Israel Matzav

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Israel and the United Nations

In case you were wondering why Israel pays absolutely no attention to the United Nations.

Labels: Abba Eban, United Nations

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Follow the election results live

For those of you who are interested, you can get constant updates on the election results in Hebrew, Arabic and English from the official election commission website once the polls close at 10:00 pm Israel time.

Of course, I will have updates throughout the day.

Tonight, I am planning to go to a press center in Tel Aviv (where I hope to arrive by the time the polls close - I have to lead the evening prayer service in Jerusalem at 8:30) and I will be liveblogging from there.

And if you're in Israel, don't forget to vote, vote, vote.

UPDATE 11:49 PM

I am liveblogging the election results from the foreign media center, sponsored by The Israel Project, here.

Labels: Abba Eban, Knesset elections 2013

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Netanyahu won't be the first

The Shmuel Katz blog reports that if Prime Minister Netanyahu caves in to President Obama and agrees to 'negotiations' based on the 1949 armistice lines, he will join a long line of Israeli leaders who abandoned reasonable positions under American pressure.

Unfortunately, Netanyahu joins a long list of backpedaling Israeli leaders whose talk doesn’t match up with their walk. In “Surrender to Washington” (The Jerusalem Post, May 20, 1983), Shmuel Katz gives a rundown of the more prominent examples of Israeli collapse in the face of American pressure.
In 1973, in spite of the disastrous opening of the Yom Kippur War, Israel was on the brink of overwhelming victory and, as then foreign minister Abba Eban asserted, the government was not even thinking of a cease-fire but only of victory. It nevertheless accepted a cease-fire resolution dictated – via Moscow – by U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

Then it abandoned its proposal (generously put forward in spite of Israel’s tremendous advantage in the field) to restore the status quo ante, and agreed to withdraw both from the large enclave it held inside Egypt and from the canal – all for good relations with the U.S., which was seeking Egyptian favours.

Several months later, it repeated the performance on the Syrian front. After weeks of resistance to Kissinger’s demands, the Golda Meir government caved in, returned to Syria the captured enclave and, for good measure, a slice of the Golan Heights captured in 1967.

Here was manifestly – in both cases – acceptance of the posture of defeat in the field – where Israel had lost 3,000 dead – all for those good relations.

A further price was yet to be paid – in 1975 – by further withdrawal in Sinai. The Rabin government at first refused to hear of surrender of the vital Mitla and Gidi passes and the Abu Rudeis oilfields – but in the end it capitulated, demonstratively as a favour to Washington.

Now came the turn of the Likud. The allegedly formidable, intransigent Mr. Begin turned out to be formidable and intransigent only temporarily. Throughout the negotiations on the “peace plan,” he finally accepted nearly every American formulation – which he had declared in the process unacceptable, jettisoning cherished and long proclaimed principles.

At the Camp David conference, which came after nine months of preparatory negotiations with Washington, only an emasculated remnant remained of his original autonomy peace plan. Nor did the agreement contain a hint of Zionist purpose, of the Jewish relationship and right to the Land of Israel; on the contrary, it quashed (if it were to be consummated) any hope of future Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.

In the negotiations for the subsequent peace treaty, President Anwar Sadat at the last moment demanded the nullification of the clause which would prohibit Egypt from going to war with Israel in fulfillment of previous pacts with the other Arab States. Begin – correctly – proclaimed this would make the treaty a “sham treaty.”

President Jimmy Carter, however, anxious for a foreign policy success, pressed Begin, and an annex satisfying Sadat was introduced into the text.
Big words followed by little deeds is a hallmark of Jewish leadership extending to pre-state days. Vladimir Jabotinsky, Shmuel’s mentor and hero, remarked on the phenomenon in a satirical feuilleton he wrote in May 1939, under the pen name Echad Rosho (the Bad One). Jabotinsky avoided ad hominem attacks and denied that the title of the piece “Mr. Ben Bouillon” referred to Mr. David Ben-Gurion. (Similarly, any resemblance to Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu is purely coincidental.)

In all fairness to Begin, by May 1983, he was a broken man. It was six months after his wife's death and he would resign just a couple of months later and leave the position to Yitzchak Shamir. Of course, Begin also caved in to the Egyptians several times during the negotiations over the Camp David accords in the late '70's.

But Israeli Prime Ministers have an unfortunately long history of talking big and doing little. What could go wrong?

Labels: Abba Eban, Binyamin Netanyahu, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Shmuel Katz, Yitzchak Rabin

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Abba Eban addresses the UN Security Council June 1967

Someone in the comments asked for then-Foreign Minister Abba Eban's address to the United Nations upon the conclusion of the 1967 Six-Day War.

I have it for you but (sorry) it's audio only.

Let's go to the tape.

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Awesome, wasn't he?

Labels: Abba Eban, Six Day War, United Nations Security Council

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Two years ago, I posted a 1958 interview Mike Wallace with Abba Eban, who was Israel's Foreign Minister during the Six-Day War. I had occasion to look at that post again this morning due to this article by Sarah Honig. I'd like to repost the video - this time from YouTube.

It's in three parts. Here's the first part. Let's go to the videotape.

Here's the second part. Let's go to the videotape.

Here's the third part. Let's go to the videotape.

Two years ago, I commented:

What's amazing in watching this video is how much things are still the same (except for the cigarette ads). In particular, I want to point out to you that the Arabs were complaining about land Israel had liberated in 1948 that went beyond the original lines that the UN had fixed in the 1947 partition plan. What they never mentioned was that they had rejected the partition plan and had lost that additional land in a war that they started. Does that sound familiar? It should. It's essentially the same thing that happened in 1967, and the Arabs have been crying about it ever since. Note who wants peace and who wants war.

In a column published on Friday, Sarah Honig comments.

Once we make allowances for cumulative historical processes and the propaganda-amplifying potential of new technologies (like the World Wide Web), it becomes obvious that the differences we perceive are mostly in detail rather than substance. The bare essence was uncannily the same back in the day.

Just get a load of Wallace’s opening salvo: “In its 10 years as a state, Israel has been involved in repeated violence, major border incidents and two open wars.” The subtext is that there’s something unsavory and belligerent about Israel, that it’s a troublemaker.

But then Wallace pulled out bigger guns – the Arab refugees: “Such men as historian Arnold Toynbee have said this: ‘The evil deeds committed by the Zionist Jews against the Arabs are comparable to crimes committed against the Jews by the Nazis.’”

Are we shocked? What can be more perversely prevalent in our existence than Nazi epithets hurled at the country that resisted annihilation merely three years after the Holocaust?

But perhaps we should all memorize Eban’s timeless retort. He accused Toynbee of “monstrous blasphemy. Here he takes the massacre of millions of our men, women and children, and compares it to the plight of Arab refugees alive, on their kindred soil, suffering certain anguish, but of course possessed of the supreme gift of life. The refugee problem is the result of an Arab policy which created the problem by the invasion of Israel, which perpetuates it... and which refuses to solve the problem which they have the full capacity to solve.”

Just as worthy of recall is Eban’s comment about Israel’s alleged expansionism. He advised everyone “not to lose any sleep at night worrying about whether the State of Israel is too big. Really there is nothing more grotesque or eccentric in the international life of our times than the doctrine that little Israel, 8,000 square miles in area, should become even smaller in order that the vast Arab Empire should still further expand.”

Wallace escalated his provocation: “Mr. Ambassador, do you... foresee further territorial expansion by Israel?” In gentlemanly tones Eban objected: “I don’t like the word ‘further,’ Mr. Wallace... I wonder whether the issue isn’t one of Arab expansion.”

Wallace wouldn’t let go: “Israel benefited territorially from a war, from armed violence.”

Eban was unfazed: “Yes, I’m glad to say that I hope that whenever countries wage a war of aggression, as the Arab States did, they should be the losers.”

Unswayed, Wallace pressed on: “As a member of the Judaic faith, which cherishes social justice and morality, do you believe that any country should profit territorially from violence?” The entire exchange reveals the pervasiveness of anti-Israel mainstream-media bias long before the Six Day War. Although the Arabs controlled all the territories which Palestinians currently claim for their state, Israel was portrayed, already then, as an occupier – because it successfully fended off a concerted attack by seven Arab armies on the day of its birth.

Read the whole thing.

Honig doesn't mention it, but the part about the Egyptian banker saying "Israel can only exist on charity" is pretty funny in light of where Israel is today and where Egypt and the 'Palestinians' are today. Heh.

Labels: Abba Eban, Mike Wallace

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

When the UN did something right

The enemies of Israel can never state that Israel is not a legitimate country.

Today, nearly 70% of all UN resolutions are castigating Israel in some form. However the UN voted for the Jewish state and that can never be undone. This resolution sticks in the throat of every Jew hater. Use it and show it to all decent open minded people so they know the truth.

Let's go to the videotape (Hat Tip: NY Nana).

Labels: Abba Eban, November 29, partition plan, United Nations

Monday, November 15, 2010

Will the 'Palestinians' miss the opportunity to miss an opportunity?

Israel's longtime ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban, is known to have quipped that the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. If the Israeli government approves the package that Prime Minister Netanyahu brought home from Washington on Friday, it will (God forbid) be a huge opportunity for the 'Palestinians.' But will they miss it? We've already seen a report of them asking for their own package. Here's a better indication that they really might take the opportunity to miss the opportunity (and make Netanyahu look like a genius for calling their bluff).

The Arab League is waiting to see if the Obama administration will offer it further inducements to entice the Palestinian Authority into direct talks, but it likely will reject direct talks with Israel based on the ”Clinton freeze,” an official said Monday.

“If the news is true about there being a settlement freeze that excludes Jerusalem and that takes the criticism off Israel, I cannot imagine that would be acceptable to the Palestinian side or the Arab side,” Hesham Youssef, an official with the office of the secretary general of the Arab League, told the German press agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

...

The Palestinian Authority and the Arab League have said the freeze must include all areas of Jerusalem that it demands as part of a PA state, including the Temple Mount and adjacent Western Wall, all of the Old City, and "neighborhoods in northern and eastern Jerusalem where 300,000 Jews live.

Like the Palestinian Authority, the Arab League has not rejected the proposal, but is rather holding out for additional offers, such as compensation, guarantees on its desired borders and its demand that five million foreign Arabs can move to Israel, on the basis of claims that they or their parents and grandparents lived in the country - known as the "right of return." The demand is part of the Saudi 2002 Initiative and has been regarded by almost every Israeli political leader as being aimed at eliminating Israel as a Jewish state.

What could go wrong?

Labels: Abba Eban, Arab League, final status negotiations, Palestinian Authority