Column One: Israel: The happy little country

Netanyahu thought a moment and said, “I’d like to be remembered as the leader who preserved Israel’s security.”

By CAROLINE B. GLICK, The Jerusalem Post
April 19, 2013 https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Column-One-Israel-The-happy-little-country-310293

As Independence Day celebrations were winding down Tuesday night, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made a guest appearance on Channel 2’s left-wing satire show Eretz Nehederet. One of the final questions that the show’s host Eyal Kitzis asked the premier was how he would like to be remembered after he leaves office.

Netanyahu thought a moment and said, “I’d like to be remembered as the leader who preserved Israel’s security.”

On the face of it, Netanyahu’s stated aspiration might seem dull. In a year he’ll be the longest-serving prime minister in the state’s history, and all he wants is to preserve our national security? Why is he aiming so low? And yet, the studio audience reacted to Netanyahu’s modest goal with a thunderclap of applause.

After pausing to gather his thoughts, a clearly befuddled Kitzis mumbled something along the lines of, “Well, if you manage to make peace as well, we wouldn’t object.” The audience was silent.

The disparity between the audience’s exultation and Kitzis’s shocked disappointment at Netanyahu’s answer exposed – yet again – the yawning gap between the mainstream Israeli view of the world, and that shared by members of our elite class.

The Israeli public gave our elites the opportunity to try out their peace fantasies in the 1990s. We gave their peace a chance and got repaid with massive terror and international isolation.

We are not interested in repeating the experience.

We will be nice to leftists, if they are polite. We might even watch their shows, if there’s nothing else on or they are mildly entertaining. But we won’t listen to them anymore.

This is why US President Barack Obama’s visit last month had no impact on public opinion or government policy.

Obama came, hugged Netanyahu and showered us with love just like Bill Clinton did back in the roaring ’90s. He praised us to high heaven and told us he has our back. And then he told us we should force our leaders to give Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to our sworn enemies even as they teach their children to aspire to kill our children.

And we smiled and wished him a pleasant flight home.

Obama had no idea what he was getting into when he came here. Like Kitzis and his colleagues on Channel 2, Obama surrounds himself with people who, like him, prefer fantasy to reality. In Obama’s world, Islamic jihad is about the West, not about jihadists. In Obama’s world, the most pressing issue on the international agenda is apartments for Jews in Jerusalem and Efrat. And in Obama’s world, what Israelis need more than anything else is for leftist Europeans to love us.

Talk about retro.

But a lot has changed since the 1990s. Twenty years after Yitzhak Rabin shook Yasser Arafat’s hand on the White House lawn and so officially ushered in Israel’s Age of Terror, most Israelis don’t really care what the Europeans or the Arabs think of us.

The Europeans prattle on about Israeli racism, and threaten to put yellow stars or some other nasty mark on Israeli goods. They ban Israeli books from their libraries in Scotland. They boycott Israeli universities, professors and students in England. In Italy they hold rallies for convicted mass murderer Marwan Barghouti at their national Senate. And in France they butcher Jewish children.

And then the likes of Catherine Ashton expect us to care what they think about us. Well, we don’t.

For their part, Americans are bemoaning the resignation of the unelected Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, and insisting that he was a true partner for Israel, who just couldn’t make a go of it due to forces beyond his control. While most recognize Fayyad’s departure has nothing to do with Israel, some US pontificators have blamed Israel for Fayyad’s failure. Elliott Abrams, for instance, wrote, “Israeli governments also gave him less cooperation than he deserved.” To that we answer, Fayyad was nothing more than a Western delusion, like Arab peace with Israel.

Fayyad didn’t have a chance of leading the Palestinians because he never personally killed a Jew. And the Palestinians only accept murderers as their leaders. But the fact that he never killed a Jew personally didn’t render Fayyad a partner for Israel.

Fayyad dutifully used donor funds to pay the salaries of terrorists in Judea, Samaria and Gaza every month.

He led the Palestinian branch of the boycott, divestment and sanctions war against Israel. He made working for Israelis and buying Israeli goods criminal offenses. Fayyad personally led raids into private homes to inspect people’s refrigerators to see if they had Israeli cottage cheese on their shelves. He organized and attended bonfires where they burned Israeli goods.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is not the sort of behavior you would expect a peace partner to engage in.

The Americans who insist on mourning Fayyad’s departure refuse to accept the obvious fact that Palestinian aspirations for statehood are a cheap, shoddy, for-export-only Arab product. The Palestinians don’t want a state. They want to destroy Israel. Unable to accept this basic fact, the Americans invent lies like Fayyad-as-peace partner and try to shove them down Israel’s throats. Well good riddance, Salam Fayyad.

Obviously Fayyad is not the last word in Western delusion. They will think of a new perfect solution to replace him in short order.

But in their endless search for the next silver bullet, the Europeans and the Americans and their Israeli followers miss the fact that the easiest way to build a secure and peaceful world is not by wooing terrorists. The best way to achieve these goals is by accepting the world as it is. This is what the Israeli people has done. True, we needed to have our fantasies blown away in suicide bombings before we reconciled ourselves to this simple truth. But life has been better, happier and more secure since we did.

The “international community’s” inability to accept that sober-minded contentment is better than pipe dream fantasies has caused leftist writers in Israel, Europe and the US alike to express mystification at a recent survey carried out by the OECD, which ranks Israelis among the happiest people in the world. The ranking made no sense to commentators.

Israelis work harder than other members of the OECD. We complain more than other members of the OECD. We don’t have “peace.” And yet, we are among the happiest people in the OECD.

What gives? For decades before we embarked on the phony peace process, Israel was a model socialist state. We had paralyzing tax rates and failed government industries that crowded private entrepreneurship out of the market. Monopolies ran every sector and provided shoddy goods and horrible services at astronomical prices. The Histadrut labor union owned most of the economy along with the government and in every sector, Histadrut commissars ensured that anyone with an ounce of initiative was subject to unending abuse.

Nirvana.

Just around the time we began extricating ourselves from our socialist straitjacket, we were also recognizing that the peace thing wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be. And at that point we began to understand that happiness and success aren’t about what other people give you – money, treaties, a phone line after a five-year wait. Happiness and success are about what you accomplish.

At that point, sometime between 1996 and 2000, Israelis began creating large families and embracing the free market.

Today, with an average of three children per family, Israelis are the fecund outliers of the industrial world. And as David Goldman at PJ Media has demonstrated, there is a direct correlation between children and human happiness. This is why fruitful Israelis have the lowest suicide rate in the industrial world. When you have children, you have a future.

And when you have a future, you work hard to secure it, and have a generally optimistic outlook.

What could be so bad when your kid just lost his first tooth? Israelis are also happy because we see that we can build the future we want for our families and our country even without another glitzy signing ceremony at the White House every six months. Our country is getting stronger and more livable every day. And we know it.

Those on the international stage that share our view that life is about more than pieces of paper signed with Arab anti-Semites recognize what is happening. For them Israel is not “that shi**y little country.” It’s “The Little Engine that Could.”

Take the Chinese. Last July China signed a deal with Israel to build an inland port in Eilat and a 180- km. freight railway to connect Eilat to Israel’s Mediterranean ports in Ashdod and Haifa. The purpose of the project is to build an alternative to the Suez Canal, in Israel. The Chinese look at the region, and they see that Egypt is a failed state that can’t even afford its wheat imports. The future of shipping along the Suez Canal is in doubt with riots in Port Said and Suez occurring on a regular basis.

On the other hand, Israel is a stable, prosperous, successful democracy that keeps moving from strength to strength. When the freight line is completed, as far as the global economy is concerned, Israel will become the most strategically important country in the region.

Then there is our newfound energy wealth. Israel became energy independent on March 30, when the Tamar offshore gas field began pumping natural gas to Israel. In two to three years, when the Leviathan gas field comes online, Israel will become one of the most important producers of natural gas in the world. Moreover, in 2017, Israel will likely begin extracting commercial quantities of oil from its massive oil shale deposits in the Shfela Basin near Beit Shemesh.

Geologists assess that the field alone contains some 250 billion barrels of oil, giving Israel oil parity with Saudi Arabia. Chinese, Russian and Australian firms are lining up to sign contracts with Israeli energy companies. International analysts assess that Israel’s emergence as an energy power will have a stabilizing impact on the global economy and international security. Israel can end Asia’s oil and gas hunger. It can reduce European dependence on Russia. It will remove OPEC’s ability to dictate world oil prices through supply manipulation.

Israel’s discovery of its energy riches couldn’t have come at a more propitious time. Had Israel discovered its oil and gas 65 or even 20 years ago, we wouldn’t have had the economic maturity to manage our resources responsibly. But now, with our free market, our hi-tech sector and our entrepreneurial culture, we can develop and manage our resources wisely and successfully.

At 65, Israel is becoming a mature, responsible, prosperous and powerful player in the international arena. The only thing we need to ensure that we enjoy the fruits of our labors is security. And the one thing we can do to squander it all is place our hopes in “peace.” And so we won’t, ever again.

Caroline Glick: Mike Pompeo Destroys the Ideological Legacy of Obama’s Middle East

By Caroline Glick 14January2019 https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2019/01/14/caroline-glick-mike-pompeo-destroys-the-ideological-legacy-of-obamas-middle-east/

From the moment that President Donald Trump entered office two years ago, he has been stripping away his predecessor Barack Obama’s legacy in the Middle East, piece by piece.

It hasn’t been easy.

It took Trump a year to finally overcome the opposition of the professional bureaucracy at the State Department and the Defense Department, and overrule the opposition of his then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to recognize Israel’s capital, Jerusalem. Trump had to overcome further opposition from his senior advisors and the consensus view of the foreign policy establishment to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

So too, to walk away from Obama’s signature foreign policy, his 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, Trump had to overcome opposition from Mattis, the foreign policy establishment, the European Union, and the media.

Trump has faced attempts by Obama alumni and the media to undermine his strategy of undermining Iran through a mix of economic sanctions on Iran and strengthening U.S. allies and alliances in the Sunni Arab world. The media hysteria over the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, an al-Qaeda sympathizer who wrote columns for the Washington Post, was a transparent attempt to undermine Trump’s ability to work with Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman.

In Syria, Mattis and other senior officials worked to preserve Obama’s policy of limiting U.S. operations and focus to fighting Islamic State forces while ignoring Iranian and Iranian proxy forces operating in Syria.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dismantled the ideological foundation of Obama’s Middle East policy, at the very place where Obama first set it out.

Less than six months after Obama took office, he set out his perception of America’s rightful position in the world generally, and the Middle East, in particular at a speech at American University in Cairo. His speech, “A New Beginning,” was billed as a speech to the “Muslim World.”

Obama’s address was the most radical, most anti-American speech any U.S. president had ever delivered. In his speech at American University in Cairo, Pompeo rejected all aspects of Obama’s address — and in so doing, set out the intellectual foundations of Trump’s view of America’s position and role as superpower in the Middle East.

Obama opened his speech in Cairo by vilifying America and the West. He cast the blame for bad relations between the U.S. and the Islamic world on America and its Western allies.

In his words:

The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of coexistence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.

While Obama castigated the United States and the West collectively, he cast Islamic terrorism and other forms of Muslim aggression against the U.S. and the West as the misdeeds of mere “violent extremists,” who comprise but “a small but potent minority of Muslims.”

Far from rooted in their own ideological or religious beliefs, the crimes of this small minority of “violent extremists” were, in his telling, provoked by American and Western collective malevolence and ill-treatment.

In other words, America’s and the West’s chickens came home to roost.

After judging his own country as the primary driver of poor relations with the Muslim world, Obama then rejected America’s right to act independently in international affairs. The war in Afghanistan was legitimate, he argued,  because it was initiated “with broad international support.”

The war in Iraq, on the other hand, “was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world.”

He promised to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq quickly, and then scolded his nation, “Events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible.”

Perhaps most shockingly, Obama alleged that the U.S. had effectively lost its soul in its response to the September 11 attacks. In his words, “Nine-eleven was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals.”

Obama went on to castigate Israel at great length. He echoed the radical Islamic claim that Israel is a colonialist implant in the Muslim world, installed as a salve to the guilty consciences of Europeans in the wake of the Holocaust rather than the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.

He accused Israel of responsibility for the absence of peace, and drew a moral equivalence between Israel’s counter-terror operations and the physical presence of Jews and Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria to the Holocaust.

After demonizing America’s closest ally in the Middle East, Obama turned his attention to Iran. Far from committing himself to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, Obama committed himself to appeasing Iran. He placed the blame for Iranian hostility towards the U.S. on the CIA’s role in the 1953 coup that brought about the overthrow of then-Iranian President Mohammad Mosaddegh.

Then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak boycotted Obama’s address and refused to follow protocol and greet Obama as he alighted Air Force One at the airport in Cairo. Mubarak turned a cold shoulder to Obama because Obama insisted on inviting Muslim Brotherhood members to his speech.

The outlawed jihadist group, which spawned Hamas, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad led by Ayman Zawahiri, and other major Islamic jihadist terror groups was – and remains still today – the greatest threat to the Egyptian state. During the Muslim Brotherhood’s year in power following Mubarak’s ouster a year after Obama’s speech, it moved steadily to transform Egypt into an Islamic regime.

By delivering his speech in the Egyptian capital to “Muslims around the world,” rather than to the Egyptian people, Obama effectively rejected the distinct identity of the peoples of Arab states. By rejecting Arab nationalism, he subverted the legitimacy of the leaders of the separate and distinct Arab states and gave support to the Muslim Brotherhood’s perception of the Muslims of the world as one distinct nation or umma, which is supposed to be ruled by a global caliphate.

To sum up, Obama rejected America’s moral right to lead in world affairs. He undermined the morality of Israel’s very existence. He rejected the legitimacy of Arab governments and elevated the Muslim Brotherhood as a legitimate force in the Muslim world. And he ignored all of the pathologies of the Arab and Muslim world.

Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran; his hostile treatment of Israel; his support for the overthrow of allied and non-threatening Arab governments in Egypt, in Tunisia, and in Libya; and his refusal to take decisive action against either ISIS or Iranian aggression in Syria all were rooted in the anti-American principles he set out in his Cairo speech.

On Tuesday, Pompeo disavowed and condemned Obama’s speech point by point. Pompeo rejected Obama’s denunciation of American power insisting, “America is a force for good in the Middle East.”

Of the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt following Mubarak’s ouster in 2011, Pompeo said

These lands witnessed convulsions from Tunis to Tehran as old systems crumbled and new ones struggled to emerge. That’s happened here, too.

And at this critical moment, America, your long-time friend, was absent too much. Why? Because our leaders gravely misread our history, and your historical moent. These fundamental misunderstandings, set forth in this city in 2009, adversely affected the lives of hundreds of millions of people in Egypt and across the region.

Pompeo then spoke directly to Obama’s accusations against America.

Remember: It was here, here in this city, that another American stood before you.

He told you that radical Islamist terrorism does not stem from an ideology.

He told you that 9/11 led my country to abandon its ideals, particularly in the Middle East.

He told you that the United States and the Muslim world needed, quote, “a new beginning,” end of quote.

He continued, explaining the disastrous consequences of Obama’s ill-assessment of American morality.

In falsely seeing ourselves as a force for what ails the Middle East, we were timid in asserting ourselves when the times – and our partners – demanded it.

We grossly underestimated the tenacity and viciousness of radical Islamism, a debauched strain of the faith that seeks to upend every other form of worship or governance. ISIS drove to the outskirts of Baghdad as America hesitated. They raped and pillaged and murdered tens of thousands of innocents. They birthed a caliphate across Syria and Iraq and launched terror attacks that killed all across continents.

America’s reluctance, our reluctance, to wield our influence kept us silent as the people of Iran rose up against the mullahs in Tehran in the Green Revolution. The ayatollahs and their henchmen murdered, jailed, and intimidated freedom-loving Iranians, and they wrongly blamed America for this unrest when it was their own tyranny that had fueled it. Emboldened, the regime spread its cancerous influence to Yemen, to Iraq, to Syria, and still further into Lebanon.

Our penchant, America’s penchant, for wishful thinking led us to look the other way as Hizballah, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Iranian regime, accumulated a massive arsenal of approximately 130,000 rockets and missiles. They stored and positioned these weapons in Lebanese towns and villages in flagrant violation of international law. That arsenal is aimed squarely at our ally Israel.

When Bashar Assad unleashed terror upon ordinary Syrians and barrel-bombed civilians with sarin gas, a true echo of Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurdish people, we condemned his actions. But in our hesitation to wield power, we did nothing.

Our eagerness to address only Muslims and not nations ignored the rich diversity of the Middle East and frayed old bonds. It undermined the concept of the nation-state, the building block of international stability. And our desire for peace at any cost led us to strike a deal with Iran, our common enemy.

So today, what did we learn from all of this? We learned that when America retreats, chaos often follows. When we neglect our friends, resentment builds. And when we partner with enemies, they advance.

The good news. The good news is this: The age of self-inflicted American shame is over, and so are the policies that produced so much needless suffering. Now comes the real new beginning.

Pompeo went on to describe the Trump administration’s actions to restore and strengthen America’s alliances with its Arab allies, its strategy for countering Iranian aggression, and cultivating good relations between the Arab states and Israel.

He underlined the America’s continued commitment to utterly destroying Islamic State forces in Syria, even after U.S. forces are withdrawn. And he spoke in great detail about U.S. actions to curtail Iranian power and influence throughout the region.

There is little doubt that the media, the foreign policy establishment, the European Union and the Democrats will continue to seek to undermine Trump’s policies in the Middle East with the intention of paving the way for a restoration of Obama’s policies – based on Obama’s Cairo speech from January 4, 2009.

But on Thursday, by condemning and disavowing that speech in detail, from the place where it was delivered, Pompeo drove a spear through the lie at its very heart – that America is anything other than a force of good in the Middle East.

Caroline Glick is a world-renowned journalist and commentator on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, and the author of The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. She is running for Israel’s Knesset as a member of the Yamin Hahadash (New Right) party in Israel’s parliamentary elections, scheduled for April 9. Read more at www.CarolineGlick.com.