FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

News item:

On Sunday, Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yom-Tov Samia, the former head of the Southern Command who continues to function as the current head’s deputy in the reserves, hinted at the possibility that the IDF will conquer the Philadelphi Corridor in the future.

In an interview with Army Radio, Samia said that in a future conflict, Israel would take over “specific territory” in Gaza that would help reduce Hamas’s “oxygen supply.” Contacted later in the day, Samia refused to specify which territory he had referred to.

“We are facing another round in Gaza,” said Samia, who during Cast Lead functioned as the deputy to OC Southern Command Maj.-Gen. Yoav Galant. “I am very skeptical about the chance that Hamas will suddenly surrender or change its way without first suffering a far more serious blow than it did during Cast Lead.”

The blow, he said, would be “more focused with long-range results including the conquering of territory that Hamas will understand it lost as a result of its provocations. We need to create a situation which reduces its oxygen supply.” [my emphasis]

Note that Maj.-Gen. Samia does not discuss the option of overthrowing Hamas and destroying its leadership. I presume that there are two main reasons for this: the expected number of IDF and Palestinian casualties (who will all be claimed to be civilians) from the required penetration into the center of Gaza City — which probably would mean bloody fighting in tunnels and bunkers — and the need for Israel to take responsibility for filling the resulting administrative vacuum.

But Hamas will not ‘surrender or change its way’ no matter how serious a blow it suffers, as long as that blow is nonfatal. So a ‘Cast-Lead plus’ would only provide temporary breathing space, and the repercussions in the information arena would be as severe or worse than they were last winter.

Would cutting the lifeline of the “Sinai Subway” alone be enough to take down Hamas? Maybe, but I doubt it. Maintaining the occupation zone along the border indefinitely would be dangerous and provide a focus for never-ending ‘humanitarian’ complaints.

The consideration of casualties is important, but casualties will mount quickly enough if there has to be a mini-war every year or so. That’s a much more costly alternative in every way than one campaign which ends in victory — as should have happened in Cast Lead.

So we need to ask, who would run Gaza if Hamas were gone? The UN? Worthless. It would serve as cover for Hamas to recreate itself, just as it has for Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Egyptians? Why would they? What would they gain from it except trouble?

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has said that it doesn’t want to return to Gaza on the backs of Israeli tanks, but given the huge amount of international funds that would flow in to rebuild it, perhaps a way could be found. Possibly the cooperative security model used in Judea and Samaria, which has so effectively reduced terrorism from there, could be made to work in a PA-controlled Gaza.

I don’t know enough of the details to know if it’s practical, but it seems like the only solution. Hamas-ruled Gaza is like an infection that is periodically lanced but never cured.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Hamas, Gaza

Quoted in Steve Rosen’s blog, a snippet from an interview with US Mideast envoy George Mitchell:

George Mitchell: …Israel annexed Jerusalem in 1980….for the Israelis, what they’re building in, is in part of Israel. Now, the others don’t see it that way. So you have these widely divergent perspectives on the subject. …The Israelis are not going to stop settlements in or construction in East Jerusalem. They don’t regard that as a settlement because they think it’s part of Israel….

Charlie Rose: So you’re going to let them go ahead even though no one recognized the annexation.

GM: When you say let them go ahead, it’s what they regard as their country. They don’t regard — they don’t say they’re letting us go ahead when we build in Manhattan or in the Bronx or —

CR: But don’t the international rules have something to do with what somebody can do to define as their country?

GM: There are disputed legal issues. .. And we could spend the next 14 years arguing over disputed legal issues or we can try to get a negotiation to resolve them in a manner that meets the aspirations of both societies. [my emphasis]

This is remarkable, both because Mitchell appears to understand and appreciate the Israeli position, and because he doesn’t spout the usual rubbish about ‘settlements are illegitimate’ that we’ve heard from both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

But unfortunately, Mitchell understands the Palestinians less well. Here’s some more, and we can see where his understanding goes off the rails (the full transcript of the interview is here):

GM: Keep this in mind, the Israelis have a state, a very successful state.  They want security, which they ought to have… The Palestinians don’t have a state, they want one, and they ought to have one.  We believe that neither can attain its objective by denying to the other side its objective.  The Palestinians are not going to get a state until the people of Israel have a reasonable sense of sustainable security.  The Israelis on the other hand are not going to get that reasonable sense of sustainable security until there is a Palestinian state.

Mitchell seems to think that the Palestinian objective is a state in the territories. There are at least three really good arguments that this is false:

1. They had numerous opportunities, the most recent and advantageous being Olmert’s 2008 offer, to have such a state and they refused to take them.
2. They continue to put obstacles in the path of negotiations that would lead to a state, such as insisting on preconditions like a construction freeze in Jerusalem.
3. When they speak in Arabic, they do not say that they want a state in the territories, they say that they want to replace Israel with their state. Here’s just one of many possible examples.

It often happens that one fails to understand as a result to listening to words and ignoring actions, or vice versa. But if one doesn’t pay attention to either actions or words and makes judgments based only on what one wishes were true, then misunderstanding is guaranteed.

Here’s a good example of what Barry Rubin often talks about, the Western propensity to think that everyone shares your goals and priorities. Who wouldn’t see a peaceful state and economic progress in their interest, suggests Mitchell:

CR: Why do you believe [a two-state solution is] possible?

GM: Because it’s in the best interests of the people on both sides… Despite the horrific events of the past half century, all of the death, all of the destruction, all of the mistrust, and all of the hatred, a substantial majority on both sides still believes that’s the way to resolve the problem.

It all depends on how you define best interests. If you ask most Palestinians, they will say that carrying on the war for as long as it takes for them to get ‘their land’ back is much more important than a stable, peaceful state and economic prosperity without ‘their land’. And Mitchell is quite wrong about what a majority of Palestinians think: in 2007, 77% of Palestinians said that “the rights and needs of the Palestinian people cannot be taken care of as long as the state of Israel exists” (Pew survey, 6/27/07). And their attitudes, if anything, have become more hardened since then.

So I don’t think Mitchell’s approach is going to work, and his vaunted persistence will not help so long as he doesn’t see that there is no middle ground between Israel’s security and Palestinian aspirations:

The latter  preclude the former.

Technorati Tags: George Mitchell, Israel, Palestinians

“It is not that Islam has been hijacked, rather different forces are fighting over control of the steering wheel.” — Barry Rubin

For the first time — as far as I can tell — in recorded history, a war is raging in which one side does not know the identity of its enemy.

This war has been underway since at least the 1990’s and pits the US and other Western democracies against various groups whose ideology is Radical Islamism.  It is not a ‘war on terror’ — which is a tactic, not an opponent — and certainly not ‘overseas contingency operations’, an expression that Orwell would have been proud to invent. But on the other hand neither is it a ‘clash of civilizations’ and the enemy is not Islam.

What exactly is Radical Islamism, how is it related to Islam, why do Islamists employ the tactic of terrorism, why are we fighting, and what can be done to defeat it?

Important questions, and it appears that the previous and present US administrations lacked and continue to lack answers.

The following is a short but incisive discussion of these questions. It should be required reading in Washington. — ed.

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Radical Islamism: An Introductory Primer
By Barry Rubin

A young American named Ramy Zamzam, arrested in Pakistan for trying to fight alongside the Taliban, responded in an interview with the Associated Press: “We are not terrorists. We are jihadists, and jihad is not terrorism.”

What he says is well worth bearing in mind in order to understand the great conflict of our era. First and foremost, Jihadism or radical Islamism is far more than mere terrorism. It is a revolutionary movement in every sense of the word. It seeks to overthrow existing regimes and replace them with governments that will transform society into a nightmarishly repressive system.

And so one might put it this way: Revolutionary Islamism is the main strategic problem in the world today. Terrorism is the main tactical problem.

Read the rest here

Technorati Tags: islamism, terrorism, jihad, radical islamism, Barry Rubin

Rahm Emanuel is sick of Israelis and Palestinians. In an explosion of even-handedness, he stopped just short of calling for a pox on both of our houses:

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel recently told the Israeli consul in Los Angeles that the Obama administration is fed up with both Israel and the Palestinians, Army Radio reported on Wednesday.

Emanuel met with Jacob Dayan, consul general of Israel in Los Angeles, about two weeks ago, after which Dayan briefed the Foreign Ministry. Emanuel told Dayan the U.S. is sick of the Israelis, who adopt suitable ideas months too late, when they are no longer effective, according to Army Radio.

The U.S. is also sick of the Palestinians who never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, Emanuel reportedly said. — Ha’aretz

With respect to Israel,

Emanuel reportedly said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly acknowledged the two-state solution too late, and that the freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank came only after months of U.S. pressure.

Is it reasonable to think that the Palestinian and Israeli positions on Jerusalem borders, refugees, etc. would have been any closer together six months ago than today? After all, Olmert offered much more to the Palestinians in 2008 than Netanyahu will countenance today, without results. So why would it have helped to get Netanyahu to utter the magic words “two-state solution” — words which mean entirely different things to Israelis and Palestinians — or to impose a partial settlement freeze which will never be enough for the Palestinians?

No, what prevents a settlement is that what Israel can give without surrendering its right to exist is less than the minimum that the Palestinian leadership can accept. Welcome to the Middle East, as the old joke goes.

This should have been clear to the Obama Administration from the outset. But they continued to believe that all they needed to do was push a little harder. This backfired when US pushing for a settlement freeze gave the Palestinians an excuse to refuse to talk; of course they know that Israel isn’t ready to roll over yet, so why bother.

It’s a reflection of the shape of the conflict: it is not, as the Obama Administration sees it in the most charitable interpretation, simply a struggle over the territories and Jerusalem.  If that were the case, maybe it could succeed in beating the two sides into a two-state compromise in which neither would be entirely happy. Rather, it’s a struggle over whether there will be an Israel at all. The only ‘compromises’ possible in this situation are defined by how long the Jewish state exists before it’s swallowed up.

This is nothing new. Zionists have been saying it since Arafat demonstrated this when he chose war over a Camp David agreement. It’s interesting that US officials are capable of understanding the Israeli position — Israel wants peace within secure borders — but insist on misunderstanding that of the Arabs, who want all of ‘their’ land, from the river to the sea, under their control.

Emanuel added that if there is no progress in the peace process, the Obama administration will reduce its involvement in the conflict, because, as he reportedly said, the U.S. has other matters to deal with.

Does it ever! It’s tough being an empire in decline, dealing with internal and external barbarians every day. It certainly doesn’t need a diplomatic impasse with no positive payoff for US interests even if it did get what it wanted, which it won’t.

Actually, what America needs is a strong ally in the Mideast who can help it hold back Iran, which threatens to push Western influence entirely out of the region, and perhaps ultimately out of an Islamified Europe. It could have such an ally in Israel, which has great incentive to oppose Iran, which is trying to crush it between the pincers of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Nope, instead Obama plays engagement games with Iran while the centrifuges spin. At the same time, he uses the ‘peace process’ as a club to bludgeon Israel, for example by insisting on a pointless settlement freeze that is causing the nation to tear itself apart.

In Plato’s Republic, Polemarchus suggests that Justice is “helping one’s friends and hurting one’s enemies.” This may not be Plato’s favorite definition of Justice, but it certainly is part of successful international relations. Why is the US doing the opposite?

Technorati Tags: Israel, Rahm Emanuel, Palestinians, Obama Administration

Mideastern surrealism

News item:

Iraq will demand that Israel pay compensation for bombing the unfinished nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981, an Iraqi member of parliament told the Iraqi al-Sabah newspaper in an article published on Tuesday…

The Iraqi demand is based on UN Security Council Resolution 487, which was drafted following the bombing of the reactor in June 1981. The resolution harshly condemned Israel’s aerial attack and determined that Iraq had a right to demand compensation over the damages.

This is reminiscent of the time the Egyptians demanded that Israel compensate them for the gold and valuables taken by the bnei yisrael at the time of the exodus (in response to which someone said that Israel would gladly pay as long as they received back wages for 400 years of slave labor).

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The rabbi’s strange perspective

Rabbi David Saperstein of the Union for Reform Judaism’s Religious Action Center will speak at our local Reform congregation, Temple Beth Israel, next Sunday. His subject: “Israel’s Three Most Vital Challenges: Peace, Equality, and Religious Freedom.”

Just to make things clear, ‘Peace’ means something like “making an agreement with the Palestinians to end the occupation of Judea and Samaria”, ‘Equality’ refers to the position of Arab citizens of Israel, and ‘religious freedom’ means ending the dominance of the Orthodox establishment over religious affairs (and funds) in Israel.

As Dave Barry, a very funny writer, always said, I Am Not Making This Up.

I don’t suggest that Rabbi Saperstein’s issues are unimportant, but I wonder how he missed these three:

• The Iranian nuclear project
• The 40,000+ rockets aimed at Israel by Hezbollah, plus thousands more by Iranian satellite Syria
• The supply of rockets – much more powerful than the Qassams of the past — and other weapons now in the hands of Hamas

English assignment for the rabbi: get a dictionary and look up ‘vital’.

More to come, after his talk.

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Bakri, the artist with a postmodern concept of truth

Last week I wrote about the possibility that Israeli Arab (excuse me, ‘Palestinian resident of Israel’) filmmaker Mohammad Bakri, who was responsible for the propaganda film ‘Jenin, Jenin’,  would be indicted for criminal libel. It turns out that he will not. But Attorney General  Menachem Mazuz said that he would support the appeal of several reserve soldiers in their civil libel suit against Bakri.

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But people still take them seriously…

How did I miss this one? Not only is J Street funded by Arab and Iranian money, but the connections to Saudi Arabia are even closer than had been previously imagined, writes Lenny Ben-David. The close relationship between J Street and Qorvis Communications, the Saudi-employed PR firm, should remove all doubts that J Street is no more than an anti-Israel front group.

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Statistics

This blog has been in existence for a bit more than three years. There are 1311 posts, most of them written by me, and 985 comments, most by my old friend (of almost 50 years) Shalom Freedman from Jerusalem. My own favorite blogs are still The Rubin Report and Elder of Ziyon.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Osirak, J Street, Bakri, Saperstein