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Who wants to fly over Saudi Arabia?
Recently President Obama and his administration have been slowly trying to coax certain Arab countries into making concessions to Israel. An example of one of these concessions is allowing Israeli planes to fly over Saudi Arabia en route to somewhere else or who knows maybe even to Saudi Arabia itself. There are several others like trade agreements or diplomatic relations being floated around the Arab world as possible “soft” concessions necessary to be made in order to jump start the peace process here in Israel. To date there hasn’t been much success in getting the Arab states to move at all on this front. I am confident though that President Obama will pull of some victory down the line of getting some small gesture on an Arab Government in this direction. Trust me though it will not be anything huge and it won’t be said very loud to that governments people. So the question will arise ok now what. Let’s say for arguments sake we are allowed to fly over Saudi Arabia, does that mean that we have to commit national suicide by giving into whatever demands the Palestinians are holding onto, be it right of return or exclusive control of East Jerusalem free of Jews? Is it just me or have we not already offered them everything else short of that? So if these are our red lines as they should be the point of talking peace right now is a waste of time and dangerous. Yet for the holy grail of dialogue we continue to play our side of the game.
Due to the security barrier more efficient monitoring and an overall assault on the terrorist infrastructure violence coming from Arab populated areas of the “land” of Israel have gone down. Their economy has gotten better and as a result gestures were made to ease movement by removing road hindrances like checkpoints and barriers of other kinds. One might say as a result life here in Israel has gotten a little bit more “peaceful”. There are no suicide bombers, shooting have gone down to a few random episodes and the only real resistance we see are kids throwing rocks at cars here and there. On other fronts Hamas is still licking its wounds and trying to restore their power amongst the people of Gaza. As a result the rockets have slowed down to a trickle. Now don’t get me wrong there should be no rockets at all yet improvement is improvement. On our Northern Front Hezbollah boasts as being as strong as ever but at the moment they aren’t firing their rockets either. As for the Syrian border there is a cold quiet. We know they hate us and want to avenge their defeats yet they fear us enough not to provoke us directly. So in getting back to the peace talks I again as the question what do we stand to gain versus what we stand to lose? If we give in to the Palestinians then we relinquish our G-d given right to the land of Israel and we make our defensive ability weaker and a whole lot more vulnerable. Let’s not also forget the last 20 years of peacemaking and where it led us here in Israel. Even the most left wing Israeli knows that the right of return would end us democratically. We also know that pulling thousands of Jewish Citizens out of their homes all 600,000 of us including of course East Jerusalem is not only highly unfeasible it’s national suicide as well. Even if the rest of the world could push us to that place civil war here would break out as a result. So we are back to square one. What’s the point of hoping that the rest of the world will accept us as a country if we make the mistakes that causes that very same country and its independence to be taken away from us? I personally am content to keep the Golan and its 30,000 Israeli inhabitants and maintain my right as an Israeli to live in all parts of the land of Israel including I dare say the holiest city of the world Jerusalem. Even if it means not being able to fly over Saudi Arabia.
