Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, May 15, 2020

05/15 Links Pt1: Caroline Glick: Pompeo, the coronavirus and the 'risks' of sovereignty; Melanie Phillips: A muffled consensus serves not Israel but her enemies; Why Hamas Loves Human Rights Watch

From Ian:

Declaring Israeli sovereignty in the Jordan Valley - with its obvious strategic significance and relatively small population of Palestinians - is a demand shared across the Israeli political mainstream.

Israel can even plausibly claim that extending sovereignty to the area between the West Bank ridgeline and the Jordan River would be a coordinated move, rather than a unilateral one: The U.S. peace plan framework foresees permanent Israeli control over the area and doesn't condition a change in status on any peace agreement with the Palestinians.

A significant share of Israeli leaders, and the people who elect them, believe they now live in a region where the consequences of such a move are manageable. By their logic, the Arab states need Israel too much to scuttle relations over what amounts to less than a quarter of the West Bank, especially when such action would be consistent with an American peace plan that most regional governments have endorsed.

American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and relocation of its embassy there, as well as endorsement of Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, were moves that were long believed to be too provocative to ever carry out. Instead, when they happened, they were all relative nonevents.

Dore Gold, Israel's former ambassador to the UN, director-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and confidante to both Benjamin Netanyahu and the late Ariel Sharon, was one of a small number of Israelis outside of government who routinely consulted with Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman about the U.S. peace plan. "I was in it to try to help formulate a plan that would provide a consensus basis for Israel's future borders," Gold recalled.

The Jordan Valley was hardly a new issue for Gold. In 1997, he accompanied Netanyahu to the Map Room of the White House, where they presented President Clinton's peace process team with an "interest map" of the West Bank that highlighted areas Israel believed to be of critical importance, the Jordan Valley included.

Until the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, it was believed Saddam Hussein's army could cross the Kingdom of Jordan and reach Israeli-controlled territory in 36 hours. Even with that scenario foreclosed, Gold thought Israeli planners needed to work across a longer time scale than the life of a single leader or even a single regime. "Military planning, especially strategic planning, should never be scenario-specific," Gold said.

"I personally had the view, which got backing from the prime minister's office, that in places like the Jordan Valley where Israel had the highest security interests, it would have to seek actual sovereignty over the territory." This argument repudiated decades of peace process doctrine, which defaulted to treating the valley as territory in a future Palestinian state.

American Zionist Movement: The Path to Independence and Recognition: Why San Remo Matters

Join the American Zionist Movement and the Israel Forever Foundation to celebrate the 72nd anniversary of the May 14, 1948 Declaration of the State of Israel, its immediate recognition by the United States, and to mark the important Centennial of the San Remo Conference.

Melanie Phillips: A muffled consensus serves not Israel but her enemies

The claim that the restoration of Jewish sovereignty over parts of the West Bank would destroy the possibility of a Palestinian state is untrue. Every serious Middle East peace plan has accepted the eventual incorporation into Israel of the major settlement blocs to safeguard its security.

It is the Palestinians who have destroyed the possibility of a Palestinian state. Offered it repeatedly from the 1930s onwards, they have refused it every time. Nine decades of the Palestinians rejecting the two-state solution might possibly mean that the Jews aren't the obstacle.

Opposition to the "annexation" is driven by the belief that Israel illegally occupies these territories. But this is untrue. As several legal experts have pointed out over the years, the Jews are the only people to have a legal and moral right to this land. In 1922, the international community gave them the never-abrogated right to settle what is now Israel and the disputed territories. Restoring Israeli sovereignty to parts of Judea and Samaria will therefore actually correct a historic act of illegality. And it will help protect Israel against its existential enemies.

Caroline Glick: Pompeo, the coronavirus and the 'risks' of sovereignty

On Sunday, Saudi journalist Abdelhameed al-Ghoban gave an interview to the BBC in Arabic. His remarks, which were translated by MEMRI, were devoid of nuance.

"Today, the public is informed. There is a deluge [of opinions] against the Palestinian cause. It is no longer just public support for normalization and building ties with Israel. [Our] public has turned against the Palestinians in general. Unfortunately, the Palestinians have lost. The Palestinians have not contributed anything. We can say that they are emotional people whose behavior is governed by their feelings."

Al-Ghoban added, "It is in our strategic interest, and in keeping with our future economic interests, to maintain real relations with Israel. Israel is an advanced country and we can benefit from it."

Al-Ghoban's remarks are not a lone voice in the wilderness. During the Ramadan Muslim holy month, Saudi television networks broadcast two series that portray Jews and Israelis in a positive light.

Palestinian leaders are beside themselves at what they view as pan-Arab abandonment. In remarks to Israel Hayom this week, a senior Palestinian official bitterly referred to the mild criticisms of US President Donald Trump's peace plan and of Israel's plan to apply its sovereignty to its communities in Judea and Samaria and to the Jordan Valley as no more than "lip service."

Israeli leftist groups are hanging their hopes for torpedoing Israel's sovereignty plans on the European Union. France's plan, supported by Luxemburg, Belgium and Ireland to impose EU sanctions on Israel in the event it implements its sovereignty plan was widely reported this week.

But like the Palestinians, Israeli leftists are likely to be disappointed. EU rules require all decisions to be made by consensus. And there is no consensus on sanctioning Israel.

How Arabs were treated in Israeli prison, May 1948

This account of how a frightened Arab prisoner was treated while the newly reborn State of Israel was fighting for its life tells you all you need to know about the differences between how Jews treat their enemies and how Arabs treat theirs, no matter what the circumstances.

From the Palestine Post, May 17, 1948:

The article immediately beneath this one says that rabbis told their religious followers in Jerusalem to dig foxholes and fill in sandbags on the Sabbath immediately after the State of Israel was declared, which they did – in their Sabbath clothes.

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Iranian media is going crazy with anti-Israel articles today for “Nakba Day.” One of them is an interview with Firas al Najim, head of something called the “Canadian Defenders of Human Rights,” where he confidently predicts that “the Zionist regime” is nearing its end – exactly what Iran has been saying for over a decade.

I was curious about what “Canadian Defenders of Human Rights” is. So I found its webpage, and the front page looks like it is a fairly generic human rights organization.

The problem starts when you click the links. The “About Us” page doesn’t have a single name. The “Our Work” page is empty. The “Campaigns” page is empty. The “Events” page is empty.

It’s a scam.

What about Firas al-Najim himself? It turns out Bnai Brith Canada has a bit on him. In January, Facebook deleted the page used by “Canadian Defenders for Human Rights” because al-Najim has repeatedly harassed members of the Jewish community in the Greater Toronto Area:

B’nai Brith Canada has filed a complaint with Toronto Police after a man was filmed harassing a member of the Jewish community in a North York park on Sunday.

In the uploaded confrontation at G. Ross Lord Park, Firas al-Najim berates a man in an electronic wheelchair for supporting Israel, refuses to condemn Palestinian suicide bombings, and denounces Arab-Jewish cooperation in Israel.

After the man in the wheelchair leaves the scene, al-Najim launches into an antisemitic diatribe in which he claims that “Zionists” are trying to take over North York, warning them not to “come here and start claiming this country as if it’s occupied Palestine and calling it now Israel.”

In June, B’nai Brith received previous complaints alleging that a man had harassed Jewish seniors in G. Ross Lord Park, but those interactions were not video-recorded.

“It is totally unacceptable that Jewish residents of North York are being accosted and harassed as they go about their daily lives,” said Michael Mostyn, Chief Executive Officer of B’nai Brith Canada. “We expect law enforcement to take this matter seriously and put an end to this behaviour.”

B’nai Brith has been in touch with York Centre MP Michael Levitt and Councillor James Pasternak, who noted that he was “willing to vigorously respond to the harassment, and work with City staff to implement a trespass order.”

Al-Najim, the manager of the ironically named “Canadian Defenders for Human Rights” (CD4HR), is listed as residing in Mississauga by Corporations Canada, but has claimed elsewhere to be a resident of North York.

This is not CD4HR’s first attempt to disturb the Jewish community in the Greater Toronto Area. In May, al-Najim and a small band of followers attempted to disrupt the Toronto Walk for Israel. Abbas Hamideh, a Palestinian activist who came from the United States to join CD4HR, called North York “the heart of the Criminal Zionist Community.”

On June 28, the group protested outside the Israel Day Festival in Thornhill, where al-Najim’s followers accused Canadian Jews of trying to “occupy Canada” before being led away by police.

Aliya Hasan, al-Najim’s co-manager at CD4HR, has told Jews that they are “forbidden from gathering and forming their own state” and alleged that Israel is committing a “Holocaust” against Palestinians.

Is any more proof needed that antisemites try to hide their bigotry behind “human rights”?

The CD4HR website claims it is a a registered Canadian non-profit #1067715-9. It sounds like it is past time to have Canadian authorities check up whether it is providing benefits to an antisemitic organization..

Jaramana UNRWA camp in Syria

The word “nakba” was coined in 1948 by Constantin Zureiq in his pamphlet “The Meaning of Nakba,” but he didn’t describe it the way it is used today. His description of the events of 1948 were centered around the mistakes of the Arabs rather than the actions of the Jews.

He wrote, “When the battle broke out, our public diplomacy began to speak of our imaginary victories, to put the Arab public to sleep and talk of the ability to overcome and win easily – until the Nakba happened…We must admit our mistakes…and recognize the extent of our responsibility for the disaster that is our lot.”

Other quotes from the pamphlet include, “Seven Arab countries declare war on Zionism in Palestine….Seven countries go to war to abolish the partition and to defeat Zionism, and quickly leave the battle after losing much of the land of Palestine – and even the part that was given to the Arabs in the Partition Plan.”

“When the battle broke out,” Zureiq wrote, “our public diplomacy began to speak of our imaginary victories, to put the Arab public to sleep and talk of the ability to overcome and win easily – until the nakba happened.”

“Zionism is deeply implanted in Western life, while we are far from it…They live in the present and look to the future, while we are drugged-up dreaming of a magnificent past,” he continued.

Crucially, Zureiq emphasized, “We must admit our mistakes…and recognize the extent of our responsibility for the disaster that is our lot.”

Zureiq, who taught in Lebanon, here isn’t talking about Palestinian responsibility but of broader Arab responsibility. Yet his lesson has been ignored for 72 years while the term remained, in a twisted form, to refer to Palestinian victimhood at the hands of the criminal Zionists.

It is ironic that Zureiq was correct – and his analysis of Arab responsibility for the Palestinians being stateless remains true not only for history but for today.

Even if one would accept the Arab lies of how Israel is evil incarnate and committed the most horrific massacres in 1948 and physically expelled the Arabs, there is a very basic question that no one asks: why are the Palestinians still in misery today, in Syria and Jordan and Lebanon? Why are they stateless today in the entire Arab world outside the ones who lived in the West Bank in 1949 and have since moved to Jordan?

The responsibility for Palestinian suffering for 72 years is entirely from their fellow Arabs, usually with the excuse that it was necessary to keep the Palestinian issue alive.

The Arab League decision in the 1950s to disallow Palestinians to gain citizenship in member countries remains one of the most vicious attacks on Palestinian rights in history – but it was ostensibly to keep Palestinian unity and nurture Palestinian nationalism, which was practially nonexistent at the time.

But that was only one of literally scores of examples of how Palestinians have been mistreated by the Arab world and by their own leaders. The expulsion of thousands of Palestinians from Jordan in 1970. The expulsion of hundreds of thousands from Kuwait. The apartheid against them in Lebanon. The bombing of Palestinian camps in Syria. Palestinian leaders today maintaining two classes of citizens – keeping “refugee camps” open and treating their residents as second class citizens who are kept there forever, or until Israel is destroyed.

This is the real nakba. But the word itself has been twisted for political ends to be an attack on Israel rather than its original meaning of how Arabs have failed Palestinians, and continue to do so today.

“Nakba Day” was only created in 1998 by Yasir Arafat, who picked the first day of Israeli independence as its date. Though he created this day during the Oslo process that was supposed to bring a state, but his message is that Nakba Day must always be associated with delegitimizing Israel. It was yet another brilliant PR move that ultimately hurts the Palestinians who, for reasons of honor and shame, are taught an Orwellian history where the hatred exhibited by Arabs towards them is erased and replaced with a fiction of 72 years of suffering solely at the hands of Israel.

It is way past time for Palestinian leaders and the Arab world to take responsibility for their role in Palestinians not having a state and rotting in “refugee camps” today. Only the truth can bring effective change. But the truth is exactly what the Arab world is avoiding with the Nakba story.

05/14 Links Pt2: PragerU: Lies About Israel Lead to Lies About Everything; Top 10 reasons Israel has (so far) survived coronavirus; Reuters Whitewashes Suicide Bombers, Murderers as ‘Killed in Unrest’

From Ian:

David Collier: An evening with Zoom. Delusion, propaganda and defeat

I sat through two events last night on Zoom. One was hard-core anti-Zionist, featuring several of the anti-Israel camps big names. It was all about how antisemitism doesn’t exist. The other was a much more mundane affair, with Yachad hosting Husam Zomlot, the ‘Palestinian Ambassador’ to the UK. I came away feeling depressed. The level of discussion was so weak. If this is the best that both camps can do, then they are extremely lucky that some people can be so easily fooled.
The defeated conspiracy theorists on Zoom

The first event was hosted by the anti-Zionist Miko Peled. Peled should need little introduction to readers of this blog. Having been to several of his events, and read much of what he has written, I think the time I called him a deflated, lying buffoon sums him up best.

The others on the panel were
- Asa Winstanley the Electronic Intifada writer and ex Labour Party member. Despite his antisemitism, officially Winstanley wasn’t expelled, just suspended – and he quit rather than face the music.
- Estee Chandler founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. When an American Jew, hangs a US flag upside down, you just know she isn’t operating with a full deck.
- Anya Parampil a hard-left correspondent for Russia Today in the US. She writes on Max Blumenthal’s GreyZone about all the things you would expect – Venezuela, Cuba, China, Assange and anything else that can help to attack the US and the West.

During the Q&A, a fifth face appeared, Jamil Mazen to pick out which questions to put to the table.

The event was titled ‘From Corbyn to Sanders‘, looking at whether ‘Zionists’ are targeting ‘progressive politicians’. To be honest, these speakers came across as defeated and dejected. The conversation was dull and each of the speakers in turn played their part. Miko Peled was the buffoon. Chandlers role was to keep quiet and simply nod in agreement when everyone else was talking. When Parampil was on she kept talking for ages, throwing in keywords without making a point. And poor Winstanley could not string two coherent sentences together. ‘Our Asa’ was beyond awful.

Lost they certainly have, and it showed. The thing is, because they are so convinced they are right, the more they get beaten, the more insidious and hidden they believe the enemy they face. The entire conversation was a conspiracy theory. These four used the word ‘they’ to describe the invisible forces against them at least 100 times. Each of these people seem to believe in a Zionist monster that probably even reads their private emails. They are so lost in conspiratorial nonsense, not a single concrete argument was made. I couldn’t help myself, in the end I even felt sorry for them (kidding).

PragerU: Lies About Israel Lead to Lies About Everything

Why would someone like Sebastian Cevallos, a university student in Ecuador, care about Israel? You'd think this tiny country on the other side of the globe from where he lives would have no bearing on his life. But it does. Here’s why.

Daphne Anson: An Interesting Facet of the History of Zionism

It's almost 15 minutes long, but is fast paced, this talk by a British academic who specialises in the history of British-Israel relations.

The speaker is Dr James Vaughan, of the Department of International Relations at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales, the first and arguably still the best such department in the world, which had as its inaugural head Professor Alfred Zimmern, who was of Jewish extraction.

Dr Vaughan is the author of Unconquerable Minds. The Failure of American and British Propaganda in the Arab Middle East, 1945-1957 (Palgrave, 2005), and while he continues to publish on British propaganda policy towards the Arab Middle East and Iran he is currently researching the changing attitudes and policies of Britain's main political parties towards Zionism, Israel, Palestinian nationalism and the Arab-Israel dispute.

The talk is entitled '"From Aberystwyth to San Remo" - The Birth of International Politics and the Jewish National Home' To quote the page of the original uploader, UK Lawyers for Israel Charitable Trust, it explains how scholars such as Zimmern and Sir Charles Webster

"combined idealistic internationalism and a ‘Wilsonian’ belief in the rights of small nations to self-determination with an ability to bridge the worlds of academia and politics, both through their connections to Chaim Weizmann and the Zionist Organization, and in their role as participants in the making of the post-war settlement."

1948 Arab quotes shows the only “nakba” is that they didn’t slaughter the Jews

Here are some quotes from Arab leaders in 1948 around the War of Independence. (They were compiled by the late Ami Isseroff, whose MidEast Web site is an encyclopedic and accurate source of information.)

Encouragement by Arab Leaders and Rumors - A study by Childers, which examined British monitoring of Arab broadcasts during that period, did not find any evidence that Arab leaders called on Palestinians to leave their homes. However, considerable evidence and testimony exists that at different times, Arab leaders encouraged refugees to flee. This issue has been inflated beyond its actual importance. It has no real significance in international law, except to counter or support the Palestinian claims of expulsion by force.

During a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949, Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo and no friend to Israel or the Jews, found that while the refugees "express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. "We know who our enemies are," they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their home. . . ."

The Economist, reported on October 2, 1948: "Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit....It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades."

Times Magazine (May 3, 1948) reported: "The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by orders of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city....By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa."

Edward Atiyah, the secretary of the Arab League Office in London, wrote in his book, The Arabs: "This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boastings of an unrealistic Arabic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to reenter and retake possession of their country."

According to Near East Arabic Radio, April 3, 1948: "It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees to flee from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem, and that certain leaders . . . make political capital out of their miserable situation . . ."

Nimr el Hawari, the Commander of the Palestine Arab Youth Organization, in his book Sir Am Nakbah (The Secret Behind the Disaster, published in Nazareth in 1955), quoted the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said as saying "We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down."

Habib Issa wrote in the New York Lebanese daily newspaper Al Hoda on June 8, 1951, " The Secretary General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade... He pointed out that they were already on the frontiers and that all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw Jews into the Mediterranean. -- Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes, and property and to stay temporarily in neighbouring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down."

Reports of massacres and actual fighting caused fear among the population. In Tiberias, Haifa and Jaffa, the Arab irregulars initiated combat with the Jews, who retaliated. The Palestinian civilian population, often abandoned by their leaders, were unwilling to stay under Jewish administration and left. In Haifa, Jewish leaders including the mayor and head of the labor council pleaded with Arabs to stay. In Jaffa, the British pleaded with them to remain, but the exodus continued.

The atmosphere in Palestinian towns can be appreciated from the following quote:

"Jaffa was boiling: every second that passed you heard a new rumour, and after every minute the imaginary tales and lies became bigger, finally, they were accepted as definite truth by the public. At sunset, many of the Mufti henchmen patrolled the streets in private and lorry cars, calling upon the people: oh! men, oh! heros; Help..Help.., stop the Jewish attack! They have attacked your brothers in the Manshiya; they pillaged their properties; burned their holdings and raped their women and girls. They have committed awful acts of horror and brutality against your brothers!! In but a few minutes Jaffa's inhabitants were incited and agitated shouted and fired into the air -- On Them! On Them! ("aleihoom, aleihoom") on Tel-Aviv, the town of the wicked...Groups and individuals, they marched on and among them, behind them or in front of them, went the Mufti henchmen belittling the Jewish strength..."

[Muhamed Nimer Al Hawari in THE SECRET OF THE CATASTROPHE, Nazareth, 1955]

It is hard to square the actual atmosphere among Arabs in 1948 and the current narrative of Jews ethnically cleansing them. The “nakba” was and remains a problem created by and for Arabs, but pride and politics does not allow Palestinians to blame anyone but the Jews.

The narrative they say today is a lie. To know the truth, look at what they said in 1948.

Knesset Passes Law Prohibiting Coronavirus From Infecting MKs (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Jerusalem, May 14 - Israeli lawmakers pre-empted various proceedings today surrounding the imminent formation of a government, to draft and pass legislation assigning COVID immunity to their 120-strong group, to prevent the parliament from getting hit by the current worldwide pandemic.

The Coronavirus Act of 2020 sailed through its approval process Wednesday, from preliminary reading to three formal votes, each time with nearly unanimous support. The lone "nay" vote each time came from Opposition MK Ahmad Tibi.

In response to the continuing threat of the pathogen, the legislators came together in what many agreed represented a rare moment of near-unity in a body riven by ideological, personal, and political conflicts. Joint sponsors Ofer Shelah of the Blue and White Party and Michal Rozin of Meretz persuaded their colleagues to adopt the measure in the interest of maintaining the functionality of the political system.

"It's a gratifying moment, and something of a relief," breathed MK Rozin after the bill's third successful reading. "Knowing we're that little bit safer as a society because the Members of Knesset will still be able to do what we do, the citizens can have that much less anxiety in their lives at this stressful time."

"This is an important, even if limited, move," concurred Likud MK Yuval Steinitz, whose party often opposes Rozin's across the political and legislative board. "Perhaps we can move on the legislation that bans coronavirus from other critical places, such as nursing homes, but that might be a tad ambitious at this stage."

Lone dissenter Ahmad Tibi explained his opposition to the law. "There's nothing fundamentally wrong with it," he conceded, "but it simply doesn't go far enough, and I would hope my colleagues agree this falls far short of what should be in such a measure. There's no difference in the extent or expense of the enforcement mechanism for the law if it were also to apply to, for example, judges in the justice system, or even the staff of the legislators ourselves. Also, it makes no mention of any of the grievances of the Arab sector, which I am obliged by precedent to invoke in at least three interviews a day."

Even Tibi agreed further legislation remains possible to remedy the shortcomings of the current law. "This is actually a sound approach to numerous problems," he assessed. "I wonder whether anyone in Knesset has ever thought of passing a law to make all crime illegal."

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05/14 Links Pt1: Arab World Moving On, But West Still Indulging Palestinian Return Fantasy; U.S. Supreme Court Revives Potential $655.5 Million Judgement Against PA

From Ian:

Arab World Moving On, But West Still Indulging Palestinian Return Fantasy

The greatest tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today is that while the Arab world is moving on from the war against the Jewish state, the West is still encouraging Palestinian rejectionism by giving legitimacy to a fictitious "right of return" that would flood Israel with millions of refugees, former Knesset member Dr. Einat Wilf said Tuesday.

Her new book, The War of Return, co-authored with Adi Schwartz, posits that this "right" essentially does not exist anywhere in international law and in fact violates international norms regarding the treatment of refugees everywhere else in the world.

The Palestinians, however, show no sign of giving up on the right of return because it is the one way they may still be able to convert Israel into an Arab state by sheer weight of demographics.

Wilf said, "You're beginning to hear voices in the Arab world...who are beginning to say, the Palestinians have made a mess of things, they made a mistake."

"The way they're speaking, no Westerner would dare speak. They're saying very hard truths: That it's over. That it's time to move forward."

"The tragedy is that as the Arab world is slowly moving away from their support for the Palestinian vision that the war of 1948 is not over and could still be undone, we have Western countries giving a billion dollars to UNRWA, thereby continuing to fuel the Palestinian vision...that the outcome of 1948 could still be rolled back."

Netanyahu officially announces he’s formed new government

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu officially announced Wednesday that he had succeeded in forming a new government, bringing to an end nearly 18 months of political gridlock.

Netanyahu made the announcement in formal letters to Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz in his capacity as the temporary Knesset speaker and to President Reuven Rivlin.

“I managed to form a government,” he wrote, asking Gantz to convene the Knesset to hold a vote of confidence.

The new government, which, according to the coalition agreement, will see Gantz replace Netanyahu as prime minister after 18 months, is scheduled to be sworn in Thursday evening after lawmakers vote to approve it during a Knesset plenum session that will begin at 6 p.m.

The Knesset will also vote on a new speaker, slated to be Likud MK Yariv Levin.

The swearing-in of the new government will conclude the longest political logjam in Israel’s history, in which Netanyahu’s Likud party and Blue and White went head-to-head in an unprecedented three consecutive elections.

Gantz campaigned on replacing Netanyahu due to the premier’s indictment on graft charges but dropped his opposition to sitting in a government with him after the latest elections again ended with no clear winner, citing the coronavirus pandemic and a desire to avoid a fourth round of voting.

The move led to the breakup of the Blue and White alliance, with Gantz being elected as Knesset speaker with the backing of Netanyahu’s right-wing religious bloc as they negotiated the terms of the new government.

Israel set to swear in biggest government, after longest political deadlock

Israel’s new government is set to be sworn in on Thursday evening, bringing nearly 18 months of political gridlock to an end.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally announced on Wednesday that he had succeeded in forming a government in letters to Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz in his capacity as the temporary Knesset speaker and to President Reuven Rivlin.

The new government, which, according to the coalition agreement, will see Gantz replace Netanyahu as prime minister after 18 months, is scheduled to be sworn in Thursday evening after lawmakers vote to approve it during a Knesset plenum session that will begin at 6 p.m.

The swearing-in of the new Knesset, Israel’s first fully functioning government in over 500 days since the end of December 2018, will conclude the longest political logjam in Israel’s history, in which Netanyahu’s Likud party and Blue and White went head-to-head in an unprecedented three consecutive elections.

At the Knesset’s presentation of the 35th Government of Israel on Thursday evening, Netanyahu will detail the makeup of the government, its ministers, basic principles and guidelines.

Netanyahu, Gantz postpone swearing-in of government
Hanegbi, Dichter announce boycott of confidence vote

The swearing in of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Blue and White leader Benny Gantz's new government will be delayed until Sunday, Netanyahu and Gantz announced on Thursday evening.

The delay came due to the logjam of ministerial hopefuls in Likud.

Netanyahu was supposed to announce the list of his cabinet ministers at 6pm.

Iran’s parliament is discussing a "very urgent" bill on Israel .

The Islamic Republic News Agency said Tuesday that the Iranian Shura Council had been “urgently” creating a draft resolution on “confronting Israel's countermeasures against peace and regional and international security.”

Mujtaba Dhul Nur, head of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of the Iranian Shura Council, said that the draft resolution is of great importance because it requires that the Iranian Shura Council, early next week, discuss its articles, vote on it quickly, to counter Israels’ ability to harm Iran's national interests.

But when you look at the specifics, it is a whole lot of nothing.

The draft resolution affirms that “the occupied lands in Palestine are for indigenous Palestinians.” It obliges Tehran to recognize only Jerusalem as the eternal and united capital of Palestine. It calls on Iran to open, within six months, a virtual consulate or embassy in Jerusalem for “Palestine.” It imposes severe sanctions against any kind of cooperation with Israel. It prohibits companies and financial and commercial institutions in Iran from dealing in any formal or informal manner with Israeli companies or Israel.

So, what’s new?

I don’t see anything that affects Israel in the slightest way.

Which means that this is a purely symbolic resolution. And the only reason for passing a symbolic resolution would be to send a message that Iran is serious about confronting Israel.

Yet the only thing it can do is pass symbolic resolutions.

This move appears to be more a confirmation of Iran’s impotence at this time than anything else. And Iranians will see right through this. They will interpret the resolution as a sign of weakness, not strength.

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Ahlam Tamimi says she’s “terrified” she will be extradited

Is there a tiny bit of hope that Jordan will extradite the unrepentant, monstrous Hamas terrorist Ahlam al Tamimi?

The Arabic press has been covering the letter written by seven Republican (why no Democrats?) members of Congress demanding the extradition of the woman behind the 2001 bombing of the Sbarro pizza shop in Jerusalem that killed 15, including 7 children. Tamimi, who was released in a truly immoral prisoner swap, has become a celebrity in Jordan, which has protected her from extradition even though the US and Jordan have an extradition treaty that is meant exactly for cases like hers, since she murdered American citizens.

None of the Arabic articles that I can find are even the slightest bit negative towards Tamimi. On the contrary, they all support Jordan sheltering the terrorist, many praising her for her “legitimate act of resistance” in murdering Jewish children. One political party in Jordan, the Islamist Parliamentary Reform Bloc, rejected the demand., calling it “blackmail.” Other opinion pieces are saying that this is a purely political move to shore up Trump’s chances and to help Israel “annex” territory.

Most interesting is Ahlam al Tamimi’s own response. Rather than express confidence in Jordan’s continued shielding of her, she says she is “terrified” that the kingdom might acquiesce to the US demands.

Al-Tamimi told Arabi 21, “Despite my great confidence in the Jordanian law and justice that treated me fairly, which told the American authorities that I will not be extradited and this reassured me, but the last news and what it included began to make me feel that my topic had started to take a political turn. "

The terrorist continued, "It is about financial support to Jordan, and the United States prohibits the delivery of allocations to any country that the US State Department says refuses to extradite anyone accused of a [major] crime.

“Is the law above politics or politics above the law?…Here my fear take over despite my confidence in the Jordanian law and the Jordanian judiciary, and the Jordanian people who support me, but I fear in light of the coronavirus crisis that ravaged the economic situation, …there is political silence that terrifies me,” she said.

Tamimi pointed out that there was no official response to this letter from the members of Congress, which was sent to the Jordanian ambassador in Washington.

That silence from the king and the Jordanian government is the tiny bit of hope that US pressure might result in justice finally being served. It indicates that the arrogant Jordanian response of the past is not happening this time. It indicates that now is the time to increase the pressure on Jordan, so this letter would be seen as only the opening salvo of many such demands and not only a single initiative that gets forgotten over time.

While the chances for true justice still seems remote, there is a small bit of satisfaction that this terrorist who has been so proud of murdering children is not sleeping well as night, worried that the government that has been protecting her is wavering.

Now is the time to add pressure. Now is the time for groups like the Simon Wiesenthal Center to call for justice. Now is the time for senators from both sides of the aisle to issue statements. Now is the time for newspapers to write op-eds calling on Tamimi’s extradition.

Only then will Jordan make the calculation that keeping Tamimi is worse than extraditing her. And given that most Jordanians support her, much more pressure is needed to achieve justice.

(As always, the latest news about the quest for justice is on the This Ongoing War site by the parents of terror victim Malki Roth, of blessed memory.)

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

EU chief calls Israel extending its laws on Judea and Samaria “the most important item on the agenda”

EU High Representative/Vice-President Josep Borrell spoke at a press conference on Tuesday, where he fielded two questions about Israel:

Q. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that on the government’s agenda should be discussions of possible annexations of parts of the West Banks. France thinks that the EU should respond with something strong and concrete, what do you think?

This is the most important item on the agenda of the next Foreign Affairs Council, which will take place next Friday afternoon. I hope that there, the European Union will present its position about a possible annexation. We already did at the beginning [of the year], when the Americans presented their so-called “peace plan”. We already did it, we will do it [again].

In the meantime, we are waiting for the new Israeli government to be in office and we will congratulate them. I will have a phone call - I hope - with the new Foreign Affairs Minister and with the information I can have from this contact I will go to the Foreign Affairs Council where we will discuss what is going to be the position of the European Union.

Yes, there might be a worldwide pandemic, Egypt is threatening war against Ethiopia over the Renaissance Dam, Iran is threatening to throw out all remaining controls on the way to a nuclear weapon, China puts a million Muslims in concentration camps – but the most important item on the EU’s foreign affairs council is worrying about whether Israel will extend its laws over land it would have insisted on keeping in any peace treaty.

Seems like a twisted set of priorities.

Q. After this contact you will have with the Israeli Foreign Minister, is there also an option to have sanctions on the table?

My contact with the Foreign Affairs Ministers of the new recently formed Israeli government is just a normal contact to congratulate him and to offer cooperation from the side of the European Union. I do not think we are going to go into deep discussions about which are their plans and which will be our answer. This is just not the right moment.

It is just a call to congratulate him and offer cooperation and maybe we will go in some specific issues but I do not expect to engage in a deep discussion about this very specific issue.

The important thing is to go to the Council and for the Member States to present their point of view. You know that everything in [EU] foreign policy requires unanimity, especially sanctions. We are for the time being far from discussing sanctioning. But it is important for me and for the European Union foreign policy to know what is the position of the Member States with respect to the respect of international law, and how we can judge this announcement and actions, in order to clarify the position of the European Union.

But I cannot [prejudge] the result because I know that this is a very divisive issue inside the Council and [that] different Member States have different positions. We have noticed it when we discussed it a couple of months ago. I suppose that this divide is still there so it will be a very interesting Foreign Affairs Council. Maybe next Friday at the press conference I will be able to give you more details about it.

Yes, it will be an interesting meeting. But why is this the top priority of all the world’s issues nowadays?

(h/t Irene)

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Our Soft Enemy (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

Israel has many enemies. There are our “hard enemies” that fight us with weapons and explosives. And then there is the European Union.

The European Union is an organization of monumental size and bureaucratic complexity. It has been compared to the Holy Roman Empire, but I’m sure it has more functionaries today than that sprawling affair ever did. There is a European Council, a Council of the European Union (they are not the same), a European Commission, and a European Parliament with no less than 705 seats. There are courts and a central bank. There are agencies beyond counting. The EU’s draft budget for 2020 includes expenditures of more than 168 billion Euros (US $182 billion or 641 billion Israeli shekels). This is more than 1% of the total GDP of its 27 member states (not including the UK, which had the good sense to leave the Union on January 1 of this year).

Although the individual member nations influence the EU’s decisions via the councils and the parliament, there is no question that they have traded a great deal of sovereignty and freedom of action for the financial benefits of membership. Sometimes, as a majority of the citizens of the UK decided, this does not serve their national interests. It’s felt by many that the EU’s bureaucracy is too far removed from the citizens of the various member countries. The EU’s councils are made up of heads of state and ministers, and the massive Parliament is elected according to a system of proportional representation like Israel’s, in which the voters choose between parties which in turn pick the candidates. Overall turnout in these elections is about 51% of eligible voters.

As a citizen of Israel, my concern is that the EU also has a foreign policy, a very active one, and I don’t like it at all. The policy is mostly determined by voting in the Council of the EU, which is composed of ministers from the member states. It is implemented by the EU Commission, led by the Vice-President of the Commission, who sports the impressive title of “High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.” This position is held today by Josep Borrell, the Spanish representative on the Commission, who recently succeeded Federica Mogherini.
To give you an idea of what we can expect from him, Borrell recently announced that the “most important item” on the EU’s Foreign Affairs Council agenda for its meeting this Friday will be “Israeli annexation plans.” In a previous statement, he hinted at the possibility of EU sanctions on Israel if it carried out its plan.

In addition to the fact that it’s none of their damn business, it can hardly be the most important foreign thing that is going on – or that might at some point in the future go on – in the world. So it appears that Borrell is following in the footsteps of Mogherini and her predecessor, Catherine Ashton. Ashton once compared the terrorist murder of four Jews, including three children aged three to eight, at the Otzar Hatorah school in Toulouse, France, with “what’s happening in Gaza” (what was happening at the time was a war provoked by Hamas rocket fire). Mogherini was usually more classy, but her positions on such subjects as “settlements,” Jerusalem, labeling of products from Judea/Samaria, Gaza, the Iran deal, and others have been consistently anti-Israel.

The EU’s grandparent, the European Coal and Steel Community, was created after WWII as a deliberate first step toward unifying Europe economically and politically, beginning with those parts of the economy that were felt to be the most important to making war, and therefore over which the founders wanted to establish international control. This organization, initially including only six countries, grew into the European Economic Community, and ultimately the EU, by way of various treaties and agreements. It is important to understand that the union was intended to ultimately wipe out not just the economic barriers to trade between Europeans, but also the social and ideological walls that made possible the nationalistic feelings which they believed were responsible for the world wars of the 20^th century.

Yoram Hazony, in his book “The Virtue of Nationalism” argues that the project was misconceived. He believes that the wars were not caused by extreme nationalism among nation-states, but rather by the clash of expansionist empires and states with imperial ambitions. The problem, in other words, was not that nationalist nation-states fiercely favor and guard their particular cultures, languages, religions, and ideologies; but rather that empires and would-be empires seek to assert their dominance over their neighbors, because they wish to universalize their ideologies.

A nation-state, says Hazony, offers a much better chance for the various tribes and clans and peoples that are the basic units of human society to create and enjoy the kind of political structure that most suits their culture. An empire, on the other hand, at most empowers only its dominant culture – there is one in all empires – and subjugates others in its zeal to universalize its “perfect” ideology.

The EU has no military forces of its own, and most of its members are relatively weak, preferring to nestle under the nuclear umbrella of the US. But the EU has a potent weapon in the form of its treasury, and it uses its money to promote its liberal, internationalist, anti-religious (except Islam, which it is too cowardly to oppose), ideology – in part to atone for the post-colonialist and post-Nazi guilt of some of its members. While decrying imperialism, it has built an empire in Europe that rivals the achievements of Rome and Byzantium; and its resources are committed to spreading its liberal ideology, defeating competitors (e.g., the new Russian Empire of Vladimir Putin), and crushing rebellions (e.g., Orban’s Hungary) as well as successful independent nation-states, like Israel.

Israel is a particular target of the EU Euro-weapon for several reasons: first, it is proudly nationalist; second – thanks to the ideological cover provided by the KGB’s propaganda offensive of the 1960s and 70s – it can be falsely portrayed as colonialist and racist, thus providing the Europeans a way to assuage their guilt for their own colonialist and racist past; third, its local enemies are Muslims, providing a way for Europe to pay jizya to its own uneasy Muslim minorities; and finally, it’s a Jewish state – and here no further explanation is necessary.
The EU is the largest funder of UNRWA, the Palestinian refugee agency that exists to maintain a constantly growing population of stateless people, which it educates – some 98% of UNRWA staff are Palestinians, many of them members of Hamas, Fatah, or other terrorist organizations – to hate Jews and Israelis, and to blame them for the ill-treatment of the original refugees and their descendants by the Arab nations in which most of them live. UNRWA is set up to reward large families and to prevent their becoming independent or being resettled as normal citizens anywhere – except in the context of a “return” to Israel which would displace her Jewish population. The EU gave UNRWA 127 million Euros in 2018.

But that is only the beginning. The EU provides direct financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority, for salaries and pensions, as well as for hospitals, security forces, and other purposes. Much of the “salaries and pensions” are paid to Palestinians imprisoned in Israel for terrorism-related offenses, especially murder – the so-called “pay to slay” program. This aid amounted to 154 million Euros in 2019.

The EU also distributes 5 million Euros per year to “civil society organizations promoting links across the political divide” in Israel and the PA. This includes organizations spreading hate and incitement to terrorism under the cover of “arts and culture,” as well as Israeli and international NGOs that promote BDS, engage in “lawfare” against Israel, try to sway Israeli elections, oppose “normalization’ (i.e., treating Israelis like human beings), and provide a constant flow of propaganda accusing Israel of being an apartheid state, the IDF of deliberately targeting children, and so on. And much of the money that flows from the EU ends up in the pockets of terrorist organizations.

Finally, there are numerous “development projects” by which the EU constructs buildings for the Palestinians in Area C of Judea/Samaria, the part which is supposed to be under Israeli security and civil control, in violation of Israeli zoning and building regulations. Few Palestinians live in these areas, but this creates facts on the ground intended to prevent strategic areas from becoming part of Israel in any future agreement.

Some of the money granted to NGOs and used for development projects is done in cooperation with the governments of various countries, like Germany, France, or the UK. Thus the amounts appearing in the EU budget may be much smaller than the actual amounts involved.

All in all, the “soft war” against Israel is one of the EU’s largest and most ambitious projects.
So who is Israel’s greatest enemy? Is it Hamas and Hezbollah? Or is it Europe, a much older enemy of the Jewish people?

05/13 Links Pt2: Barry Shaw: JStreet lost; Melanie Phillips: The leftward movement of diaspora Jews; NYTs: Orthodox Jews Are Half of Covid-19 Plasma Donors; Latma 2020, Episode 7

From Ian:

Barry Shaw: JStreet lost

The question remains. Which side of history do the Jewish youth of JStreet, the putative friends of Israel who are no friends at all, wish to be on? Or that of Bnei Ami, the real heart and soul of the Jewish people.

It is with us, the Israeli Zionists, where the Revolutionary Generation resides, forging beyond the despots that surround us, the shining star that guides the way to a better future whenever our neighbors will be capable of dropping their rancid hatred, a hatred that has troubled the world for far too long.

We Jews accepted a historic, a biblical, challenge to be exceptional. We are delivering on that challenge. From our success we demand of our neighbors to rise up to the challenge, as we have done. Pick leaders who can give you a better future. It is achieved by forging the 21st Century, not by being trapped in the past. Look at our liberty and freedom and follow our lead.

We are one of the countries with a sense of purpose in a jaded world .

While we fight for life, our detractors, such as JStreet arrogantly weigh our sins.

Israel’s sovereignty is questioned as in no other country on the planet. They demand justice for the Palestinian Arab but not for us. Nothing that we do will ever satisfy them. The angry thrust for justice and judgment fall on the collective Jew, never on our malevolent enemy that thirsts for our destruction. And these haters have recruited JStreet to sit on their jury against us.

We have a close knowledge of evil, and it is not us.

Are there any Arab intellectuals who disassociate themselves from the traditional religious and radical firebrands that whip up the street and the campus with their rhetoric of hate and rejection of the Jew in the Middle East? If there are any, they are a fearful and silent minority. Those that do speak up can be found in Israel. Arab intellectuals that agree with me are too frightened to remain where they are. For out of the street the next firebrand will emerge to harness old religious hatreds to a new rebellion. And so it goes on. A stalemate where liberal dreamers think they represent all that is liberating for a tradition that maintains a rigid dogma.

This clash solves nothing. It only increases the discord between two worlds leaving us isolated and in jeopardy. The malevolent rejectionists must be weakened, not strengthened. Sometimes it is kind to be cruel. Isn’t it always thus in war to achieve peace? It was with Germany, with Japan, where only total victory led to peace? Appeasing the Third Reich as it marched from Poland to France would never have achieved peace. To think that appeasing a violent and rejectionist Palestine Authority by scolding Israel will achieve peace is dangerous nonsense. Liberal, progressive, call JStreet what you want. It is an idiocy of a dangerous kind.

Israel, geopolitically, is a tiny state in the epicenter of a maelstrom of savage hostility.

In Israel. staying alive is a cause for joy and optimism. Isn’t that always the Jewish psyche? They came to kill us. We won. Let’s celebrate.

There is something perverse about the adoration by Jews of the killers of Jews. For JStreet, it has become an obsession.

Feeding the beast, as JStreet does, has achieved nothing. It never will.

JStreet lost.

Melanie Phillips: The leftward movement of diaspora Jews

Is there a leftward movement of diaspora Jews? I took part in a webinar organised by EMET, the Endowment for Middle East Truth, which does sterling work defending Israel against the calumnies that distressingly pass for received wisdom in so much of the west. At this webinar, which was attended by more than 430 people, Caroline Glick and I were talking about the state of the Jewish community in the US and Britain. We discussed the scourge of antisemitism, the contribution to this of left-wing politics and whether or not the leadership of the Jewish community was adequately confronting this. You can watch the webinar below.

Yisrael Medad: Book Review | Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality

The Two-State Solution Always Failed

The ‘paradigm’ Lustick has championed for decades had its origin in the Cairo Conference of March 1921. It was there that Winston Churchill, as newly-appointed Colonial Secretary, conducted deliberations with his staff and advisors and decided to adopt what is referred to in Middle East studies as the Sharifian Solution. That policy saw Great Britain as responsible for fulfilling, as much as possible, its war-time pledges to the Arabs as delineated in the McMahon-Hussein talks. The two sons of Sharif Ali ibn Hussein were set to become rulers of much of the former Ottoman Empire territory, with Abdullah becoming Emir and later, King, of newly-created Transjordan (although originally, the Foreign Office had not thought the Jordan River to be an adequate frontier) and Faisal was crowned as king of the new Kingdom of Iraq, formerly Mesopotamia, after losing Syria.

Later that month, in Jerusalem, Churchill confirmed this first two-state solution outline. Essentially, as Isaiah Friedman has noted, TransJordan would be carved out of ‘Historic Palestine’ and become a separate political entity. That policy was confirmed by the League of Nations in Article 25 of its 1922 Palestine Mandate decision although both territories, juridically, would be under the same administrative umbrella of the British Mandate for Palestine. In doing so, the two brothers would dissociate themselves from Palestine, and, in particular, Abdullah would recognise the legitimacy of the Jewish National Home policy. In fact, Abdullah did inform a local Arab delegation, who were protesting the essence of the Balfour Declaration for a reconstituted national Jewish home in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, that they had to accept the situation as offered, telling them ‘the Arabs must remember that the question of interests not only them and Jews, but Christendom as well’.

That suggested resolution did not work. Seventy-five per cent of the land-mass Chaim Weizmann demanded the 1919 Paris Peace Conference grant to the Jewish National Home was lost. In 1937, the remaining 25 per cent was subjected to a partition proposal with the hope that this second two-state solution concept would resolve the conflict the Arabs had with Zionism. It didn’t. Neither did the third proposal of a two-state solution of the UN in 1947.

This brief review of Mandate-era history is ignored by Lustick, which would have provided some qualifying historical context to his central argument. The truth is that the two-state solution was not ‘lost’ recently, but had been attempted, and had failed, and failed again, long ago. Lustick ignores this history.

Trump’s peace plan for Israel has a major flaw: it assumes the Arabs can govern themselves, when they have proven just the opposite, and it rewards them for their failures in statecraft, with a state on Jewish land. The Arabs, meantime, are not only an abject failure at self-government, their economy is a failure, too. They exist by the grace of UNRWA/EU life support. Despite these facts, Trump's deal of the century calls on Israel to write off territory in order to create the State of Palestine on Jewish land, along Israel's border.

It is true that this state would exist on land already Judenrein, a place where no Jews live, land that is under PA autonomy. It must be stated that, nonetheless, this is Jewish land.

Trump’s deal is not new. It is a reprise of the land for peace formula. In this tired paradigm, Israel offers Jewish land to the Arabs in exchange for peace. But the peace somehow never arrives.

The narrative which accompanies the land for peace formula on the face of it looks as though both sides give something up. The Arabs, their arms, the Jews their land. Giving away precious land stands as a statement that Israel cares more about peace than land--a statement forced on Israel by outside parties. But what land for peace really represents, is Jews ceding Jewish land to the PA, a foreign, latter-day terrorist entity.

In land for peace the Jews are told to take a leap of faith and hope for the best. The outcome has, historically, never been favorable to the Jews.

Some would say that Israel has already ceded the territory in question, when it gave the Arabs autonomy. Self-rule and a territory free of Jews! Is this not, already, a de facto state?

But no, a state it was never meant to be. What Begin offered with autonomy, was something less than a state: the right to self-determination, but never a state:

We do not even dream of the possibility---if we are given the chalice to withdraw our military forces from Judea, Samaria and Gaza--of abandoning those areas to the control of the murderous organization that is called the PLO. . . . This is history's meanest murder organization, except for the armed Nazi organizations.

And of course, in the light of day, autonomy is a failure. The PA government is corrupt, the people poor, their economy dependent on outside support. From Wikipedia (emphasis added):

In 2013, $1.1 billion was contributed to UNRWA, of which $294 million was contributed by the United States, $216.4 million from the EU, $151.6 million from Saudi Arabia, $93.7 million from Sweden, $54.4 million from Germany, $53 million from Norway, $34.6 million from Japan, $28.8 million from Switzerland, $23.3 million from Australia, $22.4 million from the Netherlands, $20 million from Denmark, $18.6 million from Kuwait, $17 million from France, $12.3 million from Italy, $10.7 million from Belgium as well as $10.3 million from all other countries.
In 2016, the United States contributed $368 million to the agency, and $350 million in 2017, but has cut around one third of its contributions for 2018. In January 2018, the United States withheld $65 million, roughly half the amount due in the month, again creating a financial crisis for UNRWA. Belgium and Netherlands plan to increase their contributions to UNRWA.
In August 2018, the United States cut its annual contribution of $360m to UNWRA. In mid-2019, Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland temporarily suspended funding to UNRWA. In December 2019, Netherlands restored funding to UNWRA, increasing its donation by €6 million for 2019, to €19 million.

If the Arabs have been unable from the 1977 Autonomy Plan until now, to either effectively rule themselves or build an independent economy, even with a never-ending pipeline of foreign money, how will Trump’s money make any difference at all? The peace has never arrived because the Arabs do not want lots of money and some Jewish land for their state. They want all the land, and they want the Jews gone. Ignoring these realities, Trump asks Israel to pretend that this time, with his plan, things will be different: the Arabs will build Canada on Israel's border, bearing nothing but maple syrup and goat's milk fudge. At least that is the message conveyed to the people of Israel by President Trump by way of Ambassador Friedman:

“I understand them, but [we are saying] you don’t have to live with that Palestinian state, you have to live with the Palestinian state when the Palestinians become Canadians. And when the Palestinians become Canadians all your issues should go away.”

Alas and alack, the Palestinian Authority will never be other than what it is, the "meanest murder organization" save the Nazis: a terrorist regime. In spite of this, Trump asks Israel to look the other way, to give the PA a state on Jewish land, a state that will sit on Israel’s border, run by the democratically-elected leader of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas, the man behind the Munich Massacre who succeeded Arafat, a president in the 15th year of a four-year term.

Abbas is Abbas. The same Abbas who uses his platform to incite the masses against the Jews.

Abbas has not changed and will not change.

Now we do not say that the PA, under Abbas, has no achievements. But unfortunately, the greatest achievement of the PA under Mahmoud Abbas has been ensuring the continuation of the pay-to-slay salaries to terrorists in Israeli prisons, in contravention of the Taylor Force Act. In its insistence on giving financial incentives to terror, the PA thumbs its nose at Taylor Force, Donald Trump, and America, and should this peace deal go forward, Trump will effectively be looking the other way.

This is quite bad enough. But Trump also asks Israel to reward the PA, to give them yet more Jewish land. Abbas and his PA, however, have never acted in good faith. They are bad actors and should not be rewarded, let alone with de jure recognition as a genuine state, even if they lie some more and say they'll behave. There is no doubt that hiding behind any such lies, the true intention of any such state is to continue as a belligerent welfare project perched along Israel’s border, poised to strike at the Jews.

Trump’s plan of partial Israeli sovereignty and a new Arab state, like all the plans before it, is not really new. It’s just more of the same salami tactics, no different really from the creation of Transjordan as the national homeland for the Arabs on 78% of the land that the British had already promised the Jews.

As the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun. From the time of the Brits, and way before, the world has pressured Israel to cut up its body like an ever-shrinking salami, to feed bits and pieces to the wolves outside the door, as it waits for a peace that never quite arrives.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

The 1931 British Census of Palestine includes an interesting observation:

In addition, however, to the development of this complex of religious communities, a political development has taken place, and the Jewish Community existing as legal entity, and created historically under a principle of religious freedom, has now a specifically political character. The following quotation descriptive of the community is extracted from Command Paper No. 1 700 of the 1st of July, 1922 :-

. . . The Jewish community in Palestine has its own political organs : an elected assembly for the direction of its domestic concerns elected councils in the towns : and an organization for the control of its schools. It has its elected Chief Rabbinate and Rabbinical Council for the direction of its religious affairs. The business is conducted in Hebrew as a vernacular language, and a Hebrew Press serves its " needs . It has its distinctive intellectual life and displays consider " able economic activity. This community, then, with its town and " country population, its political, religious and social organizations, " its own language, its own customs, its own life, has, in fact,' national ' " characteristics."

In fact, the Jewish Community is a " nationality ". The consciousness of the existence of this "nationality " has led the non-Jewish religious communities to a vague conception of an Arab "nationality ". This Arab " nationality " has no legal existence since there is no Arab community in any formal sense. Its basis is perhaps best described as an awareness, on the part of members of some of the non-Jewish religious communities, of the possibility of common factors in the aims of the several communities. This awareness found its expression in a request during the preparations for the census from the Arab Census Committee that persons enumerated at the census should be given the opportunity of declaring an Arab " nationality ".

While this is speaking about “nationality” from a legal perspective, realizing that the Jews of Palestine had even in 1922 already become a cohesive community that acts and self-governs like a nation, it is striking that it notes that there is no similar Arab consciousness of nationality.

Of course, the word “Palestinian” is not mentioned. They were taking about a general Arab nationality, not specifically Palestinian Arab national feelings, which of course virtually did not exist at the time.