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I Stand Ashamed That My Country Voted for the New Nazis: Giulio Meotti, Israel National News, Dec. 2, 2012—At the United Nations we are witnessing the creation ex nihilo of a foreign country, which never existed, and accepting the claims of the “Palestinian Arabs,” by giving them the land whose memory kept the Jews together as a people and brought them back to Jerusalem after the Holocaust.
Building in Jerusalem: A Strategic Imperative: Prof. Efraim Inbar, BESA Center, December 5, 2012 —Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu must ignore the Pavlovian response of the international community against building in Jerusalem, particularly in Area E1.
What If the Arabs Had Accepted the Creation Of Israel?: Allan Levine, National Post, Dec 6, 2012—Nov. 29, the date of Mahmoud Abbas’ speech to the United Nations last week, has always had special historical significance in the thorny annals of the Middle East.
A Search for God Through Bluegrass and Klezmer: Samuel G. Freedman, The New York Times, Nov. 30, 2012
Pillar of Defense: An Initial Strategic and Military Assessment: Dr. Eitan Shamir, BESA Center, Dec. 4, 2012
A Woman Who Cared: Greer Fay Cashman, Jerusalem Post, Nov. 29, 2012
Bond in Bankruptcy: Mark Steyn, National Review, Dec. 3, 2012
ISRAEL, LIGHT UNTO THE NATIONS
HANNUKAH, 5773/2012
Baruch Cohen
In Memory of Beloved Malca z”l
As we celebrate Hannukah today, heavy dark clouds of global racism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Semitism loom over Israel. As we, the Jewish People, welcome the holiday of joy and light, new Hamans rise up against us.
“Hannukah” means, literally, “dedication”. It tells the story of Jewish commitment, bravery and unflinching devotion to the high humanistic values embodied in our Torah, and of the unquenchable flame of Jewish heroism, embodied in the Hannukah story itself.
The first Hannukah flame was lit in Jerusalem on the 25th day of Kislev, 164 BCE, elebrating victory by our Maccabee heroes over the Hellenistic oppressors, led by the brutal King Antiochus IV.
Eternal Israel, as always, prevailed, and Jerusalem, timeless, endures as our capital, to this day!
Parallels to the past are evident today. Once again we encounter hate and incitement against our brave People and State; and once again, despite the dark forces ranged against us, Eternal Israel will prevail!
To all CIJR supporters and all people of goodwill, Hag Hannukah Sameach! Hag-HaUrim! Happy Hannukah, Festival of Lights!
(Baruch Cohen is CIJR`s Research Chairman)!
I STAND ASHAMED THAT MY COUNTRY
Giulio Meotti, Israel National News, November 30, 2012
At the United Nations we are witnessing the creation ex nihilo of a foreign country, which never existed, and accepting the claims of the “Palestinian Arabs,” by giving them the land whose memory kept the Jews together as a people and brought them back to Jerusalem after the Holocaust.
The Western community at the United Nations, including my miserable Italy, just adopted the Nazis’ strategy. Cunning in wickedness, the Germans dangled before their victims the possibility of saving themselves at the expense of other Jews.
In this case, the Jews to be sacrified are all of those living in Judea and Samaria, but ultimately it is the entire State of Israel, since a Palestinian State would only arise upon the fall of Israel. I am ashamed that my country voted for the first step towards officially prohibiting Jews or any other faith from living in a certain area, the first since Nazi Germany, which sought a country that was jüdenrein, cleansed of Jews. I am ashamed that my country voted for the PLO, an organization of murderers and Holocaust deniers now officially dedicated to the mass deportation of Israel’s Jews.
I am ashamed that my country voted for a state that tortures inmates in prisons, that throws political dissidents from the roofs of public buildings, that puts to death human beings simply because they are guilty of apostasy and that will be a combination of corruption, dictatorship, Islamic theology and “Bin-Ladenism.”
On September 29, 1938, the Czechoslovak state was truncated and deprived of defensible borders by the “Munich agreement.” Six months later, abandoned by its allies England and France, and bullied by Hitler, Czechoslovakia lay down and died. Like Israel today, the Czechs were accused of “intransigence” and of being “disturbers of the peace.” They were so disheartened that in the end they chose not to fight, but to surrender.
“Peace” meant capitulation. Czechoslovakia’s situation in 1938 is in fact similar to Israel’s in 2012. Like Israel’s IDF, the Czechs had one of the strongest armies in Europe. Like Israel, Czechoslovakia was a very young and vibrant state. And like the West pressing Israel to give up its land to the Arabs, the Nazis demanded the annexation of the Sudeten, settled by three million Germans. And the Sudeten mountains, like Israel’s “occupied territories,” were the only position from which the Bohemian plain and the capital Prague was defensible. And does anyone remember how Lord Trenchard got up in the British parliament after Munich and declared that the Czechs didn’t need the Sudeten territories for security? “The best security border,” Trenchard said, “is peace.” Sound familiar?
A Palestinian state, to not mention Hamas, is a mortal danger to Israel because it will immediately absorb 700,000 Palestinians who are living in Syria, another 750,000 Palestinians who live in Lebanon and hundreds of thousands of others who will flock to the new state from all over the world. They will settle in villages that overlook Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, Kfar Saba and Jerusalem.
I am ashamed that my country adopted the same method used by the Sudeten Nazis in Czekoslovakia in the late ’30s, destroying the country from within. Yesterday it was then the SS, today it’s the PLO, which murdered at least 1,500 Jews (comparable to 82,000 American fatalities).
Who will guarantee that the moment a Palestinian state is declared, the rifles won’t start shooting again? The Italian police? Will bloody attacks be planned against Jews at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem? Will the Jewish holy sites – Rachel’s tomb in Bethlehem, the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hevron and Joseph’s tomb in Nablus – be destroyed by local mobs? Will Jewish areas in eastern Jerusalem be subjected to Arab sniper fire? Will Katyusha rockets start falling on runways at Ben-Gurion Airport or on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway, so that Israel’s economy would simply cease to exist? Will the Hebron Jews be the victims of a new Jihadist pogrom like in 1929?
I am ashamed that my country would vote for a state that will conclude treaties with Arab countries and with Iran serving as a tripwire for a pan-Islamic attack to exterminate Israel. I am ashamed that my country would vote for a state where the “Mein Kampf” is a best seller. I am ashamed that my country will be remembered among those who legitimized Palestinian terrorists as “victims,” that tacitly maligned Israel as the villains, letting off the true villains with a single objective: The “final solution” of the Jewish problem. Seventy years ago, in what had become one of the opening acts of the greatest tragedy in European history, Italy betrayed its own Jews. Very few came back from Birkenau.
Today, Italy capitulated again in the battle against those who seek to finish the job started by the Nazis. Now that we are approaching Israel’s Stalingrad, where have all the “allies” gone?
Giulio Meotti is an Italian journalist with Il Foglio and the author of the acclaimed book, A New Shoah, that researched the personal stories of Israel’s terror victims (published by Encounter).
BUILDING IN JERUSALEM: A STRATEGIC IMPERATIVE
Prof. Efraim Inbar
BESA Center, December 5, 2012
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu must ignore the Pavlovian response of the international community against building in Jerusalem, particularly in Area E1. The fate of the Jewish State depends largely upon the government’s ability to take immediate action to populate the area that links Jerusalem to Maaleh Adumim with thousands of Jews.
Maaleh Adumim, a settlement of over 40,000 Jews east of Jerusalem, serves as the linchpin in establishing an effective line of defense along the Jordan Valley against aggression from the east. Building a Jewish-populated corridor to Maaleh Adumim will prevent the division of Jerusalem and secure the only safe route via which Israel can mobilize troops from the coast to the Jordan Valley if necessary. Jerusalem’s importance to the Jews is not only historical and religious. Rather, Jerusalem also holds strategic importance in controlling the only highway from the coast of the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan Valley, along which Jews are able to travel with little interference from concentrations of Arab population.
Those who object to Jewish presence in Area E1 express concern for Palestinian contiguity, which is a deceptive argument. Free travel between Samaria and Judea can be arranged quite easily by constructing overpasses or tunnels. (Ironically, the Palestinians suggest these arrangements in response to Israeli concerns regarding the Palestinian demand for a corridor between Gaza and Judea that would divide Israel in two.)
The main issue, however, is Jerusalem. The Palestinians plan to populate Area E1 with Arabs in order to create demographic contiguity between Samaria and East Jerusalem, thereby facilitating the division of the city. Such a development would also isolate Maaleh Adumim and undermine Israeli claims to the Jordan Valley. The only way to prevent the realization of these Palestinian plans is to settle Jews in Area E1.
Many pundits claim that Israel no longer needs the Jordan Valley as a shield against aggression from the east. They argue that the peace treaty with Jordan renders the dangerous threat of the eastern front’s proximity to Israel’s population centers and economic infrastructure a thing of the past. Yet this is a very short-term perspective, motivated by a desire to convince the Israeli public that the Jordan Valley is militarily dispensable. Such a view ignores the immense potential for political upheaval in the Middle East, perceived American weakness, the greater political role of radical Islamists, and the growing pressures upon the Hashemite regime.
The destabilization of Hashemite Jordan and Saudi Arabia, an emboldened and more radical Syria, and the re-emergence of the eastern front as a credible threat are not far-fetched scenarios….[And] these armchair strategists overlook the history of military technology, which shows a clear oscillation between the dominance of offensive and defensive measures over the centuries. The belief that the technology of today – which temporarily reduces the importance of topography – will remain unchallenged constitutes a dangerous strategic fallacy. Designing stable defensible borders in accordance with the current, yet transient, state-of-the-art technology and political circumstances is strategically foolish. Therefore, if Israel wants to maintain a defensible border along the Jordan Valley it needs to secure the road that leads there from the coast, via an undivided Jerusalem and via Maaleh Adumim.
Netanyahu will be put to the test to prove that his rhetoric about a united Jerusalem and the incorporation of settlement blocs – such as Maaleh Adumim – into Israel has substance. Former American President George W. Bush’s promise to allow the incorporation of settlement blocs is to be capitalized upon in this context. We should also remember that the US has opposed Israeli settlement efforts since 1967 and only rarely did American objections have an impact on Israeli decisions on this issue. Moreover, the Americans can be persuaded to tacitly go along with linking Maaleh Adumim to Jerusalem if a clear strategic vision based upon the principle of territorial compromise is presented.
While the strategic wisdom of indiscriminately settling the Land of Israel is not compelling, a selective settlement policy focusing on areas within the Israeli consensus, including Maaleh Adumim and the Jordan Valley, can be pursued with little foreign interference. Such a policy should be complemented with the removal of illegal posts located outside the areas of consensus, and even with a gradual freeze in allocations to isolated settlements. Such a policy reflects the preference of a large majority of the Israelis.
Area E1 is of vital importance for the political future of Jerusalem and for Israel’s chances to establish a defensible line along its eastern border. It is imperative to build homes for Jews there. Hopefully, Netanyahu will soon send the bulldozers to create vital irreversible facts on the ground.
Prof. Efraim Inbar is a professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
WHAT IF THE ARABS HAD ACCEPTED THE CREATION OF ISRAEL?
Allan Levine
National Post, Dec 6, 2012
Nov. 29, the date of Mahmoud Abbas’ speech to the United Nations last week, has always had special historical significance in the thorny annals of the Middle East. On that day in 1947, the United Nations voted in favour of the partition of the British Mandate for Palestine in two — one independent state for the approximately 500,000 Jews, but with a sizable Arab population of 400,000, and one for the 725,000 Arabs and the 10,000 Jews residing in that territory. Jerusalem was to be maintained as an international area.
The Jews accepted the partition, while the Arabs did not. Before the UN vote, Jamal al-Husseni, vice-president of the Arab Higher Committee, the Palestinian Arab political organization, had declared to the UN General Assembly: “We are solidly and permanently determined to fight to the last man against the existence in our country of any Jewish state, no matter how small it is. We will drench the soil of our beloved country with the last drop of our blood.” He was true to his word.
Now, 65 years later, Mr. Abbas, the president of the Palestinian authority, asked the same august international body, which the Palestinians once rejected, to promote them from their status as observers to a non-member state. The vast majority of UN members were happy to comply. Just as there was dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv in 1947 and months later on May 14, 1948, when the state of Israel declared its independence, there was also dancing on the streets of Ramallah at last week’s diplomatic victory, as hollow as it likely will prove to be….
In the long struggle waged between Israelis and Palestinians, history frequently has been manipulated, and no more so than around the pivotal events that took place six and a half decades ago. A case in point: Palestinian insistence on the “right of return” to Israel of Palestinian refugees and their millions of their descendants.
The stalemate over this issue comes down to what happened in 1948. In the widely accepted Israeli narrative, the estimated 700,000 Arabs who left the Yishuv (or Jewish settlement and adjacent territories) during the Israeli War of Independence mainly did so of their own volition.
In the Palestinian historical narrative, on the other hand, the 1948 war is known as Al-Nakbah — the catastrophe. This alternative view argues that Palestinians were victims of a ruthless Zionist policy of ethnic cleansing, terror and worse….
In 1998, a kibbutznik and peace activist by the name of Teddy Katz received his master’s degree from Haifa University for a thesis entitled The Exodus of Arabs from Villages at the Foot of Southern Mount Carmel in 1948. The focal point of the study was the Arab village of Tantura, today the site of one of the best Mediterranean beaches in Israel. The incident in question took place on May 23, 1948, about six weeks after another notorious confrontation between Jewish fighters and Arabs at Deir Yassin, in which a hundred Arabs, some armed, were killed and for which Jewish officials later apologized….
Following interviews with Israeli Haganah veterans as well as former Arab villagers (some of whom were young children at the time), Katz concluded that approximately 200 to 250 unarmed Arab men had been murdered, women had been raped, the village looted and the rest of its small population expelled.
Once Katz’s controversial findings were published in a newspaper story, the former head of the Haganah unit involved launched a libel suit against Katz. During the proceedings, it was determined that Katz had fabricated evidence to fit his thesis about an Israeli-led massacre. He was forced to write a public apology. (The university revoked his degree; he resubmitted a revised version, however only got a “second class” master’s.) As might be accepted, thereafter, the story of Tantura was regarded as a big lie by Israelis and a true massacre by Palestinians.
Who to believe? Ben-Gurion University historian Benny Morris is probably the best authority on the 1948 war….he has aggravated both Israelis and Palestinians with his dogged search for the truth.
After considering the Tantura case, he is skeptical that a mass atrocity occurred, though he suspects that Haganah fighters likely did kill as many as 70 unarmed civilians. On the 1948 war overall, he has concluded that there was no general Zionist plan to cleanse the Jewish state of Arabs, though many were expelled. And, when the Arabs left, Israelis made it difficult or impossible for them to return. At the same time, tens of thousands of Palestinians also left before the main hostilities began.
As he writes in his 2004 book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited : “In the following months, hundreds of thousands [of Palestinian Arabs] fled not under Jewish orders or direct coercion though, to be sure, most sought to move out of harm’s way as Zionist troops conquered town after town. … And most probably believed that they would be returning home in a matter of months if not weeks, perhaps after the Arab armies had crushed Israel.” That miscalculation, as we now fully understand, was to have enormous ramifications….
The great “what if” of Middle East history in the 20th century is how events would have unfolded if Arab leaders had not rejected the partition of Palestine, but instead accepted establishment of the state of Israel. There would have been no Six Day-War in 1967, no occupation and settlements, no suicide bombings, no wall, no rockets and no bloodshed. Who knows how many Palestinians would still be living in their ancestral homes? “It was our mistake. It was an Arab mistake as a whole,” Mahmoud Abbas said about the 1947-1948 decision in a rare interview with an Israeli television network he granted last year…..
Winnipeg historian Allan Levine’s most recent book, King: William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Life Guide by the Hand of Destiny is now available in paperback.
A Search for God Through Bluegrass and Klezmer: Samuel G. Freedman, The New York Times, Nov. 30, 2012—Andy Statman stood in the narrow basement of an Orthodox synagogue improbably wedged among the boîtes and boutiques of Greenwich Village. He wore a plain blue suit and white shirt, and from his waist hung tzitzit, the fringes meant to remind an observant Jew of the 613 commandments.
Operation Pillar of Defense: An Initial Strategic and Military Assessment: Dr. Eitan Shamir,
BESA Center, Dec. 4, 2012—Israel’s declared objectives in Operation Pillar of Defense were limited: to cripple Hamas’ military capabilities, restore its deterrence, and return quiet to the communities of the South.
A Woman Who Cared: Greer Fay Cashman, Jerusalem Post, Nov. 29, 2012—Founder of the ‘Jerusalem Post’ Funds and a distinguished citizen of Jerusalem, Helen Rossi could get things done, no matter how challenging the situation.
Bond in Bankruptcy: Mark Steyn, National Review, Dec. 3, 2012—For some reason, the quadrennial humiliation of the Republican presidential candidate now coincides with the release of the new Bond movie.
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