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Posts Tagged ‘Ariel Sharon’

Finally, a chance to move on

by Mojambo ( 8 Comments › )
Filed under Gaza, IDF, Israel, John Kerry, Palestinians, Special Report at April 11th, 2014 - 7:00 am

I agree with Miss Glick that the “peace process” – thankfully – died last week when the Palestinian Authority under the kleptocratic leadership of the increasingly autocratic Mahmoud Abbas made some absurd demands (even by the Palestinians admittedly  own standards of delusion)  on Israel just so they could continue the fruitless talks. However every Secretary of State seems to  think they have the solution or believe in their own powers of persuasion to change events over there for the better.   As for that corrupt loser Ehud Olmert and the feckless former chief of staff  Gabi Ashkenazi – good riddance to them both!  She makes clear what I always suspected,  that  Ashkenazi should have kept the pressure on Gaza  during  Operation Cast Lead to the point where Hamas would be begging for mercy and offering to release Gilad Shalit.  Indecisiveness in politics and war (the two are often intertwined) leads to disaster.

by Caroline Glick

On Monday, former prime minister Ehud Olmert’s career ended.

Earlier this month, former IDF chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Gabi Ashkenazi’s career ended.

And on Tuesday, the phony peace process ended.

In the lead-up to last year’s elections, the media and key political figures were yearning for Olmert’s return to politics.

In July 2008, Olmert was forced to cede leadership of the Kadima party, and so opt out of running for reelection, when then-attorney-general Menahem Mazuz announced he was indicting the premier on corruption charges.

Olmert left office in March 2009 when his government was replaced by Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition government.

The public abandoned its support for Olmert in the summer of 2006 as a result of his incompetent leadership of the Second Lebanon War. By the end of the summer, Olmert’s approval rating stood at 3 percent. But with the able assistance of the media, and of Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman who saved Olmert’s government by joining it, Olmert was able to weather the storm and keep going despite the public’s lack of faith in his leadership and ardent desire to force him from office.

The media’s romance with Olmert began formally in late 2003, when he followed then-premier Ariel Sharon from the center-right to the far Left. Indeed, as Sharon abandoned his pledges to voters and adopted the platform of the defeated Labor Party of unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza, Olmert outflanked him from the Left.

Always a political pugilist, Olmert was eager to attack everyone who opposed Sharon’s withdrawal plan. He had no qualms about using rank demonization to attack his former political allies in the Likud.

It was Olmert’s newfound devotion to the platform of the far Left that won him the support of media heavies like Yediot Aharonot’s Nahum Barnea, Ma’ariv’s Ben Caspit and Channel 2’s Amnon Abramovich. They were more than happy to attack as delusional independent investigative reporter Yoav Yitzhak who broke nearly every corruption story regarding Olmert, beginning in 2005.

After four years of desultory, at best, probes between 2009 and 2012, Olmert was indicted in four separate cases on corruption charges. After he was acquitted of most of the charges in his first two trials, his media allies began a campaign to return him to politics. Only Olmert, they said, had a chance to defeat Netanyahu. None of the other leftist party heads had a shot.

[……]

Even his media friends have to cut their losses and find a new leader.

Several years ago, they were certain that they had their man. Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi was promoted to the helm of the IDF following his predecessor Dan Halutz’s forced resignation due to his incompetent leadership of the army in the Second Lebanon War.

Ashkenazi was everything the media and the Left love in a leader. He was a general. He was handsome. And he was going to save the IDF from its demoralization.  […….]

Oh, and he was a leftist. Which meant that even if he failed, no one would ever find out.

And indeed, Ashkenazi’s leadership of the IDF during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009 was a failure. As one senior commander put it shortly after the operation ended, “Gabi Ashkenazi marched the army into Gaza, and marched it out again, leaving Hamas in charge and Gilad Schalit behind.”

Officers who wished to take a more constructive approach to fighting, like OC Southern Command Maj.-Gen. Yoav Galant and Gaza Division commander Brig.-Gen. Moshe Tamir, were immediately placed on Ashkenazi’s enemies list.

Allegations of wrongdoing against Ashkenazi first surfaced three-and-a-half years ago. In August 2010, Abramovich exposed a document on Channel 2 which purported to show that Galant was waging a negative campaign against Ashkenazi and then-Maj.-Gen. Benny Gantz to replace Ashkenazi as chief of the General Staff.

Within a week the document was shown to be a forgery. It was concocted by an associate of Ashkenazi’s named Boaz Harpaz. It was leaked to Channel 2 by a senior Defense Ministry official, Gabi Shimoni, a close friend of Ashkenazi.

Rather than pursue the story, which stank to high heaven, the media ignored it. Attorney- General Yehuda Weinstein refused to order the police to investigate it.  [……]

The only reason that the story of the forged document didn’t disappear is because state comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss investigated it, and Channel 1’s Ayala Hasson pursued it. And due to their efforts, the police were shamed into investigating.

[……]

Earlier this month, Ashkenazi’s closest aides Col. (res.) Erez Winer and former IDF spokesman Brig.-Gen. (res.) Avi Benayahu were arrested in connection to rising allegations of mass abuse of power. Since then, a parade of Ashkenazi’s close associates including current Deputy Chief of General Staff Maj.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkott and deputy director-general of the Defense Ministry Betzalel Tribor have been called in for questioning.

The widening probe paints a revolting picture of a mass abuse of power by Ashkenazi, facilitated by senior IDF officers and officials at the Defense Ministry and then covered up by senior officials at the Justice Ministry and the police, with the active collusion of the media.

Ashkenazi, it appears, was positioning himself to become the next prime minister. To this end, he allegedly decided to end the careers of IDF officers who criticized his leadership. And far more egregiously, he actively undermined then-defense minister Ehud Barak, and subverted Barak’s authority and that of the elected government in a bid to force Netanyahu and Barak to toe his timid line on Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Although the police probe is only at its early stages, and it is far too early to know who if anyone will be indicted for what, as a result of the investigation Ashkenazi’s political aspirations have been destroyed. More important, the permanent bureaucracy, which enabled Ashkenazi to run roughshod over democratic norms in his quest to position himself as the prime minister in waiting, has been weakened.

Ashkenazi’s foot soldiers are all in trouble. And their troubles will likely deter other officers and senior officials from abusing their power in similar ways in the future.

[…….]

Olmert’s fall and Ashkenazi’s fall coincide with the implosion of the so-called peace process. For the past generation, allegiance to the phony peace process with the PLO has been the glue that has held the Left together. No matter how opposed to concessions the public became, the leftist establishment maintained its faith and total commitment to continued appeasement of the PLO. In large part they did so because allegiance to the peace process earned them the support and legitimization of the US.

In the absence of any capacity to win the public’s support for continued concessions to the PLO, the Left has used its close ties to the US as a shield from criticism and as valuable leverage against the government. Only the Left, it was said, could protect Israel’s alliance with the US.

Back in January, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon let the truth be known about the nature of Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace process.

In private remarks reported by Yediot, Ya’alon said, “There are no actual negotiations with the Palestinians. The Americans are holding negotiations with us and in parallel with the Palestinians.

So far, we are the only side to have given anything – the release of murderers – and the Palestinians have given nothing.”

This week, Kerry proved that Ya’alon’s statement was a gross understatement. The US is not acting as a go-between between the sides. It is acting as the PLO’s proxy.

By offering Israel to trade imprisoned Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard for Palestinian terrorist murderers, Kerry transformed the US from the leader in the war against terrorism, into the champion of terrorists. Moreover, he indicated that he views Pollard as a hostage that the US is free to use to extort concessions to terrorists from Israel.

As a result of Kerry’s scandalous behavior, the US media, which for 20 years have enthusiastically supported every US effort to force Israel to make concessions to the PLO, lost their stomach for the show. Everyone from The New York Times to The Washington Post to The Wall Street Journal and network news attacked Kerry for his actions.

To a degree, the US media’s castigation of Kerry was unfair. He only followed the two-state model to its logical conclusion. Since the Palestinians refuse to abandon their goal of destroying Israel, they will never agree to a peace deal with Israel that will require them to live at peace with the Jewish state. As a result, they will never make any concessions to Israel.

The only way to keep this fraudulent negotiating process going is for the US to both coerce Israel into making more and more one-sided concessions to the PLO, such as freeing terrorist murderers form prison, and providing Israel with US payoffs to make the government continue to abide by a fiction. In other words, Kerry had no option other than to offer up Pollard as a hostage to be swapped in exchange for freedom to Palestinian terrorists.

Transforming the US into the proxy of a terrorist organization was just the beginning of Kerry’s failure.

His desperate behavior showed PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas that there are no depths Kerry will not plumb to prolong the fictional peace process.

And so on Tuesday, in an open act of contempt for Kerry, Abbas applied for membership in international bodies, in breach of the foundational requirement of the peace process: that a Palestinian state only be formed as a consequence of a peace agreement with Israel to prevent such a state from gaining independence while in a state of war with Israel.

Until now, it was US pressure on Israel for concessions to the Palestinians that kept the Israeli Left going. Now, without any leadership, with its power base in the permanent bureaucracy weakened, and the US role as mediator wholly discredited not only among the Israeli public, but in the US media, the Left has nothing to latch on to.

If the government uses the opportunity to abandon the two-state paradigm, it stands its best chance in 20 years of succeeding.

Read the rest – A chance to move on

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Posted in Gaza, IDF, Israel, John Kerry, Palestinians, Special Report | 8 Comments »

Ariel Sharon Dies at 85 (1928 – 2014)

by Phantom Ace ( 6 Comments › )
Filed under Headlines, Israel at January 11th, 2014 - 11:56 am

Ariel Sharon has died after 8 years of being on coma.

Ariel Sharon, a monumental figure in Israel’s modern history who epitomized the country’s warrior past even as he sought to become the architect of a peaceful future, died Jan. 11 of organ failure eight years after a massive stroke left him in a vegetive state at the height of his political power in 2006.

His death, at 85, was confirmed by a senior official in the Israeli prime minister’s office and Dr. Shlomo Noy of the Shedba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer near Tel Aviv, where Mr. Sharon had spent his last years.

[….]

Ariel Scheinermann was born Feb. 27, 1928, in Palestine, then under British mandatory rule, in a cooperative farming village. In his memoirs, he wrote that he often thought back to “working with my father on that arid slope of land, walking behind him to plant the seeds in the earth he had turned with his hoe. When I felt too exhausted to go on, he would stop for a moment to look backwards, to see how much we had already done. And that would always give me heart for what remained.”

He took the Hebrew name for “plain” (as in the Israeli coastal plain of Sharon) and as a teenager joined the Haganah, the main Jewish underground movement opposed to British rule. During Israel’s war of independence, he commanded an infantry unit and was wounded during the battle to secure the road to besieged Jerusalem.

[….]

He saw Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, then based in Beirut and southern Lebanon, as the supreme obstacle to his geopolitical vision. Using PLO raids on Israel as his justification, he set out to break the movement’s power with an ambitious invasion that took the Israeli army to the gates of Beirut.

Mr. Sharon took personal command of the operation, at times overruling his own generals and ignoring objections from field commanders who argued he was risking too many soldiers’ lives and inflicting needless damage on Lebanese and Palestinian civilians.

The operation eventually succeeded in expelling Arafat and his fighters to Tunis. But critics, including some of Begin’s closest advisers, accused Mr. Sharon of having deceived the prime minister and the cabinet about the extent of his invasion plans — allegations Mr. Sharon always denied.

Rest in peace.

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Posted in Headlines, Israel | 6 Comments »

Israel, the Maccabees and the Pilgrims

by Mojambo ( 130 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, History, Holocaust, Iran, Israel, John Kerry, World War II at December 3rd, 2013 - 2:00 pm

The last time Hannukah and Thanksgiving coincided was back in 1888.

by Caroline Glick

Back in October 2001 then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, raised the hackles of the White House when he warned the United States, “Do not try to appease the Arabs at our expense. We cannot accept this.” Sharon then invoked the 1938 Munich Pact. As he put it, “Don’t repeat the terrible mistakes of 1938, when the enlightened democracies in Europe decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia for a comfortable, temporary solution.”

Israel, he said, “will not be Czechoslovakia.”

Sharon was sharply rebuked not only by the White House, but by leading American supporters of Israel. They attacked him for daring to make the comparison. In time, with the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, Sharon’s warning was largely forgotten.

The question of whether George W. Bush sought to appease the Arabs and Iran at Israel’s expense is an open one. Strong arguments can be made on both sides of the issue. On the one hand, Bush took the fight to terror supporting regimes.

On the other hand, Bush refused to face the threat of Iran. And he forced Israel to remain trapped in the two-state paradigm which requires it to make unreciprocated concessions to Palestinian terrorists working towards its destruction.

While Bush’s legacy remains uncertain, what is absolutely certain is that his successor Barack Obama is seeking to appease the Iranians and other Islamist forces at Israel’s expense. […….]

In the haze of accusations and counteraccusations by opponents and supporters of Obama’s new pact with the mullahs of Tehran, it bears recalling that the problem with the Munich pact was not the agreement in and of itself. If Adolf Hitler had been a credible actor, then the agreement might have made sense.

But Hitler was not a credible actor.

The problem with the Munich pact was that it empowered Hitler and so paved the way for the German invasion of Poland a year later.

That invasion, in turn paved the way for the Holocaust, and for the death of 60 million people in World War II.

Those, like Winston Churchill and Zev Jabotinsky who foresaw these events, were castigated as extremists and warmongers. Those who ignored their warning were celebrated as peacemakers who boldly chose peace over war.

So too today, Israel is castigated by Obama and his supporters in Washington, Europe and the media as a warmonger for realistically foreseeing the consequences of last weekend’s nuclear deal with Iran. Even worse, they are portraying Israel as a rogue state that will be subject to punishment if it dares to militarily strike Iran’s nuclear installations. In other words, rather than threatening Iran – the leading state sponsor of terrorism, led by a regime that is pursuing an illicit nuclear weapons program while threatening Israel with annihilation – with military strikes if it refuses to cease and desist from building nuclear weapons, the world powers are threatening Israel.

British Foreign Minister William Hague made this projection of Iranian criminality onto its intended victim the explicit policy of the world powers on Monday during his appearance before the British Parliament.

[…..]

The agreement that Britain and the US heroically defend from the threat of Israeli aggression guarantees that Iran will develop nuclear weapons. Like the Munich Pact’s empowerment of Hitler 75 years ago, the Geneva agreement’s empowerment of Iran’s ayatollahs guarantees that the world will descend into an unspeakable conflagration. And this is far from the only step that they are taking to weaken Israel.

As the EU weakens its economic sanctions against the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, it is ratcheting up its economic sanctions against Israel, the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. The goal of these sanctions is to coerce Israel into surrendering its historic heartland and ability to defend itself to Palestinian terrorists sworn to its destruction.

For its part, the Obama administration is expected to massively increase its pressure on Israel to make concessions to the PLO that if undertaken will similarly threaten Israel’s viability militarily, legally and politically. Obama has promised that if Israel and the PLO are unable to reach an accord by January, he will present his own formulation, and seek to coerce Israel into implementing it. Given Obama’s stated positions on the Palestinian conflict with Israel, it is clear that his formulation will involve the surrender of eastern, southern and northern Jerusalem, as well as the surrender of Judea and Samaria and the forced expulsion of more than a half a million Jews from their homes to enable the surrender of these areas Jew free.

And that is not all. Obama is also expected, in the next several months to place Israel’s purported nuclear arsenal on the international chopping block. Since entering office, he has already taken steps in this direction. Now, in his rush to transform Israel into the new Iran and Iran into the new Israel, it the prospect that Obama will expose Israel’s nuclear secrets as a means to enable Iran’s completion of its nuclear weapons program cannot be disregarded.

[……]

The worst is still very much before us.

It is a fortuitous coincidence that this challenging era in the history of Israel – certainly the most challenging diplomatic period since the establishment of the Jewish state 65 years ago – began the week of Thanksgiving. It is even more fortuitous that in these frightening moments, the most American of festivals took place during Chanukah the most Jewish of festivals.

This is a fortuitous coincidence because if we consider the meaning of these holidays, we can understand what the basis of our actions today must be. Just as importantly, we can rest assured that those actions will lead us to safer shores.

These two festivals that have rarely if ever been celebrated at the same time are similar in key respects. Thanksgiving is not simply about a voyage of religious freedom seekers from Europe to America. The story of the Pilgrims, who weathered an impossible 65 day journey from England to Plymouth Rock in a rickety ship called the Mayflower, is not remembered simply because they landed in the New World.

The Pilgrims are celebrated for how they comported themselves upon arrival. In the three months after their initial landing, half of the Pilgrims died from disease and murder at the hands of the native tribes. Those who survived suffered from unspeakable privations. Yet in three months, they managed through their sufferings to establish the first modern democracy, and to build a settlement.

Rather than rail against their fate, or abjectly surrender to their hardships, the Pilgrims gave thanks to God for the meager tools he gave them to mount the seemingly insurmountable challenges they faced. It is for the Pilgrims’ capacity to see the blessing in their condition, and to be empowered by their cognizance of that blessing that they are remembered. Their faith grounded heroic tenacity is the reason that a small band of religious rebels formed the cultural basis for the United States of America, when it was founded 155 years later. It was that heroism that led Abraham Lincoln to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday during the darkest hour of the Civil War, when the image of the Pilgrims empowered the Union soldiers fighting for a new birth of freedom.

As for Chanukah, the Festival of Lights is a celebration of Jewish religious freedom and national liberation. The Maccabees freed the Jews from the tyranny of Greece, the world’s greatest superpower, which denied them their right to remain Jewish. The Maccabees, a small band of heroically tenacious Jews who suffered extraordinary hardship in their war against the far superior Greek forces, took strength and comfort in their faith. It was their faith in God that empowered them to face impossible odds and emerge victorious. It was their faith in God that gave them the ability to stand up not only to the Greeks, but to the Jewish elites who preached submission and appeasement as the better part of virtue, castigating them as warmongering zealots for refusing to bow before false gods.

The faith of the Pilgrims and the faith of the Maccabees was the faith of free men. It was the faith that formed the foundations of the United States. It is the faith that has enabled the Jews to survive for four thousand years. It is the faith that enabled the Jews to do the impossible and rebuild our homeland after 2,000 years of exile and unspeakable persecution.

It is this foundational faith that made the American people feel a natural kinship with the Jewish people. And it is this foundational faith that has brought the people of Israel to love America. This bond, based on the best of both people persists today, even as Obama and his fellow appeasers push America on the path their founding fathers rejected when they came to the New World. Thanksgiving and Hanukka teach us that when we rely on our faith in God, we can surmount impossible challenges.

[……]

Both the Israelis and the Americans must take heart from this week when we commemorate the heroic heritage of free men and women.

With the providence of God, we will be the loyal children of the Maccabees, and the Pilgrims.

And we will merit their legacy.

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Posted in Barack Obama, History, Holocaust, Iran, Israel, John Kerry, World War II | 130 Comments »