Americans remember the Bible story of King Solomon. Two women came tohim with a baby. They were disputing whose child it was. "Cut the childin half," the wise king ordered. The mother of the child cried out: Givethe baby to her. She would give up her child rather than let it bekilled.
President Obama is playing Solomon now. He has decided to cut the babyin half. In this case, the child is Israel. Although he has not said sodirectly, that is the burden of his argument, that's what just one wordin his speech means. That word is 'contiguous.'
Mr. Obama delivered a major address calling for Israel to return to itspre-1967 borders. That would mean the West Bank and East Jerusalem are to be evacuated andhanded over to Israel's mortal enemies. They would become, under Arabpressure, Jew-free zones. The German word for that is Judenrein.
But I want to focus on that one word, 'contiguous,' that Mr. Obama saidshould define the new Palestinian state he wants to create. That meansthat Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank of the Jordan River should havedirect access to their brethren in the Gaza Strip, an area ruled withbloody force by the terrorist group Hamas.
It's not that terrorists have any trouble accessing West Bank towns likeJericho and Nablus now. But giving them a Hamas corridor would bisectIsrael, cutting the Jewish state in two. Cutting Israel in half will befatal.
When the town of Vicksburg fell in 1863, President Lincoln knew it wasthe death knell of the Confederacy. "The father of waters flows unvexedto the sea," Lincoln said, poetically describing the Union's new controlover the length of the Mississippi River.
Contiguous, or contiguity, the noun. That's what the Confederates lostat Vicksburg. Their new nation was cut in two. It withered and died.
Dictators, it seems, understand these principles better than our latterday presidents do.
Hitler understood it when he ordered his Wehrmacht to wipe out thePolish Corridor in 1939. That strip of land had been given to the infantPolish state in order to give it access to the sea. From Germany, andfrom his territory in East Prussia, Hitler caught the unhappy Poles in apincer movement and wiped out their armed forces. Soon, Poland fellunder his boot.
Soviet Communist dictator Josef Stalin understood contiguity, too.That's why he tried to seal off West Berlin. He blockaded the accessroutes in 1948 that led from West Germany to West Berlin. He was hopingnot only to swallow up the free city of West Berlin, he wanted the rumpstate of West Germany to die, as well.
By promising contiguity to the Palestinians, Obama is rewarding a groupof people whose only political expression has been terrorism. Just weeksafter the supposedly "moderate" Fatah faction concluded an agreement andformed an axis with the openly terrorist Hamas, President Obama decidednot to cut off U.S. aid to the so-called Palestinian Authority formed byFatah. Instead, he is rewarding them with, what? Contiguity.
What to call the new access route that will be paved with Americandollars and Israeli blood? The Hamas Corridor? Or should it be calledthe Obama Freeway? Whatever we call it, it will not be found anywhere onthe Mideast's Roadmap to Peace.
Ken Blackwell is co-author of the newly released, Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservativism CanSave America, published by Simon and Schuster (Threshold Editions).