Friday, March 08, 2019
From Ian:
Dr. Martin Sherman: “Palestine” - Time to say “No!”
The dinosaurs and the Palestinian state
Dr. Martin Sherman: “Palestine” - Time to say “No!”
Ladies and gentlemen, when the Palestinians say "two states" they do not mean what we mean—Maj-Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin , October 2018.
Failed in past, unfeasible in present, dangerous in future
Echoing precisely what two-state opponents have been insisting on for decades, he pronounced categorically: “There is no-one to agree with, there is nothing to agree on—and the implementation [of any two-state initiative] is dangerous”.
But then, astonishingly, rather than arrive at the rational conclusion that the pursuit of the two-state objective be abandoned and alternative approaches be explored—he did precisely the opposite!
He urged that Israel should undertake a policy, set out in the INSS “plan”, that assumes that there is—or rather that there might be—someone to agree with, and something to agree on—at some unspecified future date and as a result of some unspecified process that would somehow overcome his previously stipulated obstacles of “Palestinian divisiveness, political weakness and ideological extremism.”
Yadlin’s patently perverse and paradoxical position on the two-state doctrine—or rather dogma—underscores precisely why it must be renounced—unequivocally and irrevocably.
Indeed, its deadly detriments are so glaringly apparent that it is becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile calls for a Palestinian state with genuine concern for the well-being of the Jewish nation-state.
The dinosaurs and the Palestinian state
You still hear serious people talking out loud about the two-state solution as a reasonable – even inevitable – possibility to the conflict between us and the Arabs of the region: dividing the good land and establishing an Arab state on the hills of Judea and Samaria, which could wind up connecting to the Hamas state in the Gaza Strip to the west and the state of Jordan to the east.Arab Religiosity and Support for the Palestinians
Exactly 100 years have passed since the division of the land was first suggested in the 1919 Faisal–Weizmann Agreement, after World War I. Eighteen years later, in 1937, the Peel Commission (convened to investigate the bloody events of 1936) proposed dividing the land, and a decade later, on Nov. 29, 1947, the U.N. voted in favor of the partition plan. The Arabs refused, and their response was war.
The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded before the "occupation" of the 1967 Six-Day War. Its goal was to "liberate all the land from the Zionists." Our country was then quite small in size, and still the organization's terrorists wanted it. The goal hasn't changed; it has sometimes been disguised to delude naïve, liberal, self-righteous Jews in the West.
The Oslo Accords came into being after the PLO was on the mat after backing Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein during the First Persian Gulf War. The Palestinians supported any murderous dictator who served their purposes. In Oslo, the government under then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin put the dying organization on artificial life support and brought tens of thousands of terrorists whom we had armed into western Israel to force the division of the country and fulfill their dream of peace. If the Jews don't acknowledge their right to their own land and revive their sworn enemies from the ashes, we can expect nothing more from Europe or the U.S. That is how the organization of terrorists became the official, respectable representative of the supposed forthcoming Palestinian state.
Palestinians—as well as Arab leaders and opponents of Israel in the U.S. and Europe—have often claimed that the Palestinian fate is a central concern, if not the central concern, of Arabs everywhere. Examining data from Google in various Arab countries, Hillel Frisch notes that the frequency of searches for such topics as “Palestinian resistance” decreases sharply the farther one goes from Gaza and the West Bank. Non-Palestinian Arabs, by contrast, are far and away more likely to search for “al-Aqsa mosque” than for information about the Palestinian resistance, and Palestinians’ own interest in al-Aqsa is similarly high. To Frisch, all of this makes clear that religion, far more than nationalism, motivates Arab attitudes regarding Israel:
[These data] underscore the importance of the religious dimension in the Arabic-speaking world, both within and without the Palestinian arena, in the Arab-Palestinian conflict. This is hardly new. Islam was a major if not dominant theme in the most tumultuous periods of strife between Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land. In April 1920, attacks against Jews began during the religious Nabi Musa pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The 1921 riots began in Jaffa to protest the participation of immodestly clad Jewish women in the May Day demonstrations in Jaffa.
Seven years later, in 1928, Haj Amin al-Husseini coined the phrase “al-Aqsa in danger” in a pan-Islamic campaign against the Zionist movement that led to the most murderous onslaught against Jews to date in August 1929. This term has since been adopted by both Hamas and the northern branch of the Islamic Movement, which was banned by Israel in 2015.
During the second intifada, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Fatah tried in vain to name the conflict the “independence intifada” in its struggle against a rising Hamas, which wanted to color the conflict with Israel in religious terms. Today, it is universally referred to in Arabic as the “al-Aqsa intifada,” even in Fatah and PA discourse. The same religious zeal regarding the Palestinian cause can be found in the Arab world.
