Governor Romney is about to visit Israel during the increasing heat of this summer’s presidential election season.
While running for office, almost all candidates say what they feel the voters want to hear. Yet that’s not always the case…unless you also believe that you can get away with doing the opposite–for one reason or another.
Case in point…
Among the biggest headaches Israel has with President Obama is his insistence that Israel return to its 1949, U.N.-imposed armistice lines which made it a mere 9 to 15 miles wide at its waist, where most of its population and infrastructure are located. Most folks have to travel farther than that just to go to work or to the shopping mall. Israel existed this way until the June 1967 Six Day War (started when Arabs blockaded it at the Straits of Tiran and Gulf of Aqaba –a casus belli–and other hostile acts), and those lines did nothing but constantly tempt Israel’s enemies to sever it in half.
In the wake of that war, as many have frequently noted, Israel was promised by the architects of the final draft of the main official guide for peacemaking, UNSC Resolution 242, that it would never have to return to those vulnerable armistice lines. Since I’ve written extensively about this myself, I won’t pursue this further here. Nothing more really needs to be added, so please check, for example, http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2012/6/article142.htm to fill in the details.
Besides Israel and the Jewish people’s several thousand year connections (including land ownership right into the 20th century) to the disputed territories such as Judea and Samaria (called that for millennia before British imperialism also named them the “West Bank” after World War I), Israel had been promised, via 242, more secure, defensible, and real borders to replace its previous Auschwitz/armistice lines. And, again, this is what the nastiness between Israel, Obama, and the ever-hostile State Department (which fought President Truman over Israel’s very resurrection in the first place in 1948) is largely all about.