Why it is hypocritical to boycott Israel

By Jake Wallis Simons May 5^th 2014

http://tinyurl.com/ln65lrr

We're not normally called upon to justify a decision to travel abroad. Few people would challenge me if I were visiting China, despite that country’s appalling human rights record, repression of free speech, and colonisation of Tibet. If I was travelling to America, even though Predator drones kill hundreds of innocent people each year, and even though Guantanamo Bay still holds 154 detainees, nobody would complain.

I would not be criticised for travelling to Egypt, which has become a police state that imprisons journalists, attacks protesters, and sentences political opponents to death. Nobody would suggest that I boycott India; or Pakistan; or Venezuela; or Saudi Arabia; or indeed Britain, which – I seem to recall – ignored the United Nations and attacked Iraq.

I could go on. But later this month, I am planning to travel to Israel to appear in the Jerusalem literary festival. As surely as night follows day, I have received an “open letter” from a group of 71 activists calling themselves the British Writers in Support of Palestine (BWIP), led by a poet and “professional Tarot card reader”. They were, I was informed, “extremely disappointed” by my decision, and “respectfully encouraged” me to boycott the event. But I am honoured to have been invited to Israel, and will be proud to attend. Here’s why.

It is my strong belief that Israel is, relatively speaking, a force for good in the world. I’m not saying that it is free from controversy, and I’m not saying that I have no sympathy with Palestinians. But every country that abides by the democratic process, enshrines in law the rights of women and minorities, and conducts itself with compassion both in war and in peace – or at least aspires to do so – deserves our support and respect.

But what about Israel’s flouting of international law, I hear you ask? Very well: but has Britain always been squeaky clean? I have already mentioned the example of Iraq. Britain intentionally bombed civilian targets during the Second World War, which was the last time we were under existential threat (the Area Bombing Directive ordered the RAF to attack the German workforce and destroy morale). Moreover, the Army’s Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, based in Kensington Palace Gardens, London, between 1940 and 1948, carried out systematic torture on enemy prisoners. If we were at war again, against an enemy that was able to strike at the heart of our civilian population centres, how would we behave?

Would we, perhaps, be tempted to react as we did when the IRA were terrorising the streets of London? Would we reprise the British Army’s Operation Demetrius of 1971, which allegedly included detention without trial, beating, starving, hooding for long periods, harassment with dogs, placing nooses around prisoners’ necks, forcible head shaving, denying prisoners clothes, forcing them to run barefoot behind Army vehicles, burning them with cigarettes, dragging them by the hair and pressing guns to their heads? Would Bloody Sunday, in which 26 protesters and bystanders were shot by British paratroopers, happen again?

These examples are particularly relevant when you consider the geographical, topographical and historical context in which Israel exists. The Jewish state is roughly the size of Wales, with a ridge of high ground running along the middle of the West Bank. If Britain were surrounded by hostile neighbours at such close proximity, some of which contained terror groups bent on the destruction of the country, would we be doing any better? And would a fearful British public be outraged at the Army’s brutality? Or relieved that it was keeping us safe?

It is significant that a man who knows war, Colonel Richard Kemp – the former commander of Britain’s armed forces in Afghanistan testified to the UN Human Rights Council that the Israeli military does “more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare”. It is right that every instance of military abuse should be treated gravely. But this does not justify a boycott.

From a historical point of view, Israel has been attacked repeatedly by an enemy bent on its destruction (when the Arab world attempted to liquidate the Jewish State in 1967, the settlements had not yet been built). The country has suffered terror attack after terror attack, tragedy after tragedy. Clearly, whatever the boycott activists may say, to draw a parallel with pre-1994 South Africa is ludicrous.

Of course, Israel presents many areas of concern. In particular, the situation on the West Bank is disturbing, as are the societal disadvantages that confront minorities in Israel, particularly Israeli Arabs. The army has been guilty of heavy-handedness many times. And it is sad to witness the tit-for-tat violence the plagues the region, not to mention the heavy civilian losses that are sustained by Palestinians in warfare.

Again, I could go on. But to boycott Israel alone reveals a deeply partisan approach to the conflict, and a ridiculously na?ve and even hypocritical one.

By the standards of the pro-boycott activists, should the Palestinians not also be boycotted? Their society is severely intolerant of homosexuals, many of whom go to live in Israel rather than face oppression at home. Both on the West Bank and in Gaza, the authorities regularly harass and imprison journalists who criticise their leaders; last year, 26-year-old Anas Said Awwad was sent to prison for one year for "insulting" President Mahmoud Abbas by depicting him as a member of the Real Madrid football team on Facebook.

Moreover, the Palestinian government has signed a reconciliation deal with a terror organisation, and within weeks they may form a unity government. And as I reported in the Telegraph last week, the Palestinian leadership pays huge financial rewards to those convicted of terror offences, and cold-blooded child killers are celebrated as heroes when they are released.

If all of this does not merit a boycott, I don't know what does.

While we’re on the subject, shouldn’t the BWIP have called their group “British Writers In Support of Palestine and Israel”? And if not, why not?

For these reasons I am proud to be travelling to Israel later this month. As a journalist I value objectivity above all, and am not interested in closing my ears to one side of any story, particularly a story as complex as this. And as a novelist, my concern is with the human condition; attending a festival with fellow writers and artists who are not afraid of challenging ideas can only be a good thing.

And given that according to a YouGov poll, three-quarters of Britons “see no reason why British performers should not travel to Israel” and fewer than one in five Britons believe that Israeli artists should be barred from the UK – I travel in the knowledge that I have public opinion on my side.

Palestinian Magical Thinking

The campaign to place pressure on Israel through activism on the international stage is the latest example.

Jonathan Spyer May 7^th 2014

http://tinyurl.com/p5nep6w

So April 29^th has passed, and the nine-month period allotted by the current U.S. administration for its effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has come and gone.  Entirely predictably, it has failed, in its entirety.

What can be learned from the failure? And what may be expected to happen now?

The failure of the talks was predictable first and foremost because of the irreconcilable positions of the sides.  This is not a matter of small details, as is sometimes maintained.  It isn’t that the Palestinians want 99% of the West Bank while Israel will offer only 98%.

Palestinian nationalism in both its Fatah and Hamas variants rejects the possibility of accepting the permanence of Jewish statehood in any part of the area west of the Jordan River.

For the Palestinian Authority, the nine-month period of negotiations came as an unwelcome interruption to a very different strategy to which it will now return.  This strategy consists of an attempt to place pressure on Israel through action in international forums to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state.  Presumably the intended result of this is to induce Israel eventually to make concessions in return for nothing. The struggle would then continue for further concessions.

This strategy is unlikely to bear fruit, but its adoption follows a notable pattern in Palestinian politics – namely, the constant attempt to find an alternative to a negotiated peace based on compromise.

At the root of Palestinian perceptions is a very notable strategic optimism.

The Palestinians see themselves as part of the local majority Arabic-speaking Sunni Muslim culture.  From this point of view, the establishment of a non-Muslim sovereignty in Israel was not only an injustice, it was also an anomaly.  Israel, being an anomaly, is therefore bound eventually to be defeated and disappear.  So there is no need to reconcile to it, with all the humiliation therein.

This core perception leads to the momentary embrace of all kinds of unlikely strategies, which are invested with tremendous hopes.

This pattern has been around for a while.

In the 1970s, in their first incarnation as an independent national movement, Palestinians believed that the long war strategy of the Palestinian terror organizations would serve to hollow out and destroy the hated Zionist entity, on the model of the FLN in Algeria.

In 1990/91, almost forgotten now, Palestinians en masse embraced the empty promises of Saddam Hussein to “burn half of Israel.”  Arafat went to Baghdad to embrace the Iraqi dictator.

In 2000, after the short Oslo period, Palestinians looked to Hizballah and its ideology of resistance as the model for what they hoped would be a successful military and terror campaign against Israel.

All these strategies failed.  All turned out to be based on illusion.

In the meantime, the Jewish state went from strength to strength – absorbing millions of new immigrants, leaping ahead economically, diplomatically and militarily.

The campaign to place pressure on Israel through activism on the international stage is the latest example of this Palestinian magical thinking.  It is likely to share the fate of its predecessors.  The noisy BDS movement  notwithstanding, Israel’s position on the global stage remains strong.

Its alliance with the U.S., despite the utter lack of warmth from the current administration, remains strong at its core, reflected in cooperation on myriad levels, both military and economic.

Israel is forging ahead in constructing positive relationships with the emergent powers of India and China.  It maintains very close and warm relations with Canada, Australia, Germany and other important western players.  None of this is under threat from the automatic majority the Palestinians enjoy at the UN because of the Arab and Muslim blocs of states.

So Palestinian optimism regarding  the model for defeating Israel is hard to understand. But then  the faith placed in the previous approaches noted above also made little apparent sense.

What we are in for now is a period in which the current chimera will need to be played out.  On the bright side, this means that a return to large-scale political violence is unlikely.  The Palestinians were defeated heavily in the 2000-4 period, and there is little energy for a return to war.

The Palestinian elite and their children live comfortable and privileged lives in Ramallah and elsewhere in the region and beyond it.  Combining this with diplomatic and political activity can be pleasant and rewarding.  Combining it with military activity, by contrast, could be harmful and has already been proven not to work.

So expect more furious and pathos-filled denunciations of Israeli crimes from various UN committees largely staffed by the representatives of sundry dictatorships.

Expect Saeb Erekat and the others to come up with yet more inventive reasons as to why Islam and Arabic are “indigenous” to Jerusalem while Judaism and Hebrew represent foreign implants.  And so on, and so forth.

And at the end of all this, expect more failure, more bewilderment and a pause until the next alternative to a negotiated peace is stumbled upon.  This is the nature of the  magical thinking that lies at the core of Palestinian Arab politics.

This politics, in its various manifestations, exists to reverse the verdict of the war of 1948. It has no other purpose.

Its  credo was perfectly rendered in the words of the Moroccan scholar Abdallah Laroui, as quoted by Fouad Ajami: “On a certain day everything would be obliterated and instantaneously reconstructed and the new inhabitants would leave, as if by magic, the land they had despoiled; in this way will justice be dispensed to the victims, on that day when the presence of God shall again make itself felt.’

The language is elegant. The message is one of politicide and destruction. For as long as this credo remains at the root of Palestinian politics, peace between Israelis and Palestinians will remain unachievable. All else is mere detail.

The Questions No-one Asks

Bassem Tawil March 12th 2014

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4209/the-questions-no-one-asks

The Palestinians aspire to control all the holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem, not only those holy to Islam, but those holy to Christianity and Judaism as well.

They understand that [in a peace agreement] they would have to declare the end of the conflict. That is not a situation the Palestinians are ripe for yet.

The next Palestinian leader will simply say that any agreement was Abbas's, not his, and does not commit them or the Palestinian people. Both Palestinian society and public policy are based on the rejection of peace with Israel, and the Palestinian street is bombarded daily with propaganda from the Palestinian establishment advocating war, the return of refugees and the destruction of Israel.

The Palestinians aspire to control all the holy sites in the Old City, not only those holy to Islam but those holy to Christianity and Judaism as well. Needless to say, that is to be accomplished at the expense of both Israel and Jordan, which manages the Islamic holy sites as part of its peace agreement with Israel.

Kerry told Abbas that, as part of the agreement being formulated, the Palestinians would have to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Mahmoud Abbas and his close associates understand that this request would force them to accept that they will no longer be able to claim the "right of return" of the Palestinians refugees to the State of Israel or destroy it by changing its demography. They understand that the refugees would have to settle in the future state of Palestine and that the Palestinians would have to declare the end of the conflict. That is not a situation the Palestinians are ripe for yet.

Kerry also told Abbas that the Palestinians would have to waive security control of the Jordan Valley corridor along the border with the Kingdom of Jordan. The Americans have therefore foiled the Palestinian plan of "stages," Yasser Arafat's original plot, never abandoned by the Palestinians, of dismantling Israel one slice at a time like a roasted lamb. The initial plan of "stages" was for Islamists to cross the Jordan river, join the Palestinian Authority's armed security forces (or those of Hamas, if it managed to take over the West Bank), and attack Israel's cities with missiles, cross its borders and slaughter its citizens.
If Israel were to waive security control, first the Palestinians would reap the political and territorial fruits of the agreement, then soon they would violate it by flooding the West Bank with mujahidin from all over the world.

In rejecting the American proposal the Palestinians now accuse Kerry of being a foil for the Israelis, ad have told him that Abbas is the one rational man with whom Israel can make peace. Some Palestinian leaders threaten that if no agreement is reached, a third intifada may break out. For Israel, that clearly means the entire peace process depends on one man alone, not on the will of the Palestinian people. The result of such a deal will be that the conflict will not have been resolved even after Abbas's eventual departure from the political scene: the next Palestinian leader will simply say that any agreement was Abbas's, not his.
The Israeli demand for the end of incitement and threats against Israel is directly related to its demand to construct a foundation for the Palestinian people which includes a real peace that will continue even after Mahmoud Abbas is no longer the Palestinian leader.

Israel has good reason to be suspicious, especially in view of the amateur and irresponsible policies of the current Obama administration, which now has a pattern of abandoning friends in need. Kerry's proposal reflects an understanding of historical truth: the need for both a Palestinian state and Israel's security needs -- but what will happen if Arab or European pressure forces the Americans to alter their policies, as they have done so often before?

The Arabs regard Israel as a well-oiled, state-of-the-art war machine, but in reality it is vulnerable, fragile and easily blackmailed, unable fully to implement its forces to counteract the Islamic terrorism deliberately hidden within the Palestinian population in the territories. In the meantime, Hamas continues to use human shields and the Palestinian Authority continues its anti-Israeli incitement, especially via Qatar's Al-Jazeera TV channel in Arabic. Qatar funds Hamas and supports Islamic terrorist organizations all over the Arab world. 

In addition, the permanent support the Arabs and the Europeans give the Palestinians -- such as the Europeans' demand for "proportional" force and the expectation that Israel will compromise its own security by sacrificing its territorial assets -- only serves to encourage terrorism, makes the Palestinians less flexible and leads them to believe that between pressure from the Arabs and the sanctions and boycotts they expect to be imposed by the Europeans, they will eventually be able to defeat Israel.

The Arabs seem to have forgotten that Israel already overcame Arab and Palestinians boycotts. During the last two intifadas, when there was a Palestinian boycott of Israeli-made products and Palestinians were forbidden to work in Israel, Israel began using automated industrial building techniques, thereby leaving the tens of thousands of Palestinians who had previously worked in construction permanently without jobs.
When it comes to changing their situation, the Palestinians still refuse to ask the right questions. Is there a single Palestinian, for example, who really thinks Israel will sign an agreement that would settle millions of Palestinians into its territory? Would Israel agree to have its future depend on a leader like Mahmoud Abbas, who does not enjoy either a consensus or a legal Palestinian constitutional status? Can Israel ignore that both Palestinian society and public policy are based on the rejection of peace with Israel, and that the Palestinian street is bombarded daily with propaganda from the Palestinian establishment advocating war, the return of refugees and the destruction of Israel?

And is there really a single Palestinian who thinks Israel will rush to sign an agreement while the Palestinian Authority works unceasingly in international forums to delegitimize it, boycott it and maneuver to achieve unilateral international recognition without a gesture towards Israel?

There are other questions the Palestinians refuse to ask themselves: for instance, is there a single Palestinian who really believes that Israel places faith in the upper echelons of the Palestinian Authority who are now planning to have Israel's leaders tried as war criminals in the International Criminal Court in The Hague and threatening of a third intifada? Can Israel make concessions to the Palestinians in the Jordan Valley and ignore what happened after the Israeli army withdrew from south Lebanon, which it saw it turn into a vipers' nest of Hezbollah-instigated terrorism? Will Israel ignore the lessons of the past, especially after Hamas's border with Egypt turned into a highway for smuggling arms and the Gaza Strip itself became a regional and global stronghold of Islamism?

The Palestinians fool only themselves as they waste their time theorizing, inventing excuses and plotting, while the Jews engage in practical matters, and do not plan their future on the unattainable. Do the Palestinians not understand that once the murderers terrorizing the civilian population of Syria in the name of jihad have finished there, they will turn their attention to the Palestinian Authority and do the same to the Palestinian population there?

The peace process is not simple, it requires time and the building of trust. Israel has territories the Palestinians want and holds the key to the international recognition of "Palestine." The Palestinians have the resources of trust necessary to win over the hearts of the Israelis. The more that time passes, the more the Palestinians waste that precious resource. The Israelis dig in their heels and the Western world is gradually coming around to their way of thinking. If the Palestinians really want to establish a Palestinian state, they might start by asking themselves the right questions.

Bassem Tawil is based in the Middle East.

Abbas at the UN: Decoding the Babble

September 27, 2013 By Arlene Kushner 

 http://tinyurl.com/p6a2xoy

Mahmoud Abbas – putative president of the Palestinian Authority – addressed the UN General Assembly on Thursday, focusing on the negotiations between the PA and Israel. How eminently reasonable was the tone he attempted to project.  There he stood on the dais, expressing his intention to work hard for peace, even pleading for peace.

“Our quest is supportive of the path of peace,” he assured those assembled.

“I affirm before you that… we shall continue [the negotiations] in good faith and with open minds, strong determination and an insistence on success…we shall …foster the most conducive atmosphere for the continuation of these negotiations…”

Ah! That he should truly be what he would have us believe he is. But an even cursory look at his words tells us that he is not.  The leopard has not changed his spots.

We might start with that bit about fostering “the most conducive atmosphere…” Khaled Abu Toameh has just described the atmosphere that Abbas fosters:

“Although Abbas and some of his aides have been telling Israelis, Americans and Europeans that they are opposed to violence and terror attacks against Israel, they continue to incite Palestinians against Israel on a daily basis.”

The irony is that Abbas himself provides an example of this incitement in his talk, as he refers to almost daily attacks on the Al-Aksa mosque.  This is pure and outrageous fabrication.  The reality is that Jewish visitors on the Temple Mount – which is where the mosque is located – are sometimes accosted by stone-throwing Arabs, and sometimes prevented from visiting at all because of threats of Arab riots.

“The objective of the negotiations,” he explains,

“is to secure a lasting peace accord that leads immediately to the establishment of the independence of a fully sovereign State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, on all of the Palestinian lands occupied in 1967, so that it may live in peace and security alongside the State of Israel, and the resolution of the plight of Palestine refugees in a just agreed upon solution, according to United Nations resolution 194, as called for by the Arab Peace Initiative.”

This run-on sentence must be unraveled. What we are seeing here is the Palestinian Arab “narrative”: A host of claims without legal or historical basis that have been repeated so often that much of the world believes them.

There is no “occupation.”  “Belligerent occupation” applies only when a sovereign state moves into the territory of another sovereign state.  This was not the case here, when Israel took Judea and Samaria in a defensive war in 1967.  What is more, and perhaps more significantly, this area is historically the cradle of the ancient Jewish nation. This fact – the reality of the region as the heritage of the Jewish people – was recognized in the Mandate for Palestine, an international legal document mandating establishment of a Jewish homeland from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Prior to the ‘67 war, Jordan was the presence on the other side of the Green Line, not “the Palestinians.”  And so, in no event should that land be referred to as “Palestinian land.”: And, it should be noted here, that Green Line was merely an armistice line, which Jordan, when signing the armistice agreement, concurred would be temporary only.

UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed shortly after the war in ’67, recognized that Israel would not move back behind the Green Line, as this would not provide a secure border. That resolution referred neither to a “Palestinian state” nor to a “Palestinian people.”

As to the “refugees,” Palestinian Arabs and their supporters routinely point to Resolution 194 as proving that they have a “right to return” to lands in Israel they left in 1948.  But this is a misrepresentation of the facts.  That was a General Assembly resolution, and GA resolutions are merely recommendations – not binding and without weight in international law. What is more, while one phrase in the resolution speaks of “return,” when one reads the entire resolution, it becomes apparent that this was only one option mentioned, along with resettlement.

Israel has never agreed to the Arab Peace Initiative, for it was a “take it or leave it” deal that is nothing more than a formula for her destruction – precisely along the lines that Abbas spells out here.  Recently there were suggestions by representatives of the League that “minor” adjustments “might” be made but were never approved by the League.

The initiative consists of a two-part plan. First, to push Israel back behind the indefensible armistice line.  And then to push on that “right” of refugees to return to their villages of  65 years ago, thereby inundating Israel with a hostile population.

We see this two-track theme in Abbas’s speech. In one place he refers to the “injustices” of 1948, and in another, the “occupation” of 1967. There is a reason why Palestinian Authority textbooks routinely reflect “Palestine” from the river to the sea.

Abbas indicates that if Israel signs on to the deal he outlines, there will be recognition from 57 Arab and Muslim states, but this is simply not the case.  The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has 57 members, but by no stretch of the imagination have they all signed on to recognition of Israel, whatever the parameters of an agreement.  The Arab League consists of 22 members.

What must be emphasized here is that Israel would, ostensibly, be recognized. But not Israel as the state of the Jewish people.  This is more than a technicality, for it is the intention of supporters of the Palestinian Arabs to push for Israel as the “state of all its residents,” by which is meant that its Jewish character would be erased.

Lastly here I note the outrage of Abbas instructing Israel that it is time to “stop relying on exaggerated security pretexts and obsessions.”

In 1967, the Security Council recognized Israel’s need for secure and defensible borders.  How much more so is this the case in the volatile Middle East of today.  Nightly operations by the IDF in Palestinian Arab areas of Judea and Samaria control the threat of terrorism.  Radical Islamic groups would have a field day, were the IDF no longer able to enter within the borders of a Palestinian state. What is more, should Jordan fall to Islamists, there would be risk from farther east.

Where Israel’s borders are set is of enormous, existential, import.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Postscript: - For more of the tunnel discovered in Gaza go to article;  ISRAELI CEMENT, CABLES, CANDY WRAPPERS: INSIDE THE TUNNEL http://tinyurl.com/m33t3tb

Funds from European governments support an ‘erase Israel conference’

By Yitzhak Santis 30 Sept. 2013

 http://tinyurl.com/nh2e2cz

When "peacemakers" incite to conflict they make murder respectable.

It has become axiomatic in some circles that the sole cause of the Arab- Israeli conflict is Israel, by which is really meant Israel’s existence. For many holding this view the “solution” is a single “binational” state as opposed to the two-state solution favored by the international community. These “one state” proponents also insist on a “right of return” for 1948 Palestinian refugees and their millions of descendants, amounting to a call for the elimination of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

A conference promoting this vision, funded mostly by Protestant and Catholic groups, is being held this week in Tel Aviv. These Christian groups are themselves largely funded by European governments that officially support the two-state solution. The conference, then, undermines these governments’ own policies.

The event, “From Truth to Redress: Realizing the Return of Palestinian Refugees,” is organized by Zochrot, a tiny Israeli fringe group.

Israeli one-state advocates are so few that they have neither a constituency nor influence in Israel. For Zochrot, foreign funding is their lifeline; the conference was “made possible thanks to the generous support of: Misereor, Christian Aid, HEKS-EPER, CCFD, Finn Church Aid, Broederlijk Delen, AFSC, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Mennonite Central Committee, Trócaire, St. Het Solidariteitsfonds, Oxfam GB and private donors.”

NGO Monitor wrote each of the sponsors, and we received several replies.

France’s CCFD and Germany’s Misereor (both Catholic) wrote identical messages – including the same grammatical mistakes. They affirmed they are a “funding partner of Zochrot” and declared “refugee issues and refugee rights all over the world are of utmost importance to us.” But regarding funding they opted for fogginess: “Our privacy policies do not allow to disclose (sic) the amounts given to recipients.”

Belgium’s Broederlijk Delen, also Catholic, wrote a similar response: “We support the work of Zochrot as we believe refugee rights are important in any context and should be openly discussed.”

But regarding funding, they also chose murkiness: “With regard to details on funding, we wish to respect our partners’ privacy.”

What seems to be lost on these Christian groups is they are supported by public funds.

In 2012 Misereor received 114 million euros from the German government, CCFD received 1.1 million euros from the EU and another 368,000 euros from France, the Swiss government gave $12.7 million to HEKS and Broederlijk Delen received 6,891,347 euros from Belgium taxpayers.

As for the one-state formula itself, the onus for proving that this “solution” is workable is on the shoulders of its advocates. In Europe binational states have an unhappy history.

Czechoslovakia was one state, now it is two. Yugoslavia’s multi-national experiment ended in a horrific war that gave the world the term “ethnic cleansing.” Belgium, Spain and the UK each have strong national separatist movements (Flemish, Basque and Scottish respectively).

IN THE Middle East, the region most relevant to this discussion, concrete models of binational entities do not exist. The rights of non-Arab and non- Muslim minorities in Arab states are severely repressed, sectarianism is rending Syria, Iraq and Lebanon asunder, and the upsurge of violence against the region’s Christians should serve as a warning. Israel is the only Middle East country where democratic institutions are strong and minorities enjoy by right the full protection of the law.

Yet, these Christian funders are targeting Israel, and appear to be utterly unaware of the plight of their Middle Eastern coreligionists. What makes them think that Jews would fare better as a minority once Israel is forced to be a Muslim-majority state than do Christians today in Egypt, Syria or Iraq? This point is all the more pertinent considering the ethnic cleansing by Arab governments of 99 percent of their Jewish citizens after 1948. After Arab governments stripped them of their citizenship and property most Jewish refugees fled to Israel.

That two refugee populations resulted from the Arab-Israeli conflict, one Jewish, one Arab, is ignored by this conference’s organizers and funders. With all their moralistic rhetoric of refugee rights being “of utmost importance” “in any context,” these Christian groups are mute about the rights of nearly a million Jewish refugees from Arab states, and millions of their descendants.

Peacemakers, which is how these Christian aid groups view themselves, do not support efforts to erase one side of a conflict, which is what support for this conference means. The one-state formula is a recipe for war, and its proponents are exposed as uncompromising supporters of permanent conflict.

By dressing up as “peacemakers” the Christian aid societies supporting Israel’s demise bear truth to George Orwell who wrote, “Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Is that how public funds ought to be spent? 

======================================================================

For the full script of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech at the UN, click on this link   http://tinyurl.com/q397d3r

Abbas at the UN: Decoding the Babble

September 27, 2013 By Arlene Kushner

http://tinyurl.com/oht5z6l  

Mahmoud Abbas – putative president of the Palestinian Authority – addressed the UN General Assembly on Thursday, focusing on the negotiations between the PA and Israel. How eminently reasonable was the tone he attempted to project.  There he stood on the dais, expressing his intention to work hard for peace, even pleading for peace.

“Our quest is supportive of the path of peace,” he assured those assembled.

“I affirm before you that… we shall continue [the negotiations] in good faith and with open minds, strong determination and an insistence on success…we shall …foster the most conducive atmosphere for the continuation of these negotiations…”

Ah! That he should truly be what he would have us believe he is. But an even cursory look at his words tells us that he is not.  The leopard has not changed his spots.

We might start with that bit about fostering “the most conducive atmosphere…” Khaled Abu Toameh has just described the atmosphere that Abbas fosters:

“Although Abbas and some of his aides have been telling Israelis, Americans and Europeans that they are opposed to violence and terror attacks against Israel, they continue to incite Palestinians against Israel on a daily basis.”

The irony is that Abbas himself provides an example of this incitement in his talk, as he refers to almost daily attacks on the Al-Aksa mosque.  This is pure and outrageous fabrication.  The reality is that Jewish visitors on the Temple Mount – which is where the mosque is located – are sometimes accosted by stone-throwing Arabs, and sometimes prevented from visiting at all because of threats of Arab riots.

“The objective of the negotiations,” he explains,

“is to secure a lasting peace accord that leads immediately to the establishment of the independence of a fully sovereign State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, on all of the Palestinian lands occupied in 1967, so that it may live in peace and security alongside the State of Israel, and the resolution of the plight of Palestine refugees in a just agreed upon solution, according to United Nations resolution 194, as called for by the Arab Peace Initiative.”

This run-on sentence must be unraveled. What we are seeing here is the Palestinian Arab “narrative”: A host of claims without legal or historical basis that have been repeated so often that much of the world believes them.

There is no “occupation.”  “Belligerent occupation” applies only when a sovereign state moves into the territory of another sovereign state.  This was not the case here, when Israel took Judea and Samaria in a defensive war in 1967.  What is more, and perhaps more significantly, this area is historically the cradle of the ancient Jewish nation. This fact – the reality of the region as the heritage of the Jewish people – was recognized in the Mandate for Palestine, an international legal document mandating establishment of a Jewish homeland from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Prior to the ‘67 war, Jordan was the presence on the other side of the Green Line, not “the Palestinians.”  And so, in no event should that land be referred to as “Palestinian land.”: And, it should be noted here, that Green Line was merely an armistice line, which Jordan, when signing the armistice agreement, concurred would be temporary only.

UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed shortly after the war in ’67, recognized that Israel would not move back behind the Green Line, as this would not provide a secure border. That resolution referred neither to a “Palestinian state” nor to a “Palestinian people.”

As to the “refugees,” Palestinian Arabs and their supporters routinely point to Resolution 194 as proving that they have a “right to return” to lands in Israel they left in 1948.  But this is a misrepresentation of the facts.  That was a General Assembly resolution, and GA resolutions are merely recommendations – not binding and without weight in international law. What is more, while one phrase in the resolution speaks of “return,” when one reads the entire resolution, it becomes apparent that this was only one option mentioned, along with resettlement.

Israel has never agreed to the Arab Peace Initiative, for it was a “take it or leave it” deal that is nothing more than a formula for her destruction – precisely along the lines that Abbas spells out here.  Recently there were suggestions by representatives of the League that “minor” adjustments “might” be made but were never approved by the League.

The initiative consists of a two-part plan. First, to push Israel back behind the indefensible armistice line.  And then to push on that “right” of refugees to return to their villages of  65 years ago, thereby inundating Israel with a hostile population.

We see this two-track theme in Abbas’s speech. In one place he refers to the “injustices” of 1948, and in another, the “occupation” of 1967. There is a reason why Palestinian Authority textbooks routinely reflect “Palestine” from the river to the sea.

Abbas indicates that if Israel signs on to the deal he outlines, there will be recognition from 57 Arab and Muslim states, but this is simply not the case.  The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has 57 members, but by no stretch of the imagination have they all signed on to recognition of Israel, whatever the parameters of an agreement.  The Arab League consists of 22 members.

What must be emphasized here is that Israel would, ostensibly, be recognized. But not Israel as the state of the Jewish people.  This is more than a technicality, for it is the intention of supporters of the Palestinian Arabs to push for Israel as the “state of all its residents,” by which is meant that its Jewish character would be erased.

Lastly here I note the outrage of Abbas instructing Israel that it is time to “stop relying on exaggerated security pretexts and obsessions.”

In 1967, the Security Council recognized Israel’s need for secure and defensible borders.  How much more so is this the case in the volatile Middle East of today.  Nightly operations by the IDF in Palestinian Arab areas of Judea and Samaria control the threat of terrorism.  Radical Islamic groups would have a field day, were the IDF no longer able to enter within the borders of a Palestinian state. What is more, should Jordan fall to Islamists, there would be risk from farther east.

Where Israel’s borders are set is of enormous, existential, import.

BDS and Peace Talks

By EDWARD S. BECK  (Jerusalem Post 08 /01/2013)

http://tinyurl.com/kyzlhp2 

Let us be very clear: the BDS campaign does not serve the cause of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

From the very beginning of the anti-Israel boycott, divestments and sanctions campaigns, the attempt by their advocates was not to bring about a just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, but to lay the foundation for the dismantling of Israel by any means necessary, starting with what Natan Sharansky called the “3-D standards” of being demonized, delegitimized and held to a double standard.

This strategy was relatively new and reaching a far more influential level of society than were the previous shouts by radical extremist groups to “drive Israel into the sea,” but had very much the same intent.

This remains true as the calls for BDS ring loud and clear even as peace talks begin in Washington. If the BDS campaign were really about bringing Israel to the peace table to make the painful sacrifices it will need to make, the campaign would be bragging success and victory.

It is not and will press on during the peace talks and after, regardless of outcome, because of the politically pathological desire to not just demonize and hold Israel to a double standard, but to delegitimize Israel to a nonexistent state in the Middle East because of their fundamentalist extreme hatreds toward Israel, with the rationale that Jews have no claim or place in the neighborhood.

Regardless of what the European Union and others may say, this isn’t about the settlements in the disputed territories, this is about the legitimate presence of a sovereign Jewish nation surrounded by a sea of Arab sovereign states.

This is about Israel delegitimizers believing that creating the State of Israel was wrong in the first place or possibly even worse, that region was betrayed when the fledgling State of Israel when created was not wiped into the sea by her Arab neighbours to finish the job Hitler started. These people don’t want to live in peace with Jews; they don’t even want Jews in the Middle East. One only has to look at the history of Jewish expulsion from Arab countries to completely understand and accept this as truth. Jews are infidels and second-class citizens and their relative degree of inferior acceptance is dictated by imams and sheikhs and not guaranteed by the Koran.

BDS movements against other countries such as South Africa accepted that there had to be peaceful coexistence of all the parties as a goal with equal rights and standing.

No such goals exist in the present BDS campaigns. The campaign does not state what it is for in terms of peaceful coexistence, only that it is against the State of Israel’s very existence in any shape, form of fashion.

In fact the Arab concept of normalization of relations is not even yet in effect with the Palestinians, who do not even choose either religiously or politically to recognize the existence of the State of Israel, which is a starting point for any negotiations. Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian leader of the BDS campaign, can speak against normalization with Israel, yet secure an academic degree from an Israeli university. The irony is both astonishing and troubling.

I wonder, if there is a peace deal with the Palestinians will Bishop Desmond Tutu come to share a blessing, and will Stevie Wonder and Roger Waters join Alicia Keyes and Eric Burden in Celebrate Peace Concert in Jerusalem? If a peace deal is hammered out and Israel gives up a good bit of land for peace, will the EU lift its boycott of goods from the newly defined areas which may be behind the current Green Line, such as Ariel and others? Will the US State Department permit US government research and aid agencies to fund basic research and development at Ariel University, which is currently banned from receiving directly or indirectly research aid from US government agencies, thus forcing it to partner with other countries for funding for basic research from which all countries benefit? I think not.

Will calls for the BDS of Israel continue? Yes. Why? Because the BDS movement will find something else endemic in Israel politics and society to protest and continue the ongoing attempt to erode any ongoing peace and legitimacy of a sovereign Jewish state. It’s in their DNA. Calls for BDS not only ratchet up the level of anti- Israelism during an incredibly important series of forward movements in peace efforts, they have the consequence of stifling the very voices in Israel that are calling for peace with the Palestinians.

To take it one step further, it has been estimated that over 15,000 Palestinians may be negatively economically affected by the EU boycott of goods produced in the disputed territories. How is putting Palestinians out of work in the territories promoting peace? It is not, and therein is the crux of the fallacy of BDS thinking.

The British academic unions are pathological in their perseverance in both publicly and silently boycotting Israeli academics and academic institutions, even though they are silencing and collectively punishing many in the academic community who are roundly in favour of peace and who work side by side with Palestinian, Israeli Arab and Arab colleagues both in Israel and internationally.

The British justice system, by scolding British academic Ronnie Fraser for his suit against the faculty union for this annual ongoing anti-Semitic effort since 2005, has not only rendered itself incapable of sanctioning anti- Semitism in Britain, but has allowed the clownish, pretentious, self-righteous, but dangerous leaders of the British academic union (more a political lot than a scholarly lot) to aid and abet those who would see an end to the state of Israel.

Let us be very clear: the BDS campaign does not serve the cause of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

The BDS campaign does not even bring justice for the Palestinians and in some cases causes them to suffer.

Whatever the real intent of the BDS campaign, the reality of it is that it serves to incite against Israel unjustly and confound efforts for peace. It is the wrong strategy for real peace and justice.

The writer is president emeritus and co-founder of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and also served as chairman of the SPME Task Force on BDS from 2004 to 2012.

================================================

We feel it appropriate to bring to your attention the development of the UN since the establishment of the State of Israel and how it has become a forum for Israel bashing to the exclusion of dealing with the major problems that exist around the world.

For a full analysis see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1pq8Fk5arU

What really happened in Jerusalem

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: March 29

http://tinyurl.com/bmr6ghk

“I honestly believe that if any Israeli parent sat down with those [Palestinian] kids, they’d say, ‘I want these kids to succeed.’ ”

Very true. But how does the other side feel about Israeli kids?

Consider that the most revered parent in Palestinian society is Mariam Farhat of Gaza. Her distinction? Three of her sons died in various stages of trying to kill Israelis — one in a suicide attack, shooting up and hurling grenades in a room full of Jewish students.

She gloried in her “martyr” sons, wishing only that she had 100 boys like her schoolroom suicide attacker to “sacrifice . . . for the sake of God.” And for that she was venerated as “mother of the struggle,” elected to parliament and widely mourned upon her recent passing.

So much for reciprocity. In the Palestinian territories, streets, public squares, summer camps, high schools, even a kindergarten are named after suicide bombers and other mass murderers. So much for the notion that if only Israelis would care about Arab kids, peace would be possible.

That hasn’t exactly been the problem. Israelis have wanted nothing more than peace and security for all the children. That’s why they accepted the 1947 U.N. partitionof British Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. Unfortunately — another asymmetry — the Arabs said no. To this day, the Palestinians have rejected every peace offer that leaves a Jewish state standing.

This is not ancient history. Yasser Arafat said no at Camp David in 2000 and at Taba in 2001. And in 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered a Palestinian state on all of the West Bank (with territorial swaps) with its capital in a shared Jerusalem. Mahmoud Abbas walked away.

In that same speech, Obama blithely called these “missed historic opportunities” that should not prevent peace-seeking now. But these “missed historic opportunities” are not random events. They present an unbroken, unrelenting pattern over seven decades of rejecting any final peace with Israel.

So what was the point of Obama’s Jerusalem speech encouraging young Israelis to make peace, a speech the media drooled over? It was mere rhetoric, a sideshow meant to soften the impact on the Arab side of the really important event of Obama’s trip: the major recalibration of his position on the peace process.

Obama knows that peace talks are going nowhere. First, because there is no way that Israel can sanely make concessions while its neighborhood is roiling and unstable — the Muslim Brotherhood taking over Egypt, rockets being fired from Gaza, Hezbollah brandishing 50,000 missiles aimed at Israel, civil war raging in Syria with its chemical weapons and rising jihadists, and Iran threatening openly to raze Tel Aviv and Haifa.

Second, peace is going nowhere because Abbas has shown Obama over the past four years that he has no interest in negotiating. Obama’s message to Abbas was blunt: Come to the table without preconditions, i.e., without the excuse of demanding a settlement freeze first.

Obama himself had contributed to this impasse when he imposed that precondition — for the first time ever in the history of Arab-Israeli negotiations — four years ago. And when Israel responded with an equally unprecedented 10-month settlement freeze, Abbas didn’t show up to talk until more than nine months in — then walked out, never to return.

In Ramallah last week, Obama didn’t just address this perennial Palestinian dodge. He demolished the very claim that settlements are the obstacle to peace. Palestinian sovereignty and Israeli security are “the core issue,” he told Abbas. “If we solve those two problems, the settlement problem will be solved.”

Finally. Presidential validation of the screamingly obvious truism: Any peace agreement will produce a Palestinian state with not a single Israeli settlement remaining on its territory. Any settlement on the Palestinian side of whatever border is agreed upon will be demolished. Thus, any peace that reconciles Palestinian statehood with Israeli securityautomatically resolves the settlement issue. It disappears.

Yes, Obama offered the ritual incantations about settlements being unhelpful. Nothing new here. He could have called them illegal or illegitimate. It wouldn’t have mattered — because Obama officially declared them irrelevant.

Exposing settlements as a mere excuse for the Palestinian refusal to negotiate — that was the news, widely overlooked, coming out of Obama’s trip. It was a breakthrough.

Will it endure? Who knows. But when an American president so sympathetic to the Palestinian cause tells Abbas to stop obstructing peace with that phony settlement excuse, something important has happened. Abbas, unmasked and unhappy, knows this better than anyone.