RUTHIE BLUM: HOT MIC COLD SHOULDER
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=9257
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is coming to Israel on Tuesday, following a visit to Cairo to meet with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The purpose of both trips is to try and secure a cease-fire in Gaza.
It’s been a while since Kerry has graced the region with his presence. This is just as well. If it hadn’t been for the secretary of state’s flying back and forth between Jerusalem and Ramallah for months on end to “assist” in the establishment of a Palestinian state, there would not be a war going on in Gaza right now.
As is always the case when Israel engages in “two-state-solution” talks with the Palestinian Authority, terrorism against the Jewish state ensues. Buoyed by what they perceive as a crack in Israeli armor, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas up the ante on demands already met — such as the release of massive numbers of terrorists held in Israeli prisons — and then launch operations against the Israeli homefront.
The present war in Gaza, thus, has Kerry’s fingerprints all over it.
But Washington is in a bit of a bind. On one hand, the White House and State Department are hostile to the national camp in Israel, which they see as represented by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They feel much more comfortable with figures like outgoing President Shimon Peres and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who parrot their own delusions about the way to achieve peace.
On the other, even the doves in America are hard put to denounce such a clear-cut case of a “war of no choice” as the one that Israel is being forced to engage in right now.
This is why Kerry and U.S. President Barack Obama keep making statements about Israel’s right to defend itself out of one side of their mouths, while urging restraint out of the other.
It also explains the dripping sarcasm, caught on a hot mic at Fox News on Sunday, which Kerry expressed about Israel’s assertion that it has been taking every step to avoid killing innocent Gazans. Talking on his cellphone to his deputy chief of staff, Kerry said, “It is a hell of a pinpoint operation. … We’ve got to get over there.”
Later, when asked by Fox about his tone, he said he had “reacted obviously in a way that, you know, anybody does with respect to, you know, young children and civilians.” What he did not explain was why his disdain on this score was not reserved for, you know, Hamas, the organization wholly responsible for the deaths of “young children and civilians” — you know, both in Israel and in Gaza.
This does not mean he is unaware that Hamas is to blame. It merely reflects his wish that Netanyahu would not end up having the high moral high ground all the time. And what can he say about the fact that Hamas has received two “humanitarian cease-fires” so far, to enable the evacuation of the dead and wounded (you know, to places like the Israeli field hospital at the Erez Crossing), both of which it violated by firing missiles into Israeli cities?
It must have been comforting for him to meet with Ban the minute he arrived in Egypt on Monday, on the heels of the secretary-general’s statement that placed the blame on Israel for the civilian deaths incurred during Sunday’s strikes in the Shujaiyya section of Gaza — a hotbed of terrorist operations and infrastructure.
”I condemn this atrocious action,” he said. “Israel must exercise maximum restraint and do far more to protect civilians.”
It is no surprise, then, that Kerry’s first order of business with Ban was to announce that the U.S. will be sending $47 million in humanitarian aid to Gaza. Nor will it help to point out that these millions, as all the billions that have been poured into Gaza over the years, will promptly be spent on rebuilding the rocket launchers and terrorist tunnels that Israel has been targeting and attempting to destroy during this war.
Nevertheless, a group is organizing in Israel to demonstrate across from the David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem, where Kerry will be staying in the coming days, to tell him to go home.
What the protestors should keep in mind, however, is that Kerry’s hot mic moment, like his general cold shoulder to Netanyahu, is in keeping with his administration’s overall ideology in relation to the West and its enemies. Hamas is small fry compared to its backers in Tehran; and Kerry behaves no differently towards the mullahs of the Islamic republic than he does to their proxies in Gaza.
Sunday was the deadline spelled out in the Joint Plan of Action, signed in January, for the nuclear talks between the P5+1 countries and Iran to culminate in a deal. Naturally, the Iranians have been using the time to continue working on their nuclear weapons capability. Yet now being given an extension until November 24.
“Diplomacy takes time,” Kerry said in a statement on Sunday. “[A]nd persistence is needed to determine whether we can achieve our objectives peacefully. To turn our back prematurely on diplomatic efforts when significant progress has been made would deny ourselves the ability to achieve our objectives peacefully, and to maintain the international unity that we have built. … [This extension] will give us a short amount of additional time to continue working to conclude a comprehensive agreement, which we believe is warranted by the progress we’ve made and the path forward we can envision.”
It is for this reason that Israel is in existential danger, no matter what Kerry says about Israel or how the war in Gaza ends.
Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.'”
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