In 2010, there was a big story that the Arab League pledged a half billion dollars to "defend Jerusalem." The amount paid? Zero.
However, Arab nations consistently tell Western leaders that "Palestine" is the major issue for them. This deception ends up fooling even otherwise smart diplomats and generals who assume that when it is the top agenda item in every meeting, it must really be important to the Arabs.
As always, the importance of "honor" is not realized. The Arabs find the Palestinian situation - corrupt leaders, refusal to make peace, the bitter split between Hamas and Fatah - to be an embarrassing and shameful reflection on the Arabs as a whole. They must try to convince the West that the issue is important to them because they want to minimize the embarrassment.
Appearances is what matters in an honor/shame culture, not reality. Pledges fulfill the appearances.
It is interesting that South Africa, which is very vocal in its support for the Palestinian Arabs, pledged almost a token $1 million - and hasn't paid a dime.
Here is the list of countries who pledged to rebuild Gaza, sorted by how much they still owe (and will never pay.)
Donor
Support
to Gaza
Disbursement
of Support to Gaza
Disbursement
ratio of Support to Gaza
Shortfall
Qatar*
1000
216.06
22%
783.94
Saudi
Arabia*
500
90.41
18%
409.59
Kuwait*
200
48.93
24%
151.07
UAE
200
59.08
30%
140.92
Turkey
200
139.48
70%
60.52
European
Union1
348.28
296.73
85%
51.55
Italy5
23.68
4.69
20%
18.99
Spain
22.8
14.6
64%
8.2
Germany
63.32
60.67
96%
2.65
Bahrain*
6.5
5.15
79%
1.35
South
Africa
1
0
0%
1
Estonia
1.27
0.63
50%
0.64
Greece
1.27
0.63
50%
0.64
Slovenia
0.19
0.127
67%
0.063
Croatia
0.4
0.35
88%
0.05
Serbia
0.05
0
0%
0.05
USA
277
277
100%
0
World
Bank
62
62
100%
0
Algeria*
61.4
61.4
100%
0
Japan4
61
61
100%
0
UK
32.16
32.16
100%
0
The
Netherlands
15.31
15.31
100%
0
Canada
14.66
14.66
100%
0
Denmark
14.46
14.46
100%
0
Australia
13.18
13.18
100%
0
France7
10.13
10.13
100%
0
Finland
9.31
9.31
100%
0
Russia
8.74
8.74
100%
0
Belgium8
7.92
7.92
100%
0
Austria9
5.22
5.22
100%
0
India
4
4
100%
0
Ireland
3.17
3.17
100%
0
Brazil10
2.46
2.46
100%
0
South
Korea
2
2
100%
0
Mexico
1.1
1.1
100%
0
Chile
0.25
0.25
100%
0
Hungary
0.16
0.16
100%
0
Poland
0.1
0.1
100%
0
Malaysia
0.1
0.1
100%
0
Singapore
0.1
0.1
100%
0
Bulgaria
0.06
0.06
100%
0
Slovakia
0.05
0.05
100%
0
Romania
0.05
0.05
100%
0
Portugal
0.03
0.03
100%
0
Sweden
10
11.37
114%
-1.37
Switzerland
65.28
66.96
103%
-1.68
Norway2
144.98
173.91
120%
-28.93
3,395
1,796
1599.243
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January 2011 was the first time the US allowed the Palestinian flag to officially fly in Washington, DC:
The Palestinian flag was flown for the first time outside PLO diplomatic offices in Washington today, in a symbolic step that officials said shows momentum towards creation of an independent Palestinian state.
Ambassador Maen Areikat unfurled the red, green, white and black banner from a balcony above the office entrance to a round of applause from supporters. He hailed the moment as historic.
Areikat praised the Obama administration for a small, if symbolic, gesture that reflects improved diplomatic relations and a U.S. commitment to help promote the goal of a Palestinian state.
"It means the administration is serious," he said of the U.S. permission to fly the flag. "What we are urging them now is to translate their support for a Palestinian state into concrete action."
In September 2015 the US opposed raising the Palestinian flag outside the UN:
After Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas ramped up rhetoric toward Israel Wednesday, the United Nations raised the Palestinian flag above its headquarters in New York as part of a ceremony that the world body’s leader said represented a “day of hope.” The United States opposed the move, asserting that Palestinian statehood must be reached through a negotiated peace with Israel.
Wednesday, the Palestinian flag flew at the White House itself.
Inexplicably, President Trump was positioned in front of the Palestinian flag and Abbas in front of the American flag:
And Fatah supporters celebrated photos like this, claiming that it was an implicit recognition of the "State of Palestine" by the US:
It seems unlikely that the White House intended to give such a gigantic symbolic victory to the Palestinians to get nothing in return.
To Western eyes, symbolism may not be meaningless but it is not of overarching importance. But to Palestinians, it is everything. The honor/shame system ensures that appearances are more important than reality. A smart US policy would use this divergence between the shame culture of the Arabs and the guilt culture of the West and trade symbols from the US in exchange for tangible concessions from the Palestinians.
A good dealmaker wouldn't just give away what is the most valuable to one side without ensuring something significant for the other. As of this writing, we are not aware of any such deal. The likelihood is that this was cluelessness, not cleverness.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
“We are raising our youth, our children, our grandchildren on a culture of peace,” said Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday, during a joint presentation alongside President Donald Trump.
Watch the segment below, or watch the entire event here.
Speaking Arabic due to insufficient fluency in English, Abbas described the “Palestinian people” as something other than regional Levantine Arabs. “Palestinians,” he continued, constitute a distinct nation entitled to self-determination and independence via statehood on Israeli and disputed territories.
Abbas spoke of “occupation” while describing “Palestinians” as a people: “Mr. President, it’s about time for Israel to end its occupation of our people and of our land. After fifty years, we are the only remaining people in the world that still live under occupation. We are aspiring and want to achieve our freedom, our dignity, and our right to self-determination and we also want for Israel to recognize the Palestinian state just as the Palestinian people recognize the state of Israel.”
A future “Palestinian” state, said Abbas, must be built upon disputed territories east of the 1949 Armistice Lines, which he referred to as “the border of 1967.” Its future capital city, he added, must be “East Jerusalem” in accordance with the “two-state solution.”
Abbas described “Palestinians” as “suffering,” later attempting to link Islam with Judaism and Christianity via grouping of “the three great monotheistic religions.”
Islamic terrorist groups such as the Islamic State (ISIS), said Abbas, have nothing to do with “noble religion” of Islam.
Donald Trump is hosting Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas today, in the Palestinian leader’s first official visit to the White House under the new administration. In honor of the meeting, we collected a number of important facts on the work of the PA Chairman in the past and present. The following facts, should they arise during the meeting, will likely cause a great deal of discomfort on the Palestinian side.
1. Mahmoud Abbas was an active terrorist.
Abbas was one of the planners and primary funders of the massacre of 11 Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich 1972. One of the planners of the horrific slaughter, Abu Daoud, testified that Abbas was responsible for funding the massacre. Not only does the Palestinian leader not regret his role in the murder of the Israeli athletes — he brags about it. Last September, the official Facebook page of the Fatah movement, headed by Mahmoud Abbas, described the murderous attack as an “heroic operation”, and described it as a demonstration of “the meaning of the courage and power of the Palestinian resistance fighter and his self-sacrifice for the homeland and for the cause.”
3. Abbas is a Holocaust denier.
In his doctorate, called The Other Side: The Secret Ties Between the Nazis and Zionism (Arabic), Abbas questions the historical truth of six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. He noted in his thesis that “there are rumors” that the number of victims reached six million. However, Abbas claims, no-one can confirm this number: “The number of Jewish victims might be six million, and it might be much smaller, perhaps even less than a million.”
Furthermore, Abbas is deeply invested in conspiracy theories about an alleged Zionist-Nazi collaboration, and writes that the heads of the Zionist movement “granted legitimacy to every racist in the world, and especially Hitler, to do as they wish with the Jews in their power with the long-term aim of those Jews immigrating to Palestine.”
It should be noted that it was Haj Amin al-Husseini, considered the leader of the Arabs of the Land of Israel in WWII, who closely collaborated with Hitler — with the aim of exterminating the Jewish population in the Land of Israel and throughout the Middle East. These solid facts do not of course appear in Abbas’s false doctorate.
There’s a reason UNESCO just disavowed Israel’s sovereignty
over Jerusalem and it’s not what you think it is.
It has nothing to do with antisemitism. Nope. Not a thing.
It does, however, have everything to do with FEAR.
That would be the fear of Israeli leaders.
Israeli leaders, you see, are afraid to speak the truth.
They may see things with complete clarity, but when they go to act on that
truth, they let their fear do them in.
If it’s a statement they need to make, for instance, they
end up couching their words in some sort of nebulous PC fog. If it’s a court
ruling, they’ll rule righteously then reverse the ruling. If it’s a law that
needs creating, they create the law and then fail to apply it 100% of the time.
And the thing is, if you let the enemy see your fear, you’ve
lost. Plain and simple.
Look what happened with this UNESCO resolution. We knew it
was coming down the pike. It was going to happen on Israeli Independence Day
(and did). Therefore, it was incumbent on the Israeli prime minister to issue a
statement on the subject. And what better place could a prime minister smack
UNESCO’s hand for its planned disavowal of Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem
than in Jerusalem? At the yearly bible quiz, no less.
Here is how the Jerusalem Postparaphrased
Bibi’s remarks: “Netanyahu said there was no nation in the world to whom
Jerusalem was more holy than to the Jewish people.”
No, Bibi. Wrong. You let your fear do you in; do us in.
Jerusalem is not MORE holy to the Jews. It is ONLY holy to
the Jews and you needed to say that.
Jerusalem was holy to the Jews before Jesus was born.
Jerusalem was holy to the Jews before Mohammed was born.
When Christians and Muslims say or even believe Jerusalem is
holy to them, it’s only because it is holy to the Jews and their religions are
replacement religions: designed to make Judaism obsolete.
This is the truth and EVERYONE knows it. UNESCO passes these
resolutions to rewrite the truth. UNESCO DOESN’T NEED YOUR HELP to do so.
UNESCO knows as well as we do that Jerusalem is not
mentioned even once in the Quran. UNESCO knows as well as we do that Jerusalem
has always been in Jewish thoughts and prayers. This body knows we’re
the indigenous people of this territory. It knows we fought a defensive war and
have full rights to the city both according to birthright AND international
law.
But UNESCO also knows that Bibi is going to give lip service
to the idea that Jerusalem is holy to three peoples, therefore meeting its
sneaky intentions halfway. And once Bibi does that, the entire tower of logic begins
to disintegrate. People see or hear Bibi’s remarks and they say, “Even HE
admits Jerusalem is not the sole province of the Jewish people!” and so the
cookie crumbles.
And UNESCO’s resolution gains strength and momentum.
Look what happened earlier in the week regarding the UN compound
in the Armon HaNetziv neighborhood of Jerusalem. There’s all kinds of illegal
construction going on there. Regavim demanded that Israel force the UN to return the property to the
state. So what did the State of Israel do?
It asked Regavim to hold off on demanding a response until
such time as the Foreign Ministry could be in touch with UN officials and
officially request a tour of the compound.
Which screws up the whole point of what Regavim was
righteously trying to do, namely to show the UN that Israel is sovereign and if the UN
will not obey Israeli law, they will have to turn the property over to its
rightful, lawful owner, the State of Israel.
Instead, Israel sniveled and made itself little, came
CRAWLING, “Oh, please Mr. Powerful UN, will you let us tour our own property (in
which we so kindly HOST you and in which you have egregiously ABUSED our
hospitality???)?”
UNTSO Headquarters, South View, 1986
Now one Israeli government official did stand up and show
her mettle. That would be Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev
(you go, Girl!). "Fifty years to our sovereignty in the city, there is no
need for the presence of UN observers. They were given the opportunity to use
the compound to supervise the ceasefire agreements of the Six Day War—agreements
that are no longer relevant. This saga must end,” said Regev to Channel 2 News,
Tuesday evening.
“I intend to approach the Foreign Ministry and other
relevant parties in order to return the compound, in the Armon Hanatziv
neighborhood in the heart of Jerusalem, to the State of Israel,” she said.
Unfortunately, this is a little like closing the barn door
after the horses have escaped. Plus, Regev isn’t terribly powerful in the
hierarchy of the Israeli government and though the words are great, they’re
just words.
This should have been taken care of before the UNESCO vote. And without
big brave empty words. Either it’s our property or it’s not. And it won’t be if
we don’t have the gumption to claim it for ourselves.
Another recent example of how our leaders let fear hamper
them and suck our power away was the mishandling of
the visa for Human Rights Watch staffer Omar Shakir. Israel turned down his
request for a work visa because Human Rights Watch isn’t a real human rights
organization. It’s an organization dedicated to bringing down the State of
Israel.
NGO Monitor
summarizes things nicely for us (please do visit the website for further details):
“Human Rights Watch is a powerful NGO, with a massive budget, close links to
Western governments, and significant influence in international institutions.
Its publications reflect the absence of professional standards, research
methodologies, and military and legal expertise, as well as a deep-seated
ideological bias against Israel.”
At any rate, Israel’s Foreign Ministry wrote a letter
explaining the denial of Shakir’s work visa:
“For some time now, this organization’s public actions and
reports have focused on politics in service of Palestinian propaganda while
falsely raising the banner of ‘human rights.’”
So what did Shakir do then? He applied for a TOURIST visa.
This too, was (correctly!) denied.
But you know what happened next, don’t you? I know. You’re
cringing. And you’re right: a hue and cry was raised on SOCIAL MEDIA and so Israel
caved. Completely.
They gave Shakir a WORK visa (and not a tourist visa).
We’d all been cheering the Foreign Ministry for turning the
guy away. And then it caves!
It’s an awful feeling to watch your representatives cave on
the most important issues—on the issues that really matter.
They let in this potential terrorist to craft all sorts of
plans to hurt Israel from within. All funded, of course, by Germany and other Western
Jew-haters.
It’s unbearable.
What’s the solution? People say, “Don’t vote Likud.”
But no one else, at this point in time, has the qualities of
leadership that Bibi has. He’s what we’ve got. He’s all we’ve got. And he’s no
good at speaking the truth.
He stood up to Sigmar
Gabriel—told him if he meets with Breaking the Silence and B’tselem, he
wouldn’t meet with him. But then he called him to iron things out after the fact,
giving Gabriel a SECOND chance to snub him: Gabriel refused
to speak to Bibi.
And now Bibi has caved on the UNESCO thing with his
politically correct statements.
It’s sickening. It could make a person lose hope.
Unfortunately, there may not be more to do than outline the problem whenever
it happens, to underscore the PC caving, the weakened statements and actions. We
can speak of these things until our leaders get the point. This is something we all can
do. If so, if this is ALL we can do for now, please consider this blog post as
my opening salvo.
You can trust there will be more to come.
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Washington, May 3 - An aide to a senior executive at an organization that bills itself as pro-Israel and pro-peace expressed relief today that Israel Independence Day was over, as he could not handle the awkwardness in not knowing whether to greet his colleagues yesterday with a "Happy Nakba Day" wish, or what.
Nye Eave, 22, encountered numerous mentions of something called the Nakba yesterday as Israel marked its sixty-ninth Independence Day, and assumed the term referred to some positive event, given the nature of Independence Days to highlight the successes and milestones the country has attained since achieving sovereignty. Since J-Street is pro-Israel, he reasoned, the organization must take a positive attitude toward the Jewish State on the anniversary of the state's founding. However, he recalled, none of the people employing the term Nakba conveyed any sense of satisfaction or pride, causing Eave to wonder what he was missing. Ultimately, he related, he did not utter any such greeting.
"It left me with a feeling of unease, I guess is what you'd call it," explained the recent Georgetown University graduate. "We at J-Street love Israel. We never tire of saying that. It drives everything we do, right? So Israel's Independence Day must be a big deal for such a pro-Israel organization. People kept mentioning this Nakba thing in such solemn terms, I thought they were just still in the whole Memorial Day for fallen soldiers from the day before. But it was everyone, everywhere. It confused me, I admit."
Eave waited yesterday for a statement by the organizational leadership consistent with what one might expect from a pro-Israel group, namely expressions of support for the people of Israel, and appreciation of the achievements Israel as a society has made in sixty-nine years in culture, the sciences, education, and industry, not to mention thriving economically despite the continual need to fight off existential foes. "I must have missed the e-mail that went around," he surmised. "Maybe it's because I'm just an intern and I'm not on all the distribution lists, I guess, even though I get all the other ones. Maybe it was the one we all got from Mr. Ben-Ami about remembering the Nakba? I don't know. It had totally the wrong tone about it for a celebratory message."
Eave hopes to forge strong professional ties during his internship, and to establish a reputation as a person dedicated to the organization's mission. "My calendar says Jerusalem Reunification Day is coming up in a few weeks, so I'll bet they've got something appropriate planned to celebrate fifty years of the Jewish capital returning to Jewish sovereignty for the first time in almost two thousand years," he gushed. "Should I bring in a poster of that iconic photo with the three paratroopers looking at the just-liberated Western Wall, or is that overkill?"
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A Non-Binding Resolution with No Legal Status Nobody should take this resolution seriously. It is nothing more than a non-binding, politicized expression of the political opinion of the extremist, anti-Israel states voting for it. It has no legal status whatsoever.
In a highly transparent and obvious attempt by the Palestinian Authority to “camouflage” in UNESCO language, the motion is nothing other than one more blatantly hostile, Israel-bashing resolution. The Palestinian leadership has, once again, devoted its international efforts at abusing an international organization in order to delegitimize Israel, rather than to instill mutual good faith and seek peace.
Such hysteria and concentrated activity by the Palestinian leadership aimed at delegitimizing Israel, on the eve of the projected visit meeting by Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, with U.S. President Donald Trump, represents a distinct “poke in the eye” of the new U.S. administration. It is a telling sign of the disdain by the Palestinian leadership for any serious attempt to restore a peace-negotiation process. Hiding behind accepted UN and UNESCO terminology of “safeguarding the cultural heritage of Palestine and the distinctive character of East Jerusalem,” the Palestinian leadership is once again dragging UNESCO – once a credible and reputable professional organization – into the pit of politicization.
Ostensibly, in order to deceive and to recruit the support of the European countries and others for what they claim is a “watered down” text, the Palestinians and their Arab colleagues have devised curious terminology that is tantamount to political and legal acrobatics.
Fatah: "If we do not do this [pay salaries to prisoners], what will be their fate? They are liable to turn to ISIS... [We] say to the donor states [whose money goes to terrorists] that your donations help the PA bring peace to the Middle East."
"There is a drop in support and funding [of 70%] from all [countries]... [Donor countries are told]: Why are you providing aid to those [the PA] who are paying the prisoners and the Martyrs' (Shahids') families?"
As PA leader Mahmoud Abbas prepares to meet US President Trump today, many are hoping that Trump will condition US aid to the Palestinian Authority on the cessation of the PA payments to terrorists and their families. Clearly concerned about this, PA leaders have published many statements this month defending their practice of financially rewarding terror. In a strange twist of logic, Fatah is now arguing that donor countries should welcome the PA's paying salaries to terrorists with their money, since this practice promotes peace by keeping the Palestinian terrorists from joining "ISIS or any other extremist party... [We] say to the donor states [whose money goes to terrorists] that your donations help the PA bring peace to the Middle East."
In 2017, the national security interests of the US and Israel have converged in an unprecedented manner, in response to the anti-US Arab Tsunami; anti-US Islamic terrorism; the declining European posture of deterrence; drastic cuts in the US defense budget; an increasingly unpredictable, dangerous global situation; Israel’s surge of military and commercial capabilities; and US-Israel shared values.
Contrary to conventional wisdom — and traditional State Department policy — US-Israel and US-Arab relations are not a case of zero-sum-game. This is currently demonstrated by enhanced US-Israel strategic cooperation, concurrently with expanded security cooperation between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other pro-US Arab countries, as well as stronger cooperation between the US and those same Arab countries. Unlike the simplistic view of the Middle East, Arab policy-makers are well aware of their priorities, especially when the radical Islamic machete is at their throats. They are consumed by internal and external intra-Muslim, intra-Arab violence, which have bled and dominated the Arab agenda, prior to and irrespective of the Palestinian issue, which has never been a core cause of regional turbulence, a crown-jewel of Arab policy-making, nor the crux of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Israel’s posture as a unique ally of the US — in the Middle East and beyond — has surged since the 1991 demise of the USSR, which transformed the bi-polar globe, into a multi-polar arena of conflicts, replete with highly unpredictable, less controllable and more dangerous tactical threats. Israel possesses proven tactical capabilities in face of such threats. Thus, Israel provides tailwind to the US in the pursuit of three critical challenges, which impact the national and homeland security of the US, significantly transcending the scope of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian issue:
Bassam Abu Sharif is a former adviser to Yasser Arafat who was one of the organizers of the series of plane hijackings in 1970 to Jordan. (Time magazine called him "The Face of Terror.")
Sharif is a committed Marxist who admires Mao Zedong and Che Guevara. He is also a conspiracy theorist who claimed that Israel assassinated JFK and Yemenite Jews were going to assassinate President Obama.
Sharif is nervous about how the Arab world is thinking about the Palestinian issue recently.
Abu Sharif: We are facing a war to erase the Palestinian issueBassam Abu Sharif, former political advisor to the late president Yasser Arafat, stressed that the Palestinian people is going through lean years and the hardest stage of the Palestinian struggle, because it is facing a war to erase the Palestinian issue, in the shadow of the worst situation for the political Arab world, the likes of which it has never went through in the history of the Arab nation.
In an interview with the “Filastin” newspaper yesterday, Abu Sharif said: “The Palestinian people is going through a field that is full of mines, and it must prove that it is attached to its land and has deep roots in it, through working towards returning the (Palestinian) issue to the attention of the Arab nation”.
He also expressed bitterness at how the Palestinian issue has been sidelined by Egypt specifically.
It is not all bad news, though. He notes that while Arab countries are abandoning the Palestinian issue, he says that there are 15,000 Palestinian academics in the US and many more in Europe who have pushed the issue (he called them "the long arm of the Palestinians."
The Arab world indeed is sick of the Palestinian issue and has started to break with the longstanding reflexive support for whatever the Palestinian leadership demanded. The bad news is that the center of gravity for this support has moved from the Arab world to the so-called liberal universities, where propaganda has replaced actual thought in many cases.
When Arab leaders make more sense than university professors, you know that something is seriously wrong.
(h/t Ibn Boutros)
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Future generations will probably never believe it. Teachers will have a hard time convincing their students that what sounds legendary actually occurred. The children will naturally swallow each word, but later on, as adults, they’ll nod their heads and smile, remarking that these were fantasies of history.
They won’t believe that this small state, surrounded by hatred, fire and murder, had so quickly managed a miracle. It will be hard to describe how, amid a sea of hatred, a tiny army drove off and humiliated several well-equipped military hordes of who knows how many Arab countries.
How does acclaimed scholar and Talmudic genius Shaul Lieberman put it? In another 2,000 years, people will consider these events the way we think of descriptions of the Maccabees and their victories.
Did I say another 2,000 years? No, make that: in another year, or even tomorrow.
Last Sunday, the Arabs and their allies were boastfully threatening Israel that if she dared to make another move, she’d pay with her existence. And several hours later, our Jewish heroes advanced, and the entire world, holding its breath, followed their every movement.
You’ll recall the radio broadcasts at the beginning of the week that sounded practically Job-like. Every hour, another Arab government declared war against Israel. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia. And then: Morocco, Tunisia, Algiers. In Tunisia, an incited mob led a pogrom in the Jewish Quarter. Other Muslim — or part Muslim — countries rushed to sign up in [Egyptian president Gamal Abdul] Nasser’s “holy war.” Malaysia, Sudan, Mali, Guinea and more.
We bit our lips, cracked our knuckles and could find no comfortable spot for ourselves. Quietly, we asked if the test was too hard this time. Was too much being demanded from the Jewish people and from their land? How could we expect to be redeemed, knowing that the enemy numbered tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of people, against a mere 2 million Jews in Israel?
And then, between Passover and Shavuot, the Hanukkah miracle occurred. It didn’t take long before the supposedly mighty enemy was rendered speechless and lost its nerve. Even the Soviet Ambassador to the UN, Nikolai Fedorenko, suddenly changed his tone. Instead of worrying about whether Nasser would finally curb his appetite for power, world leaders began looking for ways to make amends to Israeli Premier Levi Eshkol.
It was as though a theater director, unfamiliar with his cast, suddenly switched the parts of his actors: those who had stubbornly opposed us now asked for mercy, as their former protectors now distanced themselves from them. Overnight, the mood at the UN Security Council seemed unrecognizable.
I approach this half-century mark with a confusing mixture of wonderment and dread, joy and despair, pride and embarrassment. The crushing military victory that expanded Israel threefold and brought Jerusalem back to the Jewish people has also turned the Israel I love into a sometimes-brutal occupier of an estimated 2.9 million Palestinians, with no end in sight.
I believe many others share this painful ambiguity. The temptation is to turn away, because it feels too damn hard to reconcile, but that shirks our responsibility as Jews.
Why does she feel this way? Because of the major lie that has permeated the world since 1967:
“From the get-go we didn’t view them as Israelis. We coveted their land. We did not covet them,” Danny Seidemann, one of the nation’s top experts on Jerusalem, told me a few months ago. “And they didn’t view themselves as Israeli. Everything derives from that.”
It was a historic victory for Israel, absolutely. It was also a disaster for another people.
At the time, the Arabs in Judea and Samaria weren't considered "Palestinians." They were Jordanians. They expressed loyalty to Jordan, they were Jordanian citizens, and the word "Palestinians" was hardly ever used to refer to them; at best they were "Palestinian Arabs," even in the Fatah 1964 charter.
Their recent transformation into a people - and I agree they are a people today - was a political decision by the Arab leadership to keep them stateless and miserable.
The entire reason the Palestinian people exist today is to destroy Israel.
This is the fundamental truth that too few dare to mention. It seems cruel. And it is. But the cruelty is from the Arab world and Palestinian leaders, their cynical and systematic use of human lives as cannon and propaganda fodder against Israel, within and without the territories.
Every single political or military move by the Arab world and the Palestinian leadership vis a vis the Palestinian Arabs is to ultimately destroy Israel. Some are meant to do it sooner and some to do it in stages, but this is the one consistent fact that illuminates the otherwise nonsensical history of the past fifty and 69 years.
Why did Jordan choose to turn millions of people stateless in 1988? Why did Arafat sign the Oslo Accords and claim to renounce terror? Why has the Arab world refused to allow Palestinians, and only Palestinians, to become citizens? Why did the Palestinians reject statehood in 2000 and 2001 and start a terror war instead? Why do they spend so much time on symbolic victories at the UN rather than doing anything to actually help their people? Why do Palestinian leaders refuse to accept European initiatives for grassroots peace initiatives like youth soccer games between them and Israeli kids? Why haven't there been any significant new universities or hospitals built under PA rule despite huge monetary support from the West? Why are there still "refugee" camps in areas under Palestinian control? Why does UNRWA still exist? Why do Palestinians insist that Jerusalem, a city that was largely ignored under a thousand years of Muslim rule, must be their capital?
Surveys that bother to ask the proper questions uncover the answers: the "Palestinian state" that the world thinks the Palestinians desire is only meant as a stage to destroy Israel, and Palestinians themselves admit it. This is why the "right to return" is still left as an open issue outside of statehood. This is why Hamas "accepts" a state in the territories. This is why there is such resistance to compromise in any negotiations - because compromise means that the claims must end, while waiting for the world to provide 100% of Phase 1 means that there will be a Phase 2.
The sad fact is that every Palestinian with false "refugee" status, within and without the territories, is a pawn. This was recognized since the 1950s but the desire to eventually destroy Israel is what keeps this issue alive today, not "justice." What kind of justice is it to artificially keep people in misery and to pretend that it is being done for their own good?
50 years of propaganda and lies have had a huge effect. The end of Elie Wiesel's essay is now depressing, because the antisemites of the world have managed to spread their propaganda so thoroughly that it sounds like it was written in a different era:
Do you remember how thousands of Jewish youth besieged the Israeli Consulates, pleading to be sent as volunteers to Israel? Do you recall the mass demonstrations in the streets? And the countless Jews, including the poorest of the poor, donating their meager savings to the pushkes [charity boxes] of the United Jewish Appeal?
This new Jewish awakening is part of that miracle, a part of the Jewish victory. Those who thought Jews were frightened by huge armies were mistaken, and those who thought you could separate the Jewish state from the Jewish people around the world clearly underestimated us.
Unfortunately, over fifty years, they have to an extent succeeded, as too many Jews have drunk the Palestinian State Kool-Aid and regard Israel as not a liberal bastion trying to protect the Jewish state in the Jewish ancestral homeland but as a cruel colonial occupier of "Palestinian land" - a phrase that no one ever uttered in 1967.
If Palestinians wanted a state and peace, they would have a state and peace. It is their desire to use such a state as a launching pad to destroy Israel that has left them stateless.
That is the only thread of consistency to explain the entire past fifty years of propaganda, lies, false "moderation" and terror.
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A new report on attitudes towards gender equality in the Middle East shows that there are still a significant number of people, men and women alike, who can justify families punishing female members who act in ways that are perceived as a violation of honor, with many excusing "honor killings."
An NGO called IMAGES surveyed people in Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and the Palestinian Authority. Here are their results on the questions of family honor and honor killings:
35% of Palestinian men say that men who kill their female relatives for "honor" reasons should not go to jail. That is a higher percentage than any other group surveyed.
Worse, 47% of Palestinian men say that female relatives who "act or dress" in ways that they disapprove deserve to be punished. (62% of Egyptian men believe that.)
The survey, called the International Men and Gender Equality Survey (Images), was carried out in the territories by a group at Bir Zeit University, and as a result it downplays the misogynist violence and attitudes to be the result of "occupation." This bias includes a section of interviews with former long-term prisoners, who are a tiny percentage of Palestinian men, about how well well they respect their wives for taking care of their families while they were incarcerated. The Palestinian part of the survey goes to great lengths to blame Israel, with the entire section introduced with "The reality of Palestinian lives – including gender relations and gender dynamics – has been carved by the prolonged Israeli occupation. The occupation has become the central structural framework of analysis for all elements of political, economic, and social life in Palestine. IMAGES findings in Palestine must be understood within this contextual framework."
In other words, even this survey is being twisted to Palestinian political desire to place the "occupation" as the central problem in the Middle East. As a result, findings like the tolerance for honor killings is downplayed and the more progressive findings are trumpeted. Paragraphs like these, with no scientific basis, are sprinkled throughout:
This leaves the pursuit of gender justice objectives in Palestine in a unique place: by many indicators, quality of life seems to be deteriorating for the majority of Palestinians, patriarchal structures and gendered expectations persist, and the occupation goes on seemingly indefinitely. At the same time, partly in spite of and partly because of these factors, many Palestinian women and men find themselves in truly transformed gendered spaces. This study has sought to better document these overlapping dynamics and this moment in the rich story of gender in Palestinian life.
Here is where social science is subverted by politics.
So you have to dig to find out that about one fifth of Palestinian husbands beat their wives, 34% of men believe that there are times that a woman deserves to be beaten, and 67% say women are too emotional to be leaders. These are blamed on high unemployment by men, which are the fault of Israel (and the PA):
These realities are a result of the prolonged occupation’s structural domination of Palestinian lives and the Palestinian economy, as well as the Palestinian Authority’s neo-liberal policies that impoverish the majority of Palestinians. The depressive symptoms, in this case, can be understood as an expression of the failure of society to provide the conditions under which men can fulfil their socially-assigned role as breadwinners.
Yes, a survey on gender equality is so subverted by anti-Israel politics that it accepts the idea of men alone as breadwinners to justify their violence and misogynist attitudes towards women.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Nasreen Kadri singing at the Day of remembrance ceremony:
And singing to celebrate Israel's independence, a medley of songs about Israel and Jerusalem, with other Israeli singers:
Notice also that some of the dancers are in wheelchairs!
Israel is clearly one of the most progressive and liberal countries on Earth.
Which is exactly what drives the fake "progressives" crazy.
(h/t Yoel)
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Tuvia Tenenbom is a writer who manages to entertain at the same time as exposing evil and prejudice (mostly antisemitism). His previous book "Catch the Jew" was a devastating indictment of the antisemitism driving Europe's funding of anti-Zionist organisations in Israel. This latest book is an equally devastating exposure of ignorance and antisemitism in America. Tuvia is especially adept at exposing the hypocrisy of the left. However, contrary to what many people assume, Tuvia is certainly not 'a man of the right' or a conservative in any sense of the word. This is something I return to at the end of my review, along with some criticisms (that I think have been missed despite there having been some very good in-depth reviews of the book already, such as this one by Phyllis Chesler).
Before stating my reservations I want to make it clear that I think this is a brilliant and must-read book for anybody concerned not just with antisemitism but also with the increasingly damaging effects of 'political correctness' which, in America, has eroded free speech and created a highly authoritarian society - a process massively accelerated by 8 years of Obama. A recurrent theme of the book is the lack of critical thought and predictable consistency of leftists: the two things they are invariably obsessed with are climate change and 'Palestine'. Indeed Tuvia notes that there is a perfect correlation between opinions on climate change and opinions on Israel. Those who believe in man-made climate change are anti-Israel while those who don't are generally pro-Israel. Tuvia highlights the obsessive and irrational anger that leftists have for Israel which seems to be based on complete ignorance, such as:
The Quakers in Pennsylvania who love Obama but only worry that he is 'too friendly to Israel' and 'not supportive enough of the Palestinians'. They care deeply about the plight of the Palestinians but not local blacks whose neighbourhoods are more dangerous than Gaza.
Bryan from Texas whose main interest is in foreign affairs and who proves this interest by saying how Israel must 'stop settlement building in Gaza'.
Jason - the first person he meets in Fargo Dakota - who introduces himself as 'pro-choice, pro gay marriage, pro-environment and pro-Palestine.'
On my last visit to Israel, I thought it would be interesting to take a tour of the West Bank from the perspective of critics of Israeli government policy. I went with MachsomWatch, an organization of Israeli women who, among other things, monitor checkpoints. The guide, Daniela, said the tour would not be political, but it was essentially a day long diatribe against Israel’s efforts to defend itself against terrorists.
The Orwellian logic of the tour began just outside the Palestinian town of Qalqilya. We could get a good view of the security wall separating the town from Israel. Roughly five percent of the security barrier consists of a wall rather than a fence and the reason for this stretch of concrete is that Palestinians used to shoot at Israeli motorists on the nearby highway. Daniela said there had not been any terror attacks from Qalqilya in years to suggest the wall was unnecessary as opposed to demonstrating its effectiveness.
One of the main messages of the tour, after visiting with three Palestinians, was that the checkpoints and gates inside the West Bank make life burdensome for Palestinians. Some spend an inordinate amount of time waiting at these checkpoints to travel through the area and to get to and from their jobs. Some fences separate farmers from their fields and groves and, according to the guide, are only permitted to pass through the gates at certain times, some of which are restricted to a few times per month or year. On a different tour, I saw an area where the fence separated some farmers from their land and, even though there were specific times when they were allowed to pass through the gates, when they wanted to tend to their crops they would simply shake the fence until soldiers arrived and opened it for them. Also, she also did not mention that Arabs benefited from the fence because it brought quiet and allowed a significant upsurge in economic activity.
During our tour, we did not witness any delays, however, it is true that Palestinians are inconvenienced by these restrictions and many feel humiliated by the way they are treated by soldiers responsible for ensuring they are not carrying weapons or planning a terrorist attack. Unfortunately, this is the price many Palestinians must pay for the decisions of their leaders to support terrorism. Their discomfort is temporary whereas the deaths of the victims of terror is permanent.
In honor of the 69th anniversary since Israeli independence, an Arab woman has posted a video in which she fearlessly declares her love for the State of Israel and blasts the hypocrisy of the Arab world.
“My name is Sarah Zoabi. I am an Arab, Muslim, Israeli, proud Zionist,” she declares, as she stands in front of the Knesset building in Jerusalem. “I believe with my whole heart in the right of the Jewish people to a sovereign state in the Holy Land of Israel.”
“It is a right that G-d promised and gave to the Jewish people - not a kindness - the right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.”
“The State of Israel is here to stay,” she says.
“How can I not love you, Israel?” she asks. “Even though you suffer from Arab and Muslim terror from within and without, you do not distinguish between sex, race, and religion. You respect, welcome, and embrace me as an Arab, Muslim woman.”
“Israel, my heart is full of love for you, a tiny country, but huge in the size of its good deeds - and you do a lot of good in the world. I stand proud next to your flag.
This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 19 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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Elder of Ziyon
