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From Camp David to Camp David

Arie Stav

The strategic campaign of the Arabs to dwarf Israel continues with impressive success with the generous cooperation of the present government. Ehud Barak received the state of the Jews from his predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu and brought it to its present nadir. As expected, what began at Camp David in 1979 comes to deadly fruition.

At Camp David, Menachem Begin laid the groundwork for Israel's gradual capitulation in four domains:

l. The evacuation of the Sinai destroyed Israel's status as a regional power in the Middle East.

2. A principle of justice fundamental to international law was violated, namely that a territory that served the aggressor in war and was wrested from it by the state under attack, will not be returned to it. In relinquishing the Sinai, Israel not only violated international law but became a supporter of aggression. There is a certain poetic justice to the fact that this aggression is directed against Israel.

3. For the first time in the history of Zionism, a precedent was established for the destruction of Jewish settlements.

4. The "legitimate rights of the Palestinian people" were recognized. In other words, the cornerstone was laid for the Palestinian state, which is aimed at subverting the legitimacy of the state of Israel, eliminating it and replacing it.

Thus Menachem Begin perpetrated the gravest strategic blunder in the history of the Jewish state.

His successor, Yitzhak Shamir, made two grave errors.

1) The lack of response to the volleys of Iraqi missiles in the winter of 1990-91 marked the betrayal by the government of the basic reason for its existence: to defend its citizens. This severely harmed Israel's deterrent image and led to an escalation in the arms race for weapons of mass destruction and the ballistic missiles that can deliver them. If in the late 1980s the missiles aimed at the greater Tel Aviv area numbered in the dozens, today their number is close to two thousand, some of them tipped with weapons of mass destruction.

Israel is in fact merely the metropolitan area of Tel Aviv in which 75% of its Jewish population is concentrated in an area of 100 square kilometers. A fatal hit on this area is equivalent to the liquidation of Israel. The Arabs know this and until the Iraqi war, Israel's determination to deter aggression was the central war doctrine of the Israeli army and a decisive factor in the Arab unwillingness to risk war. The abandonment of this deterrent and Jewish mass flight in the nights of the Scud missiles signaled to the Arabs that Israel undermined the assumptions of its physical existence.

2) Shamir brought Israel to the Madrid Conference. This conference in turn grew out of the capitula- tion to American pressure not to react under the Iraqi missile bombardment. Here Israel shattered its own red lines. For the first time, the law that prohibited meetings with the PLO as a terrorist enemy was breached and without penalties on those who breached it: Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin and their agents who conducted the talks. In the Orwellian world Israel has created, it is only natural that Beilin, who openly broke the laws of the state, has been accorded the status of a Minister of Justice in Israel and Shimon Peres was candidate for President. The Peres and Beilin policies that breached the law and made a lie out of the principles of democracy was reinforced by the activities by Yitzhak Rabin who wanted to turn over the Golan Heights to Syria, and who breached the law of the state, paragraph 97(b) which says "Anyone who acts or intends to act to transfer a sovereign area of the state [in which the Golan is included] is liable for the penalty of death or life imprisonment."

This conference also saw the infraction of the

At Camp David, Menachem Begin laid the groundwork for Israel's gradual capitulation.

red line that had always guided Israel's policy: face-to-face negotiations rather than an international conference where Israel would play the role of the accused in a field trial. That, indeed, is what occurred. Benjamin Netanyahu, then Deputy Foreign Minister, was despatched to Madrid. Finding himself in the spotlight of the world media, liberated from his inactivity under the heavy hand of Foreign Minister David Levy, Netanyahu was carried away and sold all that could be sold under the prevailing circumstances. The Syrian demand for the Golan acquired legitimacy; the PLO came out of the closet and Israel was put in the pillory of international committees in the areas of water, refugees, disarmament and so on.

The momentum of Madrid (what Sadat loved to call "the momentum toward returning the Zionist entity to its true size") led to Oslo. At Oslo there began the disassembly of the state of the Jews in Eretz Israel itself. Yitzhak Rabin gave his seal of approval to an agreement essentially aimed at withdrawal to the borders of June 4, 1967, the division of Jerusalem, and the establishment of a Palestinian state on the outskirts of Greater Tel Aviv. The Oslo agreement did not suffice for Rabin, and before his assassination he also managed to commit himself to the delivery of the Golan Heights to Damascus.

With his rise to the position of Prime Minister, Netanyahu turned over Hebron to the Arabs, an act which even Shimon Peres had not dared to do during his own

[(Continued on p.4)]

October 2000 - 3 - Outpost

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