Risks and Threats

"Attempts to impose a boycott on the State of Israel are immoral and unjust. Moreover, they will not achieve their goal. First, they cause the Palestinians to adhere to their intransigent positions and thus push peace further away. Second, no pressure will cause me to concede the vital interests of the State of Israel, especially the security of Israel's citizens. For both of these reasons, threats to boycott the State of Israel will not achieve their goal."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

US secretary of state John Kerry spoke about boycotts of Israel during an international security conference in Munich. His comments have led to a public spat with Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu . Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

"The risks are very high for Israel. People are talking about boycotts. That will intensify in the case of failure. Do they want a failure that then begs whatever may come in the form of a response from disappointed Palestinians and the Arab community?"
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry

That's some example of diplomacy at work...foreseeing, quite accurately, the 'response' from 'disappointed Palestinians' should Israel fail to succumb to Mr. Kerry's blandishments, and President Mahmoud Abbas's increasing demands for concessions by Israel. The 'response' would, needless to elaborate, be expressive of ongoing violent attacks. Each and every time the U.S. indicates it is prepared to accept that Israel must surrender to Palestinian self-entitlements, the Palestinians' reaction is validation creates the opportunity to increase demands.

And if it isn't the subtle and not-so-subtle urging of the U.S. for Israel to take whatever's on offer and forfeit their own rights and entitlements, then it's the bullying tactics of the European Union which loves to think of itself collectively as the conscience of the world, and the champion of the underdog. Coercion is their very special weapon against what they perceive as a naughty world which must conform to the EU's concept of the justness of things.

This would be the very same European Union of whom it has now been revealed that corruption in each of the 28-sanctimonious-member-countries is rampant, to the tune of over $120-billion dollars per year, equal to the size of the EU's annual budget. How's that for mind-boggling? A culture of corruption so broad and so vast that it equals legitimate financial transactions among the membership of the European Union.

The Palestinians insist they will not recognize Israel as a Jewish state, holding that to do so would compromise their insistence that Israel be flooded by a tsunami of returning Arab 'residents'. Of the estimated 750,000 who fled the area when Israel declared itself a nation with the blessing of the United Nations and the Partition plan, the UN refugee agency recognizes all succeeding generations as representative of 'refugee' status, so that millions of Palestinians may now claim their desire to 'return' to Israel.

Are the Arab states who summarily and with malice aforethought expelled 850,000 Jews from lands they had lived on for thousands of years, in reaction to the creation of the State of Israel in 1946, and who had their properties and belongings confiscated in the process, now prepared to welcome their exiled Jewish population back with open arms, and restore their belongings to them? Should we ask or should we think: perish the thought.

One can only muse whether Russia has ever regretted selling Alaska to the United States. Might they now seek to revoke the legitimacy of that sale on second sober thought? And how about Mexico? Might they conceivably see value in insisting on the return of Texas, New Mexico, most of Arizona and California which the U.S. took from Mexico, claiming them as its own in the 1846 America-Mexican war? A rather lop-sided, unfair war that was, and its territorial claims rather unjust.

"The things ... Kerry said are hurtful, they are unfair and they are intolerable. Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with a gun to its head when we are discussing the matters which are most critical to our national interests", objected Yuval Steinitz, Israel's intelligence and strategic affairs minister. "We expect of our friends in the world to stand by our side against the attempts to impose an anti-Semitic boycott on Israel, and not to be their mouthpiece", added Israel's Naftali Bennett, industry minister.

Might India wish to reconsider having agreed to allow Pakistan to carve itself out of greater India, in the year before that when Israel declared itself a nation? Might Turkey wish to reconsider its intransigence in refusing a homeland for Kurds who represent the largest minority ethnic group in the world without a homeland of their own? Surely Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey could accommodate the Kurds, surrendering a trifling amount of their borders?

"Today's status quo absolutely, to a certainty, I promise you 100%, cannot be maintained. It's illusionary. You see for Israel, there's an increasing delegitimization campaign that has been building up. People are very sensitive to it. There are talks of boycott and other kinds of things", said Mr. Kerry at the Munich Security Conference relating to perceived risks of failure of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Mr. Kerry has his prestige wrapped into those talks, and that of Mr. Obama.

The inference here is that Israel is balking and holding up the process, certainly not the Palestinians to whom the international community concedes the upper hand. The question is, why? And the answer is guilt; the Western world used the Middle East and its Arab nations as fodder for their own economic advancement. In a kindly gesture of recompense, the price to be paid for forgiveness is a sacrifice, and what other such sacrifice might have any meaning than that of the perpetual lamb, Israel?