RUTHFULLY YOURS

Even more important than the nations that voted with the United States, are those that abstained, which included many African nations that formerly voted against Israel in lock step with all Arab states-Togo voted no, and Rwanda, Malawi, Uganda, Lesotho, Equatorial Guinea and South Sudan abstained. Kenya was absent. Looking ahead it may be a nascent trend….rsk

The United Nations General Assembly today voted to condemn the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and demand that all member nations comply with UN Security Council resolutions on the status of the city.

The emergency special session vote was scheduled after the U.S. used its veto power to block a similar resolution at the Security Council on Monday. There is no veto power in the General Assembly.

U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley warned that America would be “taking names” of countries who voted against the United States. President Trump said Wednesday, “They take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars, and then they vote against us. Well, we’re watching those votes. Let them vote against us. We’ll save a lot. We don’t care.”

The final vote was 128 in favor of the resolution, nine against and 35 abstentions. The “no” votes came from the U.S., Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Togo, Honduras, and Guatemala. Britain voted in favor of the resolution, while Canada and Mexico abstained.

Explaining the UK’s stance at the Security Council earlier this week, UK Ambassador to the UN Matthew Rycroft said Washington’s move was “unhelpful to the prospects for peace in the region, an aim that all of us in this Council remain committed to — the British Embassy to Israel is based in Tel Aviv and we have no plans to move it.”

Unlike votes in the Security Council, General Assembly resolutions are non-binding. Today’s resolution calls on all states to “comply with Security Council resolutions regarding the Holy City of Jerusalem, and not recognize any actions or measures contrary to those resolutions.”

Haley said today at the General Assembly that she’s “often wondered why, in the face of such hostility, Israel has chosen to remain a member of this body.”

“And then I remember that Israel has chosen to remain in this institution because it’s important to stand up for yourself. Israel must stand up for its own survival as a nation, but it also stands up for the ideals of freedom and human dignity that the United Nations is supposed to be about,” she said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Reports from the West Bank after the Six Day War show that the Arabs interviewed defined themselves as “Arabs” or “Jordanians”, and evidently did not yet know that they were “the Palestinian people”. Since then, they were taught it. They were also taught that it is their duty is to “liberate Palestine” by killing Jews. The Palestinians are the first people invented to serve as a weapon of mass destruction of another people.

“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.” — PLO leader Zuheir Mohsen, interview in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, March 1977.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the European Union has become the main financier of the “Palestinian cause”, including its terrorism. They are also contributing to war.

Iran, strengthened enormously by the agreement passed in July 2015 and the massive US funding that accompanied it, has been showing its desire to become a hegemonic power in the Middle East.

The grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah Al ash-Sheikh, recently issued a fatwa saying that “fighting the Jews” is “against the will” of Allah and that Hamas is a terrorist organization.

For many years, “Palestine” has not stopped aspiring to new heights in the so called “international community”. “Palestine” has been present at the Olympic Games since 1996, and, later, became a permanent observer to UNESCO and the United Nations. The vast majority of the 95 “embassies” of “Palestine” are in the Muslim world; many others are in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. In 2014, the Spanish Parliament voted in favor of full recognition of “Palestine.” A few weeks later, the French Parliament did the same.

There is no other instance in the history of the world where a state that does not exist can have missions and embassies presumed to function as if that state did exist.

Now the time has probably come for the “Palestinians” to realize that they have lost and fall back to earth, as noted by the scholar Daniel Pipes.

Have “Palestinian” leaders been showing by their speeches and actions that they are ready to rule a state living in peace with their neighbors and with the rest of the world? All “Palestinian” leaders have incessantly incited terrorism, and do not hide their wish to wipe Israel off the map.

“The greatest obstacle to the expansion of peace today is not found in the leaders of the countries around us. The obstacle is public opinion on the Arab street, public opinion that has been brainwashed for years by a distorted and misleading presentation of the State of Israel.” — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Today, in spite of the lasting peace treaty between Cairo and Jerusalem, much of the media in Egypt continues to demonize Israel. Even under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, with whom Netanyahu has been developing mutually beneficial security relations, prominent figures in the state-run press disseminate anti-Israel conspiracy theories.

El-Sisi now has a genuine opportunity to spread to his populace his own increasingly positive relations with a neighbor that could significantly benefit his people and his country.

The 40th anniversary of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to the Knesset took place on November 21. There, Sadat had announced:

“I have come to you so that together we might build a durable peace based on justice, to avoid the shedding of one single drop of blood from an Arab or an Israeli.”

To commemorate the occasion, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered an address, saying:

“The greatest obstacle to the expansion of peace today is not found in the leaders of the countries around us. The obstacle is public opinion on the Arab street, public opinion that has been brainwashed for years by a distorted and misleading presentation of the State of Israel.”

Netanyahu had a point. Today, four decades later — in spite of the lasting peace treaty between Cairo and Jerusalem — much of the media in Egypt continues to demonize Israel. Even under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, with whom Netanyahu has been developing mutually beneficial security relations, prominent figures in the state-run press disseminate anti-Israel conspiracy theories.

Former MP Mustafa Bakri, for instance, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Al-Osboa and the host of the “Facts and Secrets” talk show on Sada El Balad TV. told the Egyptian daily Al Youm 7, as recently as November 20th, that Egypt must force the “Israeli enemy,” the “Zionist entity,” to return antiquities that it had supposedly smuggled out of Egypt into Israel.

Earlier in the month, when it was announced that Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri had resigned (he has since suspended his resignation), Bakri said on his talk show that Israel — which he referred to as the “State of Israeli Occupation” — was the only party that would benefit from a new war breaking out in the Middle East. He also alleged that Israel was conspiring against Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Egypt and Lebanon.

During a different segment of his show in the beginning of November, Bakri denounced the 1917 Balfour Declaration as a sinister act — a crime committed by Britain that enabled Israel to extort Palestine (which did not exist in 1917) — and backed the Palestinian Authority’s threat to sue Britain in the International Criminal Court.

In a 2016 study — “Peace with Israel in Egyptian Textbooks: What Changed between the Mubarak and el-Sisi Eras?” — Ofir Winter, an Egypt specialist at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies, found that although the Egyptian government had revised the way in which the Egypt-Israel treaty was presented and taught to ninth-graders in the 2015-2016 academic year, the change had little effect on the Egyptian public. Winter writes:

resident Trump’s national security strategy – as enunciated on December 18, 2017 – reflects a realistic assessment of clear and present threats to the US, rejecting the politically-correct worldview of the foreign policy establishment, which has been crashed, repeatedly, against the rocks of reality. It provides a prescription for the enhancement of the flourishing, mutually-beneficial US-Israel relationship.

Contrary to the US and West European government, academic and media foreign policy establishment – which are highly critical of Israel and top heavy on wishful-thinking concerning the supposed Arab Spring, ostensible democratization and peaceful coexistence of the Arab World – Trump recognizes the complex and inherently brutal reality of the Middle East. Trump is aware of the lethal threats posed by Shiite (Ayatollahs) and Sunni terrorism and the threats posed by the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement.

Apparently, Trump does not embrace the myth of the Palestinian issue as – supposedly – a core cause of regional instability, a crown-jewel of Arab policy-makers, nor the crux of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

According to Trump, apologies, appeasement and multilateralism have been replaced by America-first patriotism, the independence of unilateral US military action, the resurgence of the US posture of deterrence, an expanded defense budget and peace-through-strength.

Will Israel leverage these principles in its own battle against Islamic/Arab terrorism and its public relation posture in the US?

The Palestinians do not want peace. They want victory, a victory that will lead to the elimination of Israel and the expulsion of the Jews.

The 1968 charter of the PLO has never been changed, despite decades of promises that it would be modified. Although secular in character, it advances much the same attitudes as those found in the Hamas charters. In Article 2, for example, it defines “Palestine” in boundaries encompassing the entirety of Israel: “Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit”. This means that calls for a Palestinian state based on that definition are also calls for the destruction of Israel.

All attempts at normalization between Palestinians and Israelis or between other Arab states and Israel are routinely dismissed as treachery, a position that endangers the lives of any Palestinian who seeks peace.

Meanwhile, Western leaders, including religious figures such as the Pope, are enchanted with the fantasy that a peace process exists, and forever chant the mantra that nothing must be done to interrupt it. President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is the first time any world leader has stood up to the threats of anger and violence.

On December 6, US President Donald Trump fulfilled a promise that was made by Congress on November 28, 1995 in its Jerusalem Embassy Act — to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel and to mark this by moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to the ancient city. That move, according to the Act itself, was to “be established in Jerusalem no later than May 31, 1999”. Trump’s declaration that the US will now implement the Act has been a historical démarche. So why has it taken so long to act on this agreement?

For more than two decades, this clear expression of the will of Congress had, in effect, been held in abeyance following an amendment (section 7) that introduced a waiver that allowed presidents to “suspend the limitation set forth in section 3(b) for a period of six months if he determines and reports to Congress in advance that such suspension if necessary to protect the national security interests of the United States”. Since then, every president who followed (including Trump, six months earlier) exercised this waiver.

Over the years, implementation of the Act was caught up in increasingly complicated legal and diplomatic issues that made deferment appear judicious and necessary in the belief that stalling it might help the so-called “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians: according to Time Magazine:

“though both the Clinton Administration and Israeli government ‘support the move to Jerusalem in principle, they would prefer to see the peace process more stabilized before confronting the explosive issue of Jerusalem’.”