By Stan Goodenough
Dec 09, 2007
If Israel is to go ahead and surrender half its historic homeland to the Palestinian Arabs, it will need NATO to help ensure the Jewish state is not overrun and destroyed.
This is the point of view of Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who on Friday appealed to her NATO nation counterparts at a meeting in Brussels.
According to The Jerusalem Post, Livni told her audience - which included foreign ministers from Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria - that it was important to begin dialoguing with NATO "to make sure that we [Israel] do not jeopardize our security and our future."
Livni's admission of existential risks posed to Israel by IDF withdrawals comes just days after she accompanied Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to Annapolis, Maryland, where they together affirmed their willingness to relinquish control over, and ownership of, the heart of Israel's 4000-year-old national home.
Israel has always fiercely guarded its reliance on its own military to protect and defend the state, and the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) is widely considered to be the most battle-proven military force in the world.
Anti-Zionist politicians in Israel, especially those at the forefront of the push to surrender Jewish land for Arab promises of peace, have in the past been willing to consider introducing foreign forces into the areas from which Israel has withdrawn, like the Gaza Strip.
For their part, consecutive Israeli governments have lacked the statesmanship needed to make a priority of using the IDF to defend their own people.