Deconstructing the Israeli ‘Settlement’ Myth

Daniel Greenfield

There are between 350,000 and 550,000 Jews who have been targeted for ethnic cleansing by the international community. Their crime is their race and religion.

In 1948, armies from Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen and Lebanon invaded Israel, along with the Holy War Army, commanded by the nephew of Hitler’s Mufti, and the Arab Liberation Army, under Fawzi al-Qawuqji, freshly released by the Soviet Union after being captured with his Nazi allies in Berlin. Along with them came thousands of terrorists and thugs from the Muslim Brotherhood.

Driven by hate, they swarmed into Israel to destroy it. They seized half of Jerusalem, expelling its Jewish population, blowing up its synagogues and using tombstones from its cemeteries to pave their roads.

Villages such as Kfar Darom in Gaza were besieged, first by the Muslim Brotherhood, and then by the Egyptian Army. The village of 400 men, women and children had managed to throw back the forces of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had shelled the village and failed to break through its fence with tanks, and briefly held out against the Egyptian Army, before it was evacuated, captured and destroyed. Other villages, such as Kfar Etzion, which were not evacuated in time, witnessed massacres after their capture.

Hezbollah Is Blamed in Attack on Israeli Tourists in Bulgaria

By NICHOLAS KULISH and ERIC SCHMITT
New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/world/europe/explosion-on-bulgaria-tour-bus-kills-at-least-five-israelis.html

BURGAS, Bulgaria — A senior American official confirmed Israel’s assertions on Thursday that the suicide bomber who killed five Israelis in an attack here on Wednesday was a member of a Hezbollah cell operating in Bulgaria.

 

The official said the current American intelligence assessment is that the bomber was “acting under broad guidance” to hit Israeli targets when the opportunity presented itself. That guidance was given to Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group, by its primary sponsor, Iran, he said.

"The Balance"

Today I'm going to start with the good stuff I never wrote about yesterday, because I was too heavy-hearted about the terror attack.  What we must keep in mind -- why my sharing that good stuff is important -- is that in spite of the obscenities and the horrors, we are also making progress in some very positive ways.

 

Those who are devoted to Jewish rights in the Land saw this as a significant victory this week:

 

The Judea and Samaria Council for Higher Education voted on Tuesday that Ariel University Center be accorded full accredited status as a university.  It will be the first institute of higher learning to be accorded this status beyond the Green Line.

The Train

Steven Plaut

Rudolf Kastner
He was having trouble getting up from the platform and into the cattle car. After all, he was only twelve years old and there was no ramp leading inside. An SS thug saw him “dawdling” in front of the car and aimed a boot at the boy’s posterior. The boy jumped out of the way just in time and the SS man fell to his face from the violence of his own kick.
Fearing the German would take his fury out on him, the boy scampered into the train. He hid himself from the Nazi inside a crowded, filthy car until the train pulled out of Budapest’s Nyugati station.

Higher education in Ariel

http://blogs.jpost.com/content/higher-education-ariel

 

Moshe Silman is still in intensive care, at least four copycats have failed to immolate themselves alongside banks or government offices thanks to alert bystanders, politicians are accusing one another of being too soft on the Haredim or being too stubborn about one or another detail of what to do with them, and the Middle East is still the Middle East.

 

One of the two hottest topics of the moment is the upgrading of the Ariel University Center of Samaria to full university status, against those who opposed the move for good or nefarious reasons, and some who wish it would go away altogether along with the rest of Ariel and its 18,000 residents.

 

Until 2007 it was the College of Judea and Samaria. Its intermediate title as a university center suggested, without actually saying, that it was already a university.

 

The nomenclature associated with institutions of higher education is fuzzy in the extreme. Differences between colleges and universities, and other vague terms like center or institute, are there for the picking. "University" may generally be at the top of the prestige heap, but the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Weizmann Institute of Science, and a few others would quarrel.

 

In Israel the difference between a college and university is money. Universities get more, enough to support research by faculty members.

Attempted murder in Hebron

The Jewish Community of Hebron




Late this afternoon an Arab terrorist threw a boulder at a sixty year old man from Kiryat Arba as he began bathing in the Abraham spring at Tel Rumeida in Hebron.

More photos at: http://goo.gl/ZlGN9

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ5HLTreYVQ

The spring, thought to have existed in the days of King David, some 3,000 years ago, is a popular place where people come to bathe, and purify themselves. The water is very clean and very cold.

The Three-State Solution

Malcolm Lowe

Gibraltar, Monaco, and Hong Kong are all, like Gaza, small heavily populated areas with a coastline, and all are thriving. The main obstacle to further dramatic growth is Gaza's bad habit of shooting missiles at Israel.

The future is already here, but people refuse to see it. Why? Because the world's politicians and journalists froze their minds decades ago about how to deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Every speech by Western leaders, and every pontification by a Thomas Friedman, has as its nucleus what I called – already back in 2003 – the "Dogmatic Chant."

It runs as follows: "The Palestinians must end terrorism, the Israelis must totally freeze settlement activities, then there can quickly arise a Palestinian state whose borders will approximate the 1967 lines and the Middle East will know peace at last!" Read any of those speeches and pontifications and you will find that its total thought content boils down to just this, apart from the frills.

It is a dogma, because it is impervious to any new facts, and a chant, because so many authoritative politicians and journalists chant it together. Its greatest flaw is that it pretends that the biggest issue of all – the Palestinian demand for the so-called "right of return" – is inessential.

Gaza: Fulfilling Caliph Umar's Vision?

Andrew G. Bostom

A report today (7/17/12) in Haaretz highlights the ongoing plight of Gaza's tiny, fragile Christian minority. Their miniscule numbers have shrunk from a mere 3,500 to about 1,500 since Hamas seized control in 2006,  dispersed among 1.7 million Gazan Palestinians, overwhelmingly traditionalist, Hamas-supporting Muslims.
Briefly ignoring their dangerous vulnerability, as they verge on extinction, Gaza's beleaguered Christian minority has brought their latest predicament-forced conversions, the recrudescence of a millennial Islamic scourge upon the region's pre-Islamic, indigenous Christians-to public attention.

Dozens of Gaza Christians staged a rare public protest Monday, claiming two congregants were forcibly converted to Islam and were being held against their will. The small but noisy demonstration showed the increasingly desperate situation facing the tiny minority. Protesters banged on a church bell and chanted, "With our spirit, with our blood we will sacrifice ourselves for you, Jesus."

"The Picture at Present"

For the first time in a while, I am reporting on the situation of Noam Jay ben Inbar, the nine-year-old boy with cancer around his heart, whom I've been asking you to pray for -- and for whom I continue to ask you to pray, please!

 

The situation was horribly grim when I started writing about him.  He had been discovered to have an extensive and aggressive cancer growing around his heart, which was said to be inoperable.  The doctors considered him terminal and he was put in hospice care.

 

But when the doctors did an MRI recently they found the cancer had stopped advancing, and they decided he would be a candidate for an experimental treatment.  That treatment has just begun and I know next to nothing about it -- it is not chemotherapy.  Noam is the first child in Israel to receive this treatment.

Fatah summer camp named after female terrorist Mughrabi, who led killing of 37 in bus hijacking

Governor of Jericho:

Mughrabi must be a "beacon" for young Palestinians

http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=7156

by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik

Fatah has named a summer camp for youth "Sisters of Dalal Mughrabi," after female terrorist Dalal Mughrabi. In 1978, Mughrabi led the most lethal terror attack in Israel's history, in which 37 civilians were killed, 12 of them children. The Governor of the Jericho district said to participants in the summer camp that Mughrabi and others who "sacrificed" "should be a beacon for us in our activities."

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is also head of Fatah.

The camp was cosponsored by the Women's Association of Qalqilya and the Farmer's Association.

"Shameful"

In my last posting I wrote about the Conference on the Application of Israeli Sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.  As I explained, a significant message that day, delivered by several speakers, was with regard to the need for the Jews of Israel to believe in their own rights. 

 

"There is an absence of willingness to accept sovereignty." lamented Daphne Netanyahu.  "We must be prepared to accept our rights."

 

While Gershon Mesika asked, "Do we see ourselves as grasshoppers [as the spies coming out of Canaan did]"? 

What Do Newly Released Soldiers Do After the IDF?

idfspokesperson

For some newly released soldiers of the IDF, the transition from military to civilian life can be daunting. It's common for these new civilians to travel the world, from South America and New York to Thailand and India, before returning to Israel and deciding what's next.

Former soldiers have many options available to them. They are eligible for a one-time loan to be used for university studies, the completion of a high school diploma, a psychometric exam (the Israeli SAT), professional courses (tour guiding, bartending, etc.), buying a home, opening up a new business and planning a wedding. The amount of money available to soldiers will vary depending on the length and type of their service in the IDF and whether they served in combat units.

Nahal infantry brigade soldiers during a camouflage training course, learning warfare capabilities in complex, forested areas.

Certain fields are increasingly popular for former Israeli combat soldiers.

Israel’s ‘Maariv’ Sinks into Western Sunset

Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu

Israel’s “Maariv” newspaper will cease to exist in print as it succumbs to the Internet and to the increasingly popular Yisrael HaYom free newspaper, according to Globes.

It is no secret that Maariv – a name based on the root meaning "evening" and "west" and which also refers to the Jewish evening prayers – has been in financial difficulty for years. Valiant efforts to inject new funds while cutting back staff have failed to save it, and it will gradually phase out its print edition, except for the Friday edition, Globes reported Monday.

The parent company, Maariv Holdings, plans to keep the center-right newspaper alive on the Internet with a digital edition.

The loss of Maariv’s daily print edition will leave Yisrael HaYom, owned by U.S. billionaire gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, as the only newspaper to give Yediot Acharonot a run for its money.

A Reminder That Anti-Semitism Has no Place in Debates Over Israel

The consequences of a website that spouts anti-Semitism entering mainstream discourse on Israel and Palestine.
Reuters
Some ideas have earned their banishment from civilized discourse, and anti-Semitism is one of them. The paranoiac take on Jewish peoplehood holds that there are not Jews, but The Jews, a self-interested group of people who don't as much think individually as answer to tribal imperatives; an omnipresent mass of ravening self-interest, whether they're cooking matza with the blood of Christians or bending modern-day superpowers to their will.

 

We live in a society of competing ideas -- not, as anti-Semitism frames it, of competing groups, competing ethnicities, or competing fears. This is particularly important when it comes to Israel and Palestine. Ethnically and religiously-dominated understandings of the conflict, as well as of the wider world, have repeatedly dragged the region away from peace. By vilifying and dehumanizing one side of the conflict, the poison of anti-Semitism makes a constructive, forward-looking discourse far more difficult to achieve.

Jewish Woman Rescued from Arab Village After 28 Years

A dramatic rescue takes a Jewish woman and her two young children out of the clutches of a brutal Palestinian Authority Arab husband with whom she lived for 28 years.

The anti-missionary Yad L'Achim organization, which also works on behalf of Jewish women trapped in relationships with Arabs, revealed the extraordinary story, after "Dinah, the daughter of Leah," was safely back among Jews.

Dinah was born in the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Lod 48 years ago but became estranged from her family during an emotional crisis, which led her to a relationship with an Arab man.

Since then, she was declared as missing, and her family did not know whether she was dead or alive. At one point, Israeli authorities mistakenly thought they had identified her in a morgue.

Does Freezing Settlements Help Peace?

Mudar Zahran

Israel has given such "goodwill gestures" to the Palestinians before, but the reciprocal gestures were never as good-willed. In exchange for "goodwill gestures," Israel gets concussions.

The current US administration has been advocating the freezing of Israeli settlement activity in Judea and Samaria, and so have several global players involved in the peace process. Evidence on the ground, however, seems to suggest that freezing settlement activity only fuels radicalism and terrorism, encourages delegitimizing Israel, deprives Palestinians of decent livelihoods and works significantly against achieving the long-sought peace.