Who Ever Thought A Two-State Solution Was The Answer For Arabs and Israelis?

 Nadene Goldfoot:                                          

                                                           Richard D. Goldberg

Richard Goldberg was co-host of Jewish Insider‘s Limited Liability Podcast. A Senior Advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Rich previously served on the White House National Security Council and led the Trump administration’s efforts to counter Iranian weapons of mass destruction. A Chicago native, Goldberg previously served as chief of staff to former Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner and as a senior adviser to former United States Sen. Mark Kirk. As a devoted Cubs fan and former Navy intelligence officer, Rich enjoys his whiskey neat.

      Jonathan Conricus,   Conricus, only 46 years old, a former officer in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF),  knows what he is talking about.  (Hebrew: יהונתן קונריקוס; born 1979) In 1997, when he was 18 years old, he was drafted into the IDF, and served in the Givati Brigade. From 1997–2000 he served as an infantry soldier in an elite unit in southern Lebanon. From 2000 to 2005 he served as a company commander in Gaza.    

Jonathan Conricus is a Swedish-Israeli spokesperson and media commentator. He was the international spokesperson of the Israel Defense Forces from 2017 to 2021. Conricus is a senior fellow at the think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, based in Washington, DC, in the United States.   The men are FDD people with Cliff May.  The Foundation for Defense of Democracies is a non-profit neoconservative think tank.  

I saw this Cliff May presentation on YouTube this morning and wanted to share it with you along with my extra comments.                  

A two-state solution was first offered to Palestinian leaders as early as 1937. The Peel Commission Plan: In 1936, in response to the Arab Revolt against the British mandatory government and repeated Arab violence against Jews, the British government appointed a commission of inquiry headed by Lord Peel to assess the cause of the Arab riots and the performance of the Mandate government. In July 1937, the Peel Commission recommended for the first time a partition of the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state alongside an international zone, stretching from Jerusalem to Jaffa, that would remain under British mandatory authority.

(The Commission also recommended an exchange of land and population between the two states. The Peel partition plan was rejected by the Arabs, and was widely debated amongst the Jewish leadership (but accepted by them). In 1938, the British declared the plan unimplementable.)

#israel offered two-state solutions again in 1947, 1967, 1978, 2000, 2001, and 2008. Mostly,as I remember, the Labor Politicians were in, offering the sun, moon and stars, more than others could believe. After Labor, Likud came in, more on the defensive side of land following its historic meaning. In 1968, the Israeli Labor Party formed from three earlier left-leaning parties, but was defeated in the 1977 election by Menachem Begin's centre-to-right Revisionist Zionist Likud bloc (then composed of Herut, the Liberals and the smaller La'am Party).Knowing the party in favor shows the mindset of the government/people and their attitude toward a 2 state solution.   

    Prime Minister Netanyahu with friends in Israel                     

Palestinian leaders declined each and every such offer. They have proposed no alternatives. Their grievance, it should by now be clear, is not the absence of a nation-state called #palestine but rather the existence of a nation-state called Israel: the resurrected homeland of the Jewish people, a tiny island in an ocean of Arab and Muslim states.

Yet within the #foreignpolicy establishment in the U.S. and Europe, there has for generations been an unshakeable belief that there must be a two-state solution. President #trump has shaken that belief, changed the debate, and widened what’s known as the Overton Window, the range of policy proposals considered acceptable.

Does anyone think that the Egyptians knowing the Muslim Brotherhood organization was in favor of the 2 state solution? I think not; they didn't allow it in their own country of Egypt.It evidently was a big problem. (The group spread to other Muslim countries but still has one of its largest organizations in Egypt, despite a succession of government crackdowns from 1948 up until the present. It remained a fringe group in the politics of the Arab World until the 1967 Six-Day War, when Islamism managed to replace popular secular Arab nationalism after a resounding Arab defeat by Israel. The movement was also supported by Saudi Arabia, with which it shared mutual enemies like communism.)

Resource:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPh4MUIByxQ

https://www.fdd.org/team/clifford-d-may/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPh4MUIByxQ 

All Eyes On GazaEpisode 254 with Jonathan Conricus and Richard Goldberg;  To discuss, host Cliff May is joined by his FDD colleagues Jonathan Conricus and Rich Goldberg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Israel

https://embassies.gov.il/MFA/AboutIsrael/Maps/Pages/The-Peel-Commission-Plan-1937.aspx#:~:text=The%20Commission%20also%20recommended%20an,British%20declared%20the%20plan%20unimplementable.

https://www.fdd.org/

https://jewishinsider.com/authors/richard-goldberg/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Conricus

Richard Goldberg On America's Iran Position 's Changed For The Worst in Vienna

 Nadene Goldfoot                                         

  No wonder former national-security official, Richard Goldberg called the new Iran agreement “The Worst Deal in History.”the Biden strategy—led by U.S. Iran envoy Robert Malley—promises to make the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, even more terrifying.                    

Richard Goldberg has the background to say such a thing.  He holds a Bachelor of Science in Journalism and Master's in Public Policy and Administration from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He is an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve with prior service in Afghanistan. Goldberg has served as an intelligence officer in the United States Naval Reserve since 2006, and was deployed to Afghanistan in 2011. This included  assignments as a Navy Watch Officer in the Pentagon’s command center, Chief of Counterintelligence Threats for a reserve unit supporting U.S. European Command, and Senior Intelligence Officer for an electronic attack squadron deployed to Afghanistan.

From 2004 to 2014, he worked on Capitol Hill, serving as deputy chief of staff and senior foreign policy adviser to former U.S. Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois. As a staffer for former Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., Goldberg helped write legislation that served as the basis for the Barack Obama administration’s sanctions regime on Tehran prior to the nuclear deal. He went on to work for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which advocates maximum pressure on Iran.

From 2015 to 2017, he served as deputy chief of staff for legislative affairs and later chief of staff for Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner. .

 From 2019-2020,during Trump's 4 years,  Richard served as the Director for Countering Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction for the White House National Security Council.  Rich previously served on the White House National Security Council and led the Trump administration’s efforts to counter Iranian weapons of mass destruction. 

He has the background for such a position.  As a staff associate for the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State-Foreign Operations, Richard worked on a wide range of issues related to U.S. foreign assistance, including foreign military financing, international security assistance, international peacekeeping, development, global health and economic support funds. He was a founding staff director of the House U.S.-China Working Group and was among the first Americans ever to visit China’s human space launch center. 

A leader in efforts to expand U.S. missile defense cooperation with Israel, Richard played a key role in U.S. funding for the Arrow-3 program, Iron Dome and the deployment of an advanced missile defense radar to the Negev Desert.Goldberg was also a leading FDD ideologue on the Israel-Palestine conflict. One of his first op-eds after joining FDD attacked the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), a favorite target for the Israeli right and its supporters. “If President Trump wants to use his financial leverage at the United Nations to strike at the heart of the anti-America, anti-Israel institutional infrastructure, he should look no further than the agency responsible for Palestinian refugees: The United Nations Relief and Works Agency,” Goldberg wrote.

He urged President Trump to establish a definition of Palestinian refugees, limiting the term to those who were displaced in 1948, which is at odds with the Palestinian definition. He recommended “formally adopting a definition for Palestinian refugees that makes a clear distinction between refugees displaced by the 1948 war and their descendants.”

In July 2018, Goldberg and his FDD colleague Jonathan Schanzer called the issue of Palestinian refugees a “scam” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. The pair based this assertion on their preferred definition of refugees, which would only include the approximately 30,000 surviving Palestinians from 1948. The common figure of around five million refugees would be “exposed,” according to Goldberg and Schanzer. They further argue that this would fatally undermine UNRWA and would be “the most pro-Palestinian step an American president could take.” They argued that President Trump “can send a clear message to the millions living in Unrwa (sic) camps: Your leaders want to keep you in squalor, while America wants you to prosper.”

In the Senate, Richard emerged as a leading architect of the toughest sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic of Iran. An Iran hawk, Richard Goldberg played an instrumental role in the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign against Tehran. His position was created by John Bolton, National Security Advisor.  

 He was the lead Republican negotiator for three rounds of sanctions targeting the Central Bank of Iran, the SWIFT financial messaging service, and entire sectors of the Iranian economy. Richard also drafted and negotiated legislation promoting human rights and democracy in Iran, including sanctions targeting entities that provide the Iranian regime with the tools of repression.                 

His Iran sanctions work was featured in the book, The Iran Wars.

With our new president, Joe Biden, Goldberg's efforts to curb Iran's nuclear ability  have found their way into the round file, evidently.

Trump had quit a deal between the US, its European allies, and Iran and said he's going to hit Iran with the toughest economic sanctions he can.

What it means:  In 2015, the US, along with its main European allies, including the UK and France, plus Russia and China, signed a deal with Iran. The deal promised to lift economic sanctions – a form of economic penalty, placed on one country by an other, if it disapproves of its behaviour. They can be things like trade barriers or tariffs, which can hurt a country's industry – if Iran curbed its nuclear development program.

According to the Guardian, the deal led to a rapid reduction in Iran’s nuclear programme. It reduced its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98% to just 300lbs, not enough to make one bomb. But Trump's said the deal's failed, that it hasn't led to peace and that he is going to come down hard on Iran.

Although the other European countries involved are pretty desperate to keep the deal (politicians from France, Germany and the UK have all been in the US in the past few weeks to try and persuade Trump to stick to it) they're now going to have to fight pretty hard to keep it standing. One analyst said that with economic sanctions imposed from the US, global companies could leave Iran, further damaging its industry.                    

Goldberg had pushed the Trump administration to exit the nuclear deal even as former officials, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, urged the president to remain in the accord. Trump has since replaced them with Iran hawks Mike Pompeo and John Bolton. Goldberg’s appointment signals that the president still favors a more hawkish posture on Iran, despite his recent decision to pull US troops out of Syria and his assertion that Iran “can do what they want” in the war-wracked country.

 "Last week, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. (IRGC) launched 14 missiles that landed near the U.S. consulate in Irbil, northern Iraq—though strangely the IRGC said it was aiming for an unspecified Israeli “strategic center.”

Nonetheless the Biden administration continues 

negotiations with Iran in Vienna—meant to reward 

Iran with a $90 billion “signing 

bonus” and a clear path to nuclear weapons".

Goldberg's comments can be heard below.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vWHkdJjaxA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYIdBIqwHa0

Many Americans should realize by now that Iran's intentions on having nuclear weapons is to wipe out Israel.  Richard, in defending Israel against Iran,  sees the problems that are so obvious.  Sadly, his opinions are being overridden by our American president, Biden.  

His grandfather, David Goldberg, should be very proud of him, nevertheless.     

Resource:

https://www.factsandlogic.org/as-iran-missiles-attack-us-consulate-biden-desperately-rushes-to-sign-nuclear-deal/?fbclid=IwAR0KubFG9FP_ajIkThoFFSTvYcutFydFMdaflAOTtv9_ZZv09_pvuu6UGl8#.Yjdl_DhMtL4.facebook

https://jewishinsider.com/authors/richard-goldberg/

https://www.amazon.com/Iran-Wars-Battles-Secret-Reshaped-ebook/dp/B00RRT34MS

https://www.ecnmy.org/engage/donald-trump-just-backed-iran-nuclear-deal/?gclid=CjwKCAjwoduRBhA4EiwACL5RP9NZXbV31uukwYsx2IhsXI2mBceQeQ1OSaZ9SUcggFpY0txdf8N_iBoCjAMQAvD_BwE

https://www.jns.org/iran-director-leaving-white-house-national-security-council-after-one-year/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-goldberg-34a5391a0

https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/richard-goldberg/

Read more: https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2019/01/intel-white-house-nsc-richard-goldberg-iran-policy.html#ixzz7O6QMa88B

Read more: https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2019/01/intel-white-house-nsc-richard-goldberg-iran-policy.html#ixzz7O6qUZWsj