Howard Epstein – HEY, MARK REGEV! WHEN WILL YOU GET REAL?
An open letter to the Israeli Ambassador to the Court of St James (ie, the UK)
and to the Israeli government
Dear Ambassador Regev. Mark.
As I can recall, and you will have learned, Golda Meir, Israeli Prime Minister from 1969 to 1974, famously joked that “in Israel, there are three million prime ministers”. Golda, as she was known affectionately, at least until October 1973, had the foresight to emigrate to the Holy Land in 1921, and to join Executive Committee of the Histadrut in 1934, thereby placing herself in the vanguard of those who would bring about the rebirth of the Jewish State. Her percipience appears to have deserted her, however, when as Prime Minister she refused to face up to the imminence of the Egyptian and Syrian attacks on Yom Kippur in 1973. Even had she not failed that test, it seems unlikely that she would have conceived of nearly treble the number of prime ministers here by the 70th anniversary of the State.
The joke that everyone here thinks they can run the country as well as, or better than, the elected Prime Minister should not be dismissed, but distilled down to the perfectly proper assertion that we have a vibrant democracy, that the expression of public opinion is an essential part of it and that politicians should heed it. Sometimes the ordinary Joe, or Moshe, may have an insight that those subjected to the burdens of office may miss. I offer you the following example from this self-elected prime minister (myself).
Whenever I am present to hear politicians or diplomats speak in person, about the “Peace Process” or the “Two State Solution”, I ask them the same question:
Why are we not telling the Palestinians that they may have all they seek, and a cornucopia of goodies with it, once they have passed the fifteen year test?
I explain the test as follows:
Can the Palestinians, for fifteen years, put behind them their virulent anti-Semitism, as evidenced by their politician’s speeches about driving us into the sea, their media diffusing the same message, and their school-books and chugim in which they teach their impressionable youngest generations to hate and kill us?
(Which amongst the nations at the UN could properly call that test unreasonable?)
Each time I raise that question, the answer I receive is long-winded and obfuscating, with the occasional final concession that “we do demand that they drop their anti-Semitism”. And every time they say that they provide a misleading response. The reality is somewhat different and disheartening. I have written evidence for that assertion and it is your evidence, Mark.
You will recall your letter to the editor of the Times of London, published not two weeks ago on August 3, 2016:-
Sir
Balfour Declaration
Further to Ben Macintyre’s article (July 29), the 1917 Balfour declaration speaks of a “national home for the Jewish people” while calling for the protection of the” civil and religious rights” of the Arab population.
Israel has honored the spirit of the declaration: Arab Israelis enjoy the fruits of a pluralistic liberal democracy; meanwhile, Palestinian national aspirations have been thwarted not by the Zionists, who were ready for a fair compromise, but by their own successive leaderships whose desire to destroy the Jewish national home far outweighed their commitment to achieving independence for their people. Israel remains ready for a just and secure peace based on the principle of two states for two peoples and calls for the immediate resumption of peace talks without preconditions. [My emphasis.]
Mark Regev – Israeli Ambassador to London
Well, sorry, Mark, and the real Israeli PM: not good enough. The confirmation that there are no preconditions is a sell-out by the Israeli government of its obligations to the Israeli/Jewish people. It is a retreat from the reality of the opposition we face, and a failure of policy. It amounts to a surrender to whatever fate (and President Obama) may have in store for us. We should fight Palestinian anti-Semitism by calling it out, and not allow things to happen to us without loudly advertising that the motivation of our detractors and enemies is anti-Semitism, unadorned and unconcealed.
Consider, Mark: if you owned adjoining apartments in Tel Aviv or London, and you discovered that some-one who had expressed deep animus towards you, who had threatened to kill you because he hated you or all Jews, wished to buy the apartment abutting yours … are you going to tell me that you would sell it to him? The question plainly has only one response: do turkeys vote for Christmas – or Thanksgiving?
It is time, Mark – and Bibi – for us to get real about the Palestinians. Where we are concerned, they have been taught, and teach, only one thing: that we are to be destroyed. 
They teach their children this. They will teach their grandchildren this, just as they have always taught their grandchildren this. The generation that claimed to have been usurped by Israel in 1948 (as if that, to the extent that it is true, represented the only exchange of populations after WWII) have stuck to that line as surely do and will do all their descendants. It will ever be thus – until we confront the issue as a plain and unshakeable pre-condition of our sought-after, required or demanded flexibility.
We need to fight this battle according to our narrative and not that of our adversaries. For too long our leaders’ have failed to state the simple, single pre-condition to “Peace” – that Palestinian anti-Semitism be abjured. Now, that failure may be about to punish us. Consider the forces arrayed against us:-
- the hate-filled (and morally-bankrupt) French government, desperate for a diversion (and to appease its increasingly murderous Muslim constituency), whose desire is to impose “peace” terms on us by way of a UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution for mandatory (and not advisory) sanctions, to be passed in the next few months (before Obama leaves office); and
- a possibly vengeful Obama, who may back it.
For the past seven years, the US President worked to inhibit resolutions against Israel at the UNSC, preferring instead to see the two parties move forward together towards a directly-negotiated solution. Now, we cannot be sure that his parting shot will not be the reversal of that position.
We are confronted here with a legacy-less US President. In almost eight years he has achieved, to merit the Nobel Peace Prize vacuously awarded him as (let us be kind and 
say) an incentive to do things to justify it, precisely nothing. He certainly did nothing for his black constituency, who are still suffering daily from the first black president’s failure to impose rules of engagement on American policemen that would have drastically reduced black deaths from police bullets. And many Americans say that his centrepiece health reforms will bankrupt the (possibly already bankrupt) fiscal system.
More serious than that, on the world stage, Obama abandoned all in the Middle East, save for the Iranians and their proxy army, the Hezbollah outlaw entity, with the deal that at some point atomically empowers Iran, the deplorable JCPOA (deplored that is by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, as well as by Israel). The death spasms of Pax Americana – too painful to watch as 
Obama ignored his own red-line injunction against Assad using WMD against his own people – created the vacuum (one that now threatens to extend to Ukraine and the Baltic states too) that Putin deftly and comprehensively filled. The Americans are nowhere-men in these parts now. The American, whether he wears the attire of the diplomat or the uniform of the soldier, is the last century’s man of tomorrow, and the US has neither power-base nor credibility in this neighbourhood any longer. Russia is everywhere, and both calls, and shoots, the shots.
Finally, in this short geo-political overview, we must acknowledge the axis just formed between traditional enemies, Russia (newly re-armed with matériel that the British military admitted last week represents a quantum leap over their own latest generation weapons – watch out for a new arms’ race) and NATO member, Turkey, with its now omnipotent, latter-day sultan, Erdoghan. Two peas in a pod of insouciant tyranny. With his indolence, and worse, Obama has created a mess for his successor that will be more difficult to unravel than a plate of dried-up lokshen pudding.
Time for Obama to look for a scape-goat? The bitterness of the relationship between him and Netanyahu has been palpable, and Obama may be about to punish us, as his revenge on our Prime Minister for (absolutely properly) going the extra mile, by being the only person to have addressed Congress three times, in seeking to resist the hapless JCPOA, the terms of which the Iranians flout with impunity on an accelerating basis. As his parting shot, Obama may well be about to abandon us to the Europeans and, as a result of the failure of Israeli policy and diplomacy, he (and they) would do so free from any stain of thereby furthering anti-Semitism.
This situation is the fault of not just the present but also preceding Israeli governments. Had they been consistent in calling out the anti-Semitism of the Palestinians, they would have created a formidable obstacle to those who seek to reduce us. That they did not do so means that that obstacle never took form. Not good enough. In the court of public opinion, with a jury of today’s some seven million would-be prime ministers, it warrants a resounding guilty verdict on an indictment of perpetuating a woeful failure of policy and diplomacy of fundamental and massive importance.
It is now both urgent and, just about, not too late. The Israeli government should immediately make clear, with the vast documentary evidence at its disposal, prior to any UNSC vote, that the Palestinian desire for nationhood is not simply that, but is a hate-fuelled movement driven by an irrational anti-Semitism that loudly proclaims its intention to drive the Jewish people out of every part of the Land and State of Israel; and that to ignore that reality is immoral and can be guaranteed to lead to further conflict. In this way could you, Mark, the Israeli Prime Minister and the Government be redeemed at a stroke – and possibly save Israel from summary condemnation to unacceptable peace arrangements by the UNSC.
Coda: Do you think that no lame duck president would act so maliciously? You would be wrong.
On the very last day of his term of office, President Clinton ordered the dismissal from her job at the Pentagon of Linda Tripp. It was she, you may remember, who had recorded her telephone conversations with Monica Lewinsky and thereby obtained the irrefutable evidence of the President’s bodily fluids on Monica’s little blue dress; it 
was Tripp who went to Special Prosecutor Kenneth Star with that evidence, thereby proving that Clinton had lied on oath, as president, in his deposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit to the effect that he had no sexual relationship with Lewinsky; and it was therefore Tripp who would have sealed Clinton’s fate in the impeachment proceedings, had he not escaped by the skin of his teeth by a vote in the Senate that was as political and perverse as it was non-judicial. In no court of law, not even one held in Benghazi, would Clinton have got away with it. Vengeance (against Tripp) was his, even as he gave one of those full-arm Nixonesque waves, that all presidential candidates must practise as they announce their intention to run, upon his leaving the national scene (all too transiently).
We should hope and pray for – but not necessarily expect – better from Clinton’s political heir, Obama. Of course, it is perfectly possible that he will not behave in so pernicious a manner as pessimism foresees. We are about to discover the true nature and personality of the man.
© Howard Epstein – August 2016
Many of the facts and themes mentioned above have been borrowed from my recently-published book: Guns, Traumas and Exceptionalism: America in the Twenty-First Century, now available on Kindle.
To get your copy, just click on one of the following links:-
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