Thursday, April 25, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
Geopolitical concerns must never overshadow history. The short term gain, in relation to the memory of genocide and mass murder, is not worth momentary strategic advantages or military agreements. The relationships between Turkey alongside both Israel and the U.S. will continue, even when both countries eventually honor history and formally recognize the Armenian genocide.
On the 104th anniversary of a genocide that paved the way for the Nazi’s to implement the destruction of European Jews, it’s time the U.S. and Israel accept their responsibility to simply recognize historical fact. The longer both countries ignore reality, the longer nations around the world question the moral stature of both Israel and the U.S. For a nation forged from Holocaust survivors, and a country who defeated the Nazis alongside the Allies of World War Two, it’s imperative moral clarity take precedent over whatever benefits are derived from appeasing Turkey on this grandiose issue.
The U.S. and Israel, especially the generations of Israelis and Jews around the world who remember the murder of 6 million souls by the Nazis, must never allow short-term political considerations to overshadow historical record. Had the world recognized the reality of 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children murdered in the Armenian Genocide, Hitler might not have been able to murder 1.5 million children, of which 1 million were Jewish, during the Holocaust.
Six million Jews might have lived, had the world protected the memory of 1.5 million Armenians who’s lives were stolen by the Ottoman Empire.
In addition, Raphael Lemkin stated categorically that genocide, the word he created, originated from his study of what the Armenians experienced 104 years ago. For revisionist historians, Lemkin’s own words provide all the evidence needed to prove categorically what happened to the Armenians is the same planned and orchestrated barbarism committed against the Jews and other peoples across history. As Lemkin states in a 1949 CBS interview, “I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times, it happened to the Armenians and after the Armenians, Hitler took action…”
In 2002, Shmuel Waldman, an American from New Jersey, was shot while boarding a bus in Israel. The terrorist attack killed 2 people and left 40 injured. Among that 40 was Shmuel whose leg was blown apart, forcing him to undergo multiple surgical procedures, and leaving him suffering from PTSD.Honest Reporting: The Five Commandments of Successful Israel Advocacy
The terrorist who shot him was Said Ramadan, a “police officer” working for the terrorists who run the Palestinian Authority. The attack had been planned by senior Palestinian Authority officials and the Palestinian Authority viewed Ramadan as a hero. Waldman joined other victims of terrorism in a lawsuit against the terrorist group, which is funded by American taxpayers, under the Antiterrorism Act.
Waldman v. PLO resulted in a record award of $655 million in damages against the Palestinian Authority terror network. But the verdict was thrown out because an American court lacked jurisdiction over the terrorist group even though the United States provides much of the cash flow that its terrorists rely on.
The Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act was introduced and approved to make it clear that accepting security assistance for its "police force" would place the Palestinian Authority under judicial jurisdiction for lawsuits such as these. The PA could stop funding terrorism or face lawsuits from its victims.
A ruthless battle was waged against ATCA by a variety of groups which understood that the Palestinian Authority would not stop funding and promoting terrorism under any circumstances. These groups falsely claimed that ATCA would undermine American and Israeli security. That was a blatant lie.
The only thing that ATCA would undermine was the flow of tax dollars to Islamic terrorists.
Last year, the Palestinian Authority informed the United States that the terror group would no longer accept any aid from the United States that would expose it to ATCA lawsuits. The terror group’s letter suggested that it might revisit its refusal if the law were changed. That’s just what 6 Democrat senators, led by Senator Dianne Feinstein have set out to do, using the false claim of a humanitarian disaster.
“President Trump’s refusal to provide humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people is a strategic mistake,” Senator Feinstein claimed, accusing him of "denying funding for clean water, health care and schools in the West Bank and Gaza."
(h/t Failexa)
How do you ‘win?’
So how do you “win?” And why engage in these discussions at all? Because the Israel-haters are not your target audience!
In society, whether you are interacting with folks face to face or in cyberspace, you will encounter three kinds of people:
1. Those who completely oppose the existence of Israel as the state of the Jewish people;
2. A much larger number who actively support Israel;
3. And, far bigger than both groups, the majority who don’t have strong opinions about this issue and usually aren’t paying much attention to it at all, except when it is brought to their attention by a flare-up of violence in the region, an action on the local university campus, or a demonstration in their community.
This last group, not your interlocutor, is the audience that you are trying to reach.
Even if you can’t earn a decisive victory, you don’t want to be afraid to engage and challenge anti-Israel activism. Perhaps you’ll get the haters to think twice, but even if you don’t, you have an opportunity to reach the same audience that they’re trying to recruit.
What you might accomplish is getting a fair-minded person, who is listening to the exchange or following it online, to think more about what you have to say. You might get them to realize that the steady drumbeat of misinformation from the other side might not reflect the reality of a complex ethno-religious conflict that is over a century old. You might even get them to engage in conversation with you, to ask you some genuine questions, and to reconsider some of what they have heard.
The Five Commandments of Successful Advocacy
To best accomplish this, we need to avoid arguing down at the level of some of our opponents. To that end, I offer you The Five Commandments of Successful Advocacy. They are just as relevant online as face-to-face. (Perhaps you were expecting a different, more biblically connected, commandment number? Sorry, I don’t want to suggest that these small kernels of advice were the result of any type of divine revelation.)
Thursday, April 25, 2019Elder of Ziyon
eoztv
The suicide bombers in Sri Lanka were affluent and well educated. That should tell us something about the war on terror.
In 2015, then-State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf suggested that potential terrorists would not join the Islamic State if they had better job opportunities. "We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium- to longer term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it's lack of opportunity for jobs," Harf said on MSNBC. "We can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance. We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people."
Harf is actually right—well, in the narrow sense that combatting Islamist terrorist groups is about more than military strikes. She is woefully—and dangerously—wrong, however, about more jobs being a solution. Yet the view she articulated is not hers alone. Her former boss, Barack Obama, similarly claimed that "extremely poor societies … provide optimal breeding grounds for disease, terrorism, and conflict." Indeed, the Department of Homeland Security's program on "countering violent extremism," or CVE, which the Obama administration established to counter radicalization within vulnerable communities, adheres to the same belief. How? CVE treats jihadists like members of street gangs or the mafia—as disgruntled, perhaps defenseless individuals who traveled down a dark path but can return to the light. And creating a better quality of life—a decent job, a reliable income, more responsibilities—is key to that return. In many cases, this framework would, for example, help gangsters who grew up poor with few opportunities. Not so much for the people who join ISIS.
Recent events show why this approach is misguided for Islamist terrorists. On Wednesday, Sri Lankan authorities revealed that most of the suicide bombers who murdered more than 350 people in coordinated attacks in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday were affluent and well educated. "They're quite well educated people," Ruwan Wijewardene, Sri Lanka's state minister of defense, said of the attackers, adding that many came from "middle class" backgrounds. "We believe that one of the suicide bombers studied in the U.K. and then later on did his post-graduate in Australia before coming back to settle in Sri Lanka."
Two of the brothers who carried out the bombings came from one of the wealthiest Muslim families in the capital, a family that, according to a neighbor, was "very well connected, very rich, politically connected as well." The Daily Mail reports they are "the sons of millionaire spice trader Yoonus Ibrahim and were privately educated in Colombo." Another terrorist had a law degree, and two others were married—not the hopeless loners that one often imagines as suicide bombers.
In 2003, Asif Hanif – Britain’s first jihadist suicide bomber – murdered three people at Mike’s Bar in Tel Aviv. He had attended Kingston University. This week, a second alumnus of Kingston University, Abdul Lathief Jameel Mohamed, committed a horrifyingly bloody massacre in Sri Lanka.Two teenage Westminster Synagogue members named among victims of Sri Lanka bombing
A significant number of takfiri jihadist terrorists have passed through British universities over the past couple of decades. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had been a member of UCL’s student Islamic Society and its president in 2006-7 before graduating in 2008, joined al-Qaeda under the guidance of Anwar al-Awlaki and tried to bring down an American airliner in 2009 with a bomb concealed in his underpants. Kafeel Ahmed, a former president of Queen’s University Belfast’s Islamic society, tried to blow up a nightclub in London and then set fire to himself, fatally, in Glasgow Airport in 2007. Yassin Nassari, a former president of the University of Westminster’s student Islamic society, was convicted of smuggling missile blueprints into the UK in 2007. Waheed Zaman, the former president of the London Metropolitan University Islamic society, was convicted of conspiracy to murder in 2010 in a plot to place bombs on several airliners travelling from the UK to North America.
More recently, in April 2019 the BBC reported that no fewer than seven students from the University of Westminster alone had allegedly joined ISIS.
Whenever an atrocity is committed, it is natural to ask: why? What could drive a human being to slaughter his neighbours?
Ideology clearly plays an important part. Humans are, at least in part, rational. We do things for reasons which appear good to us. The beliefs which we hold, guide our actions.
In the case of Asif Hanif, evidence emerged which indicated that he had a connection to Al Mujhajiroun: the splinter group of Hizb ut Tahrir which has emerged as a nexus in many terrorist attacks. With Abdul Mohamed, the picture is not yet clear. We don’t know what meetings he attended, with which preachers, and during which period. Therefore, at present, it is proper to make only the most general of points about ideology and radicalisation.
Tributes have been paid to a Jewish brother and sister who were among more than 300 people killed in Easter Sunday's bombings in Sri Lanka.Israel Advocacy Movement: Sri Lanka terror attack - Christian lives matter
Daniel and Amelie Linsey, who were members of Westminster Synagogue, were among eight Britons killed in the attack.
Shul president Lord Leigh paid tribute to them in the House of Lords on Wednesday.
He noted Amelie had been batmizvah there just last March, "reading with poise, maturity and warmth from our Torah scrolls"
He said Daniel was "especially interested in Jewish festivals" and had helped the synagogue to prepare for Purim.
"We have pledged as a community to offer our love and support and do everything we can every step of the way," he said.
"The Jewish community is used to counselling mourners who have been affected by a terrorist bomb. This is another chapter in that sad and sorry book."
Thursday, April 25, 2019Elder of Ziyon
Islam, which is in the curricula of our schools and government universities, is the problem, not the Muslims.
- ISIS works using the approach of Islamic conquests.
- Within every Muslim believer in our heritage literature is a potential terrorist waiting for empowerment.
- All the Islamic schools of preaching are, to varying degrees, waiting for empowerment.
And if we speak openly as Muslims, much of what is done by Al-Qaeda and even the Muslim Brotherhood, the Houthis and the other extremist groups when it governs a region is the real Islam, which is found in the books of fiqh and the prophetic biography of the different sects without exception and some extreme interpretations of verses in the Holy Quran.
..I talk about the correct and frequent conversations and compiled between all the doctrines of Islamic Sunnis and Shiites without exception, including the story of the invasion of Bani Qurayza, led by the Messenger of Allah in the fifth year of migration, the Jews of Bani Quraizah in Madinah, and ended with the surrender of Bani Qurayza on the condition of arbitration, and the sentence was to kill men and and take wives and children captive and divide their wealth and land to Muslims.
The execution was carried out in the Jews of Beni Qurayza. The men who had reached the age of fighting were executed, whether they participated in the crime of treachery - which was the cause of war against them - or did not participate. Then the women and children were taken away and converted as Muslims in the battle. Those were the practices in many "Islamic conquests".
...The children were taken captive and enslaved, the women were sexually abused.
Imagine this scene with me of a Jewish family from Bani Qurayza, consisting of six people, for example, husband and wife, 18-year-old boy, 13-year-old girl and children 8 and 9 years old, The husband and the eldest son are killed, their house, property, homes and lands were divided, the rest of the family was taken away and distributed to the Muslim Mujahideen. The mother raped by a Mujahid of the Quraish and the older girl raped by another Mujahid.
Is the scene of terror and terrorism the mercy of Islam, which they told us repeatedly? Isn't this the Islam of ISIS? Convert to Islam or give us a tribute, and if you refused we kill you, we loot you, and your wife and daughters were abused.
We are always pretending to ourselves that some Muslims are bad but not Islam. The truth is that the problems is in Islam and not in Muslims. I'm talking about the Islam found in the books of the Sahih and mothers of the books of the doctrines, which contain a lot of fatwas and da'is, And talk about the "Islamic conquests" of how to deal with Christians and followers of other religions, we must recognize, without flinching, that the correct Islam is found in those books....All these doctrines and imams recognize the legitimacy of the execution of the prisoners of Bani Qurayza and the captivity of their women, which contradicts several verses of the Koran. How to execute even those who did not participate in treason, women and children who are blameless, and recognize the legitimacy of forcing people to Islam or tributes or taking the captives and money contrary to many verses.
...
We must admit that within every Muslim who believes in these narratives is a latent terrorist. ...That is why we must review our religious heritage, criticize it and correct it. Otherwise, terrorism will remain on our necks, waiting for favorable circumstances or intrigues or conspiracies to spread its fangs within our societies.
Thursday, April 25, 2019Elder of Ziyon
After years of operating a woefully inadequate and inefficient pedestrian checkpoint in Qalandiya that often left Palestinian laborers from the central West Bank waiting in extremely long lines, Israel finally inaugurated a new checkpoint in the area in late February.So everyone should be happy that an overcrowded checkpoint has been replaced with something that takes less time to pass through than a trip through New York's Port Authority terminal?
Inside the checkpoint, groups of laborers formed orderly lines and patiently waited their turn to pass through metal detectors and automatic gates that verify their entry permits (all Palestinian workers in Israel have biometric permits) as IDF soldiers and private security guards observed them from a distance.
Within five to ten minutes, they exited the checkpoint and started to search for the vans and buses waiting to transport them to their workplaces.
The checkpoint is located at the southern end of Kafr Aqab, Jerusalem’s northernmost neighborhood, which abuts the West Bank security barrier and has suffered from years of poor municipal services. The estimated 60,000 Kafr Aqab residents, many of whom are permanent residents of Israel, and other Palestinians in the central West Bank must cross through Qalandiya or another checkpoint to reach the center of Jerusalem.
The laborers, who have various jobs throughout Israel, overwhelmingly said the new checkpoint has made their morning commute to work significantly more manageable compared to the old one.
“It is substantially better,” said 43-year-old Yousef Jabareen, who works as a butcher in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market, while standing at Qalandiya’s exit. “It used to take about an hour to pass through the old one. Now it only takes a few minutes, which means that I get about an extra hour of sleep.”
Azzam al-Ahmad, a senior Fatah and Palestine Liberation Organization official, said that Israel “should not be working to beautify checkpoints, but rather to remove them and end its occupation.”If the PLO wants a two state solution, then wouldn't there be checkpoints between the states anyway?
“We are a people that wants its dignity and they only way we can achieve that is ending the occupation and establishing an independent state along 1967 lines with East Jerusalem as it capital,” Ahmad said in a phone call.
The new terminal is well lit, there is no crowding such as we used to see, people one on top of another, and it really does move quickly and efficiently . But I think of the times that we have brought people to see the horror of the situation there and also the photographers. When such people now come to Qalandiya how many of them will be aware what is going on behind this civilized scene. The West Bank, Hebron, The violence of the settlers, the soldiers who support them and give them a free hand, the nightly invasion of houses, children even under the age of 12 who arrested, the trees that are cut down, the schools which are destroyed, the demolition of houses. And I ask myself ….. Will Qalandiya be the whitewashing of the occupation.As usual, Israel is going to be blamed. As usual, Israel is going to do the best it can, knowing that people will criticize it no matter what.
Thursday, April 25, 2019Elder of Ziyon
Wednesday, April 24, 2019Elder of ZiyonVic Rosenthal
It was once said that every Jewish holiday could be summed up with the same nine words: ‘They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat’. Now it only takes eight: ‘A Labour spokesperson apologised for any offence caused’. On Friday, the Labour party tweeted warm wishes to Jews celebrating Passover. At this stage, most Jews are glad to receive any communication from Corbyn supporters that doesn’t ask where the Rothschilds were on 9/11, but the well-meaning post contained a blunder: the accompanying graphic showed the Star of David, a cup of wine and… a loaf of bread.
Under halakha — Jewish religious law — bread is the ultimate forbidden food during Pesach. It is chametz (leavened) and Jews must abstain in memory of the slaves who fled Egyptian bondage so quickly their bread didn’t have time to rise. No doubt Labour moderates think the Israelites should have ‘stayed to fight’ until the yeast kicked in and Tom Watson triggered a leadership contest against Pharaoh. Whoever is in charge of tweeting Labour’s Yom Kippur message would be advised to delete any pictures of bacon rolls from their phone.
Why is this facepalm different from other facepalms? It’s a relatively minor one compared to most of Labour’s behaviour towards Jews. Unfortunately for Labour, it comes after a ComRes poll showing 51 per cent of Britons believe Labour has a ‘serious’ anti-Semitism problem and 55 per cent say it makes Jeremy Corbyn ‘unfit’ to be prime minister. Unfortunately for Jews, the same pollster puts Labour 10 points clear of the Tories. The British people are on the brink of knowingly electing an anti-Semitic government and our radio phone-ins are chocked on the ethics of policemen skateboarding with anarchists.
Do the Jews have a future in the UK? The confluence of Corbynism, an alt-right that has moved from the tweets onto the streets, the forgotten threat of Islamist terrorism and a simmering hostility to kosher slaughter methods will make the coming years the most trying British Jews have faced since the war. For some gathered around seder tables over the weekend, the words ‘next year in Jerusalem’ will have prompted thoughts practical as well as spiritual. Moving to Israel involves many sacrifices but at least once there existential angst comes with an air force.
In the 1970 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures delivered at Yale, the literary critic George Steiner offered a compelling explanation for the persistence of anti-Semitism: The Jews suffered for millennia as retribution for introducing the “Ideal” into Western culture. With its idealism and ethical imperatives, the revelation at Sinai “tore up the human psyche by its ancient roots,” depriving its inheritors of not just the material God and the image, but also “natural consciousness,” and “instinctual polytheistic needs.” Jews, the original Puritans, rejected the satisfaction of both the body and the image, for the purity and ascetic life dictated by the divine Word. From this perspective, Judaism represents the earliest celebration of the absolute, the West’s punishing superego, demanding idealism and self-denial, which was later incarnated in primitive Christianity and Messianic socialism, also founded by Jews, Jesus, and Karl Marx, in whose visions the Ideal persists “with terrible tactless force.” By Steiner’s lights, Hitler’s “jibe” that the Jews “invented consciousness” explains the tenacity of Western hatred of the Jews.‘I have no patience for bullies.’ Nikki Haley says the United Nations targeted Israel
Western hatred of the Jews thus begins with anxiety about Jewish claims to exceptionalism. There can only be one bearer of the ideal: The city on the Hill is not Jerusalem, but Rome, later London, and even later still, Boston. In this form of anti-Semitism, which Steiner both described and in some ways endorsed, Jews are loathed because they represent a reminder of their antecedent claim to the Ideal—a claim that causes such anxiety that it must be extirpated. Non-Jewish messianic movements reject the notion of Jewish exceptionalism, because they are the exceptional ones. The continued existence of the Jews, and the resurgence of Israel, are troubling reminders that that the Jews were first to be singled out as God’s “chosen people.”
Steiner’s writings on the State of Israel provide an early primer on the dynamics of the specific form of secular anti-Semitism that has captivated so many progressives in academia and among the rank and file of the British Labour Party, as well as, increasingly, among American progressives. For Steiner, nationalism is a “madness,” as is the “vulgar mystique of flag and anthem.” But it is Israel’s “barbed wire and watch-towers of national dogma” that represent a “rhetoric of self-deception as desperate as any contrived in the history of nationalism.” For Steiner, and in this, contemporary progressives follow him, Israel must bear all the sins of the nation-state. The Greek dramatist Aeschylus in his celebration of Athens—the Oresteia—avows that the city-state is founded on blood: For contemporary progressives, as for Steiner, only Israel, the nation-state ne plus ultra, has blood on its hands. (h/t Yerushalimey)
Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley called her veto vote that paved the way for the United States Embassy in Israel to move to Jerusalem “one of my proudest moments.”
“What I saw at the Security Council reminded me of what it felt like to be bullied when I was a kid. I have no patience for bullies. They were kicking Israel just because — without facts,” she said during the session with Hillel Neuer, the executive director of United Nations Watch.
Haley spoke during an on-stage interview in Montreal at the Shaar Hashamayim synagogue April 10.
She told the 1,200-person audience she doesn’t think U.N. resolutions are effective.
“I don’t think they matter,” she said, speaking of one of the main tools the U.N. General Assembly or Security Council uses to give an opinion.
Member states are not actually required to abide by U.N. resolutions, according to the U.N.
When she vetoed a resolution that would have condemned the United States for moving its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Haley told the crowd, “I felt like I was fighting for the truth and for what was right. And I was mad. Every country has the sovereign right to put their embassy wherever they choose. The U.S. always chooses to have its embassy in the capital. Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. The rest of the world can’t hide what we know as fact. The president had great courage to do it.”
“The Arab countries have a lot of oil and a lot of money, and they started picking up all these other countries to vote with them. If you actually go into the quiet corners of the U.N., most countries don’t hate Israel, most envy Israel,” she said.
Wednesday, April 24, 2019Varda Meyers Epstein (Judean Rose)Judean Rose, Opinion, Varda
Why is the matzoh situated at the lowest point of the graphic? Misplaced humility.— (((Varda Epstein))) (@epavard) April 22, 2019
Wednesday, April 24, 2019Elder of Ziyonhumor, Preoccupied
Washington, April 24 - Waves of empathy and condolences for the hundreds of Sri Lanka church bombing victims and their families have left prominent figures in the Democratic Party bewildered, aides report, as those victims of violence do not belong to the Islamic faith.
President Trump appears set to expose more than forty years of deceptive and misleading information disseminated by the United Nations (UN) in relation to the boundaries of former Palestine.
This welcome development comes with President Trump’s Special U.S Envoy Jason D. Greenblatt telling Sky News in Arabic on 19 April:
“there is no reason to use the term ‘two-state solution,” the reason being that, “every side sees it differently.”
The UN must take responsibility for creating such confusion by perpetuating intellectual and political fraud originating with its 1978 publication: "The Origins and Evolution of the Palestinian Problem" (referred to below as the Study).
Part 1 of the Study covering 1917-1947 was trashed by Israel’s Ambassador to the UN – Yehuda Blum – on 16 November:
“Even the most cursory reading of this document can leave no doubt that the means and machinery of the United Nations have been misused once again to disseminate highly selective and tendentious information under the guise, in this instance, of what purports to be a scholarly study.
The history of international conflicts, and particularly those with complex historical origins, can only be properly written by objective historians who enjoy complete academic freedom. The practice of writing and rewriting history according to the transient interests of a political body is, of course, characteristic of certain regimes. It is regrettable that the United Nations has now been drawn into that pattern.”
Blum then told the UN General Assembly on 30 November 1978:
“At the end of the first part of the publication, ostensibly dealing with the period of the Palestine Mandate, there appear a number of maps. The one map that is conspicuously absent is the official map of the Palestine Mandate which, until 1946, included Transjordan on the east bank of the Jordan River. This map was omitted because it does not fit into the PLO’s own scheme, as it would show too clearly that a Palestinian Arab state has already been in existence for 32 years on more than three quarters of the territory of mandated Palestine – that is, the state now called Jordan. That embarrassment is eliminated in this purportedly scholarly and impartial publication by the simple expedient of eliminating the map.”
In the years since the second intifada ended, no small number of retired high-ranking IDF officers and intelligence officials have argued that complete separation from the Palestinians is a strategic necessity for Israel. Gershon Hacohen, analyzing the geography, the changes in warfare—and Middle Eastern warfare in particular—since the 1990s, and recent history, argues that they are wrong:Eugene Kontorovich (WSJ): Saving U.S. Soldiers from Runaway Prosecutors (click via Google)
The withdrawal of IDF forces from the West Bank and the establishment of a Palestinian state in these territories will constitute an existential threat to Israel. The absence of an Israeli military presence in the West Bank, especially along the Jordan River, will enable the creation of a terrorist entity, à la the Gaza Strip, a stone’s throw from the Israeli hinterland. This withdrawal will box Israel into indefensible borders, especially in light of the major changes in the nature of war in recent decades that have made the astounding achievements of 1967 impossible to replicate, not to mention the stark international response [that would follow Israel’s] takeover of a sovereign state.
The deployment of international forces in the West Bank will not, [contrary to what some have argued], ensure the demilitarization of the prospective Palestinian state, let alone prevent the entry of Arab forces into its territory (with or without its consent) and/or its transformation into a springboard for terrorist attacks against Israel. . . .
Israel [now] maintains control of some 60 percent of the West Bank’s territory, . . . which is mostly empty of Palestinian population but includes all of the West Bank’s Jewish communities and IDF bases, as well as main highways, vital topographic areas, and open spaces descending eastward to the Jordan Valley. The retention of this territory constitutes the absolute minimum required for the preservation of defensible borders and meets two conditions necessary for Israel’s security: the Jordan Valley buffer zone, without which it will be impossible to prevent the rapid arming of Palestinian terrorist groups throughout the West Bank; and control of intersecting transportation arteries, which, together with control of strategic topographical sites, enables rapid deployment of IDF forces deep inside Palestinian areas.
The Trump foreign policy team scored a big victory in The Hague that will protect American soldiers from illegitimate and unaccountable foreign prosecutions. The International Criminal Court dropped a more than decade-long inquiry into alleged crimes by U.S. personnel in Afghanistan after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the U.S. would deny a visa to the court's prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda.Swiss government spending millions on anti-Israel lawfare
If the ICC were to indict U.S. servicemen, no American president would turn them over, but it would have a real effect on their lives. They would face peril in traveling to countries that have joined the ICC, including all of Western Europe. They would be international fugitives.
The court's officials are unaccountable to nationals of non-member states like the U.S. Yet they might sit in judgment of decisions made by U.S. personnel in life-or-death situations, and second-guess the judgments of professional prosecutors in democratic countries that have chosen not to join the court.
The court is currently considering whether to open an investigation into whether Israel is committing war crimes by allowing Jews to live in the West Bank. Thus the ICC would be investigating a non-member state at the behest of a non-state member, for a supposed crime that no one in the history of international criminal law has been charged with.
The Swiss government has been directly funding legal activity targeting Israel over the past year. The funding, estimated at $2 million at least, was transferred by the Swiss Foreign Ministry through its diplomatic mission in Ramallah to a series of Israeli and Palestinian organizations one year ago.
The transfer of the funds took place shortly after the Swiss government ended its support for the Ramallah-based Human Rights and International Law Secretariat over its support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Ultimately, though, the funds went toward financing similar projects.
Israel Hayom has seen the contracts, signed by both the Swiss diplomatic mission in Ramallah and six pro-Palestinian organizations in 2018. In addition, funding was allocated toward three Israeli organizations: Hamoked human rights organization, Physicians for Human Rights and Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.
Among the activities financed in accordance with the contract: “building cases for the International Criminal Court” and “collecting testimonies, field inspections, holding interviews and [providing] legal assistance to victims of war crimes.”
It should be noted that according to the security doctrine formulated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the ICC is one of the greatest threats to Israel.
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PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
