VICTOR SHARPE: LAND FOR PEACE OR OBLIVION
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“To meet a people’s need through a people’s own effort…this idea of self-emancipation is Zionism” Henrietta Szold.
Immediately after the June 1967 Six Day War, a secret memorandum was issued by the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). Their conclusions were that any peace settlement between Israel and the Arab belligerents would only succeed if Israel retained certain territories vital for its continued existence and survival.
The areas the Joint Chiefs declared as the minimum defensible borders for the Jewish state included the Golan Heights, the western half of Samaria (the northwestern part of the West Bank), all of Judea (the southern part of the West Bank), the Gaza Strip and several portions of the eastern Sinai Peninsula.
This, of course, occurred before the world became obsessed with the creation of an Arab terror state within Israel’s narrow territory between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan. Since that report in 1967, the Begin government gave away all of the Sinai.
The first city that Joshua liberated during the Israelites entry into the Promised Land, Jericho, was given away by Binyamin Netanyahu during his first term as Prime Minister, followed by most of Hebron, King David’s first Jewish capital and one of Judaism’s four holy cities. Both cities are practically lost to the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.
Under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his deputy, Ehud Olmert, Israel gave away the entire Gaza Strip in 2005, with catastrophic consequences for the Jewish state.
These breathtaking concessions to the Arabs have all been made under the hope that it will bring peace with the Arab enemies. But it has not. “Peace, peace, but there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14.)
Ehud Barak, Israel’s present Defense Minister, had years earlier withdrawn from the southern Lebanon security strip, thus allowing the Islamist Hezbollah to fill the vacuum with dire consequences for northern Israel.
A conflict broke out – the Second Lebanon War – disastrously mismanaged by ex-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. It was launched too late and ended too soon.
After Israel endured over 12,000 incoming missiles from Hamas-occupied Gaza, Operation Cast Lead was finally launched by Israel. It ended too soon, and the Islamist Hamas continues to pursue its ambition of finally destroying Israel with relentless barrages of ever more lethal missile attacks upon Israeli towns and villages.
Vice President Biden last year attacked Israel for planning to build apartments in a north Jerusalem suburb followed by a vituperative call from Secretary of State Clinton making yet more demands upon Israel. Building apartments or adding a room to an existing house is now considered an act of aggression in this Kafkaesque world we live in.
The Palestinian Authority gave the green light to launch riots by Arab mobs in Jerusalem, Hebron and throughout Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank). Suspicions that President Obama used an application for zoning approval for additional housing in Jerusalem as the excuse to ratchet up unbearable pressure upon the Jewish state were more than persuasive.
Israel is now under the greatest pressure in years from an American administration to give away the ancestral Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria. President Barack Obama is perceived by many to be a clear and present danger to the very survival of the reconstituted Jewish state.
His deafening silence, along with that of his lieutenants, Biden, Clinton, and his army of anti-Israel advisors, at the disgusting ceremony that was held in Ramallah by the Palestinian Authority honoring a female terrorist and her grisly accomplices who murdered 38 Israeli civilians in 1978, speaks volumes about the towering anti-Israel bias of this president.
In the aftermath of the Six Day War, the US Joint Chiefs were not interested in Jewish patrimony or Biblical history. They were solely concerned with the strategic necessities for Israel’s survival in a very bad neighborhood. That is why they set out what the bare minimum retention of territory for Israel should be.
Col. Irving Kett (USA, ret.) also prepared an Army War College study on Israel’s security needs in 1974. His study was called, “A Proposed Solution to the Arab-Israel Conflict”.
In it, he strongly suggested that, from a military point of view, Israel’s borders should be constituted to make it a compact state with natural boundaries on all sides – the Jordan River to the east, Golan Heights to the northeast, the Litani River in the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the west and the historic boundary with the Sinai Peninsula to the south.
As a direct result and consequence of Arab aggression, most of those borders had been attained by Israel at one time or another. Colonel Kett pointed out what the IDF has always known, but what too many Israeli politicians preferred to ignore; namely, that there is vital strategic value in the mountain range which forms the spine running through Judea and Samaria.
The highlands run some 54 miles from Jenin in the north to Hebron in the south and dominate Israel’s coastline. The spine is 12 miles wide and Israel simply cannot afford to vacate it. It was assumed for years by both the Israeli military and politicians that if a Palestinian Arab state came into existence it would have to permit an Israeli defense line on the Jordan River (the Allon Plan), and that such a state would have to be demilitarized.
The answer, of course, would be to have made permanent the suggested boundaries proposed in both Kett’s memorandum and the earlier JCS report of some 40 years ago. Events have moved on since then. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank would never agree to this and Hamas in Gaza would scornfully dismiss it out of hand.
The Arabs have become even more vicious in their anti-Jewish rhetoric and behavior, and a jihadist Iran has encircled the Jewish state through its Islamist proxies in Gaza and Lebanon.
The Arab-Israel conflict is not, and never has been, merely a war over territory. It is, and always has been, a religious war. Islam will never accept a non-Muslim state, whatever size or shape it may be, within lands previously conquered by Muslims in the name of Allah.
Even if Israel shrank to just one down town square in Tel Aviv it would still be a provocation to the Arab and Muslim world. “Land for Peace” and a “Two State Solution” are euphemisms that are no different to the dread euphemism coined by the German Nazis, The Final Solution, which meant complete extermination of the Jews.
The “Two-State Solution”, so beloved of President Obama, requires Judea and Samaria to be given away to the Palestinian Arabs. Obama has upped the ante. Now he wants those Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem built on land liberated from the Jordanian occupiers to also be given to the Palestinian Arabs.
We are now talking about a potential plan to expel some 700,000 Jews from their biblical and ancestral heartland of Judea and Samaria along with many suburbs of the Jewish capital city: Jerusalem.
But the Arabs have no intention of making peace whatever territorial concessions Israel makes. That should be enough for an Israeli government and Prime Minister with intestinal fortitude to defy the world’s pressure for the Jewish state to slowly and surely disappear.
After all, Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin and Yitzchak Shamir all said “no” to unrealistic presidential demands in the past and prevailed.
Interestingly, Colonel Kett had also suggested that the Palestinian Arabs be resettled in a state in the Sinai. The other famous suggestion is that Jordan is Palestine, which is based upon the historical fact of the first “Two-State Solution” enacted in infamy by Great Britain some 90 years ago.
Even President George W. Bush, when visiting Israel as Governor of Texas, was moved to utter, “The whole of Israel is only about six times the size of the King Ranch near Corpus Christie.” Yet even he, after becoming president, called for a “Two-State Solution” west of the Jordan River.
Pushing Israel back to the “Auschwitz borders”, as Abba Eban called them, where the Jewish state is only nine miles wide at its most populous region, is what the “Two-State Solution” is all about. That other chilling euphemism “The Final Solution” again comes to mind.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer, contributing editor, and author of Volumes One and Two of “Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.”
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Immediately after the June 1967 Six Day War, a secret memorandum was issued by the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). Their conclusions were that any peace settlement between Israel and the Arab belligerents would only succeed if Israel retained certain territories vital for its continued existence and survival.
The areas the Joint Chiefs declared as the minimum defensible borders for the Jewish state included the Golan Heights, the western half of Samaria (the northwestern part of the West Bank), all of Judea (the southern part of the West Bank), the Gaza Strip and several portions of the eastern Sinai Peninsula.
This, of course, occurred before the world became obsessed with the creation of an Arab terror state within Israel’s narrow territory between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan. Since that report in 1967, the Begin government gave away all of the Sinai.
The first city that Joshua liberated during the Israelites entry into the Promised Land, Jericho, was given away by Binyamin Netanyahu during his first term as Prime Minister, followed by most of Hebron, King David’s first Jewish capital and one of Judaism’s four holy cities. Both cities are practically lost to the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.
Under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his deputy, Ehud Olmert, Israel gave away the entire Gaza Strip in 2005, with catastrophic consequences for the Jewish state.
These breathtaking concessions to the Arabs have all been made under the hope that it will bring peace with the Arab enemies. But it has not. “Peace, peace, but there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14.)
Ehud Barak, Israel’s present Defense Minister, had years earlier withdrawn from the southern Lebanon security strip, thus allowing the Islamist Hezbollah to fill the vacuum with dire consequences for northern Israel.
A conflict broke out – the Second Lebanon War – disastrously mismanaged by ex-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. It was launched too late and ended too soon.
After Israel endured over 12,000 incoming missiles from Hamas-occupied Gaza, Operation Cast Lead was finally launched by Israel. It ended too soon, and the Islamist Hamas continues to pursue its ambition of finally destroying Israel with relentless barrages of ever more lethal missile attacks upon Israeli towns and villages.
Vice President Biden last year attacked Israel for planning to build apartments in a north Jerusalem suburb followed by a vituperative call from Secretary of State Clinton making yet more demands upon Israel. Building apartments or adding a room to an existing house is now considered an act of aggression in this Kafkaesque world we live in.
The Palestinian Authority gave the green light to launch riots by Arab mobs in Jerusalem, Hebron and throughout Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank). Suspicions that President Obama used an application for zoning approval for additional housing in Jerusalem as the excuse to ratchet up unbearable pressure upon the Jewish state were more than persuasive.
Israel is now under the greatest pressure in years from an American administration to give away the ancestral Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria. President Barack Obama is perceived by many to be a clear and present danger to the very survival of the reconstituted Jewish state.
His deafening silence, along with that of his lieutenants, Biden, Clinton, and his army of anti-Israel advisors, at the disgusting ceremony that was held in Ramallah by the Palestinian Authority honoring a female terrorist and her grisly accomplices who murdered 38 Israeli civilians in 1978, speaks volumes about the towering anti-Israel bias of this president.
In the aftermath of the Six Day War, the US Joint Chiefs were not interested in Jewish patrimony or Biblical history. They were solely concerned with the strategic necessities for Israel’s survival in a very bad neighborhood. That is why they set out what the bare minimum retention of territory for Israel should be.
Col. Irving Kett (USA, ret.) also prepared an Army War College study on Israel’s security needs in 1974. His study was called, “A Proposed Solution to the Arab-Israel Conflict”.
In it, he strongly suggested that, from a military point of view, Israel’s borders should be constituted to make it a compact state with natural boundaries on all sides – the Jordan River to the east, Golan Heights to the northeast, the Litani River in the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the west and the historic boundary with the Sinai Peninsula to the south.
As a direct result and consequence of Arab aggression, most of those borders had been attained by Israel at one time or another. Colonel Kett pointed out what the IDF has always known, but what too many Israeli politicians preferred to ignore; namely, that there is vital strategic value in the mountain range which forms the spine running through Judea and Samaria.
The highlands run some 54 miles from Jenin in the north to Hebron in the south and dominate Israel’s coastline. The spine is 12 miles wide and Israel simply cannot afford to vacate it. It was assumed for years by both the Israeli military and politicians that if a Palestinian Arab state came into existence it would have to permit an Israeli defense line on the Jordan River (the Allon Plan), and that such a state would have to be demilitarized.
The answer, of course, would be to have made permanent the suggested boundaries proposed in both Kett’s memorandum and the earlier JCS report of some 40 years ago. Events have moved on since then. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank would never agree to this and Hamas in Gaza would scornfully dismiss it out of hand.
The Arabs have become even more vicious in their anti-Jewish rhetoric and behavior, and a jihadist Iran has encircled the Jewish state through its Islamist proxies in Gaza and Lebanon.
The Arab-Israel conflict is not, and never has been, merely a war over territory. It is, and always has been, a religious war. Islam will never accept a non-Muslim state, whatever size or shape it may be, within lands previously conquered by Muslims in the name of Allah.
Even if Israel shrank to just one down town square in Tel Aviv it would still be a provocation to the Arab and Muslim world. “Land for Peace” and a “Two State Solution” are euphemisms that are no different to the dread euphemism coined by the German Nazis, The Final Solution, which meant complete extermination of the Jews.
The “Two-State Solution”, so beloved of President Obama, requires Judea and Samaria to be given away to the Palestinian Arabs. Obama has upped the ante. Now he wants those Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem built on land liberated from the Jordanian occupiers to also be given to the Palestinian Arabs.
We are now talking about a potential plan to expel some 700,000 Jews from their biblical and ancestral heartland of Judea and Samaria along with many suburbs of the Jewish capital city: Jerusalem.
But the Arabs have no intention of making peace whatever territorial concessions Israel makes. That should be enough for an Israeli government and Prime Minister with intestinal fortitude to defy the world’s pressure for the Jewish state to slowly and surely disappear.
After all, Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin and Yitzchak Shamir all said “no” to unrealistic presidential demands in the past and prevailed.
Interestingly, Colonel Kett had also suggested that the Palestinian Arabs be resettled in a state in the Sinai. The other famous suggestion is that Jordan is Palestine, which is based upon the historical fact of the first “Two-State Solution” enacted in infamy by Great Britain some 90 years ago.
Even President George W. Bush, when visiting Israel as Governor of Texas, was moved to utter, “The whole of Israel is only about six times the size of the King Ranch near Corpus Christie.” Yet even he, after becoming president, called for a “Two-State Solution” west of the Jordan River.
Pushing Israel back to the “Auschwitz borders”, as Abba Eban called them, where the Jewish state is only nine miles wide at its most populous region, is what the “Two-State Solution” is all about. That other chilling euphemism “The Final Solution” again comes to mind.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer, contributing editor, and author of Volumes One and Two of “Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.”
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