Dear friends,
I hope you have noticed the longer than
usual hiatus of my bulletins. The reason has
been due to happy family circumstances and a
wonderful five weeks in Israel that is gradually
returning to its amazing self.
One of the most
brilliant PR creations by the Arabs was the
invention of the term "OCCUPATION." Those of
you who read me regularly know full well that
this term is a propaganda ploy, or in short, a
LIE, with no reference in fact or legality.
Just as a reminder: 1) One cannot
"occupy" one's own territory. 2) Judea &
Samaria never had an official sovereign from
who to occupy.
You were challenged many times
here to supply me with a legal justification of
"occupation." I am still waiting to hear from
you...
Lately, the "occupation" charade has
been loosing steam. The chance of a
"Palestinian" state within the the small area
between the Jordan River and the sea is being
squashed by three major events: The Arab
"Spring," the latest Gaza war and the brutal
Islamic violence of ISIS. Lack of leadership in
the empty White House is another reason.
The left, now
deprived of the buzz word "occupation," had
to invent a new buzz word lie. They came up
with "civil rights."
I urge you to read the superb
article by Vic Rosenthal in his blog ABU YEHUDA.
I take this opportunity to congratulate Vic and
his wife Lise on their recent Aliya to Israel.
No more Fresno Zionism for Vic. Now it's Zionism
Zionism.
Your Truth Provider,
Yuval.
Why the Palestinian Arabs lack civil rights
By Vic Rosenthal
Israel’s Left is unhappy. Nobody
votes for their parties and their chance of
returning to power is negligible. You can see
them boiling with frustration — they used to run
things here, and now they are a permanent
opposition, reduced to increasingly hysterical
announcements that “time is running out” on a
peaceful solution with the Palestinian Arabs.
Outside of Israel they are still
taken seriously, primarily because of their
well-funded — by the Europeans and left-wing
American sources — English-language propaganda
organs and NGOs. It doesn’t seem to occur to
those Israeli progressives who still think that
there is room in the world for a Jewish state
that they may be compromising their Zionism by
accepting the largesse of people who oppose
Jewish self-determination.
Some are giving up,
making
plans to emigrate, to
rejoin the Diaspora that their parents and
grandparents suffered immensely to escape.
Others think that their
fundamental conception — that Israeli Jews have
it in their power to bring about peace and
reconciliation with the Arabs by being more
forthcoming, more prepared to sacrifice — is
correct, and it only needs to be sold more
effectively. None of them seem to think that
this premise is simply wrong.
So journalist
Noam Sheizaf writes
in the European
and American-Left funded +972 Magazine that “the
problem of the occupation” needs to be solved
in a new way, because they will not get
Israelis to agree to commit suicide by
agreeing to a Palestinian state in Judea and
Samaria. Forget “two states,” he says, and
concentrate on a “civil rights struggle” for
Palestinians.
This is a stroke of
unmitigated PR genius. If anything will play
to the hearts and open up the coffers of
well-meaning Europeans and Americans, it is
‘civil rights’. It immediately
makes the comparison to the African-American
movement of the 1960s and the anti-apartheid
struggle in South Africa. It immediately pushes
aside the question of Israel’s security, for
which there is no analogy in these other civil
rights campaigns.
The analogy breaks
down in several essential ways. The US and
South Africa were not surrounded by hostile
states allied with their black residents.
The American civil-rights movement was not
dominated by groups whose charters called for the violent
expulsion or killing of whites, and which
had already killed thousands in terrorist
attacks. South Africa really was an
apartheid state, characterized by explicit
institutionalized racism.
What does he think
count as civil rights issues?
The fact that Palestinians do not enjoy freedom of movement. The fact that they have been tried in military courts for almost half a century. The limits on their freedom of speech and their right to freely assemble. The lack of proper detainee rights (including minors). The disrespect for their property rights, and, of course, their lack of political rights.
The justification
for all of these limitations, as everyone
knows, is security. The right to freely
assemble, for example is limited when the
assembly is a riot in which Palestinians and
supporters try to destroy the security
barrier and throw rocks and firebombs at
police and soldiers. Freedom of movement is
limited in order to prevent terrorists from
killing Jewish Israelis; and plenty of them
have been stopped by the barriers that are
so strongly criticized.
It is certainly true
that these measures are inconvenient, unfair and
oppressive to Palestinians who are not
terrorists. The alternative,
however, isn’t to dismantle them in the name
of civil rights and hope for the best.
That’s suicide.
Sheizaf is right that
the two-state solution idea is dead. He is right
that Palestinian Arabs living in the territories
do not have the same rights as Jews and Arabs in
Israel. He is right that this is bad for Arabs
and Jews alike.
But what he doesn’t
understand is that ending the conflict isn’t
up to us. Israel has already done more than
what ought to be expected of it, and result
has only been wars, intifadas, and the
further radicalization of Palestinian Arabs.
The root
of the problem is the Palestinians’
adherence to a false historical narrative
and to ideologies that do not accept the
existence of a Jewish state (and in some
cases, like Hamas, the physical presence of
Jews) in the Middle East. It is nurtured by
the continuous propaganda coming from the
terrorist organizations that own Palestinian
politics, the anti-Jewish attitudes that
permeate international institutions like the
UN, and the complicity of the West.
Israel
didn’t create this situation, and it can’t
fix it.
The key to
the solution to the problem, if there is one,
is in the hands of the Palestinian Arabs, who
will have to give up for good the idea of
replacing Israel with an Arab state. Unless a
Palestinian leadership arises that understands
this, the conflict will continue, and so will
the limitations on the rights of Palestinian
Arabs.
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