Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, January 15, 2017

01/15 Links: Israeli-Palestinian peace conference: No tango in Paris; Arson is not legitimate criticism

From Ian:

Elliott Abrams: The Paris Peace Conference

What is the point of this endeavor? According to the French, it is to show support for the two-state solution and urge both parties, meaning Israel and the PLO, to negotiate. That is a demonstration of bias, because it is the PLO not Israel that has been refusing negotiations and rejecting peace plans again and again for years—indeed decades. To treat the government of Israel and the PLO as if their desire for peace were identical is wrong and unfair. If the participants at the conference truly wished to advance peace, they would be pressuring the Palestinians to stop rewarding and inciting terrorism by glorifying terrorists, and pressuring them to start negotiating seriously. This will not happen. There is every reason to believe Mr. Abbas will leave Paris satisfied with the circus and feeling zero real pressure to do anything at all.
The other point, perhaps the real point, of the conference is to pressure Israel to stop all settlement growth. In this sense it is a follow-up to UN Security Council resolution 2334 of December, and shares its conclusion that the real barrier to peace is the increasingly rapid, uncontrollable, endless, limitless growth of Israeli settlements. But this is false, as the statistics show. Settlement populations are growing, at about four percent a year, but the notion that they are rapidly gobbling up the West Bank and making peace impossible is a fiction.
There may be a third objective for the conference: pressing President-Elect Trump not to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. We can expect language about leaving Jerusalem as a final status issue and doing nothing at all that changes the status quo. If you believe the President-Elect will be dissuaded by such a declaration from a conference such as this, well, I don’t agree.
So the conference will soon be nearly forgotten, and go down as yet another feeble effort to undermine Israel’s legitimacy. Of course if you ask the French, they will angrily deny that this was their purpose. I agree that it was not the purpose, but it is the effect, predictably. Like Resolution 2334, it is another diplomatic blow against the Jewish State, trying to isolate it and criticize it and undermine its ideological and diplomatic defenses. And meanwhile, this very month, we will see the PLO pay more money to prisoners convicted of terrorist acts and name more schools or parks or squares after murderers and would-be murderers. But there will be no Paris conference about all of that.

Why the Palestinian Question Won’t Be Resolved by the Paris Conference

Yet while the change of administration in Washington may strengthen Israel’s diplomatic position for the immediate period, and while the Palestinians will have to get to the back of the line in terms of international priorities, the Palestinian question itself will not disappear. In many ways, it will find its status enhanced.
To begin with, there’s the public domain. And this brings us to something that the Europeans have never understood: The historic Palestinian strategy has never been about achieving statehood, but about preventing a negotiated solution in order to perpetuate the image of the Palestinians as the people to whom history has dealt the cruelest blow. It’s why the Palestinians make deliberately unrealistic demands, like the “right of return”—a goal the Palestine Liberation Organization originally pledged to achieve through violence—and suing the United Kingdom for the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
In terms of building up public support around the world, it’s a strategy that has worked. Hence, we can assume that if President-elect Donald Trump does a 180-degree turn on President Obama’s approach to the Israelis, the narrative of the Palestinians—ignored by America, facing 50 years of “occupation” under Israel—will become emblematic of public resistance to the foreign policies of the Trump administration. In the American context, the Democratic Party is now the most significant barometer of that process.
The Palestinians can also play power politics. They can carry on with their campaign to achieve membership in international bodies as an independent state. They can curry favor with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the next stage of his conflict with the West. And they can insert themselves into domestic issues—rising anti-Semitism, the political culture on university campuses, the legality of boycotts—in a way that few other foreign policy issues can do.
As I said, Netanyahu may well be right about the last gasp of Obama’s strategy to secure Palestinian independence. But none of us should believe that these battles are over.

An indulgent, damaging MidEast "peace" conference

The French initiative for a conference was made tempting with promises of incentive packages for both Israel and the Palestinians if agreement could be reached on a peace arrangement.
It is laudatory that each people understand the basic needs of the other party. But there is a basic asymmetry in the situation. There are legitimate disagreements on Israeli settlements, but the state of Israel threatens no other nation or people.
On the contrary it seeks satisfaction of its security needs and defense against unending terrorist attacks, most recently in the truck attack in Jerusalem. Israel is not reinforcing the worst stereotypes of Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims when it accuses them and responds to terrorist attacks.
It is time for the international community to consider the real nature of the problem. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict exists and has always existed because of the refusal of Palestinians to acknowledge the right of Israel, a Jewish state, to exist.
The US administrations, particularly Secretary of State John Kerry, have forgotten the statement of Madeleine Albright in March 1994 when she was US Secretary of State, “We simply do not support the description of the territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 war as ‘occupied Palestinian territory.’”
The solution can only come through negotiations between the two parties, bilateral talks, and not by statements or intervention by the US, the UN, or any other nation or international body.

Hatem Bazian backed by supporters

Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian-Arab instructor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is calling for the elimination of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people.

In a recent blog post entitled, Trump’s Appointment of David Friedman is the Official End of Oslo, Bazian argues that because President-Elect Donald Trump appointed David Friedman the incoming U.S. ambassador to Israel this means that the "peace process" is concluded and that, therefore, Israel has no right to exist as the Jewish state.

Let us see how he gets from point A to point B.

In his opening remarks Bazian claims:

Trump’s appointment of David M. Friedman as the new ambassador to Israel brings an end to 70 years of U.S. official policy on Palestine centered on U.N. resolutions 181, 242 and 338 with a two-state solution as the final outcome.

Other than as an implied fallacious "last straw" argument, just how he draws this conclusion from Trump's appointment of Friedman remains unexplained. While Bazian is correct that the two-state solution is a corpse, it was neither Trump, nor Friedman, who killed it. In truth it was still-born upon conception for the simple reason that the Palestinian-Arabs, as an irrational religious imperative, never had the slightest intention of accepting a state for themselves in peace next to Israel to begin with.

Upon arbitrarily deciding that Friedman's appointment means the end of the so-called "peace process," Bazian then insists that people everywhere should therefore "call for Israel’s annexation and demand one person, one vote rather than allow Apartheid to masquerade as democracy."

Just how Bazian came to believe that he is in any position to demand anything from anyone, much less his Jewish enemies, is hard to imagine. Nonetheless, by "annexation" he presumably means the potential Israeli annexation of Judea and Samaria. If so, Bazian is one of those academic anti-Zionists nurturing the hope that Israel can be defeated via demographics.

Many Israelis and diaspora Jews wish to see Israel annex the ancient heart of the Jewish homeland.

Bazian wishes for this, as well, with the anticipation that the hostile Arab majority could then force its will upon the Jewish minority within the Middle East. Just as for thirteen hundred long years, from the rise of Muhammad to the demise of the Ottoman Empire, Muslims held non-Muslims as slaves and dhimmis, so Bazian hopes to see a return of Muslim domination to the Holy Land.

Although subjugating non-Muslims is integral to Islam, Bazian should however be careful what he wishes for.

If Israel annexes Judea and Samaria it will remain a majority Jewish democracy. This is true for a number of simple reasons. The first is that the Palestinian Authority habitually inflates the numbers of Arabs living in Areas A and B and it is, therefore, highly questionable whether Israel would become a majority Arab country in the future. Furthermore, despite popular opinion otherwise, the birthrate among Palestinian-Arabs is declining while the birthrate among Jews is increasing.

More importantly, of course, Israel is under no suicidal obligation to offer citizenship to enemies of the Jewish people or the Jewish state. If Israel does annex Judea and Samaria it will likely institute pathways to citizenship for those Arabs with no political-religious agenda that involves either the murder or subjugation of the Jewish people. This is to say that Jihadis, terrorists, and anti-Semitic anti-Zionists will probably not be eligible to participate in the political life of the country, if they are permitted to remain in the country at all.

In order to determine eligibility for citizenship, Israel could easily institute a two or three year national service requirement with political enfranchisement dependent upon the demonstrated good-will of the individual Arab. Those who demonstrate a true desire for good citizenship within the Jewish state will be allowed citizenship. Those who do not, will not.

However, let's give Bazian the benefit of the doubt and assume that what he really wants is what is good for everyone in that part of the world. In this case, Bazian is telling the Jewish people that despite Jewish history under the brutality of Islam they are under a moral obligation to hope that a Bazian-style single-state will emerge that will not trample their well-being and civil liberties.

Now, how is that for a roll of the dice?

Bazian would have the Jewish people dependent upon the goodwill of Palestinian-Arabs in an Arab-dominated state. Does he honestly expect that after centuries of dhimmitude and theocratically-based Arab aggression it makes sense for the Jewish people to gamble the very lives of their children on Arab-Muslim hospitality?

The notion is ridiculous on its face and the great majority of Jewish people will have none of it.

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

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A small reminder of how Palestinian Arab leaders view freedom of speech

For the past week, the big story in Palestinian media has not been the Paris conference. It hasn't been the US possibly moving the embassy to Jerusalem.

No, the top story has been the shortage of electricity in Gaza.

Gazans have been protesting by blaming Hamas for the shortage. (Not Israel.) Hamas has responded by violently suppressing demonstrations.

And attacking reporters.

On Thursday evening, an Associated Press reporter covering a demonstration in the northern Gaza Strip was detained by plainclothes Hamas security men and forced at gunpoint to turn over his mobile phones to them. The men stuck a pistol in his chest and verbally threatened the reporter until he agreed to give them the phones.
In addition an AFP photographer was badly beaten to the head by uniformed policemen required medical care after he had refused to give up his camera. The memory card of his camera was confiscated and he was placed under arrest.

Hamas responded with its own manufactured protests, where they blame Fatah (not Israel!) for the power shortage. In these rallies, they burn photos of Mahmoud Abbas and other top PA officials.

PA and Fatah officials lashed out at this, saying that burning photos of Abbas is a "crime" that "excceds all red lines."

And Hamas is not the only side that attacks reporters. The Palestinian Authority is just as ruthless against any reporters who might write about endemic corruption there:

No journalists in Gaza — no matter how senior — would even think of criticizing the leaders of Hamas, and in the Palestinian Authority (PA), criticism of any kind against President Mahmoud Abbas, or exposure of corruption in the PA, could result in the journalist’s arrest.

“We all known there’s terrible corruption in the PA,” a senior veteran journalist from Ramallah, the seat of the PA in the West Bank, told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “We know hundreds of stories about senior PA officials and about Abbas’ sons, but we can’t publish them or even talk openly about them.”

“We saw PLO activists who arrived [in the West Bank and Gaza] from Libya and Tunisia [in the 1990s] with only the clothes on their backs, and a few months after the PA was established they were already driving around in Mercedes cars, wearing Italian suits and building ostentatious villas,” the journalist claimed. “To this day they are all rich, taken care of and no one can say a word or even ask where such wealth came from.”

European Union states that donate hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid to the PA have tried to establish supervisory mechanisms over the funds they provide, but according to Palestinian journalists who spoke with Al-Monitor, the top PA levels were more devious than all the oversight mechanisms, and they found loopholes through which to funnel some of the money into their own pockets.

The criticism discussed behind closed doors does not relate only to past malfeasance. A senior journalist who works for an Arabic language media outlet notes in a conversation with Al-Monitor that the sons of the Palestinian president are also mentioned among those making a fortune out of their family connection to Abbas.

The journalist said that reporters have learned not to ask “unnecessary” questions, lest they lose their jobs, at best, or are sent to jail in a worst-case scenario. The media learned the limits of what was permissible and what was not in the affair of Mahmad Hadifa, an independent journalist who published a series of investigative reports about the goings on in the Palestinian Ministry of Economy in Ramallah. Hadifa was arrested by Palestinian security forces after the stories ran and was threatened, even though no one claimed his reports were false.

The international community turns a blind eye to all of this, because criticizing the Palestinian leadership is viewed as watering down criticism of Israel. So Palestinian leaders, knowing that no one will demand that they act responsibly towards their critics or to reduce corruption, can freely act as they please, confident that there will be no international conferences on their own corruption and crimes.

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Human Rights Watch, along with Amnesty International, claim that they are very much against antisemitism. They issued a joint statement in 2003:

Recognizing anti-Semitism as a serious human rights violation, we also recognize our own responsibility to take on this issue as part of our work. It should not be left to Jewish groups alone to highlight this issue and to appeal to the international community to address it. We are firmly committed to joining their ongoing efforts and to helping to bring problems of anti-Semitism into the overall human rights discourse.

I have noted previously that the groups have nothing to say about antisemitism in Arab countries. On the other hand, right-wing antisemitism in Europe has always been the one and only example of Jew-hatred that they would mention in their reports. As recently as Friday, HRW noted in an article that "Anti-Semitism remains a serious concern" in the EU in the context of right-wing xenophobia.

What about European antisemitism that pretends to be anti-Zionism?

We have a perfect example in this well-reported story also from Friday. This is how Vox, hardly a right-wing site, reported it:

A synagogue burning in Germany is perhaps among the most literal illustrations of anti-Semitism imaginable.

But apparently, not all synagogue burnings are equal.

This week a German regional court ruled that the 2014 firebombing of a synagogue in Wuppertal, a region just east of Düsseldorf, was an act of criminal arson, but not anti-Semitic. Instead, the court found it was a protest against Israel, even though the synagogue was obviously not in Israel and those who worship there are Jews, not Israelis.

The decision upheld that of a lower court, which stated the perpetrators, a trio of Palestinian-born German residents, wanted to “call attention to the Gaza conflict” when they prepared and then lobbed Molotov cocktails at the synagogue one July night in 2014. No one was injured, but the attack caused €800 in damages. The men were ultimately given suspended sentences.

The court’s decision is baffling — and deeply troubling. The men didn’t target the Israeli Embassy or one of its consulates. They attacked a Jewish institution. To conflate Israelis with Jews — and to say that a disagreement with the policies of the former somehow justifies attacking the latter — is by definition anti-Semitic. And if there is a line between anti-Israel sentiments and anti-Semitic ones, this attack definitely crossed it.

Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch tweets around two dozen times a day. But he didn't say a word about this. (Neither did Amnesty International.)

I tweeted Roth asking him what his opinion was, and he ignored me (and 30 retweets) - even as he tweeted on other topics. Including a swipe at Israel.

Apparently, HRW is only against some antisemitism, just as long as the bad guys are the same people that HRW considers bad to begin with. But Muslims or Arabs or their sympathizers cannot possibly be guilty of antisemitism, for the same reason the German judge gave:

Claims of being merely anti-Israel exonerates Jew-haters in both the German court system - and in "human rights" groups.

Remember this next time HRW and Amnesty ask you for money by claiming that they fearlessly speak "truth to power" about human rights. Jews obviously do not have human rights if their oppressors are on HRW's and Amnesty's "good guys" list.

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01/14 Links: Alan Dershowitz: Obama’s Mid-East Legacy Is Tragic Failure; The UN and Obama's Act of Aggression

From Ian:

Alan Dershowitz: Obama’s Mid-East Legacy Is Tragic Failure

The Middle East is a more dangerous place after eight years of the Obama Presidency than it was before. The eight disastrous Obama years follow eight disastrous Bush years during which that part of the world became more dangerous as well. So have many other international hot spots. In sum, the past 16 years have seen major foreign policy blunders all over the world, and most especially in the area between Libya and Iran, that includes Israel, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey and the Gulf.
With regard to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, the Obama policies have made the prospects for a compromise peace more difficult to achieve. When Israel felt that America had its back – under both President Clinton and Bush 43 – they offered generous proposals to end settlements and occupation in nearly all of the West Bank. Tragically the Palestinian leadership – first under Arafat and then under Abbas – did not accept either the Barak-Clinton offers in 2000-2001, nor the Olmert offer in 2008. Now they are ignoring Netanyahu’s open offer to negotiate with no pre-conditions.
In his brilliant book chronicling the American-Israeli relationship – “Doomed To Succeed” – Dennis Ross proves conclusively that whenever the Israeli government has confidence in America’s backing, it has been more willing to make generous compromise offers, than when it has reason to doubt American support. President Obama did not understand this crucial reality. Instead of having Israel’s back, he repeatedly stabbed Israel in the back, beginning with his one–sided Cairo speech near the beginning of his tenure, continuing through his failure to enforce the red-line on chemical weapon use by Syria, then allowing a sunset provision to be included in the Iran deal, and culminating in his refusal to veto the one-sided Security Council resolution, which placed the lion’s share of blame on the Israelis for the current stalemate.
These ill-advised actions – especially the Security Council resolution – have disincentivized the Palestinian leadership from accepting the Netanyahu offer to sit down and negotiate a compromise peace. They have been falsely led to believe that they can achieve statehood through the United Nations, or by other means that do not require compromise.

The UN and Obama's Act of Aggression

UNSC Res. 2334 is an act of political aggression against foundation of the Judeo-Christian civilization and should be treated as such. The Jewish nation has every right to consider this attack as an act of war against it.
President Obama sometimes seems to have an indifference to historical truth that often borders on antagonism. Obama has again tried to re-write history by claiming that Greece, with the help of the winners of World War I, was an aggressive and imperialistic state that cared only to re-build its Empire against the Turks.
The notion that ancient non-Muslim nations are occupiers in their own lands, is repeated in the UN Resolution 2334.
Historically, Muslim forces began invading Syria in 634, and ended by conquering Constantinople in 1453. They invaded not only all of Turkey -- obliterating the great Christian empire of Byzantium -- but then went on to conquer all of North Africa, Greece, southern Spain, parts of Portugal and eastern Europe.
President Obama apparently did not learn about the Trojan War in school; he apparently never read Homer to know that the inhabitants of the Bosporus and much of Asia Minor were Greeks -- just as he apparently never read the Bible, or the Greek and Roman historic records of the Jewish people and their capital, Jerusalem.

Palestinians: A Strategy of Lies and Deception

Abbas here lied twice. First, it is a lie that he is prepared to return to the negotiating table with Israel. In the past few years, Abbas has repeatedly rejected Israeli offers to resume the stalled peace negotiations.
Abbas's chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, claimed this week that his boss was ready to resume the peace talks with Israel in Moscow....Indeed, Abbas had "earlier" voiced his readiness to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow. But Abbas once again outlined his preconditions for such a summit... This means that Abbas has not abandoned his preconditions for resuming the peace talks with Israel. The timing of Erekat's announcement in Moscow is clearly linked to the Paris peace conference. It is part of the Palestinian strategy to depict Israel as the party opposed to the resumption of the peace talks.
Abbas has in the past reluctantly condemned some of the terror attacks against Israel. But these statements were made under duress, after being pressured by the US or EU.
In fact, his "condemnations" are nothing but political pablum, a sop to the West.
The Palestinian terrorist who rammed his truck into a group of young Israeli soldiers last week was doing exactly what his president urged Palestinians to do.
The Germans and French should not believe Abbas when he says that he condemns truck terror attacks in their countries. The scenes of Palestinians celebrating carnage in Jerusalem should serve as a wake-up call to the international community. The message of the call? That the overall Palestinian strategy – like the jihad strategy - is built on lies. Both continue to feature terror as one their main pillars.

The spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party on Saturday warned that if the Trump administration moves the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, it will “open the gates of hell.”

Should America be scared by this "moderate" spokesman threatening it with opening up the
gates of Hell?

It is hardly the first time.

Here is a very incomplete list of the number of times that we have heard that expression when Palestinian Arabs - including "moderate" Saeb Erekat - want to scare people into bending to their will,

January 2001 - Fatah officials in response to Israel killing a Fatah terror leader

August 2001 - Saeb Erekat in response to Israel's killing a PFLP terrorist leader

August 2001 - Also Saeb Erekat, in response to Israel's destroying a terror HQ/police building in Jenin

November, 2001 - Hamas in response to Israel's killing of Mahmoud Abu Hanoud

January 2002 - Fatah warning Israel not to hurt a terrorist in custody

September 2003 - Hamas after an unsuccessful attempt to kill Sheikh Yassin

March, 2004 - after the successful attempt to kill Sheikh Yassin

July 2005 - after Israel killed 7 Hamas terrorists

November 2005 - After Israel killed a member of Fatah and Hamas

February 2006 - when Israel withheld money transfers to Gaza

June 2006 - by the PRC after their founder was killed

April 2007 - a general warning against an Israeli invasion of Gaza

May 2007 - after Israel fired at the house of Ismail Haniyeh

August 2008 - Islamic Jihad general warning against Israel

December, 2008 - Hamas threatened this before Cast Lead

March 2011 - threat against UNRWA if it started teaching about the Holocaust in Gaza schools

November 2012: Hamas in response to Ahmed al-Jabari's assassination

June 2014: Hamas warning Israel not to react to the kidnappng and murder of 3 Israeli teenagers

March 2015: Saeb Erekat warning of consequences if Palestinians are blocked from UN action by the US

So, how many times have we seen the gates of Hell open up in the past sixteen years?

All it takes to end these threats is to call them on it, and let them know that any attempts to intimidate anyone with these sorts of threats will result in responses that they would not be happy with.

It is the fastest way to turn their false "honor" at making empty threats into a source of shame.

They have to learn to grow up. And the only way that will happen is by holding them responsible for their words and actions the way other adults are.

(h/t Meryl Yourish)

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01/13 Links Pt2: German court calls synagogue torching an act to 'criticize Israel'; PA TV: Jews stole Kim Kardashian’s diamonds

From Ian:

German court calls synagogue torching an act to 'criticize Israel'

A German regional court in the city of Wuppertal affirmed a lower court decision last Friday stating that a violent attempt to burn the city's synagogue by three men in 2014 was a justified expression of criticism of Israel’s policies.
Johannes Pinnel, a spokesman for the regional court in Wuppertal, outlined the court’s decision in a statement.
Three German Palestinians sought to torch the Wuppertal synagogue with Molotov cocktails in July, 2014. The local Wuppertal court panel said in its 2015 decision that the three men wanted to draw “attention to the Gaza conflict” with Israel. The court deemed the attack not to be motivated by antisemitism.
Israel launched Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014 to stop Hamas rocket attacks into Israeli territory.
The court sentenced the three men – the 31-year-old Mohamad E., the 26 year-old Ismail A. and the 20-year-old Mohammad A.—to suspended sentences. The men tossed self-made Molotov cocktails at the synagogue. German courts frequently decline to release the last names of criminals to protect privacy.
The attack caused €800 damage to the synagogue. The original synagogue in Wuppertal was burned by Germans during the Kristallnacht pogroms in 1938. Wuppertal has a population of nearly 344,000 and is located in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. (h/t Yenta Press)

PMW: PA TV: Jews stole Kim Kardashian’s diamonds

PA TV took advantage of yesterday’s news update on the Kim Kardashian jewelry heist as an opportunity to spread Antisemitism.
An article in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot on the arrest of 17 suspects in the well-publicized theft noted that the brains behind the robbery in Paris were two Algerian immigrants. It further mentioned that her driver and his brother, who are also suspects, are reportedly Jews. This reference was embraced by PA TV’s “Israeli affairs expert” as an opportunity to generalize that all Jews are "thieves.”
PA TV chose not to mention that there were 15 non-Jewish suspects arrested. Nor did it mention or speculate about the religion of the two Algerian immigrants who were the masterminds behind the crime.
Palestinian Media Watch has documented that Antisemitic hate speech is fundamental to PA expression, including portraying Jews as enemies of Allah, descendants of monkeys and pigs, and allied with Satan.
PA TV's reporting demonstrates that Antisemitism is so fundamental to PA ideology that even a single mention of two Jews anywhere in the world in a negative context is all that is needed launch another PA Antisemitic rant.

PA TV host: Jews stole Kim Kardashian’s diamonds: “They are thieves”

01/13 Links Pt1: State Dept. Says It’s Going to Paris Conference to Defend Israel; Meet The ‘Afro-Palestinians’

From Ian:

Netanyahu derides Paris summit as rigged, ‘last gasp of the past’

The upcoming international peace conference in Paris is a “rigged” effort intended to hurt Israel and its hopes of reaching peace, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday, adding that Jerusalem was not bound by any decision that would be taken there.
“It’s a rigged conference, rigged by the Palestinians with French auspices to adopt additional anti-Israel stances. This pushes peace backwards,” he said. “It’s not going to obligate us.”
During a meeting with Norwegian Foreign Minister Børge Brende, the prime minister called the planned conference, scheduled for Sunday, “a relic of the past.”
“It’s a last gasp of the past before the future sets in,” he said.
The conference comes just five days before the inauguration of US President-elect Donald Trump, who is widely expected to take a more friendly approach to the Netanyahu government’s policies.
Netanyahu also called the conference an effort that would “render peace hopeless,” comparing it to a terror attack.

State Dept. Says It’s Going to Paris Conference to Defend Israel

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Thursday that Secretary of State John Kerry is going to this weekend’s Middle East peace conference in Paris to defend Israel, despite the Obama administration allowing a resolution condemning Israeli settlements to pass through the United Nations Security Council.
Kerry is going to Paris for the conference on what will probably be his last foreign trip as secretary of state.
Associated Press reporter Matt Lee asked Toner if Kerry was going to the conference to protect the Jewish state from an anti-Israel conclusion.
“I think we feel obliged to be there, to be part of the discussions, to help make them into something that we believe is constructive and positively oriented towards getting negotiations back up and running and doesn’t attempt to in any way kind of dictate a solution,” Toner said.
Lee said Toner’s comments sounded odd after the U.S. abstained last month from a U.N. Security Council vote that critics say was anti-Israel, breaking with decades of American policy to defend the Jewish state at the U.N. and veto such measures. Kerry gave a speech on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict days after the vote that criticized Israel on multiple issues, particularly its settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Toner said that the Obama administration stands by its abstention vote.

Report: Draft Paris Agreement Calls Two-State Solution ‘Only Way’ to Ensure Israeli-Palestinian Peace

In a strong message to Israel and the incoming Trump administration, dozens of countries are expected this weekend to reiterate their opposition to Israeli settlements and call for the establishment of a Palestinian state as "the only way" to ensure peace in the region.
France is hosting more than 70 countries on Sunday at a Mideast peace summit, in what will be a final chance for the Obama administration to lay out its positions for the region.
According to a draft statement obtained by The Associated Press on Friday, the conference will urge Israel and the Palestinians "to officially restate their commitment to the two-state solution."
It also will affirm that the international community "will not recognize" changes to Israel's pre-1967 lines without agreement by both sides.
The draft says that participants will affirm "that a negotiated solution with two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security, is the only way to achieve enduring peace."

Is a protest with hundreds of people significant? Haaretz thinks so...unless they are pro-Israel

Here are some Haaretz headlines over the past several years:

Hundreds Protest Against Trump Outside California Republican Convention
Hundreds Protest Air Pollution, High Cancer Rates in Haifa
Hundreds Protest Conditions in Southern Tel Aviv Neighborhoods
Tel Aviv 'Tent City' Demonstrations Continue to Draw Hundreds
Hundreds of pro-Palestinian Demonstrators Protest Netanyahu's Arrival in London
Hundreds of Protesters Disrupt Jewish Reception at Chicago LGBTQ Conference

There are dozens of other examples of how Haaretz reported on protests as being significant when attended by hundreds of people, from Israel to London to the US.

And here is a headline from Haaretz today:

New York Rally Against Paris Peace Summit Draws Tiny Turnout

How many?

According to the Haaretz article, about 500 people came.

You know.."hundreds."

True, the turnout was lower than organizers anticipated, as the organizers miscalculated how many people would take off work to attend (it was held at 12:30 PM.) But Haaretz wants to make opposition to the Paris "peace" conference look like it is a minor fringe of committed Zionists, so it calls a rally that is significant in any other context "tiny." In truth, a rally of 500 people during a workday is significant.

Here is an idea of the size of the crowd:

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Shocker: Palestinians don't think "terror" section of UNSC 2334 applies to them

One of the main justifications given by the US for why it abstained on UNSC resolution 2334 rather than vote against it was because the language was supposedly not as biased against Israel.

Here is the entire paragraph of the resolution that was used in this justification:

Calls for immediate steps to prevent all acts of violence against civilians,
including acts of terror, as well as all acts of provocation and destruction, calls for
accountability in this regard, and calls for compliance with obligations under
international law for the strengthening of ongoing efforts to combat terrorism,
including through existing security coordination, and to clearly condemn all acts of
terrorism;

Note that it doesn't mention which side must perform these "steps."

Guess what? The Palestinian side interprets this to apply to Israel and only Israel.

Their UN representative sent a letter to various UN officials praising the resolution unequivocally, with no reservations about the obligations that the US insists the resolution imposes on them. On the contrary, they imply that only Israel is subject to that one paragraph supposedly aimed at them:

For all of these war crimes, acts of State terrorism and systematic human rights violations being committed against the Palestinian people, Israel, the occupying Power, must be held accountable and the perpetrators brought to justice.

For this reason they don't even claim that they are fighting and stopping terror - they feel no need to defend themselves from the language of this resolution since they don't define "resistance" with guns, knives and trucks to be "terror" to begin with.

And the drafters of the resolution deliberately chose language to allow Palestinians to feel that there is nothing in the document that gave them any responsibility for helping bring peace.

Obama and Samantha Power and John Kerry know this quite well, and when they justify the abstention on the basis of the "evenhanded" language, they are lying.

(h/t Irene)

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Fisking the lies behind the Paris "Peace" Conference

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault writes in Haaretz his justifications for why a peace conference must be held now.

The Middle East peace process cannot wait, for two main reasons.

First and foremost, the situation is urgent. Many crises throughout the region, from Syria to Libya, from Yemen to Iraq, have generated new threats to its stability. Some say that because of these crises, priorities need to be established, and in the name of these supposed priorities, resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be put off until later.

This is not what I believe: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be considered separately from its regional environment. Thinking that the Middle East could restore its stability without settling its oldest conflict is unrealistic. This conflict, if not dealt with, will continue to fuel frustration and will ultimately only worsen the vicious cycle of radicalization and violence. It will continue to give budding terrorists excuses for enlisting. The heinous attack in Jerusalem last Sunday is an additional warning sign.

Ayrault engages in sleight-of-hand here. No one is saying that one can ignore the Israel-Arab conflict forever, only that its solution would have little real impact on regional stability. What he is really saying is "we are impotent but we can always pressure Israel to feel like we are doing something, and we can justify it with straw man arguments."

The proof that this is not Israel's fault is clear. The Palestinians rejected the only realistic peace process in the region, the Oslo process, and actively chose war instead in 2000. Yet the world community did nothing to pressure the PLO for that decision.

I have a very strong conviction, and it is one I share with most of our partners and with most Israelis and Palestinians. This conviction is that only a two-state solution will, in time, bring stability to the region and enable Israel to live in security.

Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the Sinai have absolutely nothing to do with Israel, and Ayrault knows this. There will never be stability in the Middle East as long as supremacist versions of Islam and dictators who care little about their people exist. To lay the blame at Israel (which is what Ayrault is doing despite claiming to be evenhanded) is the political equivalent to the Chelm story of the man looking for his lost keys in the well-lit town square instead of the muddy forest where he lost them.

This does not mean imposing peace. France has never claimed to outline a solution for anyone. We are extremely aware that the conflict will not be settled until parties have decided to set out down the courageous and demanding path of reconciliation.

Haaretz proved this to be a lie with the publication of the draft resolution to be published at the end of the conference, a document that explicitly says that Israel has no rights over any territory beyond the 1949 armistice line.

Palestinians are seeing their future state shrinking, as settlement expansion continues at an unprecedented speed.

I've shown how this is false before from the perspective of actual area taken up by Jewish communities. Anti-Israel activists keep putting out maps that falsely give the impression of huge growth by either making the actual communities look much larger than they really are (by using large dots) or by sizing the dots by population size to make it look like the Jewish communities' size, still around 2% of the West Bank, takes up so much more. See, for example, this Peace Now map:

But let's talk about population growth, since everyone uses those numbers for their evidence of "unprecedented" growth.

Here's Peace Now's chart of population growth of the Jewish communities:

Any demographer would tell you that populations grow exponentially. A 4% growth rate for 100,000 people would be 4000 people, for 300,000 it would be 12,000, so the chart would show a curve, not a line, if the growth rate was steady. This chart is a straight line growth, meaning that roughly the same increase in real numbers year over year - which means that the rate of growth is actually going down. This chart shows an average increase of about 10,000 people a year both when there were 100,000 people and when there were 300,000 people.

Moreover, Haaretz showed last year that practically all the real growth was in Haredi communities right on the Green Line that would be part of Israel in any peace plan, and that is the case with most of the growth.

Anti-Israel activists play with the numbers to give a sense of urgency to politicians like Ayrault who are more than happy to use this false data to spout lies.

Note that while Haaretz published this apologia for pressuring Israel, all the proofs that I use to show that the assumptions are false come from Haaretz as well. The Left knows the truth but chooses to hide it when it is convenient for them, and pressuring Israel to make concessions that would jeopardize its security is very convenient for many people who feel that something must be done, and Arabs cannot be expected to fold under pressure the way Jews can.

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01/12 Links Pt2: Chloé Valdary: Where Israel Advocacy Fails, and How It Can Succeed

From Ian:

Chloé Valdary: Where Israel Advocacy Fails, and How It Can Succeed

This past November, the student newspaper at McGill University in Montreal responded to accusations that it had been providing a platform for anti-Semitism. While denying the specific charge, the editors emphatically reasserted their core position—namely, that the student paper “maintains an editorial line of not publishing pieces which promote a Zionist worldview, or any other ideology which we consider oppressive.”
This blunt statement is a reminder that hatred of the Jewish state is rapidly becoming the default position on many college campuses. Meanwhile, Israel’s friends, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, are left to ask what, if anything, can be done to stem the rising tide of anti-Israel venom.
In more than five years of involvement in advocacy for Israel, both as a college student and in a professional capacity, I’ve spoken at hundreds of events, worked with dozens of organizations, designed campus programs and social-media campaigns, and advised members of Congress, donors, and even Israeli government officials on how best to advance the cause of the Jewish state. As a member of the “millennial” generation, I have also been privy to the frustrations and complaints of my activist, pro-Israel peers whose own enchantment with the Jewish state is a driving force in their lives and who believe that too much institutional support is going to forms of advocacy that have outlived their usefulness.
Partially in response to these frustrations, I conducted a year-long study of how pro-Israel groups engage millennials. What works? What doesn’t? How to improve? In addressing those questions, I compared the available survey data about the attitudes of young Americans toward the Jewish state with what pro-Israel groups are currently doing to reach them, and conducted hundreds of interviews with students, professors, essayists, and professional activists.
The conclusion I eventually arrived at, presented below in severely boiled-down form, is that some kinds of Israel advocacy are at best of limited effectiveness and at worst can do more harm than good. Yet I also found some approaches that promise significantly greater success.

Trump’s Pentagon chief: The capital of Israel is Tel Aviv

Diverging from the signals the president-elect has been sending out, James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis opts to ‘stick with US policy’
President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Pentagon said Thursday that the United States should continue treating Tel Aviv as Israel’s capitol, breaking with Republican members of Congress and indications the incoming president could fulfill his campaign pledge to move the US embassy to Jerusalem.
Asked during his confirmation hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee if he supported the embassy’s relocation, retired Marine Corps general James “Mad Dog” Mattis said, “Right now I stick with the current US policy.”
Facing an hours-long session of questions from senators, he emphasized that “the capital of Israel is Tel Aviv” because, he said, “that’s where all the government people are.”
The last three successive presidents have maintained that the future status of Jerusalem should be settled in final negotiations between the parties, as both Israelis and Palestinians claim the city as their rightful capital.
But Trump has indicated since his surprising victory in November he will no longer honor that tradition. In December, he nominated his longtime friend and attorney David Friedman, a vocal supporter and donor to West Bank settlements, to be the next US ambassador to Israel
In a statement announcing the selection, Friedman said he expected to carry out his duties in “Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem.”

David Collier: Corked. Ben Dor’s anti-Israel ‘circus of hate’ comes to UCC in Ireland

Corked is a word that defines something special turning rotten. A wine that is flawed due to a damaged or broken cork. In this case, it is perhaps fitting that Oren Ben Dor chose UCC, or University College Cork, as the new site for the failed academic hate-fest from two years ago. The hate fest, the venom, the anti-Israel activism posing as academic thought, the deception, the rush to be top of the ‘Israel hating’ pile. This is what happens when academia is not preserved properly. When unwanted and unsavoury elements are allowed to infest and spoil the natural academic process. The proposed conference is effectively ‘corked’.
What do you do when on the one hand you want to adhere to the strongest principles of free speech, but on the other believe that academia is being used for something illegitimate.
For two years, the organisers of the disgraceful Southampton conference have had the ability to rent the local hall, pull these activists together, and conduct this vile call for the destruction of Israel in private. This is not good enough for them.
Almost all the academics involved are activists. People who are apparently on a mission to bring about the end of the democratic state of Israel. These people, in the vast majority, see Israel as an Apartheid, Nazi-like state. The conference is seen by these people, as part of their activism.
Therefore, it is not the ‘in gathering’ of like-minded people that is important. It is not about the discussion, but rather how the output can best be utilised to further delegitimise Israel and strengthen their personal cause. They need this to be in a university because they must have the academic stamp of approval.

The man behind the scam: dubious tactics of Al-Jazeera’s undercover reporter

This is the man who spent six months undercover for a sting that aimed to expose “attempts by the Israeli government to influence British democracy” – but his true identity remains hidden four days after the story broke.
The reporter, posing as a pro-Israel Labour activist by the adopted name Robin Harrow, first made contact with Shai Masot, then assistant to deputy ambassador Eitan Na’eh, last summer.
He subsequently spent considerable amount of time with him, even accompanying him to a Jewish Labour Movement meeting between Ambassador Mark Regev and a group of young Israeli Labor leaders, and social gatherings such as the one where he made his much-reported remarks about ‘taking down’ Alan Duncan.
To create his persona, ‘Harrow’ set up a fake Twitter account promoting pro-Israel messages and also a blog on the Times of Israel, with a bio describing himself as German-born and having taken part in Israel exchange programmes in school. He also professed his fascination with the strength of Israeli society “to live under such circumstances and continue to grant civil rights to all citizens”.
In one in which he lauds the treatment of LGBT people compared to other parts of the Middle East, he wrote that those calling themselves anti-Zionist are “effectively saying that Israel should not exist”. He added: “If the Labour Party loses its path, leaves the progressive camp and sanctions terrorist groups like Hamas, we lose more than legitimacy and electability in the minds of the electorate. The Labour Party will lose its soul and open the door to a new wave of anti-Semitism.”