Sultan Knish
Few figures in American political life have been as consistently wrong
as often as John Kerry. The former Senator bet on every Communist leader
and Middle Eastern tyrant he could find only to watch the wheels of
history roll over his mistakes. And now as Secretary of State, Kerry is
at it again.
In
between peddling a Syrian peace process that no one but him believes
in, he took a break to peddle the even more discredited peace process
between Israel and the terrorists.
In a speech to the American
Jewish Committee, Kerry invoked the litany of failures, "Madrid to Oslo
to Wye River and Camp David and Annapolis", but urged his audience not
to pay attention to history and “give in to cynicism”.
"Cynicism
has never solved anything," he said. But then again neither has the
Peace Process. And while cynicism isn't likely to usher in an era of
peace or grow money on trees, it offers you the power to extract
yourself from bad situations instead of taking refuge in more of the
same wishful thinking that got you into them.
If you find
yourself mailing your tenth check to that Nigerian prince, cynicism
won't get you a 200 percent return, but it will keep you from losing
more money.
"Why should any Israeli start giving in to that
cynicism now?" Kerry asked. Perhaps because it's been twenty years. Or
because thousands of Israelis have been killed and wounded. Or because
there isn't a single piece of supporting evidence to show that the other
side is interested in any kind of final peace agreement.
The
only sure things that have come out of the Peace Process in two decades
are terrorist attacks and increased demands by the terrorists. There has
been no final status agreement for the simple reason that the
terrorists can only get the best possible deal by never coming to an
agreement. The longer they hold out, the better the offers that the
likes of John Forbes Kerry extract from Israel are. And the offers keep
getting better so there is never any reason to actually make a deal.
Picture
a desperate rug merchant dickering with a customer. The rug merchant
always lowers his prices. The customer always lowers his bids. The deal
can never happen until the price of the rug reaches zero or until the
rug merchant decides that the price isn't worth selling at. And that is
the thing that men like Kerry will never allow Israel to do. Israel can
never stop bargaining and the Palestinian Authority never has to stop
bargaining until the entire rug, all of Israel, is on the table.
Since
Israel can never make that offer and since its enemies will never
accept less than the whole rug, the negotiations are doomed to a
descending spiral in which the Jewish State's negotiators offer more and
more in the hopes of settling the negotiations faster to avoid the even
higher demands that they know they will face down the road, while the
exact same calculation removes any incentive from the other side to
settle because they know that the deals will be better down the road.
The
only way out of the spiral is for Israel to walk away from the
negotiations for good, accepting that the penalty for permanently
abrogating the peace process will be less than the eventual penalty for
perpetuating the peace process. And that is what Obama and Kerry hedge
against by talking up the benefits of peace.
"The great enemy of
the truth is very often not the lie; deliberate, contrived and
dishonest, but the myth; persistent, persuasive and unrealistic," John
F. Kennedy said. The mythology of the peace process is the enemy of the
truth. Its "reassuring repetition of stale phrases" prevents what
Kennedy called, "the difficult, but essential confrontation with
reality."
Kerry repeatedly calls for hope against cynicism, using
stale phrases to perpetuate a mythology of peace with no basis in
reality. Out of his mouth fall all the stale promises and threats that
have been moldering for decades."We can’t let the disappointments of the
past hold the future prisoner," he says and you can hear the faint
echoes of a thousand old speeches and smell the musty air of old banquet
halls.
All these are the enemies of the truth. And the truth is a simple thing.
Kerry keeps speaking of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. But which Palestinians would those be?
Nearly
half of the population of the Palestinian Authority lives under Hamas
rule. Hamas is arguably the legal government of the entire Palestinian
Authority having actually won elections.
Meanwhile President
Abbas, the man whom Kerry would like Israel to reach a final status
agreement with, was last elected in 2005. He is approaching the eighth
year of his four year term.
During his heavily hyped visit to
Israel, Obama gave a speech in which he said, "The days when Israel
could seek peace simply with a handful of autocratic leaders, those days
are over. Peace will have to be made among peoples, not just
governments."
But that's exactly what Kerry is peddling. A worthless deal with a bunch of autocrats.
If
Obama really meant what he said, then he would have insisted that Abbas
win a current election to show that he actually speaks for the
residents of the West Bank and Gaza. It would also be a matter of basic
practice for the entire question of Hamas and Gaza to be settled so that
there is one unified Palestinian Authority to negotiate with, rather
than two Palestinian states.
And yet that's not on the table
here. Anyone who proposes that a man who claims to speak for the
Palestinian people should have been elected by them to higher office in
this decade would be accused of cynicism and lacking in hope and faith
in the mythology of peace.
Obama’s failure to insist on that means that he knows the negotiations are worthless.
The
bigger Arab League peace plan that Kerry is proposing is equally
worthless. Not only is it worthless in detail, but it's worthless
because, as Obama said in his speech, it represents a handful of
autocratic leaders.
The proposal came from the Saudi King who has
never run for anything, except perhaps a dessert tray. The Arab League
consists of monarchies, tyrannies and a few elected governments that
took a severe beating during the Arab Spring and remain unstable even
after elections. Aside from the absolutely terrible terms of the
agreement, there is absolutely nothing to show that the offer represents
any popular will or mandate in the Arab World.
In 2010, John
Kerry met with the Emir of Qatar who told him that the best way to
resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be for Israel to give up
the Golan Heights to Syria because then Assad could convince Hamas,
Hezbollah and Iran to come to the negotiating table.
The full
phrasing of the Wikileaks cable is worth quoting here if only because it
should serve to disqualify John Kerry from ever being allowed to
negotiate anything, including his next yacht buy.
"Senator Kerry
told the Amir he knew Qatar could help the U.S. but asked how we deal
with those who advocate violence. The Amir said the short answer is to
work the Syrian track, which means pushing for Israel's return of the
Golan Heights to Syria. The Amir said return of the Golan is important
not just to Syria but also to Hizballah and Iran."
The last time an American leader performed this well, he was sitting across the table from Stalin at Yalta.
Kerry
said that he had "great discussions" with Assad. The Emir told Kerry
that Assad was committed to "big change". Kerry agreed that Assad wants
change and peace with Israel. The Emir told Kerry that it's important
that the United States pressure Israel into turning over the Golan
Heights.
A year later, the Emir of Qatar was financing a Sunni
war to overthrow Assad. Everything that he had told Kerry proved to be
utterly worthless. There was no peace on the horizon. The Emir had only
been using Kerry and Assad to weaken Israel, before using Hillary
Clinton to weaken Assad. There was no peace here. Just the puppetry of
diplomatic war.
Kerry learned no lessons from this. If there is
anything that Kerry has learned a lesson from in all his years of being
played by everyone from the Viet Cong to the Sandinistas to Assad, it's
impossible to tell.
At the AJC, Kerry talked up the "moderate"
leadership of Abbas, who had declared that he was no different than
Hamas. And he doubled up on the mythology of hope. "People have spent so
much time lamenting what hasn’t worked in the past that I believe we’ve
actually forgotten to focus on what the future could look like if we do
keep faith," he said.
But it's actually the other way around.
The creaky process has only dragged on this long because of all the
people who insist on taking hope on faith, instead of basing their
decisions on the solid ground of history.Who trade Patrick Henry's lamp
of experience for rose-colored glasses.
"Mythology distracts us
everywhere," John F. Kennedy said. "In government as in business, in
politics as in economics, in foreign affairs as in domestic affairs."
The
mythology of the peace process is a giant distraction. It allows for
the same worthless commodity to be sold and resold, again and again. And
that commodity is hope. The Israelis have been compelled to trade
territory and lives for hope. Now the trade is beginning all over again,
this time with a peace plan put forward by a country that is behind
much of the terrorism around the world.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar
insist that they are American allies even while they fund terrorists who
carry out attacks against America. In 2010, they were insisting that
Syria could also be America and Israel's best friend if only it had the
strategic high ground of the Golan Heights. And that once it had the
Heights, then it could bring Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to join the
party. Now they're insisting that America has to destroy Assad and
pressure Israel to give up half of Jerusalem to a terrorist organization
and then there will be peace.
The substance of John Kerry's
speech was that he had learned absolutely nothing from the past and that
everyone else should join him in not learning anything from the past.
That optimistic ignorance is not a luxury that either America or Israel
can afford.
At the conclusion of his address, Kerry invoked the
oath of Israeli soldiers at Masada. But the very point of the oath is
the responsibility of the Israeli soldier not to allow his country to be
put into a position where it is so besieged that its only choice is
between the depredations of the enemy and an honorable suicide. And
Masada, the final last stand in a desert fortress, is exactly where
Kerry and the Qatari and Saudi devils whispering in his ear are driving
the Jewish State.
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