http://britanniaradio.blogspot.com/2013/01/on-failure-to-adopt-edmond-levy-report.html In failing to adopt (and proclaim) the Edmond Levy Report on the status of Judea and Samaria, the Government of Israel is missing a golden opportunity to assert Israel’s case, loud and clear, regarding our rights in this land under international law. For decades now, we have swept this vital issue under the carpet, […]
My friend in Shiloh, Yisrael Medad(www.myrightword.blogspot.com) has kindly sent me this column by Efraim Karsh written in 2002….in Commentary Magazine
Few subjects have been falsified so thoroughly as the recent history of the West Bank and Gaza.
by Efraim Karsh
Reprinted with permission from Commentary, July-August 2002.
No term has dominated the discourse of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict more than “occupation.” For decades now, hardly a day has passed without some mention in the international media of Israel’s supposedly illegitimate presence on Palestinian lands. This presence is invoked to explain the origins and persistence of the conflict between the parties, to show Israel’s allegedly brutal and repressive nature, and to justify the worst anti-Israel terrorist atrocities. The occupation, in short, has become a catchphrase, and like many catchphrases it means different things to different people.
For most Western observers, the term “occupation” describes Israel’s control of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, areas that it conquered during the Six-Day war of June 1967. But for many Palestinians and Arabs, the Israeli presence in these territories represents only the latest chapter in an uninterrupted story of “occupations” dating back to the very creation of Israel on “stolen” land. If you go looking for a book about Israel in the foremost Arab bookstore on London’s Charing Cross Road, you will find it in the section labeled “Occupied Palestine.” That this is the prevailing view not only among Arab residents of the West Bank and Gaza but among Palestinians living within Israel itself as well as elsewhere around the world is shown by the routine insistence on a Palestinian “right of return” that is meant to reverse the effects of the “1948 occupation” — i.e., the establishment of the state of Israel itself.
Palestinian intellectuals routinely blur any distinction between Israel’s actions before and after 1967. Writing recently in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, the prominent Palestinian cultural figure Jacques Persiqian told his Jewish readers that today’s terrorist attacks were “what you have brought upon yourselves after 54 years of systematic oppression of another people” — a historical accounting that, going back to 1948, calls into question not Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza but its very legitimacy as a state.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/exposing-the-anti-israel-peace-industry/ The other day, I went online for what was supposed to be a quick Internet search. Instead I ended up spending a couple of hours meandering from one website to another, led by links and Google hits, increasingly fascinated – and appalled – by what I was seeing. What I was looking at was […]
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/
A Brace of Fresh Air by William Mehlman
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/a-brace-of-fresh-air-by-william-mehlman.html
From his space station at the outer limits of surreal-politik, Shimon Peres has thrown down a gauntlet to Israel on the eve of perhaps its most fateful national election in more than six decades . The Jewish state, its 89 year-old president solemnly informed an audience at the prestigious Globe-Israel Business Conference in Tel-Aviv, “faces a choice between Gaza and the West Bank, between Hamas and [Palestinian Authority] President Abbas… One is wrong, the other is right. We have to choose.”
From the Editor Rael Jean Isaac
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/from-the-editor-rael-jean-isaac-25.html
A Disproportionate Response
With all the concern expressed by the U.S. administration that Israel’s response to the terrorists of Hamas not be “disproportionate,” the true disproportion is being practiced by that same administration–in keeping Jonathan Pollard in prison for what is now 28 years. This is even more outrageous now that new evidence, as a Jerusalem Post editorial says “puts the lie to American allegations that have been used for over a quarter of a century to justify Pollard’s continued incarceration.”
The most important lie is that Pollard did enormous damage to U.S. national security. The Department of Justice’s Victim Impact Statement (VIS), now a matter of public record, which was submitted to the sentencing judge in 1987, states that Pollard’s “unauthorized disclosures have threatened the US relations with numerous Middle East Arab allies” and “deprived the US of bargaining leverage with the Israel government.”
Occupying the Laboratory by Ruth King
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/occupying-the-laboratory-by-ruth-king.html
Today I received an e-mail from a prominent Israeli scientist. I had asked him why the same people whose lives are enhanced and lengthened by Israel’s dazzling contributions to medicine, science and technology should want to boycott and divest from Israeli companies and seek to terminate the Jewish state. He responded with his customary wit:
“First, there is the occupation of the laboratory. Then our medical Mossad spies on and locates and diagnoses errant and destructive cells and tumors. Then our assault team targets them and destroys them using all the weapons at our disposal including chemicals, drug protocols, radiation, genes and enzymes. Then when we are successful, we call a cease fire to observe and record the results.”
Linking the City of Maale Adumim to Jerusalem by Nadav Shragai
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/linking-the-city-of-maale-adumim-to-jerusalem-by-nadav-shragai.html
Editor’s note: Below are excerpts from a 2009 essay by Nadav Shragai on what is known as the E-1 area between Jerusalem and M’aale Adumim.
Netanyahu’s declaration that Israel will build there has produced a firestorm of criticism worldwide, including from the Obama administration, which calls it a “provocative action.” Yet, as this three year old essay makes clear, in saying that he will build in this corridor Netanyahu promises no more than what every Prime Minister since Rabin has undertaken to do. Under U.S. pressure all of them have backed down. The question remains open whether this time building will go beyond planning and rhetoric.
It’s Official: Muslim Population of Britain Doubles by Douglas Murray
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/its-official-muslim-population-of-britain-doubles-by-douglas-murray.html
The national census for England and Wales has come out, and, as usual, this once-a-decade event has had all of its most significant points overlooked.
By any measure, what it reveals is a country undergoing seismic change. Over the course of a decade up to four million more people have entered the country to live. In the capital, London, people identifying themselves as “white British” have for the first time become a minority. Perhaps most strikingly, the national Muslim population has doubled.
European Jewish History Is Nearing Its End by Giulio Meotti
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/european-jewish-history-is-nearing-its-end-by-giulio-meotti.html
Surprised that Israelis entering Jordan are required to deposit religious Jewish items, like skullcaps and tefillin, for “security reasons”?
It’s happening in many European countries as well, where Jews are once again in grave danger and Judeophobia has become the common currency of politics.
Gush Etzion by Ruth King
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/gush-etzion-by-ruth-king.html
(Editor’s note: This is another in our series celebrating the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria.)
In early 1927, a small group of residents in what was then called Palestine, spurred by the Zionist goal of reclaiming Israel and encouraged by the promises of the Balfour Declaration, established a community south of Jerusalem on land recently bought by a Jewish landholding company. They named it “Migdal Eder” after a site named in the Torah. The community faced continual hardships and the Arab riots of 1929 soon drove them off.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/will-america-continue-down-the-road-to-decline/ Looking back over 2012, one could be forgiven for thinking that if America goes on at this rate, the nation must be ruined. But as Adam Smith replied to a young man who said those same words about British losses during the American Revolution, “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/israel-in-the-new-year-resounding-successes-looming-threat/ Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics has released its population data for 2012, the year that just ended. As usual, the trends are favorable. The total Israeli population rose to just under eight million, while the Jewish population—for the first time—rose to just over six million. Naturally, the number has a certain resonance. Aside from […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-klein/when-unrepentant-terrorists-teach-our-youth/ Morgan Gliedman, 27, and her boyfriend Aaron Greene, 31, were arrested on weapons charges this past weekend in their Greenwich Village apartment on West 9th Street. They were charged with possessing bomb-making materials and were also found to have in their apartment bomb-making manuals, various booby traps and a sawed-off shotgun. Both are reported […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/fiscal-cliff-postponed-to-march/ With a cocky President Obama no doubt grinning from ear-to-ear, federal lawmakers yesterday gave their blessing to legislation that boosts income tax rates and government spending while kicking many of the “fiscal cliff” issues down the road for several weeks. The $1.2 trillion in scheduled spending cuts –falling largely on the Pentagon– have now […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/336673 As members of Congress fight with the president and each other over the budget impasse, another battle looms. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said he may try — on the very first day of the new Congress — to change the Senate’s rules regarding the filibuster. Reid wants to severely limit the minority’s […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323320404578213222157770046.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
http://diplopundit.net/tag/ryan-crocker/
Retired Ambassador Ryan Crocker Takes Plea Bargain in DUI Charge (NOV. 2012)
After three postment of his DUI hearing in Spokane, Washington (originally scheduled for September 12, then postponed to October 10 and later to November 5), Ambassador Crocker finally had his court hearing on Nov. 21. According to the Spokesman.com, the former ambassador pleaded guilty to “a reduced charge of reckless driving in connection with a drunken auto accident” this past summer. Excerpt: The 63-year-old retired diplomat accepted the plea bargain this afternoon in Spokane County District Court. He faced a drunken-driving charge following a collision with a semitruck at a busy Spokane Valley intersection on Aug. 14. He drove away as a witness tailed him, authorities said. No injuries were reported in the collision.
Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense
“His keen understanding of national security was clear to me as I represented the U.S. across the Middle East.”
Mr. Crocker has served as U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, Kuwait, Syria, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The discussion of former Sen. Chuck Hagel’s possible nomination for secretary of defense continues to swirl. I recently joined with eight other senior former Foreign Service colleagues in an open letter expressing our unqualified support for the idea and for Mr. Hagel as a person of integrity, courage and wisdom. Here’s why.
As a veteran of almost 40 years in Middle Eastern affairs, I have a sense of how complex and multifaceted the issues in that region are. There are no easy answers or prepackaged solutions, and Mr. Hagel understood this from the day he walked into the Senate in 1997.
I began my three-year tour as U.S. ambassador to Syria the following year. During that time and beyond, there was never a question in my mind about Mr. Hagel’s support for Israel. Neither was there a question about his support for Middle East peace, and he understood that peace is made between enemies, not friends. He backed the process, led by then-President Bill Clinton, that almost produced peace in early 2000.
