IDF officer: “The Americans have never been so hostile”

New York — Leading Israeli columnist and Middle East analyst Caroline Glick has outlined a disturbing picture as to why the Annapolis summit, which commences today, is likely to be even worse for Israel than many informed analysts fear. Glick, who is the Deputy Managing Editor of the Jerusalem Post and Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Washington D.C.-based think-tank, the Center for Security Policy, enumerated a number of factors regarding the dangers for Israel stemming from Annapolis:

• A senior officer in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) General Staff has said that “As bad as it might look from the outside, the truth is 10 times worse. This is a nightmare. The Americans have never been so hostile.”
  
  
• A leaked draft of the joint statement that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are discussing ahead of the conference shows that the Palestinians are trying to force Israel’s hand by tying it to diplomatic formulas that presuppose an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines and an Israeli acceptance of the so-called “right of return” or free immigration of foreign Arabs to Israel.
  
  
• The Palestinians are also trying to take away Israel’s right to determine for itself whether to trust the Palestinians and continue making diplomatic and security concessions or not by making it the responsibility of outside parties to decide the pace of the concessions and whether or not the Palestinians should be trusted.
  
  
• The leaked draft document shows that the Americans have sided with the Palestinians against Israel, in particular, making themselves arbiter of whether or not the Palestinians and the Israelis are abiding by their commitments and whether and at what pace the negotiations will proceed.
  
  
• The U.S. demands for wide-ranging Israeli security concessions to the Palestinians even before the “peace” conference at Annapolis have shown that Israel’s security is of little concern to the State Department.

Glick observes that “IDF sources blame the shooting murder of Ido Zoldan on Monday night by Fatah terrorists on Israel’s decision to bow to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s demand to take down 24 security roadblocks in Judea and Samaria. If it hadn’t been for US pressure, they say, it is quite possible that the 29-year-old father of two small children would be alive today. But this is of no concern for Washington. As Rice has made clear repeatedly, the US wants to see “signs of progress.” Since the Palestinians are taking no action against terror and doing nothing to lessen their society’s jihadist fervor, the only way to achieve “signs of progress” is by forcing Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians. And so that is exactly what Rice and her associates are doing … if Annapolis is seen as a success, then the Arab states will be convinced that the US is worth supporting on Iran. This theory has several flaws. First, as the US’s treatment of Israel makes clear, success in Annapolis involves weakening Israel whose destruction Iran seeks and empowering the Palestinians whom Iran supports. This means that far from weakening Iran, success at Annapolis advances Iran’s interests. But beyond that, whether wittingly or unwittingly, by convening the conference next week, the Bush administration has directly empowered Iran. Today the determination of whether the administration emerges unscathed or humiliated from Annapolis is entirely in Iran’s hands. Iran will decide whether the conference opens and closes peacefully or whether it is convened as Lebanon is submerged in civil war by Iran’s proxies Syria and Hizbullah” ( Jerusalem Post, November 22, 2007).