Bahrain and John Kerry, Kushner is repeating the same mistake - by Ben-Dror Yemini

It's difficult, very difficult, to wean an entire community off illusions. After all, the "forces of progress" cultivate illusions. It's a lot easier to invite people to a workshop in Bahrain.

Ben-Dror Yemini..
Israel National News..
22 June '19..
Link: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/264947

John Kerry, who served as US Secretary of State under former US President Barack Obama, claimed more than once that poverty leads to terror. We'll give the poor economic prosperity, he thought, and the level of terror will drop. If anyone thought that the Trump administration had changed direction - the "deal of the century" proves that nothing has changed.

The economic workshop, to be held this week in Bahrain, is proof. We'll give the "Palestinians" economic prosperity, says Jared Kushner, who leads the Trump administration's peace deal staff, and the level of enmity will drop.

Both Kerry and Kushner, along with many others, should know that this is an illusion. The poor in Africa do not choose terror. There are millions of poor people in Nigeria. They don't choose terror. And among the "Palestinians" as well, those who choose violence are not necessarily poor.

The city of Shechem (Nablus) has enjoyed relative prosperity in recent years, thanks to the buying power of Israeli Arabs. Has it changed anything for Zakaria Zubeidi? After all, in recent years he has enjoyed status and is well-to-do financially. But he went back to terror. Because the brainwashing and incitement are a lot stronger than the options of money and prosperity. All the mass terror attacks in the US were carried out by successful, middle-class Muslim youth. Did any of that prevent them from choosing terror?

The biggest obstacle to achieving peace was and remains the fantasy of a "Palestinian right of return," which are supported by not insignificant portions of academia, the media, and the Israeli and global Left. In this sense, the anti-Israel campaigns are not promoting peace. They are preventing it. In order to advance towards peace, we need to look the "Palestinians" in the eye. They'll act like adults the moment we treat them like adults. Anyone who walks around campuses around the world and turns Israel into a criminal is someone who encourages their fantasies, someone who is funding UNRWA, someone who is cultivates the illusion of return - and someone who is perpetuating the problem.

It's difficult, very difficult, to wean an entire community off illusions. After all, the "forces of progress" cultivate illusions. It's a lot easier to invite people to a workshop in Bahrain. Kerry's mistake was in his theory regarding poverty and terror. Kushner, it's sad to see, is repeating that exact same mistake.

The full article was published in the Yediot Ahronot newspaper.

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.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Question. Why Is the Palestinian Authority Opposed to the Upcoming Economic Conference in Bahrain? by Pinchas Inbari

The Bahrain assembly needs to inform the “Palestinian leadership” that the “Arab masses” have other troubles, and they are no longer interested in the Palestinians.

Bahrain skyline (Eduard Marmet/Flickr)

Pinhas Inbari..
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs..
10 June '19..
Link: http://jcpa.org/why-is-the-palestinian-authority-opposed-to-the-upcoming-economic-conference-in-bahrain/

The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Labor is currently busy slandering Israel to international labor organizations by accusing it of robbing the rights of Palestinians working within Israel proper. This is outrageous, because they should be thanking Israel for taking security risks by employing citizens of the Palestinian Authority, for whom the failing Palestinian Authority is unable or does not want to. Furthermore, this reveals why the Palestinian Authority is so opposed to the upcoming economic conference to be held in Manama, capital of Bahrain, at the end of June.

The framework of the United Nations organization includes most of the international organizations that have an automatic majority against Israel. By strengthening this context, the PLO gains a compelling solution that could obligate Israel to accept positions that it cannot normally agree upon, such as on the 1967 borders or the refugee question.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman’s recent remarks on Israeli claims in Judea and Samaria only intensified Palestinian concerns regarding the loss of a primary lever for putting pressure on Israel, specifically, the United Nations and the international organizations connected with it.

The conference in Manama is a regional framework that is outside the parameters of the United Nations. Therefore, Palestinian participation in it would be tantamount to an admission that the PLO’s United Nations strategy has failed.

Palestinian Authority orders schools not to meet with pro-peace Bahrainis - by Elder of Ziyon

...This is how Palestinians treat fellow Arabs who make it clear that that they simply want peace. This is about as clear an indication as you can find as to which side actually wants peace and which side wants to use the word "peace" as a synonym for never ending conflict.

Elder of Ziyon..
11 December '17..

From Times of Israel:

A delegation of religious figures from the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain arrived in Israel this week “in order to send a message of peace,” in an extremely rare instance of representatives from an Arab country without diplomatic relations visiting the Jewish state.

The trip seemed to signal a further warming of ties between Israel and Bahrain, which a report earlier this year said are on a path to normalizing diplomatic relations.

The delegation, which is made up of 24 members of the “This is Bahrain” group — which on its website heralds a commitment to a vision of “religious freedom and peaceful co-existence where we all live together in harmony in the spirit of mutual respect and love” — is in Israel for a four-day visit meant to send a message of religious tolerance and coexistence.

“The king sent us with a message of peace to the whole world,” a Shiite cleric on the trip told Hadashot TV news, which aired a report on Saturday about the group.

That's a big story in itself.

But just as big is that the Palestinian Authority is so anti-peace that they are arranging protests against the Bahrainis.

(Continue to Full Post)

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.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Bahraini Moral Clarity versus the ‘Al-Aqsa in Danger’ Myth

...Thus while figures as diverse as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and former British minister Sayeeda Warsi have implicitly justified the synagogue killing, and thereby encouraged more such crimes, by trying to paint it as morally equivalent to Jews visiting the Temple Mount the Bahraini foreign minister is trying to quench the flames by stating unequivocally that there’s never any excuse for killing worshippers at a house of prayer. For nobody understands the dangerous consequences of doing so better than Muslims elsewhere in the Middle East, who, unlike their Israeli-protected Palestinian brethren, have all too frequently been the victims of such killings.

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary Magazine..
19 November '14..

The most surprising response to yesterday’s deadly attack on worshippers at a Jerusalem synagogue came from the Bahraini foreign minister. “It is forbidden to react to the crimes of the Israeli occupation against our brothers in Palestine by killing innocents in a house of prayer,” Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa reportedly wrote on his Arabic-language Twitter feed. “Those who will pay the price for the crime of killing innocents in a Jewish synagogue and for welcoming the crime are the Palestinian people.”

For a senior Arab official to publicly condemn the killing of Jews by Muslims at all–much less with such moral clarity, devoid of any attempt to create a false equivalence to Israeli “crimes–is so unusual that it cries out for explanation. And the most likely explanation lies in the violence that has swept the Middle East in recent years. In a world where Muslim innocents are being killed in houses of prayer on a regular basis by fellow Muslims, mosques in Israel and the West Bank–including Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque–remain among the safest places in the Mideast for Muslims to pray. And the Arab world’s pragmatic axis, of which Bahrain is part, has no interest in seeing that change.

In August, for instance, Shi’ite gunmen opened fire in a Sunni mosque in Iraq, killing at least 73 people. In October, a suicide bomber killed at least 18 people at a Shi’ite mosque in Iraq. Those are just two of the dozens of deadly mosque attacks in recent years that have killed thousands of Muslims in numerous countries, including Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, India, and Nigeria. Almost all the perpetrators were fellow Muslims–usually Shi’ites or Sunnis attacking each other’s institutions.

By contrast, Israel and the West Bank are safe havens. True, there have been some vandalistic attacks on mosques–though far fewer than in, say, Holland. But there hasn’t been a lethal attack on a mosque in two decades. Indeed, for all the Palestinians’ efforts to libel Jewish visits to the Temple Mount as “attacks” on Al-Aqsa, anyone who’s been paying attention realizes that mosques elsewhere in the Muslim world have been suffering far worse fates than innocuous Jewish visitors.

Granted, both the Palestinians themselves and many Westerners are too fixated on the Palestinian cause to care; recent Jewish visits to the Mount have generated far more uproar in the West than lethal mosque attacks elsewhere ever have. But the pragmatic Arab states, as I’ve written before, are quite aware that Israel is the least of their problems, and they’d rather it stay that way.