The Real Question Is…How Long Is Your Driveway?
by Gerald A. Honigman
President Bush is planning a trip to Israel and elsewhere next month. It will be his first visit to Israel as president. He’ll undoubtedly try to further squeeze Jews into believing that he knows Arabs better than they do, and that his Annapolis summit–where Jews were forced to enter via the servants’ door so as not to offend their alleged Arab peace partners–is their best hope for peace.
Four Aprils ago, Israel’s Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, made a very hard decision.
After decades of supporting Israel’s presence in disputed territories Israel wound up with as a result of fighting 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, despite fluctuating numbers, Jews had lived in Gaza for millennia; that, since the days of the Pharaohs, Gaza had been used as an invasion route into Israel by those aiming to 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 proper conditions presented themselves.
As we are currently witnessing, with the post-Annapolis 2007, largely one-sided concrete expectations placed just on Israel’s shoulders, Israel had long been under pressure to take some steps to revive the all-but-dead, roadmap with Arabs in 2004 as well.
Lacking any Anwar Sadat or King Hussein-type to deal with among Palestinian Arabs (i.e. Arab leaders willing to allow for a viable Jewish Israel still existing on the morrow after a 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/is hotly debated.
Many of us feared that this would just bring Arab terror closer to Israel proper. With thousands of rockets and mortars landing in Israeli communities like Sderot after the full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, we were, of course, correct in our concerns. But The General most probably had something else up his sleeve and knew how he’d deal with further aggression from a Judenrein Arab Gaza. Unfortunately, Arik is no longer of this world, in a deep coma after he suffered a stroke almost two years ago.
But, in April 2004, Sharon came up with his Gaza withdrawal plan. In addition to the removal of Gaza’s 8,000 Jews, some Jewish communities in Samaria (the northern West Bank,) were also placed on the eviction notice. The world had been clamoring for such Israeli moves for decades.
Those who had conquered lands 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 constantly faced due to armistice lines imposed upon it in 1949 by the United Nations. As is well known by now, those lines made Israel a mere 9 to 16 miles wide at its strategic waist, where most of the nation’s population and industry are located. Most people travel farther than that just to go shopping or to work.
Israel was never meant to be a 9-mile wide 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 1948 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 got involved only later on–to limit Arab losses, not to prevent their initial, blatant aggression. This behavior would be repeated in subsequent decades as well.
Arab settlers from elsewhere in the region then poured into these disputed territories. As leading international legal scholars like Eugene Rostow explain, the latter had largely been unapportioned state lands belonging to the original Mandate, open to settlement by Arabs, Jews, and others as well. After 1949, however, only Arabs were able to move here in the aftermath of Arab Transjordan’s internationally unrecognized land grab.
As needs to be repeatedly pointed out since Arabs and their supporters repeatedly pretend otherwise, purely Arab Transjordan, comprising all the land on the east bank of the River, had already been created by the British in 1922 from almost 80% of the original 1920 borders of the Mandate of Palestine. Jewish communities dating back from Biblical times in Judea and Samaria–the “West Bank”–had been massacred by Arabs in the 1920s and 1930s. The debate today is thus over the birth of the Arabs’ second state in “Palestine”–not their first…state # 22 in all.
During this same time period, the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission documented massive waves of Arabs (scores of thousands in just a few months alone) pouring into the Mandate from Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and elsewhere. Many more Arabs entered under cover of darkness and were simply never recorded–more “native Palestinians.” Thanks to the Jews, the Mandate was economically booming, drawing Arabs in from the entire region.
And while the following has also been repeated ad nauseam, it must be stated yet again for similar reasons…
In the aftermath of the latest attempt on Israel’s life in 1967, the architects of famed UN Security Council Resolution 242 (Britain’s Lord Caradon, Rostow, etc.) carefully worded the final, accepted draft so that Israel would not be expected to return to pre-’67, suicidal armistice lines. Indeed, the resolution called for the creation of “secure and recognized borders” to replace those lines. The bulk of Israel’s official settlements have thus been placed with such a strategic territorial compromise in mind. While some will have to go as a trade off for a real peace agreement (no Arab “hudna“ ceasefires), others will have to stay.
There is an indisputable set of basic facts regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict…
If there will ever be peace between Arab and Jew, Arabs will have to give up their eternal plans for Israel’s destruction. Had they done this, Arabs could have had their second state in Palestine decades ago.
Fair and just plans were presented–and rejected–over the decades by the Arabs themselves…certainly far more than Arabs have ever offered to any of their own national competitors. Just ask black Africans in the Sudan, Kurds in Iraq and Syria, Berbers in North Africa, and so forth. The reality is that Arabs still want that additional state to exist in place of, not along side of, the Jewish one. Hence their continued post-Annapolis rejection of a lone Jewish state while demanding a 22-member Arab League.
Enter George W. Bush…
Standing near Sharon, at an April 2004 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 even yet lead to peace if he only regains the courage today he displayed back then. Or if his successor does.
Bush stated, before millions watching him, the two key ingredients for such a recipe:
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 itself. Recall that half of Israel’s Jews were refugees from Arab/Muslim lands. Einstein was not needed to figure out this recipe.
And that brings us back to the President’s upcoming visit to Israel…
You see, Bush had indeed visited Israel before, but while serving as governor of Texas.
Here is an excerpt from a December 3, 1998 press release from his office quoting him…
“I was able to learn a lot about the security needs of our strong friend and ally, Israel. It’s hard to believe as a Texan how small Israel is, I mean, we’re used to huge spaces. I just got off the campaign where I spent nearly everyday in a King Air trying to get from one stop to the other. Had I gotten on that same King Air and I took off out of Jerusalem it would have been no time before I’d be in either Jordan or in Syria. It’s a small country and it was important for our Israeli host to remind our delegation of how really small it was so I got on a helicopter one day and flew with the foreign minister Ariel Sharon to see first hand how small the population was between, what has been over the course of history, enemy lines and population centers. We went to the Golan Heights where I was able to hear a general brief us on what the war was like to take the Golan Heights and then how important the Golan Heights are to the security of the people living in northern Israel.”
It was on this same helicopter flight that, according to his press secretary, Ari Fleischer, Bush also commented, regarding the tiny strategic waist of Israel, “In Texas, we have driveways longer than that.”
When arriving in Israel this time, as leader of a nation three thousand miles wide and separated from its main enemies by two vast oceans, Mr. Bush may want to pay his old comatose friend a visit.
With all of his human flaws and faults, Ariel Sharon was/is a true hero of Israel reborn–a source of fear for those who planned and attempted Israel’s destruction non-stop. That’s the real reason his enemies hate him so much.
I’m convinced that Arik had lines in the sand beyond which he would not cave…despite all the pressure from his American friends, Condi’s tantrums, and so forth. On the other hand, the entire Jew of the Nations is now at risk given the nature of the current crew running Israel’s show. They’ve replaced lines in the sand with heads in the sand.
Annapolis and its aftermath will likely expose Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, Jerusalem, and so forth with the same fate Sderot is now facing….and probably worse.
Forcing suicidal concessions upon Israel in light of the rejectionist good cop/bad cop enemies it still faces–despite all of the State Department whitewashing being done on Abbas and his latter day Fatah Arafatians’ behalf–will only backfire on America itself in the long run.
The quarrel between Hamas and Fatah is more about who will ultimately control the billions of dollars in aid and weaponry “Palestine” will receive rather than over any acceptance of their Jewish neighbor. Arafat’s Swiss bank accounts are legendary…
When visiting an Israel next month which can fit thirty-four times into his own home state of Texas, it would be proper for the President to keep all of this in mind.