News and Updates

The projection of Iranian power through proxies in the Middle East creates a critical dilemma for Israel, and we must make difficult decisions now to secure our future. This was the message at a special policy briefing sponsored by American Friends of Likud and webcast live from the Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem on March 30 entitled Israel at the Crossroads: Palestinians and Gaza in the Shadow of Iran. Likud Anglos heard Likud MK Yuval Steinitz, Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror, and Dan Diker tackle security and political aspects of Iran's nuclear program, Hamas's takeover of Gaza, the Second Lebanon War and Israeli negotiations with Palestinians. The panel was moderated by Ari Harow, Likud Anglos Chair and Bureau Chief for Likud Leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

MK Yuval Steinitz (photo) Israel has failed to confront the challenge to security posed by Iran's two proxy armies on Israel's border: Hamas in post-withdrawal Gaza, and Hizbollah in southern Lebanon. Any concessions to Fatah will only strengthen Hamas, just as the Israeli turnover of Gaza to Fatah ultimately created a new Iranian proxy base, and weaken Israel's moral authority to confront Iran and terrorist organizations, according to MK Yuval Steinitz, former Chair and current member of the Knesset Defense and Foreign Relations Committee.

By negotiating with PLO President Mahmoud Abbas, clearly an unreliable negotiating partner because of his inability to deliver on promises, while Palestinian missiles and terror attacks continue, Israel is giving up on all its previous principles, Steinitz said. Israel's government justified the Annapolis summit, and its surrender of the principle not to negotiate under fire, on grounds that the talks would help launch an anti-Iran coalition with moderate Arab states. Instead, the opposite occurred, and the Annapolis summit which launched direct Israel-Palestinian negotiations on borders, refugees and Jerusalem, was followed by deepening Iranian ties with moderate states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, while Abbas "mocked" Israel by calling for continued Arab support for armed struggle against the Jewish state.

General Yaakov Amidror (photo) There must be no cease-fire agreements with Hamas, tacit or otherwise, and the architects of the withdrawal from Gaza should acknowledge their dangerous error, according to General Yaakov Amidror, former Commander of the IDF's National Defense College and now with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Amidror said that Israel faces two bad options, but we must choose between them, and choose soon -- either a costly war now against the Hamas-led Gazan mini-state, or a temporary agreement that will lead to a far more costly and deadly future war with Hamas, perhaps under a protective Iran nuclear umbrella that will severely limit Israeli military options. He also indicated that the paradigm of a "two state solution" has failed and that Israel must develop a regional solution with Egypt and Jordan.

Gaza is a mini-state created through collaboration between the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood and Shia Iran, Amidror explained, and part of an Iranian initiative to remake the Middle East. This partnership's success in taking and holding power in Gaza shows that Sunni and Shia groups can cooperate in service of a common goal such as destroying Israel. He pointed out that the threats to Israel from south Lebanon, Gaza and Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) cannot be viewed in isolation; Iran's power is growing in all three locations, and Iranian expansionism and its threat to Israel will only increase as Iran's nuclear program nears completion.

Dan Diker (photo) The Declaration of Principles currently being negotiated represent a collapse of traditional Israeli positions not only on defensible borders but also on the division of Jerusalem and the Israeli absorption of Palestinian refugees, said Dan Diker, of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and formerly of IBA News. Secure and defensible borders, the cornerstone of U.N. resolution 242, must be of primary concern in any diplomatic arrangement regarding the hilly area of the West Bank. This is even more important now given Iran's revolutionary impulse and drive for regional dominance.

A "shelf agreement" like the proposed Declaration of Principles is problematic even if never signed since it would establish a floor for demanded future Israeli concessions, allow the Palestinian Authority to avoid agreed-upon sequencing such as fighting terror first, and create a false moral equivalence between Palestinian terror and Israeli counter-terror measures. Our diplomatic generosity continues to backfire, Diker said. Israel must move from the post-Oslo approach based on concessions, which has eroded our diplomatic strength, to a rights-based diplomacy.