Kerry Forces Israel’s Moment of Decision. By Caroline Glick.

Kerry forces Israel’s moment of decision. By Caroline Glick. Jerusalem Post, December 16, 2013. Also at CarolineGlick.com.

Glick:

Facing the Palestinians’ continued defiance of the very notion of peaceful coexistence with Israel, Kerry is planning to present his own peace deal next month and try to force Israel to accept it.

 

There was a ghoulish creepiness to US Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to Israel last week. Here we were, beset by the greatest winter storm in a hundred years. All roads to Jerusalem were sealed off. Tens of thousands of Jerusalemites and residents of surrounding areas were locked down in their houses, without power, heat, telephone service or water.

 

And all of the sudden, out of nowhere, Kerry appeared. As Hamas-ruled Gazans begged the supposedly hated IDF to come and save them from the floods, and as Israel took over rescue operations for stranded Palestinians living under the rule of the PLO ’s gangster kleptocracy in Judea and Samaria, here was Kerry, telling us that we’d better accept the deal he plans to present us next month, or face the wrath of the US and Europe, and suffer another Palestinian terror war.

 

What is going on? Why can’t Kerry leave Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the rest of the country alone, even for a week, in the middle of a blizzard of biblical proportions? According to leaks from the now five month old negotiations, after 20 rounds of talks, the Palestinians have not budged from the positions they have held to for the past 50 years. They do not accept Israel’s right to exist. They do not recognize the existence of the Jewish people. They do not believe that the Jews have the right to freedom or self-determination. They insist on taking control of our 3,000 year old capital. They demand that we surrender our ability to defend ourselves from foreign aggression and Palestinian attacks and infiltration from the east.

 

There is nothing new here, of course, This was the case 13 years ago at the Camp David summit. This was the case during the Annapolis summit in 2007 and 2008.

 

This was the case when PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas rejected then prime minister Ehud Olmert’s offer of peace in 2008.

 

Facing the Palestinians’ continued defiance of the very notion of peaceful coexistence with Israel, Kerry is planning to present his own peace deal next month and try to force Israel to accept it. Although the text of Kerry’s deal has not yet been revealed, we know exactly what it will involve just by listening to what he has already told us.

 

In his speech at the Saban Forum on December 7, Kerry said, “For many years the broad contours of an eventual solution have been absolutely clear, and they were crystallized for the world in December of 2000 when president Clinton laid down the parameters for a final-status agreement. They were reaffirmed through the Annapolis process during the Bush administration.”

 

The Clinton parameters involved a near complete American embrace of the PLO ’s maximalist demands. The Annapolis guidelines went even further in the PLO ’s direction.

 

And now, Kerry intends to put forth his own parameters that will be even more forthcoming to the PLO than either the Clinton or Bush administrations were.

 

Like the Clinton and Bush plans, the Kerry parameters will involve Israeli surrender of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount to the PLO , which rejects the historical fact that two Jewish temples were built at the site that was and remains the cradle of Jewish civilization and history and holiest site to Judaism.

 

They will involve the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to make room for an anti-Semitic, Jew-free state that maintains its devotion to the destruction of the rump Jewish state.

 

Kerry’s framework deal will involve the mass immigration of hundreds of thousands of foreign-born Arabs, who have been living in al-Qaida-, Hamas- and PLO -controlled UN-run “refugee camps,” for the past four generations.

 

Kerry’s plan will require Israeli society to destroy its cohesion through the dismemberment and destruction of hundreds of Jewish communities. As occurred before the Gaza withdrawal, it will require the government to oversee the demonization and criminalization of well over three million law abiding, patriotic Israeli citizens who oppose the mass expulsions.

 

Kerry’s parameters will require Israel to surrender its ability to defend itself against foreign aggression and Palestinian attacks. As for the Palestinians, implementation of the Kerry parameters will guarantee that all moderate elements in their society, including among Israeli Arabs, will be overwhelmed and destroyed. The PLO state in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, like the Hamas state in Gaza, will be breeding grounds for global jihadists. They will actively incite, organize and oversee an armed insurrection of the Arabs of the Galilee and the Negev, meting out punishment for all dissenters.

 

As for the US forces that Kerry proposes deploying to the Jew-free PLO state, they will be targeted by the Palestinians, just as the Palestinians and the Syrians attacked US Marines in Beirut 30 years ago. And like the Marines in Beirut, they will be withdrawn in humiliation and defeat, but the lesson – that the Arabs perceive the Americans and Jews as enemies of equal weight – will not be learned. And, at any rate, unable to defend itself after agreeing to Kerry’s parameters, Israel will cease to be a strategic ally and be transformed into a strategic basket case. Its destruction will interest Kerry and his supporters just as much as the destruction of South Vietnam interested them in 1975.

 

Aside from being a more anti-Israel version of the Clinton parameters and Bush’s framework, Kerry’s parameters, and framework deal, have one other unique and particularly dangerous feature. Until now, US peace plans followed former prime minister Ehud Barak’s dictum that “nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to.”

 

That is, no hypothetical Israeli concession on Jerusalem, for instance, will be binding unless a final deal is concluded.

 

Kerry indicated at the Saban Forum that his goal is to coerce Israel into making irrevocable concessions up front, before the Palestinians agree to peaceful coexistence.

 

As he put it, “A basic framework will have to address all the core issues – borders, security, refugees, Jerusalem, mutual recognition, and an end of claims. And it will have to establish agreed guidelines for subsequent negotiations that will fill out the details in a full-on peace treaty.”

 

For the past five and a half years, Netanyahu’s strategy for dealing with US President Barack Obama has been to try to survive him. He’s withstood Obama’s constant demand for Israeli national suicide for “peace” by giving the bare minimum of revocable concession possible to keep Obama at bay.

 

But with Kerry poised to shove his lethal parameters down our throats, parameters that will require Israel to irrevocably accept terms of peace that will destroy the country, it is obvious that Netanyahu needs to adopt a longer-term strategy. Our goal cannot be limited to waiting out Obama. Our goal must be to extricate Israel from the two-state trap.

 

Yes, Israel will pay a huge price for jumping ship. For 20 years, non-leftist Israeli leaders have been trying to go along to get along with the Left, and the Americans and their ever-escalating demands. But Kerry’s obsessive harping, and his insistence on pushing forward with his disastrous framework deal forces our hand.

 

Either we pay a huge price now, or accept our destruction within five to 15 years.

Obama’s Four-State Solution. By Caroline Glick.

Obama’s four-state solution. By Caroline B. Glick. Jerusalem Post, December 9, 2013. Also at CarolineGlick.com.

Glick:

Israel has no reason to withdraw from Judea and Samaria. Absorbing the areas into sovereign Israel will not endanger the country demographically.

 

Inadvertently, President Barack Obama just made an important contribution to our understanding of the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

 

Since Hamas ousted all PLO forces from the Gaza Strip in 2007, Gaza has operated as a separate political entity from Judea and Samaria. Indeed, it has been a de facto independent Palestinian state, controlled by Hamas.

 

Gaza’s only connection to Judea and Samaria has been financial. Every month, the PLO-controlled Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria transfers tens of millions of dollars in US and other international donor funds to Gaza to finance the terror state.

 

Despite the clear distinction between the two areas, the US and the rest of the world have continued to insist that an Israeli-PLO peace deal will cover Gaza as well as Judea and Samaria. Obama always insists that a future Palestinian state must be “territorially contiguous,” meaning in a final deal Israel will be required to cut itself in half in order to give the Palestinians a land corridor connecting Gaza with Judea and Samaria.

 

But during his remarks at the Saban Forum on Saturday, Obama let the cat out of the bag. Gaza, he admitted, is a separate entity. A peace deal, he explained, “is going to have to happen in stages.”

 

As he sees it, a peace deal will involve an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. A post-Israel Judea and Samaria will be so wonderful that the Gazans will decide to join it.

 

Obama explained, “If there is a model where young Palestinians in Gaza are looking and seeing that in the West Bank Palestinians are able to live in dignity, with self-determination, and suddenly their economy is booming and trade is taking place because they have created an environment in which Israel is confident about its security and a lot of the old barriers to commerce and educational exchange and all that has begun to break down, that’s something that the young people of Gaza are going to want. And the pressure that will be placed for the residents of Gaza to experience that same future is something that is going to be I think overwhelmingly appealing.”

 

Before considering whether Gazans will likely behave as Obama expects them to, we need to consider the implications of his assertion that Gaza will not be automatically included in a peace deal.

 

Israelis and Palestinians engage one another for different reasons. Israelis are told we need to engage the Palestinians because they pose a demographic threat to our continued viability as a Jewish state.

 

In his remarks at the Saban Forum, Secretary of State John Kerry claimed that the Palestinian “demographic time bomb” is an existential threat on the level of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. If we don’t vacate Judea and Samaria as we vacated Gaza, he warned, we will be doomed as a Jewish nation state.

 

For the Palestinians, the peace process is supposed to lead to a satisfaction of their assumed yearning for self-determination as a nation.

 

Israeli demographics and Palestinian nationalism have been the basic assumptions upon which the peace process has been based. But the Obama-recognized fact that Gaza is a separate political entity demonstrates the emptiness of both.

 

The truth is that the “demographic time bomb” is a PLO-concocted lie. In its 1997 census, the PLO falsified its data and inflated the number of Palestinians by 50 percent.

 

They then projected natural growth and immigration rates that bore no relation whatsoever to reality.

 

In truth, demography is one of Israel’s strongest advantages, not an existential threat. Were Israel to absorb the Palestinian populations of Gaza and Judea and Samaria tomorrow, Israel’s Jewish majority would be reduced from 78% to well over 50%. While Israel’s Jewish identity would not be in doubt, it would be weakened.

 

On the other hand, without Gaza, there is no demographic threat to Israel’s Jewish majority. If Israel applies its sovereignty over Judea and Samaria and offers a path to citizenship to its Palestinian residents, Israel would still retain a two-thirds Jewish majority. And if current fertility and immigration rates hold, within 15 to 20 years, Jews could well restore their 80 percent majority overall.

 

Then there is the Palestinian nationalism issue.

 

Obama’s acknowledgement that Gazans will have to be convinced to join a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria exposes the lie at the heart of it. Since the League of Nations assigned both sides of the Jordan River to the Jewish people in 1922, the international community has insisted that the path to peace will be forged by taking land from the Jews and giving it to the Arabs.

 

First we had a two-state solution when Jordan, with its overwhelming Palestinian majority, was carved out of the Jewish territory.

 

For the past 20 years, we have been told that we need a three-state solution with another Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

 

Since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, we have had two Palestinian states – in Gaza and Jordan. And yet, the Gazans who we are told are motivated by nationalist aspirations have refused to declare an independent Palestinian state in Gaza. And now Obama is talking about a four-state solution – three Palestines and one rump Israel.

 

The Palestinians’ refusal to ever view the areas under their control as the focus of their nationalist aspirations indicates that there is something awry in the international community’s assumption that the Palestinians are motivated by nationalist aspirations.

 

And that brings us to Obama’s projection that once the Gazans see how great things are in post-Israel Judea and Samaria, they will join the peace train. We’ve been told things like this before.

 

In 1993 we were told that the Palestinians as a whole would embrace peace once Israel recognized the PLO and allowed it to set up an autonomous government in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. In the event, the Palestinians became more violent and radicalized and anti-Jewish under PLO rule, until in 2006 they elected Hamas to lead them.

 

In 2005 we were told that once Israel vacated Gaza, the Gazans would abandon their war against Israel and use their energies to transform Gaza into a Middle Eastern Singapore. Instead they transformed it into a Middle Eastern Afghanistan.

 

In 2007, after Hamas ousted the PLO from Gaza, we were told that the international community would pour so much money into the PLO-run PA in Judea and Samaria that the Gazans would decide that they want the PLO back. Instead, Hamas has grown more popular in Judea and Samaria.

 

In other words, there is no reason to think Obama’s sunny projection is correct.

 

Clearly without meaning to, Obama told us the truth.

 

There is no demographic time bomb. Israel has no reason to withdraw from Judea and Samaria. Absorbing the areas into sovereign Israel will not endanger the country demographically.

 

And the fact that the Gazans do not see themselves as part of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, (or in Jordan), shows that the Palestinian national movement is not what it has been billed as. Obama’s four-state solution is not about demography or Palestinian nationalism.

 

It is about making up reasons to force Israel to surrender its strategic and historic heartland.

The Tragic Situation. By David Brooks.

The Tragic Situation. By David Brooks. New York Times, December 19, 2013.

David Brooks comes out against the occupation. By Philip Weiss. Mondoweiss, December 20, 2013.

Secretary Kerry’s Derring-Do. By Thomas L. Friedman.

Secretary Kerry’s Derring-Do. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, December 17, 2013.

An “Arab Idol” Wows His Fans in America. By Lindsay Crouse.

An “Arab Idol” Wows His Fans in America. By Lindsay Crouse. New York Times, December 18, 2013.

Neanderthals and the Dead. By John Noble Wilford.

Neanderthals and the Dead. By John Noble Wilford. New York Times, December 16, 2013.

Evidence supporting an intentional Neandertal burial at La Chapelle-aux-Saints. By William Rendu et al. PNAS, published online, December 16, 2013. [check back in 6 months to download PDF]

Toe Fossil Provides Complete Neanderthal Genome. By Carl Zimmer.

Top Fossil Provides Complete Neanderthal Genome. By Carl Zimmer. New York Times, December 18, 2013.

Archaic humans: Four makes a party. By Ewan Birney and Jonathan K. Pritchard. Nature, published online, December 18, 2013.

The complete genome sequence of Neanderthal from the Altai Mountains. By Kay Prüfer et al. Nature, published online, December 18, 2013.

Abstract:

We present a high-quality genome sequence of a Neanderthal woman from Siberia. We show that her parents were related at the level of half-siblings and that mating among close relatives was common among her recent ancestors. We also sequenced the genome of a Neanderthal from the Caucasus to low coverage. An analysis of the relationships and population history of available archaic genomes and 25 present-day human genomes shows that several gene flow events occurred among Neanderthals, Denisovans and early modern humans, possibly including gene flow into Denisovans from an unknown archaic group. Thus, interbreeding, albeit of low magnitude, occurred among many hominin groups in the Late Pleistocene. In addition, the high-quality Neanderthal genome allows us to establish a definitive list of substitutions that became fixed in modern humans after their separation from the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans.

A possible model of gene flow events in the Late Pleistocene. The direction and estimated magnitude of inferred gene flow events are shown. Branch lengths and timing of gene flows are not drawn to scale. The dashed line indicates that it is uncertain if Denisovan gene flow into modern humans in mainland Asia occurred directly or via Oceania. D.I. denotes the introgressing Denisovan, N.I. the introgressing Neanderthal. Note that the age of the archaic genomes precludes detection of gene-flow from modern humans into the archaic hominins.