By Orly Halpern, The Jewish Daily Forward, 26.1.07

Herzliya, Israel - Israel’s most prestigious annual gathering of national security strategists, meeting here under the shadow of Iranian threats and Palestinian violence, heard a succession of Israel’s highest-ranking officials call for renewed diplomacy as the best way to keep Israel safe.
 
Defying a rash of international speculation that either Israel or America is planning military strikes on Iran’s nuclear structures, most of the senior Israeli leaders who spoke at this year’s Herzliya Conference — including Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Vice Premier Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and a parade of defense professionals — argued that Iran could be contained through a combination of deterrence and coalition building with moderate Arab states.
 
Many participants, including American and European as well as Israeli leaders, argued that peace deals with Syria or the Palestinians would be an essential first step. The views presented contrasted sharply with the positions usually offered by Israel’s advocates in the West, that resolving broader Middle East crises has no relationship to Israel’s disputes with its neighbors.
A minority of speakers took a starkly more pessimistic view, predicting continued hostility and confrontation on all fronts. Most speakers, however, insisted that Israel could best guarantee its security through diplomacy and negotiations — with Syria, the Palestinians, Sunni Arab states or all three — that would isolate and temper Iran.
 
“Economic and political sanctions will bring Iran down to its real proportions,” said Peres, the former prime minister and senior statesman, in a lunchtime speech to the conference. He added that Iran’s saber-rattling president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had done “a wonderful job” of alienating most other nations, making Israel’s task simpler.
 
“Let’s not be so narrow minded and prophesy doom,” Peres said in an undisguised dig at the doomsday prophecies of Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. “I recommend not taking this lightly, but we still aren’t in the year 1938 and Hitler is not coming. There is a Jewish state, and we won’t stand by as someone who doesn’t care.”
Livni sounded a slightly more cautionary note in an address that evening. While noting that the “security of the State of Israel is based on military might,” requiring good intelligence and strong deterrent power, she said that the “best Israeli interest” right now dictates opening negotiations with the moderate wing of the Palestinian leadership.
 
In a speech directed mainly to the Israeli public, Livni struck an almost presidential tone, touching on Israel’s endless internal scandals but rallying Israelis to overcome their national gloom and positioning herself as the natural successor to the wounded prime minister, Ehud Olmert. Her stature only strengthened her bottom-line message: that Israel’s “national interest” as a Jewish state “requires us to accept the principle of two states for two peoples” — and to work with “moderate Palestinians, the moderate Arab states and the entire free world” to contain religious extremism in the region.
The idea of forming alliances with moderate Arab states was a theme sounded repeatedly throughout the three-day conference by Israeli leaders, academics and military figures as well as by visiting leaders and academics from America and Europe.
 
Speakers contended that fear of Iran’s nuclear program is raising shivers not only in Jerusalem but also in Riyadh, Cairo, Amman and other Sunni Arab capitals. That shared fear has created a new openness among Sunni Arab states toward an alliance with their Jewish neighbor. That, in turn, would isolate Iran and restrict its freedom of action as it faces world pressure to end its nuclear ambitions.
 
“This is the first time I have perceived such fear among the Arabs,” said the tough-talking director of the Defense Ministry’s political-military bureau, Amos Gilad, former military governor of the West Bank. “We need to strengthen every possible contact with Egypt, the Saudis and of course the Jordanians.” Gilad noted that the peace process with the Palestinians is still in a state of flux, given the rise of what he called “Hamastan” in Gaza. But he said that Israel must do “everything it can” to strengthen the Palestinian Authority and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, in order to weaken Hamas.
 
He also advocated reaching out to Syria and convincing it to end its alliance with Iran and “change sides,” while noting that he spoke only for himself and not for the government.