Dear HonestReporting Member,
Old administration members often don’t fade away, they just seek to reverse their irrelevance.
This week, former President Jimmy Carter and his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, attempted to make themselves relevant again on the Israeli-Arab conflict. Brzezinki, who was involved in the original Camp David talks more than two decades ago, presented “A Peaceful Intervention” (The Washington Post, Dec. 24) — his view of the “international consensus as to what a truly fair peace would entail.” Carter wrote “Precedents for Mideast Peace” in The New York Times (Dec. 23).
Brzezinski and Carter both err when they write that UN resolutions, the 1978 Camp David Accords, and the Oslo Agreement require Israel return to the pre-1967 borders. Their claims parrot Arab positions, but don’t accurately reflect the words and intentions of UN Resolution 242, the agreed basis for all negotiations.
The drafters of Resolution 242 — the British Ambassador to the UN in 1967, Lord Caradon, and the American Ambassador, Arthur Goldberg — specifically did not call for Israel’s return to the pre-1967 borders. In an interview in the Beirut Daily Star on June 12, 1974, Caradon stated:
“It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967 because these positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers on each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That’s why we didn’t demand that the Israelis return to them, and I think we were right not to.”
Brzezinski further repeats Palestinian propaganda by charging Israel with a “repressive occupation and its indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians — including numerous children.”
In truth, Israel strikes only at Palestinians combatants, and with laser precision (literally). If innocents are wounded or killed, it is accidental, and Israeli leaders and citizens express their sincere regrets.
Rather, it is Palestinian suicide bombers who are “indiscriminate,” seeking to kill anyone and everyone in their mad quest — babies, mothers and teenagers — in bloody deeds extolled by Palestinian society.
GHOST BUSTER
A former Administration official who “gets it” is former UN Ambassador and Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, who writes a cogent and accurate article, “A Palestinian State — But Not Now” (Boston Globe, Dec. 24). Richardson writes:
“Yasser Arafat is destined for the history books as the man who squandered Palestine… The painful, uncomfortable truth is that Arafat has been playing both sides for years. In English he is a willing partner in peace, a statesman protecting his people and hoping to end bloodshed; but when speaking to Arab audiences, Arafat is the pistol-wearing guerrilla of old, filled with venom for Israel and fueling the worst of Palestinian blood libel against the Jewish state.”
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HonestReporting.com
