RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/lie-palestinian-right-return-richard-l-cravatts/

While more than 1200 rockets rained down on southern Israeli towns during the latest violence from Gaza’s Hamas, the terrorist organization’s leader Ismail Haniyeh arrogantly warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to “play with fire . . . Neither you nor your army and police can win this battle. What’s happening in Jerusalem is an intifada that must not stop.”

In fact, an unending intifada against the Jewish state has been the central mission of Hamas since its inception, and part of that war against Israel includes what Palestinians claim is their legal “right of return;” that is, the right of those Arabs who fled or were expelled from what became Israel to now return, en masse, to the Jewish state—together with all of the original refugee’s descendants, now numbering in the millions.

In its “Document of General Principles and Policies,” Hamas specifically articulates this supposed right, claiming, mistakenly, that “The right of the Palestinian refugees and the displaced to return to their homes from which they were banished or were banned from returning to – whether in the lands occupied in 1948 or in 1967 (that is the whole of Palestine), is a natural right, both individual and collective. This right is confirmed by all divine laws as well as by the basic principles of human rights and international law.”

Hamas’s aspirations aside, all sentient observers of the Palestinian issue know that the “right of return” issue is a core tactic in rendering real peace, any viable Arab/Israeli solution, effectively impossible, that the prospect of some five to seven million Palestinian refugees flooding into what is now Israel would, as the late University of Haifa professor Steven Plaut once put it, “derail Israel demographically and turn it into the Rwanda of the Levant.”

The demand for a right of return, a notion referred to by Palestinians and their supporters as “sacred” and an “enshrined” universal human right granted by UN resolutions and international law, in fact has no legal standing at all, and is part of the propaganda campaign that is based on the thinking that if Israel cannot be eradicated by the Arabs though war, it can effectively be destroyed by forcing it to commit demographic suicide.       

In the first place, the right of return claim uses the fraud as its core notion that the Palestinians were “victimized” by the creation of Israel, that they were expelled from a fictive land of “Palestine” where they were the indigenous people “from time immemorial,” as historian Joan Peters put it in her book of the same name. The recounting of this wistful fable has enabled the Palestinian cause to become the obsession of Leftists in the West, Middle East Study Centers on university campuses, the United Nations, much of Europe, and throughout the Arab world where Jew-hatred helps fuel a central evolving myth of Zionist oppression and occupation of fellow Muslim brethren.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-the-democrats-and-israel-11621376744?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Since Hamas began its rocket offensive last week, the Biden Administration has wisely refused to dictate the Israeli response. But the U.S. narrative war took a notable turn this week as Congressional Democrats demanded a cease-fire. We hope the President bucks his instinct to follow his party and leads it instead.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad have launched more than 3,000 rockets into Israel since last week, Jerusalem says, and Israel has been pummeling those groups in the Gaza strip to stop the attacks. Media and progressive activists blamed the Hamas-initiated war on Israel, as they always do, but the White House did not go along.

That position may not be viable for much longer on Capitol Hill. “Now, after more than a week of hostilities, it has become even more apparent that a cease-fire is necessary,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy told Politico, “If Israel doesn’t believe a cease-fire is in their interest, that doesn’t mean we have to accept that judgment. We have enormous persuasive power.”

Rep. Gregory Meeks, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, reportedly floated an arms-sale delay on Monday, but backed off on Tuesday citing assurances from the White House.

With any luck Israel will soon inflict enough damage on Gaza’s terrorist stockpiles and leadership that it can negotiate a genuine cease-fire. Israel wants a swift end to the conflict, not a repeat of its 2014 Operation Protective Edge, which lasted 50 days and involved a Gaza ground incursion.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/senator-warren-outraged-israeli-evictions-sheikh-hugh-fitzgerald/

Senator Elizabeth Warren has in the last few years been delivering herself of ever more strident anti-Israel remarks.

In October 2019, she said “everything is on the table” should Israel move away from a two-state solution. By “two-state solution,” she did not mean the one offered by the Trump Administration, but one which would be based on the “1967 lines,” which means the 1949 armistice lines. In May 2020, she signed a letter with 18 Senate Democrats opposing Israel’s possible “annexation” – really, an extension of sovereignty — of territories in the West Bank. On the campaign trail, the senator said she would push Israel to end its “ongoing occupation of Palestinian land” – and denounced the country’s decision to bar Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich, and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., from entering the West Bank and East Jerusalem where, of course, they would have participated in an anti-Israel propaganda fest, complete with visits to the demolished houses of terrorists and scenes of Israeli bulldozers creating new apartments in “the settlements,” and whatever else they could find to blacken Israel’s image.

In a speech at J Street recently, Warren said that “if we’re serious about arresting settlement expansion and helping move the parties toward a two-state solution, then it would be irresponsible not to consider all of the tools we have at our disposal. One of those is restricting military aid from being used in the occupied territories. By continuing to provide military aid without restriction, we provide no incentive for Israel to adjust course.”

She’s a law professor, well-versed in bankruptcy law, but international law is not her strong suit. She assumes, a bit too self-assuredly, that she doesn’t need to study further any aspect of the Arab-Israeli dispute; she’s a Harvard Law professor; don’t try to tell her there are gaps in her knowledge. Between the two attitudes — Wittgenstein’s “whereof we do not know, thereof we should not speak” and the verses aimed at Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, “I am the master of this college/And what I don’t know isn’t knowledge” — the complacent Warren displays the second attitude every time.

For It is clear from her constantly referring to “occupied territories” that Warren has no idea that the League of Nations assigned all of the land which we now call the “West Bank” to the Mandate for Palestine, to form part of the future Jewish National Home. She has certainly not read the Palestine Mandate, and especially its Article 6, which calls on the Mandatory (Great Britain) to “facilitate Jewish immigration” and “to encourage close settlement by Jews on the land.” She does not realize that the League of Nations’ Mandates became part of international law. She does not know that Article 80 (known as “the Jewish people’s article”) of the U.N. Charter constituted the U.N.’s solemn promise to fulfill the commitments previously made by the League of Nations when it created its system of mandates.