Why Israel Must Maintain Its Presence in the Jordan Valley

June 19 2020

While Dan Schueftan is skeptical about the benefits of applying Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank settlements, located mostly in the vicinity of Jerusalem, he believes that the Jewish state has much to gain from applying its sovereignty to the Jordan Valley. Otherwise, Israel would be left entirely unable to protect its eastern border:

In 2014 General John Allen, the security adviser to then-Secretary of State John Kerry, suggested a plan that was based on much goodwill yet little understanding of the conditions in the Middle East. . . . The plan included Palestinian sovereignty in the Jordan Valley. The answer to Israel’s security fears would be sensors, unmanned aircraft, satellites, and other technological devices. There was also talk of foreign troops, possibly American, being stationed along the banks of the Jordan River, and a possibility of a U.S.-Israel deal ensuring American support for unilateral moves by Israel when responding to threats on its security.

Establishing [sovereignty] in the Jordan Valley entails abandoning the delusional idea of Israeli and Jordanian security based on technology and foreign presence. What Israel needs is not information on threats and the hope that someone else will respond before it’s too late. Rather, it needs deterrence that comes with a good chance of prevention and an Israeli force that will neutralize threats when needed.

A scheme like the Allen plan is much worse than no arrangement at all. Without it, Israel acts “defiantly” against threats when it sees them, and foreign diplomats protest after they are successfully neutralized. Since decolonization in the mid-20th century, the fate of a foreign military presence in sovereign land of a hostile country has been grim. This scheme will postpone and [enfeeble] the Israeli response to perceived threats and will give the Palestinians an effective tool to damage Israel’s relations with the U.S.

Read more at Israel Hayom

More about: Israeli Security, John Kerry, Jordan Valley, Peace Process

The Demonic Impulse Behind Tucker Carlson’s Holocaust Denier

Nov. 12 2024

Meir Soloveichik sees in the so-called “revisionist” view of World War II an inversion of good and evil best explored by C.S. Lewis:

In 1942, with the world at war, an Oxford tutor wrote a book about traditional faith unlike any other ever published. It consists of missives from a senior devil in a demonic bureaucracy who is guiding a junior devil tasked with tempting one specific soul to achieve that man’s damnation. The senior devil is named Screwtape, and his letters are addressed to his nephew, Wormwood. . . . Screwtape refers to God as “our Enemy above,” and to Satan as “our father below.” For this bureaucratic demon, Hell is a source of admiration, Heaven an object of horror. Damnation is desired, and eternal life with God is disdained. By experiencing an instinctive horror at these moral reversals, the reader is to intuit the right and the good.

Indeed, as Soloveichik explains, Lewis may have been inspired to write The Screwtape Letters after listening to a speech of Hitler’s and pondering how the Führer “utilized his rhetorical gifts to frame the most horrific position imaginable as something entirely reasonable.”

For those who have watched the course of Carlson’s career, the recent showcasing of a Nazi defender and Holocaust denier is not a surprise, but it is, unquestionably, a new low. And it is a reminder that one does not need to adopt the Christian approach to Satan . . . to understand that today, in the United States, genuine demons walk, and podcast, amongst us. They may use microphones instead of missives to advance their morally inverted cause, but what they still seek is to sway souls to embrace evil.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Anti-Semitism, C.S. Lewis, Holocaust denial, World War II