Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

A good way to evaluate Simon Wiesenthal's life

A quick look at Google finds that the harshest critics of Simon Wiesenthal are Holocaust deniers, neo Nazis, bigots and supporters of Arab terror.

He must have been doing something right.

Baruch Dayan ha-emet.

EU rewarding Palestinians for acting like animals

Since the Palestinian Arabs did such a good job over the past couple of weeks in destroying Gaza's economy and future prospects, smuggling weapons and drugs in from Egypt, burning synagogues, looting, pillaging, creating complete chaos and threatening Israeli Jews with genocide, the EU has decided that they deserve more money.

Brussels - The European Union on Monday announced an increase in aid for the Palestinians this year, saying help is crucial to maintain the peace momentum triggered by Israel's withdrawal from Gaza.

The European Commission, executive arm of the EU which has long been the biggest aid contributor to the Palestinians, (not any Arab country! -EoZ) said it will provide some €280m in aid, bigger than the €250m previously announced.

"Only Israel and Palestine can make peace, but Europe is playing its part in the international quartet to create the environment in which peace can take root," said EU external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner.

'We are taking very practical action to regenerate Gaza, and help prepare the Palestinians for statehood,' she said.

"Having led the way in support for reform efforts in the Palestinian Authority, we are now helping to lay the foundations for a viable Palestinian economy."

And look how successful their previous outlays of money have been!

Arabs getting nervous with Israeli diplomatic success

In the wake of Israel's seeming diplomatic victories that accompanied the Gaza withdrawal, notably the overtures from Pakistan, it is interesting to see how isolated some Arabs are feeling from their Muslim counterparts.

In this funny screed published in the "Arab American News", Ramzy Baroud writes an article titled "The risks of normalizing relations with Israel." As part of his "historical overview" showing the supposed centrality of Palestine to Arab thinking, he offers this whopper:

Israel exploited the mostly sentimental relationship Arabs and Muslims held toward Palestine. While the tangible and perpetual conflict was in fact taking place between Israel, a newly forged entity with further colonial ambitions, and a fragmented and displaced Palestinian refugee population, Israel labored to elate a different interpretation, that of a tiny little country struggling for survival amongst hordes of hostile Arabs and Muslims, who were up in arms to erase this little stretch of land from the face of the earth. Considering the political and military positioning of most Arab and Muslim countries, the Israeli claim is almost comical.

One would almost think that the wars in 1948, 1967, and 1973 initiated by Arab countries against Israel never happened!

But the fact that articles like this are even being written betrays the nervousness that is rippling through the Arab world since Musharraf made his overtures to Israel, and especially since he shook hands with Sharon last week.

Israel has also increased ties with Tunisia, Bahrain is making overtures, Israel made diplomatic contact with Qatar as well as with Indonesia.

How much of these efforts are honest reappraisals from the Muslim world of Israel, and how much is the result of diplomatic arm-twisting by the US, is unclear. Equally unclear is whether the apparent diplomatic gains offset the problems with the Gaza withdrawal. But it is fun to watch the Arabs squirm as it becomes more apparent that their unified front of Muslim anti-Israelism is crumbling, and that their pretense of solidarity with Palestinian Arabs has shown no solid results over the decades.

by Alastair Gordon, President, Canadian Coalition for Democracies
Monday, September 19, 2005

Toronto, Canada - Saturday, 17 September 2005 - On September 15, Prime Minister Paul Martin announced from New York that Canada will give another $24.5 million to the Palestinian Authority (PA). This past May, Mr. Martin announced $12.2 million in aid during the visit to Canada of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, bringing the total Canadian aid to the Palestinians to $310 million since 1993.

“President Abbas came to office promising (1) to disarm Palestinian militants, (2) to end incitement in schools and media, and (3) to end glorification of suicide bombing,” said Alastair Gordon, President of the Canadian Coalition for Democracies (CCD). “On that understanding, Prime Minister Martin promised another $12.2 million in May of this year.'

Since receiving Canadian tax dollars, President Abbas has reneged on all his commitments. Specifically, (1) PA Foreign Minister Nasser al-Kidwa publicly declared in June that the PA will not disarm Hamas and other terrorist groups under its jurisdiction; (2) Not a single textbook denying the existence of Israel and preaching the destruction of “the Zionist entity” has been removed or revised; and (3) Abbas himself, speaking to a group of high school students and educators in Gaza, glorified suicide bombing when he declared, “What has been achieved here [in Gaza] is due to the martyrs.”

“When money is given on the understanding that certain commitments to peace will be undertaken, the open declaration by the recipient that those commitments will not he honoured should mean, at a minimum, that funding would stop,” said Gordon. “Instead, our Prime Minister rewards bad faith with another $24.5 million from Canadian taxpayers.”

“It is not enough to pretend that the money is allocated to specific projects, because money is fungible,” added Gordon. “If Canadians are paying to build a highway, those funds are now freed up for war against Israel, in keeping with the PA’s constitutional governing charter and repeated declarations by PA spokespeople.”

On behalf of Canadians, CCD is urging Paul Martin to inform President Abbas that he will receive no more Canadian funding until he meets his commitments. Canadians expect that the Palestinian Charter will finally be amended to remove Article 9 that declares “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine”, Article 20 that states “Jews [do not] constitute a single nation with an identity of its own”, and other articles that call for the destruction of Israel through violence (See PLO Charter below).

“The constitutional Charter of the PA is available on the web for Paul Martin to read,” concluded Gordon. “Instead, our Prime Minister has chosen to purchase international approval with the blood of Israelis, while refusing to tell Canadians what benefit has been derived from nearly one third of a billion tax dollars paid to Arafat and Abbas.”

Today's Palestinian Police Phunnies

Palestinian Authority policemen went on a rampage in Nablus on Saturday night, setting a car and a house on fire and shooting indiscriminately in one of the city's main squares.

The policemen were protesting against the killing of one of their colleagues, Khalil Kharmah, by a security officer from the PA's National Security Forces. Kharmah, 35, was shot to death while he was sitting inside a police station. The motive for the killing was unknown.

Following the incident, scores of policemen torched the house and car of the assailant. Later, they drove through the center of the city, shooting into the air and burning tires, forcing shopkeepers to close their businesses.

Grand slam: Police phunnies, Palestinian rampages, AFP bigotry and lies

This story has it all!

NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip (AFP) - Once the epitome of high-tech and worth millions in desperately needed trade, the greenhouses of Gaza have been stripped bare by their former Jewish owners and pillaged by the Palestinians.
Fitted out with sophisticated, computer-programmed irrigation systems, rich New York Jews forked out 14 million dollars to buy the hothouses from former Israeli settlers and donate them to the Palestinians.

Under the deal negotiated by James Wolfensohn, the international special envoy for the pullout, the glass houses and their annual crops of 75 million dollars, were to be handed over in good state to the Palestinian Authority

But pillagers, taking advantage of the chaos reigning over some evacuated settlements in the days since Israel left and ceded control of Gaza to the Palestinians, made a bee-line for greenhouses seen as gold dust.

According to Palestinian authorities, who have since ordered police and civilians to stop the ransacking of money-making structures so crucial to the future of impoverished Gaza, around 800 of the 4,000 greenhouses are unusable.

"Repairs cost 10,000 dollars per greenhouse," said Osama al-Farra, mayor of the closest Palestinian town, Khan Yunis.

"Part of the electrical circuits, irrigators and computers were taken by settlers, the rest by looters," he said.

Taking a quick tour of the ruins of the largest Jewish settlement bloc, Gush Katif, is enough to ascertain that if most of the greenhouses' metal frames are still in place, they are cavernous shells.

Electricity sub-stations have been gouged open and their wires yanked out, impossible to know whether it's the handiwork of settlers or looters.

Few greenhouses have even a pipe left as ripped tarpaulin flaps in the wind.

Next to one, a peasant from near Gaza City and three of his cousins bundle water pipes and tarpaulin into a pick-up van.

"An Israeli tank destroyed our farm," Hani offers by way of excuse.

"The Palestinian Authority talks but does nothing. The intifada ruined us: with this we can build again," he adds.

Outside Neve Dekalim, once the largest Jewish settlement in Gaza, Abdelaziz Ali Otman, 53, and colleagues drink tea. For 20 years they were employed in the enclave by a wealthy Jewish settler.

"It was us who did everything here so we know how to take care of it!" According to him, some owners stopped watering flowers, fruits and vegetables two months before the withdrawal, others carried on until the last day.

Otman and five colleagues were sitting down, unarmed, to protect the hundreds of hectares and put off looters. One civilian car skidded in front of them: "Guys, guys, come quickly, some lads are cutting the fence!"

Palestinian forces are now installed outside most of the greenhouses, but that doesn't stop the looters from continuing to carve out treasures.

Three pillagers were slicing through the fence when a police patrol orders them off the premises.

Suddenly a guard comes out from behind the bushes. Carrying pliers, he was helping the looters.

Where to begin?

AFP explicitly blames Jews for some of the equipment missing from Gaza without the slightest fact to back it up.
AFP twice refers to Jews as "rich" or "wealthy". While in the case of the stupid American Jews who decided to throw away millions on Palestinians, they were in fact rich, the story could have easily said "by members of the American Jewish community" rather than bring up the stereotype of influential New York Jews. And what purpose is served by calling the Gaza greenhouse owner "wealthy" if not to again promote a stereotype?
If it costs $10,000 to fix each of 800 greenhouses, that means that out of the $14 million gift, $8 million is already wasted. It also means that the true value of the greenhouses far exceeded $14 million (especially if the annual crop is $75 million) - a fact never mentioned in the media.
Palestinian "police" joining in the looting is always a nice touch to any story from the territories!

Tehran newspaper accidentally supports Jews' rights to Jerusalem

The "Islamic Republic News Agency", based in Iran, quotes from Iranian newspapers about various topics. One recent article quotes a "Kayhan International" editorial with the usual blather about Zionists usurping etenal Muslim lands and how disgusting it is for any Muslim to even think of having cordial relationships with "the Zionist entity."

But then comes this interesting paragraph, referring to Jerusalem:

Press blast Sharon for irrelevant words at UN on Beit ul-Moqaddas - Irna: "The daily concluded its editorial by stressing that 'It is an irony that those heads of Muslim states who shamelessly shook hands at the UN with the head of the usurper Zionist entity that lacks any legitimacy to exist on the map of the Middle East, felt no concern of either the Palestinian cause or the issue of Bait ul-Moqaddas which houses Islam's first qibla of Muslims, and which Sharon insolently referred to as the 'Temple Mount.''

Anyone witrh a passing knowledge of Hebrew would see an amazing resemblance between the word "Bait ul-Moqaddas" and the Hebrew words "Beit ha-Mikdash", which use the exact same Semitic root letters. The Beit ha-Mikdash is the Jewish Holy Temple, and the term pre-dates Islam by many centuries. Clearly Islam took the term, translated it (or possibly transliterated it) to Arabic, and now refers to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount by a variant of the Hebrew term.

Which means that in the early history of Islam (and, in fact, much more recently), Muslims freely admitted that the Jewish Holy Temple stood at the site of the Temple Mount, even though they absurdly try so hard nowadays to deny any Jewish connection to Jerusalem.

The term seems only to be used by Iranians; Arabs all seem to refer to the Temple Mount as "Haram al-Sharif" and to Jerusalem usually as Jerusalem, sometimes as Al-Quds (notice also the similarity of roots between Quds and the Hebrew Qodesh, "Holy." Jerusalem was known in antiquity as "Ir haQodesh", the Holy City, by Jews.)

It would be fun to ask an Iranian the etymology of "Bait ul-Moqaddas" and watch them try to spin it as an original Arabic or Persian term. Yet every time they use it, they are reinforcing the Jewish claim to the city that they try so hard to minimize.

About 60 members of rival Palestinian security units engaged in a shootout in the center of the West Bank town of Ramallah after two officers feuded over a parking space, security officials said. No one was hurt.

We have seen quite a few stories like this, where there are huge shootouts involving Palestinian "security" forces and no one getting injured. Is their aim that bad, or are they just not willing to admit to any casualties?

Either way, the idea that the finest of Palestinian Arab society along with dozens of their supporters shoot guns over a parking space speaks more about the prospects for peace than any number of pontificating pretend "Prime Ministers".

Haveil Havalim #37 is up

SoccerDad hosts this weeks' Best of the Jewish Blogosphere, this week misspelled in his title (though not in the content) as "Haveil Havlim."

Oh, and he very nicely mentions this article of mine, along with a unusually large number of other excellent posts from around the JBlogosphere. Check it out!

Best article on Palestinian demography 1880-1948

This article is, hands down, the best attempt by anyone to nail down the facts about how many people lived in Palestine before 1948. The group that wrote this has no political agenda I could detect on either side - many articles on the site are clearly not pro-Israel.

The major conclusions were:

1. The nature of the data do not permit precise conclusions about the Arab population of Palestine in Ottoman and British times,

2. Palestine was not an empty land when Zionist immigration began.

3. Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians.

4. Historic population data in Palestine during Ottoman times and during Mandatory times show significant discrepancies.

5. It is not possible to estimate illegal Arab immigration directly, but apparently there was some immigration.

5. There are large discrepancies between official population figures and the number of Palestinian refugees

6. There are serious discrepancies in reporting of the number of refugees by UNRWA.

7. The city of Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since about 1896

I found this article while trying to find out the facts about land ownership before 1948. So many times, anti-Zionists point out that Jews only owned 6-8% of the land in Palestine, implying that Arabs owned 92-94%. I was wondering how much of the land was privately owned by Arabs, how much by the British (and Ottomans beforehand), and what other categories there were.

Here is what I found out from this article:

Population and Land Ownership prior to the UN Partition Resolution
An Anglo-American commission of inquiry in 1945 and 1946 examined the status of Palestine. No official census figures were available, as no census had been conducted in Palestine in 1940, so all their surmises and figures are based on extrapolations and surmises. According to the report, at the end of 1946, About 1,220,000 Arabs and 608,000 Jews resided within the borders of Mandate Palestine. Jews had purchased 6 to 8 percent of the total land area of Palestine. This was about 20% of the land that could be settled and cultivated. About 46% of the land was registered in the tax registers to Arab villages, to Arabs living on the land, or absentee owners, and about the same amount was government land. However, most of this land was not privately owned. The Arabs of Palestine had received much of their land in leases conditional upon cultivation or used land that was part of village commons.

So based on this, it appears that Arabs privately owned somewhere between 1% and 22% of the land in Palestine before 1948, depending on the meaning of the word "most" in the sentence above. The other "Arab" land was not owned by them, but was leased conditionally from the British.

In other worlds, it is even possible that Jews owned more land than Arabs did before the 1948 war!

This discounts the fact that the British tried very hard to stop Jews from buying and privatizing land - if it wasn't for that, Jews would undoubtably have come to privately own much more. Even so, it is an illuminating fact amongst the rhetoric.

Must-read article on Palestinian Arabs in 1961

Via Oceanguy comes this amazing article from neo-neocon.

An article in Atlantic Monthly from 1961 shows how the Palestinian Arabs were being exploited mercilessly by the Arab nations, blaming Israel and the West for all their problems - exactly like they still do.

A tiny excerpt:

Although no one knows exactly how many refugees are scattered everywhere over the globe, it is estimated that since World War II, and only since then, at least thirty-nine million non-Arab men, women, and children have become homeless refugees, through no choice of their own....The world could be far more generous to these unwilling wanderers, but at least the world has never thought of exploiting them. They are recognized as people, not pawns. By their own efforts, and with help from those devoted to their service, all but some six million of the thirty-nine million have made a place for themselves, found work and another chance for the future. To be a refugee is not necessarily a life sentence.

The unique misfortune of the Palestinian refugees is that they are a weapon in what seems to be a permanent war. Alarming signs, from Egypt, warn us that the Palestinian refugees may develop into more than a justification for cold war against Israel...today, in the Middle East, you get a repeated sinking sensation about the Palestinian refugees: they are only a beginning, not an end. Their function is to hang around and be constantly useful as a goad.

And the author's conclusion:

I had appreciated and admired individual refugees but realized I had felt no blanket empathy for the Palestinian refugees, and finally I knew why...It is hard to sorrow for those who only sorrow over themselves. It is difficult to pity the pitiless. To wring the heart past all doubt, those who cry aloud for justice must be innocent. They cannot have wished for a victorious rewarding war, blame everyone else for their defeat, and remain guiltless....

Arabs gorge on hate, they roll in it, they breathe it. Jews top the hate list, but any foreigners are hateful enough. Arabs also hate each other, separately and, en masse. Their politicians change the direction of their hate as they would change their shirts. Their press is vulgarly base with hate-filled cartoons; their reporting describes whatever hate is now uppermost and convenient. Their radio is a long scream of hate, a call to hate. They teach their children hate in school. They must love the taste of hate; it is their daily bread. And what good has it done them?

There is no future in spending UN money to breed hate. There is no future in nagging or bullying Israel to commit suicide by the admission of a fatal locust swarm of enemies. There is no future in Nasser's solution, the Holy War against Israel; and we had better make this very clear, very quickly.

Palestinian militants punched a new hole in a border wall between Gaza and Egypt on Thursday and hundreds of civilians streamed across, defying efforts by official to plug gaps in the frontier, witnesses said.

Palestinian police stood by as about 50 gunmen from Hamas and the Palestinian Resistance Committees rammed a dump truck into the cement wall, knocking down several large slabs.
...
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, visiting the southern border town of Rafah, said he gave security forces orders to prevent further border infiltrations.

'I have given them instructions to prevent violations whatever they are,' he said.

Meanwhile...

Mahmoud az-Zahar, the most prominent political leader of Hamas, admits openly that al- Qaeda is putting down roots in Gaza. ((Il Corriere della Sera-Italian, 13Sep05), quoted by Daily Alert)

It is interesting to watch the world leaders and press in denial, still regarding Abbas and something other than a joke, pouring money into the PA black hole and pretending that Abbas actually has any influence over Gaza.

And there were some encouraging words from Egypt:

Egyptian Ambassador Mohamed Assem Ibrahim assured Israel that the situation on the border would be addressed and law and order restored. When asked about the weapons-smuggling tunnels, Ibrahim said, "you can be sure that people do not need to smuggle weapons into Gaza, there are enough there already."

No worries, mon!

Pragmatism from Pakistan

An interesting editorial from Karachi.

By Irfan Husain

A year or two ago, I had made the point that recognition of a state is not a badge for good behaviour. Rather, it is an acknowledgement of a reality. The truth is that there are a lot of very unpleasant countries out there, and if we only talked to states we liked, our cost on foreign missions could be reduced substantially. Frankly, if recognition were to be conferred on the basis of civilised behaviour, Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave would be far less crowded.

Currently, our official position is that we would recognise Israel when it vacates the West Bank and a Palestinian state comes into being. But what kept us from normalising ties with the Jewish state between 1948 and 1967, the year in which it occupied Gaza and the West Bank? For nearly 20 years, we referred to Israel as "the illegal Zionist entity," although it came into being with the blessings of the United Nations.

Granted, there were many horrors associated with the birth of Israel, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are still suffering as a direct result. Their plight is largely responsible for the anger and bitterness that have radicalised two generations of Muslims. But the creation of Pakistan was not exactly pain-free: at Partition, nearly 40 per cent of Sindh’s population comprised Hindus.

How many remain today? Today, Hindus from Sindh are scattered around the world, often doing remarkably well, but even their children talk nostalgically of Hyderabad and Karachi. For their sake, I am glad they have not witnessed the sad state these cities have been reduced to.

Population transfers are messy, painful events, and from the comfort of hindsight and physical distance, one can afford to be philosophical about such matters. Certainly millions of Palestinians have every right to feel cheated, abused and oppressed. But time moves on. Individuals can rail against the injustices of the world, but states and governments have to deal with realities as they exist at a given time.

The fact is that for nearly two decades, we refused to recognise Israel because Arab countries had decided not to. And yet Turkey, another non-Arab Muslim country, opened diplomatic ties with the Jewish state soon after its creation because it perceived that it was in its interest to do so. We have denied ourselves the benefits of enlightened self-interest because of our fuzzy notions of the ummah, that nebulous, ill-defined and incoherent Islamic brotherhood that supposedly cuts across man-made state borders.

The reality is very different. Never were a people more divided than Muslims are today. Indeed, more Muslims have been killed by their fellow Muslims than from any other cause. By and large, Arab countries have generally acted in their own interest without caring what the "ummah" might think. Thus, Egypt and Jordan opened diplomatic relations with Israel when it suited them. Other Middle Eastern states trade and talk with Israel all the time. Israeli tourists flock to Morocco and other destinations in the Maghreb.

Even Pakistan’s leaders have been pragmatic when they needed to be. One of the minor revelations in the Hamoodur Rahman Commission report is the fact that during the disastrous 1971 war, when Yahya Khan asked Nixon for military assistance, he was told that the quickest way would be for him to accept Israeli Skyhawk fighter bombers. Desperate, Yahya Khan accepted the offer. However, the war was over far too quickly for the planes to arrive.

During the Afghan war, the CIA bought Soviet arms captured by Israel in its various wars with Arab armies, and transferred them to Pakistan for onward supply to the mujahideen. This was obviously done with Zia’s blessings, and yet he was the grand patron of the religious parties. None of the MMA leaders, today trying to make political capital out of the Kasuri-Shalom meeting in Istanbul, uttered a squeak then.

When the mullahs pretended such rage over President Musharraf’s initiative, they found it difficult to rally many people behind them. Their demonstrations were more pro-forma than passionate. The truth is that for most people, this is a non-issue. Even the poor, illiterate silent majority realise that Israel is a reality that has come to stay, whether Pakistan recognises it or not. Hence their indifference to the religious right’s ineffectual protests.

At the end of the day, we cannot forever subordinate our policies to suit other nations. The fact is that we have no territorial dispute with Israel. Diplomatically and strategically, we ignore its existence to our peril. Foreign policy should be conducted on the basis of cold calculation and pragmatism, and not be motivated by idealism and ideology.

Arab countries should make a gesture towards Israel after its withdrawal from Gaza by talking with their Middle East neighbour to chart a future for the region, Qatar's foreign minister has said.

'Arab countries must take a step towards Israel through an international meeting or a meeting between Arab states and Israel and the co-sponsors of peace, particularly the United States, in an attempt to come up with a clear vision to the period after Gaza,' Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor Al Thani said in a speech on Wednesday at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

Praising the Israeli pullout after 37 years of occupation in Gaza, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim said Arab countries should respond, stressing that 'it is very important that there be a clear vision after this step'.

Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim said the Gaza pullout could bring normalisation of relations with Israel to prominence, but he acknowledged the issue remains 'controversial' in the Arab and the Islamic worlds.

This is interesting. The Pakistani overtures strike me as being just a cynical attempt to gain favor from the US, but this sounds like he really means it.

My guess is that there will be some sort of temporary "peace dividend" from the Gaza withdrawal, but it will disappear pretty quickly as the Arabs retrench and start amplifying their next set of never-ending demands from Israel.

Leonard Nimoy on drugs

This has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of this blog, but I just saw this video and it has got to be proof that Nixon spiked the US water supply with acid around 1969. Shatner's song stylings don't seem quite so embarrassing next to this.