Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: i problemi della soluzione a due Stati

Will the world applaud Israel's just-announced decision to restrict
its military forces by imposing even more stringent rules to avoid
accidental civilian casualties? Don't bet on it. The world remained
silent as Israel endured hundreds of Palestinian suicide bombers,
stabbings, drive-by shootings, and kidnappings. No censure or demands
for a cease-fire impeded Hezbollah in the north and Hamas from the
south as they rained thousands of missiles on almost 40 percent of the
Israeli population.
On the contrary. The common response of a world professedly eager for
peace was to criticize Israel's measures of self-defense in setting up
checkpoints and building a security fence along the West Bank. For six
years, rockets from Gaza forced a major portion of Israel's southern
population to sleep in bomb shelters. When Israel entered Gaza, after
repeatedly warning Hamas to desist, the outcry revealed that the
capacity of Israel's critics for hypocrisy is infinite. Every Israeli
effort at self-defense is treated as aggression.
The multiple injustices of these years, compounded by the abysmal
performance of the media in separating truth from propaganda, have
produced a political transformation in Israel that the administration
of President Obama has accelerated. Israelis have lost trust in the
possibility of peaceful coexistence. They have observed that every
effort to make peace breeds new aggression. They have realized, with
understandable bitterness, that every defensive military operation
that leaves the aggressor still in control of the attack base results
only in the enemy being better prepared the next time.
It is not on the world's agenda to dream of doing anything, even to
make a murmur of protest, when the Hamas leadership in Gaza continues
to smuggle in rockets capable of threatening Tel Aviv. Rockets with a
range increasing to as much as 60 kilometers can be fired from a
mobile launcher fitted on the back of a truck, or from a stationary
launcher hidden in a building, as was Hezbollah's in Lebanon.
How do the Israelis, without absolute control of the territory,
prevent Hamas from turning into the Palestinian version of Hezbollah?
Iran has supplied Hezbollah with more than 40,000 rockets, many of
them long-range, such as Scud and M-600 missiles. The Israelis know
that the gun or rocket that is hung on the wall in the first act will
be fired in the third. They simply cannot tolerate living alongside an
entity owning a terrorist infrastructure and hosting hostile military
forces.
When the Israelis consider evacuating their military forces from the
West Bank for the sake of a "two-state solution," they fear leaving
another base for terrorism. If Hamas takes over the West Bank from the
Palestine Liberation Organization, as it did Gaza, then it and other
al Qaeda-type groups may well have access to the overlooks of
Jerusalem's suburbs and Tel Aviv's beaches. The Israelis cannot forget
that the last time Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas received
control of an area—namely Gaza in 2005—PLO forces ran away and left it
to Hamas. Currently Israel's military freedom of operation in the West
Bank allows the Israel Defense Forces to reach every place where
prohibited arms are manufactured or hidden. Thus they have prevented
terrorists there from manufacturing and launching them at Jerusalem
and Tel Aviv, not to mention intercepting innumerable suicide bombers.
The nightmare scenario for Israel is that the West Bank becomes
another failed Palestinian state. The West Bank is as near as 8 to 12
miles from the Mediterranean. Any sustained rocket assaults from the
West Bank would seriously threaten Israel's interior. What's more,
there is the critical advantage of the West Bank's ridge line. From
the higher terrain, even a Palestinian teenager with such simple
weaponry as a Kassam rocket could hit Israel's main airport and major
cities, making the defense of Israel impossible.
I have stood on that ridge. It is hard to explain to Americans how
close everything is. That is why any Middle East settlement would
require a fully demilitarized Palestinian entity and a method for
Israel to verify that. International forces cannot be relied on for
demilitarization. They have historically been unsuccessful where one
party is ready to ignore the fulfillment of its international
responsibilities. This has been especially so in the Middle East where
the peacekeepers have been killed, breaking the political will of
states who contribute.
Perhaps it would be different if the Israelis had confidence that the
current U.S. administration would make up in security for whatever
Israel might cede in territory. They were given that assurance when
they took the risk of leaving Gaza in 2005. Then there was a written
commitment by President George W. Bush that the United States would
not expect Israel to withdraw to its pre-1967 borders and that any
future settlement would reflect Israel's right to secure, recognized,
and defensible borders. (So too did President Obama pledge support for
this same right, in these same words, in a public speech when he was
campaigning for presidency.)
Yet the Obama administration disavowed this commitment—with Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton saying that Bush's pledge "did not become
part of the official position of the United States government." This
ignores the fact that recognized boundaries "and defensible borders"
were enshrined in the U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 after the
1967 war and that Bush unequivocally provided a presidential guarantee
to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in exchange for Israel's 2005
withdrawal from Gaza. "The United States," Bush said, "reiterates its
steadfast commitment to Israel's security, including secure,
defensible borders, and to preserve and strengthen Israel's capability
to deter and defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible
combinations of threats." The Bush letter was approved by both houses
of Congress—and yet it has been repudiated by this administration.
The scene is even more menacing if we consider the regional scenario
of a Palestinian state inspired by Iran and Islamic radicalism. Iran
is getting close to obtaining nuclear abilities and already has
ballistic missiles that can menace Israel as well as its Arab
neighbors. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard serves as a strategic
umbrella for radical groups that move across the Middle East,
including Shiite militias in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as
Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank.
The Israeli experience in Lebanon is a case study of the dangers.
After the 2006 war, Israel withdrew and 10,000 U.N. peacekeeping
troops came into southern Lebanon, authorized by U.N. Security Council
Resolution 1701. With what effect? Hezbollah has rearmed at a rapid
pace, accumulating more than 40,000 rockets and missiles that,
according to recent reports, have now moved down to the southern part
of Lebanon without any Hezbollah operatives being arrested. U.N.
forces have simply been ineffective, even when the Lebanese government
wanted the U.N. to curb Hezbollah.
A sovereign Palestinian state that refuses to accept an international
force is bad enough. Worse yet is that, in practice, organizations
like Hezbollah and Hamas can render any international force
ineffective. This is what occurred when European monitors were placed
at Gaza's Rafah crossing. The monitors fled their positions as soon as
internal fighting between Hamas and Fatah heated up after the Hamas
victory in the 2006 elections. The monitors themselves fell victim to
local Palestinian kidnappings. When the Palestinian president says he
will not accept Israeli forces but might accept an international
presence, his statement might seem reasonable or negotiable. In truth,
it has about as much value as the "peace in our time" document that
Neville Chamberlain waved on his return to London after meeting Adolf
Hitler. Bottom line: The only successful security forces that Israel
can rely upon are its own. Israelis feel they have read the book in
Gaza and don't want to see the movie in the West Bank.
Paradoxically, the presence of U.N. forces creates an obstacle to
Israel's ability to defend itself, by itself. Look at what happened to
the force that was dispatched to Lebanon in August 1982. The U.N.
mission was made up of units from Britain, France, Italy, and the
United States, but in October 1983 both the French paratrooper
barracks and the U.S. Marine headquarters were attacked by Shiite
suicide bombers, killing a few hundred French and American service
members. Within a year, both forces withdrew from Lebanon, reflecting
the reality that foreign forces will quickly leave the theater when
attacked. The states that volunteer them soon lose political support
for keeping them there.
Let's not forget the Oslo Accord and its 1995 interim agreement. The
PLO failed to honor the agreement. In fact, Yasser Arafat, Abbas's
predecessor as PLO leader, supplied competing security organizations
with thousands of weapons that were prohibited in the agreements he
had signed. Again contrary to the Oslo agreement, the PLO gave its
national security apparatus all the trappings of an army, which it was
not permitted to have. Then in 2000, in the second intifada, it
launched a terrorist attack on Israeli civilians.
Israel must prepare for the possibility that even after agreements are
signed, and a demilitarized Palestinian state is established, groups
such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad would act in contravention and an
international force would likely not take action. Iranian-backed
rocket assaults against Israel would place its coastal plain in range
and make Israel uninhabitable. And if U.N. forces were present on
Palestinian territory, the Israeli army couldn't open fire against the
enemy without first verifying the location of the U.N. personnel. It
would thus be even more difficult for Israel to act against
terrorists.
There is an old saying: "Nobody ever washes a rental car." Only Israel
would have the will to defend itself. When you think about the failure
of NATO forces in Afghanistan, you have to wonder about the efficacy
of NATO troops in this theater.
Israel knows that a threat will evolve when hostile intentions join
with aggressive capabilities. Given that it has been virtually
impossible to alter hostile intentions, with the split between Abbas's
Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza—the latter allowing non-state
actors to emerge—classic principles of deterrence and punishment are
far less effective. There is no unified government to exert control
over people, weapons, and terrorist groups.
Israel has prudently maintained its uncompromising policy of disarming
the terrorist infrastructure within and along its borders. But
Israel's success in this relies on high-quality, precise military
intelligence, along with full freedom of operation to enter
Palestinian city centers and villages to locate and destroy bomb-
producing factories. This is the only way that Israel can deal with
the asymmetrical threat of terrorist groups able to attack Israel at
will.
Until this same kind of security is assured, the two-state solution is
not a solution at all, but a dramatic escalation of risk.
http://politics.usnews.com/opinion/mzuckerman/articles/2010/07/23/mort-zuckerman-for-israel-a-two-state-starts-with-security_print.html

 accidental civilian casualties? Don't bet on it.
60 anni di menzogne sioniste hanno abituato il mondo a badare ai
fatti, non alle parole.