Tom Friedman: out of the closet, dyed-in-the-wool Israel hater

 From Caroline Glick, December 20, 2011:

 

 

For decades New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman balanced his substantively anti-Israel positions with repeated protestations of love for Israel.

His balancing act ended last week when he employed traditional anti-Semitic slurs to dismiss the authenticity of substantive American support for Israel.

Channeling the longstanding anti-Semitic charge that Jewish money buys support for power-hungry Jews best expressed in the forged 19th century Protocols of the Elders of Zion and in John Mearshimer's and Stephen Walt's 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, Friedman denied the significance of the US Congress's overwhelming support for Israel.

As he put it, 

"I sure hope that Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby."

...It doesn't matter to Friedman that overwhelming survey evidence, amassed over decades, show that the vast majority of the American public and the American Jewish community support Israel. It doesn't matter to him that the support shown to Netanyahu in Congress last May was a reflection of that support.

...researchers discerned no difference in levels of support for Israel across the political spectrum. As the study reported, "We found that conservatives were no more likely than liberals to feel connected to Israel or regard Israel as central to their Jewish identities. These findings are remarkable given that liberalism is associated with reduced support for Israel in the broader American population."

...On December 7 Politico's Ben Smith published a detailed report about how two of the Democratic Party's core institutions, the Center for American Progress and Media Matters are waging a concerted, continuous campaign to diminish left wing Democratic support for Israel. Media Matters official M.J. Rosenberg acknowledged that given the depth of popular support for Israel in the US, chances are remote that their efforts will pay off in Congress today. He explained that his goal is to shift the Democratic Party's position on Israel through its younger generation.

As he put it, "We're playing the long game here."

Happily, to date, they are losing the long game as well as the short game both in Israel and the US. While it is important to remain on guard against radicals like Friedman and Rosenberg and their fellow travelers on campuses, it is also important to recognize that despite their powerful positions, they remain marginal voices in both Israel and the US.

Chinese=Jews in Malaysia

From the Centre for Policy Initiatives (Kualar Lumpur), 22 December 2011:

...Ng Wei Aik is state assemblyman and aide to Penang chief minister Lim Guan Eng. ...one day soon after Israel’s military operation against the Gaza flotilla, he saw that his party, the DAP, had beaten Najib Razak to the clock. The prime minister was being tardy, Ng complained ... If Najib is slower, then by inference, his heart may not be with the Palestinians, that is, Muslims. If not with Muslims, who with? Conversely, DAP people like Ng cast the impression that they think of Muslims every moment of their waking hours. So touching….

Now it seems domestic politics is beginning to be measured in terms of hours taken to react and to issue a condemnation. And that over an ancient, Jewish-Muslim conflict nearly half a world away and reignited more than half a century ago, it having sparked when Malaysia was not even in existence.

Ng’s posturing is sign that the country is off on yet another trajectory in demonizing Chinese and in Sino-Malay relations. Anti-Chinese racism in Malaysia has this historic, lasting quality in varied forms: before, in stereotypical portrayal of Chinese as gangsters, prostitutes, towkays, usurious money-lenders (‘Ah Longs’); today, gamblers and Jews.

Most tellingly it is DAP’s scathing attacks on Israel that beat even the usual hate mongering coming from Umno and PAS/PKR.

This is to the credit of the Gaza flotilla, which offered a window of opportunity to propel Malaysia into arriving at the milestone in Chinese-Malay relations – a milestone reaffirmed on the streets earlier this month in demonstrations against Israel (against Jews really), and almost simultaneously in the Ketuanan Melayu propaganda papers: Jews equal Chinese.

He who started it

Mahathir Mohamad has been one of the earliest to bed the Chinese and the Jewish diaspora – his two pet hate projects. His most recent rants against both Jews and Chinese are today preambled and chorused by other Malaysians, notably Mohd Ridhuan Tee Abdullah (left),  and Muslims and Chinese Christians who are staunchly anti-Jew.

From a lone Mahathir project before, it’s gone truly Malaysian. DAP, PKR, Chinese, everybody appears to have unanimously jumped on the bandwagon, or should we say the flotilla?

Equating Jew and Chinese, Ridhuan Tee says upfront: “the Jews are already right in front of our eyes???. To rub it in for the Chinese, he praises Hilter and fascism.

...Ng contributes to feather the very bed made by Mahathir – Jews equal Chinese – and which Ridhuan Tee now repeats to no end.

Drive Chinese into the sea?

The device Mahathir employs (and in whose hallowed footsteps Ridhuan follows) is a form of logic technically called syllogism, using two inter-related or parallel concepts, and tying them up to forge a third – the conclusion.

Because it is so easily mistaken as truth, syllogism is used everywhere in the English speaking world, as in Malaysia by individuals who otherwise cannot make a convincing case from empirical evidence.

From one of the latter editions of The Malay Dilemma, below is a sample of terms, all Mahathir’s, and note they are entirely of a subjective, adjectival kind because in syllogism no objective facts are required – just say it.

First Parallelism (P.1):

• Jews: hook-nosed, stinginess, financial wizardry, commercial control, understand money instinctively.
• Chinese: almond-eyed, unscrupulous, manipulative, monopoly wholesale trade, defer to riches.

Second Parallelism (P.2):

• Palestine: whole country was taken (sic!) and handed to the Jews
• Malaya: predatory immigrants, Sinocization (sic!) of the country

The examples above pile syllogism on syllogism. The conclusions in each of them automatically pull together to create a third: (P.1) Jews = Chinese; (P.2) Palestine = Malaya; therefore, (P.3) Chinese illegally occupied Malaya. Extrapolate P.3, hence, drive the Chinese into the South China Sea as Mahathir did to the Vietnamese boat people? (Arabs say the same of Israel’s Jews.)

These conclusions need not be made plain; they become intuitive just reading the stuff.

The Chinese profile being constructed for hate has evolved so far along these lines (and note the same syllogism at work):

• Chinese are Jews.
• Chinese are infidels and the heathen.
• Jews killed Jesus.
• Jews kill Palestinians.
• Therefore Chinese are anti-Palestinians
• Palestinians are Muslims.
• Malays are Muslims.
• Therefore Chinese oppress Muslims.
• Chinese won’t become Muslims or Christians (neither will Jews).
• Therefore Chinese are anti-Muslims and anti-Christians.

Taken far enough in this reconstructed profile of racial hate, as Mahathir did in the Dilemma, is a recipe for a future pogrom.

...praising the anti-Semitism, opposition politicians fawning after the Muslim vote are locked hand-in-hand with the Muslim fundamentalism they once denounced.

The greatest Malaysian achievement in the ‘Peace Flotilla’ to Gaza is, therefore, not concern for Palestinians. ...the Turkish flotilla electrifies a domestic, Malaysian, hate-Chinese project by transforming and giving it an international character, supported even by local Chinese, Lim Kit Siang et al.

From Mahathir, anti-Semitism as a way to drum up Chinese hatred is to be expected. But how could the opposition, one might ask, be so callous in their politics?

Iran is close to a nuke - a military showdown is no longer avoidable

From a DEBKAfile Special Report December 20, 2011:

"..they have reached a point where they can assemble a bomb in a year or potentially less," 

said US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in a CBS interview Tuesday, Dec. 20, marking a radical change in US administration policy, he added:

 "That's a red line for us and that's a red line, obviously for the Israelis. If we have to do it we will deal with it."

... as recently as Dec. 2, the US defense secretary ... warned Israel that a military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities would hold back its bomb program by no more than a year or two and seriously damage the world economy...In the CBS interview [yesterday], ...he answered: 

"It would probably be about a year before they can do it. Perhaps a little less." That would depend on their having "a hidden facility somewhere in Iran that may be enriching fuel."...The United States does not want Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. That's a red line for us and that's a red line, obviously, for the Israelis. If we have to do it we will deal with it....There are no options off the table. A nuclear weapon in Iran is unacceptable.

...Panetta made no mention of sanctions in this interview – not even of the ultimate penalties of an embargo on its oil trade and blacklisting its central bank.

debkafile's intelligence sources link this radical change of posture, and its implied open door to joint US-Israeli military action, to the discussion on the Iranian nuclear issue President Barack Obama had with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak in Washington last Friday, Dec. 16 ... at about the same time as Leon Panetta was meeting with Turkish leaders in Ankara. Both meetings ...addressed the reality of Iran having a nuclear bomb within months.

The administration's change of course finds expression in six areas:

1. Panetta ... now accepts that Tehran may be only months away from [a nuclear bomb].
2. His reference to "a hidden facility somewhere in Iran that may be enriching fuel" reflects the growing conviction among Western and Middle East intelligence experts that Iran has fast-tracked its high-grade uranium enrichment in underground facilities.
3. He is no longer warning Israel against attacking Iran and appears to be taking the opposite tack...
4. It is the last moment for the US to avert the Middle East's plunge into a nuclear race. Dec. 5, the former Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal said that after failing to persuade Israel and Iran to give up their nuclear weapons, Riyadh had no option but to develop its own; and Turkish leader have been saying to the  Obama administration that if Iran has a nuclear weapon, so too will Turkey.The administration is now facing the bleak realization that a disastrous nuclear race in this volatile region can be deflected only by military action to cut down and destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program.
5. Iran's capture of the American RQ-170 stealth drone on Dec. 4 brought home to US military and intelligence planners that a military showdown between the US and Iran is no longer avoidable and if America does not take the initiative, Iran will keep on driving it into corners until there is no other option but to hit back.
6. The sudden death of the North Korean leader Kim Jong II and the period of uncertainty facing his successor Kim Jong-un could potentially lead to Pyongyang - or factions fighting for power – stepping up its involvement in Iran's nuclear weapon and missile development programs.

PLO teaches its children to admire Hitler because he murdered Jews

From a PMW Bulletin, 20 Dec 2011, by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik:

Hitler tells a Palestinian girl in her dream:

"I killed them [the Jews] so you would all know that they are a nation which spreads destruction all over the world."

The following is an excerpt from Deception: Betraying the Peace Process, chapter 14, section 1:
The Palestinian Authority funds a monthly educational magazine for children called Zayzafuna. The magazine is made up of material written by the magazine's staff and also includes essays and poems written by children. Accordingly, Zayzafuna both represents the values of the educators and serves as a window into the minds of the participating Palestinian children. The magazine is published with the sponsorship of the PLO's Palestinian National Committee for Education, Culture and Sciences.
Most of the content in Zayzafuna is positive and educational. ...When it comes to portraying Israel and Jews, Zayzafuna changes its tone and includes items glorifying Jihad against Israel and praising Martyrdom death for Allah, and the Martyrs themselves.
[In] an essay submitted by a teenage girl ...Hitler is presented as a positive figure to be admired because he killed Jews in order to benefit the world.
...In addition, the magazine portrays a world where "Palestine" has replaced Israel by referring to Israeli cities such as Haifa and Jaffa as places in "Palestine" or as "occupied" cites. It denies Israel's right to exist by saying that Israel is on "stolen" or "occupied" land, and demonizes Israel and Jews. Approximately one fourth of the children's submissions are on nationalistic topics, and among them are expressions of hatred and delegitimization against Jews and Israel that mirror the messages transmitted by the PA leadership through official media, PA education and other structures under their control.
It is specifically because this is not a hate magazine, but in general a positive publication promoting good values, that the hatred expressed towards Israel and Jews is so damaging. All the positive messages about coexistence and peace, which abound throughout the magazine, apply to everyone but Israelis and Jews. The message of Zayzafuna concerning Israelis and Jews is that they are in a unique category separated from other peoples and religious groups: For others - peace, cooperation and coexistence; for Israelis and Jews - hatred, confrontation and Jihad

...The following is the essay in Zayzafuna presenting Hitler with other positive role models.

"One hot day, I was very tired after a hard day... and suddenly I saw four white doors in front of me. I opened them in no particular order.

I opened the f irst door and saw a beautiful place full of f lowers. I was surprised to see a man there. I asked him, 'Who are you?'

He said, 'I am Al-Khwarizmi.' [Ninth century Persian mathematician who lived in Baghdad, known for his contribution to the development of algebra.]

I said: 'You're the one who invented mathematics and arithmetic?' He said: 'Yes. What's your situation like today?'

I said: 'The Arabs and Muslims are in a deep sleep; they can't do anything. They have moved away from all the sciences.'

He [Al-Khwarizmi] said: 'Yes, I know that. The day will come when the Arabs will return to their glory. And you - you have a great duty, which is to take an interest in the Islamic sciences and to protect them from being forgotten.'

I said, 'I promise,' and left the door.

I turned to the next door; there Hitler awaited me. I said, 'You're the one who killed the Jews?'

He [Hitler] said: 'Yes. I killed them so you would all know that they are a nation which spreads destruction all over the world. And what I ask of you is to be resilient and patient, concerning the suffering that Palestine is experiencing at their hands.'

I said [to Hitler]: 'Thanks for the advice.'

Then I turned to the third door, and met Naguib Mahfouz [Nobel Prize- winning Egyptian author], who was the one who knew best the value of time and how to use it.

He said: 'People's pastime, these days, has become killing time and wasting it, as though they are punishing themselves. So strive to use your time in the best way.'

At the fourth door I meet Saladin Al-Ayoubi [Muslim leader who defeated the Christian crusaders and conquered Jerusalem in the twelfth century]. He said: 'I am Saladin.'

I said: 'You were the one who liberated Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa [Mosque].' He answered: 'Yes.'

I said: 'Return, oh Saladin, for Jerusalem and Palestine cry out and no one answers.'

He [Saladin] said: 'I know, but every time has its men, and the right man to liberate Jerusalem is still to come.'

And before I could finish my dream, the alarm clock rang and I woke up. It was seven in the morning, and I needed to go to school early, because I had promised Naguib Mahfouz that I would use time well."

[Zayzafuna, February 2011]

Although repugnant, a Palestinian teenager's admiration for Hitler because he killed Jews, alongside other Muslim role models, is not unexpected. 
...Palestinian children are brought up with the teaching that killing Israelis and Jews is heroic. 
The PA has named streets, schools, sporting events and more after Palestinian terrorists who have killed hundreds of Israeli civilians. In Palestinian cultural, educational and social events, every Palestinian child is exposed to repeated glorification of terrorists who have killed Jews. Palestinian children have participated in summer camps named after Dalal Mughrabi who led a bus hijacking in which 37 civilians were killed, and played in football tournaments named after Abd Al-Basset Odeh, a suicide bomber who killed 31 Israelis at a Passover dinner. It is not surprising that a Palestinian child who has been educated to see those who have murdered Jews as heroes and role models will conclude that Hitler, the one who murdered the most Jews in history, is likewise worthy of admiration.

About the publishers and advisory staff of Zayzafuna:
The magazine is published by the Zayzafuna Association for Development of Children's Culture, and sponsored by the PLO's Palestinian National Committee for Education, Culture and Sciences.
The magazine's advisory board is comprised of Palestinian Authority officials and educators, including PA Deputy Minister of Education Jihad Zakarneh, and former PA Minister for Women's Affairs Zuheira Kamal. [Zayzafuna, February 2011]
The Zayzafuna magazine is part of a larger education program funded by the Palestinian Authority which contributed 90,000 Shekel ($24,370) in 2010 and 10,000 Shekel ($2,700) a month in 2011.
Since August 2011, the magazine is also sponsored by UNESCO and the MDG Achievement Fund (MDG-F), a UN humanitarian foundation funded by the Spanish government. [Zayzafuna, August 2011.] In the October 2011 issue a note appears: "Opinions expressed in this magazine don't necessarily express UNESCO's views."
Deputy Chairman of the Zayzafuna organization Abd Al-Karim Ziyada has explained the following about the funding of Zayzafuna:

"The magazine has advertisements, which cover some of the costs. For the year 2010-2011 we have subscriptions by students and schools, and that also helps [funding the magazine]. We are fortunate in that the Palestinian Authority and the Prime Minister [Salam Fayyad] have helped us this year with aid in the amount of 90,000 Shekel ($24,370) to cover the magazine and organization costs, and that has given us a push forward. Allah be praised, there is a new agreement for a monthly [PA] payment of 10,000 Shekel ($2,700) to cover the magazine [costs]."

[PA TV (Fatah), May 9 and 13, 2011]

This excerpt above is from a chapter in the book Deception: Betraying the Peace Process, recently published by PMW. The book includes a longer analysis of the other material as well found in issues of Zayzafuna from May 2010 through August 2011, focusing on messages relating to Israelis and Jews. A short summary of the positive messages in Zayzafuna and that are unconnected to Israel, is also included.

Palestinians: Invented People

From BESA Center PerspectivesPaper No. 157, December 20, 2011, by Prof. Michael Curtis*:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The concept of Palestinian identity and nationalism is a recent invention. Both historically and in contemporary times, the Arabs living in the area now known as Palestine were regarded both by outsiders and by their own spokespeople as members of the greater Arab population, without a separate or distinct identity. Today, however, it is clear that Palestinian nationalism has emerged and become a political factor.  

The recent statement uttered by US Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich that the Palestinians are an “invented people” has been criticized [but] ...the accuracy of his statement cannot be denied. 

This conclusion stems from two factors. The first is that Arabs living in the area now known as Palestine were regarded, both historically and in contemporary times, not as a separate entity but as part of the general Arab people. This has been recognized by Arab spokesmen, by scholars, and by objective international official reports. The second is that no independent Palestinian state has ever existed, let alone one that manifested a “Palestinian identity.”
A few examples can illustrate this. The first Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations in the area met in February 1919 to consider the future of the territory formerly ruled by the Ottoman Empire, which dissolved after World War I. The Congress declared: “We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, moral, economic, and geographical bonds.” The celebrated scholar Philip Hitti, testifying before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946, stated there was no such thing as Palestine in history, “absolutely not.”
The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), in its September 3, 1947 report, remarked that Palestinian nationalism, as distinct from Arab nationalism, was a relatively new phenomenon. It concluded that Palestinian identity was part of a rich tapestry of identities, mostly predicated on Arab and Islamic solidarity.
The Palestinians themselves reached the same conclusion. Palestinian spokesperson Ahmad Shuqeiri told the UN Security Council in 1956 that Palestine was nothing more than southern Syria. The head of the Military Operations Department of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Zuheir Muhsein, declared on March 31, 1977, “Only for political reasons do we carefully underline our Palestinian identity. …the existence of a separate Palestinian identity is there for tactical reasons.” The PLO, in its own Charter or amended Basic Law (article 1), states that Palestine is part of the Arab nation.
That “Arab nation” never included a state known as “Palestine.” Indeed, the inhabitants of the general Palestinian area were not subjects of an Arab nation but of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled the area from 1516-1918. This was the last recognized sovereign power in the area. The area of Palestine was a district of the Empire, officially a vilayet (province), not a political entity. No independent Palestinian state has ever been established, nor was there a single administrative or cultural unit of Palestinians. Arabs in the area were not different in any way from other Arabs in the Middle East. Nor was Israel established on the ashes of any state other than the Ottoman Empire.
On the other hand, a sovereign Jewish state existed prior to the rise of the Roman Empire. While the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, changed the name of the land to Syria Palestina, and banished the Jews from Jerusalem, this did not eradicate all Jewish presence in the area. Moreover, the Jews in the Diaspora maintained a strong consciousness of the historical connection of the Jewish people to Palestine – a connection that was acknowledged in the League of Nations mandate. Jewish nationalism has used legends of individuals like Moses as common ancestors and founders of the Jewish people.
... the Jews constitute a people – a set of individuals linked together not only by a common religion, but also as members of an ethnic community with memories of a shared past, common ceremonies and culture, and mutual legal codes, social behavior, myths and symbols. Between Jews there is a peoplehood, a subjective belief in their common descent from ancestors in Judea and Samaria.
The first official naming of “Palestine” as a distinct, defined territorial area came with the decision of the League of Nations, dealing with areas of the former Ottoman Empire, to create a Mandate for Palestine. This was accorded to Great Britain, which ruled the area from the Mediterranean Sea to west of the Jordan River from 1922 until May 1948.
All people living in that area were regarded as “Palestinians” without any ethnic connotations. Ironically, the name was used not by Arabs but only by Jews in the area, as in The Palestinian (now the Jerusalem) Post, and the Palestine Symphony (now Israel Philharmonic) Orchestra. Only after the State of Israel was established in May 1948 did the term “Palestinian” become exclusively used in referring to Arabs in the area.
It is now clear that a concept of Palestinian identity and nationalism has emerged... as a claim to self-determination by Arabs in the period after World War I in reaction to the increasing importance of Zionism and the assertion of self-determination by the Jewish people. The single most important factor leading to the idea and development of a Palestinian national identity was the creation of Israel and the Arab defeat by Israel in 1948-49. One might say it was even an imitation of the Zionist movement. Palestinian national identity was formally asserted only with the formation of the PLO in 1964.
The essential problem is not simply a terminological one – a refusal by many to acknowledge that the category of Palestinian identity is a recent invention. Rather, the insistence on a presumed, time honored right of a Palestinian people to the disputed land is being used as a weapon against the right of Israel to exist. Such an insistence is a handicap to a peaceful, negotiated agreement between the Palestinians and Israel. The decision about the exercise of sovereign power in Palestine remains to be determined in an overall peace settlement.
*Michael Curtis is a distinguished professor emeritus of political science at Rutgers University.

Ending UNRWA And Advancing Peace

From the Council on Foreign Relations, December 19, 2011,by Elliott Abrams:

A Palestinian rides his bicycle as he passes the United Nations Works and Relief Agency (UNRWA) headquarters at Shati refugee camp in Gaza April 26, 2008. (Courtesy REUTERS/Ismail Zaydah).

Since the end of the Second World War, millions of refugees have left refugee camps, and refugee status, and moved to countries that accepted them–quickly or slowly–as citizens. Post-World War II Europe was an archipelago of displaced persons and refugee camps ...Czechs, Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Latvians, Greeks, and many more nationalities. 

By 1952, all but one of the camps had closed. Hundred of thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe went to Israel after 1948, and then hundreds of thousands more arrived from Arab lands when they were forced to flee after 1956 and 1967. 

The children and grandchildren of these refugees, born after their arrival, were never refugees themselves; they were from birth citizens of the new land, as their parents had become immediately upon their own arrival. In this process many nations and agencies have played wonderful roles, not least the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

The exception to this refugee story is the Palestinians. In most of the Arab lands to which they fled or travelled after 1948 they were often treated badly, and refused citizenship (with Jordan the major exception) or even the right to work legally. And instead of coming under the protection of UNHCR, they had a special agency of their own, UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency. In the decades of its existence, it has not solved or even diminished the Palesinian refugee problem; instead it has presided over a massive increase in its size, for all the descendants of Palestinian refugees are considered to be refugees as well. Once there were 750,000; now there are five million people considered by UNRWA to be “Palestinian refugees.” And UNRWA is now the largest UN agency, with a staff of 30,000. UNHCR cares for the rest of the world with about 7,500 personnel.

The political background to this story is simple: only in the case of Israel was there a determined refusal to accept what had happened during and after World War II, with the establishment of the Jewish state and the increase in its population by the acceptance of refugee Jews. 

Of all the world’s refugees, whom UNHCR tries normally to resettle, only the Palestinians are an exception. UNRWA presides over generation after generation of additional refugees, and Arab states and leaders make believe that some day they can turn back the clock and send them–and their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren–to Israel.

To say this is not necessarily to criticize the day-to-day activities of UNRWA, for it was handed a mission by the UN. There are and have always been many UNRWA officials who are reliable international civil servants. ..But UNRWA should cease to exist, and Palestinian refugees should be handled by UNHCR with the intention of resettling them. 

That process should begin with a redefinition of who is a refugee entitled to benefits, so that benefits are based on need rather than on status. Moreover, Palestinians who have citizenship in other countries should not be considered refugees at all–the standard practice for every other group of refugees in the world. Why, for example, should the nearly two million Palestinians in Jordan, over 90 percent of whom have Jordanian citizenship, today be considered refugees by UNRWA at all?

Lest that position seem idiosyncratic, consider this: in 2010 Canada cut off its funding of UNRWA, and just now the Netherlands government has said it is considering the same action. How did they explain this? The foreign minister told parliament that Holland would “thoroughly review” its policy and the ruling party called UNRWA’s refugee definition “worrying.” UNRWA, said the party spokesman, “uses its own unique definition of refugees, different to the UN’s. The refugee issue is a big obstacle for peace. We therefore ask the government acknowledge this discrepancy, which leads to the third-generation Palestinian refugees.” Correction: fourth-generation, actually.

It is worth noting that there are many other criticisms of UNRWA: that it overlooks terrorist group activity in some camps, or allows members of Hamas and other terrorist groups to hold UNRWA staff positions. But those are criticisms of how UNRWA is carrying out its mission, while the deeper problem is the mission itself. That mission might accurately be described as enlarging the Palestinian refugee problem forever and thereby making any Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement tremendously more difficult if not impossible to achieve.

Closing UNRWA would in the end be a great favor to Palestinians who live outside the West Bank and Gaza, assuming that the needed services it provides them could be provided by other agencies or the governments of the countries in which they live. Some of those individuals will some day move to the West Bank or Gaza, but they do not need UNRWA to do that. None of them will ever move to Israel, and the existence of UNRWA helps to maintain the cruel myth that they will.

The “peace process” seems stalled today; no negotiated final settlements is on the horizon. But there are many things that can be done that move toward peace, such as the building of Palestinian institutions and improvement of the economy in the West Bank. 

Starting the process of closing down UNRWA would be a move toward peace, as it would replace the permanent perpetuation of the Palestinian refugee problem with a process designed to reduce it in size and some day solve it.

Give Peace A Chance

Uploaded to YouTube on Aug 22, 2011:

A 15 minute film about a new perspective for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians based on the discovery of the formerly classified minutes from the San Remo peace conference of April, 1920. This long hidden document explains the legal rights of the Jews as well as the Palestinians. By returning to the negotiating table and respecting historical facts and international law the film believes there can be real peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

What is Palestine?

From "Israel Hayom” newsletter, December 16, 2011, by Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger:

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the geographic term "Palestine” was predominantly associated – from biblical times until the 1948 establishment of Israel- with the Jewish people, Jewish history and Jewish geography. It was the crux of Jewish national aspirations, the Jewish Homeland.
In 135 AD, Judaea was renamed "Palestina,” by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, following the suppression of the Jewish uprising, in order to eradicate Jewish nationhood and to uproot the inherent Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel.  Similarly, Jerusalem was renamed "Aelia Capitolina,” in honor of Aelius Hadrian and the Roman Capitol, in an attempt to obliterate Jewish association with the spiritual and physical core of Judaism.
Since 1949, and increasingly since 1967, the term "Palestine” has been employed, by Israel's enemies, in order to delegitimize the existence of the Jewish State.  In April 1950, Judea and Samaria were renamed "the West Bank”, by the Jordanian occupation, in order to assert Jordanian rule, and expunge Jewish connection to the cradle of Jewish history. Until 1950, all official Ottoman, British and prior records referred to "Judea and Samaria" and not to the "West Bank.”
"Palestine" is a derivative of the Hebrew term "Plishtim” (invaders), the Biblical name of the Philistines, non-Semites from the Greek islands and from Phoenicia, who migrated in the 12th century BCE to Pleshet, along the Mediterranean. The term "Palestine" was established, in the 5^th century BC, by the Greek historian, Herodotus, and adopted in 135 AD, by the Roman Empire, in an attempt to erase "Judaea" from human memory.
According to Prof. Bernard Lewis, the icon of Mid-East historians (International History Review, January, 1980), "the earliest attempts at a territorial definition of the country later known as Palestine are in the Bible.”   In its attempts to devastate Jewish national aspirations, the Roman Empire attached Palestine to the province of Syria.  In 400 AD, Palestine was split into Palestina Prima – with its capital in Caesarea – and Palestina Secunda – with its capital in Bethshean, further diminishing the stature of Jerusalem. 
Prof. Lewis notes that the 7^th century Arab conquest of Palestine perpetuated the neglect of Jerusalem, while elevating the status of Lydda, Ramla and Tiberias. "In the early medieval Arabic usage, Filastin [Palestine] and Urdunn [Jordan] were sub-districts forming part of the greater geographical entity known as Syria…. Under Roman, Byzantine and Islamic rule, Palestine was politically submerged.  It reappeared only under the Crusaders…. the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem….
"Under the successors of Saladin, and still more under the Mamluks, the country was redistributed in new territorial units … with its capital in Damascus…. After the Ottoman conquest in 1516-17, the country was divided into Ottoman administrative districts... subject to the authority of the Governor-General of Damascus....
"[The term Palestine] was no longer used by Muslims, for whom it had never meant more than an administrative sub-district and it had been forgotten even in that limited sense…. 
"With the British conquest in 1917-18, Palestine became the official name of a definite territory for the first time since the early Middle Ages…. Palestine at this moment included both banks of the Jordan…. On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly of the UN adopted a [non-binding] resolution approving the partition of mandatory Palestine into three components: a Jewish state, an Arab state and an international zone…. [The Arab] rejected the partition resolution and went to war to prevent its implementation…. The Palestine entity, formally established and defined by Britain, was formally abolished in 1948 with the termination of the Mandate.” 
The Land of Israel (Palestine) has played a critical role in Jewish history, religion, nationalism, culture, language and personal and communal relationships, compared with the marginal role played by Palestine in Arab and Muslim history. Hence, the moral high ground for mandating the establishment of a Jewish State by the 1917 Balfour Declaration (on both sides of the Jordan River) and the 1922 League of Nations' British Mandate for Palestine (from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean).  Article 80 of the UN Charter upholds the "Mandate for Palestine,” which has not been overruled until today.
The fact that most Arab towns and villages in Judea and Samaria have retained their original Biblical Jewish names, highlights Jewish roots in the Land of Israel (Palestine).  For example, Bethlehem, Hebron, A-Dura is Biblical Adora'yim, A-Ram is Haramah, Anata is Anatot, Batir is Beitar, Beit-Hur is Beit Horon, Beitin is Bethel, Mukhmas is Mikhmash, Seilun is Shilo, Tequa' is Teqoah, etc.
These sites are not occupied by the Jewish State.  They are the epitome of the Jewish moral high ground and Statehood in the Land of Israel, Palestine.

Netanyahu: "NO THANKS" to ‘New York Times’

From JPost, 16 Dec 2011, by Herb Keinon:

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is refusing to pen an op-ed piece for The New York Times, signaling the degree to which he is fed up with the influential newspaper’s editorial policy on Israel.
In a letter to the Times obtained by The Jerusalem Post on Thursday, Netanyahu’s senior adviser Ron Dermer – in response to the paper’s request that Netanyahu write an op-ed – wrote that the prime minister would “respectfully decline.”
Dermer made clear that this had much to do with the fact that 19 of the paper’s 20 op-ed pieces on Israel since September were negative.
Ironically, the one positive piece was written by Richard Goldstone – chairman of the UN’s Goldstone Commission Report – defending Israel against charges of apartheid.
“We wouldn’t want to be seen as ‘Bibiwashing’ the op-ed page of The New York Times,” Dermer said, in reference to a piece called “Israel and Pinkwashing” from November. In that piece, a City University of New York humanities professor lambasted Israel for, as Dermer wrote, “having the temerity to champion its record on gay rights.”
That piece, he wrote, “set a new bar that will be hard for you to lower in the future.”
Dermer’s letter came a day after NYT columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that the resounding ovation Netanyahu received in Congress when he spoke there in May had been “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”
With Friedman clearly – but not solely – among those in mind, Dermer wrote that “the opinions of some of your regular columnists regarding Israel are well known. They constantly distort the positions of our government and ignore the steps it has taken to advance peace. They cavalierly defame our country by suggesting that marginal phenomena condemned by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and virtually every Israeli official, somehow reflect government policy or Israeli society as a whole.”
Dermer also took the paper to task for running an op-ed piece by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in May that asserted that shortly after the UN voted for the partition of Palestine in November 1947, “Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued.”
Those lines, Dermer wrote, “effectively turn on its head an event within living memory in which the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan accepted by the Jews, and then joined five Arab states in launching a war to annihilate the embryonic Jewish state. It should not have made it past the most rudimentary fact-checking.”
That it did find its way into the op-ed pages of the “paper of record,” he wrote, showed the degree to which the paper had not internalized former senator Daniel Moynihan’s admonition that “everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but... no one is entitled to their own facts.”
Furthermore, Dermer wrote, the paper’s sole positive piece about Israel since September – the Goldstone piece rejecting the apartheid charges – “came a few months after your paper reportedly rejected Goldstone’s previous submission. In that earlier piece, which was ultimately published in The Washington Post, the man who was quoted the world over for alleging that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza fundamentally changed his position. According to The New York Times op-ed page, that was apparently news unfit to print.”
Dermer wrote that the paper’s refusal to run positive pieces about Israel was not because they were in short supply. In fact, he said he understood that in September the paper had turned down a piece cowritten by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland), expressing bipartisan support for direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and opposition to the PA’s statehood gambit at the UN.
“In an age of intense partisanship, one would have thought that strong bipartisan support for Israel on such a timely issue would have made your cut,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Rep. Steve Rothman (D-New Jersey) called on Friedman to apologize for saying the congressional ovation Netanyahu received in May was “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”
Rothman said he gave Netanyahu a standing ovation not because of “any nefarious lobby,” but because it is in the US’s vital strategic interest to support Israel.
“Thomas Friedman’s defamation against the vast majority of Americans who support the Jewish state of Israel is scurrilous, destructive and harmful to Israel and her advocates in the US,” Rothman said. “Friedman is not only wrong, but he’s aiding and abetting a dangerous narrative about the US-Israel relationship and its American supporters.”

The American congressional candidates were correct in criticizing the PA for promoting terror

From PMW Bulletin, Dec. 18, 2011, by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik:

US presidential candidate and the former speaker of US House of Representatives Newt Gingrich said this week that the Palestinian Authority does not recognize Israel's right to exist and that Palestinian schoolbooks teach children to become terrorists. ...However, the PA has rejected his statements as "groundless." 

...Certainly the PA's rejection of the US candidate was expected, as his charges contradict what the PA has been telling Western countries for years. 

This is not merely an irrelevant distraction and rhetoric of a presidential campaign. It is these issues - PA non-recognition of Israel and its support of terror - that are at the heart of the peace process and constitute a major impediment to its success. Therefore, it is critical to determine who is correct - Gingrich or the PA. 

What exactly was said about the PA?  

During the ABC News Republican presidential candidates' debate (December 10, 2011), Gingrich said that the PA does not recognize Israel's right to exist. He said that 

"the Palestinian Authority ambassador to India said last month, 'There is no difference between Fatah and Hamas. We both agree Israel has no right to exist." 

This quote, taken from a PMW bulletin, is precise and is very significant, elaborating one of the most important and yet relatively unnoticed principles of PA ideology.

The PA Ambassador to India, Adli Sadeq, wrote in the official PA daily: 

"They [Israelis] have a common mistake or misconception by which they fool themselves, assuming that Fatah accepts them and recognizes the right of their state to exist, and that it is Hamas alone that loathes them and does not recognize the right of this state to exist. They ignore the fact that this state, based on a fabricated [Zionist] enterprise, never had any shred of a right to exist." (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, November 26, 2011) 

The point of the PA ambassador was the following: The PA differentiates between recognizing that Israel in fact exists - and its unwavering denial of Israel's legitimacy, that is, Israel's right to exist. The PA educates its children with this dual message that Israel exists but has no right to exist, as expressed in a PA schoolbook for grade 12: "Palestine's war ended with a catastrophe that is unprecedented in history, when the Zionist gangs stole Palestine and established the State of Israel." (Arabic Language, Analysis, Literature and Criticism, grade 12, p. 104)  

Defining Israel as being created after "Zionist gangs stole Palestine" is the definitive expression of denying Israel's right to exist. Significantly, this rejection of Israel is not just found in Palestinian schoolbooks but is a central part of the ongoing Palestinian discourse. 

When a fire raged in northern Israel last year and the PA sent a team of firefighters to join international forces trying to put it out, it was justified by a regular columnist in the official PA daily as follows: "Even if an aggressive foreigner occupies our home and steals it, we don't wish for the home to burn." (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, December 5, 2010)  

Even the official PA daily, when reporting on sporting events, uses political language that tells its readers that it rejects the legitimacy of Israel. The official PA daily reported on a ceremony honoring an Israeli Arab soccer team and its success in moving up to Israel's top division Premier League. Yet when the story was reported in the PA daily it was described as "the team's rise to the national league in the homeland occupied in 1948." (Al- Hayat Al-Jadida, June 18, 2010)  

It did not report that it was the "national league in Israel."  

In the article in the official PA daily that Gingrich quoted, the PA ambassador to India explained this central duality of the PA ideology, whereby they recognize Israel's existence as a fact of history, but reject Israel's right to exist, as does Hamas. 

In a different part of the article the PA ambassador explained this explicitly: 

"There are no two Palestinians who disagree over the fact that Israel exists, and recognition of it is restating the obvious. But recognition of its right to exist is something else, different from recognition of its [physical] existence." (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, November 26, 2011) 

Clearly, Gingrich was correct. 

Similarly, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas himself has promoted this dual message. In his speech at the UN asking for recognition of Palestine as an independent state, Abbas stated to the international community: "Let us build the bridges of dialogue instead of checkpoints and walls of separation, and build cooperative relations based on parity and equity between two neighboring states - Palestine and Israel." (Speech at the UN, September 23, 2011)  

However, on the very next day, Abbas's own government- controlled PA TV as part of its UN statehood campaign broadcast a map that included PA areas as well as all of Israel, wrapped in the Palestinian flag, symbolizing Palestinian political sovereignty over all of Israel. This visual statement was another blatant denial of Israel's legitimacy. 

Newt Gingrich's second critique of the PA, which presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann likewise mentioned in the ABC debate, was of the PA schoolbooks which he said teach children to be terrorists. Gingrich said: "These people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their schools. They have textbooks that say, 'If there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left? We pay for those textbooks through our aid money." 

Here, Gingrich was correct in principle but his example was not. The PA schoolbooks do not include that particular math question. Instead the PA Ministry of Education does something far worse: It glorifies murderers and terrorists. The PA Ministry of Education has two of its schools named after Dalal Mughrabi (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, January 23, 2006), the woman who led the most lethal terror attack in Israel's history, the Coastal Road massacre bus hijacking in which 37 civilians were killed. 

What exactly is the PA message to its children regarding terror? When the Ministry of Education makes children study in a school that venerates a terrorist who killed 37 civilians, its message is very clear: terror and killing Israelis is not only justified but is even worthy of honor. 

Fatah has a women's club at Palestinian universities called Sisters of Dalal, honoring the same terrorist Mughrabi. Two summer camps for children this past summer had groups named after her, and one of the camps was sponsored by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. The entire environment the PA has created for its children envelopes them in glorification of terror. 

The PA, it seems, learned that the world would no longer permit it to directly call to kill Israelis, for to do so would cause it to lose American and European funding. So instead of promoting the terror, it glorifies the terrorists; instead of Palestinian children learning that they must kill Israelis, they learn that whoever kills Israelis will become a Palestinian hero. 

When the American congressional candidates criticized the PA for promoting terror among Palestinians they were absolutely correct. When they accused the PA of denying Israel's right to exist they were merely exposing authentic PA ideology. 

The time is approaching for the PA to make some hard choices. Is it going to change and take the path of peace or is it going to continue on the path of deception?
(For more information on PA deception, see Deception: Betraying the Peace Process) 

The time has come to uninvent the Palestinians

From The JPost, 16 December 2011, by MARTIN SHERMAN:

The Palestinians aspiration is not to establish a state of their own but to dismantle a state of others

I think there is an Arab nation. I do not think there is a Palestinian nation. I think it’s a colonialist invention... When were there any Palestinians? ...until the 19th century Palestine was the south of greater Syria. – Azmi Bishara, 1994

I think we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community. – Newt Gingrich, 2011

Newt Gingrich is to be warmly commended on his recent statement underscoring the lack of authenticity of Palestinian nationality. ...Coming from the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination it is a declaration that could have a profound impact, not only as a much needed clarification of Middle East history, but more important, as a vital signposting for Middle East policy in days to come.
...Negation of ‘other’
...the Palestinian collective is ...defined not by what it is, but what is not; not by what it wishes to achieve, but what it wishes to prevent; not by what it wants to create, but by what it wants to eliminate.
It has no independent rationale – apart from the denial of Jewish nationhood — to sustain it. As such it is not an affirmation of national “self” but a negation of a national “other.”
Jordan’s King Hussein underscored precisely this when he remarked that the emergence of collective Palestinian identity was merely a ploy to counter Jewish claims to territory considered “Arab.”
At the Arab League meeting in Amman in November 1987, he said: “The appearance of the Palestinian national personality comes as an answer to Israel’s claim that Palestine is Jewish.”
This is precisely the sentiment conveyed a decade earlier by the now oft-cited and largely uncontested remark by Zuhair Muhsin, former head of the PLO’s Military Department and an Executive Council member, in which he candidly conceded to a Dutch daily: 

“... the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel.”

Historically fictitious, politically fraudulent
The usually dovish former Mossad head Efraim Halevy cast doubt on the Palestinians’ “capability of nationhood” in a 2009 interview with the Canadian weekly Maclean’s. He identified a lack of internal drive for nationhood, warning, “A nation has to be built from within... the Palestinians are not creating their own nation. The nation is being created from without. This... cannot succeed.”
...Even the Palestinians’ own “National Charter” reveals that they are not — and do not see themselves — as a genuinely distinct people or a cohesive nation, with a coherently defined homeland. Thus the Palestinians not only affirm that their national demands are bogus, but that they are merely a temporary ruse meant to annul what they term “the illegal 1947 partition of Palestine” (i.e. Israel in its entirety):

“The Palestinian people are a part of the Arab Nation... [and] believe in Arab unity.... However, they must, at the present stage of their struggle, safeguard their Palestinian identity and develop their consciousness of that identity.”

How is any fair-minded person to avoid concluding that at a later stage there will be no need to preserve their identity or to develop consciousness thereof? How is one to avoid concluding that Palestinian identity is merely a short-term deception designed to achieve the political goal of eliminating the Jewish nation-state?
Significantly, the urge for Palestinian sovereignty only seems to arise in response to the manifestation of Jewish sovereignty. Thus the 1964 version of their National Charter unequivocally forswears Palestinian claims to “any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and Gaza,” areas which are now stridently claimed to comprise their “ancient homeland.”
Palestinians did not object to almost two decades of Jordanian and Egyptian authority, nor does the solid Palestinian majority in Jordan today seem highly motivated to express its distinct “national identity.”
And while the possibility of a revolution in Jordan cannot be discounted, this would most likely be motivated by the same factors that precipitated revolutions in other parts of the Arab world – dissatisfaction with the regime rather than desire to throw off alien sovereignty.
We are thus compelled to concede that “Palestinian nationality” is devoid of any independent existence, but is fabricated only to counteract Jewish territorial claims.
Indeed, without such claims there would be no Palestinian nationality. As such it is a fictional derivative — an invention — precisely as claimed by Azmi Bishara, Zuhair Muhsin, King Hussein, the Palestinian National Charter — and of course by Newt Gingrich.

Contrived statelessness
If any further evidence of deception were needed, consider the issue of the “statelessness” of the Palestinians – one of the major themes played upon to invoke sympathy for their “cause” and fierce recriminations against Israel.
In reality, however, this state of “stateless” is not a result of callous Israeli malfeasance but of deliberate Arab malevolence.
For the Palestinians are stateless because the Arabs have either stripped them of citizenship they already had, or precluded them from acquiring citizenship they desire to have.
In the “West Bank,” for example, up until 1988, all Palestinians, including the refugees, held Jordanian citizenship. This was annulled by King Hussein when he relinquished his claim to this territory. This abrupt and brusque measure was described by Anis F. Kassim, a prominent Palestinian legal expert, in the following terms: “... more than 1.5 million Palestinians went to bed on 31 July 1988 as Jordanian citizens, and woke up on 1 August 1988 as stateless persons.”
But Palestinians have also been prohibited from acquiring citizenship in their countries of residence in the Arab world, where they have lived for over half a century. The Arab League has instructed its members to deny citizenship to Palestinian Arabs resident within their frontiers, “to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right to return to their homeland.”

Thus Arab League spokesman Hisham Youssef conceded in an 2004 interview to the Los Angeles Times that Palestinians in the Arab world live “in very bad conditions,” but added that this official policy is meant “to preserve their Palestinian identity,” which apparently is incapable of existence without coercion. With breathtaking callousness, he went on to assert that “if every Palestinian who sought refuge in a certain country was integrated and accommodated into that country, there won’t be any reason for them to return to Palestine.”
Indeed.

Clearly, Palestinian nationalism is being preserved and pursued with greater zeal by their Arab brethren than by the Palestinians themselves. How then can it be considered anything but an artificially contrived invention?

...The time has come for a concerted effort to uninvent the Palestinians. ...An observation by Daniel Pipes suggests...  

“...the fact that this [Palestinian] identity is of such recent and expedient origins suggests that.... it could eventually come to an end, perhaps as quickly as it got started.”...

1947 Arab threat of genocide confirmed

From Hudson New York, December 16, 2011, by Efraim Karsh*:

Of the countless threats of Arab violence in the run-up to the November 29, 1947 Partition Resolution and in its wake, none has resonated more widely than the warning by Abdul Rahman Azzam, the Arab League's first secretary-general, that

the establishment of a Jewish state would lead to "a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades."

Unfortunately, the longstanding failure to trace the original document in which the threat was made has given rise to doubts regarding its veracity, and by implication - the murderous Arab intentions: not least since the historical truth has been erased from public memory by decades of relentless pro-Arab propaganda.

... the missing document was recently found, with an annotated full translation published in the Middle East Quarterly, which I edit...

From the Middle East Quarterly article:
...David Barnett found a Jewish Agency memorandum, submitted on February 2, 1948, to the U.N. Palestine Commission, tasked with the implementation of the partition resolution, and yet again to the U.N. secretary-general on March 29, 1948.
Describing the panoply of Arab threats of war and actual acts of violence aimed at aborting the partition resolution, the memorandum read:

 …  the Secretary-General of the Arab League was thinking in terms which are quite remote from the lofty sentiments of San Francisco. "This war," he said, "will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades."

The Jewish Agency memorandum cites an October 11, 1947 article in the Egyptian newspaper Akhbar al-Yom as the quote's source. An examination of the original article readily confirms the quote's authenticity, laying to rest one of the longest running historiographical debates attending the 1948 war.

*Efraim Karsh is director of the Middle East Forum, research professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College, and author, most recently, of Palestine Betrayed.

Jewish Spring trumps the Arab Spring: energy security, strategic energy exports, dramatically improved relations with Greece and Cyprus

From Canada free Press, Friday, December 16, 2011, by Martin Beranek:

Energy has always been the weak link in Israel’s thriving economy. Decades of digging and drilling yielded practically no hydrocarbons at all. Israel was forced to spend 5% of its GDP buying fuel from suppliers that did not have its interests at heart, and were often unreliable. At one point for instance, Israel purchased 40% of its natural gas from Egypt. But the pipeline across the Sinai has been bombed so many times there was often not enough time between explosions to get the gas flowing again. Post-Mubarak Egypt desperately needs the money to replace lost tourism revenue, but hatred of Israel trumps all.
The first brightening of this bleak picture came in 1998, when offshore drilling in Israel’s Mediterranean waters got under way. In 2000, a consortium led by Noble Energy of Houston struck commercial quantities of natural gas off the southern coast, west of Ashdod. By 2004, the Mari B field was in full production, with reserves of nearly 1 trillion cubic feet of gas. This remains the only currently producing offshore well in Israel.
But Noble Energy was convinced there must be bigger reserves waiting in deeper waters, and in 2009, diligent exploration paid off in a big way. The Tamar field, with 9 trillion cubic feet of gas, was the biggest offshore gas field found anywhere in the world that year. And the next year, Noble Energy struck it even richer with the 16 trillion cubic foot Leviathan field, further west of Haifa. That was the biggest offshore find of the decade. Together, these discoveries opened up entirely new possibilities. The Tamar field, with enough gas to supply all of Israel’s needs for decades, offered energy security, and the Leviathan fielded offered energy for export, and billions of dollars a year in potential revenues.
Gas is scheduled to start flowing from Tamar in 2013, and from Leviathan in 2016, With the same consortium operating Mari B and Tamar and Leviathan, the Israeli government was very concerned about giving one group of companies a monopoly over its offshore gas. This monopoly has now been broken by other companies who’ve found rich pickings in the sea off central Israel. A three-dimensional seismographic survey of the Myra and Sarah fields northwest of Netanya and southeast of Leviathan has revealed 6.5 trillion cubic feet of gas waiting to be developed by a consortium led by the Israel Land Development Company.
Modiin Energy has a controlling interest in the Gabriella field in shallow water not far west of Tel Aviv, with an estimated 3.56 trillion cubic feet of gas, and the Yam Hadera field west of Hadera, with an estimated 1.4 trillion cubic feet.
Adira Energy, a Canadian company, is developing the Yitzhak field southwest of Netanya, with an estimated 989 billion cubic feet. And ATP Oil & Gas of Houston has partnered with Isramco Negev to develop the Shimshon field, with a best estimate of 2.3 trillion cubic feet.
Of course, Nobel Energy hasn’t rested on its laurels after Leviathan. It has identified 12 more prospects with 20 trillion cubic feet of potential gas in the territory covered by its licenses. And all of the fields mentioned have substantial quantities of oil waiting to be developed as well. The best estimate for the Gabriella field alone is 277 million barrels of oil.
Getting the most out of all these discoveries will take not just technical expertise and money, but strategic thinking and sound diplomacy as well. And that is what Israel has been practicing, with Greece and Cyprus in particular.
Israel has carefully cultivated its relations with Greece since early in 2010. Progress began with an unlikely but warm personal relationship between Prime Ministers Netanyahu and Papandreou. It intensified after Turkish-Israeli relations fell into a deep-freeze following the Mavi Marmara incident, and after the scope of the Leviathan discovery became clear. Face-to-face meetings between officials in Athens and Jerusalem, business and tourism delegations, sharing of intelligence, and joint exercises between the Israeli and Greek air forces all bore fruit when the Greek Coast Guard brought the 2011 version of the Gaza flotilla to a complete halt, and Israel tirelessly lobbied the EU to extend a helping hand to Greece in the face of its financial crisis.
Greece is ideally situated to serve as a hub for distributing Israeli gas to Europe, particularly since Turkey has rejected any notion of letting pipelines from Israel cross its territory. In return for giving Israel access to this market, Greece will earn much-needed revenue. Athens has yet to demarcate its Exclusive Economic Zone in the Mediterranean, largely because Turkey has threatened war whenever it tried to do so. There are believed to be big, unexplored reserves of oil and gas east of the mainland and south of Crete. With Israel firmly in its corner keeping Turkey at bay, Greece has a powerful motivation to finally declare its EEZ and fully develop those resources, taking advantage of the Israeli experience in extracting hydrocarbons from the same Mediterranean environment.
This mutually beneficial relationship is so compelling that it has survived the fall of the Papandreou government. The first official from the coalition unity government headed by Lucas Papademos to visit Israel was the Energy Minister, Giorgos Papakonstantinou, and he came eager to talk about Israeli gas and Greece. It’s worth noting that not long ago, Athens was the font of some of the most vehement hostility to Israel in all of Europe.
Pipelines from Israeli gas fields to Greece will pass through Cyprus, and here too, Israel has been busy polishing relations and facing down Turks. The formation that contains the Leviathan field extends into Cypriot waters, and Noble Energy is busily drilling there now. Ankara has insisted that Turkish-occupied North Cyprus must take a share of any gas from Greek Cypriot waters, and threatened to send its navy to block the drilling. But Israel maintained a strong naval presence nearby, and the US, EU, and Russia, none of whom recognize Turkish Cyprus, all affirmed the right of Greek Cypriots to develop their resources. After getting carried away with bellicose rhetoric, the Erdogan government found itself completely isolated. Drilling south of Cyprus has proceeded since late September without incident.
The administration of Cypriot President Dimitris Christofias has discussed a security alliance with Israel, and the Israeli air force has carried out exercises over Cypriot airspace. Cypriots in general are eagerly embracing closer ties with Israel and the prosperity coming their way with the development of gas fields, pipelines, and gas liquefaction plants.
The Arab Spring has turned into winter, with Syria a slaughterhouse, tourists in Egypt fleeing chaos and Salafists, and Islamists taking power everywhere, even in Tunisia. Meanwhile, the elements of a Jewish Spring are being quietly put into place—energy security, a new strategic position as an energy exporter, dramatically improved relations with Greece and Cyprus, the prospect of better relations with every country that will buy Israeli gas, and the satisfaction of seeing hostile countries punish themselves in their attempts to punish Israel.