Is It Time for the Iranian Mullahs to Go?

 

President Trump has finished one job in the Middle East which has been on the “to-do list” for over twenty years. That, of course, was recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and setting in motion moving the United States embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. One can only hope and pray that he remains in office and on-top of this momentous project assuring that it is accomplished. Should President Trump not complete the embassy move within his remaining three years and not be reelected, then the next President could simply return to signing the six-month waiver provided in the 1995 Legislation calling for this relocation and place it back in limbo. That would be sad indeed. There was a threat which came from the various leaders of the Middle East about how this move would cause the entirety of the area to erupt into uncontrolled violence. Fortunately, the only real violence was contained to Gaza and selected locations for maximum effect in the Palestinian Authority areas. Sure there were demonstrations held for a day or two, three at the most around the Middle East, but these were obviously planned and though appearing violent and potentially destructive for the camera crews, they were likely more like the riot scene on a movie set with the action peaking when the cameras went on and some coaching and practice between shots for the noon and evening news shots in the capitals of the world. Watching these in person one would likely have seen them preparing for each live broadcast, “from the Middle East where rioting is ongoing,” But have we been shown the full extent of the demonstrations in the Middle East? The answer to that is a definitive no.

 

The media alluded to demonstrations in Iran after President Trump announced the embassy move and recognition of Jerusalem and a few had scenes of demonstrators protesting against Israel and the United States. In Iran this is a normal scene as this specific set of demonstrators are well trained and ordered in their mayhem and are employed ever Friday after prayers to whip up the crowd before the government official, occasionally the Supreme Leader himself, where, “Death to America,” “Death to Israel” and “Death to the Jews,” are chanted often rhythmically almost as if there were a conductor leading the chant. Even sports stadium chants which are often put to music are less synchronized. Such demonstrations from Iran are almost professionally conducted where a core leads a large gathering of extras in that evening’s routine. What is interesting is that there are protests still ongoing throughout much of Iran despite the camera crews ignoring them and the reporters seemingly having gone home. One has to wonder why these protests are not being covered. They have their own, “Death to (the person of their choice),” being chanted so we have to assume that these protests are not news worthy because they are not targeting the correct people to support the media happy story that Trump is a tyrant who won through Russian collusion and actually Hillary should be in the White House theme. That leaves one to wonder exactly are what the Iranians are protesting, why are they protesting, and what if anything should be done about these protests.

 

Below we have included an insider’s video placed on YouTube showing the demonstrations unedited and commentary free. For those desiring commentary beyond here, below the first video we include CNN coverage followed by Al-Jazeera English. After that we will give our hopes for Iran and the world, particularly the Middle East as Iran was placed into a beneficial position with numerous options other than placing everything into military conquest across the Middle East and could have assisted the people and made life more comfortable and, in too many cases, made basic survival and life easier for the working classes.

 

And

And

 

The Iranian people rose up against the government and the stolen election in 2009 in the Green Revolution, probably with hopes that United States President Obama, who had shown some interest in assisting Iran, would take their side allowing for a reformation of power structures and the people given their freedom and the nations permitted to engage in economic reform. When the Iranian Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad and the others in power decided that the protests had to end, they called out their special forces known as the Basij. These Basij are a volunteer paramilitary force who operates under the command of the IRGC* and are often dressed as civilians without any identifiable uniforms. The Basij are an internal security, law enforcement and special religious or political force and morals policing which use shaming and often severe physical violence and torture as they are given great amounts of latitude with minimal oversight. This was greatly evident when they were turned loose on the 2009 Green Revolution protesters. President Obama took a strong stand on the Green Revolution, unfortunately backing the government crushing of the protests with heavy tactics resulting in the deaths of numerous protesters. The Basij came riding motorcycles initially using clubs and eventually using rifles. The visual which portrayed the violence with the most emotion grabbing heartbreak was the needless shooting death of Neda Agha-Soltan who became the image of that failed reaching of hope. We are approaching a point where we may suffer 2009 Green Revolution redux. That will be the point where the world will need to answer the same questions again, intervene and support the demonstrators or simply sit back and cry over the violence and deaths.

 

Neda Agha-Soltan Shot by Basij Militias in 2009 Green Revolution in Iran

 

The coming days and weeks may be the first true test of President Trump and his foreign policies. Thusfar President Trump has been a mixed bag on foreign policy sometimes appearing to simply repeat the last item any of his advisors had whispered in his ear. That leaves for a mixture of views so disjointed that finding a common strand becomes challenging. His most steady positions have been his support of Israel and meeting his promise to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem, demanding that the Europeans actually carry their weight and meet their obligations to NATO and other treaties, and that the United Nations actually commit to the functions it was intended to attend and perform functions beyond, or preferably instead, sanctioning Israel as if they were the world’s sole problem. President Trump has shown Tweet-support for the Iranian demonstrators. We have included his #IranProtests Tweet (see image below). Of course, pressing the little bird on your phone posting #IranProtests is great but is not actual foreign policy. Fortunately, the State Department has also come out in support of the Iranian protesters. That is also a huge turnaround from their 2009 position when they were in lockstep with President Obama and selling out the farm to please the Iranian Mullahs. The problem comes when we look at what the Iranian power structure will most likely do when they grow tired and have had enough of these demonstrations. Their track record makes guessing their next move unfortunately all too easy.

 

President Trump’s #IranProtests Tweets

 

If only the world were so easy that a simple tweet including any # with name of problem would solve things. The news panned President Trump’s #IranProtests tweet as minimal and next to useless, a long call different than they reacted over an earlier White House Tweet. Anyone remember the drooling over the sentiment and great power of a tweet back a few years. You remember the Tweet of the century, or so one would have thought. We will include a picture to help you below. That’s right, we are talking about the picture of Michelle Obama with the seriously forlorn look holding her #BringBackOurGirls little sign when Boko Haram kidnapped an entire school of young Nigerian girls. That tweet sign was supposed to force the return of the girls because how could the terrorists resist such pressure. We claimed that tweet was worthless and we feel that President Trump’s #IranProtests might be a nice soft way of stating where he stands, but Tweets are not solutions, not when Michelle Obama did one and not now with Trump doing one. Perhaps a short, prime time speech on the Iran protests and the United States support of people seeking freedom and a governance which addresses their needs first rather than waging wars across the Middle East from Syria to Yemen.

 

 

The Iranian regime will, at some point in the not too distant future, turn on the protesters with ever-increasing violence. When this begins, President Trump will need to take a stand and do so with something a whole lot of a bit stronger than another #IranProtests sent from the Presidential I-phone. That is when Donald Trump will need to call up that Presidential Donald he boasted we would see once he was in the White House. He has made some impressive and very poignant speeches when abroad but this time he is going to need to make one of those style speeches from the White House quite possibly with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Norman Mattis (former four-star Marine General), Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff Joseph Dunford (an active four-star Marine General) and the White House Chief of Staff John Francis Kelly (former four-star Marine General) with the retired Generals wearing their dress uniforms just for effect and to make the statement in a manner which the Mullahs, even Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Khamenei will understand. The Middle East is where the strong horse is respected and all others eat sand, some literally. Many Americans will protest making such a gaudy show of the President surrounded by so many men of military bearing, but sometimes one must speak in the language your target audience, in this case, the Iranian leadership all religious, political and military will fully understand. Targeting the speech and framing the message, as seriously as intended is what matters. Would it help the President if the media were to take him seriously and not instead find every nit-picky thing to berate and weaken the speech and its effect as they have done in the past would be working against the demonstrators and their hopes as well as the President. We would hope that the media would take the speech and its intent and enhance its seriousness and weight as backing for the Iranian people, but perhaps we hope for too much.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

* IRGC = Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps

 

What Erudite Opposition to the Taylor Force Act Tells Us

 

An editorial argument in Foreign Policy titled The Smart Way to End ‘Pay to Slay’ written jointly by David Makovsky, Dennis Ross and Lia Weiner could not have been more off the point had they tried. They did correctly note that the aid the United States earmarks for the Palestinian Authority (PA) is intended (our denotations) to be, “divided into three baskets. The first basket, consisting of roughly $70 million, goes to electricity costs in the West Bank and medical treatment. Approximately $25 million of this basket serves to reimburse hospitals for medical care of Palestinians in East Jerusalem.” Also, “The remaining $45 million of this basket is paid directly to Israeli electricity companies to settle the PA’s electricity debts for services to PA buildings and debts accrued by Palestinians.”

 

Lia Weiner, David Makovsky, Dennis Ross

 

They then go off the rails by claiming should this money be cut, then the PA would be required to take monies from other uses to pay these debts. The reason these funds are paid directly to the necessary recipients is because the PA never paid these debts and had this practice continued a number of Israeli hospitals would have financially collapsed partially due to providing the free treatments of the PA and Gaza patients and the Israeli electricity company was intending to cut off all service due to overdue, by numerous years, payments which they were no longer going to stick the payments due to their Israeli customers.

 

Their next notation is, “The second basket of $85 million consists of U.S. aid that is tangentially related to the PA. Most of these projects pertain to roads, water desalination, education, and good governance.” This is a bigger joke than the shovel ready road, bridge, highway and infrastructure repair jobs that President Barack Obama promised the American people in his first term. These vital infrastructures are often repaired due to necessity by Israel and the waste and trash treatment by the PA is intentionally done in the most ecologically damaging manner possible. They regularly pollute ground water and then blame Israel for the tainting of wells their own people are dependent upon, as they get no direct water from the PA due to disrepair or simply not being attached to the water supply. Israel attempted to assist but when workers, including Arab Israelis, were shot upon, this work ceased unless performed under IDF guards. The PA then protested about the invasion of their areas by the IDF to the United Nations and Israel was coerced in removing the protection and the workers. We will leave it to your imagination what the next accusation was against Israel about not completing promised repairs.

 

The final basket is more tragedy than aid as they tell it as such, “A third basket, made up of the remaining $106 million, goes directly to projects that are completely independent of the PA. These include various educational initiatives and private sector development. One of the notable projects in this basket is headed by the U.S.-based Mercy Corps, which aims to improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of Gazans by improving economic growth, education, and health in the Gaza Strip.” Any private sector development goes over 75% to Mahmoud Abbas’s three sons and their numerous construction and other infrastructure companies. Further, there are kickbacks to Abbas and his cronies for every dollar spent thus often doubling or tripling the cost of any project and the enrichment of the PA and Fatah hierarchy. But these are their minor cost arguments.

 

The rest of their argument is that any cutting of United States aid would adversely affect the poor Palestinian Arab people. They argue that these are a people who have no control over their leadership despite the fact that they overwhelmingly elected them in 2006 and Abbas in 2005. Further, if new elections were to be held to find a successor to Mahmoud Abbas, the two leading candidates are Fatah’s Marwan Barghouti, the Fatah leader who is currently serving five life sentences plus additional twenty years in Israel for a myriad of lethal acts of terror and Ismail Haniyeh who is the former leader of Hamas in Gaza. Further, a minimum of seventy percent would cast their votes for the two leading parties in the Parliament, Hamas and Fatah (in that order) with another approximately ten percent voting for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a potentially even more radical terrorist group. Making their argument that the people are victims and not part of the problem is further undermined by a July 2017 polling by the Palestinian Center of Policy and Survey Research headed by Dr. Khalil Shikaki, the well-respected and known worldwide Palestinian pollster, where, “91% are opposed to the suspension of PA payments to Palestinian security prisoners (a euphemism for convicted terrorist) in Israeli jails; only 7% support such measure.”

 

Perhaps we should just cut to the chase and take everything down to the ground and forget high principles and grand eloquence. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is in all actuality and honesty the substitution by the Arab Islamic world for the Arab-Israeli conflict done in order to make Israel appear to have the power and numerical advantages instead of Israel as David and the Arab world as Goliath. Their propaganda ploy had worked to the best of their hoped intentions with Europe and the left worldwide lining up behind the poor, downtrodden, unfortunate Arab victims and pulling all sympathy away from Israel. Now the Arab world can berate Israel and feel good about themselves and read in the Western media how they are so feeling and taking the side of the poor, downtrodden, unfortunate Palestinian Arab victims instead of reading how six Arab nations’ armies crossed the Israeli borders outnumbering Israel a hundred planes to one and five thousand men to one and five hundred tanks to one and then read a week later how Israel miraculously survived and even defeated these combined forces. The reality is those same six Arab nations are simply biding their time waiting for the perfect moment to pounce across the Israel borders after using the Palestinian Arab areas as staging zones claiming to have entered these zones to protect innocent victims of Israeli hegemony. There is the reality as simply as we can state the truth which nobody desires to say.

 

The Arab-Israeli conflict, and let us stop being rubes for a plain case of Taqiyya and call this what it is, the Arab-Israeli conflict is about two completely opposing worldviews and positions. The Israeli position is and always has been peace. Israel surrendered 78% of the British Mandate to provide the Arabs with a homeland which we today call Jordan whose population is 80% Palestinian Arabs, if that terminology is to have any true meaning. Then when the United Nations voted on November 30, 1947, to further divide the British Mandate resulting in the Arabs gaining another 11% and Israel getting only half of the remainder after Jordan, also 11% with two-thirds of the Israel portion being Negev Desert, Israel agreed while the Arabs rejected starting an Arab-Jew Civil War in the remaining 22% as a preemptory start to the ensuing May 15, 1948, Israel independence marred by those six Arab armies and numerous militias attempting to eradicate the Jewish State at her inception. Israel is said to have won, survived would be more accurate as when the Arabs rejected the General Assembly Resolution 181, that resolution basically ceased to exist leaving the entirety of the 22% of the remaining British Mandate, as promised by the Churchill White Papers, to the Jewish State presumably backed by the British Crown, though you would have had a hard time believing this as many British as well as Nazi officers from World War II advised the Egyptians and Jordanians standing together all but side-by-side. The result was Israel lost Judea and Samaria to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt and both nations flooded these areas with Arab refugees and other Arabs they wished to reward with land or simply displace from lands they held. The Jews in these areas were thrown from their homes and properties and sent to Israel, if they were fortunate.

 

Then there were the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War which were both initiated by the Arab forces and had numerous armies against Israel, yet Israel managed to prevail in these wars. Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza despite Egypt’s illegal occupation of Gaza to Egypt in exchange for peace and offered Judea and Samaria back to Jordan despite Jordan’s illegal occupied for almost twenty years of these areas. Egypt and Jordan resigned their illegally occupied areas but refused to allow their citizens to return from these areas knowing they would cause a demographic nightmare for Israel as well as a security nightmare. The Arab-Israeli conflict comes down to one simple fact, the Arabs refuse to permit Israel to exist. Israel, by her actions, is not attempting to conquer Arab lands, their usual claim. Israel only seeks to retain her 22% of the British Mandate and is willing to permit the Arabs in Gaza to become a nation, Hamasatan or West Iran, choose whatever name they wish, and allow semi autonomy for the Arabs in Judea and Samaria in Areas A and B while Israel retains most of Area C. Israel cannot permit the Arabs to have an independent state along the 1949 Armistice Lines (ala Green Line aka 1967 Lines) as that would place Arab rockets on the crest of the highlands overlooking the central plains of Israel which includes around three-quarters of her population and industrial zones as well as her main international airport. Truth be told, if the world were honest, as they were when creating Pakistan and millions were relocated from one area to the other and vice-versa, they would allow the Arabs to sell their properties in Judea and Samaria and even receive a relocation allowance from Israel and have them relocate to Jordan, Egypt, or whatever Arab nations or other nation willing to house them and end this impasse once and for all. But the world is not honest and as we have stated, they want to have Israel face these crippling problems with the hopes that Israel will fail before the pressures and thus appease the Arabs.

 

Plain English, the Arab-Israeli conflict are two implacable enemies, not prospective peace partners. The Palestinian Arab leadership and the people themselves have stated that the only solution that they will accept is Israel either eradicated or under Arab rule and every Jew dead. That is not something which can be settled over any peace process in all of history. The Arabs, like the Europeans, spent half their time stealing wealth from the Jews or murdering them and the other half living in an uneasy peace with an additional tax, the Jiyza, placed on the Jews as Dhimmis. Now that the Jews have their homelands returned and rule themselves the Arabs no longer can collect the Jiyza, the Jews are no longer Dhimmi but are instead proud and armed, something not permitted Dhimmi, and the Arabs cannot accept that they were defeated because since they left Mecca and Medina their book, the Quran, guaranteed they would rule the entire world, destroy the Jews and never ever lose a war. Europe is about to learn this lesson of how it is to have Arabs living within your society and desiring all of it for themselves and you enslaved or dead. Europe, learn from Israel, lighting candles and listening to the Arabs sweet songs of commiserating over your loss while handing out sweet candies to celebrate in private is not exactly a recipe for survival. Your ancestors understood Arab Muslim desires to conquer their lands and fought back sometimes successfully and others not so much which is why we are having the crazed discussion about Jews and Christians having no claim to Jerusalem. These are both societal struggles and only one can survive within any national boundary. As an object lesson, allow us to close with a little tale about the Camel and the tent, it is an Arab tale told where they are to learn from the camel and to never be that Arab.

 

 

It was a cold winter night. An Arab was resting in his tent when his camel peeped inside and asked, “Master, it’s very cold outside. Please allow me to put my head inside your tent.”
The kind master took pity on the poor animal and agreed to the camel’s request. A little later, the camel asked, “Master, please let me put my neck inside your tent as well.” Once again, the master allowed him to do so.
Next, the camel asked if he could put his forelegs in and again the kind master agreed. Very soon, the camel was completely inside the tent. But the tent was too small for both the master and the camel.
Finally, the camel asked his master to leave the tent so that he could be more comfortable. By now, the master was very angry and turned the camel out in the cold again.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Can There Ever Be Trust Again?

 

Despite what is being written and stated by much of the media in the United States, Germany and across the remainder of Europe by the media, there must be some relieved leaders and military commanders in much of Europe and in the Sunni states of MENA and, of course, Israel to have the United States reaching out to many of her more traditional allies. The United States had its nervous breakdown, where anybody that was perceived by the administration under President Obama of being or supporting European colonialization or could be guilty of privilege were considered as an enemy who had to be belittled and brought low, and the winner of the lottery of life ended up being an ally who despised the same nations as President Obama’s White House, which was Iran. This became an obsession and was to become the pinnacle of President Obama’s foreign policy to equal his domestic policy of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The wonderful result is both will have equally horrific results. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will cause economic disruptions and will probably force a number of smaller health insurance companies out of business. His Iran nuclear deal, the Parameters for a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Nuclear Program, will have far deeper reaching effects which may potentially be far more horrific and could cost millions if not billions of lives. It is this foreign policy which will have the farthest reaching of all effects and some of these may present themselves as desirable.

 

There will be some people making noise about a Sunni-Israel alliance which might even join as an appendage to NATO. The NATO talk is pure hyperbole. The Sunni-Israel alliance will be make or break on two specific realities; the first being any demands for Israel to permit an Arab state, especially if the requirement is to use the pre-Six Day War lines, the 1949 Armistice lines from the Jordanian front and especially if it requires relinquishing half of Jerusalem, and second on the next President after President Trump leaves office, especially if that President should be a Democrat similar in ways to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.

 

The first condition, especially if it should include anything concerning relinquishing parts of Jerusalem, could be a complete dead end and thus no cooperation except in the most dire situations. Israel cannot permit the return to those borders under any circumstance and anyone demanding Israel do so will face the stiffest resistance from the people. Even should there be offers of peace treaties with every Sunni nation, Israel should refuse even that offer as peace treaties are about as permanent as marriages in much of the Western world and any divorce on a peace treaty is far more serious than who gets the house and which car and who pays whom how much each month and all the other messy little details. The end of a peace treaty is more often than not war and Israel has seen enough peace treaties grow cold and in the history of the Jews over the past three thousand years, we have seen nations which allowed the Jews refuge willingly and with great fanfare only to chase them away within a few decades but only after murdering some percentage as a lesson. The Jews slaughtered in the Shoah, the Holocaust, were not in Germany or Poland or France or any of the European nations illegally, they were productive members of their societies and many fought for their country valiantly in World War I. Statistics showed the Jews fought in higher percentages than any other religious group, and yet were treated as traitors and dangerous citizens who needed to be exterminated. Trust, for Israel that should be as valuable as diamond, rubies, sapphires, gold, silver, platinum and even more rare than these and that is why Israel need be careful and guarded. We have been a trusting people and yet that trust was regularly betrayed by every power and nation with which the Jews, the Israelites, entered into from the Persians to the Greeks on to this very day. Giving the Arabs yet another state carved from the British Mandate which was to be the Jewish State would be an act of suicide. The Zionists surrendered seventy-eight percent of the British Mandate in order for the British to honor the second half of their World War I obligation to King Feisal allowing both his sons to be granted their own kingdoms, one given Iraq and the other Jordan. This left the Zionists, the Jews with a mere twenty-two percent and ever since the world has been obsessed with taking the remainder from the Jews. If the world desires peace and truth with Israel, the first step is to stop trying to destroy Israel.

 

The Sunni states claim they want the best for the Palestinian Arabs. They claim that the best would be for them to be granted a state with their current governance taking power and leading them. The same people who have stolen billions of dollars and delivered nothing. How about we try to give them something better than the thieves who have all but imprisoned them starting with Yasser Arafat and continuing under Mahmoud Abbas. Maybe the best thing the Sunni states could do is to give the Palestinian Authority leadership including their security commanders permission to keep their ill-gotten gains and move to Qatar or some Sunni state and enjoy the rest of their lives including their children and everyone else who gained from the theft of funds for all these years. Perhaps arrangements could be for them to take up residence in the same row of villas and high scale apartments in Paris with Ms. Arafat. Then they can work with Israel and resettle the Palestinian families throughout the Sunni Arab world after they receive a generous buyout from Israel for their properties and a resettlement incentive from a combined pool of funds from all honestly interested in settling the Palestinian Arab situation. Their leaders do not and never have had their best interests at heart and that is the misfortune they have suffered and that is the misfortune which needs repair, not Israel as many were moved into the lands by Jordan to make facts to use against Israel. That would be a start for winning Israeli trust and making amends for the years of threats and warfare.

 

That should settle the Arab-Israeli conflict and in some means give restitution to both the Arabs who have been victimized by the same people who have victimized Israel. Israel has no animosity against the Arabs in Judea and Samaria, as they are just as much victims of this conflict as the Jews. Once Israel has received the promised lands which are honestly hers under Article 80 of the United Nations Charter, then everyone can move on. That brings us to the future and what could be a promising which could potentially provide a secure future with the nations in the area actually making an honest peace laying all their cards on the table and then having the bravery and even audacity to reach an accord and actually mean every word of their agreements and build trust. Their agreement will need to be backed by the Western world if it is to have any hope, in particular the United States. This brings us to a crucial point, the promises of the United States. We need now to go back to the great Gaza deal made between Israel and the United States to allow the Palestinian Authority to prove their ability to actually form a functioning nation state. Israel was provided a letter which was authorized by both houses of Congress and signed by President George W. Bush and presented to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with conditions which were to be backed by the Office of the President of the United States spelled in the letter. When President Obama took to the Oval Office he all but immediately reneged on every promise in that letter and the Congress, completely controlled by the Democrat Party, refused to enforce the stipulations in President Bush’s letter which had they chosen to do so by the same margin with which they had endorsed its writing, they could have easily overrode any Presidential veto. This set probably the most disturbing precedent ever in United States history. Now a promise from a President which had all but unanimous consent from Congress is only trustworthy for as long as that President remains in office. Maybe, if the same party of a President is in office the promises would be honored, but even this can no longer be completely trustworthy.

 

This makes any agreement potentially to be made in the Middle East between Israel and the Arab nations, Sunni or Shiite, all but impossible unless Israel is willing to take what would be a huge risk in trusting the Arabs. Thanks to recent history, Israel now knows that they can no longer count on anything the United States promises even in an actual and ratified treaty if a President can decide that they can ignore anything even that which had the complete support of Congress as apparently Congress has no desire to back those things a previous Congress had ratified. This was not something promised and ratified in the days of the Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes or even John Adams (either John Adams or John Quincy Adams as it matter little) but the previous President whose promises were voided by his successor. The United States has been all but neutered as far as entering into relations with any guarantees of any nature due to this reversal of policy making the word of the United States a matter restricted to each administration and afterwards simply something which only has meaning should it agree with the new Presidential policy interests. Now when there are alterations in foreign policies made one day they have a guaranteed until date on them and that is the end of the administration which reached the accord, if even that long. The only thing which thus far has not been made irrelevant is a promise by a President while they are in office, something that if that were to fail, the United States would then have lost all credibility in world relations. Perhaps this will be the first which President Trump will make pass as he might make a promise and forget about the promise and then turn a full 180o making the promise disappear and ending the United States word having any validity whatsoever.

 

That brings us back to the forming of any warm relations and possible alliances with Israel and Arab nations. The history between Israel and any or all Arab nations has been one of violence and mistrust. One of the Muslim nations which Israel once had good relations was Iran under Shaw Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi but after the 1979 revolution and the return of Ayatollah Sayyid Ruhollah Mūsavi Khomeini Iran became one of the greatest Israeli enemies promising the complete and total annihilation of the entire nation and every Jew within. Further, Israel and Egypt reached an accord signing a peace treaty with Egyptian President Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Begin signing the treaty at the White House with President Carter watching on. When, while under pressures from United States President Obama, standing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stood down and an election was held electing President Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, the treaty between Israel and Egypt became under suspicion with the Egyptians claiming they were not planning on honoring the treaty though they were not going to go to war quite yet. The Egyptian people rose up and the Egyptian military overthrew President Morsi and held new elections which were won by the former Egyptian Military Commanding General, el-Sisi who on becoming President made known to Israel that he would honor the peace treaty. Still, for the span under President Morsi the treaty between Egypt and Israeli was truly in jeopardy and was not being enforced except through expediency. The basic problem is there are no real guarantees that any Arab nation can give and the backing by the United States is severely tarnished such that it can not be trusted much more than any Arab leader as with changes in any of these leaders can make all the difference as to whether or not these agreements hold any weight and have actual meaning equal to their intent.

 

Display of the Muslim Nations of the World in the Middle East, Asia and Northern Africa in Green with Israel depicted in Red

 

The one other problem is that Israel has entered so many agreements including a number before becoming a state as the Zionist Congress did when making the supposed ironclad agreement with the British Crown presumably guaranteeing that all the lands of the British Mandate west of the Jordan River was to be preserved by the British Crown for the Jewish State yet they were one of two nations (the other was Pakistan) who recognized the annexation of Judea and Samaria by Jordan, so much for the British Crown. Further, the United Nations also was supposed to back up that very promise under Article 80 of their Charter yet they too tried to cut Israel in half and giving Israel lands which would have been half desert. The Security Council fortunately did not agree to this motion forcing it to remain as General Assembly Resolution 181 which once it was refused by the Arab League became completely null and void and unenforceable yet this is the one Resolution the world constantly claims it must enforce. All of these point to one simply rule which Israel must live by, if there is any agreement which favors Israel, it will be ignored or overturned and if there is any agreement which is to the detriment of Israel, it can never die no matter how many times it is refuted even by International Tribunals because the world will still be eager to find some way of reviving it. So, there can be only one means by which Israel could enter into any agreement allying herself with Arab nations even with the guarantees from the European Union, United Nations, United States, British Crown and Commonwealth, the French Republic, the German Fatherland, Mother Russia, the People’s Republic of China and any group, combination, litany or expediency thrown together by the world to impress and promise that virtually every person and entity existing and residing on the planet stands behind, and that is only through the unending desire to believe in the best and the foolhardiness of her leaders and particularly the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Security Cabinet. The problem is it appears when people make it into such high offices in Israel they lose all common sense and in its place become overly optimistic that everything will be for the best. Where that is fine for the average person, but that may not be the wisest of conditions for leaders. Still, that is the reality and all the rest of us can do is pray and pray very hard and often.

 

Beyond the Cusp