More truth about "Masafer Yatta"

Anti-Israel activists have been screaming about Israel's demolition of the illegal structures on the "Masafer Yatta" area. Even this week, one resident published an op-ed in The Independent "The Israeli government is trying to destroy my village – we need your help." 

I showed last month that Masafer Yatta is a relatively recent set of illegal outposts, with no residents or structures outside ruins mentioned in the 19th century Survey of Western Palestine.

This 1935 map also shows nothing in that area:

Some recent aerial photos showing that the area was nearly empty as recently as 1997. Here are comparisons of areas as they looked then (at the beginning of the land grab) and in 2021:

 The residents showed their own evidence of residency in the area in recent decades, and the Israeli High Court said that their photos were only showing evidence that there weren't any permanent structures there.

For the sake of example, our focus will be on the aerial photographs of "Khirbet al-Fahit" presented by the respondents ("al-Fahit" according to the petitioners). In 1967 and 1981 the area was completely empty of buildings. Some development is evident during the years 1990 and 1991. In 2001 it is evident that a number of buildings were already built in Kharbit, and such were built more and more in 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2012. 

An identical picture is revealed from the aerial photographs attached by the petitioners and even more clearly. It can also be seen that in 1972 and 1981 there is no evidence of buildings in the area compared to 2011, when there is a lot of construction on the site. 

The same is true with regard to Khirbet Hilweh ("Al Hilweh" according to the petitioners). There is not much room to doubt that in the early years (1967, 1979, 1981 and even 1991) there is no evidence of construction on the site. However in the years 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2012 more and more buildings and houses were built.  There is a sharp and noticeable difference between the photos from the early period (in 1972, 1981 and even 1993) and the photo from 2011 in which  construction can be clearly identified.

The Regavim NGO gives the true origins of the illegal outposts:

This is how these "villages" were born: The shepherds of Yatta, who lived in brick and mortar homes, would sleep in the natural caves in the grazing areas during certain seasons, rather than trekking back to the village each night. After the IDF closed off the area, the shepherds were permitted to continue to graze their flocks there; the IDF gave them a few days' warning before live-fire exercises to insure that no one got hurt. But the give-them-an-inch-and they'll-demand-a-mile dynamic soon set in, and the Palestinian Authority jumped in and began to fund construction and provide materials for permanent structures. Foreign interests funded infrastructure projects for the "indigenous farmers" - laying the water and electricity lines that enabled more and more people to set themselves up on the "free" land and build additional homes - all funded by European donations. This pattern was repeated all through the area; this was proven in the High Court of Justice - by the plaintiffs themselves!    

But the IDF willingness to compromise meant that instead of dealing with the illegal construction early, they allowed it to become much more of a problem.

 The first petitions regarding Masafer Yatta were filed over 20 years ago - by leftist organizations that tried to wrest control of the area out of the State's hands. There were temporary injunctions issued, which were not only ignored, they were trampled. Rather than tear down the few structures that had popped up in the firing zone, the IDF kept pulling back, limiting the area it used for training in order to avoid harming the squatters who, for their part, pulled out all the stops and poured massive resources into more and more construction and development. What started off as a few structures in contained areas metastasized into hundreds of structures, many hundreds of residents, and a brand new fake-news international humanitarian crisis. A full two decades passed before the High Court finally admitted what had been clear from the start, and what Regavim has been saying all along: The Arab claims to this land are fake news, the claim that Israel is dispossessing indigenous people is a lie - and the State of Israel has allowed its own delusions that it can compromise on our national interest to cause massive local and international damage.   

The court decision also noted that the vast majority of petitioners still have homes in the places they moved from to grab this seemingly free land from the State of Israel. In other words, the claim that over 1000 Palestinians will be "homeless" is yet another lie. They have their original homes.

There are no indigenous residents of "Masafer Yatta." The land was always empty and the only reason anyone lives there today is because Palestinians are trying to steal all the previously empty lands they can and claim that they were always there. 

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06/09 Links Pt2: Liberating our Jerusalem; The Soviet origins of left-wing anti-Zionism; Israel’s Destruction Is Championed at the University of Chicago

From Ian:

Mark Regev: Shireen Abu Akleh, Palestinians, Al Jazeera and press freedom - opinion

The accusation of a willful murder is made when among the nations of the Middle East it is in Israel alone that a free and critical press thrives. Israel’s famously boisterous and pugnacious media is always ready to expose a misbehaving politician, government wrongdoing and the IDF’s mistakes. This while the practice in the PA and Al Jazeera falls into a very different category.

Press freedom in the PA, Qatar
Although a PA basic law theoretically guarantees a free press, in reality such freedom is nonexistent: the media is severely constrained, critical platforms are shut down and journalists arrested when the authorities object to their work. Reporters have been beaten while in custody, blogger Nizar Banat ended up dead. When Abbas was angered by an Al Jazeera story, he ordered the closure of the network’s Ramallah offices.

The Palestinian president might have championed the deceased Abu Akleh as a martyr, but live Palestinian journalists know what may happen if they incur the wrath of the PA.

For its part, Al Jazeera likes to present its reporting as hard-hitting independent journalism, but the Qatari government-funded channel’s hundreds of employees never report about matters that could embarrass their patron.

Consequently, Qatar’s ongoing systematic mistreatment of the country’s migrant worker population of more than two million (similar in size to the entire population of Gaza) does not make it to Al Jazeera’s newsroom. The network has been equally silent on the kingdom’s discriminatory sexist male guardianship laws, on the criminalization of criticism against the emir’s leadership and on the lack of press freedom.

Even more problematic, following last year’s war in Gaza, the channel was presented with an award from Hamas for its reporting of the conflict. Hamas acclaim for Al Jazeera is not new, the network has a history of glorifying the perpetrators of terror attacks and broadcasting material that incites violence; its recent regurgitation of erroneous claims that the Jews somehow threaten al-Aqsa Mosque just the latest example.

Ultimately, like with its Kremlin-controlled sister channel RT, the Qatari state furnishes a television news station with a highly tendentious agenda.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the European democracies banned RT broadcasts deeming them a “direct threat” to the “public order and security” of the EU. Yet, despite Al Jazeera’s record of affinity with a terrorist organization sworn to Israel’s destruction, Jerusalem takes no analogous action, media freedom being sacrosanct.

While Shireen Abu Akleh’s untimely death warrants thorough examination, allegations that Israel deliberately targets the press deserve no credence. They are cheap propaganda and should be dismissed as such.

Daniel Greenfield: Liberating our Jerusalem

In 1966, Jerusalem was a city sundered in two, divided by barbed wire and the bullets of Muslim snipers. Diplomacy did not reunite it. Israel pursued diplomacy nearly to its bitter end until it understood that it had no choice at all but to fight. Israel did not swoop into the fight, its leaders did their best to avoid the conflict, asking the international community to intervene and stop Egypt from going to war. Read back the headlines for the last five years on Israel and Iran, and you will get a sense of the courage and determination of the Israeli leaders of the day.

When Israel went to war, its leaders did not want to liberate Jerusalem, they wanted Jordan to stay out of the war. Even when Jordan entered the war, they did not want to liberate the city. Divine Providence and Muslim hostility forced them to liberate Jerusalem and forced them to keep it. Now some of them would like to give it back, another sacrifice to the bloody deity of diplomacy whose altar flows with blood and burnt sacrifices.

As we remember Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day, it is important to remember that the city is united and free because diplomacy failed. The greatest triumph of the modern state happened only because diplomacy proved hopeless and useless in deterring Muslim genocidal ambitions. Had Israel succumbed to international pressure and had Nasser been as subtle as Sadat, then the Six-Day War would have looked like the Yom Kippur War fought with 1948 borders– and Israel very likely would not exist today.

Even as Jews remember the great triumph of Yom Yerushalayim, the ethnic cleansers and their accomplices are busy searching for ways to drive Jews out of Jerusalem, out of towns, villages and cities. This isn’t about the Muslim residents of Jerusalem, who have repeatedly asserted that they want to remain part of Israel. It’s not about peace, which did not come from any previous round of concessions, and will not come from this one either. It’s about solving the Jewish problem.

As long as Jews allow themselves to be defined as the problem, there will be plenty of those offering solutions. And the solutions invariably involve doing something about the Jews. It only stands to reason that if Jews are the problem, then moving them or getting rid of them is the solution. There is less friction in defining Jews as the problem, than in defining Muslims as the problem. The numbers alone mean that is so.

Yom Yerushalayim is a reminder of what the real problem is and what the real solution is. Muslim occupation of Israel is the problem. The Islamization of Jerusalem is the problem. Muslim violence in support of the Muslim occupation of Israel and of everywhere else is the problem. Israel is the solution. Only when we liberate ourselves from the lies, when we stop believing that we are the problem and recognize that we are the solution. Only then will the liberation that began in 1967 be complete.

Only then will we have liberated our Jerusalem. The Jerusalem of the soul. It is incumbent on all of us to liberate that little Jerusalem within. The holy city that lives in all of us. To clean the dross off its golden gates, wash the filth from its stones and expel the invaders gnawing away at our hearts until we look proudly upon a shining city. Then to help others liberate their own Jerusalems. Only then will we truly be free.

The Soviet origins of left-wing anti-Zionism

Ironically, Soviet anti-Zionism itself drew extensively from Nazi rhetoric and imagery. Many prominent contributors of propaganda material, such as Trofim Kichko, Yuri Ivanov, Lev Korneev and others unabashedly recycled ideas directly from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf. They even blamed the Jews for the extermination of both Jews and non-Jews during World War II. Today, anti-Zionist groups keep that legacy alive by routinely comparing Zionism to the Nazis. For example, Shahd Abusalama, a professor at Sheffield University in the United Kingdom, found it acceptable for a first-year student to compare an Israeli operation in Gaza to the Holocaust.

One of the Soviet propaganda machine’s greatest victories was the United Nations’ 1975 adoption of the “Zionism is Racism” resolution. Its revocation in 1991 had little effect on the U.N.’s stance on Israel. Statistics from 2020 are particularly illustrative: Israel was targeted by 17 U.N. resolutions, while all other countries combined, including regimes like Iran and North Korea, received six. On campus, Israel is frequently attacked in the same language. For example, at a Cornell SJP poetry reading, one participant designated Israel a “racist, exclusivist, supremacist state.”

Throughout their entire anti-Zionist campaign, the official Soviet line was that anti-Zionism was not anti-Semitism. A 1979 article in TheWashington Post noted, “Although the number of anti-Semitic books and denunciations has grown continuously [in the Soviet Union] since the Six-Day War in 1967, recent months have brought remarkable new additions to this genre. Officially, they are labeled ‘anti-Zionist.’ Soviet bureaucrats vehemently reject suggestions that ‘anti-Zionism’ means ‘anti-Semitism.’ To many Soviet Jews, it is a distinction without a difference.”

Today, this is one of the most popular talking points among left-wing anti-Zionists and anti-Semites. Indeed, it is telling that anti-Israel groups have repeatedly attempted to block universities and municipalities from adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Anti-Semitism, which defines certain kinds of anti-Israel rhetoric as anti-Semitic. At the City University of New York (CUNY), for example, former president of CUNY’s SJP chapter Nerdeen Kiswani tweeted: “#IHRAoutofCUNY we know all too well that this purposeful conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism is used against Palestinians and organizers for Palestine. We must protect our right to organize and speak out against oppression.”

There is no doubt that today’s left-wing anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism can be directly traced to the Soviets’ anti-Zionist propaganda campaign. Knowing this is the first and perhaps most important step toward creating a more balanced and honest dialogue on the issue.

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Arabs love Haaretz article saying Jews should go back into exile

Earlier this week, Haaretz published an op-ed by B. Michael which I still cannot tell if it is parody or not. Excerpts:

I’m a proud exilic Jew. I’m an internationalist and a cosmopolitan. I’m also devoid of any relationship to my geographic birthplace, and “land” to me is just the dirt in which food grows and people are buried. It doesn’t have a single milligram of sanctity, and it isn’t worth even a single drop of blood.

...

In our own day, we’ve learned that we owe our survival to being geographically dispersed rather than geographically concentrated. To diversity rather than unity. To communities rather than a state.

We’re really terrible at being a “nation.” We very quickly become as stupid, violent and greedy as most of the other nations of the world, and within a short time we brought destruction and exile on ourselves. Only there, in exile, do we regain the sense we lost and resume being a people that survives.

Apparently, being a majority doesn’t suit us – ruling, running an army and a state. We’re good at being a minority. Even a little persecution suits us. It brings out the best in us.

And now, we’re once again playing at being a “nation.” Ostensibly, that’s our eternal answer to the Holocaust that befell us. But in reality, it’s the continuation of the Holocaust. Not, heaven forbid, the burning of our bodies, only the crushing of our souls.

It’s the growth of another shoot from the Jewish tree that does harm to everyone around it. A rotten, poisonous brother of the Zealots, the Sicarii, Rabbi Akiva’s blind students and Simon bar Kochba’s foolish disciples. They ought to be called Jew-oids. They’re like Jews who took the trivial and wicked parts of Judaism and turned it into the essence.

... Consequently, there’s no choice but to admit that Zionism was a naïve mistake and to go into exile again to regain our strength and refresh our values.

B. Michael is the pen name of Michael Bryzon, a screenwriter and satirist. At first glance this seems like satire, but there is no punchline - and people with no sense of humor like Judith Butler also believe that the Diaspora is where Jews properly belong.

But satire or not, Arab media is reporting heavily about this article without the slightest doubt it is meant seriously. Many Haaretz articles excite Palestinians, but this one is being reproduced all over. 

It reminds me of the interview last month where Ehud Barak expressed his worries about Israel making it successfully past its eighth decade. Arabic articles are still being published about the "curse of the eighth decade." 

There is nothing wrong with self criticism, but the Arab world always misinterprets anyone asserting Israel has made mistakes as an indication of the demise of the Jewish state, rather than an indication of a thriving, open society.

The anti-Israel Arab world, humiliated at their inability to destroy Israel in 1948., pathetically grab onto any Jews who says that Jews will destroy the state themselves. 

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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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Beinart spews antisemitism. Again.

In Peter Beinart's Substack, he writes:

In 1984, in an essay in The London Review of Books, Edward Said observed that while Palestinians were increasingly talked about, they still weren’t often listened to. “Never has so much been written and shown of the Palestinians, who were scarcely mentioned fifteen years ago,” he noted. “They are there all right, but the narrative of their present actuality – which stems directly from the story of their existence in and displacement from Palestine, later Israel – that narrative is not.” Said was the exception that proved his own rule. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he was a frequent guest on Charlie Rose. His columns graced The New York Times. But he was largely alone. A study by the University of Arizona’s Maha Nasser found that of the opinion columns in The New York Times that discussed Palestinians between 1970 and 2020, less than two percent were written by Palestinian authors. In The Washington Post, the figure was one percent.

They were absent because America’s public debate about Israel-Palestine largely pitted dovish Zionists against hawkish Zionists. Anthony Lewis versus William Safire. Arthur Hertzberg versus Elie Wiesel. Thomas Friedman versus Charles Krauthammer. Daniel Kurtzer versus Dennis Ross. Jeremy Ben-Ami versus Alan Dershowitz. Roger Cohen versus Bret Stephens. The participants changed but the terms of the debate remained largely the same: The doves said Israel could not afford to stay in the West Bank. The hawks said Israel could not afford to leave. Both sides shared a common belief that the Jewish state must survive.

During the fighting last spring, that began to change. While still underrepresented, Palestinian commentators gained more prominence. Noura Erekat appeared on CNN. Mohammed El-Kurd appeared on MSNBC. Refaat Alareer and Yousef Munayyer published in The New York Times. Rula Jebreal and Rashid Khalidi wrote for The Washington Post. Their presence shifted the terms of debate about Israel-Palestine...

Beinart made a similar claim in 2020, saying that "For decades, Palestinians have been largely excluded from the mainstream US media conversation about Israel-Palestine. That exclusion continues today, and represents one more form of Palestinian dispossession."

I then noted that the New York Times had published op-eds from the following Palestinians in the years since Oslo:

Marwan Barghouti

Saeb Erekat

Diana Buttu

Ahmed Abu Artema

Mahmoud Abbas

Hanan Ashrawi

Ali Abunimah

Ayman Odeh

Raja Shehadeh

Zena Agha

Daoud Kuttab

Yasir Arafat

Ali Jarbawi

Yousef Munayyer

Rashid Khalidi

Khalil Shikaki

Linda Sarsour

Zahi Khoury

Beinart says, "Of the opinion columns in The New York Times that discussed Palestinians between 1970 and 2020, less than two percent were written by Palestinian authors. In The Washington Post, the figure was one percent."

That study included editorial pieces by columnists and the editorial board, who are all Americans. That is really skewing the data. If you actually wanted to prove an anti-Palestinian bias in the media, you would compare the number of Palestinian-authored pieces with the number of Israeli-authored pieces. Probably there were more from Israelis - but if you further subdivide them into whether the pieces were pro-Israel or anti-Israel, I would bet that the number of pro-Israel pieces from Israelis were less than the number of anti-Israel pieces by Palestinians.

Under this methodology, Peter Beinart's own op-eds count as "pro-Israel." 

If you want fairness, then include op-eds by Palestinians who are critical of Fatah and Hamas. Include op-eds by Khaled Abu Toameh or Bassem Eid. Only then can you claim that these statistics are based on a level playing field. Of course, the New York Times would never publish any op-ed by a Palestinian (or Muslim) who is critical of Palestinian national actions, and they eagerly publish op-eds by anti-Israel Israelis and Jews. 

Beinart also shows, again, what a disgusting human being he is. When he says that the overwhelming number of op-eds agreed that " the Jewish state must survive," he is saying that this is a debatable issue.

How many op-eds in any newspaper say that the Italian state or the French state or the USA (or Yemen and Lebanon, for that matter) must be destroyed? The answer is zero. But Beinart, whose propaganda methods are second to none, is saying, as accepted fact,  that Israel's existence should be debated - the only nation on Earth whose very existence is subject to debate.

That is antisemitism.

This is not an example of how the media should be fair. It is an example of antisemitism that Beinart slyly throws in as an assumption so that most people won't notice. Which makes Beinart possibly the most effective propagandist for antisemitism today.

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.@NYTOpinion writer @itranslate123 calls me a "fascist" - but he is a Hamas propagandist whose brother was a terrorist

In the early days of the Gaza operation, Refaat Alareer wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about how hard it is to be a good parent during wartime.

He mentioned that the lost his brother in the 2014 war along with many relatives:

In 2014, during the last war, Israel killed my brother Hamada; it destroyed my apartment when it brought down the family home that housed 40 people. It killed my wife’s grandfather, her brother, her sister and her sister’s three kids. 

Why would Israel target his apartment?

Well, because Refaat Alareer's brother was a Hamas operative, and he was holed up in the apartment with a fellow Hamas terrorist - effectively holding the family hostage as human shields. 

Here is Mohammed (Hamada) Alareer, still memorialized on Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades website:

He was killed along with Musab al-Ajlah, another Hamas terrorist.

If Refaat owned the apartment, as he implies, that means that he was knowingly shielding two Hamas terrorists and his own family members. If anyone is responsible for the deaths of his wife’s grandfather, her brother, her sister and her sister’s three kids, it may be Refaat himself!

Hamada also played the Nahoul the Bee character on a Hamas kid's show, telling children to shoot Jews and smash them.

I don't know if Refaat himself is a Hamas member, but he certainly is a fan. His now-suspended Twitter account included this:

Now he is pretending to be an upright, moral dad who values human lives. But he clearly teaches his daughter to lionize terrorists as well. This is from her Facebook page a few years ago - the photo on top is Refaat posing in front of a cannon in Turkey, and her profile picture is of a masked Al Qassam Brigades terrorist:

Lots more details about this family here.

This is who the New York Times promotes.

On Friday, the same New York Times had a front page photo essay highlighting the photos of children killed in Gaza, a truly grotesque demonization of Israel that is unprecedented. 

Of course every child killed is tragic. But only those that can be blamed on Israel are front-page news for the New York Times. Kids killed by gunfire, in Afghanistan, in Syria - none of them are named, let alone plastered on the front page of the leading newspaper in the West.

In response to this, I tweeted 

I just gave $64 to Friends of the IDF, one dollar for every kid in the @nytimes front page that (despite denials) paints Israel as a child killing entity. 

The IDF does more to save children's lives on BOTH sides than any media, NGO or "pro-Palestinian" group ever has - or will.

My point, which was clear, is that the IDF saves more Gaza kids' lives while defending Israeli kids than the New York Times, or PCHR, or Amnesty, or any of the others whodemonize Israel - combined.  

Refaat is a terrorist fan who teaches his daughter to love Hamas and that Hamas is legally allowed to blow up Jews.   And he writes how wonderful a father he is for the New York Times. Then, today, he called me a fascist who celebrates dead kids - the exact opposite of my post:

He throws in a little antisemitism for good measure, saying that me, a child of Holocaust survivors, is a Nazi. 

 Yes, this Hamas propagandist who fully supports murdering Jewish children in Israel, who supports the antisemitic Hamas charter, who says that suicide bombs are "legitimate resistance" and moral - is calling me a fascist and someone who celebrates killing children.

This isn't even psychological projection: this is a terrorist supporter who is gaslighting the Western world into thinking that Israel is the monster and Hamas is only defending poor Gaza children, the exact opposite of the truth. He knows this and he chooses to propagandize for a terror group.

Refaat Alareer cannot hide his true allegiance for antisemitic, genocidal Hamas. 

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Even the most articulate Palestinians (like Noura Erakat) have the idiotic zero-sum mentality that helping Israel = hurting Palestinians

From the start, the "pro-Palestinian" movement has not been pro-Palestinian at all. It has been anti-Israel. And its supporters, no matter how educated or articulate, are so consumed with hate for the Jewish state that they literally cannot tell the difference between the two concepts.

Noura Erakat, the "human rights attorney" and assistant professor at Rutgers University, wrote an op-ed for NBC News that crystallizes this basic fact  - and thereby reveals a major reason why the Palestinians have remained stuck in limbo for so long.

Notwithstanding several early steps that distinguish him from his predecessor, President Joe Biden promises to continue [Trump’s] legacy. It’s true that the new administration intends to reinstate critical U.S. humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees and will reopen the PLO mission office in Washington, D.C. Just Monday, it announced that it will rejoin the U.N. Human Rights Council, from which the Trump administration withdrew mostly in protest of its scrutiny of Israel.

But none of these policies, welcome though they are, will challenge the oppressive status quo sustained by the United States. Worse still, the Biden administration will uphold several of the Trump administration’s most damning precedents.

These examples are most revealing:

The new secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has made clear that the administration will not move the U.S. Embassy from Jerusalem back to Tel Aviv; it will maintain, and celebrate, Israel’s normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan without ensuring a single enduring concession for the Palestinians; and it will continue to provide Israel with unconditional military support in the amount of $3.8 billion annually — a precedent established by Biden’s former boss, President Barack Obama.

Late last week, the Biden administration also expressed “serious concerns” over the International Criminal Court’s effort to exercise jurisdiction over Israeli officials to prosecute them for war crimes, and is even considering maintaining the Trump administration’s sanctions on the court’s leading personnel.

She brings three examples of what she considers anti-Palestinian policies: keeping the embassy in Jerusalem, supporting peace between Israel and Arab states, and maintaining military aid that gets spent in the US.

None of these policies hurt Palestinians. None of them affect Palestinian lives at all, except for Gaza terrorists who want to murder Israeli civilians with rockets. None of them are speedbumps towards a Palestinian state.

They do support Israel as a sovereign nation – which this “human rights lawyer” considers “damning.”

The rest of the article is more of the same, complaining that a definition of antisemitism that includes demonizing the Jewish state’s very existence is somehow anti-Palestinian.

Erakat is so filled with hate for Israel that she literally cannot tell the difference between “pro-Israel” and “anti-Palestinian,” nor the difference between “pro-Palestinian” and “anti-Israel.” She fully subscribes to a zero-sum mentality that what is good for Israel is automatically bad for Palestinians – and, worse, that nothing can be considered good for Palestinians unless it is also bad for Israel.

The UAE and Bahrain (and to an extent Morocco and Sudan)  have abandoned the zero-sum mentality. No one can call them “anti-Palestinian” although the Gulf Arabs are justifiably critical of the current Palestinian leaderships.  They see Israel not as an enemy but as a partner that can help them thrive; not as a open Jewish wound in the Arab Middle East but as a permanent feature that improves the region and that can lift up Arab states.  Instead of zero-sum, they seek a win-win. The zero-sum mentality that they maintained for so many decades did not help them – or the Palestinians – one bit.

The zero-sum mindset is childish and counterproductive. If there is one lasting change from the Abraham Accords, it is that this puerile way of thinking is finally on the wane in the Middle East.

As long as the Palestinians – including their Western “defenders” – cannot grasp that basic concept, they will never get anywhere.

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Arabic op-ed admits: Anger at UAE is based on hating Jews, not because anyone is "pro-Palestinian"

Al-Omah, an Egypt-based pan-Muslim news site, has a most revealing op-ed about the Israel/UAE accord that shows how systemic Arab antisemitism is.

The article, by Dr. Abdul Latif, is so dripping with anger at the UAE for partnering with Jews that it doesn't even mention the UAE by name. 

It is entitled, "Loyalty to the Jews is the epitome of hypocrisy." In this case, the word "hypocrisy" is not a mere value judgment but a specific Quranic term describing someone who appears on the outside to be a Muslim but who is actively working to destroy the Muslim world from the inside. 

Latif employs two well-known Quranic verses:

Quran 5:51:

O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you - then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people.

Quran 4:145:

Indeed, the hypocrites will be in the lowest depths of the Fire - and never will you find for them a helper.

Dr. Latif is saying that UAE leaders who cooperate with Jews will go to the worst depths of Hell, beyond the spaces reserved for mere unbelievers.

Remarkably, Latif doesn't even pretend to care about Palestinians in his criticism of the Emiratis, which is the usual fig-leaf used by Arab critics of the deal. His enmity is based purely on old fashioned Muslim Jew-hatred. Cooperating with Jews on any level is a major sin and those who do it are condemned to hellfire. 

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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Best takedown of Tom Friedman comes from a grocer

Thomas Friedman wrote in a NYT op-ed last week:

If I were an Israeli grocer, just following this deal on the radio, I’d hate it for enshrining Iran’s right to enrich uranium, since Iran regularly cheated its way to expanding that capability, even though it had signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. After all, Iran holds “death to Israel” marches and in 2006 sponsored a conference to promote denial of the Holocaust. Moreover, Iran’s proxy, the Lebanese Shiite militia, Hezbollah, in 2006, started an unprovoked war with Israel, and when Israel retaliated against Hezbollah military and civilian targets, Hezbollah fired thousands of Iranian-supplied rockets all across Israel. No — no matter the safeguards — I as an Israeli grocer would reject this deal from my gut.

An Israeli grocer responds:

"You tell Friedman that this grocer was a military officer, who knows how to fight a war, and that I fought with my head and not my gut. You tell Friedman that as a 'makolet' owner, I know that I will give credit to a customer who pays his bills, but will demand money up front from someone who has a record of cheating. And you tell Friedman that as a kind person, I will give charity to a person who is economically suffering, but if it's obvious that the poor person will spend the money on drugs, I'd prefer to bring him into my grocery and give him some basic foods for free, but I would not just give him money to spend as he wishes on dangerous things. You tell Friedman that I think these negotiators could have used some Israeli grocers at the negotiating table with Iran."

Friedman's arrogance, ignorance and condescension, all revealed in one paragraph.

(h/t Norman)

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Peter Beinart's nonsensical NYT op-ed

Peter Beinart in the New York Times has another incredibly misleading article about - well, you know what its about.

TO believe in a democratic Jewish state today is to be caught between the jaws of a pincer.

On the one hand, the Israeli government is erasing the “green line” that separates Israel proper from the West Bank. In 1980, roughly 12,000 Jews lived in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem). Today, government subsidies have helped swell that number to more than 300,000. Indeed, many Israeli maps and textbooks no longer show the green line at all.

In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel called the settlement of Ariel, which stretches deep into the West Bank, “the heart of our country.” Through its pro-settler policies, Israel is forging one political entity between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — an entity of dubious democratic legitimacy, given that millions of West Bank Palestinians are barred from citizenship and the right to vote in the state that controls their lives.

For Beinart's thesis to be correct, you must believe that the Palestinian Authority and the PLO has no political legitimacy, or power.

Yet it is recognized as a full state by 129 nations; its citizens vote (at least in theory) to elect their leaders, it has autonomy, a territory that all accept as controlled by its own security forces, a court system, an Olympic team, and its own passports. According to at least one distinguished legal scholar, it is considered a full state under international law. The World Bank is putting out reports about how ready the territories are for statehood. The entire Oslo process - that Israel still supports - was designed to give full self-determination to Palestinian Arabs in the territories, and (more recently) statehood. For Beinart to turn around and state that all of these don't exist, and that for some reason the territories are (as he tries to coin the term) "nondemocratic Israel," is nonsense. Israel has no intention of integrating Ramallah or Jericho into Israel. And as recently as January, Israel tried to hold negotiations with the PLO, and the other side refused.

Beinart, in his attempt to sound an alarm for Israeli democracy, chooses quite deliberately to ignore everything that happened to the Palestinian Arabs since 1994.

It is Palestinian Arab intransigence, not Israeli settlements, that has stopped a Palestinian Arab state. Beinart's willingness to blame only one side shows that he is not being as evenhanded and "pro-Israel" as he tirelessly claims to be.

But, you might counter, what about Area C? Israel does indeed control all aspects of the lives of Arabs who live there, and while they vote in PA elections, they do not have much say in their own political affairs. Doesn't Israel's presence there endanger Israeli democracy?

The number of Palestinian Arabs in Area C is about 150,000 (about 2.5% of all Palestinian Arabs.) Which means that the percentage of people living under Israeli sovereignty who do not have political rights is, today, about 1.9%.

By way of contrast, the percentage of people living in US territories who are not represented in Congress and who cannot vote in presidential elections - those in Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands and elsewhere - is about 1.3%.

So is Israel's control of Area C a danger to Israeli democracy? Not unless you think that US territories endanger US democracy too. The idea is ridiculous. It is an issue, it is not a death-blow to democracy.

To go further, if Israel would decide to annex Area C, wouldn't that solve all the problems? No demographic issue, giving the Arabs there full citizenship - and Beinart's argument is down the drain.

Somehow, I don't think that Beinart would support that solution, or even a modified version of that solution. Because he has bought into the Palestinian Arab narrative that the artificially constructed 1949 armistice lines - which were not considered international borders before 1967 and were always meant to be modified in a final peace agreement between Israel and the Arab world - are somehow special, and that no peace can possibly result from a change in those lines that would include, say, Ariel. (He sort of says that he agrees that some of the border settlements would end up in Israel, and then tells those "settlers" to throw the more "ideological" settlers under the bus. Yay for Jewish unity!)

But there is no proof that this is true. Is is simply an assertion on the part of Palestinian Arabs, who repeat it over and over again so much that people like Peter Beinart believe it. And, whether they realize it or not, "pro-Israel Jews" like Beinart - by writing op-eds that accept this false premise - end up increasing Palestinian intransigence.

They are not helping peace at all.

What does Beinart think about the Clinton parameters, or the Olmert offer? They were clearly sufficient to demolish all of his arguments about a threat to Israeli democracy. Yet instead of slamming the PLO for its rejection of those peace plans, he continues insistence on the 1967 lines. Beinart buys into the Palestinian Arab narrative.  Instead of telling them that they should compromise and bring a lasting peace, he is telling them implicitly that they should buckle down and wait for American Jews like himself to pressure Israel to accept all of their demands.

The eventual border between Israel and a Palestinian Arab state must be negotiated. Moving it a bit to the east does not endanger Israeli democracy nor does it endanger Palestinian statehood. It doesn't even endanger Palestinian Arab contiguity, as any glance at a map would prove. This is self-evident, but repeated Palestinian Arab assertions that it is not "acceptable" are swallowed whole by a lot of otherwise smart people who believe they are pro-Israel.

I'm sorry, but this is not a pro-Israel argument, and op-eds like this do not bring peace any closer. Quite the contrary.

(h/t Avi for some ideas)

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Must read: Richard Landes fisking Goldstone's NYT piece

Professor Richard Landes does a superlative job fisking Judge Richard Goldstone's op-ed in the New York Times today. And while I have been spending what time I have on the minutae of the large Goldstone Report, Landes' post goes to the very heart of the topic, and shows exactly what is problematic about the entire enterprise. It casts great doubt on Goldstone's honesty, at least with regards to this topic.

It is a must-read, as are the links Landes uses to support his arguments.

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An example of Arab Jew-hatred masked as intellectualism

Al-Ahram in Egypt printed an op-ed, by a professor of political science at Cairo University, where the author starts off saying what is wrong with Arab conspiracy theories, and then swallows one hook, line and sinker. It has to be seen to be believed:

Many, I believe, share my sense of alarm over current events in the Arab world. Many wonder what will become of a region home to the world's worst crises. In Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Somalia and Sudan millions are being killed and repressed, imprisoned and tortured, expelled and displaced, brutalised and starved. No sooner do explosions abate in one location that they would flare up in another. Places of worship, the traditional safe haven for those in need of protection, have not just been caught up in the cycle of murder, but have become a target for destruction and bombing. Amid the dust cloud rising from chaos, everyone seems to be grabbing each other's throats. Often, we don't know what the fighting is about.
The most disturbing thing is that the crises present in the aforementioned countries keep escalating, finding new twists, and spilling over elsewhere in a whirlwind of intersecting disasters. Like a deadly disease slowly working its way across the region, some of our countries are in utter turmoil while others appear quiet on the surface. We don't hear explosions in these countries, nor do we see rivers of blood flowing. But if we look beneath the surface, we soon discover that these countries are neither immune nor sturdy. An eruption can happen at any moment.
There is no denying that the crises gripping the Arab world, whether evident or latent, have various roots. The causes may differ from one country to another, but there is a common thread somewhere -- a common thread that makes all vulnerable to civil war, to the kind of turmoil that may redraw the map of the region along ethnic or sectarian lines. How did we get into this fix? Is it self-destruction? Or is it the handiwork of outside powers? If so, what are their plans and intents?

So far, so good - the esteemed professor identifies a large undercurrent of problems throughout the Arab world and is seeking a common thread.

The mere asking of such questions causes controversy in the circles of the Arab elite. Any attempt to answer such questions inevitably puts one in one of two camps: the camp of conspiracy theory and the camp of self- deprecation. The camp of conspiracy theory has a ready- made interpretation for every disaster. It blames all sorts of evil on outside powers that hate the Arabs and the Islamic world -- mainly the US and Israel. The camp of self- deprecation takes the opposite point of view. It argues that our troubles are due to pitfalls latent in the nature of Arab and Islamic political systems. Both camps are busy ridiculing each other's thinking. So you can only challenge one or both at your own risk.
The conspiracy theory people tend to overlook aspects of inertia in the structure of Arab and Islamic regimes, as if the latter have no influence on our dismal reality. The self- deprecating people hate to admit that certain powers are plotting against the Arab world, and are therefore responsible for many of our current tribulations. I believe that it is time to get over the polarisation between those two schools of thought. We should start assessing events on the Arab and Islamic scene from various angles and dimensions, both domestic and foreign. We need to look at the entire picture. No conspiracies, however elaborate, can succeed without the inbuilt drawbacks in our systems.

OK, perhaps a little biased, but on the whole an admirable attempt to realistically come to grips with reality. Right?

I would like now to discuss the way the Zionist mind works and how it hopes to establish a major and dominant Jewish state in the region.

Ah, an analysis of the Zionist mind! Things are getting interesting!

To shed light on that issue, consider an article entitled "A strategy for Israel in the 1980s". Oded Yinon, a former Israeli journalist and diplomat, wrote the article in Hebrew. It appeared in February 1982 in the newspaper Kivunim. The article drew the attention of the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, which asked Israel Shahak, the well-known Israeli human rights activist, to translate it into English and comment on it. The article was then republished under the title, "The Zionist plan for the Middle East."

Yes, out of the hundreds of articles written by Israelis and Zionists about foreign affairs in the past six decades, our good professor seems to have decided - based on commentary by one of the most outstanding Jewish anti-semites of recent history - that this one is emblematic of all of Zionist thought.

Some may wonder why I am interested in an article written by an obscure journalist, even if he was a former employee in the Israeli Foreign Minister. Why would I treat that article as if it were an official document released by the Zionist movement or Israel, instead of relying on the many documents released by official figures and organisations? To those, I would say that Professor Shahak, an authority in Zionist thinking, described the article as the most extensive on the subject and as faithfully mirroring the thinking of the Zionist mainstream on the matter of dividing the Arab world.

Just as an example, Shahak wrote in his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion. The Weight of Three Thousand Years that orthodox Jews worship Satan during ritual hand-washing before meals and that Jewish children are taught a curse to say when they walk outside non-Jewish cemeteries. Yes, the professor has found his authority.

Does it make sense, you may ask, for the Zionist movement to publish a paper that would reveal its true intentions, even if it were written in Hebrew? Shahak provides the answer to this question. First, he points out that the aim of the document is to educate the new generations of the Israeli elite, especially in the military, of the thinking of the founding fathers, whose teachings were up to then relayed orally. Secondly, the Zionists doubt the ability of the Arab mind to react sensibly to any threats, however devastating those could be.

Now that we've solved that problem, time to see what this clearly seminal article from that obscure journal that is the blueprint of Zionist thinking actually says.

The Zionist strategy at stake involves two main aspects. One is its perception of the structure of the region surrounding it from the demographic, social and cultural perspectives. The other aspect is its perception of the security of the Jewish state and of the means to defend this security in an absolute manner, which is the ultimate aim of the Zionist movement.

Concerning the first aspect, the Zionist movement sees the Arab world not as an integral entity that is ethnically, socially, or religiously cohesive, but as a region of immense diversity, a mosaic of countries inside which tribes, sects and minorities are in continual conflict. Current entities, or Arab states, have been created through historic and political coincidences related to the ambitions of foreign powers (the imperial powers that inherited the Ottoman Empire) and the interplay of domestic interests (of tribes, clans and political and social movements). The Zionist movement believes that these units, or Arab states, cannot endure in their current form and can easily be dismantled, which would allow for the region to be reshaped on completely different foundations.

Concerning the second aspect, the Zionist movement believes that Israel's security cannot be achieved through military superiority alone, however important that military superiority may be. So no other major central state should be allowed to exist in the region. The Zionist movement is determined to break up any central state in the region and divide it into small entities created on ethnic or sectarian lines. Once this is done, Israel would become vindicated, for its ethnic foundations would be no different than that of other countries in the region; and Israel would become the biggest, strongest, and most advanced country in the Middle East. This would give it the clout it needs to lead the region and control its future course. In other words, Israel would be the region's mastermind, the country that calls the shots and tells others what to do.

I can imagine a serious article talking about how fractured the Arab world is, and even how it is in Israel's interests to encourage indigenous ethnic Arab subgroups to assert themselves. But it takes a special kind of paranoia to see this article as a blueprint for regional Zionist domination that echoes, in nationlistic terms, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And now that this Egyptian professor feels that his arguments are air-tight, he is free to see the world since 1982 in terms of Jewish - um, Zionist - domination:

The above is a short synopsis of Yinon's article, and yet the article is worthy of further discussion. First, because the article was published for the first time years after Egypt signed a peace agreement with Israel, a few months after the assassination of President Anwar El-Sadat, and a few months before Israel pulled out of Sinai on 25 April 1982. When Israel invaded Lebanon, less than four months after the article was published, it was literally doing everything Yinon recommended. ...

Second, it has now become clear, beyond any doubt, that the Zionist movement, led by Israel, has played a pivotal role in prodding the current US administration to invade Iraq. The US administration acted like a tool in the hand of a Zionist movement that wanted Iraq partitioned at any cost, and that hopes to see other countries in the region follow suit.

Third, it is the right of future generations of Arab citizens to be aware of plots against their countries. We must encourage the young generations to keep an open mind about all ideas, including those attributed to conspiracy theories, before they wake up one day and discover that their future has been shattered or their land taken away.

I will dedicate three more articles to a detailed discussion of Yinon's essay. In the first article, I will discuss Zionist schemes against Egypt, focussing on Israel's hope to restore Sinai and divide Egypt into two states, a Coptic one in the south and a Sunni one in the north. In the second article, I will discuss Zionist designs on the eastern part of the Arab world; namely, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. In the third, I will discuss Zionist schemes for the Gulf and North Africa. Again, I do not wish to promote conspiracy theories per se, but some risks of naïvety are too real to ignore.

There you have it. A secret Zionist plan, cleverly leaked out to the public where only the most far-seeing Arabs can see its huge importance, for regional dominance and the destruction of the Arab world.

This is how the elite academics and intellectuals of the Arab world - in a country that is supposedly at peace with Israel - think. (I would rather not fall into the trap this author does of generalizing one article - if someone can find me Egyptian political science articles that do not think that there is a Zionist plan to dominate the Arab world or the world at large, I will be happy to give it equal space. But I've never seen it.)

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