WORLD AT WAR: 12.31.16 - UNSC resolution promotes Mid East war

UNSC resolution promotes Mid East war - http://www.debka.com/article/25856/UNSC-resolution-promotes-Mid-East-war

 

The United States did not abandon Israel by its abstention from vetoing the UN Security Council resolution condemning settlements that was passed Friday, Dec. 23, 2016.

 

The one who abandoned Israel was US President Barack Obama - and not for the first time. During his eight years in office, Obama let Israel down at least three times on issues that jeopardized its security:

 

One of the first consequences of his 2011 "Arab Spring" initiative was the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak as Egyptian president and his direct promotion of the Muslim Brotherhood's takeover of power in Cairo.

 

Four years later, Obama turned his back on Israel to award Iran favored status. Iran was allowed to retain the infrastructure of its military nuclear program as well as continuing to develop ballistic missiles, with the help of an infusion of $250 billion in US and European sanctions relief.

 

The horror of the carnage in Syria overshadowed the fact that President Obama allowed Tehran to pump Revolutionary Guards forces into the country through Iraq in order to fight for the brutal Assad regime. The president made no effort to halt the influx of pro-Iranian Shiite groups, including the Lebanese Hezbollah, into Syria, as though it was perfectly natural and his policies had nothing to do with bringing Israel's arch-foes to its back door.

 

In 2015, too, when Obama tried to wash his hands of the Middle East at large, he opened the war for the Islamic State and its leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi to walk in and commandeer large swathes of Iraq and Syria virtually unopposed.

 

From those vantage points, the jihadists sent out a tentacle to Egyptian Sinai - close to another Israeli border.

 

Of late, the Obama has claimed he was not aware of ISIS' potential for expansion, implying that US intelligence was at fault.

 

All the same, Obama never tired of emphasizing that he had done more than any US president before him to support Israel's security, mainly in the form of advanced US weapons systems supplied for its defense. Because of the close military and intelligence ties between the two countries, no voice was raised to contradict him.

 

It is now time to point to the hypocrisy of the incumbent president's posture: Had he invested less in granting benefits and free rein to the Jewish state's closest enemies, Israel would perhaps have been less dependent on American hardware.

 

In the latest UN Security Council resolution, Israel is reprimanded on the score that "all Israeli settlement activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including east Jerusalem, are illegal under international law and constitute a major obstacle to the achievement of peace on the basis of the two-state solution."

 

Before anyone else, Barack Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry are in a position to attest to the falseness of this equation.

 

On Nov. 25, 2009, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced that Israel would impose a 10-month freeze on construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem as a concession to ease the US peace initiative. Israel gave way further on its demand for direct negotiations, when Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas dug his heels in against meeting Israeli officials face to face. John Kerry was forced to engage in shuttle diplomacy.

 

Even after those concessions for peace, the Obama initiative fell flat when it came up against Palestinian resistance.

 

The departing US president seems determined to use his last weeks in office to teach the Israeli prime minister a painful lesson he won't forget in a hurry after his White House exit on Jan. 20.

 

But he is getting it wrong one more time. The UN SC resolution will soon be reduced to a piece of paper. The Palestinians will wave it gladly in the face of the international community, but Israel won't remove a single settlement or stop building new housing estates in Jerusalem. The Prime Minister's Office made it clear that Israel is not bound by the resolution and rejects it.

 

The only concrete result will be to make peace more elusive than ever

 

The notion that Donald Trump will come riding to Israel's rescue as soon as he moves into the Oval Office is foolish. He was elected to rebuild America as a global power. That would necessarily include restoring US influence in the Middle East, but how he proposes to accomplish this is not generally known.

 

If he decides to call on Israel for support and assistance, it stands to reason that he will introduce radical changes in Obama's steps - especially the nuclear deal with Iran and the peace process with the Palestinians.

 

Not all those changes can be achieved peacefully. They may well entail the use of military force by the United States and Israel. In this sense, Security Council Resolution 2334 may turn out to be the real obstacle to peace, tending rather to promote belligerence in the Middle East, because the Palestinians and other hardliners and rejectionists will use the resolution as their justification for bashing Israel and more acts of terror.

 

Israel and Syria - By Ira Sharkansky - https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/80718/israel-and-syria-opinion/#Gtz2UJuzScu5xKfy.97

 

Estimates are ranging to half million deaths in the four year civil war in Syria that shows no sign of reaching an end, or even of agreement among observers about what is likely to occur.

 

The most recent headlines have focused on what Hebrew and Arabic speakers call Chalab, and the speakers of western languages call Aleppo. What had been a city with some 2.3 million residents now is providing videos looking like Berlin and Tokyo in 1945, estimates of 30-40 thousand dead, perhaps 100,000 refugees seeking relief from cold, hunger, and thirst,  as well as threats of more killing, rape, and pillage.

 

The city is 500 km (300 miles) from northern Israel, assuming it would be possible to make the trip. There is also fighting right over the border of the Golan Heights, with occasional shells falling by mistake or intention in Israel.

 

Aside from clucking our tongues in sadness at the carnage, pretty much like other outsiders, Israelis aren't doing much, also like other outsiders. Medical personnel take care of injured fighters or civilians who make it to the border, the IDF bombards in response to the shells that land on Israeli territory, and has destroyed stockpiles and shipments of munitions apparently destined for Hezbollah in Lebanon.

 

The Jerusalem Post published an editorial with the headline, "Israel's moral obligation to help save Aleppo's civilians," but the item's content is a pale shadow of anything heroic. Its essence is that Israel must promote action by the UN, US, EU, Russia, Turkey and others to stop the carnage. The concluding paragraphs  read more as a moral whisper than anything practical.

 

"As a people who suffered the Holocaust, we should see it as our moral imperative to protect the lives of Syrian civilians, including the thousands of innocent children.

 

There are no easy answers in the ongoing conflict.

 

But before time runs out, the innocent - civilians and aid workers trapped in the fighting - must be saved."

 

The Prime Minister spoke about bringing injured civilians from Chalab to Israel. However, in the aftermath of Muslim refugees killing civilians in Berlin, that may go the way of a lot that the Prime Minister says and doesn't do.

 

A group of Israelis acquired air-time on radio to ask for donations for the purchase of baby food for the refugees from Chalab. How the delivery would be made is its own mystery.

 

More prominent than moral worries are the benefits Israel enjoys from carnage among our enemies. Muslim civil war and its uptick in Islamic extremism is keeping our enemies busy, and distracting the world's elites from making any effort to impose a solution for Israel and Palestine. It's also helping to minimize the clout of the country's own leftists, and their standard claim that Israel is at fault for not trying harder to please those claiming priority where Israelis are residing on one or another side of the armistice lines created in 1948.

 

IDF planners as well as Arabic speaking commentators are pondering the warfare in Syria and its implication for us via which groups may end up on top, especially in areas near the border.

 

For some 40 years Israel's relationship with Syria has been one of enmity and threat, along with restraint. Israel has posted significant military resources along the border, but the area is generally quiet. There was an attack against a nuclear site in 2007. There was also the final exit of what had been a substantial Jewish community with a history of two millennia, with some of the last remnants making their way to Israel from way stations in the US or Europe.

 

Officially Israel has distanced itself from what is happening, along with some kind of relationship with several of the combatants and sources of their support, including Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the Kurds, not all of whom are usually on the same side of the fighting.

 

Hezbollah and its Iranian supporters are arguably the most assiduous of Israel's adversaries, and they are deeply involved in the fighting, with significant casualties.

 

Optimistic Israelis see both of them as bleeding enough in Syria to postpone any likelihood of significant efforts against Israel. Should they position themselves in any major way close to the border, that would be one of the reasons to contemplate an Israeli preemption.

 

In a situation where the forces of Russia and Assad appear to have some degree of staying power, while dozens of militias are competing in a chaos that sees allies turning into enemies and again allies, it is best for Israel to stay out of it, while using its power when appropriate.

 

There have been declarations of friendship with Israel from individuals claiming to speak for one or another of the groups rebelling against the Assad regime. There have also been Syrians who refuse to speak to a reporter identified as an Israeli, perhaps because of fear of retribution or because of the person's own enmity to anything Jewish.

 

We can assume that the militias killing one another's fighters and civilian supporters would unify with escalated enthusiasm, and turn their weapons against Israelis if they had the opportunity.

 

The level of pathos may be significantly greater among Israel's Arabs than Jews, and especially among the Muslims. It is their people who are tearing themselves apart, and producing mass graves as well as countless refugees. We hear of bitterness within families as individuals choose sides and justify the actions of those seen as more just, or more likely to emerge victorious, with other individuals depressed by what seems to be a hopeless chaos of shifting loyalties with no results beyond more death and destruction.

 

There is no shortage of governments to blame for the unrestrained warfare and civilian misery. For some, Russia is the prime evil, but for others it is the excessive restraint of Barack Obama. Against the occasional bombing run, supplies and advisers sent to favored militias, as well as joining the EU in economic sanctions against Russia for what it has done in Ukraine, the greater impact of the US is to keep its force at home and to provide a free hand to Russians who are supporting and leading the actions of Assad's forces.