Thoughts from Charles Krauthammer:
Obama didn’t just move the goal posts on borders. He also did so on the so-called right of return. Flooding Israel with millions of Arabs would destroy the world’s only Jewish state while creating a 23rd Arab state and a second Palestinian state — not exactly what we mean when we speak of a “two-state solution.” That’s why it has been the policy of the United States to adamantly oppose this “right.”
Yet in his State Department speech, Obama refused to simply restate this position — and refused again in a supposedly corrective speech three days later. Instead, he told Israel it must negotiate the right of return with the Palestinians after having given every inch of territory. Bargaining with what, pray tell?
The Kumbaya president.
[Update mid morning]
What Jeffrey Goldberg gets wrong:
Does Goldberg really believe that if there were no settlements, and if they were suddenly abandoned, that Mahmoud Abbas would suddenly recognize Israel and be ready to make peace? He knows well that since 1948 and Israel’s creation, the Arab nations and the Palestinian leadership — then commanded by the Nazi supporter the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem — have vowed never to accept any Jewish state anywhere in Palestine. To them, all of Israel was an illegal settlement by colonialist-imperialist occupiers.
Has Goldberg read any of the penetrating columns by Sol Stern, who regularly has shown how Israel has offered to make peace, only to find Palestinian rejection facing them? (Stern’s most recent one can be read here.) As Stern writes, it is not the settlers who are the impediment to peace, but the false “Nakba narrative” propounded by the PA leaders, especially Abbas. Stern points out: “No one living under Palestinian rule dares publicly question this lie. No historian dares offer his people a balanced account of the 1948 war, of who attacked whom, and of the reasons for the flight of the refugees. As long as this remains the case, the ‘right of return,’ far more than any question of borders, will remain the principal roadblock to successful peace negotiations.”
Some truths are too hard to face for some people.