From Ian:
The Dream Palace of the Americans - Why Ceding Land Will Not Bring Peace
Dore Gold: American Withdrawal and the Future of Israeli Security
The Dream Palace of the Americans - Why Ceding Land Will Not Bring Peace
The Trump administration’s Middle East policies have been roundly attacked by the U.S. foreign policy establishment. There are various lines of criticism, including ones concerning its approaches to Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, but the administration’s gravest sin is generally held to be its support for Israel. By moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, blessing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, and other gestures, the Trump team is said to have overturned half a century of settled U.S. policy, abandoned the Palestinians, and killed the two-state solution.
These are serious charges. But on close inspection, they turn out to say more about the hysteria of the prosecutors than the guilt of the defendant. Some of President Donald Trump’s policies are new, some are not, and it is too early to see much impact. So why all the hue and cry? Because the administration openly insists on playing power politics rather than trying to move the world beyond them. Trump’s real crime is challenging people’s illusions—and that is an unforgivable offense.
THE ROAD TO 242
Israel’s conflict with the Arabs has long functioned as a screen onto which outsiders project their own psychodramas. Actual Middle East politics, meanwhile, churns on relentlessly, following the same laws of political physics as politics everywhere else: the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
The United States entered the regional geopolitical game in earnest during World War II, drawn in by the strategic importance of the oil recently discovered under the Arabian Desert and elsewhere. With postwar power came regional responsibility, however, and Washington eventually had to decide how to deal with the messy residue of the British mandate for Palestine.
Dore Gold: American Withdrawal and the Future of Israeli Security
America's withdrawal from the Middle East validates the long-standing Israeli view that it must not rely on external guarantees, but rather do what's necessary to defend itself, by itself. This applies especially to the discussion over Israel's retention of the Jordan Valley.Khaled Abu Toameh: Why Are Palestinians 'Disappearing' in Saudi Arabia?
Israel captured the valley and the rest of the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War. UN Security Council Resolution 242 did not insist upon a full Israeli withdrawal to the old armistice lines. Britain's Ambassador to the UN at the time, Lord Caradon, who helped draft 242, commented on PBS: "We all knew - the boundaries of '67 were not drawn as permanent frontiers."
Immediately after the Six-Day War, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon, who in 1948 had served as the commander of the pre-state Palmach strike force, became the architect of a string of mostly agricultural settlements in the Jordan Valley and along the hills that dominate it. Today, nearly 30 Israeli communities are situated in this area. Allon's map became known as the Allon Plan.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are structured around mostly reserve units. To match the quantitative superiority of its neighbors, Israel has to mobilize its reserve forces, which requires up to 48 hours. The terrain Israel captured in the West Bank, particularly in the Jordan Valley, provided Israel with a formidable barrier for the first time that would allow the IDF to buy the precious time it needed to complete its reserve call-up. The lowest parts of the Jordan Valley and its mountain ridge form a virtual strategic wall 4,500 feet high.
Even after the Oslo Agreements were signed in 1993, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin reiterated a vision for a final peace settlement that kept the Jordan Valley under Israel: "The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the widest meaning of that term." What he had in mind was Israel continuing to control the high ground along the eastern slopes of the mountain ridge that descended down to the Jordan River.
The Jordan Valley is to the West Bank what the Philadelphi Route was to Gaza. This refers to the border zone between Gaza and Egyptian Sinai. After Israel's Gaza Disengagement in 2005, Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel shot up as Palestinian terror organizations smuggled enormous quantities of rockets through tunnels under the border into Gaza. Three wars resulted from this escalation in Palestinian rocket fire.
Israeli public opinion has clearly internalized the importance of the Jordan Valley for Israeli security. In the last decade, as many as 81% of Israeli voters agreed that in any peace arrangement Israel must preserve its sovereignty over the Jordan Valley.
The Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med), a youth-led independent organization that advocates for human rights across Europe and the Middle East, said it has collected names of about 60 Palestinians detained by the Saudi authorities in recent months
Euro-Med said it considers the "practices of the Saudi authorities a flagrant violation of the requirements of justice, which guarantees everyone the right to a fair trial, including knowing charges against and the right to defense and access to a lawyer... [and] affirms that the relevant authorities do not comply with the international legal rules that guarantee the simplest rights of litigation for any individual..."
The Saudi authorities have offered no explanation for the widespread campaign targeting Palestinians in the kingdom. It appears that PA President Mahmoud Abbas and his officials in Ramallah fear that any criticism of this behavior would jeopardize the financial handouts and political support they receive from Saudi Arabia.... For Palestinian leaders, Saudi money and political backing far outweigh the fate of a few dozen Palestinians held without trial in an Arab country.
It is only Palestinians who are held by Israel for terrorist-related crimes who Abbas and his friends remember to mention in their endless litanies of complaints.









































