'A practical idealist who knew where he stood and wouldn't budge'
The New York Sun pays tribute to former Prime Minister
Yitzchak Shamir.
He was the second longest-serving premier, after Ben Gurion. It was under his leadership that Israel attended the Madrid peace conference. The parley was established without crossing Shamir’s redlines; the Palestine Liberation Organization did not have a seat, nor did the Madrid talks include Arabs from Jerusalem. It was a more hard-headed, more principled process than the one for which it was abandoned, namely Oslo.
One of our favorite facts is that history doesn’t disclose her alternatives. The world will never know what would have happened had America and the other parties been held to the standards Shamir insisted on at Madrid. No doubt there are many who will scorn the very thought. But here we are a generation after Oslo, and the Iranians are building an a-bomb, the Arafat who was embraced at Oslo is gone without achievement, the Eyptians have just elected a president who will make it a priority to seek the release of the sheik who masterminded the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the Syrians are engulfed in a civil war, the Lebanese are victims of Iranian-based terror and tyranny, and the Europeans are more hostile to Israel than ever. So the world will miss this practical idealist who knew where he stood and wouldn’t budge.
My guess is that had the world been held to Shamir's standards, we would be exactly where we are today in terms of the 'peace process' (i.e. nowhere) with 1,500 fewer dead Israelis.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Madrid Conference, Yitzchak Shamir
Aim of GHW Bush's post Gulf War I Madrid conference was to dismember Israel
A soon-to-be-published book based upon stolen archives from the Kremlin argues that it was the Soviet Empire - and not the British Empire - that was responsible for the instability in our region that persists to this day. That includes being behind some of the most heinous acts of 'Palestinian' terrorism in the 1970's. But most fascinating to me - especially in light of the way that the Israeli Left lambasted then-Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir for resisting attending it - is that the 1991 Madrid Conference was convened as a result of an agreement between George HW Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev to
dismember Israel.
From the close of World War I, the great prize of the Middle East has been the Persian Gulf. During the Cold War, America and its allies in Europe and Asia depended upon its oil for 90 percent of their energy needs; developing countries would be instantly crippled by a sharp hike in oil prices. But for the Soviets, attaining control of the Gulf could be achieved only by direct military aggression. Following the return of British forces to Kuwait in 1961 to defend the Emirate from Iraq’s Abd al-Karim Qasim—whose ambitions for Kuwait were subsequently, if temporarily, realized by Saddam Hussein—it became clear to the Soviets that the West would go to any length to defend the oil. “And so the comrades postponed the conquest of the Gulf,” writes Stroilov, “although some of them were sorely disappointed with that decision.”
What, then, was Plan B? It was “the subversion and eventual destruction of Israel.” Though not as good as the Gulf oil fields, Israel would also be a big prize. It was the only democracy in the region, the strongest military power in the pro-Western camp and, indeed, the bridgehead of the Western world. Even more importantly, the very process of crusading (or jihadding) against Israel offered fantastic political opportunities. A besieged Israel effectively meant millions of Jewish hostages in the hands of the comrades, and the threat of genocide could intimidate the West into making great concessions in the Gulf or elsewhere. On the other hand, by making the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the central problem of the Middle East, the Soviets could exploit Arab nationalism, anti-Semitism, and even Islamic religious feelings to mobilize support for their policies. Indeed, under the banner of Arab solidarity, the socialist influence in the region grew far beyond the socialist regimes and parties.
The code-name for this operation against Israel, according to Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from the Soviet Bloc, was “SIG”—Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or “Zionist Governments.” In a National Review article, Pacepa recalls a conversation he had with KGB chairman Yuri Andropov, who envisioned fomenting “a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world. … We had only to keep repeating our themes—that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist countries’ bankrolled by rich Jews.”
In the mid-1970s, Pacepa recalls, the KGB ordered its Eastern European sister agencies to scour the Middle East for trusted agents, train them in disinformation and terrorism, and export a “rabid, demented hatred for American Zionism.” They showered the region with an Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and KGB-fabricated documents alleging that Israel and the United States were dedicated to converting the Islamic world into a Jewish colony.
Following the defeat of the Egyptians in the Six Day War, the Soviets came to a second realization: A conventional military confrontation with Israel, and by extension the West, carried too great a risk of escalating into nuclear war. A change of tactics was required. Gen. Alexander Sakharovsky, then head of the KGB’s intelligence arm, explained this to his East European colleagues: “[T]errorism should become our main weapon.” Sakharovsky boasted that airplane hijackings were his own invention; he decorated his office with a world map, covered in flags, each marking a successful hijacking. Though the PLO managed to unite various terrorist organizations, “the supreme headquarters of the whole network was, of course, the Kremlin,” Stroilov writes, and “the evidence accumulated at this point leaves no doubt that the whole system was invented by Moscow as a weapon against the West, and the PLO was a jewel in their crown.”
Pacepa lists examples of KGB-sponsored acts of terrorism: November 1969, armed attack on the El Al office in Athens, leaving 1 dead and 14 wounded; May 30, 1972, Ben Gurion Airport attack, leaving 22 dead and 76 wounded; December 1974, Tel Aviv movie theater bomb, leaving 2 dead and 66 wounded; March 1975, attack on a Tel Aviv hotel, leaving 25 dead and 6 wounded; May 1975, Jerusalem bomb, leaving 1 dead and 3 wounded; July 4, 1975, bomb in Zion Square, Jerusalem, leaving 15 dead and 62 wounded; April 1978, Brussels airport attack, leaving 12 wounded; May 1978, attack on an El Al plane in Paris, leaving 12 wounded.
Stroilov’s documents indicate that the Soviets and Syrians also took credit for blowing up the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1984.
Pacepa, as some of you may recall, was the first to report explicitly that Yasser Arafat was gay.
Then there's the Madrid Conference:
Stroilov’s archives closely detail the Soviet mediation of secret negotiations between Washington and Baghdad during the fall of 1990. The superpowers apparently came near to agreement on rather extraordinary terms: Saddam would withdraw from Kuwait in exchange for a scheme, proposed by the Soviets, to hold a U.N.-sponsored international conference designed to result in the disarmament and dismemberment of Israel.
The documents show that George H.W. Bush agreed to that deal in principle—so long as the linkage was kept secret. G. BUSH. I agree with everything you’ve said. We do not seek laurels of individual or collective victors in the fight against Saddam Hussein. But both you and I want the new order to prevail in the future world. For this, we need to find such a response which provides guarantees against an aggression in the future. As far as I see, that is exactly what many provisions of your plan are designed for.
He wanted Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait as if unconditionally; the United States would then pressure Israel to join an ostensibly unrelated “peace process.” Bush asked Gorbachev to see what Saddam thought about this. Saddam demurred: He would only agree if the deal was made openly. It is fascinating to compare Stroilov’s transcripts with the memoirs written by Bush, Brent Scowcroft, and James Baker. The latter memoirs suggest that Gorbachev wanted to mention Israel and the Palestinians in a joint public statement but then conceded the point. In fact, the argument was about a secret deal, not a public statement.
That UN-sponsored international conference was, of course, Madrid, but it was eventually
sponsored by the US and the USSR.
One more little bonus. Here's a little background on current EU Foreign Policy chief Catherine Ashton:
A final note: While not discussed at length in this book, the Bukovsky archives show clearly that nuclear disarmament campaigns across Europe were largely funded by the Soviet bloc. The money was channeled through communist parties or other pro-Soviet organizations.
Baroness Catherine Ashton was the treasurer for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from 1980 to 1982. The CND was notoriously secretive about its sources of funding and refused to submit its accounts to independent audit; when it was finally forced to do so under immense pressure, the auditors discovered that 38 percent of their annual income could not be traced back to the original donors. Will Howard, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, was responsible for this part of the fund-raising.
Baroness Ashton is now the E.U. foreign policy chief, leading negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran.
Read the whole thing. There's much more here that I didn't post.
Labels: First Gulf War, George H. W. Bush, Madrid Conference, Mikhail Gorbachev, Palestinian terrorism, USSR
We've been here before
Jennifer Rubin points out the
lack of transparency in the Obama administration's approach to Hamas and then asks
How can Israel sit down when we don’t even know the identity of the Palestinians’ representation?
We've been down that road before. In 1991, the George H.W. Bush administration railroaded Israel into the Madrid Conference in the aftermath of Gulf War I. At the time, the PLO was about where Hamas is today in terms of recognizing Israel (not that they have really moved much further but they were saying the same things that Hamas is saying today). Israel agreed to go to Madrid provided that any 'Palestinians' there would be part of the Jordanian delegation and not connected to the PLO.
Well, surprise. It turns out that every time the 'Palestinians' needed to answer something, they would excuse themselves and go call Yasser Arafat. Eventually, the sham was exposed, but there was nothing Israel could do about it, and the PLO terror organization gained credibility as a result of the US granting it legitimacy.
Will a 'Palestinian Authority' delegation to 'peace talks' include people chosen by Hamas? Bet on it.
Labels: Hamas, Madrid Conference, PLO
The New York Sun pays tribute to former Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir. 
