Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, November 07, 2017

The biggest Israel-related story of the decade that no one (right or left) wants you to know

Graphic by Haaretz

In June, Haaretz published a major investigative report (excerpted here) on the negotiations between Israel, the US and the Palestinians in 2013 and 2014.

The report shows that Netanyahu approved a framework, created by John Kerry and his team, that would have resulted in a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines with land swaps. When it was presented to Mahmoud Abbas, he angrily rejected it.

When Kerry came back with a sweeter offer that addressed Abbas' concerns - without consulting the Israelis - Abbas never responded and let the talks die.

This story, published in an ultra-left wing newspaper, it the biggest news story of the year for Israel.

It proves that Netanyahu is far more flexible towards a two-state solution than any reporter has ever written. It proves that Abbas is more intransigent and uninterested in peace than any reporter is willing to admit.

It completely up-ends the conventional wisdom about Israel and the Palestinians.

And no one wants to talk about it.

The media and world diplomats don't want to upset their carefully crafted mythology of an intransigent Likud government and a moderate PA. This story destroys that.

Worse, the Government of Israel doesn't want to mention this story either - because Netanyahu needs to portray himself as someone defending Israel's interests in the face of his more right-wing coalition partners.

So no one, right or left, is touching the more important story of the year.

Literally every day over the past two weeks we have seen op-eds and editorials castigating Britain or Balfour or Israel for blocking a Palestinian state that would fulfill a part of the Declaration that was never written.

Typical is The Guardian which wrote:

The Guardian of 1917 supported, celebrated – and could even be said to have helped facilitate – the Balfour declaration. However, Israel today is not the country we foresaw or would have wanted. It is run by the most rightwing government in its history, dragged ever rightward by fanatical extremists. ...

For Palestinians the situation is even more desperate. Almost 5 million live under a military occupation, which has lasted for five decades. ....

This is all the fault of the Palestinian leadership which has consistently rejected every single peace offer. Including peace offers supported by the "most rightwing government in [Israel's] history." Clearly, Israel's right wing extremists are more liberal and supportive of peace than the most moderate and liberal Palestinian leaders.

But no one is willing to admit this - from the right or the left.

The government of Israel is not going to help spread the best pro-Israel story of the year (perhaps the decade since Netanyahu has been Israel's leader since 2009.)

The mainstream media is not going to spread it.

Haaretz, which broke the story, has treated the issue like Kryptonite since then.It's own op-eds have ignored the story and continued to use the conventional wisdom of evil Likud and wonderful Fatah.

Competing Israeli media don't want to credit Haaretz with the scoop. They haven't reported it.

John Kerry didn't want to mention this when he cravenly pushed Israel, and only Israel, to make even more concessions- even though he knows the truth.

Neither right-wing nor left-wing websites want to admit that Netanyahu was willing to make sacrifices for peace similar to what Olmert and Barak were willing to do, and considerably beyond what Yitzchak Rabin was willing to do.

And Israel suffers because of it.

But you could do something. Every time someone writes or speaks about Israeli intransigence and Palestinian suffering, respond with the facts: Even Netanyahu accepted a Palestinian state, and Mahmoud Abbas rejected it. Force Israel's detractors to respond to this. Because the only rejectionists in the Israeli-Arab conflict has always been the Palestinians.

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Montefiore

Haaretz reports:

Britain's Labour Party is not doing enough to combat anti-Semitism masked as anti-Zionism, three prominent and influential British Jewish writers have claimed.

Historians Simon Shama, Simon Sebag Montefiore and novelist Howard Jacobson penned an open letter in the U.K.'s The Times criticizing Jeremy Corbyn's party for what they called its "derisory" response to anti-Zionism that they claim has become indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.

“We are alarmed that during the past few years, constructive criticism of Israeli governments has morphed into something closer to antisemitism under the cloak of so-called anti-Zionism," the joint letter read.

This is an important letter. The trio are all passionate Zionists. Shama once created an entire hour-long documentary for the BBC giving the moral case for Israel and he defended Israel's reaction to Hamas terror in Gaza. Montefiore, from the famed Zionist famly, wrote the acclaimed "Jerusalem: A Biography." Jacobson has fiercely defended Zionism in print.

So it is most disappointing - nay, infuriating - to read that their open letter included this passage:

“We do not forget nor deny that the Palestinian people have an equally legitimate, ancient history and culture in Palestine nor that they have suffered wrongs that must be healed. We hope that a Palestinian state will exist peacefully alongside Israel...”

Equally legitimate ancient history and culture in Palestine?

Simon Schama

The first two are historians, for God's sake. How can they say that Palestinian history and culture are on a par with that of Jews?

The idea is absurd. There were no Arab people called "Palestinian" before the 20th century, and the only reason they exist is to deny Zionism. Their "ancient history and culture" consists of soap from Nablus and costumes from Bethlehem, which no one ever called "Palestinian," and little else.

It is an insult to Jews and Zionists to equate the two claims and narratives and ideas of "justice.".

Even if you give these writers the benefit of the doubt and say that they are only making this claim to allow their message about antisemitism to be easier to swallow by British anti-Zionists - doesn't that mean that they don't really believe that anti-Zionism is a modern form of antisemitism? It dilutes their argument, instead of strengthening it.

Moreover, when prominent Jews openly say that the Jewish claim on the Jewish homeland is nothing special, then why on earth should the rest of the world think that Israel has a right to exist - especially when Arabs universally claim that Jews have no rights to the land whatsoever? Who wins that argument? The British Zionist leaders are handing the keys to Jewish holy places to those who want to ban Jews from visiting.

The fear that prominent Jewish Zionists have to fearlessly defend the Jewish claims to Israel in the face of the Arab lies is sickening. Israel's claim to all of the land from the Jordan to the Mediterranean is far superior to that of anyone else - historically, culturally, politically, legally. When the most prominent Zionists in Britain show that even they don't believe that, there is something very rotten going on in England.

The irony is that people respect those who are strong in their beliefs that they are right. Embracing the Arab narrative makes observers doubt the sincerity of these prominent Jews, no matter how eloquently they state the case for Israel in other contexts. The truth is solidly on the side of Israel, and their propleptically giving the arguments for the other side dilutes their message. They could have simply said that Palestinian Arabs have rights too - as all humans do - and that their rights must be respected in any solution to the conflict.

There may be legitimate reasons to want a two-state solution. But it should be done because Israel, the entity that has the strongest claim, is willing to compromise on that claim for peace. If it is done because one legitimizes Arab claims, then Arab claims on Green Line Israel are just as compelling (and illegitimate) as their claims on the "territories." (And you will never hear even the most moderate Palestinian say that Jews have a right to self-determination.)

No self-respecting Zionist can accept any part of the Palestinian Arab claims - because the very acceptance of those claims negates Jewish claims. That is the entire point of Palestinian nationalism since the 1910s - to delegitimize Zionism and Jewish peoplehood altogether. If there was no Zionism, there would have never been Palestinian nationalism which exists to combat Zionism. (Where were the Palestinian nationalists demanding self-determination in the territories between 1948 amd 1967?)

If Schama and Montefiore disagree, please, I would love to hear their arguments. I have looked for years for any evidence of a "Palestinian" nation and culture and people that predate Zionism, without luck.

I have no doubt that these three writers love Israel, but they seem very unaware of how much damage they can unwittingly cause to the nation they love by embracing the narrative of those who want to destroy Israel.

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11/06 Links Pt2: The roots of Labour's antisemitism problem; Who Saved Israel in 1947?

From Ian:

Syrian Diplomat Who Accused Israelis of Trafficking Children’s Organs Now Professor at Rutgers University

A former Syrian diplomat who accused Israeli officials of trafficking children’s organs is now working as a professor at state-funded Rutgers University in New Jersey, The Algemeiner has learned.

Mazen Adi, an adjunct professor in Rutgers’ Political Science Department, worked for Syria’s foreign ministry in various roles for 16 years starting in August 1998, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Most recently, between January 2007 and July 2014, Adi served as a diplomat and legal adviser at the Permanent Mission of Syria to the United Nations in New York. He represented the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as it met pro-democracy protesters with lethal force in 2011, sparking a conflict that has left an estimated 465,000 people dead or missing.

By the time Adi left Turtle Bay, the Assad regime had faced years of international opprobrium and sanctions, having been accused of perpetrating atrocities including mass killings, systematic torture, forced starvation and chemical weapons attacks.

Adi voiced Assad’s views — and occasionally those of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation — at both the UN Security Council and Sixth Committee of the General Assembly. Among his comments, found in UN records from 2008 to 2011, were allegations that Israel systematically targeted civilians, destroyed the environment and buried alive enemy soldiers; that Syria was a “trailblazer” in the fight against terrorism; and that Assad was committed to seeking a peaceful resolution to the Syrian conflict and implemented “sweeping reforms” following popular protests.

U.S. should deport Rutgers prof who represented Syria, abetted genocide

An international human rights group today called on Rutgers University to fire Mazen Adi, a professor on war crimes law, on grounds that as a Syrian diplomat and legal advisor he justified the war crimes of the genocidal Assad regime.

UN Watch, an independent non-governmental monitoring group based in Geneva, also called on the U.S. to deport Mr. Adi, whose identity was first exposed by The Algemeiner newspaper yesterday.

“The U.S. government needs to investigate how a long-time agent of the Syrian regime, close ally of Iran, was granted a visa to work and teach in America,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch.

“It ought to be a matter of profound concern that an American university would allow an apologist for the Syrian regime’s genocide to be a teacher.”

“When the United Nations debated Syria’s culpability for bombing its own people, Mazen Adi said that the Syrian authorities ‘upheld all their legal and judicial responsibilities,’” Neuer went on to say. “He is a liar and an apologist for mass murder.”

While serving as a Syrian delegate and legal advisor at the UN, Mr. Adi systematically acted as an apologist for the mass murder committed by the Assad regime against his own people, helping Syria to win impunity at the UN to conduct continued war crimes.

Mr. Adi joined Rutgers in September 2015, where he teaches international criminal law, political science, and United Nations and global policy studies.

Prior to Rutgers, Adi had served for 16 years as a Syrian diplomat, including as a legal advisor and occasional chargé d’affaires at the Syrian mission to the UN in New York.

Rutgers prof: "Israel trafficking in children's organs"

Rutgers prof Mazen Adi spins Assad genocide as "democracy"

Rutgers prof: Syria "upheld all legal responsibilities," "preserves rights of accused"

Fatah's disgusting Theresa May cartoons

Here are some cartoons that were published on Fatah's Facebook page and other media in the past week or two directed at Theresa May:

Yes, Fatah has turned Theresa May into an honorary Jew!

See more from PMW.

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The Zionist conspiracy against Tariq Ramadan (Petra Marquardt-Bigman)

By Petra Marquardt-Bigman

For an ardent Zionist like me, it is utterly disappointing to learn from the United Arab Emirates’ news site The National that “Supporters of Mr Ramadan are describing the accusations against him [as] part of a Zionist plot to destroy his name.” Obviously, there can be no doubt whatsoever that the eminent Oxford professor has the most awesome supporters who know what they’re talking about. So now the depressing question is: what took the infamous Elders of Zion so long??? Are they getting real old??? I mean, why didn’t they act well before 2009, when Ramadan was appointed “H.H. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies and Senior Research Fellow” at Oxford’s St Antony’s College???

On the other hand, I have to admit that the Zionist plot starts to look really formidable. The first to accuse Ramadan was French ex-Salafi Henda Ayari, who – encouraged by the #MeToo campaign – went to the police to file a complaint against Ramadan for “rape, sexual assault, willful violence, harassment and intimidation.” Soon afterwards, another French woman (who remained unnamed) came forward and “gave an account of an extremely violent [sexual] assault to two French newspapers.” A third woman reportedly “told Le Parisien in an interview … that Mr Ramadan sexually harassed her in 2014 and blackmailed her for sexual favours.”

And then there was a rather stunning confession by a French official “who was considered the ‘Monsieur Islam’ of the French Ministry of the Interior between 1997 and 2014, [and who] was well acquainted with Mr Ramadan.” Reportedly, “Monsieur Islam” was really really shocked by the allegations against Ramadan: he “insisted he had ‘never heard of rapes’” – all he sort of knew was that Tariq Ramadan “had many mistresses, that he consulted sites, that girls were brought to the hotel at the end of his lectures, that he invited them to undress, that some resisted and that he could become violent and aggressive.”

Shocking, utterly shocking, isn’t it – who could ever suspect that a man known for sometimes becoming “violent and aggressive” with “girls … brought to the hotel at the end of his lectures” would rape some of those girls???

The plot (the Zionist plot, naturally!!!) thickened further when Swiss media reported that four Swiss women testified about being sexually exploited by Ramadan while they were his teenage students. And once again, “a Swiss specialist in Islam who spent years accompanying Mr Ramadan on his trips across Europe,” admitted “that he had heard various rumours and suspicions about his former close associate’s behaviour over the years.”

Of course it should go without saying that the people who kept quiet about all those allegations against Ramadan did the right thing – as the Director of Oxford’s Middle East Centre just put it so delicately: “It’s not just about sexual violence. For some students it’s just another way for Europeans to gang up against a prominent Muslim intellectual. We must protect Muslim students who believe and trust in him, and protect that trust.”

Absolutely and obviously right: it would be plain old “Islamophobia” to focus on the fact that there have been accusations of sexual misconduct and even potentially criminal conduct against Ramadan for years and that some women finally have found the courage to come forward to testify!!!

So all we can do now is helplessly watch the monstrously evil Zionist plot against Tariq Ramadan take its course. But in the meantime, let me just highlight a bit of the record of the “prominent Muslim intellectual” whom Oxford apparently deems so worthy of the continued “trust” of students – particularly Muslim students.

If you check out Ramadan’s own website, you will see that it has several pages worth of links to his Press TV show “Islam and Life.” According to the Facebook page of the program, it is a “weekly show with Prof. Tariq Ramadan on the world’s fastest growing religion and the daily challenges faced by its followers especially in the West.”

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has described Press TV as “Iran’s official English-language propaganda arm” and “one of the world’s leading dispensers of conspiratorial anti-Semitism in English.”

Maybe Oxford’s H.H. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies and Senior Research Fellow Tariq Ramadan could devote one of his shows to the “Zionist plot” against him???

Now let’s have a quick look at some of the views the oh-so-trustworthy Oxford professor shares with his social media followers (634K on Twitter, more than 2 million on Facebook).

Some two years ago – on the same day when The Atlantic published Jeffrey Goldberg’s excellent piece on “The Paranoid, Supremacist Roots of the Stabbing Intifada” – Ramadan posted a rant entitled “ISRAELI SOCIETY IS SICK.” Naturally, no word about the ongoing wave of murderous stabbing and car-ramming attacks by Palestinian terrorists, but plenty of blood-libel style poison about how utterly evil and murderous Israeli society is, concluding with the professor’s view: “It is Israel that is the first danger of Israel, and its main disease.” One of Ramadan’s fans responded with a succinct summary: “Israel has become its worst nightmare; zionism is naziism.”

Already a few weeks earlier, Ramadan bitterly denounced “the great democrats of the world” who “talk about self-defense of Israel” which really means giving “Israel carte blanche to spread inhumanity, repression and horror.” The eminent professor concluded “Disgusting, really.”

If you’re not too disgusted by now, here are a few more similar outpourings of Oxford’s H.H. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies and Senior Research Fellow Tariq Ramadan: “#Israel They kill in #Palestine;” “#Israel CONDEMN ! CONDEMN ! FOR GOD SAKE CONDEMN !!!;” and “ISRAEL AND STATE TERRORISM.”

Finally, it will come as no surprise that Carlos Latuff – the proud second-prize-winner of Iran’s 2006 “International Holocaust Cartoon Competition” – is the kind of “artist” who can express in a picture that is worth a thousand antisemitic words how Tariq Ramadan feels.

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11/06 Links Pt1: The British left’s obsession with Israel-Palestine; Melanie Phillips: Our crazy world

From Ian:

The British left’s obsession with Israel-Palestine (Saturday Nov 4, 2017)

A short interview (with Tom Gross) while yet another anti-Israel protest takes places in London, with buses organized by the trade unions and others bringing in protestors from all around Britain.

Meanwhile there have been no protests for the 600,000 Rohingya Muslims made refugees in recent weeks by the military in Burma, which has had British arms and training and like Israel is another former British colony, and has been carrying out systematic ethnic cleansing and a scorched earth policy against Rohingya.

Nor for the 160,000 Kurdish men, women and children forced from their homes in the last two weeks by Iranian-controlled Shia militia in Kirkuk.

For over two years now, partly using British weapons, the Saudis and other gulf Arabs have been bombing civilians in Yemen, leading to mass starvation and malaria inflicting millions of people there. There hasn’t been a single protest in London. And the list goes on...

Andrew Marr clumsily claims “a lot of Jewish friends” and “Jewish community leaders” blame Israel for antisemitism in Britain

BBC presenter Andrew Marr has claimed in an interview with the visiting Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that “a lot of Jewish friends” and “a lot of Jewish community leaders have said that Israeli government policies are feeding antisemitism in Britain.

Mr Marr asked Mr Netanyahu: “Can I ask you about the condition of Jews in this country because I’ve got a lot of Jewish friends and there are a lot of Jewish community leaders who are very worried about your government and they say that particularly the settlements issue has made it much, much harder to defend Israel in this country.” However, Mr Marr then added: “We have always had antisemitism in Britain but it has been quite quiet for a long time and it is back on the rise.”

Mr Netanyahu correctly answered: “Well, you know, I wouldn’t blame Jews for antisemitism any more than I would blame blacks for racial hatred stirred against them, or anti-gay hatred. It’s because of what they are.” Mr Netanyahu appeared to have more to say, but Mr Marr interjected: “There’s a distinction between Jews and policies.” Mr Marr was correct to draw such a distinction, which makes his suggestion that many Jews think that rising antisemitism in Britain has been fuelled by the political positions adopted by the Israeli government so extremely clumsy.

There is no evidence that Israeli government policy, which has not changed terribly markedly in recent years, has had any impact on rising hate crime against British Jews, nor is there any evidence that there is any policy that the Israeli government could adopt to stem the tide of hatred aimed at British Jews by the neo-Nazis of the far-right, the extremists of the far-left, or Islamists inspired by groups such as ISIS.

IsraellyCool: Binyamin Netanyahu Handles ‘Hostile’ Andrew Marr Interview Like a Boss

I am not sure if it just me, but BBC television presenter Andrew Marr comes across as both goofy and smug. And he would not be out of place in a James Bond film as Q, showing Bond the latest gadgets.

Be that as it may, he recently had Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on to discuss the Middle East conflict. He tried to play “bad cop” – much like Tim Sebastian used to do on HARDTalk, and still does on DW’s Conflict Zone.

Bibi always give a good account of himself but I’d venture to say this was one of his most masterful performances.

Benjamin Netanyahu on the Israeli Palestinian "conflict".

Over the years, I’ve talked about some of the psychological factors that might explain the behavior the of BDS advocates. These include a ruthlessness that drives them to drag third-parties into their battles, regardless of the cost to others, and fantasy politics which leads them to engage in activities for the sole purpose of making themselves feel more important than they are.

Some of these factors are actually detrimental to the BDS cause (witness the nearly universal revulsion that greets their fantasy-driven public temper tantrums). But some of them are a major source of the boycotter’s power, especially when faced with opponents who labor under the illusion that BDS is a genuine, “normal” political project.

For example, the BDSers ability to ignore any facts or arguments that do not suit their purpose or fit their world view means they can never actually lose an argument since, in reality, they refuse to engage in one (even if they pretend their diatribes to be dialog). But there is another psychological element that fuels not just BDS but the entire anti-Israel project that relates to the dynamics of blame.

This is something most of us can relate to since we all are involved in blame dynamics (healthy and unhealthy) at various points in our lives. To take a simple example, imagine a couple that drives to the beach where one person places the car keys on a beach blanket. As the day winds to a close, the other person folds and packs up the same beach blanket, but does not notice the keys which tumble into the sand and get lost.

Under such circumstances, the couple could see this chain of events as an unlucky accident, a pair of reasonable actions that, when linked together, led to negative consequences neither party could have foreseen. But since it was a pair of individual actions that led to the loss, each person could choose to blame the other for one of the two steps that led to the problem (leaving the keys on the blanket rather than in a bag or pocket vs. not noticing them when packing up), claiming - in effect - that just one person bore primary responsibility for the problem they both face.

On some occasions, the circumstances lend themselves to assigning primary responsibility to one person or another. But blame is rarely driven by such analytical calculations. Instead, the first person to accuse the other tends to gain the initiative, putting the blamed person on the defensive (often in an attempt to absolve the blamer of responsibility). And in this dynamic, someone willing to accept some responsibility tends to be at a disadvantage vs. someone willing to accept none.

Over time, the roles of blamer and blamee can become engrained in personal relationships, causing the person who is “faster on the draw” to automatically zero in on something the other person did that is blameworthy, with the other person taking a default position of either accepting responsibility or, eventually, avoiding confrontational situations that may be driven by an uncomfortable blame dynamic.

If this dynamic is common among individuals where the stakes are fairly low, it is a cornerstone of international politics where the nation assigned blame can face serious consequences (from being targeted for economic punishment, to justifying war waged against it). Which is why nations routinely tap the aforementioned blame dynamic, making sure to point an accusing finger outwards immediately and never acknowledging responsibility for anything (regardless of their actual culpability). And within the Arab-Israeli conflict, this politics of blame has reached near pathological levels.

This is why every negative action that can be assigned to Israel (real or imaginary) is the subject of not just accusation by this or that Arab country, but must become top priority for every international organization – combining the blame dynamic with Israel’s foes willingness to corrupt any institution in order to achieve their own ends.

This is also why the Arab states and the Palestinians will never accept responsibility under any circumstances for anything they are unquestionably responsible for (from supporting every one of the 20^th century’s totalitarian movements, to rejecting peace offers over and over again, to resorting to violence and triggering wars in which their own people suffer the consequences).

This dynamic plays itself out amongst the Palestinians “friends” in the BDS movement who, if cornered, will manage a choke out a cough of concern regarding Hamas rocket fire into Israeli schoolyards. But once Israel returns fire, they rise together as a single great pointing finger and shouting voice screaming “J’accuse” at Israel (and its supporters), insisting that the boycotters alone represent the voice of human rights and justice (regardless of how little they have to say on either subject when Israel is not the target of their abuse).

In the case of the BDSers, the blame dynamic fits perfectly with their fantasy of being the only voices of courage and virtue in a Manichean world where evil and all-powerful opponents endlessly conspire against them.

Getting back to the original dynamic described in the earlier lost-keys story, the endless repetition of one party’s readiness to blame and unwillingness to accept responsibility creates a situation whereby the party trying to avoid the blame game who is willing to accept some responsibility is punished for not immediately and unquestionably accepting all of it.

This is the unhealthy dynamic Israel faces vis-à-vis its finger-pointing, responsibility-avoiding foes, and it is not entirely clear how she can get out of it short of becoming as ruthless, cynical and insensitive as her accusers.

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UK diplomat admits "second half of Balfour" doesn't exist - but it SHOULD

Last month the UK mission at the US tweeted a bizarre statement that there was a second half to Balfour that has never been fulfilled.

As noted then, this statement makes no sense. There were three clauses to the Balfour Declaration:

1. His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people
2. nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine
3. or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

The tweet implied that a Palestinian state would be the fulfillment of the "second half" of Balfour, even though it only mentioned civil and religious rights - both of which are safeguarded under Israeli law.

Sir Simon McDonald, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, spoke at a Balfour centenary event last week at the Portcullis House, Westminster where he expanded on this "second half of Balfour" - and his assertions are literally a fantasy.

He said, “If written after the Second World War, when the international community developed a rules-based international architecture, the Declaration would have included the political rights of self-determination of these communities too.”

McDonald is saying that the "other half of Balfour" is a clause that was never written - but would have been, supposedly, had Balfour written them in 1947.

Official British policy is that Israel is obligated to create a Palestinian state dedicated to its destruction because the British Government has given itself the ability to insist on using alternative history fiction as a diplomatic instrument.

This is bizarre on so many levels that one doesn't know where to begin. And to add insult to injury, McDonald spoke "as a historian."

McDonald also engages in his own bit of revisionist history when he describes the Peel Commission as an attempt to fulfill this fictional part of Balfour: "A two-state solution was first proposed by the Peel Commission in 1937 in an attempt to make a reality of both elements of the Balfour Declaration," he asserted.

But the Peel Commission report does not pretend to be a fulfillment of Balfour. On the contrary, it attempts to abrogate Balfour. First it says that Balfour's assumptions (included in the Mandate) on how things would play out were wrong:

The association of the policy of the Balfour Declaration with the Mandate System implied the belief that Arab hostility to the former would presently be overcome, owing to the economic advantages which Jewish immigration was expected to bring to Palestine as a whole.

The entire idea of partition is antithetical to Balfour who anticipated the Jewish National Home on all of Palestine. Peel attempted to change the rules.

Later on, in discussing holy places as a separate territory, Peel explicitly abrogates Balfour:

Guarantees as to the rights of the Holy Places and free access thereto (as provided in Article 13 of the existing Mandate), as to transit across the mandated area, and as to non-discrimination in fiscal, economic and other matters should be maintained in accordance with the principles of the Mandate System. But the policy of the Balfour Declaration would not apply; and no question would arise of balancing Arab against Jewish claims or vice versa. All the inhabitants of the territory would stand on an equal footing. The only official language" would be that of the Mandatory Administration. Good and just government without regard for sectional interests would be its basic principle.

Balfour implies the the Jewish national home would administer the holy places and allow full access (as Israel does today.) Peel wrests that right away.

Finally, it remains fascinating that during this month of non-stop Balfour coverage, so little has been written about the third clause that was supposed to ensure that Jews in other countries would be treated well even with a Jewish national home in historic Israel. The Arabs - including the Arabs of Jordan, who were under British influence - certainly didn't adhere to this clause, and Great Britain did not do anything to enforce that among its Arab friends.

(h/t Irene)

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Despite Hamas-PA agreement, crossings still closed and medicines still not entering Gaza

While much has been made of the Hamas-PA agreements in Cairo, on the ground things are getting worse for Gazans.

On November 1, the PA formally took over responsibility for the Gaza crossings into Egypt. Days later, nothing has changed. Egypt has not yet opened its border and no one is talking about any practical moves the PA has made to help out. The PA is insisting on a full return to the 2005 crossings agreement, and apparently the de facto Gaza leaders of Hamas have not yet agreed to some of the provisions.

The EUBAM monitors of the Rafah crossing, who have been paid to do nothing for the past ten years, have not yet been asked to resume their mission by any of the parties.

Naturally, the Gisha NGO blames Israel above all:

Two million people in Gaza have been held hostage to political power struggles for far too long, while their most basic needs and rights have been trampled or overlooked. The parties responsible for this ongoing reality include the feuding Palestinian authorities in Gaza and Ramallah, as well as the Egyptian government, but first and foremost Israel, the only party that has maintained extensive control over the Strip for the past 50 years.

(Gisha never said a word against Hamas' role in restricting people's movement until this blog shamed them a few years ago.)

Meanwhile, the severe medicine shortage in Gaza - entirely the fault of the Palestinian Authority who has refused to ship medicines there since spring - keeps getting worse, despite the Cairo agreement.

The Gaza Ministry of Health announced that the southern governorates have completely depleted their stocks of 130 pharmaceutical products, 45% of the list of essential medicines, including 50 types of surgical drugs like anesthetics.

Yet the only party that gets blamed remains Israel,which imposes no restrictions on medicines into Gaza.

"Human rights" NGOs are notably silent, because for them to mention these problems after the supposed agreement between Hamas and the PA would show yet again that their singleminded focus on Israel and willingness to give the Palestinian leaderships a pass has in fact been part of the reason why Gazans suffer. Today.

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Iran again reveals how nervous it is about Israel/Gulf ties

From Iran's Mehr News agency:

Leader’s Advisor, Ali Akbar Velayati, said certain countries of the region were obsessed with normalization of relations with the Zionist regime.

Iranian Leader’s Aide Ali Akbar Velayati made the remarks while addressing the second International Union of Resistance Scholars on Thursday in Beirut.

The official said the opening ceremony of the meeting had been accompanied a message by Leader of Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, who called for continued fight against Israel; “the issue reveals the great importance attached to the Palestinian issue by Iran’s Leader.”

“Gathering of great scholars of the Islamic world in one place indicates that resistance, and not compromise, remains as the only path to freedom of Palestine,” he continued.

The secretary general of the Islamic Awakening Assembly said that some of the countries in the region were unashamedly after normalizing relations with Israel.

He emphasized that, driven by the Iranian Leader’s guidelines, Palestine will always remain the first issue of the Islamic world.

If Arab countries don't consider Israel an enemy, then Iran's desire to lead the Islamic world is a failure. But it has no cards to play to make the Arab nations turn towards Iran, especially given how it is acting in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

Iran is what is driving the Arabs to cooperate with Israel. And Iran cannot figure out how to fix that and maintain its Shiite-supremacist stance.

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.

11/05 Links: PA TV: In 1917 “There was nothing called a Palestinian people”; Haley: Unless UN rights council reforms, US is out

From Ian:

PMW: “There was nothing called a Palestinian people” in 1917, says Palestinian historian

To mark the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Mahmoud Abbas, the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority published an op-ed in the British Guardian newspaper. After castigating Lord Balfour for promising "a land that was not his to promise" he went on to describe the Palestinian people as "a proud nation with a rich heritage of ancient civilisations, and the cradle of the Abrahamic faiths." [The Guardian, Nov. 1, 2017]

Contradicting Abbas' historical revision, just a day before, PA official TV broadcast an interview with the historian Abd Al-Ghani Salameh, who explained that in 1917 there was no Palestinian people.

During the broadcast, the host of the program asked:
"There always was a historical struggle over Palestine, and many wanted to rule it. How did the aspirations to rule affect the Palestinian existence, the Palestinians' options, and the Palestinians' possibilities of development?"

Salameh responded:
"Before the Balfour Promise (i.e., Declaration) when the Ottoman rule ended (1517-1917), Palestine's political borders as we know them today did not exist, and there was nothing called a Palestinian people with a political identity as we know today, since Palestine's lines of administrative division stretched from east to west and included Jordan and southern Lebanon, and like all peoples of the region [the Palestinians] were liberated from the Turkish rule and immediately moved to colonial rule, without forming a Palestinian people's political identity." [Official PA TV, Nov. 1, 2017]

Collection: The PA demonizes Britain and the Balfour Declaration

Latest Terror Tunnel Discovery Spotlights the ‘Real Proxy of Iran’ in Gaza

When it comes to terrorism emanating from the Gaza Strip, most public attention usually focuses on Hamas, the group that rules the coastal enclave. But Israel’s latest discovery and destruction of a cross-border attack tunnel has brought to light the role of Gaza’s second-largest terror faction, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

The IDF is on high alert for the possibility of revenge attacks from PIJ following Israel’s destruction of the tunnel on October 30. PIJ dug the tunnel, which had crossed into Israeli territory, and the terror group reportedly sustained most of the 15 casualties that resulted from the IDF’s explosion of the tunnel.

The Israeli defense establishment believes that PIJ has around 10,000 armed members, as well as its own rocket arsenal and tunnel network. It has a unique religious affinity with the Iranian Shia regime, and may be receiving messages from Tehran to escalate the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

Hamas, on the other hand, is likely pressuring PIJ to avoid sparking a renewed round of violence at this time, due to Hamas’s desire to avoid endangering its agreement to form a Palestinian unity government with the Fatah faction by December 1.

Dr. Ely Karmon, a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel, noted that from its inception, PIJ “acknowledged the importance of the Iranian revolution and its influence.” He said that PIJ — not Hamas — has been the “real proxy of Iran.”

Yes, that is the way it is.

I suppose that it is not surprising that my cohort, born in the 1960s, stomped on the Western Liberal Tradition.

This is to say that the contemporary Left is shedding its own intellectual heritage - defined by Enlightenment liberalism - and in the process is emerging as authoritarian, increasingly opposed to freedom of speech and thought, and increasingly antisemitic.

{One of my new favorite rebels - University of Toronto professor of evolutionary psychology, Jordan Peterson - would likely agree.}

And when I argue that my friends on the Left are trending against the "Western liberal tradition," I mean just that.

The contemporary Left is turning against the philosophical tradition of Enlightenment liberalism that emphasized rationality and individuality as it emerged out of the European Renaissance and took political forms from Magna Carta to the Constitution of the United States to the Knesset in Israel.

Instead, what we get today from the activist Left is reactionary, irrational, close-minded, violently-inclined, smug, stupid, arrogant, authoritarian, and dismissive of freedom of speech.

The American Left is often misdescribed as "liberal," but that is the last thing that it is.

The western-left, today, is opposed to the liberal tradition.

Among the reasons for growing American Left disinterest in the tradition of Enlightenment liberalism is because those of us who came of age following the Baby Boomers were trained not to believe in "Western values" by our Vietnam War era older peers and siblings.

From Abbie Hoffman to Alan Ginsberg to Noam Chomsky, much of The Movement, as Terry Anderson called it, prodded and poked at the ongoing viability of more traditional and allegedly objective European suppositions on how to apprehend truth.

It is no coincidence, after all, that the post-structuralist turn in western academia paralleled the Counterculture and the rise of the New Left toward the middle-end of the twentieth-century.

Our older siblings and friends who came out of the Vietnam War period, for understandable reasons, passed their cynicism off to us.

The twentieth-century was a bloody nightmare and those of us raised on the Anti-War Movement, the Counterculture, and Civil Rights looked in directions - politically and personally - beyond anything that Eisenhower could have imagined when his boys stormed the beaches.

I do not know about you, but I grew up reading Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson and Joseph Heller.

It was all about rebellion and, in the cases of the latter three, hilarious rebellion.

{Kerouac was never particularly funny.}

The interesting question for me, now, is how it is that my generation - which both voted for Ronald Reagan and read Vonnegut - is now ushering in the current era of corrosive, hard-ass, high-handed, progressive-left identity politics which is shedding liberalism and tends to despise Israel.

From a political-social standpoint, it is a damn good question.

It's not that we are responsible for the never-ending malice and bloodshed in the Arab-Muslim Middle East. Nor are those of us who entered college in the United States in the 1980s responsible for the perpetual poverty of the urban poor, or climate change, or general human stupidity.

We inherited these joys to the world.

We are, however, responsible for the current state of American politics, which is absolutely dismal and, on the progressive-left, increasingly ugly toward diaspora Jewry when we speak out on behalf of our brothers and sisters in Israel.

The United States has not been this culturally torn-up since 1968.

American politics at this moment has people at one another's throats. It is ripping up families and friendships. It is resulting in violence in the streets from Berkeley to Charlottesville.

And, it must be understood, that the current toxic nature of American politics is encouraging the rise of the new white nationalism. I tend to downplay the white nationalist trend because playing it up increases its attractiveness to idiots so inclined.

But the difference between now and then is that by 1968 over 30,000 U.S. servicemen died in Vietnam in a war that seemed to have no end.

Women were still objectively second-class citizens.

And bigotry throughout the country was violent in a way that makes the contemporary South look like a racial shangri-la.

I was born in 1963, the very year that Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous I Have a Dream speech on the Mall in Washington, D.C. and almost exactly one year before Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, during Freedom Summer.

Despite the fact that I am a New York Jew, I can assure you that from a historical perspective race relations in the South are far better today than they were in 1963. It's not even close. An observer from Mars should be able to see that, yet somehow it seems lost on much of the contemporary American Left.

The causes of political tensions in the United States today are not due to war or sexism or racism like they were in 1968.

On every social-political level, the U.S. has made great strides toward social justice from that day to this.

The truth, in fact, is that the U.S. is among the most liberal countries on the planet.

This may sound old-fashioned but we hold out a greater opportunity to any man or woman of any "race, color, or creed" - as they used to say - than almost any place else on Earth.

We should be proud of how far we have come in so short a period of time.

We are well beyond where we were when Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the Mall.

But we do not recognize it.

Instead, we tear down statuary of Robert E. Lee.

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.