Ruthie Blum: IDF purity of arms and Palestinian Authority bloodlust
WITHOUT SKIPPING a beat, US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf told reporters in a phone briefing on Wednesday that “the security conditions on the West Bank do concern us greatly, but they also concern Israel and they also concern the Palestinian Authority.”Abu Mazen is trying to blackmail Israel
Never mind that the PA is at fault for those conditions, which make a mockery of the rules of Israeli engagement that place heroes like Falah in extra peril.
“Our part in this is to ensure that, to the greatest degree possible, security cooperation is robust and continuing,” she said, adding incomprehensibly, “but those other things are done around and outside that security cooperation that sustains it.”
She went on to spew the same old platitude, proven time and again to be totally false, about how improving “economic conditions” in the West Bank and Gaza “can help and sustain improvement in security conditions.”
Not a word about PA and Hamas terrorism. Perhaps Lapid and Gantz didn’t mind so much, since they tend to agree with her overall assessment.
They also must be patting themselves on the back for responding so forcefully about the IDF doctrine that Foggy Bottom slightly eased up on its criticism. Ironically, it did so before Falah was killed, through US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides and State Department spokesman Ned Price.
“Israel is a sovereign country and will make their own decisions,” Nides said on Monday at The Jerusalem Post Annual Conference in New York.
“No one knows the IDF’s processes and procedures better than the IDF,” Price told the press during his daily briefing on Tuesday. “And so, it is not on us or any other country or entity to say precisely what the IDF or any military or security organization around the world should do.”
On the other hand, he stressed, “It is incumbent on us to continue to underscore the importance that we place on mitigating civilian harm and taking steps, including revised policies and procedures, that would mitigate the possibility of civilian harm.”
Falah is but a single casualty of Israel’s gargantuan efforts over the years to avoid hurting civilians, including those used by terrorists as human shields. May he rest in peace, while the IDF remembers that it’s at war.
On Wednesday, terrorists in the West Bank opened fire at an IDF checkpoint, killing Bar Falah, a thirty-year-old major. Falah’s comrades quickly killed the shooters, one of whom was a Palestinian Authority (PA) security officer. Last week, thanks to good luck and the vigilance of police, a major terrorist attack in Tel Aviv was thwarted. Yoni Ben Menachem believes these and many other recent incidents are not so much the result of the aging PA president Mahmoud Abbas losing his grip on the reins of power, but of his decision to resume violence:Mark Regev: Israel can engage with Mahmoud Abbas despite Holocaust revisionism
Abbas is trying to blackmail Israel and the U.S.; he sees the new wave of terrorism that broke out independently in the field as a lever of pressure on Israel in everything related to creating a “political horizon” and renewing negotiations about the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
Abbas, who has reached the end of his political career, is not interested in calming the situation. So long as the armed terrorists do not threaten the Muqata in Ramallah, [the Palestinian equivalent of the White House], and he has American and European backing as well as that of moderate Arab countries, he feels that this is the right time to squeeze major concessions out of Israel. . . .
Next week the PA president will go to New York to deliver his annual speech at the UN General Assembly. The PA has been engaged in a political campaign for several weeks now with the aim of obtaining the agreement of the United Nations to recognize “Palestine” with full membership in the organization. Today it has the status of an observer state. Israel strongly opposes this move. President Biden also opposes it, and last week he sent Barbara Leaf, a U.S. assistant secretary of state, to Ramallah. Abbas refused to meet with her, but in a meeting with Hussein al-Sheikh, [his deputy and likely successor], she clarified her position that the U.S. might veto the Palestinian request in the Security Council.
Abbas is playing with fire and if he doesn’t come to his senses he may end his rule just like Yasir Arafat: Operation Protective Shield in 2002 resulted [effectively in the end of Yasir Arafat’s political power]. If Abas pushes Israel into a corner, another IDF operation in Judea and Samaria in the style of Protective Shield may bring him closer to the end of his rule.
Over the years, Abbas has repeatedly revisited such themes. In 2018, at a meeting of the Palestinian National Council, he stated that European Jews were massacred because of their “social role related to usury and banks.”
Unfortunately, Abbas’s comments are reflective of a Palestinian society plagued by antisemitic stereotypes, where spurious references to the Holocaust are pervasive.
It is not just the ubiquitous charge that the IDF acts with Nazi-type brutality, or that the crimes of the Holocaust are deliberately magnified for political purposes; rather, it is widely accepted that the Palestinians themselves, and not the Jews, are the ultimate victims of the Holocaust.
In this skewed narrative, the Palestinians lost their homeland to pay for Europe’s crimes against the Jews, as if their political leadership was on the right side of history during the genocide.
Forgotten is Grand Mufti Amin Husseini, the preeminent Palestinian political leader of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, who was the Arab world’s chief Nazi exponent and spent World War II in Berlin, broadcasting Hitler’s propaganda to the Middle East.
Husseini was aware of, and supported, the Holocaust, encouraging Bosnian Muslims to volunteer for the Waffen SS. At the end of the war, he fled Europe to escape prosecution by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. He eventually surfaced in Gaza in 1948 to be elected president of the All-Palestine Government, despite his notorious Nazi affiliations.
The current Palestinian leader has nothing critical to say about Husseini’s wartime activities; instead, Abbas prefers to propagate bogus theories of Zionist-Nazi collaboration. But while Abbas’s revisionism is very real, he nonetheless can be seen as one in a long list of unsavory characters with whom Zionists have negotiated.
Zionist negotiations with antisemites, pogrom participants
In 1903, Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, met with tsarist interior minister Vyacheslav Plehve, who many held responsible for the Kishinev pogrom. Herzl had few illusions about his counterpart, but the goal was to enlist Russia’s support for a Jewish state that could absorb the masses of persecuted Jews of the tsarist empire.
In 1921, Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky met with the Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura, who had been accused of complicity in pogroms in which thousands of Jews were murdered. Jabotinsky sought Petliura’s support for the establishment of Jewish military units that could protect Ukraine’s Jews from future pogroms.
Most well known, in 1933, Haim Arlosoroff, the head of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, negotiated an arrangement with Germany’s new Nazi regime. The Ha’avara Agreement enabled the emigration of some 60,000 German Jews to Mandatory Palestine, saving their lives.
THE AFOREMENTIONED negotiations provided Israel’s enemies with ammunition for allegations of Zionist collusion with antisemites. Such accusations were a staple of Soviet anti-Israel propaganda throughout the 1970s and 1980s (when Abbas wrote his PhD in Moscow) and were echoed by the hard left across the West, reemerging in the UK in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.
Zionists weren't complicit, they practiced realpolitik
But rather than proving a nefarious complicity between Zionists and Jew-haters, these diplomatic efforts by Zionist leaders merely demonstrate the omnipresence of political realism in all international relations. This type of realpolitik, decried by the Soviets when exercised by Zionists, was a practice in which they themselves were consummate specialists.