Posted on 11/17/2008 12:16:46 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
I spent last week in Israel on a trip sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, which is an AIPAC-linked charitable organization. When you travel around the country and speak with public officials, citizens, and scholars, it becomes clear that there isn't any sort of monolithic opinion of Israelis, so it was a good opportunity to get a variety of perspectives ranging from a far-right settler who doesn't believe the much discussed two-state solution model is practical to a mom who supports the current peace process. I also had a chance to speak with a negotiator for the Palestinian Authority. It's hard to know where to start, but I figured I'd offer the following impressions, and hopefully as the week goes on I'll try to provide more detail on at least some of them.
-- It's pretty clear to me that the Israeli government views the possibility of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons as a worse outcome than the consequences of military action against the Islamist state. While the rest of the world -- including America – struggles with the issue, Israelis I spoke with believe that they don't have the luxury to gamble on whether or not Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is serious about his threats to wipe them off the map. (Whether or not Ahmadinejad himself has power, or is merely a mouthpiece for the ayatollahs, is irrelevant in this context). While the threat to Israel from Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist groups is profound, a nuclear Iran would present an immediate existential threat. A significant majority of the Israeli population lives on a narrow band of coastal land north and south of Tel Aviv, so any nuclear attack there would have catastrophic consequences.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Sometimes, history asks questions to which there is no satisfactory answers, and this may be one of them.
If it’s truly possible that Iran or any other middle eastern state is willing to launch a suicidal nuclear attack against Israel, than Israeli “security”is a misnomer, for example Pakistan already has a fully militarized nuclear capability coupled with a very real chance that it will fall into the hands of either of a future radical Islamic regime or worse into the hands of nonstate actors via radicalized elements of the Pakistani military or security services.
Under such circumstances if mutually assured destruction is not a sufficient deterrent it’s hard to see how any sort of security policy could provide for the long-term safety of Israel, and you are faced with the horrifying possibility that the country intended to provide for the eternal security of the Jewish people could become instead the site of the second great modern Jewish Holocaust.
And if that’s the case, it may be best course of action is support the state of Israel but also to facilitate the emigration and resettlement of any portion of the Jewish population that wishes to leave, now or in the future.
That’s of course completely contrary to current official US policy, and extremely unpalatable option for many American supporters of the state of Israel, but IMO if your concern is for the Jews rather than the Jewish homeland it’s a policy increasingly worthy of serious consideration.
Amazing how most of these people seem to have never read the Bible.
High volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel, WOT
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Alaska and several Western states are all but empty.
Without trying to sound patronizing....I wish we would “Berlin Airlift” out every Israeli. Then re-establish them on the border with Mexico. The climate and land is similar and the Israeli’s know about building walls and defending borders.
Give the mad mullahs their own, self made radicals back to them.......the “palestinians” will be gone in 2 years.
Netanyahu was not “overwhelmingly” thrown out of office. He got elected because Peres could not control a pre-suicide bomber terrorist wave in 1996. Things were so quiet by 1999 under Netanyahu, terrorism was no longer an issue. Netanyahu also inherited the slain Rabin’s Oslo so-called peace process and was caught in a sandwich. His party, Likud, wanted to dump it but couldn’t because in order to get elected he promised to keep it going, and Rabin’s party, Labor, said the only reason it wasn’t succeeding was because Nethayahu didn’t have his heart in it. That alone would not have been enough to defeat him in that election, but he alienated, through inexperience, some very senior members in his party. Some quit, and David Levy, the elder statesman, switched sides and ran as Barak’s deputy. Barak took up the mantra that he would bring peace in the blink of an eye and promised hundreds of thousands unemployed and under-employed Russians jobs galore. With the Russian vote and that of Levy’s following, Netanyahu was leveraged out.
As things turned out Barak’s attempt to rush to a settlement blew up into the biggest wave of terror Israel has ever seen. Levy quit just before Barak went to Camp David saying Barak is doomed to failure because he doesn’t know what he is doing. And Barak never created one job for the Russians and that is why Labor is now a party with a base that consists only of rich suburbs and kibbutzes and is heading for a distant third place finish this time around.
The other error in that article is that Livni, with the hawk Mofaz her number two guy, and Netanyahu are not that far apart on their approach to the current peace process. Everyone knows it’s a sham and are just playing along. Nothing can happen as long as Hamas controls Gaza for starters and until Abbas and his crowd abandon their claims to half of Jerusalem and the flooding of Israel with 5 million Arabs who claim to be refugees for finishers. Olmert is a crook but Livni is Ms. Clean so she’s not affected by the disgrace of the former leader of her party, Kadimah. The big foreign policy issue here is Iran and the nukes. But domestic issues are always a factor in the Israeli vote and this time the economy is strong, there is lots of work, but no one knows if the world recession will affect matters before the vote.
By the way we’ve gone through a war every decade here and
we take all this sabre ratting in stride. Ya’alon, the former chief of staff and intelligence expert, is joining Likud and will be defence minister if Netanyahu is elected. Iran should fear him. If Livni gets in, it’s Mofaz, an Iranian by origin, and also a very competent guy. Nothing to worry about.
Arizona and Nevada already have substantial Jewish populations, so immigrants would not be starting from ground zero culturally.
Many Jews in Israel feel such a strong attraction to the idea of a Jewish national identity and/or a sense of cultural/and religious connection to the holy land that emigration would not be an option no matter how dangerous the situation. However there has already been considerable emigration; currently it's estimated by the Israeli Government that around 700,000 Israelis are living abroad, including 450,000 in the US and Canada - a considerable number, considering that about 5M Jews live in Israel.
I don't think it's likely you could get the majority of US citizens to accept the creation of autonomous Jewish state within the boundaries of the US (most people would think it pretty strange, for instance, to suggest the creation of an autonomous Catholic or Protestant state within our borders). But the US already contains a number of semi-autonomous Native American "Nations" which have religious beliefs more different from Christianity than Christianity is from Judaism, so I suppose it's theoretically possible we could accommodate one more.
On the other hand, the very idea of re-creating an additional "Jewish homeland" highlights the fact that the very concept of such a state is an anachronism in Western political thought - in many it's ways related more closely to mid-18th century eastern European nationalism which was the crucible of Zionist theory than to the concept of the secular representative democracy which has become the model in the US, Western Europe, Canada.
Even so, the logic of confrontation between Israel and radical Islam - if you believe that radical Islam really is deeply and suicidally irrational - seems to me a pretty compelling argument for voluntary Jewish emigration from Israel, and I would have no problem at all with the United States being the destination for most or all of it.
Love the Irony....
Well, seems to me that makes sense if you assume either 1) Islamic states and/or non-state actors can be permanently prevented from obtaining weapons of mass destruction or 2) they may get them, but the prospect of mutually assured destruction (and quite possibly, asymmetric destruction, with the Islamic populations getting by far the worst of it) will deter them from using such weapons.
Now, it seems quite likely to me that well-organized states such as Iran probably can be deterred, but I really don't know what the possibility of such weapons getting into the hands of non-state actors (for example, via Pakistan) would mean - I just have no way of judging - and suspect no one does - either how likely that is or how it would play out.
And if you don't assume one of those things, then the problem becomes really intractable.
For example short of a ground invasion and probably a long-term occupation there is likely no way to prevent a really determined Iran from eventually obtaining nuclear weapons, and to the extent that you believe Iran's leadership is suicidally irrational, then you do have a problem. Similarly, fantasies of special forces dropping in and securing Pakistani weapons aside, I don't see how anyone can guarantee that it's unlikely non-state actors will obtain access to such weapons.
So while deterring conventional attacks on Israel by foreseeable opponents and containing non-state assaults to a tolerable level is (political or moral fatigue aside) "nothing to worry about" if you grant the concerns that most people here have about the stability and rationality of Islamic states I don't see how the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East can be anything but "a big thing to worry about" from the standpoint of preventing a potential second modern Jewish Holocaust.
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