DIDN’T WE USED TO BE ON THE SAME SIDE?

DIDN’T WE USED TO BE ON THE SAME SIDE?: "

DIDN’T WE USE TO BE ON THE SAME SIDE?

By David Horovitz (Jerusalem Post)

Before we can even get to grips with the complexities of dealing with the Palestinians, we need to remember the story, often repeated, that shows a Rabin so focused on the important things of life, so “utterly without pretense” as Clinton put it, that he never quite came to terms with this merely decorative article of clothing – a black tie!

“True to form, two weeks before his assassination,” Clinton wrote of Rabin, “he arrived in Washington at a black-tie event without the black tie. We borrowed one for him, and I still smile whenever I think about straightening it for him…”

The affection with which he retells the tie story is emblematic of Clinton’s tone in all of his writings and musings on Rabin. The president quite plainly adored our late Prime Minister – admired him, respected him, empathized with him, regarded him as a role model. As he wrote in the Times, loved him.

There is nothing comparably affectionate in George W. Bush’s new memoir about Ariel Sharon – the Prime Minister with whom Clinton’s presidential successor worked for crucial periods. But there is evidence of respect, admiration and a meeting of minds.

Bush recalls his first visit to Israel in 1998, and the helicopter tour he took with Sharon – “a bull of a man… who had served in all of Israel’s wars.” Sharon’s proud, “gruff” airborne commentary that day, his familiarity with “every inch of the land,” his observation that “Here our country was only nine miles wide,” undoubtedly shaped some of the then-Texas governor’s fundamental thinking on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The tour with Sharon, which constituted his “most striking memory” of that debut trip to the Holy Land, left Bush, as he writes, “struck by Israel’s vulnerability in a hostile neighborhood.”

Tellingly, too, Bush notes, it is with Sharon he speaks by telephone immediately before his first post-September 11 cabinet meeting – “a leader who understood what it meant to fight terror.”

Recognizing the personal and professional dimensions of these relationships between recent American Presidents and Israeli Prime Ministers serves, bitterly, to underline how strikingly the climate – and, one fears, the essence – of our bilateral ties has chilled of late. The Clinton-Rabin alliance and, albeit to a much lesser personal extent, the Bush-Sharon interaction, were true partnerships in which all manner of fundamental shared values and interests were safely assumed, and served as the basis from which heartfelt mutual concern and commitment flowed. These were leadership pairings of profound trust, and of profound benefit to both countries.

Today, there is little echo of these personal meetings of minds to be found in the relationship between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The notion that they loathe each other is almost certainly incorrect. For a start, loathing would require a passion it is unlikely either can muster for the other.

A more reasonable assessment is that, on a personal level, they get along okay, without any of the particular respect, admiration, never mind love, of the Clinton-Rabin team.

Much more troubling, however, is the growing sense in these past few weeks that the shared interests and values that constituted the basis for those earlier, heartfelt personal relationships is crumbling. As our two leaderships have haggled (and that, unfortunately, is the only word for it) over the terms of a new settlement freeze, our alliance seems to be shriveling into a cold, adversarial contest.

In the past, guiding the American-Israel approach to peacemaking with the Palestinians was a wealth of shared goodwill and historical precedent. We were partners, trying together to find the balance of carrots and sticks, to perfect the framework, that would finally draw the immensely, sometimes violently reluctant Palestinians into reducing their maximalist demands to viable terms we all could live with.

US-Israel relations were not an uninterrupted love fest down the decades. The Clinton-Rabin connection was exceptional. Some of the leadership pairings really did take a strong dislike to each other. There were always arguments and disagreements and stark policy differences.

But implicit in the partnership, underpinning it, was recognition of the fact that the Jewish state was revived in 1948 because its leadership unhappily accepted a partition of British Mandatory Palestine that left the most resonant places in Jewish history outside our sovereign borders, while an intended Arab entity was not established because the Arab leaderships preferred to try and strangle Israel. Implicit, too, was the fact that Israel, the world’s only Jewish state and the region’s only democracy, had been forced to fight war after war for its survival in the face of implacable enemies bent on its destruction, to endure unprecedented terrorist onslaughts, and to overcome relentless attempts at economic boycott and diplomatic sanction.

It was recognized that the territory Israel’s critics now asserted lay at the heart of the conflict – territory to which Israel has an incontrovertible historic claim, and which Israel captured when forced into war – was not even held by Israel between 1948 and 1967. Rather, that very territory was the launching point of Arab efforts to destroy the country.

Also implicit in the partnership was the awareness that, while some Israeli governments are more reluctant than others to trade land for peace, no Israeli government has balked at that equation when a credible, dependable Arab peace partner made an appearance. In fact, in recent years, all Israeli governments have shown a readiness to embrace that equation even when the ostensible Palestinian peace partner has fallen some distance short of credibility and dependability.

TODAY, though, that history, those fundamentals, that peacemaking context seem at risk of being forgotten.

Negotiating with the Palestinians has proven extraordinarily frustrating these past two decades – their leadership to date has been frequently disingenuous, often murderous and serially rejectionist. But we insist on trying afresh, because we need an accommodation to retain a Jewish, democratic Israel. We do not want to have to live by the sword. We nurture the faint hope that, along with its undoubted desire for statehood, the current Palestinian leadership can yet be persuaded of the virtues of reconciliation,­ the benefits of a future, as Clinton put it in his Times op-ed, where cooperation triumphs over conflict.”

But now, before we can even get to grips with the complexities of negotiating with the Palestinians, we find ourselves head-to-head with Washington, locked in tense negotiating sessions where previously we were often locked in step. Instead of working together to identify areas of leverage, pressure points and incentives for the Palestinians, we are looking for those same opportunities and vulnerabilities in each other.

Last Thursday in New York, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and their respective advisory teams sat together for seven hours to try to find an agreed path toward resuming Israeli-Palestinian direct talks. The very fact of this marathon session, the news that our two sides had worked intensively for seven hours, was deemed by most analysts to be a good thing, evidence of substantive progress.

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, what seems to have been overlooked here is that these were negotiations between Israel and the United States, not Israel and the Palestinians. These were negotiations, that is, between two parties that, until not very long ago, used to sit on the same side of the table- ­ figuring out how best to entice the recalcitrant Palestinians toward peace. Now we are sitting across the table from each other. And the Palestinians, the people who used to be on the other side of the table, the people who walked out of the direct talks two months ago­ just as they have ultimately walked away from every serious Israeli peace offer­ are not even in the room. They are proceeding sedately toward statehood, with growing confidence that they can attain independence without the necessity of reconciliation.

MEANWHILE, for all the presumed wisdom of the various interlocutors, the ideas that are emerging from this alarming new Israel-American negotiating construct sound frankly ridiculous.

The “incentives” America is said to be offering Israel include the promise of a one-year US veto on Palestinian unilateralist actions toward statehood in the UN Security Council. Why on earth would that constitute an incentive? Why would the US, our partner, ever want to sanction a unilateral process that by definition resolves none of the core issues in dispute between us and the Palestinians?

Similarly, we are reportedly being promised various security guarantees that would reduce the military risk to Israel posed by a Palestinian state? Again, why would these be offered as an incentive, when surely it is a profound American interest that its sole dependable ally in this vicious region be secure?

Why, for that matter, would our Prime Minister be seeking to extract more and better such “incentives” ­ to compel the administration into explicitly committing itself to all kinds of pledges and actions which, until now, we reasonably assumed would be forthcoming anyway should the need arise.

And why are these and other gifts, gestures, promises and guarantees being offered in the first place? In the service of an attempted 90-day freeze on settlement expansion, a second one-time-only freeze after the previous 10-month moratorium predictably failed to enable the finalizing of a peace accord. Does anybody honestly anticipate, after 17 years of Palestinian duplicity and evasion, that three months will yield a deal?

Worse, if nobody actually harbors any such expectation, and the best we can hope for, as is being hinted, is major progress on just one core issue, that of the borders between Israel and “Palestine,” why is that deemed potentially beneficial either? For surely, central to any viable accord is the refinement of the “land for peace” equation into the more specific “land for refugees” bargain.

If Israel is to ultimately partner the Palestinians to sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza, abandoning our hold on Judea and Samaria, then the Palestinians’ side of the deal must be to abandon their demand for a “right of return” for their refugees and descendants to Israel. They will have to give up on the dream of overwhelming the Jewish state by weight of numbers, and belatedly integrate all their people into their new country, just as we integrated all of our scattered people into ours. A deal on borders alone would see Israel making its most wrenching concession, without the vital quid pro quo of the Palestinians making theirs.

In a healthy American-Israel relationship, the type that plainly prevailed until not too long ago, the US would not have turned the settlement issue into what it has become, an appallingly counterproductive precondition for Palestinian consent to so much as talk to us. The US would have recognized that Israel has already dismantled the settlements in Gaza and a handful in northern Samaria, and has presented a series of peace proposals that would involve dismantling most of the settlements elsewhere in the West Bank.

In a healthy American-Israel relationship, the US would not have calculatedly inflated the unfortunate Ramat Shlomo dispute into a full-scale public bust up, complete with scorching denunciation of Israel by Hillary Clinton, who publicly described the dismally timed announcement of the building plans, during Vice President Biden’s visit in March, as “insulting” and whose spokesman went so far as to declare in her name that it sent “a deeply negative signal about Israel’s approach to the bilateral relationship.”

This public humbling of Israel told the Arab world that our alliance was far from the oft-asserted unshakeable and unbreakable, thus fueling our enemies’ hopes that Israel can yet be fatally weakened, and it undermined Israelis’ vital faith in the US as our ultra-dependable guarantor when we calculate the risks we dare take for peace.

In a healthy American-Israeli relationship, our Prime Minister would volunteer an open-ended freeze on the expansion of settlements outside those areas we anticipate retaining under a permanent accord. This would underline to the Palestinians and the international community Israel’s genuine commitment to compromise and potentially ease the negotiating process. It would also demonstrate pragmatic self-interest. For why would the Prime Minister want to allocate further resources, and mislead more Israelis into making their homes, in areas where his declared support for Palestinian statehood will necessitate an eventual withdrawal?

In a healthy American-Israeli relationship, that freeze, freely offered, without demands for spurious “incentives,” would be welcomed effusively by Washington, accurately presented as evidence of Israel¹s fierce imperative to reach an accommodation. It would be utilized to help ensure the US-supported and US-financed Palestinian leadership not only came to the negotiating table, but stayed there until it internalized its obligation to accept the legitimacy of the Jewish state’s existence and to champion conciliatory positions to its public.

As things stand, Palestinians are all too often imbibing, including via the PA’s own media, an unmodified message of Israel as a nation born in sin, whose soldiers indiscriminately attack its people. Israel is depicted as a transient entity that is illegitimate within any borders, no matter how constricted. Our towns and cities are frequently misrepresented on PA television as Palestinian towns and cities. We are portrayed as a nation that, according to Na’aman Shahrour the guest speaker at this month’s PA Ministry of Culture political conference in Tulkarm, held on the 93rd anniversary of the “cursed” Balfour Declaration ­ was created so that Britain and Europe could be “rid of this burden called the Jews… even at the expense of a different nation.” In such an atmosphere, no peace effort can take hold.

In a healthy American-Israeli relationship, finally, we would be working, on the same side of the table, to ensure that nothing distracted us from our critical joint focus on thwarting the would-be nuclear Iran. Here, too, it would worryingly seem, our red lines are being drawn in very different places.

Of all the dire potential consequences of our shifting partnership­ of the sorry drift since the days when an American President was working with an Israeli Prime Minister he loved, in a climate of instinctive cooperation ­ there is none more dangerous than a dilution of the shared imperative to thwart Teheran’s opportunistic, ruthless and genocidal regime.

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WORST JERUSALEM RIOTS IN SEVERAL YEARS! by Dr. David Hocking

WORST JERUSALEM RIOTS IN SEVERAL YEARS

by David Dolan (Jerusalem)

Sounds of border police stun grenade fire and ambulance sirens reverberated for many hours throughout the center of Jerusalem recently as Israeli Jews put the finishing touches on their outdoor Succot booths which are central to the annual Feast of Tabernacles celebration. To many local residents, it was a carbon copy of the days when the Palestinian uprising attrition war raged in the city from late 2000 until 2004.

The ferocious clashes erupted in the troubled Silwan neighborhood near the Temple Mount. Although founded by Yemenite Jews in the early 1900s, Silwan has mostly been populated by Arabs since Islamic mobs violently chased the Jewish residents out during the 1929 riots, which left dozens of Jews dead all over the land. However in recent years, Silwan, with around 50,000 residents, also contains a growing Jewish enclave because it is adjacent to the ancient City of David, which is revered by many religious Jews.

At least ten Israelis, five of them policemen, were wounded during the prolonged clashes, which quickly spread to other Arab neighborhoods. Around fifteen Palestinians were also injured, most of them active rioters. One Israeli man was stabbed in the back during the unrest. Several police and private cars were torched or smashed, along with a number of city buses. Thick smoke covered the Temple Mount complex and the nearby Mount of Olives for much of the day. Dozens of Palestinians hurled stones and metal objects upon thousands of Jewish worshipers gathered for pre-Feast of Tabernacles prayers at the Western Wall. Israeli riot police then rushed to the contested holy site, clashing with Palestinian stone throwers while pushing them back from above the hallowed Western Wall.

The intense violence began when an armed Israeli security guard, who works at the City of David Jewish enclave, stopped at an intersection in Silwan as he was driving to a private Jewish home before dawn. He was quickly surrounded by a group of local Palestinians men wielding rocks, including 32 year old Sami Sirhan, a known activist who has been involved in a series of clashes with Jews in the area. Police reports said the incident appeared to be a deliberately staged ambush. The guard told police investigators he pulled out his gun and attempted to escape the area, shooting first in the air and then at Sirhan after the men surrounding his car refused to move back. Sirhan was instantly killed. His subsequent funeral later in the day sparked off the worst rioting in the city since the Al Aksa uprising ended in 2004. Some media reports said he was a member of the large Sirhan family clan which spawned Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian who assassinated US presidential candidate Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles in 1968.

Israeli police and paramilitary forces were quickly reinforced in the city. Officials pledged to do everything possible to keep the incident localized, and to prevent another full blown Palestinian attrition war from breaking out. However sporadic clashes have been continuing in the city every day since, with occasional gunfire cutting through the air. A Jewish apartment was firebombed in the mixed Abu Tor neighborhood on September 26. While PA leaders publicly urged calm, some Israeli critics charged their purported attempts to maintain the peace were thin at best. Hamas and its allies continued to urge Palestinians to use “all means possible to resist Zionist occupation of Palestinian land.”

FLOOD OF FIRE

Weeks before the Jerusalem riots, the Hamas terrorist group had already launched its program, dubbed “Flood of Fire,” to oppose renewed Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations by means of violent unprovoked attacks upon Israeli civilians. Two days before the elaborate early August White House ceremony took place that formally inaugurated the US-mediated talks, four Israeli civilians were brutally slaughtered in a Hamas ambush near Judaism’s second holiest city on earth, Hebron. The following evening, Hamas terrorists attempted to kill two more Israeli male civilians who were driving northeast of Ramallah. Although the men survived the attack, one was seriously wounded. On September 26, a young Jewish couple was shot and seriously wounded in the same area as the first attack near Hebron, but this time both victims survived. As before, the wife was nine months pregnant, but thankfully this time the baby was born alive, delivered by caesarian section

Many Israeli news reports pointed out that the number of Jewish victims in the initial assault should have read five, since a 40 year old mother of six who was due to deliver her seventh child this month was among the dead. Her husband, driving their family car, was also slain, leaving their six other children instantly orphaned. Two younger passengers in the back seat, a man and a woman, were also killed. They were acquaintances of the car owner who was simply giving them rides to their homes in the Jewish community of Beit Haggai after picking them up at a hitchhiking outpost.

The sheer brutality of the armed assault was demonstrated by the fact that after shooting their victims from a passing car, the Muslim terrorists jumped out and pummeled their bodies with bullets at point blank range to make sure they were all dead, at which time they would have realized that one of the women was clearly pregnant with child. This did not stop them from riddling her swollen belly with bullets.

KILL ALL THE JEWS

The Hamas group took full responsibility for the atrocious attack, the worst terrorist incident in several years. A Hamas statement hailed the murderous assault as a “heroic operation” that would be repeated many times in the future. The statement claimed it was not just timed to coincide with the Washington ‘peace summit,’ but was “a continuation of the jihad and resistance project against the Zionist enemy until the liberation of the land.”

Although PA leader Abbas echoed President Barrack Obama in denouncing both attacks during his Washington summit comments, he used the very same language as the Hamas statement, calling them “operations.” And Abbas mainly decried the violent assaults because they might affect the renewed peace process, not because they had taken innocent Jewish lives, including an unborn baby. PA security forces did at least arrest some leading Hamas activists in the Hebron area, a move denounced by the radical Islamic group which put out a threatening statement saying, “The hands that have reached the heart of the occupier can reach you too.”

Israeli army officials indicated that the three terror attacks may have been ordered by Iran and/or Syria, who actively support the radical Muslim group with money and arms. They said army intelligence had detected increased text communications prior to the attacks, without specifying what that entailed.

Palestinian rockets and mortar shells were fired on many days during September at various Israeli targets around the Gaza Strip, mostly civilian centers. Grad missiles landed on several occasions either inside or on the outskirts of the large city of Ashkelon, just a few miles north of the Hamas-ruled coastal zone. Others struck near the port of Ashdod, which is halfway between Gaza and metropolitan Tel Aviv. One shell exploded between two kindergartens in an Israeli kibbutz community thirty minutes prior to the scheduled arrival of youngsters for their daily activities.

The discovery of phosphorous inside some of the mortar shells was particularly worrisome since it can badly burn skin and lead to permanent nerve damage. Hamas accused Israel of dropping phosphorous bombs on Palestinian civilian zones during the Cast Iron war nearly two years ago. The IDF countered that traces of the element found on the ground came from flares exploded high above in the air, designed to light up the night sky during ground combat engagements.

A popular new film produced in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip vividly illustrates the Hamas vow to wage jihad until Israel is totally destroyed. Titled, The Great Liberation, it shows Palestinians blowing up central Israeli government and economic institutions, including the Bank of Israel in Jerusalem and the nearby Supreme Court building. The movie later pictures jubuliant Palestinian forces ‘liberating’ Tel Aviv from Israeli Zionist rule. Palestinian national flags are shown flying over the city’s buildings as Arabs drive through the streets celebrating their ‘triumph.’

IDF GETS READY

On the tenth anniversary of the start of one of Israel’s worst ever conflicts—the Palestinian Al Aksa attrition war, which took over 1,100 Israeli lives, mostly civilians, and over 5,000 Palestinians, a majority of them armed fighters—IDF commanders were busy preparing for the possibility of a major new wave of violence if American mediated peace negotiations break down once again, as many expect. However unlike during that four year conflict, Israeli security officials warn that a renewed wave of Palestinian violence today could be quickly supported with active military intervention by Syria and Hizbullah, along with Hamas militia forces that now fully control the Gaza Strip. In other words, a full blown conflict may result on a scale not seen since the1973 Yom Kippur war.

Such a conflict could also be sparked by an IDF strike on Iranian nuclear targets or a successful Hizbullah or Hamas assassination of a senior Israeli political or military official. Hizbullah leaders threatened again during September to revenge the car bomb killing of a top Hizbullah military commander Imad Mughniyehin in Damascus in February 2008 by carrying out assassinations of Jewish officials, even though Israel has strongly denied any responsibility for his death.

In continuing preparations for a potential major conflict, full-scale brigade level military exercises involving live fire are now being held on a regular basis. Military forces have been reinforced on the Golan Heights and along the Lebanese border, and sea patrols have been stepped up off the coasts of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile a Kuwaiti newspaper says Syrian army leaders have signed a formal “defense alliance pact” with the Hizbullah militia. The paper, Al-Rai, reported that in the event of war, Syrian and Hizbullah missile launchers will “split a bank of targets” inside of Israel while Syrian radar outposts pass on intelligence pinpointing the exact locations of airborne Israeli Air Force jets and helicopter gunships. The report came soon after a large house filled with Hizbullah rockets blew up in south Lebanon. According to the 2006 UN ceasefire resolution, the Iranian and Syrian backed militia is not supposed to be operating in the area.

Meanwhile Israeli officials have decided not to publicly oppose the largest ever American weapons sale in the region, worth close to 60 billion dollars, even though it could potentially threaten Israel. The sale, to oil rich Saudi Arabia, will include around 70 F-15 warplanes and over 140 Apache and Black Hawk helicopters.

With regional war possibly looming, Israel’s new incoming armed forces chief of staff, Major General Yoav Galant, was busy during September putting together his new military team. His vacated position as head of the Southern Command, in charge of all operations involving the Gaza Strip, will be taken over next February by Major General Tal Russo, who previously served on the general staff. In a surprise move, the new head of Military Intelligence—a crucial position given that he is responsible for giving regular strategic assessments to senior government officials—is not someone serving on the general staff, as is usually the case. The new head is Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, a widely respected officer that previously served as Russo’s deputy.

‘STAND WITH US AGAINST IRAN’

US President Obama publicly admitted in late September that an American military strike against Iran’s threatening nuclear program may become unavoidable. Speaking during a televised town hall meeting, he first stated that “We don’t think a war between Israel and Iran or other military options would be the ideal way to solve the problem”—a statement Israeli leaders agree with, although they would be quick to add there may be no other realistic choice if Iran is to be kept from developing deadly nuclear warheads. However the President then added that his administration is “keeping all our options on the table,” which is not something he was saying soon after coming into office when he expressed confidence that diplomacy alone would suffice to deflect the radical Shiite regime from developing nuclear weapons.

The same day that Obama spoke, visiting Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told the Fox News Network that Iran may be capable of producing nuclear warheads within two years. The statement squared with others issued recently by the UN Atomic Energy Agency and French government officials. Barak added that “We have to start to consider what follows if sanctions won’t work.” In reality, most security experts believe that the Israeli government is far beyond just ‘starting to consider’ its options.

The clearest hint that Israel may be closer than many experts think to selecting a “military option” against Iran came from Israel’s Ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, said to have a close working relationship with Netanyahu. He stated quite clearly that Israeli leaders believe Iran is developing nuclear weapons, and called upon American Jews to support them in whatever actions they may deem necessary to counter this portentous reality. The diplomat’s comments were widely reported in Israel.

Speaking before a Jewish audience at a Yom Kippur synagogue service in the American capital city, Oren said Israeli leaders are more concerned with the Iranian threat than with Hamas activities in the Gaza Strip and the current peace process with the Palestinians. “More than Gaza, more than peace, the ultimate quandary of statecraft centers on Iran. This is the radical, genocidal Iran whose leaders regularly call for Israel’s annihilation and provides terrorists with the means for accomplishing that goal. This is the Iran that undermines governments throughout the Middle East and even South America, and an Iran that shoots its own people protesting for freedom. Iran does all this without nuclear weapons: Imagine what it would do with the nuclear arms it is assiduously developing.” He ended his address by calling for American Jewish support as Israeli leaders grapple with difficult issues, especially Iran: “Stand with us as we resist Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.”

As the all too familiar dance carries on featuring words of ‘peace’ swirling around acts of terror and threats of regional war, it is comforting to recall the Word of the Lord delivered through the great Hebrew prophet Isaiah many centuries ago: “Your sun will set no more, neither will your moon wane. For you will have the Lord for an everlasting light, and the days of your mourning will be finished.”(Isaiah 60:20)