Love of the Land: Akiva Eldar Clueless in Jerusalem

Akiva Eldar Clueless in Jerusalem

Tamar Sternthal
CAMERA Media Analysis
23 March '10

"It's clear these leaders have no clue what's happening in Israel's largest city," veteran Ha'aretz writer Akiva Eldar charges in his March 22 Op-Ed, referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. But one wonders whether it's not Eldar himself who hasn't got a clue when he writes in the very same paragraph:

For 17 years, since the days of the Peres-Yitzhak Rabin administration, holy places in the Old City have been closed to Muslim and Christian believers from the occupied territories. The only East Jerusalem residents allowed to enter the Temple Mount compound are women and the elderly.

In general, the thousands of West Bank Palestinians with permits to enter Israel (for work, study and other purposes) and all east Jerusalem Arabs, including men, have had free access to the Temple Mount over the last 17 years. There have been periods of heightened violence which prove to be the exception; at those times, access is usually limited to men over the age of 45 or 50 and women of all ages. An example of this restricted period fell earlier this month, as Hamas called a "day of rage," inciting violence on the Temple Mount and beyond. The fact that intermittent closures and restrictions are the exception, as opposed to the rule, is apparent from the media reports which note the beginning or the end of a more restrictive period. Thus, Akiva Eldar's own newspaper reported March 17, 2010:

Earlier Wednesday, Israel lifted its closure on the West Bank and granted open access to the Al-Aqsa mosque, with police saying that thousands of troops will remain on high alert but reported no disturbances. Israel originally sealed off the territory last week.

There are also periods of complete closure on the West Bank, such as during Jewish holidays, in which West Bank Arabs may not enter Israel aside from humanitarian cases. Yet even during a period of closure during the Jewish new year (Rosh Hashanah) which fell on September 2009, nearly 60 percent of the West Bank Palestinian population still had access to Jerusalem, according to the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The Sept. 16-29 "Protection of Civilians Report" by OCHA details:

(Read full report)

Love of the Land: Akiva Eldar Clueless in Jerusalem

Love of the Land: Little tommy's big plans

Little tommy's big plans

Soccer Dad
17 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

Thomas Friedman in 1996

Arafat, belatedly, came to understand that Israel could never keep up the momentum of peace without Palestinians making a 100 percent effort to guarantee Israeli security, and Mr. Peres came to understand that Mr. Arafat could never guarantee security unless the peace process continued its momentum. Because they agreed on the big issues, and had forged a strategic partnership, the little issues never led to massive blowups. The violence that did occur was the Israeli and Palestinian extremes against the Israeli and Palestinian mainstreams.

Thomas Friedman today:

Fayyad is the most interesting new force on the Arab political stage. A former World Bank economist, he is pursuing the exact opposite strategy from Yasir Arafat. Arafat espoused a blend of violence and politics; his plan was to first gain international recognition for a Palestinian state and then build its institutions. Fayyad calls for the opposite -- for a nonviolent struggle, for building noncorrupt transparent institutions and effective police and paramilitary units, which even the Israeli Army says are doing a good job; and then, once they are all up and running, declare a Palestinian state in the West Bank by 2011.

Is Friedman implicitly acknowledging that Arafat never truly gave up terror? All the years when he berated Israel, he never truly acknowledged that Arafat hadn't changed. Now is he acknowledging the truth only to foist another mirage on us.

Fayyad sounds great. Really. Here's more:

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Little tommy's big plans

Love of the Land: Peres’s extracurricular clinchers

Peres’s extracurricular clinchers

Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
12 March '10

So who says you can’t accurately predict the future? admittedly, clairvoyance isn’t realistic in all circumstances, but in some instances not to sense what’s about to occur is to willfully avoid reality. In given situations what threatens to unfold is obvious.

So it was when Shimon Peres campaigned for the presidency in 2007.

I wrote then: “How Peres would exploit presidential office, given his past predilections, boggles the mind. A Peres presidency would be invitation to intrigue. It’s safe to assume he wouldn’t make do with a figurehead role, but would hyperactively preside over a parallel government and spawn an unimaginable surfeit of inventive visions, plans and proposals. Their common denominator would be the increasing Palestinization of this land and dangerous compromising of what Golda Meir called ‘the Jewish national interest.’”

There was plenty over the past few years to vindicate this forecast, but the most recent reports of Peres’s extracurricular activities are the clincher.

GET A load of the following samples from Haaretz (which fully approves of the president’s hijinks).

“Talks have recently been under way to arrange a summit meeting in Rome this April between President Shimon Peres and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The talks have reportedly been carried out without the involvement or even the knowledge of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, whom Abbas has persistently refused to meet.”

Sounds familiar? Deja vu? The same old MO?

There’s more:

“The person behind the summit drive is Uri Savir, president of the Peres Center for Peace, who was one of the architects of the Oslo Accords and served as director-general of the Foreign Ministry when Peres was foreign minister.”

And more:

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Peres’s extracurricular clinchers

Love of the Land: Israel's Last Chance of Survival

Israel's Last Chance of Survival

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
22 February '10

In the summer of 2011, it will have been 18 years since the Oslo Accords were signed by Shimon Peres, secretly and without the knowledge of the Israeli public whose rights to their own land were being signed away. The accord was based on meetings by left wing academics with terrorists that were illegal under Israeli law, signed covertly by a disgraced politician who had been an admirer of Marx and finally sealed with a public handshake between the world's greatest terrorist and an Israeli Prime Minister suffering from such severe dementia that he had trouble recognizing the man beaming down on them both as the President of the United States, who 5 years later would be facing impeachment.

That handshake with Arafat took place on September 13th, 8 years minus 2 days, before terrorists would duplicate a feat that only Arafat's own terrorists had previously accomplished, by simultaneously hijacking 4 aircraft. Even as the United States had begun pandering to Arafat, the rise of the next wave of terrorism was already underway with Bin Laden hard at work on the organization that would evolve into the Al Queda we know today. The Oslo Accords would play a crucial role in the rise of Islamist terrorism creating a vacuum into which the Muslim Brotherhood could step into with groups such as Hamas and Al Queda. And the Oslo Accords would also come to define Israel's worst defeat since the accords it had signed with Rome over two thousand years ago.

Now as that fateful 18 year mark approaches, there is still a crack in the door remaining through which Israel can save itself. In Hebrew the word for life is Chai, whose letters code as 18. And eighteen years after the scourge of Oslo has brought war and death into the heart of Israel, turned its town and cities into targets for missiles, made its roads into highways of death and now threatens to divide Jerusalem itself-- Israel has the chance to choose life over death by appeasement.

Each year since Oslo, the situation has grown steadily worse. Not just militarily, not just in relation to the children who have been left without arms and legs by Arab terror. But even diplomatically as well. The political war against Israel has reached an unprecedented height with no comparison to even the ugliest days of the Intifada. And all of it has one common element, a blood lust spurred on by Israel's willingness to accommodate, appease and retreat. Not only has any Israeli concession, any act of goodwill and compassion, not changed the way Israel is portrayed-- but each one has only fed the furious hate that Islam and the international left feels for it.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Israel's Last Chance of Survival

Love of the Land: Short takes — letters, potshards and human rights

Short takes — letters, potshards and human rights

Fresnozionism
26 January '10

The McDermott/Ellison letter

News Item:

Fifty-four members of the U.S. Congress have signed a letter [the text is here -- ed.] asking President Barack Obama to put pressure on Israel to ease the siege of the Gaza Strip.

The letter was the initiative of Representatives Jim McDermott from Washington and Keith Ellison from Minnesota, both of whom are Democrats. Ellison is the first American Muslim to ever win election to Congress.

McDermott and Ellison wrote that they understand the threats facing Israel and the ongoing Hamas terror activities against Israeli citizens but that “this concern must be addressed without resulting in the de facto collective punishment of the Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip.”

“We ask you to press for immediate relief for the citizens of Gaza as an urgent component of your broader Middle East peace efforts,” they wrote, adding that the siege has hampered the ability of aid agencies to do their work in Gaza…

Ellison has harshly criticized the House of Representatives decision to reject the Goldstone report, arguing that the report “only presents facts and raises recommendations for the future.” He cast doubt that members of Congress who voted to reject the report even took the time to read it and that the rejection hurt the Obama government’s role as an honest broker in the Middle East conflict.

The letter was also signed by those paragons of pro-Israel-ness, J Street and Americans for Peace Now.

Love of the Land: Short takes — letters, potshards and human rights

Love of the Land: The wonderful wizard of Hope (Arkansas)

The wonderful wizard of Hope (Arkansas)

Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
26 November 09

His real name, according to author L. Frank Baum, was Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkel Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs. Since it's a bit cumbersome, the bearer of this moniker squeezed it down to the initials only, which came out as O.Z.P.I.N.H.E.A.D. From the third letter onward the acronym spells "pinhead," not desirable for an ambitious individual, even if it does hint at the truth. Obfuscating that truth and enhancing his image, therefore, necessitated a further trim, leaving only OZ.

Mr. Diggs, originally of Omaha, Nebraska, made his none-too-impressive living as a circus magician. For promotional purposes he painted the OZ logo boldly on the hot-air balloon he used for some of his none-too-impressive tricks.

His fortunes dramatically improved after said balloon once drifted to the Emerald City. There, this otherwise ordinary con artist found himself worshiped by the naïve denizens as the all-knowing Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Incredibly they hung on to the presumed supreme sorcerer's every word, and he did his utmost to sustain the myth.

Just like former US President William Jefferson Clinton (born Blythe), originally of Hope, Arkansas. Whenever hot air ferries this political magician over to our backwater, the natives incredibly hang on to his every word, inane and hackneyed as it may be. This possibly is the last spot on Earth in which he is still worshipped as a great wizard and he laps it up. Seeming to do his darnedest to enlighten his benighted fans, he in fact does his utmost to sustain the myth.

DURING HIS latest speechifying extravaganza, Slick Willie (as fellow Arkansans called him) pontificated when memorializing Yitzhak Rabin: "Had he not lost his life on that terrible November night, within three years we would have had a comprehensive agreement for peace in the Middle East."

No kidding.

It's a stretch to believe the wizard was sincere. He must have at least dimly recalled that the Oslo pipedream had revealed itself a haunting nightmare. Packed passenger buses were blown up and what Rabin euphemistically dubbed "victims of peace" were slaughtered in our streets.

There are more than a few indications that Rabin himself was already growing increasingly edgy and unsure. The great historical irony is that he may have been assassinated on the verge of awakening from the hypnotic Osloite delusion. Rabin resolutely opined against a Palestinian state, the re-division of Jerusalem and ceding the Jordan valley. There can be no certainly that by 1998 he'd have marched dutifully down the path outlined for him by Shimon Peres and Clinton. It's all moot. It's conjecture.

(Continue reading)

Love of the Land: The wonderful wizard of Hope (Arkansas)

Love of the Land: Don't run to Assad

Don't run to Assad

Gabriel Siboni
Haaretz
15 November 09

The latest appeal by Syrian President Bashar Assad to renew negotiations with Israel, and statements on his people's readiness for peace, have once again brought peace talks with Damascus to the forefront.

The eager response by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who expressed their willingness to enter negotiations without preconditions as soon as possible, amply demonstrates how Assad is getting to eat the cake and have it too.

Syria has been brought back from the political cold only after indirect talks with Israel via Turkey were revealed. These talks gave the Syrian regime legitimacy, even though Syria continued on as a loyal member of the radical bloc. The talks boosted the ostracized regime, and the full extent of the strategic damage they have caused to Israel has yet to be fully understood. Syria was and is a disturber of regional balance, as American forces coping with its attempts to destabilize Iraq can testify.

Assad has several personal achievements of this kind to his credit: Syrian involvement in the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri is well-known; Syria is developing chemical weapons of mass-destruction, and has tried to set up a nuclear reactor to achieve military nuclear capability.

Terrorist organizations over the years have found Syria to be a convenient and helpful host. Syria's deep involvement in Lebanon and its part in delivering advanced weapon systems to Hezbollah increase Lebanese instability, while providing backing for increased Iranian involvement. All these demonstrate how deeply Assad is implicated in the radical axis.

Some say that pulling Syria out of the Axis of Evil will improve Israel's overall strategic balance. But closer heed must be paid to the Syrian president's words. To him, peace with Israel means Israeli retreat from the Golan, while he maintains his strategic connection to Iran and other rogue states. Past experience shows that rapprochement attempts by Israel and parts of the international community don't make him moderate his positions, but rather convince him to believe he can have everything both ways.

Israeli decision-makers need to fundamentally review Israel's real interest in regard to Syria, while neutralizing the kind of strategic discourse that was relevant 30 years ago but is now hopelessly outdated.

The enemy, having realized it cannot conquer Israel, has chosen the path of resistance and attrition, with the aim of exhausting Israelis in the long run. This change proves the irrelevance of giving away assets in exchange for security arrangements and guarantees, demilitarization and the like.

A true peace agreement with Syria can only be discussed after Syria undergoes a profound and fundamental change. The desire to please the Damascus regime and go into talks will not help bring about such change.

Assad, whose supreme interest is preserving the Alawi reign, has a lot to lose. Israel must reach a strategic agreement with the American administration on the fundamental conditions for talks with Syria.

The first among them should be separation from the radical axis and from radical ideology. Syria, deep in the throes of an economic crisis and located in a problematic geo-strategic position, must choose a new path before peace talks can begin. Right now, Assad's haughty attitude is like he is living in a glass house and throwing stones in every direction.

The author chairs the military research program at the Institute for National Security Studies.

Love of the Land: Don't run to Assad

Love of the Land: Judge Goldstone: I Participated in a Farce

Judge Goldstone: I Participated in a Farce

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
16 November 09

Richard Goldstone seems to use interviews to chip away at the legitimacy of his own work. He told the Forward that nothing he uncovered in Gaza is credible enough to be admissible in court. And now he has admitted this to Haaretz:

Many Israelis are right to feel that the United Nations and its member bodies such as the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly have devoted inordinate and disproportionate attention to scrutinizing and criticizing Israel. This has come at the price of ignoring violations of human rights in other countries, some of them members of those very same bodies. The time has come for the investigation of all violations of international human rights law and international law whenever they are committed, in any state.

A few thoughts: First, this is almost exactly what Bob Bernstein argued in his New York Times op-ed about Human Rights Watch — for which he was accused by HRW, on whose board Goldstone sat, of claiming that no scrutiny whatsoever should be applied to Israel. Will HRW now distort Goldstone and level the same charge? Not a chance.

Second, this statement would seem to validate Shimon Peres’s critique that Goldstone is a “small man, devoid of any sense of justice, a technocrat with no real understanding of jurisprudence” who was “on a one-sided mission to hurt Israel.” Goldstone has admitted that the lawfare campaign against Israel, of which he has become the de facto leader, is a perversion of justice: disproportionately and selectively applied. It is the equivalent of a police force that pursues the arrest of Jews, and scarcely anyone else, for violations. Such a police force is inherently illegitimate. Yet Goldstone chose to become the chief of that police force, and now denounces the fact of its — his — own iniquity. What psychodrama. What a small man.

Third, there is one person perfectly situated to rise to the challenge of even-handedness and proportionality that the good judge has placed before the world: his name is Richard Goldstone. He has earned his bona fides as a harsh and tendentious critic of Israel. Because of this, he has immense credibility at the UN and among “human-rights” activists worldwide. When will his campaign of inquisition against other democracies begin? Someone should ask him.

Love of the Land: Judge Goldstone: I Participated in a Farce

Love of the Land: Good Governance Post National Trauma: Rejecting a Two State Solution

Good Governance Post National Trauma: Rejecting a Two State Solution

Prof. Alan Friedlander
Jerusalem Defender
12 November 09

Israeli President Shimon Peres recently said, "Those who reject the two-state solution will not bring a one-state solution. They will bring one conflict, not one state. A bloody endless conflict."

Excuse me, but isn't that what the Oslo Accords accomplished? Is that not the very fruit that it brought upon Israel? Isn't that what the Roadmap to Peace (Oslo 3) ended up doing, especially before the security fence was built?

Has it been so long since the first Intifada began that people have forgotten what it was like when Arab refugees didn't try to kill Israelis?

Answer this: Why, when Arafat was a fugitive for the first three decades of his terroristic career, there was no intifada? Why when Arafat underwent a PR makeover and was a pseudo partner in a pseudo peace process, why then did Israel stop looking over its borders with fear, but then start looking within its borders for the most clear and present dangers?

Arafat created a goon squad of terrorist abusers of the national psyche. Did anyone really believe that whitewashing the high crimes of the PLO by calling them by the designation of "diplomats" would bring Israel closer to peace?

Oslo 1, Oslo 2, the Roadmap. Wrong thought processes were at play that conceived these plans, which have brought these decades of endless violence. Like a battered wife who clings to her abusive husband. She should not cower behind the locked bathroom door each night hoping for her husband to calm down. She should leave or call the police.

By continuing to advocate the pursuit of a "one-state solution" you are essentially telling your people to sit there and take it; for eternity. This is peace? This is madness!

Bad policy such as this hopes to placate the abuser long enough so that the victim can just be left alone for a scant few moments of respite from his limitless rage. But no practical plans for long term security are on her agenda. Taking dangerous risks without a clearly obtainable goal is a classic symptom of the faulty reasoning that often affects the thought processes of victims of abuse. For example following up Oslo 1 with Oslo 2, then Oslo 2 with the Roadmap would be an expression of this disorder at the political level.

The healthier choice would have been seeking national consensus on the vital issues at play rather than forcing through the Knesset a left wing agenda.

To have true freedom from bloodshed, you must first inculcate true freedom of the heart and mind. As God told Yehoshua (Joshua) repeatedly, "Be strong and courageous".

Not only has the violence continued, your reaction has you pointed in the wrong direction to fix the problems...

Why should Arabs keep their homes and not Jews? Is this justice?

Why should Israel be forced into "Auschwitz Borders" as your friend Abba Eban used to call them? Is this security?

Why should you have to give anything to get peace? Should peaceful intentions not be shared by both partners?

Currently only one side is committed to peace and freedom of the other side if they should reach a peace deal, while the other guys refuse to accept even the notion of a Jewish State. Is this a true path to peace?

You have been strong and courageous to make sacrifices for peace. Now be strong and courageous to encourage the forsaking of the failed paths of national self destruction, leaving them as history. Only this new direction is a path that can lead to healthy and true peace.

Soon may it be so, by the grace of G-d.

Love of the Land: Good Governance Post National Trauma: Rejecting a Two State Solution

Love of the Land: Our day of mourning... and hatred

Our day of mourning... and hatred

Yitzhak Klein
JPost
1 November 09

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room... The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.
- George Orwell, 1984

In George Orwell's dystopia, formal public ceremonies are devoted to the inculcation of hatred. The object of this hatred is the classic "enemy" that is a feature of every totalitarian society, legions of faceless and anonymous traitors who threaten society on all sides and whom it is an obligation to hate.

In totalitarian societies, the cultivation of hatred serves important political objectives. Totalitarian society requires subjects who subordinate their lives to the demands of the regime, who submerge their personalities within its logic. This is achieved by deliberately inflaming their basest passions.

The tragedy of totalitarian culture however is not that it finds the cultivation of hatred useful, but that hatred genuinely reflects the spiritual life of rulers and ruled alike. The true purpose for which hatred is cultivated is to create a society in which the human virtues of pity, compassion and decency are suppressed. This can happen only in a society in which such virtues have already been undermined. Totalitarian societies may pay lip service to the highest ideals, but in practice they dehumanize themselves by dehumanizing their enemies, who possess no rights and to whom no justice is due. Such a society can fall into a barbarism darker than that of any society of primitives.

Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were characterized by public ceremonies devoted, formally or informally, to the cultivation of hatred. By contrast, the State of Israel at its foundation set aside a day for remembering the victims of the Holocaust, and many individuals continue to cherish antipathy for Germany, but nobody ever contemplated a day devoted, formally or informally, to the hatred of Germans. That rightly would have been considered sick, a mark of Cain on the forehead of our society. No day devoted to the deliberate inculcation of hatred was established in Israel until 1996.

SINCE ITS establishment, those who arrogated to themselves the right to determine the nature of Yitzhak Rabin's memorial day have devoted it to inculcating hatred against a particular community within Israeli society. Last year, repeating a frequent theme, President Shimon Peres admonished the national-religious community for not joining in the commemoration of Rabin. How ironic. On this day, members of that community are expected to have no voice, other than the voice that those who despise them would put into their mouths. Like Jews in medieval Europe herded into churches on Christmas, their role is to confess in public the crime of unbelief in Rabin's agenda, and to affirm that unbelief is equivalent to culpability.

This of course serves a particular political agenda. But the real tragedy of Rabin's memorial day is that it has become the occasion for legitimizing a culture of hatred. This culture invokes a community of public enemies, treats them as collectively guilty and makes it easier to rationalize the denial of their fundamental rights. The way Rabin's memorial day is celebrated admits a breath of totalitarian culture into our public life.

Politically motivated hatred has practical political consequences. The hatred which finds its expression on Rabin's memorial day had such consequences four years ago, during disengagement, which violated the fundamental rights of hapless Israeli citizens and traduced Israel's civil compact.

It matters little what "security" arguments were deployed by those who legitimated this policy, or that the arguments turned out - indeed were known at the time - to be baseless. At root, the policy was motivated by causeless hatred, as some of its advocates have since acknowledged. The victims of disengagement are the objects of sympathy today, but not yet, as they should be, of repentance.

It has become habitual for those who have appropriated Rabin's memorial day to blame the spiritual ills of Israeli society on "the occupation." That is too easy and facile an explanation. Surely these people are inured against that particular source of spiritual contamination. Those who tolerate or encourage an element of totalitarian culture in the celebration of Rabin's memorial day ought to make the day an occasion for what they are ever eager to urge upon others - heshbon nefesh, taking a critical, reflective retrospective of one's soul.

The writer heads the Israel Policy Center.

Love of the Land: Our day of mourning... and hatred

Love of the Land: Weekly Commentary: Palestinian State Without Final Status Agreement Recipe For Disaster

Weekly Commentary: Palestinian State Without Final Status Agreement Recipe For Disaster

Dr. Aaron Lerner
IMRA
29 October 09

Who would gain from the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state before an agreement is reached on final status issues?

President Shimon Peres claims that this will somehow promote peace and stability, but he doesn't offer much substance to his argument beyond a "best case assumption" that things will be so good for the Palestinians when they have a sovereign state that they will bend over backwards to behave themselves.

This is a pretty insulting take on the will and determination of the Palestinians to achieve their aspirations.

It doesn't require much imagination to come up with a Palestinian plan of action to exploit Palestinian sovereignty to facilitate increasing security and other pressures against the Jewish State.

And this with most of the world "understanding" if not downright accepting and even applauding the argument that the Palestinians had every right to continue with their "struggle against the occupation" given that final borders and other key issues had yet to be agreed upon.

Israel's enemies would come to the aid of sovereign Palestine on a scale magnitudes greater than current clandestine operations.

Israel's friends would counsel the Jewish State to show more "flexibility" and accept various Palestinian demands, in order to bring peace, arguing that "after going so far and making so much "progress" (aka concessions) it would be irresponsible for Israel to jeopardize this by taking a "hard line".

All this while Israeli security operations would be subject to even greater international review, criticism and even sanctions as they are carried out within sovereign Palestine.

And let's not forget that a sovereign state is a sovereign state even if it should violate the conditions under which it was formed.

When Mr. Peres makes this proposal he shows himself to be more an anarchist than a diplomat.

And the last thing we need in this region is to add to its instability.

Love of the Land: Weekly Commentary: Palestinian State Without Final Status Agreement Recipe For Disaster

Love of the Land: Another Tack: Friendly Little Green Men

Another Tack: Friendly Little Green Men

Sarah Honig
JPost
24 September 09

It's hunky-dory to kick off another year with comforting reassurances of stability. There are no unsettling changes in the wings. What was is what will be, albeit with slight superficial variations. For instance, Yossi Beilin will keep on tinkering with our existential interests as he did so assiduously hitherto. Although he announced his retirement, indefatigable Beilin is still out there avidly looking for E.T., still trying to broker that intergalactic encounter between alien life-forms, the one that will bless us with universal bliss.

Seeking peace in our time and in our land has often been likened to seeking friendly little green men in the outermost cosmos. The probability of finding what you're looking for is infinitesimally negligible in both cases. Yet Yossi won't let disheartening odds dampen his enthusiasm. Same goes for stunning past failures.

So what if the Oslo he concocted behind the backs of Israel's elected government unequivocally manifested itself as a gargantuan flop, as have his Geneva Initiative and his political aspirations (the Meretz he led until recently was trounced in the last elections). Beilin won't let staggering setbacks get in the way of grand designs.

IN THE 1950s prominent social psychologist Leon Festinger, progenitor of the Cognitive Dissonance theory, focused on the obsessive rejection of tangible reality by fanatic followers of fantasy. He studied a small cult that awaited the imminent arrival of aliens from another galaxy. They calculated dates and prepared meticulously for the great event - which never materialized. Yet members of the flying saucer cult didn't relinquish their faith in "Guardians" from outer space and their promises for a new universe.

This led Festinger to observe in his ground-breaking 1956 book When Prophecy Fails that the collapse of prophecies disseminated by cults "often has the opposite effect from what the average person might expect. The cult following gets stronger and the members even more convinced of the truth of their actions and beliefs."

Israel's homegrown peace cult is proof positive.

Buoyed by his blunders, fearless Beilin hasn't given up on the Geneva washout. Valiantly insisting it's still a viable option, he last week ceremoniously announced the publication of a 400-page, most-detailed-yet version of the "grassroots" recipe for peace he first inflicted upon us in 2003. Shimon Peres, Yossi's patron of old, received an advance copy of the updated Geneva Initiative. So has Hillary Clinton (in the hope she'd get Washington to impose it on the vast majority of Israelis who clearly rejected the original) and all EU's movers and shakers (in the hope they'd egg Hillary to do their bidding).

The fact that nobody authorized him to represent Israel, haggle on its behalf and determine its future is of no hindrance to Beilin. He's done it previously. In August 1993 the then-deputy foreign minister pulled off a similar stunt in the Norwegian capital. He later pitched the Osloite concoction to his boss, Peres, who proceeded to convince then-PM Yitzhak Rabin that the Palestinians had undergone a strategic metamorphosis.

With much fanfare and self-congratulation the clandestine deal was unveiled to the citizenry as a glorious fait accompli. The intelligence community didn't raise a ruckus, the intellectual elites celebrated and the obstinate opponents were lumped with Hamas as "enemies of peace."

Eventually, however, Nobel prizes notwithstanding, the strategic metamorphosis was revealed as nothing but a marketable version of the old Arab phased plan for Israel's destruction, rendered feasible via the invaluable complicity of duped Israelis.

This is what comes of lack of accountability and failure to demand reckoning. We're now in the midst of our annual neurotic Yom Kippur self-flagellation orgy, wherein we commemorate the 1973 war. This faultfinding frenzy, however, only accentuates the dearth of probes into Beilin's Oslo fiasco.

There are no academic studies, investigative reports or exposés about how our national leadership was bamboozled into crowning Arafat the prince of peace, importing him and 50,000 henchmen from Tunis and arming them. This gratuitous debacle is of unprecedented proportions. It's still ongoing, unresolved and with no happy end in sight. It's far from being behind us.

NONETHELESS, ACADEMICIANS and media hotshots refrain from pointing fingers at the enlightened bunglers who brought us Oslo, because they're all chums in the same progressive fraternity of radical postmodernist flying-saucer devotees.

A decade after Oslo literally bombed, an undeterred Beilin promoted its Geneva spin-off to demonstrate that, contrary to overwhelming empirical evidence, we do have interlocutors with whom to chew the fat. Substantiating Festinger's conclusions, Beilin went on the offensive to redeem his incontrovertible flop, to show Israel's benighted masses how right he is - even if it kills them.

He is still at it. In the coming year, the resurrected Geneva's boosters plan seminars on each of the 13 intractable irritations which keep peace away, among them Jerusalem, security, water, the PA economy and refugees. A cult convocation is already scheduled this October in Prague to palaver there about our H2O-shortage here. A much-ballyhooed junket to pleasing faraway climes never hurt any space cadet.
(Continue)

Love of the Land: Another Tack: Friendly Little Green Men

Israel Matzav: Medvedev: 'Peres promised that Israel won't attack Iran'; UPDATE: Peres was wrong

Medvedev: 'Peres promised that Israel won't attack Iran'; UPDATE: Peres was wrong

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was the guest on Fareed Zakaria's GPS show on CNN on Sunday. During the interview, Medvedev was asked about Russia's relations with Iran, Iran's nuclear program and the prospects that Iran will attack Israel or that Israel will attack Iran. It all starts at 7:58 below and runs until 14:14 (sorry, they did not break this video apart and I don't know how to do that myself):

Let's go to the videotape.

So Medvedev says that Shimon Peres told him that Israel won't attack Iran. That was the headline here. Just one problem: Peres is a figurehead with no real power.

If Medvedev really believes that Israel won't attack Iran if it feels threatened, he is fooling himself. Shimon Peres is not in charge here. Barack Obama isn't in charge either.

UPDATE 5:19 PM

Fox News reports that Peres was wrong.

"Israel has the right to defend itself and all options are on the table," Israel Lieutenant-General Gabi Askenazi said during a rare interview on Army Radio.

The army chief's statement comes after Medvedev said on Sunday that Israeli President Shimon Peres assured him it would not attack Iran.

Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon was asked by Reuters on Monday if the comment by Peres, as reported by Medvedev, was a guarantee there would be no Israeli strike on Iran.

"It is certainly not a guarantee," Ayalon said. "I don't think that, with all due respect, the Russian president is authorised to speak for Israel and certainly we have not taken any option off the table."

Heh.

Israel Matzav: Medvedev: 'Peres promised that Israel won't attack Iran'; UPDATE: Peres was wrong

Love of the Land: New Dawn, New Year

New Dawn, New Year

Marc Prowisor

Yesha Views

10 September 09

Back in 1982, Shimon Peres traveled to the USA to speak in opposition of Israel’s then war against terror from Lebanon. He managed to gain US support and increased international pressure on Israel amidst the fighting causing a premature cease-fire and in essence prolonging Israel’s presence in Lebanon. We as soldiers were in the middle of battle as we were listening on the radio how one of our own Government officials was gathering support against us. Most of us in our late teens and early twenty’s, we simply cared about doing our job, protecting Israel and stopping the enemy and then going home. We didn’t understand how a government official could speak out against what we were doing, and worst, take it to the outside world. Was it the world’s business anyway, were they getting bombed? We knew in our hearts that we were stopping the terrorists from continuing to fire on the North, and we were stopping our enemies.

I remember watching the terrorists of Fatah traveling safely from Lebanon, because of a brokered cease fire and the confusing feeling among us, how could we let our enemies leave so they would attack us again?

After Oslo, we let these same terrorists back into our country, rearmed them only to see those weapons turned against us and we watched as waves of bombings against the innocent took their toll in lives, again the result of the same team from 1982.

Even today, opposition leader Tzippi Livni will travel to the US to gain support against the present government and attempt at keeping her job. Peace Now, Human Rights Watch, Rabbis for whatever and so many others will do the same.

Continuing to travel outside the country to gain support and funds, these movements and politicians that put the security and safety of the Jewish people here in jeopardy and roam freely without regard to the Jewish lives they endanger.

People of the world look at us, the Jewish people, in amazement how we endanger ourselves and our nation by capitulating to outside pressures and give in to an enemy that has one goal in mind, that of destroying us. How come everybody understands this but our own officials and so called peace movements? How can we expect any sort of unity among our own people, or the attempt of unity, when our own representatives choose to air their dirty laundry outside?

These politicians and others hold a grudge against the new growing strength in Israel. The new Israel is that of a strong Jewish identity, this new Israeli, is not ashamed of who he or she is. They know they are in their land, and will defend it and fight for it. They grow vineyards and orchards and produce world renowned goods. They are creating technologies that are saving lives around the world. They are not ashamed of lighting candles Friday night and they are proud of who they are and where they live.

This is what frightens our dear Knesset members and supposed intelligentsia who oppose our presence in Judea and Samaria. They go so far as to seek out and create more opposition because they cannot find enough support at home. These same people ignore democracy and justice while attempting to create their own rules and double standards. They are racists, discriminating against their own.They do not believe in equality, only their way, at the expense of Jewish life. They will adopt an enemy rather than make peace at home and they will bend laws without regard to justice.

Most of the nations of the world do not really care what happens to us, they care what happens to them, quite normal. This applies to most people in the world, again, normal. By creating and bringing opposing views outside the country, we weaken and confuse our people and ourselves. This in turn creates the exact atmosphere needed to harm us, and what are enemies seek and this is forbidden.

Every nation and country in the world has its problems, we all agree and disagree with each other, we talk, we yell and eventually work things out, you might say this is the democratic process. Our job in Israel regarding the Jewish Communities outside the country is to keep them strong, and protect them when needed, they are the minority there. Our job here in Israel is to keep our country strong and safe and to be able to provide a place to live for all Jews around the world, when needed.

So I turn to our people, who bear this grudge against their own, and embrace values that are foreign to us and our people, come home, look inside, you will be proud of who you are and who you are becoming.

There is a new dawn, and it is beautiful.

Love of the Land: New Dawn, New Year