#how israel first denied it and said that it was a failed hamas rocket

[astraystayyh]

They have since left four premature babies to decompose on their beds. They have since kidnapped, stripped, tortured civilians and tried to frame them as Hamas fighters for their propaganda. They have since shot people at refugee camps execution style. They have since targeted academics and poets and directors. They have since killed 86 journalists. Still no ceasefire.

psa: i know that many of us did NOT doubt this for a second, neither did i. this is targeted at the people who educated themselves for the first time about this genocide and discovered the absolute horrific things that Israel is capable of doing to Palestinians, with the unwavering support of its allies.

#i rem clearly that video of the first hospital that was bombed #how israel first denied it and said that it was a failed hamas rocket #then it said it attacked the hospital because hamas was hiding in there #and i rem thinking that this would get every world leader outraged #that they would do everything to stop this genocide #that was too many weeks ago #nothing has changed #this should terrify us all #this could have been us in that hospital #in that house in that refugee camp in that ambulance in that street #nowhere is safe in Palestine #nowhere #free palestine #palestine #free gaza #gaza

[intersectionalpraxis]

The hospital was not bombed by Israel, it was a result of a faulty missile launch by the Islamic jihad. There are video evidence for that, and probably more to come.

Israel is committing war crimes right now and has been relentlessly bombing Gaza: killing now up to 3000 innocent Palestinian civilians JUST these past several days. Most of whom are children because they represent 50% of Gaza's population.

There have been innumerable Israeli propaganda videos dehumanizing Palestinian people, yet without fail -videos of Israeli soldiers in Gaza and West Bank brutalizing Palestinian civilians and often proudly spewing genocidal rhetoric about oppressing the Palestinian people -are often taken down.

Israeli apartheid has been ongoing violently for 75 years, and NO major western/European power had openly condemned this deliberate ethnic cleansing, which had been systemically done by the Israeli government by settling illegally on Indigenous Palestinian land in the first place with help from Britain and the United States, displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people during thr Nakba of 1948 (which forced these people into Gaza) and an estimated tens of thousands were murdered if they did not go).

Do you think for one second that I would believe ANYTHING that comes out of Israeli governmental/military mouths when they lied about Hamas beheading 40 Israel babies heads (when Israeli military actually beheaded 10 Palestinian babies heads), or the fact they LIED about an assault on a German woman, as well as countless other sexual assault allegations, which in this case was proven to be false and something to further their violent agenda. Less we also conveniently forget to mention the amount of Palestinian women that the IDF/Israeli officials have raped and brutalized during 'interrogations,' which of course Isreal/Netanyahu vehemently denies because it's not becoming of a democratic nation right?

Rampant crimes against humanity, breaking of Geneva Conventions, getting 3 BILLION in military aid EVERY year from the United States. Controlling what goes in and out of Gaza for decades, and making Gaza the largest concentration camp in the world. Intending to decimate Palestinian people and some of ya'll can't stop to actually think about what is really happening? To see how Western media, without fail, has been almost immediately spreading Isreali propaganda without sharing content and videos from the ground in Palestine (it certainly doesn't help the Israeli government cut electricity and wifi).

So before you come on my page and try to proclaim/claim that Israel is innocent or is not at all at fault for this massacre, maybe unpack it more and bear witness to Palestinians losing their lives for simply existing in what Israeli settlers consider to be their right to control.

Here is a series of tweets that convey information about this strike and also with original evidence of the strike, which people have already distinguished as NOT a rocket (which is what the Israeli government said initially):

This person also did great work debunking the EDITED video Israel posted about the bombing if you want to take a look:

And we now how confirmation this happened:

FREE PALESTINE 🇵🇸

#feminist #intersectionality #palestine #freepalastine🇵🇸 #gaza #israel is an apartheid state #israel #history #human rights

[eretzyisrael]

Gaza and the long tradition of blood libels

The Gaza hospital lie is only the latest iteration of ancient incitement. Lyn Julius  in JNS News looks at the long history of fabricated accusations against Jews: 

A mob burst into Makhachkala airport in Dagestan in search of Jewish passengers arriving on a flight from Tel Aviv

When news broke of the bombing of the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, Western media and the Muslim world rushed to judgment. It was an Israeli airstrike, they said. It had to be. By the time the IDF announced the results of its investigation into the incident, which revealed that a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that fell in the hospital parking lot was to blame—later confirmed by numerous governments and intelligence services—it was too late. The “Arab street” was in an uproar.

The repercussions rippled as far as Dagestan, where Muslims attempted a pogrom against the passengers on a plane arriving from Tel Aviv.

Meanwhile, the Arab media stubbornly persists in claiming without evidence that Israel caused the hospital explosion. Not only that, but some deny that the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre ever took place or claim the Israelis inflicted it on themselves.

The hospital libel has a long pedigree. Blood libels date back in some form to the time of ancient Rome and emerged in full in 12th century England. It was a classic trope of Christian antisemitism, alleging that Jews murder children in order to use their blood to bake matzah. This monstrous lie in various forms led to violence against Jews well into the 20th century.

The blood libel was spread by Christians in the Muslim world. The 1840 Damascus Blood Libel was the first of dozens in the Ottoman Empire. After the French consul in Damascus joined Capuchin monks in accusing Jews of murdering a monk and his servant, many Jewish notables were arrested.

In the Arab and Muslim world today, a fabricated accusation is still enough to incite violence against Israel and Jews. Indeed, the power of the mob has always been a tool of the unscrupulous.

The Gaza hospital libel unleashed these mobs. For example, in Tunisia, the shrine of Rabbi Yossef HaMa’aravi, 30 kilometers from Gabès in the south, was torched. The tiny 1,500-member Jewish community—once 100,000 strong—fears for its future.

Over the centuries during which Jews lived in Muslim-majority countries, many acts of antisemitic violence originated with false accusations. A favorite pretext was connected to the Jewish use of alcohol. Charges that Jews defiled the Qur’an or Muslim holy sites, committed blasphemy or had supposed designs on the Al-Aqsa mosque have fueled anti-Jewish violence for decades—and still do today. The destruction of Jewish neighborhoods was often accompanied by looting, murder and rape.

Historically, the Jews had few rights and could not defend themselves against such false allegations. In the 19th century, Britain and France cast themselves as champions of defenseless minorities in the face of injustice. But these same colonial powers helped incite violence through a policy of “divide and rule” or were complicit in the violence by failing to protect vulnerable minorities. The forces of law and order were conspicuously absent until Jewish blood had been spilled.

Arab autocracies have long used the conflict with Zionism as a means to unite the masses and distract them from domestic failings. From the 1930s to the ‘60s, the power of the mob was directed against the Jews living in Muslim countries. These Jews became proxies for Israel. Often, the accusations descended into farce: A Jew smoking a cigarette could be accused of sending smoke signals to the “Zionists.”

In this age of instant information, how does one explain the persistence of such libels? It is clear that social media is a double-edged sword. It can be used to tell the truth but also to amplify lies.

People believe what they want to believe, even in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence. Telling the truth in the Arab world, however, has a political dimension. Whatever Arab leaders might think in private, correcting lies could endanger their survival.

The post Gaza and the long tradition of blood libels appeared first on Point of No Return.

#Antisemitism #Blood Libels

[creepingsharia]

Professors at U.S. Universities Advance Qatari Influence Operations on ‘Islamophobia’

by Ahnaf Kalam

In February, the College of Islamic Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) in Doha, Qatar, hosted a panel titled “Global Islamophobia: Understanding its Roots, Challenging its Impact.”

It was a fitting venue for a misinformation campaign based on the weaponized term “Islamophobia,” coined not to advance debate but to end it. Emad El-Din Shahin, interim provost and dean of the host College, is a member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood sentenced to death in absentia in Cairo. Its faculty include a former Texas imam who encouraged his listeners to attack Israel, and several affiliates of the International Institute of Islamic Thought, a Virginia-based think tank founded by the Muslim Brotherhood “that is the nexus of a terror-finance network named the SAAR Network,” according to security analyst Oren Litwin.

Qatar uses its oil wealth to support extremism worldwide, including jihadi groups in Iraq and Syria. It has lavished over $1 billion in support to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, and houses the leaders of the Taliban, Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas in Doha. Abroad, it spends billions of dollars on influence operations, including the international propaganda network Al Jazeera.

Its efforts to Islamize American education are no less impressive. Since 2011, Qatar has donated over $1 billion to universities in the U.S., making it the largest foreign donor. Additionally, six American universities have branch campuses in Doha. Qatari money also supports secondary education in the U.S., including through biased teacher training programs.

As detailed in the Peninsula, a state-run Qatari newspaper, panelists at the Doha conference discussed how anti-Muslim discrimination has “effectively gone global,” spreading from its place of origin in Western capitals, metastasizing, and leading to genocide, mass incarceration, and human rights abuses in Qatar’s “regional neighborhood.”

The panel included four Western scholars with experience in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies chosen, no doubt, for their records of whitewashing Islamism and blaming the West for systemic problems in the Middle East. Predictably, they peddled the false assertion that Uighur Muslim concentration camps in China and mob violence against Muslims in India are Western exports stemming from racism, xenophobia, and anti-Muslim prejudice.  

Advertised as “a dynamic mix of academic perspectives and thought leadership,” the panel included Karen Armstrong, a British author on comparative religion; John Esposito, founding director of the Saudi-sponsored Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding (ACMCU) at Georgetown University and current director of its pro-Islamist Bridge Initiative; and Asifa Quraishi-Landes, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and apologist for sharia. Nader Hashemi, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver and an apologist for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, moderated the discussion. All were happy to support Qatar’s foreign policy agenda: spreading a pro-Islamist, conspiratorial worldview that paints the West as a neo-imperialist aggressor in eternal conflict with Islam.

Our panelists have first-hand experience of the challenges posed by Islamophobia in its original heartlands,” Emad El Din Shahin, told the Peninsula. “They also know what works when it comes to countering harmful narratives and negative perceptions.” In other words, they are experts at extracting the maximum political capital out of perceived Muslim injustices by using identity politics to shut down debate and force concessions.

Hashemi has long been a mouthpiece for Islamist talking points, including his opposition to the state of Israel, which fundamentalists regard as the embodiment of Western imperialism in the Middle East. In the past, Hashemi has publicly endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign, an organized effort to single out, delegitimize, and ultimately destroy Israel as a Jewish state.

Hamas-apologist: Nader Hashemi, Univ. of Denver

His apologias for Hamas include an article he tweeted during Israel’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge against Hamas terrorists in Gaza falsely claiming Israel has “ethnically cleansed, occupied, subjected to apartheid, and repeatedly slaughtered” the “imprisoned” Palestinians. In fact, Israeli Defense Force mounted clearance operations in Gaza in response to a relentless barrage of rocket and mortar attacks, many of which Hamas militants staged in hospitals, schools, mosques, and United Nations facilities.

Unsurprisingly, Hashemi has in the past disavowed legislative efforts to designate as a terrorist entity the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its numerous militant offshoots. When reminded in 2016 of Hamas’s genocidal charter calling for the destruction of Israel, he dismissed the assertion as a “pro-Israel talking point,” adding “if you were living in Gaza you would be sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood, I guarantee you.”

Of course, many senior Hamas commanders refuse to live in Gaza, preferring the glamor and safety of Doha. And if top Muslim Brotherhood brass use Qatar as a launching pad for jihadist operations, Middle East studies professors such as Esposito have joined the emirate in whitewashing and minimalizing Islamic terrorism. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are archrivals, but Esposito happily cashes checks from both Wahhabi powers. While the Saudis funded Georgetown’s ACMCU under his direction, the university is now the largest recipient of Qatari aid. Esposito’s allegiance to Islamist-supporting regimes in the Middle East is, then, transparent: he even implied that Muslim rulers who fail to back jihadist movements are Islamophobic. In a 2012 interview with Ahram Online, he argued that Muslim dictators who are “keen to display a negative image of Islamists” do so to preserve Western interests. “Authoritarian regimes always used the idea that any opposition was Islamist,” he said. 

Esposito denies any connection between nonviolent Islamism and terrorism. In a 2016 essay, he pointed to “American and European foreign policies in the Middle East” as the culprit for terrorism in the region. The Georgetown professor’s record of perpetually blaming the West made him an obvious choice for HBKU’s Islamophobia conference.

Armstrong, a former Catholic nun an author of many books on comparative religious studies, also disparaged Western civilization. During the panel discussion, she diagnosed bigotry in the West as people “retreating into ever more narrowly defined ethnic, religious, political, and national groups. They enhance their own identity by denigrating or belittling the ‘other.’”

She later did a bit of “denigrating or belittling” Westerners herself according to the Daily Q, the student paper of Northwestern University in Qatar, by suggesting that bigotry and hatred against Muslims is a uniquely European innovation. As a point of reference, Armstrong once said in PBS interview that “Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the West at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.”

Qatar’s ongoing efforts to weaken the West is, therefore, multifaceted: In addition to funding Islamist preachers and militant jihadists, it sponsors willing Western academics, master dissimulators skilled at using social justice and grievance politics to deflect criticism of religious extremism. By assigning unilateral responsibility to the West for acts of anti-Muslim persecution in China, India, and the Middle East, Qatar hopes to legitimize the violent Islamist factions it hosts and supports. American or Western scholars who embrace and spread Qatari/Wahhabi-sponsored propaganda should be shunned as disgraces to their profession. Sadly, they are its leaders.

#Education #Islam #Muslim #Sharia #Jihad #News #Finance #Media #Legal #Immigration

[dunnystuff]

Sent: Thursday, May 13, 2021 3:17 PM

Subject: Rich's Blog

Unintended Consequences

Hi to all -

Colonial Pipeline

Well, looks like some Russian group hacked their computers, shutting down distribution of fuel, and demanding a ransom. Russian ransomware is renowned for being especially bad. Pundits speculate that if this is not resolved by the weekend, we will have real problems on our hands. Who wants to bet that the hike in gas prices will remain, long after this 'crisis' is over?

In several southeastern states, gas stations are out of fuel to sell. It ranges from 6% to 9%. Downtown Atlanta is up to 20%. I had to go out for errands today, and stores were packed with people panic buying. Every gas station I passed had jacked up prices from 25 cents to a dollar per gallon, and there were long lines at every one of them. Larger stations had people outside, directing traffic. It was crazy.

As usual, our intelligence agencies missed this completely, as they have missed every other major event for decades. Of course, the Biden camp is ignoring this, 'it is a private company', they say, 'and we will not get involved'. What? No 'national security' issue here? Or is the administration too dumb to think of ways to help? Or, do they approve of what happened, since it furthers their 'green' agenda? Have you noticed that many 'green items' are being sneaked in via the back door, as promised, so that they can ignore public debate, or those annoying legal questions and constitutional issues?

A-10 Pilot

Captain Taylor Bye was on a training mission, and was to fire the A-10's massive 30mm gatling gun on a range, when the gun malfunctioned. It destroyed her forward landing gear, blew off her canopy and did other damage to this rugged little plane. If you have ever ridden a motorcycle, or even been in an open convertible, you know what it is like to have the wind in your face. But in a plane, that wind is several hundred miles per hour. With a little help from her wingman, she managed to bring this wounded jet back to base, and did a successful belly landing. She was not hurt, and received a medal for her calm, effective response to a critical situation.

Golden Globes

Well, NBC has cancelled these. Seems there were not enough black people among the judges, and after all, Hollywood is all about 'diversity', and little else. Not everyone was happy with this 'woke' approach, and Tom Cruise was one of those. He returned his previous awards.

Dr. Fauci-

The good doctor was grilled at length by Rand Paul and congress today. They had a lot of questions about his illegal 'gain of function' research, done by the Wuhan labs with our money. Saint Fauci, who has a history of seeking the limelight and basking in it, was quite upset. In spite of massive evidence presented, he denied doing gain of function research, and called Rand Paul a liar. We will have to see if democrats can salvage their Messiah, or if this spells the end of the Year of the Fauci.

Army

As part of their 'diversity' program, large numbers of female soldiers have been recruited. But there is a problem with equality. These soldiers cannot perform physical tasks as well as male soldiers. In fact, half of them fail the basic physical fitness requirements, which were lowered to allow for those physical differences. This is not new. More than 50 years ago, when women started entering the Navy in large numbers, we had similar issues. We had separate standards for men and women, to allow for those differences. This did not affect intellectual issues, or technical skills. In many cases, women performed far better than men in those areas. But in activities that demanded physical strength and stamina, they were not equal. Guess we will have to settle for 'equity', not equality.

Jessica Beavais

This lady is a 32-year-old podcaster and radio host. She has gone on several anti-cop rants on her shows for a while now. A few days ago, she ran down a NYPD officer, killing him. After her arrest, she was found to have double the legal limit of alcohol in her blood. She has now been charged with 13 counts related to this, including manslaughter and negligent homicide. If convicted, she could do 15 years.

Israel and the Middle East

The media is not really reporting this very much. One of the first things Biden did was restore taxpayer funding to Hamas. They are a proxy military arm for Iran, and Trump took away a lot of their funding by sanctions against Iran, which Biden is also trying to remove, as well as returning to the terrible nuclear deal with Iran. So, guess who stepped up to assist Hamas? Russia - the same folks who hacked our oil pipelines. It is not a coincidence that Hamas has fired more than 500 rockets into Israel in the last few days, and that Israel has responded with air strikes, and mobilizing troops along the border, ready to react. A number of people have been killed on both sides. Israel has the Iron Dome missile defense system, which has intercepted most of the incoming rockets. So, their casualties have been fewer than those of Hamas and the unfortunate civilians they hide among.

What is next? Our electrical grid? Years of warnings about how vulnerable it is to hacks, and physical attack. Largely ignored. Perhaps the banking system? Imagine if your credit and debit cards just quit working.

These actions are acts of war, against Israel, and also the US, and they are connected. Naturally, 'The Squad' and the other communists in our government are blaming Israel for defending itself.

A while back, I had a list of members of congress who openly belonged to communist front organizations, or even the actual Communist Party of the US. There were more than sixty congressmen - all democrats. When you see attacks from different fronts, all aimed at destroying our Constitution, do not think for a minute that these are unique, or unrelated events. It is exactly the plan that was laid out back in 1963, on how to bring down this nation - and they meant it when they said 'We will bury you.' And, we will provide the shovels to do it with.

Rich

[newstfionline]

Israel’s right-wing revolutionaries

Christa Case Bryant, CS Monitor, February 14, 2017

JERUSALEM--As a leftist 20-something in the 1990s, Anat Roth railed against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not making peace with the Palestinians. She recruited university students and organized demonstrations day after day outside his house, his office, anywhere--armed with slogans such as “the wild right is a danger for Israel.”

“It was very noisy and it was very effective,” recalls Ms. Roth, noting that Mr. Netanyahu lost to a pro-peace candidate in 1999. “We succeeded ... to get rid of Netanyahu--big time.”

Today, Netanyahu is back in power, and Roth is opposing him again--but for a completely different reason. She thinks he isn’t conservative enough.

Netanyahu has said in the past that he supports the establishment of a Palestinian state, a move that she now believes would be suicidal for Israel. She has come to that conclusion after years of Palestinian bombings, shootings, and stabbings that have killed more than 1,200 Israelis; after Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip that led to the rise of a terrorist regime that showered her fellow citizens with rockets; after her liberal friends failed to answer her increasingly persistent questions about how to protect the country.

Roth has also become more religious and moved from her small Jerusalem apartment to a spacious home in Efrat, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. In the last election, she ran for parliament with a party to the right of Netanyahu. She has given up entirely on the two-state solution she once fought so hard to achieve.

“You have to fight for what you believe in,” says Roth. “But if you realize that it is not achievable, and that the theories and assumptions you believed in are not right, you need to have the guts, the strength, to confront it and look for other options and not be stuck in prior assumptions that don’t bring you anywhere.”

Roth’s transformation in many ways mirrors what has happened to Israeli society. Over the past two decades, Israel has undergone a fundamental shift that has brought to power the country’s most right-wing government in history.

And it may be about to get more conservative.

Netanyahu--whose hard-line stances taxed his relationship with former President Barack Obama and other Western leaders--is being pulled inexorably to the right by rising rivals, toughening public opinion on security issues, and by the increasingly religious tilt of the Israeli population.

For years, when Netanyahu wanted to check the power of interest groups to the right of him--most notably the settler movement--he could always invoke the United States: Washington, he’d say, won’t let us build more. But now that could change. President Trump has signaled a more hands-off stance toward Israel--including a pro-settlement pick for ambassador, David Friedman. Right-wing elements see a chance to move the country decisively against the formation of a Palestinian state and perhaps toward formal annexation of lands in the West Bank, which they refer to by the biblical names of Judea and Samaria.

All this could fundamentally change Israel’s standing with much of the West, at the United Nations, and with other countries in the volatile Middle East--a region already seemingly in a perpetual state of war and splintering increasingly along religious lines.

“I think Israel is at a unique junction,” says Naftali Bennett, one of the most prominent politicians pulling the Israeli government to the right. “For the first time in 50 years, we need to ask ourselves, what do we really want? There’s a unique opportunity for Israel to go through quantum change.”

While Roth has given up completely on a Palestinian state, many Israelis have shifted more conservative largely out of a loss of hope--though not a desire--for peace with the Palestinians. But there are other factors behind the hardening attitudes as well.

Israelis have long touted the dual nature of Israel as Jewish and democratic. In the past, when asked to choose which of those foundational principles should take precedence, they would refuse. But increasingly Israelis are revealing a preference--and it’s “for the Jewish element,” says Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), an independent research center in Jerusalem that does extensive polling.

The growing presence of religious Jews, both in number and influence, is challenging the secular Zionist vision that has long dominated Israel’s elite institutions: its parliament, courts, military, and media. A religious nationalist vision, one that sees Israel establishing its sovereignty over Judea and Samaria as a prelude to the Messiah’s coming, is increasingly moving from the fringes of Israeli society into politics. It is spurring right-wing parties, which now make up about half of the political spectrum, to try to outdo each other ideologically, says Dahlia Scheindlin, a political scientist and pollster.

The most visible sign of this, and the one arguably of most concern to the international community and its hopes for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is the rising clout of the settler movement. Ideological settlers have become a critical part of Netanyahu’s base in the Likud party, and key supporters of his chief rival, Mr. Bennett of the Jewish Home party--the party to which Roth now belongs.

Her move to Efrat, a ridge of red-roofed homes surrounded by Palestinian farmland, is part of a surge in the Israeli settler population in the West Bank, which has nearly quadrupled since the 1993 Oslo Accord. Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the government has approved another 5,500 homes in the settlements.

The settlers are now “probably the most effective interest group in the country,” says Mr. Plesner.

Bennett, a software entrepreneur who made millions before going into politics, is pushing a far-reaching--and controversial--solution in the West Bank: Extend Israeli sovereignty to the 61 percent of the area that is already under full Israeli control. Allow the more than 400,000 Israeli settlers there to stay in their homes, offer Israeli citizenship or residency to the area’s estimated 80,000 Palestinians, and let the rest of the West Bank Palestinians live in autonomous areas under a government of their choice. He’d couple that with a “massive Marshall Plan” to improve infrastructure and economic opportunity.

Bennett plans to introduce a bill in the coming weeks that would extend Israeli sovereignty over Maale Adumim, a settlement of 40,000 people just outside Jerusalem. Nearly 8 in 10 Israelis support such a move, but it would set a legal precedent for implementing the rest of Bennett’s plan--which is not as widely accepted. Only 44 percent of Israelis support annexing the West Bank, according to IDI. “I feel that if we don’t make our move now, and apply Israeli law based on my plan, we’ll miss this window,” he says.

If Bennett succeeds, that would effectively kill the prospects for the two-state solution, ending the international community’s decades-long drive to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

“There would be no need to talk about a two-state solution in a scenario of annexation of occup[ied] territory,” says chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat in a statement to the Monitor. “[It] seems that the ‘two-state solution’ that Israel is talking about is the State of Israel and the state of the settlers that this extremist government has been vigorously building. Their vision is one of ‘one state and two systems,’--apartheid, rather than two states. Without international intervention, it will be very difficult to save the prospects of a sovereign and independent State of Palestine.”

Bennett admits that his vision for a Greater Israel is not appealing to the world, but says people respect a “coherent vision.” If there’s one thing he says he’s learned from doing business in America, it is to be honest.

If there’s a problem with your product, “Call the guy, tell him the truth, tell him what you know, tell him what you’re doing about it, bite the bullet,” he says. “They’re not going to be happy ... but they’ll respect you.”

“What I think is unacceptable is when we say, ‘Hey, we want a Palestinian state but but but--this and that,’ “ says Bennett.

Many analysts are skeptical that Bennett will succeed in implementing his vision, given Netanyahu’s considerable legislative power as prime minister, as well as the prospect of international opprobrium. But in a tumultuous era of populism that brought “Brexit” and now a Trump White House, it’s not inconceivable.

Even during her years as a peace activist, Roth found it painful to accept that Israel should give up the West Bank, which it conquered in the Arab-Israel conflict of 1967, to create a Palestinian state.

“The basic thing is that you don’t want to get rid of it because it’s ... one of the limbs of your body,” she says. “When do you amputate a limb? Just when you’re forced to.”

When Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, with no negotiations or concessions from the Palestinians, the militant Hamas movement took credit for pushing Israel out--and won elections the following year. Gaza militants showered Israel with rockets, despite periodic poundings by Israeli planes that killed thousands of Palestinians. The 2014 war, in which Hamas even targeted Tel Aviv, sending parents and children scurrying to bomb shelters, shattered the idealistic notions that many leftists had harbored.

“Gaza is like a laboratory of what will happen in Judea and Samaria,” says Roth, who formally left the Labor Party after those attacks. “The security threat of having a Palestinian state next to us is more dangerous than the demographics.”

To be sure, there are security risks involved in denying Palestinians a state as well. “No one can control the new generation” of Palestinians, says Issa Samander, a former Palestinian activist in the West Bank, who sees the seeds of a new Palestinian uprising germinating. “[Israelis] don’t know the new generation.... They will be surprised.”

But for religious settlers, it goes beyond safety to a sense of mission. This is why Roi Harel still lives in his home on a windswept hill surrounded by Arab villages, with the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv visible in the distance.

One morning last March, while his five kids and wife were still sleeping, Mr. Harel opened his door on his way out to serve in the army reserves. Suddenly, in the predawn darkness, two Palestinian teenagers assaulted him with baseball bats and knives. They pushed him back into his home, down a corridor. Unarmed and wounded, he was all that stood between the assailants and his family. He shouted to his wife to call security. Then, somehow, he managed to push the intruders outdoors. Soon thereafter, security forces found the Palestinians and killed them.

Palestinians, many of whom feel justified in defending their homeland by force, pointed out that six times as many Palestinians as Israelis had been killed in the most recent wave of violence.

Netanyahu, for his part, called Harel to congratulate him on his bravery, while local schoolchildren made a sign for the family’s front door that celebrated “the hero.”

For some Israelis, formally extending the country’s sovereignty to the West Bank is fundamentally opposed to its nature as a Jewish and democratic state. For either Israel would have to absorb so many Palestinians that Arabs would become the majority in the near future, or it would have to relegate Palestinians to a different civil or legal status.

Palestinians, for their part, already see Israel’s claim to being a democracy as a sham. Not far from the West Bank settlement of Eli, a small outpost called Amona has become a firestorm of controversy, a symbolic battle against the entire settlement enterprise and its legal underpinnings. Palestinians claiming ownership of the land celebrated when Israel’s High Court of Justice ordered the outpost evacuated. The government complied earlier this month. But its offers of compensation and resettlement, as well as a new law to legalize homes built on private Palestinian land, are seen as running counter to the court decision.

“I feel the democracy in Israel is just for their people,” says Mayor Abdulrahman Saleh in the neighboring Palestinian town of Silwad, who has been involved in the legal battle. “But for Palestinians, either in [historical Palestine] or here--it is like Bashar al-Assad,” he adds referring to the Syrian strongman. “It is dictatorial.”

Hilik Bar, the deputy speaker of Israel’s Knesset (parliament) and a friend of Roth’s since her Labor Party days, is among the shrinking minority of Israelis who haven’t given up on a Palestinian state.

As head of the lobby for the two-state solution since 2013, Mr. Bar has pitched his plan to the Knesset and the Israeli president. He’s gone to Ramallah to talk to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president. He’s even consulted with leaders from the broader Arab and Muslim world, whose support he sees as crucial for such a deal.

He insists that a two-state solution can be achieved without endangering Israel’s security.

“Look, Israel is surrounded by many, many enemy states with ordinary armies, with long-range missiles, with tanks, with combat jets--and we are living. We won five [or] six wars in seven decades against almighty armies of Arab states, because we have a very strong army and the most courageous soldiers that you will meet,” Bar says. “And this is why it seems to me very defeatist to assume that ... we should be afraid to do a peace agreement because of a small, demilitarized ... state that will be in some of the areas in Judea and Samaria.”

It’s not that he’s sanguine about the Palestinian leadership. In fact, he says he has “no confidence” that Mr. Abbas can broker a deal. “He’s not strong, he’s not always reliable, he’s often closing his eyes against incitement,” says Bar. But, he adds, “We will never find a Palestinian president who will be a great Zionist and have ... an Israeli flag in his office.”

#Israel #Israeli right wing #Anat Roth #Netanyahu #naftali bennett #Israeli settlers #Israel-Palestinian relations

[eretzyisrael]

How the international community sought to create an endless Israel-Palestinian war

By SETH J. FRANTZMAN

One of the remarkable outcomes of the recent Hamas war on Israel was the use of terminology that illustrates a larger goal designed to create conditions that justify Hamas “resistance” and claim Israel is a “settler” state. These terms, similar to the chants of “from the river to the sea” that span the far-left and far-right Hamas supporters are designed to assert that Israel should be destroyed as a country. They have origins in the international community’s attempt to undermine Israel from the first days of the state.

In no other place in the world has the international community worked so hard to try to erode the foundations of an internationally recognized state. It’s worth looking at the broader context of this. For instance when Israel was created in 1948 it was immediately attacked by several other countries. This was an illegal invasion and attack on a state whose creation had been backed by the United Nations. When Israel succeeded in defeating these countries the immediate response from the international community was not to help broker peace and aid the refugees that fled, but rather to create a situation in which Israel’s borders were called into question so as to create the conditions of excusing war against Israel.

There would be “cease fire agreements” which by their nature meant the war was not over, just waiting for the next round. At the same time the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who had fled the fighting were housed in refugee camps and a narrative created telling them they would soon return to their homes. This “right of return” which does not apply to other refugees everywhere, of which there have been hundreds of millions in the last century, was created to force Israel to take back refugees. If Israel didn’t, international organizations would create numerous groups to support the refugees until such time this took place.

Next began the terrorism against Israel, no condemnation by the UN or others for countries hosting “armed struggle” against Israel which provoked wars in 1956, 1982 and at other times. Israel was subjected to an illegal military blockade at this time to and non-recognition by most states in the region. 

When that had largely failed to destroy Israel the next step was arming of Egypt, Syria and other countries to fight Israel. The same countries arming these states also claimed that the “conflict” and solving it would solve all the region’s problems, but pouring arms into the region for endless wars against Israel was not seen as a problem. Israel’s defensive actions were condemned, including the raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, a reactor supplied by France. Instead of preventing countries like Iraq from pursuing existential threats to Israel, it was encouraged. 

At the same time the Palestinian “liberation” organizations that vowed to reconquer all of Israel were given praise at the UN even as Israel was routinely subjected to one sided critique and barred from various regional bodies, isolated and then its national movement called “racist.” Countries in the region were encouraged to use the excuse of fighting Israel to roll back democracy, crush dissidents and minorities, develop and import weapons and start various wars. At each turn whichever extremist regime, from Iran to Nasser’s Egypt, was able to use the Israel excuse as a crutch. The most outlandish comments from Saddam’s regime, firing Scuds illegally at Israel in 1991, to Iran’s comments about Israel go uncondemned in the international community. 

What is extraordinary is how at each juncture the international community did not play a positive role trying to foster peace. Instead when there were peace talks there were. Purposeful roadblocks put up to derail them. Talks always said that the “refugees” and “right of return” would be the last issue on the agenda, guaranteeing failure. Also Jerusalem would need to be divided. Meanwhile everything that came to Israel always was removed from international norms. Countries like Iran could target Jews in South America, terrorists targeted Israelis at the Olympics, Hamas was permitted to produce and stockpile missiles illegally and so was Hezbollah. At each turn it was always an excuse that so long as these groups targeted Israel their illegal arsenals could increase. The Palestinian Authority wasn’t even expected to have elections. Israel was kept out of CENTCOM and regional bodies to appease the regional states up until recently. 

Ridiculous obsession with Israel at the UN led everything to be warped just to attack Israel from the WHO to Women and Human Rights groups, to UNESCO. Every rule that applies to every country in the world was shifted regarding Israel being singled out. And now human rights groups have done the same regarding accusations of “apartheid.” There is no commonality between Israel’s system and apartheid, but the term had to be changed just to attack Israel. The term “settler state” was shifted from its original meaning relating to the New World states to apply to Israel, a country that is not made up of “settlers.” The supposed “two state” solution has now been tossed aside in favor of what the anti-Israel voices call “one state” and “from the river to the sea.” The accusations that all of Israel is “apartheid” is designed to cater to this alliance of Hamas and the progressive left against Israel. It doesn’t matter what Israel does, just defending itself with Iron Dome is now considered a reason to attack it. Similarly the use of the term “settler” to describe Israel, asserting that this gives it less rights, when numerous other states in North America and other places were created by “settlers.” Only in Israel’s case are migrants and refugees called “settlers.” 

Even when Israel tried to do what the international community has asked, withdraw from Gaza, the same community that made sure that failed chaotic Palestinian Authority elections would enable Hamas to take over Gaza. Then they say that Israel still “occupies” Gaza, when Israel left. Hamas is said to have a “right” to “resist occupation” and attack Israel with rockets, and if Israel blockades Hamas then it is said to be evidence of “occupation.” Similarly even though Israel left Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah is permitted to claim it must keep a massive arsenal to “resist” Israel because Israel “occupies” Lebanon, even though it doesn’t. This shows no matter how much Israel withdraws from the “occupation” will never end and the need for “resistance” will never end. The doctrine is “one state” and a “binational” state. Under no circumstance to international organizations say they won’t fund Palestinian groups that use maps showing all of historic Palestine as theirs, and no Israel. Even terms like “’48 Arabs” or “48 lands” are used. To deny the existence of Israel. No other country is subjected to this. No one says that India is “48 lands”. 

Only Israel is subjected to non-recognition by numerous countries, based often on religious hatred. Even as the Cold War ended and other disputes ended there was no push by the international community to recognize Israel. It is a conflict that began in 1948 and which many in the international community will use forever. Iran’s regime uses the conflict to excuse spreading chaos in the region and arming illegal extrajudicial groups. Why does Iran threaten Israel? That question is never asked. Why does the regime get to continually use the Palestinian issue to threaten? No other country randomly adopts a cause far away to threaten to destroy some other other country. For instance Burma may be accused of suppressing Rohingya, but Iran or Turkey don’t threaten the country’s destruction. Only with Israel. 

The international community has done nothing to try to create peace in the Middle East and prevent the stockpiling of rockets by Hezbollah, Iran’s brazen nuclear program and other issues. As long as these countries say they will “destroy” Israel, they get a pass. If they threaten any other country they are held to account. Even Jewish history is neatly removed, UNESCO declaring Hebron a heritage site but purposely focusing on the Mamluk and Ottoman period to remove any need to mention Jewish heritage in Hebron. The whole of world history changed just to ignore Jewish rights and role in historic Israel. 

This is not about Palestinian rights and a state. Because the nature of the argument, the “river to the sea” talk now said at western Universities, it all about ethnic cleansing of Israel. It is the only state in the world the western left leaning progressive will seek to ethnically-cleanse of its diverse population. It’s the only state they say that it has to provide full and equal rights to “all its citizens” and change its flag and anthem, but no other state in the Middle East must do so. It’s the only state where 4,000 rockets can be fired at it without condemnation or even mention of Hamas. It’s the only state where when there is a war there is a huge rise in attacks on Jews all around the world by the same people who claim “anti-Zionism” is not antisemitism. This is the reality in the wake of the Hamas war. 

Regardless of Israel’s mistakes, the international community’s failure to rein in extremist groups and to continue to enable the excuses about why there is a war is one of the root problems. Had the international community done more to say that groups like Hamas and Hezbollah shouldn’t have a de facto “right to resist” there might have been more peace long ago. 

#international community #israel-palestinian war #history #united nations #obsession #seth j frantzman