Soccer Dad

Netiv haasarah redux

As Israel prepared to evacuate all Israelis from Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan, a famous Palestinian "moderate" demanded that Israel also withdraw from Netiv Haasarah, a community just north of Gaza.

PA security chief Mohammad Dahlan publicly voiced the PA demand that Israel withdraw from the town of Netiv Ha'asara, a small residential community south of Ashkelon, in order to complete the planned withdrawal from Gaza.

A similar scenario is replaying itself in the north.

A senior Hezbollah official on Monday said the Lebanese militant organization believes that large swaths of northern Israel belong to Lebanon, far beyond the line Israel pulled back to in 2000.

"The Zionist terror organizations moved the border from that of 1920 to that of 1923, and Lebanon lost seven villages and twenty farms. One must be cautious before moving the border to the Blue Line, because then Lebanon will lose millions of square meters," said Nawaf Musawi, head of international relations for Hezbollah. ...

He branded Blue Line [the UN-approved border between Israel and Lebanon], which runs very close to the 1949 Israel-Lebanon border known as the Green Line, as merely a "withdrawal line."

In response Noah Pollak observes wryly:

What's less fun, I suppose, is all the westerners who will use this proclamation to insist that Hezbollah is a reasonable group with limited ambitions and a flexible political agenda.

Emanuele Ottolenghi writes:

Advocates of dialogue with Hezbollah have repeatedly argued that a compromise over the Shebaa Farms would deny Hezbollah any further pretext for continuing "resistance" against Israel. In a textbook move, Hezbollah has just laid out just that-the next pretext.

The ever increasing demands of terrorist organizations on Israel, is a reminder of the aptness of Winston Churchill's description of appeasement.

It also shows the inadvisability of the President elect Obama's reported promise to the Palestinians, as that will only encourage them to demand more from Israel.

Crossposted on Yourish.