RUTHFULLY YOURS

From the time of the British Mandate in Palestine (September 29, 1922 to November 29, 1947) to the present, numerous British, American and European government commissions and official emissaries have come to the region to investigate the underlying causes of the Palestinian Arab/Israeli dispute. Academics and journalists have added their own analyses.

In the absence of a solution, a myriad of myths continue to proliferate about the conflict. US Secretary of State John Kerry joins the pantheon of American diplomats, academics and journalists who appear either ignorant of why the dispute remains intractable, or are blinded by their contempt for Israel or their own biases. Many seem psychologically incapable of accepting the reality that Palestinian Arabs refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist, and that until they do so, the war against the Jews will continue.
Two Basic Questions Not Addressed

Some of these “experts” are so “obsessively focused” on the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as “obstacles to peace,” they fail to ask two fundamental questions: Do the Arabs want a two-state solution? Is establishing a separate Arab state in the best interests of Israel and the West?

For many of Israel’s enemies and detractors, even the suggestion of abandoning this formula is proof that Israel does not want peace. The assertion that once the matter of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria is resolved, a peaceful resolution of the conflict will be achieved, is fallacious. There is no mention of the homicide bombers; pervasive incitement in the schools, mosques and social media; attempts to deny Jewish connection to the land of Israel; the Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries; or the deadly rock-throwing and fire-bombing attacks, beatings and stabbings.

Rarely, if ever, is there any recognition that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat 94 percent of Judea and Samaria, which he refused, and then launched the second Intifada. Ten years later, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas 93.6 percent of Judea and Samaria with a one-to-one land swap. This means that expansion has not significantly reduced the land available for establishing a Palestinian Arab state.

To secure Abbas’s consent, the Jewish communities of Elon Moreh, Ofra, Beit El and Kiryat Arba would be destroyed, Hebron abandoned, and Jerusalem divided. In the process, tens of thousands of Jews would be expelled from their homes. Abbas rejected the offer.
Why Do Arabs Reject the Two-State Solution?

Any attempt by the Security Council to enforce Resolution 2334 or to pass any new Resolutions based on Resolution 2334 will also be illegal.

Article 80 preserves the legal rights vested in the Jewish people to reconstitute the Jewish National Home within 22 per cent of the territory comprised in the 1922 Mandate for Palestine (“Mandate”). That territory includes what is known today as Area “C” located in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and East Jerusalem (“disputed areas”).

Resolution 2334 seeks to erase and annul – not preserve – those vested Jewish legal rights in the disputed areas by:

1. Claiming that Jews now presently living – or seeking in the future to live – in the disputed areas constitutes “a flagrant violation under international law” – when in fact their right to live there is sanctioned by Article 6 of the Mandate and Article 80.

2. Alleging that the right to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in the disputed areas requires the consent of any other party.

3. Calling on all States to discriminate between Jews living in the disputed areas and Jews living in Israel.

4. Discouraging Jews from living in the disputed areas when Article 6 of the Mandate specifically encourages close Jewish settlement in the disputed areas.

The questionable legality of Resolution 2334 needs to be urgently resolved by the Security Council itself seeking an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”) under Article 96(a) of the United Nations Charter.

The General Assembly so acted when it sought an advisory opinion in 2003 from the ICJ on the legality of the security barrier erected by Israel.

That decision was fundamentally flawed because contrary to Article 65 (2) of the ICJ Statute – two vital documents – the Mandate for Palestine and Article 80 – were not included in the dossier of documents submitted to the ICJ for consideration by then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan – an omission never explained until today.

Give the ICJ half the documents and you will only get half a judgement.

Secretary of State John Kerry, echoing other policymakers in the Obama administration, blasted Israel last week in a 70-minute rant about its supposedly self-destructive policies.

Why does the world — including now the U.S. — single out liberal and lawful Israel but refrain from chastising truly illiberal countries?

Kerry has never sermonized for so long about his plan to solve the Syrian crisis that has led to some 500,000 deaths or the vast migrant crisis that has nearly wrecked the European Union.

No one in this administration has shown as much anger about the many thousands who have been killed and jailed in the Castro brothers’ Cuba, much less about the current Stone Age conditions in Venezuela or the nightmarish government of President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, an ally nation.

President Obama did not champion the cause of the oppressed during the Green Revolution of 2009 in Iran. Did Kerry and Obama become so outraged after Russia occupied South Ossetia, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine?

Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power was never so impassioned over the borders of Chinese-occupied Tibet, or over Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus.

In terms of harkening back to the Palestinian “refugee” crisis that started in the late 1940s, no one talks today in similar fashion about the Jews who survived the Holocaust and walked home, only to find that their houses in Eastern Europe were gone or occupied by others. Much less do we recall the 11 million German civilians who were ethnically cleansed from Eastern Europe in 1945 by the Soviets and their imposed Communist governments. Certainly, there are not still “refugee” camps outside Dresden for those persons displaced from East Prussia 70 years ago.

More recently, few nations at the U.N. faulted the Kuwaiti government for the expulsion of 200,000 Palestinians after the liberation of Kuwait by coalition forces in 1991.

Yet on nearly every issue — from “settlements” to human rights to the status of women — U.N. members that routinely violate human rights target a liberal Israel.

When President Obama entered office, among his first acts were to give an interview with the Saudi-owned news outlet Al Arabiya championing his outreach to the mostly non-democratic Islamic world and to blast democratic Israel on “settlements.”

Partly, the reason for such inordinate criticism of Israel is sheer cowardice. If Israel had 100 million people and was geographically large, the world would not so readily play the bully.

Instead, the United Nations and Europe would likely leave it alone — just as they give a pass to human-rights offenders such as Pakistan and Indonesia. If Israel were as big as Iran, and Iran as small as Israel, then the Obama administration would have not reached out to Iran, and would have left Israel alone.

Israel’s supposed Western friends sort out Israel’s enemies by their relative natural resources, geography, and population — and conclude that supporting Israel is a bad deal in cost/benefit terms.

Partly, the criticism of Israel is explained by oil — an issue that is changing daily as both the U.S. and Israel cease to be oil importers.

Still, about 40 percent of the world’s oil is sold by Persian Gulf nations. Influential nations in Europe and China continue to count on oil imports from the Middle East — and make political adjustments accordingly.

Partly, anti-Israel rhetoric is due to herd politics.

The Palestinians — illiberal and reactionary on cherished Western issues like gender equality, homosexuality, religious tolerance, and diversity — have grafted their cause to the popular campus agendas of race/class/gender victimization.

Textbooks used in United Nations-run schools in the West Bank did not include Israel in their maps or mention Jewish historical or cultural ties to the country, a recent study has found.

Professors Arnon Gross and Roni Shaked of the Harry Truman Research Institute at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem found that books, which are written by the Palestinian Ministry of Educatin and used in West Bank schools run by the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), display a single state of Palestine in the place of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority—effectively teaching students to recognize Israel as a nation. No Israeli city established after 1948 is listed on maps in the books.

In one of the textbooks, Zionism is described as a colonialist ideology devoted to moving European Jews to Israel and displacing Arabs. The textbooks also teach that Jewish holy places—including the Western Wall, the Cave of the Patriarchs, and Rachel’s Tomb—are actually Muslim holy sites that Jews are appropriating. They claim that the 1929 riots, in which around 130 Jews were killed by Arab neighbors in Hebron, Jerusalem, and Safed, were part of the “al-Buraq revolt,” to prevent Jews from taking over religious sites in those areas.

In another instance, an image of a Mandatory-era stamp, which had writing in Hebrew, English, and Arabic, was reproduced with the Hebrew erased.

Palestinian textbooks have long been under scrutiny for their denial of Jewish history, incitement of violence, and failure to promote peaceful coexistence to Palestinian children. A similar report was issued in last June by the watchdog group IMPACT-SE, which found that the word “peace” did not appear at all in its survey of 78 Palestinian Authority textbooks for grades 1 through 12.

In The Palestinian Textbook Fiasco, which was published in the June 2013 issue of The Tower Magazine, Adi Schwartz dissected a State Department-sponsored study that whitewashed the extremism present in Palestinian textbooks.

The Obama administration is receiving a well-deserved hammering for orchestrating the UN’s fresh assault on Israel. Most refreshing is a good deal of that hammering is being delivered by an infuriated Israel, whose representatives haven’t flinched in slamming the U.S. for its betrayal. They are learning for the first time, or perhaps re-learning for the umpteenth time, a doctrine taught by Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky: the principle of resistance.

The Likud Party which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads purports to draw inspiration from Jabotinsky and to faithfully follow his teachings. Banners depicting Jabotinsky fly at every Likud event. Yet, in his many years in office, Netanyahu has seemed less a devotee of Jabotinsky than a disciple of Dale Carnegie, who famously said, “You can’t win an argument.” Netanyahu and his government haven’t won any arguments when it comes to Jewish rights in Israel’s heartland. Indeed, they haven’t tried. Instead, they’ve chosen to manage the problem. We see the fruits of that strategy: Resolution 2334.

Ironically, it was the Prime Minister’s father, Prof. Ben-Zion Netanyahu, who offered one of the best analyses of Jabotinsky’s thinking in a 1981 essay that was reprinted in his last book, The Founding Fathers of Zionism. Ben-Zion points out that Jabotinsky’s greatest contribution to Jewish thinking was this: “He taught the doctrine of resistance to a people who had not known what resistance meant for hundreds of years.”

What did this mean in political terms? “Vigorous resistance to any concession of any rightwhatsoever.” Ben-Zion Netanyahu writes: “After all, if you have a right, and concede that right, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, even if out of supposedly ‘pragmatic calculations,’ then what is taken away from you is, simply, theft. Hence, you have fundamentally surrendered to robbery, even if you pretend to having been magnanimous.”

Think of the prime minister’s approach in light of the above. When facing election, he speaks out against a two-state solution as he did in 2008 and in 2015. Afterwards, he hastily backs down under U.S. and international pressure, reaffirming his support for two states. Instead of vigorous resistance, Netanyahu chooses the path of least resistance.

Although describing himself as a disciple of Jabotinsky, Netanyahu acts more like Jabotinsky’s nemesis, Chaim Weizmann. The strategy of Weizmann and the Laborites was “a dunam and a cow, and then another dunam and another cow”––a dunam being an area of land (4 equaling 1 acre). The idea was to avoid tipping off the Arabs while creating facts on the ground that would make a Jewish state inevitable. Weizmann even denied he wanted a Jewish state. The strategy was disingenuous, fooled no one and cost the Jews dearly politically, as the British, who favored the Arabs from the start, gradually stripped away Jewish rights.

TEL AVIV—Members of Israel’s governing coalition said they would propose legislation after Donald Trump’s inauguration to annex a West Bank Jewish settlement for the first time, defying the United Nations and the international community.

If approved, such a law would mark a stark departure from decades of Israeli policy tolerating and even promoting settlements but not considering them part of the country proper.

Naftali Bennett, leader of the pro-settlement Jewish Home party, said Monday that after the new U.S. president takes office on Jan. 20, he would put to an initial vote in parliament a bill to make the settlement Ma’ale Adumim part of Israel. Mr. Trump has indicated he will ease U.S. pressure on Israel to curtail settlements when he is in the White House.

“The conclusion is to stop the march of folly toward a Palestinian state and to implement Israeli law in Ma’ale Adumim,” Mr. Bennett said in a statement issued from the settlement. Jewish settlers in the West Bank are subject to military law, but if the territory they occupy is annexed they come under civilian Israeli law.

Mr. Bennett has advocated for Israel to abandon its longstanding commitment to establishing a Palestinian state as part of a future peace deal—a position that in part spurred the U.S. decision last month to allow the U.N. to pass a rare censure of Israel that deemed settlements illegal.

His plan to push for annexation of a settlement appeared to be in response to that U.N. resolution and a subsequent speech by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that also criticized Israel over settlements.

Jewish Home holds enough seats in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fragile ruling coalition to force a collapse of the government if it wants to. In recent months, Mr. Netanyahu has acquiesced to many of the party’s demands to expand or maintain settlements on land Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

To become law, the bill would need the support of the vast majority of governing coalition members, who account for 67 out of 120 seats in the Knesset. It already has the support of some of the 30 lawmakers from Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party and all of Jewish Home’s eight seats.

Members of the Likud party and Mr. Bennett’s Jewish Home initially drafted a bill last year to annex Ma’ale Adumim—one of the largest Jewish settlements in the West Bank with 37,000 residents, and located just 5 miles east of Jerusalem—but ultimately decided not to push it while the Obama administration was still in office.

Lawmakers from all but one of the parties in Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition signed off on support for the bill last year. Those from the ultraorthodox United Torah Judaism party, which has six seats, haven’t formally offered their support.

It would have to pass a number of votes in the parliament before becoming law, a process likely to take months.

“Right now, the prime minister asked us not to do anything active in the short term as he is going to consider the move with the President-elect Trump and will work to get support,” said Yoav Kish, a member of the Likud party who led the drafting of the bill. “From my side, I’m going to push it forward once we pass President Obama.” CONTINUE AT SITE