Israel and an Out of Control President

 

The initial volley of the final confrontation escalated when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu accepted United States Speaker of the House Boehner’s invitation to address a joint session of Congress pertaining to the situation with Iran and their nuclear weapons program along with updating the Congress on the situation as best as could be described of the state of the P5+1 negotiations with Iran presumably to prevent their attaining nuclear weapons. The necessity for this address to Congress and the over the top reaction from the White House was due to the simple fact that the President and his Administration refused to brief the respective members of the Congress on the state and intents of the President in the negotiations with Iran. This pressed the Congress to find an alternative means to gain this information. It probably was in the mind, even if just subliminally, of Speaker Boehner when he chose to make the invitation with minimal lead time in informing the White House, a lead time which though denied by the Administration did exist as was leaked but ignored by much of the mainstream media with their failure to mention the thirty minutes before initiating the invitation the White House had been informed. As far as waiting for Presidential approval before extending the invitation, the simple fact that a previous communication of an invitation for Prime Minister Netanyahu to address Congress waited numerous weeks before the President responded and the Israeli leader gave this address on May 24, 2011, but the wait time would have been unacceptable as that would have pushed the address off beyond the end of the Iran negotiations making it no longer relevant. If one remembers, the White House’s demand which was ignored, strongly suggested the speech be put off until the end of March or even April, either date making the speech being put off until the negotiations were either completed or to be finalized within a few days as the negotiations had a March 24 deadline for a framework to be completed and the final agreement to be completed by March 31.

 

The assault from President Obama and the members of his administration started out well beyond cordial as they demanded that the White House had not been contacted about the speech, which was quickly denied and this altered the attack to claiming the President had not been informed as required by protocols and that the President’s approval was normally necessary before such an invitation was acted upon. Truth of the matter which never received coverage in the media is that there is no requirement for gaining the President’s approval as the Congress is presumably a coequal branch of the government and has as much right to invite people to address the Congress or brief them in private without observing any imagined protocols. The advising of the White House is merely an unnecessary but polite gesture and is not required before the invitation has been issued but solely upon its confirmation and then simply so the President may assign somebody or attend the address himself. Having somebody address a joint session of Congress requiring the President’s approval is as absurd a concept as the White House required to gain approval from the Congress to address the nation on national television or for the Supreme Court to require approval from either remaining branch of the government to invite the testimony of an expert in their deliberations and information gathering for a case before the Supreme Court. So, this presumed break with some imagined protocol was the initial assault and that the President had been insulted and took great feelings of disrespect and that the invitation was a slap in the face of the President was all over the top grandstanding. Truth of the matter is that the Congress has no requirement to inform the President of any actions they plan to take and the only requirement of interacting with the Presidency is to send on to the President passed legislation for his signature or veto as required in the Constitution, anything beyond such is out of courtesy and polite discourse, something which has not exactly been granted the Congress by the President since the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives as the President worked with the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to block any and everything the President disapproved of legislation wise by preventing it being considered by the Senate allowing for the charge of a Republican do nothing Congress. Respect and consideration of polite interaction is a two way street and had been completely absent in the direction of the President with the Republican Speaker of the House since he took the position from Nancy Pelosi at the beginning of the term following the 2010 elections.

 

The first volley after the speech which was of consequence was the determination by the Administration an order pertaining to the 1987 assessment of the nuclear situation of all known and suspected nuclear capable nations. The summary and full report on the assessed state of the Israeli nuclear weapons program was declassified with the Pentagon ordering the release of the declassification results, but the Pentagon retained the classification of information about nuclear research in Italy, France, Britain and other NATO countries releasing solely the Israeli report. This was done out of pure spite and was the shot across the bow informing Israel that any independent actions or any diverging from the exact demands and directives issued from the White House are to be obeyed to the letter or else Israel will be further compromised. This action was taken for a number of reasons other than a warning to Israel and at the same time a punishment of Israel for not putting off the Prime Minister Addressing Congress until the White House had a completed or near completed agreement with the Iranians making the address superfluous and the information in the address worthless. It needs to be said that the declassification of the United States Pentagon assessment of the state of the Israeli nuclear program was declassified before Benyamin Netanyahu had won reelection as the next, or continuing, Prime Minister of Israel. Any retribution for Netanyahu having the audacity of winning an election where the White House with assistance financially from the State Department actively campaigned and gathered funding from across Europe and from individual donors in an effort which had as its slogan, “Anyone but Bibi,” which was officially defined as efforts for a new governance so as to further conceal the real intent, the election of the Labor Party Leader Yitzhak Hertzog and Hatnua Party founder Tzipi Livni who were running on a joint ticket under the name of “The Zionist Union.” The initial reaction from the White House for this insult of actually campaigning and taking the steps necessary to win the election which included the honest and correct warning made in the afternoon of the election day as a means of spurring those who had yet to vote to make an extra effort to do so as the V2015 effort, in conjunction and financially backed by the OneVoice NGO which received funding from the State Department of $350,000 for the time period leading to and during the elections in Israel, headed by President Obama’s campaign director from his reelection campaign of 2012 Jeremy Bird and four other high campaign organizers. The final and most incredible tie to the Obama campaign is the rallying call for the anti-Netanyahu campaign of, “Change,” just change without the Hope part, maybe this was the reason they were unsuccessful. We had an article with some additional information including a directive from Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Lee Zeldin to Secretary of State John Kerry demanding information on the depth and breadth of the United States efforts through OneVoice, V2015 (aka V15), and the State Department in the Israeli elections titled Obama’s Deceits Over Israeli Elections.

 

The direction taken by the White House has been direct, overt and as obvious in its targeting as described by the White House and also personally by the President that they have been forced to reassess the relationship and support that the United States has granted Israel and whether the United States is served by providing continued protection for Israel at the United Nations and other international institutions. We gather the obvious definition for the somewhat vague other international institutions is actually any of the various international courts, in this case the ICC, International Criminal Court, should the Palestinian Authority bring charges against individual Israeli military or political individuals or Israel itself for presumed war crimes or crimes against humanity as has been regularly threatened by Mahmoud Abbas for over a decade. The most grievous of these efforts which the United States has presumed to offer protection is when the United Nations Security Council is petitioned by either the Palestinian Authority or any actual nation pertaining to the recognition and granting of statehood officially often including that said state should be formed around the 1967 lines which is a reference to the 1949 Armistice Lines which are also referred to as the Green Line and was at its forming written into the armistice itself that these lines were to never be intended or used as a border officially denoting statehood.

 

This clause was added by the Arab League and the Arab states involved in the 1948-9 War, also called the Israeli War for Independence or more accurately as the efforts at the founding of the state of Israel to, with genocidal intent, eradicate the nascent Jewish state by the seven Arab armies which included Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and additionally the Arab Brigades under the command of the Mufti of Jerusalem (it must be noted this was the Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini who spent most of World War II with his close friend Adolph Hitler and the rest of the Nazi Hierarchy), and command support provided by British and German officers who had impressive military command experience as well as some European pilots who volunteered their services and actually flew combat missions. In one instance in January 1949 in which IAF pilot Ezer Weizman managed to shoot down one attacking British piloted Spitfire aircraft killing its British pilot which brought condemnations and accusations from the British government, revealing they were aware of the participation of their officers and pilots aiding the Arab efforts.

 

Back to the present after a short interlude into past events and the implications from the very beginning of the saga of this fourth rendition of the Jewish State on the Promised Lands gifted to Abraham and established after the Exodus from Egypt and opposed by virtually every single government but the friend of the many who have received care after disasters or other emergencies where the Israeli relief teams arrive in force often being the initial caregivers and often to places off the maps and beyond the beaten paths, the smaller places overlooked by the main efforts which are almost always placed at the capital city or other major metropolises. These smaller Israeli teams may not be physically attached to the main effort or central field hospital, but do receive support and supplies and attention similar in scope and often building schools and a medical clinic complete with supplies and equipment and also training for indigenous local personnel and when these teams depart, always a tears flowing moment, with hugs and nary a dry eye on either side, the equipment and supplies in the clinic remaining behind and the school is complete with desks and chairs, paper and pencils, office supplies and equipment, a complete school ready for students, and even a remaining Israeli to teach and assist with training teachers. This is the truth, those who receive Israeli aid learn of the real Israel, her people whose love for mankind is beyond measure. Israel has won the hearts of people, strangers who received loving and caring as if they were longtime friends or family as this is the manner the teams who Israel deploys are among the most caring combined with proficiency and true empathy and love for those they assist as if they were angels. Still, President Obama knows not the kind and caring heart of the Israeli people, he knows little of the struggles Israel has endured, he knows nothing of the hundreds of thousands Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) who arrived without a shekel’s worth of money and a few suitcases hurriedly packed and often all that was allowed, true refugees who had also lost their homes, businesses, farms, herds, lost everything and came seeking shelter who instead of being thrown into camps and scorned were treated as the brothers and sisters they were and taken into Israeli society; he knows not of the influx of Russians when finally the Jews were allowed to return home and who have been taken into the society to the point that in some places such as Nahariya there are places where the language spoken is as often Russian as it is Hebrew; he knows nothing of the take of the Ethiopian Jews, the Indian Menashe Jews or the numbers of other Jews found scattered in every corner of the earth and all greeted and arranged for their return to their ancestral lands and the efforts to include them into their homeland.

 

President Obama does not recognize the rockets out of Gaza as much as he notices the Israeli response which according to him and the leadership of many across the globe, particularly in Europe and the nations making up MENA, that Israel must show restraint after all nobody was killed and the rockets only struck around their town or hits a school or home causing trauma as well as property damage, something considered necessary to note when any Gazan home is struck. He knows of the disparity in the death toll but refuses to actually include that Israel spends millions upon millions to protect their citizens from rockets while Hamas and Islamic Jihad use the people of Gaza to protect their rockets and that Israel not only takes care to protect its people as best they are able, but takes greater care to avoid killing Gazan civilians as best as they are able while Hamas and Islamic Jihad use the Gazan civilians as protection devices for their ammunition stores, their rocket launches, their command posts which the central one is located underneath the largest hospital in Gaza, and basically place the Gazan civilians in direct line of fire attempting to have as many killed by those actions as they possibly can; yet even by the United Nations and European examinations of the casualty lists, they all found that there was virtually a one to one ration between combatants killed and civilians killed, an unprecedentedly low number for civilian casualties for urban combat. By comparison the United States drone strikes ordered solely during President Obama’s period as Commander in Chief and the person who gave the final order for each strike has a ratio of 19-to-1 and approaching 20-to-1, a far cry from the Israeli numbers. Still, the one thing President Obama takes as proof that Israel is the main hindrance from the Arab Palestinians being granted statehood largely because Mahmoud Abbas told him this and it was backed by the Europeans from almost every front and because he believes that the Jewish state has to be at fault because that is what he has heard from virtually every mentor and teacher he has ever believed to be credible and an anchor for his viewpoint throughout his life. We need look no further than his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright or his childhood mentor in Hawaii, Frank Marshall Davis, his more contemporary relations with William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Rashid Khalidi, Carl Davidson and the Reverend Louis Farrakhan. These are the roots from which the tree grew and was watered with their ideals and politics which include beyond the Marxist and his indoctrination as a follower of Saul Alinsky and his political principles for political warfare and implementation of socialist views which he purported. These are simply the cause for the further irritation over the election victory despite all efforts by the White House to deny Netanyahu another term. President Obama has taken this defeat personally as if it was he who was in place of Yitzhak Hertzog and that Netanyahu had bested President Obama himself when he won the election. This is just a further look inside the megalomaniacal, narcissistic, vainglorious and overtly arrogant neurotic individualist who is the current President and Disaster in Chief who has decided to ramp the war against Israel to the top of his to do list and colored it in red, underlined in purple, and circled in cyan just to assure he will not miss it every time he references his to do list.

 

There had been hopes that as long as President Obama had apparently decided that while he was more than likely not going to lift a finger to protect Israel before the United Nations, all its individual agencies and the collection of international courts, he was at least not ready to propose any charges or motions against Israel, only permit such motions and charges to flow unimpeded by the United States on to their conclusion. This leaves one last concern, how far is President Obama willing to go on this path. Perhaps we will conclude with this concern in a little while. Apparently President Obama may not have requested the announced plans to begin talks at the United Nations on a new Security Council resolution to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace process as was announced Friday by the French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. This proposal is similar in nature to the Arab proposal this past December which was defeated by there not being sufficient support to produce the necessary nine votes in favor so there was no need for a veto by any of the five permanent members of the Security Council, France, Britain, Russia, China, and of course the United States. Fabius stated before Agency France Press (AFP), “I hope the partners that were reluctant will be less reluctant. It is necessary to move forward to have a solution to this problem,” In earlier comments to AFP Fabius stated, “Only the creation of viable sovereign Palestinian state… will ensure peace and prosperity in the Middle East.” He wished for negotiations to resume to achieve “a comprehensive and lasting peace accord,” which needs to be based on the principle of the “two-state solution.” It is already well known and documented that President Obama supports the two-state solution and goes further demanding they be formed along the Green Line, the 1967 lines, with agreed upon swaps which is the same as saying that all the Jewish residences beyond the Green Line and in East Jerusalem are to be abandoned and will likely be destroyed within days of the Jews being removed. The current make-up of the Security Council has changed since the last time in December when a similar proposal was rejected. We covered these changes and what they meant in our article If Only! If Only!!! These changes make the likelihood somewhat more promising that it will pass unless one of the permanent Security Council members uses their overriding veto, the very veto President Obama has been threatening to withhold. This makes the wording of the French proposed resolution extremely important and even more important is whether it will be granted Chapter Seven making it a binding resolution backable by military force if so decided or a Chapter Six which makes it a strong recommendation but a whole slew of Chapter Six resolution as well as General Assembly resolutions which are also simply recommendations which become void at whatever point any participating member decides that they no longer support the resolution. Such rejection may come at the very beginning or any time after, it makes no difference.

 

The final question is what will be the result and exactly how far will President Obama decide he is willing to go. Will he fully commit to a Chapter Seven resolution and all that it entails? This may be the upcoming test which will determine whether or not President Obama has gone around the bend and entered an area previously unthinkable. The French proposal likely will just entail another round of negotiations with a time limit for the two sides to reach an agreement and then if no agreement is reached then the Security Council might be requested to resume deliberations and decide what comes next if anything. On the other hand the French proposition might not only include a deadline for reaching an agreement but might have the worst possible of measures where it calls for the formation of an Arab state using the Green Line as the border including East Jerusalem as the new State’s capital city and for all the Jewish residents to be removed by a set date after which the Arab State named Palestine (assumed) will have become a reality at long last. With such a clause in a Chapter Seven Resolution could at that point, should Israel refused to comply, require military force used to enforce the Security Council Resolution and then would President Obama actually order troops from the United States military to join the United Nations efforts to force compliance and the removal of every Israeli Jew residing past the Green Line? It is all but guaranteed if there exists such a clause calling for the enforcement of an Arab state with the Green Line as its borders, there is absolutely no way in the universe, let alone the earth, that Abbas will make any other arrangement or permit any land swaps as he would receive everything he presumably demands and have it granted by the European and American military might. That would be his idea of perfection as once the foreign troops had presumably successfully forced the complicity to the resolution, he could then request the United Nations remain to protect the Arab state from the Israeli threat. This would place the United Nations forces in place of the IDF in protecting Mahmoud Abbas and his government from a Hamas takeover which would otherwise take place. This would also have these United Nations troops preventing any Israeli attempts to interdict to prevent terrorism, enter the Arab state to make arrests as Israel cannot depend on Abbas and his courts to incarcerate terrorists, they name streets after them, and the terrorists would have free reign as far as crossing into Israel as the United Nations troops are only there to prevent Israeli ability to enforce laws against crimes perpetrated on her, not stop terrorists from entering Israel or returning to the safety of the new Arab state with its permanent military, the United Nations protective force manned by-in-large by the United States military forces. Would President Obama actually send troops against Israel? I pray that offer never becomes available to him in such a manner as supporting a United Nations resolution as I fear he would not even need to think about it, he would do so willingly and send more than requested, but possibly less than required. Such a situation would probably be sufficient for Israel to retreat rather than fight against United States or European troops as that would bring too much hardship on both sides and the Israelis are not at war with the United States or European people and never would take such a position unless such was forced upon them. Let us hope that things are not ramping up towards crazyland, we will not enjoy crazyland.

 

Beyond the Cusp