijinks).

“Talks have recently been under way to arrange a summit meeting in Rome this April between President Shimon Peres and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The talks have reportedly been carried out without the involvement or even the knowledge of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, whom Abbas has persistently refused to meet.”

Sounds familiar? Deja vu? The same old MO?

There’s more:

“The person behind the summit drive is Uri Savir, president of the Peres Center for Peace, who was one of the architects of the Oslo Accords and served as director-general of the Foreign Ministry when Peres was foreign minister.”

And more:

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Love of the Land: Peres’s extracurricular clinchers