The Bush letter nine years on

(Carl) Rick Richman reminds us that Sunday is the 9th anniversary of the famous Bush letter that effectively promised Israel the 'settlement blocs.' At the time, the letter was overwhelmingly endorsed by both Houses of Congress, but in 2009, President Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, tried to pretend that it didn't exist, and Obama has continued to behave as if the letter did not exist.
US Secretary of State John FN Kerry is unable to pretend the letter didn't exist. But that doesn't mean he's going to back Israel's position. Rick Richman explains.

At an April 9 press conference in Tel Aviv, Bow Shapira from Israeli TV (Channel 1) told Kerry he wanted to ask about “a guarantee from the past”–the 2004 Bush letter, which he described as “telling that blocs of settlements can stay, cannot [be] removed from the territory.” His question about the guarantee was straightforward: “well, does it exist?” Kerry responded in part as follows:

I remember that commitment very well because I was running for president then, and I personally have supported the notion that the situation on the ground has changed, and obviously, we’re talking about blocs that are in a very different status. I’m not going to get into telling you what ought to happen with respect to any particular piece of geography today because that’s for the parties to decide in their negotiation. But I have certainly supported the notion publicly myself that we need to deal with the ’67 lines, plus the swaps that reflect some of the changes that have taken place since then.

It is not surprising that Kerry remembered the commitment so well. He appeared on “Meet the Press” on April 18, 2004–four days after the Bush letter was issued–and was asked directly about it by Tim Russert:

MR. RUSSERT: On Thursday, President Bush … said that Israel can keep part of the land seized in the 1967 Middle East War and asserted the Palestinian refugees cannot go back to their particular homes. Do you support President Bush?
SEN. KERRY: Yes.
MR. RUSSERT: Completely?
SEN. KERRY: Yes.

Kerry’s response to the Israeli reporter last week is significant, because he recognized: (1) that the Bush letter was in fact a commitment, subsequently endorsed by both the Senate (95-3) and the House (407-9) in concurrent resolutions; and (2) that he supported it at the time, in unambiguous terms.

But it is indicative of the continuing problem President Obama created with his refusal in 2009 to endorse the Bush letter that an Israeli reporter felt it necessary to ask whether the U.S. commitment exists. The president has been attempting to assure Israelis with his have-your-back, all-options-on-the-table rhetorical commitments, but they remember that in the past he did not feel constrained to respect even a written commitment to Israel.

Given that Obama doesn't live up to his commitments, why should Israel give up real assets to appease him?

unbelievable!

Report: #Hagel Said #Israel Headed Toward #Apartheid, #Netanyahu a ‘Radical’

(Report: Hagel Said Israel Headed Toward Apartheid, Netanyahu a ‘Radical’ | Washington Free Beacon)

BY: Alana Goodman
February 19, 2013 12:51 pm
Secretary of defense nominee Chuck Hagel said Israel is on its way to becoming an apartheid state during an April 9, 2010, appearance at Rutgers University, according to a contemporaneous account by an attendee.
Hagel also accused Israel of violating U.N. resolutions, called for U.S.-designated terrorist organization Hamas to be included in any peace negotiations, and described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “radical,” according to the source.
Kenneth Wagner, who attended the 2010 speech while a Rutgers University law student, provided the Washington Free Beacon with an email he sent during the event to a contact at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The email is time-stamped April 9, 2010, at 11:37 AM.
“I am sitting in a lecture by Chuck Hagel at Rutgers,” Wagner wrote in the email. “He basically said that Israel has violated every UN resolution since 1967, that Israel has violated its agreements with the quartet, that it was risking becoming an apartheid state if it didn’t allow the Palestinians to form a state. He said that the settlements were getting close to the point where a contiguous Palestinian state would be impossible.”
“He said that he [thought] that Netanyahu was a radical and that even [former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi] Livni, who was hard nosed thought he was too radical and so wouldn’t join in a coalition [government] with him. … He said that Hamas has to be brought in to any peace negotiation,” Wagner wrote.
AIPAC had no comment.
Wagner said the remarks were made during the Q amp;A session. The speech took place at the Rutgers School of Law in Newark.
Wagner, a pro-Israel activist, reiterated the account in an interview with the Free Beacon and called Hagel’s comments “pretty shocking.”
“I was very surprised at his attitude because I had been listening to politicians speak about the situation in the Middle East and the U.S. Israel relationship for about two decades,” Wagner told the Free Beacon. “And it was probably the most negative thing I’d ever heard anybody in elected office say.”
The news of the comments given during the 2010 speech comes at a time when the embattled secretary of defense nominee has been forced to respond to a report that he called the State Department an adjunct of the Israeli foreign ministry during the Q amp;A portion of a 2007 speech at Rutgers.
The Free Beacon reported Thursday on a contemporaneous account of another speech then-Senator Hagel gave at Rutgers in 2007. The report, written by Hagel supporter and political consultant George Ajjan, claimed Hagel had described the U.S. Department of State as an extension of the Israeli government.
Sens. Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte on Friday sent a letter to Hagel requesting an explanation of the alleged comments. The Anti-Defamation League also called on Hagel to explain, and the American Jewish Committee said, “Further Senate deliberation is called for before any final vote is taken.”
Hagel has disavowed the remarks and says he does not recall making them.
“I do not recall making any such statement, or ever making any similar statement,” he wrote in a reply letter to Graham and Ayotte on February 16. “I completely disavow the content of the alleged statement attributed to me.”
According to one of the 2007 event’s organizers, Hooshang Amirahmadi, who is currently running for president of Iran, Ajjan’s account of the 2007 speech is “complete nonsense.”
Amirahmadi told the Free Beacon that some of his “very good Jewish colleagues who are very pro-Israel” did not appear offended at any point during the speech.
The Daily Caller reported on Monday that Amirahmadi accepted funding grants from the Alavi Foundation, which federal law enforcement officials have called a front group for the Iranian regime.
Amirahmadi is also the head of the American Iranian Council, which awarded Hagel an expensive clock in 2002.
Another attendee at the 2007 speech, Rutgers Professor Charles Häberl said he is “certain” Hagel did not say the State Department was an adjunct of the Israeli government, BuzzFeed reported today.
When the Free Beacon contacted Häberl about the 2007 speech last Thursday, he said he was not the best person to talk to about the event.
“Have you been in touch with Hooshang Amirahmadi?” Häberl wrote in an email. “He’s the one who organized the event, and he would be the best situated to talk about it. At the time, I was just a lecturer.”
Meanwhile, Ajjan stood by his account and said he is the only person who has provided a written report from the time.
“If somebody comes out with a transcript and those words aren’t uttered, I’d be the first one to say, ‘My apologies. I wrote something down that was wrong—I misheard it, or I misreported it,’ if that’s the case,” Ajjan told the Washington Free Beacon.
“I’m a conscientious person,” Ajjan said. “When I was blogging at that time, I did my best to record things accurately … there’s no way that I would pick a phrase like ‘adjunct of the Israeli foreign ministry.’ That’s a pretty odd combination of words to use. I wouldn’t have just pulled those out of thin air.”
When asked about Häberl disputing his account, Ajjan said he wants to make it clear he is not trying to undermine Hagel’s confirmation or the Rutgers event. He said he is still a supporter of Hagel.
“I suppose [Häberl] thinks that I’m somehow trying to disparage Chuck Hagel or cast a dark shadow over his confirmation hearings. That’s not the case at all. And I certainly don’t wish to besmirch the people who organized the event,” said Ajjan. “I very much enjoyed the event, I appreciate the people who organized it.”
The Free Beacon is working to obtain transcript and video of Hagel’s comments during the question and answer sessions at Rutgers in both 2007 and 2010, and is continuing to speak to others who attended both events.
A representative for Hagel did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

via freebeacon.com

Time for some more research into what really happened here

To #CBS' #BobSimon, Israelis deserve to be blown up if #settlements are built

(EOZ)(h/t O)Of course, he wouldn't characterize it this way, but how else can you explain this bizarre linkage he suggests?

The $270 million the U.S. has provided Israel to help build Iron Dome is in addition to the three billion dollars Israel gets annually from the U.S. in military aid. Palestinians complain that while all this U.S. support is being given to Israel, the Israeli government has repeatedly defied U.S. policy and approved the construction of new settlement blocks in the West Bank.
Bob Simon: The Americans have already given $270 million dollars.
Ehud Barak: More than this, I believe, along the, yeah.
Bob Simon: And they're promising just the Iron Dome another $660 million--
Ehud Barak: Yeah. Yeah. $680-- probably $211 might be given in the coming fiscal year.
Bob Simon: While the Americans are helping you so much in your defense. Israel goes on building settlements, which is exactly what the Americans don't want. How does that work, when you're asking America for help and doing exactly what the Americans don't want you to do?
....How does it work? I mean, right now, Israel has just announced the building of a gigantic settlement project. This is at the same time that the Americans are providing the money for Israel's most important defense system.

So if Israel builds settlements, Simon is saying, then the US should no longer help fund Iron Dome to save Israeli lives from rocket attacks. Israelis in Ashkelon must die because the Knesset allows Jews to build houses in their historic homeland.

Summary: (sabril) Do commentators like Bob Simon ask similar questions about US aid to or support for Egypt? To the Palestinian Authority? To the United Nations? To Turkey? (jzaik) ...Who controls whom here. Simon is saying that the Americans are paying israelis. Bill maher is saying we're controlled by the israelis. (singingt) how valuable is Israeli technology to the US?

Jews building settlements in Judea and Samaria is legal

By Salomon Benzimra, author of the book: The Jewish People's Rights to the Land of Israel (http://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Peoples-Rights-Israel-ebook/dp/B0065WZM14)

First and foremost, the first five pages of the Levy Report ("Legal Argument") clearly summarizes why Israel is not an occupying power in Judea and Samaria – and East Jerusalem - and, therefore, why the settlements are not illegal. You can find the English version of these 5 pages here:

http://elderofziyon.blogspot.co.il/2012/07/english-translation-of-legal-arguments.html

The following are the points on which this claim rests:

1. The legality of the "settlements" cannot be dissociated from the notion of "occupation." As long as Israel is viewed as an "occupying power," not only the "settlements" can be construed as illegal but the whole of Israel becomes "occupied territory" since there is no difference between land acquired or repossessed - a better term would be "liberated" - in 1967 and 1948-49 respectively.

2. The Fourth Hague Regulation of 1907 defines "occupation" in Article 43: it presupposes that "the authority of the legitimate power ...passed into the hands of the occupant." The annexation of Judea & Samaria (renamed in 1950 "The West Bank') by Jordan has never been recognized as "legitimate."

3. The San Remo Resolution (April 1920) integrated the Balfour Declaration (November 1917) to Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations (June 1919) and resulted in the following:

3a: The provisions of the Balfour Declaration (i.e. the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine) became binding upon Britain, which the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers selected as the Mandatory Power in the land.

3b. The establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine was no longer a mere a British foreign policy decision, but became an act of international law.

3c. Pursuant to the San Remo Resolution, in July 1922, the Mandate for Palestine was confirmed, approved by the 52 members of the League of Nations and entered into force in September 1923.

3d. No "special rights" were conferred to the Jewish people. The Supreme Council recognized a pre-existing right by calling for the "reconstitution" of the Jewish National Home in Palestine – and not the "creation" – it being clearly understood that it would turn, in time, into a sovereign Jewish State, pending on an expected Jewish population majority.

4. Following the Churchill White Paper – the official British policy for Palestine - of June 1922, Britain separated the Transjordan part of Palestine – the land east of the Jordan River - and made it an exclusively Arab land where no organized Jewish settlement was allowed, as per the inserted Article 25 of the Mandate. However, in "western Palestine" - from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea - all the provisions of the Jewish National Home were upheld, including the encouragement of Jewish settlement of all lands (as per Article 6).

5. When the League of Nations ceased to exist, in 1946, following the creation of its heir, the United Nations, the acquired rights of the Jewish people remained enshrined in the UN Charter (Article 80).

6. The UN General Assembly Resolution 181 recommended a further partition of the remaining "western Palestine" into a Jewish State and an Arab State. Had this recommendation been accepted by both parties, the terms of the Mandate would have been superseded. But that was not the case, due to the Arabs' rejection of the Resolution. Besides, the recommendation formulated in UNGA Res. 181 violated the UN Charter (Article 80) and the terms of the Mandate, still in force in 1947, especially Article 5 which prohibited the cession of any territory of Palestine to a foreign power.

7. Since no agreement occurred in 1947 pertaining to a further partition of Palestine, and no other binding agreement has been entered into between Israel and the Arabs ever since, which might affect the Jewish sovereignty over western Palestine, the provisions of the Mandate still hold, and especially the title to the land, vested in the Jewish people and that includes Judea and Samaria.

8. Point #7 therefore refutes the notion of Israel being an "occupying power" in any part of western Palestine –From the River to the Sea - since one cannot occupy land on which it has legal title.

9. Because the State of Israel is not an "occupying power" in any part of western Palestine, it follows that the Fourth Geneva Convention does not apply. This is especially true for Article 49 which deals with transfer and deportation of populations to and from occupied territories, in addition to other legal aspects (the nature of the Contracting Parties, the non-forcible transfers, etc.), and the preposterous situation of ethnic cleansing, which the Arabs demand that would result in making Judea and Samaria judenrein.

Conclusion: The claim that it is illegal for Jews to build in Judea and Samaria and that Israel "occupies" the land is an utter lie, arises from deliberate ignorance, pandering to the Arab/Muslim world, anti-Semitism or all of the above combined.

Guest Comment:

Statement: International law, under which Judea and Samaria is part of the legal land of the state of Israel has become a political law and thus the world has come to believe that Israel has no claim to any land beyond the 'Green Line'.

All the UN resolutions condemning Israel on the "settlements" are based on lies, totally ignoring international law that has become international political law.

It is just like admitting that the existence of the Palestinian Authority and its recent "promotion" in the UN is based on going AGAINST the UN charter, AGAINST the Montevideo Agreement on what determines a state to be, etc. It's exactly the same.

The main problem is not the lack of pertinent international law, but rather the practical irrelevance of any such law in a world that still basks in ritualistic anti-Semitism. Europe, as the always-residual source of such hatred, will never support Israel, irrespective of authoritative international law. Hence, the core problem here is not jurisprudential, but geopolitical. This is a problem that must be solved by Israelis only.

In the meantime, Israel is NOT making its legal case for construction in Judea and Samaria and is not defending itself. As it stands now, if Israel continues to build beyond the 'Green Line', the European Union may even begin taking harsher punitive measures against it.  As long as the government of Israel does not promote the jurisprudence that the "settlements" in Judea and Samaria are legal, world pressure will continue and get even worse.

We need to push back! And we begin right here with the facts and truth. Every time we see anyone complaining about the illegality of the "settlements" in Judea and Samaria we send them the below explanation as our reply. The government of Israel needs to use this one page as well. Enough of the lies.

Below is a 9-point summary explaining why Jews building in Judea and Samaria is NOT illegal. One page with the facts that settlements in Judea and Samaria are NOT illegal to act as a tool to push back and defend Israel from the anti-Semites in Europe and beyond.

Nurit Greenger

via docstalk.blogspot.com

Moral behavior and Jewish rights

(Fresno)if Israel begins negotiating from the position that it is occupying someone else’s land, then the only thing there is to negotiate is the timetable for withdrawal. This is precisely the Palestinian position, and it is also reflected in the Arab League Peace Initiative.

The recent Levy Commission report — perhaps many years late — tries to reestablish these legitimate rights under international law:

“According to international law, Israelis have a legal right to settle all of Judea and Samaria, at the very least the lands that Israel controls under agreements with the Palestinian Authority,” Levy stated. “Therefore, the establishment of Jewish settlements [in Judea and Samaria] is, in itself, not illegal.” …The committee issued its report on [July 10, 2012], which was subsequently handed over to Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein. In the report, Levy wrote that “upon completing the committee’s tasks, and considering the testimonies heard, the basic conclusion is that from an international law perspective, the laws of ‘occupation’ do not apply to the unique historic and legal circumstances surrounding Israel’s decades-long presence in Judea and Samaria.”
“Likewise,” the report said, “the Fourth Geneva Convention [relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War] on the transfer of populations does not apply, and wasn’t intended to apply to communities such as those established by Israel in Judea and Samaria.” (MORE)

We're All "Settlers"

(Shiloh)It really blows my mind that so many Israelis think that they have more rights to their homes in other parts of Israel than I have to mine here in Shiloh. They absolutely hate it when our enemies lump us all together in the same illegal sic category. They consider themselves more acceptably "kosher*" than I am.(MORE)

It is all of us. Not just in Israel. All of us are settlers. All of us have to protect our homes

Former Israeli PM Olmert cleared of charges that drove him from office

(Olmert headlines offer short-term hype | The Times of Israel) Interestingly, only two papers give front-page prominence to the story that was all the talk yesterday, namely the release of a legal report announcing that Israel is not the occupying force everybody believes it to be. One might expect that a paper penned by a former Supreme Court justice and commissioned by the prime minister, which recommends legalizing most West Bank outposts and strikes at the heart of Israel’s national character, would make more noise. But as it happens only Haaretz and Israel Hayom thought it was Page 1-worthy.
Haaretz, as might be expected of a stalwart left-wing publication, comes out against the report’s findings with a front-page editorial calling for its shredding. Israel Hayom meanwhile highlights the report’s warm embrace by the right and its calls for the government to adopt the findings and shift policies accordingly.

I'm glad Olmert was cleared and I'm glad Olmert was wronged

(Washington Post) GALI TIBBON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES - Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert speaks to the press at the District Court in Jerusalem on Tuesday after hearing the verdict in his trial where he was acquitted on two key corruption charges while finding him guilty on a lesser charge.

JERUSALEM – An Israeli court on Tuesday cleared former prime minister Ehud Olmert of two corruption charges--including a bribery accusation that led to his resignation in 2008, as he was trying to negotiate peace with the Palestinians--but convicted him of a lesser charge of fraud and breach of trust.
While some commentators hailed the mixed verdict as proof of an independent justice system, the decision was widely viewed as an embarrassing blow to Israeli prosecutors, and it raised questions about whether an overly-aggressive investigation had wrongly driven Olmert from office.
Olmert was convicted of fraud and breach of trust in connection with a case dating to 2006, when he was a government minister. But he was acquitted of more serious charges that he had pocketed envelopes stuffed with hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from a wealthy New Yorker, Morris Talansky, and that he double-billed state agencies and charities for overseas flights while he was a minister and mayor of Jerusalem.
“There was no corruption. There was no taking of money, there was no use of money, there were no cash envelopes,” Olmert said after the ruling on Tuesday.
Olmert was thrust to power in 2006 after his then-boss, former prime minister, Ariel Sharon, suffered a stroke. Olmert led Israel through an inconclusive but damaging war with the Lebanese militant movement Hezbollah that summer and re-started long-dormant negotiations with the Palestinians in 2007.
At the time, those talks appeared to have little traction, and they were cut short by an Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip in late 2008 and early 2009.
Elections after Olmert’s resignation ushered in the current administration of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his conservative Likud party. Peace talks have been essentially moribund since.
Yoel Hasson, a lawmaker from Olmert’s centrist Kadima party, told the Israeli news Web site Ynetnews.com on Tuesday that he hoped Olmert would return to politics. The corruption accusations, he said, had “wronged one of the best prime ministers Israel has ever had…the Israeli public finally understands that a prime minister was impeached for nothing.”
After Olmert’s resignation, both he and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said they were close to a pact in 2008. Former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice has written that Olmert secretly presented a map for a Palestinian state that included international control of holy sites in Jerusalem, but Abbas did not agree to it.

Caroline Glick..
carolineglick.com..
11 July '12..
(Love of the Land: Glick - Thoughts on Olmert's partial acquittal)I have not had the opportunity to read the court decision on Olmert. And so my thoughts on his acquittal have little to do with the merits of the prosecution in the three cases adjudicated by the Jerusalem District Court.
I have a problem with corruption investigations against politicians generally and against Ehud Olmert specifically. In general, I find these sorts of investigations against politicians inherently biased. I take my cue from the Federalist Papers, and there I believe it was James Madison who explained that the presumption has to be that politicians are all corrupt. Their power puts them in contact with powerful and wealthy men who use their proximity to politicians to advance their interests. The larger government is - that is, the larger government's influence over the economic life of a society, the greater the likelihood of corruption. The more power a politician exerts over the economy, the larger his propensity to take bribes from people interested in making a profit.
This is the way of the world. And in our world, where governments control enormous welfare states and therefore exert massive influence over the economic life of a country, the assumption ought to be that all politicians are corrupt.
This assumption then leads to the clear conclusion that every corruption investigation and prosecution of politicians is inherently discriminatory. If all politicians are on the take to greater or lesser degrees, then the decision regarding who to investigate is essentially a decision about who to single out. And therefore, all corruption investigations of politicians are by their nature unjust. The investigations are themselves corrupt.
These understandings led Madison and his colleagues to the conclusion that all government should be limited as much as possible. It also led them to call for a system of checks and balances so that all arms of government checked one another's power.
In Israel, (and increasingly in the US as we see with the Obamacare ruling), the third branch of government - the judiciary - has become increasingly unhinged from this system. In Israel, the judiciary has effectively co-opted the state prosecution. Under the de facto control of the judiciary, the prosecution has leveraged itself into a position where, like the judiciary, it appoints and promotes its own without answering to elected officials. This situation has weakened severely Israel's democratic system, attenuating the ability of the public to control its government or trust its institutions.
It is due to these twin issues - the assumption that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely and therefore all people with power can be assumed to be corrupt; and the imperial nature of Israel's legal system - that I view all corruption scandals in Israel with great suspicion. We have consistently seen the tendency of the legal fraternity to selectively prosecute corruption allegations in order to advance the fortunes of the Left against the Right.
And this brings me to my special difficulty with the legal prosecution of Olmert.
Objectively speaking, Olmert was the worst prime minister that Israel has ever had. And that is saying a lot. He had stiff competition from Ehud Barak, but he managed to outdo him in incompetence and general failure to meet the challenge of the office he aspired to in his unmitigated shamelessness and hubris.
Olmert lost the war with Hezbollah in 2006. He lost Israel's campaign against Hamas in 2008-2009. He failed to block Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. He weakened Israel's international position and its alliance with the US. And so on and so forth.
The public never forgave him for his failed leadership in the 2006 war. And rightly so. There can be no forgivIng or forgetting his decision to send forces to their deaths in battle AFTER he had already accepted the ceasefire ensuring that none of their action would make any difference. I believe that 34 IDF soldiers died in the last 36 hours of the war that took place AFTER Olmert had agreed to the ceasefire.
And this brings us to the issue of his alleged corruption.
The Israeli media specifically, and the left generally holds the lion's share of responsibility for the outbreak of the 2006 war due to its massive propaganda campaign to coerce successive governments into withdrawing from southern Lebanon in 2000. Had Israel not run away in May 2000, Hezbollah would not have been free to attack Israel in 2006. It's that simple.
In 2006, the media were unwilling to acknowledge the cause for the war - them. So right after it was over, they sought to bury it and forget all about it. But the public would not put it behind them. The reservists called up to serve in the war and risk their lives for a war their government decided to lose formed a protest movement and marched on Jerusalem demanding Olmert's resignation.
The establishment tried to deflect their anger first by seeking to discredit them. Led by Channel 10's Raviv Drucker, the media sought to castigate the reservists by accusing them of being closet right wingers whose only goal was to avenge the expulsions from Gaza.
When that didn't work, they tried to punt by forming the Winograd Commission to investigate the war. The mandate of the committee was to begin its investigation with what happened AFTER the unilateral withdrawal of May 2000. By so determining the mandate of the commission, the establishment ensured that no attention would be paid to the cause of the war - Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon.
But even the Winograd Commission's findings couldn't assuage the public's hatred for Olmert. So the media decided to sacrifice him to the wolves of the state prosecution on corruption charges. They decided that Olmert had to be sacrificed to protect their ideology. And so he was. It is a scandal of historic proportions that Olmert was ousted for anything other than his unforgivably failed leadership of the country in war. His alleged corruption was at best a tertiary concern.
There is now some talk of Olmert making a political comeback. All I can say to that is that if the Israeli public is stupid enough to allow him back in power, then we deserve what we get. But I don't believe this talk.
The one possible silver lining in all of this is that Olmert's partial acquittal has put the prosecution in the dock. If its failure to convict Olmert finally empowers the Knesset to reign in our out of control prosecutors, then perhaps it can be said that there was a divine plan to all of this. But since I am in no position to understand God's design, all I can say is that there are no heroes in this story. The bad guys won, and the bad guys lost.
Link: http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2012/07/thoughts-on-olmerts-partial-ac.php

Legalise the settlements says Israeli judge

(Anne) Map of Mandate era Palestine, showing Israeli sovereignty over the area that was never legally superseded

Justice Edmond Levy, who was appointed by PM Netanyahu to head a committee to review the legal status of the settlements, has issued an extremely important statement (my emphases):

Israel must legalize the majority of illegal West Bank outposts, a committee appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to review the legal status of such communities recommended, Ynet learned Monday.
The panel, headed by Supreme Court Justice (Ret.) Edmond Levy, also ruled that the State must devise ways to “ease land acquisition and zoning protocols for Jews residing in Judea and Samaria.”
The Levy Committee, formed in January and comprised of Levy, Tel Aviv District Court Judge (Ret.) Tehiya Shapira and Dr. Alan Baker an international law expert, who was part of the team that devised the Oslo Accords, met harsh criticism from the Left, which claimed it was biased.

That’s rich coming from the Left, since the esteemed Talia Sasson joined the extreme-left Meretz party at the time she issued her damning report. It seems that what is sauce for the goose is not saucy enough for the gander – as we see below.

The committee’s findings stand to significantly change the legal reality in the West Bank, especially when compared to the 2005 Sasson Report on construction in the West Bank, which deemed 120 outposts as illegal.
Tackling the issue of sovereignty, the Levy Committee ruled that in its operations in the West Bank, “Israel does not meet the criteria of ‘military occupation’ as defined under international law.”
The ruling is based on the fact that “no other legal entity has ever had its sovereignty over the area cemented under international law,” the committee said, adding that the latter included Jordan, which ruled the area prior to the Six Day War.
West Bank settlements are legal since that is no provision in the international law that deems that having Jewish population in the area is illegal, the report added.
[...]
As for the matter of Israeli construction in the West Bank – and especially the question of illegal outpost – the committee ruled that the State must find a way to legalize and regulate the construction.
West Bank settlements and outposts were created as the State’s bidding, the report said, and the settlement movement was encouraged to continue its mission.
The report further urges the government to regulate the outposts’ municipal status, enable natural growth, accelerate the regulation of zoning and planning and refrain from executing any demolition orders pending further legal review.
[...]
Justice Levy criticized the “lack of clear government direction and policy” in regards to West Bank settlements.
“The conduct we discovered vis-à-vis the Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria is unbecoming of a nation that has made the rule of law one of its primary objectives,” he wrote.

Sadly there is a fly in this ointment:

Still, the committee’s recommendations are not mandating. Netanyahu is likely to ask the Ministerial Committee on Settlements to review the report.

I don’t trust Netanyahu and his advisers as far as I can throw them. I suspect these findings will end up buried in committee.

In complete contradiction to the findings of the Levy Committee, James Crawford, an”international law expert”, has provided his legal opinion that a trade ban on Israeli settlements is fully permissible.

European governments, including Britain’s, have received legal opinion from a leading international counsel who argues they would be fully within their rights to ban trade with Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
The formal opinion from James Crawford, professor of international law at Cambridge University, is likely to inject fresh momentum into campaigns in the United Kingdom and elsewhere for a ban, at a time when some EU member states are examining ways of hardening their position on the imports of settlement produce.
Israeli settlements in the West Bank are considered illegal under international law, a position upheld by all EU member states.

These EU members states need to read Justice Edmond Levy’s opinion above, read the San Remo Conference resolutions and take a look at the maps of Palestine from the San Remo conference rather urgently. They are talking out of their hat. Further, they need to read Judge Eugene Rostow’s opinion (he helped to formulate UN resolution 242) of the legality of Israel’s capture of the territories in 1967.

Back to the Independent article:

In particular the opinion will be seen as challenging received wisdom in official circles that for a state such as Britain to ban imports of settlement produce, or prohibit banks from financing settlement activity, would contravene European or global trade law. Professor Crawford says in his 60-page opinion, shown to senior officials of EU member states in the past few months and seen by The Independent, that “there do not appear to be any EC laws which could be breached by a member state taking the decision to ban the import of settlement produce on public policy grounds.”
He argues that member states wishing to block the import of produce from settlements could “have recourse” to the EU’s Association Agreement with Israel, which stipulates that the agreement “shall be based on respect for human rights and democratic principles.” He argues that, by executing such a ban on trade with settlements, the EU would not be in breach of its World Trade Organisation obligations since, “as a matter of international law, the West Bank and Gaza cannot be considered to be Israel’s territory”.
The opinion will be published this week by the Trades Union Congress, which has mounted a sustained campaign for a ban on settlement trade – as distinct from a boycott of Israel itself, which the TUC does not support.

Read it all if your blood pressure will allow it.

You might be interested, however, in the background of this international law expert James Crawford.

In the 2004 International Court of Justice ruling about Israel’s defensive separation wall, dubbed the “apartheid wall” by Israel’s opponents, Crawford was one of the lawyers for “Palestine”.

He is as neutral as Talia Sasson and even more prejudiced against Israel. Watch the British media lionise him

Netanyahu agrees to expel Jews from their homes

(CARL) warned you all five years ago. Who listened?
Prime Minister Netanyahu announced this evening that the Netanyahu-Barak-Lieberman government is going to expel 30 Jewish families from their homes in Beit El (which means House of God) in Samaria. Netanyahu tried to throw a sop to the revenants saying that for every home that the Supreme Court asks him to destroy, the Netanyahu-Barak-Livni Lieberman government will build ten more, but apparently he's no better at Math than he is at telling it straight. He's destroying 30 homes and will build 50 new ones instead (maybe, eventually, if there's money and if he gets around to it and if Ehud Barak agrees and if the homes cannot be rebuilt elsewhere).

As part of Netanyahu's decision, the government will reimburse and relocate the settlers. The homes themselves will not be demolished, according the the Channel 2 report, but will rather be detached from their infrastructure and physically moved to a nearby settlement. In addition, Netanyahu will allow 50 homes to be built in Beit El - 10 times the number of homes being evacuated in Ulpana, Channel 2 reported.
"The settlement enterprise will be advanced through building," Channel 2 quoted Netanyahu as saying. "For every home we are forced to evacuate, we will build 10 in its place."
The prime minister came out against MKs calling for legislation that would legalize the settlements, calling the solution unhelpful and saying that it would harm Israel's standing within the international community.

And moving the homes elsewhere in Samaria (assuming they get there intact) will help our standing in the international community? And building 50 more homes (assuming Ehud Barak ever approves them - fat chance - will improve our standing in the international community? You've got to be kidding. Here's the Supreme Court's Knesset member.

Meretz leader Zehava Gal-On congratulated the prime minister on his decision, stating that she hoped his intentions would be carried out. Gal-On, however, criticized Netanyahu's alleged desire to build 50 new structures in the Beit El settlement in place of those being evacuated in Ulpana.
"Netanyahu's promise to increase building in Beit El grants a reward to law-breaking settlers in the territories and encourages committing more crimes. The prime minister is applying a death blow to the peace process, leading to the establishment of one state, and exposing the unity government for what it really is," Gal-On stated.

Just like the Arabs, she takes any concession she's given and then reopens the point asking for more.
YNet adds:

MK Arieh Eldad (National Union) slammed the decision. "Netanyahu's behavior is befitting the 'liar' label that was given to him by his partner, (Minister Shaul) Mofaz," Eldad said. "Only legislation can prevent destruction.
"He is displacing Migron and Ulpana," he added. "All that's left for Netanyahu to do in order to achieve world peace is to shift Jerusalem to New York."
...
Peace Now Director General Yariv Oppenheimer [Googleheimer. CiJ] voiced similiar sentiments. Oppenheimer expressed contentment with the decision, but asserted that the decision to expand settlement construction is detrimental to Israel's interests.
"Netanyahu's decision to implement the High Court's ruling is in line with the founding principles of democracy, and should be obvious," he said. "His decision to apply a price tag and expand the settlements will hurt the State of Israel first and foremost, and will reward law-breaking settlers."

And the Times of Israel reports that the commitment to build ten new homes for each one destroyed will only go into effect if the homes being destroyed cannot be rebuilt. And if Attorney General Weinstein agrees. I guess Netanyahu is taking lessons from Hussein Obama in leading from behind.

Netanyahu said that if everything went according to plan, Ulpana’s five contested buildings — home to some 30 families, and built on what the state accepts is privately owned Palestinian land — would be transplanted several hundred meters away. However, in the event that the houses would have to be demolished rather than transplanted, 10 more would be built in Judea and Samaria, pending the approval of Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein.
“The settlement enterprise will be strengthened by construction; in place of every house we are forced to evacuate, we will build 10,” said the prime minister.

And Israel Radio reports (11:00 pm) that the government is only 'investigating the possibility' of moving the homes someplace within Beit El.
But the biggest consequence is the one raised by MK Zevulun Orlev (National Religious Party) as reported by Israel Radio: There will be dozens more claims brought to the Supreme Court (and under Israel's bizarre system they can be brought directly to the Supreme Court) that hundreds of houses are built on 'private Palestinian land.' What could go wrong?

Condi may be clueless but Obama is worse

Condi is not to be trusted by the GOP. Her allegiance is to people who are presently literally part of Obama's foreign policy. Yes, I'm not kidding. Baker is in Obama's team and that is the Saudi lobby. She might of grown up near Bibi's family house in Colorado, but her bread got buttered by Aramco/Chevron and that allegiance to it's board is still there. I could never see demonizing oil companies, but it is time to discriminate between obtaining oil locally in North America and being a slave to interests in the status quo in the Arabian peninsula and North Africa.

(h/t Carl) Former US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has finally gotten around to blasting the Obama administration for its obsession with Jewish 'settlements.'

“When you look at where we are now, we’re a long, long way back from where we were,” Rice said in an interview with AP.
Rice said she had hoped that the Obama administration could revive stalled peace talks quickly when it took office in 2009, but she said she was disappointed by the new administration’s handling of the delicate issue of new Israeli housing construction in the West Bank.
“I do think focusing on settlements in that particular way was a mistake,” Rice said. “The parties then were able to have a reason not to sit down.”
The gulf has only widened, Rice said, “and they’re running out of time.” She did not sound optimistic for a settlement soon, or even for new talks. “When they’re not talking, they’re sliding backward,” Rice said.
...
Rice herself had called settlement building unhelpful and was infuriated when Israel appeared to undercut her by announcing new building licenses hard on the heels of some of her diplomatic visits.
But new Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and her Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, took a much harder line in the spring of 2009, demanding a full freeze on any building.
Obama “wants to see a stop to settlements,” including the expansion of existing developments, Clinton said in May of that year.
With Israelis suspicious of Obama even before he assumed office, the settlement position further unnerved them. The Palestinians, initially encouraged, became disillusioned when the U.S. was unable to persuade Israel to freeze settlement construction.

She's obviously angling to get her old job back in a Republican administration in 2013. Someone please tell me it will be Bolton instead.

she just said: "the U.S. was unable to persuade Israel to freeze settlement construction. "? Not true at all and she would know this. The Israelis did stop for what was agreed (a little less the a year), but got no cooperation from the Arabs.

Who does the boycott hurt?

A while back, one Israeli company decided to move out of the Barkan (Settler) Industrial Park because of the pressure from the Left. As a result, its 90 Arabs employees were fired as they couldn’t work within the “Green Line”, the Jewish employees merely had to commute in the opposite direction. The firing of 90 Arabs means that some 800 Arabs no longer had a provider of income.
The truth is, a successful boycott would in reality hurt the Palestinians far, far more than it would hurt the Jews. But don’t confuse the Leftists with that piece of information, because their calls for boycott are helping improve the Settler economy they hate so much.

Ahmed Tibi

Oh, and here’s a question for you (as asked in Makor Rishon).
If Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli citizen currently living over the Green Line (making him a Settler) were to open a factory, would the Left call for its boycott too? Or are their calls to boycott actually racist and only targeting Jews? more via muqata.blogspot.com

you can not reason with the unreasonable though

JEWISH LEGAL RIGHTS TO JUDEA AND SAMARIA

Catering to international support for Palestinian victimization claims, the International Criminal Court, established by the UN General Assembly in 1998, made Jewish settlement a “war crime.” But Israel (like the United States) “unsigned” from the statute of authorization for the Court; furthermore, as international legal scholar Jeremy Rabkin indicates, the Court lacks jurisdiction over “crimes” committed before 2002. By then, virtually all the currently existing Jewish settlements had already been established. That renders any designation of settlements as “war crimes” meaningless ex post facto rhetoric – although not without power to elicit ever more anti-Israel venom.

The Economics of Settlement

In the mid-19th century, before the arrival of the first groups of Jewish settlers fleeing pogroms in Russia, Arabs living in what became the mandate territory of Palestine -- now Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza -- numbered between 200,000 and 300,000. Their population density and longevity resembled today's conditions in parched and depopulated Saharan Chad. Although Worldwatch might prefer to see the Middle East returned to these more earth-friendly, organic, and sustainable demographics, the fact that some 5.5 million Arabs now live in the former British Mandate, with a life expectancy of more than 70 years, is mainly attributable, for better or worse, to the work of those Jewish settlers.

...Jordan. A country almost four times larger than Palestine (including Sinai), Jordan partakes of the same mountain fold of mesozoic limestone, the same rich river plains, the same Rift Valley and highlands, the same mineral resources, the same climate, and a several times larger population in ancient times. But at the time of Lowdermilk's visit, its agricultural output and per capita consumption of imports was one-fifth that of Palestine and its population density was one-tenth Palestine's.

...Lowdermilk summed it up: "Rural Palestine is becoming less and less like Trans Jordan, Syria and Iraq and more like Denmark, Holland, and parts of the United States [Southern California]."
...Raja Khalidi's entire argument itself suffers from a huge gap -- namely, the absence of evidence that Arabs anywhere in the world outside of the United States have performed as well economically as have Arabs in Israel. The average Arab annual per capita income in Israel is $600 per month (i.e., an annual household income of $14,400 for a family of four). This compares with an average annual income of $9,400 for a family of four in sparsely populated Jordan, which roughly matches the average across the Arab world. Moreover, while Palestinians in the disputed territories have undergone a catastrophic 40 percent drop in income since the PLO's resurgence, the income gap between Israel's Palestinian Arab population and Jewish population has, in fact, been declining.
Any income gap between the Jewish and Arab populations of Israel is clearly attributable to the prowess of Jewish entrepreneurs and other professionals, whose excellence produces similar gaps in every free country on earth with significant numbers of Jews. Jews, for example, outearn other Caucasians in the United States by an even larger margin than they outearn Arabs in Israel. This probably reflects the fact that the United States, until recently, had a freer economy, by most standards, than Israel.

....As George Will acerbically noted in a particularly brilliant column, "Turkey was claiming to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, a land with higher incomes and longevity than Turkey itself." via spectator.org

World to Israel: Surrender before it's too late

The international community -- including some Israeli pols, American Jews and the media -- are pushing hard. The Obama administration isn't making things any easier. A penetrating analysis that considers claims against Israel's legitimacy Over the past several years, a growing number of patriotic Israelis have begun to despair. We can't stand up to the whole world, they say. At the end of the day we will have to give in and surrender most of the land or all of the land we took control over in the 1967 Six Day War. The world won't accept anything less.
These statements have grown more strident in the wake of the slaughter of the Fogel family last Friday night in Itamar. For example on Thursday Ari Shavit , a columnist for Israel's equivalent of the New York Times, Ha'aretz, called Israeli communities built beyond the 1949 armistice line the local equivalent of Japan's nuclear reactors. Like the reactors, he wrote, they seemed like a good idea at the time. But they have become our undoing.
The international community's response to the Palestinian atrocity in Itamar is pointed to as proof of that Israel must surrender. Instead of considering what the savage murder of an Israeli family tells us about the nature of Palestinian society, the world media have turned the massacre of the Fogel family into a story about "settlements."
Take the Los Angeles Times' for example From the Times' perspective the Fogels were not Israeli civilians. They were "Jewish settlers."
They weren't murdered in their home. They were killed in their "tightly guarded compound."
And, in the end, the Times effectively justified the murder of the Fogel children when it helpfully added, "Most of the international community… views Israel's settlements as illegal."
The Times' report was actually comparatively sympathetic. At least it mentioned the murders. Most European papers began their coverage with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's announcement that the government will permit Israelis to build 400 homes in Judea and Samaria.
As for the governments of the world, most were far swifter and more aggressive in their condemnation of Netanyahu's announcement of the building permits than they were in their condemnation of the murders.
Then there is the US Jewish community.
According to New York's Jewish Week, there is a new consensus in the American Jewish community that imposing an economic boycott on Israeli communities outside the 1949 armistice lines is a legitimate position. The paper interviewed Martin Raffel, the head of the new Israel Action Network, a multimillion dollar effort by the Jewish Federations of North America and other major Jewish groups to counter the delegitimization of Israel.
Raffel called the boycott movement misguided, rather than wrong. Then he justified it by arguing, "Being misguided in one's policies doesn't mean one necessarily has become part of the ranks of the delegitimizers."
If that wasn't enough, Ron Kampeas, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency's Washington bureau chief wrote Tuesday that we shouldn't rush to conclude that Palestinians carried out the attack. Kampeas wrote, "We do not yet know who committed the awful butchery in Itamar over the weekend."
With American Jews taking a lead role in delegitimizing Israel and flacking for Palestinian terrorists; with the international media ignoring the massacre of the Fogel family and attacking Israel for its response to the event they didn't cover; and with the US government united with the nations of the world in condemning the government's decision to allow Israelis who are Jewish to build on land they own, the despair of a growing chorus of Israelis is understandable.
But while understandable, the notion that Israel has no choice but to surrender Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians is wrong and dangerous.
Like his fellow defeatists, Shavit argues that Jewish communities in these areas are the cause of international moves to delegitimize Israel. If they were gone, so the argument goes, then neither the Palestinians nor the international community would have a problem with Israel.
The first problem with this view is that it confuses the focus of Palestinian and international attacks on Israel with the rationale behind those attacks. This is a mistake Israelis have made repeatedly since the establishment of the Fatah-led PA in 1994. Immediately after the PA was set up and IDF forces transferred security control over Palestinian cities and towns in Judea and Samaria to Yassir Arafat's armies, Palestinian terrorists began attacking Israeli motorists driving through PA-controlled areas with rocks, pipe bombs and bullets.
Then prime minister and defense minister Yitzhak Rabin blamed the attacks on "friction." If the Palestinians didn't have contact with Israeli motorists then they wouldn't attack them. So Israel built the bypass roads around the Palestinian towns and cities to prevent friction.
For its efforts, the Palestinians and the international community accused Israel of building "Jews-only, apartheid roads." Moreover, Palestinian terrorists left their towns and cities and stoned, bombed and shot at Israeli motorists on the bypass roads.
Then there was Gaza. When in 2001 Palestinians first began shelling the Israeli communities in Gaza and the Western Negev with mortars and rockets, we were told they were attacking because of Israel's presence in Gaza. When the IDF took action to defend the country from mortar and rocket attacks, Israel was accused of committing war crimes.
The likes of Shavit said then that if Israel left Gaza the Palestinian attacks would stop. They said that if they didn't stop and the IDF was forced to take action, the world would support Israel.
Shavit himself engaged in shocking demonization of the Israelis living in Gaza. In May 2004 he wrote that they were undeserving of IDF protection and that no soldier should defend them because they weren't real Israelis.
But then the Palestinians and the international community threw Shavit and his friends yet another curveball. After Israel expelled every last so-called settler and removed every last soldier from Gaza in August 2005, Palestinian rocket attacks increased tenfold. The first Katyusha was fired at Ashkelon seven months after Israel withdrew. Hamas won the elections and Gaza became an Iranian proxy. Now it has missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv.
As for the international community, not only did it continue blaming Israel for Palestinian terrorism. It refused to accept that Israel ended its so-called occupation of Gaza. It has condemned every step Israel has taken to defend itself from Palestinian aggression since the withdrawal as a war crime.
The lessons of these experiences prove is that Israeli towns and villages in Judea and Samaria and Israeli are not castigated as "illegitimate" because there is anything inherently illegitimate about them. Like the bypass roads and the Israeli presence in Gaza, they are singled out because those interested in attacking Israel militarily or politically think are an easy target.
The Arabs, the UN, the Obama administration, the EU, anti-Israel American and Israeli Jews, university professors and the legions of self-proclaimed human rights organizations in Israel and throughout the world allege these Israeli communities are illegitimate because by doing so they weaken Israel as a whole.
If Israel is convinced that it has no choice but to bow to these people's demands, they will not be appeased. They will simply move on to the next easy target. Israeli Jewish communities in the Galilee and the Negev, Jaffa and Lod will be deemed illegitimate. In a bid to pretend that the communities in Judea and Samaria are somehow different from communities in the Galilee, proponents of surrender point to the non-binding 2004 International Court of Justice opinion that the communities in Judea and Samaria are illegal.
But Israelis who accept the non-binding opinion as a binding ruling for Judea and Samaria ignore that the opinion also asserted that Israel has no right to self defense.
The same people who think that so-called settlements are illegal also believe that opposition leader Tzipi Livni is a war criminal. The same people who think the so-called settlements are illegal would condemn as a war crime any attempt to enforce the law against irredentist Israeli Arabs.
Israel's bitter experience proves incontrovertibly that bowing to international pressure just invites more pressure.
So what can Israel do?
The first thing we must do is recognize that legitimacy is indivisible. In the eyes of Israel's enemies there is no difference between Itamar and Maaleh Adumim on the one hand and Ramle and Tel Aviv on the other hand. And so we must make no distinction between them.
Just as law abiding citizens are permitted to build homes in Ramle and Tel Aviv so they must be permitted to build in Itamar and Maaleh Adumim. If Israel's assertion of its sovereignty is legitimate in Tel Aviv, then it is legitimate in Judea and Samaria. We cannot accept that one has a different status from the other.
Likewise, it is an act of economic warfare to boycott Israeli products whether they are made in Haifa or Mishor Adumim. Anyone who says it is permissible to boycott Mishor Adumim is engaging in economic warfare against Haifa.
Once we understand that Israel's legitimacy is indivisible we need to take actions that will put the Palestinians and their international supporters on the defensive. There are any number of moves Israel can make in this vein.
For example, following the Palestinian massacre of the Fogel family, Netanyahu highlighted the fact that the PA routinely glorifies terrorist murderers and pays them and their families handsome pensions for their illegal acts of war. He also highlighted the genocidal anti-Jewish incitement endemic in Palestinian society.
While all of this is useful, talk is cheap. It is time to make the Palestinians pay a price for their depravity and to put their international supporters on the defensive.
Specifically, Netanyahu should ask the US to cut off all US economic and military assistance to the PA. Two PA intelligence officers were arrested as part of the Fogel murder investigation.
The US is training and equipping the Palestinian intelligence services. This should stop.
Two days after the massacre in Itamar, the PA dedicated a public square in el Bireh to terror commander Dalal Mughrabi. Mughrabi commanded the 1978 bus attack on the coastal highway in which 37 Israelis - including 12 children were murdered. The PA previously named a street, a dormitory, a summer camp and a sports tournament after her. Several popular songs have been written to glorify her crimes.
The US is underwriting the PA's budget. This should stop.
Were the government to go after international aid to the PA, not only would it begin a debate in the US and perhaps Europe about the nature of Fatah specifically and Palestinian society generally, it would force the Palestinians' myriad supporters to justify their support for a society that is defined by its goal of annihilating Israel.
It is hard to stand up to the massive pressure being brought to bear against Israel every day. But it is possible.
And whether defying our foes is hard or easy, it is our only chance at survival. Either all of Israel is legitimate or none of it is.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, where her column appears.
Caroline B. Glick
18 March '11
via calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com

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An open letter to Harvey Weinstein

Daniel Greenfield writes an open letter to Harvey Weinstein, the director of the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel movie Miral, which is previewing this week in the United Nations General Assembly.

Come along Harvey, into the bedroom where a father and his three-month-old daughter, Hadas, were fast asleep. It can be hard to get a 3-month-old baby to fall asleep. Her father must had quite a time of it that night. Babies may not have language, but they do have fears. They are afraid of the strange new world they were born into. And they need parents to comfort them and assure them that everything will be all right. That they are loved and protected.

When Rabbi Fogel finally got his little baby daughter to sleep, she must have felt safe with her father there. The man who would have taught her about life. Who would have done his best to protect her. And the man whose throat was slashed in his sleep along with his child's.

Tell me Harvey, do you know what goes through a three month old baby's mind when her throat is being slashed? You can't make a movie about it and you wouldn't it if you could. Movies are complex stories. The characters change and grow. They become someone else. A three-month-old baby having her throat cut will never become anyone else. She is fixed in that moment of horror and pain. Dying without knowing why. Only that her parents couldn't protect her.

If you were going to make a movie about this scene, it would be about the killers. You would show their past and explain their actions. Surely an Israeli soldier stepped on their toe once or blew up their house. Stretch it out over two hours and you can justify anything. Even the knife being drawn across Hadas' throat. That is the magic of cinema. But to three-month-old Hadas, there is no context. The movie of her life ended the night you were hard at work promoting yours.

The mother had been in the bathroom while the bloody work took place. A small moment of peace while her children slept. She didn't let them cut her throat, the way they had that of her husband and her baby daughter. Instead she fought them. They had to stab her to death.

If you ever make a movie about these particular terrorists, be sure to emphasize how hard it is to stab a mother to death. She will fight for her children. And the terrorists will have to work to kill her. You should swoop the camera down sympathetically on their sweating faces as they do the hard work of murdering her.

From there they went on to murder 11 year old Yoav who was reading in bed. Next was 3 -year-old Elad. Why stab a 3-year-old boy twice in the heart? That is the question, Harvey. I understand once. Once is certainly enough to kill any 3 year old. But twice? Maybe it was that each killer wanted a turn and a share of the glory of murdering a toddler. They had already murdered three children and their parents, but the laws of Islam can be arcane sometimes. Is it possible then that the Shaheed (the martyr) will not enter paradise unless he murders a 3 year old too?

Maybe there are more virgins waiting in paradise for each child killed. Murder a child and trade his body in for more virgins. Or maybe it is that the brave Jihadists who climb through living room windows and cut the throats of children in their sleep wanted to feel the violence of that blow. The thrill of the knife slamming home into a child's heart. Or maybe it is that Elad's heart was strong enough that even two adult Muslim terrorists had to stab twice to kill him.

I would like to think so.

Your article promoting Miral urges that 'understanding the "other" requires us to step out of our comfort zones'. Step now out of your comfort zone. And understand the other. I don't mean the murderers themselves. I think you understand them a little too well. If you didn't understand them at all, Miral would be lying on a back shelf somewhere.

I urge you to understand your own 'Other', not those who kill in the name of Islamic terrorism, but those who die of it. Who die and yet refuse to give in. Who cling to their tiny patch of land, more than you would ever cling to your Connecticut estate.

Family members have released photos of the children lying in their blood, but I don't think you will want to see them. They are too far outside your comfort zone. There is plenty of blood and gore in your movies, but this is different. These are the bodies of inconvenient children. Their deaths don't fit into your ideological framework. You know quite well that Muslims are good people, and Jews who live on land claimed by the Muslims, are bad people. If they are murdered it is inconvenient because it retards the peace process. The process by which terrorists climb through living room windows and slash the throats of children. Until whole families are at peace.

...

"Unless the Palestinian narrative is finally understood and acknowledged by Israelis and their American supporters, there will never be peace in the Holy Land," you say. As if peace were in your hands to give. But we understand the Palestinian narrative all too well. The real one and the fake one. We know the olive groves, the bulldozers and the keys. And we also know the terrorist gangs trained by Islamic fanatics and Socialist dictators to seize the land and murder its inhabitants. The gangs whom Moscow gave a nationalist gloss calling them the Palestinian people, the smirking thugs on whom President Clinton and European leaders bestowed legitimacy and billions of dollars.

If you want to know the real narrative, then put Miral on a shelf and ask where the Christians of the region have gone. Where have the Zoroastrians gone? Why are there so few left? The answer would make for a much better movie, but it is not a movie that you will ever make. It is a story of bigotry and genocide. It is an old story and a new one. You can find its oldest chapters in the Koran, along with the graves of the Jews of what is today Saudi Arabia. Its latest chapters are being written in Europe, where Jews once again flee European cities, not from men in uniforms, but in long robes. And unless that narrative is understood, there will be no peace in the Holy Land, or anywhere else.

I know that none of this will move you. Controversy is your bread and butter. The more you hear cries of pain, the more you count the cash. Miral will make you money. Just as Der Ewige Jude made money. And you will protest that there is no comparison between the two. Miral is only giving the Palestinian narrative, just as Der Ewige Jude gave the Aryan narrative. It is more subtle, I'm sure. The audiences you count on are liberal and sophisticated. They won't be taken in by gutter propaganda.

You will dismiss this as, what you describe in your article, being, "smeared by those who insist on reducing this conflict to us vs. them." So stand outside while Rabbi Cohen walks with his gun, a twelve year old by his side, her heart beating almost as hard as her little brother's did when the knife came down on it, and wait while she goes inside. And then answer her this, if you truly believe in not reducing the conflict to 'Us vs Them' then why are you telling the story of Miral and not her story?

You have chosen a side. Our 'Them' is your 'Us'. Soon that girl will leave the house again, along with her younger brothers. Three children who somehow survived. Look her over carefully. She is your 'Other'. The story you do not want to hear. The face you do not want to see. She survived tonight. So did two of her brothers. Next time they might not. No movie is needed to tell her story. Her life is her story. Her survival a testament.

The letter is a bit long, but it's worth it to read the whole thing.

via israelmatzav.blogspot.com

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IDF, settlers save Arab baby

IDF Corporal Levin and Palestinian baby, Jude

After massacre, settlers help bring new life into world: IDF forces and local paramedics helped save the life of a Palestinian woman and her newly born infant Wednesday, at the settlement where Fogel relatives are sitting Shiva for the five Israelis brutally murdered last week.

Just as IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz arrived in Neve Tzuf to offer his condolences, a Palestinian cab raced towards the community's entrance. In it, soldiers and paramedics discovered a Palestinian woman in her 20s in advanced stages of labor and facing a life-threatening situation: The umbilical cord was wrapped around the young baby girl's neck, endangering both her and her mother.
The quick action of settler paramedics and IDF troops deployed in the area saved the mother's and baby's life, prompting great excitement and emotions at the site where residents are still mourning the brutal death of five local family members.

Corporal Haim Levin, 19, an IDF paramedic, was the first medical team member at the scene and recounted the dramatic situation he faced. "When I arrived, I saw a woman covered by a blanket in a yellow Palestinian van. I moved closer and saw the baby's head and upper body," he told Ynet. "The umbilical cord was around the baby's neck; the baby was grey and didn't move." "I first removed the cord from the neck and at the same time asked paramedics to prepare the baby resuscitation kit. I pinched her to see if she's responding, and she started to cry," he said. Paramedics also treated the mother, who was in good condition at that point, Levin said. Paramedic: We treat everyone Meanwhile, ambulance driver Orly Shlomo raced to the scene. "We joined the military paramedic and helped him cut off the umbilical cord…without the medical treatment, the fetus and woman faced genuine life danger," she told Ynet. "It was touching, but I couldn't help but think that a few meters from there, people were sitting Shiva for another baby, who was murdered," she said. "I was touched to see the face of the new baby, but I also thought about the face of the murdered baby." Gadi Amitun, who heads the Magen David Adom team at Neve Tzuf, said this was not the first time settlers assist Palestinians in distress. Advertisement "They know we have a skilled medical team here, and in any case of accident or injury they arrive and we help them," he said. The paramedic noted that on the day of the Fogel massacre, settlers saw fireworks and celebrations in nearby Palestinian communities, but added that the local medical team is committed to assisting anyone in need. "Two years ago, we also made sure to treat a terrorist who attempted to place a bomb on the road and was shot by soldiers," he said. Palestinians from the nearby village of Nabi Salah gathered around the paramedics along with the new grandmother and could not hide their joy. "They thanked us and told us they named the girl Jude," Corporal Levin said. "I volunteered for Magen David Adom since age 15 and it's the first time I witnessed childbirth. It was an amazing feeling, to hold the girl that was just born in my arms, and to know that in this complex place we did something good."

via ynetnews.com

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