Indyk: a Disastrous Choice for Mediator

From Word From Jerusalem, July 26, 2013, by Isi Leibler:


















Indyk: a Disastrous Choice for Mediator

The US State Department has floated a trial balloon to test the idea of former US Ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, serving as mediator in the forthcoming peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. It is not surprising that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has signaled his approval. What is incomprehensible is that Prime Minister Netanyahu has done likewise.

Unfortunately the prospect of genuine progress in the negotiations is extraordinarily slim. There is no evidence that the Palestinian Authority will compromise on a single issue. In the unlikely event that the weak, corrupt President Abbas does make even a single concession, his Fatah supporters will immediately topple him.

Nonetheless, an “honest broker” is essential to the process.

However, Martin Indyk is not that broker. His track record in presiding over previous peace negotiations indicates that if re-appointed, he will, in all probability, direct negotiations in a manner to ensure that Israel will be blamed for their failure.

Indyk has had an impressive political career. Educated in Australia, he moved to the US where he joined AIPAC and subsequently held executive positions at prestigious Washington, DC think-tanks (Executive Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Director of Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution). He also has assumed key political positions (Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs in the Clinton administration). After becoming a naturalized US citizen, President Clinton appointed him US Ambassador to Israel - the first foreign born and first Jew to hold the position. He served two terms, from April 1995 to September 1997 and from January 2000 to July 2001.

Indyk’s rise in the political arena has been ascribed to his talent of adjusting to the prevailing political climate of the Democratic leadership. When President Obama was elected, Indyk aligned himself with the new leader, and enthusiastically participated in Obama’s Israel-bashing and Netanyahu-snubbing. He was unsparing and, at times, vicious in his criticism of our Prime Minister, and laid the bulk of the blame on Netanyahu for the breakdown in Israeli-Palestinian relations.

He has moved further and further to the left as his career unfolded. He served as International Chair of the New Israel Fund, an organization that has repeatedly been castigated for funding rabid anti-Zionist and anti-Israel NGOs, including several organizations that compiled distorted and false information for the notorious Goldstone Report accusing the IDF of engaging in war crimes.

Aside from occasional lip service to their failings, Indyk became an aggressive apologist for the Palestinians and at one stage even identified himself with those defending Arafat’s rebuff of Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s extreme concessions at Camp David.

Indyk has made outrageous claims about Israel’s de-stabilizing effect on the Middle East, and the need for Israel’s to bend to the will of the United States, threatening, “If Israel is a superpower and does not need $3 billion in military assistance and protection, and [does not require] the efforts of the US to isolate and pressure Iran, then go ahead and do what you like. If you need the US, then you need to take American interests into account… Israel has to adjust its policy to the interest of the United States or there will be serious consequences.”

He has also made the obscene charge that it was Israeli intransigence that contributed to US military casualties in Afghanistan, accusing Israel of endangering “a vital security interest of the United States.” The “intransigence” he was alluding to was the settlement construction then taking place in Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.

He stooped even lower when he stated that Prime Minister Netanyahu should take into account that President Obama was obliged to write 30-40 condolence letters a week. To climax his antagonistic attitude towards Israel, in 2010 Indyk publicly urged Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli government to cede the Golan Heights to Syria.

Indyk frequently invokes the memory of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who he refers to as “Israel’s greatest strategic thinker.” But Rabin would have undoubtedly rejected an American spokesman or diplomat with the chutzpah to make the demands on Israel as made by Indyk. He would have dismissed him for his lack of respect for Israel’s sovereignty and his treatment of it as a vassal state. Certainly, Rabin would never have endorsed Indyk’s calls to divide Jerusalem and to make unilateral territorial concessions.

Most of us continue to dream of peace. However, we recognize that with the current chaos and violence in the region, the likelihood of moving forward with a peace “partner” who sanctifies murder and engages in vicious incitement is almost a mirage. Yet to demonstrate our commitment to leave no stone unturned in our desire for peace, we have succumbed to pressure and unfortunately compromised the rights of terror victims and their families, by releasing hundreds of mass murderers as a “goodwill gesture” to sit at the negotiating table.

Yet the extraordinary lengths to which we will go for the sake of peace will not move us forward if the US mediator is an American Jew, whose recent track record is indistinguishable from that of J Street in seeking to pressure Israel to make unilateral concessions. That such a politically jaundiced Jew is being proposed for this role is cause for grave concern.

Prime Minister Netanyahu would be well advised to bite the bullet now and resist pressure to accept Indyk as mediator. Otherwise, we will once again be accused of intransigency and inflexibility, if not the cause of an upsurge in violence that President Abbas has already threatened should his demands go unmet.

Europe wages war on Israel: How the Jewish state must respond

From Jewish World Review July 26, 2013, By Caroline B. Glick: 

This week the EU took three steps that together prove Europe's ill-intentions towards the Jewish state. 
First, last Friday the EU announced it is imposing economic sanctions on Israel. The sanctions deny EU funds to Israeli entities with an address beyond the 1949 armistice lines. They also deny EU funds to Israeli entities countrywide that carry out activities beyond the 1949 armistice lines. The areas beyond the 1949 armistice lines delineated by the EU directive include the Gaza Strip, which Israel abandoned eight years ago; the Golan Heights, which has been under Israeli sovereignty since 1981; eastern, northern, and southern Jerusalem, which have been under Israeli sovereignty since 1967; and Judea and Samaria, over which Israel has shared governance with the PLO since 1994 in accordance with signed agreements witnessed by EU representatives. 
The EU's second action was the publication Tuesday of EU foreign policy commissioner Catherine Ashton's letter to her fellow commissioners informing them that by the end of the year, the EU will publish binding requirements for specially labeling Israeli goods produced by Jews beyond the 1949 armistice lines exported to EU member states. This act is potentially more damaging for Israel than the ban on transferring EU monies to Israeli entities with "bad" addresses. Labeling Israeli products is a means of signaling Europeans consumers that they should view all Israeli exports as morally inferior to other goods and wage a consumer boycott of Israeli products. Indeed, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius described the proposed labeling as an alternative to a broader boycott of all Israeli goods. 
The EU's third act was its decision to define Hezbollah's "military wing" as a terrorist organization, but leave all the other Hezbollah-related institutions untouched. While the move has been applauded by Israeli politicians desperate to deny Europe's animosity, Europe's partial designation of Hezbollah as a terrorist entity is another act of aggression against Israel. By pretending that Hezbollah has a legitimate "political wing" — a transparent lie that even Hezbollah has denied — the EU ensures that Hezbollah personnel and Hezbollah institutions can continue to find safe haven in Europe so long as the avoid attacking non-Jewish Europeans. Hezbollah agents can continue raising money, planning attacks, and recruiting terrorists in Europe, as long as Hezbollah labels the activities "political." In other words, all Hezbollah operations directed against Israel and Jews will remain lawful in Europe. 

Beyond exposing the EU's fundamental and obsessive hostility towards the Jewish state, these three actions put paid the EU's protestations of allegiance to international law and commitment to bringing about peace between the Palestinians and Israel. 

As Ambassador Alan Baker, the former legal advisor to the Foreign Ministry, wrote in an article published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the EU's actions against Israeli entities that operate beyond the 1949 armistice lines are unsupported by international law. The EU's claim that Israel's presence beyond the 1949 armistice lines is unlawful is not supported by any treaties or customs. Indeed, it is explicitly refuted by treaties and customs. Israel's legal rights to sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem are recognized under the law of nations through the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which also called for "close Jewish settlement" of these areas. The Mandate's allocation of sovereign rights over all of these areas to the Jewish people, and its recognition of the Jews as the indigenous people of the areas, has not been abrogated by any subsequent treaty. To the contrary, they were reinforced by Article 80 of the UN Charter. Moreover, as Baker noted, the EU wrongly claims that Jewish communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines are illegal under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention from 1949. But authoritative interpretations of Article 49 make clear that Article 49 does not apply to such communities. The lines the EU points to as Israel's legal border were never borders and never legal. The 1949 armistice lines, which the EU falsely refers to as the 1967 borders, represent nothing more than the lines at which Israeli forces halted the invading armies of Arab states who illegally assaulted the nascent Jewish state at its birth on May 15, 1948. The armistice agreements explicitly stated the armistice lines lack all legal significance in terms of claims of parties to lands beyond the lines. Finally, as Baker noted, the EU itself repeatedly supported UN resolutions and international agreements that recognize the legality of Israel's continued control and civilian presence in the areas. As a consequence, its own actions contradict its claim that Israel's presence and the presence of Israeli civilian communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines are illegal.
Beyond its unsubstantiated legal claims against Israel, both in its intention to label Israeli products and in its actions related to Hezbollah, the EU itself is acting in violation of international law. The EU's intention to label Israeli products involves the imposition of trade barriers in contravention of the World Trade Organization's legally binding rules. By allowing Hezbollah to continue to operate in the EU, the EU is in violation of binding UN Security Council Resolution 1373 from 2001 that prohibits the use of member states' territory for the benefit of terrorist groups.

 Justice Minister Tzipi Livni called the EU's imposition of economic sanctions a "resounding wake-up call," adding, "I hope that now all those who thought it is possible to continue with the freeze [in the peace talks with the PLO] will understand that we have to act to open negotiations, because this is the only way to protect Israel's general interests." This view, which is the official view of the Left, is based on a complete denial of reality. 

The EU announced its sanctions on the very same day US Secretary of State John Kerry announced he had convinced the PLO to return to peace talks with Israel. The confluence of these events could not demonstrate more clearly that the EU's diplomatic onslaught against Israel has nothing to do with the conduct of negotiations with the PLO. If the EU's chief interest was bringing Israel and the PLO to the negotiating table, Brussels would be sanctioning the Palestinians who have refused to negotiate with Israel since 2008. 

By levying sanctions the EU does not seek to advance the cause of peace. It hopes to coerce Israel into abandoning its legitimate historic claims as the indigenous people of the land of Israel to the lands allocated to the Jewish people under international law by the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. It hopes to coerce Israel into surrendering its right to defensible borders and voluntarily transform itself into an indefensible strategic basket case wholly dependent on the goodwill of outside powers for is survival. The question is what can Israel do about it? Were Israel to fight fire with fire and levy counter sanctions on European goods it would be entering an economic war that it would lose and therefore has every interest in avoiding. But Israel's inability to respond in kind to European aggression does not mean it is without options. 

Europe is using economic sanctions to expand its political power over Israeli decision-makers. So Israel should act to diminish Europe's political power in Israel. The EU itself told Israel how to go about doing this in Paragraph 15 of the sanctions directive.. It reads, "The requirements [banning the transfer of EU funds to Israeli entities operating beyond the 1949 armistice lines]… do not apply to activities which, although carried out in the territories . . . aim at benefiting protected persons under the terms of international humanitarian law who live in these territories [i.e., the Palestinians] and/or at promoting the Middle East peace process in line with EU policy." In other words, Israeli NGOs that receive EU assistance are exempt from the financing ban if they commit to undermining Israel's rights in the area. As the EU sees it, NGOs who receive EU money are EU agents, advancing European goals in the domestic Israeli arena, and as such should be exempted from the EU's economic sanctions.
In a 2010 meeting with US diplomats leaked by Wikileaks, Jessica Montell, the Executive Director of the Israeli registered pro-Palestinian pressure group B'Tselem effectively admitted that her organization would cease to exist without European funding. According to the protocol of the meeting, Montell, "estimated her 9 million NIS ($2.4 million) budget is 95 percent funded from abroad, mostly from European countries." 

To stem the momentum of Europe's new economic war, Israel's first response to the EU's sanctions must swift passage in the Knesset of a law requiring all Israeli entities who agree to operate under the EU's funding guidelines to register as foreign agents and report all EU contributions. Those contributions should be taxed at the highest corporate tax rate. 

EU officials have stated repeatedly that they seek to undermine Israeli control over Area C. Area C is the area of Judea and Samaria, where in accordance with agreements signed between the PLO and Israel, Israel exercises most civil and military authorities. The EU is funding projects in Area C whose stated goal is to make it impossible over time for Israel to assert its authority over the area. 

Israel's second response to the EU's announcement of economic sanctions on Israeli economic activity in Judea and Samaria should be to suspend all EU projects in Area C.

Future EU projects should be subject to intense scrutiny by the Civil Administration. Israel's default position should be to reject, rather than approve such requests, given their hostile intent. 

Finally, EU peacekeeping forces from Gaza to Lebanon to Syria have repeatedly proven not only their cowardice, but their willingness to act in ways that endanger Israel in order to protect themselves. In Gaza, EU border guards fled to Israel following Hamas's takeover of the area in 2007. Along the border with Syria Austrian peacekeepers fled at the first sign of trouble leaving Israel to deal with Syrian breaches of the European-sanctioned 1974 disengagement agreement by itself. European forces in UNIFIL in Lebanon have signed protection agreements with Hezbollah where in exchange for European forces' turning a blind eye to Hezbollah's illegal use of civilian infrastructures as military installations, Hezbollah has promised not to murder European forces. 
Given this track record, Israel should bar European forces from further participation in armed forces in Israel.
To this end, Israel should allow the mandate of the European-dominated Temporary International Presence in Hebron to expire when it next comes up for review. The TIPH, which has been deployed to the city since 1994, is comprised of forces from Denmark, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey. 

Israel has for years been operating under the misguided belief that the EU would eventually come around and side with Israel against its enemies. This belief has been informed by equal doses of innocence and wishful thinking.

The EU's decision to initiate an economic war against the Jewish state forces Israel to abandon its long-held illusions.

Israel has options for responding forcefully to Europe's aggression. If judiciously and firmly employed, these responses can diminish the Europeans' interest in escalating this economic war, by denying them the political victory they seek.

Legal Experts Tell Ashton: Cancel the EU Boycott

From Arutz Shiva, 22 July 2013, by Elad Benari:

Judea and Samaria is not occupied territory, therefore the EU ban on it should be lifted, legal experts tell Catherine Ashton.

Catherine Ashton

AFP photo

Hundreds of legal experts from Israel and around the world plan to appeal to European Union Foreign Affairs Commissioner Catherine Ashton and ask her to annul the EU's plan to impose financial sanctions on Israeli institutions operating beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines...

The experts are noting that the decision does not have a legal basis, because, they argue, Judea and Samaria is not occupied territory in the legal sense of the term.

On Friday, the European Commission ratified a resolution stating that the EU will no longer be party to any economic, social or academic ventures involving Israeli institutions based in Judea and Samaria, eastern Jerusalem or the Golan Heights.

The appeal, which was declared on Saturday, is led by former Israeli Ambassador to Canada Alan Baker, who now serves as head of the International Action Division at the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel.

Other signatories include former Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman and top jurists and international law experts Professor Eliav Shochetman and Professor Talia Einhorn, according to Israel Hayom.

The appeal...urges the European Commission to rescind its directive, arguing it is "based on misguided and legally flawed assumptions about the status of the Israeli settlements and the validity of the 1967 lines as Israel's borders.

"The EU's definition of Judea and Samaria as 'Palestinian territories' or 'occupied territories' is devoid of any legal or factual merit. The area was never defined as such [under international law] and therefore the EU's continuous use of this terminology undermines the negotiations for a permanent [peace] deal. … The EU's perception of the Israeli settlements' illegality stems from various different interpretations of international law," the signatories note.

The Israeli lawyers further state that the EU's constant use of the term "1967 borders" is also devoid of legal merit, as the ceasefire agreement of 1949 between Israel and its Arab neighbors stipulates that the cease-fire lines cannot be construed as international borders.

The appeal argues that UN Resolution 242, which bars the forceful annexation of land, and UN Resolution 338, which ratified the 1973 Yom Kippur War ceasefire, both mandate the negotiation of peace in the Middle East in a manner that would create "safe and secure borders for all states," as well as devise a just solution for all refugees, Jews and Arab alike.

"...Commissioner Ashton cannot simply dismiss the legal opinion of hundreds of international law experts," Baker said...

"Our rights in these territories are very clear, as is the legitimate status of the settlements. This boycott is a regrettable step and it only stands to hurt the Palestinians and the world," Baker said.

Baker is the former legal adviser of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and one of the authors of the Levy Report, which concluded that there is no “occupation” and international law allows Jews to live in Judea and Samaria, as its status was not that of a nation in 1967 when the areas were liberated by Israel. The report was presented to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu last summer after months of study by former High Court Justice Edmund Levy, Baker, and a third legal expert....

Ahead of Peace Talks, PA’s Fatah Honors Terrorist Responsible for 61 Murders

 From Algemeiner, July 25, 2013, by Zach Pontz:  

Terrorist Abdallah Barghouti's glorification on official Fatah Facebook page. Photo: PMW.

With the start of peace talks in Washington between Israel and the Palestinian Authority less than a week away, PA political party Fatah, headed by President Mahmoud Abbas, glorified terrorist Abdallah Barghouti  as a “brave prisoner.”
On the official Facebook page of the Enlistment and Organization Commission of Fatah, the party glorified five of the suicide bombings that Barghouti prepared explosives for and which killed 61 “Zionists,” Palestinian Media Watch reported on Thursday.
The terrorist was honored as a “brave prisoner” and his attacks were described as “self-sacrificing activity” and “Martyrdom-seeking operations,”a Palestinian euphemism for suicide bombings.
Barghouti is serving 67 life sentences in Israel for preparing explosives for terror attacks in which 67 people were murdered:

• Sbarro restaurant (15 killed, Aug. 9, 2001),
• Sheffield Club (15 killed, May 7, 2002),
• Moment Café (11 killed, March 9, 2002),
• triple attack at Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall (11 killed, Dec. 1, 2001),
• Hebrew University (9 killed, July 1, 2002), and
• Bus 4 in Tel Aviv (6 killed, Sept. 19, 2002).

The full text from Fatah’s Facebook page is posted below (courtesy of PMW):

“The brave prisoner, Abdallah Barghouti, who has the longest [prison] sentence in the history of the Palestinian cause”

Text on photo:

“The free prisoner Abdallah Barghouti
Personal information:
Born in Kuwait in 1972.
Married and father of one son and two daughters: Osama, Tala and Safa.
Studied electrical engineering in South Korea.

Date of arrest: March 5, 2003.
His self-sacrificing activity: Planning a series of Martyrdom-seeking operations (i.e., suicide terror attacks) during 2000-2003:

- The Sbarro restaurant operation in Jerusalem which killed 15 Zionists
- The Moment Café operation which killed 11 Zionists
- The Sheffield Night Club operation which killed 15 Zionists
- The Hebrew University operation which killed 9 Zionists
- The Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall operation which killed 11 Zionists

Prison sentence: 67 life sentences.
Recipient of the longest [prison] sentence in the history of the Palestinian issue.”

- [Official Facebook page of the Enlistment and Organization]

The poverty of boycotting Israel

From an article published Jul. 25, 2013, by Qanta Ahmed*:

Those calling for an academic boycott of Israel not only show the depth to which anti-Israel bias is now entrenched in our ivory towers; they show their ignorance about the boycott's major victims: Israel's minorities, its Arab Muslims and Christians.

As a woman, a Muslim and as a physician of Pakistani descent, I can attest personally to the inordinate importance of academic freedom in Britain and the United States. This freedom was extended to me even during the time I was practicing medicine in Saudi Arabia, where - like all women – I was subject to gender apartheid. Because of this experience, I can only see the closing of the academic mind in the form of the ‘academic boycott’ of Israeli citizens and institutions as the act of invertebrate hypocrites. Boycotting Israel, whether academic or cultural is not an act of moral indignation, but an act of moral turpitude.

Academic freedom builds relationships, tolerance, and opportunity. When I moved to Riyadh 15 years ago, I had no doubts about maintaining my professional relationship with my own Jewish American mentor who had guided me throughout my then early career.

While I lived and worked in a country where as a Muslim I could worship but my mentor and his coreligionists could not, I was given every opportunity to develop in the American academic space because of his intellectual generosity. While I was subject to legislated male supremacy and relegated to being a legal minor, no Western academic suggested boycotting the medical academe hosting me in the Kingdom.

Academic freedom was in fact my only freedom at the time and I was determined to share it. I connected my Saudi colleagues - leading Saudi Muslim academics - with my mentor which led to the publication of jointly-authored papers on patient care in the Arab Gulf, benefiting primarily Muslim patients. This work sowed the seeds for subsequent conferences where both my Saudi Muslim and American Jewish colleagues met and developed their own relationships.

In contrast, boycotting Israeli entities penalizes apolitical individuals, their institutions, their innovations and ultimately, stymies a global market of ideas which benefits humanity. Perhaps it's possible to make a more generous assessment of why the various scholars, writers and entertainers who call for a boycott of 'apartheid Israel' claim to act in the interests of Palestinians: That it's based on simple ignorance. They would certainly be wiser if they had had the same opportunity that I recently enjoyed when I visited Israel to meet Israeli academia, and – critically – examined how such a boycott, whether overt or covert, particularly damages Israeli Arabs, or Palestinian citizens of Israel.

I spoke to Arab Muslim undergraduates at Haifa's Technion University during my visit in May this year. Arab undergraduates (most of whom are Muslim with a smaller Christian representation) lead a program to remove barriers to success of fellow Arab undergraduates there. Professor Daoud Bshouty, Dean of Undergraduate Studies (and both Israel’s and Technion's first Christian Arab faculty member) and Sara Katzir, former Israeli Airforce officer and head of the Beatrice Weston Unit for the Advancement of Students, explained the origin of the program, joined by Assistant Professor Youseff Jabareen, an Arab Israeli Muslim graduate, and the Muslim undergraduate Maysoun Hindawi, who related their own experiences as minorities.

When, eight years ago, the Technion examined their own data, they were dismayed to find a high drop-out rate amongst Arab undergraduates, even though they had met the rigorous entry criteria to a university consistently rated amongst the top three science institutes in the world. This was an untenable loss of intellectual talent for the university and in their mind, for Israel.

Since then, the Beatrice Weston Unit for the Advancement of Students has developed one-on-one peer mentorship by and for Israeli Arab undergraduates, with men mentoring men and women mentoring women in view of the cultural sensitivities. The program was funded by Jewish American philanthropists intent on serving all sectors of Technion’s students, majority and minority alike.

In the program, Technion students run after-class tutorials to help each other keep pace with the rapid absorption of knowledge required; sometimes, student mentors intervene in family dilemmas to advocate on behalf of a fellow student to his distressed family. They do so by mediating between student and parents struggling to resolve traditional cultural mores with the demands of advanced education. They render personal counseling on these and other adjustment difficulties, concentration and learning difficulties and the challenges of making vocational choices.

In less than a decade, the Weston Advancement Unit has improved the Technion’s Israeli Arab undergraduate retention rate by over 50 percent, with more gains likely. But The Technion’s support extends beyond their undergraduates. Many Israeli Arabs attend Arabic medium schools, so the move to the Hebrew-language university is a significant challenge. In response, candidates identified as Technion material are given intense year-long programs preparing them (and their Hebrew) – developed by the university itself.

Dumbfounded, I asked why an institution, supposedly pitiless when it comes to academic competition, would devote energies to empower the disadvantaged? Surely academia was the base evolutionary battle of our times: “survival of the fittest”? After all, Technion is affectionately known by its faculty and students as “The City with No Pity’ (referring to Technion’s purist, hardcore meritocracy).

“We have a moral obligation to develop everyone who enters the Technion, because we must nurture scientific ability. It is our responsibility," Katzir told me. The advancement program has been so effective at closing disparity gaps that it has now been rolled out across the institute and offered to every Technion undergrad who needs it, minority or not. After winning national awards, this program is being emulated at other Israeli institutions at government request.

There are also life experience and leadership gaps that need to be overcome for minority students. At the Technion, Maysoun explained, Arab Muslim students are often the first in their families -sometimes in generations - to enter higher education, and, in the case of women, may be breaking stereotypical gender roles in conservative families who may not approve of a female student living on campus. Arab Muslim students must also overcome a leadership gap created by the military service that their Jewish peers have gone through. The program develops the leadership skills of its Israeli Arab Muslim undergraduates who direct many activities themselves, based on merit, not ‘quota’.

My Technion experience clarified for me how calls for academic boycott would particularly imperil the future of these Arab Israeli students and the progressive opportunities they are offered. The shockingly ignorant acquiescence to the widespread braying for boycott, now a socially acceptable sport eclipsing the spirit of academe, whether led by Stephen Hawking or others, reveals the depth to which anti-Israel bias is now entrenched in our ivory towers.

The reality is simple: Calling for an Israeli boycott invites no reprisals. It is more than socially acceptable; it is a badge of honor brandished by those claiming to defend ‘minorities’. Yet ironically, while the costs of boycott will be shouldered by every Israeli, the major costs will be born by Israel’s own minority population, including Israeli Muslims of Palestinian heritage. This is a population which is for the first time becoming highly educated, advancing in the workplace, collaborating with their fellow Israeli Jewish citizens and eager to enter the global marketplace of ideas. These Israeli Muslim Arabs are the keystones to lasting peace in the region. No one else is better positioned to bridge conflicts and cultures and yet no one else will be more penalized by boycott.

Academic freedom means the freedom to collaborate, the freedom to cooperate, the freedom to communicate, the freedom to investigate, and the freedom to know the other. Isolating Israelis imposes upon all of us outside of Israel the worst kind of self-isolation, one which denies our engagement not only with the richly intellectual and extraordinarily productive Israeli academic community but access to those minorities facing the greatest challenges in Israel. The boycott flattens the painstakingly earned, inch-by-inch progress towards coexistence within and outside Israel; and coexistence is surely the primary step towards regional peace. At this discouraging time of increasing academic and cultural siege, every thoughtful academic should join me in lending their name and their reputation to fighting the boycott.

*Qanta Ahmed MD is the author of In the Land of Invisible Women (2008), a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow in Science and Religion and Associate Professor of Medicine, State University of New York. Follow her on Twitter @MissDiagnosis.

PA minister equates negotiations to medieval pact made to be broken

From The Times of Israel, July 22, 2013, by Elhanan Miller:

Mahmoud Habbash, in sermon attended by Abbas, echoes notorious comments made by Arafat in 1994

 

Palestinian Religious Endowments Minister Mahmoud Habbash

(photo credit: Issam Rimawi/Flash90)        

 

A Palestinian minister likened negotiations with Israel to a medieval agreement signed between the Prophet Muhammad and his political rivals in Mecca, which he violated two years after signing, Palestinian Media Watch revealed on Monday.

During last Friday’s sermon — attended by PA President Mahmoud Abbas and broadcast on national Palestinian television — Religious Endowments Minister Mahmoud al-Habbash blasted “Hamas’s impulsive adventure,” praising the leadership wisdom of the PLO that led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority and the international recognition of Palestinian statehood.                 

Habbash then compared the decision of the PA leadership to negotiate with Israel to the agreement of the Prophet Muhammad on a 10-year truce with his rivals in the Quraish tribe of Mecca, known as the Treaty of Hudaibiya, reached in the year 628 CE.

“The hearts of the Prophet’s companions burnt with anger and fury … this is not disobedience [of God's command], it is politics. It is crisis management, conflict management … in less than two years, based on this treaty, the Prophet returned and conquered Mecca. This is the example. It is the model.”

Habbash’s sermon mirrored the incendiary historical comparison by deceased PA president Yasser Arafat in a Johannesburg mosque on May 10, 1994, where he compared the Oslo Accords to Hudaibiya.

“This agreement, I am not considering it more than the agreement which had been signed between our prophet Muhammad and Quraish,” Arafat told his audience, unaware that his speech was being recorded.

Habbash’s statements reflected a predominant atmosphere of skepticism within the Palestinian leadership towards renewed talks with Israel. Presidential Spokesman Nabil Abu Rdeneh and PLO Executive Council Secretary Yasser Abed Rabbo have both claimed in recent days that no Palestinian decision has yet been taken to resume negotiations.

On Monday, Fatah official and veteran negotiator Nabil Shaath joined the two, telling Ma’an news agency that even preliminary talks in Washington depend on the Americans fulfilling a Palestinian demand, which he refused to specify.

“If the Americans agree, we will move to the next step, which is preliminary negotiations in Washington to explore the rules and terms of reference,” Shaath told Ma’an.

Fractured Islamism's Likely Doom

From Israel Hayom, 23 July 2013, Daniel Pipes:                       As recently as 2012, it appeared that Islamists could overcome their many internal dissimilarities -- sectarian (Sunni, Shiite), political (monarchical, republican), tactical (political, violent), or attitudes toward modernity (Salafi, Muslim Brotherhood) -- and cooperate. In Tunisia, for example, Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood types found common ground. Differences between all these groups were real but secondary, as I put it then, because "all Islamists pull in the same direction, toward the full and severe application of Islamic law (the Shariah)." This sort of cooperation still persists in small ways, as shown by a recent meeting between a member of Turkey's ruling party and the head of a Salafi organization in Germany. But Islamists have in recent months abruptly and overwhelmingly thrown themselves at each others' throats. Islamists still constitute a single movement who share similar supremacist and utopian goals, but they also have different personnel, ethnic affiliations, methods, and philosophies. Islamist internecine hostilities have flared up in many other Muslim-majority countries. Sunni vs. Shia tensions can be seen in Turkey vs. Iran, also due to different approaches to Islamism; in Lebanon, where it's Sunni vs. Shiite Islamists and Sunni Islamists vs. the army; Sunni vs. Shiite Islamists in Syria; Sunni vs. Shiite Islamists in Iraq; Sunni Islamists vs. Shiites in Egypt; and Houthis vs. Salafis in Yemen. More often, however, members of the same sect fight each other: Khamenei vs. Ahmedinejad in Iran; the AKP vs. the Gülenists in Turkey; Asaib Ahl al-Haq vs. Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq; monarchy vs. the Muslim Brotherhood in Saudi Arabia; Islamic Liberation Front vs. the Nusra Front  in Syria; Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood vs. Hamas regarding hostilities toward Israel; Muslim Brotherhood vs. the Salafis in Egypt; and a clash of two leading ideologues and politicians, Omar al-Bashir vs. Hassan al-Turabi, in the Sudan. In Tunisia, the Salafis (called Ansar al-Sharia) are fighting the Muslim Brotherhood-style organization (called Ennahda). Seemingly minor differences can take on a complex quality. Just try to follow a Beirut newspaper's arcane account of hostilities in the northern Lebanese town of Tripoli: "Clashes between the various Islamist groups in Tripoli, divided between the March 8 and March 14 political movements, are on the rise. … Since the assassination of March 14 figure and intelligence chief Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Hasan in October, disputes between Islamist groups in Tripoli have been heading toward a major conflagration, particularly following the killing of Sheikh Abdel-Razzaq Asmar, an official from the Islamic Tawhid Movement, just hours after Hasan's death. The sheikh was shot dead … during an armed clash that erupted when supporters of Kanaan Naji, an independent Islamist figure associated with the National Islamist Gathering, attempted to take over the headquarters of the Islamic Tawhid Movement." This pattern of fracturing brings to mind the 1950s divisions of pan-Arab nationalists. They aspired to unify all Arabic-speaking peoples, as the expression then went, "From the [Atlantic] ocean to the [Persian] gulf." However appealing the dream, its leaders fell out as the movement grew in power, dooming pan-Arab nationalism to the point that it eventually collapsed under the weight of kaleidoscopic and ever-more minute clashes. These included: Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt vs. the Baath parties ruling in Syria and Iraq. The Syrian Baath party vs. the Iraqi Baath party. The Sunni Syrian Baathists vs. the Alawi Syrian Baathists The Jadidist Alawi Syrian Baathists vs. the Assadist Alawi Syrian Baathists. And so on. In fact, every effort at forming an Arab union failed -- in particular the United Arab Republic between Egypt and Syria (1958-1961) but also lesser attempts such as the Arab Federation (1958), the United Arab States (1958-1961), the Federation of Arab Republics (1972-1977), the Syrian domination of Lebanon (1976-2005), and the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait (1990-1991). Reflecting deep Middle East patterns, dissension among Islamists likewise prevents them from working together. As the movement surges, as its members approach power and actually rule, its cracks become increasingly divisive. Rivalries papered over when Islamists languish in the opposition emerge when they wield power. Should the fissiparous tendency hold, the Islamist movement is doomed, like fascism and communism, to be no more than a civilizational threat inflicting immense damage but never prevailing. This possible limit on Islamist power, which became visible only in 2013, offers grounds for optimism but not for complacency. Even if things look brighter than a year ago, trends can quickly turn around again. The long and difficult job of defeating Islamism remains ahead.

Israel’s Latest Strike: A Renewed Warning to Rogue Regimes

From FrontPage Magazine, July 23, 2013, by Ari Lieberman:

A mysterious explosion that rocked Syria’s embattled port city of Lakatia on July 5 has generated a storm of reports pointing the finger at Israel. If true, it would mark the fourth such strike of its kind this year.
In January, Israeli warplanes struck a Syrian chemical and biological weapons research facility as well as a Syrian military convoy transporting sophisticated SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles bound for Hezbollah.
And in May, the Israelis launched two additional strikes that resulted in the destruction of long-range, Iranian-made surface-to-surface Fateh-110 missiles (or possibly the Syrian variant, the M-600), which were slated to be delivered to Hezbollah.
According to reports, The Israelis targeted a facility that stored some fifty advanced Russian Yakhont P-800 anti-ship cruise missiles. In addition to posing a threat to Israeli shipping lanes, the missiles could have also been deployed against Israeli offshore gas drilling platforms. The recently discovered Tamar, Leviathan and Tanin gas fields off Israel’s coastline has instantly transformed the once energy-starved Jewish State into a major energy player. Lebanon, at Hezbollah’s instigation, has challenged Israel’s superior maritime claims, and the possibility of the Yakhont falling into the hands of Hezbollah represents a nightmare scenario for regional stability. The missiles also pose a threat to Western ships seeking to resupply Syrian rebels or trying to enforce arms interdiction.

The only regional player capable of executing such a complex, precision operation is Israel and the Israelis have repeatedly stated that they would never tolerate the transfer of game-changing weaponry to Hezbollah or other terrorist groups. The Yakhont missile, with its long range, sophisticated guidance system, versatility and large warhead, clearly represents such a game-changing weapon.

RT, citing “reliable sources,” reported that the Israelis struck from a secret military base in Turkey, but such a scenario is highly unlikely and logistically unnecessary. Israel’s three previous strikes did not utilize Turkish resources and a 2007 Israeli strike against a Syrian nuclear facility near the northern Syrian provincial city of Deir el-Zor was similarly devoid of any willing Turkish participation. Moreover, despite Israeli efforts to soothe relations, Turkey’s Islamist leaders, who have accused Jews of fomenting the Gezi Park demonstrations, have shown no interest in reciprocating the goodwill, making the RT story that much more far-flung.
More likely is the claim that the attack was carried out by fighter bombers taking off from Israeli airbases or by a Dolphin Class submarine capable of approaching Syria’s shoreline undetected and firing a variety of cruise missiles. Regardless of how the attack was carried out, both Israel and Syria are keeping mum. While Israel neither confirmed nor denied involvement, Syria went out of its way to deny any Israeli involvement. Any acknowledgement by the Syrians of Israeli involvement would back Assad into a corner and would place enormous pressure on the dictator to respond and that would be the last thing his beleaguered regime needed.
Realpolitik notwithstanding, Israel, by its daring raid, has sent a clear message to Syria, Iran and Hezbollah and, to a lesser extent, Hamas, that it will not sit idly by while its interests are threatened. The four known raids that Israel has carried out this year against Syria as well as the 2007 strike near Deir el-Zor and multiple strikes executed against Sudan, the latest of which occurred in October 2012, should serve as an ominous warning to Iran that its WMD facilities are potentially on Israel’s “to do” list.

Germany backs away from EU settlement directives

From JPost, 20 July 2013, by BENJAMIN WEINTHAL:

Merkel's Bundestag spokesman says guidelines are "pure ideology and symbolic politics," and will not help peace.

Germany distances itself from the "controversial European Union guidelines" banning cooperation with Israeli entities beyond the Green Line, a foreign policy spokesman in the Bundestag announced on Friday. In a statement issued by MP Philipp Missfedler, the Bundestag spokesman for German chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party and its coalition partner the Bavarian Christian Social Union, he stated the guidelines are “pure ideology and symbolic politics” and will not contribute to finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Missfelder stated it is encouraging that the Federal Government has moved away from the new EU directives, which declared that from January 1 2014, Israeli projects in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights will no longer be given European Union financial backing. He added that the European regulations are not “objective requirements” because over the last seven years of the approximately 800 million Euros of financial aid from Brussels to Israel, only 0.5% was funneled into projects covering the disputed territories. “Israel is the recognized administrative power in the territories without which approved development projects like solar energy or sewage works could not be installed," Missfelder stated. He continued that an implementation of the new EU guidelines could mean an “end of research cooperation with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem because some of their academics have an address in East Jerusalem." It is unclear if the German position will reverse the EU action and lead to backtracking among other countries within the 28 member EU body. Missfelder said the EU guidelines have a similar quality to the recent legislative initiative of the Green Party in the Bundestag to label products from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The Green Party legislative initiative also fails to contribute to a” constructive solution of the conflict in the Palestinian territories,” said Missfelder. He added that "instead of issuing statements hostile to Israel, the Green Party faction should concentrate on a solution to the essential questions of the Middle East conflict: Israel’s right to exist, an end to terrorism and fundamentalist violence, as well as the creation of a foundation for a two state solution, with final borders for both states.” Missfelder’s disavowal of the product labeling measure appears to contradict Germany’s Ambassador to Israel, Andreas Michaelis, who defended in a June Jerusalem Post opinion article labeling Israeli products made in the West Bank. “EU consumer protection law sets very detailed requirements for retail labeling.They exist to provide a level playing field for trade across Europe and to inform consumers on the origin of products,” wrote Michaelis. Jewish organizations such as the Wiesenthal Center and the prominent German-Jewish journalist Henryk M.Broder declared the product labeling measure to be a de-facto boycott of Israeli merchandise, which recalls the Hitler movement’s boycott of Jewish businesses. Michaelis, however, wrote, “Neither are we in the business of calling for boycotts.” The German Greens have come under fire because of their aggressive legislative push to label Israeli products. The Neo-Nazi NPD party issued a similar demarcation measure to the Green Party in a East German state legislature last year. The Green party deputy Kerstin Müller played a critical role in the initiative targeting Israeli settlement products. She is slated to take over the reins of the German Green Party’s Heinrich Böll foundation office in Tel Aviv later this year. “Obviously, a person who played a leading role in this initiative is uniquely unsuitable to represent the Böll Foundation in Israel, but perhaps they have an opening available in Ramallah,” Efraim Zuroff , the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office, told the Jerusalem Post last month. Müller has faced intense criticism over the last three years from Germany’s Jewish community. The Central Council of Jews in Germany said in 2010 Müller displays an “intolerably paternalistic tone” toward Israel and toward Jews in Germany. That year, she supported an anti-Israel parliamentary resolution and attacked the council in a letter because its leadership criticized the resolution. The resolution rebuked Israel for its interception of the Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara, which tried to break Israel’s legal blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. The head of the Berlin Jewish community, Dr. Gideon Joffe, said in June that Müller’s conduct is anti-Semitic because she singled out only the Jewish state for product labeling. ... Prof. Gerald Steinberg, from the Jerusalem-based watchdog group NGO Monitor, told the Post at the time that “The Heinrich Böll Foundation irresponsibly channels German taxpayer funds to some causes and organizations that promote political warfare against Israel." He cited the Greens support for “such radical Palestinian groups as the Applied Research Institute in Jerusalem.”...

Europe's sick obssession

From Arutz Sheva, Friday, July 19, 2013, by Tom Wilson*:

An analysis of the reasons for the constant preoccupation with the only democracy in the Middle East.
 

Most international observers will find unremarkable the latest round of European Union boycotts against the Settlements, that is to say any Jewish community that happens to find itself located over the briefly maintained 1949 armistice lines. This move sits neatly within an ongoing pattern of European hostility towards Jews living in a vast array of places, ranging from much of Israel’s capital Jerusalem to Judaism’s next most holy and arguably most ancient city, Hevron.

At times this ongoing fixation has appeared almost farcical. On the same day in May of last year that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas once again stated his refusal to return to the negotiating table, the European Union was seemingly too busy announcing the publication of yet another report on Settlements to even notice. While Palestinian intransigence remains unshakable European foreign policy analysts obsessively count and recount the number of Jews living in Israel’s disputed territories and meanwhile the rest of the region precariously hurtles from one crisis to the next.

...So what is it about Jerusalem and the "West Bank" that has so excited the Europeans?

True, the Zionist national revival in general sits squarely counter to the post-nationalist universalism of the European project and the progressive march towards the no doubt thrilling dream of world government that so many eurocrats already speak fondly of. Palestinian Arab nationalism, as aggressive and fiercely intolerant as it may well be, is of course dressed up as an anti-colonial civil rights movement, one to which Europeans enthusiastically lend their support, perhaps in the hope of redeeming themselves of their own history.

Europeans, it seems were less troubled by Israel in its early incarnation; secular, socialist and for the most part territorially confined to the Mediterranean coastal plain. They refused, however, to recognise any Israeli claim to a capital in even the most outlying western suburbs of Jerusalem. This city was, apparently, a problem for many Europeans. Could religiously charged Jerusalem lend biblical connotations to the new Jewish State they might have wondered.

Then in 1967 everything changed. In fending off its attackers not only did Israel establish its military preeminence in the region but now all of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, and the biblical heartlands of Judea and Samaria had fallen to Jewish Sovereignty. This was too much.
No Palestinian Arab State had been extinguished; Jordanian occupiers had simply been replaced by Israeli forces. Yet, the international community, seemingly previously untroubled by the Jordanian seizure of these areas, was clearly outraged by the Jewish presence there and from the UN the call immediately began for Israeli withdrawal.

The religious and historical significance of Jerusalem and the adjacent regions of Judea and Samaria have not been lost on the many Israelis who have made their homes there, yet this significance has also not been lost on other observers too. At any anti-Israel rally or meeting in Europe one can hear shrill speeches decrying the ‘Judaisation of Jerusalem’. A phrase uttered in genuine angst rather than with any sense of irony.  For Europeans have thrown off the now much resented influences of their own Churches and they lack the kind of Evangelical Christian Right that can be found in America. The notion then that anyone might take the Bible seriously enough to let it influence how they live their lives or...determine where they live, is a serious affront to the modern European mind.
Yet it gets worse.

The return of Jews and Jewish sovereignty to such religiously sensitive areas as Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria all begins to look horrifically like happenings envisaged by the Bible. For post-Judeo-Christian Europe it is difficult to overstate just how catastrophic it would be for anything to appear to give any kind of validation to biblical claims. Europeans have spent a century or more trying to free themselves of the frustrating limits that biblical morality placed on their appetites.

Whether they proclaim it openly or not, they are now akin to the more starkly honest American philosopher Thomas Nagel who once declared ‘It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God... It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want a universe like that’.
And while it may be for slightly different reasons, perhaps it is  also no coincidence that the ‘progressive’ and anti-Orthodox strands of Judaism have taken so aggressively against the Jewish presence in biblically sensitive areas; these are denominations who have similarly staked everything on the hope that the Bible is a fairytale.

Islam, on the other hand, does not concern most Europeans, for as Douglas Murray observes in his latest ebook Islamophilia, liberal Westerners are happy to swoon over Islam. This is primarily because they don’t for a moment entertain the thought that it could be true.
They do not historically have the same cultural hang-ups about Quaranic prohibitions and so feel no sense of guilt when say drinking alcohol for instance. Christianity and its taboos still loom in the European psyche, however, and so Europeans often reveal themselves to be far more hostile to the Church leaders than to many extremist Islamic clerics; compare Yusuf Qawadawi’s visit to London to that of Pope Benedict’s.

In his strikingly insightful essay The Myth of the Supra-Human Jew, Irving Kristol wrote at length about the long European struggle with what the Jews meant for their own religion. Since Church doctrine taught that the survival of the Jews until the end of time was testament to the truth of the Bible and its claims so, argues Kristol, was the challenge set to any European wishing to rid himself of the shame and guilt associated with Judeo-Christian morality. Annihilate the people of the book and in doing so disprove their book and free yourself of its restrictions.

Six decades on from the German-led attempt to extinguish the Jewish people, one that found collaborators in every European country, and it is striking how in some German cities it can seem as if there is a sex-shop on every street corner. Across Europe grand Cathedrals, like the once thriving Jewish quarters, are almost entirely deserted.
Yet, anti-Semites always encounter the same conundrum; the more they persecute the Jews, the more they reaffirm the very Jewish exceptionalism they seek to deny. Success becomes a failure that must spur on new attempts.

In the long run severing Israel from Judea, Samaria and the most religiously significant parts of Jerusalem not only serves to destroy Israel’s identity and rob the nation of much biblical significance but it also creates indefensible borders for what many of Israel’s enemies already refer to as a ‘one bomb country’. As has been suggested by Charles Krauthammer, it is doubtful whether this time the Jewish people could survive such a blow as another destruction of their homeland and their most determined opponents must surely have calculated similarly.

The European Union’s latest directive against the "settlements" has no shortage of unfortunate historical connotations. Not only are Europeans once more telling Jews where they can and can’t live but it smacks of a futile colonialism whereby Europeans are again recklessly attempting to draw other people’s borders for them. Similarly, boycotts are a longstanding tactic in the war against Jews, advocated in early Medieval England just as they were also the first anti-Jewish policy enforced in Nazi Germany.

Noticeably, most Europeans seem to have been just as untroubled by the myriad daily atrocities and injustices taking place around the globe as the rest of the world that also routinely looks on with apparent disinterest. Even when genocide returned to Europe itself in the 1990s, it was for the Americans to lead an intervention in the Balkans to put a stop to it. Yet, when it comes to Jews living in biblically sensitive places, then we can surely always count on the Europeans to spring into decisive action.

*Tom Wilson is a British born writer and political commentator. He writes often on matters of politics and religion as well as making regular media appearances discussing current affairs in the US and Middle East.