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Lessons from the Embassy Takeover
By Caroline Glick
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
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Israel’s Rights as a Nation-State in International Diplomacy
By Alan Baker
Jerusalem Issue Brief
Vol. 11, No. 16 18 September 2011
• A concerted campaign is being waged against Israel to question its
very legitimacy in virtually every aspect of its historical, political, and
cultural life, with the aim of undermining the very foundations of Israel’s
existence.
• In response, several world-renowned experts have joined to present an
authoritative exposition of Israel’s Rights as a Nation-State in
International Diplomacy, published jointly by the Jerusalem Center for
Public Affairs and the World Jewish Congress.
• The volume includes: “The National Rights of Jews“ by Prof. Ruth
Gavison, “From the Balfour Declaration to the Palestine Mandate“ by Sir
Martin Gilbert, “Self-Determination and Israel’s Declaration of Independence“
by Prof. Shlomo Avineri, “The United Nations and Middle East Refugees: The
Differential Treatment of Arabs and Jews“ by Dr. Stanley A. Urman.
• “Israel’s Rights Regarding Territories and the Settlements in the Eyes
of the International Community“ by Amb. Alan Baker, “The Historical and
Legal Contexts of Israel’s Borders“ by Prof. Nicholas Rostow, “The
Misleading Interpretation of Security Council Resolution
242 (1967)“ by Prof. Ruth Lapidoth, “Defending Israel’s Legal Rights to
Jerusalem“ by Amb. Dore Gold.
• “Palestinian Unilateralism and Israel’s Rights in Arab-Israeli Diplomacy“ by Dan Diker, “Is the Gaza Strip Occupied by Israel?“ by Col. (res.) Pnina Sharvit-Baruch, “The Violation of Israel’s Right to Sovereign Equality in the United Nations“ by Amb. Alan Baker, and “Countering Challenges to Israel’s Legitimacy“ by Prof. Alan M. Dershowitz.As the United Nations is about to be manipulated by a Palestinian attempt to impose its statehood on the international community in a manner that undermines a vital negotiating process based on the UN’s own resolutions, a concerted campaign is being waged against Israel by Palestinian, Muslim, and other non-Arab elements in the international community to question the very legitimacy of Israel in virtually every aspect of its historical, political, and cultural life, with the aim of undermining the
very foundations of Israel’s existence.
In response, several world-renowned experts have joined to present an authoritative exposition of Israel’s Rights as a Nation-State in International Diplomacy, edited by Alan Baker, former legal counsel of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and former ambassador to Canada, and published
jointly by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and the World Jewish Congress.
The National Rights of Jews
Prof. Ruth Gavison, Professor (emerita) of Human Rights at the Faculty of
Law of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and recipient of the Israel Prize
in Law (2011), challenges the often- repeated denial by the Arabs of the
rights of Jews to establish their own nation. The Jews have always had the
characteristics of a nation, both ethnical and cultural, and not only
religious. This was true before Israel was established and it is true today.
It is justified for Jews to have sought revival of their political
independence in their ancient homeland – Zion.
Zionism is not a colonial or an imperialist enterprise. The Arab population
in pre-state Israel had never enjoyed or established political independence,
and Jews were at liberty to seek political revival in the only place in the
world that had been their homeland.
“An Overwhelmingly Jewish State” - From the Balfour Declaration to the
Palestine Mandate
World-renowned British historian and author Sir Martin Gilbert, who is
Winston Churchill’s official biographer, discusses how Great Britain viewed
the right of the Jews to a national home in Palestine. The Times of
London declared on September 19, 1919: “Our duty as the Mandatory
power will be to make Jewish Palestine not a struggling State, but one that
is capable of vigorous and independent national life.”
Winston Churchill announced publicly on March 28, 1921: “It is manifestly
right that the Jews, who are scattered all over the world, should have a
national center and a National Home where
some of them may be reunited. And where else could that be but in the land
of Palestine, with which for more than 3,000 years they have been intimately
and profoundly associated?”
On June 3, 1922, the British Government issued a White Paper, known as the
Churchill White Paper, which stated: “During the last two or three
generations the Jews have recreated in Palestine a community, now numbering
80,000....It is essential that it should know that it is in Palestine as of
right and not on the sufferance. That is the reason why it is necessary that
the existence of a Jewish National Home in Palestine should be
internationally guaranteed, and that it should be formally recognized to
rest upon ancient historic connection.”
Churchill told the 1937 Palestine Royal Commission: “We committed ourselves
to the idea that someday, somehow, far off in the future, subject to justice
and economic convenience, there might well be a great Jewish State there,
numbered by millions, far exceeding the present inhabitants of the country
and to cut them off from that would be a wrong.”
Self-Determination and Israel’s Declaration of Independence
Israel Prize recipient Prof. Shlomo Avineri, Professor of Political Science
at the Hebrew University and Director-General of the Israel Foreign Ministry
in the first term of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, analyzes Israel’s right
to self-determination in the context of its Declaration of Independence. He
notes that the Arabs of Palestine and Arab states went to war not only
against the emerging Jewish state, but also against a UN resolution in the
only known case when member states of the UN not only did not abide by a UN
resolution but went to war against it.
Had the Arab community gone through a profound internal debate and come out
of it – as did the Jewish community – with an acceptance, however reluctant,
of the compromise idea of partition, be it on moral or realistic grounds, or
both – history would have been different: on May 15, 1948, two states –
Israel and Palestine – would have been established. There would have been no
1948 war, no Palestinian refugees, no nakba, no further Arab-Israeli wars,
no terrorism, and no Israeli reprisals. This could have happened – but it
did not. The moral and political responsibility rests on the shoulders of
the Arab side. Had the Palestinian Arabs and the countries of the Arab
League chosen a different path, this would have made the Middle East a
region of prosperity, mutual respect, progress and abundance for all its
peoples.
Despite the difficult war situation, the practical steps taken by the newly
established, independent State of Israel reflected the country’s willingness
to abide by obligations inherent in the UN partition plan. Israel adopted a
multicultural approach toward its Arab minority, maintaining the status of
Arabic as an official language. Israeli Arabs send their children to schools
which teach in Arabic, with the curriculum tailored to their culture.
The acceptance by most Israelis today of a two-state solution – of a Jewish
and a Palestinian state living in peace with each other – is a testimony to
the fact that, despite decades of war and siege, the fundamental decision adopted by the Jewish community in 1947 continues to guide the moral compass of the Jewish state.
The United Nations and Middle East Refugees: The Differential Treatment of
Arabs and Jews
Dr. Stanley A. Urman, Executive Director of Justice for Jews from Arab
Countries (JJAC), contrasts the considerable diplomatic advocacy and
discussion concerning the Palestinian refugee issue with the utter lack
of consideration for the Jewish refugee issue. The mass violations of
the human rights of Jews in Arab countries and the displacement of over
850,000 Jews from their countries of birth has never been adequately addressed by
the international community, although on two separate occasions, the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) specifically declared that Jews fleeing
from Arab countries were indeed refugees “who fall under the mandate” of the
UNHCR.
From 1949 to 2009, General Assembly resolutions focused much greater
attention on the issue of Palestinian refugees (163 resolutions) – some 20
percent – than on any other Middle East issue. There were never any General
Assembly resolutions that even mention Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
Since 1947, billions of dollars have been spent by the international
community to provide relief and assistance to Palestinian refugees. During
that same period, international resources provided to Jewish refugees from
Arab countries were negligible.
For the United Nations or other international entities to continue to ignore
or reject the rights of Jewish refugees from Arab countries is to validate
past and continuing injustice.
Israel’s Rights Regarding Territories and the Settlements in the Eyes of the
International Community
For over 40 years, it has been persistent UN practice to repeat in parrot
fashion the phrases “Israel the occupying power,” “the occupied Palestinian
territories,” and to refer to Israel’s settlement activity as illegal,
irrespective of the facts and the correct legal situation. Amb. Alan Baker
stresses that the Israel-Palestinian Interim Agreement of 1995, signed by
Israel and the PLO, was witnessed by the United States, the European Union,
Egypt, Jordan, Russia, and Norway, and supported by the UN. This agreement
changed the status of the territory and the status of each of the parties to
the agreement as well.
Israel’s continued presence in Area C of the West Bank, pending the outcome
of permanent status negotiations, enjoys the official sanction of the
PLO. It cannot, by any measure of political manipulation or legal
acrobatics, be considered “occupied territory.”
Construction activity by each side in those parts of the territory under
their respective control was expressly permitted in the agreement. Israel’s
presence in the territory of the West Bank, pending the outcome of permanent status negotiations, was with the full approval of the Palestinian leadership and thus is not occupation.
Furthermore, analysis of the introduction to the 4th Geneva Convention as
well as the official International Red Cross Commentary to it makes it very
clear that Article 49 of the Convention was never intended to apply, and
cannot apply, to settlement activity carried out by Israel.
The Historical and Legal Contexts of Israel’s Borders
Prof. Nicholas Rostow, senior director of the U.S. National Defense
University’s Center for Strategic Research, addresses the claims against
Israel’s rights to defensible and recognized borders. He notes that UN
Resolution 242 left open for negotiation where Israel’s final boundaries
would be in exchange for withdrawal from Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian, and
disputed territory, rather than requiring a restoration of the 1949
Armistice Demarcation Lines as the international boundary of Israel. The
resolution thus treated that boundary only as marking a minimum Israeli
territory. Resolution 242 arguably entitled Israel to more territory than
that. Adjustments were contemplated, as implied by the requirement for
“secure and recognized boundaries.”
The Misleading Interpretation of Security Council Resolution 242 (1967)
Israel Prize recipient Prof. Ruth Lapidoth, former legal adviser to Israel’s
Foreign Ministry and member of Israel’s negotiating team, analyses the way
in which Israel’s rights are being consistently negated through misleading
interpretations of UN Security Council Resolution 242. The resolution does
not request Israel to withdraw from all the territories captured in the 1967
Six-Day War and does not recognize that the Palestinian refugees have a
right to return to Israel.
The establishment of secure and recognized boundaries requires a process in
which the two states involved actually negotiate and agree upon the
demarcation of their common boundary. The UN Security Council did not regard
Israel’s presence in the territories as illegal. As an act of self-defense,
this military occupation was and continues to be legitimate, until a peace
settlement can be reached and permanent borders agreed upon.
Defending Israel’s Legal Rights to Jerusalem
Israel’s rights regarding Jerusalem are perhaps one of the most sensitive
issues on the agenda of the international community. Amb. Dore Gold, former
ambassador to the United Nations and currently President of the Jerusalem
Center for Public Affairs, sets out Israel’s rights regarding the city. The
Jewish people restored their clear-cut majority in Jerusalem not in 1948 or
in 1967 but in 1863, according to British consular records. This
transformation occurred well
before the arrival of the British Empire in the First World War and the
Balfour Declaration. It even preceded the actions of Theodor Herzl and the
First Zionist Congress. Indeed, in 1914 on the eve of the First World War
there were 45,000 Jews in Jerusalem out of a total population of
65,000.
In the last seventeen years, a number of key misconceptions about Jerusalem
took hold in the highest diplomatic circles in the West as well as in the
international media. When Israel signed the Oslo Agreements in 1993, for the
first time agreeing to make Jerusalem an issue for future negotiations, that
did not mean that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin planned to divide Jerusalem.
On October 5, 1995, one month before he was assassinated, he detailed to the
Knesset his vision for a permanent status arrangement with the Palestinians:
“First and foremost, united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma’ale Adumim
and Givat Ze’ev – as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty.”
In the years of the Arab-Israeli peace process, proposals were raised and
considered for the re- division of Jerusalem, but no binding agreements were
actually reached and brought to the Knesset for ratification. Israeli
opinion remained firm about the rights of the Jewish people to retain their
united capital under the sovereignty of Israel. The recognition of those
rights in the future by the international community will depend on Israel
demonstrating that it alone will protect the Holy City for all faiths.
Palestinian Unilateralism and Israel’s Rights in Arab-Israeli Diplomacy
Dan Diker, Secretary-General of the World Jewish Congress and Adjunct Fellow
of the Hudson Institute in Washington, addresses the attempt to deny Israel’s
rights to settle the conflict through bilateral negotiation. UN support for
or endorsement of Palestinian unilateral actions would clearly negate the
principles of negotiated settlement of disputes as set out both in the UN
Charter and in the major Security Council resolutions regarding the Middle
East peace process.
A unilateral declaration of statehood by the Palestinians robs Israel of all
its rights and negates the peace process’s validity in its entirety. The
Palestinians’ rush to unilateral statehood cannibalizes the basis of all
past agreements including those that established the Palestinian Authority,
and ignores and dismisses the concessions already made by Israel during the
Oslo Accords and in later agreements.
Is the Gaza Strip Occupied by Israel?
In light of the attempts to represent Israel as if it is still occupying the
Gaza Strip, even after having evacuated its forces and citizens from the
area, Col. (res.) Pnina Sharvit-Baruch, former head of the IDF
International Law Department who served as legal adviser to the
Israeli negotiating teams during Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian peace
negotiations between 1993-2009, places the legal status of Gaza in the correct perspective.
The evacuation of Israeli citizens and IDF forces from Gaza was aimed to
reduce friction with the Palestinian population and improve Palestinian
living conditions. The hope was that the Palestinians would take advantage
of the opportunity created by Israel’s disengagement to break the cycle of
violence and reengage in a process of dialogue. Israel is clearly not an
occupier of Gaza. Israel has fully withdrawn and carries out no governmental
authority over the population in the area.
According to the Supreme Court of Israel: “Israel is under no general
obligation to provide for the welfare of the residents of the Gaza Strip and
to preserve the public order there, according to the body of laws pertaining
to belligerent occupation in international law.” Israel does not possess
full control over the external perimeter of Gaza and has no effective
control over the area. Thus, there is no valid legal basis to regard Israel
as the occupying power of the Gaza Strip. The Hamas government exercises
effective powers of government there. Consequently, the laws of occupation
do not apply.
The Violation of Israel’s Right to Sovereign Equality in the United Nations
Amb. Alan Baker notes that since becoming a member of the UN in 1949, Israel
has been denied its Charter-based right to “sovereign equality,” and is the
only UN member state that is excluded from the UN geographical
groupings and that cannot be elected to the Security Council, the
International Court of Justice, or any other major UN body. Sovereign
equality in the UN – judicial equality, equality of voting, equality in
participation in all UN activities and processes, and equality in membership
in all forums – break down with respect to Israel, which is clearly
discriminated against.
Since Israel has been excluded from its geographical regional group – the
Asian Group – by vote of the Arab and Muslim members of that group, and is
not accepted as a full member in the Western European and Others Group
(WEOG), Israel is being denied its UN Charter-guaranteed equality.
In such a situation, Israel can never put up its candidacy for membership in
the Economic and Social Council or other major UN organs. It is denied any
chance of having its jurists chosen as candidates for the major juridical
institutions, tribunals, and courts within the UN system, and it cannot
participate in consultations between states, organized within the regional
group system, to determine positions and voting on issues, resolutions, and
other matters. In 1998, the UN Secretary-General called “to rectify an
anomaly: Israel’s position as the only Member State that is not a Member of
one of the regional groups....We must uphold the principle of equality among
all UN member states.”
Sir Robert Jennings, former President of the International Court of Justice,
wrote in 1999: “Exclusion of one member from an essential part of
the workings of an international organization in which all other members
are entitled to participate is a crude breach of the rule on
non-discrimination.” He continued: “I venture to suggest that Israel’s
exclusion should no longer be tolerated; and that it is now an issue of
primary importance for the [UN] Organization itself to see that it be
remedied.”
Countering Challenges to Israel’s Legitimacy
Persistent and oft-repeated charges against Israel’s legitimacy, such as the
charge that Israel is an illegitimate, “colonial” state; that it secured its
statehood unlawfully; that it is an apartheid state; and the claim for a
“one-state solution” are analyzed by the eminent U.S. jurist Prof. Alan M.
Dershowitz, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He notes that the Jewish
refugees in Palestine had established their homeland without the assistance
of any colonial or imperialist power. They relied on their own hard work in
building an infrastructure and cultivating land they had legally purchased.
These Jews had the right to determine their own future consistent with the
Wilsonian principle of self-determination.
Israel’s statehood was secured lawfully by, among other instruments and
acts, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the 1922 League of Nations Mandate,
the 1937 Peel Commission Report, the 1947 United Nations partition
resolution, Israel’s Declaration of Independence, subsequent recognition of
the State of Israel by numerous world powers, and Israel’s acceptance into
the United Nations. What other country has its origins so steeped in
international law?
A bi-national state would not only imperil Israel’s Jewish population, but
would eradicate the one state in the Middle East that affords its Muslim
citizens more expansive civil liberties and political prerogatives than any
other. Israeli Arabs are better off – as measured by longevity, health care,
legal rights, even religious liberty – than other Arabs in the Middle East.
* * *
This book will serve as a vital tool for all those who are genuinely
interested in looking through the shallow and clichéd attempts by those in
the international community who are determined, for whatever reason, to
question Israel’s legitimacy and to deny its rights.
View the full study online
http://jcpa.org/text/israel-
This Jerusalem Issue Brief is available online at:
http://www.jcpa.org
Dore Gold, Publisher; Alan Baker, ICA Director; Mark Ami-El, Managing
Editor; Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (Registered Amuta), 13 Tel -Hai
St., Jerusalem, Israel; Tel. 972 -2-561-9281, Fax. 972-2-561-9112, Email:
jcpa@netvision.net.il. In U.S.A.: Center for Jewish Community Stu dies, 7
Church Lane, Suite 9, Baltimore, MD 21208; Tel. 410-653-7779, Fax 410-653-8889
Website: www.jcpa.org. © Copyright. The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
The Institute for Contemporary Affairs (ICA) is dedicated to providing a forum for Israeli policy discussion and debate.
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MK Evokes Jabotinsky: For Peace, Build 'Iron Wall'
By Fern Sidman, Arutz Sheva New York Correspondent
 Working to ensure that Never Again remains more than a mere slogan |
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Israel's Path to Victory
By Caroline B. Glick
23 September, 2011 / 24 Elul, 5771
The US Congress is providing the Jewish state with a path to security. So why is Netanyahu hesitating? There is something surreal about the coverage of developments this week at the UN. The general tenor is akin to the showdown at the O.K. Corral. Either the Palestinians win recognition of statehood, or they don't. If they do, they win. If they don't, Israel wins.
The problem with this message is that even if the Palestinians don't receive UN membership they still win. There is no scenario in which Israel wins at the UN. The reason is simple. The UN is profoundly hostile to Israel. It has a large, permanent, automatic majority of members that always supports harming Israel.
In the present circumstances, the best case scenario for Israel is that the Palestinians bring their membership resolution before the Security Council and the US immediately vetoes it. If that happens, at least we'll have closure in this particular fight.
But even such a "victory" will have little lasting effect. There is nothing preventing the Palestinians from reinstating their membership request whenever they want. And given the sympathy their current membership bid has won them, the Palestinians have every reason to repeat the process again and again and again.
By Thursday, it appeared that the most likely outcome of their present statehood bid will not be a quick US veto in the Security Council, but rather something much worse for Israel. Wednesday morning talk had already begun of a long drawn out period of deliberation at the Security Council which could last weeks or months or even longer. The idea is that during that time, the US and the Europeans will place massive pressure on Israel to make more concessions to the Palestinians in order to restart stillborn negotiations. And the specter of a Security Council endorsement of Palestinian statehood will loom over Israel's head the entire time like the Sword of Damocles.
Rather than wash its hands of this loser's game and move its policies to a diplomatic battlefield where it has a chance of actually winning, the government is playing out its losing hand as if what Israel does makes a difference. Even worse, the Netanyahu government is refusing to consider crafting a strategy for victory that it can advance outside the hostile confines of the UN.
This is not simply a failure of imagination. It is a failure of cognition. It is a failure to notice the significance of what is already happening.
Israel's friends in the US Congress have put forward two measures that pave the way for just such a strategy for victory. By failing to recognize the opportunity they represent for Israel, the government is showing a distressing lack of competence.
The government's behavior is probably due to force of habit. Since the initiation of the phony peace process with the PLO 18 years ago, at their best, Israel's governments have justified the Jewish state's control over territories it won control over in the 1967 Six Day War on the basis of our security needs. Without the Jordan Valley, Israel is vulnerable to foreign invasion from the east. Without Gush Etzion to Jerusalem's south and Gush Adumim to its north, the capital is vulnerable to attack. Without overall Israeli security control over Judea and Samaria, Israel's population centers are vulnerable to terrorist attacks. And so on and so forth. All of these statements are accurate. But they are also defensive. While Israel has been defending its right to security, the Palestinians have been on the offensive arguing that all the land that Israel took control over from Jordan in 1967 belongs to them by ancestral right. And so for the past 18 years, the conflict has been framed as a dispute between the Palestinians' rights versus Israel's security requirements.
Like its willingness to place itself at the UN's mercy, Israel's willingness to accept this characterization of the Palestinian conflict with Israel has doomed its cause to repeated and ever escalating failure. For if the land belongs to the Palestinians then whether or not their control of the land endangers Israel is irrelevant.
This is the reason the US's support for Israel's right to defensible borders has been reduced from support for perpetual Israeli control over unified Jerusalem and some fifty percent of Judea and Samaria in 1993 to US support for a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines — including the partition of Jerusalem — in 2011. You can define "defensive needs" down. Defining rights down is a more difficult undertaking.
The irony here is that Israel's sovereign rights to Judea and Samaria are ironclad while the Palestinians' are flimsy. As the legal heir to the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, Israel is the legal sovereign of Judea and Samaria.
Moreover, Israel's historic rights to the cradle of Jewish civilization are incontrovertible.
And yet, because Israel has not wanted to impede on the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians, for the past 18 years it has avoided mentioning its rights and instead focused solely on its security requirements. Consequently, outside of Bible-literate Christian communities, today most people are comfortable parroting the totally false Palestinian claim that Jews have no rights to Judea, Samaria or Jerusalem.
They further insist that rights to these areas belong exclusively to the Palestinians who did not even exist as a distinct national community in 1967.
As for Israel's allies in the US Congress, they have responded to the PLO's UN statehood gambit with two important legislative initiatives. First Cong. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee introduced a bill calling for the US to end its financial support for the Palestinian Authority and drastically scale-back its financial support for the UN if the UN upgrades the PLO's membership status in any way. Ros-Lehtinen's bill shows Israel that there is powerful support for an Israeli offensive that will make the Palestinians pay a price for their diplomatic aggression.
Ros-Lehtinen's bill is constructive for two reasons. First, it makes the Palestinians pay for their adversarial behavior. This will make them think twice before again escalating their diplomatic warfare against Israel. Second, it begins an overdue process of delegitimizing the Palestinian cause, which as is now clear is inseparable from the cause of Israel's destruction.
Were Israel to follow Ros-Lehtinen's lead and cut off its transfer of tax revenues to the PA, and indeed, stop collecting taxes on the PA's behalf, it would be advancing Israel's interests in several ways.
It would remind the Palestinians that they need Israel far more than Israel needs them.
Israel would make them pay a price for their diplomatic aggression.
Israel would end its counterproductive policy of giving the openly hostile PA an automatic seal of approval regardless of their treatment of Israel. Israel would diminish the financial resources at the PA's disposal for the advance of its war against Israel.
Finally, Israel would pave the way for the disbandment of the PA and its replacement by another authority in Judea and Samaria.
And this brings us to the second Congressional initiative taken in anticipation of the PLO's UN statehood gambit. Earlier this month, Cong. Joe Walsh and thirty co-sponsors issued a resolution supporting Israeli annexation of Judea and Samaria.
While annexation sounds like a radical formula, the fact is that Israel already implemented a similar move twice when it applied Israeli law to Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. And the heavens didn't fall in either case. Indeed, the situation on the ground was stabilized.
Moreover, just Israel remains willing to consider ceding these territories in the framework of a real peace with its neighbors, so the application of Israeli law to Judea and Samaria would not prevent these areas from being ceded to another sovereign in the framework of a future peace deal.
And while not eliminating the prospects of a future peace, by applying Israeli law to Judea and Samaria, Israel would reverse one of the most pernicious effects of the 18-year-old phony peace process: the continuous erosion of international recognition of Israel's sovereign rights to these areas.
With each passing round of failed negotiations, offers that Israel made but were rejected were not forgotten. Rather they formed the starting point for the next round of failed negotiations. So while then prime minister Ehud Barak for instance claimed that his offer to cede the Temple Mount was contingent of the signing of a peace treaty, when the so-called Middle East Quartet issued its roadmap plan for peace, Barak's ostensibly cancelled offer was the starting point of negotiations.
By applying Israeli law to Judea and Samaria, Israel would change the baseline for future negotiations in a manner that enhances its bargaining position.
Perhaps most importantly, by applying its laws to the areas, Israel would demonstrate that it understands finally that rights need to be asserted by deeds, not just by words if they are to be taken seriously.
Thursday the New York Times published a news story/analysis that essentially rewrote the history of the last two and a half years. The paper ignored Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas's open admission that US President Barack Obama compelled him to radicalize his own policies towards Israel when Obama demanded that Israel abrogate Jewish property rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria as a precondition for negotiations. This was a precondition the Palestinians themselves had never demanded. And by making it a US demand, Obama ended any possibility of resuming negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel.
By the Times' telling, Obama is a victim of the combined forces of an intransigent Israeli government and the pro-Israel lobby that holds sway in Congress. These nefarious forces made it impossible for Obama to bring the sort of pressure to bear on Israel that would have placated the Arab world and paved the way for a peaceful settlement. And in the absence of such presidential power, Israel and its lobbyists wrecked Obama's reputation in the Arab world.
The lesson that Israel should take from the Times' borderline anti-Semitic historical revisionism and conspiracy theories is twofold. First, Israel will never be rewarded for its concessions. The Times and its fellow anti-Israel activists don't care that since 2009 -- and indeed since 1993 -- Israel has made one concession after another only to be rewarded time after time with ever escalating demands for more concessions. The Times and its fellow Israel baiters have a story of Israeli conspiracies and bad faith to tell. And they will tell that tale regardless of objective facts and observable reality.
This brings us to the second lesson of the Times article specifically and the experience at the UN generally. Israel has nothing to lose and everything to gain from going on the offensive. Our friends in the US Congress have shown us a path that lays open to us to follow. And we must follow it. Since we'll be blamed no matter what we do, we have no excuse for not doing what is best for us.
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JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, where her column appears.
caroline@carolineglick.com
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The PLO-UN Axis of Evil: Part I*
by Prof. Paul Eidelberg
The PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, was founded in 1964, three years before the Six-Day War of June 1967, when Israel regained possession of Judea and Samaria, which Jordan named the “West Bank” to erase Jewish history. During the nineteen years that Jordan ruled Judea and Samaria (1948-1967), not a word was heard of a “Palestinian people.” In fact, Arabs began to flock into this area only after the Six-Day War, when this utterly desolate land came under Israeli management.[1]
Now recall my previously mentioned meetings with Shimon Peres and his advisers ("My Talks With Israel's Leaders"). What prevented them from exposing the fiction of a Palestinian people and its fictitious right to self-determination or statehood? Surely Peres’ expert on Arab culture, Professor Harkabi, knew of the eminent Arab-American historian Philip Hitti who, in 1946, described the common Arab view: “There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not.” Palestine was never “perceived as a distinct entity deserving national self-determination but as an integral part of a unified regional Arab order ….”[2]
No Arab nation ever set its historical roots in this soil, and no national claim was ever made to the land by any national group other than the Jews. This is why the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate, having affirmed the land as the National Home of the Jews, charged them with guaranteeing the civil and religious rights of other inhabitants. No mention was made of anynational rights of other inhabitants if only because it was recognized that the only national claim to the area was that made by the Jewish people.
But this confirms that the PLO is an Arab hoax. So again I ask: “Why didn’t Israel’s government expose this hoax—which could have been done before the PLO was given observer status in the UN General Assembly in 1975?” It is one thing for the UN to serve as a cover for con artists; but why did Israel’s policy-makers refrain from exposing a hoax that endangered their country’s existence? Why didn’t they combat this lie with this simple truth: the PLO is nothing more than a congeries of terrorist groups drawn from various parts of the Middle East and North Africa? Let's me dispel this noxious political atmosphere.
Yasser Arafat, the notorious PLO chairman and godfather of international terrorism, was an Egyptian. Until his demise in 2004, Arafat also served as president of the Palestinian Authority (PA). He was succeeded by his second-in-command Mahmoud Abbas (a.k.a. Abu Mazen). Abbas was implicated in the Munich massacre, when 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team in the1972 Summer Olympics were taken hostage and eventually murdered by Black September, Arafat’s personal security guard. Abbas was also implicated in the Ma’alot massacre of May 15, 1974 in which 22 Israeli high school students from Safed, ages 14–16, were murdered. Finally, and more recently, when Muslim riots broke in Jerusalem during the October 2009 annual Succoth holiday (the Feast of Tabernacles), Abbas, in an interview on Yemenite television, virtually called for another intifada.[3]
Just as Arafat had been festooned as a “moderate” to justify Israeli negotiations with that terrorist, so the same script was adopted for Abbas (even while he exalted suicide bombers). Recall my meeting with Mr. Peres’ political adviser Asher Ben-Natan. To say “we can’t lie as well as the Arabs” implies that Israel’s political elites are quite capable of deceiving the public. Not only has Abbas been called a “moderate” by Shimon Peres, but Benjamin Netanyahu, upon becoming Israel’s Prime Minister after the February 10, 2009, expressed an ardent desire to negotiate with that “moderate”!
Just as the PLO is a consortium of terrorist groups drawn from various parts of the Middle East and North Africa, the so-called Palestinian people consists of an aggregation of Arab clans and tribes drawn from these far-flung areas. One way of identifying these Arabs is by their family names, which refer to their places of origin: Masri (Egyptian), Mugrabi (Moroccan), Ajami (Persian), Haurani (Syrian), Halabi (Aleppan), Kurdi (Kurdish), and many more. The multifarious origins of these “Palestinians” involve family, tribal, and sectarian rivalries. These facts are seldom heard.
The Palestinians are commonly referred to as the Arab inhabitants of the “West Bank”—the fabricated rendering of “Judea” and “Samaria,” both Hebrew names. These Arabs are portrayed as an oppressed minority seeking national self-determination. Not only do most of these Arabs carry Jordanian passports, but their brethren, the “Palestinian” citizens of Jordan, comprise a large majority of Jordan’s population. Mention should also be made of the “Palestinians” who are citizens of Israel. To these add the “Palestinians” in Lebanon and Syria.[4] Far from being an oppressed minority, these so-called Palestinians are part of the Arab Nation, of the Sunni-Arab-Muslim majority which has ever aimed to smother the non-Muslim and non-Arab minorities of the Middle East.[5]
Who speaks for these ersatz “Palestinians”? Until the Oslo Agreement of 1993, it was the PLO. That agreement produced the Palestinian Authority, the PA, whose parent, the unreconstructed PLO, has a long record of terrorism, of hijacking civilian aircraft, kidnapping, drug-dealing, and cold-blooded murder, even of two American diplomats in Khartoum.
The most powerful faction of the PA is al-Fatah, founded in 1959. Fatah itself underwent fission, most recently with the emergence of Tanzim and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Also competing in the leadership of the PA is the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), a faction linked to Syria. To this welter add the leftwing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) based in Damascus. Another faction is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which was responsible for the assassination of Israel’s Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi on November 17, 2001.[6]
It should also be emphasized that none of these or other terrorist groups could exist without state support. Various countries in the third world provide training grounds for terrorists, as Afghanistan did for Al-Qaeda. These groups would not survive were it not for the support of the United Nations and the appeasement and suicidal policies of the West, including the United States, which has bankrolled the Palestinians. Of course, Western ignorance about these Arabs also perpetuates their existence. But it beggars the mind that the government of the United States, a superpower, has kowtowed to the murderous thugs of the Fatah-led PLO.[7]
But what about Israel’s government? It knew quite well that the 1966 version of the PLO Charter called for Israel’s destruction. The document may be summarized as follows:
β Principles: (1) Palestine is part of the Arab world, the Palestinians are part of the Arab nation and their struggle is part of the struggle of the Arab nation. (2) The Palestinian struggle is an integral part of the worldwide struggle against Zionism, colonialism and international imperialism.
β Goals: (1) Complete liberation of Palestine and the economic, political, military and cultural elimination of Zionism. (2) Establishment of an independent, democratic state in all of Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital.
β Method: (1) Military struggle is the sole method of liberating Palestine. (2) This struggle will not be complete until the Zionist state is destroyed and Palestine in its entirety will be liberated.
The 1989 version of the Charter was softened to facilitate Israel’s recognition of the PLO. It calls for Israel’s “replacement” by peaceful means. More significant than official documents intended for foreign consumption is the ceaseless propaganda in the Palestinian media calling for Israel’s destruction. Even while PA leader Mahmoud Abbas extolled suicide bombers as “martyrs,” he was called a “moderate” by Israeli prime ministers.” Their deviousness did not skip a beat when Abbas selected as his successor Muhammad Ghaneim, a founder of Fatah who rejected the 1993 Oslo Accords as too moderate!
Israel’s annihilation is still on the agenda of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, especially in view of the fact that Arab children are educated to hate Jews and emulate suicide bombers—hence to love death.
Much more will be said about the insidious character of the PLO in the sequel, Part II.
*Based on my book "An American Political Scientist In Israel" (Lexington Books 2010), updated September 2011.
[1] According to George Gilder: “Under Israeli management, economic growth in the West Bank and Gaza surged for some twenty years at a rate of 30 percent in 1979, averaging 25 percent per year …” He goes on to say: “…without the presence of the Jews, there is no evidence that the Palestinians would particularly want these territories for a nation.” The Israel Test (Richard Vigilante Book, 2009), 26, 27. Gilder cites Professor Efraim Karsh: “…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 … During the 1970s, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world … with per capita GDP expanding tenfold between 1968 and 1991 … Life expectancy rose from 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000 … By 1986, 92.8 percent of the population … had electricity around the clock, as compared to 20.5 percent in 1967 … [Similar advances occurred in hygiene, healthcare, child mortality, immunizations, and communications, which all rose to levels equal or exceeding other Middle East countries]. The number of school children … grew by 102 percent … Even more dramatic was the progress in higher education. [From zero in 1967] by the early 1990s, there were seven [universities] boasting some 16,500 students.” The Israel Test, 49-50. The growth rate began to decline with the ascendancy of the PLO (after the Oslo Accords) and the introduction of foreign aid, which increased the power of Yasser Arafat’s emerging kleptocracy.
[2] See Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press 2006), 139.
[3] See Caroline Glick, “The newest round of war,” Jerusalem Post, Oct. 9, 2009, 24.
[4] See Dan Nimrod, “Inflation and the Refugee Problem,” Jerusalem Post, May 11, 1992, 6, which shows how the PLO inflates the number of “Palestinian” refugees. The Palestinian Arabs inflate their number to 6 million, perhaps to evoke in the public the idea of the 6 million Jews who perished in the Nazi Holocaust. See Adam Garfinkle, “Israeli and Palestinian Proposals for the West Bank,” Orbis, Summer 1992, 436.
[5] See Mordechai Nisan, Minorities in the Middle East (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 1991), 15.
[6] See Neil C. Livingston & David Halevy, Inside the PLO (NY: William Morrow, 1990), 72-79, 289-294; Raphael Israeli (ed.), The PLO in Lebanon: Selected Documents (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983), 182-185.
[7] Fatah forces in Judea and Samaria, have received military training from the U.S. under Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton. See Jerusalem Post, Oct. 9, 2009, 24.
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[Freeman Note: Please look at Bernard's Press Release (1993) below this excellent article.]
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"Freeman Center Says Rush to Embrace PLO Is Foolish and Ultimately Dangerous"
‘...nothing more than an elaborate trap for Israel’
Shapiro continued: "Despite the media hype surrounding these developments, let me make something very clear: A leopard does not change his spots.You can say a berachah (blessing) over a ham sandwich, but that doesn’t make it kosher. And a deal with the PLO is like a dance on quicksand - before you realize it, you have sunk into the muck and slime."
A Critical Analysis of Netanyahu's September 23, 2011 Speech to the United Nations
Prof. Paul Eidelberg, President
Israel-America Renaissance Institute
Part II. Perfidy
At the conclusion of Part I, after referring to the forced expulsion of 8,000 Jews from their homes in Gaza, I asked Mr. Netanyahu: "On what empirical grounds, on what historical grounds, on what logical grounds, on what psychological grounds, on what theological grounds, had you any reason to expect peace after this display of defeatism and this unconscionable crime against the Jews of Gaza?"
What else are we to infer from these questions but this: What motivates you is either fear or egoism—because you have no rational grounds whatsoever to expect peace from the disciples of Muhammad who have waged recurring genocidal wars against Jews and Christians and other non-Muslims during the past 1,400 years.
In your speech you rightly decry the "wishful thinking" of fools who would have Israel withdraw to her pre-1967 borders to achieve peace with the Palestinians. But what shall we call your overture of peace to the unrepentant Palestinians who murdered and maimed some 10,000 Jewish men, women, and children since 1993? What is this overture but a grotesque display of wishful thinking? Will not these Palestinians continue to genuflect to the Quran which exalts the Muslim who “slays and is slain” for Allah (Sura 9:111)?
Have not these Palestinians educated two generations of Arab children to hate Jews and to exalt suicide bombers? Do you expect these Palestinians to renounce their political religion whose distinctive imperative is Jihad, and whose foremost military tactic is taqiyya, unmitigated deceit and dissembling?
You boast of Israel as a democracy. Who gave you the authority to endorse the creation of a Muslim Arab state in the heartland of the Jewish people? You did so without Knesset or public debate, didn't you, Mr. Netanyahu? How fitting, therefore, are these words of Ben Hecht in Perfidy: “In my own time,” he writes, “governments have taken the place of people. They have also taken the place of God. Governments speak for people … and determine, absurdly, their lives and deaths.”
"This was not so," says Hecht, "of the Jewish people in days of old, when our Prophets admonished kings and kingdoms, or when our Sages taught us the laws of piety and of public morality." In those days, “in the soul of the Jews, in his tabernacle and kitchen, there was only one Kingdom—that of God."
“What happened to this fine heritage," asks Hecht, "when Jews finally fashioned a government of their own in Israel; what happened to Jews when they became politicians, what happened to a piety, a sense of honor, and a brotherly love that 2,500 years of anti-Semitism were unable to disturb in the Jewish soul?”
What happened, Mr. Netanyahu, is that "Egoism and impersonal authority arose and removed piety and honor and brotherly love from public life."
Hence you had the arrogance to endorse a Muslim state in Judea and Samaria and thus place in question the future of 300,000 of your Jewish brethren. What will happen to these Jews, Mr. Netanyahu? Will these 300,000 Jewish men, women, and children be made homeless like the 8,000 that were expelled from Gaza by the Sharon Government of which you were a cabinet minister? And for what noble cause will they be sacrificed? Alas, "There is no devilish or disgraceful deed," writes Hecht, “that cannot be shined up into a patriotic necessity by the right propaganda [like the mendacity of ‘peace’ or the ignominious defeat called 'unilateral disengagement' or the fatuous ‘two-state solution’]. All that is needed is for people to believe in their duly elected leaders.”
If Hecht were alive today he would say, as he said in Perfidy: “The Jews have of necessity been good traders and bright salesmen, although they never before sold what a government clique has been selling … their loyalty to their dead, their moral judgment of their enemies.”
Kill for Peace: Introduction and Part II
By Prof. Paul Eidelberg
Part I. Analysis
The best analysis I have read of America’s foreign policy failings since the unfinished Persian Gulf War of 1991 will be found in the writings of Ralph Peters, a retired American army Intelligence officer who worked and studied in dozens of countries as well as in the U.S. Executive office.
If there is a single power the U.S. underestimates it is the power of collective hatred, meaning the hatred that animates the Arab-Islamic world. This failing applies to Israel.
Like their American counterparts, Israel’s ruling elites do not “understand the delicious appeal of hatred.” They will not face the fact that man is a killer. They have learned nothing from the genocidal wars and wholesale massacres of the twentieth century, not merely in Nazi Germany, but also in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Bangladesh, Iraq, Sudan—to name only a few.
There is at least a minority of human beings who enjoy killing. That minority may be small, says Peters, but it does not take many enthusiastic killers to trigger a genocidal war. The Arab Palestinian Authority consists of such killers. Indeed, they have educated a generation of Arab children to become killers.
Like the United States, Israel plays by rules, some encoded in its own laws or in international laws, others in long-established customs, which are part of the West’s collective consciousness. But Israel’s enemies don’t give a damn about our laws and customs.
Again and again we find that hard-won treaties or agreements mean nothing to our enemies. While we are word- or talk-oriented, out enemies are action-oriented. We mirror-image and think that our enemies are like us, that they want peace, even though they have repeatedly said, “peace means the destruction of Israel.” Israelis live in a state of denial.
Even the terms we use to describe the enemy—whether we name them “terrorists” or “Islamic fundamentalists”—are misleading.Such terms hinder the political and military echelons from developing an appropriate strategy against the enemy. Ralph Peters calls these terrorists “warriors,” because he wants Americans to take terrorists more seriously. He speaks of five different types of warriors—because if we do not understand the enemy, we won’t win the war against them.
β One pool of warriors comes from the underclass, a male who has no stake in peace, a loser with little education and little legal earning power. It’s easy to recruit such warriors against the Great or against the Little Satan. These warriors are bloody savages.
β A second pool of warriors consists of youth and young men who join and fight for the Arab cause. Their savagery increases with the duration and intensity of the conflict.
β A third pool of warriors consists of opportunists, entrepreneurs who profit from the conflict. They traffic in arms and drugs.Their great strength is their cynicism. The Palestinian kleptocracy—Mahmoud Abbas belongs to this pool. They are chameleons and very dangerous. This type of warrior is the most likely to be underestimated, especially by wishful-thinking Jews.
β A fourth pool of warriors consists of true believers like Osama bin Laden, or like Abdullah Badran, the 21 year-old university student who blew himself up in Tel Aviv nightclub. These warriors fight out of religious conviction and become infected with bloodlust. They are the products of a failed civilization that blames the Americans or Zionists for its inability to adapt to modernity and compete with the West. They burn with resentment and the desire for revenge.
β Dispossessed or otherwise failed military men form the fifth and most immediately dangerous wool of warriors.
But the greatest danger to Israel and the United States is when the cynic is working together with the true believer.
All of these warriors are habituated to violence; they have no stake in civil order. Unlike soldiers, they do not play by the rules of the Geneva convention; they do not respect human life; treaties mean nothing to them; and they regard compromise as equivalent to prostitution. Negotiation with warriors is sheer folly. We should not negotiate with them until they surrender. Until then, they must be killed.
Unfortunately, Israelis, like Americans, believe that all men want peace, that all conflict can be resolved through compromise and understanding. But many men have no stake in peace. Many would be bored by peace, and would lose honor or be out a job with peace. You find such men in the Palestinian Authority—in Fatah, Tanzim, Hamas, Hizbullah, Islamic Jihad, and so on.
β American and Israeli opinion-makers refuse to believe that many human beings thrive and profit on disorder and on killing other human beings.
β Americans, profit from peace; warriors profit from war, and Israelis suffer the consequences.
β Both American and Israelis talk about a war against “terrorism,” a war that is actually against Islam, a jihadic culture that breeds terrorists.
As Ralph Peters points out, we refuse to understand that certain human beings cannot accept that their culture is failing. These human beings do not realize that they are failing individually because of the mode of thought and behavior to which their culture has conditioned them. They want someone to blame, and they want revenge on that someone.
But our academics and intellectual elites—the educators of our politicians and judges—are so conditioned by the moral relativism that permeates all levels of education in the democratic world, that they cannot think of a failed culture such as Islam. They would accuse me of racism. One does not have to be a racist to recognize that Israel’s enemies have some nasty characteristics:
β They regard Israeli peace overtures as a sign of weakness.
β They have nothing but contempt for Jews who advocate “land for peace.”
β They will not honor any form of agreement a moment longer than it suits their needs.
β Their contempt for human life inevitably leads them to commit atrocities.
We face an enemy whose sole motivation to refrain from killing is the fear of being killed; but since many of them love of death, the only deterrent is to kill them in sufficient numbers before they kill us.
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Part II. What Must Be Done
The Netanyahu Government is following the failed Oslo policy of “land for peace.” I propose a policy of “Kill for Peace”—a harsh policy, but one that would actually reduce Arab as well as Jewish casualties. The rationality and effectiveness of such a policy is substantiated not only by Ralph Peters but also by the greatest military theorists in history, Carl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu.Moreover, the thinking of these military geniuses is supported by principles of statecraft enunciated by the great 19th century Austrian statesman, Prince Metternich. Accordingly, I shall now enumerate ten principles of statecraft and rules of warfare required for the policy “Kill for Peace” vis-à-vis Israel’s Janus-faced enemies:
β First Principle: A wise and courageous statesman must set forth a clear military goal. For Israel, this goal is the destruction of the entire Arab terrorist network in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. The statesman must tackle this goal vigorously. For this to happen it is necessary that the goal should not only be clear in the eyes of the cabinet, but it should also be made clear in the eyes of the public.
(Bear in mind, however, that Israel’s system of multi-party cabinet government is inherently incapable of pursuing a coherent and vigorous national strategy. This is why I have proposed a presidential system of government.)
β Second Principle: In this age of publicity the first concern of government must be not only to be right, but, even more important, to see that everything is called by its right name. Israeli statesmen must stop talking about a “peace process” or about “peaceful coexistence.” Israel is in a war for its survival. In this war there is no substitute for victory.
β Third Principle: There is no compromising with an uncompromising enemy—an enemy that regards compromise as a sign of weakness. Israel is confronted by the most evil of enemies—warriors who lust for Jewish blood.
β Fourth Principle: Eliminate the evil at its source, that is, eliminate the enemy’s leadership, its supporting gangs and infrastructure. Disarming the enemy must be the immediate object of hostilities, for as long as the enemy remains armed, he will wait for a more favorable moment for action.
β Fifth Principle: Know that any strategy conceived in moderate terms will fail because the circumstances confronting Israel are extreme—its very existence is at stake. Therefore, where each of the possible lines of action involves difficulty, the strongest line is the best.
β Sixth Principle: Tell the people of Israel that there will be casualties to Arab non-combatants or civilians. Most of these civilians are not innocent: they allow terrorists to use them as human shields. Emphasize that the overwhelming majority of the Arab inhabitants of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza support suicide bombers and reject Israel’s existence.
β Seventh Principle: Impose rules of engagement that favor the IDF, not the enemy. Bomb terrorist havens from the air, rather than endanger Jewish soldiers by house-to-house combat.
β Eighth Principle: Operate offensively, never passively or defensively, and operate continuously. Give the enemy no rest.Hence, no cease fires, for they allow the enemy to regroup, obtain more weapons, and prepare for deadlier attacks.
β Ninth Principle: Sun Tzu, who actually hated war, warns that “to kill the enemy, men must be roused to anger.” This leads me to a tenth principle, for which I turn to King David.
βTenth Principle: The statesman must exhibit hatred of Israel’s enemies. King David said, “I hate them, O God, that hate you” (Psalm 139:21). Here the haters of God means those who hate God’s people, or God’s Torah, because actual hatred has no meaning in terms of God’s essence.
Hatred, however, is futile if it does not issue in action. Therefore King David writes: “I pursued my enemies and overtook them, and returned not until they were destroyed. I crushed them so that they are not able to rise; …. I pulverized them like dust in the face of the storm …” (Psalm 18:38-43).
This is what must be done to Israel’s enemies. I therefore propose that the untried but rational policy of “Kill for Peace” replace the discredited, irrational policy of “land for peace.” Obviously this will not be done by the present government. Hence Israel needs a very different kind of government.
Kill for Peace (cont'd)
by Prof. Paul Eidelberg
Part I concluded with a simple message: "We should not negotiate with warriors until they surrender. Until then, we must kill them.
Unfortunately, Israelis, like Americans, believe that all men want peace, that all conflict can be resolved through compromise and understanding. But many men have no stake in peace. Many would be bored by peace, and would lose honor or be out a job with peace. You find such men in the Palestinian Authority, in Fatah, Tanzim, Hamas, Hizbullah, Islamic Jihad, and so on.
We just refuse to believe that many human beings thrive and profit on disorder and on killing human beings. Intensifying the problem today is Islam and global jihad.
Americans and Israelis refuse to understand that certain human beings cannot accept that their culture is failing and that they are failing individually because of the behaviors to which their culture has conditioned them. They want someone to blame, and they want revenge on that someone.
But our academic and intellectual elites—the educators of our politicians and judges—are so conditioned by the cultural relativism that permeates all levels of education in the democratic world, that they cannot think of a failed culture such as Islam. They would accuse me of racism. One does not have to be a racist to recognize the following characteristics of Israel’s enemies:
β They regard Israeli peace overtures as a sign of weakness.
β They have nothing but contempt for Jews who advocate “land for peace.”
β They will not honor any form of agreement a moment longer than it suits their needs.
β Their contempt for human life inevitably leads them to commit atrocities.
β They will employ all available means to win the conflict.
Given their love of death, there is no civilized deterrent; only logical and rational deterrent is to kill them in sufficient numbers before they kill us.
Given the eighteen-year failure of the policy of "land for peace," propose a policy of “kill for peace”—a harsh-sounding policy that would nonetheless reduce Arab as well as Jewish casualties. The rationale for such a policy can be substantiated by the greatest military theorists in history, Carl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, as well as by principles of statecraft enunciated by Metternich, the great 19th century Austrian statesman. Here I will outline ten principles.
Hatred, however, is a futile if it does not issue in action. Therefore King David writes: “I pursued my enemies and overtook them, and returned not until they were destroyed. I crushed them so that they are not able to rise; …. I pulverized them like dust in the face of the storm …” (Psalm 18:38-43).
This is what must be done to Israel’s enemies. And so I propose the rational policy of “Kill for Peace” to replace the proven-to-be irrational policy of “land for peace.” Obviously this will not be done by the Netanyahu government. Hence Israel needs a very different kind of government—and this obviously does NOT mean a Labor or Kadima government.
"A considerable percentage of those executives told us, basically — 'So what?' " says James Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at CSIS. "Some said they had things under control — or this type of threat was a national security problem for government — not them. Bottom line: these guys are reluctant to spend money on things that don't generate a financial return. Cybersecurity doesn't make business sense." New cybersecurity standards for the electric utility industry are now in place. But loopholes allow US utilities to interpret the standards often as not applying to USB memory sticks, notes Joe Weiss, an industrial control systems security expert in a blog post. Yet infected USBs were exactly what Stuxnet's creator used to spread the attack to Iran's centrifuges, even though they were "air gapped" — separated from the Internet.
"Stuxnet-like threats will require asset owners, technology providers, and homeland security organizations to think more broadly about how [to] develop more flexible, skilled, and adaptive security programs," says Michael Assante, former security chief of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), which oversees grid reliability.
Even so, there are at least a few positive signs that Stuxnet has started to change how utility professionals think, he and others say. In corners of industry there's a "new appreciation for the types of consequences that Stuxnet introduced [that] is beginning to drive decisions about technology designs and practices," he and others say.
For example, Schneider Electric, a big Paris-based manufacturer of industrial control systems hardware and software is taking steps, says Eric Byres, chief technology officer for Vancouver-based Byres Security.
"Schneider, and a few others, are definitely making a major push to create a security culture," he says. "But other companies seem to be doing nothing. It's all over the map. Boeing and Exxon are moving aggressively. For others, it's business as usual."
In a recent interview, Timothy Roxey, NERC's director of critical infrastructure risk management and technology, says his group and the utility industry are keeping a watchful eye and taking steps to defend the US electric grid.
"Stuxnet, especially at the beginning, had everyone exceptionally concerned," he says. As experts started to understand that Stuxnet was targeted at the Iranian centrifuges "a lot of the immediacy of the concern to the utility space kind of came off the table. It didn't mean that we at NERC were letting it off the hook, since we subsequently wrote an alert on it, but it did mean that we were apparently not the target."
But there is also plenty of denial that Stuxnet represents a new threat.
Although Stuxnet infected tens of thousands of machines worldwide, its payload activated only when it found the particular system it was after. Yet according to the man who first identified Stuxnet as a weapon a year ago, industrial control systems expert Ralph Langner, the next Stuxnet-style attack might be closer to a "digital dirty bomb" that simply turns off any industrial machine it infects.
Stuxnet, he says, is a "Pandora's box" that provides ideas to hackers on how to build similar attacks.
Since Stuxnet appeared, the Industrial Control System — Computer Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT), a division of the Department of Homeland Security, has issued a number of alerts. Yet Mr. Langner and others criticize it for being slow and incomplete in its analysis and dissemination of useful information on dealing with Stuxnet.
DHS officials, in interviews with the Monitor, have previously rebutted such criticism, saying it has done a lot — and can only do so much to protect US critical infrastructure when 85-90 percent of it is run by private industry.
Meanwhile, signs are growing that the hacker community is keenly interested in developing Stuxnet-like capabilities — and that far less discriminating cyberweapons than the original Stuxnet are not far behind. Terrorists and cybercrime groups meanwhile are waiting patiently to evaluate such weapons when they emerge, experts say.
"Right now people are playing with Stuxnet, seeing how it did what it did — and how might it affect control systems that run other civilian infrastructure," says Stewart Baker, a Washington lawyer and cybersecurity expert who served in the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency. "Free floating communities of amateur hackers who are working to deconstruct and democratize Stuxnet. They're saying,: 'Gee, this is cool. I could break the power grid.' "
Others agree. The rate at which industrial control system vulnerabilities are being discovered by researchers and added to the national database has more than doubled since Stuxnet appeared, says Mr. Huber, whose company tracks them. That intensified research into control system weaknesses usually translates within a short time into "exploits" — attack software designed to penetrate those known weaknesses.
"We've had signs that people were developing these things [industrial control systems attack software] for years," Mr. Assante, the former electric grid security chief, said in an earlier interview. "What Stuxnet has done is to increase their confidence it can be done. Expect to see Stuxnet-type attacks in 2012."
A year after Stuxnet demonstrated the capacity to wreck industrial equipment, NERC's Mr. Roxey says the utility industry is busy conducting followup webinars and embarking on a fresh examination of systems to see if Stuxnet has reemerged.
But not everyone is convinced that either government — or private industry — is doing enough.
"There has been some recognition of the threat — yet we still haven't made the mental adjustment on strategy, policies, and the many things we have to do to guard ourselves," says Baker, the former DHS and NSA official. "We need to do a lot more — and sooner rather than later."
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A Prayer for 5772By Caroline B. Glick The Jerusalem Post 28 September, 2011
It's my prayer for coming year that US Jewish community will act with the majority of their fellow Americans to defend Israel. |
Many of Abbas’s supporters in Ramallah held posters of US President Barack Obama. On them Obama was portrayed as a monkey. The caption read, “The First Jewish President of the United States.”
The fact that the Palestinians from Fatah and Hamas alike are Jew-hating racists should surprise no one who has been paying a modicum of attention to the Palestinian media and general culture. Since the PA was established in 1994 in the framework of the peace process between Israel and the PLO, it has used the media organs, schools and mosques it controls to spew out a constant flow of anti-Semitic propaganda. Much of the Jew-hating bile is indistinguishable from anti-Jewish propaganda published by the Nazis.
As for their anti-black bigotry, it is enough to recall the frequency with which Condoleezza Rice was depicted as a monkey and a devil in the Palestinian and pan-Arab media during George W. Bush’s presidency to realize that the racist depiction of Obama was not a fluke. Moreover, and more disturbingly, it is worth recalling that like its fellow Arab League members, the PA has strongly supported Sudan’s genocide of black Africans in Darfur.
To a degree, the willingness of African-Americans to turn a blind eye to Arab anti-black prejudice is understandable. Since the mid-1960s, oil rich Arab kingdoms led by Saudi Arabia have spent hundreds of millions of petrodollars in outreach to African-Americans. This outreach includes but is not limited to massive proselytization efforts among inner city blacks. The combination of a strong and growing African-American Muslim population and a general sense of amity towards Muslims as a result of outreach efforts contribute to a willingness on the part of African- Americans to overlook Arab anti-black racism.
Unlike African-Americans, Jewish Americans have been targeted by no serious outreach campaigns by the likes of Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab world. To the contrary, as Mitchell Bard documented in his book The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East, these Arab nations have spared no effort in anti-Israel lobbying in the US. Among the Arab lobby’s goals is to undermine the legitimacy of American Jewish lobbying on behalf of Israel.
Furthermore, the anti-Jewish atmosphere in the Arab world is far more comprehensive and poisonous than its anti-black prejudice. A Pew global opinion poll from 2008 showed that hatred of Jews is effectively universal in the Arab world and overwhelming in non-Arab Muslim states. In Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon, between 95 and 97 percent of respondents expressed hatred of Jews. In Indonesia, Turkey and Pakistan between twothirds and three-quarters of respondents expressed hatred of Jews.
Jew-hatred among Muslim minorities in the West is less overwhelming. But Muslim antagonism towards Jews vastly outstrips that of the general populations of their countries. According to a Pew survey from 2006, while 7% of British citizens express unfavorable views of Jews, 47% of British Muslims admit to such views. In France, 13% of the general population admits to harboring negative feelings towards Jews and 28% of French Muslims do. Likewise in Germany, 22% of the general population acknowledges anti-Semitic views and 44% of German Muslims do.
More dangerously, the quantity of anti-Semitic attacks carried out by Muslims in the West far outstrips their percentage in the general population. According to Pew data, in 2010 Muslims comprised just 4.6% of the population of the UK but carried out 39% of the anti-Semitic attacks. Moreover, according to the Times Online, in 2006, 37% of British Muslims claimed that British Jews are legitimate targets for attacks. Only 30% of British Muslims disagreed.
WITH THE overwhelming data showing that throughout the Arab world there is strong support for organizations and regimes which advocate the genocide of world Jewry, the American Jewish community could have been expected to devote the majority of its attention and resources to exposing and combating this existential threat. Just as the American Jewish community dedicated itself in the past to causes such as the liberation of Soviet Jewry and fighting neo-Nazi groups in the US and throughout the world, it could have been expected that from the Anti-Defamation League to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, that major American Jewish groups would be using the financial and human resources at their disposal to defend against this violent, genocidal hatred.
But this has not occurred. Many leading American Jewish organizations continue to be far more involved in combating the currently relatively benign anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church and Evangelical Christians than confronting the escalating dangers of Muslim anti-Semitism.
According to a Gallup poll released last month, 80% of American Jews have favorable views of American Muslims. Seventy percent believe that they are not supportive of al-Qaida. These data indicate that American Jews are second only to American Muslims in their support for Muslim Americans. Indeed 6% more American Jews than American Muslims believe that American Muslims face prejudice due to their religion.
American Jewish championing of American Muslims is disconcerting when compared with American Jewish treatment of the philo-Semitic Evangelical Christians. Matthew Knee discussed this issue in depth in a recent article published at the Legal Insurrection website.
In a 2003 Pew survey, 42% of American Jews expressed antagonism towards Evangelical Christians. In a 2004 American National Election Study, Jews on average rated Evangelical Christians at 30 out of 100 on a “feeling thermometer,” where 1 was cold and 100 was hot.
A 2005 American Jewish Committee survey found that Jews assessed that following Muslims, Evangelical Christians have the highest propensity for being anti-Semites. And yet, in the same 2004 American National Election Survey, Evangelical Christians rated Jews an average of 82 on the 1- 100 feelings scale. Evangelical Christians rated Catholics at 80.
Consistent survey data show that levels of anti- Semitism among Evangelical Christians is either the same as or slightly lower than the national average According to a 2007 ADL survey, the US average is 15%.
There is a clear disparity between survey data on anti-Semitism among various American ethnic groups and American Jews’ assessment of the prevalence of anti-Semitism among the same groups. The AJC survey found that American Jews believed that 29% of Evangelicals are largely anti- Semitic. They assessed that only 7% of Hispanics and 19% of African-Americans are anti-Semites.
As it works out, their perceptions are completely incorrect. According to the 2007 ADL survey, foreign born Hispanics, and African-Americans, harbor significantly stronger anti-Semitic views than the national average. Twenty-nine percent of foreign born Hispanics harbor very anti-Semitic views. Thirty-two percent of African-Americans harbor deeply anti-Semitic views.
Like Jews, Hispanics, African-Americans and Muslims vote disproportionately for the Democratic Party. Evangelical Christians on the other hand, are reliably Republican. A 2009 survey on US anti- Semitism conducted by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research in San Francisco found that Democrats are more likely to be anti-Semitic than Republicans.
The Gallup survey from last month showing American Jews’ deep support for American Muslims is of particular interest because that support stands in stark contrast with survey data concerning American Jewish perception of Muslim American anti-Semitism.
THE 2005 AJC survey showed that American Jews believe that 58% of American Muslims are anti- Semitic. That is, American Jews are Muslim Americans’ strongest non-Muslim defenders at the same time they are convinced that most Muslim Americans are anti-Semites. What can explain this counterintuitive behavior? And how can we account for the apparent pattern of incorrect Jewish perceptions of anti-Semitism among Evangelical Christians on the one hand and fellow Democrats on the other hand.
As Knee argues, the disparity may very well be due to partisan loyalties. The Democratic Party has openly engaged in fear mongering and demonization of Evangelical Christians in order to maintain Jewish loyalty to the party. Knee quotes then-Democratic national chairman Howard Dean’s statement that “Jews should feel comfortable in being American Jews without being constrained from practicing their faith or be compelled to convert to another religion.”
As for Muslims, Knee cites a press release from the National Jewish Democratic Council from March attacking Congressman Peter King’s hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims. In the press release, the council claimed that such hearings “can and will” harm religious tolerance in America. That is, the council implied that by investigating the radicalization of American Muslims – and its concomitant transformation of American Muslims into supporters of the genocidal Jew-hatred endemic among radical Muslims worldwide – Rep. King is endangering Jews.
If American Jews are most concerned with being able to maintain their loyalty to the Democratic Party, then it makes sense for them to wildly exaggerate Evangelical anti-Semitism. It is reasonable for them to underestimate African-American and Hispanic anti-Semitism, and ignore the higher rates of anti-Semitism among Democrats than among Republicans. Moreover, it makes sense for them to follow their party’s lead in failing to address the dangers of global Islamic anti- Semitism.
None of this makes sense, however, if American Jews are most concerned with defending Jews – in America and worldwide – from anti-Semitic sentiments and violence.
On Wednesday evening we begin our celebration of the New Year. Rosh Hashana marks a period of soul-searching among Jews. We are called upon at this time to account for our actions and our failures to act and to improve our faithfulness to our people, to our laws and to God.
At the UN last week, Abbas received accolades and applause from all quarters for his anti-Semitic assault on Jewish history and the Jewish state. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s remarks were applauded by Israel-supporters in the audience in the General Assembly.
As Israel is increasingly isolated and Jews worldwide are under attack, it is my prayer for the coming year that the American Jewish community will come to terms with a difficult reality and the choices it entails, and act with the majority of their fellow Americans to defend Israel and combat anti-Semitism in the US and throughout the world.