Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, April 06, 2014

Financial Times: "Israeli tail wagged US dog" in negotiations

An article by David Gardner in the Financial Times squarely blames Israel for, well, everything, including forcing the US to be too pro-Israel:

The ostensible new roadblock concerns prisoners. Mahmoud Abbas, president of the interim Palestinian Authority, came back to the negotiating table even though Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, refused yet again to freeze settlement building, thus allowing Israel to continue eating up the shrinking territory over which the Palestinians are negotiating to eventually build their state.

As I've shown, virtually all settlement building supported by Israel since 1992 has been within already established settlement blocs. The "shrinking territory" meme is simply a lie, there has been extraordinarily little new land taken up by recognized settlements for decades.

Mr Abbas, seen by admirers as a moderate and by critics as a quisling, has abjured radical siren calls for resistance in favour of a negotiated solution. He has nothing to show his people. He looks weak and discredited.

To offset this, Israel was persuaded to release 104 Palestinian long-term prisoners. The Netanyahu government’s refusal to hand over the last batch on the due date precipitated the current crisis. In retaliation, Mr Abbas this week signed articles of accession to 15 multilateral treaties, investing Palestine with some of the international attributes of a state – which he had promised the US to defer while negotiations continued.

Actually, at the time Abbas signed the articles, Israel's final decision about the prisoner release had not been made, although it was delayed. Only after Abbas' stunt did Israel announce that the last batch of prisoners would not be released.

Now that we know how closely Gardner adheres to facts, we can go on:

The prisoners in question were supposed to have been released 20 years ago as part of the Oslo accords, at the high water mark for hopes that these two peoples could close a deal on sharing the Holy Land. They were not.

Wrong again. The only document about pre-Oslo prisoners was the Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum of 1999. Israel was to release two batches of pre-Oslo prisoners. They released the first, but did not release the second because of a long list of violations of the agreement by the PLO, such as the "revolving door" policy of releasing terrorists, their refusal to give Israel a list of their policemen by September 13 1999, their refusal to collect weapons from terrorists, and many others.

But Palestinian Arab violations of agreements don't exist in Gardner's mind.

[There is] a pattern of the US consistently over-rewarding a recalcitrant ally, as well as being snubbed by Israel for its pains.

In 2009, for example, it was Mr Obama who blinked when Mr Netanyahu simply refused to halt colonisation of Palestinian land. Instead, in 2010, the US president offered Israel the Jordan Valley – a big chunk of the occupied West Bank that is not his to give – in return for a short pause in settlement building. Mr Netanyahu, in any event, refused.

The US offered Israel the Jordan Valley? Really?

And Netanyahu did freeze settlement construction for 10 months, during which Abbas refused to talk for nine of them.

It is not just that Washington is behaving more like a crooked lawyer than an honest broker, bullying the weaker Palestinian party into keeping talks going while Israel continues to settle illegally occupied territory.

Far from pushing Israel to roll back the occupation enough to enable Palestinians to build a viable state on the occupied West Bank and Gaza, with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital, it looks as though the US is planning to hand Israel almost all the settlement blocs, about three-quarters of East Jerusalem, and the Jordan Valley.

Since when does the US award territory? The framework was never completed, as far as I can tell. Gardner, based in Beirut, seems to be getting his news from Al Quds rather than any honest source.

Gardner's selective memory and disregard for the facts is bad enough, but for FT to publish such obvious untruths makes its self-described "high quality journalism" more than suspect.

(h/t Herb G)

Those racist Israelis: Newest Master Chef Israel is an Arab Muslim

The newest winner of Master Chef Israel is Nof Atamna-Ismaeel, a Muslim Arab-Israeli woman.

Or, as visceral haters like Max Blumenthal would say, "Tokenism!"

You see, the idea that Israelis would love an Arab on a TV competition - consistently! - completely destroys his thesis of a racist Israeli society. So when things like this happen, he gets a bit defensive. People like Nof might hurt his book sales, and we can't have that! (Max is going to shill for his book next at a CAIR banquet.)

Back to Nof, you can see how effusive the TV hosts and judges were about her performance, obviously all engaged in a massive case of chef-washing:

But that is not the most impressive thing about her.

Nof is a post-doctoral research scientist in microbiology!

According to her LinkedIn profile, she received her PhD from that evil racist Israeli school known as Technion, and now is pursuing her research at another racist school that must be boycotted, Oranim College of Education.

And if the Israel-hating faux boycotters would get their way, she wouldn't have a job.

Who are the racists again?

UPDATE: Third place was an Ethiopian native.

04/05 Links: Kerry ‘Smothered in a Middle East Sandstorm’; The Bad Faith of Mahmoud Abbas

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: A chance to move on

His desperate behavior showed PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas that there are no depths Kerry will not plumb to prolong the fictional peace process.
And so on Tuesday, in an open act of contempt for Kerry, Abbas applied for membership in international bodies, in breach of the foundational requirement of the peace process: that a Palestinian state only be formed as a consequence of a peace agreement with Israel to prevent such a state from gaining independence while in a state of war with Israel.
Until now, it was US pressure on Israel for concessions to the Palestinians that kept the Israeli Left going. Now, without any leadership, with its power base in the permanent bureaucracy weakened, and the US role as mediator wholly discredited not only among the Israeli public, but in the US media, the Left has nothing to latch on to.
If the government uses the opportunity to abandon the two-state paradigm, it stands its best chance in 20 years of succeeding.

To my colleague Caroline, a caveat

Regrettably, I feel this is the case with her new book, The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, which has received a warm reception among leading rightwing and conservative circles.
The book has considerable value for two reasons. First, it represents a welcome, and much needed, challenge to the monopolistic stranglehold the two-state approach has had on much of the public discourse on the Palestinian issue.
Second, it provides a penetrating historical review of how this choke-hold developed, particularly regarding the formulation of US Mideast policy, and of why this detrimental impediment should be removed.
However, while I strongly endorse her admirable analysis of the pernicious pervasiveness of the two-state principle, I strongly disagree with the conclusions she draws from that analysis. I therefore find myself compelled to take issue with her prescription for the measures with which the problem should be confronted, and with the nature of the alternatives she proposes to replace the dysfunctional paradigm that hitherto dominated the discourse. (h/t Bob Knot)

The Bad Faith of Mahmoud Abbas

The conclusion can only be that Abbas on behalf of the Palestinians is trying to prevent the peace process from continuing by preventing the possibility of negotiations. At his meeting with President Obama on March 17, 2014 he made it clear that he would not recognize Israel as a Jewish State, knowing that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had made this a condition for resumption of negotiations.
Most important of all is the sad realization that the Palestinian leaders show bad faith in their unwillingness to abide by international agreements. The crucial factor involved is the Oslo Accord of September 13, 1993, with Article V on permanent status negotiations issues that needs quoting in full. It says “It was understood that several issues were postponed to permanent status negotiations, including: Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security arrangements, borders, relations and co-operation with other neighbors, and other issues of common interest. The outcome of these permanent status negotiations should not be prejudiced or pre-empted by the parties.”
It is essential that the officials of the 15 bodies to which Abbas is making applications for membership, as well as President Obama and the US State Departments should remind him of Article V before any action is taken. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Rare photos of Second Aliyah

I found these photos of the Second Aliyah in, of all places, an Iraq news website.

Many of the images seem to have been taken from this 2010 post. But others I cannot find anywhere else on the web.

The sepia-colored ones at the end were taken by Ya’acov Ben Dov, and published in Vienna in 1912

I think we need Israel Daily Picture to help us out here....

04/04 Links Pt2: Foreign investment in Israel $74b up 15%; Israeli software in new Amazon TV Box

From Ian:

Sarah Honig: The postulate of illegitimacy

Something strikingly dramatic happened in this country exactly on this day 94 years ago. Cries of Itbach el-Yahud(slaughter the Jews) filled the air. It was the first coordinated mass-murder offensive launched by infamous Jerusalem Mufti Haj-Amin el-Husseini (who would in time become an avid Nazi collaborator, Hitler’s personal guest in Berlin during WWII and a wanted war-criminal).
Ever since, this land shook fitfully as rounds of massacres and wars followed each other in breathless succession. The past mustn’t be consigned to irrelevance. Unbroken historical continuities contextualize current events. Nothing springs forth from a vacuum. What now transpires began back then.
The pivotal murder-drive of 1920 and its aftermath are vital for understanding why John Kerry’s peace pageant is a flop and why Israel so profoundly displeases him, his boss Barack Obama and their pet-Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas. It established the prototype whereby Jews are punished for Arab crimes against Jews. It highlights the pattern of appeasing Arab wrath and of Jews paying – as if Jewish existence is in and of itself a casus belli.

Injustice Anywhere Is a Threat to Justice Everywhere: A Mother’s Plea

Today, Malki and Michal lie buried side by side, while their murderer, who smiled happily to learn her tally of dead children, is free and thriving in Jordan. She frequently travels in the Arab world to incite adoring crowds to follow in her footsteps.
In my country, my husband and I are not welcome to decry this. Parents of murdered children are hailed as heroes when they declare that they want the murderer to go unpunished. Whether for the sake of a prisoner “swap,” to prolong the negotiations with the PA or, as the cliche goes, “to promote peace.” Waiving our right to justice is considered the noble, patriotic thing to do.
Our quest for justice, for a life sentence for Tamimi – there is no capital punishment here – has invited accusations that we are merely vengeful. (h/t Ken Kelso)

My unpleasant evening with ‘Breaking the Silence’

On March 31, I attended a disturbing lecture at Washington University in St. Louis. It was co-sponsored by St. Louis Hillel at Washington University and J Street U. The speaker, a former Israeli soldier with the group “Breaking the Silence” (BtS), misrepresented and demonized the Israel Defense Forces, Israel, and Israeli policy. BtS is known for bringing in speakers like this, so I could not understand why Hillel and J Street U had sponsored a talk whose only purpose appeared to be to misinform audiences and instill hostility towards Israel.
As an Israeli reservist who had been stationed in the West Bank, I sat in disbelief as the speaker described attitudes and policies that were entirely divorced from reality.
The former soldier, Oded Na’aman, claimed that Israeli soldiers are trained to oppress the Palestinians individually and as a people, that they maliciously mistreat Palestinians in the West Bank, and that they are taught to make Palestinians fear Israeli soldiers. He argued that there are no civil rights for Palestinians and that the Jewish people who now have a state use their power to oppress Palestinians.
I had no idea what he was talking about or what motivated him to lie.
He did not describe the Israel or IDF that I know so intimately.

The Sodastream/Glee Conspiracy

Something awful happened on the last episode of Glee.

I'll let Twitter users describe it.

Nasty #sodastream product placement on #Glee tonight. #wrongsideofhistory #freepalestine
— Ms. Pye (@ladaysandnights) April 2, 2014

Did i just spot a SodaStream product placement in #Glee? shame on u 4 promoting #occupation & #apartheid!
— NS (@NotOccupying) April 3, 2014

OMG!!!! An Israeli company - that employs hundreds of happy Palestinian Arab workers,and yet is targeted for boycott by people who simply hate Israel - is being mentioned on a popular TV show! Horrors!

Apparently, there was a funny scene where one of the characters said, "Do you have to use the SodaStream right now? Artie's in a very fragile state."

But the Sodastream Glee horrors don't end there. No, this is a massive conspiracy involving the highest levels of teen soap opera operatives.

Here is a photo taken last December of actors from Glee at a Sodastream charity event!

And the Sodastream Pinterest page has dozens of photographs of celebrities with Sodastreams!

David Hasselhoff

Mel B

Nicole Kidman

Reese Witherspoon

Zain from One Direction

But it gets even worse.

Sodastream has product placement in other popular TV shows!

The Big Bang Theory

How I Met Your Mother

Homeland

There's a lot of celebrities and TV shows that need boycotting.

Then again, I imagine next year the BDS movement will trumpet their critical role in taking How I Met Your Mother off the TV schedule for 2014-15.

04/04 Links Pt1: Abbas to Kerry: Please Beg Me More!; Kerry Praises Non-Existant Iranian ‘Fatwa’

From Ian:

Khaled Abu Toameh: Abbas to Kerry: Please Beg Me More!

Abbas is convinced that it is only a matter of time before U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry rushes back to the region in yet anther desperate effort to "salvage the peace process."
In recent weeks, according to Palestinian officials, Kerry has literally been "begging" Abbas to agree to an extension of the peace talks after the end of April.
Abbas and the Palestinian Authority leadership have concluded that the Obama Administration is prepared to do almost anything to show some kind of "victory" in the peace process between Palestinians and Israelis. Palestinian demands therefore have continued to increase almost every day.

How Many Palestinians Would Endorse a Jewish State?

The Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) has just released a new poll, conducted March 20-22 in the West Bank and Gaza, in which one of the polling questions raised this issue:

There is a proposal that after the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and the settlement of all issues in dispute, including the refugees and Jerusalem issues, there will be mutual recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and Palestine as the state of the Palestinian people. Do you agree or disagree to this proposal?” [Emphasis added].
The percentage of Palestinians that “certainly agreed” was 3 percent. A total of 58.5 percent disagreed.
In other words–just as Israel’s Ron Dermer asserted at AIPAC five years ago–the Palestinian refusal to recognize a Jewish state does not involve the refugees. The poll assumed “all issues in dispute” were settled, including the refugees. But even with no other issue remaining on the hypothetical table, a lopsided majority of Palestinians rejected a Jewish state. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Related to this story.

Hamas newspaper Felesteen reports that the International Committee of the Red Cross will stop routinely providing medicines, ambulances and spare parts for medical equipment to the Gaza health ministry by the beginning of 2015.

The report says that the aid began during Operation Cast Lead and had remained for five years since then.

The Hamas government is strongly protesting this.

Israel had not restricted any imports of medicines or medical equipment to Gaza (although certain types of equipment sometimes take a few extra days for special permission.)

It appears that Hamas' complaint is that the cash-strapped government doesn't want to pay for these things itself and prefers to have the extra $3 million to be able to buy rockets and build kidnapping tunnels.

In the past, Hamas has confiscated donated medicines from NGOs and governments and sold them for a profit.

The PA has balked at paying for medical equipment and medicine for Gaza as well.

I didn't see any announcement on the ICRC webpage about this.

The Assumed Symmetry Fallacy, continued (Israel Thrives)

Dr. Michael Lumish (bio here), of the Israel Thrives blog, has an excellent article expanding on my piece yesterday about Peter Beinart:

The Elder of Ziyon has a recent piece entitled, Peter Beinart cannot tell the difference between a "narrative" and a fact.

Speaking before a group of Democrats and progressives, former New Republic editor, Peter Beinart, said the following concerning conservative billionaire Sheldon Adelson:

In 2008, when Tel Aviv University's Shlomo Sand published a book called "The Invention off the Jewish People," he was widely called anti-Semitic. When Adelson says the same about Palestinians, he's a Republican rock star.

This is an example of what the Elder calls the "Assumed Symmetry Fallacy."

He writes:

I am not a logician and do not know of a formal name for this fallacy, but let's call it the Assumed Symmetry Fallacy: the assumption that two sides - by virtue of their opposition - are falsely assumed to be symmetric.

This is a very important insight and one that we need to consider and discuss. The western world tends to think of the Arab war against the Jews as a matter of symmetry. They use terms like "cycles of violence" or the "Israel-Palestine" conflict, both of which suggest a symmetry of power and hostility.

This is not merely a matter of false analogy, as one of his commenters suggests, but of a systemic bias against the Jewish minority in the Middle East via medias and governments throughout the world. It is a bias in which it generally suggested that the Jewish minority deserves a good beating because we are mean to the "Palestinians."

The Jews of the Middle East, via the State of Israel, are now a powerful people and we should be very proud, as Jews and friends of the Jewish State, of their accomplishments. The success of Israel is nothing short of remarkable, given its humble beginnings. Israel has the most powerful military in the entire region and one of the best economies, given its relative size, of any country in the world. Israel is creative, innovative, technological, internationally-minded, and sophisticated.

However, the Jews of the Middle East also represent a tiny minority surrounded by a much larger, hostile majority of Muslims who have made it very clear, over the long and brutal course of 1,400 years, that they simply will not stand for Jewish sovereignty on historically Jewish land and will do everything within their power to make life miserable for the Jewish minority. They teach their children that Jews are the descendants of apes and pigs and that killing Jewish people is pleasing in the sight of Allah. They wage war against us. They shoot rockets at us. They strap suicide belts onto women and children because when Muslim women and children commit suicide in an effort to murder Jews it is considered not merely a noble act, but the most noble spiritual act of the shaheed.

The truth of the matter is that in the Long Arab War Against the Jews of the Middle East, there is no symmetry. In terms of numbers, resources, land mass, every advantage goes to the Arabs. They outnumber the Jews by a factor of 60 or 70 to 1 throughout the region. They conquered and control over 99% of the entire Middle East, with the sole exception of the Jewish State of Israel, and are driving Christians out of the region entirely. They hold all non-Muslims under submission to Islam within the system of dhimmitude since the rise of that religion in the 7th century.

And now they literally create a brand-spanking new people, the "Palestinians," for the distinct purpose of countering Jewish sovereignty and freedom on historically Jewish land. So, no, there is no symmetry in this fight.

The Jews are fighting to maintain freedom and sovereignty and the great Arab majority is dedicated to destroying that freedom and sovereignty and will ruin their own cousins, the Palestinian-Arabs, in order to keep them as the dagger pointed at the heart of the Jewish people on Jewish land.

Peter Beinart, it should be noted, is perhaps the single foremost example of Jewishdhimmitude in the public square today. He represents an excellent example of the kind of Jewish "progressive" who cannot only not bring himself to take his own side in a fight, but who has so incorporated the "Palestinian narrative" of pristine victim-hood into his understanding of the conflict that he honestly believes that the besieged Jewish minority in the Middle East are the aggressors upon their former Arab-Muslim masters.

Finally, and most importantly, the Elder is generally correct when he writes this:

The Palestinian Arabs are a recently invented people. They exist today, to be sure, but they were not a "people" before 1948 at the very earliest. Westerners who drew the borders after World War I created what today's Palestinian Arabs laughably call "historic Palestine" - arbitrary lines that surrounded a people who had as much in common with those across those lines as with those within them. Arabs in the Galilee had more in common with those in Damascus than those in Bethlehem. Tribes and families trumped geography (and they often still do.) They became a "people" because of how their Arab brethren refused to allow them to integrate into their countries, forcing them to suffer as a separate group that eventually diid turn them into a people. Arabs themselves admit freely that they kept Palestinian Arabs in miserable conditions in order to foster their nascent "unity."

And that, of course, is his primary point concerning the Assumed Symmetry Fallacy. The Jews have been a people for over 3,500 years and perhaps considerably longer. Among the peoples of the earth the Jews, along with the Chinese and other indigenous peoples, are among the oldest on the planet. Jews are also, along with native Americans, for example, among the most persecuted. The Palestinian-Arabs, by contrast, only emerged as an allegedly distinct people toward the end of the twentieth-century and did so for the specific purpose of beating up on the Jews.

And I suppose this is where I disagree with the Elder. Are the "Palestinians" a distinct and separate people from Jordanian Arabs or Syrian Arabs or Egyptian Arabs? The classical definition of nationhood would suggest not. So-called "Palestinians" share the same religion with other Arabs, the same food-stuffs, generally speaking, with other Arabs, the same language and traditions. The "Palestinians" are Arabs. Period. And, in fact, most of them immigrated into the area following the Jewish aliyahs around the turn of the century.

The Jewish people are under no obligation to recognize a brand-new allegedly distinct people who came into existence for the explicit purpose of robbing the tiny Jewish minority of sovereignty on Jewish land.

The truth of the matter is that we owe them nothing.

If this sounds rather harsh, I am sorry, but the "Palestinians" have turned down every single offer for a state in peace next to Israel since 1937. They are never going to accept a Jewish presence with autonomy on land that was once captured by the forces of Islam, because to do so contradicts the very reason that they came into existence as an allegedly distinct ethnicity to begin with.

What the Elder understands, and what Beinart clearly does not, is that there is no symmetry. Shlomo Sand is a racist and a traitor to his people. The very notion that the Jews are a recently invented people is historically preposterous and Sand is a fraud. Adelson, however, whatever one may make of his politics, was correct if he suggested that the "Palestinians" are a newly invented people.

This is not a matter of opinion.

It is a matter of fact.

PA sets SEVEN new conditions - just to talk

Not demands for a permanent peace - but demands just to continue to pretend to negotiate!

Palestinian negotiators have posed seven conditions that must be met by Israel to continue negotiations beyond April 29.

The conditions were announced during a 9-hour meeting Wednesday with Israeli negotiators in Jerusalem, a high-ranking source in the PLO told Ma’an.

The following are the conditions, according to the source.

1. To receive a written letter from Israel's premier recognizing the Palestinian borders of 1967 with East Jerusalem as its capital.

2. The release of Palestinian prisoners who former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agreed to free including Marwan Barghouthi, Ahmad Saadat, and Fuad Shweiki.

3. Implementing a border-crossing agreement and lifting the siege on Gaza.

4. The return of exiles deported in the 2002 Bethlehem siege.

5. Stopping settlement activity in Jerusalem, and opening closed institutions in Jerusalem.

6. Allowing the reunification of 15,000 Palestinians with their families.

7. Israel refraining from entering areas under Palestinian Authority control for arrests or killings, and granting the PA some control over Area C.

The problem is that they know that the world will consider these reasonable.

So their best option is to continue to "talk" and get everything they demand without any compromise.

Which is what they have been doing all along.

04/03 Links Pt2: Fox News Rips Richard Silverstein; Israeli Co. helps save Chileans after earthquake

From Ian:

Richard Millett: Palestine Solidarity Campaign holds anti-Israel hate event at P21 Gallery.

Meanwhile, Jehan al Farra, an alumnus of the Islamic University in Gaza, definitely was in London. She had been in the UK since September studying for a Masters in Computer Studies.
Her main preoccupation last night was describing the problems of studying in Gaza, especially getting to and from academic institutions there due to fuel shortages.
During the Q&A an audience member pointed out that she is highly articulate and very confident, which is a tribute to her teachers and the syllabus. This was a difficult point for her to address without admitting that, just maybe, the situation isn’t as bad as her and her colleagues were attempting to portray.

Fox News Rips Richard Silverstein

On International Women’s day, March 8, a devastating new film about the endemic culture of brutally oppressing women within Islamic society was debuted. This film is now being shown on campuses and other venues across America.
So Fox News ran a piece on the film and asked CAIR for a representative to defend their anti-free speech stance. Instead of sending someone from their organisation, they put forward Richard Silverstein to speak for them! Let that sink in: Muslim Brotherhood linked group CAIR puts forward a Jewish blogger from Seattle to attack a film about the horrendous treatment of women in Muslim society.
Seriously. Richard Silverstein is now on the CAIR rolodex as an official apologist! It’s pretty hard to reconcile his claim to be “pro-Israel” with an organisation which the Anti Defamation League (ADL) describes as:

Islamophobia in action? 'Honor Diaries' screening shut down by CAIR

...CAIR isn’t doing the dirty work here or even its own research. The group is relying on the facts and arguments presented by Richard Silverstein, a progressive blogger who discredits the film on his blog: “One has to ask why a film about the purported abuse of Muslim women was produced by Jews, and ones with a distinct ideological agenda at that.”
CAIR links to his blog on Twitter to make the case: A Jew can’t be profiling human rights abuses against Muslim women.