SYRIA HAS FINALLY acknowledged its ownership of weapon grade chemical weapons, and has been threatening to use them if there is any interference from outside.
There have been reports of such weapons being moved around the country, igniting fears that Assad was preparing to use them against the rebels. Now it is Israel who fears into whose hands these weapons may fall.
Hezbollah is an ally of Syria and is fanatical enough to use any device it can get its hands on to destroy the Jewish state. They would not, for instance, think twice about using the nuclear option if it was available to them. So an arsenal of chemical weapons would be seen as just another means of bringing Israel to its knees.
Israel is watching events in all of the Arab Middle East with great apprehension. Egypt could become the main office for the Muslim Brotherhood; while a divided Lebanon could implode at any moment following the events in Syria. Jordan has historically sought peaceful coexistence with Israel, but would, as she did in the Six Day War, come under great pressure to join in, if once the Arab world (or a large part of it) once more decided to try its luck.
It is important for Jordan to continue its balancing act between supporting her Arab neighbours and peaceful coexistence with Israel. She must also stand ready to jump ship if in any conflict with Israel, Israel looks like losing it. In which case – Allah Aqba!…the filthy Jews have been defeated!
Each day we see what Assad is prepared to do to his own people in order to cling to power. What would happen to the people of Israel if Syria or any Arab nation under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood, coupled with their Hezbollah and Hamas auxiliaries, marched in victory into Israel? What could the Jew expect from such people, who have very little compassion for their own people, let alone the Jews?
The Arab Spring has overturned the old order represented by the Camp David Accords. In Egypt, as soon as the Muslim Brotherhood feel they are strong enough and can square the military, they will gladly shred the Camp David Accords brokered by the US president, Jimmy Carter, and signed by the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and President Anwar El Sadat of Egypt in 1979.
These accords had, to each of the signatories benefit, kept war at arm’s length. Hosni Mubarak no doubt had many faults; but he did preserve the peace between the Arab world and Israel, which could, even today bring the great military powers into the conflict should Israel’s nationhood be endangered.
In Syria today we see both Russia and China putting up a firewall around Assad. Russia needs the Syrian seaport of Tartus for its navy’s use. It is the last naval facility Russia has outside of its home ports (that is, since the demise of the Soviet Union) and is regarded by them as vital: while China needs Syria’s oil to help keep China’s economic growth in full bloom. Which is why both nations are prepared to upset the United Nations. Each country has to put their own needs before those of the international community. It is a lesson long forgotten by, in particular, European nations eager to conjoin.
ISRAEL IS RIGHT to feel nervous about the almost volcanic events they are currently surrounded by. The future is difficult to predict, and those who have tried in the past have invariably been disappointed. But the unfolding drama created by the Arab Spring does not bode well for the state of Israel. Vengeance is now abroad. When all settles down and after, finally, Assad, Mubarak, Saddam, and Gadaffi have all left the stage; the theatre in which they performed will be even less welcoming of the Jewish state.
I feel that those who have been chosen through election, via the Arab Spring, will not want to relinquish their power. To put it, as my brother puts it, how many of those democratically elected to their posts will regard the democratic mandate as a lifelong office not requiring further legitimacy from the electorate?
Democracy has to evolve, it cannot be imposed, as the international democratic community seems to believe it to be capable of. Israel laid their democratic foundations from the very beginning of the Jewish state. The Jewish people were drawn by instinct to democracy by their experiences within the Diaspora, and have held it aloft as the best system that upholds freedom and justice.
It was natural for those who managed to survive, through allied liberation, the death camps in Europe, that they would want to be part of a society that believed in freedom and liberty. The freedom to speak allowed without the sinister knock on the door; and without a Stasi neighbour informing on them.
Israel was once the only democracy in the Middle East – now we must ask ourselves; how long will it be before she retains the title? I do not think that once the Muslim Brotherhood wins power in Egypt, or, for that matter anywhere else in the Arab world, they would want to relinquish it to the ballot box.
VERY SOON, ONE FEELS, the state of Israel, will have to once again fight for its very existence. This time she will find it much harder to defeat her many enemies in the region; and could once more be faced with the awful prospect of a return to the Diaspora where each and every Jew have been the chosen scapegoats and demonized with little means of defending themselves, for over 1,000 years.
In the past Israel could count upon the United States to help with its defences and give billions in aid. But will America act this time to come to the aid of the Jewish state? If the final battle comes on Obama’s watch, then the answer must be no.
Apart from the real possibility that Obama is more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than to the preservation of a Jewish state; he is also a liberal Democrat, and as such would lack the military ruthlessness needed to defeat Israel’s enemies.
I hope I am proven wrong when the time comes; I want to be wrong- deeply wrong. But I think Obama will give Israel fair wind in order to get re-elected. After which, without a third term beckoning, he will let his true loyalties flourish.
It is not only in the Middle East that the Jewish people find themselves hemmed in. But Jews all over the world are now being confronted by a wave of anti-Semitism, and not only from traditional far Right sources. Now under the fig-leaf of anti-Zionism, the Left are joining in. While in the past the outer fringes of the Left have been anti-Semitic[1]; today, because of their support for the Palestinians the centre-Left liberals are joining in.
The culture at the BBC is one that supports the Palestinians - when its sole function at all times, as an institution that has millions of Jews and their supporters paying a licence fee to help keep it afloat, is surly to remain above the fray and at all times remain neutral.
Until one was kidnapped, the BBC actually had a Gaza correspondent; while another of their correspondents in that part of the world, broke down and cried when Yasser Arafat died. All of this on top of bias reporting by their Middle East correspondents.
The liberal press, like the Guardian are openly supportive of the Palestinians. Which is all well and good, because we have a choice of whether or not to buy the Guardian – but we are ordered by our government to pay to watch the BBC on threat of imprisonment.
AS THE STORM CLOUDS gather, not only for the state of Israel, but also for Jews living in the Diaspora; those of us who were born close enough to the Second World War’s end to appreciate the inhuman, cruel, ruthless, and heartless brutality of the Holocaust, now sit amazed by the unlearned lesson of history, by those present generations, regarding Jews.
Holocaust denying was once a fringe practice that only the likes of the BNP took serious. But as part of their anti-Semitism, the Arab World buys into this fiction, including the Palestinians: and if the Palestinians buy into it, then why not those on the Left who support them. Ancient hatreds of blood libel are once more surfacing. The Elders of Zion, that long since discredited work of fiction created by the Russian intelligence service in the early part of the 20th century to invoke the pogroms against the Jews needed whenever the tsar found himself in economic difficulties with his people; is now being treated seriously once more.
‘Popular anti-Semitism[2]’ has now returned 67 years after the ending of the Holocaust. The Palestinians have gripped the emotions of the Left. Emotions, after all, are to do with feeling. Objectivity will always falls fowl of sensation and passion.
It was, I think under the reign of the Roman Emperor Hadrian 117-138 AD, that ancient Judea was given the title of Palestine. It had always belonged to the Jews and became, through the Diaspora in the 19th century, the Jewish peoples one hope of returning to their ancient homeland. Like the Arabs, the Jews were a distinct people. But the Jews were driven from their ancient lands and forever subject to the whims of prejudices from any country they found themselves seeking residence in.
Today in Israel the Jews have returned to their ancient homeland and turned it from a dessert into a fertile nation that is able to feed itself as well as produce advanced technology. Israel has its own high technological industry which America and Europe seek to take advantage of – especially in the field of military technology.
Israel must survive. All it insists upon from its Arab neighbours is to be allowed to do so. The Jewish state is under a threat greater than at any time in its past. Its survival is now questionable unless the West is prepared to support it, if need be, militarily - but it will hopefully not be proved needed.
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