Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, November 06, 2017

Despite Hamas-PA agreement, crossings still closed and medicines still not entering Gaza

While much has been made of the Hamas-PA agreements in Cairo, on the ground things are getting worse for Gazans.

On November 1, the PA formally took over responsibility for the Gaza crossings into Egypt. Days later, nothing has changed. Egypt has not yet opened its border and no one is talking about any practical moves the PA has made to help out. The PA is insisting on a full return to the 2005 crossings agreement, and apparently the de facto Gaza leaders of Hamas have not yet agreed to some of the provisions.

The EUBAM monitors of the Rafah crossing, who have been paid to do nothing for the past ten years, have not yet been asked to resume their mission by any of the parties.

Naturally, the Gisha NGO blames Israel above all:

Two million people in Gaza have been held hostage to political power struggles for far too long, while their most basic needs and rights have been trampled or overlooked. The parties responsible for this ongoing reality include the feuding Palestinian authorities in Gaza and Ramallah, as well as the Egyptian government, but first and foremost Israel, the only party that has maintained extensive control over the Strip for the past 50 years.

(Gisha never said a word against Hamas' role in restricting people's movement until this blog shamed them a few years ago.)

Meanwhile, the severe medicine shortage in Gaza - entirely the fault of the Palestinian Authority who has refused to ship medicines there since spring - keeps getting worse, despite the Cairo agreement.

The Gaza Ministry of Health announced that the southern governorates have completely depleted their stocks of 130 pharmaceutical products, 45% of the list of essential medicines, including 50 types of surgical drugs like anesthetics.

Yet the only party that gets blamed remains Israel,which imposes no restrictions on medicines into Gaza.

"Human rights" NGOs are notably silent, because for them to mention these problems after the supposed agreement between Hamas and the PA would show yet again that their singleminded focus on Israel and willingness to give the Palestinian leaderships a pass has in fact been part of the reason why Gazans suffer. Today.

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Iran again reveals how nervous it is about Israel/Gulf ties

From Iran's Mehr News agency:

Leader’s Advisor, Ali Akbar Velayati, said certain countries of the region were obsessed with normalization of relations with the Zionist regime.

Iranian Leader’s Aide Ali Akbar Velayati made the remarks while addressing the second International Union of Resistance Scholars on Thursday in Beirut.

The official said the opening ceremony of the meeting had been accompanied a message by Leader of Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, who called for continued fight against Israel; “the issue reveals the great importance attached to the Palestinian issue by Iran’s Leader.”

“Gathering of great scholars of the Islamic world in one place indicates that resistance, and not compromise, remains as the only path to freedom of Palestine,” he continued.

The secretary general of the Islamic Awakening Assembly said that some of the countries in the region were unashamedly after normalizing relations with Israel.

He emphasized that, driven by the Iranian Leader’s guidelines, Palestine will always remain the first issue of the Islamic world.

If Arab countries don't consider Israel an enemy, then Iran's desire to lead the Islamic world is a failure. But it has no cards to play to make the Arab nations turn towards Iran, especially given how it is acting in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

Iran is what is driving the Arabs to cooperate with Israel. And Iran cannot figure out how to fix that and maintain its Shiite-supremacist stance.

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11/05 Links: PA TV: In 1917 “There was nothing called a Palestinian people”; Haley: Unless UN rights council reforms, US is out

From Ian:

PMW: “There was nothing called a Palestinian people” in 1917, says Palestinian historian

To mark the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Mahmoud Abbas, the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority published an op-ed in the British Guardian newspaper. After castigating Lord Balfour for promising "a land that was not his to promise" he went on to describe the Palestinian people as "a proud nation with a rich heritage of ancient civilisations, and the cradle of the Abrahamic faiths." [The Guardian, Nov. 1, 2017]

Contradicting Abbas' historical revision, just a day before, PA official TV broadcast an interview with the historian Abd Al-Ghani Salameh, who explained that in 1917 there was no Palestinian people.

During the broadcast, the host of the program asked:
"There always was a historical struggle over Palestine, and many wanted to rule it. How did the aspirations to rule affect the Palestinian existence, the Palestinians' options, and the Palestinians' possibilities of development?"

Salameh responded:
"Before the Balfour Promise (i.e., Declaration) when the Ottoman rule ended (1517-1917), Palestine's political borders as we know them today did not exist, and there was nothing called a Palestinian people with a political identity as we know today, since Palestine's lines of administrative division stretched from east to west and included Jordan and southern Lebanon, and like all peoples of the region [the Palestinians] were liberated from the Turkish rule and immediately moved to colonial rule, without forming a Palestinian people's political identity." [Official PA TV, Nov. 1, 2017]

Collection: The PA demonizes Britain and the Balfour Declaration

Latest Terror Tunnel Discovery Spotlights the ‘Real Proxy of Iran’ in Gaza

When it comes to terrorism emanating from the Gaza Strip, most public attention usually focuses on Hamas, the group that rules the coastal enclave. But Israel’s latest discovery and destruction of a cross-border attack tunnel has brought to light the role of Gaza’s second-largest terror faction, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

The IDF is on high alert for the possibility of revenge attacks from PIJ following Israel’s destruction of the tunnel on October 30. PIJ dug the tunnel, which had crossed into Israeli territory, and the terror group reportedly sustained most of the 15 casualties that resulted from the IDF’s explosion of the tunnel.

The Israeli defense establishment believes that PIJ has around 10,000 armed members, as well as its own rocket arsenal and tunnel network. It has a unique religious affinity with the Iranian Shia regime, and may be receiving messages from Tehran to escalate the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

Hamas, on the other hand, is likely pressuring PIJ to avoid sparking a renewed round of violence at this time, due to Hamas’s desire to avoid endangering its agreement to form a Palestinian unity government with the Fatah faction by December 1.

Dr. Ely Karmon, a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel, noted that from its inception, PIJ “acknowledged the importance of the Iranian revolution and its influence.” He said that PIJ — not Hamas — has been the “real proxy of Iran.”

Yes, that is the way it is.

I suppose that it is not surprising that my cohort, born in the 1960s, stomped on the Western Liberal Tradition.

This is to say that the contemporary Left is shedding its own intellectual heritage - defined by Enlightenment liberalism - and in the process is emerging as authoritarian, increasingly opposed to freedom of speech and thought, and increasingly antisemitic.

{One of my new favorite rebels - University of Toronto professor of evolutionary psychology, Jordan Peterson - would likely agree.}

And when I argue that my friends on the Left are trending against the "Western liberal tradition," I mean just that.

The contemporary Left is turning against the philosophical tradition of Enlightenment liberalism that emphasized rationality and individuality as it emerged out of the European Renaissance and took political forms from Magna Carta to the Constitution of the United States to the Knesset in Israel.

Instead, what we get today from the activist Left is reactionary, irrational, close-minded, violently-inclined, smug, stupid, arrogant, authoritarian, and dismissive of freedom of speech.

The American Left is often misdescribed as "liberal," but that is the last thing that it is.

The western-left, today, is opposed to the liberal tradition.

Among the reasons for growing American Left disinterest in the tradition of Enlightenment liberalism is because those of us who came of age following the Baby Boomers were trained not to believe in "Western values" by our Vietnam War era older peers and siblings.

From Abbie Hoffman to Alan Ginsberg to Noam Chomsky, much of The Movement, as Terry Anderson called it, prodded and poked at the ongoing viability of more traditional and allegedly objective European suppositions on how to apprehend truth.

It is no coincidence, after all, that the post-structuralist turn in western academia paralleled the Counterculture and the rise of the New Left toward the middle-end of the twentieth-century.

Our older siblings and friends who came out of the Vietnam War period, for understandable reasons, passed their cynicism off to us.

The twentieth-century was a bloody nightmare and those of us raised on the Anti-War Movement, the Counterculture, and Civil Rights looked in directions - politically and personally - beyond anything that Eisenhower could have imagined when his boys stormed the beaches.

I do not know about you, but I grew up reading Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson and Joseph Heller.

It was all about rebellion and, in the cases of the latter three, hilarious rebellion.

{Kerouac was never particularly funny.}

The interesting question for me, now, is how it is that my generation - which both voted for Ronald Reagan and read Vonnegut - is now ushering in the current era of corrosive, hard-ass, high-handed, progressive-left identity politics which is shedding liberalism and tends to despise Israel.

From a political-social standpoint, it is a damn good question.

It's not that we are responsible for the never-ending malice and bloodshed in the Arab-Muslim Middle East. Nor are those of us who entered college in the United States in the 1980s responsible for the perpetual poverty of the urban poor, or climate change, or general human stupidity.

We inherited these joys to the world.

We are, however, responsible for the current state of American politics, which is absolutely dismal and, on the progressive-left, increasingly ugly toward diaspora Jewry when we speak out on behalf of our brothers and sisters in Israel.

The United States has not been this culturally torn-up since 1968.

American politics at this moment has people at one another's throats. It is ripping up families and friendships. It is resulting in violence in the streets from Berkeley to Charlottesville.

And, it must be understood, that the current toxic nature of American politics is encouraging the rise of the new white nationalism. I tend to downplay the white nationalist trend because playing it up increases its attractiveness to idiots so inclined.

But the difference between now and then is that by 1968 over 30,000 U.S. servicemen died in Vietnam in a war that seemed to have no end.

Women were still objectively second-class citizens.

And bigotry throughout the country was violent in a way that makes the contemporary South look like a racial shangri-la.

I was born in 1963, the very year that Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous I Have a Dream speech on the Mall in Washington, D.C. and almost exactly one year before Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, during Freedom Summer.

Despite the fact that I am a New York Jew, I can assure you that from a historical perspective race relations in the South are far better today than they were in 1963. It's not even close. An observer from Mars should be able to see that, yet somehow it seems lost on much of the contemporary American Left.

The causes of political tensions in the United States today are not due to war or sexism or racism like they were in 1968.

On every social-political level, the U.S. has made great strides toward social justice from that day to this.

The truth, in fact, is that the U.S. is among the most liberal countries on the planet.

This may sound old-fashioned but we hold out a greater opportunity to any man or woman of any "race, color, or creed" - as they used to say - than almost any place else on Earth.

We should be proud of how far we have come in so short a period of time.

We are well beyond where we were when Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the Mall.

But we do not recognize it.

Instead, we tear down statuary of Robert E. Lee.

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Anti-Balfour rallies in London, Ramallah, Gaza, Ankara pathetic failures

Haaretz reports:

[W]hile all the pro-Palestinian organizations from around England had been talking the [anti-Balfour London] rally up and planning it for months, it was hard to ignore the disappointment of many involved that only a few thousand people attended. In corners of Grosvenor Square, opposite the U.S. Embassy, where the march began, there were piles of signs that had been prepared but remained unused.

The organizers boasted afterward that 15,000 had taken part, but it was clear the actual number was much lower, probably no more than a third of that.

Over the last decade and a half, during Israeli operations in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, tens of thousands had assembled for angry rallies in central London. But then, large numbers of young Muslim protesters – inflamed by social media and television footage of the carnage – had swelled their ranks. An event that took place 100 years ago clearly doesn’t excite the same passion.

This time, the majority of protesters were relatively elderly white Britons, members of far-left groups and veteran protesters.

Many of the marchers were also trying to draw attention to a variety of other causes: the condition of social housing in Britain; nuclear disarmament; workers rights; and the global struggle against capitalism. Balfour and Palestine were mentioned only in the back pages of the array of “revolutionary” newspapers on sale. One of the vendors, who complained he had yet to sell a single copy, was flying the Palestinian and Cuban flags together, and seemed much more knowledgeable about Marxist-Leninist communism than the Palestinian cause.

Passions were so low that even when a group of pro-Israel protesters blocked the march for a few minutes on Oxford Street, the marchers were happy to wait while police asked them to move, and only some shouted “Zionist pigs!” before being hushed by others.

But this was a rousing success compared to the rally in Ramallah on Thursday.

It doesn't appear that more than 100 people attended. and traffic wasn't even stopped.

A similar rally at the British Consulate in east Jerusalem also gathered only a few dozen protesters:

Even in Gaza, where Islamic Jihad and Hamas can put together a rally with tens of thousands of protesters any time they want, only several hundred showed up at an anti-Balfour protest according to AFP.

In Ankara, Turkey, a rally near the British embassy seems to have gathered no more than fifty people.

The anti-Israel movements - and especially the PLO - prepared for the Balfour centenary for an entire year, but while they managed to place some op-eds here and there, they completely failed in mobilizing anyone who wasn't already radicalized to really care.

Only die-hard Israel haters bothered to show up.

Any way you look at it, the Balfour centenary has been a huge bust, and more evidence that the Palestinians are more interested in symbolism than an actual state. And the world is slowly catching on to the fact that it isn't Balfour that has denied Palestinians a state - but Palestinian leaders themselves, from 1937 through 2014.

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Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas wrote his own article about how Britain should "atone" for the Balfour Declaration.

Even though the article is in English, I can only find it in one Gulf newspaper. The British press seems to have ignored Abbas altogether during Balfour week!

But his article still needs to be exposed - because it is a litany of Palestinian lies that must be answered.

Many British people will not know of Sir Arthur James Balfour, an early 20th century foreign secretary. For 12mn Palestinians, his name is all too familiar. On the 100th anniversary of the Balfour declaration, the British government should take the opportunity to make things right.
At his desk in London, on 2 November 1917, Balfour signed a letter promising the land of Palestine to the Zionist Federation, a recently established political movement whose goal was the creation of a Jewish state. He promised a land that was not his to promise, disregarding the political rights of those who already lived there. For the Palestinian people – my people – the events this letter triggered have been as devastating as they have been far-reaching.

No, Balfour said "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object." It wasn't a promise and the declaration was not to give land to the Zionist Federation but to the Jewish people.

At the end Balfour's letter says "I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation." That was the British Zionist Federation, founded in 1899. Balfour didn't promise Palestine to the British ZF - he said that Great Britain would help to facilitate a national home for Jews worldwide.

Abbas doesn't want to say that the letter was intended to create a state for "Jews" because he knows damned well that Jews had been wishing to return to Israel since the first century CE. So he purposefully lies, characterizing Balfour as a promise to a few Zionists

Abbas' lies don't end there. His assertion that Balfour disregarded the "political rights" of Palestinians makes the reader assume that there were a Palestinian people who asserted political rights in 1917. There weren't. A very tiny number of Palestinian Arabs said they wanted an Arab Palestine (in reaction to Zionism, not from any actual desire for a state) but the majority of Palestinian Arabs, if they wanted any national rights at all, wanted it to be part of Syria.

In 1948 Zionist militias forcibly expelled more than 800,000 men, women and children from their homeland, perpetrating horrific massacres and destroying hundreds of villages in the process. I was 13 years old at the time of our expulsion from Safad. The occasion on which Israel celebrates its creation as a state, we Palestinians mark as the darkest day in our history.

Abbas himself described his family's leaving Safed in 1948 - and they never saw a single Jewish soldier. They left on their own. In his words:

"We left on foot at night to the Jordan River... Eventually we settled in Damascus... My father had money, and he spent his money methodically. After a year, when the money ran out, we began to work. "People were motivated to run away... They feared retribution from Zionist terrorist organizations - particularly from the Safed ones. Those of us from Safed especially feared that the Jews harbored old desires to avenge what happened during the 1929 uprising. This was in the memory of our families and parents... They realized the balance of forces was shifting and therefore the whole town was abandoned on the basis of this rationale - saving our lives and our belongings."

This was the experience of most Palestinians who left in 1947-8 - a small number were indeed expelled, a larger number voluntarily left on their own, and most fled out of fear. (Note also how Abbas has inflated the number to "more than 800,000" - another lie, the real number was about 600,000.)

The Balfour declaration is not something that can be forgotten. Today, Palestinians number more than 12mn, and are scattered throughout the world. Some were forced out of their homeland in 1948, with more than 6mn still living in exile to this day. Those who managed to remain in their homes number roughly 1.75mn, and live within a system of institutionalised discrimination in what is now the state of Israel.

A lie on top of the other lies.

Approximately 2.9mn live in the West Bank under a draconian military occupation-turned-colonisation, with 300,000 of that number being the native inhabitants of Jerusalem, who have so far resisted policies to force them out of their city. Some 2mn live in the Gaza Strip, an open prison subjected to regular destruction through the full force of Israel’s military apparatus.

Are 300,000 Jerusalem Arabs in danger of being forced out of the city? Of course not.

Is Gaza an open prison? Of course not.

Has Israel ever used its full force on Gaza? Of course not.

Every sentence is a lie that cannot be supported.

The Balfour declaration is not something to be celebrated – certainly not while one of the peoples affected continues to suffer such injustice. The creation of a homeland for one people resulted in the dispossession and continuing persecution of another – now a deep imbalance between occupier and occupied. The balance must be redressed, and Britain bears a great deal of responsibility in leading the way. Celebrations must wait for the day when everyone in this land has freedom, dignity and equality.

Abbas himself has rejected peace proposals - as the Palestine Papers and Haaretz have shown. Any of these would have given his people a state. He, and his blood-soaked predecessor Arafat, are the ones responsible for their not having reached that alleged goal, not Great Britain.

Despite the horrors we have endured in the past century, the Palestinian people have remained steadfast. We are a proud nation with a rich heritage of ancient civilisations, and the cradle of the Abrahamic faiths. Over the years we have adapted to the realities around us – the chain of events triggered in 1917 – and made deeply painful compromises for the sake of peace, beginning with the decision to accept a state on only 22% of our historical homeland while recognising the state of Israel, without any reciprocation thus far.

Try to find any record of a specifically Palestinian Arab heritage or civilization in any newspaper or book written before 1950. I've tried. There isn't any.

And there is a contradiction within this paragraph itself. If there was an ancient Palestinian people, then they lived in areas that were considered Palestine before Balfour and San Remo. Which means, they included Transjordan. But Abbas here says that the West Bank and Gaza are 22% of his "historic homeland" - yet they only include areas of British Mandate Palestine, not "Eastern Palestine".

Why does Mahmoud Abbas, so proud of Palestinian heritage, accept a colonialist definition of Palestine that excludes much of what was considered Palestine before 1917?

The answer is he same as to the question of why did the PLO in 1964 explicitly exclude the West Bank and Gaza from areas it claimed as its land. Because Palestinian nationalism was never about creating a state - it was about destroying one. And when Jordan and Egypt controlled parts of British Mandate Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas never claimed those areas as his own.

Only the land that Jews control are the ones that must be "liberated." Arabs controlling part of Palestine was fine.

Which means that Palestinianism is not a national liberation movement. It is an antisemitic movement.

But that isn't politically correct.

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Unbelievable antisemitism in the British Labour Party, illustrated

From The Daily Mail: (I found the corresponding illustrations myself, they were not in the article)

The scale of anti-semitism within Labour has prompted training sessions for 1,200 party members in a drive to stamp out the vile online abuse.

Labour’s Jewish wing is holding the events that use a slide show of hate-filled messages posted on the internet by the party’s own activists.

The Daily Mail has chosen to reproduce the comments despite their shocking content in order to highlight the enormity of the problem.

The abuse includes one Labour member describing Jews as a ‘corrupt master race’ controlling sex-trafficking, pornography and wars worldwide.

Another wrote: ‘Every f****** Jew that died in the Holocaust was a blessing.’

One councillor suggested there was a worldwide Jewish conspiracy and that Israel wanted to commit atrocities across the whole world.

Last night MP John Cryer, who is chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, said that the tweets were ‘stomach-churning’ and ‘awful’.

‘I have no idea why people who hold these views would want to be a member of the Labour Party,’ he said.
‘The Labour Party has been at the forefront of confronting Nazism right from the 1930s – so what possesses these people to become members I don’t understand. I have seen tweets like this at our disciplinary body and what I know is these people are quickly suspended and expelled.’

The Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) held a training session at September’s Labour conference – itself blighted by accusations of anti-semitism – in a doomed attempt to nip the problem in the bud. Some 1,200 members have attended the official Labour Party sessions, which are carried out by the JLM, in the past 14 months.

Slides from the event obtained by the Mail – which were not leaked by the JLM – show party members have had to be told anti-semitism means ‘making mendacious, dehumanising, demonising or stereotypical allegations against Jews as such or the power of Jews as a collective’.

Members were told this includes commenting on the ‘myth of a world Jewish conspiracy’, ‘Jews controlling the media’ or ‘holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel’.

They were shown examples of anti-semitic abuse hurled at JLM chairman Luciana Berger on Twitter, and JLM member Rhea Wolfson.

The event said that among elected Labour representatives ‘denial of anti-semitism is particularly common’, as was the idea that ‘Jewish people are wealthy or interested in wealth or finance’.

A message was shared from the online Labour Party Forum, showing a man with a large nose reading the BBC Six O’Clock News alongside the caption: ‘B***** BBC is Zionist propaganda puppet show.’

Another message from an unknown Labour councillor contained ‘echoes of the blood libel’, the JLM events are told.

The tweet showed an Israeli flag dripping with blood along with the words: ‘The genocidal murderers of innocent women and children: Moses must be proud of you.’ The message was headlined: ‘Israel is evil, long live Palestine.’

A Scottish Labour member shared a Holocaust denial cartoon, showing a Jewish stereotype withdrawing cash from a Holocaust memorial.

A councillor shared a picture saying: ‘The modern state of Israel was created by the Rothschilds, not God – and what they are doing to the Palestinian people now is exactly what they intend for the whole world.’

Alongside a picture of a child in a hospital bed, it said: ‘Today it’s a Palestinian child: soon it will be your child.’

A Labour forum discussed the ‘master race’ and included a picture of nine large-nosed people alleged to be in control of Wall Street, ‘internet spying’, Hollywood and TV, the law courts, the cancer industry, pornography, ‘wars for Israel’, sex-trafficking and ‘fake opposition’.

One member wrote: ‘I see the corrupt “master race” side-stepped into this graphic,’ to which another replied: ‘Lol [laugh out loud] be careful you might get accused of being anti-semitic.’

This led to a discussion about ‘paid disinfo agents’ and Blairites ‘running to the MSM [mainstream media]’ with mention of the Zionism ‘problem’. ‘Just look at who owns what,’ one said.

And another Labour member simply tweeted: ‘Every f****** Jew that died in the Holocaust was a blessing. Imagine how bad the world would be now if 6 million more of them had survived?’ Accompanying notes to the slides make the point that Labour members often end up sharing comments from the far-Right because they agree with their comments on Israel.

‘Labour people often end up tweeting proper Nazis either by ignorance or because they fall for their posts on Israel/Palestine. Holocaust denial and revisionism now also being seen on the Left,’ it said.

The notes also said that ‘denial of anti-semitism is known as the Livingstone formulation’ in a reference to comments by former London mayor Ken Livingstone in which he said that anyone critical of Israel was accused of anti-semitism.

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11/04 Links: Phillips: Britain's unfinished Balfour business; Lebanon’s PM resigns, slams Iran and Hezbollah

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Britain's unfinished Balfour business

There is indeed unfinished business arising from the Balfour declaration.

Unfinished is Britain’s pledge to create the Jewish homeland which it subverted and betrayed when it tore up the UK’s legally binding Mandate obligation to settle the Jews throughout Palestine, instead denying desperate Jews entry from Nazi Europe while turning a blind eye to illegal Arab immigration in order to block the Jewish homeland that Britain was legally bound to create.

Unfinished is the acknowledgement that Britain did indeed create a separate state for the Palestinian Arabs in 1921, when it hived off more than three quarters of Palestine to become Transjordan, now Jordan – the original two-state solution and national home for the Palestinians which everyone now ignores.

Unfinished is the Arabs never having been held to account for their unceasing attempts to destroy the State of Israel through war, terrorism or the “strategy of stages” – through which the Palestine state to which the FCO is so deeply committed is intended to serve as the geographical platform for Israel’s destruction.

Unfinished is the Palestinian Arabs’ incitement and glorification of terrorism and the indoctrination of their people into Nazi-style antisemitism and the historical lies which seek to write the Jewish people out of its own history.

If Sir Simon McDonald wishes finally to realise the “lasting peace” that he said would fulfil the whole of the Balfour Declaration, this is the real unfinished business Britain must no longer ignore.

Simon Schama at Balfour lecture: ‘The life of Israel is Hitler’s failure’

The historian Professor Simon Schama concluded a bravura Balfour Centenary Lecture on Wednesday night with an emotional belief that some of the hopes and fears of the makers of the Balfour Declaration were being realised in Israel, “a living, breathing, debating, thriving, rejoicing democracy.”

Israel’s six million Jews, Professor Schama said, “are the ultimate retort to the number that Adolf Hitler exterminated. The life of Israel is Hitler’s failure”.

And he took pleasure in celebrating the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, because, he said, “the dark pages of Jewish history have been lit by such impossibilities.”

His lecture, which took place in front of a 300-strong audience at the Royal Society in London, was live-streamed to sell-out events across the UK including at JW3 in London, and venues in Bournemouth, Leeds, Glasgow, Belfast, Brighton and Barnet. The Royal Society was chosen due to its reputation as the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.

In his hour-long address Professor Schama sought to put Balfour in the context of what was happening globally — and also locally, by starting his remarks with warm memories of his father’s experience of dancing in the streets of Whitechapel as the Balfour Declaration was made public to the Jewish community. At the beginning of December 1917, Arthur Schama stood outside the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden as the audience rose to applaud the singing of Hatikvah.

Simon Schama’s Balfour Centenary Lecture

Before Balfour: The Labour Party’s War Aims memorandum

Ronnie Fraser tells the little-known story of the British Labour Party’s support for Zionism. Three months before the Balfour Declaration, its War Aims Memorandum made clear that ‘The British Labour Movement expresses the opinion that Palestine should be set free from the harsh and oppressive government of the Turk, in order that the country may form a Free State, under international guarantee, to which such of the Jewish People as desired to do so may return, and may work out their salvation’.

Contrary to popular belief, the Labour Party’s support for Zionism did not originate with the Balfour Declaration but with the Party’s own War Aims memorandum which was published in August 1917, three months before Balfour’s letter. The five thousand word memorandum set out a Socialist and Labour vision for the future, once peace had been achieved. It was divided into six sections; making the world safe for democracy, territorial questions, economic relations, the problems of peace, the restoration of the devastated areas and the reparation of wrongdoing, and a proposal to hold an international conference of labour and socialist organisations. Foremost in the Labour party’s plans was the establishment of the League of Nations. The section on territorial questions proposed solutions for Belgium, Alsace Lorraine, the Balkans, Italy, Poland and the Baltic provinces, the Jews and Palestine, and addressed the problem of the Turkish Empire, Austria-Hungary and the colonies and dependencies. Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann credited the Jewish socialist group, Poale Zion for the inclusion of Jewish rights in the memorandum.

Poale Zion (the Workers of Zion) was a Marxist–Zionist movement which was founded in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century. The ideology of Poale Zion was a blend of socialism and Zionism aimed at persuading Jewish workers to support Palestine as a Jewish homeland as well as campaigning for Jewish equality in all countries. Poale Zion was active in Britain from 1905 onwards and established branches in London, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool. Throughout the First World War, the organisation, under the leadership of J. Pomeranz and Morris Meyer, the editor of the Jewish Times, campaigned for the granting of political and civil rights for the Jewish people in all countries where they were denied. Their efforts were rewarded when both the 1915 and 1916 Congresses of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) adopted resolutions about the civil and political rights of Jews.

In August 1917, the Labour Party published its draft ‘War Aims Memorandum’ containing the following paragraph on the Jews and Palestine:
The British Labour Movement demands for the Jews in all countries the same elementary rights of tolerance, freedom of residence and trade, and equal citizenship that ought to be extended to all the inhabitants of every nation. It furthermore expresses the opinion that Palestine should be set free from the harsh and oppressive government of the Turk, in order that the country may form a Free State, under international guarantee, to which such of the Jewish People as desired to do so may return, and may work out their salvation free from interference by those of alien race or religion.

Petra Marquardt-Bigman: David Hirsh: Fighting anti-Semitism on the left from the left

A recently published book on “Contemporary Left Antisemitism” is an arguably long overdue study of “antisemitism amongst people who believe that they strongly oppose antisemitism.” That’s how the author David Hirsh, a sociologist at London’s Goldsmiths University, puts it in his Introduction, acknowledging that he is examining “a phenomenon whose very existence is angrily contested.” One reason Hirsh’s book is special is that he – a man of the left for all his life, and a veteran opponent of anti-Semitism – has experienced up close and personal just how angry reactions can get when a leftist insists on calling out left-wing anti-Semitism. Yet Hirsh’s analysis remains remarkably dispassionate, and the book has drawn well-deserved praise from leading intellectuals and scholars.

Israelis interested in contemporary anti-Semitism will have a chance to meet David Hirsh at a series of events in Haifa, Jerusalem, Netanya and Tel Aviv between November 5-8. On the evening of November 8, The Times of Israel will host Hirsh for a screening of the documentary “Whitewashed” that examines the efforts to ignore and downplay anti-Semitism in the British Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. (Ticket info for this event at the end of this post.)

While this documentary and much of the book focuses on anti-Semitism propagated by the British left, it is striking to see how easily Hirsh’s analysis can be applied to examples elsewhere.

Consider this observation that Hirsh offers at the very beginning of his book:
“If the Palestinians stand, in the antizionist imagination, as symbolic of all the victims of ‘the west’ or ‘imperialism’, then Israel is thrust into the centre of the world as being symbolic of oppression everywhere. Like antisemitism, antizionism imagines Jews as being central to all that is bad in the world.”

11/03 Links Pt2: Karsh: Turks, Arabs Welcomed the Balfour Declaration; Ayalon: The History of the Palestinian People

From Ian:

Efraim Karsh: Turks, Arabs Welcomed the Balfour Declaration

"100 years have passed since the notorious Balfour Declaration, by which Britain gave, without any right, authority or consent from anyone, the land of Palestine to another people. This paved the road for the Nakba of Palestinian people and their dispossession and displacement from their land."

So Mahmoud Abbas claimed at last year's annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly in what constitutes the standard Palestinian indictment of the November 1917 British government's pledge to facilitate "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" providing that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."

It is an emotionally gripping claim, but it is also the inverse of truth. For one thing, Britain did consult its main war allies, notably U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, before issuing the declaration, which was quickly endorsed by the contemporary international community, including the leaders of the nascent pan-Arab movement. Furthermore, the declaration was used as a model by the Ottoman Empire for its own official communiqué.

Conclusion

Mahmoud Abbas's rejection of the Jewish right to national self-determination, which was acknowledged a hundred years ago by the international community, including the world's foremost Muslim power, leaders of the pan-Arab movement, and ordinary Palestinian Arabs, affords a sad testament to the unchanging nature of the Palestinian leadership's recalcitrance.

It was Hajj Amin Husseini's predication of Palestinian national identity on hatred of the "other" rather than on a distinct shared legacy that "paved the road for the Nakba of Palestinian people and their dispossession and displacement from their land." And it was Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas's persistence in this zero-sum approach, despite their feigned moderation in the Oslo peace charade, which ensured the perpetuation of Palestinian dispersal and statelessness to date. It is only by shedding their century-long revanchist dreams and opting for peace and reconciliation with their Israeli neighbors that Palestinian leaders can end their people's suffering. And what can be a better starting point for this sea change than endorsement of the Balfour Declaration rather than its atavistic denigration? (h/t Elder of Lobby)

PMW: PA historian: In 1917 “there was nothing called a Palestinian people”

To mark the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority published an op-ed in the British Guardian newspaper. After castigating Lord Balfour for promising "a land that was not his to promise" he went on to describe the Palestinian people as "a proud nation with a rich heritage of ancient civilisations, and the cradle of the Abrahamic faiths."

Contradicting Abbas' historical revision, just a day before, PA official TV broadcast an interview with the historian Abd Al-Ghani Salameh, who explained that in 1917 there was no Palestinian people.

During the broadcast, the host of the program asked:

"There always was a historical struggle over Palestine, and many wanted to rule it. How did the aspirations to rule affect the Palestinian existence, the Palestinians' options, and the Palestinians' possibilities of development?"

Salameh responded:
"Before the Balfour Promise (i.e., Declaration) when the Ottoman rule ended, Palestine's political borders as we know them today did not exist, and there was nothing called a Palestinian people with a political identity as we know today, since Palestine's lines of administrative division stretched from east to west and included Jordan and southern Lebanon, and like all peoples of the region [the Palestinians] were liberated from the Turkish rule and immediately moved to colonial rule, without forming a Palestinian people's political identity. However, Palestine as a geographic area and the people dwelling within it enjoyed prosperity." [Official PA TV, Nov. 1, 2017]

Danny Ayalon: The History of the Palestinian People

Today we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. Why did Balfour only think to offer a nation-state to the Jewish people and not to the Palestinians?

11/03 Links Pt1: Israel will help Syrian Druze village fend off jihadists; Islamic Scholars Gather to Discuss Destroying Israel

From Ian:

Evelyn Gordon: Will Palestinian Reconciliation Reduce Hamas’ Cash Flow?

Of course, it will still have the money it gets from Iran, estimated at $60 million to $70 million this year, and that money will continue going straight to its military wing. But that’s still far below what it was spending on its military in 2014 when it was getting less money from a cash-strapped Tehran but had a steady stream of Gazan tax revenue to play with.

Hamas agreed to dismantle the checkpoints because both PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Egypt refused to accept a return to the status quo ante, demanding instead that the PA be given full control of Gaza. And they backed this demand with heavy financial pressure—the PA by ceasing its funding for Gaza, and Egypt by shuttering its border crossing for months on end.

The question is whether they have a plan for continuing to enforce this demand over the long term. After all, once Hamas is no longer responsible for Gaza’s civilian needs, it will no longer be vulnerable to that kind of financial pressure. And since the reconciliation didn’t require Hamas to disarm, it will continue to be the strongest military power in Gaza even after PA forces return to the borders. Thus, it’s not clear how anyone could stop it from using its guns to resume extorting taxes once it has gotten what it wants out of the deal, which is to stop being responsible for civilian affairs.

This matters because Hamas has shown no signs of losing its desire to fight Israel. Just last month, its new leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, declared, “The discussion is no longer about recognizing Israel but about wiping Israel out.” What has stopped it for the last three years hasn’t been lack of desire, but lack of capacity: Its arsenal of rockets and cross-border attack tunnels was depleted in the last war, in 2014, and another war won’t be practical until that arsenal is rebuilt. Thus, the more money Hamas has to spend on its military build-up, the sooner it will reach the point where it feels it can afford to start another war.

Hence if the PA, Egypt, and the international community want to avoid such a war, they must start thinking now about how to keep Hamas away from Gazan revenues if and when the reconciliation deal is fully implemented. For if Hamas is allowed to resume milking Gaza for cash to pour into its military wing, the next Gaza war will certainly be just a matter of time.

Palestinians: Meet Abbas's New Partners

Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders are strongly opposed to Mahmoud Abbas's political agenda and even see him as a collaborator with Israel.

Leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad announced at a rally on November 2 that they are determined to stick to their weapons "until the liberation of all of Palestine" -- or, in other words, until the total destruction of Israel and the elimination of Jews.

When Zahar says that only a "crazy person" thinks he can disarm Hamas and other armed groups in the Gaza Strip, he is clearly referring to Abbas. Zahar's statement should be seen as a direct threat to Abbas.

Abbas continues to tell the world that he is working to achieve a peaceful settlement with Israel. But will he be able to continue saying such things after he joins forces with his new partners in Hamas and Islamic Jihad? The answer is simple and clear: No.

Alan Baker: What goes for UNESCO goes also for the UN

The annual Israel-bashing parade of senseless resolutions undermines any credibility of the organization, and turns it into a willing tool for cynical manipulation and abuse by gangs of states plying their particular political interests – mostly against Israel.

Perhaps the straw that is breaking the camel’s back is an amazing, recent joint UN-Palestinian project for the years 2018-2022, the title of which conceals its true intentions: “UN Development Assistant Framework – State of Palestine.”

The UN has committed to channel no less than $1.3 billion into various UN agency signatories to the framework, in order to assist the Palestinian leadership in advancing its diplomatic warfare against Israel.

The project aims to finance “training, capacity-building and technical advice” with a view to assisting “Palestinian victims” to exploit international accountability mechanisms and to prosecute “Israeli violations of international law.”

In other words, the entire UN human-rights assistance machinery has now been formally and officially recruited and financed to streamline the harassment and persecution of Israel.

The question is when whether there are any serious and responsible states that, out of genuine concern for the organization, would be willing and prepared to demonstrate their frustration and disgust. This would entail taking the appropriate action of suspending their membership, their annual payments and substantive involvement until the organization corrects itself and returns to the original purposes and principles for which it was created.

Logic would assume that the US, Israel and the major European powers should now take decisive action to halt this deterioration.

First and foremost, they should each dock $1.3b. from their membership fees as a demonstration of their disgust at the UN’s official policy of Israel-bashing. What is good for UNESCO should be all the more relevant to the UN itself.

An Arabic-French news site in Morocco discusses the recent fashion trend of wearing purposefully ripped jeans, which apparently has hit the Arab world as well.

The author, Mohammed Sharkey, first goes through the history of jeans altogether, pointing out that they were designed and marketed originally by Jews Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis.

Sharkey goes on to describe how horrible the fashion trend is,where sometimes the rips make underwear visible. "There is no justification for this appearance in the land of Islam," he says.

And who is behind this new trend? Obviously, just as Jews invented jeans, it was Jews who are pushing this immoral fashion!

"Undoubtedly Jews were the first to create this jeans fashion in order to pour gasoline on the flames of moral decay generated by the depravity and pornography and homosexuality..." he writes.

Undoubtedly!

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Frightened Waqf confiscates a map of the Second Temple from Christian tour guide

On Thursday morning, the Muslim Waqf guards on the Temple Mount seized a map that was being used by am American Christian tour guide to explain where the Second Temple was on the Mount.

Palestinian media reports that the American was "explaining to some of the intruders of the mosque about the building of the alleged 'temple' there.".

A spokesman for the public relations and information department of the Waqf, Firas al-Debbs said that "one of the American guides was carrying a map in his hand to explain to a number of those intruders about the establishment of the 'temple' in the place of Al Aqsa, but the guards confiscated the map from him."

The Waqf is actually proud of this. Yet the seizure itself shows how well they know the truth that they are the ones who usurped a Jewish holy site.

Because if they were confident in their narrative, they wouldn't be threatened by a piece of paper.

It is a shame that the tour guide didn't go to the media. It was a golden opportunity to highlight the Muslim leaders' fright of the truth, and it would have put the Waqf on the defensive -- they would have to double down on their reasons that a map makes them go crazy, knowing that the western world would ridicule them, which would shame them.

Shame is the best weapon the West has to force the Waqf to treat visitors with basic respect. Otherwise they will continue to act like toddlers who don't want to hear the truth..

It is worth repeating that Muslims all freely admitted that the First and Second Temples were on the Temple Mount before 1967. Which is one more reason why people should be especially skeptical when they make claims today - lying in the service of the Umma is not only tolerated but expected.

This is a translation of a 15th century work by a Muslim scholar all about the Jewish Temples.

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A tweet from Forward editor Batya Ungar-Sargon:

The brilliant @Issaamro says: Israel: Take Note — The NYPD Didn’t Kill Manhattan Terrorist https://t.co/MWvZ5pjA5j via @jdforward
— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) November 2, 2017

Let's bask in Issa Amro's "brilliance:"

[F]or me, a Palestinian watching from occupied Hebron, it felt almost impossible to comprehend. The [New York] terrorist wasn’t killed on the spot? They managed to apprehend him alive?

It was surprising because it feels so antithetical to Israel’s approach.

That's Amro's entire point. The rest of the article is about two cases where Israeli police fired on what appeared to be Palestinians who did not post an imminent threat and one where Amro was certain that they would have shot him dead had he not spoken Hebrew to them saying he wasn't armed.

Amro is writing in the Forward that Israel's policy is to shoot first even when it is not necessary, and that the NYPD cop who shot the truck terrorist is amazing for not continuing to shoot.

Nash shot at the terrorist 9 times. He missed 8 times. The shot that stopped him hit him in the abdomen, and the terrorist was in critical condition when brought to the hospital..

Police throughout the world are taught where to aim to shoot a suspect when warranted. they are not taught to aim at his or her knees or the arm, or to shoot the weapon out of their hand. They are always taught to aim at the midsection. That is the "center of mass" and the most likely to take the suspect down. The life of the suspect is the last thing they are taught to think about when they judge that it is a life-threatening situation.

Gunshots to the midsection are very often fatal. This was luck.

But...what about Israeli police? Don't they shoot dozens of times to make sure that the terrorist suspect is dead? Don't they have disregard for human life and choose to execute anyone they choose?

No.

The female terrorist who stabbed someone outside a hospital in July 2016 wasn't killed. The terrorist who went on a stabbing spree in Tel Aviv earlier this year wasn't killed. The terrorist who rammed his car into a Tel Aviv nightclub and started stabbing people wasn't killed. Even the two terrorist cousins who shot and murdered four people at a coffeehouse last year were not killed.

Yes, there may have been some Israeli police who went beyond their rules of engagement - just like officers all around the world. Amro is claiming that this is the rule, not the exception. Without a shred of evidence.

But there is another difference between Israel and New York: In Israel, the chances that the terrorist also has an explosive belt under his clothes is a major consideration. Knowing that someone can possibly blow up the entire area is part of the calculus that Israeli police need to routinely make and that New York police, thankfully, do not have to. (Yet.)

In Israel, a person who approaches the suspect who is apparently down to kick his weapons away from him, as a civilian did in New York, is actually placing himself and others in danger. If he hadn't done that, and the terrorist had made a move to shoot his (toy) gun, there is no doubt Nash would have shot the terrorist again.

Just like in Israel.

So Amro is wrong about how police treat suspects who have deadly weapons. He is wrong about how Israeli police act. He is wrong about the differences between Israeli police and Ryan Nash. In fact, he is wrong in essentially everything he wrote.

But Batya Ungar-Sargon, instead of acting like an editor should act and check out her writer's words with a critical eye, swoons over Amro's "brilliance." She betrayed her own job as an editor and instead became a cheerleader for a story that has literally no basis for its thesis.

If an article is written for the Forward that adhere's to the editor's anti-Israel bias, there is no reason to fact check.

This is The Forward today.

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Six things you need to know about the Balfour Declaration (Forest Rain and Michal Behagen)

Six things you need to know about the Balfour Declaration
by Forest Rain Marcia & Michal Behagen

The Balfour Declaration was a milestone in the history of the Jewish people.

Today, those who object to the presence of Jewish people in the Land of Israel are attempting to rewrite history, creating “alternative facts,” claiming that this declaration gave the Jewish people Israel, at the expense of the “Palestinians.” There are demonstrations outside embassies and even a social media campaign with the hashtag #MakeItRight, implying that the Balfour Declaration was wrong and unjust. This narrative is getting traction in the conventional media and being legitimized by repetition.

In this atmosphere it is important to know a few things. Facts, not feelings. Historical, documented truth, not propaganda.

Here are the 6 things you need to know about the Balfour Declaration:

1. What is the Balfour Declaration?

Named after the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, the Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government during World War I announcing support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine (which at the time was part of the Ottoman empire).

The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2 November 1917 which Balfour sent to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community. He requested Lord Rothschild transmit its message to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland.

The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9 November 1917:

2. The right to settle in the Land of Israel

It is not the Balfour Declaration that granted Jews the right to settle in the Land of Israel. The document that gave us that right is the Bible. The Koran corroborates this, making Muslim objectors to our historical right not only ignorant but also blasphemers against their own religion.

3. 3. The impetus to immigrate to Israel
The Balfour Declaration did not cause Jews to immigrate to Israel. Would that it had!
There was a continuous (albeit small) Jewish presence in the Land of Israel from the time of the destruction of the second Jewish Temple. What is considered the first wave of immigration of Jews returning to Israel began in 1882 and still most of the world’s Jewish population remained in exile. Following the Balfour Declaration, the Land of Israel waited for the Nation of Israel who did not believe the cries of the leaders of the Zionist movement. Unlike the few who understood (Herzl, Jabotinsky, Uri Zvi Greenberg and others), they did not comprehend the gravity of their situation in exile and so they stayed there - until the furnaces.
(After the furnaces, it was the British themselves who prevented Jews from immigrating to Israel, in complete contradiction to their previous commitment and humanitarian and moral duty.

4. 4. League of Nations Mandate
The Balfour Declaration is the basis for the League of Nations decision regarding the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in our homeland.
This was one of the functions of the British Mandate (on both banks of the Jordan).

5. 5. International Law
The League of Nations decision is the only valid document in what is called "International Law" regarding the right of any people to this land.

6. 6. When does the Balfour Declaration matter?
The Balfour Declaration is important whenever someone lies, talking about "illegal settlements," "violations of international law," or "occupation".
THAT is the moment when we must raise the Balfour Declaration and say:
We are not here by virtue of international law but by virtue of historical truth.
We are ALSO here in accordance with international law - since the League of Nations adopted the Balfour Declaration - we are here by right. International law did not give us the right to this land, it recognized and reaffirmed our historical right to the land.

For that, Balfour, we thank you.

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