Mr. President, Yes, You Could

An open letter to President Obama
From Alan Hart
Dear President Obama,

In the teeth of Zionist lobby opposition, your decision to give veteran diplomat Charles W. Freeman the responsibility for producing the National Intelligence Estimate adds substance to the case for believing that you really do want to prevent this lobby from determining (more or less) your foreign policy agenda as it relates to ending the Israel-Palestine conflict and, beyond that, winning what your predecessor called “the war against global terrorism”. The world, and not least the Jews of the world, needs you to be successful in this effort. In my assessment your chances of success will be greatly improved if you are prepared to look one Great Truth in the face. It is that Israel’s political and military leaders are not interested (and never have been) in peace on any terms the vast majority of Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept.I emphasized leaders in the sentence above to indicate my belief that, for policy making purposes, a distinction must be made between Israel’s leaders and most if not all of the Jewish citizens of Israel, the voters. A related Great Truth is that they, too, have been brainwashed by Zionist propaganda. I mean that it was not only the mainly Gentile Judeo-Christian or Western world that was conditioned by Zionism’s spin doctors to believe that poor little Israel has lived in constant danger of annihilation - the “driving into the sea” of its Jews. The Jews of Israel were also fed the same propaganda nonsense by their leaders.



As I document in my book, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, (the American edition of Volume One is being published by Clarity Press in April with the sub-title The False Messiah), Israel’s existence has never, ever, been in danger from any combination of Arab military force. Not in 1948. Not in 1956. Not in 1967. And not even in 1973. Zionism’s assertion to the contrary was the cover that allowed Israel to get away where it mattered most, in America and Western Europe, with presenting its aggression as self-defense and itself as the victim when actually it was, and is, the oppressor.



Since you, Mr. President, are unlikely to have the time to read my book (even if you had the inclination), I’d like you to be aware of one tiny fragment of its substance. It’s at the end of the Prologue to Volume One which is titled Waiting for the Apocalypse. I quote from a conversation I had in 1980 with then retired Major General Shlomo Gazit, the best and the brightest of Israel’s Directors of Military Intelligence. Over coffee one morning when I was the linkman in a secret, exploratory dialogue between Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat, I took a very deep breath and said to Shlomo: “I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all a myth. Israel’s existence has never, ever, been in danger.” Through a sad smile, he replied, “The trouble with us Israelis is that we’ve become the victims of our own propaganda.” Later I tell my readers there were times during the writing of the book when the Gentile me wanted to cry out with the pain of knowing how much the Jews of Israel (as well as the Jews of the world) have been deceived by their leaders.



In my assessment there is not a snowball’s chance in hell of solving the Palestine problem, curing the cancer at the heart of international affairs before it consumes us all, unless and until enough Israelis, by definition a majority of them, are assisted to understand that peace based on justice for the Palestinians and security for all Jews now living in Israel-Palestine is there for the taking. If they could be convinced of that, there would, surely, be a good chance of them insisting that their deluded leaders make peace not war without end.



The question arising is what could you do, Mr. President, to arrange things to give most if not all Jews in Israel-Palestine good reason to believe that peace based on security for them and an acceptable amount of justice for the Palestinians is available?



You’ve made a good start by authorizing a dialogue with Syria. I say that assuming you’re not running an agenda which is premised on the expectation that in exchange for the return of the Golan Heights, Syria can be prevailed upon to become, like Eygpt and Jordan, an American-and-Israeli stooge. I can tell you that a separate Israel-Syria peace was Arafat’s “nightmare”. In my last conversation with him before he was murdered (do you know that he was most probably the first victim of Israeli biological warfare?), he said that a separate Israel-Syria peace could result in Syria, to please America and Israel, working with Jordan and Eygpt to oblige the Palestinians to accept whatever crumbs the Zionist state was prepared to offer them. And worse still in that scenario, Arafat added, was the probability that if the Palestinians refused to accept the crumbs on offer, Syria would be complicit with Jordan, Eygpt and Israel in eliminating any further possibility of Palestinian resistance to Zionism’s iron fist and will.



That said, I am assuming that you, Mr. President, are wise enough to know that peace, if it is to be real and enduring, must be a comprehensive one. (And therefore that a separate Israel-Syria peace could well create more problems than it solved).



In that context bringing Syria in from the cold is a good start but it’s not enough. You must also bring Iran into the peace making process.



The fact that Damascus has influence with Hamas and Tehran has influence with Hizbollah and Hamas is not really the point. Neither Hamas nor Hizbollah need their arms twisted by their friends to make peace with Israel on terms which any rational government and people in Israel would accept with relief.



As I’m sure Ambassador Freeman will confirm if you don’t already know, Hamas’s real position has been a matter of record for some time. I often put it this way. If tomorrow Israel said and meant that it was ready for final negotiations on the basis of its withdrawal to the borders as they were on the eve of the 1967 war (give or take some mutually agreed and minor border modifications), and with Jerusalem an open city and the capital of two states, Hamas’s leaders would say, “Let’s do the business”. And they would mean it because they are not stupid. They know that a genuine and viable two-state solution is still what the vast majority of Palestinians are prepared to settle for. (Though for how much longer that will remain the case is a good question).



Also true (I’m sure Ambassador Freeman could confirm this, too) is that Hizbollah’s real position is known. It is prepared to accept whatever the Palestinians accept.



And that is also what could be described as Iran’s fallback position, fallback because Iran’s preferred solution is the complete de-Zionisation of Palestine, otherwise known as the One State Solution - one secular, democratic state in which Arabs and Jews enjoyed equal political, other civil and human rights. (As you may or may not know, Mr. President, Iran’s Ahmadinejad never called for Israel to be “wiped off the face of the earth”. Those words, which were not the words he used, obviously implied that he did want Israel’s Jews to be driven into the sea. What he actually said was that he wished to see the Zionist colonial entity “vanish from the pages of history” in the same way as the Soviet Union vanished. The notion that he called for Jews now living in Israel-Palestine to be liquidated was and is nothing but Zionist propaganda nonsense which, unfortunately, the mainstream Israeli-occupied American media was happy to promote as truth).



So here, Mr. President, is what I think you should do. Give your diplomats the authority to talk honestly and openly with all parties to the conflict including Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran. By so doing you could establish that what I’ve summarised above is true - that the whole Arab world and Iran is ready, willing and able to make peace with Israel on terms which, to repeat, any rational government and people in Israel would accept with relief.



Once you had established that fact, you could go to Israel and tell its Jewish citizens the truth and that they have a real choice to make.



If I was writing your speech for that occasion, I would have you tell Israel’s Jews that they need to make the right decision not only for their own self-interest but also for the continued wellbeing of the Jews of the world. And I’d have you reinforcing that point by quoting Yehoshafat Harkabi, Israel’s longest-serving and universally respected Director of Military Intelligence. In his seminal book, Israel’s Fateful Hour, published in 1986, he wrote these warning words:



“Israel is the criterion according to which all Jews will tend to be judged. Israel as a Jewish state is an example of the Jewish character, which finds free and concentrated expression within it. Anti-Semitism has deep and historical roots. Nevertheless, any flaw in Israeli conduct, which initially is cited as anti-Israelism, is likely to be transformed into empirical proof of the validity of anti-Semitism. It would be a tragic irony if the Jewish state, which was intended to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, was to become a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism. Israelis must be aware that the price of their misconduct is paid not only by them but also Jews throughout the world.”



More than two decades on, I think it could and should be said (and I would seek to persuade you, Mr. President, to say it), that Israel’s “misconduct” has become the prime factor in the rise of anti-Semitism.



In engagements with Israel’s Jews you would have to address their three main fears. They are not rational fears, but they are nonetheless real fears in minds that have been closed to reason by Zionist propaganda.



One fear is in the belief that a Palestinian mini-state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would pose an unacceptable and perhaps unmanageable threat to Israel’s security and even its existence. The reason why this is complete and utter nonsense was given to me by Yasser Arafat. He said, “Alan, we Palestinians are really not that stupid!” What he meant and went on to say was that if a Palestinian mini-state was in existence, and if from it Palestinian rejectors of compromise attacked Israel, there would come a point (if the Palestinian government did not stop the attacks) when the Israeli army would roll over the mini state’s borders and crush it out of existence, and would do so with the understanding if not the full approval of the whole world. Arafat then asked me this question. “Do you really believe that after struggling for so many years against impossible odds to achieve an acceptable minimum of justice, we Palestinians would then give Israel the pretext to take away for all of time what we had gained?” I replied: “No, I don’t believe that, and nor should any person of sound mind."



Another fear that could be explained away if the minds of Israel’s Jews were open to reason concerns the return of the Palestinian refugees - those and the descendents of those who were dispossessed of their land, their homes and their rights by, mainly, Zionist terrorism and ethnic cleansing in the months immediately before and after Israel’s unilateral declaration of the independence. Zionism has always insisted that the return of the refugees to all of what was once Palestine is an insurmountable obstacle to peace because it would swamp the Israel of a two-state solution and end its existence as a Jewish state by numbers (by peaceful means). The fact is that the return of Palestinian refugees ceased to be an insurmountable obstacle to peace many years ago. As far back as the early 1980’s, the pragmatism of Arafat and his mainstream PLO leadership colleagues went as far as understanding and accepting that, in territorial terms, the return would have to be limited to the land of the Palestinian mini-state. They even worked out approximately how many refugees would be able to return. The number was not greatly in excess of 100,000. The rest, several millions, would have to settle for financial compensation and, for their heritage and dignity, a Palestinian passport. The problem at the time Arafat and his leadership colleagues decided that they’d got to make this unthinkable concession to the reality of Israel’s existence was that they could not say so publicly - because they knew they could not sell it to their people without some real proof that Israel was going to negotiate a genuine and viable two-state solution in good faith. That never happened. Israel has never negotiated in good faith.



And then, of course, there’s the fear of Israel being annihilated by a nuclear-armed Iran, a fear that is currently being reinforced and exploited to the full by Israel’s deluded leaders and the Zionist lobby in America and elsewhere. I don’t know if Iran wants to possess an atom bomb, but so what if it does and actually succeeds in producing one or some? Israel is and will remain the military and nuclear-armed superpower of the region. It has considerably in excess of 300 nuclear warheads and the missiles to deliver them, and hundreds of tactical battlefield nuclear weapons. In my view only leaders deluded to the point of clinical madness could imagine that a nuclear-armed Iran would initiate a first strike on Israel. To do so would be to invite the certain destruction of all of Iran. None of its present leaders are, and none of its future leaders will be, so stupid. The real problem for Israel’s political and military leaders is that Iran’s possession of an atomic bomb would greatly limit and perhaps end their ability to impose Zionism’s will on the region.



Mr. President, what I’ve been trying to say comes down to this. The only real obstacle to peace in the Middle East is in the fact that Israel’s Jews, most but not all of them, are beyond reason. Against the ever present background of the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust, it’s the way they’ve been conditioned to be by their Zionist leaders. You, Mr. President, are uniquely placed to gather and then present to Israel’s Jews the evidence that could open their minds to reason - to an understanding that peace is there for the taking if they are prepared to insist that their leaders negotiate in good faith.



Can you do that, Mr. President? Yes, you could. If you did and brought the longest running conflict in all of human history to an end, you would not only save Israel from itself and stop the countdown to Armageddon, you would go down in history, (even if the American economy collapsed around you, which would not be your fault), as the greatest of all American presidents.



So no more “Yes, we can” or even “Yes, I can”. Let’s have “Yes, I will.” As Winston Churchill used to say, carpe diem. (I think the American equivalent is step up to the plate).



With truly respectful best wishes,



Yours sincerely,



Alan Hart