Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, January 24, 2011

More Guardian lies about "Palestine Papers"

The Guardian writes:

Palestinian negotiators accept Jewish state, papers reveal

But did they?

Read on:

Palestinian negotiators privately accepted Israel's demand that it define itself as a Jewish state, the leaked papers reveal, while Israeli leaders pressed for the highly controversial transfer of some of their own Arab citizens into a future Palestinian state as part of a land-swap deal.

[B]ehind closed doors in November 2007, Erekat told Tzipi Livni, the then Israeli foreign minister and now opposition leader: "If you want to call your state the Jewish state of Israel you can call it what you want," comparing it to Iran and Saudi Arabia's definition of themselves as Islamic or Arab.

Erekat's quote continues on in the actual memo, "This is their issue, not mine."

The Guardian is purposefully mischaracterizing what Erekat said. He's even said the exact same thing in public! Israel, he says, can define itself as it wishes, but the Palestinian Arabs will not accept it.

So he was not in any way accepting Israel as a Jewish state, unlike how the Guardian phrases it.

The Guardian also tries to spin Livni as wanting to "transfer" Arabs:

The-then Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, repeatedly pressed in 2007-08 for the "transfer" of some of Israel's own Arab citizens into a future Palestinian state as part of a land-swap deal that would exchange Palestinian villages now in Israel for Jewish settlements in the West Bank

What did the Israelis really say?

Tzipi Livni: We have this problem with Raja in Lebanon. Terje Larsen put the blue line to cut the village in two. [This needs to be addressed.] We decided not to cut the village. It was a mistake. The problem now – those living on Lebanese soil are Israeli citizens.

Udi Dekel: Barka, Barta il Sharqiya, Barta il [Garbiya], Betil, Beit Safafa…

Ahmed Qurei: This will be difficult. All Arabs in Israel will be against us.

Tal Becker: We will need to address it some how. Divided. All Palestinian. All Israeli.

Tzipi Livni: We will need to address it one way or another.

Ahmed Qurei: Of course – it is in borders and territory.

Livni was saying that it is unacceptable to have villages divided arbitrarily, and what a nightmare it is for Ghajar in Lebanon. She, and Tal Becker, are saying that the villages should be in one state or another, not to continue to be divided. She is not advocating "transfer" in the way that the term is used, as ethnic cleansing. Since there would be land swaps anyway, this was an idea she floated, and that the PLO rejected out of hand. (Which indicates how much they want "Palestine" to be the state of "Palestinians.")

Al Jazeera is even worse.

From reading the memos it is clear that both sides were just floating ideas, looking for reactions, trying to get an idea of how the other side thinks about a variety of issues. The talks are very informal. To characterize them on either side as saying that "one side offered this" and "one side rejected that" is ridiculous; the memos reveal (from the Palestinian Arab perspective) the mindset of the players and which "red lines"are pinker than others, but one cannot conclude from them that anything was really up for grabs.

Arab protests intensify. Must be Israel's fault.

Over the weekend, there were more violent protests in Algeria (where a second person died from putting himself on fire,) Yemen, Jordan, (and Albania.)

Today there were protests in Tunisia and Lebanon.

And Egypt is bracing for a major protest tomorrow.

Those damn Israelis!

UPDATE: No, I have no idea why HuffPo chose this old post of mine to link to. I have stuff about the protests from, like today.

Palestinian Arabs really mad at Al Jazeera for "Palestine Papers"

The fallout from Palileaks continues....

Besides Yasser Abed Rabbo's attack on the Emir of Qatar this morning for supposedly being behind the "Palestine Papers," we have...

A mob - no doubt "spontaneous" - attacked the Al Jazeera offices in the West Bank. They broke in and vandalized the office.

Hani al-Qawasmi of Fatah said that Al Jazeera was working to create discord among Palestinian Arabs. He questioned the timing of the news, at the same time that the PLO is trying to get a Security Council resolution to condemn Israeli communities across the Green Line. He then went on a general rant about Al Jazeera's supposed Zionist bias, by interviewing Israelis, and saying that the channel was dedicated to "destroying the social fabric of the Arab nation."

PLO executive committee member Ahmed Qurei called for an emergency meeting of the movement to condemn the "organized and directed campaign" of Al Jazeera against the Palestinian Arab people. He reiterated that the network is only serving Israeli interests.

A spokesman for the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades also slammed Al Jazeera, noting the draft Security Council resolution and saying that just when the Palestinian Arabs had the Us and Israel on the ropes, along comes the "Palestine papers" to royally screw everything up.

Schadenfreude!

The Guardian, the PalArabs, Israel and the truth

The divergence between how the Guardian is spinning the Palestine Papers release and how the actual leaders of the Palestinian Arabs are reacting teaches us volumes.

So while the Guardian decries supposed Palestinian Arab weakness in recognizing what every sane person does, that Israel will never give up the major Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem...

Palestinian concessions roll on. The Israeli settlements around East Jerusalem? Sold, two years ago...

..the Palestinian Arabs are decrying the idea that they would even consider compromise. Erekat:

In the past few hours, a number of reports have surfaced regarding our positions in our negotiations with Israel, many of which have misrepresented our positions, taking statements and facts out of context.

Other allegations circulated in the media have been patently false. But any accurate representation of our positions will show that we have consistently stood by our people’s basic rights and international legal principles.

Indeed, our position has been the same for the past 19 years of negotiations: We seek to establish a sovereign and independent Palestinian state along the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital and to reach a just solution to the refugee issue based on their international legal rights, including those set out in UNGA 194.

Even though many ideas have been discussed by the two sides as part of the normal negotiations process, including some we could never agree to, we have consistently said any proposed agreement would have to gain popular support through a national referendum.

No agreement will be signed without the approval of the Palestinian people.

And Mahmoud Abbas is even saying that any hint of flexibility in the leaked documents actually reflect Israeli positions, not PalArab positions!

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Monday that leaked Palestinian negotiation documents deliberately confuse the positions of either side, according to Reuters.

"There was an intentional mix-up. I have seen them [Al-Jazeera] present things as Palestinian but in fact they were Israeli... This is therefore intentional," Abbas said in Cairo.

PLO executive committee member Yasser Abed Rabbo, who was in the negotiations, echoes his pride at Palestinian Arab intransigence:

We did not agree to any proposal regarding east Jerusalem. The only position to which we adhere is Abbas' position that east Jerusalem, according to the 67 borders, belongs to us.

So we are left with two possibilities. Either the Palestinian Arabs were the flexible parties and Israel the intransigent ones, which means that Abbas, Abed Rabbo and Erekat are lying now, or Israel was always the more flexible party and the Guardian is lying now.

We also see from the Guardian's screed that the newspaper is not interested in a real peace, but in forcing Israel to make all the concessions and rewarding the Palestinian Arabs for their decades of terror and refusal to accept Israel as a reality.

Of course, while some details about what Tzipi Livni offered might raise an eyebrow or two, everything Israel has said about the negotiations has been very consistent through the years, and consistent with what the leaks say. The Israeli leadership has repeated the mantra often enough: "We will have to make painful compromises for peace."

Those words about compromise were never uttered by any Palestinian Arab leader or negotiator, because the entire idea of compromise is foreign to them. Especially when they have cheerleaders like the Guardian ready to support their intransigence (and insult the very idea of compromise.) Behind closed doors, perhaps, they float an idea or two, but they can rest assured that their people who they themselves have indoctrinated to hate will reject any plans they pretended to accept to make the US happy.

Israel's position towards compromise has been vindicated. The Abbas regime's intransigence has been verified. And the only side that has nothing to hide is Israel.

Not that the Guardian would ever admit that.

Elliott Abrams on "Palestine Papers"

It is always nice to see some analysis from someone who was there....

First, some of the papers seem inaccurate to me, going solely by memory. They put into people’s mouths words I do not recall them saying in meetings I attended. This is not shocking: written records of meetings can be inaccurate even when there’s a serious effort at accuracy. Moreover, Palestinian officials reviewing the documents after the meetings may have “improved” them, putting words in their own mouths (rather in the way our own members of Congress can “revise and extend” their remarks to improve them) or with less friendly objectives putting words in the mouths of others. Or, I may have missed parts of meetings or simply not be recalling accurately. But I would not take every one of these documents as necessarily 100% accurate.

Second, these negotiations over possible compromises will surprise no American and no Israeli. In the United States and in Israel there have been twenty years of discussions of the compromises needed for a final status agreement. This has not been the case among Palestinians, where the debate has been far less free. There are still constant calls among Palestinians and in Arab capitals for a complete return to the 1967 “borders,” which are in fact the 1949 armistice lines and to which there will never be a return. Palestinians may be surprised to learn that their negotiators understood this quite well and that the negotiations were actually about how far from the 1949 lines a final deal might go.

Third, what some newspapers are calling “offers” or “agreements” made in the 2007-2008 negotiations are far less than that–are in fact most often preliminary probes or efforts to smoke out the other side. The Israelis and Palestinians never reached an agreement and in many areas, as the papers so far published show, were very far apart. It is often said that “everyone knows what a final status agreement will look like” but these documents powerfully undermine that conclusion; a good example here is the Palestinian refusal to accept that Maale Adumim, a “settlement” with a population just short of 40,000 that is actually a suburb of Jerusalem, will remain part of Israel. It may be true that the range of options is limited, but the negotiators never concluded on agreement and the proposal made by then-prime minister Olmert in 2008 was not accepted.

The release of these “Palestine Papers” may be healthy. Anything that helps Palestinian public opinion move toward greater realism about the compromises needed for peace is useful. The impact on specific individuals is a different matter, one to be played out in the coming days.

Israeli diplomat strike over

From YNet:

After four weeks of disruptions, strikes and protests – the Foreign Ministry employees committee has put an end to the diplomats' strike.

Chairman of the Professional Union Department in the Histadrut Avi Nisankorn said: "The Foreign Ministry employees stand at the forefront of the international stage and as representatives of Israel carrying out essential work, they are entitled to fair and suitable salary provisions.

"Among other things, the agreement creates incentives for employees to take on positions in difficult countries and to serve with excellence. This is an important step in strengthening and promoting the Foreign Service in Israel."

The employees are set to resume work immediately. The visit of Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel is set to go ahead as planned in spite of previous concerns.

This is the best news of the day.

While it is easy to deride Israel's outreach efforts, the Wikileaks cables tells us that there is a lot that diplomats do behind the scenes. They are the eyes and ears of the nation abroad and they are relied upon to make the correct recommendations and speak with the right people at the right times.

It may not be coincidental that it was during this strike that many of the South American countries recognized "Palestine." This is something that the Foreign Ministry might have been able to forestall or at limit damage from.

Welcome back.

Egyptian man confesses to role in church bombings

From Al Arabiya:

Egypt’s Interior Ministry announced Sunday that an Egyptian man helped the Palestinian Army of Islam group in the bombing of Alexandria church on New Year’s Eve.

According to a statement issued by the Egyptian Interior Ministry during the ceremony to mark Police Day, the man the group recruited is called Ahmed Lofti Ibrahim, born in 1984 in Alexandria and a graduate of the Faculty of Arts, Library Science Department.
Lotfi, who was arrested and is currently in detention, admitted in writing that he sneaked in to the Gaza Strip in 2008 after subscribing to the ideologies of al-Qaeda and deciding to take part in Jihad, or holy war, for which the group calls.

During his stay in Gaza, Ibrahim got in touch with the Palestinian Army of Islam and its members convinced him that targeting Christian and Jewish places of worship is part of the Jihad he is seeking to take part in.

After returning to Egypt, the statement added, Ibrahim stayed in contact with members of the Palestinian Army of Islam and in 2010, they asked him to watch several churches and synagogues in preparation for carrying out terrorist attacks.

In October, Ibrahim suggested to members of the group two churches next to where he lives, one of them was the Two Saints Church that was targeted on New Year’s Eve. He also suggested a synagogue, also in Alexandria and took several pictures of the Two Saints Church, which he sent to the group.

According to the statement, the group asked Ibrahim to find accommodation for members of the group who would come to Alexandria to carry out the operation and to provide them with a car.

Ibrahim, the statement said, was the one who suggested that the operation be suicidal. Then he left the country to undergo a surgery in his ear.

In December, the group contacted Ibrahim and told him the militants who were to carry out the operation were ready. The head of operations in the Palestinian Army of Islam later called him and congratulated him after the bombing took place and thanked him for the role he played.

I find this part interesting:

Hamas denied the presence of any link between al-Qaeda and resistance fighters in the Gaza Strip and called upon Egypt to provide proof of the involvement of the Palestinian Army of Islam in the Alexandria church bombing.

Hamas spokesman Taher al-Nounou told Reuters earlier that al-Qaeda has no operatives in the Gaza Strip and that all Palestinian groups only direct their attacks against Israel.

The Palestinian Army of Islam also issued a statement denying the group’s involvement in the bombing and its spokesman Abu Muthana accused the Mossad of planning the attack in a statement to AFP.

I don't think that anyone is saying that the Palestinian Army of Islam directly reports to Osama Bin laden, just that they subscribe to the same jihadist philosophy as Al Qaeda.

So why is Hamas so adamant to insist that a group, supposedly not associated with Hamas, is not aligned with Al Qaeda?

The reason can be found in the other part of Hamas' statement: "all Palestinian groups only direct their attacks against Israel." If Egypt considers Gaza a source of terror (which, of course, it already did, blaming Gaza groups for the rockets in Aqaba and other attacks) then Hamas' problems are doubled. They need to maintain relatively friendly relations with Egypt, the ability for their members to travel there, and the ability to smuggle in goods and weapons while maintaining deniability. Hamas certainly does not want the Rafah border crossing to be hostile.

But Hamas does have close ties to Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, which would love to see a Tunisia-type uprising in Egypt. In fact, the Hamas takeover of Gaza gave the Brotherhood hope for something similar in Egypt. The Egyptian leadership is, of course, quite sensitive to that possibility.

This being Al Arabiya, of course the idea that this is all an Israeli plot cannot be dismissed:

According to Dr. Samir Ghattas, expert on al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups, the Interior Ministry statement clarifies that the involvement the Palestinian Army of Islam is a fact and argued that the group has a presence in Egypt as well as other countries.

“The fact that the group recruited someone from Egypt means that it managed to infiltrate the country and form terrorist cells there,” he said. “The minister said Egyptian authorities have proof of that and we will know about this proof within a few days.”

Ghattas added that the group carried out this operation for other regional powers like Iran, Hamas or perhaps Israel.

“The Palestinian Army of Islam is just a tool in the hands of these powers.”

Iranian conference on "Hollywoodism"

From Tehran Times:

Foreign guests invited to Fajr film festival will be discussing the impact of Hollywood in the world of cinema.

Organizers of the Fajr International Film Festival are holding a conference entitled “Hollywoodism and Cinema” on the sidelines of the event on February 6 and 7, Culture Ministry official Gholamreza Montazemi said in a press conference held on Sunday.

French actor and political activist famous for his anti-Zionist attitudes Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, American documentary filmmaker Abdullah Hashem, and French director and screenwriter Mathieu Kassovitz are among the invited guests who will be taking part in the conference, he added.

The conference will be held on different themes including Zionism and Hollywood, terrorism and Hollywood, Hollywood and Satanism and the American lifestyle in Hollywood.

Isn't "Hollywood and Zionism" and "Hollywood and Satanism" redundant?

I hope they give out transcripts. There would be enough blog material for a month!

Palestine Papers, day 2: PLO reactions

It is a new day and there are a lot more reactions to the publication of the so-called "Palestine Papers" by Al Jazeera.

I will not go so far as some are to dismiss them as forgeries. There are too many details and too many documents. The Guardian claims that they have been authenticated, and while I am no fan of the Guardian they have incentive to validate them - newspapers do not want to be known to fall for hoaxes like the fake Howard Hughes diaries. The downside for the Guardian is simply too great to think that they did not make a good effort to prove that they are really minutes of meetings from the Palestinian Arab side.

I do believe that the papers reflect the PLO viewpoint of the negotiations, and in many details they might be at odds with the Israeli or American interpretations of those same meetings. We have seen many times that the two sides simply speak different languages.

Another important point to remember is that the PLO knows its own political roadblocks far better than the Israelis or Americans do. While America will push the PLO to make concessions - and the PLO cannot stand up to the US in private the way they proudly do in public - the Arabs know very well that some of the concessions will simply not fly; not for their people and not for the Arab League. They could pretend to put forth supposed peace plans secure in the knowledge that there is no real political way to push them through,and then they can go back to the Americans and say that the "Palestinian street" has tied their hands; they must ask for a few dozen more concessions and put the ball back in Israel's court.

While every Israeli leader across the political spectrum has been relatively honest with the people about the needs for "painful compromises for peace," the PA and PLO never did that. So it is really amusing to see how they are reacting to the release.

Saeb Erekat says that "Al-Jazeera's information is full of distortions and fraud."

Ahmed Qureia, one of the PLO leaders who was involved in the negotiations, said that these were "fabrications" and that Al Jazeera was working for Zionist interests by releasing them.

Qureia is quoted in one of the papers as discussing the Kadima primaries with Tzipi Livni, and telling her "I would vote for you." It can't be good for his career to say nice things to the person who was foreign minister during Operation Cast Lead!

Yasser Abed Rabbo, another member of the PLO Executive Committee, is going further and slamming Qatar (al-Jazeera's home) for being behind the leaks. He is demanding that the Emir of Qatar come clean on his own contacts with Israel and Iran, and says that Al Jazeera would never have done this without the Emir's pushing them to.

Abed Rabbo's statements, incidentally, indicate that the Palestinian Arab (West Bank) media wouldn't publish anything big without the approval of the PA and PLO!

Finally, one can expect that the leakers will be looking over their shoulders for quite a while, hoping that no bullets are heading their way. They are the ones that had the real agenda, and there are only so many people who should have had access to these documents.

(See also Noah Pollak's analysis. Also in Commentary, a good piece by Emanuele Ottolenghi.)

The medicine wars between Hamas and the PA

From Ma'an:

The Palestinian Authority Health Ministry on Sunday released the names of employees who it claimed were dismissed by security forces in Gaza.

The Ramallah ministry demanded that the employees were reinstated to their positions in medicine warehouses in the Gaza Strip to facilitate the provision of medicine to residents.

The PA ministry also demanded that the Gaza government placed all medical aid from international donors under the administration of the main warehouses in Gaza.

It further accused the Hamas-led government of charging patients for medicines provided for free by the PA. President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree exempting Gaza residents from paying for medicine, the ministry noted.

The two ministries regularly trade accusations in an ongoing spat. The Gaza government has accused the PA of failing to meet its responsibilities to the Strip, warning several times that the health sector was on the verge of collapse.

The PA responded that Hamas was stockpiling donated medicine for use by party members, and accused Gaza security forces of dismissing Fatah-affiliated staff.

Fatah-associated media has gone further, saying that Hamas diverts the medicines away from hospitals and towards Hamas-affiliated pharmacies, where hospital patients' families are forced to buy medicine not available in hospitals.

The implication is that Hamas, by demanding more medicine from Ramallah and claiming that the medical system is on the verge of collapse, is actually using those medicines as a means to get cash to finance its own infrastructure.

Anti-semitism as a tool of Arab regimes (Mudar Zahran)

Mudar Zahran is a London-based Jordanian writer who I have previously reported was the object of public death threats from people in his home country. This article in Hudson-NY shows one reason why.

For more than sixty years of conflict, the carefully government-channeled hatred revolved around Zionism and Israel, rather than around Judaism and Jews.

Since 2008, however, the Jordanian printed media has been launching a fierce attack on almost everything Jewish.

Why would the supposedly-moderate Jordan adopt a strong anti-Semitic agenda?

The answer to this question is simple; Jordan's oppressed Palestinian majority has been seeking more civil rights in the last few years. Therefore, the Jordanian government has to distract them by igniting anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Arab regimes apparently needed a new method to direct their own people's anger towards someone else. The US and Europe were, of course, out of the question, and the communist "infidel" states were no longer in existence. Again, Arab regimes were stuck with Israel as "the source of all evil" with no way for regimes to revive that notion: their people have become fed up after decades of propaganda. The Arab regimes' "Plan B" was to ignite an even larger religious zeal by constantly reminding their people that the Israelis are "a part of a larger Jewish scheme of controlling the world."

Today, the message has dramatically changed; media language and definitions have been surgically altered by many Arab governments. The term "Zionist" has turned into "Jews," and, for the more moderate Arab media, "Peace talks" into "Jewish opposition to peace…or world peace."

The growing trend of anti-Semitism on Arab TV shows has been vigorously picking up momentum the last few years. Anti-Semitic-themed shows have become common on many of the 300-plus Arab satellite networks, including TV Channels and media outlets owned by theoretically pro-Western Arab governments are no exception -- crossing the line from anti-Semitism to open support for terrorism.

Read the whole thing.