Bar-Ilan 2.0 -- Does Israel Need a Peace Plan?

Earthquakes, tsunamis and a nuclear meltdown in Japan top the news pushing aside mad Muammar Gaddafi, upheaval throughout the Arab world, and the butchery of five members of a Jewish family in their sleep by Palestinian Arabs at Itamar. Rest assured, however, that in short order Israel's wobbly friends in Europe and the U.S. will be back to press Jerusalem to "do something" about what Washington sees as the "unsustainable" stalemate in the "peace process" over which German Chancellor Angela Merkel scolded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “You haven’t made a single step to advance peace.”

Not a single step?

Israel's lifting of 400 security checkpoints up and down the West Bank including near Itamar, its ten-month moratorium on most settlement building, its willingness to extend the freeze another three months, and Netanyahu's 2009 Bar-Ilan University address have, to be sure, not had much of a diplomatic shelf-life. In the Topsy Turvy world of Mideast peacemaking, because none of these moves enticed Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian faction to end their two-year boycott of negotiations, Israel is blamed for the impasse.

Abbas – recklessly impelled, initially at least, by President Barack Obama – has adhered to the position that the Palestinians simply can't negotiate so long as any Jewish construction continues anywhere beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines. Of course, the West Bank settlements issue would be resolved were Abbas willing to negotiate permanent boundaries with Israel. But why should he have to compromise in direct negotiations with Netanyahu when his internationally backed intransigence promises to deliver an Israeli withdrawal to the euphemistically called "1967 border."

Netanyahu, under withering pressure to somehow assuage the smoldering irritation of Israel settlement-obsessed Europeans and Americans, has reportedly been planning a major address to expand upon his Bar-Ilan "vision of peace" for "two peoples" speech. Yet it is difficult to see what Netanyahu could say or do – short of capitulating to all of Abbas's demands – to win lasting EU and Obama administration acclaim.

With the Hamas-led Palestinian faction in Gaza explicitly, unalterably, committed to the destruction of the Zionist enterprise; with Abbas refusing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, compromise on refuges, and resolutely committed to an internationally imposed solution that would completely disregard Israel's legitimate territorial rights and basic security needs, what realistically could Netanyahu offer?

Put another way: Can Israel placate its irritated allies while not committing national suicide?

No sooner had Netanyahu's office leaked the prospect that he would present (either to the Quartet or in a Washington speech) a new plan that would promote an interim arrangement with the Palestinians by recognizing a Palestinian state within temporary borders then Abbas utterly rejected the idea.

To complicate matters, if nascent pressure from young Palestinians for Fatah-Hamas reconciliation were to gain traction the result would undoubtedly be yet a further hardening of the Palestinian position rather than a softening of the Islamist one. No one in Fatah is talking about Hamas recognizing Israel, renouncing violence and adhering to previous diplomatic agreements signed by the PLO, the requisite demands by the Quartet for Hamas to join a Palestinian unity government.

Netanyahu's predicament recalls Ariel Sharon's whose disengagement plan announced in 2003 was partly intended to head-off pressure from President George W. Bush, who during the height of second intifada terror in 2002 "envisioned" a roadmap to a Palestinian state. Sharon was also profoundly worried about growing international support for the EU-backed Geneva Initiative and, notwithstanding Palestinian violations, for the Quartet's Road Map. All these schemes were designed to push Israel back to the old, hard to defend, armistice lines. Essentially, by "doing something" Sharon had sought to buy time, reap diplomatic approval and garner an American commitment for strategic settlement blocs in the West Bank. All these gains proved ephemeral.

Given this experience and the fact that any Netanyahu peace offering would be dead on arrival, is this really the time for him to present a new Israeli peace plan?


Yes and no.

Israel does need to put forth a coherent plan – to its own citizenry. Netanyahu should turn inward to broaden the domestic consensus on what the Jewish state can realistically offer the Palestinians and what it must expect in return. Fortunately, the fundamentals have already been laid out by Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Moshe Ya'alon (now Minister for Strategic Affairs).

Rather than take chances with Israel's security, Netanyahu needs to take personal political risks. He should appoint Ya'alon defense minister and together present a revised, fully detailed version of Ya'alon's blueprint to the electorate. If need be, Netanyahu should call for new elections seeking a clear mandate for the Ya'alon plan.

In coalition negotiations, Israel's mainstream political parties would likely have no trouble embracing Ya'alon's outline, but if they expect to – let them explain why to the electorate.

Instead of allowing Europe and the Obama administration to railroad him into proffering concessions that will not deliver peace and security – or even short-term diplomatic breathing space – Israel's best bet is to have a forthright internal dialogue aimed at building domestic cohesion for Ya'alon's plan that can offer the Palestinian Arabs a state and Israel security.

Areas that Israel needs to retain in any peace accord should not be subject to a any building freeze. Israelis living in Judea and Samaria have a right to know which parts of the Jewish heartland will one day be abandoned in the event an Arab partner for peace emerges.

Were Israeli decision makers -- with a clear electoral mandate -- to speak coherently and consistently, the country could garner support in Washington outside the administration and in fair-minded EU countries.

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-- March 14, 2010

Let the Arab League Enforce the No-Fly Zone

I see that the Arab League called on the United Nations Security Council to impose a no-fly zone over Libya.

Once it does, how about if Arab air-forces enforce the no-fly zone?

There are some 21 Arab air-forces represented in the League.

Many have the latest US equipment including F-15s.

Why should NATO have to carry this burden?

Why should all eyes be turning to Washington and Europe?

Juliano Mer, a prominent Israeli actor of mixed Jewish-Christian Arab parentage, was shot dead yesterday afternoon in Jenin...

WHERE HAVE ALL THE ARAB MODERATES GONE?

Juliano Mer, a prominent Israeli actor of mixed Jewish-Christian Arab parentage, was shot dead yesterday afternoon in Jenin.
-- News Report, April 5, 2011

What made Shahbaz Bhatti the moderate Pakistani minister assassinated by Islamist "militants" for campaigning against the country's blasphemy law unique was that he was – a Christian. Muslim extremists tend to invest the bulk of their homicidal energies in slaughtering their own coreligionists.

Mass casualty suicide bombings, now obscenely routine and carried out by Muslims against Muslims mostly in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan have engendered pathological responses.

Yet no less devastating in their impact on Muslim civilization have been pinpoint assassinations intended to obliterate individual moderates. In fact, the term assassin dates back to an 11th century Persian Shi'ite sect that first employed the systematic use of murder as a political weapon, according to historian Bernard Lewis.

Bhatti's murder followed on the heels of the assassination in January of Salman Taseer, the cosmopolitan governor of Punjab province. His killing was the most devastating assassination of a moderate politician since the 2007 murder of former premier Benazir Bhutto.

Political assassinations intended to eradicate moderates are no less rampant among Arab Muslims. Take the 1951 killing of Jordan's King Abdullah, suspected of being willing to make peace with Israel; he was shot at the Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem. Or Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, murdered in 1981 for having made peace with the Jewish state.

The litany includes Algerian president Mohamed Boudiaf, shot dead in 1992 by an Islamist bodyguard and Lebanon's Sunni Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, killed in 2005 by the Shi'ite Hezbollah network. Lebanon's Christian president Bashir Gemayel was assassinated in 1982 for meeting with Israel's premier Menachem Begin to discuss a possible peace treaty.

While no one would accuse Hariri of wanting to make peace with Israel, he apparently did not kowtow with sufficient obsequiousness to Hezbollah's masters in Iran's. Teheran also has a bloody history of assassinating its own moderates including former premier Shapour Bakhtiar in 1991.

Even the U.S. has not been immune to the phenomenon of radicals murdering comparative moderates.

This month marks the (February 21, 1965) 46th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, the African American radical who was killed after he broke with Elijah Muhammad's xenophobic Nation of Islam and converted to Sunni Islam.

But it is the Palestinian Arabs who have made a morbid fetish of murdering those of their own suspected of being ready to compromise for peace.

Twenty-five years ago this week, (March 3, 1986) Zafer Al-Masri, the forty-four year-old mayor of Nablus was assassinated on the doorsteps to city hall by Palestinian gunmen. Tarred as "an Israeli collaborator," he was said to have close ties to Jordan which at the time was seeking West Bank Palestinians willing to negotiate with Israel under its auspices.

Palestinian Arab society had historically been divided between fanatics led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, former mufti of Jerusalem, and relative moderates, who included notable families such as the Nashashibis. They moderates had reluctantly concluded that the Zionists could not be defeated and that coexistence was a Palestinian interest.

Already by the time Israel was established in 1948, hundreds upon hundreds of Palestinian moderates had been murdered. Moderation came to be treated as treason and punished by death. That is how the Husseini camp came to dominate Palestinian politics and created an intransigent political culture which would ultimately spawn both Fatah and Hamas.

This brings us to the supposedly moderate Palestinians running the West Bank today. Saeb Erekat – one of the most accommodating figures in the PLO hierarchy – confidentially assured Western diplomats that the Palestinians were prepared to compromise on the issue of refugees.

Publicly, however, he continued to insist on the so-called right of return for "seven million" refugees and their descendents to Israel proper as "absolutely necessary for the stability of peace" – a death knell to resolving the conflict. Whatever the motivation for Erekat's duplicitous statements the net effect has been that the Palestinian masses remain unprepared for requisite compromise.

Lately, the only point of consensus between Hamas and Fatah is that Western-backed "moderate" Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad – widely credited for developing political institutions his people will need for statehood – must go. Despite the fact that he spearheaded a boycott against Jewish products manufactured in the West Bank, Fayyad is suspected of sincerity in professing acceptance of a two-state solution.

The systematic slaughter of genuine moderates has necessitated redefining moderation. Only by the Hobbesian yardstick of Palestinian politics, where the lives of peacemakers have been brutishly cut short, can an obdurate Mahmoud Abbas, now two years into his boycott of negotiations with Israel, be pronounced a "moderate."


-- March 7, 2011

BYE BYE J STREET?

On the face of it, J-Street appears to be a success story.

In a little over three years, the lobby has either supplanted or co-opted Americans for Peace Now, Israel Policy Forum, New Israel Fund and other likeminded outfits to emerge as the preeminent Jewish force committed to pushing Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines irrespective of what the Palestinians do. This remarkable achievement by executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami is attributable to the branding of J Street as "passionately and unapologetically pro-Israel.”

A neophyte to the American Jewish political scene could be forgiven for taking him at his word. After all, J Street's just concluded policy conference drew 1,500 "pro-peace, pro-Israel" conventioneers, 500 animated college students, junketeering opposition Knesset members, progressive rabbis, advocacy journalists and even a welcoming letter from Kadima party head Tzipi Livni.

Without doubt, most of the attendees came in good faith convinced that they were bolstering the two-state solution. Had they appreciated J-Street's disingenuously cloaked agenda, utterly reckless policy prescriptions and deeply troubling ethical lapses, many would, presumably, have stayed home. That they did not is a tribute to artful political manipulation practiced by J Street's strategists.

J-Street has capitalized on the "fatigue" many liberal Jewish Americans feel in having to defend unpopular Israeli positions on campus, in the media, and around the office water cooler. J Street promotes the fanciful notion that public criticism of Israel has been inhibited by a monolithic Jewish "establishment" (headed by AIPAC) and that its "dissent" is somehow gutsy.

In truth, discomfiture with this or that Israeli policy has been a factor in the Israel-Diaspora relationship dating back to Nahum Goldmann's break with David Ben-Gurion in the 1950s and was reaffirmed by the precipitate flirtation by Breira and the New Jewish Agenda with the pre-Oslo PLO in the 1970s and 80s. What's more, with the 1977 election of Menachem Begin, Israel's first nationalist prime minister, major American Jewish leaders have routinely lambasted Israel's West Bank settlement policies.

J-Street's more savvy defenders claim its saving grace is that it offers ashamed liberal Jewish undergraduates besieged by virulent campus anti-Zionism (of the Tony Judt strain) with a way of joining the bandwagon of criticism while remaining "pro-Israel."

Regrettably, J-Street does more than criticize Israel; it actively lobbies the U.S. Congress to take steps that would undermine Israeli security and it serves as an enabler to an unsympathetic Obama administration whose misguided policies have impeded the peace process and hardened the already intransigent positions of the Palestinian Authority.

In fact, J Street relishes the role of providing domestic political cover for White House pressure on Israel. J Street stands apart from other Jewish critics of Israel for its ability to legally raise money and give it away to candidates who share its redefinition of pro-Israelism.

Making no substantive demands on the Arabs, J-Street blames Israel solely for the breakdown in negotiations. It claims to support Israel's right to self-defense; yet since its founding J Street has opposed every measure Israel has taken to defend its citizens. It is against the security barrier which has kept suicide bombers at bay.

It opposed military action to stop Hamas's bombardment of the Negev. It abandoned Israel in the face of the Turkish flotilla hullabaloo. And it had to be dragged kicking and screaming to embrace even mild sanctions against Iran.

J-Street professes to oppose the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel. In practice, it has partnered with BDS proponents and some of its supporters believe in selective sanctions. It has shown no scruples about aligning with the vociferously anti-Zionist U.S. Council of Churches. Rather than discrediting Judge Richard Goldstone's lawfare campaign to enfeeble Israel's right to self-defense, J-Street staffers actually promoted his appearances in Congress. J Street has even provided cover for the crusade to delegitimize Israel by the U.N.'s so-called "Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People."

In fact, one is hard put to discern any policy differences between the Palestinian Authority's stated positions and those of J-Street. This explains why the PLO ambassador in Washington was glad to address J Street's 2011 policy conference while Israel's ambassador stayed away.

Both J Street and the PLO oppose any and all Jewish presence over the Green Line, metropolitan Jerusalem included. Both oppose Palestinian recognition of Israel as a “Jewish State.” Both back efforts to turn the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood into sovereign Palestine thus endangering access to the nearby Hebrew University campus on Mt Scopus. The PLO and J-Street's partners, the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement, want to see the Jewish Agency, Jewish National Fund and the Israeli Land Authority abolished because, in the words of Sara Benninga, a Sheikh Jarrah activist and J-Street honoree, ending the "occupation" is not enough.

Both J-Street and the PLO support the Trojan horse Arab Peace Initiative which Ehud Olmert, Shimon Peres and Tzipi Livni, not to mention Benjamin Netanyahu, have all sensibly rebuffed. Like the PLO, J Street brazenly – albeit unsuccessfully – prodded the administration not to veto the recent UN Security Council resolution terming any Jewish presence over the Green Line as "illegal."

What, unadorned, does J-Street advocate?

In face-to-face negotiations, the Palestinians would be expected to compromise on boundaries, refugees and security. Consequently, J-Street advocates that the U.S. impose a solution. But what motivates such behavior? One clue comes from J Street co-founder Daniel Levy who has said that Israel's creation was "wrong." That is in line with the Arab view that Israel's "original sin" was to have been born; it furthermore illuminates why elements in J Street's base favor a one state solution.

This year's policy conference may be J Street's last hurrah.

Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), a leading Congressional dove has acrimoniously broken with the group prompting Ben-Ami to ruefully acknowledge that he had overplayed his hand. Taglit-Birthright has rebuffed J Street's cheeky request to co-sponsor a trip to Israel. But it is the momentous upheaval in the Arab world, along with Iran's newly revealed ramped-up quest for the atom bomb that may prove to be J Street's ultimate undoing.

No amount of wordplay will convince the Diaspora's mainstream that J-Street's scapegoating of Netanyahu and its drive to push Israel back to indefensible borders now is even remotely "pro-Israel."


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-- Monday, Feb. 28, 2011

Will Egypt and Iran Now Be Friends?

Add bilateral relations between Teheran and Cairo in the post-Mubarak era to the already boiling Mideast cauldron. The request of two Iranian warships bound for Syria to transit the Suez Canal for the first time since the 1979 Iranian Revolution has met with telling indecisiveness on the part of Egypt's ruling military council.

One barometer of where Sunni Arab Egypt is heading will be the evolution of its bilateral relations with Shi'ite Persian Iran. Another will be the latitude Cairo gives Iran's Hamas-client in Gaza. It is surely not a good omen that the exiled old anti-Semite and anti-Zionist, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, al-Jazeera's rabble-rousing preacher and darling of the Moslem Brotherhood, was granted a platform to address the multitudes at Friday prayers in Tahrir Square.

The Jewish state has long been a bone of contention in Iran-Egypt relations. Iran's 1950 de facto recognition of Israel was put on ice the following year by the newly appointed premier Mohammed Mossadegh; and resumed in 1953 with his downfall. The Arab League, instigated by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, retaliated against Iran, now directly ruled by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah, and imposed sanctions. Against the canvass of the Cold War, Nasser aligned with the Soviet Union while the Shah sided with the West. Yet both men felt threatened by the Islamists. Nasser executed Moslem Brotherhood theologian Sayyid Qutb, while the Shah merely exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Attitudes toward Jews also differed. The Shah (who happened to be married to the deposed Egyptian King Farouk's sister) protected his country's 80,000 Jews so that there was little overt anti-Semitism. Far from the institutionalized Holocaust denial of the Islamist-era, Iran's press under the Shah openly covered the Eichmann trial of 50 years ago. Even today, the Iranian Jewish population numbers some 11,000 souls. By the late-1960s, in contrast, Egypt's Jewish community had ceased to exist.
Under Anwar Sadat cordial bilateral relations were finally established. These ended, however, after Iran's 1979 Islamist revolution, reflecting Khomeini's unbendable antagonism toward the Egypt-Israel peace treaty and his temper at Sadat for having granted the Shah temporary asylum. In 1981, the shameless mullahs would dedicate a street to Sadat's assassin.

Despite overtures by Iran on pan-Islamic grounds, Hosni Mubarak remained suspicious of their intentions, convinced that Teheran was organizing insurrection inside Egypt and seeking to influence events in the Sudan and Gaza – Egypt's backyard.

The Mubarak regime had been of two minds about Iran's quest for the atom bomb. In June 2009, Mubarak allowed an Israeli submarine to traverse the canal sending an implicit message that Egypt was committed to stopping the Iranian bomb. Yet Egyptian diplomats simultaneously led the UN mob in claiming that Israel was the real nuclear threat in the region. In November 2009, for example, the Mubarak government criticized an IAEA resolution that required Iran to cease construction of its enrichment facility near Qom. Egypt vacillated; sometimes abstaining at IAEA votes critical of Iran, other times calling on Teheran to cooperate with the international community.

Mubarak and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met in 2008; the two countries established interest sections in each other's capitals. Yet relations remained strained as Mubarak blamed Iran for Egypt's failure to reconcile Fatah and Hamas. When Cairo barred an Iranian weapons ship from the Suez Canal, Ahmadinejad accused Egypt of selling out the Palestinians in favor of relations with the Zionists. In 2009, when a Hezbollah cell was uncovered preparing to carry out attacks inside Egypt, Mubarak saw further proof that Iran had designs on the Sunni Arab world. (The cell's imprisoned leader escaped during the anti-Mubarak upheaval to Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon.) Mubarak watched warily as the Sunni Moslem Brotherhood, along with its Hamas affiliate, built ecumenical bridges to Shi'ite Iran rooted in their mutual loathing of Israel and disdain for the West.

With all that, toward the end of the Mubarak era, Iran had secured Egypt's agreement for the resumption of direct flights between their respective capitals. Perhaps to delink Cairo from Washington, Iran offered not only to help Egypt develop its nuclear power industry but also to provide it with wheat to cover shortages and ameliorate rising bread prices.

Where are bilateral relations heading? Iranian leaders are positing that the anti-Mubarak uprising was inspired by the Iranian Revolution. Anyhow, the Muslim Brotherhood is an essential part of the dialogue between the opposition and the ruling junta. Moreover, two probable presidential candidates, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Musa and ex-IAEA chief Mohammad ElBarade are both known for their warm ties to Iran. As far as Jerusalem is concerned, this is almost beside the point since even the liberal opposition figure Ayman Nour has called for reassessing the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.

Iran certainly expects relations with Egypt to become "more balanced" and, most likely, for a resumption of full diplomatic relations. But a genuine strategic alliance between the two countries would be unprecedented. After all, Iran, Egypt and Turkey have traditionally been geostrategic rivals. A thin veneer of pan-Islamic solidarity may not be able to overcome the deep-seated patterns of history.
The biggest wildcard is whether the contagion of popular uprisings sweeping the region, notwithstanding the mullahs' utter ruthlessness in putting down dissent, may yet lead to the toppling of Iran's benighted regime and a truly new Middle East.

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--Feb 24, 2011