Condi’s Mideast roadmap is being influenced by whom!?
By Caroline B. Glick
Jewish World Review
February 9, 2005
As US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice embarked on
her maiden voyage, it was reported that she departed
from America armed with a new policy paper on how to
implement the Quartet’s road map produced by the James
Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.
According to Edward Djerejian, the former US
ambassador to Syria who directs the Baker Center, the
paper, with its detailed recommendations, is a “street
map to the road map.”
One of the things that make the paper significant is
that it bears former US secretary of state James
Baker’s name. Not only did Baker serve under the
president’s father, he now plays a formal role in
mobilizing international support for Iraqi
reconstruction efforts.
As well, the team that composed the report included
senior policy makers from the US, the Palestinian
Authority, Egypt, Canada and the World Bank. The US
was represented by current Assistant Secretary of
State for Near Eastern Affairs William Burns as well
as by Norman Olsen, the political counselor at the US
embassy in Israel. The PA was represented by security
strongman Jibril Rajoub and by senior aides to Mahmoud
Abbas, Yasser Arafat and Ahmed Qurei. Egypt was
represented by Dictator Hosni Mubarak’s senior adviser
Osama El Baz and by General Hossam Khair Allah.
Israel had no official representation. Rather, the
Jewish state was represented by none other than Yossi
Beilin’s Geneva Accord crowd. Amnon Lipkin Shahak and
Shlomo Brom, signatories to that subversive agreement
where private citizens tried to abscond with the
government’s sovereign power to determine foreign
policy by negotiating the scandalously anti-Israel
“accord,” participated. They were joined by members of
Beilin’s EU-financed think tank, the Economic
Cooperation Foundation.
Not surprisingly, the product this team produced and
delivered to Rice is soft on Palestinian terrorism,
soft on Palestinian democratization, and relentlessly
harsh toward Israel — its sovereignty, its right to
defend itself, and its ability to claim any right to
retain any of the Israeli communities in Judea and
Samaria.
The document makes no clear statement on the need for
the Palestinians to dismantle terrorist organizations.
Indeed, the term “terror organizations” is absent from
the report. Instead, the Palestinian requirement to
combat terrorism is reduced to demands on Israel to
facilitate the training, arming and operation of the
“reformed” Palestinian security services while not
interfering with them in any way.
While the report pays lip service to the need for the
PA to reform its governing institutions, its only
clear statement on the end-product of reform is
unabashedly authoritarian. The aim of all the reforms
must be the “consolidat[ion of] Fatah as the main
political player in Palestinian society.”
While the report makes no call for the destruction of
Palestinian terror organizations and bucks up the
authoritarian, corrupt PA, it calls for Israel to be
treated with hostility and suspicion.
The paper calls for the establishment of a
multinational force that will implement the
agreements. Implicit in this statement is the
assumption that Israel will be prevented by the
presence of this force from taking any measures to
defend itself against attacks.
International border crossings in Gaza and Judea and
Samaria, including the weapons smuggling hub at the
Philadephi Corridor which separates Gaza from Egypt,
are to be controlled by the Palestinians. The report
gives Egyptian forces a more prominent role in
implementing the agreements than the IDF.
WHERE THE report’s anti-Israel bias is most blatant is
in its discussion of the Israeli communities in Judea
and Samaria. The authors refer to their desire to see
“The Palestinian people establish a viable state in
the West Bank and Gaza” and make it clear that a
precondition for the state’s viability is that it be
racially pure — entirely cleansed of Jewish
communities. At the same time, they express their
desire to “assure that Israel will continue to exist
as the democratic homeland of the Jewish people and
its other citizens.” So in the authors’ view, Israel
is to be a state of all of its citizens while
“Palestine” is to be Judenrein.
The report calls for the institution of a draconian
regime in the Defense Ministry and the Justice
Ministry to effectively prevent any building
activities whatsoever from being conducted in the
Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria. This regime,
“The Special Office on Settlement Activities,” will be
obliged not simply to act as the enforcer of the
attrition of these communities. The report determines
that this body will be subordinate to the US embassy
in Israel — effectively ceding Israeli sovereignty to
the US.
The study even dares to dictate what propaganda moves
must be made by the Israeli government to force the
Israeli public to accept this policy. A close reading
makes it clear that the result of this policy will be
the expulsion of more than 400,000 Israeli Jews from
their homes. This is so because the destruction of
Israeli neighborhoods in Jerusalem is implicit in the
section’s opening paragraph, which mendaciously
claims: “The US government policy has been based on
the principle that there can be no acquisition of
territory by war.”
Not only does this sweeping and totally false
statement necessarily include Jerusalem; it can easily
be interpreted as saying that the only borders Israel
can legitimately claim are the UN partition borders
from 1947 since much of the land that makes up the
1949 armistice lines was acquired in war.
Perhaps it is reasonable that officials pushing a plan
that would cause Israel to effectively become the ward
of the international community should not feel limited
by the positions of the Israeli government as it makes
its plans — sufficing instead to have Israel
“represented” by radical free agents with Israeli
citizenship.
But two questions still arise: Why is the US
government sending its officials to participate in a
“working group” which works to undermine the
sovereignty of a US ally; and why is the Israeli
government not taking legal action against private
citizens who travel the world “negotiating” away the
sovereign rights of the state while undermining the
prerogatives of the Israeli government?
Jewish World Review contributor Caroline B. Glick is
the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for
Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy
managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress