from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 02 Dec 2009 08:45 PM PST

Once upon a time a mad Caliph demanded of an old servant
of his that he teach a donkey to talk for his amusement. If he refused,
he would be put to death. If he failed he would be put to death as well.
The old servant shrugged and assented, asking for a year's time. When
other servants asked him why he had accepted, he answered. "A year is a
long time. Either the Caliph will die or the donkey will learn to
speak."

Now in Jerusalem, Netanyahu is busy playing Caliph Obama's
game. He knows that the donkeys of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are
not about to learn to talk like human beings and engage in actual
diplomacy, instead of using diplomacy as a subterfuge for terrorism. But
at the same time he knows that the American Caliph is not about to cease
making irrational demands for talking donkeys. So once again Netanyahu is
playing for time.

It is hard to tell whether Netanyahu is trying to finesse the
Caliph, or repeating the mistakes of his first term, when he gave in to
the Clinton Administration's pressure, only to be forced from office by
Clinton's hired goons anyway. And there may be no practical
difference.

The 10 month freeze on construction beyond the Green
Line that Netanyahu agreed to has already resulted in a revolt within the
Likud and the settlement community. Inspectors have been met with protests
and acts of civil disobedience. Netanyahu in turn has canceled his trip to
Germany and is trying to settle the bubbling political crisis.

While everyone in the government is assuring the public that the
freeze is only temporary, there's no sign that this belief is shared on
the Caliph's side of the fence. America and the EU view the freeze as a
sign of things to come. And while construction has frozen, Obama and the
EU are busy creating new facts on the ground. Obama has already broken
ground by calling Jewish housing in Jerusalem a Settlement. A leaked
classified EU report meanwhile calls for the European Union to strengthen
the PA's hold on Israel's capital city and pushes for sanctions against
Jewish residents of East Jerusalem.

Netanyahu's show of "good
faith" has not averted Palestinian Arab terrorist attacks, nor a drive by
the US and the EU to disenfranchise Israel in its own capital. All it has
done is frozen Israel's ability to respond by countering the facts on the
ground created by Fatah terrorists and their EU and US government backers,
with facts on the ground of its own. Countering efforts to ethnically
cleanse Jews from their own country with the most potent antidote, Jewish
settlement.

Once again Netanyahu has not made diplomatic
concessions to the Palestinian Authority, which in any case lacks a legal
government and no longer even controls its own territory. He made a
political concession to Caliph Obama. But he would be extremely foolish to
expect any gratitude for it.

The 10 month freeze is viewed as
inadequate in Washington D.C., a minimal concession that Obama had to
settle for because he couldn't get anything more out of Netanyahu this
time around. Like a mugger who escapes with a few quarters, only because
he couldn't grab the whole wallet, an embittered Obama will be back
because his administration is governed by the belief that the only way to
bring stability to the Middle East is by taking that wallet away from
Israel and giving it to the Muslim terrorists of Hamas (Gaza) and Fatah
(Palestinian Authority).

Obama settled for 10 months only to avoid
leaving the impression that he had failed to accomplish anything, but he
certainly won't be settling for 10 months. But Israelis have a grabbing
onto the faintest statements from America for a thin shred of hope. Rabin
insisted that the Palestinian Authority would be easily revocable if
violence ensued. Sharon took American assurances about retaining some of
Judea and Samaria as ironclad guarantees, when a few years later Obama
demonstrated that they weren't a clod of dirt, let alone the misery and
horror inflicted by the Gaza Disengagement on the people of Israel. This
lack of memory, this perpetual political amnesia is the same reason why
conservative Israelis are baffled that Netanyahu 2.0 is a lot like
Netanyahu 1.0, only a little better at playing politics.

Meanwhile Netanyahu has found that
cutting a deal with Obama may actually destroy him at home. Parliamentary
critics point out that the Knesset never voted on the freeze. And with the
scope of the freeze touching on even sizable Israeli cities such as Beitar
Ilit, with a prominently Haredi population, the outrage extends well
beyond the usual settlement activists, as Israelis who are not usually
caught up in politics are discovering that the freeze will hit them hard
in the wallet and prevent them from building and expanding homes, or
moving into partially constructed housing.

With everyone in his
government looking to score points, Netanyahu is more on the defensive
than he has ever been. Barak has seen his chance to boost his otherwise
terrible standing within the left wing camp with a round of settler
bashing, both metaphorical and physical via the dreaded Yasam units. Shas
played its usual cynical game by opposing the freeze in word, and sitting
out the vote to score brownie points, while not actually voting against
the freeze. Lieberman is busy touting his foreign affairs credentials,
despite the fact that much of the world thinks of him as little more than
a shaved ape in a suit. Which is not altogether far from the truth. The
Likud meanwhile is full of pretenders to the throne who are willing to
talk tough, right up until the point that they sit down in the big chair
themselves.

The UTJ, which as usual cares about only money, is
putting a bill forward to have the government compensate everyone who now
be losing money on existing construction projects. While the UTJ
move is another cynical example of a corrupt Haredi politics that
cares only for its own finances, it is clear that no one in the government
went so far as to consider the economic fallout from the freeze. And that
fallout extends beyond Israel and to the Palestinian Arabs as well, who
depend heavily on Israeli construction in the Settlements and
Jerusalem for their income. This means that a construction freeze is
paradoxically likely to inspire further violence.

By agreeing to
the freeze, Netanyahu made another concession that will make it harder for
Jews to live in Israel. Because each concession has only served to whet
the wolf's appetite for territory in the Arab world, and the drive to
stamp out Israel in the EU and the State Department. A 10 month freeze on
housing construction in Judea and Samaria doesn't mean 10 months in the
chandelier lit halls of Brussels and Washington D.C. It means an
indefinite freeze as a precursor to turning the territory over to Fatah
and Hamas, while ethnically cleansing its Jewish population. And anyone
who thinks any different, is fooling themselves.

But by turn
Netanyahu's harshest critics are ignoring the unpleasant reality that
weakening him or forcing him out, will only bring the same results it did
last time, when it ushered in Barak's election as Clinton's puppet,
followed by Sharon ethnically cleansing Jews from Gaza in exchange for
worthless promises that Obama has already disavowed.

To survive
Israel must stop making concessions, and recognize that it is not
negotiating with the PA, which has never taken the negotiations seriously
in the first place, and used them only to help extract financial aid from
its foreign sponsors. It has been and is negotiating with the US and the
EU. And those negotiations must cease.

Feeding into the idea that the process is a dead end and
futile, can't help but weaken the foreign policy advocates of creating a
stable Middle East by feeding Israel to the terrorist crocodile. And
Netanyahu has demonstrated that he is quite capable of wasting everyone's
time and frustrating them in the bargain, almost as well as Arafat did. If
Israel can't have a leader who can openly dispense with the niceties and
the negotiations, then it may have to settle for a leader who borrows the
Palestinian Arab negotiating handbook and turn the entire process into a
hopeless sinkhole.

In the World Championship chess matches, the
Soviet authorities determined that Karpov, their man, should defeat
Korchnoi, who had defected from the USSR, successfully terrorized the
latter. Karpov won, but wound up facing Bobby Fischer, who was crazy
enough to terrorize any opponent without requiring the services of the
secret police. If Netanyahu lacks the courage to openly drop the pretense
of negotiating with the US and the EU, he can turn the negotiations into a
complete farce. That is the third answer to the Caliph's game. Because the
Caliph is not all powerful, he only has as much power as your cooperation
gives him. Israel's willingness to negotiate has made it into a target.
Only by destroying the process one way or another, can Israel survive and
be free.