Amnesty and its Israeli Collaborators (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

The recent Amnesty International report which accuses Israel of apartheid and crimes against humanity is demonstrably dishonest, tendentious, and so lacking in context to be unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, it has even been called “a paradigmatic example of anti-semitism [sic].” But this will not prevent its use as a weapon in the ongoing diplomatic and legal war being waged against Israel in the UN. As Anne Herzberg of NGO Monitor wrote,

These groups [Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem]—through their personal connections and singular influence at the U.N. Human Rights Council, and the acquiescence of Europe—instead will simply get U.N. Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk and the Navi Pillay-headed Commission of Inquiry [COI] to uncritically adopt their claims and mark them with the U.N. stamp of approval in the next few months. Unsurprisingly and in keeping with his history of anti-Israel activism (as well as in violation of U.N. rules), although he is ostensibly currently conducting an independent and objective investigation of apartheid, Lynk promoted the group’s report on Twitter. There is no doubt that the COI will act in a similar fashion.

Here are a few of Amnesty’s dozens of recommendations (p. 272ff.): Israel must repeal its nation-state law, “relocate” Jewish residents from areas outside 1949 armistice lines, cancel evictions of Arabs (for nonpayment of rent) and change the law so that “Palestinians” are not subject to “forced eviction,” grant recognition to all “unrecognized villages” in the Negev (i.e., legalize squatting on state land), remove all restrictions on freedom of movement of people and goods into and out of the Gaza strip, punish officials and military personnel for their “violations of international law” and “crimes against humanity,” and – last but not least:

Recognize the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to homes where they or their families once lived in Israel or the OPT, and to receive restitution and compensation and other effective remedies for the loss of their land and property.

It should be clear from the above that Amnesty’s objective is no less than the end of Israel as a Jewish state, and its replacement by an Arab-majority state. Nevertheless, we can expect in short order UN resolutions calling for sanctions on Israel and attempts to prosecute Israeli officials and IDF officers in accordance with Amnesty’s recommendations.

The accusations contained in the report constitute a große Lüge, a “big lie.” They are “supported,” in a parody of scholarship, by citations from their own previous reports, from anti-Israel UN agencies like the notorious Human Rights Commission, from documents provided by the so-called “State of Palestine,” from interviews with Palestinians, from the work of anti-Israel academics, and of course from numerous NGOs, including those that were recently outlawed in Israel because of their links with the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Amnesty is the largest player in the world-wide “human rights” industry. The organization operates in numerous countries and has an overall budget of close to $US 300 million. It started out in the 1960s with a pro-Western orientation, perhaps receiving funds secretly from the British government and the CIA. At some point it became more critical of the West; in 2011, it called for George Bush to be prosecuted over the treatment of 9/11 detainees. In recent years, it has focused disproportionately on alleged human rights abuses by Israel, perhaps as a result of hiring a number of anti-Israel activists for key positions. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary-general since March 2021, recently had to disavow a tweet she made in 2013, idiotically accusing Israel of poisoning Yasser Arafat.

But Amnesty’s biased researchers had significant help on the ground. The Zionist group Im Tirtzu (disclosure: I’m a member and donor) analyzed the Amnesty report and found that 77% of the citations from various NGOs in the report came from 16 Israeli organizations, which are heavily funded by foreign money, mostly from the EU and its constituent governments. They are the usual suspects; B’Tselem, Adalah, Ir Amim, HaMoked, Peace Now, and others. Over the past 10 years, these groups have raked in more than half a billion shekels ($US 171 million) from the European Union and its constituent governments. B’Tselem alone got more than 62 million shekels ($US 19 million).

This is a huge sum and should be a scandal of major proportions. These organizations, despite having almost no support among Israel’s Jewish population, are able to exert great pressure in the legal and political realms. They have petitioned the Supreme Court to dismantle communities built over the Green Line, to prevent the demolition of the homes of convicted terrorists, to prevent the deportation of illegal residents, and so on. They seem to have good access to the Israeli media, as illustrated by the recent B’Tselem and Peace Now campaign to mainstream the idea that there is an outbreak of “settler violence.” But most importantly, they produce a steady flow of accusations against Israel to the international media and to foreign governments.

Whenever there is a military conflict, they swing into action to provide respectability to the propaganda from Israel’s enemies; and they provide the fodder for international condemnations of Israel, as happened in 2009 with the Goldstone Report. Much of the material they supply is simply a repetition of claims made by the PA and Hamas, which achieve credibility through the “halo effect” created by their passing through a supposedly disinterested NGO.

Why does the EU pay to maintain subversive anti-state organizations in Israel? Some of the officials involved may actually believe that they are advancing the cause of human rights. On a few occasions, when the connection to terrorism has been blatant, the EU or a government has suspended funding for a particular group. But they appear to be fine with the idea of supporting the Palestinian cause, the dissolution of the Jewish state, at least when no guns or bombs are directly and immediately involved. I believe that there is a deep feeling in Europe, possibly going back long before there was a Palestinian cause (or even Palestinians), that the world would be better off without Jews or, even more so, their state. Antisemitism has somehow morphed into humanism.

And why does Israel permit her enemies to support a subversive fifth column inside the state? I don’t know. Big money corrupts. Maybe enough Israeli politicians have personal connections to these NGOs, and they or friends and family benefit from them, and that’s why the laws that have been passed to regulate foreign money are weak and toothless. Maybe now, after the damage has been done, the Knesset will take action.

The Amnesty report is just another libel against the Jewish people, like the medieval blood libels and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There is little that the State of Israel can do to silence its external enemies. But it does not have to allow them to pay her home-grown quislings to do their dirty work.

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Standing Together (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

I still follow the rabbi of the largest (Reform) synagogue in the small California city where I lived before returning to Israel some 8 years ago. Yesterday, I saw that he wrote on his Facebook page that he and his institution, and I presume others of good will, “stand together,” against racial, religious, and anti-LGBTQ+ hatred, and “against all those who seek to divide us...all those who make people into 'others.'”

He wrote this in response to a news report that several historically black colleges had received bomb threats for the past two days.

I don’t mean to suggest that he is insincere about deploring various forms of prejudice, but could there be an emptier gesture? I was tempted to suggest that if he really wanted to take action, he should send a busload of congregants to the nearest historically black college where they could spend the day checking dumpsters and bus shelters for bombs, as I recall doing during my army reserve duty.

Meanwhile, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), in a perversion of its name and mandate, has established what Amb. Alan Baker calls “a permanent inquisition” against the State of Israel.  With a large staff and budget, this “Commission of Inquiry” will proceed to demonize and delegitimize the one Jewish state. Even for the UN, such a one-sided “inquiry” is unprecedented, and its outcome will be used to justify prosecutions, sanctions and perhaps even expulsion from the international body for the Jew Among Nations.

I did not see that the rabbi mentioned this on his Facebook page. Again I was tempted to ask what he thought about it, since almost one of the first acts of the Biden Administration, for which at least 80% of his congregation voted, was to rejoin the UNHRC.

I also did not see any mention of Amnesty International’s vicious, antisemitic smear of Israel as an apartheid state, which will certainly be used as “evidence” by the UNHRC in its indictment of Israel. Amnesty’s report calls for the arrest and prosecution of Israel’s leaders whom it deems guilty of “crimes against humanity” [!] and sanctions against the country and any other countries that support it. It manages to almost entirely leave out the hundred-year long war against the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel that has been waged by Palestinian and other Arabs and their supporters (with the help of the Nazis, the Soviet KGB, and other interested parties). Even the Union for Reform Judaism, to my surprise, found the Amnesty report scandalous.

If there were ever a group that suffered from being made “others,” it would be the Jewish people. In addition to Israel’s confrontational enemies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, and the grass-roots antisemitism that appears to be popping up everywhere lately, there is also an organized and heavily funded international campaign against the Jewish state. Participants include the UN, the EU, and their allies in the so-called human rights industry, like Amnesty. If you read the Amnesty report, you will see that they will not be satisfied with anything less than the replacement of Israel with an Arab state. Anything else would deny the “human rights” of the millions of descendants of 1948 refugees. What would happen then to the Jewish people, inside and outside of Israel?

American Jews, some 90% of whom are non-Orthodox, make up the second largest Jewish community in the world (Israel recently surpassed it for the top spot). If they would “stand together” as the rabbi suggests, and present a unified political front to defend the Jewish state, it would be a powerful counterforce to the international conspiracy – there is no other word – against the State of Israel.

But unfortunately, they seem to care much more about every other identifiable group – blacks, LGBTQ+ people, Muslims, and even Palestinian Arabs. When will we see the liberal Jewish establishment demand that its constituency “stand together” … for Israel?

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The “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is Back (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

Do human stupidity and wickedness have any bounds?

After reading the comprehensive Wikipedia article about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, I have to answer a resounding “no.”

The Protocols, from its its first publication in Russia in 1903 by Pavel Krushevan, an antisemitic activist, publisher, and politician whose newspaper articles instigated the notorious Kishinev Pogrom, to its employment by Henry Ford, the Nazis, and Hamas, has been one of the most effective tools for spreading Jew-hatred throughout the world.

Supposedly a transcript of secret meetings of Jewish conspirators, it is not clear who the authors were. Much of it was plagiarized from various sources, including large chunks of dialogue from an 1864 (non-antisemitic) work called Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, by Maurice Joly, with anti-Jewish material interpolated. The work was translated into numerous languages, including of course English, German, and Arabic. It appears in various versions on the internet, and is a best-seller in print as well. The Jerusalem Post reports that “Walmart, Book Depository, Thrift Books, Hudson Books, and Barnes & Noble are each selling dozens of versions,” including some with introductory material that suggests that it may be genuine.

Let me repeat: introductory material that suggests that it may be genuine. The bogus nature of this document was conclusively documented in the 1920s, but in some quarters it is still considered “controversial!”

The document strikes every antisemitic chord possible. It presents the Jews as arrogant, dishonest, corrupt, greedy, sneaky, murderous, promiscuous, manipulative, and cold. It lays out their alleged plans to destroy the family, the state, the church, and the national economy. It presents their conspiracy to control the minds and bodies of gentiles, to trick and force them into doing their bidding. It tells how they foment war and insurrection in order to achieve their goals. And of course it describes the great octopus of hidden Jewish control over all the important institutions in society that the stupid gentiles believe are independent.

It’s a perfect theory, because it accounts for everything bad that happens to those who believe it. Business reversal? The Jews cheated you! War? The Jews started it! Your spouse has an affair? The Jews introduced immorality into art, literature, and media! Are you conservative? The Jews are responsible for the destruction of traditional values everywhere, in government, business, and the family! Are you liberal? The Jews are the most privileged of the privileged, exploiting the oppressed classes! They are rebellious communists and rapacious capitalists, godless libertines and God’s purported chosen.

Almost every antisemitic act that hits the headlines echoes the Protocols. Robert Bowers murdered eleven old Jews in Pittsburgh because he believed that the Jews are responsible for uncontrolled non-white immigration into the US. Malik Faisal Akram took Jewish hostages in Texas because he believed that the Jews could pull strings to get a terrorist released from Federal prison. John Earnest killed a woman and injured several other people when he shot up a synagogue in Poway, California in 2019 because he thought Jews were executing a “meticulously planned genocide of the European race,” apparently by encouraging interracial relationships.

Recently, Jewish conspiracies have been “found” everywhere. In one of the most egregious violations of the principles of logic and evidence, cases of American police abusing black citizens are attributed to some American police officials participating in programs to study counter-terrorism in Israel. But even if significant race-based police mistreatment of minorities exists (in fact, it may not), it long predates such training programs, which in any event are related to intelligence gathering or SWAT training and not to techniques of apprehending suspects. And certainly there is no racial content! Nevertheless, the theory – pushed by a “Jewish” anti-Israel organization – became wildly popular. Because nothing “fits” like  a Jewish conspiracy.

Such conspiracy theories have been popular since the Middle Ages (killing Jesus, poisoning wells, the blood libel, etc.). But the grand conspiracy to rule the world that is expressed so comprehensively in the Protocols may date to the late 19^th century, and I think it’s fair to say that nothing did more to popularize it than the publication of the Protocols. While it may or may not have affected the thinking of Hitler and other Nazis – there is no evidence that Hitler believed that it was genuine – they certainly used it to great effect as a propaganda tool. And other antisemites continue to do so today. In 2002, the Protocols was made into a dramatic series called Horseman Without a Horse, aired on Egyptian TV. It was rerun in 2012, and was also shown on Lebanon’s Hezbollah-linked Al Manar channel.

There’s no doubt that a book or other work of artistic expression can have malign effects. But does it make sense to say that it can be inherently evil?

I think the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an argument for that proposition.

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Keeping the Land of Israel (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

News Item:

The European Union has spent half-a-billion dollars over the last seven years to support a Palestinian Authority plan to control Area C of the West Bank, an Intelligence Ministry report publicly released Tuesday.

“Foreign assistance as a significant accelerator in the takeover processes,” stated the report by the ministry’s research division, which was authored in June and published this week for Tuesday’s debate in the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on the matter.

“The rough estimate is that from the period of 2014-2021, at least half-a-billion dollars were transferred to the Palestinians through various channels and it’s possible that the sum was larger,” the report stated.

An annual sum of some €20 million is earmarked for Palestinian legal battles against settlements and the security barrier, the report stated.

All the territories except Gaza were divided into Areas A, B, and C in 1995 by the Oslo II Agreement. Area A includes major Arab population centers, and is under complete PA security and civil control. That means that PA provides all needed services to the population, including counter-terrorism and law enforcement. The IDF only enters Area A when it is absolutely necessary, and coordinates with the PA to locate and apprehend terrorists (needless to say, this procedure can break down when a wanted terrorist is associated with the PA’s ruling Fatah faction). Area B is under Israeli security control and PA civil control. It is made up of areas with Arab populations that, because of their strategic location or nature, must be under IDF control. About 90% of the Arab population of the territories lives in areas A and B.

Area C, which is about 60% of the land area in question, is under complete Israeli control. It comprises all Jewish communities and military installations in the territories, and contains their entire Jewish population. It also includes strategic areas. Some 450,000 Jews and 180,000 Palestinians live in Area C. Some right-wing parties have advocated annexing or extending Israeli law to Area C, and even most “2-state” proponents agree that for security reasons, and to avoid expelling hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes, at least parts of Area C must become part of Israel.

In 2009, former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister and Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, in cooperation with the Obama Administration and the EU, came up with a plan to unilaterally establish a Palestinian state, regardless of Israeli wishes. Fayyad envisioned establishing all the pieces of a government and an economy before declaring the state, much like the Zionists did in the pre-state Yishuv. Detailed plans were written, with a high degree of detail and attention to concepts like justice, democracy, and even environmentalism, that would appeal to the Western technocrats who were to pay for the project. The contrast with the actual behavior of the PA, toward its citizens, the environment, and Israel, is striking.

The stated goal is to create a “sovereign and independent state on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital, and reach a just and agreed solution for Palestinian refugees in accordance with relevant international resolutions, and UN General Assembly Resolution 194 in particular.” If you think the plan might not be problematic for Israel, let me remind you that the PLO has always interpreted 194 to mean that all the descendants of Arab refugees of 1948 can choose to return “home” to Israel, or be compensated for the loss of their “property.”

The plan requires maximum land area under Palestinian control and maximum contiguity thereof, so control of Area C and the expulsion of as many Jews as possible is critical to it. Although Fayyad was pushed out in 2013 by a jealous Mahmoud Abbas (he went to work at various prestigious educational institutions and think tanks), the implementation of the plan continued under his successors.

American funding for the project began with the Obama Administration, stopped under Trump, and is being restarted by Biden. But the lion’s share has come from European sources. Regavim, an Israeli organization dedicated to protecting Israeli lands (both within and outside of the pre-1967 lines), explains some of the methods used by the Palestinians and their European partners to take de facto control of land in the most strategic parts of Area C, such as “E1,” located between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim:

The method is simple: E.U. vehicles station water cisterns and solar panels in strategic spots in Area C. Bedouin clans then create encampments around these critical resources, and the rest is history: The Jahalin clan and the residents of Khan al Akhmar are two well-known examples of the results.

Another ploy is to build an illegal structure at a strategic location, and to post signs designating it a “school” or a “hospital.” If Israel attempts to remove it – remember, the area is supposedly under full Israeli control, which includes zoning and issuing building permits – then she is alleged to be guilty of an inhumane act, or even a war crime. It’s ironic that at the same time, Palestinians and their supporters claim that Israel is “gobbling Palestinian land” by “settlement construction,” when in fact there is almost no construction of new communities and minimal construction inside old ones going on.

The Israeli government does sometimes take action, often when prodded by Regavim, but equally often the thefts of land are simply ignored. I think this is because many Israeli officials, even ones that are supposedly “right-wing,” have internalized the idea that a Palestinian state of some kind is both benign and inevitable. It had better not be inevitable, because nothing about it is benign. The Fayyad plan is essentially a detailed blueprint for the implementation of Arafat’s “Phased Plan” for the replacement of Israel by an Arab state (Fayyad was Arafat’s Finance Minister in the PA’s 2002 government).

It is difficult to think that the European – and American – officials believe that they are doing anything less than working to subvert the Jewish state. It is difficult to think that they are so credulous as to actually believe that the Palestinian State that they are creating on top of us will be democratic, peaceful, and neighborly. Finally, it is impossible to accept that they don’t have the imagination to picture what is likely to happen here if the PLO succeeds in implementing its plan.

What they are doing is an act of war. I would say it is flying under the radar of the citizens of their countries who are paying for it, but the truth is that most of those citizens couldn’t care less about what happens in this tiny spot in the Mideast.

But we, who live here, care, and it’s up to us to make our government carry out its responsibility to defend its citizens, which in this case also means to protect our lands from being nibbled away.

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The Bedouin Occupation (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

Bedouin citizens of Israel formerly embraced a nomadic lifestyle, drifting between Arabia and the Sinai; but since 1948 many have permanently settled in the southern part of Israel. They established their settlements on any convenient unoccupied land, where they grazed their flocks and planted crops. Israeli authorities have established several towns and even a large city, Rahat, for Bedouin occupation, and in recent years have legalized numerous unrecognized settlements; but many Bedouin still live in the “dispersion,” a collection of hundreds of illegal favelas built on state land that resemble garbage dumps with scattered satellite dishes.

Throughout the years there have been various programs in which the state offered plots of land or homes in or near the recognized towns, along with agricultural land to replace state land on which Bedouins were squatting. Success of these programs was mixed. About 3/4 of the roughly 200,000 Negev Bedouin live in recognized towns.

The Negev Bedouin are virtually all Muslims. The population is significantly younger and is growing faster than either the Jewish or non-Bedouin Arab sectors, with (as of 2009) a fertility rate of 5.7, compared to Jewish and other Arab rates that are close to 3. Some 30% (as of 2002) of married Bedouin men have more than one wife.

Their political loyalties are primarily to their tribe or clan, though they are citizens of the state of Israel. A small number choose (it’s optional for Arabs) to join the IDF. Probably an equally small number of them identify with anti-state groups like Hamas. Those that vote lean towards the Ra’am party of Mansour Abbas (not to be confused with Mohammad Abbas of the PLO), a party whose official ideology is Islamist and associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. But Abbas has adopted a pragmatic approach – i.e., obtaining money and benefits for his constituents – in preference to an ideological one. This, and the deadlock resulting from the fourth successive election in two years, has led to Ra’am becoming the first Arab party to join a governing coalition in Israel.

Apparently the price paid to Ra’am for joining the coalition was astronomical, close to 30 billion shekels (US$9.6 billion) for programs to benefit the Arab sector. One of the promises made to them was that structures in unrecognized Bedouin settlements could be hooked up to the national electrical grid. This past week, the coalition, in one of the most raucous Knesset sessions ever, kept its promise to Mansour Abbas, passing an amendment to the Construction Law (referred to as the “Electricity Law”) permitting connection of illegal structures to electrical and other utility systems.

Normally, a structure built without a permit on land that the builder does not own cannot be connected to the national electrical and water systems. This has been described as “one of the state’s most effective tools against the national epidemic of illegal construction.” There have been exceptions when the state planned to legalize or otherwise regulate the structure, but these have been few. It will now be possible for tens of thousands of homes and other structures built illegally on state land to become permanent. To add insult to injury, an attempt to include “young Jewish communities” in Judea and Samaria to the law was voted down.

The law was passed by the Coalition with a vote of 61-0 after much of the Opposition walked out. Supporters say that it will save lives by eliminating unsafe electrical connections and will result in the Bedouins paying for electricity instead of stealing it. Opponents say that it will formalize the illegal occupation of state land, and permanently eliminate the possibility of relocating squatters. Israel Harel writes,

What’s the big deal? All they did was whitewash the (intolerable) status quo, in which thousands of illegal buildings are connected illegally to utilities, mainly electricity, putting lives in danger. Very humane. But – and it is a big but – in so doing we determine, in both theory and practice, that the piratical construction that extends over hundreds of thousands of acres will become permanent. Let’s recall that the so-called Kaminitz Law [increasing enforcement of building codes - vr] was suspended as a preface to the Electricity Law. Thus, the government put an end to existing plans to help the residents of the “Bedouin dispersion” to move, at almost no cost to them, to planned communities built by the state connected to modern infrastructure.

In 2005, the state of Israel tore Gush Katif from itself. Now, after the Electricity Law, it is ripping away large parts of the Negev too. In the area that extends eastward from Be’er Sheva nearly to Dimona, and southward from Be’er Sheva to the mountains of the central Negev, an independent regime will be established that will operate – and already does operate – according to Bedouin law. The neighboring state, Israel, will pay for this regime, according to the provisions of the most recent national budget.

Recently, there has been a sharp increase in crimes committed by Bedouins in southern Israel: car theft, drug offenses, agricultural theft, theft of weapons and ammunition from IDF bases, the use of firearms, and protection rackets. Women are harassed on the streets. Criminal activity is in the open, policing is ineffective, and judges give light sentences to those arrested, because they fear retaliation. Residents of the area complain of a “wild west” atmosphere; not long ago there was a shootout between gangs in the parking lot of a hospital emergency room.

One of the promises that the government has made, both to Jews and Arabs, was that it would crack down on crime among Arabs. So in November, the police took a stab at cleaning up the Negev, sending 1,200 policemen, with IDF assistance, into the area. They made a total of 12 arrests and confiscated a few makeshift weapons (in fact, the Bedouin are armed to the teeth with stolen military weapons) and some marijuana.

The Bedouin do not accept the idea that there is land which belongs to the state; as far as they are concerned, land belongs to whoever cultivates it. So this week the Jewish National Fund tried to plant trees on state land that Bedouins had decided was theirs. A riot ensued (encouraged by Hamas), in which cars were burned and rocks placed on railroad tracks. The planting continued this morning (Wednesday), but after Ra’am threatened to topple the government, a “compromise” was reached in which the tree-planting was delayed. Israel Harel’s words about “an independent regime” operating according to “Bedouin law” are apparently no exaggeration.

It seems that the Right’s worries about the consequences of including an Islamist party in the coalition were well-founded. Of course, the present coalition, which includes both Ra’am and the left-wing Meretz party, only exists because the Right has split itself over the question of Binyamin Netanyahu. Could we work any harder to defeat ourselves?

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"The Axis" vs. the Jews of Judea and Samaria (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

Psychological warfare is not all that different in organization from the kinetic kind. There are campaigns and objectives. Recently the objective of our enemies – the Arab-European axis of antisemitism – has been to destroy the legitimacy of the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria. The attacks have come from several directions, but the objective is the same: to establish in the minds of target populations, which include Israelis, Europeans, and Americans, the idea that Jews living in the territories is illegal, immoral, and detrimental to the prospect of peace in the region; and to force their expulsion.

The operations include the EU’s requirement for special labeling of products produced by Jews in Judea and Samaria. The decision was made in 2015, but the difficulty of implementing it without appearing to be overtly antisemitic seems to have deterred many countries from following it. In 2019, the European Court of Justice affirmed the ruling, but some countries still show pangs of conscience.

A more recent operation has been the “settler violence” campaign of recent weeks, waged by various European-funded NGOs (e.g., B’Tselem and others), that claim to report violent harassment of Arab residents by Jewish “settlers” with the connivance of the IDF. Leaving aside the huge imbalance between the number and severity of incidents that can be attributed to Jews and the daily attempts by Arabs to murder them, “settler violence” is often self-defense which is provoked by Arab attacks, and then “documented” by NGO activists, Israeli and European, who just happen to be in the area with their video cameras. Even so, actual data indicates that anti-Arab activity by Jews has actually decreased recently:

…the data made available by the Israel Police point to something remarkable - the number of incidents of Jewish violence is decreasing. From 2019 to 2021, there has been a 61.1% drop in so-called price-tag attacks. Moreover, the number of indictments of Jewish extremists has doubled from 16 to 32 over the past year. That is not the picture the pro-Palestinian groups wish you to see.

“Occupation,” “settlements” and “settlers” also figure prominently in the NGO-initiated campaign to declare Israel an “apartheid” state. The imposition of apartheid is considered a serious crime, based on the prominent example of the former South African regime, which almost everyone agrees, viciously violated the human rights of its subjects. However, since there is no resemblance between Israel and apartheid South Africa, Israel’s accusers (e.g., Human Rights Watch (HRW)) had to gin up their own definition of “apartheid” to apply to Israel. The Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, defines “apartheid” as a crime against humanity, including

… inhumane acts of a character similar to [murder, enslavement, extermination, deportation, torture, rape, etc., etc.] committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime;

Needless to say, this does not characterize the regime in Judea and Samaria. The HRW report cites a “two tiered-citizenship structure and bifurcation of nationality and citizenship,” but the fact that the laws in effect in Judea/Samaria differentiate between citizens and non-citizens is common practice and does not constitute apartheid. Other accusations are the usual exaggerations and inventions characteristic of NGO discourse about Israel. And of course the terrorism that requires security-related responses is never discussed, except to deny its relevance to Israeli countermeasures.

As always, history illuminates what politics obscures. The British Mandate for Palestine, which charged Britain with implementing the Balfour Declaration to provide a Jewish homeland, included all the area between the river and the sea (until 1921, it also included what ultimately became the Kingdom of Jordan). The Mandate itself called for “close settlement” of Jews on the land. In 1947, the UN recommended partition of the land into a Jewish and Arab state, and when the Mandate terminated in May 1948 (in the midst of war precipitated by Palestinian Arabs), the State of Israel was declared, “on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly.”

Immediately thereafter the area of the former Mandate and the new state was invaded by five Arab nations, in contravention of the UN charter. When the dust settled in 1949, Jordan was illegally occupying the eastern part of the territory, which it murderously ethnically cleansed of its Jewish population. The next year, Jordan officially annexed the area – again in violation of international law – and invented the appellation “West Bank” to refer to what had historically been called Judea and Samaria.

Jordan controlled this area for 19 years, during which time only Britain and (possibly) Pakistan recognized its sovereignty. During this period, in contravention of the Armistice Agreement that it had signed, which called for “free access to the Holy Places and cultural institutions and use of the cemetery on The Mount of Olives,” Jews were not permitted to visit their holy sites in Jordanian-controlled areas, such as the Western Wall. Regarding the Mount of Olives, which has been in use as a Jewish cemetery for 3,000 years,

At the end of 1949, Israeli lookouts posted on Mount Zion reported that Arab residents began uprooting the tombstones and plowing the land in the cemeteries. The destruction of the cemeteries continued over the course of the 19 years that the Jordanians ruled eastern Jerusalem. Four roads were paved through the cemeteries, in the process destroying graves including those of famous persons. Skeletons and bones were strewn about and scattered. Tombstones were used as paving stones for roads in the Jordanian Army camp in Azariya, east of Jerusalem. In Azariya, a telephone booth was found built out of tombstones, and Jewish tombstones were also used as flooring for latrines. Uprooted tombstones were also used in Jordanian military positions surrounding the city. Both the newer sections and ancient graves were destroyed, some a thousand years old.

After the liberation of Judea and Samaria in 1967, Jews returned to areas in which they had been displaced by Jordanian ethnic cleansing, such as Gush Etzion and eastern Jerusalem, as well as other places from which they had been driven by Arab pogroms and terrorism, such as Hevron. They also established some new communities that were on the other side of the lines that had been drawn in the 1949 Armistice Agreement. It should be noted that the agreement made it clear that the armistice lines have no political significance and are drawn “without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines or to claims of either Party relating thereto.”

In an unintended irony, the EU insists that Israeli control of the area amounts to “belligerent occupation” although the area being “occupied” by Israel was previously illegally occupied by Jordan (which illegitimately transferred its stolen property to the PLO in 1988). So in effect the liberation of the territories put Israel in control of all the land that had been originally earmarked by the Mandate for a Jewish homeland.

The EU then misinterprets Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which was originally intended to prohibit acts like the deportation of German Jews to occupied Poland for the purposes of forced labor and murder, as rendering the unforced movement of Jews across the Green Line (which has no political significance) a violation of international law.

In this day when college professors can be fired for using language that is deemed inappropriate and offensive, it should be noted that the terms “West Bank,” “settler,” and “settlement” are precisely those things. But their employment is supremely important for the psychological and diplomatic/legal war against the Jewish state. The abandonment of Judea and Samaria would be blow to the security of the Jewish state that might be fatal, because they are necessary to maintain defensible borders, and to prevent the establishment of a Gaza-like terrorist enclave next to Israel’s population center. The loss of the holy sites in Hevron, eastern Jerusalem, and other places that would fall under Arab control, and the loss of the optimism for the future created by the victory of 1967, would be a spiritual and psychological defeat, a great victory for the Arab-European axis that wishes to see the Jewish state undone.

And we mustn’t fool ourselves into thinking that a retreat from Judea and Samaria would be the end of it. The PLO has never abandoned Arafat’s “Grand Strategy” to bring about an Arab Palestine from the river to the sea, which depends on first reversing Israel’s gains in the 1967 war. The plan got a great boost with the Oslo Accords, that gave legitimacy to a PLO-ruled entity (and later gave birth to one ruled by Hamas). It’s certain that an Israeli withdrawal would immediately be followed by demands for the Arab “refugees” to realize their “right of return.”

Unfortunately, many Israeli politicians seem to have internalized the mindset that is promoted by the psywar campaign; otherwise, they wouldn’t be so quick to bend when pressure is applied from Europe or the US on questions of Jewish and (illegal) Arab building in Judea and Samaria.

Judea and Samaria are the spiritual heartland of the Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael and are essential to her security. There is no other single goal that is more critical to Israel’s long-term survival than establishing a strong Jewish majority there and fully incorporating them into the state – and rejecting the antisemitic lies of our enemies.

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How not to treat an enemy (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

How Not to Treat an Enemy

News item:

Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced on Wednesday that Israel would implement a series of measures intended to prop up the indebted Palestinian Authority and ease Palestinians’ daily life. …

Israel will provide the PA with a NIS 100 million loan ($32.2 million) on tax revenues Israel collects on Ramallah’s behalf, in an attempt to reduce the PA’s spiraling deficit. Ramallah, the PA’s seat of government, has seen dwindling foreign aid for years, and almost none from its biggest backers in 2021. …

According to another Israel official, Gantz told Abbas that a series of economic measures are being weighed, including lowering fees for purchasing fuel and a pilot program to allow shipping containers to enter the West Bank from Jordan via Allenby Bridge.

Such steps “would likely add hundreds of millions of shekels to the Palestinian Authority on an annual basis,” said Gantz, according to the official. …

Gantz and Abbas, in their Tuesday meeting, also discussed legalizing more Palestinian construction in the West Bank.

As you probably know, the Knesset passed a law in 2018 that requires Israel to deduct a sum equivalent to the amount that the PA pays to convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons and to the families of “martyrs” from tax revenues collected on behalf of the PA. This loan and an even larger one (500 million NIS) given to the PA in August partially neutralizes the law. It’s hard to see how Israel can complain about the Biden Administration circumventing its own law against the PA’s “pay to slay” program, when her government does the same thing.

The article I’ve quoted from above does not mention anything that the PA will do for Israel in return. Will they end “pay for slay?” If they had wanted to, they could have done so long ago and would not need to accept “loans” (which I am prepared to eat my hat if they repay). But the leaders of the PA, from Mahmoud Abbas on down, have consistently said that if there is only one penny left in their treasury, it will go to the prisoners.

What about incitement of terrorism? The PA actually committed to end incitement, back in the days of Yasser Arafat. Of course, as you probably know, they never did this, continuing to honor terrorists in their schools and media, and to name sporting events after them. PA officials claim regularly that Israel is planning to destroy or defile the al-Aqsa mosque, creating riots and inspiring terrorism. Incitement continued after the 500 million shekel “loan” in August, and there is no indication that it will stop now.

Improving the daily life of the Palestinians by fattening the PA is a joke, as any resident of the PA will tell you. The last thing they do with their resources is to help their citizens (except for a few “connected” ones).

So why is Israel giving cash and other concessions to the PA? The stated reason is that it is necessary to strengthen the PA; if it collapses, the territories are expected to fall into the hands of Hamas, which would turn it into a launching platform for rockets next door to Tel Aviv.

One might think that the best solution to that problem would be to weaken Hamas, rather than strengthening the PA. But our government is also concerned about protecting Hamas, which, if it collapsed, might be replaced by worse organizations, like Palestinian Islamic Jihad or even ISIS. So Israel permits the introduction of millions of dollars from Qatar in order to prop up Hamas.

There is something very wrong here. The PA and Hamas tell us in no uncertain terms that they want us to disappear. They do so in language as bad or worse than that of the Nazis. And they try to kill our citizens, with rockets and knives and bullets. Our response is to try to restrain them from killing us (doing the least collateral damage possible), and pay them. Has this ever been the way a nation successfully defended itself against its enemies?

This is also the way we deal with Hezbollah. Yes, we attack shipments of advanced weapons from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon via Syria; but some get through on the ground, by air, and by sea. Little by little Hezbollah builds up its deterrent against us.

I am naïve, I am told. I don’t understand the realities of the complex situation. We need to gain time so that we can deal with Iran. The US and Europe will punish us if we act aggressively. The status quo, in which we buy a small, manageable amount of terrorism, is actually the best situation we can hope for. And so on.

We are giving in to extortion: from the PA and Hamas, but also from the anti-Israel regimes in the US and Europe. We are taking the easy course, which results in a slow degredation of our strategic position, against Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran. Our defensive, protective, strategy, which includes antimissile systems, physical barriers, interdiction of weapons shipments, as well as payments to our local enemies, is a strategy for buying time and avoiding confrontation. But it does not permanently weaken our enemies; indeed, it preserves them.

Are we waiting for some external event to come along and reverse the decline of our strategic position? Maybe a revolution in Iran? I wouldn’t hold my breath. A miracle is always welcome, but counting on one is a poor strategy. If things continue as they are now, a point will be reached when our enemies feel that they are in a position to prevail, and at that point will trigger open conflict. This was the essence of the plan described by Yasser Arafat in 1974, and it has only changed in detail since then.

There is also the psychological damage from this policy. For example, what is the message sent to the PA, when we pay them for quiet and they return antisemitic incitement against us? Does it not justify their behavior, in their minds and in the minds of their supporters around the world? The propaganda campaigns paint us as oppressors, land thieves, people who don’t belong here. Payments are construed as compensation, reparations to our victims.

A better strategy is an aggressive policy to weaken and destroy our enemies, one at a time if possible. It would be much more convenient to deal with Hezbollah if we didn’t have to worry about Hamas opening a second front; and similarly with the PA. And it goes without saying that Iran depends on Hezbollah to deter us from striking their nuclear project.

So why are we trying to avoid conflict with all of them? And why are we strengthening them?

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