Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, March 25, 2021

You can even find Jews to support David Miller

A group of over 200 Jews have signed a letter to support Bristol University professor David Miller.

This came as the House of Lords debated his antisemitic actions, including his accusing Jewish students of being part of an anti-Islamic, pro-Israel lobby group. Excerpts of the debate:

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con) (responding for the Government)

Universities are independent and autonomous organisations. Accordingly, the Government have not intervened directly in this case, but we consider that the University of Bristol could do more to make its condemnation of Professor Miller’s conduct clear to current and future students. Students also can and should inform the police if they believe that the law has been broken. Professor Miller has expressed some ill-founded and reprehensible views and the Government wholeheartedly reject them.

Lord Austin of Dudley (Non-Afl)

Academics do have freedom of speech, including to criticise Israel, but Professor Miller does not have the right to attack Jewish students as being part of an Israel lobby group that makes Arab and Muslim students unsafe. Bristol should not be employing someone to teach students wild conspiracy theories about Jewish people. His behaviour has resulted in Jewish students being subjected to weeks of harassment and abuse. Bristol must support its students and take this much more seriously.

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)

The noble Lord gets to the nub of the issue with his questions. Academics of course have the right to espouse views that many might find offensive, perhaps even idiotic, and universities should be places where such views can be rigorously and vigorously debated. What makes this case concerning is Professor Miller’s comments about his own students, suggesting that their disagreement with his views is because they are political pawns of a foreign Government or part of a Zionist enemy, which has no place in any society. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism draws the important distinction between legitimate criticism of the Government of Israel and their policies and holding Jews collectively responsible for them. We are glad that the University of Bristol has adopted that definition and we hope that it will consider it carefully.

Lord Mendelsohn (Lab)

Miller's supposed anti-Zionism is indistinguishable from antisemitism. The most famous example is this chart created by his Spinwatch group that purports to show relationships between disparate Zionist and Jewish organizations in Britain, all allegedly controlled by Israel, all to give the false impression that they are all part of a massive unified front - in Miller's case, to attack Muslims and support Israeli racism.

This the exact same logic that the antisemites when they enumerate all the Jews who are involved in the media or government, pretending that of course all Jews have the same underlying motivations to take over the world.

Miller has another database of prominent Jewish and Zionist organizations that he considers part of the Israel lobby. Included in the list is Peter Beinart (where he is accused of promoting the Iraq war and is associated with AIPAC) and J-Street (whose crime is supposedly supporting sanctions on Iran in 2010.)

Sadly, I am not on the list.

Even the rabidly anti-Israel Jewdas noted how absurd Miller's Jewish conspiracy web is, noting, "The first thing to note is that David Miller is, to use the academic term, bad vibes. He is Director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies, which has been accused of spreading conspiracy theories about the white helmets. His website Neocon Europe uncritically published the writings of a neo-Nazi. Miller’s writings on Jewish institutions contain few outright falsehoods, but they are embarrassingly conspiratorial, significantly overstating the influence and aims of various organisations."

The response from Miller's supporters was to assume that Jewdas has now joined the enemy:

This is as much proof as you need of the underlying antisemitism behind the defenders of Miller. If even the most anti-Israel Jewish group is uncomfortable with Miller, instead of thinking that perhaps there may be something to these accusations, the socialist Jews are all thrown into the same bucket as the most right-wing Kahanist.

It is embarrassing that there are so many Jews who are willing to loudly and openly support Jew-hatred. Unfortunately, nowadays it is not surprising.

Jews supporting David Miller doesn't make Miller look good. It only makes his craven Jewish supporters look very bad.

In August, 1776, Benjamin Franklin suggested this scene to be on the Great Seal of the United States:

Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity. Motto, Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.

Thomas Jefferson modified the idea somewhat:

Pharaoh sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his head and a Sword in his hand, passing through the divided Waters of the Red Sea in Pursuit of the Israelites: Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Cloud, expressive of the divine Presence and Command, beaming on Moses who stands on the shore and extending his hand over the Sea causes it to overwhelm Pharaoh. Motto: Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.

The American story is the story of the Israelites. A people fleeing persecution, going through the wilderness and journeying across a body of water, to build a new nation of a type never built before, based on a covenant and ideals, utterly unlike every other nation that existed in their respective eras.

Even the thirteen colonies uniting to become one nation, but maintaining their own distinct laws and customs, echo the twelve tribes of Israel.

The American idea was described by Governor John Winthrop in 1630, as he was en route to Massachusetts, with purely Hebrew Scripture quotes and sensibilities:

[F]ollow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory...And to shut this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel, Deut. 30. "Beloved, there is now set before us life and death, good and evil," in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it.

Thomas Jefferson, in 1805: "I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old, from their native land, and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life..."

Abraham Lincoln once referred to Americans as God's "almost chosen people."

This idea is renewed again and again in America. Bill Clinton said in the introduction of his second Inaugural address, "Guided by the ancient vision of a promised land, let us set our sights upon a land of new promise."

The story of America is the story of the Exodus. It is the story of Passover, taught to children generation after generation. It is the story of a people with a mission to spread universal ideas of freedom, liberty, justice and equality around the world.

This is one major reason why America has always been good to its Jews, and why the United States is always going to be a friend of Israel's.

It also explains another interesting phenomenon.

Antisemites, on both the right and the left, hate America as much as they hate Jews. American exceptionalism and the American dream are abhorrent to them, just as the idea of the Chosen People and a successful Israel enrages them.

Antisemites want to destroy America, because they see in America the things they hate about Jews.

The far-Right antisemites claim to be patriotic, but they want to tear apart the nation, as we've seen recently, throwing out the Constitution and all American ideals when they disliked how an election turned out. Waving the flag is not the same as loving America.

The far-Left antisemites use old Soviet socialist tropes and methods to sow discord among Americans. They spend countless hours publishing screeds about how terrible America is. They are trying to divide Americans into classes and races and saying that these artificial divisions are not reparable, when the American dream is precisely the opposite - that anyone can succeed no matter what their social standing and these divisions are abhorrent. They want to destroy the American story and recast it as horror; they want to change the American dream into a nightmare.

Those who want to fight antisemitism must also fight for America, because if America turns into the type of nation that the far-Left or far-Right want it to be, it will not be a welcome place for Jews.

The American story is the Jewish story. Our fates are intertwined. In this age of custom Haggadot where any political or social position overtakes Passover's message of freedom, American Jews could add a prayer of thanks for living in a great nation that shares so many ideals with the Jewish people.

When “Equality” is not Everything (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

Avraham Burg (b. 1955) today is best described as a post-Zionist, or even an extreme anti-Zionist. But he was not always thus. The son of long-time religious Zionist politician Yosef Burg, he served as an officer in the IDF, became Speaker of the Knesset on behalf of the Labor Party, was Chairman of the Jewish Agency, and even served as interim President of the State of Israel for ten days. Always left-leaning, he became more and more extreme, and in 2015 renounced Zionism and joined Hadash, the Israeli communist party. More recently, he responded to the passage of Israel’s Nation State Law by announcing his resignation from the Jewish people.

Burg’s psychological story may or may not be interesting, but he is not lacking in intelligence, and so I feel obliged to consider his arguments carefully. They appear in this interview, by Ravit Hecht in Ha’aretz.

Burg’s objections to the [Nation-State] law itself begin with its very first article, which defines the Land of Israel as the historical homeland of the Jewish people. “The patriarch Abraham discovered God outside the boundaries of the Land of Israel, the tribes became a people outside the Land of Israel, the Torah was given outside the Land of Israel, and the Babylonian Talmud, which is more important than the Jerusalem Talmud, was written outside the Land of Israel,” he asserts. “The past 2,000 years, which shaped the Judaism of this generation, happened outside Israel. The present Jewish people was not born in Israel.”

He is correct in detail, but he ignores the content of the Torah itself, which – whether or not one is an observant Jew – must be seen as the “charter” of the Jewish people. The narrative of the Torah, which describes the entry of the people into the land of Israel and the conditions under which they earn (or lose) the right to stay there, is nothing if not an assertion of the connection of the people to the land. And the 2000 years of diaspora was characterized by the combination of Jewish alienation from alien surroundings with a yearning to return. Religious Jews prayed every day for the rebuilding of a Jewish Jerusalem.

Unsaid but implied is that the Palestinian Arabs are the true owners of the land. But their historical connection to it is much shorter than that of the Jews, since almost all of the population is descended from migrants who arrived in it no earlier than 1830; the majority only goes back to the early 20^th century. Most did not even identify as “Palestinians” until the 1960s. The Palestinians are aware that their claim to being long-time “natives” that were dispossessed by colonialist European Jews who had no connection to the land is tenuous. That’s why they go to such lengths to try to destroy evidence of ancient Jewish habitation here, and why they make fanciful claims of descent from Canaanites or Philistines.

Burg is committed to the idea that the most important (and the most Jewish) of political principles is that of equality. The simplest way to understand it is that the rights and obligations of a citizen are invariant over ethnicity, religion, race, sex, and numerous other characteristics, the number of which has been increasing recently in Western societies. There is no doubt that any definition of a Jewish state must violate the principle.

In a recent article, Burg argues that the demand for equality invalidates the concept of a Jewish state, which the Nation-State Law explicates:

Every supporter of [Israel’s political] parties is prepared to swear that their issue is the most important in the world: Gender, ethnic background, orientation and religious beliefs – everyone seeks equality for themselves and are committed to preferential treatment for their community and its interests. Just theirs. They aren’t capable of rising above, of uniting and running together in this election for the greatest idea of all: a state of all its citizens, committed to true and meaningful equality for all Israelis. The real, profound election campaign is one that is pitting the secular perception of the civilian State of Israel against the zealots of Jewish supremacy, who are prepared to sanctify discrimination, distinction and exclusion to preserve this tribal power.

Burg is wrong about “Jewish supremacy,” which is not essential to the idea of a Jewish state. One is not required to believe that Jews are superior to anyone else in order to understand the need for a state that – admittedly – must practice some form of “discrimination, distinction and exclusion” in order to guarantee the continued existence of the Jewish people.

There are numerous “states of all of their citizens” in the world, mostly Western democracies, although there are none in the Middle East. The USA is a an example of one that was founded on the very principle of being such a state, although it took some years and a civil war for full citizenship to be granted to former slaves, and even longer for female citizens to obtain full rights. But Israel is different, and the reason is that Israel was founded according to the principles of Zionism, and not on the Enlightenment concept of the Rights of Man.

The Jews of the West expected that the principles of the Enlightenment would apply to them. It seemed at the end of the 18^th century and the beginning of the 19^th, that they might. But as time passed it became clear that the promise of equality would not be extended to the Jewish people. Herzl and other Zionists realized that the only way to ensure that Jews would be able to live normal lives without needing to choose between persecution or assimilation would be in a state in which Jews were the sovereign power. And for Jews outside of the West, in the empires of Eastern Christianity and Islam, there was not even the glimmer of the Enlightenment.

The fundamental idea of Zionism is that there must be at least one state in the world that is not a state of its citizens, but which is defined as the state of the Jewish people. This is why there is a Law of Return for Jews to Israel, and not one for descendants of Palestinian refugees. This is why the state’s holidays, and calendar are Jewish, and why the Hebrew language has a special status. Although the state can and does have a commitment to providing equal political rights to all of its citizens, it does not pretend to treat them all equally in every respect. One way to express this is to say, as the Nation-State Law does, that “the exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People.”

This means that non-Jewish citizens of Israel must compromise. Like Jews throughout diasporic history – although with more rights and privileges – they must come to terms with living as an ethnic minority in someone else’s nation. In return, they have the advantages that come with living in a stable, prosperous, and democratic country in the midst of failed states and vicious dictatorships.

Most Arab citizens of Israel understand this, even if Avraham Burg doesn’t.

***

One final word: yes, I know we have just had an election. It looks like there will be some form of coalition led by Bibi. But the results aren’t clear as I write this, and small movements one way or another could result in a big change. Tune in next week for more. Meanwhile, have a happy and kosher Pesach.

03/24 Links Pt2: Why “academic freedom” is no defence of the Bristol University professor David Miller; The Grammy Awards Illustrate The Cultural Mainstreaming of Antisemitism

From Ian:

Why “academic freedom” is no defence of the Bristol University professor David Miller

The University of Bristol is investigating one of its own professors, David Miller, for comments he made about Jewish students that attracted widespread protest, including from hundreds of other academics and from parliamentarians. Many of Miller’s critics have defended his academic freedom while condemning his depiction of Bristol’s Jewish Society as local agents of a foreign power trying to subvert British freedoms. This is a convenient distinction that sidesteps a crucial fact: Miller’s conflicts with Jewish students flow from the same analysis of “Zionist” power that he teaches in class. They are inseparable in a way that tests the limits of both academic freedom and a university’s duty of care towards its students.

Professor Miller has said that there is “an all-out onslaught by the Israeli government” to “impose their will all over the world”, and that all university Jewish societies (including Bristol’s), plus the Union of Jewish Students, are “directed by Israel” as part of this effort. More broadly, he says that Bristol Jewish Society belongs to a “Zionist movement” that he has characterised as “the enemy of the left, the enemy of world peace, and they must be directly targeted”. Miller says the goal is to “defeat the ideology of Zionism in practice” and “to end Zionism… as a functioning ideology of the world”. While many consider Miller’s comments to be so inflammatory as to endanger Jewish students, he claims it is university Jewish societies that render Muslim and Arab students unsafe.

At the heart of all this is Miller’s belief that Islamophobia is generated and encouraged by “parts of the Zionist movement”, and that it is “fundamental to Zionism to encourage Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism”. In February 2019 he taught this theory to undergraduates at Bristol using a PowerPoint slide with a network map of Jewish, Israeli and pro-Israel organisations and individuals that he had first drawn up in 2013 under the title of “the British Zionist scene”. As the sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris has pointed out, this map was a meaningless mass of names and arrows with no real academic or analytical value. Even worse, by the time Miller taught it to students in 2019, most of the individuals named on the map had either left their posts or died. Jewish students in Miller’s lecture complained and the slide has come to represent, for Miller’s critics, the anti-Semitic nature of his work.

Bristol University was familiar with this aspect of Miller’s research, and even with this specific image, when it hired him in 2018, because Miller had used this same PowerPoint slide in a talk at an academic seminar held by the university’s Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship three years earlier. Speaking to an audience of Bristol academics, Miller described it as showing “the transnational Zionist movement”, which he said connected Israeli state institutions and UK Jewish organisations such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council. “It’s important to see this as a transnational affair”, he told his academic audience, which is not limited to supporting Israel but is also a “social movement” that engages in “domestic politics”, including “ultra-Zionist funders” who are “active in Islamophobia”; while the Israeli government, he claimed, “is directly involved in trying to sabotage and undermine the role of Muslims in public life”.

@LordIanAustin opening today's debate in the House of Lords on the comments of David Miller and the response by @BristolUni.

"His behaviour has led to Jewish students being subjected to weeks of harassment and abuse"

Lord Parkinson calls Miller's comments 'idiotic' in response pic.twitter.com/8uYH9qspPt
— SussexFriendsofIsrael (@SussexFriends) March 24, 2021

Warwick University blames “unauthorised access” after its verified Twitter account ‘likes’ a tweet that says “Jewish students are agents of a Foreign Power”

The official Twitter account of the University of Warwick ‘liked’ a tweet endorsing recent inflammatory comments by the academic and conspiracy theorist David Miller, with the University subsequently deleted the ‘like’ and blaming “unauthorised access” to the account.

The tweet, which was part of a thread from an account called Socialist Campaign Group Highgate, read: “We agree with Dr Simon Behrman, @Warwick_Law and @Warwickuni of @RussellGroup that David Miller @Tracking_Power is right to say that Jewish students are agents of a Foreign Power and would like to male a job offer. Name your price.”

A spokesperson for the University said: “The tweet in question was ‘liked’ following unauthorised access to the account. The unauthorised access and ‘like’ was quickly spotted by the social media team and the tweet was soon ‘unliked’, and the matter has been referred to Twitter.”

The University of Warwick has had problems with addressing antisemitism on its campus in the recent past, and was reluctant to adopt the International Definition of Antisemitism, which it ultimately did under pressure on 12th October 2020.

Campaign Against Antisemitism monitors the adoption of the International Definition of Antisemitism by universities.

Labour urged to suspend councillor who posted that Priti Patel was ‘hatched’ in Israel

Labour is facing calls to suspend a councillor who posted a message claiming Priti Patel, now Home Secretary, was “hatched” in Israel.

He also shared a post of a highly offensive cartoon branding Israel a “blood-thirsty racist Zionist war machine”.

Newham Borough Councillor Suga Thekkeppurayil shared the “war machine” post from the Let’s Save Palestine account which includes a cartoon of headless corpses and dismembered bodies in Gaza.

The cartoon also shows UK and US broadcasters ignoring the butchered bodies and focusing their cameras on a crying baby in Israel.

The 2014 post says: “This is still how Western media routinely cover Operation Genocidal Edge, committed by the blood-thirsty racists Zionist war machine”.

Cllr Thekkeppurayil also shared a Guardian opinion piece in March, 2019, that said Jeremy Corbyn had “nothing to apologise for being the first Labour leader to oppose Zionism on moral grounds”.

The former Labour leader was suspended from Labour in October last year after refusing to apologise in the wake of damning findings from the EHRC that the party acted unlawfully in its handling of the antisemitism crisis.

He was readmitted just two weeks later but has still not had Labour’s parliamentary party whip restored.

Now let's take a look at Ahmad Al-Issa's Trump hating, Christian hating, Jew hating, white hating daddy's Facebook posts. Curiously he was not banned by Facebook. Wonder why. pic.twitter.com/lnOYcTpn9B
— Carmine Sabia (@CarmineSabia) March 23, 2021

Palestine, the Israel-Palestine conflict, Palestinians. All day long, it seems, there is a merciless barrage of agitprop to brainwash us into believing that “Palestine” is an actual Arab country peopled with “Palestinian” nationals. This, despite the fact that there has never been a sovereign state known as “Palestine” and certainly not a sovereign Arab state known as “Palestine.”

Many writers, commentators, and just plain regular folks have long given up trying to call the Arabs of the PA and Gaza anything but “Palestinian.” It’s just become too hard for people to go against that overwhelming tide of propaganda. And what should one call them instead? Calling them “Arabs,” just generically, sounds wrong, and almost racist, being that the term has no connection to any specific location.

So where do we go from here, when you want to be accurate, without sounding racist, in describing what is essentially a group of ragtag migrants who found a good place to settle and dug in their heels? I figured the best person to ask would be my late friend Robert Werdine. Robert grew up in Michigan, but his mother’s family was Lebanese. “What do you call them?” I asked.

“I call them ‘Arabs,’” he said.

And that was good enough for me.

It makes sense: the Arabs of the PA and Hamas, along with the Arabs who left Israel in 1948, have no single nationality, as they originate from not one but several Arab countries in the Middle East. That means that the best we can do is identify them as “Arabs,” just as you might more broadly identify someone as Asian or Native American. When you don’t know a person’s country of origin or their tribe, you’ve got to go broad. That’s not racist. It’s inclusive, and even respectful.

What’s not respectful is calling indigenous Jewish land “Palestine” and pretending that Arabs, and not Jews, are native to the territory. And still, every day, people are out there, ramming the lie down our throats, incessantly. I’m a stubborn cuss, however, and so I continue to fight this dishonest nomenclature. I fight it on Twitter.

If you are an Arab, you are from ARABIA. Just as Jews come from JUDEA.
— (((Varda Epstein))) (@VardaEpstein) March 10, 2021

But mostly I fight the lie of this fictitious Arab nation and its people on Quora. The people who pose questions on this topic are disingenuous. They are uninterested in my answers. They only want to assert the premise of the question—the lie—as fact.

I see them and what they are doing, but I answer them over and over again, mostly the same way. They are tireless in trying to get us to swallow the lie, just by saying “Palestine, Palestine, Palestine,” and “Palestinian, Palestinian, Palestinian” at us all day long, and they have been all too successful in training us to repeat after them. To my mind, the best way to deal with this is to counter them all day long, by telling the truth.

By way of example, here are several “questions” along with my answers, on the topic of the imaginary country of Palestine and its pretend nationals:

If the Balfour Declaration of 1917 had been kept, how different would the history of Israel and Palestine have been?

Varda: Israel would still exist and Palestine would still be nonexistent.

With Israel and Palestine having elections, are either of the candidates in either country likely to work towards a peace agreement together or is that not going to happen?

Varda: Of the two, only Israel exists.

Is it likely a two-state solution will happen in the next century now that the Palestinians have committed to one? Can biden create a two state solution in four-eight years?

Varda: I assume that when you say “Palestinians” you mean the Arabs who live under the Palestinian Authority or Hamas, as there is no such place called “Palestine” and therefore there cannot exist such a nationality as “Palestinian.”

There will never be a two-state solution because neither side desires one. This is something that Trump understood, and for some reason others refuse to understand, even when the writing on the wall is plain to see. Hamas and the PA pretend they want this, in order to accrue maximum benefits from the American and Israeli governments, meantime, they tell the truth in Arabic, to their people. See:

Biden administration and even Israeli media are fooled by Palestinian doubletalk: No, Hamas didn't commit to a two state solution

Why doesn't Quora show posts related to the Israel and Palestinian conflict?

Varda: If this were the case, I would not be able to see your question.

Is a two state solution likely to take Isreal and Palestine 4-8 years to agree to or would it take many more years than that to come to an agreement? Do you think it will happen within 50 years?

Varda: Your question is a contradiction in terms. If there were a place called “Palestine” there would already be two states. If that is the case, what is meant by the “two-state solution” and why has it not brought peace?

There is no reason for the Jewish people to give up any of their land, and especially not to those who threaten to annihilate them.

Why does Israel want to annex lands in the West Bank? What will happen to the Palestinians living there?

Varda: Israel has no desire to annex land. Not in Judea and Samaria, and not anywhere else.

“West Bank” is propaganda term that people substitute for the geographical area known as Judea and Samaria, part of indigenous Jewish territory. The term is used to suggest that this land sits on the west bank of the Jordan River, hence belongs to Jordan. The territory is nowhere near any body of water except for the body of water known as the Dead Sea.

Judea and Samaria was returned to the Jewish people by dint of a defensive war imposed on the Jewish State. There is no need to annex land that already belongs to you. There is, however, a need to exercise sovereignty, because at present, the territory is under martial law, and it is necessary to bring law and order to the area. Also, Israel has a right to declare its sovereignty over all its land, including Judea and Samaria, which was returned to its rightful owners, the Jewish people, in 1967.

What makes up Palestine?

Varda: That’s a very good question. There is no state called Palestine. If there were such a state, there would be no clamor for a two-state solution, as such a “solution” would already exist, there being two states: Israel and “Palestine.”

The other reason this is a good question is that those who speak of “Palestine,” cannot name its borders unless it is to say that the borders of “Palestine” are exactly the borders of the Jewish State.

What are some Palestinian building archetypes?

Varda: There is no such thing, as there is no state of Palestine, hence no such nationality.

How should President Biden approach the Israel/Palestine issue considering the Middle East seems more preoccupied by Iran now?

Varda: There is no Israel/Palestine issue, because one of these countries does not exist. Biden has already sworn to restore aid to the PA and Hamas which will no doubt go toward their terror-incentivizing pay-to-slay program, so he is not as uninvolved as you suggest in the move to rid the Middle East of its Jewish presence.

What are your thoughts on Jared Kushner calling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a ‘real estate dispute’?

Varda: I wouldn’t call it an “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” to begin with, because there is no sovereign Arab country called “Palestine” and as such, there can be no such nationality as “Palestinian.”

Also, it’s not a conflict if one side wants to live and the other side doesn’t want them to live.

All in all, I guess I’d have to say I disagree with Jared Kushner, because it’s not just about real estate, but about the fact that the PA and Hamas want this real estate to be “judenfrei” or free of a Jewish presence.

Aside from the land, and who may and may not live there, the PA and Hamas want to destroy the Jewish people and are working toward that eventuality (God Forbid) by inciting the people under their rule to commit terror attacks. The PA even pays stipends to the families of those who murder Jews to incentivize others to follow suit.

If Israel and the Palestinians did manage to cease hostilities and both agree to a resolution which would lead to peaceful relations, how exactly could that occur in your opinion?

Varda: Presumably, you refer to the Arabs who settled in what is the State of Israel. A resolution to the state of war will occur when the Arabs lay down their arms, as they are the belligerent party.

What is the focus of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? Which of them has the right to the land of Palestine?

Varda: No such conflict exists as there is no such thing as a “Palestinian” being that there is no such place as “Palestine.” There was never an independent state called by this name, and there was never an independent sovereign Arab state by this name, either. As such, there can be no nationality called “Palestinian.”

There is, however, a state called “Israel” that is indigenous Jewish territory and has been for thousands of years. Presumably, you would like to take this land from the indigenous Jewish people and give it to the Arabs and pretend it is called “Palestine.”

Perhaps that is your conflict, in a nutshell: that the Jewish people have a tiny sliver of land and you would like to take it away from them and give it to the Arabs. Perhaps you are not aware that even the Quran refers to the Jews as the Bani Isra’il, the “sons of Israel.”

Do you think the conflict between Israel and Palestine will ever end?

Varda: There’s no such conflict, as only one of these countries exists.

***
Anti-Israel, hence antisemitic Quorans, will continue to bombard me with these stupid questions, and I’ll keep coming back with the same honest answers. Will it help? Maybe, maybe not. At least not unless everyone else who knows the truth makes an effort to stop using the language of “Palestine,” the country that doesn’t exist and never has.

03/24 Links Pt1: Israeli Elections 2021: With Most Votes Counted, Arab Party Ra’am Poised to Play Key Role as Netanyahu’s Advantage Slips Away; Kontorovich: Fake International Law Is the Newest Anti-Israel Libel

From Ian:

Israeli Elections 2021: With Most Votes Counted, Arab Party Ra’am Poised to Play Key Role as Netanyahu’s Advantage Slips Away

With 87% of the vote counted in Israel’s 2021 elections, the political ground appeared to shift on Wednesday, with Naftali Bennett’s Yamina party falling from the position of kingmaker and the Arab party Ra’am emerging as a possible decisive force.

Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the “pro-Netanyahu” bloc of parties has fallen from 56 seats to 52, while the “anti-Netanyahu” bloc — a diverse group of parties that seek to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — dropped slightly to 56 mandates.

Netanyahu’s Likud party won 30 seats, Yair Lapid’s opposition Yesh Atid 18, and the religious parties Shas and Yehadut HaTorah 9 and 7, respectively. The results show Benny Gantz’s Blue and White with 8, Labor with 7, and Yisrael Beiteinu, the Joint List, New Hope, and Religious Zionism with 6 apiece, with Meretz winning 5.

Crucially, the Yamina party received 7 seats, while Ra’am is now slated to win 5 — despite appearing to fall below the threshold to enter the Knesset during much of Tuesday night.

Initial exit polls Tuesday showed Yamina’s Bennett set to play kingmaker, with his party’s 7 seats able to swing the balance between the pro- and anti-Netanyahu blocs. Now, however, those seats would not be enough to give Netanyahu a majority to form a government.

However, if both Ra’am and Yamina join with Netanyahu, he would have such a majority. By the same token, if either or both of them joined the anti-Netanyahu bloc, it would theoretically be able to form a government, although such a coalition forming is unlikely.

Even with most results in, they appear close enough that it remains possible the map will continue to change as the final ballots are counted.

Both blocs have to some extent declared victory, with Netanyahu pledging to form a right-wing government but leaving his options open.

Outcome still up in air, officials to start count of 450,000 absentee ballots

The Central Elections Committee was preparing on Wednesday afternoon to begin counting some 450,000 absentee ballots, and said it hoped to conclude the tally by Friday morning.

The ballots, cast in special double envelopes, account for some 10 percent of the national vote, and could yet determine whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is able to form a new government, whether his rivals do so, or whether the political gridlock continues and Israel heads for yet another election after four inconclusive rounds.

As of 5 p.m., 97 percent of regular votes had been tallied, with the Central Elections Committee expected to add the final 3% shortly.

The double-envelope system is used for anyone voting outside a regular polling station assigned to them according to their place of residence. They are all brought to the Knesset to be counted by CEC representatives. The process takes longer than the regular count as officials cross-reference the person’s details on the outer envelope to ensure they have not also voted elsewhere. After this is completed, the anonymous inner envelopes are amassed together and the ballots within can be counted like all other votes.

Absentee ballots are usually cast by members of security forces, prisoners, diplomats and persons with mobility issues who can not reach their assigned polling station.

In the previous three elections, the number of people voting by double envelope rose from 240,000 to 280,000 to 330,000, but this year jumped significantly as it now includes isolated COVID-19 patients and those in quarantine.

Eugene Kontorovich: Fake International Law Is the Newest Anti-Israel Libel

Not only are Palestinians capable of securing vaccines from abroad, they have in fact done so—though, according to media reports, they have misallocated early doses to ruling party officials and even re-exported many to Jordanian royals. The Palestinians get to choose which vaccines they want—typically not the Pfizer doses preferred by Israel—and how much they are willing to pay for them. Israel got its shots early because it paid top taxpayer dollar for quick delivery. The Palestinians are not taxed by Israel.

Again, the experts waving around Art. 56 are surely aware of the ICRC commentary that makes clear it does not mean what they say it does. But they disingenuously choose not to mention that inconvenient fact.

The official commentary also makes clear that even when an occupying power does provide public health services, it does not have to do so for free. But Israel does not control the Palestinian budget, and it is surprising that Jerusalem's critics insist that it impose its spending priorities on the Palestinian government. Part of having one's own government is the ability to set budgetary priorities. According to a State Department report, the PA spends hundreds of millions of dollars on its "pay for slay" program that incentivizes terror against Israeli Jews. The funding for that program would be more than enough to buy vaccines for its entire population. But the PA has put killing Jews ahead of protecting its own people.

The claim of Israeli responsibility for vaccinating the PA's populace was never made before Israel achieved global renown for its rapid vaccine rollout program. The accusations against Israel now are designed to besmirch and belittle this remarkable achievement. But absolutely nothing in the Geneva Convention says that an occupied territory is unable to "look after the health of its population" if it does not vaccinate them with the speed of the fastest country on earth. This idea is baseless and preposterous. In fact, the PA is receiving vaccines at roughly the same speed as are comparable governments.

And of course, none of this even touches upon the dispute as to whether Israel actually illicitly "occupies" Judea and Samaria in the first instance.

Pandemics throughout history have seen Jews blamed for the spread of disease. Today, such claims come dressed in legal robes—and get amplified by progressive U.S. legislators.

For many years, we have been reading that the Palestinians are starving.

News Line (socialist), 2006: "Israel’s brutal occupation of the Palestinian people has created refugees, death squads, and now starvation in Gaza, and hunger throughout the occupied territories."

The UN, 2007: "The forced starvation diet of Palestinians"

Richard Falk, 2007: " Israel ...has brought the people of Gaza to the brink of collective starvation and desolation."

Business Insider, 2011: "The Israeli Campaign To Starve Palestinians Into Submission Is A Crime"

WRMEA, 2019: "The Scenario of a Million Palestinians Going Hungry in Gaza"

Guardian, 2019: "One million face hunger in Gaza after US cut to Palestine aid"

The Palestinian Authority and Hamas never complained about these stories - on the contrary, they encouraged them, because they blamed Israel and the US for "starving" Palestinians and the result could be more money for them.

Something interesting happened in the past week, though.

Mohammed Dahlan, the exiled Fatah Gaza leader who is now trying to get involved in the planned Palestinian elections, said in an interview with Al Arabiya that “The Palestinian people have suffered from poverty, oppression and hunger for 15 years,” exactly what Israel's critics have claimed - but Dahlan blamed the Palestinian leadership for this, not Israel.

Pro-Abbas Palestinian media responded dismissively: "We have never heard of a single Palestinian who died of starvation."

Oh wow. It seems the Palestinians really weren't starving for 15 years as we've been told. (They were literally starving to death - in Syria - but no one talks about that.)

The article also reveals a lot about Palestinian corruption without intending to. It says that Dahlan entered Yasir Arafat’s council one day, protesting the financial corruption in the Palestinian Authority, and Arafat replied to him mockingly: “Oh Mohammad, let other people talk about corruption, not you. By the way, tell me. From where did you get the money to buy your Al Shawa villa, from your father's account? ”

If the story is true, it means that Arafat knew about the amount of corruption at every level of his Fatah cronies, and didn't do anything about it. Corruption was how he kept everyone in line.

Nothing has changed - we know that Abbas' family has become rich from their business ventures funded by the Palestinian Authority's decisions.

Many in the UK like to celebrate the Kindertransport - the initiative to save some 10,000 Jewish children from Europe after Kristallnacht.

The reality is a bit more complicated.

The UK refused to spend a penny to help the children and insisted that they all get sponsors to pay significant sums for them. Parents and adult siblings were of course not allowed to come. And the ones that were allowed to come to England were the ones who didn't look Jewish, with no health issues, and who were not religious, so they could work and assimilate.

Within hours of Germany invading Poland, the British Home Office stopped all transfers of children - even the ones already en route, as we can see from this heartbreakingly cruel letter.

The ten thousand who were saved were saved very reluctantly and most were used as child labor. Their lives were saved but it was not quite as altruistic as it sounds.

The BBC just published an extensive report on a Nazi war criminal who hid in England for decades after the war. In the middle of the article we see this detail:

As many as 50,000 Nazi collaborators infiltrated Polish forces in the later stages of World War Two, historian Martin Dean, who worked on the government inquiry and for the Metropolitan Police’s War Crimes Unit, says.

About a third of them ended up in the UK.

This means that over 15,000 Nazi sympathizers ended up sheltering - and hiding - in the UK after the war.

The British ended up sheltering far more Nazi sympathizers after the war than Jewish children before the war.

The Jewish children were vetted to make sure they were the "right" kind of Jews before being admitted. The Nazis seem to have had a far easier time to enter the UK and live out their years than the Jewish children did.

It is a small detail, but it points to the larger issue of how little the world cared about Jews.

Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party has been floundering in recent weeks, with the defection of Nasser al Kidwa who wants to run as a separate candidate/party for elections and rumors about Marwan Barghouti being interested in running for president from his Israeli prison cell, while exiled strongman Mohammed Dahlan goes on Gulf TV shows every night to insult Abbas.

But according to the latest PCPSR poll, Fatah is actually doing better than it was three and six months ago. 38% of the public wants to see a Fatah led government, and only 22% was Hamas.

Mahmoud Abbas himself is not that popular, though. Only 32% are satisfied with how he does his job and 65% are not satisfied. 68% of the public want president Abbas to resign while 26% want him to remain in office.

The people seem to dislike both Hamas and Fatah. When asked what would happen if Fatah won, over 2/3 of those who responded said that corruption would increase. If Hamas wins, the people expect the economy to go downhill.

An open ended question of who people want their next president to be results in 22% preferring Marwan Barghouti, 14% Ismail Haniyyeh, and only 9% Mahmoud Abbas. Other names mentioned were 7% for Mohammed Dahlan, 3% Khalid Mishal, 2% Mohammad Shtayyeh, 2% Mustafa Barghouti, and 1% Yahya Sinwar.

03/23 Links Pt2: How The Equality Act Would Legalize Religious Bigotry; The National Council of Jewish Women's Apologists for Anti-Semites; NY Times Defends Holocaust-Inversion

From Ian:

How The Equality Act Would Legalize Religious Bigotry

The Founding Fathers recognized freedom of expression and religious liberty as core elements of diversity and tolerance. Now, nearly 250 years later, Congress is acting to stamp them out, ushering in a new era of government-sanctioned anti-religious bigotry.

While no one could argue this is motivated by anti-Jewish bias in particular, the disproportionate repression of Jewish religious practice — by a law unironically billed as an “Equality Act,” no less — is far too significant to ignore.

On Jan. 1, 2020, almost three months before COVID-19 limits on gatherings, more than 100,000 observant American Jews filled MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, and other locations across the country for a unique gala honoring religious education. Called simply “The Siyum,” meaning “the completion,” it honored the tens of thousands of religiously motivated men — and significant number of women — who completed a seven-and-a-half-year cycle studying the Oral Torah.

The Siyum celebrates not only education, but Jewish resilience in the face of persecution. The 2,711-day cycle was first set in motion in Poland in 1923, where the first Siyum ensued in 1931. In 1945, the main venues of the third Siyum were in Israel, but, incredibly, one was also held by Holocaust survivors in a displaced persons camp in Germany. Since 1990, the largest celebrations have taken place in the United States, each exponentially larger than the one before it.

But now the Land of Liberty might never allow another. With the Equality Act, Congress is waging a legislative effort to prohibit the next Siyum, scheduled to take place in June 2027, and other such “discriminatory” violations of human rights. Under the Act, observant Jews will no longer be legally permitted to gather to celebrate religious education, or any other occasion, in accordance with their beliefs.

The reason is simple: not only prayer services, but family lifecycle events of all kinds — from circumcisions to bar mitzvahs to weddings to funerals — are commonly divided by biological sex in traditional Orthodox Judaism. This is true whether or not ceremonies are held in synagogues.

Whether in restaurants, catering halls, funeral homes, or elsewhere, all of these gatherings are often observed in what the law describes as “public accommodations.” Every major Siyum event over the past century has observed this same strict separation of the sexes. The Equality Act would ban them all.

For Election Day: The famous 1961 debate over the claim that the 'Jews are a fossil race'

Recently, Melanie Phillips wrote in an article posted on Arutz 7 "...The controversy started with a tweet by the Labour Party’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, congratulating the new head of the Scottish Labour Party, Anas Sarwar, on his appointment. Rayner described Sarwar, who is of Pakistani descent, as “the first-ever ethnic minority leader of a political party anywhere in the U.K.”

Sarwar is certainly the first Muslim or Asian leader of a political party. But there have been four Jewish party leaders in the United Kingdom—from Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in the 19th century to Labour Party leader Ed Miliband in the last decade.

...This erupted on the BBC’s daily show, “Politics Live,” which chose to respond to protests from British Jews over Rayner’s remark by hosting a discussion with a title card: “Should Jews count as an ethnic minority?”

To many Jews, even to ask this question was demonstrably absurd. How could they not be counted as such? And why were non-Jews suddenly presuming to tell Jews what they were or were not?

Back to the 1961 debate
The claims that Jews are not an ethnic minority are not new, I would like to describe a debate that happened in 1961 at Montreal's McGill University and became world famous - what we today would call viral - with recordings still existing. It was between the famous historian Dr. Arnold Toynbee, professor at the London School of Economics, and Israeli Ambassador to Canada Rabbi Dr. Yaakov Herzog. Herzog's brother, Chaim Herzog, would later become the sixth president of Israel. He was also the son of the second Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Yitzhak Herzog.

The debate probed among other topics whether Jews today are a vibrant continuation of a people rooted in antiquity. Rabbi Yisroel Meir Lau describes the debate in which Toynbee described the Jews as a fossil race.

"Dr. Toynbee insisted that Israel is not truly a nation, and does not deserve a state. The Jews, he claimed, are a religious sect with a mission to guide mankind in monotheism, morals and ethics in the Diaspora, but are not a nation. Permit me to use an imaginary voyage to develop a point made by Dr. Herzog."

Swastikas in Damascus

A new death notice appeared in a Lebanese village north of Beirut last September, glued to a public wall. As residents of the village went about their days, some of them probably stopped, out of habit, to read the name of the man who had recently died. It would have been a scene repeated every day in Syrian and Lebanese villages: Those who didn’t know the deceased proceeded to peruse the names of his surviving family members to find out whether condolences were in order.

There was more to this particular death notice, however, than the news of the death itself. People took pictures of it and posted it to social media, where it immediately went viral. Incredulous, people read the name of the deceased man, written in big, bold font in the center of the poster: Hitler Zakhia Bassil.

Not much was shared about Mr. Bassil himself. But the names of his sons, Adolf and Addie, hinted at something of a family tradition. I was aghast when a photo of the poster reached me via WhatsApp, from a friend looking for a laugh.

I spent my life between Aleppo, Damascus, and Beirut before moving to Paris a year ago. I’ve encountered countless such anecdotes, which seem to be the haphazard leftovers of some combination of enduring government propaganda and a lack of actual World War II and Holocaust education.

Despite the rejection of the ideology by the vast majority of the population in Syria and Lebanon, symbols associated with Nazism were there, out in the open, and having a swastika tattoo or waving a Nazi flag did not land a person in jail or lead to a financial penalty. The first time I remember seeing a swastika was at the all-boys Presbyterian school I attended for 12 years in Aleppo. Al-Saleeb al-Ma’qouf, the Hooked Cross, was one of many symbols that boys would mindlessly carve into their desks, scribble on the walls of the bathroom, or sketch in textbooks. Most of them, I would learn, didn’t even know what the symbol meant. Those who did, didn’t know much.

School management didn’t rush to remove those symbols, or try to ban them, more than they did any other symbol or writing on the wall.

State Department memo confirms Palestinians paying terrorists

From the Washington Free Beacon:

The Biden administration privately confirmed to Congress last week that the Palestinian Authority has continued to use international aid money to reward terrorists but said the finding won't impact its plans to restart funding.

In a non-public State Department report obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, the administration said the Palestinians spent at least $151 million in 2019 on its "pay-to-slay" program, in which international aid dollars are spent to support imprisoned terrorists and their families. Financial statements further indicate that at least $191 million was spent on "deceased Palestinians referred to as ‘martyrs.’" Despite this practice, which violates U.S. law and prompted the Trump administration to freeze aid to the Palestinians, the "Biden-Harris Administration has made clear its intent to restart assistance to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza," according to the report.

It remains unclear how the Biden administration will restart American aid without violating a 2018 bipartisan law known as the Taylor Force Act, which prohibits the U.S. government from resuming Palestinian aid until the payments to terrorists are stopped.

The State Department admitted it was "unable to certify" to Congress that the Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization are complying with the Taylor Force Act, primarily because they have "not terminated payments for acts of terrorism to any individual, after being fairly tried, who has been imprisoned for such acts of terrorism and to any individual who died committing such acts of terrorism, including to a family member of such individuals," according to the report.

Currently, "plans for [resuming] this assistance are being developed, and the resumption of assistance to the West Bank and Gaza, including any assistance for the PA using [fiscal year] 2020 funds, will be fully consistent with applicable requirements under U.S. law," the administration claims in the report without explaining exactly how it will legally execute that plan.

Another private State Department memo outlining the Biden administration’s efforts to increase diplomacy with the Palestinian government indicates that U.S. aid dollars will start flowing again at the end of March or early April, according to a copy of that memo recently leaked in the press.

Israel haters like to imply, without evidence, that Israel is misusing US funds for demolition of Palestinian terrorist houses or other anti-terror activities in the territories. They self-righteously claim that they are only trying to protect US taxpayer dollars.

You can be sure they will not say a word against resuming funding the Palestinian Authority even with the full knowledge that the funds will go, directly or indirectly, into the pockets of terrorists and their families.

You can also be sure that the Palestinian Authority has learned that it doesn't need to change at all and Western nations will still fall over themselves to give them cash.

03/23 Links Pt1: Biden’s ‘Nine-Miles-Wide Plan’; PA Funneled Hundreds of Millions to Terrorists, State Dept Report Reveals; Ahmad Alissa Named as Suspect in Boulder Shooting

From Ian:

Josh Hammer: The Peace Process That Never Was

In a sane world, partisans of the Palestinian-Arab cause would celebrate the fact that last year, a pro-Israel U.S. president and right-wing Israeli prime minister both agreed to a framework that included the potential for an independent Palestinian state. They, of course, did not. Which brings us back to the present moment.

There is a tremendous risk that the Biden-Harris administration is set to reverse the genuine progress of the Trump era, opting instead to raise failed pieties from the dead and reassert them anew. But there is no U.S. national security interest served by a return of pressure on Israel to concede “land for peace” in the absence of any Palestinian concessions. There is no American interest in subjecting Israel to public flogging and bribery, or dangling the sword of Damocles over Israeli military aid.

America’s interest, rather, is better fortified with a strong Israel, one that knows America has its back when it acts against common enemies in Bashar Assad’s Syria, Hezbollah-run Lebanon, within Gaza, or in Judea and Samaria. In a post-JCPOA world, an unapologetically strong Israel means a strong military counterweight to the threat posed by Iran, and a mighty bulwark against Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s aspiration to neo-Ottoman hegemony. It means a greater chance of rapprochement between Israel and the Arab nations.

America has much to gain from an empowered Israel, which—paradoxical though it may seem—has quite obviously led to more peace, not less: more regional normalization agreements, better containment of Iran, more security for American interests, and more geopolitical stability. Only a stronger Israel can ever lead to a durable and lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace. As America’s regional interests are supported by Israel’s military, diplomatic, and economic strength, it follows that America’s regional interests are effectively coterminous with a strong U.S.-Israel relationship. The analysis really is that simple.

To the extent that the Biden-Harris administration might change its current course and consider genuine alternatives to the failed “inside-out,” “land for peace” consensus, it has options. One intriguing idea is what Bar Ilan University Professor Morechai Kedar calls the “emirates plan,” modeled after the eponymous Gulf state. Just as the UAE is a loose confederation of disparate Arab tribes, each overseeing its own tribal land, so too could the deeply fractious Palestinians of Judea and Samaria confederate into a series of noncontiguous, Palestinian “emirates” based around the relevant tribes’ home cities. That kind of plan is “based on the sociology of the Middle East, which has the tribe as the major cornerstone of society,” as Kedar has explained. In other words, a plan based on how the Middle East is, not how blinkered Western elites want to believe it could be.

Prevailing leftist orthodoxy holds that everything the dreaded Orange Man did was bad and must therefore be toppled. But the Trump administration, unlike so many of its predecessors, understood something about how the region works, decided to accept that reality, and worked with it. As a result, the region today is more stable, more secure, and more peaceful, and the United States’ own national interest is better served. Biden’s legacy will depend, in part, on his not mucking it up.

Biden’s ‘Nine-Miles-Wide Plan’

The central theme of Biden’s Israeli-Palestinian policy in the short term, according to the Amr memo, will be a series of rewards to be given to the Palestinian Authority, even though the P.A. has done absolutely nothing to merit any of them.

Despite the P.A.’s financial support for terrorists, harboring of fugitive terrorists, constant anti-Jewish incitement and unrelenting anti-American propaganda, the Biden administration intends to “reset the U.S. relationship with the Palestinian people and leadership” by:
- Sending the P.A. at least $15 million monthly ($180 million annually) as “humanitarian assistance,” starting in “late March or early April.”
- Soon expanding that P.A. aid package to include “a full range of economic, security and humanitarian assistance,” including funds for the corrupt, pro-terrorist UNRWA agency. By “security” aid, Amr undoubtedly means the pro-terrorist, de facto army that the P.A. calls its “security services.”
- Resuming diplomatic contacts with P.A. officials by reopening the PLO embassy in Washington, D.C., and using the old (but still functioning) American consulate in Jerusalem as a de facto embassy to the Palestinians.
- Inviting the United Nations and the Quartet, both of which are militantly pro-Palestinian, to “engage” in the diplomatic process.
- Resuming “country of origin labeling,” which means declaring that goods made in much of Jerusalem, as well as Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights, will be forced to carry “Made in Palestine” labels since the Biden administration has decided that all those areas belong to the Palestinian Arabs.

In return, the Biden administration intends to make two laughably inadequate “demands” of the P.A. First, it will seek “to obtain a Palestinian commitment” to stop paying terrorists, which will probably be as genuine and durable as all the previous P.A. commitments to stop aiding terrorists.

Second, Biden will “emphasize to the P.A.” the need for “reductions of arrests of bloggers and dissidents.” What a joke! The P.A. won’t even be expected to stop arresting dissidents; it just has to arrest a few less.

What’s most important, however, is the end goal of the Biden plan. Amr’s draft says that all of the above steps are “a means to advance the prospects of a negotiated two-state solution … based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps.”

In plain English, that means a sovereign “State of Palestine” in all, or nearly all, of Judea and Samaria, and the Gaza Strip (and part of Jerusalem). The “land swaps” phrase can be disregarded. It’s nonsense; obviously, if Israel and the P.A. ever wanted to “swap land”—which they don’t—they don’t need a plan by U.S. President Joe Biden to do it.

Elliott Adrams: A New (or Old) Biden Policy on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?

A “reset” of relations with the PA and PLO leadership, especially if Hamas wins a role in the legislature and is given control of some ministries, is going to be difficult and controversial. The memo says “The last Palestinian elections were held 15 years ago, and half of the young population has never had a chance to vote. But the implications of an election remain uncertain: the collapse of a power-sharing agreement after the prior elections led to the Hamas takeover of Gaza.” If I were on Secretary Blinken’s staff, I would kick this memo back downstairs to ask that it take account of all those coming problems, and how Congress will react to them.

The second issue is the memo’s assumption that U.S. policy should be built around the two-state solution, as if the Oslo Accords had been signed recently rather than a quarter-century ago. The memo says the Biden administration's goal should be “to advance freedom, security, and prosperity for both Israelis and Palestinians in the immediate term which is important in its own right, but also as means to advance the prospects of a negotiated two-state solution.” The memo is correct, in my view, to see how the Abraham Accords can be used: “In these new normalised relationships, we will look for opportunities to support Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and improve the quality of life for the Palestinian people.”

The memo argues for “rolling back certain steps by the prior administration that bring into question our commitment or pose real barriers to a two-state solution, such as country of origin labelling.” It is plain silly to think that such product labelling is actually a barrier to a two-state solution. What’s more striking is that on this subject there is no new thinking. There is simply a return to position papers from the Obama administration, and to the very old tradition of seeking smooth relations with the PA leadership no matter how bad their treatment of their own people.

But what if Hamas joins the PLO, which signed the Oslo Accords, after the Palestinian elections (likely after the scheduled PLO internal parliamentary elections, for the Palestine National Council, scheduled for August 31). In that case a terrorist group that is completely opposed to Oslo and to the two-state solution would be gaining influence and power in the PLO and the PA. Would it still be sensible to seek closer relations with the Palestinian leadership, and strengthen that “connective tissue?”

Perhaps there are other significant parts of the memo not described by The National, and in any event this is (to repeat) a memo to not from the secretary of state. Nevertheless, it is a rare early insight into administration policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From what it shows, the “new” or “reset” policy will not be very new at all: it will instead be a return to patterns of conduct that were tried and found wanting in the past.

The Three-State Solution

In many ways, to avoid becoming another Gaza, a binational state in the West Bank would need its Jewish minority. The presence of a substantial minority group makes democracy and equal rights a moral imperative; fosters openness, liberalism, and diversity; and promotes cooperation and creativity. Indeed, throughout modern history the Jews have tended to be a “creative minority,” helping the process of liberalization and modernization, with their presence often inadvertently minimizing the possibility of a “tyranny of the majority” that threatens to become oppressive or murderous.

It is true that neither the Jews nor the Palestinians in the West Bank are ready to entertain the possibility of a binational Judea-Palestine at the moment, but there are perhaps certain preliminary steps that could be taken. Israel could, for example, unilaterally freeze settlement expansion, thus reassuring the Palestinians that their majority—which is growing thinner—is preserved. An initiative could then be undertaken to bring the Palestinian Authority and the settlers’ Yesha Council together to work on infrastructure and development, thus building trust and dialogue between the two sides. The Palestinians could stop policies that incentivize violence, such as payments to imprisoned terrorists and the families of dead terrorists. And Israel could make it clear that it has no intention of annexing the West Bank itself.

This idea must seem, at the moment, to be vaguely akin to madness. But with Israel smoothly forging official ties with much of the Arab world, it is clear that, even against the most fervent convictions of experts and statesmen, the unthinkable can become inevitable very quickly. At the moment, moreover, both the Israeli and Palestinian Authority governments are mired in denial and self-deception. Contrary to what appears to be the vision of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his party, normalization with the rest of the Arab world will not make the Palestinian issue go away. The almost 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank will still be there—annexing them would still be political and national suicide, and a perpetual occupation remains immoral and unmanageable.

At the same time, however, the Palestinian dream of destroying Israel will remain impossible, the encouragement and lionization of Palestinian war crimes and terrorism will still be self-destructive and morally horrific, and the settler population will continue to grow. Both sides, in other words, must admit to reality and attempt to deal with it in a constructive way.

A three-state solution, with a binational state in the West Bank, would no doubt be difficult to establish; but it has the virtue of never having been tried before, and thus never having failed. This means, at the very least, the possibility exists that it might actually work. And for this reason alone, perhaps, it is worth trying.