Just Peace For Israel

Senator McCain. Some "Straight Talk" From Jerusalem

By Bill Mehlman*

TO ALL AM ISRAEL

Senator McCain, you have made “Straight Talk” the theme of your campaign for the U.S. Presidency, so we trust you’ll be receptive to some straight talk from Jerusalem on the Middle East

There are presently two viable states living side by side in peace in our troubled neighborhood.  Their names are Israel and Jordan

The jihadist “Palestinian State” the U.S. State Department proposes to wedge between them would guarantee a quick end to the peace and viability of both these American allies. It would, in short order, become the enshrined capital of radical Islam.   

There is no greater gift that America and the West could bestow on the armies of radical Islam than the consecration of the Holy Land as a playground for the corrupt Palestinian Authority and its terrorist appendages -- the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades and Tanzim gunmen. The euphoria this would generate from Teheran to Riyadh would sweep like a tsunami over the entire Middle East, inundating not only Israel and Jordan, but the oil monarchies and Egypt. It would sound the death knell for America’s valiant struggle to hold back the forces of Islamic terror in Iraq and  Afghanistan.

Senator McCain, the “Arab refugee problem” was created by the seven Arab states that attempted to strangle Israel in its cradle . It is not Israel’s problem.  It is not America’s problem.  It is the problem of an Arab world that for 60 years has cynically used these people and their misery as a weapon against Israel.  It is a problem to which it has defiantly refused to apply the only rational solution possible – the absorption of the refugees it created  within its underpopulated  22-state nexus stretching from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf.  If its vast oil wealth is insufficient to the task, the West can doubtless  be counted on to pitch in with an economic aid package.

Senator McCain, “straight talk” on the Middle East demands the total reassessment of an American-inspired “peace process” constructed on the sands of illusion. It’s a fool’s bet on a self-serving Palestinian leadership repudiated by its own constituents and a famously inept Israeli government too befogged to tell the difference between a peace process and a suicide contract.

The prerequisite for straight talk is straight thinking. Our respect for your ability to think straight on major issues compels us to believe you would think long and hard before taking America further down the road of an ill-conceived  policy  marked for certain failure.   

*Bill Mehlman is on the Executive Committee of Americans For A Safe Israel .

The Bush Metamorphosis

By Bill Mehlman*

“Why in Texas , some of our driveways are longer than that.”

Texas Governor George W. Bush commenting on the 10-mile, pre-June 1967 distance between enemy lines and Israel ’s coastal population following a December 1998 helicopter tour of Judea and Samaria .

Jerusalem -- Both during and long after his January 9th first visit to Israel since taking up residence in theWhite House, President Bush must be made to realize that the dimensions of Israel’s pre-1967 midsection that so shocked Governor Bush are precisely those to which Israel would be forced to revert under the “peace process” launched at Annapolis.

Governor Bush had no trouble assessing the existential threat such a reversion would pose for the Jewish state. Describing the impact of that helicopter tour he took in the company of then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, Ron Suskind in his book, The Price of Loyalty, quotes the Texas governor as saying “ It looks real bad down there. I think it’s time to pull out of that situation.” With the memory of what he saw still fresh, the newly minted President Bush, in his first meeting with his National Security Council on January 30, 2001 asserted (according to notes taken by Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill) that “we’re going to tilt back toward Israel.” O’Neill reports Secretary of State Colin Powell responding that it would be dangerous if Sharon and the IDF were given a free hand. To which Bush is quoted as having retorted: “Maybe that’s the best way to get things back in balance. Sometimes a show of force can really clarify things.”

More than a drawl

With a lot more of Texas still in him that just a drawl, Bush wasn’t above “clarifying things,” including telling the pro-Arab State Department where to get off. This was a George W. Bush still determined to make good on his campaign pledge to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, a president who elected to surround himself with pro-Israel neocons like Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby, a defense secretary who routinely referred to Judea, Samaria and Gaza as the “so-called occupied territories” and a vice president who thought Arafat “should be killed.”

George Bush, circa January 2008, bears only passing resemblance to the original product. The brain trust that esteemed the added value a strong, defensible Israel brought to America ’s valiant struggle against radical Islam is long gone, replaced by such as Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, whose skewed perspective on the Arab-Israeli conflict has been echoed in recent White House policy decisions. Viewed as a sounding board for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Haas, who formerly headed State’s Division of Policy Planning, expressed his displeasure with what he deemed the too general and congenial nature of the president’s speech at Annapolis . “Bush’s speech,” he averred, “failed to give Mahmoud Abbas an argument he could take back to the Palestinian people and say ‘this is why negotiations offer the more promising route and this is why you should not put your hope in violence.’” “More promising?” Under what circumstances does Mr. Haas suggest the United States should regard terrorist violence in any degree against a democratic friend and ally as “promising?”

Total freeze

Haas’s three-step formula for kick-starting the post-Annapolis “process” includes the halting of all further Israeli settlement beyond the 1949 Armistice lines; the removal of all Israeli roadblocks in Judea and Samaria, and a reconstituted Palestinian Authority security force (presumably incorporating under its expanded umbrella the gunmen of Fatah, Tanzim and the Martyrs Brigades). His anti-Jewish settlement plank found special resonance with Saeb Erekat, the PA’s star negotiator and emissary to the Western media. “We demand a freeze on all settlement activity,” said the man who told the world at Annapolis that the words “Jewish state” would never issue from his lips. And a “freeze,” he added, must include not only new settlement construction but construction in existing settlements. “Either it’s a 100 percent settlement freeze,” he barked, “or no settlement freeze. There is nothing in the middle.” In respect to which, Mr. Haas has noted: “The Arab world and the Palestinians will be willing to work with us and accept our role if we act credibly,” i.e., serve them Israel ’s head at the next Ramadan festival.

President Bush’s response to all this has been rather pathetic. “I’ll make sure, as will the secretary of state, that when they get stuck, we’ll help them get unstuck,” was the most profound thing he had to say at the conclusion of the Annapolis conclave. Condoleezza Rice has not nearly been as reticent. The President, she has made clear, wasn’t coming to Israel for another helicopter ride, but to “signal support for the bilateral process between the parties and to continue, in a hands-on way, to encourage them to move forward.” Anybody vaguely familiar with the context and syntax of Middle Eastern “peace” negotiations over the last 40 years knows that “hands-on” and “move forward” are code words describing pressure on Israel for unilateral concessions. Secretary Rice abandoned the code words for more direct language a bit further on in noting that Bush’s January trip would include other stops in the region aimed at rallying broader Arab backing for the Annapolis initiative, “The Palestinians can’t make these tough choices without Arab support,” she asserted.

Har Homa lecture

Did Madam Rice mean to imply that the PA’s acceptance of Israel ’s surrender of 95 percent of Judea and Samaria plus eastern Jerusalem amounted to a “tough choice,” moreover one that required “broad Arab support?” Or was the secretary tiptoeing, ever so delicately, around the possibility that the Olmert government might demand of Mahmoud Abbas the public recognition of Israel as a Jewish state? Indeed, it may have been in an attempt to make that bitter pill more palatable that she lashed out at Israel ’s refusal to veto the construction of additional sorely needed apartments in Har Homa, a neighborhood plainly within Jerusalem ’s municipal boundaries. Treating that simple fact as though it were a non sequitur, she went off on a tangent about the “obligation to be very careful about activities that undermine confidence. This is a time to build confidence between the parties,” she declared, “and something like the Har Homa activity undermines confidence.”

If the addition of an apartment block in a demarcated and developed neighborhood in Jerusalem “undermines confidence” in the “process,” what might be said of a soon to be unveiled poster marking the 43rd anniversary of Fatah, a wholly owned terrorist subsidiary of the PA. Already on view at several Fatah-affiliated web sites, it features a map of Israel draped in a Palestinian keffiah, with Arafat’s picture supporting an automatic rifle symbolizing the continued “armed struggle” against the “Zionist entity.”

Secretary Rice, at this writing, has yet to condemn this belligerent affront by an organ of a Palestinian Authority ostensibly committed to an independent “ Palestine ” alongside, not in place of, Israel . It may be that she simply regards the “undermining of confidence” in the “process” an exclusive Israeli preserve. Perhaps the former governor of Texas would be good enough to shed some “hands-on” light on the subject before he leaves here.

*Bill Mehlman is on the Executive Committee of Americans For A Safe Israel .

Time to Lay Down the Law

Bill Mehlman

Jerusalem -- Insightfulness doesn’t readily leap to mind as the defining characteristic of Ehud Barak, the failed prime minister whose midnight dispatch of the IDF from south Lebanon set the stage for Hezbollah’s takeover of that strategic area and the disastrous 2006 Lebanese war. But even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day and Barak, in his second incarnation as Israel’s defense minister, set the chimes ringing a couple of weeks ago when he observed that “any state that wishes to live can have only one army.”

Israel could wind up with two armies, or maybe half an army under an Olmert government that seems hell- bent on blowing the morale of the IDF, already badly bruised in the 2005 Gush Katif evacuation, out of the water. One army might remain dedicated to carrying out any order sent down by an increasingly unhinged “political echelon.” However, there’s a second army, with a rising representation among Israel ’s elite combat units, that is assembling under the banner of a 1947 “Nuremberg Judgement,” which, in the words of Professor Louis Rene Beres, unequivocally asserts that “the obligation to disobey military orders contrary to any state’s survival is generic and universal.” Member of Knesset Dr . Aryeh Eldad envisions a third, even worse scenario . If the government’s enlistment of IDF muscle in the expulsion of Jews from their homes is not halted, he warns, “we may remain with no army.”

The split opened in the IDF’s ranks at Gush Katif and northern Samaria was further widened this past summer with the refusal of 12 solders of the Kfir regiment, including two company commanders, to participate in the evacuation of two Jewish families that had taken up residence in a shuttered Hebron market adjacent to the city’s tiny Jewish quarter, which the courts have ruled to be under legal Jewish ownership. The 12 refusers were promptly court-martialed and packed off to prison for 28 days, sparking an uproar that has swept Knesset members, rabbis, parents and soldiers, including a retired general, into its orbit.

A furious Avner Cohen, father of Sgt. Haim Cohen, one of the jailed 12, charged that his son “was paying the price for the outrageous removal of Jews in the Land of Israel .” Additional weight to Cohen’s allegation was provided by what may have once have seemed the most unlikely of sources. General Yaacov Armidor (Res.), one of the IDF’s most respected intelligence experts, declared outright that “the reason for the evacuation of the families from Hebron was not strategic, but political.” MK Eldad, the Knesset’s passionate critic of Jewish evacuation, echoed Armidor’s conclusion some weeks later, as he joined a hike by some 2,000 residents of Efrat, the Gush Etzion community just outside of Jerusalem , to five empty hilltops within the boundaries of its state owned charter. The Olmert government, waving the sword of the IDF, has declared the hilltops to be land upon which Efrat may not build to accommodate an expanding population and strengthen its security. “Instead of fighting Israel ’s enemies,” Eldad asserted, “the IDF has become a political army. The failures of the next war are already written on the wall.”

To the daily Ha’aretz, the institutional voice of Israel ’s ruling elite, the message speaks for itself. “The ideological refusal to evacuate settlers,” the newspaper opined in a recent editorial, “is no longer a marginal phenomenon.” Indeed, from the perspective of Rabbi David Stav, the influential head of the pluralistic and decidedly moderate “Tzohar” movement, what occurred at the Hebron market in August was just a hint of the resentment against involvement in settler evacuation being expressed by members of some of the IDF’s key combat units. Giving voice to that emotion, one paratrooper, who admitted using a subterfuge to escape participation in the Hebron market affair, asked “Why do we have to be dragged into this despicable business?” Declared a buddy standing nearby: “I will fight the enemy to the best of my ability, but there’s a red line I will not cross to help evict Jews from their homes.”

Rabbi Stav would advise the government to be very much aware of that red line. “If the state has another mass expulsion such as Gush Katif,” he cautions. “the conscientious objection will also be massive. I’m saying this as someone who is opposed to refusing orders, but people have had enough. They feel they have become a tool in the hands of a government they do not consider legitimate.”

Legitimate or not, one fact is becoming ominously clear with each passing day of the Kadima-led coalition: If the IDF, Israel ’s lifeline, is to be spared any further damage, it must, by law and with all urgency, be placed beyond the political grasp of this or any other Israeli government. The responsibility for that task rests squarely with the Knesset. The moment for enacting a law specifically prohibiting the employment of the IDF or any of it components for any mission other than the defense of the nation and the protection of its citizens could not be more compelling. And if the Knesset requires any stiffening of its spinal column in this regard, a class action lawsuit charging the government with misuse of the IDF in violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of Israeli Basic Law should certainly be entertained. Scores of thousands of Israelis would jump at the invitation to join the class and there ought to be a raft of competent, national Zionist-oriented lawyers ready to lend pro bono assistance to the effort.

It is time to lay down the law to Mr. Olmert’s runaway regime – both in the Knesset and the courtroom.

*Bill Mehlman represents Americans For A Safe Israel (AFSI) in Israel and is co-editor of the Jerusalem- based internet magazine ZionNet. (www.zionnet.net). He is also one of the founders and sponsors of Just Peace For Israel