VICTOR SHARPE: FATAL FLAWS IN THE RELIANCE ON INTERNATIONAL GUARANTEES
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/fatal-flaws-in-the-reliance-upon-international-guarantees?f=puball
When an earlier Secretary of State before Hillary Clinton, namely Condoleezza Rice, arrived several times in Jerusalem she pressured the then weak and embattled Israeli government of Ehud Olmert into continuing the dreary and one sided exercise of concessions to the Palestinian Arabs.
The futile peace process, which has now existed through successive US and Israeli administrations dating back to 1993, has always been predicated on the belief that it takes two to tango. The problem has always been that Israel has never found that its Palestinian partner in peace ever truly wanted to embrace it except in a dance macabre.
Ms. Rice was just one of a long list of American Secretaries of State who have sought the elusive “holy grail” of a lasting peace between Israel and the Arab world, and especially with those Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. But in attempting to achieve such a goal and lasting legacy for themselves they have all found the conflicting pressures existing in the Arab and Islamic world to be a fatal distraction.
The United States had sought the honorable course of peace in the Middle East by using various methods that it believed would achieve success. The method, now repeated yet again by Hillary Clinton and her boss, Barack Hussein Obama, is to coerce Israel (sometimes gently, sometimes less gently) into giving ground to relentless Arab demands designed to erode the Jewish State’s ability to defend itself.
Land for Peace has been a dreary dirge to give away a piece of land followed by another piece of land to assuage the relentless appetite of the Palestinians. This is probably the real meaning of the phrase, “peace process” or should it be in reality, “piece process.”
In return for nibbling away at another piece of Israel – a tiny nation no larger than New Jersey – the United States offers guarantees to defend and support the Jewish state. But the story of previous US guarantees not only to Israel but to South Vietnam, Taiwan, and Georgia, is not a glowing one.
The late Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson wrote, as far back as December 18, 1973, about the delusion of US forces defending Israel against Arab aggression:
“I can’t imagine a more misdirected policy than to ask Israel, which has been the model of a self-reliant ally, to transform itself into an American dependency … Much of the history of international guarantees is the history of countries who have lost their territory, their freedom and even their sons and daughters … It is a history that the Israelis, for their reasons, and we, for ours, ought to do everything possible to avoid.”
If the report of November 23, 2012 from the Security organization known as Debka File is correct, Israel has agreed to accept President Barack Obama’s personal pledge to “start deploying US troops in Egyptian Sinai next week. The conversation between Obama and Netanyahu, which finally tipped the scales for a ceasefire, took place on a secure line Wednesday morning, just hours before it was announced in Cairo. The US and Israeli leaders spoke at around the time that a an Israeli Arab belonging to Hamas was blowing up a Tel Aviv bus, injuring 27 civilians.
“Obama’s pledge addressed Israel’s most pressing demand in every negotiating forum on Gaza: Operation Pillar of Cloud’s main goal was a total stoppage of the flow of Iranian arms and missiles to the Gaza Strip. They were smuggled in from Sudan and Libya through southern Egypt and Sinai. Hostilities would continue, said the prime minister, until this object was achieved.”
I myself have called several times in various articles for Israel to re-possess the strip of land between Egypt and the Gaza Strip known as the Philadelphi Corridor but if U.S. troops are truly to be deployed in the Sinai in order to construct an elaborate system of electronic security fences along both the Suez Canal and in northern Sinai, as Debka claims, then this would also choke off the smuggling tunnels through which armaments and lethal weapons are brought into Hamas occupied Gaza.
According to Debka, “the US Sinai fence project was first disclosed exclusively by them on Nov 9 and US security and civilian units will need to be deployed in Egyptian Sinai to man the fence system and operate it as an active counter-measure for obstructing the smuggling of Iranian weapons supplies.”
Israel is a vibrant democracy and enjoys the inherent strengths from being so. But democratic societies, due to their internal party political considerations and multiple viewpoints, are often unable to employ firm and unwavering policies or withstand the withering aggression against them that autocratic and dictatorial societies can so easily employ.
Brooking no resistance or opposition by the masses, dictators demand immense sacrifices from their people – sacrifices that a democracy could never impose. Thus Israel, surrounded by tyrannical Arab and Islamist regimes, now falling like ninepins under Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaida regimes, is understandably weary of the endless and remorseless Arab violence it is forced to endure.
But to appease that violence, to offer concession after concession to the initiators of that violence, and to do so with the belief that an outside super power will always be there to guarantee protection, is equally a delusion.
To repeatedly try to seek peace with an implacable and deceitful enemy, whether it is the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas or the Hamas regime in Gaza, is rather like the description of a second marriage given by the 18th century English literary giant, Samuel Johnson, who wrote that it is “… the triumph of hope over experience.”
But the hope within the Arab-Israel conflict is sadly an illusion for the Jewish state and can never be fulfilled so long as the enemy is imbued with Islamic injunctions to never make a lasting peace with a non-Muslim state but always to war against it until it is exterminated.
So the Rabin government, which entered the Oslo Peace Accords in good faith with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under the late arch-terrorist, Yasser Arafat, produced nothing but a precipitous erosion of Israel’s security. Arafat is dead but his evil legacy lives on.
Arafat told his Arab critics of the Peace Accords that they need not worry. He knew that all that has transpired was merely the realization of the PLO’s ‘Two Step Policy’ of destroying the Jewish state in stages. He said; “This is the phased plan we adopted in 1974. Why should you oppose it now?”
In this transparent and pernicious plan, which Israeli leaders from the Left seem ever willing to ignore, the Palestinian Arabs will accept any territory given to them by the naive Israelis, and then use that territory to mount terror attacks and a ‘final solution’ against a reduced Israel to finish it off. As Arafat stated, “… the Palestinian state is within our grasp. Soon the Palestinian flag will fly on the walls, the minarets and the cathedrals of Jerusalem.”
Mahmoud Abbas does not shout out the same slogans publicly, but he undeniably harbors in his heart the very same desire. And Hamas, his rival in anti-Israel terror, echoes Arafat by proclaiming in even more vicious and pan-Islamic terms: “We are announcing a war against the sons of apes and pigs, which will not end until the flag of Islam is raised in Jerusalem.”
Meanwhile, with all the experience of previous failed marriages, the present Netanyahu government, met with the Secretary of State Clinton to continue the nonsense of the “peace process” in which Israel does the giving and the Arab thugdom does the taking. At the same time, the carrot of US guarantees is again dangled in front of the Israeli donkey – this time the Obama plan of using U.S. forces to prevent Hamas from being resupplied with missiles from Iran and the Libyan stockpiles.
In response to an earlier carrot dangled by President Richard Nixon, the Israeli Prime Minister of the time, Golda Meier, said: “By the time you get here, we won’t be here.”
In my book: Politicide – The attempted murder of the Jewish state – I recounted the many disappointing experiences Israel gained from previous US guarantees. After the 1956 “100 hours war,” when Israel drove out the Arab terrorists from Gaza and pushed back their Egyptian defenders towards the Suez Canal, the Eisenhower-Dulles administration forced Israel to withdraw completely from Sinai in return for written guarantees.
In the June, 1967 “Six-Day War” those guarantees were conveniently mislaid. In the following War of Attrition, the US arranged a cease-fire between Israel and Egypt, which included US assurances that Egypt would not be allowed to violate the agreement.
Within a few days following the cease-fire, the Egyptians blatantly broke the agreement and moved their missiles into the Sinai. Despite Israeli protests, the US did nothing and when Egypt and Syria launched their assault upon Israel in the 1973 “Yom Kippur War,” these same Egyptian missile batteries inflicted extensive and grievous Israeli casualties.
United Nations guarantees to Israel have also proven to be examples of cynical double speak and egregious anti-Israel behavior on the ground. The UN’s record of duplicity towards Israel can be summed up in the highly discredited UN “peacekeeping force known as UNIFIL. Here again, Israel fell for the falsehoods of international guarantees against Arab and Islamist aggression. It never worked then and it won’t work now.
No doubt President Obama and Secretary Clinton will attempt to hoodwink the Israeli government into appeasing the Hamas thugdom and ease the pressure on the Hamas-occupied Gaza Strip. Such concessions have proven to be an Israeli self-inflicted national wound. Fresh from the disaster in Benghazi, Clinton will want to score a “political victory” in the Middle East and, as usual, it will be at Israel’s expense.
Years ago, President Clinton said that: “The United States relies on its defense forces to defend America, and Israel should do likewise.” He went on to say that, “… the first duty of any government is to try to keep its citizens safe.”
Sadly it may be beyond the ability of the current government of Israel to grasp the perils these latest guarantees create; even though past experiences should sound alarm bells in the Prime Minister’s office and the Knesset.
Such guarantees are always a delusion and Israel should not trade what is left of its defensible borders and sovereignty for further unreliable promises.
With the world repeating the errors of 1938 by not militarily confronting the genocidal aggression against the Jewish state from a soon to be nuclear armed Iran and a resurgent and triumphalist Islam, the supreme irony may yet be that Israel will be pushed so much by friend and foe alike that it will find its back against the wall.
Worse still, if U.S. troops are given rules of engagement by the Obama Administration that prevent them effectively halting or confronting the importation of weapons and missiles into Gaza, this could conceivably create unnecessary and tragic tensions between American and Israeli troops.
Such a nightmare situation would validate all those critics who have expressed grave misgivings about the Morsi brokered ceasefire and now the Obama promise.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of several books including The Blue Hour, a collection of short stories, and Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
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