FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

Yaakov Lozowick has written a fascinating report on a newly declassified transcript of the Israeli cabinet’s discussion about what to do with the captured territory immediately after the Six Days War.

Something he said struck me:

Sometime in the 1980s the general perception of the conflict changed. No longer seen as Arab rejection of a Jewish State, the conflict was understood as a conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which the Arab world would maintain only until the two central protagonists reached an accommodation. Since the Israelis and Palestinians have not yet reached accommodation this proposition has never been tested, a fact which contributes to its explanatory power. 1967, however, was before the 1980s, and participants and observers the world over saw the conflict as an Arab-Jewish conflict, with the local Arabs playing a subordinate role; they were not generally referred to as Palestinians.

I know this is hard to believe, but it’s true.

Yesterday I fantasized about how the world would relate to Israel if there were no Palestinians. My answer was “not all that differently.” Not only would non-Palestinian-related geopolitical issues like Turkish neo-Ottomanism and Iran’s ‘tomorrow the world’ attitude still create conflict, but there is that old regret in Europe that maybe the idea of allowing a Jewish state was an overreaction to the mess of WWII. And in the Arab world — where Palestinians are only valued as victims of Israel and treated badly in any other context — Jewish sovereignty has always been seen as a crime against Allah.

Suddenly, sometime after the 1973 war and succeeding oil price spike, there was an explosion of concern for the Palestinians. The UN has since then established what seem like dozens of agencies and functionaries relating to their ‘plight’, despite the fact that Arab citizens of Israel and those “under occupation” have fared much better economically and have more individual freedom than Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East. This has become even more clear as the great majority of Arabs in the territories are now ruled by Hamas or the corrupt Palestinian Authority (PA).

This is a point, incidentally, which many miss: very few Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens live under Israeli administration any more. Oh, there is still a blockade of Gaza which prevents weapons and explosives from arriving by sea, but the Egyptian border is essentially open, and Israel does not interfere with deliveries of food, gas and other staples across its land border. And while the PA doesn’t have full sovereignty in Judea and Samaria — the IDF enters Palestinian areas from time to time to arrest wanted terrorists — the PA does govern the day-to-day lives of the residents, often to their great unhappiness.

In other words, the ‘yoke of occupation’ under which the Palestinians are groaning these days is more or less whatever security measures are necessary to prevent them from killing Israelis.

Nevertheless, we have the aforementioned UN functions, the numerous NGOs supported by the European Union, the massive Human Rights industry and of course all of the student groups, academic champions and ad hoc organizations concerned with the condition of the Palestinians.

Why is this?

The centrality of the Palestinians in the political life of the world today is not accidental. And in order to understand it, I want to do the opposite thought experiment to the one I did yesterday:

Let’s imagine that all the Israelis disappeared tomorrow. What would happen?

After the initial candy distribution and ceremonial firing of rifles in various directions, Hamas, unrestrained by the IDF, would quickly swallow up the PLO. Unrepentant Fatah-ists would be tossed off tall buildings, and the long-awaited Islamic Republic of Palestine would be declared.

But then what? Would mutual enemies Iran, Turkey and Egypt — all of which support Hamas today — continue to do so? Or would Egypt grab what it could, Syria retake the Golan, Hizballah invade the Galilee, maybe even Jordan try to get Jerusalem back?

Europe and the US, after some lip service to decry the violence, would quickly lose interest. Perhaps the New Ottomans would try to step into the power vacuum. The one thing that would almost certainly not happen would be the development of a stable Palestinian state:

• Because the Palestinians do not have institutions, only militias.
• Because they don’t have an economy, only international donors.
• Because they don’t have a national consciousness, only tribal loyalties.
• Because nobody, not the UN, not the Arabs, not even the Palestinian leadership itself, cares about the actual Palestinians.

The “Palestinian people” are useful for one and only one reason, as a weapon against the Jewish state. And their prominence, their 15 minutes of fame on the world stage, was granted to them by the Arab and European enemies of Israel, who would take it away in a moment once their function was performed.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinians

The interior of the Church of the Nativity after Palestinian siege ended

News item:

The secretariat of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee has come out against a bid by the Palestinian Authority to use an emergency procedure to register Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity under the country of “Palestine” as a World Heritage site.

“At the UN, where the General Assembly each year adopts more resolutions criticizing Israel than on the rest of the world combined, this is a spectacle as rare as Halley’s Comet,” UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer said…

“This is the first time in recent memory that a draft resolution circulated by the United Nations – let alone by UNESCO, which recently elected Assad’s Syria to its human rights committee – openly rejected a Palestinian claim or position,” Neuer said. His Geneva-based nonprofit group monitors UN activity.

Actually, this is not in the least surprising.

The Christian world understands quite well what would be likely to happen to its holy places under Muslim rule. While it is unlikely that the PA would immediately flatten the church and build a mosque on the site — although one wonders how long it would take Hamas to do so — even the relatively moderate Jordanians severely limited access by Christians between 1948 and 1967, and of course totally excluded Christians who were Israeli nationals. Israel, on the other hand, has gone to great lengths to protect and provide access to Christian (and Muslim) sites.

In Egypt, Muslim extremists have attacked and destroyed churches and murdered Christians, who are 12% of the population. If the Muslim Brotherhood should take power, Christians may officially be declared dhimmis and forced to pay a special tax:

When asked what he thought about many Christian Copts coming out to vote for his secular opponent, Ahmed Shafiq, [Muslim Brotherhood presidential candidate Mohammed] Morsi reportedly said, “They need to know that conquest is coming, and Egypt will be Islamic, and that they must pay jizya or emigrate.”

I’m certain that the 2002 invasion of the Church of the Nativity hasn’t been forgotten. I’ll quote at length from an account by David Raab (see link for sources):

…”More than 100 Palestinian gunmen…[including] soldiers and policemen, entered the Church of the Nativity on Tuesday, as Israeli troops swept into Bethlehem in an attempt to quell violence by Palestinian suicide bombers and militias.”³⁴ The actual number of terrorists was between 150 and 180, among them prominent members of the Fatah Tanzim. As the New York Times put it, “Palestinian gunmen have frequently used the area around the church as a refuge, with the expectation that Israel would try to avoid fighting near the shrine” [emphasis added].³⁵

And in fact this was the case. The commander of the Israeli forces in the area asserted that the IDF would not break into the church itself and would not harm this site holy to Christianity. Israel also deployed more mature and more reserved reserve-duty soldiers in this sensitive situation that militarily called for more agile, standing-army soldiers.³⁶

On the other hand, the Palestinians did not treat it the same way. Not only did they take their weapons with them into the Church of the Nativity and fire, on occasion, from the church, but also reportedly booby-trapped the entrance to the church.³⁷

On April 7, “one of the few priests evacuated from the church told Israeli television yesterday that gunmen had shot their way in, and that the priests, monks and nuns were essentially hostages….The priest declined to call the clergy ‘hostages,’ but repeatedly said in fluent English: ‘We have absolutely no choice. They have guns, we do not.'”³⁸

Christians clearly saw the takeover as a violation of the sanctity of the church. In an interview with CWNews, Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican’s Undersecretary of State and the top foreign-policy official, asserted that “The Palestinians have entered into bilateral agreements [with the Holy See] in which they undertake to maintain and respect the status quo regarding the Christian holy places and the rights of Christian communities. To explain the gravity of the current situation, let me begin with the fact that the occupation of the holy places by armed men is a violation of a long tradition of law that dates back to the Ottoman era. Never before have they been occupied – for such a lengthy time – by armed men.”³⁹ On April 14, he reiterated his position in an interview on Vatican Radio.⁴⁰

On April 24, the Jerusalem Post reported on the damage that the PA forces were causing:

Three Armenian monks, who had been held hostage by the Palestinian gunmen inside Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, managed to flee the church area via a side gate yesterday morning. They immediately thanked the soldiers for rescuing them.

They told army officers the gunmen had stolen gold and other property, including crucifixes and prayer books, and had caused damage….

One of the monks, Narkiss Korasian, later told reporters: “They stole everything, they opened the doors one by one and stole everything….They stole our prayer books and four crosses…they didn’t leave anything. Thank you for your help, we will never forget it.”

Israeli officials said the monks said the gunmen had also begun beating and attacking clergymen.⁴¹

When the siege finally ended, the PA soldiers left the church in terrible condition:

The Palestinian gunmen holed up in the Church of the Nativity seized church stockpiles of food and “ate like greedy monsters” until the food ran out, while more than 150 civilians went hungry. They also guzzled beer, wine, and Johnnie Walker scotch that they found in priests’ quarters, undeterred by the Islamic ban on drinking alcohol. The indulgence lasted for about two weeks into the 39-day siege, when the food and drink ran out, according to an account by four Greek Orthodox priests who were trapped inside for the entire ordeal….

The Orthodox priests and a number of civilians have said the gunmen created a regime of fear.

Even in the Roman Catholic areas of the complex there was evidence of disregard for religious norms. Catholic priests said that some Bibles were torn up for toilet paper, and many valuable sacramental objects were removed. “Palestinians took candelabra, icons and anything that looked like gold,” said a Franciscan, the Rev. Nicholas Marquez from Mexico.⁴²

Please explain again why Christians might be nervous about the church being in ‘Palestine’!

Technorati Tags: Church of the Nativity, Israel, Palestine, UNESCO

Soulmates: President Obama giving a hug to Turkish Islamist PM Recep ErdoÄŸan at G-20 meeting last November.

Yesterday I wrote that the US had allowed Turkey to veto Israeli participation in a counterterrorism forum. This isn’t the first time. Raphael Ahren writes,

Turkey has since [the Mavi Marmara affair] blocked Israeli participation in several international events. Last week, the World Economic Forum held a “special meeting” on the Middle East, North Africa and Eurasia in Istanbul. No Israeli officials were present, possibly because Erdoğan, who partially funded the conference, demanded that they not be invited. Last month, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu vetoed Israel’s participation in a NATO summit of heads of state and government in Chicago. Then, too, an Israeli diplomatic official said: “We didn’t plan on attending the summit anyway.”

Considering that the Mavi Marmara affair was orchestrated by the Turkish regime, following other provocations — a visit by Hamas leader Haniyeh to Turkey in 2006 (and this year), and a theatrical display by ErdoÄŸan in 2009 at the Davos economic forum, this behavior is not surprising. Turkey under ErdoÄŸan’s AKP has made enmity with Israel a fundamental part of its program to become the major power in the Middle East, as US influence there fades.

What is particularly interesting is the way the US, under Obama, seems to be playing along.

After the Mavi Marmara affair, US pressure caused Israel to back off its economic warfare against Hamas, handing Erdoğan a victory (and Israel a defeat).  And compared to his clearly expressed distaste for Israeli PM Netanyahu, Obama sees Erdoğan as a soulmate. Barry Rubin wrote (Mar 26),

President Barack Obama is continuing his love affair with Turkish Islamist leader Recep Erdoğan. As Erdoğan continues to undermine Turkish democracy, throw hundreds of moderates into jail, destroy the nation’s institutions, help Iran, throw hysterical tantrums about how much he hates Israel, promote Islamism in the region, and is fresh from still another meeting with Hamas leaders, Obama continues to use Erdoğan as his guru.

When the two men met at the Seoul, South Korea, Nuclear Security Summit on March 25, Obama practically slobbered over the anti-American ruler, calling Erdoğan his “friend and colleague….We find ourselves in frequent agreement upon a wide range of issues.”

One could write a great deal about how ErdoÄŸan is bad for Turkey, bad for the Middle East and bad for the US (Rubin does). But there is another aspect of this that particularly bothers me.

That is the question of how Obama relates to our traditional ally, Israel. By his unforced silence in the face of ErdoÄŸan’s ostracism of Israel from the family of nations — in effect, the virtual erasure of the Jewish state — Obama is sending a message to both Israel’s friends and enemies that he has no problem with it.

Obama’s message is received loud and clear in the capitals of Israel’s enemies, who are emboldened to try to move from virtual erasure of a nation to its physical destruction. And to those who are not enemies, it is a prediction of how Obama will act (or not) when the chips are down.

May I hope that the message is also received by Israel’s friends among American voters?

Technorati Tags: ErdoÄŸan, Obama, Israel, Turkey

Secretary of State Clinton apologizes on behalf of US at Global Counterterrorism Forum in Istanbul

News item:

The United States blocked Israel’s participation in the Global Counterterrorism Forum’s (GCTF) first meeting in Istanbul on Friday, despite Israel’s having one of the most extensive counterterrorism experiences in the world.

Israel was excluded from the meeting due to fierce objections by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a Washington-based source told Globes news…

Twenty-nine countries are participating in the GCTF, ten of which are Arab and/or Muslim countries.

The GCTF was created (and is undoubtedly mostly funded by) the US. According to the State Department,

The U.S. proposed the creation of the GCTF to address the evolving terrorist threat in a way that would bring enduring benefits by helping frontline countries and affected regions acquire the means to deal with threats they face. It is based on a recognition that the U.S. alone cannot eliminate every terrorist or terrorist organization. Rather, the international community must come together to assist countries as they work to confront the terrorist threat.

Given that the most ‘frontline’ country facing terrorist threats is Israel, which has been subjected to terrorism on an almost daily basis since its birth, one would expect that Israel would be among the founding members of the GCTF.

Nope. Israel was not included among the membership, and as we see from the above, is not even permitted to attend its meetings as a non-member.

Do we begin to sense the stench of hypocrisy here, as our State Department happily acquiesces in maintaining Israel’s pariah status for the benefit of the ‘enlightened’ members of this forum like Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia?

The smell gets even stronger as  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, representing the Obama Administration, crawls on her belly to apologize for the behavior of the US:

I am here today also to underscore that the United States will work with all of you to combat terrorists within the framework of the rule of law. Now some believe that when it comes to counterterrorism, the end always justifies the means; that torture, abuse, the suspension of civil liberties – no measure is too extreme in the name of keeping our citizens safe…

I know that the United States has not always had a perfect record, and we can and must do a better job of addressing the mistaken belief that these tactics are ever permissible. That is why President Obama has made our standards very clear. We will always maintain our right to use force against groups such as al-Qaida that have attacked us and still threaten us with imminent attack. And in doing so, we will comply with the applicable law, including the laws of war, and go to extraordinary lengths to ensure precision and avoid the loss of innocent life.

Of course, the Obama Administration has been responsible for many more targeted killings than its predecessor — not that I think that’s a bad thing — but apparently it’s the attitude that’s important.

The real purpose behind the GCTF was made clear at the conference:

“The GCTF sought from the outset to bridge old and deep divides in the international community between Western donor nations and Muslim majority nations. And it has, I think, done that quite effectively,” a top US official said at the press briefing prior to the opening session.

The $90 million so far distributed by the GCTF to ‘frontline’ countries may have helped.

Technorati Tags: GCTF, Hillary Clinton, Turkey, Israel, terrorism

When a distorted view of reality is broadcast to the world and then remains unchallenged, after a while it becomes something that ‘everybody knows’. It becomes a jumping off point for even more lies and distortions. This has been the story of the Israeli-Arab conflict from the beginning.

For years the attitude of the Israeli government has been that actions are important and words are not. Who could believe the crazy rantings of a Yasser Arafat, for example? Who would take seriously the idea that the return of the Jewish people to their historic homeland was an example of Western colonialism, and that the Palestinian Arabs, most of whose ancestors arrived in the land in the 19th and 20th centuries and whose leadership collaborated with Adolf Hitler, were an ancient, noble and oppressed indigenous people?

Everyone ‘knows’, for example that “Israeli settlements are illegal under international law” because news sources like the UK Guardian and NPR repeat it every chance they get. They also believe that eastern Jerusalem is and always was ‘Arab’, and is now being ‘Judaized’, despite the fact that the long-time Jewish population was expelled by the Jordanian army in 1948.

They are also sure that Israel committed ‘war crimes’ in Gaza, despite the fact that a well-known British military expert said that “the Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in the combat zones than any other army in the history of warfare.”

I could go on. But with the exception of the last example, the government of Israel and its official representatives have done little to counteract these lies.

Unfortunately, sometimes the government even plays along with the charades of its enemies. Take the question of terrorism, which has been waged against Israel by Palestinian Arabs and others since its inception. The truth is that thousands of Israelis and Jews around the world have been murdered by terrorists. Either these terrorists are gangsters in the service of hostile regimes, or they are armed combatants who are committing the most vicious war crimes, deliberately targeting the most vulnerable civilian populations, especially including children.

What they most definitely are not are soldiers fighting bravely according to the laws of war and deserving of honors.

So what are we to make of the fact that the Israeli government just returned the bodies of 91 Arab terrorists, formerly buried in numbered graves in Israel, to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas?

These terrorists were anything but military heroes: they include suicide bombers who exploded in buses, markets and nightclubs, gunmen who took hostages and murdered them, snipers, etc.

The families of terror victims complained, just as they did when more than a thousand prisoners, many of them convicted murderers, were traded for Gilad Shalit. But as always, their protest was ignored.

This was supposedly a “humanitarian gesture,” which is intended to make the PA more likely to negotiate with Israel. But what it did was provide a photo-op for the Palestinians to pretend that the terrorists were actually soldiers, and that their actions were warfare and not murder. You can see the treatment that they received here:

The PA is not likely to drop their preconditions for negotiation — indeed, the whole “2-state solution” negotiation is a farce, based on the false premise that the PA is prepared to accept the existence of a Jewish state of any size.

So what has Israel gained? Families of terror victims were punished yet again to see the murderers of their relatives honored, and another anti-Israel myth — that terrorists are not terrorists — is given new life.

Technorati Tags: Israel, terrorism, Palestinians