ISRAELI CONCESSIONS: A ZERO SUM GAME
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Israeli Concessions – A Zero Sum Game Victor Sharpe
With Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, about to sit with Arab leaders and President Barack Hussein Obama in the White House, some have likened Netanyahu to a minnow surrounded by circling sharks.
Present will be Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Jordan’s kinglet, Abdullah, the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and the joker in the pack, President Obama, at the ‘peace’ talks – peace being an oxymoron with the news that four Israelis, including a pregnant woman, were slaughtered Tuesday evening by Arabs near Hebron.
Never before has an Israeli leader been coerced into a White House meeting where the American president has displayed such extreme partiality to the Muslim and Arab world and barely disguised hostility to the Jewish state.
The talks are already stacked against Prime Minister Netanyahu who had been promised both by Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, that there would be no Arab preconditions imposed upon him. But there most certainly are and they will be at the top of the anti-Israel agenda. Most prominent will be that demanded by Mahmoud Abbas who has already threatened to bolt the talks if Israel does not make the six month self-imposed Israeli building freeze in Judea and Samaria, as well as within Jerusalem itself, permanent.
It was a trap of his own making when Netanyahu, with the best of intentions, announced the voluntary freeze. It was obvious that the Arabs and Obama would lean heavily upon Israel to extend it beyond its September 26 expiration date; in other words to make it a permanent fact. The irony is that Netanyahu ordered the six month building freeze as another in the long line of Israeli concessions in order to encourage Abbas to attend peace talks. But the wily Abbas made his demands just prior to the talks, which goes to prove yet again that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
The entire purpose of the talks is to give Obama a photo-op and an opportunity to force Israel into accepting a two-state solution. President Obama has already made the creation of a Palestinian state his primary foreign policy goal and he is determined to turn the screw on the Jewish state even as the U.S. economy sinks further and further into the abyss.
But what are the frightful dangers to Israel’s survival should a new Arab state – one hostile in the extreme to Israel – be carved out of what is biblical Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), leaving Israel a mere nine miles wide at its most populous and vulnerable region? The views of non-Israelis immediately after the June 1967 Six Day War are as pertinent today as they were then.
A secret memorandum was issued by the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) shortly after Israel liberated the West Bank from Jordanian occupation. The Golan Heights had also been taken from the Syrian army, which had used the dominant heights solely to rain artillery barrages down upon Israeli farmers in the Hula Valley and fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. The Sinai had been wrested from Egyptian control after Egypt’s Nasser had moved his armies into the peninsula to threaten Israel. Subsequently the Gaza Strip was liberated from Egyptian occupation. The conclusions of the JCS 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 the narrow 44 mile wide territory between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan.
Since that report in 1967, the Begin government gave away all of the Sinai. 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.
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 Israel. After Israel endured over 10,000 incoming missiles from Hamas-occupied Gaza, a war was finally launched by Israel to remove or nullify the threat. To date it has not succeeded and missiles and mortars continue to target Israeli civilians though not at the levels that existed before Israel’s Operation Cast Lead. Hamas occupied Gaza remains a lethal dagger pointing into the heart of Israel. And behind Hamas and Hezbollah is the nexus of all Islamic terror: Iran.
Israel is 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.
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 in 1974 an Army War College study on Israel’s security needs. 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. Now Sinai, the Gaza Strip and the security zone in Southern Lebanon have all been given away to an implacable Arab enemy as Israeli concessions and gestures of peace.
Irving Kett had not been aware that another memorandum had been produced earlier, on June 29, 1967, for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara by General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the JCS, at the direction of President Lyndon Johnson. That study was declassified in 1983 and recommended that Israel keep all of Judea, the western half of Samaria, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and two significant parts of east and south Sinai. The similarity between the memorandums is quite remarkable.
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 Jordan valley, which is part of the Great Rift Valley that extends down into East Africa, lies deep below sea level. The mountains rise up to form a massive defense barrier against any Arab and Muslim invasion attempt from the east. The mountain 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.
The “two-state solution”, so beloved of President Obama and President George Bush before him, requires Judea and Samaria to be given away to the Palestinian Arabs. But the Arabs have no intention of making peace, which 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 has been that Jordan is Palestine, which is based upon the historical fact of the first “two-state solution” enacted in infamy by Great Britain some 88 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. The dread euphemism “Final Solution” comes to mind.
Hopefully Binyamin Netanyahu will stress the territorial insanity of that fact over and over to President Obama in the White House. But it will avail him nothing. Accordingly, I am not holding my breath.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer, contributing editor, and author of Volume One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
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