The drumbeat of incitement of hate from the Jewish state’s supposed peace partner

...More to the point, were the media to focus as they should on the drumbeat of incitement of hate against Israel and Jews that comes not from Palestinian outliers but the government that is the Jewish state’s supposed peace partner — Abbas’s PA — the notion that an accord merely requires an Israeli territorial retreat would be seen as a transparent fiction.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
11 October '13..

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas is planning on using the United Nations to publicize what he characterizes as violations of Arab rights in Jerusalem and settler violence in the West Bank. According to Abbas, the chutzpah of some Jews to demand the right to pray on part of their faith’s holiest site — the Temple Mount — is intolerable. But aside from his push to declare all of those parts of the city that were illegally occupied by Jordan from 1949 to 1967 as exclusive Palestinian property (a stand that would include the Western Wall as well as the Temple Mount in the Palestinian state he wants to create), Abbas is trying to focus the world on what he says is a campaign of outrages by Jews living in the West Bank against their neighbors. The latest example is an incident in which a mosque was defaced and cars vandalized in an Arab village by what appears to have been settlers.

Such instances are outrageous and should be punished. But those who commit such crimes are a tiny minority of even the Jewish population in the territories. The Israeli government, settler groups as well as the overwhelming majority of the Israeli people condemn these occurrences. But as shameful as they are, to pretend, as most mainstream media outlets do, that it is Jewish violence that is the everyday occurrences in the West Bank, let alone the most serious threat to the peace, is beyond absurd. Evidence for just how wrong this assumption is can be found throughout the year as the number of instances of violent attacks, lethal stone throwing and sundry other forms of terrorism that result not just in damaged windshields but wounded and dead Jewish bodies. Just last night, infiltrators near his home in the Jordan valley killed an Israeli. Last weekend, Arab terrorists shot a nine-year-old Israeli girl in a settlement. And yet you can bet that the U.N. and its sundry agencies dedicated to delegitimizing Israel will take up Abbas’ complaints rather than investigating the wave of anti-Jewish violence or ask what role the PA media plays in inciting these attacks.

The Difference Between Lovers of Life and Lovers of Death

West Bank Mama
17 March '11

http://westbankmama.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/the-difference-between-lovers-of-life-and-lovers-of-death/

The contrast couldn’t be greater. In Neve Tzuf, a yishuv where the relatives of the Fogel family are sitting shiva, the IDF and local residents (yeah, go ahead, call them settlers) saved the life of an Arab woman and her baby girl.

A taxi sped into the yishuv with the woman in labor. The cord was around the baby’s neck and both were in danger. The medics treated her and both are fine.

It is amazing how G-d arranges things. Perhaps many will not pay attention, but to those who do this couldn’t be a greater demonstration of the difference between the Jews and the Arab terrorists. We love life and protect it whenever we can. The terrorists love death and kill whenever they can.

Please note – the Arabs are so confident and feel so safe with the Jews, that they knew they could go to the settlers for help. Not only don’t they fear retaliation, but they go there freely for assistance. It is a crying shame, that people like this, who know that the Jews are not monsters, cannot express their opinion in Arab society without fear of retaliation from their own people. If they did then perhaps there would be a chance for peace.


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Why I am pro-settler

Fresnozionism.org
21 November '10

I have something to tell you: I am pro-settler.

OK, you are not surprised. But considering the amount of vitriol poured out every day on settlers and settlements, I thought I needed to explicitly say this.

For example, here is how Naomi Paiss of the putatively pro-Israel New Israel Fund (about which I wrote yesterday) justifies boycotting ‘settlement’ products and artistic activities beyond the Green Line:

The settlements are not in Israel. They represent not “just” a blot on Israel as a just and decent nation, and a terrible danger to its survival, but also the waste of billions of shekels for security, expensive bypass roads, government-subsidized construction and mortgages, and more. Those are shekels that could be used to build a more prosperous and socially just Israel. Refusing products and services made in the settlements, and opposing government expenditures there, is well within the rights of every organization and individual who intends to influence the Israeli government to finally abandon the quixotic and immoral settlement enterprise.

I think even members of the pro-Zionist Left (I think NIF has crossed the line, although they would deny it) more or less share this viewpoint.

(Read full post)

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Clinton’s Slander Against Israeli Democracy

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
24 September '10

Bill Clinton’s comments on the number of Russian immigrants and settlers in the Israel Defense Forces do indeed, as Jennifer said, sound xenophobic. But Clinton’s slander is far more dangerous than mere xenophobia. For when he says the increased presence of “children of Russians and settlers, the hardest-core people against a division of the land… presents a staggering problem,” what he’s implying is that these soldiers cannot be trusted to obey a government order to evacuate territory — or in other words, that Israel is no longer a democratic state where the government controls the army. And nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s true that for the last decade, roughly one-third of newly minted infantry officers have been Orthodox Jews, almost triple their 12 percent share in the overall Jewish population. It’s also true that Russian immigrants and their children, representing about one-sixth of the Jewish population, constitute one-fourth of all combat soldiers.

But all this was equally true five years ago, when Israel withdrew from every inch of Gaza, dismantled its 21 settlements and evacuated four West Bank settlements to boot. Yet of the approximately 50,000 soldiers involved in the disengagement, a mere 63 refused to obey the evacuation order — about a tenth of a percent. That’s less than the number of leftists who have refused to serve in the West Bank — though they, too, are a tiny minority.

Both numbers are minuscule for a very good reason: most Israelis of every political stripe accept the principle that in a democracy, the army takes orders from the government regardless of the soldiers’ own political views. That’s as true of “Russians” and settlers as it is of secular leftists — as both the disengagement and several subsequent evacuations of illegal settlement outposts show. If Clinton offered no evidence for his libelous insinuation to the contrary, it’s because there isn’t any.

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Don’t betray us this year

Op-ed: In coming year, may government not harm settlers to curry favor with our enemies


Orit Struck
Israel Opinion/Ynet
10 September '10

Dear Sara Netanyahu,

This Rosh Hashana, not all of us got to sit with our families as we celebrated the coming of the New Year. An hour’s drive from the prime minister’s residence, in the Mount Hebron community of Beit Hagai, the children of the Aimes family had a tough time celebrating. Only recently they ended the mourning period and visited their parents’ grave at Mount Olives, and suddenly here is the Jewish New Year – without their mother’s cooking and their father’s blessings. The honey-dipped apple must have been salty of tears by the time it reached their mouths; they may have very well chocked up on the New Year’s blessings.

This is why I decided to turn to you, Sara. Recently you wrote a letter to the interior minister, saying that “as a mother to two sons and as a child psychologist, I view the profession I chose as a daily mission to help children.” Perhaps just like you helped the children of foreign workers, Sara, you can also help the Aimes children?

A year of cruel decrees has drawn to an end in Beit Hagai and in other Judea and Samaria communities; insulting decrees that turned Eretz Yisrael into the only place in the world where a Jew is not allowed to build a home just because he’s Jewish. May it be your will, God, that our ministers will not impose further such decrees on us.

May it be your will that the prime minister hold his head up high rather than walk with his tail between his legs – so that he won’t capitulate and cave in to the pressure. Let him deliver on his word, not evacuate even one community, and revive the construction effort. The Aimes children are too young to remember where the previous “peace” talks managed by the prime minister led to, but you remember, Sara.

“May it be your will to terminate our enemies and haters,” the Aimes children asked on Rosh Hashana, also referring to the “partners” starring in the new Geneva Initiative campaign meant to confuse us all. As a child psychologist, Sara, you know how to warn people against sweet-talking swindlers. So please warn the prime minister too. “Bibi, be a partner,” they urge him in giant, US-funded ads. Yet we know them, remind him of that. They’re responsible for the Oslo failure and its thousands of casualties, so don’t go with them, Bibi.

(Read full article)

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'Settlers harass Druze soldiers'?

This photo from the Ynet article is appropriately mis-captioned as these are not Border-Police and what is being described in the article is not connected to the photo. In general, you will not see even Yassam Police handling Arab women, Druze, Bedouin, or others, as this is tolerated or encouraged only towards Jewish women.

Yosef
Love of the Land
11 July '10

Today's Ynet carries an article entitled 'Settlers harass Druze soldiers' by Hanan Greenberg, and to which I have added a question mark, given the source.

A couple of points are in order. Ynet is not exactly known (and I'm being polite) for the truthfulness or accuracy of it's articles, as is known by the general population, including beyond our circles. One could ask, how many times has this occurred to make it newsworthy and what was the agenda of whoever raised this? I've heard on occasions, taunts by individuals towards Border Police/Police concerning why they allow Arab unit members to either beat or remove Jews, or destroy their property.

What I don't hear is when some members of the Druze communities rioted in large numbers this year and last, and injured Border Police/Police, plus substantial property damage, that what they called out, was disgusting or that their violence and the numbers involved was worthy of but a passing mention.

Update 11 July '10: Angry mob attacks police in Druze town. Residents of Majdal Shams say nine injured as police assist officers besieged by 1,500 people

Because realistically the magnified scale of violence directed towards security forces by the more anarchic elements of the Druze and Beduin communities must be appeased, irrespective of the justice, or lack of justice of their complaints, and surely must not be reported, for fear of the further violence they promise.

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Bombers For Settlements

Avi Davis
The Intermediate Zone
25 March '10

I can’t say I disagree with the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens all too often. His is the first piece of writing I turn to every Tuesday morning, so certain am I that I will be greeted by a succinct, well argued editorial, wrapped in elegant, wry prose.

But his last two pieces for the print version of the Journal have angered me, not for the thrust of his arguments, but for some ancillary matters that he allowed to slip into the writing which betrayed a bias out of keeping with his generally level headed approach.

On Tuesday, March 16, his piece Settlements Aren’t the Problem, he let fly this doozy of a paragraph:

“It’s easy to dislike Israel’s settlements, and still easier to dislike many of the settlers. Whatever your view about the legality or justice of the enterprise, it takes a certain cast of mind to move your children to places where they are more likely to be in harm’s way. In the current issue of The American Interest, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer persuasively spells out the many ways in which the settlement movement has undermined Israel’s own rule of law, and hence its democracy.

(Read full post)
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