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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Carl in Jerusalem</title>
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		<title>Detached from Reality</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/carl-in-jerusalem/detached-from-reality/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=detached-from-reality</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/carl-in-jerusalem/detached-from-reality/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:58:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Carl in Jerusalem]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Right to Exist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[righttoexist]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.newsrealblog.com/?p=122477</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[And you thought Shimon Peres was our only politician who is detached from reality.... Defense Minister Ehud Barak told the Wall Street Journal on Monday that Israel may seek another $20 billion in assistance from the United States to cope with the fallout from the democratization of Arab countries that's currently going on in the Middle East.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a class="highslide" onclick="return vz.expand(this)" href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/obama-barak.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-122479" title="obama-barak" src="http://www.newsrealblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/obama-barak.jpg" alt="" width="317" height="231" /></a></p>
<p>And you thought Shimon Peres was our only politician who is <a href="http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2009/10/peres-delusion.html"><strong>detached from reality</strong></a>&#8230;. Defense Minister Ehud Barak told the Wall Street Journal on Monday that Israel may seek <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703386704576186861325527354.html?mod=fox_australian"><strong>another $20 billion</strong></a> in assistance from the United States to cope with the fallout from the democratization of Arab countries that&#8217;s currently going on in the Middle East.</p>
<blockquote><p>Israel will need to boost military spending and may seek an additional $20 billion in U.S. security assistance to help it manage potential threats stemming from popular upheavals in the Arab world, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Monday.</p>
<p>Still, he said Israel shouldn&#8217;t fear changes in the region or the risk of offering bold concessions in a renewed bid to achieve peace with the Palestinians.</p>
<p><span id="more-122477"></span>&#8220;It&#8217;s a historic earthquake&#8230;a movement in the right direction, quite inspired,&#8221; Mr. Barak said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, surveying the youthful revolts in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and the Gulf. &#8220;It&#8217;s a movement of the Arab societies toward modernity.&#8221;</p>
<p>In the short term, however, Israel worries that adversaries Iran and Syria &#8220;might be the last to feel the heat&#8221; of regional unrest, he said, and that public pressure could push new leaders in Egypt away from that country&#8217;s 1979 peace treaty with the Jewish state.</p>
<p>&#8220;The issue of qualitative military aid for Israel becomes more essential for us, and I believe also more essential for you,&#8221; said Mr. Barak, a former prime minister. &#8220;It might be wise to invest another $20 billion to upgrade the security of Israel for the next generation or so&#8230;.A strong, responsible Israel can become a stabilizer in such a turbulent region.&#8221;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Look, I&#8217;m grateful for any assistance the United States gives us, and I certainly wouldn&#8217;t call for it to be reduced unless we were getting a lot of freedom of action in terms of defense spending and armament sales (some of you may have sensed my ambivalence about this subject when I blogged Caroline Glick&#8217;s call for Israel to <a href="http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2011/02/time-to-give-up-american-aid-money.html"><strong>give up its aid money</strong></a> ten days ago). But to believe that there is any chance that the US is going to increase aid by $20 billion (!) when the American economy is suffering a jobless &#8216;recovery&#8217; and annual deficits in the trillions of dollars is simply delusional!</p>
<p>There&#8217;s a flip side to this, and that&#8217;s the silver lining in the cloud: Aside from the $20 billion that Barak claims we need for our security, he&#8217;s also calling for &#8216;bold concessions&#8217; in dealing with the &#8216;Palestinians.&#8217; Any &#8216;bold concessions&#8217; would involve expelling Jews from their homes. There&#8217;s no money for that either and we can&#8217;t ask the American people to pay for it.</p>
<p>A year ago, a Knesset study found that the government spent NIS 3,162,500 <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/136572"><strong>for each Jew expelled from Gaza</strong></a> in 2005. (And even with all that spending, most of those Jews still have no homes and no jobs &#8211; but now they also have no savings or assistance money left). Extrapolating from that number a year ago brought a total of NIS 408,750,000,000 as the cost of expelling Jews from their homes in Judea and Samaria (God forbid). If you follow that last link, you will see that it gives a dollar total of $110 billion. But that&#8217;s based on the exchange rate at the time, which was close to NIS 3.72 to the dollar. Today&#8217;s exchange rate is around NIS 3.6 to the dollar, which leads to a total of $113,542,000,000 &#8211; <strong><em>and that assumes that no Jews in &#8216;east&#8217; Jerusalem are expelled from their homes</em></strong>! We can&#8217;t pay that (it&#8217;s more than our annual budget!), and we cannot and should not ask the United States to pay it, especially given its current economic conditions.</p>
<p>So let&#8217;s skip the &#8216;bold concessions,&#8217; stop acting like a bunch of schnorrers, live within our means, and let our friends in the United States get their economy back on its feet. Let&#8217;s live in a way that&#8217;s grounded in reality. The world cannot afford a &#8216;Palestinian state&#8217; financially or in any other way.</p>
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		<title>Learning the Right Lesson from the Palestinian Election of 2006</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/carl-in-jerusalem/learning-the-right-lesson-from-the-palestinian-election-of-2006/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=learning-the-right-lesson-from-the-palestinian-election-of-2006</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/carl-in-jerusalem/learning-the-right-lesson-from-the-palestinian-election-of-2006/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Feb 2011 13:00:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Carl in Jerusalem]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Right to Exist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[righttoexist]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.newsrealblog.com/?p=116360</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In Friday’s edition, the Wall Street Journal suggests that the lesson that ought to be learned from the Palestinian election of 2006 was that Hamas should not have been allowed to run without accepting past agreements and Israel’s right to exist, and eschewing violence. Instead, Hamas was allowed to run in that election without meeting those preconditions, and won the election, leading to the eventual split between Hamas and Fatah which leaves us with two de facto Palestinian polities to this day.]]></description>
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<p>In Friday’s edition, the Wall Street Journal suggests that the lesson that ought to be learned from the <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703960804576120072249468908.html"><strong>Palestinian election of 2006</strong></a> was that Hamas should not have been allowed to run without accepting past agreements and Israel’s right to exist, and eschewing violence. Instead, Hamas was allowed to run in that election without meeting those preconditions, and won the election, leading to the eventual split between Hamas and Fatah which leaves us with two de facto Palestinian polities to this day.</p>
<p>The Journal also hints that the Palestinian election of 2006 should have been postponed, arguing that the “proper groundwork” should first have been laid. It argues that it was a mistake to allow “an armed Hamas to participate in a political process whose very legitimacy Hamas rejects…” because “[A]nti-democratic parties cannot be a part of a democratic system, a lesson the world might have learned as far back as 1933.”</p>
<p>The Journal then goes on to attempt to apply that lesson to the participation of the Muslim Brotherhood in an upcoming election in Egypt suggesting that</p>
<blockquote><p><span id="more-116360"></span>If the Brotherhood wants to participate in elections, it should have to promise to play by democratic rules, respect religious and social pluralism, and honor Egypt&#8217;s treaty commitments, especially to Israel. And because promises can be broken by those in power, Egypt needs a constitutional system of checks and balances to withstand any attempt to impose one man, one vote, once. Egypt can have a viable democratic future, provided that the democracy is for democrats.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These would all be excellent suggestions but for one small catch. In 2006, Israel had troops in the administered territories who could have prevented the elections from taking place or Hamas’ participation in them, but for American pressure to hold the elections and to allow Hamas to participate.</p>
<p>But the U.S. has no troops on the ground in Egypt, and given President Obama’s reluctance to commit American troops anywhere, it is not likely to have troops on the ground in Egypt in the foreseeable future.  Thus the U.S. has no power to stop the elections from taking place whenever whoever ends up in charge decides to hold them, nor does it have the power to impose conditions on the Muslim Brotherhood’s running in those elections. What the US should be doing instead is to (a) help non-Islamist democratic parties behind the scenes by using political consultants to ensure that the “good guys” win, and (b) to pressure what remains of the Egyptian government to accept strong international monitoring of the future elections to ensure that the Brotherhood cannot steal them through violence or deception.</p>
<p>These conditions are far more important to Egypt’s future than whether President Mubarak departs today, tomorrow, next week, next month or in September. But no one in the U.S. government seems to have focused on them.</p>
<p>What could go wrong?</p>
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