The Map of Israel That Pulls No Punches Map by Mark Langfan, hat tip AFSI, Americans for a Safe Israel

What would happen if a Qassam rocket fired from Gaza hit Israel's Ben Gurion International Airport?

How not to build a state; The int'l community cannot morally push the creation of a Palestinian state before Israeli security concerns underlined by recent attacks are addressed.

Palestinians are ready for statehood. That is the message conveyed by the International Monetary Fund in a report on the economies of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to be presented next week to a donors’ conference in Brussels.

For the first time the IMF said that it viewed the Palestinian Authority as “able to conduct the sound economic policies expected of a future well-functioning Palestinian state, given its solid track record in reforms and institution- building in the public finance and financial areas.”

The IMF report, which reached a conclusion similar to that of a World Bank report released last fall, adds ostensible credibility to the PA’s campaign to garner international recognition for a “Palestine” along June 4, 1967, “borders,” even without Israeli agreement. From the point of view of PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, an economist by training, the professional assessment by the IMF, an institution that once employed him, is a major accomplishment.

But besides its financial and economist readiness, heavily supported by massive international aid, is the PA truly ready for statehood? If a Palestinian were established tomorrow on the West Bank, what sort of place would it be? 

THIS WEEK a few indications were given. One was the murder of actor and producer Juliano Mer-Khanis, son of a Christian Palestinian father exiled to Lebanon after the War of Independence and an Israeli Jewish mother whose relatives had perished in Buchenwald concentration camp. Mer-Khanis, co-founder of the Jenin Children’s Theater in 2006, was gunned down on Monday, apparently by Muslim extremist opposed to how he was using drama to encourage artistic freedom and democratic ideals among Palestinians.

An advocate of a binational state, Mer-Khanis was by no means an Israeli patriot. Yet his theater had been firebombed by Muslim extremists and he had been threatened in the past for staging co-ed theatrical productions. Islamists were particularly incensed by the idea that a Muslim played the role of a pig in Mer-Khanis’s production of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Even if the motive behind the murder was “family honor,” it is clear that Mer-Khanis was murdered for being a free man and for encouraging his fellow Palestinians to behave likewise.

FEAR REIGNS on the streets of “Palestine” – and not just in Hamas-controlled Gaza, which is once again functioning as a terrorist base for despicable attacks such as the one Thursday that targeted a school bus with terrible consequences.

The supposedly “moderate” leadership of Fatah in the West Bank is seeking to achieve unity with Hamas, and there are precious few signs that the result would be remotely moderate.

According to a report this week by Human Rights Watch, the PA is guilty of blatant suppression of freedom of press. Journalists who work on the West Bank are detained by the PA for no just reason, they are assaulted and intimidated. In one case HRW detailed how a filmmaker was arrested and held in custody for 24 days, then forced to sign a confession incriminating him for being engaged in anti-government activity. Another journalist, Khalid Amayreh, said he had been forced to sleep in a toilet as part of his punishment for criticizing the PA’s suppression of anti-government protests. The HRW report and the shooting of Mer-Khanis are just two examples of the unbridled extremism and officially sanctioned repression taking place in one part of “Palestine.” Thursday’s cross-border attack from Gaza was another escalation of the diet of unprovoked violence from the other.


ONE OF the central lessons to be learned from the unrest sweeping the Middle East is that millions of Arabs who have lived all their lives under repressive, reactionary regimes want a better life for themselves. They want the freedoms and liberties that are available in the West and in Israel. The upheavals in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere also demonstrate how Western leaders have become implicated in perpetuating repression by supporting repressive leaders such as Hosni Mubarak, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Muammar Gaddafi.

The international community cannot morally push the creation of a Palestinian state before the Israeli security concerns underlined by Thursday’s attack are addressed. The international community also cannot back the creation of a Palestinian state before institutions are put in place that not only support an economy but also ensure freedom of the press, fair judicial systems and basic human rights. To act otherwise would be to endorse the establishment of yet another rogue and repressive regime in the region. Creating such a state would be an injustice to the Palestinian people and an acute danger to Israel.

Terrorist bombing in Jerusalem is brutal reminder of why Israel must keep tight security controls

The past came screaming back to Jerusalem yesterday: A bomb exploded at a bus stop in the center of the capital, killing an Israeli civilian and wounding more than 20 others.

It was the first such attack in nearly four years, evoking painful memories of the days when blood regularly spilled on the floors of pizza parlors and malls.

While the world's eyes have turned to Libya and Egypt, the Palestinian rejectionists are seizing the moment, resuming their campaign to attack and terrorize the Israeli people.

To all those who laugh off the need for security checkpoints in the territories, this is why they're a must: because a hardened band of violent Palestinians will accept nothing but perpetual war.

The bomb - apparently a remote-control device - is only one weapon of choice.

Just hours before the Jerusalem attack, Hamas hit the Israeli city of Beersheba with two Katyusha missiles.

In the past four days, at least 70 rockets and mortar shells have been fired from Gaza into Israel.

Will Israel respond in self-defense? Perhaps. It may have no choice. And the terrorists will relish the violence. They live to kill and die. They will consider their work done when Israel is history.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a reasonable man among many unreasonable men, said the right thing:

"I harshly condemn this act of terror regardless of who is behind it," adding that the actions contradict his people's plan to "achieve freedom by peaceful means."

One wishes that sentiment were more widely shared.

The Israeli Dilemma

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates met with his Israeli counterpart, Ehud Barak, Thursday. There was no shortage of issues for the defense officials to discuss amid what appears to be an impending Israeli military operation in Gaza; gradually building unrest in Syria; and the fear of an Iranian destabilization campaign spreading from the Persian Gulf to the Levant. Any of these threats developing in isolation would be relatively manageable from the Israeli point of view, but when taken together, they remind Israel that the past 32 years of relative quietude in Israel’s Arab backyard is anything but the norm.

Israel is a small country, demographically outnumbered by its neighbors and thus unable to field an army large enough to sustain long, high-intensity conflicts on multiple fronts. Israeli national security therefore revolves around a core, strategic need to sufficiently neutralize and divide its Arab neighbors so that a 1948, 1967 and 1973 scenario can be avoided at all costs. After 1978, Israel had not resolved, but had greatly alleviated its existential crisis. A peace agreement with Egypt, ensured by a Sinai desert buffer, largely secured the Negev and the southern coastal approaches to Tel Aviv. The formalization in 1994 of a peace pact with Jordan secured Israel’s longest border along the Jordan River. Though Syria remained a threat, by itself it could not seriously threaten Israel and was more concerned with affirming its influence in Lebanon anyway. Conflicts remain with the Palestinians and with Hezbollah in Lebanon along the northern front, but these do not constitute a threat to Israeli survival.

The natural Israeli condition is one of unease, but the past three decades were arguably the most secure in modern Israeli history. That sense of security is now being threatened on multiple fronts.

To its west, Israel risks being drawn into another military campaign in the Gaza Strip. A steady rise in rocket attacks penetrating deep into the Israeli interior over the past week is not something the Israeli leadership can ignore, especially when there exists heavy suspicion that the rocket attacks are being conducted in coordination with other acts of violence against Israeli targets: the murder of five members of an Israeli family in a West Bank settlement less than two weeks ago, and the Wednesday bombing at a bus station in downtown Jerusalem. Further military action will likely be taken, with the full knowledge that it will invite widespread condemnation from much of the international community, especially the Muslim world.

“The natural Israeli condition is one of unease, but the past three decades were arguably the most secure in modern Israeli history. That sense of security is now being threatened on multiple fronts.”

The last time Israel Defense Forces went to war with Palestinian militants, in late 2008/early 2009, the threat to Israel was largely confined to the Gaza Strip, and while Operation Cast Lead certainly was not well received in the Arab world, it never threatened to cause a fundamental rupture in the system of alliances with Arab states that has provided Israel with its overall sense of security for the past three decades. This time, a military confrontation in Gaza would have the potential to jeopardize Israel’s vital alliance with Egypt. Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and others are watching Egypt’s military manage a shaky political transition next door. The military men running the government in Cairo are the same men who think that maintaining the peace with Israel and keeping groups like Hamas contained is a smart policy, and one that should be continued in the post-Mubarak era. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, part of an Islamist movement that gave rise to Hamas, may have different ideas about the treaty; it has even indicated as much during the political protests in Egypt. An Israeli military campaign in Gaza under the current conditions would be fodder for the Muslim Brotherhood to rally the Egyptian electorate (both its supporters and people who may otherwise vote for a secular party) and potentially undermine the credibility of the military-led regime. With enough pressure, the Islamists in Egypt and Gaza could shift Cairo’s strategic posture toward Israel. This scenario is not an assured outcome, but it is likely to be on the minds of those orchestrating the current offensive against Israel from the Palestinian territories.

To the north, in Syria, the minority Alawite-Baathist regime is struggling to clamp down on protests in the southwest city of Deraa near the Jordanian border. As Syrian security forces fired on protesters who had gathered in and around the city’s main mosque, Syrian President Bashar al Assad, like many of his beleaguered Arab counterparts, made promises to order a ban on the use of live rounds against demonstrators, consider ending a 48-year state of emergency, open the political system, lift media restrictions and raise living standards – all promises that were promptly rejected by the country’s developing opposition. The protests in Syria have not reached critical mass due to the relative effectiveness of Syrian security forces in snuffing out demonstrations in the key cities of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and Hama. Moreover, it remains to be seen if the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which led a violent uprising beginning in 1976 aiming to restore power to the Sunni majority, will overcome its fears and join the demonstrations in full force. The 1982 Hama crackdown, in which some 17,000 to 40,000 people were killed, forced what was left of the Muslim Brotherhood underground and is still fresh in the minds of many.

Though Israel is not particularly keen on the al Assad regime, the virtue of the al Assads, from the Israeli point of view, is their predictability. A Syria more concerned with wealth and exerting influence in Lebanon than provoking military engagements to its south, is far more preferable than the fear of what may follow. Like in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood branch in Syria remains the single largest and most organized opposition in the country, even though it has been severely weakened since the massacre at Hama.

To the east, Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy has a far better handle on its political opposition (the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Jordan is often referred to as the “loyal opposition” by many observers in the region,) but protests continue to simmer there and the Hashemite dynasty remains in fear of being overrun by the country’s Palestinian majority. Israeli military action in Gaza could also be used by the Jordanian MB to galvanize protesters already prepared to take to the streets.

Completing the picture is Iran. The wave of protests lapping at Arab regimes across the region has created an historic opportunity for Iran to destabilize its rivals and threaten both Israeli and U.S. national security in one fell swoop. Iranian influence has its limits, but a groundswell of Shiite discontent in eastern Arabia along with an Israeli war on Palestinians that highlights the duplicity of Arab foreign policy toward Israel, provides Iran with the leverage it has been seeking to reshape the political landscape. Remaining quiet thus far is Iran’s primary militant proxy, Hezbollah, in Lebanon. As Israel mobilizes its forces in preparation for another round of fighting with Palestinian militants, it cannot discount the possibility that Hezbollah and its patrons in Iran are biding their time to open a second front to threaten Israel’s northern frontier. It has been some time since a crisis of this magnitude has built on Israel’s borders, but this is not a country unaccustomed to worst case scenarios.

Territory Israel Must Have for Self Defense; Israel's Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace

The following video clip is five minutes.  Discussing only Israel's most fundamental security needs to assure basic national survival -- without any consideration of any religious, historical, or emotional argument -- it provides a comprehensive, visually compelling understanding of why Israel cannot give up control of Judea-Samria under any circumstances.  The Youtuber clip was compiled by six ex-IDF generals for the Jerusalem Institute. This clip shows what Israel cannot relinquish under any circumstances.


Israel, in any future agreement with the Palestinians, has a critical need for defensible borders. This video outlines the threats to Israel from terrorist rockets, ballistic missiles, and conventional ground and air threats from the east.

http://www.defensibleborders.org/secu...
http://www.jcpa.org/