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James Besser reports that a new Zogby poll shows increasing support for a military strike on Iran.

Last week’s poll by Zogby International came as the Bush administration ratchets up both its warlike rhetoric and its sanctions against Teheran and war opponents intensify efforts to erect obstacles to U.S. military action. According to the national survey, 52 percent of likely voters now would support a U.S. military strike to prevent Iran from growing nuclear — and 53 percent believe such a strike is likely before next year’s presidential election. Republicans, according to the survey, are far more likely to support the military option, but still, 41 percent of Democrats indicated support. In one surprise, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) emerged as the candidate “best equipped” to deal with the Iranian threat, selected by 21 percent of respondents. Clinton was followed by former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani at 15 percent. … The Jewish numbers in the Zogby poll — with 48 percent “very supportive” of a U.S. military strike and 20 percent “somewhat supportive” — are dramatically different from last year’s American Jewish Committee survey, in which only 38 percent said they supported U.S. military action.

That first paragraph isn’t exactly accurate as war opponents are also objecting to diplomatic tools such as the boycott of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. I’m not sure that results about Hillary Clinton are that surprising. Given that much of the support for striking at Iran is coming from the Jewish community, which is strongly Democratic, it would follow that Hillary Clinton would be viewed as the candidate most likely to deal with Iran effectively. However there are other polls.

But critics point out that the Zogby poll is not consistent with other national surveys. A recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll suggested opposition to the military option is growing, with 68 percent of Americans saying they would oppose a decision to strike Iranian targets. And in a Fox news poll, only 29 percent of Americans advocated military action “before President Bush leaves office,” with 54 present preferring to “let the next president deal with Iran.”

So the question remain if the differences in the results are due to timing (like maybe the Zogby poll took place after the revelation that Interpol has issued warrants in the Argentina bombing) or possibly due to the wording.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Melanie Phillips’ disturbing Britian’s Anti-Semitic turn notes that:

And now, in Britain and elsewhere, anti-Semitism has mutated again, its target shifting from culture to creed to race to nation. What anti-Semitism once did to Jews as people, it now does to Jews as a people. First it wanted the Jewish religion, and then the Jews themselves, to disappear; now it wants the Jewish state to disappear. For the presentation of Israel in British public discourse does not consist of mere criticism. It has become a torrent of libels, distortions, and obsessional vilification, representing Israel not as a country under exterminatory attack by the Arabs for the 60 years of its existence but as a regional bully persecuting innocent Palestinians who want only a homeland.

She shows how antisemitism has infected different sectors of British society: academia, the Church and the media. And while it doesn’t seem to be as bad in the government, the government isn’t without its bad apples.

Livingstone is not the only leftist politician “crossing the line.” In 2003, Labour backbencher Tam Dalyell claimed that Tony Blair was “being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers.” Liberal Democrat Jenny Tonge, whose party honored her with a peerage after she sympathized with suicide bombers and compared Arabs in Gaza with Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, told her party conference in 2006: “The pro-Israel lobby has got its grips on the Western world. I think they’ve probably got a certain grip on our party.”

While the English weren’t always supportive of Jewish settlement in Palestine, at least one British leader was supportive of a Jewish Homeland, Winston Churchill. Arthur Herman writes

A student of history, Churchill came to feel that Judaism was the bedrock of traditional Western moral and political principles–and Churchill was of a generation that preferred to talk about principles instead of “values.” For Europeans to turn against the Jew, he argued, was for them to strike at their own roots and reject an essential part of their civilization–“that corporate strength, that personal and special driving power” that Jews had brought for hundreds of years to Europe’s arts, sciences and institutions. To deny Jews a national homeland was therefore an act of ingratitude. Churchill became a keen backer of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which broached the idea of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As a friend to Zionist leader Chaim Weizman, and as colonial secretary after World War I, Churchill made establishing such a homeland a matter of urgency. “The hope of your race for so many centuries will be gradually realized here,” Churchill told a Jewish audience in Jerusalem during his visit in March 1921, “not only for your own good, but for the good of all the world.”

Interestingly, the one action that Churchill took that haunts the Middle East to this day, was apparently done to help the Jews.

Yet Churchill was convinced that Arab civilization would benefit from contact with an entrepreneurial and morally centered people. “Speaking entirely as a non-Jew,” he wrote, “I look on the Jews as the natural importers of western leaven so necessary for countries in the Near East.” At the same time, Churchill tried to ensure that Palestinian Arabs got their own national homeland. It was Churchill who, as colonial secretary, decided to separate Transjordan (modern-day Jordan) from the rest of Palestine, assuming that Transjordan would become the site of the Arabs’ future state and that other parts of Palestine (including the West Bank of the Jordan River) would be open to Jewish settlement.

(Keep that history in mind the next time you hear a Palesitnian spokesman saying that they’ve compromised by giving up claims to 72% of Palestine and shouldn’t be required to compromise anymore. The Palestine Mandate included what is now Jordan.)

Given Churchill’s friendship with the Jews it’s more than a little ironic that James Baker whose hostility towards Israel was well known, (along with Lee Hamilton) was recently honored with a Churchill Award.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.

Jackson Diehl rings the alarm bells in If this peace process fails.

For the next several days, Israel’s talk radio and op-ed pages converged on a single subject — but it was not Olmert’s groundbreaking speech. Instead, the buzz was all about something that took place at a soccer game in Haifa while Olmert was speaking. Before the game began, an announcer asked for a moment of silence in honor of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who led Israel toward peace in the early 1990s before being assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995. Hundreds in the crowd, most of them supporters of the visiting Jerusalem team, responded with boos; some began lustily singing songs in honor of Yigal Amir, the man who murdered him. The message drawn from this episode by Israeli security officials, as well as pundits, was grim: The return Olmert signaled to an aggressive pursuit of a final peace with Palestinians also will mean the comeback of the ugly and potentially violent resistance from Israel’s far right. The soccer game wasn’t the only sign. Posters showing Israeli President Shimon Peres, another peace advocate, wearing an Arab headdress have appeared on walls around Jerusalem this week, an explicit echo of the propaganda that preceded the attack on Rabin 12 years ago.

Treppenwitz neatly disposes of the idea that the booing was, in some way, significant.

When a bunch of unruly Beitar Yerushalayim fans booed during the moment of silence that was observed in memory of Rabin (and many even chanted “Yigal Amir”), MK Yossi Beilin urged Sports and Culture Minister Raleb Majadele to pull all government funding for the club and Peace Now Secretary-General Yariv Oppenheimer immediately demanded that Beitar Jerusalem be penalized for its fans’ conduct. I’m just wondering, do these people really think that the Beitar management has some sort of control over what the fans will say at a game? I could see it if they flashed “Boo” or “Yigal Amir” on the Jumbo-tron and the fans dutifully followed along. But this was a spontaneous occurrence… albeit in incredibly bad taste. My point is that the left seems to have an insatiable urge to inflict collective punishment upon the right for something that was the act of a lone lunatic.

I’d add that though PM Sharon did even more damage to the Right, by evacuating thousands from Gaza, and despite his claims to the contrary, no one attempted to kill him. The Right was furious and felt betrayed, to be sure, but no one lifted a finger against him. For Diehl to argue that Olmert is in some danger due to his expressed willingness to make reckless compromises insults our intelligence.

The problem will be the other legacies from the peace processes of the past. That’s not only potential Jewish violence. There is also the probable terrorism of Palestinian rejectionists, above all a Hamas movement that has been excluded from the upcoming U.S.-sponsored Annapolis conference and bottled up in the Gaza Strip. There is the inability of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s West Bank authority to control its own militia-gangs, and political rivalries in Israel that may prevent Olmert from taking quick steps on settlements. Then there is the incurable proclivity of both Israelis and Palestinians to burden negotiations with maximalist demands and negotiating tricks intended to elide what both sides know to be the available settlement terms.

And now, yes, we’re back to 1996 and Hamas will try to kill the peace process if negotiations are successful. What absolute bunk. Has Diehl been paying attention to Gaza? Has he read the news that thousands of citizens have fled Sderot? Palestinian violence doesn’t happen to derail the peace process, but it takes advantage of the gains in territory and freedom resulting from the peace process. Qassams raining down on Sderot became worse after Israel withdrew.

And the terror of early 1996 was a result of Israel’s withdrawals in late 1995. Hamas was able to organize in areas that had been abandoned by Israel because the Palestinian Authority refused to assert control as it had been obligated by the Oslo Accords. Diehl charges that Israel “burdens” negotiations. Baloney. Israel has real concerns. Israel has changed a lot since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993.

As Daled Amos pointed out recently, the views of Rabin – whom Diehl cites as an ideal – at the time of his assassination would now be considered right-wing. But there’s been no similar movement on the Palestinian side. None. Yes Arafat is dead, but his ideology lives on even if it’s now expressed by a well groomed man who wears suits.

Diehl claims that Abbas is willing to compromise on the Palesitnian right of return. (This shouldn’t even be an issue as insistence on it, is insistence that Israel ceases to exist.) But as Elder of Ziyon observed, Abbas essentially gives veto power to Hamas. Finally Diehl tells us what’s really at stake.

For Olmert, Abbas and Rice, the motivation for bulling through this familiar pattern of resistance may not be just courage but fear. All three know that if they fail this time, the result will not be the mere continuation of a miserable status quo. More likely, it will be another eruption of bloodshed and the consolidation of Hamas as the preeminent Palestinian power. That means not Abbas but Hamas’s patron, Iran, will become the arbiter of whether Israel is accepted as “a Jewish homeland.”

Interesting that he sees the strengthening of Iran an outcome of a failed peace process. Last year Diehl recommended that Olmert make some bold moves of his own including

Israel cares less about who rules Lebanon. And it has something Assad wants at least as much: the Golan Heights. The Syrian president has been saying for months that he is ready to open talks about a swap of the territory for peace, a deal that his father came within inches of closing 6 1/2 years ago. Until recently Israel had little incentive to make that bargain with Bashar Assad. But the rise of the Iranian threat in the past year has changed the calculus for at least some of Olmert’s advisers. Imagine Ehud Olmert emerging from the White House to announce that Israel is prepared to explore peace with Syria. It might not turn the ugly tide in the Middle East. But it would, at least, get Israel and the United States back in the fight.

So strengthening an Iranian ally doesn’t bother Diehl. As long as it’s Syria and not Hamas. Nor does he consider that Israel’s making a deal with Abbas might have the same effect of strengthening Iran. Even if Israel deals with Abbas, there’s no guarantee that it won’t strengthen Iran. For one thing, it’s pretty clear that Abbas will still deal with Hamas. For another, if Israel cedes more territory now, it will no doubt embolden Hezbollah and Syria to demand more. Diehl, spends the first part of the article implicating the Israeli Right in fighting peace. Actually the Israeli Right was right. It was right about trusting Arafat. It was right that ceding territory to an unrepentant terrorist organization will only embolden it – as we saw with the PA in 1994, Hezbollah in 2000 and Hamas in 2005. So please spare us the lectures and the urgency. Following your prescriptions will only make matters worse. You don’t know how to make peace.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

via memeorandum

Thousands of Palestinians apply for Israeli citizenship

In the months leading up to the upcoming Annapolis peace conference talk of a future division of the city has prompted a staggering increase in nationalization requests by Palestinians seeking to escape life under the Palestinian Authority. Some 250,000 Palestinians currently reside in Jerusalem. Only 12,000 of them have sought to obtain an Israeli citizenship since 1967, an average of about 300 new citizens a year. But over the past four months the Interior Ministry has registered an unprecedented 3,000 applications, primarily residents of the Arab neighborhoods unlikely to remain under Israeli sovereignty according to the political initiative currently on the agenda.

This is, of course, nothing new. The BBC in August 2000 reported:

Israeli media reports today said the number of applications for citizenship had doubled in the past year to more than one-hundred and eighty. An Israeli interior ministry spokeswoman said that twelve-hundred Palestinians from east Jerusalem had been granted citizenship since it was captured by Israel in 1967.

Daniel Pipes showed that the objection Israeli Arabs to living under Palestinian Authority rule is longstanding and affects Arabs from Jerusalem and elsewhere.

Jerusalem. In mid-2000, when it appeared that some Arab-majority parts of Jerusalem would be transferred to Palestinian Authority control, Muslim Jerusalemites expressed less than delight at the prospect. Peering over at Arafat’s PA, they saw power monopolized by domineering and corrupt autocrats, a thug-like police force, and a stagnant economy. Arafat’s bloated, nonsensical claims (“We are the one true democratic oasis in the Arab region”) only exacerbated their apprehensions. ‘Abd ar-Razzaq ‘Abid of Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood pointed dubiously to “what’s happening in Ramallah, Hebron, and the Gaza Strip” and asked if the residents there were well off. A doctor applying for Israeli papers explained: The whole world seems to be talking about the future of the Arabs of Jerusalem, but no one has bothered asking us. The international community and the Israeli Left seem to take it for granted that we want to live under Mr. Arafat’s control. We don’t. Most of us despise Mr. Arafat and the cronies around him, and we want to stay in Israel. At least here I can speak my mind freely without being dumped in prison, as well as having a chance to earn an honest day’s wage. In the colorful words of one Jerusalem resident, “The hell of Israel is better than the paradise of Arafat. We know Israeli rule stinks, but sometimes we feel like Palestinian rule would be worse.”

Sounds sort of like Milton, doesn’t it?

Nor was the idea popular elsewhere.

The entrance to Umm al-Fahm, the largest Muslim town in Israel, sports the green flags of the Islamic Movement Party that rules the town, along with a billboard denouncing Israel’s rule over Jerusalem. That said, Hashim ‘Abd ar-Rahman, mayor and local leader of the Islamic Movement, has no time for Sharon’s suggestion: “Despite the discrimination and injustice faced by Arab citizens, the democracy and justice in Israel is better than the democracy and justice in Arab and Islamic countries.” Nor does Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Arab member of parliament and advisor to Arafat, care for the idea of PA control, which he calls “a dangerous, antidemocratic suggestion.” Just 30 percent of Israel’s Arab population, a May 2001 survey found, agree to the Galilee Triangle being annexed to a future Palestinian state, meaning that a large majority prefers to remain in Israel. By February 2004, according to the Haifa-based Arab Center for Applied Social Research, that number had jumped to 90 percent preferring to remain in Israel. No less startling, 73 percent of Triangle Arabs said they would resort to violence to prevent changes in the border. Their reasons divided fairly evenly between those claiming Israel as their homeland (43 percent) and those cherishing Israel’s higher standard of living (33 percent). So intense was the Arab opposition to ceding the Galilee Triangle to the Palestinian Authority that Sharon quickly gave the idea up.

When the international community pressures Israel to make concessions on Jerusalem and Israeli leadership seems ready to oblige, why doesn’t anyone look at those who those concession are purported to help. They sure don’t seem to look forward to the development.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Wizbang’s Jay Tea asks a simple question

Can anyone — ANYONE — ever cite a single example where the Palestinians were called upon to make any sort of concession or “good faith gesture” and actually kept it? Just once?

It’s a good question. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t very encouraging. With the Palestinians, there were obligations that, by now, have been defined down to “good faith gestures.” For example see In Mideast, Rice Pushes Annapolis Talks

The first phase of the road map called for confidence-building security measures, including Palestinian action against armed groups, Israeli dismantlement of settlement outposts and the easing of restrictions on Palestinian movements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Annapolis document, in its new format, would state that negotiations were proceeding toward the “final status” core issues.

For the Palestinians taking arms against a sea of terrorist groups is a “confidence building measure.” That’s how it goes in this parallel peace making universe. A step that most would consider a fundamental obligation of the Palestinians is now a “confidence building measure.”

On the Israeli side, the Palestinians no doubt consider dismantling settlements to be necessary, but nothing that Israel has signed has so obligated them. And it’s absurd to characterize “easing of restrictions” as a “security measure.” It is a measure that puts Israel’s security at risk and is done in the absence of Palestinian measures against terrorists.

Still calling a primary Palestinian obligation a “confidence building measure” is beyond absurd.

Crossposted on Socer Dad.

Given the unlikelihood of any substantial result emerging from the upcoming Annapolis summit David Brooks, in Present at Creation, asks why Secretary Rice would expend such energy in putting the darn thing together.

It’s slightly unfortunate that the peace process itself is hollow. It’s like having a wedding without a couple because you want to get the guests together for some other purpose. But that void can be filled in later. The main point is to organize the anti-Iranians around some vehicle and then reshape the strategic correlation of forces in the region. Iran has done what decades of peace proposals have not done — brought Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Palestinians and the U.S. together. You can go to Jerusalem or to some Arab capitals and the diagnosis of the situation is the same: Iran is gaining hegemonic strength over the region and is spreading tentacles of instability all around.

Yikes. The peace conference is a sham. It’s an attempt to organize the nations of the Middle East against Iran. Preposterous! And John Podhoretz agrees and demonstrates why this is absurd.

What, specifically, does the status of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship have to do with that urgent and pressing need? The honest answer is: Very little. Unless, that is, you accept the contention that the “moderate” states need and deserve some face-saving bribery in the form of Israeli concessions to get them to act reasonably in concert against Iran. But if they are so worried about Iran, why would they need face-saving bribery, especially considering David’s concession that “there is remarkably little substance to [the peace process] so far. Even people inside the Israeli and Palestinian governments are not sure what’s actually going to be negotiated and what can realistically be achieved.”

(But then again, even though other Arab nations feared Saddam, the United States wouldn’t bring in Israel as an ally during the first Gulf War. So it is possible that Arabs would demand a bribe to join in an initiative with their own self interest in mind.)

But then I saw this article. (h/t Israel Matzav, but in a different context) David Samuels who had recently interviewed Dr. Rice in the Atlantic wrote Condi’s Shame, an assessment of what he saw in his interview with her.

Based on my own interviews with Rice, and my analysis of what she has said about the conflict over a long period of time, I have concluded that Rice is an agnostic on the subject of Israeli-Palestinian peace – but she believes very strongly that the appearance of an active effort to cut a deal is important to America’s interests in the Middle East. The paradox of Rice’s conduct is that she is taking the role of an activist secretary of state while believing very strongly on an intellectual level that events are driven by underlying historical circumstances and currents on which our actions and desires can have only a very limited effect. She has repeatedly stated that the deal cut between East and West Germany and the Soviet Union to end the Cold War would have been impossible even a few years earlier. She told me more than once that it seemed quite possible that historical circumstances may not be ripe for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Samuels, then, comes to a conclusion that’s consistent with that of Brooks. He only leaves out the speculation about the ultimate end of the Annapolis conference. He only allows that she sees arranging the conference to be in America’s interest.

Shrinkwrapped is dismissive of Secretary Rice’s efforts.

If Rice truly believes she can compel or create a breakthrough she is already lost; if she believes that it is better to convene a conference based on lies and obfuscations than to tell people the truth, her conference will surely fail. The truth is that only the Arabs can force the Palestinians to make the concessions necessary for Peace and there is no indication that the Saudis, Egyptians, Fatah, or any other actor is ready, willing, or able to make the mental leap required for peace. All else is rationalization.

Bookworm Room though argues that necessity might well be the mother of the conference.

Nevertheless, this is certainly not a wacky idea, and it does reflect an impulse to bring some central stability to a region that will become entirely unbalanced if the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas axis does in fact ascend to real power, rather than stopping at the noises of power, along with the violence of terrorism.

Daled Amos, though clearly sympathetic to Podhoretz, makes a similar observation to mine.

Why would there be a need to bribe the alliance to do something that natural self-interest should make natural and automatic? Then again, natural self-interest did not keep the Arabs out of the Nazi fold during WWII either.

I’m not sold on the Brooks/Samuels argument. However Samuels is somewhat more convincing in that he’s basing his conclusion on close observation of the Secretary.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.