The much-needed and vital battle for Israel’s open spaces - by Gershon Hacohen

The purpose of our struggle also used to be clear and we'd be wise to embrace it again: We aspire to an existence in the land of our forefathers in all its fields and open spaces, not just behind our gated "villas in the jungle."

Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen..
Israel Hayom..
25 August '19..
Link: https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-fight-for-the-open-space/

The murderous terrorist attack at Danny Spring near Ein Buvin is a reflection of the ancient struggle over territorial control.

The story is about far more than mere unbridled evil striking down a father and his children on a Friday afternoon summer hike. It's a simple matter: Jews and Arabs aren't only fighting over freedom of movement in the open space, but over who controls it. This struggle assumes many different forms, spanning all corners of the land, from the Galilee to the Negev. From the Palestinian perspective, Jews can perhaps exist in their city high-rises and engage in their white-collar occupations, high-tech, and commerce – this is their place as Jews. The open space, on the other hand – the fields, springs, and pastures – these the Arab must control. We should examine the significance of the "villa in the jungle" metaphor, posited by Ehud Barak to describe Israel's existential experience. In their fervor for security, the Jews deem to only exist in spaces surrounded by fences, a type of upscale, safe ghetto whose boundaries they dare not exit.

Presbyterian Church (USA), Where Hatred Triumphs Over Ethics

As the Muslim Middle East burns, the Presbyterian Church (USA) takes a brave stand – against Israel.

Ilya Meyer..
ilyameyer.com/..
22 June '14..



Sunni Muslim terrorist group Boko Haram is slaughtering its way through Christian communities in Nigeria, its reputation for barbarism preceding it as it rides a wave of genocidal attacks.

Somalia’s Sunni al-Shabab Muslim terrorist group is wreaking havoc in both Somalia and neighbouring Kenya, its reputation for mindless brutality well-deserved following many significant attacks in both countries. It is viciously opposed not only to Christianity but also to Sufi Muslim traditions and seeks every opportunity to uproot all traces of Sufi Islamic practice.

A large number of Sunni Al Qaeda-inspired Muslim terrorist groups are spreading their poison across the Maghreb; North African Muslim nations such as Libya are being increasingly held to ransom as the violence enters a new phase with the use of advanced weaponry.

Lebanon is in a vice, trying desperately to maintain some semblance of normality as the Shia Muslim terrorist group Hezbollah tightens its stranglehold on this multi-ethnic nation that has seen so much sectarian strife and bloodshed over the past few decades.

Shia Muslim terrorist group Hezbollah is also operating with impunity in neighbouring Syria, whose nominal head of state, the Muslim Alawite Bashar al-Assad, has so far slaughtered about 160,000 of his own citizens while at the same time making more than 9 million Syrians, of whom 5.5 million children, either internally displaced or refugees overseas as a result of the civil war.

The other party in that Syrian civil war is the Sunni Muslim ISIL/ISIS forces (Islamic State in the Levant/Islamic State in Syria). Their brutality is legendary, they indiscriminately behead Shia Muslims and burn Christians alive in a deliberate campaign of terror aimed at driving away all those who do not conform to their strict interpretation of Islam. ISIS/ISIL have achieved immense military successes both in Syria and now also in neighbouring Iraq, about one-third of which they control.

Iraq’s Shia Muslim Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki has deliberately sidelined his country’s 35 percent Sunni minority, leading to the civil strife we see now, with the Sunni ISIS currently in control of about one-third of Iraq and much of its vital oil infrastructure.

Peace — But Not Now

Why Palestinian-Israeli talks cannot make real progress any time soon.

Clifford D. May
National Review Online
23 September '10

At an off-the-record gathering of foreign-policy mandarins and opinion-mongers recently, the former head of an allied nation said he was advising President Obama to push as hard as possible for a speedy settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Most of those attending the conference nodded in agreement. I bit my tongue, waited for a break, and then buttonholed the statesman near the coffee and tea dispensers. Might I ask a question? He graciously said I might.

Sir, if you were Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, would you make peace with the Israelis? You understand that peace would be of enormous benefit to your people and to Israelis alike. On the other hand, you know that while you wield power in the West Bank, Hamas rules Gaza. And Hamas refuses — as a matter of both theology and policy — to accept the existence of a Middle Eastern nation led by non-Muslims.

What’s more, Hamas is financed and instructed by an Iranian regime that also wants the Jewish state wiped off the map. Tehran plans to soon have nuclear weapons to utilize in pursuit of that goal.

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Fiction by Margaret Atwood

Tamar Sternthal
CAMERA/Snapshots
20 September '10

Celebrated poet and fiction writer Margaret Atwood, the recipient of the Dan David Prize at Tel Aviv University last May, should stick to the world of fiction. In a Sept. 17 piece in Ha'aretz, Atwood gives a so-called test case to challenge those "entrenched" in their views regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to agree on the following (note: really, she challenges only one side):

What about the Palestinian children of Area C? (Area C, for those witless innocents who have never heard of it, is not that part of the West Bank controlled by the Palestinian Authority, nor is it Gaza, for which Israel now claims no administrative responsibility other than blockading it. Instead it is that part of Palestine entirely occupied and controlled by Israel since 1967. ) According to a 2009 report by Save The Children U.K. called "Life on the Edge," the rate of malnutrition of the children in Area C is higher even than that in Gaza, and many kids are not only developmentally stunted, but are dying from related illnesses.

Is Israel responsible for this situation?

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Viewpoint: Financial Times blames Israel for conflict

Carmel Gould
Just Journalism
26 August '10

Today’s opinion piece in the Financial Times written by the publication’s international affairs editor David Gardner encapsulates perfectly the problems Israel will face in the coming weeks when direct negotiations with the Palestinians restart, and possibly, break down. ‘A poisoned process holds little hope’ reads more like a charge sheet against Israel than a reasoned analysis and is striking in its capacity to reverse historic truths and omit key facts.

At the centre of Gardner’s peace process universe is the occupation, which he claims ‘killed Oslo’ and remains ‘the heart of the question’. His evidence for the occupation scuppering the Oslo process is simply that settlements grew a lot between 1992 and 1996. In a show of presenting the other side he adds: ‘Many Israelis will point to the perfidy of the late Yassir Arafat, who wanted to talk peace but keep the option of armed resistance dangerously in play.’ But it was not just ‘[m]any Israelis’ who blamed Arafat - President Clinton, who brokered the talks, as well as key negotiating aides, blamed him too. In terms of according blame for what Gardner terms, ‘the Oslo intifada’, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas himself stated recently that the second intifada was ‘the worst mistake of our lives’. Who’s blaming whom here?

Gardner breezily telescopes ten years and arrives at the present day, drawing a direct line between the occupation sabotaging Camp David in 2000 and the current predicament in the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli settlement ‘has turned the occupied West Bank into a discontiguous scattering of cantons, walled in by a security barrier built on yet more annexed Arab land and criss-crossed by segregated Israeli roads linking the settlements.’ Gaza is ‘a vast, open-air prison.’

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Iraq and The Real Middle East Conflict

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
22 August '10

Aymenn Jawad is a talented young Arab writer who shows how to analyze regional politics well. His short article on Iraqi politics and how they fit into the Nationalist-Islamist, Iran-Syria-Turkey bloc versus Arab regimes' conflict really makes the issues clear. Recommended reading.

Basically, he shows how Saudi Arabia and Iran are competing for influence in Iraq just as the Saudis were battling with Iran and Syria in Lebanon but gave it up as a lost cause. Meanwhile, the United States and Europe are acting clueless about this huge struggle in the region that will determine its future. The central issue is not Israeli-Palestinian or even, in a sense, Iranian nuclear. It is the massive conflict between two blocs.


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Misinformation is the Name of the Game

Paula R. Stern
A Soldier's Mother
17 August '10

The Palestinians win the war of propaganda because facts are foreign, truth expendable. I enjoy honest debates with people who believe differently than me; I don't enjoy those built on lies and twisted or partial facts. Someone new has found my blog. That's always a source of pride for me. I enjoy sharing my thoughts and words. I believe in the basic principle that there are three groups of people. The proportional ratios may vary, but there are those who will love you unconditionally, those who will hate you unconditionally, and those who are curious and open to forming an opinion.

I love when those who love us write to me - they offer support, comfort, words that are precious when we mistakenly feel that those who are curious are being swayed by those who hate us. I love when those who are curious write to me - they ask me wonderful questions. My favorite so far was the simple question, "What is it actually like in Israel?"

I can't say I love when those who hate us write to me because too often, their words are cruel. They wish upon my country destruction and pain; they have wished death on my sons and described the death they would deliver in words no mother should see. I will not despair; I will not let them see the fear in my heart. At times, I'll even laugh, as I did at Faisal and his stupidity (A Journalist or a Liar?) .

Bonnie has found my blog. A new reader who quickly made it clear where she falls. She does not love us, that is for sure. Nor is she really curious or interested in learning more. She falls in the area of those who hate but wants us to know that it is acceptable to hate Israelis and we have no right to suggest this means she is anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic.

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Christian Science Monitor Contributors Stack the Ethnic Deck

CAMERA
Media Analysis
13 August '10

To learn what "bias" means, you could flip through the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary and discover that it is "an inclination, leaning, tendency, bent; a preponderating disposition or propensity; predisposition towards; predilection; prejudice."

Or, if you are the type who learns better from examples, you could turn to page 15 of the Aug. 9, 2010 Christian Science Monitor.

There you’d find, in the article "Why land disputes in Jerusalem turn epic" by contributors Omar Kasrawi and Sommer Saadi, a striking illustration of "inclination," "leaning," or "bent" about the source of ethnic/religious disputes in Israel.

The authors describe as "common" the tendency among both Jews and Palestinians "to deny the spirituality or the sanctity of the history of the other," as George Mason University's Marc Gopin put it in the article. But inexplicably and unfairly, their follow up paragraphs providing several purported examples of such a tendency finger the Jewish side alone as a perpetrator. This strikingly biased handling of the topic violates the Monitor's promise to readers to be "unrelenting but fair."

The relevant section reads:

In Israel especially, place is connected to identity, making it a priority to protect the places that offer a sense of belonging. Any effort to remove evidence of historical ties is seen as an attack on identity. Just last week, Israeli authorities destroyed at least 15 tombstones in the Mamilla cemetery which it said were illegally built.

"There is a tendency in both communities to deny the spirituality or the sanctity or the history of the other on a certain spot," says Marc Gopin, a rabbi and the director of George Mason University's Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution.

Such tactics are common. This past March, a right-wing Israeli group sponsored ads on 200 buses that displayed fictitious posters of the Temple Mount, in which a Third Temple replaced the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

In 2000 Israeli leader Ariel Sharon set off the second intifada by visiting the Temple Mount and asserting permanent Israeli sovereignty over the compound. The violence lasted four years and claimed the lives of more than 5,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis.

But even lesser-known holy sites become part of the conflict if a community feels its presence being threatened.

Recently, the Israeli government named as heritage sites Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, which both Judaism and Islam claim as Abraham's birthplace. By claiming sites in the Palestinian-controlled West Bank, Israel further blurred the lines of the ownership of land – and history.

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Is Obama Using Israel as a Scapegoat for His Foreign Policy Failures?

Moshe Dann
Pajamasmedia.com
19 April '10

Though needing to handle dozens of difficult issues around the world, President Obama seems obsessed with one: the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Obama’s administration has been on the warpath with Israel from the beginning, picking fights over issues that have been around for a long time. These include where Jews can live and build in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria (the West Bank); removing checkpoints that stop terrorists; and easing restrictions on the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip. Yet Obama has been silent regarding anti-Jewish and anti-Israel incitement, and the upsurge in rioting, violence, and terrorist attacks sponsored by the Palestinian Authority.

An innocuous announcement of approval for building permits in a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit gave Obama the opportunity he, perhaps, was waiting for — he bombarded Israel with unprecedented wrath and scorn. Out of proportion and unusually harsh, Obama’s disappointment seemed irrational.

A few weeks later, David Sanger of the New York Times quoted one of Obama’s foreign policy advisors:

If Obama can’t set some parameters for our allies, how is he going to set some for the mullahs?

Sanger also wrote:

Obama’s team seems to understand that if they lose that contest of wills [with Israel], the rest of their foreign policy agenda is also threatened.

Assuming this is true, Obama is tying Israeli concessions to U.S. moves to stop Iran from producing nuclear weapons, and to other issues as well. This policy makes Israel a scapegoat for Obama’s failures.

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