Krauthammer: "No peace in our time" - The Washington Post

Every once and a while, a writer completely nails a complex topic - succinctly, boldly, and accurately. This is one of those articles, on Israel and the Middle East, no less. Must read. - R.O.

"No peace in our time"

By: Charles Krauthammer - The Washington Post

March 20, 2015 

Of all the idiocies uttered in reaction to Benjamin Netanyahu’s stunning election victory, none is more ubiquitous than the idea that peace prospects are now dead because Netanyahu has declared that there will be no Palestinian state while he is Israel’s prime minister.

I have news for the lowing herds: There would be no peace and no Palestinian state if Isaac Herzog were prime minister either. Or Ehud Barak or Ehud Olmert for that matter. The latter two were (non-Likud) prime ministers who offered the Palestinians their own state — with its capital in Jerusalem and every Israeli settlement in the new Palestine uprooted — only to be rudely rejected.

This is not ancient history. This is 2000, 2001 and 2008 — three astonishingly concessionary peace offers within the past 15 years. Every one rejected.

The fundamental reality remains: This generation of Palestinian leadership — from Yasser Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas — has never and will never sign its name to a final peace settlement dividing the land with a Jewish state. And without that, no Israeli government of any kind will agree to a Palestinian state.

Today, however, there is a second reason a peace agreement is impossible: the supreme instability of the entire Middle East. For half a century, it was run by dictators no one liked but with whom you could do business. For example, the 1974 Israel-Syria disengagement agreement yielded more than four decades of near-total quiet on the border because the Assad dictatorships so decreed.

That authoritarian order is gone, overthrown by the Arab Spring. Syria is wracked by a multi-sided civil war that has killed 200,000 people and that has al-Qaeda allies, Hezbollah fighters, government troops and eventhe occasional Iranian general prowling the Israeli border. Who inherits? No one knows.

In the last four years, Egypt has had two revolutions and three radically different regimes. Yemen went from pro-American to Iranian client so quickly the United States had to evacuate its embassy in a panic. Libya has gone from Moammar Gaddafi’s crazy authoritarianism to jihadi-dominated civil war. On Wednesday, Tunisia, the one relative success of the Arab Spring, suffered a major terror attack that the prime minister said “targets the stability of the country.”

From Mali to Iraq, everything is in flux. Amid this mayhem, by what magic would the West Bank, riven by a bitter Fatah-Hamas rivalry, be an island of stability? What would give any Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement even a modicum of durability?

There was a time when Arafat commanded the Palestinian movement the way Gaddafi commanded Libya. Abbas commands no one. Why do you think he is in the 11th year of a four-year term, having refused to hold elections for the last five years? Because he’s afraid he would lose to Hamas.

With or without elections, the West Bank could fall to Hamas overnight. At which point fire rains down on Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport and the entire Israeli urban heartland — just as it rains down on southern Israel from Gaza when it suits Hamas, which has turned that first Palestinian state into a terrorist fire base.

Any Arab-Israeli peace settlement would require Israel to make dangerous and inherently irreversible territorial concessions on the West Bank in return for promises and guarantees. Under current conditions, these would be written on sand.

Israel is ringed by jihadi terrorists in Sinai, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Islamic State and Iranian proxies in Syria, and a friendly but highly fragile Jordan. Israelis have no idea who ends up running any of these places. Will the Islamic State advance to an Israeli border? Will Iranian Revolutionary Guards appear on the Golan Heights? No one knows.

Well, say the critics. Israel could be given outside guarantees. Guarantees? Like the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in which the United States, Britain and Russia guaranteed Ukraine’s “territorial integrity”? Like the red line in Syria? Like the unanimous U.N. resolutions declaring illegal any Iranian enrichment of uranium — now effectively rendered null?

Peace awaits three things. Eventual Palestinian acceptance of a Jewish state. A Palestinian leader willing to sign a deal based on that premise. A modicum of regional stability that allows Israel to risk the potentially fatal withdrawals such a deal would entail.

I believe such a day will come. But there is zero chance it comes now or even soon. That’s essentially what Netanyahu said Thursday in explaining — and softening — his no-Palestinian-state statement.

In the interim, I understand the crushing disappointment of the Obama administration and its media poodles at the spectacular success of the foreign leader they loathe more than any other on the planet. The consequent seething and sputtering are understandable, if unseemly. Blaming Netanyahu for banishing peace, however, is mindless.

Settling Israel's Ancient West Bank Roots

Here's my latest article for the Times of Israel based on my first-hand report from a pro-settlement political event that I attended in the West Bank in July: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/israels-right-to-re-settle/

Enjoy.

-R.O.
--------

Settling Israel's Ancient West Bank Roots
By: Robert D. Onley - August 22, 2013
Times of Israel

The uproar emitted by the Palestinian Authority and the international community after Israel approved new housing blocks in East Jerusalem - on the eve of renewed peace talks - caused many people to seriously question the logic of the State of Israel.

However the casually and widely accepted proposition that any Israeli construction in the West Bank is somehow indisputably wrong is based on a fundamentally flawed understanding of present realities and Israel’s ancient history.

One only has to travel about 45 minutes outside of Jerusalem to have this conclusion become abruptly clear. In mid-July I had the privilege of attending the opening of a new cultural center and synagogue on the historic hilltop in Ancient Shiloh, an area deemed 'occupied' by the international community.

Located in the Ephraim hill-country in the Samarian countryside, the village of Ancient Shiloh was the religious capital of Israel for 300 years before Jerusalem and the existence of the first Temple. Ancient Shiloh was also home to the first tabernacle, Judaism’s earliest holy site, and at one point held the Ark of the Covenant. Both iconic Jewish artifacts pre-date the existence of Islam by over a millennium, and yet the reflexively anti-Israel proletariat in Europe and in the West summarily dismiss the centrality of these artifacts to Jewish identity.

Consider a basic comparative example to appreciate Israel’s alleged defiance of international law when building in Shiloh: in the same way that the ummat al-Islamiyah rightfully upholds the sanctity of the site at the Dome of the Rock, the Jewish people justifiably lay claim to the historic significance of geographic locations such as Ancient Shiloh, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and numerous other areas integral to the Jewish faith.

The Ancient Shiloh area was re-settled in 1978 and officially recognized by the Israeli government a year later. Just like the local Muslim populations in East Jerusalem near the Dome of the Rock, a Jewish population too has gradually grown up around Ancient Shiloh.

In the last few years, efforts by various pro-settlement groups were undertaken to establish a permanent structure to commemorate ancient Israel’s ties to the land at Ancient Shiloh. Embodying this effort is the multi-purpose synagogue and cultural building that opened there in July. The building features a sweeping panoramic view and a super-widescreen theatre displaying a top-notch reenactment film which uses the natural Samarian hillside as a real-life backdrop for the film.

Commemorating the opening of this unique facility attracted the who’s who of Israel's political settlement movement, including politicians Naftali Bennett, leader of The Jewish Home party, and Moshe Feiglin, leader of Jewish Leadership faction of the Likud party and the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset. Their respective political identities and electoral success are based on an unshakeable belief in the historicity and veracity of the Jewish lineage in the land of Israel, including, of course, at places such as Ancient Shiloh.

However, the existence of a factual Jewish lineage does not matter to those whose understanding of Jewish history extends strictly to June 10, 1967, when the borders between the State of Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan were transformed by the Six Day War and Israel’s subsequent occupation of formerly Jordanian land. To many observers, Israel’s decision then to capture additional Jordanian territory still constitutes “theft” of Palestinian land, today.

All of which is problematic because the European Union’s recent decision to boycott Israeli investments in the West Bank is also predicated on this flawed logic. The E.U.’s logic disregards any actual or potential historic Jewish connection to any of the land in the West Bank.

Further, with its latest directive, the E.U. instead dismisses ancient Jewish history as irrelevant, and alternately is implicitly accepting the totality of the P.A.’s assertion of sovereignty over all of “Palestine”. Meanwhile repeated Israeli governments have sacrificed Israeli territory in the pursuit of peace, only to receive rockets and relentless intransigence in return.

Unanswered by the P.A., is that if the 1967 borders are essential to peace for both the P.A. and the E.U., why then were these borders not acceptable in 1967 immediately prior to the Six Day War? Tracing this reasoning further back in history: why were the 1948 borders not acceptable for the creation of a Palestinian state? Legally and objectively, at both points in history – May 1948 and June 1967 – Israel was not “occupying” a square inch of territory in the “West Bank”.

The P.A.’s inability to address these simple yet challenging questions, and the resultant 65 years of bloodshed between Israel and the various Palestinian entities that have expressed vitriolic hatred toward the Jewish people, together raise alarming concern about the fundamental ideological underpinnings of the current and future Palestinian government.

Further, the P.A.’s silence in the face of legitimate objective inquiry exposes its radical agenda, reliance on historic revisionism and perpetual strategic hypocrisy. More than anything, this silence effectively legitimizes Israel’s construction activity, particularly in areas of ironclad historic prominence to Judaism.

At the Ancient Shiloh event, Naftali Bennett, a member of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s governing coalition, made explicitly clear his response to the paradox above, stating:

“The world says that these ‘settlements’ are terrorizing the Palestinian people. I say that not building on this land is terrorism against the Jewish State.”

Bennett’s new party won 12 seats in the 2013 national elections, and he is widely considered an up-and-coming political leader. With peace negotiations now underway, Bennett’s ideological ambition and rising popularity are worth bearing consideration in the context of Israel’s future.

In many respects, Bennett’s vision for Israel’s growth (into the West Bank), emerges from the perception in Israel that the Palestinian government is systemically and intractably divided, riven with venomous jihadi ideologies, and simply incapable of the intellectual maturity required to accept both Jews and the Jewish State on a secular, humanistic, civilizational basis.

That the P.A.’s anti-Semitic political positions are granted hearing in the highest global forums only entrenches Bennett’s belief that Israel must take matters firmly into its own hands, both now and for the foreseeable future.

The reality is that Israel has agreed to come to the negotiating table in 2013 without preconditions. That means: without the basic condition that Israel be accepted as a Jewish State. Is it really any wonder to the international community precisely why Israel continues to build in areas of vital historic importance?

None of this means that Israel has the right to build absolutely anywhere in the West Bank that it deems fit. Nearly all Israelis agree that sensible limits should be placed on construction in areas that will directly impact the ability to create a contiguous Palestinian state - indeed such limits are in Israel's interest when they can lead to definable final status borders.

Yet as the construction at Ancient Shiloh demonstrates, Israel's "settlements" are not necessarily unreasonable or baseless land grabs, but rather are often rooted in ancient, verified history. If only the rest of the world, particularly the E.U. and P.A., would stop to appreciate and construct that conclusion on their own.

The Truth About Israeli Settlements

Caroline Glick is one of the top Israeli commentators on current events and issues in the Middle East. Her writing is published in the Jerusalem Post and around the world.

Last week she participated in a debate hosted by Intelligence Squared, where she argued against the proposition: "Israel is Destroying Itself with Its Settlement Policy: If settlement expansion continues, Israel will have no future."

In her opening remarks in the video below, Caroline Glick utterly destroys the premise of the proposition and systemically deconstructs commonly held views about Israel's "settlements" in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). This video is a must watch for anyone who considers themselves knowledgeable about the settlement topic. Also read Glick's post about the video here. - R.O.

Falling for Hamas’s media manipulation

Legitimate criticism of the Western media's biased reporting of the Israel-Hamas conflict. - R.O.

Falling for Hamas’s media manipulation

By Michael Oren, Published: November 28, 2012 - Washington Post

Michael Oren is Israel’s ambassador to the United States.
What makes better headlines? Is it numbing figures such as the 8,000 Palestinian rockets fired at Israel since it unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and the 42.5 percent of Israeli children living near the Gaza border who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder? Or is it high-resolution images of bombed-out buildings in Gaza and emotional stories of bereaved Palestinians? The last, obviously, as demonstrated by much of the media coverage of Israel’s recent operation against Hamas. But that answer raises a more fundamental question: Which stories best serve the terrorists’ interest?

Hamas has a military strategy to paralyze southern Israel with short- and middle-range rockets while launching Iranian-made missiles at Tel Aviv. With our precision air force, top-notch intelligence and committed citizens army, we can defend ourselves against these dangers. We have invested billions of dollars in bomb shelters and early-warning systems and, together with generous U.S. aid, have developed history’s most advanced, multi-layered anti-missile batteries. For all of its bluster, Hamas does not threaten Israel’s existence.

But Hamas also has a media strategy. Its purpose is to portray Israel’s unparalleled efforts to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza as indiscriminate firing at women and children, to pervert Israel’s rightful acts of self-defense into war crimes. Its goals are to isolate Israel internationally, to tie its hands from striking back at those trying to kill our citizens and to delegitimize the Jewish State. Hamas knows that it cannot destroy us militarily but believes that it might do so through the media.

One reason is the enlarged images of destruction and civilian casualties in Gaza that dominated the front pages of U.S. publications. During this operation, The Post published multiple front-page photographs of Palestinian suffering. The New York Times even juxtaposed a photograph of the funeral of Hamas commander Ahmed Jabari, who was responsible for the slaughter of dozens of innocent Israelis, with that of a pregnant Israeli mother murdered by Hamas. Other photos, supplied by the terrorists and picked up by the press, identified children killed by Syrian forces or even by Hamas itself as victims of Israeli strikes.

In reporting Palestinian deaths, media routinely failed to note that roughly half were terrorists and that such a ratio is exceedingly low by modern military standards — much lower, for example, than the NATO campaign in the Balkans. Media also emphasize the disparity between the number of Palestinian and Israeli deaths, as though Israel should be penalized for investing billions of dollars in civil-defense and early-warning systems and Hamas exonerated for investing in bombs rather than bomb shelters. As in Israel’s last campaign against Hamas in 2008-09, the word “disproportionality” has been frequently used to characterize Israeli military strikes. In fact, during Operation Pillar of Defense this year, Hamas fired more than 1,500 missiles at Israel and the Israeli Air Force responded with 1,500 sorties.

The imbalance is also of language. “Hamas health officials said 45 had been killed and 385 wounded,” the Times’ front page reported. “Three Israeli civilians have died and 63 have been injured.” The subtext is clear: Israel targets Palestinians, and Israelis merely die.

The media perpetuated Hamas propaganda that traced the fighting to Jabari’s elimination and described Gaza as the most densely populated area on earth. Widely forgotten were the 130 rockets fired at Israel in the weeks before Jabari’s demise. For the record, Tel Aviv’s population is twice as dense as Gaza’s.

Hamas is a flagrantly anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti-feminist and anti-gay movement dedicated to genocide. The United States, Canada and the European Union all consider it a terrorist organization. Hamas strives to kill the maximum number of Israeli civilians while using its own population as a human shield — under international law, a double war crime. Why, then, would the same free press that Hamas silences help advance its strategy?

Media naturally gravitate toward dramatic and highly visual stories. Reports of 5.5 million Israelis gathered nightly in bomb shelters scarcely compete with the Palestinian father interviewed after losing his son. Both are, of course, newsworthy, but the first tells a more complete story while the second stirs emotions.

This is precisely what Hamas wants. It seeks to instill a visceral disgust for any Israeli act of self-defense, even one taken after years of unprovoked aggression.

Hamas strives to replace the tens of thousands of phone calls and text messages Israel sent to Palestinian civilians, warning them to leave combat zones, with lurid images of Palestinian suffering. If Hamas cannot win the war, it wants to win the story of the war.

Veteran journalist Marvin Kalb, writing for Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on the terrorists’ successful media strategy against Israel, warned that “the trajectory of the media, from objective observer to fiery advocate,” had become “a weapon of modern warfare.” Kalb quotes a U.S. military expert who describes how perception has replaced reality on the battlefield and that the terrorists know it.

Israel will take all legitimate steps necessary to defend our citizens. We know that, despite our most painstaking efforts, tragic stories can emerge — stories that the enemy sensationalizes.

Like Americans, we cherish a free press, but unlike the terrorists, we are not looking for headlines. Our hope is that media resist the temptation to give them what they want.

Gaza Missiles a Bigger Threat Than Syria

Gaza Missiles a Bigger Threat Than Syria
By: Jonathan S. Tobin

Over the weekend, provocations on two of Israel’s borders presented the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with new challenges. In the Golan Heights, what was described in reports as “erratic mortar fire” from Syrian army positions brought a sharp, though limited, response from the Israel Defense Forces. In the south, Hamas launched a rocket offensive aimed at Israeli civilian targets. But while the Syrian incident made headlines in the international press since it threatened to drag Israel into the Syrian civil war, it was the situation in Gaza that was the more troubling.

As troubling as the possibility that Israel could be dragged into the ongoing chaos of Syria is, the country’s Gaza dilemma is far more worrisome. Rockets continued to fall on Israel Monday as the Hamas rulers of Gaza continued their own attempt to provoke Israel into an offensive. While both Israel and neighboring Egypt have little to gain from either a repeat of the 2008 Operation Cast Lead, in which Israel knocked out terrorist positions inside Gaza, or a more far-reaching offensive, in which the Islamist terrorist group would actually be deposed, the possibility that at some point Netanyahu will have to do something to stop the rain of fire on his country is very real.

Israelis don’t know for sure whether, as some observers seem to think, the fire from Syria was an attempt by the faltering Assad regime to portray its struggle as one against Israel rather than its own people. Given that such a ploy is a tried and true standby for Arab dictators, it seems logical to think that a desperate Bashar Assad thinks involving Israel in the fighting will bolster support for his embattled government. Yet it is just as likely that the fire into the Golan was unintentional spillover from that war. Certainly it was nothing comparable to the deliberate attacks from the regime on the Turkish border, which is actually a transit and supply route for the rebels who have the support of Ankara.

While Israel has no love for Assad and would be happy to see Iran’s ally fall, it must also ponder whether his replacement by a weak rebel regime would lead to more conflict in the future. Israel is likely to do just about anything to stay out of that mess, and it will take more than a few stray mortar shells to drag it into that war.

But Netanyahu’s choices with regards to Gaza are not so easy. Though Israel’s main strategic focus in the last year has understandably been on the Iranian nuclear threat, Hamas’ ability to make the lives of Israelis living in the south a living hell is a reminder that the enemies on the Jewish state’s border can’t be ignored. Since Saturday, more than 160 rockets have fallen on the region bordering Gaza. Their motives for this offensive are complex.

The impetus for the escalation may stem in part from a desire to remind the world that the Palestinian Authority is merely one of two groups competing for control of a future Palestinian state. The surge in violence doesn’t help PA leader Mahmoud Abbas’s efforts to get the United Nations to unilaterally recognize Palestinian independence without first making peace with Israel, and that suits Hamas’s purposes.

The Hamas fire may also have a tactical purpose. Last Thursday, the Israel Defense Forces discovered a tunnel along the border with Gaza, the intent of which was obviously to facilitate a cross-border terror raid along the lines of the one that resulted in Gilad Shalit’s kidnapping as well as the murder of two other soldiers. Israel has sought to establish a 300-meter no-go zone on the Gaza side of the border in order to prevent such attacks, but Hamas uses rocket fire to defend its freedom of action.

Whether thinking tactically or strategically, Hamas continues to hold approximately one million Israelis living in the south hostage. Anti-missile defense systems like Iron Dome help limit the damage, but they can’t stop all or even most of the rockets, as the last two days showed. Hamas seems to be assuming that an Israeli counter-offensive into Gaza to silence the fire would be too bloody and too unpopular abroad to be worth it for Netanyahu. Another option would be to return to targeted killings of Hamas leaders, but that is likely to lead to more rockets fired at Israeli civilians rather than to stop the attacks.

The bottom line is that Israel has no good choices open to it with regard to Gaza. But with elections looming in January, Netanyahu can’t afford to let the people of the south sit in shelters indefinitely. If their Muslim Brotherhood friends in Egypt — who also worry about the spillover from a new war — can’t persuade Hamas to stand down soon, the prime minister may have to consider raising the ante with the Islamist terrorist movement. While the world is more interested in the violence in Syria, Gaza remains the more difficult dilemma facing the Israelis.