Frontline Tours In The Holy Land
At his final press conference Barack Obama could not resist taking one last swipe at Israel, repeating the mantra that without a Two-State solution, Israel would not be Jewish and Democratic. A true friend of Israel would let Israel decide what’s best for it.
Samantha Power may not know it, but most Israel supporters understand that her boss Barack Obama and herself were the most anti-Israel administration ever. UN Resolution 2334 declares that not only Judea and Samaria, the cradle of Jewish civilization should be off limits to Jewish residents, but Israel’s holiest sites in Jerusalem are really “Palestinian.” If that is not anti-Semitic and anti-Israel, then what is?
Trump will take office on Friday. Since he was elected, he has given every reason to believe that Abbas and his deputies and their European and American enablers will have to either put up or shut up.
With a gun on his hip, on November 13, 1974, PLO chief Yasser Arafat stood before the UN General Assembly and made the West an offer that it didn’t refuse.
At the end of a long speech in which he rewrote history to erase all connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel and criminalized the very notion of Jewish freedom, Arafat declared, “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat: Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”
Arafat’s offer has served since that time as the foundation of European relations with the Palestinians and the wider Islamic world. It has also been the basis of US-PLO relations for the better part of the past four decades.
His trade was simple and clear.
If you stand with the PLO in its war to annihilate Israel and deny Jewish freedom, then PLO terrorists and our Arab state supporters will leave you alone.
If you refuse to join our war against the Jewish state, we will kill you.
Today, Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, is reiterating Arafat’s offer.
Speaking Saturday at the Vatican after the Holy See decided to recognize “Palestine,” Abbas said that if US President-elect Donald Trump goes ahead with his plan to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, it will “fuel extremism in our region, as well as worldwide.”
Abbas’s spokesman was more explicit. Saturday night, Osama Qawasmeh, spokesman for Abbas’s Fatah PLO faction and member of Fatah’s Revolutionary Council, said that if the US moves its embassy to Israel’s capital city, “The gates of hell will be opened in the region and the world.”
Abbas and Qawasmeh also said that the PLO expects that members of the international community will make Trump see the light and abandon his plan.
French President Francois Hollande’s “peace conference” on Sunday was the international community’s way of fulfilling Abbas’s demand.
As multiple commentators have noted, the conference’s purpose wasn’t to promote the prospects for peace. It was to constrain Trump’s policy options for handling the Palestinian war against Israel.
By bringing together representatives of some 70 countries to insist that Israeli homeowners are the moral equivalent of Palestinian terrorists, Hollande and his comrades hoped to box Trump into their PLO-compliant policy.
Spelling out the demand Trump is required to accept, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc-Ayrault parroted the Palestinian threats.
Asked by the French media Sunday if moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem would provoke the Palestinians, Ayrault said, “Of course.”
He then demeaned Trump’s plan to move the embassy as nothing but the regular bluster of American politicians.
In his words, “I think he [Trump] would not be able to do it. It would have extremely serious consequences and it’s not the first time that it’s on the agenda of a US president, but none has let himself make that decision.”
Ayrault is correct about Trump’s predecessors.
To one degree or another, since the early 1970s, successive US administrations have joined the Europeans in selling Israel down the river to prevent Arafat’s minions from pointing their guns at the American people.
Like the Europeans, the Americans have upheld their side of this bargain even when the PLO failed to uphold its end. For instance, in 1973 Arafat ordered his terrorists to storm the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum and take US ambassador Cleo Noel, his deputy, George Curtis Moore, and Belgian diplomat Guy Eid hostage. Arafat then ordered his henchmen to murder the diplomats after then president Richard Nixon rejected his demand to release Robert F. Kennedy’s Palestinian murderer, Sirhan Sirhan, from prison.
Instead of responding to the execution of US diplomats by siding with Israel against the PLO, the US covered up and denied the PLO’s responsibility for the attack for the next 33 years.
The US is still covering up for the PLO’s murder of US embassy personnel in Gaza in 2003. At the same time, it is providing the PLO with nearly three quarters of a billion dollars in direct and indirect annual aid, including the training and provision of its security forces.
The Europeans for their part have egged the US along throughout the years. France has generally led European efforts to convince the Americans to side with Palestinian as well as Hezbollah terrorists in their war against Israel in the name of “peace.”
Sunday morning, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the Paris conference as a “futile” relic of a period that is about to end.
Netanyahu said that the conference’s goal of boxing Israel into an untenable framework for dealing the Palestinians was nothing more than the “final palpitations of a yesterday’s world.”
“Tomorrow,” he intoned, “will look a lot different. And tomorrow is very close.”
Trump will take office on Friday. Since he was elected, he has given every reason to believe that Abbas and his deputies and their European and American enablers will have to either put up or shut up.
Speaking of the president-elect, Henry Kissinger said that Trump is the first man in recent memory who doesn’t owe anybody anything for his victory.
The only people he is answerable to are the voters who elected him.
Trump’s electoral victory owes to his success in tapping into the deep reservoir of popular disaffection with the elitist culture and policies that have governed post-Cold War West. He has used the mandate he received from American voters to revisit the basic assumptions that have driven US policies for the past generation.
His skepticism at NATO and the EU are examples of his refusal to simply accept the received wisdom of his predecessors. Just this weekend he told Germany’s Bild magazine that he continues to question the purpose of NATO, which is a drag on US taxpayers and doesn’t fight terrorism.
He similarly restated his ambivalence toward the EU and that its open border policy has been a “catastrophic failure,” and he expects more countries to follow Britain’s lead and exit the EU.
Trump’s position on the PLO and the Palestinian war on Israel is of a piece with his wider rejection of the common wisdom of Western elites. Just as he didn’t hesitate to say that the EU mainly serves as an instrument for Germany to dominate the European market, so he has made no mystery of his rejection of the moral equivalence between Israel and Palestinian terrorists which forms the basis of the twostate formula.
Not only won’t Trump join the Obama administration and the French in criminalizing Israeli homeowners, Trump is celebrating them. He has invited the leaders of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria – that is, the so-called “settlements” – to attend his inauguration.
And he appears dead serious about moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem.
Under these circumstances, Israel has the opportunity and the obligation to end the PLO’s ability to threaten the US, not to mention itself. It is Israel’s duty to ensure that the next time the PLO tries to exact a price in blood for America’s refusal to abide by the terms of Arafat’s blackmail, his terrorist group is finally destroyed.
Similarly, Israel is now obliged to take the lead and abandon the PLO-friendly two-state policy, which blames Israel for Palestinian terrorism, and adopt a strategy that works in its place.
Netanyahu has refused to consider any alternative until after Barack Obama is out of office.
Consultations must be scheduled for Saturday night.
Originally Published in Jerusalem Post.
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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.
Obama bend over backwards trying to defend his support for UN Resolution 2334, claiming “I think has a legitimate interest in saying to a friend, ‘This is a problem,'” referring to the growing communities built in Judea and Samaria. Obama has been opposed to Jews living in their historic homeland since the beginning of his Presidency. His extreme action at the end of his Presidency is a parting shot and culmination of what is considered the most antagonistic American administration to the continuing presence of Jewish communities beyond the 1948 Armistice lines.
Transcript, via CBS:
Steve Kroft: A few weeks ago you allowed the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution condemning Israel’s settlements in the West Bank. It caused a major fallout between the United States and Israel. Was it your decision to abstain?
President Barack Obama: Yes, ultimately.
Steve Kroft: Why did you feel like you had to do that?
President Barack Obama: Well, first of all, Steve, I don’t think it caused a major rupture in relations between the United States and Israel. If you’re saying that Prime Minister Netanyahu got fired up, he’s been fired up repeatedly during the course of my presidency, around the Iran deal and around our consistent objection to settlements. So that part of it wasn’t new. And despite all the noise and hullabaloo– military cooperation, intelligence cooperation, all of that has continued. We have defended them consistently in every imaginable way. But I also believe that both for our national interests and Israel’s national interests that allowing an ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians that could get worse and worse over time is a problem. And that settlements contribute. They’re not the sole reason for it, but they’re a contributing factor to the inability to solve that problem. And–
Steve Kroft: And you wanted to make that point?
President Barack Obama: Not only did I want to make that point. We are reaching a tipping where the pace of settlements, during the course of my presidency has gotten so substantial that it’s getting harder and harder to imagine an effective, contiguous Palestinian state. And I think it would have long-term consequences for peace and security in the region, and the United States, because of our investment in the region, and because we care so deeply about Israel, I think has a legitimate interest in saying to a friend, “This is a problem.” And we’ve said it– look, it’s not as if we haven’t been saying it from Day One. We’ve been saying it for eight years now. It’s just that nothing seemed to get a lot of attention.
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The 70-nation conference on the Israeli-Palestinian issue in Paris on Sunday included neither Israeli nor Palestinian representatives and was a farce and a fraud—but could have been still worse.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the conference represented the “last twitches of yesterday’s world. Tomorrow’s world will be different—and it is very near.”
It was, of course, one of the reasons the conference was farcical: although Secretary of State John Kerry was in attendance, he was representing an administration that is in its last five days in office, and whose policy of harassing Israel was—among much else—repudiated in the U.S. elections two months ago.
France, the host and convener of the conference, was hardly in a stronger position: the Socialist government of François Hollande is on its last leg and its path, too, is expected to be jettisoned in the upcoming French elections.
Israeli columnist Prof. Eyal Zisser notes that “in the actual Middle East…no one gives France a second thought and no one is taking its peace initiative seriously.” It was, after all, France that led the misguided Western assault on the defanged Qaddafi regime in Libya and reduced that country to jihadist chaos; and it is France that has sat impotently while its former colonies, Lebanon and Syria, have fallen under Hizballah rule in one case and into Hobbesian mayhem in the other.
And as David Harris has pointed out, France’s credentials as an honest broker on the Israeli-Palestinian issue are also less than sterling:
at the World Health Organization General Assembly in May…France voted in favor of a measure that bizarrely singled out Israel by name as the only country in the world accused of undermining “mental, physical and environmental health,” and…France could do no more than abstain at UNESCO in April on a resolution that denied any Jewish (and Christian) link to the holy sites in Jerusalem.
At Sunday’s conference, none of this prompted an ounce of humility on the part of Hollande and Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, or deterred them from drawing the de rigueur moral equivalency between Palestinian terror and Israeli home construction.
If this is what Netanyahu meant by the “last twitches of yesterday’s world”—a world in which the West has been obsessed for decades over Israeli home-building while its errant policies have helped turn the Middle East into crumbling chaos—then one can only hope Netanyahu’s optimism is not misplaced.
Foreign Minister Ayrault, however, went a step further.
It was on Saturday that Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, visiting the Vatican, issued a dire warning against moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, saying: “Any attempts at legitimizing the illegal Israeli annexation of the city will destroy the prospects of any political process, bury the hopes for a two-state solution, and fuel extremism in our region, as well as worldwide.”
If “fuel extremism in our region, as well as worldwide” sounds like a threat of terrorism, and an effort to get others to intimidate the incoming Trump administration out of transferring the embassy to Israel’s capital—that indeed is what it was.
A few hours later Osama Qawasmeh, a spokesman for Abbas’s Fatah movement, was more graphic, saying that if the embassy is moved “all chances for peace and stability will be lost. The gates of hell will be opened in the region and the world.”
And it was that chorus to which, at Sunday’s conference, the French foreign minister lent his voice, stating that moving the embassy would have “extremely serious consequences…. When you are president of the United States, you cannot take such a stubborn and such a unilateral view on this issue.”
Translation: the “old world” insists that when it comes to Israel, the West’s role is to knuckle under to Arab and Muslim bullying, making Jerusalem the world’s only capital to be devoid of other countries’ embassies. If this “old world” is truly on the way out, it cannot disappear soon enough.
So much for the deeply objectionable side of Sunday’s gathering. The event also yielded some relatively good news.
Israeli officials reportedly welcomed the fact that the conference’s final statement was much less harsh toward Israel than last month’s UN Security Council Resolution 2334, and “credited the efforts of [Israel’s] National Security Council and…Foreign Ministry” for achieving that result.
The officials also welcomed Kerry’s promise in a phone call to Netanyahu that the U.S. would rein in any further Security Council vilification of Israel—a promise to be tested in the administration’s waning days.
Also encouraging is that Britain, under Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative government, refused to sign the conference’s final statement, claimed it would merely “harden positions,” and said it had “particular reservations” about the lack of Israeli and Palestinian representatives—in other words, about the fact that the conference was an empty farce.
A new era in which conservative Western administrations, with the U.S. and Britain taking the lead, could treat Israel with diplomatic decency and take a clearer view of the Middle Eastern reality it deals with? Time will tell.
Originally Published in FrontPageMag.
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Israeli settlements in the West Bank have been tried in the New Zealand court of public opinion and found to be illegal. Waikato Professor of Law, Alexander Gillespie, recently declared in the NZ Herald that “There is no question in international law that these settlements are illegal.” Similarly, many of the mainstream media articles written on the subject, as well as the slogans and placards of anti-Israel activists, refer simply to “illegal settlements”. We hear this refrain time and again.
UN Security Council resolution 2334 stated that the establishment of settlements “has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law”.
However, despite the certainty with which these claims are made, there is very considerable evidence and analysis to suggest that it is not correct to label settlements as illegal.
Under the Reagan administration, the United States referred to the settlements as “not illegal” and, at least until resolution 2334, subsequent administrations have used the term “illegitimate”, because there are questions over the legal status.
The Israeli government describes the legal status of settlements this way:
In legal terms, the West Bank is best regarded as territory over which there are competing claims which should be resolved in peace process negotiations – and indeed both the Israeli and Palestinian sides have committed to this principle….“Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Northwestern University Professor of Law, Eugene Kontorovich has outlined the legalities of Israeli settlements, which explains why Gillespie is so grossly mistaken:
Here is a summary of some key legal points, which Gillespie and others have overlooked:
These points are elaborated below.
Israel has the strongest historic and legal claim to the land
The territory in question was historically called Judea (named after the Israelite tribe of Judah) and Samaria (from the ancient city of Israel) and has had a constant Jewish presence for millennia.
The term “Palestine” was first introduced around 135 CE when the Roman Emperor Hadrian decreed that the name “Judea” should be replaced by “Syria Palestina” as a way of punishing the Jews for revolting and to de-Judaise the land.
Prior to the First World War, the Ottoman Empire controlled the land from Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). Following defeat of the Turks, the League of Nations entrusted Great Britain with the “Mandate for Palestine”. The only binding resolution of international law, a resolution which has never been countermanded, is the 1922 Mandate for Palestine.
Adopted by the League of Nations, the 1922 resolution recognised the “historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country”. It called for the creation of a Jewish national homeland and “close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes” – this included the land West of the Jordan river (i.e.what is commonly referred to as the West Bank).
Shortly thereafter the League of Nations and Great Britain decided that the provisions for setting up a Jewish national home would not apply to the area East of the Jordan River.Transjordan was created for the Arabs with 75% of the original land administered under the mandate. Transjordan eventually became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Under further Arab pressure, the British Mandatory government withdrew from its commitment to the Jews, especially with respect to immigration and land acquisition. The White Papers of 1930 and 1939 restricted immigration and acquisition of land by Jews. After the UN General Assembly adopted the resolution to partition Palestine on November 29, 1947 (which New Zealand voted in favor of and the Arabs rejected), Britain announced the termination of its Mandate over Palestine.
When Israel declared its independence in 1948, neighbouring Arab nations attacked, hoping to destroy the nascent Jewish state. Following this war (the War of Independence), Transjordan annexed Judea and Samaria, renamed it the “West Bank,” and occupied it for nearly two decades. During this time Jews and Christians once more faced discrimination and were banned from their Holy sites.
In the 1967 Six Day War, after Jordan attacked Israel, Israel regained the territory, reunified Jerusalem and administered it until the Oslo Accords era, at which point Israel turned areas over to the Palestinian Authority. The final borders of a Palestinian state were left contingent upon Palestinian progress in ending terrorism and bilateral negotiations over presumed land swaps.
According to Gillespie, the Israeli settlements are on “territory which they acquired by military force in 1967 and never returned”. The suggestion is that Israel, through an act of aggression, took the land from the Palestinians, to whom it must be returned. However, at that stage Arab Palestinian national identity was still in its infancy. There had never been a self-governing Arab Palestinian state. How could the land then be “returned” to them?
As Political Science Professor Miriam Elman wrote in 2016:
Jordan unlawfully invaded and annexed Judea and Samaria [in 1948]. In 1967, Israel ended this illegal occupation in a war of self-defense, taking control of the territory. This suggests that it’s actually Israel which has a strong claim of sovereign title to the territory, by virtue of its having retaken the area from an unlawful Jordanian presence. The case of Israel is unique because there’s no prior instances where a new state’s territory was immediately occupied. But Israel has valid claims to legal title of the West Bank, and now legally holds it.”Miriam Elman
Further, in a 1,100 page thesis researched over 20 years at the University of Geneva’s political science department and international law school, a Canadian international human rights lawyer, Jacques Paul Gauthier, concluded that Israel has a legal right to occupy territories under its control since 1967. The arguments that contradict Gillespie’s “there is no question” statement are expanded below.
In the wake of the 1967 war, the United Nations crafted resolution 242 to establish principles that were to guide the negotiations for a “peaceful and accepted settlement”. The most controversial clause in Resolution 242 is the call for the “Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict”. It wasn’t, as many would like to claim, assumed that this meant all territory. In fact, the resolution deliberately eschewed the definite article, which would have required withdrawal from all “the” territories, on the understanding that they would only be yielded up if the Arabs ended their aggression.
Resolution 242 meant a negotiated agreement based on the resolution’s principles rather than one imposed upon the parties – and this has also been the longstanding policy of New Zealand. The withdrawal from occupied territories was also linked to the “termination of all claims or states of belligerency” and the recognition that “every State in the area” has the “right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force”.
This has not been achieved because, in spite of several offers of land for peace Palestinian leaders have still not accepted the presence of a Jewish state in their midst.
Another argument used by many to try and ‘prove’ that the settlements are illegal was also proffered by Gillespie when he claimed “The rule, very clear since the Geneva Conventions were created in the wake of the atrocities of World War II in 1949, is that the populations of occupied territories shall not be forced out and the occupying power shall not transfer its own civilians into the territory it possesses.”
It has been argued that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the settlements for a number of reasons. One is that, as outlined above, Israel has the best legal claim to the land and is not an occupying power. Another is that the land was captured in a defensive war against countries which had illegally occupied them since 1949. However, a 1999 resolution was unanimously passed stating that the Fourth Geneva Convention does apply to Israeli settlements in the “occupied territories”.
Kontorovich has compared the situations of several ongoing occupations with settlement policies; Western Sahara, Northern Cyprus, and the Russian occupations of Ukraine and Georgia, in order to determine whether the Israeli settlements are in breach of the Geneva Conventions.
Clear patterns emerge from this systematic study of state practice. The allowed practices are significantly inconsistent with “conventional wisdom” concerning the Geneva Conventions, specifically Art. 49(6) to which Gillespie referred:
First, the migration of people into occupied territory is a near-ubiquitous feature of extended belligerent occupations.
Second, no occupying power has ever taken any measures to discourage or prevent such settlement activity, nor has any occupying power ever expressed opinio juris suggesting that it is bound to do so.
Third, and perhaps most strikingly, in none of these situations have the international community or international organizations described the migration of persons into the occupied territory as a violation of Art. 49(6). Even in the rare cases in which such policies have met with international criticism, it has not been in legal terms. This suggests that the level of direct state involvement in “transfer” required to constitute an Art. 49(6) violation may be significantly greater than previously thought.
Finally, neither international political bodies nor the new governments of previously occupied territories have ever embraced the removal of illegally transferred civilian settlers as an appropriate remedy.”Eugene Kontorovich
It seems that there are evidently double standards in the application of the Geneva Conventions and is the only state to have resolutions passed against it requiring the removal of civilians. Either the settlements are in breach of the Geneva Conventions – and then so are many other conflicts where the word “illegal” is not invoked – or the Israeli settlements are like many other disputed territories – not actually illegal.
Further, when the issue of legality was actually tested in the court of law, the occupation of Judea and Samaria by Israel was found to be unequivocally legal under international law. The Court of Appeal of Versailles issued this ruling in 2013, following a suit brought by the Palestinian Authority against Jerusalem’s light rail – because it was built by French companies. The Palestinian case, built primarily on reference to the Geneva Conventions was dismissed.
Despite the arguments above, there have been non-binding United Nations General Assembly and Security Council resolutions that call Israeli settlements illegal (in addition to some legal scholars and armchair critics). This does not remove any questions about the actual legalities but it has put pressure on the Israeli legal system.
Unlike its neighbours. Israel is a liberal democracy with an independent judiciary and a stringent rule of law. The Supreme Court has ruled on many controversial issues to ensure the law is upheld, including that of settlements. Every aggrieved inhabitant of the disputed territories, including Palestinian residents, can appeal directly to this Court. Ministers of the Israeli Parliament have tried recently to introduce bills that would legalise some “outpost” settlements (those built without proper permits), but the Attorney General of Israel has warned that the legislation would not be defensible in court.
Israel’s courts have ruled that some building activity, by Arab, Jewish, Bedouin, and others, is illegal. Most recently, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged a crackdown on illegal Jewish settlements and helped negotiate a peaceful resolution to removing settlers from the village of Amona, stating that the law on illegal construction “must be egalitarian. The same law that necessitates the evacuation of Amona, necessitates the evacuation of illegal construction elsewhere in our country”.
The Israeli courts have also ruled that some settlement activity is legal – when there are appropriate permits in place and the law is being followed, building is allowed. However, when there are individuals or groups who wish to unilaterally take land and claim it as their own, the courts step in. That is how the law should work.
You don’t need to be a professor of law to know that there are few legal issues so black and white that they can be answered with a “there is no question” or “everyone says so”. Contrary to Gillespie and others’ superficial statements, the question of the legality of the settlements is a complex one, which cannot be summed up as “all settlements are illegal”. While the Security Council can make recommendations, it is not a court of law. Rather, the evidence shows that there is considerable room for debate on this question.
Originally published in Shalom Kiwi.
As the USA and the world await the swearing in of Donald Trump, a political storm is growing in Israel. For years the Left and the Israeli media elite have tried their best to take down Bibi Netanyahu. The goal has always been to replace the Likud led government with a left of center leadership that would gut Israel’s Biblical heartland by vacating the communities that have been built there. The Left was so assured that their full court press against Netanyahu would work during the last elections, when it didn’t, they were left despondent.
With Trump about to take over the reigns of leadership in America, the Israeli left knows that a permanent presence of Jews in Judea and Samaria will be a fait accompli, that is unless they can throw the government into turmoil.
Two pending cases have surfaced against Bibi Netanyahu. One involves a friend buying expensive cigars for the Prime Minister. The other involves Bibi’s arch nemesis, owner of Yediot Aharonot Nuni Mozes and his attempt to offer favorable news coverage in place of Bibi supporting a law to shut down Israel HaYom. Israel HaYom, owned by Sheldon Adelson is the most widely circulated newspaper in Israel and is seen as the Prime Minister’s mouth piece.
With the media pushing out a false narrative involving incomplete facts at daily intervals, Israelis have begun to accept the Left’s talking points. Although Bibi Netanyahu is prohibited from speaking about specifics involving both cases, he released a statement over Facebook.
“In recent days, there has been an orchestrated media campaign, unprecedented in its scope, to bring down the Likud government under my leadership. This propaganda campaign is designed to pressure the Attorney General and other factors in the prosecution to indict me.
“The method is simple: Every day and every night carefully filtered transcripts and intentional lies are distributed on both issues on the agenda.
“Of course, as long as the investigation is ongoing, I cannot defend myself. I cannot tell the public the real story behind these things, which makes it clear that there was no crime here.
“Since I am prevented from going into the details of the investigation, I can say only the things that are visible and known to all: Everyone knows that I was firmly opposed to the Israel Hayom Law, which others concocted and initiated long before the 2013 election.
“For months I prevented the bringing of the law to a preliminary vote. When it did come to a vote, I voted against the law, along with a handful of Knesset members which included most of my fellow Likud members.
“It is also known that after the law was passed by a large majority, I dissolved the government and called for elections, partly because of the subversion within the government to pass the law. Everyone also knows that in the new government after the elections, I inserted an explicit clause in the coalition agreement to prevent the recurrence of such legislation.
“Because of all this – nothing happened. Israel Hayom remains intact, flourishing. While the bad media I got from Yediot Aharonot and Ynet did not stop even for a moment. So all these claims that I promoted the Israel Hayom Law are false claims. The same applies to the second issue, as will be made clear over time.”
In fact, Ron Yaron editor of Yediot Aharonot, supported Bibi’s assertion that the charges are ridiculous with the following statement reported by the Jerusalem Post:
“We all, as one, would leave and seek another home,” Yaron said. Yaron continued saying that the Yediot staff place their loyalties to the readers, “and only after that to those who pay our salaries.” Yaron also defended Mozes saying the publisher is “endlessly loyal to the readers of this paper, and to his life’s work that his father and grandfather established 77 years ago.”
The answer to that depends on an affirmative to each of the following points:
While the Left is pushing for new elections and some parties are already gearing up for spring time elections, most experts believe that the media and politicians are way out in front of the process by not paying attention to the above points.
The Left’s Campaign May Backfire
The Left’s only chance to regain the reigns of overt power in Israel is to smash Bibi’s control of the government. Yet, there is a gamble in this. If they are truly overreaching with this latest push against the Prime Minister then the public will forever punish them. Not only that, but the Right will have cart blanche to push forward with the Nationalist camp’s vision for a strong Israel as the sovereign through out all of the Jewish people’s homeland.
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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Lev HaOlam, the Israel based movement that connects thousands of Israel supporters around the world to Judea and Samaria through monthly packages was represented in the wide spread demonstrations today in Paris, France against the “Peace” Summit.
Founded by activist Nati Rom more than three years ago, Lev HaOlam supports countless artisans, craftsmen, and pioneers in Israel’s Heartland by buying their products and making them available to thousands of customers.
