The UN or Israel? America must choose

Two powerful bombs sent by terrorists from Yemen to Chicago-area synagogues this
past weekend advance the world war against the Jews. As a benign voice of “the
world,” the U.N. has been useless in attempts to stem or mollify this evil.
Instead, its passive profile enhances it. In a very short time the U.S. will
have to choose between the U.N. and Israel. It will be the beginning of the end
for the U.N.

Direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have moved inevitably toward collapse,
says John Bolton, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In an
Oct. 20 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal
he says the Palestinian Authority (PA) fully understand that the talks — and
the “two state solution” — will fail. Several ideas are circulating
to skip negotiations with Israel and move immediately to Palestinian
“statehood.”


The PA could persuade the United States to recognize a Palestinian state in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip. The other option would have the United Nations
Security Council call upon U.N. members to recognize “Palestine”
within those lines. Critical to this second tactic is a U.S. commitment either
to support such a Security Council resolution or, at a minimum, not to veto it.

President Obama has a jaundiced view of Israel, says Bolton, but actual recognition
of “Palestine” seems remote. A more indirect but still effective
course is to let statehood emerge through a Security Council resolution:
“Israel would then confront a dramatic change in its international posture,
facing a political equivalency with the new state of Palestine.

 “A Security Council resolution
fixing the 1967 lines as borders would call into question even Israel’s legitimacy,
dramatically undercutting prospects for security and defensibility,” says
Bolton.

Bolton’s thinking has resonated in the past week. If America joined the world
in opposition to Israel it would not hinder Israel’s progress in the world. It
would, however, leave the U.N. jaundiced in the eyes of Americans, eight out of
10 of whom feel kindly toward Israel, and it would nurture the U.N.’s advanced
state of irrelevancy.

But Roger Cohen, who keeps a close eye on Israel, writes in his New
York Times column a week after Bolton’s
piece: “President Barack Obama has to overcome that [Israeli] skepticism if his
words to the United Nations General Assembly five weeks ago are not to be added
to the long list of well-meaning Middle East blather. Those words were: ‘When
we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that will lead to a new
member of the United Nations — an independent sovereign state of Palestine,
living in peace with Israel.’

“I don’t believe Israel has yet got to where the world is: the inevitability of
a Palestinian state,” writes Cohen.

That is exactly the issue: the advanced Woodstock Nation model of world peace —
the illusion of permanent global American cultural conquest. But “we are the
world” only in hippie law. The “rest of the world’s” opinion should be as
irrelevant to Israel as it is to South Boston or (“Come and take it”) Texas.
And the president of the United States does not speak for “the world” in
opposition to Israel or anyplace else outside our borders.

Probably more pertinent to the moment is another essay Cohen wrote the day
after Bolton’s piece appeared. “Among the minor fiascoes of the Obama
administration’s foreign policy, the rapid White House-to-wipe-out course of
Middle Eastern diplomacy in recent weeks rates high … No U.S. president should
invest his personal capital by inaugurating direct talks between Israeli and
Palestinian leaders when those talks are set to abort weeks later over an issue
— Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank — that’s long been sitting
there like a big truck on the road.”

This is the work of an amateurish State Department that tweets sardonic
birthday wishes to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is the fault
specifically of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It is the fault primarily
of President Obama.

Visit Mr. Quigley’s website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.