Longing For April…
by Gerald A. Honigman
As March bids farewell amid troubled sigh, a longing for April– of years gone by…
What a March it has been–for those caring about Israel, that it is.
True to its honest agenda, put on the table well before the November 2008 election, when a then Senator Obama claimed that Israel would be crazy (his very own words–repeated after the election as well) to reject the alleged Saudi Peace Plan, Team Obama is now pressuring Israel to forsake the promise of the final draft of UNSC Resolution 242. Along with # 338, the former was the supposed basis for peace-making between Arab and Jew in a post-’67 War world.
The nasty fight the current American leader and the other honchos in his Gang of Three have going on with Israel right now is all about whether Israel gets the secure and defensible real political borders as an end result of true peace-making with Arabs, or is forced back to the suicidal, 1949 U.N.-imposed armistice lines which made it less in width than the distance most people have to travel just to go to work–a constant temptation to those who would see it destroyed. President George W. Bush is said to have commented, after a helicopter ride taken while governor, that Texas has driveways longer than that.
Indeed…
And that’s what the current mess is all about–not Jews building more homes in their capital, Jerusalem, a place Jews have been doing such building for over three thousand years, at a time when the Gang of Three’s ancestors were worshiping idols, practicing fertility cults, likely engaging in human sacrifice, and other such goodies.
So, to better understand all of these troubling goings on, let’s take a stroll back in time–to an April of yesteryear.
Israel’s Prime Minister, a now comatose Ariel Sharon, made a very hard decision in April 2004.
After decades of supporting the construction of Israeli towns in disputed territories Israel wound up with as a result of having to fight a defensive war for its life in June 1967, the Old Warrior decided that the costs outweighed the gains of keeping Jews in Gaza.
While it is true that while their numbers fluctuated, Jews had lived in Gaza for millennia; that since the days of the Pharaohs, Gaza had been used as an invasion route into Israel proper by those aiming to destroy or subjugate it; that Gaza had become a hotbed for terrorists aiming to destroy Israel; that Jewish communities set up in Gaza were not on Arab-owned land; etc. and so forth; it is also true that many–if not most–Israelis were looking for a way out of Gaza if the proper conditions presented themselves.
As it is once again now, Israel had long been under pressure to take some steps to revive the all-but-dead, so-called roadmap for peace with Arabs. When it comes to making such real, tangible gestures, notice that it is always only Jews who are expected to make them…
Lacking any Anwar Sadat or King Hussein-type to deal with among Palestinian Arabs (i.e. Arab leaders willing to allow for a viable Israel still existing on the morrow after an actual peace treaty is signed), Arik decided to make a unilateral move to break the stalemate while also supposedly enhancing Israel’s overall security position. The latter assertion was hotly debated given certain “facts of life.”
In April 2004, Sharon thus came up with his unilateral Gaza withdrawal plan. In addition to the removal of Gaza’s 8,000 Jews, some “settlements” in Samaria, the northern “West Bank,” were also placed on the eviction notice. When Arabs move in from elsewhere, their dwelling places are called towns. When Jews do this, their new homes are called settlements.
As just one of many examples regarding how this works, when Sheikh Izzedin al-Qassam (think Qassam rockets)–the patron saint of Hamas–moved into the Mandate of Palestine from his birth place in Latakia, Syria in the early 20th century, along with scores of thousands of other Syrian Arabs, they set up such “towns.” When thousands of Syrian Jews did likewise, they set up “settlements.”
Get the picture?
As we see again today, the world had been clamoring for such Israeli moves for decades to advance the “peace” process.
Those who conquered territories sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles away from home in the name of their own nations’ security somehow couldn’t figure out the life-threatening problems Israel was constantly faced with due to the absurd armistice lines imposed upon it in 1949. As is well known by now, those lines made Israel a mere 9-15 miles wide at its strategic waist, where most of the nation’s population and industry is located.
One needn’t be Napoleon to figure out what this all meant to a nation grossly out-manned and out-gunned, surrounded by enemies sworn to its demise. And, as would become the norm, the U.N. had stepped in only after the Jews turned the tide of the Arab invasion in 1948 to snuff out both their own lives and the life of their sole, miniscule, reborn nation.
Israel was never meant to be a 9-mile wide sub- rump state…but that’s how it was left when the lines were drawn in ’49 marking the point where the Jews finally turned back the invasion of a half dozen Arab armies supplied to the teeth with weaponry left over by the Allies from World War II and led, in Transjordan, by British officers. The UN stepped in to limit Arab losses, not to prevent their blatant aggression. This behavior would be repeated in subsequent decades as well.
The Gang of Three is now attempting to force Israel back to those ’49 lines–and to accept being flooded by millions of real and fudged Arab refugees as well–the other part of that Saudi plan which America’s current leader repeatedly states Israel would be crazy not to accept. For this–not mere apartments– President Obama left Prime Minister Netanyahu waiting in the White House “to think about ” while abruptly leaving him to join his family for dinner. No pictures or other nice formalities either.
Bibi should have walked out the door and gone home. I have a few other “shouldas” that I’ll keep to myself right now…but you may use your imagination if you’d like…
Perhaps it is time for Israel to cut itself off from American aid if it means it must agree to simply become a puppet on a string, ignoring its own minimal security needs. I’d at least like to see how the American people and Congress would react if Team Obama made it come to this…
Back to Sharon and the Gaza withdrawal…
The area under discussion is tiny to begin with.
When Egypt held Gaza and Jordan (name changed from Transjordan after it came to hold both banks of the River after illegally seizing Judea and Samaria in ’48) held the West Bank for almost two decades, no one called for the creation of an additional Arab State…their second, not first, one in “Palestine.” But, after 1967, the world has demanded the latter of the Jews, expecting them to bare the necks of their children to those who deliberately target them to bring this about.
Despite all of this, Sharon sought to break the log jam with his April 2004 unilateral withdrawal proposals.
Arabs, of course, viewed this simply as yet another victory in their openly-admitted, destruction-in-phases plans for the Jews…Terrorism works, Lebanon again, and so forth.
That’s the message, unfortunately, Arabs got from Sharon’s gesture. And rather than feeling compelled to come up with some real conciliatory moves of their own, Arabs simply made more demands for additional, unilateral Israeli concessions. Israel was soon hit with some 10,000 rockets and mortars from Gaza over the subsequent years. That’s the lesson Israel learned regarding such unilateral withdrawals to the old armistice lines. The very lesson Team Obama wants it to simply ignore.
Nothing has changed in 2010.
Today, Mahmoud Abbas and his “moderate” latter-day Arafatians claim that Israel–and Israel alone–will have to do all of the giving while Arabs just do all of the taking in any “negotiations.” And they are fully supported in this, both in word and deed, by America’s new leader.
No screaming on the phone for concessions from Arabs by Hillary, and so forth, either. That’s reserved for the Jews.
Since the failure of their “one fell swoop” plan for Israel’s destruction in June 1967, Arabs adopted a strategy to politically force a return to the indefensible armistice lines of 1949.
Given new technologies, massive buildups of Arab armed forces, the continuing Arab birth rate, and the like, the return of Israel to its pre-’67 lines, coupled with a demand for a “return” of millions of Arabs to the Jews’ sub-rump state, would be the beginning of the end. Arabs openly acknowledged all of this. Even their “moderates” openly-called Oslo and other so-called plans for “peace” (like Obama’s favorite Saudi one today) merely a Trojan Horse, designed to bring about Arafat’s so-called “Peace of the Quraysh,” the temporary hudna ( cease fire) designed to buy time while weakening the Jews further for the same final blow Muhammad dealt to his pagan enemies almost fourteen centuries earlier.
That Arabs have responded this way was no shock…but they have also been supported in this behavior by most of the world and the current American Administration as well.
But, then there was the magic of April…2004, that is.
There had been talk before Sharon came up with his withdrawal plan that he would get some backing from Washington on some other key matters.
There is an indisputable set of facts regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict…something Team Obama obviously does not understand.
If there will ever be peace between Arab and Jew, Arabs will have to give up their eternal plans for Israel’s destruction. They have not…Had they done this, Arabs could have had their second state in the borders of the original April 25, 1920 borders of Palestine decades ago.
Fair and just plans were presented and rejected over the decades by the Arabs themselves–certainly far more than Arabs had ever offered to any of their own national competitors. Just ask some seventy million Kurds and Imazighen (Berbers) about this subject–and there are millions of others victimized by Arabs in the region as well.
The reality is that–despite all of the attempted whitewashing from abroad (especially courtesy of the American State Department and Team Obama)–the alleged “good cops” of Fatah’s Abbas and the bad cops of Hamas still want that additional Arab state (# 22 ) to exist in place of, not along side of, the Jewish one.
Enter George W. Bush…
Standing near Sharon, in a news conference being watched on television all over the world, an American President–the first since Truman in 1948–finally took a political stance that might yet some day lead to peace.
Dubya stated, before millions watching him, the two necessary, key ingredients:
Israel should not be expected to return to the indefensible armistice lines of 1949 (and he called them just that, not “borders”), and…
Real and fudged Arab refugees would have to go to the proposed new Arab state, not overwhelm the Jews in Israel proper. Recall that half of Israel’s Jews are from refugee families from Arab/Muslim lands.
The Saudi plan that Obama is nastily trying to force down Israel’s throat negates both of these crucial ingredients.
Einstein was not needed to figure this recipe out.
But Arabs had long been given reason, via the world’s actions, to hope that Israel would yet become an updated Czechoslovakia with the West Bank as its Sudetenland. All that was missing was a proper new Chamberlain and conditions allowing for another Munich sellout to achieve “peace.”
Guess what, that other Chamberlain now sits in the White House.
President Bush’s words, as simple as they were, are the magic ingredients necessary if there is ever to be peace between Arab and Jew in the Middle East.
Today, Team Obama pretends that the letters Bush gave Israel confirming the magic of April 2004 do not even exist.
Millions of Americans–Christians more than Jews (most of whom who’ll vote for Team Obama yet again in 2012 anyway, despite all of this mess)–are outraged by what their elected officials are doing right now vis-a-vis Israel in its long quest for justice.
My timely, new book, The Quest For Justice In The Middle East–The Arab-Israeli Conflict In Greater Perspective made its debut in academia at Professors’ Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis’s (two of “the tops”) ASMEA Conference last October. It gets into this struggle that both Jews and all of those other non-Arab peoples–scores of millions of them–are still engaged in trying to obtain a slice of that same justice pie for themselves in a region proclaimed by Arabs to be purely Arab patrimony. It dares go where few others dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict have ventured… Please see it at http://q4j-middle-east.com If you like what you’ve read above, just imagine what my personalized copy of the book to you will have within its covers…
During Passover, and with Easter fast approaching, let all people of good will ( moderate Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and others as well) pray that Israel will have the strength to withstand the nastiness coming out of Washington these days.