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U.S. Ambassador to Israel Is Out of Touch with Reality

(JNS) Jonathan S. Tobin - During an astonishing webinar last week, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Thomas Nides, laid bare his hostility to the views of the overwhelming majority of Israelis, including many in the current government. He appears determined to stick with the foreign-policy establishment's failed Middle East policies of the past to try to force Israel to do things that voters of that democratic nation have repeatedly rejected. Nides vented his spleen about Israelis building homes in Jerusalem or those parts of the West Bank that he knows the Jewish state will never relinquish, even in a theoretical peace deal. In addition, his devotion to restoring the pre-1967 "Green Line" extends to the point of refusing to visit the tunnels under the Western Wall in Jerusalem, a stand that validates the Arab claim that efforts to restore and reaffirm the sacred site's Jewish history are somehow a provocation. Instead of working to widen the circle of peace between Israel and the neighboring Arab states, Nides indicated that his main agenda was focused on the idea that granting the brutally tyrannical and corrupt Palestinian Authority formal sovereignty was the only thing that mattered. Moreover, he tellingly referred to the PA's notorious "pay to slay" policies as "martyr payments." Unlike U.S. ambassadors sent to virtually every other country on the planet, ambassadors to Israel often act as imperial proconsuls whose task is to treat its democratically elected governments as wayward children who don't know what's best for them and to impose harmful policies on them regardless of the will of the Israeli people. People like Nides are living in the past, as if the events of the last quarter-century in which the PA has repeatedly sabotaged and rejected efforts for peace and fostered terrorism never happened.
2022-03-21 00:00:00
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