Author

Moshe Phillips

Moshe Phillips, a veteran Zionist activist, is National Director of the U.S. division of Herut North America - The Jabotinsky Movement. More information is available at: www.herutna.org.

Biden Should Quash Abbas’s Newest Offensive

by Moshe Phillips January 11, 2021

written by Moshe Phillips

(Republished with author’s permission from the Algemeiner news website)

In December both Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Vladimir Putin each called for the Quartet on the Middle East to be the sponsor of future negotiations. But why? The Quartet was established in Madrid in 2002 and is comprised of the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Russia. It has been irrelevant for many years — at least since May 2015 when Tony Blair officially resigned from his role as Special Envoy for it and very arguably long before that. The Biden administration will have the chance to have the U.S. leave the Quartet and it should exercise the opportunity as soon as possible before Abbas’s offensive on the Quartet’s behalf sees success.

A review of the Quartet’s website is instructive in examining why Abbas has been so vocal lately about his support for the Quartet’s increased involvement. The entire approach of the Quartet to the conflict is contrary to Israel .

The tagline that is included at the top of every page of the Quartet’s website is “supporting the Palestinian people to build the institutions and economy of a viable, peaceful state in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

It’s important to break down that sentence.

First, the tagline does not mention Israel at all. That, in and of itself, is an important fact that cannot be defended in any way. How can you be about making peace between two sides and ignore the very existence of one side?

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Second, Israel’s major cities and Ben-Gurion International Airport would be within easy rocket range of terrorists sitting on the Palestinian side of the border of a “West Bank” state. Who honestly believes that a new Palestinian government would stamp out the terrorists? Does anybody remember the Oslo Accords, which obligated the Palestinian Authority to outlaw and disarm all terrorists? Who enforced that? Who will enforce future Palestinian compliance?

Not only that, but by linking the Hamas-controlled Gaza terror statelet that now exists with a proposed entity in Judea-Samaria (what the Quartet partisanly labels the “West Bank”) and the Quartet necessitates the creation of a tunnel and/or railway linking Gaza to the P.A.-run territories. Such territorial contiguity would endanger Israel’s security is a very widely accepted fact by Israel’s defense policy establishment.

And that is in part because a tunnel and railway would slice across Israel’s middle and would connect, and thereby significantly strengthen, the potential military capacity of these two perennially hostile anti-Israel regimes. Hamas already takes advantage of every current opportunity to send terrorists from Gaza into Judea and Samaria, so just imagine what it would do if it is given a highway and railway tunnel system through which it could send whatever it wants.

If Israel tried to interfere with Palestinian Arabs using that corridor, it would become the subject of severe international condemnation. The United Nations would almost surely threaten sanctions, as would the European Union. Under such pressure, Israel would hesitate to act—thus effectively tying its hands in the face of a terrorist buildup.

Another issue with the Quartet’s mission statement that must be confronted is the use of a place named “East Jerusalem” when no such place has ever existed in Middle East history. The name “East Jerusalem” is an artificial construct that supporters of the Arab argument use in their propaganda to make it appear as if that part of the city is an intrinsically Arab area that Jews are illegally entering.

At the time Israel haters created the name “East Jerusalem” it was for one reason: They sought to rip Israel’s capital apart to defeat Israel. What it is that they are really saying with the term is that Jerusalem’s Old City and its surrounding neighborhoods are not part of Israel or part of Israeli Jerusalem itself. The original and oldest parts of Jerusalem are what they falsely label “East Jerusalem.”
Led by Mahmoud Abbas, the P.A. understands that the Quartet’s envoys and its bureaucracy are biased in their favor, even more so than the United Nations, and that is why Abbas is so focused on bringing the Quartet back into the picture. Abbas must be prevented from reactivating the Quartet as a player in Middle East affairs.

The Middle East’s political climate has changed remarkably in the last several years, largely due to the work of the Trump Administration’s Middle East team. One thing that the Biden administration can do to not squander what has been accomplished is to bring a swift end to U.S. sponsorship of the Quartet. It has shown that it is systemically incapable of being a fair arbiter as far as Israel is concerned. Ending US involvement in the Quartet will cause its collapse and that is a good thing.

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January 11, 2021 0 comments

Israel Politics Radical Islam

MUSLIM EXTREMIST SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN INVITED TO JEWISH EVENT

by Moshe Phillips December 17, 2020

written by Moshe Phillips

A Muslim-American extremist has been disinvited from a Jewish-organized civil rights panel, and Jewish liberals are denouncing his removal as a suppression of free speech.

But the real outrage here is that he was invited in the first place.

Salam Al-Marayati, longtime president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), was invited by a group called Jews United for Democracy to speak as part of its panel on “After Four Years of Division, Tension and Bigotry—Now What?”

Yet Al-Marayati himself is a promoter of division, tension and bigotry. Bigotry against Jews, that is.

Al-Marayati’s organization, MPAC, publicly defended infamous French Holocaust-denier Roger Garaudy, after Garaudy was fined by the French government for his denial activities.

Al-Marayati was a longtime member of the small editorial board of The Minaret, a magazine closely associated with MPAC leaders, which in the 1990s and early 2000s repeatedly published grotesque political cartoons depicting Jews and Israel controlling the American government. That theme was consistent with Al-Marayati’s assertion that the U.S. “is in full partnership with Israel. Where Israel goes, our government follows.”

Al-Marayati has had a long association with the white supremacist William Baker, the onetime chairman of the extremist Populist Party, which was founded by a late neo-Nazi leader / Holocaust denier named Willis Carto, in 1984. MPAC has invited Baker to speak at a number of events. At MPAC’s “United for Al Quds Conference” in 2002, Al-Marayati himself introduced and praised Baker.

Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is standard fare for Al-Marayati. For example, writing in the notoriously anti-Israel magazine Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in June 1994, Marayati asserted: “Just as Hitler forged a conflict between Judaism and Christianity, apologists for Israel crave for Islam to be at odds with both Judaism and Christianity.”

Let it be noted that the U.S. government, together with the 30 other member-states of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, uses a definition of antisemitism which states unequivocally that “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is anti-Semitic.

Al-Marayati’s ugly record of Israel-bashing also includes his declaration, immediately after the 9/11 Islamic terrorist attacks, that ”If we’re going to look at suspects, we should look to the groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list because I think this diverts attention from what’s happening in the Palestinian territories so that they can go on with their aggression and occupation and apartheid policies.”

At the same time, Al-Marayati has a long record of justifying or condoning Islamic terrorism. He has equated America’s struggle for independence from Britain with Islamic fundamentalism. He denounced then-Senator Joe Biden’s Counterterrorism Act of 1995. He accused the U.S. of committing “a terrible act of terrorism” by sanctioning Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. He condemned the U.S. for striking at terrorists in Sudan and Afghanistan.

Here’s what Al-Marayati’s MPAC had to say following the March 1997 suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that left three dead and 48 wounded: “Because the Palestinian people have no avenues to redress their grievances, some of them have been pushed beyond the margins of society and have adopted violent reactions to express their despair and suffering.”

Al-Marayati’s occasional statements condemning terrorism are meaningless, because he defines Israel’s actions as terrorism and Palestinian Arab violence as freedom-fighting. Here’s how MPAC has put it: “Terrorism is wrong: Israeli occupation is terrorism and oppression. American policy must be based on the recognition that no people will remain passive under foreign occupation and military aggression. The Palestinian people are no different…The uprising is a spontaneous, collective reaction to the continued illegal and immoral Israeli occupation of the Palestinian people and their land.”

Likewise, regarding Hezbollah, Al-Marayati has said: “If the Lebanese people are resisting Israeli intransigence on Lebanese soil, then that is the right of resistance and they have the right to target Israeli soldiers in this conflict. That is not terrorism. That is a legitimate resistance. That could be called liberation movement, that could be called anything, but it’s not terrorism.”

That’s why then-Congressman Richard Gephardt (D-Missouri) withdrew the nomination of Al-Marayati to serve on the National Commission on Terrorism in 1999. Al-Marayati’s record of apologizing for terrorism is lengthy, indisputable, and nothing less than damning.

In recent years, Al-Marayati has softened his tone in the hope of trying to re-enter the mainstream. But sometimes he just can’t resist showing his true colors. Last year, he and MPAC signed a public letter defending Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, following her statements accusing Jews of bribing members of Congress to support Israel.

I guess Al-Marayati’s support for Rep. Omar is no coincidence, considering that Omar’s statements sound a lot like what Al-Marayati and his organization have been saying about Jews for the past three decades. Birds of a feather flock together, after all.

December 17, 2020 0 comments

Israel Politics

A DIFFERENT TAKE ON THE EFFIE EITAM / YAD VASHEM DISPUTE

by Moshe Phillips December 10, 2020

written by Moshe Phillips

(Republished with author’s permission from the Israel Hayom news website)

A storm of criticism has erupted over the possible nomination of Israeli war hero Effie Eitam, the son of a Holocaust rescuer, to the chairmanship of Yad Vashem, Israel’s main Holocaust institution. At issue are two remarks that Eitam reportedly made concerning Arabs fourteen years ago.

If a transcript of Eitam’s remarks is ever published, we will finally be able to see the full statements and their context. And when Eitam chooses to publicly address the matter, we will learn whether he still subscribes to those statements, which he made at a memorial service for fallen Israeli soldiers back in 2006. Eitam had a distinguished 29 year career in the IDF, which included the Operation Entebbe in 1976, and retired as a Brigadier General; he later served in the Knesset for six years.

Eitam’s critics should consider the ramifications of the “canceling” out any Israeli or Jewish figure who has ever made an offensive remark be they comments about Arabs or other ethnic or gender groups. Let’s review some of the prominent public figures who would have been shunned according to this standard:

TEDDY KOLLEK: After a group of women were violently assaulted at the Western Wall by opponents of their prayer service, Kollek, the longtime mayor of Jerusalem, accused the victims of “provoking” the attack and “using prayer as a means of protest.” (New York Jewish Week; 4-14-1989).

In a Boston Globe interview in 1992, Kollek declared: “The way of the Palestinians is the way of war and bloodshed, not peace … The Arabs say ‘We will again rule all the lands of Islam as we once did’—this is an essential Islamic concept. It is hard for me to say all this, but I have to acknowledge it.”

SHIMON PERES: At a 1981 election rally, Peres denounced Moroccan Jews in Israel as “barbarians” and “disgusting Arabs.” (The footage of the rally can be seen in the 2002 film, “Kaddim Wind – Moroccan Chronicle”)

ABBA EBAN: In a speech at the Jewish Theological Seminary, in Manhattan on February 29, 1952, Eban warned of “the danger lest the predominance of immigrants of Oriental origin force Israel to equalize its cultural level with that of the neighboring world…Our object should be to infuse them with an Occidental [Western] spirit, rather than to allow them to draw us into an unnatural Orientalism.”

AMOS OZ: One of Israel’s most celebrated novelists, and a prominent Peace Now activist, Oz said at a “Writers Talk About Peace” symposium in 1987: “The Palestinian national movement is one of the most insensitive, ugly and wicked national movements of the 20th century” and is characterized by “fanaticism, hardheartedness, and violence.” (Al Hamishmar, 5-15-87)

Among Holocaust scholars, consider these men and women whose remarks would have disqualified them from chairing Yad Vashem:

YEHUDA BAUER, the longtime senior historian at Yad Vashem, has minimized the Nazis’ persecution of gays as “a political invention” and a “red herring.” The famed historian of antisemitism, Prof. George Mosse, said in response to Bauer’s remarks: “That’s absurd. That’s like denying the Holocaust.” (New York Jewish Week, 5-22-97)

LUCY DAWIDOWICZ, renowned author of “The War Against the Jews,” demanded that Israel pay restitution to Arabs who fled in 1948, comparing it to German restitution to Holocaust victims. Dawidowicz never retracted her Israel-Nazis comparison, but that didn’t stop the American Jewish Committee from hiring her as its director of research, nor did it stop Yeshiva University from choosing Dawidowicz for the first named chair in Holocaust Studies in the United States. (New Leader, 1-19-1953)

HANNAH ARENDT, the renowned philosopher and author of some of the most famous studies of totalitarianism, in 1961 derided Sefardi Jews as “an Oriental mob” who “looked Arab but spoke Hebrew.” (Cited in The Forward, 4-25-14)

Surely the most startling and ironic name on this list is Yosef “Tommy” Lapid, who served as chairman of Yad Vashem from 2006 to 2008. His statements about minorities were so extreme that the Jerusalem Report dubbed him “an articulate Archie Bunker.” Lapid called Orthodox Jews “parasites,” “barbaric primitives,” and “enemies of progress.” (Tablet, 5-31-2013) He minimized spousal abuse, speculating that “some sociologist heard that his neighbor beats his wife, and are to the conclusion that in every house, there is at least one husband who beats his wife.” He complained about the prominence of Sefardi Jews in the Israeli music scene, claiming their style showed that “We didn’t conquer [the Arab town of] Tulkarm, Tulkarm conquered us.” Lapid’s statements about Arabs were so controversial that in 2006, Yad Vashem had to publicly dissociate itself from one of his remarks. (Haaretz, 1-8-2003)

Writing in Newsday on December 7, 1995, the eminent Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt pleaded for greater tolerance within the Jewish world. “Judaism is a big tent with room for vastly differing views,” she wrote. “And Jews must recognize that—within reason—no one can be read out of the Jewish community solely for his or her point of view.”

Lipstadt’s caveat, “within reason,” remains to be defined. But if it is defined in such a way as to “cancel” out anybody who has ever made an offensive remark about an ethnic or gender group, then quite a few of the best known figures in Israeli politics and the world of Holocaust studies, past and present, belong on that list alongside General Eitam.

December 10, 2020 0 comments

Deep State Land of Israel Regional Analysis

Trump should let the Quartet die with James Wolfensohn

by Moshe Phillips December 6, 2020

written by Moshe Phillips

James Wolfensohn, the former president of the World Bank Group, passed away on Nov. 15, and in the conclusion of his obituary, The New York Times quoted his “mission impossible” quip about his envoy experience with the Quartet on the Middle East.

“The Middle East turned out to be my mission impossible,” claimed Wolfensohn. He was tasked with working on Israel’s so-called disengagement from the Gaza Strip. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair would succeed Wolfensohn in leading the Quartet and be the last leader of the Quartet to have any gravitas on the world stage.

The Quartet has outlived both the involvement of Wolfensohn and Blair, who ended his own involvement with his 2015 resignation and now has outlived Wolfensohn himself. But it has also quite literally outlived its usefulness, if it ever had any at all.

It’s almost never in the news, and yet still exists and still has U.S. involvement. As a reminder, the Quartet was established in Madrid in 2002 and is comprised of the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Russia, according to its website.Subscribe to The JNS Daily Syndicate by email and never miss our top stories

A review of the Quartet’s website is instructive in examining just what’s wrong with the body. Its failures—and they are plentiful—stem from its entire approach to Israel.

Let’s break down that sentence.

First, it does not mention Israel at all. That, in and of itself, is an important fact that cannot be defended in any way. How can you be about making peace between two sides and ignore that one side exists?

Another issue with the Quartet’s mission statement that must be confronted is the use of a place named “East Jerusalem” when no such place has ever existed in history. The name “East Jerusalem” is an artificial construct that supporters of the Arab use in their propaganda to make it appear as if that part of the city is an intrinsically Arab area that Jews are illegally entering.

The truth is there are Jewish neighborhoods throughout the eastern, western, northern and southern parts of Jerusalem. It’s a shameful thing when Jewish organizations choose to use such geographically inaccurate and politically loaded language. At the time, anti-Israel extremists created the name “East Jerusalem” for one reason: They sought to rip Israel’s capital apart to defeat Israel. What it is that they are really saying with the term is that Jerusalem’s Old City and its surrounding neighborhoods are not part of Israel or part of Israeli Jerusalem itself. The original and oldest parts of Jerusalem are what they falsely label “East Jerusalem.”

For promoters of Israeli territorial concessions, the Gaza Disengagement that Wolfensohn was so heavily involved with was supposed to set the precedent they hoped would soon be repeated in the Judea and Samaria areas. Instead, Gaza has become the most graphic illustration of why relinquishing Judea and Samaria to the perennially hostile and extremely corrupt P.A. is a flat-out dangerous idea.

It’s worth noting that the last time before Wolfensohn’s death the Quartet was in the news at all was in June 2020, in the aftermath of the Trump plan for Middle East peace being made public. The P.A. declared to it, in a letter, “We are ready to have our state with a limited number of weapons.”

Led by Mahmoud Abbas, the P.A. understands that the Quartet’s envoys and its bureaucracy are biased in their favor, even more so than the United Nations, and that is why it appealed to it in its effort to stay relevant when so many other of its former friends around the world were suddenly not willing to kowtow to it any longer.

The Middle East’s political climate has changed remarkably in the last several years, largely due to the work of the Trump administration’s Middle East team. One thing the president can do now to bolster what has been accomplished in the Middle East during his term would be to end U.S. sponsorship from the Quartet. And the sooner, the better.

December 6, 2020 0 comments

Politics

BIDEN TEAM’S BLIND SPOT ON TERROR

by Moshe Phillips November 29, 2020

written by Moshe Phillips

President-elect Joe Biden’s first major foreign policy appointments are being hailed as centrists and experts. None of them are known as radicals, ideologues or Israel-bashers. News outlets have made much of the fact that the stepson of a Holocaust survivor is one of the key appointments.

But a closer look at their backgrounds and associations raises disturbing questions about their views on Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Secretary of State designate Antony Blinken, National Intelligence director designate Avril Haines, and UN Ambassador designate Linda Thomas-Greenfield have an interesting professional association in common: they are among the cadre of leaders of a little-known advocacy group in Washington, D.C. called Foreign Policy for America, which has a very disturbing perspective on Israel.

Foreign Policy for America (FPA), established in 2016, has two leadership bodies, both of which are quite small, indicating that their members are not just window dressing or names on a letterhead. The Board of Directors has just twelve members, one of whom is J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami. It also has an Advisory Board, with just twenty members. Blinken, Haines, and Thomas-Greenfield are among them. Ben-Ami’s J Street is also based in D.C. and is a Jewish pressure group that, judging by its actions, seems to have been created specifically, and almost exclusively, to lobby for an independent Palestinian state. The FPA’s executive director, Andrew Albertson, also has a long record of supporting J Street and he can be seen on YouTube as far back as 2011 heaping praise on the group.

Blinken and Ben-Ami are both alumni of the Clinton Administration. A fact that Blinken pointed out when he addressed the J Street annual conference in March 2012. In his speech Blinken showered compliments on J Street for having “emerged as an influential and constructive voice.”

FPA says on its website that its purpose is to “oppose xenophobia and military-first foreign policy.” It lists the twenty issues that are the group’s top concerns. One is the “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” That section of the website consists of a seven-paragraph summary of the causes and history of the conflict, with two large pull-out quotes from J Street publications and link to the J Street website, followed by tips on how to press Congress to be more sympathetic to the Palestinian Arabs.

This is on FPA’s “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” issue page. Besides J Street the only other organization FPA suggests its readers review material of, in order to “Learn More,” is an extremist Israeli organization called B’Tselem. In 2018, the Simon Wiesenthal Center labeled B’Tselem a “campaigner against its own country.”

In the FPA’s version of history, the conflict began “in 1947, in the aftermath of the Second World War.” No mention of the Palestinian Arab pogroms of 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936-1939. Of course not; mentioning that there was massive Palestinian Arab terrorism before Israel even existed would remind people that the Palestinian Arabs oppose Israel’s very existence.

FPA then briefly summarizes the various Arab-Israeli wars, without indicating that the Arabs were the aggressors. Wars just suddenly erupt for no apparent reason.

This “history” soon reaches the 1993 Oslo Accords. Guess why they haven’t produced peace? “The peace process has become complicated by growing settlements in the West Bank, continued Israeli military presence in the West Bank, and a blockade on Gaza,” according to FPA.

No suicide bombers. No machine-gunning of attendees at Passover seders. No lynchings by terrorists waving their bloody hands. No rockets fired into kindergartens. None of that affected the Oslo process. No, the word “terrorism” literally does not appear in the FPA’s entire history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This is the distorted view of the world to which the incoming secretary of state, National Intelligence director, and UN Ambassador have contributed their names.

That’s not all. Intelligence director-to-be-Haines and three other members of the FPA Advisory Board—Robert Malley, Ned Price, and Donald Steinberg—signed the public letter earlier this year urging the Democratic Party to adopt more pro-Palestinian language in its platform.

Among other things, they recommended that the party adopt a full-throated moral equivalency, by expressing “opposition to violence, terrorism, and incitement from all sides.” Just like FPA, the signers of the letter were incapable of uttering the term “Palestinian terrorism.”

Not surprisingly, that letter is featured on the J Street website.

More broadly, FPA seems to be deeply uncomfortable with the war on terror. The website’s “Use of Military Force” section—another one of its twenty areas of focus—consists of a long attack on previous presidents for aggressively pursuing terrorists around the world.

FPA complains that anti-terror actions in “Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan” have been “extraordinarily costly,” that is, too costly. They want to pass legislation to limit presidential authority in the war against terror, so they can reverse policies such as “detentions in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and training operations in (the) Philippines.”

That’s the worldview that the Biden foreign policy team is coming from: ignoring terrorism in Israel and trying to tie the hands of those who are fighting terrorism around the world.

There are, of course, additional reasons for concern about the team of the incoming administration. For example, the newly-announced Deputy Director of the Office of Legislative Affairs is Reema Dodin, a Palestinian-American activist, who has publicly justified Palestinian Arab suicide bombings as “the last resort of a desperate people.”

And according to NBC News, the top candidate for White House Press Secretary is Karine Jean-Pierre, who has accused Israel of “war crimes,” called AIPAC “severely racist,” and praised Democratic candidates who boycotted last year’s AIPAC conference.

J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami is delighted that so many of his FPA colleagues will have major positions in the Biden administration. They are “exactly the type of leadership this country deserves,” he tweeted. Many Israelis, and many friends of Israel around the world, are probably not yet convinced.

November 29, 2020 0 comments

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