Ray Cook - As I See It

Israel, Zionism and the Media

Category: Israel-Palestine (Page 18 of 19)

Relations between Israel and Palestine and the peace process

Palestinians don’t support Israel boycott

13/11/2009 / / 2 Comments

Yeah, kinda goes against your preconceptions and prejudices, doesn’t it.

Recently, TUFI ([British]Trade Union Friends of Israel) went on their own fact-finding mission to both Israel and the Palestinian Authority West Bank to meet Israeli and Palestinian Trades Unionists.

Each day one of their number wrote a short blog article about their experiences.

You can find their blog here.

Here are some of the interesting and revealing things they had to say. Yes, I know they are ‘Friends of Israel’ but the TUFI mission statement states:

TUFI was established to promote Israeli-Palestinian trade union co-operation and strengthen the links between the Israeli, Palestinian and British trade union movements.

On the every first day, Terry McCorran, clearly on a first visit to Israel says at the beginning of his blog entry:

The first thing to say is that Israel was not what I expected, at all….. I was expecting a large Israeli military presence – like there used to be in my home town of Belfast – but throughout the day we only saw a handful of soldiers walking around Jerusalem.

It is often the case that those who only know a place by media reporting and British media reporting at that, form preconceptions that are not matched on the ground. In a recent BBC programme about the Frankincense which tracked the ancient trade route from Yemen to Gaza, when report Kate Humble arrived at the Jordanian-Israeli border to enter Israel she was expecting a different reception. She told us that the Israeli Army has reputation for being formidable and she was clearly apprehensive. She was then amazed that the only person at the border post was a diminutive female border guard and instead of being delayed an interrogated by those nasty Israeli soldiers, she and her camera team entered Israel in a matter of minutes. Humble, like McCorran have be conditioned to think of Israel in the way it is represented by the media and anti-Israel propaganda.

McCorran continues:

It is hard to describe how intertwined the significant religious sites are in the Old City  – Churches, Mosques and Synagogues next to each other, overlapping and sometimes even on top of one another.  The proximity is astounding.

I expected to see friction and stand-offs, but people were just getting on with their lives with complete religious tolerance and freedom.

Well, yes, again, life is always different from propaganda. McCorran, no doubt, had seen and read about the problems on the Temple Mount because Muslim clerics and the Palestinian leadership have been trying to manufacture stories about Jewish plans to both undermine the Al Aqsa mosque and to storm the Temple Mount and claim it for Judaism. As a result there were tensions and incidents but it seems Israeli Arabs and Palestinians didn’t buy in to their own propaganda and despite ongoing attempts to stir things up, so far, the Third Intifada has not happened. As McCorran witnessed first-hand, people just go about their daily lives.

The thing that struck me the most was the mix of people in the different quarters – Arabs, Israelis, Jews, Muslims, Christians and secular people all walking and working freely side by side.  Our Jewish guide seemed to be friends with every Palestinian in the Arab quarter and everyone was working together.

But aren’t Jews and Muslims supposed to hate each other?!  This is the same Jerusalem from which every Jew was expelled by the Jordanians in 1948 and every synagogue destroyed. Those Israeli Jews are amazing: they actually allow their non-Jewish citizens to work and practice their religion in freedom and respect – like any other decent, enlightened, democratic nation.

I got the impression that if left to their own devises – if the extremists on both sides backed off – the people of Jerusalem, Israel and Palestine would have peace.

Amen to that, brother.

And so to the Knesset:

It just so happened that when we walked in an Arab Member of the Knesset was making a speech against some of the government’s policies in the West Bank.

What! Freedom of Speech! Freedom to criticise the government! Freedom to vote and organise politically! I can hardly contain myself. But Israel is worse than Iran, isn’t it? Ok, some Arab MK’s have been making very anti-Israel statements and, yes, the reaction of some Israeli MK’s (heard of Avigdor Lieberman, for example?) have been pretty extreme and, yes, Israeli Arabs do face some discrimination, but there are a whole raft of NGO’s, political groups, individuals and also the Supreme Court who are working in the interest of Arabs within Israel and the Territories. At least mechanisms exist in Israel to stand up for minorities and to try to right wrongs.  Name me one Arab country where the same could be said. Go on. Still thinking are you? You’ll be thinking a very long time.

Later in the day we had a very positive meeting with a representative working for Tony Blair at the UN Quartet office in Jerusalem.

He said that although there were still many problems for people in the West Bank, there had been significant achievements in the last twelve months.  He said that for the first time the Palestinian Authority was performing on the security side, which in turn has lead to improvements with security and access.

He emphasised that there was no comparison to how it was just two years ago, with checkpoints being opened up and dismantled and the economy growing dramatically in the West Bank.

Again this was another positive that has not been reported by the media.  And this is my concluding point – the main eye opener of the day for me is that there seems to be little or no resemblance between what I have seen today and how Israel is sometimes portrayed in the media back home.

I don’t think any comment is necessary, just read that last sentence again.

And so it goes on. Day Two, Gerry Maloney:

One of the most surprising things about Israel is the lack of ill-well and bad sentiment between Jewish Israelis and the Israeli-Arabs.

We have visited both Jewish orthodox areas and Arab areas and found both communities mixing freely.

Each community seemed to be perfectly at ease with the other.  This was the exact opposite of what I expected to see – it was certainly the opposite of what the media in the United Kingdom report….

… The media propagate Israel as being a “military state” but the reality is that there has been no military presence in evidence at all.

Now here’s the rub:

Listening to people from both communities on the subject of the proposed international trade union boycott, it is evident that all parties oppose this action.  In a meeting with the Jerusalem Municipality workers, one view from the Palestinian contingent was that a boycott would be more detrimental to the Arab workforce than any other.

The reason for this was that in the event of economic sanctions, it would cause a detrimental impact on the employment levels of their community.

Are you listening Israel boycotters everywhere? THE PALESTINIANS DO NOT WANT YOU TO BOYCOTT ISRAELI GOODS. The Palestinians that really count, that is, not their leaders or the fanatics among them but every day decent Palestinians trying to earn a living. The boycotters would harm the very people they are supposed to be trying to support. But they don’t really care about that because the boycott is not about Palestinians and their rights, it is about demonizing and delegitimizing Israel. Boycotters hate Israel so much they are willing to make the Palestinians pay for it.

Finally, having spent a few days in Israel, I certainly intend to return for a holiday. …. the climate is a warm and inviting as any Mediterranean resort and, most importantly, completely safe.

Completely safe!! Yes, you heard and read right. Completely safe!!! I can vouch for the fact that in Israel you feel much safer walking at night than you do in London or Manchester. I am not saying Israel is crime-free, on the contrary there is a growing problem with crime. But attacks against the person are far less frequent than in Europe. Let’s hope it stays that way. Oh, you may scoff and ask how safe it is for a Palestinian who lives near an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. How about one who lives in Gaza City under a fundamentalist Islamic regime> I know where I’d rather be.

As the delegation moved to Nablus, Mike Dixon reported on the positives but also found negativity with a Trade Unionist referring to Israel as her enemy. But even here in the heart of Palestine the boycott was not wanted. They were more concerned with the traditional trade union concerns of pay and conditions.

You can be cynical and say TUFI were pre-disposed to finding the positives in Israel and that may well be true, but they report what they saw and they spoke to both sides.

Boycotts are cynical, political, anti-Israel mechanisms which harm Palestinians and ignore the facts. Let’s hope that that lesson is learned around the world and here in the UK. Somehow, I doubt it. TUFI is a minority in the Trades Union movement and boycotts or attempts to boycott will continue to be used against one country – Israel.

Israel’s Moral Dilemma

21/10/2009 / / 0 Comments

The 500+ page Goldstone Report, produced for the UN Human Rights Council by Judge Richard Goldstone and a distinguished group of Human Rights advocates, came to some damning conclusions about Israel’s conduct of its assault on Hamas in the Gaza Strip between December 2008 and January 2009. The report also criticised Hamas.

The report found that Israel and Hamas were probably both guilt of war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. The report was endorsed by UNHRC and will be sent to the UN Security Council for recommendation to be considered by the International Criminal Court.

Israel refused to co-operate with the Report on the grounds that some of the fact-finding members who were to produce the report had already decided in advance that Israel had committed war crimes and were, therefore biased. Israel and its supporters also saw the move to condemn it as yet another attempt by the UNHRC to delegitmise the State of Israel and pillory it internationally. The UNHRC’s activities have been disproportionately focused on Israel in the past and Israel sees the UNHRC as an instrument of its enemies and detractors.

Indeed, supporters of Israel like myself, have focused on the injustices and bias of the reporting of Operation Cast Lead, the manipulation of the world media and world opinion by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority and the virtual free pass that Hamas and its seven year rocket attack on Southern Israel have received. The Goldstone report was seen by me and those of like opinion as yet another tool with which to bash Israel and whitewash the murderous and genocidal Hamas terrorists. This was a new opportunity to further advance Israel’s pariah status in the world.

By focussing on the one-sided nature of the report and the extraordinary moral equivalence which persists in the corridors of the UN and elsewhere between Hamas’s attempts to destroy Israel and Israel’s attempts to defend itself, we have to be careful about dismissing the findings of the Report out of hand.

Although it may be unfair that Israel is once again singled out and it may be galling that most of the nations voting in the UNHRC to recommend the Report have themselves human rights records which are far worse than even the most partisan interpretation of the report, nevertheless, Israel must investigate every allegation and every criticism of its conduct because that is the only moral and, indeed, politically expedient route to take. Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister, Dan Meridor has told Ha’aretz “[he] thinks Israel should establish its own independent committee to investigate Israel Defense Forces activity in the Gaza Strip during last winter’s Operation Cast Lead.”

If Israel can rebut the accusations then it should find the means to do so via a truly independent internal investigation. Just how it does that and what would be considered fair and independent by the outside world is hard to say, but, it is important for Israel itself to make the investigation and to act on any findings. Not because that’s what the UN requires but because Israel must preserve its own moral compass, it must prove primarily to itself that either it is guiltless or if it is not, then how to remedy and rectify its transgressions.

Of course, the Report calls on Hamas to do the same, to investigate its own conduct. This is ludicrous; terrorists do not have a conscience or moral scruples. For Hamas ALL is justified in their Jihad against Israel and, indeed, against the Jews. They have no regard or respect for International Law except to use it to beat Israel with. Their objection to the report was that it confused aggressor with victim – on that score they were dead right, except the aggressor was Hamas and the victim Israel.

The question Israel has to address now is whether there own aggressive act of self-defence, to destroy or disable Hamas before it could pose an existential threat to Israel, was conducted not just according to International Law but Israeli Law and customary law; was their strategy morally and ethically sound, could they have achieved the same goal with less destruction and fewer casualties.

For those whose default position is ‘Israel: evil, rabid, colonial, apartheid, illegitimate, expansionist, American proxy state. Palestine: freedom fighters, oppressed, impoverished victims of injustice and dispossession’, no accounting by Israel will ever be enough; they just want Israel destroyed and look no further than that goal, the consequences of which would be far worse than the status quo.

For those of us with a more temperate view and who have Israel’s and, indeed, the Palestinians’ long-term well-being at heart, Israel must bite the bitter bullet and formulate its own investigation into Operation Cast Lead which avoids accusations of whitewash from all but its bitterest enemies.

Goldstone the patsy

19/10/2009 / / 2 Comments

Now that the United Nations Human Rights Council has voted to send the Goldstone report to the UN General Assembly, the head of the fact-finding team that produced the report, Richard Goldstone, is back-pedalling.

Goldstone has been exposed in all his naivety. Just like a ghetto Jew policeman, collaborating with his people’s murderers, Goldstone accepted the role of heading the fact-finding mission. And no sooner than the report is presented to the UNHRC, the resolution recommending it to the UN General Asembly becomes doctored to exclude any mention of Hamas and  to include extraneous materials attacking Israel which were not part of the original brief.

And Goldstone, like a naive Jew collaborator never saw it coming.  The revered jurist, the impartial investigator who produced a report so one-sided as to be obscene. Now he is widely reported as being “saddened” by the resolution as jta.org reports, Goldstone went on to say “”There is not a single phrase condemning Hamas as we have done in the report”

Well that’s naive and disingenuous, isn’t it? Even in the report the condemnation of Hamas was a mere after-thought thrown in, probably at Goldstone’s embarrassed insistence, as a fig-leaf to cover a deeply nasty biased and dangerous report.

So Goldstone finds himself surprised at being the patsy of the anti-Israel league.

You see the resolution of the UNHRC does not mention Hamas AT ALL! Surprise, surprise. The murdering, lying terrorist abomination that calls itself Hamas and who committed every war crime and broke every rule of war, the Geneva convention, customary law and human decency get off scot free whilst Israel is now called a war criminal and its pariah status no doubt enhanced. Meanwhile other countries for whom no investigation and no resolution will ever see the light of day (Russia in Chechnya and South Ossetia, China in Tibet, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and probably Pakistan) laugh on the sidelines or actively participate in condemning Israel.

This moral inversion, this moral blindness towards Israel and Israel alone is the real crime.

And the UNHRC resolution did not stop at the Goldstone Report. Here’s the extraneous stuff

Reaffirming the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and the inadmissibility of the acquisition of land by the use of force, as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations

So what’s that got to do with the Gaza conflict?

Affirming the applicability of international human rights law and the international humanitarian law, namely the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem,

That’s OK until ‘to the Occupied Palestinian Territory..’ bit. This has nothing to do with Gaza but a lot to do with final status negotiations. Clearly those sponsoring the resolution have already decided that East Jerusalem is occupied Palestinian Territory even though there is and never has been a Palestinian state. Indeed, the resolution’s title is:

HUMAN RIGHTS SITUATION IN PALESTINE AND OTHER OCCUPIED ARAB TERRITORIES.

Do they mean Iraq? Probably the Golan Heights and Gaza which the UN is determined to call ‘occupied’ even though Israel abandoned it and withdrew all its troops several years ago. It was that very withdrawal which led to Gaza being taken over by Hamas and other terrorist groups who used the Gaza Strip to launch thousands of rockets against Israeli towns and cities and whose actions precipitated the conflict.

Only the naive and the blind could say that the text of the resolution includes Hamas by implication.

Goldstone, meanwhile has defended his Report in the Jerusalem Post and this defence is analysed brilliantly by Alan Baker here.

So like the ghetto policeman, Goldstone, a man of impeccable credentials, has sold his soul. But not because of self-serving, but because he has failed to spot the trap. He has failed to see how many lies and distortions Israel’s enemies are prepared to use against it. He has failed to expose the lies of Hamas, the lies of the Palestinian Authority and the moral inversion of the bleeding-heart human rights lobby for whom the narrative is simple: Israel is the aggressor and Palestinians the victim. End of.

The Moral Bankruptcy of the UN Human Rights Council

15/10/2009 / / 1 Comment

Following the Goldstone Report and its seriously flawed and biased findings against Israel, the enemies of freedom and justice are having a field day at the UN.

On Tuesday this week (13th October 2009) the UNHRC reported that 18 of its 47 members had supported, or co-sponsored a request from the Palestinian Authority for a Special Session of that august body to discuss the report.

The Jerusalem Post reports the following list of countries as being the 18 countries supporting the PA, presumably to express their moral outrage at the report’s findings and to seek every avenue to pillory Israel in the UN and beyond.

So here are the Magnificent 18: Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Gabon, Indonesia, Jordan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Senegal.

Does it not make your blood boil when you see names like China, Cuba, Egypt and Saudi Arabia so keen on human rights? Some of the others don’t have much to be proud of either.

Let’s just remind ourselves that these countries have the audacity to take a morally superior stance against Israel, a tiny country, fighting for its very existence for decades and now the victim of lawfare of the most morally bankrupt and cynically hypocritical kind.

The same Jerusalem Post article points out that 6 of the 12 special session of the UNHRC have been about Israel. How many about Sudan or Zimbabwe or China, or Russia or Turkey or Syria or Sri Lanka?

This obsession with Israel can only mean one thing and we all know what that is. The Jews are still the world’s favourite people to hate.

Oh no, I’m not saying Israel is perfect, but is it really responsible for 50 percent of the world’s human rights violations?

If the UN would not be so obsessed with five and a half million Jews and take a look at the real villains in the world then perhaps we could take it seriously and perhaps they would actually do some good rather than just be a mouthpiece for international Jew-hatred.

The Goldstone Report – an important resource

12/10/2009 / / 1 Comment

A new website has been created which systematically dismantles the findings of the Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead.

The report accused Israel of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in its offensive against Hamas in Gaza in December 2008-January 2009.

Hamas got off lightly.

Now the Israeli Defense Force and individual officers and members of the government of the day may be accused of war crimes and subject to arrest and trial in the International Court of Justice if the UN finds cause to recommend further action.

This new website – www.goldstonereport.org is an intelligent and well-argued and meticulously documented analysis which exposes the lies, bias and bankrupt forensics of the report.

I urge you to read it.

Libyan chutzpah

09/10/2009 / / 3 Comments

Libya, that bastion of democracy and human rights has forced the UN Security council to meet ahead of schedule to discuss the Goldstone report on alleged war crimes in Gaza by Israel and Hamas in Operation Cast Lead.

Presumably it’s Israeli war crimes Libya has in mind, not Hamas’s war crimes.

This is just as extraordinary as the original Palestinian Authority’s request to the UN Human Rights Council to delay the debate.

Now Libya and other Arab states say that October 14th is the day when the debate must take place. They can’t wait to accuse Hamas of its egregious human rights violations, can they.

Now the PA has made a U-turn and supports Libya’s request.

Of course Libya can force this issue as a member of the UN Human Rights Council.

A natural choice as a defender and investigator of Human Rights, of course. It’s rather like having Hannibal Lecter running a vegetarian restaurant.

For example, one of the most important of all human rights is the ability of a nation to choose its leaders and remove that leadership in regular elections.

Libyans have no human right to replace Colonel Gadaffi.  No political parties are allowed in Libya.

For a full explanation of Libya’s right to serve on the UNHRC you might do well to visit the US Department of States’s website here.

You will see a litany of abuses including arbitrary arrest, detention without trial, torture, trumped up charges.

Look at this – remember?:

Trial Procedures

The law provides for the presumption of innocence, informing defendants of the charges against them, and the right to legal counsel. In practice defendants often were not informed of the charges against them and usually had little contact, if any, with their lawyers. Defense lawyers automatically were appointed, even if the defendant declined representation.

On two occasions, in 2004 and 2006, a court sentenced to death six foreign health workers accused of deliberately infecting 426 children with HIV‑tainted blood in 1999. The sentences reportedly were based on confessions that the accused made under torture. International observers reported serious concerns about the lack of investigation into allegations of torture and delays in bringing the case to a conclusion. In 2005 the Supreme Court accepted the appeal of the medics and ordered a retrial by the criminal court, which began in May 2006 and concluded with a second guilty verdict in December 2006.

During the second criminal trial, authorities denied the defendants and their lawyers the right to call witnesses or present evidence while giving wide latitude to the prosecution. Defendants and their lawyers had limited access to government‑held evidence. Following the December 2006 guilty verdict, the medics again appealed to the Supreme Court, which held its first hearing on the defendants’ appeal on June 20. On July 11, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s conviction and reinstated several lesser charges to the indictment, including alcohol consumption and currency violations. On July 17, the Higher Judicial Council intervened and commuted the death penalty to life imprisonment after the victims’ families expressed satisfaction with a compensation arrangement, which included a payment of one million dollars for each infected child, substantial foreign investments in the local health infrastructure, and European promises to provide medical care abroad for some affected children.

On July 24, the government allowed the medics to depart to serve their remaining prison terms in Bulgaria, where authorities pardoned the six medics upon arrival. (my emphasis)

The Libyans thus managed to kidnap innocent people and hold them to ransom and extort millions from European governments before releasing their hostages. If this had not been state kidnapping but some terrorist group in Iraq the hostages would not have been bartered.

Libya. The same country that greeted Lockerbie bomber and mass-murderer, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, with celebration and triumph on his release from a Scottish prison.

A fundamental human right is freedom of religion, is it not? Surely the UNHCR could not allow its council to have a member where a government proudly professes its anti-Semitism.  Wrong. Gadaffi has just done just that. On March 27th 2007  Gadaffi said “”Jews will go extinct because everyone hates them.”

For Libya to be so exercised about the Goldstone report is rank hypocrisy of the most cynical kind. A country, run by a lunatic, who condones and supported terrorism across the world, a dictatorship,  has the chutzpah to want to bring Israel to justice.

But that’s the problem with the UNHRC and the UN, They are seriously compromised by an obsessive, biased and politically motivated animus against Israel whilst the true criminal regimes in the world merit scant and mealy-mouthed condemnation. How does Libya stand on Sudan or Zimbabwe? Sri Lanka anyone? Russia and Georgia – where’s that investigation? China and Tibet? Where are the Goldstone reports on these countries?

Why should any country or any individual pay any attention to anything spewed out of the hate-filled mouths of just about every UN body. Judge Goldstone as next Secretary General? It’s a distinct possibility.

NATO clinic raid draws little fire

04/09/2009 / / 2 Comments

The BBC News website reports :

A member of the Afghan parliament has criticised a Nato air strike on a clinic where a Taliban leader was being treated for his injuries.

The report stresses that NATO checked there were no civilians in the clinic first before they attacked with helicopter gunships.

Amnesty International has called for an investigation. NATO say 12 militants were killed.

I’d like you to compare this incident to the furore that would surround and has surrounded Israeli attacks of a similar nature.

For NATO to say they checked that there were no civilians in the building requires a healthy degree of scepticism.

Clinics like hospitals are protected buildings unless they are being used as a base for military operations or direct attack.

Think Gaza Operation Cast Lead and accusations of  war crimes.

But AI are very reasonable when it’s not Israel who are the accused party:

Amnesty International has called for an investigation into the attack, but added that if the Taliban fired first, they had committed a serious violation.

Not quite the point despite AI’s attempt to whitewash NATO. If you were confronted by troops and gunships you might be inclined to fire first too. This does not vindicate the imminent attack on a clinic.

Just replace NATO with Israel and Taliban with Hamas. Now what would you say?

I know what I would say. Proportionality.

Israel is being and was being directly attacked on its own borders by Hamas. This rendered Hamas a legitimate target. If those targeted are responsible for horrendous acts of terrorism and are hiding in a protected facility then, as far as I am aware, Israel waits for them to come out. In Operation Cast Lead hospitals were only fired upon when fired from. The main hospital in Gaza, where the Hamas leadership were using the basement as an operations centre, was not attacked. If Israel was so intent on war crimes and so careless of civilian casualties would they not have targetted Shifa hospital?

Apparently NATO would.

Double standards anyone?

Aya’s story – a hope for a future of peace between Israel and Palestine

13/08/2009 / / 1 Comment

The Rambam Medical Center in Haifa has just issued a press release about a little Palestinian girl called Aya Aiid Abo-Mois.

Aya Aiid Abo-Mois from Jenin at the Rambam Medical Center, Haif, IsraelAya travels every day from a village near Jenin in the Palestinian Authority-run West Bank.

At 5.am every morning she and her mother are picked up by Jewish volunteers from an organisation called Derech HaChlama (The Road to Recovery). They operate regularly between the West Bank and Israeli hospitals.

Aya is just two and her sister died, aged one, of kidney failure. Now Aya also has kidney failure and requires dialysis every day.

It’s a struggle for her mother and traumatic for Aya but her mother Sahir is determined that her daughter survive.

The report relates:

Israeli Arabs and Jews, meet and speak freely about their fears and hardships and even discuss geo-political issues of the day. Sahir has developed a close kinship with the people she met at the hospital and says that there is a feeling of cooperation. She says, “I am especially grateful to ‘Derech Hachlama,’ and without their help I don’t know how we could provide my daughter with the superior life-saving treatment that she needs.”

So how did Derech HaChlama come about?

“Derech Hachlama” was founded in 2006. It began when a Palestinian member from the “Forum of Bereaved Families” asked his friend, an Israeli member of the forum, to help him with travel to Rambam. The Israeli, Yuval Roth, lost his brother 15 years ago; (his brother was murdered during his reserve duty service when he hitched a ride with Hamas terrorists disguised as religious Jews). Yuval didn’t hesitate to offer assistance to his friend and very quickly, with the aid of other members, a network of approximately 60 patients’ using the organization’s travel services developed. “The demand is great for travel from Palestinian villages to Israeli hospitals, and at least two new patients join our service every month,” states Yuval.

Aya Aiid Abo-Mois from Jenin at the Rambam Medical Center

Sometimes, amidst the darkness of hatred and prejudice a bright light shines.

Photos by Pioter Fliter with the kind permission of the Rambam Medical Center

Obama and the Jewish Democrats

06/08/2009 / / 0 Comments

In an op-ed piece in the Jeruslame Post, Marc R. Stanley castigates the Jewish critics of Obama who say that he is not talking to Israel.

Stanley correctly points out the often paranoid reactions coming mainly from the Right and concludes:

The long-term security of Israel will only be fully ensured if peace is achieved. Obama has made clear that the road is difficult, but the president is working hard to make that day come. However, there will still be those with the undying chutzpah to attack the president for not being sufficiently supportive of Israel. I urge them to actually listen to what the president is saying and watch what he is doing – they might be surprised.

Hmm.

I have to say that from where I sit/stand (in the UK) Obama is playing a very dangerous game and the efforts of the US Jewish Democrats to convince themselves that all is well and peace will inevitably result from this ‘new approach’ are simply comforting themselves that their choice of President will all turn out OK in the long run.

I do not doubt President  Obama’s commitment to Israel, and, as a naturally left-leaning person myself, I was extremely pleased to see him elected. But we should not allow the historic significance of his election at home cloud the reality of his policy in the Middle East.

Although ‘well-meaning’ I believe the ‘even-handed’ policy, designed to give confidence to the Arab world and to be seen as an honest broker, just will not work for a very simple reason: the PA (and, of course, Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran) have not budged one inch; they see a Palestinian State merely as a stepping stone to the destruction of Israel and the creation of a single state ‘from the river to the sea’. None of their statements are in any way indicative of any compromise on ANY of the sticking points, namely, settlements, Jerusalem, Right of Return, demilitarisation etc., let alone changing the whole ethos of Jew-hatred which is promulgated daily on TV and in schools and mosques.

As long as the Palestinian leadership continues its century-old animus against the Jewish people with attitudes which have only become more polarised over time, then Obama is barking up a tree that has been continuously urinated on by the dogs of the PA et alia.

Obama, frustrated by Arab and Palestinian stone-walling (encouraged, no doubt by the US administration’s new tough-love approach to Israel) simply reacts by criticising just about everything Israel does (settlements, evictions etc) whilst remaining publicly effectively uncritical of the PA.

But, sooner or later, he will realise that regardless of what Israel does, the PA will remain firmly a prisoner of its own rhetoric and history. It cannot change. Only a revolution within Palestine, a new generation that can face reality and not live on fantasies driven by ideology and religious fanaticism, can start a real dialogue for peace.

Obama is doomed to fail, and in the process he simply fuels the world’s bias, anger and frustration with and against Israel whilst Palestinians remain the poor benighted victims of racism, apartheid and European colonialism. So the narrative goes and will go for a very long time.

BBC et alia misleading on Jerusalem evictions

03/08/2009 / / 0 Comments

Nothing could better illustrate the skewed and biased animus of the BBC and much of the world’s media against Israel than Sunday’s story about the eviction of two Palestinian families from  buildings in Sheik Jarrah in East Jerusalem.

News From Jerusalem has a scathing article about the misrepresentation and trashy journalism that completely turns the real situation (known as “The Truth”) on its head.

Here’s the BBC article in Question, now headlined as “Israel Condemned over evictions”,

The News from Jerusalem article quotes as follows:

A BBC article entitled, “Palestinians evicted from Jerusalem,” tells of Israeli police who evicted nine Palestinian families living in two houses in “occupied East Jerusalem.”

“Jewish settlers moved into the houses almost immediately. The U.S. has urged Israel to abandon plans for a building project in the area,” reported the British outlet.

An AFP report, “Israel evicts Palestinians from Jerusalem homes,” begins with a scene of intimidating Jews removing peaceful Arabs from their apartments.

“Israeli riot police wielding clubs kicked out two Palestinian families from their homes in occupied east Jerusalem on Sunday, defying international protests over Jewish settlement activity in the area,” reported AFP.

“I was born in this house and so were my children,” Maher Hanoun, one of the evictees, was quoted as stating. “Now we are on the streets. We have become refugees.”

But NFJ reveals

The home was originally Jewish, but its Jewish occupants were chased out during countrywide anti-Jewish Arab riots in 1929. Arabs then squatted on the property, with one family, the Hejazi family, becoming the de facto occupants despite never having purchased the property.

Even though documentation proves the complex is owned by Jews and that Arabs have been squatting on it illegally for almost a century, Jewish groups still legally re-purchased the property from the Hejazi family. Following pressure from the Palestinian Authority, however, the family later denied selling the complex back to the Jews despite documentation and other evidence showing the sale went through.

Israel’s court system, not exactly a friend of Jewish “settlers,” twice ruled now the property undoubtedly belongs to Jews.

This is not made clear by the BBC. Let’s just repeat this. The land was owned by Jews until 1929. The Arabs who live their never compensated the original owners. Despite this, the land was RE-PURCHASED. Yes, money was paid for the property but despite evidence to the contrary the family living there denied it! Presumably under pressure from the PA and out of fear that they had sold property to Jews, which is a capital offence in the Palestinian Authority.

The family were given weeks to move out, but didn’t.

But here’s the crunch:

The construction project at the center of attention, a hotel financed by Miami Beach philanthropist Irving Moskowitz, is located just meters from Israel’s national police headquarters and other government ministries. It is a few blocks from the country’s prestigious Hebrew University, underscoring the centrality of the Jewish real estate being condemned by the U.S.

Moskowitz’s housing project, legally purchased, formerly was the house of the infamous mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who spent the war years in Berlin as a close ally of Adolf Hitler, aiding and abetting the Nazi extermination of Jews.

Al-Husseini was also linked to the 1929 massacre of Jews in Jerusalem and Hebron and to other acts of incitement that resulted in death and destruction in what was then called Palestine. Some Palestinians have expressed a desire to preserve the building as a tribute to Husseini.

Did the Israeli authorities try to rehouse the families involved? I don’t know. But, presumably they and their PA backers were more intent on making political capital against Israel because they knew how the eviction would appear, and they were certainly right.

Once again Israel is vilified even though the Supreme Court, internationally recognised as an independent judiciary, found in favour of the Jewish groups who legally purchased the property. This is completely glossed over by the BBC who thus imply that the Supreme Court is an instrument of Israeli State oppression of the Palestinians when nothing could be further from the truth.

The US condemnation is as ignorant as it is malign and disingenuous.

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