We have the great good fortune to have Mike Sachs, the Northeast Regional Director of AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee) as a member of our community and our temple. Mike is kind enough to share some of the more interesting and relevant articles he sees about Israel with a number of us every week or so. With the overwhelming amount of information to sort through, I am finding great benefit in his taking the time to help me focus on specific articles.
It occurred to me that sharing theses selected pieces might be of great benefit to our entire community. This is particularly true at this moment in history as the threat of Iran's nuclear aspirations is greater than ever before. As a result, I will be posting a brief synopsis and a link to each article as I receive it. I thought there would be no better time to do so than now, as we celebrate Israel's establishment in 1948.
My thanks to Mike for taking the time to share these informative articles.
About Israel... Worth Reading Today...
When Armageddon Lives Next Door - Benny Morris
I take it personally: Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wants to murder me, my family and my people. Day in, day out, he announces the imminent demise of the "Zionist regime," by which he means Israel. And day in, day out, his scientists and technicians are advancing toward the atomic weaponry that will enable him to bring this about. President Obama, when not obsessing over the fate of the ever-aggrieved Palestinians, proposes to halt Ahmadinejad's nuclear program by means of international sanctions. But the wider Obama casts his net to mobilize as many of the world's key players as he can, the weaker the sanctions and the more remote their implementation. Yet even if severe sanctions are imposed, they likely won't have time to have serious effect before Iran succeeds at making a bomb.
At the end of 2007, the U.S. intelligence community, driven by wishful thinking, expediency and incompetence, announced that the Iranians had in 2003 halted the weaponization part of their nuclear program. Last week, Obama explicitly contradicted that assessment. At least the American administration now publicly acknowledges where it is the Iranians are headed. (Los Angeles Times)
The Trap of Foreign Forces Along the Jordan River - Amitai Etzioni
In the book America and the World, former U.S. national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft recognize that Israel has a legitimate concern that if a Palestinian state is established, Iran and Syria will rush to load it with weapons and armies of Jihadists, or that Hamas will extend its policy of seeking to destroy the State of Israel to the West Bank. Brzezinski suggests "an American line along the Jordan River," while Scowcroft favors putting a "NATO peacekeeping force" on the West Bank. Most recently, a Washington Post op-ed by Brzezinski and Stephen Solarz mentioned "a demilitarized Palestinian state with U.S. or NATO troops along the Jordan River."
I suggest that this idea is a dangerous trap. Abba Eban once compared a UN force stationed on the Israeli-Egyptian border, which was removed just before Nasser attacked Israel, to an umbrella that is folded when it rains. The new umbrella is not much more reliable. Second, the American troops in Iraq, and the NATO ones in Afghanistan, are unable to stop terrorist bombs and rocket attacks in those parts. There is no reason to hold that they would do better in the West Bank. Third, there are very few precedents for demilitarized states. One second after the Palestinian state is declared, many in the Arab world, Iran, and surely in Europe, not to mention Russia and China, will hold that "obviously" the new free state cannot be prevented from arming itself, whatever it says on some treaty.
A strong case for a two-state solution has been made, but it better be based on the Palestinians developing their own effective forces and an Israeli presence on the Jordan River. Neither can rely on the U.S. or casualty-averse NATO to show the staying power for peacekeeping which neither mustered in Kosovo, Bosnia, or Haiti. The writer is a professor of international relations at George Washington University. (Global Security)
A Letter to Gaza - Nonie Darwish
I love my original culture and people. What makes me different is that I do not only love Arabs, but I also love the Jewish people. I respect their right to live in peace in their tiny homeland, Israel. We Arabs have suffered from an unnatural and consistent indoctrination into Islamic supremacy and Jew hatred for over 1400 years. Thus it has become unfathomable to the Arab mind to comprehend loving both Arabs and Jews and wishing both well. We want to encourage Arabs to look at Jews and others as human beings and not as enemies to conquer.
The first casualty of the jihad principle is peace and that is why I never learned peace as a value in Gaza. I have never heard a peaceful song in Arabic. I cannot blame the Jewish people, or the government of Israel, for what you call the "misery" of the Palestinians. I can only blame Arab and Islamic culture. I believe that this is an Arab self-inflicted crisis that has nothing to do with Israel. Arab education has never told us the truth about the Israeli people and the story from their side and what Jerusalem means to them. We were told that Jerusalem was a Muslim city simply because Mohammed dreamt one night that he went to the farthest mosque but he never mentioned Jerusalem. The Koran never mentioned Jerusalem, which is mentioned hundreds of times in the Bible as the heart and soul of the Jewish people.
It was the tradition of Muslim conquerors to convert churches and temples to mosques and that is exactly what happened to the Jewish Temple Mount when 100 years after the prophet Mohammed died, Muslim conquerors built the mosque right on top of it. Just imagine if Jews or Christians had built a temple on top of the Kaaba in Mecca. It is time for Muslims to extend the hand of reconciliation and peace to the Jewish people. The writer is an Egyptian-American human rights activist. Her father, Col. Mustafa Hafez, was commander of Egyptian Army Intelligence in Gaza and founded the fedayeen, which raided southern Israel between 1951 and 1956, killing 400 Israelis. (Front Page Magazine)
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