A response to Israel’s haters

By Joseph A. Klein

My article appearing in Canada Free Press last Friday entitled “Hamas apologist Norman Finkelstein attacks Israel again” (along with its publication by FrontPage Magazine under the title “Finkelstein’s Slander Against Israel”) has apparently brought the haters of the Jewish state of Israel out from under their rocks. And I mean that literally, since the terrorist organization Hamas, which they so zealously defend, still has its founding Charter in force which quotes the prophet Mohammed:

“The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

Those who take what the Hamas Charter says seriously about the goal of obliterating the Jewish state are told not to worry. Hamas has changed and wants peace, its supporters argue. It is the villainous Jewish state that refuses to negotiate a peaceful resolution of the conflict, we are told.

Yet, would any sane person trust an organization whose leaders have made statements in the last few years such as the following?

Sheik Yunus al-Astal, a Hamas legislator and imam, in a column in the weekly newspaper Al Risalah in 2008 discussed a Koranic verse suggesting that “suffering by fire is the Jews’ destiny in this world and the next.” Astal concluded “Therefore we are sure that the Holocaust is still to come upon the Jews.”

“We will not rest until we destroy the Zionist entity” stated Hamas leader Fathi Hammad in Gaza on Friday January 2nd 2009.

In a sermon aired on Hamas’ Al-Aqsa television, cleric Yunis Al Astal stated, “Today, Rome is the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital, which has declared its hostility to Islam, and has planted the brothers of apes and pigs in Palestine in order to prevent the reawakening of Islam.” He went on to say that Rome would become, “an advanced post for the Islamic conquests, which will spread though Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas, even Eastern Europe.”

Hamas has repeatedly refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist, refused to disown its Charter and refused to abide by the previous commitments of the Palestinian Authority.

With that as background, let’s examine a few of the arguments that the Israel haters have thrown my way, when they weren’t engaging in their customary ad hominem attacks.

The Jewish Zionists stole the Palestinians’ land and are not entitled to have a state of their own on any portion of “Palestine.”

Hamas’ apologists love to cite international law when it suits their purposes in holding Israel to account, but then reject the international legal framework under which the Palestinians could have had their own state more than 60 years ago. They have nothing to say that would justify why the surrounding Arab states torpedoed the original UN-sponsored two-state solution in 1947-8.

All they do is whine that the land of “Palestine” was stolen from the “Palestinian” Muslim inhabitants. Aside from the long historical connection of the Jewish people to the land, including Jerusalem, that pre-dated Islam by well more than a thousand years, the region the British called the Palestine Mandate (the area that included Jordan, Israel and the “West Bank”) and out of which the British offered the two state solution adopted by the United Nations, emerged out of the pre-World War I Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire had been ruled for 400 years by the Turks who lost it when they, fighting on the German side, were defeated in World War I.

Many Jews who were living in this area had bought their homes from the absentee Turk landlords. Arab masses immigrated from outside this area along with the Jews. Most of those who were called “Palestinian Arabs” were members of families who migrated into the same region that Jews were migrating into beginning in the late 19th century. And there had been a continuous Jewish presence in the region for many centuries.

To say that European Jews had less of a right to emigrate to the ancient Jewish homeland starting in the late 19th century (and develop the land from a desolate swamp) than did Arabs who emigrated during the same period from other regions outside of the Palestine Mandate is racist, not Zionism. In any case, the majority of Jews living in Israel today are non-European – some from Africa and many expelled from their homes in surrounding Arab countries.

Jordan was created on about 75% percent of the Palestine Mandate. The majority of its population was, and still is, Palestinian. Thus, even before the two-state solution was offered with respect to the 25% remainder of the Palestine Mandate, a state made up of a majority Palestinian population was already in existence. The fact that the minority rulers of a different Arab tribe run things in Jordan is a problem for the Palestinian majority that pre-dated the creation of the state of Israel.

The 1947 UN Resolution 181 partition plan was to divide the remaining 25% of Palestine into a Jewish state and a second Arab Palestinian state (Trans-Jordan being the first) based upon population demographics. The partition was offered even though the Arab inhabitants’ leaders had sided with the Nazis in World War II.

The Jewish inhabitants accepted the partition. The Arab inhabitants rejected the partition and the rest, as they say, is history. The Palestinians could have had their own independent state more than 60 years ago but for the rejectionism of their Arab neighbors who violated international law in trying to drive “the Jews into the sea” and the refusal of the Palestinian inhabitants themselves to negotiate a two-state solution in good faith.

Israel has illegally occupied the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem since 1967 and “oppressed” the Palestinian people in violation of international law.

Isn’t it strange how the friends of Hamas blithely skip over 20 years of history? Why weren’t the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, while those territories were in Arab hands, provided the land to create their own independent state? Where was the outcry for justice under international law back then?

After Israel took over the territories following the June 1967 war, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 242 which (i) called on Israel to withdraw its armed forces “from territories occupied in the recent conflict”; and (ii) called for “termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”

The resolution deliberately omitted the word “all” before “territories” in (i) above to allow the parties to negotiate a peaceful solution that would best achieve the goals set forth in (ii) above.

Israel has since returned the Sinai to Egypt as part of a peace treaty, normalized relations with Jordan, withdrawn unilaterally from Gaza and offered to give back 90% of the West Bank and negotiate the fate of Jerusalem – all of which was rebuffed by Arafat and his successors.

There were no security fences or elaborate checkpoints in the years immediately following 1967. What has Israel received in return?

Every year Israeli civilians have been murdered by Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, Hezbollah or some other terrorist group. Islamic terrorists use suicide bombers and increasingly sophisticated rockets, launched from lands relinquished by Israel to the Palestinians, to kill innocent Israeli civilians. Their killing machines of choice tomorrow will be whatever weapons of mass destruction they can get their hands on, including from their buddies in Iran whose president has vowed to wipe Israel off the map.

Israel is falsely accused of ‘collective punishment’ when it strikes back to defend its citizens. Yet it is the Palestinian and other Islamic terrorists who continually violate the Israelis’ human rights under the Geneva Conventions, which state that “Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.” The innocent Israeli women and children, who have been slaughtered while going about their daily lives in their homes, their schools, on buses, at shopping malls, and places of worship, have committed no wrong against the Palestinian people. They are the victims of the Islamic terrorists’ measures of intimidation and terrorism, which violate their most basic of human rights - life itself. The Islamic terrorists are pursuing nothing less than the collective annihilation of the Israeli people. Just look at the Hamas Charter and the statements of their own leaders.

When the Israeli government responded with stern but non-violent, defensive measures to protect its most vulnerable citizens from murder – for example, with border closures, security checks, economic sanctions and a separation wall which came years after the 1967 war – the terrorists’ apologists complain that it is Israel which is violating the Palestinians’ human rights under international law. Although Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2005, it is Israel’s citizens who continued to suffer intimidation and terrorism launched from Gaza in violation of their international human rights. Israel ceded the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians in a good faith effort to advance peace. Gaza turned instead into hostile territory under Hamas’s control. More than 4200 rockets were launched from Gaza into Israeli residential areas after Gaza was no longer “occupied territory.”

Israel broke the cease-fire with Hamas and launched Operation Cast Lead that turned into a “massacre” of innocent Palestinian civilians. Israel’s “war crimes” are incontrovertibly documented in the Goldstone Report.

Hamas Does Not Honor Truces 


Hamas, not Israel, unilaterally decided against extending the six month ceasefire that had expired in mid-December 2008.

One fundamental problem overlooked by the Goldstone Report and other so-called “human rights” reports is that Hamas does not abide by truces or cease-fires for very long, even when it decides to enter into one. To Hamas, truces are just stalling tactics to use as lulls during which the terrorists build up their military capability. Don’t take my word for it. When asked if he could envision a 50-year hudna (cease-fire) with Israel, Hamas leader Nizar Rayyan (who was since killed in an Israeli bombing attack) responded, “The only reason to have a hudna is to prepare yourself for the final battle. We don’t need 50 years to prepare ourselves for the final battle with Israel. Israel is an impossibility. It is an offense against God.”

Gaza’s fellow Arab neighbors in Egypt have witnessed first hand Hamas’s destructive ways. In the wake of the militants’ blasting of the barrier between Gaza and Egypt, more Egyptians finally realized themselves where the source of the Palestinians’ problems and of the real threat to peace lies.

For example, Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies director Dr. ‘Abd Al-Mun’im Sa’id criticized Hamas’s failed policies in a column he wrote for Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party weekly Al-Watani Al-Yawm:

“Hamas’s election by the majority of the Palestinian people has invested it with the formidable responsibility of leading the Palestinian people, protecting its interests, developing its abilities, and managing its relations with the world and with Israel. Its military coup against the Palestinian Authority and its [currently] exclusive control of the Gaza Strip have forced it to assume complete responsibility over the Gazans, in financial, social, and security matters.

However, Hamas has failed to fulfill this responsibility, both after it was elected and following its [Gaza] coup. In fact, it has done nothing but publicly condemn Israel and the PA, on television and in daily communiqués to the world, and to the Islamic Arab countries…

The rockets, [which are being used] as a means of opposing the peace process and applying pressure [on it], are not for pressuring Israel, but for gaining popularity among the Palestinians…”

The editor of the Egyptian government daily Al-Gumhouriyya and Egyptian MP Muhammad ‘Ali Ibrahim was even blunter in his column:

“The Hamas fighters are not satisfied with Abu Mazen’s [i.e. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s] way of reaching a permanent and definitive solution with the Hebrew state that will ensure the establishment and continuity of the Palestinian state. This is because the only aim of [Hamas Political Bureau head] Khaled Mash’al and his men is to keep this issue hot, so that regional [forces] such as Iran and Syria can continue playing the card of the Palestinian problem to promote their private interests – that is, Iran’s nuclear dossier, the liberation of the Golan Heights, etc…

The Egyptians know their Gazan neighbors very well. They blame Hamas for sabotaging any prospects for peace with Israel and for the Gazan residents’ current suffering. Egypt wants to be left alone from Hamas’s aggression and interference with its sovereignty. So does Israel. And don’t tell me that Egypt is in cahoots with Israel. They have what is called a cold peace. They are barely on speaking terms.

Hamas uses its own civilians as human shields

This is not some wild charge of Israeli propagandists. It is based on the boasts of Hamas officials themselves. 

Following are excerpts from a speech delivered by Hamas MP Fathi Hammad, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on February 29, 2008: 


Fathi Hammad: [The enemies of Allah] do not know that the Palestinian people has developed its [methods] of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: “We desire death like you desire life.” (Emphasis added)

The Goldstone Report

The Goldstone fact-finding panel, commissioned by the anti-Israel United Nations Human Rights Council, concluded that Israel “may” be guilty of war crimes based on the assumption that the country’s military forces and leaders deliberately targeted civilians. Israel’s enemies have seized on this conclusion to brand Israel’s military operation a “massacre,” to use Norman Finkelstein’s term. It is worth noting that not once in its 575 page report did the Goldstone panel actually use the term “massacre” to describe Israel’s actions during the Gaza conflict.

One of the most serious charges leveled against Israel’s operation during Project Cast Lead was its use of white phosphorous. Yet while the Goldstone Report concluded that Israel was reckless in its use in built-up areas it also noted that “white phosphorous is not at this stage proscribed under international law.” The report cited one specific example of a family in which children were alleged to have died as a result of injuries from white phosphorous. This is tragic to be sure, but it hardly demonstrates a widespread pattern of deliberate and indiscriminate burning to death of Palestinian children by Israel’s military that Norman Finkelstein and his followers try to portray.

It is curious why Israel’s enemies felt they had to exaggerate the Goldstone Report’s findings since the Goldstone panel was biased against Israel in the first place. It consisted of four members, three of whom considered Israel guilty before their investigation began. Judge Goldstone was outnumbered 3-1, even giving him all the credit in the world for his own objective judicial temperament.

Here are just a few examples of the Goldstone Report’s distortions of the facts as compiled and written up by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America: 



REPORT:
There is no evidence of Palestinian fighters using civilian clothes. 


FACT:
Journalists and eyewitnesses repeatedly noted the use of civilian clothes by Hamas fighters. 



REPORT:
There is no evidence of armed groups directing civilians to areas where attacks were being launched or forcing them to remain in the vicinity of attacks. 


FACT:
Palestinian witnesses and video evidence reveal that fighters did direct civilians to areas where attacks were being launched.

REPORT:
There is no evidence that hospitals or ambulances were used for military activities.

FACT:
Eyewitnesses describe Palestinian firing from hospitals and using ambulances. Why, for example, did the Goldstone fact-finding mission choose not to visit the al-Shifa Hospital or investigate allegations that Hamas leaders and fighters used this hospital as a base, especially given the testimony by a captured Islamic Jihad fighter to this effect?

REPORT:
The mission could not determine whether mosques were used for military purposes.

FACT:
There is video evidence of weaponry stored in a mosque, and of secondary explosions of mosques consistent with the storage of explosives. While the Report refers to allegations of mosques being used for military purposes and notes that it cannot rule out the inappropriate use of other mosques by Palestinians, the Mission nevertheless chose not to fuhrther investigate these possible war crimes by Palestinians and dismissed or ignored the readily available pictorial and testimonial evidence indicating that this was indeed the case.

CONCLUSION

I could go on and on, but one thing is clear. There can be no real peace so long as the Palestinian terrorists and their state sponsors such as Iran want more innocent Jews to die for death’s sake and will settle for nothing short of Israel’s extermination. As long as they allow Hamas and other extremists to rule them, the Palestinians will remain their own worst enemies.



Canada Press

Why Don't the Israel Haters Boycott Syria?

By Arsen Ostrovsky

This week begins an annual part of the global campaign to delegitimize and vilify the Jewish state, as anti-Israel activists and student groups on campuses around the world, including United States and Canada, mark the eighth annual Israel Apartheid Week [IAW].

According to organizers of the IAW, the purpose of the movement is to "to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system and to build Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns."

First, let's make one thing crystal clear -- attempts to brand Israel as an "apartheid" state or compare it to white South Africa are at best uninformed; and at worst, maliciously dishonest and anti-Semitic. It also does a great injustice to the real victims, who had to endure institutionalized segregation and apartheid in South Africa.

The irony is that, despite problems in Israel (as in any democracy), Arab citizens still enjoy more rights, freedoms, and liberties than do their neighbors in any number of Middle East countries currently fighting and dying for these very same privileges.

As the Muslim Arab Israeli journalist Khaled Abu Toameh says: "Israel is not an apartheid state...[it] is a free and open democratic country. The law of Israel does not distinguish between a Jew and an Arab... I would rather live as a second class citizen in Israel, even though I'm not, than a first class citizen in any Arab country."

Notably, those using the IAW to demonize Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, and which respects the rights of women, minorities, homosexuals, and people of other faiths, are holding no such events for Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad has already butchered some 7,500 pro-democracy protestors.

Nor are they holding similar events against Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is a crime, in Egypt, where the Copts continue to be persecuted both pre- and post-Mubarak, or Iran, where women and the Baha'i are repeatedly tortured and executed.

Of course, other great bastions of human rights and democracy, like Russia and China, which recently vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for the ousting of al-Assad, get a free pass too.

So why is Israel the only country singled out for special opprobrium?

During the IAW, you will hear all sorts of lofty humanitarian labels like "justice," "equal rights," and "peace." But don't be fooled. It is all a charade. They have no such interest. The sole purpose of the BDS movement is the vilification, delegitimization, and destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.
Just listen to what their leaders say.

Omar Barghouti, one the founders of the BDS Movement (and ironically, also a PhD student of ethics at Tel Aviv University), has said that the Palestinian refugees "Right of Return" is the "litmus test of morality for anyone suggesting a just and enduring solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict."

To put it a little more bluntly, he added: "I clearly do not buy into the two-state solution...[I]f the refugees were to return, you would not have a two-state solution, you would have a Palestine next to Palestine, rather than a Palestine next to Israel."

Other BDS leaders are equally forthright.

Ali Abunimah is the executive director of the anti-Zionist website, Electronic Intifada, and one of the leading proponents of the one-state solution as a supposedly "just" and "non-violent" solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He sees the BDS as key to achieving this. But only last month, he tweeted: "Isn't it the time for a popular Palestinian revolution in the form of a third intifada?" Is that because the first and second intifadas were so "non-violent" also?

And then only two week ago, in what came as a major blow to the legions of Israel haters, anti-Zionist poster-boy Norman Finkelstein said the BDS Movement's call for the "Right of Return" was just "a cover for its desire to see the destruction of Israel," calling the movement "disingenuous" and a "cult."

Granted, Finkelstein made these comments not out of a new found Zionism or desire to advance peace in the Middle East, but rather he believes there are other "more efficient" means for anti-Israel activists to achieve the goals.

But undoubtedly the most illuminating of all the statements by BDS leaders came from Ahmed Koor (another proponent of the Palestinian "Right of Return'", who wrote in April 2010: "Ending the occupation doesn't mean anything if it doesn't mean upending the Jewish state itself...BDS is not another step on the way to the final showdown; BDS is The Final Showdown."

The similarity between Koor's "Final Showdown" and Hitler's "Final Solution" is as unmistakable as it is chillingly revealing about the BDS Movement's true motives.

Whereas Hitler's "Final Solution" sought to bring about the end of the Jewish people, the BDS Movement's "Final Showdown" seeks to bring about the end of Israel as the Jewish state, by endorsing a one-state solution and flooding Israel with millions of Palestinians.

The BDS movement is nothing short of racist, insidious, and anti-Semitic. Its goal is not to advance Palestinian rights, but to deny and strip Israel of its rights, with the ultimate objective being the destruction of the Jewish state.

The most unfortunate thing is that supporters of IAW and BDS do nothing to advance the cause of peace or well-being of Palestinians or Israeli Arabs. But then again, that has never been their goal in the first place. They only breed further hate and extremism at a time when peace and cooperation is needed most.



Huffington Post

Crash Course in Islam and Arab Lies

MYTH 1: ISRAEL OCCUPIES ARAB PALESTINE

This is a genocidal claim made by the Muslim Students Association and other pro-Arab groups. It is genocidal because it obliterates the Jewish state. If Israel is actually “Occupied Palestine” then there is no legitimate Jewish state in the Middle East.

Since Roman times when the Philistines inhabited the region around the Jordan (hence the name “Palestine”) there has never been a political entity – neither a province nor a state – called “Palestine” and no one claimed there was until well after the United Nations created Israel in 1948. The land on which Israel was created by the U.N. was also used by the colonial powers to create Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan. It was land that had belonged to Turkey for 400 years. The Turks are not “Palestinians” and are not even arabs.

There never was an Arab country called “Palestine” or inhabited by “Palestinians.” Before the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, which was sixteen years after the birth of Israel, no Arab political entity was called by that name.

MYTH 2: ISRAEL IS AN APARTHEID STATE

The term Apartheid refers to the segregation of groups on the basis of ethnicity or race, and the denial of basic civil rights to the segregated group. There is no such segregation in Israel. Arabs are granted full civil rights under Israeli law, which forbids discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or sex. Arabs take part fully in Israeli society and government. Arab citizens of Israel vote in national elections, have representatives in the Israeli Parliament, sit on the Israeli courts and on the Israeli Supreme Court benches, and serve as tenured professors teaching in Israeli colleges and universities. The Arab citizens of Israel have more rights, and enjoy more freedom, education, and economic opportunity than the Arabs of any Arab state.

MYTH 3: THE ARABS WANT PEACE AND A STATE ON THE WEST BANK

The Arab nations rejected peace and a state on the West Bank first in 1948 when it was offered to them by the U.N. and then in 2000 when it was offered by Presidents Clinton and Barak. In 1949, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which the U.N. had designated as a homeland for the Arabs, were annexed respectively by Jordan and Egypt. When the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed in 1964 its covenant made no mention of liberating the West Bank or Gaza from Jordan and Egypt. The PLO leadership stated that its goal was to “push the Jews into the sea.” Today the “liberation” of Palestine “from the river to the sea” is still the goal of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA). The war in the Middle East is about the desire of the Arab nations and Muslims to destroy Israel; it is not about the desire for a Palestinian state.

There are 1.4 million Arabs living in Israel with civil rights that are the envy of the Arab world. Israeli Arabs vote in Israel’s elections, have representatives in the Israeli Parliament, sit on Israeli courts and on the Israeli Supreme Court, and serve as tenured professors teaching in Israeli colleges and universities. The Arab citizens of Israel have more rights, and enjoy more freedom, education, and economic opportunity than the inhabitants of any Arab or Muslim state.

MYTH 4: THE HOLOCAUST IS EUROPE’S PROBLEM; PALESTINIANS HAD NO ROLE IN IT

The father of Palestinian nationalism, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, planned death camps for the Jews in the Middle East. Haj Amin Al-Husseini, was a devoted follower of Hitler who spent the war in Berlin, recruited an Arab legion to the Nazi cause and planned a “Final Solution” for the Jews of the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood, which created Hamas, the government of Gaza, translated Mein Kampf into Arabic in the 1930s and called for the destruction of the Jewish state at its birth.

MYTH 5: ISRAEL’S SECURITY FENCE IS AN “APARTHEID” WALL

This is two myths in one. The West Bank fence is a fence, not a wall. About 97% of the fence is made of chain-link material. The remaining 3% is concrete, designed to repel sniper fire in particular areas. The fence was built in 2003 in response to thousands of suicide bombings and rocket attacks on Israeli citizens by Palestinian terrorists, sponsored and armed by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. The fence was built to keep out terrorists, not Arabs.

In the years since the construction of the fence, terrorist attacks have declined by more than 90%. The fence is Israel’s legitimate defense against a ruthless and amoral terrorist aggressor.

MYTH 6: ISRAEL IS THE CAUSE OF THE REFUGEE PROBLEM

The Palestinians claim there are 5 million Palestinian refugees who fled Israel during the 1948 war. This is false. There were only 500,000 Arab refugees from the 1948 war – an unprovoked war that Egypt and four other Arab states had launched against the newly created state of Israel. In the aftermath of the war, 500,000 Jewish refugees were driven out of the Arab states in the Middle East. There are no Jewish refugees today, sixty years later, because Israel resettled them. Why are there still Arab refugees? The Arab regimes have been given billions of dollars by Israel and the United States to relocate their refugees. But the Arabs are still in refugee camps. While Israel resettled Jewish refugees, no Arab country would take in the “Palestinians” who were forced into camps and were kept there by the Arab regimes to stir up hatred against the Jews. The refugee “issue” has been created by the Arab regimes as a weapon in their war against the Jews. It should be resolved by resettling the inhabitants of the refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza where almost all of them have lived all their lives.

MYTH 7: ISRAEL COMMITS WAR CRIMES BY KILLING CIVILIANS

This is the Big Lie, coming as it does from some Palestinians who have made terrorist attacks on civilians a weapon of choice, and who make martyrs and national heroes out of suicide bombers.

The Gaza strip was a base for 7,000 rocket attacks against schoolyards and townships in Israel before the Israelis responded in 2007. During Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza rocket sites there was one civilian death for every 30 terrorists. By contrast, a 2001 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross found that the civilian-to-military death ratio in wars fought since the middle of the 20th Century has been 10:1 – ten civilian deaths for every soldier death. In other words, the Israelis protect civilians at a rate 300 times greater than any other national army. As Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz observes, “No army in history has ever had a better ratio of combatants to civilians killed in a comparable setting.”

MYTH 8: JEWS HAVE LITTLE HISTORICAL CONNECTION TO ISRAEL

Jews have lived continuously in the land of Israel for over 3000 years; the Arabs arrived through multiple invasions, beginning in the 7th Century AD. In the year 70 AD, when the Jewish civilization was already over 1000 years old, the Romans forced most of the Jews of Judea and Samaria (now the West Bank) into exile. By the end of the 19th Century, the majority population of Jerusalem was Jewish.

MYTH 9: THE KORAN DESCRIBES JERUSALEM AS HOLY TO ISLAM

The Koran does not mention Jerusalem because Mohammed never set foot in the city. Jerusalem was conquered by Muslim armies in 636 after the death of Mohammed. Muslim jihadists claim that the Koran mentions “The Furthest Mosque” — Al-Aqsa in Arabic – and that this is a Koranic reference to Jerusalem. This is a lie. The Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem had not been built when the Koran was written, so the reference is to some other (or any other) “furthest mosque.” In contrast, Jerusalem is and has always been a holy city to Jews. The daily prayers of the Jews are focused on Jerusalem. The Hebrew Bible mentions Zion and Jerusalem a total of 809 times.

MYTH 10: THE TEMPLE OF SOLOMON IS NOT JEWISH

This myth is one of many designed to steal the history of the Jews in order to justify erasing them from the Middle East. When the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994, it immediately began a campaign to delegitimize Israel by rewriting history with the intention of denying Israel’s right to exist. Among its false claims is that the remains of the Temple of Solomon – the Western Wall – are in fact the remnants of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Al-Aqsa Mosque was deliberately built on top of the Temple after the Muslim conquest to humiliate the conquered.



Rad More:
Wall of Truth

Israel & Apartheid

Isn't Israel's treatment of the Arabs just as bad as South Africa's Apartheid?

Today, within Israel, Jews are a majority, but the Arab minority are full citizens with voting rights and representation in the government. Under apartheid black South Africans could not vote and were not citizens of the country in which they are the overwhelming majority of the population.

The situation of Palestinians in the territories - won by Israel in a defensive war forced upon it by its neighbors - is different. The security requirements of the nation, and a violent insurrection in the territories, have forced Israel to impose restrictions on Arab residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that are not necessary inside Israel's pre-1967 borders. The Palestinians in the territories, typically, dispute Israel's right to exist whereas blacks did not seek the destruction of South Africa, only the apartheid regime.

If Israel were to give Palestinians full citizenship, it would mean the territories had been annexed. No Israeli government has been prepared to take that step.

Meanwhile, Palestinians from the territories are allowed to work in Israel and receive similar pay and benefits to their Jewish counterparts. They are allowed to attend schools and universities. Palestinians have been given opportunities to run many of their own affairs. None of this was true for South African blacks.

- from Israel Is Not An Apartheid State, JSource -

Yet Zionism itself, and not only the current policies of the Israeli government, is constantly accused of being equivalent to apartheid simply because it represents a national emancipation movement which differs from others in being Jewish.

- Jacques Givet, "The Anti-Zionist Complex" -

Does Israel force Arabs into laborious work, menial labor?

"We do not want to create a situation like that which exists in South Africa, where the whites are the owners and rulers, and the blacks are the workers. If we do not do all kinds of work, easy and hard, skilled and unskilled, if we become merely landlords, then this will not be our homeland"

- David Ben-Gurion in conversation with Musa Alami, 1934
from Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs: From Peace to War, London: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 140

Is there racist Apartheid in the Middle East?

Another myth about Islam is that it promoted equality. In reality Islam permitted the ultimate inequality--slavery. As Muir says of Mohammed: "He rivetted the fetter." "There is no obligation whatever on a Moslem to release his slaves.' Mohammed himself had slaves--17 men and 11 women. One of the early Caliphs, Omar "insisted on a medieval Apartheid with the Arabs as master race."

In subsequent years the Arabs had one of the worst records as slavers, and this has continued right up till the later years of the 20th century and may still be going on. Some of the worst feudal regimes in history were based on Islam as is the present regime in Saudi Arabia.

- from THE DEAD HAND OF ISLAM, by Colin Maine

In fact, in an Islamic country, an infidel is a necessary evil, who is just about tolerated. The dignity of man signified by human rights, and promoted by bloody revolutions over a period of centuries, is a piece of sheer nonsense in Islam. It is because a non-Muslim in an Islamic state is required to pay jaziya, which in the Koranic language is a Humiliation Tax. In fact, the life of an unbeliever is a series of humiliations in a Muslim country. He has to wear distinctive clothes and mark his house to express the unbelief of its dwellers. Muslims are forbidden to associate with him and attend his matrimonial or funeral ceremonies. He must not ride horses or bear arms. Since it is the Islamic way of life, which requires an unbeliever to yield way to the Muslim when they happen to be walking on the same path, it can be safely called the forerunner of the South African apartheid.

- from ISLAM and Human Rights, by Anwar Shaikh -

Is Mandela a hero of the Free World?

"Mandela's Mideast Muddle"
by Patrick Goodenough

More than a year ago, on August 19 1996, South African President Nelson Mandela was due to arrive on a long-awaited visit to Israel. The trip was postponed because -- we were told -- Mandela's health at the time was poor.

Since then, however, Mandela has travelled to most corners of the globe, addressing international gatherings and conducting full state visits from Britain to Indonesia. This week he visited Israel's neighbour, Egypt, before heading for a highly controversial visit to Libya. It's hard to believe any longer that Mandela is not staying away for political reasons.

His reaction to US opposition to the visit, and those of his somnolent Foreign Minister, Alfred Nzo, suggest that these two old men are woefully out of touch with late 20th century reality. Mandela accused Washington of arrogance for dictating "where we should go or who our friends should be" Nzo called for an end to UN sanctions against Libya.

On October 21, the Johannesburg MAIL & GUARDIAN newspaper published letters on its Internet edition from Libyan exiles, deploring Mandela's decision to visit. One wrote: "I simply cannot believe that it is too much to ask of you what you have asked the world to do in the recent past: boycott tyranny and oppression".

Another called the visit "an insult to Libyan martyrs who have been hanged publicly by [Muammar] Gaddafi and left to rot in public squares for days; to the families of Libyans whose bodies were dug up by his thugs and thrown to the sea for opposing him during their life; and to the thousands of Libyans who are still in the jails of this tyrant, subjected to torture on a daily basis for asking nothing more than what you and the people of South Africa have asked for: to breathe free in our own land".

The reaction of these dissidents -- shock at Mandela's apparent blindness to the irony of his stance -- is not new. Many South Africans with a deep love both for our country and for this one share their concerns.

To many of us who grew up in the shadow of apartheid, Mandela in his prison cell were a constant reminder of a future, better South Africa which we, too, could work towards. But our joy at the transition when it occurred was tempered by profound misgivings about the close relations between the ANC and the likes of Libya, Iran and the PLO.

We hoped the ANC's ties with such dubious allies of the exiled organisation would diminish once Mandela assumed power, but that did not happen. His loyalty to old friends appears to have blinded him to a cold assessment of the damage done to his reputation by images of him embracing Yasser Arafat and Gaddafi.

Pretoria's shifting policy on the Middle East is cause for deep misgiving. A case in point was last year's agreement to store Iranian oil, flying in the face of American appeals for sanctions against Tehran. (The deal was since aborted, reportedly for reasons unrelated to US pressure).

Even more disturbing was the admission by former Energy Affairs Minister, Pik Botha, that nuclear cooperation between the two countries was on the agenda during his visit to Tehran early last year. Botha told the writer he had "met with representatives of Iran's nuclear research industry" whom he said were "engaged in research and the peaceful application of nuclear power"

Yet Iran's attempts to buy nuclear know-how from China, North Korea and former Soviet republics have triggered alarms among intelligence services around the world. In the light of this, Botha's insistence in response to my queries that "under no circumstances will South Africa become involved in any form of cooperation in violation of its obligations and responsibilities in terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty"sounded naive at best -- if not downright untrue.

If Mandela is unaware of the involvement in terrorism of Tripoli and Tehran, he is clearly not being properly advised by Nzo (who was himself warmly received in Tehran in October 1994).

When it comes to Arafat, one wonders what Mandela sees to talk about with a man not just with a history of personal responsibility for terrorism, but who even now oversees a security force which kidnaps, tortures and kills opponents in the areas under his authority. At a time when South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is hearing gruesome evidence of "dirty tricks"activities carried out by operatives of the apartheid state, doesn't it strike Mandela as ironic that his government's foreign policy transforms the perpetrators of similar crimes into diplomatic and trading partners?

Should he ever decide indeed to visit Israel, Mandela will have to bear in mind that, by legitimising the tyrants in Tripoli, Gaza and Tehran, he has relinquished any right to advise Israelis on matters which could affect the very survival of the Jewish state.

Did Israel have a special relationship with the Apartheid regime?







Peace Faq

Israel's False Apartheid Dilemma

Israel does not have to withdraw to 1967 borders to maintain democratic nature

by Yoram Shifftan

There is a growing realization that Israel faces a dilemma: either it withdraws to pre-1967 borders and maintains its Jewish Democratic nature, or it would turn into a "racist" "apartheid" state in the sense that Arabs in the "territories" do not get voting rights for a national parliament.

But in fact this is false dilemma. It is perfectly legitimate for all Jews in Western Palestine, Judea, Samaria and Gaza included, to vote for an Israeli parliament and for Arabs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza to vote for an Arab parliament.

This can be an Arab parliament of an existing Arab state. In particular Jordan's parliament is an appropriate option since Jordan extends on four fifths of Palestine: Eastern Palestine which was given to the Jewish National Home by the unanimous vote of all 51 nations of the League of Nations.

Jewish national rights in Eastern Palestine (Jordan) were only postponed but not cancelled. Yet for peace Israel will be willing to make this concession. Alternatively the Arabs of the territories (Judea, Samaria, Gaza) can vote for an additional new Arab parliament of a new Arab state, for example, in Ramallah.

A variation, or an option, of the above would include the Arabs of pre-1967 Israel who could vote too to such a parliament in Amman or to a new Arab parliament in Western Palestine.

Thus even though all Arabs are members of one nation, and therefore deserve one state only by their own logic - and indeed historically, culturally, linguistically all experts agree they are one nation as they themselves have been saying for many years - and anomalously they have already 21 states whereas people like the Kurds do not have even one state and one parliament, still for peace Israel would be willing to make the concession of increasing the anomaly even further and consider yet another Arab state.

Thus even though Arabs in America or Europe cannot express their national identity in an Arab parliament, Arabs in Western Palestine will be able to express their national identity in an Arab parliament, and simultaneously the settlement of Jews in all of Western Palestine could be encouraged so as to fulfill the requirement of international law, and to respond to the security requirement and to the necessity to settle Jews in the cradle of their civilization.

In order to see the legitimacy and legality of this type of arrangement one should invoke the many precedents of similar arrangements. They all repose on the fact that one needs not have a territorial continuity between the territorial parts of a given nation state.

The Irish example
Take for example Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. These two territories share a common island. Yet their territorial proximity still allows for their belonging to completely different nation states. The people of Northern Ireland belong to the UK and vote for a parliament located in London in another island altogether.

Nobody says that the British or Irish governments are implementing "apartheid" or a "racist" regime because the people of Northern Ireland do not vote to the proximate parliament in Dublin and are not part of the Republic of Ireland. Nobody says that the people of Northern Ireland do not enjoy national self-expression, just because they do not vote for the Irish parliament in Dublin which is their geographical proximate capital, or because they do not vote to a parliament of their own.

This is just one example. The UK alone provides multiple examples of a nation whose parts are spread all over the world, albeit not all these parts are fully-fledged British like Northern Ireland; they may be British to varying degrees and enjoy certain autonomy.

Thus, Gibraltar is British, and the British even fought in the other end of the world only recently in order to keep the "Britishness" of the Falkland Islands. To proponents of the dilemma above, these Islands should be Argentinean just because they are closer to Argentina.

Alaska and Hawaii are not territorially contiguous with mainland US, yet they are part of the US. Spain has got territory in North Africa. Corsica is an island separated from the French mainland. In fact, it is closer to Italy than to the French mainland and yet it is part of France.

The principle that one needs not have a geographical continuity or proximity between parts of a given nation is even demonstrated closer to home by recalling the status of Mount Scopus until 1967. This territory and all the buildings of the Hebrew University located on it were an official part of Israel. Yet it was encircled by Jordanian territory.

Thus, the position that Israel can only be Jewish and democratic in the pre-1967 borders is false.


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