TOS's Week in Review, May 31, 2011

Because of my extremely busy schedule at the moment, I’ve addressed only one news item this week, but it is a crucially important one. —CB

Netanyahu Appeases The Appeaser, Pretends A is Non-A, and Joins Obama in Throwing Israel to the Islamist Wolves

After too-politely rebuffing President Obama for his morally obscene speech calling for Israel to compromise with the Palestinians by accepting “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a cowardly and dishonest speech to the U.S. Congress, in which he pretended that Obama is a friend of Israel and that compromising with the Palestinians can somehow lead to peace. Excerpt:

Thank you all, and thank you President Obama, for your steadfast commitment to Israel’s security. . . .

I am willing to make painful compromises to achieve this historic peace [with the Palestinians]. As the leader of Israel, it is my responsibility to lead my people to peace. This is not easy for me. I recognize that in a genuine peace, we will be required to give up parts of the Jewish homeland. . . .

[But] so far, the Palestinians have been unwilling to accept a Palestinian state, if it meant accepting a Jewish state alongside it.

You see, our conflict has never been about the establishment of a Palestinian state. It has always been about the existence of the Jewish state. This is what this conflict is about. In 1947, the United Nations voted to partition the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews said yes. The Palestinians said no.  In recent years, the Palestinians twice refused generous offers by Israeli Prime Ministers, to establish a Palestinian state on virtually all the territory won by Israel in the Six Day War.

They were simply unwilling to end the conflict. And I regret to say this: They continue to educate their children to hate. They continue to name public squares after terrorists. And worst of all, they continue to perpetuate the fantasy that Israel will one day be flooded by the descendants of Palestinian refugees.

My friends, this must come to an end.  President Abbas must do what I have done. I stood before my people, and I told you it wasn’t easy for me, and I said - "I will accept a Palestinian state". It is time for President Abbas to stand before his people and say - "I will accept a Jewish state".

Those six words will change history. They will make clear to the Palestinians that this conflict must come to an end. That they are not building a state to continue the conflict with Israel, but to end it. They will convince the people of Israel that they have a true partner for peace. With such a partner, the people of Israel will be prepared to make a far reaching compromise. I will be prepared to make a far reaching compromise. . . .

So I am saying today something that should be said publicly by anyone serious about peace. In any peace agreement that ends the conflict, some settlements will end up beyond Israel’s borders. The precise delineation of those borders must be negotiated. We will be very generous on the size of a future Palestinian state. . . .

Read the whole speech here.

How “generous” would Israel have to be to satisfy the Palestinians on this count? Clues can be found in the Palestinian Constitution, which calls for, among other things:

Article (12) Complete liberation of Palestine [i.e., the land where Israel exists], and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence.

Article (13) Establishing an independent democratic state with complete sovereignty on all Palestinian lands, and Jerusalem is its capital city. . . .

As to the means of achieving these ends, the Palestinian Constitution is unequivocal:

Article (17) Armed public revolution is the inevitable method to liberating Palestine. . . .

Article (19) Armed struggle is a strategy and not a tactic, and the Palestinian Arab People's armed revolution is a decisive factor in the liberation fight and in uprooting the Zionist existence, and this struggle will not cease unless the Zionist state is demolished and Palestine is completely liberated.

Further clues as to how “generous” Israel would have to be to satisfy the Palestinians can be found in the official charter of Hamas, with whom the Palestinians have now officially allied. As Netanyahu recognized in his speech, Hamas’ charter “not only calls for the obliteration of Israel, but says ‘kill the Jews wherever you find them.’” Article Seven of Hamas’ Charter is quite clear on this point:

Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad, which is a Jewish tree (cited by Bukhari and Muslim).

With such clues at hand—not to mention the thousands of rockets that the Palestinians and Hamas launch into Israel every year—we can reasonably conclude that in order to satisfy the Palestinians and their allies, Israel would have to be so generous as to go out of existence.

How generous would Israel have to be to satisfy the Obama administration? Obama made that clear last week, when, a few days after Islamists assaulted Israel on three borders (Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza) in celebration of “Nakba Day,” he called for Israel to compromise with the Palestinians and return to the 1967 lines—which, for the above reasons (and others) everyone knows are indefensible.

The morally correct way for Israel to deal with the Palestinian problem is as follows:

1. Israel should recognize the fact that people who murder, attempt to murder, or are in any way complicit in attempts to murder Israelis have thereby relinquished their rights.
2. Israel should recognize that the Palestinians will never stop seeking to murder Israelis until Israel demonstrates that to attack Israelis is to commit near-instant suicide.
3. Israel should make it official policy that the IDF will immediately destroy any and all Palestinians known to be involved directly or indirectly in any assault on Israelis.
4. Israel should recognize and openly state that the deaths of innocent Palestinians (such as children) in retaliatory strikes are the moral responsibility of those who initiated force and thereby necessitated the retaliatory force.
5. Israel should tell the United States forthrightly that (a) Israel has a moral right and obligation to defend itself and that the United States has no right to stop Israel from doing so; and (b) Israel, as the only semi-rights-respecting state in the Middle East, is America’s only friend and ally in the region; so it is in America’s best interest to help defend Israel—not to throw her to the Islamist wolves, as Obama has by calling for a return to the 1967 borders.
6. Israel should maintain the borders it has today—unless it is assaulted again by the Palestinians in Gaza, in which case Israel should reclaim Gaza by whatever means necessary.

The Palestinian assault against Israel can be ended, and rather easily ended (as can the Islamist assault on America). All Israel has to do is announce that henceforth any regime or tribe that assaults Israel will be bombed out of existence by the IDF within a few hours—and then uphold that promise.

While Netanyahu and Obama compete to see who can be more appeasing, more dishonest, more selfless—and thus more responsible for the deaths of innocent Israelis and Americans in the future—Israeli and American citizens had better find (or generate) some leaders who know how to think, who refuse to pretend that facts are other than they are, and who care about freedom and human life.

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I hope you enjoyed this edition of TOS’s Week in Review. Feel free to forward the link to others who might enjoy it as well. —CB

Joshua Lipana contributed to this WiR.

(TOS does not necessarily agree with the content of articles to which we link.)

About Craig Biddle

Craig is cofounder and editor of The Objective Standard, cofounder and director of education at Objective Standard Institute, and executive director of Prometheus Foundation. He is the author of Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It; Rational Egoism: The Morality for Human Flourishing; and the forthcoming Moral Truths Your Parents, Preachers, and Teachers Don’t Want You to Know. He is currently working on his fourth book, “Thinking in Principles.”

View all articles by Craig Biddle →