Forty years on, thoughts on the Sinai withdrawal's dangerous legacy - by Michael Freund

So when we look back on the peace treaty with Egypt, we need to do so with our eyes wide open, cognizant of the fact that since relations between states can be ephemeral, territory is not something Israel should ever consider abandoning.

Michael Freund..
Pundicity/Jerusalem Post..
22 March '19..
Link: http://www.michaelfreund.org/22492/sinai-withdrawal-dangerous-legacy  

If you open Google Earth and search for "Yamit, Sinai," the globe on your screen will slowly spin its way to the Middle East before zooming in on a small area in the northern Sinai Peninsula, just west of Gaza (though it comes up as "Yammit").

There, amid the sand dunes, one can still see the bare and bulldozed ground where the town of Yamit, a thriving Jewish community of 2,500 people, once stood, until it was uprooted and destroyed in 1982 as part of the peace treaty with Egypt.

The contours of various structures are still visible, paying silent testimony to the traumatic removal of Jews from their homes that was carried out by a Jewish government.

As Israel marks 40 years since the signing of the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty on the White House Lawn, it is worth recalling the expulsion that was wrought in its wake, as more than a dozen Jewish communities in Sinai, numbering a total of 7,000 people, were compelled to disband and depart.

While forgoing Sinai might have brought us four decades of a cold peace with Egypt, it also elicited a heavy price from the Jewish state, one that continues to haunt us until the present day.

After a century in which the values of Zionism and settling the land had prevailed, Israel suddenly took a sharp U-turn, conferring legitimacy on the illegitimate idea that peace must necessarily entail withdrawal and retreat.

In the miraculous victory of the 1967 war, the Jewish people were granted a Divine gift. Over the course of just six days, we were reunited with the Temple Mount, the hills of Samaria and the streets of Hebron.

And in reclaiming Sinai, where our ancestors wandered for decades after the Exodus from Egypt, Israel was blessed with priceless strategic depth, along with military installations, oil fields, and an untamed desert waiting to be developed.

But just 12 years later, acting as though it was in a rush to unload the peninsula, the Jewish state gave in to Egyptian demands and turned over the Sinai's 61,000 sq.km. (23,550 sq.mi.) to foreign control.

In one fell swoop, Israel had given away more than 90% of the territory it had liberated during the 1967 Six Day War.

SIMPLY PUT, the withdrawal from Sinai laid the groundwork for later expulsions, heralding decades of further Israeli territorial concessions.

The latent agenda for Israel’s April elections? Unilateral concessions - by Dr. Martin Sherman

...whether raised explicitly during the campaign or not, support or opposition for it will be the latent agenda in the April election, and voters ought to be aware of what they are really voting for or against.

Martin Sherman..
JNS.org..
10 February '19..

The major issue is not [attaining] an agreement, but ensuring the actual implementation of the agreement in practice. The number of agreements which the Arabs have violated is no less than number which they have kept.” — Shimon Peres, Tomorrow is Now, Jerusalem: Keter, 1978, p. 255

Almost inevitably, elections in Israel revolve, one way or another, around one issue … even when everyone insists they don’t. This is the “Palestinian problem” and its unavoidable derivative, the fate of the Jewish communities across the so-called “Green Line.”

Take for example the previous elections, in 2015, in which there was widespread consensus among pundits that the conflict with the Palestinian Arabs was largely a non-issue. Indeed, barely a week before polling began, a Reuters report on the electoral campaign, headlined, “As Israeli election nears, peace earns barely a mention,” noted: “While social issues and the economy were grappled over at length, the conflict with the Palestinians and efforts to forge a two-state solution to the crisis … drew little … comment or insight.”

However, despite this apparent marginalization of the Palestinian issue, in broad brush strokes, the parties left in opposition—arguably, with the perverse exception of Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu Party—all embraced, as matter of political preference, the idea of territorial withdrawal and Palestinian statehood.

By contrast, all the parties that comprised the coalition were ones with a political aversion to territorial withdrawal and the prospect of a Palestinian state, being ready to express grudging acceptance of the idea only with great reluctance, and subject to unrealistic and unattainable provisos.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Important Question. Land for Peace or Land for Jihad? - by Daniel Kryger

...Israel has not only been fighting for her existence since her rebirth in 1948. The Jewish state is at the forefront in the epic ongoing battle between civilization and barbarism. By betraying the sister democracy Israel, much of the West is spinelessly betraying its own fundamental values. Genuine peace based on territorial compromises is only possible when borders represent peaceful coexistence. As long as Israel’s genocidal enemies view borders as war fronts against the reborn Jewish state, only overwhelming Israeli military deterrence will keep the wolves at bay.

Daniel Kryger..
MiDA..
26 December '17..
Link: http://en.mida.org.il/2017/12/26/land-peace-land-jihad/

The conflict between Muslim Arabs and Jews over a tiny sliver of land remains the most misrepresented conflict in modern history. Headed by the EU and the UN, the world community obsessively pretends that this is a conventional conflict over land and specific borders.

The harsh reality that the world refuses to acknowledge however, is that this unique conflict is an Islamic ideological opposition to the existence of a Jewish state within any borders. Even if Israel would shrink to Tel Aviv, it would still be considered an unacceptable affront in the eyes of countless of Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia. Muslim fundamentalists make no distinction between the Jewish “settlement” Tel Aviv and Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

Many American and Israeli liberals have joined the European ideological bandwagon that regards territorial compromise and kindness as the greatest of human virtues. In a characteristic Eurocentric fashion, the European experience is mistakenly believed to fit the entire world including the Middle East.

Historically, Europe used to be the most violent continent on earth where neighbors were locked in seemingly never-ending wars over borders, resources and influence. Europe was the epicenter of two world wars. World War 2 alone claimed over 50 million lives, including 6 million murdered Jews in the Holocaust.

Post-1945 Western Europe decided to build its future based on democracy and settling disputes through peaceful means. However, this only works with a counterpart that shares your fundamental values. Sweden and Denmark fought for centuries over borders but did not oppose each other’s existence. Today, both countries are peaceful secular democracies that would not dream of waging war against each other. The same thing applies to France and Germany.

The education of the Israeli electorate

LOTL..
09 January '13..

David Horovitz's op-ed in today's Times of Israel, A different Israel after January 22, contains a number of interesting insights into the Israeli national orientation as we approach elections. In the paragraph below he gives a brief review of what is commonly referred to as Israel's territorial compromises for peace, and the resulting consequences.

It will be remarkable, if the polls are more or less accurate, that the Israeli electorate has not swung dramatically to the right. Remarkable because this is an era, and a region, in which profound wariness about the notion of Israeli territorial compromise seems axiomatic. Israel left Gaza and South Lebanon without an agreement, and the extremists immediately took over. Israel relinquished territory to Egypt with an agreement, and the extremists eventually took over. Israel adjusted its border with Jordan, and the extremists are on the rise there too. The relatively moderate Abbas would be ousted by Hamas if the IDF were not deployed in the West Bank, and even the relatively moderate Abbas chose not to accept prime minister Ehud Olmert’s far-reaching, albeit problematically timed, peace offer in 2008. Israel contemplated giving up the Golan Heights, from which it was attacked in the state’s early years, and now heaves a daily sigh of relief that Bashar Assad doesn’t hold that high ground, even as it braces for still greater dangers on that frontier when he is gone. Turkey loathes Israel and is moving out of the Western orbit. Iran is closing in on the bomb.

Without a doubt, this has played a significant role in the education of the Israeli electorate. The results, the impact, will be seen shortly. May we choose wisely.

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In Defense of Defense

Prof. Shmuel Sandler
BESA
Perspectives 107
24 May '10

(A different "perspective" and worth the read.Y.)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: One of the foremost criticisms of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's statecraft is that he has refrained from advancing a dynamic foreign policy or what is termed a peace “initiative.” He is accused of preferring political survival over an initiative that could help Israel ease its diplomatic isolation. But an alternative reading of the situation might lead to the conclusion that a protective or defensive diplomatic strategy is the right strategy in light of Israel’s bitter experiences with Middle East peace processes. Israeli “initiatives” of the past twenty years have produced such dismal results that any purported Israeli diplomatic initiative holds more pitfalls than promise.

One of the foremost criticisms of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's statecraft is that he has refrained from advancing a dynamic foreign policy or what is often called a peace “initiative.” In general, the critique runs as follows: Netanyahu's main concern is political survival, which implies keeping his coalition intact and nothing beyond. In order to accomplish this goal he has avoided taking any initiative in “peace diplomacy” that could extract Israel from its isolation on the international scene.

In this view, Netanyahu’s acceptance of the two-state solution in his June 2009 BESA Center/Bar-Ilan University speech and his declared desire for direct peace talks with the Palestinians -- are to be considered half-hearted reactions to demands from Washington. Netanyahu's opponents aver that, while he may be successful in maintaining his political survival, Netanyahu is compromising Israel's national interest.

Is this an accurate evaluation of the situation?

An alternative reading of the situation is that given the current international scene, a protective or defensive diplomatic strategy is more rational for reasons of statecraft, not (only) for domestic political reasons. A careful reading of the past twenty years of ‘peace diplomacy’ and its dismal results supports the assertion that any purported Israeli diplomatic “initiative” holds more pitfalls than promise. The reason for this is simple: It is now the norm that an “initiative” is synonymous with Israeli territorial concessions; dangerous concessions.

(Read full perspective)

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