RUTHFULLY YOURS

Nikki Haley has received great and deserved praise for defying UN standards to defend Israel. Well done indeed!

The United Nations conceived with such hope, has lost its way to bias, ignorance and endless attacks on Israel. The irony here is that the finest speeches delivered there have been by Israel’s defenders.

In 1949, Abba Eban urged the United Nations, still housed in Lake Success, to accept Israel’s membership. His speech lasted more than two hours. He chided the U.N. for holding up Israel’s application with the lame excuse that the “refugee and resettlement” issue had to be investigated. He noted many nations which expelled and dislocated hundreds of thousands were swiftly accepted. He scolded Jerusalem’s Arab authorities for flouting the UN’s resolution declaring Jerusalem an “international city” with access to people of all faiths. He described the desecration of shrines, churches and synagogues. And he addressed the problem of refugees with data and possibilities for resettlement in other Arab nations.

Abba Eban succeeded: United Nations General Assembly Resolution 273 was adopted on May 11, 1949 admitting the State of Israel to membership in the United Nations. It was passed following the approval of UN Security Council Resolution 69 on March 4.

Abba Eban served as Israel’s representative to the U.N. from 1948 until 1959 and as Israel’s Ambassador to the United States. He became Israel’s most effective speaker in the Diaspora. With a courtly manner and perfect diction, rarely checking notes, he defended his nation with zeal and rhetorical genius. The response of the Arab states was laughable. As soon as Eban stood, the Arab representatives walked out.

When he returned to Israel in 1959 he joined the Labor party. In June 1967 Eban, then Foreign Minister, returned to the United Nations to address the Security Council following the Six Day War.

Here are excerpts from his magnificent speech which should be read in full by anyone who falsely uses the word “occupation.”

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres displayed how little he knows of the history, geography and demography of Palestine when addressing the opening of the 2018 Session of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (“CEIRPP”). Established by the General Assembly in 1975 – CEIRPP was responsible for the publication in 1978 of a false narrative of the Arab-Israel conflict – “The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem 1917-1947″ (“UN Study”) – which has undoubtedly influenced United Nations thinking and decision-making.

Three examples highlight the falsity and outright bias of this UN Study:

1. Deliberately misrepresenting General Assembly Resolution 181 spoke of a “Palestinian Arab State” – when claiming:

“After investigating various alternatives the United Nations proposed the partitioning of Palestine into two independent States, one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish, with Jerusalem internationalized.”

The actual wording of Resolution 181 stated:

“Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem, set forth in Part III of this Plan, shall come into existence in Palestine….”

2. Omitting any mention of the fact that 78% of Palestine had become an independent Arab State in 1946 and been renamed the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan.

3. Falsely alleging:

“The decision on the Mandate [for Palestine] did not take into account the wishes of the people of Palestine”

The evidence contradicting this falsehood actually sits in the United Nations own archives.

Donald Trump’s election as US president has meant the whole notion of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ is now very much part of a wider conversation. But for decades before the Trump era, more honest or open-minded journalists were aware that some of their colleagues often didn’t tell the whole truth about all kinds of matters, or cherry-picked what they reported. And perhaps no subject has been so misreported as the Palestinian issue.

Western media has often focused on this issue to the detriment of many other conflicts or independence movements throughout the world. The BBC, in particular, has devoted an inordinate amount of its budget and staff to covering the West Bank and Gaza in thousands of reports over the years. But you would be hard pressed to learn from the BBC’s coverage that, despite many difficulties, Gaza’s economy is also thriving in all kinds of ways.

To get a glimpse of that you would have to turn instead to this recent Al-Jazeera report from Gaza, showing footage of the bustling, well-stocked glitzy shopping malls, the impressive children’s water park (at 5.25 in the video), the fancy restaurants, the nice hotels, the crowded food markets, the toy shops brimming with the latest plush toys (at 8.39 in the video). (This video was translated into English by the excellent Middle East Media Research Institute).

The West Bank also has good quality shopping malls and other prosperous aspects to it. And while, of course, there are also many poor people in Gaza – just as there are poor people in London, New York, Washington, Paris and Tel Aviv – this prosperity among Palestinians is not just for the wealthy. Much of the population enjoys the benefits of it in one way or other. None of this is new. I have written about it several times before, for example, here in 2009 for the Wall Street Journal.

The Hamas-ISIS war comes at a time when the Gaza Strip is experiencing a severe humanitarian crisis, including shortages of fuel and medicine, that has forced a number of hospitals and medical centers to suspend their services. The suffering of the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip, however, is apparently of no concern to Hamas.

Instead of attending to the needs of his people, Mahmoud Abbas is busy picking a fight with the U.S. administration and its “Zionist” representatives, David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt.

Once again, the Palestinians have fallen victim to their leaders, who are seemingly preoccupied with one thing alone: pumping millions of dollars of public donations into their own private coffers.

What do Muslim terrorists do when they are not killing “infidels” and non-Muslims? It is simple: They start killing each other.

Take, for example, the Islamic terror groups Hamas and Islamic State (ISIS). Although the two groups share the same ideology and seek to kill anyone who obstructs their effort to spread their version of Islam to the rest of the world, it now seems that the throats they are looking to slit are each other’s.

The quarrel between Hamas and ISIS is not a spat between good guys and bad guys. Rather, it is a dispute between two bloodthirsty, vicious and ruthless Islamic terror groups that have the blood of countless non-Muslims on their hands.

Israel’s military said it carried out extensive airstrikes on Syrian targets Saturday after it intercepted an Iranian drone launched from Syria that had infiltrated its airspace, intensifying tensions between the two neighbors.

The Israeli jets came under fire from Syrian antiaircraft missiles and one crashed in Israeli territory, the military said. The F-16 aircraft wasn’t shot down and the pilots ejected, with one evacuated to the hospital in a serious condition, it added.

Syrian state media called the strikes a “new Israeli aggression.” The shots set off warning sirens in northern Israel of an imminent rocket attack, the Israeli military said.

While Israel and Syria have exchanged volleys frequently in recent months and the Israeli military has intercepted enemy drones, the incident Saturday was unusual in that Israel for the first time claimed it involved an Iranian unmanned aerial vehicle.

It was also the first time Israel has lost a jet during a strike in Syria, despite dozens of airstrikes in recent years.

Facts on the ground. Let the likes of Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah and Hamas goons see before their very own eyes how their encouragement of Muslim terror results in new Jewish communities.

The two wonderful women, Nadia Matar and Yehudit Katsover, founders of Women in Green and leaders of the Sovereignty Movement, call for the application of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.

They do so in a Press Release in which they condemn the latest Muslim Arab atrocity against a Jewish Israeli civilian, 29 year old Itamar Ben Gal Hy”d (may G-d avenge his blood) who was struck down near the entrance to Ariel in Samaria.

The murderous knife attack was perpetrated by a Muslim Arab with Israeli citizenship calling himself a Palestinian. His vile act, as with all other atrocities,was encouraged by the grisly terrorist, Mahmoud Abbas, whose so-called Palestinian Authority reeks of hatred against any and allmembers of the Jewish faith and people – including myopic liberal and left wing Jews.

The PA’s territory occupies large swathes of the Jewish ancestral and Biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria – territory which too many nation states and hostile organizations still prefer to call by the Jordanian Arab name: West Bank.

Charles D. Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel, is a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center. His new book, Israeli National Security: A New Strategy for an Era of Change, is forthcoming from Oxford.

Israel’s relationship with the United States is a fundamental pillar of its national security. Militarily, diplomatically, and economically, American support has for decades been a vital strategic enabler. For consultations on emerging events, Washington is usually Israel’s first and often sole port of call, almost always the foremost one, and inevitably the primary address when planning how to respond to such events. Indeed, Israel’s reliance on the United States is so great today that the country’s very survival is at least partly dependent on it—with, as we shall see, a variety of consequences not all of which are salutary.

I. The Origins and Growth of a “Special Relationship”

First, some historical background. Contemporary readers may be surprised to learn that, until the late 1960s, the Israel-U.S. relationship was actually quite limited and even cool. Only in the aftermath of the Six-Day War (1967) and especially the Yom Kippur War (1973) did it begin to evolve into a more classic patron-client setup, and not until the 1980s did it start to become the institutionalized and strategic “special relationship” we know today.

And it truly is a special relationship: a largely unprecedented arrangement for the U.S. and a critical one for Israel, encompassing ties in all spheres of national life—military, political, economic, diplomatic, and cultural. Even through episodes of government-to-government disagreement and discord, not to mention the continual criticism of various Israeli polices by American elites of one stripe or another, popular support for Israel remains high in the U.S., by some measures higher today than ever, and the security relationship itself remains not only fundamentally strong but extraordinarily close.

Let’s count the ways. Economically, the United States is Israel’s single biggest trading partner (only the EU taken as a whole is larger), with bilateral trade in 2016 running at approximately $35.5 billion. The two countries signed a free-trade agreement in 1986, the first such bilateral deal ever concluded by the U.S. Over the years Washington has, in addition, provided emergency economic assistance and loan guarantees.