Two Million Bullets

Talk about arming your own enemies.

Israel, it was revealed today, has allowed Egypt to transfer an enormous quantity of weapons to Fatah, the Palestinian faction controlled by PA President Abu Mazen.

A total of 2,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 20,000 magazines and two million (!!) bullets were included in the shipment, which is ostensibly aimed at strengthening Fatah in its rivalry with Hamas.

Of course, there is one slight problem with this approach: Fatah has this nasty little habit of turning its weapons on Jews. The very same Palestinian security forces that received the ammunition are the very same Palestinian security forces that engage in terror against the Jewish state.

And so, in a move of astonishing obtuseness, Israel has once again overseen the arming of its foes. Incredibly, according to media reports, the shipment of weapons was actually escorted across the Egypt-Gaza border by Israeli Military Police!!

After 13 years of Palestinian Authority terror, you'd think that our government would have learned by now that giving guns to the enemy is not only short-sighted, but dangerous too.

Sadly, it appears that even this most basic of lessons has yet to sink in.

You Don't Make Peace with Your Enemies

Just the other day, Yossi Beilin was at it again.

In an interview on Israel Radio, the dovish head of the Yahad/Meretz faction in the Knesset spoke about the need to start negotiations with Syria in an effort to reach a peace deal with the Dictator from Damascus, Bashar al-Assad.

It doesn't seem to matter one whit to Mr. Beilin that Assad is a ruthless tyrant who has been busy aiding Hizbullah in Lebanon, the insurgents in Iraq, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. Assad's hands may be full of blood, but Beilin just can't wait to shake them anyway.

Nor, it seems, does Syria's beating of the war drums seem to dissuade him. Just yesterday, Syria's Information Minister echoed remarks made by Assad in recent months, threatening that if Israel did not hand over the Golan Heights, Damascus might resort to "other means, which struggling people have used at various points in history, beginning with legitimate resistance".

Similarly, Israel's military intelligence now reportedly believes that Syria and Hizbullah are planning to launch another round of conflict with the Jewish state next summer.

It just goes to show how wrong the left has been in asserting that, "you can only make peace with your enemies." This may be a good sales slogan, but it is intellectually vacuous. The fact of the matter is that you don't make peace with your enemies – you make it with your former enemies. And this is not just an issue of semantics. When someone is out to get you, you can't fool yourself into thinking that smiling at him a couple of times will change his mind.

What Beilin and his comrades on the left fail to understand is that Syria is gearing up for war – verbally, psychologically and militarily. All the evidence points in that direction, and wishful thinking on Israel's part won't make it go away. Hence, Beilin's call for peace talks with a nation that is preparing to strike at Israel is as na?ve as it is dangerous.

The Growing Al-Qaeda Threat to Israel

If Osama Bin-Laden’s official representative in Iraq is to be believed, Al-Qaeda has now officially turned its sights on the Jewish state.

In an audio tape posted on an Islamist website, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claimed that 4 Katyusha rockets fired from southern Lebanon into northern Israel on December 27 were the work of the terrorist group and came at the instructions of its chieftain, bin Laden.

“The rocket firing at the ancestors of monkeys and pigs from the south of Lebanon was only the start of a blessed in-depth strike against the Zionist enemy”, al-Zarqawi declared, adding that “All that was on the instructions of the sheikh of the mujahedeen, Osama bin Laden”.

This comes just a few short weeks after UPI reported (December 7) that Al-Qaeda had forged an alliance with Hizbullah terrorists in Lebanon to coordinate anti-Israel attacks.

The presence of Al-Qaeda in Lebanon is extremely significant, because it now means that the terror group has operatives in nearly all the countries surrounding Israel. Don’t forget that Al-Qaeda has carried out bombings in Amman, Jordan (in November 2004), and in the Egyptian-controlled Sinai (in October 2004) at Western and Israeli targets.

Hence, as ominous as it sounds, Al-Qaeda has the ability to target Israel from the west, the east and the north. And, as Israel’s head of Military Intelligence confirmed at the end of September, Osama bin-Laden’s thugs established a presence in Gaza as well in the wake of the Israeli retreat, giving them still another launching pad for attacks against the Jewish state.

All this underlines just how much Israel is on the front-lines of the global war on terror – and how essential it is that we stand firm and confront it. For some time now, I have been reporting on this blog about the growing threat posed by Al-Qaeda to Israel, particularly in light of the Gaza withdrawal and the vacuum it created in the area. It is crucial that we raise awareness about this issue, both in Israel and the West, and that we inform our communities, elected representatives and leaders about it.

I don't want to sound like an alarmist, but Al-Qaeda’s increased presence in the region clearly does not bode well for the future. It is time for Israel’s decision-makers to take this threat seriously, and to start taking concrete action to forestall a Middle Eastern 9/11 – before it is too late.

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