IPF to Obama: Endorse the Arab Peace Initiative Now
Comment by Ted Belman. Rosenberg’s proposition is that the image of the US suffers due to the Palestinian/Israel conflict so Obama should embrace the Saudi Initiative and push for a final agreement. Also that the conflict is a rally cry for radicals. But he misrepresents the Initiative by saying the Saudis will proceed as soon as the Israelis and Palestinians cut a deal. The Palestinians aren’t willing to compromise. So in effect Rosenberg is asking Israel to give the Palis what they want which means no negotiations. He has no regard for whether the Arabs can be trusted to make peace or whether the concessions required make peace unstable. He also ignores the superiority of Jewish rights to Arab rights. He also ignors the will of his fellow Jews in Israel.
M. J. Rosenberg, ISRAEL POLICY FORUM
President Obama returns from his first overseas trip even more popular (i.e., powerful) than when he left. It is not only that his predecessor set the bar so low. Barack Obama (and First Lady Michelle Obama) were the most impressive figures to represent the United States abroad in at least a good half century.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was good, and very impressive, but most of the excitement about Kennedy had to do with his (and Jackie’s) physical attractiveness and style. The Obamas are also attractive people, but it is clear from reading the European press that it was not looks or style that most impressed Europe. No, it was their intelligence, empathy, and the sheer significance of their unlikely presence as president and first lady of the United States that grabbed the Europeans. It does not hurt that the Obamas follow Bush (and especially Cheney), but he and Michelle would have looked just fine even if they had succeeded Franklin and Eleanor.
After Europe, Obama has even more capital in the bank than he had before, and it’s not like he was hurting prior to leaving for the G20 summit.
Now it is time for him to start using some of this capital on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The Israeli elections are over and the new government has been installed. The economic situation here at home remains bad, but not so bad that the president cannot turn his attention to the Middle East. Additionally, many of our economic problems are associated with energy—supply and cost—and resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue will help mightily.
Powerful opponents of vigorous U.S. efforts to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict insist that it is not central to America’s problems in the Middle East. They are so insistent on this point precisely because they know that it is not true. In fact, no one can seriously argue that the Arab-Israeli conflict is not at the core of America’s problems with the Arab world in particular and the Muslim world in general.
Neither Arabs nor Muslims at large present a united front on any issue except Palestine. Sunnis and Shiites disagree on Iran and the Saudis. Radicals and conservatives disagree on Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Many Arabs despise Hezbollah and Hamas; others venerate them. As for non-Arab Muslims, Indonesians and Turks for instance, they certainly don’t agree with Gulf Arabs or Jordanians or Syrians about much of anything except Palestine.
No, not about the specifics. But they all feel the continuing suffering of the Palestinian people and were pained and outraged by the Gaza war.
There is nothing surprising about that. The entire state of Israel, and many Jews worldwide, are anguished by the continued captivity of one soldier, Gilad Shalit. Jews from Long Island to Paris were pained by the repression of Soviet Jews. Why wouldn’t Arabs (and Muslims) empathize with the suffering of millions of their kinsmen or coreligionists who live either in the same region or not far away? For Jordanians, Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, Saudis, and Iraqis, they are people who live virtually next door. Why wouldn’t they be horrified that 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza war and that a third of them were children? It is not as if they are the only ones to feel that way.
The ability of the Palestinian issue to unify Arabs and Muslims is precisely what has turned the issue into the best recruiting tool terrorists have ever had. I don’t think (or care) if Osama bin Laden feels for the people of Palestine. Certainly, Nasrallah doesn’t (he cheerfully killed Palestinians along with Israelis during the 2006 war). Nor do I think Ahmadinejad has the slightest interest in the Palestinians (if he did, he could not threaten to annihilate Israel when he knows that doing so would also kill a few million Palestinians). But I do think that all these thugs happily invoke the Palestinian issue because the Arab “street” does care about it. And they understand that it is the locomotive that drives anti-American feeling throughout the region.
Solve the Palestinian problem, and you rob the radicals of the most powerful weapon they have to use against America (especially now that Obama, and not Bush, is in the White House). Allow it to fester and you further jeopardize U.S. interests and Israel’s security.
And that is why President Obama needs to act. But what should he do?
I think it’s clear. He should go for a comprehensive approach. A step-by-step plan is death by a thousand cuts. A solution will only be reached by a president who uses his prestige to solve not only the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also the larger conflict of which it is the core.
There is only one vehicle that can carry that much weight and that is the Arab Peace Initiative (the former Saudi Plan).
The Arab Initiative, endorsed by every Arab state and the Palestinians, offers Israel full peace, recognition, and normalization of relations in exchange for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with its capital in East Jerusalem.
The Arab Initiative, in itself, is not a full-blown, detailed peace plan. It is an offer to Israel: full peace in exchange for full withdrawal. To get to the offer, negotiations need to take place between Israel and the Palestinians, first. Once they reach agreement, the rest of the initiative comes into play. In the words of the Saudi government, “If Israel and the Palestinians can find a peaceful territorial compromise along the lines of UN Resolutions 242 and 338, under which Israel would withdraw from the lands it occupied in the 1967 War, including East Jerusalem, and make peace with a Palestinian state, then the Arab world would not only accept Israel’s existence, but have normal relations with it.”
In other words, it’s up to the Israelis and Palestinians to come to a deal. Once they do, the Saudi offer takes effect.
That is why it is silly to argue about the exact language of the initiative itself. It is not a peace treaty. Its terms, in the initiative’s own words, must be “agreed upon,” which means that Israelis who complain about the language on refugees have erected a straw man. If the provisions on refugees need to be accepted by Israel, as the initiative states, then what is there for Israel to worry about?
Nothing.
President Obama should unequivocally endorse the Arab Initiative as the rubric under which negotiations should begin. No, Likud Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu may not like it. But neither did his predecessor Yitzhak Shamir like the idea of the Madrid Conference, which President George H. W. Bush convened right after the first Gulf War. It was there that Israelis and Palestinians began formal negotiations. Madrid totally changed the terrain for the better.
How did Bush get a reluctant Shamir to attend? He insisted. With his postwar popularity in the stratosphere, Israel had no choice but to attend the conference, whether it wanted to or not. The result was, essentially, the birth of the two-state solution that Obama can bring to fruition. He is in the same position Bush was in 1991: popular and powerful. Strike while the iron is hot.——-
MJ Rosenberg is the Director of Israel Policy Forum’s Washington Policy Center
The entire article is complete and utter tripe.
What bullshit. Rosenberg’s fawning over the Obamas is sickening.
It is not the concern of the welfare of so-called palestinians that unites them on this particular issue, it is their common hatred of the Jews. They only concern themselves with the “palestinians” to the extent that they can blame their plight on the Jews. They are merely useful as political pawns to make continuous war on the Jewish state. In light of the fact that the palestinian refugees in arab countries as well as Arabs in general are treated far worse by their own than Israel has ever treated them, denying them basic human rights, what sense does it make for Rosenberg to make this absurd claim that the muslim countries are united over concern for the palestinians? How gullible can one be?
Furthermore how does the Israeli-palestinian conflict explain the jihad being waged in Thailand, the Philipines, India and Kashmir, throughout Africa etc.? How would the situation in any of those places change with the creation of a palestinian state? No, it is certainly NOT the Israeli-palestinian conflict that is at the core of our problems with islam. Rosenberg and fellow travelers on the left just don’t get it. And if they haven’t by now, they never will.
Comment by Laura — April 7, 2009 @ 6:21 pm
The Israel Policy Forum, J Street and Americans for Peace Now are falsely classified, by the Jewish community and the media, as pro-Israel groups. As far as I am concerned, they are enemies of the Jewish state and their policy suggestions are hardly different from the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist left and from the Israel Lobby crowd. They are a fifth column within world Jewry.
Comment by 4infidels — April 7, 2009 @ 6:34 pm
more re #2:
It was one thing to be a naive peace processor in the Oslo 1990s. It is quite another to put the onus on Israel after the withdrawal from Lebanon, the rejection of the Clinton-Barak proposal without counteroffer, the launching of the Post-Oslo terror war, the evidence captured by the Israelis in 2002 that the so-called PA peace partners were funding terror and had planned for war while pretending to be pursuing peace, the knowledge that both Fatah and Hamas promote genocidal incitement daily in Palestinian mosques, schools and media, the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and the subsequent bombardment of southern and central Israel with rockets, the propaganda war against the Jews conducted throughout academia and Western media and the increasing hatred of Israel in the international community with each Israeli concession. There is no way any rational person could have lived through the past 15 years, and think that Israel is the obstacle to peace and that the Arab-Muslims, if only a reasonable and just offer was put forward by Israel, would end the conflict once and for ever.
Comment by 4infidels — April 7, 2009 @ 6:50 pm
MJ Rosenberg makes a good case for his position based on realities as they are, irrespective of whether those realities are rightly or wrongly conceived and acted upon.
The following statements by Rosenberg fairly set out the realities I am speaking of:
What many here including myself would rail against is that such perceptive and attitudinal realities are based on Arab/Palestinian lies about Middle Eastern history, lies about Arabs, Palestinians and Israel, lies they tell themselves and lies about how they really see and understand the West and non-Muslims.
Many of of these lies have been canvassed on these pages in the context of various arguments advanced.
The economic and oil power of the Saudis/OPEC are what leverages, if not forces Western and American perceptions and attitudes to accomodate the Arab/Palestinian lies including the lies as regards the significance of the unresolved Israel vs. Palestinian/Arab war to the West’s ability to further their interests and to lessen their problems in the Middle East.
The Arabs and the Palestinians have Obama salivating already to force Israel to her knees in a peace deal with the Palestinians so that Obama can prove himself to be the world’s saviour and he can gluttonously feed his infinite ego. It doesn’t matter to Obama and his fawning supporters whether such deal is fair and just for Israel. All that matters is that there is some kind of a deal.
MJ Rosenberg sees that. He is obviously fine with that.
MJ Rosenberg is not far wrong in his assessment of the problem. What he does to arrive at his conclusions is he casts aside any sense of morality, ethics and decency in assessing the situation as it appears or as I noted is made to appear by the lies upon lies of the Arabs and Palestinians.
In accepting that the Arab/Palestinian lies have permanently displaced truth, MJ Rosenberg uses that as his jumping off point to make his case as to what that all means in terms of bringing about solutions.
MJ Rosenberg’s case is indeed a very easy one to make if one, as he does, accepts the Arab/Palestinian lies for truth as the starting point of the analysis.
A bit of MJ Rosenberg’s biography is at this site:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=M.J._Rosenberg
The above article appears at:
http://www.israelpolicyforum.org/commentary/obama-endorse-arab-peace-initiative-now
Comment by Bill Narvey — April 7, 2009 @ 6:58 pm
This is the most stupid, arrogant, misnomer that I have ever read. I had to wait until I read the whole article to find who wrote it. I could have sworn that it was Peskin, shadowed be Oatmeal.
Comment by Ed D — April 7, 2009 @ 8:37 pm
Laura, your post is as profane as ever, but you did succinctly describe Rosenberg’s drivel in one sentence. By way of correction, though, I must stand in defense of tripe. If you boil it long enough in salt water, then properly season it, it can actually be tasty. Rosenburg’s piece, on the other hand, resembles unwashed, raw kishkas.
Comment by BlandOatmeal — April 7, 2009 @ 9:31 pm
[...] Ted Belman placed an observative post today on Israpundit » Blog Archive » IPF to Obama: Endorse the Arab Peace …Here’s a quick excerptHe has no regard for whether the Arabs can be trusted to make peace or whether the concessions required make peace unstable. He also ignores the superiority of Jewish rights to Arab rights. He also ignors thge will of his fellow Jews in … [...]
Pingback by Topics about Peace » Archive » Israpundit » Blog Archive » IPF to Obama: Endorse the Arab Peace … — April 7, 2009 @ 10:09 pm
M.J has been into Israel Bashing for over 30 years all the while posing as a sort of Zionist. His arguments Narvey do carry weight and logic unless we base our argument on Judaism and not history or security. Once we base our arguments on our right based on Tanach then there is no argument. The Arabs can make an equally strong historical case for ethnic if not national rights as we; maybe even stronger. The mistake you secular Jews make is trying to present rational and reasoned facts when nobody cares or even understands those arguments. Basing our rights on the Tanach is the only argument that even non believing Christians and Muslims at least understand and all believing Christians and Muslims cannot refute without undermining their own core beliefs. Security? Is the worst argument to justify our existence. almost nobody can define it within an Israel context(Like Peace), Israels security requirements today are not the same as they were in 1948, 1967 or today. They are ever changing with the threats. Likewise Peace without acceptable contextual definition is Gibberish. Jewish rights are first and foremost religiously based, then Nationally based, then territorial based. Without Tanach all the rest crumble as to viable argument. We could just say Veni vidi vici :: I came, I saw, I conquered. Just as almost every nation came into existence. We exist as long then as we have the power to defend our existence. History? remember Jews were only sovereign in total for less than 500 years the rest we were autonomous as a vassal state. The Ottomans and Arabs in that sense were sovereign for much longer and more recently.
Kahana debates M.J. Rosenberg on Larry King.
http://www.archive.org/download/CollectedSpeechesDebatesAndInterviewsPart2/RavKahane19m_64kb.mp3
This debate puts into focus our inner conflict then as well as now. Nothing has changed, in fact today the problem is much worse. Kahane was mostly right.
Comment by yamit82 — April 8, 2009 @ 3:32 am
Another link for Larry King and MJRosenberg
http://www.archive.org/details/CollectedSpeechesDebatesAndInterviewsPart2
Comment by yamit82 — April 8, 2009 @ 6:25 am
another intresting Link
http://www.archive.org/download/CollectedSpeechesDebatesAndInterviewsPart2/CollectedSpeechesDebatesAndInterviewsPart2_64kb.m3u
Comment by yamit82 — April 8, 2009 @ 7:54 am
Yamit, why would the anti-Israel crowd, primarily secular leftists, understand or give a damn about Jewish rights to Israel based on the Tanach any more than they would accept arguments based on history and security? And religious Christians and Jews already accept Jewish rights to the land of Israel. Of course muslims will NEVER accept Israel, so they are not even a consideration.
Comment by Laura — April 8, 2009 @ 3:24 pm
the best solution for middle east crisis is to award Noble Peace Prize to Alqaaeda,Hamas and Mr Barack Obama.
can u see how all shall be happy.
And dear Jews don’t be selfish to ask for your share, you can have your own land.
lots of love
Comment by serindipity — April 8, 2009 @ 3:27 pm
Koran recognizing Jews rights to the Land of Israel:
Quotation from The Koran (Sura 5:21) attesting to the divine gift of the Land of Israel to the Jewish People. (
Peace will come from a perceptual shift in which Muslims see the State of Israel as a blessing expressing Allah’s will and Christians see it as the Divine fulfillment of the biblical promise of the Land of Israel to the Jewish people.
The Indigenous People of the Land of Israel
The Koran, Islam’s holiest book, confirms what every Jew and Christian who honors the Bible knows: The Land of Israel was divinely deeded to the Children of Israel. The Jews are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel who have continuously lived there for more three millennia despite the conquests of numerous imperialist empires. Jews are from Judea. Arabs are from Arabia.
Those who believe (in the Qur’an), and those who follow the Jewish
(scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians,- any who believe in
God and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward
with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.
(2:62)
Children of Israel! call to mind the favour which I bestowed upon
you, and that I preferred you to all others. (2:47 repeated in 2:122)
Remember Moses said to his people: “O my people! Call in remembrance
the favour of Allah unto you, when He produced prophets among you,
made you kings, and gave you what He had not given to any other among
the peoples.(5:21)
A Koranic reconciliation with the Jewish Return
By Yossi Klein Halevi
Jerusalem Post / Aug. 28, 2003
There are brave - admittedly isolated - Muslim voices who insist that the Koran does indeed recognize the Jewish right to the Holy Land. One of them is Khaleel Mohammed, an Islamic scholar who taught at Brandeis University and will begin teaching this fall at San Diego University. I met him a few weeks ago at an interfaith seminar sponsored by “Brandeis in the Berkshires,” Brandeis’s adult education summer institute.
“As a Muslim,” he told us then, “I have no choice but to believe that God gave the land to the Jews.”
Of course there are other Koranic verses that aren’t particularly flattering to Jews or Christians (though the worst of those references are found in the Hadith, the compilation of stories attributed to the Prophet Muhammad). But theological change happens though selective quoting. Every religious person does it: You quote those verses that resonate with your own religious insights and ignore or reintrepret those that undermine your certainties. Selective quoting isn’t just legitimate, but essential: Religions evolve through shifts in selective quoting. One way the Catholic Church has justified its new theology toward Judaism and the Jewish people is by downplaying the anti-Jewish language of the Gospels and instead emphasizing philo-Judaic verses like the one in Romans that refers to Jesus’ gentile followers as a branch grafted onto the olive tree of Israel.
Khaleel - Guyana-born and of Indian descent - is one of several scholars of Islam who have rediscovered a long-forgotten debate among medieval Muslim authorities over the identity of the son chosen by Abraham for his sacrifice. Contrary to common assumption, the Koran doesn’t name the son whom Abraham placed on the altar. And initally at least, some leading Muslim scholars believed that the intended sacrificial son wasn’t Ishmael but Isaac.
According to Khaleel, opting for Ishmael - father of the Arab nation - over Isaac satisifed a political need to assert Arab preeminence in the Muslim world, as well as an Arab desire to negate the centrality of Jewish figures like Moses and Jesus in the Koran. (Moses is the individual most cited in the Koran.) It isn’t Islam that distorted the biblical narrative, insists Khaleel, but Arab interpretation of Islam.
And so, he suggests, in seeking dialogue with Muslims, Jews should look to the vast Islamic periphery outside the Arab world, where antipathy to Judaism isn’t as deeply rooted and where politics hasn’t entirely poisoned faith.
Clearly, scriptural interpretation can lead to all sorts of conclusions. I know one politically hard-line Muslim scholar in Jerusalem who accepts, on the basis of Sura 5, the right of Jews to live in the Holy Land, but not their right to sovereignty over it. The Koran, he explains, approves of Jewish immigration to the land, but says nothing about a Jewish state.
Khaleel, who happens to be an imam who studied for seven years in Saudi Arabia, would dismiss that position as sophistry.
As a Jew who loves Islam and prays for its continued evolution, all I can say is: Let the disputation begin.
The writer is a contributing editor and Israel correspondent for The New Republic. He is author of At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land.
Fulfillment of Mohammed’s Prophecy
The ingathering of the Jewish people into its historic homeland in the midst of the Islamic world is the fulfillment of Mohammed’s prophecy in the Koran (Sura 17:104): “And we said to the Children of Israel, ‘scatter and live all over the world…and when the end of the world is near we will gather you again into the Promised Land.”
The Koran Honors a Jewish State
The Koran (Sura 5:20-21) supports the Arab world’s need to change their viewpoint to recognize the sovereign right of the Jews over the Land of Israel as the will of Allah: “Remember when Moses said to his people: ‘O my people, call in remembrance the favor of God unto you, when he produced prophets among you, made you kings, and gave to you what He had not given to any other among the people. O my people, enter the Holy Land which God has assigned unto you, and then turn not back ignominiously, for then will ye be overthrown, to your own ruin.’”
Comment by yamit82 — April 8, 2009 @ 4:29 pm
I disagree: It could be possible but there would need to be a sea change in our own conceptions and perceptions: We should continue to kill them at least those who threaten us and bomb the crap out of Iran but when it comes to defending our selves in the court of world public opinion we should not argue on their turf but rest on our Own. The Bible. Believe me they will be argumentatively disarmed.
Yamit, why would the anti-Israel crowd, primarily secular leftists, understand or give a damn about Jewish rights to Israel based on the Tanach any more than they would accept arguments based on history and security?
Because it would change the basis and context of their arguments. To counter a religious or theological argument they would be forced to argue and attempt to counter a non modern and anti humanist ethical argument. What could they counter with when we say G-d gave the Jewish People the Land from the Nile to the Euphrates? UN, International Law? etc. We can beat them on any argument not based solely on security issues or history. Can you see believing and non believing Christians denying the Holy writ and thus denying G-d they profess to believe in?
Since almost 80% of Americans believe in G-d and Most Muslims also believe in a monotheistic deity using those beliefs and their own texts and beliefs we can win. Sure there will always be that minority that won’t go along but using the religious card will disarm most of their primary weapons, Ignorance,Malice and some of the nationalist arguments. Even if I am wrong it seems to me a better way to go than always trying to MAKE A CASE FOR ISRAEL OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND LOSING THE BATTLE ON THAT BASIS.
Comment by yamit82 — April 8, 2009 @ 5:05 pm
What could they counter with when we say G-d gave the Jewish People the Land from the Nile to the Euphratese>
Comment by rongrand — April 8, 2009 @ 8:00 pm