Caroline Glick

The perils of a remilitarized Sinai

Will the Egyptian military be permitted to remilitarize the Sinai? Since Palestinian and Egyptian terrorists crossed into Israel from Sinai on August 18 and murdered eight Israelis this has been a central issue under discussion at senior echelons of the government and the IDF.

The perils of a remilitarized Sinai

Will the Egyptian military be permitted to remilitarize the Sinai? Since Palestinian and Egyptian terrorists crossed into Israel from Sinai on August 18 and murdered eight Israelis this has been a central issue under discussion at senior echelons of the government and the IDF. Under the terms of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, Egypt is prohibited from deploying military forces in the Sinai. Israel must approve any Egyptian military mobilization in the area. Today, Egypt is asking to permanently deploy its forces in the Sinai. Such a move requires an amendment to the treaty.

Glenn Beck’s revealing visit

American media superstar Glenn Beck's visit to Israel this week was a revealing and remarkable event. It revealed what it takes to be a friend of Israel. And it revealed the causes of Israel's difficulty in telling its enemies from its friends. Many world leaders, opinion-shapers and other notables profess enduring friendship with Israel. From Washington to London, Paris to Spain, policymakers and other luminaries preface all their remarks to Jewish audiences with such statements. Once their declarations are complete - and often without taking a breath - they proceed to denounce Israel's policies and to deny its basic rights.

Blood in the Streets

Israeli military preparedness follows a depressing pattern. The IDF does not change its assessments of the strategic environment until Israeli blood runs in the streets. In Judea and Samaria, from 1994 through 2000, the army closed its eyes to the Palestinian security forces' open, warm and mutually supportive ties to terror groups.

The Left’s Faustian bargain

The Palestinians' decision to place the issue of the establishment of a Palestinian state before the United Nations for a vote next month repudiates the principles of the 1993 Oslo peace framework, through which the Palestinian Authority was formed out of the PLO. The Oslo framework dictated that the final status of Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Jerusalem would be determined through direct negotiations between the PLO and Israel. While brazen, the Palestinians' UN gambit is not the first time that Israel has been confronted with unequivocal proof that the Palestinians have been operating in bad faith. From the outset, PLO leaders from Yassir Arafat down have made statements and taken actions that have demonstrated that from the PLO's perspective, the entire "two-state paradigm," of peacemaking upon which the Oslo process is predicated was nothing more than a ploy.

Norway’s Jewish problem

In the wake of Anders Breivik's massacre of his fellow Norwegians, I was amazed at the speed with which the leftist media throughout the US and Europe used his crime as a means of criminalizing their ideological opponents on the Right. Just hours after Breivik's identity was reported, leftist media outlets and blogs were filled with attempts to blame Breivik's crime on conservative public intellectuals whose ideas he cited in a 1,500 page online manifesto. My revulsion at this bald attempt to use Breivik's crime to attack freedom of speech propelled me to write my July 29 column, "Breivik and totalitarian democrats." While the focus of my column was the Left's attempt to silence their conservative opponents, I also noted that widespread popular support for Palestinian terrorists in Norway indicates that for many Norwegians, opposition to terrorism is less than comprehensive.

Obama’s only policy

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has explained repeatedly over the years that Israel has no Palestinian partner to negotiate with. So news reports this week that Netanyahu agreed that the 1949 armistice lines, (commonly misrepresented as the 1967 borders), will be mentioned in terms of reference for future negotiations with the Palestinian Authority seemed to come out of nowhere. Israel has no one to negotiate with because the Palestinians reject Israel's right to exist. This much was made clear yet again last month when senior PA "negotiator" Nabil Sha'ath said in an interview with Arabic News Broadcast, "The story of 'two states for two peoples' means that there will be a Jewish people over there and a Palestinian people here. We will never accept this."

The media revolutionaries

Last Monday Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz gave an interview to Channel 2's news anchor Yonit Levy during the prime-time news broadcast. Levy began the interview with a revealing "question." Oozing professional probity, Levy said, "I assume you came here armed with wonderful data about the drop in unemployment and rising economic growth, but I want to ask you, Mr. Steinitz if for all your data you've forgotten the people, you've forgotten an entire class of working people who can't live?"

Israel’s “social justice” protesters and and apologies for everyone!

This week on The Tribal Update, the weekly television on internet program produced by Latma, the Hebrew-language media satire website I run, we bring you a wide array of subjects to chew on and laugh about. First and foremost, we bring you a new musical perspective on the "social justice" protesters demanding the destruction of capitalism in Israel and Bibi's head on a platter.

Breivik and totalitarian democrats

Last Friday morning, Anders Breivik burst onto the international screen when he carried out a monstrous act of terrorism against his fellow Norwegians. Breivik bombed the offices housing the Norwegian government with the intention of murdering its leaders. He then travelled to the Utoya Island and murdered scores of young people participating in a summer program sponsored by Norway's ruling party. In all, last Friday Breivik murdered 76 people. Most of them were teenagers.

No Prizes for Erdogan

Shortly after Turkey's Islamist Prime Minister Recip Erdogan came to power in 2002, he began undermining Turkey's strategic alliance with Israel. Erdogan officially ended the alliance last May when he sent the IHH, an al Qaeda-aligned, Turkish NGO affiliated with his Islamist AKP Party to lead the pro-Hamas flotilla to Gaza. Aboard the Mavi Marmara, IHH members violently attacked IDF naval commandos who boarded the ship in order to prevent it from breaking Israel's lawful maritime blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza coast. In the life and death battle that ensued, nine of the IHH assailants were killed.

Squandering Israel’s limited influence

The past month has been a difficult one for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the Palestinians (UNRWA). First Palestinians in Hamas-controlled Gaza held mass protests against the agency's attempt to change its name to the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees. Conspiracy theories claimed the name change was part of a secret plan to end the Palestinians' refugee status so as to block their demand to "return" to Israel. UNRWA officials explained repeatedly to the public and to Hamas terror masters that this was not the case. The agency's devotion to the cause of "return" remained unchanged. The name change was just a bid to streamline their website to mark the agency's 60th anniversary.

Israel’s premier opportunist

Saying that Israel faces daunting challenges today and that those challenges will multiply and grow in the near future should not be construed as a partisan or ideological statement. Rather, it is a statement of fact. It is also a fact that the greatest dangers facing Israel stem from President Barack Obama's rapid withdrawal of the US from its position as the predominant power in the Middle East on the one hand, and from Iran's rise as a nuclear power and regional power on the other.

Israel’s only two options

Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas is in Europe this week seeking to convince the Spanish and Norwegian governments to support the Palestinian bid to sidestep negotiations with Israel and have the UN General Assembly recognize Palestinian sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem in addition to Gaza. The Palestinians know that without US support, their initiative will fail to gain Security Council support and therefore have no legal weight. But they believe that if they push hard enough, Israel's control over these areas will eventually unravel and they will gain control over them without ever accepting Israel's right to exist.

Caution: Storm Approaching

It was seven months ago that Mohammed Bouazizi, a vegetable peddler in Tunisia set himself and the Arab world on fire. The 26-year-old staged his suicidal protest on the steps of the local city hall after a municipal inspector took away his unlicensed vegetable cart thus denying him the ability to feed his family of eight. Most depictions of the Arab revolutions that followed his act have cast them as struggles for freedom and good government. These depictions miss the main cause of these political upheavals. No doubt millions of Arabs are upset about the freedom deficit in Arab lands. But the fact is that economics has played a decisive role in all of them.

The path to the next Lebanon War

Five years ago this week, Iran’s Lebanese proxy opened war with Israel. The war lasted 34 days, during which Hezbollah launched more than 4,000 missiles against Israel. Now five years later, under US President Barack Obama, America is pushing a policy that drastically escalates the chance that a new war between Israel and Iran’s Lebanese army will break out again in the near future. Back in 2006, Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s aggression was swift but incompetent. While Israel scored some blows against the Iranian proxy force, the war ended with Hezbollah still shooting. Israel failed to defeat the terror army. And because Hezbollah survived, it won the war.

Rival hegemons in Syria

Last Saturday, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah gave Hezbollah-backed Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati the political equivalent of a public thrashing. Last Thursday, Mikati gave a speech in which he tried to project an image of a leader of a government that has not abandoned the Western world completely. Mikati gave the impression that his Hezbollah-controlled government is not averse to cooperating with the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon. The Special Tribunal just indicted four Hezbollah operatives for their role in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.

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