Israel Matzav

Yet again I don’t see this point as very significant. What’s important is whether a large portion of the people in question believe that they are a people. Moreover, the same “invented” charge has been made against the Jewish people by Stalin and of course by Arab and Islamist propaganda.

The fact that today, a Palestinian people does exist doesn’t give the Palestinians a right to invent history, of course. ABC News didn’t point out that they regularly claim a history of two thousand years or more. And Golda Meir was pointing to the fact that the dominant politics of the Palestinian movement certainly as late as 1945 was a pan-Arab nationalist one. If the “invention” of a Palestinian (Arab, Muslim) people is relatively recent, though, that does imply that they don’t have a claim to everything between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And that’s what’s important.

Everyone from the PLO to a Mitt Romney spokesman jumped on Gingrich for this assertion, but he happens to be absolutely correct: no Arabic-speaking Muslims identified themselves as "Palestinian" until 1920, when, in rapid order this appellation and identity was adopted by the Muslim Arabs living in the British mandate of Palestine.

It should also go without saying that radical and bigoted polemicists on the other side of the Arab-Israeli dispute have their own pseudo-scholarship—their own numbing, often anti-Semitic, tracts—which make the case that Israel, and the Jewish people, are alien and have no claim on the land.

The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.

"The demands of this enemy [Israel] are strange and amazing demands, unique in the history of conflicts... They [Israelis] are not satisfied with Palestinian recognition that is a function of their state and its existence, but want recognition of the eternal right of Israel to exist. Possibly their nature will bring them to ask for compensation for the years that have passed without their state's existence, during the time it had the right to exist upon our skulls... They have a common mistake, or misconception by which they fool themselves, assuming that Fatah accepts them and recognizes the right of their state to exist, and that it is Hamas alone that loathes them and does not recognize the right of this state to exist. They ignore the fact that this state, based on a fabricated [Zionist] enterprise, never had any shred of a right to exist... Hamas, Fatah and the others are not waging war against Israel right now for reasons related to balance of power. There are no two Palestinians who disagree over the fact that Israel exists, and recognition of it is restating the obvious, but recognition of its right to exist is something else, different from recognition of its [physical] existence."

"They talk to us about the Jewish state, but I respond to them with a final answer: We shall not recognize a Jewish state," Abbas said in a meeting with some 200 senior representatives of the Palestinian community in the US, shortly before taking the podium and delivering a speech at the United Nations General Assembly.

On November 15, 1988, the Palestinian National Council, then led by late President Yasser Arafat, declared the independence of the State of Palestine within the 1967 borders. This was the historic Palestinian compromise: we accepted that our state would exist on only 22 percent of our historic homeland. Israel responded by colonizing more of our land and entrenching its control over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

In its response, the BGU administration claimed that the department was structured to differ from traditional political science departments by offering a multidisciplinary perspective. Unfortunately, according to Israel Academia Monitor analysis, the department failed to execute this policy as illustrated by the roster of tenured and tenure- track faculty, which shows that a majority of professors specialize in various aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict with an emphasis on what is termed the subjugation and mistreatment of the Palestinian and Arab- Israeli population. This peculiar reading of a multidisciplinary approach stems from the political activism of neo-Marxist faculty members who have coopted similarly minded scholars.

Two top think tanks in Washington are mulling whether to sever ties with a controversial former AIPAC spokesman after it emerged that he was encouraging conservative writers to echo charges that critics of Israel are guilty of anti-Semitism, according to sources familiar with the discussions.

The fate of the former AIPAC spokesman, Josh Block, will be a big deal to people in left-leaning foreign policy circles in Washington. For them, the question of whether the think tanks will remain affiliated with Block will be seen as a referendum on the larger issue of whether demeaning Israel critics as anti-Semitic will be considered acceptable discourse among foreign policy experts.

Block stirred a lot of discussion and anger among foreign policy types when Salon reported last week that he was shopping “opposition research” on bloggers critical of Israel to friendly neoconservative journalists. Salon said that Block threw around accusation of anti-Semitism on a friendly listserv, calling on others to “echo” and “amplify” his efforts to “attack the bad guys.” The Salon story came after Block accused writers at the left-leaning Center for American Progress of writing “borderline anti-semitic stuff.”

It also sheds light on how intense the battle over what it means to be “pro Israel” has become, now that left leaning groups are mounting a serious challenge to the reigning and long unchallenged Washington consensus about what that term means.

I would like to know from Jennifer Rubin and from her editor -- and from the Chairman of the Board of the Washington Post -- what I have ever said, what I have ever written, what I have ever organized that deserves the characterization I received from Jennifer Rubin today at the Washington Post. What does she consider makes me an Israel-basher?

I believe that she and I have a serious disagreement about what Israel's interests are -- and I believe that the Netanyahu wing of the Israeli political establishment regularly places short term interests over long to mid-term interests. But I don't call those who support Netanyahu Israel-bashers even though I believe that as patriotic as they may be as Israelis or as pro-Israel as they may be as Americans they are harming Israel's interests. That could be a constructive debate -- something where both sides could learn something, perhaps.

Calling someone as Israel-basher is akin to calling them an anti-Semite or a bigot, and that can't go without response....

Steve is a friend and a very smart guy, so he probably knows this already, and while I have no dog in this particular hunt, having read neither his post nor Ms. Rubin's, just yours, given his "plaintive" question, perhaps it is worth pointing out the obvious.

Working to isolate Israel in the United Nations, and calling on the United States to abandon our policy of opposing unbalanced, anti-Israel Security Counsel resolutions, is the DEFINITION of anti-Israel activism, as is bragging or promoting in widely circulated emails one's letter being signed by the likes of Walt/Measheimer, Chas Freeman and a like crowd of mostly anti-Israel actors and critics. [Emphasis mine. CiJ]