What is the Temple Mount ‘Status Quo’?

Video Of The Week - "Temple Mount UNtruth" -https://tinyurl.com/mruz59xh

For the full article “Israel Today” by Lt. Col. (Res) Maurice Hirsch- https://tinyurl.com/58d4pby8

Secret documents released by the Israeli archives expose the real “status quo” instituted in 1967.

The current status quo on the Temple Mount was the decision of one man, and largely contradicts what the Muslims themselves acknowledged just 100 years ago regarding the Jewish connection to the holy site. 

(JNS) On June 17, 1967, 55 years ago last Friday, then-Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan made one of the most fateful decisions in the history of the State of Israel and the Jewish people. Just days after the end of the Six-Day War, Dayan agreed to establish a new “status quo” for the Temple Mount. Fearing open discussion of the decision, Dayan’s agreement was not positively ratified by the government of the day—or by any government since.

The Temple Mount is Judaism’s holiest site. It is the biblical Mount Moriah, where Abraham was to sacrifice his son Isaac. It is the site at which King Solomon built the first Jewish Temple, destroyed in 586 BCE. It is the site at which the Jews, 70 years later, built the Second Temple. As a pamphlet for tourists published in 1924 by the Supreme Muslim Council openly declares:

“This site is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest (perhaps from pre-historic) times. Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute”.

The Temple Mount is also holy to Muslims, who refer to it as Al-Haram Al-Sharif (“The Noble Sanctuary”). The Muslims added two dominant structures to the site: The Dome of the Rock, built in 691 CE, that stands in the middle of the mount, directly over the ruins of the inner sanctuaries of the two temples; and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, built in 693 CE, in the southwestern corner of the mount.

In the 1990s, the Waqf excavated the area known as “Solomon’s Stables,” turning it into a new mosque, referred to as the El-Marwani Mosque. It is located 12 meters (40 feet) below the current courtyard; the Supreme Muslim Council pamphlet notes that the area of the Stables “dates probably as far back as the construction of Solomon’s Temple. According to Josephus, it was in existence and was used as a place of refuge by the Jews at the time of the conquest of Jerusalem by Titus in the year 70 AD” It was Titus who destroyed the Second Temple.

COMPELLING TESTIMONY: The Supreme Muslim Council admits that the Temple Mount is deeply connected to Jewish history.

After Israel liberated Jerusalem and the Temple Mount from Jordan, which had illegally occupied it from 1948 to 1967, a decision needed to be made regarding access to the site.

Seeking to placate the Muslims after their unequivocal defeat, Dayan offered the Jordanian Waqf control of activities within the walls of the mount itself, while Israel would be responsible for external security and public order. Dayan further conceded that Muslims would be granted free access to the site, and that while there would be no limitations on the number of Jews entering the mount, they would not be allowed to pray there.

The argument has been made that in ceding the internal activities on the mount to the Waqf, Dayan sought to neutralize the religious ingredient of the Israeli-Arab conflict. However, secret documents released by the Israeli archives and reviewed by Palestinian Media Watch expose the authentic and official “status quo” instituted in 1967.

For certain periods, the Temple Mount was entirely closed to Jews, predominantly during and after bouts of Arab violence and terror. In contrast, the site is almost never closed to Muslims, except in exceptional circumstances, such as in July 2017, when the mount was closed for a few days after terrorists murdered two Israeli policemen there.

While no Israeli government ever ratified Dayan’s agreement, to this day, the “status quo” on the Temple Mount is that the internal part of the site is run by the Waqf and Israel is responsible for the external security and maintaining public order. Muslims are allowed to freely visit the site, in unlimited numbers, subject to fine-tuning to take into account safety and security precautions. Jews are only permitted to enter the site for limited hours of the day, and in limited numbers, and are mostly not allowed to conduct individual or communal prayers.

Since its creation, the Palestinian Authority has continuously and consistently used the Temple Mount as a means to inflame religious fervor and as a rallying call for violence and terror. Repeatedly claiming that Israel is planning to destroy the “Al-Aqsa Mosque,” which it deceptively defines as being 144 dunams (36 acres) in area—ie. the entire area of the Temple Mount—the PA misleads the Palestinians, and indeed the entire Muslim world, into falsely believing that “Al-Aqsa is in danger.”

While documents and 55 years of reality clearly demonstrate that Israel has no intention to even undermine, let alone destroy, any part of the site, the PA still claims, as shown by PMW, that “Since the June War (ie., the Six-Day War in 1967)—we are talking about its 55th anniversary—there are [Israeli] intentions to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and build the alleged Temple” (Official PA TV, June 6, 2022).

For the PA, which has no say whatsoever regarding the manner in which the site is run, allowing Jews to pray on the Temple Mount would be tantamount to declaring World War III. Similar empty rantings were also made by the PA before the United States moved its Israeli embassy to Jerusalem.

A lot has changed since 1967. Over the past few decades, most western societies have developed and adopted a much more heightened sense of personal freedoms and rights, including freedom of religion. The idea that the decision of one person alone—Moshe Dayan—could prevent all Jews from praying at Judaism’s most holy site would, today, be inconceivable. At the same time, over the years, the desire and willingness of Jews to enter the Temple Mount has increased dramatically.

Since it is unreasonable to believe that Muslims are inherently incapable of recognizing the legitimate rights of Jews to pray on the Temple Mount and expressing the religious tolerance required, maybe the time has come for Israel’s government to finally clarify what exactly the “status quo” on the Temple mount was, is and should be.

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Israel Signs Free Trade Deal with UAE

 Video Of The Week - Israel to Help Solve Europe’s Energy Shortage - https://tinyurl.com/yckrfs2k 

For the full article from the JPost by LAHAV HARKOV go to https://tinyurl.com/2p84zx99

Ambassador to the UAE Amir Hayek succinctly announced the signing of the agreement on twitter, tweeting "Done!" in response to a previous tweet on the topic.

Israel entered its first-ever free-trade agreement with an Arab state, when Economy Minister Orna Barbivay signed the deal with her counterpart in the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday.

Ambassador to the UAE Amir Hayek succinctly announced the signing of the agreement on Twitter, writing “Done!” in response to a previous tweet on the topic.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett praised the FTA as “historic” and the fastest to be signed in Israel’s history. He thanked Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Mohamed Bin Zayed for accelerating the process.

 “We are continuing to warm the peace between the countries,” Bennett tweeted.

On Monday, Barbivay said her visit to Dubai was “of strategic importance to the economic relations between the State of Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Together we will remove barriers and promote comprehensive trade and new technologies.”

Israel and the UAE established full diplomatic relations in August 2020, in what is called the Abraham Accords. Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco followed soon after.

“Together we will remove barriers and promote comprehensive trade and new technologies,” she added.

Israel and the UAE established full diplomatic relations in August 2020, in what was called the Abraham Accords. Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco followed soon after.

Israel has 19 free agreements, including the one with the UAE. Israel also has a more limited free-trade agreement with Jordan, but the new deal with the UAE is much broader and is similar to those with the United States and the European Union.

The free trade agreement is the UAE’s second, following one with India earlier this year.

This agreement covers 96% of the trade between Israel and the UAE, which stood last year at $885 million.

That is more than double Israel’s $330m. in trade with Egypt in 2021, even though the two countries have had a peace agreement since 1979.

According to the Economy and Industry Ministry, the level of trade in 2020 stood at $120m. and at $1m. in 2010.

The FTA signing went forward as planned, even though the UAE criticized Israel a day earlier for allowing Jews to visit the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site.

“The UAE today strongly condemned the storming of al-Aqsa Mosque courtyard by extremist settlers under the protection of Israeli forces,” a statement by the Emirati Foreign Ministry read, calling on Israel “to take responsibility for reducing escalation and ending all attacks and practices that lead to the continuation of tensions.”

There was no documentation of violence by Jews or Israelis on the Temple Mount this week, though some did pray at the site in contravention of the rules for Jewish visitors. Some Muslims threw rocks at visitors and police from the Aqsa Mosque.

The UAE statement came a day after the annual Jerusalem Day flag march through the Old City, which was mostly peaceful, though some Jews and Muslims chanted calls for violence and there were some minor clashes, leading to about 50 arrests.

Tovah Lazaroff contributed to this report.

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"Apartheid" State, Who is Kidding Who?

Video Of The Week - CNN lies corrected by Bennett- https://tinyurl.com/yc6735tf

For the full Article go to the Spectator - https://tinyurl.com/2p96jkjk

If you’re after evidence of apartheid in Israel, you don’t have to look very far. Amid rioting by Palestinians and Arabs, the Israel Police has declared the Temple Mount in Jerusalem off-limits. For ten days, only practitioners of one religion will be allowed to visit.

For context, Temple Mount is home to the Holy of Holies, the most sacred site in Judaism, and is where the First and Second Temples stood until their destruction by the Babylonians and Romans, respectively. Following Jerusalem’s conquest by Islamic imperialists in the 7th century, a succession of caliphs worked to Islamise the Temple Mount by erecting Muslim worship sites including the Dome of the Rock, built on top of the old Jewish temple, and Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.

In recent days, Arab and Muslim rioters have run amok on the Temple Mount and throughout the Old City. They have fired off Molotov cocktails and rocks at law enforcement from inside Al-Aqsa. They have beaten religious Jews on their way to pray at the Western Wall. They have stoned at least ten buses, injuring passengers including a 13-year-old girl. Hence why the Israel Police has said adherents of one religion and one religion alone will be permitted on the Temple Mount for the next ten days. That one religion is, naturally, Islam.

For centuries, Jews were forbidden from ascending Temple Mount by the occupying empire of the day

Welcome to Israel, apartheid state. This interdict is not unusual and nor is the tumult that has occasioned it; both have played out semi-regularly in recent years. Religious discrimination against non-Muslims is in fact routine on Temple Mount, which is governed by the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, a Jordanian religious trust, in cooperation with the Israel Police.

For centuries, Jews were forbidden from ascending Temple Mount by the occupying empire of the day, and even after they liberated their capital city in 1967, almost all senior rabbis have forbidden Jews to set foot on the hill. Nevertheless, some have persisted and Israel permits a limited number of its Jewish citizens to visit their holiest site, provided they do not pray while there. Those Jews who do pray are arrested. Jews may only enter the complex through a separate gate designated for use by non-Muslims.

The virtues of these arrangements are open to question. For one, they concede Islamic and Palestinian supremacist views about the Temple Mount and the freedom of Jews to worship there. Limiting Jewish access to the hill does not stop Palestinian terror groups, preachers and media routinely prompting riots with false claims that the Zionists are ‘storming Al-Aqsa’. Israeli police operations to curtail said rioting are then packaged by the international media and NGOs as a wanton Israeli attack on Muslim holy sites and worshipers, a framing amplified by gullible western progressives.

Ariel Sharon’s decision to visit Temple Mount in 2000 is generally agreed to be the cause of the Second Intifada, in which Palestinian suicide bombers murdered more than a thousand Israelis. (If you’re wondering why the lesson from this incident was ‘Israeli Prime Ministers must not be so provocative as to visit Jewish holy sites in their own capital city’ and not ‘blowing up buses and pizza parlours for four years because someone walked up a hill seems a bit extreme’, you just failed your Foreign Office civil service exam.) Nor do the current arrangements do much for the sacrosanctity of Al-Aqsa, the mosque that is ‘desecrated’ by Israeli police entering to stop rioting but not by the rioting itself.

Rather than acknowledge Israel’s self-denying efforts to keep the peace on Temple Mount, the international community simply breezes past them and onto their condemnations. It is taken as given that Israel ought to cede sovereignty in its capital city and task its police with arresting Jewish citizens for praying on a hill. This goes to the hypocrisy that runs through elite western (and, it must be said, Israeli) discourses on Israel and the Palestinians. Western legal norms and the assumptions of rights-based liberalism are applied – often, though not always, dishonestly – to characterise Israeli laws, military decisions and security measures as arbitrary and discriminatory, motivated by racial and religious malice and a nationalist desire to dominate the Palestinians. Because Israel is not Sweden, it is damned as South Africa.

Yet this commitment to universalising western values only goes one way. It is not applied to Palestinian demands for a Jew-free state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, nor to Palestinian prohibitions – backed up by the death penalty – against selling property to Jews. Most noticeably, it does not apply when Israel discriminates against its Jewish citizens and restricts their liberty of movement and freedom to manifest their religious faith. Israelis often complain about double standards but there is only one standard and it is always against Israel.

The Temple Mount compromise is messy, unjust, inequitable and probably doesn't bring a fraction of the benefits the Israeli security establishment tells itself, but it is an accommodation made in the interests of public order, stability, and coexistence. It is plainly discriminatory against Jews but Israel figures, rightly or wrongly, that this is the price of keeping an uneasy peace. There's your apartheid state.

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Stockpiling Rocks and Ammunition in Mosques-the New Religion?

Tension on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount isn’t new. The site of both the First and Second Temples in ancient times and al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock shrine today has the potential for friction built-in.

But what we are increasingly seeing are cynical attempts to exploit the holy site for a different purpose, for propaganda  rather than peaceful religion. The Palestinian rioters who desecrated the site by throwing rocks and firecrackers at police and on the Jewish worshipers gathered at the Western Wall below the Mount, did not go to the area Muslims call al-Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) or al-Aqsa compound for a spiritual Ramadan experience.

Video footage of clashes between Israeli police and security forces and Palestinian rioters at the site have gone viral and are often difficult to watch. There certainly seem to be cases of police overreacting and attacking Palestinians who appear to be unconnected to the violence. Nonetheless, what needs to be kept in mind is cause and effect.

The Muslims who stockpiled stones, rocks, logs and firecrackers in al-Aqsa did not do so for religious purposes. They prepared for a riot – to attack police and Jewish worshipers – not for prayers. Police did not storm al-Aqsa Mosque to “conquer” it. They broke in to arrest the rock throwers who had barricaded themselves inside after Friday prayers. Some of the masked Palestinians waved Hamas flags and praised arch-terrorist Muhammed Deif as they tried to bombard the Jewish worshipers who had come to pray at the Western Wall at the start of the Passover holiday.

With their unholy actions, the rioters are disturbing the freedom of prayer of everyone, including other Muslims. The vast majority of the 50,000 or so Muslim worshipers in the al-Aqsa area on Friday came with the peaceful intention of prayer at Islam’s third holiest site. The fact that so many thousands were able to gather there shows that Israel is intent on protecting freedom of worship for the Muslims.

It is Jewish worship that is limited at Judaism’s holiest site. The Muslim extremists object to any Jewish presence on Temple Mount and now refer to the entire area as “al-Aqsa” and yesterday they threw rocks at buses traveling to the Western Wall. Jews who ascend Temple Mount note, however, that part of the area serves as a soccer field, far from serving religious needs.

Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Authority have all accused Israel of carrying out “provocations” and an “assault” at the site. They are hoping to turn it into a battle cry. It is easy to rally Muslims everywhere around the lie that al-Aqsa is in danger and needs defending. The terrorist organizations are hoping that this becomes as self-fulfilling prophesy.

Stockpiling rocks and weapons in a mosque is a desecration, not a way of elevating its religious status; similarly, launching rockets in the direction of Temple Mount does absolutely nothing to “protect” it. On the contrary.

The Temple Mount is significant to all three monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Thousands of Muslim worshipers were able to pray at al-Aqsa Mosque yesterday, during Ramadan, as a few hundred Jews also went up to Temple Mount, on Passover, while Christians could be seen celebrating Easter in Jerusalem.

Israel cannot allow a minority of violent rioters to desecrate the holy site. Anyone who supports freedom of religion and truly cares about the Temple Mount should condemn the Arab rioters, not the police.

 

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The Palestinian Lie about Jerusalem Has Legs

 Video Of The Week - How Did Islam Get Involved with the Temple Mount? https://tinyurl.com/epwg88q5

For the full article by Nadav Shragai go to -  https://tinyurl.com/1cmugufb

 “A lie,” according to the well-known saying, “has no legs,” but that does not mean lies do not need them.

 The “Al-Aqsa is in danger” libel rests on a huge false leg that, in the end, will collapse. The lie would not have survived so long without it. Today, the Palestinians and many Muslims charge that Israel “seeks to destroy al-Aqsa” and build the Temple in its stead on a site where no Temple ever stood; that the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount is al-miza’um, that is, “supposed,” “fraudulent,” “invented,” or “imaginary;” that the Jews have no connection to the Temple Mount or, for that matter, to the Western Wall.     

 This is a libel on top of a libel, a double lie. The many Muslims who are convinced that al-Aqsa is in danger are now also convinced that “their” al-Aqsa stands on a place where “our” Temple never stood – the latter being nothing but a fabrication.

 Some of the legitimacy that terrorism draws from the libel rests on that added lie. It is more legitimate to libel and murder Jews, so as “to protect the captive al-Aqsa and free it from the Jews who are plotting to destroy it,” if Israel and the Jews who “conspire to attack the site,” have only a false and concocted connection to it. Thus, the lie that undergirds the libel also bolsters the legitimacy to murder in its name.

 From the standpoint of the “Al-Aqsa is in danger” terrorists and their supporters, they do not murder only those who seek to wrest the Mount from their hands. As they see it, they are also murdering the falsifiers of history, who have no link to the site at all. They also want the Mount to be “liberated” psychologically so that their historical and religious narrative will prevail. This chapter (the appendix of the book) aims to refute this lie as well and to prove that it is nothing but a broken prop.

 To grasp the magnitude of the lie, one must go far back on the path the Muslims themselves trod over the past 1,350 years, the path from which they have strayed only in recent times. Despite the misrepresentations and the sweeping denial that many Muslims now adopt regarding the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount and to the Temple that stood there, they themselves were the ones who, up until the Six-Day War, identified the Mount – unequivocally – as the site of Solomon’s Temple and as the place where David said his Psalms.

 Furthermore, Solomon and David, as important prophets in Islam, are seen as the ones who laid the foundations on the Temple Mount for the building of the mosques there. Nevertheless, today, Muslim clerics and leaders remove the Jewish Temple from the Mount and “transfer” it to places like Mount Zion, Nablus, and even Yemen.

 Moreover, many of the names and terms the Muslims have used over the years for the Temple Mount, particularly “Beit al-Maqdis,” which is a translation of the Hebrew name Beit haMikdash, derive from the Jewish designation for the site, where the two Muslim shrines were built around 1,350 years ago. 

Today, Muslims commonly use the name Beit al-Maqdis for Jerusalem, but in the ancient past, they used the name for the Temple Mount itself. The Jewish people and the State of Israel do not, of course, need the Muslim sources – which, for more than 1,350 years, have identified the Temple Mount as the site of the Temple – to prove their connection to the place.

 Given, however, the dispute on this issue and the resolutions hostile to Israel in the international arena, which espouse the new Muslim narrative, it is worth presenting the primary Muslim documentation and sources for the Jewish connection to Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, and the Temple. 

Today, many Muslims erase this reliable documentation from memory. From such forgetfulness, the path is short to denial, and this gives rise to a lie. On this lie now rests the libel from which the “Al-Aqsa is in danger” terror derives its inspiration and legitimacy to murder Jews.

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The UN: Abbas’s Palestinian playground

Video Of The Week - Why is the US cutting aid to refugees? https://tinyurl.com/y8uq8snw

For full article by Yisrael Medad - https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-un-abbas-playground/  

(October 2, 2018 ) 

How important is the Temple Mount?  Ask Mahmoud Abbas. Elected leader in 2009, with no elections since then, of the Palestinian Authority that purports to be a state (but can’t even extend effectively its rule over Gaza).

According to the Haaretz version of his speech at the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday last week, he said:

“And you might note, ladies and gentlemen, that the Israeli settlers and even the Israeli army on every single day; they are committing acts of blasphemy against our holy sites, especially Al-Aqsa mosque.”

The media supporting the P.A. regularly employs purposeful terminology so as to distort and demonize Jews. One recent headline published during the Sukkot holiday reads: “Over 500 Israeli settlers storm Al-Aqsa.” Indeed, “storm” is their preferred word-of-choice, intimating that Jews as Jews should not be there at all, and that they are somehow breaking in illegally. Another referred to “religious rituals” as if they were witches from Macbeth.

Interestingly, that section was not in the official WAFA version.

By the way, Jews do not, indeed cannot, enter the Temple Mount compound daily, unlike prior to 2000. Almost 160 days in the year the Temple Mount are off-limits to Jewish visitors for various reasons.

But that was but one part of Abbas’s litany of lies.

He also touched on the Law of Israel as a nation-state and declared:

“This racist law talks about what is called the ‘land of Israel.’ Can you ask the Israeli government what exactly constitutes the ‘land of Israel’? What are the ‘borders’ of the State of Israel? I challenge anyone to tell us what they are.”

If one reads the Basic Law of the Palestinian Authority, no exact borders of a proposed Palestinian state exist. Worse, all we are informed geographically is that “Palestine is part of the large Arab world.”

In another version, we read of another land mass undefined: “On the land of the fathers and forefathers, the land of heavenly Messages … ,” but then deeper into the document, we read, “Its territory is an indivisible whole with its boundaries, as they existed on the eve of 4 June 1967.” And yet, Judea and Samaria were part of Jordan, illegally occupied and annexed, and Gaza was under Egyptian military rule. We also need not forget that the U.N.’s Resolution 242 does not mention Palestine as a state or other political entity.

So, what is Abbas claiming?

Quite simply, he is engaged in national-identity negation.

A bit later on in his address, Abbas notes that the Arabs of Palestine are “an indigenous people and our roots are deep across 5,000 years.” Arab collective identity within the general area of historic Palestine is 1,380 years old. Arabs may have been engaged in commerce or pilgrimage before 638 C.E. (and prior to them assuming an Islamic ethos), but to claim a 5,000-year history, even as Canaanites or Jebusites or even Natufians are false, ridiculous and outlandish suggestions.

What does Abbas mean when he said peace must include “an independent Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and not some place in East Jerusalem as its capital, and with all of its holy sites?” Do all holy sites refer to just Islamic sites? What about Christian or Jewish sites, and the claim that one cannot be Palestinian if one is Jewish? Of course, since Abbas and company promote a form of reconstructionism that suggests the Western Wall is actually the Al-Buraq tethering post, and outright denies of the 800-year existence of two Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount—despite their explicit mention in the Koran—perhaps Abbas really does disavow anything Jewish about Jerusalem.

One last excerpt of reveals Abbas’s strategy of self-denial, on the one hand, and his assumption that all will believe him no matter how pejorative he is on the other:

“We resist this colonial, settler Israeli occupation through the legitimate means created by this international organization. Foremost among these is peaceful, popular resistance as we witness today in the Great March of Return in Gaza.”

Incendiary kites, terror tunnels, sniper fire, tossing of grenades, IEDs, infiltration and more at the Gaza border occur almost daily, not to mention mortars, rockets and missiles.

But Abbas knows that the United Nations is his playground, his theater. He can be elected, as he was just now, to the Group of 77 with impunity despite his words and his actions. And his stage is becoming increasingly immoral, malevolent and extremely hazardous, revealed by the applause Abbas received from that seemingly august, peace-loving body.

It is that applause that assign to his appearances the tragicomic label.

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Israel, not the West, stands for international law

For the full article by Melanie Philips go to: http://tinyurl.com/hmok5r8

The West maintains that Israel occupies Palestinian territory in the “West Bank.” This is untrue. There has never been any “Palestinian territory.”

After the death of Shimon Peres, BBC  radio’s flagship current affairs show Today interviewed Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Mark Regev.

The presenter persistently suggested to him that Peres’s record as a peacemaker ran contrary to Israel’s subsequent record of failure to make peace with the Palestinians, and that the absence of a two-state solution was all the fault of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Her questioning reflected the grotesque false assumption underlying Western hostility toward Israel: that if only it wasn’t so belligerent there would be peace. Repeatedly challenged with this claim, Regev refused to engage. Instead he mouthed platitudes about how Peres would always have answered such a question with hope and optimism about a peaceful solution.

This was a missed opportunity. The overwhelming requirement for Israel is always to nail the big lie behind the questions thrown at it.

Regev should have said that the reason for the absence of a two-state solution was displayed last week at the UN, where the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas made a speech expressing hostility to Israel’s very existence.

He falsely presented the Jews of Israel as squatters in the Palestinians’ own land. He even demanded that Britain apologize for the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which first committed Britain to reestablish the Jewish homeland in what was then called Palestine.

Through this declaration, said Abbas, Britain had given “without any right, authority or consent from anyone, the land of Palestine to another people.”

This preposterous speech was notable for three things. First, it rewrote the Jews out of their own history by fabricating an entirely fictitious Palestinian story. The only people for whom the Land of Israel and the disputed territories have ever been their national kingdom are the Jews.

Second, Abbas blamed Israel for his own people’s aggression and murderous violence over the Temple Mount.

Third, his speech showed that the Palestinians’ complaint is not about the absence of a state of their own. It is about the existence of Israel which they want gone.

The full speech received no mainstream coverage in the West. Abbas could be confident, however, that it reflected two entirely false Western beliefs: that Israel acts in contravention of international law, and that the land originally belonged to the Palestinians.

With the West duly softened up, Abbas is thought to be planning a maneuver at the UN. He says he will be pushing a UN Security Council resolution against the settlements. What worries Israel more is the rumor that President Obama will refuse to veto a proposed French UN resolution recognizing a Palestinian state.

If Obama does this, the US will be complicit in tearing up international law and bringing into being a terrorist state whose existential purpose is the extermination of Israel.

As the international law expert Prof. Eugene Kontorovich argued in The Washington Post in September, the proposed French measure repudiates UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed in the wake of the Six Day War. Resolution 242 represented a territorial compromise, with Israel agreeing to cede some but not all the territories it seized during the Six Day War in return for peace.

According to Kontorovich the French resolution, which would push Israel back behind the 1949 “Auschwitz” armistice lines, would repudiate 242 and amount to “a fundamental reversal of 50 years of Middle East diplomacy.”

Instead of a negotiated settlement, the US would therefore not only be aiding the unilateral imposition of a new terrorist entity in the Middle East but would also show its contempt for international law.

In fact the US, Britain and Europe have long displayed this contempt by supporting the big lie that Israel behaves illegally or belligerently.

The West maintains that Israel occupies Palestinian territory in the “West Bank.” This is untrue. There has never been any “Palestinian territory.”

Israel’s presence in the disputed territories cannot be legally defined as an occupation. Under the Hague and Geneva conventions, an occupation can only take place on sovereign land. The territories were never anyone’s sovereign land.

Israel is furthermore entitled under international law to continue to hold onto them as a defensive measure as long as its Arab aggressors continue to use them for belligerent ends.

The West says Israel’s settlements are illegal. This is also untrue.

In the 20s, the Mandate for Palestine gave Britain the legally binding duty to settle the Jews throughout what is now not just Israel but the disputed territories too. That Jewish right has never been abrogated.

The Geneva conventions, cited as the reason the settlements are illegal, prohibit an occupying power from transferring people en masse into occupied territory. This was drafted after World War II to prevent any repetition of the Nazis’ forced displacement of peoples. Israelis resident in the disputed territories, however, have not been transferred but moved there through their own free choice.

Kontorovich has looked at every modern example where occupied territories have been settled. In none of them did the international community denounce such action as illegal or demand that settlers had to vacate the land as a condition for peace or independence. If world powers asked the occupying force to withdraw, they referred only to the army and not the settler population. The only exception has been Israel.

The West makes a fetish of international law. Yet it denounces Israel, the one Middle East state that upholds it. It’s time to call out the US, Britain and Europe for aiding the repudiation of law and justice and thus helping promote the Arab agenda of exterminating Israel.

Melanie Phillips is a columnist for The Times (UK).

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Abbas can't mention "Temple Mount" at UNESCO for fear of ISIS

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GENEVA, July 15, 2016 — Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas is refusing to include any non-Islamic term for Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in a UNESCO resolution out of fear that he and Jordan’s King Abdullah would be targeted by ISIS, reported Israel’s ambassador to the Paris-based UN agency on science, education and culture. (See story below.)

Israel is expressing alarm over an EU members’ revised draft resolution at a session of UNESCO's World Heritage Committee now meeting in Istanbul. Foreign ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon said it would be “crazy” for EU states on the 21-member committee—Poland, Portugal, Croatia, and Finland—to agree to a text that is “denying Jewish Jerusalem” and Temple Mount, thereby “denying the roots of Christian Europe.”

In a statement by the foreign ministry, Israel said it was “concerned by the European Union’s intention to propose a draft resolution that denies the connection between the Jewish people and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest site.”

 “The EU resolution would serve as an alternative to the draft resolution proposed by the Palestinians,” yet “the EU proposal is a continuation of the attempts being made to negate the Jewish people’s deep historic and religious ties to the Temple Mount.”

“This despite France’s apology and admission that it erred in supporting the April decision of UNESCO’s Executive Board that considered the Temple Mount to be a site holy only to Muslims.” (See below on France.)

“They must come to their senses!” wrote spokesman Nahshon on Twitter.

Palestinian Rep: Abbas Won’t Mention Temple Mount for Fear of ISIS.

Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO, Carmel Shama Hacohen, present at the UNESCO meeting in Istanbul and leading the campaign against the European initiative, was quoted by Ynet as follows: “Though the Euro soccer tournament ended, the EU is deep offside; instead of focusing on its challenges, it may be adding troubles in a region that already has its share. The European consensus for severing the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount reaches a new record of hypocrisy.”

During the discussions, reported Ynet, Ambassador Shama Hohen asked Palestinian delegate Mounir Anastas why Palestinians are not prepared to recognize the Jewish right to the Temple Mount and include the term “Temple Mount” in the resolution, alongside the Arab term, Haram al-Sharif.

The Palestinian delegate replied, according to Ynet, that if the Palestinians were to recognize the Temple Mount, then Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Jordan’s King Abdullah would become number one targets of ISIS.

Shama Hacohen commented that “the historical connection of the Jewish people to the Temple Mount is not subject to the wishes and threats of ISIS, just like it is not subject to the will or decisions of foreign countries and international organizations.”

“Palestinians and Jordanians should thank God for Israeli sovereignty over Temple Mount, which gives them and the place complete religious freedom and absolute protection from ISIS and the destruction it sows of cultural and religious heritage sites in the entire Middle East.”

Jordanian-Palestinian Draft Denies Jewish Ties to Jerusalem

An earlier, Palestinian-Jordanian draft referred ten times to Al-Haram Al-Sharif, the Islamic term for Temple Mount, without mentioning that it has been the holiest site in Judaism for thousands of years.

France backed a similar resolution adopted at UNESCO’s executive board in April, but after an outcry several of its leaders expressed regret. President Hollande pledged to be “vigilant” in the next resolution, to affirm the shared significance of the holy sites. Brazil also expressed regret. Now is an opportunity for both countries, who exercise influence despite not being members of the committee, to play a positive role in Istanbul.

Arab states can expect immediate support from 11 of the 21 committee members. Six of them—Cuba, Indonesia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Tunisia and Zimbabwe—are almost certain to back the Palestinians, while another five, the Philippines, Jamaica, Turkey, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, are likely to do the same.

On the other hand, it was hoped that Croatia, Finland, Poland, Portugal, South Korea and Tanzania would take a more balanced position, as possibly could Angola, Burkina Faso, Peru and Vietnam.

After UNESCO Vote in April, French Leaders Criticized Own Position

 After the April resolution at UNESCO that effectively denied Jewish ties to Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu reprimanded French President Francois Hollande for his country's support of the resolution, citing it as a stumbling block to Israel endorsing a French-led international conference on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

• In a rare development, French leaders then questioned their own government's vote. President Francois Hollande indicated that he will be "vigilant" in ensuring that the next text on the subject, expected in October, will be unequivocal in its affirmation of the shared significance of the holy sites.

• Prime Minister Manuel Valls more sharply criticized the resolution, saying: “This UNESCO resolution contains unfortunate, clumsy wording that offends and unquestionably should have been avoided, as should have the vote."

• Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve also criticized France's vote, telling an event organized by CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish communities, that he does “not take a supportive view of the text.” The resolution “should not have been adopted,” Cazeneuve said at the event in Paris, adding that the resolution passed “was not written as it should have been,” the Le Figaro daily reported.                          

 Video of the week: My Message to President Abbas: 5 Steps for Peace http://tinyurl.com/j4v57nq

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