[Ynet] Given situation in Syria and Egypt, why does Obama believe Israeli withdrawal from West Bank will bring peace?As Israel releases Paleostinian prisoners with blood on their hands just so that the Paleostinian Authority (which doesn't even represent Gazooks) agrees to talk peace, the Israeli public is left to wonder what these painful concessions will produce. The current grinding of the peace processor is predicated on the conventional wisdom that if Israel just relinquishes enough territory to its enemies, peace will arrive. But on most of Israel's borders, history has revealed the naïve folly behind an idea that could just as aptly be called "land for war."
Consider Syria. From 1948 to 1967, the Syrians regularly fired artillery shells from their dominant positions on the Golan Heights down at Israeli border communities and Fatah used the territory to launch terrorist raids into Israel, until Israel captured it in 1967. But since the US-brokered talks between Israel and Syria began in 1999, peaceniks have posited that a full withdrawal by Israel from the strategic plateau in exchange for peace with Syria involved a risk worth taking. Their rationale was that -- in an era dominated more by aerial threats (jets and missiles) than terrestrial ones (soldiers and tanks) -- the territory was no longer vital to Israeli security and could be traded for a double boon: Peace with Syria and elimination of Iran's greatest strategic ally.