A Photoshopped Piece Process

By his effusive grandstanding of Netanyahu's last visit to Washington, President Obama may have tried to make amends for his disgraceful snub delivered at their first White House meeting. But most Jews will not have been fooled by this spin job. 

The UK peer Lord Janner once remarked on a radio programme that his late father - Sir Barnett Janner - used to say: you cannot always see antisemitism but you can usually smell it.

So, what brings me to recall this today?

Well, today's headline in the Israeli press is that the Obama administration feels that Netanyahu's 10-month settlement freeze has been so important to the peace talks that the Quartet is to pressure Netanyahu to extend it. 

Let's remember that our supposed peace partner - Mr Abbas - spent the first 8 months of the freeze up a tree, hoping that Obama would follow up his snub with ever more crippling pressure on Israel for unilateral concessions.

Obama may be a total naif on Jewish history, but he does know perfectly well that an extension of the current freeze would create a coalition crisis for Netanyahu and probably bring down his government.  But surely that has been his gameplan all along; most likely scripted by Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and SecState Hillary Clinton - neither of whom are said to have have much affinity for Netanyahu.

So, having been pressured by the Jewish lobby to make amends for appearing to push Netanyahu out of the back door of the White House, like so much garbage, Obama goes for the bolder 'Plan B' ...  to push Netanyahu out of his own prime ministerial residence.

Which makes this whole peace process look just about as genuine as this picture of Mubarak walking in front of Obama and the other summiteers, as photoshopped by an Egyptian newspaper last week.

We have always joked that the Arabs are not into any peace process but a 'piece' process ... to eradicate the Jewish 'entity' by pieces.  After the British gifted half of the mandated Jewish homeland to the Hashmites, we gave back the Sinai and Gaza and have given up vast sections of Judea & Samaria (a.k.a the West Bank) for vitually nothing in return.  This salami-slicing will continue until we have leaders brave enough to say: enough!

Let's hope Bibi finds it within himself to say this to Obama and his Quartet.

Owner Occupation

We issue building permits as owners ... not occupiers.


These days it seems that a Jew can buy property and build a home anywhere in the world … except in his own homeland. And Netanyahu’s announcement of a 10-month settlement freeze in the ‘West Bank’ would appear to confer Israeli government legitimacy to a clear breach of the human rights of Jewish people.

By its proper name, Judea and Samaria has been Jewish territory for thousands of years. Our biblical title to it is undeniable. Under international law too, our rights are no less legitimate. It was designated as the Jewish homeland by the League of Nations in 1922. After being invaded by the Arabs in 1948 it was recaptured from its Jordanian occupiers in Israel’s defensive war of 1967. It is currently home to over 200,000 Jewish returnees. And, for all the fuss created by our detractors, those Jewish homes actually occupy less than 2 percent of the whole ‘West Bank’ territory.

Few pundits ever mention that both banks of the Jordan were originally allotted to the Jewish homeland. At the last moment, Britain inserted the infamous ‘Clause 25’ by which they gifted our East Bank to the Hashemites who turned it into the modern-day Kingdom of Jordan. So, having been robbed of half the territory, we are now told we cannot live in the half we were left with. Not even in a measly 2 percent of it.

So why, of all ruling parties, should it be the Likud that appears to abuse the rights of Jews in their own land? And why would such ministerial hawks like Moshe Yaalon and Bennie Begin appear to be standing behind Netanyahu’s announcement?

The answer has nothing to do with the peace process. Nor has it to do with the belief that any concessions, in terms of land or refugees, will ever yield Arab recognition of a Jewish State in this region. Instead it is simply a matter of national security which the Prime Minister has rightly put above party politics and other considerations.

Iran’s mullahs are about to go nuclear on the watch of the weakest and most vacillating president ever to have occupied the White House. There is also the matter of 50,000 Hezbollah rockets pointed at Tel Aviv and incessant weapons smuggling into Gaza. Obama turned his back on the Iranian reformers, unilaterally abandoned the missile defence of Baltic democracies, and has spent 3 months second-guessing his own handpicked general’s call for reinforcements in Afghanistan. Such a US President cannot be trusted as a guarantor to coax Israel into even riskier territorial concessions.

Until Obama transforms himself or is replaced after a single term, Netanyahu is forced to play along with this charade. The fiction that Mahmoud Abbas is a credible peace partner. The illusion that Syria can ever be trusted with repossession of the Golan Heights. And the fantasy that the Muslim Brotherhood will ever accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state, even if confined to the city limits of Tel Aviv.

Happily, Israel has more dependable friends in the US: its Congress and the military. Thirty years ago Menachem Begin recognised the value of appealing to Congress over Jimmy Carter’s head. In current times Israel enjoys a high level of co-operation with the US military, culminating in the completion of their joint missile defence exercise last month.

Is that relationship worth a 10-month settlement freeze?
Netanyahu clearly thinks it is. And his courage in resolutely excluding Jerusalem from the offer shows that he is no pushover for Obama.

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[This was first published in the London Jewish News]

The illustration is a detail from a French map dated 1791