Tsunami be damned

The important thing is to stay calm, not press the panic button, and not listen to those familiar faces who reappear every now and then with a new-old initiative suggesting that Israel announce it is prepared to withdraw to the ’67 borders.’

Israel must not succumb to false diplomatic alarms

By Moshe Arens, HAARETZ

Anyone who has helped design alarms and early warning systems knows the phenomenon of false alarms. They bedevil both the developers and those who are supposed to be protected by the system. The systems being put in place to warn of oncoming “tsunamis” are also affected by this false alarm syndrome. The more sensitive the system, the more likely it is to sound the alarm when there is nothing to actually be alarmed about. Israel has its own tsunami warning system – and it is none other than our defense minister, who has already sounded the alarm.

According to him, Israel will be hit by a political tsunami in September. His warning bell is being echoed by many who demand the government launch a daring initiative before it is too late, before the tsunami hits us. But they have a pleasant surprise awaiting them: Israel will still be here in September, and for many many months to come; it will not be devastated like northern Japan.

States have never been created by UN declarations and never will be. For those who have forgotten, Israel was not created by UN resolution 181 in November 1947, but by David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of Israeli independence on May 15, 1948 and by the IDF’s ability to take and control the areas of the new state.

A UN declaration, whether at the Security Council or the General Assembly, recognizing a Palestinian state within the borders of the April 1949 armistice lines with Jordan, with Jerusalem as its capital, will be no more effective than Security Council resolution 1701, which prohibited Hezbollah from military operations in southern Lebanon, or General Assembly resolution 3379, which equated Zionism with racism.

If this latest declaration is actually passed, it will merely serve as another reminder of the impotence of the United Nations and its irrelevance when it comes to dealing with international conflicts. The U.S. government must surely be aware of this.

All this brouhaha about the coming tsunami skirts the fundamental issues preventing an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Namely, that such an agreement must constitute the end of the conflict, and that the Palestinian signatories to the agreement must be capable of assuring that no acts of terror will be launched from territories that Israel turns over as part of the agreement.

The current Palestinian spokesman, or president if you like, Mahmoud Abbas, is not capable of satisfying either of these conditions. At best, he represents only half of the Palestinians, and regardless of what commitments he undertakes, Hamas and other Islamic jihadists will have plenty of additional claims on Israel even after Abbas signs an agreement. His control over areas in Judea and Samaria is limited at best, and he certainly cannot be relied on to prevent acts of terror against Israel from those areas Israel would withdraw from.

Until the Palestinians get their act together, there seems little chance of reaching an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. That is the sad truth, and no amount of theatrics by Abbas, and maneuvering by the Quartet, the United States and the United Nations, or all of them in concert, will change that. That is what Israeli spokesmen should be explaining to everyone – friends, do-gooders and enemies alike.

And one other point must be made: What they call the 1967 borders are in fact the armistice lines that were agreed on with Jordan in April 1949, an agreement that was violated by Jordan in June 1967. There is nothing sacrosanct about these lines, while many things have changed in the intervening 62 years that cannot be wished away.

The important thing is to stay calm, not press the panic button, and not listen to those familiar faces who reappear every now and then with a new-old initiative suggesting that Israel announce it is prepared to withdraw to the “’67 borders.” And to not make any hasty, half-baked statements under the illusion that they will appease those applying pressure on Israel.

At this point, their minds are made up. And such statements will only come to haunt us in the future when the time becomes ripe for proper negotiations with the Palestinians. Only when it is clear that the Israeli government is standing firm on its positions will the pressure on Israel be relaxed.

April 13, 2011 | 2 Comments »

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  1. I wouldn’t know all the finer details of Tora and Tanach, but being an old-timer who has studied a sufficiency of Jewish national history, I think I know a Judenrat when I see one. And what I see is what I have learned to distrust.

    1) So what the people of the Jewish state need to do is get rid of their present “Judenratische” leadership, once and for all.
    That means Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Shimon Peres (Does all Israel have to wait for this foolish old man to die before getting a president more worthy of his title?), and any and all others of the same cringing ilk that always has been so fatal to Jewish national interests. The kind of national leadership Israel needs, now more than ever, would be built around Moshe Feiglin’s Manhigut ha-Yehudit, along with Ya’akov Katz’s ha-Ichud ha-Leumi, Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, and all Jewish nationalist elements of the Yesha groups, religious or otherwise.

    2) Then the next immediate step should be to put the Shomron and Yehuda cities, villages and outposts under control of Israel’s Ministry of the Interior, with Zahal’s Central Command solely in charge of overall territorial defense and not involved in day to day decision-making that allots rights of Jews to reside in the heart of the Jewish heartland.

    3) Following that, the Knesset should declare statehood over all the existing Jewish populated places in Judea and Samaria, and tell the UNO, the “quartet” and any other foreign Jew-hating and pro-Arab terrorist busybodies that these lands were given to the Jewish national 3,400 years ago, are now being renewed, and that no government capable of being elected in Israel will ever break its national bond with any of the Jewish lands.

    4) Next, Israel should encourage all its friends in the USA to join with efforts of Christians United for Israel, the Tea Party, and every Republican and pro-Israel oriented group to remove our present African Moslem leader from the presidency of the United States at the election on the first Tuesday of November 2012. If he continues in office for a second term, Obama, backed by the self-hating and treacherous Jewish billionaire George Soros will take steps not only to make life in Israel untenable but will do the same for the people of the United States of America. And don’t feed me any crap about the dangers of cooperating with Christian proselytizers; I wouldn’t care if such people were devil-worshipers, as long as they are fervently on our side of the national and international struggle. In contrast, nobody in the Jewish leadership elites in this country are worth what they unload into their own toilets each morning.

    Harsh words. But which of you people would tell me these are not harsh times?

    Arnold Harris
    Mount Horeb WI

  2. The Bible talks about getting ready to run away, even when nobody’s chasing you:

    15 And if ye shall despise my statutes, or if your soul abhor my judgments, so that ye will not do all my commandments, but that ye break my covenant:

    16 I also will do this unto you; I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart: and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it.

    17 And I will set my face against you, and ye shall be slain before your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you; and ye shall flee when none pursueth you.

    — Leviticus 26 KJV