Europe's Unaccountable Palestinian Aid

By  Michael Theurer*  April 9, 2014

http://tinyurl.com/p93mcvm

(“BIG” Editor comments -The government is considering subtracting from the monthly tax revenue it transfers to the Palestinian Authority the amount the PA pays to terrorists and their families, a government official said on Wednesday.

Holding back the monthly tax revenues – or a part of them – is one option Israel is considering, the official said, in response to the PA ’s unilateral application last week to join 15 international conventions and treaties, a move that sent the diplomatic talks into a tailspin.

According to a document released from the Prime Minister’s Office, the PA transferred $153.5m. in 2012 to terrorists in Israeli prisons and to their families, as well as to families of deceased terrorists, including suicide bombers. This amounts to nearly 16 percent of all foreign aid to the PA .

It should also be noted that the Palestinians owe in excess of $300 mill. to the Israeli Electric Co. )

The government in the West Bank is the only body receiving EU funds regardless of its human-rights record or economic performance.

At a time of austerity and belt-tightening, the European Union remains the biggest donor to Third World countries. EU assistance to the developing world serves European values and objectives—but only if EU institutions abide by the highest standards of accountability in managing European taxpayers' money. As a recent report by the European Court of Auditors found, that hasn't always been the case with respect to EU aid to the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority.

Since the 1994 Oslo Agreement, which created the Palestinian Authority, the EU has offered generous financial assistance to Ramallah to help advance a just and lasting peace between Palestinians and Israelis. The EU is today the largest donor to the Palestinian Authority, which relies mainly on foreign donations. But European lawmakers have a duty to ensure that EU funds aren't diverted from the noble purpose for which they're intended.

In its report, issued in December, the European Court of Auditors revealed major dysfunctions in the management of EU financial support to the Palestinian Authority, and called for a serious overhaul of the funding mechanism.

Among other things, the court criticized the absence of any conditions for EU aid to the Palestinian Authority, an approach that reduces the potential leverage of the EU to push for more reforms from the Palestinian Authority. This is a surprising exception to the EU's famous "more-for-more" principle, according to which the EU offers stronger partnership and more incentives to countries that make more progress toward democratic reforms. This principle applies to every other recipient of EU aid in the world. In other words, the Palestinian Authority is the only body that receives EU funds regardless of its human-rights record or economic performance.

The court also revealed that, since 2007, "a considerable number" of Palestinian Authority civil servants in Gaza have received their salaries partly funded through EU aid—even though they "were not going to work due to the political situation in Gaza." How exactly does this contribute to peace-building? And how can the EU preserve its credibility back home when it pays salaries to people who don't work, while millions of European citizens are unemployed?

The court also found that the EU paid insufficient attention to the fungibility of the funds it provided to the Palestinian Authority. There is reason to believe that EU financial assistance has allowed the Palestinian Authority to use its own general budget to support terrorist or criminal activities.

The Palestinian Authority, for example, allocates a significant portion of its budget to paying salaries to Palestinian prisoners convicted of terrorism offenses. These salaries are up to five times higher than the average salary in the West Bank. Prisoners also receive large grants from the Palestinian Authority. According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in 2012 the Palestinian Authority's payments to convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons and to the families of deceased terrorists (including suicide bombers) together accounted for more than 16% of the annual foreign donations and grants to the budget of the Palestinian Authority. In February this year the Palestinian minister for prisoners' affairs announced that €30 million will be allocated to current or former prisoners in 2014.

One of the Palestinian Authority's main challenges is its widespread reputation for graft. That reputation has contributed to the success of Hamas, an EU-designated terrorist organization. Very simply, the more the PA is perceived as corrupt by the Palestinian people, the greater their support will be for Hamas. Thus, to promote peace and stability, Brussels must help the Palestinian Authority build strong and transparent institutions. This can't be achieved as long as the EU fails to set clear conditions for aid.

How can we ensure that EU financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority helps advance peace and stability in the region, while also promoting freedom, democracy and the rule of law? How can we guarantee no EU funds are used to reward terrorism? How can we be sure that EU money meant for public investment doesn't wind up in private Palestinian bank accounts?

The report from the European Court of Auditors is a wake-up call on the need for stricter supervision of how EU funding to the Palestinian Authority is spent. The plenary of the European Parliament last week passed a resolution calling for greater transparency in EU aid to the Palestinian Authority.

As chair of the European Parliament's Committee on Budgetary Control and a contributor to that resolution, I'm proud of my colleagues. But much more needs to be done: A useful next step would be the imposition of clear benchmarks and conditions that the Palestinian Authority would have to meet in order to receive additional EU funds. These should include improving the state of human rights in the West Bank, cracking down on corruption and cutting off subsidies to convicted Palestinian terrorists.

In these hard times, Brussels shouldn't tolerate blatant misuse of EU taxpayers' money.

* Mr. Theurer is chairman of the European Parliament's Committee on Budgetary Control.

Four reasons why Israel must be recognized as a Jewish state

Ex-Mossad head Meir Dagan says demanding recognition as a Jewish state is nonsense. Here’s why he’s wrong.

By Ari Shavit Feb. 13. 2014

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.574000

Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan thinks the demand to recognize Israel as a Jewish state is nonsense. But it is not nonsense - it is the most natural and justified demand imaginable. For four different reasons we must support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who are placing the demand at the top of the diplomatic agenda.

The first reason: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not start in 1967 and does not revolve around the occupation and the settlements. It is a deep national-religious-cultural-social conflict, whose foundation is blindness. For decades Zionism refused to see the Palestinian people and in doing so refused to recognize its right to establish a Palestinian state. To this day the Palestinian national movement refuses to see the Jewish people and recognize in this way its right to a Jewish state. This double and continuing blindness is what ignited the 100-year war between us and them. That is why, in order to end this war, we must recognize their nationalism and their state, and they must recognize our nationalism and our state. Just as peace is impossible without a Palestinian state, peace is impossible without a Jewish state.

The second reason: The great achievement of the Oslo Accords was in their bringing the Israelis to recognize the fact that there is a Palestinian people in the land of Israel with legitimate rights. The great achievement of the Camp David peace summit was in Israel recognizing the need to establish a Palestinian state. The cumulative result of Oslo and Camp David was a revolution in Israel. The people living in Zion finally saw that there is another people in this land and admitted that it is entitled to a different state, which will express its right to self determination. Thus, there is no reason that the people residing in Palestine cannot open its eyes finally and see that there is another people in the land, and that it is entitled to a different country that will express its right to self determination. Reciprocity is not a sin. Symmetry is not a war crime. Those who believe the Israelis and Palestinians are equal have a moral obligation to demand from the Palestinians exactly what they demand from the Israelis.

The third reason: The Palestinians will not give up on the demand for the right of return. The trauma of the Nakba is their foundational trauma, and the experience of the refugees is the experience that molded them, and there is no Palestinian leader who will declare that the Palestinians will never return to the cities and villages they lost in 1948. If there is any solution at all to the refugee problem, it will be a superficial and insignificant one. But because it is actually impossible to demand from the Palestinians that they change their spots and convert their identity, it is required to demand they recognize this: that the Jewish people is a people of this land, and it did not arrive here from Mars. It is necessary to demand of them to admit that the Jewish people has a history of its own and a tragedy of its own and its own justification. The Palestinians must concede that the Jews are not colonialists but legal neighbors. There will not be peace if the children growing up in the Deheisheh refugee camp will not know that the country across the border is a legitimate Jewish state of a true Jewish people, whom they are decreed to live with. It is those who give up on the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state who are actually giving up on peace.

The fourth reason: An Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is to a great extent a one-sided agreement in which Israel gives and the Palestinians receive. Only the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state would turn the longed-for agreement into a two-sided one. While Israel will transfer concrete assets to its neighbor, territory and rights, the Palestinians will give the only gift they are capable of giving: legitimacy.

Meir Dagan is an Israeli due a great amount of respect. His biography is a heroic one of “by the rights of power.” But peace is not made by the right of power but by the power of right. Without the Palestinians’ explicit recognition of our name, identity and rights, there will not be peace.

The Truth Behind the Palestinian Water Libels

By Prof. Haim Gvirtzman February 24, 2014

For the full article go to http://tinyurl.com/q63dajv

3BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 238

A significant public debate has been sparked by the assertion of European Parliament President Martin Schulz that the amount of water available to the average Israeli unfairly overwhelms the amount of water available to the average Palestinian. The main issue that should be discussed – and has not been sufficiently analyzed – is: What are the causes of Palestinian water supply problems?

The discussion must be informed by the following basic facts:

1. The Oslo agreements grant the Palestinians the right to draw 70 million cubic meters from the Eastern Mountain Aquifer (ground water reservoir). Yet this water resource is not currently being capitalized on by the Palestinians; the waters spill untapped underground into the Dead Sea. As per the Israeli-Palestinian agreement, some 40 sites were identified for drilling into this aquifer in the eastern Hebron hills region, and permits were granted to the Palestinians by the Israel-PA Joint Water Committee. Nevertheless, over the past 20 years, the Palestinians have drilled at just one-third of these sites, despite the fact that the international community has offered to finance the drilling of all sites.

2. The Palestinians do not bother fixing water leaks in city pipes. Up to 33 percent of water in Palestinian cities is wasted through leakage. Upkeep on the Palestinians’ urban water infrastructure has been completely neglected. By comparison, leakage from Israeli municipal water pipes amount to only 10 percent of water usage.

3. The Palestinians refuse to build water treatment plants, despite their obligation to do so under the Oslo agreement. Sewage flows out of Palestinian towns and villages directly into local streams, thereby polluting the environments and the aquifer and causing the spread of disease. Despite the fact that donor countries are willing to fully fund the building of treatment plants, the Palestinians have managed to avoid their obligations to build such facilities.

4. The Palestinians absolutely refuse to irrigate their agricultural fields with treated sewage effluents. By comparison, more than half the agricultural fields in Israel are irrigated with treated waste water. Irrigating Palestinian agricultural fields with recycled water instead of fresh water would free up large amounts of water for home usage. This would greatly reduce the water shortage in many places.

5. Some Palestinian farmers irrigate their fields by flooding, rather than with drip irrigation technology. Drip irrigation, as practiced in Israel, brings water directly to the root of each plant, thereby reducing water consumption by more than 50 percent. Flooding fields causes huge water evaporation and leads to great waste.

6. The international community has offered to build a desalination plant for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians have refused this gift. A desalination plant could completely solve the Gaza Strip’s water shortages. The Palestinians refuse to build this plant because they claim they have the right to access the fresh groundwater reservoir in Judea and Samaria, and they are prepared to suffer until they realize this dream. In the meanwhile, Gaza residents suffer from severe shortages of water.

These basic, undeniable facts are extremely important because they have wide-ranging consequences.

Today, the Palestinians consume some 200 million cubic meters of water per annum in Judea and Samaria. The Palestinians could easily raise that amount by at least 50 percent, without any additional assistance or allocation from the State of Israel. This would require several simple actions:

1)    To begin drilling the Eastern Mountain Aquifer, at the sites already approved for drilling, they very quickly would secure an additional 50 million cubic meters of water per year.

2)    to reduce urban water waste from 33 percent to 20 percent by fixing the main leaks in their urban water pipes would give additional10 million cubic meters of water per annum.

3)    to collect and treat their urban waste water, would gain at least 30 million cubic meters of water a year. This would free up 30 million cubic meters (per annum) of fresh water

4)    to adopt drip irrigation technology, they would save 10 million cubic meters a year.

5)    In the Gaza Strip, too, the Palestinians could easily double the amount of water available, without additional assistance from the State of Israel. If the Palestinians agreed to build a desalination plant on the Gaza coast (funded entirely by the international community), they would increase the amount of water available by 60 to 100 million cubic meters a year.

6)    Unfortunately, the Palestinian Authority’s deleterious policies – as evidenced in the facts listed above – are a function of the Palestinian water war against Israel. There is no real Palestinian desire to solve water problems

Illegal drilling of wells: As of 2010, the Palestinians had drilled about 250 unauthorized wells into the Western and Northern Aquifers, in violation of the Oslo agreements. Since 2010 the number of unauthorized wells being dug has continued to rise at an alarming pace.

The Palestinians also steal water by pirate tapping into pipes belonging to Mekorot, Israel’s national water company. As a result, Mekorot’s ability to supply water to Israelis and Palestinians alike has been compromised. The stolen water is used mainly for agriculture, not for home usage.

Which brings us to another dirty little secret about the Palestinians: most West Bank and Gaza residents and businesses do not pay the PA for the water they use, in either their homes or fields. There are simply no water meters on pumping wells and no water meters at the entry to most homes, so it is impossible for the PA to measure the amount of money owed by individual consumers. This, of course, leads to widespread water waste. People who don’t pay for their water usage have no motivation to conserve.

Beyond the conclusion reached above, it is worthwhile to consider a broader perspective on the water situation in the Middle East. The Palestinians live in the shadow of the State of Israel, a world superpower in terms of water technologies. Consequently, the Palestinians enjoy a relative Garden of Eden. Only in Israel, in the West Bank, and in Gulf States does sufficient, safe, drinkable tap water exist in 96 percent of households. Residents in almost every other country in the region suffer from terrible water shortages.

In the future, if and when peace is achieved, and cooperation is truly desired by the Palestinians – which they do not currently seek – the State of Israel will be ready and able to assist its neighbors in overcoming their water shortages.

Interview with Khaled Abu Toameh

 Charley J. Levine,  September 2013                    

http://tinyurl.com/p43ydf7

Khaled Abu Toameh, 50, an award-winning Israeli journalist and documentary filmmaker, has reported on Arab affairs for three decades. He writes for The Jerusalem Post and the New York-based Gatestone Institute, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit international policy council and think tank, where he is a senior adviser. Since 1989, he also has been a producer and consultant for NBC News. He grew up in the Arab Israeli town of Baqa al-Gharbiyye near Haifa and studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He now lives in Jerusalem.

Q. What are the challenges of working as a journalist in the West Bank and Gaza?
A. Before the Oslo peace process began, Arab journalists had almost no problem traveling throughout the West Bank and Gaza, speaking freely with Palestinians. But ever since the Palestinian Authority came to the West Bank and Gaza, the situation has become much more challenging and dangerous. The P.A. expects you to serve as an official spokesperson and avoid criticism of its leaders.
With Hamas in power in Gaza, it’s become even more dangerous for independent Arab journalists. Because of the BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] movement against Israel, journalists representing the Israeli media, like myself, face not only difficulties but threats and even physical violence when we go to Ramallah. The P.A. leadership in the West Bank promotes BDS against Israel and also fights normalization with Israel. It bans meetings between Palestinians and Israelis and condemns the Israeli media as extremely hostile, which makes it impossible to work there and endangers our lives.

Q. How does the Arab street respond to your reporting?
A. No one tells me that what I am reporting is inaccurate or untrue. I am often criticized, however, for reporting the facts. I am only reporting what many Arab journalists want to report. If I resided in Ramallah, I would not be reporting many things. There are P.A. journalists who post critical things on Facebook and risk prison. Those who ask the wrong questions at press conferences are sometimes detained or even tortured.
I live inside Israel, so my reality is sharply different. I receive more threats from pro-Palestine students and academics in the U.S. than I do from local Palestinians.

Q. What happened to the moderate Palestinian center?
A. Palestinians have been so radicalized that you will find very few Palestinians who will openly talk about making any significant compromise with Israel. No P.A. leader would dare to sign any agreement with Israel for fear of being condemned as a traitor. Israel has been delegitimized in the eyes of most Palestinians and this is the result of decades of indoctrination and incitement against Israel. This is true throughout the entire Arab world.
Ironically, this incitement intensified after the peace process began. The Palestine Liberation Organization leadership used the media, the mosques and every available podium to delegitimize and discredit Israel in the eyes of the Palestinians. By doing so, the P.L.O. has actually shot itself in the foot. P.A. leaders know that they have radicalized their people to the point where there are people who don’t want to hear about peace with Israel at all. I believe this is why [Mahmoud] Abbas will not sign any agreement with Israel. He simply doesn’t want to go down in history as a traitor.

Q. Is there anything Israel should be doing differently?
A. Israel is facing two camps in the Palestinian community. One is the radical camp that doesn’t believe in Israel’s right to exist and seeks its destruction. With that camp, there’s nothing that can be done. The second, less radical, camp is represented by some P.L.O. leaders in the West Bank who are unable to deliver [change or peace]. This is a camp that lacks grass-roots support. It has further been discredited due to its close relations with the U.S., Europeans and even Israel. So Israel is facing one camp that doesn’t want to deliver and another that cannot practically do so.

Q. United States Secretary of State John Kerry has tried to revive the peace process with multiple visits and public declarations. Can this break the logjam?
A. It’s a waste of time. You might be able to reach some sort of interim agreements with Abbas over certain areas that he’s actually in control of in the West Bank, but I doubt he’ll go even for that. Many in the international community see Abbas as a peace partner and this might be partially true, but so what? The question we need to ask is ‘Can this man deliver?’ What’s a peace agreement worth with Abbas when he can’t even visit his house in Ramallah that has been taken over by Hamas? The international community should go to the Palestinians and ask them to get their act together and start speaking in one voice and stop the indoctrination and glorification of suicide bombers. They must start preparing their people for possible compromise with Israel.

Q. What are Israel’s Arab citizens saying about Israel?
A. Arab citizens of Israel can act as a bridge between Jews and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli Arab dilemma is that their State of Israel is in conflict with their people, the Palestinians. While most Israeli Arabs would like to see a Palestinian state and a better life for the Palestinians, they would nevertheless prefer to stay inside Israel for two reasons: First, this has always been their home. Second, they have always been comfortable in Israel despite all the challenges facing them.
I am worried about the process of radicalization that is taking place among the Arab community inside Israel. I blame some of the domestic Arab community leaders for inciting their fellow citizens against Israel. I’m talking about some of the Arab Knesset members. And the Israeli establishment’s failure to address very serious problems within Arab society is no less problematic: unemployment, unequal allocation of public funds and investment in physical infrastructure.

Q. Does the composition of Israel’s government or the country’s political landscape matter to the Palestinians? 
A. Most Arab Israelis don’t see a difference between Labor and Likud. Sometimes, ironically, right-wing governments do more than the left wing. In this regard, I’ve never understood the P.A. leadership. When there’s a left-wing government in Israel, they reject it, and because of that Israeli left-wing governments fall. And when the right-wing government comes to power, they complain that they can’t make peace with them.

Q. Why is there such a pronounced Palestinian denial of Jewish history—from the Holocaust to the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount and Western Wall?
A. It’s part of the campaign to delegitimize Israel: [The message is that] the Jews have no historical attachment to this land. We are told...even by moderates that there is no such thing as the Western Wall; it is the southern wall of the Al Aqsa mosque. We are told that there is no such thing as Rachel’s Tomb. We are told that there’s no such thing as Joseph’s Tomb; it’s just the tomb of a Muslim sheik. And all the archaeological discoveries are fake. That Jews come at night and plant items at excavation sites and in the morning call a press conference to present these items as something that demonstrates a connection.

There are different views about the Holocaust. There are those who might admit it happened but challenge the numbers; there are those who completely deny it. Finally, there are some who recognize it happened on the full scale. But the first categories are prevalent and they contend that Israel is using the Holocaust to extort money. The common sentiment says: Why should we talk about Jewish suffering? We have enough suffering of our own.

Q. What should Israel’s approach to peace be at this time?
A. Israel’s policy should be to talk to anyone who wants to talk and shoot back at anyone who shoots. I don’t see anything that Israel can do under the current circumstances. Some would say, ‘Why doesn’t Israel just get up and leave, unilaterally go to pre-1967 lines?’ I think that would be a recipe for another war. Any land you give to the P.L.O. will undoubtedly end up in the hands of Hamas and other extremists. We’ve been to this movie before and I’m not even sure the P.L.O. wants Israel to pull out of the West Bank, although they demand that in public. The P.L.O. knows that its survival in the West Bank depends on Israel’s security presence.

Unlocking the problems of the Middle East

·         Douglas Murray: September 23, 2013  Favorite "Key Issue" Fizzles Out

·         The idea that solving the Israel/Palestinian question is the key to unlocking the problems of the region was what everyone who wanted to sound as if they knew what they were saying was most delighted to say: "What was that about Yemen? Well of course the real problem we need to solve is the Israel/Palestinian issue." Rarely in diplomatic history has so much been got so wrong by so many people for so long.

·         With the civil war in Syria grinding through its third year, Egypt descended into ethnic and inter-religious barbarism, and the American Secretary of State reduced to promising "unbelievably small" action by the world's only super-power, it is hard to find any chinks of light. But one, perhaps, exists. It is that we may finally have seen the explosion of one of the most embedded and central myths of our time: the idea that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is the "key" to sorting out the problems of the Middle East.

·         After seeing what has happened since the "Arab Spring" began, this might be an appropriate moment to ask whether or not every Western foreign minister deserves simply to be sacked and sent back to school. Rarely in diplomatic history has so much been got so wrong by so many people for so long.

·         For at least the twenty years since the Oslo Accords, the idea that the Israel-Palestinian conflict was the "key" to unlocking the problems of the Middle East was the leitmotif of any discussion about the Middle East and North Africa areas. So pervasive was it that people could refer to the "Middle East" problem as though everyone agreed that there was only one problem across that whole set of benighted lands.

·         While of course it would be nice if all disputes could be solved — Cyprus, Kashmir, Turkey, Morocco, Tibet -- what is worse is that the allegation came from every side of the political spectrum. Politicians of the left said it. Politicians of the right said it. The idea that solving the Israel/Palestinian question was the key to unlocking the problems of the region was what everyone who wanted to sound as if they knew what they were saying was most delighted to say: "What was that about Yemen? Well of course the real problem we need to solve is the Israel/Palestinian issue." "A bomb was planted in which Western city? Well what we really need to do is solve that border dispute issue of the Israelis."

·         Further, one of the oddest things about all this is that for some reason, when the alleged centrality of the issue should have been swept aside most completely, it became instead even more central.

·         After 9/11, when Western cities began to be places on the front-line of a global effort to express innumerable Islamist grievances and extort endless Islamist demands, the free world's leaders instead decided to play this long-defunct tune one more time.

·         For instance there was the whole Bush era push to address the "key" issue. Tony Blair boasted in his memoirs of his determination to persuade George W. Bush that the quid pro quo for support for the war in Iraq must be a boost to the Israel-Palestinian peace process. Blair's belief in the centrality of the issue was endless -- as it remains. Then, as now, it was confirmed by a particular type of politician on the ground. Blair recalls a meeting with the Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora in September 2006 in which Siniora stressed that there could never be peace in the region until "Israel/Palestine" was resolved. "With it, everything is possible; without it, nothing is," he said. Blair clearly nodded this through, "I pledged again to do what I could to get the U.S. president to refocus our efforts on it."

·         Elsewhere Blair recalls another period of mulling on the Israel/Palestinian issue. "With that [the peace talks] stalled, all manner of bad things were going to happen." This idea was not just the pet theory of the Prime Minister. It permeated the Foreign Office establishment as well as Blair's disciples and heirs in Parliament. David Miliband, his former Foreign Secretary was still talking about the centrality of the dispute just last year when, by then in opposition, he used a television interview on something else entirely to talk about that this dispute being the one that was "key" and most in need of addressing.

·         This is not, however, just a Labour party problem. The Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has repeated the same theme ad nauseum. And so has the Foreign Secretary William Hague and every one of the current political establishment with barely one exception.

·         If a list of exponents of this fallacy were ever compiled in full it would outrun the patience of the most diligent reader. The message, needless to say, ran across Europe. Catherine Ashton -- the lamentable EU Foreign Minister -- has spent her time in office even since 2009 parroting the "key to the region" motif. She has shown a remarkable ability to hold this thought in her head even as her period of office has seen the Middle East fall apart almost everywhere other than in the Israel/Palestinian areas. Even the former head of the British domestic intelligence service, MI5, has said that the "grievance" over the Israel/Palestinian issue is a factor we must address for domestic security reasons.

·         I have dwelt on Britain, but the same story can be told anywhere in the West. It can be told by the bucket-load in each and every European country. And of course the same story can be told in the U.S. -- where the current administration as well as their predecessors seem to have swallowed the motif hook, line and sinker.

·         In three years of uprisings, overthrows, revolutions and counter-revolutions, barely a protester in any country has come out onto the streets to express their irritation at current housing arrangements in East Jerusalem. In every instance they have come out to demand a say in their future or to demand work, fair pay, opportunities or simple amenities such as food. The demands of the Palestinian people and their propagandists in the West have not even been at the bottom of the list of demands in a single one of the Arab uprisings. And just as Israel has played no part in their revolutions, so it has played less-than-no part in their ensuing civil conflicts.

·         It is time to face up to the fact that in almost all Western countries, entire foreign ministries and political establishments have been caught repeating a motif so wrong-headed, so completely mistaken that if they had any shame, they should now be silent. In the meantime we should tell them that although it is possible we will listen to them at some point in the future, we will not do so until they have gone away for a time and successfully returned.

Palestinians Dismiss Prisoner Release as a "Bribe" (which, of course it is!)

by Khaled Abu Toameh  August 5, 2013

 http://tinyurl.com/me2exc8

They regard the prisoner release as something Israel was supposed to have done anyway, many years ago. Many will continue to see it as as part of an Israeli-American scheme to extract concessions, and will continue to attack Abbas for "succumbing" to US pressure.

The argument that the release of Palestinian prisoners boosts the standing of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and "moderate" Palestinians and facilitates the resumption of peace talks with Israel is not necessarily true.

Many Palestinians do not see Israel's decision to release more than 100 Palestinians who were imprisoned before the signing of the Oslo Accords two decades ago as a gesture on the part of Israel.
Rather, they regard the Israeli move as something that Israel was supposed to have done anyway, many years ago.

As Saeb Erekat, the chief PLO negotiator, explained: "This Israeli cabinet decision is an overdue step towards the implementation of the Sharm Sheikh agreement of 1999, whereby Israel committed to release all the pre-Oslo prisoners. We welcome this decision 14 years later."

So unlike the US and other Western governments, the Palestinian Authority does not see the release of prisoners as a conciliatory move on the part of the Israeli government.

Moreover, Palestinian Authority representatives do not believe there is a link between the release of prisoners and progress toward achieving peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Many of the prisoners who are scheduled to be released do not even belong to Abbas's Fatah faction.
It is unrealistic to think, for example, that members of Islamic Jihad or the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who killed Israelis are going to come out of prison and declare their support for the Oslo Accords and the two-state solution.

There is also no guarantee that Fatah prisoners who were incarcerated before the signing of the Oslo Accords will endorse the peace process.

Of course Abbas and Fatah will do their utmost to take advantage of the prisoner release to try and score points on the Palestinian street.

Abbas's aides and loyalists are busy these days preparing a big rally in Ramallah to celebrate the release of the prisoners.

They are keen on presenting the prisoner release as a "huge achievement" by Abbas.
But even if a large number of Palestinians turn out to greet the prisoners, this still does not mean that they support Abbas's decision to resume peace talks with Israel.

Some Palestinians, including Abbas loyalists, see the release of a few dozen prisoners as a "bribe" offered by US Secretary of State John Kerry to the Palestinian Authority president to entice him to return to the talks.

These Palestinians point out that in return for this "bribe," Abbas was forced to drop his two other preconditions for resuming the peace talks: a full cessation of settlement construction and Israeli acceptance of the pre-1967 lines as the basis for a two-state solution.

There are also Palestinians who see the release of about 100 prisoners as a "minor" achievement for Abbas, especially in comparison to Hamas's success in securing the release of more than 1000 inmates in return for kidnapped Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Schalit.

"Israel is not doing anyone a favor by releasing 100 prisoners," said a Fatah official in Ramallah. "While we welcome this decision, we do not see how it could help the peace process, particularly in light of the fact that there are more than 5,000 Palestinians who are still in prison."

So while most Palestinians are expected to rejoice over the release of the prisoners, it is naïve to think that they will take to the streets to celebrate the resumption of peace talks with Israel.
The prisoner release could benefit Abbas in the short-term. But in the long-term, many Palestinians will continue to see it as part of an Israeli-American scheme to extract concessions from Abbas and the Palestinian Authority leadership.


After the celebrations over the release of the prisoners end, Palestinians will continue to criticize Abbas for "succumbing" to US pressure and going to the peace talks against the recommendation of the PLO leadership. And of course they will continue to attack Israel for not fulfilling all their demands, including a settlement freeze and the release of the rest of the prisoners.

The European Union - Hypocrisy, Hostility and Blatant Prejudice

Alan Baker 18 July 2013

http://tinyurl.com/kof7uqm

• The publication of guidelines by the European Commission on the eligibility of Israeli entities for EU cooperation is the culmination of a concerted policy initiative led by the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Catherine Ashton, directed against Israel's settlements in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] to press the Israeli government into making territorial and political concessions.

• This unprecedented and hostile EU fixation with Israel and its settlements is based on a series of long-standing and deliberately misleading and flawed legal and political assumptions regarding the illegality of Israel's settlements and the status of the pre-1967 armistice lines as Israel's border.

• Similarly, they negate the very positions supported by the European states that endorsed UN Security Council Resolution 242 from 1967 calling for "secure and recognized boundaries," and negate the EU's own commitments as signatory and witness to the Oslo Accords not to predetermine and undermine specific negotiating issues including the final status of the territories, borders, settlements, Jerusalem, and other issues.

• Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), often cited as the basis for the claim that Israel's settlements are illegal, relates to deportations of over 40 million people subjected to forced migration, evacuation, displacement, and expulsion in World War II. The vast numbers of people affected and the aims and purposes behind such a population movement speak for themselves. There is nothing to link such circumstances to Israel's settlement policy.

• The rigid fixation of the EU to assert that its agreements with Israel must reflect the non-recognition of Israel's sovereignty over any territory beyond the 1967 lines stands out in contrast to European policy toward other conflicts.

• The EU has many free trade agreements and understandings with countries whose territorial boundaries are in dispute. The EU has been negotiating a free trade agreement with India, yet its applicability to Kashmir is not under discussion. An EU fisheries agreement from 2005 allows European fisherman to operate in Western Sahara, even though the EU does not recognize Moroccan sovereignty in this territory.

Amb. Alan Baker, Director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, is former Legal Adviser to Israel's Foreign Ministry and former Ambassador of Israel to Canada.

For further facts and information on this subject read: http://tinyurl.com/l4pha7s  




 

“THE TRUE FACE OF THE PA” ?

by Isi LeiblerFebruary 1, 2012
http://wordfromjerusalem.com/?p=3873

We are told, day after day, that Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is a genuine moderate committed to achieving a peace settlement with Israel. In addition to the international community, even some Israelis – admittedly a dwindling minority – also chant this mantra.

Abbas and his spokesman Saeb Erekat bolster this theme by uttering soothing statements in English, endorsing peace to the gullible international community. Yet they speak with forked tongues because in Arabic to their own people, they deny Israel’s right to exist and promote vicious hatred against Jews.
They also claim to have reneged violence. But the PA never conceded that terrorism was immoral. They simply concluded that having failed to achieve their objectives by violence, their goals could best be promoted by temporarily suspending terrorism in order to gain Western support. Abbas made it clear that he "had the honor of firing the first shot in 1965" and was only opposed to terrorist attacks "at this time" for tactical reasons and that "in the future things may change." Yet, even within this framework, Fatah has still succeeded in killing more Israelis than Hamas.

The true objectives of the PA are reflected in the poisonous hatred against Jews and Israel inculcated to their people through the broad range of institutions they control, permeating every level of society– from kindergarten and upwards.

This can be traced to the very inception of the Oslo Accords. Before that, the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis, whilst far from ideal, was certainly better than now, when polls indicate that 84% of Palestinians endorse the murder of Israelis.

In addition to denying Jewish sovereignty, the PA from the outset indulged in the most horrendous demonization, describing Jews as the descendants of apes and pigs, comparing them to Nazis whilst simultaneously praising Hitler, accusing them of stealing Palestinian body parts, using human blood during Passover, promoting AIDs, and many other loathsome blood libels.

This defamatory torrent impacts directly on Israel’s diminished standing in the international community.
In response to this, an important book compiled by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik titled "Deception: Betraying the Peace Process”, has just been released. It meticulously documents the poisonous behavior of the Palestinian Authority during 2010 and 2011 throughout the broad range of institutions they control. It will become an important source for pro-Israeli activists and provide irrefutable evidence in response to those denying the criminality pervading Palestinian society.

Itamar Marcus founded Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) in 1966 as a nonprofit organization to monitor the Palestinian media. Its documentation of Palestinian behavior, including systematically taping State Palestinian TV, became important sources for parliamentarians and serious journalists throughout the world. His briefing of U.S. legislators was a major factor contributing towards the prevailing pro-Israel orientation of Congress and the American people.

The book and the PMW website (http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=68624789&msgid=961022&act=SOIL&c=365152&destination=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.palwatch.org%2F) chronicle obscene examples of incitement, especially in the wake of the release of the terrorists in the Schalit exchange. Chairman Abbas, who publicly embraced these mass murderers, summed up the PA approach when he stated "every prisoner is for us a saint and we must exult him”. He subsequently appointed Mahmoud Damra, a notorious terrorist, as his advisor.

The state-controlled Palestinian media sanctified the murders committed by the released terrorists. Thus Ahlam Tamimi, the woman who orchestrated the suicide bombing at the Jerusalem Sbarro restaurant which killed 22 civilians including seven children, was quoted proudly proclaiming she would do it again; Abbas al-Sayed who perpetrated the Passover suicide attack at the Park Hotel in Netanya which killed 30 Israelis was described by Abbas as a "hero" and "symbol of the Palestinian Authority".

Only recently, whilst commemorating the 47th anniversary of Fatah, the Mufti Muhammad Hussein, the PAs highest religious authority appointed by Abbas, proclaimed that the killing of Jews was a major Islamic goal required before the Islamic Resurrection. The moderator introducing him, reiterated that "our war against the descendants of apes and pigs is a war of religion and faith".

And just last week PMW reported how the PA State TV conveyed “greetings” to Hakim Awad, the barbaric and unrepentant murderer of the Vogel family which included a 4 month infant and children aged 3 and 11 years. His mother was honored on the program and conveyed “greetings to dear Hakim, the apple of my eye, who carried out the operation in Itamar, sentenced to 5 life sentences”. His aunt also related to “Hakim Awad, the hero, the legend”. How can people claiming to be promoting human rights conceivably associate themselves with a regime which adulates such monsters on its controlled TV outlets?

The book itself chillingly provides documentation demonstrating how an entire generation is brainwashed into absorbing a culture of death and slaughter. The Palestinian children's programs promoting hatred and evil are incorporated into textbooks, music videos and summer camps all blatantly indoctrinating the sanctity of Shahada (martyrdom) and murder of Jews.

Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, purportedly the most moderate of all Palestinian leaders, is cited for his speech praising four terrorists and sponsoring of a Palestinian children’s summer camp in which the participants were divided into groups labeled with the names of terrorists including a notorious bus hijacker.
Marcus and Zilberdik point out how, in the course of one day, a Palestinian child can walk on a street named after the mass murderer Abu Jihad, to a school named after the founder of Hamas, where he will read hate-filled textbooks, work in a computer room named after a suicide bomber, spend the afternoon at a soccer tournament with the teams named after suicide bombers, go in the evening to the Abu Iyad community center, the orchestrator of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and finally return home to view anti-Semitic cartoons on TV before going to bed.

After reading this book, a number of questions come to mind.
The U.S. Congress was considering terminating the funding of the PA general budget unless it terminated incitement, glorification of suicide bombers as heroic role models, payment of over $5 million a month for “salaries” to 5500 terrorists in Israeli prisons, and pensions to the families of terrorists. Why did Prime Minister Netanyahu ask them to desist?

Why does Prime Minister Netanyahu so frequently pay lip service to Abbas as a peace partner and, other than very recently, fail to systematically highlight the criminality of the Palestinian leaders? If our Prime Minister agreed not to publicly highlight these evils in order to placate President Obama, we are likely to pay a bitter price. If the civilized world is made aware of the culture of death and hatred which permeate Palestinian society, we would be in a far stronger position in the ongoing war of ideas.

And finally, how can President Obama and Western countries justify their repeated vitriolic condemnations of Israeli construction in Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem and yet have so little to say about a society which indoctrinates its children with such a barbaric worldview? How can Secretary of State Hillary Clinton validate her silence over these issues after having so passionately condemned Palestinian incitement against Israel when she was a Senator?

After reviewing these horrific texts which document such a savage state-imposed Jihadi culture, it is surely delusional to view the current Palestinian leadership as peace partners. Such a calculated policy of deception reflected by the disparity between reality and duplicitous statements designed for foreign consumption is not merely an expression of malice. It is a manifestation of a determined policy to poison the people against any possible accommodation with Israel. It provides a devastating response to the question raised in the introduction to the book. Was a genuine peace process ever intended?