Jerusalem News 896. Views, Jews, Ten Tribes News
2 February 2010, 18 Shevet 5770
Contents:
1. Is the US an ally of Israel?
A chronological look at the evidence
2. The Oslo Crime Against the Jewish People
The Deadly Price of Pursuing Peace by Evelyn Gordon
3.Interesting Short Video Clip: Ultra-Orthodox Settlers in the West Bank
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1. Is the US an ally of Israel?
A chronological look at the evidence
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/hirally.htm
Brit-Am Note:
Article to be read with GREAT reservation but it does bring up some valid points.
2. The Oslo Crime Against the Jewish People
The Deadly Price of Pursuing Peace by Evelyn Gordon
## Israel's increasingly frantic pursuit of peace has
aroused not admiration but rather the instincts of a predator scenting
blood.##
Evelyn Gordon Commentary Magazine January 2010
www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-deadly-price-of-pursuing-peace-15321
Extracts Only:
When the Oslo process began in 1993, one benefit its adherents promised was a significant improvement in Israel's international standing. And initially, it seemed as if that promise would be kept: 37 countries soon established or renewed diplomatic relations with Israel; a peace treaty was signed with Jordan; five other Arab states opened lower-level relations.
But 16 years later, it is clear that this initial boost was illusory. Not only is Israel's standing no better than it was prior to the famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat on the White House Lawn in September 1993, it has fallen to an unprecedented low. Efforts to boycott and divest from Israel are gaining strength throughout the West, among groups as diverse as British academics, Canadian labor unions, the Norwegian government's investment fund, and American churches. Israeli military operations routinely spark huge protests worldwide, often featuring anti-Semitic slogans. References to Israel as an apartheid state have become so commonplace that even a former president of Israel's closest ally, the United States, had no qualms about using the term in the title of his 2007 book on Israel. European polls repeatedly deem Israel the greatest threat to world peace, greater even than such beacons of tranquility and democracy as Iran and North Korea. Courts in several European countries, including Belgium, Britain, and Spain, have seriously considered indicting Israeli officials for war crimes (though none has actually yet done so). And in October, when the United Nations Human Rights Council overwhelmingly endorsed a report that advocated hauling Israel before the International Criminal Court on war-crimes charges, even many of Jerusalem's supposed allies refused to vote against the measure. In academic and media circles, it has even become acceptable to question Israel's very right to exist-something never asked about any other state in the world. None of these developments was imaginable back in the days when Israel refused to talk to the Palestine Liberation Organization, had yet to withdraw from an inch of "Palestinian" land, and had not evacuated a single settlement.
Yet even today, conventional wisdom, including in Israel, continues to assert that Israel's international standing depends on its willingness to advance the "peace process." That invites an obvious question: if so, why has Israel's reputation fallen so low despite its numerous concessions for peace since 1993?
The answer is unpleasant to contemplate, but the mounting evidence makes it inescapable: Israel's standing has declined so precipitously not despite Oslo but because of Oslo. It was Israel's very willingness to make concessions for the sake of peace that has produced its current near-pariah
status.
Why should this be so? There are several reasons.
_____________
First, Oslo led Israel to sideline its own claim to the West Bank and Gaza, which all Israeli governments (and international Jewish leaders) had stressed to some extent before 1993. Though there had long been a lively debate as to whether Israel ought to hold on to these territories in practice, until 1993 all sides were ready to assert that it had a valid claim to them in principle. The argument in favor of Israel's right to sovereignty there was simple: these territories are the historic Jewish homeland, the heart of the biblical Jewish kingdom. They were explicitly allotted to the future Jewish state by the 1922 League of Nations Mandate, which was never legally superseded. Although the 1947 UN partition plan allotted part of the land to a putative Arab state-a plan that Palestinians and other Arabs rejected as a matter of principle-it was merely a nonbinding "recommendation" (as its own language stated). Thus once the Arabs rejected it, the measure had no more validity than any other unsigned deal. Nor did any sovereign state ever replace the Mandate on this territory: though Jordan and Egypt conquered the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, in 1948, neither conquest was ever internationally recognized. Legally, therefore, the territories remained stateless lands whose ownership is disputed; over time, the Palestinians simply replaced Egypt and Jordan as the Arab claimants.
The problem was exacerbated by Sharon's unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and Ehud Olmert's election the following year on a platform of unilaterally quitting most of the West Bank. Until then, Israel had deemed evicting settlers from their homes a personal and national tragedy that merited sympathy and compensation. But then two successive Israeli prime ministers declared that for both demographic and security reasons, uprooting settlements was an Israeli interest. A plurality of Israelis even endorsed this view in a national election. And if so, dismantling settlements cannot be a "painful concession" for which Israel deserves to be rewarded.
Granted, much of the world was disposed to accept the Palestinian claim even before Oslo. But as the sage Hillel famously said 2,000 years ago, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" Oslo marked the moment when Israel stopped defending its own claim to the West Bank and Gaza and instead increasingly endorsed the Palestinian claim. And with no competing narrative to challenge it any longer, the view of Israel as a thief, with all its attendant consequences, has gained unprecedented traction.
_____________
This alone would be devastating to Israel's image. But the problem has been compounded by another unanticipated consequence of Oslo: the territorial withdrawals it entailed have resulted not only in more dead Israelis but also in more dead Palestinians. Nothing undermines a country's image more quickly than pictures of bleeding victims recycled endlessly on television and computer screens.
Statistics compiled by B'Tselem (the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) clearly reveal the correlation between withdrawals and increased Palestinian fatalities. During the first intifada, from 1987 through 1993, when Israel controlled the territories, Israeli forces killed 1,070 Palestinians. That is only slightly more than the 1,015 killed in a single year (September 2001 to August 2002) of the second intifada, which erupted after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had already left much of Gaza and the West Bank, and less than 30 percent of the 3,713 killed during a six-year period of the second intifada. Indeed, it is fewer than the number killed in just three weeks in the January 2009 Gaza war: the lowest estimate of Palestinian fatalities, which comes from the IDF, is 1,166.
This data flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which holds that a continuous IDF presence increases the likelihood of deadly encounters. But when the IDF controls an area, it can usually arrest suspected terrorists rather than kill them. Israel cannot arrest suspects in territory it has ceded to Palestinian control. Thus the only way to fight terror emanating from territory the IDF has quit is by military means-namely, killing the terrorists. And military action inevitably involves collateral civilian casualties as well.
Clearly, withdrawals would not have required military action, with its resultant Palestinian casualties, had the Palestinians not turned every bit of territory they received into a launching pad for terror attacks. But that is exactly what they have done. In the first two and a half years after Oslo, Palestinian terrorists killed more Israelis than they had in the preceding decade. In 2000-04, according to the Shin Bet security service, Israel's terror-related casualties exceeded those of the preceding 53 years.
And between the mid-2005 disengagement from Gaza and the 2009 war, Gazan terrorists fired almost 6,000 rockets and mortars at southern Israel, according to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center. Hence, every withdrawal has faced Israel with a stark choice: sit with folded hands while its citizens are attacked, or take military action that will inevitably produce Palestinian casualties and consequent international outrage.
_____________
Israeli withdrawals have also had another unintended consequence: they have energized anti-Israel radicals who, despite their small numbers, have contributed greatly to the anti-Israel climate by propelling the boycott and divestment movement. Because groups such as labor unions and churches are generally viewed positively, when a wide variety of such groups throughout the West all start targeting one particular country for boycott and divestment, people without any prior knowledge of the facts might naturally assume that the accused country must indeed be guilty to merit such treatment.
Israel's increasingly frantic pursuit of peace has aroused not admiration but rather the instincts of a predator scenting blood.
Over the next four years [after further Israeli Concessions in Washingto 2000, and Taba 2001], Palestinian terror claimed more Israeli victims than in all the years from 1947 through 2000. Yet international pressure for Israeli concessions continued, and Israel again capitulated: in August 2005,
it evacuated 25 settlements-something it had previously conditioned on a full-fledged peace treaty-for no recompense at all.
Sixteen years of unrequited concessions have
convinced anti-Israel radicals that Israel is indeed vulnerable to this kind of pressure. Thus Israel's very pursuit of peace has spurred its enemies to go for the jugular.
3. Interesting Short Video Clip: Ultra-Orthodox Settlers in the West Bank
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/07/
26/world/1247463629010/ultra-orthodox
-settlers-in-the-west-bank.html
A look at the growing population inside the West Bank's Ultra-Orthodox settlements of Modiin Illit and Beitar Illit.
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