"Pathological" Israeli Symptoms, Again

The Israeli regime recently regurgitated out another empty offering to the Palestinians, saying they might "freeze" their massive colony expansion mutilating the West Bank, with not even a word about the obvious real solution: Get those nearly one-half million Zionist squatters out of remaining Palestine!

And occupied East Jerusalem, where about half of the illegal settler population has stolen swaths of land from a future Palestinian state? Well, no freeze AT ALL.

It's no wonder, then, why one prominent American Jewish leader would call this relentless Israeli ethnic cleansing policy for what it is: Pathological.

Henry Siegman, former national director of the American Jewish Congress and current director of the U.S./Middle East Project, wrote a scathing critique in a New York Times editorial earlier this month that pointed to the most obvious sticking point in achieving a just, lasting peace in the Middle East.

"The Israeli reaction to serious peacemaking efforts," says Siegman, "is nothing less than pathological.....Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose assassination by a Jewish right-wing extremist is being remembered this week in Israel, told Israelis at his inauguration in 1992 that their country is militarily powerful, and neither friendless nor at risk. They should therefore stop thinking and acting like victims.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s message that the whole world is against Israel and that Israelis are at risk of another Holocaust — a fear he invoked repeatedly during his address in September at the United Nations General Assembly in order to discredit Judge Richard Goldstone’s Gaza fact-finding report — is unfortunately still a more comforting message for too many Israelis.

This pathology has been aided and abetted by American Jewish organizations whose agendas conform to the political and ideological views of Israel’s right wing. These organizations do not reflect the views of most American Jews who voted overwhelmingly — nearly 80 percent — for Mr. Obama in the presidential elections.

An Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement has eluded all previous U.S. administrations not because they were unable to devise a proper formula for its achievement; everyone has known for some time now the essential features of that formula, which were proposed by President Clinton in early 2000.

Rather, the conflict continues because U.S. presidents — and to a far greater extent, members of the U.S. Congress, who depend every two years on electoral contributions — have accommodated a pathology that can only be cured by its defiance.

Only a U.S. president with the political courage to risk Israeli displeasure — and criticism from that part of the pro-Israel lobby in America which reflexively supports the policies of the Israeli government of the day, no matter how deeply they offend reason or morality — can cure this pathology."

Until that president has the guts to stick to an effective, genuine prescription, then we're going to be subjected to an eternity of the continuing Frankenstein horror show, graphically presented in the "I Am Israel" expose.....