FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

Secretary of State Clinton meets PM Netanyahu in Jerusalem Monday

Some days all I can do is shake my head. Consider this news item:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held talks Monday evening with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the end of a day of meetings with Israel’s leaders on Iran, Palestinian peacemaking and America’s desire to see Israel heal its ties with Turkey.

Clinton reportedly urged Netanyahu to mend ties with Turkey and make moves to jump start peace talks with the Palestinian Authority.

So here we have Ms Clinton telling Israel that it should apologize to Turkey because its soldiers defended themselves when Turkish thugs, in a provocation orchestrated by the Turkish government, tried to kill them.

Next, Israel should give in to PLO demands for freezing construction East of the Green Line, releasing prisoners, and who knows what else (the demands change from day to day) in order to restart negotiations which cannot possibly lead to anything but further impossible demands.

The item continues,

The US secretary of state, in Israel as the last leg of a tour through Asia, also told Netanyahu that Jerusalem should transfer small arms to the PA in order to help get the Palestinians back to the negotiating table, according to Ynet news. She also called on Netanyahu to release Palestinian prisoners. Both moves have been mentioned as Palestinian prerequisites for coming back to talks…

Oh — give them more weapons. I forgot that one. Naturally they can’t possibly hold ‘peace talks’ without weapons. You will recall that the PLO will not recognize Israel as belonging to the Jewish people, nor will they stop dedicating children’s summer camps to terrorists like Dalal Mughrabi. In fact, I can’t think of a single compromise or concession that they have ever made in order to move the ‘peace process’ along.

This is how the US treats Israel, an ally. I’m sorry, but this isn’t the relationship you have with an ally. You don’t pressure it to surrender to its enemies, you don’t create obstacles for it — you may remember that it was President Obama who originally came up with the idea of freezing construction in the territories — and above all, you don’t ask it to compromise its security.

But here is the icing on the cake:

Clinton reportedly told Netanyahu he should hurry to achieve peace with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, since it was not clear who would replace them.

This wins the monthly Bad Advice Award with an oak leaf cluster for Cluelessness: does Clinton think Hamas would honor an agreement made with Abbas and Fayyad? Doesn’t the precedent of the peace treaty with Egypt, which is now being ‘reexamined’ by the new Islamist regime, tell us that you can’t count on treaties made with despots to survive them?

Clinton is asking — telling — Israel to trade land and security, which it cannot easily get back if things don’t work out, for a promise of peace from an illegitimate Palestinian regime (PA elections are long since overdue) that would be overthrown in a moment if the IDF didn’t protect it and the US didn’t finance it.

What a deal!

Technorati Tags: Hillary Clinton, Israel

The Israel Policy Forum (IPF) is a left-of-center group formerly associated with Clinton Administration officials, which apparently slipped into irrelevance with the eclipse of the ‘peace process’, the violence of the Second Intifada, and the Hamas takeover of Gaza.

It’s back, reconstituted under the sponsorship of philanthropist Charles Bronfman, and with some big names in the American (and American-Israeli) world behind it.

But money and names can’t change reality.

No matter how irrational the land-for-peace paradigm proves, no matter how little support there is for it among ordinary Israelis (who will have to deal with the consequences), no matter how vicious the anti-Jewish hatred spewing from PLO media, no matter how many rockets land in southern Israel, no matter how explicit the Palestinian leadership is about its desire to replace Israel with an Arab state, no matter how often the Arabs pocket concessions and immediately escalate demands, no matter how clear it is beyond any reasonable doubt that further concessions at this point will lead to war, not peace — no matter what, some people simply cannot face the brute fact that there is no possibility of peace with the Palestinian Arabs and the larger Arab world in the foreseeable future.

They have convinced themselves that yet another partition of the land of Israel (or ‘Palestine’ — whatever you want to call it) will end the conflict. It won’t. It will only damage Israel’s ability to defend herself while providing a platform for more demands. Soon we will be hearing about “Arab Haifa, Yafo and Acco,” and then perhaps “Tel Arabiyya.”

This is the lesson of recent history. This is what we have learned from what the Arabs say and from what they do. But the ideological commitment to the impossible ‘solution’ seems to override the ability to learn from events.

Here is the letter that 40 well-known (mostly) American Jews have written to Israel’s Prime Minister, under the auspices of the IPF, calling upon him to reject the report of the Levy Commission, which offered a legal opinion that Israeli settlement in Judea and Samaria is legal under international law. I’ll intersperse comments.

As strong advocates for Israel’s security and well-being as a Jewish and democratic state, we are deeply concerned about the recent findings of the government commission led by Supreme Court Jurist (Ret.) Edmund Levy. We fear that if approved, this report will place the two-state solution, and the prestige of Israel as a democratic member of the international community, in peril.

There is no comment about whether the Levy report is correct in its legal judgment or not; only that its adoption will make it harder for Israel to cede land to the Arabs in pursuit of the imaginary ‘solution’, and that it will anger the “international community,” which, by and large, would prefer that there be no sovereign Jewish state.

It’s important to understand that the legitimacy of the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria derives from the same source — the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine — as does the Jewish presence West of the Green Line. The line is an accidental boundary with no legal significance. Hence if the Government of Israel were to reject the report, then it could be construed as weakening the case for Jewish sovereignty anywhere. This is a far greater ‘peril’ than the loss of the two-state fantasy.

As you boldly stated in your address to the United States Congress last May, “I recognize that in a genuine peace, we’ll be required to give up parts of the ancestral Jewish homeland.” As you said clearly, doing so is not easy. While the Jewish people indeed share a biblical connection to the lands of Judea and Samaria, you told Congress, “there is another truth: The Palestinians share this small land with us. We seek a peace in which they’ll be neither Israel’s subjects nor its citizens. They should enjoy a national life of dignity as a free, viable and independent people living in their own state.”

If Israel does give up part of the “ancestral Jewish homeland” for peace — if somehow this becomes possible, as it clearly is not today — it will be as part of a comprehensive agreement that recognizes that the Jewish people do have a right to a homeland here. Rejecting the report today implies that there is no such right, before there is even a glimmer of hope for an agreement. Insisting that we have a right to this land doesn’t preclude us from agreeing to part with some of it. And if we don’t have the right, why should we keep any of it?

Securing Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state requires diplomatic and political leadership, not legal maneuverings. We recognize and regret that the Palestinian Authority has abdicated leadership by not returning to the negotiating table. Nonetheless, our great fear is that the Levy Report will not strengthen Israel’s position in this conflict, but rather add fuel to those who seek to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist. At this moment, it is more critical than ever that Israel strengthen its claim in the international community that it is committed to a two-state vision, which is, in turn, central to Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state.

This paragraph is shocking in its open admission of cowardice and assertion that appeasement is better than standing up for our rights! Never mind if it is actually legitimate for Jews to live in Judea and Samaria, let’s say it’s not — so the Arabs will be empowered to demand that we expel those Jews, in the name of ‘peace’ that they will never permit us to have anyway.

Israel’s right to exist is not determined by its degree of commitment to “a two-state vision,” but rather by its rights under international law and its ability to defend itself against encroachments against those rights. The only thing that can come of surrendering those rights de jure is that we will be forced to give them up de facto as well.

There is also the implication — a sure sign of Oslo Syndrome infection — that if only we make this new concession, the “international community” will finally accept us. Have any of the previous withdrawals or concessions to the Palestinians brought anything other than additional demands or rockets and terrorism?

The “international community” has no problem with the racist exclusionary state that the Arabs plan to set up. Of course Jews will not be able to live in an Arab Palestine! But it is very, very concerned about the rights of Arabs living in Israel. Does this asymmetry tell us anything?

The last sentence suggests that we have no options other than surrendering our rights to Judea and Samaria, or annexing all of it and accepting all of its Arab population as citizens. But this is by no means an exhaustive dichotomy.

Finally, look at the language of the letter: “We fear that if approved…,” “Our great fear is…” How revealing! And how inappropriate for representatives of a Jewish people with a sovereign state.

We are confident that with your deep understanding of the gravity of this situation, and your unprecedented political strength, you will ensure that adoption of this report does not take place.

I wonder.

Technorati Tags: Levy report, Israel Policy Forum

I’ve written about this myself. But you can’t emphasize too often the craven, and ultimately destructive, cowardice displayed by our American leadership (Europe is long gone).

Israel can take care of herself. Can we?

Diana West writes,

The Washington Free Beacon reported this week on the continuing omission of Israel from a U.S.-sponsored organization called the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF). At a recent forum meeting in Spain, Maria Otero, U.S. undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy and human rights, delivered a speech titled “Victims of Terrorism,” but, in her roll call of victims, she didn’t mention Israel. The conference at which she spoke was described as a “high-level conference on the victims of terrorism,” but Israel wasn’t a participant.

It bears repeating because it is so fantastic: At an international conference devoted to victims of terrorism, the world’s leading victim or, better, leading target of terrorism — Israel — was nowhere in sight, or mind.

Welcome to the GCTF — U.S. counterterrorism’s new “normal.” This 30-member organization got its official start last September as a “major initiative” of the Obama administration when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced its launch in New York.

It was quite an occasion; Hillary curled her hair. Seated next to her Turkish co-chairman, ensconced amid ministers from Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and 18 other miscellaneous member-states plus the European Union, she then said the magic words: “From London to Lahore, from Madrid to Mumbai, from Kabul to Kampala, it’s innocent civilians who have been targeted …”

Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ashkelon? Poof, gone. And that’s the point: This new counterterrorism organization, with its related counterterrorism center coming soon to Abu Dhabi, is Judenfrei. Not coincidentally, it is also heavily Islamic. Eleven member-states — slightly more than one-third of the organization’s membership — also belong to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of 56 Islamic countries working to impose Islamic law (Shariah) on the world. Six of those 11 members additionally belong to the Arab League. Both groups have defined “terrorism” to exclude Israeli victims (sometimes U.S. soldiers), and “terrorists” to exclude groups dedicated to the destruction of Israel, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. It is no wonder the Arab-Islamic members would now unite in “counterterrorism” without Israel.

What is both shocking and shameful, however, is that the U.S. would, too. It shows that the U.S. has implicitly but clearly accepted the Arab League/OIC definitions of terrorism and terrorists…

I would like to say this is all something President Barack Obama initiated, but such appeasement goes back a long way. If we look to the Gulf War in 1990-1991, we see this same denial of Israel’s existence take shape in the makeup of President George H.W. Bush’s “international coalition” — sans Israel. The same is true in 2003 with the formation of President George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing” in Iraq (also Afghanistan) — sans Israel.

These omissions were in no way due to Israel’s unwillingness to join the “war on terror.” They were due to the same Islamic pressure in force today. Both Bushes bowed to it, accepting a state of dhimmitude (inferiority of non-Muslims under Islam) for the high privilege of spilling American blood and treasure into the ungrateful desert. Israel, both Bushes agreed with their Islamic “allies,” just wasn’t fit to fight on Islamic sand. Thus, Israel was excluded from these wartime alliances.

Such dhimmitude only intensifies, as the latest developments show. Under the Bushes, after all, while Israel was not permitted to fight alongside coalition forces, at least it was still recognized for withstanding more than 60 years of Islamic terrorist attacks. Today, under the auspices of the Obama administration, Israel no longer rates mention even as a victim. “Big Satan” has thrown “Little Satan” to the sharks. Which says two things about Big Satan. Our institutions now see the world from the Islamic perspective, and, as far as the sharks go, we’re next.

Shabbat Shalom!

Technorati Tags: GCTF, OIC, terrorism, appeasment, Diana West

Former Israeli Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy. Unlike the NY Times, no ghetto mentality.

Yesterday I explained why a New York Times editorial was wrong when it said that the decision of Israel’s Levy Commission that Israel had a legal right to build settlements in Judea and Samaria was “bad law.” Today I want to take on the accusations that it is “bad policy” and “bad politics.”

The Times writes,

The recommendations would annul a number of past Israeli Supreme Court rulings and orders, including a 1979 decision forbidding the expropriation of land for “military needs” when the real goal is settlement construction. It is alarming to see this latest attack on the court, which has tried to temper government excesses, ruling that several outposts and buildings constructed on private Palestinian land should be dismantled. Thirty families were evicted from five such buildings last month.

The implication here is that Israel is going around condemning Palestinian property and handing it over to ‘settlers’.

This is untrue and disingenuous. The commission did not rule that Israeli Jews had a right to take “private Palestinian land.” If anything, it called for additional safeguards to ensure that ownership of land is clarified before it is built on by anyone, Jew or Arab. Unlike in the US, questions of land ownership in the territories are often very complicated and unclear, with missing documentation the rule rather than the exception, and various systems of law involved, including those in force in the Jordanian, Mandate and Ottoman periods.

It doesn’t help that the Palestinian Authority has decreed a penalty of death for an Arab who sells land to a Jew. Nor does it help that European and New Israel Fund financed lawyers and NGOs are seeking out Arabs to file claims against settlements, and that in some cases the government has ordered demolition of structures after receiving complaints, without waiting to establish the actual ownership of the property (see link to Ulpana below).

The commission also recommended the option of compensating owners when encroachment was established after construction rather than eviction and demolition, such as in the recent case of Ulpana (you will have to read the details; it’s too bizarre for me to summarize).

Bad policy? It seems to me that it is a much better policy than before.

In the vein of “bad politics”, the Times continues,

The commission, led by Edmund Levy, a former Supreme Court justice, was established in January under pressure from settlement leaders. If its conclusions are not firmly rejected by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there is likely to be new international anger at Israel. That could divert attention from Iran just when the world is bearing down with sanctions and negotiations to curb Tehran’s nuclear program.

This is absolutely delicious: the Times warns the Jewish state against provoking “international anger,” as if absolutely anything Israel does that is not a concession doesn’t provoke “anger,” and as if concessions aren’t always pocketed and immediately followed by new demands.

The Times’ idea of ‘good politics’ is that Israel should not assert its legitimate rights under international law because that will anger the Goyim, who then won’t protect Israel against the Iranian pogromists!

Does the Times hire its editorial writers straight out of medieval ghettos? Because this is the mentality they display.

We know and they know that the “international community” is not going to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

We know, and they are either too stupid or too dishonest to admit, that in order to survive Israel must deter aggression or preempt it. Appeasement, so consistently recommended by the Times and its columnists, is precisely the wrong way to bolster deterrence.

Let me point out a final bit of dishonesty:

[if the report is accepted by the government] It would also draw attention to a dispiriting anomaly: that a state founded as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people is determined to continue ruling 2.5 million Palestinians under an unequal system of laws and rights.

Perhaps the Times has failed to notice that something like 97% of the approximately 1.5 million Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria are under the administration of the Palestinian authority (I have no idea where they get the 2.5 million figure). But Israel is not ‘ruling’ them except insofar as it is not permitting their terrorist gangs to operate.

The commission did not, as this paragraph suggests, decide that the entire area of Judea and Samaria was a permanent part of Israel, but only that settlements there are not illegal. The eastern border of the state of Israel remains undefined, as it has been since the war of independence. Israel is still waiting, as it has for 64 years, for serious negotiations with the Arab nations and the Palestinians.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Levy Commission, Judea and Samaria, Ulpana