I am not a journalist to track the news. So it is only recently that I have come across a month-old column in The Jewish Chronicle authored by the two co-chairs of J Street-Pittsburgh ("Obama: ‘You must create the change you want to see’"). By itself, it is of little interest and was not a news item even when it was published. It only regurgitates approvingly some points made by Obama in his speech to Israeli students when he finally descended in his presidential glory on the bothersome country with its insufferable Prime Minister. Remember the president's sharing Sarkozy's hot mic revelations about the "liar" with whom poor Obama has to "deal" so often? The column is hardly made more interesting by its arrogant absurdities, which include calling Obama’s decision to talk to young people (instead of the Knesset) “a way to elevate the discussion about peace above the typical rancor of their leaders.” Ah, those benighted rancorous Israeli leaders - so beneath the station of our soaring president and the "co-chairs" whom I'd call paternalistic were they not women. What is interesting is not what is in, but what is not in that column – nor is it in the Obama speech.
First, missing are not only the Members of the Knesset. Obama addressed young Israelis but not young Palestinian Arabs. This is consistent with what he, along with his many mouthpieces including J Street, considers the cause of the lack of any progress in the "peace process". Nevertheless, even his words could have provided a clue to the only realistic solution. He said, "Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland..." - and the logical conclusion could well be, "the Palestinian Arabs should build theirs". That would place some responsibility on the Arabs' shoulders. The Jewish state had been built and existed de facto before it was declared in 1948. All the attempts, if any, that the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza have made to create a semblance of a working state have failed - the latest with Fayyad's resignation. Lo and behold, we now find out, he "feuded" with Abbas, the "Palestinian president" (whose term, for what it had been worth, expired in January 2009). These are the two people whom Obama, in torturous English making two persons into one entity that is on a par with a state, called Israel's "true partner" - half of which is now gone. The only state structure that functions in the "Palestinian state", declared recently for the second time, is the numerous "security forces" that double as terror groups.
Unfortunately and illogically, instead of Arabs' responsibilities, Obama concluded that sentence with the non-sequitur of their rights: "Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land". Put this way, that right - paraphrased by Obama from a verse in the Israeli state anthem - is denied to them by external forces. Not by the corruption of their own rulers and their dreams of vengeance and violent takeover of entire "Filastin", Israel included, but by the Israeli government, to pressure which the young Israelis were called by Obama. Unsurprisingly, no mention of the Arabs' responsibilities was made by the J Street writers of that column either. In the co-chairs' view, "the existential threat to Israel’s future" is not the Muslims/Arabs' refusal to reconcile with the Jewish state and to end the war they've been waging for as long as it exists, but "the lack of a two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinians conflict" - which is, you guessed it, Israel's fault. Simple logic, however, should have told them that when one side has all the responsibilities while the other has rights only, the solution is as possible as the sound of one hand clapping.
It is hard to imagine that neither Obama nor J Street are capable of seeing that. They cannot have missed that the only concessions ever made in the "peace process", and in the Arab-Israeli "conflict" in general, were Israeli. Those were not merely some formal diplomatic steps, but colossal territorial sacrifices - the land that had been paid in the blood of those who had recently survived a European genocide only to be promised another one by the Arabs, over and over again.
Nobody expects territorial gains made by other countries in the aftermath of defensive wars to be relinquished to their prior possessors: ask Russia about Kaliningrad/Koenigsberg. Or ask the Czechs about the Sudetenland, with the after-war wholesale expulsion of Germans from there, characterized by Churchill in 1944 as "the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting." No Arab country had ever been a legal possessor of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, which were captured by Israel along with oil-rich Sinai during the defensive Six Day War, won under Nasser's and PLO's promises of genocide. Nevertheless, after its stunning victory Israel offered to forgo those gains - in exchange for peace. It was at the time not peace with the "Palestinians", who had not yet been invented, but with the Arabs in general. Nobody had talked then about another Arab "Palestinian" state in addition to the already existing one, Jordan. The Arab response was the "3 No's" of the Khartoum Resolution: "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it." After another victorious defensive war, Israel ceded Sinai to the thrice (at least) defeated enemy - for the empty paper of "peace", which would last only as long as Egypt is sure of its defeat if it starts another war. Then Israel ceded Gaza - to the nonentity of the "Palestinian Administration" - for nothing at all but hopes for a peaceful development, which had been seen as unfounded and lethal by whoever was willing to open an eye. Rockets from Gaza have pounded Israel ever since.
Why then, certainly knowing all this, Obama and his J Street fellow travelers do not address Arab responsibilities - the only thing that has always been needed for any positive change in the status quo? Why don't they ask for peace those who have ceaselessly waged the war - since the time when the Jewish state was at its embryonic stage? Why don't they ask Abbas who chairs the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was created to exterminate Israelis, in 1964, before any "occupation"? The PLO, whose ruling Charter calling for the violent liquidation of Israel has never been changed, and which has never stopped being a terrorist organization just because the West decided it no longer was?
The reason is simple. They don't ask because they know it would be futile. They know they have nobody to address there - neither Abbas, the halved "partner" of Israel, the fake president of no country and a doctor of Holocaust denial, nor the assorted terrorist gangs including the Gaza rulers of Hamas, nor the Arab population of Judea, Samaria and Gaza as a whole, which is ever ready to elect terrorists to rule them and celebrates mass murder including 9-11. It is a revolting hypocrisy when the J Street peaceniks, from the safety of Squirrel Hill (a cozy Pittsburgh neighborhood), call for Israelis to "demand from their political leaders to take the necessary risks for peace". They do it in full knowledge that those risks, taken by Israeli leaders so many times, are for continuing war and terror while the gains are mirages. This has been proven again and again whenever such risks were taken - with irreversible territorial losses, encouraging further terror.
Obama and his J Street cohorts are eager to submit Israel to those 100% risks for the sake of their political utopias. Knowingly unrealistic as those utopias are, they serve their purposes: to present Obama as a peacemaker statesman, and to fill the J Street co-chairs' leisure with self-important political activity and satisfy their leadership ambitions. Just like so many among the Jewish pacifist "co-chairs" in the US before and during 2nd World War, they care for nobody's peace except their own. It is no wonder J Street has decided to stop pretending to be "pro-Israel" to attract the kind of campus support it needs to "elevate" discussions to nowhere. With its vacuous pro-Arab rhetoric of unconditional "restraint" for Israel, J Street is a blind alley, a path leading to a deadly abyss.
