RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Arab exodus from Israel in 1948 was the direct result of a genocidal war declared against the newly established Jewish state by all of its Arab neighbors, including the Arabs of Israel… approximately 700,000 local Arabs were displaced.

Approximately the same number of Jews were displaced from their Arab homelands during this period. Nearly all of them could trace their heritage back thousands of years, well before the Muslims and Arabs became the dominant population. …The most significant difference is between how Israel dealt with the Jews who were displaced and how the Arab and Muslim word dealt with the Palestinians who had been displaced by a war they started. Israel integrated its brothers and sisters from the Arab and Muslim world. The Arab world put its Palestinian brothers and sisters in refugee camps, treating them as political pawns — and festering sores —in its persistent war against the Jewish state.

The time has come – indeed it is long overdue – for the world to stop treating these Palestinians as refugees. That status ended decades ago. The Jews who came to Israel from Morocco many years ago are no longer refugees. Neither are the relatives of the Palestinians who have lived outside of Israel for nearly three quarters of a century.

A visit to Morocco shows that the claim of Palestinians to a “right of return” has little historic, moral or legal basis.

Jews lived in Morocco for centuries before Islam came to Casablanca, Fez and Marrakesh. The Jews, along with the Berbers, were the backbone of the economy and culture. Now their historic presence can be seen primarily in the hundreds of Jewish cemeteries and abandoned synagogues that are omnipresent in cities and towns throughout the Maghreb.

I visited Maimonides’s home, now a restaurant. The great Jewish philosopher and medical doctor taught at a university in Fez. Other Jewish intellectuals helped shape the culture of North Africa, from Morocco to Algeria to Tunisia to Egypt. In these countries, Jews were always a minority but their presence was felt in every area of life.

The Juniper Cobra 18 exercise, held since 2001, practices the rapid deployment of American air-defense units and equipment to Israel from Europe in the event of armed conflict.
The Israeli and U.S. militaries are in the midst of a large-scale missile-defense exercise, designed to simulate responses to a Middle East war on multiple fronts.

The scenario at the heart of the planned, biannual drill involves the Israeli home front coming under heavy enemy fire from several directions simultaneously.

The Juniper Cobra 18 exercise, held since 2001, practices the rapid deployment of American air-defense units and equipment to Israel from Europe in the event of armed conflict, in addition to the integration of U.S. capabilities into Israel’s air-defense layers.

“If conditions arise, and we are requested by the government of Israel, through our government, we will deploy,” said Lt.-Gen. Richard M. Clark, commander of the United States 3rd Air Force. Clark, who is based at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, added: “Once we get word, we can get here in days. I could be on the ground in one day. The fighting forces can be here within 72 hours.”

Brig.-Gen. Zvika Haimovich, who heads the Israeli Air Defense Command of the Israel Defense Forces, said it was the largest U.S.–IDF exercise to date, adding that it is expected to play out in the course of more than four weeks.

Some 2,500 American personnel are taking part in the endeavor. Most were mobilized to Israel, while some stayed in Europe and the United States. Around 2,000 IDF personnel are taking part as well.

The United States European Command, based in Germany, sent a number of American air-defense systems to Israel.

To the Washington, DC policy community, and to Jewish organizations across America, Uri Lubrani had become a familiar face.

The first time I met him in Washington was in November 1994, when he came to openly challenge the Clinton administration over what he saw as an appeasement policy toward the Iranian regime.

His words at the time ought to resonate in the ears of policy-makers and corporate lobbyists seeking to do business in Iran today.

As I wrote in Countdown to Crisis, the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran:

“Let me make it absolutely clear,” Lubrani said. “The Iranis have no doubt in their mind that when some of the largest U.S. companies seek a working or trading relationship with Iran, even if this is done indirectly, it cannot be done without the knowledge and explicit approval and authorization by the highest quarters in Washington. This is so because it would be unthinkable to an Irani mind, which has no understanding of the inner workings of a democracy, that such activities are at all possible without being sanctioned from above.”

At the time, the company seeking to do business in Iran was oil giant Conoco. Today, of course, it is Boeing.

On Monday, with Lubrani’s peaceful death at the age of 91, Israel lost a warrior, and a giant.

Since its 1948-49 War of Independence, the Jewish State has faced clear and present lethal challenges, adversities, assaults and threats, handling them as opportunities in disguise. This state of mind has catapulted Israel to unprecedented heights, commercially and militarily – a uniquely productive partner of the United States.

The scarcity of natural resources and the nature of the Middle East – a prototype of conflict-ridden, violent, intolerant, merciless, unpredictable, shifty and tenuous environment – have shaped Israel’s do-or-die state of mind, producing game-changing innovations in the areas of health, medicine, agriculture, irrigation, science, communications, space, homeland and national security.

In Thou Shalt Innovate (How Israeli ingenuity repairs the world), Avi Jorisch – a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council – documents the worldwide positive impact of Israel’s groundbreaking and cutting-edge hightech innovations upon critical challenges facing mankind.

Jorisch highlights the cardinal Jewish tenet of repairing – not controlling – the world (Tikkun Olam in Hebrew). This has generated a tailwind to Israel’s systematic sharing of its research and development with the world at-large, feeding reality-based optimism and upgrading the standard-of-living in the USA, India, Russia, China, Canada, Europe, Australia, Latin America, Asia and Africa. For example, since 2013 Israel has treated more than 2,500 Syrians seeking medical care, in addition to the dispatching of aid delegations to Turkey, Argentina, Mexico, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, etc.

The Palestinians appear to be the only ones in the Arab world who are coming out on a daily basis against a plan no one has seen.

This Arab apathy towards the Palestinians is the result of a long-standing belief in the Arab world that the Palestinians are an ungrateful people who do not hesitate to bite the hand that feeds them.

When Trump finally does announce his Middle East peace plan, the Palestinians will discover that they are alone in threatening to thwart it.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has been working hard to persuade the Arab countries to support its position in the standoff with the US administration.

The PA leadership in Ramallah fears that without the backing of the Arab countries, the US administration will “impose” President Donald Trump’s “deal of the century” — the yet-to-be-announced plan for peace in the Middle East.

The Arab countries, however, appear to be preoccupied with other matters. For now, the Palestinians are getting much lip service from their Arab brothers, including promises to put pressure on the Trump administration possibly to “modify” its plan to make it less “harmful” to Palestinian demands and aspirations.

What is actually happening is that the PA leadership is terrified that many of the Arab countries will support the Trump plan, thus abandoning their Palestinian brothers and leaving them exposed to international pressure to accept the “deal of the century.” This fear does not seem to be unjustified.

They believe in supporting American allies and supporting countries that share their moral values.

In speeches to fellow Jews around America, I often point out that many American Jews are experiencing cognitive dissonance. The institution Jews most admire — the university — turns out to be the most significant source of Israel hatred in America and the rest of the West. At the same time, the people many Jews most distrust — Christians (especially Evangelical and other conservative Christians) — turn out to be the Jews’ and Israel’s best friends.

Given that these two facts are undeniable, how do many American Jews deal with this dissonance? They largely ignore the Israel hatred on campuses, and they dismiss the authenticity of the Christian support. They dismiss it by denying it is genuine. Christians who support Israel, they (and non-Jews on the left) argue, do so for two deceptive reasons.

One is they seek to convert Jews.

That Christians seek to convert non-Christians is, of course, true. The primary aim of Christianity, after all, is to spread belief in Christ. But why would anyone think supporting Israel will convert Jews? Does anyone think that Christians who support Israel’s enemies are making Muslims convert to Christianity? The fact is there isn’t a shred of evidence that Jews have converted to Christianity because of Christian support for Israel. Indeed, the Jews who most support Israel are either the most religious or the most strongly identifying secular Jews. Neither is a candidate for conversion.

The first reason that so many deal-makers have failed is that peace is never negotiated and is always imposed by the side that wins a war. There is not any instance in history, which is primarily a narrative of countless wars, in which an outsider has imposed peace on unwilling belligerents.

The second reason is that outside deal-makers have their interests and agendas which make an already tangled web even more complicated. For example, in the case of American deal-makers, how to win Jewish votes in the US without antagonizing the Arabs who sell us oil and buy our arms?

The third reason is that whenever a status quo is at least tolerable for both belligerents, the desire for risking it in the hope of an ill-defined peace is diminished. Many people in the world live with a status quo they don’t regard as ideal.

There is one thing that Trump the deal-maker could do. He could ask the Israelis and the Palestinians to work on an agreement, each in their own camp, on what they exactly want, and report to him.

Casting himself as the best friend Israel could hope for, President Donald Trump is promising, some may say threatening, to unveil his grand plan for a peace “deal” to end the so-called “Middle East problem”.

Trump has always fancied himself as a deal-maker; he has even written a book on the subject. It is, therefore, no surprise that he might want to put his skill to use on an issue which has defied numerous deal-makers for six decades.

What are the chances of him succeeding? The short answer is: nil!

Last month during a conference at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, the State Department’s David Satterfield said the administration would keep “bolster[ing] the elements of state security in Lebanon, with an emphasis on the Lebanese army.”

So reports Eldad Shavit, a researcher at the institute. Yet at the same conference another State Department official, Nathan Sales, argued “that the Lebanese army is currently a tool of Hezbollah and … it is therefore pointless to strengthen it.”

Which of those two diametrically opposed views, coming from the same State Department, is accurate?

If Sales is right, it is troubling that since 2006, as Shavit notes, the U.S. has given the Lebanese army “more than $1.6 billion in military aid,” and that “recent months have witnessed an expansion in U.S. aid, some of which has already reached Lebanon.” This aid included attack planes and helicopters as well as drones.

The official Israeli view is that it’s all a big mistake. Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman says:

[T]he Lebanese army has lost its independence and is another unit in Hezbollah’s apparatus, and therefore, as far as we are concerned, the infrastructure of the Lebanese army and the Lebanese state is one with the infrastructure of Hezbollah.

Shavit, a former high-ranking intelligence official, spells it out in more detail:

Close cooperation continues between the Lebanese army and Hezbollah. Therefore, the working assumption must be that weapons and knowledge that reach the Lebanese army will find their way into the hands of Hezbollah. This means that all aid to the Lebanese army is liable to strengthen the military capabilities of Hezbollah.

Hezbollah, officially listed as a terror organization by the State Department, is an enemy of the West that is sworn to Israel’s destruction.

And yet:

Lebanese authorities are taking no action to prevent Hezbollah from increasing its military capabilities, and no efforts were made to prevent the group from deploying surface-to-surface missiles and rockets intended for striking at Israel and taking measures to improve the systems’ accuracy.