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So Close to Excellent, Yet So Very Far Off Base

- Wednesday, November 14, 2007 |

Secretary of State Rice spoke before the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities this week in Nashville. She was eloquent about the contributions of the American Jewish community to our country, to charity and to faith. Then she turned to Israel and the Middle East and, while on the one hand, clearly inspired by Israel, she missed the essential nature of the conflict.

Whenever I visit Israel I am reminded of the awesome living achievement that is the Jewish state. I look out upon a nation that has made the desert bloom. I think of how a people with ancient traditions have built a prosperous, modern democracy, and how inspiring that could be for the rest of the Middle East. I see on the side of the road the aging shells of Israeli tanks and I think of the long line of Israeli patriots who gave their lives so that Israel could survive. But most of all, ladies and gentlemen, whenever I visit Israel, I am reminded of how precious the idea of Israel is and how essential it is to defend it.

Lovely, but:

Just think back to 2001. Despite the extraordinary efforts of the Clinton Administration, peace negotiations had collapsed. The violence between Palestinians and Israelis was almost daily. Israelis feared that every bus ride, every night out, could be another Passover massacre. The underlying factors that had made peace elusive since 1967 were nearly unchanged in 2001: Israel occupied the future Palestine and the Palestinian leadership was complicit in terror.

No, Madame Secretary. The problem was NOT that Israel “occupied the future Palestine.” Israel had already turned over the outline of a future state to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords and had already been rewarded with unbridled hatred spewing from official Palestinian media, with terrorism, with the ruination by Palestinian education of their OWN children to provide cannon fodder for killing Jews. The PA leadership was not “complicit” in OTHER people’s terrorism – it was the sole-source manufacturer. The problem was, and remains that the Palestinians and most Arab states were never reconciled to the existence of Jewish sovereignty. There was terrorism against Israel long before and continuing after the defensive 1967 war in which Israel found itself in possession of the unallocated part of the British Mandate that had been used as a launching pad for violence against Jews. If you don’t understand where the violence comes from, you cannot presume to set a path to a future without it.

Just consider, most Israelis now believe that a responsible Palestinian state is in the national interest of Israel and that true security will require an end to the occupation that began in 1967. Most Palestinians now believe that Israel will always be their neighbor and that no Palestinian state is going to be born through violence.

Again, a problem – ISRAELIS may believe the occupation began in 1967; could you provide some evidence that the Palestinian leadership is not referring to the occupation they invariably say began in 1948?

Failure is simply not an option.

Yes, it is actually – it always is.

We read in Proverbs: Where there is no vision, the people perish. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my fear that if Palestinian reformists cannot deliver on their people’s hope of an independent state, then the moderate center could collapse and the next generation of Palestinians could become lost souls of unbridled extremism.

Our fear, Madame Secretary, is that there simply is no “moderate center” among Palestinians. Our fear is that the current generation of Palestinians is lost after 14 years of being drenched in the “unbridled extremism” and blood lust of both Fatah and Hamas. Our fear is that the next generation of Israeli Jews will become the souls lost to unbridled Palestinian extremism.