RUTHFULLY YOURS

The last time Arabs ruled eastern Jerusalem and the Old City all but one of the Jewish Quarter’s 35 synagogues was demolished, a fact John Kerry prefers not to mention. Trump’s pledge to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv would end the prospect of history repeating itself.
As a candidate in the 2016 election season Donald Trump often talked of moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It was easy enough to dismiss. After all, both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had made the same promise before winning the White House.

This time around might be different. For a start, David Friedman sounds like a very different kind of U.S. ambassador to Israel. Here’s Friedman responding to Trump endorsing him for the post: “I intend to work tirelessly to strengthen the unbreakable bond between our two countries and advance the cause of peace within the region, and look forward to doing this from the U.S. embassy in Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem.”

Should the United States relocate its embassy to Jerusalem? A lot of opinion in Australia is against it, although Tony Abbott saw merit in the idea. Australia joining a move by President Trump to shift its embassy to Jerusalem could “demonstrate its unswerving support for Israel, as the Middle East’s only liberal, pluralist democracy”. Members of the Turnbull government rebuffed “talkative” Abbott’s latest idea. Shifting the embassy would exacerbate an already problematic situation, especially with regards to the “two-state solution”. Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce referred to Abbott’s comments as “not helpful”, while Foreign Minister Julie Bishop gave her former leader short shrift: “The Australian government does not have any plans to move the Australian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.”

Greg Barton, professor in global Islamic studies at Deakin University, made this case for retaining the status quo:

“The future of Israel for Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis and for people living on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank depends upon trust and negotiation…If we went ahead and moved our embassy, following suit after the Americans to Jerusalem, we would be closing off doors of opportunity to play that mediating role.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s, not surprisingly, took an even harder line, and warned that changing the US embassy would unleash a “crisis we will not be able to come out from” for “the peace process in the Middle East and even peace in the world”. Departing Secretary of State John Kerry appeared to be reading from the same script, characterising the planned embassy change as dangerous: “You’d have an explosion, an explosion in the region, not just in the West Bank, and perhaps in Israel itself, but throughout the region.”

But so many explosions are already taking place in the Middle East and none have anything to do with the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Syria’s civil war alone has resulted resulting in as many as 470,000 deaths. Perhaps this outgoing secretary of state might have found better things to do than trying to foist on Mahmoud Abbas a Palestinian mini-state (the West Bank and East Jerusalem) instead of his real goal, a fully-fledged Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

The Palestinian Authority has played John Kerry for a fool. The latest version of Mahmoud Abbas’ polemic naturally enough features UN Resolution 2334 and its call for East Jerusalem – including the Jewish Quarter in the Old City – to be the capital of an independent Palestinian state. According to Abbas, at any rate, it would now be “hypocritical” of the US government to move its embassy before all Israeli-Palestinian territorial disputes, not least any final agreement on Jerusalem, are resolved. John Kerry – again – is on the same page as Mahmoud Abbas: “If all of a sudden Jerusalem is declared to be the location of our embassy, that has issues of sovereignty, issues of law that would deem to be affected by that move…”

TEL AVIV—A Palestinian man rammed a truck into Israeli soldiers on a busy promenade in Jerusalem on Sunday, killing four, in what Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a terrorist attack.

The driver targeted a group of Israeli soldiers disembarking from a bus in a popular tourist area overlooking Jerusalem’s Old City and was shot dead at the scene by security forces, police said.

A video published by Israeli media outlets showed the truck driving into the Israelis before attempting to ram them again. The attack killed three female soldiers and one male soldier, all in their 20s, Israeli authorities said. Some 17 other soldiers were wounded and evacuated to hospitals, they said.

“We know the identity of the perpetrator, who by all indications supports the Islamic State,” Mr. Netanyahu said as he visited the scene Sunday evening, according to his office.

Israeli police identified the driver of the truck as 28-year-old Fadi Qunbar. The Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, Wafa, said the driver was a Palestinian from East Jerusalem.

The attack came ahead of a conference France is convening this month with members of the international community in an effort to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, and amid tension over a United Nations resolution last month that deemed Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem illegal.

Mr. Netanyahu compared the Jerusalem attack with Islamic State-claimed truck-rammings last month at a Berlin Christmas market, which left 12 people dead, and in France last July, in which 86 were killed. He provided no evidence of links between Islamic State and Sunday’s attacker.

In the past, the Israeli leader has attempted to link Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians and soldiers with global acts of terrorism committed by Islamic State. But support for the terror group isn’t widespread among Palestinians, according to Israeli security officials.

There was no immediate claim or statement referencing the attack on Islamic State’s official media channels.

Medics and police arriving moments after Sunday’s truck-ramming described a bloody scene, with bodies wedged under the vehicle.

“When we arrived there was chaos,” said Chen Lendi Sharon, a medic who was among the first to arrive on the scene, according to a statement from Israel’s ambulance service. “I saw a truck that rammed youngsters getting off the bus.” CONTINUE AT SITE

This will not be an academic conference in any real sense of the word. It is, from the outset, a hate-fest of international anti-Zionist, anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric and distortion. It is totally without balance.

Some of those 45 participants will be more vehement in their criticism of Israel, but none, so far as is known, is wholly without some degree of association with bias. How do we know this? First, because a significant majority of the participants have made no secret of their support for the boycott of Israeli academics.

For more than 3,000 years, the “original ‘aboriginal’ inhabitants” were the Jews” – along with Ethiopians, Nubians, Carthaginians, Phoeneicians, and eventually the Romans, Christians and eventually several Arab Muslim imperialists, culminating in the Ottoman Turks. The Jews were the people who inhabited Canaan; the Jews are why Judaea is named Judaea. An Arab “Palestine”, bluntly, never existed. If the Jews do not belong in Israel, then the Europeans do not belong in New Zealand, Australia or North and South America.

Prominent at Southampton, and again planning to address the conference, were some of the leading academic activists working both in the universities and outside for the destruction of Israel, regardless of whether that means the expulsion or genocide of the country’s Jewish population.

In “Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust,” Richard Falk compared some Israeli policies with regard to the Palestinians to the Nazi record of collective punishment, warning (unbelievably) that Israel may be planning a Holocaust in the same way Nazi Germany did. It is arguable that he has done more than any other figure to inspire loathing for Israel worldwide.

This conference is an outright attack on everything academic work is about. Many are already protesting in the hope that UCC can be persuaded to recognize the threat to scholarship that such a conference poses for academic teachers and researchers everywhere.

The passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 on December 23 2016 has upset more than one apple cart.[1] By declaring that Israeli settlements have no legal validity and are a “Flagrant Violation of International Law”, the resolution has handed the Palestinians a weapon as powerful as any they have used against the Jewish state in their many physical attacks upon it for more than a century. Lawfare has for many years now replaced warfare (although not terror) as the Palestinian method of choice for the long-term elimination of Israel; this new resolution, even if only advisory, is a major step along the way to declare, not just the settlements but the entirety of Israel itself as illegal.

Almost all countries in the world, along with the UN, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Arab League and the Socialist “Left” now consider the Zionist project to create a living space for Jews to be a colonialist conspiracy against the “aboriginal” inhabitants of a legendary state of “Palestine”. They are conveniently “forgetting” – with a significant dose of anti-Semitism – that for more than 3,000 years, the “original ‘aboriginal’ inhabitants” were the Jews – along with Ethiopians, Nubians, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, and eventually the Romans, Christians and eventually several Arab Muslim imperialists, culminating in the Ottoman Turks. The Jews were the people who inhabited Canaan; the Jews are why Judaea is named Judaea.

An Arab “Palestine”, bluntly, never existed. If the Jews do not belong in Israel, then the Europeans do not belong in New Zealand, Australia or North and South America.

It seems that US President Barack Obama, along with the UN, the OIC and much of Europe – especially France – would like to destroy Israel, and in its place create yet another mangled Syria out of whatever is left, fought over by a mixture of sects, terrorist organizations and political factions.

From the time of the British Mandate in Palestine (September 29, 1922 to November 29, 1947) to the present, numerous British, American and European government commissions and official emissaries have come to the region to investigate the underlying causes of the Palestinian Arab/Israeli dispute. Academics and journalists have added their own analyses.

In the absence of a solution, a myriad of myths continue to proliferate about the conflict. US Secretary of State John Kerry joins the pantheon of American diplomats, academics and journalists who appear either ignorant of why the dispute remains intractable, or are blinded by their contempt for Israel or their own biases. Many seem psychologically incapable of accepting the reality that Palestinian Arabs refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist, and that until they do so, the war against the Jews will continue.
Two Basic Questions Not Addressed

Some of these “experts” are so “obsessively focused” on the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as “obstacles to peace,” they fail to ask two fundamental questions: Do the Arabs want a two-state solution? Is establishing a separate Arab state in the best interests of Israel and the West?

For many of Israel’s enemies and detractors, even the suggestion of abandoning this formula is proof that Israel does not want peace. The assertion that once the matter of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria is resolved, a peaceful resolution of the conflict will be achieved, is fallacious. There is no mention of the homicide bombers; pervasive incitement in the schools, mosques and social media; attempts to deny Jewish connection to the land of Israel; the Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries; or the deadly rock-throwing and fire-bombing attacks, beatings and stabbings.

Rarely, if ever, is there any recognition that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat 94 percent of Judea and Samaria, which he refused, and then launched the second Intifada. Ten years later, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas 93.6 percent of Judea and Samaria with a one-to-one land swap. This means that expansion has not significantly reduced the land available for establishing a Palestinian Arab state.

To secure Abbas’s consent, the Jewish communities of Elon Moreh, Ofra, Beit El and Kiryat Arba would be destroyed, Hebron abandoned, and Jerusalem divided. In the process, tens of thousands of Jews would be expelled from their homes. Abbas rejected the offer.
Why Do Arabs Reject the Two-State Solution?

Any attempt by the Security Council to enforce Resolution 2334 or to pass any new Resolutions based on Resolution 2334 will also be illegal.

Article 80 preserves the legal rights vested in the Jewish people to reconstitute the Jewish National Home within 22 per cent of the territory comprised in the 1922 Mandate for Palestine (“Mandate”). That territory includes what is known today as Area “C” located in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and East Jerusalem (“disputed areas”).

Resolution 2334 seeks to erase and annul – not preserve – those vested Jewish legal rights in the disputed areas by:

1. Claiming that Jews now presently living – or seeking in the future to live – in the disputed areas constitutes “a flagrant violation under international law” – when in fact their right to live there is sanctioned by Article 6 of the Mandate and Article 80.

2. Alleging that the right to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in the disputed areas requires the consent of any other party.

3. Calling on all States to discriminate between Jews living in the disputed areas and Jews living in Israel.

4. Discouraging Jews from living in the disputed areas when Article 6 of the Mandate specifically encourages close Jewish settlement in the disputed areas.

The questionable legality of Resolution 2334 needs to be urgently resolved by the Security Council itself seeking an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”) under Article 96(a) of the United Nations Charter.

The General Assembly so acted when it sought an advisory opinion in 2003 from the ICJ on the legality of the security barrier erected by Israel.

That decision was fundamentally flawed because contrary to Article 65 (2) of the ICJ Statute – two vital documents – the Mandate for Palestine and Article 80 – were not included in the dossier of documents submitted to the ICJ for consideration by then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan – an omission never explained until today.

Give the ICJ half the documents and you will only get half a judgement.