Does Obama understand Middle East dynamic?

Reactions to the president's speech outlining U.S. Mideast policy have been swift and varied.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly rejected the call for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations to begin anew using the pre-1967 borders as a starting point. He said the 1967 lines would leave Israel "indefensible" and a withdrawal would endanger Israel's security and leave major Jewish West Bank settlements within Palestinian territory.

Opposition leader Tzipi Livni slammed Netanyahu for "harming the relationship" between Israel and the United States.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., issued a statement that included: "I am also deeply concerned by any calls for Israel to return to the armistice line that existed before 1967. That line left Israel far too vulnerable to outside attack, and without access to many of the Jewish holy sites on the other side of the line. Past experience demonstrates that when the Arabs have controlled the Jewish holy sites they have not permitted access to Jews." 

Elliot B. Karp, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas and Rabbi Bradley Tecktiel, chairman of the Jewish Community Relations Committee, released the following statement: "We commend President Obama for recognizing the current opportunities for freedom and democracy in the Middle East which he made during his speech at the State Department on May 19. At the same time we are disturbed by the president's call for a reversal of long-standing United States policy in which he called for Israel to withdraw to pre-1967 borders."

What Rep. Berkley, Elliot Karp and Rabbi Tecktiel (and even Tzipi Livni) failed to address was one of the most important non-starter points in the president's address. The president included in his remarks: "The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their full potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state."

When I asked Karp about this statement at the Israel independence celebration on the Sunday following the president's speech, Karp said he was not aware that this was included in the president's remarks.

"Contiguous," as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, means being in actual contact: touching along a boundary or at a point; an unbroken sequence. The Gaza Strip is in the southwestern corner of Israel and the West Bank is on the east side/center of Israel. If President Obama gets his way based on his own words, Israel would be cut in half. This is a prospect that neither should nor could ever happen if Israel is to remain a sovereign state.

One other point: The president stated that any negotiations would have to take into account "the fate of Palestinian refugees." The Palestinians have been intransigent on this issue stating that there must be a full and complete return of all Palestinians (and their progeny) that left Israel in 1948. The Arab countries that surrounded Israel in 1948 urged the Palestinians to leave Israel and join in the fight to drive the Jews into the sea in order to reclaim all of the land the United Nations designated as the new Jewish state. Most Palestinian refugees have since lived in camps controlled by their Arab brothers in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Libya, as well as in the Gaza (controlled by Arabs prior to 1967). If, in fact, all of these Palestinian refugees were to return to Israel, Israel would no longer be the Jewish state envisioned in the 1947 United Nations vote.

How serious is the issue of Palestinian refugees? In the fall of 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak sat with Yasser Arafat and President Bill Clinton and offered Arafat everything the Palestinians wanted, save one issue: The return of all Palestinian refugees to Israel, making Israel a non-Jewish state. It is said that Arafat never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity and summarily walked out of the negotiations. It wasn't long before rockets and suicide bombers began ratcheting up a reign of terror on Israelis.

These are the issues that our current U.S. president and his minions refuse to address. They urge everyone to just get along. They urge exchanging land for peace. In the words of the founder of Caucus for America, Rabbi Aryeh Spero, "Every time Israel relinquishes land on the altar of peace, it gets not peace but rockets."

The president is a learned man and a great orator. He is, however, either unaware of the historic intricacies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or he is simply not interested in hearing the facts. To invoke the Palestinian refugee issue when that is a known deal breaker or to ask for Israel to voluntarily cut itself in half is sheer fantasy.

Rep. Berkley has said, "The president knows where I stand on Israel." It is incumbent on the good congresswoman to educate the president on the Israeli-Palestinian realities, as well.

Alan Stock is a Las Vegas resident.