Malcolm Hoenlein on Middle East Peace, and What John Batchelor Does Not Bring Into His Studio

Malcolm Hoenlein, the Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, has a really fancy title at a really important sounding place. It is fitting, then, that he and Imus engaged in a (mostly) serious conversation about a really important issue: President Obama’s speech yesterday on the Middle East, in which he said that any settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be based on the pre-1967 borders. Whatever that means.
 
Luckily, Hoelein was well equipped to translate. In 1949, following Israel’s War for Independence against five Arab countries, the United Nations authorized a partition plan to create an Arab and a Jewish state. “The Arabs rejected it, the Jews accepted it, the Jews moved to create the state of Israel, the Arabs went to war,” Hoenlein summarized.
 
The U.N.-created boundaries became known as the 1949 armistice lines, and they remained in effect until 1967, when the Arab countries launched a coordinated attack that resulted in Israel capturing the Sinai from Egypt; the Golan Heights from Syria; and the West Bank from Jordan.
 
The primary issue when discerning where Israel ends and its settlements begin, according to Hoenlein, is ensuring the Jewish state possesses “defensible borders.”  “At points, it’s nine miles wide, which is less than the length of Broadway,” Hoenlein said of Israel, which, at other points, is 17 miles wide. “You literally could penetrate it with a rifle.”
 
Defensible borders need to be defined not just by geography, he added, but by Israel’s ability to protect its citizens. From the West Bank, for instance, “you can fire rockets that could hit 70 percent of the Israeli population,” Hoenlein said. Israel’s other borders have also repeatedly been hit with rockets since it withdrew from Gaza and Lebanon.
 
Hoenlein does not understand why Obama’s address, which focused mainly on the Arab Spring and reestablishing American relevance in the Middle East, even mentioned Israel at all. “I think it was a mistake to then throw in this issue, which was 20 percent of his speech, but which has completely eclipsed the other issue,” he said.
 
The timing also struck Hoenlein as strange, since the Palestinian political wing Fatah recently merged with Hamas, the internationally recognized terrorist organization that runs Gaza. “To appear to award them at this time, or to appear to make concessions at this time, doesn’t make much sense,” he added.
 
Obama said yesterday that if Israel does not comply with the pre-1967 borders, there will never be peace. But Imus wondered if there might never be peace anyway. “When the President came into office…he kept saying the key issued in the Middle East is the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Hoenlein said. “As we saw over the last months, it’s not the key issue. Iran is a key issue. The desire for democracy, jobs, other things—those are key issues that motivate and mobilize.”
 
Peace in the Middle East will not be achieved, in his view, by putting forth proposals that take land away from Israel and allow Palestinians to return. “When Israel was created, several hundred Palestinians, at the urging of their leaders in the conflict situation, left,” he said. “Nine-hundred thousand Jews were driven out of Arab countries, but nobody talks about them.”
 
Also something nobody talks about (besides Imus): whether there are body parts hidden under the refrigerator of WABC Radio’s John Batchelor, an odd fellow, to say the least.
 
Hoenlein, who appears frequently with Batchelor, offered only this: “He hasn’t brought them into the studio.”
 
-Julie Kanfer