The American ambassador to Israel met someone who planned the attack in which my son and I were injured. Big disappointment but little surprise.
After World War II, the US was presented with a moral dilemma. The Cold War followed hard on the end of the war, with Europe being split between Eastern and Western blocs. While Germany and Berlin were physically divided into zones of control, all of the world was beginning to align either with the US and its European allies or the Soviet Union and its bloc of nations freed from Nazism by the Red Army which never left. It was hard to believe that the Americans and Russians were allies against Hitler and Tojo when their facing off occurred almost immediately with the end of hostilities.
The moral problem related to German personnel. There were individuals from the SS, Nazi government and Whermacht who were positioned to help the US in various ways. Some could act as spies in the Soviet zones due to their access to East Germany and their not being suspected of espionage. There were those fluent in Russian whose assistance in understanding the new enemy would be critical. But none was as famous as SS major Wernher von Braun. The inventor of the revolutionary V2 missile was the undisputed father of the American missile program and the Saturn 5 rocket that put astronauts on the moon 56 years ago this month. von Braun tried to downplay his SS role, noting that virtually all professionals like doctors and lawyers were brought into the SS. The problem for von Braun was the existence of witnesses from the slave labor used to build his ballistic missiles. He could not shake his use of slaves to advance his work in producing a key weapon system for Hitler.
Was the US right in ignoring Nazi backgrounds and using possible war criminals to advance American interests? The story with von Braun would almost be one of comedy. The Americans and Russians were desperate to get any advanced German technology: U-boats, planes, missiles, nuclear technology, jet engines, etc. It was a foot race and the Americans got most of the scientists from Peenemunde first and eventually moved 1,600 scientists and engineers to the United States in Operation Paperclip. The Russians took what was left and used them to get to space first with Sputnik. If the US had sworn off all Nazis, it would have been in a huge hole on many fronts including the space race and espionage against the Russians.
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Last week, the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee went to Ramallah and met with the #2 in the Palestinian Authority (PA), Hussein Al-Sheikh. As I have written previously, Al-Sheik’s name jumps off of the page of the indictments of those involved in the suicide bombing in which my son and I were wounded. Three were murdered on that cold Jerusalem afternoon, including a woman pregnant with twins and her young husband. I had arranged to meet the ambassador last month, but two meetings were canceled and pushed forward to September. I guess that meeting will also be mute, as I’ve already lost again.
The argument in favor of meeting Al-Sheikh goes back to the approach to former Nazis: what can you do, you need these people? It was the Palestinians who installed the terrorist to replace his aging boss after a few more years of his running the PA into the ground. If that is their guy, then our man in Jerusalem needs to meet him and not somebody else who has no power. I don’t fully disagree but I think that the US has leverage to make such a meeting on its terms. The PA is a garbage organization that was supposed to exist for a few years between the signing of the Oslo Accords and the formation of a full state of Palestine. As the terrorists from Yasir Arafat and on down showed over decades that they are incapable of and not really interested in having a state, the PA has remained in existence for over 30 years. It lives on international donations and spends its time condemning Israel or Hamas, depending what the hour demands. Its members, like Al-Sheikh, have been involved in the murder and injury of thousands of Israeli citizens. Its offshoots participated in the October 7th massacres.
Huckabee or his people could have demanded from Al-Sheikh an apology to any Americans he harmed in our and other attacks in which he was involved as the head of Fatah in the West Bank during the second intifada. He could have asked him to renounce terror, something that Palestinians refuse to do because they see it as their ace in the hole: when negotiations get tough, go blow up a packed city bus. He could have demanded that the PA settle its lawsuits with American plaintiffs in US courts. There was much that could have been done prior to the Huckabee-Al-Sheikh meeting, but none of it was done because none of it was important.
The ambassador truly appears to be a good friend of Israel and the Jews. And possibly because of his enthusiasm and various visits to sites in the country, there is a feeling at the State Department that he needs to balance his approach. In short order he demanded the investigation of a Palestinian-American harmed by settlers, claimed—and later retracted—that settlers had burned an ancient church in a Christian-Arab town and of course, met with the terrorist Al-Sheikh. I am disappointed by Huckabee as he proudly said that he will worry about the interests of all Americans living in Israel.I have a very shiny American—and only American—passport, but once again, my guys chose the bad guys over us. Blinken met Al-Sheikh in Washington, but that was no surprise as he personally shafted our anti-terror lawsuit in 2015. I expected more from Huckabee, but in the end, they all receive their paychecks from the US government and act accordingly.
There would have been a strong moral argument not to employ Nazis after World War II--something they insisted for the emerging post-war West German government. That might have been the "right" thing to do, but it would have put the US at greater risk from the Soviet Union. These are not simple considerations, and realpolitik is something that was near and dear to many American leaders including former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. On a secret recording that Nixon made, Kissinger stated that he would not let his Judaism get in the way of the interests of the US during the Yom Kippur War. I am sure that Huckabee is a good man and a sincere employee of the United States government. I only wish he had put a former and current terrorist in his place.
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