RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

The United States believes that Israel has waited long enough to redeem promises by the United Nations, and in the absence of Palestinian engagement, Israel is entitled to begin the process of securing its border in the east: in Judea and Samaria.

As Israel considers how and when to apply sovereignty to parts of Judea and Samaria—drawing its map in cooperation with the United States and leaving a chair at the table for the Palestinian Authority—American Democrats, the European community, parts of the international Jewish community and to an apparently lesser degree the Gulf Arab countries have been busy pronouncing themselves “troubled” by the whole process. The silent party has been the Palestinian Authority.

Until now.

In a text message to “the Quartet” (the “peacemaking” group consisting of the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Russia), the P.A. declares itself “ready to resume direct bilateral negotiations where they stopped” in 2014. The Palestinians are ready, the message says, to consider “minor border changes that will have been mutually agreed, based on the borders of June 4, 1967.” It helps to know that the June 4 line is not a border. It is the 1949 Armistice Line that was rejected by the United Nations as a border for Israel in U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.

Israel’s pre-1967 waistline was shorter than the length of DFW Airport in Texas and the distance between RFK Stadium and Kennedy Center in Washington, DC; equal to the distance between JFK and La Guardia airports and between Columbia University and Wall Street in New York City.

National security requirements in the Middle East

National security requirements are a by-product of the geo-strategic environment.  The more predictable and peaceful the environment, the lower the security requirements. The more unpredictable and non-peaceful the environment, the higher the security requirements.

Thus, Israel’s national security requirements are determined, mostly, by the 1,400-year-old tectonic Middle East reality: unpredictability, instability, highly-implosive, violent intra-Arab intolerance, no intra-Arab peaceful coexistence, systematic intra-Arab terrorism and subversion, Islam-dominated societies and minority despotic regimes, which are as tenuous as are their policies and agreements.

Realistic Middle East national security requirements must be capable of overcoming worst case scenarios of surprise offensives, not good-case-scenarios, which are rare in the Middle East.

The transition from Middle East peace to war could be as precipitous as Middle East politics (e.g., the toppling Mubarak by the Muslim Brotherhood, which was toppled by A-Sisi) and intra-Arab relations (e.g., Jordan’s support of Saddam Hussein and availing its territory for anti-Israel Palestinian terrorism). 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16213/palestinians-suicide

Last year, Palestinian activists took to the streets of the Gaza Strip to protest economic hardship and demand that Hamas provide solutions for soaring unemployment and poverty rates. The protests, held under the banner “We want to live!,” were brutally suppressed by Hamas’s security forces and militiamen.

Such calls by human rights organizations are dismissed out of hand by Hamas leaders, whose only concern is the iron grip of their power.

Hamas, after 13 years of criminal negligence, rejects responsibility for the wellbeing of its people. Astoundingly, it continues to succeed in convincing the world that Israel is to blame for the misery of its own people. This convenient and toxic lie enables it to continue receiving money and weapons from its friends in Iran and Hezbollah to tighten its death grip on the Gaza Strip.

For Hamas, jihad (holy war), not a decent life for its people, is what matters. Tragically, it seems that young Palestinians in Gaza are getting the message — loud and clear.

The Palestinian terror group Hamas is making a serious effort to prevent journalists from reporting about a surge in suicide rates in the Gaza Strip. Hamas does not want the world to know that young men and women living under its rule in the Gaza Strip, have, as a result of economic hardship and oppression, been taking their own lives.

In the past week alone, four Palestinians from the Gaza Strip reportedly committed suicide in separate incidents — by gunfire, pills, self-immolation, and jumping from a tall building. The suicides have embarrassed Hamas, whose leaders decided to take strict measures to stop the news from leaking to the media.

Thirteen years after its violent takeover of the Gaza Strip, Hamas is still seeking to present a rosy picture of the situation there. Hamas wants to show the world that life for many Palestinians under its Islamic rule and repressive measures is wonderful.

Orek 16 Launch – July 6, 2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wkEiC8UoYg&feature=emb_logo 

Israel’s Defense Ministry and the country’s Aerospace Industries on Monday morning launched the Ofek 16 reconnaissance satellite. The launch was carried out at 4:00 AM by the Israeli made Shavit rocket launcher from a pad in the center of the country and was a success. According to the Defense Ministry’s announcement, the satellite has already entered its orbit and began transmitting data. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16196/palestinians-censorship-terror

“We see corruption everywhere. Is the Palestinian Authority headed towards self-destruction? Or is it just destroying the [Palestinian] people so that its own sons and relatives can rise to power?” — Nadia Harhash, journalist, who awoke on June 1, 2020 to find her car being torched, raialyoum.com.

Instead of heeding the call of the Palestinian Coalition for Accountability and Integrity and many Palestinians to end nepotism and ensure accountability and transparency, the PA has chosen to remain silent.

Thanks to the criminal negligence of the international community and the so-called human rights organizations, however, the Palestinian Authority leadership can simply continue to pursue its policy of deadly intimidation against Palestinian journalists. These groups are much too busy drafting condemnations of Israel to have time left over to expose the true Palestinian menace: the Palestinian Authority.

The leadership of the Western-funded Palestinian Authority (PA) has again proved that it does not — and will not — tolerate any form of criticism, particularly when it comes from its own people. In the past few days, at least three Palestinian journalists have fallen victim to the PA’s long-time policy of terrorizing and silencing dissenting voices.

PA leaders have always resorted to various methods to silence and intimidate their critics. These methods include, among other things, arrests, recurring summons’ for interrogation, dismissal from work, and physical and psychological abuse.

The PA leadership has drawn deeper from its well of malevolent creativity to muzzle Palestinians from expressing critique: they are now also torching private cars.

This is an old technique of Palestinian activists to silence voices that dare to speak out against corruption, embezzlement of public funds and abuse of power.

The victims of car-torching are considered “lucky”: fire is directed at their property and not their bodies — it is better to have your car set on fire for your views than to get shot or stabbed for them. Torching cars has a twofold goal: to inflict financial damage and to send a deterrent message to both the victim and the surrounding environment.

Hamas has publicly threatened the Jewish state in the run up to Israel’s extension of sovereignty over communities in Judea and Samaria.

By Associated Press

The Israeli military on Sunday said three rockets were fired by Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip toward southern Israel.

The barrage set off air-raid sirens in southern Israel.

Israel’s Channel 12 TV said two rockets landed in open areas, causing no damage or injuries.A third projectile was intercepted by Israeli air defenses.

There was no immediate Israeli reaction, although the military usually responds to rocket fire with airstrikes on Hamas terror targets in Gaza.

So, it appears that the Russians–whose country is the largest in the world, even after the breakup of much of the former Soviet Union–have joined the international chorus of hypocrites assailing Israel. To create their enormous nation, numerous non-Russian peoples were conquered and had their lands annexed in the name of Russian national security.

Covering an area of almost seven million square miles, Russia includes nine different time zones and shares land borders with 14 adjacent countries. Its moves to absorb Ukraine’s Crimea are just the latest (renewed) examples of how Russia views the importance of its own interests–and to hell with everyone else.

Israel National News included a Reuters news organization report on July 4th (Happy Independence Day USA!) that Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, welcomed a pledge of unity between Fatah and Hamas against Israel’s plans to apply sovereignty in Judea and Samaria https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/282972.

And sovereignty is indeed the correct term.

Judeans don’t “annex” Judea–this isn’t Brits in the Falkland Islands; Arabs in Amazigh/”Berber” North Africa, black African Sudan, Syrian and Iraqi Kurdistan; the native Copts’ Egypt; and so forth  https://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13420 

I have a question for my Christian friends: Was Jesus born in Bethlehem of Judea–or in Bethlehem of Palestine or the “West Bank”? Check the Gospel of Matthew if you forgot …certainly not Zionist propaganda.

https://bit.ly/2Z4nFW1

The suggestion that the application of the Israeli law to the Jordan valley and parts of Judea and Samaria would severely undermine Israeli interests, jeopardize Israel’s peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt and Israel’s overall ties with Arab countries, is divorced from the Israeli track record and Middle East reality.

Israel’s track record

The resurgence of the Jewish State from the ashes of WW2 to global prominence, technologically, scientifically, medically, agriculturally, economically, diplomatically and militarily – despite systematic adverse global pressure and Arab wars and terrorism – has demonstrated that there are no free lunches for independent nations, especially in the Middle East.

For example, in 1948, Prime Minister Ben Gurion, Israel’s Founding Father, did no wait for a green light from the White House, in order to declare independence.  He was aware that a declaration of independence would trigger a costly Arab military invasion. The CIA estimated that it could subject the Jewish people to “a second holocaust.”  However, Ben Gurion concluded that achieving a supreme goal was preconditioned upon the willingness to pay a supreme cost.  Indeed, the war against the Arab invasion consumed 1% (6,000) of the Jewish population (600,000).  Fending off the Arab invasion, Israel expanded its borders by 30%, and did not retreat to the suicidal 1947 lines, despite brutal global (including US) pressure.  The pressure on Israel dissipated, but Israel’s buttressed borders were preserved.

In 1967, Prime Minister Eshkol preempted a planned Egypt-Syria-Jordan joint offensive, in defiance of a strong red light from the White House (“Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go alone”), and despite prominent Israelis who preferred the venue of negotiation and mediation, and predicted a resounding Israeli defeat on the battlefield.  Eshkol was aware that Israel’s existence, in the violently intolerant and unpredictable Middle East, required a firm posture of deterrence, which could entail heavy cost. In the aftermath of the war, Eshkol reunited Jerusalem and renewed Jewish presence beyond the 1949/67 indefensible Green Line, in spite of a very heavy US and global pressure.  Consequently, while the pressure on Israel has subsided, the Jewish presence in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem has surged to 700,000 people.