Almost as quickly as it started, Brussels Air's cooperation with the BDS campaign has stopped. The airline has gone back to serving Achva halva bars (the fancy flavor pictured is not one I have found on most airlines) to its passengers. Achva is manufactured in the Barkan Industrial Zone in Ariel, Samaria. And just to make the sacrilege complete, the picture above came from the website alibaba.com.
While Brussels Airlines said last week it did not order the halva and
the snack was served on its flight by mistake, the airline now
called the food manufacturer Achva “one of our trustful suppliers” in a
statement to the Israeli Foreign Ministry quoted by The Times of Israel.
“It is clear that Achva remains one of our trustful suppliers and
without any distinction related to the origin of the product, and
therefore we will continue to accept Achva’s products on board our
flights, especially given its positive role in the community,” the
Brussels Airlines statement read.
...
The change came about through “the quick work of the Foreign
Ministry, at the direction of Dore Gold, the deputy head of public
advocacy and the advocacy unit, and our embassies in Brussels and
Berlin,” according to a Foreign Ministry statement.
Last week, Brussels Airlines stopped serving
its passengers the halva snack following complaints by the Palestine
Solidarity Movement, a proponent of the Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions movement. A passenger had alerted the group about the snack.
“We’re an airline catering to a large international audience, it’s
our responsibility to offer products that please all,” the airline said
in its earlier statement on pulling the halva.
“Therefore, we decided to
take the halva bars off the menu and replace it with another product.”
This is the Middle East, where my enemy's enemy is often my friend. But this would have been unthinkable in this region until quite recently. A high-level Saudi delegation visited Israel on Friday, and to make sure the protests from the Arab-Muslim world aren't too loud, they said they were here to promote the Saudi peace initiative.
Former Saudi general Dr. Anwar Eshki and a group of Saudi businessmen
and academics meet Friday in Jerusalem with a delegation led by MKs
Ksenia Svetlova (Zionist Union), Omer Bar-Lev (Zionist Union), Esawi
Frej (Meretz) and Michal Rozin (Meretz).
Eshki met separately
with Foreign Ministry director-general Dore Gold and the Coordinator of
Government Activities in the Territories Maj.-Gen. Yoav Mordechai in an
effort to advance the Saudi Initiative, a diplomatic plan that calls for
Israel to return to pre-1967 borders in return for recognition from
Arab countries.
Svetlova said the meetings were important, because Eshki is close to Saudi King Salman and his son, Mohammad.
Eshki heads the independent think tank Middle East Institute,
which is working on plans for the bridge between Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The delegation also visited Ramallah and met with Palestinian Authority
chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
That story makes it sound like the MK's the Saudis met were all opposition MK's (Zionist Union and Meretz both being opposition parties), but looking at this picture, I doubt that's true.
Meanwhile, the meeting was condemned by the Hadash party, a far Left mixed Jewish-Arab party. They didn't condemn the Israelis for taking the meeting: They condemned the Saudis.
“The recent visit by Saudi personalities, including former general Anwar Eshki, and their meetings with representatives of the Netanyahu government, on the pretext of advancing a dialogue about the Arab peace initiative, were not designed to challenge Israel’s refusal strategy, but to legitimize it by giving Arab ‘sponsorship’ to voiding the initiative of any content and for eliminating the two-state solution and the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination," said a statement issued by Hadash, a faction with the Joint List of Arab parties.
"The visit is part of the normalization of cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Israel against Iran, Syria and resistance movements in the region,” the statement continued.
Two weeks ago Hadash also condemned Egypt’s foreign minister Sameh Shoukry’s visit to Jerusalem as well as his meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu. The condemnation of both visits was issued by the Hadash secretariat without the endorsement of other members of the Arab Joint List.
The thanks for these meetings go to Barack Obama. Obama has so bungled the Iranian nuclear threat as to leave 'moderate' Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt to feel that they have no choice but to join forces with Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a press conference for the
foreign press, along with Foreign Ministry Director General Dr. Dore
Gold and National Security Adviser Yossi Cohen.
Let's go to the videotape. Netanyahu starts around the 9:30 mark.
By the way, I am not convinced that Jewish terrorists burnt down that house in Dura killing two family members.
State Department spox John Kirby reaches bottom, keeps digging
State Department spokesman John Kirby almost makes you long for the days of ditzy Marie Harf. Yesterday, he reached bottom and kept digging.
At a daily press briefing on Wednesday, U.S.
State Department spokesman John Kirby said Israel, which has set up
roadblocks in Palestinian neighborhoods of Israeli-occupied East
Jerusalem to try to stem attacks, has a right and responsibility to
protect its citizens.
He added:
"Now, we have seen some – I wouldn’t call the checkpoints this - but
we’ve certainly seen some reports of what many would consider excessive
use of force.
"Obviously, we don’t
like to see that, and we want to see restrictions that are elevated in
this time of violence to be as temporary as possible if they have to be
enacted," Kirby said, without citing specific incidents.
Asked on Army Radio
about the remarks, Yaalon said: "Are we exercising excessive force? If
someone wields a knife and they kill him, is that excessive force? What
are we talking about?"
...
Kirby's comments touched a nerve in Israel,
especially after allegations by Abbas, in a televised speech in Arabic
on Wednesday, that Israeli forces were "executing our sons in cold
blood, as they did with this child, Ahmed Manasra, and other children in
Jerusalem and other places in Palestine".
Many Palestinians
were incensed by amateur video that had shown Manasra, 13, lying on the
street in Pisgat Zeev, a Jewish settlement on the northern edge of
Jerusalem, with blood coming from his head. Israeli police said that he
and a cousin stabbed two Israelis there on Monday.
The
15-year-old cousin was shot dead, and Israel said that day that Manasra
was alive and taken to hospital after being hit by a car during the
attack. On Thursday, after Abbas's address, Israel's Government Press
Office released a video, without sound, showing a youth it identified as
Manasra being spoon-fed in a bed in Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital. A
doctor said he could be discharged soon.
I'll have that video for you in the next post, so make sure to check back. And the Prime Minister has called a press conference for this evening at which he will be flanked by Dore Gold (Director General of the Foreign Ministry these days) and Tzipi Hotovely (Deputy Foreign Minister) at which the video will undoubtedly be shown.
But at least Kirby was forced to walk back one outrageous comment.
Clarification from today's briefing: I did not intend to suggest that status quo at Temple Mount/Haram Al-Sharif has been broken.
President Hussein Obama finally has a diplomatic achievement to which he can point. But it's not the one he was hoping for. The picture at the top is a photo of a handshake between incoming Director General of Israel's Foreign Ministry, Dore Gold (who has a kipa on his head and is at left) and Anwar Majed Eshki, a retired Saudi general and ex-adviser to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the U.S. And there's much more to it than a handshake, and it's been going on for a year and a half.Eli Lake reports.
Since the beginning of 2014, representatives from Israel and Saudi
Arabia have had five secret meetings to discuss a common foe, Iran. On
Thursday, the two countries came out of the closet by revealing this
covert diplomacy at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
...
It was not a typical Washington think-tank event. No questions were
taken from the audience. After an introduction, there was a speech in
Arabic from Anwar Majed Eshki, a retired Saudi general and ex-adviser to
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the U.S. Then
Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations who is
slotted to be the next director general of Israel's foreign ministry,
gave a speech in English.
While these men represent countries that have been historic enemies,
their message was identical: Iran is trying to take over the Middle East
and it must be stopped.
Eshki was particularly alarming. He laid out a brief history of Iran
since the 1979 revolution, highlighting the regime's acts of terrorism,
hostage-taking and aggression. He ended his remarks with a seven-point
plan for the Middle East. Atop the list was achieving peace between
Israel and the Arabs. Second came regime-change in Iran. Also on the
list were greater Arab unity, the establishment of an Arab regional
military force, and a call for an independent Kurdistan to be made up of
territory now belonging to Iraq, Turkey and Iran.
We only have five of the seven points here, but notice what's missing: 'Peace between Israel the Arabs' is not the same as 'Palestinian state.' Well, maybe not.
Eshki told me that no real cooperation would be possible until Israel's
prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, accepted what's known as the Arab
Peace Initiative to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The plan was
first shared with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman in 2002 by Saudi
Arabia's late King Abdullah, then the kingdom's crown prince.
In any event, these ties go back a long time - all the way to the beginning of the Obama administration.
These ties became more focused on Iran over the last decade, as shown by
documents released by WikiLeaks in 2010. A March 19, 2009, cable
quoted Israel's then-deputy director general of the foreign minister,
Yacov Hadas, saying one reason for the warming of relations was that
the Arabs felt Israel could advance their interests vis-a-vis Iran in
Washington. "Gulf Arabs believe in Israel's role because of their
perception of Israel's close relationship with the U.S. but also due to
their sense that they can count on Israel against Iran," the cable
said.
Note - that was two months after Obama was inaugurated, and Netanyahu had already been elected by then and was forming a government (he was sworn in on March 31, 2009).
Obama finally has a diplomatic achievement: A burgeoning reconciliation between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The beginning of the end of Leftist domination of Israel's Foreign Ministry?
In the past week, there have been two significant appointments to Israel's foreign ministry that have the potential to change the foreign ministry's longtime Leftist slant. Keep in mind as you read this that Prime Minister Netanyahu did not appoint a foreign minister and that it was previously thought that he was holding the position open in the hope that Avigdor Lieberman or Dore Gold would eventually join the government.
First,
she’s a novice who has never held any executive branch position before,
yet will now exercise de facto control over one of the cabinet’s most
important ministries. Technically, she serves under Netanyahu, who
retained the foreign affairs portfolio for himself. But since Netanyahu
already has a full-time job as prime minister, she will largely run the
ministry.
Second, she’s one of the most hawkish members of Netanyahu’s coalition and an outspoken opponent of Palestinian statehood. As The Jerusalem Post’s diplomatic correspondent, Herb Keinon, put it, “Hotovely represents the opposite of everything much of the world...wants to see in Israel.”
Third,
in contrast to appointees like Miri Regev or Haim Katz, whose power
bases within Likud were simply too strong for Netanyahu to ignore,
Hotovely’s support inside the party is tenuous; in the last primary, she
barely scraped into the 20th slot. Nor is she known as one of the
premier’s own loyalists. Thus he was under no political compulsion to
reward her with such a lofty post.
Finally,
there were plenty of other candidates who would seemingly have been
more suitable, including the one many American Jews undoubtedly hoped to
see there: former ambassador to Washington and current Kulanu MK
Michael Oren.
Indeed, Hotovely’s main qualification for the post – aside from being pretty, personable and reportedly speaking excellent English
– would seem to be that she constitutes no threat to Netanyahu, who
notoriously squelches anyone he does consider a potential political
threat.
That’s why so many ambitious Likudniks eventually quit the party
to run their own parties (see Moshe Kahlon, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor
Liberman).
Gordon goes on to make a case for Hotovely being the one to shift the Foreign Ministry's focus away from the West and toward Africa and Latin America. And while I agree with Gordon that there's little hope of Europe ever taking our side again in the diplomatic courts of the world for the foreseeable future, I believe that there's a lot more that Hotovely can accomplish than just keeping countries like Rwanda and Nigeria on our side.
Sunday was perhaps the first indication that Netanyahu intends to have Hotovely remake the foreign ministry and the diplomatic corps: Netanyahu summarily fired the Director General and appointed his longtime confidante Dore Gold to be Director General of the Ministry and to work directly under Hotovely.
Gold, a former ambassador to the United Nations and currently head of
the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, will be working under Deputy
Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely, who was told about the appointment
just prior to it being made public. He replaces Nissim Ben-Sheetrit, a
veteran ministry employee who started out in its administrative track
and then moved to the diplomatic side.
...
[Former Foreign Minister Avigdor] Liberman commented on the appointment, saying that while it was
Netanyahu’s prerogative to appoint his own man to this post,
appointments at the ministry are not ways to give out favors or settle
scores. He also said that “it needs to be clear that new appointments
or changes are not a replacement for clear policy.”
In that
regard, one government source said, Gold was the perfect candidate
because he had a direct line to Netanyahu, and his interlocutors would
know that when he speaks, he is speaking for Netanyahu and with
authority.
“This will give him power and make him relevant,” the official said, noting that Ben-Sheetrit never enjoyed that status.
The
American-born Gold is considered one of Netanyahu’s top foreign policy
advisers. He served as one of his foreign policy advisers starting in
1996, during the prime minister’s first term in office, being appointed
the following year as ambassador to the UN, where he served until
1999. In 2014, he became an “outside” consultant in the Prime
Minister’s Office.
In recent years, Gold has accompanied
Netanyahu on many of his trips to Washington and the UN, and over the
years has been one of Israel’s foremost unofficial spokesmen, speaking
in the media and at conferences around the world on Israeli policy. He
is often sought out by journalists and diplomats because of his
knowledge of the issues, and because he is considered to be close to
Netanyahu, thus reflecting his thinking.
He has also been very active in lobbying policy-makers on behalf of “defensible borders” for Israel.
Hotovely
spoke with Gold after the appointment and issued a statement, saying
that with his rich experience in the international arena, the former UN
ambassador could contribute to furthering Israel’s position in the
world.
For those of you who have forgotten, 'defensible borders' mean that any 'Palestinian state' would be severely truncated.
Dore Gold has done the State of Israel a great service by forcing us to
focus on concrete things that we want out of the 'peace process.' Dore
is fond of pointing out that when you ask a 'Palestinian' what he wants
from the 'peace process,' he will tell you that he wants a 'Palestinian
state' in the areas that are outside Israel's '1967 borders' (for now),
whose capital is Jerusalem. If you ask an Israeli Jew what he wants from
the 'peace process,' he will tell you 'peace.'
Dore is changing
that paradigm. One of the things he believes that Israeli Jews can and
should be demanding from the 'peace process' is defensible borders. His
organization, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, has put together a
collection of essays that sets out in concrete terms what defensible
borders mean. The collection is called Israel's Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace. It's reviewed by Lee Smith in Tablet Magazine.
The book Israel’s Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace
is a collection published this year under the auspices of the JCPA with
essays about security and diplomacy by leading figures in Israel’s
security establishment, like Maj.-Gen. Aharon Ze’evi Farkash, former
head of IDF intelligence, and Maj.-Gen. Uzi Dayan, former IDF deputy
chief of staff and a former national security adviser to Prime Ministers
Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon. The volume’s findings represent a broad
consensus across the Israeli political spectrum, and the fact that
Lt.-Gen. Moshe Yaalon—former IDF chief of staff and currently the vice
prime minister—wrote the introduction is evidence that the ideas have
won approval at the highest political levels.
The book pushes
three common ideas, some likely to add to the friction between
Washington and Jerusalem: First, Israel, must not withdraw to the 1949
armistice lines; second, Israel needs defensible borders; third, Israel
must rely on itself to defend itself and not on foreign forces as
proposed by U.S. national security adviser Gen. James Jones, who has talked openly about replacing the IDF with international forces in the West Bank.
The
insistence that Israel must retain the ability to defend its own
borders—a basic attribute of national sovereignty—is the least
controversial element of Gold’s blueprint. The issue is not merely the
inglorious record of U.N. peacekeeping forces—from Sinai to Bosnia and
Lebanon—but also the fact that the international community rarely sends
its blue helmets into the middle of a real shooting war, which is what
the West Bank would become if an IDF withdrawal left Hamas and Fatah at
each other’s throats and eager to gain credit for launching terror
attacks on Israel.
The concept of defensible borders is closely
tied to the drawing of 1949 armistice lines, commonly and incorrectly
known as the 1967 borders. As Gold explains in his contribution to the
volume, successive U.S. administrations since Lyndon Johnson’s have all
recognized the danger in Israel withdrawing to those borders. George
Shultz, one of President Ronald Reagan’s secretaries of State, explained
that “Israel will never negotiate from or return to the 1967 borders,”
and the Clinton Administration reaffirmed the Reagan White House’s
concept of defensible borders. However, it was during Clinton’s Camp
David negotiations that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak abandoned
the idea of defensible borders in the hope of a radical breakthrough
with Yasser Arafat. With the outbreak of the Second Intifada and peace
nowhere in the offing, the George W. Bush Administration pledged not to
hold the Israelis to the Clinton parameters and returned to the
traditional U.S. position. “It is unrealistic to expect that the outcome
of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the
armistice lines of 1949,” reads an April 14, 2004 letter from Bush to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
How will this play out in the field? One indication might be this link I received in an email this morning from JCC Watch's Richard Allen.
The UJA-Federation’s top brass have been twisting the arms of
Israel’s diplomatic corps to provide cover for supporting the New Israel
Fund marching in the Israel Day Parade, according to emails obtained by
JCCWatch.
The strategy to use the Foreign Ministry as their beard came to an
uncomfortable public end last week, when the Spokesman for the Israeli
Consulate in New York had to make a statement to deny what UJA-Federation
CEO Eric Goldstein had told Talkline Communications radio host Zev
Brenner on March 30. In an appearance on the show, Goldstein said, twice
actually, that “the government of Israel, the Consul General’s office,
very much, emphatically, want us to allow these groups to continue to march.”
The consulate spokesman told Arutz Sheva last week
that at “no point did any of the parade’s organizers consult with the
Consulate or with someone acting on its behalf regarding the New Israel
Fund’s participation.” The newspaper quoted the spokesman directly as
saying, “never, ever, did the Consul-General, or someone on his behalf,
or any of the Consulate’s employees, say anything favoring the NIF’s
participation, either explicitly or implicitly, in a hinted manner or in
public, in secret or openly.”
The oddly worded distancing of the Consul-General’s office from the
UJA-Federation comes as emails obtained by JCCWatch show Goldstein and
former UJA-Federation president Jerry Levin, indeed, reaching out to
Israeli ambassadors for exactly that kind of cover.
The email trail leading up to Goldstein’s foot-in-mouth routine,
and reproduced below, casts a dark shadow on UJA-Federation leadership
who were able to co-opt important Israel diplomats to publicly boost
their cause of defending the New Israel Fund.
The exposure of Federation efforts to force parade organizers to accept the New Israel Fund, and the disavowal of interference on behalf of the NIF's behalf by the Consulate may have come on a direct order from Hotovely. And if it did, it's long overdue. In the past, I doubt that the Consulate would have issued such a clarification.
Here's hoping that Hotovely and Gold will bring about an end to the Leftist domination of the Foreign Ministry, which goes back to the days of Shimon Peres, Tzipi Livni and others. That would be a welcome change.
Sean Hannity also interviewed former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold on Wednesday night. Gold gave him a history of Jerusalem.
Let's go to the videotape.
Last night, I posted a video which, like this one, was embedded from Fox News' web site. A couple of people (one in the comments and one on Twitter) complained they couldn't see the video. It turned out that one of them wasn't trying to watch the video but rather to get to the embed code. I don't know how to do that other than getting to Fox's web site. For anyone else who has problems, I would suggest that if you're using NoScript or something similar, you must free up any components that are required to view the video.
By the way, I think this video is Part 1 of 2. I will try to post Part 2 later.
Former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold answers critics who claim that Israel's handling of Shejaiya was 'disproportionate.' If your country were confronted like this, what do you think it would do? (Hint: Think NATO in Yugoslavia in 1999 - not pretty).
Finally, there was the decision that Israel ultimately made: Separate,
as much as possible, the civilian population from the Hamas fighters and
arms in their midst. This required getting the Palestinian population
to evacuate potential target areas by multiple means: dropping leaflets
with evacuation routes, breaking into Hamas radio broadcasts with
warnings about specific areas, Arabic-language telephone calls to homes
and text messages to cellphones. While the notification process was
underway, an Israeli drone would hover over the area that was to be
cleared to ensure that residents had left.
Against this Israeli effort, Hamas employed a counter-strategy of
trying to prevent civilians from heeding Israeli warnings. On July 8,
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri appeared on local television and called
on Gazans to serve as human shields against Israeli air attacks. Hamas
enforcers sought to dissuade civilians from fleeing. And, anticipating a
ground incursion into neighborhoods like Shajaiya, Hamas booby-trapped
whole rows of homes, hoping to collapse them on Israeli soldiers. This
only magnified the scale of the destruction.
It should be recalled
that proportionality in international law has a very specific meaning:
It is the calculation a military commander must make as to whether the
military advantage to be gained by the use of force is greater than the
probable harm that may be inflicted on the surrounding civilian
population. Anyone who complains about “disproportionality” must explain
exactly what the IDF should have done to neutralize the terrorist
threat from Shajaiya while causing less destruction than what occurred.
War
between an embattled democracy, like Israel, and a terrorist
organization, like Hamas, inevitably produces certain asymmetries.
Israel heavily invested in the defense of its population, including air
raid shelters as well as a missile defense system, known as Iron Dome.
Where did Hamas put the billions of dollars it obtained from supporters
like Qatar? It built the system of attack tunnels and an arsenal of
missiles. Yet there are those who wrongly infer Israeli intent to cause
civilian casualties from the greater damage suffered by Hamas, which
resulted from a war Hamas imposed, and from its readiness to sacrifice
the lives of its people to advance its extremist goals.
Civilian to combatant casualty ratio in Gaza around 1:1
Despite ongoing 'Palestinian' efforts to create civilian casualties in Gaza through the use of human shields, the IDF reports that the civilian to combatant casualty ratio in Operation Protective Edge is around 1:1.
Israel has
evidence that almost half of Palestinians killed in the 25-day-old Gaza
war were combatants, its deputy foreign minister said on Saturday,
pushing back against international allegations of a lopsidedly heavy
civilian death toll.
Gazan human rights groups say
at least 80 percent of the 1,669 Palestinians killed have been
non-combatants, including hundreds of children. The U.N. Human Rights
Council last week accused the Israelis of "disproportionate and
indiscriminate attacks" and launched an inquiry into possible war
crimes.
...
"There is research being done in the military,
very professionally and reliably, (whose) conclusion is that at least
47% of the fatalities are terrorists, with photographs and names,"
Tzachi Hanegbi told Israel's Channel Two television, adding that the
data would be presented to investigators.
He
did not elaborate. Israel rejected the U.N. Human Rights Council's
probe announcement, describing the forum as biased, but usually conducts
its own combat inquiries.
Israel
says Hamas and other Palestinian guerrillas in Gaza are terrorists and
in past conflicts has used broad definitions of combatants - including,
for example, Palestinian policemen working for the Hamas administration.
Other significant factors in the count include:
1. The statistics from the 'Palestinian Health Ministry' in Gaza come from Hamas and are therefore not reliable.
2. The statistics from the 'human rights council' counted anyone under the age of 18 as a civilian, whereas Hamas uses 16 and 17-year olds (and sometimes even younger children) as combatants. and even uses babies as human shields.
3. The more significant statistic in determining whether civilians or combatants are being killed is the male to female casualty ratio. The numbers I have seen for Operation Protective Edge put that at 3:1.
According to a 2010 assessment by John Sloboda of Iraq Body Count,
a United Kingdom-based organization, American and Coalition forces had
killed at least 28,736 combatants as well as 13,807 civilians in the Iraq War, indicating a civilian to combatant casualty ratio inflicted by coalition forces of 1:2.[24] However, overall, figures by the Iraq Body Count
from 20 March 2003 to 14 March 2013 indicate that of 174,000 casualties
only 39,900 were combatants, resulting in a civilian casualty rate of
77%.[25]
The civilian casualty ratio for U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan
is notoriously difficult to quantify. The U.S. itself puts the number
of civilians killed from drone strikes in the last two years at no more
than 20 to 30, a total that is far too low according to a spokesman for
the NGOCIVIC.[26] At the other extreme, Daniel L. Byman of the Brookings Institution
suggests that drone strikes may kill "10 or so civilians" for every
militant killed, which would represent a civilian to combatant casualty
ratio of 10:1. Byman argues that civilian killings constitute a
humanitarian tragedy and create dangerous political problems, including
damage to the legitimacy of the Pakistani government and alienation of
the Pakistani populace from America.[27] An ongoing study by the New America Foundation
finds non-militant casualty rates started high but have declined
steeply over time, from about 60% (3 out of 5) in 2004-2007 to less than
2% (1 out of 50) in 2012. The study puts the overall non-militant
casualty rate since 2004 at 15-16%, or a 1:5 ratio, out of a total of
between 1,908 and 3,225 people killed in Pakistan by drone strikes since
2004.[28]
By the way, Britain's civilian-combatant ratio in Afghanistan was 3:1.
After Operation Cast Lead, Israel produced a 500-page report which, among other things, showed that it had killed mostly combatants (make sure to watch the video at that link). Subsequently, former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations demolished the 'human rights council's investigation chairman, Richard Goldstone, in a debate (videos at this link) at Brandeis University, which I live-blogged. After that debate, Goldstone refused to debate anyone else (including Alan Dershowitz) about his report, and eventually he recanted the major accusations in the report - far too late.
Harvard students told Arafat's grave to be moved to Jerusalem
In an earlier post, I reported on a pilgrimage by Harvard University students to Yasser Arafat's grave, which was financed by the Boston Combined Jewish Philanthropies. A couple of the students have posted blogs about the trip, which make clear some of the things the students 'learned' in Ramallah. Here's the first one (both blogs came from Truth Revolt).
The Israel-Palestine conflict is urgent for my green-sweatered friend in
Ramallah whose house had been destroyed twice. Ambassador Dore Gold and
Col. (res) Dr. Eran Lerman spoke to us about security at the Jerusalem
Center for Public Affairs. One map after another filled the screen in
front of us as our speakers turned geographic boundaries into calculated
threats, like the range of rockets, or the time needed to mobilize
troops from A to B. For them, Israel’s fight is urgent. The man who
spoke to us at Yasser Arafat’s grave emphasized the grave’s temporary
location, to be moved to Jerusalem when (not if) Palestine
reclaims the city. The conflict, for him, is urgent.
The amazing organizers of this trek are all Israelis. Five of them are
Jewish and one of the is Arab Israeli. Was it easy for them to see the
grave of Arafat, who is responsible of the death of so many Israeli
civilians, their beloved ones specifically? But does that dispute the
fact that the same person is also the founder of the PLO, hero of so
many Palestinians symbolizing their fight for independence?
It is not at all easy to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
That is exactly why we listened to speeches at Harvard by Ari Shavit,
the author of the book ‘The Triumph and Tragedy of My Promised Land’ and
Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Shin Bet, Israeli National Security
Agency, who was appointed to the position right after the assassination
of the Prime Minister Ytzhak Rabin. Then, during our tour in Israel, we
were lucky enough to hear from Jodi Rudoren, the editor in chief of New
York Times Jerusalem, Danny Siedemann, an attorney very much involved
with the negotiations process, Dore Gold, foreign policy advisor to the
Prime Minister Netanyahu, Nadav Tamir, senior policy advisor to the
President of Israel Simon Peres, Eran Lerman, Deputy National Security
Advisor for Foreign Policy and International Affairs, Dr. Rachel
Korazim, a Holocaust educator, a Rabbi from Jewish settlements in West
Bank and an Israel Defense Force officer along with those two
Palestinian leaders.
Actually, out of the named speakers, there are a lot more people of the Left than of the Right. I've added some links that explain why.
Was there an agenda here? Did the pilgrimage to Arafat's mausoleum fit in with that agenda? I leave that to the reader to decide.
#Tomorrow13 Should we initiate or should we wait until the Middle East sorts itself out?
Anyone who has read this blog for a day or more knows my position on this.... Steve Linde moderating.
I walked into this session as Itamar Rabinovich was speaking and now Dore Gold is up. Gold says that before we talk about what we should do, we have to recognize what has happened and where we stand. He says that we don't have an option for a permanent status agreement with the 'Palestinians' and lots of weapons on our borders and therefore we have to adopt the position of dispensable borders. Leaving the Jordan Valley would be a national disaster.
Dore Gold says that Hassan Rohani is a master of taqiyya and is the star of the first chapter of Gold's book on the Iranian nuclear threat. Rohani bragged in 2004 about how they completed their nuclear program because of his negotiations. Rohani is not a dove but a fox.
Dan Kurtzer now speaking. Kurtzer wants to talk about the ostrich and the eagle. Kurtzer says that ostrich exposes a certain part of its anatomy that might be exposed to shrapnel by burying its head in the ground. Israel has limited ability to influence change in Arab world, and is mostly affected by what Israel says and not by what it does. Response to Arab spring so far has been enlightened.
Kurtzer found out over the last few days that he's a solutionist and he believes that there's a solution to our dispute with the 'Palestinians.' Gap has been narrowed significantly but no final settlement has been reached. He thinks Israeli initiative which shows it understands that fire in its own house must be put out would be smart. That must include secure, recognized and defensible borders. Both peace treaties with Arab neighbors have provided us with security because they gave us peace partners who were responsible to implement the treaty just like we were. He says borders have to be negotiated. Starting with defined borders may be a way back into the 'peace process.'
Kurtzer says there's a major debate in the US over intervention in Syria. Israelis know better than anyone that conflict fatigue has affected the US - troops on the ground here for the last 12 years. To what degree are concrete achievable American needs at stake? American people aren't sure. Is a devil we know better than what will emerge from the outcome?
Meir Dagan up next. Says he's not a prophet. Says we should not fear worst case scenario. Says our interest and those of the Gulf countries, Egypt and maybe even the 'Palestinians' all have the same interest. All of us fear the open conflict between Shiite and Sunni, and that this creates opportunities for Israel to create different alliances.
Says Saudi plan a starting point and vital for us to discuss it even though he doesn't like all of it either. There are things for which we need the support of other Arab countries to reach an arrangement with the 'Palestinians.' Problems are complicated. Lists other issues in Iran aside from nuclear issue.
If Assad doesn't win in Syria, we can shut down Hezbullah. There are more opportunities here and we should take initiative with Arab world. Says the Muslim Brotherhood took over in Egypt because they were very well organized. New regimes in Tunisia and Libya may not survive - they are criticized daily. The same is true in Egypt. Morsy trying his best not to touch agreement with Israel because he is dependent on money he receives from the United States. King Abdullah has been ruling Jordan longer than any Prime Minister of Israel or any President of the United States. We took a risk with Jordan and it paid off. We have to prepare ourselves for the worst but take every opportunity and chance that we get.
20 minutes of panel debate and then short questions.
Sima Shine says she agrees with Dagan because he was her boss.... She wants to talk about the Iranian election. Where is Iran really going? She doesn't have an answer yet. Rohani is only becoming President in August. What does it mean that he was elected with more than 50% in the first round? She says that the public in Iran sees Rohani as stepping into Moussavi's shoes from 2009. Have to look at his internal agenda - is talking about lifting censorship and giving women more freedom. But the economy is terrible. In July there will be more sanctions. You cannot disconnect the economy from sanctions and the nuclear project and therefore he cannot improve the economy without coming to terms over the nuclear program. The Iranians want sanctions removed which is impossible.
She says that there is no doubt that Israel must initiate. The question is whether Israel has a good answer to all its problems and are they all connected. Will doing something about the 'Palestinians' change the situations in Syria and Iran? She says yes (I say no).
Itamar Rabinovich says that the problem is that no Israeli leader will put Olmert's 2008 proposal on the table, but that Abu Mazen won't accept anything else. So how to find a way to move forward? Offering them $4 billion as a bribe is not the best way forward. Saudi plan (now known as Arab peace initiative) may not be the best way forward. It talks about return to 1967 borders. That includes Syria and obviously no one is going to do that today. So need to open a dialogue with the Saudis but cannot put five lines on the table and say 'take it or leave it.'
Dore Gold says he agrees with Rabinovich that time is not ripe for a full final status agreement. He says that he also agrees with much of what Dagan said. In the '90's the entire approach was economic. The Middle East we have today has two common threats - the Iranians and the Muslim Brotherhood. That should help us to build dialogue with some Sunni Arab countries, but that dialogue has to be quiet.
Rabinovich says that 'two-state solution' is not dead and criticizes senior Israeli officials for saying that it's dead. For a senior minister in the cabinet to say that the 'two-state solution' is dead is damaging.
Kurtzer asks why isn't this the time to try for a final status agreement. He thinks this is a time to try for it. He says that we cannot look at the Arab peace initiative through its details but we have to understand the context and that it represents a victory for Zionism because it shows that the Arab world has given up on trying to destroy Israel. In 2002, Arab world threw up its hands and said that Israel is here to stay (if only... CiJ).
Kurtzer says that if we don't agree with him, we shouldn't keep digging the hole deeper with 'settlements.' He says it's just exacerbating the problem every day. People are moving into these houses with no expectation of being a bargaining chip and complicating the agreement that Israel says its seeks with the Arab world. Says people are looking at details instead of looking at eagle's perspective. Dagan pointed out unexpected benefits of Morsy government which has done more to stop Hamas tunnels than anyone else. Egypt working with Israel on strategic issues. Kurtzer says it's time for final status agreement but at least don't make the situation worse.
Dore Gold says that the problem with the Arab peace initiative is that it's 'take it or leave it.' You can't even keep the 'refugees' in Lebanon. It's not a basis for sitting down to talk. Unfortunately, it's take it or leave it.
Meir Dagan disagrees. He says that Israel has to start a serious dialogue with the 'Palestinians.' Saying that there's no way to reach an agreement is damaging to Israel. He knows we cannot reach a final agreement with the 'Palestinians' now but we have to talk to them seriously. He says that we have to take seriously the Arab League's willingness to accept the existence of the State of Israel.
Dagan says he agrees with Kurtzer. Asks rhetorically if we should wait for Hamas to take over in the 'West Bank.' At least the 'Palestinian Authority' has a goal of establishing a 'Palestinian state.' Says Hamas would win election and that is worst case scenario for Israel.
Now taking questions from the audience. First questioner asks Dore Gold why Israel doesn't just call the 'Palestinians' bluff by offering six-month 'settlement freeze.' (Because we did already - CiJ). Gold says just what I said. We did this. It may not have been perfect but the US recognized it was a real freeze. Maybe Mahmoud Abbas doesn't want a negotiation right now. Mubarak would help him in the old days but now Hamas' sponsors are in control in Cairo. Gold says that in a NY Times interview a few years ago, Abbas said that 'settlements' constitute 1.2% of 'West Bank' and Abbas offered 1.9% swap. Arafat signed Oslo without a 'settlement freeze.' There are far more important issues.
Itamar Rabinovich talks about 'settlement products' in Europe. Says Europeans ask why we don't want them to take a more active role. He says just think of what happened a few weeks ago and how the Austrians ran away from the Golan Heights (remember EUBAM? CiJ). BDS gaining in Europe. Rabinovich says don't expand 'settlements.' Improve our hasbara (public relations). Put 20 spokesmen on networks and it won't help if a minister gets up and says that Bibi doesn't want a 'two-state solution.'
Next questioner asks Dan Kurtzer what we're going to do about the Russians holding all the cards in Syria. Kurtzer says that you have to be careful what you say publicly (implies that Obama spoke too quickly on Syrian use of chemical weapons). US trying to weigh all factors carefully. What happens if Assad stays in power? Who will come to power if he leaves? If US believed that there would be a liberal democratic regime in Syria, there would be US bombers in Syria today. But that's not going to happen and the civil war is likely to continue even if Assad leaves. Russia has significant interests in that context. US and Russia trying to align their interests in a way that provides for a reasonable transition in Syria. It hasn't happened yet.
Meir Dagan disagrees with Dore Gold - says that the IDF can protect Israel from any border that the government decides. Withdrawing from Jordan Valley not a disaster according to Dagan. In 1967 we were on different borders and we prevailed militarily. Using security for political issues is a mistake according to Dagan.
Dore Gold cites Yitzchak Rabin's last speech to the Knesset in which he said that Israel had to retain the Jordan Valley in the widest sense possible. Ariel Sharon said the same and so did Gold when he prepared the IDF's interest map for Prime Minister Netanyahu. Gold and Dagan are going back and forth on this.
Dagan claims that Jordan Valley was only important until 1991. Iraq, Syria and Jordan were a threat until 1991 - called Eastern front. Claims it's no longer an issue (Really? Weapons smuggling to 'Palestinians' in Judea and Samaria? CiJ) because Iraq has no military and Abdullah won't join an eastern front. Says have to prevent terrorists from coming in but don't need direct military presence to do that if you have good cooperation with the Jordanians. Says he's not presenting a political approach. IDF can protect Israel from different borders.
Sima Shine agrees with Dagan (again - why is she on this panel?) about the Arab peace initiative even though we don't like the details and even though we don't know who will rule Syria. You have to take into account that the Arab peace initiative now is mostly Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf and maybe Syria.
Hudson Institute Conference on the Perils of Global Intolerance: The United Nations and Durban III
A little surprise for all of you. I’m attending the Hudson Institute Conference on the Perils of Global Intolerance: The United Nations and Durban III. I got here a bit late – it took 45 minutes to get through security. Yuli Edelstein, Israel’s Minister of Public Affairs and the Diaspora now speaking. Says that human rights groups go to Israel and not to Syria because it takes months to get a visa for ten days, then once you get there you sit in your hotel for nine days and then they send you for an official tour. Edelstein says that the same people who once hijacked planes and kidnapped reporters have now hijacked the human rights agenda. He says we need to concentrate on human rights as no more than any other part of the UN charter and then we will be able to combat the hijackers. Anne Bayefsky announces that the UN has just moved up the adoption of the third Durban declaration under a proposal by Sudan. Alan Dershowitz now speaking. One reason there is no peace in the Middle East can be summarized in two letters: UN. They have disincentivized the Palestinians from negotiating a reasonable compromise. He cites several examples where there were genocides going on in the world, and all the UN focused on was Israel. UN has encouraged anti-Semitism, racism and genocide and has made Durban into another Nuremberg. By the way, this conference is being webcast by PJ Media (just saw on the agenda). Conference is in a small room and it’s packed. Still haven’t seen my friend Ed Morrissey, who is here. Back to Dershowitz – UN has become main advocacy arm of Palestinians at the expense of so many others who are being oppressed. The nations will take a vote which will be described as ‘implementing the two-state solution’ but states that don’t recognize Israel are voting for a final solution for Israel. Dershowitz says that any state that does not recognize Israel ought not to be able to vote. Source of law in ‘Palestine’ will be Sharia law. No worries from Jews because they won’t allow any although they are trying to spin it as though they only don’t want ‘settlers.’ First Judenrein state since Nazi Germany. They will have a ‘law of return’ while they criticize Israel for having a law of return. Why should they compromise when they get the ’67 borders to start the game? Abu Mazen told Dersshowitz that real estate is valued based on location. If you want the Western Wall you have to give thousands of acres. The same goes for access roads to Hebrew U and the Jewish quarter of the Old City. Dershowitz says that he helped draft 242 as an aide to Arthur Goldberg. Russians and French wanted to say “the” territories but US and UK said no and that version won out. There is no doubt that under 242 they’re not supposed to start from the ’67 border. He refers to op-ed by Olmert. UN happy to let ‘Palestine’ by militarized. So why should the ‘Palestinians’ compromise. How dare war mongering countries lecture Israel? He lists lots of countries – Turkey is high on the list and he refers specifically to the Mavi Marmara incident. He slams Bishop Tutu for saying Israel not sufficiently Christian for his tastes. US has adopted Israel’s methods of targeted assassinations using drones. Israel has become the model of democracy. Dershowitz gets a standing ovation. He did not once mention ‘settlements.’ Next up is Ed Koch. Koch says Obama should be applauded for his UN speech. Says he hopes to be a supporter of Obama again. Says Israel can’t sit with Hamas unless and until it gives up terrorism. Hamas says that every Jew who entered historic Palestine since 1917 and Hamas is likely to be the senior partner in the ‘Palestinian Authority’ eventually. How can you have ‘agreed upon swaps’ with a terror organization that says that Tel Aviv is theirs. You can’t expect Israel to sit down with Hamas. Koch: We can’t end the United Nations because every house needs a cesspool. He says there’s a tendency among Jews to reject Christian fundamentalist support of Israel. “Such Jews are nuts.” Koch says that when you see the Messiah, ask if he’s Jewish and then ask if it’s first visit or his second. If it’s his first, they have to convert. Dore Gold is next and says that if there’s anything good about UNSCR 1701 it’s because John Bolton was there and hammered in security clauses. Gold shows a Powerpoint presentation on Resolution 1701. Included El-Khiam which looks remarkably like Gaza City. 25,000 people and full of weapons. Whose civilians do we protect – ours or theirs? This is the result of the Goldstone Report. Photo of El Khiam released for the first time today – it shows map of weapons storage. Gold blasts Olmert for suggesting virtually full withdrawal from West Bank and having Jerusalem administered by Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the US. Lunch break to listen to Ahmadinejad at the United Nations across the street.
Hudson Institute and Touro College running anti-Durban conference
Hudson Institute and Touro College running a conference on September 22 - the day of the Durban III conference - between 9:00 am and 6:00 pm. The conference is entitled The Perils of Global Intolerance: the United Nations & "Durban III" and will take place at the UN Millenium Plaza Hotel.
The Hudson Institute and the Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust today announced an historic conference targeting manifestations of racism, anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance at the United Nations. The conference will coincide with the highly controversial UN event known as “Durban III.” Organizers were galvanized, according to Anne Bayefsky, a Senior Fellow of the Hudson Institute and Director of the Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, after learning that “Americans will be mourning the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001 at the same time as the United Nations will appear to be legitimizing the kind of intolerance that drives terrorism itself.”
"Durban III" is intended to "commemorate" the 10th anniversary of the UN-sponsored anti-Semitic hatefest that took place in Durban, South Africa in 2001. The final product of that conference – the Durban Declaration – charged Israel with racism, the only one of the UN's 192 state members so accused. Led by Congressman and Holocaust survivor Tom Lantos, the United States – along with Israel – walked out of Durban I in disgust.
According to conference organizer, Anne Bayefsky, a Senior Fellow of the Hudson Institute and Director of the Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, "The Durban conference legitimized hate speech on a global scale." At the widely-perceived racist "anti-racism" conference, the streets were filled with signs such as "for the liberation of Quds machine guns based on faith and Islam must be used," and handouts with Hitler's photo read "What if I had won? The good things: there would be no Israel..." Durban I ended three days before 9/11. The Durban Review Conference, or Durban II, was held in Geneva in 2009, and the only world leader to attend was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Organizers of the "Perils of Global Intolerance" conference were galvanized, Bayefsky said, after learning that "Americans will be mourning the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001 at the same time as the United Nations is legitimizing the kind of intolerance that drives terrorism in the first place."
The one-day conference will be a call to action. "Given the events that Durban III is intended to commemorate," Bayefsky noted, "the UN will sadly serve as a global platform to promote the inverse of its original purposes and principles. It is imperative to deny legitimacy to prejudice and the Durban Declaration."
A Speakers List of International Prominence
The conference has gathered an impressive array of distinguished speakers from three continents, including Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel, former US UN Ambassador John Bolton, former Governor Mike Huckabee, world-renowned scholar Bernard Lewis, Ronald Lauder is the current President of the World Jewish Congress, Academy-award winning actor Jon Voight, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, Harvard Professor and best-selling author Alan Dershowitz, a psychologist named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world Wafa Sultan, Sudanese human rights activist Simon Deng, former Israeli UN Ambassador Dore Gold, Harvard Professor and National Humanities Medal recipient Ruth Wisse, veteran award-winning journalist Khaled Abu Toameh, Hoover Institution Fellow and National Humanities Medal recipient Shelby Steele, bestselling author and award-winning UK journalist Douglas Murray, and President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy Zuhdi Jasser.
Political and other leaders who have a genuine interest in combating xenophobia will be provided a crucial forum to speak with passion about their concerns, and to distance America and decent people everywhere from a multilateralism divorced from fundamental freedoms and inalienable rights.
Read the whole thing. If any of you (especially fellow bloggers) are planning to go, please let me know via email. Yes, I would love to go....
Former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold appeared on Fox & Friends on Tuesday to defend Israel against President Obama's 'peace plan.' While he was there, they also asked him about what's going on in Syria.
Let's go to the videotape.
In that video, you saw excerpts of a brief video called "Israel's critical security needs for a viable peace." I showed you that video once before here, but since it's been more than a year, I'm going to post it again.
We keep hearing spin from Washington about how '1967 lines with agreed swaps' has 'always' been American policy and no one should be surprised by it and so on and so on.
But that's spin for a lot of reasons. Dore Gold explains some of them.
So where did the idea of land swaps come from? During the mid-1990s there were multiple backchannel efforts to see if it was possible to reach a final agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinians argued that when Israel signed a peace agreement with Egypt, it agreed to withdraw from 100 percent of the Sinai Peninsula. So they asked how could PLO chairman Yasser Arafat be given less than what Egyptian president Anwar Sadat received.
As a result, Israeli academics involved in these backchannel talks accepted the principle that the Palestinians would obtain 100 percent of the territory, just like the Egyptians, despite the language of Resolution 242, and they proposed giving Israeli land to the Palestinians as compensation for any West Bank land retained by Israel. This idea appeared in the 1995 Beilin-Abu Mazen paper, which was neither signed nor embraced by the Israeli or the Palestinian leaderships. Indeed, Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) subsequently denied in May 1999 that any agreement of this sort existed.
There is a huge difference between Egypt and the Palestinians. Egypt was the first Arab state to make peace, and in recognition of that fact, Prime Minister Menachem Begin gave Sadat all of Sinai. Moreover, the Israeli-Egyptian border had been a recognized international boundary since the time of the Ottoman Empire. The pre-1967 Israeli boundary with the West Bank was not a real international boundary; it was only an armistice line demarcating where Arab armies had been stopped when they invaded the nascent state of Israel in 1948.
In July 2000 at the Camp David Summit, the Clinton administration raised the land swap idea that had been proposed by Israeli academics, but neither Camp David nor the subsequent negotiating effort at Taba succeeded. Israel's foreign minister at the time, Shlomo Ben-Ami, admitted in an interview inHaaretz on September 14, 2001: "I'm not sure that the whole idea of a land swap is feasible." In short, when the idea was actually tested in high-stakes negotiations, the land swap idea proved to be far more difficult to implement as the basis for a final agreement.
After the collapse of the Camp David talks, President Clinton tried to summarize Israeli and Palestinian positions and put forward a U.S. proposal that still featured the land swap. But to his credit, Clinton also stipulated: "These are my ideas. If they are not accepted, they are off the table, they go with me when I leave office." The Clinton team informed the incoming Bush administration about this point. Notably, land swaps were not part of the 2003 Roadmap for Peace or in the April 14, 2004 letter from President Bush to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
It was Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who resurrected the land swap idea in 2008 as part of newly proposed Israeli concessions that went even further than Israel's positions at Camp David and Taba. It came up in these years in other Israeli-Palestinian contacts, as well. But Mahmoud Abbas was only willing to talk about a land swap based on 1.9 percent of the territory, which related to the size of the areas of Jewish settlement, but which did not even touch on Israel's security needs. So the land swap idea still proved to be unworkable.
Writing in Haaretz on May 29, 2011, Prof. Gideon Biger, from Tel Aviv University's department of geography, warned that Israel cannot agree to a land swap greater than the equivalent of 2.5 percent of the territories since Israel does not have vast areas of empty land which can be transferred. Any land swap of greater size would involve areas of vital Israeli civilian and military infrastructure.
Furthermore, in the summaries of the past negotiations with Prime Minister Olmert, the Palestinians noted that they would be demanding land swaps of "comparable value" - meaning, they would not accept some remote sand dunes in exchange for high quality land near the center of Israel. In short, given the limitations on the quantity and quality of territory that Israel could conceivably offer, the land swap idea was emerging as impractical.
Read it all. If Obama wanted to kill the 'peace process' he could not have done better than '1967 lines with agreed swaps.'
One thing Dore doesn't address is the fact the giving Egypt 100% of Sinai back under Camp David was a mistake. It was. That doesn't make the 'Palestinian' case comparable, and I'm sure that's why Dore glossed over the issue - he didn't want to distract people from his main argument. But giving Egypt back 'every last grain of sand' was a serious mistake. It raised the 'Palestinians' expectations, and it made the Egyptians believe that they could one day go to war with Israel again without suffering any consequences. If an aggressor loses a war, there ought to be a price to pay. And there is - except when the aggressor is attacking Israel.
The map above should show you why Prime Minister Netanyahu said that Israel cannot go back to the 1949 armistice lines. And if you don't get it from there, here's Dore Gold.
The cornerstone of all postwar diplomacy was U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, passed in November 1967. It did not demand that Israel pull back completely to the pre-1967 lines. Its withdrawal clause only called on Israel to withdraw "from territories," not from all territories. Britain's foreign secretary at the time, George Brown, later underlined the distinction: "The proposal said 'Israel will withdraw from territories that were occupied,' and not from 'the' territories, which means that Israel will not withdraw from all the territories."
Prior to the Six Day War, Jerusalem had been sliced in two, and the Jewish people were denied access to the Old City and its holy sites. Jerusalem's Christian population also faced limitations. As America's ambassador to the U.N., Arthur Goldberg, would explain, Resolution 242 did not preclude Israel's reunification of Jerusalem. In fact, Resolution 242 became the only agreed basis of all Arab-Israeli peace agreements, from the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Treaty of Peace to the 1993 Oslo Agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.
How were Israel's legal rights to new boundaries justified? A good explanation came from Judge Stephen Schwebel, who would later be an adviser to the State Department and then president of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Writing in the American Journal of International Law in 1970, he noted that Israel's title to West Bank territory—in the event that it sought alterations in the pre-Six Day War lines—emanated from the fact that it had acted in lawful exercise of its right to self-defense. It was not the aggressor.
The flexibility for creating new borders was preserved for decades. Indeed, the 1993 Oslo Agreements, signed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, did not stipulate that the final borders between Israel and the Palestinians would be the 1967 lines. Borders were to be a subject for future negotiations. An April 2004 U.S. letter to Israel, backed by a bipartisan consensus in both houses of Congress, stipulated that Israel was not expected to fully withdraw, but rather was entitled to "defensible borders." U.S. secretaries of state from Henry Kissinger to Warren Christopher reiterated the same point in past letters of assurance.
If the borders between Israel and the Palestinians need to be negotiated, then what are the implications of a U.N. General Assembly resolution that states up front that those borders must be the 1967 lines? Some commentators assert that all Mr. Abbas wants to do is strengthen his hand in future negotiations with Israel, and that this does not contradict a negotiated peace. But is that really true? Why should Mr. Abbas ever negotiate with Israel if he can rely on the automatic majority of Third World countries at the U.N. General Assembly to back his positions on other points that are in dispute, like the future of Jerusalem, the refugee question, and security?
Mr. Abbas's unilateral move at the U.N. represents a massive violation of a core commitment in the Oslo Agreements in which both Israelis and Palestinians undertook that "neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of Permanent Status negotiations." Palestinian spokesmen counter that Israeli settlements violated this clause. Yet former Prime Minister Rabin was very specific while negotiating Oslo in preserving the rights of Israeli citizens to build their homes in these disputed areas, by insisting that the settlements would be one of the subjects of final status negotiations between the parties.
But all attention is now focused on the coda he offered about the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which he said that "the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines." Though he immediately added that those lines should be adjusted "with mutually agreed swaps" of territory "so that secure and recognized borders are established for both parties," it's the 1967 line that is sticking.
And with good reason. At its neck, the distance from the Mediterranean coast to the West Bank is nine miles. Foreign analysts may imagine that strategic depth no longer matters, but Israelis know better thanks to the thousands of short-range rockets fired at their towns from Hamas-controlled Gaza. As candidate Obama said when he toured one such Israeli town in 2008, "If someone was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that, and I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."
Well, exactly. Which is why it was strange to hear Mr. Obama, in a speech otherwise devoted to urging change in the nature of Arab societies, suddenly revert to the tired land-for-peace formula that has so often failed. Since the rest of Mr. Obama's speech borrowed heavily from President Bush's Freedom Agenda, he might also have taken a cue from his predecessor's June 2002 speech, which conditioned Palestinian statehood on renouncing terrorism and liberalizing politics.
That concept is all the more appropriate now that Hamas has joined the Palestinian government, a point Mr. Obama acknowledged in his speech. Most Israelis would not object to a Palestinian state, even on the 1967 lines, if its politics resembled those of, say, Canada. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's problem is that political trends among the Palestinians lean more in the direction of Iran, despite some recent promising economic trends.
Nor does it help that Mr. Obama wants Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territory even before the two sides resolve the issues of the status of Jerusalem and of the 1948 Palestinian refugees, recently in the news with their attempt to force their way through Israel's borders. No Israeli leader is going to give up the West Bank without resolving those existential issues, since it would merely allow the Palestinians to pocket the territorial gains while perpetuating the conflict.
The President's team is explaining the speech as an attempt to restart the moribund Israeli-Palestinian talks, but it will accomplish no such thing.
Indeed.
Although right now, I doubt most Israelis would agree to any 'Palestinian state.' Most of us have had enough.
To hear Jennifer Rubin tell it, Dore Gold was a fascinating speaker at an on-the-record luncheon on Tuesday.
The real issue is whether the United States, its Quartet partners, the United Nations and Russia will live up to the commitment made in U.N. Resolution 242 ( which provided for “Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force” )and by presidents of both parties to ensure that Israel has defensible borders. The U.N. commitment to secure borders was reiterated by the Clinton administration in a January 1997 letterfrom then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher to the Israeli prime minister:
Mr. Prime Minister, you can be assured that the United States’ commitment to Israel’s security is ironclad and constitutes the fundamental cornerstone of our special relationship. The key element in our approach to peace, including the negotiations and implementation of agreements between Israel and its Arab partners, has always been a recognition of Israel’s security requirements. Moreover, a hallmark of U.S. policy remains our commitment to work cooperatively to seek to meet the security needs that Israel identifies. Finally, I would like to reiterate our position that Israel is entitled to secure and defensible borders, which should be directly negotiated and agreed with its neighbors.
That promise was repeated in an April 14, 2004, letter from President George W. Bush to the Israeli prime minister [which you can find in full with commentary here. CiJ]:
...
These commitments were made as part of the U.S. inducement to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to put forth the Gaza disengagement plan and to agree to withdraw some military installations and settlements in the West Bank. It was a commitment by the U.S. government that was in keeping with bipartisan U.S. policy. Moreover, Gold pointed out that this arrangement was endorsed by both houses of Congress. The House voted 407-9. In the Senate the vote was 95-3. Voting to back the April 14 letter were, among others, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.). The Obama administration has repeatedly refused to indicate whether it is repudiating or standing by that commitment. One additional note: a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood would also violate the Oslo II Interim agreement signed by the PA and Israel and witnessed by the U.S., the EU, Norway, Egypt and Jordan. (This would be pretty much the same set of characters now pressuring Israel to recognize a Palestinian state.) Article XXXI contains these provisions:
Permanent status negotiations will commence as soon as possible, but not later than May 4, 1996, between the Parties. It is understood that these negotiations shall cover remaining issues, including: Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security arrangements, borders, relations and cooperation with other neighbors, and other issues of common interest.
Nothing in this Agreement shall prejudice or preempt the outcome of the negotiations on the permanent status to be conducted pursuant to the DOP. Neither Party shall be deemed, by virtue of having entered into this Agreement, to have renounced or waived any of its existing rights, claims or positions.
...
Gold did not want to comment on the role Congress might play. However, it seems that the House Foreign Affairs Committee does have a role to play. It should consider why we are continuing to fund the Palestinian Authority while it is in breach of its obligations to negotiate with Israel and to abide by the rest of the Oslo II interim agreement (for example, “Israel and the Council shall seek to foster mutual understanding and tolerance and shall accordingly abstain from incitement, including hostile propaganda, against each other and, without derogating from the principle of freedom of expression, shall take legal measures to prevent such incitement by any organizations, groups or individuals within their jurisdiction.”) The House controls the purse strings and can certainly put that leverage to good use. Moreover, Congress can pass a resolution reminding the Obama administration of its obligations to adhere to the Christopher and Bush letters and reaffirming that a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state violates international agreements and U.S. commitments. And finally, some probing oversight can take place. The United States is a member of the Quartet, so why aren’t we using our power to block a unilateral declaration of recognition?
Read the whole thing. The real issue here is if the US, the UN and the 'Palestinians' are not going to live up to their commitments (which seems readily apparent based on past experience), why should Israel degrade its position based on those commitments? And if, as seems obvious, Israel should not degrade its position based on those commitments, then why is it doing so?
By the way, the luncheon that Jennifer attended was a lead-up to Gold's testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. You can find the full text of Gold's statement to the Committee here.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
