[click on four outward-pointing arrows at bottom right for full-screen. Press esc key to exit full-screen]
This video degenerates into partisan propaganda at the end. But the discussion of the dynamic connections between World War I, the Battle of the Somme, and the appeasement and miscalculations that led to World War II is very good.
The analogy between the policies of the interwar Axis powers and Iran and Saudi Arabia is not instantly persuasive but neither is it to be lightly dismissed.
The "vote for the Republicans" moral might be of greater interest had the Senate Republicans not spent the past year acting en bloc as essentially enemies of the American people. Their uncompromising opposition to, and trimming down of, both health insurance reform and Wall Street reform, make them utter slime - people without conscience or principle. Their sponsorhip of Tea Party jingoism entirely to protect their financial interests is despicable.
On the other side of the coin, and I do mean coin, Whittle is exactly right that the Democratic and liberal policy of conciliation is suicidal. To compromise, one needs a sincere partner. The West in general, and the United States in particular, does not have one.
One hopes the American policy elite finds out sooner rather than later what the equivalent class in Israel found out during the past twenty years. The basic premise of the Israeli left and center was that territorial and economic concessions to the Palestinians would mollify their hostility.
The offer of substantially everything the Palestinians claimed they wanted first by Ehud Barak of Labor, and then by Ehud Olmert of Likud, brought about not peace but year-long waves of terrorism and violence - the First Intifada and the even worse Second Intifada.
Ariel Sharon, when he was Prime Minister decided that the problem was dealing with the PA. He went around them, directly to the Palestinian people by giving them Gaza without the thicket of negotiation. The Israeli government forcibly removed 7,000 Israeli settlers from Gaza and just left. There could be no more explicit territorial concession than just walking away.
Did the Palestinians in Gaza respond with peaceful coexistence to Israel giving them exactly what they claimed they wanted? No. They responded with thousands of rockets launched from the very territory Israel had given up.
The result was the collapse of the whole collection of Israeli parties based on the premise that concessions to the Palestinians would bring peace. That argument was proven false by the Palestinians themselves. That is why American liberal newspapers describe Netanyahu as "right-wing". His policy argument, which won him what was a landslide for Israel, was really just, "See, I told you so." And that is not what America liberals want to hear, facts on the ground in Gaza or not.
And every single rocket launched from Gaza, every Hamas flotilla that attempts to sail there, proves again that Netanyahu was right. Concessions for peace to people who do not want peace are both pointless and self-destructive.
It took the fruitless concession of all of Gaza to convince the Israeli public that the appeasement position was wrong. But at least they know it now.
The American liberal elites seem unable to draw that same conclusion. That is essentially what the diplomatic dialogue between Washington and Jerusalem consists of. The Obama administration demands that Israel make concessions for peace. The Israeli response is, "Like in Gaza?" whereupon the Americans diplomats return home "for further instructions'. It is the confrontation of American liberal ideology with Israeli facts.
Thus Israel and the PA have been forced by the Obama Administration into negotiations that both sides recognize as pointless. The sole real Palestinian demand, that the Israelis turn all of Israel over to them, the Israelis have already turned down.
The Palestinians' cover story is that all they want is certain territorial concessions before they demand others. After Gaza that fools no one at all. So they have nothing to negotiate about either.
Which is why everyone in Israel is far more interested in the Eurovision Song Contest, soccer, the weather, the economy, and a Hebrew University professor winning the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for mathematics, than in the peace negotiations - which are neither about peace nor are they actual negotiations.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment