RUTHFULLY YOURS

The fire of Islam struck Israel beginning on November 22. It is not likely that the dry season and the easterly winds ignited four separate fire sites in Haifa, also in Zichron Yaakov, Gilon and Mitzpe Harashim in the Galilee, Nataf and Beit Meir in the Judean hills, Dolev and Talmon north of Jerusalem, and Neve Tsuf/Halamish in Samaria.

As in years past, Arab arsonists are primary suspects for this crime of wanton destruction. While police investigations continue, and the left-leaning reality-denying media outlets predictably exonerate the Arabs and blame meteorology and negligence, the experienced and intelligent Israeli public is not fooled. ‘Not all Arabs are terrorists and arsonists’ becomes the inane thought-control conclusion.

After six days, public authorities reported basic statistics: a quarter of Haifa’s population, some 75,000 residents, were evacuated from their homes, while 1,700 dwellings were damaged and over 100 people hospitalized for smoke inhalation; 32,000 acres of land were burned in over 200 fires around the country. Some 10 countries provided Israel with firefighting planes, including the United States and Russia, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and Italy, the Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Croatia. Thirty Arabs (i.e. Muslims), of which 22 were Israeli citizens, and others from the Palestinian Authority area in the West Bank, had been arrested and interrogated on suspicion of arson.

Insight into Muslim warfare methods can be gleaned from Muhammad the prophet of Islam, who set fire to the palm groves of the Jewish tribe Banu el-Nadr in Medina, despite the fact that the next day, with the imminent banishment of the Jews, the groves would revert to the Muslims. Heaping destruction and humiliation upon the enemy was more satisfying than benefiting from his property. Islam, according to the Muslim scholar Ibn Hazm (994-1064), is permitted to burn the produce of the land and its trees as part of the jihad against infidels.

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The wildfires in Israel lead us to address the place of the Arabs in Israel, incorrectly referred to as ‘Israeli Arabs’. Their identity as Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims – excepting Christians and others who are not – transcends their nominal Israeli citizen status.

The Joint Arab List (JAL) of 13 Knesset members relentlessly conducts a political and ideological assault upon the State of Israel and its Jewish Zionist ethos. They are authentic representatives of the Arab voting public, of whom more than 90% cast their ballots for the JAL in the general elections of 2015.

At the head of the Israel-bashing Arab political class and parliamentary caucus is MK Ayman Odeh, himself a resident of Haifa. He is the visible and vocal spokesman of an embittered and angry minority group, demanding national status on the path to redefining Israel as a bi-national Jewish-Arab state. The formula of ‘a state of all its citizens’, with its democratic egalitarian melody, is designed to de-Zionize and destroy the renewed Jewish state. The state that is in fact for all its citizens is essentially and firstly the state of the Jewish people.

Ayman Odeh, who recently memorialized Yasir Arafat at a commemoration ceremony in Ramallah, refused to attend the state funeral for Shimon Peres in Jerusalem. Politically active before entering the Knesset, Odeh aggressively campaigned against the proposal for Arab national service – Arabs are exempt from army service – because it would be in his view an act of ‘collaboration’ with the state.

The news out of Syria this week is, as usual, complex—and seemingly contradictory.

On the one hand, the Russian-Syrian-Iranian-Hizballah alliance appeared to have overcome rebel resistance in Aleppo—a major turning point that would shift the war’s momentum in the alliance’s favor.

On the other hand, Arab and other media reported that on Wednesday the Israeli air force struck a Syrian weapons depot west of Damascus and a weapons convoy headed for Hizballah in Lebanon.

As of Thursday evening there had been no retaliation against Israel, and Israeli analysts generally saw a retaliation as unlikely.

Media outside of Israel have, of course, often reported in the past on Israeli airstrikes—usually against Hizballah-bound weaponry—in Syria.

Israel’s policy has been to keep mum, neither denying nor confirming the reports. Last April, though, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged that Israel had carried out “dozens” of strikes in Syria against “game-changing weaponry” for Hizballah.

It’s no secret that, since the 2006 war between Israel and Hizballah in Lebanon, Hizballah has massively rearmed and now harbors tens of thousands of missiles. But Israel regards some kinds of weapons—precision rockets, advanced antiship and antiaircraft systems—as out of bounds for the terror group.

What has changed in the Syrian arena, though, is that late last year Russia deployed its powerful S-400 radar and antiaircraft system there. It covers Syria, Lebanon, and much of Israel and can track Israel’s northern airspace.

Since then there have been far fewer reported Israeli airstrikes in Syria. In one of them, last September, the outcome seemed ominous when Syria—not a military match for Israel by itself, but backed by Russia and Iran—fired missiles at two Israeli aircraft.

Why, then, the Israeli strike this week? Why no military response this time?

“The bigger error would be to treat Arab-Israeli peace like a real-estate deal. An avid deal maker would be inclined to see the conflict as a matter of offering just the right inducements to the parties. But that’s precisely the failed approach that has disappointed successive American presidents for half a century, since it doesn’t take the Palestinian ideology into account.”
Emergency services in Israel combated brush fires across the country for a week beginning Nov. 22, ranging from Haifa to the Galilee to Jerusalem. Hundreds of homes burned down and nearly 16 square miles of forest land were damaged before the fires were contained this week. Dozens of people suffered smoke inhalation, and some 70,000 had to be evacuated.

It was an almost perfect metaphor for the Palestinian national movement.

Of the 39 largest fires—there were 1,700 separate events in all—29 were ignited by Palestinian arsonists. “We have also identified an additional 10 sites where arson was attempted but didn’t succeed,” Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan told me in a phone interview Thursday. “In some cases we were able to catch the suspects by camera or drone. In others we found Molotov cocktails at the scene.”

He added: “All the big fires were in Israel or in Jewish towns or near Jewish towns. There was no Arab city where there was a big fire inside.”

Police have arrested 35 suspects on arson and incitement charges so far, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to “prosecute anyone committing these acts so that all can see that anyone who tries to burn down the State of Israel will face the fullest punishment.”

Having tried and failed to destroy Israel through violent rioting, all-out invasion, suicide bombings, campus boycotts, and random stabbing and vehicular attacks, Palestinians are now literally setting the Holy Land on fire. The message, evident to all but their friends in Washington and Brussels, is that they would sooner see the land go up in flames than coexist with a Jewish state.

The Palestinian leadership remains Janus-faced as ever. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas dispatched 40 firefighters and eight firetrucks to help extinguish the fires, earning justified praise and gratitude from Mr. Netanyahu and the Israeli political establishment. Without PA assistance and support from the likes of Egypt, Greece, Jordan, Russia, Spain and Turkey, among many others, the fires could have raged for much longer.

Yet Mr. Abbas’s Fatah movement also accused Jerusalem of “exploiting the fire” to blame the Palestinian people. And during a three-hour stemwinder at a Fatah conference on Wednesday, Mr. Abbas lauded the 1980s “intifada of stones” and once more called for unity with Hamas, the Gaza-based terrorist movement constitutionally committed to destroying Israel.

“Our national unity is our safety valve, and I call on Hamas to end the division,” Mr. Abbas said. He also assailed Britain for the 1917 Balfour Declaration that paved the way for Israel’s creation in Mandatory Palestine, demanding that Her Majesty’s Government “declare its apology for making such a promise and repair the damage done to our people, resources and our nation.”

Then there’s the wider atmosphere of online incitement. Arab social-media users cheerfully shared the hashtag #IsraelIsBurning throughout the crisis. They were “happy and supporting it and calling on others to do it,” said Mr. Erdan, the public-security minister. “It’s all based on spreading a culture of hatred in a social network. You don’t need a mosque or school anymore to spread lies and hatred. You can spread your lies globally, 24/7, without effective monitoring.”

There’s a useful lesson here for the incoming Trump administration about the perils of diving into Israeli-Arab peace-processing. Judging by most of his statements, Donald Trump’s instincts are pro-Israel in the conventional sense. But the president-elect is also tempted by the peace-deal El Dorado. CONTINUE AT SITE

Some pieces are easy to write. I go to an event and hear people suggest that the Zionists were responsible for the holocaust, or witness mention of Jewish power. If it is a speech by Max Blumenthal or Tom Suarez, I will hear tales of Jewish conspiracy. I return home, analyse the recordings, research, and write. It is an easy process to follow.http://david-collier.com/?p=2460

The more difficult pieces are those that challenge the narratives. The message is not a simple ‘one-liner’. There can be discomfort in internally challenging deeply held beliefs, an inability to ‘cross the divide’. People are even uncertain sometimes ‘which side’ the piece is on.

This is one of those items. To make the journey with me, you need to let go of some of your beliefs. Ignore statements that challenge your history and set aside all you know about the creation of the conflict between 1917 and 1967.

I am going to ask you to immerse yourself inside the Palestinian narrative. I am doing so because I am going to use their narrative, not just to show that Zionism is a movement of national liberation but to forcefully drive home the idea that the Balfour apology campaign, anti-Zionism and the entire settler colonial paradigm are all knee deep in antisemitic thought.
An alternate universe

The Arab narrative suggests that the British had written a letter as a nation of empire and handed a land that was not theirs over to a rich and powerful European sect. The British then spent 30 years facilitating this movement. Eventually, in 1948, the Palestinians were brutally expelled from their land by these invading racist white Europeans.

Today, millions of the descendants of the victims of this ‘Nakba’ are scattered. Many live as refugees in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Others have gone further afield, and you can find them in nations across the globe. Waiting with their deeds and their keys until they, or their children, or their grandchildren, can eventually return.

That return is described as a movement for national liberation. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. ‘Fatah’, the largest faction of the PLO, was originally called the ‘Palestinian National Liberation Movement’.
Return

Central to the liberation movement is the return of the refugees. Those that were ‘scattered’:

“the “right of return” for the descendants to their land and homes in “Palestine” will be valid for all eternity, it is not subject to negotiation, and is both a group and personal “right” that cannot be cancelled.” (Palestinian Diaspora in Europe” conference 2015)

The same message is repeated here:

“Palestinians have repeatedly said that the right of return enshrined in various United Nations resolutions is non-negotiable and does not have an expiry date.”

The Palestinian right of return. An inalienable right. A hereditary condition, with Palestinian ‘nationhood’ passing from parent to child.

In this manner, 70 years later, the struggle, even the violent struggle, is framed as a movement of National liberation rather than a struggle for personal freedoms. The Arab who was born in Lebanon, whose parents were born in Lebanon, does not strive for freedom in Lebanon, but rather to experience the liberation of his ‘homeland’. A land neither he nor his parents ever trod. This movement of national liberation has full time support from a long list of anti-Zionist activists.

Jimmy Carter is 92 now, and it has been 36 years since his landslide defeat for reelection. But neither the passage of time nor the debilities of age slow him from making proposals that will do real harm to the State of Israel — and he has just tried one more time.

In Monday’s New York Times, he writes that “America must recognize Palestine” and presents a version of Israeli reality that simply takes leave of the facts. Carter tells us that “the simple but vital step this administration must take before its term expires on Jan. 20 is to grant American diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine, as 137 countries have already done, and help it achieve full United Nations membership.”

Now, granting diplomatic recognition to “the state of Palestine” will no more make it a legitimate and genuine country than granting diplomatic recognition to Plains, Ga., would make it one. The fact that 137 countries have done so — to no effect whatsoever — ought to make that obvious. So, what is Carter’s real goal here? He writes that it is peace, but the steps he proposes and the analysis he offers would leave Israel and the Palestinians further from peace than ever.

The “facts” Carter adduces are not only wrong, but tricky and misleading. For example, he writes that there are “600,000 Israeli settlers.” That number can only be reached by counting every Israeli living in Jerusalem — including in the Jewish Quarter, and the parts barred to Jews by Jordan before 1967 — as settlers. He writes that “Israel is building more and more settlements, displacing Palestinians and entrenching its occupation of Palestinian lands,” but he offers no data — because there is none to support his claim. Anyone who has visited the West Bank knows that virtually all settlements have not displaced Palestinians but have been, instead, built on fallow land, and the number of settlements and the land they take up rises very slowly indeed. The actual land area taken up by settler buildings themselves covers perhaps 1 percent of the West Bank, though far more falls within settlement boundaries. Roughly 12 percent of the West Bank lies to the west of the security barrier built by Israel to stop Palestinian terrorism. That barrier is not moving, or creeping, or taking up more land.

For decades, UN agencies have slandered the Jewish state, most recently with the April 2016 accusation that it has been “planting Jewish fake graves” in Palestinian territory, and with UNESCO declaring last year that the ancient Jewish Biblical sites Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs are actually Muslim holy sites, and last month that the Temple Mount, where the Jewish Temples were destroyed in 587 BCE and 70 CE, is an Islamic site with no connection to Judaism.

West Bank: This territory was for millennia called Judea and Samaria. After the 1948 War of Independence, Transjordan annexed it, renamed it the “West Bank,” and occupied it for nearly two decades. In the Six Day War, after Jordan attacked Israel, Israel entered the territory and administered it until the Oslo Accords era, when Israel turned over much of the area to the Palestinian Authority.

Occupation: When it comes to Israel, the UN is obsessed with the word “occupation.” A recent Wall Street Journal article documents 530 General Assembly references to Israel as an “occupying power” versus zero for Indonesia (East Timor), Turkey (Cyprus), Russia (Georgia, Crimea), Morocco (Western Sahara), Vietnam (Cambodia), Armenia (Azerbaijan), Pakistan (Kashmir), or China (Tibet). Saying that Jews are “occupying” Judea is as nonsensical as saying Arabs are “occupying” Arabia or Gauls are “occupying” France.

Settlement: The UN uses the term to insinuate Israeli theft of “Palestine.” The Obama administration eagerly embraced this terminology. If there is an occupying force in Gaza, it is Hamas. The West Bank is “disputed territories” to anyone claiming a modicum of neutrality. As Elliot Abrams put it, “the term ‘settlement’ loses meaning when applied to Jews building homes in their nation’s capital city.”

US President-elect Donald Trump won the White House promising to reform our dysfunctional government. But will he also stand up to the even more dysfunctional United Nations?

As the Trump campaign emphasized in a position paper released November 2, the UN has long displayed “enormous anti-Israel bias.” For decades, UN agencies have slandered the Jewish state, most recently with the April 2016 accusation that it has been “planting Jewish fake graves” in Palestinian territory, and with UNESCO declaring last year that the ancient Jewish Biblical sites Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs are actually Muslim holy sites, and last month that the Temple Mount, where the First and Second Jewish Temples were destroyed in 587 BCE and 70 CE, is an Islamic site with no connection to Judaism. On the day America elected a new president, the UN adopted ten new resolutions against Israel.

This piece was first published on the Hebrew-language website Mida on November 25, 2016, rendered into English by Avi Woolf, and republished here with permission.http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2016/11/the-forest-jihad-is-here/

In contrast to talk about a “new form of terror,” the weapon of arson has served radical Islam for years around the world, with the aim of causing damage and “sowing fear into the hearts of infidels.”

A wave of fires is raging throughout Israel, causing great damage and leading to furious debates and rumor mills regarding their cause. Is this deliberate, negligence, or just a matter of the weather? The answer, so it seems, is a combination of the three. Some of the fires may indeed be the result of negligence, but such a large number of them in so many places suggests deliberate intent, helped by changes in the weather.

Indeed, police officials spoke this week of a “wave of arson,” and even arrested some suspects. At a press conference convened in burning Haifa by Prime Minister Netanyahu and Interior Minister Gilad Erdan, the fires were described as “terror,” and Minister Erdan even defined the “arson terror” as a new phenomenon which Israel is now coping with. But in fact, this isn’t the first time terrorists have made use of the arson weapon, and the idea has been widespread on the internet for years. The main party spreading it is al-Qaeda.

While Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership hid in the Afghan-Pakistani hills, Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, the organization’s ideologue and strategist, published a two-volume book entitled A Call for Global Islamic Resistance. In his book, al-Suri calls on supporters of global jihad to hurt the West via urban combat and terror, individually and in groups. He provided inspiration for the terrorists who bombed Madrid in March 2004 and London in July 2005. Marc Sageman, a former psychiatrist working for American intelligence called this approach “leaderless jihad.” After the attack by terrorist Mohammad Merah on the Jewish Otzar Hatorah school in Toulouse, the head of Europol called it “the new jihad.”