RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last Tuesday, coinciding with Israel’s 69th Independence Day, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) passed a resolution entitled ‘Occupied Palestine.’ The resolution denies Israel any sovereign claim to its own capital city, Jerusalem, and falsely describes Israel as the city’s “occupying power” and speaks of the “cultural heritage of Palestine and the distinctive character of East Jerusalem.”

Clearly, the intention of the UNESCO resolution is to achieve internationally the direct repudiation of Israel’s Jewish history and sovereignty in favor of Arab claims.

Lying behind this Arab diplomatic offensive is an Arab street and Muslim world, neither of which have reconciled themselves to Israel’s existence nor even the peoplehood of the Jews and thus the Jewish immemorial association and claim to Jerusalem.

However, this clamor and fixation on Jerusalem, quite recent in Muslim history, has led many to conclude that Jerusalem is holy to Islam and central to Palestinian Arab consciousness. This is, however, a propaganda fiction.

Though possessing important Muslim shrines, such as the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosques, Jerusalem holds no great significance for Islam, as history shows.

Jerusalem rates not a single mention in the Quran, nor is it the direction in which Muslims turn to pray. References in the Quran and hadith to the ‘farthest mosque,’ in allusion to which the Al Aqsa Mosque is named, and which has sometimes been invoked to connect Islam to Jerusalem since its earliest days, clearly doesn’t refer to a mosque which didn’t exist in Muhammad’s day.

Indeed, the site of the biblical temples is called Temple Mount, not the Mosque Mount and –– in contrast to innumerable Palestinian Authority statements today –– was acknowledged as such for decades by Jerusalem’s Muslims.

Nearly a quarter-century has passed since Yitzḥak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn. The agreement signed on September 13, 1993 established the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as the official representative body of the Palestinian people and permitted its chairman, Yasir Arafat, to return to the West Bank after his extended isolation in Tunisia. Committing Israel and the Palestinians to negotiate a final-status agreement, the so-called Oslo Accords opened the era of the peace process. https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2017/05/the-flaws-of-oslo-are-the-same-as-the-flaws-of-oslo/

It is worth recalling the buoyant atmosphere that characterized not only that particular moment on the South Lawn but, more generally, the period in world history in which it occurred. Most dramatically, the cold war with the Soviet Union had ended in a triumph for the United States and its form of liberal democracy. If this was not quite the “end of history,” as a major public-policy essay had conjectured, the fall of the mighty Soviet empire raised similarly exuberant expectations for other arenas of conflict. Why, after all, couldn’t Israelis and Palestinians make peace?

To some, all the elements were in place. The Palestinians, it was averred, were willing to come to the table, and Israel was open, forward-looking, and “hopeful.” Its Labor-party leadership—not only the war hero Rabin but also Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak—had set aside any remaining illusions of permanent occupation. Having marginalized the “territorial maximalists,” Israelis were prepared to make the painful compromises for peace—a dynamic that President Bill Clinton, a friend of Israel, could help push along.

As even ardent supporters of the ensuing peace process will admit, things did not—to put it mildly—go according to plan, and the final-status agreement never came about. Today, notwithstanding Donald Trump’s (quite possibly fleeting) enthusiasm for the project, even the beginning of direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority seems highly unlikely. The optimism that greeted the apparent breakthrough of 1993, however understandable in light of the cultural atmosphere of the time, in retrospect seems downright delusional. Yet many Westerners, Jewish and gentile alike, still look back at the Oslo years as a kind of golden age, one that shines only the brighter in contrast to the allegedly dark present.

Was Oslo a golden age? Those inclined to that belief now have the gift of a cleverly constructed drama that supports, and flatters, their view. Written by the New York playwright J.T. Rogers, Oslo tells the backstory of the Norwegian-brokered talks between informal envoys of the Israeli foreign ministry and the PLO over a ten-month period in 1992-93. Nearly three hours long, the play is heavy on dialogue and mostly lacking in the bells and whistles of many major New York productions. Nevertheless, by any non-Hamiltonstandard the play has been a hit, having moved from its debut last year at a small off-Broadway venue to the much bigger Lincoln Center Theater. On the evening I saw it, the crowd, more Upper West Side than Upper Midwest, gave the performers a rapturous standing ovation.

One might attribute this fervor at least in part to our own, highly fractious times, in which political, not to say partisan, drama is ripe for a comeback. But Oslo, which has been nominated for a 2017 Tony Award, is also an effective piece of indoctrination, mirroring, to a subtle but powerful degree, the dominant political mentality that helped produce the disastrous Oslo Accords themselves.

Aside fromthe iconic Rabin-Arafat handshake, the whole story of the Oslo negotiations is not especially well known, and Rogers deserves credit for telling it with relative fidelity. The events are seen from the perspective of a Norwegian deputy foreign minister named Jan Egeland and his wife and fellow bureaucrat, Mona Juul. Thanks to a shared zeal, whose motive is never examined, the two navigate all manner of obstacles in order to bring Israelis and Palestinians together in secret negotiations at a country house south of Oslo, where the play is largely set.

Indeed, the play quite artfully stresses the single most astonishing fact about the Oslo talks: not only were they secret, but, on the Israeli side, they were at first completely unauthorized. At the time, Israelis were forbidden by law from having direct contact with PLO officials. It was Yossi Beilin, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, who unilaterally decided that flouting the law was justified by the end he sought. In December 1992, Beilin asked Yair Hirschfeld, a University of Haifa economist, to meet in London with the PLO’s finance minister, Ahmed Qurei, also known as Abu Ala. In January and early February, at further meetings in Norway, Hirschfeld and another economist, Ron Pundak, began drafting with the PLO team a document offering an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Jericho, the establishment of an autonomous Palestinian administration in the West Bank, and direct negotiations regarding a final-status accord.

Donald Trump is set for his first overseas trip as the U.S. president, with stops in Saudi ‎Arabia, Israel, Italy and Belgium.‎ The trip will include meetings with Pope Francis in Rome, NATO leaders in Brussels, ‎and G7 members in Sicily in addition to Saudi, Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

The Saudi visit, which kicks off the trip, is expected to result in the announcement ‎of a large arms sale package, as well as demonstrate that the American posture in ‎the region is no longer based on balancing Iran and Saudi Arabia, former President Barack Obama’s inexplicable strategy which has done nothing but to encourage Iran to be an even more ‎provocative and aggressive actor. So too, early and frequent American efforts at ‎the United Nations by Ambassador Nikki Haley to stop the constant Israel bashing, and the Trump-Netanyahu meeting, which offered a warm American embrace of ‎Israel, seemed a part of an effort to restore close ties between the two traditional ‎allies and put an end to the distancing of America from Israel, a strategy carried ‎out throughout Obama’s two terms.‎

While the Trump administration has worked to put U.S. relations with Israel on a ‎more traditional path, there is renewed hope among the career Middle East peace ‎processing contingent, and the vast majority of foreign policy journalists who do ‎such a poor job covering the region, that perhaps Trump will be serious ‎about dealmaking, and is at work setting balls in motion to get another peace ‎process between Israelis and Palestinians going. The new hopes stem from ‎the warm welcome that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas received ‎on his recent official visit to the White House, and other signals that the president ‎and his team seem to have been sending to Israel. ‎

Many are putting weight on the fact that long-time Trump friend Ronald ‎Lauder has been encouraging the White House to launch a new peace process initiative, ‎arguing that Abbas is a moderate and open to a deal and that the time is right ‎given the new American team in place. (Presumably, the timing and people were ‎wrong on all prior occasions.) Attached to this theory is the notion that Abbas ‎could sell a deal to Palestinians, including those affiliated with or supportive of ‎Hamas, a bitter enemy of the PA and currently in control of Gaza. Selling a deal would mean that Israel and the ‎Palestinians could reach a deal, and there is no evidence today of overlapping sets ‎of minimally acceptable positions between the two parties, just as there never has ‎been. Most who have studied Palestinian politics believe that Abbas, who has long ‎overstayed his elected term, is hardly strong enough to ‎conclude a process that would require moderation or abandonment of core ‎Palestinian positions, such as the so-called “right of return” for millions of descendants of ‎refugees.‎

When Trump administration officials have met with Israeli leaders, both at the ‎White House and in Israel, the issue of settlement construction, the obsession of ‎the Obama White House, has come up. Trump chose not to get into a ‎public fight with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the issue on his first visit to ‎meet with the president, but nonetheless made clear that expansion of settlements ‎beyond their current boundaries would be viewed as problematic. ‎

Last Thursday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah boasted in a televised address (he rarely makes live appearances) that the next war with Israel would be waged in Israeli territory. Nasrallah said that Israel was “scared and worried… and knows that [war] could be inside the occupied Palestinian territories.” Nasrallah’s tough rhetoric is somewhat peculiar as it comes from a man who’s been living underground for the past 11 years and rarely resides at any given location for any lengthy period of time for fear of being at the receiving end of Israel’s long arm.

Nasrallah’s speech was meant to mark the one year anniversary of the liquidation of Hezbollah’s chief of special operations Mustafa Badreddine, who was killed in Syria under mysterious circumstances. Badreddine replaced Imad Mughniyeh in that capacity. Mughniyeh himself was killed in 2008 in Damascus in a hit widely believed to have been executed by Mossad and CIA operatives in a joint operation.

Nasrallah’s bombast is eerily reminiscent of Arab rhetoric just prior to the June 1967 Six-Day War, which ended badly for the Arabs. Calls for an Arab invasion and Israel’s destruction reached fever pitch in the days preceding the war, with Arab leaders vying for top spot in the shrill contest.

On May 22, 1967 Radio Cairo announced that, “the Arab people is firmly resolved to wipe Israel off the map.” On May 31, President Abdel Rahman Aref of Iraq announced, “our goal is clear – to wipe Israel off the map. We shall, God willing, meet in Tel Aviv and Haifa.” Not to be outdone, PLO chairman, Ahmed Shukairy, boasted on June 1, that, “we shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors – if there are any – the boats are ready to deport them.” Government leaders of other Arab countries, including those of Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Algeria and Saudi Arabia, joined in on the hate fest.

Israel’s answer to its enemy’s venom was delivered on June 5, 1967 at 7:45 a.m. At precisely that time, Israel unleashed its version of Shock and Awe, and in just under 3 hours, destroyed the bulk of the air forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Some 452 Arab aircraft – MiG-21s, MiG-19s, MiG-17s, Hawker Hunters and various medium and heavy bombers were instantly transformed into expensive heaps of scrap metal.

The State of Israel,” declared David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, “will be judged not by its riches or military power, nor by its technical skills, but by its moral worth and human values.”1 Israel is engaged in a world-wide political war against a vast array of organizations seeking her demise. Attempts to dehumanize her through delegitimization continues unabated.

From debates in universities, among left-wing European movements, academics, church associations, unions, segments of the Western media, human rights groups, entertainers, a number of liberals and some Arab and Third World countries, Israel’s right to exist remains in dispute.2 British journalist Melanie Philips observed: “Israel inspires an obsessional hatred of a type and scale that is directed at no other country.”3

War of Analogy

The goal is to isolate Israel, criminalize her actions and expose her as an international war criminal, an occupier of Arab lands and a rightwing religious theocracy. They want to deny her the fundamental rights of self- defense and security in an asymmetric war, erode her stature, and turn her into a pariah state through lies, disinformation and double standards. To undermine the legal, political and moral justification for the Jewish state, Israel must be seen as the impediment to peace, and an oppressive government with no historic or legal claim to the land of Israel or to Jerusalem her capital. 4

This “War of Analogy,” a term coined by former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, describes the spurious analogies comparing Israel to the crusaders, colonialists and the former apartheid regime of South Africa. 5 The war is waged in the media and in cyberspace, with its websites, blogs, social networks and forums.6 The profusion of this technology allows hate speech, in the form of racist and vile comments by readers, to remain for days on respectable mainstream media websites. Access to hate literature and propaganda such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler’s Mein Kampf can easily be purchased at Amazon or read on the Internet.

In response to cyber-attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu established the National Cyber Directorate to create a “digital Iron Dome” to protect the country, and the formation of a national program to train young people for cyber warfare.7

Nathan Sharansky, an Israeli politician, human rights activist and once a refusenik in the former Soviet Union, sees these new attacks as presenting a unique challenge. Traditional antisemitism threatened the Jewish people or the Jewish religion.8 Individual Jews were denied the right “to live as equal members in a society. The new anti-Jewishness denies the right of Jewish people to live as equal members in the family of nations…. All that has happened is that we’ve moved from discrimination against the Jews as individuals to the discrimination against the Jews as a people.9

The warning by Hamas and Islamic Jihad is directed not only against Trump and his new administration, but also against Abbas and any Arab leader who dares to “collude” with the U.S.

A new policy document recently published by Hamas says that the Islamic terror movement accepts a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, but without recognizing Israel’s right to exist. Translation: Hamas seeks a Palestinian state that would be used as a launching pad to destroy Israel.

The electoral showing demonstrates with excruciating clarity that Hamas could easily take over any Palestinian state that the U.S. and the Europeans help create in the West Bank.

Abbas is a weak leader with precious little legitimacy among Palestinians. He would never survive any kind of real peace deal with Israel — a reality that, ironically, he has done his very best to create.

As U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to hold his second meeting with Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem next week, two Palestinian terror groups have announced that the new U.S. administration is planning to “liquidate the Palestinian cause.” The warning by Hamas and Islamic Jihad is directed not only against Trump and his new administration, but also against Abbas and any Arab leader who dares to “collude” with the U.S.

The two Palestinian terror groups, which control the Gaza Strip and its two million residents, also renewed their pledge to pursue the armed fight against Israel; they said they would not give up one inch of Palestine, from the (Mediterranean) sea to the (Jordan) river.

Trump and his administration would do well to heed the warning issued by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, especially in the wake of Abbas’s recent statements concerning a two-state solution and peace with Israel. Abbas controls only parts of the West Bank, and how he intends to establish a Palestinian state when he cannot even set foot in the Gaza Strip is anyone’s guess. Recently, Hamas announced that if and when the 82-year-old Abbas shows up in the Gaza Strip, he will be hanged in a public square on charges of “high treason.”

The warning by the Palestinian terror groups was made during a joint rally in the Gaza Strip on May 14. Leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad vowed to “preserve the Palestinian rifle and Palestinian rights in the face of any schemes and attempts to liquidate the Palestinian cause.”

Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar stated that Palestinian “principles are part of our [Islamic] religion, and we cannot make any concessions on them. We will not give up one inch of our land and holy sites. We will continue to work until the liberation of each inch of Palestine.”

Zahar also warned Abbas against signing any agreement with Israel that includes relinquishing Palestinian rights. “Anyone who gives up our rights and holy sites will betray Allah and his Prophet Mohammed,” Zahar cautioned.

Notably, Zahar’s statement to “liberate every inch of Palestine” comes amid false claims in the Western media to the effect that Hamas has abandoned its dream of eliminating Israel.

The claims are based on a new policy document recently published by Hamas; it says that the Islamic terror movement accepts a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, but without recognizing Israel’s right to exist. Translation: Hamas seeks a Palestinian state that would be used as a launching pad to destroy Israel.

Zahar and other Hamas leaders have taken advantage of every available platform to clarify that their acceptance of a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines does not mean abandoning their plan to eliminate Israel.

Abu Sneineh , one of four Palestinians behind the murder of six Israeli yeshiva students in 1980was reportedly elected mayor of the West Bank city of Hebron on Saturday as head of the Fatah Party list.

The students, included two American citizens and a Canadian national, were part of a group that had danced from the Cave of the Patriarchs to Beit Hadassah in Hebron when Abu Sneineh and his terror cell opened fire. The six students were killed and 16 others were wounded.The students, included two American citizens and a Canadian national, were part of a group that had danced from the Cave of the Patriarchs to Beit Hadassah in Hebron when Abu Sneineh and his terror cell opened fire. The six students were killed and 16 others were wounded.

“I have spent my life fighting totalitarian ideologies,” blared the banner headline of the May 8 Jerusalem Post. The Post’s editors chose that single line, and a photo of its speaker, as the highlight of the annual conference it had hosted the previous day in New York. The speaker was Dr. Sebastian Gorka, Deputy Assistant to President Trump, specializing in national security and counterterrorism.

Gorka’s brief time on stage was indeed the highlight of the conference. It was also – at least outside the conference itself – the most controversial. So much so that the Post’s Editor-in-Chief, Yaakov Katz, felt the need to introduce the controversy before calling Dr. Gorka to the stage. He referenced the campaign, spearheaded by Jewish leftists, to brand Gorka as the worst type of anti-Semite: a Neo-Nazi – or, at the least, a neo-Nazi sympathizer and collaborator. Katz then asked his audience to be respectful, shook Gorka’s hand, and invited him to address the allegations directly. Gorka responded with a bold and unequivocal denial. He spoke about his life’s work fighting totalitarian ideologies, explicitly grouping Islamism with fascism and communism. And he talked passionately about the strong bonds and commonality of interest that President Trump shares with Israel.

Katz’s request for decorum proved unnecessary. The crowd was identifiably Jewish and pro-Israel, not a room full of progressives. The habit of disrupting, threatening, and attacking speakers presenting diverse or dissenting views—particularly if they are Israeli or pro-Israel—is a phenomenon of the left. The largely centrist crowd in attendance welcomed Dr. Gorka warmly, rising in a spontaneous standing ovation even before he began to speak. Time and again the throng of 1500 rewarded Dr. Gorka’s pro-America, Jewish and pro-Israel passion, and his references to President Trump, with cheers and applause–and another standing ovation when he concluded. It was about as close to a communal embrace as the notoriously fractious American Jewish community can offer. The crowd understood that the extreme Jewish left had targeted Dr. Gorka because he is a visible player in the Trump White House and precisely because of his passionate commitment to protecting Jews, Israel, and American interests.

Fake news indeed. As controversial as the issue may have seemed to those on the outside, to Jews other than Islamist-apologists and Israel-slanderers of the progressive camp, Gorka himself isn’t actually controversial. His attackers, however, are – from the political operative brazenly hijacking Anne Frank’s good name to attack political opponents to the newspaper editor frantically betraying 120 years of the Forward’s opinionated but legitimate journalism by turning it into a hack political propaganda tabloid.

Indeed, columnist Caroline Glick closed the conference speaking about the real issue of l’affaire Gorka: the danger—and the shame—of members of the Jewish community having slandered a good man.