The “Real News From Israel”? By Richard H. Shulman

Senior Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit writes (WSJ, December 1, page C3 “The Real News from Israel,” without background about his paper’s bias toward local Arabs against Jews.  Examples of this bias: barring Jewish purchasers from moving into houses in which Arabs are squatting, Bedouin seizure of public land, and encouraging terrorism.  
Mr. Shavit praises Zionism for technical achievement and condemns it for “occupying” and denying the rights of another people.  The praise is not news; what he condemns is not real.  When even an Israeli reinforces global prejudice that Israel has no right to the land, technical marvels won’t deter foreign anti-Zionist pressure. 
Remember, Islam denies Jews’ rights to any part of the Land of Israel, not just to the territories.  Their Covenants and hate-indoctrination make that clear.  The Muslim strategy is first to wrest the Territories from Israel, thereby gaining strength at Israel’s expense, and then to attack the State of Israel.  Mr. Shavit helps that jihadist goal ironically in the name of justice.
He mistakenly depicts the conflict as limited to Palestinian Arabs and to territory.  The real problem is that Islam rejects any Jewish self-determination, recognized by the WWI peace treaties, Palestine Mandate, and UN Charter.  Palestinian Arabs deny Jews freedom of religion.  Where they control Judaism’s holy sites, they bar Jews; where they don’t but hope to, they vow to bar Jews.  They deny Jews’ human dignity by calling them “sons of apes and pigs.”  They deny Jews the right to work, drive, and live free of racist attack, the Oslo Accords’ prohibition of terrorism notwithstanding. 
The Palestinian Authority (P.A.), to which Israel granted autonomy, also oppresses its own women, minorities, and democrats.  So you see who denies the rights of whom!   
“Palestinian” rights?  In the 1960s, the PLO fabricated a nationality in order to assert a claim against the Jewish nationality.  It invented Palestinian history by airbrushing themselves into history and the Jews out.  They also contradict the Christian Testament.  How can Jesus have chased moneylenders out of the Hebrew Temple in Jerusalem, if Abbas denies the past existence there of Temple and Hebrews?  Where is Mr. Shavit’s righteous indignation against P.A. mendacity?
Palestinian ex-post facto nationalism came late. Those Arabs never had a separate country.  Most of their families followed modern Zionist prosperity-creation into the area.  They have no legal or moral right to be called “occupied.”  Mr. Shavit’s allegation of Israel denying Arabs’ rights doesn’t specify any.  Unfair.  Would he acknowledge that when Israel withdrew from Gaza and most of Hebron, Islamist jihad took hold there?  Does Mr. Shavit spare some sympathy for his own people, beleaguered by Muslim Arabs who have been attempting genocide against the Jews for not submitting to Islam?
The perversity of his concept is that it depicts as: (1) Victims, the Muslim fomenters of war and terrorism against Jewish civilians; and (2) Villains, the Israelis who defend themselves while risking their own lives to minimize enemy casualties.  The broad context is that jihad is being waged in country after country, the particular excuses for it here and there usually being just P.R..

Bio: Jer. Post published “Ecuador’s Jews” by my wife, Norma Davidoff Shulman, and me, 5/27/11.  I had 3,300 articles on the Arab-Israel conflict in Examiner.com and 33 feature and news articles in Our Town weekly in Manhattan, circulation 100,000, in early 1990s

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