What Iran Negotiations and Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations Have in Common

Nov. 26 2014

The recent decision by Iran and the U.S. to extend the deadline for an agreement on nuclear weapons is based on a fundamental fallacy that the current American government believes wholeheartedly: that this is a problem that can be solved through further negotiations. In truth, no agreement can be reached because Iran is unwilling to give up its nuclear-weapons program. The same fallacy lies behind the blundering attempts to force an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Elliott Abrams writes:

[T]he beginning of wisdom in both these cases, Iranian and Israeli-Palestinian, is the realization that the fundamental differences cannot be papered over. The Obama administration has tried and tried, and it has failed—not due to a failure of its diplomats to master their briefs, but because the administration did not understand the nature of the problem. Once you recognize that the Ayatollah Khamenei insists on a nuclear-weapons program, and that President Abbas will not and cannot agree to give up the “right of return” and make compromises on Jerusalem, you recognize that more sessions with more diplomats won’t reach a different result. It’s a category error, where a thing belonging to a particular category is presented as belonging to a different category. Here, disputes that are fundamental (because interests are adverse) are presented by the Obama administration as being mere misunderstandings—problems that American good faith and State Department elbow grease can resolve.

Read more at Weekly Standard

More about: Ayatollah Khamenei, Iranian nuclear program, Peace Process, U.S. Foreign policy

The Democratic Party Is Losing Its Grip on Jews

Since the 1930s, Jews have been one of America’s most solidly Democratic ethnic groups. Although, true to form, a majority again voted for Kamala Harris, something clearly has shifted. John Podhoretz writes:

Over the course of the past thirteen months, Jews in America have been harassed, threatened, seen their ancestral homeland derided as a settler-colonial genocidal state. They have seen Jewish kids mistreated on college campuses. And they have seen the Biden administration kowtow to Muslim populations hostile to Jews and the Jewish state in Michigan. They have heard the criticisms of Israel’s efforts to defend itself, and have noted the silence from the administration when it came to anti-Semitic assaults and the refusal of college presidents to condemn the treatment of Jews and Jewish topics under their ambit.

And Jews have acted.

The initial evidence from last night’s election is that there has been a significant shift in the Jewish vote from previous elections, a delta of anywhere from 10 to 40 percent overall.

Read more at Commentary

More about: 2024 Election, American Jewry, Anti-Semitism, Democrats, U.S. Politics