Kerry’s deceptive Israeli supporters

From Caroline Glick*, Tuesday, February 4th, 2014 (Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. ):

Once again, on Saturday, US Secretary of State John Kerry tried to extort Israeli concessions to the PLO by threatening us with a Western economic boycott.
Kerry is obsessed with Israel’s economic success. Last May he told us that we’re too rich to surrender our land. Now he’s saying we’ll be poor if we don’t do so.
The anti-Semitic undertones of Kerry’s constant chatter about Jews having too much money are obvious. But beyond their inherent bigotry, Kerry’s statements serve to legitimize the radical Left’s economic war against the Jewish state. Administration supporters and fundraisers from Code Pink and other pressure groups, as well as the EU understand that if they escalate their economic and political persecution of the Jewish state, their actions will be met with quiet understanding, and even support from the Obama administration.
This is so even if the State Department issues indignant press releases expressing fury that Israeli elected officials have the chutzpah to object to Kerry’s behavior.
Israel has been subjected to plenty of abuse from American secretaries of state. But Kerry’s incessant talk of “illusory” Jewish money is unprecedented.
Why does Kerry believe he can get away with this? The overwhelming majority of US lawmakers oppose economic warfare against Israel.
The vast majority of Americans support Israel and believe that a Palestinian state will support terrorism and be hostile to Israel.
So if the American public opposes Kerry’s obsessive aggressiveness toward Israel, who is supporting him? Who is giving him cover for his anti-Jewish smears and his irrational focus on Jewish communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines?
The answer is as infuriating as it is apparent. It is the Israeli Left and through it, much of the American Jewish community that enables Kerry’s diplomatic aggression against the Jewish state.
Operating under their cover, Kerry feels free to engage in anti-Jewish bigotry directed against Israeli society. He believes he is immune from allegations of ill-will toward Israel even as he places the full weight of the US government behind a plan that will endanger Israel, bring no peace, destabilize the Middle East and fail to win the US any friends or allies in the Islamic world.
On the face of it, it is hard to understand why leftist Israeli Jews cheer Kerry’s aggressive attacks and threats. After all, they live here.
They know as well as the rest of the country that if Israel bows to his will and surrenders Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to the PLO the move will bring no peace.
Rather it will unleash a Palestinian terrorist assault the likes of which we haven’t seen before.
They know that the international delegitimization of Israel only expands with every Israeli concession to the PLO, and that giving up the store will bring us no respite from the Western world’s assault on our right to exist.
So what do they gain by giving cover to Kerry? Why do people like Labor MK Shelly Yacimovich applaud Kerry for placing unrelenting pressure on the government to take steps that the majority of Israelis oppose and urge him to keep it up? Ron Pundak, one of the original architects of Israel’s embrace of the PLO and the so-called two-state solution at Oslo in 1993 supplied the answer in a recently published paper.
Last November the George Soros-supported International Crisis Group published a paper by Pundak entitled “Leap of Faith: Israel’s National Religious and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”
The purpose of his paper was to provide strategies for contending with the religious Zionist opposition to the two-state model. According to Pundak, non-secular Israelis oppose the two-state policy because it “is seen as… aimed at de-Zionizing the state.”
Rather than develop talking points to convince Israeli Zionists that they are wrong to view the two-state model as an anti-Zionist project, Pundak admitted they are right. Indeed, destroying the Zionist underpinning of the Jewish state is not a byproduct of the two-state model. It is the purpose of the two-state model.
In Pundak’s words, “Peace is not an objective by itself. It is a way to transition Israel from one era to another: to an era of what I consider is a normal state. Israelisation of society rather than its judaisation…”
Pundak’s explanation is not new. Before the Sharon government surrendered Gaza to Palestinian terrorists and forcibly expelled its 8,000 Jewish residents from their homes, Haaretz published an unsigned editorial along the same lines.
“The disengagement of Israeli policy from its religious fuel is the real disengagement currently on the agenda. On the day after the disengagement, religious Zionism’s status will be different.”
The editorial concluded that all the talk about enhanced security or peace was pure nonsense. The purpose of destroying the communities in Gaza was to destroy the political and social power of religious Zionism in Israel.
Other leftist commentators and policy makers including Doron Rosenblum, Avirama Golan, Avrum Burg, Efraim Sneh, Dan Margalit and Ami Ayalon made similar arguments.
For Pundak and his colleagues in the post-Zionist camp, Kerry is a key ally. And to the extent Kerry weakens the government and its supporters, he is a strategic asset.
True, Kerry’s “framework” will bring no peace. But if what Pundak and his camp were after was peace, they wouldn’t have embraced the PLO to begin with. They would have cultivated pro-Israel Arabs who would lead their people into Israeli society.
That is, they would have done precisely what center- right governing coalitions – that included religious Zionists – sought to achieve, with significant success, in the decade and a half that preceded the phony peace-process.
Israel is a democracy. And it is perfectly legitimate for Pundak and his colleagues to try to advance their policy goal of replacing Zionism with a de-Judaized state or anything else they wish.
What is illegitimate is the means they have employed to advance their goal.
In a democracy, the strategic goals and policies of the government are supposed to be based on the will of the public as expressed at the ballot box. In Israel, there is a political party that shares the goals of the post-Zionist camp. It is called Meretz and it receives between two and five seats in the Knesset every election.
Pundak and his colleagues know that they cannot convince the majority of Israelis to abandon Zionism in favor of their anti-Jewish vision of the future. So rather than tell us the truth about what they are doing, they engage in subversion and subterfuge. They call themselves “the peace camp,” and use outside pressure and coercion to bend an unwilling public to their will.
For them, Kerry is best when he’s worst for their country.
And Kerry knows this. And so he piles on the threats, and the anti-Semitism, and with their support, he knows he can get away with it.

*Caroline Glick’s new book, The Israeli Solution: A One- State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, is due out on March 4.

Oxfam and extremists flock together

This report from Stand for Peace, 15 Jan 2013, is freshly relevant in the light of Oxfam's recent attack on Scarlett Johansson and Sodastream:

Oxfam ...a leading charity in the UK.. sponsors and runs events with a number of extremist groups.

Download the full Report Here

Summary
This report reveals that Oxfam has partnered with groups that support terrorism, religious extremism, anti-Semitism and advocate violence against Jews, women and homosexuals.

But what exactly defines a partnership? Oxfam has sponsored events, issued joint press releases, and run campaigns with all these groups...

Most importantly, Oxfam itself describes many of these relations as “partnerships”. It partnered with Islamic Relief and Human Appeal and Muslim Brotherhood-linked group MADE to produce a ‘campaigns toolkit’.  Both Islamic Relief and Human Appeal have been accused by a number of Governments of being “terrorist fronts”. Further, Islamic Relief’s President, Essam al-Haddad, was the campaign manager for Egyptian President Morsi, who recently described Jews as the “descendents of apes and pigs”.

In fact, on Oxfam’s website, the blog post acknowledging the ‘campaigns toolkit’ project was written by an Oxfam staff member called Nina Gora, who was a leading anti-Israel activist while at University. Working with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, she invited Aharon Cohen, the extremist leader of Neturei Karta, to address students. A few years before, Cohen had said that Holocaust victims “deserved it”. Gora also wrote this piece, titled ‘Horror of Occuption’.

Oxfam’s relationship with the London Muslim Centre, considered by many to be one of the most extreme anti-Semitic institutions in Europe, has also been described as a “partnership”.

Oxfam proudly labels itself as the leading supporter of Zaytoun, an organisation run by the pro-Hamas International Solidarity Movement. Again, Oxfam calls the relationship a “partnership”. And yet Zaytoun is one of the leading actors in the movement to boycott Israeli goods.

Oxfam’s relations with these groups goes beyond sharing the occasional platform; it includes running joint events and affirming support for each other.

Oxfam partners have included:

1. East London Mosque - an extremist institution whose speakers have included Saad Al Beraik, a hate preacher who calls for the enslavement of Jewish women.
2. Islamic Relief - a charity which the Israeli government has designated a “terrorist front”. Ayaz Ali, the head of the charity’s Gaza operations, was deported after being accused of funnelling money to Hamas. Neo-Nazi images were found stored on his computer.
3. MADE in Europe - a charity whose staff are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamist groups, and whose offices are based at the extremist London Muslim Centre.
4. Human Appeal International - a charity identified by the US Government as one of a number of groups used as conduits for funds to terrorist organisations, including Hamas.
5. Zaytoun - a trade collective run by members of the anti-Israel, pro-terror International Solidarity Movement. Zaytoun works to promote the boycott of Israeli goods.
6. Palestine Solidarity Campaign - an anti-Israel lobbying group which the BBC has described as a ‘radical’ organisation that supports Hamas. The Board of Deputies of British Jews has stated the PSC’s views include “racist conspiracy theories, the propagation of antisemitic stereotypes and Holocaust denial”.
7. Muslim Aid - According to its own accounts, Muslim Aid paid £325,000 to the Islamic University of Gaza, where leading Hamas figures teach; and £13,998 to the al-Ihsan Charitable Society, designated by the US government as a “sponsor of terrorism” and a front for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group.
8. Federation of Student Islamic Societies – a radical student movement which has, in the past, promoted Al Qaeda recruiter Anwar Awlawki and has provided a platform to hate preachers such as Haitham Al-Haddad, who has said that Jews are “apes and pigs” and that the Gaza war made him happy because “it clearly encouraged Muslims to prepare themselves for jihad, all over the world”.

Download the full Report Here

Israel will manage, even without an agreement with the Palestinians

From JPost, 2/2/2014, by Herb Keinon:

Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon speaks at Munich Security Conference 

Photo: COURTESY MUNICH SECURITY CONFERENCE

Israel will manage, even without an agreement with the Palestinians, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said Sunday, in contradiction to US Secretary of State John Kerry’s assessment that the status quo is unsustainable.
Speaking of a possible agreement with the Palestinians, Ya’alon – at the Munich Security Conference – said he was not willing to talk about giving up “one inch” unless the Palestinians agree that

 “at the end of the process, the framework of the negotiations will include 

• the recognition of our right to exist as a nation-state of the Jewish people, 

• a finality of claims, giving up the right of return, and 

• addressing our security needs. That is what is [being] discussed now. 

Hopefully we’ll get it. If not, we will manage.”

The day before, Kerry’s message to the conference was that if the Israeli-Palestinian talks failed, matters would get significantly more problematic for Israel.

“Today’s status quo absolutely, to a certainty, I promise you 100 percent, cannot be maintained,” he said. “It’s not sustainable. It’s illusionary.
There’s a momentary prosperity, there’s a momentary peace. Last year, not one Israeli was killed by a Palestinian from the West Bank. This year, unfortunately, there’s been an uptick in some violence.
But the fact is the status quo will change if there is failure.”...

Ya’alon reiterated his position that the Israeli- Palestinian conflict was not a dispute over territory but over the Palestinian refusal to accept Israel as a Jewish state and to declare an end to the conflict, if and when there is an agreed-upon withdrawal from the West Bank.

“The core of the conflict is not territory which was liberated or occupied or taken in ’67,” said Ya’alon, who added that he supported the Oslo process because he believes that human life is more important than land. “The conflict started early on since the dawn of Zionism, and unfortunately I don’t see a leadership on the Palestinian side that is ready to say that if we reach a compromise on territory, it would be the end of claims.”

“I support the negotiations, I support any political engagement, but we should tell the truth to ourselves and not delude ourselves and to deceive ourselves regarding Abu Mazen’s intentions,” ...

“Will Abu Mazen be ready to recognize our right to exist as nation state of the Jewish people?...We got a clear answer. Never.”

The defense minister also rejected suggestions that Israel’s settlement activity was a sign that the government was not sincere about negotiating an agreement with the Palestinians.

“Settlements are not the obstacle to peace...The settlements include today less than five percent of the territory in the Palestinian arena. If we are going for peace – we have Arabs living side by side with us in Galilee and Jaffa and Acre; we don’t deny this right. Why does the Palestinian leadership insist on getting the territory without Jews? If we have to live together, we can benefit from each other.”...