Tag Archives: Mahmoud Abbas

Obama to Palestinians: Accept the Jewish State

Posted on by
Reply

by Daniel Pipes
Washington Times
March 26, 2013

 

Title page of Theodor Herzl's 1896 book, "Der Judenstaat" ("The Jewish State").

Title page of Theodor Herzl’s 1896 book, “Der Judenstaat” (“The Jewish State”).

One key shift in U.S. policy was overlooked in the barrage of news about Barack Obama’s eventful fifty-hour visit to Israel last week. That would be the demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state, called by Hamas leader Salah Bardawil ”the most dangerous statement by an American president regarding the Palestinian issue.”

 First, some background: Israel’s founding documents aimed to make the country a Jewish state.Modern Zionism effectively began with the publication in 1896 of Theodor Herzl’s book, Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”). The Balfour Declaration of 1917 favors “a national home for the Jewish people.” U.N. General Assembly resolution 181 of 1947, partitioning Palestine into two, mentions the term Jewish state 30 times. Israel’s Declaration of Establishment of 1948 mentions Jewish state 5 times, as in “we … hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.”

Because of this tight connection, when Arab-Israeli diplomacy began in earnest in the 1970s, the Jewish state formulation largely disappeared from view; everyone simply assumed that diplomatic recognition of Israel meant accepting it as the Jewish state. Only in recent years did Israelis realize otherwise, as Israeli Arabs came to accept Israel but reject its Jewish nature. For example, an important 2006 publication from the Mossawa Center in Haifa, The Future Vision of Palestinian Arabs in Israel, proposes that the country become a religiously neutral state and joint homeland. In brief, Israeli Arabs have come to see Israel as a variant of Palestine.

Awakened to this linguistic shift, winning Arab acceptance of Israel no longer sufficed; Israelis and their friends realized that they had to insist on explicit Arab acceptance of Israel as the Jewish state. In 2007, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert announced that unless Palestinians did so, diplomacy would be aborted: “I do not intend to compromise in any way over the issue of the Jewish state,” he emphasized. ThePalestinian Authority immediately and unanimously rejected this demand. Its head, Mahmoud Abbas, responded: “In Israel, there are Jews and others living there,. This we are willing to recognize, nothing else.”

Netanyahu and Olmert agree on the need for Palestinian recognition of Israel as the Jewish state

Netanyahu and Olmert agree on the need for Palestinian recognition of Israel as the Jewish state

When Binyamin Netanyahu succeeded Olmert as prime minister in 2009, he reiterated this demand as a precondition to serious negotiations: “Israel expects the Palestinians to first recognize Israel as a Jewish state before talking about two states for two peoples.” The Palestinians not only refused to budge but ridiculed the very idea. Again, Abbas: “What is a ‘Jewish state?’ We call it the ‘State of Israel.’ You can call yourselves whatever you want. But I will not accept it. … It’s not my job to … provide a definition for the state and what it contains. You can call yourselves the Zionist Republic, the Hebrew, the National, the Socialist [Republic] call it whatever you like, I don’t care.”

Only six weeks ago, Abbas again blasted the Jewish state concept. The Palestinian rejection of Jewish statehood could not be more emphatic. (For a compilation of their assertions, see “Recognizing Israel as the Jewish State: Statements” at DanielPipes.org.)When Binyamin Netanyahu succeeded Olmert as prime minister in 2009, he reiterated this demand as a precondition to serious negotiations: “Israel expects the Palestinians to first recognize Israel as a Jewish state before talking about two states for two peoples.” The Palestinians not only refused to budge but ridiculed the very idea. Again, Abbas: “What is a ‘Jewish state?’ We call it the ‘State of Israel.’ You can call yourselves whatever you want. But I will not accept it. … It’s not my job to … provide a definition for the state and what it contains. You can call yourselves the Zionist Republic, the Hebrew, the National, the Socialist [Republic] call it whatever you like, I don’t care.”

American politicians, including both George W. Bush and Obama, have since 2008 occasionally referred to Israel as the Jewish state, even as they studiously avoided demanding Palestinians to do likewise. In a typical declaration, Obama in 2011 sketched the ultimate diplomatic goal as “two states for two people: Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people and the State of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people.”

Barack Obama changed U.S. policy in a speech at a convention center in Jerusalem.

Barack Obama changed U.S. policy in a speech at a convention center in Jerusalem.

Then, in his Jerusalem speech last week, Obama suddenly and unexpectedly adopted in full the Israeli demand: “Palestinians must recognize that Israel will be a Jewish state.”

That sentence breaks important new ground and cannot readily be undone. It also makes for excellent policy, for without such recognition, Palestinian acceptance of Israel is hollow, indicating only a willingness to call the future state they dominate “Israel” rather than “Palestine.”Then, in his Jerusalem speech last week, Obama suddenly and unexpectedly adopted in full the Israeli demand: “Palestinians must recognize that Israel will be a Jewish state.”

While not the only shift in policy announced during Obama’s trip (another: telling the Palestinians not to set preconditions for negotiations), this one looms largest because it starkly contravenes the Palestinian consensus. Bardawil may hyperbolically assert that it “shows that Obama has turned his back to all Arabs” but those ten words in fact establish a readiness to deal with the conflict’s central issue. They likely will be his most important, most lasting, and most constructive contribution to Arab-Israeli diplomacy.

Mr. Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum.

Mar. 26, 2013 update: Other Arab reactions to Obama’s “Jewish state” statement:

Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi, March 23:

Never in my life have I seen a US President beg for the approval of the Israelis while demeaning himself in the process quite like Barack Obama has done during his current trip. … He has broken our trust and dashed our hopes, reminding us instead of Uncle Tom (from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin) – the black servant whose subservience to his white master overcame his humanity.

Barack Hussein Obama surprised us with his speech in Jerusalem when he demanded the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state and urged the Arab states to recognize Israel. … Obama wants us to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, what about the 25 percent of its population who are not Jewish, in particular the 1.5 million Arabs living inside Israel? America’s long line of caucasian presidents never stooped this low; most of them pressured Israel to some degree to recognise the rights of the Palestinian people.

Obama did not come to the region as a man of peace but as a war monger. … Obama’s revised approach suggests that the Arabs and Muslims are in for four years of misery during Obama’s second term as president. … This is the age of American hypocrisy and Arab humiliation.

PA Continues to Advocate for Israel’s Destruction

Posted on by
1

Palestinians-rip-an-American-flag-during-a-protest-against-the-visit-of-the-U.S.-President-Barack-Obama-AP

Palestinians rip an American flag during a protest against the visit of President Barack Obama / AP

by IPT News  •  Mar 20, 2013 at 6:14 pm

Calls for liberating “Palestine” have been reverberating among the various Palestinian political factions for decades.

Hamas actively pursues Israel’s destruction, but how does the Palestinian Authority (PA) differ from the terrorist organization?

A recent Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) report highlights the PA’s continued efforts to propagate the Palestinian refugees’ “right of return” within Israel. This narrative is perpetuated at the core of PA schools and is clearly disseminated throughout history, civics, and Arabic language textbooks. For example, MEMRI points to a fourth grade textbook, which says, “Four and a half million Palestinians live in the diaspora outside Palestine… Most are refugees waiting to return to the motherland, from which they were expelled.”

Other examples start as early as second grade and run throughout primary school textbooks. By subjecting children to continuous propaganda regarding an eventual “return” to Israeli cities like Haifa and Jaffa, the PA is clearly indoctrinating future generations on the virtues of a one-state solution. In that scenario, Palestinians would outnumber Israelis stripping Jews of a homeland.

This tactic is part of the broader strategy of subjugating younger generations of Palestinians to propaganda that glorifies terrorists and advocates for violent jihad for the purposes of destroying the Jewish state.

The Palestinian culture of death has been exposed in various forms throughout the years. Among the more notorious examples was a children’s television program that featured a Mickey Mouse knockoff calling for martyrdom and violence against Jews. Moreover, MEMRI reports that the PA continues to praise terrorists such as Dalal Al-Mughrabi, commemorating the anniversary of a terrorist attack which killed 35 Israelis and injured dozens of civilians. Former and current PA officials continue to glorify such atrocities, describing Mughrabi as an inspirational figure and role model.

Furthermore, PA President Mahmoud Abbas recently claimed that there is “no difference between [the PA's] policies and those of Hamas.” Based on the PA’s educational curriculum, media dissemination, and terrorist glorification, the international community must look behind the PA’s doublespeak before pressuring Israel to make further concessions.

Related articles

Facebook’s “Accidental Mistake” and Free Speech in the Arab World

Posted on by
Reply

FB censoringby Khaled Abu Toameh

Many Palestinian journalists, and those in the Middle East, are forced to use Facebook to publish what their own media will not accept. But the problem becomes worse when Facebook itself starts removing material that bothers dictatorships and tyrants. One can only hope that the same Facebook employee who “accidentally” removed the article will make the same mistake and and close down the accounts belonging to terrorist organizations and their leaders. It is the duty of Facebook and Western societies to side with those seeking freedom, and not to be complicit in suppressing there voices.

“All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.” — George Bernard Shaw

Earlier this week, Facebook closed down this writer’s account for “security reasons,” arguing that he had posted an item that violates its terms of use.

Twenty-four hours later, Facebook issued a “sincere apology” and said that a member of its team had “accidentally removed something you posted on Facebook. This was a mistake.”

Although Facebook did not say which “problematic” item had prompted it to take such a drastic measure, apparently it was referring to an article that had been published by Gatestone Institute: The Palestinian Authority’s Inconvenient Truths.

Facebook’s move came at a time when Arab dictatorships in general, and the Palestinian Authority in particular, have been cracking down on Facebook users.

During the past year alone, a number of Palestinian journalists and bloggers were arrested by Western-funded Palestinian Authority security services in the West Bank for criticizing the PA leadership on their Facebook pages.

Among those detained was Esmat Abdel Khaleq, a university lecturer in journalism. She was held in detention for two weeks for posting comments on her Facebook page that allegedly insult Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Many Palestinian journalists, and those in the Middle East, are forced to use Facebook to publish what their own media will not accept. The media in the West Bank is mostly controlled by the Palestinian Authority, which has repeatedly demonstrated a large degree of intolerance toward any form of criticism. The same applies, of course, to most Arab dictatorships.

Arab governments have obviously become wary of the use their critics are making of Facebook to air their grievances and opinions. In some countries, including the Palestinian Authority, intelligence services have set up special teams to monitor Facebook and other social media networks in search of critics and “dissidents.”

But the problem becomes worse when Facebook itself starts removing material that bothers dictatorships and tyrants.

One can only hope that the same Facebook employee who “accidentally” removed the article will make the same mistake and close down accounts belonging to terrorist organizations and their leaders.

Take for example, the account of senior Hamas official Izzat al Risheq, or the numerous accounts that promote hatred and violence and are openly affiliated with terrorist and jihadi groups.

All one has to do is log in to these accounts, especially the ones in Arabic, to see how most of them are engaged in all forms of incitement.

Read more at Gatestone Institute

Related articles

Palestinian President Abbas Praises Dead Terrorists As ‘Martyrs’

Posted on by
Reply
Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority

Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority

IPT:

by John Rossomando

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is viewed in the West as a moderate relative to Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups. But that may be because Western media ignore incendiary rhetoric Abbas routinely makes in Arabic.

An example came earlier this month, when Abbas praised a litany of deceased Palestinian terrorists as martyrs. That includes Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Palestinian Islamic Jihad founder Fathi Shikaki and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine founder George Habash. Abbas named each during a January 4 rally for Palestinian unity in Gaza. The rally took place on the eve of Egyptian-sponsored unity negotiations with Hamas leader Khalid Meshaal in Cairo.

“We must remember the pioneers, the Grand Mufti of Palestine Hajj Muhammad Amin Al-Husseini as well as Ahmad Al-Shukeiri, the founder of the PLO,” Abbas said in a translation of the speech made by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

Al-Husseini was a close ally of Adolf Hitler who instigated terror attacks against Jews and moderate Palestinians in pre-World War II Palestine. He also helped organize a Muslim SS division and was complicit in the Holocaust, preventing the rescue of 19,000 Jewish children.

“The National Socialist movement of Greater Germany has, since its inception, inscribed upon its flag the fight against the world Jewry. It has therefore followed with particular sympathy the struggle of the freedom-loving Arabs, especially in Palestine, against Jewish interlopers,” Al-Husseini wrote during World War II.

The State Department declined to comment when asked about these statements by the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

“Saying such things is a form of incitement,” said Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. “We are seeing rhetoric in camps that were previously seen as moderate, and it is rhetoric heading in the wrong direction.”

It is a direct response of the populism that followed the Arab Spring.

The rhetoric also stands in stark contrast with what Abbas said in November when he pledged there would no Third Intifada on his watch. “As long as I’m sitting here, in this position, I will not allow an intifada. We will act only through diplomatic and peaceful means,” he said.

Such rhetoric has been matched to Israel’s south by Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi who called the Israelis “the descendants of apes and pigs” in 2010 when he said the “Zionists” needed to give the Palestinians everything they want or face war.

Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was struck by the lack of attention those comments, which were only recently translated and released by MEMRI, garnered in the West. “One possibility is, to borrow a phrase, the soft bigotry of low expectations,” he wrote. “Another: Anti-Semites have done such a thorough job of convincing the media that anti-Semitism doesn’t exist that when it does pop up it causes a paralyzing form of cognitive dissonance.”

Related articles

No Peace For Israel

Posted on by
5

imagesCA2RGAJ7

by Justin O Smith

On November 29, 2012, the anti-American and anti-Jew organization of the United
Nations granted “observer” status to the Palestinian Authority (PA) under
Mahmoud Abbas, which has only served to intensify the already fierce struggle of
the Jews to survive in their own land. Beleagured, besieged and constantly
attacked by Her Arab neighbors since 1948, Israel is still surrounded by enemies
and their proxies, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and Jaamat el-Fuqra, who
are dedicated to Israel’s destruction. This move by the U.N. materialized after
a year long defense by Israel against over 1500 Katusha and Iranian SR75 missile
attacks by the terrorist group Hamas from the Gaza Strip, which has become one
massive forward positioned armament depot and islamofascist military
base!

Just as a “palestinian state” or government, a palestinian homeland, a palestinian people and language (they are Arabs) are myths, fictions and lies created after 1948 (“palestini” is a Roman word used to describe Arab and Jew alike and translates from Hebrew as “invader”)…so too are the notions of the two state solution and a lasting peace between Israel and the “Palestinians” of Gaza and the West Bank.

In 1982 at Amman, Jordan, journalist and writer extraordinaire, Oriana Fallaci intensely questioned and prodded Yasser Arafat into outlining the desired borders for “Palestine.” Arafat stated that they could be the ones established under the British Mandate, but
continued with, “If we take the Anglo-French agreement of 1918, Palestine means
the territory that runs from Naqurah in the north to Aqaba in the south, and
then from the Mediterranean coast that includes the Gaza Strip to the Jordan
River and the Negev Desert.” When Fallaci pointed out that this included a large
portion of Jordan… and the whole region west of Jordan… Cisjordania, Arafat
replied, “What you call Cisjordania is Palestine.”

Reality and the crux of the matter are illuminated by the words of Salah al-Bardaweel, a Hamas spokesman: “We do not recognize Israel, nor the partition of Palestine, and
Israel has no right in Palestine… Our membership in the U.N. bodies is our
natural right, but without giving up any inch of Palestine’s soil.” In other
words, forget the 1917 Balfour Treaty and the 1922 League of Nations Mandate and
every other initiative taken in the name of a peaceful solution since then,
because Hamas and Bardaweel’s vision is a Palestine extending from the
Mediterranean Sea to the borders of Egypt, Jordan and Syria with Israel no more
and the Jews destroyed!

The U.N. vote was 138-9 to recognize Palestine as a nonmember observer state, and all but one European nation, the Czech Republic, voted with the Palestinians or abstained in the vote, as they cited concerns about settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem territories repatriated by Israel during the 1967 war. And, in a very real sense, this action has revealed an attempt to isolate America and Israel on this issue, as the world faces a rising islamofascist tide, so warmly embraced by the despot infested, anti-Freedom/human rights, anti-Jew crowd of the U.N.

In ‘The Meaning of the Yom Kippur War’, Yehuda Amital illustrated how deep seated fears of annihilation penetrated the psyche of nearly every Jew in Israel, as they were
reminded of their isolation in the Middle East and shown that they were
encircled by enemies. This raised the specter of the Holocaust.

Three months ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu extended the hand of peace to
Mahmoud Abbas, and, as noted by Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Ron Prosor, “He
reiterated that his goal was to create a solution of two states for two peoples,
where a demilitarized Palestinian state will recognize Israel as a Jewish
state.” And yet, the world has never heard the Palestinian leadership use the
phrase “two states for two peoples,” because they do not, nor will they ever,
recognize that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people.

It is absurd for so many world leaders, including President Obama, to act so dismayed
over Israel’s retaliation through last Friday’s approval of 3000 new homes in
territory that was originally the land of the Jews, King David and King Solomon.
This should trouble them a damn sight less than a group of terrorists
unilaterally attempting to grab statehood without having to compromise with
Israel.

Saeb Erekat, the PA’s chief negotiatior, stated, “At a moment
where Palestinian leadership is doing every single effort to save the two state
solution, the Israeli government does everything possible to destroy it.” It
must be pointed out that in the West Bank where the PA has largely been residing
peacefully, as of late, Israel has left them to themselves; and in Gaza, Hamas
constantly initiates confrontation and attacks Israel, so the Hamas terrorists
get to fully enjoy the ire and wrath of the Israeli Defense Force… and, as for
the people of Gaza….their continued support of Hamas thugs… their
complicity… makes them responsible for their own misery!

Israel has long maintained its right to develop neighborhoods throughout East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and more than 500,000 Jews are already living there; however, America and Europe have attempted to force Israel not to move into the E1
Development Area, which they see as a “red line.” And, when I hear former U.S.
Ambassador to Israel, Daniel Kurtzer, state, “This is one of the most sensitive
areas in the territory, and I hope the United States will lay down the law,” I
have to highly praise Netanyahu’s firm resolve to safeguard Israel’s interests
and national security concerns.

Shortly before the 1967 Six Day War, Rabbi Kook interrupted his usual sermon with a scream, as he asked a pointed and prophetic question. “Where is our Hebron, Schechem, Jerich and Anatoth, torn from the state in 1948 as we lay maimed and bleeding?” Three weeks later, the Israeli army entered these biblical cities. By the end of this war, Israel had conquered the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria. Jerusalem, divided between Israel and Jordan since 1948, was annexed and declared the eternal capital of the Jewish state. Jews were once again able to pray at the Western Wall.

Yitzhak Shamir, one time Israeli Foreign Minister who also became Prime Minister, was a strong advocate for Jewish settlement in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from 1967 on, however, it was the December 9, 1987 Palestinian uprising (infitada) that deepened divisions between Israel’s leftists, who believed in making concessions to bring peace,
and the right, who believed that Israel’s days without Jerusalem, Judea and
Samaria and the Gaza Strip are gone forever and will not return.

Signing the Oslo Accords in 1993 also signed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s death
warrant. Many Jews and their rabbis saw Rabin as a “rodef”/pursuer, one who
actively threatens the life of a Jew. On November 4, 1995, Yigal Amir, an army
veteran and a student at Bar Ilan University, assassinated Rabin during a peace
rally in Tel Aviv; his study of Jewish law convinced him that Rabin was an enemy
of the Jewish people, and he believed that he had a duty to kill him.

The current crop of Hamas terrorists now occupying the Gaza Strip are no different
from the Muslim Brothers who published their vile “news” articles for decades in
their journal ‘al-Dawah’ (The Call). They describe the enemies of Islam as
Western Christianity (al-Salibiyyah, the Crusade, to  highlight its perceived
imperialism), communism, secularism Ataturk-style and Zionism. “Jewry” in
particular was linked inextricably to the other three enemies and specifically
targeted for destruction by Hamas in its charter. And, these are also the same
sort of islamofascists who followed the teachings of Al-Faridah al-Ghaybah, ‘The
Neglected Duty’ (jihad/holy war) and whose followers in the Muslim Brotherhood
assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981, because he dared
deal with “the Jews”; the ideas outlined in ‘The Neglected Duty’ were not
confined to a tiny group of extremists, but were more widespread in Egyptian
society than observers believed at the time.

Israel needs Her warriors to stand firmly beside Netanyahu… Where are the modern day Joshuas, Davids, the Maccabees, the Theodor Herzls, the Ben Gurions and those pioneers of Israel, who were seemingly possessed by their own mystical vision or mad genius?!?…Where are those like the Jews who settled on the site of the biblical city of Schechem in Nablus in the West Bank, because their sacred land was being profaned by the Palestinians?

With Iran still smuggling more powerful and longer ranged
missiles into Gaza by way of Egypt,  Israel’s only real chance for survival and
ensuring its national security and the safety of its citizens lies in the
following course of action. The annexation of the Golan Heights should be
further solidified and made permanent by extending settlements and defense
perimeters across the area; and in conjunction with this, Israel must also annex
the Gaza Strip, the Shaba Heights, the West Bank and the entirety of Jerusalem.
This should be followed with the immediate expulsion of Hamas and all
Palestinians not holding Israeli citizenship, just as Jordan’s King Abdullah
expelled the PLO and Yasser Arafat in the 1970s. The current climate and path in
today’s halls of diplomacy will only serve to hand Israel to Her
enemies!

“Each, the religious and the secularist, gazes at each other in
horror. Neither can see the other clearly. Both recall the excesses, the
cruelties, and the intolerance of ‘the other side’ and wounded to the core they
cannot make peace.” -Israeli novelist Amos Oz

U.N. Says ‘Aye’ to Palestinian Terror State

Posted on by
2

large-450x313By P. David Hornik

Late Thursday evening, Israel time, the UN General Assembly voted to confer nonmember statehood on the Palestinian Authority by a sweeping majority.

Even Israel’s hopes of putting together a “moral minority” of Western-country nays had crumbled, with France and Italy pronouncing themselves in favor of the Palestinian nonmember state and Britain and Germany abstaining. Israel, the United States, Canada, and the Czech Republic stood virtually alone in opposing the move by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.

The nonmoral majority of Western countries ratified Palestine (actively with ayes or passively with abstentions) even though doing so is a blatant violation of the Oslo Accords they had once piously sanctioned. And they did so even though last week and the week before, Gaza—where almost half of Palestinian Authority Palestinians live—had fired 1600 hundred rockets at civilian targets in Israel, every single firing a manifest war crime intended to kill and injure men, women, and children.

It is said that the Gaza eruption led some European countries to change their minds and vote in favor of the resolution (or abstain) so as to strengthen Abbas’s “diplomatic” approach over Hamas’s violence. Abbas’s diplomatic polish and peacemaking disposition were well in evidence when he addressed the General Assembly in September, saying among other things:

During the past months, attacks by terrorist militias of Israeli settlers have become a daily reality, with at least 535 attacks perpetrated since the beginning of this year. We are facing relentless waves of attacks against our people, our mosques, churches and monasteries, and our homes and schools; they are unleashing their venom against our trees, fields, crops and properties, and our people have become fixed targets for acts of killing and abuse with the complete collusion of the occupying forces and the Israeli government.

As Israel’s UN ambassador Ron Prosor noted in a stinging op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “Many countries in the Assembly are taking an approach to Palestinian statehood that is…Pavlovian…. For decades, the body has rubber-stamped any Palestinian whim no matter how ill-advised, ill-conceived or illogical.”

Prosor went on to list some glaring shortcomings of the Palestinian Authority/Gaza that—seemingly by any normal calculus of Western countries—would disqualify it rather than qualify it for statehood, such as:

● Lack of control over territory, with Abbas’s Ramallah-based, official Palestinian Authority having had zero control over Gaza since Hamas seized power there in 2007. Prosor could have added the tenuousness of Abbas’s rule in the West Bank itself, where towns are run by clan-based extortion gangs and Israeli forces are all that prevents a Hamas takeover.

● The fact that Gaza is a terrorist state in every sense of the term, “a haven for global jihadist organizations like al Qaeda,” a beachhead for Iran in its ongoing war for Israel’s annihilation.

● The fact that democracy has not exactly flourished in Islamist Gaza or, for that matter, in the West Bank, where “journalists, bloggers and activists continue to be jailed and tortured…for crimes such as ‘extending their tongues against the Palestinian President’” (see reports here and here).

● The fact that the Palestinian Authority is bankrupt, totally dependent on foreign aid, yet “devotes 6% of its annual budget to payments for imprisoned terrorists and the families of suicide bombers”—while using its educational autonomy to instill a culture of hatred of Israel.

And to all this Europe voted yes—or at best took refuge in a cowardly neutrality.

Read more at Front Page

 

Related articles

The Absurdity of Treating a Terrorist Gang Like a State

Posted on by
Reply

By Bruce Thornton

The currently suspended missile duel between Israel and Hamas exposes yet again the surreal absurdity of the way the international community handles this conflict between a democratic state and a terrorist gang. Yesterday’s cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas is another example of the folly of treating a bunch of murderers like a legitimate government.

Consider, for example, the way a terrorist outfit like Hamas, self-defined in its charter by its genocidal goals, is treated as if it were a legitimate state. But Hamas is not a government that rules over a sovereign territory defined by international borders. If you want a recent graphic illustration of Hamas’ true nature, peruse this video of the aftermath of the summary execution of 6 accused “collaborators.” Or consider Hamas’ official television coverage of this week’s terrorist bombing of a bus in Israel. Or contemplate the barbarity of using its own “citizens” as human shields for its munitions dumps and rocket launchers. Calling Hamas honcho Ismail Haniyeh a “Prime Minister,” as virtually every world government and news organization does, doesn’t mean he is actually a prime minister, no matter how many elections are held. These titles and voting procedures do not constitute a legitimate government that should be recognized as such by the world community as though it respects international laws and treaties like the Geneva Conventions. Let alone should this façade of political legitimacy rationalize the millions of dollars Western governments give to Hamas under the guise of U.N. aid for social services, freeing up funds for purchasing weapons and munitions.

The same pretence of state legitimacy is equally absurd in the case of Palestinian “President” Mahmoud Abbas, the holocaust-denying head of the Palestinian Authority, which is recognized as the sole representative of the Palestinians instead of the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization ever since the cosmetic makeover brought about by the 1993 Oslo Accords. The PA is still just another terrorist gang, as demonstrated by its frequent honoring of terrorist murderers by naming streets and parks after them, and its clinging to the goal of destroying Israel through demands for territorial concessions and the “right of return” for an endlessly growing number of “refugees.” As such, the PA’s main functions include peddling to the international community the “two-state” and “nationalist aspirations” canard in order to delegitimize Israel and obtain money, and to distribute to its people whatever international financial aid is left over after PA fatcats have skimmed their take. Yet today as in the past, the U.S. is intervening in the current conflict to ensure that Abbas rather than Hamas is the “primary interlocutor with the international community,” as the Wall Street Journal reported, because it allegedly is more “legitimate” and “moderate”––the only sign of its moderation being that it believes Israel should be destroyed later rather than sooner.

Of course, totalitarian regimes for decades have appropriated the government titles and offices of legitimate governments, but at least a state like the laughably named Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea actually controls a recognized territory defined by international borders (except for the armistice line in the south). That hypocrisy is bad enough, but extending it to terrorists whose sole foundation for existence is the destruction of a neighboring legitimate nation compounds hypocrisy with delusion. It demands that superficial nomenclature substitute for reality. After all, as Plato pointed out, a gang of thieves behaves “democratically” when it divvies up the loot. But that machinery does not signify the presence of the principles and beliefs that constitute legitimate government.

Read more at Front Page

Between a rock and a hard place

Posted on by
1

By Melanie Phillips

In Israel, an enormous call-up of reservists suggests that a ground invasion of Gaza is imminent – and this morning’s further attacks on Tel Aviv make that more likely still. The prospect of a ground invasion fills Israelis with dread. A ground invasion means that Israeli soldiers will go into Gaza street by street and house by house to destroy the rocket launchers, rockets and ammunition dumps where they have been stored. Many have been situated in residential neighbourhoods, for two reasons: first, to deter the Israel Defence Force from attacking them for fear of killing civilians as a consequence; and second, to ensure that many Gazan civilians are indeed killed, thus guaranteeing an international outcry so that Israel will be forced to stop its operation to destroy these weapons.

Such a ground operation, where from past experience many of these places have been booby-trapped, carry the certainty of a high casualty rate among the Israeli soldiers.

That is why Israel today waits in dread. People in Britain and elsewhere who have the luxury of living in a country that has not been under existential attack for six decades have absolutely no idea of the extraordinary pressure under which so many Israeli families live. Their children are conscripted into the armed forces because Israel is under permanent threat of attack by an Arab and Muslim world which is determined to wipe Israel off the map.

And so these young Israelis are sent to fight and some of them — maybe many of them — will die, in a country where every such life that is lost is a national tragedy because the Jewish people was almost wiped out half a century ago, and their families will be torn apart – all because millions of murderous fanatics who believe the Jews must not be allowed to live in their own historic homeland continue to try to destroy that homeland and murder as many Jews as possible. And many more of Israel’s children will die if the Israel Defence Force starts a ground war in Gaza. Yet Israelis also know that if the rockets and missiles from Gaza are to stop, a ground war may be the only way to destroy these weapons since there is a limit to what can be achieved by aerial bombardment.

This is the kind of rock and very hard place indeed dilemma under which Israelis live week in, week out – and have done for more than sixty years, all because a bunch of fanatics are bent on their annihilation. Yet none of this is acknowledged by those in Britain, whose hearts bleed for the Palestinians who are the aggressors in this conflict but never for the Israelis who are their victims – and whose motives in mounting such a military operation must therefore be assumed to be malevolent or evil.

Among western leaders, the hypocrisy is particularly odious. Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague, who has been saying Israel has the right to defend itself against attack, nevertheless also says :

‘Israel does have to bear in mind that it is when ground invasions have taken place in previous conflicts that they have lost international support and a great deal of sympathy around the world.’

In the US similarly there are reportsthat Obama is telling Israel not to mount a ground invasion –because the likely toll of civilian casualties would benefit Hamas. So according to these leaders, Israel absolutely has the right to defend itself — but not actually to take the action that will defeat its attackers! And just whose international support might Israel lose by such a casualty toll? Why, the support of leaders like Hague and Obama!  What hypocrisy, furthermore, from those who have been bombing the living daylights out of Afghanistan but impose a totally different standard on Israel.

Of course, no-one in Israel imagines that even the most successful operation in Gaza will defeat the Hamas. The most they hope for is to degrade its capabilities for mass murder so that Israelis can have a few years free of attack before they have to do the same thing all over again.

The reason why this conflict goes on and on in this interminable way, leaving Israel in a state of permanent siege, is quite simple. It is that the so-called civilised world, for all its empty pledges of support for Israel, actually leaves it to swing in the wind.

It persists in casting the conflict entirely falsely as a fight over land boundaries. It totally ignores the Judeophobic incitement to hatred and murder of Israelis with which the Palestinians indoctrinate their children; it totally ignores the Nazi-style (and yes , it is straight from the Nazi lexicon) deranged racist demonisation of the Jews as cosmically evil people responsible for all the ills in the world and controlling everything that moves in the west; it totally ignores the statements made even by so-called moderates such as Mahmoud Abbas that the Palestinians  will never accept Israel as a Jewish state, thus committing them to permanent war against it; it totally ignores the fact that this is a religious war against the Jews (read the Hamas Charter); it totally ignores the gross inversion and misrepresentation of history by which the Arabs have concealed the fact that it is only the Jewish peoplefor whom Israel was ever their national homeland.

Read more

Libya, Jordan and Obama’s guiding lights

Posted on by
1
The operational, intelligence and political fiascos that led to and followed the September 11 jihadist assault on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, all derive from the same problem. That problem is the failure of US President Barack Obama’s conceptual framework for understanding the Middle East.
The Islamic revolutionary wave sweeping across the Arab world has rent asunder the foundations of the US alliance system in the Middle East. But due to Obama’s ideological commitment to an anti-American conceptual framework for understanding Middle Eastern politics, his administration cannot see what is happening.
That framework places the blame for all or most of the pathologies of the Muslim world on the US and Israel.
What Obama and his advisers can see is that there are many people who disagree with them. And so they adopted a policy of delegitimizing, discrediting and silencing their opponents. To this end, his administration has purged the US federal government’s lexicon of all terms that are necessary to describe reality.
“Jihad,” “Islamist,” “radical Islam,” “Islamic terrorism” and similar phrases have all been banned. The study of Islamist doctrine by government officials has been outlawed.
The latest casualty of this policy was an instructor at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.
Until he was sacked this week, the instructor taught a class called “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism.”
According to Col. Dave Lapan, spokesman for the Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the instructor was fired for committing a thought crime. He “portrayed Islam almost entirely in a negative way.” Dempsey himself ordered the probe of all Islamic courses across the US military educational system.
The administration’s refusal to accept the plain fact that the Islamic regimes and forces now rising throughout the Muslim world threaten US interests is not its only conceptual failure.
Another failure, also deriving from Obama’s embrace of the anti-American and anti-Israel foreign policy narrative, is also wreaking havoc on the region. And like the conceptual failure that led to the murderous attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, this conceptual failure will also come back to haunt America.
This second false conceptual framework argues that the root of instability in the region is the absence of formal treaties of peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. It claims that the way to pacify the radical regional forces is to pressure Israel to make concessions in land and legitimacy to its neighbors.
Obama is not unique for his embrace of this conceptual framework for US Middle East policy. He is just the latest in a long line of US presidents to adopt it.
At the same time the concept that peace processes and treaties ensure peace and stability collapsed completely during Obama’s tenure in office. So what makes Obama unique is that he is the first president to cling to this policy framework since it was wholly discredited.
Israel signed four peace treaties with its Arab neighbors. It signed treaties with Egypt, Jordan, the PLO and Lebanon. All of these treaties have failed or been rendered meaningless by subsequent events.
Today Israel’s 31-year-old peace treaty with Egypt is a hollow shell. No, Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood regime has not officially abrogated it. But the rise of the genocidally anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood to power has rendered it meaningless.
The treaty is no longer credible, because the Muslim Brotherhood, including Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, reject Israel’s right to exist. Their rejection of Israel’s right to exist is not a primarily political position, but a religious one. Morsi and his regime perceive Jews as the enemies of Allah deserving of annihilation.
Morsi himself has a rich record of pronouncements attesting to this fact. For instance, in November 2004 he said, “The Koran has established that the Jews are the ones in the highest degree of enmity towards Muslims.”
He continued, “There is no peace with the descendants of apes and pigs.”
In January 2009, Morsi called Israelis “Draculas who are always hungry for more killing and bloodshed using all kinds of modern war weapons supplied to them by the American administration.” He accused Israelis of “sowing the seeds of hatred between humans.”
With positions like these, Morsi has no need to pronounce dead the peace treaty for which Israel surrendered the Sinai Peninsula, and with it, its ability to deter and block invasions from the south. Its death is self-evident.
The peace was made with a regime. And once the regime ended, the peace was over. The fact that the peace was contingent on the survival of the regime that made it was utterly predictable.
In 1983, Israel signed a peace treaty with Lebanon. The treaty was abrogated as soon as the regime that signed it was overthrown by Islamic radicals and Syria.
Then there was the peace with the PLO. That peace – or peace process – was officially ushered in by the signing of the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993.
Today, the Obama administration opposes PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas’s attempts to receive international recognition of a Palestinian state through an upgrade of its position at the UN to non-member state status.
Monday US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice explained that the Obama administration opposes the PLO’s move because it believes it “jeopardize[s] the peace process.”
But this is not a credible reason to oppose it. The reason to oppose it is because the PLO’s move harms Israel.
The peace process is dead. It is dead because it was a fraud. The Palestinians negotiated in bad faith from the beginning. It is dead because the Palestinian Authority lost the Gaza Strip to Hamas in 2007. It is dead because Abbas and his PA have no capacity to make peace with Israel, even if they wanted to – which they don’t. This is so because their people will not accept peaceful coexistence with Israel. The Palestinian national movement is predicated not on the desire to establish a Palestinian state, but on the desire to destroy the Jewish state.
Abbas made this clear – yet again – this week in a statement published on his official Facebook page. There he said outright that his claim that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian territory applies not only to Judea and Samaria, but rather, “the point applies to all the territories that Israel occupied before June 1967.”
With peace partners like this, it is beyond obvious that there is nothing that Israel can do short of national suicide that will satisfy them.

Morsi’s anti-terror ploy to root out pro-US influence in Cairo, cut Israel from Sinai

Posted on by
Reply

President Morsi with army chief Field Marshal Tantawi in Sinai

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report August 10, 2012

Israel willingly acceded to Cairo’s request for permission to deploy fighter planes and armored troop carriers in Sinai, which was ruled a demilitarized buffer zone under their 1979 peace treaty. It shared an interest in President Mohamed Morsi’s counter-terror offensive against lawless Islamist bands. But when sensational reports started coming in from Cairo about non-existent Egyptian victories in which an improbable “60 gunmen killed,” they realized the “offensive” was largely bogus.

According to debkafile’s intelligence sources, Washington and Jerusalem strongly suspect that they should be worried about what the Muslim Brotherhood president is really up, especially after the sweep he conducted Wednesday, Aug. 8 of pro-Western military officers and other moves.

1.  Until then, President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership were deemed two separate and competing power bases in Cairo, with the president ready to defy the Brotherhood by leaning on the supreme military council for support. This perception broke down in the aftermath of the terrorist raid of Aug. 5 in which 17 Egyptian troops were murdered at their Mansoura base in northern Sinai. By his subsequent actions, Morsi put paid to the impression, which was supported by many high-ranking members of Israel’s security community, that the Egyptian president of two months had chosen an independent path and was ready to break ranks with the Brotherhood.

2.  Wednesday, Aug. 8, with considerable fanfare, Morsi sacked key military officials in an apparent purge of those responsible for the Sinai debacle.

Chief of intelligence Gen. Mourad Mowafi was sent into retirement and Maj. Gen. Mohamed Shahata given an interim appointment in his stead. The same bulletin announced that the head of the Supreme Military Council and defense minister, Field Marshal Tantawi, had fired the head of the military police, Maj. Gen. Hamdy Badeen. Our sources disclose that Tantawi had no part in this or any other military dismissals, although they were his prerogative. Morsi quite simply seized the moment to appropriate the top military command’s authority for the first time by taking upon himself the firing and hiring of military officers.

The president furthermore sacked the head of the Republican Guard, the division responsible for safeguarding the president and members of his regime and replaced him with an officer loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood, Maj. Gen. Hamed Zaky. Morsi’s highhanded actions, especially in the case of Gen. Mowafi, are seen in Washington and Jerusalem as the first steps in the Brotherhood’s takeover of the Egyptian army.

3.  Mowafi had to go because he stood in the way of Muslim Brotherhood objectives. It was he who raised the alarm for months about an impending terrorist attack on the Egyptian-Gaza-Israel border junction and urged the deployment of attack helicopters for preemptive missile attacks on their networks.

Instead of being commended, our sources report he was fired for two reasons: For what the MB thought of as his pro-western and pro-Israeli orientation; and for his efforts to broker a compromise deal for unifying the two Palestinian wings, the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. However, this not what the Brotherhood wants. Rather than Palestinian unity and compromise, the MB seeks a Hamas takeover of the Ramallah-based Fatah wing headed by Mahmoud Abbas. Gen. Mowafi stood in the way of this goal. At the same time, the new man, Gen. Shahata, had to be satisfied with an interim appointment as head of intelligence. The MB does not trust him to be loyal and regards him as pro-Western – albeit less well-connected than Mowafi. They will use him as a stopgap until they find an intelligence chief who understands where his allegiance belongs – and then drop him too.

In the “counter-terror offensive” charade, the MB assigned Hamas in Gaza a key role. According to the script, Cairo would give Hamas an ‘ultimatum” to surrender the Al Qaeda-linked Army of Islam operatives alleged to have carried out the raid on the Egyptian base. The Muslim Brotherhood regime in Cairo would then be able to close the books on the episode and avoid even the semblance of an offensive against Salafi terrorist networks in Sinai.

Read more