The revelation in David Frum’s opening argument– in a debate with Dan Levy at the Economist over the US role re Israel/Palestine– is what a Bible-thumping religious-nationalist Frum is re Israel. His mother Barbara was the same way, as a Canadian broadcaster, I’m told, and the son says things in the Economist that he never said in An End to Evil, his manifesto for regime change in the Arab world, or in the speeches he slipped on to George W. Bush’s teleprompter:
The aspiration for a Jewish homeland specifically in the Holy Land of the Bible is rooted not in persecution, but in a thousand years of Jewish political sovereignty, more than 3,000 years of spiritual and religious connection, and now more than 150 years of modern resettlement of the ancient land. This resettlement was legally recognised in the treaties and commitments that followed the first world war, not the second.
Frum goes on to say that Jerusalem must be Jewish because you can’t trust the Muslims’ aspirations for Jerusalem after you read their religious texts.
Obama’s error is "pledging American prestige to unachievable goals, miscalculating priorities." And what was the Iraq war that Frum pushed? What was the effect on American prestige? And did those plans flow from Frum’s belief that America’s role is to protect Israel’s "substantive security needs," as he says here? I guess so. Because those security needs entail colonization. Frum:
Even supposing a Palestinian state were a pressing and desirable outcome from a US point of view, it is important to recognise that the most significant obstacles to such an outcome arise within the Palestinian national community. Settlements are the consequence of Arab and Palestinian intransigence, not the cause.
Too bad he didn’t throw in Judea and Samaria while he was at it. Here Frum referred to the "Palestinian areas of Israel." I want more secular outrage. Remember how liberal Jews used to respond when fundamentalist Christians got their hands on the steering wheel?
