Israel’s Increasingly Dangerous Neighborhood
by Larry GreenfieldI was invited to speak on 21st century missile threats and defenses at the recent 7th annual Jerusalem Conference, 2010, held at the Regency Hotel on Mt. Scopus, in the city of David, but I was pleased as well to hear a wide variety of experts (speeches are delivered in English and Hebrew with convenient wireless earphone translation headsets).
This gathering is rooted in historic Zionism, the meaning of the land of Israel, and the spiritual meaning of Jerusalem. Many Israeli statesman and American political leaders come to address current security crises, as well as existential questions ever-present for the Jewish state still facing war.
The Palestinian Front
On the Palestinian front, many now believe that the idea of a small PLO state within the 1967 borders, to include Gaza, major parts of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, has lost its appeal within Araby.
Radical Islamism, unrealistic expectations, and daily incitement against Israel in mosques, the media, and madrassas, have all added up to another era of Palestinian intransigence and irredentism.
Unfortunately, the drive for Palestinian independence has not been equated with responsible state building leading to the kind of sovereignty that would help the Palestinian people themselves.
Palestinians universally wish to cast Israel off their shoulders, but this does not mean they support a fair division of land, or a desire to live in peaceful coexistence with a Jewish state in the middle east.
Israeli journalist and commentator Ehud Ya’ari stated that the Palestinians have now fully collapsed into the unwilling arms of the Israelis, and that Israel must urgently solve the seemingly unsolvable.
Israel is today faced with a reverse annexation: It is the Palestinians who have decided to annex Israel, because Israel did not annex them first.
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