Antisemitic top ten

From the Wiesenthal Center List of Anti-Semitic Outrages in 2014:

Demonization of Israel was a central theme in 2014's anti-Semitic outrages, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Photo: Twitter

2014 was a “year of unprecedented explosions of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel hatred,” Jewish advocacy group The Simon Wiesenthal Center declared, as it announced its list of the ten worst anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incidents over the last twelve months.

In a telling sign of the degree to which anti-Semitism presents a threat in Europe, the majority of the incidents described took place in European countries ranging from Belgium to Hungary.

At the top of the list is the shocking story of a doctor in the Belgian city of Antwerp who refused to treat a 90 year-old Jewish woman who’d broken a rib. “Send her to Gaza for a few hours, then she will not feel pain anymore,” the doctor told the lady’s grandson, Hershy Taffel, who later filed a discrimination complaint with the police, when he sought assistance for his grandmother on August 1.  “It reminds me of what happened in Europe 70 years ago,” Taffel told the Joods Actueel newspaper. “I never thought those days would once again be repeated.”

The Wiesenthal Center also noted that Belgium was the site of the deadliest attack on a Jewish target this year, when a terrorist murdered four people during a gun attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels in May.

Next on the list is the decision of the Jordanian parliament to hold a moment of silence for the Palestinian murderers of four worshippers and a Druze policeman one day after their November 19 attack on a synagogue in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood.  “I ask God to envelop them with mercy and to grant you with patience, comfort and recovery from your grief…” wrote Jordanian Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour to the families of the terrorists.

In third place was the invasion of a Jewish home in the Paris suburb of Creteil at the beginning of December. “Tell us where you hide the money, you Jews always have money,” one of the assailants demanded of the young man in the house before they tied up and raped his girlfriend. In his condemnation of the attack, French President Francois Hollande commented that the assault targeted “the greatness of France that finds itself wounded, damaged.”

Fourth place is given over to the infamous “Toiletgate” scandal in Germany, involving the popular leader of the Left Party, Gregor Gysi, the American anti-Semitic propagandist Max Blumenthal, and an obscure, Israel-based ‘filmmaker’ David Sheen. Both Blumenthal and Sheen had been scheduled to give a talk at the German parliament under the auspices of the party when Gysi, alerted to Blumenthal’s demonizing of Israel as the reincarnation of Nazi Germany, elected to cancel the event. After he was spotted in a corridor by Blumenthal and Sheen, Gysi was chased into a bathroom by the two activists, both of whom were ranting hysterically, and forced to lock the door for his own safety.

“By stoking obsessive hatred of and demonizing Israel, members of our party in positions of responsibility are promoting anti-Semitic patterns of argument and a relativization of the Holocaust and the German responsibility for the extermination of millions of European Jews,” 

said a group of Left Party parliamentarians in a statement explaining why the event was pulled. Blumenthal and Sheen are now banned for life from the German parliament because of their violent behavior.

Other incidents listed by the Wiesenthal Center include

• the demand by the leader of the extreme right-wing Sweden Democrats, Björn Söder, that Jews must give up their Jewish identity in order to be considered full Swedes, 
• the hanging of effigies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres by the anti-Semitic mayor of Erpatek in Hungary, and 
• the growing support for the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in U.S. academic circles.

In addition, the Center said, 2014 was “a year of unending genocidal threats against the Jewish state from

• a nuclearizing Mullahocracy in Iran and 
• continuing efforts in Europe to criminalize age-old Judaic practices of Shechita (Kosher slaughter) and Brit Milah (ritual circumcision.)”

Nazis' vast, secret WMD facility uncovered in Austria

The picturesque north-Austrian alpine landscape continues to yield its sordid history of cruelty and evil in dungeons, including the secret activities of the Nazis and their many local collaborators. 

The Nazis ran a system of subterranean factories, commanded by a hell-on-earth regime of concentration camps around Mauthausen that worked and starved its slave workers to death in an average of 4 months. The fact that my father survived enslavement  there for 9 months is a miracle.

More recently these alps achieved international notoriety for secretly imprisoning young girls as sex slaves in soundproof, subterranean apartments.

Read more on this subject in this previous JIW posting.

To learn about the latest sordid discovery, see this from The Times of Israel, 29 Dec 2014: 

A huge, secret, underground Nazi weapons factory, believed to have been built for the development and planned manufacture of nuclear weapons and other WMDs, has been uncovered in Austria.

Now scholars want to know if the SS general who oversaw it was brought to America after the war to help the US with its weapons programs.

The vast weapons facility was uncovered last week near the town of St. Georgen an der Gusen by a team led by Austrian documentary- maker Andreas Sulzer, who said it was “likely the biggest secret weapons production facility of the Third Reich.” 

The 75-acre industrial complex is located close to a second subterranean factory, the B8 Bergkristall facility where the Messerschmitt Me 262, the world’s first operational jet-powered fighter, was produced toward the end of World War II....

The existence of the facility was mentioned in the diaries of an Austrian physicist who worked for the Nazis, and Sulzer used ground-penetrating radar technology to pinpoint its location. His team cut away layers of earth and granite slabs with which the Nazis had sealed the entrance shaft.

“Declassified intelligence documents as well as testimony from witnesses helped excavators identify the concealed entrance,” The Times said. Work on the excavation was halted last week by local authorities who required that he get new permits for the dig, but is set to resume next month.

“Previous research had found increased levels of radiation around the St Georgen site, apparently giving credibility to longstanding claims that Nazi scientists experimented with nuclear weapons in the area, which was under the exclusive command of the SS,” the Times reported.

It quoted Rainer Karlsch, a historian working with Sulzer, saying:

“The SS leadership . . . aspired to create a combination of missiles and weapons of mass destruction. They wanted to equip the A4 [a variant of the V-2] missile, or more advanced rockets, with poison gas, radioactive material or nuclear warheads.”

“The facility, like the Bergkristall factory, relied on slave labor from the nearby Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp...Up to 320,000 inmates are said to have died because of the brutal conditions in the subterranean labyrinth.”

“Prisoners from concentration camps across Europe were handpicked for their special skills — physicists, chemists or other experts — to work on this monstrous project,” Sulzer told the British newspaper, “and we owe it to the victims to finally open the site and reveal the truth.”



Hans Kammler (photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sulzer, whose work is being partly funded by German state TV network ZDF, is also seeking to establish what became of SS General Hans Kammler, who managed the project and reported to SS chief Heinrich Himmler.

“Kammler was in charge of Hitler’s missile programs, including the V-2 rocket used against London in the latter stages of the war. He was known as a brilliant but ruthless commander, who had signed off the blueprints for the gas chambers and crematoria at the Auschwitz concentration camp complex in southern Poland,” The Times reported. “Rumors persist that he was captured by the Americans and given a new identity after the war.”

In the post-war Operation Paperclip, some 1,500 scientists, technicians and engineers from Nazi Germany and other countries — who were believed capable of contributing to US weapons programs, and whose expertise the US did not want going to the Russians — were brought to America. Nazi party participants, activists and supporters were supposed to have been excluded from this program, but this restriction was circumvented, and recruits included rocket scientist Wernher von Braun — the central figure n Nazi rocket development.

Kammler is believed to have lived at the St. Georgen site, and was headquartered in an area captured by the US Army in May 1945.

“Kammler was officially said to have committed suicide after the war. But according to John Richardson, supported by declassified documents from the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), he was interrogated by Richardson’s father and then taken to America as part of Operation Paperclip,” the newspaper reported. Donald Richardson worked for the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA.

What can one say about Europe?

From Arutz Sheva, 26 Dec 2014, by Rabbi Berel Wein:

Protesters in support of Palestinians in Gaza displayed a swastika at a Paris rally. 

(Photo: Etienne Laurent / European Pressphoto Agency)

To Europe, the noble Palestinians – fomenters of worldwide terrorism, intifadas and recurring wars – are worthy of diplomatic recognition, media support, financial aid and moral justification. 

This is Europe's revenge on the Jews for surviving.

What can one say about Europe?
I imagine that if one wants to be bitterly truthful then one could easily say that Hitler has in effect triumphed. He branded the Jews as the root of all troubles and proclaimed that the “final” and only solution to the “Jewish problem” was to eradicate all Jews from the face of the earth.

And as we all know, he followed through on his genocidal program. A great deal of Europe, its leaders, intellectuals and common folk, willfully and almost gleefully cooperated in this genocide. Many did so actively while many more Europeans did so passively.

Once the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed after the war ended, this irrational and pathological hatred of the Jews went underground. After all, it was too shameful to admit that the continent that prided itself on the advancement of civilization could be guilty of such organized, government-sponsored inhumanity and cruelty. So, most Europeans shielded themselves from any true feelings of guilt by simply stating that they were ignorant as to what was occurring.

...As penance for their atrocious behavior, many European countries, though not all, voted for the establishment of the state of Israel and granted the nascent nation diplomatic and sometimes even economic recognition and help.

And there the matter seemed to rest during the decade of the 1950s. But ...the world would not be allowed to so easily forget what had happened.

...Israel captured Adolf Eichmann and placed him on trial for his crimes against the Jewish people and humanity. The trial, which lasted almost a year, revealed in a stark and graphic way what had happened to the Jewish people on European soil from 1939 to 1945.

Thus it was not only Eichmann and the Nazis that were the defendants in that most bruising and bitter trial, but in a very real sense, Europe itself was on trial. And when Eichmann was justifiably found guilty and executed for his crimes, subliminally Europe was also judged to be guilty and complicit in the horror of the Holocaust.

Europe has never forgiven Israel for that trial and verdict. It is well aware that it is guilty but can never own up to this guilt. Therefore, in line with its time-honored obsession with the Jewish people and its innate necessity to scapegoat Jews for all of Europe's problems, Europe has turned its enmity in an unremitting fashion against the Jewish state.

Israel should be pilloried and boycotted, delegitimized and isolated, while the noble Palestinians – fomenters of worldwide terrorism, intifadas and recurring wars – are worthy of diplomatic recognition, media support, financial aid and moral justification. This is Europe's revenge against the Jews for surviving the Holocaust and thereby instilling the unease and guilt that Europe feels.

Hardly an Excessive Demand

From Myths & facts, December 28, 2014, by Eli E. Hertz:

The weight of the evidence of so many scholars, observers, pollsters and monitors make it almost impossible to mitigate, not to mention ignore the enormity of finding a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict [or better described as Arab-Israeli war].

When one grasps the duration of the conflict and its roots, when one fully faces the depth of animosity towards Israel and the antisemitism that permeates the Arab world from the political, religious and intellectual elites down to the grass roots, the sheer magnitude of the challenge for peacemakers becomes painfully apparent.

When one admits the implications of Palestinian society’s behavior – the repetitive pattern of nearly 100 years of rejectionism on the diplomatic front and a penchant for terrorism against civilians, the “readiness” of Arabs for co-existence and the chances of a breakthrough assume their true proportions.

The unwillingness to accept Israel as a legitimate non-Muslim political entity is epitomized by the Palestinians asymmetrical demands for the Right of Return of all Palestinian refugees to the Jewish state coupled with a demand that the West Bank and Gaza be cleansed of all Jews.

One cannot artificially narrow the scope of the conflict. One cannot duck the tough issues – whether in the Palestinian camp or the Arab world as a whole. Western leadership that is “Staying above the conflict” out of fear that demanding Arabs to ‘walk the talk’ will jeopardize one’s status as an honest broker has not and will not bring peace.

There has never been “a cycle of violence.” Resorting to such neutral terminology requires the U.S. and Europe to acquiesce to, and perpetuate a gross misrepresentation of reality.

Putting Israel and its neighbors on the same footing totally ignores the asymmetry of the history of the conflict and something as fundamental as “cause and effect.” The truth is – one side has been the aggressor time-after-time. 

The Arabs have been the initiators of more than five major wars resulting in the death of more than 22,000 Israeli soldiers and civilians. Arabs continuously call for political and economic boycotts and unbridled incitement. The Palestinians have launched wave-after-wave of terrorism against Israelis and other Jews and made hate the fuel that directs and runs their society.

All this began before there was a State of Israel, before there was an “occupation” and it continues unabated to this day.

In response to these onslaughts, Israel has not demanded reparations for the horrific causalities it has sustained in its fight for survival against repeated Arab aggression. It did not ask the Arab countries for restitution on behalf of 899,000 Jews that fled “All Moslem Lands” [NY Times , May 16, 1948]. 

It has only asked that it be allowed to live in peace with recognized and defendable borders as suggested in UN Security Council Resolution 242, and to develop according to its own Jewish ethos, and this is hardly an excessive demand.

It's a WAR ...of propaganda

From JPost, 28 Dev2014, by Greer Fay Cashman:

Former Labor and Independence MK Einat Wilf is not vying for a seat in the next Knesset. She is not even sure about which party - if any - will get her vote.

Former Labor Party lawmaker Einat Wilf. (photo credit:FACEBOOK)

Inasmuch as she is a political activist, former Labor and Independence MK Einat Wilf is not vying for a seat in the next Knesset. She is not even sure about which party - if any - will get her vote.

Speaking last Thursday night at the Sharon Hotel in Herzliya Pituah to members of the Israel Britain and the Commonwealth Association, Wilf said that at the present time, with the proliferation of political parties and the lack of clarity in their platforms, she feels politically homeless.

The absence of a political home was not the key topic of her talk. What she really wanted to get across was the inherent danger in the current non-violent conflict being waged by the Palestinians against Israel. 

When they saw that armed conflict and terrorism didn’t work, said Wilf, they resorted to the war of words - a war that, so far, Israel is losing.

When she had served in the Knesset, she said, she had raised this matter at the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, where she received a symbolic, benign pat on the head. She was indulged to the extent that she was permitted to present her thesis, but no one really took her warning seriously.

The more she travels abroad on speaking engagements in different countries, the more she realizes how successful the Palestinians have been in their campaign.

She cited an example of a debate with a Palestinian spokesperson in London. He had come up with the expression that Israel was committing cultural genocide. There is no such thing and it doesn’t mean anything, said Wilf, but it was a way of linking Israel with genocide and putting that concept into people’s minds. The same thing happens when Palestinians and their supporters talk about settlements, occupation, colonialism and apartheid.

“This is all part of the Palestinian strategy of planting words, images, ideas and arguments into people’s minds,” said Wilf.

“The world’s greatest atrocities were preceded by preparing people’s minds that what they were about to commit was not an atrocity but something they were doing for a noble cause,” said Wilf, noting that most people don’t think of themselves as evil.

But what is happening with the use of specific words she said is “a strategic threat.  It’s a real danger.”

Outlining the methodology, Wilf said that it starts with placard strategy equating Zionism and Israel with racism, imperialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing. 

“You know what it says even though you don’t believe it.”

Eventually she continued, many people, even Israel’s best friends, start to think that where there’s smoke there’s fire.

In her travels she has found that people who are genuinely interested in peace in the Middle East, including Jews who are not anti-Israel but are against Israel’s policies, fall victim to this strategy and utilize it.  But the Palestinians and other Arabs who are utilizing it have a different purpose. 

They want to get rid of the State of Israel and they don’t want any Jews living in the land which is currently Israeli territory, said Wilf, “but no-one believes it.”

Wilf underscored the misconception in the popular belief that if Israel would only get rid the settlements and allow Palestinian refugees to return there would be peace.

“It’s not what we do but who we are,” she said.  “They hate us.”

Nonetheless, there are large numbers of Israelis who are willing to make peace and share the land, but every time that the Palestinians have had an opportunity to create their own state, they have found a reason not to, she said.

Moving on to unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood, Wilf pointed out that there is a lacuna in resolutions to this effect. If she was writing the resolution she would add the codicil that once a Palestinian state is recognized, it means the end of the Palestinian refugee situation, because people who have a state are not refugees.

Wilf regretted that in the war of words Israel has not yet been able to emulate the victories achieved in armed conflict.

Livni's treachery will fail

From PJ Media, 26 Dec 2014, by Jonathan Spyer, a senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center:

With the date of the elections set for March 17th, the campaigning season has begun in Israel.

There was little public enthusiasm for the new polls.  It is only 20 months since the last time Israelis turned out to vote.  The 2015 contest will be the fifth general election in Israel since 2003.  This means the average life expectancy of an Israeli government is less than two and a half years.  It isn’t a recipe for political stability, or for the pursuing by governments of clear and consistent policy objectives.

The too-frequent polls are the product of the Israeli electoral system, which produces the need for complex and inevitably fragile governing coalitions.

Still, the present campaign is shaping up to be an interesting one.  For the first time since the collapse of the “peace process” into war in 2000, Israel’s center and left parties scent the chance of victory.
The optimism of the left derives from a shrewd move by Labor leader Yitzhak Herzog.  Previously regarded as the latest in a long line of no-hopers at the Labor helm, Herzog has united his Labor Party list with that of Tzipi Livni’s “Hatnua” party. Livni drove  a hard bargain.  If the united list forms the next government, the prime ministership will be shared — two years for Herzog, two for Livni.

Current opinion polls have this list neck and neck with Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling center-right Likud.  

A poll taken by the respected Geocartographia Institute on Sunday had the Likud on 27 seats, with Labor-Hatnua on 25.  The right-of-Likud Jewish Home list was third with 11 seats.

Previous polls had put Likud and Labor-Hatnua each on 21 seats, with Jewish Home close behind.

The lines of debate are also emerging as the campaign gets into gear.

All the signs are that this election will be fought largely over national and diplomatic issues, rather than bread-and-butter social questions.

Despite the urgency and importance of many social questions in Israel, this is natural and appropriate.

Because the ground around Israel is burning.  A sectarian war between Sunni and Shia Arabs is raging in the large land area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Iraq-Iran border.  To Israel’s south, an Islamic State-affiliated movement (Ansar Beit al-Maqdis)  is engaged in an insurgency against  the government of Egypt.  The Islamist Hamas movement remains firmly in control of Gaza, from where rockets continue to be launched against Israel.  The Islamic State has begun to make its ominous appearance in Gaza too.

Meanwhile, the government of Israel’s main ally appears to be oblivious to the danger posed by the onward nuclear march of Iran.

On the diplomatic front, the Ramallah Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas abandoned negotiations in April, and is now embarked on a path of seeking to build a campaign of international pressure on Israel, in order to force it into a retreat on the West Bank and in Jerusalem, in return for nothing.  The resolution presented by Jordan to the UN Security Council on behalf of the PA exemplifies this stance.

The PA’s campaign has been encouraged from the growing hostility to Israel in some western European countries, particularly emerging from the growing political strength of Muslim communities in those countries and in turn from the sympathy for political Islam among those communities.  It is possible that societal exhaustion and strong native traditions of anti-Semitism are also playing a role in this emergent stance.

In the face of all this, the center left in Israel needs to explain why it is the government of Israel which is the cause of the country’s difficulties. It needs to outline why its own more accommodating approach is more in tune with the underlying realities.

The form that this will take is already becoming clear.  The center left will argue that Israel’s problems are to a great extent of its own making, and that if there is a danger of extremism it is to be found largely among Israeli Jews, rather than among their neighbors.

Thus, in her most memorable statement so far, Livni recently told reporters that “(Israeli) extremists…are turning our country into an isolated, boxed-in country, and an alienating one — even for its own citizens.”



She later claimed that she was responsible for the U.S. decision to delay the vote on the Palestinian state resolution at the UNSC.  According to a diplomatic source quoted by Foreign Policy magazine, Kerry himself has confirmed this.

Beyond all the inevitable posturing at election time, there is a kernel of dead seriousness here.

The belief underlying the Israeli center-left’s campaign is evidently that if Israel is “boxed in” it is because of its own “extremists” and that the solution to this is greater accommodation to the U.S. administration.

The U.S. administration, however, has opposed or prevaricated over the key measures that Israel has found necessary to take against the threats gathering around it.

Thus, Israel has been infuriated by the administration’s decisions to leak information on Israeli targeting of regime and Hizballah positions in Syria — moves Israel found necessary to prevent the arrival of game-changing weaponry to the Shia Islamist group.

Similarly, during Operation Protective Edge,  Secretary Kerry sought to involve the Muslim Brotherhood bloc of Qatar and Turkey in efforts to mediate  a ceasefire, and was critical of Israel’s tactics during the war.

An Israeli government which believes that Israeli “isolation” is mainly Israel’s fault and which thinks that the solution to this is greater accommodation to the Obama administration is an Israeli government which will be less likely to act in Israel’s vital interests, at the right time and with sufficient determination.

This, in turn, is likely to increase the threat to Israelis — see the 2000-2 period, when a reluctance to abandon the internationally sanctified  illusions of the “peace process” led to a failure to act against the Palestinian terror campaign in a determined fashion.

But if this is indeed to be the thrust of the center-left’s campaign in the elections, success is likely to continue to elude it.

Israelis are deeply aware both of the threats that surround them, and of the cold attitude of the current U.S. administration toward their country.  A campaign which seeks to blur or obscure these or to claim that they are largely of Israel’s own making is likely to win its proponents a further term in the opposition.

Jewish AND Democratic

From The Wall Street Journal, 18 Dec 2014, by Joel H Golovensky, lawyer and founding president of the Institute for Zionist Strategies in Jerusalem:

...Opponents ­[of a proposed law to designate ­Israel the “Nation-State of the Jewish People”] denounce it as anti-democratic, saying it will turn non-Jews into second-class citizens. That criticism is based on a misunderstanding of the bill and of the nature of democratic nation-states.

I was one of the bill’s originators. All of us are passionately committed to liberal democracy of the type that Israel has worked to build since its birth in 1948. The proposed law does not have anything to do with religious practices. Not one of us favours theocracy, and none would want to live in a country that lacked full democratic rights for everyone, including freedom of religion.

The proposed law would preserve the current basic laws guaranteeing democratic and civil rights. But in line with the thinking of David Ben-Gurion and Israel’s other founders, it would also ­reassert that there is nothing inherently inconsistent in the state protecting its generally Jewish character and all its citizens’ individual rights.

This notion is under assault from several directions. For decades, progressive activist judges have been increasingly calling into question the fundamental principle that Israel should be a Jewish state as well as a democratic state. Such politically activist judges often legislate from the bench in ways their critics (I among them) consider to be anti-democratic. For instance, Israeli law has for many years prohibited political parties from trying to destroy the Jewish or the democratic character of the state, yet some judges have chosen not to disqualify parties — such as the Balad Party — that aim to destroy Israel’s Jewish character by eliminating all Jewish characteristics of the nation-state and making it ethnically neutral.

Israeli Supreme Court president Aharon Barak made what he called a “constitutional revolution” in the early 1990s. An important consequence of that was interpreting civil liberties as inconsistent with Israeli government measures to give specific protection to Jewish culture, history and collective peoplehood.

The court has opposed classic Zionist land-use policies — such as the right to build Jewish settlements alongside Arab ones in the upper Galilee and Negev — going back to the founders of the Zionist movement. The court has also weakened the status of Hebrew, the national language of renewal which from the beginning has driven the Zionist enterprise. Justice Barak refers to protecting ­Israel’s Jewish character as a matter of mere “interest”, not on the level of civil “rights”.

Anti-Zionists and so-called post-Zionists have also campaigned to transform Israel. They argue it should cease to be the Jewish state and become an ethnically neutral country along the lines of the US or New Zealand. They argue that there’s something inherently non-democratic in Zionism. They are challenging not just Zionism, but the very idea of ­national self-determination.

Most democracies either have state religions (Britain, Denmark), put religious symbols on their flags (Norway, Switzerland), have ethnically based immigration-law preferences (Ireland, Germany) or otherwise give special protection to a particular ethnic culture (the Baltic states). Most of the more than 60 ­democracies are built on the ­ethnic identity of a predominant group, which moulds the character of the state while affording ­minorities full civil and religious rights. In this regard the Jewish state of Israel is a typical democratic country.

Untypically, it has been fighting to survive all of its life. Since the Roman Empire expelled them from their homeland 2000 years ago, the Jews in exile preserved their religion and their identity as a people. The dream of Zionism was to return to the homeland and re-establish sovereignty in a Jewish-majority state that would have equal dignity with all nations. The League of Nations endorsed this idea in 1922 by unanimous vote.

While the Arabs would have states of their own throughout the Middle East, the Jews would have one state in part of their ancient homeland. Like many of the states created after World War I, the Jewish state in Palestine would have citizens who were not part of the majority group and their civil and religious rights were to be protected within the Jewish state.

The Zionist dream was realised in 1948 with the creation of Israel. Jews exist across the globe, but Jewish national history marches forward only in the Jewish state.

The proposed bill codifying ­Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people grows out of a long and complex history in which the Jewish people and all of Israel’s citizens are thinking through their communal identities — as Jews, Arabs, Palestinians, Christians, Muslims and Israelis. Reasonable people can and do differ about the bill. But its essence is simply to ­reaffirm the principle of national self-determination — that Israel is a Jewish and democratic state.

Hezbollah Wants Assad in Power

From The Tower, 25 Dec 2014, by TheTower.org Staff :

[Photo: hAwrA حـوراء /Flickr]

Hezbollah insists that its ally, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, will remain in power. 

In a message delivered to Russia, the Shiite terror organization made clear that it does not agree that anyone, even from the Alawite sect, should replace the current President as part of any possible solution to the Syrian conflict.

The Lebanese newspaper “Al-Akhbar” reported (Arabic link) Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah recently said to the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “is a red line.” The two met a few weeks ago in Beirut.

Sources close to Hezbollah told the paper that Nasrallah emphasized to the Russian diplomat that his organization is not only trying to protect Syria against “terrorism,” but also to protect Bashar al-Assad. “Any solution must include leaving the President in his post,” Nasrallah said.

Hezbollah officially acknowledged in early 2013 that its forces crossed from Lebanon into Syria and are fighting alongside the Syrian regime forces. Hezbollah fighters have enabled the regime to regain control of rebel-held areas in central Syria and have improved the effectiveness of pro-regime forces.

Hezbollah and Assad belong to “The Resistance Axis”, an Iran-led alliance of state and non-state actors in the Middle East that seeks to confront Western interests in the region, namely those of the United States and Israel. In recent years, Iran has also cultivated Iraqi Shia militants as the newest members of this alliance. 

In an think tank research  article dealing with this axis, Marisa Sullivan of the Institute for the Study of War wrote:

“The war in Syria presents a significant threat to the strategic alliance of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah. The Syrian government, the vital conduit between Iran and Hezbollah, is in danger of being overthrown. Iran cannot afford to lose its most important foothold in the Levant, and Hezbollah cannot risk losing its access to critical Iranian and Syrian support. Syria’s importance to Hezbollah, however, is not limited to its role as a conduit for financial and material support; the Assad regime has provided safe haven for Hezbollah training camps and weapons storage. 

Overall, Hezbollah’s support for Assad seeks to achieve three broad objectives. First, Hezbollah seeks to preserve the Axis of Resistance by shoring up the military capabilities of the Assad regime. Second, Hezbollah also seeks to retain access to Iranian and Syrian material support by securing the lines of communication that run from Damascus to Lebanon from any rebel interference. Without the ability to operate within Syria, Iranian support to Hezbollah becomes much more difficult and risks interdiction; Hezbollah’s own military capabilities and readiness would suffer without access to this military and financial assistance. Third, the group also seeks to prevent the emergence of a Sunni-dominated regime in Syria should Assad fall.”

Who's your daddy now, Hamas?

From The Tower, 23 Dec 2014, by TheTower.org Staff:

[Photo: Lodgaard / Flickr]

Tensions in Hamas Surface Over Ties with Qatar, Syria, and Iran

The Arab newspaper Rai Al-Aam reports (Arabic link) that tensions inside the terrorist organization Hamas are pitting factions who support Iran and the Syrian regime against those who are based in Qatar.

The origin of this internal Hamas conflict centers on the decision by Hamas’s political leadership and its chairman Khaled Meshaal to abandon Hamas headquarters in Syria a few years ago. There were harsh disagreements about whether the movement should leave Syria, and especially whether it should move to Qatar, a country that is hostile to the Syrian regime.

The eventual decision aroused the ire of other senior Hamas figures, especially those in Gaza, who later claimed that leaving Syria angered Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad and his ally Iran, which in turn led to the decision to reduce the supply of Iranian-funded arms to Hamas terrorists in Gaza.
This conflict surfaced again last month, when Iran postponed a request by Meshaal to visit Tehran while allowing other lower Hamas officials to visit its territory. According to Rai Al-Aam, this is another sign of Iranian anger over the Hamas leader who left Syria. A week ago, Syrian president Assad also attacked Meshaal (Arabic link).

Within Hamas there are now two conflicting opinions. The first wants to maintain Hamas’ relationship with Qatar and Turkey, despite the Qatari move to improve relations with moderate Sunni countries, including Egypt, which is very hostile towards Hamas. The second group wants to normalize relations with Tehran.

More specifically, the military wing of Hamas in Gaza is very interested in improving relations with Iran. During the terror group’s 27th anniversary parade, a spokesman thanked Iran for its military assistance. This statement indicates the movement’s desire for more weapons from the Islamic Republic.

Meanwhile, senior Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzouk confirmed that Iran promised his movement that it will resume the flow of its aid to the Gaza Strip. In an interview with a Turkish news agency, Abu Marzouk said (Arabic link) that relations with Tehran have returned to their natural state.

Beating Bibi: Obama’s Last Campaign

From PJ Media, 23 Dec 2014, by Rich Baehr:

The real goal of the Obama administration is to bring Netanyahu down.

Barack Obama has proven to be a determined man when it comes to achieving goals he really cares about. He may not get everything he wants when he wants it, but he has shown that there is often more than one way to advance his agenda, and he can be patient when the political environment is unfavorable. This has been true on both the domestic front and in foreign policy.

Obama has used federal agencies such as the EPA and NLRB to move aggressively to favor Obama interests (bashing coal producers, making it easier for workers to organize into unions) when Congress did not adopt climate change legislation or “card check” legislation. The Department of Health and Human Services has regularly changed the rules of Obamacare, seemingly making the rules up as they go along when it became clear that certain provisions were either very badly conceived or politically unpalatable to important Obama interest groups.

There has also been subterfuge to make it seem that the abuse of the separation of powers and routine bypassing of Congress has not really occurred. The president says he has issued far fewer executive orders than prior presidents, when in fact he has issued far more when you include his memoranda – which serve the same purpose.

In foreign policy, the administration has pursued several policies with the same doggedness. One of these has been to damage the historically close ties between Israel and the United States. The alternative way to say this is that so long as Israel elects leaders who do not see things the way the administration does, it will be very much out of favor with the White House.

Over the first six years of the Obama administration, there is little that Israel under the leadership of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has ever done right according to the White House or the State Department. Conversely, almost nothing the Palestinians have done has been called out for similar criticism. 

Meanwhile, the administration has pursued a new relationship with Iran (much as it has with Cuba), signaling that traditional alliances and enmities were out the window with this administration. The obsession of Secretary of State Kerry with pushing the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations and the Iranian nuclear negotiations seems to be a mix of legacy-building for both Kerry and Obama, but also part of the shift away from the traditional alliance with Israel.

A goal of the White House seems to have been to break the bipartisan support for a strong U.S-Israel relationship in Congress by making it far easier for Democrats to go their own way. In essence, the White House has facilitated a transition within the party to better reflect the views of the Democratic Party’s base, now heavily made up of younger voters and minorities, among whom there is not nearly as much support for Israel as in the past.

The Obama administration has set in place a longer-term process to separate Democrats in Congress from their historic role as strong supporters of Israel.

Whether Obama is following his base on this issue or leading it is a different question. As the single most visible political figure in government, when a president is viewed as being engaged in a bitter feud with a foreign leader, as the press has dutifully reported is the case between Netanyahu and Obama, a strong message has been delivered. This message particularly gets to those who support the president in general, and on pretty much all specific issues.

The president has also blessed and opened the White House’s door to J Street, an organization allegedly committed to both Israel and peace. In reality, the group is a “blocking back for the White House,” as its own leaders have admitted, for the regular Israel-bashing and pressure campaign that has been underway since both Obama and Netanyahu took office in 2009. If one looks for instances of J Street uttering a kind word about Netanyahu, you will find even fewer than those from the president himself.

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government has collapsed following the firing of two ministers from parties in his coalition that had broken with his government. New elections have been called for March 17. The Israeli election system is a parliamentary one, although one without legislative districts. Parties nominate slates and determine the order of their candidates. If a party wins 20 of 120 seats in the Knesset, based on their share of the overall vote among the parties who register at least 3.5% of the total vote, then the first 20 names on that party’s list will become Knesset members.

Thirteen parties hold seats in the current Knesset (the hurdle until this current election  had been only 2% of the total vote for representation for a party), an indication of the fragmentation of the current system. After the Knesset elections are held, since no single party ever wins a majority on its own or even comes close, the country’s president picks the leader of a party that he thinks has the best chance of putting together a coalition of parties to get to at least 61 seats, a Knesset majority. That has been Netanyahu for two consecutive elections, though a third victory is not assured.

A recent poll shows right-wing parties winning 40 seats, left-wing and Arab parties winning 40 seats, and 40 seats up for “sale” (or persuasion), though many of these would be with religious parties generally more comfortable as part of a right-wing government.

One of the issues Bibi has to deal with is that many Israeli voters are concerned about deteriorating U.S.-Israei relations. Israel has few allies beyond America, Canada under Stephen Harper, and Australia most of the time. Among these three, of course American support has always mattered most, given the history of foreign aid, weapons supply, and the Americans’ Security Council veto. European behavior, on the other hand, has become  more viper-like every week. Most Israelis are smart enough to understand that whatever Netanyahu’s faults, the problems in the relationship the last few years have been largely created by the Obama administration. Though there are some who are right-of-center on security issues who might think that someone other than Bibi might be better able to shepherd the country through the rocky last two years of the Obama administration, since any new president after Obama is unlikely to be so hostile.

When Bill Clinton was president, he allowed his campaign team, including pollster Stanley Greenberg, Bob Shrum, current J Street operative Jim Gerstein, and Jim Carville, to assist Labor party leader Ehud Barak and to help bring down Netanyahu’s government  in 1999. Greenberg is going back to Israel to help the Labor Party again. Surely, this has the Obama seal of approval.

The Obama team may have overplayed its hand when it allowed a rumor to get out that sanctions against Israel over its settlement building had been discussed at the White House. Congressional Democrats pushed back hard against the idea, and the administration denied it had ever come up. A few weeks back, a reporter close to the White House had repeated various obscenities which top administration figures had used to describe Netanyahu, including “chickens**t.”

This week, Secretary of State Kerry seems to be trying a different approach, by reassuring Israel that the U.S. will use its veto in the Security Council (if it has to, assuming the Palestinians collect nine votes) to prevent the Palestinian Authority from getting its resolution passed on a two-year deadline for statehood within the 1967 borders. Of course, Kerry has generally been milder in his public criticisms of Israel than the off-the-record amateurs at the White House.

At the same time, Kerry has let slip that Israeli leaders from the left believe a debate and vote on a PA resolution at the UN now will only solidify support for Netanyahu and right-wing parties, so he is loathe to give Bibi an assist.

In any case, the administration seems to be trying to deliver two messages: things could get far worse for Israel in the next two years (we won’t use our veto at the UN next time), or there could be more support if Israel is more forthcoming and accepts the American approach (offering concessions to the Palestinians and not opposing a U.S.-Iran nuclear deal). 

Of course, since Bibi Netanyahu is unlikely to become a J Street prime minister, the real goal of the administration, as was the case in the Clinton administration, is to bring him down.

Another Charade by Arab Despots Collapses

From Commentary, 18 Dec 2014, by Jonathan S. Tobin:

In the end, there wasn’t much suspense about the Obama administration’s decision whether to support a United Nations Security Council resolution endorsing a Palestinian state.

After weeks of pointless negotiations over proposed texts, including a compromise endorsed by the French and other European nations, the wording of the proposal that the Palestinians persuaded Arab nations to put forward was so outrageous that even President Obama couldn’t even think about letting it pass because it would undermine his own policies. And the rest of the international community is just as unenthusiastic about it.

In a very real sense this episode is the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict in a nutshell: the world wants to do something for the Palestinians but their leaders are more interested in pointless shows than in actually negotiating peace or doing something to improve the lives of their people.

The resolution that was presented to the Security Council was so extreme that Jordan, the sole Arab nation that is currently a member, didn’t want anything to do with it. But, after intense lobbying by the Palestinian Authority representative, the rest of the Arab nations prevailed upon Jordan and they put it forward where it will almost certainly languish indefinitely without a vote since its fate is preordained.

The terms it put forward were of Israeli surrender and nothing more. The Jewish state would be given one year to withdraw from all of the territory it won in a defensive war of survival in 1967 where a Palestinian state would be created. That state would not be demilitarized nor would there be any guarantees of security for Israel which would not be granted mutual recognition as the nation state of the Jewish people, a clear sign that the Palestinians are not ready to give up their century-long war against Zionism even inside the pre-1967 lines.

This is a diktat, not a peace proposal, since there would be nothing for Israel to negotiate about during the 12-month period of preparation. Of course, even if the Palestinians had accepted the slightly more reasonable terms proposed by the French, that would have also been true. But that measure would have at least given the appearance of a mutual cessation of hostilities and an acceptance of the principle of coexistence. But even those concessions, let alone a renunciation of the “right of return,” was not possible for a PA that is rightly fearful of being supplanted by Hamas. So long as Palestinian nationalism remains wedded to rejection of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders might be drawn, no one should expect the PA to end the conflict or actually make peace.

Though many of us have been understandably focused on the question of how far President Obama might go to vent his spleen at Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government, that petty drama is, as it has always been, a sideshow distraction from the real problem at the core of the Middle East peace process: 

Palestinian rejectionism.

Though the administration has tirelessly praised PA leader Mahmoud Abbas as a champion of peace in order to encourage him to live up to that reputation, he had other priorities. Rather than negotiate in good faith with the Israelis, Abbas blew up the talks last year by signing a unity pact with Hamas that he never had any intention of keeping.

The purpose of that stunt, like the current UN drama, isn’t to make a Palestinian state more likely or even to increase Abbas’s leverage in the talks. Rather, it is merely a delaying tactic, and a gimmick intended to waste time, avoid negotiations, and to deflect any pressure on the PA to either sign an agreement with Israel or to turn it down.

That’s not just because the Palestinians wrongly believe that time is on their side in the conflict, a dubious assumption that some on the Israeli left also believe. The reason for these tactics is that Abbas is as incapable of making peace as he is of making war.

This is not just another case of the Palestinians “never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” in Abba Eban’s immortal and quite accurate summary of their actions over the years. It’s that they are so wedded to unrealistic expectations about Israel’s decline that it would be inconceivable for them to take advantage of any opening to peace. That is why they turned down Israeli offers of statehood, including control of Gaza, almost all of the West Bank, and a share of Jerusalem, three times and refused to deal seriously with a fourth such negotiation with Netanyahu last year.

And it’s why the endless quarrels between Obama and Netanyahu over the peace process are so pointless. No matter how much Obama tilts the diplomatic playing field in the Palestinians’ direction or how often he and his supporters prattle on about time running out for Israel, 

Abbas has no intention of signing a peace agreement. 

The negotiations as well as their maneuverings at the UN and elsewhere are nothing but a charade for the PA and nothing Netanyahu could do, including offering dangerous concessions, would change that. 

The sooner Western leaders stop playing along with their game, the better it will be for the Palestinian people who continue to be exploited by their leaders.

The Day Europe Voted for Another Holocaust

From Arutz Sheva, Friday, December 19, 2014, by Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio:

Europe sent a clear, strong message: Hamas is a legitimate organization aiming to destroy the Jewish State.

January 20, 1942. In the villa at 56–58 Am Großen Wannsee, the administrative leaders of various Nazi government departments meet for the implementation of the "final solution to the Jewish question". The Holocaust.

December 18, 2014. The European Court of Justice and the European Parliament meet to vote the recognition of the "Palestinian State" and to include Hamas among the legitimate organizations. It is the day Europe planned a new Holocaust. 

In a single day, Europe's highest political and legal bodies voted as just and legitimate the mass deportation of 600,000 Jews from their historic land, the goal of the PLO and Mahmoud Abbas. Europe also gave a legitimacy to the stabbings, rockets, shootings and suicide bombings perpetrated by Hamas and Fatah, which killed over 1,000 Israeli Jews in twenty years.

Europe voted to create a state founded on the ethnic cleansing of every single Jewish man, woman and child between Beersheba and Afula and the Jordan border and Tel Aviv. Europe wants to ethnically cleanse one third of the Judea and Samaria population. 

Mr. Abbas, this Holocaust denier, said it last year in front of those European faces. He proclaimed his Nazi and Stalinist intentions. Lady Ashton, the ridiculous then EU foreign chief, was present. And she stood silent.

On December 18, 2014, Europe voted to see hundreds of thousands of Jews surrendering to expulsion or to becoming refugees like "lambs to the slaughter". 

The Palestinian nationhood argument is a real strategic deception, more dangerous even than the Iranian death cult, the one geared to set up the destruction of Israel. 

Hamas thanked the European Union from Gaza for the "victory of the Palestinian people". Hamas well might return to the blacklist of terror groups, the place where it should stay forever. But Europe sent a clear, strong message: Hamas is a legitimate organization aiming to destroy the Jewish State.

Don't believe to Europe's empty words about "two states", the December 18 vote means: "Israel is illegitimate, it’s the instigator of every type of the world's disorder, it must be disengaged from the Middle East as soon as possible". 

This is the meaning of the French resolution coming to the UN these days and asking Israel to "end the occupation".

And there is a lot of money, Islamic money, behind the vote. You see it from the Islamic finance present in London, the Qatari investments in Paris and so on. Europe sold the Jews for money - and because it hates them. Especially the strong, religious and armed Israeli Jews. 

Meanwhile, in Europe's mosques and on its televisions you hear the same slogans of Al Aqsa's mosque over the Temple Mount: "Idbach al Yahud!" (Slaughter the Jews) and "Falastin baladna, al Yahud kalabna" (Palestine is our homeland, the Jews are our dogs). 

PLO Covenant Article Six declares:

“The Jews, who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion (usually dated as the mid-19th century) will be considered Palestinians”. 

In other words, 98 per cent of the existing Israeli population must be uprooted and exiled, like the 8.000 Jews of Gush Katif. 

Or slaughtered, like the Fogels. 

Is this the "Palestinian State" envisioned by the European Union and judges? Yes. Brussels supports the establishment of a state that would be the first to officially prohibit Jews or any other faith since the Third Reich. 

It is not a coincidence that the vote on "Palestine" came the same day Hamas returned to the club of the good people. As if Hamas never abducted and killed three students in Gush Etzion. As if Hamas never fired thousands of rockets on Israeli homes. As if Hamas never killed 11 people in the last two months of Third Intifada in Jerusalem and surroundings. And the list goes on.

Europe's ability to implement this new Holocaust will now depend only on the Jews. I hope the Jews have enough courage and wisdom to see what the rest of the world is preparing for them. It is the "final solution" - to the "Israeli question"...

We are breaking up with you. For good.

From JPost, 18 Dec 2014, by Anna Berg*:

Despite everything that happens here, I still feel that Israel is the sanest place in the world. In fact, we seem to be the only country that still has its head straight on, while the Europeans run around like ISIS-beheaded chickens. The latest balagan? Hamas is “temporarily” removed from the EU terrorist list due to a technicality, while an anti-Israel conference is being organised in Geneva.

Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Seriously, what is wrong with everyone? The only democracy in the Middle East is boycotted, shunned, ostracised, obsessively criticised, hated, lied about and attacked in every way imaginable – while our terrorist neighbours are left in peace to continue with their dirty, evil deeds.

We are the light unto the nations, even though the rest of the world is too engulfed in their own darkness to see it. We are the bullied new kid on the block that will grow up, move on and shine – while the bullies will get older, stay put and live miserable lives beating their wives and kids.

Look what we have achieved since our beginning as a state in 1948. The heat and desert has not stopped us from making it bloom. Wars have not torned us apart. Suicide bombers have not stopped us from living our lives. Boycotts have not stopped our economy from thriving. Our love for life is still here. Our strong spirit grows stronger every day. Our sense of family and community is unbreakable. We are friggin’ amazing!

So why stay in this stormy, dysfunctional relationship? It’s time to move on. Can you hear it? Israel is calling you to come home dear Jews in the diaspora. It’s time now. You are needed here. Take all the culture, innovation, science, spirituality and chutzpah that you have and come! You are wasting your time in countries that don’t appreciate you. You deserve better. They deserve less. Leave them in the dark and come here and make this country shine even brighter. You know they will miss us, but then it’ll be too late.

It’s time to break up with Europe. For good.

Sorry, we are just not that into you. This relationship isn’t working. It’s not us, it’s you. Really.

Goodbye.

*Anna Berg

Anna Berg was born in Sweden and made Aliyah in April 2014. 

She currently resides in Tel Aviv

Today Damascus, Soon, Khuzestan

From ArutzSheva, 13 Decemeber 2014, by Mark Langfan:

This war isn’t a Shia-Sunni War; this is a Persian-Arab War and the Arabs are being played for fools by non-Arab Iran.

The recent Israeli daylight strike at the heart of the Iranian Shi’ite project has shown the Iranian-Hezbollah behemoth to be a paper tiger incapable of ultimately defeating the Moderate Sunni-Israeli alliance that is congealing against its hegemonic imperial ambitions.

In February 2013, Mehdi Taeb, a high-level Iranian cleric, speaking to Iran’s Basij (paramilitary group attached to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps), said

"Syria is…[Iran’s] 35th province and a strategic province for us. If the enemy attacks us and wants to take either Syria or Khuzestan, the priority for us is to keep Syria…If we keep Syria, we can get Khuzestan back too, but if we lose Syria, we cannot keep Tehran."  

What was Taeb saying?  Taeb meant that if Iran loses Arabic-Syria, Iran’s "35th Province", nothing will stop the Arabs from cascading eastward and taking the Iranian Arab-majority Khuzestan Province.  Khuzestan holds 90% of Iran’s oil reserves, and is situated, defenseless, west of the Zagros Mountains that form Iran’s western border.  And, without the oil-rich Khuzestan, Iran is nothing but a bankrupt, oil-poor, Bangladesh of an Islamic country.

See Oil and Arabic-Speakers in Iran’s Troubled Southwest

Fantasy? Aisha Noor in the leading Pakistani daily, The Nation, just wrote in an op-ed:

“The twin crises in Syria and Egypt have marked the emergence of a new superpower coalition in the Middle East, the odd couple alliance of Israel and Saudi Arabia, with Jordan serving as an intermediary and the Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms playing a supporting role.”

By striking Iran’s weakest link, Assad, Israel has brought joy to the hundreds of millions of Sunnis who rightly see the Persian Iranians as their true arch-enemy, not Israel.  And, even better, Iran is impotent to lift so much as a single Hezbollah finger against Israel in retaliation. Consequently, the Israeli raid has given millions of Arab Sunnis hope that Iran’s Shi’ite enclaves, otherwise called “Syria” and “Iraq” will soon be broken, and all the Arabs will come east for their rightful inheritance, the oil-rich Arab region of Khuzestan, the Arabic-speaking Iranian Province which the Persian have stolen and raped it of all its Arab-petrodollars.

In this Arab Shi’ite-Sunni War, what is the Persian Iranians’ big-picture strategy?  Do the Arab Sunnis really want to behead Arab Shi’ites, and vice versa?  Some  do, but most don’t.  Shi’ite-colonizing Persian Iranians have purposefully instigated an Arab Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian holocaust.  The Persian Iranian goal is not for all “the Shi’ites” to win, but for all the Arabs, all the Sunnis and Shi’ites alike, to kill one another and be so divided that the Arabs will have no energy left when the Persian Iranians come in for the kill, and take the entire Arab “Persian” Gulf containing 56% of the worlds oil supply.

This war isn’t a Shia-Sunni War; this is a Persian-Arab War.  But, unfortunately, the Arabs are being played for fools by their Persian Iranian puppeteers.

Hence, Israel’s attack on the Damascus Airport arms depot will, in years to come, be seen as nothing less than a modern-day attack of the Bastille by the French Revolutionaries.  By attacking Damascus, Israel has signaled it stands with the moderate Sunni Arabs, and with all Arabs including Shi’ites, against the Shi’ite colonializing tyranny of the Persian Iranians.

Israel bravely rejected Obama’s mollycoddling, de facto protection, of Assad, Iran’s puppet, and showed itself to be the functional heart of an Israeli-moderate Pan-Arab alliance.  And, with time, this Israeli-Moderate Arab alliance will come to vanquish Iran’s modern-day Shi’ite colonization of the Arab world, and of the earlier Safavid Empire’s Shi’ite colonization of Iran itself.

The time has come to examine UNRWA policy

From Israel Resource Review, December 10, 2014, by David Bedein*:

United Nations Relief and Works Agency spokesman Chris Gunness launched personal attacks this week against a Palestinian critic of UNRWA who wrote an op-ed for The Jerusalem Post, followed by a vitriolic attack against the Post itself for publishing the piece. This past Sunday, however, Gunness related to substantive questions about UNRWA policy in a radio interview on the new Voice of Israel Internet radio network. Gunness’s policy statements deserve close attention.

He argues that there are other refugees in the world whose refugee status extends for more than one generation, under the aegis of the other UN agency (the one that handles all other refugees in the world), the United Nations High Commission of Refugees (UNHCR). Yet he neglects to mention that Palestinian refugees are the only refugees in the world who are promised the “right of return” by a UN agency.

Gunness states that UNRWA’s mandate comes from the UN General Assembly, and that that is where the UNRWA definition of “refugee” comes from. Yet UNGA 302, which created UNRWA and from which UNRWA gets its mandate, did not define what a “refugee” is.

UNRWA itself invented a working definition of “refugee” in 1950. Its original refugee definition was: “For working purposes, the Agency has decided that a refugee is a needy person, who, as a result of the war in Palestine, has lost his home and his means of livelihood.” So it is UNRWA that decides who is a refugee – not the UNGA.

Indeed, UNRWA changed the definition [of a UNRWA refugee] over time, including, around 1965, the accommodation of children and grandchildren through the male line, and at a later date extending the definition to all descendants.

Gunness states that the only factor that can change UNRWA policy toward refugees is the UN General Assembly, confusing UNRWA policies with the UNRWA mandate. While the UNRWA mandate to handle Palestinian refugees is etched in stone by the UNGA, donor nations can influence any internal UNRWA policy decision which donor nations may find objectionable or inconsistent with UN policies. 

Gunness claims that UNRWA “must” use the host nation’s textbooks, but does not explain that the choice to do so is an internal UNRWA decision that can be changed if a schoolbook or school teacher violates UN principles.

Gunness holds that Nathan Brown, a Professor of Political Science at George Washington University, is his sole source authority on Palestinian education, and ignores the fact that Brown works for pro-Arab organizations. 

Gunness ignores multiple independent studies of the new PA textbooks that were conducted by The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, the Vatican, IMPACT and CFNEPR over the past 14 years, all of which concluded that the new PA textbooks, used in UNRWA schools, encourage jihad, martyrdom and right of return to Palestine, by force of arms.

Gunness categorically states there is no evidence that Hamas terrorists are on the payroll of the UN. Yet successive reports of the US Congressional Research also show that UNRWA, which receives $300 million per year from the US government, reports that UNRWA has never vetted its staff to see if UNRWA employs members of Hamas.

Meanwhile, the European Parliament funded a study that documented Hamas’s takeover of the UNRWA unions in March 2009. The pro-Hamas al-Resala newspaper, right before the September 2012 UNRWA union elections stated that, 

“It is noteworthy that Hamas has controlled the UNRWA staff union in the elections since its inception….”

Al Quds, a Fatah-leaning paper, wrote after the elections:

“According to multiple sources within the Election Commission… the ‘Professional’ slate of Hamas won 25 seats out of 27, divided by 11 seats out of 11 in the teachers’ sector and 6 out of 7 in the labor sector elections, and 8 seats out of 9 in the services sector election.”

Gunness states that whenever there are allegations of UNRWA employees violating UNRWA’s neutrality policy, “They are always investigated and disciplinary action is taken up to and including dismissal.”

Yet in March 2013, in my presence, Gunness told staffers of the US Congress that Hamas leader Suhail Hindi, head of the UNRWA teachers’ union in Gaza, had been dismissed.

However, Hindi was suspended for less than a week. Hindi functions in his capacity to this day.

So much for removing Hamas on staff.

In sum, the concern over UNRWA is that, as a UN agency, it is supposed to maintain absolute neutrality. In an interview with the Post, US State Department spokesman Edgar Vasquez stated unequivocally: 

“It is imperative that all sides respect the humanitarian and development role of UNRWA. And we expect UNRWA personnel to uphold its stated policy of neutrality so that it can carry out its critical mandate.”

In light of the UN policy of neutrality, I have repeatedly asked the US embassy and US AID, which administers funds to UNRWA, why the US does not demand an overhaul of the UNRWA curriculum and an end to Hamas presence in UNRWA schools as a condition to render future US funds to UNRWA.

No response has been received – not from the US embassy and not from US AID.

Perhaps the time has come for the US Congress to hold hearings about UNRWA policies, which have now been clearly articulated by UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness, to determine if UNRWA is indeed preserving the sacrosanct principle of UN neutrality. After all, if UNRWA is found to be employing thousands of Hamas employees, funding for UNRWA from nations which designate Hamas as a lethal foreign terrorist organization could be suspended.

That includes the US, Canada, the UK, the EU and Australia.

*The writer is author of Roadblock to Peace – How the UN Perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict: UNRWA policies reconsidered.

Boycott of Israel is a “Big Hoax”

From The Tower, 9 Dec 2014:


[Photo: Dave Bender / YouTube ]

Blogger “Elder of Ziyon” published a translated interview with Palestinian human rights activist Bassam Eid yesterday. The interview with Eid was originally conducted in Hebrew by Ishai Friedman and was published on his blog.

One of the central subjects of the interview was a supposed Palestinian boycott of Israel and Israeli settlements.

Well, what happens?
“Abbas will not feed them and won’t provide them jobs. After Protective Edge, it was agreed to put another 5,000 workers from Gaza to Israel so this they boycott? I beg you to give me more jobs then demand a boycott? And even if they prohibit selling Palestinian produce to Israel your economy will not hurt. Who would hurt are those Palestinians who earn four or five times in Israel than in the territories. ”
And the Authority’s statement about boycotting the settlements?
“It shows you the disconnect between the public and its leaders. That there is no boycott. There is one “hero,” Mustafa Barghouti, who is a very corrupt. He stole money from Saudi Arabia meant to buy them ambulances. He states that he invented the boycott of Israel, and he tours across Europe and talks about a boycott of Israel. Every other day he is in Sweden and they listen to him but let him go and declare a boycott in Ramallah and the refugee camps.”
So the whole story is a bluff?
“This is a big hoax on the part of the Palestinians. What, Arabs from the territories do not work and buy from Rami Levi in Gush Etzion? It is not enforced and can not be enforced. Bir Zeit buys Strauss Ice Cream. Grocery store there, the seller hung a sign, this place sells purely Israeli products.”

The interview also covers Eid’s opinions of Hamas (Gazans don’t support it but “are afraid to talk.”), the Palestinian Authority (“political corruption is a government that the Palestinian public know nothing of what is happening in it.”) the state of human rights organizations (“today all organizations Israelis and Palestinians, all of them deal with Israel.”)  and the funding of these groups (“if I want to establish an anti-Israel NGO, I promise you tomorrow I would get a half a million dollars from Sweden.”)

Eid set off a controversy last week when he criticized the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in an op-ed in The Jerusalem Post. Eid wrote that instead of helping the Palestinians, UNRWA “depends on death and the visual suffering of five million Palestinians who continue to wallow in and around UNRWA facilities.” In order to reform UNRWA, Eid proposed a five point program:

1. Audit all funds allocated to UNRWA, which operates with a $1.2b. budget.
2. Introduce UN High Commissioner for Refugees standards to UNRWA, to encourage permanent refugee settlement.
3. Cancel the UNRWA war curriculum, based on principles of jihad, martyrdom and right of return by force of arms.
4. Demand that UNRWA schools conform to the UNRWA slogan: “Peace Starts Here.”
5. Dismiss UNRWA employees affiliated with Hamas, defined by the donor nations to UNRWA as a terrorist entity.

Eid noted that UNRWA couldn’t even provide an exact number of Palestinian refugees, about which it “should be the authoritative source.”

Eid’s op-ed provoked a furious response from UNRWA’s spokesman, Chris Gunness, who called the Post “unbalanced” and demanded a boycott of the paper.

“Elder of Ziyon” noted that Gunness didn’t address the bulk of Eid’s claims, and instead resorted to blasting The Jerusalem Post. The blogger has recently been documenting what Eid refers to as UNRWA’s “war curriculum,” and condemned Gunness for ignoring the charge.
In The Real Palestinian Refugee Crisis, which was published in the May 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, Asaf Romirowsky explained how UNRWA perpetuates Palestinian statelessness:

UNRWA’s role in perpetuating and even expanding the refugee problem is a complex one; but, more than anything else, it is the result of the agency’s own definition of a Palestinian refugee—which is unique in world history. The standard definition of a refugee, which applies in every case except that of the Palestinians, includes only those actually displaced in any given conflict. UNRWA has defined a Palestinian refugee as anyone whose “normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948 and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” But it has also continually expanded this definition, now stating “the children or grandchildren of such refugees are eligible for agency assistance if they are (a) registered with UNRWA, (b) living in the area of UNRWA’s operations, and (c) in need.”
As a result, the number of official Palestinian refugees—according to UNRWA— has expanded almost to the point of absurdity. The best estimates are that perhaps 650,000 Palestinians became refugees in 1948-1949; but UNRWA now defines virtually every Palestinian born since that time as a refugee. That number now reaches well into the millions. This is quite simply unprecedented. In no other case has refugee status been expanded to include subsequent generations over a period of decades.