Frontline Tours In The Holy Land
Even Yair Lapid gets it. Change is coming fast to both Left, Right, and Center and it is being forced on Israel from Donald Trump and his desire to radically shift the paradigm. Expect to see unprecedented changes in how the USA and Israel approach the “peace” process.
Another spectacle. Another photo-op to say “I care” and to feel like “I’m doing something”. But the cause of peace will be set back. This is what the Paris Middle East Peace Summit is about.
It’s in Paris but it’s not about the Middle East; it’s only about Israel. It’s in Paris but it’s not about peace; it’s about leaders patting each other on the back and posing for pictures.
If it were really about peace, the summit would help the Israeli and Palestinian leaders sit and talk so they can reconcile and resolve their differences. It would prepare them for the need to make painful sacrifices, because the prize of peace is worth it.
The French-Palestinian conference in Paris on 15 January 2017 is about to do just the opposite. Instead of urging the Palestinian leadership to return to the negotiating table with Israel it will reinforce that leadership’s serial determination to avoid negotiating at any cost.
Peace between Israelis and Palestinians does not need grand conferences with dozens of participants, replete with empty declarations. To promote peace, the nations of the world need simply to tell Palestinian leaders the truth: that peace requires reconciliation with Israel and the only way to achieve that is through direct negotiations. The ‘International Community’ needs to tell the Palestinians that Israel is a partner for peace and is ready to make painful sacrifices, as indeed it has in the past. World leaders need to tell the Palestinians that they will have to accept difficult compromises with Israel on borders, refugees, security and Jerusalem; to tell them that this is the only way to bring hope and a better future to their children and the generations to come.
The road to peace between Jerusalem and Ramallah passes through just that – Jerusalem and Ramallah. Not New York. Not Paris. Not through international forums, resolutions, or futile conferences. Peace is paved through bilateral negotiations, with leaders meeting face-to-face, ready and willing to work with each other. That was the case with the Israel-Egypt peace in 1979; that was the lesson of the Israel-Jordan peace in 1994. From Northern Ireland to South Sudan, in region after region, direct peace talks alone have brought real solutions.
On the heels of December 2016’s one-sided UNSC Resolution 2334 which, amongst other things, shamefully designates Judaism’s holiest sites in Jerusalem as “occupied Palestinian territory,” the Paris conference is slated to serve as yet another platform for renewed and deliberately selective censure of Israel. It will likely become another international forum that will fail to place the necessary responsibility at the feet of Palestinian leaders.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly entreated Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to meet him, yet instead of joining and endorsing those entreaties, the international community prefers to incentivise Abbas’s deliberate avoidance of this direct contact. Indeed, why should Abbas negotiate with Israel when he so effortlessly can have the international community lay the blame on Israel, even as it turns a blind eye to the culture of hate and violence frothing under Abbas’s nose in Palestinian society?
Israel has said yes – and continues to say yes – to any opportunity, any time, any place, to have direct negotiations with the Palestinian leadership without preconditions. But the Palestinians have run away from negotiations time and again, from Camp David in 2000, to Ehud Olmert in 2008, and Paris and Washington in 2014. Through cherry-picking issues in order to appease the Palestinians, the conference in Paris will only entrench this Palestinian intransigence and perpetuate the conflict, thus hurting the Palestinian people rather than helping them.
The Palestinian effort to ‘internationalize the conflict’, enabled by world leaders including New Zealand’s, allows the Palestinian leadership to avoid a final status resolution on these lines. Indeed, this perpetual evasion only proves that the conflict has never been about a Palestinian state. It is – and has always been – about Israel’s right to exist, within any borders. The solution to the conflict requires that the Palestinians be willing to live alongside Israel, rather than seeking to replace it.
If the world’s nations truly seek to advance peace, they should therefore send a clear, unequivocal message to Abbas: Stop encouraging violence and terrorism, stop promoting hate speech, and stop educating Palestinian children to kill Israelis. Teach them that Israel is here to stay, and that peaceful relations with Israel must be the foundation of a future Palestinian state.
While the bloodbath rages in neighboring Syria, world leaders are busy convening yet another display of misguided hubris, that demands nothing from the Palestinians. As such, the Paris conference is a meeting of yesterday. It is anti-Israeli, and anti-Palestinian; it is anti-peace and counter-productive. The international community can – and must – do better.
Originally Published in Shalom Wiki.
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It appears that the persistent criticism of McCully’s sponsoring of the anti-Israel UN Resolution 2334 has hit a nerve. On 12 January 2017 he published a defence of the move in The New Zealand Herald, in an opinion piece titled “Vote to rebuke Israel only option in push for peace”.
Unsurprisingly, it contained a continuation of the light-weight analysis, one-sidedness and wishful thinking that we have come to expect from our Foreign Minister.
McCully denies the charge made by critics that the resolution predetermines the outcome of any negotiations, without offering any real counter-argument. UN resolution 242, passed in the wake of the 1967 war, was specifically worded so as not to perpetuate the 1949 Armistice Line as the final borders in order to encourage negotiations. McCully seems to not understand that Israel’s ability to negotiate must be impaired by the new resolution – the Security Council has now declared any land over the 1949 Armistice Line to be “Palestinian Territory”. Why would Palestinian negotiators ever move back from that position? Why would Palestinian leaders enter negotiations when they can use the UN to pass resolutions like this one?
Again, without offering a counter-analysis, McCully denies that the resolution affects the rights of Israelis to access certain religious sites. This is an absurd statement if one reads the text of the resolution, which declares the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, the Western Wall, and Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount, to be part of “occupied Palestinian territory”. Resolution 2334 potentially criminalises Jews living in the ancient Jewish Quarter, rebuilt after the destruction during the years of Jordanian occupation (1948-67) and makes it illegal for Jews to pray at the Western Wall, the surviving structure of the Second Temple. Did Prime Minister Bill English and Cabinet truly support this?
Is McCully not aware of ‘moderate’ Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas’ statements that the State of Palestine will not allow a single Israeli to live under their rule? A future Palestinian State will be Judenrein, just like when Jordan controlled the area. How does McCully intend to ensure access to Jewish holy sites for Jews?
McCully attempts to pass critics off as hard-liners, claiming (falsely) that “the focal point for much of the critics’ anger is the direct call for a halt to the settlements”. In fact, many of those who object to the Resolution also happen to be critics of the settlements. The true focal point for the critics’ anger is the danger to the survival of Israel through the imposition of indefensible borders and the assault of 2334 on Jerusalem, by designating the heart of it a settlement and thus criminalising residents. The resolution goes well beyond simple criticism of the current government’s settlement policy and this is where the anger lies.
Another focal point for the critics’ anger is the failure of the resolution – and McCully – to recognise the role of Palestinian rejectionism, violence and incitement in the current stalemate, and to hold only one side – the Israelis – to account for their actions. McCully declares in his NZ Herald justification that the resolution, “condemns the obstacles to a negotiated two-state solution: incitement and acts of violence and terror against civilians on all sides…”. McCully, a man who, for reasons known only to himself, refuses to use the term “terrorism” when it relates to murderous attacks by Palestinians on Israeli civilians, apparently equates the constant violent attacks by Palestinians against Israelis – stabbings, shootings, bombings and vehicle rammings – with the Israeli government’s attempts to prevent further terror attacks. He ignores the role of the Palestinian Authority in inciting these acts of terror and rewarding the families of those responsible.
In the last week, a Palestinian terrorist killed four young Israelis and wounded many others when he rammed his truck into a crowd on a Jerusalem street. The “successful” attack was met with jubilation on West Bank streets and the Palestinian Authority will pay the widow of the assailant a lifetime allowance. No condemnation for the attack has been made by President Abbas, nor by our own Minister McCully, whose claim to be vexed about violence and incitement (when against Israelis) has been shown to be little more than lip-service.
The lack of balance in the resolution is also evident in the both the rapturous reception by the Palestinian Authority and the widespread condemnation it received across the Israeli political spectrum, from many prominent left-wing proponents of the two-state solution.
McCully ended his defence with an unexpected revelation, when he explained why the resolution was hurried through in the last session of the year: “The truth is: the United States would not accept any resolution on this topic until after US presidential elections in November. The domestic politics would have been too difficult.” It is an astonishing admission, that the Obama administration knew that the resolution would lose the Democrats support before the election, so it waited until the “lame duck” period. What exactly does this say about the resolution and the “spirit of unanimity” that McCully takes cover behind, particularly in light of its subsequent bipartisan rejection by the House of Representatives?
This admission also contradicts statements made by both the Obama administration – which denied planning the anti-Israel resolution – and by New Zealand’s ambassador to the UN, who has been quoted saying, “We did not discuss the substance of the resolution at any time with the United States,” and further noting, “We did not know how the United States would vote.”
According to the Huffington Post:
Team Obama was not going to have their plan derailed by the Israelis or Donald Trump. Luckily, John Kerry already had that covered. In November, he spoke with New Zealand’s foreign minister, Murray McCully, about such a resolution. McCully, known for his anti-Israel leaning, was only too happy to oblige. The next day, New Zealand’s UN envoy, joined by Venezuela, Malaysia, and Senegal, picked up the baton and brought the resolution to a vote. It passed as the Obama administration originally planned, albeit a little later and with more blowback than they expected.”Huffington Post
So what really happened? Why the apparent contradiction? What mandate did McCully have – or could he have obtained in such a short space of time – and what spurred him to leap so quickly into gear to sponsor this anti-Israel resolution? What did Bill English know of any of this?
Many questions remain about how such a flawed and unbalanced resolution – and one that departs from longstanding NZ policy – can have been rushed through the Security Council with New Zealand’s connivance, and the answers are unlikely to come directly from McCully. What is clear, however, is that the legacy that McCully has sought to achieve for himself through this sorry episode will be an ignominious one.
Originally Posted in Shalom Kiwi.
Ahead of today’s sentencing of the terrorist who murdered Danny Gonen z’l, his mother Devorah Gonen penned a moving open letter to her son. Danny Gonen z’l was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist in June 2015 while hiking near the yishuv of Dolev.
CEO of the Im Tirtzu movement, Matan Peleg, who has been supporting Devorah throughout the entire judicial process, said: “The situation in which terrorists enjoy more benefits and services than any other criminal in Israel is disgraceful.”
Peleg added: “There are organizations funded by foreign governments that work to provide exaggerated rights to terrorists in jail, and at the same time defend their families in the Supreme Court. The decision makers need to wake up and immediately change this absurd situation.”
BS”D
My Dear Danny,
A year and a half has passed and it seems like an eternity. The time passes, the world continues as if nothing happened, but you still remain my boy.
In the year and a half since the murder, we experienced a lot of emotions, sleepless nights, thoughts. Every moment that you were not physically here, you were still with us. In the past year and a half we were frequent visitors at the military court. Why? To fight for justice. To fight again and again. For you.
It’s odd, that the State of Israel allows for an animal on two feet, a so-called human being, to continue to laugh at our expense. The last time we saw the murderer, he, for the first time, lowered his eyes. He understood that the celebration was over. He understood that the eternity of Israel will not lie.
I fought.
We fought.
Today, we will be seeing him again in court. This time for the sentencing. Who would have thought that I would need to fight so much for you? For justice? For truth? For preventing the next murder? Over the past weeks many words have been exchanged about the quality of the military court, mainly surrounding the soldier Elor Azaria. Everywhere they spoke about the obligation to protect the judges. But I ask…what about us? What of the basic obligation to do justice? How can it be that it’s more worthwhile for a terrorist to murder a Jew than to steal his car?
The biggest absurdity is that these terrorists know that it pays to murder. Yesterday it was you Danny, and tomorrow it can be someone else. I also thought that the situation would be different, but apparently it’s not so bad for them here. They enjoy wonderful benefits and all the pleasures of life. They receive money from the Palestinian Authority, supplies from the Red Cross that would put any fancy Tel-Aviv restaurant to shame, and living conditions that many needy families in Israel could only dream of.
And at whose expense, I ask? At your expense, at our expense…
Today, we are coming to protest. To protest against the situation where bereaved families need to cry out loud with no one to stand behind them. Against the radical organizations that decided to sell their souls to the devil and defend terrorists like the one who murdered you Danny. Against the hypocrisy that cries out to the heavens. Against the next release of terrorists.
Danny, today in court, you will stand together with us. No one can erase your smile that touched so many people. They thought that they can defeat us. But today we will prove to them that this will not happen.
We will continue in your path, Danny. In every place and at all times. We will continue to be proud Jews who are not embarrassed to fight for the truth and to continue living here in Israel.
That is what you wanted. That is what will be.
I miss you.
Ima
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Mike Huckabee continued his tour of Israel yesterday visiting the Tomb of the Biblical Patriarchs and Matriarchs in Hebron. He was emphatic of his support of the Jewish people’s connection and control of the 4000 year old site.
Huckabee said the site “one of the most unique places on earth” and said it is a tragedy that there are so many restrictions that exist on visiting various parts of the holy site due to Muslim objections. He believes that if we could access all of the caves it would be “one of the greatest archaeological opportunities in the history of mankind.”
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