At Lincoln Square Synagogue
May 8 – 8PM

New York – The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) is proud and honored to host the Lenore Broughton Lecture, being given by Israel’s immediate past Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), Lieut. General Moshe Ya’alon. General Ya’alon is presently Distinguished Military Fellow at the Washington Institute Center for Near East Studies. He served as Chief of the IDF from July 2002 until June 2005. The title of his lecture is “The Security of the State of Israel — The Challenges Ahead.” The lecture will take place on Monday, May 8, 2006, 8PM at the Lincoln Square Synagogue in Manhattan. It is located at 200 Amsterdam Avenue (at 69th Street). The lecture is open to the media and the public and there is no admission charge.

General Ya’alon has strong views on the continuing Palestinian Arab war against Israel. Statements he has recently made include:

• “The lesson that terrorism will not pay must be seared onto the Palestinians’ minds.”
  
• “The establishment of a Palestinian state would lead to war, and such a war could be dangerous for Israel. The idea that a Palestinian state can be established by 2008, and will then produce stability is divorced from reality and dangerous and will be a state that will try to undermine Israel.”
  
• “A two-state solution is simply not relevant. It is a story that the western world tells with western eyes. And that story does not comprehend the scale of the gap and the scale of the problem. We, in Israel, are also sweeping it under the rug.”
  
• Ya’alon insisted Israel must strive for “total victory,” until “every last Palestinian understands that terror cannot win.” Therefore, he added, Israel cannot afford any unilateral withdrawal from the territories, lest it be interpreted as “a sign of weakness,” as was Israel’s May 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon.
  
• Very simply, any surrender to terror attacks — in public sentiment, in transportation choices, or at the ballot box — will convince terrorists of the success of terrorism and generate more terror attacks!
  
• “We need to escalate military action against the Kassam launchers even if it means entering the Gaza Strip.”
  
• “Israel made a mistake,” by not responding immediately after the “Kassam rain showers” began.
  
• Ya’alon criticized the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip this past summer and blamed Israel for Hamas’s take-over of the Palestinian Authority. “There is no question that the disengagement from Gaza strengthened the Hamas…”
  
• “Many people see the occupation as an obstacle to peace instead of the Palestinians who started the conflict. The bottom line is that we could have done it [disengagement] differently and we could have strengthened the Zionist story and not the Palestinian story. The Hamas saw what happened and understood that terrorism had won.”
  
• Unilateral steps that did not create a profit for Israel should not be taken, “Instead of making the Palestinians understand they will pay a heavy price for terror, they learned they are better off as terrorists and that is a serious problem.”
  
• Meetings recently between the head of Hamas’s political wing Khaled Mashal and officials in Teheran including Iran’s radical president Mahmoud Ahmadinelad. Ya’alon continued, “should make us lose sleep at night.”
  
• “Hamas’s victory in the elections will tighten the ties between the PA and Iran and will grant Iran a great deal of influence over what happens in the West Bank and especially I the Gaza Strip.”
  
• “Al-Qaida, was also operating in Gaza and “young Palestinians were easy recruits” to enlist in the radical terror group. “We need to assume that the Palestinians will try and improve their rocket abilities. We can assume that we will soon face accurate and deadly long-range rockets that can reach Ashkelon and possibly even farther west.”
  
• The challenges, he said, were not just Israel’s but also affected the entire western world.
  
• “The Palestinian threat harbors cancer-like attributes that have to be severed.” He even expressed concerns that we could face “a situation in which there will not be a Jewish state here in the end.”
  
• “From the dawn of Zionism until this day, the source of all terrorist attacks has been the refusal of the Arab world to recognize Israel’s existence. Until this changes we will remain the target of violent terrorist activity. The ’67 borders are neither a solution to rocket attacks, suicide bombs nor to more conventional forms of warfare.”