Arlene Kushner
There's plenty to report on/analyze with regard to Obama and his administration (including material on the settlements, below), but it's time to take a vacation from analyses of his speech.
As to his much hyped visit to Buchenwald, I will not comment here. Precisely because I think it's hype. He came down harder on Israel than on Iran in Cairo, and then went to the camp to demonstrate to the world how sensitive he was to Jewish suffering. I didn't buy it. Or, rather, I'm more interested in seeing his sensitivity to Jewish rights and heritage.
So, let's turn to other matters.
~~~~~~~~~~
The focus now is on the issue of settlements and our right to continue to build for natural growth (a denial of such a right being equivalent to the denial of our right to thrive and endure on the land).
The Obama government, with the full complicity of Hillary Clinton, is insisting that our commitment via the Road Map is to an absolute freeze on all settlements, with "freeze" meaning no building whatsoever.
The story, as I've indicated here, is more complicated than this by a long shot. There is the exchange of letters between Sharon and Bush, which are like a memorandum of understanding, with court precedent -- I've been advised -- for recognizing such a memorandum as having implications in terms of commitment.
In June 2004, a Concurrent "Spirit of Congress" Resolution (which was not binding) passed in both houses of Congress. It "strongly endorse[d] the principles articulated by President Bush in his letter dated April 14, 2004, to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon..."
~~~~~~~~~~
Beyond this, we have a statement from Elliot Abrams, a former national security advisor involved in negotiating the issue of settlements. He was cited in the Washington Post, on May 24, as confirming that there were discussions during the Bush administration regarding the nature of the constraints on settlements, with an understanding reached.
On June 2, Dov Weisglass, former chief of staff to PM Sharon, wrote a piece in Yediot Ahronot, with regard to this understanding. Says Weisglass:
"...on May 1, 2003 in Jerusalem. Senior administration officials Steven Hadley and Elliott Abrams met with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and me, and, over the next two days succeeded in working out an exact definition of the term 'settlement freeze' in the Road Map. According to this definition, (1) no new settlements would be built, (2) no Palestinian land would be expropriated or otherwise seized for the purpose of settlement, (3) construction within the settlements would be confined to 'the existing construction line', and (4) public funds would not be earmarked for encouraging settlements.
"On a further meeting held with Ms. [Condoleezza] Rice on May 14, 2003, the agreement on the definition of the term 'freeze' was confirmed..."
~~~~~~~~~~
Since the height of the confrontation between our government and the US on this issue, however, there has started to be a subtle softening of tone. When Defense Minister Barak was in Washington last week, he was assured that Obama had no intention of trying to topple the Netanyahu government -- which intention has been suggested in certain quarters.
While US envoy George Mitchell, who is here now, has begun a process of de-emphasizing our differences and emphasizing our relationship as close allies.
There are even hints that our disagreement on settlements can be "worked out."
~~~~~~~~~~
While there might be reason to be pleased by this, in point of fact it makes me uneasy. For, when I read that the matter can be "worked out," I immediately ask myself what it is expected that we will surrender in principle. (I've read unconfirmed reports, for example, about our possibly agreeing to limit where we would do construction for natural growth -- with some communities that should not be excluded indeed being left out of the agreement. Unconfirmed.)
~~~~~~~~~~
What we are coming to in a matter of days is a major policy speech by Bibi, to be delivered at Bar Ilan University, at the BESA Center. He's been mum on what the parameters of this speech will be. But within this lies the core of what our policy is likely to be (or, better, will be, with possible adjustments).
Speculation is that he will hold out for something less than the full sovereignty of a state for the Palestinians, insisting that for our security we require that there be an autonomy for them instead -- whatever that autonomy would be called -- that requires demilitarization and keeps them out of strategic areas and high points where their presence would threaten our security.
Beyond a certain point, however, speculation is not productive.
~~~~~~~~~~
But we may have a hint in a speech just delivered by Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya'alon, at the Institute for Near East Policy, in Washington.
The result of an American plan to resolve issues within two years, he said, might lead to a Hamastan in Judea and Samaria.
"These assumptions [that the two-state vision is the only viable solution, and that Israel's settlement activity constitutes a major obstacle to peace] stood behind the Oslo process, and its failure indicates that they deserve to be reexamined. Such examination will reveal that, whereas the Israelis were really ready for this kind of a solution, including myself, the Palestinians do not accept that ‘the two state solution’ refers to two states for two peoples.
"In their view, one state should be the Palestinian state and the national identity of the other state should remain undefined, so that in the future it can become a Palestinian state as well."
Said Ya'alon, "It is our duty to explain the facts to our American friends."
I salute him for this straight talk, which he likely would not have offered without the tacit approval of the prime minister.
~~~~~~~~~~
I am mindful of the tightrope that Bibi walks right now. And I have discussed before the fact that he opts generally to not be confrontational, though he has, to date been tough indeed. His tendency is to work within the system to achieve what he sees as the best result.
Thus, for example, he was not receptive to the letter sent by Minister without Portfolio Yossi Peled (Likud), who suggested that we become less dependent on the US -- for example by buying planes from Airbus in France instead of Boeing in the US.
We're going to see a stance from Bibi that is, indeed, a compromise, which will not please ideologues. No, he is not going to say, "This is our land and so I reject all proposals." He will say, "Because our rights and our security are my first concerns, and because I demand reciprocity, this is as far as I will go."
That much is close to certain.
~~~~~~~~~~
According to Gil Hoffman in the Post, the hawks of Likud are saying that they know they have to be flexible with Bibi because of the heat he's taking. Thus, if he recognizes the Road Map, but secures an agreement to build in the settlements, this will not bring down the coalition.
MK Danny Danon, who is staunchly nationalist and thoroughly opposed to a "two-state solution," said, "We would still scream but we would understand his decision."
Most significantly, according to Hoffman:
"Likud MKs said that if Netanyahu did make such a policy shift, they expected that he would tell them he was doing so with the knowledge that the Palestinians and the Arab world would not do their part to allow US President Barack Obama to advance his policies, so there would not be any real danger that a Palestinian state would actually be created."
My perception is clearly in line with this -- that is, I believe it is a given that a Palestinian state is not going to evolve from what Obama is promoting (and more about this below). The danger, however, is in agreeing to things in principle that can come back to haunt us later.
~~~~~~~~~~
According to an (unconfirmed) report in the Arab daily in London, Asharq Al-Awsat, Obama formulated a two-year plan for achieving Israeli- Palestinian peace, which was presented to Netanyahu when he was in Washington. And, says this report, Netanyahu "was given six weeks" to respond. If this is true, it puts my back up very badly indeed. Obama giving ultimatums? Making demands rather than requests?
Reportedly, the plan was also presented to Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman and Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, when they were in Washington.
They took in seriously, but saw a stumbling block: the political fragmentation of the Palestinians. How about that!
Thus, the Egyptians are now taking it upon themselves, once again, to work on reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah.
Forgive me, but this is breathtakingly stupid. There is no way to be diplomatic about this, nor should I try to be. Aside from the fact that any coalition they might cobble together would not be stable long-term, there is the refusal of Hamas to recognize Israel, renounce terrorism, and honor previous agreements. Do they intend to try the diplomatic slight-of-hand, by which Hamas doesn't have do these things even if it's part of a unity coalition, as long as the members of the government (i.e., the ministers) they select do? And they would expect us to sign off on a significant agreement with such a government?
Quite simply, even if Fatah were sincere about making peace (it's not), Hamas is the fly in the ointment that makes it impossible -- yet Obama and company won't recognize it.
~~~~~~~~~~
On top of Hamas intransigence, there is this: Abbas has declared that until Netanyahu freezes settlements and accepts a "two state solution," he will not sit at a negotiating table with him. He is counting on Obama to take care of matters. Obama's stance has simply hardened the inflexibility of the PA -- hey, the White House is on their side now, no need to worry. Thus are Obama's actions counterproductive to his declared goals. And thus is the likelihood of any agreement even further diminished.
~~~~~~~~~~
see my website www.ArlenefromIsrael.info
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Kadima doesn't back settlement freeze
Jun. 10, 2009
Rebecca Anna Stoil , THE JERUSALEM POST
Although Kadima has presented itself as the party that is prepared to heal the increasingly troubled US-Israel relationship, the Obama administration could find itself unpleasantly surprised by some of the less-than-Obama-esque stances of Kadima MKs, including a number who flatly refuse to consider freezing natural growth-based expansion in settlements. Although some in Washington view party chairwoman Tzipi Livni as a more comfortable negotiating partner, a Kadima lawmaker said this week that acceding to Obama's demands to freeze building in all settlements would lead to the break-up of the party.
"Kadima will never accept the demand for an end to natural growth," MK Otniel Schneller said on Tuesday. "Kadima cannot accept it because it would cause a split and tear the party apart."
The former secretary-general of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip and current resident of the Ma'aleh Michmash settlement said Israel must be "allowed to develop in the recognized settlement blocs. They have practically already been agreed-upon and so there is no reason to freeze building. The denial of natural growth is not legitimate, not moral, and is anti-Jewish. Nobody can tell my daughters not to have children just because they happen to live in settlements."
MK Ze'ev Boim echoed Schneller's comments, reiterating that he supported continuing building for natural growth within the municipal boundaries of settlements that were part of major blocs. The two are far from alone, and reflect a strong - if not necessarily majority - trend within the leading opposition party.
Even legislators who see themselves on the left-wing of the centrist party are reluctant to agree to a complete freeze on all settlement growth.
Although MK Shlomo Molla said that he is "completely in favor of Obama's plans," he emphasized that "Kadima supports the major settlement blocs of Gush Etzion, Ariel and Ma'aleh Adumim."
Molla said he was certain that a final-status agreement would involve a land swap through which those three blocs remained in Israel in exchange for territory in a place like the Halutza Dunes in the Negev.
Molla argued that it was Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's "backward" policy that was "dragging Israel into a situation in which we will ultimately not be allowed to build in the blocs. Bibi is weakening the blocs," he said, arguing that under the Olmert administration, building in the settlement blocs continued with the consent of the Bush administration.
Even Schneller, representing the right-wing of Kadima, said he understood that "Israel must arrive at a deep territorial compromise," adding that "I therefore agree in principle with the demand for not building additional settlements. We will not encourage population growth - we will freeze development of settlements that are not in blocs, and because we stand by our word, we will take down outposts. But only as long as we will be allowed to develop in the agreed-upon blocs."
On the subject of Jerusalem, the party has a general consensus that the "holy basin" around the Old City must remain in Israeli hands, but there is a range of views - from "I can never accept returning Jerusalem" to "distant neighborhoods such as Aram, Kfar Aket, Hizme, Anata, Abu Dis, Jebl Mukaber will be the basis for al-Quds as the Palestinian capital."
There is, however, practically unanimous support among the Kadima MKs for "two states for two peoples," a sticking point between Netanyahu and Obama.
"There is no other solution," explained Molla. Many lawmakers, including MK Robert Tibayev, Ya'acov Edri and Schneller, emphasized that they had arrived at the conclusion that two states were the only solution after years of identification with the Right.
"There is no other choice if we want Israel to remain a Jewish state," Tibayev said.
During Monday's Kadima faction meeting, Livni - apparently aware of the foreign policy discussion within her own party - gave MKs a closed-door briefing on the history of recent peace accords, explaining the significance of Annapolis and characterizing the road map as a plan that offered little chance of making progress, while providing excuses of Palestinian noncompliance to explain Israeli reluctance to proceed.
And so despite the facade of party unity behind Obama's foreign policy, the message was clear when one senior MK told The Jerusalem Post - less than an hour after the faction meeting - that he fully supported the road map and advancing pending Palestinian compliance.
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1244371056163&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
Rebecca Anna Stoil , THE JERUSALEM POST
Although Kadima has presented itself as the party that is prepared to heal the increasingly troubled US-Israel relationship, the Obama administration could find itself unpleasantly surprised by some of the less-than-Obama-esque stances of Kadima MKs, including a number who flatly refuse to consider freezing natural growth-based expansion in settlements. Although some in Washington view party chairwoman Tzipi Livni as a more comfortable negotiating partner, a Kadima lawmaker said this week that acceding to Obama's demands to freeze building in all settlements would lead to the break-up of the party.
"Kadima will never accept the demand for an end to natural growth," MK Otniel Schneller said on Tuesday. "Kadima cannot accept it because it would cause a split and tear the party apart."
The former secretary-general of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip and current resident of the Ma'aleh Michmash settlement said Israel must be "allowed to develop in the recognized settlement blocs. They have practically already been agreed-upon and so there is no reason to freeze building. The denial of natural growth is not legitimate, not moral, and is anti-Jewish. Nobody can tell my daughters not to have children just because they happen to live in settlements."
MK Ze'ev Boim echoed Schneller's comments, reiterating that he supported continuing building for natural growth within the municipal boundaries of settlements that were part of major blocs. The two are far from alone, and reflect a strong - if not necessarily majority - trend within the leading opposition party.
Even legislators who see themselves on the left-wing of the centrist party are reluctant to agree to a complete freeze on all settlement growth.
Although MK Shlomo Molla said that he is "completely in favor of Obama's plans," he emphasized that "Kadima supports the major settlement blocs of Gush Etzion, Ariel and Ma'aleh Adumim."
Molla said he was certain that a final-status agreement would involve a land swap through which those three blocs remained in Israel in exchange for territory in a place like the Halutza Dunes in the Negev.
Molla argued that it was Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's "backward" policy that was "dragging Israel into a situation in which we will ultimately not be allowed to build in the blocs. Bibi is weakening the blocs," he said, arguing that under the Olmert administration, building in the settlement blocs continued with the consent of the Bush administration.
Even Schneller, representing the right-wing of Kadima, said he understood that "Israel must arrive at a deep territorial compromise," adding that "I therefore agree in principle with the demand for not building additional settlements. We will not encourage population growth - we will freeze development of settlements that are not in blocs, and because we stand by our word, we will take down outposts. But only as long as we will be allowed to develop in the agreed-upon blocs."
On the subject of Jerusalem, the party has a general consensus that the "holy basin" around the Old City must remain in Israeli hands, but there is a range of views - from "I can never accept returning Jerusalem" to "distant neighborhoods such as Aram, Kfar Aket, Hizme, Anata, Abu Dis, Jebl Mukaber will be the basis for al-Quds as the Palestinian capital."
There is, however, practically unanimous support among the Kadima MKs for "two states for two peoples," a sticking point between Netanyahu and Obama.
"There is no other solution," explained Molla. Many lawmakers, including MK Robert Tibayev, Ya'acov Edri and Schneller, emphasized that they had arrived at the conclusion that two states were the only solution after years of identification with the Right.
"There is no other choice if we want Israel to remain a Jewish state," Tibayev said.
During Monday's Kadima faction meeting, Livni - apparently aware of the foreign policy discussion within her own party - gave MKs a closed-door briefing on the history of recent peace accords, explaining the significance of Annapolis and characterizing the road map as a plan that offered little chance of making progress, while providing excuses of Palestinian noncompliance to explain Israeli reluctance to proceed.
And so despite the facade of party unity behind Obama's foreign policy, the message was clear when one senior MK told The Jerusalem Post - less than an hour after the faction meeting - that he fully supported the road map and advancing pending Palestinian compliance.
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1244371056163&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
One Big Astounding Mistake America!!!
http://www.nypost.com/seven/06062009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/what_obama_taught_me_172894.htm
By RALPH PETERS
Salaam aleikum, dudes!
I thought I knew a little bit about the Middle East. Boy, was I wrong. Last week, President Obama set me straight. Here's what our president taught me during his Middle-Eastern pilgrimage:
There is no more terrorism. Wow, cool! No more security checks at airports, right? It's unclear which side won, but it's all over. Obama didn't mention terrorism a single time in his star-turn speech in Cairo. Only a few "violent extremists" (our own troops?) remain at large.
America tortured. I thought there was still a debate about that, but I guess not. And no regime in the Middle East tortures anybody, ever. Our bad.
Churches and synagogues are about to open in Saudi Arabia. Since "Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance" and there are "over 1,200 mosques within our borders," I can't wait for the first Baptist hymn-sing in Riyadh. Sign me up!
Behind closed doors with Saudi King Abdullah, our president must've mentioned the many hundreds of churches and synagogues that thrived on the Arabian Peninsula during the Prophet's lifetime. Muslims zealots destroyed them. Time to get the bin Laden family's construction firm on the job re-building!
And stoning converts who leave Islam to death is a no-no, right?
Women can dress any way they want in Saudi Arabia. Just my analysis, based on Obama's insistence that Islam recognizes "the dignity of all human beings" and that Muslim women must be free to make their own decisions about what to wear. Surely, fashion choices extend to Mecca and Medina, not just Detroit and Paris?
"Islam has always been a part of America's story." Guess the Founding Fathers missed that one. But I'm assured that George Washington turned to his mullah in the dark days at Valley Forge, that Daniel Boone read the Koran around the campfire, and that al Qaeda stood by us at the Alamo.
Yeah, there was that misunderstanding with the Muslim Barbary Pirates, when they killed, kidnapped and enslaved American citizens for years - but who's perfect?
There are "nearly seven million American Muslims." Who knew? We all thought there were three or four million, max. Is this a preview of the predetermined results of our upcoming census? [Note to editor: Confirm numbers with ACORN.]
"It was not violence that won full and equal rights" for black Americans. So much for the Civil War and my ancestor, who volunteered to wear Union blue and paid for it with his life. I thought a half-million Americans died fighting to end slavery. Silly me. Still, it was brave of our president to highlight slavery's "lash of the whip" in his speech, since his own ancestors, as Muslims along Africa's Swahili Coast, would have been complicit - if not actively engaged - in enslaving their fellow black Africans for Arab masters. As a self-proclaimed "student of history," Obama surely knows that.
Holocaust, schmolocaust. Aren't those pesky Jews ever going to go away? Yes, denying the Holocaust is "hateful." But let's get a grip. Palestinians "endure.. daily humiliations." Their lot's "intolerable." Israel "devastates Palestinian families." No wonder our president shunned wicked Israel during his trip - sending a clear, if unspoken, message that Jews are now fair game.
"America's strong bonds with Israel are...unbreakable." Yup. And they're issued by Chrysler.
Hamas is a legitimate, recognized voice of the Palestinians. Rocket attacks against civilians, suicide bombings and kidnappings really work.
Iran can have nukes. Our president's acceptance of "peaceful nuclear power" for Tehran was coded language for "no pre-emptive military action."
Jordan doesn't matter. So much for one Arab country's attempts at human decency. If you want attention from our president, you've got to be a desert gangbanger.
My wife wondered why Obama didn't make his speech in Indonesia, the world's most-populous Muslim state, where he would've been welcomed proudly as a home-boy. Obama just reinforced the stereotype that Muslim equals Arab.
Democracy isn't for everybody. We're done peddling that particular drug.
Of course, our president didn't mention al Qaeda's catastrophic defeat in Iraq, where millions of Sunni Arabs rejected the terror organization. Iraq was Bush's war, so it's all bad.
And forget junk like modern medicine, telecommunications or even the internal combustion engine. Islam's been the source of real progress. Like "calligraphy." Medieval Islam's ballyhooed contributions actually were due to Greek-speaking Christians (including slaves) employed as court officials, to Armenian architects and Jewish physicians. But, yeah, Arabs had really good penmanship.
Our president's breakthrough message to the Muslim world was that America overthrew democratic regimes, slavery was our history's central feature, and we invaded people on a whim - but we're sorry now.
His crowd-pleasing speech sanitized and romanticized Islam, letting the disgruntled populations of the Middle East off the hook for their own self-wrought failures, their monstrous oppression of women (our president's women's-right-to-wear-hijab remarks were aimed at Europe), and the violent aggression toward others they often celebrated and generally tolerated.
To Arab ears, especially, the Cairo speech made America the guilty party in our confrontations, as if, on 9/11, crazed Presbyterians had attacked Mecca. Yet, the historical facts are that Islam's remorseless assault on the West lasted for more than one thousand years, its cruel occupation of Christian lands lasted into the 20th century, and the dream of an all-conquering caliphate remains very much with us.
The last mass slaughter of Christians in Iraq wasn't a millennium ago, but in 1933. Al Qaeda isn't an aberration. It's a manifestation.
Our president may or may not be a student of history, but he can't just make it up.
Aleikum salaam!
Ralph Peters is Fox News' Strategic Analyst. And here is the rest of it.
By RALPH PETERS
Salaam aleikum, dudes!
I thought I knew a little bit about the Middle East. Boy, was I wrong. Last week, President Obama set me straight. Here's what our president taught me during his Middle-Eastern pilgrimage:
There is no more terrorism. Wow, cool! No more security checks at airports, right? It's unclear which side won, but it's all over. Obama didn't mention terrorism a single time in his star-turn speech in Cairo. Only a few "violent extremists" (our own troops?) remain at large.
America tortured. I thought there was still a debate about that, but I guess not. And no regime in the Middle East tortures anybody, ever. Our bad.
Churches and synagogues are about to open in Saudi Arabia. Since "Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance" and there are "over 1,200 mosques within our borders," I can't wait for the first Baptist hymn-sing in Riyadh. Sign me up!
Behind closed doors with Saudi King Abdullah, our president must've mentioned the many hundreds of churches and synagogues that thrived on the Arabian Peninsula during the Prophet's lifetime. Muslims zealots destroyed them. Time to get the bin Laden family's construction firm on the job re-building!
And stoning converts who leave Islam to death is a no-no, right?
Women can dress any way they want in Saudi Arabia. Just my analysis, based on Obama's insistence that Islam recognizes "the dignity of all human beings" and that Muslim women must be free to make their own decisions about what to wear. Surely, fashion choices extend to Mecca and Medina, not just Detroit and Paris?
"Islam has always been a part of America's story." Guess the Founding Fathers missed that one. But I'm assured that George Washington turned to his mullah in the dark days at Valley Forge, that Daniel Boone read the Koran around the campfire, and that al Qaeda stood by us at the Alamo.
Yeah, there was that misunderstanding with the Muslim Barbary Pirates, when they killed, kidnapped and enslaved American citizens for years - but who's perfect?
There are "nearly seven million American Muslims." Who knew? We all thought there were three or four million, max. Is this a preview of the predetermined results of our upcoming census? [Note to editor: Confirm numbers with ACORN.]
"It was not violence that won full and equal rights" for black Americans. So much for the Civil War and my ancestor, who volunteered to wear Union blue and paid for it with his life. I thought a half-million Americans died fighting to end slavery. Silly me. Still, it was brave of our president to highlight slavery's "lash of the whip" in his speech, since his own ancestors, as Muslims along Africa's Swahili Coast, would have been complicit - if not actively engaged - in enslaving their fellow black Africans for Arab masters. As a self-proclaimed "student of history," Obama surely knows that.
Holocaust, schmolocaust. Aren't those pesky Jews ever going to go away? Yes, denying the Holocaust is "hateful." But let's get a grip. Palestinians "endure.. daily humiliations." Their lot's "intolerable." Israel "devastates Palestinian families." No wonder our president shunned wicked Israel during his trip - sending a clear, if unspoken, message that Jews are now fair game.
"America's strong bonds with Israel are...unbreakable." Yup. And they're issued by Chrysler.
Hamas is a legitimate, recognized voice of the Palestinians. Rocket attacks against civilians, suicide bombings and kidnappings really work.
Iran can have nukes. Our president's acceptance of "peaceful nuclear power" for Tehran was coded language for "no pre-emptive military action."
Jordan doesn't matter. So much for one Arab country's attempts at human decency. If you want attention from our president, you've got to be a desert gangbanger.
My wife wondered why Obama didn't make his speech in Indonesia, the world's most-populous Muslim state, where he would've been welcomed proudly as a home-boy. Obama just reinforced the stereotype that Muslim equals Arab.
Democracy isn't for everybody. We're done peddling that particular drug.
Of course, our president didn't mention al Qaeda's catastrophic defeat in Iraq, where millions of Sunni Arabs rejected the terror organization. Iraq was Bush's war, so it's all bad.
And forget junk like modern medicine, telecommunications or even the internal combustion engine. Islam's been the source of real progress. Like "calligraphy." Medieval Islam's ballyhooed contributions actually were due to Greek-speaking Christians (including slaves) employed as court officials, to Armenian architects and Jewish physicians. But, yeah, Arabs had really good penmanship.
Our president's breakthrough message to the Muslim world was that America overthrew democratic regimes, slavery was our history's central feature, and we invaded people on a whim - but we're sorry now.
His crowd-pleasing speech sanitized and romanticized Islam, letting the disgruntled populations of the Middle East off the hook for their own self-wrought failures, their monstrous oppression of women (our president's women's-right-to-wear-hijab remarks were aimed at Europe), and the violent aggression toward others they often celebrated and generally tolerated.
To Arab ears, especially, the Cairo speech made America the guilty party in our confrontations, as if, on 9/11, crazed Presbyterians had attacked Mecca. Yet, the historical facts are that Islam's remorseless assault on the West lasted for more than one thousand years, its cruel occupation of Christian lands lasted into the 20th century, and the dream of an all-conquering caliphate remains very much with us.
The last mass slaughter of Christians in Iraq wasn't a millennium ago, but in 1933. Al Qaeda isn't an aberration. It's a manifestation.
Our president may or may not be a student of history, but he can't just make it up.
Aleikum salaam!
Ralph Peters is Fox News' Strategic Analyst. And here is the rest of it.
Palestinians: US will demand IDF pullout from West Bank cities
Ahead of US envoy Mitchell's visit to region, PA demands control of positions it held prior to outbreak of second intifada in 2000; 'we lived up to our end of the bargain, now it's time Israel reciprocates,' Palestinian official says
Ali Waked
Israel News
YNET News
Palestinian officials said Monday they were close to reaching an agreement with the US according to which the Obama administration would demand an Israeli withdrawal from positions that were manned by Palestinian forces prior to the outbreak of the second intifada at the end of September 2000. IDF forces currently controls positions situated at the entrance to large Palestinian cities in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority is demanding that these positions be moved and that Israeli forces be prevented from entering the cities.
Speaking to Ynet ahead of George Mitchell's scheduled visit to the region, Palestinian officials said they would brief President Barack Obama's Mideast envoy on the PA's continued efforts to maintain security in areas under its control.
According to the officials, part of the Authority's success has to do with the dismantling of various armed groups, particularly those affiliated with Fatah. The PA is working diligently to abide by the security-related clauses of the US-backed Road Map for peace initiative, they said.
"Now it's time for Israel to reciprocate and fulfill its part of the Road Map initiative, meaning the transfer of control to the Palestinian security forces in such a way that by the end of the process PA security forces will return to all the outposts they had controlled on the eve of the second intifada," one official said.
The Palestinians are also demanding that the IDF be prevented from operating in areas under full control of the PA.
"We've shown that we are acting in accordance with our supreme interest, which is to maintain calm and security so the Israelis will not have an excuse (not to implement the Road Map initiative)," said a PA official.
"Therefore, we will tell Mitchell that we've held up our end of the bargain, and now we expect that a clear timetable be set for the return of Palestinian forces to their pre-intifada positions."
Endorsing two states won't topple PM'
Gil Hoffman , THE JERUSALEM POST
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu would not face a rebellion inside his party if he endorsed the road map diplomatic plan and its call for a two-state solution, as long as he received results from the US in return, hawks in the Likud faction said Monday. The MKs, who met informally on Monday to prepare for Netanyahu's speech, said they would not be surprised if Netanyahu would take a leftward shift in his long-awaited policy address at Bar-Ilan University on Sunday. They said they understood that Netanyahu had to take steps to quell American pressure on Israel and that they needed to be flexible with him.
"If he says road map and receives permission for natural growth in the settlements in return, he won't get toppled," said MK Danny Danon, who is considered the most hawkish Likud MK. "We would still scream but we would understand his decision."
Likud MKs said that if Netanyahu did make such a policy shift, they expected that he would tell them he was doing it with the knowledge that the Palestinians and the Arab world would not do their part to allow US President Barack Obama to advance his policies, so there would not be any real danger that a Palestinian state would actually be created.
Netanyahu refused to reveal any part of his new diplomatic plan in Monday's Likud faction meeting. When MKs asked him to consult with them on the speech, Netanyahu belittled them by telling them to leave their advice with cabinet secretary Tzvi Hauser.
The prime minister mockingly told Likud MK Miri Regev that she could write the speech for him if she wanted.
Netanyahu's associates said he had already consulted with the heads of the parties in his coalition and he would still talk to a long list of ministers and settler leaders.
Ministers who talked with Netanyahu said they received the impression that he would accept a Palestinian state in one way or another, but that he had not yet made up his mind about how exactly to express it.
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1244371045274&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu would not face a rebellion inside his party if he endorsed the road map diplomatic plan and its call for a two-state solution, as long as he received results from the US in return, hawks in the Likud faction said Monday. The MKs, who met informally on Monday to prepare for Netanyahu's speech, said they would not be surprised if Netanyahu would take a leftward shift in his long-awaited policy address at Bar-Ilan University on Sunday. They said they understood that Netanyahu had to take steps to quell American pressure on Israel and that they needed to be flexible with him.
"If he says road map and receives permission for natural growth in the settlements in return, he won't get toppled," said MK Danny Danon, who is considered the most hawkish Likud MK. "We would still scream but we would understand his decision."
Likud MKs said that if Netanyahu did make such a policy shift, they expected that he would tell them he was doing it with the knowledge that the Palestinians and the Arab world would not do their part to allow US President Barack Obama to advance his policies, so there would not be any real danger that a Palestinian state would actually be created.
Netanyahu refused to reveal any part of his new diplomatic plan in Monday's Likud faction meeting. When MKs asked him to consult with them on the speech, Netanyahu belittled them by telling them to leave their advice with cabinet secretary Tzvi Hauser.
The prime minister mockingly told Likud MK Miri Regev that she could write the speech for him if she wanted.
Netanyahu's associates said he had already consulted with the heads of the parties in his coalition and he would still talk to a long list of ministers and settler leaders.
Ministers who talked with Netanyahu said they received the impression that he would accept a Palestinian state in one way or another, but that he had not yet made up his mind about how exactly to express it.
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1244371045274&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
Monday, June 08, 2009
Life Or Death For Israel In The Time Of "Apocalypse"
Louis Rene Beres
Posted Jun 03 2009
How desperately I would like to be more "positive" in these columns. Like my ever-faithful readers here at The Jewish Press, I would dearly welcome an opportunity - any opportunity - to discover some real evidence of genuine progress toward peace in the Middle East. But, as always, we Jews are especially obligated to look squarely at things the way they are. Recalling our history as a people, we simply should not expect that our most optimistic inclinations will somehow be wished into truth.
And the truth, my dear readers, dreary as always, remains unassailable. In fact, threats to literally annihilate Israel are now unremarkable. Almost nowhere do we find any reason for camouflage or concealment. Were it not for Israel's "bomb in the basement" - its still-unacknowledged nuclear force - these openly genocidal threats would represent much more than verbal bluster. Nonetheless, barring any last-minute Israeli preemptions (anticipatory self-defense under international law), Iran's ascent to full membership in the Nuclear Club is now less than several years away.
Such membership may also coincide with a persisting Iranian leadership belief in the Shi'ite apocalypse. Israel, therefore, might soon have to face not only Palestinian suicide-bombers, but also what amounts to the "suicide bomber" in macrocosm.
Let us never forget the truth that still stares us in the face. The goal of all Israel's Islamist enemies is simply Jewish extermination. Significantly, this goal is not hidden. In the bitterest of ironies, our ancient nation that was ingathered and reborn to prevent another Holocaust has now become the explicit and determined focus of a second "Final Solution."
In essence, the goal of all Israel's enemies, especially Iran and the still-impending Palestinian state, is to be left standing while Israel is made to disappear. For these enemies, there can be no coexistence with Israel. Never. This is because their own indispensable survival presumably requires Israel's extinction.
Here in the U.S., President Obama does not appear to understand. Again, Mr. Obama has extolled the clichéd virtues of an altogether twisted cartography. Ironically, in the fashion of his predecessor, Mr. Obama also favors the "Road Map to Peace in the Middle East." Yet, like the ill-fated Oslo Agreements that came before, this one-sided plan is still premised on Israel's coerced acceptance of land for nothing.
It would be a fatal mistake for Israel to believe that Reason and Justice govern the world. It would be a grievous error for Israel to continue to project its own Western, rational and humane sentiments upon the most relentless and barbarous Jihadistfoes. It would assuredly be a "life risk" for Israel to seek to endure by continuing to cling to numbingly false promises and manifestly false hopes.
Barack Obama will not save Israel. Once Iran has decided to launch nuclear missiles at Israel - possibly a plausible prospect in a few years, Washington's only real assistance would be to help Jerusalem bury the dead. And for this, whole Israeli cities would have to be transformed into a giant cemetery.
Whether in Gaza, Judea/Samaria or Tehran, Israel's Jihadistenemies wish to kill Jewsbecause any such homicide is always felt to be a sacred obligation. For these enemies, killing Jews is indisputably a praiseworthy expression of religious sacrifice. Such killing is expected to confer immunity from personal death. Could there ever be a more precious or compelling expectation?
The idea of death as a zero-sum commodity - "I kill you; I therefore remain alive forever" -has been explained elsewhere. It is captured perfectly, for example, in Ernest Becker's grotesque paraphrase of Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti: "Each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good."
To stay alive, Israel must finally understand what Otto Rank had once revealed in his Truth and Reality: "The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed." This very difficult and subtle insight is at the very heart of Islamist orientations to Israel. It explains almost everything about these genocidal orientations.
Israel's enemies, in order to remain standing - and to prevent Israel from standing up - seek to sacrifice the Jewish State on an endlessly blood-stained altar of war and terrorism. Sacrifice is central to what is now happening in the Middle East. Genocidal destruction of Israel is integrally part of a system of religious worship that is directed toward an enhancement of life, and - simultaneously - the conquest of personal death.
The true source of global influence is power, and the highest expression of power is always the conquest of death. For Iran, and for that proposed government (Hamas, Fatah, it makes little difference) of executioners now battling each other for control of some future Palestinian state, killing Jews - indeed, killing Israel itself - offers an incomparable fusion of private ecstasy and personal survival. These sworn enemies of Israel are more than dimly aware that in killing Jews and in "killing" Israel, they will also have killed their own death. For the Islamist "martyr," whether as a terrorist individual or as a murderous individual writ large, killing Jews and the Jewish State is the optimal way of affirming life.
The overwhelming security costs to Israel of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Gaza "disengagement" are now plain to see. To the extent that Hamas continues to collaborate closely in Gaza with al-Qaeda, these costs may soon also have to be borne by citizens of the United States. Hamas has begun to allow al-Qaeda to fashion various terror weapons and tactics for potential use in New York, London, Washington and certain other selected "crusader" targets in the West. It is finally time for an American president to recognize that Israel's implacable enemies are also the sworn enemies of this country. Indeed, with such recognition, Israel would stand a far better chance of meaningful U.S. support and consequently of long-term security.
Posted Jun 03 2009
How desperately I would like to be more "positive" in these columns. Like my ever-faithful readers here at The Jewish Press, I would dearly welcome an opportunity - any opportunity - to discover some real evidence of genuine progress toward peace in the Middle East. But, as always, we Jews are especially obligated to look squarely at things the way they are. Recalling our history as a people, we simply should not expect that our most optimistic inclinations will somehow be wished into truth.
And the truth, my dear readers, dreary as always, remains unassailable. In fact, threats to literally annihilate Israel are now unremarkable. Almost nowhere do we find any reason for camouflage or concealment. Were it not for Israel's "bomb in the basement" - its still-unacknowledged nuclear force - these openly genocidal threats would represent much more than verbal bluster. Nonetheless, barring any last-minute Israeli preemptions (anticipatory self-defense under international law), Iran's ascent to full membership in the Nuclear Club is now less than several years away.
Such membership may also coincide with a persisting Iranian leadership belief in the Shi'ite apocalypse. Israel, therefore, might soon have to face not only Palestinian suicide-bombers, but also what amounts to the "suicide bomber" in macrocosm.
Let us never forget the truth that still stares us in the face. The goal of all Israel's Islamist enemies is simply Jewish extermination. Significantly, this goal is not hidden. In the bitterest of ironies, our ancient nation that was ingathered and reborn to prevent another Holocaust has now become the explicit and determined focus of a second "Final Solution."
In essence, the goal of all Israel's enemies, especially Iran and the still-impending Palestinian state, is to be left standing while Israel is made to disappear. For these enemies, there can be no coexistence with Israel. Never. This is because their own indispensable survival presumably requires Israel's extinction.
Here in the U.S., President Obama does not appear to understand. Again, Mr. Obama has extolled the clichéd virtues of an altogether twisted cartography. Ironically, in the fashion of his predecessor, Mr. Obama also favors the "Road Map to Peace in the Middle East." Yet, like the ill-fated Oslo Agreements that came before, this one-sided plan is still premised on Israel's coerced acceptance of land for nothing.
It would be a fatal mistake for Israel to believe that Reason and Justice govern the world. It would be a grievous error for Israel to continue to project its own Western, rational and humane sentiments upon the most relentless and barbarous Jihadistfoes. It would assuredly be a "life risk" for Israel to seek to endure by continuing to cling to numbingly false promises and manifestly false hopes.
Barack Obama will not save Israel. Once Iran has decided to launch nuclear missiles at Israel - possibly a plausible prospect in a few years, Washington's only real assistance would be to help Jerusalem bury the dead. And for this, whole Israeli cities would have to be transformed into a giant cemetery.
Whether in Gaza, Judea/Samaria or Tehran, Israel's Jihadistenemies wish to kill Jewsbecause any such homicide is always felt to be a sacred obligation. For these enemies, killing Jews is indisputably a praiseworthy expression of religious sacrifice. Such killing is expected to confer immunity from personal death. Could there ever be a more precious or compelling expectation?
The idea of death as a zero-sum commodity - "I kill you; I therefore remain alive forever" -has been explained elsewhere. It is captured perfectly, for example, in Ernest Becker's grotesque paraphrase of Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti: "Each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good."
To stay alive, Israel must finally understand what Otto Rank had once revealed in his Truth and Reality: "The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed." This very difficult and subtle insight is at the very heart of Islamist orientations to Israel. It explains almost everything about these genocidal orientations.
Israel's enemies, in order to remain standing - and to prevent Israel from standing up - seek to sacrifice the Jewish State on an endlessly blood-stained altar of war and terrorism. Sacrifice is central to what is now happening in the Middle East. Genocidal destruction of Israel is integrally part of a system of religious worship that is directed toward an enhancement of life, and - simultaneously - the conquest of personal death.
The true source of global influence is power, and the highest expression of power is always the conquest of death. For Iran, and for that proposed government (Hamas, Fatah, it makes little difference) of executioners now battling each other for control of some future Palestinian state, killing Jews - indeed, killing Israel itself - offers an incomparable fusion of private ecstasy and personal survival. These sworn enemies of Israel are more than dimly aware that in killing Jews and in "killing" Israel, they will also have killed their own death. For the Islamist "martyr," whether as a terrorist individual or as a murderous individual writ large, killing Jews and the Jewish State is the optimal way of affirming life.
The overwhelming security costs to Israel of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Gaza "disengagement" are now plain to see. To the extent that Hamas continues to collaborate closely in Gaza with al-Qaeda, these costs may soon also have to be borne by citizens of the United States. Hamas has begun to allow al-Qaeda to fashion various terror weapons and tactics for potential use in New York, London, Washington and certain other selected "crusader" targets in the West. It is finally time for an American president to recognize that Israel's implacable enemies are also the sworn enemies of this country. Indeed, with such recognition, Israel would stand a far better chance of meaningful U.S. support and consequently of long-term security.
Hamas converts 46 ambulances to military vehicles, misusing humanitarian aid
Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook
PMW has documented the repeated use of foreign funding by both the PA and Hamas for terror and glorification of terror. The following is another case of well intended humanitarian assistance given to Palestinians that is appropriated for military or terror purposes: "The [Palestinian] Health Ministry stated yesterday that Hamas militias had raided 46 ambulances, donated by Arab states during the recent aggression on the Gaza Strip, of the medical equipment that they contained... and used them as military vehicles to arrest civilians, after painting [the ambulances] black.
The Ministry's director of public relations and information, Dr. Omar Nasr... said that the medical equipment removed from the ambulances was expensive. He demanded that the Hamas militias declare, courageously and openly, what had become of the thousands of tons of medical equipment which had been brought into the Gaza Strip as assistance for the Palestinian people, and which had passed at its [Hamas's] orders to private warehouses and its own medical centers, and was later sold to the helpless citizen..."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, May 20, 2009]
PMW has documented the repeated use of foreign funding by both the PA and Hamas for terror and glorification of terror. The following is another case of well intended humanitarian assistance given to Palestinians that is appropriated for military or terror purposes: "The [Palestinian] Health Ministry stated yesterday that Hamas militias had raided 46 ambulances, donated by Arab states during the recent aggression on the Gaza Strip, of the medical equipment that they contained... and used them as military vehicles to arrest civilians, after painting [the ambulances] black.
The Ministry's director of public relations and information, Dr. Omar Nasr... said that the medical equipment removed from the ambulances was expensive. He demanded that the Hamas militias declare, courageously and openly, what had become of the thousands of tons of medical equipment which had been brought into the Gaza Strip as assistance for the Palestinian people, and which had passed at its [Hamas's] orders to private warehouses and its own medical centers, and was later sold to the helpless citizen..."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, May 20, 2009]
Congratulations Caroline Glick Defender of Jerusalem
Last week Caroline Glick received the Guardian of Zion Award from the Ingeborg Rennert Institute for Jerusalem Studies at Bar Ilan University. At the awards ceremony Caroline delivered a lecture entitled "Jerusalem the Eternal Frontline." Caroline has always been a strong defender of Jerusalem as the eternal Capital of the Jewish people. We are gratified to see her recognized for her passionate work. Below is an excerpt of the brilliant speech Caroline delivered at the ceremony:
I take enormous satisfaction from receiving this award. For nearly as long as I can remember, the image of the watchman on the gates of Jerusalem has been the singular image of Jewish strength for me. It is has always been to the Jewish watchmen, ever vigilant, to whom we have owed our lives, and our survival as a people.
Today these watchmen preserve our freedom in our land. For fifty generations in exile, it was the memory of those Jewish Centurions, manning the barricades that inspired us to keep faith with our traditions, our God, our law, and our land.
I believe that it is an honor beyond measure that Bar Ilan University and the Rennert Center would deem it proper to cast me among the ranks of our greatest defenders and champions. I know I do not deserve this distinction. I certainly do not believe that I have earned it. But I do know that since childhood I have strived to emulate the image of the watchman—or watchwoman—on the walls of Zion. And I pledge that I will continue throughout my life to strive to earn the distinction you bestow on me tonight.
THE WATCHMAN at the gates is a powerful image. But of course the defense of Jerusalem does not begin at the gates. And guarding Jerusalem is not simply a matter of physical strength. It requires spiritual commitment and wisdom as well. Indeed, defenders of Zion require a greater mix of physical and spiritual strength than any defenders of any spot on earth.
Both our recent and ancient history as a people is one continuous testament to this truth.
And it is this aspect of Jerusalem—the eternal and temporal front line of the Jewish people—that I wish to discuss with you tonight.
If you drove to Jerusalem this evening from Tel Aviv, as the coastal plain suddenly ended 25 kilometers from the city at Sha’ar Ha’guy or Bab el Wahd, you reached the starting point of the siege of Jerusalem from 1947. It was from this gauntlet that the British-commanded Jordan Legion sought—with the help of the Arabs of Jerusalem and surrounding villages—to cut the Jews of the city off from the rest of the country and so to conquer the nascent Jewish state.
As you began ascending through the hills to Jerusalem you could see the remnants of some of the most fearsome and bloody battles of the war. They came in the form of the reverentially preserved hulks of armored personnel carriers used by Haganah and Palmach units sent in front of the Jordanian snipers in a continuous attempt to bring reinforcements and food to the besieged Jews of Jerusalem.
As the hills—covered on both sides by JNF forests—rose to meet you, you passed the Latrun fortress on your right. It was the British decision to transfer control over Latrun—with its command over the road below—to the Jordan Legion, that all but guaranteed the fall of Jerusalem by preventing reinforcements from aiding its undermanned defenders.
Wave after wave of Jewish soldiers threw themselves against the guns of the Jordan Legion in a desperate attempt to break its choke hold on Jerusalem.
If you came to this hotel from the center of town, you may have gone by Davidka Square. There you would have passed by one of the primitive mortars used by the Harel Brigade in the battle for Jerusalem.
The Davidka was grossly ineffective as a killing machine. But between its thunderous noise and the rumor mill, it proved an effective tool of psychological warfare against the enemy. Even more than in traditional conflicts, the psychological aspect of the War of Independence played a pivotal role in determining its outcome.
The Jews, who just three years before had been incinerated in European crematoria were an object of wonder no less than hatred for our enemies. Like the phoenix rising from the ashes, for many Arabs there was a sense that supernatural powers were at work as the new Jewish state rose from the ruins of Jerusalem.
For their part, schooled in the martial traditions of Joshua and Gideon, the Jews of 1948 blended seamlessly the psychological and the metaphysical with armor and steel.
The Davidka monument is just as much a reminder of what this uniquely Jewish military doctrine can achieve as the unwalled city of Jericho.
If you came this way from the Old City, you most likely walked through the Jewish Quarter. It was to the 1,700 Jews who lived there in 1948 and their 150 defenders that the eyes of the citizens of nascent Jewish state were turned. The future security of the country was dependent on their ability to withstand the Arab siege. They had to be assisted and they had to hold their ground if the war was to end in a resounding victory for the Jews.
Tragically, the spiritual strength that sustained us 61 years ago was not matched by sufficient physical strength to hold the city.
As Jerusalem commander Dov Yosef instructed the starving and desperate Jews within the walls about the nutritional benefits of various leaves that they could eat in the absence of food, and as wave after wave of Jewish fighters fell to their deaths on the roads ringing the city—at Latrun, the Castel, Har Adar and Gush Etzion—in their bid to relieve the Jerusalemites—the British-commanded Jordanians delighted in our suffering. Arab snipers picked off any Jew within range.
In the end, the Jews of the Old City held out for 6 months. Last week marked the 61st anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem on May 27, 1948. Of the Jewish Quarter's 150 defenders, only 43 survived until the Hurva synagogue was destroyed by the Jordan Legion. It was the destruction of the venerable old synagogue that finally forced the hands of the rabbis within the walls. After the Hurva was destroyed, the rabbis began negotiating the surrender of the Old City to the Arabs.
If you walked to the King David Hotel today from the Old City, and exited through the Jaffa Gate, you certainly took note of the gentrified neighborhood of Mamila. Today, as you walk through the new upscale shopping plaza, it is hard to believe, that from May 27, 1948 through June 7, 1967 Mamila was Israel's frontline. It was Sderot and Kiryat Shemona of its time.
The Jews of the neighborhood lived in constant fear of Jordanian snipers who took pot shots from the walls of the conquered city at the Jews down below. The buildings you passed were once surrounded by sandbags. The Jews who lived inside them would run, not walk across the street. Any hesitation could spell their death.
But then, on the third day of the Six Day War, their long nightmare ended. After 19 years, the IDF succeeded in liberating the capital city. Paratroopers from kibbutzim danced with yeshiva buchers as they stood in awe before the remnant of the Second Temple. In June 1967, the proper balance between our spiritual and physical defenses had finally been struck. After 2000 years, we were again a free people.
EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, on May 27, 1991, the 43rd anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem, and the 24th anniversary of its liberation, tens of thousands of Jews from Ethiopia were airlifted to the Jewish state. As then Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said, the Ethiopian aliyah marked the first time in history where Africans were liberated from slavery by being taken out of Africa.
The entire country celebrated the arrival of these Jews, who had maintained their allegiance to Zion for thousands of years often in complete isolation from the rest of the people of Israel.
The next day, May 28, 1991, I stepped off an El Al plane at Ben Gurion Airport, and before reaching the passport check, I walked up the stairs of the old terminal building to the Ministry of Absorption's offices and officially made aliyah. A friend picked me and my massive immigrant suitcases up and a few hours later, I began my new life in Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem that greeted me 18 years ago was almost entirely free from fear. It was hard for me to imagine that the city had ever been endangered as I rode the buses, walked along the streets, sat in cafés, hiked in the forests, shopped in supermarkets and clothing stores.
As I moved without fear through Arab neighborhoods, and traversed the old and new city, it rarely occurred to me that I was walking on contested ground. The Palestinian uprising, which had begun in 1988 and had instigated a period of self-segregation and renewed hostility towards Israel among the city's Arab residents, had been defeated in the wake of the Gulf War.
But unbeknownst to me and to my fellow Jerusalemites, all of this was set to change just two years later. When, as part of the implementation of the Oslo peace process with the PLO, the government of Israel allowed for an Arab armed force to be deployed on the outskirts of the city, fear returned to Jerusalem.
Within just a few weeks of the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, Jerusalem again became the front line of the country as terrorists from Ramallah, Hebron, Beit Lehem and beyond converged on Jerusalem to terrorize its people in shooting attacks and suicide bombings. What the people of Sderot experience today was first suffered by residents of Gilo
I moved away from Jerusalem at the end of 1991, after I joined the army. I returned to the city in 2002. By that time, the sense of safety I had felt here during my first months in the country had been obliterated. Every day brought a new atrocity or attempted atrocity. My own street became the scene of carnage as a bus was bombed just a half a block from my front door. My neighbors' mangled bodies were strewn before me as I ran out of my home with some vague notion that I could help someone.
While there was no hunger among the city's residents in 2002 as there had been during the siege in 1948, the chronic, continuous sense that at any moment you could be killed filled the air with similar dread and foreboding.
It was only after the government finally unleashed the Israel Defense Force in Judea and Samaria that a semblance of normality returned again to the city. It was only after Operation Defensive Shield returned our soldiers to the streets of Ramallah, Beit Lehem, Shehem, Jenin, Kalkilya and Hebron, and vastly curtailed the powers of the Palestinian armed forces, that we could feel safe going out to dinner and riding the bus again.
DURING THE YEARS THAT Jerusalem came under physical threat, it also became politically threatened. Israel's acquiescence to the PLO's military presence on the outskirts of the city began a process of unraveling Israel's own claim to the city. As Yassir Arafat ordered his forces to march on Jerusalem, and denied that the Jewish people have any rights to the city, successive Israeli governments found themselves on the diplomatic defensive.
Just as our leaders allowed Jerusalem's physical wellbeing to be threatened, so they enabled its political unity to come under assault. Rather than insist that the world recognize our sovereign rights to our capital, at best, our leaders spoke of the strategic importance of Jerusalem to our physical security.
The element of metaphysical power embodied by the tactically worthless Davidka was absent from discussions of how Israel needed Tzur Bahar and Jabel Mukaber to defend Armon HaNatziv or how our control over Sho’efat and Beit Hanina is necessary to defend Ramot, Neve Yaakov and Pisgat Zeev.
Happily today Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat have abandoned this defensive posture and are waging strident campaigns against all who demand that we again surrender our eternal capital.
But for much of the past 15 years, the full expanse of Jewish history and identity was narrowed to a discussion of isolated neighborhoods, as if they were what this is all about.
Jerusalem's importance is far greater than the sum total of its neighborhoods. In ignoring this basic truth, our leaders did more to imperil the city's neighborhoods than legions of our enemies could hope to accomplish.
Even more devastating than what we said to the world is what we said to ourselves. For much of the past 15 years, our national leaders scornfully and contemptuously worked to limit our expectations and accused us of being greedy for assuming we had a right to our capital.
When did King David live in Abu Dis, they sneered. Why were we needlessly upsetting the Arabs by moving back to Ir David, they hissed. The underlying message was clear. We were provoking our enemies by asserting our rights, which we were told, were unimportant.
In general, since 1994, to greater and lesser degrees, our leaders abandoned Jerusalem as our metaphysical frontline and reduced the rationale of our control over our eternal capital to a security argument.
This argument is fine for as far is it goes. We explained—correctly—that without Israeli control over Jerusalem, the entire country would be under threat. And this is true. Indeed it has always been true.
Among other reasons, King David chose Jerusalem as his capital city because of its strategic importance. Were foreign forces to take control over Jerusalem and surrounding areas today, everything from Ben Gurion Airport to Tel Aviv to Beersheva to Tiberias would be placed under threat.
As Shaar Haguy in 1948 and Beit Jalla in 2000 showed, with foreign forces on the outskirts of the city, Jerusalem is cut off from the rest of the country. To secure the city is to secure the country. And to abandon the city—whether by surrendering control of the road to Tel Aviv or by relinquishing Judea and Samaria—is to imperil the country.
Specifically, placing foreign forces in Jerusalem or on its doorstep would mean importing Gaza into the heart of the country.
Jerusalemites would find ourselves living in bomb shelters like our brothers and sisters in Sderot. Tel Aviv would find itself, like Ofakim, within range of enemy rockets. Terrorists with simple portable weapons could sit on the hills of Jerusalem and shoot down civilian jetliners landing at Ben Gurion airport. In wartime, terrorists with primitive artillery could shut down the country's vital traffic arteries, preventing reservists from reaching the fronts to defend the state.
Although inarguably accurate, Israel's security arguments for its sovereignty over Jerusalem have fallen on deaf ears. Neither the Americans—who demand that we cease asserting our sovereignty over eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem, not to mention Judea and Samaria—nor the Arabs consider Jerusalem primarily a military issue.
The Americans prefer to ignore the metaphysical and spiritual aspects of the city's frontline status as they push for an Israeli retreat to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines. For them, the issue of Jerusalem is no more than a petty real estate squabble.
But our enemies know better. For them the question of who controls Jerusalem is rightly recognized as the core issue—as the issue upon which Israel rises or falls as a state and as a people. Earlier this month, this point was made clearly by one of Israel's sworn enemies.
In a television interview on May 7, the PLO's Ambassador to Lebanon Abbas Zaki explained that from the PLO to the Iranian mullahs, Jerusalem is seen as the metaphysical key to Israel's wellbeing. As he put it, "With the [implementation of the] two-state solution, [involving an Israeli relinquishment of Jerusalem], in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made—just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward."
As a wayward Jew once said, "The truth will set you free."
We owe the likes of Zaki—and the Iranians who call their most prestigious terrorist unit the Jerusalem Brigade—a big thank you for reminding us of who we are and what we need to survive. For even as our leaders tried to forget what we as a people have always known, our history—both ancient and modern—is testament to the truth of Zaki's statement.
WE MARK THE END of Jewish control over the Land of Israel as having occurred not with the Roman invasion in 63 BCE, nor from the defeat of Bar Kochba's rebellion 182 years later in 135. We mark the hurban, the destruction of our sovereignty as having occurred with the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE.
And why is this the case? It is because people do not fight for strategically significant hilltops. They fight for ideas like freedom. They fight for symbols, for abstractions like flags. They fight for their beliefs. They fight for their way of life.
They do not fight for strategic advantage.
We Jews know this better than any other people. We were the first people to self-consciously define ourselves at Mt. Sinai as a nation committed to an abstract principle of an invisible God, an abstract code of law, and an abstract, yet-to-be-seen promised land.
Josef Trumpeldor is not remembered as a great hero for having said, "It is good to die for strategically significant hilltops,"—although that is what he died defending. Trumpeldor is remembered as a great hero for declaring, "It is good to die for our country."
Even further back, we remember that the only reason the Kingdom of Judea did not suffer the same fate as the Kingdom of Israel in the end of the 8th century BCE is because as the ten tribes of Israel were expelled into oblivion, King Hezkiyahu saved Jerusalem from the Assyrians.
Due to his failed attempt to purge Judea of Assyrian influence, Hezkiyahu lost Lachish and Gat and dozens of other cities and villages and was forced to fall back on Jerusalem. There, against all odds, Hezkiyahu kept Jerusalem free. He breached the Assyrian siege by digging his famous water tunnel under the city.
Assyrian King Sennacherib, who destroyed the Kingdom of Israel and deported the ten tribes, went home empty-handed. His conquest of all the other cities and villages meant little without Jerusalem. By saving Jerusalem, Hezkiyahu saved Jewish independence and through it, he saved the Jewish people.
As Isaiah had promised in Chapter 37, verses 32-35:
לב כִּי מִירוּשָׁלִַם תֵּצֵא שְׁאֵרִית, וּפְלֵיטָה מֵהַר צִיּוֹן; קִנְאַת יְהוָה צְבָאוֹת, תַּעֲשֶׂה-זֹּאת. לג לָכֵן, כֹּה-אָמַר יְהוָה אֶל-מֶלֶךְ אַשּׁוּר, לֹא יָבוֹא אֶל-הָעִיר הַזֹּאת, וְלֹא-יוֹרֶה שָׁם חֵץ; וְלֹא-יְקַדְּמֶנָּה מָגֵן, וְלֹא-יִשְׁפֹּךְ עָלֶיהָ סֹלְלָה. לד בַּדֶּרֶךְ אֲשֶׁר-בָּא, בָּהּ יָשׁוּב; וְאֶל-הָעִיר הַזֹּאת לֹא יָבוֹא, נְאֻם-יְהוָה. לה וְגַנּוֹתִי עַל-הָעִיר הַזֹּאת, לְהוֹשִׁיעָהּ--לְמַעֲנִי, וּלְמַעַן דָּוִד עַבְדִּי
"From Jerusalem and Mt. Zion the people will be renewed. And so God said to the King of Assyria, you will not enter this city, you will not shoot your arrows upon it, you will not breach its defenses, your cannons will not reach it. You will go back the way you came. You will not enter this city, God decreed. I defended this city to save it for me and for David my servant."
Our history as a people—both ancient and modern—has always been tied to Jerusalem. On Hanukah we remember the Maccabean revolt in a very telling way. The Maccabees began their revolt against the Greeks in 167 BCE. The fighting lasted for 23 years until Jonathan was crowned king.
But we remember the revolt for an event that occurred two years into the fighting. We celebrate the revolt not because it established the Maccabean dynasty. We celebrate it because in 165, Judah Maccabi liberated the Temple and so reinstated our sovereignty as a nation and our hope for national renewal. Again—from Jerusalem and Mt. Zion, the people were renewed.
Just as Zaki, Arafat, Nasrallah, and Ahmadinejad remind us every day, from the outset of our nationhood here in Israel four thousand years ago, throughout the centuries of our dispersion and to this day, our fate as a nation—both physically and spiritually—has always been tied directly to our control, or lack of control over Jerusalem. Jerusalem has always been our front line both physically and spiritually.
Rabbi Akiva knew, as he gazed at the destroyed Temple from Mt. Scopus that one day our control over the city would be restored and so our national wellbeing would be renewed. This is why he laughed as he watched foxes entering and exiting the Holiest of Holies.
Perhaps if he had known then that it would take nearly 2,000 years for that to happen, he would have joined his colleagues in their tears instead of shocking them with his laughter and gaiety.
But still, today we know that Rabbi Akiva was right. Our return to Jerusalem did presage our national rebirth with the renewal of our sovereignty in 1948 and 1967.
The modern Zionist movement, which officially began with Hovevei Tzion in 1882, came after the Jewish repopulation of Jerusalem. By 1850, Jews again comprised the majority of the city's population. And it was our strong presence here that emboldened the early Zionists to believe that a mass return to Zion was finally possible. It was because we had returned again to Jerusalem that our hope and so our strength were finally renewed after 2000 years of stateless wandering and persecution.
LET US RETURN for a moment to 1967. There were many glorious events that occurred during those six days in June. I said before that it was only in 1967 that we wrought the proper balance between physical and spiritual strength. I would like to consider that statement at somewhat greater length.
In June 1967, Israel was transformed from a threatened, vulnerable Jewish shtatelet into a mighty state to be reckoned with. But who celebrated—then or since—the conquest of Gaza and Kalkilyah? Who remembers the great battles in the Sinai or even the Golan Heights?
The images of that war that have entered our collective consciousness—never to leave—are the images of our paratroopers on the Temple Mount, of Mota Gur crying "Har Habayit b'Yadeinu!" "the Temple Mount is in our hands!," of our young soldiers praying at the Western Wall.
The convergence of Jerusalem as our frontline of physical security and spiritual security was palpable in those days.
In honor of Yom Yerushalayim this month, a documentary was aired on Israel Television about the signals battalion in the Paratroopers Brigade. The battalion played a major role in the fighting—first taking over the Rockefeller Museum, then the Temple Mount, then the Kotel, then the walls of the city.
In the documentary, the heroes who liberated Jerusalem were brought together forty years later to celebrate its renewal and to recall their fight. They told a stunning story.
After the city was liberated, they situated themselves in the abandoned Jordanian police station just inside the Jaffa Gate. The same station now houses the Israel police. In one of the rooms, they found a large quantity of musical instruments. Apparently, a Jordanian police band was stationed at the site and stored its instruments there.
The men took one of the drums and climbed up the walls of the Old City overlooking Mamila. There the Jews had been huddled beneath the streets in their bomb shelters for several weeks.
As they ascended the walls, the paratroopers began pounding the drum. It must have been a terrifically strange noise since they all claimed to have had no idea how to play the drums.
As the men told it, and as a woman who had been hiding in the shelters with her family recalled, the civilians became perplexed at the new sound that replaced the familiar staccato pop of gun bursts and cannon fire. Slowly, they began emerging from the shelters to find out what was happening.
There above them, they saw the flag of Israel flying. They saw Jewish watchmen on the walls, beating the drums of victory in a half-mad boom, boom, boom.
And at the site of the Guardians of Zion above them, the Jews of Mamila began to dance as in times of old. They danced and danced, and walked to the walls, first tentatively, and then with a massive convulsion of joy and relief, of hope and ecstasy as for the first time in 2000 years the city was secured. The Jews were free of fear as we returned to the Temple Mount, to Mt. Zion, to Jerusalem from whence our strength was renewed.
OUR ENEMIES are right in choosing their targets. They are right because they know who we are. We are the children of Jerusalem, of Zion. Our physical and spiritual survival is dependent on our willingness to dedicate our lives in every generation to guarding both the physical and spiritual walls of this city. It is only by guarding Zion, that we guard its people.
I am humbled and honored beyond words to have been chosen from among so many of my fellow Jews for this singular honor of being named a Guardian of Zion. For me, more than anything, what this means, is that people I respect for their defense of our people accept me as a loyal daughter of this eternal city.
It is all I have ever wished to be.
It is all I wish for my children to become.
And with God's help, it is something I will be blessed to remain all the days of my life.
Thank you. God bless the people of Israel and our eternal capital city.
I take enormous satisfaction from receiving this award. For nearly as long as I can remember, the image of the watchman on the gates of Jerusalem has been the singular image of Jewish strength for me. It is has always been to the Jewish watchmen, ever vigilant, to whom we have owed our lives, and our survival as a people.
Today these watchmen preserve our freedom in our land. For fifty generations in exile, it was the memory of those Jewish Centurions, manning the barricades that inspired us to keep faith with our traditions, our God, our law, and our land.
I believe that it is an honor beyond measure that Bar Ilan University and the Rennert Center would deem it proper to cast me among the ranks of our greatest defenders and champions. I know I do not deserve this distinction. I certainly do not believe that I have earned it. But I do know that since childhood I have strived to emulate the image of the watchman—or watchwoman—on the walls of Zion. And I pledge that I will continue throughout my life to strive to earn the distinction you bestow on me tonight.
THE WATCHMAN at the gates is a powerful image. But of course the defense of Jerusalem does not begin at the gates. And guarding Jerusalem is not simply a matter of physical strength. It requires spiritual commitment and wisdom as well. Indeed, defenders of Zion require a greater mix of physical and spiritual strength than any defenders of any spot on earth.
Both our recent and ancient history as a people is one continuous testament to this truth.
And it is this aspect of Jerusalem—the eternal and temporal front line of the Jewish people—that I wish to discuss with you tonight.
If you drove to Jerusalem this evening from Tel Aviv, as the coastal plain suddenly ended 25 kilometers from the city at Sha’ar Ha’guy or Bab el Wahd, you reached the starting point of the siege of Jerusalem from 1947. It was from this gauntlet that the British-commanded Jordan Legion sought—with the help of the Arabs of Jerusalem and surrounding villages—to cut the Jews of the city off from the rest of the country and so to conquer the nascent Jewish state.
As you began ascending through the hills to Jerusalem you could see the remnants of some of the most fearsome and bloody battles of the war. They came in the form of the reverentially preserved hulks of armored personnel carriers used by Haganah and Palmach units sent in front of the Jordanian snipers in a continuous attempt to bring reinforcements and food to the besieged Jews of Jerusalem.
As the hills—covered on both sides by JNF forests—rose to meet you, you passed the Latrun fortress on your right. It was the British decision to transfer control over Latrun—with its command over the road below—to the Jordan Legion, that all but guaranteed the fall of Jerusalem by preventing reinforcements from aiding its undermanned defenders.
Wave after wave of Jewish soldiers threw themselves against the guns of the Jordan Legion in a desperate attempt to break its choke hold on Jerusalem.
If you came to this hotel from the center of town, you may have gone by Davidka Square. There you would have passed by one of the primitive mortars used by the Harel Brigade in the battle for Jerusalem.
The Davidka was grossly ineffective as a killing machine. But between its thunderous noise and the rumor mill, it proved an effective tool of psychological warfare against the enemy. Even more than in traditional conflicts, the psychological aspect of the War of Independence played a pivotal role in determining its outcome.
The Jews, who just three years before had been incinerated in European crematoria were an object of wonder no less than hatred for our enemies. Like the phoenix rising from the ashes, for many Arabs there was a sense that supernatural powers were at work as the new Jewish state rose from the ruins of Jerusalem.
For their part, schooled in the martial traditions of Joshua and Gideon, the Jews of 1948 blended seamlessly the psychological and the metaphysical with armor and steel.
The Davidka monument is just as much a reminder of what this uniquely Jewish military doctrine can achieve as the unwalled city of Jericho.
If you came this way from the Old City, you most likely walked through the Jewish Quarter. It was to the 1,700 Jews who lived there in 1948 and their 150 defenders that the eyes of the citizens of nascent Jewish state were turned. The future security of the country was dependent on their ability to withstand the Arab siege. They had to be assisted and they had to hold their ground if the war was to end in a resounding victory for the Jews.
Tragically, the spiritual strength that sustained us 61 years ago was not matched by sufficient physical strength to hold the city.
As Jerusalem commander Dov Yosef instructed the starving and desperate Jews within the walls about the nutritional benefits of various leaves that they could eat in the absence of food, and as wave after wave of Jewish fighters fell to their deaths on the roads ringing the city—at Latrun, the Castel, Har Adar and Gush Etzion—in their bid to relieve the Jerusalemites—the British-commanded Jordanians delighted in our suffering. Arab snipers picked off any Jew within range.
In the end, the Jews of the Old City held out for 6 months. Last week marked the 61st anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem on May 27, 1948. Of the Jewish Quarter's 150 defenders, only 43 survived until the Hurva synagogue was destroyed by the Jordan Legion. It was the destruction of the venerable old synagogue that finally forced the hands of the rabbis within the walls. After the Hurva was destroyed, the rabbis began negotiating the surrender of the Old City to the Arabs.
If you walked to the King David Hotel today from the Old City, and exited through the Jaffa Gate, you certainly took note of the gentrified neighborhood of Mamila. Today, as you walk through the new upscale shopping plaza, it is hard to believe, that from May 27, 1948 through June 7, 1967 Mamila was Israel's frontline. It was Sderot and Kiryat Shemona of its time.
The Jews of the neighborhood lived in constant fear of Jordanian snipers who took pot shots from the walls of the conquered city at the Jews down below. The buildings you passed were once surrounded by sandbags. The Jews who lived inside them would run, not walk across the street. Any hesitation could spell their death.
But then, on the third day of the Six Day War, their long nightmare ended. After 19 years, the IDF succeeded in liberating the capital city. Paratroopers from kibbutzim danced with yeshiva buchers as they stood in awe before the remnant of the Second Temple. In June 1967, the proper balance between our spiritual and physical defenses had finally been struck. After 2000 years, we were again a free people.
EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, on May 27, 1991, the 43rd anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem, and the 24th anniversary of its liberation, tens of thousands of Jews from Ethiopia were airlifted to the Jewish state. As then Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said, the Ethiopian aliyah marked the first time in history where Africans were liberated from slavery by being taken out of Africa.
The entire country celebrated the arrival of these Jews, who had maintained their allegiance to Zion for thousands of years often in complete isolation from the rest of the people of Israel.
The next day, May 28, 1991, I stepped off an El Al plane at Ben Gurion Airport, and before reaching the passport check, I walked up the stairs of the old terminal building to the Ministry of Absorption's offices and officially made aliyah. A friend picked me and my massive immigrant suitcases up and a few hours later, I began my new life in Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem that greeted me 18 years ago was almost entirely free from fear. It was hard for me to imagine that the city had ever been endangered as I rode the buses, walked along the streets, sat in cafés, hiked in the forests, shopped in supermarkets and clothing stores.
As I moved without fear through Arab neighborhoods, and traversed the old and new city, it rarely occurred to me that I was walking on contested ground. The Palestinian uprising, which had begun in 1988 and had instigated a period of self-segregation and renewed hostility towards Israel among the city's Arab residents, had been defeated in the wake of the Gulf War.
But unbeknownst to me and to my fellow Jerusalemites, all of this was set to change just two years later. When, as part of the implementation of the Oslo peace process with the PLO, the government of Israel allowed for an Arab armed force to be deployed on the outskirts of the city, fear returned to Jerusalem.
Within just a few weeks of the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, Jerusalem again became the front line of the country as terrorists from Ramallah, Hebron, Beit Lehem and beyond converged on Jerusalem to terrorize its people in shooting attacks and suicide bombings. What the people of Sderot experience today was first suffered by residents of Gilo
I moved away from Jerusalem at the end of 1991, after I joined the army. I returned to the city in 2002. By that time, the sense of safety I had felt here during my first months in the country had been obliterated. Every day brought a new atrocity or attempted atrocity. My own street became the scene of carnage as a bus was bombed just a half a block from my front door. My neighbors' mangled bodies were strewn before me as I ran out of my home with some vague notion that I could help someone.
While there was no hunger among the city's residents in 2002 as there had been during the siege in 1948, the chronic, continuous sense that at any moment you could be killed filled the air with similar dread and foreboding.
It was only after the government finally unleashed the Israel Defense Force in Judea and Samaria that a semblance of normality returned again to the city. It was only after Operation Defensive Shield returned our soldiers to the streets of Ramallah, Beit Lehem, Shehem, Jenin, Kalkilya and Hebron, and vastly curtailed the powers of the Palestinian armed forces, that we could feel safe going out to dinner and riding the bus again.
DURING THE YEARS THAT Jerusalem came under physical threat, it also became politically threatened. Israel's acquiescence to the PLO's military presence on the outskirts of the city began a process of unraveling Israel's own claim to the city. As Yassir Arafat ordered his forces to march on Jerusalem, and denied that the Jewish people have any rights to the city, successive Israeli governments found themselves on the diplomatic defensive.
Just as our leaders allowed Jerusalem's physical wellbeing to be threatened, so they enabled its political unity to come under assault. Rather than insist that the world recognize our sovereign rights to our capital, at best, our leaders spoke of the strategic importance of Jerusalem to our physical security.
The element of metaphysical power embodied by the tactically worthless Davidka was absent from discussions of how Israel needed Tzur Bahar and Jabel Mukaber to defend Armon HaNatziv or how our control over Sho’efat and Beit Hanina is necessary to defend Ramot, Neve Yaakov and Pisgat Zeev.
Happily today Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat have abandoned this defensive posture and are waging strident campaigns against all who demand that we again surrender our eternal capital.
But for much of the past 15 years, the full expanse of Jewish history and identity was narrowed to a discussion of isolated neighborhoods, as if they were what this is all about.
Jerusalem's importance is far greater than the sum total of its neighborhoods. In ignoring this basic truth, our leaders did more to imperil the city's neighborhoods than legions of our enemies could hope to accomplish.
Even more devastating than what we said to the world is what we said to ourselves. For much of the past 15 years, our national leaders scornfully and contemptuously worked to limit our expectations and accused us of being greedy for assuming we had a right to our capital.
When did King David live in Abu Dis, they sneered. Why were we needlessly upsetting the Arabs by moving back to Ir David, they hissed. The underlying message was clear. We were provoking our enemies by asserting our rights, which we were told, were unimportant.
In general, since 1994, to greater and lesser degrees, our leaders abandoned Jerusalem as our metaphysical frontline and reduced the rationale of our control over our eternal capital to a security argument.
This argument is fine for as far is it goes. We explained—correctly—that without Israeli control over Jerusalem, the entire country would be under threat. And this is true. Indeed it has always been true.
Among other reasons, King David chose Jerusalem as his capital city because of its strategic importance. Were foreign forces to take control over Jerusalem and surrounding areas today, everything from Ben Gurion Airport to Tel Aviv to Beersheva to Tiberias would be placed under threat.
As Shaar Haguy in 1948 and Beit Jalla in 2000 showed, with foreign forces on the outskirts of the city, Jerusalem is cut off from the rest of the country. To secure the city is to secure the country. And to abandon the city—whether by surrendering control of the road to Tel Aviv or by relinquishing Judea and Samaria—is to imperil the country.
Specifically, placing foreign forces in Jerusalem or on its doorstep would mean importing Gaza into the heart of the country.
Jerusalemites would find ourselves living in bomb shelters like our brothers and sisters in Sderot. Tel Aviv would find itself, like Ofakim, within range of enemy rockets. Terrorists with simple portable weapons could sit on the hills of Jerusalem and shoot down civilian jetliners landing at Ben Gurion airport. In wartime, terrorists with primitive artillery could shut down the country's vital traffic arteries, preventing reservists from reaching the fronts to defend the state.
Although inarguably accurate, Israel's security arguments for its sovereignty over Jerusalem have fallen on deaf ears. Neither the Americans—who demand that we cease asserting our sovereignty over eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem, not to mention Judea and Samaria—nor the Arabs consider Jerusalem primarily a military issue.
The Americans prefer to ignore the metaphysical and spiritual aspects of the city's frontline status as they push for an Israeli retreat to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines. For them, the issue of Jerusalem is no more than a petty real estate squabble.
But our enemies know better. For them the question of who controls Jerusalem is rightly recognized as the core issue—as the issue upon which Israel rises or falls as a state and as a people. Earlier this month, this point was made clearly by one of Israel's sworn enemies.
In a television interview on May 7, the PLO's Ambassador to Lebanon Abbas Zaki explained that from the PLO to the Iranian mullahs, Jerusalem is seen as the metaphysical key to Israel's wellbeing. As he put it, "With the [implementation of the] two-state solution, [involving an Israeli relinquishment of Jerusalem], in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made—just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward."
As a wayward Jew once said, "The truth will set you free."
We owe the likes of Zaki—and the Iranians who call their most prestigious terrorist unit the Jerusalem Brigade—a big thank you for reminding us of who we are and what we need to survive. For even as our leaders tried to forget what we as a people have always known, our history—both ancient and modern—is testament to the truth of Zaki's statement.
WE MARK THE END of Jewish control over the Land of Israel as having occurred not with the Roman invasion in 63 BCE, nor from the defeat of Bar Kochba's rebellion 182 years later in 135. We mark the hurban, the destruction of our sovereignty as having occurred with the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE.
And why is this the case? It is because people do not fight for strategically significant hilltops. They fight for ideas like freedom. They fight for symbols, for abstractions like flags. They fight for their beliefs. They fight for their way of life.
They do not fight for strategic advantage.
We Jews know this better than any other people. We were the first people to self-consciously define ourselves at Mt. Sinai as a nation committed to an abstract principle of an invisible God, an abstract code of law, and an abstract, yet-to-be-seen promised land.
Josef Trumpeldor is not remembered as a great hero for having said, "It is good to die for strategically significant hilltops,"—although that is what he died defending. Trumpeldor is remembered as a great hero for declaring, "It is good to die for our country."
Even further back, we remember that the only reason the Kingdom of Judea did not suffer the same fate as the Kingdom of Israel in the end of the 8th century BCE is because as the ten tribes of Israel were expelled into oblivion, King Hezkiyahu saved Jerusalem from the Assyrians.
Due to his failed attempt to purge Judea of Assyrian influence, Hezkiyahu lost Lachish and Gat and dozens of other cities and villages and was forced to fall back on Jerusalem. There, against all odds, Hezkiyahu kept Jerusalem free. He breached the Assyrian siege by digging his famous water tunnel under the city.
Assyrian King Sennacherib, who destroyed the Kingdom of Israel and deported the ten tribes, went home empty-handed. His conquest of all the other cities and villages meant little without Jerusalem. By saving Jerusalem, Hezkiyahu saved Jewish independence and through it, he saved the Jewish people.
As Isaiah had promised in Chapter 37, verses 32-35:
לב כִּי מִירוּשָׁלִַם תֵּצֵא שְׁאֵרִית, וּפְלֵיטָה מֵהַר צִיּוֹן; קִנְאַת יְהוָה צְבָאוֹת, תַּעֲשֶׂה-זֹּאת. לג לָכֵן, כֹּה-אָמַר יְהוָה אֶל-מֶלֶךְ אַשּׁוּר, לֹא יָבוֹא אֶל-הָעִיר הַזֹּאת, וְלֹא-יוֹרֶה שָׁם חֵץ; וְלֹא-יְקַדְּמֶנָּה מָגֵן, וְלֹא-יִשְׁפֹּךְ עָלֶיהָ סֹלְלָה. לד בַּדֶּרֶךְ אֲשֶׁר-בָּא, בָּהּ יָשׁוּב; וְאֶל-הָעִיר הַזֹּאת לֹא יָבוֹא, נְאֻם-יְהוָה. לה וְגַנּוֹתִי עַל-הָעִיר הַזֹּאת, לְהוֹשִׁיעָהּ--לְמַעֲנִי, וּלְמַעַן דָּוִד עַבְדִּי
"From Jerusalem and Mt. Zion the people will be renewed. And so God said to the King of Assyria, you will not enter this city, you will not shoot your arrows upon it, you will not breach its defenses, your cannons will not reach it. You will go back the way you came. You will not enter this city, God decreed. I defended this city to save it for me and for David my servant."
Our history as a people—both ancient and modern—has always been tied to Jerusalem. On Hanukah we remember the Maccabean revolt in a very telling way. The Maccabees began their revolt against the Greeks in 167 BCE. The fighting lasted for 23 years until Jonathan was crowned king.
But we remember the revolt for an event that occurred two years into the fighting. We celebrate the revolt not because it established the Maccabean dynasty. We celebrate it because in 165, Judah Maccabi liberated the Temple and so reinstated our sovereignty as a nation and our hope for national renewal. Again—from Jerusalem and Mt. Zion, the people were renewed.
Just as Zaki, Arafat, Nasrallah, and Ahmadinejad remind us every day, from the outset of our nationhood here in Israel four thousand years ago, throughout the centuries of our dispersion and to this day, our fate as a nation—both physically and spiritually—has always been tied directly to our control, or lack of control over Jerusalem. Jerusalem has always been our front line both physically and spiritually.
Rabbi Akiva knew, as he gazed at the destroyed Temple from Mt. Scopus that one day our control over the city would be restored and so our national wellbeing would be renewed. This is why he laughed as he watched foxes entering and exiting the Holiest of Holies.
Perhaps if he had known then that it would take nearly 2,000 years for that to happen, he would have joined his colleagues in their tears instead of shocking them with his laughter and gaiety.
But still, today we know that Rabbi Akiva was right. Our return to Jerusalem did presage our national rebirth with the renewal of our sovereignty in 1948 and 1967.
The modern Zionist movement, which officially began with Hovevei Tzion in 1882, came after the Jewish repopulation of Jerusalem. By 1850, Jews again comprised the majority of the city's population. And it was our strong presence here that emboldened the early Zionists to believe that a mass return to Zion was finally possible. It was because we had returned again to Jerusalem that our hope and so our strength were finally renewed after 2000 years of stateless wandering and persecution.
LET US RETURN for a moment to 1967. There were many glorious events that occurred during those six days in June. I said before that it was only in 1967 that we wrought the proper balance between physical and spiritual strength. I would like to consider that statement at somewhat greater length.
In June 1967, Israel was transformed from a threatened, vulnerable Jewish shtatelet into a mighty state to be reckoned with. But who celebrated—then or since—the conquest of Gaza and Kalkilyah? Who remembers the great battles in the Sinai or even the Golan Heights?
The images of that war that have entered our collective consciousness—never to leave—are the images of our paratroopers on the Temple Mount, of Mota Gur crying "Har Habayit b'Yadeinu!" "the Temple Mount is in our hands!," of our young soldiers praying at the Western Wall.
The convergence of Jerusalem as our frontline of physical security and spiritual security was palpable in those days.
In honor of Yom Yerushalayim this month, a documentary was aired on Israel Television about the signals battalion in the Paratroopers Brigade. The battalion played a major role in the fighting—first taking over the Rockefeller Museum, then the Temple Mount, then the Kotel, then the walls of the city.
In the documentary, the heroes who liberated Jerusalem were brought together forty years later to celebrate its renewal and to recall their fight. They told a stunning story.
After the city was liberated, they situated themselves in the abandoned Jordanian police station just inside the Jaffa Gate. The same station now houses the Israel police. In one of the rooms, they found a large quantity of musical instruments. Apparently, a Jordanian police band was stationed at the site and stored its instruments there.
The men took one of the drums and climbed up the walls of the Old City overlooking Mamila. There the Jews had been huddled beneath the streets in their bomb shelters for several weeks.
As they ascended the walls, the paratroopers began pounding the drum. It must have been a terrifically strange noise since they all claimed to have had no idea how to play the drums.
As the men told it, and as a woman who had been hiding in the shelters with her family recalled, the civilians became perplexed at the new sound that replaced the familiar staccato pop of gun bursts and cannon fire. Slowly, they began emerging from the shelters to find out what was happening.
There above them, they saw the flag of Israel flying. They saw Jewish watchmen on the walls, beating the drums of victory in a half-mad boom, boom, boom.
And at the site of the Guardians of Zion above them, the Jews of Mamila began to dance as in times of old. They danced and danced, and walked to the walls, first tentatively, and then with a massive convulsion of joy and relief, of hope and ecstasy as for the first time in 2000 years the city was secured. The Jews were free of fear as we returned to the Temple Mount, to Mt. Zion, to Jerusalem from whence our strength was renewed.
OUR ENEMIES are right in choosing their targets. They are right because they know who we are. We are the children of Jerusalem, of Zion. Our physical and spiritual survival is dependent on our willingness to dedicate our lives in every generation to guarding both the physical and spiritual walls of this city. It is only by guarding Zion, that we guard its people.
I am humbled and honored beyond words to have been chosen from among so many of my fellow Jews for this singular honor of being named a Guardian of Zion. For me, more than anything, what this means, is that people I respect for their defense of our people accept me as a loyal daughter of this eternal city.
It is all I have ever wished to be.
It is all I wish for my children to become.
And with God's help, it is something I will be blessed to remain all the days of my life.
Thank you. God bless the people of Israel and our eternal capital city.
"Convert or die, Jew!" -- the last Jews in Yemen are leaving now
"Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance." -- Barack Obama, Cairo, June 4, 2009
Islamic Tolerance Alert: "The tragedy of the Yemeni Jews," by Lyn Julius in The Guardian, June 7 (thanks to Paul): The last Jews of Yemen are leaving. They are packing their bags and moving to Israel or the US. A community dating back to Biblical times is on the brink of extinction.
Sixty years ago one million Jews lived in Arab countries, but violence and state-sanctioned discrimination scapegoating them as Zionist spies have forced out all but 4,000 – who remain mainly in Yemen, Morocco and Tunisia.
Uh, do they have a...Right of Return?
Most Jews were airlifted from Yemen to Israel in the 1950s. The 400 left have resisted moving to Israel, having come under the influence of the non-Zionist Satmar sect. Some returned after a taste of life in the US or Israel (the government generally turns a blind eye to Jews travelling to the Jewish state). Now things have got so bad that even these die-hards are departing.
The murder in December of Moshe al-Nahari, a 30-year-old teacher based in Reda, north of the Yemeni capital, sparked this latest crisis. At first, the authorities claimed that the murderer was "mentally imbalanced". But it became clear that he was religiously motivated, screaming "convert or die, Jew!" as he pumped five bullets into his victim.
For some time jihadist gangs have been harassing Jews in Yemen. Girls have been abducted and forced to marry local tribesmen. Two years ago, 45 Jews, driven out of their village of al-Salem in north Yemen by threats from Shia Houthis, were relocated to the capital Sana'a.
Yemen is hardly an oasis of tranquility: it has more guns than people. The Jews are not the only ones to suffer in its long history of lawlessness and instability. Lately, however, Jews have had it especially tough.
Jews, tribal sheikhs, rights activists and lawyers all concur that harassment has reached an all-time high. After al-Nahari's murder, the Jews were besieged in their own homes and petrol bombs lobbed at them. Moshe's brother, rabbi Yahia Ya'ish, appealed to the government: "protect or deport us". Those wishing to leave could not claim their passports because the government's computers had mysteriously broken down.
Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, pledged to take the Jews under his wing in Sana'a, where, in contrast to the countryside, he has firm control. Some say the government is well-meaning but ineffective; others that the promised relocation was never serious. The Jews were to be re-housed in two blocks, too cramped for their large families and vulnerable to attack. But they could not even sell their homes in Reda after local imams intimidated would-be buyers.
The Al-Nahari murder verdict in March was the last straw. During the trial the murderer's family threatened the victim's relatives. Instead of the prescribed death sentence, the judge ordered the murderer to pay "blood money". The Jews felt less secure than ever: the Jewish Agency and the US government swung into action to plan the Jews' rescue and resettlement.
Mahmud Taha, a journalist who has been following the story, is not surprised that the Jews want to go. "There is no option for the Yemeni Jews but to migrate. The local authorities have failed to protect them ... The Jews are fed up and have reached an intolerable situation," he said.
Mansour Hayel, a Muslim human rights activist and Yemeni Jewry expert, blames the government: "In Yemen there is hardly a mosque sermon that's free of bigotry. The government's own political rhetoric marginalises the Jews, and civil society is too weak to protect them," he says.
Perhaps because they understand that tolerance towards minorities is the key to strengthening Yemen civil society, Yemeni human rights activists
have been vigorously defending Jewish rights. They want the media to start promoting democracy and tolerance; and equal civil rights for Jews, who pay discriminatory taxes and, as dhimmis, suffer various handicaps under sharia law. But Jews whose lives are in danger are unlikely to stick around long enough to see such reforms implemented.
The lesson one draws from the final exodus of the Jews of Yemen is that the Arab world does not even tolerate non-Zionist Jews. There can be no future for the pitiful remnant in Arab lands if their safety cannot be guaranteed.
In Morocco, where the Jewish community is largest, Jews traditionally repaid the king's sympathy with tremendous loyalty. But the king of Morocco was unable or unwilling to prevent 260,000 Jews leaving in the face of rising antisemitism in the 1960s, media incitement and forced conversions.
Even benevolent rulers have been powerless to stem the rising tide of anti-Jewish hatred engulfing the Arab world. Few Arabs are now likely to meet a Jew in their lifetime, and the gullible believe the demonisation and conspiracy theories peddled by their media.
No wonder Jews have spurned official invitations for them to return to live in their countries of birth. Jews visit as tourists, but few see their future in these countries. In Tunisia and Morocco al-Qaida targeted Jews in 2002 and 2003. In April the murder of a Jew in Casablanca sent the community into a panic.In May, eight terrorists were arrested for planning attacks on Jewish sites.
If Morocco and Tunisia fail to keep a lid on jihadist terrorism and incitement, their last Jews, too, will soon be following the beleaguered Jews of Yemen into exile.
Islamic Tolerance Alert: "The tragedy of the Yemeni Jews," by Lyn Julius in The Guardian, June 7 (thanks to Paul): The last Jews of Yemen are leaving. They are packing their bags and moving to Israel or the US. A community dating back to Biblical times is on the brink of extinction.
Sixty years ago one million Jews lived in Arab countries, but violence and state-sanctioned discrimination scapegoating them as Zionist spies have forced out all but 4,000 – who remain mainly in Yemen, Morocco and Tunisia.
Uh, do they have a...Right of Return?
Most Jews were airlifted from Yemen to Israel in the 1950s. The 400 left have resisted moving to Israel, having come under the influence of the non-Zionist Satmar sect. Some returned after a taste of life in the US or Israel (the government generally turns a blind eye to Jews travelling to the Jewish state). Now things have got so bad that even these die-hards are departing.
The murder in December of Moshe al-Nahari, a 30-year-old teacher based in Reda, north of the Yemeni capital, sparked this latest crisis. At first, the authorities claimed that the murderer was "mentally imbalanced". But it became clear that he was religiously motivated, screaming "convert or die, Jew!" as he pumped five bullets into his victim.
For some time jihadist gangs have been harassing Jews in Yemen. Girls have been abducted and forced to marry local tribesmen. Two years ago, 45 Jews, driven out of their village of al-Salem in north Yemen by threats from Shia Houthis, were relocated to the capital Sana'a.
Yemen is hardly an oasis of tranquility: it has more guns than people. The Jews are not the only ones to suffer in its long history of lawlessness and instability. Lately, however, Jews have had it especially tough.
Jews, tribal sheikhs, rights activists and lawyers all concur that harassment has reached an all-time high. After al-Nahari's murder, the Jews were besieged in their own homes and petrol bombs lobbed at them. Moshe's brother, rabbi Yahia Ya'ish, appealed to the government: "protect or deport us". Those wishing to leave could not claim their passports because the government's computers had mysteriously broken down.
Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, pledged to take the Jews under his wing in Sana'a, where, in contrast to the countryside, he has firm control. Some say the government is well-meaning but ineffective; others that the promised relocation was never serious. The Jews were to be re-housed in two blocks, too cramped for their large families and vulnerable to attack. But they could not even sell their homes in Reda after local imams intimidated would-be buyers.
The Al-Nahari murder verdict in March was the last straw. During the trial the murderer's family threatened the victim's relatives. Instead of the prescribed death sentence, the judge ordered the murderer to pay "blood money". The Jews felt less secure than ever: the Jewish Agency and the US government swung into action to plan the Jews' rescue and resettlement.
Mahmud Taha, a journalist who has been following the story, is not surprised that the Jews want to go. "There is no option for the Yemeni Jews but to migrate. The local authorities have failed to protect them ... The Jews are fed up and have reached an intolerable situation," he said.
Mansour Hayel, a Muslim human rights activist and Yemeni Jewry expert, blames the government: "In Yemen there is hardly a mosque sermon that's free of bigotry. The government's own political rhetoric marginalises the Jews, and civil society is too weak to protect them," he says.
Perhaps because they understand that tolerance towards minorities is the key to strengthening Yemen civil society, Yemeni human rights activists
have been vigorously defending Jewish rights. They want the media to start promoting democracy and tolerance; and equal civil rights for Jews, who pay discriminatory taxes and, as dhimmis, suffer various handicaps under sharia law. But Jews whose lives are in danger are unlikely to stick around long enough to see such reforms implemented.
The lesson one draws from the final exodus of the Jews of Yemen is that the Arab world does not even tolerate non-Zionist Jews. There can be no future for the pitiful remnant in Arab lands if their safety cannot be guaranteed.
In Morocco, where the Jewish community is largest, Jews traditionally repaid the king's sympathy with tremendous loyalty. But the king of Morocco was unable or unwilling to prevent 260,000 Jews leaving in the face of rising antisemitism in the 1960s, media incitement and forced conversions.
Even benevolent rulers have been powerless to stem the rising tide of anti-Jewish hatred engulfing the Arab world. Few Arabs are now likely to meet a Jew in their lifetime, and the gullible believe the demonisation and conspiracy theories peddled by their media.
No wonder Jews have spurned official invitations for them to return to live in their countries of birth. Jews visit as tourists, but few see their future in these countries. In Tunisia and Morocco al-Qaida targeted Jews in 2002 and 2003. In April the murder of a Jew in Casablanca sent the community into a panic.In May, eight terrorists were arrested for planning attacks on Jewish sites.
If Morocco and Tunisia fail to keep a lid on jihadist terrorism and incitement, their last Jews, too, will soon be following the beleaguered Jews of Yemen into exile.
Sunday, June 07, 2009
My comment to the WashPost re Obama's 'even-handed' speech
The following represents a response to a recent Washington Post article-CG
Were Pres.Obama as knowledgeable about history as he is capable of delivering a speech he would know that the Arabs have been terrorizing Jews in the M.E. for more than 100 years - long before the recreation of a Jewish state. Other facts that he misses: the original Jewish Palestine included the land both east and west of the Jordan
River; close to 80% of that land - east of the river- was cut off by Churchill to create Transjordan where Jews could not settle. All of today's Palestine was to have remained as the Jewish homeland. Even the existence of such a state was objected to by the Arabs who demanded that the British limit Jewish immigration even to those fleeing the Holocaust.
At the same time the British appeased the Arabs and permitted their immigration from neighboring countries
and looked aside as Jews were massacred. This was a 'land grab' by the Arabs and, if there is 'occupation',
the truth is that that accusation against Israel is the reverse. Jews thrown out of Arab lands were true refugees - who were absorbed by Israel and dignified with Israeli citizenship; the 26 Arab/Muslim countries would do the same if they cared as much about their brethren as they do about killing Israelis. Israel is not responsible for the lack of 'dignity' caused by Arab leaders.
In addition, Obama's reference about 'destroying/ saving a world when one destroys/saves one person' originated not with the 'Holy Koran' as he stated but from Jewish writings many hundreds of years before the creation of Islam. The distortions of historical fact and intentional omissions of truth by Pres. Obama should make us wary.
Today is D-Day; we remember the tremendous sacrifice of Americans as they fought the Nazis whose evil intent to eradicate Jews was then supported by the Muslim religious leader, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and his followers who have not changed their goal even today.
Comment: The article that sparked this reply follows:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/04/AR2009060404553.html?wpisrc=newsletter
Using New Language, President Shows Understanding for Both Sides in Middle East
By Glenn Kessler and Jacqueline L. Salmon
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 5, 2009
There was no mention of "terrorists" or "terrorism," just "violent extremists." There was the suggestion that Israeli settlements are illegitimate and the assertion that the Palestinians "have suffered in pursuit of a homeland." There were frequent references to the "Holy Koran" and echoes of Muslim phrases.
President Obama, who aides say spent many hours "holed up" in the past week revising his Cairo speech, clearly believes in the power of his oratory to win people to his point of view. In many ways, he used his address to promote American values, but his efforts to use new language to recast old grievances have already prompted debate and consternation in some quarters.
At the same time, he avoided specific complaints about the lack of freedoms in the Muslim world. Instead, he spoke of the need to obtain concrete political goals, such as the fair administration of justice. He made no mention of his host, President Hosni Mubarak, a snub surely noticed by Egypt's autocratic ruler of nearly three decades.
In discussing the Arab-Israeli conflict, Obama was both resolute in expressing support for Israel and remarkably sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians. In an Arab capital, he spoke of America's "unbreakable" bond with Israel and condemned anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, an apparent repudiation of the anti-Israeli rhetoric that periodically emanates from Iran. Yet he also seemed to draw an equivalence between Jewish and Palestinian suffering, noting "the daily humiliations -- large and small -- that come with occupation."
He said they were "two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive."
For some hawkish Israelis, the comparison was too much. Aryeh Eldad, a member of parliament with the National Union party, decried what he called "a shocking parallel between the destruction of European Jewry and the suffering that the Arabs of Israel brought upon themselves when they declared war on Israel."
Some Palestinians said they were gratified by Obama's words. "He compared Palestinians under Israeli occupation with slaves. This was powerful. He made everyone feel close and at home," said Eyad El Sarraj, a psychiatrist who heads the Gaza Community Mental Health Program in the Gaza Strip.
In contrast to what Obama called "the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity," the president was sharply critical of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank: "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements." Not since Jimmy Carter has a U.S. president in his own voice declared the settlements to be illegal, but Obama tiptoed very close to the line. He also deftly referred to a "Jewish homeland," slightly different from Israel's demands that it be considered a Jewish state.
Obama also appeared to break ground on Israel's possession of nuclear weapons, without even mentioning them specifically. He seemed to acknowledge the double standard of accepting Israel's weapons but opposing Iran's nuclear ambitions, and then made a specific reference to the responsibilities and rights of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Iran has signed but Israel has not. Nuclear power should be the right of any nation that complies with its responsibilities under the treaty, "and it must be kept for all who fully abide by it," Obama said. "And I'm hopeful that all countries in the region can share in this goal."
Obama quoted from the holy books of all three Abrahamic faiths -- Islam, Christianity and Judaism. But, most especially, he drew on the Koran as well as other Islamic religious teachings and sayings to provide the spiritual underpinnings of his speech.
Mohamed Magid, imam at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society Center, a Sterling mosque, and vice president of the Islamic Society of North America, said he was "amazed" at the sophisticated use that Obama made of Islam's holy text. "He was taking verses from the Koran to support his arguments," Magid said. "He was looking to persuade them to believe in the ideas that he wanted to share with them -- 'Not only listen to my words, but your own religion asks you to do the same.' "
Obama quoted three times from the Koran, the 114-chapter Islamic holy book that Muslims revere as the word of God revealed to Muhammad, the founder of Islam, in the 7th century.
The first, quoted by Obama as "Be conscious of God and speak always the truth," is from Chapter 33, Verse 70, titled "Ahzab," or "The Confederates," and addresses the issue of those who are hypocritical in their faith and maintaining one's faith in hard times. It was quoted by Muhammad in his final sermon before he died, and imams worldwide use it frequently in Friday sermons, said Jonathan Brown, a Muslim who is a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Washington.
When Obama used that verse, said Brown, "he wasn't just quoting from the Koran, but he was doing what any Muslim preacher would do when speaking to an audience."
Most striking to many Muslims was Obama's use of the phrase "May peace be upon them" when referring to Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. It is a term of respect and reverence that Muslims use when referring, in speech or in writing, to such figures, and rarely is used by non-Muslims.
Ben Rhodes, Obama's chief foreign policy speechwriter, said Obama told him "to cast a wide net" in preparing the address. That included conference calls and meetings between Muslim Americans and national security staff.
Tariq Malhance, the president of the largest Muslim community center in Chicago, was invited to participate in one of the calls, and later he sent an e-mail to the White House urging Obama to "be mindful" that most Muslims around the world are not Arabs.
Almost two weeks ago, senior Obama advisers met with an even broader group of Muslim leaders at the White House, including activists and academics from across the political spectrum, according to participants. One of those at the meeting, University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami, said the result was a speech that provided a far more specific description of Obama's goals on a series of issues related to Muslims, Middle East peace and the Arab world.
"Now the pressure mounts, though, because expectations rise," Telhami said. "Once you designate specific issues, people start looking for actions. This speech raises the stakes, and the pressure is going to mount to deliver something more than just a dialogue."
Staff writer Michael D. Shear contributed to this report.
Were Pres.Obama as knowledgeable about history as he is capable of delivering a speech he would know that the Arabs have been terrorizing Jews in the M.E. for more than 100 years - long before the recreation of a Jewish state. Other facts that he misses: the original Jewish Palestine included the land both east and west of the Jordan
River; close to 80% of that land - east of the river- was cut off by Churchill to create Transjordan where Jews could not settle. All of today's Palestine was to have remained as the Jewish homeland. Even the existence of such a state was objected to by the Arabs who demanded that the British limit Jewish immigration even to those fleeing the Holocaust.
At the same time the British appeased the Arabs and permitted their immigration from neighboring countries
and looked aside as Jews were massacred. This was a 'land grab' by the Arabs and, if there is 'occupation',
the truth is that that accusation against Israel is the reverse. Jews thrown out of Arab lands were true refugees - who were absorbed by Israel and dignified with Israeli citizenship; the 26 Arab/Muslim countries would do the same if they cared as much about their brethren as they do about killing Israelis. Israel is not responsible for the lack of 'dignity' caused by Arab leaders.
In addition, Obama's reference about 'destroying/ saving a world when one destroys/saves one person' originated not with the 'Holy Koran' as he stated but from Jewish writings many hundreds of years before the creation of Islam. The distortions of historical fact and intentional omissions of truth by Pres. Obama should make us wary.
Today is D-Day; we remember the tremendous sacrifice of Americans as they fought the Nazis whose evil intent to eradicate Jews was then supported by the Muslim religious leader, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and his followers who have not changed their goal even today.
Comment: The article that sparked this reply follows:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/04/AR2009060404553.html?wpisrc=newsletter
Using New Language, President Shows Understanding for Both Sides in Middle East
By Glenn Kessler and Jacqueline L. Salmon
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 5, 2009
There was no mention of "terrorists" or "terrorism," just "violent extremists." There was the suggestion that Israeli settlements are illegitimate and the assertion that the Palestinians "have suffered in pursuit of a homeland." There were frequent references to the "Holy Koran" and echoes of Muslim phrases.
President Obama, who aides say spent many hours "holed up" in the past week revising his Cairo speech, clearly believes in the power of his oratory to win people to his point of view. In many ways, he used his address to promote American values, but his efforts to use new language to recast old grievances have already prompted debate and consternation in some quarters.
At the same time, he avoided specific complaints about the lack of freedoms in the Muslim world. Instead, he spoke of the need to obtain concrete political goals, such as the fair administration of justice. He made no mention of his host, President Hosni Mubarak, a snub surely noticed by Egypt's autocratic ruler of nearly three decades.
In discussing the Arab-Israeli conflict, Obama was both resolute in expressing support for Israel and remarkably sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians. In an Arab capital, he spoke of America's "unbreakable" bond with Israel and condemned anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, an apparent repudiation of the anti-Israeli rhetoric that periodically emanates from Iran. Yet he also seemed to draw an equivalence between Jewish and Palestinian suffering, noting "the daily humiliations -- large and small -- that come with occupation."
He said they were "two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive."
For some hawkish Israelis, the comparison was too much. Aryeh Eldad, a member of parliament with the National Union party, decried what he called "a shocking parallel between the destruction of European Jewry and the suffering that the Arabs of Israel brought upon themselves when they declared war on Israel."
Some Palestinians said they were gratified by Obama's words. "He compared Palestinians under Israeli occupation with slaves. This was powerful. He made everyone feel close and at home," said Eyad El Sarraj, a psychiatrist who heads the Gaza Community Mental Health Program in the Gaza Strip.
In contrast to what Obama called "the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity," the president was sharply critical of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank: "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements." Not since Jimmy Carter has a U.S. president in his own voice declared the settlements to be illegal, but Obama tiptoed very close to the line. He also deftly referred to a "Jewish homeland," slightly different from Israel's demands that it be considered a Jewish state.
Obama also appeared to break ground on Israel's possession of nuclear weapons, without even mentioning them specifically. He seemed to acknowledge the double standard of accepting Israel's weapons but opposing Iran's nuclear ambitions, and then made a specific reference to the responsibilities and rights of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Iran has signed but Israel has not. Nuclear power should be the right of any nation that complies with its responsibilities under the treaty, "and it must be kept for all who fully abide by it," Obama said. "And I'm hopeful that all countries in the region can share in this goal."
Obama quoted from the holy books of all three Abrahamic faiths -- Islam, Christianity and Judaism. But, most especially, he drew on the Koran as well as other Islamic religious teachings and sayings to provide the spiritual underpinnings of his speech.
Mohamed Magid, imam at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society Center, a Sterling mosque, and vice president of the Islamic Society of North America, said he was "amazed" at the sophisticated use that Obama made of Islam's holy text. "He was taking verses from the Koran to support his arguments," Magid said. "He was looking to persuade them to believe in the ideas that he wanted to share with them -- 'Not only listen to my words, but your own religion asks you to do the same.' "
Obama quoted three times from the Koran, the 114-chapter Islamic holy book that Muslims revere as the word of God revealed to Muhammad, the founder of Islam, in the 7th century.
The first, quoted by Obama as "Be conscious of God and speak always the truth," is from Chapter 33, Verse 70, titled "Ahzab," or "The Confederates," and addresses the issue of those who are hypocritical in their faith and maintaining one's faith in hard times. It was quoted by Muhammad in his final sermon before he died, and imams worldwide use it frequently in Friday sermons, said Jonathan Brown, a Muslim who is a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Washington.
When Obama used that verse, said Brown, "he wasn't just quoting from the Koran, but he was doing what any Muslim preacher would do when speaking to an audience."
Most striking to many Muslims was Obama's use of the phrase "May peace be upon them" when referring to Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. It is a term of respect and reverence that Muslims use when referring, in speech or in writing, to such figures, and rarely is used by non-Muslims.
Ben Rhodes, Obama's chief foreign policy speechwriter, said Obama told him "to cast a wide net" in preparing the address. That included conference calls and meetings between Muslim Americans and national security staff.
Tariq Malhance, the president of the largest Muslim community center in Chicago, was invited to participate in one of the calls, and later he sent an e-mail to the White House urging Obama to "be mindful" that most Muslims around the world are not Arabs.
Almost two weeks ago, senior Obama advisers met with an even broader group of Muslim leaders at the White House, including activists and academics from across the political spectrum, according to participants. One of those at the meeting, University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami, said the result was a speech that provided a far more specific description of Obama's goals on a series of issues related to Muslims, Middle East peace and the Arab world.
"Now the pressure mounts, though, because expectations rise," Telhami said. "Once you designate specific issues, people start looking for actions. This speech raises the stakes, and the pressure is going to mount to deliver something more than just a dialogue."
Staff writer Michael D. Shear contributed to this report.
Mark Steyn: Obama's message of weakness
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/world-muslim-president-2446787-obama-one#
As recently as last summer, General Motors filing for bankruptcy would have been the biggest news story of the week. But it's not such a very great step from the unthinkable to the inevitable, and by the time it actually happened the market barely noticed, and the media were focused on the president's "address to the Muslim world." As it happens, these two stories are the same story: snapshots, at home and abroad, of the hyperpower in eclipse. It's a long time since anyone touted GM as the emblematic brand of America – What's good for GM is good for America, etc. In fact, it's more emblematic than ever: Like General Motors, the U.S. government spends more than it makes, and has airily committed itself to ever more unsustainable levels of benefits. GM has about 95,000 workers but provides health benefits to a million people: It's not a business enterprise, but a vast welfare plan with a tiny loss-making commercial sector. As GM goes, so goes America?
But who cares? Overseas, the coolest president in history was giving a speech. Or, as the official press release headlined it on the State Department Web site, "President Obama Speaks To The Muslim World From Cairo."
Let's pause right there: It's interesting how easily the words "the Muslim world" roll off the tongues of liberal secular progressives who'd choke on any equivalent reference to "the Christian world." When such hyperalert policemen of the perimeter between church and state endorse the former but not the latter, they're implicitly acknowledging that Islam is not merely a faith but a political project, too. There is an "Organization of the Islamic Conference," which is already the largest single voting bloc at the United Nations and is still adding new members. Imagine if someone proposed an "Organization of the Christian Conference" that would hold summits attended by prime ministers and Presidents, and vote as a bloc in transnational bodies. But, of course, there is no "Christian world": Europe is largely post-Christian and, as President Barack Obama bizarrely asserted to a European interviewer last week, America is "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world." Perhaps we're eligible for membership in the OIC.
I suppose the benign interpretation is that, as head of state of the last superpower, Obama is indulging in a little harmless condescension. In his Cairo speech, he congratulated Muslims on inventing algebra and quoted approvingly one of the less-bloodcurdling sections of the Quran. As sociohistorical scholarship goes, I found myself recalling that moment in the long twilight of the Habsburg Empire when Crown Prince Rudolph and his mistress were found dead at the royal hunting lodge at Mayerling – either a double suicide, or something even more sinister. Happily, in the Broadway musical version, instead of being found dead, the star-crossed lovers emigrate to America and settle down on a farm in Pennsylvania. Recently, my old comrade Stephen Fry gave an amusing lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in London on the popular Americanism, "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade" – or, if something's bitter and hard to swallow, add sugar and sell it. That's what the president did with Islam: He added sugar and sold it.
The speech nevertheless impressed many conservatives, including Rich Lowry, my esteemed editor at National Review, "esteemed editor" being the sort of thing one says before booting the boss in the crotch. Rich thought that the president succeeded in his principal task: "Fundamentally, Obama's goal was to tell the Muslim world, 'We respect and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that you don't hate us and murder us in return.'" But those terms are too narrow. You don't have to murder a guy if he preemptively surrenders. And you don't even have to hate him if you're too busy despising him. The savvier Muslim potentates have no desire to be sitting in a smelly cave in the Hindu Kush, sharing a latrine with a dozen half-witted goatherds while plotting how to blow up the Empire State Building. Nevertheless, they share key goals with the cave dwellers – including the wish to expand the boundaries of "the Muslim world" and (as in the anti-blasphemy push at the U.N.) to place Islam, globally, beyond criticism. The nonterrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to Western notions of liberty and pluralism.
Once Obama moved on from the more generalized Islamoschmoozing to the details, the subtext – the absence of American will – became explicit. He used the cover of multilateralism and moral equivalence to communicate, consistently, American weakness: "No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons." Perhaps by "no single nation" he means the "global community" should pick and choose, which means the U.N. Security Council, which means the Big Five, which means that Russia and China will pursue their own murky interests and that, in the absence of American leadership, Britain and France will reach their accommodations with a nuclear Iran, a nuclear North Korea and any other psychostate minded to join them.
On the other hand, a "single nation" certainly has the right to tell another nation anything it wants if that nation happens to be the Zionist Entity: As Hillary Clinton just instructed Israel regarding its West Bank communities, there has to be "a stop to settlements – not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions." No "natural growth"? You mean, if you and the missus have a kid, you've got to talk gran'ma into moving out? To Tel Aviv, or Brooklyn or wherever? At a stroke, the administration has endorsed "the Muslim world's" view of those non-Muslims who happen to find themselves within what it regards as lands belonging to Islam: the Jewish and Christian communities are free to stand still or shrink, but not to grow. Would Obama be comfortable mandating "no natural growth" to Israel's million-and-a-half Muslims? No. But the administration has embraced "the Muslim world's" commitment to one-way multiculturalism, whereby Islam expands in the West but Christianity and Judaism shrivel remorselessly in the Middle East.
And so it goes. Like General Motors, America is "too big to fail." So it won't, not immediately. It will linger on in a twilight existence, sclerotic and ineffectual, declining unto a kind of societal dementia, unable to keep pace with what's happening and with an ever more tenuous grip on its own past, but able on occasion to throw out impressive words albeit strung together without much meaning: empower, peace, justice, prosperity – just to take one windy gust from the president's Cairo speech.
There's better phrase-making in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, in a coinage of Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Committee on Foreign Relations. The president emeritus is a sober, judicious paragon of torpidly conventional wisdom. Nevertheless, musing on American decline, he writes, "The country's economy, infrastructure, public schools and political system have been allowed to deteriorate. The result has been diminished economic strength, a less-vital democracy, and a mediocrity of spirit." That last is the one to watch: A great power can survive a lot of things, but not "a mediocrity of spirit." A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for a while. That sound you heard in Cairo is the tingy ping of a hollow superpower.
As recently as last summer, General Motors filing for bankruptcy would have been the biggest news story of the week. But it's not such a very great step from the unthinkable to the inevitable, and by the time it actually happened the market barely noticed, and the media were focused on the president's "address to the Muslim world." As it happens, these two stories are the same story: snapshots, at home and abroad, of the hyperpower in eclipse. It's a long time since anyone touted GM as the emblematic brand of America – What's good for GM is good for America, etc. In fact, it's more emblematic than ever: Like General Motors, the U.S. government spends more than it makes, and has airily committed itself to ever more unsustainable levels of benefits. GM has about 95,000 workers but provides health benefits to a million people: It's not a business enterprise, but a vast welfare plan with a tiny loss-making commercial sector. As GM goes, so goes America?
But who cares? Overseas, the coolest president in history was giving a speech. Or, as the official press release headlined it on the State Department Web site, "President Obama Speaks To The Muslim World From Cairo."
Let's pause right there: It's interesting how easily the words "the Muslim world" roll off the tongues of liberal secular progressives who'd choke on any equivalent reference to "the Christian world." When such hyperalert policemen of the perimeter between church and state endorse the former but not the latter, they're implicitly acknowledging that Islam is not merely a faith but a political project, too. There is an "Organization of the Islamic Conference," which is already the largest single voting bloc at the United Nations and is still adding new members. Imagine if someone proposed an "Organization of the Christian Conference" that would hold summits attended by prime ministers and Presidents, and vote as a bloc in transnational bodies. But, of course, there is no "Christian world": Europe is largely post-Christian and, as President Barack Obama bizarrely asserted to a European interviewer last week, America is "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world." Perhaps we're eligible for membership in the OIC.
I suppose the benign interpretation is that, as head of state of the last superpower, Obama is indulging in a little harmless condescension. In his Cairo speech, he congratulated Muslims on inventing algebra and quoted approvingly one of the less-bloodcurdling sections of the Quran. As sociohistorical scholarship goes, I found myself recalling that moment in the long twilight of the Habsburg Empire when Crown Prince Rudolph and his mistress were found dead at the royal hunting lodge at Mayerling – either a double suicide, or something even more sinister. Happily, in the Broadway musical version, instead of being found dead, the star-crossed lovers emigrate to America and settle down on a farm in Pennsylvania. Recently, my old comrade Stephen Fry gave an amusing lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in London on the popular Americanism, "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade" – or, if something's bitter and hard to swallow, add sugar and sell it. That's what the president did with Islam: He added sugar and sold it.
The speech nevertheless impressed many conservatives, including Rich Lowry, my esteemed editor at National Review, "esteemed editor" being the sort of thing one says before booting the boss in the crotch. Rich thought that the president succeeded in his principal task: "Fundamentally, Obama's goal was to tell the Muslim world, 'We respect and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that you don't hate us and murder us in return.'" But those terms are too narrow. You don't have to murder a guy if he preemptively surrenders. And you don't even have to hate him if you're too busy despising him. The savvier Muslim potentates have no desire to be sitting in a smelly cave in the Hindu Kush, sharing a latrine with a dozen half-witted goatherds while plotting how to blow up the Empire State Building. Nevertheless, they share key goals with the cave dwellers – including the wish to expand the boundaries of "the Muslim world" and (as in the anti-blasphemy push at the U.N.) to place Islam, globally, beyond criticism. The nonterrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to Western notions of liberty and pluralism.
Once Obama moved on from the more generalized Islamoschmoozing to the details, the subtext – the absence of American will – became explicit. He used the cover of multilateralism and moral equivalence to communicate, consistently, American weakness: "No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons." Perhaps by "no single nation" he means the "global community" should pick and choose, which means the U.N. Security Council, which means the Big Five, which means that Russia and China will pursue their own murky interests and that, in the absence of American leadership, Britain and France will reach their accommodations with a nuclear Iran, a nuclear North Korea and any other psychostate minded to join them.
On the other hand, a "single nation" certainly has the right to tell another nation anything it wants if that nation happens to be the Zionist Entity: As Hillary Clinton just instructed Israel regarding its West Bank communities, there has to be "a stop to settlements – not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions." No "natural growth"? You mean, if you and the missus have a kid, you've got to talk gran'ma into moving out? To Tel Aviv, or Brooklyn or wherever? At a stroke, the administration has endorsed "the Muslim world's" view of those non-Muslims who happen to find themselves within what it regards as lands belonging to Islam: the Jewish and Christian communities are free to stand still or shrink, but not to grow. Would Obama be comfortable mandating "no natural growth" to Israel's million-and-a-half Muslims? No. But the administration has embraced "the Muslim world's" commitment to one-way multiculturalism, whereby Islam expands in the West but Christianity and Judaism shrivel remorselessly in the Middle East.
And so it goes. Like General Motors, America is "too big to fail." So it won't, not immediately. It will linger on in a twilight existence, sclerotic and ineffectual, declining unto a kind of societal dementia, unable to keep pace with what's happening and with an ever more tenuous grip on its own past, but able on occasion to throw out impressive words albeit strung together without much meaning: empower, peace, justice, prosperity – just to take one windy gust from the president's Cairo speech.
There's better phrase-making in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, in a coinage of Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Committee on Foreign Relations. The president emeritus is a sober, judicious paragon of torpidly conventional wisdom. Nevertheless, musing on American decline, he writes, "The country's economy, infrastructure, public schools and political system have been allowed to deteriorate. The result has been diminished economic strength, a less-vital democracy, and a mediocrity of spirit." That last is the one to watch: A great power can survive a lot of things, but not "a mediocrity of spirit." A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for a while. That sound you heard in Cairo is the tingy ping of a hollow superpower.
Not expecting any credit to be given:Shechem Crossings Operate Round the Clock
Hana Levi
A7 News
The Hawara and Barrel crossings into the Palestinian Authority, both located near the PA-controlled Samarian city of Shechem, have begun round-the-clock operation, according to the IDF Spokesperson. The two crossings join the Atzira a-Shamalia checkpoint that began to operate 24 hours a day, effective last week, further easing movement in the area.
The measure was taken as part of the “goodwill” gestures to the PA negotiated during the Olmert administration. It was authorized following meetings held between the OC Central Command Major-General Gadi Shamni, the head of the Judea-Samaria division, Brigadier-General Noam Tibon, the head of the Civil Administration, Brigadier-General Yoav Mordechai, and officials in the Palestinian Authority.
As the crossings were opened to round-the-clock traffic, PA terrorists attacked an IDF unit Saturday near the city of Kalkilye, also located in Samaria. However, the bomb hurled at the force did not explode, and the soldiers were unhurt. IDF sappers safely destroyed the bomb.
Late Saturday night, IDF troops arrested four wanted terror suspects in Samaria during counterterrorism operations. The four were arrested in Jelizone, north of the PA city of Ramallah, near the Jewish town of Beit El.
Two other suspects were rounded up south of Jerusalem, in the Judean city of Hevron. All six were transferred to security personnel for investigation by the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet). A few hours earlier, a group of Arab men hurled a firebomb at Border Police officers near the Judean village of Abu Dis, next to Jerusalem. The officers were not injured in the attack.
Border Police also disarmed and arrested a terrorist earlier in the day who was trying to enter the Jewish neighborhood of Hevron. The officers confiscated a knife after searching the would-be attacker, who was a local Arab resident. He was taken into custody.
Saudis to US: Issue Ultimatum to Israel
Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
A7 News
The United States should cut off all to Israel if the Jewish state does not accept the terms of the 2002 Saudi Peace Plan, Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told Newsweek magazine. In answer to a question if U.S. President Barack Obama should use financial help as a tool to force Israel to implement the plan, the Foreign Minister stated, "Why not? If you give aid to someone and they indiscriminately occupy other people's lands, you bear some responsibility."
He also made it clear that the only concession the Arab world can make to Israel is diplomatic recognition, meaning that all other terms of the Saudi peace initiative are non-negotiable. “We don't have anything to offer Israel except normalization, and if we put that before the return of Arab land we are giving away the only chip in the hands of Arab countries,” he told the news weekly.
The interview was conducted the day after President Obama’s speech calling on a “new beginning” in relations between Muslim nations and the U.S.
Foreign Minister al-Faisal said that Israel “must be reasonable and make reasonable concessions.” Echoing the Arab demand that the Obama government take concrete steps, he revealed that during the president’s visit to Saudi Arabia the day before his Cairo speech, the monarchy told him it wanted to see action.
“But we did not expect him [Oba to be so specific,” the Foreign Minister revealed. “He called Israeli settlements in the West Bank ‘not legitimate’ -- and this is more important, and stronger, than ‘not legal.’”
The Saudi Peace Plans calls for the 22-member Arab league to recognize Israel as a country, but not necessarily as a Jewish state, on condition that it surrender all of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, including numerous neighborhoods in Jerusalem and the Old City, where the proposed PA state would be headquartered.
It also wants to allow the immigration to Israel of five million foreign Arabs who claim ancestry in Israel.
Re-visiting Obama
Arlene Kushner
Motzei Shabbat (After Shabbat)
A deluge is the proper word, I think, for the amount of commentary that is being produced with regard to Obama's speech (with much of it being forwarded to me). Here I will provide key insights and background that I have not yet covered, and then, in the next few days, I hope to turn to other issues. Please my friends, unless you uncover commentary with a whole different perspective, or news that is startling, do not send me anything else with regard to Obama's talk.
~~~~~~~~~~
In his talk, Obama spoke of the Holocaust, and the suffering Jews endured. In practically his next breath, however, he said:
"On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people...have suffered in pursuit of a homeland...."
And, following this observation, he went on to say:
"For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history..."
~~~~~~~~~~
This is deeply troubling -- offensive! -- and must be challenged at several levels.
There is, first, the unacceptable moral equivalency of his statement: The Jews suffered in the Holocaust...the Palestinians suffered the "nakba" -- as if the historical experience of pain of the Palestinians in being "dislocated" is as great as what we endured in the Shoa (Holocaust) when six million died.
Within this formulation is a libelous implication: That just as we endured the Holocaust, we then brought commensurate suffering on another people. But I won't go in that direction now. For there is more that is unacceptable:
What is also implied in Obama's statement is that we are entitled to a Jewish state BECAUSE there was a Holocaust. And this too, fits with Palestinian mythology. See, they say, it is because of the Holocaust that they suffered dislocation -- the Jews who had nowhere to go came here and pushed them out. Obama doesn't say, as the Palestinians do -- when they lament that they shouldn't have to suffer because of our problems -- that we are not entitled to a state, but his approach leans in this direction.
~~~~~~~~~~
What Obama misses, when he focuses on the Holocaust as the reason we have a claim to a state, is the entire religious and historical basis for our claim here.
He says not a word about this land as divine Jewish inheritance, and this is critical. From the time of the Patriarchs, we Jews have been tied to this land. But the Muslims say today that we have no religious connection here. They have written us out in their falsified version of things, they have attempted to destroy ancient archeological evidence, and they call this land a Muslim wakf (trust) for eternity. It has gotten so bad that they call the Kotel (Western Wall ) an exclusively Muslim site: the place where Mohammad tied his horse or something. (Arafat denied there was a Temple on the Mount, ever, and Abbas has made similar statements.)
Make no mistake about it. The battle for the Land of Israel is at heart a religious battle, not a political one. By not acknowledging the Jewish connection to the land, Obama has left room for the Arabs to continue to make their claims.
~~~~~~~~~~
Obama said not a word about our ancient presence here, going back 3,000 years at least: The City of David, the Temple of Solomon, the Machpelah -- the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and much more, well before there even was Islam.
And he failed to mention our devotion to the land over the millenia, and our continued presence.
In short, he failed to acknowledge this land as our traditional homeland.
~~~~~~~~~~In
Beyond all of this, he ignored our modern Zionist history and the legitimacy of our claim to the land that is founded in international law.
It was in 1922 that the League of Nations granted to Great Britain the Mandate for Palestine, which charged Britain with "secur(ing) the establishment of the Jewish national home," which meant, in the words of the Mandate, that Britain was to "facilitate Jewish immigration" and "encourage close settlement by Jews on the land."
Wording in the Mandate was actually drawn directly from the British Balfour Declaration of 1917. This was a letter that had been written by British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, which said, in part: "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object."
~~~~~~~~~~
This is still a matter of international law that has never been superceded. The responsibilities born by the League of Nations were assumed by the United Nations. When the UN General Assembly, in 1947, voted for partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, this was only a recommendation, as GA resolutions carry no weight in international law. In any event, the Arabs relinquished all claims by rejecting the recommendation.
~~~~~~~~~~
To this day, at the very most, Judea and Samaria, which represent the very heartland of the ancient Jewish presence here, can be said to be unclaimed Mandate land. By no stretch of the imagination is it a given that this is "Palestinian" land or land which is destined, either morally or legally, to be a Palestinian state. This is yet another myth that the world has bought.
The Green Line was an armistice line from the end of the War of Independence in 1949 -- it is not the demarcation of our border. In fact, when Israel and Jordan signed an armistice agreement, written into it was the understanding that future negotiations on a final border for Israel would not be prejudiced by the armistice line.
We are not, by any stretch of the imagination, "occupiers" in Judea and Samaria. This is land to which we have a most legitimate claim (a claim enhanced by the fact that in modern times we re-acquired it in a defensive war). Legally,"occupation" occurs only when one sovereign nation moves into the land of another sovereign nation. This is simply not the case here.
~~~~~~~~~~
Egypt moved into Gaza, and Jordan into Judea and Samaria, in 1949. In 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded. In its charter was a statement that the PLO made no claim against either Egypt or Jordan. That is, there was no claim that Gaza and Judea and Samaria had to be turned over to the Palestinians for a state. It was only Israel within the Green Line that was to be "liberated."
Only after Israel acquired control of Gaza and Judea and Samaria in 1967 did the PLO claim that it had a right to these areas for a state. But in point of fact, UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed after the Six Day War, does not even mention either the Palestinian people or a Palestinian state.
It speaks about pullback of Israel from "territories" but not "all territories": It was never the intention of the framers of this resolution that Israel should return to the Green Line. Withdrawal from whatever territories would not, in any event, take place until Israel was also provided with respect for her sovereignty and territorial integrity, and her right to live in peace within secure borders was acknowledged. This was all to be accomplished concurrently. Under no conditions was Israeli withdrawal conceived of as a precondition, something to be done absent the other stipulations of the resolution.
Israel is absolutely not in non-compliance with the resolution because she hasn't withdrawn from territories. It was not expected that Israel would move from one inch until secure boundaries for Israel were accepted by all belligerents.
There is no legal reason for us to not have settlements in Judea and Samaria.
Even Oslo in no way restricted our right to these settlements.
~~~~~~~~~~
How different this legal reality is from the way the world has come to perceive the situation. This is information that every Jew and every lover of Israel must possess.
We must publicize the realities of the situation continuously and energetically in every possible forum. We must speak out, finally, to tell our narrative and claim our rights.
~~~~~~~~~~
According to news yesterday, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon (Yisrael Beitenu) told reporters in Washington, after meetings he held with government officials and members of Congress, that "Israel won't give up on the continuation of construction in settlement blocs. "Even if it results in a harsh response from the American administration and tension with Washington, it will ultimately dissipate."
Right on!
~~~~~~~~~~
Israel's official response after Obama's talk was appropriate and also demonstrated strength:
"The Government of Israel expresses its hope that this important speech in Cairo will indeed lead to a new period of reconciliation between the Arab and Moslem world and Israel.
"We share President Obama's hope that the American effort heralds the beginning of a new era that will bring about an end to the conflict and lead to Arab recognition of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, living in peace and security in the Middle East.
"Israel is committed to peace and will make every effort to expand the circle of peace while protecting its interests, especially its national security."
~~~~~~~~~~
see my website www.ArlenefromIsrael.info
Motzei Shabbat (After Shabbat)
A deluge is the proper word, I think, for the amount of commentary that is being produced with regard to Obama's speech (with much of it being forwarded to me). Here I will provide key insights and background that I have not yet covered, and then, in the next few days, I hope to turn to other issues. Please my friends, unless you uncover commentary with a whole different perspective, or news that is startling, do not send me anything else with regard to Obama's talk.
~~~~~~~~~~
In his talk, Obama spoke of the Holocaust, and the suffering Jews endured. In practically his next breath, however, he said:
"On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people...have suffered in pursuit of a homeland...."
And, following this observation, he went on to say:
"For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history..."
~~~~~~~~~~
This is deeply troubling -- offensive! -- and must be challenged at several levels.
There is, first, the unacceptable moral equivalency of his statement: The Jews suffered in the Holocaust...the Palestinians suffered the "nakba" -- as if the historical experience of pain of the Palestinians in being "dislocated" is as great as what we endured in the Shoa (Holocaust) when six million died.
Within this formulation is a libelous implication: That just as we endured the Holocaust, we then brought commensurate suffering on another people. But I won't go in that direction now. For there is more that is unacceptable:
What is also implied in Obama's statement is that we are entitled to a Jewish state BECAUSE there was a Holocaust. And this too, fits with Palestinian mythology. See, they say, it is because of the Holocaust that they suffered dislocation -- the Jews who had nowhere to go came here and pushed them out. Obama doesn't say, as the Palestinians do -- when they lament that they shouldn't have to suffer because of our problems -- that we are not entitled to a state, but his approach leans in this direction.
~~~~~~~~~~
What Obama misses, when he focuses on the Holocaust as the reason we have a claim to a state, is the entire religious and historical basis for our claim here.
He says not a word about this land as divine Jewish inheritance, and this is critical. From the time of the Patriarchs, we Jews have been tied to this land. But the Muslims say today that we have no religious connection here. They have written us out in their falsified version of things, they have attempted to destroy ancient archeological evidence, and they call this land a Muslim wakf (trust) for eternity. It has gotten so bad that they call the Kotel (Western Wall ) an exclusively Muslim site: the place where Mohammad tied his horse or something. (Arafat denied there was a Temple on the Mount, ever, and Abbas has made similar statements.)
Make no mistake about it. The battle for the Land of Israel is at heart a religious battle, not a political one. By not acknowledging the Jewish connection to the land, Obama has left room for the Arabs to continue to make their claims.
~~~~~~~~~~
Obama said not a word about our ancient presence here, going back 3,000 years at least: The City of David, the Temple of Solomon, the Machpelah -- the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and much more, well before there even was Islam.
And he failed to mention our devotion to the land over the millenia, and our continued presence.
In short, he failed to acknowledge this land as our traditional homeland.
~~~~~~~~~~In
Beyond all of this, he ignored our modern Zionist history and the legitimacy of our claim to the land that is founded in international law.
It was in 1922 that the League of Nations granted to Great Britain the Mandate for Palestine, which charged Britain with "secur(ing) the establishment of the Jewish national home," which meant, in the words of the Mandate, that Britain was to "facilitate Jewish immigration" and "encourage close settlement by Jews on the land."
Wording in the Mandate was actually drawn directly from the British Balfour Declaration of 1917. This was a letter that had been written by British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, which said, in part: "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object."
~~~~~~~~~~
This is still a matter of international law that has never been superceded. The responsibilities born by the League of Nations were assumed by the United Nations. When the UN General Assembly, in 1947, voted for partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, this was only a recommendation, as GA resolutions carry no weight in international law. In any event, the Arabs relinquished all claims by rejecting the recommendation.
~~~~~~~~~~
To this day, at the very most, Judea and Samaria, which represent the very heartland of the ancient Jewish presence here, can be said to be unclaimed Mandate land. By no stretch of the imagination is it a given that this is "Palestinian" land or land which is destined, either morally or legally, to be a Palestinian state. This is yet another myth that the world has bought.
The Green Line was an armistice line from the end of the War of Independence in 1949 -- it is not the demarcation of our border. In fact, when Israel and Jordan signed an armistice agreement, written into it was the understanding that future negotiations on a final border for Israel would not be prejudiced by the armistice line.
We are not, by any stretch of the imagination, "occupiers" in Judea and Samaria. This is land to which we have a most legitimate claim (a claim enhanced by the fact that in modern times we re-acquired it in a defensive war). Legally,"occupation" occurs only when one sovereign nation moves into the land of another sovereign nation. This is simply not the case here.
~~~~~~~~~~
Egypt moved into Gaza, and Jordan into Judea and Samaria, in 1949. In 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded. In its charter was a statement that the PLO made no claim against either Egypt or Jordan. That is, there was no claim that Gaza and Judea and Samaria had to be turned over to the Palestinians for a state. It was only Israel within the Green Line that was to be "liberated."
Only after Israel acquired control of Gaza and Judea and Samaria in 1967 did the PLO claim that it had a right to these areas for a state. But in point of fact, UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed after the Six Day War, does not even mention either the Palestinian people or a Palestinian state.
It speaks about pullback of Israel from "territories" but not "all territories": It was never the intention of the framers of this resolution that Israel should return to the Green Line. Withdrawal from whatever territories would not, in any event, take place until Israel was also provided with respect for her sovereignty and territorial integrity, and her right to live in peace within secure borders was acknowledged. This was all to be accomplished concurrently. Under no conditions was Israeli withdrawal conceived of as a precondition, something to be done absent the other stipulations of the resolution.
Israel is absolutely not in non-compliance with the resolution because she hasn't withdrawn from territories. It was not expected that Israel would move from one inch until secure boundaries for Israel were accepted by all belligerents.
There is no legal reason for us to not have settlements in Judea and Samaria.
Even Oslo in no way restricted our right to these settlements.
~~~~~~~~~~
How different this legal reality is from the way the world has come to perceive the situation. This is information that every Jew and every lover of Israel must possess.
We must publicize the realities of the situation continuously and energetically in every possible forum. We must speak out, finally, to tell our narrative and claim our rights.
~~~~~~~~~~
According to news yesterday, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon (Yisrael Beitenu) told reporters in Washington, after meetings he held with government officials and members of Congress, that "Israel won't give up on the continuation of construction in settlement blocs. "Even if it results in a harsh response from the American administration and tension with Washington, it will ultimately dissipate."
Right on!
~~~~~~~~~~
Israel's official response after Obama's talk was appropriate and also demonstrated strength:
"The Government of Israel expresses its hope that this important speech in Cairo will indeed lead to a new period of reconciliation between the Arab and Moslem world and Israel.
"We share President Obama's hope that the American effort heralds the beginning of a new era that will bring about an end to the conflict and lead to Arab recognition of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, living in peace and security in the Middle East.
"Israel is committed to peace and will make every effort to expand the circle of peace while protecting its interests, especially its national security."
~~~~~~~~~~
see my website www.ArlenefromIsrael.info
New Outpost Named “Obama Hilltop”
Hillel Fendel
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/131729
(IsraelNN.com) Jewish youths in Judea and Samaria, refusing to accept Obama’s “no Jews” decree, have built yet another neighborhood outpost – and named it “Obama Hilltop.”
The few against the mighty? With U.S. President Barack Obama having told billions of people across the world that a Palestinian state will happen, and that Jews have few if any rights in Judea and Samaria, several dozen Jewish youths in Israel continue to build more outpost neighborhoods in those very areas When Israel’s armed forces come to raze the structures, the youths rebuild them once more.
Ramat Migron, Pnei Shilo
This pattern has repeated itself several times just this week. On Tuesday, youths who had been thrown out of Ramat Migron – outside Migron, north of Jerusalem – set up camp in an abandoned army base near Shilo. Army forces arrived the next day on the scene, named Pnei Shilo, and destroyed the lone wooden hut. The youths say they will return – or rebuild somewhere else.
Shvut Ami, Maoz Esther
In Shvut Ami, just west of Kedumim, young pioneers have rebuilt two structures, which had been destroyed a few days earlier by Border Guard police forces.
In Maoz Esther, outside Kokhav HaShachar in eastern Binyamin (north of Jerusalem), some 250 people gathered to celebrate the re-dedication of a synagogue in memory of Merkaz HaRav terrorist victim Yehonadav Hirschfeld. The synagogue had been destroyed just the day before, as well as the week before, by security forces, and was rebuilt each time.
The hundreds of singing and dancing celebrants were joined by Rabbi Dov Lior, the Chief Rabbi of Kiryat Arba-Hevron, and MK Dr. Michael Ben-Ari (National Union). Rabbi Lior blessed the participants, saying, “Thank G-d, you are healthy in soul and spirit, and are not affected by the weaknesses around us.”
Ben-Ari said, “We can see here yet another healthy expression of the Jewish People’s return to our Land, and we are not planning to leave. We have no other land; the Arabs have 22 countries, and it’s too bad that Obama did not mention that in his speech. Giving them another country means an attempt to destroy the Jewish People in Israel – and we have no intention of being destroyed. The Jewish People are holding on tight to their Land.”
Obama Hilltop
Near Kokhav Yaakov, between Jerusalem and Beit El, a new outpost was formed on Friday morning, tentatively called Givat Obama, or Obama Hilltop. The builders say the name is “in recognition of the president’s actions, which have led to a dramatic increase in the number of outposts being built throughout Judea and Samaria.”
Oz Yehonatan
Yet another new outpost was formed on Friday near Kochav HaShachar. The outpost, named Oz Yehonatan, consists, so far, of one wooden building.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/131729
(IsraelNN.com) Jewish youths in Judea and Samaria, refusing to accept Obama’s “no Jews” decree, have built yet another neighborhood outpost – and named it “Obama Hilltop.”
The few against the mighty? With U.S. President Barack Obama having told billions of people across the world that a Palestinian state will happen, and that Jews have few if any rights in Judea and Samaria, several dozen Jewish youths in Israel continue to build more outpost neighborhoods in those very areas When Israel’s armed forces come to raze the structures, the youths rebuild them once more.
Ramat Migron, Pnei Shilo
This pattern has repeated itself several times just this week. On Tuesday, youths who had been thrown out of Ramat Migron – outside Migron, north of Jerusalem – set up camp in an abandoned army base near Shilo. Army forces arrived the next day on the scene, named Pnei Shilo, and destroyed the lone wooden hut. The youths say they will return – or rebuild somewhere else.
Shvut Ami, Maoz Esther
In Shvut Ami, just west of Kedumim, young pioneers have rebuilt two structures, which had been destroyed a few days earlier by Border Guard police forces.
In Maoz Esther, outside Kokhav HaShachar in eastern Binyamin (north of Jerusalem), some 250 people gathered to celebrate the re-dedication of a synagogue in memory of Merkaz HaRav terrorist victim Yehonadav Hirschfeld. The synagogue had been destroyed just the day before, as well as the week before, by security forces, and was rebuilt each time.
The hundreds of singing and dancing celebrants were joined by Rabbi Dov Lior, the Chief Rabbi of Kiryat Arba-Hevron, and MK Dr. Michael Ben-Ari (National Union). Rabbi Lior blessed the participants, saying, “Thank G-d, you are healthy in soul and spirit, and are not affected by the weaknesses around us.”
Ben-Ari said, “We can see here yet another healthy expression of the Jewish People’s return to our Land, and we are not planning to leave. We have no other land; the Arabs have 22 countries, and it’s too bad that Obama did not mention that in his speech. Giving them another country means an attempt to destroy the Jewish People in Israel – and we have no intention of being destroyed. The Jewish People are holding on tight to their Land.”
Obama Hilltop
Near Kokhav Yaakov, between Jerusalem and Beit El, a new outpost was formed on Friday morning, tentatively called Givat Obama, or Obama Hilltop. The builders say the name is “in recognition of the president’s actions, which have led to a dramatic increase in the number of outposts being built throughout Judea and Samaria.”
Oz Yehonatan
Yet another new outpost was formed on Friday near Kochav HaShachar. The outpost, named Oz Yehonatan, consists, so far, of one wooden building.
Settlers: We are protecting the peace
Abe Selig , THE JERUSALEM POST
As US President Barack Obama called in his address in Cairo Thursday afternoon to end settlement construction, Benny Gal, secretary of the unauthorized Givat Asaf outpost, was busy giving his own speech.
"The issue isn't Givat Asaf, nor is it about outposts or settlements," Gal said as he stood near his home in the hilltop community on the eastern outskirts of Ramallah, holding his young daughter in his arms. "This is about Israel, and if you take us out of here, it's Israel that will be in danger. The dismantling of one outpost is a huge boost for terrorism, and it's a windfall for those who seek to destroy us." He was of course addressing recent US demands to freeze settlement expansion and uproot unauthorized outposts such as Givat Asaf.
As he spoke, gazing through the mid-afternoon glare at the nearby Palestinian village of Deir Dibwan, some 300 km. away, Obama was making a very different case, and speaking, in some sense, about him.
"Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's," the US president said at Cairo University. "It is time for these settlements to stop."
Such statements are rejected out of hand by residents here, who view the increase in American pressure as misguided and ill-informed.
"I think it's symptomatic of Western thought," Gal said. "They read so deeply into a situation that in reality, is quite simple. We're the Jewish people and this is our home, and the Arabs are not going to stop attacking us if we leave Givat Asaf. If Israel pulls back from the settlements, Ben-Gurion Airport will become the next target. You have to ask yourself, what could we possibly gain from another disengagement?"
Gal's and Obama's words come at a time of high tension in the area, as 26 unauthorized outposts - Givat Asaf included - have been slated for destruction by the government, and the residents of this cluster of nearly two-dozen corrugated steel caravans - erected and named for Ofra resident Asaf Hershkovitz, 30, a father of two who was murdered by Hamas terrorists as he drove to work on the nearby road on May 1, 2001 - are well aware of it.
"We know all about the government's plan, and we're prepared to oppose it," said one of the young men who studies in the outpost's small beit midrash. "But that's in principle. On an everyday basis, we just keep living our lives."
And according to the residents, that means a quiet, seemingly-mundane existence.
"There's 20 families that live here, and 100 kids between them," Gal said. "On a day-to-day basis, that's what our life revolves around, family, our children and Torah. On that level, we're not doing anything so monumental, but if you step back and look at it, our presence here is safeguarding the rest of the country."
But therein lies the root of contention between Gal's stream of thought and that of President Obama. While many Jewish residents of the West Bank see themselves as an insurance policy for peace, the US administration views them as the direct opposite.
"But that's not a new phenomenon," Gal said. "When [prime minister] Menachem Begin proposed an attack on Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor in 1981, the Americans were firmly opposed to it. But Begin went through with it, and when it was all said and done, that decision came to be a source of warmth between the two countries."
That said, Gal and the other residents of Givat Asaf worry about the impending destruction of their home.
"We know it's there, but we're not worried about it," he said.
Still, as the day drew on, and a group of soldiers stopped at the junction below to wait for their next ride, the teens inside the outpost's beit midrash came outside to watch them.
"What are they doing here?" one of the young men asked.
"I don't know," said another, betraying a slight unease. "I think they're just passing through."
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1244035003067&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
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