FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

Some recent discussions have convinced me that I should take up this question again.

What is the core issue of the conflict that surrounds Israel?

Most people that I argue with tell me that it has to do with the Palestinian Arabs. Because of the 1967 occupation, because their rights are being violated, because they don’t have a state, because the security barrier impinges on their land, because of an unending list of grievances, there can’t be peace. If Israel will fix these problems, they say, there can be peace — between Israel and the Palestinians and Israel and the Arab nations.

In the past I’ve always responded that the problem is not the occupation, but the fact that the Arabs do not accept the presence of a Jewish state of any size in the Mideast. It’s easy to prove this: all you need to do is to show that violent opposition to Israel started before 1967 — the PLO, for example, was founded in 1964 — and that the Palestinians have refused to accept very fair offers from Israel, in 2000 and 2008, to create an Arab state from the occupied territories.

The real issue, I argue, has been that the Palestinians — with support from the other Arab nations — will not be satisfied with less than a reversal of the 1948 occupation — the replacement of Israel by an Arab state.

Lately some of my opponents have started to agree. The problem is the 1948 occupation, they admit, and there should not be an Israel at all. The very existence of a Jewish state, they say, is incompatible with Palestinian rights. This is a harder argument to have, because you have to bring up lots of historical facts, and there is a whole mythology to refute. But at least they are being more honest about their goal.

But now there is an additional factor, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Palestinian Arabs, and it has come to be the overriding issue that prevents Israel from living at peace.

That factor is the Iranian program to dominate the region economically, politically and religiously. Iran wants to rid the Middle East of Western (mostly American) influence, and even grandiosely challenges the position of the US as the most powerful nation in the world. Iran’s influence is growing in Iraq, and it’s hard to see how the US will be able to withdraw from there without it quickly becoming an Iranian satellite. With the US gone, Iran will be able to dominate the conservative regimes like those of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which depend on it for protection.

This means that one-third of the world’s oil resources will be under Iranian control. It means that Iran will be able to spread its revolutionary Islamism, and perhaps establish the Shiite caliphate that the Mullahs so desire.

Soon Iran expects to have nuclear weapons to provide an ‘umbrella’ for its expansionist activities. There’s just one little thing standing in its way, and it’s not hard to guess what it is.

Israel perceives the Iranian nuclear bomb as an existential threat, and if the US will not act to stop it, Israel will. Israel is a check on the activities of Iranian proxies Syria and Hizballah in Lebanon. Israel props up the regimes in Egypt and Jordan, and prevents the radical Hamas from gaining total control of the Palestinians. Israel is a close ally of the US, and provides intelligence and maybe other kinds of assistance to it. Tiny little Israel is a big fat bone in the Iranian throat, and Iran wants to dislodge it.

So today Iran has replaced the Arabs as the primary enemy of Israel and the main cause of the continuation of the conflict. Iran supplies and supports Hamas and Hizballah, with whom Israel has fought two recent wars, and there’s no doubt that Iranian funds flow to other terrorist factions.

This has been happening for years: remember the Karine A, the ship full of weapons intended for Arafat’s terrorists that was intercepted in 2002? Iran has paid for the huge Syrian missile buildup in recent years. Even in the Palestinian Authority, hardliners are encouraged by their hope that Iran’s proxies will keep the IDF occupied, and weaken Israel.

If we assume that the Obama Administration wants to ‘solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ it is going about it in the wrong way, attacking the symptoms — Israeli-Palestinian issues — instead of the cause, Iranian expansionism. Changing the approach would actually simplify US policy a great deal, because instead of trying to achieve its ends in the Middle East by creating a Palestinian state and then getting Arab support as a result — the incoherent ‘linkage theory‘ — the US could simply move directly toward its desired goal, which is (or should be) preventing the Iranian takeover of the region.

Effective action to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons would go a long way in this direction, as would real support for Iranian dissidents.

Israeli-Palestinian peace might be a byproduct.

The seized Karine A, stuffed with Iranian weapons, in port at Eilat

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinians, Isareli-Palestinian conflict, Iran

George Jahn of the AP writes,

VIENNA — Israel’s secretive nuclear activities may undergo unprecedented scrutiny next month, with a key meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency tentatively set to focus on the topic for the first time, according to documents shared Friday with The Associated Press.

A copy of the restricted provisional agenda of the IAEA’s June 7 board meeting lists “Israeli nuclear capabilities” as the eighth item — the first time that that the agency’s decision-making body is being asked to deal with the issue in its 52 years of existence…

The 35-nation IAEA board is the agency’s decision making body and can refer proliferation concerns to the U.N. Security Council — as it did with Iran in 2006 after Tehran resumed uranium enrichment, a potential pathway to nuclear weapons…

The latest pressure is putting the Jewish state in an uncomfortable position. It wants the international community to take stern action to prevent Iran from getting atomic weapons but at the same time brushes off calls to come clean about its own nuclear capabilities.

This article obscures an important point, which is that the IAEA — and the UN — have no authority over Israel’s nuclear capability. And it gives the impression that Iran and Israel’s nuclear programs are both in some way in violation of international law, and that if action is taken regarding Iran it should also be taken toward Israel. This is entirely false.

The IAEA was created in 1957 as “the world’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ agency.” The idea was that the IAEA would supply fissionable material and know-how to countries that wanted to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes in return for strict controls over how these would be used. To that end it set up a system of inspections; if a country was found to be using IAEA-provided materials for military purposes, the information would be passed to the Security Council for action.

The IAEA’s authorized functions are listed in its founding Statute. They do not include interference in nuclear activities that are not related to material supplied by the IAEA, unless the parties involved have voluntarily agreed to involve the IAEA, as was done with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

In 1970 the NPT came into being. It recognized that five nations already had nuclear weapons — the US, Soviet Union, UK, France, and China — and in effect granted them a monopoly. Signatories on the treaty agreed that they would not develop nuclear weapons themselves or contribute to the proliferation thereof and would accept IAEA supervision over their peaceful use of atomic energy.

Israel already had several weapons in 1970 and chose not to sign the NPT. So it is not in violation of it. And it is not subject to IAEA inspection.

Indeed, Israel’s nuclear weapons are exactly as legal under international law as those of the US.

Iran, on the other hand, did sign the NPT. It is required to permit IAEA inspections of its nuclear installations, and the IAEA has determined that Iran is probably developing weapons in violation of the treaty, but Iran insists that its project is entirely for peaceful purposes. Nobody honestly believes that.

North Korea, which has tested (it’s not clear how successfully) a weapon was a party to the NPT, but withdrew from it. Two other nuclear states — India and Pakistan — did not sign the treaty and so are not bound by it.

Israel has always suggested — but not stated explicitly, since it has never admitted to possessing nuclear weapons — that they would only be used defensively and only when there was no alternative. The closest it may have come to doing so was in the early stages of the 1973 war, when there was a possibility of enemy penetration into Israel beyond the pre-1967 borders. Some believe that Israel armed some weapons in the knowledge that the US and USSR would detect this, both as a deterrent to intervention by the USSR and a spur to the US to resupply Israel with conventional weapons.

In 1991, it’s said that weapons were put on alert in the event that Saddam would fire Scuds with chemical warheads at Israel (he did not). Syria also has a large quantity of chemical warheads which have not been used, probably from fear of nuclear retaliation.

The IDF has multiple delivery systems, which include submarine-launched cruise missiles and IRBM/ICBM’s in hardened land installations, giving it a second-strike capability. As I wrote yesterday, an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel, no matter how ‘successful’, would trigger a response that would in essence eliminate Iran as a modern state. Israel’s missiles can also reach far beyond the Middle East, a fact which was highly relevant during the period that the USSR was supporting the Arab nations.

One might say that the form that the Mideast conflict has taken since 1973 — a low-intensity war involving non-state proxies and terrorism combined with stepped-up political and economic pressure — has been determined by the presence of Israel’s nuclear deterrent. Not good, but better than the alternative.

So it’s not surprising that Israel’s enemies have recently begun a diplomatic campaign for Israel to sign the NPT, to declare the Mideast a ‘nuclear-free zone’, etc.

Bad idea. Israel’s nuclear weapons are probably the most ‘pro-peace’ factor in the entire Mideast equation. Probably the best policy for Israel is to continue its policy of official ambiguity along with continued development of low-fallout nuclear weapons technology — i.e., neutron weapons, electromagnetic pulse weapons, etc.

Jericho III ICBM

Technorati Tags: Israel, IAEA, NPT, nuclear weapons

Recently a friend asked me if I thought there would be a war in the near future. Of course I don’t know. My contacts in the IDF aren’t on the General Staff, and I don’t know anybody in Hizballah, Hamas, Iran or Syria.

Guy Bechor, who is very well informed about the Arab world, thinks not. He thinks that Hizballah, Hamas and Syria, who will bear the brunt of the fighting, are afraid of Israel and wouldn’t purposely initiate hostilities. He writes,

Each side accuses the other one of intending to strike, and the explanation for this is as follows: Nobody has an interest in a new regional war. The opposite is true – the status quo is convenient for all sides involved, while the results of a war may be terrible. Hence, a war is not expected to break out this summer…

We scared Hamas so much in Operation Cast Lead that they have no interest whatsoever in prompting a new war. They got the message. We also scared Hezbollah so much that Nasrallah has been in hiding for almost four years now, fearing Israel’s long arm. He too got it…

So would Israel be the one to launch a war this summer? No chance. The deterrence that was created and the stability it prompted satisfy our defense and political leaderships. The status quo on all fronts is convenient for Israel.

Yaakov Katz, on the other hand, is more pessimistic:

Not many periods resemble this year in terms of military buildup among Israel’s enemies.  A quick glance along the borders demonstrates just how significant the current trend is – Hamas is re-arming at an unprecedented rate in the Gaza Strip; Hizbullah is doing the same in Lebanon; and Syria is also training its forces in guerrilla tactics in the event of a future war.

What will spark this future war is unclear, but IDF officers joke about how they will have to cancel their overseas vacation plans this summer.

And Caroline Glick believes that war is inevitable, and if so, she’d rather it be on Israel’s terms:

Israel’s political and military leaders have to take two considerations into account. First, the side that initiates the conflict will be the side that controls the battle space. And second, there is a real possibility that the Obama administration will refuse to resupply Israel with vital weapons systems in the course of the war…

In the coming war, Israel will have only one goal: to destroy or seriously damage Iran’s nuclear installations. Every resource turned against Iran’s proxies must be aimed at facilitating that goal. That is, the only thing Israel should seek to accomplish in contending with Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas is to prevent them from diverting Israeli resources away from attacking Iran’s nuclear installations.

Here’s what I think:

Iran wishes to destroy Israel insofar as the Jewish state is the main obstacle to Iran extending its hegemony throughout the Mideast. Israel is seen as a forward base of US power, as well as a threat to the Iranian nuclear program; and of course there are the traditional religious/ideological motives.

Note that this has nothing to do with the ‘peace process’, Palestinian nationalism, ‘The Occupation’, the ‘Siege of Gaza’, building in East Jerusalem, etc. It is all about Iran’s ambitions.

The Iranian strategy, as articulated by Ahmadinijad and others many times, is that Israel will be overwhelmed by its proxies.  To this end, Iran has spent a huge amount of money arming Syria, Hizballah and Hamas and helping them prepare for war. The tens of thousands of missiles of multiple types in the hands of these proxies combined with fortifications and other advanced weapons in their possession, now constitute more than a mere (though deadly) irritant, but rather a force that can cause serious damage and loss of life in all parts of Israel.

Although Iran is developing nuclear weapons, the one state that it will most likely not use them against is Israel, because Israel’s retaliation would certainly put an end not only to the regime, but to Iran as a modern state. Estimates of the result of such an attack have been in the neighborhood of 30 million dead. However, the Iranian weapon will be very effective as an umbrella for conventional aggression against other states in the Mideast, and as a threat to damage Israel in multiple ways (economic, demographic, morale, etc.). Iran will also be able to threaten Israel indirectly by threatening US and European interests.

I think we’ve already seen some of this effect on the Obama Administration’s policy toward Israeli-Palestinian issues.

There’s no question that the combination of the conventional forces aimed at Israel by Iranian proxies and the nuclear umbrella that will soon be in place represents an existential threat to Israel. In the event of war, I suspect that Israel would not limit its strikes to the proxies, but would also seek to damage the Iranian nuclear capability as much as possible. It is thus in Iran’s interest to delay hostilities until its nuclear capability is in place and hardened as much as possible.

Combined with the real fear on the part of Hamas, Hizballah and Syria that Bechor describes, this probably means that Israel’s enemies will not initiate a war in the very near future. And they are banking on Israel’s concern for the unavoidable death and destruction that would occur even if an Israeli attack were successful, to deter her from preempting — not to mention the international reaction, which might go past the point of the usual condemnations to Security Council-imposed sanctions or even military intervention. I don’t think Israel could count on a US veto of such action from the present administration.

Nevertheless, I think Glick is right and that Israel must preemptively strike the missile forces of the proxies and the Iranian nuclear facilities before Iran’s capability becomes operational, because the alternative is war on Iran’s terms, under her nuclear umbrella. The consequences of such a war would be disastrous, although Israel would probably prevail, and I think that the Israeli political and military leadership understands this.

I expect, then, that sometime before the Iranian nuclear capability is ready, Israel will defy the Obama Administration and strike first.

This promises to be a difficult and terrible struggle, and I blame the nations of the world. Had the US and others taken a tough stand against the rearmament of Hizballah (as called for by UNSC resolution 1701) or the Iranian nuclear program, there would be no war. But our administration prefers appeasement as a tactic, and others have not only enabled, but actually taken up the cause of those who would destroy the Jewish state.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Iran, war

Arye Tepper, in a review of Yehuda Shenhav’s book “The Time of the Green Line”:

The issue that divides the two camps is Zionism. The Zionist left wants to consolidate a Jewish-democratic state within the “green line”—that is, the borders that existed from 1949, fixed by the armistice that ended Israel’s war of independence, until the June 1967 Six-Day war—and to help engineer a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The post-Zionist or “radical” left is in favor of a one-state solution, i.e., doing away with Israel as a Jewish state and creating a “state of all its citizens” in its stead.

To the Zionist left, the post-Zionist left isn’t so much post- as anti-Zionist. But to the post-Zionist left, the Zionist left isn’t liberal — or leftist — at all…

Shenhav puts forward two large claims about the Zionist left, the first being that it lives in a state of complete denial regarding the fundamentals of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. According to Shenhav, the Zionist left has persuaded itself that the basic point of contention in the conflict lies in the results of the Six-Day war, which ended with Israel having seized the Sinai peninsula (long since returned to Egypt), Gaza (now under Hamas), the Golan Heights (claimed by Syria), and, especially, the West Bank with its large Palestinian population. Therefore, reasons the Zionist left, once Israel hands back the West Bank, “1967” will have been reversed and peace will become possible.

To Shenhav, this is a delusion. Zero hour for the Palestinians, he contends, was and remains not 1967 but 1948: i.e., the founding of Israel itself. Averting its eyes from this fact, the Zionist left has fabricated an artificial starting point in time (1967) and space (the green line) in order to preserve to its own satisfaction the basic legitimacy of Israel’s establishment in 1948. The trouble is that the Palestinians will never agree to this construction of history, because it fails to take into account their most fundamental grievances. [my emphasis]

Shenhav’s second claim is that the Zionist left’s stubborn fidelity to the notion of a specifically Jewish state is inherently anti-democratic. How so? Democracy, writes Shenhav, is more than a matter of individual rights; it is also a matter of collective rights. So long as the collective rights of native Palestinians living within the state of Israel go unrecognized—and, in a state that calls itself Jewish, they are by definition unrecognized—that state, no matter how much it pretends otherwise, cannot be regarded as democratic in any meaningful sense.

You can read the rest of the review here (thanks to Israel Academia Monitor for bringing it to my attention).

The division on the Israeli Left is mirrored here in the US, with the traditional Zionist Left represented, for example, by the Union for Reform Judaism and the post-Zionists by groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, etc. I’ve argued that J Street pretends to belong to the former category in order to get liberal support but its policies — and the identity of some of its supporters — actually place it closer to the latter.

Shenhav is absolutely right about Palestinian grievances and goals. The Palestinian Arabs themselves have always been quite clear about them to anyone who is willing to listen. The non-Zionist Left has done Israel a great disservice by doing its best to obscure this fact, by promulgating the idea that there is a Palestinian partner for a two-state solution that would end the conflict when at best there are some Palestinians who would agree to establish a state as a stepping stone to replacing all of Israel with an Arab state.

Shenhav correctly realizes is that there can’t be a compromise between Zionism — the belief that there should be an independent state of the Jewish people in the land of Israel — and Palestinian nationalism, which denies that. But then he argues (unsoundly) that Zionism is incompatible with democracy and rejects it. What’s left, although the argument tries to obscure it with concepts like ‘a democratic state of all its citizens,’ is Palestinian nationalism.

This is where the post-Zionist position becomes dangerous, because it’s certain that such a state would be unstable:

Shenhav offers a number of one-state schemes for sharing the land, including something called “consociational democracy”; in doing so, he silently passes over the inconvenient fact that this fanciful arrangement has already been tried and found wanting in such distinguished islands of tranquility as Cyprus and Lebanon.  “Any reasonable person,” [Gadi] Taub sums up, “realizes that the one-state solution would constitute a chronic civil war,” a war from which posturing professors like Shenhav will be able to escape while those “with nowhere to go — both Jews and Arabs — will end up . . . drowning in rivers of blood.”

But Shenhav’s argument is unsound. The assertion that democracy requires the protection of “collective rights” as well as individual rights is false. If you replace “collective rights” with “national aspirations” — which is what is driving the Arab citizens of Israel who are demanding this — you expose his conflation of these ideas, and the source of the instability. Indeed I would argue that, on the model of the US constitution, Democracy is all about individual rights.

In the US, a sharp distinction has been made between movements to guarantee (individual) civil rights for minorities, which are supported by the great majority of citizens, and such things as black or Mexican-American nationalism which are generally regarded as inimical to democracy. One could even cite as an example the insistence by some southern states on a culturally-based right to hold slaves, probably the most destructive such demand in our history.

The idea of ‘collective rights’ — or should I say ‘competing nationalisms’ — has gained some traction in the West with regard to Muslims, where some have suggested that Muslim communities should be given special consideration where Sha’aria conflicts with civil law, etc. This is a very bad idea which contradicts the basic ideas of the Enlightenment, the ideas that gave rise to Western democracy.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Yehuda Shenhav, post-Zionism

US policy toward Israel has always been ambivalent, at best. Truman struggled with his State Department, particularly Secretary George Marshall, to recognize the state of Israel. Eisenhower was furious when Israel conspired with France and England to invade the Sinai in 1956, and threatened economic sanctions to force a withdrawal (he also promised that the US would guarantee free passage through the strait of Tiran, a promise the US broke in 1967). Ronald Reagan sold AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia against strident Israeli objections, and George H. W. Bush forced Israel to take no action while Iraqi Scud missiles were crashing into Tel Aviv.

The US has never accepted Israeli rights to Jerusalem — even West Jerusalem — and since the 1970’s, policy has been to try to undo the results of the 1967 war and return Israel to the 1949 armistice lines.

Having said that, the US was generous with military aid after 1967, particularly during the Cold War when Israel served as a bulwark against Soviet influence in the region. But keep in mind that aid money was spent to buy weapons from US contractors, so this was not all done out of love for the Jewish state.

There is reason to think that the present administration has decided to implement an even more aggressive policy. Apparently it’s been decided that it is not possible to undo 1967 without also undoing 1948.

The failure of Oslo, of Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal and of other diplomatic initiatives have produced a consensus in Israel that today there is no practical way to implement a two-state solution. At the same time, Fatah has escalated demands rather than becoming more moderate (or perhaps Fatah’s mask of moderation has fallen away). And of course, Hamas controls Gaza and 40% of the Palestinian population.

In any event, the Obama administration seems to have come to the conclusion that a sovereign Israel can’t be cajoled or even  pressured to accept an agreement with the Palestinians that it regards (correctly) as suicidal. So the approach will be to remove Israel’s independent volition — in effect to go back to the solution the State Department had pushed in 1948, a US-controlled “Trusteeship.”

This is what is meant in practice by the “American peace plan” which was created by Obama’s highly Israel-hostile Mideast team of Jones, Scowcroft, Brzezinski, Berger, Kurtzer, Power, etc.

Here is how Eliyakim HaEtzni explains it:

Alex Fishman, in an article in “Yediot Achronot” from April 9th, details what Obama presented to Netanyahu for his
signature [at their last meeting]:

• The withdrawal of the IDF from all the Arab cities of Judea and Samaria and a large proportion of the countryside, precluding all future Israeli military operations in those areas (pretty much the only way of preventing terrorist attacks against Israeli targets);
• Allowing the Palestinian Authority to resume operations unhindered in Jerusalem;
• Obligating Israel to cease any present or future building in Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, amounting to the de facto division of the capitol [sic].

In addition, Obama demanded that Netanyahu continue the building freeze in Judea and Samaria indefinitely and hand over parts of Area C to the Ramallah authorities, changing its status to Area A, which prohibits Israelis from setting foot there. Obama required Netanyahu to relinquish the northern Dead Sea and parts of the Jordan Valley to enable the PA to develop tourism there.

All this must take place immediately, before the beginning of negotiations, while the negotiations themselves will determine the final border and, according to the American timetable, will be signed and sealed within two months….

First by forcing Netanyahu to create in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria conditions under which the territory is de facto handed over to the Arabs, and then by giving him a few months to play at the farce of negotiations, with the predetermined result of arriving at the American “peace plan.”

And that’s not all. There’s the Quartet’s declared intent to base the forced “peace” on foreign armies. The Americans and Europeans are offering Israel the services of foreign troops as a beneficence in response to Israel’s complaint that it will no longer be able to defend itself within the borders of the Green Line. Their answer to this is “security guarantees” backed up with a military presence in the Jordan Valley and along the Green Line. They tell us that their intention is to defend us from the Arabs while they tell the Arabs that their intention is to defend them from us. In effect, this military presence will tie our hands and will prevent the Israeli government from taking any independent military action. From then on, Israel will be a sovereign nation in name only. In fact, Israel will be a protectorate under international control, led by America.

HaEtzni is a right-winger, a “settler advocate.” Nevertheless, his analysis can’t be faulted. Given the incompatibility between Palestinian demands and Israeli security, there is no way that the Palestinian state so sought by the Obama Administration can be brought into existence except against Israel’s will.

Obama has threatened that if the “proximity talks” don’t bear fruit by September/October he will produce the “American proposal” and call for a summit led by the hostile Quartet to beat Israel into submission. Perhaps he thinks that a foreign policy ‘success’ (he has never had one) will help the Democrats in November’s election.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Obama, Palestinians