Each with a different fate but a single aim: "To return to the land of our fathers."

...Before I recited the Kaddish, I told the story of Garin and Begin in the ship's hold on the Pechora River, which had witnessed, for the first time since its waters began to flow, the prayer of Jews to return to the land of their fathers. Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, those Jews had cried out from the depths of hell, praying to reach safe haven together with the remnant of their people.

Dror Eydar..
Israel Hayom..
19 July '13..

1. Menachem Begin was 28 years old when he was deported to a "re-education camp" on the banks of the Pechora River in northwest Russia. He tells of that episode in his moving memoir, "White Nights: The Story of a Prisoner in Russia."

Life in the camp was cruel beyond bearing. The prisoners were put to work laying railroad tracks and suffered illness, hunger, torture, the erasure of their humanity and the loss of hope. Under Stalin's regime, the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, imposed a reign of terror, which the best thinkers of Europe's elite justified in countless ways. Begin was one of the pioneers who portrayed the Soviet regime as it truly was. He had an excellent memory.

One of the prisoners was a prominent Jew named Garin, who had been deputy editor-in-chief of Pravda, the Communist Party official newspaper, and a leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party. In the prime of their lives, he and his wife, a scientist ("She is not Jewish, but what does that matter?") were imprisoned for supporting Trotskyist ideas. Interrogated for over four years, he was almost tortured to death and attempted suicide twice. He was finally sentenced to eight years in the Pechora labor camp.

By that time he was a broken man, forced to do backbreaking physical labor even though he suffered from a heart condition and a constant fever. At first he was hostile toward Begin, who had been sent to the camp for his Zionist activity as the head of the Betar movement in Poland and later in Vilnius. Even in the Pechora labor camp, Garin never lost his faith in communism. To him, Zionism and anti-Semitism were two sides of the same coin: "an expression of an archaic, racist and nationalistic legal system." It was axiomatic, to him, that "Zionism was an agent of imperialism."

When one of the prisoners said he did not care if the Germans reached them because he had "nothing to lose," Garin lashed out at him. "I am also a prisoner. I am suffering too," he said. "But my suffering has not driven me out of my mind. I desire the victory of the Soviet Union. Fascism is a deadly danger to all humanity. If the Soviet Union should fall, all the accomplishments of the revolution will be nullified. Have you forgotten how many kindnesses the motherland has done you? And now, when it is in danger, would you betray it?"

2. On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. In late July the Soviets, in shock over their defeat, signed an agreement with the exiled Polish government establishing a Polish military force under General Wladislaw Anders, who was imprisoned in Moscow at the time. Polish prisoners were released, but the release order was never given in Pechora. Instead, roughly 800 prisoners were crammed so tightly into the hold of a small cargo vessel that they could not stand or sit, but only lie down. For close to three weeks they sailed northward "to build a new world."

Most of the prisoners on board were hardened criminals. Only a few were political prisoners. Back in the camp, the criminals, known as the Urki, had been in control. Below the deck of the vessel, they abandoned all traces of restraint. It was "a regime of criminals who had no limits, who had absolute power." The Urki spent their time abusing the weaker prisoners until they died. That was how the "slave ship," as Begin called it, became a symbol of the sinking civilization of Europe, which was also ruled at the time by a regime of criminals who knew no restraint.

"In this place of foul odor and darkness," Begin wrote, "of torture and abuse, of threats and terror, the soul of Garin, who had fallen from the heights of power into the kingdom of the Urki in the hold of the slave ship, reached the ultimate point of crisis." His spirit was tormented by years of interrogation, torture, and suicide attempts. He, who had denied his Jewishness, suffered to hear himself called "Zhid," in hatred, "under Soviet skies." "And this tormented soul, whose entire world of dreams and aspirations had collapsed under the blows of reality," could not withstand the test of the slave ship.

3. One day during that hellish voyage, Garin woke Begin up. "Do you remember the song 'Lashuv' [return]?" he whispered, speaking in Yiddish for the first time. Begin did not understand, since Garin spoke the word with an Ashkenazi inflection, with the accent on the first syllable and the vowels pronounced slightly differently, rendering the word as "lo-shuv" rather than the modern Hebrew "la-shuv."

"That's the song the Zionists in Odessa sang when I was a boy," Garin told Begin. "Do you know it?" "Do you mean 'Hatikvah' ['The Hope,' later Israel's national anthem]?" Begin asked. "Maybe," Garin answered. "I remember only the word lashuv." "That's 'Hatikvah,'" Begin said, and quoted: "'Lashuv le-eretz avoteinu' -- to return to the land of our fathers."

Lapidot - Rewriting history

Aharon Lapidot..
Israel Hayom..
28 February '12..

This week we commemorate 20 years since the passing of Menachem Begin. Channel 2’s senior commentator, Amnon Abramovich, took the opportunity this week in particular to poke holes in one of the late prime minister’s most accomplished military operations: the June 1981 bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor.

Abramovich said (and I paraphrase) that it wasn’t our air force that put an end to Iraq’s nuclear program, but rather the American invasion of Iraq 10 years later (Operation Desert Storm in 1991). He went so far as to say that the attack on Osirak backfired against Israel, leading to international condemnation and even achieving the opposite of Israel’s goal because Iraq actually accelerated its nuclear armament as a result.

First, the facts: After the attack, Iraq never successfully developed nuclear weapons. The reactor destroyed by the air force was never rebuilt. Iraq had aimed to do so. France hesitantly agreed to help, but political and funding problems shelved the plans. During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the U.S. merely bombed the reactor’s dusty ruins, which had stood undisturbed for a decade.

Akunis - Lessons from the Golan

MK Ofir Akunis
Israel Hayom
11 December '11

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=993

Thirty years ago this week something happened in Israel: The Golan Heights legally became an inextricable part of our country. For years, the Golan Heights had been part of the Land of Israel, but on Dec. 14, 1981, it fell under "Israeli law, jurisdiction, and administration." In other words, the Golan became an inseparable part of sovereign Israel.

Anyone who reads the fascinating minutes of the discussion and vote held that day in the Knesset would certainly not be able to discern between claims made back then and those voiced in today's Knesset. The rivalry between the Left and the Right was fierce. During the hearing, then Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who introduced the law, could not restrain himself, calling opposition MK Meir Vilner a "Stalinist."

Exactly 30 years later, what can we learn from that debate about contemporary public discourse?

"Israel Is Not A Banana Republic"

Begin’s Rebuttle Of Reagan, State Dept., on “Punishing” Israel

Love of the Land
09 December '11
H/T to David P.






VOLUME 7: 1981-1982 Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
91. Statement by Prime Minister Begin on U.S. Measures Against Israel, 20 December 1981.

http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Foreign%20Relations/Israels%20Foreign%20Relations%20since%201947/1981-1982/91%20Statement%20by%20Prime%20Minister%20Begin%20on%20US%20Measure

In an unprecedented move, Mr. Begin summoned the United States ambassador to Israel, and read to him the following statement. It was later read to the cabinet and issued to the public. Mr. Begin complained that the U.S. had punished Israel three times in the past six months. Israel was no. “vassal state” or a “banana republic.” He also hinted of anti-Semitic overtones in some of the punitive measures taken by the United States.

Text of Menachem Begin Statement:

Three times during the past six months, the U.S. Government has “punished” Israel.

On June 7 we destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor “Osirak” near Baghdad. I don’t want to mention to you today from whom we received the final information that this reactor was going to produce atomic bombs. We had no doubt about that: therefore our action was an act of salvation, an act of national self-defense in the most lofty sense of the concept. We saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians, including tens of thousands of children.

Nonetheless, you announced that you were punishing us – and you left unfilled a signed and sealed contract that included specific dates for the supply of (war) planes.

Not long after, in a defensive act – after a slaughter was committed against our people leaving three dead (including an Auschwitz survivor) and 29 were injured we bombed the PLO headquarters in Beirut.

You have no moral right to preach to us about civilian casualties. We have read the history of World War Two and we know what happened to civilians when you took action against an enemy. We have also read the history of the Vietnam war and your phrase “body-count”. We always make efforts to avoid hitting civilian populations, but sometimes it is unavoidable – as was the case in our bombing of the PLO headquarters.
We sometimes risk the lives of our soldiers to avoid civilian casualties.

Nonetheless, you punished us: you suspended delivery of F-15 planes.

A week ago, at the instance of the Government, the Knesset passed on all three readings by an overwhelming majority of two-thirds, the “Golan Heights Law.”

Now you once again declare that you are punishing Israel.

What kind of expression is this – “punishing Israel”? Are we a vassal state of yours? Are we a banana republic? Are we youths of fourteen who, if they don’t behave properly, are slapped across the fingers?

Freund: Three decades of retreat

Michael Freund
Fundamentally Freund/JPost
25 April '11

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=217834

The steady march of capitulation that began in Yamit and continued on through the Oslo process has brought this nation to the brink of disaster.

This weekend marked a profoundly painful anniversary in the history of the modern State of Israel, one whose agonizing consequences continue to haunt the Jewish state.

It was on April 23, 1982, that IDF soldiers descended on the Jewish community of Yamit in northern Sinai not to defend it, but to uproot and destroy it.

As part of the peace treaty with Egypt, then-prime minister Menachem Begin agreed to withdraw from all of the Sinai, which necessitated the forced evacuation of more than 7,000 Israelis who had made the desert bloom.

Over 2,500 of them resided in Yamit, which came to symbolize the resistance to the government’s plan.

Defense minister Ariel Sharon was tasked with overseeing the operation, which was carried out with brutal efficiency.

Indeed, the excruciating scenes of Jewish soldiers dragging Jews from their homes, carting off families’ belongings, and extinguishing communal life in the area, were indelibly stamped into the nation’s consciousness.

A dozen other Sinai communities were uprooted as well, and most of them were razed to the ground.

After a century of Zionism and pioneering settlement of the land, Israel was dramatically turning its back on some of its key core principles, all for the sake of a dubious peace with a dictatorial neighbor.

With its 61,000 sq. km, the Sinai consisted of more than 90 percent of the territory that Israel had liberated during the Six Day Way.

Home to more than a hundred military installations and oil fields valued in the tens of billions of dollars, the peninsula provided Israel with strategic depth and new frontiers.

But all that was torn asunder by the withdrawal from Yamit. And while it may have brought us 30 years of a cold peace with Egypt, conceding the Sinai will likely prove to have been a colossal blunder of strategic proportions.

Consider recent events in the region, which underline the perils inherent in turning territory over to our neighbors.

What Would Begin Do?

Rick Richman
Commentary/Contentions
09 March '11

To help evaluate Evelyn Gordon’s impassioned post regarding Israel’s possible $20 billion defense request, let me recount two incidents from the negotiations Menachem Begin conducted with the Carter administration in 1977-78 that are worth remembering today.

The first incident occurred in July 1977, when Zbigniew Brzezinski presented Begin with a draft statement regarding the just-concluded U.S.-Israel meeting. Begin told Brzezinski that the draft was acceptable — “except for two sentences.” Brzezinski asked what they were:

“Please delete ‘The United States affirms Israel’s inherent right to exist.’”

“Why so?”

“Because the United States’ affirmation of Israel’s right to exist is not a favor, nor is it a negotiable concession. I shall not negotiate my existence with anybody, and I need nobody’s affirmation of it.”

Brzezinski’s expression was one of surprise. “But to the best of my knowledge every Israeli prime minister has asked for such a pledge.”

“I sincerely appreciate the president’s sentiment,” said Begin, “but our Hebrew Bible made that pledge and established our right over our land millennia ago. Never, throughout the centuries, did we ever abandon or forfeit that right. Therefore, it would be incompatible with my responsibilities as prime minister of Israel were I not to ask you to erase this sentence.” And then, without pause, “Please delete, too, the language regarding the commitment to Israel’s survival.”

“And in what sense do you find that objectionable?”

“In the sense that we, the Jewish people alone, are responsible for our country’s survival, no one else.”

The second incident came a year later, in perhaps the tensest moment of the Camp David negotiations. In his diary entry for September 12, 1978, published last year in White House Diary, Carter wrote that Begin called him during dinner and said he “wanted to see me as soon as possible for the most serious talk we had ever had.” Carter tried to postpone the meeting until the next morning, but Begin insisted.

(Read full "What Would Begin Do?")

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Recalling The 1981 Bombing

The boundaries of responsibility


Eitan Ben Eliyahu
Begin Center Diary
18 August '10

On May 10, 1981, the Israel Air Force was busy with last-minute preparations for an attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor. But then Menachem Begin, who was both prime minister and defense minister, decided to cancel the mission. Begin had received a letter from the head of the opposition, Shimon Peres, objecting to the operation. And if the news had leaked to Peres, Begin thought, it might also have reached the enemy.

Another possible strike date was May 31, but since Begin was due to meet with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in Sharm al-Sheikh on June 4, the operation was postponed until June 7 to avoid undermining the summit. Thus Begin used his authority to decide whether or not a military operation that was about to be launched would actually be implemented.

In his recent testimony before the Turkel Committee investigating Israel's raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla, Defense Minister Ehud Barak distinguished between the "what," which is decided by the government, and the "how," which is the province of the army. But in truth, to this day, no formula has yet been found to properly define the relationship between these two bodies. Barak's definitions of "what" and "how" attempted to draw a clear line between the parties' respective authorities, but the most important question lurks in the area where they overlap.

Military action is supposed to complement diplomatic action, pave the way for it or, sometimes, substitute for it. Therefore, the first question that needs to be answered is "why" - in other words, is there any reason for the military action?

(Read full article)

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William Quandt's Embarrassing Memo

Daniel Pipes
danielpipes.org
24 May '10


While working on documents at the Carter Center, a researcher from the Menachem Begin Heritage Center came across a declassified action memorandum from William Quandt, Middle East specialist on the National Security Council, to his boss, Zbigniew Brzezinski. (Click here for the document in full.) Dated May 18, 1977, it was written just one day after Begin's breakthrough victory over Labor, the first time any other party had beaten Labor since the State of Israel had been founded 29 years earlier.

The memo makes for deliciously instructive reading. Count the mistakes in Quandt's opening analysis:

Much of our strategy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict has been predicated on the assumption that a strong and moderate Israeli government would at some point be able to make difficult decisions on territory and on the Palestinians. Now we face the prospect of a very weak coalition, a prolonged period of uncertainty, and an Israeli leadership which may be significantly more assertive in its policies concerning the West Bank, Palestinians, settlements, and nuclear weapons.

The Arabs will no doubt read the Israeli election results as signifying an end to the chance of getting to Geneva this year, and possibly the end of any hope for a political settlement, and we may see them begin to take out insurance by patching up quarrels with the Soviets, digging in their heels on peace terms , and acting more belligerently on oil prices.

In fact, Begin's government made the difficult decisions Labor had not taken, his coalition endured, the Egyptians became more forthcoming, their rift from the Soviets deepened, and oil prices were not affected (until the fall of the shah shot them up).

(Read full post)

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Carter thought Begin would fall fast, new documents show

US official said that due to Likud’s election, chances for peace looked bleak at the time.

Gil Hoffman
JPost
24 May '10

US president Jimmy Carter’s administration tried to undermine prime minister Menachem Begin’s government from the moment he got elected in 1977, documents published by Yediot Aharonot over the weekend reveal.

The newspaper published a letter written to Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski by the head of the Mideast desk on the council, William Quandt, the day after Begin’s landmark first election victory, whose 33rd anniversary was marked by the Likud last week.

In the letter, Quandt suggests not putting too much pressure on Begin at first and “allowing him to make his own mistakes” that would encourage Israelis to elect a more dovish prime minister in a year or two. It shows how the Carter administration interpreted the transfer of power from Left to Right as temporary when, in hindsight, the Center-Right has been in power for all but six of the last 33 years.

“Much of our strategy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict has been predicated on the assumption that a strong and moderate Israeli government would at some point be able to make difficult decisions on territory and on the Palestinians,” Quandt wrote Brzezinski. “Now we face the prospect of a very weak coalition, a prolonged period of uncertainty, and an Israeli leadership which may be significantly more assertive in its policies concerning the West Bank, Palestinians, settlements and nuclear weapons.”

Quandt said that due to Begin’s election victory, chances for Middle East peace looked bleak. He cautioned against appearing to interfere in Israeli politics, but suggested doing just that.

“We should do nothing in public to indicate disappointment with the Likud victory,” he wrote. “Instead, we should continue to talk of the importance of [the peace process], the requirements of a comprehensive peace, and the need for flexibility.

“By our actions, we do not want to increase support for Begin, which might occur if we reassess our policy too quickly,” Quandt wrote.

“At the same time, Israeli voters should know that a hard-line government will not find it easy to manage the US-Israel relationship.

(Read full story)

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Is Obama Carter, but without the good fortune?

Soccer Dad
14 May '10

In his devastating critique of ex-President Jimmy Carter, Our Worse Ex-President, Joshua Muravchik wrote:

Carter's interest in the conflict is in one sense natural: the agreement he mediated between Israel and Egypt at Camp David in 1978 stands as one of the few solid achievements of his presidency. Yet the intensity of his rhetoric suggests that his absorption with this issue derives from something deeper than the pleasure of returning to the scene of past triumphs.

Generally, the Camp David treaty is considered the major accomplishment of Carter's term in office. Yet, as Jason Maoz recounts, the impetus for Sadat going to the Jerusalem was a miscalculation by Carter.

Standing out among Carter's flubs was his decision to issue a joint statement on the Middle East with the Soviet Union. This totally unexpected document, released on October 1, 1977, marked the first time the U.S. officially employed the phrase "legitimate rights of the Palestinian people."
The communiqué also recommended the conveying of an Arab-Israel peace conference in Geneva, with the participation of Palestinian representatives and with the Americans and the Soviets acting as joint guarantors of any agreement that might be reached.

Reaction in the U.S. was immediate - and furious. "[A] political firestorm erupted," wrote Middle East expert Steven Spiegel. "After American officials had worked successfully for years to reduce Russian influence over the Mideast peace process and in the area as whole, critics could not understand why the administration had suddenly invited Moscow to return."

If there was anyone more incensed at Carter than the Israelis and most American lawmakers, it was Anwar Sadat. It had been just five years since the Egyptian leader stunned the world by unceremoniously expelling thousands of Soviet military advisers and their families from Egypt, his most concrete signal to date of his desire to align his country with the West.

Yet Carter ignored Sadat's break with Moscow. A number of other factors came into play and ...

Eventually, of course, the U.S. would broker what became known as the Camp David accords and oversee the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. But Carter had been blindsided by Sadat, with the compliance of Begin, in response to the American president's inexplicable decision to involve the Soviets in the peace process.

(Read full post)

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Elijah from the Taiga

The story of Lithuania’s Betar head, who founded the Prisoners of Zion group.


Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
16 April '10

It was a short time before Israel’s 30th birthday. Again I found myself in the small, modest living room of Mr. and Mrs. Pulerevitch on Tel Aviv’s Ben-Yehuda Street. It was an old building and the rented apartment seemed suitably suffused with old-world ambiance. The metropolitan hustle, bustle and brashness were all left outside. Inside everything was genteel and unhurried. Another time, another dimension.

I had become a frequent family guest, was affectionately called Sarah’le and pampered more like a favorite daughter than a news-reporter. Originally I met Yechezkel at his workplace, the Tel Aviv municipality’s paymaster department. He had founded the Prisoners of Zion Association and among my beats was the then-climaxing aliya struggle in the then-extant USSR.

The Pulerevitches are both long gone now. Yechezkel had the kindliest face and eyes that forever twinkled with a smile. His wife Ella filled another tea-glass nestled inside a dainty silver holder and pushed toward me more cookies in a china dish she rested on a crocheted doily. In his impeccably erudite Hebrew, laced with traces of Litvak intonation, Yechezkel inquired where my immediate family was on the very day Israel was born.

Sighing, he remarked that he can’t say for sure what he did on that pivotal 1948 day except that he spent it in forced labor as a logger in a Siberian prison camp in the subarctic taiga forests. But that’s also how he spent the other days of that period and he couldn’t tell them apart.

He had been at one camp or another since 1941. At the time of his arrest for the crime of Zionism he was the de facto head of Betar (the Revisionist youth movement) in Lithuania. That made him equal in status to Menachem Begin, Poland’s Betar head, who was likewise sent by the Soviets to the gulag. Begin, though, was released a year later, while Pulerevitch spent 17 years in camps and exile.

Yechezkel couldn’t specify when he learned of the Jewish state’s birth: “Prison and the taiga know no dates. Days aren’t individually distinguished and labeled. Time is marked only by the seasons of the year. But I did have my own Independence Day. For folks with calendars it was probably another date, but calendars weren’t part of my reality. The inner subjective reality of the inmate is deeper and more powerful than that of the outside world, and for me the day on which I discovered that a Jewish state had come to exist became my Independence Day.”

(Read full story)

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Redeeming the Jewish Wimp

Emmanuel Navon
For the Sake of Zion
16 April '10

In his press conference last week, Prime Minister Netanyahu lamented that his Turkish counterpart has been attacking Israel since Operation Cast Lead. Actually, Erdogan’s anti-Israel salvos have a longer history.

In 2004, Erdogan called Israel a “terrorist state” after we eliminated Sheikh Yassin. In February 2006, he hosted Hamas leader Haled Mashal in Ankara. In January 2009 he staged a temper tantrum at the Davos Conference calling Shimon Peres an expert killer. In October 2009, the Turkish state television started airing fiction series showing Israeli soldiers intentionally murdering Palestinian children. In November 2009, Erdogan declared that he’d rather meet with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir (accused of war crimes and genocide by the International Criminal Court) than with Benjamin Netanyahu. In March 2010, Erdogan claimed that the Temple Mount, Hebron and Rachel’s tomb were never Jewish sites. Last week, Erdogan used his official visit to Paris to call Israel the greatest danger to the world and to peace.

Israel has been quietly putting up with Erdogan’s antics for no justifiable reason. True, Avigdor Lieberman decided to finally say something by comparing Erdogan to Chavez and Gaddafi. That was ineffective and silly: nothing could make Erdogan happier than being categorized as anti-American Don Quixote. All Lieberman had to do to embarrass Erdogan and expose his hypocrisy was to mention the Armenian genocide, Turkey’s refusal to grant a “right of return” to the post WWI Greek refugees, Turkey’s occupation of Cyprus, Turkey’s “apartheid wall” and “settlers” in Cyprus, Turkey’s adamant refusal to accept the establishment of a Kurdish state, and Turkey’s stubborn insistence on holding to a territory it grabbed from Syria (the Alexandretta Province).

Alas, Israel is a wimp –and not only with Turkey. Israel would never dare to “upset” Egypt by complaining about the fact that Mubarak’s state-controlled media are full of anti-Semitism, blood libels and Holocaust denial. When Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni said he would burn any Israeli book he found in his country, Israel didn’t have anything to say.

(Read full post)

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When Israel Stood Up to Washington

Daniel Pipes
Frontpagemag.com
06 April '10

As U.S.-Israel tensions climb to unfamiliar heights, they recall a prior round of tensions nearly thirty years ago, when Menachem Begin and Ronald Reagan were in charge. In contrast to Binyamin Netanyahu’s repeated apologies, Begin adopted a quite different approach.

The sequence of events started with a statement from Syrian dictator Hafiz al-Asad that he would not make peace with Israel “even in a hundred years,” Begin responded by making the Golan Heights part of Israel, terminating the military administration that had been governing that territory from the time Israeli forces seized it from Syria in 1967. Legislation to this effect easily passed Israel’s parliament on Dec. 14, 1981.

This move came, however, just two weeks after the signing of a U.S.-Israel Strategic Cooperation Agreement, prompting much irritation in Washington. At the initiative of Secretary of State Alexander Haig, the U.S. government suspended that just-signed agreement. One day later, on Dec. 20, Begin summoned Samuel Lewis, the U.S. ambassador in Tel Aviv, for a dressing-down.

Yehuda Avner, a former aide to Begin, provides atmospherics and commentary on this episode at “When Washington bridled and Begin fumed.” As he retells it, “The prime minister invited Lewis to take a seat, stiffened, sat up, reached for the stack of papers on the table by his side, put them on his lap and [adopted] a face like stone and a voice like steel.” Begin began with “a thunderous recitation of the perfidies perpetrated by Syria over the decades.” He ended with what he called “a very personal and urgent message” to President Reagan (available at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website).

(Read full article)
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Is Netanyahu ‘Apologizing to the Obama Administration’?

Part II of a two-part interview with Moshe Arens — former Israeli defense minister, foreign minister, and ambassador to the U.S. (Read Part I here.)


Ruthie Blum Leibowitz
Pajamasmedia.com
04 April '10
Posted before Chag
The concluding half of Ruthie Blum Leibowitz’s interview with Moshe Arens — former Israeli defense minister, foreign minister, and ambassador to the U.S.

Q: Are the Obama administration’s policies towards Israel a total about-face from the position of the Bush administration, which maintained there was a global struggle going on between the West and radical Islam, and that the Palestinian conflict belonged to that struggle? The current administration seems to be asserting that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not only a phenomenon in and of itself, but that solving it is necessary to dealing with the rest of the world.

A: The major difference, again, is that this administration is taking its disagreements with the Israeli government public. If we look back at the history of U.S.-Israel relations, the last time we can discern this kind of a breach in the discourse was during the Eisenhower years. That was right after the Sinai Campaign, when Secretary of State [John Foster] Dulles publicly pressured Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion into moving the Israeli army out of the Sinai and the Gaza Strip, though Ben-Gurion was initially hesitant. The Eisenhower administration made no bones about its views on that subject, and hinted at additional pressures that might be forthcoming if Israel did not accept. That was in 1957. Here we are 53 years later.

Q: Why didn’t you mention the Carter administration in this context, as so many commentators have been doing of late?

A: Well, I don’t think we had a serious rift with the Carter administration, though we certainly might have had one, had Prime Minister Menachem Begin not accepted the terms that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat insisted on during negotiations at Camp David. President Carter might very well have come down on Sadat’s side. But we never got to that point, and in the final analysis, Carter was quite happy with the fact that Begin, after some convincing and maybe a little bit of discrete pressure, accepted the condition that there be a total withdrawal of Israeli forces and removal of Israeli settlements from the Sinai.

Q: Can Netanyahu be compared to Begin in this respect? After all, at the time, Begin seemed to be the least likely prime minister to give away territory. Netanyahu, today, is considered by many to be “intransigent.” Will the upshot in this case be similar? Will Netanyahu ultimately agree to withdraw to the 1967 borders?

A: It’s very unlikely. And the analogy is not entirely apt. Begin was quite doctrinaire, and what made it possible for him to agree to a total withdrawal from the Sinai was his view that it was not really part of the land of Israel. The fact is that he was not prepared to give an inch of the Gaza Strip, because he said it was part of the land of Israel.

(Read full interview)
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