You do not need insider information to know that Hillary Clinton threw a hissy fit at Bibi Netanyahu last Friday morning. And you don’t need that kind of information to know that she was sent out to do this little job by her boss.
No, not Dwight Eisenhower (and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles), who thought of his Arabs as the Egyptians. Frankly, in 1956, nobody thought of Palestinians, including especially the Palestinians.
And, no, not even Jimmy Carter, who, while now especially entranced with the Palestinians, including Hamas, was beginning his macabre infatuation with Hafez Assad.
Then there was George Herbert Walker Bush and his sidekick James Baker, who didn't much like the Jews but wanted especially to please the Saudis. The U.S. provided arms to Saddam Hussein, who made the mistake of using them against Kuwait, which, of course, frightened "the kingdom." Hence the first Gulf war. A little simplified? Not much. Oh, yes, Baker gave Tom Friedman the White House telephone number and told him to give it to Yitzhak Shamir, who spoke only to himself. He's still alive and still mute. He once wagged his stubby little finger at me in Blair House.
That's more or less the presidential narrative except for Bill Clinton, who loved the Israelis so much that they loved him back and gave him what he wanted, even color-coding the Old City between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Arafat told him and them to go shove it. Apparently, Bill still loves Israel. (Apparently, he still speaks for the Jews as long as the price is right.) But it's hard to imagine that Hillary loves anyone. Anyway, she's been busy in Ireland (where "the troubles" are beginning again) and in Africa (where the troubles never end) and in China (to whose leaders she said nothing about human rights) and in Russia, where she had a low-level host and visited a low-level state in the Federation and unveiled a statue to Walt Whitman but didn't know he was gay and got into trouble with gay activists who were being beaten up by the present-day version of the Cheka.
And so, back to President Obama, who's been reciting the Palestinian narrative so much that he's got it memorized by heart. Which gives rise to the suspicion that it really comes from his heart. This is difficult for me since I gave a lot of energy (and the maximum amount of money allowed) to his campaign.
Which is Latin and means "I do not want to be bishop." That is how every Anglican designee for that office demurs ... but most then take on the miter anyway and with it the bishopric itself. President Obama could have said "I am not worthy," a true response that would also have kept him from the ridicule this Nobel Peace Prize designation has brought upon him. But it is not in his character. For the sin of pride is the most deceitful. The very sin prevents man from recognizing it in himself.
The list of Nobel peace laureates is not an especially august one. I've never heard of most of the people on it, and I'd bet you haven't either. So I have no comment on them. Then there are the perfectly ridiculous ones, the paradigmatic figure being the Guatemalan peasant, Rigobertu Menchú Tum, who literally invented her life, for which fabrication the custodians of the prize bestowed it on her.
Yasir Arafat--well, yes, Yasir Arafat--spent his life as a murderer, and he got a Nobel, too.
Kofi Annan received the Nobel as well. Perhaps for Bosnia, where he delayed an intervention by the West, and for Rwanda, where he literally prevented both the United Nations and the United States from intervening. I don't know what the Bosnian death toll attributable to him is. But we all know how many Tutsis were murdered in the Rwanda enormity. One million. The jackpot.
Frank B. Kellogg and Aristide Briand each became a Nobel Peace Laureate for designing an international treaty outlawing war. It was approved by all of the salient governments. Within a decade, however, the world had gone to war … to World War II.
Among all of the demeaning reactions to the bestowal of the prize on Obama, the most curious and hostile come from Arabs. You would have thought that they'd be indebted to him for at least altering the propaganda balance against Israel in the world. Not at all. Ingrates.
It is just about 15 years since Yasir Arafat received the Nobel Peace Prize. Everybody understood that the two leaders of the State of Israel who shared the award with him, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, actually deserved it. But Arafat's primary deed in life was to be a terrorist. A tactician of terror and a strategist of terrorism. Thinking about Arafat in the royal palace made me cringe then. When I went to Al Gore's installation two years ago, I could not get out of my head that the rais had stood in the same spot, a usurper and a fraud. It was he who denied the Palestinians a state in 2000 and 2001 by refusing Ehud Barak's far-too-generous terms, terms which will never be offered again. Never. This is Arafat's real achievement: He protected Israel from its own good will.
But it is not Arafat's prize that absorbs us now. It is Barack Obama's. Edward Jay Epstein knows about the quotidian rules of the honors. Here they are:
The Jerusalem theater lights came on, and no man between the ages of 25 and 35 moved. We had just watched Waltz With Bashir, Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman's animated documentary about Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent Sabra and Chatila massacre. The film deals with Folman's struggle with the surreal trauma that many veterans of that conflict retain.
Jerusalem, Israel--The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, had planned on offering the usual complaints when he visited Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last week. There was the stalled road map, Israel's security fence, and the recently announced expansion of West Bank settlements close to the Green Line. But, before he arrived in Jerusalem, something happened that changed Lavrov's agenda: the massacre of Russian children by Chechen Islamist terrorists.
Some two million Israeli homes recently received in the mail the 47-page text of the Geneva Accord, which claims to be the comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Accord, a European-funded effort secretly negotiated by Palestinian officials and Israeli public figures for two years--and signed in a symbolic, lavish ceremony in Geneva this week--states that Israel will withdraw to the 1967 borders, a Palestinian state will emerge with its capital in Jerusalem, and the two peoples will recognize each other's right to statehood and resolve the refugee issue.
Along the serpentine road that heads east from the Yemeni capital of Sanaa to the desert, the barrel of a tribe-owned tank peers out over rugged, lawless territory where heavily armed local patriarchs shun government authority and harbor Al Qaeda militants. In the governorate of Ma'rib, a cigarette-smoking 10-year-old carries a Desert Eagle handgun in his belt, one of some 60 million weapons scattered throughout this country of 20 million people. At arms bazaars, or souks, anyone with a fistful of cash and minimal bartering skills can buy rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns. Yemen's ubiquitous weaponry is menacing and seems even more so when you consider that the country has been home to a string of terrorist attacks that began with Osama bin Laden's first in 1992 and culminated in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000, which killed 17 sailors. Recently, several alleged participants in that assault escaped an Aden prison by drilling through a bathroom wall, raising suspicions about government cooperation with terrorists.
Yehuda Amichai, the great Hebrew poet dead a year now, a friend of The New Republic and its editors, wrote a poem two decades ago that began:
The diameter of the bomb was thirty
centimeters
And the diameter of its effective range
about seven meters,
The 1929 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to U.S. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg. And why not? The year before, he had persuaded the great powers to outlaw war. Among those that ratified the historic Kellogg-Briand pact were the democratic countries, plus Germany, Japan, and Italy. High-minded people, deluded that signed agreements shaped history, were delirious with joy. Barely a decade later, of course, most of the world was plunged into war. Did the committee that chose the prize's recipients have any second thoughts?
It has been three months since "the handshake" on the White House lawn, and the euphoria that followed it has by now all but dissipated. The Israel-PLO talks have become one impasse after another. What keeps the process going is one Israeli concession after another. Yasir Arafat says he won't come to Jericho unless and until his officials control the bridges to and from Jordan and the cross-points between Egypt and Gaza. In return, the Israelis agree to a larger, more heavily armed Palestinian police force than they ever contemplated.
