Without Judea and Samaria (AKA the West Bank) Israel would be 9 miles wide at its narrow waist. Its eastern border would go from 40 miles to over 200 miles in length – impossible even for the Israeli army to police. Arab tank columns in a race to the sea could cut the nation in half in hours. Controlling the high ground Palestinians could rain mortar rounds and rockets on an area containing 80 percent of Israel’s population.
Don’t misunderstand me. The Sharon Plan is atrocious. Once the Palestinians have their state they can begin importing heavy armaments and training commando units to act as an advance column for the rest of the Arab world when the next Middle East war comes – as come it will.
But the fact that Buchanan finds Sharon’s unilateral submission paltry and insufficient and an insult to the noble Arafat and his heroic people shows that Pat is either totally detached from reality or has an implacable blinding hatred of the Jewish state that defies rational explanation. I think it’s a little of both.
Buchanan has constructed a worldview in which all of our troubles with Islam come down to a nation the size of Connecticut devoid of resources. I wonder if he ever asks himself why Muslims are killing Hindus in the Kashmir – because Sharon won’t share Jerusalem with Arafat? Or why Muslims are murdering Christians in Indonesia oppressing Christians in Egypt and committing genocide in the Sudan (a fact now even acknowledged by hard-core leftist Danny Glover)? Was the foregoing sparked by Sharon’s provocation on the Temple Mount?
Why is Saudi Arabia financing the building of militant mosques all over the United States while signs in Riyadh proclaim An Islamic World? Perhaps the phenomenon is due to Israel’s security fence. Why are Kosovar Muslims burning down Orthodox churches razing convents and slaughtering Serbs whenever they can lay their hands on them? Could this be a reaction to neoconservative control of US foreign policy?
Like the Oxford students in the 1930’s who signed petitions vowing they’d never fight for king and country like the America-Firsters under Charles Lindbergh (whom Buchanan reveres) Pat is blind to any reality that threatens to intrude on his cozy isolationist worldview.
Where The Right Went Wrong is dedicated to Ronald Reagan. Would you care to know what a real conservative – the greatest conservative of the 20th. century – thought of the Jewish state?
In October 1980 Reagan called for an undivided Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty. In the same speech he declared I believe in the right of settlements in the West Bank.
In April 1978 Reagan observed The present (Carter) administration is dead wrong when it says Israel’s West Bank settlements are illegal.
In September 1980 the Gipper explained: The touchstone of our relationship with Israel is that a secure strong Israel is in America’s self-interest. Israel’s a major strategic asset to America. Israel is not a client but a very reliable friend. That view did not change with the end of the Cold War.
In office Reagan was forced to modify his position on what are called settlements. But he never changed in his opposition to a Palestinian state ( The United States will not support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza ) or his rejection of negotiations with Arafat and his PLO (whom our 40th president consistently branded terrorists).
The man who won the Cold War envisioned Palestinians living in post-1967 Israelexercising a fair degree of autonomy in some sort of loose federation with Jordan.
In his book Broken Covenant former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Moshe Arens disclosed Meeting President Reagan was like meeting an old friend and he had a strong feeling of friendship and admiration for Israel that was always apparent in word as well as in deed.
In light of the foregoing who has betrayed the Reagan legacy – the neoconservatives or Patrick J. Buchanan?
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