Adele Ferguson 6/2/11

President Obama’s Middle East speech

You know what I was afraid our president would do in that much awaited speech to the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC after he got his comeuppance from Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?

Tell Saudi Arabia to get on board promoting peace between Israel and the Palestinians or we would stop buying its oil. That would make him look sincere in his insistence that the U.S. (its president anyway) is a friend of Israel and abet his goal of getting us out of our reliance on foreign oil suppliers by reducing availability of oil and/or forcing the price to such heights most people couldn't afford to drive their cars.

It has always been amazing to me how little part the Saudis take in conversations about Middle East problems, considering we are their military protector and they pay under cover money to terrorists to leave them alone. Or so I read. And as I recall, all the terrorists of 9/11 were Saudis except one Egyptian. Somehow we never linked the country itself to the terrorists who were always listed as being with Al Qaeda.

I have always been pro-Israel. But if you had to choose between siding with a country that sends children and women out as suicide bombers to places of the innocents, i.e., school buses, restaurants, police stations, and a country that responded by attacking only places terrorists were known to frequent or reside, which would you favor?

We aided and abetted the violence and terror caused by the Palestinians by sending millions of dollars to Yasser Arafat over the years despite the knowledge that little or none of it was going to aid the people but wound up in a Paris bank for the use and future upkeep of Mrs. Arafat. We - the U.S., that is - are notorious for dishing out money without ever checking to find out if it was going to the use for which it was asked. Somehow we failed to notice that years and millions later the Palestinians are still mostly a bunch of ragged nomads.

Sure, we gave, give, Israel money too but when I was on one of Lt. Gov. John Cherberg's trade missions that went there, we were told by Israeli authorities that they have never asked for American troops and that goes for today when the Palestinians are lobbing rockets at them. Obama's warning to Israel to be able to defend itself was unwarranted. It's been doing exactly that since its birth.

He's pouring out the rhetoric now trying to mend fences since his remarks about making Israel go to the boundaries of its land before the Six Day War, which he claims were not fully quoted by reporters who didn't emphasize the part about mutual agreement between Israel and the Palestinians for land swaps to make it acceptable.

Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, says in the Wall Street Journal that the so called pre-1967 lines "only demarcated where five Arab armies were halted in their invasion of the nascent state of Israel 19 years before. legally they formed an armistice line, not a recognized international border. No Palestinian state ever existed that could have claimed these prewar lines."

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has announced that he will ask the United Nations in September for a resolution calling for member states to recognize a Palestinian state on 1967 lines. He expects the automatic majority of third World countries to back him, indicating there isn't much use for negotiations between now and then. Descendants of the residents of Israel and the Palestinians will be still arguing over this for years to come, just as our descendants will be arguing over how to deal with the economic disaster our leaders are leaving for us.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville WA 98340.)