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ISRAEL

DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE WAR FOR JERUSALEM

When Jordan’s Arab Legion seized half of Jerusalem, ethnically cleansed its Jewish population and annexed the city– the only entity to recognize the annexation was the United Kingdom which had provided the officers and the training that made the conquest possible. Officers like Colonel Bill Newman, Major Geoffrey Lockett and Major Bob Slade, under Glubb Pasha, better known as General John Bagot Glubb, whose son later converted to Islam, invaded Jerusalem and used the Muslim forces under their command to make the partition and ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem possible.

The Jews living in the free half of Jerusalem continued to be killed by Jordanian Muslim snipers. The victims of those years of Muslim occupation included Yaffa Binyamin, a 14-year-old girl sitting on the balcony of her own house and a Christian carpenter working on the Notre Dame Convent.

Under Muslim occupation, while Muslim snipers were cold-bloodedly murdering their children, the Jewish residents living under fire couldn’t so much as put in an outhouse without being reported to the UN for illegal construction. In one case a UN observer organization held four meetings to discuss an outhouse for local residents before condemning Israel for illegal construction.

It did not however condemn Jordan when one of its soldiers opened fire on a train wounding a Jewish teenage girl.

Not very much has changed.

The hysterical condemnations of “illegal construction” did not end when the Muslim occupation did. The great outhouse of the United Nations and the smaller outhouses of the foreign ministries of countries whose leaders tremble whenever Muslims grow agitated over a cartoon or a YouTube video fill the air with the vilest of substances whenever a Jewish family moves into a home in Jerusalem.

It would be inconceivable for the international community to denounce an ethnically cleansed group which survived attempted genocide for moving back into its own city. It is, however, standard policy at the State Department and the Foreign Office to denounce Jews living in those parts of Jerusalem that had been ethnically cleansed by Muslims, as “settlers” living in “settlements,” and accuse them of being an “obstruction to peace.”

Peace being the state of affairs that sets in when an ethnic cleansing goes unchallenged.

What we are talking about here is not peace, but ethnic cleansing. In 1948, the Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem to Islamize the city. Their synagogues were blown up by the Muslim occupiers. Their tombstones were used to line the roads traveled by the racist Muslim settlers. In 1948, the Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem to Islamize the city. Whether they were Zionists or anti-Zionists did not matter. They were not Muslims. That was all that counted.

“For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter,” Abdullah el-Talal, a commander of the Muslim invaders, had boasted. “Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return here impossible.” In his memoirs he wrote, “I knew that the Jewish Quarter was densely populated with Jews who caused their fighters a good deal of interference and difficulty…. Only four days after our entry into Jerusalem the Jewish Quarter had become their graveyard. Death and destruction reigned over it.”

Every politician who denounces Jews building houses in Jerusalem, but not Muslims doing the same thing is endorsing Abdullah’s genocidal vision and all the terrorism that goes with it.

In 1920, racist Muslim settler mobs in Jerusalem had chanted “Mohammed’s religion was born with the sword”, “Death to the Jews” and “the government is with us” as Muslim policemen under British colonial rule had joined with them in the rape and murder of the indigenous Jewish population.

The World Needs to Drive Out Destructive Fantasies by Shireen Qudosi

The Palestinians and other powers such as the OIC, the UN and domestic interest groups do not get a veto over reality.

If we are going to “reset” the Middle East, we need to reset our thinking as well, starting with accepting that Israel has a right to exist. Israel exists, and Israel has a legitimate claim to Jerusalem. Further, the Jewish people have proven themselves as more capable custodians of Jerusalem than their Muslim neighbors, who are already burdened by challenges in their own territory.

Alongside us, the world must drive out the fantasy that Jerusalem is not Israel’s capital. Jerusalem is the heart and soul of Israel. To deny Jerusalem as a part of Jewish and Israeli identity is the same as denying Mecca as inherent to Muslim identity.

The most iconic moment of President Donald Trump’s visit to the Middle East was not his “speech on Islam”; it was his visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

The Western Wall is a contested space, and that controversy has bled outside Israel’s borders. U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently reignited the debate, mentioning the Wall as being in “Jerusalem”, instead of in Israel. It is a play on language often used to deny Israeli sovereignty over a space that clearly belongs to the Jewish people, as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, quickly rectified in response.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to the Western Wall in Israel was the most iconic moment of his recent visit to the Middle East. (Illustrative photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

How we talk about religion matters. If we want to be effective in moving forward, it is important to be truthful. The truth is that Israel won the Six Day War, thereby liberating eastern Jerusalem from Jordan, which had seized it illegally when it attacked Israel in 1948-49 and expelled all Jews from eastern Jerusalem.

Israel has earned the right to reclaim Jerusalem fully. This also means that the Palestinians and other powers such as the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the UN and domestic interest groups do not get a veto over reality. If the new foreign policy standard is to work together to combat destructive forces, then it is also important to recognize that it is destructive to start a discussion from positions of falsehoods.

How the Ebb-and-Flow of American Politics Affects American Jewish Attitudes toward Israel After the fall of the Soviet Union, progressives began to picture the U.S.-Israel relationship as the embodiment not of enduring American values but of bad old “hegemonic” habits. by Jordan Chandler HirshH

In his quest to discover the sources of the growing rift between American Jewry and Israel, Daniel Gordis convincingly arguesthat, rather than being traceable to the character of Israeli policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians, or to changing patterns in American Jewish life, the rift is over issues of “moral and political essence and ideology”—issues of, in a word, identity. He proceeds to diagnose four divergent “political and cultural assumptions” that, taken together, expose the ways in which Israel and America represent “two fundamentally different if not antithetical political projects.” Although the resultant tensions between Israeli and American Jews are “as old as Israel itself,” rarely if ever have they generated the fissures currently dividing the two communities. The question, then, is: why now?

In what follows, I mean to expand on the reasons advanced by Gordis with some background reminders from American political history. This history shows that inter-communal tensions are not the only or even the most important factors in the rift. Although, as Gordis notes, suspicion and misunderstanding plagued relations between American Jews and the Jewish state from Israel’s inception, they were also tied in great part to a tension that pervaded U.S.-Israel ties more broadly, and that has its locus in the shifting priorities of American foreign policy.

In May 1948,President Harry Truman swiftly extended diplomatic recognition to the newly born state of Israel. Nevertheless, during its War of Independence, he also imposed an arms embargo that imperiled Israel’s ability to repel invading Arab armies. For his part, Truman’s successor Dwight Eisenhower at firstdistanced America from Israel as he sought to win over Gamal Abdel Nasser and convert the Egyptian dictator’s influence into coin on the Arab street more generally. His administration even established a CIA front group to counteract popular American sympathy for Zionism.

Although the relationship improved somewhat under the Kennedy administration, it remained tepid until the Six-Day War. Just as Jerusalem’s stunning success in that conflict “did much,” as Gordis writes, “to soften feelings” toward Israel among American Jews, more significantly it did the same in Washington. Israel’s victory demonstrated the logic of a U.S.-Israel alliance. Morally, the Jewish state represented at once a fellow democracy in a region otherwise devoid of free societies and a plucky underdog pursuing its national self-determination in the mold of America’s founding fathers. Strategically, Israel could serve as America’s battleship in the Middle East; armed with U.S. weapons, it could help balance and beat back Soviet power.

The new partnership quickly took hold. President Lyndon Johnson began to speak of the Jewish state with the moral conviction that would become common among later presidents. Soon after the war, when the Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin asked why the U.S. would back a country with only three million citizens against 80 million Arabs, Johnson responded: “because it is right.” Many Americans appeared to agree. In June 1967, a Gallup poll had found 38 percent sympathizing more with Israel than with the Arab nations; by January 1969, that number had jumped to 50 percent.

Throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s—despite Arab oil embargoes, despite the humiliation of the American defeat in Vietnam and the ensuing years of foreign-policy confusion and disillusionment—Israel successfully reinforced its moral alignment with the United States. It did so through its performance as the forward arsenal of American might in the Middle East. As I’verecounted elsewhere, Israel saved the U.S.-backed Hashemite kingdom in Jordan from a Syrian invasion, humiliated the Soviet Union by downing its planes over the Suez Canal, and opened the port of Haifa to the U.S. Sixth Fleet to counter the Soviet presence in Syria. Most spectacularly, in the summer of 1982, Israeli pilots flying U.S. planes downed 86 Syrian-manned Soviet MiGs without suffering a single loss.

Israel’s achievements generated American goodwill. When asked in the 1970s whether a so-called Jewish lobby was taking over Congress, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the Democratic Senator from Washington, responded that Americans of all kinds, far from being in the thrall of lobbyists, “respect competence. They like that we are on the side which seems to know what it’s doing.” In 1988, 63 percent of Americans averred to pollsters that an “extremely important” or “very important” reason for U.S. support of Israel was that the country was “the most outspoken foe of Communism in the Middle East and its strength prevents the Soviets from gaining even further influence in the region.”

American Jews, for their part, largely adhered to the same views. Not only did they remain strongly pro-Israel, but, as Gordis points out, they “saw no friction between those feelings and their feelings as proud Americans.” And this seamless support would persist, at least on the surface, throughout the Reagan presidency and until the collapse of the Soviet empire—after which the tectonic plates undergirding the U.S.-Israel alliance and, correspondingly, the American Jewish relationship with Israel began to shift.

Abbas Disrespects Trump How the PA “president” insulted the U.S. president prior to their initial meeting. Danielle Avel

Palestinian Authority “president” Mahmoud Abbas exploited his visit with Donald Trump in the White House on May 3 to tell a lie so deceitful, it amounted to an insult: “we are raising our youth, our children, our grandchildren on a culture of peace.” As many observers quickly noted, schools routinely are named after Palestinian suicide bombers, and Abbas’ party consistently glorifies murderers including on the very day Abbas met with Trump — his Fatah party honored 12 terrorists who murdered 95 people.

But that’s just the beginning of Abbas’ outrages against Trump; Abbas and his many organizations – Fatah, the PLO, the Palestinian Authority – insult the American president in outlandish and unpleasant ways.

On January 20, Fatah posted photos of anti-Trump protests that included a banner of Trump’s face stepped on by Palestinian protestors; a screaming Trump being warned to “Keep your populism away from Jerusalem”; and a sneering image of Trump with claims he is a racist. Protestors set fire to some images of Trump over a Twitter text announcing: “Activists of the popular resistance burn pictures of Trump before the entrance of the occupation wall of Bethlehem.”

(When Trump visits Bethlehem on May 23, you can be sure that all anti-Trump imagery will have been cleaned up.)

Fatah Twitter post January 20, 2017.

Abbas and his Fatah party organized anti-Trump protests on January 19 in the West Bank. The Fatah Facebook post states, “#Pictures of protests organized by the Fatah movement in the city of #Nablus against the promise of Trump to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to #Jerusalem.” The highlighted photo features a poster of Donald Trump as a screaming pile of manure.

Fatah Facebook post January 19, 2017.

A Fatah video shows a city circle decorated with professionally produced banners demanding that a belligerent-looking Trump not move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In the Trump banner, it states, “The world advances and the Trump administration regresses.” Next to it is a second banner of a wide-eyed Yasser Arafat ordering Trump to submit to Palestinian demands and not move the embassy. (Which, so far, he has done.)

End Propaganda Myth That Jerusalem is Holy to Muslims By Morton A. Klein and Daniel Mandel

Morton A. Klein is National President of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). Dr. Daniel Mandel is Director of the ZOA’ s Center for Middle East Policy and author of H.V. Evatt & the Establisment of Israel (Routledge, London, 2004).

It’s time to end the propaganda myth that Jerusalem is a holy city to Muslims.

The Muslim fixation and clamor on Jerusalem is actually a very recent historical development, a product of political conflict, not historical truth.

Jerusalem rates not a single mention in the Quran and Muslims face Mecca in prayer.

In the seventh century, the Damascus-based Umayyad rulers built up Jerusalem as a counter-weight to Mecca. This is when the important Muslim shrines, the Dome of the Rock (691 CE) and, later, the Al-Aqsa Mosque (705 CE), were intentionally built on the site of the destroyed biblical Jewish temples –– a time-honored practice to physically signal the predominance of Islam.

However, references in the Quran and hadith to Muhammad’s night journey to heaven on his steed Buraq from the ‘farthest mosque’ couldn’t mean Jerusalem because the Quran refers to Palestine as the “nearest” place. And it couldn’t have been a reference to the Al-Aqsa (‘Furtherest’) Mosque, for the simple reason that the Al-Aqsa Mosque didn’t exist in Muhammad’s day.

With the demise of the Umayyad dynasty and the shift of the caliphate to Baghdad, Jerusalem fell into a long decline, scarcely interrupted by occasional bursts of Muslim interest in the city during the Crusader period and the Ottoman conquest. Mark Twain, visiting in 1867, described it as a “pauper village.”

It did, however, become a majority Jewish city during the nineteenth century. The 1907 Baedekers Travel Guide lists Jerusalem with a population of 40,000 Jews, 13,000 Muslims and 7,000 Christians.

Why the ‘two-state solution’ hasn’t worked, and can’t By Moshe Dann

With Islamist forces waiting to take advantage of any power vacuum, the area would plunge into Somalia-like chaos.Much has been written about the “two state solution” (TSS) or “two states for two peoples” (TSTP) as the path to resolving the conflict between Israel and Arab and Muslim countries and Palestinians, but at the same time there appears to be little understanding of why it consistently fails. It fails because it is focused on territory, Palestinian statehood, rather than ideology – Palestinian nationalism and Palestinianism, the belief that Jews have no right to a state and that Jewish nationalism, Zionism, is anathema and that Jewish history is a fraud.

The idea of separating Israeli Jews and Arab Palestinians into two separate states is logical, but practically it involves other issues which remain obstacles. Supporting Palestinian statehood, therefore, without including a resolution of or reference to other problems prevents a rational, comprehensive approach to finding a realistic solution.The principle behind the TSS/TSTP seems simple: since Arabs don’t want to live under Israeli rule and Israelis don’t want to rule over them, give them a state in all or most of Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”), the Gaza Strip and eastern Jerusalem.

Jews would be expelled from the Arab Palestinian state and not permitted to live there, but Israeli Arabs would remain in Israel as citizens. A population transfer/ethnic cleansing would occur in only one state.

Granting statehood, however, depends on resolving all other issues which were included in previous “peace plans” and agreements such as the Oslo accords: 1) ending the conflict, ending violence and incitement; 2) ending all claims against Israel, abandoning “the Nakba” (the catastrophe, Israel’s establishment); 3) ending the “Palestinian Right of Return” of refugees and their descendants to Israel; 4) shared status of the Temple Mount and Jewish rights in eastern Jerusalem and the Old City; 5) continued IDF presence in the Jordan Valley and other strategic areas; 6) land swaps to include areas of major settlement; 7) access to all holy sites; and 8) recognizing Israel’s right to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish People and its historical and religious connection to the land of Israel and the Temple Mount.

Trump’s First Day in Israel: An Encouraging Performance By P. David Hornik

President Trump arrived in Israel this morning on what was apparently the first direct flight ever from Riyadh to the Holy Land. He also became the first U.S. president to visit Israel so early in his term, and the first serving U.S. president ever to visit the Western Wall — the 2,000-year-old section of a retaining wall of the Second Temple, Judaism’s holiest site.

In Riyadh, Trump had given a long, sharp-edged speech that most Israelis saw as a success. Trump called on his audience of Arab and Muslim leaders to root out terrorism entirely, dispensing with the euphemisms used by his predecessors. He decried “Islamist extremism and the Islamist terror groups it inspires.”

Trump also spoke unsparingly of Israel’s existential enemy, the Iranian regime:

For decades, Iran has fueled the fires of sectarian conflict and terror.

It is a government that speaks openly of mass murder, vowing the destruction of Israel, death to America, and ruin for many leaders and nations in this room.

Until the Iranian regime is willing to be a partner for peace, all nations of conscience must work together to isolate Iran, deny it funding for terrorism, and pray for the day when the Iranian people have the just and righteous government they deserve.

Trump also announced a massive $110 billion arms sale to the Saudis. Some top Israeli officials reacted with alarm, citing both the size of the sale and the fact that — against protocol — the administration had not first consulted with Israel about it. Others, however, insisted the deal was nothing to worry about; Israel and Saudi Arabia are indeed in a tacit alliance against Iran. However, Saudi Arabia remains hostile to Israel, has no diplomatic relations with it, and is rife with animosity toward the Jewish state. And the Middle East remains unpredictable, especially in the longer term.

Once Trump arrived in Israel, however, the talk was of peace. As Trump put it while speaking at Ben-Gurion International Airport:

We have before us a rare opportunity to bring security and stability and peace to this region and to its people, defeating terrorism and creating a future of harmony, prosperity and peace. But we can only get there by working together.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for his part, said:

Israel’s hand is extended in peace to all our neighbors, including the Palestinians.

PayPal, the Palestinians, and Problems By Mike Konrad

There is a campaign, which ironically started in the United States, but which has now spread all over the world, to have PayPal, the internet payment processing company, extend its services to Palestine. No matter what happens, this proposal is fraught with landmines.

PayPal offers its services to over 200 countries, in at least 25 currencies. So its scope is pretty much universal, with the exception of a few areas. There ia a rogue’s gallery of countries which are not connected to PayPal, but only a few. Many of those are pretty much totalitarian. The rest are prohibited because of concerns that payments would be either fraudulent or used to fund illegal or terrorist causes.

This reluctance to connect PayPal to Palestine has been a source of major criticism from around the world, especially since PayPal does operate in nearby adjacent Jewish communities. It is preventing a large community of well-educated IT professionals in the contested areas and Gaza from getting employment — especially needed for those stuck on the wrong side of the security fence, where unemployment is rampant.

The American Group, A4VPE (Americans for a Vibrant Palestinian Economy), has been running a major campaign to bring PayPal to the contested areas. In August of 2016, they sent an open letter to the President of PayPal, Mr. Dan Shulman.

We have been told that PayPal is concerned about the compliance investments required to enter the Palestinian market. We believe such costs have been greatly overestimated. The U.S. Treasury Department has spent a great deal of time working with the Palestine Monetary Authority to strengthen safeguards against abuse. PayPal currently operates in over 203 countries including places with major problems of corruption and terrorism like Somalia and Yemen. We are confident that Palestine will prove a much easier place to profitably do business than these and other markets that PayPal has already entered.

In addition to business reasons, there are also ethical reasons for PayPal to enter the Palestinian market. PayPal’s decision to launch its service in Israel for Israeli bank customers means that it inadvertently made its services freely available to Jewish settlers living illegally in the occupied West Bank. Palestinians living in close proximity to those settlers do not, however, have access as PayPal doesn’t work with Palestinian banks and Palestinians are unable to establish Israeli bank accounts. — A4VPE

Technically, there is no reason that PayPal could not be extended to the Palestinian areas, if technology were the only concern as Tech Crunch noted:

PayPal currently does not work for Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza, but does work for Israelis living in settlements in the West Bank, which are illegal by international law… [H]ow an Internet platform could work in some areas of a country but not in another — where the areas in question are in some cases literally meters apart — is puzzling to say the least. — Tech Crunch (emphasis mine)

GOOD NEWS: GOVERNORS OF ALL 50 STATES SIGN DECLARATION CONDEMNING ANTI-ISRAEL BDS MOVEMENT AS ANTITHETICAL TO AMERICAN VALUES

By: Max Gelber, United with Israelhttps://unitedwithisrael.org/all-us-state-governors-sign-anti-bds-declaration/?utm_source=

The governors of all 50 US states signed a declaration condemning the anti-Israel BDS movement as antithetical to American values.

The governors of all 50 US states on Thursday signed a statement declaring the anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement as standing in opposition to their values and those of the US in general.

“The goals of the BDS movement are antithetical to our values and the values of our respective states, our support for Israel as a vital US ally, important economic partner and champion of freedom,” the letter states.

BDS seeks “to isolate Israel—a pluralistic nation with deep cultural, familial, security, educational, scientific and commercial bonds with our state and with the United States as a whole—rather than recognize the profound mutual benefits of our engagement with it. They malign a trusted ally that, while forced to defend itself against repeated and ongoing attempts to annihilate it, has consistently extended its hand in peace to its Palestinian neighbors and to states across the Middle East and around the world…

“At this critical time, in the face of the virulent movement to promote anti-Israel boycotts both in this country and around the globe, we strongly condemn the BDS movement as incompatible with the values of our states and our country,” the statement concludes.

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) praised the governors for signing the declaration.

“Our nation’s 50 governors, as well as the District of Columbia mayor, recognize the pernicious goals of the BDS movement, which singles out Israel from among all the nations of the world for relentless and undue criticism, and whose efforts undermine the prospects for advancing Israeli-Palestinian peace,” stated David Harris, CEO of AJC.

Palestinians: Tomorrow’s Secret ‘Day of Rage’ by Bassam Tawil

What is really driving this Palestinian hatred of Trump and the U.S.? The Palestinians and the Arabs have long been at war with what they regard as U.S. bias in favor of Israel. What they mean is that U.S. support for Israel stands in their way of destroying Israel.

Abbas is not going to tell Trump about the “Day of Rage” because it flies in the face of his repeated claim that Palestinians are ready for peace and are even raising their children in a culture of peace.

Once again, Abbas is playing Americans and other Westerners for fools. His people remain unwilling to recognize Israel’s very right to exist as a state for Jews. And so, Abbas will talk peace and coexistence while his people organize yet another “Day of Rage.”

Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority (PA), preparing to welcome U.S. President Donald Trump to Bethlehem, are seeking to create the impression that their sentiments are shared by their people. Yet many Palestinians are less than enthusiastic about the visit.

It is in the best interests of Abbas and the PA to hide the truth that many Palestinians view the U.S. as an Israel-loving enemy.

While the PA president and his aides attempt to bury that inconvenient fact, they are also doing their best to cover up the truth that many Palestinians have been radicalized to a point that they would rather aim a gun or knife at Israelis than aim for peace with them.

The strongest and most vocal protests against Trump’s visit have thus far come from Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinians.

Ramallah is regularly described by Western journalists as a base for moderation and pragmatism. It is in this city that Abbas and the top PA leadership live and work.

In a statement published earlier this week, the National and Islamic Forces in Ramallah and El-Bireh, a coalition of various Palestinian political and terror groups, called for a “Day of Popular Rage” in the West Bank to protest the imminent presidential visit.

In Palestinian-speak, a “Day of Rage” is a call for intensified violence and terrorism directed mainly against Jews.

The term was formally introduced during the First Intifada, which erupted in late 1987, and consisted of stone and petrol-bomb attacks against Israel Defense Force soldiers and Jews residing in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Similarly, during the Second Intifada, which began in 2000, Days of Rage were associated with suicide bombings, drive-by shootings and other acts of terrorism and assorted crimes perpetrated against Jews living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as within Israel.

In recent years, Abbas’s Fatah faction and other groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) have used different occasions to urge Palestinians to declare a Day of Rage against Israel.

Generally speaking, such calls come in response to Jewish visits to the Temple Mount — visits that have been taking place since East Jerusalem was liberated from Jordanian occupation in 1967.

The visits were temporarily suspended, however, for security reasons in the first years of the Second Intifada, out of concern for the safety of visitors. It is worth noting that non-Muslims areallowed to tour the Temple Mount, as has been true for the past five decades. The Palestinians, however, are specifically opposed to Jews visiting the site, under the false pretext that Jews are plotting to rebuild their Temple after destroying the Islamic holy sites there. This charge is, of course, another Palestinian blood libel against Jews.