Let me say from the beginning that I don’t hate anyone as a general rule. I look for and desire to see the good in every human being as I believe everyone else should do as well. If someone has been influenced by an evil mindset in ideology, then my first reaction is not to commence hating that person but rather to make an attempt to shake that person out of that destructive mindset by using logic and reason, along with a persuasive passion for what is spiritually right and true.However, because this is not always possible regardless of the amount of truth that is placed before certain individuals, and because there are those who will always love the evil inwardly more than righteousness, I believe that there can is righteous-based hatred regarding some humans. I don’t believe in living a life for the sole purpose of hating for any cause as do certain political, religious, and non-religious hate groups. But there are things in this life (including evil devoted people) of whom it's righteous to hate.
God judges hatred along with all motivations of the human heart by His law and not by man’s westernized liberal conceptions. There is a big difference between hating your personal enemy on a personal level for personal reasons, and hating an enemy of God on a spiritual level for spiritual reasons. Examine what the scripture states:
"Do not I hate them, O YHVH, that hate thee? And am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred: They are become mine enemies. Search me, O God, and know my heart: Try me, and know my thoughts; And see if there be any wicked way in me, And lead me in the way everlasting." - Psalms 139:21-24. (also see II Chronicles 19:2)
In this segment from the book of Psalms, the psalmist was searching his heart before God in which he was making sure that his godly resistance towards his enemies - in the form of righteous hatred - was in check. In this passage Israel’s enemies are the ones who hates God. For the psalmist, his thought was that if he did not have a "perfect" hatred towards God’s enemies, then his thoughts of not hating God's enemy would be of a wicked way within his heart. From my point of view, the politically-correct secular world could learn volumes from the simple declaration that this psalmist proclaimed and of which the first and second Jewish Temple singers sang the psalm:1
“Do not I hate them, O YHVH that hate thee?” and "I hate them (God's enemies) with a perfect hatred"
.
I have heard people say that they may hate the things evil people do but not the person themselves. I agree with that concept in general but not as an overall concept. An individual can sink so much into evil that they become “as one” with their wickedness. There is a place in the realms of evil where a person has sold out "soul" lock, stock and barrel in effect crossing the point of no return where their whole lives can only be devoted as an enemy against God. Such was the case with Pharaoh during the time of the Exodus whose heart become more hardened after each manifestation of the ten plagues of Egypt.
To bring this reality into modern times, I do not and cannot love any part of Adolph Hitler including his very soul. I not only hate the things that he did on earth but I also hate him spiritually as God's enemy as well. How about you? Are you a hater of Hitler's very soul?
Fact: There is no separation between Hitler's soul and his Holocaust deeds that he did on earth both now and forever.
Hitler made a choice to become the image of evil rather than expressing the image of God he was made in. I don’t believe God loves him but rather hates him insomuch that Hitler’s soul (and not just the things he did) is in a place of the eternally damned where he will be forever separated from the God of mercy, justice, and righteousness. So in trying to be like minded with God’s thinking towards Hitler, I hate the expressed devil that Hitler was and forever shall be known. I not only believe that it's a righteous act to hate Hitler, but in fact it would be evil of me or anyone else not to do so as the above Psalm of David plainly points out. Furthermore, the so-called do-gooders who actually love Hitler are the ones most likely to support him and his deeds.
.
Hitler is not the only ambassador of evil to walk around in human form. I feel the same way with the likes of other such devils as Yassier Arafat, Louis Farrakhan, David Duke, and now Jimmy Carter who has devoted the rest of his evil life to the cause of Israel's murderous enemy. These men are not simply misguided fools that are followers of evil (a place where true repentance and the turning away from evil are still available to such a person) but they are in fact actual leaders and forgoers of evil for the sole purpose of leading others in their evil!
Since false prophets don’t repent, (no false prophet in the Bible ever did) I have no desire to pray for these men and others like them for a change of their evil ways. Rather, I choose to pray according to God’s promise to them which is for their destruction as God sees fit according to their relentless evil and unrepentant deeds upon this earth.
"And He repays those who hate Him to their face, to destroy them. He will not be slow to repay him who hates Him. He will repay him to his face." - Deuteronomy 7:10 (See also Isaiah 59:18).
Therefore, my Bible-guided prayer is, "May YHVH according to His holy and righteous Torah promise, repay the Arab-Palestinians to their face, along with and all who support them in their terrorist-expressed hatred acts against YHVH's chosen people."
The Palestinians:
There isn't a greater enemy towards the nation of Israel in all the world today than the Palestinians! The Palestinians have taken the title from the German Nazis as "the greatest threat" to the Jewish nation. Mein Kamph gave way to Jihadi - both meaning "my struggles" in both German and Arabic. When Hitler's struggles expired the Islamic struggles picked up the banner. What now is at stake in the conflict between the Jews and the Palestinians that wasn't at stake during Hitler's Final Solution is the possibility of the most evil people in all the earth, worshiping the most evil god (their god Allah), in the most holiest place (Jerusalem and the Temple Mount) in all the world!
The rebirth of Israel as a nation has given rise to Allah (an Arabian deity) wanting to be worshiped by his subjects at the very place designed for the God of Israel to be worshiped (see Psalms 132:13,14). Just the possibility of this scenario alone should show the secularists that there is a God of Israel that holds an everlasting covenant with the Jewish people (see Psalms 105:8-10). For it is impossible to ask for better stage to be set from what we see in the Middle East today to begin an all out "end of the age" showdown between good and evil.
.
There has never been of people in modern times besides the Palestinians whose paradigm is terrorism and whose ultimate goal as a people in the world is towards the annihilation of another people based upon their religion and spirituality. What makes this fact all the more significant is that the Palestinians are given the world's support (7.4 billion dollars worth of support recently > http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1207/west.php3) in their terrorist endeavors and annihilation aspirations, and this was after the Palestinians as a people overwhelmingly voted in the party of Hamas to run their government in January 2006!
.
There has never been of people in modern times besides the Palestinians whose paradigm is terrorism and whose ultimate goal as a people in the world is towards the annihilation of another people based upon their religion and spirituality. What makes this fact all the more significant is that the Palestinians are given the world's support (7.4 billion dollars worth of support recently > http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1207/west.php3) in their terrorist endeavors and annihilation aspirations, and this was after the Palestinians as a people overwhelmingly voted in the party of Hamas to run their government in January 2006!
World actions of this nature adds a greater significance to the end-time war between good and evil (Ezekiel 38:16-23). Besides the 7.4 billion pledged the to Palestinians, billions of dollars more are added in the form of state of the art weaponry being sold to the enemies of Israel >http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/07/28/saudi.arms/.
Along with the billions of dollars that the UN is pledging to the Palestinians, the world's plan for tiny Israel becomes very clear! If the nations hadn't taken upon themselves to support Israel's greatest enemies there would not have been a need for Zechariah 12:9 to have been written: "And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem."
.
To try and understand the depth of the very evil that lies within the Palestinian society, one must look at what they as a society are capable of. The following is a very small and incomplete list as to the kind of things that comes forth from out of the Palestinian people. While viewing this list ask yourself, "Why are the world nations (especially the United States lead by a conservative president) are so desperately seeking to grant these Palestinians (of all people) any kind of a political state?"
Remember, O YHVH , the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof. O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
The psalmist is not promoting that idea of killing innocent children for the sake of killing children. That would be what the enemies of the Bible and Israel would have you believe! This is the same mindset that the "Human Rights Watch" tried to sell the world (which the world willfully bought) when they accused Israel of killing 54 children in Qana, Lebanon during the 2006 Lebanon-Israeli War. Because of their spiritual state they didn't have the ability nor the will to considered the 4,000 rockets that was shot from civilian locations into Israel to start the war by which was indeed meant to kill as many Israeli citizens including children as possible!
When given over to dark forces the human mind can no longer judge between good and evil. This scripture in the book of Psalms is about God's judgment (of what He will allow to occur) in the form of reaping and sowing. Babylon had "dashed" Jewish babies against stones in their invasion against the Jewish people much like the Palestinians shoot rockets targeting Jewish school children. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6977346.stm The scripture of Psalms 137:7-9 is stating that what the Babylonians did against the Jews would divinely return back to them in the form of the coming Persian Empire. In fact, one could argue that Babylon is still reaping from their deeds of old in today's Iraq!
Likewise, the prophet Ezekiel has declared that Israel's enemies would reap what they have sown at the End of Days (Ezekiel. 35: 5-11). Keep in mind that Psalm 137 is one of the most Zionistic portions of scripture in the entire Bible. In it we find the great love for God's chosen people - the Jews, and for Zion - God's chosen place of worship. But also we find in it a bitter hatred for all those who hate and try to kill God's chosen and possess Zion for their own - kind of like what the Palestinians do.
So why do I hate the Palestinians? Simply put; because God does! Not that every single Palestinian is hated by God, for I know that God loves Palestinians such as Walid Shoebat - a Palestinian who has a deep devoted love for Israel and Israel's covenant with YHVH. But according to the Hebrew scriptures God hates all those who hate His covenant with Israel, which puts the Arab-Palestinians as a people first in line to be hated by God!
.
To try and understand the depth of the very evil that lies within the Palestinian society, one must look at what they as a society are capable of. The following is a very small and incomplete list as to the kind of things that comes forth from out of the Palestinian people. While viewing this list ask yourself, "Why are the world nations (especially the United States lead by a conservative president) are so desperately seeking to grant these Palestinians (of all people) any kind of a political state?"
- Among the two great political parties that rule the Palestinians (Al-Fatah in the West Bank, and Hamas in the Gaza Strip) both covenants from both parties call for for an arms struggle and the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel. http://www.iris.org.il/plochart.htm http://www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/documents/charter.html
- The greatest forms of child abuse in all the world occur among the Palestinians. Children who are barely old enough to speak are taught to Jew-hate with words they don't even understand. http://www.youtube.com/watchv=ZL0C2QvqIlo This gives heed to the saying, "they drink the hatred with their mother's milk"! Just the picture alone (at the top of the article) speaks volumes of the Palestinian society.
- Children TV shows are shown in the name of Shahid (martyrdom). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi-c6lbFGC4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4zgURMOZ6k
- Shahid (martyrdom) for children is glorified of official PA and Hamas television. http://www.pmw.org.il/ASK%20FOR%20DEATH.htm
- An exhibition of glorifying and celebrating suicide / mass murder is displayed with Palestinian gleeful acceptance at Al Najah University in the West Bank town of Nablus in September, 2001. http://www.gamla.org.il/english/feature/sbarro.htm This exhibition included many displays of body parts one of which was a bloody set of blue-jean wearing legs with no torso connected, still sitting on a chair. The bombing of Sbarro pizza restaurant in Jerusalem in which the exhibition re-enacts hits a little close to home. My wife and I personally eat there three years before this massacre occurred.
- School text books promote anti-Israel and pro shahid-martyrdom. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/patext1.html http://www.edume.org/research/testimonies/2007-05-15.html http://www.pmw.org.il/getresults/political/index.html#i214759
- Women who sends their sons to Jew-murder are given high status in Palestinian society, even to run for a government office. http://www.amitiesquebec-israel.org/texts/mother.htm
- Suicide murderers are glorified all through Palestinian controlled areas, in the form of billboards, street names, names of soccer fields, trading cards, names of hospitals, new babies named after suicide bombers, and children's events, songs, chants, and poems during parades, ect. http://programs.ssrc.org/gsc/gsc_quarterly/newsletter5/content/allen/ http://www.zoa.org/2003/07/palestinian_aut_13.htm Even "Saddam Hussein" whose Scud missiles hitting Tel-Aviv civilian areas brought Palestinian cheers, is honored in the Palestinian city of Jenin> http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53882
- Suicide for the murder of Jews is an accepted norm and is a high form of religious devotion. Outside of martyrdom, there is no guarantee of reaching paradise for oneself and family members. This is one of the reasons candy is passed out in celebration at suicide / murderer's funeral. http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/013234.php
- One Hundred Thousand citizens of the would-be future State of Palestine attended the funeral of Yahya Ayyash (a.k.a. "the Engineer") not to mention the many funerals of other Palestinian terrorist and terrorist spiritual teachers like Sheikh Ahmed Yassin! I wonder how many of these one hundred thousand funeral attendees of Yahya Ayyash would consider themselves Palestinian moderates? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash Moreover, this Palestinian hero has traffic squares named after him in both Jenin and Jericho with no Palestinian complaints. Imagine that! This issue of glorifying and mass murderer among the Palestinians even became part of "peace" negotiation with such a people. See "article 6" section "h" > http://www.israelmfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace+Process/Guide+to+the+Peace+Process/Israeli+View+on+Palestinian+Security+Commitments.htm?DisplayMode=print
- Palestinians seek to destroy the God of Israel through a revised history of Holocaust and Temple denial, and stand as a barricade between God and His fulfillment of the covenant He has with His chosen people, the Jews. http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/facultyforum.cgi?ID=1735
Muslim religious fervor has many different facets of Jew-murdering expressions that are fully exposed in the Palestinian society. From passing out candy at shahid funerals to eating flesh and drinking blood of Jewish victims as they did on October 12, 2000 in Ramallah> http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/014886.php Yet, the Muslim world has the audacity to vilify Israel as the blood-libel people and state. It is these Palestinians who are on the front lines (even occupying a huge portion of the ancient land of Israel) in the Islamic war against the God of Israel!
The 64,000 dollar question: Does the God of Israel "hate" the Palestinians?
The politically-correct answer would be, "God loves everybody". However, the Bible is never politically correct. The Bible states very clearly that God hated Esau, who like the Palestinians wished to destroy Jacob / Israel.
"I have loved you, saith YHVH. Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou loved us? Was not Esau Jacob's brother? saith YHVH: yet I loved Jacob, And I hated (Hebrew: sanay-ti) Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness. Malachi 1:2,3
The New Testament correctly applies this scripture of God's hatred of an individual as also to the nation that proceeded from that individual (see Romans 9:12,13). The land that should be considered for a Palestinian state is all contained in the ancient writings of which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about -the Bible. Aside from Mecca, the Palestinian spiritual base is that of Esau's - Mt. Seir in Jordan, which is why the prophecies of Ezekiel against Israel's most vicious enemy is not against the West Bank, for that is Israel's land and not the Palestinians! http://www.danielpipes.org/article/298
Take another look at the list above as to what the Palestinians are capable of and then see if you notice any similarities in the following scripture: "Because thou hast had a perpetual hatred, and hast shed the blood of the children of Israel by the force of the sword in the time of their calamity, in the time that their iniquity had an end...Because thou hast said, These two nations and these two countries shall be mine, and we will possess it; [sound familiar? > http://inbrief.threatswatch.org/2006/02/palestine-from-the-river-to-th/ ] whereas YHVH was there: Therefore, as I live saith YHVH God, I will even do according to thine anger, and according to thine envy which thou hast used out of thy hatred against them; and I will make Myself known among them, when I have judged thee. - Ezekiel 35:5, 10-111
One of the hardest scriptures for most people to understand and one that I personally had an atheist use in trying to discredit the Bible, is Psalms 137:7-9 which reads:Remember, O YHVH , the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof. O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
The psalmist is not promoting that idea of killing innocent children for the sake of killing children. That would be what the enemies of the Bible and Israel would have you believe! This is the same mindset that the "Human Rights Watch" tried to sell the world (which the world willfully bought) when they accused Israel of killing 54 children in Qana, Lebanon during the 2006 Lebanon-Israeli War. Because of their spiritual state they didn't have the ability nor the will to considered the 4,000 rockets that was shot from civilian locations into Israel to start the war by which was indeed meant to kill as many Israeli citizens including children as possible!
When given over to dark forces the human mind can no longer judge between good and evil. This scripture in the book of Psalms is about God's judgment (of what He will allow to occur) in the form of reaping and sowing. Babylon had "dashed" Jewish babies against stones in their invasion against the Jewish people much like the Palestinians shoot rockets targeting Jewish school children. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6977346.stm The scripture of Psalms 137:7-9 is stating that what the Babylonians did against the Jews would divinely return back to them in the form of the coming Persian Empire. In fact, one could argue that Babylon is still reaping from their deeds of old in today's Iraq!
Likewise, the prophet Ezekiel has declared that Israel's enemies would reap what they have sown at the End of Days (Ezekiel. 35: 5-11). Keep in mind that Psalm 137 is one of the most Zionistic portions of scripture in the entire Bible. In it we find the great love for God's chosen people - the Jews, and for Zion - God's chosen place of worship. But also we find in it a bitter hatred for all those who hate and try to kill God's chosen and possess Zion for their own - kind of like what the Palestinians do.
So why do I hate the Palestinians? Simply put; because God does! Not that every single Palestinian is hated by God, for I know that God loves Palestinians such as Walid Shoebat - a Palestinian who has a deep devoted love for Israel and Israel's covenant with YHVH. But according to the Hebrew scriptures God hates all those who hate His covenant with Israel, which puts the Arab-Palestinians as a people first in line to be hated by God!
As God commanded Israel to hate Amalek that his name be blotted out from under heaven for his deeds in using cowardly acts against Israel in possessing her land of inheritance (Deuteronomy 25:17-19) the modern Amaleks of today should be hated for their cowardly terrorist attacks on Jewish civilians who claim their land of inheritance as well. May Arafat's name and the names of those who support his goal be blotted out from under heaven! Amen? Amen!
"The boastful shall not stand in Your sight; You hate all workers of iniquity." - Psalms 5:5
"YHVH tests the righteous, But the wicked and the one who loves violence [terrorist Palestinians] His soul hates." - Pslams 11:5
Do not I hate them, O YHVH, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies. Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. - Psalms 139: 21-24
.
Notes:
1. Psalms chapters 107-150 (the fifth section of the Pslams in the Hebrew Bible) are mostly liturgical psalms for pilgrimages to the temple and festivals.
"The boastful shall not stand in Your sight; You hate all workers of iniquity." - Psalms 5:5
"YHVH tests the righteous, But the wicked and the one who loves violence [terrorist Palestinians] His soul hates." - Pslams 11:5
Do not I hate them, O YHVH, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies. Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. - Psalms 139: 21-24
.
Notes:
1. Psalms chapters 107-150 (the fifth section of the Pslams in the Hebrew Bible) are mostly liturgical psalms for pilgrimages to the temple and festivals.
3,878 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 401 – 600 of 3878 Newer› Newest»The website TimesofIsrael.com has an article titled
"Meet the Makuya, Israel’s most unwavering supporters"
Abraham Teshima’s ‘New Zionism’ movement was born in Japan in May 1948, as Israel declared independence. It was no coincidence
By AVIVA AND SHMUEL BAR-AM
30 May 2015, 9:46 am
Makuya members march in Jerusalem (Shmuel Bar-Am)Makuya members march in Jerusalem (Shmuel Bar-Am)Shavuot study at the Jerusalem Makuya Center (Shmuel Bar-Am)Shavuot study at the Jerusalem Makuya Center (Shmuel Bar-Am)Makuya members march in Jerusalem (Shmuel Bar-Am)Makuya members march in Jerusalem (Shmuel Bar-Am)Jerusalem Makuya Center director Asher Seito Kimura, his wife Tzofiya and their children Shmuel Bar-Am)Jerusalem Makuya Center director Asher Seito Kimura, his wife Tzofiya and their children Shmuel Bar-Am)Makuya members at the Jerusalem center (Shmuel Bar-Am)Makuya members at the Jerusalem center (Shmuel Bar-Am)
For some time now, I’ve been singing the Israeli national anthem with less fervor than in the past. Indeed, despite the Zionist zeal that brought me to Israel nearly five decades ago and which will undoubtedly keep me rooted to this country forever, I may have become a bit jaded. And so have many of my friends.
Small wonder, then, that when a group of us spent an evening with members of the Japanese Makuya in Jerusalem, we could barely hold back our tears. For when they sang “Zion, Zion, Zion” under the Israeli flag, their enthusiasm and shouts of joy could have raised the roof. With a collective lump in our throats, my friends and I were carried back to a simpler time, when it had all seemed only a matter of survival – and Israel had somehow survived.
The Makuya movement was born in May of 1948, the same month and year in which Israel declared its independence. But the Makuya don’t believe in coincidence. In fact, they consider the establishment of the modern State of Israel and the reunification of Jerusalem 19 years later to be the fulfillment of biblical prophecies, miraculous works of God.
Often called New Zionism, the Makuya movement was founded by a successful Japanese businessman, the late professor Abraham Ikuro Teshima. Professor Teshima was a deeply religious Christian who had early on become disenchanted with the established Church and its western trappings. But he hadn’t yet heard the Divine voice. That would come later, a few years after World War II.
Following the Japanese defeat, Teshima tried to help his starving countrymen by producing bread out of seaweed. But it tasted awful, and the factories closed down. Then an American army camp near his home decided to expand. Teshima heard the news from his son, who reported with sorrow that the Americans were planning to close his elementary school and take over the property on which it stood.
Teshima immediately organized a large protest that greatly angered the Americans. When a friend warned Teshima of his imminent arrest, he went into hiding in the wilderness. It was while he was in the volcanic Aso Mountains that he had a personal encounter with God, and heard a phrase from the book of Amos: “I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.”
Now he understood that the Japanese famine was not physical, but spiritual. He realized that the Japanese had to return to the basics, to the source – to God. When he was able to safely return home, he closed his business and began teaching the Bible. He had only a handful of students in the beginning. But it was a start, and soon afterwards he founded the Makuya.
Teshima maintained that in order to grasp the spirit of the Bible, it was essential to reach a deeper understanding of the Jewish faith, its people, language and history. Unfortunately, his burning desire to visit Israel was delayed for many years, until Japan and Israel established diplomatic relations in 1961.
As luck would have it, however, in 1954 Teshima met his first Israeli – while riding on a Japanese train. He thought the people next to him might be speaking Hebrew and when he inquired, in English, he learned that they were from Israel. One of them was Professor Israel Slomnitzki, on a mission from the Israeli Agriculture Ministry. The two struck up an immediate friendship, corresponded for years, and in 1961 Slomnitzki invited Teshima to visit his homeland.
Jerusalem Makuya Center director Asher Seito Kimura, his wife Tzofiya and their children (Shmuel Bar-Am)
Jerusalem Makuya Center director Asher Seito Kimura, his wife Tzofiya and their children (Shmuel Bar-Am)
Once here, Teshima was unhappy that so many of Israel’s holy sites were covered up with churches. But he was delighted to meet pioneers, thrilled at their effort to create a viable state, and convinced that the soul of Judaism was alive and well. So taken was Teshima with the Jewish state that he returned a number of times, bringing some of his disciples along.
Soon Makuya members had begun studying Hebrew at the ulpan in Kibbutz Hefziba. Many ulpan graduates have gone on to schools of higher learning in Israel: to date 1,060 students have attended classes or graduated from Bar Ilan University and the Hebrew University, the Technion, and the universities in Haifa and Beersheba. They learn archaeology, Bible and Jewish thought as well as music and other subjects, and their mastery of Hebrew is amazing.
And the Makuya movement is growing fast. They prefer not to give an exact number, citing David’s sinful census of his fighting men (2 Shmuel 24:2). But over 300,000 Japanese subscribe to the Makuya newsletter. Thousands of Makuya have already been on pilgrimages to Israel, with thousands more planning to come.
Four students (out of the 35 currently in Israel) live at the Jerusalem Makuya Center, along with its new director Asher Seito Kimura, his wife Tzofiya and their children. Each Makuya member has a Hebrew name, taken by or given to him or her upon arrival in Israel. They chat easily about their faith, which is based heavily on the Old Testament and doesn’t contain even a hint of proselytism. But none of the Makuya will discuss politics. They will talk with feeling, however, about their position on Israel. Every Makuya, they say proudly, identifies with — and wholeheartedly supports — the State of Israel.
Outward manifestations of support began in 1967, before the onset of the Six Day War, when Teshima set up the “Israel Emergency Relief Committee of Japan.” He flew to Israel with relief goods as soon as the war broke out, and not long afterwards he entered reunited Jerusalem to pray at the Western Wall.
Six years later, Israel was attacked by the combined forces of Egypt and Syria. A threatened oil boycott had caused Japan to reverse its normally neutral position and adopt a blatantly pro-Arab stand.
“Israel cannot, indeed must not, be forsaken in her time of need,” declared Teshima. Although gravely ill, he organized a large pro-Israel demonstration in downtown Tokyo. It extended over two kilometers and more than 3,000 men, women and children sang joyful Hebrew songs as they danced in the streets. Teshima, who had put his heart and soul into the demonstration, insisted on participating despite the bitter winter cold. He died three weeks later, at the age of 63.
Makuya members march in Jerusalem (Shmuel Bar-Am)
No leader has taken Teshima’s place, but the Makuya follow in his path. They planted several forests in Teshima’s honor, and every few years, Makuya members come to Israel in large numbers to celebrate Independence Day.
Makuya, in Hebrew, translates as “tent of meeting” – the Hebrew ohel moed or the place where man encounters God. Teshima taught that you can find God anywhere, and that it is not necessary to pray in a church. Therefore Makuya worship in houses where they also read the Bible, and study its lessons.
Like Teshima himself, a Makuya minister is called a teacher, and he is well versed in the Bible and other sources. Often he has a regular job and leads his congregation only on the weekends. The Makuya object to institutionalized Christianity and there is no central Makuya religious authority, although a committee of district representatives meets every few months to discuss the movement. Baptism is spiritual — a coming of age ceremony when boys and girls reach the age of 13 and accept adult responsibilities. It takes place on Mount Aso, where Teshima had his encounter with the Lord.
Asher, who completed archaeological studies here in 2005, is responsible for those Japanese students and foreign workers in Israel who belong to the Makuya movement (not all of the Japanese in Israel are Makuya, he reminded me). He also receives guests and delegations from Japan, organizes cultural evenings for Israelis and trips for Makuya members, and leads prayers on the Sabbath.
Each of the Makuya with whom I spoke emphasized that the Israelis they meet take them into their hearts. Said one: “We feel like Israelis, like we are at home.”
The website www.ucg.org has an article titled -
UCG.org / Beyond Today / Beyond Today Magazine / Who Are the Palestinians?
Posted on Jun 7, 2018 by Tom Robinson
The Israeli Jews are regularly accused of invading and occupying land that is not theirs—the land of Palestine that purportedly belongs to the indigenous Palestinian people. But just who are the Palestinians? Is the land theirs? What is the truth?
A young man holding a Palestinian flag. Ahmed Abu Hameeda/Unsplash
Just who are the Palestinian people?
To the Arab nations, the birth of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948 is not a cause for celebration but what they call the Nakba or “Disaster.” Israel’s declaration of statehood was followed immediately by an invasion by surrounding Arab nations who told non-Jewish, Muslim inhabitants of the land that was then called Palestine, mostly Arabs themselves, to join the struggle or temporarily evacuate while the Israelis were conquered—and to then return to a Jew-free country. And many indeed left.
But events didn’t go as planned. The Israeli Jews defeated the invading Arab forces, and the inhabitants who had left became displaced, most relocating to Arab countries where they were not absorbed into the general populace but lived as refugees. A similar situation occurred nearly 20 years later in the 1967 Six-Day War, resulting in many more fleeing or being expelled and joining the refugees in Arab countries.
The non-Jewish inhabitants of the land, including the many of them who scattered as refugees, came to be known as the Palestinians. Most of these people now live in Jordan and in the territories known as the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and in lesser numbers in Syria, Lebanon and other countries.
The article continues
"They often portray themselves as indigenous people of the land they say is properly called Palestine, or Filastin in Arabic. The claim is made that the Zionist Jews who migrated to the land from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s had no legitimate national claim to the land—land they were supposedly stealing from the long-established ancient Palestinians. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently said that Israel is “a colonial enterprise that has nothing to do with Jewishness”—as if the Jews are foreign invaders of “Palestinian” land.
Is that what actually happened 70 years ago and in the decades before and after? To whom does the land actually belong? And just who are the Palestinian people?
Indigenous Canaanites or Arabs from elsewhere?
As history shows, the idea of a “Palestinian” people or nation is an invention. No such ethnically or culturally distinct people of this name has ever existed. It is clear that the Palestinians of today are mostly Arabs, yet from many other areas, along with various other peoples.
Palestinian leaders, however, insist on wild claims. In Mahmoud Abbas’ words: ‘We said to him [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu], when he claimed the Jews have a historical right dating back to 3000 years B.C.E., we say that the nation of Palestine upon the land of Canaan had a 7,000-year history. This is the truth that must be said: Netanyahu, you are incidental in history. We are the people of history. We are the owners of history’” (quoted by David Bukay, “Founding National Myths: Fabricating Palestinian History,” Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2012).
The Palestinian Authority leader prior to Abbas, Yasser Arafat, claimed that the Palestinians are descendants of the Jebusites, the Canaanite people of ancient Jerusalem.
Yet consider these words of the Palestinian Hamas interior and national security minister, Fathi Hammad, in March 2012: “Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called al-Masri [the Egyptian], whose roots are Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Dumietta, from the north, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians; we are Arabs. We are Muslims. We are part of you. Egyptians! Personally, half my family is Egyptian—and the other half are Saudis” (quoted by Pinhas Inbari, “Who Are the Palestinians?” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Aug. 7, 2017, emphasis added throughout). Indeed, Palestinian last names show many other national origins.
Note what they are not —a unique people group indigenous to ancient Palestine. In fact, Arafat and his compatriots admitted as much. In a March 31, 1977, interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) executive committee member Zahir Muhsein said:
“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism” (quoted by Joseph Farah, “Palestinian People Do Not Exist,” WND.com, July 11, 2002).
In fact, the first article in the 1964 PLO Charter proclaims, “Palestine is an Arab homeland bound by strong Arab national ties to the rest of the Arab Countries and which together form the great Arab homeland.”
“Palestinian” a designation for the Jews?
Of course, in terms of the land there is quite a problem in this statement—seeing it as an Arab homeland and not a Jewish homeland. In fact, it should be pointed out that the Palestinians do not consider only the West Bank and Gaza Strip as Palestinian territories occupied by Israel. They regard the whole of what is called the land of Israel to be the land of Palestine belonging to the Palestinians, with all of it illegally occupied by the Jewish state.
Ironically the “West Bank” bears this name as denoting territory Jordan annexed and occupied on the west side of the Jordan River after 1948 (rather than being called east Palestine), while the Jews call this territory Judea and Samaria—the very heartland of the ancient Israelite kingdoms of Judah and Israel.
Even more ironic is the fact that “before the State of Israel was born, the term ‘Palestinians’ was used by the Jews to refer to themselves and their organizations. ‘The Palestine Post,’ the Palestine Foundation Fund, Palestine Airways, and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra were all purely Jewish enterprises” (Daniel Grynglas, “Debunking the Claim That the ‘Palestinians’ Are the Indigenous People of Israel,” Jerusalem Post blog, May 12, 2015).
Indeed, “the term Palestine was Western and was regularly used by Jews who immigrated to the country; the Zionists called themselves Palestinians while the Arabs simply identified themselves as Arabs. The Zionist institutions—such as the Anglo-Palestine Bank, the Palestine Post, and so on—were ‘Palestinian’ whereas the Arab institutions, such as the Arab Higher Committee, were simply ‘Arab’” (Inbari).
But terminology later shifted dramatically. “We first hear of Arabs referred to as ‘Palestinians’ when Egypt’s President Nasser, with help from the Russian KGB, established the ‘Palestine Liberation Organization’ in 1964. It was only during the 1970s that the newly minted ‘Palestinians’ began to promote their narrative through murder and assassination. The Arabs have justified their attacks as acts of the indigenous people struggling for national liberation” (Grynglas). But this is utterly contrived—a complete fabrication!
From Canaanite habitation to Jewish dispossession
Let’s briefly examine the history of this land from a biblical perspective. The Bible refers to this ancient land by the name of Canaan (Genesis 11:31; Genesis 12:5; Genesis 13:12), with Philistines dwelling along the Mediterranean coast before the Hebrew patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their descendants, the Israelites, settled there. Yet the God of the Bible, who owns the world and everything in it, stated His intention to give this land to His people Israel (Genesis 12:5-7; Genesis 17:8; Exodus 13:5; Exodus 13:11). Thus, by divine decree, even if there were still remnants of the indigenous Canaanites here, the land was given to Abraham and his descendants and was taken from the original inhabitants.
The Israelites formed a nation and kingdom that became divided into two—Israel and Judah. After persistent sin, God allowed the northern tribes of Israel to be deported by the Assyrians and the southern people of Judah, the Jews, to be mostly carried away to Babylon, with a few remaining in the land and some later returning to revive a Jewish state under the rule of the Persians and then continuing under Greek and Roman rule.
The Romans crushed two Jewish revolts, in A.D. 70 and 135, and the Jews became mostly scattered—although a significant population of Jews always remained in the land. (The Jews were expelled from Jerusalem in 135, but a number remained in other communities in the Holy Land.)
One might assume that God’s expulsion of Israel and Judah from the land means their claim on it came to an end. But God gave this land to the descendants of Israel forever (see Exodus 32:13). And even when He warned of removing them and ultimately did so, He still spoke of regathering them in their homeland. So according to God, no other people has a right to this land. And all would do well to remember this!
History of the term Palestine
Where did the name Palestine come from? When the Romans crushed the Jewish revolt of 135, they merged the Roman province of Judaea into Syria and called the new province Syria Palaestina, presumably to remove its Jewish distinction.
The term Palestine, while derived from the ancient Philistines, previously had become a common geographic distinction for the land well before the renaming. It had been used by Greek and Roman writers such as Herodotus, Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Plutarch and others—and even a few times by the first-century Jewish historians Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus.
The area continued to be called Palaestina later in the Byzantine period, and forms of this name persisted under the Arab caliphates and Turkish Ottoman Empire, though “Southern Syria” was the common distinction. “After World War I [when the Ottomans fell to the western Allies], the name ‘Palestine’ was applied to the territory that was placed under British Mandate; this area included not only present-day Israel but also present-day Jordan … [At that time] it was common for the international press to label Jews, not Arabs, living in the mandate as Palestinians” (Jewish Virtual Library, “Israel: Origins of the Name ‘Palestine’”).
Inhabitants from Byzantine through Islamic periods
What was the makeup of the land of Israel after the Romans crushed the Jewish revolts in A.D. 70 and 135? As mentioned, most of the Jews were forcibly removed or fled, yet many others still remained throughout the land. The Romans would encourage others to settle here, particularly after the Empire became officially Christian.
When the Muslim Arabs took control of the Holy Land from the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire in the seventh century, many of them settled in the conquered land, with the Jews remaining the largest minority. Yet it’s been argued that “many of the native population, both Jewish and non-Jewish, were forcefully converted to Islam and the country was forcefully Arabized … [becoming] an Arab-speaking country.
“That does not mean the people living there were ‘real Arabs’ … They were, in fact, descendants of the original Jewish population and of the Greek-speaking population that the Byzantines imported to Christianize the land” (Schlomo Sherman, “The Myth of the So-Called ‘Palestinians,’” 1994, reproduced at Daniel Pipes Middle East Forum, comments).
Later the Seljuk Turks and Kurds (under Kurdish leader Saladin) fought the European Crusaders in the Holy Land. Many of these non-Arab Muslims were stationed here, and as a result, “numerous Hebron families … are of Kurdish origin. The Kurds also settled in other parts of the country and Transjordan. By now, the Kurds have completely Arabized, and they retain no connection with their origins” (Inbari).
A desolate land through Ottoman times
In the late 1600s, during Ottoman rule, a geographer and language expert named Hadriani Relandi toured the land, surveying about 2,500 places where people lived that were mentioned in the Bible or Mishnah. He recorded his observations in a book published in 1714. What does the book show?
“1. Not one settlement in the Land of Israel has a name that is of Arabic origin … not one Arabic settlement has an original Arabic name …
“2. Most of the land was empty, desolate, and the inhabitants few in number and mostly concentrated in the towns Jerusalem, Acco, Tzfat, Jaffa, Tiberius and Gaza. Most of the inhabitants were Jews and the rest Christians. There were few Muslims, mostly nomad Bedouins … who arrived in the area as construction and agricultural labor reinforcement, seasonal workers …
“3. The book totally contradicts any post-modern theory claiming a ‘Palestinian heritage,’ or Palestinian nation. The book strengthens the connection, relevance, pertinence, kinship of the Land of Israel to the Jews and the absolute lack of belonging to the Arabs” (Avi Goldreich, “A Tour of Palestine; the Year Is 1695,” Think-Israel.org, Aug. 4, 2007).
The population dwindled as various factors made it increasingly difficult to live here. The ruin of the land had begun with the Roman destruction of Judah, Roman historian Cassius Dio writing at the time that “the whole of Judea became desert” after the destruction of hundreds of towns and villages, yet things became far worse after the Arab conquest and later under Ottoman rule (Joseph Katz, “Palestine, a Land Virtually Laid Waste With Little Population,” EretzYisroel.org, 2001).
In the latter period the land “had become nearly desolate. The Turkish government taxed landowners by the number of trees on their land. The forests were decimated in an effort to avoid the tax. Hills and plains were overgrazed by sheep and goats. Large tracts ceased to be cultivated and lost their fertility. Many cities were abandoned. Swamps and deserts encroached upon the battered landscape. The fabled Holy Land had sunk into a sleeping death” (video presentation The Galilee Experience, 1997).
Visitors to the land in the 1700s and 1800s commented on its forlorn desolation. The British Consul in Palestine reported in 1857, “The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population” (quoted by Katz).
The most famous to speak of the land’s condition was the American author Mark Twain in his book The Innocents Abroad after his visit in 1867. Joseph Katz summarizes what Twain found:
“In one location after another, Twain registered gloom at his findings: ‘Stirring scenes … occur in the valley [Jezreel] no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent—not for thirty miles in either direction …’ [He further wrote of] ‘… these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness … that melancholy ruin of Capernaum … We reached Tabor safely … We never saw a human being on the whole route.’”
Other peoples joined in a hodgepodge
Even so, there had been an influx of some people earlier in the 1830s with the invasion and temporary occupation of Syria and Palestine by the Egyptian general Ibrahim Pasha. He left behind a number of permanent Egyptian colonies. And with Jewish people returning to the land in the later 1800s, the Ottomans brought in other people to the land as well.
A major step came with the Bosnians. The Balkan country of Bosnia was invaded and by force converted to Islam by the Ottomans in the 1300s. Starting in the late 1600s the Ottomans began to lose European territories. Then “in 1878, at the Congress of Berlin … Turkey lost Bosnia to Austria. The result was a stream of Moslem refugees pouring out of Bosnia looking for haven in the Ottoman Empire…
“This migration of Moslem refugees marked a very important historic milestone in the history of Palestine. The Ottoman rulers adopted a policy of Moslem colonization … In the Carmel region, in the Galilee, in the Plain of Sharon and in Caesarea, lands were distributed to the Moslem refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina. The refugees were further attracted by 12-year tax exemptions and exemption from military service” (Manfred Lehmann, “Bosnia—Motherland of ‘Palestinians’”).
“The same colonization policy … was also directed toward Moslem refugees from Russia—particularly from Georgia, the Crimea and the Caucasus, [a diverse people group] called Circassians and Turkmenians—leading to their settling in Abu Gosh, near Jerusalem, and in the Golan Heights. Refugees from Algeria and Egypt were also settled in Jaffa, Gaza, Jericho and the Golan” (ibid.).
All these and other immigrants of widely disparate and mixed heritage formed part of the basis for the later so-called Palestinian people. Among those counted as “indigenous” Palestinians today are peoples actually springing from all over Europe, Russia, South Asia, North Africa, a host of Arab countries and some Jews—in short, “the greatest human agglomeration drawn together in one small area of the globe” (John of Wurzburg, quoted by Katz, “Palestine Inhabited by a Mixed Population,” EretzYisroel.org).
Some of the European elements were those who came to the Holy Land during the Crusades while others came as slaves during centuries of Islamic slave trade. Yet most of the varied people groups mentioned on this list make up a very small part of today’s Palestinians, the major exception being the Arabs.
Arabs swarm in—the real colonizers
The Jews returning to the land in the late 1800s and early 1900s as part of the Zionist movement and during the time of the British Mandate sparked further immigration from surrounding Arab countries. This migration was so large as to overwhelm and assimilate the earlier non-Jewish immigrants, leading to all being essentially Arabized and regarded as Arab. “The ‘indigenous’ 4.3% comprised many non-Arab nationalities. [But] all of them were swamped by the Arab immigrants and within a few generations largely lost their identity” (Grynglas).
What prompted this large influx of Arabs into the land? “Records show that it was 19th and 20th century Jewish settlement and the resulting employment opportunities that drew successive waves of Arab immigrants to Palestine. ‘The Arab population shows a remarkable increase … partly due to the import of Jewish capital into Palestine and other factors associated with the growth of the [Jewish] National Home’ (the Peel Commission Report, 1937).
“[It’s earlier reported that] ‘in the Jewish settlement Rishon l’Tsion [First to Zion] founded in 1882, by the year 1889, the forty Jewish families settled there had attracted more than four hundred Arab families … Many other Arab villages had sprouted in the same fashion’ (Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial, p. 252 …). “British PM Winston Churchill said [of Palestine] in 1939: ‘… far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country’” (Grynglas).
This large-scale migration into the land continued up to the formation of the Israeli state, when “most Muslims living in Palestine … had been living there for fewer than 60 years” (Ezequiel Doiny, “The Muslim Colonists,” Gatestone Institute, Aug. 15, 2014).
Mideast expert Daniel Pipes, in reviewing Joan Peters’ 1984 book From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, states: “The data unearthed by Joan Peters indicate that Arabs benefited economically so much by the presence of Jewish settlers from Europe that they traveled hundreds of miles to get closer to them. In turn, this explains why the definition of a refugee from Palestine in 1948 is a person who lived there for just two years [ two years! ]: because many Arab residents in 1948 had immigrated so recently.”
Thus, as Daniel Greenfield states, “The ‘Palestinians’ are what they always were: a foreign Islamic Arab colony inside Israel.” And he poignantly answers Mahmoud Abbas’ claim of a Zionist colonial enterprise at the outset of our examination, declaring: “The ‘Palestinians’ are not the victims of colonialism. They are its perpetrators.”
Bible prophecy indicts Edom
Now, all of this being said, there does seem to be—in consideration of what Scripture tells us on the issue—more to the identity of the Palestinian Arabs beyond their just being part of the general mass of Arab people.
The Arabs are not monolithic in their heritage. They consider themselves to be descended mainly from Ishmael, the first son of Abraham and half-brother of Isaac, and this is evidently the case. Yet among the Arabs are also some elements from other early tribes, including that of Jacob’s brother Esau, who was renamed Edom. Esau intermarried with daughters of Ishmael and the Canaanites. And we should further realize that Esau’s descendants, the Edomites, are not limited to Arab tribes but include various other peoples.
The article lastly says
"Why focus on Edom here in regard to the Palestinian Arabs? The answer is found in a remarkable prophecy in the book of Obadiah, which concerns what will happen to the Edomites in the end time.
Obadiah 1:19 is speaking of territories—stating that those who control particular territories in the Holy Land will come to possess additional territories there. In context, we can see that Israelites in this verse are retaking areas that the Edomites have appropriated as their own.
Fascinatingly, the areas listed as doing the taking here are areas that are today populated by Jews. The areas being taken back are now populated by Palestinians—thus apparently identifying the Palestinians as Edomites, at least in significant measure.
It could be that some of the disparate peoples making up the non-Jewish, non-Arab inhabitants of the Holy Land prior to the more recent Arab influx are also made up of Edomites to some degree (for more details, see our online commentary at bible.ucg.org/bible-commentary/Obadiah/ ).
God further prophesies against Edom in Ezekiel 35–36. He warns in chapter 35 that “Mount Seir,” the land of Edom, because of its inhabitants’ lust for the lands of Israel and Judah, will be judged and made desolate (Ezekiel 35:10-15).
God gives a similar warning in Ezekiel 36:5, and then says He will end the shame His land has borne and bring back the people of Israel to at last make abundant use of it.
Amazingly, through many prophecies we learn that the return of the Jewish people today is only a small foretaste of a far greater return of all Israel to the Promised Land under the coming reign of the Jewish Messiah, the Savior of all peoples, Jesus Christ.
It will shock many to learn that Palestinian Arabs are now occupying much of the land God gave to the rightful occupiers, the people of Israel, forever. Rest assured, He will not allow things to go on as they are indefinitely. All will come to pass just as He promises.
Keep looking to His Word and to the clear facts of history to understand your world. And trust in God’s plan to ultimately set all things right!"
It's Important to Remember that even "TV Guide" magazine has mentioned The Holocaust on the Front Cover of a few of it's past issues
-- On the Cover of "TV Guide" for April 15-21,1978 it says
'Holocaust' Powerful Miniseries stars this week
-- On the Cover of "TV Guide" for April 28-May 4, 1979 it says
"How 'Holocaust' Shocked the World"
-- On the Cover of "TV Guide" for February 13-19, 1982
it says "A Noted Historian Judges TV Holocaust Films" by John Toland
-- The Cover of "TV Guide" for April 6-12, 1985 says
"This Week: Wallenberg: A Hero's Story - The Brave Christians who saved Jews From the Nazis" by Elie Wiesel , Richard Chamberlain as Raoul Wallenberg is on the Cover
The words of St. Paul in Romans 3:4 in the New Testament are very relevant
Romans 3:4 says
New International Version
"Let God be true, and every human being a liar." Israel supporters are Truthful,
The Arab & "Palestinian" enemies of Israel are all ugly liars, and full of BS, Many people have noticed how "Female" supporters of "Palestine" tend to be butt ugly, Fugly as Hell, in fact they are all repulsive looking , all disgusting and ugly looking,
While Women who Speak Up For Israel & Support Israel tend to be Not Only more Intelligent , but More Attractive as Well !!!
From the website, www.Jewishvirtuallibrary.org there is an article titled
"Israeli Humanitarian Operations: Aid to the Gaza Strip"
(June 2010 - Present)
Category » Humanitarian Operations
Humanitarian Operations Around the World
Nepal Earthquake
Balkans Floods
Gaza Strip
Philippines Typhoons
Turkey Earthquake
Japan Tsunami, Earthquake, Flooding
Haiti Earthquake
Burkina Faso Floods
Hurrican Katrina
Kosovo War Refugees
Kenya Terrorism
Join our mailing list
Email address
Join
Support JVL
Donate
Israeli Humanitarian Operations:
Table of Contents
|
Japan Tsunami
|
Haiti Earthquake
Israel facilitates the entry of humanitarian supplies into the Gaza Strip for the benefit of the civilian population, despite the fact that Gaza is controlled by Hamas - a terrorist organization that has declared its intention to eliminate the Jewish State.
The amount and variety of goods entering Gaza every day has increased exponentially since 2010.
Essential food products including meat, chicken and fish, grains and legumes, fresh vegetables, dairy products, oil, flour, salt and sugar, in addition to animal feed, hygiene products, clothing, school supplies, medicines and medical supplies are among the goods regularly delivered to Gaza. A wide variety of commodities - including spices, cakes and candies, toys, cosmetic products, housewares and other items according to the demands of the vendors and the customers - were added to the list in Israel's civilian policy towards Gaza, adopted June 2010.
Israel suspended shipments of cement to Gaza's private sector in early April 2016, after learning that a senior Hamas official had been confiscating large quantities of the cement and using it for nefarious purposes. These cement shipments were reinstated one month later, after an investigation by the Israeli Foreign Ministry revealed that 95% of the cement shipments were being diverted from civilians and used for Hamas military installations.
The only goods restricted are weapons, war materials and certain items that have military as well as civilian applications.
January 2015
- 15,205 tons of construction material , and 16.8 million liters of fuel were delivered from Israel to Gaza.
- 804 tons of goods were exported from Gaza and marketed in Judea and Samaria.
- 11,826 Palestinians, including medical patients, passed into Israel through the Erez Terminal.
May 2014
- 5,392 truckloads of goods, including 1,949 truckloads of food products and 986 truckloads of construction materials, were delivered from Israel to Gaza.
- 4 truckloads of goods and boxes were exported from Gaza.
- 14,328 Palestinians, including medical patients, passed into Israel through the Erez Terminal. Do "Palestinians" ever give Humanitarian Aid to Israel ? Nope , Look up the article for the Rest of the Info
From the Wikipedia article "Criticism of the United Nations" it says
"Allegations of anti-Zionism and antisemitism
Further information: UNESCO § Israel
The UN has been accused by Dershowitz, human rights activists Elie Wiesel, Anne Bayefsky, and Bayard Rustin, historian Robert S. Wistrich, and feminists Phyllis Chesler and Sonia Johnson of tolerating antisemitic remarks within its walls.[40][43][50][51] Israeli delegates to the UN "have been treated to a sickening litany of anti-Semitic abuse at the General Assembly, in the UN Human Rights Commission, and sometimes even in the Security Council" for decades.[40]
UN conferences throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s often passed resolutions denouncing Zionism. These conferences often did not have anything to do with Middle East politics. UN documents of the period denied the existence of the Jews, Israel ancient history, the Holocaust, and the notion that Jews deserve the same rights granted to other groups.[52] Wistrich described the 1980 World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women in Copenhagen in his book, A Lethal Obsession:
"Jewish feminists heard truly chilling comments, such as 'The only good Jew is a dead Jew' and 'The only way to rid the world of Zionism is to kill all the Jews.' One eye-witness overheard other delegates saying that the American women's movement had a bad name because its most prominent founding figures ... were all Jewish. The feminist activist Sonia Johnson described the anti-Semitism at the Copenhagen conference as 'over, wild, and irrational.' ... The psychologist and author Phyllis Chesler recorded the savage response when one Jewish woman mentioned that her husband had been shot without a trial in Iraq and that she had to escape to Israel with her children. The place went wild: 'Cuba si! Yankee no! PLO! PLO!' they shouted. 'Israel kills babies and women. Israel must die.'"[40]
The most infamous example of this trend was the passage of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism with racism, on November 10, 1975. It was the first postwar ideology to ever be condemned in the United Nations' history. The resolution was internationally condemned in the media (especially in the media of Western countries). Many observers noted that the resolution was passed on the thirty-seventh anniversary of Kristallnacht, the pogrom historians agree marked the beginning of the Holocaust.
A UN sponsored conference was held in 2001 in Durban, South Africa. The conference was meant to combat racism, but ended up being a forum for world leaders to make various anti-Semitic statements.[53][54] Among the anti-Semitic literature freely handed out at the conference were cartoons equating the Nazi swastika with the Jewish Star of David, flyers expressing the wish that Adolf Hitler had completely killed every last Jew on Earth, and copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.[55][56] Tom Lantos, Colin Powell, Chuck Schumer, Elie Wiesel, Irwin Cotler, Alan Dershowitz, and Robert S. Wistrich condemned the entire conference, calling it hateful, racist, and anti-Semitic.[43][57]"
The Wikipedia article/entry "Criticism of the United Nations" also says
"Alleged support for Palestinian militancy"
According to Dore Gold, Alan Dershowitz, and Robert S. Wistrich, the United Nations has a long history of elevating what it calls "national liberation movements," armed groups who commit violence against civilians to achieve political goals, virtually to the status of civilians.[43][58][59] In 1974 and again in 1988, the UN invited Yasser Arafat to address the General Assembly.[58][60][61][62] Alan Dershowitz accused the UN of allowing states that sponsor terrorism to sit on the Security Council.[63] These visits legitimized the PLO without it "having to renounce terrorism."[64]
In July 1976, Palestinian and German terrorists hijacked an Air France plane headed from France to Israel, landed it in Uganda, and threatened to kill the civilian hostages. Ugandan dictator Idi Amin provided sanctuary for the terrorists in the Entebbe airport. After Israel raided the Ugandan airport and rescued most of the hostages, United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim condemned Israel for the violation of "Ugandan sovereignty."[65]
Alan Dershowitz stated that while Tibetan people, Kurds, and Turkish Armenians all desire "national liberation," the United Nations has only officially recognized Palestinian claims to "national liberation" and allows representatives of the Palestinian cause to speak at the UN.[66] The difference between the three groups and the Palestinians is that the Palestinians use terrorism as a tactic for getting their voice heard, while the Tibetans and Turkish Armenians do not.[66] The UN, according to Dershowitz, favors "national liberation" groups who practice terrorism above those who do not, including those people who have been under more brutal occupation for a longer time (such as Tibetans). Dershowitz has accused the UN of allowing its refugee camps in the Palestinian territories to be used as terrorist bases.[43]"
Another Good website is www.cufi.org , which is the website for
Christians United For Israel, Other Christians have said "Thank God For Israel"
The website www.poletical.com has an article titled
"Israel Is Morally Superior"
July 15th, 2014 | R. Rados
That's right – I said it. It might be difficult for some people to grasp how a nation that kills children by firing missiles at its enemies can still be credited for being morally superior. If you're an anti-semite, you probably froth at the mouth and spit with anger any time someone takes Israel's side. Unfortunately, that's exactly why Israel deserves the support of the international community and why Palestine does not.
Israel occupied land that some Muslims and Palestinians think it shouldn't have occupied. This all stems from a war between Israel and four Arab countries. Jews and Zionists wanted independence, freedom and safety following centuries of enslavement and persecution. After the United Nations voted to declare the validity of a Jewish state alongside Arab states, Israel fought off Arab aggressors to maintain its independence. After the war, Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt annexed Gaza. The majority of Palestinians within Israel's borders fled or were expelled for various reasons. Ever since, generations have become accustomed to what is known as the Israel/Palestine conflict. Unfortunately, truth and accuracy have become less present in most media coverage, helping to create a growing animosity toward Israel around the world. Barack Obama's administration has tapped into America's growing resentment of Israel and adopted an astonishingly inept foreign policy.
Almost immediately after the United Nations voted to back the creation of a Jewish state, Arab nations retaliated with intolerance and violence. It wasn't greed that prevented them from accepting the peaceful existence of a neighbouring Jewish state, it was anti-semitism.
Since its creation, Israel has been a democracy. Contrary to popular belief and some school curricula, Israel is not a theocracy or an exclusively Jewish country. In fact, Israel is a secular state open to all religions and political affiliations. Israel exists to give all Jews a safe, secure place to call home – something they've never had, unlike Arabs and Christians. However, unlike most of its Arab neighbours, Israel also offers a safe home to Christians, Muslims, Catholics, agnostics and atheists. Over the past 50 years, Christians from across the Middle East and the former Soviet Union have sought sanctuary in Israel from their oppressors.
After Jordan, Israel has the second largest population of Palestinians. Close to two million Palestinians live within Israel's borders, peacefully co-existing with Jews. Rather than just the Palestinian Liberation Organization, groups like Hamas are largely to blame for most of the hostility and violence directed at Israel in the region. An important caveat to note when blaming Hamas, however, is that Hamas was democratically elected in Gaza. The terrorist group was given 74 out of 132 seats in the Palestinian Parliament by the people of Palestine. In 2006, 44% of voters gave Hamas a mandate to rule.
Hamas – and groups like it – preach, spread, and promote militant anti-semitism. Like Iran's leadership, Hamas opposes Israel's existence and has suggested the necessity of wiping Israel off the map. At no point in history has Israel condoned or suggested the elimination of Islam and all Arab states. Nothing has driven Israel to retaliate with force besides its own independence and security. The hostility towards the world's only Jewish state is driven by nothing more than cold, callous anti-semitism. We see evidence for this dating back to Israel's recognition by the United Nations and the immediate reaction of the four Arab states that chose violence over peace and co-existence.
In May of this year, senior Hamas leader, Mousa Abu Marzouk, said, “Hamas will not recognize Israel.” Since this month's conflict between Israel and Hamas, Hamas has launched missiles at Israel from inside civilian neighbourhoods and used civilian homes as hide-outs, making Israel's retaliations almost impossible without civilian casualties. Immediately following any Israeli strikes, Palestinian and Middle Eastern tabloids report that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians. Such coordinated military and propaganda efforts help fuel further anti-semitism across the region – and even in the West. Although the use of human shields by Hamas is well documented, most media reports leave out these facts in favour of demonizing Israel. To this day, Israel has never used civilians as shields and has never fired rockets or waged military attacks from civilian neighbourhoods. In fact, the Israeli military dropped leaflets in Gaza encouraging civilians to evacuate and called off an airstrike after discovering children near a target.
The first strike in the most recent exchange between Israel and Hamas came from Hamas with the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens in June. Although Hamas has neither confirmed or denied the kidnappings, a recording of a call to police by one of the teens was sent to US investigators. The three teens were allegedly kidnapped by a Hamas militant posing as a religious Jew and then shot ten times with a silenced gun. The killings triggered a revenge murder of a Palestinian teen that infuriated Hamas. It wasn't until Palestinian casualties began to mount that the UN and United States began to call for a ceasefire.
Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system is to credit for the lack of Israeli casualties. Over 100 Palestinians have been killed in the recent conflict, while no Israelis have lost their lives. Israel's Iron Dome is 90% affective in keeping civilians safe, but it could also be the reason for Israel's negative coverage and dwindling sympathy. As Palestinians die from Israel's defensive tactics, life goes on as normal in Israel. Bloomberg's Peter Coy pointed this out on July 11 in a column entitled “Israel's Iron Dome Is Amazing, And That's A Problem”:
The article lastly says
"Israel hardly feels like a place under assault from close range. Bars, restaurants, and the Mediterranean beaches are still busy. Although traffic is lighter than normal, the roads are hardly abandoned. Incoming rockets that would ordinarily wreak havoc are being blown up in the air, causing nothing but a boom, a puff of white smoke, and falling debris. - Peter Coy, Bloomberg BusinessWeek
Unfortunately, because Israelis aren't being killed, that means that Israel is not allowed to defend itself and root out its enemies to further secure the safety of its civilians. That's the view that seems to have been adopted by some North American news organizations. One question seldom asked by media is why Hamas continues to unsuccessfully fire rockets at Israel and put Palestinians in danger when it knows what the consequences will be.
Any mother or father should imagine having an angry mob outside of their homes, wielding sticks and knives. They can't get into your home to harm your children, so your neighbours might blow a gasket if you try to shoot at them from your upstairs window. God forbid you kill one of the people who wants your entire family wiped off the face of the Earth.
Anti-semitism has been on the rise in North America to a noticeable extent. It's mostly fueled by ignorance, misinformation, and blatant deception. This fact is what makes North American anti-semitism completely infantile but very nefarious. Unlike the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration has alienated Israel and taken a more neutral approach to the conflict. This is the result of electing a president that was born into a generation of growing contempt and ignorance toward Israel and its history. The generations of North American youth being persuaded by this mentality is still growing, and Barack Obama's presidency and foreign policy are the consequence.
Luckily, Canada has stood beside Israel in the face of opposition. Despite the media's perpetually biased and negative coverage of Israel, Stephen Harper is the only Western leader that has taken the country's side against a known terrorist organization. It's not in Stephen Harper's nature to care about public opinion, so as long as the Conservative Party continues to rule, we shouldn't expect Canada's support for Israel to soften. In any case, Israel shouldn't expect to have the world's support, especially since the election of Barack Obama. This is exactly why Israel is under a strong obligation to defend itself. When no one else but Canada and a few European countries take your side, what other choice could you possibly have but to defend yourself at all costs? " Israeli Jews also NEVER teach their Children to Hate or Kill other People,
From the website blogs.timesofisrael.com an article by Morton A. Klein titled
"
"Israel remains remarkably moral"
Rejecting the turning of the Abu Khdeir murder into an occasion for a morality tale about corrosive 'occupation'
JUL 11, 2014, 2:13 PM
Israelis were traumatized in recent weeks by the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli youths — Eyal Yifrah, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16 — by the Hamas terrorist group, now part of Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Palestinian Authority (PA) regime. Days later, an Arab Israeli teenager, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, 16, was murdered by what appears to have been a violent underworld group of Jewish Israelis. Former Jerusalem Post editor, David Horovitz, immediately wrote a tendentious article, painting an inaccurate and ugly image of Israeli society, ‘A sobering moment for complacent Israel’ (July 7), in which he contended that “the killing of Muhammed Abu Khdeir must rid us of the illusion that we enjoy a distinctive moral superiority over our neighbors … [without] a reverence for life, we have no particular right to be here at all.”
Indeed, Horovitz thinks that this admittedly horrific, bestial crime tells us something about Israelis in general that we didn’t know, or care to think, before: “We Israelis knew we had nothing in common with those Hamas killers who so callously ended the lives of three innocent Israeli teenagers; we were wrong.”
The article continues:
But it is David Horovitz who is wrong. First, Israel’s national existence, like that of other countries, is not conditional on a “distinctive moral superiority” — which Israel actually possesses over its enemies. Second, the way to gauge whether a society supports or reviles terrorism is to observe its reaction to it. Comparison here is instructive.
Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority (PA) has institutionally glorified terrorism against Jews as a national and religious duty. The PA honors, lauds and rewards terrorists — by naming schools andstreets after them; by calling them ‘martyrs’ and paying condolence calls on their families when they’re killed; by hiding wanted terrorists in Abbas’ presidential compound; by paying stipends to those imprisoned and pensions to the families of those deceased; and by demanding the release of jailed terrorists by Israel as precondition of further negotiations.
Palestinian society widely approves of anti-Jewish terrorism. Hamas has an explicit policy of kidnapping Israelis to ransom their imprisoned members, a policy which Abbas himself has publiclydescribed as “a good thing.” A September 2013 Pew survey found that a large majority — 62% — of Palestinians justify the use of suicide terrorism, while a July 2011 Palestinian Center for Public Opinion poll found that 62% of Palestinians support a policy of kidnapping Israeli soldiers and that a staggering 73% agree with the hadith (Islamic tradition), quoted in Hamas’ Charter, about the need to kill Jews.
By contrast, in Israel, Jewish terrorist outrages are reviled by all but a violent fringe. Thus, when in 1994 Baruch Goldstein gunned down 29 Muslims in Hebron, the Knesset condemned the act in a unanimous vote, the groups that praised Goldstein’s crime were outlawed and expressions of horror and repudiation traversed the political spectrum. A makeshift shrine raised in his honor by extremists was razed by the Israeli government.
Or again: when Yakov Teitel murdered two Palestinian Arabs, bombed a left-wing Israeli activist, and was found to be planning further terrorist acts, he was apprehended, convicted and imprisoned. There are no Israeli security forces planning to kidnap Palestinians to trade for Yaakov Teitel’s release. The Israeli school system isn’t teaching children that Yaakov Teitel is a hero. Israeli youth do not attend summer camps named after Yaakov Teitel. Yaakov Teitel’s family doesn’t get a monthly stipend from the Israeli Government for murdering Arabs.
Given this night-and-day distinction between Israel and the Palestinian-controlled territories, it’s scarcely complacent triumphalism to say that Israel enjoys a “distinctive moral superiority” over its neighbors — merely demonstrable fact.
It would be idle to deny that there is deep Israeli distrust and concern about the Palestinian Arabs — yet the reason for that isn’t racism; it stems from decades of Palestinian Arab terrorism, refusal to make peace over twenty years of negotiations, glorification of terrorism and inculcation of hate by the PA. It is due to Palestinian Arab words and deeds, not race or religion. Israelis do not like being hated and murdered and their murderers cheered. The Israeli reaction to these things would be the same if it was coming from Scandinavian Lutherans.
The article lastly says
"Regrettably, Horovitz prefers to make the Abu Khdeir murder the occasion for a false morality tale about corrosive “occupation,” when in fact 98% of Palestinian Arabs have lived for years under Palestinian control, with their own legislature, courts, police and schools. Indeed, peace would have arrived but for the rejection in 2000 and again in 2008 of Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert’s respective proposals for Palestinian statehood in virtually all the territory publicly demanded by the PA. Jewish communities in the territories cover a mere 3% of the land in question. Yes, Israeli security forces operate repeatedly in some PA areas — but that is a function of ongoing terrorism, not racism or corroded ethics.
Can it really be said that Israeli humanitarianism is corroded when Israel saves daily the lives of Palestinian Arabs in its hospitals, sends doctors and agricultural experts to assist African countries, makes disproportionately large and sustained contributions to international relief efforts, as in Haiti in 2010 — or as it would have done in 2004 in Iran, governed by a regime denying the Holocaust and calling for Israel’s elimination, had but the Iranian regime permitted Israeli medical teams to assist the country devastated by an earthquake?
The record shows Israeli society to be extraordinarily humane and moral, despite constant Arab assault, encompassing hundreds of suicide bombings, thousands of roadside bombs, drive-by shootings and rocket barrages resulting in over 2,000 Israelis murdered and over 10,000 maimed. Despite all this, Israel has produced remarkably few acts of reprisal violence and vigilantism and has dealt expeditiously with them whenever they occur, as it did this week."
Jewish World Review July 28, 2006 there is an article titled
"Life in an Orwellian universe"
By Charles Krauthammer
Israel's moral scrupulousness is being paid in blood — and yet they're still branded as evil personified
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?
What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities — every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians — and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?
The article continues
"Hearing the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world — governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats — has completely lost its moral bearings.
The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is "disproportionate," as in the universally decried "disproportionate Israeli response."
When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel "proportionate" attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a cinder, and turned the Japanese home islands to rubble and ruin. Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right — legal and moral — to carry the fight until the aggressor is disarmed and so disabled that it cannot threaten one's security again. That's what it took with Japan.
Britain was never invaded by Germany in World War II. Did it respond to the blitz and V-1 and V-2 rockets with "proportionate" aerial bombardment of Germany? Of course not. Churchill orchestrated the greatest land invasion in history that flattened and utterly destroyed Germany, killing untold innocent German women and children in the process.
The perversity of today's international outcry lies in the fact that there is indeed a disproportion in this war, a radical moral asymmetry between Hezbollah and Israel: Hezbollah is deliberately trying to create civilian casualties on both sides while Israel is deliberately trying to minimize civilian casualties, also on both sides.
In perhaps the most blatant terror campaign from the air since the London blitz, Hezbollah is raining rockets on Israeli cities and villages. These rockets are packed with ball bearings that can penetrate automobiles and shred human flesh. They are meant to kill and maim. And they do.
But it is a dual campaign. Israeli innocents must die in order for Israel to be terrorized. But Lebanese innocents must also die in order for Israel to be demonized, which is why Hezbollah hides its fighters, its rockets, its launchers, its entire infrastructure among civilians. Creating human shields is a war crime. It is also a Hezbollah specialty.
On Wednesday, CNN cameras showed destruction in Tyre. What does Israel have against Tyre and its inhabitants? Nothing. But the long-range Hezbollah rockets that have been raining terror on Haifa are based in Tyre. What is Israel to do? Leave untouched the launch sites that are deliberately placed in built-up areas?
Had Israel wanted to destroy Lebanese civilian infrastructure, it would have turned out the lights in Beirut in the first hour of the war, destroying the billion-dollar power grid and setting back Lebanon 20 years. It did not do that. Instead, it attacked dual-use infrastructure — bridges, roads, airport runways — and blockaded Lebanon's ports to prevent the reinforcement and resupply of Hezbollah. Ten-thousand Katyusha rockets are enough. Israel was not going to allow Hezbollah 10,000 more.
The article lastly says
"Israel's response to Hezbollah has been to use the most precise weaponry and targeting it can. It has no interest, no desire to kill Lebanese civilians. Does anyone imagine that it could not have leveled south Lebanon, to say nothing of Beirut? Instead, in the bitter fight against Hezbollah in south Lebanon, it has repeatedly dropped leaflets, issued warnings, sent messages by radio and even phone text to Lebanese villagers to evacuate so that they would not be harmed.
Israel knows that these leaflets and warnings give the Hezbollah fighters time to escape and regroup. The advance notification as to where the next attack is coming has allowed Hezbollah to set up elaborate ambushes. The result? Unexpectedly high Israeli infantry casualties. Moral scrupulousness paid in blood. Israeli soldiers die so that Lebanese civilians will not, and who does the international community condemn for disregarding civilian life?" RIP Charles Krauthammer , Many Countless people have pointed out how Israel has the Most Humane Civilized Disciplined Armed Forces in the World,
Israel also does NOT "Torture" Arab or "Palestinian" Prisoners, that is a Lie, Israel does NOT "Torture" anyone, yet when an Arab or other enemy of Israel in the Mideast conflict gets so much as a Broken nail the whole world blames Israel for it, and the whole world gets hysterical over it, in his book "The Case for Israel" Alan Dershowitz refutes the lie that Israel uses Torture
The website www.meforum.org has an article titled -
"The Privileged Palestinian "Refugees"
by Efraim Karsh
Middle East Quarterly
Summer 2018
No sooner had the Palestinian Arabs fled their homes during the 1948-49 war than they were taken under the protective wing of the international community and protected like no other group in similar circumstances. This special treatment ranged from their very recognition as refugees despite the failure of many to satisfy the basic criteria for such status, to the unprecedented creation of a relief agency committed exclusively for their welfare: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA.
Yet rather than help resolve the Palestinian refugee problem, this unparalleled indulgence has only served to confirm its permanency. And no factor has contributed more to this perpetuation than UNRWA, which, instead of ending direct relief and transferring responsibility for the refugees to the host Arab states within months, as stipulated by its mandate, has kept them on the U.N.'s dole for decades under false humanitarian pretense.
Singled out for Privilege
World War II created an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. In Europe alone, more than 16 million refugees and displaced persons languished in search of a solution to their plight. This included some 13 million Germans expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and other East European countries; nearly 2.5 million Poles, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Russians, and Lithuanians driven from their homelands to their newly demarcated states; some 250,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors herded in overcrowded camps (mainly) in the country that had just slaughtered six million of their brothers; and over 400,000 Finns driven from Soviet-occupied Karelia for the second time in half-a-decade.[1]
The article continues -
Not only has UNRWA not helped to resolve the Palestinian refugee problem, it has amplified the problem. UNRWA was initially envisaged as a short-lived agency, but its mandate was perpetuated by declaring Palestinian "refugee" status hereditary, allowing its application to descendants of the original refugees.
These massive refugee problems were handled by the International Refugee Organization (IRO), established by the U.N. General Assembly in December 1946 and succeeded in January 1951 by the High Commissioner's Office for Refugees (UNHCR), which rapidly expanded its initial Eurocentric outlook to include refugees and displaced persons from all over the world. There was only one exception to this pattern: the Arab escapees of the 1948-49 war who received their own relief agency, the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees (UNRPR), set up in November 1948 and succeeded on May 1, 1950 by UNRWA. And while UNHCR was created on a shoestring annual budget of $300,000,[2] UNRWA was established on the assumption that "the equivalent of approximately $33,700,000 will be required for direct relief and works programmes for the period 1 January to 31 December 1950."[3] In other words, the Palestinian refugees received 110 times the money allocated to the treatment of all other refugees throughout the world.
Sixty-eight years later, UNHCR comprises nearly 11,000 personnel handling 17.2 million refugees (or 1,568 refugees per worker) and 65.6 million forcibly displaced persons compared to UNRWA's 30,000-plus employees handling some 5.3 million "refugees" (or 176 refugees per worker). That is: Palestinian "refugees" receive ten times the human resources as their less fortunate counterparts anywhere in the world, and 34 times the humanitarian support extended to displaced persons worldwide.[4]
The word "refugees" has been put in quotes with regard to the Palestinians currently cared for by UNRWA for the simple reason that they do not correspond to the conventional refugee concept, which views this phenomenon as a temporary plight that needs to be rectified swiftly. As early as 1929, the League of Nations decided that its International Office for Refugees would shut down within a decade at the most. Its U.N. successor, the International Refugee Organization, was similarly created as a temporary organ due to cease activities by the end of 1950 while the High Commissioner's Office for Refugees was initially conceived as a three-to-five-years-long agency.[5]
Likewise, the U.N.'s Relief for Palestine Refugees was set up on the assumption "that the problem would be resolved in a matter of months,"[6] and even UNRWA was initially envisaged as a short-lived agency though it quickly had its mandate perpetuated by uniquely making the Palestinian "refugee" status hereditary so as to allow its indefinite application to descendants of the original refugees.[7]
What makes this distinct self-perpetuating leniency all the more extraordinary is that even the original designation of the Palestinians as refugees ran counter to both the standard definition of this status and the international treatment of similar, if not worse, contemporary humanitarian predicaments.
Real Refugees?
Misconstruing failed aggressors for victims. The notion of refugees and displaced persons has been invariably equated with unprovoked victimhood: being on the receiving end of aggression. Members of aggressing parties, including innocent civilians victimized as a result of their governments' aggression, have been viewed as culprits, undeserving of humanitarian international support.
Thus, for example, not only did the IRO constitution deny refugee status to the millions of "persons of ethnic German origins" driven from their homes in the wake of the war—thereby forcing West (and East) Germany to resettle them in their territories at their expense—but it also singled out persons who "have voluntarily assisted the enemy forces since the outbreak of the second world war in their operations against the United Nations." It moreover stipulated that Germany and Japan should pay, "to the extent practicable," for repatriating the millions of people displaced as a result of their wartime aggression.[8] Likewise, Finland not only had to absorb the 400,000-plus Karelian refugees with no international support but was forced to pay massive reparations to Moscow for having assisted the German attack on the Soviet Union.
Child refugees at Wilhelmshaven, Germany. After World War II, Europe saw more than 16 million refugees and displaced persons. UNRWA received 110 times the funds for the 600,000 Palestinian refugees than the amount allocated for all other refugees throughout the world. The Germans as aggressors were not recognized as refugees, but the Palestinians were.
In contrast, the Palestinians and the Arab states have never been penalized for their "war of extermination and momentous massacre," to use the words of Arab League secretary-general Abdul Rahman Azzam,[9] against the nascent state of Israel. Quite the reverse, in fact. Despite U.N. secretary-general Trygve Lie's admonition that "the United Nations could not permit that aggression to succeed and at the same time survive as an influential force for peaceful settlement, collective security, and meaningful international law,"[10] the Palestinians and the Arab states were generously rewarded for that very aggression. The former have become the most privileged refugee group ever; the latter have been generously remunerated for hosting the displaced persons whose dispersal they caused in the first place.
This unprovoked war of aggression should have ipso facto precluded the Palestinians from refugee status, should have obliged them to compensate their Jewish and Israeli victims, and should have made their rehabilitation incumbent upon their leaders and the Arab regimes as with post-World War II Germany and collaborating parties. However, it did not. In addition, their designation as refugees also failed to satisfy the internationally accepted definition of this status in several other key respects.
"Internal refugees"? The IRO constitution defined refugee as "a person who has left, or who is outside of, his country of nationality or of former habitual residence,"[11] and this definition was reaffirmed by the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which applied the term to any person who "is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or … unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events is unable or ... is unwilling to return to it."[12] This definition has been expanded by the UNHCR without changing its general gist to include "persons who are outside their country of nationality or habitual residence and unable to return there owing to serious and indiscriminate threats to life, physical integrity or freedom resulting from generalized violence or events seriously disturbing public order."[13]
The equation of refugeedom with being outside the national homeland was neither accidental nor a semantic sophistry. Apart from the immense dislocation occasioned by World War II, the immediate postwar years saw a number of massive population dispersals, notably the 13 million Hindus and Muslims displaced during the 1947 partition of the Indian Subcontinent into the new states of India and Pakistan; the millions dispersed during the Chinese civil strife, and the 700,000 displaced during the Greek civil war.[14] Overwhelmed by the post-World War II European refugee crisis and daunted by the magnitude of the problem elsewhere, the newly established United Nations sought to shun responsibility for these crises as evidenced by the IRO constitution and the deliberations leading to its replacement by the UNHCR and the 1951 refugee convention. Insisting that the protection of refugees "could only gain substance if it were given by all the Members of the United Nations," the U.S. representative (and former First Lady) Eleanor Roosevelt emphasized the impracticality of the idea. Only eighteen states had become members of the IRO while most other governments refrained from doing so mainly for financial reasons, she argued.
It would, therefore, be better to adhere to the IRO's definition of refugees that focused on protecting those outside their national homeland than to seek the unattainable goal of providing material assistance to "all categories of refugees existing in any part of the world."[15] As this line of thinking prevailed, the millions of Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, and Greek "internal refugees" were not recognized as refugees by the 1951 convention.
There was, however, once again, one notable exception: the Palestinians. While 480,000 of the 600,000 Palestinian Arabs who fled their homes during the 1948-49 war—or 80 percent—remained in what used to be the country of their nationality at the outbreak of hostilities, namely mandatory Palestine,[16] they were, nevertheless, recognized as refugees. And by way of legitimizing this aberration, the 1951 convention specifically excluded the Palestinians from the need to comply with its definition as a result of them benefitting "from the protection or assistance of a United Nations agency other than UNHCR."[17] This allowed UNRWA to adopt the highly inclusive definition of a refugee as "a needy person, who, as a result of the war in Palestine, has lost his home and his means of livelihood," aware of the countless borderline cases resulting from the continued presence of the "refugees" in their country of nationality:
In some circumstances, a family may have lost part or all of its land from which its living was secured, but it may still have a house to live in. Others may have lived on one side of the boundary but worked in what is now Israel most of the year. Others, such as Bedouins, normally moved from one area of the country to another, and some escaped with part or all of their goods but could not return to the area where they formerly resided the greater part of the time.[18]
To be sure, the 200,000 escapees to the Gaza Strip and the 280,000 who fled to the territory that became the West Bank after its April 1950 annexation to Jordan were in no position to return to their prewar dwellings. This was because their leaders and the Egyptian and Jordanian governments that conquered these areas during the war would not allow this, and because Israel would not allow their repatriation before a comprehensive peace was concluded in case this might be "exploited in order to encourage subversive or hostile activities" as feared by the IRO.[19]
Karsh-Gaza.jpg
American Friends Service Committee members hand out blankets to Palestinian refugees, Gaza, 1948. A British diplomat was told by refugees that "they have no quarrel with the Jews… and are perfectly ready to go back and live with them again." They clearly had no "well-founded fear of being persecuted."
Yet these displaced persons remained in their country of nationality and could have readily rebuilt their lives there as ordinary citizens rather than refugees, either by being allowed to proclaim their own independent state in the West Bank and Gaza, as stipulated by the partition resolution of November 1947, or as citizens of the respective occupying states.
Indeed, the 280,000 escapees in the West Bank, alongside the 88,000 who had fled to Transjordan (east of the Jordan River)—i.e., a total of 368,000, more than 60 percent of those who had fled their homes during the war[20]—became Jordanian citizens even before the area's official annexation to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
This, on its own, should have disqualified them for refugee status as both the IRO constitution and the 1951 convention unequivocally deny this status and its attendant benefits to any refugee who "has acquired a new nationality, and enjoys the protection of the country of his new nationality."[21] In line with this ruling, in 1952-53, the High Commissioner for Refugees declined Ankara's request to grant refugee status to the 154,000 persons of Turkish origin who had been expelled from Bulgaria on the grounds that they ceased to be refugees upon receiving Turkish citizenship.[22] Yet this principle has never been applied to the Palestinians who have been granted Jordanian citizenship or their descendants—amounting to some 3 million "refugees" in today's terms.
Even less deserving of refugee status are the Palestinians who moved from the West Bank of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to its eastern bank during the June 1967 war. Not only did they remain in the country of their nationality under the rule of their own government, but as members of the aggressing party, they did not meet the basic requirement for refugee status: victimhood.On June 5, at the outbreak of hostilities on the Egyptian front, Israel passed several secret messages to Jordan's King Hussein, pleading with him to stay out of the fighting and pledging that in such an eventuality, no harm would be visited upon his kingdom.[23] Had the king heeded these pleas and refrained from attacking Israel, there would have been no war, and the West Bank would have remained under his control.
Justified flight? Last but not least, the 1951 convention linked people's flight from their national homeland, which qualified them for refugee status, to "well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion."[24] Yet no such fear should have existed in the Palestinian case—not in 1967, when it became evident within days that West Bankers faced no imminent threat to their lives or properties, and not in 1948-49, when the Zionist leadership went out of its way to articulate its desire for peaceful coexistence with the country's Arab population. Indeed, no sooner had the guns fallen silent than a senior British diplomat on a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949 was told by the refugees that "they have no quarrel with the Jews, that they have lived with the Jews all their lives and are perfectly ready to go back and live with them again."[25]
These were no idle words. In accepting the partition resolution, the Zionist movement acquiesced in the principle of a two-state solution and all subsequent deliberations were based on the assumption that Palestine's Arabs would remain as equal citizens in the Jewish state that would arise with the termination of the British mandate. In the words of David Ben-Gurion, soon to become Israel's first prime minister: "In our state, there will be non-Jews as well—and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is: The state will be their state as well."[26]
In line with this conception, committees laying the groundwork for the nascent Jewish state discussed in detail the establishment of an Arabic-language press, the improvement of health in the Arab sector, the incorporation of Arab officials in the government, the integration of Arabs within the police and the ministry of education, and Arab-Jewish cultural and intellectual interaction.[27] No less importantly, the military plan of the Hagana (the foremost Jewish underground organization in mandatory Palestine) for rebuffing an anticipated pan-Arab invasion (or Plan D) was itself predicated, in the explicit instructions of Israel Galilee, the Hagana's commander-in-chief, on the "acknowledgement of the full rights, needs, and freedom of the Arabs in the Hebrew state without any discrimination, and a desire for coexistence on the basis of mutual freedom and dignity."[28]
The same principle was enshrined in Israel's Declaration of Independence of May 14, 1948, which undertook to "uphold absolute social and political equality of rights for all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race, or sex" and urged the Arab citizens "to take part in the building of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and on the basis of appropriate representation in all its institutions, provisional and permanent." In its first meeting two days later, the provisional Israeli government discussed a basic law regulating the nascent state's ruling institutions and practices, which ensured, among other things, the right of Arab citizens to be elected to parliament and to serve as cabinet ministers as well as the continued functioning of the autonomous Muslim (and Christian) religious courts that had existed during the mandate. Four months later, the government decided that Arabic, alongside Hebrew, would serve as the official language in all public documents and certificates.[29]
Had the Palestinian leadership and the neighboring Arab regimes similarly accepted the partition resolution rather than attempt to destroy the state of Israel at birth, there would have been no war and no refugee problem in the first place. Most of mandatory Palestine's Arab population would have resided in the prospective Arab state and a substantial Arab minority would have lived peacefully in Israel. Hence, the Palestinian exodus was not a result of "well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion" but a corollary of a failed war of annihilation against a peaceful neighbor.
Likewise, the Palestinian flight during the 1967 war was not the consequence of a "well-founded fear of being persecuted." The Israeli defeat of the second pan-Arab attempt to destroy it in a generation posed no threat to the West Bank's civilian population. Quite the contrary, had it been up to Israel, war would not have come to this front in the first place as evidenced by the secret pleas to King Hussein noted above. Besides, with West Bank fighting over within a mere four days, it was clear to all that there was no Israeli plan to harm, let alone expel the Palestinian population in this territory.
Inflating Refugee Numbers
Apart from recognizing the Palestinians as refugees despite their failure to meet the basic criteria for this status and assigning a distinct agency to tend to their affairs, the U.N. blindly registered countless false claimants as refugees despite its keen awareness of the pervasiveness of this fraud, then let their falsely obtained status be passed on to future generations.
Karsh-WestBank.jpg
Palestinians who moved from the West Bank of Jordan to its eastern bank during and after the Six-Day War, as these seen here crossing the Jordan River, June 22, 1967, are not refugees as they remained in the country of their nationality under the rule of their own government.
At the beginning of August 1948, after eight months of Arab-Jewish fighting, the director of the U.N. Disaster Relief Project (DRP) in Palestine, Sir Raphael Cilento, set the number of refugees at 300,000-350,000,[30] and the September 16 General Assembly report by the U.N. mediator for Palestine Folke Bernadotte settled on the slightly higher figure of 360,000.[31] A supplementary report submitted a month later by Bernadotte's successor, Ralph Bunche, raised the figure to 472,000, estimating the number of people who would require U.N. aid in the 9-month period from December 1, 1948 to August 1, 1949, at 500,000.[32]
By now, however, the Arabs had dramatically upped the ante. In October 1948, the Arab League set the number of refugees at 631,967, and by the end of the month, official Arab estimates ranged between 740,000 and 780,000. When the U.N.'s Relief for Palestine Refugees began operation in November 1948, it found some 940,000 refugees on its relief rolls.[33]
U.N. officials deemed these figures to be grossly exaggerated, not least since there had been no major influx of refugees since Bernadotte and Bunche submitted their far lower estimates. By way of illustrating the inflated Arab figures, Cilento pointed to allegations of growing refugee presence in certain locations at a time when their real numbers in these sites had actually decreased.[34] Similarly, in his October report, Bunche noted the false allegation by the Syrian authorities of the existence of 30,000 refugees in the northern cities of Aleppo, Latakia, Hama, and Homs whereas the actual figure was hardly half that size.[35] Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo, got a firsthand impression of the pervasive inflation of refugee numbers during a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949. He reported to London:
The Quakers have nearly 250,000 refugees on their books. … They admit, however, that the figures are unreliable, as it is impossible to stop all fraud in the making of returns. Deaths for example are never registered nor are the names struck off the books of those who leave the district clandestinely. Some names, too, are probably registered more than once for the extra rations.[36]
This state of affairs is hardly surprising. Population figures of Palestinian Arab society, especially of rural Muslim communities, were notoriously unreliable, based as they were on information provided by rural and urban headmen (mukhtars) that was deliberately inflated in order to obtain greater government support, especially food rations. As explained in the preface to the mandatory government's Village Statistics 1945, for all the "very detailed work" invested in this comprehensive compendium of rural Palestine, its estimates "cannot … be considered as other than rough estimates which in some instances may ultimately be found to differ even considerably, from the actual figures."[37] Likewise, the supplementary volume to the Survey of Palestine (1946), compiled in June 1947 for the information of the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), revealed that
many cases of death, especially in rural areas, have not been reported. These omissions (which are mainly due to the attempt to obtain food rations of deceased persons) seriously impair the reliability of the death rates (particularly infant mortality rates) and that of the rate of natural increase.[38]
Even if accepting the supplement's estimate of 1.3 million Palestinian Arabs at the end of 1946 (the actual figure was most probably 10 percent lower), the number of refugees could by no stretch of the imagination approximate the alleged Arab figures. This is because some 550,000-600,00 Arabs who lived in the mandatory districts of Samaria, Jerusalem, and Gaza (which subsequently became the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) remained in situ while another 160,000 Arabs remained in, or returned to, Israel. This, in turn, puts the number of refugees at 540,000-590,000. Likewise, according to an extrapolation of the Village Statistics 1945, the non-Jewish population of the area that was to become Israeli territory at the end of the war amounted, in April 1948, to some 696,000-726,800. Deducting Israel's 160,000-strong postwar Arab population from this figure would leave 536,000-566,800 refugees beyond Israel's frontiers.[39]
Indeed, the interim report of the United Nations Economic Survey Mission for the Middle East of November 16, 1949, which formed the basis for UNRWA's creation three weeks later, recommended that the number of rations issued by UNRPR "should be reduced by 1 January 1950 from the present rate of 940,000 to 652,000."[40] Yet, while conceding the impossibility to exclude fraudulent individuals and groups from its refugee rolls, in part given the outpouring of destitute non-Palestinian Arabs seeking to enroll in its services, UNRWA not only refused to reduce refugee numbers below 800,000 but subsequently raised this figure to one million. In the agency's first year of operation, the number of "refugees" housed in its camps grew by 20 percent with "many thousands of new applications … received each month." These included new arrivals from Israel—well over a year after the end of hostilities—and "some considerable movement of the [non-Palestinian] population in the search of water, particularly in Jordan, as a result of the severe drought that has dried up wells and cisterns."[41]
From Transience to Permanence
UNRWA was established on a very precise, highly limited, and short-term mandate:
(a) To carry out in collaboration with local governments the direct relief and works programmes as recommended by the Economic Survey Mission;
(b) To consult with the interested Near Eastern Governments concerning measures to be taken by them preparatory to the time when international assistance for relief and works projects is no longer available.[42]
The Economic Survey Mission, the recommendations of which UNRWA was established to implement, was set up in August 1949 by the Conciliation Commission for Palestine in order "to examine economic conditions in the Near East and to make recommendations for action to meet the dislocation caused by the recent hostilities" in line with Resolution 194 of December 1948.[43] Having found both options suggested by the resolution—repatriation of those refugees "wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors" and "resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees" in the Arab states[44]—to be impractical in the immediate future, the mission proposed a graduated integration of the refugees in the host countries by moving from direct relief to public works. It argued, "Rather than remain objects of charity, the refugees who are idle must have an opportunity to go to work where they are now." It reasoned that such work
would increase the productive capacity of the countries in which they have found refuge … halt the demoralizing process of pauperization, outcome of a dole prolonged … [and] increase the practical alternatives available to refugees, and thereby encourage a more realistic view of the kind of future they want and the kind they can achieve.[45]
Specifically, the mission recommended eliminating free rations supplied to the refugees by the end of 1950, by which time the new relief agency (i.e., UNRWA) would have negotiated with the Arab governments their takeover "as soon as possible, and at latest by 31 December 1950, responsibility for the maintenance of such refugees as may remain within their territories."[46] In other words, within months of its creation, UNRWA should have handed over responsibility for its operations to the host countries and been subsequently disbanded with the ending of U.N. support for the works program on June 30, 1951. In other words, within months of its creation, UNRWA should have handed over responsibility for its operations to the host countries and been subsequently disbanded with the ending of U.N. support for the works program on June 30, 1951.
Nothing of the sort happened. In his first report to the General Assembly in October 1950, five months after its launch, the UNRWA director recounted a smaller reduction in rations distribution and lower employment rates than envisaged by the Economic Survey Mission, with only 17,500 refugees working on new projects. The director attributed this underperformance to UNRWA's later than expected start of operation; to the unsatisfactory economic conditions in certain areas; and to the difficulty in "selling" the works program to the Arab governments and the refugees. Blaming the United Nations and the West for their plight, the refugees showed "little, if any, gratitude for the Agency's efforts to maintain or improve [their] condition" instead demanding "increased medical and educational services and improved rations both in quantity and quality."[47]
Karsh-IraqiJews.jpg
Hundreds of thousands of hapless Jews were expelled from the Arab states during and after the 1948-49 war. Most of these refugees were absorbed by the Jewish state. No U.N. agency was created to deal with this influx.
Yet rather than seek to dispel this misguided sense of victimized entitlement and steer the refugees toward rehabilitation as stipulated by its mandate, UNRWA began edging in the opposite direction. While paying lip service to its obligation to help "the Near East countries assume responsibility for administering the refugee programme," it proposed the continuation of direct relief beyond 1950 (budgeting its operations until July 1952) and the effective transformation of the works program into a relief operation "specifically directed toward improvement of the refugees' living conditions, current and future."[48] By 1956, its original mission of reintegration had been all but abandoned.[49]
No less importantly, the director's report absolved the Arab states (let alone the Palestinian leadership) of responsibility for reintegrating the refugees as stipulated by UNRWA's mandate. While the Economic Survey Mission sought to strengthen the governing and administrative capabilities of the Arab states by empowering them to execute the works programs "to the fullest degree possible," with the international community reduced to advisory and supervisory roles, the director declared this endeavor "to be beyond the present capacity of Near Eastern governments to bear."[50] Instead, he insisted that "the magnitude of and the danger inherent in the Near East refugee problem needs the fullest understanding and support of the nations of the world"[51]—this at a time when millions of refugees elsewhere received no international support whatsoever.
What makes this instantaneous dereliction of duty particularly galling is that UNRWA had an excellent example of how to execute its mission. The 48,000 displaced persons in Israel—17,000 Jews and 31,000 Arabs—who initially fell under its jurisdiction were absorbed into Israel's socioeconomic structures as fully-fledged citizens within a few months in stark contrast to their Palestinian counterparts whose refugee status has been perpetuated for generations. In their discussions with UNRWA, the Israelis rejected the idea of international relief distribution altogether, considering it to be the state's responsibility to care for displaced persons, especially the aged and infirm among them, through its normal social welfare machinery,[52] which is precisely what was envisaged by UNRWA's own mandate.
It is true that the scope of Israel's refugee problem was numerically much smaller than its Palestinian counterpart, yet its relative burden was three time heavier: The 48,000 displaced persons constituted 6 percent of Israel's total population while the 600,000 Palestinian refugees accounted for a mere 2 percent of the Arab states' population. And this figure does not include the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees expelled from the Arab states during and after the 1948-49 war—whose numbers exceeded Israel's total population—who were also absorbed by the Jewish state.
Conclusion
In late 1949, the American Friends Service Committee, which had shouldered most of the Palestinian refugee relief in Gaza, informed the U.N. of its intention to end its operation at the earliest possible moment:
It is obvious that prolonged direct relief contributes to the moral degeneration of the refugees and that it may also, by its palliative effects, militate against a swift political settlement of the problem.[53]
The same logic informed the establishment of UNRWA, only to be discarded by its leadership within months. Rather than "start [the refugees] on the road to rehabilitation and bring an end to their enforced idleness and the demoralizing effect of a dole,"[54] as instructed by the Economic Survey Mission, the agency not only sustained their misery but has ensured its perpetuation for decades.
It is true that culpability for this dismal state of affairs is not UNRWA's alone. With the partial exception of Jordan, which integrated the 1948-49 escapees as full citizens (which should have ended their refugee status), the Arab governments kept the refugees in squalid camps for decades as a means of extracting financial international aid, derogating Israel in the eyes of the West, and arousing pan-Arab sentiments.
Nor were the refugees themselves eager to substitute gainful employment for welfare support. Considering the U.N. to be "entirely responsible for both [their] past and present misfortunes," they viewed its aid programs as their natural right and were loath to lose its considerable benefits. In the words of UNRWA's director:
It is probably true to say that the refugees are physically better off than the poorest levels of the population of the host countries; and in some cases better off, in the way of social services, than they were in Palestine.[55]
The article lastly says
"Yet it is precisely this misguided sense of victimized entitlement and total absence of self-criticism that have turned generations of Palestinian "refugees" into passive welfare recipients rather than productive and enterprising free agents, thus allowing the decades-long manipulation of their cause by successive Palestinian leaderships and the Arab regimes. This in turn means that neither UNRWA, nor the Palestinian Authority, nor the Arab states, nor even the "refugees" themselves are likely to initiate a real change to this state of affairs, which has long benefitted their self-serving interests in one way or another.
One can only hope, therefore, that as UNRWA nears its seventieth anniversary, the agency's main donors, first and foremost the United States and the European Union, which bankroll nearly half of its budget,[56] will find the necessary courage and integrity to acknowledge the urgency of deep reform and condition future contributions on UNRWA's reversion to the original mandate: that is, its gradual transfer of responsibility for the Palestinian "refugees" to the Palestinian Authority and the host Arab governments, thus ending their eternal "refugeedom" and facilitating their integration in their respective societies as equal and productive citizens. This will be seventy years later than originally conceived, but better late than never.
Efraim Karsh, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College London and director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University.
Available for anyone to order off Amazon.com "Against All Odds: Israel Survives"
Season 1
(52)
IMDb
Subtitles and Closed Captions
How does Israel survive against all odds? Modern-day Israel is truly a divine wonder of the current age. How has it triumphed through four major wars and survived relentless terrorist attacks? Meet the actual people who lived through what can only be described as miracles of Biblical proportions, and share their remarkable stories.
From the website www.wnd.com an article titled
"
CULTURE WARS
"HAPPY 71ST BIRTHDAY, ISRAEL!"
Exclusive: Chuck Norris applauds Trump's move of embassy to Jerusalem"
Published: 3 days ago
image: https://www.wnd.com/files/2011/12/Chuck-Norris_avatar.jpg
This week marks the 71st birthday (or rebirth) of Israel as a nation. Happy Birthday, Israel! And a big congrats to our friend and the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi), for winning his fifth term in office this past month!
For those who might not be real familiar with the rebirth of Israel as a nation, let me briefly summarize the story. In 1947, the newly established United Nations officially accepted the idea to divide or partition the Holy Land – including Jerusalem – into a region for the Jews (Israel) and a region for the Arabs (Palestine). As a result, Britain relinquished its stronghold in the area on May 14, 1948, when Israel gave its Declaration of Independence
Tel Aviv became the temporary seat of government until the state of Israel moved it to Jerusalem in December 1949. Despite the shift in location, the U.S. embassy was built in Tel Aviv in 1966. At the same time, believe it or not, the U.S. consulate has had a presence in West Jerusalem since 1844. Yes, you read that year correctly. (It is further interesting to note that other countries – like Britain and France – have their consulates in East Jerusalem – yes, East Jerusalem.)
Read more at https://www.wnd.com/2019/05/happy-71st-birthday-israel/#fYjToYGIVLWFi7ro.99
The new U.S. embassy officially moved last year under president Trump’s direction on the site of the U.S. consulate general. We are the first country to open an embassy in Jerusalem since before 1980, while 86 countries continue today to have their embassies in Tel Aviv.
The U.S. recognized Israel as a sovereign state in 1948, and it has needed to acknowledge Israel’s capital and move its embassy there for over 20 years. Last year, President Trump fulfilled what three previous administrations promised to do but never did.
By doing so, the president fulfilled what Congress set out to do over two decades ago when a bilateral majority vote passed the “Jerusalem Embassy Act,” which formally recognized the sacred city as the country’s capital and called for the U.S. Embassy to be moved there from Tel Aviv by 1999. Yes, 20 years ago was the deadline for Washington to move our embassy – just another broken promise from the swamp!
The Washington Post explained that 25-year-old majority decision: “Support for the bill was overwhelming. It passed the Senateby a 93 to 5 vote, with four Republicans and one Democrat voting no. It passed the House 374 to 37, with 153 Democrats joining most of the new Republican majority that had swept into power in 1994.”
Dennis Ross is the former American envoy to the Middle East and counselor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. David Makovsky is the Ziegler Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he directs the Project on the Middle East Peace Process. In 2013-2014, he served in the Office of the Secretary of State under former President Obama, where he was a senior advisor during the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. He just released a high-tech interactive map called Settlements and Solutions.
Together, Ross and Makovsky wrote a piece for the website Foreign Policy, “Moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem Is Not a Disaster,” which commended the president’s approach: “There is a logic to this duality. Israel’s prime minister and parliament are located in the part of Jerusalem that is not contested, and there is an honesty in ending the fiction that the city is not the Israeli capital, which has gone on for close to 70 years.”
15,517
What’s ludicrous is this: Israel is the only country in the world not allowed to choose it’s own capital, at least in its enemies’ eyes around the world. However, one of Israel’s Basic Laws, the 1980 Jerusalem Law, refers to Jerusalem as the country’s undivided capital. As a response, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution condemning Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem, declaring it a violation of international law. However, that hasn’t ever stopped Israel from occupying and fighting for its capital, which is also why Bibi has also encouraged other countries to move their embassies to Jerusalem just as he did president Trump and our former presidents.
As Israel celebrates its 71st birthday as a nation, it’s high time for the rest of the world – particularly Israel’s allies – to make demonstrable actions to reaffirm its statehood and capital, too. It’s high time for the U.S. and the world also to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which I wrote about in my March WND column.
Historically, Israel has been the strongest ally of the U.S. in the Middle East, and the U.S. has been Israel’s strongest ally outside the Middle East. And it needs to stay that way.
My wife, Gena, and I couldn’t be more in support of Israel, though we respect all peoples of the world. All of our lives we have had a love for Israel. I filmed three of my action movies there – “Delta Force” being my favorite. And Gena and I have also formed many great friendships in the Holy Land, including with Bibi and his beloved wife Sara. (You can see us visiting there two years ago on the prime minister’s YouTube page.)
We believe what I encourage everyone else to do: follow what the Tanack (Hebrew Bible) commands: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: ‘May they prosper who love you.'” (Psalm 122:6).
Read more at https://www.wnd.com/2019/05/happy-71st-birthday-israel/#A0wVLV4rpsBS2ywL.99
The wnd.com article by actor Chuck Norris also said
"It is still absolutely remarkable to me that a piece of land so small – only roughly 263 miles long and 71 miles wide – has been at the center stage of Middle East politics and war for centuries, and its capital Jerusalem at the very heart of the debate and battles. Ethnic and religious tensions even ran high back in Jesus’ day.
The truth is, Palestinian and other Islamic leaders have always been deadlocked with Israel over the Holy Land. They accuse Bibi and others of fighting against the peace process, but what peace process are they referring to? There’s neither peace nor a process.
Here is a five-minute video history summarizing 4,000 years of upheaval in that sacred city. I also encourage everyone to watch WND’s inspiring and educational documentary, “70 Years,” and the movie, “In Our Hands: The Battle for Jerusalem” to understand the historical perspective about Israel and its capitol. The latter describes how Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan during the 1967 Six-Day War. Since then, the whole city has been under Israel’s power and government. However, Palestinians and others in the international community continue to see East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.
Read more at https://www.wnd.com/2019/05/happy-71st-birthday-israel/#OcW9rUU1oouKMRi0.99
An online article by David Horowitz is titled
"Why Israel Is The Victim And The Arabs Are The Indefensible Aggressors In the Middle East"
ZIONISM is a national liberation movement, identical in most ways to other liberation movements that leftists and progressives the world over -- and in virtually every case but this one -- fervently support. This exceptionalism is also visible at the reverse end of the political spectrum: In every other instance, right-wingers like Patrick Buchanan oppose national liberation movements that are under the spell of Marxist delusions and committed to violent means. But they make an exception for the one that Palestinians have aimed at the Jews. The unique opposition to a Jewish homeland at both ends of the political spectrum identifies the problem that Zionism was created to solve.
The "Jewish problem" is just another name for the fact that Jews are the most universally hated and persecuted ethnic group in history. The Zionist founders believed that hatred of Jews was a direct consequence of their stateless condition. As long as Jews were aliens in every society they found themselves in, they would always be seen as interlopers, their loyalties would be suspect and persecution would follow. This was what happened to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, whom French anti-Semites falsely accused of spying and who was put on trial for treason by the French government in the 19th Century. Theodore Herzl was an assimilated, westernized Jew, who witnessed the Dreyfus frame- up in Paris and went on to lead the Zionist movement.
Herzl and other Zionist founders believed that if Jews had a nation of their own, the very fact would "normalize" their condition in the community of nations. Jews had been without a state since the beginning of the diaspora, when the Romans expelled them from Judea on the west bank of the Jordan River, some 2,000 years before. Once the Jews obtained a homeland - Judea itself seemed a logical site -- and were again like other peoples, the Zionists believed anti-Semitism would wither on its poisonous vine and the Jewish problem would disappear.
Here is what happened instead.
2. The Beginnings
In the 1920s, among their final acts as victors in World War I, the British and French created the states that now define the Middle East out of the ashes of the empire of their defeated Turkish adversary. In a region that the Ottoman Turks had controlled for hundreds of years, Britain and France drew the boundaries of the new states, Syria Lebanon and Iraq. Previously, the British had promised the Jewish Zionists that they could establish a "national home" in a portion of what remained of the area, which was known as the Palestine Mandate. But in 1921 the British separated 80 percent of the Mandate, east of the Jordan, and created the Arab kingdom of "Transjordan." It was created for the Arabian monarch King Abdullah, who had been defeated in tribal warfare in the Arabian Peninsula and lacked a seat of power. Abudllah's tribe was Hashemite, while the vast majority of Abdullah's subjects were Palestinian Arabs.
What was left of the original Palestine Mandate - between the west bank of the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea - had been settled by Arabs and Jews. Jews, in fact, had lived in the area continuously for 3,700 years, even after the Romans destroyed their state in Judea in CE 70. Arabs became the dominant local population for the first time in the 7th Century CE as a result of the Muslim invasions. The Arabs were largely nomads who had no distinctive language or culture to separate them from other Arabs. In all the time since, they had made no attempt to create an independent Palestinian state west or east of the Jordan and none was ever established.
In 1948, at the request of the Jews who were living in Palestine, the United Nations voted to partition the remaining quarter of the original Mandate to make a Jewish homeland possible. Under the partition plan, the Arabs were given the Jews' ancient home in Judea and Samaria - now known as the West Bank. The Jews were allotted three slivers of disconnected land along the Mediterranean and the Sinai desert. They were also given access to their holy city of Jerusalem, but as an island cut off from the slivers, surrounded by Arab land and under international control. Sixty percent of the land allotted to the Jews was the Negev desert. Out of these unpromising parts, the Jews created a new state, Israel, in 1948. At this time, the idea of a Palestinian nation, or a movement to create one did not even exist.
At the moment of Israel's birth, Palestinian Arabs lived on roughly 90 percent of the original Palestine Mandate - in Transjordan and in the UN partition area, but also in the new state of Israel itself. There were 800,000 Arabs living in Israel alongside 1.2 million Jews. At the same time, Jews were legally barred from settling in the 35,000 square miles of Palestinian Transjordan, which eventually was renamed simply "Jordan."
The Arab population in the slivers called Israel had actually more than tripled since the Zionists first began settling the region in significant numbers in the 1880s.The reason for this increase was that the Jewish settlers had brought industrial and agricultural development with them, which attracted Arab immigrants to what had previously been a sparsely settled and economically destitute area.
If the Palestinian Arabs had been willing to accept this arrangement in which they received 90 percent of the land in the Palestine Mandate, and under which they benefited from the industry, enterprise and political democracy the Jews brought to the region, there would have been no Middle East conflict. But this was not to be.
Instead, the Arab League - representing five neighboring Arab states - declared war on Israel on the day of its creation, and five Arab armies invaded the slivers with the aim of destroying the infant Jewish state. During the fighting, according to the UN mediator on the scene, an estimated 472,000 Arabs fled their homes to escape the dangers. They planned on returning after an Arab victory and the destruction of the Jewish state.
But the Jews -- many of them recent Holocaust survivors -- refused to be defeated. Instead, the five Arab armies that had invaded their slivers were repelled. Yet there was no peace. Even though their armies were beaten, the Arab states were determined to carry on their campaign of destruction, and to remain formally at war with the Israeli state. After the defeat of the Arab armies, the Palestinians who lived in the Arab area of the UN partition did not attempt to create a state of their own. Instead, in 1950, Jordan annexed the entire West Bank.
3. Refugees: Jewish and Arab
As a result of the annexation and the continuing state of war, the Arab refugees who had fled the Israeli slivers did not return. There was a refugee flow into Israel, but it was a flow of Jews who had been expelled from the Arab countries. All over the Middle East, Jews were forced to leave lands they had lived on for centuries. Although Israel was a tiny geographical area and a fledgling state, its government welcomed and resettled 600,000 Jewish refugees from the Arab countries.
At the same time, the Jews resumed their work of creating a new nation in what was now a single sliver of land. Israel, had annexed a small amount of territory to make their state defensible, including a land bridge that included Jerusalem.
In the years that followed, the Israelis made their desert bloom. They built the only industrialized economy in the entire Middle East. They built the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. They treated the Arabs who remained in Israel well. To this day the very large Arab minority, which lives inside the state of Israel, has more rights and privileges than any other Arab population in the entire Middle East.
This is especially true of the Arabs living under Yasser Arafat's corrupt dictatorship, the Palestine Authority, which today administers the West Bank and the Gaza strip, and whose Arab subjects have no human rights. In 1997, in a fit of pique against the Oslo Accords, Palestinian spokesman Edward Said himself blurted this out, calling Arafat "our Papa Doc" - after the sadistic dictator of Haiti - and complaining that there was "a total absence of law or the rule of law in the Palestinian autonomy areas."
The present Middle East conflict is said to be about the "occupied territories" - the West Bank of the Jordan and the Gaza strip - and about Israel's refusal to "give them up." But during the first twenty years of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israel did not control the West Bank. In 1950, when Jordan annexed the West Bank, there was no Arab outrage. Nor did the Middle East conflict with the Jews subside.
The reason there was no Arab outrage over the annexation of the West Bank was because Jordan is a state whose ethnic majority is Palestinian Arabs. On the other hand, the Palestinians of Jordan are disenfranchised by the ruling Hashemite minority. Despite this fact, in the years following the annexation the Palestinians displayed no interest in achieving "self-determination" in Hashemite Jordan. It is only the presence of Jews, apparently, that incites this claim. The idea that the current conflict is about "occupied territories" is only one of the many large Arab deceits -- now widely accepted -- that have distorted the history of the Middle East wars.
4. The Arab Wars Against Israel
In 1967, Egypt, Syria and Jordan attacked Israel for a second time and were again defeated. It was in repelling these aggressors that Israel came to control the West Bank and the Gaza strip, as well as the oil-rich Sinai desert. Israel had every right to annex these territories captured from the aggressors - a time honored ritual among nations, and in fact the precise way that Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan had come into existence themselves. But Israel did not do so. On the other hand, neither did it withdraw its armies or relinquish its control.
The reason was that the Arab aggressors once again refused to make peace. Instead, they declared themselves still at war with Israel, a threat no Israeli government could afford to ignore. By this time, Israel was a country of 2 or 3 million surrounded by declared enemies whose combined populations numbered over 100 million. Geographically Israel was so small that at one point it was less than ten miles across. No responsible Israeli government could relinquish a territorial buffer while its hostile neighbors were still formally at war. This is the reality that frames the Middle East conflict.
In 1973, six years after the second Arab war against the Jews, the Arab armies again attacked Israel. The attack was led by Syria and Egypt, abetted by Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and five other countries who gave military support to the aggressors, including an Iraqi division of 18,000 men. Israel again defeated the Arab forces. Afterwards, Egypt - and Egypt alone -- agreed to make a formal peace.
The peace was signed by Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, who was subsequently assassinated by Islamic radicals, paying for his statesmanship with his life. Sadat is one of three Arab leaders assassinated by other Arabs for making peace with the Jews.
Under the Camp David accords that Sadat signed, Israel returned the entire Sinai with all its oil riches. This act demonstrated once and for all that the solution to the Middle East conflict was ready at hand. It only required the willingness of the Arabs to agree.
The Middle East conflict is not about Israel's occupation of the territories; it is about the refusal of the Arabs to make peace with Israel, which is an inevitable by-product of their desire to destroy it.
5. Self-Determination Is Not The Agenda
The Palestinians and their supporters also claim that the Middle East conflict is about the Palestinians' yearning for a state and the refusal of Israel to accept their aspiration. This claim is also false. The Palestine Liberation Organization was created in 1964, sixteen years after the establishment of Israel and the first anti-Israel war. The PLO was created at a time the West Bank was not under Israeli control but was part of Jordan. The PLO, however, was not created so that the Palestinians could achieve self-determination in Jordan, which at the time comprised 90 percent of the original Palestine Mandate. The PLO's express purpose, in the words of its own leaders, was to "push the Jews into the sea."
The official charter of the new Palestine Liberation Organization referred to the "Zionist invasion," declared that Israel's Jews were "not an independent nationality," described Zionism as "racist" and "fascist," called for "the liquidation of the Zionist presence," and specified, "armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine." In short, "liberation" required the destruction of the Jewish state. The PLO was not even created by Palestinians but by the Arab League -- the corrupt dictators who ruled the Middle East and who had attempted to destroy Israel by military force in 1948, in 1967 and again in 1973.
For thirty years, the PLO charter remained unchanged in its call for Israel's destruction. Then in the mid-1990s, under enormous international pressure following the 1993 Oslo accords, PLO leader Yasser Arafat removed the clause while assuring his followers that its removal was a necessary compromise that did not alter the movement's goals. He did this explicitly and also by citing a historical precedent in which the Prophet Muhammad insincerely agreed to a peace with his enemies in order to gain time to mass the forces with which he intended to destroy them.
6. The Struggle to Destroy Israel
The Middle East struggle is not about right against right. It is about a fifty-year effort by the Arabs to destroy the Jewish state, and the refusal of the Arab states in general and the Palestinian Arabs in particular to accept Israel's existence. If the Arabs were willing to do this, there would be no occupied territories and there would be a Palestinian state.
Even during the "Oslo" peace process -- when the Palestine Liberation Organization pretended to recognize the existence of Israel and the Jews therefore allowed the creation of a "Palestine Authority" -- it was clear that the PLO's goal was Israel's destruction, and not just because its leader invoked the Prophet Muhammad's own deception. The Palestinians' determination to destroy Israel is abundantly clear in their newly created demand of a "right of return" to Israel for "5 million" Arabs. The figure of 5 million refugees who must be returned to Israel is more than ten times the number of Arabs who actually left the Jewish slivers of the British Mandate in 1948.
In addition to its absurdity, this new demand has several aspects that reveal the Palestinians' genocidal agenda for the Jews. The first is that the "right of return" is itself a calculated mockery of the primary reason for Israel's existence -- the fact that no country would provide a refuge for Jews fleeing Hitler's extermination program during World War II. It is only because the world turned its back on the Jews when their survival was at stake that the state of Israel grants a "right of return." to every Jew who asks for it.
But there is no genocidal threat to Arabs, no lack of international support militarily and economically, and no Palestinian "diaspora" (although the Palestinians have cynically appropriated the very term to describe their self-inflicted quandary). The fact that many Arabs, including the Palestinian spiritual leader -- the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem -- supported Hitler's "Final Solution" only serves to compound the insult. It is even further compounded by the fact that more than 90 percent of the Palestinians now in the West Bank and Gaza have never lived a day of their lives in territorial Israel. The claim of a "right of return" is thus little more than a brazen expression of contempt for the Jews, and for their historic suffering.
More importantly it is an expression of contempt for the very idea of a Jewish state. The incorporation of five million Arabs into Israel would render the Jews a permanent minority in their own country, and would thus spell the end of Israel. The Arabs fully understand this, and that is why they have made it a fundamental demand. It is just one more instance of the general bad faith the Arab side has manifested through every chapter of these tragic events.
Possibly the most glaring expression of the Arabs' bad faith is their deplorable treatment of the Palestinian refugees and refusal for half a century to relocate them, or to alleviate their condition, even during the years they were under Jordanian rule. While Israel was making the desert bloom and relocating 600,000 Jewish refugees from Arab states, and building a thriving industrial democracy in its allotted sliver, the Arabs were busy making sure that their refugees remained in squalid refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, where they were powerless, right-less, and economically destitute.
Today, fifty years after the first Arab war against Israel, there are 59 such refugee camps and 3.7 million "refugees" registered with the UN. Despite economic aid from the UN and Israel itself, despite the oil wealth of the Arab kingdoms, the Arab leaders have refused to undertake the efforts that would liberate the refugees from their miserable camps, or to make the economic investment that would alleviate their condition. There are now 22 Arab states providing homes for the same ethnic population, speaking a common Arabic language. But the only one that will allow Palestinian Arabs to become citizens is Jordan. And the only state the Palestinians covet is Israel.
7. The Policy of Resentment and Hate
The refusal to address the condition of the Palestinian refugee population is - and has always been -- a calculated Arab policy, intended to keep the Palestinians in a state of desperation in order to incite their hatred of Israel for the wars to come. Not to leave anything to chance, the mosques and schools of the Arabs generally -- and the Palestinians in particular -- preach and teach Jew hatred every day. Elementary school children in Palestinian Arab schools are even taught to chant "Death to the heathen Jews" in their classrooms as they are learning to read. It should not be overlooked, that these twin policies of deprivation (of the Palestinian Arabs) and hatred (of the Jews) are carried out without any protest from any sector of Palestinian or Arab society. That in itself speaks volumes about the nature of the Middle East conflict.
All wars -- especially wars that have gone on for fifty years - produce victims with just grievances on both sides. And that is true in this one. There are plenty of individual Palestinian victims, as there are Jewish victims, familiar from the nightly news. But the collective Palestinian grievance is without justice. It is a self-inflicted wound, the product of the Arabs' xenophobia, bigotry, exploitation of their own people, and apparent inability to be generous towards those who are not Arabs. While Israel is an open, democratic, multi-ethnic, multicultural society that includes a large enfranchised Arab minority, the Palestine Authority is an intolerant, undemocratic, monolithic police state with one dictatorial leader, whose ruinous career has run now for 37 years.
As the repellent attitudes, criminal methods and dishonest goals of the Palestine liberation movement should make clear to any reasonable observer, its present cause is based on Jew hatred, and on resentment of the modern, democratic West, and little else. Since there was no Palestinian nation before the creation of Israel, and since Palestinians regarded themselves simply as Arabs and their land as part of Syria, it is not surprising that many of the chief creators of the Palestine Liberation Organization did not even live in the Palestine Mandate before the creation of Israel, let alone in the sliver of mostly desert that was allotted to the Jews. Edward Said, the leading intellectual mouthpiece for the Palestinian cause grew up in a family that chose to make its home in Egypt and the United States. Yasser Arafat was born in Egypt.
While the same Arab states that claim to be outraged by the Jews' treatment of Palestinians treat their own Arab populations far worse than Arabs are treated in Israel, they are also silent about the disenfranchised Palestinian majority that lives in Jordan. In 1970, Jordan's King Hussein massacred thousands of PLO militants. But the PLO does not call for the overthrow of Hashemite rule in Jordan and does not hate the Hashemite monarchy. Only Jews are hated.
It is a hatred, moreover, that is increasingly lethal. Today, 70 percent of the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza approve the suicide bombing of women and children if the targets are Jews. There is no Arab "Peace Now" movement, not even a small one, whereas in Israel the movement demanding concessions to Arabs in the name of peace is a formidable political force. There is no Arab spokesman who will speak for the rights and sufferings of Jews, but there are hundreds of thousands of Jews in Israel - and all over the world - who will speak for "justice" for the Palestinians. How can the Jews expect fair treatment from a people that collectively does not even recognize their humanity?
8. A Phony Peace
The Oslo peace process begun in 1993 was based on the pledge of both parties to renounce violence as a means of settling their dispute. But the Palestinians never renounced violence and in the year 2000, they officially launched a new Intifada against Israel, effectively terminating the peace process.
In fact, during the peace process -- between 1993 and 1999 -- there were over 4,000 terrorist incidents committed by Palestinians against Israelis, and more than 1,000 Israelis killed as a result of Palestinian attacks - more than had been killed in the previous 25 years. By contrast, during the same period 1993-1999 Israelis were so desperate for peace that they reciprocated these acts of murder by giving the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza a self-governing authority, a 40,000 man armed "police force," and 95 percent of the territory their negotiators demanded. This Israeli generosity was rewarded by a rejection of peace, suicide bombings of crowded discos and shopping malls, an outpouring of ethnic hatred and a renewed declaration of war.
In fact, the Palestinians broke the Oslo Accords precisely because of Israeli generosity, because the government of Ehud Barak offered to meet 95 percent of their demands, including turning over parts of Jerusalem to their control -- a possibility once considered unthinkable. These concessions confronted Arafat with the one outcome he did not want: Peace with Israel. Peace without the destruction of the "Jewish Entity."
Arafat rejected these Israeli concessions, accompanying his rejection with a new explosion of anti-Jewish violence. He named this violence -- deviously -- "The Al-Aksa Intifada," after the mosque on the Temple Mount. His new jihad was given the name of a Muslim shrine to create the illusion that the Intifada was provoked not by his unilateral destruction of the Oslo peace process, but by Ariel Sharon's visit to the site. Months after the Intifada began, the Palestine Authority itself admitted this was just another Arafat lie.
In fact, the Intifada had been planned months before Sharon's visit as a follow-up to the rejection of the Oslo Accords. In the words of Imad Faluji, the Palestine Authority's communications minister, "[The uprising] had been planned since Chairman Arafat's return from Camp David, when he turned the tables on the former U.S. president [Clinton] and rejected the American conditions." The same conclusion was reached by the Mitchell Commission headed by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell to investigate the events: "The Sharon visit did not cause the Al-Aksa Intifada."
9. Moral Distinctions
In assessing the Middle East impasse it is important to pay attention to the moral distinction revealed in the actions of the two combatants. When a deranged Jew goes into an Arab mosque and kills the worshippers (which happened once) he is acting alone and is universally condemned by the Israeli government and the Jews in Israel and everywhere, and he is punished to the full extent of Israeli law. But when a young Arab enters a disco filled with teenagers or a shopping mall or bus crowded with women and children and blows himself and innocent bystanders up (which happens frequently), he is someone who has been trained and sent by a component of the PLO or the Palestine Authority; he is officially praised as a hero by Yasser Arafat; his mother is given money by the Palestine Authority; and his Arab neighbors come to pay honor to the household for having produced a "martyr for Allah." The Palestinian liberation movement is the first such movement to elevate the killing of children - both the enemy's and its own - into a religious calling and a strategy of the cause.
It is not only the methods of the Palestine liberation movement that are morally repellent. The Palestinian cause is itself corrupt. The "Palestinian problem" is a problem created by the Arabs, and can only be solved by them. In Jordan, Palestinians already have a state in which they are a majority but which denies them self-determination. Why is Jordan not the object of the Palestinian "liberation" struggle? The only possible answer is because it is not ruled by Jews.
There is a famous "green line" marking the boundary between Israel and its Arab neighbors. That green line is also the bottom line for what is the real problem in the Middle East. It is green because plants are growing in the desert on the Israeli side but not on the Arab side. The Jews got a sliver of land without oil, and created abundant wealth and life in all its rich and diverse forms. The Arabs got nine times the acreage but all they have done with it is to sit on its aridity and nurture the poverty, resentments and hatreds of its inhabitants. Out of these dark elements they have created and perfected the most vile anti-human terrorism the world has ever seen: Suicide bombing of civilians. In fact, the Palestinians are a community of suicide bombers: they want the destruction of Israel more than they want a better life.
If a nation state is all the Palestinians desire, Jordan would be the solution. (So would settling for 95 percent of one's demands.) But the Palestinians also want to destroy Israel. This is morally hateful. It is the Nazi virus revived. Nonetheless, the Palestinian cause is generally supported by the international community, with the singular exception of the United States (and to a lesser degree Great Britain). It is precisely because the Palestinians want to destroy a state that Jews have created -- and because they are killing Jews -- that they enjoy international credibility and otherwise inexplicable support.
10. The Jewish Problem Again
It is this international resistance to the cause of Jewish survival, the persistence of global Jew-hatred that, in the end, refutes the Zionist hope of a solution to the "Jewish problem." The creation of Israel is an awe-inspiring human success story. But the permanent war to destroy it undermines the original Zionist idea.
More than fifty years after the creation of Israel, the Jews are still the most hated ethnic group in the world. Islamic radicals want to destroy Israel, but do so Islamic moderates. For the Jews in the Middle East, the present conflict is a life and death struggle, yet every government in the UN with the exception of the United States and sometimes Britain regularly votes against Israel in the face of a terrorist enemy, who has no respect for the rights or lives of Jews. After the Al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center, the French ambassador to England complained that the whole world was endangered because of "that shitty little country," Israel. This caused a scandal in England, but nowhere else. All that stands between the Jews of the Middle East and another Holocaust is their own military prowess and the generous, humanitarian support of the United States.
The article by David Horowitz lastly says
"Even in the United States, however, one can now turn the TV to channels like MSNBC and CNN to see Ariel Sharon who is the elected Prime Minister of a democracy equated politically and morally with Yasser Arafat who is a dictator, a terrorist and an enemy of the United States. One can see the same equivalence drawn between Israel's democracy and the Palestine Authority, which is a terrorist entity and an ally of America's enemies Al Qaeda and Iraq.
During the Gulf War, Israel was America's staunch ally while Arafat and the Palestinians openly supported the aggressor, Saddam Hussein. Yet the next two U.S. Governments - Republican and Democrat alike - strove for even-handed "neutrality" in the conflict in the Middle East, and pressured Israel into a suicidal "peace process" with a foe dedicated to its destruction. It is only since September 11 that the United States has been willing to recognize Arafat as an enemy of peace and not a viable negotiating partner.
The Zionists' efforts created a thriving democracy for the Jews of Israel (and also for the million Arabs who live in Israel), but failed to normalize the Jewish people or make them safe in a world that hates them. From the point of view of the "Jewish problem," which Herzl and the Zionist founders set out to solve, it is better today to be a Jew in America than a Jew in Israel.
This is one reason why I myself am not a Zionist but an unambivalent, passionate American patriot. America is good for the Jews as it is good for every other minority who embraces its social contract. But this history is also why I am a fierce supporter of Israel's survival and have no sympathy for the Palestinian side in the conflict in the Middle East. Nor will I have such sympathy until the day comes when I can look into the Palestinians' eyes and see something other than death desired for Jews like me. " From the website
www.fightthebias.com
Another Good website that exposes Arab & "Palestinian" Lies is ,
https://palestineisraelconflict.wordpress.com/ It's Important to Remember that
Anti-Zionism is Always Anti-Semitism , those who deny that FACT are delusional idiots or anti-semites themselves
The website nydailynews.com has an article on September 2, 2018 by Assaf Weiss titled
"Debating Israel on Campus, Civilly" this article shows that Jews & Israel supporters are often Very Civil, while sadly Anti-Israel supporters of "Palestine" are sadly often Satanic, deranged and hate filled , filled with raw hate, pure hate, anyone can look up the article ,
I don't think the Anti-Israel supporters of "Palestine" are capable of having a Civil peaceful debate, Even if they were, they would lose the debate, The FACTS are on Israel's side, No Nation is Perfect, Even Israel isn't Perfect, But when Comparing Israel to it's enemies , Israel comes out ahead by Far !!!! My Hope is that Ultimately all Peoples in the Mideast Israel, Jews & The Arabs, and all other People in the Mideast will ultimately be Reconciled Both to God and to Each Other, Most of the Conflicts in the Mideast are
Arabs killing fellow Arabs and have Nothing to do with the Israeli-Arab dispute
The website, www.fdd.org has an article titled
"November 11, 2004 | National Review Online
"The Father of Modern Terrorism; The True Legacy of Yasser Arafat"
The true legacy of Yasser Arafat.
For the last week of his life, the scuttlebutt about the Palestinian movement’s centrifugal force concerned whether his impending demise was driven by AIDS, likely contracted, according to leaked foreign-intelligence reports, by his omnivorous, orgiastic sexual appetite. This as if, after three quarters of a century’s worth of megalo-sadism, additional indicia of Yasser Arafat’s throbbing depravity were somehow necessary. And so, evidently, they were. Thus is reflection on his life, a signal emblem of the late 20th century’s triumph of terror and fraud over security and reason, as instructive about our times as it is about him.
A THUG'S LIFE
About him, while there is much to say, there is little to glean. He was a thug. One of the most cunning of all time for sure, but quite simply a ruthless, thoroughly corrupt, will-to-power thug.
As is often the case in the modern information age, just about everything in his life is known and almost nothing in his proffered legend is true. The man airbrushed in Thursday-morning encomiums from Kofi Annan and Jacques Chirac (among others) as the courageous symbol of Palestinian nationalism was not really named Yasser Arafat, was not a native Palestinian, and tended to sit out warfare with Israel whenever conventional fighting was involved.
Although he occasionally claimed to have hailed from what are now the Palestinian territories, Muhammad Abdel Rahman Abdel Rauf al-Qudwa al-Husseini was actually born in Egypt in 1929, the fifth child of a well-to-do merchant. He was educated in Cairo, although, after his mother's death when he was four, he lived at least part of the time with an uncle in Jerusalem.
Jerusalem was then the heart of the territory known as Mandatory Palestine, which chafed under British rule as a result of a 1918 League of Nations mandate. The era, to put it kindly, was not the Crown's finest hour. Sowing seeds for recriminations that persist to this day, the Brits appeared during WWI to promise some or all of the territory alternatively to Arabs and to Jews, only to exacerbate matters by keeping Palestine themselves for three decades.
Arafat's formative years were thus spent in a milieu of sectarian violence, annealed in a hatred for Jews that, far from ever subsiding, propelled him. As an engineering student in Cairo during World War II, he was powerfully influenced by Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Islamic mufti of Jerusalem who was closely aligned with Hitler and schemed from Berlin to import the Fuhrer's genocidal program to Palestine. Indeed, as the New York Sun observed in an editorial last week, one of el-Husseini's biographers relates that Arafat was a blood relative of the mufti, who preferred him to another up-and-comer, George Habash (al-Hakim), among the fiercest of Israel's Nasserite enemies who eventually founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a frequent Arafat ally.
Nevertheless, though he may have been a local gun-runner, the 19-year-old Arafat refrained from combat in 1948, when, upon Israel's declaration of independence, it was attacked by the Arab League (Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Iraq), which was defeated in the war still regarded by Palestinians and other Arabs as “al-Nakba” (the Catastrophe). Nor did he partake in the 1956 Suez War, although, as recounted last week by the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens, he later claimed to have done so.
RAISING TERROR
While Arafat's mantel as the “Father of Palestine” is dubious given that he is singularly responsible for the failure of a Palestinian nation to emerge, his credentials as the “Father of Modern Terrorism” are solid. In the late 1950's, he co-founded Fatah, the “Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine.” His métier, and thus Fatah's, was the sneak attack on soft Israeli targets, the better to maximize carnage and fear. The first efforts were ham-handed: failed attempts in 1965 to bomb the national water carrier and the railroad. But the organization soon hit its stride, successfully attacking villages and civilian infrastructure. By 1969, Arafat was the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella group he never ceased to dominate after merging Fatah into it a year earlier. The PLO had a single purpose: the destruction of Israel.
Actually, make that two purposes. The PLO was also a fabulously profitable criminal enterprise. Though Arafat purported to have made it big in the engineering business in Kuwait, British investigators, as Stephens reported, concluded after a searching probe that his wealth stemmed from sidelines his organization maintained in “extortion, payoffs, illegal arms-dealing, drug trafficking, money laundering and fraud” that yielded billions. Throughout his career, moreover, Arafat proved a master at culling funds — whether from levies on strapped Palestinian workers or gushing subsidies from starry-eyed European and American governments. From these, he skimmed millions and stashed them throughout the world — including in Israeli banks — keeping his wife on a lavish $100,000-per-month allowance in Paris while his people starved, and, of course, blamed Israel for their troubles.
By the late 1960s, the PLO had set up shop in Jordan, wreaking havoc in the kingdom. Arafat and his affiliates soon became innovators in a tactic later refined by al Qaeda: the civilian airliner as terror weapon. On February 21, 1970, the PFLP — by then also under the PLO arch — bombed SwissAir Flight 330 enroute to Tel Aviv, murdering 47 passengers and crew. Eight months later, on September 6, they attempted a spectacular atrocity: a quadruple hijack, which now appears an eerie harbinger of the tectonic bin Laden operation on another September day 31 years later.
As recalled in the riveting account of “Black September” by hostage David Raab, all the hijacked flights were bound from Europe to the United States. One, a Pan-Am 747, was taken to Cairo, where it was blown up on the tarmac just after the passengers were allowed to exit. A second, targeting an El-Al aircraft, was foiled in flight by Israeli sky marshals. But a TWA 707 and a SwissAir DC-8, with a combined 310 passengers and crew, were hijacked to a Jordanian dessert. The terrorists segregated Israeli, American, Swiss, and West German passengers for captivity — releasing the others — and threatened to kill the hostages and blow up the planes unless jailed militants were released. Under international pressure, King Hussein resolved to reassert control. War broke out on September 13. By the time it ended two weeks later, the hostages had been released, but over 2,000 people had been killed as Arafat and his terrorist band were driven out of the country.
In the first of his many rises from the ashes, Arafat relocated to Lebanon. Staging from there, the PLO embarked, almost exactly a year to the day later, on another of the late 20th century's most infamous murder sprees. On September 5, in the midst of the Munich Summer Olympic Games of 1972, eight PLO operatives (a wing of Arafat's Fatah group known as the “Black September” brigade) carried out a plan that enabled five of them to steal into the Olympic village, quickly murder two members of the Israeli team (the wrestling coach and a weightlifter), and take nine other Israeli athletes hostage. The terrorists demanded the release of 200 Arab prisoners and safe passage back to the Middle East. German authorities lured them, with their captives, to the airport, but a rescue attempt was badly botched. In the resulting battle, the Palestinians killed all nine Israeli athletes by grenade and gunfire, as well as murdering a German policeman. Five of the terrorists were killed in the struggle, but German authorities managed to capture the remaining three. True to form, Arafat's organization responded the following month by hijacking a Lufthansa jet and taking the passengers hostage. The Germans capitulated, releasing the killers.
Arafat, meanwhile, also kept Israel's support network, the U.S., in his sights. On March 1, 1973, another eight-member Black September cell raided the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, taking as captives two American government officials, Ambassador Cleo Noel and the Charge d'Affaires George Curtis Moore, as well as a Belgian diplomat named Guy Eid. The terrorists demanded the release of Sirhan Sirhan in California (jailed for the 1968 slaying of Robert F. Kennedy), of Palestinians imprisoned in Jordan (including Black September's own Abu Daoud, who later claimed to be the master-planner of the Munich Olympics massacre), and of Palestinian women jailed in Israel. When they were rebuffed, the terrorists murdered Noel, Moore, and Eid, and then anxiously surrendered to the Sudanese authorities.
These murders, theoretically an act of war against the U.S., were never “solved” in the sense of convicting the man ultimately responsible. The FBI was reported to have reopened an investigation of them earlier this year, and at least one State Department spokesman has strangely claimed the link between Arafat and Black September was never conclusively established — even as he acknowledged Black September's membership in Arafat's own Fatah faction.
Nonetheless, a number of Israeli and American intelligence officials have long maintained that Arafat personally ordered the killings by issuing a radio message, to wit: “Why are you waiting? The people's blood in the Cold River cries for vengeance” — Cold River reportedly being a predetermined code directing the executions. Furthermore, in the kangaroo court that passed for a Sudanese prosecution, one of the terrorists, Salim Rizak, testified: “We carried out this operation on the orders of the Palestine Liberation Organization”; while another witness, the Sudanese official who conducted interrogations, reported that the killers had taken their cues from radio messages emanating from Fatah headquarters in Beirut. Thus abound dark suspicions, not to mention an explicit allegation by former NSA official James J. Welsh, that Arafat's complicity was shunted aside for what was perversely perceived as the greater good of diplomatically cultivating him. Meanwhile, of the eight surrendering Black September terrorists, two were released immediately by the Sudanese due to purportedly insufficient evidence, while the remaining six were convicted, sentenced to life-imprisonment, and…released the very next day to the open arms of the PLO.
From his Lebanese perch, Arafat's rampage of Israel continued apace. On April 11, 1974, the PLO slaughtered eighteen residents of Kiryat Shmona in their apartment building. A month later, on May 15, Palestinian terrorists attacked a school in Ma'alot, murdering 26 Israelis, including several children. Then, in June, the PLO — through the “Palestinian National Council” — endorsed what it called a “phased plan” to obliterate Israel.
WEAK-KNEAD APPEASEMENT
Seven years earlier, of course, Egypt, joined by Syria and Jordan, had foolishly launched yet another war of aggression against Israel. They were routed in the Six Day War of June 1967, at the end of which Israel's territorial holdings had drastically swelled to include the West Bank and East Jerusalem (taken from Jordan), the Suez and Gaza (from Egypt), and the Golan Heights (from Syria). It was understood that this expansion would not be permanent — in accordance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, Israel agreed eventually to withdraw from some undetermined portion of these territories in exchange for peace treaties that settled borders and acknowledged Israel's right to exist. In Arafat's 1974 phased plan, however, the PLO reaffirmed its rejection of Resolution 242 and committed itself to establish, in any ceded territory, a Palestinian state that would work toward Israel's destruction.
Adumbrating the global strategy for dealing with terror that would reign supreme through the quarter century leading up to the 9/11 attacks, the world reacted to Arafat's contemptuous belligerence with weak-kneed appeasement. The PLO was rewarded with observer status in the U.N., and on November 13, 1974, a triumphant and utterly unrepentant Arafat, holster strapped to his hip, addressed the General Assembly in New York City. By 1980, the European Economic Community recognized him as the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people.
Not that there weren't setbacks. In 1979, Israel had struck a historic peace deal with Egypt in which it agreed to a phased pull-out from the Sinai (completed in 1982) and acknowledged that there should eventually be some form of autonomy for the Palestinian enclaves of the West Bank and Gaza. With its southern flank calmed, Israel wearied of continuing missile attacks and other sorties launched against its northern communities from the PLO's Lebanese stronghold. Israel invaded in 1982, inducing Arafat to flee to Tunis.
FROM KILLING KLINGHOFFER TO “NOBEL” STAR
The PLO's bloodlust did not abate. In 1985, a cell identifying itself as the Palestine Liberation Front, led by Mohammed Abu al-Abbas, hijacked the Italian cruise ship, Achille Lauro. As his horrified wife looked on, the terrorists viciously shot a 69-year-old, wheelchair-bound Jew named Leon Klinghoffer, then tossed him overboard to die in the sea. Despite indications that the PLF was acting on instructions from PLO headquarters in Tunis, a State Department spokesman incredibly contended as late as 2002 that the PLF had been a renegade group broken off from the PFLP, and that Arafat was probably blameless in the Achille Lauro operation. But, aside from the fact that the PLO's website (for its U.N. mission) listed the PLF as one of its constituents, Abbas had actually been a member of Arafat's own PLO Executive Committee. More to the point, when Abbas died last year in Iraq (where he had been harbored by Arafat's staunch ally, Saddam Hussein), Arafat issued an official statement lavishly praising him as a “martyr leader” and “a distinguished fighter and a national leader who devoted his life to serve his own people and his homeland.”
Not long after Achille Lauro, Arafat began in 1987 to blaze the path that, by the mid-1990's, sickeningly transformed him into a regular White House guest and a Nobel Laureate. As was his Orwellian wont, he started on the road to faux respectability with a terrorist barrage that became known as the First Intifada. (With Arafat, it had to be the First Intifada because there would, of course, be a Second.)
The siege was ignited by two unconnected events in the powder keg of Gaza: the December 6 murder of an Israeli, followed quickly by the tragic December 10 death of four Palestinians in a car accident which was falsely, but unrelentingly, hyped as a revenge killing. Skirmishes quickly broke out in Gaza, and careened through the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The violence, a roller-coaster of lulls and explosions, lasted over six years. In the first four years — that is, the period before the ebb that marked the onset of the 1991 Gulf War — Israeli defense forces responded to more than 3,600 Molotov cocktail attacks, 100 hand grenade attacks, and 600 assaults with guns or explosives, all of which killed 27 and wounded over 3000. Although the PLO was rivaled in the operation by militant Islamic groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Arafat's group dominated the so-called “Unified Leadership of the Intifada,” using leaflets to direct the days and targets of attacks.
Israelis were not alone among the terror casualties. Arafat unleashed PLO death squads to kill numerous Arabs who were deemed to be collaborating with the enemy. In 1990, the Arabic publication Al-Mussawar reported Arafat's defense of the tactic: “We have studied the files of those who were executed, and found that only two of the 118 who were executed were innocent.” As for those putative innocents, Arafat sloughed them off as “martyrs of the Palestinian revolution.”
Even as the violence hummed, Arafat assumed his statesman's face for the West, to great effect. As the body count mounted in 1988, the U.N. granted the PLO's observer mission the right to participate, though not vote, in General Assembly sessions. In addition, the administration of George H. W. Bush held open the possibility of direct dialogue if Arafat would renounce terrorism and agree to be bound by Resolution 242. This he purported to do on December 16, 1988, claiming to acknowledge “the right of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to exist in peace and security…including the state of Palestine and Israel and other neighbors according to the Resolutions 242 and 338”; and asserting: “As for terrorism…I repeat for the record that we totally and absolutely renounce all forms of terrorism, including individual, group and state terrorism.” Like the Europeans, the U.S. officially recognized Arafat as the legitimate leader of the Palestinians.
The bankruptcy of these claims was revealed as the Intifada ensued and Arafat blundered by publicly aligning with Saddam both after the invasion of Kuwait and throughout Iraq's scud missile attacks on Israel. But just as it seemed he might finally fade away, the strongman caught a lifeline when Gulf War victory failed to carry the first President Bush to re-election. Bush's successor, President Bill Clinton, saw in the intractable Israeli/Palestinian conflict the chance for an enduring legacy, and saw in Arafat a viable “peace partner.”
With Clinton as determined midwife, Arafat and the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the ballyhooed Oslo Accords of 1993. The Palestinian Authority was created, Arafat was appointed its chief executive, and a plan for eventual self-government by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza was set in motion. But euphoria over this seeming breakthrough blurred appreciation of both Arafat's innate mendacity and Oslo's patent failure to resolve key contentious issues, including final borders, the status of East Jerusalem, and the rights of Israeli settlers and Palestinian refugees — under the delusion that Arafat would work in good faith toward a peaceful, comprehensive settlement with Israel over a five-year period.
The mega-murderer was suddenly statesman, star, and, in 1994, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize — a once-coveted honor now, by his attainment of it, reduced to a joke best listed among his countless victims. Thanks to this peace partner, it soon became clear that Oslo was a charade, a case of a credulous American president choosing his honey over his lying eyes.
The Palestinian Authority reneged on its promises of democratic reform and establishment of the rule of law — holding elections exactly once and never again after Arafat was overwhelmingly elected. Arafat also failed to honor, despite incessant pleading by Clinton administration figures, a commitment that the Palestinian National Charter would be amended to remove clauses calling for the destruction of Israel. The PA made a show of appearing to comply, disingenuously noting the provisions purportedly slated for nullification and calling for a new draft of the Charter to be produced. No revised Charter, however, was ever forthcoming. Meanwhile, what education system existed in the territories, much like Arafat's public statements in Arabic (always far more menacing than the English he spoke to the Western world), continued to instill hatred for Jews and calls for the demise of their state. Naturally, the terrorist activity also proceeded, with the PA ineffectual in halting it — when not encouraging it outright.
There should have been surprise in none of this. As Stephens reports, in 1996, Arafat brayed to an Arab audience in Stockholm, “We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion…. We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.” Asked about his plans on Egyptian television in 1998, Arafat explained that strategic pause was a venerable Islamic strategy, referring specifically to the “Khudaibiya agreement” in which the Prophet Mohammed made a ten-year treaty with the Arabian tribe of Koreish, but broke it after two years — during which his forces used the security of the pact to marshal their strength — and then conquered the Koreish tribe.
Such machinations were certainly no secret to the governments and media in the U.S., Europe and Israel itself. They knew precisely who Yasser Arafat was. But politically and culturally, hopeful hearts and good intentions were for them more essential than results on the ground — the “process” always took precedence over the “peace.” Thus, in the Wye River Accords of 1998, the Clinton administration and Israel, now led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, took the terrorist at his word when he promised, yet again, to crack down on terror, this time in exchange for a pull back of Israeli forces (which had entered the territories in response to terror attacks), the ceding of additional territory to PA control, and even the release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners — many of whom had been incarcerated for terrorism offenses.
14 9/11s
The violence never stopped. Yet, with his presidency winding down in 2000 and desperate for an accomplishment that might balance a record besmirched by scandal, President Clinton boldly sought a final time to forge a comprehensive settlement. He brought Arafat and yet another new Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, to Camp David. Under intense U.S. pressure, Israel offered the creation of a Palestinian state over 90 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, with its capital to be in East Jerusalem. In a move comprehensible only if one accepts that Arafat was incorrigibly devoted to Israel's extermination — in which case, it was entirely comprehensible — Arafat rejected this stunning offer, with poison-pill insistence that millions of Palestinians be accorded a right of return to Israel.
The breakdown of negotiations resulted, like night followed day with Arafat, in a new round of terror: the Second Intifada, which continues to this day. This program has been pursued mostly by suicide bombings — often including explosives strapped to children encouraged by the culture of shahada, or martyrdom, which thrived under Arafat's corrupt and dysfunctional leadership. In the main, attacks have willfully targeted civilians in busses, restaurants, shopping centers, synagogues, hotels and other public centers. Since 2000, approximately 900 Israelis, three quarters of whom were civilians, have been murdered. To extrapolate to American proportions, for a country the size of Israel this is the rough equivalent of over 40,000 dead — or, as the Hudson Institute's Anne Bayefsky has calculated, about 14 9/11s.
Arafat's world, like everyone else's, radically changed on September 11, 2001. The Bush Doctrine, announcing a commitment to eradicate terrorists and terror supporting governments, did not immediately spell the end for the Palestinian strongman. He was, however, gradually marginalized and reduced to pariah status — but for the markedly less frequent, and ineffectual, paeans from Europe, the Islamic world and the U.N.
The magic began to fail even his most trusted old tricks. For example, on December 16, 2001, with American forces suppressing terrorists in Afghanistan, an ostensibly chastened Arafat appeared on PA-controlled Palestinian television to warn Hamas and Islamic Jihad against “all military activities” against Israel, and to purportedly “renew” his “call to completely halt any activities, especially suicide attacks, which we have condemned and always condemned.” This time, the ploy fell flat — undercut, no doubt, after the Nobel laureate characteristically followed it up only two days later with a speech at a Ramallah rally — the kind of red meat always conveniently ignored in the halcyon pre-9/11 days. “With God's help,” he boasted:
The article lastly says
"next time we will meet in Jerusalem, because we are fighting to bring victory to our prophets, every baby, every kid, every man, every woman and every old person and all the young people, we will all sacrifice ourselves for our holy places and we will strengthen our hold of them and we are willing to give 70 of our martyrs for every one of theirs in this campaign, because this is our holy land. We will continue to fight for this blessed land and I call on you to stand strong.
The jig was up. Arafat's celebrity might be a product of the “international community” but his relevance was strictly made-in-the-USA, and America was no longer buying. The administration of President George W. Bush let it be known that Arafat would no longer be dealt with. When the president eventually proposed his “roadmap” to resume negotiations toward an eventual Palestinian state, he snubbed Arafat and made unconditional cessation of all Palestinian terrorism a nonnegotiable prerequisite. Critically, the administration also eased the restraints that had for decades compelled Israel to accord its sworn enemy so wide a berth.
Now under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel responded forcefully to the terror onslaught, including through high-profile “targeted assassinations” of Hamas leaders. Its forces tightened the noose around Arafat. Unable to leave his squalid Ramallah compound with any assurance that he'd either survive or be permitted to return, the “president” of what was more a racket than a government — and decidedly not a nation — remained holed up there for over two years until his evacuation to Paris, in extremis, in late October. There he died on Wednesday, one of history's most repulsive conmen and killers.
“The power of bad men,” Burke famously observed, “is no indifferent thing.” The power of this evil man informed an age — the age of terrorism. The Israelis and Palestinians may never coexist peacefully, but as long as Yasser Arafat lived they didn't even have a chance.
— Andrew C. McCarthy, who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. - Yasser Arafat was truly a Satanic Diabolical Evil Ugly Cockroach , PURE EVIL, if only his Mother had Aborted him , Everyone knows Arafat should have been an Abortion
From an article by Joseph Farah on the website www.wnd.com it said about Yasser Arafat
"There’s the question of how one can discredit a monster who takes pride in his bloodlust, whose propensity for corruption and fraud and theft from his own people is legendary. I’ve attempted, over the years, to explain to Americans that Arafat is not only a killer of innocent Israeli citizens but more than 100 U.S. citizens as well – including diplomats assassinated in cold blood.
If that isn’t enough to discredit Arafat, it’s hard to imagine what could.
But then the old light bulb went on.
Arafat has maintained support from his “people” by playing tough all these years. What if they found out he was actually an old softie?
What do I mean? I mean Arafat is a homosexual. There are also persistent rumors that he is a pedophile. I mean, in his private life, he is everything the Islamic culture detests – a closet pervert.
Now, I don’t pretend to believe with certainty that this column will be widely translated into Arabic and distributed throughout the Palestinian Authority. I also don’t pretend to think that I know something about Arafat unknown to the oil sheikhs who support him financially. I don’t pretend to believe the governments in Europe who treat him like a head of state are unaware of his predilections.
Read more at https://www.wnd.com/2003/09/20907/#hLEwALhByax5ZL8C.99
After all, one former European intelligence chief recorded his own observations of Arafat’s sexual antics in a book, published 16 years ago.
I’m referring to “Red Horizons” by Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former head of Romanian intelligence. He relates a conversation with Constantin Munteaunu, a general assigned to teach Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization operations in deception and influence designed to fool the West into granting the organization recognition.
“I just called the microphone monitoring center to ask about the ‘Fedayee,'” Arafat’s code name, explained Munteaunu. “After the meeting with the Comrade, he went directly to the guest house and had dinner. At this very moment, the ‘Fedayee’ is in his bedroom making love to his bodyguard. The one I knew was his latest lover. He’s playing tiger again. The officer monitoring his microphones connected me live with the bedroom, and the squawling almost broke my eardrums. Arafat was roaring like a tiger, and his lover yelping like a hyena.”
The article by Joseph Farah lastly says about the Demon Arafat
"Munteaunu continued: “I’ve never before seen so much cleverness, blood and filth all together in one man.”
Munteaunu, wrote Pacepa, spent months pulling together secret reports from Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian intelligence agencies as well as Romanian files.
“I used to think I knew just about everything there was to know about Rahman al-Qudwa,” Arafat’s real name, “about the construction engineer who made a fortune in Kuwait, about the passionate collector of racing cars, about Abu Amman,” Arafat’s nom de guerre, “and about my friend Yasser, with all his hysterics,” explained Munteaunu, handing Pacepa his final report on the PLO leader. “But I’ve got to admit that I didn’t really know anything about him.”
Wrote Pacepa: “The report was indeed an incredible account of fanaticism, of devotion to his cause, of tangled oriental political maneuvers, of lies, of embezzled PLO funds deposited in Swiss banks, and of homosexual relationships, beginning with his teacher when he was a teen-ager and ending with his current bodyguards. After reading the report, I felt a compulsion to take a shower whenever I had been kissed by Arafat, or even just shaken his hand.” This Article on www.wnd.com was titled "Outing Arafat" Arafat was a Monster, a worthless turd and ugly pig , His Sin was NOT his Homosexuality, but his cold-blooded terrorism , he even looked like a deranged ugly rodent , ugly ratface
Read more at https://www.wnd.com/2003/09/20907/#eDwZtlyjp1QJ2Tlp.99
An article on the website stream.org is titled
"The Jewish People Are Like Everyone Else, Only More So"
Published on April 30, 2019 • 19 Comments
The article states-
In the event you don’t have time to read this whole article, here’s a two-sentence summary. The Jewish people are like everyone else, with strengths and weaknesses, good qualities and bad qualities. At the same time, the Jewish people often have a disproportionate influence on society, for good or for bad.
“Responsible for Every Social Ill”
If you listen to the critics (and, most recently, to a murderer), “the Jews” are responsible for all the evil in the world. To quote the synagogue shooter, “I would die a thousand times over to prevent the doomed fate that the Jews have planned for my race.” [Editor’s note: The hyperlink no longer works as The Federalist Papers has deleted their page that had the shooter’s alleged manifesto.]
The article continues -
"Yes, “Every Jew is responsible for the meticulously planned genocide of the European race. They act as a unit, and every Jew plays his part to enslave the other races around him—whether consciously or subconsciously. Their crimes are endless.”
And this, after listing a litany of supposed Jewish crimes (some of which involved inner-Jewish conflicts): “Every Jew young and old has contributed to these. For these crimes they deserve nothing but hell.”
Put another way, the Jews — as a whole, as an entity — are wicked and guilty.
In the words of E. Michael Jones, “The Church is faced with a choice. She can follow the plan of attempting to fight abortion, gay marriage, and all of the other ills she opposes piecemeal, and continue to fail as she has failed for the past half century. Or she can work for the conversion of the group that is responsible for virtually every social ill in our day — from wars in the Middle East to pornography and gay marriage at home — namely the Jews, around whose evil machinations the axis of history turns. If the Church wants to have its history back, then it will have to contend with the Jews once again as the Apostles and the Church Fathers did 2000 years ago.” (From his book The Jews and Moral Subversion.)
Help us champion truth, freedom, limited government and human dignity. Support The Stream »
For proof, these critics would point to men like Karl Marx, the architect of communism, or George Soros, the financier of the radical left, or porn kings like Al Goldstein, or social dissidents like Abbie Hoffman. They would point to the high percentage of Jewish Supreme Court justices, all of them liberal (Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan), or the high percentage of Jewish leadership in the ACLU, or the high percentage of Jewish atheists.
“The Jews are just plain evil, always on the wrong side of social and moral issues!”
A Disproportionate Impact for Good
What these Jew-haters forget is that the Jewish people have made a disproportionate impact for good, compared to their total population.
The article continues -
"There is the world-changing influence of Israelite-Jewish leaders, from Moses to Isaiah and from Jesus to Paul. (That influence alone would more than make up for all the negative names just listed, 100 times over.)
There are influential social commentators like Dennis Prager and David Horowitz and Ben Shapiro. (I’m obviously writing from a conservative point of view; otherwise, I would have been praising George Soros, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the ACLU.)
There is a steady stream of inventions and scientific breakthroughs benefiting the world, many of them coming directly from Israel. These include turning algae into heart tissue, developing drip irrigation technology, and inventing a “pipeline technology that promises a rapid and noninvasive diagnostic tool for cancer and other diseases.”
Note also that “Nobel Prizes have been awarded to over 900 individuals, of whom at least 20% were Jews, although the Jewish population comprises less than 0.2% of the world’s population.”
Israel is also a world leader in humanitarian service. As noted on a government website, “With aid teams poised to respond in the wake of natural or man-made disasters anywhere in the world, Israel’s 200-strong relief team was the first on the scene in January 2010 after the earthquake hit Haiti. Israel helped save thousands of lives. In March 2011 following the devastating earthquakes in Japan, Israel was one of the first countries to send aid according to the needs and request of the Japanese government, and one of the first states to send a medical team and set up a field clinic.”
Bestselling author and economist George Gilder has even written a book about Israel’s positive effect on the world economy, titled, The Israel Test: Why the World’s Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy.
And on and on the list goes. (I haven’t even mentioned leading Jewish, contemporary religious figures).
The article lastly says
"World Changers
I personally believe that God has chosen the Jewish people for a special, world-changing mission. You could say that, by calling, we are world changers. When we get things right, it is wonderful. When we get things wrong, it is terrible.
But, as a people, we are neither inherently good nor bad, not better or worse than others by nature. We simply seem to make a bigger impact, for good or for bad.
That’s why some people esteem us more highly than they should and others esteem us more negatively than they should.
The truth is somewhere in the middle."
It is Wrong & Incorrect to blame "The Jews" for the death of Jesus, Anti-Semites & Jew-Haters are Ignorant Frauds & Worthless Losers
The website www.hebrew-streams.org has an article titled "The Myth of Jewish Rejection of Jesus"
Directory | Site Map | Explanation | Judaism
Yeshua Did Not Hate Jews
The Myth of Jewish Rejection of Jesus
by Paul Sumner
"Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover many believed in his name...
many of the multitude believed in him...
many came to believe in him...
many of the Samaritans believed in him...
a great many of the priests became obedient."
(John 2:23; 7:31; 8:30; 4:39; Acts 6:7)
"You see, brother, how many tens of thousands there are among the Jews
of those who have believed,
and they are all zealous for the Torah."
(Acts 21:20)
IT'S A COMMON TEACHING that the Jews of the first century rejected Jesus as the Messiah and that every Jewish generation has done so ever since.
As with many teachings passed down from our elders and through urban legends, it's not exactly what happened — at least according to the New Testament. The NT portrays the Jewish people as being of divided opinion about him, not a unified, complete, hostile rejection. And it has also been the Jewish response over the centuries.
Countless Jews have believed in and followed Jesus, both in his own day and throughout history. Thousands of "Yeshua-believing" Jews are living in Israel today and throughout the earth.
But their stories have largely been discounted or suppressed by the Jewish community as aberrations and acts of apostasy.
Ironically, the Gentile Church over time also hushed up stories about Orthodox Jews who followed Jesus yet remained practicing, observant Jews. In the eyes of the Church, these "believers" were heretical: an embarrassing repudiation of universal, catholic (non-Jewish) Christianity.
The article continues
"So the Synagogue and Church have inadvertently conspired for most of history to conceal the truth: Not all Jews rejected Jesus.
[For some of their stories: Jakob Jocz, The Jewish People and Jesus Christ After Auschwitz (1981), Pinchas Lapide, Israelis, Jews and Jesus (1979), and Oskar Skarsaune, Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries (2007)]
Now Is Not Then
Part of the problem with this topic is the habit of reading history by what we know today. Today's urban legend says no Jewish person believes in Jesus.
A "Jew" may be a Marxist Socialist Social-Justice-Warrior atheist, or a Freudian Reconstructionist New Ager, or a Hasid who believes Rabbi Schneerson of Brooklyn will rise from the grave and become the Moshiach. A Jewess may be one who consults the Mazzalot (the stars), recites Buddhist mantras, and goes wild at Madonna concerts.
Each of these Jews can still define themselves as being a descendant of Abraham. But officially a "Jew" can't believe in Jesus and retain his or her ethnic identity or membership in the community.
Even though thousands of Jews right now believe that Jesus was (and is) the Messiah, the larger Jewish community has determined they are no longer — by definition — Jews. It's almost Websterian:
Jew: (noun) someone of the blood line of Abraham who doesn't believe in Jesus the Jew.
Another challenge to unravelling the urban myth is that many Jews think of Jesus and Christianity as synonymous.
When they look at the thousands of denominations and sects under the label "Christianity" and see a largely non-Jewish — and at times anti-Jewish — religion confronting them, they have reason not to be drawn to the "Jesus" they see.
Yet most of them choose not to see the often radical differences between these Christianities and Jesus himself.
Out of self-protection, some Jews comb the body of rabbinic tradition for reasons (justifications) why Jews can't believe in Jesus. As expected, they find what they're looking for. A person always does.
But those who feel comfortably fortified with reasons-for-rejection don't realize that the rabbis — who lived and taught centuries after Jesus — were ignorant of the real story and merely passed on second-hand polemical comments about him and his disciples.
For example, the Babylonian Talmud contains many factual errors about Jesus and his disciples (Sanhedrin 43a) and is historically unuseful for gaining an objective hearing. Yet the Talmud stands as ultimate authority for many (Orthodox) Jews.
[Top]
Burn the Land Tactics
Another development has been the "scorched earth policy" within Judaism. That means that what Christians believe, Jews must abandon, even if Jews once believed those ideas from Scripture — not merely abandon but repudiate as alien doctrine.
One example. I once overheard a woman in a synagogue bold announce that "Jews don't believe in resurrection." But resurrection from the dead was (and still is) a central tenet of Orthodox Judaism, dating from biblical times. It is one of Maimonides' 13 Principles of the Faith that all Jews should uphold.
"I believe with perfect faith that there will be revival of the dead [techiyat hameitim] at the time when it shall please the Creator." [No. 13]
To say resurrection is a non-Jewish concept is unhistorical. It's meant as a polemic dig at Christianity.
Tragically, in burning bridges with the past — with motives of protecting their people from Jesus — some Jewish leaders have revised their own history and obliterated sources of hope their ancestors once held.
[For a study of the biblical basis of resurrection, please consider The Third Day: Resurrection Patterns.]
But why are the Talmudic sources unreliable when reporting on Jesus and his teaching? Because the rabbinic opinions about him were colored by at least two agendas.
[Top]
First Agenda
The first agenda was the need to defend the reputation of previous rabbis who rejected Jesus, going all the way back to the first century.
Later rabbis had to defend the (originally non-unanimous) vote of the first century Sanhedrin which tried and convicted Jesus of apostasy, heresy and fraud. Why?
It was inconceivable that the Elders of Israel would make such a colossal mistake as repudiating God's Mashiach and turning him over to Goyim to be executed.
Without questioning, without opening the documents of the case, later rabbis accepted what their teachers — and their teachers and their teachers — believed to be a right legal decision regarding the young rabbi from Nazareth. They repeated and thus validated the original ruling as the authoritative Jewish position for all time.
Second Agenda
Another influence on rabbinic views about Jesus is that the Christianity the medieval rabbis were rejecting was Roman Catholicism, not the Judaic faith of the New Testament.
When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire under Emperor Theodosius in AD 380, it was by then largely non-Jewish and hostile to Jews and Judaism — hostile even to Jewish believers in Jesus. The new religion had little outward Jewishness about it.
Emperor Constantine had seen to that earlier at the Council of Nicea in 325 when he warned church bishops that they should have nothing to do with the practices of the "odious Jews."
Then, as the philosophically-trained theologians of the Church evolved their abstract doctrines about God and distilled them into a series of creedal formulas, the rabbis discerned no connection with Israel's scriptures or faith. So they rejected Christianity — and Jesus — as a package.
But Jesus and Christianity aren't always synonymous. The Church, in its actions and teachings, does not always represent the faith and doctrines depicted in the New Testament.
The NT is not anti-Judaism. It is against hypocrisy and unbelief and phoney religion.
Jesus' first disciples continued living as practicing Jews. And nowhere does the NT incite contempt or hatred for the Jewish people as a whole because some of their members rejected Jesus. When he was hanging on the tree, he asked God: "Forgive them, Father, for they don't know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34).
Sadly, many Greek NT manuscripts do not contain this prayer. Some later Christian scribes didn't like the idea of Jesus seeking forgiveness for his Jewish enemies, so they took the prayer out of their copies.
[For more on this please consider the articles Yeshua Did Not Hate Jews and God Did Not Reject His People]
Gradually, the Myth set in. A corolllary of it is that after the Jews repudiated him, Jesus' disciples decided to preach his gospel of the Messianic Kingdom to the non-Jews, the Gentiles, who then open-heartedly accepted him and founded "Christianity."
Let's examine these two truisms to see if they are true.
[Top]
First Error
According to the Hebrew Bible, God created all human beings in his image. Non-Jews or Goyim (Hebrew, "the Nations"), were not inferior, factory-discard images of the Creator. No one was treif. Even Abraham and his children are called a goy (Genesis 12:2; 18:18). So is the people of Israel (Exodus 19:6). Goy Israel is simply one of the goyim.
When our common parents (Adam and Eve) sinned and were sent into exile from Gan Eden, their children descended into futility and death. They became "goyish" in their corruption. But God immediately moved to rescue the human family (us) — because he loved them (us).
Early on, he formed a people named Israel to be the channel of redemptive revelation to the human race. Regathering his exiled creation to himself became a central task. Reaching all the Goyim (nations) was the plan from the start.
Genesis 12:3c: In you [Avram] all the families of the earth will be blessed.
Isaiah 49:6: I will also make you a light of the Goyim so that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.
Zechariah 2:11a: Many Goyim will join themselves to the LORD in that day and will become my people.
Psalm 117:1: Praise the LORD all you Goyim and let all the peoples praise Him.
The New Testament inherits these biblical mandates and assumes nothing changed with the coming of Jesus. God's Plan had simply entered its final stages. He was still intent on reaching and delivering the Goyim out of their darkness.
[Top]
Misreading Paul?
In spite of this obvious repeated teaching in the Hebrew Bible, many Christians have believed God decided to offer messianic salvation to the Gentiles only after the Jews had refused the Messiah Jesus. As Joseph Shulam of Jerusalem has said, it's like the Goyim get rejected table scraps: a savior the Jews didn't want.
The idea is based, in part, on a misreading of Romans 11:11-12.
There, Paul says, God exploited the rejection of Jesus by the majority of Jewish leaders and the reception of Jesus by many non-Jews to His advance His purposes — His original, eternal Purpose. The way Paul saw the events of history unfolding, it appeared as though the Gentiles got the good food because Jews said no to it. But that wasn't the truth.
In reality, the NT shows it was because Jews did believe in Jesus of Nazareth that the message went out to Gentiles.
His apostles (agents, shlichim) who gave the gospel to the world were all Jews. They were as much "Israel" as anyone else. Time after time, they tried to recruit fellow Jews to join the messianic campaign (Acts 28:23-29), and frequently gained volunteers in Jerusalem and throughout the Diaspora.
All Are Summoned, Many Say Yes
No, not all of Israel accepted Jesus. But Paul said even the unbelief of what he describes as "some" fellow Jews did not nullify God's original purpose to bless the world through Israel and her Messiah (Romans 3:3; 11:2).
The Plan went on, even though many refused to join the Jewish disciples in being messengers of redemption. Those who rejected their national calling were left behind, and strangers gratefully entered (Acts 13:26,
46-48).
But (again) Jewish rebellion and lack of concern for the Goyim didn't thwart God's Plan for Gentiles or for Israel herself. He didn't lose heart when some of His people rejected His will.
Jewish disinterest in reaching Goyim today with the truth of the Bible and the good news of the biblical God isn't stopping the God of Abraham from redeeming countless millions of them — through His Messiah, Yeshua of Nazareth.
Second Error
We can't say the Jews "rejected" Jesus anymore than we can say the Gentiles "accepted" him — if we mean all of them. Because in the New Testament era most non-Jews did not accept him, while thousands of Jews did.
Goyim For Jesus
When the gospel message of the Messiah and the God of Israel was preached to "pure" Gentiles (that is, raw pagans with no acquaintance with Judaism), few conversions are reported (Acts 16: 11-39, Philippi; 17:34, Athens; 19:23-29, Ephesus).
But when it is preached in synagogues where there are many Gentile proselytes or "God-fearers" already associated with Israel, the gospel ignites a brush fire. For example, Acts 10 (the centurion Cornelius); 13:43, 48-49 (in Antioch); 14:1 (in Iconium); 17:4 (in Thessalonica); 19:17 (in Ephesus).
The Gentiles who lived within the light of "Judaism" of the time and knew the Hebrew Scriptures were the most responsive to Jesus. Those who were ignorant of the Bible generally chose to remain so.
So the blackwash that only pure pagans — devoid of Jewish teaching — could swallow the Gospel has no historical basis. This is just polemical propaganda.
The reception of Jesus by Gentiles was actually a fulfillment of an 800-year-old prophecy.
It will come about in that day
that the Nations [Heb. goyim] will resort to the Root of Jesse . . .
and he will lift up a standard for the Goyim. (Isaiah 11:10, 12)
Jesse was the father of David; David was the "grandfather" of Jesus, who was a "root" from Jesse. There is no question that Jesus has fufilled this prophecy.
And Among Jews?
The coming of Jesus was characterized by one pious elderly Jew: "Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and the rise of many in Israel" (Luke 2:34). He saw that Jews would indeed fall away from God over the messianic child — but many would also rise: by accepting God's messianic redemption for themselves.
This mixed reaction to Jesus is exactly what we find in the NT.
[Top]
What the Gospels Report
(Contrary to Later Church Teachings)
In his gospel record, John uses an important adjective: "many."
Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover many believed in his name; many of the multitude believed in him; many came to believe in him. [Even] "many of the Samaritans [bitter enemies of Jews] believed in him." (John 2:23; 7:31; 8:30; 4:39)
Many believed; it does not say, "Everyone rejected."
Am Ha'Aretz
Even though a mindless, manipulatable rabble called for Jesus' crucifixion at the hands of the Romans, the Jewish verdict wasn't unanimous. On his way to Skull Hill, dragging his cross, "there were following him a great multitude of the people, and of women who were mourning and lamenting him" (Luke 23:27).
The Elders
Throughout his mission, Jesus was accepted not only by these common people.
Some of "the Jews" also believed in him (John 11:45). Especially in John's gospel this term apparently designates the "Judeans" or Jerusalem spiritual leaders — the Temple Establishment, the Jewish Vatican — and their supporters, not ordinary Jewish citizens of Israel. John says "many rulers believed in him" (John 12:42). This term [Grk, archontes] often denotes leaders of the Sanhedrin, the national religious court.
Thus, educated and patriotic Jewish leaders saw no reason to reject Jesus, even though the majority eventually did. That these men were willing to stand their ground in an avalanche suggests they weren't in it for prestige or advantage. No one was buying them off to be "Yeshuahnic."
Yes, there is another side to the story.
Disciples Deserted Him
Though many believed in Jesus, saying "He is a good man," others replied, "No, he deceives the people" (John 7:12). Even "many of his disciples withdrew, and were not walking with him any more" (John 6:60, 66). By the end, Jesus was left to face Roman execution alone. "All the disciples deserted him and fled" (Matt 26:56) — but only for a time, for many returned.
And though it seems unbelievable, even when he appeared to many after his resurrection, the text says "some doubted" (Matt 28:17).
The NT doesn't gloss the picture of what happened. If it wanted to convince later readers that "all the Jews" either rejected Jesus or totally accepted him, this mixed-reaction report isn't the best way to do that. You'd want to color your stories. That's just why these reports ring true to history.
To press the point: the gospels portray an Israel of divided, not one-sided, opinion. Many leaders and many ordinary people stood on opposite sides regarding Jesus. [Note 1]
[Top]
What the Book of Acts Reports
In the book of Acts (which covers events after the resurrection of Jesus), the picture is the same. "Multitudes" of Jews believe what they hear the disciples preach about the Nazarene.
Many of those who had heard the message believed, and the number of the men came to be about five thousand. (Acts 4:4)
And more than ever believers were added to the Lord, multitudes of both men and women. (Acts 5:14; also 9:42; 17:12)
Special mention is also made of Jewish leaders and hasidim, both within Israel and in the Diaspora.
A great many of the priests were becoming obedient to the faith.
(Acts 6:7)
There was a certain disciple in Damascus, named Ananaias . . .
a man who was devout by the standard of the Torah,
and well spoken of by all the Jews who lived there. (Acts 9:10; 22:12)
Certain ones of the sect of the Pharisees . . . had believed. (Acts 15:5)
Crispus, the leader of the synagogue [in Corinth, Greece], believed in
the Lord [Yeshua], with all his household. (Acts 18:8)
You see brother how many tens of thousands there are
among the Jews of those who have believed,
and they are all zealots for the Torah. (Acts 21:20)
[Top]
A Remnant of All
Here again we read of temple priests, Pharisees, synagogue officials, and Torah zealots all saying Yes to Jesus, Yeshua of Nazareth. These were orthodox — not gentilized, assimilated — Jews. They were "hasidic" (covenant loyal), Scripture-centered people. Such also comprised the inner circle of Jesus' childhood, as portrayed in Luke 1-2.
(See the details in The Tzaddikim Who Raised Yeshua, and As Was Their Custom: The Disciples in Light of Scripture.)
In Acts the nation continues to be divided on the issue of Jesus.
Those who believed in his messiahship were a minority of the nation, but that was nothing new. Only "some" ever obeyed God in Israel's history. There was always just a remnant, an inner core of faithful. Elijah led such a group in his day (1 Kings 19). Isaiah led a remnant (Isaiah 8). Ezra and Nehemiah led a small contingent of believing exiles back from Babylon to rebuild the temple.
In the case of the Messiah Jesus Movement, the remnant was a sizable one ("tens of thousands," Acts 21:20). But the size of a remnant is irrelevant. That it simply existed (and now exists within the Jewish community) is the point.
[Top]
Toppling the Myth's Icon
It's an injustice to the Jewish followers of Jesus to perpetuate the Myth of Jewish Rejection. The faith of thousands, then and today, cannot be written off as though nothing.
At what point should we admit that the Messiah Jesus Movement was credible or authentically Jewish — when every Jew believed in and obeyed him? By that measure the Moses Movement cannot be deemed credible or authentic, because never in Jewish history has every Jew followed Moses or obeyed God. So the Jews rejected Moses too?
The authenticity of a work of God needs no validation by majority vote.
And let's be historically accurate about the Gentiles. The majority of them mentioned in Acts who heard the Good News about Jesus declined to accept it. Should we also say the "non-Jews rejected Jesus," ignoring those many who did not? What about the Gentile Remnant then and now? (Some of you are part of it yourselves.)
Polishers of the Icon
Paradoxically, the Myth is promoted by two groups: (1) Christians with anti-Jewish sentiment and (2) Jews with anti-Christian sentiment.
Both groups use identical logic: "Since Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah from the beginning — and always have and always will — there's absolutely no point in discussing him. Drop it. Jews and Jesus are incompatible."
This thinking, of course, relieves social tensions between Christians and Jews. It promotes pluralism and tolerance. It pays homage to the great idol to which Western civilization now bows down: "There is no truth and all gods are the same. You have yours; I have mine. (And I don't want yours.)"
But this idol denies the unique validity of the Hebrew Scriptures upon which Jewish identity depends. If the Bible isn't true, Jewish claims of self-identity and national purpose are meaningless. Obeying the idol also leads to denying Jews the God-given right to hear the facts of the original case about Jesus to make decisions about him — free of bias.
For those who dwell under the deluding cloud of the Myth of Rejection, the New Testament itself is the best tool for evaporating it and exposing the Issue again to those of our generation.
The Walls of Walls Protecting the Icon
Over the centuries Jews have rejected several messianic pretenders.
But their self-defining corporate rejection of Jesus and the New Testament is different. They can't leave him in the past as they did, say, Shabbetai Zvi. Their response is partly due to Christianity itself: (1) to what the Roman Catholic Church has done to them in Jesus' name, and (2) to the deJudaizing and paganizing forces within all branches of Christianity — which exist to this day.
No one can rewrite the terrible volume of Christianity's history. That wall will always remain; though it's not impenetrable (as many Jews can attest). But the Paganization Barrier could come down immediately if Christians decided to demolish it and return to authentic New Testament "Olive Tree" faith (Romans 11).
We're All Alike
Historical justifications aside, Jewish rejection of Jesus may have nothing to do with history or religious conviction. It may be due to a common and shared human response to God's Plan in every age by not a few people: "Leave me alone! Don't interfere with my life! I am all the God I need and want, thank you."
But since this sounds so brash and childish — so filled with hubris — most of us find other reasonable reasons for keeping God, Jesus, and a contrite spirit at bay.
In the end, only the individual standing alone without his tribe — like an Abraham, Moses, David or Job — can say to God, "Here am I. I repent in dust and ashes."
• Paul Sumner
1 Thanks to the helpful work of Jacob Jervell, "The Divided People of God," in Luke and the People of God: A New Look at Luke-Acts (Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg Publishing, 1972).
Note on Two Fulfilled Prophecies
(1) The prophecy in Isaiah 11:10 was mentioned earlier. This says "the nations [goyim] will resort [darash] to the Root of Jesse, who will stand as a banner [nes] for the peoples."
Whether one admits Jesus is the foretold root of Jesse or not, Jesus has fulfilled this prophecy. No other Jew in history has been sought after as he has been and still is. The Goyim have gathered around no other flag raised on Zion's soil as they have his.
The article lastly says
"There is another prophecy Jesus fulfills, also related to our study.
(2) Isaiah 49 describes God's missionary Eved, his Servant, who is both "Israel" (v. 3) and distinct from Israel. It is his calling to "bring Jacob back to [God] . . . that Israel might be gathered to Him" (v. 5), to "raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved ones of Israel" — and to be "a light to the Goyim" (v. 6).
The Eved thus has a dual assignment. According to Isa 11:10, he will be successful among many of the Gentiles. But amazingly to Jacob/Israel he is "the Despised One, the One Abhorred by the nation" (v. 7).
Why would a prophet of Israel foretell such a thing? Wouldn't that undermine the credibility of God's Servant and thoroughly invalidate his calling if his own people from whom he arose despised him?
[On this please consult the article: Eved Adonai: The Two Servants in Isaiah.]
From the Jerusalem Post, www.jpost.com
"By DANIEL GRYNGLAS \ 05/12/2015 21:25
the article is titled
"Debunking the claim that “Palestinians” are the indigenous people of Israel"
The wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors were fought for many years on the battlefield between armies. In recent decades the arena of conflict has shifted from hand-to-hand combat to a war of narratives.
Everybody agrees that the current affluence of Israel, its modern infrastructure and economy were developed by the Jews. The Palestinian Arab narrative is that as the ancient, indigenous people of Palestine they feel dispossessed and they deserve to take over Israel’s riches. Jewish claims to their heritage in the land of Israel are supported by abundant archaeological artifacts and historical records.
The article continues "Meanwhile, there are no records to support the Palestinian narrative. In history, art and literature there is no trace at all of any Muslim people referred to by anybody as “Palestinians.”
Records show that it was 19th and 20th century Jewish settlement and the resulting employment opportunities that drew successive waves of Arab immigrants to Palestine. “The Arab population shows a remarkable increase ….. partly due to the import of Jewish capital into Palestine and other factors associated with the growth of the [Jewish] National Home..” (The Peel Commission Report - 1937)
“..in the Jewish settlement Rishon l’Tsion founded in 1882, by the year 1889, the forty Jewish families settled there, had attracted more than four hundred Arab families.... Many other Arab villages had sprouted in the same fashion.” (Joan Peters - From Time Immemorial p. 252 - referenced further as: FTI)
British PM Winston Churchill said in 1939: “.. far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country [Palestine]..”
Before the Six Day War in 1967, when Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt ruled in Gaza, there was never any suggestion on the part of the "Palestinians" that they wanted independence in their ancestral homeland. The reason was that the "Palestinian" nation hadn't been invented yet.
In fact, before the State of Israel was born, the term "Palestinians" was used by the Jews to refer to themselves and their organizations. “The Palestine Post”, the Palestine Foundation Fund, Palestine Airways, and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra were all purely Jewish enterprises.
We first hear of Arabs referred to as "Palestinians" when Egypt’s President Nasser, with help from the Russian KGB, established the "Palestine Liberation Organization" in 1964. It was only during the 1970s that the newly minted “Palestinians” began to promote their narrative through murder and assassination. The Arabs have justified their attacks as acts of the indigenous people struggling for national liberation.
Joan Peter’s research has exposed the truth about Arab claims
Many individual authors have challenged the “Palestinian” narrative. Among these, one of the most ambitious was Joan Peters, who in 1984 published her thoroughly researched study of Arab immigration into Palestine, From Time Immemorial (FTI). Peters assembled many accounts of 19th century travelers’ journeys through the Holy Land that paint the picture of a forsaken and almost uninhabited land.
Mark Twain’s comments in 1867 are probably the best known: “….. A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds… a silent mournful expanse…. a desolation…. we never saw a human being on the whole route…. hardly a tree or shrub anywhere.”
Peters documents how the current land of Israel with its millions of Arabs and Jews gradually emerged from its desolate 19th century beginnings. She analyzes the respective populations of Muslims, Christians and Jews based on data available from existing sources including Ottoman census figures, government documents, old publications, scientific research, etc.
Peters’ work was received with accolades and praise in most quarters and with predictable outrage by the supporters of the “Palestinian” narrative The vehemence with which Peters was attacked was very telling. She had undermined the basis for the delegitimization of Israel. She had shown that the vast majority of “Palestinians” are not indigenous to Palestine but rather descendants of the Arab economic migrants who arrived in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Peter’s thorough analysis consists of 410 pages of text and 190 pages of documentary appendices. The general public could hardly be expected to wade through the 600-page tome full of data tables and quotes from hundreds of sources. Thus the book was unable to reverse the continuing fiction of the indigenous “Palestinian” people whose lands have been stolen by the Jews.
A simple new way to prove Peters’ key conclusion
In the midst of various arguments, what has been overlooked is a simple and incontrovertible way to prove that the vast majority of “Palestinians” are the descendants of the relatively recent Arab immigrants.
Peters calculated that in 1882, just the non-nomadic, settled Muslims in Palestine numbered 141,000. Among them, those that resided in Palestine before the 1831 Egyptian invasion numbered 75 percent, or 105,700 (FTI page 197). By 2015, descendants of these 105,700 persons can trace their linage in Palestine for almost 200 years. Therefore, one might consider them to be the indigenous residents. The date 1831 is important, because this was the beginning of the war with Arab Egypt, during which many thousands of Arabs settled in Palestine and changed its demographics.
The number of 105,700 thousand settled Muslims is in general agreement with other important data. Walter Lowdermilk gives the total number of 200,000 people residing in Palestine in 1850 (page 76 – Palestine Land of Promise 1944). Lowdermilk's number includes Jews, Christians, travelling nomadic Bedouins and settled Muslims. It also includes Arabs that immigrated after the war of 1831. Arthur Ruppin estimates the total population in year 1882 as 300,000 Palestinian inhabitants, including nomadic and settled Muslims, Christians and Jews (The Jews in the Modern World, MacMillan - 1934 page 368).
If these 105,700 indigenous Muslims were to increase in numbers only through natural population growth, how many would they number today in 2015? This would represent the size of this population as if there were no Muslim immigration at all.
We can calculate the estimated 2015 native population, based on natural rates of population growth. I assume that the post-1882 Muslim population in Palestine -- apart from immigration — grew at approximately the same rate as the populations of neighboring Syria, Egypt and Lebanon for which rates we have reliable data. That rate of growth was 1.1% per annum. (FTI page 529 table in note 78) **
I used the compounded interest formula to do the math. Applying the 1.1% growth rate to the Muslim population resident in Palestine in 1882 yields a total number of 453,000 Muslim descendants in 2015 of these original 105,700 native people.
According to the 2015 World Almanac, the current “Palestinian” population, including Israeli Arabs, and Arab residents of Gaza, Golan, Judea and Samaria totals 10,523,715 people. 453,000 descendants of indigenous Muslim residents constitute only 4.3% of the current “Palestinian” population. Therefore the other 95.7% of present-day “Palestinians” are clearly those Arabs and their descendants who migrated to Israel between 1831 and 2015.
Despite the substantial documentation assembled by Peters, demonstrating massive Arab immigration into Palestine, anti-Israel propagandists continue to deny it. Based on what we know today, and the simple truths of basic math, the issue has become clear and unambiguous. All historic records indicate that only insignificant number of long-term settled Muslims were present in Palestine before 1882, when the large Jewish immigration began. Muslim Arab numbers increased dramatically as Jewish settlements developed infrastructure and provided work opportunities to Arabs from the neighboring countries.
Also worth noting is that the “indigenous” 4.3% comprised many non-Arab nationalities. All of them were swamped by the Arab immigrants and within a few generations largely lost their identity.
Given the complete absence of any historical record to the contrary, we can authoritatively say that the “Palestinian people” never existed until they were invented in the 1960s as a tool for continuing the Arab war against Israel.
The article lastly says
"
The claim that “Palestinians” are the indigenous people of Israel and that most of the present Palestinian Arabs have lived in these lands since time immemorial is a total fraud. Albeit posthumously, Joan Peters has had the last word on the subject.
Daniel Grynglas San Jose, 24 April 2015
** NOTE: Peters rejects birth rates for Palestinian Muslims given by the British Mandatory Government which purposely inflated the Muslim rates to justify British inaction in face of the massive illegal Arab immigration. To disguise that illegal immigration, British claimed that Arabs in Palestine had unbelievably high birth rates.) " From www.jpost.com Anyone can look up all the articles given on the comments to this blog, for additional information & charts
A 2019 article on TheFederalist.com website states
"The Zionist movement long predated Hitler, even if Palestinian leadership had aligned itself with the Nazis during the war. By the time the Holocaust was over, Jews had already gained enough power to defend themselves, and Arabs had already been launching pogroms, terrorism, and political attacks for decades.
Although some Arabs initially welcomed Jewish migration in the 1900s, they would become victim to Palestinian leadership—a number of Arab mayors, landowners, and others were assassinated for conspiring with Jews, just as they are today.
After the Balfour Declaration of 1917, a British government document that endorsed “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and pledged to “use its best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” there was immediate and violent anti-Semitic reaction.
This, despite the fact that Jewish migration had been exceptionally beneficial for the Arabs living in the area. Rarely mentioned in the Israeli-Palestinian debate, in fact, is that significant Arab migration into a largely empty land was spurred by Jewish economic development. Jews were not displacing Arabs, they were attracting them.
Not that it mattered. As the Peel Commission Report, a British paper recommending partition in 1936, noted, “the Arabs have benefited by the development of the country owing to Jewish immigration, this has had no conciliatory effect. On the contrary… with almost mathematical precision the betterment of the economic situation in Palestine meant the deterioration of the political situation.”
Even Palestinian “moderates” like Musa Alami told Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion “he would prefer the land to remain poor and desolate even for another hundred years” if the alternative was collaboration with Jews. Neither Alami nor Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinian cause, nor the father of modern terrorism, Yasser Arafat, nor his protégé, Mahmoud Abbas, ever shared in their deprivations of their people. It was the opposite, in fact. Palestinian leaders have always enriched themselves on this conflict.
“Why can’t we all be free and safe together?” It’s a good question. Long before the Holocaust, every single major Jewish Zionistic organization, even the right-wing ones, saw the Jewish state as giving equal rights to the Arab population. As they do today. At one point, Ben-Gurion argued that a Jewish state should be a nation under the auspices of an Arab federation.
When Vladimir Jabotinsky—the great, and often smeared, Zionist leader who would lead the forerunner of Likud—drafted the first constitution for Jewish Palestine, he gave Arabs and Jews the same duties of statehood, including military and civil service. Both Hebrew and Arabic would have had the same legal standing, and “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice versa.”
This plan was rejected. Then again, every plan that didn’t end in complete subservience of Jews to the Palestinians was rejected with violence. This hasn’t changed in 80 years.
Decades before the Holocaust, the grand mufti personally engineered or incited massacres of Jews from 1920 onward. One such incident in the ancient Jewish city of Hebron saw more than 100 civilians killed by mobs, many of them students and teachers, after Husseini spread rumors about Jews taking control of the Temple Mount (which, in reality, Jews were often barred from visiting). Spreading false rumors about Jews’ intention to occupy or expel Muslims from holy sites is nothing new. Husseini did it. Arafat did it. Fatah is doing it today.
And it was because the British offered virtually no protection for Jewish communities that defense units, mostly made up of farmers, were first created. There was no choice. Far from “trying to create a safe haven for Jews,” the British regularly gave in to Arab violence.
the 1939 White Paper, the British announced that an independent Arab state would be created within 10 years, and that Jewish immigration was to be limited for five years and then stopped completely. The policy barred sales of land to Jews in 95 percent of Palestinian territory. Even that wasn’t enough for the Arabs, who rejected the plan.
Restrictions on immigration would cost Jewish lives. Then again, the Husseinis, the leading force in Palestinian politics, showed great enthusiasm for the Nazi cause. They modeled their Palestinian youth organization on the ideas of Hitlerjugend, initially calling it “The Nazi Scouts.”
Husseini not only ramped up violence in the Middle East, he directly participated in the oppression of Jews during World War II. As a guest of Hitler, he helped recruit thousands of Muslims to join a division of the Waffen-SS, who then played an active role in the destruction of Yugoslavian Jewry. In his Berlin radio speeches during the war, Husseini preached: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them—this pleases God, history and religion.” Such words would find a safe space in any Hamas lecture.
Husseini personally, with the backing of Himmler, Eichmann, and other Nazis, intervened to stop the issuing of at least 400,000 visas to Jews trying to emigrate to British Palestine. Most of those Jews ended up in concentration camps rather than the “safe harbor” of Haifa.
In 1943, after hearing that some German allies were negotiating with the International Red Cross and others to transport thousands of Jewish children to Palestine to avoid death, he lobbied to prevent the rescue, pushing to have them sent to Poland to perish. Husseini was accused of war crimes by the Nuremberg tribunal. This hardly seems like a person offering a safe haven for Jews.
“Why can’t we all be free and safe together?” Surely we needn’t get too bogged down in explaining that the United Nations partition plan—which would have created a Jewish state and independent contiguous Arab one —was rejected by Palestinians in 1947. Or that those Palestinians, with nearly every Arab nation, then attempted to engage in a massacre of Jews only a few years after the Holocaust.
The article on TheFederalist.com also stated
"Since that time, Arab aggression has been responsible for forging Israel’s borders and creating “occupied” territories. Not one leader was concerned about the formation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank or Gaza from 1947-1967. most Palestinians consider the entire land occupied. Since the Six Day War, every good-faith effort made at peace with the Palestinians has ended in violence."
Another Online article points out how
"the decades – before, during, and after the Holocaust – of unrelenting Palestinian violence and terror and the murder of thousands of Israelis including Holocaust survivors.
Palestinians devoted great resources to making the land as uninhabitable for the Jews as possible, repeatedly trying to destroy the Jewish state through military attacks, economic and cultural boycotts, and diplomatic isolation." Very Sad,
The article also states "In actuality, the Palestinian population grew rapidly in proportion to the higher standard of living created by the Jews who brought improved agriculture, education, and health care to the region.
British historian Martin Gilbert estimates that tens of thousands of Arabs immigrated to Palestine in the 1920s and ‘30s, attracted by the economic opportunities that Jews – fueled by Western capital and technology – made possible.
At the time, Muslim leaders like Sherif Hussein understood how this Jewish return to their homeland would revive the region to the Arab’s benefit. “The resources of the country are still virgin soil and will be developed by the Jewish immigrants,” he declared.
history proves that by all metrics, the regeneration of the land, the population growth,
and the standard of living soared only after Jews returned in massive numbers. The infant mortality rate among Palestinian Arabs was cut in half, and life expectancy was doubled. Palestinians became the most educated Arab population in the Middle East, with a literacy rate of 91%; seven Palestinian universities exist where previously there were none. These are the facts."
The Article also stated
"Palestinian leaders during the 1940s were avowed and active partners in that very same Holocaust.
The undisputed leader of Palestinians during the Holocaust, Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, closely collaborated with the Nazi genocidal machine:
Husseini enjoyed a close relationship with Hitler, upon whom he conferred the Islamicized name, Abu Ali. Husseini organized 42,000 Muslim troops to form Nazi SS divisions that decimated Yugoslavian and Bosnian Jewry. Husseini’s Palestinian youth group, the "Nazi Scouts," was modeled after the barbaric Hitler Youth.
Husseini spent the war years in Berlin where, at the behest of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, he delivered a daily pro-Nazi radio broadcast to the Muslim world. The broadcasts, which would always end by calling to slaughter the Jews, were enthusiastically received. On a wartime visit to the Middle East, Adolf Eichmann swelled with pride at how "Nazi flags fly in Palestine and they adorn their houses with Swastikas and portraits of Hitler."
Husseini objected to any plans to expel European Jewry to Palestine, arguing that a better "solution" would be to kill all the Jews. As SS officer Dieter Wisliceny testified at the Nuremberg trials, "The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry, and… constantly incited [Eichmann] to accelerate the extermination measures."
Husseini issued fatwas calling for the destruction of the United States and Great Britain, and exhorted Arabs living in the U.S. not to support the Allied war effort. In a 1943 radio speech from Rome, Husseini declared: "If those Allies win this war... the world will become hell, God forbid."
Husseini plotted to construct his own Nazi-style death camp in the West Bank. As he wrote in his memoirs: “Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem… The answer I got was: ‘The Jews are yours.’”
After the war, Husseini was elected President of the National Palestinian Council, setting an example for future villains like Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas – whose doctoral thesis is a tome of Holocaust denial referring to the "fantastic lie that six million Jews were killed,” and the claim that Hitler did not kill any Jews until David Ben-Gurion provoked him into doing so.
The online article also states
"the classic technique of asserting that Palestinians are innocent martyrs who paid the price for European anti-Semitism. In truth, Palestinians are the perpetrators of their own suffering – not the victims of it."
From the website, www.touchpointisrael.com an article titled
"13 REASONS WHY ISRAEL IS AWESOME"
Posted On 28 Oct 2016 / 0 Comment
Israel is a small country having only about 29,000 square kilometers in total, and somehow, it is a place of amazing variety, with globally unique contrasts. With so much diversity, here are 13 reasons why Israel is just, well, seriously awesome!
1. Central Israel is the most populous place on the planet.
2. Having planted over 240 million trees, it is the only country that ended the 20th century with more trees than it started with.
3. Israel’s location, bridging Africa, Asia, and Europe, has blessed it with four bio-geographical zones(Mediterranean, steppe, desert, and African), making it unique worldwide in terms of its combination and variety of climate, flora, and fauna. As an example, Israel has 2,600 species of wild plants. Great Britain, into which Israel can fit almost 10 times, has 1,756.
4. Israel has virtually no rainfall for roughly eight months of the year, which has spurred development of alternative water sources. Seventy-five percent of Israel’s water is recycled after use, with the world’s largest desalination plant located in Ashkelon.
5. Israel has pioneered arid land agriculture, and has hosted more than 200,000 people from 130 developing countries for training in agriculture and other fields.
6. Israel’s achievements in hi-tech go back to its early days to 1954 when, WEIZAC, one of the world’s first computers, was designed and built at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.
7. Twenty-four percent of the members of Israel’s work-force have university degrees, the third-largest number in the industrialized world.
8. Israel also has the world’s highest count of high-tech startups (4,000 currently), the most per-capita in the world.
9. On the medical front, two out of the top three medications to treat multiple sclerosis were developed in Israel.
10. Israeli microbiologists developed the first passive vaccine against the mosquito-borne West Nile virus.
11. An Israeli company developed the first indigestible video camera to help diagnose cancer and digestive disorders, so small it fits inside a pill that desolves.
12. Israel also developed the world’s first pill to deliver a daily dose of insulin to diabetes sufferers.
13. Lastly, and perhaps most inspiring of all, is Israel’s people that makes it unique in so many ways. From being welcoming and friendly, to hailing from over 30 regions and countries all over the world, you will be sure to come into contact with many incredible individuals during your time in this wonderful country.
The website www.oneforisrael.org has an article titled
"70 Great Things About Israel"
By ONE FOR ISRAEL
Share
In honour of Israel’s 70th birthday, here are 70 reasons to love Israel!
From technological breakthroughs to ancient wonders, natural beauty and social achievements, there are so many things to thank God for here in Israel.
It really is a land of milk and honey! Israeli cows are the most productive in the world. An average Israeli cow produces about 25,500 pounds of milk each year, and Israel has been sharing its know-how with other countries like Vietnam to boost milk-production.
Israelis have literally made the desert bloom, producing vast amounts of fruit, vegetables and flowers in the Negev and the Arava desert areas. Israel exports more than $1.3 billion worth of agricultural products every year, and a record-breaking pepper was grown in the Arava desert!
Hebrew, one of the two official languages in Israel (the other being Arabic) is the only language in the world that was “dead” but has been brought back to life.
Every week, the country slows right down for Shabbat, the national day of rest. Transport stops, shops are closed, and families gather for the traditional Shabbat meal.
Israel has one of the highest standards of living, in terms of education, life expectancy (highest in the world – 82), safety for minorities, and economic prosperity, in the Middle East.
Israel is home not only to Jewish people from many different countries and cultural backgrounds, but also to Arab Muslims, Christians, Armenians, Druze, Bedouins, refugees from Sudan and other African countries, people of the Bahai faith, and others.
In times of international crisis and disaster, Israel’s emergency teams are usually among the first there on site to help.
Albert Einstein was asked to be Israel’s first president! He declined.
Christians can worship Jesus in freedom and safety in Israel – a liberty not available to many in the Middle East.
Unlike leaders of other nations in the Middle East, Israeli leaders are subject to the rule of law and are even sent to jail when convicted of criminal offences, as ex-President, Moshe Katsav, found out.
Israel is one of only 2 countries that entered the new century with a net gain of trees.
Israel has the only theater company in the world that is comprised entirely of deaf and blind actors, and our banknotes have Braille on them for the blind.
You can see the original wall from the time of Nehemiah in Jerusalem and walk through the water tunnels King Hezekiah constructed in the City of David.
You can see the remains of the very second temple that Yeshua walked in.
You can ride a boat on the sea of Galilee, and see ancient boats that are thousands of years old.
The article continues
"You can swim with dolphins in Eilat, and ski on the top of snowy Mount Hermon.
The Dead Sea is the lowest place on earth. Dead Sea mud has minerals that nourish the skin and people flock from all around to try out their healing and health benefits.
Israel produces the most scientific papers per capita per year in the world.
There are many problems in Israel, but the population is free to discuss them and protest publicly, and the Israeli press do not hold back at all in their criticism either! This is a fruit of a free and democratic country.
Thousands of Syrians (technically “enemies” of Israel) have been treated in Israeli hospitals in the last couple of years.
In fact children from many neighbouring countries – Syria, Gaza, Iraq, Kurdistan, and other places – have received life-saving medical care in Israel.
The revolutionary “drip irrigation” method invented in Israel has shown the way for many water-deprived nations to improve desperate situations.
Israel was the first country to ban size 0 models.
Israeli women have equal rights, and some of the best educational opportunities in the Middle East.
Golda Meir was the third female prime minister in the world, and 44% of Israel’s registered lawyers are women.
Israel was legally established four times over: The San Remo Article 22 of 1920 ratified the Balfour Declaration as internationally binding law, the League of Nations 1922 “Mandate for Palestine” was unanimously approved by all 51 states of the League, UN Resolution 181 to partition Palestine was passed in 1947, and the Declaration of Independence in 1948.
There are 137 official beaches, and the Red Sea has beautiful coral reefs full of exotic fish for fun snorkelling and diving experiences.
In order to protect its citizens from attack, Israel developed the revolutionary “Iron Dome” defense system, which accurately shoots down missiles fired at Israel – while they are still in the air!
Studies show that Israel is one of the best places to raise children, and that it is one of the happiest countries in the world.
For the population size, Israel has the highest ratio of university degrees.
The article continues
"The Technion University in Haifa is one of the top 100 universities in the world, and among the top 25 engineering schools.
Israeli beauty, Linor Abargil, won the title of Miss world in 1988 after having just survived a rape attack abroad. She went on to become a campaigner against sexual violence.
Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel, an Israeli Arab microbiologist from Baqa al-Gharbiyye is Israel’s new “Masterchef” and dreams of opening a Jewish-Arab cooking school.
Israel ranks 19th among 187 nations on the UN’s Human Development Index, which places it in the category of “Very Highly Developed”.
The cell phone was developed in Israel.
Anti-virus software was also developed in Israel.
Many medical breakthroughs were successfully pioneered and developed in Israel, including treatments that battle HIV and cancer, and help for those with epilepsy, autism and dyslexia, to name a few.
Israel is ranked first place in the world in the survival of cancer patients.
Flowers are exported from Israel in vast numbers, and we have become a major player in the global floral industry.
The percentage of Israelis engaged in scientific and technological inquiry, and the amount spent on research and development in relation to gross domestic product is amongst the highest in the world.
Israel produces 95% of its own food requirements.
A company called Biobee breeds and sells insects as a form of pest control, reducing the need for chemical pesticides. Their “good bugs” keep other bugs from harming the crops. They also breed bumble bees to naturally pollinate in the greenhouses and fields.
The cherry tomato was genetically developed in Israel, and is grown in the desert for a sweeter taste!
Israeli researchers have successfully cultivated a plant from 2,000 year old seeds from a date palm.
Israel is on the cutting edge of solar power technology, and 90% of Israeli homes have water heated by solar energy.
The city of Haifa has the shortest underground funicular system in the world, going up and down Mount Carmel in just 6 stops!
The public transportation system is cheap, efficient, and has free wifi.
A group of Israeli artists started “bus stop libraries”, providing free books at bus stops for people to read and exchange.
You can read the verse from Leviticus on some buses and stations: “You shall rise before the aged and show deference to the old”.
Many of the streets are named after Biblical heroes like King David, Solomon, Samson.
The article lastly says
"There is a national Bible quiz, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s son won it one year.
The Prime Minister goes to a regular Bible study and it is not uncommon from him to quote the Bible in speeches.
Israel is a country that loves to read – it publishes more books translated from other languages in the world.
Israel has won a disproportionate number of Nobel prizes for its size and small population, and has won more than all the other Middle Eastern countries combined.
Many smartphone apps like Whatsapp, Viber and Waze were invented in Israel.
Israeli company EWA developed the technology to produce drinking water out of thin air. A condenser absorbs the air’s humidity, holds it in silica based gel granules, then condenses it into water. Better still, 85% of energy used is pumped back into the system.
Israel has one of the highest rates of entrepreneurship in the world, giving it the nickname, “Start-up nation”. It has the highest rate of entrepreneurship among women and people over 55 in the world.
The city of Beersheba has the highest number of chess grandmasters per capita in the world.
Eilat and the south of the country are a bird-watchers’ paradise – Israel has one of the highest levels of bird traffic in the world per square kilometer, with more than 500 million migrating birds cross its airspace.
Stargazing from the Israeli desert is a sight to behold.
Israel produces many award winning wines.
Israeli children are 10 times less likely to suffer from peanut allergies due to early introduction to the nationally beloved peanut-puff snacks “Bamba”.
There are 273 kibbutzim in Israel – where everyone works together, lives communally and shares the benefit of their collective labour. These kibbutzim were particularly important in helping the country get established in the early days of its development.
Israel has the largest number of museums per capita than anywhere else in the world.
Israel has the highest percentage in the world of home computers per capita.
Voice mail, instant messaging and USB flash drives all began in Israel.
Israel was the first country to sign up to the Kimberly process, the international standard that certifies diamonds as being “conflict free”.
Alexander the Great is said to have entered Israel in 333 BCE via the caves at Rosh Hanikra, and Napoleon and King Richard the Lionheart (the king that was absent in the time of Robin Hood) have also paid visits to the country with hopes of conquest.
Israel has miraculously won every battle pitched against it, with hostile nations seeking to destroy it since its inception. Although the Israel’s defence forces are strong, many supernatural miracles have helped Israel to avoid annihilation.
The number of Messianic believers who know Yeshua as their Messiah has trebled every decade since 1948, and is now over 30,000." from the website, www.oneforisrael.org the article was titled "70 Great Things about Israel"
The website www.telfed.org.il had an article titled
"65 reasons why Israel is so fabulous..." by Rolene Marks
Happy 65th Birthday Israel and may we just say that you have never looked so fabulous! You are becoming more attractive as you age and this year as we celebrate a milestone year; let us look at some of the things that make you as special as you are.
65. Israeli "chutzpah" - there is nothing quite like it in the world. Plucky for your size, Ms Israel, you never take no for an answer.
64. Fantastic Israeli summer - yes it is hot but it brings Israelis out of their winter hibernation and the beaches are dotted with sun worshippers. And dogs.
63. Israel is pet friendly - Tel Aviv has parks, a beach and even restaurants have a "Dogs Allowed" policy. Where else can Fluffy chill and drink water while his or her owners' network and catch up on the latest news.
62. Coffee Shop Networking - some of Israel's best business deals are done in her coffee shops. Israeli's are very particular about their coffee and with Java like this; it is easy to see why some of Israel's greatest deals are clinked over a cuppa coffee.
61. Bakeries to die for - forget the threats posed by Hamas and Hizbullah - the greatest threat to Israeli society are the calories provided by our fantastic and diverse bakeries.
60. Incredible diversity - over 82 different kinds of ethnic communities call Israel home. On any given day you can bump into several of them. It adds colour and life to our wonderful mosaic of people.תיאור: Image
59. Cities with very distinct personalities - Israel's cities each have very istinct personalities. Jerusalem appeals to our spiritual side and one can be forgiven for displaying signs of "Jerusalem syndrome" while Tel Aviv throbs with energy and excitement and other cities like Haifa or Safed are more laid back or speak of the esoteric...
58. Where ancient meets modern - Where else can you walk in the same footprintsas King David, Jesus or the prophets and at the same time marvel at modern architectural buildings like the AzrieliTowers with their three distinct shapes in Tel Aviv?
57. The ingathering of exiles- Over the last 65 years, Israel has gathered in Jews living in exile from all over the world, doing her best to offer a sanctuary and safe haven. Her remarkable achievements in many fields have made Israel a sought after destination for Jews in addition to Zionist ideology.
56. Size does count - Israel is a tiny country, in fact one can barely see her on a map but the energy that is contained in this tiny space is not relative to her size, Israel has achieved disproportionately. The statistics are impressive! More academic papers published than any other country, more patents registered than any country, and many more.
55. A start up nation - Israel has definitely learnt that necessity is the mother of all invention. When you are under permanent threat, the best thing you can be is innovative. As a result of our army service we have learnt to be super inventive, we have absorbed so many cultures that have brought their own intellectual and creative strength and we are a people who thirst for knowledge. Don't take my word for it - read the book!
54. A country filled with children - children are Israel's national treasure. They are our greatest hope for our future and as a result are nurtured, adored and invested in. But is not just our children that matter – Israeli NGO Save a Child's Heart has been bringing children from Africa, Iraq, the Palestinian Territories and other Arab countries, some who are hostile to Israel, to the country for life saving heart surgery.
53. Education Nation - Did you know that Israel is the second most educated nation in the world? I guess we really are the people of the book.
52. People of the Book - This is the land of the Bible and this holy book is studied,remembered and pored over. Since ancient times until today, the bible is revealing more and more of its hidden secrets.
51. Army of volunteers - There are so many incredible organisations for people to join up as volunteers. My choice is WIZO! So just do......something!
50. A healthy respect for animals - There is another community that is a huge part of Israeli society. Feral cats. These felines enjoy a purrrrrfectly relaxed life, patrolling the streets and keeping a careful eye out for vermin. They are the epitome of catitude!
49. Where everybody knows your name - and they are always glad you came -Israelis are a curious bunch. We love to know more about you and where you come from. Of course we will also poke into your personal business and offer unsolicited advice. Hey we are Mishpacha! Maybe you know someone we know in your area and then Jewish geography takes over. This really impedes gossip but we are always glad you came.
48. Unsolicited advice - Need legal or tax advice? How about medical or parenting advice? No? Doesn't matter, we will give it to you anyway. Unsolicited advice is our way of showing we care. And demonstrating our fantastic ability to access useful information at any time.
47. Hidden gems – you can turn a street corner and disappear into an Aladdin’s cave,hidden restaurant or stumble upon an ancient archaeological relic.
46. An army for the people - The brave men and women who make up Israel'sDefence Forces. On land, sea and in the air, this army made up of all her citizens keeps a watchful eye over our country. They are the defenders of our freedom and our safety. We are always grateful for their presence. Despite fierce criticism from Israel's detractors they live up to their impeccable Code of Ethics that many western armies are modeled on.
45. Seasonal eating - You can tell the seasons apart just by observing supermarket shelves. If it is summer, an abundance of exotic fruits abound, if it is spring, Oznei Haman (Hamentaschen or Haman's Ears) signal that it is Purim and time for the weather to warm up. Fall/Autumn is heralded by Crembo, delicious mounds of chocolate covered goo and winter is the season for donuts or sufganiyot. As we count the nights of Chanukah, so we also count the mounting calories from these delicious oil enriched delicacies.
44. Eating as an art form - Food is central to Israeli culture. No matter what the situation is or the mood, everything can be solved over some Hummus. Or gefilte fish. Or anything from the kaleidoscope of cultures that form the Israeli palate. We do love our food. We like it fresh, simple and in abundance. B'teavon!
43. The National Sport - Forget footballs or basketball - arguing is the national sport and all Israelis could qualify as Olympic champions. It is a simple question of mathematics: Two Israelis = 4 opinions. No subject is off limits and one can have as many players as possible. Everybody, no matter what your skill level is can join in.
42. A free press - The purpose of the press in a democracy is to shine a light on all those dark corners and expose any inefficiency committed by the government. The Israeli press are great at doing this so much that they are often criticised for being anti-Israel. Freedom House, an NGO that monitors democracy and freedom indices across the world rated the Israeli press as free, democratic and open stating in their report that the media is "vibrant and independent and freely criticize government policy."
41. The Rainbow Nation - Israel proudly recognises the rights of her Gay citizens.Gay rights in Israel are considered to be the most progressive in the Middle East and Asia and the Gay Rights Parade in Tel Aviv is one of the most anticipated dates in the annual event calendar and enjoys an enormous amount of support.
40. Everyone is family - This means that everybody has a right to meddle in your business. But they also have a right to worry about you, fuss over you, and make sure you are eating/drinking enough. And make sure that you are wearing a sweater just in case THEY feel cold!
39. Don't sweat the small stuff - Really is it worth worrying over insignificant issues when there are far greater things to worry about like our neighbours in the North and South, Iran and just how much weight we will gain over the Chagim? It is all small "Stuff". I know we are Jewish and worrying like over feeding is in our genes but sometimes you just have to prioritise and not sweat it. Besides, the summer weather makes you work up enough of a shvitz.
38. In times of strife - We are all family right? This is so evident in times of strife. When we are under threat or in a state of security escalation or war, there is no more cohesive, tight knit and united nation than Israel.
37. And in time of remembrance - There are sacred days when we are united in grief and remembrance. Sirens wail their mournful cry as we remember our 6 million heroes and martyrs who perished in the Holocaust. And we remember those who paid the ultimate price in defence of our country in Israel's wars and military campaigns as well as victims of terror attacks.
36. A reason to celebrate! - Happy 65th Birthday Israel! We have a lot to celebrate! Achievements beyond our wildest dreams in so many areas and the triumph of our plucky little state against all those who hope for her failure. L'Chaim Israel - to life!
35. Punching above our weight - For a teeny country, Israel punches above her. weight. Nearly always the first to respond to any kind of trauma or natural disaster around the world, Israel doesn't let size impede her in any way. Israel has even offered help to countries she has no diplomatic ties or hostile relations with. Now that packs a punch!
34. Green is the hot new colour - It is no secret that Israel is a leader in cutting edge technology. This also includes environmental or "green" technology. A leader is sewage recycling, water purification and concentrated efforts to encourage people to recycle and lessen their carbon footprints, makes environmental issues an important priority.
33. Hebrew speak Hebrew - Hebrew is an ancient language that has been revived with the birth of the new state. With the influx of Olim, some interesting hybrids that include hebrench, hebranish, heblish, hebrussian and hebritalian amongst others.
32. Democracy at its best - Elections in Israel bring with them much excitement. And a steady raise in blood pressure. But it is democracy at its best. All facets of Israeli society are represented, despite what some may say and results are almost always surprising. The 2013 elections put new party, Yesh Atid firmly on the map - surprising even them! Viva la democracy!
31. The "cottage" revolution - The humble tub of "cottage" is the little dairy product that could. An essential part of the Israeli diet, the rising cost of "cottage" inspired a revolution for social justice in the summer of 2011 and one could hardly pass a park without the ubiquitous protest tents. Viva la revolution!
30. A very Nobel people - We have already discussed that Israel punches above its weight but did you know that she has a disproportionate amount of Nobel laureates in fields that include literature, science, medicine and peace? Now that is worth raising a glass to!
29. When in doubt sing - Israelis love to sing. In the car, in the shower, in the post office and in the middle of the mall. Hey why not?
28. Watch us on TV - Some of your favourite TV shows are based on shows created in Israel The award winning "Homeland" and "In Treatment" are just two of Israel's stellar small screen offerings.
27. No censorship (within reason) - Most radio stations around the world steer clearof dropping F bombs. In Israel you can enjoy your morning radio with a liberal smattering of profanity. The F word has little or no impact here. Just don't swear in Hebrew - now THAT is disrespectful!
26. Museums - You can lose yourself in a myriad of different kinds of museums. From the historical to art, to our Zionist history and honouring our precious lost, Israel offers something that appeals to everyone no matter what your interest is.
25. Protecting the endangered - Israel is home to no less than 25 special programmes aimed at protecting endangered wildlife. Here, rhinoceros who are hunted all over the world thrive in breeding programmes, endangered birds and other threatened species are cared for and under stress free conditions, happily multiply.
24. A nation filled with Jewish mothers - Everyone's a Jewish mother. Don't be surprise if a total stranger offers you something to drink in the blistering heat or something small (okay so we all suffer from Jewish woman's gene to overfeed) to nibble on.
23. Living by the Jewish calendar - You can always tell which Chag, national holiday is coming up by what is on sale at the supermarket. If the shelves are lined with boxes of matzah, it must be Pesach, if pomegranates abound, Rosh Hashanah approaches. Is it just coincidental that most of it is food related?
22. Do you read me? - Israel has more books published per capita than any other country. And while we may be the people of the book, we are also the people of the book week.
21. Home to the three monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam were all born in this region. Where else in the world but Jerusalem can you pray (and slip a note)into the Wailing Wall while hearing the Imam call the Muslim faithful to prayer and the church bells peal all at the same time?
20. Freedom of religion - The freedom of ALL religions is protected in Israel While we may be the Jewish State and home to the three Abrahamic religions, we also protect the rights of Baha'i, Hindu, Buddhists and any other sacred religion that our citizens choose to observe.
19. A world in one country - Israel offers a world in one country. If you are hankering for the Alps, you can ski in the north, swim with the dolphins in the south and feel like you have toured several different countries thanks to the mix of cultures and personalities of our towns and cities.
18. An investment darling - Israel is attracting a fortune (literally!) of investment from major international brands such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and others. Not to forget earning the praises and investment from Warren Buffett. and others.
17. All the world loves an Oscar - Israel has had a presence in the Best Foreign Film Category at the Academy Awards ceremony nearly every year. And the Oscar goes to....
16. Women’s rights - Women in Israel enjoy a much higher status than their counterparts in many other countries around the world. One of the first countries to have a female Prime Minister and with a strong representation of women in our new Knesset, Israel is demanding that the status of women continuously improves.
15. Cultural hub - Opera? Theatre? Live music? Mime? Art exhibition? Book reading? Whatever cultural activity you feel like indulging, you can bet that you can find something that tickles your fancy...
14. Defying the odds - With no clearly defined borders, constant threat of war and hostile neighbours, how is it that this tiny Oasis continues to defy the odds? Perhaps we are a miraculous country....
13. Amazing national institutions - Before we had a formal government we had incredible organisations like the Jewish National Fund (KKL), Keren Hayesod, WIZO, the World Zionist Organisation and the Jewish Agency who prepared and nurtured the country in anticipation of the ingathering of her exiles.
12. Literary gifts to the world - Award winning authors Amos Oz and David Grossman are just some of our writers who enjoy international support.
11. Protecting our civilians - in times of strife, every citizen knows that the processes are in place to make sure we are protected. Whether it is bomb shelters or rocket proof centres, our safety is paramount.
10. One of the world's natural wonders (Dead Sea) - Have a float or enjoy some pampering at one of the earth's most spectacular wonders, the Dead Sea. It is enough to soothe away your stress.תיאור: Image
9. Israeli NGO's - From fighting Israel's media war to helping animals and children. Israel is home to many NGO's who are working hard to protect and defend our nation. Our very special WIZO works for an improved Israeli society. Now that is something to be proud of!
8. Support systems for Olim - What other countries makes sure that its new immigrants are well taken care of and have a soft landing? While we don't promise you a rose garden, we can pad your arrival a bit just to help you. The processes are in place to advise you and help point you in the right direction. The rest is up to you.
7. The right to criticise - Israel faces a lot of criticism from the international media but the irony of it all is that nobody is more critical of the country than its citizens. The right to voice our approval or disapproval is one of the greatest benchmarks of a democracy and our democratic right to complain and criticise is fiercely defended.
6. Working with our neighbours - one of Israel's best kept secrets it projects with our neighbours. While stories of mutual cooperation in this volatile region may not sell newspapers, they do in fact happen. We sow the Seeds of Peace and improve water supplies used by both people. Peace will be built through these initiatives.
5. Superb medical innovation - From teeny cameras that you can ingest to an external carapace that will enable paraplegics to walk, Israel is not only saving lives, we are helping people start new ones.
4. Exporting our know-how - So we weren't blessed with a fortune of natural resources. Until recently with the founding of natural gas reserves, so what is our key export? Technical know how! In a sphere of different industries and arena, Israeli products are changing and shaping the world.
3. Diaspora community - Our wonderful communities around the world support us and while we know that a strong Diaspora = a strong Israel, we welcome you here with open arms.
2. Don't worry - be Israeli - Really, don't worry, everything will be okay. Kol yihye b'seder. That is the Israeli motto and over the years I have learned to not worry or question how things get done, they just do.
1. An absolute reverence for life -There is nothing more sacred and worth celebrating than life. Israelis were voted one of the happiest nations in the world and it is easy to see why. Let’s all raise a glass and toast to 65 spectacular years and many many more. L'Chaim!
From the website theisraelgroup.org an article titled
"The Myth: Jewish Theft of Arab Land"
BY ALEX GROBMAN, PHD
One of the most persistent canards Arabs have exploited against Israel is that she stole Palestinian Arab land, which explains why this dispute remains intractable. This fabrication has led the media to label Israel as occupiers of Palestinian Arab lands. An examination of what the Jews found as they returned to their ancestral homeland, the enormous obstacles they encountered and how they overcame them should debunk this lie. 1
Those Jews who settled in the Yishuv, the Jewish community in the land of Israel before the establishment of the Israeli state, came to a land that was sparsely populated and economically underdeveloped, with sizeable regions of desert, semiarid wilderness and swamps. Before the British arrived in Palestine at the end of World War I, the Ottoman government had practically no involvement in regulating land use, health and sanitary conditions or controls on the construction of private and public buildings. Except for a few roads and a rail line that projected imperial power, there were few public works projects. Resident Arabs, traditional in outlook, had no interest in new plans for their communities. For Herzl and other European Zionists, Turkish Palestine, was inviting because of its lack of government accountability, absence of local Arab initiative, and the “empty landscape.” 2
Condition of the Land
The task facing the early Jewish pioneers in purchasing land and resurrecting neglected desert regions, malarial valleys, swamps, hills and sand seemed almost insurmountable.3 Walter Clay Lowdermilk, a soil conservationist who reclaimed lands throughout the world, found Palestine “a land impoverished by erosion and neglect.” The “soils were eroded off the uplands to bedrock over fully one-half the hills; streams across the coastal plains were chocked with erosional debris from the hills to form pestilential marshes infested with dreaded malaria; the fair cities and elaborate works of ancient times were left in doleful ruins.” 4
Henry Baker Tristram, an English clergyman and biblical scholar, describes the situation in the mid-19th century: “A few years ago, the whole Ghor [the Jordan Valley] was in the hands of the fellahin, and much of it cultivated for corn. Now the whole of it is in the hands of the Bedouin, who eschew all agriculture, except in a few spots cultivated here and there by their slaves; and with the Bedouin come lawlessness and the uprooting of all Turkish authority. No government is now acknowledged on the east side; and unless the Porte acts with greater firmness and caution than is his wont, it will lose the last vestige of authority on the right bank also, and a wide strip of the most fertile land in all Palestine will be desolated and given up to the Nomads. The same thing is now going on over the plain of Sharon, where, both in the north and south, land is going out of cultivation, and whole villages rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth. Since the year 1838, no less than 20 villages have been thus erased from the map and the stationary population extirpated. Very rapidly the Bedouin are encroaching wherever horse can be ridden; and the Government is utterly powerless to resist them or to defend its subjects.” 5
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster Abbey, added what he saw in Palestine in 1853: “In Judea it is hardly an exaggeration to say that whilst for miles and miles there is no appearance of present life or habitation, except the occasional goat herd on the hill side, or gathering of women at the wells, there is hardly a hill-top of the many within sight which is not covered by the vestiges of some fortress city of former ages. Sometimes they are fragments of ancient walls, sometimes mere foundations and piles of stone, but always enough to indicate signs of human habitation and civilisation…. But the general fact of the ruins of Palestine, whether erect or fallen, remains common to the whole country; deepens and confirm, if it does not create, the impression of age and decay, which belongs to almost every view of Palestine, and invests it with an appearance which can be called by no other name than venerable.” 6
In 1894, Scottish theologian George Adam Smith published his comprehensive investigative report on the Holy Land in which he said: “Judah has lost his eyes, and his raiment is in rags.” 7
Urgency of Buying Land
Unless the Zionists could purchase their own land, they could not expand the number of immigrants, build and enlarge settlements or create the foundation for the society and nation they envisioned. Even with the restrictions enacted by the Ottoman government and the growing public Arab hostility against such purchases, the Zionist’s succeeded in buying more than 420,000dunams (4 dunams=1 acre) by 1917. As more Jews entered the country, the demand for additional real-estate increased as did the willingness of the Arabs to sell their land.8
Land sold by Arabs to Jews accounted for 40 percent of all registered sales in Palestine between 1929 and 1946 according to economic historian Jacob Metzer. No similar statistics are available for the 1920s. From a high of 54 percent of all Arab land sold from 1929-1939, the number declined to 22 percent from 1940-1946. The decrease in the 1940s probably occurred as a result of government imposed restrictions on land sales to Jews when the Land Transfer Regulations were decreed in 1940, since the percentage of unregistered (and therefore not recorded) transactions undoubtedly increased in order to evade government controls. This assumption is indirectly corroborated by the increasing disparity between the number of officially registered Jewish land purchases and the Jewish Agency for Palestine’s projected total land purchases.9
Did The Jews Buy All The Prime Land At Inflated Prices and Then Dispossess the Arabs?
Auni Abdul Hadi a lawyer, member of the Arab Higher Committee and leader of the Istiqlal (Arab nationalist party) he established in Palestine in 1932, charged the Jews with buying all the prime land at inflated prices and then dispossessing the Arabs. Who could resist such outrageous sums offered by the Jews, he asked. Some individual Arabs were becoming wealthy, positions for other Arabs were continually being lost. 10
Is this attack justified? The Palestine Royal Commission (known as the Peel Commission head by Lord Peel), sent to suggest modifications to the British Mandate following the six-month-long Arab general strike concluded: “The Arab charge that the Jews have obtained too large a portion of good land cannot be maintained. Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes, or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased. Though to-day, the light of experience gained by Jewish energy and enterprise, the Arabs may denounce the vendors and regret the alienation of the land, there was at the time at least of the earlier sales little evidence that the owners possessed either the resources or training needed to develop the land. So far as the plains are concerned, we consider that, with due precautions, land may still be sold to Jews.”11
Furthermore, “The shortage of land is, we consider, due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population,” 12 which rapidly grew as a result of better conditions created by the Jews. Between 1931 and 1942, the non-Jewish rural population increased by 160,000, and the percentage of the non-Jewish rural population decreased only somewhat.13
In terms of disposing the Arabs, The Commission found: “The Jews had made… careful enquiry into the matter of landless Arabs and they had discovered only 688 tenants who had been displaced by the land being sold over their heads; and that of these some 400 had found other land. This enquiry related to the period 1920 to 1930.”14
The British Partition Commission determined “The Arabs would be would be no better with a larger population than to-day on the same amount of land, unless, they learn to cultivate their land more intensively and unless in addition they can find supplementary employment in the towns. And neither of these two things can be brought about without the assistance of Jewish taxable capacity and Jewish capital.” 15 Lowdermilk agreed: “Our observations in Palestine convince us that Jewish settlement not only has done no harm to the Arabs but has actually raised their status far above that of the Arabs in the neighboring lands.” 16
In response to Auni, Dr. Judah Magnes, first president of The Hebrew University, argued that there was sufficient undeveloped and fallow land in the country, which if cultivated using farming procedures they had perfected, would allow for a greater concentration of people. At the turn of the 19th century, for example, a farmer needed at least 250 dunams to subsist. In 1934, the same Arab or Jewish farmer required only 50 dunams that produced even more income than they had previously. 17
In explaining the difference in the relationship of Palestine between Jews and Arabs, Magnes said, “For us, the Land was everything, and there was nothing else. For the Arabs, Palestine was only a small portion of the large and numerous countries. Even when the Arabs became a minority in Palestine, they would not be a minority in their territory, which extended from the Mediterranean coast to the Persian Gulf, and from the Taurus Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean.”18
Ben-Gurion said the Arab position would be similar to the English minority living in Scotland. As part of the United Kingdom, the English were in the majority, even while living in Scotland. The Jews needed to be in the majority in Palestine, otherwise they would become a minority. Auni said the Arab intelligentsia in Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Tunis and Morocco felt they were part of “one culture, one past and one nation” although he was not sure the masses shared this view. 19
As far as land sales, Ben-Gurion asserted the issue was non-negotiable. “We had been compelled to come and settle without the consent of the Arabs, and we would continue to do so in the future if necessary, but we would prefer to act on the basis of an understanding and mutual agreement.” This arrangement would work if the Arabs “recognized our right to return to our land, while we would recognize the right of the Arabs to remain on their land.” If the Arabs agreed to this arrangement, the Jews would assist them financially, politically and morally to achieve the “rebirth and unity of the Arab people.” 20
Chaim Weizmann, Zionist leader and statesman, responded to the same charge: “Very often I heard from quite benevolent Arabs… you have come to Palestine and you have in your hands the best land in the country. In fact, some of them whom I know said, well, you have really cheated us; we have sold you this and that piece of land very, very cheaply; if we had waited another ten years we could have sold it to you at double or triple the price… My answer to them was, gentlemen, you seem to have forgotten that we have made it into good land; we have made it into good land because we have sunk so much effort into it. If you would do the same, your land would be just as good if not better than ours. Do not reproach us for having improved that part of the land which you have sold us because you could do nothing with it.” 21
By May 1948, Jews owned 1.621 million dunams and leased 181,000 dunams of state land, amounting to 11.4 percent of non-desert area. Sixty-six percent of Jewish land was in the northern valleys and the “fertile accessible coastal plain.” In 1945 they owned 23 percent of the coastal plain, 30 percent in the northern valleys, and four percent of the hill country. 22 Though this was a moderate amount of territory compared to the entire mandated area or the land that became part of Israel’s 1949 armistice lines, this was far less than the five million dunams the Zionists had projected in 1925 to purchase according to historian Kenneth W. Stein. Only the lack of funds impeded Jews from buying more land before and after the establishment of the Mandate. With all the difficulties the Zionists encountered with Arab opposition to land purchases and government legal regulations and restrictions, the land they obtained from the Arabs played a vital role in enabling them to create a Jewish national home. Their success in procuring property demonstrated that the Zionist dream of redeeming the land could be achieved immediately. 23
A number of factors facilitated this process. The Arab peasants were poor throughout the Ottoman and Mandatory eras. Inadequate precipitation, dearth of animals capable of hauling heavy loads, ineffective management of agricultural land, small tracts of land, absence of investment capital, indebtedness, and overall disenchantment with government aided the Jews. Indifference of the Palestinian Arab elite to the fellaheen and their willingness to sell their land to Jews further helped the growth of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine). Though the Palestinian Arabs were in the majority during the Mandate, their own lack of economic resources provided the Jewish minority a clear advantage in the attempt to control Palestine. 24
At the same time, the increased sales limited the opportunities available for non-Jewish buyers. In some cases, Zionist demands for land elevated the cost of the properties beyond their true value. Large purchases by the Jewish National Fund and the Palestine Land Development Company (PLDC} of the Zionist Organization might have prevented price rises since sellers were competing with other buyers. Economists call this monopsonistic when one buyer is offering their product to many sellers. 25
Financial Risks Involved in Investing In Underdeveloped Rural Land
Not mentioned were the financial risks involved in investing in undeveloped rural land or the Zionist enterprises that failed. Though some early settlements producing oranges became prosperous, a number ended in disaster. Many individuals were ruined or suffered significant financial loss. Diversified settlements and plantation colonies such as Poriah and Rama in the north and Ruchama in the south ended in failure. Some settlements lost capital and their land. This occurred with the American Achuzah society’s Poriah settlement with 3,545 dunams. In 1928—17 years after being founded—after losing most of their money, the land ended in forced auction. 26
Sir John Hope Simpson, a British Liberal politician, sent by the British government to investigate the possibilities for future immigration and settlement of Palestine, confirmed this assessment of Jewish colonization since 1930. In the Vale of Esdraelon, between Mount Carmel, Mount Gilboa and the hills of lower Galilee, Simpson reported that “In some villages there are clear signs of success; in others, the opposite is the case. The village of Afuleh, which the American Zionist Commonwealth boomed as the Chicago of Palestine, is a sea of thistles through which one travels for long distances. A plague of field mice, which has done extensive damage to both Jewish and Arab cultivation in the Vale during the present year was officially stated to be due to the fact that 30,000 dunams of the land held by the Jews are derelict and covered with weeds.” 27The failure of these and several other settlements left many “embittered and desperate,” with no option but to leave Palestine. 28
Each purchase was intended to advance the Zionist objective, which explains why the companies did not compete with each other. The Geula Company, which acquired land for development and expansion of agricultural settlements, would not sell to Jews if they might resell the land to Arabs, even if this entailed sacrificing profit or reducing loss. 29
Arab Leaders Publicly Opposed Selling Land to Jews: Privately They Acted Differently
Though the Arab leadership vigorously protested the sale of land to Jews, Kenneth W. Stein found that large and small Arab landowners were constantly offering to sell their land before and after the Mandate came into existence. Arabs also acted as intermediaries as we have seen. Even during the period when anti-Zionist and ant-British opinion had reached a feverish pitch, Palestinian Arabs were more preoccupied with their own individual concerns than the emerging Arab national movement. Those less educated Palestinian Arabs with small tracts were more inclined to alienate their land in the 1930s when their economic existence was their principal incentive. 30
Husseini and Alami publicly expressed their abhorrence to the land sales. The charge is hypocritical for as Dr. Heinrich Wolff, the Nazi German consul in Jerusalem cabled his Berlin office in 1933 these nationalists “in daylight were crying out against Jewish immigration and in the darkness of the night were selling land to the Jews.” 31 On land sold by Jamal-el Husseini, a member of the Gaza branch of the el-Husseini family, kibbutz Kefar-Menachem was established. In a letter to the Palestine Land Development Company on October 4, 1937, he asked that the mortgage be released on the portion of the land not sold to the Jews, acknowledging that the sellers had completely fulfilled their obligation. Another 120 dunam was purchased from the el-Husseini family to settle with the Arab tenant farmers still living on the land. 32 Fahmi el-Husseini, the mayor of Gaza, amassed and sold considerable tracts of land to the Jewish National Fund. Kibbutz Beeri was established on this land during the first week in October 1946. Other members of the el-Husseini family sold land as well: Ismail Bey el-Husseini near Petah Tikvah to the Jewish National Fund; Jamal el -Husseini in Idhniba; Tawfik el-Husseini, Jamal’s brother and one of the founders of the Arab nationalist youth organization, sold his share owned together with Musa Alami; and the sons of Mussa Khasem el-Husseini, Chairman of the Arab Executive. 33
The prominent Nashashibi family of Jerusalem were also involved. Jadth Nashashibi, a member of the Arab Executive, sold his land to the Jewish National Fund before World War I, which is now Kibbutz Kiryat-Anavim. Ragheb al-Nashashibi, the Mayor of Jerusalem from 1920–1934, sold land on Mt. Scopus to The Hebrew University. 34
Even Arabs who participated in attacks against Jews sold their land to them: in Hadera in May 1921, led the assault in the 1921 riots in Petah-Tikvah, became an agitator of the 1921 riots in Jaffa; participated in the 1929 disturbances, was arrested and later exiled to the Seychelles Island in 1937; became one of the organizers of the 1936-1939 riots; proved funds for a terrorist leader in the 1936 riots. 35
Most of the large landowners in Palestine were in the Arab nationalist movement. Some families were selling land to Jews for three generations, even though the younger family members understood Zionist goals and openly opposed them. In other families, some members were in politics and communal activities, while others were in business including administering to real property the family owned together. In these situations, politicians could vigorously insist the sale of land to Jews be prohibited, while their ownership in property could be sold profitably to Jews. Some politicians concealed their dealings through multiple transfers of title to fictitious agents so their names did not appear on any official documents. Still there are sufficient well-documented records of nationalist public notables who sold land to Jews to prove that they were trying to have both ways. They eagerly sought the economic rewards Zionism generated, but did not want a state with Jews or Zionists. 36
The Arab community clearly knew their leaders were selling land to Jews, even though the leadership attempted to suppress the facts. This became a public issue when Lewis French, the first director of the British Mandatory Governments Department of Development, wrote in a memorandum to British Government revealing that some members of the Moslem Supreme Council had sold land to Jews and that Arab leaders did not oppose selling surplus land to them. In response to the Arab press’ insistence on printing the seller’s names, the Arab Executive convened a special meeting to assess the demand. The names were never published after many members refused to attend and ultimately the Executive stopped functioning completely. The political leadership reorganized only after the 1936 Arab riots began. 37
A Final Note
Ways to find a solution to the impasse fell on deaf ears. Speaking for the Palestinian Arab leadership at the London Conference in February 1939, Jamal Husseini was adamant about: preventing further Jewish immigration lest they become the majority in Palestine; precluding Jews from purchasing Arab lands; abandoning the idea of establishing a Jewish National Home; abrogating the British Mandate and replacing it with a treaty comparable to the one between Great Britain and Iraq, creating an independent Arab state in Palestine. 38
The article lastly states
"The Palestinian Arab delegation and the British Government could not have predicted that the independent Jewish state of Israel would be founded in less thanten years later in an area 77 percent of the area of Palestine west of Jordan. Neither would they have envisioned that the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon that invaded the new state would be defeated by the Israeli army—even though the population of the invading countries totaled 30 million, and that of the restored state of Israel numbered 650,000. 39
For all the aforementioned well documented reasons, the evidence is clear that Jewish purchases of the tracts of formerly Arab-owned landed was part of a systematic Arab disposition of real property for which they envisioned no productive return by further holding on. The transactions were made freely, with no coercion, and with well-defined, recognizable economic benefit to the sellers, but significant financial risk to the purchasers. Any argument to the contrary defies fact and proof." The Zionists & Jews did NOT "Steal" anyone's land to create the State of Israel , they legally purchased the land to create the State of Israel
A comment in response to the stream.org article titled "Did Paul call the Jews the enemies of the whole human race?"
a person typed as a comment to this 2019 article
" It is clear without even going into the Greek for support that not all Jews rejected Christ; even when Jesus stood before Pilate, while the Jewish crowd yelled "Crucify him!" The Gospel record and the Book of Acts of the Apostles are abundantly clear that there were many Jews who turned to Christ, even if there were many more who rejected him and persecuted his disciples.
Two examples: (1) We read in the Gospels that the Jewish leaders were afraid to come up against Jesus at various times because they were afraid the crowd of Jews would stone them. Okay, one can say that the crowd was fickle, on the one hand following him and then turning against him at his trial before Pilate. Perhaps true, but can we suggest that it was all the Jews yelling out for his death? One Gospel reads that while Jesus walked to his death, while Simon carried his Cross, a "large number of people followed him, including women who mourned and wailed for him," which seems to clearly suggest Jesus had the sympathy, if not the firm belief, of many Jews. (2) Another example is where we read Christian history in Acts. In a couple of places we read where 3,000 Jews and 5,000 in Jerusalem – the very place where he was a coupe of months before crucified! – believed in Christ as Messiah. There are also other instances recorded in Acts where we read that it was specifically the Jewish leaders and not the Jewish people in general as a whole who rejected and persecuted the Jewish believers in Christ." Many Christians have correctly pointed out that BOTH
Jesus & St. Paul were NOT anti-semites, and they BOTH Loved their own Jewish People
Another comment to the article Just mentioned on stream.org about St. Paul and the Jews says
"You are really over-generalizing when it comes to Jewish people. It is obvious that Paul and Jesus loved their people and wanted them to be saved. Many did oppose Jesus and the apostles, but many supported them also. It can be as easily said that "the Jews" brought us the old and new testaments and the messiah. The way to salvation. And Jesus even forgave the offending Jews and Romans from the cross, saying they didn't know what they were doing. It could also be said that the gentiles rejected Jesus. The majority of gentiles in the world have not yet accepted him. Even many who claimed to follow him were, and are in many cases, not doing what he said to do."
Another comment in reply to the article "Himself, and all his apostles, were Jewish. The earliest disciples were all Jewish. Jesus taught them that his teachings were also to be given to the Gentiles. It wasn't ALL of the Jews AT THAT TIME who incited and participated in the persecuting and killing of Jesus. I strongly reject the argument that the term "Jews" means every single person of that group at the time of Christ, and certainly not all those who have come after. To accept that is does would seem to justify the thousands of years of pogroms and holocausts committed against Jews." The Vast Majority of Early Followers of Jesus were Jews
Another comment to the Article says
"at that time the Jewish hierarchy had a problem with Christians, but not all Jews had the problem. And the ones that did for the most part were under the control of the leaders. I do not think Paul was saying all Jews were bad."
From the website www.jta.org an article titled
"Reported Arafat Remarks on Jews Draw Sharp Protest from the U.S."
February 13, 1992
The U.S. State Department has reacted sharply to threatening anti-Jewish remarks allegedly made last month by Yasir Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in a telephone conversation with the PLO’s Paris representative.
State Department deputy spokesman Richard Boucher on Wednesday described as “clearly outrageous” Arafat’s reputed description of Jews as “dogs, filth, dirt.”
“Comments like this,” he said, “can only be described as disparaging and obnoxious.”
However, Boucher said the remarks, which were recorded from a private conversation, would have no impact on the Arab-Israeli peace talks in progress.
But he added, “Racist and hateful rhetoric have no place in the peace process.”
A U.S. Jewish organizational leader was also incensed by the vituperative comments, which were recorded in Arabic by an unidentified Western law-enforcement agency and broadcast in English on the Cable News Network.
Malcolm Hoenlein, executive director of the Conference of Major American Jewish Organizations, called Arafat’s reported characterization of Jews “loathsome and despicable” and said it proved “that this international terrorist is not only anti-Israel and anti-Zionist, as he has claimed, but also a vicious Jew-hater.”
Hoenlein urged that Arafat not be allowed to address the U.N. Human Rights Commission currently meeting in Geneva. The commission announced Monday that the PLO chief had been invited to speak from the podium, an honor reserved for heads of state.
PLO OFFICIAL DENIES COMMENTS
In the conversation with PLO representative Ibrahim Souss, Arafat also blasted the French government for the furor that erupted in Paris at the end of January over the admittance to France of George Habash, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Habash was at a Red Cross clinic for unspecified medical treatment. For permitting his brief stay there, six top French government officials were forced to resign.
The telephone call was made Jan. 30, presumably from PLO headquarters in Tunis, according to Steven Emerson, a special assignment correspondent for CNN who broke the story.
Emerson said the conversation was confirmed to be that of Arafat and Souss by a journalist and Arab specialists.
And CNN stood by the tape’s authenticity.
But in Paris, Souss denied it and threatened to sue CNN for defamation of character.
He said, “I categorically deny the comments attributed to President Yasir Arafat and myself and reserve all my rights to action against the authors of this media manipulation.”
Souss said playing the tape had been intended to cover up “bellicose” Israeli goals in the peace talks.
The voice that appears to be Arafat’s even indicated awareness that the telephone had been tapped. In fact, he said, “Let them record this and play it on television.”
Habash checked into the Red Cross hospital with an undisclosed illness and returned to Tunis on Feb. 1.
The voice that appeared to be Arafat’s expressed outrage at the treatment of Habash and the clamor that he be arrested for questioning about past terrorist acts attributed to the PFLP.
He complained that a sick man was being hounded out of France.
WILL ‘SETTLE ACCOUNTS’ WITH JEWS
The voice attributed to Souss assured the other that “the (French) government had nothing to do with this matter at all. It’s the opposition and the Jews. The Jews, they are at work.”
The voice said to be Arafat’s responded: “The Jews at work. Damn their fathers. The dogs. Filth and dirt. All for this one sick man. I took care of and treated their ill and sick (POWs). But trash is always trash.
The jta.org article lastly says
"“And thanks to the rotten Jews, with whom I will settle accounts in the future. For a sick man. What did we send him, to have fun on the Champs Elysees? We sent him to the Red Cross.”
Emerson remarked that Arafat also unleashed “a broadside at the French, often seen as the PLO’s best friends in Europe.”
He noted that “publicly, over the last few years, Arafat and the PLO have been conciliatory toward Israel. Yet if Arafat’s comments are interpreted as provocative, this episode could damage the new Middle East peace talks launched by the United States.”
Emerson did not say why his source had leaked the bugged conversation to CNN.
Habash’s group, the PFLP, was founded in 1967 under the PLO umbrella but broke away from Arafat’s mainstream Fatah faction, saying it was too conciliatory. But while Habash and Arafat have been fiercely at odds over policy, their personal relationship seems not to have been affected.
Arafat is reported to have summoned a French ambulance plane to Tunis to transport Habash to Paris and to have personally escorted him to the plane."
Joe, this is a Great Blog, Hope it will always be on the Internet, Everyone Knows that Yasser Arafat & the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj amin al-Husseini were both demented Arab serial killers & genocidal mass murderers , they were both ugly Arab Grim Reapers who brought misery death & destruction everywhere they went , Haj amin al-Husseini met with Hitler during World War II & helped make the Nazi Holocaust Possible, After the War ended the Allied Powers wanted to Put him on Trial for War Crimes, and throw him in Prison, but al-Husseini managed to flee from Europe , he was sucked back into Hell on July 4, 1974 , People have said that Israel really should have legally tracked down al-Husseini , put him on trial, and have him put to death by hanging , just like what Israel did with Nazi War Criminal Adolf Eichmann , any other Nation would have tracked al-Husseini down and made sure justice was served, any other nation would have legally tracked down al-Husseini like the criminal thug that he was and made Dog Food out of him, If any other Nation had to deal with an ugly rodent weasel like Yasser Arafat, they would have also made Dog Food out of Arafat, Other sane normal nations in the World do Not Tolerate the Abuse that Israel endures, Any Other Nation in the World would have legally arrested and killed Arafat decades before Arafat died of AIDS in 2004, Not to make a "Martyr" out of him, but an EXAMPLE out of him, that No Arab Terrorist, no matter how high ranking they are, is above the law, that if they murder innocent Israeli Civilians, they will be arrested & Thrown in Prison for the Rest of their natural lives, Never to be Released, It's terrible the abuse &
Anti-Semitic Double Standards that Israel endures, that no other Nation in the World has to put up with, People have commented how it is truly unjust how the Arab Nations have so much more land , while Israel is so tiny in size, barely visible on the map, that Israel in 2019 is like a larger version of the Warsaw Ghetto surrounded by Sadistic Heartless Arab Nazi Regimes planning her total Extermination, Details about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, can be looked up on Wikipedia and other Places online,
Even if some people dislike or disagree with some of Israel's policies, still that does NOT justify such raw hatred, such pure hatred of Israel, it does NOT justify or excuse such raw hatred, Israel has valid legitimate security needs & concerns, Many Many Nations in 2019 have policies that are very unfair, very unfair & unjust, yet these other Nations are Not hated with the same Satanic Hate, with the same Satanic Hate & Passion that Israel is unjustly hated with, No Nation is Perfect, I want Peace in the Mideast & Peace For the Entire World, No War or Violence, or Hate, but Haj amin al-Husseini & Yasser Arafat, who were both related to each other, Both Arafat & al-Husseini were both Demons, they were both ugly monsters & Satanic smelly worthless mutant freaks of nature, Israel is the Most Humane Civilized Nation on the Planet, Israel does Not even have the Death Penalty for Convicted Arab Terrorists
From the Wikipedia article/entry "Reactions to the September 11th attacks" about the horrific terror attacks of 9/11 , September 11, 2001
the Wikipedia entry says
"Palestinian celebrations
A group of Palestinians were filmed celebrating in the street after hearing the local news reports of attacks on the World Trade Center and the deaths of thousands of Americans. Fox News reported that in Ein el-Hilweh, Lebanon's largest Palestinian refugee camp, revelers fired weapons in the air, with similar celebratory gunfire heard at the Rashidiyeh camp near the southern city of Tyre as well.[51] Yasser Arafat and nearly all the leaders of Palestinian National Authority (PNA) condemned the attacks and attempted to censure and discredit broadcasts and other Palestinian news reports justifying the attacks in America,[51] with many newspapers, magazines, websites and wire services running photographs of Palestinian public celebrations.[62][63] The PNA claimed such celebrations were not representative of the sentiments of the Palestinian people, and the Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said the PNA would not allow "a few kids" to "smear the real face of the Palestinians". In an attempt to quell further reporting, Ahmed Abdel Rahman, Arafat's Cabinet secretary, said the Palestinian Authority could not "guarantee the life" of an Associated Press (AP) cameraman if footage he filmed of post-9/11 celebrations in Nablus was broadcast. Rahman's statement prompted a formal protest from the AP bureau chief, Dan Perry.[64] Palestinian Authority has muzzled coverage of Palestinian celebrations' (MIDDLE EAST NEWSLINE)
'Israel to AP: Release film of Palestinian celebrations' (Jerusalem Post/The Associated Press)
'Bin-Laden Poster Seen at Gaza Rally' (The Associated Press).[63]
James Bennet reported in the New York Times that while "most" towns in the West Bank were quiet, some drivers in East Jerusalem were honking horns in celebration, he saw one man passing out celebratory candy.[65] Big crowds celebrated in Nablus of Palestinians, chanting Beloved bin Laden, strike Tel Aviv! while Palestinian Authority personnel prevented photographers from taking pictures.[65] Annette Krüger Spitta of the ARD's (German public broadcasting) TV magazine Panorama states that footage not aired shows that the street surrounding the celebration in Jerusalem is quiet. Furthermore, she states that a man in a white T-shirt incited the children and gathered people together for the shot. The Panorama report, dated September 20, 2001, quotes Communications Professor Martin Löffelholz explaining that in the images one sees jubilant Palestinian children and several adults but there is no indication that their pleasure is related to the attack. The woman seen cheering (Nawal Abdel Fatah) stated afterwards that she was offered cake if she celebrated on camera, and was frightened when she saw the pictures on television afterward.[66][67]
There was also rumour that the footage of some Palestinians celebrating the attacks was stock footage of Palestinian reactions to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.[68] This rumour was proven false shortly afterwards,[69] and CNN issued a statement to that effect.[70] A poll conducted by the Fafo Foundation in the Palestinian Authority in 2005 found that 65% of respondents supported "Al Qaeda bombings in the USA and Europe".[71]"
From the website www.israelforever.org an article in 2008 titled
"WHY THE NATION OF ISRAEL IS THE WORLD’S BEST NATION"
Adapted from Giulio Meotti
What makes this small country, the nation of Israel, the world’s best nation?
I don’t know another nation on earth which since its founding, had to sacrifice 23,000 soldiers and victims of terror at the hands of neighbors determined to destroy Jewish life and the Jewish state as a whole.
I don’t know another nation on earth without recognized borders because of refusal by the Arabs to accept any peace agreement that recognizes Israel’s existence.
I don’t know another nation on earth whose population lives under a perpetual emotional strain from the ongoing and incessant need to live beyond the trauma and agony of terror.
I don’t know another nation on earth threatened to be wiped off the map - threats that are disregarded by the world as insignificant only because it is Israel.
The article continues
"I don’t know another nation on earth so threatened by boycotts that are legitimized as retaliation for the existence of the sole Jewish democratic country in the world.
I don’t know another nation on earth where the winners tend to lose wars because of lies and propaganda.
I don’t know another nation on earth which provides its own enemy with water, electricity, food, weapons, and medical treatment and yet is continuously accused of not doing enough.
I don’t know another nation on earth where guests on official visits to their land utter disrespectful and offensive words yet continue to be accepted with open arms in the hopes they will open their hearts and minds about the values of the Jewish State.
But I also don’t know another nation on earth which has recorded so many miracles.
Why the Nation of Israel is the World’s Best Nation
Imagine a helpless, naked Jew at the gas chamber door, facing a Nazi official who thinks he will get rid of the “Jewish cancer”, get rid of this unique phenomenon of 2,000 years.
Could that helpless, naked Jew imagine that in 50 years other Jews will be flying F-16s in the skies over Auschwitz as a testament to Israel living and breathing long after the Nazi reign of terror has ended?
Could that helpless Jew imagine that Israel’s population today would be nine times that of 1948, the year of the state’s creation?
Could that helpless Jew imagine that Israel is much happier than all the European countries?
Could that helpless Jew imagine that Israel has the highest production of scientific publications per capita in the world?
Could that helpless Jew imagine that Israel has the highest worldwide publication of new books?
Could that helpless Jew imagine that Israel is the only nation which began the 21st century with a net gain in the number of trees?
Could that helpless Jew imagine that Israel has with largest number of chess grandmasters per capita of any city in the world?
Could that helpless Jew imagine that Israel is the nation whose academics produce more scientific papers per capita than anywhere else in the world?
Could that helpless Jew imagine that Israel is the nation with the highest ratio of university degrees to the population in the world?
Could that helpless Jew imagine that Israel is the country which, in proportion to its population, with the largest number of startup companies in the world?
Could that helpless Jew imagine that Israel is the country with the highest percentage in the world of home computers per capita?
Could that helpless Jew imagine that Israel is the nation with the largest immigrant-absorbing model on earth?
Could that helpless Jew imagine that we would once again be facing a rise of Jew hatred in nearly every corner of the world, justified by their resentment of the existence of a Jewish state?
Lastly the article says
"Unfortunately, you will not find Israel’s goodness and superiority in the media, because it doesn’t fit in with the stereotype of the colonialist Zionist occupier.
In the world’s consciousness, the word “Israel” must be equated with fear.
Israel continually faces existential war against terrorists who take shelter behind their own children.
But the Jewish State, not perfect by any means, and subject to the same ills of human society as every other country in the world, and despite its media, its cynical politicians, its often dysfunctional methods of establishment, show the world it is the best humanity has to offer.
Terrorists and their Western appeasers want to destroy Israel because it is a light unto the nations. And the only one in the world in which we live." Look up this article online for Good Quotes !!!
A book worth reading is
"A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad"
by David Patterson, anyone can order it of Amazon.com
From the Wikipedia article/entry "2018-19 Gaza Border Protests" part of the entry states
"Most of the demonstrators at the tent camps hundreds of metres from the border demonstrated peacefully, and Peter Cammack, a fellow with the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argued that the march indicated a new trend in Palestinian society and Hamas, with a shift away from violence towards non-violent forms of protest.[21] Nevertheless, groups consisting mainly of young men did approach the border, rolling burning tires towards the fence to provide smoke screens, and also throwing stones and Molotov cocktails in the direction of Israeli troops.[22][23][24][25][26] In April, Palestinian began launching kites bearing incendiary devices over the border fence, causing damage to property on the Israeli side.[27][28] Israeli officials said the protests were used by Hamas as cover for launching attacks against Israel.[29] Senior Hamas official Mahmoud Al-Zahhar, admitted in an interview to Al Jazeera "when we talk about 'peaceful resistance', we are deceiving the public. This is a peaceful resistance bolstered by a military force and by security agencies, and enjoying tremendous popular support."[30][31]
On YouTube there is a very informative video tiled "God & Hitler"
Published by The 700 Club on April 22, 2013 , the video hosted & narrated by
Gordon Robertson, documents the evil Anti-God & Anti-Christian nature & Character of
Adolf Hitler , the video is here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXWImaYevG0
On Twitter some people typed in Reply to a Satire Article from "The Onion" in 1997 titled
"Crazed Palestinian Gunman Angered By Stereotypes"
Mark Humphrys
@markhumphrys
Follow Follow @markhumphrys
More
Replying to @BasimaFaysal
"Crazed Palestinian Gunman Angered By Stereotypes" @BasimaFaysal @wuhokay
12:44 AM - 24 Feb 2015
11 Retweets 8 Likes Leopard Boas#ExDemocratgab.ai/WuhOkayStef WilsonMurt 🔴taylorbbBasimaFaysalギャレス🇬🇧 🇯🇵Trakker
3 replies 11 retweets 8 likes
Reply 3 Retweet 11 Like 8
New conversation
Jim C.
@DelGirlsHoops
24 Feb 2015
More
Replying to @markhumphrys
@markhumphrys @wuhokay @BasimaFaysal
"Crazed Palestinian"
Have you ever heard of a "Normal Palestinian"?
I mean, let's get real.
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
Reply 1 Retweet Like 2
Mark Humphrys
@markhumphrys
24 Feb 2015
More
@DelGirlsHoops @wuhokay @BasimaFaysal The "peace process" put terrorists in charge of PA, forcing all normal Pals to hide or emigrate
From the website www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org The Truth about the 1982 Sabra & Shatila Massacres
First Lebanon War: Massacres at Sabra & Shatila
(September 16-17, 1982)
|
Kahan Investigation
|
Background & Overview
The Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia was responsible for the massacres that occurred at the two Beirut-area refugee camps on September 16-17, 1982. Israeli troops allowed the Phalangists to enter Sabra and Shatila to root out terrorist cells believed located there. It had been estimated that there may have been up to 200 armed men in the camps working out of the countless bunkers built by the PLO over the years, and stocked with generous reserves of ammunition.
When Israeli soldiers ordered the Phalangists out, they found hundreds dead (estimates range from 460 according to the Lebanese police, to 700-800 calculated by Israeli intelligence). The dead, according to the Lebanese account, included 35 women and children. The rest were men: Palestinians, Lebanese, Pakistanis, Iranians, Syrians and Algerians. The killings came on top of an estimated 95,000 deaths that had occurred during the civil war in Lebanon from 1975-1982.
The killings were perpetrated to avenge the murders of Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel and 25 of his followers, killed in a bomb attack earlier that week.
Israel had allowed the Phalange to enter the camps as part of a plan to transfer authority to the Lebanese, and accepted responsibility for that decision. The Kahan Commission of Inquiry, formed by the Israeli government in response to public outrage and grief, found that Israel was indirectly responsible for not anticipating the possibility of Phalangist violence. Israel instituted the panel's recommendations, including the dismissal of Gen. Raful Eitan, the Army Chief of Staff. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon resigned.
The Kahan Commission, declared former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, was "a great tribute to Israeli democracy....There are very few governments in the world that one can imagine making such a public investigation of such a difficult and shameful episode."
Ironically, while 300,000 Israelis demonstrated in Israel to protest the killings, little or no reaction occurred in the Arab world. Outside the Middle East, a major international outcry against Israel erupted over the massacres. The Phalangists, who perpetrated the crime, were spared the brunt of the condemnations for it.
By contrast, few voices were raised in May 1985, when Muslim militiamen attacked the Shatila and Burj-el Barajneh Palestinian refugee camps. According to UN officials, 635 were killed and 2,500 wounded. During a two-year battle between the Syrian-backed Shiite Amal militia and the PLO, more than 2,000, including many civilians, were reportedly killed. No outcry was directed at the PLO or the Syrians and their allies over the slaughter. International reaction was also muted in October 1990 when Syrian forces overran Christian-controlled areas of Lebanon. In the eight-hour clash, 700 Christians were killed-the worst single battle of Lebanon's Civil War." Israel was and is still unjustly blamed for the
Sabra & Shatila massacres, Israel didn't do it, It was Arabs Killing Other Arabs,
Anti-Israel people are Hypocrites
The 2013 Brad Pitt Zombie Movie "World War Z" has been described as the "Most Pro-Israel Movie ever made" and the "Most Pro-Israel Zombie Movie ever made" from the wikipedia entry for
"World War Z" the plot of the film is described
"Plot
Former UN employee Gerry Lane, his wife Karin and their two daughters are in heavy Philadelphia traffic when the city is overrun by zombies that are attracted to sound. As chaos spreads, the Lanes escape to Newark, New Jersey and take refuge in an apartment, home to a couple with a young son, Tommy. UN Deputy Secretary-General Thierry Umutoni, an old friend of Gerry, sends a helicopter that extracts the Lanes and Tommy to a U.S. Navy vessel in the Atlantic where scientists and military personnel are analyzing the worldwide outbreaks. Andrew Fassbach posits that the plague is a virus and that development of a vaccine depends on finding the origin. Gerry agrees to help Fassbach find the outbreak's source after it is made clear that the Lanes will be removed from the cramped ship if he is not of use.
Gerry and Fassbach fly to Camp Humphreys, a military base in South Korea, where they are attacked on arrival by zombies. Turning to re-enter the aircraft, Fassbach slips, falls and accidentally shoots himself dead. After being rescued by the base's surviving personnel, led by Captain Speke, Gerry learns that the infection was introduced to the base by its doctor, who was ultimately incinerated by a soldier with a lame leg whom the infected ignored. A former CIA operative imprisoned at the base for selling weapons to North Korea (to help them fight the infection) tells Gerry to go to Jerusalem, where he says a safe zone has been maintained by the Israeli Mossad since before the outbreak's official acknowledgement. As Gerry and his team return to their aircraft, Karin—worried about her husband after he misses their pre-arranged call time—rings his satellite phone, attracting zombies who kill several soldiers, with only Gerry and his pilot escaping.
In Jerusalem, Gerry meets Mossad chief Jurgen Warmbrunn, who explains that months earlier, the Mossad had intercepted an Indian military message claiming that Indian troops were fighting the rakshasa, or "dead spirits". Israel had thereupon quarantined Jerusalem, erecting huge walls around it. Just as Jurgen shows Gerry that Israel is allowing survivors to take refuge in the city, loud celebratory singing from refugees prompts zombies to scale the walls and attack. Jurgen orders some Israeli soldiers to escort Gerry back to his plane. On the way, Gerry notices zombies ignoring an old man and an emaciated boy. Soon after, one of Gerry's escorts, a soldier who identifies herself only as "Segen" (lieutenant), is bitten in the hand, which Gerry quickly amputates to stop her turning. Gerry and Segen escape on a commercial airliner as Jerusalem is overrun.
The Wikipedia entry for the plot of "World War Z" continues
"Gerry contacts Thierry, and the airliner is diverted to a World Health Organization (WHO) facility outside Cardiff, Wales. When a stowaway zombie attacks on approach to Cardiff airport, Gerry uses a grenade to blow the infected out of the aircraft, which also causes the plane to crash. Gerry is injured, but both he and Segen survive. They proceed to the WHO facility, where Gerry loses consciousness. He awakens three days later and explains to the remaining WHO staff his theory, based on the people he has seen the zombies ignore: the infected do not bite the seriously injured or terminally ill since they would be unsuitable hosts for viral reproduction. He suggests that they test this by deliberately infecting somebody with a pathogen from the facility, but the pathogens are stored in a wing already overrun by zombies. Gerry, Segen and the lead WHO doctor go to get a pathogen. As they fight their way through, they are separated; Gerry continues to the pathogen vault while Segen and the doctor return to the main building. A zombie blocks the door to the vault, prompting Gerry to inject himself with an unknown pathogen and open the vault, thereby testing his theory. The zombie ignores him, as do those he encounters while returning to the main building. Everybody rejoices at Gerry's success.
Gerry and his family are reunited in a safe zone at Freeport, Nova Scotia. A "vaccine", derived from deadly pathogens, is developed and issued to survivors battling the infected, acting as a kind of camouflage. The vaccine also helps survivors to reach quarantine zones. Human offensives begin against the zombies, and hope is restored. "This isn't the end," Gerry comments, "Not even close. Our war has just begun."
Recently some Arab organizations & websites have cried & whined about certain famous
Right Wing Israeli & Jewish leaders who they consider "Racist" & "Hatemongers" for not liking Arabs, when the Arabs have themselves to blame for the Right Wing Israeli & Jewish Leaders who don't like Arabs, The Arab Organizations should realize it's their fault, it's the fault of the Arab Nations & Arab Peoples for certain famous Right Wing Israeli & Jewish leaders not liking Arabs, if Arabs & so-called "Palestinians" had not started all the Wars in the Mideast, and committed endless acts of Terrorism against Israeli Civilians , then the Right Wing Jewish & Israeli Leaders they mention would NOT dislike the Arabs, it's their Fault, the Arabs Started it, they have themselves to blame, Everything is their Fault, the Right Wing Israeli & Jewish leaders who dislike Arabs, it's a reaction to Endless Arab Terrorist Attacks Against Israel, The Arabs started it, But I want Peace, for ultimately Israel & The Arabs to be Reconciled to Both God and to Each Other
The website www.wnd.com has an article titled
"MODERN ISRAEL: FORMED DESPITE 'THE CRUELIST ODDS'"
Bill Federer recalls history of Jewish homeland
Published: 05/13/2019 at 8:09 PM
The article says
"On midnight, May 14, 1948, the state of Israel came into being and was immediately recognized by the United States and the Soviet Union.
A homeland for the thousands of Jews who were persecuted and displaced during World War II, Israel was attacked the next day by the Transjordanian Army, the Arab Legion, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. Against all odds, Israel survived.
The Armistice between Israel and her enemies was negotiated by Ralph Bunche, the first African-American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1947, Ralph Bunche set up a meeting between two members of UNSCOP and Menachem Begin, the leader of the Irgun Jewish underground.
As he was leaving Begin’s hideout, Ralph Bunche told the future Israeli Prime Minister: “I can understand you. I am also a member of a persecuted minority.”
Richard Crossman of Britain asked Bunche if his exposure to the Jews had made him anti-Semitic “yet.” Ralph Bunche answered: “That would be impossible. … I know the flavor of racial prejudice and racial persecution. A wise Negro can never be an anti-Semite.”
President Harry S Truman sent a telegram to the president of Israel, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, president of the Provisional Council of State, Tel Aviv, Oct. 2, 1948: “On this your first New Year’s Eve as president of the Provisional Council of the state of Israel I send you warm personal greetings and congratulations. May the New Year bring peace to Israel and to its citizens the opportunity to dedicate themselves in tranquility to furthering the prosperity of their country.”
Read more at https://www.wnd.com/2019/05/modern-israel-formed-despite-the-cruelist-odds/#vu1oTSB807rHriMk.99
The article continues
"On Nov. 29, 1948, President Harry S Truman wrote to Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel: “I want to tell you how happy and impressed I have been at the remarkable progress made by the new state of Israel.”
Truman added: “I remember well our conversations about the Negeb … and I deplore any attempt to take it away from Israel. I had thought that my position would have been clear to all the world, particularly in the light of the specific wording of the Democratic Party platform.”
The 1948 Democrat Party platform stated: “President Truman, by granting immediate recognition to Israel, led the world in extending friendship and welcome to a people who have long sought and justly deserve freedom and independence. We pledge full recognition to the state of Israel. We affirm our pride that the United States under the leadership of President Truman played a leading role in the adoption of the resolution of November 29, 1947, by the United Nations General Assembly for the creation of a Jewish state. We approve the claims of the state of Israel to the boundaries set forth in the United Nations resolution of November 29th and consider that modifications thereof should be made only if fully acceptable to the state of Israel. We look forward to the admission of the state of Israel to the United Nations and its full participation in the international community of nations. We pledge appropriate aid to the state of Israel in developing its economy and resources. We favor the revision of the arms embargo to accord to the state of Israel the right of self-defense.”
President Harry S Truman continued his letter to Israel’s President Dr. Chaim Weizmann, Nov. 29, 1948: “I have interpreted my re-election as a mandate from the American people to carry out the Democratic platform – including, of course, the plank on Israel.”
Democrat President John F. Kennedy remarked opening the Ouachita National Forest Road at Big Cedar, Oklahoma, Oct. 29, 1961: “We take our lesson … from the Bible and the story of Nehemiah, which tells us that when the children of Israel returned from captivity they determined to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, in spite of the threats of the enemy. The wall was built and the peace was preserved. But it was written, ‘Of them that built on the wall … with one of his hands he did the work, and with the other he held the sword.'”
And continues
"Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson stated in 1968: “America and Israel have a common love of human freedom and a democratic way of life. … Through the centuries, through dispersion and through very grievous trials, your forefathers clung to their Jewish identity and their ties with the land of Israel. The prophet Isaiah foretold, ‘And He shall set up an ensign for the nations and He shall assemble the outcasts of Israel and gather together the dispersed of Judah from all the four corners of the earth.’ … History knows no more moving example of persistence against the cruelest odds.”
Ancient Israel came out of Egypt, around 1,400 B.C. and entered the Promised Land. For the next 400 years, the Children of Israel were the first well-recorded instance in history of a nation ruled without a king.
This was a model for America’s founders. After the U.S. Constitution was written, it needed to be ratified by nine states to go into effect. In early 1788, eight states had ratified it, and New Hampshire was in line to be the ninth, but disagreements caused its ratifying convention to be adjourned in February of that year.
After the annual day of fasting, set by New Hampshire’s governor, state delegates reconvened in June of 1788. They listened to an address on June 5, 1788, by Harvard President Rev. Samuel Langdon, titled “The Republic of the Israelites an Example to the American States.” Afterwards, New Hampshire delegates voted to ratify the U.S. Constitution, and being the ninth state to do so, put it into effect.
In his address, Samuel Langdon stated: “Instead of the twelve tribes of Israel, we may substitute the thirteen states of the American union, and see this application plainly. … That as God in the course of his kind providence hath given you an excellent Constitution of government, founded on the most rational, equitable, and liberal principles, by which all that liberty is secured … and you are impowered to make righteous laws for promoting public order and good morals; and as he has moreover given you by his Son Jesus Christ … a complete revelation of his will … it will be your wisdom … to … adhere faithfully to the doctrines and commands of the gospel, and practice every public and private virtue. …”
Langdon continued: “The Israelites may be considered as a pattern to the world in all ages. … Government … on republican principles, required laws; without which it must have degenerated immediately into … absolute monarchy. … How unexampled was this quick progress of the Israelites, from abject slavery, ignorance, and almost total want of order, to a national establishment perfected in all its parts far beyond all other kingdoms and states! From a mere mob, to a well regulated nation, under a government and laws far superior to what any other nation could boast! …
And continues
"Langdon concluded: “It was a long time after the law of Moses was given before the rest of the world knew any thing of government by law. … It was six hundred years after Moses before … Grecian republics received a very imperfect … code of laws from Lycurgus. It was about five hundred years from the first founding of the celebrated Roman empire … before the first laws of that empire.”
Ancient Israel is highlighted in the new book “Who is the King in America? And Who are the Counselors to the King? An Overview of 6,000 Years of History & Why America is Unique.”
What was the republic of the ancient Israelites?
Israel was the first well-recorded instance of an entire nation ruled without a king.
In Israel, everyone was equal under the Law. There was no royal family to pay obeisance to at this time. This was the beginning of the concept of equality.
In Israel, everyone, both male and female, was made in the image of the Creator, possessing God-given rights which no government could take away. It was the responsibility of government to guarantee individual rights. Deuteronomy 1:17 “Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great.”
Israel had relatively few laws, as citizens were accountable to God to treat each other fairly. Leviticus 19:18 “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your kinsfolk. Love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”
Israel treated non-Israelites as equals, though the immigrants had to abide by the Law. Leviticus 19:34 “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the Lord am your God.”
Israel was tolerant. Though convinced they were worshiping the only true God, they never waged war to force other nations to accept Him, nor did they force non-Israelites living within their borders to convert. John Locke wrote in “A Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689): “Foreigners and such as were strangers to the commonwealth of Israel were not compelled by force to observe the rites of the Mosaical law… We find not one man forced into the Jewish religion and the worship of the true God. … If any one … desired to be made a denizen [citizen] of their commonwealth … to embrace their religion … this he did willingly, on his own accord, not by constraint.”
Israel had a system of honesty, thus providing a basis for commerce. Leviticus 19:36 “Just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin, shall ye have.” Proverbs 11:1 “A false balance is abomination to the Lord: but a just weight is his delight.”
In Israel, land was permanently titled to the families. This contrasted with most of the world, where kings granted land to loyal vassals, or as in Egypt, where the pharaohs owned the land. Israel called it the Promised “Land” because the people actually owned title to their land. This prevented a dictator from gathering up the land and putting the people back into slavery. If a person owned land, they could accumulate possessions. The Bible called this being “blessed”; Karl Marx called it being a “capitalist.”
Israel had a bureaucracy-free welfare system. When someone harvested their field, they left the gleanings for the poor. This way, the poor were taken care of without some political leader collecting everything and doling it back out to those who could help him stay in power.
Israel had no police. Everyone was taught the Law, and everyone was personally accountable to enforce it. It was as if everyone in the nation was “deputized.”
Israel had no prisons. The Law required swift justice at the “gates of the city” and a “city of refuge” where fugitives could flee to await trial.
Israel had no standing army, as every man was in the militia, armed, and ready at a moment’s notice to defend his family and community.
Israel was the first nation where everyone was taught to read. At the time in history when Moses and the Children of Israel left Egypt:
the Hittite language had 375 cuneiform characters
the Indus Valley Harappan language had 417 symbols
the Luwian language of Anatolian had over 500 logographic hieroglyphs
the Akkadian language in Mesopotamia had over 1,500 Sumerian cuneiform characters
the Egyptian language had over 3,000 hieroglyphic characters
the Chinese language had nearly 10,000 pictogram and ideogram characters, invented by scribes of China’s Yellow Emperor
When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, he not only had the Ten Commandments, but he had them in a 22 character alphabet. (“Aleph” is the first letter in Hebrew and “beth” is the second.) With so few characters, everyone could learn to read, even children.
Israel’s priests and Levites taught the Law, and also taught the people how to read it for themselves. It was not just a privilege to read it, they were required to, as the law was addressed to each person who was personally accountable to God obey it.
In Ancient Egypt, the literacy rate was less than one percent. The National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece, in its section on Egyptian Artifacts, has a display on “Scribes,” stating: “Only a small percentage of ancient Egypt’s population was literate, namely the pharaoh, members of the royal family, officials, priests and scribes.”
Scribes wrote on stone or clay sherds, wooden boards, linen, papyrus, and parchment. Scribes kept writing complicated to enhance their job security. It was their secret knowledge. They were needed to decipher the cryptic hieroglyphs.
The ruling class used complicated writing to maintain control over uneducated masses. Anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss (1908-2009), wrote: “Ancient writing’s main function was to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.”
George Orwell wrote in “Nineteen Eighty-Four”: “In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”
In Israel, the people chose their own leaders. Honest elections allowed for government by the consent of the governed.
Deuteronomy 1:3-13: “Moses spoke unto the children of Israel … How can I myself alone bear your … burden. … Take you wise men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you.”
Deuteronomy 16:18-19: “Judges and officers shalt thou make thee in all thy gates which the Lord thy God giveth thee throughout thy tribes.”
89,796
Exodus 18:21 stated: “Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens.”
Rather than a pyramid style, top-down form of government where the king’s will is law, Israel had a bottom-up form of government, like a living tree drawing nutrients from the roots, where every cell contributes to its growth.
Anyone could be raised to leadership, as there was no hereditary monarchy: Jephthah was the son of a prostitute; Gideon was from an obscure family; and Deborah was a just and courageous woman who knew the law.
Israel was truly unique. E.C. Wines wrote in “Commentaries on the laws of the Ancient Hebrews, with an Introductory Essay on Civil Society & Government” (NY: Geo. P. Putnam & Co., 1853): “Menes in Egypt; Minos in Crete; Cadmus in Thebes; Lycurgus in Sparta; Zaleucus in Locris; and Numa in Rome. But … Moses differed fundamentally from … these heathen legislators. … Moses’ … national unity … was not that species of unity, which the world has since so often seen, in which vast multitudes of human beings are delivered up to the arbitrary will of one man. It was a unity, effected by the abolition of caste; a unity, founded on the principle of equal rights; a unity, in which the whole people formed the state.”
In regards to Israel, former Democrat President Jimmy Carter stated in his book “Keeping the Faith – Memoirs of a President” (published 1982, p. 274): “The Judeo-Christian ethic and study of the Bible were bonds between Jews and Christians which had always been part of my life. I also believed very deeply that the Jews who had survived the Holocaust deserved their own nation, and that they had a right to live in peace among their neighbors. I considered this homeland for the Jews to be compatible with the teachings of the Bible, hence ordained by God. These moral and religious beliefs made my commitment to the security of Israel unshakable.”
The article lastly says
"On March 23, 1982, to the National Conference of Christians and Jews, New York, President Ronald Reagan stated: “A strong, credible America is also an indispensable incentive for a peaceful resolution of differences between Israel and her neighbors. America has never flinched from its commitment to the state of Israel-a commitment which remains unshakable.”
Discover more of Bill Federer’s eye-opening books and videos in the WND Superstore!
On Dec. 10, 2001, President George Bush remarked at the White House lighting of the menorah: “And as God promised Abraham, the people of Israel still live. … America and Israel have been through much together. … We’re reminded of the ancient story of Israel’s courage and of the power of faith to make the darkness bright. We can see the heroic spirit of the Maccabees lives on in Israel today.”
In April 3, 2002, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay mentioned Israel in an address at Westminster College: “No one can ignore the horrible aggression in the Middle East. … The state of Israel has been targeted by groups committed to her complete elimination. And on the basis of our shared principles and democratic values, America has an undeniable obligation to stand squarely with our democratic ally against those attempting to end the state of Israel. … The state of Israel has fought five major wars to defend its right to exist since 1948. …”
Congressman DeLay continued: “Israel and America are kindred nations. The founders of both countries were profoundly influenced by faith. Both countries drafted governments that practice religious tolerance. … Both countries are filled with immigrants summoned by dreams. For people fleeing the storms of persecution, both countries have been safe harbors. …”
Congressman DeLay concluded: “No one should expect the people of Israel to negotiate with groups pursuing the fundamental goal of destroying them. … America has a clear duty to stand beside a democratic ally that is besieged by terrorists. … The terrorists attempting to destroy the State of Israel should know that America will never allow that to happen.”
From the New York Post Newspaper on May 26, 2019 an article titled
"Palestinians’ Peace Problem"
Team Trump is rolling out its “Deal of the Century” for Israeli-Palestinian peace, but the Palestinian Authority just showed yet again how it’s in no position to deliver.
According to the official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh said last week that his government will do everything it can to hold elections “the moment national reconciliation [between Fatah and Hamas] is achieved.”
Translation: Don’t expect voting any time soon. After all, Hamas, which controls Gaza, and Fatah, which runs the West Bank, fought a civil war in 2007, have yet to make real peace with each other and show little sign they’ll do so in the near future.
By asserting that a Hamas-Fatah détente is a prerequisite for elections, Shtayyeh was basically saying no elections would be held, maybe ever; PA President Mahmoud Abbas, 83, will remain de facto dictator until he quits or dies.
Never mind that PA law puts a four-year limit on his presidency — and that Abbas is in his 15th year in office. Or that in December, the Palestinian Constitutional Court (which Abbas himself created) demanded elections “within six months.”
If Palestinian leaders can’t manage democracy or even make peace among themselves, how can they ever resolve their differences with Israel?
That, of course, isn’t stopping President Trump and adviser Jared Kushner from pressing ahead with their bid to get Arabs and Israelis to end their conflict. Though details are not yet known, Trump announced plans for an “economic workshop” next month, with the hope of winning financial pledges to offer Palestinians in exchange for concessions that can pave the way toward peace.
Hmm: Palestinian leaders aren’t talking to Trump & Co. and have discounted the plan sight-unseen.
Money, they add, can’t buy off their political demands. Indeed, they’ve taken mountains of cash from the outside world for decades, even as they barely even pretend that they aren’t still dedicated to ending Israeli statehood.
Reality check: The Palestinian conflict with Israel is actually small potatoes compared to true horrors in the area and worldwide. Over the entire 71 years of Israel’s existence, total casualties on both sides are estimated at well below 30,000.
Nearby Syria, by contrast, has seen 500,000 deaths in its civil war since 2011. Casualties in Yemen since 2015 are estimated at as high as 90,000.
Millions have died, due to famine or execution, at the hands of North Korea’s Kim dynasty. That the Israeli-Palestinian conflict gets so much attention is beyond nuts.
That doesn’t mean Trump shouldn’t try to push peace. Just don’t be surprised if he meets with the same fate as presidents before him — and for the same reasons.
Also from the New York Post Newspaper an article in December 2018 titled
"The UN’s obsession with Israel makes peace harder to achieve"
By Nikki Haley December 18, 2018 | 10:19pm
The following are excerpts from US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s remarks Tuesday at the Security Council.
When I first came to the United Nations two years ago, I was taken aback a bit by this monthly meeting. The fact that the UN would consider the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not striking. It is, after all, a matter of international peace and security. What was striking was the frequency of the discussion and the one-sidedness of it.
Members of the Security Council have heard me say this many times. The problems of the Middle East are numerous, and yet we spend a vastly disproportionate amount of time on just one of them. And the UN has shown itself to be hopelessly biased, as we witnessed again just two weeks ago when the General Assembly failed to condemn Hamas’ terrorist activity against Israel.
The Article continues
"Over the past two years, I have attempted to provide more value in this monthly meeting by using my time to speak about other pressing problems in the Middle East. I have spoken about Iran’s illegal weapons transfers and destabilizing support for terrorism throughout the region. I have spoken about the barbarism of the Assad regime in Syria. I have spoken about Hamas’ illegal and diabolical use of human shields.
I have done this for two reasons. I’ve done it to illustrate that most of the region’s problems have absolutely nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And I’ve done it to encourage the UN to move away from its obsession with Israel.
This UN obsession has sent a loud and false message to the Palestinians that they just might be able to achieve their goals by relying on the UN, rather than through direct negotiations. And it has sent a loud and accurate message to the Israelis that they can never trust the UN. This biased obsession is not the path to peace. It is the path to an endless stalemate.
Today is my last time addressing this monthly session as the United States ambassador. Because it is, I’m going to deviate from my practice of the last two years. Today, I will directly address the Israel-Palestinian issue. Given my record, some may mistakenly conclude that I am unsympathetic to the Palestinian people. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here’s how I see it.
Israel is a thriving, strong, prosperous country. It has always wanted peace with its neighbors. It has clearly demonstrated its willingness to make big sacrifices for peace, including giving up large areas of land. But Israel will not make a peace agreement at just any price, and it shouldn’t. No UN resolutions, anti-Semitic boycotts or terrorist threats will ever change that.
The article lastly says
"Throughout its existence, and even today, Israel has been surrounded by threats to its security. It would be foolish for it to make a deal that weakened its security. And yet, even in the face of constant threats, Israel has become one of the leading nations in the world. Israel wants a peace agreement, but it doesn’t need one.
And then there are the Palestinian people. Like the Israelis, they are a deservedly proud people. They, too, do not need to accept a peace agreement at any price. But the condition of the Palestinian people is very different. Economic opportunity, health care, even electricity are all scarce in the Palestinian territories. Terrorists rule much of the territory, undermining the safety of all civilians. The Palestinian people are suffering terribly while their leadership clings to 50-year-old demands that have only become less and less realistic.
It is time we faced a hard truth: Both sides would benefit greatly from a peace agreement, but the Palestinians would benefit more, and the Israelis would risk more.
Ultimately, as always, the final decisions can only be made by the parties themselves. Israelis and Palestinians will decide their own futures. They will decide what sacrifices they are willing to make. And they will need leaders with real vision to do it.
As for the American people, we have demonstrated time and again our commitment to peace in the Middle East. We will continue to offer our hand in friendship to the Palestinian people, whom we have financially supported by far more than any other country has done.
The Palestinians have everything to gain by engaging in peace negotiations. But whatever it is that others decide, the world must know that America will remain steadfast in our support of Israel, its people and its security. That is an unshakeable bond between our two peoples. And it is that bond — more than anything else — that makes peace possible." Thanks Nikki Haley for standing up for Israel !!!
The website www.crethiplethi.com has an article titled
"Hadrian’s Curse – The Invention Of Palestine"
May, 2008 | By Tsafrir Ronen
The Invention of Palestine as a Psychological Weapon for Conquering Eretz Yisrael
Relief from the Arc of Titus that depicts Roman soldiers sacking the Second Temple in Jerusalem during the second Jewish-Roman War (circa 70 AD).
Almost 2,000 years ago, the Roman Emperor Hadrian cursed the Jewish People and decreed that Judea should be henceforth called “Palestine” after the Philistines, an ancient enemy of Israel that had disappeared from the world’s stage more than 600 years earlier. It was his final twist of the knife and legacy after wars, massacres, persecutions, and exiles that had largely extinguished the Jewish presence from Judea.
Today, the modern enemies of a resurrected Jewish Nation have dusted off Hadrian’s curse and are attempting to pull off a monumental theft: the Arab world have reincarnated “Palestine” to steal Israel’s heritage and the Land of the Jewish People.
Hadrian’s Curse will expose the Big Lie of the “Palestinian cause” in a full-length 120-minute documentary. The film will document that there never was a “Palestinian” people, The world has become so accustomed to the “truth” of the “Palestinian” perversion of history and work backwards, exposing recent claims and acts whose absurdity and villainy shock uninformed observers.
When Arafat declared: “Our nation is the Arabic nation that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea and beyond it,” it turns out that Arafat’s nation already stretches over an area larger than all of Europe.
His is the twisted story of one of the biggest, most remarkable fraud in history. It is such a successful fabrication that many otherwise informed people have been duped and mislead. This propaganda has become a powerful weapon used Israel’s enemies, the Arabs, to try to conquer Eretz Yisrael without firing a shot, without an army, tanks or jets. The Jewish People eventually bested Hadrian. They returned to their land and reestablished sovereignty over it.
The article continues
"They rebuilt Jerusalem as their capital, and resettled desolate Judea. They did all this only to now confront the reincarnated curse of Hadrian in the guise of Arabs renaming themselves “Palestinians” and claiming all the ancient Land as their own.
As explained in the film, many Israelis and lovers of Zion have accepted this misnaming and misidentification. Hadrian’s ancient curse now threatens Israel’s very existence. Israel’s success and endurance and the world’s hope for peace in the 21st century, demands that the deceit and danger of a Palestinian state must be exposed and avoided. It is our fervent hope that Hadrian’s Curse will expose the historical truth.
Part I –– The Secret All the Arabs Know
At the Annapolis Conference, George Bush spoke about his vision regarding the virtues of two nations for two peoples.
One of those peoples has a clear identity –– the Jewish People. Yet it would be interesting to know the identity of that second people: Already in 1977, one of the central spokesman of that “second people”, a member of P.L.O. leadership, Zahir Muhsein, the leader of the al-Sa’iqa Organization, revealed the truth in an interview to the Dutch newspaper Trouw:
“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism for tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.”
Are you in shock? If the Palestinian People does not exist, what does exist? Arabs who live in Eretz Yisrael and who have disguised themselves as “Palestinians” for fraudulent purposes. “Only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel,” in Muhsein’s words. A fraud so successful that even George Bush can be found seeking a state for that fraud!
Do you think Zahir Muhsein is alone? This transparent fraud about the so-called existence of Palestine is revealed to us by all the Arabs’ leaders.
The article continues
"In 1974, the late Syrian President, Hafez al-Assad, declared:
“It would be fitting for us to mention to the responsible Israeli authorities that we view Palestine not just as an inseparable part of the Arab nation, but as a part of Southern Syria.”
In 1987, he reiterated himself at a conference in Amman,
“A country named ‘Palestine’ has never existed.”
Jordanian King Hussein responded,
“The appearance of the national Palestinian persona serves as a response to Israel’s claim that Palestine is Jewish.”
Yet the prize goes to Arafat who in 1970, with candid simplicity, told the reporter Arianna Palazzi:
“The question of borders doesn’t interest us… From the Arab standpoint, we mustn’t talk about borders. Palestine is nothing but a drop in an enormous ocean. Our nation is the Arabic nation that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea and beyond it….. The P.L.O. is fighting Israel in the name of Pan-Arabism. What you call “Jordan” is nothing more than Palestine.”
Such revelations are an eye-opener for anyone who has not understood until today the masked-ball being run by the Arabs: The true meaning of Arafat’s words, that “Palestine is Jordan,” is that for the Arabic people, living under the “Pan-Arab” umbrella, in addition to over twenty Arabic countries, there is already a country called Jordan that was established by the British for the Arabs on 77% of the Land of Israel, promised to the Jewish People by the League of Nations in 1922. Anywhere else on earth, would an additional country be established for a people that already has twenty-one countries?
All the same, there is nothing like the testimony of the founder of the P.L.O. himself, Ahmed Shukari. Already in 1956 he proclaimed from the podium of the U.N., as the Arab League’s ambassador there, that
“such a creature as Palestine does not exist at all. This land is nothing but the southern portion of Greater Syria…”
The article continues
"And if Ahmed Shukari says that Palestine does not exist at all, the logical inference is that “Palestinians” do not exist at all either. That same Shukari was born of a Turkish mother in Lebanon, was himself a Jordanian lawyer, served as the ambassador of Syria to the U.N., the ambassador of the Arab League to the U.N., and the ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the U.N. In 1964, after this talented actor who changed loyalties like a chameleon was fired by the Saudis, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser hired him to found the “Palestine Liberation Organization”, the P.L.O., an organization dedicated to the liberation of a country that in his own words did not exist at all.
All the prominent spokesman of that poor, homeless “people” say openly: The Arabs who live in Eretz Yisrael are precisely the same Arabs who live in Syria, Jordan or Lebanon. They are not a separate country, but a fragment of the enormous Arab nation divided amongst many Arab countries. In their identity they are Arabs and the invention of Palestine is just a transparent bluff: “a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel for our Arab unity”. Can any testimony be better than that of the Arabs themselves, exposing the lies and deception involved in Palestine’s creation?
Yet the most compelling argument for the idea that the “Palestinian People” is a fraudulent invention, and that the Arabs are all one people, was expounded by none other than Mr. Husseini, head of the Supreme Arab Committee, to the U.N. special committee that was deliberating on Eretz Yisrael in 1947:
“An additional consideration of great importance for the Arab world is racial uniformity. The Arabs lived in a broad expanse stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean. They spoke one language, and shared a common history, tradition and aspirations. Their unity was the solid foundation for peace in one of the most central and sensitive regions in the world. For that reason, it does not make sense that the United Nations should facilitate the establishment of a foreign entity within that well-rooted unity.”
Indeed, Mr. Husseini is correct. His declaration before the investigative committee of the United Nations exposes the simple fact that there is no “Palestinian” language and no unique “Palestinian” culture. The Palestinians are Arabs, and they cannot be set apart from the Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis, etc.
The article continues
"Remove from the argument the lies and untruths and you reveal that the conflict is taking place between the Arabic, Muslim empire of twenty-one states and the Jewish People, claiming their right to their one and only historic homeland, consisting of less than one fifth of one percent of the lands under Arab control.
This is the twisted story of the biggest, most unprecedented fraud in history. It involves such a successful bluff that many people have no doubt about its veracity. This propaganda has become a powerful weapon by which means Israel’s enemies, the Arabs, are trying to conquer Eretz Yisrael without firing a shot, without an army, tanks or jets.
Part II –– The Arabs’ Ultimate Goal
Following the Six Day War, the Arab countries, defeated by a small county determined to survive, understood that Israel would be impossible to beat militarily. They understood that the Israeli Samson would be possible to beat only by way of the cunning of the Philistine Delilah. And that’s what happened…. No longer would there be cries firing up the masses to genocide, but rather, sophistication… A melody carefully aimed at the delicate western ear. The Arabs discovered that from a propaganda standpoint, it was easier to convince world public opinion of the rights of the poor, small, deprived “Palestinian People” to its own state, than to justify the demand of the enormous Arab empire for an addition of territory from a tiny country fighting for its life.
The Palestinian People is a fabrication invented with aforethought as a psychological weapon of Arab countries defeated in battle, a “Trojan Horse” for conquering Eretz Yisrael, as Feisel Husseini said after the Oslo Accords.
So was born the worldwide propaganda campaign that turned matters on their head. The Israeli “David” against the Arab “Goliath” was transformed, by way of sophisticated propaganda, into the Israeli “Goliath” oppressing the Palestinian “David”. The object of this propaganda is to blot out and forget the name and identity of the ancient, Biblical Eretz Yisrael, and to transform it into the land of “the Palestinian People” fabricated by Arab propaganda.
By such means did their false propaganda gain such a strong foothold in the media and the bastions of liberalism that no one has paid any attention to the simple truths spoken openly by Zahir Muhsein, Assad, Shukari, King Hussein or Arafat.
The article continues
"By means of brainwashing, fabrications, lies, falsification, and taking advantage of the world’s ignorance and the international media’s superficiality, a process has been taking place in broad daylight, for several dozen years already, of counterfeiting and blotting out history. And just as Goebbels and Hitler, the arch propagandists of the 20th century said derisively, the bigger the lie, the more people will believe in it.
Fulfilling the demands of the Palestinian lie, will put an end to the identity of Eretz Yisrael. Following the loss of the Land’s identity, will come the loss of our right to the land. For, if there are “Palestinians”, that implies that there is also a land called Palestine, and if there is a Palestine… then there is no Eretz Yisrael.
The most terrible part is that large sectors of Israel, itself, have already fallen into the Arab propaganda trap. It is they who are opening the door to the Trojan horse that will destroy the identity of Eretz Yisrael. This is a war that is not being waged by means of weapons and armies, or over physical territory. It is being waged on the battlefields of awareness of the Land’s identity. The Roman name “Philistia” was a fiction invented by the Roman emperor Hadrian after the Bar Kochba Revolt in 135 C.E., a fiction of Hadrian then, and a fiction of the Arabs today, to the same degree.
It is a fabrication that represents no people, not then and not today. It is a sophisticated fiction invented for one purpose and one purpose alone: to wipe out a land’s identity. If the land is called Palestine, then the Jewish people are occupiers. If the land is called Eretz Yisrael, then the Arabs are occupiers.
This is the essence of the Arab propaganda war, which is intended to steal the identity of Eretz Yisrael and to transform it into Palestine, and by such means to turn the Jewish people into occupiers of Eretz Yisrael. That’s the whole story.
Now it’s already clear. The Palestinian identity is tactical, artificial and temporary. It is just a tool in the pan-Arab struggle against Israel. The amazing thing is that it’s all out in the open. Section 12 of the Palestinian charter summarizes the idea of this temporary identity, by stating that:
“The Palestinian people believes in Arab unification. It believes that in order to fulfill its task towards achieving this goal, it must, at this stage of its national struggle, preserve all the components of its Palestinian personality, and it must increase awareness of its existence, and reject all plans liable to weaken it or make it disappear.”
The article continues
"Is there another people in the world that writes in its charter of self-definition the expression “at this stage”? And what will be in the next stage? Obviously, after conquering Israel, the territory will be divided up between Arab countries, and those Arab countries themselves will throw Palestine into the wastebasket of history.
As Arafat said, the Palestinian people are a fiction. The same is true regarding the Jordanian people, and all the other Arabic speaking peoples in the Middle East. These are not peoples with separate identities, but part of the great Arab nation. Only that has a true identity. By their self-definition, they cannot be divided up into a number of peoples with individual identities. Rather, they constitute one nation consisting of many states, as Arafat himself said to Arianna Palazzi in an incautious moment.
For the sophisticated Saudis, with their Saudi Peace Plan, it is clear that its purpose is not to actualize the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, for no such people exists. They conceal the truth that the great Arab nation has already actualized its right to self-determination by establishing a large number of countries, one of which extends over about 78% of the area of mandatory Eretz Yisrael.
For the Arabs, exploding with laughter over the foolishness of the West, it is clear that if an additional Arab state arises in the western portion of Eretz Yisrael, that will not serve the right of self-determination, but the demand of imperial conquest of all Eretz Yisrael by the Arab nation. Is George Bush dragging Israel to its destruction?
The Palestinian fabrication is exposed precisely when we listen to authentic Arab voices. The prominent Arab historian, Dr. Philip Hitti, who expressed himself at the Anglo-American commission of inquiry in the State Department building in 1947, said as follows:
“Sir, Palestine never existed throughout history. Absolutely not!”
Moreover, Professor Juhan Hazam, in his testimony before that same commission, added:
“Before 1917, when Balfour made his declaration, there had never been a Palestinian question, and there was no Palestine as a political or geographic unit.”
Also a local Arab leader, Abd al-Mahdi, testified before the Peele Commission in 1937 as follows:
“There is no such land. Palestine is a term invented by the Zionists. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our land was for hundreds of years a part of Syria.”
Indeed, this is a picture of the real situation in 1918 and at the start of the British conquest of Eretz Yisrael…
And continues
"Were there any trace of truth to the claim regarding the historicity of a Palestinian People, we should certainly have expected to find mention of it in the history books and encyclopedias, as well as in archaeological research.
Part III –– Will Israel finish Hadrian’s Work?
Thus, the way to Palestinian Hell was paved with the good intentions of Christian Zionists like Lord Balfour, the British foreign secretary. In the Balfour declaration, and by the decree of the Mandate, they decided, based on historic rights, to grant Eretz Yisrael to the Jewish people. Yet they called it Hadrian’s Roman name, Palestine, which had originally had the precise intention of blotting it off the map.
From that moment on, the way was prepared for the birth of the Palestinian fiction.
The name Palestine, by which the British accidentally called the land, bore the seeds of destruction of the Palestinian bluff, as if the entire Land was the stolen property of the Palestinian people, an ancient, rooted people, thousands of years old. This was such an incredible but successful fabrication that large portions of Israeli society fell into its snare. In the report presented in 1938 to the League of Nations, the British made it very clear:
“The name ‘Palestine’ is not a country but a geographic region.”
No one could have imagined in 1917, at the time of the Balfour declaration during WWI, that anyone would use the name Palestine to create a monstrous, hostile, false identity, for propaganda purposes, and would engrave on their flag the destruction of Israel.
The reporter and writer Joan Peters, in her book From Time Immemorial, writes,
“The one and only identity never adopted [by the inhabitants of Eretz Yisrael] before 1967 was that of ‘Palestinian Arab’.”
The Palestinian lie was not hatched by any land or any people, but by a map, a map drawn by two European colonial ministers, an Englishman, Herman Sykes, and a Frenchman, George Picot, and on the map was written… “Palestine”. It was clear to the British that Palestine as a sovereign political unit had never existed. No nation had ever borne its name. No people had ever prayed for its welfare. It was a name that hadn’t existed at all for 1300 years, ironically, precisely when Muslim empires were dominant. “Palestine” was a Roman political fabrication that had faded and disappeared together with the empire that had created it.
The Land regained independence only when the name Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel], the name in the hearts of the first Zionists, was restored to it. Had not this identity been preserved by the Jewish People, and had it not been preserved in the hearts of the Christian Bible-loving nations who made up the League of Nations, the national rebirth of the Jewish People might never have taken place.
This is the substance of the war being waged on millions of television screens throughout the world. It is being waged over the identity of Eretz Yisrael. It is being waged by means of all the media, and it seems as though the Arabs have the upper hand, while Israel leaves an impression of impotence, of not yet having even identified the battlefield on which its fate will be sealed.
and continues
"While Israel prepares jets and tanks for a military struggle, Israel’s enemies are preparing their weapons for the final battle, for sticking the last dagger into the back of a State of Israel that does not understand and is not even ready for this battle. Unless Israel prepares for this battle, comes to an understanding of its complexity and frees itself from the false terminologies and constant brainwashing, Israel will be defeated and its land will be irrevocably taken from it.
Will Israel, which valiantly vanquished all the Arab armies when they attacked it also know how to face this propaganda attack that is threatening to destroy it?
It would seem as though the battle is already decided. The Arab propaganda has already penetrated the nervous system and destroyed the immune system that defended the Jewish People for 2000 years, with even the Israeli Prime Minister and Foreign Minister saying that “Israel’s interest is to establish a Palestinian state”…
In other words, what they want is for the Bible to be rewritten and for King David’s land of the Bible to become the land of Goliath the Philistine.
Could anything be more insane? Is there another nation on earth that behaves this way?
Is it possible that Israel will be beaten without a single shot being fired, simply handing over their land to a wretched fabrication, a coarse, primitive, charlatan canard, a deception that conceals the destruction that the Arabs are preparing for Israel? Could Israel’s leaders be too blind to see the danger looming of the Land’s Jewish identity being lost? Will precisely the vision of the prophets, fulfilled with the establishment of the State of Israel, bring with it the destruction of the identity of the Jewish People’s land, and lead to its exchange for the false identity of Hadrian’s Palestine? When lies are repeated many times, they become true. Such a lie is the fabrication regarding the existence of a historic Palestinian identity. That false identity, which began with Hadrian’s curse and that was revived by Lord Balfour, has become a first rate propaganda tool. It became that the moment the Arabs understood the potential of destroying the identity of Eretz Yisrael, and with it the identity of the People of Israel, whose name bears the stamp of ownership of the Land.
The article lastly says
"The struggle against Israel was the glue that bound the Arab world, otherwise sunken in endless internal quarrels. The Arabs’ aim in fabricating Palestine was not to build a nation but to annihilate a nation. Yet to conceal that plan, they invented the plan of “phases.” The first phase is the invention of a “Palestinian People”. The second phase is the liquidation of Israel, weakened and wearied after Oslo.
By such means did the Arabs conceal their genocidal intent with a “new tool”, in the words of Zahir Muhsein, for conquering Eretz Yisrael without firing a shot.
All of these lies and falsehoods, this whole “costume ball” is being marketed by the media, which is turning out to be an obsessive collaborator with the biggest lie on earth. Precisely this Hadrian understood. That’s why he chose the name Palestine. Precisely this is understood as well by Hadrian’s heirs –– the Arab propagandists who through their use of this false name sever the historic tie between the People and the Land of Israel. Without doing that, it would be impossible to use the word “conquest” –– could a people be considered the conqueror of its own land? The question Israel faces is this: Will the Jews forego the name and the identity of their Biblical land? Will the Christian world agree to concede on the identity of the cradle of western civilization, the holy land, Eretz Yisrael?
It’s the twist of fate that for all this to happen, the Jews had to vanquish Hadrian completely, return to their land, establish sovereignty, resurrect the Hebrew language, establish a mighty army, industry, the best agriculture on earth, hi-tech, culture, song, dance, reestablish a nation, rebuild Jerusalem as their capital and settle every town and village that Hadrian destroyed. Could we have possibly come full circle? Will Hadrian’s curse, which didn’t succeed for 1800 year, precisely when Israel was in exile from their land, succeed just now, with Israel’s return? Will it be precisely the Israeli government that will resurrect Hadrian’s curse, previously lost in the depths of forgetfulness?
Today, 1800 years later, an Israeli Prime Minister is calling for fulfilling what Hadrian failed to do –– the erasure of Eretz Yisrael and the establishment of Palestine.
The Emperor Hadrian is smiling from the grave." More like Hadrian is rotting in Hell
The website www.algemeiner.com has an article on December 8, 2015 titled
"72% of Palestinian Arabs Support Genocide Against the Jews"
avatar by Michael Lumish
Palestinian Arab jihadis are the contemporary Ku Klux Klan.
As with the Klan, they feel it necessary to wear masks.
They are worse than the Night Riders, because they feel free to carry out their violence in the daytime. They can do this because they know that they have Arab-Palestinian society, as created by Yasser Arafat and the PLO, behind them… as well as the Western Left.
A recent Watan Research Center poll, conducted between November 14 and the 21st of this year, reveals that 72 percent of Arabs living in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza favor the Stabbing Intifada.
This is to say that 72 percent of Arabs who live within the Land of Israel believe that they have a religious-political imperative to send their kids into the streets with kitchen knives for the Allah-inspired purpose of murdering random Jews.
It does not matter the age of those Jews; a woman in her 80s, a child in her crib. Nor does it matter the personal beliefs of those Jews. All that matters is that they be Jewish.
Still another way of gaining perspective on this 72% figure is to understand that it also means that 72% of Arabs within Israel yearn for the genocide of the Jews. It can mean nothing else. If you believe that Allah wants you to send your children into the streets for the purpose of killing Jews then, ipso facto, you favor the genocide of the Jews.
There is no way to escape that conclusion, is there?
The article continues
"Referencing this recent poll of Arabs within Israel, Dalit Halevy, writing in Israel National News, tells us:
A full 72% said they support continuing the “Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Intifada,” as it has been termed, until it achieves its “goals,” which they were later asked to define.
No less than 44% of the Arab public expressed support for an armed intifada terror war using guns, 18% gave support to stabbing attacks, and 14% supported attacks throwing rocks at Israelis.
The goal of the intifada terror war according to 48% of the Arabs is the “liberation of Palestine,” indicating the conquest and occupation of all of Israel.
This is not a border dispute.
This is a theocratic war waged by a much larger, hostile Arab-Muslim majority in the Middle East against a much smaller, besieged filthy-footed Jewish minority endeavoring to survive and thrive.
You can be sure, considering Israel’s technological and medical contributions to the world community, that if Israel represented a 23rd Arab-Muslim country it would be considered a “light unto the nations.”
When Israel was under Ottoman rule, Jerusalem was a backwater. The al-Aqsa Mosque had no gold plating. The place was essentially a ruin and nobody spoke of it as the third holiest anything to anyone. The Jews, being indigenous to the region, have lived on that land for something close to four thousand years.
The Jewish people are the closest thing that the Land of Israel has to an indigenous population. It is true that other peoples have lived on that land prior to the Israelites, but unless there is a wondering band of Jebusites out there someplace, then the land is the land of Jewish sovereignty.
But 72% of Palestinians want that land Judenfrei." It's terrible all the Arab & "Palestinian" Hatred & Incitement to Murder, Israelis & Jews Never Hate or Incite violence or murder towards anyone
The Masada2000 page on Facebook states
"Palestine is Jewish. The Jews are the true Palestinians, not the Arab squatters. The name "Palestine" was always associated with Jews. In the years leading up to the rebirth of Israel in 1948, those who spoke of "Palestinians" were nearly always referring to the region's Jewish residents. For example, the "Palestine Post" newspaper (forerunner of today's Jerusalem Post) and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra were all-Jewish. The "Palestine Brigade Regiment" was composed exclusively of Jewish volunteers in the British World War II Army. In fact, Arab leaders rejected the notion of a unique "Palestinian Arab" identity, insisting that Palestine was merely a part of "Greater Syria." In short, the so-called Arab "Palestinians" are a manufactured people. A people with no history and no authenticity whose sole purpose for existence is to destroy the Jewish State.
The Flag of Palestine Before 1948:
http://www.factualisrael.com/1939-palestinian-flag-look-li…/"
The website legalinsurrection.com has an article titled
"
"Balochistan: The real occupation and genocide that mainstream media and liberals don’t care about"
Posted by Vijeta Uniyal Tuesday, August 23, 2016 at 7:50am
Iran and Pakistan to wage war on Baloch people
the article says
"While fake instances of “Palestinian suffering” has been taking up all the bandwidth of media attention in the West, mainstream media and liberal activists have been surprisingly silent over the suffering of Baloch people living under the brutal occupation of Iran and Pakistan. Once an independent people with distinct ethnicity, culture and language, Baloch people today are living under foreign military occupation.
In 1928, the armies of the Shah of Iran took hold of the western part of Balochistan. Today over 2 million Baloch are living under Iranian rule, more than 80 percent of them in abject poverty. Just like Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in Northern Iran, ill-fed and outgunned Baloch have been putting up resistance to the Mullah Regime in the south. Forgotten by the rest of the world, Kurds and Baloch are facing an increasingly well-equipped Iranian army — replenished thanks to 150 billion dollar windfall from Obama’s sanctions relief.
After the British Rule came to an end in Indian Subcontinent in 1947, Pakistan’s army launched a military campaign bringing the whole of British-held Balochistan under its control. Pakistan-occupied Baluchistan is roughly the size of Germany. Just like the neighbouring Iran, some 7 million ethnic Baloch have been living under virtual military rule and have one of the highest infant mortality and poverty rates in the world. According to independent estimates, more than 18,000 people have disappeared in Balochistan in the wake of military campaign launched by Pakistan since 2003.
With Balochistan’s huge natural gas reserves and its shoreline strategically facing the Gulf of Hormuz, China is showing considerable interest in the region. Since 2015, China took over the Port of Gwadar Port and converted it into a naval base. German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reports:
Post a Comment