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| Week ending Shabbat, January 27, 2007 |
8 Shevat, 5767 |
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Yaalon: Concessions Won't Help
While speaking at the Herzliya Conference Monday, the former Israeli Chief of Staff said, "Conventional wisdom has it that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will bring stability to the Middle East. It is also widely felt that the core problem is Israel's occupation [of Judea and Samaria] and that a two-state solution will solve the 100-year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict." Yaalon went on to say, "These two mistaken assumptions do not allow a new type of thinking that can truly solve the problem." The "Palestinians" have no interest in a two-state solution with Israel, Yaalon said: "They have never agreed to any partition of the land. They objected to the Peel Commission's proposal in 1937 and to the UN's plan in 1947, and again in 2000 in Camp David. Arafat's rejection then of Ehud Barak's generous offer [of 95'98% of Judea and Samaria] and the war he launched instead showed that his goal was to prevent a two-state solution and, especially, the recognition of Israel... The fact that Kassams continue to fly from Gaza also prove this... Hamas has made it quite clear as well: they are interested in one Arab state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea."
Similarly, he said, "The objective of Hizbullah is not the liberation of southern Lebanon - but rather the destruction of Israel... World War III is currently underway; a clash of civilizations between the West and radical extremist Islam. Al-Qaeda did not arise because of Israel, and the State of Israel was not yet around when the Muslim Brotherhood was formed [in 1928]..."
"Therefore," Yaalon stated, "in my opinion, a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not bring calm to the Middle East... The lack of an authoritative Palestinian leadership that is capable or willing to implement a two-state solution, and the fact that an entire young Palestinian generation is being brought up on hatred and death, shows that the two-state paradigm is not relevant now, if at all." "We have experienced too many golden calves in the past years," Yaalon continued, "that were supposed to give us hope and provide quick solutions. What we need is leadership that will give true solutions, not spins."
Regarding Iran, the former IDF head said that we must stop thinking in terms of an immediate solution, and rather seek a long-range approach: "There is no choice other than a conflict with the Iranian regime. The entire world must understand that the Iranian problem is not a local one, and that the transfer of technological and financial means to Iran must be stopped immediately... Those who do not prevent the transfer of these means are bringing the conflict closer. The Syrian and Iranians must be punished by the world; they pushed Hizbullah to war but were not punished."
Natanyahu Calls on the World to Stop Iran
Speaking at the Herzliya Conference Sunday, Netanyahu said, "I want to call upon the world, which did not stop the Holocaust, to try and stop the one that Iran is planning: Stop investments in Iran - in order to stop a genocide... You remember the companies that arose against the apartheid in South Africa? The same thing can be done against Iran. We can start with the pension funds in the U.S. They invest enormous sums in 50 companies that trade with Iran. If these investments are stopped, this will place tremendous pressure upon Iran... Once the snowball of voluntary sanctions against Iran starts rolling, the citizens of Iran will start asking themselves if they are willing to pay this economic price. Israel has a key role in the international campaign against Iran. Israel must lead a coordinated, comprehensive campaign. We have to move world opinion, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and explain where the justice lies and where is evil. If another Holocaust is being threatened against the Jewish nation, who is going to respond if not us?"
Netanyahu said that he and other international political figures are working to have Ahmadinajad tried in an international court for his crimes: "If we succeed in drying out the Iran source, the Hamas and Hizbullah roots will be weakened as well. Without the Iranian checkbook, Hamas will be destabilized." Netanyahu concluded, "A new spirit, that's what Israel needs today. This isn't only dependent on us. Israel is a just country - historically, legally, and humanely. We want peace and are prepared to make concessions to achieve it."
Woolsey: PA Arabs Don't Deserve State
James Woolsey, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) said a Palestinian state should wait "many decades" until they stop teaching their children to hate and murder. Woolsey explained that shortly after 9/11, "I saw an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University where he wrote that the Cold War was World War III, and that the war against what I call Islamist totalitarianism is World War IV... We have a situation where democracies in the west such as Israel and the US, and Japan and others too, are at war with a group of Islamist totalitarianism ideologies and movements - very loosely analogous to the movements of the 1920's and
30's - Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and Japanese imperialism..." Woolsey went on to say it could take the West "decades to win this war; the Cold War took us four decades to win, and I see no reason to expect this one to be less than that."
Concerning Iran and their work at the development of nuclear bombs coupled with calls for Israel's destruction, Woolsey was asked how long Israel and/or the US can afford to wait before taking action. He did not offer a direct answer, but rather some background:
"We can only hope that the Israeli and American governments have a better handle on the precise details of the Iranian nuclear program... The Persians [precursors of today's Iranians -ed.] invented chess, and they are playing it well. Hamas and Hizbullah and other groups are their pawns, and the Syrian government is a rook, and their most precious piece - their queen - is their nuclear weapons program. They are moving the pieces around quite cleverly, this week using Hizbullah to overthrow the government of Lebanon; next week it may be something else. They are moving their pieces with skill, and they're a very serious adversary."
When asked his opinion on the establishment of a "Palestinian" state, the former CIA director recommended that it not happen in the coming decades. He said that though the Jewish presence in this region precedes the Moslem claim - "for some Muslims like Arafat to deny that Jews were ever present here is idiotic" - the Moslems also have national rights in the area. Avoiding the question of the nature or borders of a "Palestinian" state, he emphasized his opinion that "the 'Palestinians' should not be granted the right to statehood until they start to treat Israeli Jews who settle in the West Bank as fairly as Israel treats its Muslim citizens." "An Arab Muslim living in Jaffa," Woolsey said, "enjoys freedom of speech, religion, and expression, and can vote for his representatives in the Knesset, and doesn't go to sleep worrying that some government element might come and kill him. I think that once the 'Palestinians' start treating Jewish settlers with that same degree of humanity - and they're very, very far from doing that now - at that point I think we have to seriously consider how they could have some degree of self-governing. I won't get into the question of borders, but what I think is that the 'Palestinians' must be held to the same standards as Israel regarding how they treat the other. I am sure this will be many decades from now, though,
because their children are taught the Wahhabi doctrine of being suicide bombers and the like."
Concerning the disengagement, Woolsey said, "Talking to Syria and negotiating should be done only when one has leverage... Unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank would not be a wise step for Israel to take; when one sees what happened in Gaza, and sees the political advantage that Hamas has taken of the situation to claim unilateral victory and now to be part of the PA government - how many failures do you need before you recognize that it's a failure?"
Woolsey said that this past summer's war between Israel and Hizbullah was a lost opportunity for the United States and Israel to jointly decide on Syrian targets to be attacked. This type of mistake must not be repeated, he said: "We ought to make sure that if there is another legitimate and reasonable occasion for us to use force in this part of the world against Syria or Iran, we must not waste it. We should move towards encouraging peaceful regime change there; but if we are absolutely forced to use force against Iran, for instance, in order to stop its nuclear program, that should not be the limit of our use of force - it ought to be used also to break the power of the terrible Iranian regime and give the people of Iran a chance to live under a better one."
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