Romney Tells the Key Truth Needed to Comprehend the Israel-Palestinian Conflict
That behavior represents the conclusion that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is not ready to make peace. It seems quite reasonable to posit that Obama has reached the same conclusion as the one Romney articulated.
To begin with, remember there are two Palestinian leaderships today. Hamas is openly against peace, though a surprising number of people seem to forget that periodically. The PA is genuinely, relatively more moderate — a factor that has some benefits — and certainly far more subtle. But on this issue the bottom line is precisely the same.
Why doesn’t the PA want a real, lasting peace? For a lot of reasons. Much, not all but probably 90 percent, of the leadership still believes that they should and will take power in all of the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. Even though they know that Israel is not likely to go away easily or even at all, they hope that something will turn up.
Beyond that, they know that their colleagues and even rivals will use any sign of compromise — the kind of behavior needed to end the conflict in a treaty — as evidence of treason. Their career will be finished and their life might be in danger. Sure, PA “president” Mahmoud Abbas might tell a small meeting of Jews that Israel is here to stay but when it leaks into the press and provokes great anger among the other leaders, he passionately denies it. He certainly isn’t going to embody it in a document that would be simultaneously peace treaty and his own death warrant.
Third, the Palestinian leaders know that they have inflamed their people for decades and spoken endlessly of the evil perfidy of the Jews and the inevitability of total victory. Palestinian public opinion won’t sustain real compromise and the acceptance of Israel as a neighbor. The PA’s own television, radio, newspapers, leaders’ speeches, schools, and mosque sermons by its appointed prayer leaders repeat the hard line every day, indeed every hour.
I have written hundreds of pages of books and articles on the details of this issue. Space is insufficient here, but please consider this one example. Barack Obama took office in January 2009 as the most pro-Palestinian president in U.S. history. He offered to give the Palestinians the most and Israel the least. It was a dream situation if the PA and Palestinians wanted to make peace on the best possible terms.
Yet what happened? The PA leadership shafted Obama. When Abbas arrived in Washington for their first meeting, he made clear in a Washington Post interview that he had no intention of negotiating and reaching a deal. When Obama announced in late 2010 that he was about to launch intensive negotiations at Camp David, Abbas refused the invitation. And when Obama pressed Israel into an unprecedented nine-month-long construction freeze on the West Bank, the PA refused to talk at all until just before the expiration of that period, and then only to demand an extension.
So, of course, Romney was correct in what he said. Indeed, he was merely stating the obvious. In the current upside-down era, telling the truth is heresy, or at least there are powerful establishment figures who try to make it seem so.
What’s most important here, though, is not just this specific statement or this particular issue but a basic principle absolutely vital to the survival of the United States: If we are barred from recognizing the nature of our problems we will surely find no solutions.
****
Thumbnail image courtesy shutterstock / albund
“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”
George Orwell
Yes, we are living in the dystopia that Orwell described in 1984. I laid out my own thought crimes here: http://clarespark.com/2012/09/16/thought-crimes/. And MSM is perpetuating the mind-management that we all deplore. Worse, Republican pundits have broken ranks in their ill-advised complaints about Romney’s talk in May.
Unfortunately nothing has the remotest chance of happening until this naive, gullible and clueless clown falls off the world stage. Even with him gone it will take an exceptional US leader with exceptional courage to put the Palestinians in their place, as in, enough is enough. Either that or we ship the whole bloody lot of you including the Gazaians to the desert somewhere in Libya or the other side of the Suez Canal.
It will never happen as long as Europe pays them to be welfare rats and the UN forces Israel to subsidize their health, food and power needs.
Seriously, who forces an enemy combatant to supply their enemy with all their creature needs when the enemy reciprocates with bombs and bullets?
The US does, not just the UN.
Romney was absolutely correct. The Palestinian economy is based on the ongoing conflict, with big money rolling in from donations, smuggling, blackmarketeering, weapons trade, and militias as mercenaries. If the conflict were to end there would be a lot of people out of work and the bosses would be losing big money, and they just might have to get real jobs
In the case of the PA, we (Israel) also arm our own enemies.
4) Not making peace has not only been richly rewarding but it’s also formalized the power structure. Make peace and the “leaders” lose control and actually have to work for a living. Creating is hard, destroying is easy.
5) Make peace, or eradicate the Jews, and the biggest bogeyman in the Middle East dies. If they can’t blame the Jews then what… blame themselves for their depraved culture? Blame themselves for the poverty? Blame themselves for the illiteracy? Nah, keep blaming the Jews and keep banking Uncle Sam’s cash.
They have everything they need – their own psedo-state, a calm “enemy” to handle their populace with, cushy jons with few elections, not screaming about internal civil rights from the rest of the world – why would they want an agreement?
“Make peace, or eradicate the Jews” – this statement is proof of a total (but very common) western misunderstanding of Islam. Why? Because eradicating the Jews is a pro-peace act for Islam, in that it furthers their aspirations of a global Caliphate which when established, will indeed mean; that there is peace on earth via Sharia (the supreme law of their allah); which absolutely cannot be questioned without resulting in certain death for the quisling.
Abbas can fein a desire for western “peace” in order to further an agenda and get tons of money and international political and propaganda support; but he absolutely cannot commit to anything which may bring into question his real fidelity to Islam. He would be killed instantly. Islam is all about power, and encourages its own to lie, cheat, steal, deceive, murder, to take revenge etc. in order to achieve it … this is common knowledge and is considered “holy” because it’s in the Quran, Sunna and Hadith.
We’re not dealing with sane people unfortunately; we’re dealing with totally deceived individuals that know nothing (yet) of truth and justice except that which is totally screwed up in their unholy Qurans. This is a very sad situation; especially for those that refuse to acknowledge Islam for what it truly is; in spite of all the evidence worldwide.
Husky, you are bang on the money with this comment. We have to transpose ourselves into an Islamic worldview in order to understand it properly. “Peace”,”Justice”,”Charity” mean totally different things in the context of this worldview. Deceit can be good. Murder, torture, cruelty can be holy, violence itself sanctified, (not merely seen as a necessary evil in some circumstances). Islam is a complex organisation of institutionalised savagery. The Left talks about irrational fear of “the other” but they don’t even enquire as to what that “otherness” consists of. They assume “the other” is the same as they are. This is clearly ridiculous.
I find it sad, that the left leaning Jews who are somewhat pro Israel don’t see that the press is bias on all issues. Therefore they will vote for Obama.
every word Mr Rubin says about the middle east is true, beyond doubt. If even Mitt Romney knows it, then it’s not exactly a secret.
What Mr. Rubin doesn’t say is that the Democrat party is the US equivalent of Hamas.
They don’t want compromise, because they abhor the constitution. Nothing short of a full dictatorship will satisfy them.
This is the plain truth nobody in a “responsible” position is willing to say, because if someone does, similar to the fate of Mr Abbas who would surely die if he ever spoke the obvious truth, the msm will insure that the US truth sayer is banished from public view forever and humiliated for the rest of that person’s life.
Bingo! There have been plenty of cases in the past where the gop was willing to compromise just enough to get a real problem solved and the dems balked because a republican was president and they would rather die than give that victory to the gop. They would rather the country burn with the fires of a thousand suns than allow their enemies be given even a perceived victory.
How true. I have seen that sick Democrat partisanship in the California legislature. If a bill is sponsored by a Republican it is dead on arrival, the merits be damned. When in control the Democrats will not let a Republican get credit for anything.
Somebody tell The One to join the club. The PA, PLO, Hamas, whatever you call the various groups we file under the portmanteau term “Palestinians”, always double-cross everybody else.
The reason is simple. It’s called, their dogma. It goes rather like this;
That’s it. The entire “Palestinian” cum “Islamic” worldview in a nutshell.
And it isn’t even original. I was just reading the book What If? – The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, edited by Robert Cowley. It’s a collection of “counterfactual speculations” on how the world might be different if certain battles, wars, etc., had had a different outcome than they actually did. Things like “what if Alexander the Great had died before conquering half of Asia?” (He nearly did, at age 22, at the Battle of the Granicus River in 334 BC.) Or, “What if D-Day had failed?” (It could have, very easily; the most likely end result is that the first U.S. A-bomb lands on Berlin instead of Hiroshima.)
The one that caught my attention was “No Glory That Was Greece; The Persians Win At Salamis 380 BC”, by PJM’s own Dr. Victor Davis Hanson. What got my attention was the parallels between the Persians and Greeks then, and Islam and the West now. I quote;
For a thought-experiment, substitute “Israel” for “Greece” in that paragraph, and the names of the various battles of the various Arab-Israeli Wars (the Chinese Farm, etc.) for the battles. Or substitute “United States”, etc., for “Greece”. Very little has changed there in over 2500 years.
Further on, Dr Hanson observes;
In other words, we’d all be living in a modern-day Muslim country under Shari’a law. Which is in fact older than Islam itself.
Nothing much has changed over there in two-and-a-half millennia, has it?
Or even in the West, for that matter. While Themistocles and his iron men in wooden ships were risking all to smash the Persians in the Saronic Gulf, back in Athens Plato was hoping they’d lose. He stated in his Laws that Salamis had “made the Greeks worse as people”. Why?
Because he was unalterably opposed to both democracy and individual liberty. He believed firmly in “collective” virtues, based on the community acting as one. Only a minority owned property and possessed noticeable assets, and they made all the decisions for everybody. As Dr. Hanson says,
Which handily defines the modern-day progressive view of “the way things ought to be”.
Plato believed that a Persian victory would have re-affirmed the propriety of rule by an elite, which he (naturally) considered included him. He was very displeased that most other Greeks didn’t agree with him, having had enough of “philosopher-kings” with the likes of Darius and Xerxes harrying them for twenty-plus years. They weren’t about to raise up a home-grown version, no matter how smart he claimed he was. Half-a-century later, Athens made the mistake of thinking Plato was right, decided to try his brand of governance on the rest of Greece- and the result was the Peloponnesian War.
The point of all this is that Arnold Toynbee was more-or-less right. History does seem to run in cycles, and just because a bad idea has been defeated in no way prevents somebody else from adopting it and trying again.
Islam equals the Persian Empire, modern-day “progressives” here equal Plato and his cronies.
The question is, do we have the b**ls to be Themistocles & Co.?
If we don’t, the result could be the same as if the Persians had won at Salamis. But this time, it won’t be just the Eastern Med that goes down.
Nuclear missiles have a lot more reach than triremes do. And don’t need a lot of rowers to get them to their destination.
clear ether
eon
The Palestinians shaft Palestinians as well. There are no red lines…so to say.
Good point. When they don’t have anyone else to attack, they turn on each other, like street gangs.
One of their more visible mullahs said “You love life, but we love death”. Never mind suicide bombing; Islamic “true believers” love death so much they will kill each other if nobody else is within range.
This is typical of tribalist cultures. Everyone outside of the clan is “the other”, and anything which goes wrong is their fault. Therefore, kill them, solve all problems.
If the problems persist… well, there is always somebody else that can be killed.
The most obvious tribalist dispute in the West was the Catholic/Protestant confrontation in Ireland. It operated on the same basic principle. A cartoon from a Belfast newspaper from 1980 summed up how it might have ended.
It showed a little guy sitting in a graveyard with a rifle across his lap and a sad expression on his face. The caption said, “Here I am, the last living Irishman- and I can’t remember if I’m Catholic or Protestant.”
That’s how tribalist cultures die. Fortunately, they came to their senses in Ireland. (Well, I think they did. I certainly hope so.)
I see no evidence that Islam is going to “come to its senses” anytime soon. Mostly, I see evidence that it will continue to kill anyone and everyone that does not measure up to the standards of… whichever sect decides it is the One, Perfect, Ultimate Followers Of The Prophet this week.
And next week, somebody else will decide that they, and only they, deserve that title. And on and on it goes.
clear ether
eon
He’ll probably be Jewish.
Status quo with permanent freeze on settlement activity is acceptable.
Status quo with further Jewish colonization of “Judea” and “Samaria” is not.
Eventually, it will eventually make annexation of West Bank necessary.
And annexation of West Bank = Eventual Arab majority rule.
Maybe Markus would like to stop the “colonization” of certain white neighborhoods by blacks. If not, how dare he bully Jews into not living wherever they choose in their ancestral home. (Spend a minute contemplating the etymologies of “Jew” and “Judea”.) Israel, and the Jews, aren’t going away.
You’ve got things backwards. People who want Israel to hold onto their anscestral lands while refusing to give non-Jews living on those lands the same rights as Israeli Arabs are the real racists. (Or perhaps you want to go further and disenfranchise the Israeli Arabs too?)
If you think the West Bank is part of Israel, that’s fine. But if you say West Bank is part of Israel and Arabs living do not have the same rights that the Jews living there have, your nothing more than a frothing racist.
Arabs there want Israel and the Jews obliterated. Arabs are genocidal racists, and to hell with ‘em.
Arabs there want Israel and Jews obliterated. They’re racists, genocidal racists. The hell with ‘em.
Most South African blacks in the apartheid era wanted the Afrikaners to be obliterated. That didn’t stop apartheid from falling, and the Afrikaners are still around.
Ok, first of all, let’s not define Jerusalem, which was annexed by Israel (more or less) as settlements. Arabs there WERE offered citzenship. By your rules, we’re fine.
Let’s talk settlement freeze. There is a huge area that surrounds kibutz Har Etzion. That kibbutz (and others) was there BEFORE 1948. The Arabs invaded, and according to the account I heard, shot the men AFTER they surrendered.
During the freeze, there were people, families, there who had invested in building. When the freeze hit, they were suck with their money frozen. Not fun. A Freeze means you can’t buld a porch on your house. It’s makign people suffer for no reason.
Israle doesn’t build new settlements. If you want a peace agreement, encougage us to build them. Abbas will come running.
Greetings:
Eric Hoffer has asserted that what starts off as a cause, becomes a business, and ends up as a racket. Now, the joy that is Islam has been around for 1400 years or so, so it is almost self-evident into which of those categories it falls.
The supposed differences between the multitudes of muslim organization extant today all boil down to “slow jihad” versus “fast jihad” or for all the TV watchers out there, “good cop” versus “bad cop”. While the “slow jihadis” may prefer ties and no beards, jihad is the spirit that moves them and the bearded and forehead spotted guys are their muscular confederates regardless of their moniker du jour. Their wish-lists of semi- to totally-extortionate demands are pretty much in serious sync. So, who would you like to be done by, the pickpockets or the muggers?
You see, it’s all Islam 101, just like back in the 7th Century. “Dar-al-Harb” gives and “Dar-al-Islam” gets, or else. Islam is the millstone. If your plan doesn’t include limiting, undermining, or destroying the Islam ideology, you don’t have a plan. You have a hope.
That is why the Liberals insist on the code of Politically Correct language, By speaking in absolute PC code, Real problems are not identified and myth hype, feeling and good intentions replace common sense, hard choices, real solutions, and hide the failure of the socialist solution that leads to absolute government dependency until they run out of other peoples money to pay for their good intentions.
I hope that part of the video gets exposure- he seems totally sensible and truthful. Totally unlike the naive crap we’ve been pedaled for so long on the Palestinian issue.
because far too many voters can no longer tell truth from lies
still, it’s the only effective weapon we have
and in this respect, truth and lies are alike
repeated often and in its entirety, truth will become the truth
Outlaw the truth. It’s unhelpful to the narrative. Positively Orwellian, isn’t it?
The Democratic leadership is trying to correct the misdeeds of the twin naqbas-that of 1948 and 1948
naqba of 1948-zionists steal Palestine from the Palestinians, must support the destruction of the zionist entity in order to end nationalism
naqba of 1848- US steals Texas, California, etc, therefore wealth of US illegitimately obtained, must be redistributed to Mexico by not enforcing our borders
ROMNEY SPEAKS TRUTH TO IGNORANCE ABOUT PALI-ISRAELI PEACE
Surely if the great Nobel Prize winning Messiah himself, the anointed, blest planetary healer, Barack Hussein Obama, can’t quell Palestinian rage against Israel’s existence and join both peoples in loving peace no one can.
Surely when history’s greatest peacemaker playing the honest broker favoring none fails to resolve the Pali-Israeli conflict, Romney being scorned for saying it can’t be done is speaking truth to ignorance.
What is the answer to this obdurate conflict? A Palestinian Anwar Sadat. But generations could pass before he comes. Till then anyone who tries to end this conflict will get burned. And President Romney won’t be one of them.
There are no good sides to this battle for Americans. It is a lose lose. why Americans love Israel murdering American military (Uss Liberty) but condemn Al Quada for doing the same thing shows the danger supporting Israel is to the US, from Israel and American Zionists alike. And of course, Israel’s loving their national hero Jonathan Pollard, Bibi demanding the USA release his hero to Israel so they can reward him as they are rewarding his wife shows Israel still doesn’t think there is anything wrong with betraying the USA… and I hate the USA sending our classified military weapons to Israel so they can sell them to their friends the Chinese.
But, I support the USA and you know how unpopular that is with Zionists.
They let you off again and you are not taking your pills. Pity.
You could have had a human life, with little effort (well, relatively little since we are talking about you).
May God help you.
When I heard Romney utter those comments regarding the Palestinians, I was stunned. I literally had to sit down and think about it. I have never, ever, EVER, heard anybody either in or out of politics actually tell the truth like that. It was SO refreshing. It was like a big burst of sunlight was let into a dark room, and finally somebody had the stones to publicly say it. I am convinced now more than ever that the United States, as well as the free world, will be in good hands if Romney is elected. We finally would have a president that not only sees the world the way it is, but has enough sense to say it out loud in public. This is a very rare thing, my friends, and with that kind of leadership you can go very far. I think Romney hit a home run by saying that, and you’ll notice that we’re not hearing a lot from either Israel or from Jewish groups in this country saying that Romney was wrong. That tells you something. And with the way things are with Hamas and Hezbollah, Romney has already proven his point.
Mr. Rubin, your article is OK, as far as it goes. It’s true that the Palestinian leadership is not ready, willing or prepared for peace with Israel. But, the larger underlying reason the Palestinian problem persists has much more to do with the Arab states than it does with Israel. Israel is mostly a convenient pretext. The truth is that none of the surrounding Arab states want the Palestinians to have their own state. Some of them like Syria, Iran, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Saudi Arabia have their own ambitions for that land and they have no love for the Palestinian people. If it were otherwise, all those uncounted billions in Arab ‘aid’ could have built them a prosperous nation anywhere in the region. Instead, that money ensures continuous conflict, which Arafat understood and which the present leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah and the PA also understand. They know they are pawns of larger nations. The Palestinian problem is mostly a symptom of the long term Arab competition for control of that region. Egypt wants and expects to be the regional power broker. So does Turkey. And the Jordanians, Iraqis and others don’t like the idea of being muscled out. So, the conflict endures. The Jewish state is caught in the middle, has no way out and no ability to resolve it. Nor can America. Maybe the best thing would be to foment conflict between and among the Arab states in that area, hope they exhaust themselves in massive bloodletting and then accept a long term settlement. The chips will fall into new borders and smaller, weaker nations. Somehow, the idea of a fragmented Syria, a fragmented Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt sounds good to me. The tribes hate each other, the rest will take care of itself naturally. In fact, this process is already happening in Libya, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere. None of the Arab states are immune from serious internal conflict from oppressed minority groups. They are, in fact, remarkably susceptible to civil war. Let’s roll with that, instead of trying to placate the implacable. Those folks never loved the west or America and they never will. Let em burn.
that “Obama has reached the same conclusion as the one Romney has articulated.”
Not at all. The “Palestinians” don’t want peace with Israel, now, or ever.
Romney wants peace, and thinks the “Palestinians” may want peace too, someday.
Obama, like the “Palestinians”, doesn’t want peace, now or ever.
Unless, of course, Israel is destroyed and the Jews exterminated.
Big difference between the two, right there.
No problem was ever solved by ignoring it, but the credo of most politicians, both here AND in the middle East, has always been:
“There’s No Money In Solutons! Whee!”
;-(