Herbert Zweibon

That famous line, addressed in 1954 to Senator Joseph McCarthy by Counsel for the Army Joseph Welch today should be directed to our Secretary of State and to Israel’s Prime Minister.

To start with Condoleezza Rice: at Annapolis she conducted an meeting redolent of apartheid. Although she did not (as was initially wrongly reported) bow to Saudi demands that Israeli representatives enter through a different door, the Saudis maintained their refusal to shake hands with the unclean Israeli leaders. They also took off their translation earphones when Prime Minister Olmert spoke. Israeli reporters were thrown out of a press event for the arrival of Arab League Foreign Ministers.

As if this was not surreal enough at what was billed as a “peace conference,” Rice, in a truly Orwellian inversion of reality, cast the Arabs in the role of segregated blacks. The Saudi demand that Israelis use a separate entrance did not awake memories of segregation in our Secretary of State. Speaking at a private session at the close of the Annapolis meeting, she said (as reported in The Washington Post of Nov. 29) that having grown up as a black child in the South and being told she could not use certain water fountains or eat in certain restaurants, she understood the feelings and emotions of the Palestinians. “I know what it is like to hear that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian.” As Michael Freund noted in The Jerusalem Post the fact that American blacks were victims of violence while Palestinians are its proficient practitioners seems to have escaped her attention. And her comparison between Israeli security measures, aimed at catching Palestinian suicide bombers, and America’s Jim Crow laws was morally obscene.

As for Israel’s Prime Minister, rather than maintaining his country’s dignity, Olmert and his sidekick Tzipi Livni groveled through the room, begging for a hand to shake. In his talk Olmert expressed his sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinian people—not a word about how much of that suffering was self-induced or the suffering the Palestinian terror-masters had caused Israel. Yet worse, in the Israeli-Palestinian declaration President Bush read out at the conference, Olmert had agreed on wording that equated (non-existent) “Israeli terror” with Palestinian terror.

Fresh from the unbelievably humiliating experience of Annapolis, Olmert put a spin on the proceedings that even Dan Senor, former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, called “bizarre.” In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (Dec. 3) Senor noted that even before the first day of the conference was over Olmert was tracking down U.S. Presidential candidates and members of Congress, most of them strong advocates for Israel, to let them know their skepticism was misplaced: “it truly was an historic event, a real breakthrough.” Compounding the black humor of this spin was Olmert’s “evidence.” “The Saudi foreign minister even applauded after my address. That’s never happened before.” In fact he did not applaud – he didn’t even hear it.

And so the abasement of Israel continues. Former Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Arens writes: “’Dividing the land’ and establishing a Palestinian state has become the prime minister’s ultimate aim, just as in the past the establishment of a Jewish state had been the aim of the Zionist movement.” Minister of Education Yuli Tamir has ordered inclusion of the “Palestinian narrative” of the War of Independence, a tissue of lies, in the curriculum of Israeli schools. The Olmert government is turning its attention to uprooting the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria and dividing Jerusalem. As Arens concludes: “The Palestinian state that Olmert and Livni dream of handing to Mahmoud Abbas must not have a single Jew in it. This is the immoral low ground to which the new post-Zionists have sunk.”