From Washington and Jerusalem: more bad news

1. You discredit yourself by quoting Tony Judt, a notorious anti-Israel writer who has been refuted many times.

2. "Greater Israel" is a propaganda phrase right out of the anti-semitic playbook. No Israeli government has any such designs. Security accommodations are, however, necessary when some of the inhabitants including the de facto "Palestinian" administration cannot control their own international gangsters and murderers, and when most Arab states are still in a state of war with Israel, and even those two who have signed peace treaties contain huge hostile populations and very many hostile opinion leaders. In fact the Palestinians have never kept even their most basic commitments, such as removing the goal of the destruction of Israel from their charter and ending incitement.

There is Israel. There is Gaza. There is the West Bank. The first is a State where the rule of law applies and freedom of conscience and worship prevails. The third is a disputed territory whose division is yet to be determined. It contains both Jews and Arabs; it was never under Arab sovereignty, the residents are both Israeli and non-Israeli.

The second is an irredentist terrorist area which will probably need to be quarantined for many years. These are the same folks who tried to violently overthrow every host Arab government, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, and had to be kicked out by their national armies in each case. Nothing to do with Israel; they are sociopaths. They are international pariahs and need to be treated as such. The US has no interest in them, strategic, tactical, or diplomatic. At best they are a humanitarian refugee case long overdue for resettlement in the Arab world. And the actual number of refugees is minuscule; most are elderly or long gone. Their descendants are not refugees, except by an Arab confidence trick at the UN. No other people have had their descendants given "refugee" status.

In other words, the old "two state solution" IS dead. In its place what is possible is a new two state solution plus a de facto refugee camp which needs to be very widely resettled in a way that would prevent the violent among them from threatening their new homes. As to the eventual State in the West Bank, its boundaries and security arrangements need to be settled by negotiation among the parties. Let's not forget the Arabs repeatedly made war against Israel and repeatedly lost. Like the man who murdered his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the court on grounds he was an orphan, they are not in a position to make "demands" but instead are lucky they are facing a humanitarian Israeli interlocutor rather than one of their "brother Arab" states who, in their tender mercy, have kept the Palestinians in refugee camps all these years.

If the State Department, one of these days, ask you to become Ms Clinton´s advisor on the Israel-Palestina affair, would you accept? Would you like that to occur, to have direct influence on it? I know that is not likely to happen (AIPAC would go bananas!!!) but let´s suppose. Furthermore, what is the first step you will take to tackle the influence of AIPAC hawks and find a solution.

I am asking this having in mind Cordell Hull in 1934. From his experience on the Congress, he knew that instead of trying to fight the protectionist lobby with racional arguments, he had to play by their rules, using pressure politics in his favour, calling the interest of "export oriented lobby". Have you think of any such solution for this problem. I mean you know better than anyone that the beggining and the end of the problem is at the Congress.

It is a measure of Obama's grandiosity or naiveté that he felt confident he was going to get Tel Aviv to do what he wanted. Obama hugely miscalculated the presumed power of the White House to dent the iron wall of the Tel Aviv-U.S. Israel Lobby axis. This assumes one could take Obama the man and Obama the phenomenon seriously to begin with. Alas, many have. Yet, for all of Obama's presumption, the colossal effrontery of Israel and of its propagandists in this country is far more remarkable. Just look at some of their comments here.

Obama was going to work his magic on the Likudites in Tel Aviv, was he? How was that suppose to work? After promising them the moon in Washington at the AIPAC convention prior to his election, and pandering for American votes while in Israel proper, Obama was then going to direct Tel Aviv to reverse a Jewish colonization policy which Washington had winked at in public and funded in private for years? And why was this going to happen exactly? Because B.H. Obama said so? What leverage did Obama think he had, anyway? The fact of being POTUS 44? Netanyahu sat on his hands, and that was that. He knew that Capitol Hill was deep in his pocket and that Obama was irrelevant, just like his predecessors.

The case of Hillary Clinton is more curious. She was Tel Aviv's first choice for POTUS, for all the obvious reasons. Yet, as Secretary of State, Hillary sounded for awhile like she had jumped ship. For the good of her own career, she has scampered back on board, having recognized her mistake. Now she is playing kissy-face with Bibbi and Avigdor. How the gentlemen in Tel Aviv must be laughing. Washington is a laughingstock. As for Palestinian "President" Mahmoud Abbas and his chief "negotiator" Saeb Erakat, they deserve whatever is coming to them for trusting Obama and Hillary. At least Obama is back down to earth, where he belongs. He's a blank and Hillary is a zero. Hopefully, George Mitchell will have the good sense to resign and go back to playing tennis, which he is good at. This marks the end of the Washington-Tel Aviv orchestrated charade begun with the Oslo "peace process". Professor Edward Said was right all along. Let's give him some posthumous credit.

Germanicus

I believe your contention that Israel agreed to a complete settlement freeze in the past, or any freeze at all in Jerusalem, is false. Historical documents between the US and Israel have refuted that claim. Just this weekend Secretary Clinton said there never was an agreement by Israel for a complete "settlement" freeze with any US administration.

If you can support your contention with an official reference from a signed agreement (not somebody's opinion) I am sure readers would welcome it.

As to "recognizing" a Palestinian State, there is no such State to recognize. Its creation is a matter for negotiation between the parties. Otherwise the Palestinians would have unilaterally declared one and hoped for recognition from those members of the international community which count (especially those who fund them significantly--the US and Western Europe).

The Palestinians know that to unilaterally declare a State on disputed land occupied by Jews would be a casus belli that the Israelis would respond to, to the considerable economic, social, and political disadvantage of such a state. Further, as a unilaterally declared foreign state, there would be no ethical obligation on Israel's part to provide jobs, social services, or economic support as they do currently.

History is quite instructive. Even before the Jordanian peace treaty, the Palestinians kept quiet, the Israelis paid the salaries of their school teachers, and a Jordanian bag man came over monthly with Jordanian salaries for the same teachers. As long as the Palestinians didn't force the Israeli's hand, they were doing well economically under conditions of peacefulness, and helped keep things cool.

As to international law, there is NO international law holding that the Palestinians are sovereign and the Israelis occupiers. Many distinguished international law professors have written on this topic. The chain of custody was (in modern times) Turkey to Britain to the UN to the partition which Israel accepted and the Arabs rejected. This made Israel a legitimate sovereign state, and the remaining territory no-man's land. Had the Arabs accepted partition, or even sat still without making war on Israel, they might have had a case, but as history evolved, they have none, except perhaps for humanitarian support for non-belligerents. Even there, the "refugee camps" were a consequence of Arab refusal to resettle the displaced persons and thus they bear a heavy, if not the bulk of the humanitarian responsibility. Despite this, they have consistently failed fully to honor even their limited promises of financial support

Finally, I speak only for myself. I am a former senior US Government policy executive, and belong to no organizations such as AIPAC or others in the so-called "Israeli lobby". As a professional policy analyst I call things as I see them.