WarSclerotic

Netanyahu wows Congress – seattlepi.com.

Netanyahu to Congress: militant Islam threatening world, Iran’s nuclear plans must be halted – The Washington Post.

IAEA, Syria: Nuclear report on Syria may augur punitive action – latimes.com.

IAEA findings that Syria ‘very likely’ pursued a secret program may add to foreign pressure on Damascus amid a government crackdown on protesters. A separate report says Iran has expanded its nuclear capacity and stockpile.

Reporting from Beirut— The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog released a detailed report saying Syria “very likely” pursued a clandestine nuclear program, an assertion that is expected to add pressure on a regime already reeling from protests at home and sanctions imposed abroad. A confidential report published Tuesday by the International Atomic Energy Agency said Syria was building a nuclear reactor at a site in Dair Alzour that was bombed by Israel in September 2007 and had not declared the project to international inspectors, as required by Syria’s international treaty obligations. The details of the previously reported IAEA allegation that Syria was seeking to build a reactor will come as no surprise to the United States. U.S. intelligence agencies in April 2008 presented evidence asserting that Syria was building a clandestine plutonium reactor at Dair Alzour. But the report paves the way for possible punitive action against Syria at the U.N. Security Council at a time when the West is seeking ways to increase pressure on President Bashar Assad over his regime’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators. “The agency finally weighed in and came up with a conclusion that most governments came up with years ago,” said David Albright, a former weapons inspector who now heads the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington arms control watchdog. “This is laying down the gauntlet against Syria.” The report stops short of bluntly accusing Syria of being in noncompliance with its treaty obligations. But with Damascus already under intense international pressure, it may be enough to assemble a resolution against the nation, Western diplomats said. “You can’t ignore the timing,” said Albright. “Syria is politically weaker than it was six months ago, and it might be easier to muster the votes at the [IAEA] board to refer this to the Security Council.” Although no text of a proposed resolution has been passed around among members of the agency’s Board of Governors or among Security Council members, discussions involving the U.S. and other countries on a possible resolution were ongoing, said a Western diplomat. “As soon as the report is out, we will begin putting a text down to paper,” said another Western diplomat. The inspectors’ report notes the challenges of assessing a site that was bombed by Israel, bulldozed by the Syrian government afterward and blocked to inspection since June 2008, when traces of uranium particles were found that Syria alleged must have come from Israeli bombs. Based on the particles and historical satellite imagery showing the site’s progression and its layout, the agency concluded that “the site could not have served the purpose claimed by Syria,” which had maintained it was an unused military installation. A separate report on Iran’s nuclear program obtained by The Times says that the Islamic Republic, Syria’s strategic partner, had steadily increased the number of centrifuges producing enriched uranium and expanded its production of nuclear fuel. According to the report, Iran increased its total stockpile of reactor-grade nuclear fuel enriched to about 3.5% purity by 14% in the last three months, to 9,050 pounds, apparently overcoming any lingering effects of a computer virus attack on its nuclear infrastructure. Iran also increased the number centrifuges refining uranium by 13% to 5,860 machines at its facility near the city of Natanz. In addition, it has produced 125 pounds of medical-reactor-grade uranium enriched to 20% purity for a research facility in Tehran, up by about 30 pounds from the last reporting period, according to a copy of the U.N. inspectors’ report. Iran says it needs the higher-grade fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor after international proposals to recharge the ailing plant collapsed. But the report could ease tensions between Iran and the West, which accuses Tehran of pursuing nuclear weapons, because Iran has not yet installed centrifuges at its previously undisclosed enrichment facility at Fordow nor launched a set of much-touted advanced centrifuges, Albright said. daragahi@latimes.com Special correspondent Julia Damianova in Istanbul, Turkey, contributed to this report.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report May 1, 2011, 9:30 PM (GMT+02:00)

Syrian army tank in Daraa

The Lebanese Shiite Hizballah has obviously decided the Assad regime is sinking. debkafile‘s military sources report the organization is preparing to pull its heavy, long-range weapons out of storage in Syrian military facilities – no longer sure they are safe there – and risk transporting them to Lebanon.

Last year, Syrian President Bashar Assad agreed to store Hizballah’s incoming Iran-made Fatah-110 surface missiles and its Syrian equivalent the M-600 and the mobile SA-8 (Gecko) anti-air battery which holds 18 warheads with a maximum range of 12 kilometers. Tehran paid for the upkeep of the Hizballah hardware on Syrian side of the border after Israel threatened to bomb these potential game-changers if they crossed over.

Deployed at Hizballah bases in Lebanon, the Fatah-110 and M-600 would place almost every corner of Israel within range of bombardment, while the SA-8 would seriously restrict Israeli Air Force operations over southern Lebanon and Galilee.
However, as the uprising against Assad rolls ever closer to Damascus, Hizballah see a very real threat of it infecting the Syrian army and has decided that now might be its last chance to get hold of the core arsenal it has standing by for war with Israel before events get out of hand in Syria.

Hizballah’s headquarters in Dahya, Beirut, became alarmed when they heard about strong resentment building up in the Syrian 11th Division over the Assad crackdown against the dissidents – among officers as well as other ranks.
The 11th Division, which is camped outside Aleppo, is the best trained and organized of all Syrian army units, equipped as its strategic reserve with the most advanced weaponry. If the unrest has reached this elite unit, Hizballah reckons there is no time to losing for pulling its missiles out of Syrian military safekeeping.

Meanwhile, top Hizballah and Iranian offices in Tehran are working on the best way to transport the missiles into Lebanon without exposing them to Israeli attack, debkafile‘s Iranian sources report. Some of them calculate that Israel would not venture to strike them while still on Syrian soil because it would lay itself open to interfering, or even getting in the way of, the revolt against President Assad and playing into his hands.

A security emergency might well take the wind out of protest movement’s sails.
But already, Tehran’s Lebanese surrogate is beginning to distance itself from Bashar Assad, its longtime strategic partner and arms supplier, having decided he has his back to the wall.  April 28, the Hizballah-controlled Lebanese Al Akhbar newspaper started criticizing the Assad regime on its op-ed pages.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report May 25, 2011, 9:18 AM (GMT+02:00)

End of a warm friendship

Syrian President Bashar Assad’s Arab and Muslimsupport is melting fast. debkafile‘s intelligence sources report that his second most steadfast supporter after Iran, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, has secretly ordered his government officials to dump Ankara’s ties with Damascus with all speed.
This change has several consequences which may also indirectly affect Turkey’s relations with Israel. For now, Erdogan has given Syrian opposition leaders permission for the first time to hold a meeting in Anatalia from May 31 to June 2 to turn over ways of intensifying the three-month popular uprising to the right pitch for finally toppling Bashar Assad.

After three months of unstinting support for the Assad regime, Turkish government circles seek to shun finding themselves “backing a regime which shoots to kill Muslims in the street.” After the number of Syrian deaths rose past 1,100, one high-ranking official commented to debkafile, “Turkey is a Muslim democracy. It must not lend support to dictators who murder their citizens.”

This change of policy has taken form in three additional steps:

1.  The following message was posted to Damascus on Tuesday, May 24:  Turkey is not a member of the European Union and is therefore not bound by its sanctions it has imposed freezing Assad’s assets and barring him and his regime heads from travelling. Nonetheless, the Syrian ruler is advised not to try and test its intentions by trying to visit Turkey.
2.  Assad’s repression of the uprising in the Kurdish regions of northern Syria is causing ferment among the Kurds of southern Turkey. Unless it is stopped forthwith, Ankara will take overt action against the Syrian ruler.
3.  Erdogan has discontinued his almost daily phone conversations with Assad. In any case, his advice to the Syrian ruler on how to overcome the uprising against him was never heeded.

Our sources report that he also ordered the Hakan Fidan, chief of Turkish MIT intelligence service, to stop traveling to Damascus with updates on Syrian opposition activities. Assad has thus lost his key source of information about what the opposition is up to.
As a by-product of this radical policy change in Ankara, the Turkish Prime Minister is reported by our sources to have reconsidered the dispatch from Turkish ports of a large anti-Israel flotilla for breaking the Gaza blockade. It was scheduled for the last week of June.
Fifteen vessels carrying 1,500 activists from several countries were due to take part, led by the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish vessel aboard which nine people were killed in a violent clash with Israeli commandos a year ago. Erdogan decided to withdraw Turkish participation lest Syria exploit another possible Israel-Turkish clash at sea to launch an attack on Israel’s northern border as a show of Syrian-Turkish solidarity.
These days, Ankara is working hard to avoid any suggestion of solidarity with Syria.

Analysis: Applause heard in White… JPost – Diplomacy & Politics.

  The overall importance of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyanhu’s speech to a special joint session of the US Congress on Tuesday was not in the substance ­ he did not break any radical new ground ­ but rather in the overwhelmingly warm ovation he received.

Netanyahu could only dream of such a reception in Israel. Even his wife, Sarah, received a standing ovation when she entered the hall. The prime minister was applauded some 30 times, many of those accompanied by standing ovations.

The nearly four-minute ovation he received when he entered the historic chamber, ­ including a brief period of rhythmic clapping that sounded more like the Mann Auditorium than Congress, ­ was not only heard by Netanyahu, but also by US President Barack Obama, the Palestinians and the world at large.

With all the talk of the country’s existential loneliness and Israel’s real sense of isolation, when Netanyahu spoke to the most important parliament in the world, it exuded nothing but warmth toward Israel.

Even the prime minister’s comment that Jews are not interlopers in Judea and Samaria, ­ not like the Belgians were in The Congo or the British in India, ­ received raucous applause and a standing ovation by most in the hall.

Granted, Congress is not the world, and it is the US president who in the final analysis sets US foreign policy. But Congress is not just some insignificant little body that can be lightly dismissed – ­ not by the president or the world ­ – and it is a body that sets the limits to how far the president can push Israel.

With the resounding applause, on both sides of the aisle, to Netanyahu’s comments on a unified Jerusalem, not returning to the 1967 lines, not negotiating with Hamas, and not allowing the descendants of Palestinian refugees enter Israel, Obama – currently tending to US business during a visit to Europe – ­ received a clear signal from Congress that when it comes to Israel, his hands are not free.

Ahmadinejad: U.S. plotting to sow divisions among Arab states and save Israel – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Iran president says U.S. supports dictatorial regimes and blames Washington for bloodshed across Mideast.

By Haaretz Service

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned Arab countries against U.S. plots to sow divisions in the region and save Israel, the state-run Press TV reported on Tuesday.

“Their scheme is to save the Zionist regime, global arrogance and U.S. interests… the main enemies of nations are the U.S., its allies and the Zionist regime,” Ahmadinejad was quoted by Press TV as saying about the U.S.

	Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad looks on while attending a news conference in Tehran April 4, 2011.
	Photo by: Reuters

The Iranian president accused Washington of supporting dictatorial regimes and said the U.S. had devised a scheme to sow divisions among Arab countries in the region in order to reach its objectives.

He also accused U.S. warmongering of being the reason for all the bloodshed in the region.

Criticizing the U.S. government, he asked, “What is the difference between a country ruled by one or two [dictators] for thirty to forty years and a country dominated by two parties for many years?”

Ahmadinejad vowed that a new Mideast will emerge without the existence of Israel nor U.S. influence.

“The world of colonialism is about to fall apart and nations will see the collapse of capitalism in the near future,” he was quoted as saying.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Special Report May 24, 2011, 10:59 AM (GMT+02:00)

Survives another assassination bid

A large explosion set fire to an oil refinery unit in Abadan, Iran’s biggest oil city, during a visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Tuesday, May 24. He came to inaugurate a unit for expanding production capacity by 4.2 million liters a day. Two people were killed and 12 injured. The blast was attributed by officials to a gas leak or “a technical fault” in one of the units, without specifying whether it was the same unit Ahmadinejad was scheduled to visit. However, according to debkafile‘s Iranian sources, the explosion was triggered by his pushing the button to activate it that same unit, which must have been tested and run in before the inauguration ceremony to avoid any technical hitches.
A news conference was quickly staged live on state TV showing him answering questions about the Abadan refinery -apparently to put a stop to spreading rumors that he had been assassinated. He did not refer to the explosion.

The last known attack on Ahmadinejad’s life was on Aug. 24, 2010 when a grenade was lobbed at his motorcade in the western town of Hamadan. Officials then said it was only a firecracker.

Our Iranian sources point to three possible parties who might have rigged the attack:

1. Abadan on the Shatt al Arb is near the Iraqi border and the route popular with Arab agents from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf moving in and out of the Iranian oil-rich rich of Khuzestan, which is the hotbed of disaffected Arab Iranians and their liberation movements.
2. Infighting at the top of the Revolutionary Guards Corps or elite regime circles, where Ahmadinejad’s prestige has slipped badly over his dispute with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the division of authority.
The ayatollah’s clique says the president violated the Islamic Republic’s first commandment – some said even the precepts of the faith – by disobeying the Supreme Ruler. Ahmadinejad flouted his order reinstate the intelligence minister he sacked – only to be overruled by Khamenei.
The Supreme Leader’s suspects that Ahmadinejad is secretly plotting to topple him. The two camps are now squaring up for a fight with the president seeking to drum up popularity by claiming he is targeted for assassination. Maybe he is.
3.  A foreign clandestine agency may be responsible, possibly the same unnamed hand which for two years has bedeviled Iran’s nuclear program by liquidating its leading scientists a

Our World: Obama’s diversionary t… JPost – Opinion – Columnists.

By CAROLINE B. GLICK 
05/23/2011 23:31

What did the president wish to accomplish by purposely starting an ugly fight with the prime minister this past weekend?

Talkbacks (20)   As the Washington Post pointed out on Friday, US President Barack Obama purposely provoked the current fight with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. He knew full well that Netanyahu does not back the Palestinian formulation that negotiations with Israel must be based on the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, or what are wrongly referred to as the 1967 lines. In the days leading up to Obama’s speech last Thursday, Israel registered explicit, repeated requests that he not adopt the Palestinian position that negotiations should be based on those lines.

And so it was a stinging rebuke when Obama declared Thursday: “The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” According to the Washington Post, Obama wrote these lines of his speech himself and Netanyahu was informed of them just as he was scheduled to fly to the US on Thursday evening. Obama gave the speech while Netanyahu was in the air on his way to Washington to meet Obama the next morning. It is hard to think of a more stunning insult or a greater display of contempt for the leader of a US ally and fellow democracy than Obama’s actions last week. And it is obvious that Netanyahu had no choice but to react forcefully to Obama’s provocation.

The question is why would Obama act as he did? What did he wish to accomplish by purposely starting such an ugly fight with Netanyahu?

Probably the best way to figure out what Obama wished to accomplish is to consider what he did accomplish, because the two are undoubtedly related.

ON MAY 4, two weeks before Obama gave his speech, Fatah and Hamas signed a unity agreement. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Like its fellow Brotherhood satellite al-Qaida, Hamas shares the Brotherhood’s ideology of global jihad, the destruction of Western civilization and the establishment of a global caliphate. Also like al-Qaida, it is a terrorist organization which, since its establishment in 1987 has murdered more than a thousand Israelis.

In 2005, Hamas subcontracted itself out to the Iranian regime. Since then, its men have been trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and by Hezbollah. Hamas maintains operational ties with both outfits and receives most of its weapons and significant funding from Iran.

The agreement between Fatah and Hamas makes Hamas a partner in the leadership of the Palestinian Authority. It also paves the way for Hamas to win the planned Palestinian legislative and presidential elections that are scheduled for September just after the UN General Assembly is scheduled to endorse Palestinian statehood. It also sets the conditions for Hamas to integrate its forces and eventually take over the UStrained Palestinian army in Judea and Samaria and to join the PLO.

The Hamas-Fatah unity deal constitutes a complete repudiation of the assumptions informing Obama’s policies towards the Palestinians and Israel. Obama perceives the conflict as a direct consequence of two things: prior US administrations’ refusal to “put light” between the US and Israel, and Israel’s unwillingness to surrender all of the territory it took during the course of the 1967 Six Day War.

The Hamas-Fatah unity deal is indisputable proof that contrary to what Obama believes, the conflict has nothing to do with previous administrations’ support for Israel or with Israel’s size. It is instead entirely the consequence of the Palestinians’ rejection of Israel’s right to exist and their commitment to bringing about Israel’s destruction.

Forcing Israel into indefensible boundaries, (which as Netanyahu explained to Obama at the White House on Friday, “were not the boundaries of peace, they were the boundaries of repeated wars because the attack on Israel was so attractive for them,”), will not advance the cause of peace. It will advance the Palestinians’ goal of destroying Israel.

Obama had two options for contending with the Palestinian unity deal. He could pay attention to it or he could create a distraction in order to ignore it. If he paid attention to it, he would have been forced to disavow his policy of blaming his predecessors in the White House and Israel for the absence of peace. By creating a distraction he would be able to change the subject in a manner that would enable him to maintain those policies.

And so he picked a fight with Netanyahu. And by picking the fight, he created a distraction that has, in fact, changed the subject and enabled Obama to maintain his policies that have been wholly repudiated by the reality of the Palestinian unity deal.

By inserting the citation of the 1949 armistice lines into his speech, Obama made Israel’s size again the issue.

The Hamas-Fatah unity deal actually demonstrates that not only is Israel’s size not the cause of the conflict, it is the main reason that Israelis and Palestinians live in relative peace.

Israel’s control over Judea and Samaria and east Jerusalem, and with them, its ability to ward off invasion and attacks on its major cities is what has prevented wars. If Israel were more vulnerable, the de facto Palestinian terror state would not be weighing whether or not to begin a new terror war as its leaders from Fatah and Hamas are doing today. It would be waging a continuous campaign of terror whose clear aim is Israel’s destruction for again, as Netanyahu said the 1949 armistice lines make war an attractive option for Israel’s enemies.

BY PICKING a fight with Netanyahu, since Thursday, no one could have possibly noted this basic truth because the false issue of Israel’s control over these areas – that is, Israel’s size – has dominated the global discourse on the Middle East.

Obama would never have been able to create his diversion from the unwelcome fact of Palestinian duplicity and rejectionism, to imaginary problem with the size of Israel without the enthusiastic support given to him by the Israeli Left.

Led by opposition leader Tzipi Livni, the Israeli Left responded to Obama’s full-scale assault on Israel’s legitimacy by launching a full-scale partisan assault on Netanyahu. Rather than back Netanyahu as he fights for the country’s future, Livni called for him to resign and said that he was wrecking Israel’s ties with the US. In so doing, the Left provided crucial support for Obama’s move to maintain his phony anti- Israel paradigm for Middle East policymaking in the face of the Palestinian unity deal’s repudiation of that model.

The Left’s assault on Netanyahu is not the only way it has enabled Obama to maintain his pro-Palestinian policies in the face of the Palestinians’ embrace of terror and war. In his speech to AIPAC, Obama argued that Israel needs to surrender its defensible boundaries because the Palestinians are about to demographically challenge Israel’s Jewish majority.

As Obama put it, “The number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories. This will make it harder and harder – without a peace deal – to maintain Israel as both a Jewish state and a democratic state.”

The demographic time bomb story is a Palestinian fabrication. In 1997, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics published a falsified Palestinian census that inflated Palestinian population data by 50 percent. The Israeli Left adopted this fake report as its own when Palestinian terrorism and political warfare convinced the majority of Israelis that it was unwise to give them any more land and that the peace process was a lie.

Since 2004, repeated, in-depth studies of Jewish and Arab birthrates and immigration/ emigration statistics west of the Jordan River undertaken by independent researchers have shown that the demographic time bomb is a dud. In January, the respected demographer Yaakov Faitelson published a study for the Institute of Zionist Strategies in which he definitively put to rest the tale of pending Jewish demographic doom.

As Faitelson demonstrated, Jewish and Arab birthrates are already converging west of the Jordan River at around three children per woman. And whereas the fertility rates of Israeli Arabs, Gazans and residents of Judea and Samaria are all trending downward, Jewish fertility is consistently rising. Moreover, whereas the Arabs are experiencing consistently negative net immigration rates, Jewish net immigration rates are positive and high.

Faitelson based his multiyear projections on current population numbers in which Jews comprise 58.6 percent of the population west of the Jordan River and Muslims constitute 38.7% of the overall population. Non-Jewish, non-Muslim minorities comprise the other 2.7%. Using assessment baselines for Jewish net immigration well below current averages, Faitelson showed that in the years to come, not only will Jews not lose our demographic majority. We will increase it.

Faitelson’s study, like the studies published since 2004 by the American-Israeli Demographic Research Group show that from a demographic perspective, Israel is in the same situation as many Western states today. Namely, it has to develop policies for dealing with an irredentist minority population.

There are many reasonable, liberal policies that Israel can adopt. These include applying the liberal Israeli legal code to Judea and Samaria and enforcing the laws of treason. It is hard to see why the best policy for Israel is to take some of that irredentist population off its books by establishing a terror state ruled by what Netanyahu rightly referred to as “the Israeli equivalent of al-Qaida” on its border.

ALL OF this brings us back to Hamas, terrorism, the Palestinian rejection of Israel’s right to exist, and Obama’s diversionary moves to facilitate his preservation of a Middle East policy based on a wholly false and discredited assessment of reality and the Israeli Left’s facilitation of Obama’s efforts.

When we realize what Obama is up to, we recognize as well what Netanyahu must do in response.

In his address before Congress on Tuesday and in all of his appearances in the coming weeks and months, Netanyahu should have one goal: to bring the focus of debate back where it belongs – on the Palestinians.

At every opportunity, Netanyahu needs to pound the message that the Palestinians’ commitment to Israel’s destruction is the sole reason that there is no peace.

As for the Israeli Left, it is high time that Netanyahu place the likes of Livni on the defensive. This involves two things. First, Netanyahu must attack the Left’s doomsday demographic projections that are without factual basis and are indeed antithetical to reality. As long as the demographic lie goes unchallenged by Netanyahu, the Left will continue to argue that by refusing to build a terror state on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, Netanyahu is endangering Israel.

Netanyahu deserves a lot of credit for standing up to Obama on Friday. He showed enormous courage in doing so. It was his finest hour to date and polls over the weekend show that the public appreciates and supports him for it. He must build on that success by putting the focus on the truth.

caroline@carolineglick.comThe question is why would Obama act as he did? What did he wish to accomplish by purposely starting such an ugly fight with Netanyahu?

Probably the best way to figure out what Obama wished to accomplish is to consider what he did accomplish, because the two are undoubtedly related.

ON MAY 4, two weeks before Obama gave his speech, Fatah and Hamas signed a unity agreement. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Like its fellow Brotherhood satellite al-Qaida, Hamas shares the Brotherhood’s ideology of global jihad, the destruction of Western civilization and the establishment of a global caliphate. Also like al-Qaida, it is a terrorist organization which, since its establishment in 1987 has murdered more than a thousand Israelis.

In 2005, Hamas subcontracted itself out to the Iranian regime. Since then, its men have been trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and by Hezbollah. Hamas maintains operational ties with both outfits and receives most of its weapons and significant funding from Iran.

The agreement between Fatah and Hamas makes Hamas a partner in the leadership of the Palestinian Authority. It also paves the way for Hamas to win the planned Palestinian legislative and presidential elections that are scheduled for September just after the UN General Assembly is scheduled to endorse Palestinian statehood. It also sets the conditions for Hamas to integrate its forces and eventually take over the UStrained Palestinian army in Judea and Samaria and to join the PLO.

The Hamas-Fatah unity deal constitutes a complete repudiation of the assumptions informing Obama’s policies towards the Palestinians and Israel. Obama perceives the conflict as a direct consequence of two things: prior US administrations’ refusal to “put light” between the US and Israel, and Israel’s unwillingness to surrender all of the territory it took during the course of the 1967 Six Day War.

The Hamas-Fatah unity deal is indisputable proof that contrary to what Obama believes, the conflict has nothing to do with previous administrations’ support for Israel or with Israel’s size. It is instead entirely the consequence of the Palestinians’ rejection of Israel’s right to exist and their commitment to bringing about Israel’s destruction.

Forcing Israel into indefensible boundaries, (which as Netanyahu explained to Obama at the White House on Friday, “were not the boundaries of peace, they were the boundaries of repeated wars because the attack on Israel was so attractive for them,”), will not advance the cause of peace. It will advance the Palestinians’ goal of destroying Israel.

Obama had two options for contending with the Palestinian unity deal. He could pay attention to it or he could create a distraction in order to ignore it. If he paid attention to it, he would have been forced to disavow his policy of blaming his predecessors in the White House and Israel for the absence of peace. By creating a distraction he would be able to change the subject in a manner that would enable him to maintain those policies.

And so he picked a fight with Netanyahu. And by picking the fight, he created a distraction that has, in fact, changed the subject and enabled Obama to maintain his policies that have been wholly repudiated by the reality of the Palestinian unity deal.

By inserting the citation of the 1949 armistice lines into his speech, Obama made Israel’s size again the issue.

The Hamas-Fatah unity deal actually demonstrates that not only is Israel’s size not the cause of the conflict, it is the main reason that Israelis and Palestinians live in relative peace.

Israel’s control over Judea and Samaria and east Jerusalem, and with them, its ability to ward off invasion and attacks on its major cities is what has prevented wars. If Israel were more vulnerable, the de facto Palestinian terror state would not be weighing whether or not to begin a new terror war as its leaders from Fatah and Hamas are doing today. It would be waging a continuous campaign of terror whose clear aim is Israel’s destruction for again, as Netanyahu said the 1949 armistice lines make war an attractive option for Israel’s enemies.

BY PICKING a fight with Netanyahu, since Thursday, no one could have possibly noted this basic truth because the false issue of Israel’s control over these areas – that is, Israel’s size – has dominated the global discourse on the Middle East.

Obama would never have been able to create his diversion from the unwelcome fact of Palestinian duplicity and rejectionism, to imaginary problem with the size of Israel without the enthusiastic support given to him by the Israeli Left.

Led by opposition leader Tzipi Livni, the Israeli Left responded to Obama’s full-scale assault on Israel’s legitimacy by launching a full-scale partisan assault on Netanyahu. Rather than back Netanyahu as he fights for the country’s future, Livni called for him to resign and said that he was wrecking Israel’s ties with the US. In so doing, the Left provided crucial support for Obama’s move to maintain his phony anti- Israel paradigm for Middle East policymaking in the face of the Palestinian unity deal’s repudiation of that model.

The Left’s assault on Netanyahu is not the only way it has enabled Obama to maintain his pro-Palestinian policies in the face of the Palestinians’ embrace of terror and war. In his speech to AIPAC, Obama argued that Israel needs to surrender its defensible boundaries because the Palestinians are about to demographically challenge Israel’s Jewish majority.

As Obama put it, “The number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories. This will make it harder and harder – without a peace deal – to maintain Israel as both a Jewish state and a democratic state.”

The demographic time bomb story is a Palestinian fabrication. In 1997, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics published a falsified Palestinian census that inflated Palestinian population data by 50 percent. The Israeli Left adopted this fake report as its own when Palestinian terrorism and political warfare convinced the majority of Israelis that it was unwise to give them any more land and that the peace process was a lie.

Since 2004, repeated, in-depth studies of Jewish and Arab birthrates and immigration/ emigration statistics west of the Jordan River undertaken by independent researchers have shown that the demographic time bomb is a dud. In January, the respected demographer Yaakov Faitelson published a study for the Institute of Zionist Strategies in which he definitively put to rest the tale of pending Jewish demographic doom.

As Faitelson demonstrated, Jewish and Arab birthrates are already converging west of the Jordan River at around three children per woman. And whereas the fertility rates of Israeli Arabs, Gazans and residents of Judea and Samaria are all trending downward, Jewish fertility is consistently rising. Moreover, whereas the Arabs are experiencing consistently negative net immigration rates, Jewish net immigration rates are positive and high.

Faitelson based his multiyear projections on current population numbers in which Jews comprise 58.6 percent of the population west of the Jordan River and Muslims constitute 38.7% of the overall population. Non-Jewish, non-Muslim minorities comprise the other 2.7%. Using assessment baselines for Jewish net immigration well below current averages, Faitelson showed that in the years to come, not only will Jews not lose our demographic majority. We will increase it.

Faitelson’s study, like the studies published since 2004 by the American-Israeli Demographic Research Group show that from a demographic perspective, Israel is in the same situation as many Western states today. Namely, it has to develop policies for dealing with an irredentist minority population.

There are many reasonable, liberal policies that Israel can adopt. These include applying the liberal Israeli legal code to Judea and Samaria and enforcing the laws of treason. It is hard to see why the best policy for Israel is to take some of that irredentist population off its books by establishing a terror state ruled by what Netanyahu rightly referred to as “the Israeli equivalent of al-Qaida” on its border.

ALL OF this brings us back to Hamas, terrorism, the Palestinian rejection of Israel’s right to exist, and Obama’s diversionary moves to facilitate his preservation of a Middle East policy based on a wholly false and discredited assessment of reality and the Israeli Left’s facilitation of Obama’s efforts.

When we realize what Obama is up to, we recognize as well what Netanyahu must do in response.

In his address before Congress on Tuesday and in all of his appearances in the coming weeks and months, Netanyahu should have one goal: to bring the focus of debate back where it belongs – on the Palestinians.

At every opportunity, Netanyahu needs to pound the message that the Palestinians’ commitment to Israel’s destruction is the sole reason that there is no peace.

As for the Israeli Left, it is high time that Netanyahu place the likes of Livni on the defensive. This involves two things. First, Netanyahu must attack the Left’s doomsday demographic projections that are without factual basis and are indeed antithetical to reality. As long as the demographic lie goes unchallenged by Netanyahu, the Left will continue to argue that by refusing to build a terror state on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, Netanyahu is endangering Israel.

Netanyahu deserves a lot of credit for standing up to Obama on Friday. He showed enormous courage in doing so. It was his finest hour to date and polls over the weekend show that the public appreciates and supports him for it. He must build on that success by putting the focus on the truth.

caroline@carolineglick.com

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