Cheers and Cash for Terrorists!

Video Of The Week - Are Israeli Supreme Court Justices Super-Heroes? https://tinyurl.com/2dacurce

 For the full article from JNS by Jonathan s. Tobin, go to https://tinyurl.com/4ftcwy55

In his initial phone conversation with new Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, to congratulate him and the rest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government on taking office, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken conveyed two contradictory messages.  As his boss, President Joe Biden, has done in the last two years, Blinken gave assurances that the administration was committed to Israel’s security and the alliance with Washington. He then got to the real purpose of the call: to “emphasize the continued U.S. commitment to a two-state solution and opposition to policies that endanger its viability.”

This is the same message that the Israelis have been receiving from both left-wing and mainstream American-Jewish groups and leaders grudgingly welcoming Netanyahu’s new government. They still cling to the illusion that the phrase “two-state solution” is a magic formula that must be propped up despite the evidence of the last three decades that the Palestinians have no real interest in it.  This is in stark contrast to public opinion in Israel, where even most of those who voted for the Yair Lapid-led coalition that was defeated by Netanyahu’s right-wing/religious bloc want no part of the kind of policies favored by Biden and liberal Jews abroad.  Other than for far-left parties like Meretz, which failed to garner enough votes to win seats in the Knesset, the “peace process” with the Palestinians is a dead letter in Israeli politics. Still, few American-Jewish liberals, for whom this issue is an article of faith, seem willing to grasp that their Israeli counterparts have largely discarded faith in the two-state myth.

The release on Thursday from jail of Karim Younis, Israel’s longest-serving security prisoner, is an example of an incident that has a profound impact on Israeli public opinion, but makes no impression on Americans.  The 65-year-old Arab Israeli from a village near Haifa was one of three terrorists who, in 1980, kidnapped and killed IDF Cpl. Avraham Bromberg, 20, when he was on leave and hitching a ride home.  While Maher is expected to be released in a few weeks, Karim had the distinction of being the terrorist serving the longest consecutive time in an Israeli prison.

Anyone who was expecting the latter to emerge after 40 years in jail a changed man repenting for his callous crime, or for his release to be ignored by fellow Arabs ashamed of his conduct, knows nothing about Palestinian society.  Indeed, he was defiant upon his release, expressing pride in his evil act and stating that he would have been glad to give another 40 years for the Palestinian cause. Despite the efforts of Israeli authorities to ensure that the event be a low-key affair, Karim Younis was treated to a hero’s welcome in his village where, draped in a Palestinian flag, he was carried around on the shoulders of his many admirers. 

This is hardly an isolated case, as a shockingly biased article published last week in The New York Times showed, Palestinian society is obsessed with honoring “martyrs” who died trying to kill and injure Israelis and Jews. The conceit of the piece centered on the assertions that the Israel Defense Forces have been killing growing numbers of civilians, and that 2022 had been the “deadliest year” since 2005 for Palestinians. But efforts to smear the IDF are being undermined by the fact that most of the Palestinian casualties from such encounters are claimed as operatives by Hamas, Islamic Jihad or terror groups, like the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, associated with the Fatah Party that runs the P.A.  The valorization of terror is an integral element of Palestinians’ culture. It’s part and parcel of the way their national identity is inextricably tied to the century-old war on Zionism.

All of the above explains why Israeli voters turned their back on parties that support a two-state solution and brought to power a coalition that has stated its determination not to tolerate more Palestinian terrorism.  Unless and until Americans acknowledge the reality of the conflict and the nature of Palestinian politics, the disconnect between the two countries about two states will continue. What both the administration and liberal Jews need to finally understand is that if their coveted solution is dead, it wasn’t slain by so-called Israeli hard-liners. It was murdered by Palestinian cheer and cash for terrorists.

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Abbas’ Message of Hopelessness at the UN

Video Of The Week -2700 Year Old Toilet Discovered in Jerusalem - https://tinyurl.com/3mt8y34m

For the full article go to JPCA - https://tinyurl.com/m57tkcb7

• PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ statement to the UN General Assembly on September 24, 2021, was almost identical to Yasser Arafat’s statement at the 2001 Durban Conference. Nothing has changed in the Palestinian message and narrative.
• Citing the “Nakba” (catastrophe), Abbas deliberately inverted history and ignored decades of organized violence by Arab groups and forces against Jewish communities, including massacres of Jews in 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936, and 1938, all aimed at terrorizing the Jewish residents and removing any Jewish presence from the area.
• He misled the General Assembly into believing that General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) created a “right of return” for Palestinians. The truth is that the resolution was a non-obligatory recommendation and did not create legal rights.
• In violation of UN resolutions and international conventions criminalizing the financing of terror, Abbas blatantly and unabashedly defended and justified the PA’s “pay to slay” policy that provides salaries to prisoners guilty of acts of terror and murder, knowing that such payments serve as incentives and encouragement for more acts of terror.
• To come to the UN General Assembly with delusional, misleading, and misguided accusations and threats does not serve the interests of peace and does not advance the chances of a return to peace negotiations one iota.

Anybody reading or listening to the PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ statement to the UN General Assembly on September 24, 2021,¹ could not but be transformed back to the almost identical statement made by then-head of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, at the 2001 Durban Conference.

Evidently, nothing has changed in the Palestinian message and narrative.

Abbas presented the same re-hashing of the familiar Palestinian accusations, clichés, and buzzwords of racism, colonialism, apartheid, nakba, and ethnic cleansing; unceasing whining about having been neglected by the international community; misrepresentation of, and delusional reliance on old, non-binding UN General Assembly resolutions, none of which have any legal authority or practical relevance; and finally their penchant for threatening – whether to continue their “peaceful popular resistance” of rocket-firing, terror infiltration, stabbings, ecological and agricultural terror, or complaining to international juridical bodies.

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US and Israeli bills to withhold ‘pay to slay’ terror financing

Video Of The Week - Pay for Slay: The Palestinian Leadership's Terrorist Policy - https://tinyurl.com/yb3z32zs

By Alex Truman, from JNS – July 3rd 2018

The passage of an Israeli law to withhold funds that the Palestinian Authority uses to pay murderers for killing Jews is the correction of an unconscionable injustice. That a democratic country with a High Court of Justice has allowed itself to transfer funds month after month to a murder-sponsoring entity within its midst is not just bad policy, it is completely illegal and utterly immoral.

Israeli parliamentarians finally awoke to the reality that the P.A. pays more than $360 million a year to terrorists serving prison sentences in Israeli jails and to the families of terrorists killed while in the act of attempted murder. The payment scheme—on the law books of the P.A. from as early as 2011—bases amounts to each terrorist or family on the severity of the jail term, with additional incentives for terrorists holding Israeli identification cards.

Israel was not the first country to legislate against the “pay to slay” practice. In March, the United States passed the Taylor Force Act, which prohibits the U.S. from sending foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority as long as the payment scheme remains in place.

The bill was named after Taylor Force, a 26-year-old American West Point graduate who had served tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. Taylor was visiting Israel as part of an entrepreneurial seminar connected to an MBA program at Vanderbilt University when he was stabbed to death on a popular Tel Aviv promenade by a terrorist from the Palestinian city of Kalqilya.

The terrorist was killed by police responding to the attack. To add insult to injury, Palestinians celebrated Taylor’s death, and soon afterwards, the terrorist’s family began receiving large monthly stipends—well in excess of average Palestinian salaries.

Several months later, Sander Gerber, a private New York financial executive and former board member of AIPAC, reached out to Taylor’s parents, Stuart and Robbi Force.

Gerber had recently been made aware of the payment scheme, and was shocked to learn that most Israeli and American politicians were clueless that terrorists were being paid to kill in accordance with Palestinian law.

No longer was the P.A. simply guilty of incitement to murder through school textbooks, television stations, social-media avenues and frequent speeches by Palestinian leaders, including P.A. head Mahmoud Abbas calling for the blood of Jews; the P.A. was proven to be an official terror-sponsoring entity.

Worse yet, most of the funds utilized to secure its budget and make the terror payments came either by way of foreign aid provided by the United States and others, or through a tariff agreement with Israel whereby funds are collected on behalf of the P.A. at ports of entry and then passed monthly by Israel to the Palestinian entity.

With this information in hand, Gerber enlisted Taylor’s parents in a campaign to educate lawmakers. Together, they demanded that both the United States and Israel stop sending funds that now could be proven were going into the hands of murderers.

For the United States, the issue was simple: The foreign aid that America provides is voluntary and can be withheld if it is deemed to not be serving America’s interests. For Israel, there were additional legal questions, as the funds are collected by Israel on behalf of the P.A. as part of the Oslo Accords. Yet once it was clearly established that the sponsorship of terror was a direct violation of the Oslo Accords, legal concerns were eased.

The U.S. Taylor Force Act was signed into law in March; it took several more months for Israel to follow suit. Despite calls by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for funds to be withheld from the P.A. from as early as 2015—coupled with his expressed support for the passage of the Taylor Force Act—the government sought to insert a waiver provision into the Israeli law.

Recently, the United States rejected an  argument by moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Trump administration was warned that the move would spark widespread unrest and destabilize the region. While protests ensued on the Gaza border, little violence was recorded in the West Bank and virtually none of the 250,000 Arabs living in Jerusalem—some just several hundred meters from the embassy—protested a move that did little to impact their day-to-day lives.

The passage of both the U.S. and Israeli versions of the laws to withhold funding is a testament to the relentless pursuit of Gerber and Force (who were both present for the Knesset vote). At an Israeli event in celebrating the outcome, Force noted that because they weren’t government officials, it might have been easier to push for the two laws’ passage.

Other countries are now taking notice. On the same day as the vote in Israel, Australia also announced it would withhold funds from the P.A. European nations may soon do the same.

According to the Israeli law, a review of the Palestinian budget line items and payment scheme must take place at the end of each calendar year. According to this provision—unless a stricter interpretation of the law is demanded—Israel will continue to send the monthly payments until the start of 2019, when a presentation will be made as to whether the payments have halted or not. If not, funds can be withheld in February.

Gerber, Force and the backers of the Israeli law are pushing for any funds withheld to be paid out to the victims of Palestinian terror who have secured judgements against the P.A. in court. This represents the truest form of justice: to take the funds once designated for the murderers and to provide them instead to the victims.

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