Caroline Glick
There was a ghoulish creepiness to US Secretary of State John Kerry’s
visit to Israel last week. Here we were, beset by the greatest winter
storm in a hundred years. All roads to Jerusalem were sealed off. Tens
of thousands of Jerusalemites and residents of surrounding areas were
locked down in their houses, without power, heat, telephone service or
water.
And all of the sudden, out of nowhere, Kerry appeared. As Hamas-ruled
Gazans begged the supposedly hated IDF to come and save them from the
floods, and as Israel took over rescue operations for stranded
Palestinians living under the rule of the PLO ’s gangster kleptocracy in
Judea and Samaria, here was Kerry, telling us that we’d better accept
the deal he plans to present us next month, or face the wrath of the US
and Europe, and suffer another Palestinian terror war.
What is going on? Why can’t Kerry leave Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu and the rest of the country alone, even for a week, in the
middle of a blizzard of biblical proportions? According to leaks from
the now five month old negotiations, after 20 rounds of talks, the
Palestinians have not budged from the positions they have held to for
the past 50 years. They do not accept Israel’s right to exist. They do
not recognize the existence of the Jewish people. They do not believe
that the Jews have the right to freedom or self-determination. They
insist on taking control of our 3,000 year old capital. They demand that
we surrender our ability to defend ourselves from foreign aggression
and Palestinian attacks and infiltration from the east.
There is nothing new here, of course, This was the case 13 years ago
at the Camp David summit. This was the case during the Annapolis summit
in 2007 and 2008. This was the case when PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas
rejected then prime minister Ehud Olmert’s offer of peace in 2008.
Facing the Palestinians’ continued defiance of the very notion of
peaceful coexistence with Israel, Kerry is planning to present his own
peace deal next month and try to force Israel to accept it. Although the
text of Kerry’s deal has not yet been revealed, we know exactly what it
will involve just by listening to what he has already told us.
In his speech at the Saban Forum on December 7, Kerry said, “For many
years the broad contours of an eventual solution have been absolutely
clear, and they were crystallized for the world in December of 2000 when
president Clinton laid down the parameters for a final-status
agreement. They were reaffirmed through the Annapolis process during the
Bush administration.”
The Clinton parameters involved a near complete American embrace of
the PLO ’s maximalist demands. The Annapolis guidelines went even
further in the PLO ’s direction.
And now, Kerry intends to put forth his own parameters that will be
even more forthcoming to the PLO than either the Clinton or Bush
administrations were.
Like the Clinton and Bush plans, the Kerry parameters will involve
Israeli surrender of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount to the PLO , which
rejects the historical fact that two Jewish temples were built at the
site that was and remains the cradle of Jewish civilization and history
and holiest site to Judaism.
They will involve the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews
from their homes in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to make room for an
anti-Semitic, Jew-free state that maintains its devotion to the
destruction of the rump Jewish state.
Kerry’s framework deal will involve the mass immigration of hundreds
of thousands of foreign-born Arabs, who have been living in al-Qaida-,
Hamas- and PLO -controlled UN-run “refugee camps,” for the past four
generations to the new state of “Palestine.”
Kerry’s plan will require Israeli society to destroy its cohesion
through the dismemberment and destruction of hundreds of Jewish
communities. As occurred before the Gaza withdrawal, it will require the
government to oversee the demonization and criminalization of well over
three million law abiding, patriotic Israeli citizens who oppose the
mass expulsions.
Kerry’s parameters will require Israel to surrender its ability to
defend itself against foreign aggression and Palestinian attacks. As for
the Palestinians, implementation of the Kerry parameters will guarantee
that all moderate elements in their society, including among Israeli
Arabs, will be overwhelmed and destroyed. The PLO state in Judea,
Samaria and Jerusalem, like the Hamas state in Gaza, will be breeding
grounds for global jihadists. They will actively incite, organize and
oversee an armed insurrection of the Arabs of the Galilee and the Negev,
meting out punishment for all dissenters.
As for the US forces that Kerry proposes deploying to the Jew-free
PLO state, they will be targeted by the Palestinians, just as the
Palestinians and the Syrians attacked US Marines in Beirut 30 years ago.
And like the Marines in Beirut, they will be withdrawn in humiliation
and defeat, but the lesson – that the Arabs perceive the Americans and
Jews as enemies of equal weight – will not be learned. And, at any rate,
unable to defend itself after agreeing to Kerry’s parameters, Israel
will cease to be a strategic ally and be transformed into a strategic
basket case. Its destruction will interest Kerry and his supporters just
as much as the destruction of South Vietnam interested them in 1975.
Aside from being a more anti-Israel version of the Clinton parameters
and Bush’s framework, Kerry’s parameters, and framework deal, have one
other unique and particularly dangerous feature. Until now, US peace
plans followed former prime minister Ehud Barak’s dictum that “nothing
is agreed to until everything is agreed to.”
That is, no hypothetical Israeli concession on Jerusalem, for instance, will be binding unless a final deal is concluded.
Kerry indicated at the Saban Forum that his goal is to coerce Israel
into making irrevocable concessions up front, before the Palestinians
agree to peaceful coexistence.
As he put it, “A basic framework will have to address all the core
issues – borders, security, refugees, Jerusalem, mutual recognition, and
an end of claims. And it will have to establish agreed guidelines for
subsequent negotiations that will fill out the details in a full-on
peace treaty.”
For the past five and a half years, Netanyahu’s strategy for dealing
with US President Barack Obama has been to try to survive him. He’s
withstood Obama’s constant demand for Israeli national suicide for
“peace” by giving the bare minimum of revocable concession possible to
keep Obama at bay.
But with Kerry poised to shove his lethal parameters down our
throats, parameters that will require Israel to irrevocably accept terms
of peace that will destroy the country, it is obvious that Netanyahu
needs to adopt a longer-term strategy. Our goal cannot be limited to
waiting out Obama. Our goal must be to extricate Israel from the
two-state trap.
Yes, Israel will pay a huge price for jumping ship. For 20 years,
non-leftist Israeli leaders have been trying to go along to get along
with the Left, and the Americans and their ever-escalating demands. But
Kerry’s obsessive harping, and his insistence on pushing forward with
his disastrous framework deal forces our hand.
Either we pay a huge price now, or accept our destruction within five to 15 years.
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