Restraint has a better reputation than its sister, appeasement, but in the end the result is the same - by Vic Rosenthal

...Restraint is portrayed as the wiser, more mature policy than confrontation. It has a better reputation than its sister, appeasement, but in the end the result is the same: more violence, not less.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
09 July '18..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2018/07/restraint-the-strategy-of-defeat/


There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others. – Niccolo Machiavelli

It’s been reported that indirect negotiations are underway with Hamas for the release of two Israelis and the bodies of two soldiers that they are holding. Germany and Egypt are said to be involved in the negotiations. Needless to add, part of the price for their release will be the freeing of murderers associated with Hamas who are now in Israeli jails.

Some say that one reason the IDF is not taking stronger action (read: any action at all) against the terrorists that are launching incendiary devices that have burned thousands of acres in southern Israel is the sensitivity of these negotiations. Another reason is that officials are worried about tension of the northern borders and would prefer to avoid a two-front war. And the IDF also wants to finish the enormously expensive anti-tunnel barrier they are building along the frontier.

I understand the arguments for this policy. But it is wrong in every way.

Deterrence is created by conditioning the enemy to expect a painful response to aggressive behavior. If we train them to expect a minimal or no response, then they escalate their aggression, and it becomes the status quo. Today it has become normal that Hamas is burning our land. It has become normal for them to hold on to any Israeli, dead or alive, that they can get their hands on.

We have things backwards. We are the stronger power, and thus Hamas should be the ones begging for negotiations. Instead of using our power to force them to release hostages and stop setting fires, we deliberately restrain ourselves and thus allow them to control our behavior.

We are not deterring them. They are deterring us.

Avigdor Lieberman’s first challenge - by Caroline Glick

...With the traditional Arab regimes still in place fighting for their survival, and Iran ascendant, Israel needs to assume that more terrorist regimes like Hezbollah, ISIS and Hamas will be formed from the wreckage of the Arab state system in the future. Instability, then, can be expected to remain a chronic condition of the Arab world. The good news is that Israel has the capacity to adapt and forge constructive strategies for weakening and dividing our enemies. The bad news is that so long as we insist on obsessing over ourselves, we are unlikely to do so.

Caroline Glick..
Carolineglick.com..
27 May '16..

Last week, a mob of 300 Muslim men in southern Egypt stripped a 70-year-old Christian woman naked and paraded her through the streets.

This Islamist atrocity came a few days before an EgyptAir flight from Paris exploded in the skies near Alexandria. It was the second passenger jet bombed by jihadists in Egypt in recent months.

Egypt is hanging on by a thread. Like the attack that downed a Russian passenger jet over Sinai last October, this week’s attack is likely the work of an Egyptian airport employee. It is yet more proof that nearly three years after the military deposed the Muslim Brotherhood’s jihadist government, the Brotherhood’s supporters remain seeded throughout the country and are capable of threatening the regime and the very survival of the Egyptian state.

It isn’t in the least surprising that Islamists have this power. Most Egyptians support them.

In the parliamentary elections four-and-a-half years ago, Islamists won more than 65 percent of the vote. Those were the most open elections in Egyptian history.

Given their strength, it is far from certain that President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will long succeed in preventing the most powerful and populous country in the Arab world from becoming another branch of Islamic State.

From Israel’s perspective, how this battle pans out is of pivotal importance. But you wouldn’t know it from the media – or from our national security leaders.

As far as they are concerned, the gravest threat facing Israel is the Israeli Right. From their perspective, the most significant development of the year was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to appoint Avigdor Lieberman to replace Moshe Ya’alon as defense minister.

Consider for example a recent national security program on Army Radio.

On Tuesday veteran Arab affairs correspondent Avi Issacharof hosted Egyptian journalist Munib Muhamed on his radio show. Since the show was broadcast two days after the EgyptAir attack, Issacharof might have been expected to ask Muhamed about the bombing.

But then Israel wouldn’t have been the story. Instead, Issacharof asked Muhamed what Egyptians think of Lieberman. And again, there was nothing out of the ordinary in his discussion topic.

As the states around us collapse or struggle to survive, our media and our security brass spend the better part of their time telling us that Israeli society is dangerous. Our democracy is in danger. We are dangerous people. And we are making our neighbors angry.

As our elites obsess over Netanyahu’s coalition building and demand that the rest of the world obsess with them, we spend precious little time thinking about the long-term strategic implications of the revolutionary changes happening all around us.

The Marshall Islands’ cautionary tale by Caroline Glick

...Three days after a ship sailing under their flag was seized by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, citizens of the Marshall Islands discovered that their decision to place their security in America’s hands is no longer the safe bet they thought it was 29 years ago. Anyone who entertains the belief that Israel will gain diplomatic acceptance or even a respite from American pressure if it makes concessions to the Palestinians is similarly making a high risk gamble.

Caroline Glick..
CarolineGlick.com..
30 April '15..

On Tuesday, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps forcibly commandeered the Maersk Tigris as navigated its way through the Straits of Hormuz. Iran controls the strategic waterway through which 40 percent of seaborne oil and a quarter of seaborne gas transits to global markets.

The Maersk Tigris is flagged to the Marshall Islands. The South Pacific archipelago gained its independence from the US in 1986 after signing a treaty conceding its right to self-defense in exchange for US protection. According to the treaty, the US has “full authority and responsibility for security and defense of the Marshall Islands.”

Given the US’s formal, binding obligation to the Marshall Islands, the Iranian seizure of the ship was in effect an act of war against America.

In comments to Bloomberg hours after the ship was seized, Junior Aini, chargé d’affairs at the Marshall Islands Embassy in Washington, indicated that his government’s only recourse is to rely on the US to free its ship.

Immediately after the incident began, the US Navy deployed a destroyer to the area. But that didn’t seem to make much of an impression on the Iranians. More significant than the naval movement was the fact that the Obama administration failed to condemn their unlawful action.

If the administration continues to stand by in the face of Iran’s aggression, the strategic implications will radiate far beyond the US’s bilateral ties with the Marshall Islands. If the US allows Iran to get away with unlawfully seizing a Marshall Islands flagged ship it is treaty bound to protect, it will reinforce the growing assessment of its Middle Eastern allies that its security guarantees are worthless.

As the Israel Project’s Omri Ceren put it in an email briefing to journalists, “the US would be using security assurances not to shield allies from Iran but to shield Iran from allies.”

But President Barack Obama apparently won’t allow a bit of Iranian naval piracy to rain on his parade. This week Obama indicated that he feels very good about where his policy on Iran now stands. And he has every reason to be satisfied.

With each day that passes, the chance diminishes that his nuclear deal with the mullahs will be scuppered.

On the one hand, the Iranians are signaling that they are willing to sign a deal with the Great Satan. And this makes sense. For them the deal has no downside.

First there’s the money. Last week the State Department indicated that it won’t rule out paying Iran a $50 billion “signing bonus.”

Tears don't protect against murder. Bullets do.

...In 1972, the year of the Munich Massacre, there were three Security Council resolutions condemning Israel. Not a single one condemning the massacre of Olympic athletes at an international event. Not a single one condemning the countries which armed, trained, harbored and controlled the terrorists. The countries that had refused that their flags be lowered in response to the massacre. This was the law of the jungle disguised as international law. Against the law of the jungle, tears are futile. Jungle law cannot be debated away or subdued with the speechifying of an Abba Eban or a Benjamin Netanyahu. It cannot be moralized into decency or signed away with peace treaties. It can only be met with resistance.

Daniel Greenfield..
Sultan Knish..
18 November '14

After serving a few years in prison for his role in the Munich Massacre, Willi Pohl moved to Beirut. The brief sentence was a slap in the wrist, but Pohl had still served more time in prison than the Muslim gunmen who had murdered eleven Israeli athletes and coaches during the 1972 Summer Olympics. Mohammed Safady and the Al-Gashey cousins were released after a few months by the German authorities.

They went back to Lebanon and so did he.

A decade after the attack, Willi Pohl had begun making a name for himself as a crime novelist. His first novel was Tränen Schützen Nicht vor Mord or Tears Do Not Protect Against Murder.

While Pohl was penning crime novels, Israeli operatives had already absorbed the lessons of his first title. Tears, whether in 1939 or 1972, had not done anything to prevent the murder of Jews. Bullets were another matter.

The head of Black September in Rome was the first to die, followed by a string of PLO leaders across Europe. Those attacks were followed by raids on the mansions and apartments of top Fatah officials in the same city where Pohl had found temporary refuge. By the time his first book was published, hundreds of PLO terrorists and officials were dead.

European law enforcement had failed to hold even the actual perpetrators of the Munich Massacre responsible, never mind the representatives of the PLO who openly mingled with red radicals in its capitals. Israeli operatives did what the German judicial system had failed to do, putting down Safady and one of the Al-Gasheys, while the other one hid out with Colonel Gaddafi in Libya.

The Israeli raid on the PLO terrorists in Beirut's Muslim Quarter missed one important target. Arafat. And so, on another September day, some later, September 13, 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Rabin shook hands with Arafat and proclaimed, "Enough of blood and tears! Enough!"

But the blood and tears had only begun, as a PLO on its last legs was revived and built its terrorist infrastructure inside Israel's borders.

(Continue)

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The Hard-Learned Lessons

...From the moment the PA took control of territory in 1994, it never truly fought terrorism; despite Palestinian pretense, most Israeli and international terrorism experts knew the PA efforts were just a charade. It was a naïve and costly belief—made famous by the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin—that the Palestinians would fight terror more readily than Israel because they lack an interventionist judiciary (such as the Israeli Supreme Court) or vocal human rights organizations (such as B'Tselem).

IMRA..
06 January '14..





Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA: Though written a decade ago, this article could have been penned this morning.

Israel's Security: The Hard-Learned Lessons
by Yaakov Amidror
Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2004
www.meforum.org/article/575

...Israel must realize that it would be a grave risk if it were to cede total territorial control to the Palestinians in any future agreement. Israel suffered heavy casualties when the PA was only on the road to sovereignty; the price might be even higher were a fully sovereign Palestinian state to decide to go to war. In those circumstances, reoccupying Palestinian population centers, as Israel did in April 2002, would be more difficult, complicated, and costly. Indeed, given the IDF's structural limitations and the exponential growth of Palestinian capabilities from the intifada to the present war, it may not even be possible for Israeli forces to retake Palestinian cities in a future war.

To protect against another security fiasco, Israel needs to insist on two new principles in defining security arrangements within the context of a future peace agreement:

If the Palestinians do not actively, persistently, and explicitly fight terror, the agreement should allow Israel to take its own counterterrorism measures in the territory under Palestinian sovereignty.

If terrorism is conducted against Israel from Palestinian territories, then the agreement should permit IDF operations in the territory under Palestinian sovereignty.

Israel must insist on retaining the right to operate throughout the territory in perpetuity, not only for a limited number of years, not only in emergency situations, and not only upon the approval of third parties.

Border Control

A second Israeli security requirement in future negotiations concerns border control. The importance of this issue is clear from a comparison of Israel's experience in Lebanon and in the Palestinian areas.

In Lebanon, Hizbullah received a steady stream of weapons, and its ability to fight increased after every round of conflict with the IDF because of resupply from Iran and Syria. Israel's situation vis-à-vis the Palestinians could be even worse. The latter have already displayed an impressive ability to circumvent security arrangements through smuggling, such as the fifty tons of seaborne weapons destined for the PA that were intercepted by the IDF in January 2002. Add to this the fact that the geography and topography of the West Bank permit the Palestinians to pose a strategic threat to Israel's main population centers, something Hizbullah was never able to do. If Israel acceded to security arrangements that gave Palestinians control over their borders with Egypt and Jordan, it is safe to assume that weapons would flow freely into the West Bank and Gaza, with potentially catastrophic implications.

In any future negotiations, Israel must give a high priority to preventing the Palestinian acquisition of enhanced weaponry. Only Israeli border control can effectively prevent Palestinian efforts to smuggle weapons and munitions from neighboring countries. Israel, therefore, must ensure that the Palestinian state does not have contiguous, unfettered contact with its Arab neighbors, Egypt and Jordan.

The same logic underlies Israel's need to control international passageways such as airports and seaports. Israel must retain the ability to check all imports into the Palestinian areas, whether personal or commercial goods. An invisible presence, with international forces or Palestinian customs agents doing the actual work—as envisioned in previous Oslo agreements and in the recent Geneva accord—will not suffice. Unless Israel can construct a security envelope around the Palestinian areas, controlling what comes in and goes out, it is likely to face a Palestinian threat more dangerous than anything it ever faced in Lebanon.

When an Israeli shares information that could compromise our nation's most sensitive operations

Dr. Aaron Lerner..
IMRA Weekly Commentary..
14 February '13..





[Dr. Aaron Lerner: While the commentary below relates to Israelis who provide sensitive material to foreign reporters, it should be noted with regard to the oversight role of the Knesset that with the exception of the
Arab parties, the opposition parties are represented in the special Foreign Affairs subcommittee that has essentially complete knowledge of State secrets so that it can perform its oversight function.

Put simply: if an MK from Meretz really wants to get to the bottom of a story within the framework of the oversight role of the Knesset, then the Knesset can indeed get to the very bottom of the story behind closed doors. But it will remain behind closed doors. No photo op. No 20 seconds of glory on the evening news.]

We live in a world with tremendous dangers.

And there are people who put their lives on the line addressing them.

By the same token, failures in the addressing of these dangers can lead to situations that could put hundreds, thousands and even more of us in mortal danger.

As far as I am concerned, an Israeli who shares information that could compromise our nation's most sensitive operations with reporters or simply passes it around the internet is no better than a terrorist.

On second thought, they aren't terrorists, they are traitors.

I don't care how big their egos may be or their ideological motives, when it comes to this kind of information, no one has the right to take the law into their own hands.

And please don't tell me that in the age of internet that there are no secrets as long as two people know.

Rubin - Israel’s Strategic Standpoint: Mid-2011 and Mid-“Arab Spring”

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
29 June '11

http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2011/06/israels-strategic-standpoint-mid-2011.html

There are two types of strategic perspectives in Israel today. They aren’t contradictory but they have different priorities. These can be called the “northern” and the “southern” views.

The “northern” approach is the more traditional one, focusing on the situation in that direction. The key longer-term concern is over Iran and its drive for nuclear weapons. More closely, there are both concerns and hopes regarding Lebanon and Syria.

Regarding Iran, the new feature is the assumption that Israel will not attack Iran to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons. This means that Israel will be constructing a multi-level defensive system that includes long-range attack planes, a capability of subverting Iran’s nuclear force through covert operations, possibly submarine platforms, and several types of anti-missile missiles and defenses.

The goal here is four-fold:

--To delay as long as possible Iran getting nuclear weapons and to minimize the size and effectiveness of its arsenal through sanctions, international pressure, sabotage, and other means.

--To have the maximum ability to deter Iran from launching a nuclear attack on Iran and showing the ability to stop Iranian missiles. The aim is to discourage Iran from launching such an attack given a near-certainty that it can be stopped and Iran will suffer very heavy damage as a result.

--Of course, ordinary deterrence is not a sufficient safeguard against Iran given the Islamic regime’s ideological extremism and passionate hatred of Israel, the recklessness of some key elements there, and the rulers’ shortcomings in accurately assessing reality. Consequently, Israel must put a high priority on stopping any Iranian attack from happening at all or succeeding if it does happen.

--To be able, if Israel ever determines there is a real danger of an Iranian attack, to launch a first strike to inflict maximum damage on Iran’s nuclear strike force. In other words, an Israeli attack would be premised not on Iran getting nuclear weapons but on Iran being likely to use nuclear weapons.

U.S. deterrence, early-warning, and anti-missile efforts would supplement this system but this strategy is not premised on any dependence on the U.S. government.

But Israel also knows that an equal or even greater danger is the spread of Iranian influence, taking over Arab countries or turning them into clients that can be used against Israel. Here, the northern focus is on Syria and Lebanon.

Thoughts on the Situation, Part 3 -- J Street Defends the Letter of 54

Lenny Ben-David
I*Consult
22 February '10

Today’s Jerusalem Post carries an Op-Ed column by officials from J Street and Americans for Peace Now.

They defend the recent letter they sponsored with 54 Members of Congress to President Barack Obama which “express[ed] concern for Israel's security, for the humanitarian conditions in the Gaza Strip, and for the urgency of reaching a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

But that was not the reason for the letter. Read the letter here. The Members themselves state, “We write to you [Obama] with great concern about the ongoing crisis in Gaza.”

Note that for the Jerusalem Post, J Street and APN argue that first they were concerned for “Israel’s security,” but the text of the letter indicates that Israel’s security is of little concern.