Now the speech itself, which terrified me. I’ve enclosed the full video, try to follow here or on the complete text here.
[Start at 5:39] The United States’ support for Israel need not be, nor should it be an either-or proposition that dictates our relationship with our Arab allies and friends. The U.S. has a long and special relationship with Israel, but it must not come at the expense of our Arab relationships. That is a false choice, and not in the interests of Israel or the United States.
Big applause.
This is a much used distortion that plays to the single issue benefits of certain groups. The fact is we all need each other. U.S. interests are served by having strong relationships with both Israelis and Arabs, as is Israel’s interest reflecting on its relationships with Egypt and Jordan.
As long as nations continue to be driven by the lowest common denominator of conflict and instability, they will be incapable of rising above the swamps of conflict to clearly view their long term interests for more than just day to day survival.Rather they must give their people a future worthy the dignity of man.
This divisive strategy attempting to make the U.S. choose between its relationships with Israelis and Arabs perpetuates the current state of instability and mistrust and continues to drive us toward more and deeper conflict. It destroys any possibility for positive political atmospherics that are always critical, always critical in attempting to resolve historic conflicts.
The radicals and extremists will continue to use religion and intolerant cannons of life to recruit desperate, hopeless people. And they will use their twisted extremism to hate and kill and subjugate others to their will.
They world’s great religions do not preach this hatred and violence. Why can’t we sort this out?
A few more minutes of Hagel reciting the liberal line of terrorist recruiters feeding off the bad stuff America and Israel are doing to empower themselves – if only we stopped being so stubborn, they would surely stop recruiting. I just couldn’t sit through transcribing this drivel. Skip through that and a string of cliches about the United States’ war efforts in the Middle East as part of President Obama’s overall efforts to achieve peace, skip up to 9:00.
Here comes the really scary stuff:
There’s an emerging consensus about the peace process in the Arab world, but it is fragile, fragmented, and dependant on progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace tract.
In July of this year, Crown Prince of Bahrain wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for Arab-Israeli dialog, and referencing a potentially immense peace dividend for all countries and the prospects for communication and trade between countries and peoples. He said: “When stability pays, conflict becomes too costly. We must do more now to achieve peace.”
The Crown Peace’s op-ed began with a reference to the Arab Peace Initiative, offered by then Crown Prince and now King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, at the Arab League summit in Beirut, in March, 2002. It was significant breakthrough. It was significant because, for the first time ever, all 22 members of the Arab League had come forward with a unanimously agreed-to peace initiative. This after years of the United States telling the Arabs that they must get involved and take responsibility and leadership for helping resolve this conflict.
Well, they did. But the last administration ignored it.
At its core, the Beirut initiative offers to end the Arab-Israeli conflict, enter into a peace agreement with Israel, provide security for all states in the region, and establish normal relations with Israel—in return for Israel withdrawing from all land occupied since 1967, a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem, an acceptance of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Pardon the interruption, but in order to understand what this means, you must realize that the conditions set down by the Arabs – at the opening of the supposed negotiations are:
1. Go back to the 1949 armistice line, which will include uprooting close half a million Israelis from Judea and Samaria. 2. Give back all of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians, to establish their state capital there. 3. Permit the establishment of a Palestinian state with some sort of contiguous land connection between Gaza and the “West Bank.” 4. Let all the Palestinians who wish to resettle inside Israel proper do so.