By Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, December 29, 2016
“When the chips are
down, I have Israel’s back.”
— Barack Obama, AIPAC conference, March 4, 2012
The audience — overwhelmingly Jewish, passionately
pro-Israel, and supremely gullible — applauded wildly. Four years later — his
last election behind him, with a month to go in office and with no need to fool
Jew or gentile again — Obama took the measure of Israel’s back and slid a knife
into it.
Many people don’t quite understand the damage done to
Israel by the U.S. abstention that permitted passage of a Security Council
resolution condemning Israel over its settlements. The administration pretends
this is nothing but a restatement of longstanding U.S. opposition to
settlements.
Nonsense. For the last 35 years, every administration,
including a reelection-seeking Obama himself in 2011, has protected Israel with
the U.S. veto because such a Security Council resolution gives immense legal
ammunition to every boycotter, anti-Semite, and zealous European prosecutor to
penalize and punish Israelis.
An ordinary Israeli who lives or works in the Old City of
Jerusalem becomes an international pariah, a potential outlaw — to say nothing
of the soldiers of Israel’s citizen army. “Every pilot and every officer and
every soldier,” said a confidant of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, “we are
waiting for him at The Hague” — i.e., the International Criminal Court.
Moreover, the resolution undermines the very foundation
of a half century of American Middle East policy. What becomes of “land for
peace” if the territories Israel was to have traded for peace are, in advance,
declared to be Palestinian land to which Israel has no claim?
The peace parameters enunciated so ostentatiously by
Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday are nearly identical to the Clinton
parameters that Yasser Arafat was offered and rejected in 2000 and that Abbas
was offered by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. Abbas, too, walked away.
Kerry mentioned none of this because it undermines his
blame-Israel narrative. Yet Palestinian rejectionism works. The Security
Council just declared the territories legally Palestinian — without the
Palestinians’ having to concede anything, let alone peace.
The administration claims a kind of passive innocence on
the text of the resolution, as if it had come upon it at the last moment. We
are to believe that the ostensible sponsors — New Zealand, Senegal, Malaysia,
and a Venezuela that cannot provide its own people with toilet paper, let alone
food — had for months been sweating the details of Jewish housing in East
Jerusalem.
Nothing new here, protests deputy national-security
adviser Ben Rhodes: “When we see the facts on the ground, again deep into the
West Bank, beyond the separation barrier, we feel compelled to speak up against
those actions.”
This is a deception. Everyone knows that remote outposts
are not the issue. Under any peace, they will be swept away. Even the
right-wing defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who lives in one of these West
Bank settlements, has stated publicly that “I even agree to vacate my
settlement if there really will be a two-state solution.” Where’s the obstacle
to peace?
A second category of settlement is the close-in blocs
that border 1967 Israel. Here, too, we know in advance how these will be
disposed of: They’ll become Israeli territory and, in exchange, Israel will
swap over some of its land to a Palestinian state. Where’s the obstacle to
peace here?
It’s the third category of “settlement” that is the most
contentious, and that Security Council resolution 2334 explicitly condemns:
East Jerusalem. This is not just scandalous; it’s absurd. America acquiesces to
a declaration that, as a matter of international law, the Jewish state has no
claim on the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, indeed the entire Jewish Quarter
of Jerusalem. They belong to Palestine.
The Temple Mount is the most sacred site in all of
Judaism. That it should be declared foreign to the Jewish people is as if the
Security Council declared Mecca and Medina to be territory to which Islam has
no claim. Such is the Orwellian universe Israel inhabits.
At the very least, Obama should have insisted that any
reference to East Jerusalem be dropped from the resolution or it would face a
U.S. veto. Why did he not? It’s incomprehensible — except as a parting shot of
personal revenge on Benjamin Netanyahu. Or perhaps as a revelation of a deep-seated
antipathy to Israel that simply awaited a safe political interval for public
expression.
Another legacy moment for Barack Obama. And his most
shameful.
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