Sometime before the extended three-month settlement freeze in Israel is up, President Obama is expected to release a map with his assertions of where the borders between Israel and a state of Palestine should be drawn. Security experts contend that Israel will be left with little wiggle room, but major anxieties.
That reference to Israel’s critical security needs represented a return to the traditional Israeli position that peace with its Arab neighbors can only come through secure borders for Israel. The classic statement of that doctrine was the so-called Alon Plan formulated by Foreign Minister Yigal Alon in the wake of the 1967 Six Day War. Alon envisioned Israel retaining captured territory in Judea and Samaria vital to Israel’s security especially the Jordan Valley — the entire area from the Jordan River bed to the crest of the eastern slope of the Judean and Samarian mountain ridge facing the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. In a speech to the Knesset one month before his assassination Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin who served under Alon in the pre-State Palmach reiterated the vision of his mentor. “The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley in the broadest meaning of that term ” Rabin said. He added that Israel would not return to the 1949 armistice lines which were in place until June 5 1967.
From the middle of the Oslo process however Israel’s traditional security-based diplomacy doctrine began to be replaced by a radically different approach best described as diplomacy-based security. Its concept is that peace is not secured by Israel retaining the ability to defeat any possible combination of enemies but by entering into diplomatic agreements with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors. That new approach reached its height under the premiership of Ehud Barak at the 2000 Camp David conference when Yasser Arafat was offered a state in virtually the entirety of territory Israel captured in 1967.
One analyst who was listening carefully to both parts of Netanyahu’s speech was Daniel Diker a Harvard-trained foreign policy fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) and currently secretary-general designate of the World Jewish Congress. JCPA is headed by Dr. Dore Gold a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. Dr. Gold like Diker is American-born and trained and wears a knitted kippah. With the backing and direction of Gold Diker conceived the idea of gathering a group of Israel’s leading military strategists to flesh out the comprehensive security analysis behind Netanyahu’s Bar-Ilan speech.
The group assembled was exceptionally distinguished by any measure. It included a former chief of staff (and current vice–prime minister) Lt.-Gen. Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon; a former deputy chief of staff Maj.-Gen. Uzi Dayan; a former head of IDF Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Aharon Ze’evi Farkash; two former heads of IDF Intelligence Assessment Division Maj.-Gen. Yaakov Amidror and Brig.-Gen.Yossi Kuperwasser; a former head of IDF Planning Division Brig.-Gen. Udi Dekel; and two former national security advisors to the prime minister Dayan and Maj.-Gen. Giora Eiland. Dekel also headed the unit responsible for negotiations with the Palestinians under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Though the participants wrote different chapters of the final report entitled “Israel’s Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace ” Diker told me there was consensus among the group on all of the security requirements.
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