Caroline Glick in Shdema: "Obama does not like Israel nor does he like
America. More and more Americans are disappointed by their president".
"Obama and Israel" was the topic of Caroline Glick's talk on Friday
in the Land of Israel cultural Center in Shdema, Gush Etzion.
More than a hundred people packed the hall in Shdema. They came from
Jerusalem, Bet Shemesh, Gush Etzion, Efrat, Kiryat Arba Hevron, Ofra,
etc.
According to Glick's analysis, Obama never liked Israel and nothing
Israel will do will change that. The reason is simple. His biography
shows that, since his youth, Obama surrounded himself with people that
were anti-Semitic, pro-Arab and with a Communist orientation; a
surrounding of people that not only deny the right of Israel to exist
but that do not like America either.
Netanyahu will never succeed in "finding favor" in the eyes of Obama
and his friends and thus Bibi should stop trying to appease and please
them. On the contrary, more and more people in America are very
disappointed with Obama and understand he is not the person they
thought he was. They are very disturbed with the fact that clearly
Obama does not like America and is not behaving like a proud patriot.
Netanyahu should do all he can to minimize the strength of Obama.
Instead of telling us that relations with Obama are "warming up",
Netanyahu should bypass Obama and directly speak to the people in
America, passing on a very clear message that Israel is strong and
does not intend to capitulate. A message of strength like that was
passed on by Netanyahu in his speech at the UN in September; a speech
that led to an incredible wave of support in America. Unfortunately,
says Glick, after that speech, Bibi went downhill and started caving
in. Caroline Glick called upon Bibi to get a hold of himself.
At the beginning and end of Caroline Glick's talk, videoclips of Latma
were screened. Latma is Caroline Glick's Hebrew website
(www.latma.co.il) in which, through satire, they make fun of the
leftist media and elites in Israel and thus delegitimize them. Latma
enables every Jew to identify with his healthy Jewish instinct.
Caroline Glick received a very warm welcome and support by the Shdema
public, among them many English speakers who enjoyed the speech thanks
to the simultaneous translation of Ruchi Avital who translated, into
earphones, Glick's Hebrew speech.
The members of the Committee for a Jewish Shdema and Women in Green
summarized Caroline Glick's message by saying that now more than ever,
it is clear we must increase the struggle for the Land of Israel even
more; a struggle that Obama might not like but the people in America
most certainly identify with.
This coming Friday, January 8th, Attorney Yoram Sheftel will speak in
Shdema (in Hebrew) at 9:00am on "the Dictatorship of the Supreme
Court".
The Committee for a Jewish Shdema and Women in Green
For details: Nadia Matar 050-5500834, Yehudit Katzover 050-7161818
Link to pictures by Gemma
Link to pictures by Rivka Ryback
Following is Caroline Glick's Jerusalem Post article of Friday, January 1:
Column One: A low and dishonest decade
January 1, 2010
Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST
Upon returning from Cairo on Tuesday, Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu proclaimed, "It's time to move the peace process forward."
The most sympathetic interpretation of Netanyahu's proclamation is
that he was engaging in political theater. It was a low and dishonest
statement uttered at the end of what has been, in the immortal words
of W.H. Auden, "a low and dishonest decade."
Everyone with eyes in their heads knows that there is no chance of
making peace with the Palestinians. First of all, the most Israel is
willing to give is less than what the Palestinians are willing to
accept.
But beyond that, Gaza is controlled by Hamas, and Hamas is controlled by Iran.
For its part, Fatah is not in a position to make peace even if its
leaders wished to. Mahmoud Abbas and his deputies know that just as
Hamas won the 2006 elections in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, Hamas would
win elections today. To maintain even a smudge of domestic legitimacy,
Fatah's leaders have no choice but to adopt Hamas's rejection of
peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state.
Clearly, now is not the time "to move the peace process forward."
No less than what it tells us about Netanyahu, his statement is
notable for what it tells us about Israel. Our continued willingness
to ensnare ourselves in the rhetoric of peace processes demonstrates
how little we have progressed in the past decade.
In 1999, Netanyahu was ejected from office by an electorate convinced
that he was squandering an historic opportunity for peace between
Israel and its neighbors. A majority of Israelis believed that
Netanyahu's signature policies of demanding that the Palestinians
abide by their commitments to Israel, and maintaining the IDF's
security zone in south Lebanon were dooming all hope for peace.
His successor, Ehud Barak, promised to remove IDF troops from Lebanon
and forge a final peace with the Palestinians and with Syria within a
year. After winning the election, Barak famously promised a swooning
crowd at Rabin Square that the "dawn of a new day has arrived."
Barak lost no time fulfilling his campaign promises. He withdrew the
IDF from south Lebanon in May 2000.
He launched talks with Syria in December 1999. For four months he
begged Syrian dictator Hafez Assad to accept the Golan Heights,
stopping only after Assad harshly rebuffed him in March 2000.
And in July 2000 at Camp David, Barak offered Yasser Arafat Gaza, 90
percent of Judea and Samaria and half of Jerusalem in exchange for
peace. After Arafat rejected his offer, Barak sweetened it at Taba in
September 2000, adding another 5% of Judea and Samaria, the Temple
Mount, and extra lands in the Negev, only to be rejected, again.
Barak made these offers as the wisdom of appeasement exploded before
his eyes. Hizbullah seized the withdrawal from Lebanon as a strategic
victory. Far from disappearing as Barak and his deputy Yossi Beilin
had promised it would, Hizbullah took over south Lebanon and used the
area as a springboard for its eventual takeover of the Lebanese
government. So, too, with its forces perched on the border, Hizbullah
built up its Iranian-commanded forces, preparing for the next round of
war.
Similarly, Barak's desperate entreaties to Assad enhanced the
dictator's standing in the Arab world, to the detriment of Egypt and
Jordan.
To the extent he required encouragement, the ascendance of Hizbullah,
Syria and Iran made it politically advantageous for Arafat to reject
peace. Buoyed by their rise, Arafat diverted billions of dollars in
Western aid from development projects to the swelling ranks of his
terror armies. Instead of preparing his people for peace, he trained
them for war.
Arafat responded to Barak's beggary at Camp David and Taba by
launching the largest terror offensive Israel experienced since the
1950s. The Palestinians' orgiastic celebration of the mass murder of
Israelis was the final nail in Barak's premiership, and it seemed at
the time, the death-knell of his policies of appeasement.
A year and a half after he took office, the public threw Barak from
power. Likud leader Ariel Sharon - who just a decade earlier had been
taken for dead - was swept into power with an electoral landslide. To
the extent the public vote was for Sharon, rather than against Barak,
the expectation was that Sharon would end Barak's appeasement policies
and defeat Arafat and the terror state he had built in Gaza, Judea and
Samaria.
But this was not to be.
Rather than abandon Barak's policies, Sharon embraced them. He formed
a unity government with Labor and refused to fight. He didn't fight
after 22 teenagers were massacred outside the Dolphinarium nightclub
in June 2001. He did not fight after the September 11, 2001, attacks
and the Palestinian celebrations of the slaughter in New York and
Washington.
Sharon did not order the IDF to fight until the carnage of March 2002
that culminated in the Seder massacre at Netanya's Park Hotel forced
his hand. Had he not ordered the IDF to dismantle the Palestinian
terror infrastructures in Judea and Samaria at that time, he faced the
sure prospect of being routed in the Likud leadership race scheduled
for November of that year.
Operation Defensive Shield was a textbook example of what you get when
you mix weak politicians with a strong society. On the one hand,
during Defensive Shield, the IDF took control of all the major towns
and cities in Judea and Samaria and so enabled Israel to dismantle
Palestinian terror networks by remaining in place in the years that
followed.
On the other hand, Sharon refused to allow the IDF to launch a
parallel operation in Gaza, despite repeated entreaties by the army
and residents of the South. Most important, Sharon barred the IDF from
toppling the PA or even acknowledging that it was an enemy government.
And he maintained that the Palestinian jihad began and ended with
Arafat, thus absolving all of Arafat's deputies - who were then and
today remain deeply involved in the terror machine - of all
responsibility.
In acting as he did, Sharon's signaled that he was not abandoning
appeasement. Indeed, he made clear that his aim was to re-embrace
appeasement as his national strategy as soon as it was politically
feasible.
Most Israelis explained away Sharon's behavior in his first term as
the price he was forced to pay for his coalition government with
Labor. So when in 2003 Sharon, Likud and the political Right won an
overwhelming mandate from the public to lead the country without the
Left, the expectation was that he would finally let loose. He would
finally fight for victory.
Instead, Sharon spat on his party, his coalition partners and his
voters and adopted as his own the policies of the Left that he had
condemned in his campaign.
To implement those policies, Sharon dismantled his government and his
party and formed a coalition with the same Left the nation had just
overwhelmingly rejected.
The past decade's major policies: the withdrawal from Gaza, the
construction of the security fence, the acceptance of the road map
peace plan, the Annapolis Conference, Operation Defensive Shield, the
Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead all shared one central
feature. They were all predicated on ignoring the lessons of the
failure of appeasement in 2000.
Whereas Defensive Shield's strategic success was owed to Israel's
decision to maintain control over the territory the IDF seized in the
fighting, in launching the wars with Hizbullah and Hamas, Sharon's
successor, Ehud Olmert, ignored that success and chose instead to
emulate the operation's failures.
To further his government's appeasement policies, Olmert refused to
order the IDF to seize south Lebanon or Gaza. By the same token, like
Sharon in Defensive Shield, Olmert announced at the outset that he had
no interest in defeating Israel's enemies. He limited the goals of the
campaigns to "teaching them a lesson." And of course by not seeking
victory for Israel, Olmert enabled both Hizbullah and Hamas to claim
victory for themselves.
By opting not to defeat Hizbullah or Hamas, Olmert communicated the
message that like Sharon before him, his ultimate strategic aim was to
maintain the political viability of appeasement as a national
strategy. He was fighting to protect appeasement, not Israel.
As we move into the second decade of this century, we need to
understand how the last decade was so squandered. How is it possible
that in 2010 Israel continues to embrace policies that have failed it
- violently and continuously for so many years? Why, in 2010 are we
still ignoring the lessons of 2000 and all that we have learned since
then?
There are two main causes for this failure: The local media and
Sharon. Throughout the 1990s, the Israeli media - print, radio and
television - were the chief propagandists for appeasement. When
appeasement failed in 2000, Israel's media elites circled the wagons.
They refused to admit they had been wrong.
Misleading phrases like "cycle of violence" were introduced into our
newspeak. The absence of a security fence - rather than the presence
of an enemy society on the outskirts of Israel's population centers -
was blamed for the terror that claimed the lives of over a thousand
Israelis. Palestinian propagandists and terrorists such as Fatah
leader Marwan Barghouti were treated like legitimate politicians.
Palestinian ties to Iran, Syria, Iraq and the nexus of global jihad
went unmentioned or uncommented upon.
At the same time, opponents of appeasement - those who had warned of
the dangers of the Oslo process and had spoken out against the
withdrawal from Lebanon and a potential withdrawal from the Golan
Height and Gaza - were not congratulated for their wisdom. They
remained marginalized and demonized.
This situation prevails still today. The same media that brought us
these catastrophes now derides Likud ministers and Knesset members who
speak out against delusion-based policies, while suddenly embracing
Netanyahu who - with Barak at his side - has belatedly embraced their
pipe dreams of appeasement-based peace.
Then there is Sharon. The man who built the settlements, who removed
the PLO from Lebanon, who opposed Oslo, Camp David and the withdrawal
from Lebanon; the man who opposed the security fence and pledged to
remain forever in Gush Katif. As Israel's leader for most of the past
decade, more than anyone else Sharon is responsible for Israel's
continued adherence to the dishonest, discredited and dishonorable
dictates of appeasement.
Whether due to his alleged corruption, his physical enfeeblement, his
fear of the State Department, or his long-held and ardent desire to be
accepted by the Left, Sharon betrayed his voters and his party and he
undermined Israel's ability to move beyond failure.
Auden's "low and dishonest decade" was the 1930s. It was the West's
obsession then with appeasement that set the world on course for the
cataclysm of World War II.
As Israel enters the new decade, we must redouble our efforts to
forestall a repeat of the cataclysm of the 1940s. Disturbingly,
Netanyahu's call for a fraudulent peace process shows that we are off
to an ignoble, untruthful start.
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