As reported by Ha’aretz, Henry Kissinger has been invited by the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute to be one of a group of leaders tasked with setting their strategic goals — last week’s discussion centered on the Iranian “threat” to Israel. Jeffrey Blankfort does well to remind us:
[Kissinger] reportedly is the one who came up with the idea that the Palestinians, in that case, the PLO, must recognize Israel’s “right to exist,” which was not demanded of either Egypt or Jordan before Israel signed treaties with those countries. No other country has ever made such a demand which is qualitatively different than simply recognizing the fact that a particular state exists at a given moment. Accepting such a demand, of course, means recognizing the legitimacy of their victimization by the Israelis which is equivalent to asking a rape victim to accept the right of the rapist to commit his vile act in order to get him to stop it.
Meanwhile, some soul-searching from Israeli journalist Eliahu Salpeter in Ha’aretz (The state we’re in today, 3 Nov), who wonders whether Israel is on a collision course and whether in fact it is serving to protect Jews:
The Jewish people’s existence is more important than that of the Jewish state. If Israel cannot ensure the Jewish people’s survival – sometimes it seems to even impair that survival – a giant question-mark hovers over the very justification of its existence.
