What was going through the President's head when he eased up on sanctions on Iran?  The only reason Iran was willing to talk was because Iran was breaking.  He should have held his ground.

Anyone who saw Netanyahu the other day decrying Obama's rapprochement with Iran saw an Israeli leader who was fueled by rage, bordering on a breakdown.  One thing is clear: Netanyahu will not let Iran get nukes.  In the past, it has been made clear that Israel will take down the Mideast with her rather than go quietly to defeat.

It was only when the then Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir, appealed directly to President Nixon and also threatened to use the atomic bomb that Israel was given the needed tanks, guns and ammunition to turn certain defeat into victory.  - Dr. Gerhard Falk

Nixon started to move fast after the consequences of delay were made clear to him.  Israel was preparing to go nuclear.

Israel will go it alone again if she has to.  With U.S. aid, there may be no need for Israel to use her nukes against Iran.  Without U.S. assistance, Israel will have to use tactical nukes.

Doesn't anyone in the State Department realize this?

Many think Obama can link Iran to a two-state solution: put pressure on Israel to make concessions.  More likely, Israel will tell the State Department to get lost.  The Israelis will attack  Iran alone, and to hell with the Palestinians.  If a world war starts, so be it.  Israel will take down the whole Mideast with her before she surrenders Judea and Samaria.

This is not right or wrong per se.  This is simple fact.

At the London Conference of 1939, as Jews were desperate to leave Europe, Ben Gurion would not accept the insulting offer made by the British of a Jewish state barely the size of large city, even under threat of stranding Jews in Europe.

The British were not bluffing.  If Ben Gurion did not accept the British offer, the British would halt immigration and deliver a Palestinian state to the Arabs. 

Neither was Ben Gurion bluffing.  He accepted only the concept of a partition, but he stalled for a better deal.

No Jew is at liberty to surrender the right of the Jewish Nation and the Land of Israel to exist. No Jewish body is sanctioned to do so. Even all the Jews alive today have no authority to yield any piece of land whatsoever[.] - Ben Gurion

The British did cut off immigration two months later with the White Paper of 1939, and European Jews were denied an escape route from the Holocaust.

The State Department has miscalculated.  They think because Israel left the Sinai, and South Lebanon, then Israel can be persuaded to leave Judea and Samaria.  Well, it is one thing to return Egyptian and Lebanese land, but another thing to surrender Jewish land.  What is wrong with our best and brightest?

If Obama thinks Netanyahu will surrender an inch of Judea and Samaria -- what he considers the heart of Israel -- because the State Department pressures him with Iran, then Obama is clueless.

Israel, from the beginning, right or wrong, never had any intention of giving the Palestinians an independent state.

We view a permanent solution [as involving] a Palestinian entity which is less than a state. - Yitzhak Rabin, 1995

Anyone who analyzed the offers made by the Israelis noticed that the Palestinian area would be denied free borders with Jordan and would be broken up into non-contiguous cantons.  Israel would control airspace, water, and access.  Of course, this was wise from the Israeli point of view, but it was not an independent state for the Palestinians.  Yet this is not what the State Department tells the Arabs.

We set the Palestinians up with false hopes and then act shocked when they get violent after those hopes are not delivered.  The Arabs, of course, are irrational.  They do not need much of an excuse to get violent... but our State Department ignores that.  We persuaded Israel to allow free elections in Gaza, and we were surprised when Hamas won.

Yet our State Department continues to pressure Israel to make concessions, which have never born fruit from either party.

Have the Arabs calmed down?  Has Hamas stopped firing rockets?  Have terrorist attacks stopped?

Have the Israelis stopped building Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria?  Have the Israelis stopped housing demolitions in the eastern half of Jerusalem?  Did they bend to pressure and stop the wall?  How often does Israel prosecute violent Jewish settlers?

I can't say Israel always treats the Arabs justly in Judea and Samaria.  There are property seizures, housing demolitions, and denials of building permits.  Israeli Jews have assessed, rather accurately, that Arabs are volatile and hostile; and have decided to play tough.

Is this just?  It is what it is.

The Israelis will never surrender their biblical heartland.  They will stall.  They will talk.  They will dissemble.  But in the end, Israel will not give up her patrimony.

At best, the Israelis will give the Palestinians autonomous reservations.  Nothing more.  This was evident in 1995.  It was evident in the offer Barak made in 2000, which would not have given the Palestinians an open border with Jordan.  It is evident today

I am not even blaming Israel.  I am blaming the State Department, which has led Arabs to believe that they could get a state.  Israel never had any intention of ever giving the Palestinians a separate state.   She is not that crazy.  Eighty percent of Israel's population leaves in the small coastal strip between Tel Aviv and Haifa.  It would be suicidal to give the Palestinians a state.

So now our president thinks he can pressure Netanyahu.

In 1938, after Britain and France abandoned the Czechs, the Czech Army could still have made a good fight of it.  Czechoslovakia had the Skoda armaments complex under her control.  She might have won.  Instead, Czechoslovakia chose not to fight; she was conquered, and the Skoda complex went on to produce over half of Germany's tanks.

Israel is not Czechoslovakia.  She will fight.

If that fight comes, not only will Iran be hammered, but there may be a general war, with massive loss of Palestinian life.

One does not have to agree with everything Israel does to know that President Obama acted unwisely. 

If President Obama does not back off the two-state solution, and re-institute full sanctions against Iran, there will be war.

One thing is clear.  Israel will not budge.

Mike Konrad is the pen name of an American who is not Jewish, Latin, or Arab.  He runs a website, http://latinarabia.com, where he discusses the subculture of Arabs in Latin America.  He wishes his Spanish were better.