David Makovsky, who until recently served as one of the State Department’s Middle East “peace processors,” was quoted in a JTA story in your Feb. 13 issue as criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for planning to speak to Congress about the Iranian nuclear threat (“Gauging Possible Fallout From Bibi’s Speech”).
At the State Department, Makovsky devoted himself to the Obama administration’s stated goal of bringing about the establishment of a Palestinian state more or less along the 1967 armistice lines. That would reduce Israel to barely nine miles wide at its midsection —precisely at the time that Iran is racing to develop a nuclear weapon. In other words, Makovsky and his colleagues were pressuring Israel to put itself in an extremely vulnerable position, and at the same time pressuring Israel’s prime minister to refrain from crying out against the dangers that the State Department is accelerating. If that is not chutzpah, what is?
President Religious Zionists of America, Philadelphia
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