Over and over again: Mahmoud Abbas spouts Jew-hatred. He is pressured to apologize and does it again. And the world continues to respect him.

In April 2018, Palestinian Authority president and PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas gave an antisemitic speech where he claimed that Ashkenazic Jews were not really Jews, that Jews throughout history including during the Holocaust were hated not because they were Jews but because of how they acted, that Jews were never persecuted in Arab lands and that Jews have no connection to the Land of Israel.

World leaders expressed outrage, and Abbas - under pressure - apologized. 

In a statement released by his office, Abbas said he did not intend to cause offense in a speech to the Palestinian National Council on Monday, in which he claimed the Holocaust was driven not by anti-Semitism but by a reaction to the financial activities of European Jews.

In his speech, citing books written by what he described as Zionist Jewish authors, Abbas also re-aired a discredited theory that Ashkenazi Jews hail from Khazaria, an empire located in Eastern Europe, rather than the biblical Holy Land.

“If people were offended by my statement in front of the PNC, especially people of the Jewish faith, I apologize to them,” Abbas said in his statement. “I would like to assure everyone that it was not my intention to do so, and to reiterate my full respect for the Jewish faith, as well as other monotheistic faiths.”

“I would also like to reiterate our long-held condemnation of the Holocaust, as the most heinous crime in history, and express our sympathy with its victims,” Friday’s statement from Abbas said. “Likewise, we condemn anti-Semitism in all its forms."

A couple of weeks ago, Abbas repeated every single antisemitic point he made in 2018 - and added a few more.

From MEMRI:

Abbas: "The truth that we should clarify to the world is that European Jews are not Semites. They have nothing to do with Semitism.

"The story began in 900 CE, in the Khazar Kingdom on the Caspian Sea. It was a Tatar kingdom that converted to Judaism.

"[In the 11th century], this empire collapsed, and all its population left to the north and to the west. They left for Russia and Western and Eastern Europe. They spread there, and they are the forefathers of Ashkenazi Jews. So when we hear them talk about Semitism and antisemitism – the Ashkenazi Jews, at least, are not Semites.

"They say that Hitler killed the Jews for being Jews, and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews.

"Not true. It was clearly explained that [the Europeans] fought [the Jews] because of their social role, and not their religion. Several authors wrote about this. Even Karl Marx said this was not true. He said that the enmity was not directed at Judaism as a religion, but to Judaism for is social role.

"The [Europeans] fought against these people because of their role in society, which had to do with usury, money, and so on and so forth. Even Hitler...

"Everybody knows that during World War I, Hitler was a sergeant. He said he fought the Jews because they were dealing with usury and money. In his view, they were engaged in sabotage, and this is why he hated them. We just want to make this point clear. This was not about Semitism and antisemitism.

"As for the eastern Jews, they are Semites, because all of them originated in the Arabian Peninsula and they traveled to Al-Andalus, and then came back. We are familiar with this history.

"The Balfour Declaration saw the light of day only because of the complete agreement between Balfour and U.S. President Wilson. They were in full agreement about this phrasing. So America was a partner to the Balfour Declaration. Who invented that [Jewish] state? It was Britain and America — not just Britain.

"The U.S., who was not even a member of the League of Nations, force the League of Nations to include the Balfour Declaration in its covenant. I am saying this so that we know who we should accuse of being our enemy, who has harmed us and took our homeland away, and gave it to the Israelis or the Jews.

"In 1948, the population of Israel numbered 650,000 people. In 1948-1949, they occupied 78% of Palestine. 650,000 people were not enough, so Ben-Gurion complained to the British, to his friend Churchill. He said: 'Man, I have a problem. Get me the Jews from Europe. I am short [of people]. I have this vast land, but no population.'

"[Churchill] said: 'I cannot get you the European Jews. After the World War, they emigrated to different places, or settled [in Europe], or were killed. The only ones I can get you are the Jews of the Arab countries.' But Churchill said that there was no one else. Ben-Gurion said: 'God forbid! Do me a favor, I don't want the Jews of the Arab countries.'

"[Ben-Gurion] said: 'Brother, those Jews of the Arab countries are just like the Arabs. They look like Arabs. They have the same culture, same food. I don't want them.' But [Churchill] said: 'Do whatever you want. There is no other solution.'

"Not only did Ben-Gurion agree, he sent his people to Iraq, to kill, destroy, and plant explosives in synagogues, in order to force the Iraqi Jews to emigrate. This also happened in Egypt in 1956 – the Lavon Affair – and then in Morocco, and other countries. The Jews did not want to emigrate, but they were forced to do so, by means of pressure, coercion, and murder."

Abbas repeated the exact same lies he said in 2018 - that he "apologized" for.

And after his apology, everyone forgot about his antisemitism. 

Just as the media has forgotten that in 2016, Abbas claimed that rabbis called to poison Palestinian water.. His office released a statement saying "President Mahmoud Abbas has affirmed that he didn’t intend to do harm to Judaism or to offend Jewish people around the world."

Of course, he didn't apologize for lots of other antisemitic statements. In January 2018 Abbas said that European Jews stayed in Europe to be slaughtered rather than immigrate to Israel. In 2015, Abbas said Jews "have no right to defile [the Temple Mount] with their filthy feet."  In 2022, Abbas told German officials that Palestinians have gone through 50 "holocausts" at the hands of Jews. 

Do you sense a pattern?

No, I don't mean the pattern of Abbas saying vile statements that prove that he is an antisemite. I mean the pattern of the media and world leaders feigning outrage every single time one of his Jew-hating statements makes it into the headlines - and then they go back to acting as if Abbas is a respected member of the world community.

Which means that world leaders, the media and human rights NGOs care as much about antisemitism as Mahmoud Abbas himself does, and their lip service of condemning his statements are exactly as sincere as Abbas' "apologies" are.

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Saudis, Palestinians, US all negotiating Saudi peace with Israel - but Israel isn't in the room

It's happening again:

A delegation of top American officials is slated to travel to Riyadh this week to meet with Saudi counterparts in order to discuss a potential normalization agreement between the Gulf kingdom and Israel, a US official and a Palestinian official told The Times of Israel on Sunday.

The visit by White House Middle East czar Brett McGurk and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf will come just over a month after US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan visited Saudi Arabia with the same objective, pointing to Washington’s continued determination to broker an elusive deal. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also visited Riyadh on the same mission in June.

McGurk and Leaf’s visit will overlap with that of a Palestinian delegation led by Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee secretary-general Hussein al-Sheikh, who will be in Riyadh to discuss what Ramallah is hoping to obtain from a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal, the two officials said.

So the US is speaking to Saudi Arabia about conditions on Israel to accept a normalization deal.

The US is speaking to Palestinians about conditions on Israel to accept a normalization deal.

The Palestinians are speaking to the Saudis about conditions on Israel to accept a normalization deal.

Everyone is speaking to each other - about Israel, but not to Israel. 

Are there backchannels from Israel to Saudi Arabia? Probably. Is the Israeli government in charge of these backchannels? 

We have no idea. 

But we do know that the Biden administration and the Palestinians are not keen to negotiate with Netanyahu, so my guess is that some Israeli peacenik organization is leading the backchannel negotiations with the intent to manipulate the Israeli government, not to appease it, about what strings would be attached to the deal.

Maybe I'm being a bit too sensitive after reading the Gidi Grinstein book I reviewed on Sunday and how a backchannel was used by the Israeli Left, the US and Palestinians to collude to bring down Netanyahu in his first term, but the impression I am getting is that a purpose of these negotiations may include finding a way to make the current coalition government fall, something that would being a sigh of relief to the Americans, the Palestinians and not a small number of Israelis. 

Holding these meetings in Saudi Arabia is a convenient way to exclude Israeli officials who cannot officially travel to the kingdom. But all other negotiations between Israel and its erstwhile peace partners took place in neutral territory - Europe or the US. 

Excluding Israel from these talks seems to be a way to marginalize the Jewish state and put it on its back foot when the offer is revealed - a deal that, it appears, will be all but imposed on Israel rather than one that Israel has a say in. If Israel refuses an offer backed by the US, Saudis and tacitly Palestinians it will look like an intransigent player who only pretends to want peace. If Israel accepts a bad deal, the government probably will fall. 

It feels like deja vu.,

Most Israelis and Zionists would love to see Saudi normalization, myself included. Every new revelation makes me wonder if the price would be too high - especially when the major benefits of peace are already effectively there. 

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.@USAmbIsrael Tom Nides gets it exactly wrong

In a recent interview in Hamodia, US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides said, when asked about a recent poll that showed 72%  of Palestinians support terror groups like Lion's Den, "I firmly believe, and you might disagree with me, but the vast, vast majority among the average Palestinians doesn’t wake up in the morning wanting to kill someone who happens to be Jewish. They want to live just like you and I do."

Stephen Flatow responded quite nicely in JNS to this.

I would like to add my own observations.

Nides was careful in his words. He didn't say that the vast majority of Palestinians don't support terror, only that most of them don't want to personally kill Jews.

I've been closely following Palestinian polls for over 15 years.  I suspect Nides knows that polls show consistently over the years that a majority of Palestinians support terror attacks as part of a strategy to gain independence. Those questions are asked in the abstract.

But when Palestinians are asked about specific terror attacks, support goes way up.

In 2008, a terrorist entered the Mercaz Harav yeshiva and started mowing down students. 8 were killed, including 4 children. When Palestinians were asked if they supported that attack, an astonishing 84% said they did.

You can see how Palestinians consistently support specific terror attacks that murder Jews more than general attacks in the abstract from that March 2008 poll.

This is more than simply supporting terror for political gain. This is bloodlust against Jews. 

Nothing has changed since then. In 2014, after a string of stabbing attacks including the massacre of four rabbis in Har Nof, not only were celebrations shown on Palestinian TV. A survey shortly after the event asked, "Recently there has been an increase in Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in attempts to stab or run over Israelis. Do you support or oppose these attempts?" Four out of five Palestinians supported murdering Jews, and one in three emphasized that they strongly support such attacks.

Although the media and government officials try hard to wave this away, the truth is in these surveys.

It goes beyond that. You will never find a Palestinian official on Arabic TV condemning these attacks - besides when Mahmoud Abbas is pressured to do so by the US. On the contrary, the murderers are "martyrs" and "heroes," virtually every time. 

Do well-meaning lies and obfuscations from people like Nides, and New York Times reporters, and Europeans, help the cause of peace? No, they don't. When the West gives Palestinians who support terror the benefit of the doubt, they learn an important lesson: that the West is on their side. By downplaying explicit and overwhelming Palestinian support for terror, they leaves the door open for "human rights" groups and Western parliaments to demonize Israel as the obstacle to peace, and the Palestinians as hapless, defenseless victims. 

This emboldens the terrorists and results in more dead people on both sides.

It is important to note that Gulf countries, in Arabic, have been criticizing Palestinians for nearly a decade now, even as their own support for suicide terror has plummeted in other surveys. The Abraham Accords is in no small part a result of a refreshing honesty in parts of the Arab world about the real situation. 

The West needs to stop its default stance of "don't upset the Palestinians." It hasn't worked and it has empowered them to be more intransigent, thinking that the West is doing their bidding. 

Palestinians live in an honor/shame society. Therefore, upsetting them is exactly what needs to be done. Palestinians must be shamed into stopping support for terror in their schools and media.  

If Tom Nides really wants peace, that is the most effective tool he has. 

Coddling and covering up Palestinian support for terror does the exact opposite - and we see how well that has worked.

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At least we now know what "status quo" means to the Biden administration

Earlier this week, after Itamar Ben Gvir visited the Temple Mount without incident, there was a very telling exchange at the daily State Department briefings:

QUESTION: Just to cut to the chase on this, you talk about how you’re opposed to any unilateral actions and that you support – or oppose any effort to change the status quo. So do you believe that this visit alters the status quo in any way?

MR PRICE: Look, Matt —

QUESTION: And do you not support it? Do you think that it was a bad idea? Would you prefer that it had not happened?

MR PRICE: This visit has the potential to exacerbate tensions and to provoke violence. As we’ve said, we’re deeply concerned by any unilateral actions that have the potential to do that. So yes, we’re deeply concerned by this visit. Now, when it comes to the historic status quo, it’s not for me to define from here what the historic status quo is; it’s not for the United States to prescribe what the historic status quo is. That’s a question of history. It’s a question for —

QUESTION: Certainly you know what the historic status quo is?

MR PRICE: It’s a question for the parties themselves, including the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, whose role as the custodian of Jerusalem’s holy sites, again, we deeply appreciate.

The United States position is that the status quo must not be violated, but it doesn't know what the status quo is. 

Yesterday's address by the US Deputy Ambassador Robert Wood at the UN Security Council sheds some more light on the US position:

Secretary Blinken has said very clearly that it’s absolutely critical for all sides to exercise restraint, refrain from provocative actions and rhetoric, at the Haram Al-Sharif/Temple Mount and other holy sites in Jerusalem, both in word and in practice. In this spirit, we oppose any and all unilateral actions that depart from the historic status quo, which are unacceptable.

While he didn't directly say that Ben Gvir violated the status quo, in the context of an emergency Security Council session to condemn Israel for allowing the visit, and with not a single word to tamp down the anti-Israel rhetoric there, it seems pretty clear that the US position is that any "provocative actions" are violations of the status quo.

But only "provocative actions" on the Israeli side. 

When Palestinians stockpiled stones, fireworks and Molotov cocktails inside the actual Al Aqsa Mosque multiple times over the past decade and then used them, I could find no mention by the State Department that these actions were "provocative." At the time, they said "we welcome the steps the Israeli Government has taken in recent days aimed at avoiding provocations" but I do not see any indication that turning the mosque into a weapons cache has ever been considered provocative. 

In fact, I cannot recall a single time that any country besides Israel has accused Palestinians of violating the status quo, even when they excavated hundreds of  tons of rubble that contained countless priceless Jewish antiquities to build a brand new, 7000 seat mosque underneath the Temple Mount in the 1990s. It is hard to imagine a bigger violation of the status quo than that, but there were no UN sessions about it.

Putting it all together, we see that according to the US, anything that upsets Palestinians is a violation of the status quo. Because by definition, anything that upsets Palestinians is "provocative" - it provokes them, no matter how trivial it is in practice. And the US makes no distinction between "provocation" and "violating the status quo."

Looking back on the January 3 State Department statement, this becomes clear. If the status quo is defined by "the parties themselves" and Israel's opinion is ignored on the issue, as it has been this week, that means that the only people who define the status quo are the Palestinians and Jordanians - and they can define it however they want, even to change it daily, based on what "provokes" them.

A few months ago, they were "provoked" by a Spanish Christian tourist (that they called a "Zionist settler") showing her legs on the Temple Mount. They were "provoked" by other Christian tourists who carried some Jewish-looking souvenirs they had just bought in the souk on their tour. They are provoked every day that Jews visit the Temple Mount, with headlines in the newspapers about Jews "desecrating" the holy site with their very presence.

According to Israel's best friend, any "provocation" by non-Muslims that causes an uproar is a violation of the status quo and deserves condemnation. And that should concern anyone who cares about Jewish rights. 

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11/14 Links Pt1: Gleefully abandoning Israel; Why the Palestinians Snubbed the Israeli Left; Zelensky aide; Ukraine’s vote against Israel at UN ‘a grave mistake’

From Ian:

Gleefully abandoning Israel

Kasher's post was so incendiary that Facebook removed it for violating rules of decent conduct. But Kasher didn't let up. He continued to expectorate that "a Jewish people with this face is not my Jewish people, and not the Jewish people among which I wish to be counted as a son." As a result, he announced that he now prefers not to be called a Jew but rather only "a person of Jewish origin."

He then went on to reject "invalid" calls for unity with the two camps he views as mutations. "The differences between me and the people of the mutations are not marginal and should not be ignored for the sake of a higher goal," he wrote. "There is no true unity and there never will be."

What makes Asa Kasher's diatribe so disturbing is its source. Until now, Kasher had been considered one of this country's respected and reasonable thinkers, someone who authored the IDF's code of ethics in warfare and who defended its targeted assassination policies in academic and legal forums worldwide. He is an Israel Prize laureate. Now it seems that Kasher has lost his bearings in a haze of hatred and self-hatred.

Religious Zionist Party Chairman Bezalel Smotrich responded to Kasher's remarks, saying they saddened him. "People like Asa Kasher, whose wisdom, integrity, and morality I wanted to appreciate, are now unmasked as lacking national responsibility, personal integrity, and minimal morality."

Addressing his "brothers on the Left," Smotrich said his camp was "given a mandate to promote what we believe is right and good for the State of Israel. We are positively going to fulfill this mandate. But you should know that your attempts at intimidation are baseless and unnecessary. No one is going to destroy democracy, turn Israel into Iran, harm someone's individual rights, or force Israelis to change their personal lifestyle."

My conclusion is that "Ben-Gvir-Phobia" (as opposed to reasonable concern about his rise) is a purposefully blown-out-of-proportion fear of the Right that serves as cover for people who apparently weren't comfortable with staunch Zionist and real Jewish identity to begin with. It leads to off-the-rocker reactions like those of Friedman and Kasher, who seem only-too-happy to jettison their associations with Israel and Judaism.

We shouldn't go there. Israel's democratic and Jewish discourse is sound even as it tends towards the conservative side of the map, and Israel's religious, defense, and diplomatic policies will not easily be hijacked by Ben-Gvir-ism. The radicals that truly worry me are those that seek to crash Israel's diplomatic relations and Israel-Diaspora relations with false, apocalyptic prognostications of Israel's descent into barbarism.

Perhaps the best advice is to ignore angry self-declared prophets like Friedman and Kasher. Perhaps I shouldn't have written about them at all. I am certain that they do not represent mainstream opinion in either the American-Jewish or Israeli communities. The Israel they fabricate and scorn ain't the real, responsible and realistic Israel I know.

Ruthie Blum: Let’s replace the term ‘national unity’ with ‘majority rule’

It’s no wonder, then, that the “anybody but Bibi” bloc disintegrated as soon as the latest election campaign kicked off. Grasping that the best he could hope for—even with the virulent anti-Zionist parties’ support—would be to prevent Netanyahu from being able to form a coalition, Lapid’s goal was to remain interim prime minister for as long as possible until a sixth round of elections.

He thus discouraged voters from opting for smaller left-wing parties. The upshot was that Meretz didn’t pass the threshold and Labor garnered only four mandates. He also colluded with the far-left Jewish-Arab Hadash-Ta’al Party not to join forces with its radical Islamist counterpart, Balad, which then didn’t make it into the Knesset.

Then there was Gantz, who ran against, rather than with, him. To do this, he established a party whose name in English, hilariously, is “National Unity.” Neither this nor his enlisting of former Israel Defense Forces Chief-of-Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot as a draw helped him come close to surpassing Lapid, let alone Netanyahu.

The icing on the “unity” cake was on display during the coalition consultations with Herzog. The only parties to recommend Lapid were his own, Yesh Atid, and Labor, headed by Merav Michaeli, who publicly blamed Lapid for the electoral defeat.

Angry at her for having dared to cross him in this manner, he stormed out of the Knesset last Sunday when she took to the podium to deliver a speech at the ceremony marking the 27th anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The “unity” was heartwarming.

To be fair to Lapid, who is about to assume the role of opposition leader, “unity” is a meaningless concept in general, unless applied to a specific tenet or circumstance at a given time. The same goes for Netanyahu’s newfound coalition, which undoubtedly is and will continue to be fraught with frequent squabbles.

Still, the contrast in this respect between the outgoing and incoming governments is stark. Whereas the sole glue for Lapid’s coalition was anti-Bibi animosity, Netanyahu’s espouses a set of values and objectives shared by a higher percentage of the population.

Whether this constitutes “unity” is questionable. But it’s what democracies call “majority rule.”

PreOccupiedTerritory: People Who Think Actual Terrorist Arafat Changed Ways Refuse To Accept Former Kahanist Has Moderated (satire)

The evolution of a far-right figure who, among other beyond-the-pale rhetoric, once expressed admiration for a man who massacred dozens of Palestinians at prayer, into an influential kingmaker who professes a shift to more tolerant views, has prompted skepticism among his political opponents, many of whom had little problem believing that the mass-murderer Yasser Arafat sincerely disavowed violence, despite the latter’s flagrant use of such means to achieve his political ends after signing peace agreements.

Numerous commentators, politicians, and other public figures in Israel have spent months, some even years, denouncing Itamar Ben-Gvir as a fascist Islamophobe who must be kept as far from governmental power as possible – warnings that have taken on greater urgency since the alliance of his Otzma Yehudit Party and the Religious Zionism Party garnered fourteen seats in elections two weeks ago, putting Ben-Gvir in position to extract policy and personnel concessions from Binyamin Netanyahu, the prospective prime minister of an emerging right-wing coalition. Ben-Gvir has in recent years renounced some of the extreme positions that characterized his activism in prior decades, such as calling Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin a traitor and threatening harm to him; Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by another extremist with views that overlapped Ben-Gvir’s. That political evolution, however, has failed to sway Ben-Gvir’s critics, who find unconvincing his protestations of moderation, even as many of them make excuses for the arch-terrorist who ran the Palestine Liberation Organization and commitment to pursue his political aims through negotiation rather than terrorism, but disregarded that commitment repeatedly.

“A leopard can’t change his spots,” insisted Zehava Gal-On, whose far-left Meretz Party failed to meet the electoral threshold of 3.25% of the vote, and will be absent from the Knesset for the first time in more than thirty years, but for some reason journalists keep seeking out her opinion despite its questionable relevance. “Arafat was totally different. He renounced violence and I believed him. Anything that happened afterwards was just technicalities, necessary sacrifices for peace. Doesn’t count.”

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The French reaction to Kristallnacht: Let's pretend to care about Jews while watching them suffer

Reading the contemporaneous newspaper coverage of Kristallnacht is overwhelming. While the story did not start out on the front pages, the coverage snowballed over the next few days as Nazi restrictions on Jews increased and editorials in newspapers expressed outrage.

The outrage did not extend to doing a damn thing to help Jews in Germany, though.

A French newspaper published this editorial cartoon:

And the New York Times reported of angry reactions to the pogroms and anti-Jewish edicts in France:

But there were two other stories out of France that week.

In this one, we see that France turned away the Jews who were fleeing Germany - Jews the Nazis were allowing to leave.

And days later, after French newspapers said how unacceptable it would be for France to make an agreement with a Nazi Germany that so cruelly and proudly persecuted Jews, France worked hard to make exactly that agreement. 

That agreement was signed on December 6, 1938, and the articles about it didn't mention a thing about Jews. 

Then, as now, the world pretended to care about Jews - but was not willing to lift a finger to actually save their lives. It was all lip service.

So whenever the world demands that Israel compromise on its security today, remember that it is also no lip service. No one will guarantee Jewish security and survival besides Jews themselves. 

The only difference is that now we have a state and an army. 

There's another relevant lesson for today. Don't make agreements with genocidal madmen. 

They tend not to be too trustworthy.

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There's another Mediterranean natural gas agreement where Israel seems to have been out-negotiated - in Gaza

From all appearances, the new Lebanese-Israeli maritime border agreement seems to indicate that Israel has given up significant positions for very little return. 

David Schenker summarizes in the Wall Street Journal:

During negotiations, mediated by the Biden administration, Israel conceded the entirety of its claims to the 330-square-mile zone to Lebanon in return for a 3-mile internationally recognized buffer zone adjacent to the shoreline. The remainder of the zone goes to Lebanon, which will also have the right to exploit a natural gas field known as Qana, which extends south of the frontier, and an obligation to remunerate Israel for the extracted gas there.

The contours of the proposed deal are stunning. ...As per the new agreement, Lebanon will attain virtually 100% of its initial negotiating position.

It’s a remarkable turn of events, especially given Beirut’s profound lack of leverage. 

Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist organization, also played an important if indirect role in the talks. The organization has threatened to attack the Energean floating production system rig in Israel’s Karish field, south of the 23 line, if the ship started to extract gas prior to reaching an agreement on the maritime border. Before Hezbollah’s warning, Israel announced that pumping would start in September. In the absence of a deal, extraction didn’t commence.  

Israel's logic seems to be that if Lebanon becomes a partner in selling natural gas, Hezbollah is far less likely to start another war. But Israel is permanently giving up hundreds of square miles of maritime rights for an assumption of logic on the part of a group that slavishly does whatever Iran tells it to do. And Hezbollah has a history of not giving a damn about Lebanon when it makes its own decisions. 

It turns out that there was practically a mirror image of these negotiations happening on Israel's other maritime border, with Egypt. Al Monitor reports that Israel appears to have given up on its maritime rights in the sea off the Gaza coast as well:

Egypt succeeded in persuading Israel to start extracting natural gas off the coast of the Gaza Strip, after several months of secret bilateral talks, according to information provided to Al-Monitor by an official in the Egyptian intelligence service and a member of the PLO Executive Committee. 

It comes after years of Israeli objections to extract natural gas off the coast of Gaza on security grounds...

The member of the PLO Executive Committee told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that Egypt informed the PA of Israel's approval to start extracting Palestinian gas off the coast of Gaza. He pointed out that this came after political pressure exerted by European countries on Israel to meet their needs for gas alternatives to Russian gas.

The PLO official said that under the agreement, Egypt and Israel would supervise the extraction process, and that part of the gas will be exported to Egypt, and the bulk of it will be exported by Israel to Europe through Greece and Cyprus. The financial revenues from the process of exporting Palestinian gas will return to the treasury of the PA, with part of these revenues allocated to support Gaza’s economy.

The details are fuzzy, but it is apparent that there are commonalities between the Lebanese and the Egyptian/PA agreements: Israel agreed to both under pressure from world powers, Israel abandoned its long standing positions protecting its own rights, and Israel hopes that these agreements will reduce the chances of war without her enemies Hezbollah and Hamas making  or even hinting at a single promise. 

Avoiding war is of course important, but assuming that making agreements with parties who are adjacent to irrational enemies will avoid war with those enemies is a hell of a stretch, especially one to give up permanent rights for. 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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