In the tumult of the early months of the Trump presidency and in light of the recent natural disasters brought by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, many of us have been distracted from Israel’s “matzav – situation” regarding the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Yossi Alpher is a long time security analyst who served as an advisor to Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s delegation at the 2000 Camp David peace effort with President Clinton and PA Chairman Yasser Arafat.
Alpher writes frequently and is always worth reading as he is clear-sighted, pragmatic, and an astute and informed observer of Israel’s security situation.
In this article, Alpher writes:
“Netanyahu….has leveraged Middle East chaos astutely to Israel’s strategic advantage. This is an important contribution to Israel’s overall security. But it is a temporary advantage, bereft of deep roots in any shared vision of Israel’s future. Israel’s Arab friends are all dictators whose lease on power could ultimately go the way of the Shah of Iran, an earlier semi-clandestine ally who was swept away by extremist Islam in 1979. Nor are these Arab neighbors blind to the fact that the same Netanyahu is presiding over the dissolution of the two-state solution. He is engineering Israel’s slow slide down a slippery slope toward a complicated and conflicted one-state reality that will critically weaken its legitimacy. As matters stand, history will probably find far more fault with Netanyahu’s Palestinian policies than benefits to his regional strategy.”
Read more:
http://forward.com/…/netanyahu-claims-israel-arab-relation…/
Rabbi John Rosove's Blog 