Love of the Land: Will $40 Million US Tax Dollars Subsidize UN Agency That Tolerates Teaching Martyrdom to Palestinian Kids?

Will $40 Million US Tax Dollars Subsidize UN Agency That Tolerates Teaching Martyrdom to Palestinian Kids?

Heather Robinson
Huffington Report
07 February '10

Last week the United States announced an initial contribution of $40 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN agency dedicated to providing food, jobs and education in the Palestinian territories. According to a U.S. State Department press release, the money will "provide critical health, education, and humanitarian services to 4.7 million Palestinians across the region."

This United Nations agency, which receives the largest share of its funding from the U.S. taxpayer, has in recent years come under fire due to at least one of its employees' admission that it employs members of Hamas.

Last month, due to concerns Hamas had infiltrated UNRWA, the Canadian government quietly decided to redirect funding away from the agency; instead, the $300 million in aid Canada has pledged to the Palestinians for the next five years will go to food aid and the support of the Palestinian justice system in an effort to help the Palestinians build a civil society.

Perhaps the U.S. should follow Canada's lead.

In recent years, watchdog organizations have shined a light on the content of books in schools in the Palestinian territories - and what they illuminated was a consistent pattern of propaganda denying Israel's right to exist, dehumanizing Israelis and Jews, and lacking any concrete perspective that would point towards a nonviolent resolution of the conflict, such as a two-state solution. UNRWA schools use the same text books as those that are used in Palestinian schools run by the Palestinian Authority - and by Hamas.


While not part of the original article I have added this as a current example of children's media from Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas), Feb. 5, 2010

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Love of the Land: Will $40 Million US Tax Dollars Subsidize UN Agency That Tolerates Teaching Martyrdom to Palestinian Kids?

Love of the Land: When The People Will Hike

When The People Will Hike

Paula R. Stern
A Soldier's Mother
09 December 09

One of the interesting things about Israelis and Israel is that we love to hike. We climb mountains, descend into riverbeds. We seek water, the highs and lows of the land. We explore the caves, the hills, the valleys. Everything, everywhere...whenever we can. It's a national obsession - perhaps born out of too many years in which we could not freely hike our land.

On extended days off from the army, rather than avoid his army friends, Elie will arrange to get together and hike with them. Our family has gone on many hikes - few really challenging ones, as I am a bit nervous having children walk near the edges of cliffs and things. It is probably another one of the seldom recognized miracles that happen daily here that so few people actually get injured.

Some of Israel's recognized tourist sites are carefully marked. Follow the green or blue arrows. Stick on the path and climb and descend...that's what I do. I am a path-follower. Boring it is, but what can you do. As soon as I leave the path, I am sure scorpions and snakes and lions and tigers will attack. No, it's the path for me (at least as far as my kids know, so let's leave it at that. Kids, stay ON the path).

What do most Israelis do...especially the young ones? (Read here my three sons and most army-age people.) Well, if there are arrows, it is too much evidence that man has been here before. Why walk the path, my sons often feel, if they can scale the sides. Elie is often the first to break off to the side...his brothers follow as I slowly wind my way safely and slowly along the path. They sprawl on the ground, relaxed and amused, as I catch up to them.

As I said, it is a national obsession that we can't do often enough because despite living in this beautiful country, we live in the real world. We work...hard...and if you keep the Sabbath, you really have no day in which you can simply escape to the far reaches of our land.

So, when can we hike? The answer is the holidays - as many of them as possible. We go in the summer, on Passover, on Sukkot...and on Hanukah, which starts at the end of this week.

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Love of the Land: When The People Will Hike

Love of the Land: Birthday Wishes

Birthday Wishes

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
29 November 09

Shulamit Aloni, a former head of Israel’s Meretz Party, gave an interview to Yedioth on her 81st birthday. “It’s hard for me to say a kind word about the state today,” she said.

“No one should be speaking this nonsense about ‘blood on the hands.’ Since 2000, with the launching of the second intifada, we have murdered thousands. We too have blood on our hands,” she remarked.

“We need to release those demanded (by Hamas) immediately,” she went on. …

“We are a nefarious people. What we are doing in the West Bank is worse than all the pogroms done to the Jews.” But she qualified her statement by saying she was “not referring to the Nazis, but the Cossacks.”

Conventional leftist self-hatred, as these things go. But this comment on Israeli politics was interesting:

“The Right has two left hands, but the Left doesn’t even exist today,” she said.

Here’s some free political advice: That’s because most Israelis don’t loathe their country, and they know the Aloni-Meretz faction does.

Love of the Land: Birthday Wishes

Love of the Land: Terra Incognita: Where is the banality of the Jews?

Terra Incognita: Where is the banality of the Jews?

Seth Frantzman
Terra Incognita/JPost
23 November 09

The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall reminds us once again of the theory of the "banality of evil." It is important to explore the way in which contemporary thought views the actions of the East Germans and their Nazi forebears as "banal" and yet many of those who see their actions as dull, tend to judge the IDF harshly.

A discussion of the subject should begin with celebrated filmmaker and Israeli intellectual Eyal Sivan.

Sivan is primarily famous for The Specialist, a 1999 film about Adolph Eichmann. Sivan's main themes in his work have been that Israel has created a national Holocaust cult; that Israelis are capable of becoming more and more like Nazis in their dealing with the Palestinians and that Eichmann, one of the greatest Nazi organizers of mass murder, was "banal" or dull, therefore merely part of a system, and not particularly evil.

Sivan's work follows in the footsteps of philosopher Hannah Arendt, a German-born Jew who had an affair with the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger before fleeing to New York in 1941. She resumed the affair after the war, defended her philosopher-partner at his trial and then defended Eichmann's "banality" in her famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).

Both Arendt and Sivan are well-known, respected intellectuals whose ideas influence contemporary views on the Holocaust.

Many have challenged Sivan and Arendt by trying to prove that Eichmann was far from banal; that he was a crusading individual, a unique person who excelled at his work and was thus evil, not merely part of a larger bureaucratic "machine" that was Nazism.

But perhaps the question shouldn't be whether Eichmann was banal, but whether the Jews are banal.
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Love of the Land: Terra Incognita: Where is the banality of the Jews?

Love of the Land: Peace is not a must

Peace is not a must

Informal understandings only viable approach in our zero-sum conflict

Elyakim Haetzni
Ynet/Israel Opinion
17 November 09

In his recent New York Times op-ed, Thomas Friedman came up with the insight that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are interested in a peace process, and that American pressure on both sides merely hinders them from getting along on their own for lack of any other choice.

Well, welcome to the club. After all, this is what the rightist camp has been warning of all along: Impossible peace plans that exact thousands of “peace victims. However, let us hope that Friedman will not stop there and will proceed to go deeper, into the root of the problem – the reasons why the leftist peace perception was hopeless to begin with.

The deal offered to the Arabs by the “peace camp” is simple: 1948 in exchange for 1967. We will hand over to you everything we conquered in the Six Day War, and in exchange you will recognize the Jewish State’s existence and the Green Line as its lawful border. That is, you will give up much of the land of Palestine, your previous homes, and your dream of returning to them. You will give up everything you fought over through wars and terrorism.

The Arabs have rejected this deal from the outset, and the argument over it persists merely among the Jews. The Arabs, based on their religious, cultural, and national perceptions, cannot sign a deal that in their view would turn a Muslim state into a Jewish one; an Arab state into an Israeli one. Whoever does so, will pay with their life.

An authentic Arab leader will also not be giving up the right of return of Muslim Arabs to the heart of the “house of Islam.” Arafat in 2000 and Abbas in 2009 reached this obstacle and drew back. The blind Americans and Israelis failed to understand why.

A realistic position vis-à-vis the Arabs requires a different approach:

1. Don’t recognize our existence and certainly not our existence as a Jewish entity; as we already exist, we have no need for such recognition. It won’t give us anything. “Recognition” is not a type of merchandize and we offer nothing for it.

2. Don’t give up Haifa and Jaffa. Signing such deal would pain you while granting us no benefit. We know that should we become weaker one day, you will take back the 1948 Palestine even if you declare a thousand times that you renounced it. Hence, “renunciation” is not a type of merchandize either.

3. Don’t engage in negotiations with us and don’t sign an agreement whereby you cannot get more than 1967 in exchange for 1948. This will merely create frustration and disappointment and bring catastrophe to both sides. We will maintain ties, understandings, and even friendship “under the table” – de facto and not de jure. We will have a modus vivendi rather than a formal “peace.”

Our official ties with Jordan have been characterized by King Abdullah as a “cold peace.” It appears that the secret ties that prevailed previously were better. When it comes to give and take, Jews and Arabs get along very well – ranging from commerce to health and from matters of garbage collection to knowledge-sharing and joint projects.

Whatever it is that is deemed worthy for both sides because of neighborly needs goes well, as long as it is managed far away from the watchful eye of the media and public opinion; that is, far away from politics and the agreed-upon lies.

Salam Fayyad’s plan to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state stems from the inability to sign agreements. It is preferable for him to have a de-facto state in so-called Area A, rather than being perceived as a person who renounced sacred demands and rights.

It is difficult for us to internalize the fact that the conflict with the Palestinians is a zero-sum game: Each side feels deep in its soul that this is its land, and this is the only conflict in history where both nations demand the same city as their capital. Only a fool or a swindler would be seeking a “solution,” a term taken from the math realm, just like “peace process” is reminiscent of chemistry, as if we are dealing with exact science here. In life, not everything is resolvable.

Love of the Land: Peace is not a must