Posted tagged ‘Israeli left’

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The Old Generals’ Old Plan

May 31, 2016

The Old Generals’ Old Plan, Front Page Magazine, Caroline Glick, May 31, 2016

al-aqsa_martyrs_brigade

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post. 

The Israeli Left is a one trick pony. As it sees things, all of Israel’s problems – with the Palestinians, with the Arab world, with Europe and with the American Left – can be solved by giving up Judea and Samaria and half of Jerusalem (along with Gaza which we gave up already).

Once Israel does this, the Left insists, then the Palestinians, the Arab world, Europe and Bernie Sanders voters will love us as they’ve never loved us before.

The events of the past quarter century have shown the Left’s position to be entirely wrong. Every time Israel has given the Palestinians land, it has become less secure. The Arabs have become more hostile.

The West has become more hostile. The Palestinians have expanded their demands.

Because of their negative experience with the Left’s policy, most Israelis reject it. This is why the Right keeps winning elections.

Given the failure of its plan, the Left could have been expected to abandon it and strike out on a different course. But it didn’t. Instead it has tried to hide its continued allegiance to its failed withdrawal strategy by pretending it is something else.

A central component of the Left’s concealment strategy is its use of former generals.

Over the past quarter century, and particularly since the Palestinians began demonstrating in 2000 that they have no interest in a state living side by side with Israel, the Left has carted out retired generals at regular intervals to proclaim that continued allegiance to the Left’s failed policy of withdrawal is not irrational.

Every couple of years, a new initiative of former generals – often funded by the EU – is published.

Each in turn uses whatever the popular memes of the day may be to repackage their call for withdrawal from Judea and Samaria and the partition of Jerusalem.

The media, itself dominated by the Left, backs these initiatives. The retired war heroes are paraded before the cameras and presented to the public as responsible adults who have grudgingly entered the political fray, despite their aversion to it, because of their patriotism. Just as they heeded the call of duty and led forces in wars of earlier generations, so today, we are told, they heed the call again, in yet another last-ditch effort to save the country.

Just in time for Avigdor Liberman’s swearing in as defense minister, a new group of old generals released a new version of their old, discredited plan.

A group calling itself “Commanders for Israeli Security” has mobilized an impressive roster of 214 generals that have signed on to a new position paper called “Security First: Changing the rules of the game, a plan to improve Israel’s security-diplomatic position.”

The group has a great website replete with a highend web commercial that has been flooding social media feeds for the past several days. The ad shows a person ripping up a “Peace Now” bumper sticker and replacing it with a call for “Security now, peace later.”

Their plan, the ad proclaims, will improve Israel’s security, strengthen its international position, repair the cleavages in Israeli society and set the conditions for future negotiations with the Palestinians.

Unfortunately, like every leftist plan to date, if the generals get their way and the government takes their advice, the results will be precisely the opposite of what they promise. As has been the case with every other well-packaged withdrawal plan, Israel’s security will be harmed. Our international position will be wrecked. Bernie Sanders voters along with the Europeans will expand their devotion to bashing Israel. And the Sunni Arab states that now flock to us will again abandon us.

The generals’ new package involves opening their plan with a hawkish call for continued Israeli security control over Judea and Samaria, until the Palestinians decide to make peace with us.

But as we soon see, that was just throat clearing.

Having established their sober-mindedness, the generals turn to the Left’s unchanging fantasy.

They call for the government to formally relinquish Israel’s sovereign rights over the vast majority of Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem.

They call for the government to permanently stop respecting the property rights of Jews in the areas of Judea and Samaria outside of the security perimeter.

The more than one hundred thousand Jews who live in those areas, they insist, must be denied all right to property, save the right to sell whatever they now own.

They must not be allowed to build anything – no new houses; no new communities; no new infrastructure.

As for the communities inside the perimeter, the generals insist that those should be permitted to continue respecting Jewish property rights, within limits, albeit. For instance, those communities must not be permitted to expand beyond their current construction boundaries. In other words, Jews can build up, but not out.

Jerusalem, which they believe should never have been unified in 1967, should be effectively partitioned.

The generals call for the municipal government to stop administering the city as a unified mixed Jewish and Arab city. Instead, they say, the city should set up a separate governing authority for Arab neighborhoods in eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem. That separate authority should be responsible for all planning and zoning activities in Arab neighborhoods as well as the education system and every other aspect of the daily lives of the Arabs of the city.

Gaza, which has been operating as a Hamas state since 2007, is also brought in from the cold. The generals call for the government to continue to supply Gaza with everything that Hamas demands – water, electricity, employment in Israel, a Hamas-controlled port. They even call for Israel to allow Europe to pay the salaries of Hamas terrorists.

Moreover, the generals recommend that the government announce that Gaza, Judea and Samaria and partitioned Jerusalem are one political entity, despite the fact that they aren’t.

The generals insist that by taking these steps, Israel will prove its devotion to peace and keep the dream of a Palestinian state alive. As a consequence, they say, the Palestinians will be happy and stop trying to murder Israelis. The Arab world will line up to sign peace treaties with Israel. Europe along with Bernie Sanders’ voters will bury the hatchet and embrace Israel.

The problem with the generals’ newest plan and the ones its replaces is that they all ignore basic facts.

There is no Palestinian constituency for peace with Israel. The more Israel offers the Palestinians, the less interested they are in settling.

By announcing that Israel renounces its claims to Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, and treating the Jews east of the 1949 cease-fire lines as second class citizens, the generals will not only widen Israel’s social cleavages. They will tell the Palestinians that they are right to feel contempt for us. The worse they behave, the more we will offer them. The more Jews they murder, the more the Jews will turn against one another.

As for improving Israel’s international position, it is hard to understand why the generals refuse to learn the lessons of the Gaza withdrawal. Despite the fact that Israel uprooted 24 Jewish communities in Gaza and northern Samaria, and removed its military forces from the area, without exception, the international community insists that Israel still “occupies” Gaza. How can the generals expect the world to act more fairly towards a more limited withdrawal plan from Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem? As for Gaza, Operation Protective Edge brought out into the open the fact that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Arab states support Israel in its war against Hamas. They do so because they fear Islamic State and Iran more than they hate Israel, whose power they trust.

If Israel announces its intention of leaving Judea and Samaria, which the Arabs know will become a Hamas enclave faster than Gaza did, the Arab faith in Israel’s power will diminish. As a consequence, if Israel follows the generals’ advice our relations with the Sunnis will worsen, not improve.

It is a tragedy for Israel that the generals have allowed the Left to use them in this way. Their role in perpetuating Israel’s destructive adherence to the devastating two-state policy model diminishes their past contributions and endangers Israel’s future.

Categories: Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Israel borders, Israeli left, Israeli media, Israeli politics, Israeli security, Israeli settlements, Jerusalem, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian terrorists, Two state solution
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That Kissinger Promise and Obama’s Fulfillment

May 30, 2016

That Kissinger Promise and Obama’s Fulfillment, The Jewish Press, Vic Rosenthal, May 30, 2016

Obama-Kissinger-e1464550543436Pres. Obama seated with Henry Kissinger

{Originally posted to the author’s website, Abu Yehuda}

Old realpolitiker Henry Kissinger was in the news recently when he sat down with Donald Trump, to give him the benefit of his experience. It brought to mind Kissinger’s numerous attempts to get Israel out of the territories it conquered in 1967, before, during and – especially – after the Yom Kippur War.

Kissinger went to Iraq in December of 1975 to try to wean the regime away from the Soviet Union and improve relations with the US. In a discussion with Sa’dun Hammadi, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Kissinger suggested that American support for Israel was a result of Jewish political and financial power, promised that the US would work to force Israel back to pre-1967 boundaries, and indicated that while the US would not support the elimination of Israel, he believed that its existence was only temporary. Here is an excerpt (the whole thing is worth reading):

I think, when we look at history, that when Israel was created in 1948, I don’t think anyone understood it. It originated in American domestic politics. It was far away and little understood. So it was not an American design to get a bastion of imperialism in the area. It was much less complicated. And I would say that until 1973, the Jewish community had enormous influence. It is only in the last two years, as a result of the policy we are pursuing, that it has changed.

We don’t need Israel for influence in the Arab world. On the contrary, Israel does us more harm than good in the Arab world. You yourself said your objection to us is Israel. Except maybe that we are capitalists. We can’t negotiate about the existence of Israel, but we can reduce its size to historical proportions. I don’t agree that Israel is a permanent threat. How can a nation of three million be a permanent threat? They have a technical advantage now. But it is inconceivable that peoples with wealth and skill and the tradition of the Arabs won’t develop the capacity that is needed. So I think in ten to fifteen years, Israel will be like Lebanon—struggling for existence, with no influence in the Arab world.  [my emphasis] …

Kissinger also promised that aid to Israel, which he presented as a result of Jewish political influence, would be significantly reduced. He indicated that legal changes in the US – he must have been referring to the creation of the Federal Electoral Commission in 1974 to regulate campaign contributions – would attenuate Jewish power and therefore American support for Israel. Naturally, he didn’t foresee the Israel-Egypt peace agreement, which permanently established a high level of military aid to both countries.

He further promised that the US would support a PLO-run Palestinian state if the PLO would accept UNSC resolution 242 and recognize Israel. This of course is what (supposedly) happened in the Oslo accords.

Kissinger insisted that “No one is in favor of Israel’s destruction—I won’t mislead you—nor am I.” But his hint that a smaller Israel might not survive is clear. Surely he understood that a pre-1967-sized Israel (within what Eban called “Auschwitz lines”) would have no chance of surviving, simply because of the strategic geography of the area.

Kissinger was wrong about the Arabs developing the capability to challenge Israel, but their place has been taken by soon-to-be-nuclear Iran and its proxies, who are significantly more dangerous than the Arab states ever were.

US policy, however, has kept more or less the same shape, except that the hypocrisy of insisting that the US supports the existence of Israel but in a pre-1967 size is even more glaring. The substitution of the PLO for the Arab states as the desired recipient of the land to be taken from Israel has barely made a ripple either in America or among the Arabs, suggesting that the policy is more about Israel giving up land than about the Arabs getting it.

The original motivation for Kissinger’s promises was supposedly the desire of the US to replace the Soviet Union as the patron of the Arab states. After the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War in 1991, however, there was no change in policy. Although the Oslo Accords were initiated by left-wing Israelis, the US eagerly embraced them, and the so-called ‘peace process’ became a permanent stick to beat Israel with.

President Obama is especially adept at emphasizing support for Israel’s existence while at the same time demanding that Israel make concessions that would make her continued existence impossible. Apparently agreeing with Kissinger about Jewish power, Obama has worked to reduce the pro-Israel influence of American Jews in numerous ways, such as by providing access to the White House for groups like J Street and the Israel Policy Forum, while marginalizing traditional Zionist organizations like ZOA.

Kissinger’s almost anti-Semitic claim that US support for Israel is bought with Jewish money was probably untrue in 1975 and is even less so today, when a large proportion of American Jews, including wealthy ones, have chosen their liberal or progressive politics over Zionism. The coming struggle over the introduction of a pro-Palestinian plank into the Democratic platform is an indication that the party and with it, many of its Jewish supporters, is moving toward Obama’s position.

The Obama Administration’s program to extricate itself from the Middle East by empowering Iran as the new regional power has given a new impetus to the policy of shrinking Israel. Iran sees Israel as a major obstacle to its hegemony, for both geopolitical and religious/ideological reasons, and is committed to eliminating the Jewish state. Obama found it necessary to restrain Israel from bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities at least once (in 2012), and seems to be prepared to sacrifice Israel in order to achieve his goal of establishing Iranian regional dominance.

Some would go even further and say that Obama’s primary ideological goal is to eliminate Israel and the Iranian gambit is a means to this end, but that is highly speculative! Or maybe it’s a matter of two birds with one stone.

Henry Kissinger didn’t do us any favors, but I think the anti-Israel thread in American policy would have been strong enough without him, running from Truman’s Secretary of State George C. Marshall all the way to Obama’s stable of anti-Zionists like Rob Malley and Ben Rhodes.

Today Israel is long gone from the Sinai, more recently from Gaza, and probably only thanks to the disintegration of Syria, still holding the Golan Heights. I would like to believe that PM Netanyahu was correct when he said that Israel will never leave the Golan. Regarding Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, I expect that we are about to begin a very difficult time, as the Obama Administration is likely to mount a campaign in its last days to fulfill Kissinger’s promise to the Arabs at long last.

Categories: Antisemitism in America, Arab nations, Death to Israel, Defense of Israel, Foreign policy, Gaza, Golan, Hamas, Henry Kissinger, Iran and Israel, Iran scam, Israel borders, Israeli left, Israeli security, Jewish state, Leftists, Middle East, Netanyahu, Obama and Iran, Obama and Israel, Palestinian Authority, Palestinians and Jews
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No one has a monopoly on values

May 22, 2016

No one has a monopoly on values, Israel Hayom, Boaz Bismuth, May 22, 2016

No one has a monopoly on values, including the Left and the media. Nearly 40 years ago, in May 1977, the media witnessed the victory of Menachem Begin’s Likud, the fulfillment of what was for it an apocalyptic prophecy. Almost 40 years have passed, the Likud is still in power (and an “unimportant” peace deal was signed with Egypt on the way), and the media still doesn’t understand how the people can choose differently. Since the media is never wrong, it takes care to create an imaginary reality for us in which the citizens of Israel are dying of hunger in the streets, the survivors are fascist occupiers, and those who believe in the sanctity of the land of Israel are messianic or right-wing extremists. There is no other option.

After claiming a monopoly on values (just like the Left, and sometimes part of the Right), the media consistently tries to bring the latest person to leave the Likud into its ranks. In the past, it was Roni Milo, Ariel Sharon (both before the disengagement from Gaza and after it), and Gideon Sa’ar, and now outgoing Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon. Things must be really dreary on the Left if the media needs to pick on the Right time after time.

The desire to present current events (the Hebron shooting of an immobilized Palestinian, the speech by the deputy IDF chief) as watershed events in the history of relations between the military and the state is factually incorrect. Unpleasant to say, it’s even nonsense. We’ve known much harder periods in terms of the military’s relations with the country as a whole — after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, for example, or the disengagement in 2005 — but memories are short.

Do you remember that war more than four decades ago, in which 2,600 soldiers were killed due to a serious intelligence failure? Back then, people really did leave the country. They didn’t just threaten to, they simply left. “A fallout of weakings,” the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin called them. The schism was immense. The darkest scenario had come to pass: Society lost faith in the army. Is that the situation today?

Today, they are trying to create a new reality, like in 1973 after the war, but the opposite — the upper military echelon has lost faith in the people. Yes, you read that correctly. The Middle East is so quiet that those in uniform have free time for a new pedagogical role — handing out grades to society. The media, of course, welcomes it, because this conduct fits in with its own agenda.

Let’s suppose for a minute that the Left was in power, and senior officers were to take matters of value and morality into their own hands, but in the other direction: to the right. Would the media embrace them in that case, too?

In the reality in which we live, a senior officer (major general) who compares processes taking place here to the Germans in the 1930s is a man of values, but an officer who invites his soldiers to pray before an action in Gaza? That’s darker, even reminiscent of Iran. It’s a shame that Albert Einstein isn’t here to test the theory of moral relativism in our country. Perhaps we should recall Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s command prior to the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, when he called on all Allied soldiers to “beseech the blessing of Almighty God” before the operation?

Since it was announced that Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Lieberman was joining the coalition, everyone has been whipped into a frenzy. As if the man hasn’t already served as foreign minister, as if Israel’s defense minister decided to launch wars and wasn’t overseen by the prime minister and the cabinet and the military leadership. Again, we have apocalyptic predictions by the chorus of pundits, which last week proved that its understanding of the political system is as limited as its understanding of the people’s wishes.

And another brief reminder, not from 1948 or 1973, but rather from March 2015, when Israel held elections. Remember? The people made the media eat dirt, and it can’t forgive them.

In that same election, the people spoke clearly and said “Right.” In effect, the Right had a bloc of 67 mandates. Yisrael Beytenu’s place was in the coalition. What just happened is a correction. Incidentally, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu actually wanted Isaac Herzog and the Zionist Union to join the government, but Herzog couldn’t supply the goods. What we’ve gotten instead is a stronger coalition. In other words, the government now has a better chance of surviving. The media, of course, can’t accept the move as a positive one so long as it hopes the government will fall. So what does it do? “Pollute” (a term from one of the news broadcasts on Saturday) the process. Lieberman, who as of Saturday was worthy as an anti-Bibi member of the coalition, has suddenly become a pathetic, inexperienced guy, and Netanyahu is supposedly busy just trying to hang on politically — as if Shimon Peres, in his time, only dreamed of resigning.

All the events of this past week are essentially political. It’s amazing to see how experienced journalists are horrified by coalition moves. Haven’t we seen dirty tricks and political opportunism in the past? Haven’t we sometimes made territorial concessions that matched the needs of the hour more than ideology?

This weekend, I returned from France, the nation of human rights. The news shows talked with concern about anarchists who were creating disturbances and damaging property. Their economy is bogged down; their political system is having a hard time producing leaders; absorbing refugees is a problem; and the extreme Right, which won the European Parliament election in 2014, is threatening to repeat its performance in next year’s presidential election. Surprisingly, I didn’t see any French analyst or journalist expressing concern on a live broadcast that his children might leave the country.

The media must always remember that here, the people are sovereign. We should remember that the chosen people (I suppose that this makes me a condescending fascist) is also the people that chooses, and its vote counts for more than ratings.

Categories: Defense of Israel, Israeli government, Israeli left, Israeli media, Israeli politics, Lieberman, Ya’alon
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Bibi’s foes seeking a Promised Land

May 21, 2016

Bibi’s foes seeking a Promised Land, DEBKAfile, May 21, 2016

Plitim_Koteret480

The unprecedented political and personal attacks on Friday night by opponents and former allies of Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister-designate Avigdor Lieberman, who used every possible media platform to warn that “the fascists are coming,” is more indicative of their personal and political situation than the domestic political reality of the State of Israel.

In their opinion, the appointment of Lieberman to defense minister, as his predecessor Moshe Ya’alon said, shows that extremism, violence and racism in Israeli society is undermining the country’s strength and is already having a detrimental effect on the IDF. Ya’alon also accused pro-government sections of disrespect for srael’s judges and its supreme court to the detriment of the rule of law. The Israeli media said Ya’alon’s statement marked the emergence of a new leader of what it called “the sane right-of-center camp.”

In other words, anyone who does not belong to that camp is not sane.

The right-of-center camp, if it comes into being, would be a major and important change in Israeli politics. Until now, the Israeli public has been led to believe that the left-of-center camp is the one that is sane. This time, even the Israeli media understand that the left has been completely discredited and that it is time to finally shift towards the right.

But that is not the main point. Rather, opponents of Netanyahu and Lieberman refuse to accept that large parts of Israeli society are tired of being “sane”, of the hypocrisy, of political correctness, and of local media outlets with such views.

With the increasing disappearance of relevant news in Israeli media outlets, what do we see and read each day? A procession of stories on organized crime families, con men, rapists, pedophiles, and small-time crooks, as well as lawyers with enormous egos who represent them.

Perhaps the prime minister was right when he said recently that the IDF should restart holding parades on Independence Day each year, as it did for more than 20 years, to maintain “sanity” and counterbalance the endless coverage on crime.   Large sectors of the Israeli public are sick and tired of the politicians, who pretend to be righteous men, and those who turn to the Supreme Court for the resolution of every problem.

There are also large parts of Israeli society that have lost faith in the Supreme Court and in the country’s justice system as a whole and do not always recognize it as  properly carrying forward the rule of law.

Thus, it would have been possible to relate more seriously to Ya’alon’s comments if he had called for far-reaching reform of Israel’s legal authorities.

After all, it must be said openly that not only has the judicial system failed in its war against corruption and crime, but there are already initial signs that the system is not immune to these threats, and that they have spread into the system itself.

Therefore, Ya’alon’s claims regarding the rule of law, and its effect on the IDF, is a sign that he is not capable of understanding what is truly happening in Israeli society and why there is opposition to his statement within parts of the society and the IDF, and will not have the influence that he wants to achieve.

It was also a combination of two different ideas: law, which is passed by the Knesset, and justice, which is determined by the authority of the courts that must follow the law.

Besides the hypocrisy, the attacks on Lieberman’s appointment are tinged with racism. The recent political developments indicate that the Russian immigrants who entered Israeli politics in the mid-1990s have finally reached the most influential positions in the government.

To call these politicians “fascists” and “Rasputin” indicates pointless.

Those who consider themselves “Israel’s elite” have lost power, and even worse have lost hope of regaining power, so they are allowing themselves to make wild accusations without any inhibitions.

The nightmare of the “sane” camp is if Saudi King Salman and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, along with Netanyahu and Lieberman, will sit on the same podium and sign a cooperation agreement. But this is a reality that is happening every day, not just wishful thinking.

That is why the Israeli media did not publish a single word when Saudi multimillionaire and international businessman Walid Ben Talal last month opened the first Saudi embassy in Israel, located at 14 David Flusser street in Jerusalem. The international businessman is considered close to the king’s son, Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman.

Accusations of fascism onece hurled against the late Menachem Begin, who was never forgiven by Israel’s left for reaching power through the ballot box and then  t signing the historic peace treaty with Egypt in 1979.

A number of high-profile political figures think that the rule by Benyamin Netanyahu is the worst thing that has happened in the history of the State of Israel. These include Ya’alon along with fellow ex-IDF chiefs of staff Gabi Ashkenazi and Benny Gantz, Zionist Camp party chairman Yitzhak Herzog, former Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar, former Shin Bet domestic security service chief Yuval Diskin and former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

In order to bring Netanyahu’s rule to an end, they have all gotten into the same “boat” and set off for the “promised land.”

There is just one problem. Where is the boat headed in the stormy waters of the Middle East?

This land didn’t exist in the past and it doesn’t exist now. That is why they pullback in every general elections. The result of this journey to the “promised land” will be the opposite of what they expect. The flood of attacks on Netanyahu and Lieberman will only strengthen them and increase their public support.

It should be said to Herzog’s credit that he was the first among this group of politicians to understand that the only method available to opponents of Netanyahu, Lieberman and the ruling Likud party is to rid themselves of the radical left and the destructive voices within their movements.

A determined struggle to achieve that goal would create an opposition with a positive action plan, and a good chance of taking power, for the first time in recent years.

Categories: Defense of Israel, Israeli government, Israeli left, Lieberman, Netanyahu, Ya’alon
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