RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-Wrong-No-Israels-not-imploding-609325

Every period in the country’s 71-year history has been marked by internal strife coupled with external danger.
If I had a shekel for every prediction of Israel’s imminent implosion, I’d be as rich as most of my socialist friends, and as free to abandon all religious-ideological nuance as many of my right-wing ones. Alas, the affluence evades, but at least with good reason. To paraphrase a quip attributed to Mark Twain, “Reports of Israel’s death are greatly exaggerated.”

It is especially important at the moment – with an unprecedented political situation accompanying a very familiar bombardment by enemies far and near – to remind all the gevalt-sayers that every period in the country’s 71-year history has been marked by internal strife coupled with external danger. So let’s take a break from misplaced nostalgia to appreciate the present, with all its aches and pains.

As it happens, the so-called “malaise” afflicting Israelis – due to the current electoral impasse, the rockets raining from Gaza and the announcement of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s indictments – is more of a mantra than an accurate depiction of daily life in the Jewish state. Even today.

Indeed, it is not for nothing that Israel ranks high on every annual global happiness index.

 https://bit.ly/2QVMGip

In 1993, 1995 and 2005, Israel retreated from 40% of the Judea and Samaria mountain ridges (West Bank) and the entire Gaza Strip. It transformed these regions into platforms of unprecedented Palestinian terrorism and missile launches, supported by Iran, Turkey and North Korea. Moreover, it has intensified lethal threats to all pro-US Arab regimes, bolstering their security ties with Israel, which they perceived to be the most credible “life insurance agent” in the region. As expected, gestures to rogue regimes and terrorists fuel further violence!

“In November 1994, the peace process had seemed to be in full swing…. [But], an organized campaign began in the US against the idea of stationing US troops on the Golan Heights as ‘peace keepers’, in the event of an Israel-Syria [peace] agreement. The campaign was orchestrated by right-wing organizations and individuals in the Jewish community, with occasional participation of visitors from Israel… [such as] the former Minister for Congressional Affairs in our Washington Embassy, Yoram Ettinger…. The organizers conveyed the message that sending US troops as peacekeepers to the Golan was bad for the US [and that the Syrian armored mechanized divisions stationed between the Golan Heights and Damascus would be deployed to the border with Jordan, aiming to topple the pro-US Hashemite regime]…. The US could lose the lives of its soldiers and become entangled in a dangerous foreign arena…. That would no doubt lead to a rise in anti-Semitism in the US…. Senator Jesse Helms, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations [a friend of Bobby Jacobs] was openly critical of the Assad regime…. The Chairman of the House Committee on International Relations, Benjamin Gilman, was under pressure from voters in his own constituency…. This Congressional opposition had at least some negative impact on Assad’s motivation to move forward in his peacemaking with Israel….” (Prof. Itamar Rabinovich, former Israeli Ambassador to the US and Chief Negotiator with Syria, The Brink of Peace, 1999, pp. 164-167).