Israel's Armageddon

I would be severely mistaken if I said that Barack Obama has been a pro-Israel President. In fact, since taking office, he has undoubtedly strained our strong relationship with Israel and its current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

On May 19, Obama set off a firestorm during a speech on Mideast policy when he stated that any future Palestinian state should be based on the 1967 borders with “mutually agreed swaps.”

Yikes! This was hardly what the prime minister and the Israeli people had in mind when the president called for “negotiations” between Israel and Palestine.

To clarify, the 1967 borders are those that existed before the Six-Day War, when Egypt, Syria and Jordan attacked Israel. Israel was victorious, and took control of heavily disputed territories such as the Gaza Strip.

Throughout decades of conflict with the Muslim world, the U.S. has remained a staunch ally of Israel, and the maintenance of this relationship has continued to be a top foreign policy priority.

When I was in the U.S. Senate, I was a ferocious supporter of Israel. Not only did I lead the effort that forced Swiss banks to award $1.25 billion to Holocaust survivors, but I was one of the only senators to take the floor in defense of Israel when it knocked out the nuclear reactor Saddam Hussein was building in Iraq in the early 1980s. In 1991, when the riots in Crown Heights erupted, no one raised his voice louder to make sure that the civil rights of New York City’s Jewish population were protected.

The conflict between Israel and Palestine has raged for more than 100 years. The peace negotiations between the two states have always revolved around three major issues: Palestinians’ demands that their capital be in the city of Jerusalem, their demands that all of their refugees and descendants who have been displaced are allowed to return to the state of Israel; and that the borders of the new state be returned to the 1967 borders.