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WHAT OCCUPATION?
Intro to ‘What Occupation?’
John R. Houk
© February 8, 2013
Westerners are beginning a resurgence of Jew-hatred which is being expressed today in the support of Islamic nations because most of the oil producing nations of the world is Muslim. The narrative of Muslim dominated nations is that Israel existence came to be at the expense of Muslim Arabs that lived there before European Jews began to immigrate back to the Land of their God-given heritage.
Thus Westerners – especially Europeans – are believing the lie that all economic woe is due to Muslim Jew-hatred thus the petroleum economy is a dagger to oil-blood that ultimately fuels the global economy. Muslims have been winning the propaganda war making the nation Israel – you have to use a magnifying glass to view Israel on a global map – the villain of all that ails the world. The most common lie today is that the Israeli government is on par with Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Hitler successfully murdered twelve million people in a racist attempt to cleanse German dominated area of the gene pool that pollutes the so-called Aryan race of Germans. Nearly SIX MILLION of those ethnically cleansed people were European Jews. The propaganda is this miniscule Israel does not have the right to exist coupled with the bad logic that the Land Israel won back in 1967 is occupied land with those Muslims being treated like Hitler’s Jews.
The propaganda is a load pig oil and Efraim Karsh writing for Think-Israel has the factual statistics to prove it.
JRH 2/8/13
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WHAT OCCUPATION?
By Efraim Karsh
November/December 2012
Alert sent: Feb 4, 2013 at 4:58 PM
Few subjects have been falsified so thoroughly as the recent history of the West Bank and Gaza.
No term has dominated the discourse of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict more than “occupation.” For decades now, hardly a day has passed without some mention in the international media of Israel’s supposedly illegitimate presence on Palestinian lands. This presence is invoked to explain the origins and persistence of the conflict between the parties, to show Israel’s allegedly brutal and repressive nature, and to justify the worst anti-Israel terrorist atrocities. The occupation, in short, has become a catchphrase, and like many catchphrases it means different things to different people.
For most Western observers, the term “occupation” describes Israel’s control of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, areas that it conquered during the Six-Day war of June 1967. But for many Palestinians and Arabs, the Israeli presence in these territories represents only the latest chapter in an uninterrupted story of “occupations” dating back to the very creation of Israel on “stolen” land. If you go looking for a book about Israel in the foremost Arab bookstore on London’s Charing Cross Road, you will find it in the section labeled “Occupied Palestine.” That this is the prevailing view not only among Arab residents of the West Bank and Gaza but among Palestinians living within Israel itself as well as elsewhere around the world is shown by the routine insistence on a Palestinian “right of return” that is meant to reverse the effects of the “1948 occupation” — i.e., the establishment of the state of Israel itself.
Palestinian intellectuals routinely blur any distinction between Israel’s actions before and after 1967. Writing recently in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, the prominent Palestinian cultural figure Jacques Persiqian told his Jewish readers that today’s terrorist attacks were “what you have brought upon yourselves after 54 years of systematic oppression of another people” — a historical accounting that, going back to 1948, calls into question not Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza but its very legitimacy as a state.
Hanan Ashrawi, the most articulate exponent of the Palestinian cause, has been even more forthright in erasing the line between post-1967 and pre-1967 “occupations.” “I come to you today with a heavy heart,” she told the now-infamous World Conference Against Racism in Durban last summer, “leaving behind a nation in captivity held hostage to an ongoing naqba [catastrophe].”
“In 1948, we became subject to a grave historical injustice manifested in a dual victimization: on the one hand, the injustice of dispossession, dispersion, and exile forcibly enacted on the population … On the other hand, those who remained were subjected to the systematic oppression and brutality of an inhuman occupation that robbed them of all their rights and liberties.”
This original “occupation” — that is, again, the creation and existence of the state of Israel — was later extended, in Ashrawi’s narrative, as a result of the Six-Day war:
“Those of us who came under Israeli occupation in 1967 have languished in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip under a unique combination of military occupation, settler colonization, and systematic oppression. Rarely has the human mind devised such varied, diverse, and comprehensive means of wholesale brutalization and persecution.”
Taken together, the charges against Israel’s various “occupations” represent — and are plainly intended to be — a damning indictment of the entire Zionist enterprise. In almost every particular, they are also grossly false.
In 1948, no Palestinian state was invaded or destroyed to make way for the establishment of Israel. From biblical times, when this territory was the state of the Jews, to its occupation by the British army at the end of World War I, Palestine had never existed as a distinct political entity but was rather part of one empire after another, from the Romans, to the Arabs, to the Ottomans. When the British arrived in 1917, the immediate loyalties of the area’s inhabitants were parochial-to clan, tribe, village, town, or religious sect-and coexisted with their fealty to the Ottoman sultan-caliph as the religious and temporal head of the world Muslim community.
Under a League of Nations mandate explicitly meant to pave the way for the creation of a Jewish national home, the British established the notion of an independent Palestine for the first time and delineated its boundaries. In 1947, confronted with a determined Jewish struggle for independence, Britain returned the mandate to the League’s successor, the United Nations, which in turn decided on November 29, 1947, to partition mandatory Palestine into two states: one Jewish, the other Arab.
The state of Israel was thus created by an internationally recognized act of national self-determination — an act, moreover, undertaken by an ancient people in its own homeland. In accordance with common democratic practice, the Arab population in the new state’s midst was immediately recognized as a legitimate ethnic and religious minority. As for the prospective Arab state, its designated territory was slated to include, among other areas, the two regions under contest today — namely, Gaza and the West Bank (with the exception of Jerusalem, which was to be placed under international control).
As is well known, the implementation of the UN’s partition plan was aborted by the effort of the Palestinians and of the surrounding Arab states to destroy the Jewish state at birth. What is less well known is that even if the Jews had lost the war, their territory would not have been handed over to the Palestinians. Rather, it would have been divided among the invading Arab forces, for the simple reason that none of the region’s Arab regimes viewed the Palestinians as a distinct nation. As the eminent Arab-American historian Philip Hitti described the common Arab view to an Anglo-American commission of inquiry in 1946, “There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not.”
This fact was keenly recognized by the British authorities on the eve of their departure. As one official observed in mid-December 1947, “it does not appear that Arab Palestine will be an entity, but rather that the Arab countries will each claim a portion in return for their assistance [in the war against Israel], unless [Transjordan's] King Abdallah takes rapid and firm action as soon as the British withdrawal is completed.” A couple of months later, the British high commissioner for Palestine, General Sir Alan Cunningham, informed the colonial secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, that “the most likely arrangement seems to be Eastern Galilee to Syria, Samaria and Hebron to Abdallah, and the south to Egypt.”
The British proved to be prescient. Neither Egypt nor Jordan ever allowed Palestinian self-determination in Gaza and the West Bank — which were, respectively, the parts of Palestine conquered by them during the 1948-49 war. Indeed, even UN Security Council Resolution 242, which after the Six-Day war of 1967 established the principle of “land for peace” as the cornerstone of future Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, did not envisage the creation of a Palestinian state. To the contrary: since the Palestinians were still not viewed as a distinct nation, it was assumed that any territories evacuated by Israel, would be returned to their pre-1967 Arab occupiers — Gaza to Egypt, and the West Bank to Jordan. The resolution did not even mention the Palestinians by name, affirming instead the necessity “for achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem” — a clause that applied not just to the Palestinians but to the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from the Arab states following the 1948 war.
At this time — we are speaking of the late 1960′s — Palestinian nationhood was rejected by the entire international community, including the Western democracies, the Soviet Union (the foremost supporter of radical Arabism), and the Arab world itself. “Moderate” Arab rulers like the Hashemites in Jordan viewed an independent Palestinian state as a mortal threat to their own kingdom, while the Saudis saw it as a potential source of extremism and instability. Pan-Arab nationalists were no less adamantly opposed, having their own purposes in mind for the region. As late as 1974, Syrian President Hafez al Assad openly referred to Palestine as “not only a part of the Arab homeland but a basic part of southern Syria”; there is no reason to think he had changed his mind by the time of his death in 2000.
Nor, for that matter, did the populace of the West Bank and Gaza regard itself as a distinct nation. The collapse and dispersion of Palestinian society following the 1948 defeat had shattered an always fragile communal fabric, and the subsequent physical separation of the various parts of the Palestinian diaspora prevented the crystallization of a national identity. Host Arab regimes actively colluded in discouraging any such sense from arising. Upon occupying the West Bank during the 1948 war, King Abdallah had moved quickly to erase all traces of corporate Palestinian identity. On April 4, 1950, the territory was formally annexed to Jordan, its residents became Jordanian citizens, and they were increasingly integrated into the kingdom’s economic, political, and social structures.
For its part, the Egyptian government showed no desire to annex the Gaza Strip but had instead ruled the newly acquired area as an occupied military zone. This did not imply support of Palestinian nationalism, however, or of any sort of collective political awareness among the Palestinians. The local population was kept under tight control, was denied Egyptian citizenship, and was subjected to severe restrictions on travel.
What, then, of the period after 1967, when these territories passed into the hands of Israel? Is it the case that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have been the victims of the most “varied, diverse, and comprehensive means of wholesale brutalization and persecution” ever devised by the human mind?
At the very least, such a characterization would require a rather drastic downgrading of certain other well-documented 20th-century phenomena, from the slaughter of Armenians during World War I and onward through a grisly chronicle of tens upon tens of millions murdered, driven out, crushed under the heels of despots. By stark contrast, during the three decades of Israel’s control, far fewer Palestinians were killed at Jewish hands than by King Hussein of Jordan in the single month of September 1970 when, fighting off an attempt by Yasir Arafat’s PLO to destroy his monarchy, he dispatched (according to the Palestinian scholar Yezid Sayigh) between 3,000 and 5,000 Palestinians, among them anywhere from 1,500 to 3,500 civilians. Similarly, the number of innocent Palestinians killed by their Kuwaiti hosts in the winter of 1991, in revenge for the PLO’s support for Saddam Hussein’s brutal occupation of Kuwait, far exceeds the number of Palestinian rioters and terrorists who lost their lives in the first intifada against Israel during the late 1980′s.
Such crude comparisons aside, to present the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as “systematic oppression” is itself the inverse of the truth. It should be recalled, first of all, that this “occupation” did not come about as a consequence of some grand expansionist design, but rather was incidental to Israel’s success against a pan-Arab attempt to destroy it. Upon the outbreak of Israeli-Egyptian hostilities on June 5, 1967, the Israeli government secretly pleaded with King Hussein of Jordan, the de-facto ruler of the West Bank, to forgo any military action; the plea was rebuffed by the Jordanian monarch, who was loathe to lose the anticipated spoils of what was to be the Arabs’ “final round” with Israel.
Thus it happened that, at the end of the conflict, Israel unexpectedly found itself in control of some one million Palestinians, with no definite idea about their future status and lacking any concrete policy for their administration. In the wake of the war, the only objective adopted by then-Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan was to preserve normalcy in the territories through a mixture of economic inducements and a minimum of Israeli intervention. The idea was that the local populace would be given the freedom to administer itself as it wished, and would be able to maintain regular contact with the Arab world via the Jordan River bridges. In sharp contrast with, for example, the U.S. occupation of postwar Japan, which saw a general censorship of all Japanese media and a comprehensive revision of school curricula, Israel made no attempt to reshape Palestinian culture. It limited its oversight of the Arabic press in the territories to military and security matters, and allowed the continued use in local schools of Jordanian textbooks filled with vile anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda.
Israel’s restraint in this sphere — which turned out to be desperately misguided — is only part of the story. The larger part, still untold in all its detail, is of the astounding social and economic progress made by the Palestinian Arabs under Israeli “oppression.” At the inception of the occupation, conditions in the territories were quite dire. Life expectancy was low; malnutrition, infectious diseases, and child mortality were rife; and the level of education was very poor. Prior to the 1967 war, fewer than 60 percent of all male adults had been employed, with unemployment among refugees running as high as 83 percent. Within a brief period after the war, Israeli occupation had led to dramatic improvements in general well-being, placing the population of the territories ahead of most of their Arab neighbors.
In the economic sphere, most of this progress was the result of access to the far larger and more advanced Israeli economy: the number of Palestinians working in Israel rose from zero in 1967 to 66,000 in 1975 and 109,000 by 1986, accounting for 35 percent of the employed population of the West Bank and 45 percent in Gaza. Close to 2,000 industrial plants, employing almost half of the work force, were established in the territories under Israeli rule.
During the 1970′s, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world — ahead of such “wonders” as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea, and substantially ahead of Israel itself. Although GNP per capita grew somewhat more slowly, the rate was still high by international standards, with per-capita GNP expanding tenfold between 1968 and 1991 from $165 to $1,715 (compared with Jordan’s $1,050, Egypt’s $600, Turkey’s $1,630, and Tunisia’s $1,440). By 1999, Palestinian per-capita income was nearly double Syria’s, more than four times Yemen’s, and 10 percent higher than Jordan’s (one of the better off Arab states). Only the oil-rich Gulf states and Lebanon were more affluent.
Under Israeli rule, the Palestinians also made vast progress in social welfare. Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the West Bank and Gaza fell by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 1990, while life expectancy rose from 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000 (compared with an average of 68 years for all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa). Israeli medical programs reduced the infant-mortality rate of 60 per 1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 in 2000 (in Iraq the rate is 64, in Egypt 40, in Jordan 23, in Syria 22). And under a systematic program of inoculation, childhood diseases like polio, whooping cough, tetanus, and measles were eradicated.
No less remarkable were advances in the Palestinians’ standard of living. By 1986, 92.8 percent of the population in the West Bank and Gaza had electricity around the clock, as compared to 20.5 percent in 1967; 85 percent had running water in dwellings, as compared to 16 percent in 1967; 83.5 percent had electric or gas ranges for cooking, as compared to 4 percent in 1967; and so on for refrigerators, televisions, and cars.
Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, during the two decades preceding the intifada of the late 1980′s, the number of schoolchildren in the territories grew by 102 percent, and the number of classes by 99 percent, though the population itself had grown by only 28 percent. Even more dramatic was the progress in higher education. At the time of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, not a single university existed in these territories. By the early 1990′s, there were seven such institutions, boasting some 16,500 students. Illiteracy rates dropped to 14 percent of adults over age 15, compared with 69 percent in Morocco, 61 percent in Egypt, 45 percent in Tunisia, and 44 percent in Syria.
All this, as I have noted, took place against the backdrop of Israel’s hands-off policy in the political and administrative spheres. Indeed, even as the PLO (until 1982 headquartered in Lebanon and thereafter in Tunisia) proclaimed its ongoing commitment to the destruction of the Jewish state, the Israelis did surprisingly little to limit its political influence in the territories. The publication of pro-PLO editorials was permitted in the local press, and anti-Israel activities by PLO supporters were tolerated so long as they did not involve overt incitements to violence. Israel also allowed the free flow of PLO-controlled funds, a policy justified by Minister of Defense Ezer Weizmann in 1978 in these (deluded) words: “It does not matter that they get money from the PLO, as long as they don’t build arms factories with it.” Nor, with very few exceptions, did Israel encourage the formation of Palestinian political institutions that might serve as a counterweight to the PLO. As a result, the PLO gradually established itself as the predominant force in the territories, relegating the pragmatic traditional leadership to the fringes of the political system.
Given the extreme and even self-destructive leniency of Israel’s administrative policies, what seems remarkable is that it took as long as it did for the PLO to entice the residents of the West Bank and Gaza into a popular struggle against the Jewish state. Here Israel’s counterinsurgency measures must be given their due, as well as the low level of national consciousness among the Palestinians and the sheer rapidity and scope of the improvements in their standard of living. The fact remains, however, that during the two-and-a-half decades from the occupation of the territories to the onset of the Oslo peace process in 1993, there was very little “armed resistance,” and most terrorist attacks emanated from outside-from Jordan in the late 1960′s, then from Lebanon.
In an effort to cover up this embarrassing circumstance, Fatah, the PLO’s largest constituent organization, adopted the slogan that “there is no difference between inside and outside.” But there was a difference, and a rather fundamental one. By and large, the residents of the territories wished to get on with their lives and take advantage of the opportunities afforded by Israeli rule. Had the West Bank eventually been returned to Jordan, its residents, all of whom had been Jordanian citizens before 1967, might well have reverted to that status. Alternatively, had Israel prevented the spread of the PLO’s influence in the territories, a local leadership, better attuned to the real interests and desires of the people and more amenable to peaceful coexistence with Israel, might have emerged.
But these things were not to be. By the mid1970′s, the PLO had made itself into the “sole representative of the Palestinian people,” and in short order Jordan and Egypt washed their hands of the West Bank and Gaza. Whatever the desires of the people living in the territories, the PLO had vowed from the moment of its founding in the mid1960′s — well before the Six-Day war — to pursue its “revolution until victory,” that is, until the destruction of the Jewish state. Once its position was secure, it proceeded to do precisely that.
By the mid-1990′s, thanks to Oslo, the PLO had achieved a firm foothold in the West Bank and Gaza. Its announced purpose was to lay the groundwork for Palestinian statehood but its real purpose was to do what it knew best-namely, create an extensive terrorist infrastructure and use it against its Israeli “peace partner.” At first it did this tacitly, giving a green light to other terrorist organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad; then it operated openly and directly.
But what did all this have to do with Israel’s “occupation”? The declaration signed on the White House lawn in 1993 by the PLO and the Israeli government provided for Palestinian self-rule in the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip for a transitional period not to exceed five years, during which Israel and the Palestinians would negotiate a permanent peace settlement. During this interim period the territories would be administered by a Palestinian Council, to be freely and democratically elected after the withdrawal of Israeli military forces both from the Gaza Strip and from the populated areas of the West Bank.
By May 1994, Israel had completed its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip (apart from a small stretch of territory containing Israeli settlements) and the Jericho area of the West Bank. On July 1, Yasir Arafat made his triumphant entry into Gaza. On September 28, 1995, despite Arafat’s abysmal failure to clamp down on terrorist activities in the territories now under his control, the two parties signed an interim agreement, and by the end of the year Israeli forces had been withdrawn from the West Bank’s populated areas with the exception of Hebron (where redeployment was completed in early 1997). On January 20, 1996, elections to the Palestinian Council were held, and shortly afterward both the Israeli civil administration and military government were dissolved.
The geographical scope of these Israeli withdrawals was relatively limited; the surrendered land amounted to some 30 percent of the West Bank’s overall territory. But its impact on the Palestinian population was nothing short of revolutionary. At one fell swoop, Israel relinquished control over virtually all of the West Bank’s 1.4 million residents. Since that time, nearly 60 percent of them-in the Jericho area and in the seven main cities of Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron-have lived entirely under Palestinian jurisdiction. Another 40 percent live in towns, villages, refugee camps, and hamlets where the Palestinian Authority exercises civil authority but, in line with the Oslo accords, Israel has maintained “overriding responsibility for security.” Some two percent of the West Bank’s population-tens of thousands of Palestinians-continue to live in areas where Israel has complete control, but even there the Palestinian Authority maintains “functional jurisdiction.”
In short, since the beginning of 1996, and certainly following the completion of the redeployment from Hebron in January 1997, 99 percent of the Palestinian population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have not lived under Israeli occupation. By no conceivable stretching of words can the anti-Israel violence emanating from the territories during these years be made to qualify as resistance to foreign occupation. In these years there has been no such occupation.
If the stubborn persistence of Palestinian terrorism is not attributable to the continuing occupation, many of the worst outrages against Israeli civilians likewise occurred-contrary to the mantra of Palestinian spokesmen and their apologists-not at moments of breakdown in the Oslo “peace process” but at its high points, when the prospect of Israeli withdrawal appeared brightest and most imminent.
Suicide bombings, for example, were introduced in the atmosphere of euphoria only a few months after the historic Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn: eight people were murdered in April 1994 while riding a bus in the town of Afula. Six months later, 21 Israelis were murdered on a bus in Tel Aviv. In the following year, five bombings took the lives of a further 38 Israelis. During the short-lived government of the dovish Shimon Peres (November 1995-May 1996), after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, 58 Israelis were murdered within the span of one week in three suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Further disproving the standard view is the fact that terrorism was largely curtailed following Benjamin Netanyahu’s election in May 1996 and the consequent slowdown in the Oslo process. During Netanyahu’s three years in power, some 50 Israelis were murdered in terrorist attacks-a third of the casualty rate during the Rabin government and a sixth of the casualty rate during Peres’s term.
There was a material side to this downturn in terrorism as well. Between 1994 and 1996, the Rabin and Peres governments had imposed repeated closures on the territories in order to stem the tidal wave of terrorism in the wake of the Oslo accords. This had led to a steep drop in the Palestinian economy. With workers unable to get into Israel, unemployment rose sharply, reaching as high as 50 percent in Gaza. The movement of goods between Israel and the territories, as well as between the West Bank and Gaza, was seriously disrupted, slowing exports and discouraging potential private investment.
The economic situation in the territories began to improve during the term of the Netanyahu government, as the steep fall in terrorist attacks led to a corresponding decrease in closures. Real GNP per capita grew by 3.5 percent in 1997, 7.7 percent in 1998, and 3.5 percent in 1999, while unemployment was more than halved. By the beginning of 1999, according to the World Bank, the West Bank and Gaza had fully recovered from the economic decline of the previous years.
Then, in still another turnabout, came Ehud Barak, who in the course of a dizzying six months in late 2000 and early 2001 offered Yasir Arafat a complete end to the Israeli presence, ceding virtually the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip to the nascent Palestinian state together with some Israeli territory, and making breathtaking concessions over Israel’s capital city of Jerusalem. To this, however, Arafat’s response was war. Since its launch, the Palestinian campaign has inflicted thousands of brutal attacks on Israeli civilians-suicide bombings, drive-by shootings, stabbings, lynching, stonings — murdering more than 500 and wounding some 4,000.
In the entire two decades of Israeli occupation preceding the Oslo accords, some 400 Israelis were murdered; since the conclusion of that “peace” agreement, twice as many have lost their lives in terrorist attacks. If the occupation was the cause of terrorism, why was terrorism sparse during the years of actual occupation, why did it increase dramatically with the prospect of the end of the occupation, and why did it escalate into open war upon Israel’s most far-reaching concessions ever? To the contrary, one might argue with far greater plausibility that the absence of occupation-that is, the withdrawal of close Israeli surveillance-is precisely what facilitated the launching of the terrorist war in the first place.
There are limits to Israel’s ability to transform a virulent enemy into a peace partner, and those limits have long since been reached. To borrow from Baruch Spinoza, peace is not the absence of war but rather a state of mind: a disposition to benevolence, confidence, and justice. From the birth of the Zionist movement until today, that disposition has remained conspicuously absent from the mind of the Palestinian leadership.
It is not the 1967 occupation that led to the Palestinians’ rejection of peaceful coexistence and their pursuit of violence. Palestinian terrorism started well before 1967, and continued-and intensified-after the occupation ended in all but name. Rather, what is at fault is the perduring (sic) Arab view that the creation of the Jewish state was itself an original act of “inhuman occupation” with which compromise of any final kind is beyond the realm of the possible. Until that disposition changes, which is to say until a different leadership arises, the idea of peace in the context of the Arab Middle East will continue to mean little more than the continuation of war by other means.
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Efraim Karsh is a professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King’s College London, and editor of the Middle East Quarterly published by the Middle East Forum. This article was published in the 114 No. 1 July-August 2002 issue of Commentary Magazine (www.commentary.com). The present reprint is taken from the Aish.com reprinting of August 2002, which is archived at
http://www.aish.com/jw/me/48898917.html
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SlantRight Editor: Here are some excerpts from the Think-Israel homepage. I am not sure how often Think-Israel updates its homepage so I am posting some of the info here for posterity.
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We are told that there is a difference between extremist Islam and peaceloving normal Islam.
Judging by their behavior, Muslims are anti-West, anti-Democracy, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-Buddhist, and anti-Hindu. Muslims are involved in 25 of some 30 conflicts going on in the world: in Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Cyprus, East Timor, India, Indonesia (2 provinces), Kashmir, Kazakastan, Kosovo, Kurdistan, Macedonia, the Middle East, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Somalia, Sudan, Russia-Chechnya, Tajikistan, Thailand, Uganda and Uzbekistan.
Doesn’t this mean that extremist Islam is the norm and normal Islam is extremely rare?
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“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.
“For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.” (PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein, March 31, 1977, interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw.) The Palestinian leadership, including Ahmed Shukar and Yasir Arafat, has openly admitted Palestinian “peoplehood” is a fraud; Read This (PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein, March 31, 1977, interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw).
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“It should be remembered that in 1918, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France were handed more than 5,000,000 square miles to divvy up and 99% was given to the Arabs to create countries that did not exist previously. Less than 1% was given as a Mandate for the re-establishment of a state for the Jews on both banks of the Jordan River. In 1921, to appease the Arabs once again, another three quarters of that less than 1% was given to a fictitious state called Trans-Jordan.” (Jack Berger, May 31, 2004.)
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The total for all the 22 Arab League countries is 6,145,389 square miles (SM). By comparison, all 50 states of the United States have a total of 3,787,318 SM. Israel has 8,463 SM, about one-sixth of that of the State of Michigan. Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan are Muslim but not Arab and are not included.
World Arab population: 300 million; World Jewish population: 13.6 million; Israel’s Jewish population: 5.4 million. (Dr. Wilbert Simkovitz)
http://dehai.org/archives/dehai_news_archive/ apr04/0223.htmldehai.org/archives/ dehai_news_archive/apr04/0223.html [SlantRight Editor: I could not find a combination in which this link works. If you wish to play with it perhaps you can start HERE]
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“… during the late 1940s, more than 40 million refuges around the world were resettled, except for one people. They [Palestinian arabs] remain defined as refugees, wallowing 60 years later in 59 UNRWA refugee camps, financed by $400 million contributed annually by nations of the world to nurture the promise of the “right of return” to Arab neighborhoods and Arab villages from 1948 that no longer exist.” (Noam Bedein, Jerusalem Post, January 6, 2009.)
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Some 900,000 Jews left behind $300 billion in assets when they were forced to flee for their lives from the Arab countries in the 1940s. They hold deeds for five times Israel’s size. (Independent Media Centre, Winnipeg)
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Re Israel’s irrevocable ownership of Israel, Golan, Samaria, Judea and Gaza: “Nothing that Israel’s legal system says can change the facts that: (1) the legal binding document is the Mandate of the League of Nations and (2) the obligations of the Mandate are valid in perpetuity.” (Professor Julius Stone)
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“By 1920 the Ottoman Empire had exercised undisputed sovereignty over Palestine for 400 years. In Article 95 of the treaty of Sevres, that sovereignty was transferred to England in trust for a national homeland for the jews. The local Arabs had never exercised sovereignty over Palestine and so they lost nothing. Their rights were fully protected by a provisio in the grant: ‘…it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…’ The proviso has been fully observed by the Israelis. Since 1950 the Arabs have built some 261 new settlements in Judea and Samaria — more than twice as many as the Jews, but you never hear of them. They fill them with Arabs from Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan and by the grace of God they become Palestinians. Allahu Akbar! The Arabs call Judea “the West Bank’ because they would look silly claiming that Jews are illegally living in Judea.” (Comment by Wallace Brand on Martin Peretz “Narrative Dissonance” The New Republic, July 1, 2009)
Read More Quotes Here
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STEPS TO CARRY OUT THE MANDATE FOR PALESTINE
Allowing the Arabs and their European friends to set the agenda, Israel has pursued a useless peace policy, bending over backwards to persuade the Arabs to become genuine peace partners. It has brought them nothing but grief, ever more dead Israelis and more acts of terror against more of their citizens. The world hasn’t appreciated that Israel has jeopardized the safety of its own citizens to reduce harm to the Arabs. Instead, the world demands Israel do more “for peace” while asking nothing of the Arabs. How does Israel get back on the right track of making the safety of its own citizens its priority?
§ The first step is to understand that ALL of Mandated Palestine belongs to Israel and was authorized by the same international authority that gave the other 99.99% of the Middle East to the Arabs.
§ The second step is to recognize that the peace process is a scam to deprive Israel of its land. As Efraim Karsh points out, “Few subjects have been falsified so thoroughly as the recent history of the West Bank and Gaza.”
§ The third is to stop going down the wrong road and, as Caroline Glick recommends, change current Israeli policy. Israel needs to stop being an enabler that gives the Arabs immunity while they work to destroy Israel.
§ More and more Israelis are considering annexing Samaria and Judea officially and putting all of the Territories under Israeli law. See “On Reclaiming Jewish Land” here, including Hausman’s article, “Reclaim Jewish Land; Reject The Two-State Solution” here.
§ Others, Think-Israel included, believe annexation is insufficient. Israel will sooner or later be confronted by a choice that can be simply stated this way: Keep The Land And Expel The Arabs — OR — Keep The Arabs And Lose The Land. Phrased thus, the solution becomes obvious. Just as the Jews were forced from the Arab countries, it is time for the second phase of this population exchange, moving the local Arabs to some part of the vast land area controlled by the Arabs. This would be an upgrade. They would have more space while living in the same environment, life style and culture they are accustomed to having. It would allow them — and this includes all the Arab refugees now scattered in the different Arab countries — the ability to govern themselves. Or carry on their way of death, but only against each other. Their choice.
This set of papers lay out the first steps of a policy based on reality. At the very least, it protects the character of the Jewish state.
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This is Additional Material on San Remo and Israel’s ownership of Mandated Palestine:
“The San Remo Mandate” here.
Interview with Howard Grief in Norway March 21, 2011 on “The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under international Law.”
Another set of videos interviewing Howard Grief are at:
1. watch?v=ROumSVr7MFc&list=PLE3AB68BC6C75748F&index=2
2. watch?v=ROumSVr7MFc&list=PLE3AB68BC6C75748F&index=3
3. watch?v=ROumSVr7MFc&list=PLE3AB68BC6C75748F&index=4
Yoram Shifftan has written a series of articles on Israel’s ownership of Mandated Palestine by an irrevocable trust to the Jewish people. See e.g., here, here, and here. See also inter alia: Wallace Edward Brand, “Israeli Sovereignty over Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria,” here; “A Landmark Work” by William Mehlman here; Michael C. Duke, “Jerusalem: Our Redeemable Right” here; Ted Belman, “Summary Of Israel’s Legal Rights To Judea And Samaria,” here.
In the box above, google san remo, league of nations, irrevocable trust, mandated palestine, Israel’s legal right for a more complete selection of relevant articles on Think-Israel.
Should Jews leave Britain
Not to long ago Caroline Glick and Danny Dayan were debating Daniel Levy and William Sieghart. Glick and Dayan took the pro-Israel stand and Levy and Sieghart took the pro-Palestinian statehood stand.
Levy became so incensed at Glick that an article by Douglas Murray said he had to be physically restrained. Apparently Levy took umbrage to Glick’s argument that a lack of solution about statehood was Palestinian rejectionism more than Israeli Settlements in Judea/Samaria (aka West Bank).
Glick came away from this debate writing that she sees no future for Jews in the United Kingdom. The implication being that antisemitism has become ingrained into the UK public that they would rather allow the practice of unwestern Sharia Law than remember the treatment of Jews in Europe during WWII which was the Holocaust that killed about six million Jews.
Below is that Murray article which I will follow with a one hour and 45 minute Youtube video of the debate.
JRH 2/7/13 (Hat Tip: Danny Jeffrey)
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Should Jews leave Britain?
29 January 2013 15:39
Should Jews leave Britain? The question is prompted by this piece written by the Israeli journalist Caroline Glick.
Glick recently came to London to take part in an Intelligence Squared debate. The debate was about Israeli settlements. Glick and Danny Dayan attempted to explain to the London audience that Palestinian rejection rather than Jewish settlement in the West Bank is the primary reason there is still no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The debate is now available on Youtube and there you can see the deeply rancorous tone of the discussion. At one point Lord Levy’s son, Daniel Levy, (arguing against Glick and Dayan) has to be almost physically restrained by his own co-debater (William Sieghart). Levy’s frustration appears to come from being pulled up on an allegation he casually makes against Israel for which he turns out to have absolutely no evidence.
But the audience go with him, and go against Glick and Dayan in the final vote by a factor of 5 to 1. As Glick notes in her bitter farewell to London, the audience was so hostile towards her argument that when she even mentioned the matter of Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini and his involvement with the Nazis during World War II she was booed down by the audience. They – having been presented to her as open-minded – turned out to be so close-minded and partial that they would not even hear a historical fact about a Palestinian figure who was an actual Nazi. Glick writes:
‘I was prepared to conduct a civilized debate based on facts and reasoned argumentation. I expected it to be a difficult experience. I was not expecting to be greeted by a well-dressed mob.’
I suppose that there will be those who think Glick’s recommendation to Jews to be over-statement:
‘There is no future for Jews in England.’
But after the events of the last week you do have to wonder.
After all it was a week in which David Ward, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford East, used the opportunity provided by Holocaust Memorial Day to punish the Jews for the Holocaust:
‘Having visited Auschwitz twice – once with my family and once with local schools – I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.’
And on the day itself the Sunday Times saw fit to publish a cartoon by the witless Gerald Scarfe showing the Prime Minister of the Jewish state building a wall consisting of bloodied and dying Palestinians.
Much of the comment on these latter cases has focussed on the ‘inappropriateness’ of running an anti-Semitic cartoon or making an anti-Semitic comment so close to Holocaust Memorial Day. I cannot help thinking that this is missing the point. Ward and Scarfe should be excoriated not for their sense of timing but for the fact that they are wrong. Wholly, completely and outright wrong. There is absolutely no connection between, for instance, the liquidation of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank. There is absolutely no connection between the situation in Gaza and the herding of six million Jews into concentration camps. The wonder then is not over Scarfe or Ward’s sense of timing, but why at any point in any year they would be so keen to spread lies and to bait Jews by comparing the actions of the Jewish state with those of a genocidal doctrine of Nazism which sought to annihilate the Jews.
Rupert Murdoch has apologised for the Scarfe cartoon and Ward now seems to be reluctantly towing what Liberal Democrat party line can be held. But Glick’s question returns. What sort of future is there in Britain for Jews? I would submit that there is a future. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that the price of that future is that Jews will increasingly be expected to distance themselves from Israel. There is a fair amount of evidence from the Jewish community suggesting that this process is already underway. Once it is complete then those ‘good’ anti-Israel Jews will be able to proclaim victory. But the same force that they encouraged to come for their co-religionists will then just as surely come for them. And then where will they hide?
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VIDEO: Israel is destroying itself with its settlement policy
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The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP
All articles and content Copyright © 2012 The Spectator (1828) Ltd | All rights reserved
Defeating the Jewish Alinskyites
Here are some truisms in politics:
§ Leftists Lie
§ Muslims Hate Jews
§ Leftist Jews Supporting Muslim Agendas are Destined for Dhimmitude or Death
Caroline educates the uninformed about Leftist Jews in America and Israel and the link to Saul Alinsky.
JRH 6/9/12
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Defeating the Jewish Alinskyites
By Caroline Glick
June 8, 2012, 2:48 AM
Saul Alinsky, the godfather of subversive radical political action, had a very clear strategy for undermining and destroying his enemies: Infiltrate, divide and destroy.
Since his disciple Barack Obama was elected US president in 2008, Alinsky’s impact on Obama has received a fair amount of attention.
Less noticed has been the adoption of Alinsky’s methods by radical leftist Jews in the US and Israel for the purpose of undermining the American Jewish community on the one hand, and Israel’s nationalist camp on the other. This week we saw the impact of both campaigns.
The striking weakness of the American Jewish community was exposed on Tuesday with the Democratic primary defeat of Rep. Steve Rothman in New Jersey. In Israel we saw the impact of the campaign to undermine and destroy the nationalist camp with the defeat of the proposed legislation aimed at saving the doomed Givat Haulpana neighborhood in Bet El.
Ahead of the 2008 US presidential elections, the anti-Israel pressure group J Street made a sudden appearance. Claiming to be pro-Israel, the anti-Israel lobby set about neutralizing the power of the American Jewish community by undermining community solidarity. And it has succeeded brilliantly.
Rothman is Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel. His defeat at the polls in New Jersey by Rep. Bill Pascrell owed in large part to openly anti-Semitic activism by Pascrell’s Muslim supporters.
According to an investigative report of the primary campaign by the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo, in February Pascrell’s Muslim supporters began castigating Rothman and his supporters as disloyal Americans beholden only to Israel.
Aref Assaf, president of the New Jersey-based American Arab Forum, published a column in the Newark Star Ledger titled, “Rothman is Israel’s Man in District 9.” He wrote, “As total and blind support becomes the only reason for choosing Rothman, voters who do not view the elections in this prism will need to take notice. Loyalty to a foreign flag is not loyalty to America’s [flag].”
These deeply bigoted allegations against Rothman and his supporters were not challenged by Pascrell. Pascrell also did not challenge Arabic-language campaign posters produced by his supporters enjoining the “Arab diaspora community” to elect Pascrell, “the friend of the Arabs.” The poster touted the race as “the most important election in the history of the [Arab American] community.”
Rather than challenge these anti-Semitic attacks, Pascrell enthusiastically courted the Muslim vote in his district.
Pascrell was a signatory to what became known as the “Gaza-54 letter.” Spearheaded by J Street, the 2010 letter, signed by 54 Democratic congressmen, called on Obama to put pressure on Israel to end its “collective punishment” of residents of Hamas-controlled Gaza.
Pascrell’s race was far from the only recent instance of anti-Semitism being employed by Democratic candidates to win their elections. In Connecticut’s 2006 Democratic Senate primary, anti-Semitic slurs and innuendos were prominent features of Ned Lamont’s successful race against Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Defeated in his party’s primary, Lieberman was forced to run as an Independent. He owed his reelection to Republican support.
LIEBERMAN’S GENERAL election victory over Lamont did not force all of his fellow Democrats to rethink their use of anti-Semitism as a campaign strategy. At a candidate’s debate in this year’s Connecticut Democratic Senate primary race, candidate Lee Whitnum attacked her opponent Rep. Chris Murphy as a “whore who sells his soul to AIPAC.”
Given the fact that the overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans are supporters of the Democratic Party, it should have been assumed that they would have responded to Whitnum’s anti- Semitic slurs by seeking to get her expelled from their party. They also could have been expected to pour resources into defeating candidates like Pascrell who actively court the votes of open Jew-haters. But this didn’t happen.
Instead, due to J Street’s agitation, and the penetration of the Jewish organizational world by J Street fellow travelers, for the past three years, the American Jewish community has been fighting among itself about what it means to be pro-Israel. At a time when the US Jewish community’s party of choice is increasingly falling under the influence of radical leftists and Muslims who reject Israel’s right to exist, rather than standing tall, Jewish communities around the US are being neutralized by the solipsism of self-defeating, J-Street-invented issues like whether AIPAC is legitimate and whether Jewish anti-Zionists can be considered pro-Israel.
Equally horrible, if not worse, at a time when Israel is being threatened with annihilation by Iran, and Jewish communities in Europe and Latin America are under physical assault, the voice of the self-obsessed American Jewish community is coming through more and more weakly, with powerful voices questioning the very legitimacy of its collective voice.
In Israel, the success of local Alinskyites was on display this week as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu found himself squaring off against his party’s most committed constituency.
The 350,000 Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria and their massive support base inside the Likud, and indeed throughout Israeli society, suffered a tremendous defeat this week.
Netanyahu’s decision to torpedo a proposed law that would have prevented the implementation of the Supreme Court-ordered destruction of the Givat Haulpana neighborhood in Beit El has made these Likud members perceive themselves as isolated and in danger.
Just as the American Jewish community needs to recognize the J Street effect to contend with its current condition, so in Israel both sides of the divide in the nationalist camp need to understand how they came to find themselves on opposite sides of the fence.
Misreading what has happened, many are drawing false analogies between Givat Haulpana and the destruction of the Jewish communities in Gaza in 2005 and the destruction of homes in Amona in 2006. In both those previous cases, the destruction of the homes was the consequence of government policy. Then-premier Ariel Sharon wanted to destroy the Jewish communities of Gaza and northern Samaria. Their destruction was the centerpiece of his governing agenda. So, too, his successor Ehud Olmert wanted to destroy Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. He ran on a policy of destroying them in the 2006 elections.
This is not the case with Netanyahu.
Netanyahu can be faulted for not providing sufficient protection to Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria. He has not permitted Jews to build on state land to make up for the fact that they face market discrimination from the Palestinian Authority which has made it a capital crime to sell private land to Jews. And of course, he bowed to US pressure and instituted the deeply prejudicial temporary construction ban on Jews in 2009 and 2010.
But unlike Sharon and Olmert, Netanyahu has not made the destruction of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria a goal of his government.
To the contrary, he has enacted initiatives to strengthen the Jewish communities there and to raise the general public’s awareness of the centrality of Judea and Samaria to Jewish history and heritage.
Netanyahu is not the best friend of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. But he is more a friend than an enemy.
SO IF Netanyahu doesn’t oppose the communities of Judea and Samaria, why is he supporting the destruction of Givat Haulpana? The answer is that he and his angry constituents were set up by the radicals who run the state prosecution.
True, the leftist-dominated Supreme Court ordered the government to destroy the neighborhood. But the state prosecution gave the court’s justices no other choice.
The case regarding Givat Haulpana exposes several of the pathologies of Israel’s legal system. But by far the most glaring pathology it reveals is the politicization of the state prosecution by the radical leftists who run it.
In the event, the radical activist group Yesh Din petitioned the court in the name of a Palestinian who claimed to be the rightful owner of the land on which the neighborhood was built. Yesh Din presented the court with an affidavit in which the Palestinian claimed that the land in question belonged to him. Yesh Din then asked the court to make the state explain why, given the affidavit, the IDF had not yet evacuated the neighborhood.
On its face, the job of the state prosecution couldn’t have been more obvious. All they had to do was tell the court that the issue of ownership is contested and that the court should require Yesh Din to adjudicate ownership in the lower courts.
So, too, they ought to have rejected the unsubstantiated assertion that the IDF is required to destroy homes built on private land. There is ample precedent for both positions, including a nearly identical case regarding a neighborhood in Barkan where the land in question belonged – without question – to a private Jewish landowner.
But the state prosecution decided not to take any of those obvious positions. By not questioning the veracity of the affidavit or the assertion that the IDF is required to destroy homes built on private land without the permission of the owner, the state prosecution, which is supposed to represent the elected government, left the justices no choice. All they could do was set a date for the expulsion of the 30 families living in the five apartment buildings. And so they did.
Both the Knesset and Netanyahu seem to recognize that Israel’s elected leaders were manipulated by political radicals abusing their positions in the state prosecution to undermine the elected government. And they seem to be taking appropriate action. The Knesset has ordered the state comptroller to investigate the circumstances surrounding the state prosecution’s mishandling of the Yesh Din petition. Netanyahu has ordered the construction of 300 buildings in Beit El and 851 homes in all of Judea and Samaria. He has formed a ministerial committee that will oversee the state prosecution’s handling of future cases regarding Palestinian claims to land housing Jewish communities.
None of this solves the problem of the 30 families who through no fault of their own are slated to become homeless in the next three weeks because public officials abused their office to throw these families from their homes and divide and destroy the nationalist camp. But it may make prosecutorial malpractice a less attractive option for these homegrown Alinskyites.
The Alinsky strategy is brilliant in its cunning mendacity. And his followers in the American Jewish community and Israel have already succeeded in causing great harm. The stakes are high in both countries. The time has come for the majority of American Jews and Israelis to stop being cowed and confused by their destructive manipulations.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=273110
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© 2012 Caroline Glick
There is a Better Future in Annexing Judea-Samaria and Gaza
John R. Houk
© June 1, 2012
GOP nominee for President rated President Barack Hussein Obama’s foreign policy as an across the board “F”.
Of course BHO’s minions in his campaign defend BHO’s foreign policy choices:
Asked to grade Obama, Romney responded: “Oh, an F, no question about that,” adding that it applies “across the board.”
Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana and ex-ambassador to India, said Romney is “misguided and misinformed.” Romney is out of step with experts in his own party who “have recognized President Obama’s accomplishments” in foreign policy, Roemer said in an e-mailed statement. (Presidential Campaigns Duel Over Candidates’ Jobs Records, by John McCormick and Alison Vekshin; Bloomberg; May 31, 2012 11:03 PM CT)
If you look at reality rather than Obama propaganda you know Romney is correct. There is nothing misguided or misinformed or out of step with fellow Republicans in the “F” grade for Obama.
No one says it better than Caroline Glick who as actually criticizing Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak for insinuating that Israel unilaterally should give up Judea-Samaria to bring peace to Israel.
Glick points out that land for peace didn’t work for Barak when he was Prime Minister in 2000 after bending to pressure to leave South Lebanon in 2000. Hezbollah not only turned South Lebanon into a mini-fiefdom but eventually became the de facto rulers of Lebanon under the strings of Iran and Syria.
Glick points out that Prime Minister Sharon’s decision to unilaterally pull out of Gaza in 2005 forcing Israeli settlements to pull up roots was also an utter failure in the land for peace thinking. Hamas rooted out the PA and turned Gaza into a mini-Fiefdom constantly shooting rockets into Israel’s civilian urban areas.
Now Glick is focusing Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s idiotic comment; however as you read her article you will note the extreme failure of President Barack Hussein Obama’s in the Middle East relating to Israel, Iran, Syria and pushing the existence of a sovereign Palestine on the land of Israel’s heritage.
If Israel’s policy were to go along with Ehud Barak’s suggestion it would not bring peace to Israel. Rather it would bring a murdering bunch of Arab terrorists who have adopted the name Palestinian on Israel’s border. The murdering thugs would not subscribe to peace! Rather the thugs would be dedicated to destroying Israel and the mass genocide of Jews.
Although politically distasteful, it actually would make more sense to remove all Arabs that refuse an allegiance to Israel and permanently annex Judea-Samaria (West Bank) and Gaza. I have no doubt a war would result from such an action; however I also know at this point Israel would still win a regional war. The Jewish State of Israel could even easier shut down borders from terrorists with such an official expanded territory because sovereign nations such as Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt again could be held responsible for allow Islamic terrorist attack on Israeli soil. After all the whole reason the old Arab League created the Palestine Liberation Organization was a tactic to keep violence against Israel in perpetuity while the surrounding Arab or Muslim nations could not be held directly culpable for attacking Israel.
The failure of Obama and past American Presidents – Democrats and Republicans – is a failure to look at the big picture for the future. Now as Obama allows Iran to go nuclear in creating Weapons of Mass Destruction the scenario for a military enforced peace via annexation becomes less and less workable.
There is no doubt in my mind that a sovereign Palestine State will be yet another puppet for Iran to manage. We all know Iran’s feelings toward the Jewish State of Israel.
JRH 6/1/12
ANNEXATION WINS HANDS DOWN OVER A TWO-STATE SOLUTION
Here is a big chance for Lefties, Moderates and Muslim Apologists to begin peeling the bells of there goes the Christian Zionist extremist bigot.
Israel is the Land of the Jews. Israel is the Land of Promise given to Abraham and his descendants through the genealogical line of the son of Promise Isaac, Jacob and so on through Judah and on through to David, Solomon and on through Zerubbabel through Mary the mother of Jesus (Adopted father Joseph genealogy) who is also the Son of God (and HERE) the Savior of the Jews first and then the Gentiles by the Redeeming Blood of the Christ.
The Biblical witness is good enough for me as far as I am concerned; nonetheless there are Jewish Zionists and Christian Zionists that point to a more historical and secular reasoning to justify Israel as the Land of the Jews. Below is some excellent reasoning that places a heavy emphasis on ancient historical evidence and relatively recent modern documentation affirming Israel is the Land of the Jews.
If you are a friend of Israel this is an AWESOME essay that not only justifies Israel’s existence but demonstrates that there is NO SUCH PEOPLE KNOWN AS PALESTINIANS.
JRH 4/17/12
We Should Suppress Palestinians Rather than Give them a State
John R. Houk
© December 7, 2011
Western nations led by America, EU, Russia and the UN have been pressuring Israel to cave in to allowing a new State to arise from their Biblical Land for Arabs that call themselves Palestinians. As brutal as it sounds I believe Israel should drive Muslim Arabs from Judea-Samaria and Gaza to Jordan and Syria. Jordan especially was carved out of the original British Mandate for Palestine as a gift to the Hashemite family for aiding the British to victory in WWI over Turkey (then the Ottoman Empire). The British awarded the Hashemites other carved out areas as well; however the Mandate for Palestine was created with the purpose of restoring Jews to their homeland. Take note this was BEFORE the Holocaust that murdered approximately SIX MILLION JEWS. In recognition that the majority population of the area was Muslim and Christian Arabs, the huge Mandate for Palestine was intended to create an Arab State separate from the Jewish State.
Incidentally the Christian Arab population was much greater in Palestine Mandate days than they are now. Does anyone know why? It is because from the time that Arabs that call themselves Palestinians became recognized as a political entity the Muslim majority in Judea-Samaria began persecuting the Christian minority. Christian Arabs have responded by leaving traditional areas of population concentration (like Bethlehem) for safer places to live. PA-Hamas-Hezbollah propagandists have attempted to bend statistics that Israel is the fault for Christian Arabs leaving Judea-Samaria and that Christian Zionists (i.e. Evangelicals) are spreading propaganda that Islam is the reason for Christian Arabs leaving their homes. The actual truth is that Islam is to blame, the Christian Arab population in Israel has tripled and Evangelicals are countering the propaganda of Islamic terrorists. Malcolm Lowe utilizes statistics to shine a light on the blatant manipulation Muslim propagandists are using in creating lies.
Islamic terrorists are real big on using propaganda to lie their way into a sovereign Palestine on Jewish land. The propaganda has been so successful that Western governments are trying to kowtow to the terrorists by telling their citizens that stealing Jewish land and giving it to Arabs that call themselves Palestinians will bring peace to the Middle East.
Western governments are failing to tell the truth that Arabs in the Jewish territories, that their education and media are training Arabs - from cradle to the grave – to hate Jews and American Christians. Here are five example clips from Al-Aksa TV (Hamas) of how Jews are portrayed to Muslims courtesy of MEMRI TV.
Why in the world is our American government joining three other Western entities to nearly bludgeon Israel into accepting a sovereign Palestine State right alongside the Israeli border? This Palestine will be controlled by the Palestine Authority which ultimately will include Hamas controlled Gaza. The Palestine Authority is just as devilish in propagating Jew and American hatred as Hamas. Unless the Islamic terrorists accept the existence as a Jewish State and cease from brainwashing Jew-hatred, the Arabs that call themselves Palestinians will NEVER cease from a having a violent society with the primary ethic of killing Jews and destroying Israel.
JRH 12/7/11
Move Arab Refugees back to their Respective Home of Origin
John R. Houk
© October 3, 2011
The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is very near on taking a vote on whether the Arabs that call themselves Palestinians should acquire a sovereign nation even if doing so will steal the land of Jewish heritage from Israel which includes ONE-HALF of Jerusalem the Israeli capital city.
I realize I am in the global minority on what land belongs to whom when it comes to Judea and Samaria (known as the West Bank by those who believe Palestinian propaganda); however I am a Bible guy and definitely NOT a Quran guy. Biblically much of the land under control by Muslims was God-given land promised to Abraham, Isaac (NOT ISHMAEL) and Jacob (renamed Israel by God Almighty); the little sliver of land the Jewish State has as sovereign land is not the land deserved.
Biblical Christians agree with Jewish Zionists about the land of Israel that should be Israel’s. Now I realize as a Biblical Christian/Christian Zionist my reasoning for the “why” of a united Jerusalem and a Greater Israel may differ from Jewish Zionists; nonetheless the goal is the same.
Any Muslim claim is based on Islamic imperialism after the period of pseudo-prophet (probably really “profit” since Islamic imperialism was based on booty and slaves as much as conversion) Mohammed’s death. The Jews en masse were given the boot by Romans that grew weary of Jews desiring an independence from Roman rule roughly between 70 AD and 135AD. A few Jews were retained in the land of Israel renamed Palestina by spiteful Romans. You can see the parallel between Palestina and the modern rendition of Palestine. The Romans adopted the name Palestina as a derivative of the Jewish ancient enemy actually vanquished by the Kingdom of David and Solomon – the Philistines. The primary people left in the Holy Land were the Aramaic people after the Roman enforced Diaspora of Jews. As Rome turned to Christianity so did most of the subjects under Roman rule. This included the Aramaeans. After the wars between the Byzantine Empire (East Roman) and Parthian Empire (Persian Zoroastrians) weakened them immensely, Imperialistic Muslims stepped into the vacuum and conquered the cradle of Christianity in the circa 638 AD. The Aramaeans that attempted to retain their cultural heritage maintained their Christianity for hundreds of years. Eventually Muslim oppression took its toll on the Aramaean peoples and conversions to Islam began alongside the cultural exchange of Arab civilization and the Arabic language.
So check this out: the Philistines were not Arabic and did not speak Arabic even of any ancient rendition of the Arabic language. The Philistines were closer in relation to the Phoenicians which also established the ancient Roman enemy of Carthage. The Hebrew tribes of Israel found themselves expelled except for a small remnant. And even in the case of a small remnant Jews came back in small doses and then larger doses after the Spanish Inquisition. Even the City of David – Jerusalem – began to grow in a Jewish population reaching the majority in the mid-1800s.
When an Arab or an Arab calling them self a Palestinian stands up and tells you the people designated as Palestinians are an ancient people they are lying or are deluded or both. The closest thing to ancient for the Arab refugees was 1948 when 6 to 9 (I never get the number right) invading Arab Armies lost to little Israel thus losing their honor in allowing a non-Muslim nation to exist in their midst. The appellation of Palestinian to these Arab refugees did not occur until after Arab Armies again failed to destroy Israel in 1967. The year 1967 is the date that Israel regained control of all of Jerusalem (Where the Jewish Quarter existed prior to 1948 incidentally) and all of Judea and Samaria (renamed West Bank via conquest by then Transjordan in 1948).
After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war Transjordan became Jordan because its monarch decided that the land east of the Jordan River was the East Bank and the land occupied by Jordan’s Arab Legion would be the West Bank. So where is the Justice in forcing Israel to accept creating a nation by international fiat made up of the descendants of Arab refugees created by Jew-hating Arabs and Muslims trying to destroy the Jewish State of Israel?
Gordon James Klingenschmitt, who was booted out of the Navy Chaplain Corps for praying in the name of Jesus, has initiated a petition to Congress to stay true to:
Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the Secretary of State should withhold United States contributions to the regularly assessed biennial budget of the United Nations for purposes of the General Assembly of the United Nations if the General Assembly adopts a resolution in favor of recognizing a state of Palestine outside of or prior to a final status agreement negotiated between, and acceptable to, the State of Israel and the Palestinians.
AND
Expressing support for the State of Israel’s right to defend Israeli sovereignty, to protect the lives and safety of the Israeli people, and to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force if no other peaceful solution can be found within reasonable time to protect against such an immediate and existential threat to the State of Israel.
Resolved, That the House of Representatives— …
Chaplain Klingenschmitt sent the email below with all the proper links to sign the petition.
JRH 10/3/11
Is Price Tag Activism the same as Islamic Terrorism?
John R. Houk
© September 26, 2011
The ruling of a near retiring President of the Israel Supreme Court proclaimed land settled by Jewish Settlers in the settlement of Migron, Judea-Samaria is private Arab land. The Supreme Court Justice Dorit Beinisch is a Jewish Left Winger which means in her imagination Judea-Samaria is occupied even though the area is traditional Jewish land. It also means Beinisch is under the delusion that if Israel donates a chunk of her heritage to the Arabs that call themselves Palestinians that peace will exist between Israel, Palestinians and surrounding Muslim nations. The Leftist Jews will be greatly surprised.
The pressure on Israel to acquiesce to a sovereign Palestine is tremendous. Because of the pressure I sadly predict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will get the dubious credit for selling the Jewish Settlers of Judea-Samaria out of their Jewish heritage. The sell-out would be the creation of a sovereign Palestine which will force the Jewish settlers to move out or die according to the tenets of Islam. One can see the frustration in that some Jewish settlers have began attacking those that are considered the enemies of Jewish Judea-Samaria.
In early September Beinisch’s judicial ruling led to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to bulldoze three Jewish Settler houses in Migron. Bulldozing of homes is what the IDF does to families of Muslim terrorists after a homicidal suicide attack that kills innocent Jewish men, women and children. Since it appears the whole world is determined to create a Jew-hating Arab State right next to Israel that continues even today before statehood that the Jewish State of Israel will not be recognized.
The Jewish-Settler frustration with their own sell-out government and Muslim terrorists creeping in the cracks of Judea-Samaria struck out at their nemesis times two: an IDF compound and a couple of Mosques as a Price Tag.
Price Tag activism is considered religious right wing extremist terrorism by Jewish Settlers in Judea and Samaria. Here is a brief description of Price Tag activism:
‘Price tag’ is a term coined by extremist elements within the settler population in Judea and Samaria for acts of vandalism, intimidation and violence against Palestinians and their property as a reaction to the government’s removal of outposts, roadblocks, and other perceived anti-settler actions. ‘Price tag’ actions also come in reaction to Palestinian acts of violence, such as the brutal murder of the Fogel family from Itamar ([SlantRight Editor: This is what happened to the Fogels from Itamar] IDF Spokesperson: Settlers’ ‘price tag’ policy is terrorism, Israel Hayom; August 4, 2011).
I find it odd that Jewish Settlers are called terrorists for protecting their Biblical inheritance. Muslim terrorists are called victims of Israel for stealing the Jewish heritage of Israel. Yeah I know, the Arabs that call themselves Palestinians believe all of Israel, Judea-Samaria, Golan Heights and Gaza have always been Muslim possessions and that the reclaiming Jews are stealing the land Palestinians have lived on for centuries. The reality though any presence of Muslims in the Holy Land is the result of Islamic Imperialism. The land of Israel is part of the promise given to Abraham that applies to his descendents from the son of Promise Isaac (NOT ISHMAEL the son of an Egyptian slave; i.e. Hagar) and the bloodline that has flowed through Jacob (renamed Israel by God Almighty) and further on to David and further on to Zerubbabel and as far as Christians are concerned to Jesus the Son of God through the bloodline of Mary. In case you are wondering the false prophet Mohammed that proclaimed his deity Allah has no Abrahamic bloodline that flowed through the son of Promise Isaac.
The Price Tag activists have thus far expressed their anger at the Israeli government betrayal and the Jew-hatred of Palestinians by using vandalism. Is that terrorism? Yeah probably it is. Is it terrorism on the level of the Arabs that call themselves Palestinians? NO ABSOLUTELY NOT! Islamic terrorists take aim at Jewish families that include women and children, and butcher them in the most heinous manner possible. YET the West is determined to believe Palestinian propaganda that Islamic terrorist butchery is justified because Jews occupy their own land. The reality is 1948 invading Arab armies created Arab refugees by refusing to matriculate them into the Arab nations after Israel defeated them. Then in 1967 after another Arab invasion Israel recaptured Judea and Samaria from Jordan which had marooned Arabs that call themselves Palestinians in which former conquering Jordanians renamed the West Bank.
Not that it would have changed the peace-conflict thing between legitimate Israel and Jew-hating Muslims, just think how history would have played differently if the Jordanians were less interest in conquest and more interested in setting up a sovereign state called Palestine in the area they called the West Bank by Jordan (in 1948 Transjordan). Since the invading Arab armies lost in 1948 yet refused to take responsibility for the refugees they caused, the parcel of land where most of the Arabs calling themselves Palestinians would have been perfect for a Palestinian State. However even this would be a usurpation of Jewish heritage.
Leftist Jews hate religious Jews in much the same way that American Leftists despise Biblical Christians. Leftist Jews go out of their way to denounce the Price Tag movement among Jewish Settlers as a breakdown of the rule of law in Israel. This is so even though Islamic terrorism within Judea-Samaria is looked upon less as a breakdown of the rule of law and more as victimization by Israel occupying Palestinian land. Calling Israel’s heritage “Palestinian land” drives me crazy.
Now check this out: The Obama Administration under the auspices of the Hillary Clinton State Department has joined Jewish Leftists and the Israeli government in selling the Jewish Settlers out. Secretary Hillary Clinton has called for justice for the vandalism of Mosques related to Price Tag activism. Actually this is not such a great surprise because Obama has consistently taken the Palestinian side for statehood even though PA President Mahmoud Abbas refuses to recognize the existence of a Jewish State. So when the American State Department condemns vandalism as a heinous crime by Jewish Settlers struggling to maintain Judea-Samaria as part of the Jewish heritage, the State Department is then ignoring the Palestinian-Muslim treatment of Christian Churches and Christians in Judea-Samaria. ALSO the State Department refuses to condemn and call for justice when Christians in other Muslim lands are persecuted by Church burnings, rapes and murders.
If America is going to be consistent in vehement condemnation, America must also vehemently condemn the treatment of Christians in Muslim lands! Will that happen? The appeasement affair the Obama Administration has for Muslims that persecute minorities will sadly preclude sounding of calling for justice for wronged Christians.
Raymond Ibrahim touches on the hypocrisy of the U.S. State Department which looks the other way when Muslims persecute Christians and Jews.
JRH 9/26/11
Judea-Samaria: Disputed or Occupied?
John R Houk
© July 20, 2011
Israel’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Danny Ayalon explains the reality of the non-existence of an Arab nation known a Palestine. The area called the West Bank by geopoliticians did not exist prior to 1967. The area was part of the British Mandate for Palestine which originally included present day Israel, Jordan, Gaza and the Golan Heights in 1917. The reason for the existence of the British Mandate for Palestine was to provide the return of Jews to their homeland according to the Balfour Declaration and the now defunct League of Nations.
Between 1917 and 1948 Jews came back to the land they were ejected from their home by the Romans. Arabs originally could care less about returning Jews until the influence of the Grand Mufti Amin el-Husseini infected the area with a combination of Arab Nationalism, Hitler’s Nazi principles toward Jews and a bit of the return to purist Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood. By 1939 el-Husseini Muslim Arabs were stirred into becoming hostile toward the Jews returning to their homeland.
The year 1939 was the beginning of WWII for the British. Rioting between Jews and Arabs was not a pleasant thought to judge by the British. The British were counting on the Arab allies that had been made during and after WWI to keep Nazi Germany from acquiring the then increasingly important oil that was just beginning to flow toward the West. The Brits would have completely sided with the Arabs of the Mandate for Palestine had not el-Husseini became the voice of Nazi Germany to the Arab World during WWII as well as organizing European Muslims of the Balkan area to fight for Germany and kill Jews.
Great Britain’s (United Kingdom) National Interests became more important than the promises made to Jews. The math was simple: There were more Muslim-Arabs in strategic areas necessary for Great Britain and the Allied Nations to have resources to defeat Hitler’s Germany as well as to prevent the Nazis from using those same strategic areas. The 2000 years of guilt for Western oppression of Jews was overcome by the necessity of keeping evil from ruling a large chunk of the world.
Then facts began to arise that were too great for the Allied victors of WWII to keep from their citizens. Jews were exterminated to the tune of nearly SIX MILLION by Hitler’s Final Solution. After WWII tons of Jews wanted to move back to their homeland. The British continued with the halt of Jewish Aliyah (moving back to the Land of the Jews) that began just after 1929 to appease Muslims now in full swing toward Jew-hatred. When it became apparent that the British would now not support a Jewish State, Jewish militancy went on the rise to meet Muslim terrorism with Jewish terrorism. The Brits became fed up with the scenario and left their Mandate for Palestine arbitrarily in the same year that Jewish leaders managed to unite the various Jewish militants together and unilaterally declare Israel as a sovereign nation in 1948. The same year Muslim Arab nations in the British orbit of influence invaded the new nation of Israel with the intention of killing all the Jews and splitting the rest of the British Mandate of Palestine between each invading nation.
It didn’t work out that way though. The undermanned and under gunned Israel Defense Forces (IDF) managed a defeat all of the invaders except Transjordan (now Jordan). Transjordan’s army was called the Arab Legion and was British trained and British led. That means a British general led the Arab Legion to the gates of Jerusalem’s Old City in which laid the then immense Jewish Quarter. I am not clear if the IDF stalled the Arab Legion advance or if the British Officers chose not to proceed further because of the losses of the other Arab invading armies. In either case Transjordan was in possession of part of the British Mandate of Palestine. Soon after an Israeli-Transjordanian armistice Transjordan formally annexed the area they captured and renamed their nation Jordan. The reasoning being Jordan was in possession of both sides of the Jordan River with old Transjordan being on the East Bank and newly conquered areas of the old British Mandate on the West Bank. Hence there is the name West Bank.
There were several wars between Muslim nations and Israel all to exterminate the Jewish State. In 1967 the Muslim Arab nations were again massing their forces in an attempt to drive Jews into the sea. The 1967 war is called the Six-Day War. Egypt began a blockade of Israel’s Red Sea port as well as massing of troops along the Israel border. Syria also began to mass forces but added shelling toward the Israeli side of its border. Jordan was reluctant to be a part of the hostility against Israel but felt they had to engage against Israel as a show of Arab-Muslim unity against Israel.
The sliver of a nation known as Israel was watching as its enemies were about to begin an invasion by Egypt and Syria that was meant to be a genocidal war against Jews. Should Israel play the waiting game of defense in which the odds were heavy that Israel would cease to exist? NO!
Israel attacked Egypt and Syria preemptively laying waste to their air forces. Egypt called for Jordan to start a front with the lie that the Egyptian army had successfully began their invasion and Syria was to follow suit. Against Jordan’s better judgment coupled with some bad Intel Jordan began their invasion. Israel spanked Jordan’s army forcing a retreat across the Jordan River acquiring back the Old City of Jerusalem (aka East Jerusalem) and the area Jordan termed as the West Bank.
So one has to ask: How can the area renamed as the West Bank by Jordan become called an occupied area when that part of the Mandate of Palestine was itself occupied by Jordan’s British led army?
Most Israeli citizens call the area Judea and Samaria as relative to Biblical Scriptures. Deputy Defense Minister Danny Ayalon claims at worst the area should not be designated as occupied but rather as disputed territory.
JRH 7/20/11 (Hat Tip: Milonga De Una Mora Judia)
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Opportunity Missed, Opportunity Made
The Leslie J. Sacks organization sent an article by Mark Y. Rosenberg that is critical of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas hook-up because Hamas is overtly for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews.
Where I disagree with Rosenberg is his assertion that Israel should abandon the “West Bank” to allow a Palestinian State to come into existence because that is the only way for peace between Israel and the Arab world. Also Rosenberg believes that Israeli control of “occupied” West Bank is not a sustainable situation for Israel. Rosenberg does not enter the debate of borders such as Israel drawing to 1967 borders including the eastern half of Jerusalem. I would have been interested on his take on the borders and if the Jewish heritage of Jerusalem should be turned over to Jew-hating Muslims.
Finally noticed I placed quotes over “West Bank” and “occupied”. The reason for this is that I am a Christian Zionist. The so-called West Bank is part of the Land of Israel known as Judea and Samaria. Israel did not occupy it their land, they retrieved from Jordanian occupation. Since Israel retook Judea and Samaria they did not occupy it, rather Israel liberated from hostile Muslims that defaced and committed acts of sacrilege against Jewish holy places, relics and ancient possessions such as Synagogues and cemeteries.
Other than that Rosenberg’s article is good.
JRH 6/4/11
