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This isn’t the first time this has happened, but it shocks me every time:

JERUSALEM (JTA) — A Jewish father and daughter were arrested for allegedly praying on the Temple Mount, according to reports.

An Arab policeman arrested the two visitors to the mount Wednesday morning as they were being shown around the site by a relative, who is a volunteer tour guide at the site.

David Kirschenbaum took his daughter to visit the Temple Mount on the day before her wedding, The Jerusalem Post reported. Kirschenbaum told the newspaper he was pointing out sites in Jerusalem from the site and police took his daughter’s nodding for praying.

Non-Muslims are not permitted to pray on the Temple Mount, including moving their lips in silent prayer.

How did this situation come to be? From 1948 to 1967 the Jordanian occupation forbade Jews to approach the area near the Temple Mount, or indeed to enter East Jerusalem. But in 1967, Israel recaptured East Jerusalem and, supposedly, made the holy places of all three religions accessible to all. So how can a clearly antisemitic — there’s no other word — policy be in effect on the Temple Mount?

Here is an explanation, written in 2000 when Ehud Barak offered some kind of sovereignty (the exact details are not clear) over the Temple Mount to Yasser Arafat — who, of course, rejected the offer and started the second intifada:

The roots of the current standoff, it would appear, lie in decisions made by defense minister Moshe Dayan immediately after the Six Day War. A few days after the message “the Temple Mount is in our hands” crackled through his earpiece, Dayan met with Moslem leaders at al-Aksa and promised, to the astonishment of the defeated Arabs, not to interfere in their administration of the site.

Dayan’s motives appear to have been twofold: to demonstrate the Jews’ respect for freedom of religion, and to avoid provoking the immense Moslem world, thereby immortalizing a conflict that many Jews believed would end shortly after Israel’s decisive victory on the battlefield.

Yet Dayan set two conditions. Rabble-rousing sermons against the Jews would be forbidden, he wrote in his autobiography, or “we would of course take appropriate action.”

In addition, Dayan wrote, “the one thing we would introduce was freedom of Jewish access without limitation or payment. This compound, as my hosts well knew, was our Temple Mount. Here stood our Temple during ancient times, and it would be inconceivable for Jews not to be able freely to visit this holy place now that Jerusalem was under our rule.”

Both of these conditions were quickly abandoned by Israeli authorities.

Later that summer, after IDF chaplain Rabbi Shlomo Goren led prayers on the mount during Tisha Be’av, authorities backtracked and reinstated the previous ban on Jewish worship on the mount.

“It was evident that if we did not prevent Jews from praying in what was now a mosque compound, matters would get out of hand and lead to a religious clash,” Dayan wrote.

What ensued was a tenuous modus vivendi that lasted for most of the next three decades. The Wakf was allowed to continue running affairs on top of the Temple Mount in coordination, to one extent or another, with Israeli police, while Jews prayed only at the Western Wall at the mount’s base. Jews were allowed to enter the mount like any other tourists, but “suspicious” individuals – known activists or anyone who looked like an Orthodox Jew – could enter only under Wakf and police guard, and were evicted if they appeared to be moving their lips in prayer. [my emphasis]

Here we have an absolutely perfect example, a paradigm case, of the West’s abject surrender of its vital interests to its enemies. Dayan may not have understood the consequences of his actions, but the truth is that  surrender for altruistic motives is nonetheless surrender, and it doesn’t matter if it happens after a military victory.

Dayan apparently did not understand, although he had been dealing with Arabs all of his life, that his generosity would not be repaid with respect. And apparently he didn’t think it was necessary to take a firm stand against intimidation by threats of violence. He let — invited — the camel’s nose under the tent, and today the tent is occupied by the camel.

Now it may be happening that Jewish Israelis are waking up to the fact that what their soldiers died for in 1967 can be lost forever, even without further wars.

Some secular Jews say “who cares, Jerusalem is full of anti-Zionist haredim, and the religious authorities are corrupt.” This is irrelevant. Even the most secular must understand that Jerusalem is the historical heart of the Jewish state and the Jewish people, and must not be given up in the hope of placating its truly implacable enemies.*

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* Note: for what it’s worth, this writer is not Orthodox. And yes, a woman was also arrested recently for praying at the Kotel with a tallit, and I was troubled by that arrest as well.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Jerusalem

Sometimes I find myself writing about Palestinian demands and Israeli responses in connection with plans for a ‘peace agreement’ which will bring about a ‘two-state solution’. I’ll say “how dare they insist on this or that” or “any agreement must include… blah, blah”.

This is a waste of time. The ‘two-state solution’ exists only in the minds of those who do not understand the actual players in this game, or the mouths of  those (like the Swedes) who see it as a way to weaken Israel. No Palestinian with the power to influence a decision wants a peaceful two-state solution or an end to the conflict — what they want is to gain an advantage in the long-term struggle with Israel.

My head is spinning from the doubletalk of the Europeans or the Obama administration, for example, in which they give lip service to Israel’s security while demanding that Israel sacrifice it to escalating Arab demands, and the doubletalk from Israel in which its leaders pretend to believe that peace is possible while trying to avoid giving up too much for nothing.

So could we please forget about Oslo, the Roadmap and all of the forty-two quintillion ‘solutions’ that have been proposed, all of which are premised on the idea that the Palestinian Arabs want to end the conflict if we can just find terms that they would accept. They don’t.

Let’s start asking what Israel can do that will lead to a state with defensible borders with as few Arabs as possible within them. Let’s try to find policies that won’t pit the national-religious part of the population against the army and police. Let’s do our best to keep terrorist murderers out of circulation, in jail or dead. Let’s return to the position that one never, ever negotiates with terrorists. Let’s stop supplying Hamas with electricity and other needs. Let’s end the incitement and the subversion of the state by foreign-funded NGOs.

You get the idea. Israel is the state of the Jewish people, the only one. It’s past time that the Palestinian Arabs give up the idea that it belongs to them and that they are going to get it. The Arabs have 22 or so much larger states in the Middle East; let them take care of their people and leave Israel to the Jews.

Israel is not a smaller version of the politically-correct US. Priority one has to be the survival of Israel as a Jewish state. Everything else, including the human rights of Palestinians or Arab residents of Israel, must be a lower priority. Yes, you heard right.

Suicide isn’t an option.

Technorati Tags: Israel

There was a popular book in the 1950’s called “The Ugly American”, which proposed that the US was losing ground in the struggle against Communism because of its arrogance and refusal to try to understand other cultures.

Today a great deal of ugliness comes from Europe. It includes an arrogant belief that they can continue to remake the map of the Mideast however they want, as they’ve done for the past several centuries, as well as a deliberate ignorance about the intentions of the players there.

News item:

Richard Goldstone, the South African jurist and author of a controversial UN report which accused Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes during the Israel Defense Forces’ military offensive in the Gaza Strip last winter, will receive the Stockholm Human Rights Award, it was announced on Thursday.

“Richard Goldstone has made an outstanding career in the promotion of the rule of law and human rights, first in his home country South Africa and during the last fifteen years in various highly prestigious international fora,” the International Legal Assistance Consortium, a Sweden-based umbrella group of non-governmental organizations which oversees the awarding of the prize, said on Thursday.

Someone — I’m sorry that I don’t recall who — said that they would have given him a Nobel, but he spoiled it by saying that ‘Palestinian armed groups’  (not even ‘Hamas’) “may be guilty of war crimes” along with Israel. And of course they needed to give it to Obama, for reasons not clear to anyone including the recipient.

Sweden is at the forefront of Israel-hatred in Europe. Its government refused to condemn the Aftonbladet organ-stealing slander, and it is the source of funding for many of the most biased NGOs.  So naturally Goldstone is a hero to them.

But far worse is a resolution recently introduced by Sweden to the Council of the EU to split Jerusalem and recognize ‘Palestine’ in all the territories formerly occupied by Jordan.

The Swedish draft resolution to the EU can be found here. It’s loaded with gems like this:

The European Union will not recognise any changes to the pre-1967 borders except those agreed by the parties.

In other words, the resolution gives all of Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem to the Palestinians by default unless they agree to let Israel keep any of it! Of course, literally it would belong to Jordan, but I’m sure they don’t intend that.

It says that East Jerusalem will be the capital of the Palestinian state. This implies that all of East Jerusalem will be under Palestinian sovereignty.

It also says nothing about the capital of Israel. So it’s imaginable that the Europeans could continue to maintain, as they — and the US — do today, that no part of Jerusalem belongs to Israel!

It also refers to the EU’s “bilateral relations with Palestine” despite the fact that there is no such state as ‘Palestine’.

The declaration stops short of calling for the entry of Arab refugees into Israel, but does refer to ‘all relevant UN resolutions’ and mentions the Arab Initiative, which are interpreted by the Arabs to imply this.

It calls for an “immediate and unconditional opening of [the Gaza] crossings,” while paying lip service to Israel’s security needs. It calls for Gilad Shalit’s release, but the word ‘Hamas’ does not appear anywhere in the text.

The Palestinians, of course are urging other EU states to support the resolution.  Interestingly, the Arab league is unimpressed, calling it ’empty words’.

One wonders why any of this is the Swedes’ or the Europeans’ business at all!

Courtesy of Dry Bones

Technorati Tags: Sweden, Israel, Goldstone, EU, Palestinians

Some thoughts about the settlement freeze:

1. It’s 100% clear that the freeze will not cause the Palestinian Authority (PA) to ‘come to the table’. They have already said that it is insufficient because it doesn’t include Jerusalem, doesn’t include construction already under way, etc.
2. However, once the principle is accepted that Israeli concessions without reciprocity from the Palestinians or other Arab nations are appropriate, pressure will increase for Israel to take the next step, and the next…
3. I don’t know if Obama Administration officials realized the degree and depth of opposition that Israel’s government would face from residents of Judea and Samaria. If they did, the imposition of the pointless freeze is a deliberate attempt to produce civil strife within the state of Israel — an act of aggression as blatant and more dangerous than a Qassam rocket. If they didn’t understand, why didn’t Netanyahu tell them?
4. If the freeze won’t bring negotiations closer — and anyway we know negotiations with the hard-line PA today would be fruitless — and it will create strife in Israel, is there any good it could do? Only improve the administration’s image in the Arab world. But even this won’t happen, because the Arabs see the ‘incomplete’ freeze as Obama being soft on Israel.
5. As I have written before, Judea and Samaria are not ‘Palestinian land’. They are at most ‘disputed territory’. So a building freeze that affects Jews and not Arabs is discriminatory.
6. The Roadmap calls for a settlement freeze as part of Phase I. It also calls for the Palestinians to stop incitement of hatred and terrorism against Israel, and for them to “[begin] sustained, targeted, and effective operations aimed at confronting all those engaged in terror and dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure.” Only after Phase I is complete can there be movement to Phases II and III. Perhaps it’s time to ask why the PA hasn’t met its responsibilities?
7. The justification for the freeze is that construction in the territories ‘prejudges’ the final outcome. But the freeze suggests an acceptance of the Palestinian demand for “every centimeter” of the area occupied by Jordan in 1949, something that even the Obama administration has opposed.

Technorati Tags: Israel, settlement freeze, Judea and Samaria, Palestinian Authority