Israel to the rescue

On November 15, 2012, US Congressman Ted Poe of Texas announced from the floor of Congress that Israel was the only country which has received US foreign aid that in turn sent aid to victims of super storm Sandy.

Click here to read the article in the Examiner.com which reported on Congressman Poe's remarks.

Click here to read about Israeli Flying Aid.

Chronology of the West Bank

Another good blog by Jack Cohen that I believe is worthy of posting here.

In response to the EU Foreign Minister's meeting, that is laying the foundation for separating Israel from the pre-1967 territories in order to unilaterally recognize Palestinian sovereignty, I am providing a chronology of the status of the so-called West Bank.  The name derives from its being the west bank of the River Jordan, although the correct geographical names for the area are Judea in the south and Samaria in the north.  This area has become a bone of contention between Israel and the Palestinians, with the Europeans and Americans generally taking a pro-Palestinian position largely for political reasons.

1. In 1917 during WWI the British, who were fighting the Germans and the Turks, issued the Balfour Declaration, that they would establish a "homeland" for the Jews in "Palestine" (as the British called the area, referring back to the extinct Philistines who were not Arabs).
2. Under the terms of the San Remo peace treaty of 1920 in which the fate of former Turkish colonies were decided, the Balfour Declaration was adopted as the legal basis for the future of Palestine.  There was no provision for an Arab State in Palestine.
3. This Treaty granted Britain a Mandate by the League of Nations to control Palestine, until it could be transferred to Jewish ownership.  However, they had no real intention of doing this, according to the secret protocol of the British-French agreement, the Sykes-Picot Treaty, promulgated during the War.
4. In 1922, Britain under Winston Churchill unilaterally and illegally divided the Mandate and gave the eastern half of Mandatory Palestine to Abdullah, one of the sons of Emir Hussein of Mecca, to form the Arab Kingdom of Transjordan.
5. In 1947, the UN passed the Partition Plan that divided West Palestine into two putative states one Jewish and the other Arab, and the area representing the West Bank was included in the Arab State.
6. Israel accepted the UN Partition Plan, but the Arabs rejected it, and so it became void and was never implemented
7. In 1948 after Britain withdrew its forces Israel declared its independence and fought a war against the invading armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.
8. Israel won its independence and was recognized by most countries in the world, including the USA, USSR and then the UN.
9. During the war Transjordan captured the area called the West Bank and illegally annexed it, and renamed itself Jordan.
10. The sovereignty of Jordan over the West Bank was not recognised under international law except by Pakistan and Britain.
11. Israel recaptured the WB during the 1967 Six-Day War and expelled the Jordanians.
12. However, Israel did not annex the WB (like it did E. Jerusalem and the Golan Heights) pending a negotiated settlement with the Arabs.
13. It should be noted that some of the settlements on the WB, such as the three in the Etzion bloc,  were Jewish owned long before the War of Independence and the children of the original settlers returned to live there.  Also, the Jewish presence in Hebron that ended with the 1929 massacre was reestablished in 1968
14. The Oslo Accords of 1999 divided the WB into three sections, A, Arab-Palestinian control, B, joint control and C, Israeli control.  However, the Oslo Accords became moot when Arafat unleashed the terrorism of the second intifada on Israel in 2000
15. Israel maintains that the building of settlements on the WB is legal since its legal status was never altered from the time of the San Remo Treaty and there was never Palestinian sovereignty over the area.  
16. But, the international community supports the Palestinian position and considers the settlements as illegal under a Geneva Convention that precludes a victor from settling its citizens on occupied land.
17. Most Israeli Governments accepted the legality of building settlements on the WB, but since 1999 Israel adopted a policy of not building new settlements but only expanding existing settlements. 
18. Even this policy was disapproved by Pres. Obama, who forced PM Netanyahu to institute a moratorium on all Israeli construction in the WB.  This lasted for 10 months from 2009-10, but the Palestinians failed to reenter negotiations during this period and after it expired Pres. Abbas of the PA has since insisted on a cessation of all construction in the WB as a precondition to any negotiations.  He also insists that Israel accept the pre-1967 borders as the basis for a Palestinian State before negotiations can begin. 
19. Since the unilateral application to the UN for non-member state recognition by Pres. Abbas in 2012 is contrary to all previous UN resolutions and the Olso Accords that bilaterlly divided the WB (see 12 above), Israel has now unilaterally decided to expand existing settlements and to plan to build in new areas such as E1 between Jerusalem and Ma'ale Adumim.  Why should Israel not be contiguous there? 
20. Israel would like to have an international court judge the legality of its claim to the WB, but fears a biased outcome such as the infamous Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2009, that even Justice Goldstone subsequently retracted.

There are moves at the UN and EU to grant sovereignty for the Palestinians over the West Bank without any reference to Israel.  Such moves cannot lead to peace and can only exacerbate the situation. They derive from the mistaken view that only the Palestinians have a legitimate claim to those areas.

EU condemns Hamas rhetoric, Israeli settlement plans

Over the weekend, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal said that his terrorist group would never accept Israel right to exist. Not a peep was heard from any country condemning his words.  Then, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu chastised the international community for its silence.

Then, came a surprise statement of EU ministers supporting Israel's right to exist.

However, for some reason, this was only reported in a few media outlets.

Could there be a double standard?  Netanyahu threats to potentially build 3000 homes in the EI area of Jerusalem and EU countries call Israeli ambassadors on the carpet.  Hamas says that Israel should not exist and the EU countries do nothing and the international community does not call Hamas to task.

To read the article in the December 10, 2012 Jerusalem Post, click here.

UNRWA scandal

by Jack Cohen

The UN Relief and Welfare Agency (UNRWA) was founded in 1950 as a temporary means to assist Palestinian refugees who had fled Palestine during the Israel War of Independence, when six Arab countries attacked Israel.  Since then it has become a bloated permanent agency that caters to all needs of the Palestinian "refugees" in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank/PA.   

 

UNRWA has become one of the main factors in permanently perpetuating the Israel-Palestine Arab conflict:  It is certainly not aiding in the so-called peace process. There  are several major questions that need to be asked of UNRWA:

 

1. Why is it that Palestinian "refugees" are increasing every year, while all other refugee populationss in the world are actually decreasing.  The offical UN agency that deals with refugees, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNCHR) defines a refugee according to the standard interational definition, as one who leaves his/her country of origin for humanitarian reasons (war, civil unrest, danger).  But UNRWA is unique in the world that defines refugees as not only those that left their country of origin, but also their descendents ad infinitum.  When the conflict ended in 1948  there were estimated to be 720,000 genuine refugees.  Since then, as natural decrease has occured over time, the number of genuine refugees (those 65 and over) has decreased to ca. 30,000, but the number of UNRWA defined refugees has now reached 5 million (see graph)!  When will this nonsense stop, when there are 60 million, 100 million?  Its an absurd situation. 

    (The data in this graph is taken from actual UNRWA statistics of all Palestinian refugees.  The number of "actual refugees" 65 and over is taken from a poll in 2012 showing ca. 30,000 survivors and the graph is a linear interpolation from the original figure of 720,000.  May be used with attribution)

 

2. Why is the US paying m$275 per year to support these unrefugees.  And why is this US contribution one third of the total UNRWA budget, when not only is the US in financial crisis.  Instead these funds could be used to help the million Arab refugees from Syria and the US sufferers of Superstom Sandy in the NY area could well do with support like m$275.  And as the number of Palestinian unrefugees increase, the US contribution is increasing accordingly year by year.  There needs to be a major Congressional investigation into this profligate waste of taxpayer money!

 

3. The funds given to UNRWA have been used to support terrorism, to support the teaching of hatred of Israel and of Jews, UNRWA schools have been named after terrorists and suicide bombers have been glorified in these American-supported schools.  Money is fungible, just as an example, Israeli planes pinpoint the crews of missile launchers.  One of those killed in May 2008 was Awad al-Qiq, who was the chief rocket maker for Islamic Jihad.  He was also a science teacher in an UNRWA school.  So the US funds given to UNRWA were helping an UNRWA teacher to develop missiles to fire into Israel.  This has to stop! (see http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/may/19/defund-unrwa/ )

 

Action needs to be taken; It has been proposed that UNRWA be incorporated into the UNHCR and that only genuine refugees according to their definition as applied to all other refugees on earth should also be applied to the Palestinian refugees.  Why should they be treated differently, why should they receive up to 10 times more per capita than other refugees and why should the US support most of this bloated bureaucracy that helps to prevent peace?

Falling for Hamas’s media manipulation

In the November 28, 2012 edition of the Washington Post, Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, wrote an op/ed piece in which he describes how Hamas knows it can't destroy Israel militarily so it tries to do so through the media.

What makes better headlines? Is it numbing figures such as the 8,000 Palestinian rockets fired at Israel since it unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and the 42.5 percent of Israeli children living near the Gaza border who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder? Or is it high-resolution images of bombed-out buildings in Gaza and emotional stories ofbereaved Palestinians? The last, obviously, as demonstrated by much of the media coverage of Israel’s recent operation against Hamas. But that answer raises a more fundamental question: Which stories best serve the terrorists’ interest?

Hamas has a military strategy to paralyze southern Israel with short- and middle-range rockets while launching Iranian-made missiles at Tel Aviv. With our precision air force, top-notch intelligence and committed citizens army, we can defend ourselves against these dangers. We have invested billions of dollars in bomb shelters and early-warning systems and, together with generous U.S. aid, have developed history’s most advanced, multi-layered anti-missile batteries. For all of its bluster, Hamas does not threaten Israel’s existence.

But Hamas also has a media strategy. Its purpose is to portray Israel’s unparalleled efforts to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza as indiscriminate firing at women and children, to pervert Israel’s rightful acts of self-defense into war crimes. Its goals are to isolate Israel internationally, to tie its hands from striking back at those trying to kill our citizens and to delegitimize the Jewish State. Hamas knows that it cannot destroy us militarily but believes that it might do so through the media.

One reason is the enlarged images of destruction and civilian casualties in Gaza that dominated the front pages of U.S. publications. During this operation, The Post published multiple front-page photographs of Palestinian suffering. The New York Times even juxtaposed a photograph of the funeral of Hamas commander Ahmed Jabari, who was responsible for the slaughter of dozens of innocent Israelis, with that of a pregnant Israeli mother murdered by Hamas. Other photos, supplied by the terrorists and picked up by the press, identified children killed by Syrian forces or even by Hamas itself as victims of Israeli strikes.

In reporting Palestinian deaths, media routinely failed to note that roughly half were terrorists and that such a ratio is exceedingly low by modern military standards — much lower, for example, than the NATO campaign in the Balkans. Media also emphasize the disparity between the number of Palestinian and Israeli deaths, as though Israel should be penalized for investing billions of dollars in civil-defense and early-warning systems and Hamas exonerated for investing in bombs rather than bomb shelters. As in Israel’s last campaign against Hamas in 2008-09, the word “disproportionality” has been frequently used to characterize Israeli military strikes. In fact, during Operation Pillar of Defense this year, Hamas fired more than 1,500 missiles at Israel and the Israeli Air Force responded with 1,500 sorties.

The imbalance is also of language. “Hamas health officials said 45 had been killed and 385 wounded,” the Times’ front page reported. “Three Israeli civilians have died and 63 have been injured.” The subtext is clear: Israel targets Palestinians, and Israelis merely die.

The media perpetuated Hamas propaganda that traced the fighting to Jabari’s elimination and described Gaza as the most densely populated area on earth. Widely forgotten were the 130 rockets fired at Israel in the weeks before Jabari’s demise. For the record, Tel Aviv’s population is twice as dense as Gaza’s.

Hamas is a flagrantly anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti-feminist and anti-gay movement dedicated to genocide. The United States, Canada and the European Union all consider it a terrorist organization. Hamas strives to kill the maximum number of Israeli civilians while using its own population as a human shield — under international law, a double war crime. Why, then, would the same free press that Hamas silences help advance its strategy?

Media naturally gravitate toward dramatic and highly visual stories. Reports of 5.5 million Israelis gathered nightly in bomb shelters scarcely compete with the Palestinian father interviewed after losing his son. Both are, of course, newsworthy, but the first tells a more complete story while the second stirs emotions.

This is precisely what Hamas wants. It seeks to instill a visceral disgust for any Israeli act of self-defense, even one taken after years of unprovoked aggression.

Hamas strives to replace the tens of thousands of phone calls and text messages Israel sent to Palestinian civilians, warning them to leave combat zones, with lurid images of Palestinian suffering. If Hamas cannot win the war, it wants to win thestory of the war.

Veteran journalist Marvin Kalb, writing for Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on the terrorists’ successful media strategy against Israel, warned that “the trajectory of the media, from objective observer to fiery advocate,” had become “a weapon of modern warfare.” Kalb quotes a U.S. military expert who describes how perception has replaced reality on the battlefield and that the terrorists know it.

Israel will take all legitimate steps necessary to defend our citizens. We know that, despite our most painstaking efforts, tragic stories can emerge — stories that the enemy sensationalizes.

Like Americans, we cherish a free press, but unlike the terrorists, we are not looking for headlines. Our hope is that media resist the temptation to give them what they want.

The Palestine Mirage

Editorial from December 1, 2012 Wall Street Journal

The Palestine Mirage

A futile U.N. gesture that violates the 1993 Oslo Accords.

It was no accident that Mahmoud Abbas chose November 29 to seek a United Nations General Assembly vote recognizing Palestine as a state, albeit as a non-member "observer" state at the U.N. November 29 is the 65th anniversary of the General Assembly's Resolution 181, which partitioned British-Mandated Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states.

The Jews accepted the Resolution; Arabs unanimously rejected it. It passed by a vote of 33-13 with 10 abstentions. Had the Arab world voted for the plan, a Palestinian state would be as old as Israel is today, and within larger borders than the 1949 Armistice lines that the Palestinian President now claims for his new, notional, "state."

Yet if Mr. Abbas intended to acknowledge the Arab error in rejecting the creation of a Jewish homeland, it wasn't apparent Thursday. While he referred to Resolution 181 as "the birth certificate for Israel," he also spoke of the "unprecedented historical injustice inflicted on the Palestinian people since Al-Nakba [the catastrophe] of 1948." That would not have happened had the Arabs not sought to murder Israel in its crib by invading it.

Nor did Mr. Abbas help his cause by accusing Israel of "ethnic cleansing," "an apartheid system of colonial occupation," "the plague of racism," and more. That kind of talk may work with the usual suspects at Turtle Bay who gave Mr. Abbas a standing ovation. But Israelis who spent recent days in bomb shelters while Iranian-built missiles were fired at them from Gaza probably weren't cheering. Theirs is the say that matters if a Palestinian state is ever to come into being.

Those Israelis won't be reassured by the lopsided 138-9 margin of Thursday's vote, with 41 abstentions. In effect, the General Assembly voted to violate the 1993 Oslo Accords, which are the legal basis for Mr. Abbas's Palestinian Authority and require negotiations with Israel to create a state. When the world next asks Jerusalem to take "risks for peace," Israelis will know that countries such as France (which voted for the resolution) and Germany (which abstained) will not have their backs.

It will be interesting to see if the Palestinians now use their new U.N. status to harass Israelis in venues such as the International Criminal Court. Such tactics are aimed at making everyday life increasingly unbearable for Israelis, ostensibly to force their hand on accepting a Palestinian state. Our guess is that it will have the opposite effect.

As for the Obama Administration, it opposed the U.N. resolution but failed to get allies such as France and Germany to do so as well—further testimony to U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice's dubious diplomatic skills.

A brighter spot is the U.S. Senate, where Wyoming Republican John Barrasso has introduced an amendment that would cut U.S. funding for the Palestinian Authority by 50%, among other measures. Somebody needs to send Mr. Abbas the message that there's a price to be paid for flouting his agreements with Israel and ignoring the pleas of the Administration.

When the U.N. voted in 1947 for partition, the Jews of Palestine demonstrated that they were ready to create a functional state. On Thursday, the U.N. voted for a "Palestine" that has become a byword for political dysfunction, ideological extremism, and a preference for symbolism over pragmatism. The tragedy of Thursday's vote is that it will only encourage Palestinians to remain in their make-believe world.
A version of this article appeared December 1, 2012, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Palestine Mirage.