Sometimes pictures speak louder!
Off to Florida back Monday!
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A few days ago Netanyahu declared Israel would never return the Golan and that started an avalanche of criticism.
The Golan belonged to Syria and stands high above the Galilee from which Syrian forces lobbed mortar shells down upon agrarian Israeli settlers farming below.
The Golan was captured by Israel in a bloody battle and has been held by Israel ever since. The area has become a lush grape growing one and now produces world class wines. It also has strategic buffer importance and there is no reason for Israel to return the Golan. Syria rejected peace overtures in the past and now ISIS is infiltrating the region.
I have been to the Golan several times and returning land for illusive peace never has proven a reliable or bankable strategy. It is the arguments fools in our State Department make.
Yet, Obama sent Biden recently to appear before the anti Israel J Street and his message was Israel has been intransigent. Biden is Obama's pawn and he serves two functions. He attends funerals when Obama has a golf game and bashes Israel when Obama is too busy appeasing Iran and reducing our military capabilities.
In all his years in D.C and government Biden has seldom been proven right with respect to any significant matters and is known as a nice guy because he can be maneuvered.
I suspect Israel will return the Golan when The United States is returned to the Indians. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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This from a long time childhood friend and fellow memo reader and though extreme it reveals why Trump has appeal. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1)
The Golan and the Peace Fallacy
During his first term as prime minister of Israel, both foreign governments and
liberals decried Benjamin Netanyahu as an enemy of peace just as they do today.
Given the lack of credible negotiating partners, that’s always been a bum rap.
Moreover, in retrospect, Netanyahu’s cautious approach to dealing with Yasir Arafat
— the blood-soaked terrorist the U.S. State Department was doing its best to
whitewash — seems unexceptionable and perhaps even a trifle too credulous since
the prime minister signed off on a number of Oslo measures that further empowered the PA leader. But that wasn’t the only sign of Netanyahu’s willingness to engage in
peace negotiations. He also exchanged messages with Syrian dictator Hafez Assad
possible deal about the Golan. The feelers came to nothing. But Netanyahu tried
again in 2010 with Assad’s son Bashar. Again, the effort failed because the Syrians
were never prepared to make peace with Israel even if it might net them the return
of the Golan Heights as peace with Egypt gave them the Sinai. The same fate befell a previous try at negotiating peace with Syria conducted by Yitzhak Rabin.
If Netanyahu thinks backs on those efforts today, he must thank Heaven
every moment that he failed. The best decisions are often the deals you
don’t make. Even if Israel had been willing to believe that the Assad regime (whether run by the murderous father or the equally blood-soaked son) was prepared to keep its word about peace — a dubious proposition given the ideological animus of the Ba’athist regime against Israel — such an accord would have meant that the Heights would now be part of the battlefield
where the Syrian civil war is being played out. The prospect of Assad’s
army, his Iranian and Hezbollah allies, or their ISIS foes battling for control
of the strategic Heights that dominant northern Israel is one that is too
frightening for Israelis or their friends to contemplate.
Opponents of proposed land-for-peace deals involving the Golan have
always worried that allowing it to fall into hostile hands would mean Syrian
guns being able to return to their pre-June 1967 habit of bombarding the
Israelis from the safety of the high ground. But had the Jewish state decided
to give it to Syria in exchange for the hope of peace, such a gamble would
place its population within reach of ISIS killers and/or giving Iran and its
terrorist auxiliaries the chance to place much of the country under fire.
So it’s not surprising that a few years into a Syrian civil war that appears to
be locked in a seeming stalemate that leaves both Assad and his allies as
well as ISIS still in the field, Israel is signaling that it will never be so foolish
as to even think of giving up the Golan. That was the reason for Netanyahu’s decision to convene his weekly Cabinet meeting on the Golan this past
Israel formally annexed the Golan in 1981, but the U.S. and the rest of the
world did not accept the measure as legal. That still characterizes the U.S.
stand on the Golan today. In response to Netanyahu’s pledge that the Golan would remain a part of Israel “forever,” President Obama’s State Department reiterated its position yesterday that the Golan is not part of Israel and that
its return must be negotiated. But in a nod to realism that is usually lacking
with respect to Israel from the State Department, spokesman John Kirby
noted that, “the current situation in Syria does not allow this.” Yes, we know.
But there’s more to this story than a narrow escape on Israel’s part and the
fact that even the Obama administration understands that expecting the
Jewish state to abandon the Golan Heights to the chaos of civil war would
be insanity.
The impetus behind every effort to force Israel to abandon the lands it won
in a defensive war forced upon it by the aggression of its neighbors in 1967
has been the notion that trading land could win Israel peace. In theory, it
sounds good and with respect to Egypt, the nation that provided the most dangerous armed force deployed in the wars from 1948 to 1973 when the
Arab world tried to destroy Israel by invasion, it made sense. Anwar Sadat accepted the permanence of Israel when he went to Jerusalem in 1977 and in the peace treaty that followed he received back every grain of sand in the strategic Sinai Peninsula, a move that included the removal of Israeli
settlements that had been planted there.
Could Syria have ever done the same?
That’s a dream that was cherished by several Israeli prime ministers, but
the assumptions behind it were always false. Syria’s stability under the
Assads was always more of a mirage than reality due in large measure to
the fact that their regime was run by a religious minority — the Alawites —
rather than a broad-based one such as the military regimes that have
dominated Egypt with the exception of the year when the Muslim
Brotherhood supplanted Hosni Mubarak prior to the army toppling it have
been.
Israel’s giving up the Sinai was not that much of a strategic gamble
because the barren peninsula serves as a buffer between the two nations
no matter which flag is flying over it. But the Golan is far closer to Israeli population centers.
But the Palestinians and the Syrians have never shown any inclination to recognize the legitimacy of Israel no matter what territorial compromises or surrenders have been involved. Moreover, the nature of Palestinian politics
and that of Syria is one in which the sort of rational calculations that have
been the foundation of Egyptian policy toward Israel for the last 40 years
(as well as that of Jordan which made peace with Israel without the
exchange of land) is not imaginable.
Before Israel can ever think of giving up the Golan or the even more
strategic West Bank, it must have neighbors that are capable of believing in
and keeping the peace with a Jewish state. After the experiment in Gaza,
no one outside of the far left in Israel believes in repeating that mistake in
the West Bank.
Peace requires more than a simple exchange of land for a piece of paper,
and that is all Israel would get if it is willing to roll the dice in the West Bank
or the Golan. The chaos in Syria may make that obvious even to the
Netanyahu government’s critics at the State Department. But the chaos in
Gaza and the support of the Palestinian Authority for terror ought to make it
just as obvious that a similar land for peace effort with the Palestinians
would be equally suicidal.
Should Syria or the Palestinians ever evolve into societies that can sustain peace then, it’s likely that an Israeli government will be willing to discuss just about any sort of terms to achieve that goal. But until that seemingly utopian vision is achieved, the West Bank, as well as the Golan, will never change hands.
By Lea Speyer
Vice President Joe Biden’s jabs at Israel’s prime minister during a speech Monday evening at a gathering for a left-
wing Israel lobbying group amount to “payback from the White House,” retired Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz told The Algemeiner on Tuesday.
In an address delivered at J Street’s annual convention in Washington DC, Biden singled out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for criticism, expressing his “overwhelming frustration” with the Israeli leader’s policies.
“I firmly believe that the actions that Israel’s government has taken over the past several years — the steady and
systematic expansion of settlements, the legalization of outposts, land seizures — they’re moving us, and more
importantly, they’re moving Israel in the wrong direction,” the vice president asserted.
While Biden did make mention of the failure by Palestinian officials, including Palestinian Authority President
Mahmoud Abbas, to condemn acts of terror against Israel, the vice president vowed to “push them [Israel and the Palestinians] as hard as we can” towards a two-state solution. “There is at this moment no political will that I
observed from either Israelis or Palestinians to go forward with serious negotiations,” he said.
“This was payback from the White House and Joe Biden was just dead wrong,” said Dershowitz. “Netanyahu has
offered over and over again to sit down without preconditions and negotiate peace. To create moral equivalence
between Netanyahu and Abbas is to create a false equivalence.”
According to Dershowitz, Biden’s omission of the Palestinians’ long-standing practice of rejecting Israeli peace offers
only serves to fuel the flames of criticism against Israel. In 2008, when then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
“offered the Palestinians everything, Abbas did not respond,” Dershowitz said. “Why didn’t Joe Biden mention that?
Ninety percent of the responsibility lies on Abbas, and to create a false moral equivalence is to play into the double
standard directed against Israel.”
Biden’s remarks — which came hours after a suspected terror attack on a Jerusalem bus that injured 21 — also
questioned how, under the current policies of the government, Israel could remain both Jewish and democratic.
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2) Sorry Men, America Doesn't Have a chance:
The American dream ended on November 6th, 2012. The second term of Barack Obama has been the final nail in the coffin for the legacy of the white Judaeo/
Christian males & females who discovered, explored, pioneered, settled and
developed the greatest Republic in the history of mankind.
Now coalition of blacks, Latinos, feminists (women will vote for a woman as
president just to have a woman president), gays, government workers, union
members, environmental extremists, the media, Hollywood, uninformed young and
old people, the "forever needy," the lazy greedy the chronically unemployed, illegal
aliens and other "fellow travelers" have forever ended the Norman Rockwell's
America.
They will self destruct and when they confiscate civilians weapons, eventually the
country will be taken over by Islam, Obama's dream.
The end of the Republic.
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