We are a grass roots organization located in both Israel and the United States. Our intention is to be pro-active on behalf of Israel. This means we will identify the topics that need examination, analysis and promotion. Our intention is to write accurately what is going on here in Israel rather than react to the anti-Israel media pieces that comprise most of today's media outlets.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
I am a Zionist
Yair Lapid says he belongs to tiny minority that influenced world more than any other nation
Yair Lapid
Israel Opinion
I am a Zionist.
I believe that the Jewish people established itself in the Land of Israel, albeit somewhat late. Had it listened to the alarm clock, there would have been no Holocaust, and my dead grandfather – the one I was named after – would have been able to dance a last waltz with grandma on the shores of the Yarkon River. I am a Zionist.
Hebrew is the language I use to thank the Creator, and also to swear on the road. The Bible does not only contain my history, but also my geography. King Saul went to look for mules on what is today Highway 443, Jonah the Prophet boarded his ship not too far from what is today a Jaffa restaurant, and the balcony where David peeped on Bathsheba must have been bought by some oligarch by now.
I am a Zionist.
The first time I saw my son wearing an IDF uniform I burst into tears, I haven't missed the Independence Day torch-lighting ceremony for 20 years now, and my television was made in Korea, but I taught it to cheer for our national soccer team.
I am a Zionist.
I believe in our right for this land. The people who were persecuted for no reason throughout history have a right to a state of their own plus a free F-16 from the manufacturer. Every display of anti-Semitism from London to Mumbai hurts me, yet deep inside I'm thinking that Jews who choose to live abroad fail to understand something very basic about this world. The State of Israel was not established so that the anti-Semites will disappear, but rather, so we can tell them to get lost.
I am a Zionist.
I was fired at in Lebanon, a Katyusha rockets missed me by a few feet in Kiryat Shmona, missiles landed near my home during the first Gulf War, I was in Sderot when the Color Red anti-rocket alert system was activated, terrorists blew themselves up not too far from my parents' house, and my children stayed in a bomb shelter before they even knew how to pronounce their own name, clinging to a grandmother who arrived here from Poland to escape death. Yet nonetheless, I always felt fortunate to be living here, and I don't really feel good anywhere else.
I am a Zionist.
I think that anyone who lives here should serve in the army, pay taxes, vote in the elections, and be familiar with the lyrics of at least one Shalom Hanoch song. I think that the State of Israel is not only a place, it is also an idea, and I wholeheartedly believe in the three extra commandments engraved on the wall of the Holocaust museum in Washington: "Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but above all, thou shalt not be a bystander."
I am a Zionist.
I already laid down on my back to admire the Sistine Chapel, I bought a postcard at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, and I was deeply impressed by the emerald Buddha at the king's palace in Bangkok. Yet I still believe that Tel Aviv is more entertaining, the Red Sea is greener, and the Western Wall Tunnels provide for a much more powerful spiritual experience. It is true that I'm not objective, but I'm also not objective in respect to my wife and children.
I am a Zionist.
I am a man of tomorrow but I also live my past. My dynasty includes Moses, Jesus, Maimonides, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Woody Allen, Bobby Fischer, Bob Dylan, Franz Kafka, Herzl, and Ben-Gurion. I am part of a tiny persecuted minority that influenced the world more than any other nation. While others invested their energies in war, we had the sense to invest in our minds.
I am a Zionist.
I sometimes look around me and become filled with pride, because I live better than a billion Indians, 1.3 billion Chinese, the entire African continent, more than 250 million Indonesians, and also better than the Thais, the Filipinos, the Russians, the Ukrainians, and the entire Muslim world, with the exception of the Sultan of Brunei. I live in a country under siege that has no natural resources, yet nonetheless the traffic lights always work and we have high-speed connection to the Internet.
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I am a Zionist.
My Zionism is natural, just like it is natural for me to be a father, a husband, and a son. People who claim that they, and only they, represent the "real Zionism" are ridiculous in my view. My Zionism is not measured by the size of my kippa, by the neighborhood where I live, or by the party I will be voting for. It was born a long time before me, on a snowy street in the ghetto in Budapest where my father stood and attempted, in vain, to understand why the entire world is trying to kill him.
I am a Zionist.
Every time an innocent victim dies, I bow my head because once upon a time I was an innocent victim. I have no desire or intention to adopt the moral standards of my enemies. I do not want to be like them. I do not live on my sword; I merely keep it under my pillow.
I am a Zionist.
I do not only hold on to the rights of our forefathers, but also to the duty of the sons. The people who established this state lived and worked under much worse conditions than I have to face, yet nonetheless they did not make do with mere survival. They also attempted to establish a better, wiser, more humane, and more moral state here. They were willing to die for this cause, and I try to live for its sake.
Refugee in his Own Country
NIDRA POLLER
February 2009
Last October, the French author and philosophy teacher Robert Redeker, accompanied by two bodyguards, went to the office of his publisher in the charming fifth arrondissement of Paris. Redeker has been in hiding for more than two years, ever since he addressed the question of Islamic intimidation in a newspaper article in Le Figaro, which led to a string of death threats. He is France's Salman Rushdie, but his case has already been largely forgotten by his compatriots. When the staff left for lunch, Redeker encouraged his bodyguards to take a break too. He felt safe. In an interview with Standpoint he explained what happened next:
"At 1.30pm, a young man of North African origin came to deliver a package. ‘Monsieur Redeker,' he said, ‘I know who you are...' adding, ‘I won't kill you but someone else will.'
"He lashed out at me for ten, maybe 15 minutes. The genocide of the Muslims, Arabs are Semites, Hitler was Christian... ‘You make a distinction between moderate, fanatical and Islamist Muslims. You're wrong. A person is Muslim or not Muslim, period.' Over and over, he accused me of insulting all Muslims by criticising Muhammad. ‘Muhammad is more than a father for Muslims,' he said. ‘What you did is serious!' He stormed out in a rage. I called my two RG [Renseignements Généraux, the domestic intelligence service] protectors, who rushed over. They whisked me away to the airport."
It was in Paris 60 years ago that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed, on 10 December 1948. France has always claimed a special relationship with the Declaration, affirmed as a defining national quality, carried as a banner whenever and wherever human rights are threatened - more or less. In the words of René Samuel Cassin, recognised as its principal author, the Declaration "is the most vigorous, most necessary protest of humanity against the atrocities and oppressions endured by millions of human beings through the ages". Cassin, who refused to take his seat as a delegate to the League of Nations after publicly denouncing the Munich Agreement, maintained a lifelong association with the Alliance Israélite Universelle, under whose auspices he frequently visited Israel.
Today in France, demonstrators equate the Star of David with the swastika, scream their hatred of Israel, burn its flag and chant promises of destruction. Schools that bear the name of René Cassin are vandalised. Cassin was a résistant, sentenced to death in absentia by the Vichy government. Where is the Resistance today? Is it the enraged crowd in keffieh, vowing allegiance to Hamas? Or courageous thinkers who dare to denounce the greatest totalitarian threat since Nazism and communism?
Copy & paste the URL to access the full article at the Standpoint website :
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/refugee-in-his-own-country-february-09-france-islam-rushdie-threats
February 2009
Last October, the French author and philosophy teacher Robert Redeker, accompanied by two bodyguards, went to the office of his publisher in the charming fifth arrondissement of Paris. Redeker has been in hiding for more than two years, ever since he addressed the question of Islamic intimidation in a newspaper article in Le Figaro, which led to a string of death threats. He is France's Salman Rushdie, but his case has already been largely forgotten by his compatriots. When the staff left for lunch, Redeker encouraged his bodyguards to take a break too. He felt safe. In an interview with Standpoint he explained what happened next:
"At 1.30pm, a young man of North African origin came to deliver a package. ‘Monsieur Redeker,' he said, ‘I know who you are...' adding, ‘I won't kill you but someone else will.'
"He lashed out at me for ten, maybe 15 minutes. The genocide of the Muslims, Arabs are Semites, Hitler was Christian... ‘You make a distinction between moderate, fanatical and Islamist Muslims. You're wrong. A person is Muslim or not Muslim, period.' Over and over, he accused me of insulting all Muslims by criticising Muhammad. ‘Muhammad is more than a father for Muslims,' he said. ‘What you did is serious!' He stormed out in a rage. I called my two RG [Renseignements Généraux, the domestic intelligence service] protectors, who rushed over. They whisked me away to the airport."
It was in Paris 60 years ago that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed, on 10 December 1948. France has always claimed a special relationship with the Declaration, affirmed as a defining national quality, carried as a banner whenever and wherever human rights are threatened - more or less. In the words of René Samuel Cassin, recognised as its principal author, the Declaration "is the most vigorous, most necessary protest of humanity against the atrocities and oppressions endured by millions of human beings through the ages". Cassin, who refused to take his seat as a delegate to the League of Nations after publicly denouncing the Munich Agreement, maintained a lifelong association with the Alliance Israélite Universelle, under whose auspices he frequently visited Israel.
Today in France, demonstrators equate the Star of David with the swastika, scream their hatred of Israel, burn its flag and chant promises of destruction. Schools that bear the name of René Cassin are vandalised. Cassin was a résistant, sentenced to death in absentia by the Vichy government. Where is the Resistance today? Is it the enraged crowd in keffieh, vowing allegiance to Hamas? Or courageous thinkers who dare to denounce the greatest totalitarian threat since Nazism and communism?
Copy & paste the URL to access the full article at the Standpoint website :
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/refugee-in-his-own-country-february-09-france-islam-rushdie-threats
Friday, January 30, 2009
New rules of play
Strategic importance of Gaza operation much greater than we assume
Isaac Ben-Israel
Israel Opinion
Operation Cast Lead was not a war pitting equal forces against each other and was not beyond the scope of many past Israeli operations. However, I believe that its strategic importance is much greater than we assume, and that this is a milestone that would be etched in the historic memory of the Middle East for many years. This is not necessarily because of the narrow military aspect, even though the military achievements are clear First, the IDF restored its deterrence vis-à-vis Hamas. This holds great significance to the deterrence vis-à-vis other Mideastern players, mostly Hizbullah in the north and the Iran-Syria axis. Even the Second Lebanon War, which was managed in a flawed manner, looks different today in light of the capabilities showcased by the IDF in the latest operation. As opposed to common perceptions, the IDF showed that it possesses the means, combat doctrine, and required determination for fighting in a crowded urban area while ensuring minimal casualties among our forces.
Secondly, Hamas’ rocket fire ended unconditionally. It is of course possible that Hamas leaders, who are only now digesting the disaster they brought upon themselves and their people, will recover eventually and go back to their old ways. Yet then they will have to take into account the fact that the IDF could again strike at them whenever it wishes to do so, and it is doubtful whether the Gaza population would allow them to prompt another similar blow against it.
Thirdly, and most importantly, the asymmetrical rules of the game that Israel appeared to accept in recent years had been broken. Previously, it appeared as though the weak side (Hamas, Hizbullah) could attack Israeli citizens uninterruptedly, while Israel hesitates in utilizing its substantial military power (airplanes, tanks, and guided missiles) for fear of hurting civilians on the other side. Yet the recent operation showed that even mosques used by terror groups are no longer an obstacle in the face of Israel using its military power.
The attack on the Kissufim Road earlier this week is also related to the new rules of play. Hamas was forced to stop the rocket fire and attacks on civilians, yet it is trying to show that attacking soldiers is allowed. We must not agree to this, of course, and we have the power to enforce the rules of play that are desired by us, which shall also include a ban on Hamas activity in the Strip within a few hundred meters of the border fence.
Path of resistance has failed
Meanwhile, the operation’s diplomatic achievements are significant and no less important than the military ones.
The first diplomatic achievement is the destabilization of Iran’s position in the Mideast in the wake of the blow sustained by its protégé in Gaza. Moreover, most of the Arab world crossed the lines and stood by Egypt vis-à-vis Hamas. This closer step to Israel and the recognition of the common interest against Iran and its emissaries holds immense strategic importance.
The second achievement is the unequivocal support offered by Western leaders to the Israeli position regarding the prevention of Hamas’ military buildup in Gaza. Understandings and agreements on curbing the smuggling have been signed and secured vis-à-vis the US and most western European states.
The third achievement is ending the war without Israel recognizing Hamas – not even indirectly.
All of the above puts Hamas’ leadership at a crossroads. It discovered that it cannot simultaneously raise the banners of sovereignty and resistance. It is for good reason that there is no precedent for this anywhere in the world. It will have to decide what is more important: Being the sovereign in an Islamic state, or enjoying the benefits of being a terror movement.
For the time being, it appears that the path of resistance has failed, big time.
Isaac Ben-Israel
Israel Opinion
Operation Cast Lead was not a war pitting equal forces against each other and was not beyond the scope of many past Israeli operations. However, I believe that its strategic importance is much greater than we assume, and that this is a milestone that would be etched in the historic memory of the Middle East for many years. This is not necessarily because of the narrow military aspect, even though the military achievements are clear First, the IDF restored its deterrence vis-à-vis Hamas. This holds great significance to the deterrence vis-à-vis other Mideastern players, mostly Hizbullah in the north and the Iran-Syria axis. Even the Second Lebanon War, which was managed in a flawed manner, looks different today in light of the capabilities showcased by the IDF in the latest operation. As opposed to common perceptions, the IDF showed that it possesses the means, combat doctrine, and required determination for fighting in a crowded urban area while ensuring minimal casualties among our forces.
Secondly, Hamas’ rocket fire ended unconditionally. It is of course possible that Hamas leaders, who are only now digesting the disaster they brought upon themselves and their people, will recover eventually and go back to their old ways. Yet then they will have to take into account the fact that the IDF could again strike at them whenever it wishes to do so, and it is doubtful whether the Gaza population would allow them to prompt another similar blow against it.
Thirdly, and most importantly, the asymmetrical rules of the game that Israel appeared to accept in recent years had been broken. Previously, it appeared as though the weak side (Hamas, Hizbullah) could attack Israeli citizens uninterruptedly, while Israel hesitates in utilizing its substantial military power (airplanes, tanks, and guided missiles) for fear of hurting civilians on the other side. Yet the recent operation showed that even mosques used by terror groups are no longer an obstacle in the face of Israel using its military power.
The attack on the Kissufim Road earlier this week is also related to the new rules of play. Hamas was forced to stop the rocket fire and attacks on civilians, yet it is trying to show that attacking soldiers is allowed. We must not agree to this, of course, and we have the power to enforce the rules of play that are desired by us, which shall also include a ban on Hamas activity in the Strip within a few hundred meters of the border fence.
Path of resistance has failed
Meanwhile, the operation’s diplomatic achievements are significant and no less important than the military ones.
The first diplomatic achievement is the destabilization of Iran’s position in the Mideast in the wake of the blow sustained by its protégé in Gaza. Moreover, most of the Arab world crossed the lines and stood by Egypt vis-à-vis Hamas. This closer step to Israel and the recognition of the common interest against Iran and its emissaries holds immense strategic importance.
The second achievement is the unequivocal support offered by Western leaders to the Israeli position regarding the prevention of Hamas’ military buildup in Gaza. Understandings and agreements on curbing the smuggling have been signed and secured vis-à-vis the US and most western European states.
The third achievement is ending the war without Israel recognizing Hamas – not even indirectly.
All of the above puts Hamas’ leadership at a crossroads. It discovered that it cannot simultaneously raise the banners of sovereignty and resistance. It is for good reason that there is no precedent for this anywhere in the world. It will have to decide what is more important: Being the sovereign in an Islamic state, or enjoying the benefits of being a terror movement.
For the time being, it appears that the path of resistance has failed, big time.
Just a sideshow
Emanuele Ottolenghi
When historians revisit Israel's Operation Cast Lead in a few decades, they will no doubt see it as a minor tiff between the warring sides in a broader conflict engulfing the region. Behind two familiar faces engaged in a vicious century-long fight that everyone knows how to solve and no one ever manages to fix, can be found Iran and its allies, on one side, and Iran's pro-Western foes, on the other. Future historians' predecessors might be excused for imagining that this sideshow is the real thing - but the Israel-Hamas war is mostly a human-interest story. The geostrategic epicenter of our era's real conflict lies elsewhere - further to the north and the east. Granted, Hamas did not pull the trigger at the explicit urging of Tehran - unless and until proven otherwise. But Tehran did have a hand in it. After all, if Hamas' rockets gained over 30 kilometers of range during the six-month tahadiyeh (truce), it was thanks to Iranian help, not because Hamas engineers quickly mastered rocket science. And Iran had a gain - once the heartbreaking, if somewhat touched-up, images of death and destruction from Gaza reached people's living rooms, Western audiences and their leaders forgot for nearly a month that Iran's nuclear program was fast approaching a critical threshold. According to nuclear experts, Iran may reach "breakout" capacity this year - a conclusion shared by a French National Assembly report published shortly after hostilities broke out between Israel and Hamas, and ignored by a distracted and distraught public.
That lull in Western attention, though, was as much a consequence of political uncertainty regarding the transition in Washington (and an anticipated change in American policy toward Iran), as it was caused by the fighting. And on the nuclear file, the heat is on again. Oil prices did not skyrocket this time - further proof that the Eastern Mediterranean is not as strategically important to the region as it once might have been. And the EU is about to unleash new sanctions - despite all the crying over Gaza, even European leaders are hard-nosed realists when it comes to national interest.
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Iran is now rushing to resupply Hamas - and whether Israel's gains in the field can be translated into an effective international mechanism that stops the flow of arms into Gaza remains to be seen. But very few believe Hamas' victory claim - or, by extension, Iran's. Iran invested capital, political prestige and time in financing, equipping and training Hamas' fighting force. It hoped to achieve in Gaza what it did in Lebanon - to have its proxy stand until the end of the fighting while inflicting painful casualties on its Zionist nemesis. In Lebanon that appeared to have worked - though since Hezbollah's "divine victory" in 2006, its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has relied more on bunkers and less on God to stay alive, and the organization lent its southern Hamas cousins only rhetoric, not material help, to replicate that victory in Gaza.
In Gaza, Iran's fighting doctrine did not survive even the first wave of airstrikes. Israel's casualties were extremely low, whereas Hamas sustained more than 1,000 fatalities among its fighters. The melting away of an Iranian-trained force, coupled with the damage done to its Iran-planned terror infrastructure and the degrading of its Iran-supplied arsenal, is a blow to Tehran. If a wider and tighter net is now cast to block arms shipments intended to replenish Hamas, Iran will emerge bruised from this round.
Aside from the tactical results of this skirmish, what will historians say about the broader war?
Three considerations are in order. First, more than ever, the Hamas war forced regional players to take sides and draw clear lines. Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf states but Qatar did their best to give Hamas a cold shoulder. They had already muttered their discontent with Hezbollah during the Second Lebanon War. This time, their anger was even more palpable - unlike in Lebanon after the Qana tragedy, no amount of carnage instilled a sense of urgency among their leaders to stop Israel's war machine. They offered little more than rhetoric to Hamas - which is considered an even worse traitor than the Lebanese Shi'a. It is, after all, a Sunni Arab movement that turned its back on its brothers to embrace the feared and loathed Shi'ite Persian foe.
That this was the central theme of the story might have been lost in translation - but the fact is that Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, declared in early December that "Iran wants to devour the Arab world." Anti-Egyptian demonstrations in Tehran calling for the demise of his regime were more virulent than the ritual calls of "Death to Israel" and "Death to America." That is why Sunni rulers on the whole cheered for Israel, in spite of themselves.
Secondly, therefore, the divisions in the Arab world come again to the fore, as rulers define and pursue their own interests in narrow national terms, not even paying lip service to pan-Arab unity anymore.
And third, in the tacit if grudging alliance that emerges from all this, between Israel and pro-Western Sunni rulers, it is clear that the prospect of an Iran fomenting Islamist revolutions, wars and insurrections around the region under the cover of a nuclear umbrella is infinitely more terrifying than a Jewish state in the Arab heartlands. This new geostrategic environment should not pressure Israel into unhealthy concessions - the Arabs need Israel's steel against Iran today, more than Israel needs their benevolence.
None of this is new - this Middle East cold war has illustrious predecessors. Divisions in the Arab world have characterized the history of the region for much of the past century. But it is refreshingly out in the open - another sign that this time, Iran got a bloody nose.
Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi is executive director of the Transatlantic Institute, in Brussels, and author of the forthcoming book "Under a Mushroom Cloud: Europe, Iran and the Bomb."
When historians revisit Israel's Operation Cast Lead in a few decades, they will no doubt see it as a minor tiff between the warring sides in a broader conflict engulfing the region. Behind two familiar faces engaged in a vicious century-long fight that everyone knows how to solve and no one ever manages to fix, can be found Iran and its allies, on one side, and Iran's pro-Western foes, on the other. Future historians' predecessors might be excused for imagining that this sideshow is the real thing - but the Israel-Hamas war is mostly a human-interest story. The geostrategic epicenter of our era's real conflict lies elsewhere - further to the north and the east. Granted, Hamas did not pull the trigger at the explicit urging of Tehran - unless and until proven otherwise. But Tehran did have a hand in it. After all, if Hamas' rockets gained over 30 kilometers of range during the six-month tahadiyeh (truce), it was thanks to Iranian help, not because Hamas engineers quickly mastered rocket science. And Iran had a gain - once the heartbreaking, if somewhat touched-up, images of death and destruction from Gaza reached people's living rooms, Western audiences and their leaders forgot for nearly a month that Iran's nuclear program was fast approaching a critical threshold. According to nuclear experts, Iran may reach "breakout" capacity this year - a conclusion shared by a French National Assembly report published shortly after hostilities broke out between Israel and Hamas, and ignored by a distracted and distraught public.
That lull in Western attention, though, was as much a consequence of political uncertainty regarding the transition in Washington (and an anticipated change in American policy toward Iran), as it was caused by the fighting. And on the nuclear file, the heat is on again. Oil prices did not skyrocket this time - further proof that the Eastern Mediterranean is not as strategically important to the region as it once might have been. And the EU is about to unleash new sanctions - despite all the crying over Gaza, even European leaders are hard-nosed realists when it comes to national interest.
Advertisement
Iran is now rushing to resupply Hamas - and whether Israel's gains in the field can be translated into an effective international mechanism that stops the flow of arms into Gaza remains to be seen. But very few believe Hamas' victory claim - or, by extension, Iran's. Iran invested capital, political prestige and time in financing, equipping and training Hamas' fighting force. It hoped to achieve in Gaza what it did in Lebanon - to have its proxy stand until the end of the fighting while inflicting painful casualties on its Zionist nemesis. In Lebanon that appeared to have worked - though since Hezbollah's "divine victory" in 2006, its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has relied more on bunkers and less on God to stay alive, and the organization lent its southern Hamas cousins only rhetoric, not material help, to replicate that victory in Gaza.
In Gaza, Iran's fighting doctrine did not survive even the first wave of airstrikes. Israel's casualties were extremely low, whereas Hamas sustained more than 1,000 fatalities among its fighters. The melting away of an Iranian-trained force, coupled with the damage done to its Iran-planned terror infrastructure and the degrading of its Iran-supplied arsenal, is a blow to Tehran. If a wider and tighter net is now cast to block arms shipments intended to replenish Hamas, Iran will emerge bruised from this round.
Aside from the tactical results of this skirmish, what will historians say about the broader war?
Three considerations are in order. First, more than ever, the Hamas war forced regional players to take sides and draw clear lines. Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf states but Qatar did their best to give Hamas a cold shoulder. They had already muttered their discontent with Hezbollah during the Second Lebanon War. This time, their anger was even more palpable - unlike in Lebanon after the Qana tragedy, no amount of carnage instilled a sense of urgency among their leaders to stop Israel's war machine. They offered little more than rhetoric to Hamas - which is considered an even worse traitor than the Lebanese Shi'a. It is, after all, a Sunni Arab movement that turned its back on its brothers to embrace the feared and loathed Shi'ite Persian foe.
That this was the central theme of the story might have been lost in translation - but the fact is that Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, declared in early December that "Iran wants to devour the Arab world." Anti-Egyptian demonstrations in Tehran calling for the demise of his regime were more virulent than the ritual calls of "Death to Israel" and "Death to America." That is why Sunni rulers on the whole cheered for Israel, in spite of themselves.
Secondly, therefore, the divisions in the Arab world come again to the fore, as rulers define and pursue their own interests in narrow national terms, not even paying lip service to pan-Arab unity anymore.
And third, in the tacit if grudging alliance that emerges from all this, between Israel and pro-Western Sunni rulers, it is clear that the prospect of an Iran fomenting Islamist revolutions, wars and insurrections around the region under the cover of a nuclear umbrella is infinitely more terrifying than a Jewish state in the Arab heartlands. This new geostrategic environment should not pressure Israel into unhealthy concessions - the Arabs need Israel's steel against Iran today, more than Israel needs their benevolence.
None of this is new - this Middle East cold war has illustrious predecessors. Divisions in the Arab world have characterized the history of the region for much of the past century. But it is refreshingly out in the open - another sign that this time, Iran got a bloody nose.
Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi is executive director of the Transatlantic Institute, in Brussels, and author of the forthcoming book "Under a Mushroom Cloud: Europe, Iran and the Bomb."
Olmert Reveals Peace Plan to U.S. Envoy Mitchell
Avraham Zuroff
Israel News (IsraelNN.com) Prime Minister Ehud Olmert revealed his comprehensive peace plan to U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell on Wednesday. According to Olmert’s plan, Israel would retreat from most territory within Judea and Samaria and maintain large settlement blocks. Israel would evacuate 60,000 residents from their homes as part of the plan. In addition, Olmert agreed to transfer Arab neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem to the Palestinian Authority. Holy sites in Jerusalem would be placed under an international authority. In addition, a highway and a series of tunnels would connect Gaza to Judea and Samaria. As part of the plan, Olmert did refuse to allow the return to Israel of Arabs who left when the modern Jewish state was formed and their descendants.
MK Gidon Sa’ar: Plan will Bring Missiles to Tel-Aviv
In response to Olmert’s proposed peace plan, the Likud party called Thursday for an emergency session. Likud Knesset Member Gidon Sa’ar said, “This plan is dangerous and abandons the security of Israel. It will bring Hamas’ missiles to Tel-Aviv and the center of the country.” The Likud party stated that “this plan does not obligate Israel nor the Likud headed by Binyamin Netanyahu.”
In the statement, the Likud said that Kadima chairman Tzipi Livni, “who is a full participant in the negotiations with the Palestinians, already has announced immediately after her election in Kadima that she will continue in the way of Olmert regarding Palestinian and Syrian ties. Now the choice is clear to Israeli citizens – it’s either the continuation of Kadima’s way of concessions and withdrawals which endanger security, or the Likud’s way of advancing a responsible process in a position of strength and to safeguard Israel’s security interests.”
Livni Distances Herself from the Plan
Livni told students at the College of Tel Aviv-Yafo on Thursday that the plan "does not represent me or what I'm promoting." Livni said she would only promote an agreement that represents Israel's best interests, which she said included "Keeping the maximum number of settlers, keeping places that are important to us - at the head of the list, Jerusalem. No refugee would enter."
Netanyahu For a United Jerusalem
Former prime minister and Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, who will likely return to his old leadership role after the February 10 Israel elections, repeatedly emphasized the Likud’s loyalty to the concept of a united Jerusalem.
Netanyahu stated at Wednesday’s Jerusalem Conference, “We have demonstrated in the past, and will continue to demonstrate our commitment to a complete, undivided Jerusalem.” Netanyahu continued, “What would have happened had we not built all those neighborhoods around the central part of the capital after the Six-Day War? Jerusalem would have been choked.” Moreover, he said, transferring sovereignty over those areas to the Palestinian Authority is not an option.
“Everyone knows what will happen if we were to leave those areas and divide Jerusalem. Someone will enter – and that someone will be Hamas,” Netanyahu stated, adding that dividing the capital, or resurrecting the specter of internationalizing the “Holy Basin”, this time at the recommendation of the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, would cause more problems, even for the international community, than it would solve.
Police Investigation in Sidelines
Olmert’s announcement puts the news on the backburner about an impending police interrogation of the prime minister. On Thursday, police announced that Olmert would be questioned at his Jerusalem residence on Friday. This will be the tenth time that the Prime Minister will be questioned over corruption allegations that forced him to resign. The investigation was delayed due to Operation ‘Cast Lead’.
Detectives are investigating allegations that Olmert accepted cash-stuffed envelopes from U.S. businessman Morris Talansky and falsely claimed travel expenses before becoming prime minister in 2006. Olmert denies the allegations.
Obama's Diplomacy Receives Chilly Reception in Tehran
Kenneth R. Timmerman
State Department officials have been drafting a presidential letter to be sent to the Supreme Leader of Iran, offering significant U.S. concessions to the Iranian leadership, the Guardian newspaper reported on Thursday.
One draft of the letter reportedly includes assurances that the United States does not want to overthrow the Islamic regime, and will not support opposition groups operating in the border regions with Pakistan, Azerbaijan, and Iraq. But among Iran’s power elite, the make-nice diplomacy has been given a chilly reception.
Speaking to supporters in western Kermanshah province on Wednesday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cautiously welcomed Obama’s offer to “change” the dynamic of U.S-Iranian relations, then put a price on the type of “change” he expects from Washington that undoubtedly even the Obama White House would find unacceptable.
[...] “U.S. Democratic administrations always chose the wrong allies,” oppositive activist, Roozbeh Farahanipour, told Newsmax. “Instead of choosing the Iranian people, they chose a fundamentalist terrorist government to be their ally. That’s not a good strategy.”
Calling Obama’s rhetoric “good words,” he warned that the U.S. could offer “fundamental change,” including a “reorientation” of its policies toward Iran and the Middle East, or merely a “tactical” change in approach.
A tactical change in the language the United States government uses toward Iran, such as abandoning the Bush administration’s epithet “axis of evil” when referring to the Iranian regime, was mere “political rhetoric and tricks,” he said.
But Iran would welcome fundamental change, Ahmadinejad said. "The U.S. government must end its military presence in the world, which means the U.S. getting all their troops together and bringing them back to the U.S. to serve America within the territorial boundaries of the country.”
Fundamental change also would mean that the United States “should stop narcotics production in Afghanistan,” and “not intervene in internal affairs of other nations,” he said.
Ahmadinejad also demanded that the United States cut off support for Israel, “these rootless, uncultured, illegal, phony, murderous, killers of women of children, killers of babies, the Zionists.”
Finally, he demanded that the United States “apologize to the Iranian nation and compensate [it] for their crimes against the Iranians.”
In neither the Persian-language version of his speech, translated by the American Enterprise Institute’s Iran News Roundup, nor the shorter, English version provided by the official Fars News Agency, did Ahmadinejad specify what “crimes against the Iranian nation” the United States had committed.
Ahmadinejad’s comments drew a mild response from acting State Department spokesman, Robert Wood. “Our Iran policy is under review,” Wood told reporters on Wednesday.
“I think what we want to see is improved behavior on the part of Iran internationally. We’re certainly interested in having a dialogue with the Iranian people . . . But there are certain things that Iran knows it needs to do if it wants to get back into the good graces of the international community, particularly with regard to its nuclear program, in terms of its activities in supporting terror in the Middle East region. So Iran needs to take a number of steps before the international community is going to welcome it back into its good graces,” he said.
Further complicating any effort by the new U.S. administration to reach out to Iran was the flat-out rejection of any talk of improved relations by Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the powerful secretary general of the Guardian Council.
“I warn those despised and marginalized groupings who are engaged in establishing relations with America and show the American President a green light, I warn them not to make themselves worse than they are,” he said on Wednesday.
“In our country, America has no share. Power and dignity solely belongs to the people, and those who desire relations with America, meetings with America and showing the green light to the U.S. president, only give us trouble and headache,” Jannati said.
Jannati’s radical Islamist faction backed Ahmadinejad in the 2005 elections and is likely to back him when he runs for re-election this May.
Reaching out to the Tehran regime has been made more complicated in recent weeks by the blatant support of Iran for Hamas in its terror war against Israel.
Israel has accused Iran of helping Hamas to smuggle thousands of rockets into Gaza through tunnels beneath the Egyptian border, which Hamas has been lobbing at Israeli towns and cities.
The United States signed a protocol with Israel on Jan. 16, in one of the last official acts of the Bush administration, pledging to help Israel crack down on the weapons smuggling through the Gaza tunnels.
The protocol calls for “an international response to those states, such as Iran, who are determined to be sources of weapons and explosives supply to Gaza,” according to a copy the Israeli Foreign Ministry made available.
Israel Defense Force spokesmen have shown reporters 122 mm rockets supplied by Iran and Syria that they confiscated in Gaza, similar to the Iranian-supplied rockets that Hezbollah fired into northern Israel in the summer of 2006.
Recently, the Israelis say that Iran has supplied Hamas with extended-range GRAD rockets that can reach targets 40 kilometers away, bringing the Israeli cities deep in the Negev desert and along the densely populated Mediterranean Sea coast into range for the first time.
During the fighting this month, Iranian-supplied rockets hit the Israeli cities of Be’er Sheva, Ashdod, and Ashkelon, which previously had been out of range.
Smugglers bring in the rockets in kits through the tunnels into Gaza, where Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps weapons specialists supervise small Hamas workshops to assemble them locally.
The IDF also succeeded in destroying the so-called “Iranian unit” of Hamas, sources in Gaza said during the fighting.
Around one hundred members of this special unit, trained by Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers at Hezbollah camps in Lebanon were killed during fighting in the Zeytun neighborhood of Gaza City, the sources acknowledged.
Iran’s blatant support for Hamas during the recent fighting “significantly complicated” efforts by the Obama administration to launch a successful diplomatic initiative with Iran, says John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who is now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
“Direct U.S.-Iranian negotiations will not change the fundamental policy equation, or the reality that there are no incentives that will dissuade Iran from trying to acquiring nuclear weapons,” Bolton believes.
State Department officials have been drafting a presidential letter to be sent to the Supreme Leader of Iran, offering significant U.S. concessions to the Iranian leadership, the Guardian newspaper reported on Thursday.
One draft of the letter reportedly includes assurances that the United States does not want to overthrow the Islamic regime, and will not support opposition groups operating in the border regions with Pakistan, Azerbaijan, and Iraq. But among Iran’s power elite, the make-nice diplomacy has been given a chilly reception.
Speaking to supporters in western Kermanshah province on Wednesday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cautiously welcomed Obama’s offer to “change” the dynamic of U.S-Iranian relations, then put a price on the type of “change” he expects from Washington that undoubtedly even the Obama White House would find unacceptable.
[...] “U.S. Democratic administrations always chose the wrong allies,” oppositive activist, Roozbeh Farahanipour, told Newsmax. “Instead of choosing the Iranian people, they chose a fundamentalist terrorist government to be their ally. That’s not a good strategy.”
Calling Obama’s rhetoric “good words,” he warned that the U.S. could offer “fundamental change,” including a “reorientation” of its policies toward Iran and the Middle East, or merely a “tactical” change in approach.
A tactical change in the language the United States government uses toward Iran, such as abandoning the Bush administration’s epithet “axis of evil” when referring to the Iranian regime, was mere “political rhetoric and tricks,” he said.
But Iran would welcome fundamental change, Ahmadinejad said. "The U.S. government must end its military presence in the world, which means the U.S. getting all their troops together and bringing them back to the U.S. to serve America within the territorial boundaries of the country.”
Fundamental change also would mean that the United States “should stop narcotics production in Afghanistan,” and “not intervene in internal affairs of other nations,” he said.
Ahmadinejad also demanded that the United States cut off support for Israel, “these rootless, uncultured, illegal, phony, murderous, killers of women of children, killers of babies, the Zionists.”
Finally, he demanded that the United States “apologize to the Iranian nation and compensate [it] for their crimes against the Iranians.”
In neither the Persian-language version of his speech, translated by the American Enterprise Institute’s Iran News Roundup, nor the shorter, English version provided by the official Fars News Agency, did Ahmadinejad specify what “crimes against the Iranian nation” the United States had committed.
Ahmadinejad’s comments drew a mild response from acting State Department spokesman, Robert Wood. “Our Iran policy is under review,” Wood told reporters on Wednesday.
“I think what we want to see is improved behavior on the part of Iran internationally. We’re certainly interested in having a dialogue with the Iranian people . . . But there are certain things that Iran knows it needs to do if it wants to get back into the good graces of the international community, particularly with regard to its nuclear program, in terms of its activities in supporting terror in the Middle East region. So Iran needs to take a number of steps before the international community is going to welcome it back into its good graces,” he said.
Further complicating any effort by the new U.S. administration to reach out to Iran was the flat-out rejection of any talk of improved relations by Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the powerful secretary general of the Guardian Council.
“I warn those despised and marginalized groupings who are engaged in establishing relations with America and show the American President a green light, I warn them not to make themselves worse than they are,” he said on Wednesday.
“In our country, America has no share. Power and dignity solely belongs to the people, and those who desire relations with America, meetings with America and showing the green light to the U.S. president, only give us trouble and headache,” Jannati said.
Jannati’s radical Islamist faction backed Ahmadinejad in the 2005 elections and is likely to back him when he runs for re-election this May.
Reaching out to the Tehran regime has been made more complicated in recent weeks by the blatant support of Iran for Hamas in its terror war against Israel.
Israel has accused Iran of helping Hamas to smuggle thousands of rockets into Gaza through tunnels beneath the Egyptian border, which Hamas has been lobbing at Israeli towns and cities.
The United States signed a protocol with Israel on Jan. 16, in one of the last official acts of the Bush administration, pledging to help Israel crack down on the weapons smuggling through the Gaza tunnels.
The protocol calls for “an international response to those states, such as Iran, who are determined to be sources of weapons and explosives supply to Gaza,” according to a copy the Israeli Foreign Ministry made available.
Israel Defense Force spokesmen have shown reporters 122 mm rockets supplied by Iran and Syria that they confiscated in Gaza, similar to the Iranian-supplied rockets that Hezbollah fired into northern Israel in the summer of 2006.
Recently, the Israelis say that Iran has supplied Hamas with extended-range GRAD rockets that can reach targets 40 kilometers away, bringing the Israeli cities deep in the Negev desert and along the densely populated Mediterranean Sea coast into range for the first time.
During the fighting this month, Iranian-supplied rockets hit the Israeli cities of Be’er Sheva, Ashdod, and Ashkelon, which previously had been out of range.
Smugglers bring in the rockets in kits through the tunnels into Gaza, where Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps weapons specialists supervise small Hamas workshops to assemble them locally.
The IDF also succeeded in destroying the so-called “Iranian unit” of Hamas, sources in Gaza said during the fighting.
Around one hundred members of this special unit, trained by Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers at Hezbollah camps in Lebanon were killed during fighting in the Zeytun neighborhood of Gaza City, the sources acknowledged.
Iran’s blatant support for Hamas during the recent fighting “significantly complicated” efforts by the Obama administration to launch a successful diplomatic initiative with Iran, says John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who is now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
“Direct U.S.-Iranian negotiations will not change the fundamental policy equation, or the reality that there are no incentives that will dissuade Iran from trying to acquiring nuclear weapons,” Bolton believes.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Olmert Reveals Peace Plan to U.S. Envoy Mitchell
Avraham Zuroff
(IsraelNN.com) Prime Minister Ehud Olmert revealed his comprehensive peace plan to U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell on Wednesday. According to Olmert’s plan, Israel would retreat from most territory within Judea and Samaria and maintain large settlement blocks. Israel would evacuate 60,000 residents from their homes as part of the plan. In addition, Olmert agreed to transfer Arab neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem to the Palestinian Authority. Holy sites in Jerusalem would be placed under an international authority. In addition, a highway and a series of tunnels would connect Gaza to Judea and Samaria. As part of the plan, Olmert did refuse to allow the return to Israel of Arabs who left when the modern Jewish state was formed and their descendants.
MK Gidon Sa’ar: Plan will Bring Missiles to Tel-Aviv
In response to Olmert’s proposed peace plan, the Likud party called Thursday for an emergency session. Likud Knesset Member Gidon Sa’ar said, “This plan is dangerous and abandons the security of Israel. It will bring Hamas’ missiles to Tel-Aviv and the center of the country.” The Likud party stated that “this plan does not obligate Israel nor the Likud headed by Binyamin Netanyahu.”
In the statement, the Likud said that Kadima chairman Tzipi Livni, “who is a full participant in the negotiations with the Palestinians, already has announced immediately after her election in Kadima that she will continue in the way of Olmert regarding Palestinian and Syrian ties. Now the choice is clear to Israeli citizens – it’s either the continuation of Kadima’s way of concessions and withdrawals which endanger security, or the Likud’s way of advancing a responsible process in a position of strength and to safeguard Israel’s security interests.”
Livni Distances Herself from the Plan
Livni told students at the College of Tel Aviv-Yafo on Thursday that the plan "does not represent me or what I'm promoting." Livni said she would only promote an agreement that represents Israel's best interests, which she said included "Keeping the maximum number of settlers, keeping places that are important to us - at the head of the list, Jerusalem. No refugee would enter."
Netanyahu For a United Jerusalem
Former prime minister and Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, who will likely return to his old leadership role after the February 10 Israel elections, repeatedly emphasized the Likud’s loyalty to the concept of a united Jerusalem.
Netanyahu stated at Wednesday’s Jerusalem Conference, “We have demonstrated in the past, and will continue to demonstrate our commitment to a complete, undivided Jerusalem.” Netanyahu continued, “What would have happened had we not built all those neighborhoods around the central part of the capital after the Six-Day War? Jerusalem would have been choked.” Moreover, he said, transferring sovereignty over those areas to the Palestinian Authority is not an option.
“Everyone knows what will happen if we were to leave those areas and divide Jerusalem. Someone will enter – and that someone will be Hamas,” Netanyahu stated, adding that dividing the capital, or resurrecting the specter of internationalizing the “Holy Basin”, this time at the recommendation of the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, would cause more problems, even for the international community, than it would solve.
Police Investigation in Sidelines
Olmert’s announcement puts the news on the backburner about an impending police interrogation of the prime minister. On Thursday, police announced that Olmert would be questioned at his Jerusalem residence on Friday. This will be the tenth time that the Prime Minister will be questioned over corruption allegations that forced him to resign. The investigation was delayed due to Operation ‘Cast Lead’.
Detectives are investigating allegations that Olmert accepted cash-stuffed envelopes from U.S. businessman Morris Talansky and falsely claimed travel expenses before becoming prime minister in 2006. Olmert denies the allegations.
(IsraelNN.com) Prime Minister Ehud Olmert revealed his comprehensive peace plan to U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell on Wednesday. According to Olmert’s plan, Israel would retreat from most territory within Judea and Samaria and maintain large settlement blocks. Israel would evacuate 60,000 residents from their homes as part of the plan. In addition, Olmert agreed to transfer Arab neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem to the Palestinian Authority. Holy sites in Jerusalem would be placed under an international authority. In addition, a highway and a series of tunnels would connect Gaza to Judea and Samaria. As part of the plan, Olmert did refuse to allow the return to Israel of Arabs who left when the modern Jewish state was formed and their descendants.
MK Gidon Sa’ar: Plan will Bring Missiles to Tel-Aviv
In response to Olmert’s proposed peace plan, the Likud party called Thursday for an emergency session. Likud Knesset Member Gidon Sa’ar said, “This plan is dangerous and abandons the security of Israel. It will bring Hamas’ missiles to Tel-Aviv and the center of the country.” The Likud party stated that “this plan does not obligate Israel nor the Likud headed by Binyamin Netanyahu.”
In the statement, the Likud said that Kadima chairman Tzipi Livni, “who is a full participant in the negotiations with the Palestinians, already has announced immediately after her election in Kadima that she will continue in the way of Olmert regarding Palestinian and Syrian ties. Now the choice is clear to Israeli citizens – it’s either the continuation of Kadima’s way of concessions and withdrawals which endanger security, or the Likud’s way of advancing a responsible process in a position of strength and to safeguard Israel’s security interests.”
Livni Distances Herself from the Plan
Livni told students at the College of Tel Aviv-Yafo on Thursday that the plan "does not represent me or what I'm promoting." Livni said she would only promote an agreement that represents Israel's best interests, which she said included "Keeping the maximum number of settlers, keeping places that are important to us - at the head of the list, Jerusalem. No refugee would enter."
Netanyahu For a United Jerusalem
Former prime minister and Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, who will likely return to his old leadership role after the February 10 Israel elections, repeatedly emphasized the Likud’s loyalty to the concept of a united Jerusalem.
Netanyahu stated at Wednesday’s Jerusalem Conference, “We have demonstrated in the past, and will continue to demonstrate our commitment to a complete, undivided Jerusalem.” Netanyahu continued, “What would have happened had we not built all those neighborhoods around the central part of the capital after the Six-Day War? Jerusalem would have been choked.” Moreover, he said, transferring sovereignty over those areas to the Palestinian Authority is not an option.
“Everyone knows what will happen if we were to leave those areas and divide Jerusalem. Someone will enter – and that someone will be Hamas,” Netanyahu stated, adding that dividing the capital, or resurrecting the specter of internationalizing the “Holy Basin”, this time at the recommendation of the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, would cause more problems, even for the international community, than it would solve.
Police Investigation in Sidelines
Olmert’s announcement puts the news on the backburner about an impending police interrogation of the prime minister. On Thursday, police announced that Olmert would be questioned at his Jerusalem residence on Friday. This will be the tenth time that the Prime Minister will be questioned over corruption allegations that forced him to resign. The investigation was delayed due to Operation ‘Cast Lead’.
Detectives are investigating allegations that Olmert accepted cash-stuffed envelopes from U.S. businessman Morris Talansky and falsely claimed travel expenses before becoming prime minister in 2006. Olmert denies the allegations.
Livni: Surrender for Victory
Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu Livni: Surrender for Victory
Israel must give up parts of Judea and Samaria in order to preserve Israel as a Jewish state, Kadima leader Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told the sixth annual Jerusalem Conference Wednesday night.
She also called for a dialogue between different sectors in Israel in order to work together to preserve Jewish values. "Constant arguing over the way" to achieve our common goals will cost us the nation as a Jewish state, she said.
"The Jewish aspects of Israel are a national subject and not the monopoly of any single party," the Foreign Minister added. "We have a generation growing up that is afraid of a halachic (Torah -ed.) state and of political parties based on fear and hate. My job is to create the common ground and common denominator and is not an interest of a sector."
She called for unity, not only in terms of political parties but as a people with common values.
Throughout her speech to a predominantly nationalist and religious audience, she emphasized Judaism and spoke of her children who observe Jewish traditions on Yom Kippur and the Jewish New Year of Rosh HaShanah.
Referring to the political divide between nationalists and herself, she noted that years of refusal to make concessions have resulted in international demands that have forced political leaders "to run for compromise."
"I know to say ahead of time what are the compromises," pointing out her opposition to Palestinian Authority demands for the right of immigration to Israel of foreign Arabs who are descendants of families who left Israel during previous wars.
'Back to Normal': Rocket Attacks
Hana Levi Julian 'Back to Normal': Rocket Attacks
The Color Red incoming rocket alert roused Sderot residents from their beds at approximately 6:00 Thursday morning, barely giving the sleepy civilians time to scramble into shelters before a short range ("Kassam") rocket slammed into the community. No one was injured and no damage was reported. The early warning system also sounded several minutes earlier in the Eshkol region, although it was not clear whether it was a false alarm, or if a missile had fallen in an as-yet-unidentified site.
Shortly after midnight, the Israel Air Force bombed a weapons depot in Rafiah. According to a statement released by the IDF Spokesperson's Unit, an accurate hit was identified. "As the sole authority in the Gaza Strip, Hamas bears full responsibility of all terror originating from within its area of control. The IDF will respond to any terror attacks in accordance with decisions made by the Israeli government," said the army spokesman.
The IAF air strike followed a rocket attack at approximately 9:40 p.m. Wednesday, which exploded in an open area. Residents raced into shelters after three false alarms had sounded earlier in the day.
Eshkol Regional Council head Chaim Lin told reporters following the attack, "This is the first rocket since the ceasefire [bega. We hope that the Israeli government will not be drawn into a policy of restraint, and that they will respond with force in order to preserve the security of the residents."
Tit for Tat Policy Also Returns
The Israeli government has vowed to respond with military action to every attack, despite calls by U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell this week for Israel and Hamas to extend the "ceasefire."
The terrorist organization, which controls Gaza, formally rejected Israel's ceasefire terms on Wednesday. However, Hamas and other allied groups have refrained from firing long-range rockets at major Israeli cities since the IDF ended its Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.
Wednesday night's rocket attack followed a cross-border bombing by Hamas terrorists a day earlier that killed one IDF soldier and injured three others, including an officer who was seriously wounded.
Shortly after the bombing, the terrorists launched a follow-up mortar attack on southern Israel.
Meanwhile, IAF warplanes struck in response, targeting a terrorist who had carried out the attack on the soldiers. They also blasted a number of smuggling tunnels on the "Philadelphi" route that runs along the Egyptian-Gaza border.
History's tragic farce
Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST
It is a fundamental truth that while history always repeats itself, it almost never repeats itself precisely. There is always a measure of newness to events that allows otherwise intelligent people to repeat the mistakes of their forebears without looking completely ridiculous. Given this, it is hard to believe that with the advent of the Obama administration, we are seeing history repeat itself with nearly unheard of exactness. US President Barack Obama's reported intention of appointing former Sen. George Mitchell as his envoy for the so-called Palestinian-Israeli peace process will provide us with a spectacle of an unvarnished repeat of history.
In December 2000, outgoing president Bill Clinton appointed Mitchell to advise him on how to reignite the "peace process" after the Palestinians rejected statehood and launched their terror war against Israel in September 2000. Mitchell presented his findings to Clinton's successor, George W. Bush, in April 2001.
Mitchell asserted that Israel and the Palestinians were equally to blame for the Palestinian terror war against Israelis. He recommended that Israel end all Jewish construction outside the 1949 armistice lines, and stop fighting Palestinian terrorists.
As for the Palestinians, Mitchell said they had to make a "100 percent effort" to prevent the terror that they themselves were carrying out. This basic demand was nothing new. It formed the basis of the Clinton administration's nod-nod-wink-wink treatment of Palestinian terrorism since the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994.
By insisting that the PLO make a "100 percent effort," to quell the terror it was enabling, the Clinton administration gave the Palestinians built-in immunity from responsibility. Every time that his terrorists struck, Yasser Arafat claimed that their attacks had nothing to do with him. He was making a "100 percent effort" to stop the attacks, after all.
After getting Arafat off the hook, the Clinton administration proceeded to blame Israel. If Israel had just given up more land, or forced Jews from their homes, or given the PLO more money, Arafat could have saved the lives of his victims.
Mitchell's plan, although supported by then-secretary of state Colin Powell, was never adopted by Bush because at the time, terrorists were massacring Israelis every day. It would have been politically unwise for Bush to accept a plan that asserted moral equivalence between Israel and the PLO when rescue workers were scraping the body parts of Israeli children off the walls of bombed out pizzerias and bar mitzva parties.
But while his eponymous plan was rejected, its substance, which was based on the Clinton Plan, formed the basis of the Tenet Plan, the road map plan and the Annapolis Plan. And now, Mitchell is about to return to Israel, at the start of yet another presidential administration to offer us his plan again.
MITCHELL, OF COURSE, is not the only one repeating the past. His boss, Barack Obama, is about to repeat the failures his immediate predecessors. Like Clinton and Bush, Obama is making the establishment of a Palestinian state the centerpiece of his foreign policy agenda.
Obama made this clear his first hour on the job. On Wednesday at 8 a.m., Obama made his first phone call to a foreign leader. He called PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. During their conversation, Obama pledged his commitment to Palestinian statehood.
Fatah wasted no time responding to Obama's extraordinary gesture. On Wednesday afternoon Abbas convened the PLO's Executive Committee in Ramallah and the body announced that future negotiations with Israel will have to be based on new preconditions. As far as the PLO is concerned, with Obama firmly in its corner, it can force Israel to its knees.
And so, the PLO is now uninterested in the agreements it reached with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. For Israel to enjoy the privilege of negotiating with the PLO, it must first announce its willingness to expel all the 500,000 or so Israeli Jews who live in Judea, Samaria and the neighborhoods in east, south and north Jerusalem built since 1967, as well as in the Old City, and then hand the areas over, lock, stock and barrel, to the PLO.
This new PLO "plan" itself is nothing new. It is simply a restatement of the Arab "peace plan," which is just a renamed Saudi "peace plan," which was just a renamed Tom Friedman column in The New York Times. And the Friedman plan is one that no Israeli leader in his right mind can accept. So by making this their precondition for negotiations, the PLO is doing what it did in 2000. It is rejecting statehood in favor of continued war with Israel.
What is most remarkable about the new administration's embrace of its predecessors' failed policy is how uncontroversial this policy is in Washington. It is hard to come up with another example of a policy that has failed so often and so violently that has enjoyed the support of both American political parties. Indeed, it is hard to think of a successful policy that ever enjoyed such broad support.
Apparently, no one in positions of power in Washington has stopped to consider why it is that in spite of the fervent backing of presidents Clinton and Bush, there is still no Palestinian state.
SINCE ISRAEL recognized the PLO as the "sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" in 1993, the US and Israel have based their plans for peace on their assumption that the PLO is interested in making peace. And they have based their plans for making peace by establishing a Palestinian state on the assumption that the Palestinians are interested in statehood. Yet over the past 15 years it has become abundantly clear that neither of these assumptions is correct.
In spite of massive political, economic and military support by the US, Israel and Europe, the PLO has never made any significant moves to foster peaceful relations between Israel and the Palestinians. Not only did the PLO-led PA spend the six years between 1994 and 2000, in which it was supposedly making peace with Israel, indoctrinating Palestinian society to hate Jews and seek their destruction through jihadist-inspired terrorism. It also cultivated close relations with Iran and other rogue regimes and terror groups.
Many are quick to claim that these misbehaviors were simply a consequence of Arafat's personal radicalism. Under Abbas, it is argued, the PLO is much more moderate. But this assertion strains credulity. As The Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh reported on Monday, Fatah forces today boast that their terror cells in Gaza took active part in Hamas's missile offensive against Israel. Fatah's Aksa Martyrs terror cells claim that during Operation Cast Lead, its terrorists shot 137 rockets and mortar shells at Israel.
Abbas's supporters in the US and Israel claim that these Fatah members acted as they did because they are living under Hamas rule. They would be far more moderate if they were under Fatah rule. But this, too, doesn't ring true.
From 2000 through June 2007, when Hamas ousted Fatah forces from Gaza, most of the weapons smuggling operations in Gaza were carried out by Fatah. Then, too, most of the rockets and mortar shells fired at Israel were fired by Fatah forces. Likewise, most of the suicide bombers deployed from Judea and Samaria were members of Fatah.
The likes of Madeleine Albright, Powell and Condoleezza Rice claimed that Fatah's collusion with Hamas and Islamic Jihad and its leading role in terror was a consequence of insufficient Israeli support for Arafat and later for Abbas. If Israel had kicked out the Jews of Gaza earlier, or if it had removed its roadblocks and expelled Jews from their homes in Judea and Samaria, or if had prevented all Jewish construction beyond the 1949 armistice lines, then Arafat and later Abbas would have been more popular and able to rein in their own terror forces. (Incidentally, those same forces receive their salaries from the PA, which itself is funded by the US and Israel.)
THE PROBLEM with this line of thinking is that it ignores two essential facts. First, since 2000 Israel has curtailed Jewish building in Judea and Samaria. Second, Israel kicked every last Jew out of Gaza and handed the ruins of their villages and farms over to Fatah in September 2005.
It is worth noting that the conditions under which the PA received Gaza in 2005 were far better than the conditions under which Israel gained its sovereignty in 1948. The Palestinians were showered with billions of dollars in international aid. No one wanted to do anything but help them make a go of it.
In 1948-49, Israel had to secure its sovereignty by fending off five invading armies while under an international arms embargo. It then had to absorb a million refugees from Arab countries and Holocaust survivors from Europe, with no financial assistance from anyone other than US Jews. Israel developed into an open democracy. Gaza became one of the largest terror bases in the world.
Four months after Israel handed over Gaza - and northern Samaria - the Palestinians turned their backs on statehood altogether when they elected Hamas - an explicitly anti-nationalist, pan-Islamic movement that rejects Palestinians statehood - to lead them.
Hamas's electoral victory, its subsequent ouster of Fatah forces from Gaza and its recent war with Israel tells us another fundamental truth about the sources of the repeated failure of the US's bid for Palestinian statehood. Quite simply, there is no real Palestinian constituency for it.
Even if we were to ignore all of the PLO's involvement in terrorism and assume like Obama, Bush and Clinton that the PLO is willing to live at peace with Israel in exchange for Gaza, Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, what Hamas's control of Gaza and its popularity throughout the Palestinian areas show is that there is no reason to expect that the PLO will remain in control of territory that Israel transfers to its control. So if Israel were to abide by the PLO's latest demand and accept the Friedman/Saudi/Arab/PLO "peace plan," there is no reason to believe that a Jew-free Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem wouldn't then be taken over by Hamas.
Given that there is no chance that Israeli territorial giveaways will lead to a peaceful Palestinian state, the question arises, is there any way to compel American politicians to give up their fantasies of fancy signing ceremonies in the White House Rose Garden that far from bringing peace, engender radicalism, instability and death?
As far as Mitchell is concerned the answer is no. In an address at Tel Aviv University last month, Mitchell said that the US and Israel must cling to the delusion that Palestinian statehood will bring about a new utopia, "for the alternative is unacceptable and should be unthinkable."
So much for "change" in US foreign policy.
caroline@carolineglick.com
__________________________________________
Jerusalem Issue Brief
Institute for Contemporary Affairs
founded jointly with the Wechsler Family Foundation
Vol. 8, No. 19 25 January 2009
The George Mitchell Appointment: The Tactics of
"Symmetrical Negotiations" May Not Work in "Asymmetrical Conflicts"
Lenny Ben-David
* The appointment of former Senator George J. Mitchell as Middle East envoy was warmly received in Washington, Jerusalem, and Ramallah. Yet, the Middle East that Mitchell will confront today is much changed from the one he wrestled with eight years ago as chairman of the 2001 Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee, which was created to investigate the outbreak of the Second Intifada.
* The 2001 Mitchell Report was seen as an "even-handed" document, reflecting President Clinton's directive to "strive to steer clear of...finger-pointing. As a result, the committee attempted - even at the risk of straining credibility - to split the blame for the crisis. The Mitchell Committee could not ignore Palestinian terrorism and the Palestinian use of civilians as human shields. Israel's transgression - and there had to be one to balance Palestinian sins --was its settlement activity. The committee recommended a "freeze[of] all settlement activity, including the 'natural growth' of existing settlements." Israelis objected that the freeze - never mandated in the interim stages of the Oslo Accords - would serve to reward the Palestinians' terrorism.
* The committee was appointed before the 9/11 al-Qaeda attack. Its report came prior to the capture of two weapons-laden ships bound for Gaza - the Santorini in May 2001 and the Karine A in January 2002 - and prior to President Bush's 2004 recognition of "new realities on the ground [in the territories], including already existing major Israeli populations centers." Bush continued: "[I]t is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."
*
The 2001 Mitchell Report was issued years before Hamas' coup in Gaza. Hamas remains dedicated to Israel's destruction. Its alliance with Iran and its affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood mark Hamas as an enemy of moderate Arab regimes. Hamas may yet prove to be a fatal flaw to Mitchell's axiom that "there is no such thing as a conflict that can't be ended."
President Barak Obama's appointment of former Senator George J. Mitchell as Middle East envoy was warmly received in Washington, Jerusalem, and Ramallah. Over the years, Mitchell, a respected judge, legislator and negotiator, has been tasked by presidents to broker a peace agreement in Northern Ireland, explore paths to peace in the Middle East, and even chair a commission to investigate steroid use in Major League Baseball. "The Conciliator" was the apt moniker given to Mitchell by one British newspaper.
The Middle East that Mitchell will confront today is much changed from the one he wrestled with eight years ago. And the parties to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict bear little resemblance to the antagonists he dealt with in Northern Ireland.
Mitchell chaired the "Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee," mandated by a Sharm el-Sheikh summit in October 2000 to investigate the outbreak of the "al-Aqsa Intifada" one month earlier and to recommend ways to stop the violence. His committee, which also included Senator Warren Rudman and three European statesmen, presented its findings to the new Bush administration on April 30, 2001. Its recommendations were then incorporated into the April 2003 "Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," drafted by the Quartet of the UN, European Union, United States, and Russia.
In 2003, Mitchell distilled his vision of the Middle East conflict: "Palestinians will never achieve a state if Israel does not have security. Israel will never get sustainable security if the Palestinians don't have a state." Based on his experience in reaching the Northern Ireland "Good Friday" peace agreement, Mitchell expressed his belief in 2003 and again in December 2008 that "there is no such thing as a conflict that can't be ended."1
The Mitchell Report was seen as an "even-handed" document, reflecting the fact that the committee was directed by President Clinton to "strive to steer clear of any step that will intensify mutual blame and finger-pointing between the parties..The Committee should not become a divisive force or a focal point for blame and recrimination but rather should serve to forestall violence and confrontation and provide lessons for the future. This should not be a tribunal whose purpose is to determine the guilt or innocence of individuals or of the parties."2
As a result, the committee attempted - even at the risk of straining credibility - to split the blame for the crisis. "Some Israelis appear not to comprehend the humiliation and frustration that Palestinians must endure every day as a result of living with the continuing effects of occupation," the report wrote. "Some Palestinians appear not to comprehend the extent to which terrorism creates fear among the Israeli people and undermines their belief in the possibility of co-existence."
Humiliation is rarely fatal; terrorism usually is.
While the Mitchell Report did not blame Israeli Prime Minister Sharon for the outbreak of the Second Intifada,3 nonetheless, it sought to evenhandedly spread the responsibility for the violence, ignoring the evidence of Palestinian incitement.In response to Israeli claims that the violence was planned by Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, the committee declared, "[We were not] provided with persuasive evidence that the PA planned the uprising. Accordingly, we have no basis on which to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the PA to initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity."
Subsequently, the real causes for the violence were exposed by a Palestinian minister in Yassir Arafat's government. Palestinian Communications Minister 'Imad al-Falujiadmitted in the Lebanese daily al-Safir on March 3, 2001: "Whoever thinks the Intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon's visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque is wrong....This Intifada was planned in advance, ever since President Arafat's return from the Camp David negotiations." Even earlier, al-Faluji had explained that the Intifada was initiated as the result of a strategic decision made by the Palestinians.4
The Intifada's premeditation is seen in the training and indoctrination of 25,000 Palestinian youth in summer camps even while Arafat was engaged in negotiations at Camp David.5
The Mitchell Report's Recommendations
In its recommendations to the two sides, the Mitchell Committee could not ignore Palestinian terrorism and the Palestinian use of civilians as human shields. It issued these recommendations:
The PA should make clear through concrete action to Palestinians and Israelis alike that terrorism is reprehensible and unacceptable, and that the PA will make a 100 percent effort to prevent terrorist operations and to punish perpetrators. This effort should include immediate steps to apprehend and incarcerate terrorists operating within the PA's jurisdiction. The PA should prevent gunmen from using Palestinian populated areas to fire upon Israeli populated areas and IDF positions. This tactic places civilians on both sides at unnecessary risk.
According to the committee, Israel's transgression - and there had to be one to balance Palestinian sins - was its settlement activity. "The Government of Israel," the committee recommended, "should freeze all settlement activity, including the 'natural growth' of existing settlements."
Two years later, the Roadmap would cite the Mitchell Report in its call for a settlement freeze in Phase I of the Roadmap. "Israel also freezes all settlement activity," the drafters instructed, "consistent with the Mitchell Report" (emphasis added).
Israelis objected to the draconian call for a freeze. Sharon asked Secretary of State Colin Powell, "What do you want, for a pregnant woman to have an abortion just because she is a settler?"6 Moreover, Israelis objected, the freeze - never mandated in the interim stages of the Oslo Accords - would serve to reward the Palestinians' terrorism.
A Changed World Since the Mitchell Report
The Mitchell Report was drafted relatively early in the Palestinian Intifada, when it was believed by some that the Palestinians' violent outbreak was actually a spontaneous reaction to Prime Minister Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000. As mentioned above, the world today knows otherwise.
The committee was appointed before the al-Qaeda attack on September 11, 2001, and the revelation of hostile international Islamic terrorism. The report was issued prior to the capture of two weapons-laden ships bound for Gaza - the Santorini in May 2001 and the Karine A in January 2002 - and the surfacing of proof of the grand battle Arafat was planning against Israel. (The Grad rockets, explosives, mortars and anti-tank weapons on the ships would find their way into Hamas arsenals in Gaza five years later through tunnels from the Sinai Peninsula.)
By 2003, George Mitchell was refocusing his attention on the threat of terrorism. In a commencement address at MIT in June 2003, he stated, "Our committee's report was very tough on terrorism. We branded it morally reprehensible and unacceptable. It is also politically counterproductive. It will not achieve its objective. To the contrary, with each suicide bomb attack, the prospect of a Palestinian state is delayed. Such tactics also are destructive of Palestinian civil society and the reputation of the Palestinian people throughout the world."
Nevertheless, Mitchell repeated at MIT his opposition to Israel's settlement policies, in keeping with the "long-standing opposition to the government of Israel's policies and practices regarding settlements. That U.S. opposition," he continued, "has been consistent through the Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush administrations; just as consistent has been the continued settlement activity by the Israeli government."
The U.S. position toward settlements, of course, underwent a major change under President Bush in April 2004 when he assured Prime Minister Sharon: "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."7 The universal interpretation of Bush's letter was that settlement blocs would remain under Israeli sovereignty.
Lastly, the 2001 Mitchell Report was issued years before Hamas' coup in Gaza and its open fealty to Iran. Hamas remains dedicated to Israel's destruction. Its alliance with Iran and its affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood mark Hamas as an enemy of moderate Arab regimes such as Egypt and Jordan. As such, Hamas cannot be compared to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which wanted to throw the British out of Northern Ireland but had no aspirations to capture London. Moreover, while the IRA had limited international contacts, it was not a part of a European-wide network and was not backed by a petrodollar-rich, oil-producing country like Iran, which was also on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons, and thereby emboldening its regional surrogates. In short, Mitchell will be conducting diplomacy under completely different strategic circumstances than he did in the 1990s. Indeed, Hamas may prove to be a fatal flaw to Mitchell's axiom that "there is no such thing as a conflict that can't be ended."
* * *
Notes
1. Commencement address at MIT, Cambridge, Mass., June 9, 2003.
2. Mitchell Report, April 30, 2002.
3. Ibid. "The Sharon visit did not cause the 'Al-Aqsa Intifada.' But it was poorly timed and the provocative effect should have been foreseen; indeed, it was foreseen by those who urged that the visit be prohibited. More significant were the events that followed: The decision of the Israeli police on September 29 to use lethal means against the Palestinian demonstrators; and the subsequent failure, as noted above, of either party to exercise restraint."
4. Al-Ayyam, December 6, 2000.
5. New York Times, August 3, 2000.
6. BBC News, May 12, 2003.
7. Letter from President Bush to Prime Minister Sharon, April 14, 2004.
* *
It is a fundamental truth that while history always repeats itself, it almost never repeats itself precisely. There is always a measure of newness to events that allows otherwise intelligent people to repeat the mistakes of their forebears without looking completely ridiculous. Given this, it is hard to believe that with the advent of the Obama administration, we are seeing history repeat itself with nearly unheard of exactness. US President Barack Obama's reported intention of appointing former Sen. George Mitchell as his envoy for the so-called Palestinian-Israeli peace process will provide us with a spectacle of an unvarnished repeat of history.
In December 2000, outgoing president Bill Clinton appointed Mitchell to advise him on how to reignite the "peace process" after the Palestinians rejected statehood and launched their terror war against Israel in September 2000. Mitchell presented his findings to Clinton's successor, George W. Bush, in April 2001.
Mitchell asserted that Israel and the Palestinians were equally to blame for the Palestinian terror war against Israelis. He recommended that Israel end all Jewish construction outside the 1949 armistice lines, and stop fighting Palestinian terrorists.
As for the Palestinians, Mitchell said they had to make a "100 percent effort" to prevent the terror that they themselves were carrying out. This basic demand was nothing new. It formed the basis of the Clinton administration's nod-nod-wink-wink treatment of Palestinian terrorism since the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994.
By insisting that the PLO make a "100 percent effort," to quell the terror it was enabling, the Clinton administration gave the Palestinians built-in immunity from responsibility. Every time that his terrorists struck, Yasser Arafat claimed that their attacks had nothing to do with him. He was making a "100 percent effort" to stop the attacks, after all.
After getting Arafat off the hook, the Clinton administration proceeded to blame Israel. If Israel had just given up more land, or forced Jews from their homes, or given the PLO more money, Arafat could have saved the lives of his victims.
Mitchell's plan, although supported by then-secretary of state Colin Powell, was never adopted by Bush because at the time, terrorists were massacring Israelis every day. It would have been politically unwise for Bush to accept a plan that asserted moral equivalence between Israel and the PLO when rescue workers were scraping the body parts of Israeli children off the walls of bombed out pizzerias and bar mitzva parties.
But while his eponymous plan was rejected, its substance, which was based on the Clinton Plan, formed the basis of the Tenet Plan, the road map plan and the Annapolis Plan. And now, Mitchell is about to return to Israel, at the start of yet another presidential administration to offer us his plan again.
MITCHELL, OF COURSE, is not the only one repeating the past. His boss, Barack Obama, is about to repeat the failures his immediate predecessors. Like Clinton and Bush, Obama is making the establishment of a Palestinian state the centerpiece of his foreign policy agenda.
Obama made this clear his first hour on the job. On Wednesday at 8 a.m., Obama made his first phone call to a foreign leader. He called PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. During their conversation, Obama pledged his commitment to Palestinian statehood.
Fatah wasted no time responding to Obama's extraordinary gesture. On Wednesday afternoon Abbas convened the PLO's Executive Committee in Ramallah and the body announced that future negotiations with Israel will have to be based on new preconditions. As far as the PLO is concerned, with Obama firmly in its corner, it can force Israel to its knees.
And so, the PLO is now uninterested in the agreements it reached with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. For Israel to enjoy the privilege of negotiating with the PLO, it must first announce its willingness to expel all the 500,000 or so Israeli Jews who live in Judea, Samaria and the neighborhoods in east, south and north Jerusalem built since 1967, as well as in the Old City, and then hand the areas over, lock, stock and barrel, to the PLO.
This new PLO "plan" itself is nothing new. It is simply a restatement of the Arab "peace plan," which is just a renamed Saudi "peace plan," which was just a renamed Tom Friedman column in The New York Times. And the Friedman plan is one that no Israeli leader in his right mind can accept. So by making this their precondition for negotiations, the PLO is doing what it did in 2000. It is rejecting statehood in favor of continued war with Israel.
What is most remarkable about the new administration's embrace of its predecessors' failed policy is how uncontroversial this policy is in Washington. It is hard to come up with another example of a policy that has failed so often and so violently that has enjoyed the support of both American political parties. Indeed, it is hard to think of a successful policy that ever enjoyed such broad support.
Apparently, no one in positions of power in Washington has stopped to consider why it is that in spite of the fervent backing of presidents Clinton and Bush, there is still no Palestinian state.
SINCE ISRAEL recognized the PLO as the "sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" in 1993, the US and Israel have based their plans for peace on their assumption that the PLO is interested in making peace. And they have based their plans for making peace by establishing a Palestinian state on the assumption that the Palestinians are interested in statehood. Yet over the past 15 years it has become abundantly clear that neither of these assumptions is correct.
In spite of massive political, economic and military support by the US, Israel and Europe, the PLO has never made any significant moves to foster peaceful relations between Israel and the Palestinians. Not only did the PLO-led PA spend the six years between 1994 and 2000, in which it was supposedly making peace with Israel, indoctrinating Palestinian society to hate Jews and seek their destruction through jihadist-inspired terrorism. It also cultivated close relations with Iran and other rogue regimes and terror groups.
Many are quick to claim that these misbehaviors were simply a consequence of Arafat's personal radicalism. Under Abbas, it is argued, the PLO is much more moderate. But this assertion strains credulity. As The Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh reported on Monday, Fatah forces today boast that their terror cells in Gaza took active part in Hamas's missile offensive against Israel. Fatah's Aksa Martyrs terror cells claim that during Operation Cast Lead, its terrorists shot 137 rockets and mortar shells at Israel.
Abbas's supporters in the US and Israel claim that these Fatah members acted as they did because they are living under Hamas rule. They would be far more moderate if they were under Fatah rule. But this, too, doesn't ring true.
From 2000 through June 2007, when Hamas ousted Fatah forces from Gaza, most of the weapons smuggling operations in Gaza were carried out by Fatah. Then, too, most of the rockets and mortar shells fired at Israel were fired by Fatah forces. Likewise, most of the suicide bombers deployed from Judea and Samaria were members of Fatah.
The likes of Madeleine Albright, Powell and Condoleezza Rice claimed that Fatah's collusion with Hamas and Islamic Jihad and its leading role in terror was a consequence of insufficient Israeli support for Arafat and later for Abbas. If Israel had kicked out the Jews of Gaza earlier, or if it had removed its roadblocks and expelled Jews from their homes in Judea and Samaria, or if had prevented all Jewish construction beyond the 1949 armistice lines, then Arafat and later Abbas would have been more popular and able to rein in their own terror forces. (Incidentally, those same forces receive their salaries from the PA, which itself is funded by the US and Israel.)
THE PROBLEM with this line of thinking is that it ignores two essential facts. First, since 2000 Israel has curtailed Jewish building in Judea and Samaria. Second, Israel kicked every last Jew out of Gaza and handed the ruins of their villages and farms over to Fatah in September 2005.
It is worth noting that the conditions under which the PA received Gaza in 2005 were far better than the conditions under which Israel gained its sovereignty in 1948. The Palestinians were showered with billions of dollars in international aid. No one wanted to do anything but help them make a go of it.
In 1948-49, Israel had to secure its sovereignty by fending off five invading armies while under an international arms embargo. It then had to absorb a million refugees from Arab countries and Holocaust survivors from Europe, with no financial assistance from anyone other than US Jews. Israel developed into an open democracy. Gaza became one of the largest terror bases in the world.
Four months after Israel handed over Gaza - and northern Samaria - the Palestinians turned their backs on statehood altogether when they elected Hamas - an explicitly anti-nationalist, pan-Islamic movement that rejects Palestinians statehood - to lead them.
Hamas's electoral victory, its subsequent ouster of Fatah forces from Gaza and its recent war with Israel tells us another fundamental truth about the sources of the repeated failure of the US's bid for Palestinian statehood. Quite simply, there is no real Palestinian constituency for it.
Even if we were to ignore all of the PLO's involvement in terrorism and assume like Obama, Bush and Clinton that the PLO is willing to live at peace with Israel in exchange for Gaza, Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, what Hamas's control of Gaza and its popularity throughout the Palestinian areas show is that there is no reason to expect that the PLO will remain in control of territory that Israel transfers to its control. So if Israel were to abide by the PLO's latest demand and accept the Friedman/Saudi/Arab/PLO "peace plan," there is no reason to believe that a Jew-free Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem wouldn't then be taken over by Hamas.
Given that there is no chance that Israeli territorial giveaways will lead to a peaceful Palestinian state, the question arises, is there any way to compel American politicians to give up their fantasies of fancy signing ceremonies in the White House Rose Garden that far from bringing peace, engender radicalism, instability and death?
As far as Mitchell is concerned the answer is no. In an address at Tel Aviv University last month, Mitchell said that the US and Israel must cling to the delusion that Palestinian statehood will bring about a new utopia, "for the alternative is unacceptable and should be unthinkable."
So much for "change" in US foreign policy.
caroline@carolineglick.com
__________________________________________
Jerusalem Issue Brief
Institute for Contemporary Affairs
founded jointly with the Wechsler Family Foundation
Vol. 8, No. 19 25 January 2009
The George Mitchell Appointment: The Tactics of
"Symmetrical Negotiations" May Not Work in "Asymmetrical Conflicts"
Lenny Ben-David
* The appointment of former Senator George J. Mitchell as Middle East envoy was warmly received in Washington, Jerusalem, and Ramallah. Yet, the Middle East that Mitchell will confront today is much changed from the one he wrestled with eight years ago as chairman of the 2001 Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee, which was created to investigate the outbreak of the Second Intifada.
* The 2001 Mitchell Report was seen as an "even-handed" document, reflecting President Clinton's directive to "strive to steer clear of...finger-pointing. As a result, the committee attempted - even at the risk of straining credibility - to split the blame for the crisis. The Mitchell Committee could not ignore Palestinian terrorism and the Palestinian use of civilians as human shields. Israel's transgression - and there had to be one to balance Palestinian sins --was its settlement activity. The committee recommended a "freeze[of] all settlement activity, including the 'natural growth' of existing settlements." Israelis objected that the freeze - never mandated in the interim stages of the Oslo Accords - would serve to reward the Palestinians' terrorism.
* The committee was appointed before the 9/11 al-Qaeda attack. Its report came prior to the capture of two weapons-laden ships bound for Gaza - the Santorini in May 2001 and the Karine A in January 2002 - and prior to President Bush's 2004 recognition of "new realities on the ground [in the territories], including already existing major Israeli populations centers." Bush continued: "[I]t is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."
*
The 2001 Mitchell Report was issued years before Hamas' coup in Gaza. Hamas remains dedicated to Israel's destruction. Its alliance with Iran and its affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood mark Hamas as an enemy of moderate Arab regimes. Hamas may yet prove to be a fatal flaw to Mitchell's axiom that "there is no such thing as a conflict that can't be ended."
President Barak Obama's appointment of former Senator George J. Mitchell as Middle East envoy was warmly received in Washington, Jerusalem, and Ramallah. Over the years, Mitchell, a respected judge, legislator and negotiator, has been tasked by presidents to broker a peace agreement in Northern Ireland, explore paths to peace in the Middle East, and even chair a commission to investigate steroid use in Major League Baseball. "The Conciliator" was the apt moniker given to Mitchell by one British newspaper.
The Middle East that Mitchell will confront today is much changed from the one he wrestled with eight years ago. And the parties to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict bear little resemblance to the antagonists he dealt with in Northern Ireland.
Mitchell chaired the "Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee," mandated by a Sharm el-Sheikh summit in October 2000 to investigate the outbreak of the "al-Aqsa Intifada" one month earlier and to recommend ways to stop the violence. His committee, which also included Senator Warren Rudman and three European statesmen, presented its findings to the new Bush administration on April 30, 2001. Its recommendations were then incorporated into the April 2003 "Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," drafted by the Quartet of the UN, European Union, United States, and Russia.
In 2003, Mitchell distilled his vision of the Middle East conflict: "Palestinians will never achieve a state if Israel does not have security. Israel will never get sustainable security if the Palestinians don't have a state." Based on his experience in reaching the Northern Ireland "Good Friday" peace agreement, Mitchell expressed his belief in 2003 and again in December 2008 that "there is no such thing as a conflict that can't be ended."1
The Mitchell Report was seen as an "even-handed" document, reflecting the fact that the committee was directed by President Clinton to "strive to steer clear of any step that will intensify mutual blame and finger-pointing between the parties..The Committee should not become a divisive force or a focal point for blame and recrimination but rather should serve to forestall violence and confrontation and provide lessons for the future. This should not be a tribunal whose purpose is to determine the guilt or innocence of individuals or of the parties."2
As a result, the committee attempted - even at the risk of straining credibility - to split the blame for the crisis. "Some Israelis appear not to comprehend the humiliation and frustration that Palestinians must endure every day as a result of living with the continuing effects of occupation," the report wrote. "Some Palestinians appear not to comprehend the extent to which terrorism creates fear among the Israeli people and undermines their belief in the possibility of co-existence."
Humiliation is rarely fatal; terrorism usually is.
While the Mitchell Report did not blame Israeli Prime Minister Sharon for the outbreak of the Second Intifada,3 nonetheless, it sought to evenhandedly spread the responsibility for the violence, ignoring the evidence of Palestinian incitement.In response to Israeli claims that the violence was planned by Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, the committee declared, "[We were not] provided with persuasive evidence that the PA planned the uprising. Accordingly, we have no basis on which to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the PA to initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity."
Subsequently, the real causes for the violence were exposed by a Palestinian minister in Yassir Arafat's government. Palestinian Communications Minister 'Imad al-Falujiadmitted in the Lebanese daily al-Safir on March 3, 2001: "Whoever thinks the Intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon's visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque is wrong....This Intifada was planned in advance, ever since President Arafat's return from the Camp David negotiations." Even earlier, al-Faluji had explained that the Intifada was initiated as the result of a strategic decision made by the Palestinians.4
The Intifada's premeditation is seen in the training and indoctrination of 25,000 Palestinian youth in summer camps even while Arafat was engaged in negotiations at Camp David.5
The Mitchell Report's Recommendations
In its recommendations to the two sides, the Mitchell Committee could not ignore Palestinian terrorism and the Palestinian use of civilians as human shields. It issued these recommendations:
The PA should make clear through concrete action to Palestinians and Israelis alike that terrorism is reprehensible and unacceptable, and that the PA will make a 100 percent effort to prevent terrorist operations and to punish perpetrators. This effort should include immediate steps to apprehend and incarcerate terrorists operating within the PA's jurisdiction. The PA should prevent gunmen from using Palestinian populated areas to fire upon Israeli populated areas and IDF positions. This tactic places civilians on both sides at unnecessary risk.
According to the committee, Israel's transgression - and there had to be one to balance Palestinian sins - was its settlement activity. "The Government of Israel," the committee recommended, "should freeze all settlement activity, including the 'natural growth' of existing settlements."
Two years later, the Roadmap would cite the Mitchell Report in its call for a settlement freeze in Phase I of the Roadmap. "Israel also freezes all settlement activity," the drafters instructed, "consistent with the Mitchell Report" (emphasis added).
Israelis objected to the draconian call for a freeze. Sharon asked Secretary of State Colin Powell, "What do you want, for a pregnant woman to have an abortion just because she is a settler?"6 Moreover, Israelis objected, the freeze - never mandated in the interim stages of the Oslo Accords - would serve to reward the Palestinians' terrorism.
A Changed World Since the Mitchell Report
The Mitchell Report was drafted relatively early in the Palestinian Intifada, when it was believed by some that the Palestinians' violent outbreak was actually a spontaneous reaction to Prime Minister Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000. As mentioned above, the world today knows otherwise.
The committee was appointed before the al-Qaeda attack on September 11, 2001, and the revelation of hostile international Islamic terrorism. The report was issued prior to the capture of two weapons-laden ships bound for Gaza - the Santorini in May 2001 and the Karine A in January 2002 - and the surfacing of proof of the grand battle Arafat was planning against Israel. (The Grad rockets, explosives, mortars and anti-tank weapons on the ships would find their way into Hamas arsenals in Gaza five years later through tunnels from the Sinai Peninsula.)
By 2003, George Mitchell was refocusing his attention on the threat of terrorism. In a commencement address at MIT in June 2003, he stated, "Our committee's report was very tough on terrorism. We branded it morally reprehensible and unacceptable. It is also politically counterproductive. It will not achieve its objective. To the contrary, with each suicide bomb attack, the prospect of a Palestinian state is delayed. Such tactics also are destructive of Palestinian civil society and the reputation of the Palestinian people throughout the world."
Nevertheless, Mitchell repeated at MIT his opposition to Israel's settlement policies, in keeping with the "long-standing opposition to the government of Israel's policies and practices regarding settlements. That U.S. opposition," he continued, "has been consistent through the Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush administrations; just as consistent has been the continued settlement activity by the Israeli government."
The U.S. position toward settlements, of course, underwent a major change under President Bush in April 2004 when he assured Prime Minister Sharon: "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."7 The universal interpretation of Bush's letter was that settlement blocs would remain under Israeli sovereignty.
Lastly, the 2001 Mitchell Report was issued years before Hamas' coup in Gaza and its open fealty to Iran. Hamas remains dedicated to Israel's destruction. Its alliance with Iran and its affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood mark Hamas as an enemy of moderate Arab regimes such as Egypt and Jordan. As such, Hamas cannot be compared to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which wanted to throw the British out of Northern Ireland but had no aspirations to capture London. Moreover, while the IRA had limited international contacts, it was not a part of a European-wide network and was not backed by a petrodollar-rich, oil-producing country like Iran, which was also on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons, and thereby emboldening its regional surrogates. In short, Mitchell will be conducting diplomacy under completely different strategic circumstances than he did in the 1990s. Indeed, Hamas may prove to be a fatal flaw to Mitchell's axiom that "there is no such thing as a conflict that can't be ended."
* * *
Notes
1. Commencement address at MIT, Cambridge, Mass., June 9, 2003.
2. Mitchell Report, April 30, 2002.
3. Ibid. "The Sharon visit did not cause the 'Al-Aqsa Intifada.' But it was poorly timed and the provocative effect should have been foreseen; indeed, it was foreseen by those who urged that the visit be prohibited. More significant were the events that followed: The decision of the Israeli police on September 29 to use lethal means against the Palestinian demonstrators; and the subsequent failure, as noted above, of either party to exercise restraint."
4. Al-Ayyam, December 6, 2000.
5. New York Times, August 3, 2000.
6. BBC News, May 12, 2003.
7. Letter from President Bush to Prime Minister Sharon, April 14, 2004.
* *
Solving the "Palestinian Problem"
Little-noticed among those decrying Israel's 'imprisonment' of Gaza, the Egyptians - who man the southern border of the strip - are just-as-willing wardens, having (mostly) sealed off the Gaza-Egyptian border to their Arabs brothers and sisters in distress. In a recent and creative article, Daniel Pipes advocates a more hands-on Egyptian approach: reincorporating the territory into Egypt itself. In this way, Israel could wash its hands of Gaza and donate it back from whence it came. Solving the "Palestinian Problem" by Daniel Pipes (Jerusalem Post) Jan. 7, 2009
Israel's war against Hamas brings up the old quandary: What to do about the Palestinians? Western states, including Israel, need to set goals to figure out their policy toward the West Bank and Gaza.
Let's first review what we know does not and cannot work:
* Israeli control. Neither side wishes to continue the situation that began in 1967, when the Israel Defense Forces took control of a population that is religiously, culturally, economically, and politically different and hostile.
* A Palestinian state. The 1993 Oslo Accords began this process but a toxic brew of anarchy, ideological extremism, antisemitism, jihadism, and warlordism led to complete Palestinian failure.
* A binational state: Given the two populations' mutual antipathy, the prospect of a combined Israel-Palestine (what Muammar al-Qaddafi calls "Israstine") is as absurd as it seems.
Excluding these three prospects leaves only one practical approach, that which worked tolerably well in the period 1948-67:
* Shared Jordanian-Egyptian rule: Amman rules the West Bank and Cairo runs Gaza.
To be sure, this back-to-the-future approach inspires little enthusiasm. Not only was Jordanian-Egyptian rule undistinguished but resurrecting this arrangement will frustrate Palestinian impulses, be they nationalist or Islamist. Further, Cairo never wanted Gaza and has vehemently rejected its return. Accordingly, one academic analyst dismisses this idea "an elusive fantasy that can only obscure real and difficult choices."
It is not. The failures of Yasir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, of the Palestinian Authority and the "peace process," have prompted rethinking in Amman and Jerusalem. Indeed, the Christian Science Monitor's Ilene R. Prusher found already in 2007 that the idea of a West Bank-Jordan confederation "seems to be gaining traction on both sides of the Jordan River."
The Jordanian government, which enthusiastically annexed the West Bank in 1950 and abandoned its claims only under duress in 1988, shows signs of wanting to return. Dan Diker and Pinchas Inbari documented for the Middle East Quarterly in 2006 how the PA's "failure to assert control and become a politically viable entity has caused Amman to reconsider whether a hands-off strategy toward the West Bank is in its best interests." Israeli officialdom has also showed itself open to this idea, occasionally calling for Jordanian troops to enter the West Bank.
Despairing of self-rule, some Palestinians welcome the Jordanian option. An unnamed senior PA official told Diker and Inbari that that a form of federation or confederation with Jordan offers "the only reasonable, stable, long-term solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict." Hanna Seniora opined that "The current weakened prospects for a two-state solution forces us to revisit the possibility of a confederation with Jordan." The New York Times' Hassan M. Fattah quotes a Palestinian in Jordan: "Everything has been ruined for us - we've been fighting for 60 years and nothing is left. It would be better if Jordan ran things in Palestine, if King Abdullah could take control of the West Bank."
Nor is this just talk: Diker and Inbari report that back-channel PA-Jordan negotiations in 2003-04 "resulted in an agreement in principle to send 30,000 Badr Force members," to the West Bank.
And while Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak announced a year ago that "Gaza is not part of Egypt, nor will it ever be," his is hardly the last word. First, Mubarak notwithstanding, Egyptians overwhelmingly want a strong tie to Gaza; Hamas concurs; and Israeli leaders sometimes agree. So the basis for an overhaul in policy exists.
Secondly, Gaza is arguably more a part of Egypt than of "Palestine." During most of the Islamic period, it was either controlled by Cairo or part of Egypt administratively. Gazan colloquial Arabic is identical to what Egyptians living in Sinai speak. Economically, Gaza has most connections to Egypt. Hamas itself derives from the Muslim Brethren, an Egyptian organization. Is it time to think of Gazans as Egyptians?
Thirdly, Jerusalem could out-maneuver Mubarak. Were it to announce a date when it ends the provisioning of all water, electricity, food, medicine, and other trade, plus accept enhanced Egyptian security in Gaza, Cairo would have to take responsibility for Gaza. Among other advantages, this would make it accountable for Gazan security, finally putting an end to the thousands of Hamas rocket and mortar assaults.
The Jordan-Egypt option quickens no pulse, but that may be its value. It offers a uniquely sober way to solve the "Palestinian problem."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jan. 7, 2009 update: The National Post cleverly dubs my plan (in its title to this article) the "back-to-the-future option," but I like best the name bestowed on it by blogger Mary P. Madigan: "the no-state solution." Perfect.
For an extended discussion of this topic, see my weblog begun in 2005, "The West Bank to Jordan, Gaza to Egypt."
Jan. 8, 2009 update: Some readers interpret this column as an endorsement of Jordan-is-Palestine - the idea that Palestinians can have Jordan as their state. Two responses:
1. I argued at length against Jordan-is-Palestine back when that was a live issue. See my full-scale article on this issue from 1988 at "Is Jordan Palestine?" and a shorter one from two years later at "President Arafat? [and the Jordan-Is-Palestine Issue]." My views have not changed in the interim decades - I remain opposed to this gambit for all the reasons expressed there.
2. My idea in the above column is that Jordan - the Hashemites in particular - rule the Palestinians, not the reverse. And the same goes for Egypt, obviously. Call it, if you will, Palestine-is-Jordan.
Other readers have asked what implications the Jordan-Egypt scenario has for Israeilis living on the West Bank - specifically, does it mean their forced evacuation as happened to their counterparts in Gaza? No, and again two points:
1. The boundaries between Israel and the West Bank are more fluid than those between Israel and Gaza. I assume they would not return to those that existed in 1967.
2. My idea concerns the Israeli government not ruling the Palestinian population; it says nothing about control of territory.
Israel's war against Hamas brings up the old quandary: What to do about the Palestinians? Western states, including Israel, need to set goals to figure out their policy toward the West Bank and Gaza.
Let's first review what we know does not and cannot work:
* Israeli control. Neither side wishes to continue the situation that began in 1967, when the Israel Defense Forces took control of a population that is religiously, culturally, economically, and politically different and hostile.
* A Palestinian state. The 1993 Oslo Accords began this process but a toxic brew of anarchy, ideological extremism, antisemitism, jihadism, and warlordism led to complete Palestinian failure.
* A binational state: Given the two populations' mutual antipathy, the prospect of a combined Israel-Palestine (what Muammar al-Qaddafi calls "Israstine") is as absurd as it seems.
Excluding these three prospects leaves only one practical approach, that which worked tolerably well in the period 1948-67:
* Shared Jordanian-Egyptian rule: Amman rules the West Bank and Cairo runs Gaza.
To be sure, this back-to-the-future approach inspires little enthusiasm. Not only was Jordanian-Egyptian rule undistinguished but resurrecting this arrangement will frustrate Palestinian impulses, be they nationalist or Islamist. Further, Cairo never wanted Gaza and has vehemently rejected its return. Accordingly, one academic analyst dismisses this idea "an elusive fantasy that can only obscure real and difficult choices."
It is not. The failures of Yasir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, of the Palestinian Authority and the "peace process," have prompted rethinking in Amman and Jerusalem. Indeed, the Christian Science Monitor's Ilene R. Prusher found already in 2007 that the idea of a West Bank-Jordan confederation "seems to be gaining traction on both sides of the Jordan River."
The Jordanian government, which enthusiastically annexed the West Bank in 1950 and abandoned its claims only under duress in 1988, shows signs of wanting to return. Dan Diker and Pinchas Inbari documented for the Middle East Quarterly in 2006 how the PA's "failure to assert control and become a politically viable entity has caused Amman to reconsider whether a hands-off strategy toward the West Bank is in its best interests." Israeli officialdom has also showed itself open to this idea, occasionally calling for Jordanian troops to enter the West Bank.
Despairing of self-rule, some Palestinians welcome the Jordanian option. An unnamed senior PA official told Diker and Inbari that that a form of federation or confederation with Jordan offers "the only reasonable, stable, long-term solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict." Hanna Seniora opined that "The current weakened prospects for a two-state solution forces us to revisit the possibility of a confederation with Jordan." The New York Times' Hassan M. Fattah quotes a Palestinian in Jordan: "Everything has been ruined for us - we've been fighting for 60 years and nothing is left. It would be better if Jordan ran things in Palestine, if King Abdullah could take control of the West Bank."
Nor is this just talk: Diker and Inbari report that back-channel PA-Jordan negotiations in 2003-04 "resulted in an agreement in principle to send 30,000 Badr Force members," to the West Bank.
And while Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak announced a year ago that "Gaza is not part of Egypt, nor will it ever be," his is hardly the last word. First, Mubarak notwithstanding, Egyptians overwhelmingly want a strong tie to Gaza; Hamas concurs; and Israeli leaders sometimes agree. So the basis for an overhaul in policy exists.
Secondly, Gaza is arguably more a part of Egypt than of "Palestine." During most of the Islamic period, it was either controlled by Cairo or part of Egypt administratively. Gazan colloquial Arabic is identical to what Egyptians living in Sinai speak. Economically, Gaza has most connections to Egypt. Hamas itself derives from the Muslim Brethren, an Egyptian organization. Is it time to think of Gazans as Egyptians?
Thirdly, Jerusalem could out-maneuver Mubarak. Were it to announce a date when it ends the provisioning of all water, electricity, food, medicine, and other trade, plus accept enhanced Egyptian security in Gaza, Cairo would have to take responsibility for Gaza. Among other advantages, this would make it accountable for Gazan security, finally putting an end to the thousands of Hamas rocket and mortar assaults.
The Jordan-Egypt option quickens no pulse, but that may be its value. It offers a uniquely sober way to solve the "Palestinian problem."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jan. 7, 2009 update: The National Post cleverly dubs my plan (in its title to this article) the "back-to-the-future option," but I like best the name bestowed on it by blogger Mary P. Madigan: "the no-state solution." Perfect.
For an extended discussion of this topic, see my weblog begun in 2005, "The West Bank to Jordan, Gaza to Egypt."
Jan. 8, 2009 update: Some readers interpret this column as an endorsement of Jordan-is-Palestine - the idea that Palestinians can have Jordan as their state. Two responses:
1. I argued at length against Jordan-is-Palestine back when that was a live issue. See my full-scale article on this issue from 1988 at "Is Jordan Palestine?" and a shorter one from two years later at "President Arafat? [and the Jordan-Is-Palestine Issue]." My views have not changed in the interim decades - I remain opposed to this gambit for all the reasons expressed there.
2. My idea in the above column is that Jordan - the Hashemites in particular - rule the Palestinians, not the reverse. And the same goes for Egypt, obviously. Call it, if you will, Palestine-is-Jordan.
Other readers have asked what implications the Jordan-Egypt scenario has for Israeilis living on the West Bank - specifically, does it mean their forced evacuation as happened to their counterparts in Gaza? No, and again two points:
1. The boundaries between Israel and the West Bank are more fluid than those between Israel and Gaza. I assume they would not return to those that existed in 1967.
2. My idea concerns the Israeli government not ruling the Palestinian population; it says nothing about control of territory.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Top-Echelon Corruption Discussed
Hillel Fendel Top-Echelon Corruption Discussed
Former Public Security Minister Dr. Uzi Landau proposes adding 10,000 policemen to the national force over the next five years, while a former Police Investigation Department chief defends the police department and says government corruption is rampant. Participating in the 6th Jerusalem Conference’s session on “Israel’s War Against Corruption and Crime,” Dr. Landau said that crime in Israel in 2005 cost the country nearly 14 billion shekels – “and this number continues to rise.” The costs, he said, stem from public corruption, cheating the National Insurance Institute out of disability and other payments, Mafia-like protection money, crime families, and more.
Email readers, click here to watch Dr. Landau interview
“If we empower the police to deal with the issues,” Landau feels, “the police can become not only cost-effective, but even a springboard for economic growth.”
Landau, a long-time Likud member, is now running in the #2 slot on the Yisrael Beiteinu party list - whose head, Avigdor Lieberman, is the target of a long-running police investigation regarding campaign funding irregularities. Seven people close to Lieberman were called in for questioning this week - prompting protests against "election tampering" by the police.
Landau said his goal is to make the restoration of personal safety a top priority for the new government – which Yisrael Beiteinu hopes to join when Binyamin Netanyahu, who is favored to win the elections, forms it. Landau proposes giving the Prime Minister direct responsibility over the Public Security Ministry, aided by a team of professionals, thus lending it the backing of his prestige and authority.
Landau also proposes adding 2,000 policemen in each of the next five years. In addition, he says, the police department must be upgraded professionally and technologically, and Israel must build a new prison in each of the next three years. He is pleased with the move towards biometric ID – as opposed to today’s ID cards – in helping to fight crime.
Chief Investigator Moshe Mizrachi
Landau was preceded at the Conference session by Moshe Mizrachi, who headed the Investigations Department of the Israel Police until November 2004. Mizrachi was fired for having been what was described at the time as "overly enthusiastic" in carrying out his job, wiretapping many nationalistic public officials and transcribing the conversations. Some 70% of the calls he wiretapped and transcribed were later found to be of a personal nature or otherwise irrelevant. The police unit for the investigation of police officers recommended that Mizrachi be tried, then-Police Chief Shlomo Aharonishki was willing to settle for only a negative comment in his file, and then-Public Security Minister Gideon Ezra decided to remove Mizrachi from his post.
Mizrachi told the Jerusalem Conference audience that “from my subjective point of view, I see a picture of public corruption that is even uglier than most people perceive. I see the ‘intelligence map’ of public corruption in our upper echelons, I see the quick plea bargains, and I see many things that never reach the headlines. Too often, money and government mix together improperly, on both the national and the municipal levels.”
Mizrachi said that the police are possibly to blame just for “not paying enough attention to the growth of corruption and organized crime a few years ago; we might have been too busy with the Ohr Commission [which investigated the deaths of 13 violent rioting Israeli-Arabs at the hands of the police at the beginning of the Oslo War in 2000 – ed, as well as with other issues that kept us in the limelight.”
Professor Provides Perspective
Prof. Yochanan Vozner, former Dean of the Social Work School in Tel Aviv University, said, “I’m sure everyone here agrees with everything that was said here” – causing some raised eyebrows – “but it should also be noted that there has never been a society in history in which there was not some corruption. Even Samuel the Prophet, in his parting speech to the People of Israel, professed, ‘Whose ox did I ever take?’ and the like – showing that the suspicion of corruption was not unheard of. This is important to know…"
"At the risk of saying something that is already time-worn," noted the professor, "I will say that what is important is education: Our youth should not grow up thinking that the ideal is to outsmart and get the better of the other guy, but rather that he has a right to make a living just as much as I do…”
Impromptu Questions
Though there was no time for questions, several in the audience crowded around Landau and Mizrachi afterwards and asked questions such as: “Why is there a sense in the public that the police department also has its share of corruption? Why do we need 10,000 more policemen simply to deal with a few crime families? Why is there a sense in some sectors of the public that people can get arrested, or worse, for no apparent reason, and are then released a day later with nothing more than a curt apology, if that? Why must the police grab the limelight by publicizing its recommendations regarding investigations of public figures? Why was Avigdor Lieberman [currently doing well in the polls as head of the Yisrael Beiteinu party – ed suddenly the subject of a widely-publicized police investigation just two weeks before the election? Why are there especially tough police guidelines against the Jews of Hevron?”
Most of the questions were not answered, though Landau explained that more policemen are needed to be on the streets and in the malls to prevent petty crime, and for the detective departments; he said he was not referring to the more “violent” policemen of the Yassam units and the like. Mizrachi said he is convinced that the timing of investigations of public officials is, at worst, “poor judgment” on someone’s part, but that it is certainly not intended to interfere in the electoral process.
Did Israel commit war crimes in Gaza?
Thomas Darnstädt and Christoph Schult in Jerusalem
Did Israel violate international law in Gaza? The immense number of Palestinian civilian casualties suggests that it did. But can the laws of war really be applied to asymmetrical conflicts such as Israel's war with Hamas?
The Palmachim air force base is 15 kilometers (9 miles) south of Tel Aviv, tucked away in the dunes along the Mediterranean shore. A thin, bald man wearing rectangular, rimless glasses is standing in front of half a dozen combat helicopters on the airfield at the base.
He introduces himself as "Major I." A reservist in the Israeli armed forces, he ought to be looking after the restaurant he recently opened in downtown Tel Aviv. But since the end of December, his workplace has been the cockpit of a Cobra helicopter. "It's a crazy world," he says, "you're with your family in the morning and at war in Gaza in the afternoon." Appropriately serious and yet relaxed, the 38-year-old major was probably selected by the Israeli army press office for the meeting with SPIEGEL because he comes across as being so intelligent and urbane.
Israel makes a distinction between terrorists and civilians -- that, at least, is the message the reservist keeps repeating in various forms. He shows an Israeli Air Force video that depicts Palestinian fighters taking cover behind a tree, firing off a rocket and then quickly driving away in a jeep. Black crosshairs can be seen following them. No other people are visible. Suddenly the jeep turns into the garage of an apartment building.
Then the crosshairs move away from the house and comes to rest over an empty field. A bomb strikes the field a few seconds later. "We did everything possible in the war to protect the lives of innocent civilians," says Major I.
It is precisely statements like this that are being called into doubt, now that the Gaza campaign has come to an end. Each new image of destroyed residential buildings and every mother's complaint about the killing of her children puts Israel under growing pressure. Was the scale of the Israeli attacks justified? Did the Israelis take sufficient steps to protect the innocent? Were aid organizations prevented from evacuating civilians?
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who visited the Gaza Strip last week, called for a "full investigation," Amnesty International is accusing Israel of "war crimes," and Louis Michel, the EU's commissioner for aid to developing countries, says: "It is evident that Israel does not respect international humanitarian law."
Officially, Israeli vehemently denies such accusations, but its leadership is getting nervous. The office of the prosecutor general in Jerusalem is gearing up for a wave of lawsuits from around the world. The military is currently compiling a set of documentation for each complaint. Internal investigations have begun, and soldiers have been instructed not to comment on specific allegations.
It is a continuation of the war with legal means. The principal charge against Israel is that it reacted to shelling by Hamas fighters with disproportionate firepower, killing hundreds of civilians in the process. Some of the facilities the Israelis fired upon include a hospital, schools run by the United Nations and the UN headquarters building in Gaza City.
Palestinians across the board insist that Hamas would never have used these buildings as hiding places. But this argument crumbled last week, when it was revealed that Hamas had fired one of its rockets from the shelter of the Al-Shuruk tower in Gaza City, where many international television broadcasters had rented offices.
A recording that a correspondent for the Al-Arabiya Arab television network showed shortly before a live broadcast provides proof. In the tape, which was sent to the Israeli media, the sound of a rocket being fired can be heard, and the correspondent confirmed that "it was fired from below our office."
But even if Hamas fighters did fire rockets from the safety of mosques and schools, Israel's critics argue, bombing these buildings was excessive. The numbers speak more clearly than any accusation: 13 dead Israelis and 1,300 Palestinian casualties, including large numbers of civilians. Even if one takes the Israeli figure for Palestinian casualties -- about 700 dead -- the high death toll still raises a fundamental question: Can the laws of war even be applied to a conflict that has ended with such an overwhelmingly one-sided death toll?
Israel's huge military superiority, it seems, ran roughshod over not only the people of the Gaza Strip, but also the conventional laws of war. But is International Humanitarian Law (IHL), as it was essentially stipulated under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, even suited to protect the population in Gaza?
IHL, the benchmark for the treatment of war crimes, as well as the obligations of a country at war and its military, was developed for classic warfare between nations -- symmetrical shows of strength between two national armies that are essentially well-matched and clearly recognizable. But the conflict in the Gaza Strip was obviously asymmetrical. Israel's enemy is a group of terrorists that fights while in hiding and uses the civilian population as human shields. This alone is impermissible under the rules of the Geneva Conventions.
The asymmetrical wars of recent years, in the Middle East, in Africa or in Afghanistan, have led to the practice of the IHL rules being applied to such cases, albeit in modified form. If it is not possible -- be it from the air or the ground -- to identify exactly where the enemy is located and who is protected as a civilian under IHL, how can it be possible to strictly limit hostilities to combatants fighting for that enemy?
As brutal as it may sound, it would be unreasonable to expect a country to accept any legal restrictions that puts it at a serious military disadvantage. A law of war that, within the framework of acceptable practices, requires the Israelis to exercise restraint on the level of force they use would not be enforceable. After all, an international law that is not accepted by individual countries is a law in name only.
In war, say most legal experts, each side must have the right to seek victory. Is Israel, for example, required to spare the bakery of a good citizen of Gaza who pulls out his bazooka from behind his oven at night to secretly take part in the fighting? It is not, because international law defines this citizen as an enemy. But how can this be verified? And who should make that decision before an attack?
Thus, the so-called "principle of proportionality" in war, even asymmetrical warfare, has only limited applicability. It does not cover the lives of enemies. In war, anyone can be killed who is considered part of the enemy, even if he bakes bread during the day. Although civilians who cannot be considered part of an enemy's forces cannot be targeted directly, many experts believe that that party's enemies can accept their deaths as "collateral damage" -- but only if the number of deaths is not blatantly disproportionate to the military value of the operation.
No Fear of Conviction
The principle of proportionality in war sounds like an inhuman calculation performed by cynical opportunists. But war is war.
Or is it? Is it possible to ignore moral criteria altogether? When former US President Bill Clinton had to decide whether to launch a particular rocket attack as part of the hunt for terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, he chose not to, because he had seen a children's swing on one of the reconnaissance photos. At the time, however, the United States was not officially at war with bin Laden. In a comparable situation, the human rights of the affected citizens must be respected -- and this is also the position taken by the Israeli Supreme Court in its rulings.
Under this line of argumentation, only truly blatant and obviously gratuitous killings of civilians in Gaza could be regarded as war crimes. This is an option under Germany's Code of Crimes against International Law, and it has already been tested in the case of charges against former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes and torture at the prisons in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
A German federal prosecutor dismissed the charges against Rumsfeld, arguing that it was to be expected that the United States would put possible war criminals on trial -- an argument that was as unconvincing then as it is today. Although the German Federal Supreme Court in the southwestern city of Karlsruhe would probably make a similar argument in the case of Israel, the German government still has the legal option of filing criminal charges against Israel in a German court -- which would in any case be an incalculable political risk. The reality is that no Israeli soldier can expect to be convicted of war crimes outside his country. "The obstacles to punishment," says Claus Kress, a Cologne-based professor of international law, "are very, very high."
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday that soldiers need not fear prosecution for war crimes abroad. "The commanders and soldiers that were sent on the task in Gaza should know that they are safe from any tribunal and that the state of Israel will assist them in this issue and protect them as they protected us with their bodies during the military operation in Gaza," he said.
Kress, who is one of the authors of the German Code of Crimes against International Law, believes that prosecutors would find it very difficult to come up with evidence, especially in the killings of civilians in the Gaza Strip. For such evidence to hold up in court, says Kress, it would have to be clear that the bombing of civilian targets was in fact "blatantly disproportionate" from a military perspective. Prosecutors would also have to prove that the soldier responsible for a given bombing incident recognized that his or her actions had no military purpose.
In contrast, the Israelis can argue that they have imposed strict restrictions on their army, especially for their asymmetrical war against terrorists. Asa Kascher of the University of Tel Aviv calls the charges of supposed war crimes "nonsense." Kascher, a philosophy professor, wrote the code of ethics for the Israeli armed forces and developed a set of central questions for the war against terrorism. Under his guidelines, Israeli officers are first required to determine:
* how immediate is the threat from a particular terrorist,
* how "involved" the suspect is, i.e. whether the suspect is a sympathizer, an informer or a combatant,
* how reliable the intelligence information about the location of terrorists is, and
* what weapons, ammunition and explosives are deemed appropriate for a mission.
Israel takes great pains to avoid civilian casualties, claims Kascher. But he also says that it is impossible to fight terrorism without collateral damage. "If I were to categorically rule out killing a terrorist if he is holding a child," says the philosopher, "I could no longer defend myself."
Off the record, however, Israeli soldiers admit that the units involved in Operation Cast Lead faced fewer restrictions than in past operations. This, they say, was mainly the result of lessons learned in the 2006 Lebanon war, where many Israeli soldiers died after being lured into ambushes.
Israel is also suspected of having used ammunition that causes particularly horrible injuries. The International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) is looking into charges that Israel used ammunition that contained depleted uranium. The Israeli army itself is already investigating a claim that 20 white phosphorus grenades were fired, in violation of military regulations, into residential areas in the northern Gaza Strip. Doctors in Gaza are also reporting previously unknown symptoms in some of their patients, including people who showed no visible damage but had severe internal injuries. Such injuries could have been caused by micro-shrapnel from so-called Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) bombs.
Last week Israeli officers were instructed to consult with the office of Israel's chief public prosecutor before traveling abroad. Now that many countries, especially in Europe, have enacted their own national legal codes regarding war crimes, they could face arrest abroad.
That was what happened to Major General Doron Almog in 2005. As the head of the Israeli military's Southern Command, Almog had signed off on various "targeted killings," including an operation on July 23, 2002, when 15 people died after a 1,000-kilo bomb was dropped over Gaza City. When Almog, now retired, flew to London, he discovered at the airport there that an arrest warrant for war crimes had been issued against him. The major general never left the aircraft, and returned to Israel without incident.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Did Israel violate international law in Gaza? The immense number of Palestinian civilian casualties suggests that it did. But can the laws of war really be applied to asymmetrical conflicts such as Israel's war with Hamas?
The Palmachim air force base is 15 kilometers (9 miles) south of Tel Aviv, tucked away in the dunes along the Mediterranean shore. A thin, bald man wearing rectangular, rimless glasses is standing in front of half a dozen combat helicopters on the airfield at the base.
He introduces himself as "Major I." A reservist in the Israeli armed forces, he ought to be looking after the restaurant he recently opened in downtown Tel Aviv. But since the end of December, his workplace has been the cockpit of a Cobra helicopter. "It's a crazy world," he says, "you're with your family in the morning and at war in Gaza in the afternoon." Appropriately serious and yet relaxed, the 38-year-old major was probably selected by the Israeli army press office for the meeting with SPIEGEL because he comes across as being so intelligent and urbane.
Israel makes a distinction between terrorists and civilians -- that, at least, is the message the reservist keeps repeating in various forms. He shows an Israeli Air Force video that depicts Palestinian fighters taking cover behind a tree, firing off a rocket and then quickly driving away in a jeep. Black crosshairs can be seen following them. No other people are visible. Suddenly the jeep turns into the garage of an apartment building.
Then the crosshairs move away from the house and comes to rest over an empty field. A bomb strikes the field a few seconds later. "We did everything possible in the war to protect the lives of innocent civilians," says Major I.
It is precisely statements like this that are being called into doubt, now that the Gaza campaign has come to an end. Each new image of destroyed residential buildings and every mother's complaint about the killing of her children puts Israel under growing pressure. Was the scale of the Israeli attacks justified? Did the Israelis take sufficient steps to protect the innocent? Were aid organizations prevented from evacuating civilians?
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who visited the Gaza Strip last week, called for a "full investigation," Amnesty International is accusing Israel of "war crimes," and Louis Michel, the EU's commissioner for aid to developing countries, says: "It is evident that Israel does not respect international humanitarian law."
Officially, Israeli vehemently denies such accusations, but its leadership is getting nervous. The office of the prosecutor general in Jerusalem is gearing up for a wave of lawsuits from around the world. The military is currently compiling a set of documentation for each complaint. Internal investigations have begun, and soldiers have been instructed not to comment on specific allegations.
It is a continuation of the war with legal means. The principal charge against Israel is that it reacted to shelling by Hamas fighters with disproportionate firepower, killing hundreds of civilians in the process. Some of the facilities the Israelis fired upon include a hospital, schools run by the United Nations and the UN headquarters building in Gaza City.
Palestinians across the board insist that Hamas would never have used these buildings as hiding places. But this argument crumbled last week, when it was revealed that Hamas had fired one of its rockets from the shelter of the Al-Shuruk tower in Gaza City, where many international television broadcasters had rented offices.
A recording that a correspondent for the Al-Arabiya Arab television network showed shortly before a live broadcast provides proof. In the tape, which was sent to the Israeli media, the sound of a rocket being fired can be heard, and the correspondent confirmed that "it was fired from below our office."
But even if Hamas fighters did fire rockets from the safety of mosques and schools, Israel's critics argue, bombing these buildings was excessive. The numbers speak more clearly than any accusation: 13 dead Israelis and 1,300 Palestinian casualties, including large numbers of civilians. Even if one takes the Israeli figure for Palestinian casualties -- about 700 dead -- the high death toll still raises a fundamental question: Can the laws of war even be applied to a conflict that has ended with such an overwhelmingly one-sided death toll?
Israel's huge military superiority, it seems, ran roughshod over not only the people of the Gaza Strip, but also the conventional laws of war. But is International Humanitarian Law (IHL), as it was essentially stipulated under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, even suited to protect the population in Gaza?
IHL, the benchmark for the treatment of war crimes, as well as the obligations of a country at war and its military, was developed for classic warfare between nations -- symmetrical shows of strength between two national armies that are essentially well-matched and clearly recognizable. But the conflict in the Gaza Strip was obviously asymmetrical. Israel's enemy is a group of terrorists that fights while in hiding and uses the civilian population as human shields. This alone is impermissible under the rules of the Geneva Conventions.
The asymmetrical wars of recent years, in the Middle East, in Africa or in Afghanistan, have led to the practice of the IHL rules being applied to such cases, albeit in modified form. If it is not possible -- be it from the air or the ground -- to identify exactly where the enemy is located and who is protected as a civilian under IHL, how can it be possible to strictly limit hostilities to combatants fighting for that enemy?
As brutal as it may sound, it would be unreasonable to expect a country to accept any legal restrictions that puts it at a serious military disadvantage. A law of war that, within the framework of acceptable practices, requires the Israelis to exercise restraint on the level of force they use would not be enforceable. After all, an international law that is not accepted by individual countries is a law in name only.
In war, say most legal experts, each side must have the right to seek victory. Is Israel, for example, required to spare the bakery of a good citizen of Gaza who pulls out his bazooka from behind his oven at night to secretly take part in the fighting? It is not, because international law defines this citizen as an enemy. But how can this be verified? And who should make that decision before an attack?
Thus, the so-called "principle of proportionality" in war, even asymmetrical warfare, has only limited applicability. It does not cover the lives of enemies. In war, anyone can be killed who is considered part of the enemy, even if he bakes bread during the day. Although civilians who cannot be considered part of an enemy's forces cannot be targeted directly, many experts believe that that party's enemies can accept their deaths as "collateral damage" -- but only if the number of deaths is not blatantly disproportionate to the military value of the operation.
No Fear of Conviction
The principle of proportionality in war sounds like an inhuman calculation performed by cynical opportunists. But war is war.
Or is it? Is it possible to ignore moral criteria altogether? When former US President Bill Clinton had to decide whether to launch a particular rocket attack as part of the hunt for terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, he chose not to, because he had seen a children's swing on one of the reconnaissance photos. At the time, however, the United States was not officially at war with bin Laden. In a comparable situation, the human rights of the affected citizens must be respected -- and this is also the position taken by the Israeli Supreme Court in its rulings.
Under this line of argumentation, only truly blatant and obviously gratuitous killings of civilians in Gaza could be regarded as war crimes. This is an option under Germany's Code of Crimes against International Law, and it has already been tested in the case of charges against former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes and torture at the prisons in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
A German federal prosecutor dismissed the charges against Rumsfeld, arguing that it was to be expected that the United States would put possible war criminals on trial -- an argument that was as unconvincing then as it is today. Although the German Federal Supreme Court in the southwestern city of Karlsruhe would probably make a similar argument in the case of Israel, the German government still has the legal option of filing criminal charges against Israel in a German court -- which would in any case be an incalculable political risk. The reality is that no Israeli soldier can expect to be convicted of war crimes outside his country. "The obstacles to punishment," says Claus Kress, a Cologne-based professor of international law, "are very, very high."
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday that soldiers need not fear prosecution for war crimes abroad. "The commanders and soldiers that were sent on the task in Gaza should know that they are safe from any tribunal and that the state of Israel will assist them in this issue and protect them as they protected us with their bodies during the military operation in Gaza," he said.
Kress, who is one of the authors of the German Code of Crimes against International Law, believes that prosecutors would find it very difficult to come up with evidence, especially in the killings of civilians in the Gaza Strip. For such evidence to hold up in court, says Kress, it would have to be clear that the bombing of civilian targets was in fact "blatantly disproportionate" from a military perspective. Prosecutors would also have to prove that the soldier responsible for a given bombing incident recognized that his or her actions had no military purpose.
In contrast, the Israelis can argue that they have imposed strict restrictions on their army, especially for their asymmetrical war against terrorists. Asa Kascher of the University of Tel Aviv calls the charges of supposed war crimes "nonsense." Kascher, a philosophy professor, wrote the code of ethics for the Israeli armed forces and developed a set of central questions for the war against terrorism. Under his guidelines, Israeli officers are first required to determine:
* how immediate is the threat from a particular terrorist,
* how "involved" the suspect is, i.e. whether the suspect is a sympathizer, an informer or a combatant,
* how reliable the intelligence information about the location of terrorists is, and
* what weapons, ammunition and explosives are deemed appropriate for a mission.
Israel takes great pains to avoid civilian casualties, claims Kascher. But he also says that it is impossible to fight terrorism without collateral damage. "If I were to categorically rule out killing a terrorist if he is holding a child," says the philosopher, "I could no longer defend myself."
Off the record, however, Israeli soldiers admit that the units involved in Operation Cast Lead faced fewer restrictions than in past operations. This, they say, was mainly the result of lessons learned in the 2006 Lebanon war, where many Israeli soldiers died after being lured into ambushes.
Israel is also suspected of having used ammunition that causes particularly horrible injuries. The International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) is looking into charges that Israel used ammunition that contained depleted uranium. The Israeli army itself is already investigating a claim that 20 white phosphorus grenades were fired, in violation of military regulations, into residential areas in the northern Gaza Strip. Doctors in Gaza are also reporting previously unknown symptoms in some of their patients, including people who showed no visible damage but had severe internal injuries. Such injuries could have been caused by micro-shrapnel from so-called Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) bombs.
Last week Israeli officers were instructed to consult with the office of Israel's chief public prosecutor before traveling abroad. Now that many countries, especially in Europe, have enacted their own national legal codes regarding war crimes, they could face arrest abroad.
That was what happened to Major General Doron Almog in 2005. As the head of the Israeli military's Southern Command, Almog had signed off on various "targeted killings," including an operation on July 23, 2002, when 15 people died after a 1,000-kilo bomb was dropped over Gaza City. When Almog, now retired, flew to London, he discovered at the airport there that an arrest warrant for war crimes had been issued against him. The major general never left the aircraft, and returned to Israel without incident.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Two Obamas and Two Middle Easts
Terence Jeffrey
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
When it comes to discussing the Middle East, there are two Barack Obamas -- and both could cause problems for the United States.
First, there is Obama the Environmentalist. He says he wants to deprive Middle Eastern states of oil revenue because those oil revenues fund terrorists and because burning Middle Eastern oil in American cars and factories is destroying the planet through global warming. . hen there is Obama the Man of Peace. He is less worried about sending oil money to the Middle East than sending bad vibes.
Obama the Environmentalist hit the campaign trail last summer, giving speeches on energy policy. Obama the Man of Peace appeared this week on Al Arabiya TV.
Obama the Environmentalist spoke to a domestic audience whom he understood to be angry about the price of gas. Obama the Man of Peace spoke to a foreign audience whom he understood to be angry about U.S. anti-terrorism policies.
"One of the most dangerous weapons in the world today is the price of oil," Obama the Environmentalist said in a July campaign speech. "We ship nearly $700 million a day to unstable or hostile nations for their oil. It pays for terrorist bombs going off from Baghdad to Beirut. It funds petro-diplomacy in Caracas and radical madrassas from Karachi to Khartoum. It takes leverage away from America and shifts it to dictators."
In another July speech, Obama the Environmentalist envisioned a Middle East that would be populated by tyrants for at least another 20 years. That, together with the threat of climatic apocalypse, he argued, makes it necessary for the United States to mount a massive effort to curtail petroleum use.
"If we stay on our current course, the rapid growth of nations like China and India will rise about one-third by 2030," he said. "In that same year, Middle Eastern regimes will be sitting on 83 percent of our global oil reserves. Imagine that -- the very source of energy that fuels nearly all of our transportation, controlled almost entirely by some of the world's most unstable and undemocratic governments."
"We are not a country that places our fate in the hands of dictators and tyrants -- we are a nation that controls our own destiny," he said. "And it's why we must end the tyranny of oil in our time."
This Environmentalist did not appear on Al Arabiya this week. The Man of Peace did.
This Obama, speaking to the Arab world, lauded the peace plan put forward by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia -- the Middle East's premier autocratic oil peddler -- as an act that "took great courage."
This Obama did not see a region that more than 20 years from now will still bristle with "dictators and tyrants." He saw a region brimming with nations ready to work with him and Secretary of State Clinton as respected partners.
"I do think that it is impossible for us to think only in terms of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and not think in terms of what's happening with Syria or Iran or Lebanon or Afghanistan and Pakistan," he said. "And what I've said, and I think Hillary Clinton has expressed this in her confirmation, is that if we are looking at the region as a whole and communicating a message to the Arab world and the Muslim world, that we are ready to initiate a new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest, then I think that we can make significant progress."
This Obama said he was withdrawing troops from Iraq and closing Guantanamo. When the interviewer congratulated the Man of Peace for avoiding President Bush's use of "broad" terms like "war on terror" and "Islamic fascism," Obama not only declined to defend his predecessor in the presidency against a slight leveled by an anchorman for a TV network based in a Persian Gulf emirate, he accepted the anchor's point.
"President Bush framed the war on terror conceptually in a way that was very broad, 'war on terror,'" said the Al Arabiya interviewer, "and used sometimes certain terminology that the many people -- Islamic fascism. You've always framed it in a different way, specifically against one group called al-Qaida and their collaborators. And is this one way of --"
"I think that you're making a very important point," said Obama. "And that is that the language we use matters."
Yes, it does. And what matters most in the language of the commander in chief of the United States is that it reflects reality. The language the two Obamas have used to describe the Middle East reflects political posturing.
He will learn that smooth talk and smug self-satisfaction will neither defeat nor deter our very real enemies in that part of the world.
Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
When it comes to discussing the Middle East, there are two Barack Obamas -- and both could cause problems for the United States.
First, there is Obama the Environmentalist. He says he wants to deprive Middle Eastern states of oil revenue because those oil revenues fund terrorists and because burning Middle Eastern oil in American cars and factories is destroying the planet through global warming. . hen there is Obama the Man of Peace. He is less worried about sending oil money to the Middle East than sending bad vibes.
Obama the Environmentalist hit the campaign trail last summer, giving speeches on energy policy. Obama the Man of Peace appeared this week on Al Arabiya TV.
Obama the Environmentalist spoke to a domestic audience whom he understood to be angry about the price of gas. Obama the Man of Peace spoke to a foreign audience whom he understood to be angry about U.S. anti-terrorism policies.
"One of the most dangerous weapons in the world today is the price of oil," Obama the Environmentalist said in a July campaign speech. "We ship nearly $700 million a day to unstable or hostile nations for their oil. It pays for terrorist bombs going off from Baghdad to Beirut. It funds petro-diplomacy in Caracas and radical madrassas from Karachi to Khartoum. It takes leverage away from America and shifts it to dictators."
In another July speech, Obama the Environmentalist envisioned a Middle East that would be populated by tyrants for at least another 20 years. That, together with the threat of climatic apocalypse, he argued, makes it necessary for the United States to mount a massive effort to curtail petroleum use.
"If we stay on our current course, the rapid growth of nations like China and India will rise about one-third by 2030," he said. "In that same year, Middle Eastern regimes will be sitting on 83 percent of our global oil reserves. Imagine that -- the very source of energy that fuels nearly all of our transportation, controlled almost entirely by some of the world's most unstable and undemocratic governments."
"We are not a country that places our fate in the hands of dictators and tyrants -- we are a nation that controls our own destiny," he said. "And it's why we must end the tyranny of oil in our time."
This Environmentalist did not appear on Al Arabiya this week. The Man of Peace did.
This Obama, speaking to the Arab world, lauded the peace plan put forward by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia -- the Middle East's premier autocratic oil peddler -- as an act that "took great courage."
This Obama did not see a region that more than 20 years from now will still bristle with "dictators and tyrants." He saw a region brimming with nations ready to work with him and Secretary of State Clinton as respected partners.
"I do think that it is impossible for us to think only in terms of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and not think in terms of what's happening with Syria or Iran or Lebanon or Afghanistan and Pakistan," he said. "And what I've said, and I think Hillary Clinton has expressed this in her confirmation, is that if we are looking at the region as a whole and communicating a message to the Arab world and the Muslim world, that we are ready to initiate a new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest, then I think that we can make significant progress."
This Obama said he was withdrawing troops from Iraq and closing Guantanamo. When the interviewer congratulated the Man of Peace for avoiding President Bush's use of "broad" terms like "war on terror" and "Islamic fascism," Obama not only declined to defend his predecessor in the presidency against a slight leveled by an anchorman for a TV network based in a Persian Gulf emirate, he accepted the anchor's point.
"President Bush framed the war on terror conceptually in a way that was very broad, 'war on terror,'" said the Al Arabiya interviewer, "and used sometimes certain terminology that the many people -- Islamic fascism. You've always framed it in a different way, specifically against one group called al-Qaida and their collaborators. And is this one way of --"
"I think that you're making a very important point," said Obama. "And that is that the language we use matters."
Yes, it does. And what matters most in the language of the commander in chief of the United States is that it reflects reality. The language the two Obamas have used to describe the Middle East reflects political posturing.
He will learn that smooth talk and smug self-satisfaction will neither defeat nor deter our very real enemies in that part of the world.
Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.
"By your definition, madame, I am an Islamist"
Robert Spencer
The UK's only Muslim peer, Lord Nazir Ahmed, was responsible for the British Parliament's dhimmi cancellation of a showing of Geert Wilders' film Fitna. He called the cancellation "a victory for the Muslim community.” And Brian of London has more: Two years ago when I helped organise Bat Ye'or's visit to the House of Commons we had the pleasure of receiving Lord Nazir Ahmed as our guest. I personally went to enormous trouble and expense to send a personalised printed invitation to every member of both the House of Commons and Lords including spending hours stuffing envelopes before delivering them back to the Houses to be distributed in the internal mail system. We had around 50 MPs and peers which, we were told, was not a bad turn out for such an event. I had also invited just about every member of the press likely to come and a few did.
Lord Ahmed listened to Bat Ye'or give her Eurabia talk. He was the first to ask a question, which was really just an angry statement. He blustered and complained and ended with "By your definition, madame, I am an Islamist". He then got up and left.
This was, of course, unreported in the UK or anywhere.
"By your definition, madame, I am an Islamist." He said it..
The UK's only Muslim peer, Lord Nazir Ahmed, was responsible for the British Parliament's dhimmi cancellation of a showing of Geert Wilders' film Fitna. He called the cancellation "a victory for the Muslim community.” And Brian of London has more: Two years ago when I helped organise Bat Ye'or's visit to the House of Commons we had the pleasure of receiving Lord Nazir Ahmed as our guest. I personally went to enormous trouble and expense to send a personalised printed invitation to every member of both the House of Commons and Lords including spending hours stuffing envelopes before delivering them back to the Houses to be distributed in the internal mail system. We had around 50 MPs and peers which, we were told, was not a bad turn out for such an event. I had also invited just about every member of the press likely to come and a few did.
Lord Ahmed listened to Bat Ye'or give her Eurabia talk. He was the first to ask a question, which was really just an angry statement. He blustered and complained and ended with "By your definition, madame, I am an Islamist". He then got up and left.
This was, of course, unreported in the UK or anywhere.
"By your definition, madame, I am an Islamist." He said it..
Humanitarian aid continues to flow in to the Gaza Strip; Jordanian field hospital arrives in Gaza
Communicated by the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Spokesman)
Kerem Shalom, Karni, Nahal Oz and Erez crossings operated today, enabling humanitarian movements and transfer of humanitarian goods to the Gaza Strip. Throughout the day, a total of 225 trucks with 6192 tons of supplies delivered goods at the request of UNRWA, the World Food Programme, UNICEF, ANERA, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the World Health Organization, and Handicap International. Included was a donation from Jordan as well as goods for the private sector.
Also, 366,000 liters of heavy duty diesel for the Gaza power station, 122 tons of gas for domestic use and 188,000 liters of commercial diesel were transferred via the Nahal Oz fuel depot. Following extensive maintenance activities, Karni conveyor belt resumed operation and conveyed 3800 tons of different types of grain.
In accordance with the ongoing Jordanian aid to the people of Gaza, a Jordanian military field hospital, coordinated between Israel and the Jordanian authorities, arrived today in the Gaza Strip. Some 33 trucks with approximately 210 medical professionals as well as equipment entered the region at Allenby Bridge and traveled in a convoy to the Gaza Strip via Erez Crossing. The field hospital is to be established adjacent to the Shifa hospital.
Since the beginning of the operation, 70,035 tons of humanitarian supplies have been transferred to the Gaza Strip. Also, 6,565,451 liters of fuel have been conveyed through Nahal Oz and Kerem Shalom. In the ongoing humanitarian effort, since the unilateral cease fire (18/1/2009), 34,460 tons of aid has been delivered to the Gaza Strip and 2,746,900 liters of fuel.
For further details, please contact Maj. Peter Lerner at 050-6234053, 03-6977138 or dov_tpsh@netvision.net.il.
מח' מידע ואינטרנט – אגף תקשורת
26.01.2009
Kerem Shalom, Karni, Nahal Oz and Erez crossings operated today, enabling humanitarian movements and transfer of humanitarian goods to the Gaza Strip. Throughout the day, a total of 225 trucks with 6192 tons of supplies delivered goods at the request of UNRWA, the World Food Programme, UNICEF, ANERA, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the World Health Organization, and Handicap International. Included was a donation from Jordan as well as goods for the private sector.
Also, 366,000 liters of heavy duty diesel for the Gaza power station, 122 tons of gas for domestic use and 188,000 liters of commercial diesel were transferred via the Nahal Oz fuel depot. Following extensive maintenance activities, Karni conveyor belt resumed operation and conveyed 3800 tons of different types of grain.
In accordance with the ongoing Jordanian aid to the people of Gaza, a Jordanian military field hospital, coordinated between Israel and the Jordanian authorities, arrived today in the Gaza Strip. Some 33 trucks with approximately 210 medical professionals as well as equipment entered the region at Allenby Bridge and traveled in a convoy to the Gaza Strip via Erez Crossing. The field hospital is to be established adjacent to the Shifa hospital.
Since the beginning of the operation, 70,035 tons of humanitarian supplies have been transferred to the Gaza Strip. Also, 6,565,451 liters of fuel have been conveyed through Nahal Oz and Kerem Shalom. In the ongoing humanitarian effort, since the unilateral cease fire (18/1/2009), 34,460 tons of aid has been delivered to the Gaza Strip and 2,746,900 liters of fuel.
For further details, please contact Maj. Peter Lerner at 050-6234053, 03-6977138 or dov_tpsh@netvision.net.il.
מח' מידע ואינטרנט – אגף תקשורת
26.01.2009
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