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الخميس 17/05/2007 |
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الخميس 17/05/2007 |
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تحاوروا
مع سوريا وتجنبوا الحرب القادمة بقلم:
دافيد كيمشي جاروزاليم
بوست - 11/5/2007 Talk
with Syria, avoid the next war By
DAVID KIMCHE Let's
face it. Nearly all of us thought the war last summer
was justified and, despite everything that Judge
Winograd wrote in his report, we still think so. The
people who applauded the decision so enthusiastically
could not, of course, have known the manner in which it
was taken; they could not have known that the army was
not ready, that there was no clear-cut game plan, no
strategic depth to the decision. There was an implicit
reliance on our army and on our leaders. The feeling was
that Hizbullah had crossed a red line, and had to be
dealt with, and I believe that feeling was correct. There
are times when a country has to go to war, when a
Churchillian decision is preferable to a Chamberlainian
policy of appeasement. Yet war must be a means of last
resort, to be launched only after all other avenues have
been tried, and blocked. As we approach the summer
months, we hear an increasing number of voices warning
of another war in the North, but this time with We
are a country with rich experience of wars. Yet at least
one war, one of the most bitter and deadly of them all,
the Yom Kippur War, could have been avoided. We could
have prevented it in almost exactly the same fashion
that we can prevent a war with Anwar
Sadat, just like Bashar
Assad, offered to enter into peace
negotiations with us. More than a year before the Yom
Kippur War exploded on us, he told us "peace in
exchange for Sinai." We turned him down, and the
result was - eventually - that we did agree to peace in
exchange for Sinai, but only after a war in which more
than 2,000 Israeli soldiers were killed and many more
thousands wounded. The
Agranat committee of investigation, amazingly,
exonerated the prime minister, although Golda Meir's
fault in allowing the war to happen was a thousand times
more severe than anything that Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert did last year. She could have replied
to Sadat, "Yes, let's enter into
negotiations," just as Olmert could say the same to
Assad today. She could have averted the war, and the
deaths of 2,000 soldiers, just as our government can do
today. How
many will die if fighting flares in the Golan this
summer? Every single loss of life will have been in
vain, for eventually we will be negotiating with the
Syrians, and we will reach an agreement with Our
National Security Adviser, Ilan Mizrahi, went on record
last week declaring that the Syrian overtures for peace
negotiations were genuine. Mizrahi is not well known to
the Israeli public. He
was a top operative in the Mossad before landing the job
of national security adviser. He does not seek
publicity; he shies away from it. He is, however, highly
intelligent. He would not have made such a statement
unless he had analyzed the Syrian situation in the most
thorough manner possible, and unless he was utterly
convinced that it was necessary for us to engage the
Syrians - in talks and not in arms. So
the question must be asked: Why does Olmert insist in
walking in the footsteps of Golda Meir, making the same
terrible mistake that she did? It can't be because of
the Americans for, after all, we have seen Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice ensconced with
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem, to say nothing of
the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in The
sad truth is that Olmert is so weak today that he is
incapable of leading any new initiative. Instead of
leading, he is a hostage of what he perceives to be
public opinion. Far easier to do nothing than to risk
the opprobrium of some of his followers by taking
courageous steps to defuse the conflict with our
neighbors, even if, by ignoring the Syrian overtures, he
risks a repeat performance of Yom Kippur. That
conflagration was caused by the same attitude of
refusing to talk peace with our neighbors. There
is an old Arab proverb that says qabla dar, bahath
al-jar - before buying a house, see who are the
neighbors. We did not have that privilege when we
returned to this land. The Syrians are not easy
neighbors. They are arming Hizbullah, they are backing
the Hamas
extremists, and they are courting If
we don't, and if history repeats itself and we find
ourselves at war this summer with Syria,
we won't need another Winograd Committee to tell us
where we went wrong. It will be only too plain for all
of us to see. ----------------- نشرنا
لهذه المقالات لا يعني أنها
تعبر عن وجهة نظر المركز كلياً
أو جزئياً
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من حق الزائر الكريم أن ينقل وأن ينشر كل ما يعجبه من موقعنا . معزواً إلينا ، أو غير معزو .ـ |
