The first reason is that Hamas is afraid that Israel will violate the terms of the cease-fire and shoot demonstrators, prompting Islamic Jihad to respond and lead to a new confrontation. They claim Israel would provoke such a crisis to help Netanyahu stay in office.
The second reason given was to allow time to resolve differences between Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The third reason cited in the report is the Palestinians' desire to examine border areas for any leftover explosives after the recent fighting.
In fact, the organizing committee for the "March of Return" has been discussing whether to reduce the number of protests altogether, perhaps cutting them back to once a month or only in response to specific incidents, rather than on Fridays.
The world has certainly lost interest in the protests over the past 18 months and the real point of them was always public relations. In the beginning, Hamas encouraged young men to act recklessly hoping that they would be killed as they tried to cut through the fence. Later Hamas agreed to scale back the protests, apparently because of an Israeli targeted killing of a senior Hamas figure in May in response to hundreds of rockets.The newer, low profile protests did not generate the same kinds of headlines. It looks like the mini-war last week was enough to prompt Hamas to re-evaluate the protest strategy altogether.
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The news stories about Bernie Sanders' talking about Palestinians did not say the whole story:
Bernie Sanders got applause at a Democratic presidential debate when he said it not good enough to be pro-Israel, and called for treating Palestinians with dignity.
Sanders, a Vermont senator and among the front-runners in the race to garner the Democratic nomination, was one of several candidates asked Wednesday by MSNBC/Washington Post moderators whether they would take a tougher stance on Saudi Arabia, considering its human rights abuses.
All the candidates said they would be less conciliatory to Saudi Arabia, and Sanders, who is Jewish, volunteered that he would also be tougher on Israel.
“The same thing goes for Israel and the Palestinians,” Sanders said. “It is no longer good enough for us to be pro-Israel, I am pro-Israel, but we must treat the Palestinians with the dignity they deserve.”
When I read this, I thought it was no big deal. I also think the Palestinians should be treated with dignity. Who doesn't? But that "dignity" cannot be at the expense of Israel's security or Jewish rights. Allowing unlimited imports to Gaza that can include weapons or weapons parts would violate Israelis' right to life. Making Hebron Judenrein would violate Jews' rights of worship and access to their holy places. But no one is against dignity. Israel gives out tens of thousands of work permits to Palestinians to come into Israel every day.
Sanders' remarks, in context, were far worse than this. In fact, they were both clueless and dangerous.
When we rethink our American foreign policy, what we have got to know is that Saudi Arabia is not reliable ally. We have got to bring Iran and Saudi Arabia together, in a room, under American leadership, and say we are sick and tired of us spending huge amounts of money and human resources because of your conflicts.
And by the way, the same thing goes for Israel and the Palestinians. It is no longer good enough for us simply to be pro-Israel. I am pro-Israel. But we must treat the Palestinian people as well with the respect and dignity that they deserve. What is going on in Gaza right now, with youth unemployment at 70 or 80 percent, is unsustainable. So we need to be rethinking who our allies are around the world, work with the United Nations, and not continue to support brutal dictatorships.
Although the dignity line got applause, this was not Sanders' main point. He thinks that the US can treat the other nations of the world like unruly children and good parenting can solve intractable conflicts.
His plan is for the US to get Saudi Arabia and Iran in a room and tell them to fix their differences is so unbelievably naive as to make one wonder why anyone takes his foreign policy seriously. Does he know anything about their enmity? About the religious aspects of their conflict? About how much Sunnis and Shiites hate each other?
Beyond that, he is expressing an equivalence between how the US should treat Iran and Saudi Arabia. Both of them are brutal Islamist regimes, but only one of them has rallies and posters and speeches every day that say "Death to America." What possible logic is there to treat our allies - flawed as they are - the same as those who proudly declare themselves to be our enemies? The only thing worse would be to treat Iran as a partner and throw Saudi Arabia under the bus - which is what Obama did. If Democrats are rightfully upset at the US abandoning the Kurds, why do some want to do the same to the Gulf Arab states?
Sanders wants to do the same paternalistic negotiating idea with Israel and the Palestinians. Wonderful. Has he researched the reasons those talks didn't work out the last half dozen peace initiatives? Hint: it wasn't Israel that said no to peace.
But Sanders wants to stick with the exact same failed script, a script that has brought us absolutely nowhere. He thinks that US pressure, undoubtedly only against Israel, can bring peace.
Does he even have a clue that Hamas and Islamic Jihad are funded by Iran, and the latter now acts as an Iranian proxy? That no amount of negotiation with the Palestinian Authority will change that?
(His segue at the end is most concerning. It almost sounds like he is implying that treating Israel as an ally should be rethought, but he probably pivoted back to Saudi Arabia. Probably.)
Why is no one reporting on the sheer stupidity of Sanders' peace plan for Saudi Arabia and Iran?
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.
For the past several years, I’ve traveled around the United States as an advocate, speaking about my family’s story of exile from Iraq and Tunisia and its journey home to Israel. I visit schools, temples, community centers, LGBTQ groups — you name it.
After each talk, listeners tell me that their knowledge about the Mizrahi community was limited before hearing me. Although Mizrahim make up 60% of Israel’s Jewish population today, even devoted Zionists entrenched in Israel’s policies know little about the largest demographic living there.
Leaving the story of Mizrahi Jews out of pro-Israel advocacy is a mistake. Jews from the Middle East and North Africa — and our story of survival — are the greatest threat to anti-Zionism. That’s why anti-Zionist groups are so intent on harassing and silencing us.
This proved particularly true recently when I was targeted by an anti-Semitic group of anti-Zionists at Vassar College. I was there to give a talk titled: “The Indigenous Jews of the Middle East: Forgotten Refugees.”
As soon as I arrived at the on-campus venue, I was greeted by protesters. As a staunch supporter of free speech, I invited them to join the talk and ask me the hard questions.
Instead of discussing their concerns with me, they decided to scream over me. One said she decided to oppose me telling my story because she’s a “white queer Jew.” Another claimed they were protesting me telling the story of Mizrahi refugees as a means of fighting white supremacy.
It’s ironic because I was there to speak about how my grandmother narrowly survived the Farhud, a catastrophic event in which the Iraqi government collaborated with Hitler’s white supremacist regime and killed around 280 Jews in two days. To put this in perspective, British newspaper The Guardian reported in August that more than 175 people have been killed worldwide by white nationalists in the past eight years.
Why Israel's Cause is a Progressive Cause - Mark Regev
Some erroneously say that Israel's cause can never be a progressive cause. Mark Regev, Israel's ambassador to the United Kingdom, explains why, actually, Israel's cause is an inherently progressive cause.
Protesters affiliated with the Students Against Israeli Apartheid at York University (SAIA York) in Toronto on Wednesday evening demonstrated against Herut Canada's event at the campus featuring former IDF soldiers.
The protesters chanted “Viva, Viva Intifada” and “Free, Free Palestine.”
The IDF reservists spoke to students about Israel and their experiences in the army. The reservists' visit to the university sparked a “no killers on campus” campaign organized by anti-Israel student groups.
Flyers protesting the event now cover the walls of the campus, portraying a photoshopped image of an IDF soldier who appears to be strangling a child. Anti-Israel groups have vowed to disrupt the event and are circulating a number of chants students can use to derail the event, such as “From Toronto to Gaza, Globalize the Intifada!”
Students Against Israeli Apartheid at York University organized an event on Facebook urging people to show up on Wednesday evening and tell the university’s administration that “we will not tolerate war criminals on our campus.”
According to a statement from B’nai Brith Canada, officers of the Toronto Police Service and private security personnel were on hand to enable attendees to enter the event, despite the best efforts of protesters outside to block them.
Among the protesters present was Holocaust-denying newspaper editor Nazih Khatatba, who glorified a 2014 massacre at a Jerusalem synagogue and has described Judaism as a “terrorist religion.”
At one point, police were forced to intervene to prevent physical violence and injury.
Dozens of University of Toronto faculty members urged President Meric Gertler on Tuesday to root out antisemitism on their campus, which they warned had worsened after a student union formally backed the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign.
The faculty call came after the university’s Graduate Students’ Union (GSU) said its Executive Committee may be reluctant to support a motion to bring kosher food to campus because the initiative was being spearheaded by a “pro-Israel” group — namely Hillel, the largest Jewish club on campus.
The GSU Executive Committee has since said it was “deeply sorry for the harm” caused by its response, which has been widely decried as antisemitic.
Professor of dentistry Howard Tenenbaum and 20 other faculty co-signers dismissed this apology as “tepid at best” in their letter, which was endorsed by 30 additional faculty members since its submission to Gertler on Tuesday morning, according to B’nai Brith Canada. The Jewish civil rights group was involved in organizing the letter.
“Since 2012, when the UTGSU endorsed the antisemitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and committed student funds to this discriminatory campaign through the formation of its BDS Committee — dedicated solely to the delegitimization of the world’s only Jewish State — the situation on campus for Jewish students has continuously worsened, culminating into this most recent episode,” the faculty warned.
In 1992, the UN Commission on Human Rights adopted resolution 1992/4, entitled "Situation in occupied Palestine." Since then the Secretary General issues a report every year on what evil things Israel is allegedly doing in the territories.
But the phrase "occupied Palestine" goes much further back in the UN archives.
For example, in 1972, the Syrian representative said, "In that connexion, it would be relevant to draw attention to the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Zionist Israeli forces in the occupied Arab territories, in occupied Palestine since 1947 and against the civilian population of the Arab States. "
The Palestinian representative in 1965 said, "Responsibility for the tragedy of the Palestine Arabs fell squarely on the Western Powers in general and on the United States in particular. They provided the artificial Zionist regime in occupied Palestine with political, financial, military and technical assistance. "
Here's an example from 1966 where the delegate from Sudan used the term - and went on to essentially threaten war to destroy Israel if the UN didn't do the bidding of Muslim nations.
In 1962, the Pakistani delegate said, "According to the most moderate estimates, the income from Arab property in occupied Palestine amounts to more than £47,500,000 a year..."
In these cases, "occupied Palestine" doesn't mean the territories Israel gained in 1967, but the areas under Jewish control since 1948.
Within the Arab world, the phrase "occupied Palestine" remained in its original meaning of "whatever territory is controlled by Jews" way after 1967. In 1981 the Al Quds Committee recommended in a document stored at the UN ,"To take the necessary measures to put an end to the Jewish exodus to occupied Palestine, since this is the main source of the Jewish manpower which is building Israel and creating the fait accompli of the settlement of the occupied Arab territories, and of occupied Palestine, first and foremost Al-Quds. These measures include making the necessary contacts with countries that permit the Jewish exodus or facilitate it through their territories with a view to ending this exodus and to encouraging the exodus of Jews from occupied Palestine to other countries."
So "occupied Palestine" has one meaning when the UN uses it and quite another when Muslims use it. It was more explicit before 1967 but even way after that date, all of Israel has been considered "occupied Palestine."
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Tel Aviv, November 21 - An activist worried that human-driven climate change will doom civilization and disrupt the planet's fragile ecosystems within twelve years has found a kindred spirit in a homeless man who spends much of his time pacing back and forth near a downtown street corner with a placard warning of the imminent demise of humanity.
Yona Kassander, 27, came upon a man two weeks ago known to locals as Efi, a street-dweller who most observers estimate has reached past the age of seventy, and whose chief pursuit involves warning passers by of the coming end of the world, both by means of signs declaring the apocalypse nigh and by yelling. Kassander found the man's message resonated with her ecological sensibilities, and in the time since has dedicated at least two hours per day to sitting, marching, holding signs, and chanting at others with her new friend about society's imminent collapse.
"I feel like I've crossed some important borders with this initiative," she gushed on her way to a yoga session following an afternoon with Efi. "Too often the movement to raise awareness and effect real change fails to engage the disempowered elements of society. It's gratifying to know that I've established this connection with someone far outside my socioeconomic stratum, with whom I have so little in common, but with whom I can partner on challenging to world to wake up and do something before we destroy our planet."
"Repent!" concurred Efi, waving a placard at a reporter. "Repent! Mend your ways! Doom is coming for all! Got any spare change?"
Pedestrians, commuters, cyclists and others in the vicinity remarked on the incongruity of the two different personalities demonstrating together. "Who?" wondered a software developer returning to work from lunch. "Oh. Huh. Well, you don't have to be homeless to be crazy, I guess."
"I don't know what that's all about," commented a delivery driver, "but I do know whatsername's favorite herbal infusion has to be delivered from the Far East, and it's not walking here itself, so I don't know whom she thinks she's kidding with that carbon emissions crap."
"It's coming," added Efi, wagging an admonishing finger at a group of tourists who kept their distance. "No one will escape! Not you in your fancy car, not you in your iPhone!"
The septuagenarian hobo expressed only confusion when asked how the current environmental and ecological crisis relates to his prophecies of doom.
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Canada has reversed course and voted in favour of a United Nations resolution condemning Israel for its “occupation” of Palestinian Territories, prompting a backlash of anger from Jewish groups.
The move marks a further departure between the U.S. and Canada on their posture toward Israel and a potential reversal of long-standing Canadian foreign policy.
The Trudeau government on Tuesday supported a resolution put forward by “the state of Palestine”, North Korea, Zimbabwe and others that calls for a “just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement” to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and explicitly refers to contested lands between the two countries as “Occupied Palestinian Territories.” It also cites a 2004 International Court of Justice decision that said Israel’s construction of a protective wall in the West Bank “severely impedes the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”
The U.S. was among five countries that rejected the resolution, while Australia abstained. A total of 164 countries voted in favour, including the U.K., Germany and others.
The vote could mark a departure in Canadian foreign policy, which has been loosely aligned with the United States’ more pro-Israel stance since the early 2000s, when Paul Martin shifted his posture away from the previous government. The Conservatives under Stephen Harper then became an even more regular supporter of Israel.
Pro-Israel groups blasted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for the vote on Tuesday, saying it was a betrayal of more than 10 years of staunch support for the country.
“Trudeau is trading Canada’s bedrock principles of fairness & equality for a UN Security Council seat,” Hillel Neuer, founding chairman of the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, said on Twitter. Neuer was referring to a bid by Canada to gain a UN Security Council seat next year. “By voting for a resolution co-sponsored by North Korea & Zimbabwe, he has entered a Faustian bargain with dictatorships that does not bode well for a free & democratic society.”
He said Canada had “joined the jackals” in a separate tweet.
The world once feared the Arab-Israel conflict could trigger a global war. Since then, Israel made peace with Egypt & Jordan. Today it seems many in the Arab world could make peace with Israel—but that Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Roth & EU diplomats who need to condemn Israel never would.
2. Trudeau's motive was not what you claim. Why didn't you mention that Canada is lobbying for a seat on the Security Council and that—as Australia's PM Kevin Rudd tried to do ahead of the 2012 vote—Trudeau is trying to buy support by voting against Israel?https://t.co/GWpflJFm2D
Liberal critics are condemning the announcement as unprecedented—but in fact the U.S. position that settlements are illegal under international law only dates to the final days of the Obama administration. The Trump administration is bringing U.S. policy in line with the positions held by successive Republican and Democratic administrations dating back to 1967, when Israel acquired the West Bank in the Six Day War.
It was only in late December 2016, after President Trump won the presidential election and weeks before Inauguration Day that the Obama administration supported a U.N. Security Council resolution declaring settlements a violation of international law. The move was widely condemned by pro-Israel groups and even many Democrats as a spiteful, abrupt, and illegitimate policy shift by an administration days before its departure from the White House.
In fact, during the Obama administration in 2011, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice vetoed a similar resolution declaring settlements illegal, consistent with longstanding U.S. policy to both reject their illegality and to block anti-Israel activism in the Security Council. Until the administration reversed itself in late 2016, it regularly referred to settlements as "illegitimate," but not illegal.
Before that, in 2004, the United States exchanged letters with the Israeli government explicitly endorsing Israel's retention of major West Bank settlement blocs in any peace deal with the Palestinians. As part of Israel's plan to withdraw from Gaza the next year, President Bush wrote to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that:
On November 5, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected Human Rights Watch's demand that Israel renew “Israel/Palestine Director” Omar Shakir’s work visa- acknowledging his BDS activism. How did the court come to this decision? What was NGO Monitor’s role in the case? Join our host Yona Schiffmiller, Legal Expert Anne Herzberg, and Researcher Ariella Esterson as they explain this story.
Host: NGO Monitor Director of Research Yona Schiffmiller
Guests: NGO Monitor Legal Advisor Anne Herzberg and Harry C Wechsler Fellow Ariella Esterson
Not surprisingly, the reaction to Trump's recognition of the legality of the Israeli settlements has led to one more uproar in opposition to his Middle East policy.
But in contrast to the reactions that are either in favor or against the decision, one of the more novel reactions was by Shmuel Rosner, that international law is just a bluff anyway; it doesn't really matter.
He bases this on Secretary of State Pompeo's own statement, that "the hard truth is that there will never be a judicial resolution to the conflict, and arguments about who is right and who is wrong as a matter of international law will not bring peace."
Rosner takes this one step further, that not only does international law have no practical meaning when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but more than that:
Inserting it into the conversation is a disruption. Inserting it into the conversation is a manipulation. It is a tactic aimed at presenting Israel as a pariah state, a state guilty of criminality.
You'd be hard-pressed to argue otherwise.
Social media is full of self-described experts on Israel and international law. They are always available to declare which (if not all) of Israel's actions are in violation of international law.
Either they merely claim this matter of factly.
Or they will claim this is the international consensus.
After the incident of the Mavi Marmara, the UN Security Council, whose members do not not have expertise in international law, declared Israel's blockade of Gaza illegal.
A long-awaited United Nations review of Israel’s 2010 raid on a Turkish-based flotilla in which nine passengers were killed has found that Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza is both legal and appropriate. [emphasis added]
Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 war and has occupied the territory ever since. The Fourth Geneva Convention, ratified by 192 nations in the aftermath of World War II, says that an occupying power “shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” The statute that established the International Criminal Court in 1998 classifies such transfers as war crimes, as well as any destruction or appropriation of property not justified by military necessity.
Israel argues that a Jewish presence has existed on the West Bank for thousands of years and was recognized by the League of Nations in 1922. Jordan’s rule over the territory, from 1948 to 1967, was never recognized by most of the world, so Israel also argues there was no legal sovereign power in the area and therefore the prohibition on transferring people from one state to the occupied territory of another does not apply.
The International Court of Justice rejected that argument in an advisory opinion in 2004, ruling that the settlements violated international law.
In a bait-and-switch, the article starts off talking about Jordan and its questionable rights to the West Bank and just a few paragraphs later is talking about "privately-owned Palestinian land" -- without ever addressing the question of how the Palestinian Arabs acquired sole rights over an area from which Jews were ethnically cleansed by Jordan in 1949.
The article references the argument that Israel violated the Fourth Geneva Convention according to which an occupying power "shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies" and volunteers that Israel's defense is "that a Jewish presence has existed on the West Bank for thousands of years and was recognized by the League of Nations in 1922."
There is no mention that the Fourth Geneva Convention is addressing the issue of forced deportations and transfers, something that is not applicable to Israelis who willingly move there on their own.
And the League of Nations did more than just recognize the Jewish presence, it was actually a recognition of legal Jewish legal rights to the land, which formed the basis of the Palestine Mandate similar to the mandates for Syria and Iraq, the goal being the administration of those areas until they had the ability to assume their independence.
This recognition of Jewish rights in then-Palestine was then verified at international conferences in San Remo, Sevres and Lausanne and had the force of international law.
The article, after assuming what Israel's argument should be, then knocks it down: "The International Court of Justice rejected that argument in an advisory opinion in 2004, ruling that the settlements violated international law."
Left unsaid is the fact that:
o As an advisory opinion, it has no legal weight, especially since Israel had no role in the proceedings and did not present its side o The actual case before the court was the security fence. The court mentioned the legality of the settlements in response to the phrasing of the question brought before them -- without actually deliberating on the issue of the settlements o One of the judges, Justice Kooijmans, wrote a separate opinion where he says specifically that under the circumstances:
The Court has refrained from taking a position with regard to territorial rights and the question of permanent status
This New York Times is not alone in playing this game of disinterested observer objectively presenting the facts.
Palestinians have condemned a decision by the US to abandon its four-decades-old position that Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank are inconsistent with international law.
Secretary Pompeo’s statement marks a return to the policy of US administrations between 1981 and December 2016. In other words, the “position” described by the BBC is three years old rather than “four-decades-old”.
The Trump administration declared on Monday that the United States does not consider Israeli settlements in the West Bank a violation of international law, reversing four decades of American policy and removing what has been an important barrier to annexation of Palestinian territory.
“The United States, Israel’s strongest military supporter, has consistently held that settlement building in the occupied territories is illegal and detrimental to seeking a lasting peace.”
The basis for the short-lived US position that the Israeli settlements are illegal is based on a memo, 4 pages long, written by Herbert Hansell, Jimmy Carter's legal adviser, in 1978.
Even on its own terms, the memo’s conclusions no longer apply. Because occupation is part of the law of war, Hansell wrote, the state of occupation would end if Israel entered into a peace treaty with Jordan. In 1994 Jerusalem and Amman signed a full and unconditional peace treaty, but the State Department neglected to update the memo.
The attempts to cow Israel into submission with claims of international law recently went beyond words with the decision by the European Union's Court of Justice that Israeli products from the disputed areas must be labeled.
Rosner sees this no differently than other attempts at disruption, and he sees Pompeo's statement as a specific reaction to it:
Pompeo's declaration is a clear and immediate rebuff of this unwise decision by the court. Again, it is calling a bluff: this is not a judicial decision based on law, it is a political decision expressing Europe's opposition to settlement activity.
Whether resorting to fabricated accusations of illegality or to actual legal measures that have more bite, this is not really an issue of law.
It is politics.
Whether it is coming from social media, mainstream media, politicians or countries -- this is an evasion of the hard work of negotiation, relieving the Palestinian Authority of the need to come to the table and negotiate.
One can argue with the effect of recognizing the legality of the settlements on peace, but it does help put Israel on an equal footing with the Palestinian Arabs and suggest the need for the two sides to talk about "the West Bank" -- perhaps not everyone knows what peace will look like after all.
Maybe that is why some people are so angry.
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Boycotting Israel is a failure, and has only helped that country while damaging Arab nations that have long shunned the Jewish state, according to a small new group of liberal-minded Arab thinkers from across the Middle East who are pushing to engage with Israel on the theory that it would aid their societies and further the Palestinian cause.
The group has brought together Arab journalists, artists, politicians, diplomats, Quranic scholars and others who share a view that isolating and demonizing Israel has cost Arab nations billions in trade. They say it has also undercut Palestinian efforts to build institutions for a future state, and torn at the Arab social fabric, as rival ethnic, religious and national leaders increasingly apply tactics that were first tested against Israel.
“Arabs are the boycott’s first — and only — victims,” Eglal Gheita, an Egyptian-British lawyer, declared at an inaugural gathering this week in London.
Calling itself the Arab Council for Regional Integration, the group does not purport to be broadly representative of Arab public opinion. Its members espouse a viewpoint that is, to put it mildly, politically incorrect in their home countries: Some have already been ostracized for advocating engagement with Israel and others said they feared retribution when they return.
Some participants urged measures like establishing a teachers college and research institute with campuses in Casablanca, Amman, Haifa and Manama. And an Iraqi counterterrorism expert living in Germany, Jassim Mohammad, urged Arab security services to stop the spread of “radicalism and hate” in the media, schools and mosques and to spread “corrective content about Israel and Jews” instead. He called this a “matter of Arab national security.”
Al Khaleej Online adds:
Participants, particularly from Bahrain, Tunisia and Algeria, went on to praise the social, cultural and heritage role of Arab Jews in their countries, both in the past and in the present.
Representatives from Arab countries that witnessed a multi-motivated Jewish exodus, such as Lebanon, Libya, Yemen and Algeria, expressed regret over the loss of their Jewish citizens, who had an important role in the development, culture and economy of their societies.
Extremism and terrorism were deplored, and concern expressed about “brainwashing” of children in school and of students at university level; and, remarkably, from the clerics Hassen Chalghoumi, a condemnation of the “politicization” of Islam, and from Lebanon’s Saleh Hamed, a plea to Europe to crack down on the number of mosques in which imams were preaching hatred.
The event was sponsored by the US-based Center for Peace Communications, whose board of directors is headed by Dennis Ross. The CPC describes itself as “a group of Americans who believe that security and prosperity in the Middle East and North Africa require a peace between peoples.” Joseph Braude, the convenor of the conference, is a senior fellow at the Middle East Program of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, in Washington D.C., and is CPC’s founder and president.
No Israelis were present, because some of the delegates could have been subject to prosecution in their home countries for the “crime” of normalizing relations. It was clearly, Braude said, “a civil initiative in which no government had a hand,” but the views expressed are bound to resonate throughout the Middle East.
We've seen a pattern emerging in recent years of lone voices in the Arab world starting to speak up against the insane anti-Zionism and antisemitism in that world. It used to be articles that were primarily critical of Arab regimes that would incidentally say that Arabs under Israeli rule have it better, or articles that would point out that Israel had more Nobel Prizes than all the Arab nations combined. It has accelerated into open calls for dialogue with Israel.
The events prompting this small revolution include, above all, the understanding of the Iranian threat to the region and the realization that Israel is the best ally in that undeclared war. But there has also been a significant drop in support for the Palestinian cause as the Palestinians themselves have shown no interest in peace, and maintained its split between Hamas and Fatah. Finally, the Internet - and education of Arab intellectuals in the West - has allowed the Arab world to be exposed to points of view that were simply unavailable to them even a decade ago. Israel itself has been energetically pursuing relations with the Arab world and standing up for itself in international forums, such as sports. Its economic and military strength evokes respect among Arabs.
Put all of that together and Israel is now in higher esteem among Arabs than it has ever been.
To be sure, antisemitism and anti-Zionism is still the norm in the Middle East. But that position is no longer unified, and opposition to it no longer turns the "radicals" into pariahs as much as it used to.
It is a sea change in direction, but there is a long way to go.
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Supporting Jews is antisemitic and supporting the enemies of Jews is fighting antisemitism, in the newspeak of the anti-Zionist crowd.
It used to be that the Jew-haters would claim that they aren't antisemitic because "Arabs are Semites," an early form of antisemitism inversion.
But the new versions are more sophisticated.
One strain, popular at Electronic Intifada, claims that antisemitism is a form of racism, Zionism is a form of racism, so therefore anti-Zionists are fighters against antisemitism. They will also update an older argument of finding times that Zionists have worked together with antisemites (going back to the Haavara agreement with Nazi Germany) in order to save Jewish lives as evidence of Zionist "collaboration" with antisemites.
Another is to find a neo-Nazi who expresses support for Zionism as a form of white nationalism as proof that Zionism supports neo-Nazism. This violates a fundamental rule of logic but the modern anti-Zionist antisemites don't quite care.
The logic here is not expressed, perhaps because there is none. But the idea seems to be that all forms of "struggle" are the same - as long as they are the right (or Left) forms of struggle.
Obviously, the Jewish struggle for self-determination, or the Israeli struggle to be treated with the same yardstick as every other nation, are not "struggles" that can be compared to the progressive-approved "struggles."
The "struggle for Palestinian freedom" is the desire to deny Jewish self-determination and the desire to destroy the Jewish state. It is the embodiment of the antisemitism Palestinians express when asked.
When IfNotNow clams to support the Palestinian "struggle for freedom" this is what they are supporting - the actualization of Palestinian antisemitism.
It is willful blindness to overlook the antisemitism that has always animated Palestinian nationalism since the Mufti in the 1920s accused Jews of trying to destroy Al Aqsa. It is only slightly less self delusional to pretend that Arab antisemitism is a response to Zionism when it pre-dates Zionism.
One cannot separate Palestinian Jew-hatred and their "struggle for freedom." But modern antisemites who pretend to be merely anti-Zionist not only separate them, they invert Palestinian antisemitism into a struggle against antisemitism.
And too many people - often primed to hate Israel the same way people have been primed to hate Jews for millennia - buy into this inversion of antisemitism.
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Q: Why do you say “Jewish Communities” and not “settlements,” and why not “West Bank?” A: “Settlements” implies that they are outside of Israel. “Communities” is neutral. “West Bank” is a name invented by the Jordanians in 1950, after they ethnically cleansed the area of Jews and illegally annexed it to Jordan, an action recognized only by the UK and possibly Pakistan. “Judea and Samaria” is the traditional name used from biblical times, even by the UN before 1950.
Q: The Arabs, the EU and the UN often say that “settlements” are illegal under international law. What international law are they talking about? A: Usually they mean the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prescribes conditions for a belligerent occupation. Article 49, paragraph 6 says “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” There are also other limitations on what an occupying power can do in the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Convention of 1907, roughly based on the idea that the territory doesn’t belong to the occupier unless or until a formal treaty establishes its status.
Q: Why did the American government agree with them? A: The State Department had been wedded to the idea that Israel should return to her pre-1967 borders since the oil shock of the 1973 war. The requirement for “secure and recognized boundaries” in UNSC resolution 242 in 1967 receded into the background, disappearing entirely by the time of Barack Obama.
Naturally settlements were a problem. President Carter very much wanted to include Israeli withdrawal from Judea, Samaria and Gaza in the Camp David agreement that returned the Sinai to Egypt, but was unable to do so; the Camp David talks did produce a “Framework for Peace in the Middle East,” but it did not mention settlements, and was scuttled anyway by the PLO and the UN. The arguments that settlements were inconsistent with international law were set out in an opinion written for President Carter in 1978 by State Department legal advisor Herbert J. Hansell, and never changed until Pompeo’s announcement.
Q: Why do you disagree? A:Two reasons: first, it is a misapplication of 4th Geneva 49-6, which was intended to prevent forced transfers of population such as Germany’s deportation of Jews to occupied Poland, and not the voluntary movement of people. Second, because Israel’s legal claim on the territory is stronger than that of any other country, there is no belligerent occupation: the land is more properly considered disputed rather than occupied.
Q: What do you know? You’re not an expert in international law! A: No, but Eugene Kontorovich is. And here is what he said about this issue:
Under international law, occupation occurs when a country takes over the sovereign territory of another country. But the West Bank was never part of Jordan, which seized it in 1949 and ethnically cleansed its entire Jewish population. Nor was it ever the site of an Arab Palestinian state. Moreover, a country cannot occupy territory to which it has sovereign title, and Israel has the strongest claim to the land. International law holds that a new country inherits the borders of the prior geopolitical unit in that territory. Israel was preceded by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, whose borders included the West Bank. Hansell’s memo fails to discuss this principle for determining borders, which has been applied everywhere from Syria and Lebanon to post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine. Even on its own terms, [Hansell’s 1978] memo’s conclusions no longer apply. Because occupation is part of the law of war, Hansell wrote, the state of occupation would end if Israel entered into a peace treaty with Jordan. In 1994 Jerusalem and Amman signed a full and unconditional peace treaty, but the State Department neglected to update the memo. Even if there were an occupation, the notion that it creates an impermeable demographic bubble around the territory—no Jew can move in—has no basis in the history or application of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Almost every prolonged occupation since 1949—from the Allies’ 40-year administration of West Berlin to Turkey’s 2016 occupation of northern Syria—has seen population movement into the occupied territory. In none of these cases has the U.S., or the United Nations, ever claimed a violation of this Geneva Convention provision.
Q: But what about those countless UN resolutions condemning Israel? Didn’t the Security Council pass a resolution (2334) that clearly declared Israeli settlements illegal? A: General Assembly resolutions are non-binding, and even Security Council resolutions do not have the force of international law unless they are passed under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, “Action With Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression.” Resolution 2334 – which passed because the Obama Administration abstained in December of 2016 – was not such a resolution.
Q: But the UN, the EU, the New York Times, and many other organizations say Jewish communities are “illegal” or (as Obama liked to say) “illegitimate?” Doesn’t the international consensus count for something? A: International law isn’t a popularity contest, and the UN is not a world government that can make or (except in special circumstances) enforce laws. The fact that many nations and individuals dislike Israel as a result of their religious beliefs, the remnants of cold-war Soviet propaganda, their relationship with oil providers, their desire to stick it to the US, or plain old Jew-hatred, does not matter.
Q: What exactly did Pompeo do? A: Pompeo made it clear that the US did not intend to judge whether any particular community was legal (I presume he meant that one built on land that was privately owned by someone else would be illegal), but that it was no longer the case that the US would consider a Jewish community illegal simply because it was located in Judea/Samaria – or, to put it another way, that a community in Judea/Samaria would be considered illegal simply because it was composed of Jews.
Q: Does this actually matter? A: Yes, for two reasons. One is that various groups are taking actions (boycotting products from the communities or requiring special labeling on them) on the basis of their opinion that they are illegal. The fact that the US does not agree is a powerful argument that these actions are unfairly discriminatory, and might be a basis for legislation against them in the US.
The other reason is that the idea that these communities are illegal presupposes a certain view of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, in which land east of the Green Line is “Arab land” rather than a disputed territory on which both sides have claims. This clearly prejudges the outcome of any negotiations, and leads to the Arabs demanding the freezing or evacuation of Jewish communities as a precondition for negotiations. One might reasonably ask how the illegal ethnic cleansing and 19-year occupation of Judea and Samaria by Jordan converted the land set aside for “close settlement” by Jews in the Palestine Mandate into “Arab land.”
***
Here is a special question for extra credit:
Q: What has Trump and his administration done for Israel so far? A: As of today, the Trump Administration has finally fulfilled the promise of the US Congress to move the US Embassy to our capital and has asserted – as previous administrations would not – that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. It cut funding for the Palestinian Authority while it continues to pay terrorists, and reduced the amount sent to UNRWA, the UN agency that nurtures and perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem. It recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. It took the US out of the Iran nuclear deal, and re-imposed sanctions on Israel’s most serious enemy. It spoke out strongly for Israel in the UN, in the voice of Ambassador Nikki Haley. And now it has separated America from those who have dishonestly accused Israel of violating international law.
All of these actions are reasonable and should have been taken by prior administrations, which often voiced their support of Israel but did little to change wrong or discriminatory policies toward her. It’s been suggested that they are all cheap, merely “symbolic,” and have little effect on the ground. But if this is so, then why didn’t previous presidents act?
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Ammon News reports that Jordan's Interior Ministry canceled an interfaith conference at the last minute - because Israeli Jews were slated to attend.
It was entitled "Peace Between Religions" and was due to start Thursday and last for three days.
The ministry did not give a reason but reports say it was because of the presence of Israeli Jews.
A group called "Move Boycott" took credit for scuttling the conference.
An anti-Israel group issued a statement saying, "This conference is taking place in light of the official Arab acceleration of normalization with the Zionist entity, and the constant threat to Jordan by this enemy, as well as a clear encroachment on our national sovereignty, and daily encroachment on the sanctities under the protection and guardianship of Jordan, and comes at a time when the Zionist enemy terrorized the Palestinian people and its war on Gaza, which has not ended, and the blood of its martyrs has not dried up yet."
Here as the first page of the schedule.
No one in Jordan seems embarrassed by this debacle as far as I can tell.
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When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced this week that the U.S. no longer considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be in violation of international law, most Israelis were clearly pleased. All the major Israeli political parties greeted the announcement with support. Both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his leading rival, Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz, agreed that America was right to scrap its old insistence that Jews had no right to live outside the 1949 armistice lines.
Labeling these Jewish communities as illegal renders negotiations over the territories effectively moot. As long as the world considers the territories to be stolen property that must be returned to the Arabs - rather than disputed land whose fate must be arrived at by give and take by both sides - there's nothing to negotiate.
Like Netanyahu, Gantz understands that Israel must maintain control of the Jordan River Valley and most of the settlements even in the theoretical event that the Palestinians eventually choose to make peace as opposed to continue holding onto their century-old war on Zionism.
What the U.S. has done is to put the Palestinians on notice that if they want an end to the status quo, then they will have to talk to the Israelis. They cannot sit back and wait for the international community to hand them Israeli concessions on a silver platter.
All this pompous gobbledy gook being required for labelling the source of products made in territory disputed between Jews and Arabs for the last 100 years is deeply disturbing. There is no appeal from this decision.
The European Union could be in a real political bind as a result. The labelling requirements introduced by the European Union in 2011 and interpreted in 2015 has led it down this disastrous path promising only ridicule and contempt.
To be consistent and not be subjected to charges that it is deliberately targeting Jews and inciting Jew-hatred – the European Union needs to insist on similar stringent labelling requirements being immediately applied on goods originating from more than 150 disputed territories around the world.
Alternatively – the European Union could get itself out of this embarrassing labelling war and PR disaster by simply requiring goods originating from Israeli settlements to state “Product of Judea” or“Product of Samaria”.
Judea and Samaria – the historic and geographic terms used for the disputed territories for the last 3000 years – were relabelled the “The West Bank” by Jordan in 1950 – and enthusiastically embraced by the European Union.
The chickens from Judea and Samaria have come home to roost. Truth in labelling by the feckless European Union is long overdue.
The Dutch parliament on Tuesday approved a motion pushing back against a European Court of Justice decision that ordered the labeling of Israeli goods made in West Bank settlements.
The motion, approved 82-68, calls on the government to object to the ruling, unless similar standards are applied to all disputed territories around the world. It deems the singling out of Israel in such regard unfair and discriminatory.
Israel has heavily criticized the the court’s ruling last week, calling it discriminatory and noting that there are more than 200 territorial disputes across the world, but that the European court had never ruled on any of them.
The Dutch vote, supported by Christian groups in parliament and backed by the governing coalition, does not compel the government to act and is largely symbolic. However, diplomatic officials told the Ynet news site that the strong support from the coalition indicated it would guide government policy to an extent.
Israeli Ambassador to the Netherlands Naor Gilon thanked legislators for their support and expressed hope that if the court ruling stands, Dutch leaders “will adopt their own recommendation and not implement a discriminatory resolution.”
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Elder of Ziyon
