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Gerald A. Honigman

A Proper Response to the White House Rebuke
September 8, 2009
 

Hey, let's face it. Much of the world still prefers its Jews ghetto style, groveling Uncle Abes  instead of Uncle Toms (note: the very word "ghetto" was originally coined for the Jewish experience).

Ironically, of  all world leaders, the current American president should be tuned in to this problem the most; Instead, he's among the worst offenders when it comes to this.

Recently the Obama White House rebuked Israel because it refuses to prostrate itself and say, "whatever you say, boss!"

On September 4th, Associated Press writer Matthew Lee reported that, "the White House said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's settlement plans were 'inconsistent' with commitments the Jewish state has made previously and harmful to U.S. attempts to lay the groundwork for a resumption in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians."

Horse manure!

Do you really want to know what's "inconsistent?"

Try this one for starters...America's deliberate attempt to ignore--and to force Israel itself to ignore--what it is legitimately entitled to regarding the final draft of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, adopted in the wake of the Arabs' combined attempt on its life in 1967.

That war started after Egyptian Arabs blockaded Israel at the Straits of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba (a casus belli ), ordered the U.N.'s peace-keeping force out of Sinai and amassed over  100,000 troops, tanks, planes, and so forth in Gaza, right up to Israel's border in preparation for attack, and other well-documented hostile acts.

As has been often written but which needs to be constantly repeated to answer those such as the current American leader now rebuking Israel for refusing to forget this, Resolution 242 is as famous for what it did not say as for what it did. As anyone who has studied this subject knows, among other things,  there was no mention of a total withdrawal by Israel to the 1949, UN-imposed armistice lines--lines which made Israel a sub-rump state, a mere nine to fifteen miles wide at its strategic waist where most of its population and industry are located.  Those Auschwitz lines were never meant to be final political borders. This was reinforced by a call for the creation of "secure and recognized borders" to replace those lines, which forever placed Israel at its neighbors' mercy as an easy, irresistible  target for terror and invasion.  Furthermore, any withdrawal by Israel at all was to be in the context of true treaties of peace, not ceasefires. The so-called moderate "peace" partners Israel now has won't it even grant it recognition and demand that it take steps towards its own suicide. There is a proper response for such "partners," but since I can't write it here, please use  your imagination...

A reading of Great Britain's Lord Caradon, U.S. Assistant  Secretary of State, Professor Eugene Rostow, America's U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, and other architects of 242 clearly shows that Israel was not expected to return to the deadly and absurd status quo ante.  A fair, meaningful territorial compromise was thus called for. The Obama White House plays deaf, dumb, and blind to all of this, however.

So guess (three and the first two don't count) what the settlement issue, that Israel is now being rebuked for, is really all about?

As my students would say...well, duh, a no-brainer!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In the aftermath of the Six Day War, President Lyndon Johnson summarized the issue this way on June 19, 1967...

A return to the situation on June 4 [the day before outbreak of war] was not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities.

He then called for new recognized boundaries that would provide security against terror, destruction, and war.

Johnson was supported by General Earle Wheeler of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and many others, as well.  Here's a brief excerpt from Wheeler's Pentagon document prepared for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on June 29, 1967...

Israel would require retention of some captured Arab territory to provide militarily defensible borders.

Keep in mind that in Judea and Samaria, aka the "West Bank," Israel took these lands in a defensive war from an illegal occupier --Transjordan --which subsequently renamed itself Jordan as a result of its 1949 illegal acquisition of non-apportioned lands of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine west of the Jordan River.  

Transjordan--a purely Arab state in which no Jew was thenceforth allowed to live--was created itself in 1922 from some 80% of the total original 1920 territory. Regarding  the non-apportioned areas of the Mandate,  Jews as well as Arabs were legally entitled to live on those lands. Indeed, Jews have thousands of years of history linking them to those lands, owned property, and lived there up until their massacres by Arabs in the 1920s and 1930s. Additionally, many, if not most, of the Arabs themselves were newcomers, pouring in -- as the Records of the Permanent Mandates Commission, quotes from Colonial Secretary and later Prime Minister Winston Churchill,  and other solid evidence and  documentation show -- from Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere in the region...Arabs creating Arab settlements in the Mandate of Palestine.

General Wheeler's document also envisioned Israel acquiring an adequate buffer zone atop the West Bank mountain ridge, in command of the high ground, giving it at least some semblance of an in-depth defense.  Guess where most of the settlements of the Jews have subsequently been constructed?

A three-thousand mile wide, over 300 million-strong America --with two huge oceans buffering it--fights wars and has acquired territories (to which it had no historical ties) thousands of miles away from home in the name of its own national interests, but demands that the Jews once again become a 9-mile wide sub-rump state, baring the necks of their kids to those who deliberately target them for terror and disembowelment. That's what the White House "rebuke" is currently all about. The alleged Fatah "moderates" of the latter day Arafatians, with the West's darling Mahmoud Abbas at the lead,  have as much or more  Jewish blood on their hands as the Hamas and Islamic Jihad crew. The latter are simply more honest to the West about their murderous intent. Both reveal their true rejectionist intentions to their own people in Arabic.
 

Moving ahead, here's what President Ronald Reagan had to say about all of this on September 1, 1982...

In the pre-1967 borders, Israel was barely 10-miles wide... the bulk of Israel's population within artillery range of hostile armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again.

In 1988, Secretary of State George Schultz declared... 

Israel will never negotiate from or return to the 1967 borders.

In the 1990s, during the Clinton years (and despite the later pressure brought to bear on Prime Minister Ehud Barak to sweeten the pot at Camp David and Taba in 2000, by offering Yasser Arafat far more than 242 called for), official policy, as expressed by Secretary of State Warren Christopher in 1997, was that, "Israel is entitled to secure and defensible borders," a la 242.

Alright...enough of important background information.

President Obama and his long list of hostile, anti-Israel advisors and appointees are a marriage made in Heaven for the perpetually Arabist-dominated, anti-Israel crew of the State Department--folks who opposed the rebirth of Israel from the get-go.

Israel is entitled to a fair, territorial compromise in territories that it has been repeatedly attacked from and has thousands of years of historical connections to.

That Arabs--who claim the entire region as solely their own and who have continuously subjugated scores of millions of native, non-Arabs who have dared to disagree--refuse such a compromise is no shock. They refuse to recognize a sole, miniscule, 9-mile wide state for Jews let alone anything larger, while demanding a 22nd state of their own-- second, not first, Arab one created in the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine.

About Gerald A. Honigman
Gerald A. Honigman is a Florida educator who has done extensive doctoral studies in Middle Eastern Affairs, created and conducted counter-Arab propaganda programs for college youth, lectured on numerous campuses and other platforms, and has publicly debated many Arab spokesmen. He is the author of The Quest for Justice in the Middle East. His articles and op-eds have been published in dozens of newspapers, magazines, academic journals and websites all around the world. Link