golan heights and bottoms: grand designs

New cover versions of an old song. Through terror and clamor they can win concessions, and that the Israelis are willing to sacrifice their security bit by bit to win temporary calm. From time to time there is an ebb, but never a cessation. It is certainly something to re-evaluate, this mass of contradictions and the labyrinth known as “land for peace”; maybe Israel should invert the hypothesis and say “we’ll give you peace, if you stay away from our land.” Now Al-Qaeda terrorists and other virulent strains of Salafist kookisms are gradually providing the example of Gresham’s Law at work in the Syrian civil war among the so-called Free Syrian rebels: the bad is definitely driving out the good that was there at the outset of the uprising.

Which brings the issue back to the security aspect of controlling land and leaving aside the Bible’s prophecies as the basis for Israel’s claim which are the basis for effective arguments in reinforcing the Israeli position:  AL-Qaeda is now controlling the Syrian side of the border,  and are at very dicey half mile form the Israeli position. Considering that there are thousands and thousands of them attracting more by the day, just imagine if Israel had given back the Golan for a scrap of paper. Some of these Muslim radicals were trained and funded by both America and the European Union. Forty years ago it was the PLO and its secular Marxist trappings and today its Allah’s warriors with the ideology of an Islam that is not intrinsic to the faith that has had to be tailored to fit the goal. In any event, either or, the goal is to murder Jews which is the unifying theme underlying both agendas.

So, there is no valid reason for Israel  to give up the Golan. Nothing to be gained. And the same argument can even be applied to the West bank, the Judea and Samaria regions. Albeit there are demographic and diplomatic points to be gained, the template and pattern have been traced in which violent fundamentalists will use the territory as a rocket launching pad putting the onus back on Israel to confront its difficulties of self-image. Because, hard as it is to conceive, Israel has difficulty coming to terms with itself as a Jewish state.  The internal struggles within various Arab factions will always use confrontation with Israel as a safety valve in an effort to save their backsides.

Ultimately, Israel must learn to show strength based on genuine principles, being foremost among them the need to protect the lives of her citizens and focus on her own priorities in determining policy. In the land of Israel today, security provisions should never be sacrificed in the hope of achieving diplomatic success. Simply put, concessions do not breed an attitude of conciliation and peace.

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…On Tuesday evening, seven days after Israel reportedly struck a biological weapons development center in Damascus, Islamist fighters in Syria released another of their videos.

No longer standing on the horizontal tips of newly acquired Scud missiles, as they were seen doing last month, a group of four Jabhat al-Nusra fighters, their faces cloaked by kaffiyas, read from a statement. “We will put our hands on those weapons,” the man in the middle shouted regarding Assad’s biological and chemical arsenal. “We will attack and take over those sites and then use them against the Zionists, from Syrian territory, until we reach Jerusalem.”

The State Department in December called Jabhat al-Nusra, literally the assistance front, “an alias for AQI” – al-Qaeda in Iraq – and added it to the US list of foreign terror organizations, freezing all of its assets and rendering it a crime to provide the organization with any and all aid. According to State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, the organization, representing nine percent of the rebel forces in Syria, has carried out 600 strikes since November 2

including “over 40″ suicide bombings and a string of successful guerrilla assaults.

The leader of the group is a man who goes by the name Abu-Muhammad al-Julani – the moniker itself indicating, at least rhetorically, the importance placed on the Golan Heights – and its goal, according to Nuland, is “to hijack the struggles of the Syrian people for its own malign purposes.”

The nature of these malign purposes is clear in the short term and murky thereafter. The Salafist groups in Syria – local and foreign, loosely and directly affiliated with al-Qaeda, experienced in battle and inexperienced – have set as their initial goal the toppling of Bashar Assad’s secular, Alawite regime and replacing it with a Sunni Islamist one.

But what after that? Will they follow the path of their poisonous rhetoric and target Israel? Will they stick to the initial focus of al-Qaeda at the time of its founding in the late 80s and focus on toppling the Arab regimes? Will they turn toward Jordan and the long-teetering Hashemite throne? Will they surge into Lebanon and battle the Hezbollah Shiites for supremacy? And in what way will the struggle in Syria, in the heart of the lands holy to Islam, impact al-Qaeda and its ilk in the age of the Arab Spring? Read More:http://www.timesofisrael.com/will-the-al-qaeda-affiliates-ousting-assad-turn-to-israel-next/

and: legitimate security concern or pretext for Arab griping….