The article below testifies to an undeniable truth: there is nothing Israel can do to placate Palestinian hostility to Israel's existence. As Gold Meir said: "Simply put the root issue is the Arab attitude to Israel’s very existence …They don’t want us here." The article:
In 2008, Barack Obama said, “I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt a unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel – and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel. If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how we achieve these goals, then we’re not going to make progress.”
Seven years later, President Obama will go down in history as the most hostile American President towards the State of Israel in modern memory. And Obama still refuses to accept the fact that in Israel there is a democracy, and the people have yet again chosen Likud. He chooses to believe his hostility to Israel is about the Likud – and he is wrong. It’s about the State of Israel.
During a recent interview with The Atlantic, President Obama said “…I care deeply about preserving that Jewish democracy, because when I think about how I came to know Israel, it was based on images of … kibbutzim, and Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir…” Obama continued on, claiming that there is “a very concerted effort on the part of some political forces to equate being pro-Israel, and hence being supportive of the Jewish people, with a rubber stamp on a particular set of policies coming out of the Israeli government.”
The truth is that Obama is simply out of touch with reality.
Golda Meir, the first female head of state in the Western world, noted, “We are not so fortunate that the quarrel between us and the Arab countries … is a question of territory … The Arab countries are in lack of a little more sand?”
Obama – who has regularly advocated for Israel to withdraw to the 1967 lines, wouldn’t like Golda Meir’s words on the subject. She asked, “Now they say we should go back to the ’67 borders, but that’s where we were so why was there a war? And we had ’47 borders … we didn’t like them very much but we said yes to them. But there was still a war. And after the ’48 war they said we should go back to the ’47 borders. But that’s where we were … and that’s where they wanted to get us out from … They still nurture a hope that at some time we’ll disappear.”
Those words still ring true.
Ms. Meir also said that, “There can be no greater mistake in assessing the current situation in the Middle East than to assume that the conflict continues because of a specific Arab grievance – the plight of the Arab refugees, the Israeli presence on the West Bank, the reunification of Jerusalem. The heart of the problem is what caused the Six Day War … Simply put the root issue is the Arab attitude to Israel’s very existence …They don’t want us here. That’s what it’s about. It isn’t true that they don’t want us in Nablus or Jenin. They don’t want us, period.”
This “proud Jewess,” as Menachem Begin called her, would have stood against President Obama’s hostility towards Israel.
And today, as Knesset Member Eitan Cabel of the Zionist Union party noted, “this time, it is definitely not a matter of Right or Left. … with all the criticism there is about how [Netanyahu] conducted the struggle against the agreement, the struggle itself is just. Against a nuclear Iran, there is no opposition or coalition. We are all Israelis.”
Golda Meir was supremely tough and clear.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Obama’s wrong. It’s not about the Likud or about the left. It is simply about the State of Israel.
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