War Clouds over the Golan--Can Israel’s weak-kneed leaders cope with the Syrian threat?

Ehud Barak, Israel’s seemingly discredited former prime minister and current defense minister, seems ready to steer Israel toward yet another destructive fad. First it was making peace with terrorists—an idea still popular in the Israeli government though less so among the public. Then it was the separation fence that would hermetically seal Israel from the violent Middle East.

Now—with missiles’ ability to surmount a fence constantly and graphically on display in the Gaza arena—it’s missile defense, another supposed cure-all that Barak is already pushing.

Barak is described in the Israeli press as now believing Israel can withdraw from the West Bank in three to five years. By that time it can “develop and deploy an effective anti-missile system . . . capable of intercepting anything from Iran’s long-range Shihab-3 missile to the short-range, relatively primitive Palestinian Qassams.”

For one thing, Barak has not explained why, seven years ago at Camp David, he offered Yasser Arafat an almost total withdrawal from the West Bank without a missile-defense system. Surely missiles already existed then and Barak, a former chief of staff and much-decorated soldier, must have known about them. Already almost two decades earlier, constant missile attacks on northern Israel by Arafat’s PLO had forced Israel to invade Lebanon to uproot the danger.

But even more disturbing is Barak’s apparent willingness to adopt missile defense as a failsafe solution that would enable Israel to retreat to borders that are indefensible against land attack. Although missile defense can certainly contribute to security, nothing short of suicidal insanity would lead a tiny pariah state to bet everything on a technology susceptible, like any human technology, to error, failure, and imperfection. Faced with a salvo of missiles bearing nonconventional warheads, a single noninterception would suffice to spell catastrophe for Israel.

And Barak, seemingly, should also know that conventional ground warfare is not something that has by any means disappeared from the world. He could, for example, cast his gaze a bit eastward toward Iraq and see intense ground combat being waged among armies, militias, and terrorists with little role for missile attacks.

He could know—but, alas, he seemingly does not—that apart from missiles, an Israel shrunk back to its ludicrously vulnerable 1967 borders would again (as in 1948 and 1967) be invitingly open to ground assaults from the east against which missile-defense systems would offer no help at all. It also is not difficult to reason that the situation to Israel’s east is increasingly unstable and unpredictable.

But since the Oslo era ushered in by Barak’s Labor Party in 1992, Israel has kept projecting this sort of weakness, gullibility, and hunger for quick fixes, and it keeps paying a price in badly damaged deterrence that is threatening to become prohibitive.

Along with ongoing, untrammeled force buildups by the Hamas terror organization in Gaza and the Hezbollah terror organization in Lebanon, reports continue of an ominous, Iranian- and Russian-backed buildup by the state of Syria. Ron Ben Yishai, one of the military analysts for Israel’s largest daily Yediot Aharonot, notes that Syria is:

* Completing the deployment of a large rocket arsenal on the Syrian part of the Golan Heights, aimed at Israel. These are not relatively modest Katyushas but “rockets that can carry hundreds of kilograms of explosives—up to 500—and reach Tel Aviv.”

* “Quickly equipping itself with hundreds of advanced anti-aircraft and anti-tank rockets made by Russia and funded by Iran with the aim of thwarting an [Israeli] ground or air assault.” Another article by another Yediot military analyst, Alex Fishman, describes Syria’s Russian-supplied anti-aircraft arrays as the densest and most sophisticated in the world.

* “Accelerating the training sessions of all its formations, both regular and reserve,” which Syria already views as “fit for confrontation.”

Ben Yishai also notes that according to the official Israeli intelligence assessment, Syria is not taking these measures to attack Israel but to protect itself from a feared Israeli attack. This, of course, stretches credibility; it does not seem that Syria could read the map of peace-famished Israel so badly as to think its current docile leadership of Barak, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzippi Livni, and recently appointed president Shimon Peres would actually be itching to start a war.

And Ben Yishai points out that despite the official assessment, “there is no certainty within Israel’s intelligence community that Syria is not planning to initiate a military confrontation with Israel. Quite a few researchers in the IDF intelligence branch and Mossad suspect that Syria is waiting for a convenient point in time—which is not necessarily in the distant future.”

It makes much more sense that, rather than hallucinating a belligerent mood in today’s Israel, the Syrians with their Iranian and Russian allies are encouraged in their own belligerence by such spectacles as Israel’s ongoing nonresponse to Hamas rocket attacks, problematic military performance in Lebanon last summer, and yen to divest itself of further crucial territory in a headlong rush to a delusory “peace” supposedly guaranteed by the latest hi-tech panacea.

That is why there is a need for friends of Israel, who do not live with the daily Israeli pressures and have more objectivity, to try and impress upon its leaders—while there is still time—that continuing the path of appeasement and retreat is not wise and has become unacceptably dangerous. For such realistic, helpful friends, do not look to the Bush administration, which with its Abbas-, Fatah-, and peace-obsession only abets the worst Israeli tendencies, not seeming to realize that this only achieves the destabilization of the region and the ruining of Israel’s value as an ally.

But they exist to a significant extent in Congress, the commentariat, the Evangelical community, and the Jewish community, and they need to understand that Barak, Olmert, Livni, and Peres are weak-kneed, shallow, susceptible people who represent the most worn-out strain of the Israeli population. But it is on these leaders that Israel’s ability, in the near future, to deter or defeat aggression depends.

If you'd like to be on this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

High Volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel. or WOT [War on Terror]

----------------------------

Little Ehud has struck me as terminally stupid. This is the man who organized the Little Dunkirk in Lebanon that planted Hezbollah on Israel's borders, who forcibly evicted Jews in Hebron, and who now wants to tear down the border wall and give Hamas the West Bank. And he is charged with Israel's security.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

These Israeli political morons must be related to Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, John Kerry, and the rest of their moronic ilk in DC. Thank God there are still some hawks in Israel who have the brains and the guts to defend their country.

Leftist appeasers are leftist appeasers, no matter what country they afflict by living there. They're just more dangerous when you only have a country of 6 million that's the size of New Jersey, surrounded by implacable and bloodthirsty enemies.

I cannot wait until Foolmert, Barak, Livni and the rest of the idiot Chamberlains are tossed out on their collectiv(ist) asses and replaced with real patriots. It clearly looks likely Netanyahu will be the replacement, and I sincerely hope that he has learned lessons from the mistakes he made while PM. Also, I hope and pray that he doesn't have to deal with another Clinton in the White House (for the sake of both nations and our civilization).

Israel’s development of a more effective anti-missile system
is absolutely essential, as last summer’s war proves. So Barak is absolutely right on that one. However, coupling that with unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank is sheer lunacy.

Just two years ago, Israel evacuated all 9,000 Israelis living in Gaza and four northern West Bank communities in an effort to pave the way for peace and a future Palestinian state. During the disengagement, Israel uprooted entire communities including schools, businesses, places of worship and the only Jewish cemetery there.

The only Israeli still in the Gaza Strip today is Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Cpl. Gilad Shalit, who was kidnapped while patrolling the Israeli side of the Gaza border June 25, 2006

Yes, I am well aware of that sad history of unilateral evacuation from Gaza and then the West Bank communities. There were istances of brutality by Israeli police on fellow Israelis. The result of evacuating Gaza was the launching of Qassam missiles from Gaza into southern Israel, with death and destruction in southern Israel, notably Sderot. How foolish was that "disengagement!" But I don't think we could blame Barak for that since he was not in the government at the time.

I'm not sure if you can say for sure that Cpl. Shalit is in the Gaza Strip today. Hopefully he is alive and well.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.