In light of a widening range of threats to Israel’s security, for the first time a group of senior Israeli generals has come together to outline the basic principles of a defense policy – rooted in a consensus spanning past and present Israeli governments – which is focused on Israel maintaining defensible borders.
The crisis over the Hamas flotilla to Gaza illustrates how some of Israel’s critical alliances in the Middle East are changing, especially its relationship with Turkey, and the importance of designing a defense policy that takes into account the uncertainties that Israel faces with many of its neighbors.
Recent events only underscore that it is critical for Israel to preserve the principle of defending itself by itself.
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Executive Summary
Introduction: Restoring a Security-First Peace Policy Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Moshe Yaalon In his major policy speech at Bar-Ilan University in 2009, Prime
Minister B enjamin Netanyahu
articulated a major shift in Israel’s policy – a restoration of Israel’s traditional security-based approach to achieving a lasting peace.
When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin entered into the Oslo Accords, he envisioned something along the lines of the “Allon Plan” for Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Drafted shortly after the Six-Day War, the plan called for Israel to retain sovereignty in some of the territories it came to control in Judea and Samaria, and delineated a security border extending from the Jordan Valley up the steep eastern slopes of the Judea-Samaria mountain ridge and retained sovereignty over Jerusalem as Israel’s united capital.
In the aftermath of Arafat’s rejection of Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s peace offer, the Palestinian suicide bombing war that followed, Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, the Second Lebanon War, the failed Annapolis talks, and the recent war in Gaza, the Netanyahu government is readopting the notion that safeguarding Israel’s vital security requirements is the only path to a viable and durable peace with our Palestinian neighbors.
The Palestinians have adhered to their historical narrative of armed struggle that denies Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation-state, regardless of signed agreements or unilateral Israeli withdrawals. The Palestinians have interpreted Israeli territorial withdrawals as signs of weakness and retreat that have energized their struggle to force additional Israeli territorial concessions
Until now, the Palestinians have only been asked for a “top-down”
peace process,
throughout which their leaders have held meetings, shaken hands, attended peace conferences, and even signed agreements with Israeli leaders. But when a peace process does not sprout from the grassroots of a society, it is both pointless and useless. Until threeyear- old children in Ramallah stop being taught to idolize “martyrs” who blow themselves up for jihad against Israelis and Jews, there will only be a “peace process” in the imaginations of the self-deluded.