PDavidHornik

Spyer on UNRWA

Rubin's colleague at his GLORIA Center, Jonathan Spyer, an insightful observer in his own right, has this informative piece on the evil hoax known as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which perpetuates the "Palestian refugee problem" with the aim of eradicating Israel while directly supporting Hamas. And it's all powered by Western and particularly U.S. taxpayers' money. I have to acknowledge I've been seeing occasional pieces on UNRWA, more or less along these lines, for about three decades. In the end no one ever does anything about it and the U.S. and friends keep forking over the money.

Barry Rubin's bitter truth

Great piece here by Barry Rubin on "The Fall of Lebanon," with an insightful digression on Barack Obama and his total myopia about international politics and the nature of enemies. Rubin sees the West's apathetic surrender of Lebanon as in many ways analogous to its abandonment of Czechoslovakia 70 years ago, and he's very persuasive about the parallels, liberally quoting Churchill whose words can be applied to today's situation with few substitutions. Relative to our Internet Age his article is long, but it's worth every word. Some highlights:

Politicians, intellectuals, academics, and officials in the West live comfortable lives. Their careers prosper often in direct relationship to their misunderstanding, misexplaining, and misacting in the Middle East.

Then, too, all too many of them have lived up to every negative stereotype the Islamists hold of them: greedy for oil and trade; cowardly in confronting aggression, easily fooled, very easily divided, and losing confidence in their own societies and civilization.

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Why is [Obama] so totally unaware that dialogue has been tried? A decade with the PLO, longer with Hizballah by other Lebanese, four straight years of European engagement with Tehran over the nuclear issue, multiple U.S. delegations to talk with the Syrians, and so on. Was nothing learned from this experience?

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What possible issues can the United States find to compromise with Iran? Let's say: give them Lebanon (oh, we already did that); ignore their sponsorship of terrorism; give them Iraq; give them Israel; withdraw U.S. forces from the region, accept their having nuclear arms. What?

Why should the United States be able to reduce tensions through negotiations when Iran wants tensions? There is an important hint here: if the United States makes concessions it might buy off tensions. Since Iran and the others know about Obama's all-carrots-no-sticks worldview, they will make him pay a lot to get the illusion of peace and quiet.

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Here in Israel we've been more preoccupied with the mounting revelations about Olmert's corruption. But as Rubin emphasizes, Lebanon is the biggest story, and worst, at the moment.

Frank Gaffney on Israel's staticide

Frank Gaffney is one of the few U.S. observers who totally understands how dire Israel's situation has become in the era of Olmert and Bush, after that situation has already been badly deteriorating since Menachem Begin began the Era of Land for War Concessions in the late '70s.

Civilians on the front line

Udi Label, an Israeli lecturer in political psychology and insightful columnist, here tackles the pathology that's developed here of keeping soldiers out of harm's way so as to protect them, while failing to protect civilians. This pathology has now taken on appalling dimensions on the Gazan front.

An eclipse of sanity

Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin says Hamas already has rockets that may be able to reach as far as Ashdod. Yet Olmert and Barak are busily working on the "ceasefire" with Hamas. On the other hand, if a rocket hits Ashdod one of these days...so what? Who would have dreamed that a rocket would crash through a shopping mall in Ashkelon and there would be no Israeli response? Not long ago that would have been considered unthinkable across the political spectrum. I am very worried.

Palestinians hide missiles and launchers in a schoolyard

Read about it and see the pictures.

More on the Golan from Bechor

Middle East maven Guy Bechor is if anything even more alarmed than Gold:

The Sinai Peninsula is so large that the situation there is always reversible. On the Jordanian front we didn’t renounce anything, and on the Palestinian front we can always reoccupy any territory. Yet with Syria the situation will be different: From an empty buffer zone, the Golan Heights will turn into a crowded anti-Israel region for generations to come. From a strategic asset to Israel, the Golan would turn into a burden on top of the other regional efforts to eliminate Israel. Our future generations won’t forgive anyone who would do that.

His whole, concise, incisive column is here.

The latest diplomatic debacle

Olmert is now recapitulating the script of his hero Ariel Sharon. Assailed by a corruption scandal, Olmert is trying to save himself, and get the Israeli left-wing media and judicial establishment to bail him out, by advertising a big land giveaway. In Sharon's case it "worked"--he engineered the catastrophic retreat from Gaza and meanwhile the charges against him were dropped. Olmert is now attempting same with the Golan Heights. Much of the Israeli public, possibly about half, was seduced by the idea of giving up small, militarily crucial Gaza with its large Arab population. So far the Israeli public is showing no such susceptibility regarding the Golan--small, militarily crucial, and without a large Arab population. This issue arouses passions, and fortunately Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the UN, here gives a dispassionate demonstration of why giving up the Golan is folly.

Particularly remarkable to me is this notion that Syria can be bribed with the Golan into changing its whole geostrategic orientation. Syria is tied by a thousand strategic, military, sectarian, and economic ties to the terror axis headed by Iran. Israel undertakes to retreat from the Golan; Syria undertakes to be good in the future; Israel retreats, and then . . . gee, we hope Syria will keep its promises. For Israel the loss is irreversible--Syria has lost some scribbles of ink on a document. This is not statecraft but severe cognitive, diplomatic, and strategic dysfunction.

It's only words

Last week in the Knesset President Bush gave a ringing speech in which he said noble and kind things about America's support for Israel. Almost everyone was touched, but truth to tell, I didn't pay that much attention to what he said and haven't written about it even in a couple of articles that dealt, in part, with his visit. Why? Well, this piece by Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea pretty much explains. Too many negative things happening on the ground for words to have that much resonance.

Now hear this

 Israeli columnist Shaul Goldstein, in this concise, perfect, admirable oped, explains why U.S. and Israeli policy regarding Israel keeps going badly off track and cynically endangers the confused, demoralized Israeli populace. He manages to touch all the bases and get it all right.