FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

Last week I asked “why is the administration helping Iran deter Israel from bombing its nuclear facilities?”

I suggested that the leak of a war game scenario that began with an Israeli attack on Iran and ended with several hundred dead Americans — of course this is only one possible outcome among an infinite number — was a deliberate attempt to influence sentiment in the US against Israel exercising its right of self-defense.

This particular leak is just one of many. But in addition to the proliferation of reports that an Israeli attack would be ineffective, Iranian retaliation would be devastating, etc., there is a much more dangerous tactic that is apparently being used. Ron Ben-Yishai tells us,

Indeed, in recent weeks the Administration shifted from persuasion efforts vis-à-vis decision-makers and Israel’s public opinion to a practical, targeted assassination of potential Israeli operations in Iran. This “surgical strike” is undertaken via reports in the American and British media, but the campaign’s aims are fully operational: To make it more difficult for Israeli decision-makers to order the IDF to carry out a strike, and what’s even graver, to erode the IDF’s capacity to launch such strike with minimal casualties…

The damage has to do with the revelation of secret information and assessments that would require an expensive, risky intelligence effort for the Iranians to acquire. To sum up, the American publications caused the following damage:

• Iran now has a decent picture of what Israel’s and America’s intelligence communities know about Tehran’s nuclear program and defense establishment, including its aerial defenses.

• The Iranians now know about the indications that would be perceived by Washington and Jerusalem as a “nuclear breakthrough.” Hence, Iran can do a better job of concealment.

• The reports make it more difficult to utilize certain operational options. These options, even if not considered thus far, could have been used by the US in the future, should Iran not thwart them via diplomatic and military means.

In other words, while President Obama told AIPAC that “Israel must always have the ability to defend itself, by itself, against any threat,” and affirmed “Israel’s sovereign right to make its own decisions about what is required to meet its security needs,” he apparently has reserved the right to sabotage Israel’s self-defense if he believes it to be in his interest.

And make no mistake, we are talking about a narrow political interest, not the long-term interest of the US. Here’s why:

Sanctions alone cannot deter the Iranian regime from their nuclear program, because a totalitarian regime that can shoot down dissidents in the street can allocate resources however it wants to. Sanctions are always leaky, and the Revolutionary Guard can be well-fed and its vehicles full of fuel no matter how deprived ordinary Iranians may be.

The only way there is hope for diplomatic efforts to be successful is for sanctions to be coupled with a credible threat of military action. Israel’s threat to attack Iran’s nuclear program, based on its perception of an existential threat, would be credible.

Iranian leaders doubt — almost certainly correctly — that the US itself will contemplate using force, at the very least until after the election. So today only two things are likely to stop Iran from developing a weapon: fear of an Israeli attack, or, if that doesn’t work, an actual attack.

And now the US is sending a clear message to Iran:

Not only will we give you a year or so to work on your weapons, to disperse and bury your laboratories and improve your defenses, but we will make sure that Israel doesn’t strike within that time period either.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has indicated that a point will be reached later this year by which the Iranian program cannot be stopped by the means at Israel’s disposal. Therefore the administration’s actions, if successful, will ensure that Israel will not be able to attack, or even credibly threaten to attack, Iran. They will keep either diplomacy or force from being effective.

They will also nullify Israel’s ability to defend itself as a sovereign power, complete its transition to satellite status, and enable the US to dictate concessions that Israel must make to the Palestinians.  But that’s another issue.

The additional time, plus whatever it can gain by pretending to negotiate, by delaying the very last steps in weapon assembly, etc., will make it very much more likely that Iran will become a nuclear power. Iran will tough out the sanctions, because it will know that in the short term it will have nothing to fear. And in the long term, the political and economic advantages of becoming a nuclear power — and the preeminent power in the Middle East — will outweigh the immediate discomfort.

I am expecting that by next year we will start hearing that this isn’t really all that bad, after all, Pakistan has nukes and they are an irresponsible Islamic nation, the Iranians are rational and can be contained, etc.

I don’t think I have to emphasize what it will mean for the US, and indeed for the West in general, to empower the champion of revolutionary Islamism with the ultimate weapon. And yet, this is the likely outcome if the administration’s strategy succeeds!

Technorati Tags: Iran, nuclear weapons, deterrence, Israel

By Vic Rosenthal

In the 1947 UN partition resolution, the General Assembly recommended that Jerusalem be made a corpus separatum, a political entity under international control, apart from the proposed Jewish and Arab states. This was reaffirmed at the time of the 1949 armistice agreements, but nobody paid attention to it — Jordan annexed the eastern part of Jerusalem, and Israel of course included the western part, which became its capital.

The US did not vote for the corpus separatum resolution in 1949, but nevertheless was not happy with the situation. In 1962, the State Department issued a statement which said, in part,

The United States undertook, however, to give due recognition to the formal acts of the General Assembly and the Trusteeship Council relating to Jerusalem and has since maintained its position that the Holy Places in the Jerusalem area are of international interest to a degree which transcends ordinary considerations of sovereignty.

…the status of Jerusalem is a matter of United Nations concern and no member of the United Nations should take any action to prejudice the United Nations interest in this question. Our objective has been to keep the Jerusalem question an open one and to prevent its being settled solely through the processes of attrition and fait accompli to the exclusion of international interest and an eventual final expression thereof presumably through the United Nations.

I have always suspected that the State Department — many of whose employees were the children of missionaries — simply couldn’t handle the idea of the holy places in the hands of Jews and Muslims. Be that as it may, at some point the position changed — probably with the passage of UNSC resolution 242 in 1967 — so that the status of Jerusalem would be decided by negotiations between the parties concerned, and not by the UN.

The parties, in 1967, were Israel and Jordan. With the Oslo agreements, the status of Jerusalem became a “final status issue” to be negotiated by Israel and the Palestinian Authority. This is today’s official State Department line.

Note that in respect to sovereignty, the State Department has never distinguished between the eastern and western parts. Neither are part of Israel. The 1962 statement explains that

As a consequence of this policy, when the Department learns that a government for the first time is contemplating the establishment of a diplomatic mission in Israel, we inform that government of the historical background of United Nations attitudes toward Jerusalem and express the hope that, in deference to United Nations attitudes, its mission will be established in Tel Aviv, where most other missions are located.

Since the seat of Israel’s government is in western Jerusalem, the only reason to do this is because State believed that Israel is not sovereign in any part of Jerusalem, east or west.

This was reinforced more recently by the case of Menachem Zivotofsky. Zivotofsky was born in Shaare Tzedek hospital in western Jerusalem. His parents requested that his passport read that he was born in “Jerusalem, Israel,” but the State Department refused to issue a passport with this description, despite a law passed by Congress in 2002 directing it to change its policy.

Now, one can argue that the status of eastern Jerusalem is in dispute, but all of Jerusalem? Apparently the US State Department thinks so. Watch spokesperson Victoria Nuland try to wiggle and dance her way out of some expert questioning by AP reporter Matt Lee:

The part in which she will not say whether Jerusalem is the capital of Israel is priceless. Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R. FL), chairperson of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, responded “Where does the Administration think Jerusalem is? On Mars?”

But interestingly, in other contexts — like Israel thinking about building apartments in Jerusalem neighborhoods outside of the Green Line — they do seem to be able to make the east/west distinction quite clearly!

Some commentators have pointed out that if “all of Jerusalem is a final status issue” — as reporter Lee cannot get Nuland to deny — then the Palestinian Authority in effect is given a veto power over Israel’s possession of its own capital.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Jerusalem, US State Department

News item:

In a surprising decision, the High Court of Justice on Sunday rejected a compromise agreement struck between the government and residents of Migron, the largest illegal outpost in Judea and Samaria. The agreement would have allowed the residents to remain in their outpost several years after a mandatory evacuation deadline, but was struck down on the grounds that no group of people is above the law…

This 50-family community, located several miles north of Jerusalem, has become a bone of contention since its establishment in 1999. Left-wing groups claimed the families who set up the community’s first bungalows had illegally trespassed onto privately owned Palestinian land, whereas the residents claimed that they had obtained the necessary authorization to establish the new community. Last August, the High Court of Justice ruled in favor of the left-wing organization Peace Now, which petitioned the court on behalf of the alleged Palestinians [sic] owners of the property. The state was ordered to evacuate the residents and dismantle the site by April 2012, in what was hailed by some as the most important court decision on disputed construction in Judea and Samaria in years.

Without going into all the details, I want to note a few facts.

First, only a small part of the community is built on land that may belong to Palestinians, but the government decided that all of it must be ‘dismantled’.

Second, no Israeli court ruled on the substance of the case — on the question of whose land it was. The government made its decision on the basis of a report written in 2005 by one Talia Sasson, who was head of the state prosecutor’s office at the time.

Sasson is a board member of the New Israel Fund, a member of the Public Council of Yesh Din, a foreign-funded left-wing NGO which carries out ‘lawfare’ against Israel in the name of ‘human rights’, and a Knesset candidate of the fringe New Movement-Meretz party (which has 3 seats out of 120 in the Knesset). She is a professional opponent of the Jewish presence in the territories. Her objectivity is more than questionable, it is non-existent.

Migron residents claim that the land in question was distributed by King Hussein in the 1960’s, was never cultivated or built on, and that the Palestinians that ‘owned’ it were not aware of this until ‘reminded’ of it by Peace Now.

They suggest that if a similar situation had arisen inside the Green Line, an agreement for compensation would have been worked out, rather than an order to ‘dismantle’ the entire community.

The original filing was made by Peace Now, and it provided the attorney.

Peace now is one of numerous organizations ‘watching’ settlements and their residents, listening to and documenting Palestinian complaints, filing lawsuits (as in the case of Migron), producing reports, talking to journalists, etc. Other groups include B’Tselem, Rabbis for Human Rights, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Yesh Din, etc. which are active in or in connection with issues concerning communities in Judea and Samaria.

These organizations are staffed by extreme left-wing Israelis, Arabs and international volunteers. They have almost no support in Israel, and are funded — with millions of Euros and dollars — from European governments, the EU, the US-based New Israel Fund, etc. In a sense, they are the shock troops of the worldwide anti-Israel movement on the ground in Judea and Samaria.

There are also numerous other NGOs, specializing in Jerusalem, Gaza, Arab citizens of Israel, the IDF, etc. NGO Monitor has tirelessly documented their activities and funding.

This is just one area in which Western money is deployed against Israel. Of course the Palestinian Authority (PA) itself — arguably a hostile entity — receives billions of US dollars each year. At a 2007 “donor conference” the international community pledged $7.7 billion for the period of 2008-2010! Keep in mind that the PA pays salaries of employees in Gaza who are either doing nothing or working for Hamas, as well as stipends to activists who are in Israeli prisons for offenses including murder and terrorism.

But even that isn’t all that the world — primarily the US and the EU — is doing for the Palestinians. There is UNRWA, the special Palestinian refugee aid organization, whose function is to encourage growth in the population of stateless Arab ‘refugees’ and prevent their resettlement in any country — except their ‘return’ to an Israel that 95% of them have never seen. UNRWA’s budget in 2009 was $1.9 billion.

What about the special UN organizations in addition to UNRWA, like the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and the Division for Palestinian Rights? The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People? The United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine (UNISPAL)? Don’t forget the salary of the antisemitic Richard Falk, “UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967”.

What proportion of the UN budget is concerned with the Palestinians? More than you think, when you look at the inordinate attention paid to resolutions condemning Israel in the General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Council, and numerous other agencies.

The Palestinian culture is all about destroying the Jewish one in Israel. I once called them the “anti-Jews” because they invert reality and claim the history, the land, even the Zionist strategy of the Jews. They imitate us in almost every way, except that their story is a lie.

Many elements were complicit in creating and amplifying the Palestinians, from the Nazis that worked together with Haj Amin al-Husseini to plan a Final Solution for the Middle East, and the antisemitic KGB that taught Arafat how to appeal to the Western Left, to the naive do-gooders who still think that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs is fundamentally a human-rights issue.

The actual question has almost nothing to do with the Palestinian Arabs and whether they have a state. It has to do with whether the Jews can continue to have one. There is a huge amount of human energy and financial resources that are being wasted in support of the Palestinians. It wouldn’t be necessary if the world could simply get used to the idea of a Jewish state.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinians, Migron, UN

The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has proposed yet another investigation of Israel’s ‘crimes’, this one in respect to settlements. It passed by a vote of 36 in favor, one opposed (the US), and 10 abstentions. Israel has announced that it won’t cooperate, and is considering withdrawing its ambassador to the UN office in Geneva.

I am not particularly interested in writing another post excoriating the UNHRC or the UN itself, which is a vile institution, far less than worthless. Rather, I want to summarize some important issues about ‘West Bank settlements’ — that is, Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria — and why I support them. Here are a few reasons:

International law — and justice

The League of Nations Mandate called for ‘close settlement’ (see also here) of the land by Jews. UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 call for secure and recognized boundaries for all states in the region, including Israel, to be established by direct negotiations between the parties. Neither the Jews nor the Arab states accepted the 1949 armistice lines as borders, and the ethnic cleansing of Jews in 1948 followed by the illegal Jordanian occupation of Judea and Samaria until 1967 did not make them so. Jews lived in the territories before 1948, and have as much right to live there today as then.

The argument that the 4th Geneva Convention prohibits the transfer of Jews into ”occupied territories” fails for several reasons, including the status of the Jewish presence there and the original intent of the Geneva Convention.

The Palestinian Arabs wish to establish a state in the territories where Jews will not be permitted to live (statements to the contrary are disingenuous), indeed from which they will be expelled. This is racist.

Security

The Palestinian leadership — Hamas and the PLO — do not hide the fact that they are committed to the replacement of Israel by an Arab state. Further, Hamas’ founding principles include genocide against the Jews, arguably everywhere, not just in Palestine. The withdrawal from Gaza provides a lesson about the consequences of Palestinian sovereignty close to Israel’s population centers. The topography of the area (which contains hills overlooking Israel’s coastal plain and the Jordan valley) makes it strategically essential for the defense of the Jewish state (so is the Golan, incidentally).

There is no doubt that a Palestinian state in the territories will become a base for both terrorist and diplomatic attacks on the remaining state of Israel. The Palestinians have said so more than once. The only way to insure that they will remain in Jewish hands is to populate them with Jews.

Zionism

Judea and Samaria (and of course Jerusalem) are of paramount importance in history of the Jewish people. Although the Jewish state was founded in part to provide a place for Jews to live normal lives free of antisemitism, it was founded here and not in Africa or Siberia for a reason: to remind Jews of their history and peoplehood. This isn’t limited to religiously observant Jews, although today, unfortunately, they tend to be almost the only ones who take Jewish peoplehood seriously. But you can ask — and the Palestinians do — what would happen to Zionism and Israel without the connection to Jewish history and holy sites.

But…what about all those Arabs?

The overriding reason given by Zionist opponents to Jewish communities across the Green Line is that if Israel were to annex the territories, there would be even more Arab citizens of Israel, ultimately a majority. Israel would then be faced with the choice of maintaining its democracy, or remaining Jewish by denying Arabs the vote.

There are reasons to doubt this: the Palestinian authority lies about how many Arabs live there (what else is new), the Arab birthrate is not as high as they say and is trending lower, and the Jewish birthrate is relatively high there. But there is a much more important reason that this is not a critical issue:

There is no necessity for Israel to annex all of Judea and Samaria. The great majority of Arabs (97% or so) live in areas (designated A and B) that are under the administration of the Palestinian Authority (PA). They already have a (poorly, but that’s their problem) functioning government. There are very few Arabs in the areas where the Jewish communities are located. Israel could simply make “area C” a part of Israel, and offer citizenship to any Arabs living there.

Of course this would not make it possible for the Palestinians to have the contiguous state they claim to desire. Which brings us to the next topic:

Why should a ‘Palestinian’ state be created on the backs of the Jewish People?

Israel does not owe the Palestinian Arabs a state, in part because the Palestinian narrative in which ‘their land’ was ‘stolen’ is false, and in part because a ‘people’ whose culture is based on hatred and whose highest honors are given to the most vicious murderers are not owed anything by a civilized world.

Keep in mind that when offers of a contiguous sovereign state were made, including evacuation of many Jewish communities (2000 and 2008), they were not accepted because they did not include right of return or other conditions that were incompatible with the continued existence of a Jewish state next door.

The political organization appropriate for the Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria is probably not that of a sovereign state. I believe that the best that can be offered today is some kind of autonomy, in a framework of Israeli security control.

There are other ‘peoples’ that don’t have their own state, for various reasons. There are 22 Arab states in the Middle East — all of which define themselves in ethnic or religious terms (or both), by the way. Why create yet another, at the expense of the one tiny state of the Jewish people?

Technorati Tags: Israel Palestinians, settlements