It is time to end the charade and call the spade a spade; America is not the mediator that is trusted by both sides in the Middle East conflict or anything like that. The truth is that America and the Palestinians are the two antagonists in the tragedy that is unfolding out there while Israel is only the outpost that is doing the work for America as determined by an odd collection of operators. These are the American Jewish business leaders who own a business in Israel or plan to start one, the land developers who are eying the occupied Palestinian territories they do not have under their control, the politicians in America who are pandering to a fictitious Jewish electorate, the adventurers who seek thrills while protected by an army equipped with advanced American weapons, the religious idiots whose religion is the blood of Arabs and the gore of biblical dimensions, the psychopathic nuts whose mental diseases are regarded as creative genius in the offices of the Washington power establishment, the maladjusted lunatics who are given all the space they want in the American print and audio-visual media -- and so on and so forth. In short, America is not the solution to the Middle East problem; America is the problem that must be fixed before peace can be brought to that part of the world.
It was reported that sometime in the decade of the Nineteen Seventies, Golda Meir then Prime Minister of Israel reminded Henry Kissinger then America's Secretary of State that he was Jewish therefore he must be more sympathetic toward Israel's positions; toward the needs, goals and aspirations of the Jewish state. Kissinger promptly replied that he was first and foremost an American citizen who is in the service of America's foreign policy and this is where his sympathies will go without giving any regard to his religion. As can be deduced from this exchange, it is because Henry Kissinger knew who he was and what his job entailed that he was able to concentrate on his work and pave the way for a peace treaty to be negotiated between Egypt and Israel. Indeed, the treaty was later negotiated under the auspices of President Jimmy Carter; it was signed and ratified shortly thereafter and its implementation was begun during that same Carter Administration. The net result was a treaty that has endured ever since with no sign that it will falter now or any time in the future. In fact, the more that time passes the more solid and durable the treaty appears to be.
A situation like this is almost impossible to duplicate these days because what you have now are people in the Washington Establishment who do not know who they are or what their job allows them to do or even requires them to do. These are people like Eric Cantor, Joe Lieberman, Charles Schumer and others in the American Congress who openly display allegiance to Israel and support measures that hurt America enormously -- measures they may initiate themselves in the hope of giving Israel something, however small or trivial that something may be. And the funny part that is really not so funny is that it can happen as it often does that these people make an effort that ends up missing the mark and manages to net Israel nothing that can be counted as tangible or regarded as useful in any practical sense. Thus, in the end, America gets hurt to give Israel something but Israel gets nothing and so does America for the wasted effort that was made simply because it was possible to make it.
Horrendous as this may be, it is only the beginning of a horrific story because when you have names like Dan Shapiro, Samantha Power, Dennis Ross, Robert Kagan, Elliott Abrams, Tom Malinowski, Robert Satloff and others who are given the task of determining the foreign policy of the United States of America in a direct or indirect way, you know that this country is ill served in the Executive branch as much as it is in the Congress. It becomes obvious to you as it does to everyone that America has a problem you may call an identity crisis. And to believe that it is possible to negotiate peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis under these conditions is to dream not just the impossible dream but dream the absurd dream. And you realize that what must be negotiated, instead, is a peace treaty between the Palestinians and the sort of Americans who can represent America the way that Henry Kissinger did. When this happens, the resulting treaty will be one that acknowledges the reality that Israel is an addendum to this whole affair, and no more important to the scheme of things than the table around which the conferees have gathered to negotiate.
In effect then, America must resolve its own identity crisis before it can tackle the external problems that face it such as the situation in the Middle East and many more situations. This done, America must make itself fit economically as soon as possible because there is a number of factors that require her attention, the most important being that it is a power on the wane -- if not in absolute terms then at least in relative terms. This is the reality because the momentum (the big mo as they call it) is now with the Asian rising powers, the MENA established sovereigns and the Latin American developing countries. Now think about this; if you accept the notion that the nature of human beings makes them respond in such a way as to turn the table on those who mistreated them in the past, you will understand why few people if any will lament when they see America being threatened by economic sanctions the way that America used to threaten the smaller powers. Some people may even delight in seeing America agonize the way that smaller nations were made to agonize when a strong America used to kick them while they were down and had little to protect them. If something like this begins to happen to America and if the situation escalates to an extreme by design or by accident, one of several outcomes will result. Either America will capitulate under the pressure and accept its status as an inferior power or it will lash out at someone and risk triggering the much feared apocalyptic consequences or it will be contained by one or several powers who will endlessly remind it of the old refrain it used to sing to the smaller powers: “We're not taking anything off the table; all options are on the table.” Bitter medicine but a fitting one administered by the powerful on the one that whipped up the bitter taste of humiliation.
Because this scenario is a possibility that America can only ignore at its peril, there is one thing that it must absolutely do and one thing it must absolutely avoid doing. America must make friends it can rely on wherever and whenever it can find them. And it must avoid fantasizing that India and China will fight and destroy each other, then count on this idiocy to save it and sit back to see how it will all turn out. The deplorable reality is that a fantasy to this effect was floated by supposedly intelligent people who described how one of the two Asian powers might want to ally itself with America against the other and work to undermine or destroy it. These people never explained why this would happen but then again, fantasies are never explained. But logic dictates that the two Asian powers might want to get together and turn America into the sick man of Asia the way that the Ottoman Empire became the sick man of the rising powers of Europe during the Nineteenth Century. And this is not all the nefarious possibilities that would await an economically weakened America. In addition to Asia being out of America's reach and influence, the United States will find it difficult to make new friends in Latin America and difficult to keep its old European friends within its sphere of influence. This is because with the passage of time, the interests of the three continents will diverge markedly, even be at odds with each other. They will all compete against each other and do so ferociously to gain access to the same resources and the same markets.
So then, where will America find the friends it can rely on?
The people who will not mind becoming friends with America while everyone else will be deserting it will have to be a special kind of people adhering to a special kind of culture. Do such people exist in real life? Yes they do. The Arabs in particular and the Muslims in general are known to be so friendly and so hospitable, they will consider someone they just met to be a friend and will stick with them through thick and thin to the end for no reason than the fact the new acquaintance was called a guest. And even if bad blood was generated and has existed between the Arabs and someone they have known for some time, the Arabs will forgive that someone and open a new chapter in the relationship with them if the latter will promise never to hurt the Arabs again. In consequence of this and despite all the hurt that America has inflicted on the Arabs in the past, the Arabs will welcome a gesture of goodwill from America, will reciprocate by treating that country as a guest and will agree to become its good friend, something that America needs now and will need even more as time passes.
Well and good but what would constitute an American gesture of goodwill in the eyes of the Arabs and the Muslims?
The one thing that the Arabs will insist on seeing happen is that if and when America decides to go see them, it does so unattached. That is, they do not want to see America go to them with Israel hitched to it like a bride hanging on to the groom's arm. The Arabs will never be able to bring themselves to consider a situation like this a natural phenomenon. On the contrary, they will consider it to be an expression of pornography. Instead of imagining America say to them: “I come to you in peace and friendship,” they will imagine an America on whose forehead is written: “I am a pimp and I bring a whore into your house.” To give a concrete example, if America wants to trade with the Arabs, it should never again ask them to accept a trade deal whereby Arab made goods can enter America duty free if they include an Israeli component. The Jordanians and the Egyptians have accepted such a deal in the past out of deference for what they thought was a friend in the American Administration who promised to work for the conclusion of a free trade agreement between each of them and America. All that was needed, they thought, was time to satisfy a mysterious congressional requirement – perhaps having to do with making political sausage – something they never understood but left it to their presumed friend to deal with.
Instead of a free trade agreement being proposed, however, the Arabs have learned that such a deal may never be realized between them and America because the Congress had mandated the original insane stipulation to begin with as a result of pressure put on it by the Judeo-American argument to the effect that this kind of a deal will foster peace and understanding between the Arabs and the Israelis, and no one in the Congress will want to change that now. But wait a minute; the Israelis already had a peace treaty with the Jordanians and the Egyptians. What else do they want to foster? If they want to trade with the Arabs, they should approach them and negotiate an agreement the way that normal human beings do and not the way that things are done among the pimps and the prostitutes, the madams and the gigolos inside the bordellos of the red districts in some cities or inside the Washington political beltway. To the Arabs, the Judeo-American argument was a phony one as most of these arguments are; it was pornographic in its execution and the only thing it has accomplished was to generate resentment on the part of the two Arab countries that have agreed to trade with Israel in order to trade with America, and generate disgust on the part of the other Arab nations, none of which has jumped on the bandwagon.
Is there a lesson we can drawn from this situation? Yes there is but we must begin with this observation: Any action that the Jewish organizations want a government to take, they want it done in a sly manner for a reason that will be explained in a moment. But to be persuasive and to achieve their goal, those organizations will assign to the proposed action the bogus ability of fostering understanding between the Jews and the rest of the population. If the question relates to the Middle East and they want the American Congress to mandate something, they will say that the proposed action will foster peace between Israel and the Arabs. Big deal, you say; this looks like a harmless little fraud that is neither here nor there. Not so. The fact is that this is a trick often used by the Jewish organizations in the English speaking countries where they ask for money from the local governments to finance activities they say would foster understanding between them and the rest of the population but create resentment and disgust instead.
One such situation has unfolded in Quebec, the French speaking province of the English speaking country of Canada where the Jewish organizations had the mask blown off their faces in a way they never anticipated. It all happened at a time when, short of money, the government of the province cut back on financial aid to students. In spite of this, the English speaking Minister of Education secretly and illegally appropriated millions of dollars to be sent to the Jewish schools under the guise that the move will foster understanding between the Jews and the rest of the population. The students of Quebec learned about this; they rioted and in so doing sent a powerful message to the Minister. They taught him a lesson to the effect that the only understanding he has fostered among them was that the Jews will do anything to suck the blood out of you, and there will always be someone like him who will help them do the sucking. The Minister called back the money, and never again did the Jews try to pull a trick like this in the Canadian province of Quebec. But why did they try to pull one in the first place?
You will find the answer to this question when you read the Jewish history that is written by Jews. Read it carefully and you will find that the authors are fond of situations where the Jews appear to have been considered so special as to be given something that is normally denied to others. Describing this sort of events, the authors who call themselves Jewish historians make it sound like there has always been someone at the pinnacle of power who admitted that the Jews are the chosen children of God and treated them like specials. This is how these authors have participated in the maintenance of the myth and have helped to perpetuate it. And when history is reported in this way, everything that the Jews lobby for is made to look like it was given to the Jews and denied to others because Jews are special. And this effect is what the Jewish organizations seek to achieve when they make the American Congress pass binding and non-binding resolutions that may seem absurd on the surface but have the insidious value of maintaining and promoting the myth.
As to the Arabs, they consider this sort of machination to be quackery and will reject it as soon as they find out what it is. If the trick is pulled with the connivance of the American legislative body or the Administration, the Arabs will get upset at the Americans. If such act is repeated too many times, the result will be that America -- which needs the friendship of the Arabs -- will lose that friendship. When this happens, America will prove once again that it is not the solution to the Middle East problem but the problem that must be fixed before peace can be brought to that part of the world and before help can be extended to save America's economic standing in the world.
The ball is in America's court.