RUTHFULLY YOURS

Chinese Ambassador Liu Jieyi, who held the April UN Security Council presidency, announced last week that the status of the Golan Heights “remains unchanged.” That is, of course, true — like the old “Saturday Night Live” running gag, “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.”

He meant it belongs to Syria, and he was responding to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who told a meeting of the Israeli Cabinet on the Golan, “The Golan Heights have been an integral part of the land of Israel since ancient times; the dozens of ancient synagogues in the area around us attest to that. And the Golan is an integral part of the state of Israel in the new era. I told [Secretary of State John Kerry] that I doubt that Syria will ever return to what it was.”

That is, of course, also true and entirely unremarkable. But thus begins another round of UN condemnation of Israel resting on silly propositions. In this case:

That Syria — ruled by a war criminal in the midst of a civil war with other groups that include war criminals — has a valid claim to anything; and
That Israel is wrong because the UN is miffed.

A bit of relatively recent history is useful here.

An Israeli was raised in the Galilee sleeping every night in a bunker to avoid Syrian shelling from the Golan Heights — Hamas and Hizb’allah are latecomers to the war crime of indiscriminately firing at civilians. As a child, he helped on the family farm. While riding the tractor, his father couldn’t hear the mortars fired by the Syrians down into the fields. The child’s job was to be within eyesight of the tractor along the edge of the field near some trees. When the mortars began, he would wave a large red flag to catch his father’s attention, at which his father would slip off the tractor and hasten for shelter. Not exactly milking the cow.

The internecine strife in Fatah no longer appears restricted to the loyalists of Dahlan and Abbas. It is threatening to erupt into an all-out war between contesting camps. Some Palestinians see the internal strife as the most serious challenge to Abbas’s rule over Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, especially in wake of growing criticism among Palestinians against Abbas’s policies and autocratic regime.

The criticism has escalated following last week’s humiliating defeat of Fatah to Hamas at the student council election of Bir Zeit University, near Ramallah.

Hamas is thriving on the mayhem among the top brass of Fatah and disgust with Abbas and the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank. Rather than striving to improve the lives of Palestinians, Fatah leaders spend their time playing at being gangsters, settling scores. Meanwhile Abbas continues his charade of lies with the international community that he and his Fatah faction are ready for a sovereign state.

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction is supposed to be preparing its people for statehood. But it seems to be busy with other business.

According to sources in the Gaza Strip, Hamas security forces recently uncovered a scheme to assassinate a number of senior Fatah officials living there.

The sources claimed that ousted Fatah operative Mohamed Dahlan, who has been living in the United Arab Emirates for the past five years, was the mastermind of the alleged scheme. Dahlan’s men in the Gaza Strip were planning to assassinate Fatah officials closely associated with his rival, Abbas, the sources revealed.

Dahlan’s hit list included Ahmed Abu Nasr, Jamal Kayed, Emad al-Agha and Mamoun Sweidan.

After the alleged plot was uncovered, Hamas summoned a number of top Fatah officials in the Gaza Strip and asked them to take precautionary measures to ensure their safety.

Abbas and Dahlan have, for the past five years, been at each other’s throats. The two were once close allies and had worked together to undermine the former Palestinian Authority president, Yasser Arafat.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 elicited euphoria among world Zionists. It was to be short lived as a chain of betrayals truncated the land promised to the Jews and limited their immigration.

The 1922 White Paper (also known as the Churchill White Paper) averred that Jews were in Palestine by right, but bowing to Arab pressure, ceded 76 percent –all the land East of the Jordan River–to the Hashemite Emir Abdullah. It was renamed Transjordan, and closed to Jewish settlement. In explanation the British stated:

“England…does not want Palestine to become ‘as Jewish as England is English’, but, rather, should become ‘a center in which Jewish people as a whole may take, on grounds of religion and race, an interest and a pride.’” (Ironically today Israel is poised to become more Jewish than England is English given the very real prospect that Muslims will become a majority in that nation.)

The Jews of Palestine had no choice but to accept the partition of 1922, but Arab thirst for all of Palestine resulted in murders and terrorist attacks, the Hebron massacre of 1929 and later the 1936-39 “Arab Revolt.” The British responded with the White Paper of 1939 all but eliminating Jewish immigration to Palestine. This occurred after the infamous Evian conference of July 1938. With the exception of the Dominican Republic, all the participants refused to alter their immigration policies, thereby trapping Europe’s Jews. The Nazis were to kill one of every three Jews in the world.

In 1982, Sir Harold Wilson, who had been a member of Clement Attlee’s Cabinet when Israel became independent in 1948 and served as Prime Minister during the Six-Day War, wrote The Chariot of Israel-Britain, America and the State of Israel in which he described the British actions in 1939 as shameful and inexcusable.

After World War II the British continued their appalling anti-Jewish immigration policies, seizing and firing upon the vessels taking traumatized Holocaust survivors to Palestine.

However, the Jews of Palestine began a sustained effort to push the British out of Palestine and in February 1947 Britain announced its intent to terminate the Mandate, referring the matter of Palestine to the United Nations.

In May of that year the United Nations Special Committee On Palestine (UNSCOP) began deliberations on a “solution” to the Palestine “problem.”

These deliberations included an UNSCOP mission to examine the state of surviving Jews in displaced persons camps in Europe. The members were horrified by the conditions, but cynical enough to exploit the desperation of the refugees by deciding on a further partition of Palestine.

On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted 33 to 13 (with ten abstentions) to implement the new partition as Resolution 181. Absent in all the media hailing of the “compromise” was any mention that the Jews of Palestine had already relinquished 75 percent of the area promised in the Balfour Declaration. Media and diplomats alike would declare that the Jews were gaining 53% of “Palestine” when in fact they were left with roughly 12 percent.

Thus, the 25 percent of Palestine left to the Jews for a homeland in 1922 was now to be divided as follows:

What is perhaps most conspicuous about the growth of anti-Semitism on the European Left, as exemplified by the current crisis in the British Labour Party, is that it is rising at a time when Europe should be busy with much more pressing issues, such as national security — particularly in London, where the terrorist threat keeps growing and security officials can barely keep up.

It has been less than two months since Islamic terrorists successfully targeted the Brussels airport and the Maelbeek metro station, killing 32 people and wounding many more. And it has been only half a year since the Paris attacks, in which Islamic terrorists killed 130 people and wounded nearly 400. These were groundbreaking, shocking events in the history of Islamic terrorism on European soil, so one would naturally assume that Israel and Jews in general, who make up such a marginal demographic group, constituting less than half a percent of the population of the EU, would be the last thing on European politicians’ minds. Another enormous immigration crisis looms, as 800,000 migrants, according to French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, are currently in Libyan territory waiting to cross the Mediterranean Sea. This means that Europe will most likely be facing even more chaos than it did last summer.

However, European politicians, instead of busying themselves with protecting their citizens from future terrorist attacks — as well as preventing another chaotic summer of migration chaos — incredibly find time to get mired in sordid squabbles about insane ideas of transferring Israeli Jews to the United States and claiming Hitler was a Zionist — as we saw in the U.K. — or composing elaborate peace conference initiatives to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — as we saw in France. If I were a European citizen, I would wonder why my government was occupying itself with these issues, which have no vital meaning to any Europeans, at a time when Europe is facing unprecedented security threats.