As befits a modest country unaccustomed to leading the world other than by homogenized measurements of the quality of life, Canada seems not to have noticed that Stephen Harper has kicked off his new term as head of a majority government with the assumption of the moral leadership of the world (in the usual unobtrusive Canadian way); and even more astoundingly, has done so by successfully contradicting the President of the United States.
Canadian prime ministers have only rarely publicly taken issue with American presidents, and never successfully. John Diefenbaker did a U-turn and refused nuclear warheads in Canada, but bought the American missiles that were supposed to deliver them anyway; John F. Kennedy quietly disdained the whole affair, and Mr. Diefenbaker was voted out as prime minister in 1963. Lester Pearson gave Lyndon Johnson his under-informed and unoriginal views on Vietnam in a convocation speech in Philadelphia, and LBJ conspicuously ignored him. Pierre Trudeau opposed Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (which produced the Euro-missile Treaty and led to the end of the Cold War), and his inane pursuit of arms control was ignored by Reagan and every other leader in the world except those household words for enlightened statesmanship, the subsequently overthrown and executed Romanian president Nicolae CeauÐescu, and the terminally forgettable head of the unlamented state of East Germany, Erich Honecker. Jean Chrétien dissented from the American invasion of Iraq, and was ignored by George W. Bush, and the operation proceeded; there were many errors, but it was militarily successful, the Saddam Hussein regime was crushed, and Iraq is today one of the region's more stable and democratic countries.
But at the G8 meetings in Paris last month, Stephen Harper prevented the group's approval of Barack Obama's call for Arab-Israeli peace "on the basis of the 1967 borders." It was an outright veto by Canada, standing up to the Americans, and in non-confrontational dissent to all the others, who were prepared to let this stale bromide pass yet again. Mr. Harper had done the same thing at a Francophonie Conference in 2006, but that was only France, which has been playing footsie with the Arabs ever since Charles de Gaulle departed Algeria in 1963, leaving the oil behind and importing the Islamic problem into France. By killing it in the G-8 (U.S., Germany, Japan, the U.K., France, Italy, and Russia), Stephen Harper became the moral leader of the world's statesmen, as the first head of an important country to debunk the 1967 fraud upon which the Arab-Israeli crisis, the longest-running and most definitive moral litmus test in the geo-political world (and least successful extended negotiation in history) is based.
Foreign Minister John Baird's reported recent statement that "We support, obviously, that [the] solution has to be based on the '67 border, with mutually agreed upon swaps, as President Obama said," is unexceptionable, as it takes up on Mr. Obama's "clarification" of three days later, after the furore developed from his original remarks, that he was just repeating the agreed view among those who supported a two-state solution, that there should be two states with "agreed and defensible borders," The problem with the Obama formula was not the concept of 1967 with land swaps, it was the call for peace to be achieved by "negotiation" between Israel and a party that in 44 years has never ceded a square inch of territory or renounced the right of self-proclaimed Palestinian fugitives from inundating with non-Jews what was established and recognized as a "Jewish state." Mr. Baird's comment takes nothing from the courage and effectiveness of Harper having prevented the G-8 from again urging Israel onto this ski jump to oblivion.
The Arabs started and lost the 1967 War; and in wars, the status of aggressors and defenders, and of winners and losers, is not interchangeable. The pre-1967 borders were entirely accidental, and left Israel nine miles wide at its narrowest, and the Western Wall and Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem in Arab hands. They had no legitimacy and even the United Nations resolutions called for agreed and defensible borders, and a two-state solution. Israel has accepted a two-state solution and Palestine, its government comprised of both Hamas and Fatah, has not, and has shown no disposition to agree on borders, especially any that Israel could defend. It has been clear for decades that the pattern of international intervention in the Middle East has been to promote tangible and practically irrevocable concessions of land by Israel in exchange for insubstantial, easily and instantly revocable professions of reduced hostility, supposedly culminating in peaceful co-existence, from the Arabs. This is the problem of Land For Peace: Israel cedes the land but gets no closer to peace.
President Obama's urging of the parties two weeks ago to "work it out" is a shabby euphemism for Israel to concede more land in exchange for more empty words in Arabic from the same entities that have yet to implement the Oslo obligation pledge of 1993 to acknowledge the right to exist of Israel as a Jewish state. That is what negotiations mean: preemptive, unilateral, ex gratia concessions by Israel, which is already the most legitimate country in the world, as Israel was created by unanimous vote of the United Nations Security Council permanent members, not merely admitted as a founding member or applicant. It is also the only one of the world's 195 countries (including Taiwan, Palestine and the Vatican) under serious and constant threat of being eliminated as a country and exterminated as a population.
Also to be "worked out" under the Obama formula is the right of return, which is a euphemism for America abandoning its long commitment to Israel as a Jewish state while the Palestinians displaced from what is now Israel when that state was set up in 1947, may return in numbers to be negotiated, both to Israel, destabilizing it as a Jewish state, as well as to the Palestinian State to be established to accommodate them.
Those who oppose the existence of the state of Israel, for whatever motive, know that unless there is an unanswerable nuclear attack on Israel, which will not be possible even if Iran deploys deliverable nuclear weapons, given Israel's retaliatory capability, Israel can be eliminated only by extracting gradual concessions. Keep bickering about settlements, while Palestine receives international recognition as an independent state; keep arguing about borders as the Palestinian population bulks up from returning alleged fugitives on both sides of the disputed and indefensible border; and never agree until the two states are one big, happy bi-sectarian and multicultural commonwealth. Then, absorb, enslave, expel, or massacre the Jews, yet again, as so often in their history, while the world sits in professedly righteous silence.
It might be that the world would be a quieter place without Israel. Europe, desperate for non-Muslim immigration, especially of skilled people, would probably admit the Jews, as would the countries of the Americas and the Antipodes, unlike the policy of most of the countries in these areas in the 1930s and 1940s, when half the world's Jewish population was murdered, in what Mr. Churchill called "the long night of Nazi barbarism . made more sinister and more protracted by the lights of perverted science." But it would be a collective capital crime on the soul and conscience of Western Civilization.
If what Obama, heir to the presidents who saved the Old World, sponsored Israel, and contained and defeated totalitarian communism, is advocating comes to pass, our civilization, morally, will die before, and less honourably, than that of the Jews, from which it came. And only Stephen Harper and the incumbent pope, among the world's prominent current leaders, will have seriously dissented.
Whatever may come, Mr. Harper has brought great distinction on Canada, largely unrecognized, as proverbially happens among one's countrymen, and upon himself.
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