Arnaud de Borchgrave: Middle East tunnel vision
[Arnaud de Borchgrave is UPI's Editor at Large]
The only bank this Rothschild ever owned was the West Bank. Danny Rothschild, an Israeli general and onetime coordinator of all government activities in the occupied territories, and now one of 1,200 former intelligence officers in Israel's Council for Peace and Security, says the Palestinians should be allowed to have their capital in Arab East Jerusalem. The very thought of allowing Palestinians to set up a government where 200,000 Israeli settlers moved in since the 1967 war, when Israeli forces "liberated" East Jerusalem from Jordanian rule, is sacrilegious. But Rothschild, speaking at the New America Foundation, was not afraid of geopolitical apostasy.
For Rothschild, governments, including his own, are suffering from tunnel vision. Everyone sees light at the end of the tunnel, but few seem to realize this could be the search party looking for survivors. Islamization threatens the secular regimes of the Middle East, he says. Extremists are moving into gaps the governments themselves, including Israel's, create by their short-term thinking. Israel's political leaders are more concerned with their next election than in broadening their horizons to the needs of regional peace over the next decade...
"We can cry about the past," says the general, "and quote from here to eternity, but the real issue is, where do I want to be in 10 years?" Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, the U.S. Middle East negotiator, has been sucked into a debilitating game of "freezing" new construction in the settlements. That, clearly, is not the problem. Dismantling, not freezing, settlements is the issue. The Israeli public must also see how and when it is getting full normalization with the Arab world -- e.g., Israel concedes something and the Arabs then reciprocate, step by step.
Prince Turki al-Faisal was head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service for a quarter of a century. He was a key player in the U.S.-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia coalition that organized the resistance that defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Following Sept. 11, 2001, this youngest son of the late King Faisal, a brother of Foreign Minister Prince Saud and a nephew of King Abdullah, served as ambassador to the United Kingdom and then ambassador to the United States. He now runs the King Faisal Cultural Foundation -- and behind the scenes remains a key emissary for the thinking of the powers that be.
In 2002 Crown Prince Abdullah got the entire Arab world, including Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Libya's Col. Gadhafi, to agree to total peace with Israel and full diplomatic and economic relations in return for the evacuation of all occupied territories. Turki's latest message to Israel and the United States is "land first, then peace."
Answering the Crown Prince of Bahrain who had urged greater communication with Israel and "joint steps from Arab states to revive the peace process," Turki's message is that normalization will follow, not precede, Israel's withdrawal from the lands it conquered in 1967...
... When Israel agreed to evacuate the entire Sinai peninsula, which is part of Egypt, President Sadat went to Israel in 1977 and peace was agreed. Absent a similar pledge from Israel to evacuate all occupied territories, which President Obama has urged Israel to do, Faisal wrote in the International Herald Tribune, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab countries could not offer what Israelis most desire -- regional recognition.
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The only bank this Rothschild ever owned was the West Bank. Danny Rothschild, an Israeli general and onetime coordinator of all government activities in the occupied territories, and now one of 1,200 former intelligence officers in Israel's Council for Peace and Security, says the Palestinians should be allowed to have their capital in Arab East Jerusalem. The very thought of allowing Palestinians to set up a government where 200,000 Israeli settlers moved in since the 1967 war, when Israeli forces "liberated" East Jerusalem from Jordanian rule, is sacrilegious. But Rothschild, speaking at the New America Foundation, was not afraid of geopolitical apostasy.
For Rothschild, governments, including his own, are suffering from tunnel vision. Everyone sees light at the end of the tunnel, but few seem to realize this could be the search party looking for survivors. Islamization threatens the secular regimes of the Middle East, he says. Extremists are moving into gaps the governments themselves, including Israel's, create by their short-term thinking. Israel's political leaders are more concerned with their next election than in broadening their horizons to the needs of regional peace over the next decade...
"We can cry about the past," says the general, "and quote from here to eternity, but the real issue is, where do I want to be in 10 years?" Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, the U.S. Middle East negotiator, has been sucked into a debilitating game of "freezing" new construction in the settlements. That, clearly, is not the problem. Dismantling, not freezing, settlements is the issue. The Israeli public must also see how and when it is getting full normalization with the Arab world -- e.g., Israel concedes something and the Arabs then reciprocate, step by step.
Prince Turki al-Faisal was head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service for a quarter of a century. He was a key player in the U.S.-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia coalition that organized the resistance that defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Following Sept. 11, 2001, this youngest son of the late King Faisal, a brother of Foreign Minister Prince Saud and a nephew of King Abdullah, served as ambassador to the United Kingdom and then ambassador to the United States. He now runs the King Faisal Cultural Foundation -- and behind the scenes remains a key emissary for the thinking of the powers that be.
In 2002 Crown Prince Abdullah got the entire Arab world, including Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Libya's Col. Gadhafi, to agree to total peace with Israel and full diplomatic and economic relations in return for the evacuation of all occupied territories. Turki's latest message to Israel and the United States is "land first, then peace."
Answering the Crown Prince of Bahrain who had urged greater communication with Israel and "joint steps from Arab states to revive the peace process," Turki's message is that normalization will follow, not precede, Israel's withdrawal from the lands it conquered in 1967...
... When Israel agreed to evacuate the entire Sinai peninsula, which is part of Egypt, President Sadat went to Israel in 1977 and peace was agreed. Absent a similar pledge from Israel to evacuate all occupied territories, which President Obama has urged Israel to do, Faisal wrote in the International Herald Tribune, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab countries could not offer what Israelis most desire -- regional recognition.