RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israeli-american-fatally-stabbed-in-the-west-bank-1537114584?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=contextual&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

TEL AVIV—A Palestinian teenager on Sunday fatally stabbed a 45-year-old Israeli-American man in the West Bank, according to U.S. and Israeli officials.

The man, Ari Fuld, was a right-wing pro-Israel activist who had a following on social media. He was killed at a shopping mall near the Gush Etzion junction that has been the site of similar incidents in recent years. The junction and mall are frequented by both Israelis and Palestinians.

The Israeli military described the stabbing—the second such incident this summer—as an act of terror. No group claimed responsibility for the attack, and there were no signs that it was related to Mr. Fuld’s pro-Israel postings.

The attack comes amid heightened tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. Thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have been demonstrating at the border with Israel to call for the right to return each week, in protests that have often turned violent. Israeli forces have responded with live fire and have killed more than 150 Palestinians since March.

Mr. Fuld lived with his family in Efrat, a settlement in the West Bank, and was married with four children. He was also a reserve member of the Israeli military.

Videos of the scene circulated on social media show that Mr. Fuld chased and shot at his attacker before collapsing.

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/oslo-accords-douglas-feith/

Perhaps the most important misperception about Oslo is that it is – or was – a peace process, a two-sided affair, a matter of give-and-take in which each side’s promises depended on fulfillment of the other’s promises. My view, as a witness to some of the relevant history, is that it was a kind of unilateral Israeli withdrawal.

Oslo pretended to be a peace process. Israeli officials knew that Oslo lacked mutuality, but they misled the public about the relationship of withdrawal to peace.

The Rabin government’s top officials knew their priorities. Peace was important, and trading land for peace might be useful. But most important of all was reducing the burdens of the occupation. Even if Israel didn’t have the power to win peace from the Palestinians, it had the power to quit the territories on its own.

The idea of unilateral withdrawal had some appeal in Israel long before the first Oslo agreement. Years later, support in Israel for unilateral withdrawal had grown, even though (or maybe because) Oslo had been widely discredited by the terrorism that the Palestinian Authority incited and often perpetrated. Unlike the Oslo redeployments, Israel’s 2005 departure from Gaza was nakedly unilateral; it made no pretense of being a land-for-peace deal.

I served as a low-ranking Middle East specialist at the White House in the Reagan administration and much later as a senior Defense Department official in the George W. Bush administration. I will share a few Oslo-related stories from both of those periods.

Early on I saw that Oslo was more about Israeli withdrawal than peace. I was attuned to this point because of something that happened long before the famous September 1993 Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House south lawn.

Twelve years before, during the first year of the Reagan administration, I was a National Security Council staff member. Yossi Beilin – at the time an aide to Shimon Peres, who was Opposition leader – came to Washington as the guest of the US Information Agency as part of a program to cultivate friendly relations with promising young foreign leaders. Beilin’s itinerary included a meeting at the White House and I was assigned to talk with him.

Mr. Peres had recently published an article in Foreign Affairs that Beilin was generally assumed to have written, so I asked him about it. The article made the well-known argument that, if Israel continued to hold the territories, the state could not survive as both Jewish and democratic. But, the article said, Israel should withdraw from the territories only if it received reliable Arab peace pledges.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2018/09/david-singer-trump-squeezes-unrwa.html
President Trump has created a veritable diplomatic tsunami affecting the political fortunes of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Hamas and Jordan – with his decision to cease all future donations to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) – currently US$360million per annum and comprising about 30 percent of UNRWA’s budget.

The numbers of UNRWA-registered Palestinian Arab refugees in Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza have been increasing in leaps and bounds annually because they include all the descendants of those Palestinian Arabs caught up in the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israel wars.

Currently:

2,175,000 live in Jordan – 370,000 of whom reside in 10 camps
810,000 live in the West Bank – 200,000 of whom reside in 19 camps
1,300,000 live in Gaza – 580,000 of whom reside in 8 camps

UNRWA only provides services to the camps. UNRWA does not administer or police the camps, as this is the responsibility of the host authorities.

Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza comprise 83 per cent of the territory of former Palestine.

For UNRWA to count as “refugees” people who are now living in Arab-controlled parts of the same country where their forebears once resided – is really an insult to one’s intelligence.

For UNRWA to tolerate a system of apartheid and segregation that allows those “refugees” to be divided into camp dwellers and non-camp dwellers makes a mockery of the humanitarian principles espoused by the United Nations and the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Struggling under an accumulated deficit of US$271 million before Trump’s hammer blow – UNRWA had already shut down or slated for closure many programs and laid off large numbers of employees – mainly Palestinian Arabs.

The further cuts UNRWA will now be forced to make following America’s defunding will be critical to the PLO, Hamas and Jordan – as “refugees” coming under their respective jurisdictions affected by substantial cuts to their well-established entitlements see others not similarly subjected.

UNRWA funding decisions cannot possibly please all these “refugees” – and those receiving UNRWA aid in Lebanon and Syria.

The PLO, Hamas and Jordan will be lobbying furiously for UNRWA funding cuts to not be made to “refugees” living under their governance. Serious political consequences could ensue if they fail.
Jordan – enjoying a long-standing peace treaty with Israel – currently houses 50 percent of the total of UNRWA registered Palestinian Arab “refugees” in the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12999/oslo-war

Twenty-five years after Oslo, the balance sheet is more like what in 2003 the historian Efraim Karsh called the start of the “Oslo war”. In this war, he wrote, Israel had conceded from the beginning a major victory to its worst enemies by giving them a respectability they did not deserve, and thus placed itself in a losing position from which it never fully recovered.

“Contrary to Rabin’s slogan, one does not ‘make [peace] with very unsavory enemies’ but rather with former very unsavory enemies. That is, enemies that have been defeated… Wars end, the historical record shows, not through goodwill but through defeat. He who does not win loses. Wars usually end when failure causes one side to despair, when that side has abandoned its war aims and accepted defeat, and when that defeat has exhausted its will to fight. Conversely, so long as both combatants still hope to achieve their war objectives, fighting either goes on or it potentially will resume.” — Daniel Pipes, Commentary, January 2017.

“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct Palestinian people to oppose Zionism.” — PLO leader Zuheir Mohsen , interview in Trouw, March, 1977.

September 13, 1993. Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the lawn of the White House. They have just officially signed the document that was supposed to start Peace: the Oslo Accord. The cogs of this machine began their work.

Overnight, Yasser Arafat was no longer the leader of a defeated terrorist organization. He had suddenly become the President of a quasi-state; his Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had been transformed into the “Palestinian Authority”.

Terror attacks against Israelis attacks during this “peace” grew even more bloody and more profuse, and soon were being perpetrated at a frantic pace. Some deliberately targeted children and youths, such as the Dolphinarium discotheque massacre and the Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing. Arafat condemned none of them.

ttps://www.jns.org/opinion/has-j-street-lost-its-war-for-a-palestinian-state/

In a feverish 800-word email appeal for donations sent days before the Labor Day weekend, Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, made some of the group’s wildest claims yet about both current events related to Israel, as well as the history of the conflict.

Has the leading pro-Palestinian state Jewish advocacy group in the United States completely lost its way? It seems that the combination of activities and statements by both Israel’s government and the Trump administration towards the Palestinians has done just that. In a feverish 800-word email appeal for donations sent days before the Labor Day weekend, Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, made some of the group’s wildest claims yet about both current events related to Israel, as well as the history of the conflict.

The email shows just how out of step with reality J Street is. What’s worse, J Street misinterprets and misrepresents Israeli public opinion, the views of the Israeli government and U.S. history.

Space does not allow for a complete review of all of the fabrications in Ben-Ami’s letter, but here are three of the clearest examples of J Street’s extremism. J Street, if you don’t know, is the controversial Washington, D.C., based Jewish pressure group that was created specifically, and almost exclusively, to lobby for an independent Palestinian state.

Ben-Ami seems to have missed the fact that for many years, Israeli Jews have sobered up and abandoned the idea that the formation of an independent Palestinian nation would be in the best interest of Israel. The Times of Israel website reported that 43 percent of Jewish Israelis are in favor of the so-called “two-state solution.” The same poll found that 39 percent of Israeli Jews would now approve of a peace settlement based on what has been discussed in past negotiations. (See the full news article about the poll here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/support-for-two-state-solution-at-lowest-in-nearly-20-years-poll/.) When Ben-Ami writes that “the Trump administration has adopted the agenda of Israel’s far right,” is he claiming that 57 percent of Israelis are now “far right”? And just what does he mean by the label? If Likud is “far right,” then how do you define political parties to its right?

The evolution of President Trump’s stance on the Palestinian issue reflects extrication from conventional wisdom, which was embraced by his predecessors and the establishment of the State Department, academia and the media, while systematically crashed against the rocks of Middle East reality.

In contrast to his predecessors, Trump and his advisors – National Security Advisor John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, Special Emissary Jason Greenblatt and Ambassador David Friedman – have concluded that the bolstering of US national security, morality and common sense behooves the US to take a realistic – and not an artificially neutral – position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Moral equivalence has not advanced national security.

The timing of the official release of President Trump’s policy – the eve of the September 11 memorial of the 3,000 fatalities and 6,000 injured – underlines the awareness that advancing national and homeland security mandates a clear differentiation between entities which combat terrorism systematically and effectively (e.g. the US and Israel), on the one hand, and those who produce, train, educate and incite terrorists (e.g. the Palestinian leadership, Iran’s Ayatollahs and other Islamic regimes), on the other hand.

Unlike his predecessor at the White House, Trump and his advisors realize that the restoration of the US’ posture of deterrence is a precondition to the enhancement of the US’ national and homeland security, requiring the fending off – and not succumbing to – pressure, threats and terrorism. Hence, the disavowal of the self-defeating 2015 Iran Deal, the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State and the restructuring of US policy on the Palestinian issue.