Not only legally incorrect, but morally incoherent and racist - by Richard L. Cravatts

...in fact, Professor Stone observed that those enemies of Israel who point to the Fourth Geneva Convention as evidence of Israel’s abuse of international law and wish to use it to end the settlements are not only legally incorrect, but morally incoherent and racist. Stone suggested that in order to recognize the validity of using the Fourth Convention against Israel, one “would have to say that the effect of Article . . . is to impose an obligation on the state of Israel to ensure (by force if necessary) that these areas, despite their millennial association with Jewish life, shall be forever judenrein.”

Richard L. Cravatts..
Frontpagemag.com..
26 December '16..
Link: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265264/defective-law-and-morality-un-security-council-richard-l-cravatts

The shameful and morally incoherent December 23rd resolution vote by the UN Security Council demanding that “Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem,” also includes dangerous language that proclaims that Israeli settlements, which are “dangerously imperiling the viability of the two-state solution,” have “no legal validity.”

The United States, contrary to its customary role, abstained from the vote, which passed by a vote of 14 in favor out of 15 countries, and this departure marks in a new low in the U.S.’s relations with Israel, even though the State Department under President Obama has, during the last eight years, promiscuously referred to the Israeli settlements as “unhelpful,” “obstructions to peace,” and “illegitimate.”

The problem with this defective diplomacy, as is often the case when Israel is concerned, is that operates in what commentator Melanie Phillips has called “a world turned upside down,” where the perennial victim status of the long-­suffering Palestinians trumps any sovereign rights of Israel regarding its borders, security, and even its survival in a sea of jihadist foes who yearn for its destruction. The settlement debate has now also been hijacked by the Arab world and its Western apologists who, willingly blind to history, international law, and fact, continue to assign the blame for the absence of peace on the perceived offenses of occupation and Israeli truculence. As a result of this latest UN resolution, even those Jewish Jerusalem neighborhoods which everyone has agreed would be folded into Israel upon the creation of a Palestinian state can now be deemed “illegal” and their inhabitants criminal trespassers; more grotesquely, the Western Wall and Temple Mount can now be considered “occupied” Palestinian sites.

It is, of course, completely fallacious to overlook the fact that not only all of the land that is current­-day Israel, but also Gaza and the West Bank, is part of the land granted to the Jews as part of the League of Nations Palestine Mandate, which recognized the right of the Jewish people to “close settlement” in a portion of those territories gained after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. According to Eugene V. Rostow, the late legal scholar and one of the authors of UN Security Council Resolution 242 written after the 1967 war to outline peace negotiations, “the Jewish right of settlement in Palestine west of the Jordan River, that is, in Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, was made unassailable. That right has never been terminated and cannot be terminated except by a recognized peace between Israel and its neighbors,” something which Israel’s intransigent Arab neighbors have never seemed prepared to do.

Moreover, Rostow contended, “The Jewish right of settlement in the West Bank is conferred by the same provisions of the Mandate under which Jews settled in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem before the State of Israel was created,” and “the Jewish right of settlement in the area is equivalent in every way to the right of the existing Palestinian population to live there.” The Six Day War of 1967, in which Israel recaptured Gaza and the West Bank, including Jerusalem, resulted in Israel being cast in another perfidious role—in addition to colonial usurper of Arab land, the Jewish state became a brutal “occupier” of Arab Palestine, lands to which the Jews presumably had no right and now occupied, in the opinion of many in the international community, illegally.

When did the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem become Palestinian land? The answer is: never. In fact, when Israel acquired the West Bank and Gaza and other territory in the defensive war 1967 after being attacked by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, the Jewish state gained legally-recognized title to those areas. In Israel’s 1948 war of independence, Egypt, it will be recalled, illegally annexed Gaza at the same time Jordan illegally annexed the West Bank—actions that were not recognized by most of the international community as legitimate in establishing their respective sovereignties.

Is it legitimate for the Palestinians to ask for a Jew-free state?

...While it may not be entirely apt, ethnic cleansing is definitely part of the story. Jews lived throughout what would later be called the West Bank until its conquest by Jordan in 1949. The Jordanians expelled every single Jew from the area they controlled. Unlike the flight of Arabs from Israel, the purge was clearly coercive, by the fact that not one Jew was left in the Jordanian occupied territory. This expulsion was clearly ethnic cleansing, and indeed it left the area clean.

Eugene Kontorovich..
Tabletmag.com..
15 September '16..

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provoked a storm of diplomatic disapproval last week, when he pointed out that “the Palestinian Authority actually demands a Palestinian state with one precondition: no Jews.” The Obama Administration responded that it is “inappropriate” to speak of demands for a removal of settlers in such terms. Removing the settlers, Netanyahu’s critics say, is natural and appropriate: their presence in a Palestinian state would cause tension and problems, and in any case, they should not have been there in the first place.

While it is not surprising that the head of the U.N. was unhappy with Netanyahu’s remarks, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, also joined in. But neither actually addressed the central issue that Netanyahu raised: why it is legitimate for the Palestinians to ask for a Jew-free state?

(Continue to Full Article)

Eugene Kontorovich is a professor at Northwestern University School of Law, and the head of the International Law Department at the Kohelet Policy Forum.

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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Ethnic Cleansing—Why Bibi was quite right but also dangerously wrong

Netanyahu is right to excoriate Palestinians’ demand to purge Jews as ethnic cleansing, but what are the perils entailed in them dropping that demand?

Martin Sherman..
Into the Fray/Israelvoice.org..
15 September '16..

…the Palestinian leadership actually demands a Palestinian state with one precondition: no Jews! There’s a phrase for that. It’s called ethnic cleansing. And this demand is outrageous. What is even more outrageous is that the world doesn’t find this outrageous. Some otherwise enlightened countries even promote this outrage.

– Benjamin Netanyahu, September 9, 2016

Late last Friday, the Prime Minister’s office—for no immediately obvious reason—released a video, in which Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the frequently raised demand by the Palestinians, that any future state of theirs must be devoid of Jews, as “Ethnic Cleansing”.

Incandescent response

The video produced an incandescent response from the Obama administration. Thus, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau berated Netanyahu in a Washington press conference last Friday. Disapprovingly, she proclaimed: “We obviously strongly disagree with the characterization that those who oppose settlement activity or view it as an obstacle to peace are somehow calling for ethnic cleansing of Jews from the West Bank,” She added tartly: “We believe that using that type of terminology is inappropriate and unhelpful.”

“Strongly disagree”, “inappropriate”, “unhelpful” is about as barbed and caustic as formal niceties of protocol allow diplomatic rebukes to get—especially when the target of the censure is, allegedly, a close ally.

(Read 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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Advocating for a Jew-free Palestine is not a move to promote peaceful co-existence - by Anne Bayefsky

...The State Department went on offense because they have no defense. Playing the settlements card and advocating for a Jew-free Palestine is not a move to promote peaceful co-existence. It’s an intrinsic part of a 67-year old xenophobic attempt to wipe the only Jewish state off the map. Truth ought to be more “helpful” than lies.

Anne Bayefsky..
info@humanrightsvoices.org
14 September '16..

The Obama administration is furious about Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s recent objection to Palestinian plans for a state with “no Jews.” In a video posted on September 9, 2016, Netanyahu made the obvious comments that the Palestinian effort to purge all Jews from the West Bank amounts to “ethnic-cleansing” and “ethnic cleansing for peace is absurd.” The State Department responded by shooting the messenger, calling Netanyahu’s remarks “inappropriate and unhelpful.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas makes no secret about Palestinian intentions. As he boasted to the interim Egyptian President while on a visit to Cairo in July 2013: “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli – civilian or soldier – on our lands.”

The State Department’s reaction to Netanyahu opens a window into the nature of modern antisemitism, as well as possible Obama plans to drive a permanent wedge between Israel and the United States via the Security Council before he leaves office.

Simultaneously with promoting a Jew-free state, Palestinians routinely accuse Israel of “ethnic cleansing.” A mere two days after the State Department’s scolding of Netanyahu, on September 11, 2016, Abbas crowed that Israel “is advancing settlement construction, ethnic cleansing, premeditated killings and violation of holy sites, turning it into an object of criticism across the entire world.”

The ethnic-cleansing mantra is frequently accompanied by Palestinian charges of ‘apartheid,’ ‘racism,’ and ‘Judaization.’ The common thread of such hate speech is that the facts are irrelevant. Nearly two million Arabs live in Israel with more freedoms than in any Arab state.

Moreover, the ethnic-cleansing libel is really not about “settlements.” It is made in order to shatter the legitimacy of a Jewish state, period – often by shamefully appropriating Jewish history. Here is Abbas at the UN’s annual Palestinian Solidarity Day on November 29, 2012: “The Palestinian people miraculously recovered from the ashes of Al-Nakba of 1948, which was intended to extinguish their being… in one of the most dreadful campaigns of ethnic cleansing and dispossession in modern history.” The same statement was repeated by Palestinian UN ambassador Riyadh Mansour as recently as May 15, 2016.”

Where Ethnic Cleansing Is Permissible - by Jonathan S. Tobin

...In any other conflict, we would label the Palestinian demand for the removal of Jewish communities (or those of any other group) with the same words used by Netanyahu: ethnic cleansing. But when it comes to Jews living in their ancient homeland, the rules are different, and bigotry is not only accepted but also supported.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
13 September '16..
Link: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/ethnic-cleansing-palestine-israel/

As far as the Palestinians, the Israeli left, and the Obama administration are concerned, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gone too far. In a video released by his office last week, the prime minister claimed that what the Palestinians were really after in their quest to force the removal of Israeli settlements in the West Bank was the “ethnic cleansing” of Jews. The Palestinian Authority responded angrily that they had nothing against Jews but what they wanted was the end of the Israeli “occupation.”

The U.S. State Department agreed with Netanyahu’s critics, saying there was no connection between opposition to settlements and bigotry. Washington thinks the issue is the need to advance a two-state solution. To frame the discussion as one about the right of Jews to live in the West Bank is, to Obama’s administration, irrelevant. But the problem with the State Department’s view of the issue—which was criticized by the Donald Trump campaign—is that it’s clear that a two-state solution means a Palestinian state that would be only for Arabs alongside an Israel in which an Arab minority enjoys full legal rights, as they do today.

On this point, there is some argument. Netanyahu can point to statements such as one made by PA leader Mahmoud Abbas in 2013. “In a final resolution,” Abbas told Egyptian journalists, “we would not see the presence of a single Israeli—civilian or soldier—on our lands.” Apologists for the Palestinians point to other comments made by various Palestinian leaders—almost always to Western audiences or journalists rather than in Arabic to their own people—in which they say Jews would enjoy equal rights in a state of Palestine.

Which view of Palestinian intentions is correct?

Given the drumbeat of incitement to hatred of Jews and Israelis heard and read in Palestinian media and in their schools, it is hard to argue, as some critics of Netanyahu do, that Jews wouldn’t be at risk in their state. The wave of Palestinian violence known as the “stabbing intifada” is rooted in a religious-based rage against the Jewish presence throughout the country. That includes the “settlements” of Tel Aviv and Haifa that are within the 1967 borders and not just the West Bank and Jerusalem. The primary reason Israel withdrew every settler and soldier when it evacuated Gaza in 2005 is the certainty that Jews whose lives would depend on the mercy of the Palestinians would be as good as dead. Indeed, deprived of the opportunity to attack individual Jews after the Israelis withdrew, Palestinian mobs vented their rage on the abandoned buildings the Jews left behind, including the greenhouses that had been purchased by well-meaning philanthropists for use by the Arab population.

There will be no ethnic cleansing here, whether we're talking about Jews or Arabs, right?

...Before we become angry at the nations of the world, we should hold ourselves to the same standard. The people from the camp that opposes the path of the current government should take a look at the peace platform they are so proud of and remove the question mark once and for all: There will be no ethnic cleansing here, whether we're talking about Jews or Arabs. Let the intellectuals and the writers stand up and announce that they will lie down in front of trucks that try to cleanse Judea and Samaria, or any other place, of Jews.

Dr. Gabi Avital..
Israel Hayom..
12 September '16..
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=17167

Has the enlightened thinking of the West, of which we were notified after the two world wars, become so muddled? This, of course, is about the impulsive responses from White House and EU spokespeople to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's remarks that the Palestinian Authority is seeking "ethnic cleansing" of the Jews living in Judea and Samaria.

I read and listened to what Netanyahu said. I wanted to make sure it was no mirage. Neither is a dramatic faux pas. These are simply statements by the prime minister of a country embroiled in an ongoing conflict that, on the one hand, point out the reasoning behind an absolute refusal to carry out an ethnic cleansing of Jews alone, and, on the other, show a desire for broad-based coexistence and cooperation between Jews and Arabs.

If I let my imagination run away with me, I might expect U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to get the peace plane ready and presidents and royalty to stand at the doors of their own aircraft and wave excitedly at the prospect of the peace and coexistence they dream of. After all, what is more heartening than a vision of young Jews and Arabs studying side by side, both sides working together, a state dedicated to equality, and the thought that both peoples can live together after all?

I imagine that Americans, who on Sunday stood for memorial ceremonies honoring the 9/11 victims, were asking themselves, "Why did educated, well-off Saudi terrorists attack us at the World Trade Center, a symbol of universality? We didn't occupy anything, and we certainly haven't carried out ethnic cleansing." And then the criticism by the State Department would follow.

We need to go back and ask ourselves what these spokespeople's motives are and whom they represent that they can clearly support the ethnic cleansing of Jews. The Jewish sages defined it well: A sculptor sculpts in his own image. It's very easy to talk about how "ethnic cleansing" is a dangerous, fateful pair of words, while at the same time putting it into action against Jews. Black on white, like a mirror held up to the enlightened faces of those who hate wars and long for peace.

Netanyahu and the ‘otherwise enlightened’ - Caroline Glick

...Like every other national, religious, ethnic, racial and other group in the world, Jews have the right to exercise their civil rights to property. And if the Palestinians and their “otherwise enlightened” supporters don’t like it, that’s their problem, not ours.

Caroline Glick..
Opinion/JPost..
12 September '16..
Link: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Benjamin-Netanyahu-and-the-otherwise-enlightened-467554

Sometimes, nothing is more infuriating than the truth.

On Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu infuriated the Obama administration when he told the truth about the nature of the internationally supported Palestinian demand that Israel must transfer control over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians Jew-free.

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In a video address posted to his Facebook page at around dawn Washington time, Netanyahu said, “The Palestinian leadership... demands a Palestinians state with one precondition: No Jews.

“There’s a phrase for that. It’s called ‘ethnic cleansing.’ And this demand is outrageous.”

Netanyahu then turned his fire on the so-called international community that supports this bigoted demand.

“It’s even more outrageous that the world doesn’t find this outrageous,” he said, adding, “Some otherwise enlightened countries even promote this outrage.”

Later that day, Associated Press correspondent Matt Lee asked US State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau what the administration thought of Netanyahu’s statement.

Apparently turning to a prepared text, Trudeau declaimed robotically and emphatically, “We obviously strongly disagree with the characterization that those who oppose settlement activity or view it as an obstacle to peace are somehow calling for ethnic cleansing of Jews from the West Bank.

“We believe that using that type of terminology is inappropriate and unhelpful....

We share the view of every past US administration and the strong consensus of the international community that ongoing settlement activity is an obstacle to peace. We continue to call on both sides to demonstrate with actions and policies a genuine commitment to the two-state solution.”

The only thing missing from Trudeau’s response was an explanation of why Netanyahu was wrong. She didn’t explain, nor was she asked, how the US’s opposition to Israel’s respect for Jewish Israelis’ property rights in these areas squares with her denial that its policy supports ethnic cleansing.

To make this point a bit more clearly, here are a few questions that Trudeau was neither asked nor explained on her own, but whose answers are self-evident from the administration’s apoplectic response to every move by Israel to permit Jews to lawfully build homes in Judea, Samaria and unified Jerusalem.

Good Question. Why Does the State Department Endorse Palestinian Fight to Exclude Jews?

...The reason is that their goal is to create a Jew free state whose purpose will be to perpetuate the conflict against Israel, not end it. The state they envision will be, as I wrote last week, the true apartheid state in the Middle East in which parts of Jerusalem will become legal no go zones for Jews in much the same way, white South Africans made it illegal for blacks to live in parts of their own country. It is exactly for this perverted vision that Palestinians are taking to the streets to lob lethal weapons at Jews while the State Department treats the perpetrators as innocent victims and the actual victims as aggressors. That is the racism that the U.S. is endorsing by making an issue of Jews building in Jerusalem.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
27 October '14..

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu made headlines around the world again today with his assertion in the Knesset that he will defend the right of Jews to live in any part of his country’s capital. The statement and the expedited plans to build 1,000 new apartments in Jerusalem is drawing the usual condemnations from the international community as both an unnecessary provocation and a new obstacle to Middle East peace. But what Israel’s critics are missing is that the threats and actual violence coming from Palestinians about Jewish homes, is the best indicator that the sort of mutual coexistence that is essential to peace is currently not in the cards.

As the New York Times reports:

“If Israel wants to live in a peaceful society, they need to take steps that will reduce tensions,” Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, told reporters in a briefing. “Moving forward with this sort of action would be incompatible with the pursuit of peace.”

The Israeli move is being blasted as yet another example of Netanyahu worsening the already tense relationship between Israel and the United States. But Psaki’s willingness to jump on Netanyahu after repeatedly refusing in the last week to condemn statements from Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas in which he openly incited violence against Israelis, the State Department stand could easily be interpreted as an implicit approval of the PA position.

If so, then it should be understood that what the United States is doing here is saying that Palestinians are in the right when they demand that Jews be kept out of certain parts of Jerusalem. But far from disturbing the peace, the idea of building new apartments in existing Jewish neighborhoods in the city or moving into mixed or Arab majority areas not only repudiates the formula of territorial swaps that President Obama has repeatedly endorsed but also reinforces the notion that the Palestinian state that the State Department envisions will be one in which no Jew is allowed to live. That means the U.S. is backing a vision of a Palestinian apartheid state that is itself incompatible with any notion of peace and rationalizing the recent wave of Arab violence against Jewish targets in Jerusalem.

Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestine Is the Real Apartheid State

...Were Israel to ban Arabs from moving into homes they owned in West Jerusalem, it would prompt an international outcry and condemnations from the United States. But instead America condemns Jews who move into Arab neighborhoods and stays silent when Abbas seeks to treat those who sell to Jews as criminals. Instead of the Jewish home buying in Jerusalem being an obstacle to peace as Israel’s critics claim, it is the Arab attempt to criminalize selling to a Jew that best illustrates why peace is not yet possible.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
22 October '14..

In recent weeks, critics of Israel have been crying foul over the fact that Jews have moved into some apartments in East Jerusalem neighborhoods. The fact that the homes were legally purchased and that the new residents were merely attempting to reside in the country’s as-yet-undivided capital was seen as irrelevant since the presence of Jews in Arab-majority areas is considered to be an obstacle to a potential partition of the city should a peace agreement with the Palestinians ever be signed. But even if we were to concede that such moves do infuriate Arabs, surely no one, not even Israel’s most adamant opponents, would be comfortable with laws that banned the presence of Jews in parts of Jerusalem or anywhere else. Right? Wrong.

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas reacted to the fact that Jews have bought homes from Palestinians in parts of Jerusalem by vowing to toughen existing PA laws that forbid such sales. Yes, that’s right. In “Palestine”—be it the existing PA or Hamas states or the future independent Palestinian state that Europe is so eager to recognize even without it having to make peace with Israel—it is against the law to sell land or a home to a Jew.

The question of whether Jews should move into majority Arab neighborhoods or towns is a question of judgment. Let’s ignore for the moment the fact that the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected any peace deal that would give them an independent state and a share of Jerusalem since it would require them to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn. It is possible to argue that the two communities are better off living separately. But voluntary separation is one thing, legal restrictions on the right of Jews to live in some areas is something very different.

After all, in the State of Israel, which is routinely and falsely accused of being an “apartheid state,” Arabs may live where they please. When some areas have tried to restrict sales of property to Arabs, Israel’s courts have ruled that this is inconsistent with the principles enunciated in the country’s basic laws. While Israel is not a perfect society and the Arab minority faces challenges that are often rooted in the century-old war over the land, the principle of equality before the law for all citizens is upheld.

But in “Palestine,” not only are there no courts or government to prevent individuals or groups from discriminating, but there it is the government itself that both promulgates and ruthlessly enforces such bias.

Sorry Folks, But Jew-Free Jerusalem Neighborhoods Won’t Bring Peace

...It wasn’t settlements that stopped them from grabbing independence but the fact that recognizing the legitimacy of a Jewish no matter where its borders are drawn was still anathema in their political culture. Indeed, when Hamas, which commands the support of the majority of Palestinians and far more than the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas, speaks of the “occupation,” they are not referring to the West Bank but to all of pre-1967 Israel.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
03 October '14..

At first it seemed as if Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu escaped his meeting in the White House with President Obama yesterday without a renewal of their long running feud. But before the day was over, it was clear that the administration’s predilection for picking pointless fights with the Israelis hasn’t faded away even as the president appears to be more interested in fighting ISIS than in brokering Middle East peace. By focusing once again on Jewish building in Jerusalem and representing Israel’s actions as an obstacle, the U.S. was not only allowing itself to be distracted from the real problems in the Middle East. By reaffirming its opposition to Jews living in part of their capital, the Americans are also adopting a standard that will make real peace impossible.

As Eugene Kontorovich wrote earlier today, the willingness of the Obama administration to use the essentially deceptive terminology of marginal Israeli left-wing groups about settlements distorts the discussion. If you count every apartment built as a “new settlement” you get the impression that Israel is building hundreds, if not thousands of new neighborhoods and towns every year. In fact all they are doing is building homes in existing Jewish communities, the vast majority of which are located in areas that would, even under the parameters that have been suggested by the Obama administration, remain inside Israel even in the event of a peace treaty with the Palestinians.

But the arguments raised yesterday by the administration about new Jewish homes in Jerusalem—which echoed widespread condemnation of these projects by most of the international community—is troubling for more than just the usual reasons. If President Obama and his State Department truly believe that the presence of Jews in some neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem is an obstacle to peace that must be removed in order for an accord to be reached, then what they are doing is tacitly endorsing an Arab demand for Jew-free zones in the ancient capital as well as a Judenrein Palestine.

Judenrein, Judenfrei, everything is fine and dandy

...Behind a façade of enlightened sympathy for the Arab side, the international community and our Left in essence treat Arabs as an immature, petulant aggregate of primitives who cannot be counted upon to behave sensibly but must be conciliated with endless gifts. The trouble is that it doesn’t work.

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
09 August '13..

In practically two post-Oslo decades, Ramallah’s negotiators haven’t budged a fraction of a millimeter from their initial positions. In that span of unfortunate time, Israel had continually slipped back and now accedes to what would have been unthinkable for our mainstream in 1993.

The current two-state sine qua non – an ostensibly indispensable and unquestionable ingredient of any just Mideast deal – would have been a clear non-starter in Israeli public discourse pre-Oslo. But recurrent concerted assaults – both from overseas and from our domestic left-wing – on the very cornerstones of what were Israel’s self-evident truths, left us shaken and demoralized.

As a result, the traumatized citizenry began rationalizing the deviations from our fundamental postulates as feasible moves towards a doable peace. Israel’s Left pulled our entire political arena fitfully ever farther leftward. The more its predictions crashed against the hard wall of reality, the more the fantasy-merchants insisted that their premise wasn’t wrong but that we just didn’t give in enough.

Due to leftist dominance in the media, academia and judiciary, this became conventional wisdom. Not only did the Likud’s own Binyamin Netanyahu have to declaim allegiance to the two-state notion but he internalized the principle that Israel must always buy off even a modicum of the Palestinian authority’s cooperation, whereas the PA need do no more than appear reluctantly semi-mollified for the short haul – until it ups the ante.

Israel was obliged to release some of the most heinous terrorist murderers – all duly convicted – to pay for Ramallah’s participation in the apparent restart of negotiations. Down the line, we’ll doubtless have to fork more out lest Mahmoud Abbas and his honchos walk out in a huff and blame us for it. One concession leads to another in an endless chain of extortion.

Behind a façade of enlightened sympathy for the Arab side, the international community and our Left in essence treat Arabs as an immature, petulant aggregate of primitives who cannot be counted upon to behave sensibly but must be conciliated with endless gifts.

The trouble is that it doesn’t work.

In a lengthy September 14, 2001 interview in Ha’aretz, ex-premier Ehud Barak’s ultra-dovish foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami ruminated on the desperate peace-drive of 2000-2001 that began in Stockholm, continued in Camp David and expired ignominiously in Taba. It failed miserably despite Barak’s egregious territorial generosity.

Ben-Ami concluded that the Palestinians aren’t interested in a two state solution, that this becomes “a mega-camouflage to exert pressure on Israel… More than Palestinians desire their own state, they seek to delegitimize our state… The Left mustn’t ignore what we discovered – the very rejection of our right to exist.”

Abbas' Nazi Rhetoric - Where's the Coverage?

SC..
CAMERA Snapshots..
01 August '13..

Just as this week’s preliminary negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs got underway in Washington, across the globe in Cairo, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas laid out his vision for the end result:

“In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli – civilian or soldier – on our lands,” Abbas said in a briefing to mostly Egyptian journalists.

This was reported by Reuters, UPI and made its way into The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and other media outlets. This is good as far as it goes.

But what about the implication of such a statement? The statement – and the idea behind it – is so blatantly racist, that it’s hard to believe only a few media outlets have mentioned the real meaning. Giulio Meotti writes in Arutz Sheva:

This is not “peace”, but pure Nazism, it is ethnic cleansing. And instead of the expression “final resolution”, Abbas should have said what he really means, “final solution”.

Addressing a session of Arab League in Doha, Qatar, Abbas in 2011 declared that “when an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital is established, we won’t allow the presence of one Israeli in it”.

A Palestinian Arab State on Western Eretz Israel would be “jüdenrein”, or cleansed of Jews. A state founded on the ethnic cleansing of every single Jewish man, woman and child.

No one should be surprised by Abbas’ sentiments. CAMERA has reported on Abbas’ Nazi sympathies and media analyst Tom Gross wrote about this subject ten years ago:

Abbas - Arabs in Israel With a Judenrein Palestine

...If Palestinians are determined to create an independent state where there are no Jews, why then are they so afraid of agreeing that their neighbors will be a Jewish state? The reason for this is no mystery. More than any compromise on borders, accepting Israel as a Jewish state would be an open acknowledgement that the conflict is finished.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
30 July '13..

While in Cairo yesterday to meet with Egypt’s new leaders, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas let drop a few remarks about the peace negotiations with Israel that began in Washington last night. As the Times of Israel reports, Abbas left no doubt about what his vision of peace entails:

“In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli — civilian or soldier — on our lands,” Abbas said following a meeting with interim Egyptian President Adly Mansour in Cairo.

The statement provoked little comment in the Western press, and no wonder. Most of the mainstream media has long accepted the Palestinian formulation that sees the presence of Israelis in the West Bank and Jerusalem as the primary obstacle to peace with the Palestinians. From this frame of reference, the peace equation is simple. No Israelis in Palestine means the conflict disappears. Therefore the sole object of peace negotiations is to leverage Israelis out of the areas that were illegally occupied by Jordan from 1948 to 1967.

But the problem here is not just that this is an absurd distortion of reality that ignores Jewish rights and security needs. The Abbas statement provides some important context for the key Israeli demand that the Palestinians refuse to accept: PA acknowledgement of the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state. If Palestinians think there is something racist about Israel being accepted as the sole Jewish state in the world, why is it OK for them to envision an independent state of their own where Jewish communities would have to be destroyed and their inhabitants be evicted?

A Judea and Samaria Quiz from Yisrael Medad

"...But the PLO rejected it, just as the Arabs rejected Peel, Unscop and so much else as well. The reason is very clear. The PLO is not really interested in a mini-State on the West Bank, except as a preliminary to the ultimate extinction of what it calls the "Zionist entity" itself. It means what it says. There is no reason to disbelieve it.

Yisrael Medad..
My Right Word..
03 July '13..




Who declared

Whatever the legal ownership, I see no reason why the West Bank as a whole should be regarded as Judenrein. The whole of Transjordan was deliberately kept free of Jews by the British, and has been so ever since.

If Jews wish to live in the historic areas of Judea and Samaria from which so much of their civilisation sprang, I see no reason why they should not do so. But that is not to determine the eventual status of the area. That remains to be settled in the context of an overall peace settlement in accordance with Security Council resolution 242.

Possible Answers:

a) Yassir Arafat

b) Saeb Erekat

c) Raad Salah

d) Barack Obama

e) Menachem Begin

f) Vladimir Putin

g) Pope Francis

Real Answer.

Who?

Neumann - Dismantling the ‘settlement’ delusion

Jonathan Neumann..
The Times of Israel..
22 April '12..

Whether from the administration of President Obama or from the pen of Peter Beinart, all one seems to hear is that ‘‘the settlements’’ are the problem. The administration believes that freezing the growth of these communities of Israelis in Judea and Samaria is a prerequisite for negotiations, an interpretation of the conflict that dovetails with Beinart’s and that concludes that their ultimate removal is the very route to peace.

In the meantime, and relatedly, these communities erode Israel’s democratic character, for, as far as Beinart and Peace Now are concerned, the Israel ‘‘beyond the Green Line’’ — the arbitrary armistice border of 1949 — is ‘‘nondemocratic,’’ and this cancer is preying on ‘‘democratic’’ Israel on the other side of the armistice line. As long as, for illustration, the city of Ariel, in Samaria, is considered ‘‘the heart of our country’’ by Prime Minister Netanyahu, Israeli democracy itself is imperilled and a lasting peace settlement is impossible.

However, an honest consideration of realities on the ground recommends a different conclusion. To begin with, all residents of Judea and Samaria, whether Jewish or Arab, have voting rights: the Jews for the Knesset and the Arabs for the Palestinian Authority. That the different leaderships afford them unequal freedoms is no more Israel’s fault than that Arabs across the Middle East seem to prefer electing illiberal governments.

Meotti - Arab racism prevents peace

Giulio Meotti..
Israel Opinion/Ynet..
04 April '12..

The invisible headlines go beyond the settlers who bought a house near Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs. The real story is not about home ownership; rather, it's at the very core of the Mideastern conflict.

While Israel is not “Arabrein” (Jewish citizens live with their fellow Arab citizens and neither they nor anyone else suggests they are “an obstacle to peace”), a Nazi-like ideology sees the entire State of Israel as an alien presence among Islamic nations, an undesirable island in an Arab sea that must ultimately be submerged.

This is the real apartheid, which is supported by the West and which emerges from President Barack Obama’s de-legitimization of Jerusalem’s post-1967 neighborhoods.

The concept of removing a religious or ethnic community from a certain region brings back the worst memories of World War II, yet has become mainstream when it is applied to a part of the land of Israel. The scandal is epitomized by the fate of the Arabs who sold houses and land to the Jews. By now, dozens of Arabs have been murdered for selling their homes to Jews.

Wolfe - Settlements Are the Issue

Robert Wolfe
New English Review
(August 2011)
H/T Rick Richman

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/93385/sec_id/93385

You often hear defenders of the Netanyahu government say, in opposition to demands for a settlement freeze, “Settlements are not the issue. The issue is the Palestinian refusal to accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.” The unspoken subtext behind this argument is that if only the Palestinians would accept the existence of Israel, the issue of the settlements could easily be resolved, with Israel retaining some and abandoning others. And it is certainly true that the Palestinians have never accepted the existence of Israel and have always found one pretext or another to avoid a peaceful resolution of the conflict, but even if the Palestinians would formally accept the Jewish state, it is far from clear that a compromise on the question of settlements is either possible or desirable.

In the first place, although some Palestinian negotiators have given the impression that they would accept Israeli retention of the large settlement blocs in return for the surrender of some Israeli territory elsewhere, the official Palestinian and Arab position has remained that Israel must withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines, which are invariably referred to as the “1967 borders.” When the Palestinians ask individual countries to declare their support for the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state, the boundaries of that state are always described as the “1967 borders.” All this creates the impression that one of the main reasons why the Palestinians are not interested in a negotiated settlement is precisely because they are not willing to accept the existence of any Israeli settlements, whether big or small, beyond the 1949 armistice lines. This impression is further reinforced by the repeated statements by Abbas and other Palestinian leaders that they do not intend to accept the presence of even one single Jew within the territory of their new Palestinian state.

In the second place, even if the Palestinians were willing to accept some Israeli settlements while insisting that others be dismantled, Israeli agreement to this demand would not in fact represent a compromise but rather a capitulation to Palestinian antisemitism. In return for voluntarily evicting tens of thousands of Jews from their homes, with all the attendant strife and dislocation which such a step would engender within Israeli society, Israel would receive nothing in return save a meaningless promise of future peaceful intentions. A genuine compromise on the issue of the settlements would see some placed under Israeli sovereignty and some under Palestinian sovereignty, but no one thinks in these terms because everyone knows that the Palestinians would immediately move to attack any Jewish settlements placed under their authority. While the supporters of the Palestinians rave and rant against Israel as an “apartheid state,” the Palestinians themselves loudly proclaim their refusal to permit any Jews to live under their rule. And this stance is not unique to the Palestinians but is true of the entire Arab world, where hardly any Jews now remain from what were once large communities dating back literally thousands of years.

Richman - The Heart of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Rick Richman
Commentary/Contentions
23 November '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/11/23/arab-israeli-conflict-2/#more-775516

Contentions commenter Maines Michael points us to Bat Ye’or’s incisive article in the November New English Review, entitled “The Palestinization of UNESCO” (which follows Robert Wolfe’s equally incisive article in the August NER, entitled “Settlements Are the Issue”). Taken together, the two articles cut to the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Bat Ye’or’s article focuses on the claim “that Jewish existence in its ancestral homeland, Judea and Samaria, is an ‘occupation’ – a colonization:”

In this way, Israel has become a state that is occupying its own historical homeland. In Orwellian language propagandists speak of “the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land” that is called Judea, and not of the ethnic and religious cleansing of Jews from their homeland through wars, expulsions, dispossession and the dehumanizing apartheid rule of dhimmitude.

Wolfe’s article focuses on the fact that the “settlers” in Hebron are the descendants of Jews who lived there for a very long time:

[P]rior to 1949 there were numerous Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. In particular there was a large Jewish community in Hebron which dated back to the 16th century. But in 1929, this entire community was destroyed by the Arabs and its inhabitants massacred. … So when the Palestinians now argue that Jews have no right to live anywhere beyond the 1949 armistice lines, what they are actually saying is that Jews have no right to return to areas where they were previously murdered or driven out by the Arabs.

Wolfe also observes it is “neither just nor reasonable to expect Israel to maintain Judea and Samaria in the same Judenrein condition in which the Arabs left it in 1967”:

Green-Lined - The true illegitimacy

Yisrael Medad
Green-Lined
JPost
27 October '11

http://blogs.jpost.com/content/true-illegitimacy

The JPost reports now, that US Ambassador Dan Shapiro has requested of Israel to temporarily freeze settlement construction in order to promote peace talks with the Palestinians. This request has been denied.

We should recall that earlier the United States had criticized a Likud-sponsored plan to legalize rogue settlement outposts, saying it does not recognize the "legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity", a semantic term that the Obama-led Administration has consistently hammered away at, while confusing, purposefully I can only presume, the public with a closely related other term as here in a State Department statement:

"We oppose any effort to legalize settlement outposts, which is unhelpful to our peace efforts and would contradict Israeli commitments and obligations"

There is nothing illegal in a Jewish presence in the territory international law recognized as the geographical area that was to become the reconstituted Jewish national home, especially as all decisions and agreements between 1915 and 1924, including the Anglo-American Convention and various US Congressional resolutions and Presidential signatures, never mentioned Arabs in connection with this territory. The term was always "non-Jews".

In other words, in addition to the legal opinions of the many, including Rostow, Schwebel, Baum and others such as...Madeline Albright:

Levick - The Guardian’s Chris McGreal and the moral logic of a Jew-free “Eastern” Jerusalem

Adam Levick
CiF Watch
17 October '11

Before commenting on the latest report by the Guardian’s Chris McGreal, “Israel plans new settlement of 2600 that will isolate Arab East Jerusalem“, an understanding of the designation “Arab East Jerusalem” is in order.

This isn’t, of course, a comprehensive history, but represents important context sorely lacking in the Guardian’s frequent misrepresentations about issues pertaining to Jerusalem.

Around the year 1010 B.C.E., King David made the Jerusalem the administrative capital of Israel and brought the Ark of the Covenant to the city. It is believed that David’s son, Solomon, built the first Jewish Temple as a permanent resting place for the Ark of the Covenant, a place which would become the focus of Jewish veneration from that point to the present.

In 597 B.C.E. the Babylonian army captured Jerusalem, deported thousands of Jews, and razed the city.

In 560 B.C.E., the Persians conquered “Palestine” and told the Jews they could return to their homeland, and rebuild their Temple. The Second Temple was completed in 516 B.C. Over the next 150 years Jews rebuilt Jerusalem and developed the surrounding areas.

In 332 B.C.E., the Greeks, under Alexander the Great, became Palestine’s new ruler.

In 167 B.C.E., Jews rose up and, three years later, Jerusalem was recaptured from the Greeks and the Temple restored, an event that gave birth to the holiday of Chanukah.

After 76 years, the Romans wrested control of Jerusalem and the rest of Judea from the Jews.

Under King Herod, the area of the Temple Mount was doubled and surrounded with four retaining walls, including the area known as the Kotel or Western Wall. In 66 A.D., after a failed Jewish revolt against Roman rule, The Romans laid siege to the city and in the year 70 A.D. destroyed the Second Temple.

After the destruction of the Second Temple, Christianity began to rise, until the Islamic conquest in 633 – the beginning of a 1,300-year span during which more than ten different empires were to rule in the Holy Land prior to the British occupation after World War I.

The Ottoman Turks took control of Jerusalem at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

The Ottoman Turks were defeated in World War I and Palestine was captured by the British, who subsequently were awarded a mandate from the League of Nations to rule the land.

When the United Nations took up the Palestine question in 1947, it recommended that all of Jerusalem be internationalized. The Jewish Agency agreed to accept internationalization, while the Arab states were opposed to the plan, as they were to the rest of the partition plan.

In May 1948, upon Israel’s declaration of Independence, Arab armies invaded the newly created Jewish state and (by the end of the war, per the 1949 armistice lines) Jordan occupied east Jerusalem, dividing the city for the first time in its history, and driving thousands of Jews — whose families had lived in the city for centuries — into exile.

For the next 19 years, from 1948-67, the city was split between Israeli and Jordanian control, a period which represents the only time the city has been divided in its history.

This is what is meant by the extremely misleading refrain by Guardian reporters (and others in the MSM) of “Arab East Jerusalem“.

Jews living in the Jordanian controlled section of Jerusalem were expelled and all Jews were denied access to the Western Wall. Jordan also subsequently desecrated Jewish holy place and all attempted to erase all traces of Jewish history in the city. Fifty-eight Jerusalem synagogues — some centuries old — were destroyed.

(Read full "The Guardian’s Chris McGreal and the moral logic of a Jew-free “Eastern” Jerusalem")

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