Soccer Dad

Not trusting the premises of the promises

The meat of Gen. Moshe Ya'alon's Misinterpreting the MidEast are these paragraphs.

The second misconception is that Israeli territorial concessions are the key to progress. The reality is that an ascendant jihadist Islam believes that it is leading the battle against Israel and the rest of the West. Given this dynamic, Israeli territorial or other concessions simply fill the jihadists' sails, reinforcing their belief that Israel and the West are weak and can be militarily defeated.

True, a majority of Israelis supported Israel's unilateral withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005 in the belief that meeting Hezbollah and Palestinian territorial demands would nullify the cause of conflict between them. We now know the results: The Hezbollah and Palestinian reactions -- concerted terror wars, kidnapped Israeli soldiers, rockets fired at Israeli cities -- made clear that the Mideast's central conflict is not territorial but ideological. And ideology cannot be defeated by concessions.

Emissaries also still believe that "the Occupation" blocks agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. In the West, the term usually means the territories Israel conquered in the Six-Day War in 1967. If the problem between Israelis and Palestinians were just the 1967 territories, and the solution were dividing those lands up between the two sides (as proposed, most recently, in 2000 by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak), the conflict would have ended long ago.

He argues that if occupation was the main obstacle of peace in the Middle East then the Arab Israeli wars would have been over in 2000 (or 2005). It must be, therefore, that the problem is not territorial but existential. It is - still - Israel's existence that is the main point of contention in the Middle East.

Israel Matzav quotes the article favorably. And I mostly agree with his take on the op-ed. But I have to disagree with something he writes.

Yaalon's fresh thinking and refusal to abide by political correctness are just what this country needs. When Binyamin Netanyahu suddenly called Likud primaries on short notice, everyone assumed that he did so to keep his 'primary opponent' within the Likud - Sylvan Shalom - out of the race. The real reason may have been to keep Boogie Yaalon from being established enough in the party to make a primary run. I have already said that I believe that Netanyahu is trying to lure Shaul Mofaz back to the Likud to be defense minister ahead of Yaalon.

It was Netanyahu who recruited Gen Yaalon to Likud. Gen Yaalon has not been active in the political world but the academic world. (Last year he was a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; since his return he's been ensconced at the Shalem Center.) These aren't the activities of an ambitious politician. Surely Gen. Yaalon knows he can't just show up primary day and expect to win. If Netanyahu is wooing Mofaz back (and Israel Matzav has made a convincing case of it), I suspect that it's either because he has a different position for one of the two ex-Chiefs of staff in mind (such as the foreign ministry) or because Gen. Yaalon has been a reluctant politician.

After giving some background about the article - that it's a shortened version of one that appeared in Ma'ariv - Boker Tov Boulder writes hopefully

This may not be exactly good news, but it certainly is a breath of fresh air and we haven't had one in such a very long time. If only Ya'alon's pragmatic wisdom could break through the cacophony of diplo-babble....

There are more positive comments at Discarded Lies.

Boker Tov Boulder's information that the article was originally written as an open letter to Tony Blair should dispel some of the criticisms of Matthew Yglesias who writes

One can sympathize to some extent with Israeli officials feeling like their country attracts a disproportionate quantity of busybodies pushing peace plans, but while it would be one thing for Ya'alon to genuinely argue that Israel should be left to its own devices, it's another thing entirely to say that the United States should just be totally indifferent to how our most generously subsidized client state relates to its neighbors and to the millions of stateless Arabs over which it rules.

This question could and should be turned around: Why should the United States be advocating statehood to a quasi-government that is hostile to the existence of an American ally. Why should the United States continue funding that quasi-government to the tune of millions of dollars a year, when that quasi-government takes no steps to make peace. And why should the second largest recipient of American aid be spared any level of scrutiny when it does nothing to promote freedom within its own borders or to advance the causes that the American government claims are so important.

Yglesias can only see the problems that Israel's existence creates and still refuses to acknowledge the destructiveness of those who agitate against that existence.

UPDATE: more via memeorandum.

moshe yaalon, israel.