ELLIOTT ABRAMS AND THE PATH OF UNREALISM

While Bush's original policy included many provisos requiring that the
Arabs show by word and deed their support for peace with Israel, when
the Arabs dismally failed to deliver on those obligations, showing
once again that are implacable enemies to Israel, Bush nevertheless
insisted that Israel follow through on then one-sided Israeli
surrenders. Here again was revealed US inconstancy in supporting
Israel and reality that appeasement of the Arabs is the US priority.

Abrams in his article wants Israel to disregard Bush's (and the US's)
betrayal and to return to the failed Bush approach on the basis of
Abram's now astonishing belief that an Obama administration, less
openly committed to Israel than the Bush pose, will make good on
demands on the Arabs that Bush failed to uphold.

Surely, one must discover Abrams to be a star graduate of the Bernard
Madoff Confidence Man School. Like Madoff, Abrams uses his past
credentials of ties to the Jewish people -- he is the son-in-law of
Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary and he too a former arch
supporter of Israel -- and his ties with US political leaders who were
strong advocates of Israel to give him credibility in urging Israel to
adopt elements of the Arab step by step plan to reverse the existence
of Israel.

Abrams is a man obviously totally dedicated to his career within the
US foreign policy establishment. He was recently rewarded by
appointment as a fellow of the Council of Foreign Relations, no doubt
receiving that plumb because he has served narrow, short-sighted, US
foreign policy interests by selling out Israel. Abrams probably
delivered his father-in-law, Podhoretz (and Commentary) to the support
of the disastrous Gaza surrender and its Jewish ethnic cleansing that
had squandered the security of the entire southern tier of Israel.
This danger of such a policy was amply warned of at the time but such
clear eyed warnings had been overruled by the likes of Abrams and
Podhoretz.

Despite the Gaza blunder that put almost 1 million Israelis under the
threat of Hamas rockets, Abrams, we see, remains incorrigible. He now
wants Israel to repeat the Gaza type surrender within the eastern
territories of Judea and Samaria -- the very names of these
territories that I personally heard used by the late King Hussein of
Jordan on a major US Sunday interview show. While the Gaza disaster
involved less than 10,000 Jews made refugees in their own country by
being ethnically cleansed from their homes -- tragic enough in itself
-- in the ethnic cleansing proposed by Abrams for Israel's eastern
territories, the Jewish numbers refugeed could reach to the hundreds
of thousands. (Surely such a plan makes legitimate the policy of
ethnic cleansing since no one seems to find anything wrong with
allegedly gaining peace at such a price.) Even the credible Bernie
Madoff would not have had the nerve to advocate such insanity.

In advocating for this new disaster, Abrams argues that the stakes are
indeed peace for Israel, as though the Arabs really wish peace and as
though Israel has gotten an ounce of peace from all her trades of land
to her Arab enemies. Even amidst the environment of Arab hate against
Israel, Abrams paints rosy pictures of Arab leaders that no one has
ever heard of who allegedly are working for peace with Israel and he
evokes images of Arab forces cultivated and groomed to enforce peace
with Israel -- a peace that has not existed for over 60 years.

Political scientists often lecture on how a relatively small militant
group of only 10% of a population are enough to create bloody
revolutions. In fact, among the Arabs, such militant factions -- known
as terrorists -- number many times the magic 10%. These are the groups
that have dominated Arab life over the years, keeping the pot boiling
against peace with Israel -- far more numerous than the minuscule
forces for Arab peace that Abrams describes. Despite this, Abrams has
the nerve to allege that Israelis and their supporters should assume
that now the Messianic era of peace is upon us and that Israel,
trusting in Obama, can safely put her head in the Arab jackal's mouth.

The Abrams fallacies abound. Among its assumptions is that the Arabs
in the Israeli territories are some kind of powerless minority like
the Amish of Pennsylvania and are not the vanguard of a vast majority
of the Muslim Arab world, numbering about 200 million, that wants
Israel removed from the Middle East.

This so-called minority has over the years received vast and
continuous support from the Muslim world and its supporters -- wealth
that has been used for war with Israel amidst Arab poverty that is
used to keep this population motivated with hate against Israel.
Notice that, no sooner did the Hamas leaders, elected by the Gazan
residents -- like the Germans who elected Hitler -- have their own
infrastructure destroyed as a consequence of their having mounted
attacks on Israel, but that now Hillary Clinton, carrying out Obama's
Arab apeasement policy, rushes to turn over almost a billion of
dollars to rebuild the Gaza of the unreconstructed enemy -- this while
Hamas rockets continue to rain on Israel. Clearly Israel is on her own
and if she is to survive must take responsibility for making this a
reality.

If Abrams truly wants Israel to embark on the path of reality and not
failure, then he would urge Israel to face the reality of an
implacable Muslim-Arab world that wants a new Arab state only for the
purpose of using it as a lever to deprive Israel of her state. Abrams'
alleged "path of realism" would bring "Gaza" to Israel's eastern
territories. Israel's surrendering of territory to smiling Arabs has
been shown not at all to be the path of peace since every advantage
thus gained by the Arabs has been used to continue their war against
Israel.

Realism requires Israelis to recognize that Israel's condition
resembles that of a proverbial embattled man that holds a vicious
jackal powerless by the tail, which, if released, would mortally maul
him. Abrams would have such an embattled Israel let go of that Arab
tail without Israel having created with certainty the condition in
which that jackal cannot exercise its vicious desire. The reality is
that, like the jackal, the Arabs do not have willing peace to give
Israel and they must be coerced to do so just as the Nazis were
coerced.

Empowering the Arabs through Israeli surrenders, as Abrams proposes,
will hardly succeed in "laying a foundation for peace" in the mythical
"Palestine" -- no such nation ever existed in history. As experience
shows, empowerment of the Arabs will only enable them to quintuple
their low intensity war against Israel. It will make a reality of the
Arab dream to infuse millions of new Arabs into Israel -- the Arab
horde currently living in Lebanon, having been cultivated over six
decades for no other purpose than replacing the Jewish population of
Israel and make Israel disappear. WHO NEEDS THAT?

The logic of realism entails that Israel gird up to resist her
rollback. The Gaza rollback promoted by Bush resulted in opening a
dangerous route for Arab weaponry and invasion into Israel from the
south. Gaza is now an Arab military bastion attacks Israel to this
very day. Realism dictates Israel's recognition of this strategic
threat and the necessity to answer it -- not by US, Un, or Arab
promises -- by severing the southern border of Gaza from Egypt by a
wide, north-south corridor about ten to 20 miles wide along the
Egyptian border and ethnically cleansing of Arab residents, using the
tool that the world has already made legitimate in Gaza for the Jews.
This action will in one shot neutralize the Gaza tunnels and render
the remainder of Gaza militarily isolated. This is realism.

Such a policy of victory will demonstrate that Israel has recognized
that her security lies in military victory over her Arab enemy -- the
kind of military victory that the Arabs want to achieve against a
weakened Israel. Such an Israel victory will have created an effective
barrier against the Arab enemy that does not depend on its imaginary
willingness to live in peace for its success, nor on equally
perfidious US promises. It will also demonstrate that the abomination
of Israel giving up her strategic territories to deadly enemies is a
thing of the past. It will tell that, henceforth, the warring Arab
enemy will be paid back in kind and that, in the event of Arab
defeats, the Arabs will lose strategic lands they occupy in making war
-- the very same penalty that awaits Israel were Israel to be
defeated.

Realism demands that the Gaza victory model become the pattern for
responding to Arab attack. If the Arabs attack, there is no reason for
Israel to suffer living with a nine mile wide neck along the
Mediterranean that makes her vulnerable. to enemy attack. Thus, Israel
will no longer respond to Arab attack ineffectively, tit for tat, but
will respond in a manner to make another attack unlikely since the
Arabs will have lost their attack platform, permanently forfeiting
the lands used in such an attack and its Arab residents ethnically
cleansed.

Where will displaced the Arabs live? (Know that no Arabs worry about
such things in connection with defeated Jews that they would surely
remove.) These Arabs will have some options. They could live
compressed within existing Arab enclaves in Israel's territories where
they will have less capability to mount further attacks. A better
option is their relocation to any of the vast land holdings of the
Arab world. If Jordan cannot accept sizable relocated populations,
perhaps it can become a way-station elsewhere. This elsewhere could
possibly be in Iraq living in new homes among the Sunni Arab
population that some Arab leaders in the past have felt needed to be
there to augment it and to balance the must larger Shiite population.

The point here is that the Arab nations -- for the sake of peace --
would be called on to accept and integrate such Arab populations. This
is the same solution needed for the massive Arab population, alleged
to be refugees, cultivated in Lebanon. Were the Arabs truly wishing
peace with Israel, this must be solution for this Lebanese population.
What is more, enabling such Arab relocations must be seen as the
significant sign that the Arabs truly want peace with Israel. For can
it be believed that the Arabs really want to live in peace when their
demands of Israel would render Israel incapable of survival? An Israel
that can defend itself without the need to trust to its security to
others is the sine quo non for any realistic peace agreement.

Is the relocation of Arabs or other populations that are a threat to
peace extremist solutions unheard of in history? In fact, this is the
very solution that the Western Allies -- England, Germany, the US, and
others -- imposed after World War II . In this, 12 million ethnic
Germans from lands outside Germany were relocated to Germany,
undertaken for "the sake of peace." This is the same goal that Abrams
wishes to achieve by the ethnic cleansing of Jews and the surrender of
Israel's territories to the Arabs. But ask yourself, then, which of
the alternative proposals will in fact lead to peace?

Is the path of peace the weakening Israel and relocating Jews from her
territories -- territories that belong to her as set aside by the
League of Nations for a Jewish homeland -- and establishing a new Arab
state there that is certain to share the desire to destroy Israel with
its neighbors? Gaza proved the insanity of this approach, which will
only lead to continuing war to destroy Israel.

Isn't peace more likely to result from the removal of dangerous Arab
populations from strategic areas that threaten Israel? Rather than
ethnic cleansing Jews as Abrams proposes, ethnic cleansing of Arabs to
create the secure borders that UN Resolution 242 calls for,
strengthening Israel, makes unlikely subsequent Arab attack from
forces that have lost strategic positions to successfully carry them
out. This is indeed the realistic approach to peace.

Another point to be emphasized, is that the Abrams approach requires
Israel to surrender her very own legitimate territories, an unjust
requirement to give lands to those who they don't belong to and who
war to destroy the Jewish state. Meanwhile, not only does the second
approach of removing Arabs as the German ethnics were removed for the
sake of peace create peace in the region, it also morally fulfills
what was given to the Jewish people by the nations of the world under
the League of Nations' Mandate of Palestine.

The realistic proposal of attaining peace by relocating threatening
Arab populations from Israel's territories to Arab nations is, of
course, a solution which the Arabs will not willingly accept. The
Arabs will not acquiesce in doing so, not because it is not practical
-- 12 million German ethnics were once relocated -- or because of the
reason that it will not bring peace, but because the Arabs do not want
peace with Israel but rather Israel's destruction.

The only way that such a solution can be attained, insuring Israel's
long term survival, is through Israeli military victory. No one else
will make this possible. The realization of this compels Israel to
adopt the policy that, henceforth, were the Arabs to persist in making
war, the Israeli response must involve as part of her war aims the
relocation of dangerous Arab populations in the way that the Western
Allies once carried out for ethnic Germans in Europe and the way the
people of the Indian subcontinent carried out for millions in
separating the populations for peace that resulted in Pakistan and
Bangladesh. This approach involving Israeli victory is far better than
the Abram's approach that is based on Israeli surrenders for no peace
that will certainly lead to Israel's ultimate defeat, her people
massively butchered and, those surviving, in mass removals that the
Arabs have no compunctions in carrying out. No such consequence of
butchery would accompany the preferred Israeli victory.

Where did The Weekly Standard dig up this Abrams?

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David Basch is an architect and city planner in New York as well as the Freeman Center's political philosopher. Basch is also an expert on Shakespeare and the author of the book, The Hidden Shakespeare, which proves through talmudic and other Jewish sources that Shakespeare was in fact Jewish.