Norman Podhoretz, the recipient of the 2007 Guardian of Zion Award, has just been picked for Rudy Giuliani’s foreign policy team. The team consists entirely of smart pro-Israel experts. little Green Footballs predicts extended seething on the left.

On receiving the award Mr. Podhoretz gave this amazing lecture that starts with:

Being here on the 40th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem reminds me that I was also here in 1995 for the 3,000th anniversary of this city as the capital of King David’s unified Kingdom of Israel. During the opening ceremonies, which I attended with my Israeli daughter Ruthie Blum, one speaker after another arose to proclaim that Jerusalem would never again be divided, and that it would forever remain the capital of Israel. But instead of being reassured, I found myself growing more and more uneasy. After hearing the third or fourth such confident proclamation, I turned to Ruthie and muttered, “Uh-oh, there goes Jerusalem.”

My remark may have been flip, but even apart from the cynicism that the vows of politicians so often and so rightly inspire, behind it there were serious grounds for being apprehensive. For even while the then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was declaring that “There is no state of Israel without Jerusalem and no peace without Jerusalem undivided,” his government was quietly tolerating Palestinian political activity in East Jerusalem. Furthermore, much of the world was already treating the PLO’s offices in Orient House, in which this activity was taking place, as ministries of the future Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Then there was Bill Clinton, the then President of the United States. Clinton might be happy to state unequivocally that “I recognize Jerusalem as an undivided city and the eternal capital of Israel.” Nevertheless, his ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, had just joined with all the European ambassadors in refusing to attend the opening ceremonies of Jerusalem 3000. This was the same Martin Indyk who, as the head of a think tank in Washington, had written a paper advocating that the American embassy be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Now, however, Indyk was lobbying against precisely this same move. Thanks to the perversities engendered by the Oslo peace process, he even enjoyed the tacit approval of the Israeli government in doing so.

Read the whole thing; it is good.