RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mainstream Western media coverage of Israel is laced with expressions intentionally crafted to delegitimize the Jewish State. The good news is that these terms weren’t written in stone 3,300 years ago, but are post-Israel independence creations. By forfeiting this language, we forfeit our history. Here are 10 phrases we must stop repeating:

#1- “The West Bank” – No, it’s not. “Judea and Samaria” are not just “biblical names,” but the names the hill country of Israel was known by from ancient times, including in the U.N.’s 1947 partition resolution, until after Transjordan invaded in 1948 (and was ousted by Israel in 1967) and named it such to disassociate its inherent Jewish connection.

#2 – “East” or “traditionally Arab East” Jerusalem: Jerusalem has been the capital of three homeland states, all Jewish, in the past 3,000 years, and has had a renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman rule. Palestinian Arabs have never ruled any part of Jerusalem. There was no such place as “East” Jerusalem until invading Jordan seized the historical heart of the city in 1948 and expelled its Jews; until then it had never been a divided city. The eastern section of the city is where the Old City, Jewish Quarter, Temple Mount, Mount of Olives cemetery, Christian Quarter and Church of the Holy Sepulcre are located. Jerusalem is Judaism’s holiest city; it is not holy to Muslims and is not mentioned once in the Qu’ran. Only since Israel reunified the city has there been equal rights and access to religious sites of all faiths. Say rather: Jerusalem, period

#3 – “The UN sought to create Jewish and Palestinian States:” It did not. Over and over in its 1947 partition resolution, the UN referenced “the Jewish State” and “the Arab” [not “Palestinian”] State. There are 22 independent Arab states.

#4– “Palestinian Refugees of the War that Followed Israel’s Creation,” or the “Palestinian Refugee Issue:” This suggests that an indigenous population of Arab “Palestinians” was unilaterally displaced by the 1948 five-Arab-state- army invasion for Israel’s destruction, which encouraged and ordered local Arabs to leave. Much forgotten is that more Jews were consequently expelled from vast Arab lands they had lived in for many centuries (850,000- 900,000) than Arabs left tiny Israel (500,000- 650,000).

#5 – Israel “Seized” Arab Lands in 1967: It did not. Israel captured these territories in a defensive war from Arabs who vowed to destroy her. Israel has greater historic legal claims and rights to these lands.

#6 – Israel’s “1967 Borders:” The 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement expressly declared the “green line” it drew between the two sides’ ceasefire positions as a military ceasefire line only, and not a political border. The post-’67 war U.N. Resolution 242 pointedly does not demand Israel retreat from these lines.

#7 – “Israeli-Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem:” No. The 1920 League of Nations Palestine Mandate recognized the Jewish people’s right to reconstitute its Jewish National Home in Palestine (including Judea and Samaria, and what ultimately became Jordan), and called for close settlement of the Jews on this land, where Jews have continuously lived, claiming it as their homeland, for three thousand years. At worst, the legal status is disputed, not “occupied” or “Palestinian” territories.

#8 – “Jewish Settlers and Settlements” vs. “Palestinian Residents of Neighborhoods and Villages:” Jews are not alien “settlers” implying “occupiers” in a Jerusalem that’s had a Jewish majority since mid-19th century or in the Judea-Samaria Jewish historical heartland. Israelis living there are residents who live in cities, towns and villages.

#9 – “Palestinians accept and Israel rejects a Two-State Solution:” Wrong on both counts. The U.S. and Israel define “Two States” as two states for two peoples – Jews and Arabs. Many Israelis, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, support that plan – conditioned on an end to Palestinian terror. The Arabs have rejected a Palestinian Arab state living side-by-side with a Jewish state five times since 1937, and continuously deny Israel’s right to exist no matter where its borders are drawn.

#10 – “The Palestinians:” During the Mandate, “Palestinian” typically referred to Palestine’s Jews. The UN’s 1947 partition resolution called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.” Palestinian Arabs – ancestrally, culturally, linguistically and religiously are akin to neighboring regional Arabs – began claiming exclusive “Palestinian peoplehood” only in the 1960s. Post-1967 war UN resolution 242 does not mention “Palestinians.” Most Palestinian Arabs cannot trace their own lineage to the land back more than 4 generations.

Lee Bender is the co-President, and Jerome Verlin is the co-Vice Present of the Zionist Organization of America-Greater Philadelphia District, and they are the co-authors of the book “Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-Z” (Pavilion Press and co-developers of the website and mobile app, www.factsonIsrael.com.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday proposed the first new settlement in decades in the West Bank as Israeli officials and the White House appear to have reached an understanding on future settlement construction.

The new settlement will be built to accommodate roughly 40 families—about 300 residents— evicted in February from a settlement outpost called Amona, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said. The move needs to be confirmed by the Israeli cabinet, his office said.

The announcement comes as U.S. and Israeli officials in recent weeks have conducted talks on limiting settlement construction in the West Bank after President Donald Trump asked Israel to hold off.

The Trump administration gave the new settlement tacit approval on Thursday, by refraining from condemning the settlement construction, as past Democratic and Republican administrations have done.

A White House official said the Trump administration has made clear that “further unrestrained settlement activity does not help advance peace” and welcomed Israel’s commitments to consider U.S. concerns about settlements in the future.

“With regards to the new settlement for Amona residents, we would note that the Israeli Prime Minister made a commitment to the Amona settlers prior to President Trump laying out his expectations, and has consistently indicated that he intended to move forward with this plan,” the official said.

The talks between the U.S. and Israel have aimed at creating the conditions to get Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table on a future peace deal, according to U.S. and Israeli officials.

The U.S. on Thursday called on Israelis and Palestinians to take “reasonable actions moving forward that create a climate that is conducive to peace” and said it would continue to work with the parties and regional powers. CONTINUE AT SITE

Video#39: http://bit.ly/2mT25Ri; Entire mini-seminar: http://bit.ly/1ze66dS

According to the Saudi Arabian-based newspaper, Arab News, “the Arab Spring is not about seeking democracy, it is about Arabs killing Arabs… about hate and sectarian violence…. The Arab Spring is an accumulation of years of political corruption, human rights violations, sectarianism and poor education systems…. The Arabs were never united and are now divided beyond anybody’s imagination. Arabs hate each other more than they hate the outside enemy. Syrians are hurting Syrians and the Israelis are the ones who treat the Syrian wounds [in an Israeli field hospital built on the Golan Height].”

2. Connecting the dots of the increasingly boiling Arab Street highlights the 1,400 year reality of intense intra-Arab violent intolerance, hate education, transient (one-bullet) regimes, tenuous policies, non-compliance with intra-Arab agreements, explosive unpredictability and the absence of intra-Arab peaceful coexistence.

3. Since the 7th century appearance of Islam, the Arab street has never experienced freedom of religion, speech, press, association or movement, which are prerequisites for free elections and peaceful coexistence. Arab societies are ruled by – and the will of the majority is subjugated by – non-democratic, minority rogue regimes.

4. The Arab Street is dominated by domestic, regional, national and intra-Arab subversion and terrorism. Ethnic cleansing in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Tunisia, the Sudan and Libya reflects the lack of national cohesion on the Arab street and the merciless intra-Arab/Muslim fragmentation along ethnic, tribal, cultural, geographic, ideological and religious lines. The misperception of the national cohesion of two of the most powerful Arab countries throughout the 20thcentury – Iraq and Syria – has collapsed, setting them on a chaotic course of disintegration. Studying the fate of minorities in Arab countries, reveals the devastating Arab/Muslim attitude towards the “infidel” Christians, Jews, Hindus or Buddhists.

5. The current increasingly, turbulent Arab Tsunami, which erupted in 2010, has intensified anxiety and panic among the pro-US regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Bahrain, which are inherently susceptible to domestic upheaval. They are aware that Egypt’s Mubarak, Libya’s Kaddafi, Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Yemen’s Salah (possibly joined by Syria’s Assad) were perceived to be Rock of Gibraltar-like regimes, but were overthrown by Islamic mobs. They are cognizant of the clear, present and lethal threat posed by Iran and Iran’s adversary, ISIS (the “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria”). They are concerned about the lava erupting from the endemic civil war in an intractably fragmented Yemen, which controls the route of oil tankers from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean.

6. The December 2010 Tunisian upheaval fueled the February 2011 Libyan and Egyptian eruptions, which fed the February 2011 turmoil in Yemen and Bahrain, providing a tailwind for the March 2011 surge of the civil war in Syria. The intensification of terrorism and disintegration in Iraq poses an imminent deadly threat to the Hashemite regime in Jordan, which could be transformed into another haven for Islamic terrorism, threatening to sweep through Saudi Arabia and other pro-US Gulf states.

7. The increasingly boiling Arab Street accentuates Israel’s unique roleas the only stable, reliable, effective, democratic and unconditional national-security-producing-ally of the US, whose posture of deterrence – in the face of Islamic terrorism and Iran – is a life insurance policy for pro-US Arab regimes in the Middle East.

One of the most widely accepted misconceptions concerning the Arab-Israel conflict (a subject awash in misconceptions) is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a “hard-core right winger.” There is nothing in his behavior as Prime Minister during his first years in that role (1997-99) or in his more recent period in office, beginning in 2009, to support this belief. On the contrary, like his predecessors, he has made repeated dramatic territorial and other concessions, including acceptance of the so-called “two state solution.”

In Jan. 1997, still in the first year of his first term, he signed the Hebron Protocol with the Palestine Authority, turning over most of Hebron, after Jerusalem the most important city in Jewish history, to the PA. Netanyahu did so little to change Labor’s disastrous post-Oslo policy that erstwhile supporter Benny Begin (Menachem’s son) derided him at a Likud Party meeting in March of that year. “Arafat releases terrorists and so does Israel. Arafat smuggles in weapons and we give him assault rifles to round off his stores….We have government offices in Jerusalem [supposedly the unified capital of Israel] and so do they.” The following year, under President Clinton’s prodding, Netanyahu signed the Wye River Memorandum in which he promised to turn over 40% of Judea and Samaria to Arafat, a safe corridor between these areas and Gaza, even an airport in Gaza. It is true Wye was not implemented, but that’s only because (predictably) Arafat promptly reneged on his commitments under the agreement.

That same year Netanyahu embarked on secret negotiations with Syria in which he offered to return the Golan Heights. Was Netanyahu prepared to go back to the 1967 border (which Clinton and Dennis Ross assert in their respective memoirs) or did Netanyahu, according to other reports, hold out for several kilometers beyond the international border line? Although Assad backed out, according to widespread reports in the Israeli press, in 2010 Netanyahu tried again, this time with Bashar Assad, offering to return to the June 4, 1967 lines. Fortunately the negotiations collapsed with the onset of the rebellion against the Syrian ruler. (One shudders to think what “success” would have meant for Israel, with Hezbollah and/or ISIS embedded on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.)

That near miss with disaster has not prevented Netanyahu from continuing to offer major concessions. In the wake of Obama’s Cairo speech, Netanyahu agreed to adopt the “two state solution” as his government’s policy. Moreover, retired Brigadier General Michael Herzog (brother of Israeli Labor Party head Yitzhak Herzog), who has participated in almost all Israel’s peace negotiations since Oslo in 1993, writes in The American Interest that Netanyahu in the Obama years offered such large withdrawals that he could not admit their scale to the Israeli public or his coalition partners.

And contrary to the widespread perception, fostered by the media, that Netanyahu has peppered the landscape of Judea and Samaria with Jewish settlements, Israel has not built a new settlement in 25 years. The much publicized on and off settlement freezes to which Netanyahu has agreed applied to existing communities, the “freezes” meaning there was no building even to accommodate natural population growth within them.

So what accounts for Netanyahu’s reputation as an unbudging hawk? The reason is that he knows better than he acts with the result that his rhetoric differs from his policies far more than has been the case with other Israeli leaders. Prime Minister Shimon Peres seems clearly to have believed in the mirage he concocted of a New Middle East. Prime Minister Olmert appears to have genuinely felt the emotions which in 2005 (in a speech to the Israel Policy Forum) he attributed to the people of Israel as a whole: “We are tired of fighting; we are tired of being courageous; we are tired of winning; we are tired of defeating our enemies.”

One of the oft-repeated laments from many world leaders when speaking about the long-festering Arab-Israeli conflict is regarding sacrifices.

How many times did former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry, former president Obama, or other leaders talk about the need for both sides to make sacrifices for peace? We’ve heard it repeatedly. Yet the truth of the matter is that only one side has made sacrifices, while the other side has not made any. One side has continuously demonstrated its desire for peace, while the other side has continuously demonstrated it wants the other destroyed.

The Arab population makes up over 98% of the Middle East, while geographically covers more than 99% of the land compared to the size of Israel. These facts are merely to provide some perspective. Yet despite of the overwhelming advantage the Arab world enjoys, the tiny Jewish nation of Israel is considered intolerable by many.

List of Jewish Sacrifices

1. In June 1967, Israel was forced to defend itself against Syria, Jordan, and Egypt in the Six-Day War. During this decisive Israeli victory the Holy Old City of Jerusalem was captured from the Jordanians, who had been in control of it since the Independence war ended in 1949. The victory reunited the Jewish people with Temple Mount and the Western Wall of the Second Temple compound. Israeli flags flew over their holiest site for the first time in modern history.

Yet, at the conclusion of the war, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan made a huge sacrifice in the interest of peace by awarding administrative control of Temple Mount to the Jordanian Waqf (Islamic Trust). He ordered Israeli flags removed and he banned Jews from praying on Temple Mount. This remains in effect today. In spite of Israel’s sacrifice Temple Mount remains a flashpoint issue and numerous riots have taken place at Al Aqsa mosque.

In the same war Israel captured the Gaza Strip and virtually all of the Sinai Desert.

Israeli scientists have made an enormous discovery that can help lead
to a new treatment for at least two of the most resistant cancers that
exist: pancreatic and triple negative breast cancer.

Many cancer patients struggle with the adverse effects of
chemotherapy, still the most prescribed cancer treatment. For patients
with pancreatic cancer and other aggressive cancers, the forecast is
more grim: there is no known effective therapy.

A new Tel Aviv University study published last month in Oncotarget
discloses the role of three proteins in killing fast-duplicating
cancer cells while they’re dividing. The research, led by Prof. Malka
Cohen-Armon of TAU’s Sackler School of Medicine, finds that these
proteins can be specifically modified during the division process —
mitosis — to unleash an inherent “death mechanism” that
self-eradicates duplicating cancer cells.

“The discovery of an exclusive mechanism that kills cancer cells
without impairing healthy cells, and the fact that this mechanism
works on a variety of rapidly proliferating human cancer cells, is
very exciting,” Prof. Cohen-Armon said. “According to the mechanism we
discovered, the faster cancer cells proliferate, the faster and more
efficiently they will be eradicated. The mechanism unleashed during
mitosis may be suitable for treating aggressive cancers that are
unaffected by traditional chemotherapy.

“Our experiments in cell cultures tested a variety of incurable human
cancer types — breast, lung, ovary, colon, pancreas, blood, brain,”
Prof. Cohen-Armon continued. “This discovery impacts existing cancer
research by identifying a new specific target mechanism that
exclusively and rapidly eradicates cancer cells without damaging
normally proliferating human cells.”

The research was conducted in collaboration with Prof. Shai Izraeli
and Dr. Talia Golan of the Cancer Research Center at Sheba Medical
Center, Tel Hashomer, and Prof. Tamar Peretz, head of the Sharett
Institute of Oncology at Hadassah Medical Center, Ein Kerem.

A new target for cancer research

The newly-discovered mechanism involves the modification of specific
proteins that affect the construction and stability of the spindle,
the microtubular structure that prepares duplicated chromosomes for
segregation into “daughter” cells during cell division.

The researchers found that certain compounds called Phenanthridine
derivatives were able to impair the activity of these proteins, which
can distort the spindle structure and prevent the segregation of
chromosomes. Once the proteins were modified, the cell was prevented
from splitting, and this induced the cell’s rapid self-destruction.

“The mechanism we identified during the mitosis of cancer cells is
specifically targeted by the Phenanthridine derivatives we tested,”
Prof. Cohen-Armon said. “However, a variety of additional drugs that
also modify these specific proteins may now be developed for cancer
cell self-destruction during cell division. The faster the cancer
cells proliferate, the more quickly they are expected to die.”