Israel Is Its Own Worst Enemy? - NOT !

By Sherwin Pomerantz

30 years ago today, October 6th, Anwar Sadat, then the President of Egypt, was assassinated in Cairo by terrorists who were against the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel which was signed two years earlier on the White House lawn in Washington. The treaty followed his breakthrough trip to Jerusalem 16 months earlier in 1977 when he shocked Israel and the world by announcing his readiness to travel to Israel and find a way to make peace with the Jewish state.

I was still living in the US at the time and clearly remember the excitement that was generated in Jewish communities worldwide regarding this breakthrough in the way an Arab leader was prepared to look at Israel. He was invited to speak in the Knesset and laid out a plan for peace that resulted in the first ever peace agreement between Israel and an Arab country (for the full text of the speech see http://www.ibiblio.org/sullivan/docs/Knesset-speech.html). The agreement was based on agreed upon issues of mutual security as well as an Israeli withdrawal from Egyptian lands (i.e. primarily the Sinai) captured during the Six Day War. Sadly he later paid a high price for having taken this initiative but for those of us living here, the border between our countries has been peaceful for the last 30 years.

This all came to me as I was reading today’s op-ed by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, entitled “Is Israel Its Own Worst Enemy?” In it he makes a number of bold statements that demonstrate both his own misunderstanding of the situation here and the slanted information that gets out through the world press. He says: “Nothing is more corrosive than Israel’s growth of settlements because they erode hope of a peace agreement in the future.” And of course today everything over the green line is classified as a settlement even if it is a large contiguous neighborhood of Jerusalem, such as Gilo, Ramot or Ramat Shlomo.

But why is this so commonly accepted as fact? And when did the definition of a settlement become every community over the green line? And why can’s Jews continue to live in those communities after a Palestiniain state is created? Why does Abbas’ wish that the new state be Judenrein be taken as an accepted fact? Doesn’t that bother anyone?

As you may recall when former Prime Minister Sharon and former US President Bush met in Washington in 2004 and Bush issued his famous follow up letter to Sharon, he specified that “already existing major Israeli population centers” will remain within Israel, even if they are over the green line. And there was no outcry! The understanding was that this meant Gush Etzion, Ariel, and Ma’ale Adumim for example; in other words areas relatively deep inside Judea and Samaria (i.e. the West Bank). Ramot and Gilo in Jerusalem were never even on the table.

What happened of course is that President Obama moved the goal posts by saying last year that settlement construction anywhere over the green line must stop. Israel never agreed in the past to stop such construction, especially when it was related to the natural growth of these communities and the Palestinian Arab leadership never refused to negotiate even though construction was in progress. But when the goal posts were moved Israel was forced into a 10 month construction freeze which, as expected, did not bring the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. So I cannot agree with Kristof’s other statement that “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is isolating his country, and, to be blunt, his hard line on settlements seems like a national suicide policy.” Simply not true in light of the real facts.

Kristof continues by castigating the present administration here for its clumsy handling of relations with Turkey as if the deteriorating relationship is strictly Israel’s fault. He says “Mr. Netanyahu has also undermined Israeli security by burning bridges with Israel’s most important friend in the region, Turkey.” He, of course, conveniently makes no reference to the possibility that this relationship began to unravel long before May 2010 and seems to be a reflection of Erdogan’s long term plan to be the political leader of the Muslim world. Of course, for him to achieve that goal, bashing Israel at every opportunity and threatening war are simply the tools he needs to use to curry favor with other political forces in most Muslim countries. To assist him in achieving that goal Israel simply has to exist.

In retrospect, Sadat was right when he referred to the virtual wall that separated us from the Egyptians during his Knesset speech in 1997. In his words, “This wall constitutes a psychological barrier between us, a barrier of suspicion, a barrier of rejection, a barrier of fear or deception, a barrier of hallucination without any action, deed or decision. A barrier of distorted and eroded interpretation of every event and statement. It is this psychological barrier that I described in official statements as constituting 70 percent of the whole problem.”

His words then continue to be true today and, sadly, today there is no Sadat in the Arab World and, equally sad, no Menachem Begin (who welcomed Sadat to Jerusalem) in Israel. We here in Israel are not our own worst enemy although there is no doubt that we could certainly be getting our points across to the world in a more beneficial manner than we have done until now.