Uri Bar-Joseph is a professor in the international relations department of the University of Haifa and a Haaretz contributor.
He writes that Israel's security situation has never been worse.
Really. It is worse today that in 1948, worse than on the eve of the 1967 war, worse than 1973, worse than when Israel was forced to act like a sitting duck for Iraqi Scud missiles in the first Gulf War, worse than during daily bus bombings in the early 2000s.
The reason?
Hezbollah’s enormous rocket stores pose an unprecedented threat to Israel. Defense officials judge that in the first days of the next confrontation with Hezbollah, 3,000 to 4,000 rockets will be fired into Israel, some of them highly precise and with high payloads.While no one discounts the dangers of Hezbollah's arsenal, there is a reason it doesn't use it: because the damage to Lebanon in such a war would be incalculable. For all of Hezbollah's boasts that it won the 2006 war, it is not eager to start another one, where Israel's gloves would be off.
If the threat is realized, there be hundreds or thousands of casualties and significant damage to infrastructure: airports, seaports, power stations, desalination plants, transportation hubs and the like. Hezbollah’s missiles are capable of hitting not only has enough rockets to hit not only the Kirya military center in Tel Aviv but also the upscale neighborhoods around it. The military response to the threat is only partial, and it cannot prevent most of the damage.
But Bar Joseph has a new piece of information, one that somehow nearly everyone in the world missed but him - Iran accepts a two state solution, if only Israel would accept the Arab peace initiative!
The solution to the growing dangers has long been on our doorstep, but our leaders will not even consider it. On December 13 the president of Iran, the state behind the ballistic threat to Israel, signed a document stating “we support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the borders of 4 June 1967 borders, with Al-Quds Ash-Sharif as its capital. We support peace based on a two-state solution. The borders of Jerusalem will be determined in negotiations. ... we support, as a strategic choice, the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which was adopted in 2005 by an extraordinary Islamic summit conference.”If only Israel would accept the demands of the Arab Peace Initiative without any negotiations, withdraw from all of its holy sites, uproot hundreds of thousands of people - we would have a peace that even Iran wants to see! And then Hezbollah's missile threat and Iran's nuclear threat will magically disappear! Iran would recognize Israel! the lamb will lie down with the lion! Why is Israel so intransigent? Can't they see this is a game changer?
President Hassan Rohani signed this document at a session of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Istanbul. Apart from one analysis by Akiva Eldar on the Al-Monitor website, there was no reference in the Israeli media to this change in Iran’s position. Iran had never before expressed support for the Arab Peace Initiative. This pivot is a game-changer, and also a reflection of slogans heard in the recent wave of demonstrations in Iran, calling on the state’s leaders to spend less on Hezbollah, Syria and the Gaza Strip and more on domestic needs.
Again, in the absence of the stick wielded by Hezbollah it wouldn’t be so terrible for Israel to ignore the new Iranian carrot, but the existence of this stick makes ignoring the Arab Peace Initiative irresponsible.
And you can believe Bar Joseph, because he is an academic and must know what he is talking about! Akiva Eldar agrees as well!
What could be wrong with his analysis?
It took me less than two minutes to find that, sorry, Iran didn't change its position one bit:
Iran has expressed reservations about certain articles of the documents adopted at a recent emergency summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on Jerusalem al-Quds, which suggest, somehow, the recognition of the occupying Israeli regime.Iran signed the document - but publicly said it did not agree to the words that Ben Joseph and Eldar insist it did.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi reiterated the Islamic Republic’s support for the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.”
However, he said, Tehran’s backing for the two documents adopted at the Istanbul summit “does not at all amount to the recognition of the occupying and fake regime of Israel by the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Qassemi added that Iran’s reservations about its non-recognition of the Israeli entity was announced during the Istanbul forum, and officially submitted to the secretariat of the summit in a written form.
But why would we expect a professor and a journalist to actually do some research when they are so sure that Iran quietly did a 180-degree turn in its policy?
This is the purposeful of the so called pro-peace camp. They hang on to (and eagerly insist on) any shred of hope and ignore the massive amounts of easily discoverable information that contradicts their fantasies. The fact that they can think that Iran, which literally has an annual religious holiday dedicated to inciting Muslims across the world to call for Israel's destruction, suddenly changed its mind in Istanbul, is a special kind of stupidity.
(h/t Zvi)