From FORWARD:
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint meeting of Congress May 24, his first audience was the assembly of federal lawmakers and other government dignitaries seated before him. His second audience was President Obama, who was off hobnobbing with the Queen of England, but who only days earlier had set out his vision for achieving a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And his third audience was the American Jewish community…
Most of us hoped that Netanyahu would have given a courageous, creative speech to move the process forward, safeguarding Israel’s security as he must, but also recognizing the cogent, entirely reasonable requests from the President of the United States…
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NEWSLANC EDITOR: This letter appeared on line at the Forward and is published here to provide a balance of views.
The bad blood between Mr. B.H.Obama and Mr. B.Netanjahu is not new. Indeed, one can make the case easily, with many illustrations, that the former’s deep hostility is not only to Israel’s democratically elected prime minister but to the country he heads, its government, its institutions and by extension to the people whose nation-state the liberal democracy of Israel is.
The case of the 1949 armistice lines (wrongly dubbed “1967 borders”!!) didn’t have to come to the fore. Indeed, reports are clear that Israel, prior to Obama’s speech at the State Department, begged him to avoid pronouncing this subject. And, since Obama chose to state what he stated – in a similar move to he earlier statement that Israel must cease all construction, a statement which was the cause of the halt of peace talks at the time – Israel’s prime minister was forced to state what he stated, that he, the prime minister of Israel, expressed: the consensus in Israel.
And, what Mr. Netanjahu said in Congress, and prior to that in Israel’s Knesset, was based on UN Security Council Resolution, 242, which it, and not Obama’s statement, has been the point of reference for all peace talks to date and actual agreements between Israel and the various components of its Arab neighbors.
Indeed, what Mr. Netanjahu stated was in line with what Mr. Rabin stated as well at his last speech at the Knesset in October 1995: 1) Jerusalem will remain united under Israel’s sovereignty. 2) Major Jewish settlement blocs will be incorporated into the sovereign state of Israel. 3) The Jordan Valley must be viewed in the widest sense of the term, and it too will remain under Israel’s rule. 4) The future Palestinian state will not be a regular state in that it will have to be de-militarized, its airspace will be controlled by Israel as will its border passes: land, sea and air.
I would think Mr. Rabin, with a bit more knowledge and experience of the Arab Israeli conflict than a community leader in Chicago, is a higher authority of what can and what can’t be done, and especially when he, Rabin, based his views on the point of reference agreed by ALL parties to the conflict, all of them. And that point of reference DOES NOT MENTION at all the 1949 armistice lines. Indeed, it does suggest that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) should retreat to “secure and recognized boundaries”.
Jews, indeed, within and without Israel, are eager to see the “end of the conflict”, yet the very Arabs for whom the editor has no criticism for some reason, are the one’s who have been refusing, categorically, to see a peace treaty as the “end of the conflict and the end of all future demands”.
It is therefore time an editorial like this should be addressed to: 1) the Palestinian Arab leadership, demanding of it to accept Israel’s right to be, to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people; and, 2) the President of the US, impressing upon him to act based on UN Security Council Resolution, 242.