Exactly one hundred years ago, this November 2nd, a public statement issued by the British government during World War I announcing support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman Empire region, reads as follows:
“His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object. It being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
This was the Balfour Declaration which was supposed to have created a Jewish state. Of course this was done during the war when England wanted to secure the support of Jews in Russia, Germany and the United States. But promises to Jews are often as long lasting as ice immersed in a boiling glass of coffee. In 1921, with the war over and Jewish influence, whatever it was, no longer needed, the League of Nations and England took away 80% of that land and created Trans-Jordan, now known merely as Jordan. It was not until 41 years after the Balfour fake-out that the Jewish state of Israel was created.
And no thanks to the British, whose troops led the Jordanian army in its attacks meant to destroy Israel in the 1948 war of extermination. We suggest (with little hope it would be done) that Israel demands the return to it, of its original “national home.” Bear in mind, as well, that in the final creation of Israel out of the remaining 20% of its original promised homeland, half of that area was carved out by the U.N. to become another Muslim state led by the likes of Yasser Arafat, the PLO and Hamas. Talk about getting 10 cents on the dollar.
Please note that although Britain stated clearly in its original text to the Jews in 1917 that they would not infringe at all the civil religious rights of non-Jews within its proposed borders, the country of Trans-Jordan was created with no such demands on the Muslims. Today, no Jews are permitted to live in that country. Only foolish Jews who visit Jordan to vacation and sight-see are permitted to spend their money and then board their planes back to wherever.
If there is any celebration of the Balfour Declaration, let those ecstatic, euphoric souls who whoop it up as a day for rejoicing, finally come to the realization that it was nothing more than a fake-out to Jews. Think back to the refusal of Britain during the 1930’s to permit Jews to find safe haven in that land they were promised way back in 1917. How many Jewish lives would have been saved if the promise of the Balfour Declaration had been kept?
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 elicited euphoria among world Zionists. It was to be short lived as a chain of betrayals truncated the land promised to the Jews and limited their immigration.
The 1922 White Paper (also known as the Churchill White Paper) averred that Jews were in Palestine by right, but bowing to Arab pressure, ceded 76 percent –all the land East of the Jordan River–to the Hashemite Emir Abdullah. It was renamed Transjordan, and closed to Jewish settlement. In explanation the British stated:
“England…does not want Palestine to become ‘as Jewish as England is English’, but, rather, should become ‘a center in which Jewish people as a whole may take, on grounds of religion and race, an interest and a pride.’” (Ironically today Israel is poised to become more Jewish than England is English given the very real prospect that Muslims will become a majority in that nation.)
The Jews of Palestine had no choice but to accept the partition of 1922, but Arab thirst for all of Palestine resulted in murders and terrorist attacks, the Hebron massacre of 1929 and later the 1936-39 “Arab Revolt.”
The British responded with the White Paper of 1939 all but eliminating Jewish immigration to Palestine. This occurred after the infamous Evian conference of July 1938. With the exception of the Dominican Republic, all the participants refused to alter their immigration policies, thereby trapping Europe’s Jews. The Nazis were to kill one of every three Jews in the world.
In 1982, Sir Harold Wilson, who had been a member of Clement Attlee’s Cabinet when Israel became independent in 1948 and served as Prime Minister during the Six-Day War, wrote The Chariot of Israel-Britain, America and the State of Israel in which he described the British actions in 1939 as shameful and inexcusable.
After World War II the British continued their appalling anti-Jewish immigration policies, seizing and firing upon the vessels taking traumatized Holocaust survivors to Palestine.
However, the Jews of Palestine began a sustained effort to push the British out of Palestine and in February 1947 Britain announced its intent to terminate the Mandate, referring the matter of Palestine to the United Nations.
In May of that year the United Nations Special Committee On Palestine (UNSCOP) began deliberations on a “solution” to the Palestine “problem.”
These deliberations included an UNSCOP mission to examine the state of surviving Jews in displaced persons camps in Europe. The members were horrified by the conditions, but cynical enough to exploit the desperation of the refugees by deciding on a further partition of Palestine.
On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted 33 to 13 (with ten abstentions) to implement the new partition as Resolution 181. Absent in all the media hailing of the “compromise” was any mention that the Jews of Palestine had already relinquished 75 percent of the area promised in the Balfour Declaration. Media and diplomats alike would declare that the Jews were gaining 53% of “Palestine” when in fact they were left with roughly 12 percent.
Thus, the 25 percent of Palestine left to the Jews for a homeland in 1922 was now to be divided as follows:
There would be an Arab State, a Jewish State and the City of Jerusalem, linked by zigzagging corridors. The Arab state would comprise the central and western Galilee, the town of Acre, the hills of Judea and Samaria, a large enclave in Jaffa, and the southern coast from what is now Ashdod, the Gaza Strip, and a section of desert along the Egyptian border which included Beersheba. The Jews were to have the Eastern Galilee, the coastal plain between Haifa and Rehovoth, most of the Negev and a strip to what is now Eilat.
Jerusalem was to be “international”, a Corpus Separatum which included Bethlehem, with access assured to persons of all faiths.
That was a major betrayal, but the Jews, desperate to have a state, agreed to it.
Israeli athletes and performers, professors, students and tourists in countries throughout the world are regularly discriminated against for being Israeli Jews.
This week Israel’s judo team was harassed and discriminated against by UAE officials when they tried to board a flight from Tel Aviv to Istanbul, en route to Abu Dhabi to participate in the Judo Grand Slam competition.
Apropos of nothing, UAE told the Israelis they would only be permitted to enter the UAE from Amman. And once they finally arrived at the competition, they were prohibited from competing under their national flag. Lowlights of the UAE’s shameful bigotry included forcing Tal Flicker to receive his gold medal under the International Judo Association’s flag with the association’s theme song, rather than Israel’s national anthem playing in the background and the sight of a Moroccan female judoka literally running away from her Israeli opponent rather than shake hands with her.
The discrimination that Israel’s judokas suffered is newsworthy because it’s appalling, not because it is rare. It isn’t rare. Israeli athletes and performers, professors, students and tourists in countries throughout the world are regularly discriminated against for being Israeli Jews. Concerts are picketed or canceled. Israelis are denied educational opportunities and teaching positions.
Israeli brands are boycotted and Israeli shops are picketed from Montreal to Brooklyn to Johannesburg.
The simple act of purchasing Israeli cucumbers has become a political statement in countries around the world.
And of course, there is the world of diplomacy, where the nations of the world seem to have flushed the news of Israel’s establishment 70 years ago down the memory hole. The near-consensus view of UN institutions and to a growing degree, of EU institutions, not to mention the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, is that the Jewish exile should never have ended. The Jews should have remained scattered and at the mercy of the nations of the world, forever.
In the face of the growing discrimination Israelis suffer and rejection Israel endures, how are we to look at the centennial of the Balfour Declaration, which we will mark next Thursday? One hundred years ago, on November 2, 1917, Arthur Balfour, foreign secretary of Great Britain, detonated a bomb whose aftershocks are still being felt in Britain and worldwide.
That day, Balfour issued a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, the leader of the British Jewish community.
The letter, which quickly became known as the Balfour Declaration, effectively announced the British Empire supported an end of the Jewish people’s 1,800-year exile and its return to history, as a free nation in its homeland – the Land of Israel.
On November 2, 2017, it will be 100 years since Lord Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, issued the famous Balfour Declaration. Balfour was a Christian Zionist and looked with great sympathy upon Jewish aspirations and Zionism, which simply put is the Jewish people’s national liberation movement. Put in Biblical terms, it is the return from exile of the Jews to Zion – to that very special land promised by God to the first Jew, Abraham, and through his descendants, Isaac and Jacob, to the Jewish people forever.
The Hebrew Scriptures equate Zion with the holiest city in Judaism, Israel’s capital of Jerusalem. You can read numerous references in the Bible and the Psalms to the word Zion, such as in Psalm 135:21, II Samuel 5:7 and Isaiah 24:23. The Biblical yearning of the Jews to return to their ancestral homeland is mirrored in the modern political usage of the term Zionism, first employed in 1890 by the Jewish author and poet, Nathan Birnbaum.
Theodore Herzl, an assimilated Jewish journalist from Vienna, became the father of modern Zionism in the late nineteenth century. He had been so moved by the hopelessness of the lives of the Jews in Europe, that he helped create the political movement calling for the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland, which resulted finally in the rebirth and reconstitution of Israel in 1948. Herzl himself wrote in 1898. “One thing is to me certain, high above any doubt: the movement will continue. I know not when I shall die, but Zionism will never die.”
Herzl died young, his heart unable to withstand his feverish restlessness and the enormous strain he placed upon it. But this article deals with the Christians who found within their faith the Biblical signposts, which showed them the imperative need to support the return of the Jews to ancient Zion and the Land of Israel. Who were some of these Christians and what did they find in the Scriptures that moved them so profoundly?
Perhaps the first Christians to reject the belief – found among the majority of Catholics and Protestants – that the Church is the “new Israel” and that Christians are the “new Jews” occurred some 500 years ago as a result of the printing of the King James Version of the Bible. They realized that such an old and pernicious belief held by the Church was the fuel that fed the fires of the Catholic Inquisition and of the massacres of Jewish populations throughout much of Europe during the Crusades. That idea is known today primarily as “Replacement Theology” and is employed chiefly as a weapon against the reconstitution of the Jewish State of Israel in its ancestral and Biblical homeland.
In about 1560, Henry Finch, an Englishman who was a jurist, legal writer, member of the British Parliament and Hebraist, encouraged the Jews in Europe to assert their claim to the Promised Land. He spoke and wrote in Hebrew but could not speak to Jews directly for they had been driven out of England in 1290 by Edward I, after the barons and the kings had repeatedly exploited, impoverished and massacred them. It was not until 1657 that they were to return during the time of Oliver Cromwell, who himself was moved to support the rights of the Jews to live again in England and to return to Zion.
Finch was moved by the words of the Jewish prophet Isaiah, and particularly by Chapter 43:4-7 in which the Lord God of Israel declares that he will “bring back His people from the East, the West, the North and the South.” Henry Finch was thus one of the early Christian Zionists. Many Christians have been moved to embrace the return of the Jews to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, by what the Jewish prophet Jeremiah wrote in chapter 31:10-12. “Hear the Word of the Lord, O ye nations. Declare it and say, He that scattered Israel will gather him: therefore, they shall come and sing again in the heights of Zion.”
In 1910, a young British Army officer with the unlikely name, Richard Meinertzhagen, was dining with the British Consul in Odessa when a pogrom broke out in the streets outside. Meinertzhagen watched with growing but impotent rage as Jewish shops and businesses erupted in flames and Jewish men, women and children were hunted down, beaten, murdered and left to lie in the gutter while the police stood by and watched. He wrote in his journal, “I am deeply moved by these terrible deeds and have resolved that whenever or where I can help the Jews, I shall do so to the best of my ability.”
Young Richard Meinertzhagen became a lifelong Zionist and, though a nominal Christian, wrote that he was much influenced by the “Divine Promise that the Holy Land will forever remain Israel’s inheritance.” Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen went on to become a great fighter for the Zionist cause at a time when senior members of the British Government, such as Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur Balfour, and Prime Minister, Lloyd George, were devoted Christian Zionists.
Hamas is doing its utmost to conceal the truth about ISIS in the Gaza Strip, while the Palestinian Authority (PA) is continuing to pretend as if Hamas is headed toward moderation as a result of the “reconciliation” accord.
Hamas presents itself as the sole and legitimate ruler of the Gaza Strip and as if it is in full control of the Gaza Strip.
If the “reconciliation” agreement is implemented, Majed Faraj, commander of the PA General Intelligence, and considered a strong candidate to succeed Abbas in the West Bank, will soon find himself working with his Gaza Strip counterpart — a convicted terrorist who serves as a “general,” named Tawfik Abu Na’im.
Hamas claims that Israel was behind the attempt on the life of Tawfik Abu Na’im, a top Hamas security official in the Gaza Strip. There is good reason to believe, however, that ISIS was behind the assassination attempt, which took place in the Gaza Strip on October 27.
Abu Na’im, commander of Hamas’s security apparatus, was lightly injured when an explosive device hidden beneath his car exploded after Friday prayers in a local mosque. Even before Abu Na’im was rushed to hospital, several Hamas officials and spokesmen publicly held Israel responsible. This claim, of course, came without any evidence to support their charge.
Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas political bureau, visits top Hamas security official Tawfik Abu Na’im at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on October 27, 2017. (Image source: Mohammad Austaz, Hamas Media Office)
Abu Na’im, who was released from an Israeli prison in 2011 after 23 years behind bars for terror-related offenses, is one of the founders of Hamas’s military wing, Ezaddin Al-Qassam.
Since his release and return to the Gaza Strip, Abu Na’im, who holds the rank of “general,” has been dubbed the “man of difficult missions.”
Only a handful of Hamas officials know the nature of the “difficult missions” Abu Na’im is said to have carried out on behalf of the terrorist movement. What is certain, is that these missions were anything but humanitarian in nature.
Those who are familiar with Hamas’s “missions” cannot but conclude that the “general” was involved in terrorist activities such as the digging of tunnels and the smuggling of weapons. It is also likely that he was involved in planning terror attacks and preparing Hamas for another war against Israel.
Hamas is now claiming that Abu Na’im was targeted by Israel precisely because of his involvement with Hamas’s terrorist activities. Hamas is also claiming that by targeting its “general,” Israel is seeking to sabotage the recent “reconciliation” agreement between Hamas and President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority (PA).
Ma’mun Abu Amer, a Palestinian expert on Israeli affairs, argues that Israel is the only beneficiary of the assassination of a senior Hamas official. “Israel is trying to sabotage the reconciliation and create chaos in the Gaza Strip,” he alleged. He even went as far as claiming that Israel is behind a number of ISIS-inspired terror groups in the Gaza Strip.
At least seven Palestinian terrorists were killed and 12 injured hours ago after the Israeli Army discovered a terror tunnel that extended from Gaza into Israeli territory. According to Israel’s Channel 2, eleven terrorists were killed. Most of the terrorists belonged to the Islamic Jihad group but some were affiliated with Hamas.
According to Palestinian sources, the tunnel was destroyed with an airstrike. Israeli sources, which are generally more reliable, claim that it was destroyed with a controlled explosion. Israel’s combat engineering units train incessantly for such scenarios and have played a key role in detecting and destroying terror tunnels. In the past two years, several Palestinian-constructed tunnels have mysteriously and inexplicably collapsed, killing dozens of terror operatives trapped inside. Palestinians have accused Israel of deploying a new weapon and the Israelis have not denied the existence of such a top-secret device.
Israel believes that the tunnel was constructed after Operation Protective Edge, which took place in 2014. Palestinians have attempted to employ tunnels as an offensive strategic weapon for the purpose of infiltrating Israeli territory and perpetrating mass killings and kidnappings. However, at least three dozen of these tunnels were destroyed during Operation Protective Edge, thwarting Hamas’s ghoulish designs. Hamas terrorists have invested substantial sums in creating a network of tunnels that crisscross the Gaza Strip. They have also diverted cement and steel, designated for civilian use, to construct tunnels.
According to Israeli officials, the tunnel ran from the Gazan city of Khan Younis, crossed under the border for several dozen feet, and approached the Israeli Kibbutz of Kissufim. An Israeli military spokesperson noted that none of the Kibbutz residents were in danger as the tunnel was destroyed approximately 1 and ¼ miles from the kibbutz. Officials added that construction of the tunnel was being monitored for a period of time prior to its destruction.
According to Palestinian sources, at least five of the dead were identified as Islamic Jihad members while two were affiliated with Hamas. The discovery of the tunnel, its destruction and the deaths of so many terrorists has significantly raised tensions near the Gaza periphery.
The Israel Defense Forces declared the area near the Gaza Strip a closed military zone. In addition, Israel readied its Iron Dome batteries in anticipation of retaliatory rocket fire. Iron Dome proved its mettle during Operation Pillar of Defense, which occurred in 2012 and then again during Operation Protective Edge. In 2012, the system scored an 85% success rate and in 2014, Iron Dome boasted an even greater success rate, shooting down more than 700 Hamas rockets. Iron Dome calculates the rocket’s trajectory and is only fired if it is determined that the rocket will land in populated areas.
Predictably, Islamic Jihad called for retaliation. An Islamic Jihad spokesman posted the following combative comment on twitter: “The Zionist terror government must realize that we will not hesitate to protect our people and our land.” Hamas issued similar militant comments.
The question that everyone is asking now is whether this incident will spiral into a full-scale conflagration. In 2014, a Hamas kidnapping of three hitchhiking Israeli youths provoked a series of escalations that resulted in full-scale war.
ANOTHER DUPLICITOUS HEADLINE…WHAT ARE “MILITANTS” DOING IN A TUNNEL AND SINCE WHEN ARE ISLAMIC JIHAD AND HAMAS A “POLITICAL GROUP” AND TO COMPOUND THE BIAS, THE PICTURE ABOVE THE STORY SHOWS AND ELDERLY WOMAN WEEPING…..RSK
Israel blew up an underground tunnel on Monday that had reached Israeli territory from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, killing at least seven Gazan militants and wounding more than a dozen, the Israeli army and Palestinian health authorities said.
The tunnel was “detonated” in a controlled explosion, the army said, without providing further details. It was the third such passageway into Israel discovered by the Israeli army since 2014, when it fought an air and ground war with Hamas, in part to destroy the militants’ network of tunnels.
Officials from both Hamas and Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian militant and political group based in the West Bank and Gaza, said that they had lost operatives in the explosion. Islamic Jihad also vowed to retaliate against Israel, saying the tunnels existed to defend the Palestinian people.
The incident is likely to increase tensions in Gaza, as the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority moves forward with a long-awaited reconciliation process that would see it take back control of the enclave from Hamas, a move opposed by some extremist fighters in the strip.
The Israeli army since 2014 has developed and begun constructing an underground barrier around Gaza to detect and destroy cross-border tunnels. The army said it used the new technology to find the tunnel destroyed on Monday.
Hamas in 2014 mounted assaults on Israeli forces through a labyrinth of tunnels. The subsequent Israeli offensive in Gaza led to the deaths of 2,205 Palestinians and 71 Israelis and the destruction of 18,000 Palestinian homes, according to the United Nations.
The Palestinian Authority in the coming days is expected to take control of border crossings into Gaza and return its security forces to the strip, before organizing presidential and parliamentary elections with Hamas.
Hamas and the dominant Fatah party of authority President Mahmoud Abbas have for weeks been negotiating a rapprochement after a 10-year rift sparked by a short but bloody conflict in 2007.
A key obstacle to the talks remains whether Hamas wiill give up its arsenal of weapons and dismantle its militant arm, known as the Izz al-Din al-Qassam brigades. CONTINUE AT SITE
In the campus war against Israel, the all too familiar refrain from student anti-Israel activists, many of whom form the loose coalition of groups and individuals spearheading the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, is that their quarrel is only with Israel and its government’s policies, not with Jews themselves. But that specious defense continues to fall away, revealing some caustic and base anti-Semitism, representing a seismic shift in the way that Jews are now being indicted not just for supporting Israel, but merely for being Jewish.
At McGill University this week, as the latest example, three board members of the University’s Students’ Society were removed from their appointments after a vote at the Fall General Assembly due to what was reported to be their perceived “Jewish conflict of interest.” The ouster was led by a pro-BDS student group, Democratize McGill, which was campaigning against pro-Israel students in the wake of a September ruling by the Judicial Board that, once and for all, rejected the BDS movement on the McGill campus, stating that it was violative of the SSMU’s constitution because it “violate[d] the rights of [Israeli] students to represent themselves” and discriminated on the basis of national origin.
In retaliation, and to eliminate pro-Israel views on the board, Democratize McGill launched an effort to clear the board of BDS opponents, based on the cynical notion that these members harbored clear conflict of interests which arose from their purported biases, those conflicts of interests and biases stemming from the poisonous notion that because the students were Jewish or pro-Israel, or both, they could, therefore, never make informed or fair decisions as student leaders.
Ignoring their own obvious biases and the lack of any balance in their own views on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the pro-BDS members nonetheless felt comfortable with suppressing pro-Israel voices and Jewish students on the board, asserting that they sought to remove these students because they “are all either fellows at the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee (CJPAC), an organization whose explicit mandate is to promote pro-Israel discourse in Canadian politics, or primary organizers for the anti-BDS initiative at McGill.” In other words, they were being disqualified for having views that differed from those student leaders seeking to purge them from SSMU. The Jewish board member and two other non-Jewish, pro-Israel board members were subsequently voted off the board.
McGill has a previous history of seeking to suppress pro-Israel thinking by Jewish students, not in the student government but in its press. An example of that was the 2016 controversy involving The McGill Daily and its astonishing editorial admission that it was the paper’s policy to not publish “pieces which promote a Zionist worldview, or any other ideology which we consider oppressive.”
“While we recognize that, for some, Zionism represents an important freedom project,” the editors wrote in a defense of their odious policy, “we also recognize that it functions as a settler-colonial ideology that perpetuates the displacement and the oppression of the Palestinian people.”
Leading up to this revealing editorial, a McGill student, Molly Harris, had filed a complaint with the Students’ Society of McGill University’s (SSMU) equity committee. In that complaint, Harris contended that, based on the paper’s obvious anti-Israel bias, and “a set of virulently anti-Semitic tweets from a McGill Daily writer,” a “culture of anti-Semitism” defined the Daily—a belief seemingly confirmed by the fact that several of the paper’s editors themselves are BDS supporters and none of the staffers were Jewish.
An attempted purging of a pro-Israel student from student government, very similar to the inquisition that just occurred at McGill, took place in February of 2015 at UCLA, when several councilmembers on the USAC Judicial Board, UCLA student government’s highest judicial body, grilled Rachel Beyda, then a second-year economics student, when she sought a seat on the board.
One hundred years ago — on November 2, 1917 — the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, issued a letter to the British Jewish leader, Lord Walter Rothschild, pledging British support for “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration was a milestone in the Zionist effort to re-create the Jewish home in the land where, nearly two millennia earlier, it had existed for centuries.
Click Image to Enlarge
EPIC EPISTLE: The centenary of Lord Balfour’s letter to Lord Rothschild in respect of the Jewish homeland in Israel will be celebrated next month, even as the Palestinian Arabs hew to their rejectionist course. Image is of the news as published in the London Times.
By 1922, the Balfour Declaration had become an established part of international law: endorsed after World War I by the Allies at their San Remo Conference; included in the 1920 peace treaty signed by Turkey’s Sultan Mehmet VI; and incorporated in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1922, which expressly recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and their basis “for reconstituting their national home.”
After receiving the League of Nations Mandate, Britain split off the eastern portion of Palestine — known as “Transjordan” — and recognized the Arab emir, Abdullah, as its ruler. Strife between the Arab and Jewish communities in western Palestine led Britain in 1937 to propose a two-state solution: most of western Palestine would also become an Arab state, with a minuscule Jewish state in the remainder.
The Arabs rejected the 1937 partition proposal and also the 1947 United Nations two-state resolution, in favor of a war against the Jews. After Israel won, the Arabs rejected three additional two-state proposals: the 2000 Israeli offer at Camp David, the Clinton Parameters of 2000-2001, and the 2008 offer at the end of the Bush administration’s “Annapolis Process.” It seems safe to say that no people in history have been offered a state — and rejected it — more times than the Palestinian Arabs.
In 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu became the fourth Israeli prime minister to endorse the two-state solution (after Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert), as long as the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Yet the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, soon to start the 14th year of his four-year term, has repeatedly said he will “never” recognize a Jewish state in any part of Palestine and repeatedly demands that Britain “apologize” for the Balfour Declaration, which he asserts is the original cause of the conflict.
Therein lies the crux of the continuing Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
Peace processors used to believe that Israeli-Palestinian peace was a 1967 issue, negotiating suitable borders; or perhaps a 1948 issue, dealing with the refugees from the Arab war against Israel. It is now clear that it is a 1917 issue – the rejection by the Palestinian Arabs of any Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the ancestral homeland of the Jews. It is, in the words of Ron Dermer, currently Israel’s ambassador to America, the “core issue”: the Palestinians will not even agree that the goal of the “peace process” is “two states for two peoples.”
Instead of referring to “two states for two peoples,” the Palestinians always frame the goal of the process as ending “the occupation that began in 1967.” The reason they invariably add the last four words to that formulation is that they believe there is also another occupation that they want eventually to end as well: “the occupation that began in 1948.” That is the reason they say they can “never” give up an asserted “right of return.” To do so would be to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
President Trump’s administration is currently deliberating on a new peace process, despite the failures of Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama over nearly three decades. A key to whether there would be any chance for success is whether the Palestinians will agree at the outset that the goal is “two states for two peoples.” One hundred years after the Balfour Declaration, and 95 years after the international community endorsed it, the Palestinians are still fighting the recognition of any Jewish sovereignty. They want a Palestinian state, but not at the cost of recognizing a Jewish one.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11230/palestinian-militias-gaza The notion that Hamas would ever dismantle its security apparatus and deliver the Gaza Strip to Mahmoud Abbas’s forces is a fantasy. It is estimated that there are about 50 different militias operating in the Gaza Strip. These militias are said to be in possession of about a million pieces of weaponry. If Hamas […]
