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The Fatah organization is celebrating the 43rd anniversary of its first terrorist attack, an attempt to sabotage Israel’s National Water Carrier on January 3, 1965.

Please note that this was two years before the start of ‘The Occupation’ of the West Bank and Gaza.

As part of the celebration, they are fighting with Hamas members in Gaza with at least 8 dead between them overnight. But never mind, I can’t get too upset about this.

The acronym “FATAH” [فتح] is created from the complete Arabic name: HArakat al-TAhrir al-Watani al-Filastini [Palestinian National Liberation Movement], becoming “HATAF”, which, since it means “sudden death” in Arabic, was reversed to become “FATAH”. The word Fatah is prominently used for the Islamic expansion in the first centuries of Islamic history, and so has strongly positive connotations for Muslims. — Wikipedia

Fatah was founded in 1954 by Palestinian students, including Yasser Arafat (who actually was born in Cairo and was not a Palestinian at all). Arafat became Chairman of the PLO Executive Committee in 1969, a year in which the PLO claimed 2,432 terrorist attacks against Israel.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization [PLO] is composed of several factions, Fatah being the dominant one. Here are two short quotations from the PLO Charter (official English version — the Arabic is even more explicit):

Article 9: Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. Thus it is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase…

Article 15: The liberation of Palestine, from an Arab viewpoint, is a national (qawmi) duty and it attempts to repel the Zionist and imperialist aggression against the Arab homeland, and aims at the elimination of Zionism in Palestine [Arabic version says “liquidation of the Zionist entity”].

Although President Clinton demanded of Yasser Arafat that this charter be modified as part of the Oslo agreement, this was never done (see also letter of Ambassador Dore Gold here). Over the years, Fatah has been responsible for more Israeli deaths than any other terrorist faction, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc.

In fact, according to the Israeli internal security service (Shabak) the murderers of Ahikam Amichai and David Rubin, who were killed last Friday were both Fatah members and Palestinian Authority employees. One of them was a PA policeman.

Nevertheless, the US and other international donors have pledged $7.4 billion to the Fatah-dominated PA. The US — your tax dollars — is supplying rifles, ammunition, training, and even paying for armored personnel carriers for them, supposedly to ‘fight terrorism’.

This is like paying Kellogg’s to fight cornflakes.

Technorati Tags: Fatah, PLO, Israel

In the Winter and Spring of 1947-48, Palestinian Arabs and Jordanian troops maintained a siege on several Jewish kibbutzim southeast of Jerusalem in the area known as Gush Etzion. Ultimately, after five months, Kibbutz Kfar Etzion was overrun, and 250 inhabitants — soldiers and civilians — were massacred. The other kibbutzim surrendered.

Early in January 1948, a detachment of Jewish soldiers numbering 35 tried to walk the twenty kilometers from Jerusalem to Gush Etzion to bring them needed supplies. Supposedly they were seen by an Arab shepherd, whom they captured.

The story is that they considered killing him but decided to release him because he was a noncombatant. This story is told to recruits in the Israeli army, where it is presented as correct behavior, an illustration of the concept of tohar haneshek (purity of arms).

Of course the shepherd reported what he had seen, and a large force of Arabs was sent against them. All 35 were killed. They are remembered as the “lamed-hey” (the 35).

This Friday, almost exactly 60 years after the deaths of the lamed-hey, three young Israelis, Na’ama Ohion, Ahikam Amihai and David Rubin, were hiking in a place called Nahal Telem, near Hebron. Here is how Na’ama Ohion described what happened:

Ohion told her friends that, at the beginning of the hike, an elderly Arab passed them, and they began to recall the story…

Ohion told her friends they were making black-humor jokes about the historical incident. “We could never imagine that our hike would end up like theirs,” her friends said she told them.

About an hour later, she said, a gray Land Rover appeared and drove toward the three hikers, with a rifle barrel sticking out of the window. A Palestinian sitting in the back seat sprayed the three with bullets. Amihai and Rubin were hit, and Ohion ran to hide behind bushes above the trail. When she heard the shooting die down and the terrorists’ vehicle drive away, she came out of her hiding place.

Ohion saw her friends’ bodies riddled with bullets. After her attempts to resuscitate them failed, she climbed out of the wadi to a high point where she could use her cell phone, and waited there until help came. — Nadav Shragai, Ha’aretz

Amihai and Rubin, both sons of rabbis, were off-duty soldiers, and they were armed. Before they died they managed to kill one of the terrorists and wound another. The Islamic Jihad, the Fatah al-Aksa Brigades, and Hamas have all claimed ‘credit’ for the murders.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Ahikam Amihai, David Rubin, terrorism, lamed-hey

Everything you need to know about Hamas:

Hamas on Thursday called on the UN to rescind the 1947 decision to partition Palestine into two states, one for Jews and one for Arabs.

The group said in a statement, released on the 60th anniversary of the UN vote, that “Palestine is Arab Islamic land, from the river to the sea, including Jerusalem… there is no room in it for the Jews.” — Jerusalem Post

Everything you need to know about Fatah:

• Salam Fayad, Palestinian Authority “prime minister”: “Israel can define itself as it likes, but the Palestinians will not recognize it as a Jewish state.”
• Yasser Abed Rabbo, secretary general of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s executive committee: “This issue [recognition as a Jewish state] is not on the table; it is raised for internal [Israeli] consumption.”
• Ahmad Qurei, chief Palestinian negotiator: “This [demand] is absolutely refused.”
• Saeb Erekat, head of the PLO Negotiations Department: “The Palestinians will never acknowledge Israel’s Jewish identity. … There is no country in the world where religious and national identities are intertwined.” — Daniel Pipes

Everything you need to know about Arab citizens of Israel:

In a unanimous vote on Saturday, the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee decided to reject an Israeli request that the Palestinian Authority recognize Israel as a “Jewish state.” — Arutz Sheva

A large majority of Israel’s Arabs object to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations over territory swaps (73 percent), a survey conducted by Mada al-Carmel – the Arab Center for Applied Social Research in Haifa – finds. Most Arabs also object to recognizing Israel as a Jewish state (65 percent) and renouncing the Right of Return (79 percent). Israeli Arabs also believe that the Palestinians cannot back down on Jerusalem-related issues, according to the poll. — Ha’aretz [my emphasis]

Israel has agreed that there is a Palestinian people and that it is entitled to self-determination in its own state. One can argue long and hard about what makes a ‘people’, but there is no doubt that the Jewish people have it in at least as great a measure — and more — than the Palestinians.

And yet nothing seems to evoke rejection quite so violent as the Israeli demand to be recognized as a Jewish state — the state of the Jewish people. This applies not only to the Palestinians, but to most Arab nations, for example, the Saudis:

Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States rejected recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.

“There are 1.5 million civilians in Israel who do not define themselves as Jewish,” [referring to Arabs, Christians and others] Adel al-Jubeir told reporters at the U.S.-convened Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in Annapolis, Md. “We do not believe states should define themselves according to religion or ethnicity.” [!] — JTA

Leaving aside the hypocrisy — coming from the country that Jews are not allowed to enter, where Christian Bibles are prohibited, and where only Muslims can be citizens — the majority of states in the world are defined as the homeland of an ethnic group with a religious identity more or less intertwined, and the fact that they have citizens belonging to minority groups does not delegitimize them. But only Israel is denied this self-definition.

There is one simple explanation, and it is that the Arabs do not agree that there should be a Jewish Israel. They are prepared to accept a state called ‘Israel’ as long as it can be an Arab state, in which case they will quickly change the name anyway. The insistence on “right of return“, which would instantly change Israel from a Jewish to an Arab state, is proof of it.

Hamas, as always, does the best job of straightforwardly articulating the basic principle that they espouse — and share even with the ‘moderates’ of Fatah — which is that they will accept nothing less than the reversal of the creation of Israel and the outcome of the 1948 war. The pragmatic West and the optimistic Israeli Left never fathomed this, imagining the bellicose talk of the Arabs to be mere rhetoric. I would like to think that at least a few are finally beginning to understand.

Some commentators have recently started talking about how the US needs to apply “tough love” to Israel about such issues as settlements, roadblocks, prisoners, etc. But it’s the Arabs who need it, who need — for once and for all — to be forced to understand that there will be no going back to 1947. There is only one kind of peace to be had, and that is peace with Israel as a Jewish state.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Jewish state, right of return

So simple:

Cardinal Renato Martino, who heads the Vatican’s office for migrants, said an agreement to restart peace talks, reached Tuesday in Annapolis, Maryland, was encouraging and that he hoped by this time next year concrete measures would be under way.

“It is my hope that all the parts of the problem are taken into consideration such as that of the Palestinian refugees, who like all other refugees, have the right to return to their homeland,” Martino said. — Jerusalem Post

Here are seven reasons why it is not so simple, and indeed why the Palestinian demand is outrageous and unjust:

1. The war which created the refugees was started by the Palestinian Arabs and their allies and was the culmination of a campaign of terrorism and pogroms against Jews in Palestine since at least the 1920’s.
2. There were at most 700,000 Arab refugees (probably less). The Palestinians are demanding that almost 5 million descendants of these ‘return’ to Israel 60 years after the war (the Jewish population of Israel is about 5 million).
3. During and after the War of Independence, about 850,000 Jews were expelled from or fled their homes in Arab countries, in most cases leaving all of their property behind. These Jews were absorbed by other countries, most of them going to Israel. Do not their descendants have a claim on the Arab world?
4. The Arab nations hosting the Palestinian refugees refused to absorb them, and a special UN agency (UNRWA) was created just for them. The normal UN refugee agencies were not used, because they are concerned with finding homes for refugees. UNRWA’s job has been to keep them in camps and on welfare in order to nurture a hostile population to be used as a source of anti-Israel soldiers and ultimately as a demographic weapon. Some UNRWA personnel belong to terrorist organizations, such as Hamas.
5. When Jordan occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1948, the areas were ethnically cleansed of Jews, who fled or were murdered. The Palestinians are demanding that all Jewish settlements be removed from what is to be their state. Yet they expect Israel to absorb an additional 5 million Arabs!
6. If Israel were to agree to this, it would immediately have an Arab majority and would cease to be a state of the Jewish people. But the Palestinians insist that they must have a state because they have a right to self-determination. Apparently, they do not think that the Jewish people has this right as well.
7. Practically speaking, the influx would result in immediate civil war, which would make similar wars in Lebanon and Yugoslavia look like ping-pong tournaments.

Cardinal Martino, ironically, is President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace!

He is also President of the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant Peoples. One would think that he might have some understanding of the prototypical “Itinerant People”, who have finally returned home after thousands of years.

Technorati Tags: Martino, Vatican, Palestinian refugees, Israel

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has published a document called “Israel, the Conflict and Peace: Answers to frequently asked questions“. It’s a remarkably straightforward and well-written exposition of the present government’s strategy of seeking peace with the Palestinians in the framework of a two-state solution.

Whatever you think of the prospects for success of this approach, it is based on the views expressed by President Bush in his speech of June 2002, and on the so-called ‘Roadmap‘ derived from that — although the Bush Administration may have moved further toward the Arab point of view since then (a recent Bush speech mentioned the Saudi/Arab League Peace Initiative approvingly).

The paper is very readable and interesting, building on the idea of the two-state solution while making clear what Israel expects from its partners in the upcoming negotiations. However, one section in particular — about incitement — struck me as being emblematic of the reason why the whole enterprise has such a small chance of success.

When you read this section, which is specifically directed to incitement against Israel by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, keep in mind that similar remarks could be made about almost any Arab country, including (especially) Egypt, with whom Israel is allegedly at ‘peace’.

How does incitement harm peace?

There is a direct connection between anti-Israeli or antisemitic incitement and terrorism. The extreme anti-Israeli indoctrination that is so pervasive in Palestinian society nurtures a culture of hatred that, in turn, leads to terrorism.

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