O to Israel: Go Back to ’67 Borders

RUSH: All right, so now we know, ladies and gentlemen, it is official, and the instincts of many, including mine, were correct. The Arab Spring is an uprising of Middle Eastern nations against Israel, and they have been aided and abetted by President Barack Obama of the United States of America. That’s what’s going on, and that’s what this speech was all about.

Greetings, welcome back. Great to have you, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network, and the Limbaugh Institute.

Here’s the money quote of the speech. It came near the end of it. This is what all of this was about. “The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine. We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state.”

Back to the 1967 borders. So Israel is now surrounded by enemies. I’ve been there. You really can’t grasp this until you go. I mean you can look at it on a map but ’til you see how small Israel is and how surrounded it is, and then the demands that they give up even more, Israel is a country at one point nine miles wide, nine miles is all. Now, these enemies which surround Israel now have major weapons. And so according to President Obama, in a speech, Israel should give up its buffer areas like the Golan Heights, and again, if you’ve been to the Golan Heights you can see the strategic importance. You can see everything from there, including who’s coming at you.

Now, for me, I don’t know how you can even think this way. And again, I say this having been there and toured Israel for five days. I don’t know how you can think this way when the Palestinians are committed to destroying Israel. And it’s not just the Palestinians. Virtually every nation surrounding Israel is committed to its destruction. What country in its right mind would make a deal with such an enemy? Would we go back to our 1848 borders? Would we give the French areas of the Louisiana Purchase? Would we do this? What kind of president urges a country to destroy itself and submit its people to potential genocide? And that’s what Obama has just done.

Now, there is some scuttlebutt going on, and it’s only fair to mention this. As you know, Benjamin Netanyahu is coming to Washington to meet with President Obama. And the scuttlebutt is that as a bargaining chip, Netanyahu was considering using this offer of going back to the ’67 borders with swaps. I don’t know if this is true, but the scuttlebutt is that in a certain set of circumstances, if negotiations evolved in a certain way, that this would be something Netanyahu would propose. Well, if that’s true, he’s lost it because Obama just gave it away. Obama just used it himself, if that was to be a bargaining chip. Now, I have to tell you, I don’t understand how that would be a bargaining chip. I don’t know yet, I’m gonna have to try to learn this. I don’t know why Israel would offer to go back to the ’67 borders. But that’s the scuttlebutt. The scuttlebutt is that they might be willing to and Netanyahu might be willing to offer such a thing. All right, well, let’s accept that, the scuttlebutt’s true; he can’t offer it any longer because Obama just took it.

So if that was true, if that was something in Netanyahu’s arsenal, Obama just took it away from him. Israel has no flexibility in this at all other than to say no. So again, Obama just took away what could have been a bargaining chip the Israelis wanted to employ here. So that’s what this is all about. The Arab Spring is an uprising against Israel. The president of the United States has implicitly recognized the ultimate goal of the Arab Spring, and that is the defeat of and the end of Israel. And in this speech, President Obama got out in front of it. President Obama is helping them in their goal. That’s real leadership, is it not? Realizing what the Arab Spring is and moving the ball forward for them.

Just the other day, by the way, we saw Israel being attacked from all sides. There was a day last week where Israel was under the gun from all three sides. It was on the day of the anniversary of the founding of their nation, which the Arabs call that day a catastrophe. Those are the demonstrators that impressed Obama, by the way, and those are the demonstrators he cited today in his speech, the ones that were protesting Israel. So Obama is implicitly recognizing the ultimate goal of the Arab Spring, the defeat of Israel. He’s trying to get out in front and help them achieve their goal. The Arab Spring is an offensive against Israel, and this speech proves it. Every new government in the Middle East will be anti-Israel.

I tell you what, folks, Obama is really feeling his oats here from the Osama Bin Laden assassination. On the heels of that, he has sided with the Palestinians against Israel. It’s almost as if he had a Democrat-controlled Congress again, could jam legislation down our throats. And yes, all the other stuff is true, too. He did pledge all kinds of money. He did promise to give away the store. He pledged all kinds of new aid to help in this process. So it’s an amazing thing, the 1967 borders, give up the buffer zones. The one thing again, and I’m gonna have to dig deep on this, and it’s gonna be tough for me to find this during the program. I hope I can, but I don’t quite understand Israel offering this as a bargaining chip. I don’t know what they would get for it, but that’s the scuttlebutt. The scuttlebutt is that Israel was gonna offer this themselves, a return to the ’67 borders. And again, even if that happened to be true, they can’t now because Obama’s just demanded it, not made it a bargaining chip. Israel, I don’t know what they hope to gain by this.

I remember on that trip, it was in the summer of 1993, five-day trip, it was profoundly informative, moving, and educational. I had a chance to talk with many of the leaders of the day — Rabin, Shimon Peres — some of this I look back on, it was funny, I remember sitting in Shimon Peres’s office, he kept buckling and unbuckling his belt while seated. I tried not to comment on it. I tried not to even look like I noticed it. But he had obviously been prepared, done his homework, ’cause he kept ragging on Ronald Reagan and the trees, that Reagan had done great damage to the trees. So I think he was jabbing me in a way, trying to get a rise, but the belt buckle thing I never quite got. When I had a chance to talk with Rabin, remember, we didn’t know it at the time we were there, but they were in the midst of secret discussions to give up even more of the country with Arafat. These talks were going on I think in Germany. We didn’t learn about this ’til a couple months later.

I asked Rabin, “Why are you all of a sudden willing to make deals with people who have sworn your extermination? Intellectually I don’t understand it.” I said, “Is it because of your age and you’ve lived your entire life at war, and you don’t want that for your kids?” And he swore that’s not what it was. And he said this was the time this had to be done to end hostilities. The highlight was getting a three-hour tour of settlements in the West Bank on a bus with Ariel Sharon, who, of course, had no desire to give up anything. And the people of the West Bank, we stopped at a couple houses in the West Bank, and the people there loved Ariel Sharon. We had a Mossad briefing, went up to the Golan Heights. And that was kind of moving, too.

At the military installation in the Golan Heights I remember asking a young 19-year-old member of the Israeli Defense Forces something along the lines of why, other than conscription, why do you do this? And he said, “I want you to look over there.” And he pointed in the direction — “See, that’s Syria.” And it was, you know, a couple cornfields away. I mean it was right there, is the point. “See over there? That’s Jordan.” They can see the land representing every country that wants them wiped out. And then he pointed down the bottom of the hill. He said, “You see that? That’s my house where my mom and dad and my sister live. That’s why I do this. We’re surrounded. We’re totally surrounded.”

Okay. Psst. Media tweak time, folks, Media Tweak of the Day. Don’t tell anybody. Time for the media tweak. Given the partial mission of Osama Bin Laden, you have to know that there are places in the Middle East today who think it’s just a shame he didn’t live to see this day, after this speech by an American president. If he woulda just hung on a couple of more weeks, they are no doubt saying at Al-Qaeda camps, at Taliban camps, Sheik Bin Laden would have been so happy. They’re no doubt saying that after hearing this speech.

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RUSH: Okay, we’ll get to the phones here just a second, but I have one little thing. I did get a note here from someone familiar with the internal political workings of the state of Israel. “Rush, the 1967 borders, as a basis for two states, is not a big deal. The vast majority of Israelis favor it or are at least politically reconciled to that. That’s not a big deal. The real news in this speech is that Obama advocates a two-state deal without first settling the claims of the Palestinian refugees from 1948 to a right of return.” You’re familiar with that term? The right of return means the 1948 refugees demand a return to their homes in pre-1967 Israel. “If that were part of any deal that would of course destroy Israel as a Jewish state, it would be overrun. And it’s an extreme demand that nobody in Israel can or ever would accept, and until the Palestinians agree, as they haven’t, to relinquish this right, there can’t be a deal.”

There will not be two states unless the Palestinians give up on that. And they haven’t, and they won’t, and my old buddy here says if Obama can’t say that in public, he’s being irresponsible or worse. Now, I’m assuming here that all of this is pap. This whole speech today is designed to be something other than what it came off being. It celebrates the Arab Spring, aligning against Israel, all of this, there’s no question about it. But to have a genuine two-state existence, the right of return has to be dealt with, and it hasn’t been. It wasn’t even mentioned and as such to talk about a two-state solution without mentioning a right of return is irresponsible.

So here you have grandstanding on the part of the president for his own personal political purposes, without regard to the results of anything on the ground in Israel. It’s not surprising. It’s not surprising Obama would hijack something that everybody thinks is of great, major import; would hijack something that everybody thinks portends major change for the region, when in fact it doesn’t at all. And yet he gets credit for being ahead of major change when nothing really is going to happen. You talk about meddling in another country’s affairs. You know, I don’t know. I don’t live in Israel, obviously. I keep hearing here the ’67 borders, not a big deal to Israelis. To me, it seems like suicide. But what do I know? I’m not an Israeli, and I don’t live here.

We’ll shake all this out. (interruption) What is our foreign policy? What is Obama’s foreign policy? It’s called reelect 2012 Barack Obama. I shoulda mentioned this at the top because it’s true of everything that he’s doing now, foreign policy, domestic or what have you. You have to look at all this through the prism of the Obama reelect effort. Our foreign policy is reelect Obama. It’s not so much what our foreign policy is, is they believe in the power of speeches to win votes. They believe in the aggressive use of speeches, pure and simple. He knows full well that by tomorrow everybody’s gonna have forgotten the nuts and bolts of what he said, that Israel is not gonna go to the ’67 borders because the Palestinians are not gonna cave on the right to return, so nothing’s really gonna change except he’s gonna have made one hell of a good speech that the media will be able to go back to it and say it was thoughtful, it was sincere, it was serious, all that rotgut. Everything’s designed to make Obama look good, Snerdley. You know that.

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RUSH: This is Kevin, St. Clairsville, Ohio. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. Longtime listener. I’ve been a listener since 1988.

RUSH: Thank you, sir, that’s from the get-go.

CALLER: Yes, sir. And the reason I was calling was to weigh in on the president’s speech today. My theory is that with him asking the Israelis to pull back to the ’67 borders, I think Israel is being set up in that obviously I don’t believe that Israel is just gonna roll over and play dead and do what President Obama wants them to do. But the average person out there who isn’t informed enough about what’s going on in the Middle East, when Israel fails to do that, and then, you know, this is the beginning of making the Israelis look like the bad guys, in other words, making them look like —

RUSH: Oh, yeah.

CALLER: — the poor Palestinians —

RUSH: Absolutely.

CALLER: — are really trying, but the Israelis —

RUSH: Oh, yeah, there’s no question that’s the point. As I was just reading, somebody had a point here that I can’t remember — I am absorbing so much — Israel is paying the price for Barack Obama’s lack of popularity in the Arab world. That’s how somebody here has just put it, and I wish I could remember who said it so that I could credit them, but you’re exactly right. Israel is paying the price for Obama’s lack of popularity, and his attempt to regain it in the Middle East.

Now, get this. This is just in from the Jerusalem Post. Now, remember, my media tweak on today’s program was that you just know that in certain terrorist enclaves of the Middle East, they’re saying, “Damn it, if only Sheik Bin Laden could have been alive to hear this speech, to hear the plan offered for the destruction of Israel. If only Sheik Bin Laden could have heard.” You know they’re saying this.

And from the Jerusalem Post: “Right-Wing Members of the Knesset are Calling Obama the New Arafat — ‘Barack Hussein Obama adopted the staged plan for Israel’s destruction of Yasser Arafat, and he is trying to force it on our prime minister,’ said Likud MK Danny Danon. ‘All that was new in the speech was that he called for Israel to return to 1967 borders without solving the crisis. Netanyahu has only one option: To tell Obama forget about it.'” So the caller says Obama is playing the Arab street, and he is. He’s trying to define the Arab Spring here as an Arab uprising. You know, going back to ’67, the more I’ve looked into this the more I have found that it’s not that big a deal to Israelis, that apparently it was going to be a bargaining chip that Netanyahu was prepared to use, but he can’t now since Obama has appropriated it for himself.

Tantamount here, though, is the right of return. And without acknowledging that, there cannot be a two-state solution, because the Israelis are not ever gonna agree to a right of return. If there was, there’s no Israel left, and the Palestinians are never gonna formally agree to a right of return, so there’s never gonna be an agreement here. You know, I am not a diplomat and I didn’t go to school to be a diplomat, and I’m therefore, in these circles, not qualified, but I’m just gonna tell you here, folks, from the streets of common sense. For as long as I’ve been alive we’ve been going through this dog and pony show of negotiated peace settlements in the Middle East, and there’s no such thing. It is never going to happen, and it never does happen.

Peace results from one side emerging victorious in the conflict, the other side losing and surrendering. Until that happens, all of this… it’s amazing, there are careers planned for, there are careers built on this never being solved. I mean the last thing diplomats at the State Department want is a solution for any of this. There’s no reason for them, then. It’s like the Reverend Jackson really doesn’t want to end racial strife, ’cause there’s no reason for the Monochrome Coalition. These people feed off of this stuff. But just using simple common sense, how can you expect there to be a negotiated peace between two parties when one side has as its objective the extermination of the other side? You can throw all the striped-pants diplomat bigwigs in the State Department at me all day long and nobody’s gonna ever be able to persuade me that I’m full of it. This is to me just simple, pure common sense.

I don’t know about you, but as a citizen, it doesn’t matter who the president is, it doesn’t matter what world leaders are; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, boy, what a purpose it serves. It serves a purpose for presidents to be great like Clinton wanted to be great. It offered a forum for Arafat to be whatever he wanted to be. In fact, you know, proof of what I’m saying, there was a point in time when Clinton gave Arafat everything he was asking for, and Arafat ran away from it and hid. He was stunned and he was shocked. But this conflict is just too handy for too many people. It offers too much too much opportunity for too many people. A bunch of think tank people have an opportunity to make careers as great thinkers by being Middle East experts, all the guest opportunities on the cable network shows, all the writing opportunities, the publishing opportunities, sitting in this distinguished chair, or that distinguished chair, at this prestigious think tank or what have you, never solving anything. Never, ever getting anything done.

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