RUTHFULLY YOURS

“The bigger error would be to treat Arab-Israeli peace like a real-estate deal. An avid deal maker would be inclined to see the conflict as a matter of offering just the right inducements to the parties. But that’s precisely the failed approach that has disappointed successive American presidents for half a century, since it doesn’t take the Palestinian ideology into account.”
Emergency services in Israel combated brush fires across the country for a week beginning Nov. 22, ranging from Haifa to the Galilee to Jerusalem. Hundreds of homes burned down and nearly 16 square miles of forest land were damaged before the fires were contained this week. Dozens of people suffered smoke inhalation, and some 70,000 had to be evacuated.

It was an almost perfect metaphor for the Palestinian national movement.

Of the 39 largest fires—there were 1,700 separate events in all—29 were ignited by Palestinian arsonists. “We have also identified an additional 10 sites where arson was attempted but didn’t succeed,” Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan told me in a phone interview Thursday. “In some cases we were able to catch the suspects by camera or drone. In others we found Molotov cocktails at the scene.”

He added: “All the big fires were in Israel or in Jewish towns or near Jewish towns. There was no Arab city where there was a big fire inside.”

Police have arrested 35 suspects on arson and incitement charges so far, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to “prosecute anyone committing these acts so that all can see that anyone who tries to burn down the State of Israel will face the fullest punishment.”

Having tried and failed to destroy Israel through violent rioting, all-out invasion, suicide bombings, campus boycotts, and random stabbing and vehicular attacks, Palestinians are now literally setting the Holy Land on fire. The message, evident to all but their friends in Washington and Brussels, is that they would sooner see the land go up in flames than coexist with a Jewish state.

The Palestinian leadership remains Janus-faced as ever. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas dispatched 40 firefighters and eight firetrucks to help extinguish the fires, earning justified praise and gratitude from Mr. Netanyahu and the Israeli political establishment. Without PA assistance and support from the likes of Egypt, Greece, Jordan, Russia, Spain and Turkey, among many others, the fires could have raged for much longer.

Yet Mr. Abbas’s Fatah movement also accused Jerusalem of “exploiting the fire” to blame the Palestinian people. And during a three-hour stemwinder at a Fatah conference on Wednesday, Mr. Abbas lauded the 1980s “intifada of stones” and once more called for unity with Hamas, the Gaza-based terrorist movement constitutionally committed to destroying Israel.

“Our national unity is our safety valve, and I call on Hamas to end the division,” Mr. Abbas said. He also assailed Britain for the 1917 Balfour Declaration that paved the way for Israel’s creation in Mandatory Palestine, demanding that Her Majesty’s Government “declare its apology for making such a promise and repair the damage done to our people, resources and our nation.”

Then there’s the wider atmosphere of online incitement. Arab social-media users cheerfully shared the hashtag #IsraelIsBurning throughout the crisis. They were “happy and supporting it and calling on others to do it,” said Mr. Erdan, the public-security minister. “It’s all based on spreading a culture of hatred in a social network. You don’t need a mosque or school anymore to spread lies and hatred. You can spread your lies globally, 24/7, without effective monitoring.”

There’s a useful lesson here for the incoming Trump administration about the perils of diving into Israeli-Arab peace-processing. Judging by most of his statements, Donald Trump’s instincts are pro-Israel in the conventional sense. But the president-elect is also tempted by the peace-deal El Dorado. CONTINUE AT SITE

Some pieces are easy to write. I go to an event and hear people suggest that the Zionists were responsible for the holocaust, or witness mention of Jewish power. If it is a speech by Max Blumenthal or Tom Suarez, I will hear tales of Jewish conspiracy. I return home, analyse the recordings, research, and write. It is an easy process to follow.http://david-collier.com/?p=2460

The more difficult pieces are those that challenge the narratives. The message is not a simple ‘one-liner’. There can be discomfort in internally challenging deeply held beliefs, an inability to ‘cross the divide’. People are even uncertain sometimes ‘which side’ the piece is on.

This is one of those items. To make the journey with me, you need to let go of some of your beliefs. Ignore statements that challenge your history and set aside all you know about the creation of the conflict between 1917 and 1967.

I am going to ask you to immerse yourself inside the Palestinian narrative. I am doing so because I am going to use their narrative, not just to show that Zionism is a movement of national liberation but to forcefully drive home the idea that the Balfour apology campaign, anti-Zionism and the entire settler colonial paradigm are all knee deep in antisemitic thought.
An alternate universe

The Arab narrative suggests that the British had written a letter as a nation of empire and handed a land that was not theirs over to a rich and powerful European sect. The British then spent 30 years facilitating this movement. Eventually, in 1948, the Palestinians were brutally expelled from their land by these invading racist white Europeans.

Today, millions of the descendants of the victims of this ‘Nakba’ are scattered. Many live as refugees in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Others have gone further afield, and you can find them in nations across the globe. Waiting with their deeds and their keys until they, or their children, or their grandchildren, can eventually return.

That return is described as a movement for national liberation. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. ‘Fatah’, the largest faction of the PLO, was originally called the ‘Palestinian National Liberation Movement’.
Return

Central to the liberation movement is the return of the refugees. Those that were ‘scattered’:

“the “right of return” for the descendants to their land and homes in “Palestine” will be valid for all eternity, it is not subject to negotiation, and is both a group and personal “right” that cannot be cancelled.” (Palestinian Diaspora in Europe” conference 2015)

The same message is repeated here:

“Palestinians have repeatedly said that the right of return enshrined in various United Nations resolutions is non-negotiable and does not have an expiry date.”

The Palestinian right of return. An inalienable right. A hereditary condition, with Palestinian ‘nationhood’ passing from parent to child.

In this manner, 70 years later, the struggle, even the violent struggle, is framed as a movement of National liberation rather than a struggle for personal freedoms. The Arab who was born in Lebanon, whose parents were born in Lebanon, does not strive for freedom in Lebanon, but rather to experience the liberation of his ‘homeland’. A land neither he nor his parents ever trod. This movement of national liberation has full time support from a long list of anti-Zionist activists.

Jimmy Carter is 92 now, and it has been 36 years since his landslide defeat for reelection. But neither the passage of time nor the debilities of age slow him from making proposals that will do real harm to the State of Israel — and he has just tried one more time.

In Monday’s New York Times, he writes that “America must recognize Palestine” and presents a version of Israeli reality that simply takes leave of the facts. Carter tells us that “the simple but vital step this administration must take before its term expires on Jan. 20 is to grant American diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine, as 137 countries have already done, and help it achieve full United Nations membership.”

Now, granting diplomatic recognition to “the state of Palestine” will no more make it a legitimate and genuine country than granting diplomatic recognition to Plains, Ga., would make it one. The fact that 137 countries have done so — to no effect whatsoever — ought to make that obvious. So, what is Carter’s real goal here? He writes that it is peace, but the steps he proposes and the analysis he offers would leave Israel and the Palestinians further from peace than ever.

The “facts” Carter adduces are not only wrong, but tricky and misleading. For example, he writes that there are “600,000 Israeli settlers.” That number can only be reached by counting every Israeli living in Jerusalem — including in the Jewish Quarter, and the parts barred to Jews by Jordan before 1967 — as settlers. He writes that “Israel is building more and more settlements, displacing Palestinians and entrenching its occupation of Palestinian lands,” but he offers no data — because there is none to support his claim. Anyone who has visited the West Bank knows that virtually all settlements have not displaced Palestinians but have been, instead, built on fallow land, and the number of settlements and the land they take up rises very slowly indeed. The actual land area taken up by settler buildings themselves covers perhaps 1 percent of the West Bank, though far more falls within settlement boundaries. Roughly 12 percent of the West Bank lies to the west of the security barrier built by Israel to stop Palestinian terrorism. That barrier is not moving, or creeping, or taking up more land.

For decades, UN agencies have slandered the Jewish state, most recently with the April 2016 accusation that it has been “planting Jewish fake graves” in Palestinian territory, and with UNESCO declaring last year that the ancient Jewish Biblical sites Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs are actually Muslim holy sites, and last month that the Temple Mount, where the Jewish Temples were destroyed in 587 BCE and 70 CE, is an Islamic site with no connection to Judaism.

West Bank: This territory was for millennia called Judea and Samaria. After the 1948 War of Independence, Transjordan annexed it, renamed it the “West Bank,” and occupied it for nearly two decades. In the Six Day War, after Jordan attacked Israel, Israel entered the territory and administered it until the Oslo Accords era, when Israel turned over much of the area to the Palestinian Authority.

Occupation: When it comes to Israel, the UN is obsessed with the word “occupation.” A recent Wall Street Journal article documents 530 General Assembly references to Israel as an “occupying power” versus zero for Indonesia (East Timor), Turkey (Cyprus), Russia (Georgia, Crimea), Morocco (Western Sahara), Vietnam (Cambodia), Armenia (Azerbaijan), Pakistan (Kashmir), or China (Tibet). Saying that Jews are “occupying” Judea is as nonsensical as saying Arabs are “occupying” Arabia or Gauls are “occupying” France.

Settlement: The UN uses the term to insinuate Israeli theft of “Palestine.” The Obama administration eagerly embraced this terminology. If there is an occupying force in Gaza, it is Hamas. The West Bank is “disputed territories” to anyone claiming a modicum of neutrality. As Elliot Abrams put it, “the term ‘settlement’ loses meaning when applied to Jews building homes in their nation’s capital city.”

US President-elect Donald Trump won the White House promising to reform our dysfunctional government. But will he also stand up to the even more dysfunctional United Nations?

As the Trump campaign emphasized in a position paper released November 2, the UN has long displayed “enormous anti-Israel bias.” For decades, UN agencies have slandered the Jewish state, most recently with the April 2016 accusation that it has been “planting Jewish fake graves” in Palestinian territory, and with UNESCO declaring last year that the ancient Jewish Biblical sites Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs are actually Muslim holy sites, and last month that the Temple Mount, where the First and Second Jewish Temples were destroyed in 587 BCE and 70 CE, is an Islamic site with no connection to Judaism. On the day America elected a new president, the UN adopted ten new resolutions against Israel.

This piece was first published on the Hebrew-language website Mida on November 25, 2016, rendered into English by Avi Woolf, and republished here with permission.http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2016/11/the-forest-jihad-is-here/

In contrast to talk about a “new form of terror,” the weapon of arson has served radical Islam for years around the world, with the aim of causing damage and “sowing fear into the hearts of infidels.”

A wave of fires is raging throughout Israel, causing great damage and leading to furious debates and rumor mills regarding their cause. Is this deliberate, negligence, or just a matter of the weather? The answer, so it seems, is a combination of the three. Some of the fires may indeed be the result of negligence, but such a large number of them in so many places suggests deliberate intent, helped by changes in the weather.

Indeed, police officials spoke this week of a “wave of arson,” and even arrested some suspects. At a press conference convened in burning Haifa by Prime Minister Netanyahu and Interior Minister Gilad Erdan, the fires were described as “terror,” and Minister Erdan even defined the “arson terror” as a new phenomenon which Israel is now coping with. But in fact, this isn’t the first time terrorists have made use of the arson weapon, and the idea has been widespread on the internet for years. The main party spreading it is al-Qaeda.

While Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership hid in the Afghan-Pakistani hills, Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, the organization’s ideologue and strategist, published a two-volume book entitled A Call for Global Islamic Resistance. In his book, al-Suri calls on supporters of global jihad to hurt the West via urban combat and terror, individually and in groups. He provided inspiration for the terrorists who bombed Madrid in March 2004 and London in July 2005. Marc Sageman, a former psychiatrist working for American intelligence called this approach “leaderless jihad.” After the attack by terrorist Mohammad Merah on the Jewish Otzar Hatorah school in Toulouse, the head of Europol called it “the new jihad.”

“Moreover, it is puzzling and disturbing that France adopts a double standard in relation to Israel, while ignoring 200 territorial conflicts currently taking place around the world, including those taking place right on its doorstep.” — Response of Israel’s Foreign Ministry to France’s new labeling regulations.

In the Ukraine, a few sanctions were imposed by France and EU, but there was never any labeling of food or cosmetic products.

Ironically, and sadly, the people most negatively affected by the French and EU regulations will be the 25,000 Palestinians employed by Israelis in the West Bank.

In just one year, 2016, France and its socialist president have made multiple hostile gestures towards Israel, which reveal more about raw anti-Semitism posing as anti-Israelism in France than about its unjustly solitary target.

The Muslim vote is now an important factor in French politicians’ decisions. In 2012, socialist President François Hollande was elected with 93% of the Muslim vote. That is how diplomacy is made conducted in France, and in Europe generally. It is a diplomacy solidly rooted in domestic policy. It is a domestic policy made by dhimmi politicians.

In France, retail chains and importers now have the legal obligation to label products originating in Judea, Samaria, eastern Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

On November 24, the Official Gazette of the French Republic (JORF) published Regulation No 1169/2011, ordering “economic operators” to inform consumers about “the origin of goods from the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967.”

This French regulation is an application of the interpretive notice issued by the Official Journal of the European Union (OJ), on November 12, 2015. The notice states that the EU “does not recognise Israel’s sovereignty over the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967, namely the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and does not consider them to be part of Israel’s territory” and claims it is responding to “a demand for clarity from consumers, economic operators and national authorities”.

The European Commission allowed member states to arrange their own national implementation of this European regulation, with financial penalties.

The French adoption of this EU policy insists on labeling Israeli products with the greatest precision possible.