Sarah Honig: Abu-Mazen Proved Ezer Wrong
If things truly went our way, Palestinian Authority figurehead Mahmoud “Abu-Mazen” Abbas would for sure have announced unequivocally from the UN General Assembly podium that he is revoking the Oslo Accords with immediate effect.I am embarrassed to be an Arab
Without much ado, he would have torn up the documents on which Oslo’s convoluted clauses, subsections, stipulations and provisos are listed. That would have been dramatic and would have left no uncertainty in anyone’s cerebral recesses that Oslo has at long belated last been ignominiously dispatched to the netherworld.
In fact, Oslo has been a smelly decomposing cadaver for years but no one, least of all diplomatically timid Israel, dared say it like it is.
Across the Green Line, Abbas and his front men hectored ominously in a refrain of irascible rants. If we don’t bow to Ramallah’s diktats, we were warned, Abbas will do the unthinkable and actually bury Oslo’s putrid remains.
Presumably that should have sent us all into a tizzy of trepidation.
In fact, though, Israel would have heaved a sincere sigh of relief had Abbas actually done the decent thing for once and pronounced the demise of the evil poltergeist that imperils our self-preservation prospects.
But it was apparently way too good to be true. Perhaps in a rare moment of clarity amid his petulant outbursts about “filthy Jewish feet contaminating Arab Jerusalem’s sanctity,” Abbas understood that he’d only be doing the “filthy Jews” a favor by taking them off the Oslo hook.
I have long resisted saying this, but the ongoing Arab violence in Jerusalem has pushed Arab idiocy beyond my capacity for tolerance. I now need to say it and to say it publicly: I am embarrassed to be an Arab.There Was a Temple on the Temple Mount
From the start, we have refused to accept the existence of one tiny Jewish state. We fought that state tooth and nail using all the venom and anti-Semitism that we could muster. We isolated and mistreated our own Palestinian siblings so we could use them as tools against the Jews. We have not relented. We have not shown an ounce of compassion, humanity, or even smarts. We made the destruction of the Jewish home our signature cause. We made hate our religion. When will this nonsense stop?
Even some of us Arabs who have the privilege of also being Israeli have not learned to behave like civilized people. We dismissed, threatened, and silenced Mohammad Zoabi, one of our own, because he dared profess love for his country and revulsion towards terrorists. We have demonstrated in support, not of our own state, Israel, but in support of the terrorists who want her destroyed. (h/t Yenta Press)
I have many friends who find the New York Times’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be “anti-Israel.” By this, I think that they mean that given a (surprisingly large) number of possible narratives through which to present a news story, the Times often picks one that lies somewhere within the Palestinian spectrum. I never really bought this argument. The Times to me reads somewhat to the right of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. While the Times maintains a fairly consistent bias, that bias would fit well within the current Israeli spectrum, and not even all that close to the left edge. So I have not always agreed with the coverage, but it has rarely riled me. Today’s article by Rick Gladstone, though, Historical Certainty Proves Elusive at Jerusalem’s Holiest Place, was so misleading and confused that it really got my goat.Ryan Bellerose: History Matters: 5 Myths About Israel
The article claims that there is no definitive evidence that the two ancient Jewish temples stood on the present day Temple Mount. The article strongly implies that this remains a live historical controversy. The problem with posing the issue that way is that it confuses several distinct historical questions. Once those questions are teased apart, it is clear that there is actually very little disagreement among professional historians about most of them. These questions are:
Did a Jewish temple stand on the present day Temple Mount? Yes. This is as historically certain a fact as one can get in the study of ancient history. The Temple Mount was built by Herod beginning at the end of the first century BCE – the Western Wall is the western retaining wall of that reshaping of the natural hill – and on top of it were a number of structures that belonged to the Jewish temple. These included courtyards, altars, and the Holy of Holies. Now it is true (and has long been recognized even in Jewish law) that we do not know precisely where on the Temple Mount those structures stood, but there is no question that they stood there.
Prior to Herod’s renovation of the temple, did it stand at this site? Almost certainly. I would give it a 98% possibility. The second temple was built around 520 BCE and underwent a few renovations before Herod gave it a major overhaul. If Herod moved the site of the temple we would know, both from the extensive archaeological excavations conducted all around the temple as well from literary sources. People notice stuff like that.
Myth One: Israel was created by the colonialists
The truth is that the Jews had to fight tooth and nail for their ancestral lands. While the British opened the door with the San Remo accords, and then the Balfour Declaration, the subsequent partition plan and the Palestinian mandate handing over 75% of the promised land (sorry bad pun) to the Hashemite Arabs to create Jordan, showed pretty clearly that the British were not particularly helpful. When you look at the arms embargo that ended up being completely one-sided, the fact that the British armed and trained the Jordanian legion, and then limited Jewish immigration while encouraging Arab immigration, gives you a very different picture.
It’s rather amusing to me that the same people who claim that the British created Israel, are the same ones who bring up the King David hotel bombing as proof of how bad the Jews are. First, the King David was the centre of the OCCUPATIONAL BRITISH GOVERNMENT. More importantly, they never ask why the Jews would be fighting against the people who were supposedly creating the Jewish nation. It’s a perfect example of why we need to not just listen to the colonialist narrative. They of course want us to believe that without colonialist aid, the Jews would have failed, when in fact the Jews were fighting the colonialists. Feel free to verify this – the British don’t like to admit it but the facts are all there for anyone who wants to actually dig.