Thursday, April 28, 2011
Debunking the 2-State Myth
Counting on Palestinian state to improve our security situation is absolute madness.
by: Yoel Meltzer
One of the assumed benefits of the proposed two-state solution is that the creation of a Palestinian state will finally make the Palestinians fully accountable for their actions. Thus, any acts of aggression from the new entity against Israel will be considered an attack on Israel from a sovereign country rather than from a terrorist organization. Moreover, it is this distinction, so we are told, that will not only allow Israel to forcefully respond to any acts of Palestinian aggression but also do so with the full support and understanding of the international community.
Although such line of reasoning sounds very enticing and has even managed to win over some former skeptics, we shouldn’t buy it. In fact, a quick survey of the last 20 years seems to indicate otherwise.
At the height of the Gulf War in 1991, Iraq launched scud missiles at Israel in an attempt to draw it into the conflict. This was a classic case of a sovereign Arab country attacking Israel with powerfully destructive missiles, aimed at some of its most populous regions. Nonetheless, despite the numerous missiles that landed in Israel, due to various geopolitical considerations and behind-the-door pressure Jerusalem did not respond.
Roughly 10 years later, Israel speedily removed all of its troops from southern Lebanon. At the time we were promised that Israeli positions would be taken over by the South Lebanese Army (SLA) in order to prevent Hezbollah forces from stationing themselves within spitball range of Israel’s northern border. In addition, we were assured by then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak that should Hezbollah ever commit an act of aggression against Israel our response would be very painful.
Like usual, Israel fulfilled its side of the agreement while the Arabs failed to uphold their part. As a result, rather than having the SLA parked across the border we received Hezbollah. This change of events afforded Hezbollah the opportunity to closely watch our troop movements, something they quickly cashed in on. After a mere few months of up-close surveillance, Hezbollah men dashed across the border and kidnapped three Israeli soldiers.
Israeli restraint
However, despite our hard-earned justification to retaliate to such an unprovoked act of aggression and even the prime minister's own guarantee to respond with might in such situation, in the end we did very little. Thus, the promises meant nothing and unfortunately the kidnapped soldiers were killed.
Five years after the tragic kidnappings in Lebanon, Israel removed all Jewish presence from Gaza. At the time we were told that the removal of Israeli troops from the Strip would shift the burden of accountability to the Palestinian Authority, thereby forcing it to rein in the various terrorist organizations. This, like every other promised benefit, turned out to be false as attacks against Israel only increased.
While Israel did eventually reenter Gaza at the end of 2008 as part of Operation Cast Lead, this happened only after thousands of missiles were fired at Jewish communities close to the Gaza border. Moreover, the promised admiration of the world we supposedly were to acquire following our unilateral pullout quickly melted away, as many in the international community hypocritically condemned Israel for its actions in Gaza.
Although there were times when Israel responded forcefully to cross-border attacks, such as in the Second Lebanon War, the growing trend through the years has been for a limited Israeli response or total restraint. Moreover, rather than winning the world's approval based upon our polite and considerate behavior, this trend has been accompanied by the growth of an increasingly hostile anti-Israel environment worldwide.
This being the case, why should we believe that things will be different next time? It is far more plausible to assume that acts of aggression emanating from a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria will be met with the usual limited Israeli response. Moreover, even in the rare instance where Israel responds more forcefully, it is safe to assume that the world will quickly condemn the Jewish state regardless of the circumstances.
In light of the above, how on earth can we use an unproven assumption as the basis for severely weakening our national security, something which is sure to happen if a Palestinian state is created in Judea and Samaria? Indeed, it's absolute madness.
Ynet News
Social structure of Arab societies, clout of Islamists make true democracy unlikely
by: Dan Calic
With the Arab world boiling in turmoil, Western leaders led by President Obama are throwing their support behind “populist” demonstrations ostensibly calling for “freedom” in the form of democracy, and the overthrow of governments that in all cases are dictatorial.
On the surface, calls for “freedom” and “democracy” get warm reactions from Westerners who live in countries where genuine freedom of expression is allowed and true democratic governments exist. Yet Westerners who are turning their backs on “friendly” dictators and taking up the rallying cries of the protestors do not have a genuine understanding of what the likely outcome will be should the protestors succeed.
The result will not be democracy, and friendly relations with the West will disappear.
The concepts of freedom and democracy, while basic to Western countries, are anything but in the Arab world. In fact, in the entire Middle East not a single true democracy exists among the Arab countries. The region’s only true democracy is Israel.
There are also significant cultural differences between Western countries and the Arab world that present overwhelming obstacles to “freedom” and “democracy.” While obedience to civil law and acceptance of government’s role is fundamental in Western democracies, the social structure in the Arab world is made up of an entirely different order of allegiances, which maker the prospects of implementing true democracy as likely as placing a round peg into a square hole.
Islamist power
In many cases, the most important allegiance in the Arab world is not obedience to civil law and compliance with governmental authority, but rather, to the family unit. Often, a no less important allegiance is to the Imam. Many of these religious leaders ingrain Arab society with adherence to Islam, vilify the enemies of Islam, promote jihad and Sharia law, issue decrees as they see fit and object to Western-style freedom and democracy. Indeed, the very meaning of Islam is “submission.”
A third allegiance is to the tribe or clan. Tribal law and wars between various clans have been ongoing for centuries. A young son is taught to be part of his clan and obey and participate in clan activities, including war against other clans. Disobedience can result in death.
With obedience to one’s father, imam and clan all superseding the law, Western-style freedom and democracy becomes largely impossible.
Moreover, the West should be wary of is who is behind the populist uprisings. Muslims make up 90% of the 22 Arab countries in the region, and while many young people would like to see a change in their government, the fundamentalists exert huge influence in the Arab world. Even if they are not in the majority in raw numbers, they threaten and intimidate non-fundamentalists and hold huge clout.
An excellent example in this respect is the Palestinian theater. In January 2006, elections were held in the PA and fundamentalist terror group Hamas scored a resounding victory over the more secular Fatah. Some 18 months later, after bloody battles with Fatah, Hamas violently took control of the Gaza Strip and has ruled it ever since.
Similarly, elections in other Muslim countries may result in government controlled by hard line Islamists. Once they take over, they are unlikely to give up power.
Hence, President Obama ought to be careful of what he wishes for. He might just discover that his promotion of changes and revolutions in the Arab world may come back to haunt not only him, but all of us.
Ynet News
Palestine Betrayed......The truth about the nakba!
"None of the 170,000–180,000 Arabs fleeing urban centers, and only a handful of the 130,000–160,000 villagers who left their homes, had been forced out by Jews."
Efraim Karsh's new book, "Palestine Betrayed"
Nakba, the Arabic word for "catastrophe," has entered the English language in reference to the Arab–Israeli conflict. As defined by the anti-Israel website The Electronic Intifada, Nakba means "the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands [of] Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948."
Those who wish Israel to disappear actively promote the Nakba narrative. For example, Nakba Day serves as a mournful Palestinian counterpart to Israel's Independence Day festivities, annually publicizing Israel's alleged sins. So established has this day become that Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations — the very institution that created the State of Israel — has sent his support to "the Palestinian people on Nakba Day." Even Neve Shalom, a Jewish-Palestinian community in Israel claiming to be "engaged in educational work for peace, equality, and understanding between the two peoples," dutifully commemorates Nakba Day.
The Nakba ideology presents Palestinians as victims without choices and therefore without responsibility for the ills that befell them. It blames Israel alone for the Palestinian "re MORE..fugee" problem. This view has an intuitive appeal, for Muslim and Christian Palestinians had long formed a majority on the land that became Israel, whereas most Jews were relative newcomers.
Intuitive sense, however, does not equal historical accuracy. In his new tour de force, Palestine Betrayed, Efraim Karsh of the University of London offers the latter. With his customary in-depth archival research — in this case, relying on masses of recently declassified documents from the period of British rule and of the first Arab–Israeli war, 1917–49 — clear presentation, and meticulous historical sensibility, Karsh argues the opposite case: that Palestinians decided their own destiny and bear near-total responsibility for becoming refugees.
In Karsh's words: "Far from being the hapless victims of a predatory Zionist assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who, from the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival which culminated in the violent attempt to abort the U.N. partition resolution." More broadly, he observes, "there was nothing inevitable about the Palestinian–Jewish confrontation, let alone the Arab–Israeli conflict."
Yet more counter intuitively, Karsh shows that his understanding was the conventional, indeed the undisputed interpretation in the late 1940s. Only with the passage of time did "Palestinians and their Western supporters gradually rewr[i]te their national narrative," thereby making Israel into the unique culprit, the one excoriated in the United Nations, university classrooms, and editorials.
Karsh successfully makes his case by establishing two main points:
(1) the Jewish-Zionist-Israeli side perpetually sought to find a compromise while the Palestinian-Arab-Muslim side rejected nearly all deals; and
(2) Arab intransigence and violence caused the self-inflicted "catastrophe."
The first point is more familiar, especially since the Oslo Accords of 1993, for it remains today's pattern. Karsh demonstrates a consistency of Jewish goodwill and Arab rejectionism going back to the Balfour Declaration and persisting throughout the period of British rule. (To remind, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 expressed London's intention to establish in Palestine a "national home for the Jewish people," and the British conquest of Palestine just 37 days later gave it control of Palestine until 1948.)
In the first years after 1917, Arab reaction was muted, as leaders and masses alike recognized the benefits of the dynamic Zionist enterprise that helped revive a backward, poor, and sparsely populated Palestine. Then emerged, with British facilitation, the noxious figure who would dominate Palestinian politics over the next three decades, Amin al-Husseini. From about 1921 on, Karsh documents, Zionists and Palestinians had many choices to make; while the former invariably opted for compromise, the latter relentlessly decided on extermination.
In various capacities — mufti, head of Islamic and political organizations, Hitler ally, hero of the Arab masses — Husseini drove his constituents to what Karsh calls "a relentless collision course with the Zionist movement." Hating Jews so maniacally that he went on to join the Nazi genocide machine, Husseini refused to accept their presence in any numbers in Palestine, much less any form of Zionist sovereignty.
From the early 1920s, then, one witnessed a pattern still in place and familiar today: Zionist accommodation, "painful concessions," and constructive efforts to bridge differences, met by Palestinian anti-Semitism, rejectionism, and violence.
Complementing this binary dramatis personae, and complicating its stark contrast, stood the generally more accommodating Palestinian masses, the disgracefully anti-Semitic British mandatory authority, a Jordanian king eager to rule the Jews as subjects, feckless Arab state leaders, and an erratic American government.
Despite the radicalization of Palestinian opinion by the mufti and despite the Nazi rise to power, Zionists kept seeking an accommodation. It took some years, but the mufti's zero-sum policy and eliminationism eventually convinced reluctant Labor leaders, including David Ben-Gurion, that good works would not facilitate their dream of acceptance. Still, despite repeated failures, they continued the search for a moderate Arab partner with whom to strike a deal.
In contrast, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the forerunner of today's Likud party, already in 1923 understood that "there is not even the slightest hope of ever obtaining the agreement of the Arabs of the Land of Israel to 'Palestine' becoming a country with a Jewish majority." Yet even he rejected the idea of expelling Arabs and insisted on their full enfranchisement in a future Jewish state.
This dialectic culminated in November 1947, when the United Nations passed a partition plan that nowadays would be termed a two-state solution. In other words, it handed the Palestinians a state on a silver platter. Zionists rejoiced but Palestinian leaders, foremost the malign Husseini, sourly rejected any solution that endorsed Jewish autonomy. They insisted on everything and so got nothing. Had they accepted the U.N. plan, Palestine would be celebrating its 62nd anniversary this May. And there would have been no Nakba.
The most original part of Palestine Betrayed is the half that contains a detailed review of the flight of Muslims and Christians from Palestine in the years 1947–49. Here Karsh's archival research comes into its own, allowing him to present a uniquely rich picture of the specific circumstances of Arab flight. He goes one by one through the various Arab population centers — Qastel, Deir Yassin, Tiberias, Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Safad — and then takes a close look at the villages.
Israel's war of independence divides into two parts. Ferocious fighting began within hours of the United Nations vote to partition Palestine on Nov. 29, 1947, and lasted till the eve of the British evacuation on May 14, 1948. The international conflict began on May 15 (the day after Israel came into being), when five Arab state armies invaded, with hostilities lasting until January 1949. The first phase consisted largely of guerrilla warfare, the second primarily of conventional warfare. Over half (between 300,000 and 340,000) of the 600,000 Arab refugees fled before the British evacuation, and most of them in the final month.
Palestinians fled in a wide range of circumstances and for varied reasons. Arab commanders ordered noncombatants out of the way of military maneuvers; or they threatened laggards with treatment as traitors if they stayed; or they demanded that villages be evacuated to improve their standing on the battlefield; or they promised a safe return in a matter of days. Some communities preferred to flee rather than to sign a truce with the Zionists; in the words of Jaffa's mayor, "I do not mind destruction of Jaffa if we secure destruction of Tel Aviv." The mufti's agents attacked Jews to provoke hostilities. Families with the means to do so fled danger. When agricultural tenants heard that their landlords would be punished, they worried about being expelled and preempted by abandoning the land. Bitter internecine enmities hobbled planning. Shortages of food and other necessities spread. Services like water-pumping stations were abandoned. Fears spread of Arab gunmen, as did rumors of Zionist atrocities.
In only one case (Lydda) did Israeli troops push Arabs out. The singularity of this event bears emphasis. Karsh explains about the entire first phase of fighting: "None of the 170,000–180,000 Arabs fleeing urban centers, and only a handful of the 130,000–160,000 villagers who left their homes, had been forced out by Jews."
The Palestinian leadership disapproved of a population return, seeing this as implicitly recognizing the nascent State of Israel. The Israelis were at first ready to take back the evacuees but then hardened their position as the war progressed. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion explained their thinking, on June 16, 1948: "This will be a war of life and death and [the evacuees] must not be able to return to the abandoned places. . . . We did not start the war. They made the war. Jaffa waged war on us, Haifa waged war on us, Beisan waged war on us. And I do not want them again to make war."
In sum, Karsh explains, "it was the actions of the Arab leaders that condemned hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to exile."
In this book, Karsh establishes two momentous facts: that Arabs aborted the Palestinian state and that they caused the Nakba. In the process, he confirms his status as the preeminent historian of the modern Middle East writing today, and extends the arguments of three of his earlier books. His magnum opus, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923 (with Inari Karsh, 1999), argued that Middle Easterners were not, as usually thought, "hapless victims of predatory imperial powers but active participants in the restructuring of their region," a shift with vast political implications. Palestine Betrayed applies that book's thesis to the Arab–Israeli conflict, depriving Palestinians of excuses and victimhood, showing that they actively, if mistakenly, chose their destiny.
In Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians" (1997), Karsh exposed the shoddy work, even the fraudulence, of the school of Israeli historians who blame the 1948–49 Palestinian refugee problem on the Jewish state. Palestine Betrayed offers the flip side; if the earlier book refuted mistakes, this one establishes truths. Finally, in Islamic Imperialism: A History (2006), he showed the expansionist core of the Islamic faith in action over the centuries; here he explores that drive in small-bore detail among the Palestinians, connecting the supremacist Islamic mentality with an unwillingness to make practical concessions to Jewish sovereignty.
Palestine Betrayed re-frames today's Arab–Israeli debate by putting it into its proper historical context. Proving that for 90 years the Palestinian political elite has opted to reject "the Jewish national revival and [insisted on] the need for its violent destruction," Karsh correctly concludes that the conflict will end only when the Palestinians give up on their "genocidal hopes."
This article is originally appear at May 17, 2010, Daniel Pipes.Org
Mr. Pipes is a columnist for National Review Online, director of the Middle East Forum, and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Daniel Pipes
Ynet News
Assads poisoned Mideast’s atmosphere, engaged in multi-front war on Israel
by: Mordechai Nisan
Even in our world colored with grays and not only blacks and whites, the fall of the Assad regime in Damascus would be a great blessing for the Middle East and the world. Nonetheless, for some Israelis this would be a hard blow to suffer, because it might signify that Israel will be stuck with the Golan Heights for the long future.
The list of Syria’s misdemeanors and crimes is legion. From belligerent Soviet ally to godfather and patron of Palestinian terrorism, Hafez the father and Bashar the son crafted a policy strategy that demonized Israel, betrayed the Arab world, consolidated the regional hegemony of Iran, and perpetuated an Alawite sectarian regime in defiance of the Sunni Muslim majority in the country. Acting against their countrymen, the Assads persecuted the Kurds, intimidated the Druze, and despoiled the tiny Jewish community.
The quest for power whetted the ambition of the mountain family from Qardaha. They reached for rule in the 1960s, grabbed it in 1970, and held it with a vengeance employing a brutal dictatorship, a regime of fear, while waving tattered Arabist anti-Israeli slogans.
The invasion of Lebanon in 1976 that culminated in a ruthless and bloodthirsty occupation only seemingly ended in 2005; throughout it was a scandalous violation of Lebanese human rights, national identity, and political independence. A series of Syrian assassinations of key Christian Lebanese personalities did not exclude, we shall never doubt, the former Sunni Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri. Syrian interventionism also played a destructive role in Iraq to foil America’s goal of fashioning stability in the post-Saddam era on the fractured Baghdadian political landscape.
Israeli woes
Israeli sorrows and sufferings from the Assads’ Syria were far more insidious in comparison to any inflicted upon the Jewish state by any other country. Perhaps this litany of havoc began with the October 1973 Yom Kippur War that continued until May 1974 on the Golan front.
Syria’s torturing of Israeli POWs should never be forgotten. The smashing of Lebanon in the 1970s, as in the Hundred Days War in Beirut in 1978, and supporting Palestinian warfare against the Lebanese, including the barbaric massacre of Christian communities, was designed to deny Israel a free Lebanon that would be a friendly neighbor.
Syria allying with Hezbollah from the 1980s and facilitating its armaments pipeline and fighting doctrine bled Israel, demoralized the Jews, and contributed to the reprehensible and reckless IDF withdrawal in May, 2000. When Syria forged intimate ties with Iran, soon after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, it became clear that Khomeini’s jihad was now comfortably pre-positioned on Israel’s northern border regions.
Syria worked assiduously to strategically isolate Israel in the Middle East in putting together a politically unorthodox alliance system. Israel’s former regional partner, Sunni non-Arab Turkey, was enticed by its own ambitions to adopt an adversarial anti-Israel position.
The Syrian-Turkey connection warmed up, and their joint pro-Palestinian stance emitted a virulent rancor. The Damascene headquarters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad radiated Assad’s centralizing leadership role in the war against Israel. This was no less apparent with Syria’s emerging nuclear program, which Israel confronted in bombing its facility in 2007.
All the while official and non-official Israeli movers and shakers, loyal to their paradigm and disloyal to their people, fantasized that Bashar Assad was really interested in peace with Israel, and but for Jerusalem’s obstinacy a deal would be concluded.
This interpretation was divorced from the glaring strategic data and Syrian political connections that had ripened over the years. The fact that the Golan Heights was a tranquil front since 1974 did not prove the Assads’ inclination toward peace with Israel, but rather indicated that the multi-front war Syria was directing against Israel could be superbly effective as an indirect strategy conducted with impunity.
Future Hopes
When and if the Assad regime falls, the collapse of Iranian hegemony across the region may not be far behind. The Arab Sunni world will rejoice that wayward Syria has been separated from the Tehran Shiite-dominated axis. Losing its strategic hinterland and ideological benefactor, Hezbollah too will suffer a blow which will catalyze re-arranging power relations in the forlorn land of the cedars.
Freedom in Damascus will contribute to the recovery of freedom in Beirut. I believe, in rejecting the fossilized Israeli establishment view, that the end of Syrian domination of Lebanon is absolutely the moral and reasonable political interest for Israel.
A regime change in Damascus opens up the possibility of various domestic options: a Sunni fundamentalist state, a liberal polity, maybe a federated entity based on the geo-ethnic pluralism of the country. Despite turbulence in Syrian streets and politics, Israel’s military might assures her safety as she possesses both deterrent and offensive capabilities that will challenge Syria in the days ahead, regardless of the outcome of the revolutionary changes that now and will confront her.
We can now well appreciate the wisdom in the traditional Israeli stance since 1967 of settlement, development, and territorial retention of the Golan Heights. This obvious strategic resource adorned with manifest values of topography and water, a terrain decked with Jewish history and demographic tranquility, would be abandoned only in a fit of mental infirmity.
And with the Assads gone, the Middle East as a whole will be able to move to transcend the state of terror and tension with which the Syrian regime poisoned the political atmosphere for over four long decades.
Dr. Mordechai Nisan is a retired teacher of Middle East Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Ynet News
by: Yoel Meltzer
One of the assumed benefits of the proposed two-state solution is that the creation of a Palestinian state will finally make the Palestinians fully accountable for their actions. Thus, any acts of aggression from the new entity against Israel will be considered an attack on Israel from a sovereign country rather than from a terrorist organization. Moreover, it is this distinction, so we are told, that will not only allow Israel to forcefully respond to any acts of Palestinian aggression but also do so with the full support and understanding of the international community.
Although such line of reasoning sounds very enticing and has even managed to win over some former skeptics, we shouldn’t buy it. In fact, a quick survey of the last 20 years seems to indicate otherwise.
At the height of the Gulf War in 1991, Iraq launched scud missiles at Israel in an attempt to draw it into the conflict. This was a classic case of a sovereign Arab country attacking Israel with powerfully destructive missiles, aimed at some of its most populous regions. Nonetheless, despite the numerous missiles that landed in Israel, due to various geopolitical considerations and behind-the-door pressure Jerusalem did not respond.
Roughly 10 years later, Israel speedily removed all of its troops from southern Lebanon. At the time we were promised that Israeli positions would be taken over by the South Lebanese Army (SLA) in order to prevent Hezbollah forces from stationing themselves within spitball range of Israel’s northern border. In addition, we were assured by then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak that should Hezbollah ever commit an act of aggression against Israel our response would be very painful.
Like usual, Israel fulfilled its side of the agreement while the Arabs failed to uphold their part. As a result, rather than having the SLA parked across the border we received Hezbollah. This change of events afforded Hezbollah the opportunity to closely watch our troop movements, something they quickly cashed in on. After a mere few months of up-close surveillance, Hezbollah men dashed across the border and kidnapped three Israeli soldiers.
Israeli restraint
However, despite our hard-earned justification to retaliate to such an unprovoked act of aggression and even the prime minister's own guarantee to respond with might in such situation, in the end we did very little. Thus, the promises meant nothing and unfortunately the kidnapped soldiers were killed.
Five years after the tragic kidnappings in Lebanon, Israel removed all Jewish presence from Gaza. At the time we were told that the removal of Israeli troops from the Strip would shift the burden of accountability to the Palestinian Authority, thereby forcing it to rein in the various terrorist organizations. This, like every other promised benefit, turned out to be false as attacks against Israel only increased.
While Israel did eventually reenter Gaza at the end of 2008 as part of Operation Cast Lead, this happened only after thousands of missiles were fired at Jewish communities close to the Gaza border. Moreover, the promised admiration of the world we supposedly were to acquire following our unilateral pullout quickly melted away, as many in the international community hypocritically condemned Israel for its actions in Gaza.
Although there were times when Israel responded forcefully to cross-border attacks, such as in the Second Lebanon War, the growing trend through the years has been for a limited Israeli response or total restraint. Moreover, rather than winning the world's approval based upon our polite and considerate behavior, this trend has been accompanied by the growth of an increasingly hostile anti-Israel environment worldwide.
This being the case, why should we believe that things will be different next time? It is far more plausible to assume that acts of aggression emanating from a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria will be met with the usual limited Israeli response. Moreover, even in the rare instance where Israel responds more forcefully, it is safe to assume that the world will quickly condemn the Jewish state regardless of the circumstances.
In light of the above, how on earth can we use an unproven assumption as the basis for severely weakening our national security, something which is sure to happen if a Palestinian state is created in Judea and Samaria? Indeed, it's absolute madness.
Ynet News
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Revisiting the Jordan Option
With hopes fading for two-state solution, ‘Jordan is Palestine’ option may be best alternative
by: Asaf Romirowsky
Amid the unrest now sweeping the Middle East, Israeli government and security officials are quietly discussing an unusual strategy that would pass the Palestinians’ political future off to Jordan. With the odds of a negotiated two-state solution at an all-time low, former Defense Minister Moshe Arens, Knesset Member Arieh Eldad, and Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin resurrected the “Jordan is Palestine” model for regional peace.
Israeli officials fear that a Palestinian Intifada could break out on both sides of the Jordan River, and they seek to make it as much a Jordanian problem as an Israeli one.
In February, Human Rights Watch, the world’s self-proclaimed defender of minority rights, produced a 60-page report entitled, “Stateless Again: Palestinian-Origin Jordanians Deprived of their Nationality.” The paper details how Jordan deprives its Palestinian citizens of West Bank origins their basic rights, such education and healthcare. The report received scant attention back then. But the problem of Jordanian Palestinians, amidst growing unrest in the Hashemite Kingdom, has put the issue back on the front burner.
Israeli analysts worry that if the Jordanian government is to become more representative, it is possible that the country’s 72% Palestinian population could effectively take control. Jordan, in effect, could become “Palestine.”
The notion of a Palestinian controlled polity in Jordan is not new. From the war of Israeli independence in 1948 through the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli politicians on the Left and Right advanced a policy of “Jordan is Palestine.” While defending Israel from Arab aggression, they proposed that Jordan become the Palestinian homeland. Israeli officials proposed various scenarios for a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation that fused the East Bank and West Bank of the Jordan River under one administration.
However, it is not as simple as that. Dan Schueftan, author of A Jordanian Option, correctly noted in 1986 that such an arrangement would be dependent on Israeli-Jordanian relations and how the two parties view potential threats from the Palestinian populations in their midst.
Inseparable security needs
To be sure, in the years after the Six-Day War, the Jordanian monarchy was wary of the Palestinians. Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat challenged the sovereignty of the country in 1970. After that, the kingdom had blocked the flow of Palestinians from the West Bank into the East Bank in order to preserve the kingdom’s Hashemite political structure. To a certain extent, the Jordanians renounced all claims to the West Bank in 1988, backed the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the early 1990s, and then made peace with Israel in 1994 in an attempt to prevent further flooding of Palestinians into their country.
To a certain extent Jerusalem has long looked to the Hashemite monarchy to maintain stability and security on both sides of the river. Both Amman and Jerusalem, in fact, recognize that their security needs are inseparable. Jordan has benefited from the periods of relative quiet and prosperity in Israel. Accordingly, Jordanian security forces have been increasingly involved in the West Bank, where they conduct joint training sessions with Palestinian forces. It has been a win-win-win situation for Jordan, Israel and the Palestinians.
The problem now is that Jordan’s traditional power centers are unhappy with the rise of Palestinian influence in the country. Tribal leaders resent Jordan’s Queen Rania, born in Kuwait to a family with roots in the West Bank, for her vocal advocacy of the Palestinian cause. In fact, 36 tribal leaders recently published their objections to Rania’s position, fearing that it will accelerate a slow Palestinian takeover of the kingdom.
With hopes fading for a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, this seemingly far-flung notion may become the last, best option. The problem is that it could embolden Palestinian radical groups, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood, which derive much of their power from disillusioned Palestinians in the West and East Banks. With the rise of such groups in Jordan, the peace agreement between Amman and Jerusalem would be in peril.
Nevertheless, as uncomfortable as it might be for Palestinians, Israelis and Jordanians to admit, the Jordanian option might be the best one they have.
Asaf Romirowsky is an adjunct scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former liaison officer from the Israeli Defense Forces to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Ynet News
by: Asaf Romirowsky
Amid the unrest now sweeping the Middle East, Israeli government and security officials are quietly discussing an unusual strategy that would pass the Palestinians’ political future off to Jordan. With the odds of a negotiated two-state solution at an all-time low, former Defense Minister Moshe Arens, Knesset Member Arieh Eldad, and Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin resurrected the “Jordan is Palestine” model for regional peace.
Israeli officials fear that a Palestinian Intifada could break out on both sides of the Jordan River, and they seek to make it as much a Jordanian problem as an Israeli one.
In February, Human Rights Watch, the world’s self-proclaimed defender of minority rights, produced a 60-page report entitled, “Stateless Again: Palestinian-Origin Jordanians Deprived of their Nationality.” The paper details how Jordan deprives its Palestinian citizens of West Bank origins their basic rights, such education and healthcare. The report received scant attention back then. But the problem of Jordanian Palestinians, amidst growing unrest in the Hashemite Kingdom, has put the issue back on the front burner.
Israeli analysts worry that if the Jordanian government is to become more representative, it is possible that the country’s 72% Palestinian population could effectively take control. Jordan, in effect, could become “Palestine.”
The notion of a Palestinian controlled polity in Jordan is not new. From the war of Israeli independence in 1948 through the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli politicians on the Left and Right advanced a policy of “Jordan is Palestine.” While defending Israel from Arab aggression, they proposed that Jordan become the Palestinian homeland. Israeli officials proposed various scenarios for a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation that fused the East Bank and West Bank of the Jordan River under one administration.
However, it is not as simple as that. Dan Schueftan, author of A Jordanian Option, correctly noted in 1986 that such an arrangement would be dependent on Israeli-Jordanian relations and how the two parties view potential threats from the Palestinian populations in their midst.
Inseparable security needs
To be sure, in the years after the Six-Day War, the Jordanian monarchy was wary of the Palestinians. Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat challenged the sovereignty of the country in 1970. After that, the kingdom had blocked the flow of Palestinians from the West Bank into the East Bank in order to preserve the kingdom’s Hashemite political structure. To a certain extent, the Jordanians renounced all claims to the West Bank in 1988, backed the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the early 1990s, and then made peace with Israel in 1994 in an attempt to prevent further flooding of Palestinians into their country.
To a certain extent Jerusalem has long looked to the Hashemite monarchy to maintain stability and security on both sides of the river. Both Amman and Jerusalem, in fact, recognize that their security needs are inseparable. Jordan has benefited from the periods of relative quiet and prosperity in Israel. Accordingly, Jordanian security forces have been increasingly involved in the West Bank, where they conduct joint training sessions with Palestinian forces. It has been a win-win-win situation for Jordan, Israel and the Palestinians.
The problem now is that Jordan’s traditional power centers are unhappy with the rise of Palestinian influence in the country. Tribal leaders resent Jordan’s Queen Rania, born in Kuwait to a family with roots in the West Bank, for her vocal advocacy of the Palestinian cause. In fact, 36 tribal leaders recently published their objections to Rania’s position, fearing that it will accelerate a slow Palestinian takeover of the kingdom.
With hopes fading for a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, this seemingly far-flung notion may become the last, best option. The problem is that it could embolden Palestinian radical groups, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood, which derive much of their power from disillusioned Palestinians in the West and East Banks. With the rise of such groups in Jordan, the peace agreement between Amman and Jerusalem would be in peril.
Nevertheless, as uncomfortable as it might be for Palestinians, Israelis and Jordanians to admit, the Jordanian option might be the best one they have.
Asaf Romirowsky is an adjunct scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former liaison officer from the Israeli Defense Forces to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Ynet News
Fighting Jewish Genocide
Western world must join fight on genocidal incitement against Jews, Israelis.
by: Giulio Meotti
Only one nation on this planet is regarded as virtually having no civilians: Israel. Back in the 1970s already, international law expert Yoram Dinstein argued that according to UN definitions, terrorism and incitement against Israelis constitutes genocide.
David Ben-Gurion’s famous statement “Oom, Shmoom,” meaning “The UN - who cares?” summed up Israel’s indifference to world opinion in the past. It has been a failed policy as Israel’s enemies are now using all global means at their disposal to undermine the Jewish State.
In a few days, Israel will mark Holocaust Commemoration Day. There is no better time to support the historical battle just initiated by the Hebrew University-Hadassah Centre for Violence and Genocide Prevention and backed by former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.
The campaign takes aim at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Islamic religious leaders and the media for “inciting to commit genocide" and fomenting lethal anti-Jewishness reminiscent of the 1930s. The Jews are demonized using accusations of conspiracy and thirst for blood or power.
The Jews are described as sub-humans by expressions like “pig,” “cancer,” “filth”, “microbes” or “vermin”; hate material such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or school maps without Israel are being disseminated; the Jewish right to self-determination is denied, by claiming that Israel’s existence is “racist” and akin to “apartheid”; comparisons are drawn between Israeli policy and the Nazis; world Jewry is being held responsible, collectively for the actions of Israel.
Killing pregnant women
The legal basis for this anti-genocide campaign is the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, ratified on January 12, 1951 by 138 states including Iran. At this time, Tehran calls for Israel’s destruction and dehumanization, denies the Holocaust denial and incites to commit mass murder.
An upcoming example of incitement is the UN's “Durban III” conference in September 2011. Israel will be declared an “apartheid” and “criminal” state, and the Jews will be slammed as inveterate racists.
The first Durban conference was held in South Africa in 2001, where well-known NGOs such as Amnesty International and Save the Children attached their names to the racist parade. NGOs distributed leaflets with a portrait of Hitler and the inscription: “What if Hitler had won? There would be no Israel, and no Palestinian bloodshed.” Three months later the second Intifada broke out, with 1,500 Jewish civilians subsequently slaughtered in terror attacks.
Iran is not unique in inciting a new Jewish bloodbath. Another example of incitement is the fatwa issued by Muslim Brotherhood’s guru, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, permitting the killing of Jewish fetuses, on the logic that when Jews grow up they might join the Israeli army.
Below are just few names of pregnant Israeli women slaughtered by terror groups such as Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad: Yael Shorek was nine-months pregnant; Gadi and Tzippi Shemesh were killed immediately after having a scan of their unborn twins; Avital Wolanski was six-months pregnant; Rivka Holzberg was five-months pregnant; Tali Hatuel was eight-months pregnant, and Tehiya Bloomberg was five-months pregnant.
In 2003 the World Union for Progressive Judaism asked UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the UN Human Rights Commission to condemn the Hamas' charter as a violation of the Convention against Genocide. A year later, three brave Arab intellectuals, Jawad Hashim, Shakir al-Nabulsi and Lakhdar Lafif sent a request to the UN Security Council, urging the establishment of an international tribunal for the prosecution of Islamist incitement against Jews, Muslim “apostates” and Christians.
Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that it was words, not machinery, that produced Auschwitz. Now the call for Israel’s destruction echoes through schools and mosques, textbooks and newspapers, TV series and pseudo “documentaries.” And not only in the Arab world. Thanks to satellite channels, Hezbollah’s al-Manar and Hamas’ al-Aqsa TV stations can beam their incitement and hatred for the Jews into European living rooms, radicalizing Muslim immigrants.
It won't end with the Jews
That’s why Israel and its Western allies must launch a campaign to charge organizations and leaders who commit incitement, enlisting the help of attorneys, journalists and writers to testify on the endless litanies of paranoia and genocidal perversion. Such people risk their career and life daily by denouncing the blood libels, and Israel should support them.
Western parliaments would politically validate the charges and Europe must be urged to cut its business dealing with Tehran if the mullahs continue to incite against the Jews. Irwin Cotler, Canada's former minister of justice and attorney general, suggested that Ahmadinejad and other incitement leaders should be placed on a “watch list” by Western countries preventing their entrance as “inadmissible persons” (Qaradawi is already banned in the UK and US.)
Brave groups, such as UN Watch, can support the battle in legal forums. They could launch a counter campaign against UNESCO's racist policy on Judaism’s holy sites (Rachel’s tomb and the Cave of Patriarchs in Hebron were just designed as “mosques.”) In 2009, a similar campaign prevented Farouk Hosni, the Egyptian minister who said that he “would burn Israeli books himself if found in Egyptian libraries” from becoming UNESCO's head.
Moreover, human rights groups should be bombarded with the untold Israeli statistics: The 17,000 people wounded in terror attacks; the 1,600 civilians killed; the 12,000 rockets fired on southern Israeli cities; the fact that some 40% of wounded Israelis will remain with permanent disabilities.
There are wounded heroes who just want to tell their story. They should be invited to speak in the courts because they are the survivors of current-day genocide.
In European faculties, there are still brave academicians who can denounce Islamist-supporting speakers among them. An example of incitement is the book “The Matza of Zion” written by former Syrian defense minister Mustafa Tlas, in which he claims that the Jewish matzot was made from Arab blood. Still, the West maintains shameful partnerships with Arab libraries holding this book. Western democracies must be urged to rescind these cultural deals.
This is an historical battle that Israel can win with the support of Westerners who still care about the fate of their civilization. To the Spanish fascists who were saying “Viva la muerte!”, the Republicans replied: “No pasarán.” We should offer the same response to contemporary death cultists. As history has taught us, while it begins with Jews, it does not end with Jews.
Giulio Meotti, a journalist with Il Foglio, is the author of the book A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel's Victims of Terrorism.
Ynet News
Ynet Newsby: Giulio Meotti
Only one nation on this planet is regarded as virtually having no civilians: Israel. Back in the 1970s already, international law expert Yoram Dinstein argued that according to UN definitions, terrorism and incitement against Israelis constitutes genocide.
David Ben-Gurion’s famous statement “Oom, Shmoom,” meaning “The UN - who cares?” summed up Israel’s indifference to world opinion in the past. It has been a failed policy as Israel’s enemies are now using all global means at their disposal to undermine the Jewish State.
In a few days, Israel will mark Holocaust Commemoration Day. There is no better time to support the historical battle just initiated by the Hebrew University-Hadassah Centre for Violence and Genocide Prevention and backed by former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.
The campaign takes aim at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Islamic religious leaders and the media for “inciting to commit genocide" and fomenting lethal anti-Jewishness reminiscent of the 1930s. The Jews are demonized using accusations of conspiracy and thirst for blood or power.
The Jews are described as sub-humans by expressions like “pig,” “cancer,” “filth”, “microbes” or “vermin”; hate material such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or school maps without Israel are being disseminated; the Jewish right to self-determination is denied, by claiming that Israel’s existence is “racist” and akin to “apartheid”; comparisons are drawn between Israeli policy and the Nazis; world Jewry is being held responsible, collectively for the actions of Israel.
Killing pregnant women
The legal basis for this anti-genocide campaign is the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, ratified on January 12, 1951 by 138 states including Iran. At this time, Tehran calls for Israel’s destruction and dehumanization, denies the Holocaust denial and incites to commit mass murder.
An upcoming example of incitement is the UN's “Durban III” conference in September 2011. Israel will be declared an “apartheid” and “criminal” state, and the Jews will be slammed as inveterate racists.
The first Durban conference was held in South Africa in 2001, where well-known NGOs such as Amnesty International and Save the Children attached their names to the racist parade. NGOs distributed leaflets with a portrait of Hitler and the inscription: “What if Hitler had won? There would be no Israel, and no Palestinian bloodshed.” Three months later the second Intifada broke out, with 1,500 Jewish civilians subsequently slaughtered in terror attacks.
Iran is not unique in inciting a new Jewish bloodbath. Another example of incitement is the fatwa issued by Muslim Brotherhood’s guru, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, permitting the killing of Jewish fetuses, on the logic that when Jews grow up they might join the Israeli army.
Below are just few names of pregnant Israeli women slaughtered by terror groups such as Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad: Yael Shorek was nine-months pregnant; Gadi and Tzippi Shemesh were killed immediately after having a scan of their unborn twins; Avital Wolanski was six-months pregnant; Rivka Holzberg was five-months pregnant; Tali Hatuel was eight-months pregnant, and Tehiya Bloomberg was five-months pregnant.
In 2003 the World Union for Progressive Judaism asked UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the UN Human Rights Commission to condemn the Hamas' charter as a violation of the Convention against Genocide. A year later, three brave Arab intellectuals, Jawad Hashim, Shakir al-Nabulsi and Lakhdar Lafif sent a request to the UN Security Council, urging the establishment of an international tribunal for the prosecution of Islamist incitement against Jews, Muslim “apostates” and Christians.
Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that it was words, not machinery, that produced Auschwitz. Now the call for Israel’s destruction echoes through schools and mosques, textbooks and newspapers, TV series and pseudo “documentaries.” And not only in the Arab world. Thanks to satellite channels, Hezbollah’s al-Manar and Hamas’ al-Aqsa TV stations can beam their incitement and hatred for the Jews into European living rooms, radicalizing Muslim immigrants.
It won't end with the Jews
That’s why Israel and its Western allies must launch a campaign to charge organizations and leaders who commit incitement, enlisting the help of attorneys, journalists and writers to testify on the endless litanies of paranoia and genocidal perversion. Such people risk their career and life daily by denouncing the blood libels, and Israel should support them.
Western parliaments would politically validate the charges and Europe must be urged to cut its business dealing with Tehran if the mullahs continue to incite against the Jews. Irwin Cotler, Canada's former minister of justice and attorney general, suggested that Ahmadinejad and other incitement leaders should be placed on a “watch list” by Western countries preventing their entrance as “inadmissible persons” (Qaradawi is already banned in the UK and US.)
Brave groups, such as UN Watch, can support the battle in legal forums. They could launch a counter campaign against UNESCO's racist policy on Judaism’s holy sites (Rachel’s tomb and the Cave of Patriarchs in Hebron were just designed as “mosques.”) In 2009, a similar campaign prevented Farouk Hosni, the Egyptian minister who said that he “would burn Israeli books himself if found in Egyptian libraries” from becoming UNESCO's head.
Moreover, human rights groups should be bombarded with the untold Israeli statistics: The 17,000 people wounded in terror attacks; the 1,600 civilians killed; the 12,000 rockets fired on southern Israeli cities; the fact that some 40% of wounded Israelis will remain with permanent disabilities.
There are wounded heroes who just want to tell their story. They should be invited to speak in the courts because they are the survivors of current-day genocide.
In European faculties, there are still brave academicians who can denounce Islamist-supporting speakers among them. An example of incitement is the book “The Matza of Zion” written by former Syrian defense minister Mustafa Tlas, in which he claims that the Jewish matzot was made from Arab blood. Still, the West maintains shameful partnerships with Arab libraries holding this book. Western democracies must be urged to rescind these cultural deals.
This is an historical battle that Israel can win with the support of Westerners who still care about the fate of their civilization. To the Spanish fascists who were saying “Viva la muerte!”, the Republicans replied: “No pasarán.” We should offer the same response to contemporary death cultists. As history has taught us, while it begins with Jews, it does not end with Jews.
Giulio Meotti, a journalist with Il Foglio, is the author of the book A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel's Victims of Terrorism.
Ynet News
A Middle Eastern Lesson
Arab brutality shows what would have happened to Mideast’s Jews without IDF protection
by: Guy Bechor
Here’s one of Aesop’s fables: One day, the wolves sent a delegation to the sheep and asked to make eternal peace with them. “The dogs are at fault for the conflict between us,” the wolves told the sheep. “They are the source of dispute. They bark at us, threaten us, and provoke us. Banish the dogs and there will be nothing to prevent eternal friendship and peace between us.” The foolish sheep believed this and banished the dogs. And so, without the protection the dogs used to offer, the sheep became easy prey for the wolves.
Now that the world is horrified by the brutality of the Syrian regime of terror, which mercilessly butchers its own citizens, we can see what would have happened to Jews in the Middle East without their own protective force, the IDF.
In this era, lies, hypocrisy and illusions reign supreme. Many people among us and in the world believe in eternal Mideastern peace, democracy and wonderful friendship among nations, and in the repeated propaganda whereby Israel is Goliath and the Arabs are David. Yet then came reality and proved them wrong.
As we recall, Tom Friedman already reprimanded Israel for failing to understand the new “era of freedom” in the Middle East; the same sentiments were uttered by other naïve Jews, a species that did not show great survival instincts over the history of European Jewry.
When one observes the fate of the Christians in the Middle East, one realizes what would have happened to the Jews had they been defeated, heaven forbid, or remained without protection. Christians are being butchered in states that experienced “democratic change” such as Iraq, Egypt and Tunisia; their churches are being burned, they’re prompted to escape, and their property is looted.
The Christians were misfortunate enough not to establish a state with a clear Christian identity, unlike the Jews. Naively, the Christians believed in partnership with other ethnicities, and now they’re paying the price – in Lebanon, where they’re becoming extinct, in the Palestinian Authority, and very soon in Syria as well.
Targeting the IDF
This is the oh-so-transparent reason why hostile elements wish to undermine Israel’s national Jewish identity. Their desire to establish “a state of all its citizens” – a bi-national or multi-national state – aims to expunge the state’s Jewish identity, thus slowly eliminating the Jewish presence around here.
Now, the great significance of Jewish nationalism, that is, Zionism, also becomes clear, after so many already slammed it or argued that its time has passed. It’s a pity that some Jews still believe these dangerous notions.
This is also the reason why outside elements – and to my regret domestic elements as well – try to weaken the IDF via needless commissions of inquiry, incitement and criticism, propaganda, and an effort to taint the army’s moral prestige. This is the reason while arrest warrants for IDF officers are issued worldwide. The main aim here is to weaken and destroy the only defensive force that protects Jews in the Middle East.
Yet when we see the real Middle East rising up and butchering its own people in Syria, it serves as a live history lesson for all of us. Truth does not shy away and it proves who the menace in this region is, and who is being threatened with extermination; who the murderer is, and who the victims are. Suddenly, the Arab propaganda that the world has been hearing for dozens of years is fading away. It has no power in the face of truth and history.
In the face of the massacre in the Syrian town of Deraa on Monday, a continuation of the glorious tradition of the Assad family, always keep in mind the fable about the sheep, which became an easy pretty because of their lethal naiveté. There is nothing new about the brutality and foolishness of nations; Aesop wrote about it in the Sixth Century already. It is us, Jews, who particularly need to remind ourselves of this
Ynet News
by: Guy Bechor
Here’s one of Aesop’s fables: One day, the wolves sent a delegation to the sheep and asked to make eternal peace with them. “The dogs are at fault for the conflict between us,” the wolves told the sheep. “They are the source of dispute. They bark at us, threaten us, and provoke us. Banish the dogs and there will be nothing to prevent eternal friendship and peace between us.” The foolish sheep believed this and banished the dogs. And so, without the protection the dogs used to offer, the sheep became easy prey for the wolves.
Now that the world is horrified by the brutality of the Syrian regime of terror, which mercilessly butchers its own citizens, we can see what would have happened to Jews in the Middle East without their own protective force, the IDF.
In this era, lies, hypocrisy and illusions reign supreme. Many people among us and in the world believe in eternal Mideastern peace, democracy and wonderful friendship among nations, and in the repeated propaganda whereby Israel is Goliath and the Arabs are David. Yet then came reality and proved them wrong.
As we recall, Tom Friedman already reprimanded Israel for failing to understand the new “era of freedom” in the Middle East; the same sentiments were uttered by other naïve Jews, a species that did not show great survival instincts over the history of European Jewry.
When one observes the fate of the Christians in the Middle East, one realizes what would have happened to the Jews had they been defeated, heaven forbid, or remained without protection. Christians are being butchered in states that experienced “democratic change” such as Iraq, Egypt and Tunisia; their churches are being burned, they’re prompted to escape, and their property is looted.
The Christians were misfortunate enough not to establish a state with a clear Christian identity, unlike the Jews. Naively, the Christians believed in partnership with other ethnicities, and now they’re paying the price – in Lebanon, where they’re becoming extinct, in the Palestinian Authority, and very soon in Syria as well.
Targeting the IDF
This is the oh-so-transparent reason why hostile elements wish to undermine Israel’s national Jewish identity. Their desire to establish “a state of all its citizens” – a bi-national or multi-national state – aims to expunge the state’s Jewish identity, thus slowly eliminating the Jewish presence around here.
Now, the great significance of Jewish nationalism, that is, Zionism, also becomes clear, after so many already slammed it or argued that its time has passed. It’s a pity that some Jews still believe these dangerous notions.
This is also the reason why outside elements – and to my regret domestic elements as well – try to weaken the IDF via needless commissions of inquiry, incitement and criticism, propaganda, and an effort to taint the army’s moral prestige. This is the reason while arrest warrants for IDF officers are issued worldwide. The main aim here is to weaken and destroy the only defensive force that protects Jews in the Middle East.
Yet when we see the real Middle East rising up and butchering its own people in Syria, it serves as a live history lesson for all of us. Truth does not shy away and it proves who the menace in this region is, and who is being threatened with extermination; who the murderer is, and who the victims are. Suddenly, the Arab propaganda that the world has been hearing for dozens of years is fading away. It has no power in the face of truth and history.
In the face of the massacre in the Syrian town of Deraa on Monday, a continuation of the glorious tradition of the Assad family, always keep in mind the fable about the sheep, which became an easy pretty because of their lethal naiveté. There is nothing new about the brutality and foolishness of nations; Aesop wrote about it in the Sixth Century already. It is us, Jews, who particularly need to remind ourselves of this
Ynet News
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Arab Democracy - a Fantasy
Social structure of Arab societies, clout of Islamists make true democracy unlikelyby: Dan Calic
With the Arab world boiling in turmoil, Western leaders led by President Obama are throwing their support behind “populist” demonstrations ostensibly calling for “freedom” in the form of democracy, and the overthrow of governments that in all cases are dictatorial.
On the surface, calls for “freedom” and “democracy” get warm reactions from Westerners who live in countries where genuine freedom of expression is allowed and true democratic governments exist. Yet Westerners who are turning their backs on “friendly” dictators and taking up the rallying cries of the protestors do not have a genuine understanding of what the likely outcome will be should the protestors succeed.
The result will not be democracy, and friendly relations with the West will disappear.
The concepts of freedom and democracy, while basic to Western countries, are anything but in the Arab world. In fact, in the entire Middle East not a single true democracy exists among the Arab countries. The region’s only true democracy is Israel.
There are also significant cultural differences between Western countries and the Arab world that present overwhelming obstacles to “freedom” and “democracy.” While obedience to civil law and acceptance of government’s role is fundamental in Western democracies, the social structure in the Arab world is made up of an entirely different order of allegiances, which maker the prospects of implementing true democracy as likely as placing a round peg into a square hole.
Islamist power
In many cases, the most important allegiance in the Arab world is not obedience to civil law and compliance with governmental authority, but rather, to the family unit. Often, a no less important allegiance is to the Imam. Many of these religious leaders ingrain Arab society with adherence to Islam, vilify the enemies of Islam, promote jihad and Sharia law, issue decrees as they see fit and object to Western-style freedom and democracy. Indeed, the very meaning of Islam is “submission.”
A third allegiance is to the tribe or clan. Tribal law and wars between various clans have been ongoing for centuries. A young son is taught to be part of his clan and obey and participate in clan activities, including war against other clans. Disobedience can result in death.
With obedience to one’s father, imam and clan all superseding the law, Western-style freedom and democracy becomes largely impossible.
Moreover, the West should be wary of is who is behind the populist uprisings. Muslims make up 90% of the 22 Arab countries in the region, and while many young people would like to see a change in their government, the fundamentalists exert huge influence in the Arab world. Even if they are not in the majority in raw numbers, they threaten and intimidate non-fundamentalists and hold huge clout.
An excellent example in this respect is the Palestinian theater. In January 2006, elections were held in the PA and fundamentalist terror group Hamas scored a resounding victory over the more secular Fatah. Some 18 months later, after bloody battles with Fatah, Hamas violently took control of the Gaza Strip and has ruled it ever since.
Similarly, elections in other Muslim countries may result in government controlled by hard line Islamists. Once they take over, they are unlikely to give up power.
Hence, President Obama ought to be careful of what he wishes for. He might just discover that his promotion of changes and revolutions in the Arab world may come back to haunt not only him, but all of us.
Ynet News
Palestine Betrayed
Palestine Betrayed......The truth about the nakba!"None of the 170,000–180,000 Arabs fleeing urban centers, and only a handful of the 130,000–160,000 villagers who left their homes, had been forced out by Jews."
Efraim Karsh's new book, "Palestine Betrayed"
Nakba, the Arabic word for "catastrophe," has entered the English language in reference to the Arab–Israeli conflict. As defined by the anti-Israel website The Electronic Intifada, Nakba means "the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands [of] Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948."
Those who wish Israel to disappear actively promote the Nakba narrative. For example, Nakba Day serves as a mournful Palestinian counterpart to Israel's Independence Day festivities, annually publicizing Israel's alleged sins. So established has this day become that Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations — the very institution that created the State of Israel — has sent his support to "the Palestinian people on Nakba Day." Even Neve Shalom, a Jewish-Palestinian community in Israel claiming to be "engaged in educational work for peace, equality, and understanding between the two peoples," dutifully commemorates Nakba Day.
The Nakba ideology presents Palestinians as victims without choices and therefore without responsibility for the ills that befell them. It blames Israel alone for the Palestinian "re MORE..fugee" problem. This view has an intuitive appeal, for Muslim and Christian Palestinians had long formed a majority on the land that became Israel, whereas most Jews were relative newcomers.
Intuitive sense, however, does not equal historical accuracy. In his new tour de force, Palestine Betrayed, Efraim Karsh of the University of London offers the latter. With his customary in-depth archival research — in this case, relying on masses of recently declassified documents from the period of British rule and of the first Arab–Israeli war, 1917–49 — clear presentation, and meticulous historical sensibility, Karsh argues the opposite case: that Palestinians decided their own destiny and bear near-total responsibility for becoming refugees.
In Karsh's words: "Far from being the hapless victims of a predatory Zionist assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who, from the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival which culminated in the violent attempt to abort the U.N. partition resolution." More broadly, he observes, "there was nothing inevitable about the Palestinian–Jewish confrontation, let alone the Arab–Israeli conflict."
Yet more counter intuitively, Karsh shows that his understanding was the conventional, indeed the undisputed interpretation in the late 1940s. Only with the passage of time did "Palestinians and their Western supporters gradually rewr[i]te their national narrative," thereby making Israel into the unique culprit, the one excoriated in the United Nations, university classrooms, and editorials.
Karsh successfully makes his case by establishing two main points:
(1) the Jewish-Zionist-Israeli side perpetually sought to find a compromise while the Palestinian-Arab-Muslim side rejected nearly all deals; and
(2) Arab intransigence and violence caused the self-inflicted "catastrophe."
The first point is more familiar, especially since the Oslo Accords of 1993, for it remains today's pattern. Karsh demonstrates a consistency of Jewish goodwill and Arab rejectionism going back to the Balfour Declaration and persisting throughout the period of British rule. (To remind, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 expressed London's intention to establish in Palestine a "national home for the Jewish people," and the British conquest of Palestine just 37 days later gave it control of Palestine until 1948.)
In the first years after 1917, Arab reaction was muted, as leaders and masses alike recognized the benefits of the dynamic Zionist enterprise that helped revive a backward, poor, and sparsely populated Palestine. Then emerged, with British facilitation, the noxious figure who would dominate Palestinian politics over the next three decades, Amin al-Husseini. From about 1921 on, Karsh documents, Zionists and Palestinians had many choices to make; while the former invariably opted for compromise, the latter relentlessly decided on extermination.
In various capacities — mufti, head of Islamic and political organizations, Hitler ally, hero of the Arab masses — Husseini drove his constituents to what Karsh calls "a relentless collision course with the Zionist movement." Hating Jews so maniacally that he went on to join the Nazi genocide machine, Husseini refused to accept their presence in any numbers in Palestine, much less any form of Zionist sovereignty.
From the early 1920s, then, one witnessed a pattern still in place and familiar today: Zionist accommodation, "painful concessions," and constructive efforts to bridge differences, met by Palestinian anti-Semitism, rejectionism, and violence.
Complementing this binary dramatis personae, and complicating its stark contrast, stood the generally more accommodating Palestinian masses, the disgracefully anti-Semitic British mandatory authority, a Jordanian king eager to rule the Jews as subjects, feckless Arab state leaders, and an erratic American government.
Despite the radicalization of Palestinian opinion by the mufti and despite the Nazi rise to power, Zionists kept seeking an accommodation. It took some years, but the mufti's zero-sum policy and eliminationism eventually convinced reluctant Labor leaders, including David Ben-Gurion, that good works would not facilitate their dream of acceptance. Still, despite repeated failures, they continued the search for a moderate Arab partner with whom to strike a deal.
In contrast, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the forerunner of today's Likud party, already in 1923 understood that "there is not even the slightest hope of ever obtaining the agreement of the Arabs of the Land of Israel to 'Palestine' becoming a country with a Jewish majority." Yet even he rejected the idea of expelling Arabs and insisted on their full enfranchisement in a future Jewish state.
This dialectic culminated in November 1947, when the United Nations passed a partition plan that nowadays would be termed a two-state solution. In other words, it handed the Palestinians a state on a silver platter. Zionists rejoiced but Palestinian leaders, foremost the malign Husseini, sourly rejected any solution that endorsed Jewish autonomy. They insisted on everything and so got nothing. Had they accepted the U.N. plan, Palestine would be celebrating its 62nd anniversary this May. And there would have been no Nakba.
The most original part of Palestine Betrayed is the half that contains a detailed review of the flight of Muslims and Christians from Palestine in the years 1947–49. Here Karsh's archival research comes into its own, allowing him to present a uniquely rich picture of the specific circumstances of Arab flight. He goes one by one through the various Arab population centers — Qastel, Deir Yassin, Tiberias, Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Safad — and then takes a close look at the villages.
Israel's war of independence divides into two parts. Ferocious fighting began within hours of the United Nations vote to partition Palestine on Nov. 29, 1947, and lasted till the eve of the British evacuation on May 14, 1948. The international conflict began on May 15 (the day after Israel came into being), when five Arab state armies invaded, with hostilities lasting until January 1949. The first phase consisted largely of guerrilla warfare, the second primarily of conventional warfare. Over half (between 300,000 and 340,000) of the 600,000 Arab refugees fled before the British evacuation, and most of them in the final month.
Palestinians fled in a wide range of circumstances and for varied reasons. Arab commanders ordered noncombatants out of the way of military maneuvers; or they threatened laggards with treatment as traitors if they stayed; or they demanded that villages be evacuated to improve their standing on the battlefield; or they promised a safe return in a matter of days. Some communities preferred to flee rather than to sign a truce with the Zionists; in the words of Jaffa's mayor, "I do not mind destruction of Jaffa if we secure destruction of Tel Aviv." The mufti's agents attacked Jews to provoke hostilities. Families with the means to do so fled danger. When agricultural tenants heard that their landlords would be punished, they worried about being expelled and preempted by abandoning the land. Bitter internecine enmities hobbled planning. Shortages of food and other necessities spread. Services like water-pumping stations were abandoned. Fears spread of Arab gunmen, as did rumors of Zionist atrocities.
In only one case (Lydda) did Israeli troops push Arabs out. The singularity of this event bears emphasis. Karsh explains about the entire first phase of fighting: "None of the 170,000–180,000 Arabs fleeing urban centers, and only a handful of the 130,000–160,000 villagers who left their homes, had been forced out by Jews."
The Palestinian leadership disapproved of a population return, seeing this as implicitly recognizing the nascent State of Israel. The Israelis were at first ready to take back the evacuees but then hardened their position as the war progressed. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion explained their thinking, on June 16, 1948: "This will be a war of life and death and [the evacuees] must not be able to return to the abandoned places. . . . We did not start the war. They made the war. Jaffa waged war on us, Haifa waged war on us, Beisan waged war on us. And I do not want them again to make war."
In sum, Karsh explains, "it was the actions of the Arab leaders that condemned hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to exile."
In this book, Karsh establishes two momentous facts: that Arabs aborted the Palestinian state and that they caused the Nakba. In the process, he confirms his status as the preeminent historian of the modern Middle East writing today, and extends the arguments of three of his earlier books. His magnum opus, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923 (with Inari Karsh, 1999), argued that Middle Easterners were not, as usually thought, "hapless victims of predatory imperial powers but active participants in the restructuring of their region," a shift with vast political implications. Palestine Betrayed applies that book's thesis to the Arab–Israeli conflict, depriving Palestinians of excuses and victimhood, showing that they actively, if mistakenly, chose their destiny.
In Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians" (1997), Karsh exposed the shoddy work, even the fraudulence, of the school of Israeli historians who blame the 1948–49 Palestinian refugee problem on the Jewish state. Palestine Betrayed offers the flip side; if the earlier book refuted mistakes, this one establishes truths. Finally, in Islamic Imperialism: A History (2006), he showed the expansionist core of the Islamic faith in action over the centuries; here he explores that drive in small-bore detail among the Palestinians, connecting the supremacist Islamic mentality with an unwillingness to make practical concessions to Jewish sovereignty.
Palestine Betrayed re-frames today's Arab–Israeli debate by putting it into its proper historical context. Proving that for 90 years the Palestinian political elite has opted to reject "the Jewish national revival and [insisted on] the need for its violent destruction," Karsh correctly concludes that the conflict will end only when the Palestinians give up on their "genocidal hopes."
This article is originally appear at May 17, 2010, Daniel Pipes.Org
Mr. Pipes is a columnist for National Review Online, director of the Middle East Forum, and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Daniel Pipes
Arab Immigration into the Coastal Plains of Israel
Arab Immigration into the Coastal Plains of Israel (the Sharon) During the British Mandate.
by: Dr. Rivka Shpak Lissak
According to the Arabic- Palestinian propaganda, the Palestinians are the indigenous people of the country called Judea in the past, then Palestina under the British Mandte.
This article and others in the future will prove this propaganda is an attempt to rewrite history in order to eliminate the Jewish state.
Ma’ayan Hess-Ashkenazi researched the Arabic immigration to the Sharon, and this is what he found:
The Sharon area lies between the Tanninim Creek in the north and the Yarkon stream in the south, and between the foot of the mountains of Samaria in the east and the Mediterranean Sea in the west. According to data published by the Mandate Government, the Arabic population in the Sharon increased more than three-fold during its time. At the beginning of the Mandate period there were about 10,000 Arabs (mostly Muslim) in the Sharon, and in 1944 there were more than 30,000. By the time the Mandate was ended, in 1947, more Arabs had moved to the Sharon.
Demographic sources for the British Mandate period in Israel include the 1922 and 1931 censuses and data on the rural population from 1945. In addition to the British sources researchers can access sources of the Jewish settlement during the Mandate period, including the Haganah archive, the Jewish press, and studies conducted during the period, as well as personal interviews with people from that era.
The total data published by the Mandate government show that the number of Arabs grew from 752,048 in 1914 to 1,294,000 in 1944. The Arabic population nearly doubled in 30 years.
Data on natural increase published by the Mandate government show a significant natural increase in the Arabic population. Among the Muslims, the natural increase rose from 10 children per 1000 population to 29.1 children per 1000 population. Among the Christians, the natural increase reached 30.1 children per 1000 population by the end of the British Mandate. The main reason for this increase was the decrease in mortality rate from 25-30 per 1000 to 20 per 1000.
Scholars are divided over the contribution of Arabic immigration into Israel to the increase in population during the Mandate period. According to data published by the Mandate government, the natural increase in Muslim population contributed 88% of the total increase, whereas immigration contributed 12%; and among the Christians, natural increase contributed 72% of the total population increase, whereas immigration contributed 28%.
An investigation of the statistical data of the Mandate government shows differences in the rates of increase of Arabic population between areas that enjoyed economic and demographic development, such as the Coastal Plains and the Sharon, and areas that did not enjoy such development, such as the district of Jennin. In Jennin, the average natural increase stood at 70%, while in the Coastal area and the Sharon it was several hundreds of percent.
The Mandate government data show that at the beginning of the period, there were about 10,000 Arabs living in the Sharon area, some nomads or semi-nomads, and most in permanent settlements. At the end of the Mandate period there were about 30,000 Arabs in the Sharon area, with some 20,000 living in permanent settlements and about 10,000 nomads.
A careful examination of the population growth in the Sharon concludes that there was a difference between the Mandate government’s rates of population increases for the whole country and those for the Sharon area. In the Sharon, immigration contributed significantly to the population increase. This study examined 35 Arabic villages and suburbs in cities of mixed population. In 1922, 9,892 Arabs were living in the villages and the suburbs, in 1931 their number grew to 14,261, and in 1944 to 25,930. Further growth between 1945 and 1948 must be added. According to these data, the population increase in these villages and suburbs between 1922 and 1931 ranged from 37% to 510%, while from 1931 to 1944, the population increase in these villages and suburbs ranged from 28% to 138%. It should be noted that there were more settlements where the population increased by 100% or more than by a lower percentage.
For example, in Abou Kashakh the population numbered 200 in 1922, and 1,007 in 1931, an increase by 400% .In 1931 it numbered 1,007 and in 1944 it was 2,400, an increase of 138%.. In the Faliq area, on the other hand, there were no Arabs until 1944, when 1,030 of them settled in the place. In Sheikh Mounis there were 664 residents in 1922, growing to 1,154 in 1931 and 1,930 in 1944, an increase of 67% in 13 years and 190% in 22 years.
The Causes for Immigration
Draining of the Sharon Swamps
The Jewish National Fund, together with the Mandate Health Department, began draining the Sharon swamps in the early 1920’s. The drainage checked the spread of malaria and decreased the mortality rate among the Arabs in the area. The drainage project required hundreds of workers, and Arabs work immigrants from the Arabic world who were employed in the works subsequently settled in the area.
The Development of the Citrus Industry
Planting and tending the orchards and the fruit created employment and attracted Arabs from the Arabic world to the area. The planted areas grew from 70,000 dunams (17,500 acres) in 1931 to 128,000 dunams (32,000 acres) in 1946.
Construction Works
The establishment of the Jewish towns of Binyamina, Kfar Sabba, Ra’anana, Herzeliya, Ramat Hasharon, Giv’at Shaul, and others, brought about a construction boom which created employment for hundreds of workers, attracting workers from the Arabic world. Coarse sand was one of the materials used in construction, attracting camel owning Bedouins to work in its transportation.
New Water Sources
The fourth factor which encouraged Arab immigration into the Sharon was the water drilling projects which improved the water supply and increased the area’s agricultural output and its population sustainment and absorption rate.
The Composition of the Arabic Workforce in the Sharon
Farmers
The workforce in the Sharon was comprised of Arabic farmers whose economic situation in the years 1926 – 1932 suffered from cattle diseases, low rainfall, low prices for agricultural produce, and locust attacks. The work places created by the Jewish National Fund, the Mandate government, the Citrus industry, and the construction boom saved them from certain hunger.
Bedouins
Documents of the Hagana Organization indicate that members of Bedouin tribes from the Negev, the Sinai, and Trans-Jordan were employed in these works and ended up settling in the Sharon.
Horanni’s
Towards the end of the 1920’s, Arab workers from the Horan region in the south of Syria began arriving in the country, including the Sharon. According to the Syrian Governor they numbered between 30,000 and 35,000. The Hebrew newspaper “Davar” reported on 2 July 1934 that 25,000 Horanni’s “made Aliya [immigrated] into the country”.
Ten years after the Mandate was established, the Arabic population in the Sharon had grown by 50%. It is impossible to reasonably explain such increase by natural causes alone. The huge increase in Arabic population was even more remarkable in villages close to Jewish settlements, whose number grew from 25 to 77 during the Mandate period. In Bir Addas, for example, which is situated close to the Jewish town of Magdi-el, the population increased by 216%, with 40% of the village’s men working in neighbouring settlements.
In contrast, Bedouins and Arabic farmers from the mountainous region, which was hit by natural disasters, preferred to move to cities such as Jaffa and Haifa, where the living standards were higher.
During the Arabic Revolt, in 1936—1939, Arabic fighters from neighbouring Arabic countries arrived in Samaria, where they ended up settling following the suppression of the revolt by the Mandate government.
World War II hit the citrus industry hard when it brought an end to the exporting of citrus to Europe, but the British Army provided employment to the Arabs in the construction and maintenance of the bases it established in the Sharon. The British Army required food, and its demand for agricultural produce rescued the Arabic agriculture in the Sharon. The need for manpower in the British bases and camps attracted more Arab workers from the Arabic countries. The British brought with them in the 1940’s Arabic workers from Egypt who settled near Kfar Tzur south of Netanya, establishing a settlement that numbered hundreds of inhabitants. Bedouins, Egyptians, and Horanni’s, who worked in the British camps and in the industries that were established in Netanya after the war, settled in Um Haled near Netanya. In addition, during the war, villagers moved from the mountains and established settlements in the Sharon. Some were descended from Egyptians who were settled in the country by Mouhammad ‘Ali during his rule of the area (1832—1840). Data on the rural regions published by the Mandate Government in 1944/5 listed Bedouin tribes that settled in the Sharon, such as ‘Arab-a-nussirat, ‘Arab-al-marmara, and more.
The spread of Tel Aviv in the direction of Sheikh Mounis during the 1930’s and 1940’s, increased Arabic immigration to the village. Its population grew from 664 in 1922 to 1,930 in 1944. Many of these new residents were Bedouins who arrived from neighbouring countries and found employment in construction, sand transportation, and industry. Many of the village residents supplied agricultural produce to the markets in Tel Aviv.
Summary
Jewish settlement in the Sharon during the British Mandate period and development works by the government brought about the elimination of malaria and the provision of medical services which improved the health conditions in the Arabic villages, reduced the infant and adult mortality rates, and increased the longevity rate. New and varied industries created an abundance of work places, attracting Arabs and Bedouins to the Sharon, many of them from Egypt. During World War II, the British Army further created employment and increased demand for agricultural produce. The increase in sources for livelihood brought about an increase in the Arabic population in the Sharon, from 10,000 to 30,000 in less than 30 years.
Rslissak.Com
by: Dr. Rivka Shpak Lissak
According to the Arabic- Palestinian propaganda, the Palestinians are the indigenous people of the country called Judea in the past, then Palestina under the British Mandte.
This article and others in the future will prove this propaganda is an attempt to rewrite history in order to eliminate the Jewish state.
Ma’ayan Hess-Ashkenazi researched the Arabic immigration to the Sharon, and this is what he found:
The Sharon area lies between the Tanninim Creek in the north and the Yarkon stream in the south, and between the foot of the mountains of Samaria in the east and the Mediterranean Sea in the west. According to data published by the Mandate Government, the Arabic population in the Sharon increased more than three-fold during its time. At the beginning of the Mandate period there were about 10,000 Arabs (mostly Muslim) in the Sharon, and in 1944 there were more than 30,000. By the time the Mandate was ended, in 1947, more Arabs had moved to the Sharon.
Demographic sources for the British Mandate period in Israel include the 1922 and 1931 censuses and data on the rural population from 1945. In addition to the British sources researchers can access sources of the Jewish settlement during the Mandate period, including the Haganah archive, the Jewish press, and studies conducted during the period, as well as personal interviews with people from that era.
The total data published by the Mandate government show that the number of Arabs grew from 752,048 in 1914 to 1,294,000 in 1944. The Arabic population nearly doubled in 30 years.
Data on natural increase published by the Mandate government show a significant natural increase in the Arabic population. Among the Muslims, the natural increase rose from 10 children per 1000 population to 29.1 children per 1000 population. Among the Christians, the natural increase reached 30.1 children per 1000 population by the end of the British Mandate. The main reason for this increase was the decrease in mortality rate from 25-30 per 1000 to 20 per 1000.
Scholars are divided over the contribution of Arabic immigration into Israel to the increase in population during the Mandate period. According to data published by the Mandate government, the natural increase in Muslim population contributed 88% of the total increase, whereas immigration contributed 12%; and among the Christians, natural increase contributed 72% of the total population increase, whereas immigration contributed 28%.
An investigation of the statistical data of the Mandate government shows differences in the rates of increase of Arabic population between areas that enjoyed economic and demographic development, such as the Coastal Plains and the Sharon, and areas that did not enjoy such development, such as the district of Jennin. In Jennin, the average natural increase stood at 70%, while in the Coastal area and the Sharon it was several hundreds of percent.
The Mandate government data show that at the beginning of the period, there were about 10,000 Arabs living in the Sharon area, some nomads or semi-nomads, and most in permanent settlements. At the end of the Mandate period there were about 30,000 Arabs in the Sharon area, with some 20,000 living in permanent settlements and about 10,000 nomads.
A careful examination of the population growth in the Sharon concludes that there was a difference between the Mandate government’s rates of population increases for the whole country and those for the Sharon area. In the Sharon, immigration contributed significantly to the population increase. This study examined 35 Arabic villages and suburbs in cities of mixed population. In 1922, 9,892 Arabs were living in the villages and the suburbs, in 1931 their number grew to 14,261, and in 1944 to 25,930. Further growth between 1945 and 1948 must be added. According to these data, the population increase in these villages and suburbs between 1922 and 1931 ranged from 37% to 510%, while from 1931 to 1944, the population increase in these villages and suburbs ranged from 28% to 138%. It should be noted that there were more settlements where the population increased by 100% or more than by a lower percentage.
For example, in Abou Kashakh the population numbered 200 in 1922, and 1,007 in 1931, an increase by 400% .In 1931 it numbered 1,007 and in 1944 it was 2,400, an increase of 138%.. In the Faliq area, on the other hand, there were no Arabs until 1944, when 1,030 of them settled in the place. In Sheikh Mounis there were 664 residents in 1922, growing to 1,154 in 1931 and 1,930 in 1944, an increase of 67% in 13 years and 190% in 22 years.
The Causes for Immigration
Draining of the Sharon Swamps
The Jewish National Fund, together with the Mandate Health Department, began draining the Sharon swamps in the early 1920’s. The drainage checked the spread of malaria and decreased the mortality rate among the Arabs in the area. The drainage project required hundreds of workers, and Arabs work immigrants from the Arabic world who were employed in the works subsequently settled in the area.
The Development of the Citrus Industry
Planting and tending the orchards and the fruit created employment and attracted Arabs from the Arabic world to the area. The planted areas grew from 70,000 dunams (17,500 acres) in 1931 to 128,000 dunams (32,000 acres) in 1946.
Construction Works
The establishment of the Jewish towns of Binyamina, Kfar Sabba, Ra’anana, Herzeliya, Ramat Hasharon, Giv’at Shaul, and others, brought about a construction boom which created employment for hundreds of workers, attracting workers from the Arabic world. Coarse sand was one of the materials used in construction, attracting camel owning Bedouins to work in its transportation.
New Water Sources
The fourth factor which encouraged Arab immigration into the Sharon was the water drilling projects which improved the water supply and increased the area’s agricultural output and its population sustainment and absorption rate.
The Composition of the Arabic Workforce in the Sharon
Farmers
The workforce in the Sharon was comprised of Arabic farmers whose economic situation in the years 1926 – 1932 suffered from cattle diseases, low rainfall, low prices for agricultural produce, and locust attacks. The work places created by the Jewish National Fund, the Mandate government, the Citrus industry, and the construction boom saved them from certain hunger.
Bedouins
Documents of the Hagana Organization indicate that members of Bedouin tribes from the Negev, the Sinai, and Trans-Jordan were employed in these works and ended up settling in the Sharon.
Horanni’s
Towards the end of the 1920’s, Arab workers from the Horan region in the south of Syria began arriving in the country, including the Sharon. According to the Syrian Governor they numbered between 30,000 and 35,000. The Hebrew newspaper “Davar” reported on 2 July 1934 that 25,000 Horanni’s “made Aliya [immigrated] into the country”.
Ten years after the Mandate was established, the Arabic population in the Sharon had grown by 50%. It is impossible to reasonably explain such increase by natural causes alone. The huge increase in Arabic population was even more remarkable in villages close to Jewish settlements, whose number grew from 25 to 77 during the Mandate period. In Bir Addas, for example, which is situated close to the Jewish town of Magdi-el, the population increased by 216%, with 40% of the village’s men working in neighbouring settlements.
In contrast, Bedouins and Arabic farmers from the mountainous region, which was hit by natural disasters, preferred to move to cities such as Jaffa and Haifa, where the living standards were higher.
During the Arabic Revolt, in 1936—1939, Arabic fighters from neighbouring Arabic countries arrived in Samaria, where they ended up settling following the suppression of the revolt by the Mandate government.
World War II hit the citrus industry hard when it brought an end to the exporting of citrus to Europe, but the British Army provided employment to the Arabs in the construction and maintenance of the bases it established in the Sharon. The British Army required food, and its demand for agricultural produce rescued the Arabic agriculture in the Sharon. The need for manpower in the British bases and camps attracted more Arab workers from the Arabic countries. The British brought with them in the 1940’s Arabic workers from Egypt who settled near Kfar Tzur south of Netanya, establishing a settlement that numbered hundreds of inhabitants. Bedouins, Egyptians, and Horanni’s, who worked in the British camps and in the industries that were established in Netanya after the war, settled in Um Haled near Netanya. In addition, during the war, villagers moved from the mountains and established settlements in the Sharon. Some were descended from Egyptians who were settled in the country by Mouhammad ‘Ali during his rule of the area (1832—1840). Data on the rural regions published by the Mandate Government in 1944/5 listed Bedouin tribes that settled in the Sharon, such as ‘Arab-a-nussirat, ‘Arab-al-marmara, and more.
The spread of Tel Aviv in the direction of Sheikh Mounis during the 1930’s and 1940’s, increased Arabic immigration to the village. Its population grew from 664 in 1922 to 1,930 in 1944. Many of these new residents were Bedouins who arrived from neighbouring countries and found employment in construction, sand transportation, and industry. Many of the village residents supplied agricultural produce to the markets in Tel Aviv.
Summary
Jewish settlement in the Sharon during the British Mandate period and development works by the government brought about the elimination of malaria and the provision of medical services which improved the health conditions in the Arabic villages, reduced the infant and adult mortality rates, and increased the longevity rate. New and varied industries created an abundance of work places, attracting Arabs and Bedouins to the Sharon, many of them from Egypt. During World War II, the British Army further created employment and increased demand for agricultural produce. The increase in sources for livelihood brought about an increase in the Arabic population in the Sharon, from 10,000 to 30,000 in less than 30 years.
Rslissak.Com
Sunday, April 24, 2011
The Villains from Damascus
Assads poisoned Mideast’s atmosphere, engaged in multi-front war on Israelby: Mordechai Nisan
Even in our world colored with grays and not only blacks and whites, the fall of the Assad regime in Damascus would be a great blessing for the Middle East and the world. Nonetheless, for some Israelis this would be a hard blow to suffer, because it might signify that Israel will be stuck with the Golan Heights for the long future.
The list of Syria’s misdemeanors and crimes is legion. From belligerent Soviet ally to godfather and patron of Palestinian terrorism, Hafez the father and Bashar the son crafted a policy strategy that demonized Israel, betrayed the Arab world, consolidated the regional hegemony of Iran, and perpetuated an Alawite sectarian regime in defiance of the Sunni Muslim majority in the country. Acting against their countrymen, the Assads persecuted the Kurds, intimidated the Druze, and despoiled the tiny Jewish community.
The quest for power whetted the ambition of the mountain family from Qardaha. They reached for rule in the 1960s, grabbed it in 1970, and held it with a vengeance employing a brutal dictatorship, a regime of fear, while waving tattered Arabist anti-Israeli slogans.
The invasion of Lebanon in 1976 that culminated in a ruthless and bloodthirsty occupation only seemingly ended in 2005; throughout it was a scandalous violation of Lebanese human rights, national identity, and political independence. A series of Syrian assassinations of key Christian Lebanese personalities did not exclude, we shall never doubt, the former Sunni Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri. Syrian interventionism also played a destructive role in Iraq to foil America’s goal of fashioning stability in the post-Saddam era on the fractured Baghdadian political landscape.
Israeli woes
Israeli sorrows and sufferings from the Assads’ Syria were far more insidious in comparison to any inflicted upon the Jewish state by any other country. Perhaps this litany of havoc began with the October 1973 Yom Kippur War that continued until May 1974 on the Golan front.
Syria’s torturing of Israeli POWs should never be forgotten. The smashing of Lebanon in the 1970s, as in the Hundred Days War in Beirut in 1978, and supporting Palestinian warfare against the Lebanese, including the barbaric massacre of Christian communities, was designed to deny Israel a free Lebanon that would be a friendly neighbor.
Syria allying with Hezbollah from the 1980s and facilitating its armaments pipeline and fighting doctrine bled Israel, demoralized the Jews, and contributed to the reprehensible and reckless IDF withdrawal in May, 2000. When Syria forged intimate ties with Iran, soon after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, it became clear that Khomeini’s jihad was now comfortably pre-positioned on Israel’s northern border regions.
Syria worked assiduously to strategically isolate Israel in the Middle East in putting together a politically unorthodox alliance system. Israel’s former regional partner, Sunni non-Arab Turkey, was enticed by its own ambitions to adopt an adversarial anti-Israel position.
The Syrian-Turkey connection warmed up, and their joint pro-Palestinian stance emitted a virulent rancor. The Damascene headquarters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad radiated Assad’s centralizing leadership role in the war against Israel. This was no less apparent with Syria’s emerging nuclear program, which Israel confronted in bombing its facility in 2007.
All the while official and non-official Israeli movers and shakers, loyal to their paradigm and disloyal to their people, fantasized that Bashar Assad was really interested in peace with Israel, and but for Jerusalem’s obstinacy a deal would be concluded.
This interpretation was divorced from the glaring strategic data and Syrian political connections that had ripened over the years. The fact that the Golan Heights was a tranquil front since 1974 did not prove the Assads’ inclination toward peace with Israel, but rather indicated that the multi-front war Syria was directing against Israel could be superbly effective as an indirect strategy conducted with impunity.
Future Hopes
When and if the Assad regime falls, the collapse of Iranian hegemony across the region may not be far behind. The Arab Sunni world will rejoice that wayward Syria has been separated from the Tehran Shiite-dominated axis. Losing its strategic hinterland and ideological benefactor, Hezbollah too will suffer a blow which will catalyze re-arranging power relations in the forlorn land of the cedars.
Freedom in Damascus will contribute to the recovery of freedom in Beirut. I believe, in rejecting the fossilized Israeli establishment view, that the end of Syrian domination of Lebanon is absolutely the moral and reasonable political interest for Israel.
A regime change in Damascus opens up the possibility of various domestic options: a Sunni fundamentalist state, a liberal polity, maybe a federated entity based on the geo-ethnic pluralism of the country. Despite turbulence in Syrian streets and politics, Israel’s military might assures her safety as she possesses both deterrent and offensive capabilities that will challenge Syria in the days ahead, regardless of the outcome of the revolutionary changes that now and will confront her.
We can now well appreciate the wisdom in the traditional Israeli stance since 1967 of settlement, development, and territorial retention of the Golan Heights. This obvious strategic resource adorned with manifest values of topography and water, a terrain decked with Jewish history and demographic tranquility, would be abandoned only in a fit of mental infirmity.
And with the Assads gone, the Middle East as a whole will be able to move to transcend the state of terror and tension with which the Syrian regime poisoned the political atmosphere for over four long decades.
Dr. Mordechai Nisan is a retired teacher of Middle East Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Ynet News
The Iron Dome Mentality
Instead of fighting terror through offensives, State of Israel increasingly fortifying itself
by: Hagai Segal
History has a thin sense of humor. Last Thursday, where the Iron Dome system passed its first test, was also the day where a Kornet anti-tank rocket hit a civilian bus around here for the first time. Seemingly, it was a random coincidence of two combat-related events, yet it provided us with some food for thought: By the time we solved one fortification problem, assuming we indeed resolved it, a new fortification problem emerged.
Will we now start to fortify every school bus near Gaza? The Kornet’s range is some five kilometers, so this is not a problem that can be resolved by slightly modifying bus routes near the border. If another missile or two hit a school bus, heaven forbid, parents in the western Negev may raise a hue and cry similar in scope to the one that demanded the Iron Dome until authorities caved in.
The authorities always cave in. Only a month ago, the State objected to the deployment of an Iron Dome battery near Beersheba, and now officials are already preparing to position a battery in every municipal region south of Palmahim. It’s hard to see the State rejecting a firm parental demand for the fortification of school buses against missiles.
In this case there is even no need to develop a new system; we have one ready: Windbreaker. RAFAEL engineers developed it in order to protect tanks, and there is no problem to modify it for civilian protection purposes. It will cost us a fortune, about NIS 1 million per Windbreaker (roughly $300,000), yet the Iron Dome case proves that money is no object under such circumstances.
A solution for every citizen
If the residents yell loud enough and our political leadership in any case prefers to fortify instead of taking over Gaza, the Treasury eventually signs the check. Hence, soon we shall be reaching the day where the State equips every southern bus with the Windbreaker system, just as in the past it fortified Judea and Samaria buses against stones and later against gunfire.
The terrorists will then convene an emergency session with all their engineers and come up with a more advanced system to kill Jews. Next, RAFAEL’s engineers will again be urged to develop a winning Israeli response to the advanced Palestinian tactic, and so on and so forth.
The State, which once upon a time promised a solution for every settler, will one day have to fortify every citizen. Perhaps they will implant some kind of genius chip into our ears that will warn us of approaching stabbing attacks and explosive devices. It will cost us a fortune, but we are willing to do anything here to fight Hamas.
In the past, we argued that the best defense is offence. Today, we put our trust in Iron Domes. Indeed, while the enemy charges, the people of Israel go into the trenches.
Iron Dome in action
Ynet News
by: Hagai Segal
History has a thin sense of humor. Last Thursday, where the Iron Dome system passed its first test, was also the day where a Kornet anti-tank rocket hit a civilian bus around here for the first time. Seemingly, it was a random coincidence of two combat-related events, yet it provided us with some food for thought: By the time we solved one fortification problem, assuming we indeed resolved it, a new fortification problem emerged.
Will we now start to fortify every school bus near Gaza? The Kornet’s range is some five kilometers, so this is not a problem that can be resolved by slightly modifying bus routes near the border. If another missile or two hit a school bus, heaven forbid, parents in the western Negev may raise a hue and cry similar in scope to the one that demanded the Iron Dome until authorities caved in.
The authorities always cave in. Only a month ago, the State objected to the deployment of an Iron Dome battery near Beersheba, and now officials are already preparing to position a battery in every municipal region south of Palmahim. It’s hard to see the State rejecting a firm parental demand for the fortification of school buses against missiles.
In this case there is even no need to develop a new system; we have one ready: Windbreaker. RAFAEL engineers developed it in order to protect tanks, and there is no problem to modify it for civilian protection purposes. It will cost us a fortune, about NIS 1 million per Windbreaker (roughly $300,000), yet the Iron Dome case proves that money is no object under such circumstances.
A solution for every citizen
If the residents yell loud enough and our political leadership in any case prefers to fortify instead of taking over Gaza, the Treasury eventually signs the check. Hence, soon we shall be reaching the day where the State equips every southern bus with the Windbreaker system, just as in the past it fortified Judea and Samaria buses against stones and later against gunfire.
The terrorists will then convene an emergency session with all their engineers and come up with a more advanced system to kill Jews. Next, RAFAEL’s engineers will again be urged to develop a winning Israeli response to the advanced Palestinian tactic, and so on and so forth.
The State, which once upon a time promised a solution for every settler, will one day have to fortify every citizen. Perhaps they will implant some kind of genius chip into our ears that will warn us of approaching stabbing attacks and explosive devices. It will cost us a fortune, but we are willing to do anything here to fight Hamas.
In the past, we argued that the best defense is offence. Today, we put our trust in Iron Domes. Indeed, while the enemy charges, the people of Israel go into the trenches.
Iron Dome in actionYnet News
You might also like:
You might also like:
You might also like:
The Arab-Israeli Conflict, Part III: The Core of the ...
The Arab-Israeli Conflict, Part II: Why the Middle East is ...
FAQs' About the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
You might also like:
You might also like:
You might also like:
No comments:
Post a Comment