Kerry's flip-flops on Israel. Hard to keep up with his
changes. - From:LindyBill
KOSHER KERRY?
By ERIC FETTMANN
NY Post
July 14, 2004 -- JOHN Kerry, after a slightly rocky start, has had an epiphany of sorts on the Middle East.
New "talking points" being privately distributed to pro-Israel groups almost make it seem like Kerry is running for president of AIPAC, the major pro-Israel lobbying group.
In fact, though he'd surely never characterize it this way, Kerry's latest approach to the Middle East conflict is basically that he's just as supportive of Israel as is President Bush.
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Of course, Kerry hasn't always felt that way.<font size=3> Last December, speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, he accused the president of <font color=blue>"jeopardizing the security of Israel [and] encouraging Palestinian extremists"<font color=black> — a description that surely would be met with astonishment in Jerusalem.
Indeed, Kerry <font color=blue>"was the most critical of any in his party,"<font color=black> of Bush's Middle East efforts, according to Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory.
Now, however, he's solidly endorsing Israel's security fence as <font color=blue>"a legitimate right of act of self-defense"<font color=black> and is denouncing Yasser Arafat as a <font color=blue>"failed leader"<font color=black> who needs to be replaced.
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Not that Kerry has always felt that way about either the fence or Arafat, either.<font size=3>
As The Post's Deborah Orin reported back in March, a 1997 book by Kerry hailed Arafat's <font color=blue>"transformation from outlaw to statesman"<font color=black> and cited him as a potential role model for other <font color=blue>"terrorist organizations with political agendas."<font color=black>
Orin's column triggered an uproar — which quickly moved Kerry to concede that Arafat had <font color=blue>"missed a historic opportunity"<font color=black> and was now an <font color=blue>"outlaw."<font color=black> The candidate managed to avoid a debate over whether the PLO leader, who has never even begun to fulfill his personal commitment to confront terrorism, ever qualified for the title <font color=blue>"statesman."<font color=black>
As for the security fence, Kerry last year sang an entirely different tune for the Arab-American Institute, to whom he bemoaned <font color=blue>"how disheartened Palestinians are by the Israeli government's decision to build a barrier off the Green Line, cutting deeply into Palestinian areas."<font color=black>
Though calling on Palestinian leaders to <font color=blue>"bring an end to the violence against Israelis,"<font color=black> he didn't note that the fence is meant to do just that.
<font color=blue>"We do not need another barrier to peace,"<font color=black> Kerry told the Arab-American audience. <font color=blue>"Provocative and counterproductive measures only harm Israel's security over the long term, they increase hardships to the Palestinian people and they make the process of negotiating en eventual settlement that much harder."<font color=black>
Moreover, he denounced the <font color=blue>"endless cycle of violence and reprisals"<font color=black> — and thereby endorsed the idea that terrorist attacks against civilians are morally equivalent to Israeli strikes against groups like Hamas.
No wonder that leading pro-Palestinian activist Jim Zogby widely praised Kerry's remarks at that gathering.
There's more: Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations speech two months later, Kerry seemed to buy in to the discredited notion that Palestinian terrorism is the result of a lack of political progress — and that Israel's refusal to negotiate under fire is counter-productive.
As Kerry put it, <font color=blue>"it may be easier to break the stalemate and end the violence fostered by extremists if the end game is the focus, not the steps leading up to it."<font color=black>
So does all this mean John Kerry is weak on Israel? Hardly.
His voting record has been solidly pro-Israel, though his campaign's insistence that the Democratic candidate <font color=blue>"has been at the forefront of the fight for Israel's security"<font color=black> is wishful thinking at best.
And the fact that, as the Boston Globe put it, Kerry now <font color=blue>"strikes a decidedly stronger pro-Israel position . . . than he did a few months ago"<font color=black> surely will prove reassuring to Jewish voters and other supporters of Israel.
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But it hardly fails to reassure those who wonder whether John Kerry's positions swing back and forth like a pendulum, depending on who he's talking to at the moment — and whose votes he finds of immediate importance.
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Ultimately, however, the differences between Bush and Kerry on the Middle East are defined not on specifics of the security fence or moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, but the larger issue that is central to this campaign: How do threatened nations, like America and Israel, wage a War on Terror?
If he believes, as he suggested to the Council on Foreign Relations, that terrorism will cease if the Palestinians simply are promised a political solution — if he fails to comprehend that there is no point in holding negotiations when one party treacherously refuses to abandon terrorism — then that is far more cause for concern.
NEW YORK POST |
