RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/next-year-in-jerusalem/

Hardly anybody in America cares about the annual Eurovision Song Contest, and that’s just as it should be, given that on the whole, it’s almost as horrible a viewing experience these days as the Oscars or Emmys. But in Europe, Eurovision is as big as ever – almost as big a draw as the Super Bowl in the U.S., if you can imagine a Super Bowl that no straight man would ever be caught dead watching, but that is a magnet for gays, teenage girls, gays, a scattering of the senile and feebleminded who happened to have left their TVs tuned to the wrong channel, and gays.

First held in 1956, Eurovision is broadcast every year from the homeland of the winner of the previous year’s contest. This year, the winner was an Israeli chanteuse named Netta, whose song was not appreciably better or worse than most of its competitors – which is to say that, for anyone with the slightest hint of musical taste, it was sheer dreck. But that’s not what matters. On a continent with precious few cultural institutions to hold it together, or to provide a pretense of unity, Eurovision is, to coin a phrase, a bridge-builder.

For many, alas, Israel, this time around, has proven to be a bridge too far.

Israel has won Eurovision exactly three times before. The first time was in 1978; in 1979, accordingly, the competition was held in Jerusalem. Yes, Jerusalem, the city that European authorities today refuse to acknowledge as a part of Israel. Remarkably, Israel won Eurovision again in 1979, but wasn’t able to serve as host in 1980 because the date conflicted with a national holiday. Israel had to wait until 1998 for its third victory. Its representative that year was an M-to-F transgender artist named Dana International, who sang a tune called “Diva.” In 1999, thanks to him/her, the contest again took place in Jerusalem.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2018/09/16/terror-balloons-from-hamas-

A children’s playground was cordoned off in Kiryat Gat on Friday morning, when police were alerted to a bunch of “terror balloons” launched from Gaza that landed in a residential play area before the start of the school day.

Sappers and security forces successfully removed the balloons, which were fitted with combustible thread that had failed to light. Incendiary balloons have become a common terror tool in Gaza, with cheaply made balloon and kite arson devices having ignited more than 8,000 acres of Israeli land since March.

It was the second incident on Friday alone, with another set of balloons connected to an explosive device being found in the Eshkol Regional Council near Gaza.

Also on Friday, Israel Defense Forces neutralized an explosive device planted next to the security fence border with Gaza, the second such device to have been discovered in the last two days. On Thursday, terrorists attempted to attack a group of IDF soldiers on the Gaza border with a pipe bomb. Troops responded with live fire against three Gazans seen creeping along the security fence.

No injuries or damage were reported in any of the incidents.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13001/abbas-ari-fuld-murder

According to Palestinian terrorist groups, the terrorist, Khalil Jabarin, decided to murder a Jew in response to Israeli “crimes” against the Al-Aqsa Mosque in particular and Islamic holy sites in general. Needless to say, there is no Israeli plan to allow Jews to pray inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The statements made by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad confirm that there is a direct link between Abbas’s false charge against Israel and the murder of the Israeli-American citizen.

Abbas’s latest fabrication is directly responsible for the murder of Ari Fuld, stabbed to death by a terrorist who actually believed Abbas’s lies about a purported Israeli scheme to split the Al-Aqsa Mosque between Muslims and Jews.In a speech before the PLO Executive Committee in Ramallah on September 15, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas repeated the old libel that Israel was planning to establish special Jewish prayer zones inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Abbas claimed that Israel was seeking to copy the example of the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, where Jews and Muslims pray in different sections.

Abbas did not say what his lie was based on. He also did provide any evidence of Israel’s ostensible plot against the Al-Aqsa Mosque. He said, nevertheless, that the Palestinians, together with Jordan, were planning to bring this issue before the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.

Abbas’s allegation was quickly picked up by several media outlets in the Arab world, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The headlines that appeared on websites affiliated with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the second largest terrorist group in the Gaza Strip, claimed that Israel is planning to permit Jews to pray inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

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.