The Holocaust Yet to Come

Moshe Feiglin
Manhigut Yehudit
1 Iyar, 5771
(May 5, '11)



("Shimon's response was curt and brief:"If we're tired, then we won't exist. It's forbidden to tire. If we're tired, then we'll have to accept any script they want to write for us. But we're not tired." From Jonathan Spyer's The Transforming Fire YH)

http://www.jewishisrael.org/eng_contents/articles/71/article7143.html

Translated from the NRG website

This article is not about the Holocaust that happened. It is about the Holocaust that is liable to come knocking on our door. If you are weak of heart, stop reading now. But if you are staying with me, please take a deep breath, forget about secondary political issues and internalize what I am writing. The trains to Auschwitz did not have separate cars for Right and Left, Haredi and secular.

It is popular to pontificate on the lesson of the Holocaust. Every person takes the Holocaust to the place that is comfortable for him. I would like to discuss a very basic lesson that I have never seen disproved: The Western world will not try too hard to close down the gas chambers. Not only that. It will even indirectly stoke them.

True, after the Holocaust, in a rare moment of good will, the world voted to partition the Land of Israel and to recognize the fledgling Jewish state. But this recognition had no practical implications. Seven Arab armies invaded the tiny area allocated to Israel. The world did not lift a finger. The Egyptian army got to within thirty kilometers of Tel Aviv, murdering and destroying every person and settlement in its path. They cut through the Negev and reached Beit Lechem. The Jordanians were just twenty minutes away from Israel's coast. The Syrians captured Mishmar Hayarden – and destroyed it, of course.

Three years after the Holocaust, the Western world waited once again for the Arabs to finish off the dirty work. It did nothing to help Israel. But then, with G-d's loving grace, the situation turned around. The nascent IDF stopped the Arab armies. On the southern front, Yigal Alon commanded over some brilliant maneuvers that more or less eliminated the Egyptian army. The IDF forces got all the way to El Arish inside Egypt.

When that happened, Britain threatened that if the IDF would not retreat, it would invade Israel. America pressured, Ben Gurion gave in and the new norm was set: When the Jews are in danger, the world waits patiently. When they start to win, the world stops them.

How the Changing Nature of Threats to Israel Affects Vital Security Arrangements

Maj.-Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland
JCPA.org
Vol. 10, No.
26 October '10

Maj.-Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland chaired Israel's National Security Council from 2004 to 2006. Prior to that he served as head of the IDF's Operations Branch and its Planning Directorate. This Jerusalem Issue Brief is based on his presentation at a conference on "Israel's Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace," held in Jerusalem on June 2, 2010.

How do we resolve the dilemma of a peace agreement that includes handing over the Golan Heights to the Syrians, while facing the fact that Israel cannot be defended without the Golan Heights? The way around this was supposed to be the inclusion in any peace agreement of specific security arrangements. Yet this approach was based on a number of assumptions, all of them misguided.

Events over the past ten years have also revealed a marked change in the types of threats to be expected from a Palestinian state or from the existing Palestinian entity. This involves a switch to three types of weaponry that all fundamentally contradict the guidelines discussed for security arrangements.

Rockets and missiles positioned throughout the West Bank would easily cover the entire State of Israel. Advanced anti-aircraft missiles would be capable of shooting down not only large passenger aircraft flying into Ben-Gurion International Airport, but also helicopters and even fighter planes. Anti-tank missiles that are highly effective up to a range of 5 km. can easily cover not only strategic positions such as Israel's north-south Highway 6, but well beyond.



The common denominator among all of these is the ease of smuggling and clandestine manufacture, as is taking place today in Gaza. No monitoring system that may be established will be able to prevent this. Only effective control of the Jordan Valley along the Israeli-Jordanian border can prevent the smuggling of these types of weapons.

In addition, if Israel were to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines, then the area to the east of the Israel-Palestine border would be home not only to the Palestinian Authority, but to other potential enemies too, including Hizbullah and Syria. This means that in determining security arrangements in the West Bank, the approach must be broader, beyond Israel's needs vis-à-vis only the Palestinians.

(Read full issue brief)


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U.S. Official Acknowledges Regional Threats to Israel Not Linked to Resolution of Palestinian Conflict

JINSA
17 July '10

On the day an article stressing close U.S.-Israel security ties under President Obama appeared in The Washington Post, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew J. Shapiro appeared before a crowd of Middle East policy analysts to affirm the message. He was reticent to address mounting concerns that the partnership is in decline, and specifically did not address whether the administration had declined to deliver weapons contracted for during the Bush Administration, declaring that America’s security relationship with Israel is “broader, deeper and more intense than ever before.” But his message was mixed as he chastised the Netanyahu government’s commitment to the peace process, saying “a deeper political commitment” to the process by Israel is needed.

Speaking Friday at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Shapiro appeared to reveal a bit of Obama Administration policy confusion. On the one hand, he stressed the importance the White House placed on ensuring that Israel has the capability to counter rocket threats posed by Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran, but on the other hand, diminished Israel's very drive to do that. "Bolstering Israel's security against the rocket threat will not by itself facilitate a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," he said. And "A two-state solution will not in and of itself bring an end to these threats."

(Read full post)

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What's Wrong: Demanding A Stable Compromise Peace or Refusing to Make Peace at All?

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
02 July '10


It's amazing how rarely any mainstream Israeli view--excluding the far left, which provides good anti-Israel ammunition, and, rarely, the far right, to make them look stupid--gets into many of the American media's most elite organs. I'm not referring here to regular news articles but opinion pieces, columnists, and editorials. Often, it is incredibly easy to give a strong, accurate, and persuasive response to claims being made or ideas being promoted by this media. Yet since no one is allowed to do so, these rather silly and ignorant arguments go largely unanswered.

Here, for example, is the always anti-Israel Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times who writes:

"Israel has a point when it argues that relinquishing the West Bank would raise real security concerns. But we must not lose sight of the most basic fact about the occupation: It's wrong."

Even his opening sentence acknowledging that Israel has real concerns is a rarity. That's progress perhaps. But I'm not sure what the sentence "It's wrong" actually means. I can think of dozens of things in the Middle East, or in the world, that can said to be "wrong," yet what counts in international affairs is survival and reality, not the highly selective use of one-sided moral judgments.

For example, it's wrong to ask Israel to take dangerous risks and possibly commit suicide. It's wrong to take sides with radical movements and dictatorships against democracies. It's wrong to help establish on the Mediterranean Sea the long-term rule of a repressive revolutionary Islamist, antisemitic, genocidal, terrorist regime that oppresses women and Christians while being a client of Iran. Yet these wrongs for some reason don't seem to bother the current foreign policy establishment.

Moreover, the most basic claims made about Israel are simply inaccurate: There is no "occupation" (not in the way people in the West generally speak of it, which seems to assume the situation of 1967-1993 still prevails) and Israel's policy is quite right on this matter.

(Read full article)

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Israel's Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace

Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
JCPA.org
02 June '10

In light of a widening range of threats to Israel's security, for the first time a group of senior Israeli generals has come together to outline the basic principles of a defense policy - rooted in a consensus spanning past and present Israeli governments - which is focused on Israel maintaining defensible borders.



The crisis over the Hamas flotilla to Gaza illustrates how some of Israel's critical alliances in the Middle East are changing, especially its relationship with Turkey, and the importance of designing a defense policy that takes into account the uncertainties that Israel faces with many of its neighbors.

Recent events only underscore that it is critical for Israel to preserve the principle of defending itself by itself.

Restoring a Security-First Peace Policy
Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Moshe Yaalon

Defensible Borders to Secure Israel's Future
Maj.-Gen. (res.) Uzi Dayan

The U.S. and "Defensible Borders"
Dr. Dore Gold

Key Principles of a Demilitarized Palestinian State
Maj.-Gen. (res.) Aharon Ze'evi Farkash

Control of Territorial Airspace and the Electromagnetic Spectrum
Brig.-Gen. (res.) Udi Dekel

The Risks of Foreign Peacekeeping Forces in the West Bank
Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror

Israel's Return to Security-Based Diplomacy
Dan Diker

(Click here for full study, videos,and maps.)

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