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Eden Atias, z”l. Murdered by an Arab terrorist.

Yet another Israeli Jew was murdered today by a Palestinian terrorist. Eden Atias was stabbed to death while he slept on a bus near the Afula bus station.

Security guards stopped the assailant, Hussein Jawadra, a 16-year-old Palestinian from Jenin who is residing in Israel illegally, and turned him over to security forces. Jawadra’s two cousins are both held in Israel. One of them was sentenced to three life sentences for the murder of two Israelis and for several counts of attempted murder. The other was jailed for 12 years for attempted murder.

Another news report tells us that

Northern District Police Commander Maj. Gen. Roni Atiya told Army Radio that the teen confessed to the act, saying he sought to avenge relatives who are imprisoned in Israel. “He told us he left his house this morning with a clear intent to harm Israelis because his uncles are jailed in Israel,” Atiya said.

MK Tzipi Hotovely (Likud) blamed the continuous incitement by the Palestinian Authority:

Abu Mazen [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] is fostering an indirect tactic of harming Israel. The killing of Jews is no longer perpetrated by the PA’s branches but by the ‘Palestinian street,’ which is fed, daily, by anti-Israeli propaganda. We cannot continue to negotiate peace when the PA clearly pursues terror.

And Meir Indor of the Almagor Terror Victims Association said,

the hand that held the knife today may have been that of a Palestinian teenager, but he was sent by Abu Mazen and his associates in the PA, who offer released murderers a hero’s welcome in Ramallah. By doing that they are raising another generation of young killers who grow up hoping to become Palestinian heroes.

Palestinian Arabs are doing their best to kill Jews every day, throwing rocks and firebombs or shooting and stabbing. The 16-year-old murderer in this case is following a family tradition, or should I say, a national one. I would go farther than Hotovely and Indor and say that Abbas and other PA officials responsible for creating these killers are themselves guilty of murder, and should be treated appropriately.

What every organ of the PA, media, schools, mosques, etc. are telling them is that the Jews stole their country and their honor, all their land is ‘occupied’, and that any action against occupiers is justified. Their greatest heroes are terrorists and the greatest honor is to become a martyr for the Palestinian cause.

Somehow, despite the fact that war is being waged against Israel, the nation is expected to respond by voluntarily giving up critical strategic ground to their enemy. This is supposedly the responsible, moral thing to do.

It is not. Suicide is not responsible or moral. I believe that it is time for Israel to say to the world “it’s over.”

The results of the Oslo experiment — which, in the best interpretation, was intended to test if the PLO could be serious about peace — are in: the PLO is a murderous terrorist gang which has never wavered from the vision of Yasser Arafat. It remains faithful to the PLO Charter:

Article 9: Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. Thus it is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase. The Palestinian Arab people assert their absolute determination and firm resolution to continue their armed struggle and to work for an armed popular revolution for the liberation of their country and their return to it. They also assert their right to normal life in Palestine and to exercise their right to self-determination and sovereignty over it.

Article 10: Commando action constitutes the nucleus of the Palestinian popular liberation war. This requires its escalation, comprehensiveness, and the mobilization of all the Palestinian popular and educational efforts and their organization and involvement in the armed Palestinian revolution. It also requires the achieving of unity for the national (watani) struggle among the different groupings of the Palestinian people, and between the Palestinian people and the Arab masses, so as to secure the continuation of the revolution, its escalation, and victory.

This charter was never revoked, and Arafat and his successors have not abandoned it.

“It’s over” means that the Oslo process, which granted the PLO authority to form the PA is over, and the Oslo Accords are dead. The PLO abrogated them in any event by applying for statehood at the UN, and now it must (finally) be recognized that it did so by making war, both in 2000 and today.

It means that the so-called ‘peace’ negotiations with the PLO are ended, and the ideas that have been promulgated in opposition to international law — that the 1949 armistice lines are borders, or that the ‘Palestinian people’ have national rights west of the Jordan, or that Jewish settlements outside the Green line are not entirely legitimate — are repudiated.

It means that the PLO is a terrorist organization, and should be treated as such.

It means that PLO/PA security forces can be disarmed. Terrorists — even (especially) PLO/PA leaders — can be expelled. Perhaps the Arab nations and EU that have been so concerned for the Palestinian Arabs will give them a home.

Israel can’t afford to any longer.

Updated [1711 PST].

Technorati Tags: Israel, PLO, incitement

The Lavi — an Israeli-developed fighter aircraft which never made it into production, to a great extent because of US pressure.

This guy (Steven Strauss) is right for the wrong reasons:

It’s been over 15 years since PM Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress stating Israel’s goal of economic independence. In 1997, Israel received $3.1 billion in aid from the U.S. In 2012, Israel was still receiving $3.1 billion annually in U.S. aid. We haven’t made much progress towards PM Netanyahu’s goal. For Israel’s sake, as well as for America’s, it’s time to reduce U.S. annual aid to Israel — to 0 — over some reasonable adjustment period (perhaps 5 to 10 years), leaving open the possibility, of course, for emergency aid.

Before I explain why he’s right, let me make clear what he’s wrong — offensively wrong — about. While he also says that US aid could better help bankrupt Detroit, the real meat of his argument is here:

Israel and the United States have increasingly different visions about the future of the Middle East. We shouldn’t subsidize a country (even an ally) that is undermining our policy goals. The U.S. has long-term goals in the Middle East (including avoiding the humanitarian and financial catastrophe of another major war in the region). A major (bipartisan) goal of the United States has been the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel has legitimate security concerns, and a just peace will not be easy to achieve.

However, the current Israeli government is clearly not committed to the U.S. vision, and has done everything possible to sabotage American efforts. Israel’s continued building of random settlements — all over what’s supposed to become the State of Palestine — directly conflicts with American policy goals.

In other words, Strauss implies that Israel does not share the goal of avoiding war! That’s the offensive part. And what precisely is it about throwing international law to the winds and forcing Israel back to indefensible 1949 lines that makes it a “major (bipartisan) goal” of the US?

It’s just the usual anti-Israel nonsense that we’ve come to expect from academics like Strauss, who is associated with that political whorehouse, Harvard University (not that my alma mater is any better).

But this post isn’t about the cynical attempt to destroy the Jewish state and re-disperse the survivors, dressed up as a “solution” to the instability and terrorism whose real cause is the inability of Muslims to tolerate Jewish sovereignty in ‘their’ Middle East. It’s not about how the Obama Administration is aiding and abetting that project. It’s about why Israel needs to forgo the 3.1 billion in aid.

This aid is primarily in the form of weapons and systems made in the US, so it is not entirely given out of the goodness of our hearts. But there is no doubt that Israel needs the best weapons systems available, and that its defense forces are built on American systems. Israel, on the other hand, will shortly be coming into its own as a major producer of natural gas and possibly oil, and will be able to buy its own weapons.

Will the US sell them? You bet we will — our economy is bad for structural reasons and is not getting better. Thanks to the huge bill for recent wars and the upward spiral of healthcare costs for the aging boomer generation, the US will need Israel’s business. Why should only Arabs get to recycle US petrodollars?

Israel needs its independence. It needs to say to the US that it will determine its own policies, and it needs to say “thanks, but no thanks” to American spying installations inside the country. Little by little it needs to develop secondary sources for military technology, despite the unavoidable complexity. It needs to develop its own technology, too, without American interference.

Israel also needs to understand that US influence in the Middle East is waning. The administration has announced that it plans to scale back involvement in the Middle East. Concretely, the military budget of the US has been cut and will continue to be cut; the Navy will have fewer ships in the region and of course US troops are gone from Iraq and will soon be gone from Afghanistan. Russian and Iranian power is rising. Israel cannot depend on the US to protect it, and needs to follow its own course.

Strauss is correct that US and Israeli policy goals no longer coincide. Israel wants to survive as a Jewish state, and the US — the present administration at least — is pursuing polices with regard to Iran and also the Palestinians which are directly opposed to that. US aid to Israel provides leverage for a hostile administration to control Israel — and in particular to restrain it from acting in self-defense.

Time to start cutting the apron-strings.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Steven Strauss, US aid to Israel

The Arafats, Suha and Yasser.

Earlier this year, Yasser Arafat’s body was exhumed after his widow, Suha, claimed that she had evidence that he had been poisoned. She produced some personal items that he had used shortly before his death, and brought them to Al Jazeera, which hired a Swiss laboratory to look for traces of poison. They claimed to find traces of radioactive Polonium 210. So tissue samples were taken from Arafat’s body and sent for analysis to the original lab and two others.

The Swiss have released a report that their study ‘reasonably supports’ the theory that Arafat was poisoned with Polonium 210. A Russian lab reported that it did not find any Polonium in the samples, and then retracted its statement. And a French lab has yet to report.

Naturally, Israel is the prime suspect. But there are so many problems! For one thing, Israel had no reason to kill Arafat at that point. He was trapped in his muqata in Ramallah and not likely to last very long in any case. And if Israel had decided to poison him, why would they use Polonium, which is hard to get, dangerous to administer, and so radioactive that it would easily be detectable? There are much better poisons.

Then there’s the difficulty of  detecting Polonium. Polonium has a half-life of 138 days. This means that unless enough had been fed to Arafat to make him shine with a blue glow of radiation, the amount that would be left in his body after 8 years would be extremely hard to detect today. Don’t take my word for it, read this article by a physicist.

And we mustn’t forget that the tissue samples were taken from Arafat’s exhumed body by Palestinian doctors. Hmm — is there a chain of custody issue here? Do you think the same folks who brought us Mohammad al Dura would stoop at salting the samples a bit?

And what about Suha’s ‘discovery’ that the underwear, headscarves and toothbrush that she had lovingly preserved for 8 years had traces of Polonium in them? If even one nanogram of Polonium — that’s 0.000000001 gram — was left in Arafat’s boxers, then they would have contained 0.002 grams 8 years previously. That’s as radioactive as 10 grams — a huge amount — of radium! That underwear would have been deadly. And yet Suha kept it around the house.

So, although most of the media will tell you that it has been ‘proven’ that Arafat was poisoned with Polonium and that Israel did it, the chances of this being true are very, very small.

But nowadays, facts have little to do with what people believe. And they will believe this really stupid, clumsy lie.

Having said that, Arafat was responsible for the deaths of literally thousands of Israelis and countless Arabs, several wars, and arguably was responsible for making reconciliation and peace between Israel and the Arabs impossible. Israel should have killed him, many years ago. He should have been hanged like the vicious war criminal that he was, for crimes against humanity.

Just like Hitler, Arafat’s legend animates haters everywhere. His body rots, but his evil lives.

Technorati Tags: Yasser Arafat, Polonium

Churchill. Is his kind of leadership extinct in the West?

Benjamin Weinthal:

The Islamic Republic of Iran has laid a foundation to impose its will on the U.S. and continue its illicit nuclear-weapons program. The elements of a negotiated agreement outlined today in Geneva show the Obama administration engaging in concessionary bargaining with a rogue regime.

Abbas Araqchi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, declared the U.S. and its partners “accepted the framework of Iran’s proposal,” the components of which entail sanctions relief in exchange for Iran’s suspension of some elements of its nuclear program.

There is no sign that Iran is willing to permanently stop its uranium enrichment, close its Arak and Fordo nuclear facilities, and ship its already 3.5 percent–enriched uranium outside of the country.

Moreover, there is no definitive method of verification to ensure that Iran’s clerical regime — a notoriously deceptive group — will comply with an agreement (Remember the North Korean debacle.)

In choosing to grant Iran concessions, the U.S. ignores that it has crucial economic leverage to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program. Bloomberg recently reported that “Iran’s economy will contract 1.5 percent this year after shrinking 1.9 percent in 2012,” while Trevor Houser, an economics expert, says, “Right now, Iran needs to sell its oil far more than the rest of the world needs to buy it.”

Israel’s PM Netanyahu responded to the news,

The proposal would allow Iran to retain the capabilities to make nuclear weapons. Israel totally opposes these proposals … I believe that adopting them is a mistake of historic proportions.

That is more or less the whole story. There will be more details, but it seems that the US, which could stop Iran from building nuclear weapons, has decided not to. Not only will it not make a credible military threat, it has folded even before exhausting the option of sanctions.

Saudi Arabia understands. It is now either on the verge of procuring nuclear capability from Pakistan, or has already done so.

This feels so … 1938. A vicious civil war chews up a country, which is serving as a proxy for the major combatants, who are arming themselves for the big show. The ‘responsible’ nations of the world try to defuse an aggressor’s violence by a policy of appeasement. Trita Parsi asks “Do we want a deal or a war?” but maybe we’ll make a deal and get a war anyway.

Netanyahu has been accused of ‘overreacting’, he’s been called ‘shrill’ and his demand that sanctions be increased rather than reduced until Iran actually dismantles its program is said to be ‘unreasonable’. He is “out of step,” say diplomats. I am sure they said the same about Czech President Edvard BeneÅ¡ in 1938.

Netanyahu is quite rational, aware of the danger facing his country from the fanatically anti-Israel regime in Iran, whose officials have said over and over that they intend to destroy it. And now they are getting nuclear weapons. How is he supposed to sound?

Netanyahu is on a collision course with the US. The US will do practically anything to keep Israel from attacking Iran, and will punish her if she does. And Netanyahu sees that he simply will have no choice but to attack Iran.

Keep in mind that most of those, like Meir Dagan, that opposed an attack did so because they thought that the diplomatic option might work, not that Iran could be allowed to have the bomb. And diplomacy — tough sanctions — might have worked, if it were not for the cowardice, ignorance and stupidity of the Obama Administration.

But it is not going to be tried. There is going to be a deal. And then there is going to be a war.

Technorati Tags: Iran, Iranian nuclear weapons, Obama Administration, Israel

In several recent posts (here, here, here) I’ve argued that US policy has taken a serious turn against Israel with the Obama Administration.

Now the question becomes “how can Israel act to protect herself?”

There are two important aspects of the situation: the administration’s objectives, and what kind of pressure it is prepared and able to apply in order to attain them. I’ve argued these propositions in detail before, and I am just going to summarize them now:

1. The administration seems to have decided that the cost of keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons is too great, and therefore that its interests are best served by a rapprochement with the regime. This places it in direct conflict with Israel, which is committed to stopping Iran by force if necessary.

2. The administration is ideologically pro-Palestinian. It also believes that it can score a propaganda coup by being responsible for the creation of a Palestinian state. Finally, a major US diplomatic priority since the 1973 Arab oil boycott has been to fulfill its promise to the Arabs to reverse the outcome of the Six Days War. Since the PLO is uninterested in peace and will use Israeli concessions to facilitate terrorism, and since it is likely to be replaced by Hamas in any case, this is another area of conflict with the US.

The significant difference between the Obama Administration and its predecessors is its acceptance of anti-Israel narratives and ideology, and an unconcern for Israel’s security. Both a nuclear Iran and a Palestinian state as the US envisages it will be disastrous for security.

The US can apply pressure in many ways, but in general they seem to be these:

On the Iranian issue, the policy seems to be to promise that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon while at the same time acting to restrain Israel from taking action. This restraint can go from simple jawboning to threats to reveal Israel’s plans to Iran in advance, something which could increase Israel’s losses tragically.

Regarding the Palestinians, the threats seem to be that economic pressure will be applied by its European trading partners, boycotts will be encouraged, etc. And there is also the ultimate threat that if Israel doesn’t voluntarily make a deal with the PLO, one will be imposed, with an American proposal that will be passed by the Security Council and can be enforced by economic sanctions.

So what can Israel do?

First, Israel should reduce the ability of the US to gather intelligence on its activities. Recent revelations of the NSA’s worldwide spying abilities are indeed disquieting, and the fact that Israel is listed by the CIA as a “key target” for surveillance along with China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and Cuba is shocking. The American-operated X-band radar located in the Negev, ostensibly to provide early warning of Iranian rockets, is said to be able to detect anything taking off from anywhere in Israel, even a small drone. Even the kiriya, Israel’s ‘Pentagon’ in Tel Aviv, is suspected of having been penetrated and bugged.

Israel’s counterintelligence apparatus should be mobilized to root out spies and harden communications facilities. It’s not possible to stop the flow of data, but it can be reduced. The radar should be removed — Israel can use its own capabilities to detect Iranian rocket launches. Resources should be dedicated not only to planning how best to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, but how to do it so that the US will not know about it until it is too late.

Second, Israel should take its case against a deal with the PLO to the American people and Congress, who remain pro-Israel. Israel today does almost nothing in the area called ‘public diplomacy’, telling its story and combating the daily assaults of delegitimization and demonization coming from its enemies (and ‘friends’, like the Obama Administration, J Street, etc.)

Where are the pro-Israel NGOs? Where are the million-dollar grants to universities to set up departments of Israel and Jewish studies? Where are the Zionist films, the speakers crisscrossing the continent? Where is the TV network to compete with al Jazeera, now deploying in the US? Where is the counterforce to the NIF? It’s embarrassing to compare the millions spent by the Europeans to subsidize anti-state organizations inside Israel and the pittance spent by Israel to influence the American people, who are the only force that can restrain Obama at this point.

Third, Israel should reduce its economic dependence on the US and Europe. It should develop markets in the Far East and India, which are not in the grip of anti-Israel ideology or Holocaust guilt. It should not be afraid of angering Europe, because only national suicide would be enough to appease it in any case. The best thing Israel can do in Europe is to encourage its remaining Jews to make aliyah.

Fourth, Israel needs to end its own uncertainty about its legitimacy. The government needs to unequivocally assert its right under international law to settle Jews in the territories, and to keep Jerusalem united under Jewish control. Although it is possible for Israel to voluntarily cede some disputed territory to the Palestinians in return for a real peace, it’s absurd to begin negotiations by granting Arab claims. Land swaps, therefore, which are based on the assumption that the Arabs have a right to all the disputed territory and should be compensated if they give any of it up, should be off the table.

The world is a different place, now that America is withdrawing from leadership, embracing its enemies and hurting its friends. Israel must adapt to survive.

Technorati Tags: Israel