Land for Peace or Oblivion

Land for Peace or Oblivion?
by Victor Sharpe
Immediately after the June 1967 Six Day War, a secret memorandum was issued by the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). Their conclusions were that any peace settlement between Israel and the Arab belligerents would only succeed if Israel retained certain territories vital for its continued existence and survival.
The areas the Joint Chiefs declared as the minimum defensible borders for the Jewish state included the Golan Heights, the western half of Samaria (the northwestern part of the West Bank), all of Judea (the southern part of the West Bank), the Gaza Strip and several portions of the eastern Sinai Peninsula.
This, of course, occurred before the world became obsessed with the creation of an Arab terror state within Israel’s narrow territory between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan.
Since that report in 1967, the Begin government gave away all of the Sinai. The first city that Joshua liberated during the Israelites entry into the Promised Land, Jericho, was given away by Binyamin Netanyahu during his first term as Prime Minister, followed by most of Hebron, King David’s first Jewish capital and one of Judaism’s four holy cities. Both cities are practically lost to the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. Under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his deputy, Ehud Olmert, Israel gave away the entire Gaza Strip in 2005, with catastrophic consequences for the Jewish state. These breathtaking concessions to the Arabs have all been made under the hope that it will bring peace with the Arab enemies. But it has not. “Peace, peace, but there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14.)
Ehud Barak, Israel's present Defense Minister, had years earlier withdrawn from the southern Lebanon security strip, thus allowing the Islamist Hezbollah to fill the vacuum with dire consequences for northern Israel. A conflict broke out - the Second Lebanon War - disastrously mismanaged by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. It was launched too late and ended too soon.
After Israel endured over 12,000 incoming missiles from Hamas-occupied Gaza, Operation Cast Lead was finally launched by Israel. It ended too soon, and the Islamist Hamas continues to pursue its ambition of finally destroying Israel. Just this last week after the visit by Vice President Biden, who attacked Israel for planning to build apartments in a north Jerusalem suburb followed by a vituperative call from Secretary of State Clinton making yet more demands upon Israel, the Palestinian Authority gave the green light to launch riots by Arab mobs in Jerusalem, Hebron and throughout Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank). Suspicions that President Obama used an application for zoning approval for future housing in Jerusalem as the excuse to ratchet up unbearable pressure upon the Jewish state are more than persuasive. It may be that if the rioting continues, it will be henceforward known as the Obama intifada.
Israel is now under the greatest pressure in years from an American administration to give away the ancestral Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria. President Barack Obama is perceived by many to be a clear and present danger to the very survival of the reconstituted Jewish state. His deafening silence, along with that of his lieutenants, Biden, Clinton, Mitchell and his army of anti-Israel advisors, at the disgusting ceremony held in Ramallah by the Palestinian Authority honoring a female terrorist and her grisly accomplices who murdered 38 Israeli civilians in 1978, speaks volumes about the towering anti-Israel bias of this president: Barack Hussein Obama.
In the aftermath of the Six Day War, the US Joint Chiefs were not interested in Jewish patrimony or Biblical history. They were solely concerned with the strategic necessities for Israel's survival in a very bad neighborhood. That is why they set out what the bare minimum retention of territory for Israel should be.
Col. Irving Kett (USA, ret.) also prepared an Army War College study on Israel's security needs in 1974. His study was called, "A Proposed Solution to the Arab-Israel Conflict". In it, he strongly suggested that, from a military point of view, Israel's borders should be constituted to make it a compact state with natural boundaries on all sides - the Jordan River to the east, Golan Heights to the northeast, the Litani River in the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the west and the historic boundary with the Sinai Peninsula to the south. As a direct result and consequence of Arab aggression, most of those borders had been attained by Israel at one time or another.
Colonel Kett pointed out what the IDF has always known, but what too many Israeli politicians preferred to ignore; namely, that there is vital strategic value in the mountain range which forms the spine running through Judea and Samaria. The highlands run some 54 miles from Jenin in the north to Hebron in the south and dominate Israel's coastline. The spine is 12 miles wide and Israel simply cannot afford to vacate it.
It was assumed for years by both the Israeli military and politicians that if a Palestinian Arab state came into existence it would have to permit an Israeli defense line on the Jordan River (the Allon Plan), and that such a state would have to be demilitarized.
The answer, of course, would be to have made permanent the suggested boundaries proposed in both Kett's memorandum and the earlier JCS report of some 40 years ago. Events have moved on since then. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank would never agree to this and Hamas in Gaza would scornfully dismiss it out of hand. The Arabs have become even more vicious in their anti-Jewish rhetoric and behavior, and a jihadist Iran has all but encircled the Jewish state through its Islamist proxies in Gaza and Lebanon.
The Arab-Israel conflict is not, and never has been, merely a war over territory. It is, and always has been, a religious war. Islam will never accept a non-Muslim state, whatever size or shape it may be, within lands previously conquered by Muslims in the name of Allah. Even if Israel shrank to just one down town square in Tel Aviv it would still be a provocation to the Arab and Muslim world. “Land for Peace” and a “Two State Solution” are euphemisms that are no different to the dread slogan, which greeted the hapless Jews arriving at the Auschwitz death camp: “Arbeit macht frei – Work makes Free.”
The "Two-State Solution", so beloved of President Obama, requires Judea and Samaria to be given away to the Palestinian Arabs. Obama has upped the ante. Now he wants those Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem built on land liberated from the Jordanian occupiers to also be given to the Palestinian Arabs. We are now talking about a potential plan to expel some 700,000 Jews from their biblical and ancestral heartland of Judea and Samaria along with many suburbs of the Jewish capital city: Jerusalem.
But the Arabs have no intention of making peace whatever territorial concessions Israel makes. That should be enough for an Israeli government and Prime Minister with intestinal fortitude to defy the world's pressure for the Jewish state to slowly and surely disappear. After all, Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin and Yitzchak Shamir all said "no" to American presidents in the past and prevailed.
Interestingly, Colonel Kett had also suggested that the Palestinian Arabs be resettled in a state in the Sinai. The other famous suggestion is that Jordan is Palestine, which is based upon the historical fact of the first "Two-State Solution" enacted in infamy by Great Britain some 87 years ago.
Even President George W. Bush, when visiting Israel as Governor of Texas, was moved to utter, "The whole of Israel is only about six times the size of the King Ranch near Corpus Christie." Yet even he, after becoming president, called for a "Two-State Solution" west of the Jordan River.
Pushing Israel back to the "Auschwitz borders", as Abba Eban called them, where the Jewish state is only nine miles wide at its most populous region, is what the "Two-State Solution" is all about. That other dread euphemism "The Final Solution" then comes to mind.
Hopefully Binyamin Netanyahu will stress the territorial insanity of that fact during his visit to Washington, DC. Perhaps he will have the opportunity to do so with President Obama; provided the president does not give the Israeli head of state the cold shoulder.
Victor Sharpe is the author of the highly acclaimed book: Politicide – The attempted murder of the Jewish state. The second volume, updated to the end of 2009, continues documenting in some 46 easily readable chapters the relentless war of the Islamist and Arab world against Israel. It has just been published by Lulu Press and can be found with Victor Sharpe’s other books on Amazon.com
Copyright ©Victor Sharpe 2010

Barack Obama , Jerusalem and the Jews

Many periods of Israel and USA relations have been rocky, but never hostile to the degree we see today. (see the below posting Barack Obama and the Jews July 28,2009). After watching the news in the USA, Europe and here in Israel, I am seeing a situation that could seriously deteriorate in one of two ways. Both unfortunate, but not fatal for this little country, but very damaging to the world in general. The Obama adminstration is encouraging reckless and irresponsible behaviour on the part of the Palestinians and the Jihadists, particularly Hamas and Hizbullah. Weakening the relationship between the U.S. and Israel is their fondest dream and they already believe it is happening and so they just have to wait it out. The relationship could actually break temporarily and it would be temporary because of the affect of the unleashing of Jihadism all over the world. Any opening will be seen as a weakness and will be taken advantage of by this drive for Islamic domination.

First, let's get the facts straight, the misrepresentation of the situation in the press: which refers to the home building in Jerusalem as "new settlements on the West Bank". Jerusalem is not in the West Bank, Barack Obama agreed that Jerusalem was not included in the "freeze", and no country that I have found in my research has allowed the outside world to tell their own people where they can and cannot live. Jerusalem, as the Prime Minister has repeated many times is the undivided capitol of the Jewish Nation State of Israel. Whether the rest of the world likes it or not, this is a fact that no amount of political pressure will change.

Second, the Obama administration has shown not one sign of respect or friendship to it's most reliable ally in this region. Except for pretty words that are soon offset by unreasonable and insulting actions Israel has been of little interest. Instead of a reliable ally he seems to see an annoyance that he would like to stop buzzing around his quest to win the love and support of the Muslim countries of the region. Why we insist on taking at face value his claim that the Vice President, Joe Biden, came to smooth relations and develop a warmer connection with Israel is a mystery. The Vice President came to pressure Israel to bend to the Palestinian demands, which of course would mean suicide for us. If the building in Ramat Shlomo (a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem) had not come up it would have been something else i.e. Heritage sites, settlements, checkpoints,occupation, Arab humiliation. When "painful concessions" need to be made they are always Jewish, when was a "painful concession" ever made by the Arabs?

At the same time that the President and the Secretary of State were castigating Israel in the harshest manner ever, not a word appeared anywhere about the effect on peace prospects with the Arabs, when at the same time they are showering rocks down on supplicants praying at the Western Wall, or the Palestinian Authority preparing a major public dedication of a public square to honor Dalal Mugrahbi as a "courageous fighter who held a proud place in Palestinian history" according to a Fatah statement. What was this courageous fighters deed? Murdering an American photo journalist and 38 Israeli civilians including 13 children, very brave indeed.

Of course cold blooded murder is not nearly as serious as an announcemnt that a country will allow homes to be built in its own territory for its own citizens. Just weigh this: on the one hand, Jews building homes on the other hand, Palestinians making a hero out of a murderer.

Jews are banned from building because they are Jews, there is no mention of the fact that Arabs are also building and often illegally (without building permits, try that in the U.S.).

The incendiary and public nature of the remarks from the Obama administration indicate the worst of intentions. As I mentioned in my previous post, Israel unquestionably wants only the best of relations with the United States, a natural ally, but it will not be at any price. There is an old song that says "I got along without you before I met you and I will get along without you now" It will be difficult and unpleasant and even dangerous but we know that the American people and the American Congress by 75% do not support the attacks by this administration. So in time things will work out. The Prime Minister is balancing on the edge of a very sharp knife and doing it very well. We must let him know we support him in being firm with President Obama, Israel is not an American colony and that government cannot dictate her policies. She is a sovereign country and its citizens will live where they like. Israel will not tell Americans were they can live and Americans cannot tell Israelis where to live.

When Barack Obama's Presidency is over the Jews will still be here, harried, stressed and embattled, but still determined to look out for our own best interests with or without our much loved and admired ally across the ocean.

Thanks to Arlene Kushner:OK. The situation is horrendous, and every bad thing we imagined would come from an Obama administration is materializing before our eyes.
We cannot simply be horrified. We absolutely must act. And at this juncture I would like to recommend a couple of specific things, with more to follow:
First, it is absolutely imperative that we give Netanyahu as much support as possible. Please, contact him! Large numbers make a difference.
Tell him that:
[] You are behind him and will support him as he stands strong for Israel.
[] He must not be pushed into concessions that are not in Israel's best interests because of threats from the Obama administration.
[] He must take the offensive, missing no opportunity to expose the insincerity of the PA and its consistent incitement.
[] He must, at all times, remember that Israel is a sovereign state and does not answer to the US. And that there is no need to apologize for this.
Fax: 02-670-5369 (From the US: 011-972-2-670-5369)

Phone: 03-610-9898 (From the US: 011-972-3-610-9898)

E-mail: Memshala@pmo.gov.il and also pm_eng2@it.pmo.gov.il (underscore after pm) use both addresses.

Israel-why a Jewish State?

THE REAL ISRAEL TODAY
As I wander around this amazingly diverse, noisy, friendly, pushy country, the things that people talk about and receive the heaviest coverage in the news media are rarely heard of overseas. This post will be a peek inside the real Israel as I previously attempted in the posts on Tu B’Shvat and The Germany colony.
Purim and Shabbat, takes us back to why Israel is, in fact, a Jewish state the questions of should she be or shouldn’t she be or why we need her is irrelevant in that she, in fact, is a Jewish state. Sometimes the most efficient road is the road to reality even though reality is often hard to accept. In regards to the Jewish people it is even counter intuitive.
Forgetting politics which rarely takes us in the right, as in righteous, direction here are some views of this country on this Purim that can only happen in a Jewish state. The fact that approximately 75% of the Jews in Israel describe themselves as “not religious” virtually 100% observe, to some extent, all Jewish holidays, major or Minor.
Even though we had rain in sheets during the Purim celebrations this didn’t daunt the holiday atmosphere. While every city had in their streets and parks events that may have been cancelled because of the enormity of the rainstorms, this was rarely considered more than a few moments before they were simply moved to shopping malls, schools, public buildings, even churches. After all here, rain is a blessing, not something that warranted costumes being unseen by their friends and neighbors. In places like the Ajami neighborhood in Jaffa, Purim was celebrated with Jews and Arabs dressing up, singing and dancing in the Arab-Jewish Community Center and simply partying together, even though this was not an Arab event, the outside world rarely sees how well Jews and Arabs live together in areas of the country in which Arabs are not pressured by politics. It isn’t perfect, but somehow they all seem to manage to separate politics from personal relationships in a manner not often seen in these emotional times.

I have attached a picture of a group of soldiers on an Egged bus. Each of them is in uniform from the neck down but above the neck one sees funny hats, face painting and other signs of Purim. The entire time they were on the bus they sang celebratory Purim songs which in no time pulled in all the bus riders. It was certainly the happiest bus ride I have ever experienced. Where else in the world would you experience this? For weeks before Purim everywhere I walked, clothing stores and variety stores featured large displays of costumes, face painting kits, Hamentaschen are everywhere and displays of gift bags and baskets(see attached pictures) of Mashloach Manot to fulfill the tradition of bringing baskets of fruit, nuts and baked goods to neighbors and friends and to the poor. Again, we have the Jewish tradition that no one should go without the basics of celebration.

I asked many people on the street and in the shops if they felt Purim was particularly significant during this time when Israel is existentially threatened by Persia (now Iran) given that Purim is a celebration of the survival of Jewish people from the genocidal threat of Persia during the 1st or 2nd century BCE. There were three basic responses, some said yes, others responded with a shrug and the comment “someone is always trying” (what Haman tried) and lastly “I never really thought about it, it isn’t really the same”. When I pursued the last answer asking “Why today is different” the response was variations of “now we have our own state” or “we have an army to defend us”. It would be interesting to ask American Jews the same question, perhaps I will do that next Purim.
Another purely Israel experience is Friday morning, it feels as though everyone is out on the street, rain or shine, last minute shopping and preparation for Shabbat---wait a minute, most of these people are not observant-- why this activity? This is a Jewish state, regardless of level of observance; Shabbat is a different day from every other day of the week. Shops begin closing around 2:00 on Friday, public transportation stops around 4:00 depending on how early the sun sets. The attached picture shows a young religious man, typical of many young men and women who appear at public shopping places or wherever there is heavy street traffic, asking men passing by, if they would like to learn to put on Tfillin, often someone stops and says yes. Women are asked if they will light Shabbat candles and are handed a set of candles, it has come to be something I look forward to as these young people are incredibly earnest.

This young man wanted to be sure I knew the blessing and as I removed the candles from the box I would notice a slit in the top of the box to use as a bank to put change into all week and then give to the poor the next Friday. He assured me that it is always a blessing and an obligation to give to the poor however on Friday morning it is a double portion as no one must go without food and wine to bless on Shabbat.
Next post will be on Jerusalem, what the Israeli on the street thinks and feels and what the news media is talking about.