Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

10/15 Links Pt2: Islamic Help funds Hamas charitable front; Tear Down this Opera

From Ian:

Islamic Help funds Hamas charitable front

Islamic Help, a large British charity, has revealed that it is funding projects run by the Gaza-based Al-Falah Benevolent Society (a.k.a. Al-Falah Society or Al-Falah Charitable Society), which, according to the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre, is one of “Hamas’s charitable societies”.
Al-Falah is run by Ramadan Tamboura (aka Ramadan Tanbura), whom Ha’aretz newspaper describes as a “a well-known Hamas figure”. One of Al-Falah’s Directors, Jamal Hamdi al-Haddad, also manages one of Hamas’ Hebrew-language education programmes, entitled “Know Your Enemy”.
A number of extremist charities have also funded Al Falah, including: Interpal, a British charity banned under US law as a terrorist organisation; the Muslim World League, a Saudi charity that promotes fundamentalist Islam and is accused of providing financial support to a considerable number of terrorist organisations; the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, a Saudi-funded youth organisation that published anti-Shia and anti-Jewish literature; and Children in Deen, a British ‘aid convoy’ charity which was used by British suicide bomber Abdul Waheed Majeed to travel to war-torn Syria in 2013.
Islamic Help also funds the Islamic Society of Gaza, a Hamas-run organisation whose leading officials have included Ahmad Bahr, a senior Hamas leader who has said: “Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one.”

Will Westin Bonaventure permit anti-Israel discrimination on its premises?

The ASA is having its annual meeting in Los Angeles in early November at the Westin Bonaventure. The ASA has stated that it will apply its boycott rules to exclude from the conference Israeli academic institutions and any individual Israeli academics who are there on behalf of their institutions or who hold administrative capacity (e.g. Dean). Only individual Israelis who pass the test of not being there in a representative capacity will be allowed to attend.
These rules are unique to Israelis, and constitute national origin discrimination and potentially religious discrimination in violation of California’s expansive anti-discrimination and public accommodation laws. That puts the Westin Bonaventure at legal risk, because those discriminatory rules are being applied at a conference on its premises.
The American Center for Law and Justice, headed by Jay Sekulow, has sent a letter to the Westin Bonaventure, its owner and operating management, alerting them to the Westin Bonaventure’s legal risk and obligations.

Sound and Fury on the Israeli Left

Anyone who is unfamiliar with the rhetoric of the Israeli left might want to check out responses from Peace Now and Haaretz to the recent purchase of homes in Jerusalem – by Jews. With predictable frenzy they anticipated the imminent collapse of morality in the Jewish state after Jews moved into their new homes in Silwan, a few meters south of the Old City, duly purchased from a willing Arab seller. Arab property owners in Silwan denied any sale and initiated “legal procedures” to nullify it.
“The implication of this offensive act,” declared Peace Now, “has far reaching consequences.” With a mastery of arithmetic that would make any third-grader proud, it reported that 6 buildings, comprising 20 housing units, could increase “the settler presence” by 35%, enlarging the number of Jews by one hundred. For Peace Now, that is a shanda of monumental proportions, posing a severe threat to the population of Silwan, which already includes 500 Jews – and 50,000 Arabs. This “unjust and dangerous reality” climaxes more than twenty years during which “the Israeli government and police are allowing and supporting” settlements.
An editorial in Haaretz (October 10) condemned the occupancy by “dozens of Jewish settlers” in an “East Jerusalem Arab neighborhood” as proof that Prime Minister Netanyahu is “an enthusiastic supporter of annexing the territories and of handing the State of Israel . . . to the settlers.” The “seizure” of homes in Silwan was “another nail in the coffin of the peace process” – which, Haaretz concluded, was its intended purpose. But Israel’s “illegitimate colonialist policies” would surely “infuriate not only the Arab world but also Israel’s closest friends.” House buying in Jerusalem (but only by Jews) was “a destructive move,” which “could exacerbate the tense situation and spark another round of violence.”

Homemade (fireworks) rocket launcher in Jerusalem

This must be part of the "peaceful resistance" that Mahmoud Abbas loves to praise.

More from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

London, October 15 - Following a vote in the House of Commons Monday to grant symbolic recognition to a Palestinian state, Parliament passed a similar non-binding motion to grant the same recognition to the Pétain government of Nazi-occupied France.

The vote, which passed by the same 274-12 margin as the Palestine recognition measure, does not officially change government policy on theVichy state. Its symbolic nature functions primarily as a diplomatic and political statement, and does not require the Conservative government headed by David Cameron to issue such recognition. It was intended to prod warring factions to sit at the negotiating table, in the same way that recognizing Palestine is supposed to demonstrate that intransigence in negotiations is rewarded.

By favoring recognition for the Pétain government based in Vichy, Parliament thus intends to get the Free French and other anti-Nazi resistance organizations to soften their positions. The latter have been fighting to oust the Wehrmacht from areas of France they occupied in 1940, but Parliament and other international bodies would rather see them compromise, perhaps by getting the resistance movements to allow the Nazis to torture, imprison, and execute at least some citizens.

Compromise with Nazi Germany has worked well before, notes MP Ed Miliband of Labor. "Once Prime Minister Chamberlain came back from the Continent with piece of paper that guaranteed Peace in Our Time by letting Hitler have the Sudetenland, we got a full year before actual war broke out," he says. "If we can get the French to agree to roll over now, we might get as much as eight months of quiet on the western front."

Debate preceding the vote features speaker after speaker denouncing the behavior of the resistance groups, calling their actions "terrorism" and their treatment of German fighters as "barbaric." "We cannot in good conscience allow the French resistance to continue treating the Nazis with such consistent inhumanity and not face consequences," said Labor MP Joseph Goebbels of Berlin. "They must be taught a lesson."

French officials downplayed the significance of the vote, dismissing it as posturing. "The British have been making meaningless proclamations for some time now," said Free French leader Charles de Gaulle. "Remember the Balfour Declaration?"

10/15 Links Pt1: Support Allies, Not Terrorists; 'Palestinians want to destroy the Jewish state'

From Ian:

Support Allies, Not Terrorists

For the moment and against the odds, Kobani stands. Kurdish men and women, abandoned by the United States and watched but not aided by Turkey, hold the line against the sweep of ISIS across Iraq and Syria; one little point of heroism that may be gone by the time you read this. ISIS, on the other hand -- well-financed, armed, vicious, and fighting on toward Baghdad -- will assuredly not be gone.
So the Cairo meeting of Secretary of State John Kerry with UN General Secretary Ban Ki Moon and representatives of the EU, Qatar and Britain this weekend was probably a good thing, right? Just last week, a UN envoy was worried that massacres at Kobani would rival Srebrenica in the Bosnian war. Coordinated with President Obama and NSC, State and DOD meetings in Washington, an international meeting might decide a) how to take immediate steps to protect the tens of thousands of people left in the unfortunate city, b) how to pressure the Turks to provide serious support, and c) how the U.S. "air only" war plan needs to be revised in the absence of "allied" troops on the ground.
Since no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, and this one survived less well than others, there is no shame in moving to Plan B. Except they were not discussing Kobani.
They were trying to raise $4 billion for the Gaza Strip, to remove the evidence of Hamas's rocket war against Israel and its own people. Israel was not represented.
The Cairo meeting, the brainchild of Egyptian President Sisi, appealed to Kerry, who appears still to think Palestinians hold the key to glory if not peace. Qatar pledged $1 billion, the U.S. $213 million, the UK $32 million and the EU 450 million Euros. In the court of international organizational politics, Kobani loses and the Palestinians, including the terrorist group Hamas, win.

UN and British hypocrisy

When he became U.N. secretary-general in 2007, Ban Ki-moon made clear he intended to restore the trust in the institution that had been lost. Ban has not fulfilled his goal. Hypocrisy and trust have never gone hand in hand. The only narrative that unites most nations represented at the U.N. is hatred of Israel.
The world is in turmoil, thousands of people are dying daily in bloody wars and the U.S. president admits the world is out of control, but Ban's main preoccupation is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nothing is easier or more popular to do than to blame Israel for all of the world's woes.
Ban undoubtedly saw difficult scenes in Gaza when he visited there on Tuesday. War is not a pleasant thing. If not for the Iron Dome, Ban would have seen similar scenes in Israel. With its massive rocket fire, Hamas sought to wreak death and destruction inside Israel. One would expect a decent and honest person to say, loud and clear, who caused the destruction in Gaza. It is not enough to merely say, in a weak voice, that Hamas is partly responsible, as Ban certainly knows that the international media will ignore his comments on Hamas and focus on the blame he placed on Israel.

'Palestinians want to destroy the Jewish state'

No one wants to be in Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon's shoes. The man who sits at the top of Israel's defense pyramid, approves all operational plans and has intimate knowledge of all the threats on all the fronts also has to deal with demands for cuts in the defense budget and with painful encounters with families of soldiers who were killed or wounded in battle. Less than two months after the conclusion of Operation Protective Edge, Israel's latest confrontation in Gaza, Ya'alon takes time for his first in-depth post-war media interview.
"I am morally at peace with the decisions we have made," the defense minister says as he explains the moral dilemmas he faced during the fighting. The objective was to target terrorists, but in reality many civilians -- Palestinians who are not fighters -- were hurt. "When I examine whether force needs to be used, I put myself to three tests: the first test is whether I would be able to look at myself in the mirror after the bombing or the operation that I would have approved. Then, I examine the situation from a legal perspective, in terms of our law as well as international law. If everyone were to participate in the discussions surrounding the approval of an operation, they would see for themselves that we deal with very complex dilemmas, like when to shoot, like the principle of 'thou shalt not kill,' or the sanctity of life, versus the notion that 'if someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.' And yes, I am at peace with the decisions we made during the course of Operation Protective Edge.
"We examine the proportionality and the morality and the sanctity of life on all sides, but the enemy does not adhere to international law or honor the morality of the value of human life, even toward their own fighters and civilians, who are sent to the front lines. The dilemmas are very difficult. Then the U.N. comes along and wants to investigate us. There is obvious hypocrisy here; they should investigate Hamas, but it is easier to criticize and attack us. There is a combination of hypocrisy, anti-Semitism and maybe other things."

Plenty of hate and lies in the UNRWA "human rights" curriculum

UNRWA is very proud of their human rights curriculum:

We have been delivering human rights education in our schools since 2000 to promote non-violence, healthy communication skills, peaceful conflict resolution, human rights, tolerance and good citizenship.

In May 2012, the Agency endorsed its new Human Rights, Conflict Resolution and Tolerance (HRCRT) Policy to further stregthen human rights education in UNRWA. This policy builds upon past successes, but also draws from international best practices and paves the way to better integrate human rights education in all our schools.

...In Gaza, we have developed a dedicated human rights curriculum.

Specialists from UNRWA, the Red Cross, human rights NGOs and the wider academic community developed the comprehensive curriculum, anchored in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All of our over 200,000 students have a dedicated human rights lesson each week.

All children are taught about:

Fundamental human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration

Their individual responsibilities, including tolerant behaviour

The history of the global struggle for human rights

The historical context that gave rise to the Universal Declaration.

I reported on Monday that the UNRWA Arabic "human rights" curriculum website includes antisemitic statements.

Other documents on that same site do not reflect any of the self-congratulatory standards that UNRWA boasts about in English.

Here is how another document on that same site describes the history of Zionism:

From the beginning the land of Palestine was the core of the conflict with the Zionist movement that founded the State of Israel. One of the decisions of the First Zionist Congress, which was held in the city of Basel in Switzerland in 1897, was that Palestine is a land without a people, and it is the duty of the Zionists to displace the world's Jews to live in Palestine, and since that day the Zionist movement has been working day and night on the theft of Palestinian land and the resettlement of Jews in our country.

In the catastrophe of 1948, the Jews committed massacres in order to displace the Palestinian people. Most of the Palestinian people migrated from the land of Palestine to become refugees in neighboring countries. Not only that, but the Zionists worked by all means in order to take over the remainder of the land from the hands of the Arabs who remained in their homes through their policy of Judaization of Arab land, and through the development of unjust laws, such as the confiscation of the land of absentee landlords and military reasons for the confiscation and seizure under the pretext of developing the Galilee and other laws.

The Basel program does not resemble how this "history" describes it in the least.

In short, UNRWA is teaching lies. Those lies turn directly into anti-Jewish incitement.

Which is only one way how the UNRWA "human rights" curriculum actually teaches hate.

Viral photo of Jew screaming at Arab woman holds a secret (UPDATE x4)

This photo went viral yesterday on Twitter and elsewhere, and was retweeted by Max Blumenthal among hundreds of others who expressed their disgust at the Jew for screaming at the poor, frightened Arab woman:

But if you look closer at the photo, you see something interesting.

The book that the Arab woman is holding is a Hebrew Psalms!

It seems that she grabbed the Psalms from the Jewish man - just in time for the photographer to show his reaction to having had a holy book stolen from him in broad daylight.

There are other photos from the scene that show another Arab woman physically assaulting the same Jew, although I don't know whether it was taken before or after the photo above::

In fact, it is the Muslim women who created a gauntlet at the Chain Gate where Jews were exiting the Temple Mount. This photo from the same photographer shows things a little more accurately:

(h/t Rotter via Bob Knot)

UPDATE: Another photo of the Muslim woman who grabbed the Jew, grabbing another Jew:

Who's intimidating whom again?

UPDATE 2: Israellycool and Bob Knot found (fuzzy) video of the scene; the woman seems to grab his Pslams at about 6 seconds in. It is clear that the Arab women are screaming at any Jews who pass by.

UPDATE 3: Bob found a much clearer video showing the exact sequence of events - just as we thought.

UPDATE 4: More photos showing her with the book and him going to retrieve it:

Saudi Arabia calls Iran an "occupier" of Syria

Them's fighting words!

Iran must withdraw its "occupying" forces from Syria to help resolve that country's conflict, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said Monday after talks with his German counterpart.

"Our reservations are about Iran's policy in the region, not about Iran as a country or people," the foreign minister said at a joint press conference in the Red Sea city of Jeddah with Germany's Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

"In many conflicts, Iran is part of the problem, not the solution," Prince Saud said, charging that Shiite-dominated Iran had forces in Syria "fighting Syrians."

"In this case, we can say that Iranian forces in Syria are occupying forces," aiding President Bashar al-Assad, whom he described as an "illegitimate" leader.

It seems apparent that Faisal is referring to Hezbollah, although there have been reports of Iranian soldiers in Syria as well.

There can't be a much worse insult in the Middle East Muslim world than to call someone an "occupier."

10/14 Links Pt2: Dinner in Baghdad with the Grand Mufti; Down To the Last Kurd; How Turkey Went Bad

From Ian:

Dinner in Baghdad with the Grand Mufti

She spoke English and Malay, not Arabic. She cut her hair short, wore western dresses, and thrived on progressive ideas. Being young and bright, she picked up Arabic quickly, but she was not about to cover her face, shroud her body or stop dancing.
The very traditional Baghdadi family she married into couldn’t accept her, and she didn’t understand what it was to grow up in fear as they did.They didn’t understand how she, a Jew and a woman, dared speak out and talk back.
When men on the streets taunted her children or cursed her for a being a Jew she cursed them, in English.
She met a young non-Jewish Syrian couple, a doctor and his wife, who were enchanted by her. “They loved me so much, they were Muslim and they loved me so much, ‘you are not like the other Jews, we like you,’” they told her.
She felt embraced by this couple and their eclectic group of Muslim and Christian friends.
Granny loved it all and defied the family. She refused to give up her freedom.
“They, (the Jews) were like mice, I didn’t understand,” Granny said; until the dinner party where the guest of honor was none other than Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
She sat in stunned silence as he spun his diatribe against the Jews of Palestine, Jews of Iraq, and the Jews of the world. She sat there quietly “like a mouse,” as a fear she had never felt before drowned out his words.
She never imagined “educated people” sitting around a dinner table listening to his plan to ethnically cleanse Jews out of the Middle East. She felt the hate and heard the silence of her friends.

Why Would a Peace Activist Fly to Iran With Sept. 11 Truthers and Other Crackpots?

Dear Medea Benjamin,
I address you because your recent participation in a Tehran conference of anti-Zionist zealots suggests a larger and graver moral and political folly afflicting many others as well—the legions who think that hatred of America and of Israel are decisive criteria, perhaps even qualifications, for membership in “the left.”
You believe in speaking truth to power. You have gone to jail to do so. I admire your courage. But the Islamic Republic of Iran is also a power. It makes war and supplies war criminals, not least in Syria. Amnesty International maintains a formidable roster of the Iranian regime’s crimes against human rights. Human Rights Watch reports about 2013 in Iran: “The judiciary released some political prisoners, but many civil society activists remained in prison on political charges.” You are a longtime activist against corporate globalization, a vigorous Ralph Nader supporter and Green candidate for governor of California in 2000, and co-founder of the nonviolent peace group Code Pink, launched in 2002 to oppose the impending Iraq war. My guess is that, if you were Iranian, you would be one of those civil society activists who are enduring terrible conditions in prison right now for opposing or even merely criticizing the rule of their clerical leaders.

Egyptian media report that a large factory for manufacturing rockets in the Sinai was discovered and destroyed by security forces.

Authorities said that the rockets were being manufactured for the Ansar Beit al-Maqdis jihad group.

Five tons of explosive materials were discovered and destroyed.

Egyptian security officials have always claimed that Hamas and Gaza terror groups were involved in Sinai terror activity. While those claims often seem exaggerated in their hate for everything related to the Muslim Brotherhood, in this case it seems that they are onto something. It seems likely that the Sinai jihadists have learned rocket manufacturing techniques from the Gaza terror groups.

Which means that the Egyptian crackdown on tunnels and travel between Gaza and Sinai really does have a solid security rationale behind it.

U of Manchester to decide whether to extend "twinning" with jihadist university

In 2007, University of Manchester students voted to "twin" with An Najah University of Ramallah, a hotbed of Hamas terrorism.

Already at that time An Najah had hosted an exhibition celebrating the Sbarro's pizza shop suicide bombing.

Has the twinning made An Najah more peaceful and supportive of a two-state solution? Of course not.

Here are some of the stories I've reported about An Najah University since then:

Professors from the school presented at a conference celebrating the poetry of Moammar Qaddafi,
One professor posted some antisemitic material on his own website.
One of their lecturers went on TV to say that Moses led Muslims out of Egypt to liberate Palestine.
Another of their professors, a "human rights" activist, posted a celebration of a Hamas terrorist on his Facebook page.

Also:

Students at he university held a violent protest to stop the US consul from even visiting. Ironically, when security pushed back, the complained about their freedom of speech being violated.
Their Islamic Bloc student organization openly supports Hamas terror. Their logo is to the left.
That same pro-Hamas bloc gained 33 seats on the student council last year, a little behind Fatah.
Here is a video that the Hamas bloc released of students who were "martyred." Notice how many of them have guns.

The header on the school's Islamic Bloc Facebook page celebrates the kidnappers and murderers of the three Israeli teens.

TStarting this Friday, the students of Manchester will vote whether to extend their partnership with a university that has been the source and cheerleader of numerous terror attacks. It will also allow them to keep this only political poster visible in the Student Union building.

There is a (small) chance to defeat the motion to extend the partnership between Manchestor and Najah Terror U. The Jewish student association would prefer a three way partnership with a different Palestinian school, an Israeli university and Manchester. They also want this incendiary sign to be removed.

Let's hope that the students will choose co-existence over supporting terror.

10/14 Links Pt1: How the Donors Saved Hamas; So The Aye's Have It: Another British Betrayal

From Ian:

Khaled Abu Toameh: How the Donors Saved Hamas

Rebuilding or repairing infrastructure in the Gaza Strip is the best thing that could have happened to Hamas. Hamas knows that every dollar invested in the Gaza Strip will serve the interests of the Islamist movement. The promised funds absolve Hamas of all responsibility for the catastrophe it brought upon the Palestinians during the confrontation with Israel.
Hamas will now use its own resources to smuggle in additional weapons and prepare for the next war with Israel. Hamas can now go back to digging new tunnels and obtaining new weapons instead of assisting the Palestinians whose homes were destroyed as a result of its actions.
The biggest mistake the donor states made was failing to demand the disarmament of Hamas as a precondition for funneling aid to the Gaza Strip. Hopes that the catastrophic results of the confrontation would increase pressure on Hamas, or perhaps trigger a revolt against it, have faded.

Caroline Glick: Benny Gantz’s troubling assessments

The Left has followed Gantz’s lead and attacked the government for not opening Gaza’s borders and even participating in the Cairo conference.
But again, reality tells a different tale.
Israel has nothing to gain from participating in a Hamas funding drive.
It does however have an interest in influencing the international agenda. To do so, the most basic requirement for the government is to reject the lie that Israel is to blame for Hamas’s aggression. Israel’s leaders – elected and appointed – need to internalize the fact that the war this summer, like all previous acts of Hamas aggression against Israel stemmed not from privation and hopelessness, but from empowerment and hopefulness.
Hamas doesn’t attack Israel because it needs money. It attacks Israel because doing so empowers it and weakens Israel – as we saw in Cairo on Sunday.
Unfortunately, for as long as our unelected professional class is led by men who have internalized our enemies’ narratives, there is no way that Israel can act on these basic strategic truths regardless of whom voters elect. And as a result, we shall continue to witness our soldiers’ hard won victories being squandered by our leaders – in and out of uniform.

JPost Editorial: The Temple Mount

Instead of enforcing the law and protecting the rights of Jews and non-Jews to have access to the Temple Mount, the police caved in to the extremists.
The implication is that Jews who demand to exercise their right to visit the Temple Mount are to be held accountable for the violence committed by Muslim rioters. This line of thinking relieves rioters of responsibility for their actions and places the blame for their crimes on others.
But the fact remains that when someone instigates something, he or she intends for it to happen. If it is a riot, that person has fomented it. If it is murder, that person has colluded in it. People with free will orchestrated the rioting on the Temple Mount. No one forced them to behave the way they did.
By accepting the reasoning that Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount cause unrest and riots, police are essentially blaming the victim. It is similar to the argument Muslim extremists sometimes make that when women will not wear the veil, they provoke those who rape or disfigure them.
Backing down to religious fanatics leads to a number of bad, and potentially destructive, outcomes. Perhaps the most insidious is the abandonment of Western values in the face of threats from extremists who, if we let them, will send us all back to a medieval society based not on freedom but on religious fundamentalism.
In a way, religious extremists perform an important function. They challenge our core Western values and force us to stand up for what we too often take for granted.
We forget that much blood was spilled in the fight for these rights.

Melanie Phillips: Recognising Palestine won’t promote peace

Palestine has become the progressive cause of causes through an effective, decades-long campaign to twist western minds. It was Yassir Arafat who, in the 1970s, started to reframe the Palestinian Arabs as freedom fighters on the historically illiterate claim that they were the original inhabitants of the land.
Yet the Jews are the only people for whom Israel was ever their national kingdom, centuries before Islam invaded. Contrary to general assumption, the occupation and the settlements are legal, upheld both by the international law of defence against persistent belligerents and the unabrogated treaty obligations of the British Mandate for Palestine.
That will surprise many. For no other conflict has ever been so misreported and misrepresented; no other victims of a century of annihilatory aggression have been so demonised and delegitimised.
Last summer’s media coverage of the Gaza war, which caused a huge outbreak of anti-Jewish hatred, uncritically transmitted the Hamas falsehood that the vast majority of casualties were civilians. Analysis by Israel’s Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre shows that 49 per cent of fatalities were terrorists and 51 per cent civilians, a far lower civilian toll than in other wars.
Israel is the West’s one ally in the Middle East and is essential to British intelligence and military security. Passing today’s motion won’t itself change anything. But as a propaganda stunt, its capacity to do harm is immense. It will turn parliament into a human shield for Palestinian rejectionism, help to weaken and endanger Israel and incentivise yet more Palestinian hatred, mass murder and war.
In security terms, passing this motion would be an act of national self-harm. It would also be a moral stain on parliament and place Britain on the wrong side in the great battle for civilisation.

Some of the absurd anti-Israel arguments in British parliament

Yesterday, the British parliament voted in a symbolic gesture to recognize Palestine as a state.

Here are some of the more ridiculous things said during yesterday's debate in British Parliament:

Andrew Bridgen: Does my hon. Friend agree that, given that the political system of the world’s superpower and our great ally the United States is very susceptible to well-funded powerful lobbying groups and the power of the Jewish lobby in America, it falls to this country and to this House to be the good but critical friend that Israel needs, and this motion tonight just might lift that logjam on this very troubled area?

Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab): I call on right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House to give the Palestinians their rights and show the Israelis that they cannot suppress another people all the time. It is not Jewish for the Israelis to do that. They are harming the image of Judaism, and terrible outbreaks of anti-Semitism are taking place. I want to see an end to anti-Semitism, and I want to see a Palestinian state.

Mike Wood (Batley and Spen) (Lab):We have to grapple with the issue of what will happen if there are not two states. What does the one-state solution look like? We are told that the majority of the present Israeli Administration no longer accept a two-state solution. Mr Netanyahu has suddenly become a rather centrist pragmatist, holding together a coalition, many of whom are to the right of him, in wanting a one-state solution. Do they accept the genocide and ethnic cleansing that go along with that?

The situation is far worse than that in apartheid South Africa, which has been mentioned. It has been regularly referred to as a parallel to what is going on in Palestine, but the situation in Palestine is much worse than apartheid. The white junta in South Africa accepted that somewhere in the country—preferably not near them —there would be land for black people. It was the worst possible land and a long way from the ruling white group, but none the less the junta accepted that there would be a place for the blacks. A one-state solution in Israel does not accept such a thing. There is no place in Israel and Palestine for the Palestinians. We have to face squarely what that means and so do the Israelis.

...What Israel is looking at in a one-state solution is a continuation, year after year, of war and violence such as we have seen building in the past 20 years. The Israelis have just finished a third incursion into Gaza in 10 years. Are we suggesting that every two years another 1,500 people should be killed and another 100,000 people rendered homeless as a continuation of the process of driving everybody who is not Jewish out of what is considered to be greater Israel?

Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD):I support the motion for many reasons, but I will state three. First, for the Palestinians to turn away from the men of violence, they need hope, and this motion represents a degree of hope for them. Much is made of the failure of Hamas to recognise Israel, and we know about that, but let us imagine the sense of despair that ordinary Palestinians must feel at the failure of the international community to recognise their right to exist. My tweet on the firing of rockets out of Gaza and the previous comments by Baroness Tonge were never, of course, condoning terrorist acts by Palestinians; they were simply our recognition of the despair and sense of hopelessness that leads to terrorism.

Secondly, Israel is in breach of the contract set out in the Balfour declaration stating that

“nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.

In the light of the Nakba and everything since, that seems like a sick joke. The failure of the international community to recognise the state of Palestine has helped Israel to ignore this commitment.

Thirdly, on a personal note, this Sunday at Eden Camp in north Yorkshire there will be a gathering of the Palestine veterans. They will parade at 1 o’clock, but many of them will not be able to walk very far, if at all—they are all over the age of 80. They went to that land in 1945 as a peacekeeping force, but lost over 700 members of the armed forces and 200 police. I believe that we owe it to them for tonight’s motion to succeed. Many were not conscripts; many were veterans of Arnhem, Normandy and Bergen-Belsen. Many felt, and still feel, betrayed by Israel and question the sacrifice that so many of their colleagues made. If this vote on recognising the right of Palestinians is won, they will very much welcome it, but it has been so long in coming.