Barack Obama's first 100 days - part two

SAVE THE DATE -- SHMUEL KATZ

May 31
Sunday
Shmuel Katz hazkara
The Begin Center
6:30 PM
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Waiting for Netanyahu

President Barack Obama held a prime-time news conference Wednesday to mark his first 100 days in office. The potential flu pandemic was topic number one. Next came the economic crisis, with worries about the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal a close third.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict went unmentioned.

Next week, however, expect Israel to be in the Washington limelight. The 2009 AIPAC Policy Conference kicks off on Sunday with speeches by leading US politicians and Christian religious leaders. President Shimon Peres is scheduled to talk on Monday morning, and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will deliver his banquet address Monday evening, via satellite.

Following his AIPAC speech, Peres will head to the White House for a meeting with Obama. Their conversation will focus on Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons - another topic which got nary a mention during the news conference.

This is an international problem, not Israel's alone, Peres will say. In an Independence Day interview with Channel 10, our president mused about a coalition nuclear umbrella which signals the mullahs: "If you use a nuclear weapon - no matter against whom - you'll get a nuclear response."

A better plan is to give them every reason not to build a bomb in the first place, and if necessary to ensure that they do not.

We hope Peres tells Obama that while Jerusalem can appreciate Washington's reluctance to broadcast a timetable for giving up on trying to talk the Teheran extremists out of building a bomb, there is, in fact, very little time left.

NETANYAHU is booked to travel to Washington for an all-important May 18 White House meeting. There, he will present Obama with his plan on how to re-float talks with the Palestinian Authority in the wake of Mahmoud Abbas's rejection of Ehud Olmert's late 2008 peace offer.

Our premier will likely also come away from that meeting with a realistic appraisal of whether Obama will make good on his campaign promise to "use all elements of American power" and do everything to "prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon."

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is to travel to Italy, Germany, France and the Czech Republic next week to talk about Iran and the Palestinians. The EU's External Affairs Commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, has been pushing for a freeze on upgrading relations between the EU and Israel because... the Palestinians asked her to. She seems considerably less engaged over Iran's quest for an atom bomb.

Lieberman's task will be to urge more open-minded European leaders to await the outcome of Netanyahu's White House meeting and to accept that the current approach to Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations needs revamping.

Israel would like America and Europe to internalize that defanging Iran, while not a precondition to progress on negotiations with the Palestinians - or with Syria, for that matter - is an essential gateway. Also that flirting with an unreformed Hamas is a dead end if the destination is a two-state solution.

Pressuring Israel, a la Ferrero-Waldner, or making insinuations about an imposed solution, serve only to harden the already unreasonable expectations within the Palestinian polity. Thus is the conflict perpetuated.

THE PLAN Netanyahu will be taking to the White House next month needs to offer a sensible way forward on the Palestinian track, even if truly substantive progress may be difficult until the Iranian crisis is contained.

He will garner the support of Israel's majority - and of the pro-Israel community worldwide - if he broadly enunciates the country's "red lines" on defensible boundaries, strategic settlement blocs, the parameters of Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza, the issue of Jerusalem and Arab refugees.

Furthermore, his government's credibility would be immeasurably enhanced by the dismantling of unauthorized settlement outposts, demonstrating that the West Bank is not the Wild West. The Palestinians have just shown how "law" works in the territory under their jurisdiction: On Wednesday, a Hebron court sentenced a man to be hanged for selling a parcel of land to a Jew.

Though Fatah and Hamas continue squabbling, they agree on two things: a rejection of Israel as a Jewish state, and a refusal to share this land with non-Muslims.

If any plan presented by Netanyahu to Obama is going to matter, those attitudes have to change.

SAVE THE DATE -- SHMUEL KATZ

May 31
Sunday
Shmuel Katz hazkara
The Begin Center
6:30 PM

Obama's first 100 days & Israel

Thursday - Two new leaders

As Israelis celebrated Yom Ha'atzmaut yesterday, President Barack Obama completed the first 100 days of his presidency - with some pundits and lobbyists baying for him to "stand up to Israel" by imposing an American diktat to "solve" the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

These calls often come from those who - without a trace of irony - say they are friends of Israel. Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, wants Obama to declare: "This is the settlement. This is what we're for."

J Street's Jeremy Ben-Ami is more tactful, saying his goal is to provide Obama with political support within the Jewish community for what amounts to an imposed solution.

Thus has Binyamin Netanyahu's new government been greeted just 30 days after taking office.

From the day he took office, Obama has been under vicious attack by incorrigible partisans who stoke the flames of polarization. Nevertheless, his approval ratings are higher than those of George W. Bush or Bill Clinton 100 days into their presidencies.

Netanyahu has been called an enemy of peace and an opponent of a Palestinian state.

Obama has been accused of embarking on a march toward fascism or socialism; one critic even claimed the US government was building "internment camps" for its enemies. Regrettably, even mainstream television and radio outlets have given platforms to such absurd accusations.

The truth is that any president inheriting a nosediving economy in the midst of a global financial meltdown would have embarked on something like Obama's $789 billion stimulus package. While Americans have every right to debate his economic policies, no person of good faith can claim that Obama is leading America toward "tyranny."

Obama inherited a quagmire in Iraq, which is again being riven by sectarian bloodshed and anti-American sentiment. But aside from Iran, his most formidable foreign policy dilemma is Afghanistan-Pakistan, where al-Qaida and the Taliban pose a clear and present danger to the cities of America and Europe. The president is committed to defeating the extremists on their own turf.

Netanyahu, for his part, inherited a moribund negotiating process after the Palestinians rejected an extraordinarily magnanimous peace overture from Ehud Olmert. No reasonable critic of Israeli policy would suggest that Netanyahu wants to rule over the Palestinians, or that he is not committed to a territorial arrangement with them.

SO AS Israelis consider Obama's first 100 days, and as American policy-makers mull over Netanyahu's first month, here's what really matters:

• America is Israel's closest ally because the two nations share values and interests. Still, Washington and Jerusalem have long differed over how best to trade land for peace. We anticipate that the new administration will stand with Israel no less than its predecessors did. Similarly, we fully expect there to be sharp differences - as there always have been. Simply, the interests of America and Israel are not always identical.

• The link between the peace process and confronting Iran is straightforward. We in Israel need to do a better job of explaining to the administration that the menace of an ascendant, nuclear-armed regime, funneling guns and cash to Hamas and Hizbullah, inhibits the Palestinians' taking the most elemental steps toward peace.

• The administration warns that Teheran faces "crippling sanctions" if its rapprochement with Iran fails. It must realize that the clock is ticking.

• No one, least of all the Arab states, should need to be bought off to oppose a nuclear-armed Iran. Stopping the mullahs is a shared Arab, American and Israeli interest.

• Funding a Fatah-Hamas unity government - not that there's one in sight - without an explicit Hamas commitment to recognizing Israel, ending violence and abiding by previous Palestinian commitments would achieve only the illusion of momentum. A "unity" government not wholeheartedly committed to a two-state solution is hardly worth anyone's effort.

Candidate Obama chose his words carefully when he declared that "Israel's security is sacrosanct," and that "the United States must be a strong and consistent partner - not to force concessions, but to help committed partners avoid stalemate."

Those who would try to talk Obama out of this solemn pledge are no friends of Israel - no way, no shape, no how.

Israel at 61

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Dear readers,
Wed is a bank holiday in Israel. In fact, it is the ONLY day off that is not connected to a religious holiday that I can think of. (I work on election day.) And because we don't have a paper on Wednesday, if I play my cards right, I can do my Thursday writing today and have a real day off. Yipee!
Happy independence day.
elliot

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Tears and joys

Do you want to understand this country? Accompany us during the 48 hours that take in Remembrance Day and Independence Day.

There's a joke that says most Jewish holidays can be summed up thus: "They tried to kill us, they didn't succeed, let's eat." Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha'atzmaut are different. The reality is more like: "They're still trying to kill us. We won't let them win. Let's eat."

Remembrance Day commemorations began yesterday at Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem, where one of bloodiest battles of the 1967 Six Day War was waged. The fortified Jordanian police station that stood on the hill had to be overcome to help clear the way to Mount Scopus, the campus of the Hebrew University and the Old City. Thirty-six men gave their lives to achieve that mission.

At 8 p.m. last night, a siren ushered in memorial services throughout the land. Television and radio broadcast the main ceremony from the Western Wall plaza. Stirring our emotions, the cameras showed the memorial flame being lit, our flag at half-mast and the honor guard at attention, with the Wall illuminated in the background.

When our dispersed people began their return to this land in the 1880s, who could have foretold that the culmination of that homecoming would be too late for millions of them? Who, moreover, could have known that the 1948 War of Independence would be but a down payment on further wars to come?

Another siren will pierce our heart this morning at 11 o'clock in remembrance of the 22,570 men and women - of the defense forces, police, secret services and the Jewish undergrounds - who fell defending our national renewal; from 1860, when those Jews already here first began trying to build their lives outside the Old City walls, up to Operation Cast Lead this year.

What a lot has changed in 61 years. Iran, once friendly, is now an implacable enemy racing to build a nuclear bomb and threatening our annihilation. Egypt and Jordan once warred against us; now there is peace.

But the elusive peace is the one denied us 61 years ago. The Palestinian Arabs call our achievement of self-determination their catastrophe - nakba. In his latest book, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict, historian Benny Morris writes: "Put simply, the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement, from inception, and ever since, has consistently regarded Palestine as innately, completely, inalienably, and legitimately 'Arab' and Muslim and has aspired to establish in it a sovereign state under its rule covering all of the country's territory."

In other words, even if one has a skewed view of the conflict in which the "occupation," "settlements" and "east Jerusalem house demolitions" block out every other reality, Morris is implying that were these seemingly burning issues made magically to disappear, Israel would still be at fault - for existing.

This explains why, in late 2008, the most moderate of Palestinian moderates, Mahmoud Abbas, spurned Ehud Olmert's overture to create a Palestinian state on the equivalent of 100 percent of the West Bank, plus Gaza.

It also explains why the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative is predicated not just on forcing Israel back to the hard-to-defend 1949 Armistice Lines and on swamping us with millions of Palestinian "refugees," but also on the Arab League's unwavering refusal to accept the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state. Why? Because to do so would be to admit that the Jews have a connection to this place that predates the arrival of the Arabs and the birth of Islam.

It would be an admission that the Jews have a right to share this land.

INDEPENDENCE Day celebrations begin at 8 p.m. Tuesday night. For many, the transition from somber commemoration is jarring. Yet there is no better way to demonstrate the link between the tears of sacrifice and the joys of independence.

And so, we wipe away our tears and begin counting our blessings: In 1948, this country started out with 600,000 Jews; today there are 5,593,000. Since Independence Day last year, more than 150,000 babies were born; more than 12,000 Jews made aliya.

Keep counting, and Hag Sameah.

AND IN OTHER NEWS....

Monday - New flu in perspective


Gone are the days when a public health scare in Mexico or Hong Kong had little relevance for Israelis.

No sooner had Shabbat ended when news arrived that the H1N1 swine flu virus could be threatening a global pandemic. Over 80 Mexicans have been felled. Hundreds more are sick. Possible cases have been reported in France, Spain and New Zealand (among a group of students and teachers who returned to Auckland via Los Angeles after spending several weeks in Mexico). Eleven cases of H1N1 have been reported in California and Texas, along the Mexican border.

Some 3,000 miles away in New York City, health officials are examining whether eight students in Queens have come down with mild cases of the disease. And in London, officials breathed a sigh of relief after determining that the flu-like symptoms experienced by a British Airways cabin crew member on a flight from Mexico City was not swine flu.

Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, declared the disease a "public health event of international concern." The WHO threat level is currently set at 3. If a pandemic is imminent, it will rise to level 5.

Public health experts find it worrisome that those affected are not mainly the medically vulnerable, whose immune systems may be compromised, but also many young and vigorous people.

While swine flu is not new and cases of human-to-human transmission have previously been documented, the current H1N1 is the result of a mutation of genetic material from pigs, humans and birds.

There is no vaccine for H1N1, nor do scientists know whether individuals vaccinated against regular flu will be protected.

NATURALLY, there is a psychological component to the crisis. Images beamed around the world from Mexico City of nuns on their way to Sunday services and train commuters wearing surgical face masks create a sense of unease. Even the White House found it necessary to say that President Barack Obama was fine, thank you very much, in response to a disconcerting report that while in Mexico City, he met with Felipe Solis, an archeologist who subsequently died of flu-like symptoms.

While epidemiologists gather their data in an effort to clarify the nature and extent of the outbreak, Israel, like all countries in our globalized world, is gearing up. Better to be prepared, as we were for the 2003 SARS scare, than to be caught off guard.

H1N1 symptoms include a fever of more than 37.8°C (100°F), body aches, coughing, sore throat, respiratory congestion and, in some cases, vomiting and diarrhea.

At this writing, there have been no confirmed cases of H1N1 flu here. Physicians are, however, diagnosing a 26-year-old Israeli who returned from Mexico on Sunday and had himself admitted into Netanya's Laniado Hospital.

Obviously, Israelis who return from abroad feeling ill, with a fever, need immediate medical evaluation. Our Health Ministry has been in contact with health providers to ensure that cases of flu are promptly diagnosed and reported. Since carriers of the disease could themselves be asymptomatic, quarantining is not necessarily indicated. Still, the MDA is deploying special equipment in some of its ambulances should it prove necessary to transport highly infectious cases.

THE potential crisis comes just as Ya'acov Litzman takes over at the Health Ministry as deputy minister. Litzman is a savvy, dedicated and personally modest public servant who grew up in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. Although his haredi and non-Zionist United Torah Judaism party prefers (for religious reasons) not to have a cabinet vote, Litzman's talent and drive should not be underestimated.

Moreover, Israel enjoys a highly advanced medical infrastructure; and ample supplies of Tamiflu, generally effective against flu symptoms, are available. We're also fortunate that with spring here and windows open, making ventilation easier, the virus should find our climate less than hospitable.

As long as the authorities are alert, the rest of us can stay calm. Still, basic precautions are called for: Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Wash your hands often with soap and water, especially after coughing or sneezing. Alcohol-based hand cleaners are also effective. Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth because germs spread that way.

We should all stay healthy.