Rice's Betrayal of Israel

Caroline Glick in The Jewish Press:

In her monthly trip to Israel and the Palestinian Authority next week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to criticize Israel....

Rice’s visit next week ... will be a direct continuation of her last visit here on March 4. At that time, Rice forced the Olmert-Livni-Barak government to end IDF offensive operations against Hamas in Gaza. As the Israeli media have since reported, Hamas is exploiting the cease-fire to augment its control over all aspects of life in Gaza and to expand its arsenal and military capabilities against Israel.

To cite just one example, Hamas has reportedly completed its takeover of 8 out of the 22 medical facilities in Gaza. Through actions such as this, it is rendering the civilian population completely dependent on its Islamist largesse to receive basic services.

Rice’s visit comes ten days after Lt. General William Fraser’s trip to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Fraser was appointed by Rice to act as judge of Israeli and Palestinian compliance with the road map in accordance with the Annapolis declaration. Fraser’s visit was boycotted by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who absented himself from the meeting with Fraser and Fatah Prime Minister Salam Fayyad due to the overtly anti-Israel positions adopted by Fraser and his colleagues during Rice’s visit. Fraser reportedly attacked Barak and the IDF for scuttling his plans to expand Fatah military control over Judea and Samaria by insisting on fighting terrorists in the areas.

Fraser, like Rice, attacks Israel while stubbornly ignoring clear evidence of Fatah involvement in terror and Abbas’s open radicalization in the lead-up to the March 29 Arab League summit in Damascus where Fatah and Hamas leaders are expected to announce their efforts to reinstate their unity government.

See contradictory news at Haaretz - just blogged a minute ago by yours truly - U.S. road map monitors: PA failing in fight against terror. Glick must not have known of this when she penned her column.

Rice’s heavy-handed policy toward Israel amounts to a betrayal of Israel on two levels. First, as Rick Richman wrote last week on the American Thinker website, Rice’s current policy of demanding that Israel dismantle Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, freeze all building activities for Jews beyond the 1949 armistice lines including in Jerusalem and the major settlement blocs, and refrain from taking any major offensive actions against Palestinian terror groups is a complete betrayal of President Bush’s signed April 14, 2004 pledge to then-prime minister Ariel Sharon.

Bush’s letter, which came after Sharon laid out his plan to destroy all Israeli communities in Gaza and withdraw Israeli forces from the region and to similarly destroy Israel communities in northern Samaria, made clear that the U.S. views a Palestinian commitment to combat terror, end incitement and dismantle terror groups and cells as the first stage of any further peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. Bush also explicitly stated that the U.S. did not think it reasonable to expect that Israel would remove itself to the 1949 armistice lines in any future peace.

In advancing the Annapolis summit, Rice openly betrayed Bush’s written pledge to Sharon, which was followed by a Congressional resolution in June 2004 explicitly approving the letter’s contents. Rice has delighted in this betrayal by claiming that the Annapolis platform broke the “tight sequentiality” dictated by the road map. That “tight seqentiality” dictated that before Israel would negotiate a final peace with the Palestinians, the Palestinians would first cease to harbor, support and train terrorists, end their war against Israel and end their anti-Israel incitement activities.

It should be noted that in betraying the word of her boss, Rice was amply assisted by the feckless Olmert-Livni-Barak government.