Love of the Land

Marquadt-Bigman - Quote of the day (PennBDS)

2012-02-02T10:00:00.013+02:00

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
02 February '12..

And if PennBDS is particularly disturbed only by the oppression of Palestinian Arabs, then one wonders why they are not protesting the governments of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, or others in which the Palestinians have suffered extreme discrimination, violence, and forced expulsions.

In Gaza, under the authority of Hamas, political freedom, religious freedom, and freedom of association are severely curtailed, women’s rights are limited, human rights activists are targeted, and homosexuality is a criminal offense.

Upon any serious consideration, it becomes clear that BDS actually has no problem with oppression, no problem with oppression of Arabs, and no problem with the oppression of Palestinian Arabs. BDS actually has a problem only with Israel and it can only be deduced that their problem is truly with Jews.

Sarit Catz, Bigotry under the umbrella of a great university, commenting on the forthcoming 2012 National Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Conference at the University of Pennsylvania campus on Feb. 3-5, organized by a university-recognized group called PennBDS. Many excellent posts about the hollow BDS claims can be found at PennBDS-Oy.

Link: http://warped-mirror.com/2012/02/02/quote-of-the-day-14/

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Inbar - The Amman Talks: Another Exercise in Futile Diplomacy

2012-02-02T07:00:00.007+02:00

Prof. Efraim Inbar..
BESA Center..
Perspectives Paper No. 162..
01 February '12..

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The recent Israeli-Palestinian "pre-negotiations" in Amman mark another ineffectual endeavor to bridge the wide gap between the two sides. The Palestinians were quick to accuse the Israelis of bad faith, while still refusing to accept Israel as a Jewish state. Furthermore, as Hamas becomes emboldened by the "Islamic Winter," Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation seems impossible.

Few should be surprised by the failure of the Amman talks, which constituted an additional attempt by the international Quartet to restart negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. These meetings were intended to break the impasse in the peace process, after the Palestinians decided to relinquish the option of negotiations with Israel and to adopt instead a unilateral approach to attain their goals.

This unilateralism, reflected in the PLO's failed attempt to gain recognition as a state at the United Nations, was not well received in the United States and most of Europe. In order to overcome the international repercussions of such a move, the Palestinians heeded the advice of the Quartet and returned reluctantly to a "pre-negotiation" table in Amman, still committed to "go it alone" if their territorial expectations were not fulfilled by Israel.

As expected, Israel's offers did not satisfy Palestinian desires. Over the years, the Palestinians have rejected generous offers by then-prime ministers Ehud Barak (2000) and Ehud Olmert (2008). Obviously, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu could not do better. Not many details emerged from the Amman talks, but it seems that the Palestinian demand for Jerusalem was a serious obstacle for progress in the peace talks. Similarly, Israel's insistence on a defensible border along the Jordan River did not sit well with Palestinian visions.

The Palestinians refuse to accept Israel as a Jewish state--a core issue in the history of the Arab-Israel conflict. While Israel, under the leadership of Prime Minister Menachem Begin, recognized the "legitimate rights of the Palestinian people" in 1978, the Palestinians still have not reciprocated. Denying the legitimate right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel only reinforces the majority Israeli consensus that the Palestinians are not a serious partner for peacemaking.

Indeed, the gap in positions between Israelis and Palestinians is extremely large and cannot be bridged overnight. It is totally unrealistic to expect an agreement on final status issues in the near future. The best that can be achieved is interim agreements, tacit or formal, that do not entail grave security risks for Israel. Even the Obama administration learned the hard way that conflict resolution should be replaced with conflict management. That is the only strategy that has a chance to minimize suffering on both sides and achieve a modicum of stability in a stormy Middle East.

To a great extent, the Amman talks can be seen as an international effort to maintain a facade of negotiations within the framework of a conflict management strategy. Their failure will inevitably bring about another bout of diplomatic activism in pursuit of another forum for an Israeli-Palestinian exchange of views that will similarly fail. Such failures hardly discourage professional diplomats who make an honorable living by trying to bring peace.

Regional developments, namely the uprisings in the Arab world, have also contributed to the lack of progress in Israeli-Palestinian relations. The Palestinians are quite vexed that the Arab masses have hardly mentioned the Palestinian issue, showing that it is not a main cause of instability in the Middle East. This has reduced the sense of urgency for "solving" the Palestinian problem, as other problems have attracted much more attention. Moreover, the success of Islamist parties in premature elections in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as the growing influence of Islamist groups in other parts of the Arab world, does not bode well for the peace process. While domestic concerns may force such groups toward seeming moderation, Israel is still generally viewed as an illegitimate political entity that must eventually be eradicated. This is also the position of Hamas.

Unfortunately, the "Islamic winter" has emboldened Hamas, enhancing its position in Palestinian society and politics. Indeed, in May 2011, Fateh--out of weakness--signed a reconciliation accord with Hamas that remains to be actualized. In fact, the fragmentation and/or Islamization of states that characterizes the "Arab spring" was first seen in Hamas' struggle against the Palestinian Authority. After winning the 2006 elections in Gaza, Hamas took over the Gaza Strip by force in 2007. As long as Hamas plays a central role in Palestinian affairs, no real Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation is possible.

The turmoil in the Arab world has also hardened Israeli positions in negotiations with the Palestinians. Suddenly, Israelis realize that a pillar of their national security, the peace treaty with Egypt, is in jeopardy, indicating the fragility of signed international documents. Political circumstances may change suddenly in the Middle East, making defensible borders an imperative. It is a pity that the Palestinians have not yet internalized this change and do not calibrate their aspirations to the realities on the ground.

The Amman talks, another exercise in futile diplomacy, cannot be isolated from the surrounding reality. They had no chance of success. On the bright side, they were hosted by Jordan. An enhanced Jordanian role is to be welcomed because Jordan is a much more responsible international actor than the Palestinians, who must still prove that they can build a state.

Unquestionably, the Quartet will try again to make peace. We should wish them luck.-

Link: http://www.biu.ac.il/SOC/besa/docs/perspectives162.pdf

Efraim Inbar is professor of political studies and director of the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University.

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Roth - Raining and rocketing

2012-02-02T04:00:00.039+02:00

Getty Images picture from Gaza's Shati
district today. The men who run the place
could focus on making their streets and
lives work a little better; they get
more foreign aid by far than any
other aid beneficiaries on earth.
But tonight's newsreminds us that
when faced with the choice of making a
better life for their children or firing
rockets at us - well, no need to labor
the point.

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
01 February '12..

It's cold and wet tonight. Israelis who don't need to be out of doors are inside. Ideal weather, in other words, for the thugs of Gaza and their rockets. Ynet reported about an hour ago that a Gazan Qassam rocket was fired into southern Israel around 6:30 this evening, and exploded in an open space within one of the communities in the Shaar Hanegev region. For reasons of security (why give the terrorists any free and easy information?), the town is unidentified. Fortunately the report suggests no one was injured, and no property damage is reported.

The secretary-general of the United Nations, Mr Ban Ki-Moon, is due to visit the beleaguered city of Sderot tomorrow. It has the misfortune of being the closest Israeli city to our fence with Gaza, and as a result has absorbed a torrent of inbound rockets and grenades since Israel walked away from the Gaza Strip and handed control to the Palestinian Arabs in 2005. It would be good to think that visiting there will sensitize him to what it means to live next to thugs with an arsenal of rockets that numbers in the tens of thousands.

It's reported that Mr Ban will be visiting Gaza tomorrow as well. Today he spent time with the Palestinian Arab president Abbas (picture here) and with Shimon Peres, Israel's president, in Jerusalem where he opened with the right greeting: "Shalom". It seems likely - though it's not announced - that in Gaza he will meet with the leaders of the "other" Palestinian Arabs, the Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

Mr Ban managed to be in the Jordanian capital today as well. There he told the Hashemite Kingdom's foreign minister - a man with the famously unlikely name of Judeh - that the Arab world has a “generational opportunity” to create a future it deserves. In view of the things we wrote here earlier today, we're very much afraid that he's right. Large parts of the Arab world, thanks to unconscionable decisions they have made about how to raise their emerging generations of young people, are indeed heading towards a future they deserve.

UPDATE: Wednesday 9:15 pm - While writing the above, a report came in that five more Qassam rockets have crashed into southern Israel, all it seems into the same Shaar Hanegev region as the one two hours ago. We'll go off now and check this disturbing development more closely.

UPDATE: Wednesday 11:30 pm - Both JPost.com and Haaretz are reporting that the volley we reported earlier around 9 pm tonight in fact consisted of six rockets and not five as we reported earlier. Sounds of high intensity gunfire are now being reported from Sderot plus "massive" helicopter action over the city and into Gaza that started roughly an hour ago (Hebrew-language eyewitness reports here and here).

Link: http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.com/2012/02/1-feb-12-raining-and-rocketing.html

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Medad/Pollak - Why not Ynet?

2012-02-02T00:25:00.000+02:00

Yisrael Medad/Eli Pollak..
Media Matters..
JPost..
01 February 12..

The future will tell whether the public will tolerate the lack of accountability of Ynet.

One observer of media ethics, Stephen J.A. Ward, writing in the Winter 2012 issue of MEDIA, the journal of the Canadian Association of Journalists, provides us with a concise definition of the ethical journalist. According to Ward, journalists should seek to serve the public but not be activists; journalists must strive to be fully impartial as well as objective; they should maintain professional and personal independence and be truly transparent in their work, even welcoming review. These rules-of-thumb should apply to mainstream media outlets as well as internet sites and the social media phenomenon.

Good journalism in the sense of news-gathering and news-reporting isn’t that difficult to produce. The basics are quite obvious: fairness, accuracy, truthfulness, confirmation of sources, prompt correction or clarification of (and, if neccessary apology for) errors, whether they are factual mistakes or mistakes of omission.

In Israel the broadcast media has a clear code of ethics. Although compliance with it could improve, the very existence of a code guides the media and prevents egregious failures. Or at least leads at times to apologies and corrections.

Israel’s newspapers, on the other hand, are in a different league. Only Ma’ariv has a complaints commissioner. The others at best are willing sometimes to relate to public outrage or complaints, after all they do want to sell and an outraged public will not buy.

The internet is also an entirely different ballgame.

On the one hand, the public can react to any item and article and these reactions, by and large, appear on the websites. This has led to retractions, apologies and even attempts at covering up errors by removing them and presenting the public with a modified form of the same item. All this is of course impossible in the print media.

On the other hand there are no clear guidelines and one finds that reporters often allow themselves to disregard even the most elemental rules, such as the right of reply. It would seem sometimes that there is even contempt for the public users of the sites.

Consider Ynet. Anyone who has placed a complaint with this website probably knows their response by heart: “Shalom, thank you for your letter. We received your comments and passed them on to the relevant persons on the website’s editorial board, who have seriously considered them. We hereby inform you that we found no fault in our journalistic decisions. We are always at your disposal for any question, problem or comment. Signed by Ron K. from the client service department.”

This response is given irrespective of the nature of the complaint. Examples abound. The huge demonstration for equality of this summer brought with it a war of numbers. Ynet started with 400,000 demonstrators. Yet the official police estimate was 180,000, so Ynet corrected the figure and put it at “more than 300,000.”

When Uri Amiram complained that the initial figure was misleading, instead of an apology or an explanation, the answer received was the standard one.

On August 18, Ynet ran an article with the headline: “With G-d’s help, haredim pay less for their apartments.” The facts of the article actually supported the opposite conclusion, noting that apartments in haredi (ultra-Orthodox) neighborhoods cost slightly more than those in secular sectors. Michal Galperin complained that the headline was misleading and constituted incitement. Ron K. answered as usual.

On September 1 Ynet had a news item by Haim Klir headlined: “Demonstrated against the evacuation of an outpost and made NIS 100,000.” The facts of the case were straightforward and are given in the article itself. Ms. Tamar Fransi was forcibly evicted from a demonstration against the removal of an outpost in the vicinity of Nokdim. Her arm was broken by a police officer. Due to her resulting invalid status the court awarded her NIS 100,000 in damages.

One wonders how many people would be willing to have an infirmity for life for the sake of NIS 100,000. Amnon Lichtenstein complained. Ynet’s answer? You know it by now; Ron. K is not very imaginative.

The Latma website has actively criticized Ynet for quite some time. For example, On October 3, a news item by Yair Altman let us know that “The state has decided to legalize the Shvut Rachel outpost.” The subtitle was “construction in Gilo was authorized only last week, now Israel may again be criticized: In an answer to a brief of Peace Now to the Supreme Court, the state informed the Court that it decided to authorize the construction in the outpost neighboring Shilo. Peace Now: Netanyahu was and continues to be the servant of the settlers.”

Latma’s response was that now we know that Peace Now also dictates the Ynet’s headlines. We will add that Shvut Rachel has been legal since 1991.

Can Ynet change? Perhaps public pressure will do the job. The MyIsrael organization, headed by Ayelet Shaked, who will be awarded the Abramowitz Israeli Prize for Media Criticism, has spearheaded a public campaign against Ynet. They write on their website: “It is impossible not to identify that during the past year we are witnessing an increasing wave of incitement against the right wing in general and any group that does not fit with their agenda.”

They, too, provide many examples. On January 15 an article was headlined: “A police report – The extreme right will increase its activities” yet in the next sentence, in much smaller print, Ynet has it that “police estimate that during this year the extreme right- and left-wing activists will increase their activities.” Why does the headline scream only about the right-wingers?

Ynet is one of Israel’s most popular websites. It provides the public with much more than political news. Its consumer section is very helpful for anyone contemplating a purchase of products. It provides information on a wide variety of topics, such as cars, Judaism, sports and much more. Why the owners of the website – Yediot Aharonot – are willing to risk all this for the sake of unethical and unprofessional journalism and a lack of healthy respect for the public is unfathomable.

The future will tell whether the public will continue to tolerate the lack of accountability of the editorial board of the website and its journalists, or whether they will reconsider and provide us with a truly professional and public-serving website.

Link: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=256083

The authors are respectively the vice chairman and chairman of Israel’s Media Watch, www.imw.org.il

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Feiglin - The answer is in our hands

2012-02-01T22:25:00.000+02:00

Moshe Feiglin..
Israel Opinion/Ynet..
31 January '12..

Recent polls again showed that the vast majority of Israeli society is traditional, holds religious faith and shies away from coercion. Hasn't the time come for our national leadership to express the desires of the large Jewish majority?

Hasn't the time come to again emphasize Jewish education and family? To make sure that every child in Israel is familiar with his or her heritage? Hasn't the time come to restore the value of loyalty?

Is it appropriate to draw the justification for our national existence in the Land of Israel from the Holocaust alone? Isn't there a positive reason for the existence of a Jewish State on the globe?

The great danger that threatens us, and is even graver than the Iranian nuclear menace, is the loss of legitimacy. We "rightfully acquired" the question mark over our right to exist as a Jewish State after long years of evading the need to cope with the challenge of a Jewish State.

We thought that if we hand over the very heart of our holy land, they shall let us be and we would be able to leave our identity behind and just be a "normal" nation watching reality TV at home.

Say no to terror state

This process exacted a terrible price from us. We must recognize the mistakes that were made thus far and refrain from establishing yet another terror state on the border of Central Israel.

God did not miraculously safeguarded His people for 3,000 years and brought it back to its land after 2,000 years of exile only to establish yet another Western province on the land plot that the "Palestinian people" may be kind enough to give up in our favor.

The answer to the essence of our existence is not in their hands, but rather, in our hands. This is not about them – it's about us!

Let's focus on building a free Jewish country, a righteous, prosperous society premised on the morality of our prophets, and a state that fills its citizens with a sense of belonging and pride and that serves as a model for the entire world.

Link: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4183383,00.html

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Roth - One down, 1026 to go

2012-02-01T20:15:00.003+02:00

Click to enlarge this celebratory 2011
snapshot of convicted (but freed)
Palestinian Arab terrorists in
Gaza returning to action

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
01 February '12..

Yesterday, the IDF announced it had taken into custody one of the 1,027 terrorists released in the October 2011 deal with Hamas for the freedom of the Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit. The Israeli news sources that originally reported this on Tuesday seem to have published (in more than one case) the wrong name. Challah Hu Akbar published this about yesterday's confusion.

What we know about the man arrested yesterday is that his name is Mahmud Abdallah Abd al-Rahman Abu Sariya. He appears at position number 189 in the official terrorists-going-free list published by the Israel Prison Service. In May 2002 when he was 32, he and a colleague walked up to the Beer-Sheva Old City branch of an Israeli bank and placed a package on the group before fleeing for their lives. (Hebrew report here.) The package contained a bomb that thankfully failed to explode completely. As a result, "only" ten people were injured. The terrorists intended to execute a massacre (16 Israelis were killed a few days earlier in a Hamas bombing attack on a club in Rishon Leziyon), and would probably have succeeded but for the incompetence or bad luck of the bomb-maker. Abu Sariya was sentenced to 38 years in prison, and was unjustly released after serving less than nine.

Free and at liberty to do whatever constructive thing came into his head, he re-established himself in terrorism and, fortunately, will be out of action again for some time to come. He will surely be the very last of the unjustly-freed Shalit deal convicts to return to terrorism. Surely the very last.

Link: http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.com/2012/02/1-feb-12-one-down-1026-to-go.html

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Medoff - A Palestinian mufti and the U.S. election, then and now

2012-02-01T18:00:00.007+02:00

Rafael Medoff..
jidaily.com/JTA..
26 January '12..

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- A Palestinian mufti has called for violence against Jews, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is demanding Palestinian leaders disavow him and America's presidential race could be affected.

That could be the lead sentence of a news report from last week.

Or from 1946.

Sixty-five years ago, another Palestinian mufti, another Netanyahu and another American presidential race likewise intersected in an unexpected round of high-stakes Middle East politics and diplomacy.

At the center of the current controversy is Sheik Muhammad Hussein, the mufti of Jerusalem, who is the Palestinian Authority's senior religious official. In a recent speech Hussein, citing a traditional Islamic text, urged Arabs to "fight and kill the Jews." Later he explained he was "only quoting the words of the Prophet Muhammad."

In an American presidential election season, words like those can be explosive. The candidates for the Republican nomination have strongly condemned Palestinian incitement against Israel and criticized the Obama administration for not being more outspoken on the issue. The votes of Jews and pro-Israel evangelical Christians could be decisive in some battleground states in November.

"Whoever wants peace should not permit such incitement and should not allow calls to murder Jews," Prime Minister Netanyahu said, urging the Palestinian Authority to disavow the mufti's remarks.

He said that Hussein's "morally heinous" statements were reminiscent of one of his predecessors, the mufti Amin el-Husseini, who fled to Germany in 1941 and collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust. Husseini's pro-Nazi radio broadcasts were beamed from Berlin to the Arab world -- including a March 1, 1944 tirade in which he exhorted his listeners, in language similar to that of last week's controversy, to "Kill the Jews wherever you find them."

What is not well known is the impact of the mufti on the 1948 U.S. presidential race.

In the aftermath of World War II and the revelations of the full extent of the Holocaust, American Jews and Christian Zionists pressed President Harry Truman to endorse creation of a Jewish state. Truman, fearful the U.S. would be dragged into sending "half a million troops" to Palestine, preferred to stay at arm's length from the conflict.

But his political advisers saw trouble looming in the 1946 midterm congressional elections. New York State Democratic chairman Paul Fitzpatrick warned that if Truman failed to support Jewish statehood, "it would be useless for the Democrats to nominate a state ticket this fall." And another longtime New York Democratic Party leader, Ed Flynn, predicted that if Truman backed down on Palestine, "the effects will be severely felt in November."

Enter the mufti. In the waning days of World War II, Husseini made his way to France, where he was placed under house arrest. Yugoslavia indicted him for war crimes committed by members of an all-Muslim SS unit he organized in Bosnia, but did not seek his extradition. The French and the British, nervous about angering the Arab world, likewise took no action.

While Husseini was relaxing in his French villa, a series of exposes in the New York Post, PM and The Nation in early 1946 revealed new details of his wartime activities, including his sabotage of a prisoner exchange with the Germans that would have saved the lives of 4,000 Jewish children.

Furious American Jewish groups wanted Truman to intervene. The American Zionist Emergency Council sent the State Department a 13-page memo urging the United States to indict the mufti.

Another notable voice of protest was that of Benzion Netanyahu, the father of Israel's current prime minister, who in the 1940s was director of the U.S. wing of the militant Revisionist Zionist movement. He sponsored large newspaper advertisements headlined "The Mufti Must Be Brought to Trial!" and featuring a photograph of Husseini meeting with Hitler. The administration ignored the protests.

To make matters worse, in May 1946, the mufti escaped to Cairo -- with what seemed to be the connivance of the French and British -- and promptly renewed his efforts to incite the Arabs in Palestine against the Jews. For American Jewish leaders, it was another sign that London, with Washington's tacit support, was taking the Arabs' side.

Even Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, usually the most pro-Truman voice in the Jewish leadership, publicly urged the president to “speak sharply and act decisively in relation to the [Palestine policy of] the British Government.”

Meanwhile, the Republicans were taking up the Zionist cause. In 1944, the GOP had adopted the first-ever platform plank endorsing Jewish statehood (which the Democrats then had to match). From 1945 to 1948, the likely contenders for the Republican nomination, Sen. Robert Taft and Gov. Thomas Dewey, repeatedly urged creation of a Jewish state and criticized the Truman administration for waffling on the issue.

The mufti's escape and the revelations about his World War II activity were part of the tumultuous series of events in 1946-48 that helped inflame American Jewish voters against the Truman administration and, by association, the Democratic Party. It contributed to the Republican landslide in the 1946 midterm congressional elections (including the election of the first Republican senator from New York in 30 years) and the shocking defeat of Truman's candidate in a congressional election in New York City in early 1948.

These developments doubtless had a profound impact on Truman. Fear of losing Jewish votes to the Republicans moved Truman to endorse the idea of a Jewish state in 1946, when he heard Dewey was about to do so; to support the 1947 U.N. partition plan, when his advisers told him failure to do so would cost him "two or three pivotal states" in the 1948 presidential election; and surely influenced his decision in May 1948 to recognize the newborn State of Israel.

With less than six months to go before he faced re-election, how could Truman ignore his top aide's warning that "the Jewish vote is important in New York ... [and] no candidate since 1876 has lost New York and won the presidency"?

Whether or not the controversy over the current Palestinian mufti escalates to the point of affecting the 2012 presidential election, all sides would do well to keep in mind what 1948 tells us about the potential electoral impact of Middle East politics.

Link: http://www.jidaily.com/Jbi9

Dr. Rafael Medoff is the director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and co-author, with Professor Sonja Schoepf Wentling, of "Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the 'Jewish Vote' and Bipartisan Support for Israel," which will be published in April.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Sultan Knish - Muslim Firsters and Israel Firsters

2012-02-01T15:30:00.001+02:00

Daniel Greenfield..
Sultan Knish..
31 January '12..

If you were to suggest in a public forum that just possibly Israel's failure to reach a peace agreement with a terrorist organization, run by kleptomaniacs and homicidal maniacs, which still continues to applaud the murder of Israeli children, might possibly be due to the terrorists and not because of Israel, then according to the consensus of the left, you are an Israel Firster.

The paradigm of the Israel Firster only works if you assume that the America First position is to support Islamic terrorists. Even if we were to dismiss the threat of Islamic terrorism to the United States then a position sympathetic to the territorial claims of Islamic terrorists in Israel would still not be the America First position, it would be the Muslims First position.

The left which deploys names like Israel Firsters is certainly not calling for neutrality in the conflict, rather it would like us to side with the Muslim Brotherhood and the assorted Islamic terrorists scattered throughout the region. Arguably the United States has been doing this for some time already.

Obama stuck his finger in Prime Minister Netanyahu's chest, but bowed to the Saudi King. When he visited Turkey, he made no mention of the Turkish settlements in occupied Cyprus, but when Biden visited Israel, he threw a fit over a partial approval for a few houses in Jerusalem. The United States doesn't fund many terrorist groups, but the bulk of the funding that it allots to terrorists goes to terrorists operating in Israel and killing Israelis.

Last week the State Department put out a list of designated terrorist organization. That list includes the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. The Brigade has not only committed numerous atrocities against Israelis, it at one point threatened to launch terrorist attacks against America. The Brigade is the military arm of the Fatah group which controls the Palestinian Authority. The Authority is the beneficiary of an average of 600 million dollars a year in direct assistance, and indirectly through the UNRWA which has already received an initial 55 million dollars from the United States in 2012.

Terrorists who murder Israelis don't just indirectly benefit from American aid, that money is going to pay the salaries of convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons. Some of those terrorists received training and weapons from the United States. I would like to be able to say that this sort of thing is one of the innovations of the Hussein Administration, but it's an an artifact of two previous administrations.

This is usually how countries treat other countries that they are at war with. In this case it is an artifact, not of an Israel Firster policy, but of a Muslim Firster policy. There is no interpretation of Israel Firster that accommodates the United States arming and funding terrorists. But there is an extensive global policy of rewarding and appeasing Muslims.

Opponents of Israel often complain that they are being "silenced" in some intangible ways, but the United States government has certainly never criminalized criticism of Israel, however it continues to conduct discussions with the OIC, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, on ways to suppress and censor criticism of Islam. Nor has the Secretary of State suggested that critics of Israel should be subject to "peer pressure and shaming", which she has for critics of Islam.

American soldiers have been dying incessantly to protect Muslims for decades now. They died in Somalia to protect aid to Somali Muslims. They died in the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait and protect the Muslim holy sites of Mecca and Medina from Saddam Hussein. They died over Yugoslavia to build a state for the Muslim terrorists of the KLA. Thousands of American soldiers have died to protect Muslims from other Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the last year alone, the United States has helped overthrow secular governments to make way for Muslim ones. When the Libyan ruler refused to resign, Obama sent in NATO jets to bomb his forces into submission so that the Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group could take power.

While the United States abandoned Iranian students protesting against an Islamist regime, it overthrew governments in Egypt and Tunisia to make way for Islamist takeovers. The Saudis got to use tanks in Bahrain, but Gaddafi was hunted down and killed for a genocide that never happened.

What do you call all that but a Muslim Firster foreign policy?

In The Audacity of Hope, a book title taken from a sermon of his vilely Anti-Semitic former Black Muslim mentor, Obama wrote, "I will stand with the Muslims." And he has done it.

Obama has stood with the Muslims in Cote d'Ivorie, where armed force was used to illegally seat a Muslim ruler against the ruling of the country's supreme court. He has stood with the Muslims in Kenya, where his cousin and his Muslim backers forcibly wrote Sharia Law into the Constitution. He has stood with the genocidal Muslims in Indonesia, not the Christian Papuans whose land is occupied and whose representatives are persecuted.

He has stood with Muslims against Denmark and its freedom of speech. He has stood with Muslims against France. He has stood with Muslims against Israel. If slapping down traditional allies on behalf of Muslims is not a Muslim Firster foreign policy, then what is?

The American flag may be burned, the Koran may not. Cartoons depicting Jews as monsters can run, cartoons depicting Mohammed cannot. Six year olds must be strip searched in airports, but the people who actually are a flight risk cannot be singled out in any way.

In Cairo, at Al Azhar University, the home of Egyptian Islamism, Obama boasted that his administration has gone to court to "punish" those who would refuse to accede to the Hijab's oppression of women. We have two new Muslim diplomatic posts. NASA is no longer able to actually reach space, its new chief mission is outreach to the Muslim world. While America is piggybacking on the Russian space program, NASA has gotten a Muslim chief scientist in order to better focus on its core mission of pandering to Islam.

If any other group had received this level of favoritism, this degree of pandering at the expense of everyone else, the outrage would have been boundless. But we dare not say anything. Those who offend Muslims are held responsible for the murder of American soldiers by Muslims. In this perverse moral landscape, to speak out against the bigotry and hate preached by the Koran is to be responsible for the atrocities that the bigots will commit in outrage that anyone has spoken ill of their genocidal text.

Meanwhile the Muslim Firsters keep chanting Israel Firster at anyone who doesn't agree that Israel is the worst country on the planet. Anything that gets in the way of the Muslim Firster foreign policy program is denounced in the most ruthlessly bigoted language possible, and when those who use it are called on it, they claim that there is a Jewish conspiracy to silence them.

This kind of obnoxious behavior has become routine. The consensus among Muslim Firsters is that Charles Freeman was a highly qualified candidate to head the National Intelligence Council, despite working at a front group for Saudi Arabia. In an interview, Freeman said that, "It is irresponsible not to question Israeli policy and to decide what is best for the American people.” But no one is allowed to question Saudi policy or decide if the Saudi Muslim lobby and its countless affiliates should be deciding what is best for the American people.

Israeli policy is questioned non-stop. Hardly a week goes by without editorials in every newspaper complaining that Netanyahu hasn't spent enough time at the negotiating table with one half of an unelected Palestinian Authority government. When a bunch of lunatics held protests outside a girls school in a town in Israel that hardly anyone in the media had ever heard of before, there were a thousand news stories. When Saudi Arabia beheaded a woman for witchcraft, the story was quickly buried, along with her body. Unlike the Israeli school story, Hillary Clinton did not feel the need to comment on it. Not that the Saudis would listen. Masters don't pay attention to slaves.

The thirty-five Christians arrested in Saudi Arabia at a prayer service and then beaten and subjected to body cavity searches last month, are not an item for our foreign policy agenda. No matter how many American soldiers died, how many more were wounded and how many have gone on suffering from undiagonsed ailments in order to keep the House of Saud safe from Saddam. The thousands of Americans who died on September 11 because an opponent of the Saudi regime saw the presence of American forces in the holy land of Islam as an opportunity to declare a holy war against the United States are all part of the price we pay for the Muslim Firster agenda.

Carter helped replace a secular government in Iran with an Islamist terror state. The United States has been protecting the Gulf oil clans for most of the 20th century despite the covert war the domestic brutality of their slave states and the covert war they have been conducting against us. Now Obama has turned half of North Africa into an Islamist paradise. And the Muslim Firsters still aren't happy.

They want Israel and they want Europe on a platter. They want to eliminate freedom of speech and silence anyone who speaks out about the countless dead and the destruction of free nations that will follow if they get their way.

After decades of the Muslim Firster agenda, we are under siege. There is hardly a nation in the free world that isn't scrambling to study Israeli anti-terrorism techniques, because they are all becoming Israel. France has its own Intifada. Oslo is dangerous enough that the American embassy has to put out an advisory. London is swiftly becoming Londonistan. The end of the last states that might have been described as Muslim and secular is swiftly approaching. And still the Muslim Firsters haven't had enough, but maybe it's time that the rest of us have had enough of them.

If they want to condemn a Pro-Israel bias in American foreign policy, then let's take a long honest look at whom American foreign policy really helps and which group it puts first.

Link: http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2012/01/muslim-firsters-and-israel-firsters.html

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Roth - A video that reveals more about how the war against the terrorists is going than a shelf-full of analyses

2012-02-01T13:23:00.000+02:00

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
01 February '12..

The things done for and with their own children by Palestinian Arab society have long been the subject of extremely critical comment, and with justification. It's almost impossible to imagine a peace between two peoples based (as inevitably it would have to be) on some degree of painful compromise, when the Arab side consistently and continually educates its children for hatred, demonization and death. Here's a tiny example.

The things done for and with their own children by Palestinian Arab society have long been the subject of extremely critical comment, and with justification. It's almost impossible to imagine a peace between two peoples based (as inevitably it would have to be) on some degree of painful compromise, when the Arab side consistently and continually educates its children for hatred, demonization and death. Here's a tiny example.

Palestinian Authority TV's programs are beamed into most of the homes in the territories controlled by Fatah, the terrorism-friendly political party headed in the past by Arafat and today by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. A week ago, on 24th January, it covered a Fatah celebration in Lebanon: the glorious 47th anniversary of Fatah's founding. (Reminder: 47 years ago, when Fatah began its chapter of the war of terrorism against us, the total number of square miles "occupied" by the hated Zionist entity was precisely zero.) If, like us, you are unable to tune in or to comprehend the Arabic commentary, Palestinian Media Watch has just published a report - with transcript, video and pictures.

The text reads:

"Our children are our honor and glory. They were created to be fertilizer for the land of Palestine, and for our pure land to be saturated with their blood."

What kind of future do youngsters raised to see themselves as fertilizer build for themselves? And who is at fault - because someone surely is.

The beauty and heroism of being killed for the sake of a Palestinian state that never existed is a recurring theme in Palestinian Arab culture. Grasping this, you can go some way towards understanding how an entire society has been recruited to fight a war based on racist hatred of the other. It underlies the way its 'soldiers' - thousands of whom are school children and pre-teens - publicly express happiness at the prospect of dying if only (and this is the key) their death will bring pain, harm and destruction to the despised enemy.

PA TV covered another 47th anniversary event, this one in Ramallah, the PA's capital, on January 5, 2012 [see the Palestinian Media Watch report here]. The festive occasion included the participation of distinguished political leaders whom the mainstream media consistently but unjustifiably calls moderate. The broadcast shows children singing these appalling words supplied to them by their leaders and teachers:

"You have brought up and educated generation after generation. You waited patiently and discovered your heroic children. Oh, my pure land, I shall saturate you with my blood. I shall live and die upon your green ground... I shall redeem you with my life, oh my land. Your embrace warms us. Your ground satiates us, your goodness satisfies us. I shall redeem you with my life."

Evidently unconcerned as to the indictment this scene constitutes for the society in whose establishment they are complicit, the applause that follows is provided by several prominent co-conspirators. They include PA prime minister Salam Fayyad - "a moderate politician widely respected among the international community" (source); Secretary General of the Presidential Office, Al-Tayeb Abd Al-Rahim; Secretary of the PLO Executive Council, Yasser Abd Rabbo; Laila Ghannam - District Governor of Ramallah and El-Bireh; Fatah spokesman Ahmed Assaf.

It's not possible that the leaders present at this event failed to understand the message directed at their people's children. The facts about Palestinian Arab education of their children speak for themselves.

So does the report below.

Education at a Glance 2011, a study published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) demonstrates again that some societies have far higher levels of educational attainment than others. This news report published today ranks the 10 developed countries with the most educated populations. It's worth noting that Israel, with the smallest per capita income on the list, comes in at number 2, ahead of the United States, Japan and South Korea.

Peace cannot be made by education departments any more than war is caused by doctors. But there's a lot that can be learned by how countries implant expectations and ambitions in the minds of the continuing generations and how this impacts on the future. By and large, our side is focused on creating capable, concerned citizens with the equipment to succeed anywhere, and the evidence is out there to see. Theirs wants a young generation that will grow to become fertilizer and dirt, and the evidence for this is available to anyone who wants to look.

Link: http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.com/2012/02/1-feb-12-video-that-reveals-more-about.html

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Fresnozionism - The AP’s Gonzo Journalism

2012-02-01T10:00:00.002+02:00

Fresnozionism.org..
31 January '12..

The decay of the traditional Western media into irrelevance continues, as it sinks to the level of the old Soviet Pravda.

News item (the numbering of the paragraphs is mine):

1. (AP) JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has made two overtures to West Bank settlers in the run-up to his party’s leadership race on Tuesday: It’s offering financial incentives to encourage people to move to settlements and opening the door to legalizing rogue settler outposts.

2. The gestures appear to be aimed at appeasing hardline elements in the ruling Likud Party who are sympathetic to settlers. While Netanyahu is expected to win the leadership race, a relatively strong showing by his ultranationalist rival would suggest many Likud voters consider the prime minister too soft on peacemaking with the Palestinians.

3. The moves threatened to derail tentative new peace efforts with the Palestinians. A round of low-level peace negotiations ground to a halt last week, in large part because of Palestinian objections to Israeli settlement construction. U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon is expected in the region Wednesday in an effort to restart the talks…

4. Years ago, the Israeli government halted generous financial enticements designed to encourage Israelis to settle in the West Bank, the occupied territory the Palestinians see as the core of their future state.

5. But in this week’s government decision, 70 settlements appeared on a new list of 557 communities inside Israel and the West Bank that qualify for housing subsidies. The incentives, according to a statement from the prime minister’s office, are “meant to encourage positive migration to these communities.” …

6. In a separate move, the government on Monday appointed a committee to examine land ownership issues in the West Bank. The panel will review a 2005 government report that found several dozen outposts were built not only without state approval, but on privately held Palestinian land. Officials said the report needs to be reviewed because its author, state prosecutor Talia Sasson, later entered politics with a dovish political party, raising questions about her objectivity…

7. …the panel’s makeup aroused suspicions it would legalize at least some of the more than 100 outposts built without government authorization, including dozens Sasson says were erected on privately held Palestinian land.

This is presented as a news story, not an editorial. Let’s look at how its constructed.

In the very first sentence, the idea is introduced that these actions were taken in order to improve PM Netanyahu’s chances in the Likud primary. This may be true to some extent — although his opponent, Moshe Feiglin, is in no way a real threat (initial results show Netanyahu with 63% of the vote vs. Feiglin’s 36) — but surely, unsourced speculation about Netanyahu’s motives does not belong in the lead sentence of a news story.

The reporter does not let up in the second paragraph, where he refers to “hardline elements” who are “sympathetic to settlers.” I would hazard a guess that almost all Likud party members are to some extent sympathetic to Jews living east of the Green Line, considering that they face pressure from the Arabs, the US, the EU and the (vanishing but foreign-supported) Israeli Left to leave their homes and become refugees like the former residents of Gush Katif.

In paragraph 3, we get the usual line that “settlement construction” — meaning construction within existing settlements — may “derail” peace efforts. Why is that? It doesn’t change anything, particularly since most of the construction is in the larger settlements or eastern Jerusalem neighborhoods that would be expected to become part of Israel in any reasonable peace agreement. It is a problem only because the Palestinians insist that it will be. One would think that the introduction of the Hamas into the Palestinian Authority and the likelihood that it will win future elections (or coups) would be a much bigger problem! But the writer doesn’t mention that.

Then in paragraph 4, he trots out the “occupied territory the Palestinians see as the core of their future state.” The implication is that Israelis don’t have a right to live here, and Palestinian demands for Jew-free land are acceptable. I’ve discussed the falsehood of this view here.

Only in paragraphs 5-6 do we get to something partially resembling factual reporting. We are led to understand that there is a controversy concerning a 2005 land use report authored by Talia Sasson. The writer tells us that she became associated with a “dovish” party and so her objectivity when she determined that many settlements were built on “private Palestinian land” may have been questionable.

But Talia Sasson is a board member of the New Israel Fund, a member of the Public Council of Yesh Din, a foreign-funded left-wing NGO which carries out ‘lawfare’ against Israel in the name of ‘human rights’, and a Knesset candidate of the fringe New Movement-Meretz party (which has 3 seats out of 120 in the Knesset). She is a professional opponent of the Jewish presence in the territories. Her objectivity is more than questionable, it is non-existent.

Finally, paragraph 7 uses the loaded phrase “arouses suspicion” and quotes Sasson as an authority.

Although the writer clearly has a point of view, it would still have been possible to provide some balance by including other interpretations. But this was not done: the article does not quote a single spokesman for PM Netanyahu or the Israeli government. It does, however, give voice to the Palestinian position:

“They are adding obstacles at a time when everyone is intensifying efforts to try to resume peace talks,” said Palestinian government spokesman Ghassan Khatib. “I think with every additional settlement activity, the feasibility of having two states is diminished.”

And just to be fair, a spokesperson for Peace Now also appears:

After suspending benefits unique to the settlements, the government is now encouraging settlers to move to the West Bank under a different program, said Hagit Ofran of the anti-settlement group Peace Now. “They put in 70 settlements, in effect encouraging them to live there,” Ofran said.

I know that there is a place for what Hunter Thompson called “Gonzo journalism,” but it isn’t a wire service news report, where the ancient Five Ws are still appropriate.

Link: http://fresnozionism.org/2012/01/the-aps-gonzo-journalism/

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Kushner - From Israel: Fear and Rumor

2012-02-01T07:00:00.002+02:00

Arlene Kushner..
01 February '12..

I am always reluctant to repeat here speculative, unconfirmed reports that pass as "news." For once I repeat them, I am reinforcing the impression that what I am saying is solid news.

Here, then, I will just allude in the most general terms to unsubstantiated talk about the fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu might be willing to offer the Arabs a good deal of territory in Judea and Samaria.

One must begin by asking why in hell he should be ready to offer anything (if indeed that is the case). Why should there even be such speculation now? Why isn't he standing up on two feet and speaking for Israel's rights -- now especially when the Palestinian Arabs have been so obstructionist and so unwilling to seriously negotiate, so willing to abrogate the Oslo Accords via various unilateral gambits at the UN, and so quick to praise as martyrs obscene child-murders.

The answer is fairly obvious: International pressure that he may not be capable of resisting. Resisting, actually, is not his style: he prefers to play the game and look like the good guy (whatever that means in this context). We've seen it over and over -- the way he walks a very fine line, slipping evermore down that slippery slope.

~~~~~~~~~~

How far down that slope he may be prepared to go now is something we don't know. But the question I ask is whether he is truly prepared to give away the store.

Netanyahu has been taking positions of late that are most definitely not reassuring. His move to block the legislation that would save Migron is just one example.

Another is his statement with regard to an Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley. He said he would not forge an agreement that did not permit such an Israeli presence, and this was supposed to show how strong he was with regard to Israeli security and to provide reassurance. But I was not reassured. Because he didn't talk about retaining land in the valley, which is what is necessary. And he didn't allude at all to the necessity for Israel to retain high places in Samaria, also for security.

~~~~~~~~~~

But, the flip side is that there are reports about other things that he insists he will not cave on -- a united Jerusalem, no accepting "refugees," the demand that the PA recognize Israel as the Jewish state, the requirement that the PA sign off on the agreement as end of conflict, etc. And he knows with absolute certainty that if he doesn't cave on these things there will be no deal because the other side will never, ever buy it.

So the question: Is he thinking that if the Palestinian Arabs would let us keep Jerusalem, and would settle their "refugees" elsewhere, etc. etc., then he would truly be happy to give them most of Judea and Samaria? Or is he thinking that it's safe to go down that slope in order to make the international community happy, because our enemies, who can be counted on to reject what he offers, will ensure that in the end nothing happens anyway?

I cannot see into his heart, but my betting, even now, is that the answer is the latter. As nervous as Netanyahu has been making me, I persist in my belief that he is not an Ehud Olmert, who truly couldn't wait to give almost everything past the Green Line, including half of Jerusalem, to the Arabs.

And yet, when Netanyahu exclaims with great passion, as he just did, "I'm willing to travel to Ramallah to meet with Abbas," I cringe -- drama meant for the international community though I recognize it to be.

~~~~~~~~~~

If this discussion has the feeling of deja vu, it's because I have examined these issues before. Yet in light of the current situation I felt obliged to revisit it here.

~~~~~~~~~~

And then I want to throw another thought into the hopper. This news, which just broke today, is something I will surely return to in its broader aspects:

According to Israel National News:

"Mossad director Tamir Pardo is in Washington for talks about a possible attack on Iran's nuclear installations...
"Pardo's visit, which would normally be conducted in secret, was revealed by US Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, 78, who made the faux pas at committee hearing.

"The hearing was being broadcast live by US television.

"Feinstein said she had spoken with Pardo, who also met with CIA director David Petraeus, adding that the Mossad chief had mentioned the possibility of unilateral Israeli action against Iran."

This still has the feeling of rumor about it. We don't really know what Pardo and Petraeus discussed. But it is within the realm of possibility that there is a quid pro quo somewhere. It might be that Netanyahu is prepared to advance a "plan" to entice the PA back to the table, in exchange for some sort of passive US acquiescence, should Israel decide to hit Iran.

Speculation. My point is that the situation is vastly complex and we are not privy to all of the parameters.

~~~~~~~~~~

It is now about 1:45 AM as I write in Israel. I have been waiting for results of Tuesday's Likud primary with regard to the selection of party leader. If figures that have just been released are correct, it is cause for much satisfaction. That Netanyahu would win was never in doubt -- the issue was by how much. The challenger, a nationalist Moshe Feiglin, had secured some 23% of the vote last time around. Tonight it may be as much as 36% (this according to the JPost).

This delivers a message to Netanyahu to attend to the demands of the right flank of his party or risk losing voter support. It's letting him know that his position on such issues as Migron is not sitting well with a whole lot of people.

Follow-up as necessary tomorrow.

~~~~~~~~~~

With regard to Obama:

An article -- "No Matter What" -- has been circulating broadly. Purportedly written by Dr. Walter Williams, an economist on the faculty of George Mason University in Virginia, it advances the thesis that Obama cannot lose the election. But it is a fraud!

See the disclaimer and apology from the university: http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/RiteOn.orgApology.pdf

Let people know about this, for advancing the notion that Obama cannot lose has a psychological effect on how some might vote. It will not be an easy battle, but the fact is that Obama most certainly can lose.

(Thanks to Barbara O. here.)

~~~~~~~~~~

Then, Yoram Ettinger, writing about "A Return to Andalusia."

This makes crystal clear what Palestinian Arab intentions truly are -- and provides understanding as to why there is no compromise in dealing with them. What they are fighting about is the fact that Jews have no right to a presence on any land that, "in the eyes of Muslims, is Waqf - an inalienable religious endowment."

"On January 9, 2012, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, a close associate of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, stated that all of Israel has been Waqf since 637 C.E., and will be forever. The statement was made at the annual rally of Fatah, which Abba heads.

"This principle of 'holy land' is permanent, and is stronger than any leader or passing policy, and it applies to any land that was ever under Islamic control. It is an inseparable part of the legacy of Muhammad and Islamic law...

"The centrality of 'holy land' in the Muslim experience can be understood from the example of Andalusia, the Arabic name for most of the Iberian Peninsula, which was under Islamic rule from 711-1492 C.E. The Muslim Golden Age did not take place between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, but rather in Andalusia...In 1492, Spain was liberated from the control of Muslims, who today still view 'Andalusia' as their 'holy land.' Muslim terrorist plots in Madrid in March 2004 killed 191 people and wounded around 1,800. The attack intended to correct the 'injustice of Andalusia.' Saudi Arabia is constructing the second largest mosque in the world in Cordoba, the former capital of Andalusia, while mosques are springing up like mushrooms all over Spain."

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1262

~~~~~~~~~~

© Arlene Kushner. This material is produced by Arlene Kushner, functioning as an independent journalist. Permission is granted for it to be reproduced only with proper attribution.

See my website at www.arlenefromisrael.info Contact Arlene at akushner@netvision.net.il

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Wilder - Where Were $3.4 Billion of American Tax Dollars Spent?

2012-02-01T04:01:00.000+02:00

David Wilder..
hebron.com..
31 January '12..

According to Foreign Policy magazine, in an article titled Hard times in Hebron, the United States has spent $3.4 billion in development funds in the Palestinian territories of West Bank and Gaza

So, it appears that this poor, oppressed, underdeveloped Arab city has doubled the number of building permits issued since 2006, and is preparing to solicit bids for a road to a new $13 million water treatment facility — financed, of course, by USAID.

Not everyone is happy about spending so much money in the PA.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen: “By providing the Palestinians with $2.5 billion over the last five years, the U.S. has only rewarded and reinforced their bad behavior.”

The US State Department disagrees: “We think it is money that is not only in the interest of the Palestinians; it’s in U.S. interest and it’s also in Israeli interest.”

What is this money used for?

New schools were built to teach incitement ["The Zionist gangs stole Palestine ... and established the state of Israel"], and judges were trained to sentence Arabs selling property to Jews to death [PA affirms death penalty for land sales to Israelis].

What about accountability? Where is the money really going? Where are hundreds of millions of dollars that went missing under Yasser Arafat?

Ghassan Khatib, spokesman for the Palestinian Authority: “This money is going mainly to development and humanitarian projects. There is no justified reason for holding it. It’s important for stabilization.”

From the objective of the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee, ‘development and humanitarian projects’ are those that “counter and limit Israeli settlements inside the Old city [of Hebron] by surrounding settlements with inhabited buildings to prevent their horizontal expansion; and avert the urban interconnection of these settlements by increasing Arab demographic density between them.”

There are others who believe and act otherwise. South Carolina State Representative Allan Clemmons initiated a resolution, passed unanimously, declaring: “Whereas, Israel has been granted her lands under and through the oldest recorded deed as reported in the Old Testament, a tome of scripture held sacred and reverenced by Jew and Christian, alike, as the acts and words of God; and Whereas, as the Grantor of said lands, God stated to the Jewish people in the Old Testament; in Leviticus, Chapter 20, Verse 24: ‘Ye shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it, a land that floweth with milk and honey’; and Whereas, God has never rescinded his grant of said lands.”

This resolution was used as a model for a similar resolution passed in Florida, called Florida Stands with Israel. And most recently, the Republican National Committee adopted a similar policy, with a resolution stating: “BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the members of this body support Israel in their natural and God-given right of self-governance and self-defense upon their own lands, recognizing that Israel is neither an attacking force nor an occupier of the lands of others; and that peace can be afforded the region only through a united Israel governed under one law for all people.”

Presently, USAID to Arab Hebron is in jeopardy as a result of Abu Mazen’s attempt to unilaterally declare a ‘Palestinian state’ at the United Nations as reported in the Foreign Policy article quoted above. This ‘threat’ to stop USAID to Arab Hebron must be consummated, and the flow of billions of American taxpayers money halted.

I have no doubt that as Rep. Allan Clemmons, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Rep. Louis Gohmert from Texas, (who introduced a similar resolution in the US House of Representatives) and other like-minded US politicians continue in major leadership positions in the United States, they will ensure that US tax dollars are properly utilized, rather funneled to their enemies and ours.

Link: http://www.hebron.com/english/article.php?id=755

David Wilder is the spokesperson for the Hebron Community.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Leibler - Documenting Palestinian criminality

2012-02-01T00:15:00.000+02:00

Candidly Speaking: PA texts glorifying terror beg question of whether genuine peace process was ever intended?

Isi Leibler..
Candidly Speaking/JPost..
31 January '12..

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

Abbas and his chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, bolster this theme by uttering soothing statements in English, endorsing peace to the gullible international community. Yet they speak with forked tongues because in Arabic, to their own people, they deny Israel’s right to exist and promote vicious hatred against Jews.

They also claim to have reneged violence. But the PA never conceded that terrorism was immoral. They simply concluded that having failed to achieve their objectives by violence, their goals could best be promoted by temporarily suspending terrorism in order to gain Western support.

Abbas made it clear that he “had the honor of firing the first shot in 1965” and was only opposed to terrorist attacks “at this time” for tactical reasons and that “in the future things may change.”

Yet, even within this framework, Fatah has still succeeded in killing more Israelis than Hamas.

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

This can be traced to the very inception of the Oslo Accords. Before that, the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis, while far from ideal, was certainly better than it is now; current polls indicate that 84 percent of Palestinians endorse the murder of Israelis.

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

This defamatory torrent impacts directly on Israel’s diminished standing in the international community.

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

Itamar Marcus founded Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) in 1996 as a nonprofit organization to monitor the Palestinian media. Its documentation of Palestinian behavior, including systematically taping official Palestinian TV, became an important source for parliamentarians and serious journalists throughout the world. His briefing of US legislators was a major factor contributing toward the prevailing pro-Israel orientation of Congress and the American people.

The book and the PMW website chronicle obscene examples of incitement, especially in the wake of the release of the terrorists in the Schalit exchange. Chairman Abbas, who publicly embraced these mass murderers, summed up the PA approach when he stated “every prisoner is for us a saint and we must exalt him.”

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

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

Just last week PMW reported how official PA TV conveyed “greetings” to Hakim Awad, the barbaric and unrepentant murderer of the Fogel family, which included a four-month-old infant and children aged three and 11 years. His mother was honored on the program and conveyed “greetings to dear Hakim, the apple of my eye, who carried out the operation in Itamar, sentenced to five life sentences.”

His aunt also related to “Hakim Awad, the hero, the legend.” How can people claiming to be promoting human rights conceivably associate themselves with a regime which adulates such monsters on its controlled TV outlets?

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

Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, purportedly the most moderate of all Palestinian leaders, is cited for his speech praising four terrorists and sponsoring of a Palestinian children’s summer camp in which the participants were divided into groups labeled with the names of terrorists, including a notorious bus hijacker.

Marcus and Zilberdik point out how, in the course of one day, a Palestinian child can walk on a street named after the mass murderer Abu Jihad, to a school named after the founder of Hamas, where he will read hate-filled textbooks, work in a computer room named after a suicide bomber, spend the afternoon at a soccer tournament with the teams named after suicide bombers, go in the evening to the Abu Iyad community center, the orchestrator of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and finally return home to view anti-Semitic cartoons on TV before going to bed.

After reading this book, a number of questions come to mind.

The US Congress was considering terminating the funding of the PA general budget unless it terminated incitement, glorification of suicide bombers as heroic role models, payment of over $5 million a month for “salaries” to 5,500 terrorists in Israeli prisons, and pensions to the families of terrorists. Why did Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu ask them to desist? Why does Prime Minister Netanyahu so frequently pay lip service to Abbas as a peace partner and, other than very recently, fail to systematically highlight the criminality of the Palestinian leaders?

If our prime minister agreed not to publicly highlight these evils in order to placate President Barack Obama, we are likely to pay a bitter price. If the civilized world is made aware of the culture of death and hatred which permeates Palestinian society, we would be in a far stronger position in the ongoing war of ideas.

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

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

Link: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=255938

The writer’s website can be viewed at www.wordfromjerusalem.com. He may be contacted at ileibler@netvision.net.il.

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Gordon - How “Evil Israeli Soldiers” Saved an Anti-Israel Filmmaker’s Life

2012-01-31T22:20:00.002+02:00

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary/Contentions..
31 January '12..

“Five Broken Cameras” didn’t win the World Documentary competition at last week’s Sundance Film Festival, losing out to another anti-Israel film. But it has garnered plenty of international attention, including two awards at Amsterdam’s International Documentary Film Festival and a glowing write-up in the New York Times. The film, according to the Sundance synopsis, documents what happened after the West Bank village of Bil’in “famously chose nonviolent resistance” against Israel’s security fence: “an escalating struggle as olive trees are bulldozed, lives are lost, and a wall is built to segregate burgeoning Israeli settlements,” in which a child’s “loss of innocence and the destruction of each camera are potent metaphors.” In short, another tale of good Palestinians versus evil Israelis.

You have to persevere to the end of the Times piece to find another angle to Palestinian filmmaker Emad Burnat’s story:

In late 2008, he accidently drove a truck into the separation barrier and was badly injured. A Palestinian ambulance arrived at the same time as Israeli soldiers, who saw what bad shape he was in and took him to an Israeli hospital.

“If I had been taken to a Palestinian hospital,” Mr. Burnat said, “I probably wouldn’t have survived.” He was unconscious for 20 days. Three months later he was back filming.

In short, Burnat is alive today to win prizes for a film about evil Israeli soldiers suppressing “nonviolent resistance” in Bil’in because those same evil Israeli soldiers saved his life four years earlier. And this is not an irrelevancy; it epitomizes the flaw in the “good Palestinians versus evil Israelis” trope: As anyone who makes any effort to discover the facts quickly learns, Israelis all too often refuse to play the part assigned to them.

And for that matter, so do Palestinians – with Bil’in being a classic example. For contrary to the prevailing wisdom encapsulated in that Sundance synopsis, Bil’in residents certainly weren’t practicing “nonviolent resistance.” Here, for instance, is Haaretz’s report on a major demonstration in Bil’in to mark five years of protests against the fence:

The activists maintain that their demonstrations are peaceful. However, youths were preparing slingshots, and took up positions in front of an IDF checkpoint on the other side of the fence, throwing stones. IDF statistics claim that since the start of the demonstrations 110 members of the security forces suffered injuries, and one officer lost an eye as a result of projectiles fired with slingshots.

Slingshots have been lethal weapons since biblical times (remember David and Goliath?). And it’s hardly unusual for soldiers attacked with lethal weapons to respond with deadly force. What’s unusual about Bil’in is that the Israelis generally didn’t: While Palestinians have been killed, most of the deaths were accidental. Burnat’s friend Phil, for instance, was killed when a tear gas canister – not usually a lethal weapon – happened to hit him in the chest.

Reasonable people of goodwill can certainly disagree about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But no reasonable person of goodwill can view it as a “good Palestinians versus evil Israelis” morality play. And anyone tempted to think otherwise should remember Emad Burnat.

Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/31/israeli-soldiers-saved-filmmaker/#more-782358

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Ettinger - Attack Iran – at all costs

2012-01-31T20:15:00.005+02:00

Yoram Ettinger..
Israel Hayom..
30 January '12..

The discussion about the cost of a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities has added value only if it is intended to advance the attack and neutralize the potential response from Iran and its allies. The discussion becomes harmful, plays into Iran's hands and threatens Israel's existence if it appears hesitant and doubtful, if it denies the possibility of a pre-emptive attack and assumes that Israel can accept a nuclear-armed Iran.

On May 12, 1948, the People's Administration in pre-state Israel decided by a vote of six to four to announce the establishment of a state that would include Jerusalem, despite internal resistance and opposition from the U.S. and despite a terrible price: The U.S. withheld military aid, threatened economic punishment and surmised that the declaration would result in a second Holocaust, this time at the hands of the Arabs. Then Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion refused to abide by the American request to postpone the announcement by a few years, knowing that such a delay would bring tragedy upon future generations and that independence exacts a painful price.

On Oct. 5, 1973, the eve of the Yom Kippur War, then Prime Minister Golda Meir rejected the option of a pre-emptive strike to repel the clear and present danger of a joint Egyptian-Syrian attack. She was concerned about the cost of such a strike – namely appearing as the aggressor and severely damaging ties with the U.S. – and preferred to be portrayed as the victim. However, the terrible, long-term cost of that war has been far greater than pre-emptive action would have been. As expected, Israel was not viewed as a victim, but rather as a country that lost the "spirit of the Six-Day War" and that eroded its deterrent power and its position as a strategic asset for the U.S.

In June 1981, just before the destruction of the nuclear reactor in Iraq, then Prime Minister Menachem Begin weighed the cost of a pre-emptive strike versus the cost of inaction. The heads of the Mossad and military intelligence, then Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, opposition leader Shimon Peres, Deputy Prime Minister Yigael Yadin, Israel's national security adviser and the head of the Atomic Energy Commission all opposed striking Iraq. They presented apocalyptic scenarios that would result from such action: an irreparable rift with the U.S., harsh sanctions, conflict with the Soviet Union and Western Europe, reconciliation between Muslim countries and a pan-Islamic attack, threats to the peace treaty with Egypt and other doomsday events. They underestimated the success of a pre-emptive attack and glorified Iraq's military capabilities. Some claimed there was a greater chance of seeing Israeli pilots being dragged through the streets of Baghdad than being welcomed back to their bases.

But Begin decided in favor of a pre-emptive strike, ultimately determining that the cost of restraint could be greater than that of a pre-emptive strike; that a nuclear threat would enslave Israel both politically and militarily; that a nuclear attack could not be ruled out considering the violent, unexpected nature of regimes in the region, and that the ratio of Israeli territory to that of surrounding Arab states (0.2%) did not allow for a nuclear threat balance. Begin understood that the window of opportunity for a strike against Iraq's nuclear reactor was about to close. The destruction of the reactor drew a wave of virulent criticism even from avowed Israel supporters, but it was later followed by a sea of admiration and long-term collaboration.

In 2012, after a decade of failed attempts at dialogue and sanctions, and in light of the help (in terms of development and acquisition) Iran has received from Pakistan, North Korea, Russia and China for its nuclear program, Israel must decide between launching a pre-emptive attack to eliminate that threat or withstanding it. Opponents of an attack warn that it could potentially result in a harsh response from Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, international anger directed at Israel over higher oil prices, or a wave of terror and conflict in the Persian Gulf. Yet these pale in comparison to the deadly cost of a nuclear threat, which include a withdrawal of Israeli and foreign investment in the country, a greater number of Israelis leaving and fewer immigrants coming to Israel, dwindling tourism, greater military-political-economic dependence on the U.S. and a more powerful and influential Iranian regime that takes control of the Persian Gulf. Israel's position as a strategic asset would be reversed without even one nuclear warhead needing to be launched.

The cost of a pre-emptive attack against Iran would be non-lethal and short-term, and would boost Israel's long-term strategic image. It would also provide a tailwind for the forces opposing the ayatollahs' regime. Will Israel adopt the legacy of Ben-Gurion and Begin, or that of their opponents?

Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1298

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(Video) Israel & Nuclear Iran - Douglas Murray at his best

2012-01-31T18:00:00.002+02:00

Uploaded by lector0003
26 January '12
H/T Elder of Ziyon

Probably Douglas Murray's finest speech delineating the inane moral fetor emanating from Western academicians on the Iranian nuclear crisis (and the Jewish state Europe hates).

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3dBzslDdQ_g

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Daphne Anson - Melbourne Zionist Uproots Sherwood's Forest Of Stones

2012-01-31T15:34:00.000+02:00

The Age once carried this cartoon ...

Daphne Anson..
30 January '12..

Harriet Sherwood, Jerusalem correspondent of the notoriously anti-Israel Guardian, frequently features on the Guardian-monitoring website CiF Watch, and with good reason. The Melbourne Age, one of the worst offenders in Australia as far as bias against Israel is concerned, recently published an article of hers entitled "No Stone Left Unpunished".

Emily Gian, Israel Advocacy Analyst at the Zionist Council of Victoria and a doctoral candidate in Israeli literature at the University of Melbourne, has issued a riposte, carried in the latest J-Wire:

Writes Emily Gian:

'An article appeared in last Thursday’s Melbourne Age entitled "No stone left unpunished". Penned by Harriet Sherwood of The Guardian, it told the story of Palestinian children detained by Israeli authorities for committing crimes such as "throwing stones at soldiers or settlers… flinging petrol bombs… [or] more serious offenses such as links to militant organisations or using weapons".

I couldn’t help but sense from the way Sherwood dismissed such activities as stone throwing and flinging petrol bombs as not being serious, that the writer was preparing to unleash what is now becoming stock standard fare from this publication on matters relating to Israel. Plenty of one-sided accusations without context and a token response from the Israeli side usually derided or sneered at by the author in the next paragraph or somewhere further down the line.

In its original incarnation in the Guardian, it was a termed a “special report” but, to its credit, the Age avoided the embarrassment and described it more correctly as an “opinion piece”. Perhaps “propaganda” might have even been more apt.

Dealing with children involved in conflict is a serious issue that needs to be handled responsibly. So does reporting on their treatment and, in this case, allegations of their mistreatment. Sherwood’s piece is problematic on three levels.

In the first place, there is the matter of the veracity of the claims made against the Israelis. Both Honest Reporting and CiF Watch have comprehensively refuted many of the article’s allegations so I will not repeat too much of what they say. However, what is of interest is how little time Sherwood dedicates to the Israeli response to the claims made and the inadequacy of her fact checking. It seems as though she simply wishes the allegations to be true and leaves it at that hoping that nobody (and certainly not the editors at the Guardian or the Age) will detect or care about the shoddiness of her work.

The Israel Security Agency (ISA) responded directly on the claims to the Guardian before the article went to print but the response was never fully published. The ISA states that “the claims that Palestinian minors were subject to interrogation techniques that include beatings, prolonged periods in handcuffs, threats, kicks, verbal abuse, humiliation, isolation and prevention of sleep are utterly baseless”.

The full ISA statement explains how all employees act within accordance of Israeli law and that those detained receive the full rights for which they are eligible. The statement also provided a categorical denial of “all claims with regard to the interrogation of minors. In fact, the complete opposite is true – the ISA guidelines grant minors special protections needed because of their age”.

Sherwood simply chose to ignore much of this statement, and instead used information provided to her by an organisation called the Defence for Children International. The DCI is a BDS supporter that calls for the full Right of Return of Palestinian refugees and previously lobbied for the now discredited Goldstone Report to be endorsed. Given its commitment to causes aimed at deligitimising the Jewish State and ultimately destroying it (a fact not disclosed in the article), the DCI is hardly an objective observer. Interestingly, one of its board members is Shawan Jabarin, a member of the terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. CiF Watch notes that his position on the board of a group that purports to protect children is strange “for someone involved with an organisation with such obvious disregard for the lives of either terror victims or the brainwashed teenagers sent to perpetrate terror attacks”.

It goes without saying that Sherwood also brushes over the crimes committed by some of the children. Her emotive piece attempts to paint a picture of harmless little pebbles being tossed at Israeli soldiers carrying guns – the old David and Goliath image. Never mind that such attacks have had fatal results such as the instances of Asher Palmer and his infant son Yonatan, who were killed when a rock hit the car in which they were travelling last September.

We see occasional instances of people throwing rocks at cars on Australian roads which have also caused serious injury but there is no reason to make light of such behaviour (see more) let alone of the throwing of petrol bombs which Sherwood doesn’t apparently consider too seriously when those attacked happen to be Israeli.

The second matter is one of timing. The initial Guardian piece appeared on Sunday 22 January. Honest Reporting and CiF Watch both published their rebuttals on Tuesday 24 January reprinting the Israeli response, which had already been ignored by the Guardian. The Age decided to republish the Sherwood article on Thursday 26 January, days after all of the information was available.

One expects that Age editor Paul Ramadge, Foreign Editor Carolyn Jones and Foreign Desk News Editor Maher Mughrabi are intelligent, well-read people, who would have seen the ISA response to the Guardian piece, and yet somehow, it appeared in its original form days later. Unfortunately, this is not the first time this has happened (see more here and here).

Thirdly, and to their everlasting shame, it seems that neither the journalist nor any of the agencies mentioned in the article appear to have the slightest interest in coming up with a solution to the problem of children becoming embroiled in the violence of the conflict. That their usefulness is measured only as a propaganda tool for those with more sinister motives leaves a stench far greater than that which offended Sherwood so much when she visited Cell 36, deep within Al Jalame prison in northern Israel.'

Link: http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2012/01/melbourne-zionist-uproots-sherwoods.html

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Lerner - A Post Palestinian State Simulation

2012-01-31T13:00:00.004+02:00

Dr. Aaron Lerner..
inFocus Quarterly..
Fall 2011..
H/T Chetz18

Simulations are important tools for policymakers. And there certainly have been numerous simulations of what may happen after the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state. The problem with simulations, however, is that they are, by their nature, driven by the assumptions made regarding the goals and interests of the various players. Of course, assumptions have to be made, but there is the danger that the outcome of the simulation may then take on a life of its own without the caveat that it is dependent on those assumed goals.

Take for example a simulation organized last May 16 by the Lauder School of Government to consider, among other things, how a nuclear Iran would act. Former head of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate Maj. Gen (res.) Zeevi Farkash participated in that simulation playing the role of Iranian Supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Khamenei is a "Twelver Shiite"—as is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and as such believes that incinerating Israel with nuclear weapons—even if followed by the incineration of Iran—would be a positive thing because the apocalyptic result would bring the return of the Hidden Imam.

But Farkash apparently maintains that deep down inside Ayatollah Khamenei actually subscribes to some sort of universal value system that considers the incineration of Iran an unacceptable outcome rather than a reasonable price to pay for the return of the Mahdi. As a result, the simulation found that Iran would only brandish its nukes for deterrence and never actually use them. As Farkash put it, "Iran would regard its bomb as a means of self-defense and strategic balance."

Was Farkash's critical assumption correct? Perhaps a more responsible approach would have been to run the simulation both ways to see how things play out in a world where the leaders of Iran genuinely believe what they claim to believe. It might have turned out that the results were so catastrophic that even if there were only a 10 percent chance that these Twelvers are true believers, policymakers would have to adjust their recommendations to account for it.

A Palestinian Simulation

What is a reasonable assumption regarding the goals of the Palestinians? Is it indeed the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state living side by side in peace with Israel, or is such a state no more than a step towards reaching the ultimate goal of replacing Israel with a Palestinian state spanning from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River? The evidence weighs heavily in favor of the latter.

Former Fatah leader Yasser Arafat made no bones about his true view of the purpose of the Oslo Agreements. He flew straight to South Africa after the May 4, 1994 Agreement On The Gaza Strip And The Jericho Area signing ceremony in Cairo where, in a Johannesburg mosque, he explained that "I am not considering this agreement more than the agreement which had been signed between our prophet Muhammad and Quraysh," known as the Treaty of Hudaybiya. Yes, Islam holds that the treaty was violated, but Arafat's audience also knew that Muhammad exploited the treaty to decimate the Quraysh tribe. And that is exactly what he did when he amassed enough strength and a treaty violation afforded him the excuse to cancel the deal.

Simply put, the agreements between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel are no more than a temporary ceasefire to facilitate preparations to destroy the Jewish state. When victory can be assured, the Palestinians will call the peace deal off, citing some kind of trumped up Israeli violation of the agreement, and proceed to the next stage in the plan. This ongoing attitude is reflected in the fact that, to this day, the PLO Charter that sets as its goal the destruction of the Jewish state has yet to be amended—this despite the December 14, 1998 Clinton-Arafat Gaza photo op hand-wave.

And as Palestinian pollsters consistently find, the Palestinian street concurs. For example, the June 22-July 8, 2011 Palestinian Center for Public Opinion poll commissioned by The Israel Project found that 66 percent of Palestinians believe: "The real goal should be to start with two states but then move to it all being one Palestinian state."

Realizing the Goal

How could the Palestinian leadership exploit the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state to realize their ultimate goal? There are two basic ways to advance the goal: One is to make life inside Israel so untenable that the Jews (who the Palestinians view as temporary foreign interlopers—no more than modern day crusaders) leave en mass. The other is to create conditions conducive to Israel being defeated on the battlefield.

A sovereign Palestinian state could readily facilitate an ongoing proxy war of attrition against the Jewish state. By facilitating, it would not openly organize and direct the hostilities. In fact, the leadership of the sovereign Palestinian state could officially take the position that it opposes the attacks against Israel and even issue press releases against particularly high profile terror attacks. Thus, the Palestinian state could present itself as a victim of the attacks against Israel rather than as having any responsibility for them, with photo ops showing Palestinian security forces earnestly seeking for the perpetrators of the attacks.

The spin would be clear: The true purpose of the terror attacks in Israel is to undermine the ruling Palestinian leadership by evoking Israeli security activities inside the Palestinian state. The dead Israelis are just a byproduct. Israel would be urged to stand down and let the Palestinians take care of the "problem" on their own. The international observers in the area would position themselves as human shields to prevent Israeli operations in violation of Palestinian sovereignty. This while they issue glowing reports about the performance of the Palestinian security forces and recommend that they be given more weapons and other equipment.

To make matters worse, Israeli intelligence efforts against the perpetrators of the attacks would be seen first and foremost as a violation of Palestinian sovereignty. The Palestinians would use the Israeli intelligence information shared with them to ferret out the Palestinian "collaborators" who provided Israel with the information as opposed to using the intelligence to capture and close down the terrorists.

Thus, it would be possible for this war of attrition against Israel to continue essentially indefinitely. With tourism dead, an effective freeze on foreign investment and no end in sight, the Palestinians could certainly shed crocodile tears as they watch their Israeli neighbor crumble before their eyes. Yes, the deteriorating economic situation in Israel could be expected to have a significant impact on the Palestinian economy. But that is a cost measured over months or years in order to reach a goal worthy of a generation of sacrifice.

Thinking Outside the Box

Critical elements in any simulation are the assumptions regarding the secondary players. Is a "ceteris paribus" (all other things equal) approach appropriate? Less than a year ago, much of the analysis prepared for policymakers assumed that Hosni Mubarak would rule Egypt forever. Are analysts more careful in the wake of the "Arab Spring?"

It is noteworthy that many of the very same experts who insisted that policymakers did not have to take into account the possibility of a revolution in Egypt continue to base their policy recommendations on the assumption that the current leadership of Jordan will remain in power in perpetuity. Suffice it to say that the formation of a radical Muslim Jordanian state could dramatically change the scenario—in particular if the current Hashemite Kingdom fell after the creation of the Palestinian state, with Jordan's role in the state and its interaction with the state set when it was still viewed by Israel as a trusted moderating force rather than a threat.

Thus, in a world where Jordan and Egypt become unfriendly countries and decide to invade Israel—not such a far fetched idea today—the sovereign Palestinian state could function as a bridgehead for the invading Arab armies in an all-out war to destroy the Jewish state. Such an invasion could take place because it serves the interests of the leadership of the invading states or as a result of developments in Israel-Palestine that compel them to intervene. In the former case, the assault on Israel would be more a matter of domestic politics with the leadership opting to divert the rage of their masses towards Israel in order to avoid finding themselves hanging from the lamp post, rather than anything actually related to Israel or Palestine.

In the latter case, the Palestinians could manipulate events with an eye towards whipping up the Arab street to such a frenzy that the leadership feels that it has no choice but to join in the fray. To be clear: Regardless of how generous the arrangements on the ground are to the Palestinians, it would be child's play for them to come up with an ever growing series of Israeli "crimes" and "injustices" threatening not just the Palestinians but the entire Muslim world. And with a Palestinian state created, Israel would be seen as significantly more vulnerable. The leaders of the Arab world would be considerably less deterred by fear over the consequences of joining in battle against the Jewish state.

Some Israeli analysts argue that for all practical purposes the existence of a sovereign Palestinian state has no relevance in simulations of the invasion of Israel since, in the event of foreign troop movements towards Israel, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) would simply roll through the Palestinian state as it deploys to stop the invading force before it even comes close to the Jordan River. But this optimistic assessment ignores that the Palestinians themselves will have many thousands of well-armed troops.

It is reasonable to assume, based on the gross failure of anti-weapons smuggling arrangements to date, that the "demilitarized" Palestinians will have ample stocks of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons—not to mention rocket propelled grenades (RPGs), mortars, rockets, and more. But even if they only had their regulation assault rifles, this sizeable Palestinian force, deployed within walking distance of most of Israel's soft underbelly, could easily interfere with the IDF forces racing to the border while wreaking havoc on Israel's vital infrastructure—this as literally hundreds of well trained and equipped assault teams swarm on targets across the country.

The potential outcome in this scenario would be complete and total chaos within Israel with Israeli security forces stretched beyond their limits—torn between adequately addressing the invading armies approaching from Jordan, Egypt, or elsewhere, and devoting more forces to the task of somehow clearing out a seemingly endless wave of Palestinian assault teams. All this as literally thousands of rockets slam into pre-selected Israeli targets from southern Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, and in all likelihood from launching pads across the West Bank.

The Need for a Realistic Simulation

Is the above scenario an overly apocalyptic assessment? Perhaps. Then again, there is nothing in it that requires that the Palestinians acquire anything that they do not already have.

If the purpose of a simulation is to find comfort, then assume that the Palestinians want to live side by side in peace with Israel forever—just like the retired military Israeli intelligence head, who apparently sleeps well, is confident that the Twelvers leading Iran are faking their religious belief in the return of the Mahdi.

But if the purpose of the exercise is to make responsible policy decisions, there is no place for optimistically simplifying assumptions.

Link: http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2497/palestinian-state-simulation

Dr. Aaron Lerner is director of IMRA, Independent Media Review and Analysis, www.imra.org.il

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Gordon - So, You Think the Palestinians Are Actually Interested in Negotiating?

2012-01-31T10:00:00.015+02:00

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary/Contentions..
30 January '12..

As I noted earlier, one area in which Palestinians need no help from anyone is finding excuses to shun negotiations. Currently, of course, they are claiming Israel’s position on borders leaves no room for progress. But if you want to see the real reason talks are stalemated, take a look at what happened last week, when Israel tried to present its position on security arrangements at a negotiating session in Amman: Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat refused to even let the Israeli official speak, saying he had no “mandate to negotiate security arrangements” until Israel presented “detailed documents” with its position on borders.

Everyone involved in the peace process has always understood that borders and security are intimately connected, because how much territory Israel is willing to cede will depend on the robustness of the compensatory security arrangements. That’s why even President Barack Obama, in his May 2011 speech calling for a “borders first” approach that would defer issues like Jerusalem and the refugees until later, didn’t propose deferring security; he suggested that talks focus first on “territory and security.” Thus, if the Palestinians aren’t even willing to listen to Israel’s positions on security arrangements, they clearly aren’t interested in conducting serious negotiations at all. As Israel’s chief negotiator aptly told Erekat, “If you do not have the mandate to discuss this, maybe you should leave and bring someone in your place who does have the mandate.”

But that isn’t the only evidence; equally telling is the ever-growing list of “gestures” the Palestinians are demanding from Israel in exchange for deigning to sit in the same room with Israeli officials. For months, they said the condition for continued talks was a freeze on settlement construction. But now, even this isn’t enough: Nimer Hammad, an aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said earlier this month the PA also demands a release of Palestinian terrorists imprisoned in Israel, the dismantling of Israeli security checkpoints in the West Bank and the transfer of additional chunks of West Bank territory to PA control – or in other words, that Israel cede territory prior to negotiations instead of as a result of negotiations.

Even worse, the “international community” is pressuring Israel to agree to these demands, seemingly incapable of seeing the obvious: If the Palestinians had any interest in holding genuine negotiations, they wouldn’t need to be bribed with lavish Israeli concessions just to get them to enter the room.

And that, of course, brings us to the other obvious corollary that the “international community” willfully refuses to see: If the Palestinians had any real interest in obtaining a state, they wouldn’t need to be bribed, cajoled and arm-twisted just to get them to hold talks with the only party that can actually give them one –Israel.

But to admit that is to admit the entire peace process is a fraud and a failure, and that is too painful. It’s much more comfortable to keep pretending that peace could be achieved if Israel would just give a little more.

Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/30/palestinians-negotiating-with-israel/

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Glick - Hamas and the Washington establishment

2012-01-31T07:00:00.001+02:00

Caroline Glick..
Our World/JPost..
30 January '12..

To date, the Republican presidential primary race has been the only place to have generated any useful contributions to America’s collective understanding of current events in the Middle East. Last month, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich became the first major political figure in more than a generation to pour cold water over the Palestinian myth of indigenous peoplehood by stating the truth, that the Palestinians are an “invented people.”

As Gingrich explained, their invention came in response to Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement. Since they were created somewhere around 1920, the Palestinians’ main purpose has not been the establishment of a Palestinian state but the obliteration of the Jewish state.

For his truth telling, Gingrich was attacked by fellow politicians and policy hands on both sides of the ideological divide. To his credit, Gingrich has not backed away from the truth he spoke. Rather he has repeated it in two subsequent Republican candidates’ debates.

The second important contribution that Republican presidential candidates have made to the discourse on the Middle East was undertaken by Texas Gov. Rick Perry during a candidates’ debate in South Carolina on January 17, shortly before he pulled out of the race. When asked about Turkey, Perry said that country “is being ruled by what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists.” He went on to say that the US ought to be having a debate about whether Turkey should continue to serve as a member of NATO.

Like Gingrich, Perry was pilloried by all right thinking people in the US foreign policy elite. And like Gingrich, Perry was right. The hoopla his statement generated showed just how destructive so much of America’s received wisdom about the Middle East has become. Moreover, it demonstrated the extent to which the US has adopted Middle East policies that are inimical to its national interests.

After Hamas won the Palestinian elections in January 2006, Turkey was the first country to invite Hamas’s terror master Khaled Mashal to Ankara. Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s move provoked criticism from the Bush administration. But Erdogan just shrugged it off. And he was right to do so. By 2006, then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice had come to view Erdogan as the US’s indispensable ally in the Muslim world. As she saw it, he was proof that Islamist parties could be democratic and moderate.

The fact that Erdogan embraced Hamas could not get in the way of Rice’s optimistic assessment. So, too, the fact that Erdogan embarked on a systematic campaign to stifle press freedom, curb judicial independence and imprison his political critics in the media and the military could not move Rice from her view that Erdogan personified her belief that moderate jihadists exist and ought to be embraced by the US.

Rice’s starry-eyed view of Erdogan set the stage of US President Barack Obama’s even stronger embrace of the increasingly tyrannical Turkish Islamist. Since Obama took office, not only has Ankara stepped up its support of Hamas, and ended even the pretense of a continued strategic alliance with Israel that it maintained during the Bush years. Turkey began serving as Iran’s chief diplomatic protector while vastly expanding its own strategic and economic ties with Tehran.

In the face of Turkey’s openly anti-American behavior and actions, Obama clings to Erdogan even more strongly than Rice did. Obama reportedly views Erdogan as his most trusted foreign adviser. According to the media, Obama speaks with Erdogan more often than he speaks to any other foreign leader. In a recent interview with Time magazine, Obama listed Erdogan as one of the key foreign leaders with whom he has formed a friendship based on trust.

Over the past few weeks, Turkey has emerged as Hamas’s largest financier. During an official visit in Turkey, Hamas’s terror master in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh received a hero’s welcome. Erdogan pledged to finance the jihadist movement to the tune of $300 million per year.

COMMENTATORS CLAIM that Turkey’s sponsorship of Hamas was necessitated by Iran’s abandonment of the terror group. Iran, it is claimed, cut Hamas off in August due to the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood’s refusal to actively assist Iran’s other Arab client – Syrian President Bashar Assad – in massacring his domestic opponents.

These analyses are problematic for two reasons. First, it is far from clear that Iran cut Hamas off. Iran’s rulers have invited Haniyeh to Tehran for an official visit. This alone indicates that the mullahs remain committed to maintaining their relationship with the jihadist movement that controls the Gaza Strip.

And why would they want to cut off that relationship? By serving as Hamas’s chief sponsor since 2006, Iran has won enormous credibility in the Arab world. This credibility has bought Tehran influence with the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and beyond. Particularly now, with the Brotherhood taking over Egypt and much of the Arab world, Iran would only stand to lose by cutting off Hamas.

The second problem with these assessments is that it makes little sense to believe that Turkey has replaced Iran as Hamas’s main state sponsor since Iran and Turkey are not necessarily competing over Hamas. Given the interests shared by Tehran and Ankara, it is far more reasonable to assume that they are coordinating their moves regarding Hamas.

Iran became Hamas’s chief financier and weapons supplier the same year that Erdogan emerged as Hamas’s most important political supporter. And in the six years since then, Iran and Turkey have become strategic allies. Even with regards to Syria, the fact that Assad remains in power today is due in no small measure to the fact that Erdogan has used his influence over Obama to ensure that the US has remained on the sidelines and so effectively supported Assad’s survival.

In light of Erdogan’s enormous influence over leaders in both US parties, it is little wonder that Perry’s factual statement about the nature of the Turkish government and the need for the US to reassess its strategic alliance with Turkey provoked such an across the board outcry. Erdogan’s close relationship with Obama – like his previously close relationship with Rice – renders it well nigh impossible for US government officials and inside-the Beltway “experts” to make the kind of commonsense assessments of Turkey’s counterproductive regional role that an outsider like Perry was able to make from his perch in Austin, Texas.

CONTRARY TO what several leading commentators have argued since the onset of the Syrian popular rebellion against Assad, Hamas has not been seriously damaged by the events. True, its leaders are looking for a new place to station their headquarters. But there is no law that requires terrorist organizations to have one central office. The families of Hamas’s leadership have decamped to Jordan. Hamas leaders have close relations with the Qataris – who remain major funders – as well as with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Sudanese regime.

In addition to these state supporters, through its relations with Turkey and Fatah, Hamas has Washington as well. To understand how Washington acts as Hamas’s protector, it is necessary to consider the nature of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.

Since its inception in 1993, the peace process has been predicated on Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. To the extent that Israel makes concessions, the peace process is seen as advancing. To the extent that Israel fails to make concessions, the peace process is seen as collapsing. True, at certain times, the Bush administration blamed the Palestinians for the failure of the peace process, but the blame owed to the fact that Palestinian terrorism made Israel less amenable to concession making.

Palestinian terrorism was not in and of itself blamed for the demise of the peace process. Rather it was perceived as the means through which Israel avoided making more concessions. And at certain times, the US supported Israel’s avoidance of concession making.

Since Israeli concessions to the Palestinians are the only tangible component of the peace process, the US, as the chief sponsor of the peace process, requires the Palestinian Authority – run by Fatah – to be accepted as a credible repository for Israeli concessions regardless of its actual nature. Consequently, despite Fatah’s two unity deals with Hamas, its sponsorship of terrorism, its incitement of terrorism, its refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist, its adoption of negotiating positions that presuppose Israel’s demise, and its conduct of political warfare against Israel, neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration ever showed the slightest willingness to consider ending their support for the PA. If Israel has no peace partner, then it can’t make concessions. And if it can’t make concessions, there is no peace process. And that is something that neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration was willing to countenance.

It is true that under Obama the US has become far more hostile towards Israel than it was under Bush. The most important distinction between the two is that whereas George W. Bush sought to broker a compromise deal between the two sides, Obama has adopted Fatah’s negotiating positions against Israel. As a consequence of Obama’s actions, the peace process has been derailed completely. Fatah has no reason to compromise since the US will blame Israel no matter what. And Israel has no reason to make concessions since the US will deem them insufficient.

Noting this distinction, Washington Post commentator Jennifer Rubin wrote this week that for the benefit of the peace process, it is important for a Republican administration to be elected to replace Obama in November. As she put it, “If history is any guide, progress is made in the ‘peace process’ when the Israeli prime minister operates from a position of strength and has the full support of the US president. We might get there, albeit not until 2013.”

The problem with her analysis is that it is of a piece with the insiders’ attacks on Gingrich and Romney alike. That is, it is based on the false assumptions of the peace process and the generally accepted wisdom embraced by the American foreign policy elite on both sides of the aisle that the PA is a reasonable repository for Israeli concessions.

Here it is worth noting that this week Fatah-controlled PA TV aired a sequence venerating the murderers of the Fogel family. Udi and Ruth Fogel and their children Yoav, Elad and Hadas were brutally murdered in their home last March.

Fatah’s glorification of their murderers is yet further proof that the foundations of the peace process are false. Peace cannot be based on appeasing societies that uphold mass murderers as role models. It can only be based on empowering free societies to defeat societies that embrace murder, terror and in the case of Hamas, genocide.

And this brings us back to the Republican primaries and Gingrich’s and Perry’s statements. For the US to secure its interests in the Middle East, it requires leaders who are willing to reassess what passes for common wisdom on both sides of the aisle.

caroline@carolineglick.com

Link: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=255802

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Tobin - Echoes of 1967 in Israel’s Iran Dilemma

2012-01-31T04:00:00.003+02:00

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
30 January '12..

One of the interesting aspects of yesterday’s New York Times Magazine cover story about Israel’s decision whether or not to strike at Iran’s nuclear program came from a passage in which author Ronen Bergman describes his meeting with former Mossad chief Meir Amit. Amit, who headed Israel’s intelligence agency at the time of the 1967 Six-Day War, described a meeting with the CIA station chief in Tel Aviv during the lead up to that conflict. According to the transcript of the meeting, which was given to Bergman, the American spy threatened Israel and did all in his power to prevent the Jewish state from acting to forestall the threat to its existence from Egypt and other Arab states that were poised to strike.

The lessons of this confrontation certainly put Israel’s current dilemma about attempting to pre-empt Iran’s ability to threaten the Jewish state with extinction via a nuclear weapon in perspective. Bergman provides no firm answer to the question of whether or not Israel will go ahead and strike Iran even if, as was initially the case in 1967, it must happen over the objections of the United States. But he does attempt to give a coherent framework for how the decision can be made as well as providing a bit more background on the chief Israeli critic of a strike on Iran.

According to Bergman, Israel has three criteria for deciding to act on their own on Iran:

1. Does Israel have the ability to cause severe damage to Iran’s nuclear sites and bring about a major delay in the Iranian nuclear project? And can the military and the Israeli people withstand the inevitable counterattack?

2. Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from America, for carrying out an attack?

3. Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran’s nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack?

For the first time since the Iranian nuclear threat emerged in the mid-1990s, at least some of Israel’s most powerful leaders believe the response to all of these questions is yes.

I’m not sure he’s right about that, especially when it comes to the first two points. While Israel can inflict serious damage on Iran, there’s no question that to do the job properly it will require American involvement. And though it may well be that ultimately the Obama administration will give Israel the same blinking green light it got in 1967, a close read of most of the statements coming out of Washington lately on the subject may lead to a different answer. It remains to be seen whether Obama is more afraid of the terrible consequences of an Iranian nuclear device for the world as well as Israel as he is of the fallout from an Israeli attack. Elsewhere in the piece, Bergman presents an Israeli assessment of what many believe is a feckless American stand on the issue that seems more the product of magical thinking than an analytic process:

“I fail to grasp the Americans’ logic,” a senior Israeli intelligence source told me. “If someone says we’ll stop them from getting there by praying for more glitches in the centrifuges, I understand. If someone says we must attack soon to stop them, I get it. But if someone says we’ll stop them after they are already there, that I do not understand.”

Just as fascinating is his account of the activities of Meir Dagan, another former Mossad chief who has been quoted incessantly in the American press largely because he is a vocal critic of the idea of an Israeli strike on Iran.

Bergman allows Dagan his say on the matter in which he bitterly criticizes both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as Defense Minister Ehud Barak. But his is one of the rare accounts in the U.S. press to also note the spymaster carries a political grudge against the two because they did not reappoint him to his position after the fiasco in which Mossad personnel were exposed while carrying out a hit on a Hamas terrorist in Dubai.

Though he is often represented in the Western press as someone who minimizes the danger from Iran, Bergman also corrects this impression. Dagan seems as intent on stopping Iran as Netanyahu and Barak, but he thinks it can be better achieved by Mossad’s cloak-and-dagger assassinations of Iranian scientists and/or sabotage of Iranian facilities. But it’s far from clear the Iranians haven’t already overcome those tactics.

The other Israeli critic of a strike on Iran that he cites is Rafi Eitan, the 85-year-old former spook whose most famous achievement in his field was the Jonathan Pollard disaster (something Bergman fails to note). He believes it is a foregone conclusion that Iran will go nuclear and thinks the only way to avert the danger is to promote regime change. While the replacement of the Islamist dictatorship with a democratic government would be an improvement, waiting around for that to happen doesn’t seem particularly prudent, especially when you consider the consequences.

Bergman’s conclusion is Israel will attack Iran sometime this year because of a growing consensus it has no choice but to do so. If Barack Obama wishes to avert that overcome, he is going to have to prove to the Israelis he means business about sanctions that will bring the Iranian economy to its knees. But given the ambivalent signals emanating from Washington on that subject, everything Netanyahu and Barak are hearing is more likely to be hardening their conviction that, as Bergman writes, “only the Israelis can ultimately defend themselves.”

Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/30/israel-iran-nuclear-dilemma-strike/#more-782314

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Dr. Shmuel Bar - Western Hopes And Dreams, And Iranian Reality

2012-01-31T00:30:00.002+02:00

A Nuclear Iran and the Ramifications of a
Poly-Nuclear Middle East

Dr. Shmuel Bar..
Working Paper..
The 12th Herzliya Conference..
January 2012..

The failure of the international efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a military nuclear capability has raised debate in the academic and strategic communities regarding the possibility that such a development may still be averted and regarding the ramifications of a nuclear Iran.

The classic European thesis which has now been adopted in Washington is that there is some – yet undiscovered - enticement that can be offered to Iran which would hold greater value than becoming a nuclear power. A cursory examination of what Iran believes it can achieve with even the image of being a threshold state will show that nothing the West can offer Iran (short of total hegemony over the Gulf and parts of Central Asia) can give Iran more. Furthermore, the basic Iranian perception of the conspiratorial West – including perfidious Albion – is that such offers are no more than a ruse to disarm Iran of the only capability that can protect it from western subterfuge.

Another popular hypothesis draws an analogy between Iran today and the Soviet Union in the mid 1980’s. It focuses on Iran’s economic situation, the behavior of the younger generation who are attracted to Western culture, and what appears to be the decline of the clerical authority in Qom, comparable to the disintegration of the Communist party’s authority. Those who believe that it was the detante and the American engagement opposition in the former USSR that encouraged the internal opposition to the regime and ultimately contributed to the fall of the Soviet Empire now advocate Western “engagement” with civil society in Iran, which will, they believe, ultimately produce a similar Iranian “counterrevolution”. Unfortunately, this “deus ex machina” will not appear. The disparity between the Soviet Union before its collapse and Iran today is vast. The Communist ideology that went bankrupt in the Soviet Union was a secular ideology superimposed on the nation’s root religion. Its abandonment did not entail giving up basic cultural beliefs. In contrast, while the Islamic regime in Iran may not be liked by the populace, it does represent a strong tradition in Iran that existed before the revolution and retains the devotion even of those who oppose the regime. Furthermore, the Soviet Union did not fall overnight: its collapse can be traced to first stages of détente in the 1970’s when it became clear to the Kremlin that it had to reach a strategic accommodation with the US. The Soviet Union also went through a series of destabilizing leadership changes with one octogenarian coming fast on the heels of another. Other forces that had no little effect on the fall of the Soviet Union were the SDI and the defeat in Afghanistan. There is no analogy in Iran for any of these forces.

Even if, despite the dissimilarity to the Soviet Union, we accept that Iran is tending to a democratic counter-revolution, the timeline for the transformation makes this irrelevant to the nuclear crisis. Even the optimists do not see democratic change happening within the next year or two, the time most experts
believe Iran needs to cross the threshold of a military nuclear capability. And because the public, even the public that seeks democratic change, will congratulate the regime for its achievement, acquisition of a nuclear bomb will only lengthen the road to democracy in Iran.

If the above is not likely, then the question should be: what are the regional ramifications of Iran becoming a nuclear power. A common argument is that nuclear weapons endow their owners with a heavy sense of responsibility in the light of the awesome destructive power of those weapons. This would lead us to believe that a nuclear Iran will be more restrained in its behavior in the region than Iran is presently. This argument is also specious. In any case, it behooves us to explore the potential for further nuclearization in the Middle East, a breakdown of the non-proliferation regime in general and implications for the relationships between a number of nuclear states which would not be grouped in two main blocs as was the case in the cold war.

The prospect of such a “poly-nuclear” Middle East has given rise to a number of theories regarding the relevance of the lessons of the cold war to such a situation. Some highly respected experts (among them Kenneth Waltz and Thomas Schelling) regard the cold war experience as highly relevant to such a scenario. Some argue, on the basis of that experience, that a nuclear Iran not only may not be a destabilizing factor in the region, but may even provide the foundation for a regional order based on the Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction or MAD. According to their line of thought, the very possession of nuclear weapons tempers military adventurism and inculcates a degree of strategic responsibility commensurate with the grave consequences that would result from nuclear conflict. These experts point at the fears that permeated the western military establishments of a nuclear China and the fact that a nuclear Indian sub- continent did not result in nuclear war, despite mutual hostility and frequent outbreaks of crisis.

Others point at substantial differences between the cold war and the type of nuclear Middle East that may evolve. According to his viewpoint, all of these stabilizing characteristics of the Cold War strategic balance that saved the world from a nuclear war are absent in the Middle East:

1. MAD--was based not on small nuclear arsenals in the hands of several countries but large stockpiles in two nations (or two alliances) that really did assure mutual destruction. The first years of the Cold War, before the two Superpowers developed the capabilities for mutual destruction and the command and control mechanism to prevent such a catastrophe, were the most dangerous and held the highest risk of both nuclear war and local conflicts under the “umbrella” of nuclear deterrence.

2. The Cold War was in essence a bilateral struggle between American and Soviet blocs, which simplified the signaling of intentions and prevention of misunderstandings. A nuclear Iran will lead to a “polynuclear” Middle East in which the potential for nuclear error will be greatly increased. Nuclear posturing by one party will not be interpreted only by the party it was intended for but by all other parties. Regimes in the Middle East have shown a much higher predilection for brinkmanship than the US and the USSR ever did.

3. Both sides to the cold war were governed by elite decision making groups with much in common; a centralist executive system and a clear preference (in the case of the Soviet Union – even an ideological preference) for “rational” and “pragmatic” decision making. Public discussion of nuclear weapons in the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War tended to be restricted to experts, so policy makers could develop rational strategies with little public pressures to take a more belligerent position. It is argued that never did crowds in Washington or Moscow demonstrate – as they have in Pakistan - with models of nuclear bombs and calls to use them against historic enemies. Religious and nationalistic fervor have led Arab countries to countless military debacles. There are no grounds to argue that the possession of nuclear weapons will change these patterns of behavior.

4. Cold war parties did not have to deal with apocalyptic or suicidal traditions or with the centrality of honor as it is manifested in the Middle East. As eminent a scholar of Middle Eastern culture and politics as Prof. Bernard Lewis has argued that presenting a threat of destruction to a leader or leadership group which fervently believes in the imminence of the apocalypse would not be a threat but a promise. Muslim belief in the appearance of a Mahdi who will fight on the side of Allah’s soldiers and protect them, heightens the risk. Other scholars – while they do not go as far as imputing suicidal apocalyptic goals to these leaders – argue that their very posturing as believing in such a development or in claiming divine protection from any devastating reprisal from the enemy holds potential for escalation which can get out of control.

5. Regimes in the Middle East are notoriously weak and fragmented with strategic decisions taken for internal political reasons. Elements of regimes tend to latch on to the “strategic issues” confronting those countries as levers for enhancing their clout within the regime. This tendency, if translated into multiple parties involved in nuclear programs – or even in nuclear command and control – would make command and control in the hair-trigger situations that nuclear conflicts can create more difficult than was ever experienced during the cold war.

6. The cold war did not have at its core an age-old enmity such as the Sunni-Shiite and Arab-Iranian conflict. An Iranian bomb would be perceived in the Sunni Arab world as an Iranian (i.e. anti-Arab) and Shiite (i.e. anti-Sunni) capability.

So what would a nuclear Middle East look like? Certainly not a re-run of the cold war. We should expect that a nuclear Iran will move to assert its dominance in the waters that it likes to remind all is the “Persian Gulf” and to gain hegemony over the Gulf, including dictating oil production levels. Even before the present economic crisis, Iran’s economy was in shambles; the decline in oil prices has exacerbated the situation and Iran will probably attempt to intimidate its neighbors in order to raise prices. Iran will also assert itself in the heart of the Middle East by using terror with impunity. These and the very potential of a nuclear confrontation in the region should bring the western world to the conclusion that the best option remains prevention at all costs.

Link: http://www.herzliyaconference.org/eng/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/Bar_ANuclearIran.pdf

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Gordon - Encouraging Aggression by Making it Cost-Free

2012-01-30T22:25:00.000+02:00

How Egypt's economic turmoil and Western positions on the peace process combine to increase the risk of another Arab-Israeli war

Evelyn Gordon..

JINSA Visiting Fellow..
30 January '12..

Last month, Victor Davis Hanson published a fascinating article on why Iran might nevertheless decide to start a war it can't win. In it, he analyzed several cases in which countries did exactly that, including the Korean War in 1950, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1982 Falklands War and the 1991 Gulf War, and found three common factors: pressing domestic crises, belief that the West might acquiesce in their aggression, and conviction that even if it didn't, the Western response would stop well short of regime change. In short, their leaders had something to gain (domestic distraction) and nothing irreversible to lose.

While surely relevant to Iran, Hanson's analysis is equally relevant to another Mideast powder keg - one created by the combination of Egypt's revolution and a troubling change in Western attitudes toward the Israeli-Arab peace process. The former left Egypt with a major economic crisis. And the latter has assured Arab states that attacking Israel carries no risk of irreversible losses: Even if a war results in Israel capturing Arab territory, the West will demand that it return every last inch.

This wasn't always the case. UN Security Council Resolution 242, the original framework for the peace process, was deliberately crafted to ensure that Israel wouldn't have to return all the territory captured in its defensive war of 1967. While the Arab and Soviet blocs wanted the resolution to require Israel to withdraw from "the territories" or "all the territories," the final wording merely required an Israeli withdrawal from "territories" captured in 1967. And both sides understood that this omission was "not accidental," as America's then UN ambassador, Arthur Goldberg, explained: The West envisioned a "peace settlement encompassing less than a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from occupied territories, inasmuch as Israel's prior frontiers had proved to be notably insecure," and therefore, "the resolution speaks of withdrawal from occupied territories without defining the extent of withdrawal."

As time passed, however, Western attitudes shifted drastically. The European Union has been demanding a full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank for years now, and last year, the U.S. joined in: President Barack Obama declared that any future Israeli-Palestinian border must be "based on the 1967 lines," modified only by "mutually agreed swaps," meaning Palestinians can veto any proposal encompassing less than 100 percent of the territory. That is a retreat from both President Bill Clinton's parameters of 2000 (which called for Israel to cede 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank) and President George Bush's position in 2004 ("it is unrealistic to expect ... a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949").

And on the Syrian front, this change occurred even earlier: Here, even the U.S. has demanded a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights for decades.

It's sometimes argued that Israel itself set the 100-percent precedent, by returning every inch of Sinai to Egypt under their 1979 peace agreement. This, however, is a flawed comparison. Egypt was the first to breach the Arab consensus against peace with Israel, at considerable cost to its relations with its Arab neighbors (who barred it from the Arab League for 10 years). It therefore deserved a territorial bonus. But there's no reason why others should receive a similar reward for more than three decades of continued refusal to make peace.

This Western attitude has long been an impediment to Israeli-Arab negotiations: Syria has no incentive to make peace sooner rather than later as long as the West guarantees that 100 percent of the Golan will still be on the table later, while the Palestinians have learned that rejecting repeated Israeli offers of statehood merely results in Western pressure for Israel to offer them more. Had either Syria or the Palestinians thought instead that they had something to lose by holding out - i.e., that waiting would reduce the amount the territory they could ultimately expect to obtain - they might have signed an agreement sooner.

But that issue pales beside the danger posed by the new situation in Egypt. The revolution left Egypt an economic basket case. Tourism, the country's second-largest revenue source, was down 35 percent in the first nine months of last year, while third-quarter unemployment stood at 12 percent, up from 9 percent a year earlier. Foreign exchange reserves plunged 50 percent in 2011 - a disaster for a country that imports half its food - and last month, a government bond issue flopped, with investors buying less than a third despite yields of almost 16 percent. The chances that Egypt's new government can produce the economic miracle needed to reverse this decline seem slim, and if it doesn't, demonstrators are likely to return to Tahrir Square to demand its ouster, just as they did with Hosni Mubarak.

Hence Egypt's new rulers may soon find themselves in desperate need of something to distract the public from its economic distress. And in a country where 90% of the population views Israel as an "enemy" and a "threat," they might well see war with Israel as the ideal distraction.

This makes it vital for Western leaders to make it clear that Egypt does have something irreversible to lose by starting another war - namely, that if it loses Sinai to Israel again, the West won't back Egyptian demands for its full return. But there's no way to make such a threat credible while the West is simultaneously demanding that Israel return every inch of land captured in an earlier defensive war: Egypt's leaders will know they just have to wait a few years for the furor to die down, and the West will similarly demand 100 percent restitution for them.

It's therefore high time for Western leaders to send the following message to both Syria and the Palestinians: You went to war, you lost, and you refused to make peace for 45 years; our patience is exhausted. We will no longer back your demands for restoring the status quo ante; aggression and intransigence have a price.

For only by ensuring that aggression does entail a territorial price can the West deter future aggressors from trying it.

Evelyn Gordon, JINSA Visiting Fellow, is a journalist and commentator writing in The Jerusalem Post and the English version of Haaretz.

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Kushner - From Israel: Frenetic Times

2012-01-30T20:27:00.000+02:00

Arlene Kushner..
30 January '12..

Afraid it's "that time" again: Time for a review of what's going on with our "partners for peace" and their brothers in Hamas. Hate doing this. But every so many days...

As was totally predictable, the "talks" supervised by Jordan have gone nowhere and are likely finished. (Although, as I write there is an unconfirmed report that the low level talks may continue for another month. We'll see.)

You realize, of course, that the lack of progress in the talks is all Israel's fault. Must be, because that's what PA leaders are saying. We failed to submit a detailed plan of our demands for security and borders (to which I say, Baruch Hashem!); we merely submitted principles of what we think must be dealt with. The PA says the deadline for us to do so was January 26. Israel says the PA is counting wrong. The Quartet had said both side were to submit plans within three months. The PA calculates that three months as having ended now. Israel says it ends three months after the Jordanian talks began.

~~~~~~~~~~

For background information: It is Israel's policy generally (not always adhered to as perfectly as might be desired) not to reveal specifics of what might be conceded until everything is on the table and dealt with -- "nothing is decided until everything is decided."

~~~~~~~~~~

At the Cabinet meeting yesterday, Netanyahu reported, "As things stand now, according to what happened over the past few days - when the Palestinians refused even to discuss Israel's security needs with us - the signs are not particularly good."

Naturally, we will continue to see pressure brought to bear, to bring the parties back to the table. Catherine Ashton, EU foreign policy chief, was in the region last week, meeting with Israeli and PA officials.

~~~~~~~~~~

What particularly enrages -- although this is hardly new -- is that the Western world knows full well that Israel has no "partner for peace." It's simply that leaders are mindful of their relationship with Arab nations, and pander to the growing number of Muslims within their own nations, as well as to the left wing pro-Palestinian segment of their electorates. And so, they have an agenda that has nothing to do with facts or justice.

Please see this Palestinian Media Watch bulletin revealing the fact -- complete with video clip -- that Palestinian Authority TV twice last week broadcast greetings to Hakim Awad, convicted of murdering five members of the Fogel family last year, from members of his family and from the TV host. From his mother, who calls him the "apple of my eye," and his aunt, who refers to him as "the hero, the legend."

http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=6245

~~~~~~~~~~

Irish Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore has been here visiting, and PM Netanyahu remarked to him that while the world asks Israel to provide "confidence building measures," what the PA does with such praises of a terrorist destroys Israel's confidence.

Actually, I think that our prime minister didn't make the case nearly strongly enough. What this behavior does is cast a light on the perverted soul of the PA: What sort of society glorifies the murderer of babies this way? And why is it imagined that such a society merits a sovereign nation of its own?

But in the end it probably doesn't matter what Netanyahu said -- although he was correct to speak out -- because Gilmore, who represents a nation that is not exactly pro-Israel, probably wasn't really listening anyway. His mind is made up.

~~~~~~~~~~

Con Coughlin, writing last week in The Telegraph, said, "The Palestinians are doing their best to derail peace talks with Israel":

"...I am told by Western diplomats close to the exploratory talks that are currently taking place [note: have since ended] in Jordan between the two sides that the real reason they are running into difficulty is because the Palestinian delegation, led by the veteran Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, is refusing to take the talks seriously.

"For example, I am told by a Western diplomat working for the Quartet that when the Israeli delegation arrived for a meeting last weekend in Amman, the Jordanian capital, to present their latest security proposals, Mr. Erekat simply refused to enter the room.
"My man in the Jordan conference room says that he was surprised at Mr. Erekat's behaviour, especially as the topic under discussion was supposed to be one of the two main topics the Palestinian delegation wanted on the agenda...

"Erekat's refusal to enter the negotiating room and hear what the Israelis had to say does not bode well for the Quartet's attempts to get the two sides to resume full negotiations, and raises questions about just how serious the Palestinians are about getting a peace deal..."

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/concoughlin/100132355/the-palestinians-are-doing-their-best-to-derail-peace-talks-with-israel/

~~~~~~~~~~

"Not bode well"? "Raises questions"? Enormous understatements, but point is taken.

Barack Obama was inclined at one time -- before he began currying favor with American Jews for election purposes -- to publicly chastise Israel, for example, for announcing that homes for young couples would be build in Jerusalem east of the Green Line. But if he publicly chastised the PA for failure to exhibit good faith in the negotiations, I missed it.

A most unpalatable fact of life: This is what Israel must contend with.

~~~~~~~~~~

According to the Palestinian Maan News, the PLO executive committee will be meeting today, to discuss the "failure" of the preliminary talks. Then of course there will be discussion of "alternatives." UN bids, Hamas reconciliation (see below on this), etc.

Here we may go again...

~~~~~~~~~~

As to Hamas, it's in a severe state of turmoil. Iran has cut off assistance because of its leaders' refusal to back Assad in Syria. And thus, for all intents and purposes, Hamas is finished with regard to being headquartered in Damascus. According to intelligence sources, Khaled Mashaal has left for good; he's in Jordan at the moment and won't be coming back.

There seems, however, to be a real reluctance to say that the Hamas headquarters are closed. As one diplomat cited recently in the JPost put it, "Our belief is that Hamas [would] not announce a departure from Syria even if it happened." What is likely is that they'll keep low level staff there and maintain the fiction that they still have a headquarters there.

~~~~~~~~~~

But where will they go? Jordan has established limits to a Hamas presence, saying that Hamas leaders are welcome as individuals, but no more than this. King Abdullah has his hands full as it is.

The Muslim Brotherhood is similarly less than keen on hosting this movement. And, says Guy Bechor in YNet, they won't settle in Gaza because they fear it would make them too ready a target for an Israeli hit.

Bechor says that the "domestic" Hamas leadership in Gaza headed by Ismail Haniyeh is gaining ascendency within the organization now. And Mashaal is so frustrated that he's talking about leaving Hamas and starting a rival Muslim Brotherhood group, which means "a return to the Islamic track at the expense of Palestinian national identity."

Lastly, says Bechor, "Hamas won momentary global glory as result of the so-called blockade on Gaza. Yet now, when the siege is no longer in place with the border crossing to Egypt open to people and goods, how will the organization survive on the public relations front? This may be the worst problem faced by a group that lives off anti-Israel slogans and now finds itself crashing against the rocks of reality. "

See the full article here: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4181496,00.html

~~~~~~~~~~

A likely result of this enormous Hamas turmoil is that the idea of a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation will be more readily exposed for the myth that it is.

~~~~~~~~~~

We've looked before at the issue of the joint US-Israeli military exercises that were to take place here, but were cancelled, amid much speculation as to why and by which party. Even now I am seeing reports claiming that Israel cancelled, and that is what a representative of the Obama administration claimed when Gingrich chastised Obama for the cancellation.

Now I have on background, from a highly reliable source, this information:

"The U.S.-Israeli exercise was canceled because Obama is dealing secretly and intensively with Iran in an effort to stop a nuclear crisis and to ensure Teheran's cooperation for a U.S. pullout from Afghanistan. The easiest and most effective way for Obama to show his sincerity to Teheran is to keep Israel at arm's length if not farther."

~~~~~~~~~~

I want to call an important article to your attention:

Caroline Glick's brilliant "Zionist Imperative," in which she speaks about the historical ambivalence of America Jews to Zionism (all emphasis added).

"The problem that anti-Zionism poses for American Jewry is that it forces them to pay a price for supporting Israel. This is problematic because Zionism has never been fully embraced by American Jewry. Since the dawn of modern Zionism, the cause of Jewish self-determination placed American Jewish leaders in an uncomfortable dilemma.

"Unlike every other Diaspora Jewish community, the American Jewish community has always perceived itself as a permanent community rather than an exilic community. American Jews have always viewed the United States as the new Promised Land.

"With the formation of the modern Zionist movement in the late 19th century, American Jews found themselves on the horns of a dilemma. Clearly, the state of world Jewry was such that national self-determination had become an existential necessity for non-American Jews.

"But while supporting Jewish refugees and a scrappy little country was okay, support for the Zionist cause of Jewish national liberation involved an acceptance of the fact that Israel – not the US – is the Jewish homeland. Moreover, it involved accepting that there are Jewish interests that are independent of – if not necessarily in contradiction with – American interests. For instance, irrespective of the prevailing winds in Washington, and regardless of whether the US supports Israel or not, it is a Jewish interest that Israel exists, thrives and survives...

"Pro-Israel American Jews have historically tried to tie their support for Israel to larger, more universal themes, in order to extricate themselves from the need to admit that as Jews and supporters of Israel they have a right and a duty to support Jewish freedom even if it isn’t always pretty. Again, for Israel’s first several decades, it was about helping poor Jews and refugees. In recent years, the predominant defense has been that Israel deserves support because it is a democracy.

"Certainly, these are both reasonable reasons for supporting Israel. But neither support for Israel because it was poor nor support for Israel because it is free is a specifically Zionist reason for supporting Israel. You don’t have to be a Zionist to support poor Jewish refugees and you don’t have to be a Zionist to support democracy.

"You do have to be a Zionist however, to defend the Jews in Israel and throughout the world in a coherent manner when the predominant form of Jew-hatred is anti-Zionism.

"You have to be willing to accept and defend the right of the Jewish people to freedom and self-determination in our national homeland against those who deny that right. You have to be a Zionist to defend Israel’s right to survive and thrive even though it is no longer poor and its democratically elected government is not liked by the Obama administration.

"And you have to be a Zionist to realize that since Jewish survival is dependent on Jewish power, and anti-Zionists reject the right of Jews to have power, that anti-Zionists seek to bring about a situation where Jewish survival is imperiled...

"...To oppose Iran’s nuclear program effectively, American Jews are required to oppose these strongly supported US policies. And at some point, this may require them to announce they support Israel’s right to survive and thrive even if that paramount right conflicts with how the US government perceives US national interests.

"That is, it may require them to embrace Zionism unconditionally...

"We must hope that world Jewry will recognize today that the fate of the Jewish people in Israel and throughout the world is indivisible and rally to Israel’s side whatever the social cost of doing so. But even if they do not recognize this basic truth, the imperatives of Zionism, of the Jewish people, remain in place."

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=255334

~~~~~~~~~~

I end, most appropriately in light of the above, by repeating the core of yesterday's posting, which requested the assistance of readers in contacting members of Knesset. I know that many people of good heart and with the best of intentions read what I write, make a mental note to get to it, and then somehow never do. Too little time, too many distractions. And so, I am providing that information a second time, with my heartfelt thanks for your efforts.

~~~~~~~~~~

A very significant vote is coming up in the Knesset this week. The issues are complex and YOUR COOPERATION HERE IS EXCEEDINGLY IMPORTANT.

You've heard about this legislation from me previously: Proposed by MK Zevulun Orlev (Habayit Hayehudi), it would forbid the dismantling of communities of more than 20 families in Judea and Samaria without properly filed documentation that the land was Arab-owned. This would negate the vague, unsubstantiated claims of land being "Arab" that are currently filed in court by Peace Now.

What is more, this legislation stipulates that if the documentation of Arab ownership is filed after a specified period of time (four years, as I understand it), the community still wouldn't be taken down and instead the Arab land owner would be provided with monetary compensation.

~~~~~~~~~~

Prime Minister Netanyahu -- at the behest of Minister Benny Begin, who is attempting to negotiate a "deal" with the residents of Migron and wants them to feel squeezed -- has secured a negative vote on this legislation in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation. Nothing prevents the promoters of a piece of legislation from bringing it to the Knesset without the approval of the committee -- it is simply that without this endorsement it is less likely to pass in the Knesset.

An appeal has been filed -- requesting a re-vote in the committee -- by Minister of Diaspora Affairs Yuli Edelstein (Likud) and Minister of Science Daniel Hershkowitz (Habayit Hayehudi) -- but there has been no response to this. There is reason to believe the original vote would overturned if there were a second vote.

~~~~~~~~~~

Now MK Orlev has decided to bring this proposed law before the Knesset -- possibly by Wednesday.

And here's where you have to pay attention to understand the situation and its serious implications:

Coalition discipline will not be invoked, so that members of the Knesset will be free to follow their conscience on this important matter rather than having to vote a party line.

HOWEVER, since the Ministerial Committee voted against the legislation, ministers are expected to also vote against it in the Knesset. They can, if they choose, vote for the legislation, but then, according to the rules, Netanyahu can fire them. He is not obligated to fire them, he is simply at liberty to do so.

Needless to say, Netanyahu is applying pressure, and making noises about firing those who do not toe the line.

~~~~~~~~~~

This has an unpleasant echo of Gush Katif, when then PM Sharon applied every sort of strong-arm technique possible to keep his ministers in line so they'd vote as he wished. We must not let this happen again. Sharon betrayed his mandate when he behaved this way, and Netanyahu is now playing matters in a similar fashion. I've cut him slack with regard to many issues. But I cut him none here.

~~~~~~~~~~

In previous posting, I asked you to write to the Likud ministers in support of Migron. Now I ask you to write again, to these ministers and those of Shas and Yisrael Beitenu as well:

Say that you understand that legislation that would save Migron and other communities in Judea and Samaria is about to come before the Knesset. It would release Israel from the strangle-hold of Peace Now and prevent Jewish communities from being destroyed.

Remind them that the mandate given to the coalition by the voters was nationalist and that they would be betraying this mandate if they voted against this legislation.

Tell them that, even more importantly, if they vote against it they would be taking a position that is not in the best interests of the State of Israel.

Let them know that you see it as imperative that they vote their conscience on this matter. It is not acceptable for them to place job security ahead of what is best for Israel. In any event there is no guarantee that the prime minister will fire any ministers, and less likely if many ministers stand together to do what is right.

Voters and those who support the parties are very tired of political game playing. The ministers must know that they are being watched and that support in the future will depend on their readiness to do the right thing now.

~~~~~~~~~~

Do NOT send a group message; the message to each minister should be separate. But there is no reason to be intimidated by the fact that there are several names on the list that follows.

There is a way to make it easy for yourself: Compose a message that says "Dear Minister," followed by text of that message. Copy that message and salutation. Then, in turn, click on each minister's e-mail address, paste in the greeting and message, and hit send.

LIKUD:
Minister of Improvement of Government Services Michael Eitan
meitan@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Environmental Protection Gilad Erdan
gerdan@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Welfare Moshe Kahlon
mcachlon@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Transportation Yisrael Katz
yiskatz@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Culture Limor Livnat
llivnat@knesset.gov.il (a previous typo in this address has been corrected)

Minister Yosi Peled
ypeled@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Education Gideon Saar
gsaar@knesset.gov.il

Minister of the Development of the Negev Silvan Shalom
sshalom@knesset.gov.il

Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz
ysteinitz@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Yaalon
myaalon@knesset.gov.il

SHAS:
Minister of Internal Affairs Eli Yishai
eyishay@knesset.gov.il

Minister Meshulam Nahari
mnahari@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Religious Affairs Yakov Margi
ymargi@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Housing Ariel Atias
aatias@knesset.gov.il

YISRAEL BEITENU:
Minister of Tourism Stas Misezhnikov
smiseznikov@knesset.gov.il

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman
aliberman@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Immigrant Absorption Sofa Landver
slandver@knesset.gov.il

Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Danny Ayalon
dayalon@knesset.gov.il

~~~~~~~~~~

If Gush Katif infuriated you or pained you, if you want to be part of a democratic process that protects Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, if the idea of their having to turn over their land to Arabs distresses you, please! take the time to do this.

Numbers count a great deal. Send this to others who are likely to also respond.

Thank you. More will follow tomorrow.

~~~~~~~~~~

In closing, a note of clarification, very broadly, for those who are outside of Israel and perhaps confused by our system: Parties receive mandates (seats) in the Knesset according to the percentage of votes they secured in the previous election. If one party does not have sufficient seats (i.e., more than 60) to constitute a majority of the Knesset, then a coalition is formed; this always happens. Once the coalition is in place, there are ministerial positions allocated to the various parties in the coalition. With very rare exceptions, the ministers are chosen from the ranks of those within the parties who have been elected to the Knesset. Those who are ministers sit in the Cabinet and constitute the government, but they are still members of the Knesset.

~~~~~~~~~~

© Arlene Kushner. This material is produced by Arlene Kushner, functioning as an independent journalist. Permission is granted for it to be reproduced only with proper attribution.

See my website at www.arlenefromisrael.info Contact Arlene at akushner@netvision.net.il

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Weinberg - Throwing good euros after bad

2012-01-30T18:00:00.011+02:00

David M. Weinberg..
Israel Hayom..
30 January '12..

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein unearthed the nefarious dealings behind Watergate by following the advice of their mysterious source, nicknamed Deep Throat. “Follow the money,” counseled Deep Throat. And so they did – all the way up to President Richard Nixon in the White House.

So, too, with the Palestinian Authority. The money trail – which pays for stalemates, rejectionism, and diplomatic assault on Israel – leads directly from PA President Mahmoud Abbas to his central banker: the European Union.

Last week, the EU announced that it would to transfer another $70 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA) – the largest single donation ever to UNRWA. EU Foreign Policy chief Catherine Ashton said that the donation “represents our ongoing commitment to the Palestine refugees.”

It is an old story. Ask yourself: Who has been the primary financier of the PA and all its so-called refugees?

Mostly, it has not been Israel – although in the days of Rabin and Peres, Israel sinned by propping up the PA with direct payments into a secret Tel Aviv bank account held by Yasser Arafat himself.

The Sharon government held back on some $1.5 billion in various taxes and customs duties collected by the Israel Finance Ministry on behalf of the PA. Then Finance Minister Silvan Shalom used the embargoed funds to cover PA debts owed to Israeli firms and organizations like the Israel Electric Company. Current Finance Minister Dr. Yuval Steinitz tried to do the same last year after the PA angled for unilateral recognition at the U.N., but the Cabinet released the funds under international pressure.

Who, then, has bankrolled the PA and UNRWA? The U.S. and Canada cut most of their funding to UNRWA years ago, when its ubiquitous corruption and unhelpful perpetuation of Palestinian victimhood became clear. They have restricted their funding of development programs in the PA to Western-administered projects that advance governmental and security-sector reform.

What about Abbas' Arab brothers? Nah. They never have substantially put their money where their collective mouth is. Even the biggest talker of all, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, preferred to transfer his “martyr rewards” directly to the families of suicide bombers, not though the PA budget.

The correct answer is – the European Union. The EU has been the PA’s bighearted sugar-daddy; Arafat and Abbas' bountiful and boundless papa-bear; the deepest honey-pot the Palestinians could ever hope for.

As Shareholder Number One in the PA, the EU has a lot riding on Abbas. So much so that EU leaders are finding it hard to accept that the PA has grossly overshot its credit.

In sum, the EU has poured well over $3 billion into propping up the PA since Oslo, aside from funds contributed separately by individual EU countries and in addition to support for the UNRWA. This includes everything from food and health services through training and equipment for the PA intelligence and police forces, and salaries for more than 50,000 PA bureaucrats.

In the world of development assistance, this is an enormous sum of money; the size of which no other Third World territory or country could ever dream of.

So, where are the fruits of this lofty largesse? Where are the new neighborhoods for Palestinian refugees, the new infrastructure projects, the successful industrial parks, the small business incubators and thriving educational institutions – all carefully monitored for quality and efficiency by EU inspectors?

More importantly, where is the diplomatic moderation and spirit of cooperation with Israel that all this money was supposed to generate? Remember: For more than two decades we have been told that Palestinian radicalism and rejectionism could be tempered by economic development ...

Consider: Brussels has bankrolled and mentored PA television since its inception. It even rebuilt PA-TV antenna towers after Israel toppled them during Operation Defensive Shield. This is the same television that broadcasts messages of Jihad against the Jews and praise for Palestinian suicide bombers.

Consider: The PA school system has enjoyed the investment of over $600 million in EU funds since 1994, including funds for the writing and production of the new, official PA textbooks. I do not need to tell you that these textbooks deny any ancient Jewish claim to Jerusalem and Israel; that murderer-martyrs are praised; and that Israel is not to be found on any maps in these glorious, EU-financed, educational tomes.

Consider: Under the UNWRA, which applies the term “refugee” to all descendants of Palestinian refugees (unlike any other refugee in the world), the number of so-called Palestinian “refugees” has swelled from 600,000 in 1948 to seven million today! And UNRWA’s task is to perpetuate their lives as second-class citizens in camps, not to integrate and settle them in host countries. For this, the UNRWA needs another $70 million from the EU, and counting.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, Arab leaders from Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere sought to convince Western leaders to invest billions in the nascent “Islamic democracies.” Invest in us, do not fear us, they said. The unfortunate experience with the PA should serve as a warning and a caution. Unless Western support is rigorously conditioned on real democracy and human rights reforms, and unless it is closely controlled for hard results – it will be pouring good money down the drain; or worse: it will be bankrolling extremism and obstructionism.

Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1289

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Kuntzel - The Wannsee Legacy: Lessons for Genocide Prevention

2012-01-30T15:30:00.005+02:00

By Matthias Küntzel

Henry Jackson Society Event in the House of Commons, London, January 19, 2012

Let me please start with Fanny Englard, an active survivor of the Holocaust and a friend of mine. She grew up in Germany/Cologne and lives now south of Tel Aviv. Fanny wrote in a letter:

“As a twenty-year-old, on 8 May 1945 I was liberated from hell and tried to find my family, but without success. Eventually I had to accept that my father had lost his life in the Warsaw Ghetto, while my mother and ten-year-old brother had been poisoned in the gas chambers at Belzec along with my grandmother, aunts and cousins. Two brothers, aged 15 and 13, had been shot in Belarussia not far from Minsk and buried in shallow graves in 1942, but in 1943 the corpses had been dug up and burned – their ashes scattered to the four winds. In May 1947 I came to Israel and married in order to create a new family as a replacement for the murdered one that had fallen victim to Jew-hatred.”

I know the photos and the faces of Fanny’s murdered siblings and parents and I want to contrast her personal letter with the bare numbers and the monstrous language of the Wannsee-protocol which talks about “the complete clearing up of the problem” and continues: “this final solution of the European Jewish question concerns about 11 million Jews, distributed among the various countries.”[1]

However, the Final Solution was not limited to Europe.

In 1941, the 700.000 Jews of the Middle East attracted Hitler’s attention as well.[2] As Hitler envisaged it, after the assault on the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht would also occupy the Caucasus and so open the way to the Middle East. Then Iran, Iraq and Egypt would be conquered and the British Empire destroyed from the south. Pro-German movements would prepare for the German invasions of that countries. Part of this scenario was the killing of the Jews.

At the end of November 1941 – in the run-up to the Wannsee-Conference – Hitler received Hajj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti and leader of the Palestinians. On this occasion Hitler stated that, after the defeat of the Soviet Union, “the hour of liberation” would arrive for the Arab world. “The German goal would then be the annihilation of the Jews … living in the Arab region.”[3] These were’t mere words.

By summer 1942 the Nazis had drawn up concrete plans to murder the Jews of the Yishuv. They expected their genocidal endeavor to be substantially assisted by Arab collaborators.

Therefore, the SS Einsatzkommando for Palestine, which was set up in Athens by the summer of 1942 in order to direct this genocide was staffed by only 17 Germans – waiting there for Rommel to clear the way to Palestine. And indeed, as Rommel’s Afrikakorps pushed eastwards during the summer of 1942, the Germans registered growing pro-nazi sentiment all across the Middle East.

“There is no reason to claim that the anti-Semitic potential of Lithuanian, Latvian or Ukrainian nationalists should have been stronger than that of Arabs expecting the German Wehrmacht”, emphasize the German historians Mallmann and Cüppers.[4]

Persia was a more difficult place. You may recall that the name Iran means “Country of Aryans”. Thus, a long-lasting controversy among German racist ideologues sprang up over whether Persian Jews were “racially” Persian and should therefore be categorised as “non-Semites” or even “Aryans”.

Adolf Eichmann brought this debate to an abrupt end on December 8, 1942. It is clear from Eichmann’s letter that he intended to show no mercy to the native Iranian Jews, who numbered around 60,000. “In the light of the above remarks”, he concludes his letter to the Foreign Office, “no grounds exist for recognising the equal status of the Jews with Iranians as recognised in Iran in the countries within Germany’s sphere of control.”[5]

His euphemistically formulated advice could lead to only one conclusion: as soon as Iran came under German control, the Jews of Iran too would be deported to death camps and murdered.

Let me summarize my first remark. The Wannsee protocol dealt with the „European Jewish question“. Adolf Hitler, however, wanted to kill the Jews of the Middle East as well. Pro-German Muslims were designated to do the dirty work. But there was a problem which brings me to my second point.

It was understood that German-style antisemitism would have little resonance in the Middle East.

“The level of education of the broad masses is not advanced enough for the understanding of the race theory”, complained a leading German Nazis in Egypt in 1933. “An understanding of the Jewish threat has not yet been awakened here.”[6] Later, the German embassy in Tehran submitted the same complaint to Berlin. “The broad masses lack a feeling for the race idea”, explained a member of the embassy in January 1942. Thus, he recommended to lay “all the emphasis on the religious motif in our propaganda in the Islamic world. This is the only way to win over the Orientals.”[7]

But how exactly could Nazi Germany of all countries conduct a religious propaganda campaign? The German ambassador at Tehran, Erwin Ettel had an idea.

“The way to directly connect up with Shiite ideas is through the treatment of the Jewish question, which the Muslim perceives in religious terms and which, precisely for this reason, makes him susceptible to National Socialism on religious grounds”, Ettel recommended to the German Foreign Office. “A way to foster this development would be to highlight Muhammad’s struggle against the Jews in the old days and that of the Führer in modern times. By, additionally, identifying the British and the Jews, an exceptionally effective anti-English propaganda campaign can be conducted among the Shiite people.”[8]

The Nazi’s anti-Jewish incitement within the Islamic world built on the traditional, Islamically-prescribed exclusion of the Jews. It was radicalised by Nazi propaganda, the crucial medium for which was a short-wave radio channel that, since 1939, broadcast Goebbels’ antisemitism from Germany to the Middle East.

This radio channel disseminated the Nazi ideology in a multitude of languages to many parts of the world. The Orient Department, with 80 employees, was its largest foreign-language department, catering to Arabs, Turks, Persians and Indians.

We know from many contemporary reports that, at a time when people mainly listened to the radio in town squares or in bazaars and coffee houses, the Nazi broadcast was very popular. “Even if we do broadcast in Persian”, wrote Reader Bullard, the British Ambassador in Tehran, in 1940, “we cannot hope to rival the Germans in interest, as their more violent, abusive style, with exaggerated claims … appeals to the Persian public.”[9]

Let me summarize my second point: Radio programs in Muslim languages – broadcast between 1939 and 1945 several times a day – served not only the purpose of preparing the arrival of the German army but also of inciting the hatred of Jews. One example: In July 1942, on the eve of Rommels expected invasion of Cairo – only six month after the Wannsee conference – the Axis radio addressed the Egyptian people as follows: “Kill the Jews, burn their property, destroy their stores, annihilate these base supporters of British imperialism. Your sole hope of salvation lies in annihilating the Jews before they annihilate you.”[10] This brings me to my last remark.

The Nazi radio ceased operation in April 1945. But it was only after that date that its frequencies of hate really began to reverberate in the Arab world. I cannot go into details today but if you study this issue you will find a striking similarity between the Jew-hatred of the Nazis’ Arab propaganda and the Jew-hatred of Islamists today.

At the end of 1941, Hans Frank, a leading Nazi official, declared : “We must annihilate the Jews wherever we meet them and whenever it is at all possible.”[11] In 1944, the Mufti of Jerusalem repeated this message via the Nazi transmitter: „Kill the Jews whereever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion.”[12] In 1946, after the war, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, praised the Mufti as follows: „O Amin! What a great, stubborn, terrific, wonderful man you are! …Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin Al-Hussaini will continue the struggle.”[13] My last quote is from 2009: “Oh Allah, take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.”[14] This appeal stems from a former friend of a former mayor of this city –Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood today.

It was the Wannsee Conference which “counted” the Jews’ number in order “to kill them, down to the very last one”, indeed.

This conference decided on a crime which was and will remain unparalleled. The echo of Wannsee, however, still exists and also the willingness to propagate and to prepare for a new Holocaust.

Our remembrance of the Wannsee Conference would lose much of its value if it did not also serve to sharpen our attention with regards to the contemporary threats to the Jews and the Jewish State of Israel. I would therefore like to end my statement with Fanny Englard’s words:

“Here in Israel, many Holocaust survivors created new families to replace those that were murdered. However, we did not create these new families in order to sacrifice them in the wars repeatedly inflicted on us by the Jew-hatred of the Mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler’s Islamist heirs… This Jew-hatred compels us to engage in a fight for life; this is not a war to kill others, but a fight for life to secure a safe future for the new families. Did we survive and found a new family in order to sacrifice them to the same Jew-hatred again?”

Link: http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/the-wannsee-legacy-lessons-for-genocide-prevention

—————
[1] Protocol of the Wannsee conference, p. 5 and 10.

[2] Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, New Haven (Yale University Press) p.7.

[3] Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten, Darmstadt (Wissenschasftliche Buchgesellschaft) 2007, p. 61.

[4] Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz. Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina, Darmstadt (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft) 2006, p. 164.

[5] Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Eichmann an das Auswärtige Amt, Betrifft: Juden iranischer Staatsangehörigkeit, Berlin, den 8. Dezember 1942, R 99422, Inland II A-B Juden im Iran 41-44.

[6] Gudrin Krämer, Minderheit, Millet, Nation? Die Juden in Ägypten 1914-1952, Wiesbaden (Verlag Otto Harrassowitz) 1982, p. 278.

[7] Quoted in: Matthias Küntzel, Die Deutschen und der Iran. Geschichte und Gegenwart einer verhängnisvollen Freundschaft [Germany and Iran. Past and Present of a Fateful Friendship], Berlin (wjs-Verlag) 2009, p. 54.

[8] Matthias Küntzel, op.cit., p. 54.

[9] Reader Bullard, Letters from Tehran, London/New York 1991, p. 28.

[10] Jeffrey Herf, op. cit., p. 126.

[11] Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-1945, Stuttgart (Deutsche Verlagsanstalt), p. 652,

[12] Jeffrey Herf, op. cit., p. 213.

[13] Herf, op. cit., p. 244.

[14] Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals, New York (Melville House) 2010, p. 92.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Roth - Reality bites and the Palestinian Arab future is not what it used to be

2012-01-30T13:00:00.050+02:00

The double-headed world of Palestinian
Arab politics has gotten one-head
more complicated, and that's just
the start [Image source]

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
27 January '12..

We wrote recently about the triumphant tour of Middle East capitals by the "prime minister" of the Hamas terrorist regime, Ismail Haniyeh. His speeches in Ankara and such Arab capitals as Tunis, Cairo and Khartoum were filled with threats of the destruction to shortly rain down on Israel's head and promised "difficult days" for Israel.

"We are saying to the Zionist enemies that times have changed and that the time of the Arab Spring, the time of the revolution, of dignity and of pride has arrived."

But what's actually happening to Hamas, though, is more interesting than their bombastic war talk. Because inside Hamas, and in its immediate surroundings, things have changed, are changing and are certain to lead to even larger changes. Gay Bechor, an Israeli political commentator, lays some of this out in a Ynet op ed article today entitled "Hamas in deep trouble: Op-ed: Despite pompous declarations, terror group faces problems on multiple fronts "

Bechor points out that Haniyeh has lately been rousing the crowds with pretentious calls for the establishment of a Palestinian jihadist army of liberation, but reality is imposing some real challenges on him and his organization.

For instance, the mutually-productive alliance of terrorists between Sunni Moslem Hamas and non-Arab, non-Sunni, Shi'ite Iran has come to an end, at least for now. In mid 2011, Iran ordered the Hamas leadership to throw its extremely-well-armed support behind the flailing, blood-drenched Syrian despot Bashar al Assad. But this was more than Hamas was willing or able to do. Consequently, Bechor says,

"the flow of money used by Hamas to pay some 50,000 officials and troops in Gaza has ended. So where will Hamas get money? This is why the organization is engaged in bitter disputes with the Palestinian Authority and Arab League over funds supposedly owed to the group. Hamas was also forced to leave the capital of its external leadership in Damascus. Where will it go now? There were hopes that Jordan will take in Hamas’ headquarters, until the group’s leadership was stunned last week to hear that Jordan is imposing limitations. Jordan’s prime minister made it clear that the country will host senior group figures and their families as “individuals,” banning them from any political activity. Hence, the Jordan option is no longer viable in furious Hamas’ view.

Bechor makes an interesting observation about the Egyptian option:

With the Muslim Brotherhood aiming to portray itself as pragmatic and realistic in the eyes of the world, moving the headquarters of a terror group to Cairo would be an embarrassment. Haniyeh himself visited Egypt and spoke at length about Israel’s demise, yet Brotherhood representatives kept silent, and this silence should worry him. The Muslim Brotherhood now needs to care not for 50,000 people, but rather, for 88 million.

Haniyeh's victory tour was said to be predicated on the changes wrought by the mis-named Arab Spring and the conviction that newly empowered Islamic political parties would embrace Hamas. Not so much, as it turns out. Says Bechor:

We certainly saw lip service, but establishing a Jihad army against Israel? Every Arab state is currently contending with deep domestic problems; this existential trouble dwarfs Hamas’ problems.

Bechor's article also deals with the increasingly complex battle for control and influence within the world of the fractious Palestinian Arabs. The stop-start-stop-again "reconciliation" with Fatah (which Haniyeh opposes). The stop-start-stop-again road to Palestinian elections. And, most troublesome for them, the way in which

the double-headed Palestinian politics has now become tripled-headed: The domestic Hamas, external Hamas and Abbas. Each leadership has its own political agenda and its own senior figures.

Abbas and Dahlan: "The PA president last week requested
three different countries to freeze fixed and liquid assets belonging
to former Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan amid
ongoing corruption charges" [Source]. Dahlan meanwhile has been
making corruption charges of his own against Abbas and family.

And that's before we start to factor the newest edition of the Palestinian Arab national past-time - vicious infighting - into the equation. A well-documented Jonathan Schanzer article, "When Palestinian Politics Get Personal" in latest Weekly Standard lays out the contours of the Mahmoud Abbas witch-hunt to bring down Mohammad Dahlan:

It underscores the fact that Abbas has consolidated power, and that he will abide no challenges. Abbas’s whims bode poorly for the Palestinian Authority, which may now expend more energy settling scores than resolving the long-standing conflict with Israel.

The whole Weekly Standard article is worth reading for the sharp light it shines on the sea of money the Palestinian Arab leadership has looted from international aid agencies and from its own subjects over the past three decades.

Guy Bechor wraps up his analysis with a glance at the fleeting moment in the sun achieved by the Gazan Palestinian Arabs during the blockade-busting glory days of the last two years.

Now, when the siege is no longer in place [he notes] with the border crossing to Egypt open to people and goods, how will the organization survive on the public relations front? This may be the worst problem faced by a group that lives off anti-Israel slogans and now finds itself crashing against the rocks of reality.

Rocks of reality? Now there's an image to have in mind when the next choreographed, media-coordinated rock-throwing attack on Israelis appears in your newspaper or evening TV.

Link:http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.com/2012/01/27-jan-12-reality-bites-and-palestinian.html

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