FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

Someone recently asked me why I write so much about the Palestinian Arabs rather than Iran, which is really a much greater threat to Israel. One reason is that everyone knows how serious the Iranian threat is, while there continue to be be people who think that the ‘peace process’ is worth pursuing. So I write articles like yesterday’s piece about Palestinian Arab attitudes, or my recent post arguing (for the nth time) that the real issue is recognition of the Jewish state, not borders or occupation.

Another reason is that the Palestinian Arabs, combined with the increasingly radicalized Arab citizens of Israel, really are a threat to the existence of the Jewish state. Perhaps not so much a military threat — at least, by themselves — but as a wedge issue for the anti-Zionist forces throughout the world. Think of the massive resources poured into anti-Israel NGOs by the European Union. They could almost bail out the Greeks if they would only leave Israel alone!

The Palestinian Arabs also have hurt Israel greatly over the years by waging low-intensity war — several thousand Israeli Jews have been murdered by Palestinian terrorists since 1993, and many more seriously injured. It’s impossible to ignore the human, economic and psychic damage in the tiny Jewish population for which they are responsible.

If they do succeed in establishing a sovereign state in the territories, then it is likely to become another base for Iranian proxy forces, like Lebanon and Gaza.

And finally, when the inevitable war with Iran’s proxies in Lebanon and Syria plays out, we can expect that they will at least ramp up terrorism and perhaps open another front.

With respect to the Iranian threat, we probably know what’s coming, although of course we don’t know what the ultimate outcome will be. Former Mossad head Meir Dagan, as well as ex-CIA officer Robert Baer — both individuals who must be taken seriously — seem to believe that the present Israeli government is moving toward an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. Even if this is not true, there is no doubt that Iran already has or shortly will have the ability to produce a deliverable weapon. Once this happens, I think a preemptive attack will be inevitable.

Finally, it’s unlikely that Israel can allow the massive conventional and chemical/biological threat from its northern border to remain.

It may be that all of these issues will be resolved at the same time.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinian Arabs, Iran, Hizballah

One of the things I used to hear, and sometimes still do, was that Israelis and Palestinian Arabs could solve their problems if they could just get together at the “grass roots” level. It’s those extremist leaders, they would say, Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon, who are the problem. The average Israeli Jew and Palestinian Arab just want the same things everyone else does, peace, a good job, a dignified life. Each side only needs to understand the other, and they’ll see that conflict is counterproductive.

To this end there were numerous initiatives, organizations, encounter groups, etc. which tried to make possible the communication that their promoters believed would dissolve the conflict.

It never worked, and it will not work because grass roots Jews and Arabs do not want the same things — in particular, what the Arabs want is to possess the land and evict the Jews. This isn’t something that you can compromise about, nor will better communication change anything.

Palestinian Arab leaders reflect the grass roots point of view as much or more than they create it. Recently the leaked ‘Palestine papers’ got some Fatah negotiators in very hot water because it was suggested that perhaps they may have been willing to compromise to some degree on the issue of ‘right of return’.

Now a new poll of Palestinian Arabs exposes the grass roots for what they are: rejectionist.

Only one in three Palestinians (34 percent) accepts two states for two peoples as the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to an intensive, face-to-face survey in Arabic of 1,010 Palestinian adults in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip completed this week by American pollster Stanley Greenberg…

Respondents were asked about US President Barack Obama’s statement that “there should be two states: Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people and Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people.”

Just 34% said they accepted that concept, while 61% rejected it.

Sixty-six percent said the Palestinians’ real goal should be to start with a two-state solution but then move to it all being one Palestinian state.

Asked about the fate of Jerusalem, 92% said it should be the capital of Palestine, 1% said the capital of Israel, 3% the capital of both, and 4% a neutral international city.

Seventy-two percent backed denying the thousands of years of Jewish history in Jerusalem, 62% supported kidnapping IDF soldiers and holding them hostage, and 53% were in favor or teaching songs about hating Jews in Palestinian schools.

When given a quote from the Hamas Charter about the need for battalions from the Arab and Islamic world to defeat the Jews, 80% agreed. Seventy-three percent agreed with a quote from the charter (and a hadith, or tradition ascribed to the prophet Muhammad) about the need to kill Jews hiding behind stones and trees. — Jerusalem Post

There were, it’s true, some results that were interpreted as positive:

only 22% supported firing rockets at Israeli cities and citizens and … two-thirds preferred diplomatic engagement over violent “resistance.”

Among Palestinians in general 65% preferred talks and 20% violence. In the West Bank it was 69-28%, and in Gaza, 59- 32%.

Unfortunately, there’s plenty of evidence that these peaceful tendencies can be attributed to fear of Israel’s retaliation. And today the Arabs see clearly that the diplomatic track — with background pressure from ‘militants’ who are naturally not connected with the leadership and allegedly can’t be controlled by them — is inexorably producing gains for the Arab program, without the need for massive violence.

Two decades ago, the idea of a sovereign Palestinian state was supported only by Arab-related interests and the extreme Left. Today, it is a major policy goal of the US and the European Union. Until recently, the blueprint for creating such a state was UNSC resolution 242, which called for borders to be determined by the parties involved, borders which were specifically not intended to be the 1949 lines. Today, it’s 1949 lines plus swaps. A few years ago, the idea of ‘right of return’ for the descendents of Arab refugees was not taken seriously. Today, Obama refuses to rule it out — or to insist on recognition of the Jewish state.

The conventional wisdom today, accepted by most of the Western world, is that the territories are ‘Palestinian’ and Israeli settlements there are illegal. Never mind that these propositions are historically, legally and morally wrong.

There is also the purported urgency. Everyone believes, or at least repeatedly says, that the Palestinians can’t wait any longer. Never mind that they turned down statehood several times, because the terms that were offered didn’t include the end of Israel.

The diplomatic strategy is going quite well for them, thank you, and they don’t see any need to bring about another operation Defensive Shield or Cast Lead.

No, there is remarkable unanimity of opinion among Palestinian Arabs — they know what they want, and it isn’t coexistence. But the poll’s pro-Israel sponsor, The Israel Project, is remarkably upbeat in the face of what is objectively a complete demolition of the “communicate with the grass roots” theory:

Israel Project president Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi said she was encouraged that the Arab Spring would bring more accuracy to Arab media and by the 59% of Palestinians who are on Facebook. The Israel Project has 80,723 friends for its Arabic site, which has had 9.5 million page views in two months.

“Some of the numbers in the poll are discouraging, but we are trying to change them,” she said at a Jerusalem press conference in which Greenberg presented the findings.

Greenberg said the survey proved that there was a big need for public education and leadership on the Palestinian side.

Facebook isn’t the answer. How long will it be before these people start to get it?

Technorati Tags: Israel, Arabs, The Israel Project

NGO Monitor reports:

JERUSALEM – The Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement (SJSM), in cooperation with “flightilla” activists who are part of the Global BDS movement, [today] will hold a demonstration beginning at Jaffa Gate in support of a Palestinian unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) at the UN in September. The UDI represents the opposite path of direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority to end the conflict, says Jerusalem-based research institution NGO Monitor.

“The SJSM and other groups are funded via the New Israel Fund, which promotes a two [state] solution and Zionist principles. In contrast, as Palestinian leader Abbas wrote in his New York Times op-ed, unilateral recognition via the UN ‘would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict’ and for pursuing ‘claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Court of Justice.’ This strategy is the antithesis of the direct negotiations necessary for a stable peace between Israel and Palestinians,” says Prof. Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor.

Here is how Ishay Rosen-Zvi of SJSM describes it:

This march will not be yet another demonstration in support of the negotiations; not a call for an end to violence nor for a bilateral two-state solution. We’ve had enough of those. This time Israelis, Jews and Arabs, will show our support for the unilateral Palestinian declaration of independence expected in September; a free state in the 1967 borders, with its capital in East Jerusalem. No more favors, thank you very much.

SJSM has been holding weekly demonstrations in Jerusalem for about two years in support of Arab squatters in the Sheik Jarrah / Shimon ha-Tzadik neighborhood, after Israel’s Supreme Court — normally very protective of Arab rights — decided that they could not continue to live rent-free in property owned by Jews.

However, their anti-Zionist ideology extends far beyond squatters’ ‘rights’. By calling for a UDI, they are in essence demanding that Israel surrender control of the territories with no agreement from the Arabs on

• security arrangements,
• recognition of the Jewish state,
• end of the conflict,
• end of Arab claims against Israel, especially for ‘right of return’.

And as Abbas explained, the Arab plan is to pursue its claims aggressively through international diplomatic and legal fora if and when ‘Palestine’ becomes a sovereign state. Judging by past experience, they will doubtless pursue them by terrorism as well, carried out by ‘extremists’ with whom they will disavow any connection, of course.

SJSM, like many anti-Western organizations populated by westerners, has an ideology suffused with obsequious worship of the ‘noble savages’ whose cause it is promoting. Get your barf bags out as I continue to quote Rosen-Zvi (who, by the way, is a “professor of Talmudic Studies in Tel Aviv university”):

This way is unequivocally better than yet another statement of support in negotiations, which in turn is nothing more than the continuation of the occupation  by other means, that of negotiations without end. At the same time, we must ask what the role of the Jewish marchers is in this march. Is not the Palestinian state a Palestinian project? Is it not our role to just stand back and not interfere? Is it not better that we fight against the occupation, and leave the founding of the state to those whose state it will be? Is it not just slightly offensive? Hast thou conquered, and also rejoiced?

Please, spare me your public expressions of guilt. God forbid that we should ‘offend’ those whose aim is to destroy our state!

Not only is this Talmudist a fool, he has a remarkably counter-factual view of recent events:

We claim that the illusion that the end of the occupation will bring with it a separation from the Palestinians is the root of all evil. What lies behind the various “disengagement plans”, especially the greedy “separation wall”, if not the desire “not to see them anymore?” This land and its peoples have no future without cooperation. Not just because the opressor will be free only when the oppressed will be free (as Hegel well understood in his master and slave dialectic), but also because after their respective freedoms, the two sides are destined to sit together, to share a land, its resources and history. Solutions based upon separation (always unilateral), are bound to fail (see under: Gaza).

Unbelievable. We don’t want to see them? Could it be that we don’t want to see them blow us up or shoot us? He hasn’t noticed the 100-year Arab war against the Jews? He’s for cooperation? Then why does he think that the Arabs should give absolutely nothing in return for the territory that they claim? Wouldn’t it be more cooperative if they recognized Israel as a Jewish state?

But most outrageous is his reference to Gaza. According to Rosen-Zvi, the disaster that followed Israel’s unilateral withdrawal of every Israeli soldier, every civilian, and even the exhumation of every dead Jew from there, was Israel’s fault — probably because free passage was not granted to the terrorists who had to content themselves with firing thousands of rockets into Israeli towns instead of the up-close and personal forms of torture and murder that they prefer!

As NGO Monitor’s Steinberg mentioned, the New Israel Fund provides a conduit for tax-deductible contributions from the USA. Here’s a snippet from a 2011 SJSM brochure:

I am not sure of the legality of this arrangement, but certainly it should send a signal to the liberal Jews who support the NIF that perhaps this organization is not as pro-Israel as it claims to be.

In particular, I would like to ask — although I will not get an answer — Rabbi Richard Jacobs, the new president of the Union for Reform Judaism, who proudly described his participation in an SJSM demonstration last year in a Yom Kippur sermon — if he still supports SJSM and the NIF (of which he is a board member, albeit on temporary leave).

Technorati Tags: SJSM, Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity, New Israel Fund, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Richard Jacobs

News item:

The foreign ministers of the Middle East Quartet failed to reach an agreement on Monday surrounding the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and therefore did not issue a public statement on their meeting meant to renew Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Western diplomats and senior officials in Jerusalem said Tuesday.

“The goal was to give each side something that was important to them,” a Western diplomat said. “The Palestinians were supposed to get 1967 borders with land swaps and the Israelis wanted to receive in return the recognition of Israel as the Jewish homeland, but there was no agreement on this matter.”

A senior Israeli official said that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov took mostly pro-Palestinians positions in the Quartet talks and would not allow the inclusion of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state in the concluding statement of the meeting.

Could anything be more clear?

Let’s understand exactly what this means. The Arabs are being offered another state in the Middle East. There are clearly questions to be decided about precise borders and security arrangements for Israel, but that is the essence of the matter. If an agreement were to be reached along these lines, “the occupation” that the Arabs and their friends have been claiming to be the main problem in the Middle East would be over.

Why should they care that Israel is defined as a Jewish state? If Canada were to announce tomorrow that it was the state of the Inuit people, would the US have the right to object? Why do the Arabs get to decide what Israel is?

If you ask them they will say that it presupposes that there is no Arab right of return to Israel. Well, that’s clearly true — there is no such right by law and there cannot be one in practice because it is equivalent to the replacement of Israel by an Arab state.

Oh, right — that’s what they wanted all along!

So would all of you who claim that the conflict is about borders or ‘occupation’ or ‘human rights’, please, finally, shut up? It is about the existence of any Jewish state with any borders in the Middle East, as I and my ‘right-wing neo-con’ friends have been saying for years.

One more thing: if the Russians are representing the Palestinians in the Quartet, who represents Israel? Not the US, which is sticking to the Obama parameters of pre-1967 borders plus swaps. Shades of Munich, 1938!

Technorati Tags: Israel, Arabs

By Vic Rosenthal

You are probably sick of reading about how the leaders of the anti-Zionist movement — that is, the leaders of the effort to dispossess the Jewish People from their state and end their right to self-determination — are Jews. The irony has warn off by now, and the man-bites-dog stories have turned into dull, routine dog-bites-man copy.

In fact, probably even the ‘rabbi vs. Israel’ theme is old hat today, what with Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the anti-Zionist rabbinical students, and last but not least, Rabbi Brant Rosen.

So this guy, Rabbi David Mivasair, of Ahavat Olam of Vancouver BC doesn’t seem remarkable. Just another anti-Zionist who happens to earn his living by being a rabbi.

But he may be the first rabbi to actually attempt to justify the firing of deadly missiles into southern Israel. In this video taken at a demonstration in favor of the flotilla to Gaza, Rabbi Mivasair speaks from about 03:00 to 06:15. Here are some of his remarks:

There’s really no justification whatsoever for a blockade in Gaza. Just absolutely none whatsoever. There’s over 150 million absolutely innocent people who live in Gaza. Most of them live there only because their homes and villages were taken from them and destroyed in 1947 and 1948. They fled and the place they ended up was Gaza.

Of course the population of Gaza is more like 1.6 million, but never mind — what’s a factor of 100 if your heart is in the right place? He argues that the blockade of Gaza is unnecessary because “the Palestinians can smuggle rockets in through tunnels.” Therefore, Israel should not try to prevent unrestricted access for the genocidal Hamas to all kinds of weapons, explosives and terrorists! This is as crazy as his population estimate.

Whenever we read about … I have to say about a puny, ineffective rocket fired into some place like Sderot, something to think about is very likely that very likely the people firing it are the children or grandchildren of people who perhaps once lived in Sderot. But it wasn’t Sderot, it was a Palestinian village that had existed there for centuries that had several hundred people who were forcibly expelled at gunpoint and when the place was empty, then Jews moved in and built a town…

OK, try to follow this. Because the Palestinian Arabs were allegedly expelled by force from Israel — something which in fact is true of only a very small number out of the 650,000 who fled after their leadership started a war whose aim was to kill or disperse the Jews — then it is understandable that their descendents try to kill Israelis, since their rockets are puny and ineffective and have so far only killed a few tens of people! Of course some of their rockets are military-use Grad missiles, not puny and ineffective at all, but never mind that either. And never mind what they could and would do if there were no blockade.

Rabbi Mivasair — “Reb David” to his congregants — gives us more of his ideology in a blog post he wrote in 2010:

The writer [of a right-wing sermon] avoids any mention that both the US and Israel might have done something to elicit such enmity [from radical Islamists]. It is as if it arose spontaneously, a completely irrational aberration in human thinking, with no relationship whatsoever to anything that the USA and Israel have ever done…

The lachrymose emotional appeal of the piece is an attempt to lead its readers to ignore Israel’s near total dispossession of the entire population of Palestinian Arabs, 43 years of brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, decades of occupation of southern Lebanon, massively disproportionate lethal attack on Gaza only two years ago and other continuing acts of aggression. It is not Israel’s mere existence which has led to growing enmity but rather Israel’s actions. Similarly, the reader is expected to forget current US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and decades of history, for instance, that the dictatorial regime in Saudi Arabia which produces Wahabi extremists and exports “radical Islam” is itself a direct creation British imperialism at the end of World War I and would not have survived without United States support.

‘Reb David’ suggests here that Arab wars and terrorism against Israel, as well as 9/11 and other acts of terrorism against the US are the results of the actions of Israel and the US. Is he unaware that 9/11 and various other terrorist attacks on the US were perpetrated before the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? So Osama bin Laden was justified in murdering 3,000 Americans because of US support for the Saudi monarchy? What about the hundreds of Americans murdered by Hizballah in the 1980’s — was that justified by then-current American policy to try to stabilize Lebanon?

With regard to Israel, the learned rabbi accepts word-for-word the Arab narrative of dispossession and expulsion, which for the most part never happened. And he doesn’t mention the long history of violence by Arabs against Jews in the land of Israel which goes back at least 100 years and includes several major wars — wars which, by the Arabs own words, were intended to destroy the Jewish state — and an unending string of the most vicious and brutal terrorist murders, more often then not with Jewish children as targets. I’m sure Rabbi Mivasair can explain why 2-month old Hadas Fogel deserved to have her throat cut, too.

I expect that Rabbi Mivasair can list ‘atrocities’ against Arabs by Israelis as well — except that his list will be made of exaggerations and outright lies, just as the “massively disproportionate lethal attack on Gaza” was nothing of the sort, and indeed  was carried out in order to stop a massive and lethal attack on Israel.

I don’t know why Mivasair and others like him believe every word that comes from Arab sources but none from pro-Israel or pro-US ones. I don’t know why he hates Israel and America so much that he thinks a few thousand [not so] “puny and ineffective” rockets striking civilian populations, or a small number of aircraft dumping burning fuel into buildings are understandable, if not justified. I don’t know why he so loves the ‘Palestinian people’ who would cut his throat like Hadas Fogel’s if they could.

Perhaps what the Jewish people needs is a massive army of psychiatrists to deploy throughout the world (Israel too) and deal with the problems of the Mivasairs before it’s too late.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Rabbi David Mivasair