President Obama’s recent charm offensive in Israel apparently had two aims: First, to lull Israel into forfeiting timely military action against Iranian nukes in the hope that Obama will act instead; and second, to convince Israelis that now is the time to revisit the land-for-peace formula.

For years, the conventional wisdom — among Israel’s peace camp and its proponents abroad (Obama included) — has been that if Israel just relinquishes enough territory to its enemies, peace will arrive. But on most of Israel’s borders, history has revealed the naïve folly behind an idea that could just as aptly be called “land-for-war.”

Consider Syria. From 1948 to 1967, the Syrians regularly fired artillery shells from their dominant positions on the Golan Heights down at Israeli border communities and Fatah used the territory to launch terrorist raids into Israel, until Israel captured it in 1967. But since the U.S.-brokered talks between Israel and Syria began in 1999, peaceniks have posited that a full withdrawal by Israel from the strategic plateau in exchange for peace with Syria involved a risk worth taking. Their rationale was that — in an era dominated more by aerial threats (jets and missiles) than terrestrial ones (soldiers and tanks) — the territory was no longer vital to Israeli security and could be traded for a double boon: peace with Syria and elimination of Iran’s greatest strategic ally.

Current events reveal the deeply flawed assumptions underpinning the land-for-peace-with-Syria paradigm. No Israeli territorial concession is needed for Iran to lose its only Arab ally; the Syrian civil war will ultimately accomplish that. Basher Assad’s regime will eventually fall because the daily slaughter of one’s own people (with over 70,000 dead) is unsustainable when each atrocity can be instantly uploaded to the Internet. Whoever replaces Assad will be no friend to those who armed, funded, and prolonged his massacres: Iran and Russia. Iran and its proxy Hizballah have also been substantially involved in fighting the rebels on the ground, and thus will be distanced from postwar Syria far more than any Israeli-Syrian peace could have separated Iran and Syria.

More importantly, the land-for-peace formula with Syria would have transferred the strategic territory from Israel to an Alawite-led regime reviled by the mostly Sunni rebels who will eventually overthrow it and likely disavow its commitments — including any peace deal that might have been reached with Israel.

Indeed, the Syrian rebels already control much of the 200 square miles comprising the Syrian side of the Golan Heights (where they recently kidnapped 21 U.N. peacekeepers stationed there) and have openly threatened to attack Israel next. Israel comprises about 8,000 square miles. If those same rebels were on the 500 square miles constituting the Israeli side of the plateau thanks to an earlier “peace deal,” Israel would be that much closer to the errant projectiles of Syria’s civil war, and that much more exposed to whatever terrorist attacks on Israel the Syrian jihadist fighters plan after finishing Assad.

Hence, Israel’s tangible security asset (earned with the blood of its soldiers in the Six Day War) would have been traded for “peace” with Assad, but land-for-war with Syrian Islamists is what Israel may have received just a few years later.

Indeed, “land-for-war” has a compelling record. In 2000, Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon and in 2006 was attacked from there by Hizballah. It was only the force of Israel’s military response in the war that followed — rather than any territorial concession — that prevented any subsequent cross-border attacks by Hizballah, although the terrorist group still pursues murderous plots abroad, including in Europe (which still cowers from labeling Hizballah a terrorist organization).

Since Israel left the Gaza Strip in 2005, Palestinian terrorists have launched almost 10,000 rockets from there at Israeli civilians (most recently on three days of last week and during Obama’s visit to Israel, violating yet another cease-fire agreement). Since the 1993 Oslo Peace Accord requiring Israel to hand over parts of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian terrorist attacks have killed over 1,000 Israelis.

The 1994 Jordan-Israel peace involved very little land (and heavily depends on survival of the Hashemite Kingdom), so the best precedent supporting the land-for-peace model is Egypt, which agreed to peace with Israel for return of the Sinai Peninsula. That cold peace has held since 1979 mostly thanks to over $60 billion of U.S. aid to Egypt and an unpopular, secular autocrat (Hosni Mubarak). After Islamists hijacked Egypt’s 2011 revolution, the future of the Egypt-Israel peace is less certain, although Egypt now has so many economic and political problems that foreign military adventures seem unlikely.

…is the truth of what they feel.

We signed a peace agreement with Egypt; we evacuated towns and homes to give the Sinai desert back to Egypt after the wars of 1956, 1967, and 1973. In each war, we defeated their armies; decimated their defense lines. We’ll do it again if we have to. But we don’t want to – we don’t want to fight and so peace was agreed upon. But the peace with Egypt has always been a cold one – perhaps on both sides…certainly on theirs.

Will the peace hold? It will – so long as the Egyptians believe that we are strong enough and well trained enough to defeat them again. But there will likely never be real peace – the peace we dreamed about when Sadat came to Jerusalem. It didn’t happen under Mubarak and it is clear it won’t happen under Morsi.

This is a man fueled by hatred but the most unforgiving part of it all is that he would have us give his hatred to the generations to come, fed to them as their mothers nurse them. Not my words and certainly not the words of a peace partner.

Kudos to MEMRI for translating and making the videos of Morsi’s 2010 statements available – someday I hope the western world (and that idiot in the White House) will learn that what they say in English is not the language of their hearts. For that, Obama, you need to listen to them in Arabic.

Guess what? They can’t stand you any more than they tolerate us.

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There is an oped in Haaretz (where else?) by the head of the ICRC delegation in Israel arguing that

…contrary to what is claimed in the Levy report, it is manifestly clear that the West Bank is occupied by Israel…Furthermore, concerning the settlements in the West Bank, it has to be emphasized that Article 49 (6 ) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits a state from transferring parts of its own civilian population to territory it occupies, does not merely prohibit the occupying state from forcefully transferring parts of its population; it also prohibits any action by the occupier which facilitates such transfer.  The ICRC commentary on the Fourth Geneva Convention makes clear that Article 49 (6 ), like the convention as a whole, aims to protect the local population in the occupied territory and not the population of the occupying state. Furthermore, international humanitarian law prohibits any action by an occupying power aimed at altering the intrinsic characteristics of the occupied territory, including any measures that affect its demographic, cultural or social composition.

My comment left there:

This is a stupid article.  Of course a territory can be occupied, but legally or illegally is the question.  I am at the present occupying the chair I am seated in.  So what?  What Schaerer is trying to prove, that Israel is engaged in “illegality”, is a flop.  Without referring to the history of the claims to sovereignty, one would never know that what happened in 1939, i.e., the illegal move by Gt. Britian to alter the terms of the Mandate by the League of Nations, followed by the Arab rejection of Partition, to the annexation of Judea & Samaria by Jordan, the ongoing terror since 1947 and the threat of war in 1967, which all lead to a legal justification for Israel to occupy Judea and Samaria, to facilitated “close Jewish settlement” therein, including the use of “state and waste lands”.  There is no crime of “settlement” involved and the defensive war Israel was required to wage gives Israel all rights to be in the area.  The throw-in of “transferring” is ridiculous as Jews lived in the areas of Judea, Samaria and Gaza for centuries prior to 1947-49 and it was only because of a policy of ethnic cleansing practiced by Arabs during the Mandate and the War of Independence – Schaerer knows of those illegal  acts, does he not? – that Jews were not there in 1967.

We Jews are returning, not transferring oursleves or being transferred.

I think the Red Cross should be red-faced after this travesty of law and history.

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The most interesting aspect of the Guardian/AP report on Oct. 17, ‘Israel used calorie count to limit Gaza food during the blockade,’ in addition to the extremely misleading headline, is that there is little if anything in the story which demonstrates that Israel did anything improper whatsoever.

However, as we’ve seen time and again, the mere absence of information pointing to Israeli villainy is often no obstacle for Guardian editors.

Though Israel maintains a legal blockade on Gaza to prevent deadly weapons from entering the strip,  thousands of tons of supplies for Palestinians in Gaza arrive weekly from Israel, aid which includes medical supplies, food, and consumer goods, and there is simply no humanitarian crisis to speak of in the strip.

However, the Guardian, in classic propagandistic style, begins by employing the requisite photo of a Palestinian boy crying,

Yet, the strap line begins to provide a clue that there is, in fact, no real story here:

Unpacking this strap line, it seems to acknowledge that Israel was careful to “avoid” civilian malnutrition in Gaza.

So, what exactly is Israel’s crime?

The report begins, thus.

“The Israeli military made precise calculations of Gaza’s daily calorie needs to avoid malnutrition during a blockade imposed on the Palestinian territory between 2007 and mid-2010..” [emphasis added]

So far, we have a story corroborating Israeli claims that, since the blockade was launched, Israeli officials were careful to allow in enough food to avoid malnutrition.

Again, what is Israel’s crime? 

Here’s where it gets strange:

“Israel says it never limited how many calories were available to Gaza, but critics claimed the document was proof the government limited food supplies to put pressure on Hamas.

Major Guy Inbar, an Israeli military spokesman, said the calculation, based on a person’s average requirement of 2,300 calories a day, was meant to identify warning signs to help avoid a humanitarian crisis…” [emphasis added]

The average recommended calorie intake according to the UK National Health System is 2500 for men and 2000 for women, indicating that Israel was making sure they supplied Gaza with enough food for Palestinians to consume the the calories necessary for proper nutrition.

So, what’s Israel’s crime?

Indeed, further in the report, Israel is again vindicated.

“The food calculation, made in January 2008, applied the average daily requirement of 2,279 calories per person, in line with World Health Organisation’s guidelines, according to the document.

“The stability of the humanitarian effort is critical to prevent the development of malnutrition,” the document said.

Further in the report, we learn the following:

“…at no point did observers identify a food crisis developing in the territory, whose residents rely heavily on international food aid.” [emphasis added]

Ok, in summary:

Israel maintained a blockade of deadly weapons sent to the Hamas run territory to protect their citizens from harm, but carefully avoided a humanitarian crisis from developing in the enemy territory by ensuring the availability of the recommended number calories as determined by international health organizations.

Again, I ask, what’s Israel’s crime?

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This morning, a friend sent me an article by Leonard Fein called “Occupation Corrupts Soul of Israel.”

Fein writes,

Hakibush mashchit — The occupation corrupts.

And so, plainly, it does. But so what? However inadvertent the origins, the poison fruit is today fully ripe. To understand that, it is not sufficient to call attention to the horrific attack in Zion Square the other night, the attack by a mob that threatened the life of Jamal Julani, or even to add to it the firebombing hours earlier of a taxi near Gush Etzion in which six Palestinians, two of them children, were wounded.

He goes on to talk about “settler violence,” the complicity of the authorities (if you ask the ‘settlers’, they will tell you that the authorities in fact protect the Arabs), price tag vandalism, etc.

Is this the “poison fruit” of ‘occupation’?

Or is it simply that some Jews have — after decades of murder, vandalism, no-go zones in Israel’s capital and other places, stonings, lynchings, etc. — learned to act like Arabs?

Did the poison come from Jews living in their historic homeland, or from the Arabs who hate them?

The Left’s solution is to end the ‘occupation’, to withdraw from Judea, Samaria, the Golan, and eastern Jerusalem. In short, give them what they want and everything will be fine. Of course “what they want” is not limited to the territories, and surrendering them will just send the message that we are too weak to resist, and they will redouble their efforts to obtain the rest.

I responded to my friend that if ‘occupation’ corrupts the soul, then withdrawal, with its concomitant rocket attacks and terrorism might well corrupt the body in a very physical way.

But in addition to the security issues, there is something still more important, which is well-understood by the Arabs, if not by the Leonard Feins. Here is a 2009 remark by PLO official Abbas Zaki, which explains it well:

With the two-state solution, in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made – just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward.

Fein is wrong. The corruption of the Jewish soul did not begin in 1967. It began with the adoption of the idea that surrender is pro-Israel, with — as Fein mentions — the birth of Peace Now and the national self-flagellation that followed the Sabra and Shatilla massacres (in which Arabs behaved like Arabs), and culminated in the suicidal decision to allow Arafat and the PLO to return from exile in 1993. Today, it’s fed by a huge influx of money from the European antisemites who support the anti-state NGOs in Israel that are all that’s left of the Left.

It isn’t ‘occupation’ that corrupts — it’s surrender.

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The US has passed a message on to Israel that Saudi Arabia informed them they will shoot down any Israeli planes that flies over their territory on the way to attacking Iran’s nuclear weapon development facilities.

Some Israeli officials believe the idea for the message was instigated by the US in order to place additional pressure on Israel to not attack.

The Levy Report on the settlements in Judea and Samaria was like cold water on a parched landscape. The committee members who drafted the report and dared to publicly say what every child in Israel can and should know deserve credit and appreciation. The report factually states that there never was an occupation in Judea and Samaria because no entity there was ever occupied.

In the 1948 War of Independence Jordan forcefully took over Judea and Samaria. After World War I, the Commonwealth of Nations transferred the mandate on the territory to Great Britain so that the Jews could establish a national home in what was slated to become Israel. Later, the Jordanians refuted any claims of sovereignty over the territory. Thus, when the IDF captured Judea and Samaria from King Hussein, who didn’t even pretend to be its owner, it was hardly an occupation.

The local Arabs, who have suddenly invented the Palestinian nation, cannot claim that the territory was captured from them. First, they are the ones who started the War of Independence, dragging the regular Arab armies into the fighting. According to international law, whoever initiates a war cannot claim territory that they lost during the fighting. But what is even more important is that there never was national Palestinian sovereignty – not in Judea and Samaria or in any place on the globe. In the miraculous 1967 Six-Day War, the IDF liberated Judea and Samaria from the Jordanian army – not from the residents of Ramallah.

Those of us who have unfortunately become accustomed to the State toeing the brazen and false, radical leftist line – the Talia Sasson Report, for example – might see the Levy Report as a sign of the Messianic era. However, respect and appreciation for the report’s authors and Prime Minister Netanyahu for requesting it notwithstanding, the logical conclusion is missing from its findings.

It is difficult to know if the Levy Report heralds real change or if it is just part of the zigzag syndrome that we have been witnessing recently. It is very important to stop the damage wrought upon the settlement enterprise by the Sasson Report. But the fact that the Levy Report is not coupled with positive measures means that the strong forces that have been pushing Israel into harmful declarations and deeds for years can continue their activities, undisturbed. The report does say that Israel is not an occupier, but it doesn’t draw the logical conclusion: This is our land. The report does not recommend the vital next step, namely that Israel must immediately annex all parts of the Land of Israel in our hands. The precedent was Israel’s annexation of all the territory captured by the IDF in 1948 – to a lesser extent in Jerusalem and fully in the Golan Heights.

The following is Israeli law: Every part of the Land of Israel under Israeli control at any time automatically becomes part of the territory of the State of Israel.

Since the days of Menachem Begin, the Jewish majority in Israel has received glorious gifts that turned out to be nothing more than fancy wrapping. Begin’s “There will be many more Elon Morehs” turned into the reality of the great retreat from Sinai and the destruction of the Yamit settlements. On one hand, the Likud has built more than any other ruling party. On the other hand, all the destruction and major retreats are also on its resume. Without faith-based leadership for Israel, the Right will necessarily drift leftward – if not in word then in deed.

The Levy Report is another step in the right direction. It is a positive development, along with MK Yariv Levin’s proposed legislation against the High Court dictatorship and MK Miri Regev’s proposals for annexation of Judea and Samaria. While Netanyahu put the brakes on those two proposals, the very fact that they were raised creates a positive cumulative effect.

We must not fool ourselves, though. If tomorrow Mahmoud Abbas turns around and shows willingness for some type of compromise, the entire media will clamor to advance “peace,” full steam ahead. The justice system, security officials and academia will join in to ensure that the new “peace” will get past the public’s healthy skepticism. In this scenario the Levy Report will make no difference, as we march toward another mass destruction.

I will begin with a disclosure: I am the head of The Israeli Academic Monitor, an organization whose goal is to expose publicly the political activities of those Israeli academics who engage in activities against the state of Israel and against its ability to stand up to the political and security pressures that it faces. These academicians call on institutions and individuals to boycott Israel, to impose sanctions upon it and to withdraw investments from it, while camouflaging and disguising these activities as if they are done in “the academic spirit.” It must be noted that there are, among Israeli academicians, some “righteous” people who call on states and academic institutions of the world to boycott Israeli academic institutions and to impose punishments on those same institutions in which they themselves are employed, and from where they receive their salaries, the source of which is the government of Israel. We, members of The Israeli Academic Monitor, out of concern for Israeli academia in particular and for the state of Israel in general, act within the boundaries of freedom of speech and expression, and publish widely the despicable deeds of these Israeli academicians.

Today I dedicate my article to a matter that has been with us for years, which is the status of the academic institution that was established 30 years ago in the city of Ariel, in Samaria; whether to have it remain as a college or “University Center” (a concept which is not clear to me), or perhaps to raise it to the level of a university. Those who are faithful to the land of Israel support promoting it to become a university, while those who object to Israeli rule in Judea and Samaria – they call it “occupation” – oppose it. Each side of the argument brings economic, budgetary and academic justifications to support its view, but it is clear that the basis for one’s position is primarily political, and that this position dictates which of the justifications are emphasized.

The fact that there is a political argument engenders the perception among the Israeli public that all of the other seven universities are “not political,” and only the institution in Ariel is “political” because it is “in the territories” and therefore its establishment in Ariel has a “political” meaning. My claim is that all of the universities in Israel are political, and moreover, all of the colleges, schools, yeshivas, hospitals, prisons, factories, places of residence, roads, trees – everything that we have established, built, and planted in Israel – everything, but everything, is political. The whole Zionist enterprise is a political project because it is the political and nationalistic manifestation of the desire of the Jewish people to return to its land and to renew within it its national life, its independence and its sovereignty. Everything that we have done here since the students of the Gaon of Vilna arrived in Israel two hundred years ago until today, everything is aimed at renewing our political life as of old, indeed, the whole Zionist enterprise – including universities – has a political, as well as national connotation, and there are also those who see a religious component in this matter, connected in some way to the final redemption.

Jews the world over have joined this great political enterprise of the Jewish people, whether with their bodies or with their wealth. Those who joined bodily came, fought, built, paved, planted, seeded, reaped, learned, taught and did research, all in order to establish the political enterprise of the Jewish people – the State of Israel. Those who joined with their wealth remained in the Diaspora and donated their money to the establishment of schools, hospitals, yeshivas for men, yeshivas for women, colleges and universities, all in order to take part in the political, national and collective endeavor of the people of Israel.

The cornerstone of the first academic institution in Israel was laid exactly 100 years ago. This was the Technion in Haifa. Dr. Paul Natan, was behind the idea to establish “the Technikum” (the original name), enlisted the aid of David Wissotzky (the Tea producer) to donate the required funds, and they established the institution specifically in Israel, and not in the Diaspora, for the same nationalistic and political reason that influenced others to establish other institutions in Israel. Their motivation was to promote the “return to Zion” and the fact that the government of the land was then in the hands of the Muslim Ottoman Empire didn’t bother them. When they founded the first academic institution, their connection was to the Land, not the state, and to establish the life of the people in its land was their top priority.