FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

In my last post, I pointed out one of the reasons that peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs is not just around the corner. Here’s another:

From “How the Changing Nature of Threats to Israel Affects Vital Security Arrangements,” by Maj.-Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland:

…events over the past ten years have revealed a marked change in the types of threats to be expected from a Palestinian state, if such a state comes into being, or from the existing Palestinian entity. This involves a switch to three types of weaponry that create problems that are very difficult to handle:

1. Rockets and missiles of different varieties, positioned throughout the West Bank, would be easily able to cover the entire area of the State of Israel.
2. Advanced anti-aircraft missiles would be capable of shooting down not only large passenger aircraft flying into Ben-Gurion International Airport, but also helicopters and even fighter planes.
3. Anti-tank missiles that are highly effective up to a range of 5 km. can easily cover not only strategic positions such as Israel’s north-south Highway 6, but well beyond, including other sites that are crucial to Israel’s defense.

The common denominator among all three types of weaponry is that they all fundamentally contradict the guidelines discussed for security arrangements in any agreement with the Palestinians.

The Necessity of Controlling the Territory

Ten years ago it was said that the answer to coping with the Palestinian threat to Israel was a demilitarized Palestinian state. But what does this mean? If such a state is stripped of tanks, artillery, and aircraft, it is probable that a detailed agreement to that effect will be signed and a monitoring system will be instituted to oversee its enforcement.

However [today], the real threat comes not from tanks but from rockets, anti-aircraft missiles, and anti-tank missiles. The common denominator among all of these is the ease of smuggling and clandestine manufacture, as is taking place today in Gaza. No monitoring system that may be established will be able to prevent this.

For instance, in a convoy of tens or even hundreds of trucks carrying crates of agricultural produce, there is nothing to prevent missiles from being concealed. Nor would there be any problem in storing such weapons in houses and cellars in built-up neighborhoods of Tulkarm, Kalkilya, or Nablus in the West Bank, nor any way of knowing of their existence until they are used against Israel. The threat that these weapons pose to Israel is much more significant than that of tanks or airplanes. On the contrary, there are various excellent means of combating tanks and artillery, but no effective way of combating smuggling or the local production of missiles. That being so, the term “demilitarized state” is an almost meaningless concept, if not accompanied by a monitoring system. It is well known that even in the best possible scenario, the existing systems are able to monitor only standard military weapons. The only way to monitor the prevention of smuggling of such types of weapons into the West Bank, or prevent their manufacture within it, is control…

If Israel were to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines, then the area to the east of the Israel-Palestine border would be home not only to the Palestinian Authority, but to other potential enemies too, since an agreement with the Palestinians provides no guarantee of an agreement with Hizbullah or peace with Syria. The question of whether Israel is able to defend itself is relevant not only in relation to the Palestinians, but should also be examined in the not unreasonable scenario of a war with Syria, Hizbullah, and the Palestinians.

Until the definition of the Palestinian Cause (see my previous post) changes radically, the only guarantee of security is the practical ability to prevent or repel an attack.

Discussions about the ‘peace process’ seem to revolve mostly about what the Arabs will get. What will the borders be?  How much of Jerusalem will Israel give up? Lately, to a much smaller extent, there is talk about an Israeli demand for recognition. But the questions raised by Eiland are much more fundamental.

Maybe we should stop worrying so much about the political issues and more about the physical security of Israel.

Technorati Tags: Israel, security, Giora Eiland

In the peculiar mental space of the ‘Palestinian’ movements — the PLO, Hamas and their supporters — there are some words that are used very differently from the way most Israelis and Americans use them. Here are some definitions to keep in mind when you read or listen to their statements:

Palestine — The entire land area between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

Palestinian land — All of Palestine as defined above.

Palestinian People — All Arabs that lived in Palestine in 1948 and their descendants, including those who migrated into the region from Egypt or Syria in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Jews — Adherents to the Jewish religion.

Jewish People — There isn’t one. Unlike Palestinians, the PLO and Hamas do not consider Jews a ‘people’.

Zionists — Jews who colonized Palestine.

Occupation — The presence of a Zionist colony on Palestinian land. The occupation began in 1948. It is illegitimate despite League of Nations and UN resolutions, either because it is a colonialist enterprise (the PLO) or for religious reasons (Hamas).

Palestinian Refugees — Those Palestinians who lived in the area of the Zionist colony and were displaced in 1948, and their descendants. There are 4.5 million of these, and they are the true owners of the land in the Zionist colony.

Palestinian Cause — To end the occupation and return all Palestinian refugees to their ancestral homes, as defined above.

Two-state solution — An outcome to the conflict which ends the occupation by declaring two states: one in Eastern Palestine which will be entirely populated by Arabs, and one in the part of Palestine occupied by the Zionists in 1949, where Palestinian refugees will return.

Although Hamas and the PLO diverge sharply on many issues, including the kind of state that should ultimately be created in ‘Palestine’ and the best way to end the ‘occupation’, they all agree on the definitions above.

If you keep these definitions in mind, you will have no trouble understanding:

The refusal of PA leaders and negotiators to recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish People. For one thing, they don’t agree that there is a Jewish people (although with massive illogic they then insist that there is a ‘Palestinian’ people), and for another, this would declare the ‘occupation’ legitimate — in contradiction to the basic principle of the Palestinian Cause.

The rejection of the Camp David proposal in 2000  and Olmert’s offer in 2008. Both of these would have created a state of Palestine in the territories and included unprecedented concessions on Jerusalem. But they didn’t include return of ‘Palestinian refugees’ and contained various provisions that would safeguard and legitimize the ‘Zionist colony’. They would not have ended the ‘occupation’ and so contradicted the Palestinian Cause.

The derisive response to PM Netanyahu’s statement in support of a two-state solution. Netanyahu’s position represented a significant departure from previous Likud principles that it would not accept a Palestinian state, and caused him internal difficulties with his supporters on the Right. But since he insisted on demilitarization and did not accept the ‘return’ of ‘refugees’, this was not considered a legitimate ‘two-state solution’.

The continued rocket and suicide terrorism of Hamas after Israel withdrew from Gaza. Hamas considered the withdrawal as a victory in the battle to end the ‘occupation’, brought about by its policy of violent resistance. Therefore it chose to continue this successful policy to end the rest of the ‘occupation’.

And of course, the persistence of the conflict.

Most Israelis and Americans, including — one hopes — the Obama Administration, believe that Israel is legitimate and that it is the nation-state of the Jewish people. They use the word ‘occupation’ to refer to territories occupied in 1967, and they imagine a two-state solution as one in which an Arab state of Palestine lives peacefully alongside a Jewish state of Israel. All of these usages are significantly different than the ‘Palestinian’ definitions above.

Those who — deliberately or from ignorance — deny these ambiguities may say things like “everybody knows what the general outlines of a solution are; we just need to work out the details.” But that’s far from true.

Communication is impossible without agreement on the meanings of words. As long as systematic ambiguity about basic concepts remains, the conflict cannot be ended by negotiation.

So why don’t negotiators agree on terms?

The answer is that they are not trying to end the conflict. Diplomats love ambiguity, because it allows them to pretend to be making progress so they can demand concrete concessions from the other side or from third parties.

The dirty little secret about diplomacy is that it is more like warfare than problem-solving.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinians, Israeli-Arab conflict, two-state solution

Today I took part in an event to raise funds to feed hungry people. The sponsoring agency was Church World Service (CWS), founded after WWII by various Christian denominations to help feed the population of devastated Europe.

Participants included members of our local Reform Jewish congregation, many Protestant churches and a mosque. I was assured that the event was entirely non-political, intended only to fight hunger.

Sounds great, and there are certainly plenty of hungry people today in Africa, Pakistan, etc. But when I looked at the CWS website, I discovered that CWS not only fights hunger, but also advocates and lobbies for ‘peace and justice’.

Uh-oh. It’s a sad state of affairs that these words must set off alarm bells, but they do. And sure enough, here’s what I found:

Contact your members of Congress and urge them to support the Obama Administration’s efforts toward a viable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Tell them that you appreciate the Administration’s encouragement of both sides to get serious about meaningful negotiations, and you support its efforts to end Israeli settlement construction in East Jerusalem and elsewhere in the occupied Palestinian Territories.

And more: CWS presents with approval a vicious 2009 statement from some Christian Arabs, the “Kairos Document,” which begins as follows:

We, a group of Christian Palestinians, after prayer, reflection and an exchange of opinion, cry out from within the suffering in our country, under the Israeli occupation, with a cry of hope in the absence of all hope, a cry full of prayer and faith in a God ever vigilant, in God’s divine providence for all the inhabitants of this land.

Inspired by the mystery of God’s love for all, the mystery of God’s divine presence in the history of all peoples and, in a particular way, in the history of our country, we proclaim our word based on our Christian faith and our sense of Palestinian belonging – a word of faith, hope and love.

It gets much worse from here on, blaming Israel for all the misfortunes of the Palestinian Arabs, especially the Christians — whose numbers are rapidly shrinking as they emigrate to escape the conflict and religious persecution by Muslims, attacking Jewish rights in the land of Israel, providing theological justification for ‘resistance’, etc. Incidentally, various versions of this document appear all over the web, on anti-Zionist and antisemitic sites.

Snookered again! Here I wanted to feed the hungry and ended up supporting those who would like to feed the Jewish state to the lions.

This started me thinking: what caused the ‘Palestinization’ of all of these organizations that were originally intended simply to help those in need or the truly oppressed?

CWS is just one of numerous charitable NGOs that have gone this way. Amnesty International (AI) was founded in 1961 to help ‘prisoners of conscience’ — people imprisoned for purely political or religious reasons. Human Rights Watch (HRW) was created to monitor human rights provisions of the 1978 Helsinki Accords, which called for “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief.”

But recently AI and HRW cynically cooperated with the corrupt UN Human Rights Council to give birth to the tendentious Goldstone Report, which maliciously demonized Israel.

In some cases, political slants can be predicted by looking at funding sources. HRW, for example, gets most of its money from left-leaning foundations, including the Open Society Institute of George Soros; and last year it held a fund-raising dinner in Saudi Arabia. Other NGOs are funded by the European Union and other governmental sources which have a stake in pressuring Israel.

In the case of CWS, it’s not that easy. Surprisingly, 43% of its income comes from the US government, probably to pay for CWS’s work resettling Haitian and Cuban refugees in the US. It’s likely that its anti-Israel ‘advocacy’ is inspired by activists among its leadership. This is the same phenomenon which causes groups like trade unions, the Presbyterian Church, city councils, etc. to consider and sometimes pass ‘boycott Israel’ resolutions.

Most of the people who vote on these resolutions are not particularly interested in the Israeli-Arab conflict, but they have a general idea that Israel is oppressing some third-world people, and can be convinced to do the ‘right’ thing, since there is little effort involved and no personal consequences.

As a board member of a non-profit myself, I am well aware that members have pet projects, and that sometimes a director will support another’s project in return for a vote for his own.

All that’s required is at least one persistent, dedicated ideologue to introduce ‘Palestine’ as a cause, to get grants from sympathetic sources and hire like-minded staff, etc. In some cases, like HRW, it seems that issues concerning Israel come to crowd out most of the others.

There is no shortage of activists in the 36 member denominations of CWS, which include the Orthodox churches that most ‘Palestinian’ Christians belong to, as well as some others which themselves have passed anti-Israel initiatives.

I am certain that CWS does a great deal of good. But in fiscal year 2008-9, it also sent over $2 million to unspecified recipients in the Middle East (grants outside the US are not listed in detail on the form 990), and spent about $3 million on ‘education and advocacy’ — including lobbying — on issues including ‘justice and peace-building’, climate change, hunger, refugees, immigration, etc.

Next time I feel like fighting hunger, I’ll make a donation to a local food pantry.

Technorati Tags: Church World Service