Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, November 06, 2017

Israel cannot win the BDS blame game (Divest This!)

Over the years, I’ve talked about some of the psychological factors that might explain the behavior the of BDS advocates. These include a ruthlessness that drives them to drag third-parties into their battles, regardless of the cost to others, and fantasy politics which leads them to engage in activities for the sole purpose of making themselves feel more important than they are.

Some of these factors are actually detrimental to the BDS cause (witness the nearly universal revulsion that greets their fantasy-driven public temper tantrums). But some of them are a major source of the boycotter’s power, especially when faced with opponents who labor under the illusion that BDS is a genuine, “normal” political project.

For example, the BDSers ability to ignore any facts or arguments that do not suit their purpose or fit their world view means they can never actually lose an argument since, in reality, they refuse to engage in one (even if they pretend their diatribes to be dialog). But there is another psychological element that fuels not just BDS but the entire anti-Israel project that relates to the dynamics of blame.

This is something most of us can relate to since we all are involved in blame dynamics (healthy and unhealthy) at various points in our lives. To take a simple example, imagine a couple that drives to the beach where one person places the car keys on a beach blanket. As the day winds to a close, the other person folds and packs up the same beach blanket, but does not notice the keys which tumble into the sand and get lost.

Under such circumstances, the couple could see this chain of events as an unlucky accident, a pair of reasonable actions that, when linked together, led to negative consequences neither party could have foreseen. But since it was a pair of individual actions that led to the loss, each person could choose to blame the other for one of the two steps that led to the problem (leaving the keys on the blanket rather than in a bag or pocket vs. not noticing them when packing up), claiming - in effect - that just one person bore primary responsibility for the problem they both face.

On some occasions, the circumstances lend themselves to assigning primary responsibility to one person or another. But blame is rarely driven by such analytical calculations. Instead, the first person to accuse the other tends to gain the initiative, putting the blamed person on the defensive (often in an attempt to absolve the blamer of responsibility). And in this dynamic, someone willing to accept some responsibility tends to be at a disadvantage vs. someone willing to accept none.

Over time, the roles of blamer and blamee can become engrained in personal relationships, causing the person who is “faster on the draw” to automatically zero in on something the other person did that is blameworthy, with the other person taking a default position of either accepting responsibility or, eventually, avoiding confrontational situations that may be driven by an uncomfortable blame dynamic.

If this dynamic is common among individuals where the stakes are fairly low, it is a cornerstone of international politics where the nation assigned blame can face serious consequences (from being targeted for economic punishment, to justifying war waged against it). Which is why nations routinely tap the aforementioned blame dynamic, making sure to point an accusing finger outwards immediately and never acknowledging responsibility for anything (regardless of their actual culpability). And within the Arab-Israeli conflict, this politics of blame has reached near pathological levels.

This is why every negative action that can be assigned to Israel (real or imaginary) is the subject of not just accusation by this or that Arab country, but must become top priority for every international organization – combining the blame dynamic with Israel’s foes willingness to corrupt any institution in order to achieve their own ends.

This is also why the Arab states and the Palestinians will never accept responsibility under any circumstances for anything they are unquestionably responsible for (from supporting every one of the 20^th century’s totalitarian movements, to rejecting peace offers over and over again, to resorting to violence and triggering wars in which their own people suffer the consequences).

This dynamic plays itself out amongst the Palestinians “friends” in the BDS movement who, if cornered, will manage a choke out a cough of concern regarding Hamas rocket fire into Israeli schoolyards. But once Israel returns fire, they rise together as a single great pointing finger and shouting voice screaming “J’accuse” at Israel (and its supporters), insisting that the boycotters alone represent the voice of human rights and justice (regardless of how little they have to say on either subject when Israel is not the target of their abuse).

In the case of the BDSers, the blame dynamic fits perfectly with their fantasy of being the only voices of courage and virtue in a Manichean world where evil and all-powerful opponents endlessly conspire against them.

Getting back to the original dynamic described in the earlier lost-keys story, the endless repetition of one party’s readiness to blame and unwillingness to accept responsibility creates a situation whereby the party trying to avoid the blame game who is willing to accept some responsibility is punished for not immediately and unquestionably accepting all of it.

This is the unhealthy dynamic Israel faces vis-à-vis its finger-pointing, responsibility-avoiding foes, and it is not entirely clear how she can get out of it short of becoming as ruthless, cynical and insensitive as her accusers.

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UK diplomat admits "second half of Balfour" doesn't exist - but it SHOULD

Last month the UK mission at the US tweeted a bizarre statement that there was a second half to Balfour that has never been fulfilled.

As noted then, this statement makes no sense. There were three clauses to the Balfour Declaration:

1. His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people
2. nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine
3. or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

The tweet implied that a Palestinian state would be the fulfillment of the "second half" of Balfour, even though it only mentioned civil and religious rights - both of which are safeguarded under Israeli law.

Sir Simon McDonald, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, spoke at a Balfour centenary event last week at the Portcullis House, Westminster where he expanded on this "second half of Balfour" - and his assertions are literally a fantasy.

He said, “If written after the Second World War, when the international community developed a rules-based international architecture, the Declaration would have included the political rights of self-determination of these communities too.”

McDonald is saying that the "other half of Balfour" is a clause that was never written - but would have been, supposedly, had Balfour written them in 1947.

Official British policy is that Israel is obligated to create a Palestinian state dedicated to its destruction because the British Government has given itself the ability to insist on using alternative history fiction as a diplomatic instrument.

This is bizarre on so many levels that one doesn't know where to begin. And to add insult to injury, McDonald spoke "as a historian."

McDonald also engages in his own bit of revisionist history when he describes the Peel Commission as an attempt to fulfill this fictional part of Balfour: "A two-state solution was first proposed by the Peel Commission in 1937 in an attempt to make a reality of both elements of the Balfour Declaration," he asserted.

But the Peel Commission report does not pretend to be a fulfillment of Balfour. On the contrary, it attempts to abrogate Balfour. First it says that Balfour's assumptions (included in the Mandate) on how things would play out were wrong:

The association of the policy of the Balfour Declaration with the Mandate System implied the belief that Arab hostility to the former would presently be overcome, owing to the economic advantages which Jewish immigration was expected to bring to Palestine as a whole.

The entire idea of partition is antithetical to Balfour who anticipated the Jewish National Home on all of Palestine. Peel attempted to change the rules.

Later on, in discussing holy places as a separate territory, Peel explicitly abrogates Balfour:

Guarantees as to the rights of the Holy Places and free access thereto (as provided in Article 13 of the existing Mandate), as to transit across the mandated area, and as to non-discrimination in fiscal, economic and other matters should be maintained in accordance with the principles of the Mandate System. But the policy of the Balfour Declaration would not apply; and no question would arise of balancing Arab against Jewish claims or vice versa. All the inhabitants of the territory would stand on an equal footing. The only official language" would be that of the Mandatory Administration. Good and just government without regard for sectional interests would be its basic principle.

Balfour implies the the Jewish national home would administer the holy places and allow full access (as Israel does today.) Peel wrests that right away.

Finally, it remains fascinating that during this month of non-stop Balfour coverage, so little has been written about the third clause that was supposed to ensure that Jews in other countries would be treated well even with a Jewish national home in historic Israel. The Arabs - including the Arabs of Jordan, who were under British influence - certainly didn't adhere to this clause, and Great Britain did not do anything to enforce that among its Arab friends.

(h/t Irene)

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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?