“WHY IS AMERICA TRYING TO POUR NEW MONEY AND MORE WEAPONS INTO PALESTINIAN ARAB HANDS?”

Arabs losing faith in ‘the cause’
By Youssef Ibrahim
The New York Sun
June 21, 2007

www.nysun.com/article/57044

Why is America trying to pour new money and more weapons into Palestinian Arab hands barely days after the Gaza debacle? It is an ill-considered policy, both premature and useless. The only sure result will be that warring gangs in the West Bank will use every new weapon to continue the mayhem and that the millions paid out won’t buy as much as a bottle of milk for Palestinian Arab civilians. Instead, the money will end up in the pockets and bank accounts of the same crooks who lost Gaza.

Indeed, why try to recreate a world that has just crumbled? America and Israel may want to wait for what may turn out to be a changing of the guard: Arab voices, both expert and popular, are rising in vociferous denunciations of the once sacrosanct Palestinian Arabs.

“It is idle to think that Gaza could be written off as a Hamas dominion while Fatah held its own in the towns of the West Bank,” Fouad Ajami of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies noted in a sobering analysis published Tuesday in the New York Times. [Full article below - TG] “The abdication and the anarchy have damaged both Palestinian realms. Nablus in the West Bank is no more amenable to reason than is Gaza; the writ of the pitiless preachers and gunmen is the norm in both places.”

While Mr. Ajami’s commentary is poised, there is no such thing:

“Palestinians today need to be left without a shred of a doubt” as to what other Arabs think of them, a widely read opinion commentator for the Saudi daily Asharq Al Awsat, Mamoun Fandy, thundered on Monday. “We need to tell them the only thing they have proven over 50 years is that they are adolescents who cannot and should not be trusted to run institutions of state or any other important matters.”

While it could be argued that the overwhelming public outrage in Saudi Arabia reflects resentment over the collapse of the much-vaunted reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah – which was personally brokered by King Abdullah earlier this year in Mecca – the anger expressed across the Muslim Arab world reflects deep embarrassment at the discredit Hamas has brought, in the name of Islam, through its savagery against Fatah.

For its part, the Egyptian press has become unhinged, spewing vile denunciations of what is universally known as “the cause” – support for the Palestinian Arabs – and describing it as dead. Egypt’s government pulled its embassy out of Gaza on Tuesday.

Kuwaitis, who have harbored contempt for Palestinian Arabs ever since they allied themselves with Saddam Hussein’s occupation in 1990–91, also dropped all restraint. “Palestinians are neither a modernized nor a civilized people,” Ahmad Al Bughdadi wrote Monday in Al Siyassah, an influential Kuwaiti daily. “They are not statesmen. If what happened in Gaza is what they do without a state, what then shall they do when they get one?”

If there could be an editorial coup de grace, it surely was delivered by no less than Abdelbari Atwan, undoubtedly the Palestinian Arabs most influential and respected journalist and a familiar face on both Western and Arab television.

Writing in the London-based Al Quds International, his painfully felt commentary, “Yes, We Have Lost the World’s Respect,” argued that “the cause” may have lost its legitimacy: “Many, myself among them, find it difficult to speak of Israeli crimes against our people in view of what we have now done,” Mr. Atwan wrote. “I never thought the day would come when we would see Palestinians throwing other Palestinians from the tops of buildings to their death, Palestinians attacking other Palestinians to tear their bodies with knives, Palestinians stripping others naked to drag them through the streets.”

All of which suggests letting this Arab storm run its course: It may be a purging of the Arab mindset that creates new realities and opportunities.

For instance, throughout the Arab Gulf region, starting with Al-Jazeera of Qatar and Al-Arabiya of Saudi Arabia, the press has long been controlled by Palestinian Arabs practiced in spewing anti-Western and anti-American propaganda. But the Gaza conundrum has left them stymied, opening space for “local sentiments,” which differ markedly.

Instead of pouring good money after bad in the western part of the Arab world, it may be wiser for America to help foster the revolutionary new thinking unfolding in its East – perhaps by nudging along a propaganda purge among friendly Arab regimes.

MORE MIDDLE EAST MADNESS

More Middle East madness
By Victor Davis Hanson
Townhall.com
June 21, 2007

“The Palestinian people will never forgive the Hamas gangs for looting the home of the Palestinian people’s great leader, Yasser Arafat.” So Palestinian Authority spokesman Abdel Rahman recently exclaimed. “This crime will remain a stain of disgrace on the forehead of Hamas and its despicable gangs.”

Looting? Crime? Despicable gangs?

Excuse me. For years, Palestinian Authority-sanctioned gangs shot and tortured dissidents, glorified suicide bombing against Israel and in general thwarted any hopes of various “peace processes.”

Of course, this kind of behavior isn’t limited to the Palestinian territories but is spread across the Middle East. The soon-to-be-nuclear theocracy in Iran is grotesque. Iraqis continue to discover innovative ways to extinguish each other. Syria assassinates democratic reformers in Lebanon. ABC News now reports that new teams of al-Qaida and Taliban suicide bombers have been ordered to the United States and Europe from Afghanistan.

Here’s why much of the region is so unhinged – and it’s not because of our policy in Palestine or our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

First, thanks to Western inventions and Chinese manufactured goods, Middle Easterners can now access the non-Muslim world cheaply and vicariously. To millions of Muslims, the planet appears – on the Internet, DVDs and satellite television – to be growing rich as most of their world stays poor.

Second, the Middle East either will not or cannot make the changes necessary to catch up with what they see in the rest of the world. Tribalism – loyalty only to kin rather than to society at large – impedes merit and thus progress. So does gender apartheid. Who knows how many would-be Margaret Thatchers or Sandra Day O’Connors remain veiled in the kitchen?

Religious fundamentalism translates into rote prayers in madrassas while those outside the Middle East master science and engineering. Without a transparent capitalist system – antithetical to both sharia (Muslim law) and state-run economies – initiative is never rewarded. Corruption is.

Meanwhile, mere discussion in much of the region of what is wrong can mean execution by a militia, government thug or religious vigilante.

So, Middle Easterners are left with the old frustration of wanting the good life of Western society but lacking either the ability or willingness to change the status quo to get it.

Instead, we get monotonous scapegoating. Blaming America or Israel – “Those sneaky Jews did it!” – has become a regional pastime.

And after the multifarious failures of Yasser Arafat, the Assads in Syria, Muammar Gaddafi, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Saddam Hussein and other corrupt autocrats, many have, predictably, retreated to fundamentalist extremism. Almost daily, some fundamentalist claims that the killing of Westerners is justified – because of a cartoon, a Papal paragraph or, most recently, British knighthood awarded to novelist Salman Rushdie. The terrorism of Osama bin Laden, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban is as much about nihilist rage as it is about blackmailing Western governments to grant concessions.

Meanwhile, millions of others simply flee the mess, immigrating to either Europe or the United States.

These reactions to failure often lead to circumstances that can defy logic.

The poor terrorists of Arafat’s old party, Fatah, seem to shriek that they have been out-terrorized by Hamas, and desperately con more Western aid to make up for what has been squandered or stolen.

Muslims flock to Europe to enjoy a level of freedom and opportunity long denied at home. But no sooner have many arrived than they castigate their adopted continent as decadent. The ungracious prefer intolerant sharia – denying to their own the very freedom of choice that was given to them by others.

Our response in America to this perennial Middle East temper tantrum?

In the last 20 years, we’ve sent billions in aid to the Arab world. We’ve saved Muslims from Bosnia to Kuwait. We’ve removed dangerous thugs in Afghanistan and Iraq, fostering democracies in their place. We’ve opened our borders to immigrants from the Middle East. We’ve paid billions of dollars in inflated oil prices. All the while, many in the West have wrongly blamed themselves for the conditions in the Middle East.

It’s past time for Middle Easterners to fix their own self-inflicted mess. In the meantime, the U.S. and its allies should help as we can – but first protect ourselves from them as we must.

“WHAT OTHER COUNTRY ON EARTH IS EXPECTED TO SUPPLY THE VERY MEANS FOR A DECLARED ENEMY TO ATTACK IT?”

Last chance for Abbas
By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
June 22, 2007

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/21/AR2007062101863.html

Gaza is now run not by a conventional political party but by a movement that is revolutionary, Islamist and terrorist. Worse, Hamas is a client of Iran. Gaza now constitutes the farthest reach of the archipelago of Iranian proxies: Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Mahdi Army (among others) in Iraq and the Alawite regime of Syria.

This Islamist mini-replica of the Comintern is at war not just with Israel but with the moderate Arab states, who finally woke up to this threat last summer when they denounced Hezbollah for provoking the Lebanon war with Israel. The fall of Gaza is particularly terrifying to Egypt because Hamas is so closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the chief Islamist threat to the secular-nationalist regime that has ruled Egypt since the revolution of 1952. Which is why Egypt has just invited Israeli, Jordanian and moderate Palestinian leaders to a summit next week – pointedly excluding and isolating Hamas.

The splitting of Palestine into two entities is nonetheless clarifying. Since Hamas won the parliamentary elections of January 2006, we’ve had to deal with the fiction of a supposedly unified Palestine ruled by an avowedly “unity” government of Fatah and Hamas. Now the muddle has undergone political hydrolysis, separating out the relatively pure elements: a Hamas-ruled Gaza and Fatah-ruled (for now) West Bank.

The policy implications are obvious. There is nothing to do with the self-proclaimed radical Islamist entity that is Gaza but to isolate it. No recognition, no aid (except humanitarian necessities through the United Nations), no diplomatic commerce.

Israel now has the opportunity to establish deterrence against unremitting rocket attacks from Gaza into Israeli villages. Israel failed to do that after it evacuated Gaza in 2005, permitting the development of an unprecedented parasitism by willingly supplying food, water, electricity and gasoline to a territory that was actively waging hostilities against it.

With Hamas now clearly in charge, Israel should declare that it will tolerate no more rocket fire – that the next Qassam will be answered with a cutoff of gasoline shipments. This should bring road traffic in Gaza to a halt within days and make it increasingly difficult to ferry around missiles and launchers.

If that fails to concentrate the mind, the next step should be to cut off electricity. When the world wails, Israel should ask, what other country on Earth is expected to supply the very means for a declared enemy to attack it?

Regarding the West Bank, policy should be equally clear. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas represents moderation and should be helped as he tries to demonstrate both authority and success in running his part of Palestine.

But let’s remember who Abbas is. He appears well intentioned, but he is afflicted with near-disastrous weaknesses. He controls little. His troops in Gaza simply collapsed against the greatly outnumbered forces of Hamas. His authority in the West Bank is far from universal. He does not even control the various factions within Fatah.

But the greater liability is his character. He is weak and indecisive. When he was Yasser Arafat’s deputy, Abbas was known to respond to being slapped down by his boss by simply disappearing for weeks in a sulk. During the battle for Gaza, he did not order his Fatah forces to return fire against the Hamas insurrection until the fight was essentially over. Remember, too, that after Arafat’s death Abbas ran the Palestinian Authority without a Hamas presence for more than a year. Can you name a single thing he achieved in that time?

Moreover, his Fatah party is ideologically spent and widely discredited. Historian Michael Oren points out that the Palestinian Authority has received more per capita aid than did Europe under the Marshall Plan. This astonishing largess has disappeared into lavish villas for party bosses and guns for the multiple militias Arafat established.

The West is rushing to bolster Abbas. Israel will release hundreds of millions in tax revenue. The United States and the European Union will be pouring in aid. All praise Abbas as a cross between Anwar Sadat and Simón Bolívar. Fine. We have no choice but to support him. But before we give him the moon, we should insist upon reasonable benchmarks of both moderation and good governance – exactly what we failed to do during the Oslo process. Abbas needs to demonstrate his ability to run a clean administration and to engage Israel in day-to-day negotiations to alleviate the conditions of life on the ground.

Abbas is not Hamas. But despite the geographical advantages, he does not represent the second coming, either. We can prop him up only so much. In the end, the only one who can make a success of the West Bank is Abbas himself. This is his chance. His last chance.

“PALESTINIAN REFUGEE CAMPS ARE AS CRUEL AN INVENTION AS THE BERLIN WALL”

“Tear down those camps!”
By Saul Singer
The Jerusalem Post
June 21, 2007

June 12 was the 20th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall!” speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. On the popular blog Power Line, Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson describes how he drafted that line after meeting with Berliners whose raw anger at the scar crossing their city surprised him. He also recounts the pitched battle waged by the US foreign policy bureaucracy to remove those key words from the draft speech.

Robinson writes, “[They claimed] the draft was naive. It would raise false hopes. It was clumsy. It was needlessly provocative. State and the NSC submitted their own alternate drafts ... no fewer than seven. In each, the call to tear down the wall was missing.”

“The day the President arrived in Berlin, State and NSC submitted yet another alternate draft. Yet in the limousine on the way to the Berlin Wall, the President told [Ken] Duberstein he was determined to deliver the controversial line. Reagan smiled. ‘The boys at State are going to kill me,’ he said, ‘but it’s the right thing to do.’”

Minutes later, Reagan called out to the Soviet leader, “if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Two years later the wall was broken into a million pieces, along with the Soviet Union itself.

On Sunday, another anniversary arrives, this time of one of the most pivotal speeches of the Bush presidency. On June 24, 2002, Bush called on “the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror.”

Though we do not yet have the history of how this speech was written, we can imagine that Bush showed considerable determination in going directly opposite to the conventional wisdom of the time – including massive pressure from Tony Blair – to impose some new initiative on then-besieged Israel. As The New York Times reported days before the speech, the internal policy debate was over “how strongly to endorse an interim Palestinian state.”

Instead, Bush, for first time, linked Palestinian statehood not to Israeli behavior but to Palestinians embracing democracy and rejecting terror. The result was immediate and dramatic.

Europe, while not backing Bush on the need to oust Yasser Arafat, came part way with the demand for a Palestinian prime minister who would ostensibly usurp Arafat’s powers. The ensuing “road map,” though a somewhat twisted version of Bush’s speech, kept the critical notion of ending terrorism before negotiations could begin. Israel, meanwhile, was free to defend itself against the ongoing Palestinian suicide bombing onslaught, which was increasingly blamed on Arafat, not Israeli intransigence.

Now Bush is reportedly considering commemorating his 2002 speech with another landmark address on the Middle East. The timing, just after the Hamas’s “Six Day War” against Fatah in Gaza, is propitious. What should Bush say?

First, he should reiterate the linkage between Palestinian statehood, building democracy and rejecting terrorism. Though Hamas now wraps itself in the mantle of democracy, its barbaric behavior and its choice of war and terrorism – after campaigning for “Change and Reform” – amounts to a hijacking of Palestinian democracy.

Next he should challenge Fatah to take advantage of this golden opportunity. Just as Hamas now has no one to hide behind and must be held responsible for any attacks from Gaza, so Fatah must be held accountable for building a peaceful, law-abiding Palestinian state. Unfettered by Hamas, Fatah must now take real steps toward peace with Israel.

This will bring Bush to the nub that will make history. The most powerful way for Bush to call on the soon to be aid-flush Fatahland to hold up its end of the bargain is to dismantle the core symbol of the rejection of Israel’s right to exist: refugee camps.

For 60 years, the Arab world has, as Bush said in 2002, treated the Palestinians “as pawns in the Middle East conflict ... held hostage to a comprehensive peace agreement that never seems to come.” The refugees have been cruelly shaped into a living, suffering dagger aimed at Israel’s heart.

What is striking is how calculated this strategy has been. Egyptian foreign minister Muhammad Salah al-Din made no bones about it as early as October, 1949: “It is well-known and understood that the Arabs, in demanding the return of the refugees to Palestine, mean their return as masters of the Homeland and not as slaves. With a greater clarity, they mean the liquidation of the State of Israel.”

Former UNRWA official Ralph Galloway was equally blunt in August 1958: “The Arab States do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don’t give a damn whether the refugees live or die.”

Bush should call for an end to this travesty. If Mahmoud Abbas really believes in a two-state solution, he must stop telling Palestinians they will “return” to a land most have never seen. He must say that the “right of return” can only be actualized in a state alongside Israel, not in its stead.

According to UNRWA, it is managing eight “refugee camps” in Gaza and 20 in the West Bank. If Palestinians are truly going to live in a future Palestine and not in Israel, then why are they not being settled now? How is it possible to be a Palestinian “refugee” inside Palestine – unless “Palestine” actually means Israel itself?

The Arab states, for their part, should be called upon to offer citizenship to Palestinians who have lived for years in their countries and do not want to move to a Palestinian state (as Jordan has done). If they do not, they are playing into the hands of the Hamas-Hizbullah-Iran jihadi front that is fighting peace with Israel with all its might. Is this what these states want?

Palestinian refugee camps are as cruel an invention as the Berlin Wall and as central an obstacle to resolving the conflict that they embody. Reagan in 1987 and Bush in 2002 illustrated the power of honest words, however “unrealistic” they may seem at the time, to shape history.

Bush should call on Palestinians and the Arab world to “tear down those camps!”

“THE 60 YEAR-OLD CAMPS ONLY SIGNIFY OUR INHUMANITY AND DOUBLE STANDARDS”

40 years: The real stigma
By Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed (the general manager of Al-Arabiya TV)
Asharq Al-Awsat (a leading pan-Arab daily newspaper)
June 6, 2007

(Excerpt only)

“Our insistence to lock the Palestinians in camps and treat them like animals in the name of preserving the issue is far worse a crime than Israel stealing land and causing the displacement of people”.

“… Even some Arabs and Palestinians intentionally turn a blind eye to the issue so as not to expose abuses. What is happening in Lebanon’s Nahr al Bared camp today is just one such example where battles have raised an overwhelming number of questions: who are these people? How long have they lived in the camp and how? What are their rights? The answers can be found on the UNRWA’s website. Tens of thousands of people crammed in undignified houses, where many of them were born and have lived for five decades”.

“Some Arab countries ‘hosting’ refugees ban them from leaving [camps], from occupying a large number of positions and deny them any other legal rights. Some of them have to jump over walls and sneak out to complete their chores or to breathe and experience the outside world” … How can we talk about the liberation of Palestine, which we simply associate with stolen land, a desecrated mosque and a powerful enemy, while we do not allow Palestinians to settle down, earn a living or travel like all other human beings?

Our insistence to lock the Palestinians in camps and treat them like animals in the name of preserving the issue is far worse a crime than Israel stealing land and causing the displacement of people. The 60 year-old camps only signify our inhumanity and double standards. Israel can claim that it treats the Palestinians better than their Arab brothers do. It gives citizenship to the Palestinians of 1948 as well as the right to work and the right to lead a somewhat normal life, although they are treated as second-class citizens.

The complete article is available at: www.asharqalawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=2&id=9216

“IRAN IS THE MAJOR PLAYER”

The Iranian pincer
By Melanie Phillips
The Spectator (London)
June 21, 2007

Britain gazes upon the butchery in Gaza and is shocked. Shocked! How could the Palestinians be behaving in this way, it wails?

The Palestinian butchery of blowing Israelis to bits by human bomb or rocket attacks leaves Britain unmoved. The videos of lisping Palestinian toddlers being taught to sing about murdering the Jews elicits barely a shrug. After all, these are brutal Israeli occupiers who deserve all they get, right? Whereas the Palestinians are the good guys, the helpless victims, the people who only want a state of their own.

Well, now the lie is sickeningly exposed for all to see. Palestinians throwing each other off the tops of tall buildings. Churches ransacked and Bibles burned. Hospital patients being treated for their injuries gunned down in those same hospitals.

Astoundingly, there are those who blame Israel, America and Europe for causing this carnage by refusing to recognise Hamas and imposing ‘punishing sanctions’ against it.

Decent, rational people, however, can see that that this is a struggle for mastery between people who have brutalised themselves. Those who turn their own children into human bombs will behave in the same depraved way towards each other.

As for the ‘punishing sanctions’, the aid going into Gaza since these were imposed has actually doubled. If the Gazans are now going hungry, it’s because the money has been siphoned off to line their leaders’ pockets or to buy weapons.

Undoubtedly, a humanitarian disaster now looms. But the claim that Israel controls access to Gaza is untrue. Hamas now controls its border with Egypt. Aid should therefore be funnelled through Egypt, which should be held responsible with Hamas for its safe passage.

Why should Israel be expected to supply aid to those who will merely redouble their rocket and human bomb attacks on it (but whom it continues to treat, nevertheless, in its own hospitals)? Of what other country has such a truly suicidal response to those waging war upon it ever been expected?

Unreality, however, begets ever deeper unreality. It’s not just that the Palestinians have divided themselves into two ‘states’. It is quickly becoming accepted that there are two different sets of people: Hamas who are beyond the pale, and Fatah with whom we can do business.

Thus America and Israel are now busily shoring up the Fatah end of the Palestinian pantomime horse, President Mahmoud Abbas. But how deluded is this?

After all, Abbas hardly moved a muscle against Hamas in Gaza; indeed, he has always said plainly that he would never fight them. With his 40,000 armed men, he could have crushed them. He chose not to do so.

And the idea that Fatah is ‘moderate’ is ludicrous. Its militias have been heavily involved in recent attacks against Israel, to whose destruction – whatever weasel words Abbas may use for credulous western consumption – it remains committed.

But when in a hole, the Americans continue to dig. Their renewed aid to Fatah will undoubtedly fuel yet more of the corruption that helped bring Hamas to power. Worse still, although the weapons they showered upon Abbas to help him defeat Hamas have now fallen into its hands, they will continue to arm him – even though if Hamas captures the West Bank, it will capture those weapons too.

The reason for this deluded approach is the fundamentally flawed western belief that the ‘two state solution’ will end the Middle East impasse. The fact is that the ‘two state solution’ has been on offer since 1922. That was when Britain gave away to the Arabs three quarters of Mandatory Palestine – within all of which it was bound by international agreement to re-establish the Jews in their ancestral national home – creating the Hashemite kingdom of Trans-Jordan. Jordan therefore is the Arab state of Palestine.

Ever since, different configurations of the ‘two-state solution’ have been repeatedly offered, only to be met by Arab attempts to drive the Jews out. The belief that creating a Palestine state will end this 90-year trauma is therefore as much of a fantasy as finding a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow.

This continued delusion is further preventing the west from grasping that the war against Israel is merely one front in a far bigger war against the free world, in which Iran is the major player. Iran now controls Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and is wreaking havoc in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The true significance of Hamastan, therefore, is that it strengthens Iran still further in its 28-year jihad against the west. And since Hamas is now an Iranian proxy, its agenda is transparently no longer a Palestinian state but the Islamist onslaught upon the whole free world.

Yet in Britain, elements within the Foreign Office and intelligence establishment are pushing ‘engagement’ with Hamas, even though its agenda is totally non-negotiable. Its Charter doesn’t merely commit it to eradicating Israel, but is a declaration of war against the entire Jewish people, with demented Nazi-style ravings about the world Jewish conspiracy. It would be as suicidal and immoral to ‘engage’ with such a body as it was to advocate the appeasement of Hitler.

Israel is now in an appalling position. It must do everything possible to avoid re-occupying Gaza, although it may have no alternative if the rocket fire from there escalates. It is trapped by an Iranian pincer movement in Gaza and Lebanon, from where two rockets were fired on Monday at northern Israel. So much for UNIFIL. Iran’s satrapy Syria, meanwhile, is making ominous preparations for war. So Israel could soon face war on three fronts from the Iran/Syria axis.

That axis, though, does not just threaten Israel and the west but much of the Arab world too. Egypt now has the nightmare of both the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran on its doorstep in Gaza, and Jordan is eyeing the same prospect on the West Bank.

Abbas is patently incapable of stopping Hamas. So a new dynamic is being created. Long-term, the solution lies in Jordan and Egypt exercising their own self-interest. A Jordan-West Bank confederation is now being floated; the same logic would mean Egypt re-occupying Gaza.

Despite the fact that this idea would take us back 40 years, it has certain attractions. Order would be restored by Jordan and Egypt which, unlike Israel, would tackle Hamas with a vigour from which our own principled multiculturalists would not dream of demurring.

The Palestinians would be in the state they were given in 1922. The Arab world would finally take responsibility for a tragedy they themselves created. The Iranian pincer would be broken.

One thing threatens to scupper this. It is the US/UK axis of appeasement, the fateful union of British cynicism with America’s catastrophic loss of nerve. No wonder Iran is on a roll. With such serial strategic stupidity and cravenness by the west, how can it lose?

“FANATICS WITH GUNS BEAT LIBERALS WITH IDEAS…”

Why Hamas won
By Ralph Peters
The New York Post
June 19, 2007

Hamas won its shut-out victory in Gaza with alarming ease. And the reason Hamas won is even more alarming: Fanaticism trumps numbers.

You’ll hear no end of explanations for the terrorist triumph: Hamas was backed by Iran; Gaza is Hamas’ base of support; some Fatah units ran out of ammunition...

All true. And all secondary factors.

Fatah’s security forces in Gaza outnumbered the Hamas gunmen. Fatah had stockpiles of weapons and military gear (now in Hamas’ arsenal). Fatah even had the quiet backing of Israel and America.

And Fatah folded like a pup tent in a tornado.

Hamas won because its fighters are religious fanatics ready to die for their cause. Fatah runs an armed employment agency under the banner of Palestinian nationalism. Most of the latter’s security men are on the payroll because relatives or ward pols got them jobs. And they want to stay alive to collect their wages.

The result was predictable. Our government pretended otherwise. Now hairs should be standing up on the backs of thousands of necks, from the White House to the Green Zone.

Yes, Iraq is more complex than Gaza. But once you pierce the surface turbulence and look deep, the similarities are chilling: Iraq’s security forces do include true patriots – but most of the troops and cops just want a job, or were ordered to join up by a sheik or a mullah, or are gathering guns until their faction calls.

The al-Qaeda-in-Iraq terrorists, the core members of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the hard-line Sunni ghazis are willing to die for the victory of their faction and their faith. They believe they’re doing Allah’s will. It gives them a strength we rush to explain away.

The raw numbers suggest that Iraq’s fanatics don’t stand a chance. The government has a far greater numerical advantage than did Fatah. But numbers often mislead analysts during insurgencies: Iraq’s government wouldn’t last a week without U.S. troops.

The lesson from Gaza is that such wars are neither waged nor won by the majority of the population. A tiny fraction of the populace, armed and determined, can destroy a fragile government and seize power.

Polls showing that most Iraqis “want peace” and don’t support the extremists only deceive us (because we want to be deceived). It wouldn’t matter if 99 percent of the Iraqis loved us like free falafel, if we’re unwilling to annihilate the fraction of 1 percent of the population with the weapons and will to dictate the future to the rest.

At the height of last week’s fighting in Gaza, one Palestinian in 300 carried a weapon in support of Hamas – a third of one percent of the population. Now Hamas rules 1.5 million people.

Numbers still matter, of course. But strength of will can overcome hollow numbers. And nothing – nothing – gives men a greater strength of will than religious fanaticism.

We don’t want to hear it. Secular virtues were supposed to triumph. They didn’t, but we still can’t let go of our dream of a happy-face, godless world where nobody quarrels.

Our refusal to acknowledge the unifying – and terrifying – power of extremist religion has deep roots. As academics rejected and derided faith in the last century, even the Thirty Years’ War – the horrible climax of Europe’s wars of religion – was reinvented as a dynastic struggle, or a fight for hegemony, or a class struggle.

But the Thirty Years’ War was about faith. All the other factors were in play, but the core issue, from the Protestant coup in Prague in 1618 to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, was religious identity. And the atrocities committed on both sides make Iraq look like amateur hour: Wars of religion always demand blood sacrifice. (It was a compromise of bloody exhaustion that ended the Thirty Years War.)

Our problem is that, of those who rise in government, few have witnessed the power of revelation or caught a life-changing glimpse of the divine. They simply can’t imagine that others might be willing to die for all that mumbo-jumbo. Our convenience-store approach to faith leaves us numb to the passion of our enemies.

The true believer always beats the feckless attendee. The best you can hope for is that the extremist will eventually defeat himself.

And that does leave us some hope: Fanatics inevitably over-reach, as al Qaeda’s Islamo-fascists have done in Iraq, alienating those who once saw them as allies. But the road to self-destruction can be a long one: The people of Iran want change, but the fanatics have the guns. And sorry, folks: Fanatics with guns beat liberals with ideas.

Faith is the nuclear weapon of the fanatic. And there’s not going to be a religious “nuclear freeze.” It doesn’t matter how many hearts and minds you win, if you don’t defeat the zealots with the muscles.

“INVESTING IN ABBAS IS LIKE INVESTING IN THE TITANIC”

Fatah isn’t the answer
By Michael Oren
The Wall Street Journal
June 20, 2007

online.wsj.com/article/SB118230210250741414.html

America and its Middle Eastern allies have every reason to panic. The green flags of Hamas are furling over Gaza and the al-Fatah forces trained and financed by the United States have ignominiously fled. Fears are rife that Iranian-backed and Syrian-hosted terror will next achieve dominance over the West Bank and proceed to undermine the pro-Western governments of Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and the Gulf.

To avert this catastrophe, the U.S. has joined with the Israelis and the Europeans in resuming the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars in financial aid to the Palestinian Authority under the leadership of its Fatah president, Mahmoud Abbas, and accelerating talks for the establishment of a West Bank Palestinian state. The goal is to provide Palestinians with an affluent, secular and peaceful alternative to Hamas, and persuade Gazans to return to the Fatah fold. But the policy ignores every lesson of the abortive peace process to date as well as Fatah’s monumental corruption, jihadism and militancy. Indeed, any sovereign edifice built on the rotten foundations of the Palestinian Authority is doomed to implode, enhancing, rather than diminishing, Hamas’s influence.

Gunmen from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Is funding them the path to peace?

Since its creation by the so-called Oslo Accords of 1993, the PA has garnered more international aid than any entity in modern history – more, per capita, than the European states under the Marshall Plan. The lion’s share of this fortune has been siphoned into the private accounts of Fatah leaders or used to pay off the commanders of some 16 semi-autonomous militias. The PA also maintains an estimated 60,000 uniformed gunmen on its payroll, giving the West Bank the world’s highest percentage of policemen-to-population.

The Palestinian people, meanwhile, languish in ever-deepening poverty and unemployment, while lawlessness plagues Palestinian streets. The unbridled corruption of the PA and its Fatah headmen served as a principal cause of Hamas’s electoral victory in 2006, as well its takeover of Gaza. Viewers of Hamas television have recently been treated to tours of the lavish villas maintained by Fatah officials in the Strip, and video clips showing PA policemen, more abundantly armed and more numerous than Hamas’s troops, fleeing at the first sign of battle.

Though Fatah originally aspired to replace Israel with a secular, democratic state in Palestine, the organization refashioned itself in 1990s as an Islamic movement, embracing the lexicon of jihad. Hundreds of mosques were built with public funds, and imams were hired to spread the message of martyrdom and the hatred of Christians and Jews. These themes became the staple of the official PA media, inciting the suicide bombings that began in 2000 and poisoning an entire generation of Palestinian youth. Ironically, the Islamization of Fatah legitimized Hamas and contributed to the cadres of religious extremists who are now defying its authority.

In addition to its fiscal malfeasance and Islamic radicalism, Fatah has never fulfilled its pledges to crack down on terror. Though Mahmoud Abbas routinely criticizes Palestinian terrorist attacks as “contrary to the Palestinian national interest” – not an affront to morality and international law – he has never disavowed the al-Aqsa Brigades, a Fatah affiliate responsible for some of the bloodiest attacks against Israeli civilians.

In the past, such assaults have served as a means of maintaining Fatah’s legitimacy as a resistance movement and countering charges that the organization sold out to America and Israel. In fact, a distinct correlation exists between the amount of support that Fatah receives from the West and its need to prove its “Palestinianess” through terror.

In view of its performance over the past 14 years, the Palestinian Authority under Fatah can be counted on to squander most or all of the vast sums now being given to it by the U.S. and the international community. More gunmen will be hired and better weapons procured, but in the absence of a unified command and a leadership worth fighting for, PA soldiers will perform no more credibly than they did in Gaza. Mr. Abbas will continue to denounce terror while ignoring the terrorist units within his own organization, while PA imams will persist in preaching their jihadist sermons.

In response, Israel will be precluded from lifting the checkpoints that not only block suicide bombers but hinder communication between Palestinian cities. Impeded by Palestinian attacks and Israeli countermeasures, the peace talks will inexorably grind to a halt. In the end, the Palestinian people will remain impoverished, divided and stateless, and more than ever amenable to the purist polity of Hamas.

If funding and empowering Fatah is not a viable option for the U.S., what other courses might the administration take? Clearly no progress toward Palestinian statehood can be made before Fatah has reformed itself financially, ideologically and structurally. Even under the most propitious circumstances this process is certain to take many years – longer if economic aid and political support are provided to the PA unconditionally. Similarly, proposals for containing Hamas’s influence by stationing an international force along the Gaza border are unlikely to succeed if for no other reason than Hamas’s avowed determination to resist such a deployment. Yet the need to combat Hamas and provide Palestinians with an attractive diplomatic horizon remains acute. There is, fortunately, an interim answer.

The U.S., together with its Quartet partners, can work to establish areas of extensive Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank. Within these districts, local Palestinian leaders will be fully empowered to manage all aspects of daily life including health, education and resource management. A national assembly, comprised of representatives from each district, will meet regularly to deliberate issues of West Bank-wide concern. Security, however, will be jointly administered by Israel and Jordan. The Jordanian involvement is crucial to convincing Palestinians that the status quo of occupation has ended and they may in the future assume full responsibility for their internal defense. Such an arrangement will benefit Jordan as well, by facilitating its efforts to fight radicalism and stem the flight of Palestinians over its borders.

Visiting Washington this week, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described the Hamas conquest of Gaza as an opportunity for the Palestinians. This indeed may be the case, but not by resurrecting long-failed policies and imposing a state structure on a corrupt and incompetent Fatah. Doing so is tantamount to investing in the Titanic. Significant opportunities do, however, exist for policy makers – American, Israeli, and Palestinian – who are willing to consider new paradigms and incremental steps toward the realization of a durable peace.

“ABBAS IS A FICTION AND HE CANNOT BE SAVED”

Mahmoud Abbas is a fiction
By Israel Harel
Ha’aretz
June 21, 2007

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/873570.html

George W. Bush and Ehud Olmert looked pathetic giving their “full backing” to the broken-down crutch that is Mahmoud Abbas. Contrary to the talk in Washington, nothing has changed to open a new opportunity for negotiations over a final settlement. It is impossible to hold talks with Abbas, just like it was impossible to hold talks in the past on any kind of arrangement, and certainly not on a permanent settlement. The Hamas victory in the Gaza Strip and the establishment of a “moderate” government in Ramallah do not divide the territory into Hamastan in the Gaza Strip and Fatahstan in Judea and Samaria. This is only another illusion in the basket of Israeli illusions – a fallacy that’s part of the same belief that there is an Arab leader (it used to be Yasser Arafat, and now it is Mahmoud Abbas) who wants to sign an agreement with us, and one that entails relinquishing the right of return and recognizing Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and Zionist state.

It is not only the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria and their leadership who do not recognize the right of Israel to exist as a state with a Jewish and Zionist character, but as a number of recently published documents have revealed, it is a view shared by entities representing the Arab citizens of Israel too.

The Palestinian government sworn in earlier this week is a fiction, even if the United States and Israel support it. In Ramallah, where this fictitious government sits, Hamas won a decisive victory in the last elections: four seats in parliament for Hamas, and only one for Fatah. In Nablus, four seats went to Hamas and two to Fatah. In Hebron: nine to Hamas and none for Fatah. In Jerusalem: four to Hamas and two for Fatah. In the cities of Judea and Samaria Hamas won 30 parliamentary seats. Fatah got only 12.

Given the circumstances, the new government does not represent the Palestinians – only Israeli illusions, and possibly also those of the Americans and the Europeans. The Israel Defense Forces cannot prevent the erosion of Fatah’s military power, and it is doubtful whether it is even worth investing efforts in such futility. The experience of recent years proves that our “allies,” Mohammad Dahlan among them, are only boisterous characters – corrupt and lacking any real power. They are certainly no ally of Israel.

In any case, Hamas will defeat them, and Israel should prepare well for the confrontation ahead. And in a confrontation of this nature, the various Dahlans would bring no benefit, only a burden.

Abbas’ men lost in the fight not because Hamas militants are more brutal or better trained. If Fatah could, it would have adopted the same methods. Hamas won because the vast majority of the Gaza Strip population supports it, and this is first and foremost support for the religious ideology of the movement, which calls for the destruction of the Zionist entity. And as the elections have shown, this call is shared by the vast majority in Judea and Samaria, the area which Israeli analysts and politicians have designated for a Fatah state.

Certainly since the elections, areas A and B have been controlled by Hamas. As the events in the Gaza Strip show, the fact that many countries around the world have opposed the Hamas regime did not weaken support for the group. While in Judea and Samaria, thanks to the “occupation,” Israel is able to prevent, and it is important that it prevent, some of the bloodletting, it is unable to prevent the weakening, and even the disappearence of Fatah as a significant force.

It is therefore time to let the truth out: Abbas is a fiction, and he cannot be saved.

“PALESTINIAN SOCIETY HAS NOW GONE WHERE NO ‘PEACE PROCESSORS’ OR ROMANTIC POETS DARE TREAD”

Brothers to the bitter end
By Fouad Ajami
The New York Times
June 19, 2007

So the masked men of Fatah have the run of the West Bank while the masked men of Hamas have their dominion in Gaza. Some see this as a tolerable situation, maybe even an improvement, envisioning a secularist Fatah-run state living peacefully alongside Israel and a small, radical Gaza hemmed in by Israeli troops. It’s always tempting to look for salvation in disaster, but in this case it’s sheer fantasy.

The Palestinian ruin was a long time in coming. No other national movement has had the indulgence granted the Palestinians over the last half-century, and the results can be seen in the bravado and the senseless violence, in the inability of a people to come to terms with their condition and their needs.

The life of a Palestinian is one of squalor and misery, yet his leaders play the international game as though they were powers. An accommodation with Israel is imperative – if only out of economic self-interest and political necessity – but the Palestinians, in a democratic experiment some 18 months ago, tipped power to a Hamas movement whose very charter is pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state and the imposition of Islamist rule.

The political maxim that people get the leaders they deserve must be reckoned too cruel to apply to the Palestinians. Before Hamas, for four decades, the vainglorious Yasir Arafat refused to tell his people the basic truths of their political life. Amid the debacles, he remained eerily joyous; he circled the globe, offering his people the false sense that they could be spared the consequences of terrible decisions.

In a rare alignment of the universe, there came Mr. Arafat’s way in the late 1990s an American president, Bill Clinton, eager to redeem Palestinian claims and an Israeli soldier-statesman, Ehud Barak, who would offer the Palestinians all that Israeli political traffic could bear and then some.

But it was too much to ask of Mr. Arafat to return to his people with a decent and generous compromise, to bid farewell to the legend that the Palestinians could have it all “from the river to the sea.” It was safer for him to stay with the political myths of his people than to settle down for the more difficult work of statehood and political rescue.

For their part, the Arab states have only compounded the Palestinian misery. The Arab cavalry was always on the way, the Arab treasure was always a day away, and there was thus no need for the Palestinians to pay tribute to necessity. In recent years, the choice was starkly posed: it was either statehood or a starring role on Al Jazeera, and the young “boys of the stones” and their leaders opted for the latter.

After Mr. Arafat’s death, the mantle passed to a fairly decent man, Mahmoud Abbas, a leader for a post-heroic era. He is free of Mr. Arafat’s megalomania, and he seemed keen to cap the volcano; he promised, as he put it, “one law, one authority, one gun” in the Palestinian street. But he has never been a master of his world; by the time he had been given his political stewardship the culture of the Palestinian world had succumbed to a terrifying cult of violence.

It has long been a cherished legend of the Palestinians, and a proud claim, that they would not kill their own, that there would be no fratricide in their world. The cruelty we now see – in both Gaza and the West Bank – bears witness that the Palestinians have run through the consolations that had been there for them in a history of adversity.

It isn’t a pretty choice, that between Hamas and Fatah. Indeed, it was the reign of plunder and arrogance that Fatah imposed during its years of primacy that gave Hamas its power and room for maneuver. We must not overdo the distinction between the “secularism” of Fatah and the Islamism of Hamas. In the cruel streets and refugee camps of the Palestinians, this is really a distinction without a difference.

It is idle to think that Gaza could be written off as a Hamas dominion while Fatah held its own in the towns of the West Bank. The abdication and the anarchy have damaged both Palestinian realms. Nablus in the West Bank is no more amenable to reason than is Gaza; the writ of the pitiless preachers and gunmen is the norm in both places.

There is no way that a normal world could be had in the West Bank while Gaza goes under. There is no magic wand with which this Palestinian world could be healed and taught the virtues of realism and sobriety. No international peacekeeping force can bring order to the deadly streets and alleyways of Gaza. A population armed to the teeth and long in the throes of disorder can’t be pacified by outsiders.

For decades, Arab society granted the Palestinians everything and nothing at the same time. The Arab states built worlds of their own, had their own priorities, dreaded and loathed the Palestinians as outsiders and agitators, but left them to the illusion that Palestine was an all-consuming Arab concern.

Now the Palestinians should know better. The center of Arab politics has shifted from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, a great political windfall has come to the lands of the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, vast new wealth due to the recent rises in oil prices, while misery overwhelms the Palestinians. No Arabs wait for Palestine anymore; they have left the Palestinians to the ruin of their own history.

The rise of Hamas in Gaza should concentrate the minds of the custodians of power in the Arab world. Palestine, their old alibi, the cause with which they diverted the attention of their populations from troubles at home, has become a nightmare in its own right. An Arab debt is owed the Palestinians – the gift of truth and candor as well as material help.

Arab poets used to write reverential verse in praise of the boys of the stones and the suicide bombers. Now the poetry has subsided, replaced by a silent recognition of the malady that afflicts the Palestinians. Except among the most bigoted and willful of Arabs, there is growing acknowledgment of the depth of the Palestinian crisis. And aside from a handful of the most romantic of Israelis, there is a recognition in that society, as well, of the malignancy of the national movement a stone’s throw away.

The mainstream in Israel had made its way to a broad acceptance of Palestinian statehood. In the 1990s, Yitzhak Rabin, the soldier who had led its army into acquisition of the West Bank and Gaza in the Six-Day War of 1967, told his people that it was time to partition the land and to accept Palestinian sovereignty. It was an unsentimental peace, to “get Gaza out of Tel Aviv,” as Mr. Rabin put it, but it was peace nonetheless.

In varying degrees, all of Mr. Rabin’s successors accepted this legacy. There was even a current in Israel possessed of a deep curiosity about the Palestinians, a romance of sorts about their ways and folk culture and their connection to the sacred land. All this is stilled. Palestinian society has now gone where no “peace processors” or romantic poets dare tread.

(Fouad Ajami is, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies)

LET PALESTINE SPLIT INTO TWO

Let Palestine split into two
By Martin van Creveld
The Forward
June 12, 2007

www.forward.com/articles/let-palestine-split-into-two/

Many divorces are bitter, and they rarely make for a pretty spectacle. Nevertheless, once the fireworks die down some of them end well. Quite often a divorce enables two people who cannot live together to go their separate ways, if not to achieve reconciliation then at any rate to find new partners and make a fresh start.

The ongoing hostilities in Gaza between Fatah and Hamas certainly do not a pretty spectacle make. On both sides, fighters are being shot

Meanwhile, a growing number of civilians – women and children included – are being caught in the crossfire. Wherever one looks, all one sees are villains and victims. In this entire bloody drama, the only heroes are the hospital workers, both local ones and those working for international agencies, trying to save whomever they can.

But while the pictures coming out of Gaza are grim indeed, out of the prevailing chaos a better future may yet emerge.

Although the West Bank and Gaza are inhabited by a people known as Palestinians, the two pieces of land form distinct entities and differ sharply from one another. The West Bank is less densely populated – a lower percentage of the people it contains are refugees – and socially and economically more developed. Before the outbreak of the second intifada, its economy was based partly on tourism. And to this day, it remains more open and less committed to religious extremism.

In contrast to the West Bank with its many holy places, Gaza is a godforsaken piece of land that has almost nothing to recommend it. Not only is it the most densely populated area in the world, but it also contains a higher percentage of penniless refugees living in squalid, overcrowded camps.

Socially and economically, Gaza is less developed than the West Bank. As the political and military strength of Hamas proves, its inhabitants seek to make up for these problems by embracing a more fundamentalist version of Islam.

In part, these differences reflect the fact that it was only fairly recently that the two areas came under the same government.

From 1948 until it was occupied by Israel in 1967, the West Bank was an integral part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Jordan granted citizenship to all West Bank residents, refugees included.

By contrast, Egypt, which ruled for the same 19 years over Gaza, never granted the strip’s inhabitants citizenship. Instead, Cairo kept Gazans under military government and did what it could to thwart their development.

Now that Fatah and Hamas are fighting one another in Gaza, most people in Israel and the West are hoping for hostilities to cease and for the two areas to be reunited under the authority of a single moderate government that can negotiate with Israel. In the long run, such an outcome is highly unlikely – but it is fair to ask whether it is even desirable.

Of all the obstacles to eventual peace in the Holy Land, perhaps the most troublesome one is the long-time Palestinian insistence upon the so-called right of return. The Israelis, who rightly see the realization of this demand as leading to the destruction of their state, cannot grant it. The Palestinian leadership, which claims authority not only over the residents of the West Bank and Gaza but also over that part of the Palestinian people which lives in refugee camps in the neighboring countries, is unable to give it up.

The result is deadlock that, apart from everything else, has bedeviled every attempt to reconcile Israelis and Palestinians – and seems destined to go on doing so for a long time to come.

Suppose, however, that the current fighting ends not with the reestablishment of a single “moderate” government, but with the West Bank and Gaza going their separate ways. In that case, Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah will rule the West Bank, and Ismail Haniya and Hamas will govern Gaza.

Neither Fatah nor Hamas would be able to speak – or even claim to speak – for the Palestinian people as a whole. Unable to speak for the Palestinian people as a whole, each of the two will find it easier, if not to stop insisting on the right of return, at least to put it aside for the time being.

The fighting in Gaza is not pretty; divorces rarely are. In the long run, however, it is at least conceivable that the war of Palestinian against Palestinian will lead to the removal of the single most important obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace. If so, then perhaps the blood currently flowing is not being shed altogether in vain.

(Martin van Creveld is a professor of military history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

“EACH TIME ISRAEL GIVES UP SOMETHING NECESSARY FOR ITS SECURITY, IT RECEIVES IN RETURN MORE WAR, MORE TERROR AND MORE INSECURITY”

Two states of destruction
By Cal Thomas
Townhall.com
June 19, 2007

The Bush administration’s announced goal for Israel and the “Palestinian people” has been two states, living side by side in peace. The administration is two-thirds there. There are now two states – one in Gaza, headed by the militant Hamas organization, which shot its way to power; and another in the West Bank headed by accused Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas. Unfortunately for Israel, there is no peace, which should not surprise those who have been predicting exactly what is now coming to pass.

Whatever their names, be they groups like Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and al-Qaida, or states like Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran, their objectives are identical: the annihilation of the democratic Jewish State and the elimination of all Jews, either by death or displacement, from the land. To argue otherwise and to continue believing the fiction that “infidel” diplomats from the State Department or European Union can magically transform people commanded to hate Jews and Israel based on a twisted mandate from their corrupt notion of God, is to be in extreme denial.

Hamas won’t stop with Gaza. After its victory over poorly directed Israeli forces in Lebanon last summer, why should it? The one thing terrorists understand is weakness. They perceive Israel, under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, as weak and they are going for Israel’s jugular. Benyamin Elon, a conservative member of Israel’s Knesset, said, “The Fatah is diminishing in front of our eyes, and a group of gangsters is taking over. Israel can wake up now from the delusion of an independent Palestinian state.”

Will it, or will Olmert be passing out and swallowing, himself, more diplomatic sleeping pills during meetings this week with President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and members of Congress? The violence and broken agreements are not being perpetrated by Israel. They are being perpetrated on Israel. It is mystifying why Western diplomats continue to pressure Israel to “do more” when “more” has brought Israel less.

Each time Israel gives up something necessary for its security, it receives in return more war, more terror and more insecurity. If more for less remains the “strategy” of the United States, then Israel has two choices: surrender now, or prepare for all-out war with catastrophic results.

Since President Bush laid out his “vision” for a two-state solution to Middle East turmoil four years ago this month, Israel has frozen expansion of Jewish communities beyond the armistice lines of 1949 (a major Palestinian demand). As Caroline Glick wrote in The Jerusalem Post, “Israel expelled all Israeli residents of Gaza and northern Samaria in order to render the areas Jew-free to the Palestinians.”

What was the Palestinian response to Israel’s construction halt? Did they suddenly embrace the two-state solution of peace and harmony with Israel? They did not. The Palestinians held elections in January 2006 and instead of picking leaders to make peace with Israel, they overwhelmingly voted in members of Hamas to head the Palestinian Authority. A flood tide of terrorists and arms subsequently flowed into Gaza.

The intentions of Hamas and other terrorist groups are not hidden. They openly proclaim what they intend to do and then they do it. Osama bin Laden said five years before Sept. 11, 2001, that he planned to attack the United States. Few took his statement seriously enough to eliminate him when they had the chance.

Those still in doubt or denial about what Israel’s (and America’s) enemies are planning might benefit from reading Jed Babbin’s new book, “In the Words of Our Enemies” (Regnery Publishing). In it, Babbin assembles what the Islamic terrorists, Chinese and North Korean communists and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez are saying they want to do to us. This quote from the al-Qaida training manual leaves no room for diplomacy: “The confrontation that Islam calls for with these godless and apostate regimes, does not know Socratic debates, Platonic ideals nor Aristotelian diplomacy. But it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine-gun.”

Anyone who questions the sincerity of such a statement is a fool. Apparently enough fools remain in leadership in Israel, the United States and Europe to encourage the killers to fight on until victory is attained.

FULL ARTICLES

BYE, BYE NOBEL PRIZE

Arafat’s Nobel Prize, Suha’s gowns looted
Hamas gunmen who destroyed late PA chairman’s Gaza house did not spare prestigious award he won, as well as garments left behind by his widow
By Roee Nahmias
Yediot Ahronot
June 17, 2007

www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3413794,00.html

The Hamas gunmen who broke into the Gaza house of late Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat on Saturday, also stole his Nobel Peace Prize and his widow’s evening gowns, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

“This morning the Hamas gangs and militia broke into the home of the leader and symbol, Yasser Arafat, broke the door and entered his house under gunpoint. They stole and looted its content, stepped on his picture and military uniform and stole his personal documents,” the report said, using harsh words against Hamas.

According to the report, “(The gunmen) smashed the badges and gifts he received from world leaders, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize medal.”

It appears that the gunmen also visited the private room of the late leaders’ widow, Suha Arafat.

“The militiamen broke into his wife and daughter’s rooms on the second floor of the house and stole the women’s clothes. They also stepped on the picture of the ‘shahid rais’ (martyr chairman) with his daughter Zahwa and his wife, Suha Arafat.”

Fatah spokesman Ahmed Abdel Rahman was enraged by the incident, saying that “this crime took place after Hamas politburo chief Khaled Mashaal promised that Arafat’s house would not be touched.

“This is a real crime which was preceded by crimes of killing, slaughter and theft by the gangs of the Hamas militia and its executing force in the presidential headquarters in Gaza, as well as the execution of Fatah officers.

“These crimes will reveal to the entire world the face of the Hamas leadership and the political leadership which rose to power. The Palestinian people will not forgive these criminal gangs which broke into the home of the great Palestinian shahid, Yasser Arafat. This crime will remain a mark of disgrace on the forehead of the Hamas leadership and its criminal gangs,” he added.

BBC APOLOGIZES FOR REFERRING TO JERUSALEM AS ISRAEL’S CAPITAL

BBC sorry for calling Jerusalem capital of Israel
By Jonny Paul
The Jerusalem Post
June 15, 2007

www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1181813036973&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

The BBC apologized this week for referring to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and promised not to repeat “the mistake,” following a complaint by four British organizations.

Arab Media Watch, Muslim Public Affairs Committee, Friends of Al-Aksa and the Institute of Islamic Political Thought sent a joint complaint to the BBC after a presenter on its Football Focus program on March 24 mentioned that Jerusalem was Israel’s capital and “historic soul.”

The BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit posted a response on its Web site: “The reference was a passing one in a context where the focus was on sport, not politics. While recognizing the sensitivity of the issue of the status of Jerusalem, the ECU took the view that the program-makers had taken sufficient action by acknowledging the error and rectifying the Web site.”

The Editorial Complaints Unit’s ruling was: “Complaint resolved.”

In a letter to the complaining NGOs, Fraser Steel, head of editorial complaints at the BBC, said: “We of course accept that the international community does not recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and that the BBC should not describe it as such. I was therefore pleased to see that Katherine Tsang [BBC Information adviser], when she wrote to you in April, acknowledged the error and apologized for it. [Presenter] Steve Boulton and other senior managers in BBC Sport told us they very much regret the mistake and apologize for it.”

“Senior managers will try to ensure, as you suggest, that the mistake is not repeated. Because it appears on the Web site, there will be a public acknowledgement of the error, and the action taken in consequence.”

Steel added: “I’d like to add my apologies for this most regrettable, but I’m sure accidental, factual mistake. I appreciate that the status of Jerusalem is of particular concern to Palestinians, and it is important that it is not misrepresented. I am confident that lessons have already been learned, and they will be emphasized as a result of my decision.”

Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said in response: “Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. It is the right of every sovereign state to determine which city will be its capital. If this is not accepted by everyone today, I am confident it will be in the future.”

London-based Arab Media Watch told The Jerusalem Post: “Under international law, neither east nor west Jerusalem is considered Israel’s capital. Tel Aviv is recognized as Israel’s capital, pending a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.”

The Institute of Islamic Political Thought is run by Azzam Tamimi, a Hamas supporter and a member of the Muslim Association of Britain, part of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Tamimi spoke at Saturday’s anti-Israel rally in London’s Trafalgar Square. He blamed the British for their role in the Arab-Israeli conflict and vowed to return to his mother’s house in Hebron, which he said could never become a “Zionist place.”

To huge applause, Tamimi called Israel “a racist entity that sees us [Palestinians] as subhuman while they see themselves as superhuman.”

Tamimi told BBC in an interview in 2004 he did not recognize Israel’s right to exist and would be willing to become a suicide bomber. Last year, Merrill Lynch pulled its sponsorship from an event hosted by the London Middle East Institute because of Tamimi’s participation.

The Muslim Public Affairs Committee has faced continuing allegations of extremism and anti-Semitism. In 2005, during the last general election in the UK, the group campaigned against pro-Israel and pro-Iraq war MPs, and attempted to slur one MP by claiming she was a Jew. It eventually apologized when they learned the candidate was not Jewish.

Last year, The Observer discovered that the committee’s co-founder, Asghar Bukhari, had funded Holocaust denier David Irving.

The Friends of Al-Aksa states on its Web site that the first Jewish commonwealth lasted “only 98 years - from 1020 BC to 922 BC,” and that after the destruction of the First Temple, “all Jews are either killed, exiled or taken prisoners. This marks the end of Israel after 400 years of its inception.”

The Leicester-based organization had its bank accounts closed by the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2005.

The Muslim Association of Britain accused the bank of being a tool of the pro-Israeli lobby. “It appears the Royal Bank of Scotland is being used as a tool against those that express sympathy with Israel’s victims,” a representative of the Muslim Association said.

“No bank or institution should be allowed to get away with such anti-Palestinian or anti-Muslim bias.”

“WELCOME TO GAZASTAN!”

Hamas-land and Fatah-land at war
Amir Taheri on three reasons for trouble ahead
Times of London
June 16, 2007

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article1940406.ece

Welcome to Gazastan! This is how the Arab media greeted the seizure of control by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Although some have blamed the fighting on “the international community”, Israel, and even George W. Bush, what is happening is prompted by intra-Palestinian political rivalries. The fighting has three causes: immediate, medium-term and long-term.

The immediate cause is the desire by Hamas to bring the security apparatus of Fatah, its rival group in Gaza, under its own control. Months of negotiations with the help of Saudi Arabia failed to persuade Fatah to put its security forces under government (which in practice meant Hamas) command.

To Hamas, Fatah’s security machine, led by Muhammad Dahlan, is little better than “the Zionist enemy”. Dahlan, for his part, knew that, without his machine, he would have little chance of making a bid for the presidency when the incumbent, Mahmoud Abbas, is forced out. Dahlan ran a lucrative protection racket in Gaza, set up by the late Yassir Arafat and his family, to bankroll Fatah.

Having expelled Fatah, Hamas takes over this protection racket. Despite a $250 million cash gift from Tehran, Hamas has been short of money for almost a year. Thus, seizing control of Arafat’s business empire in Gaza will be a godsend.

The medium-term cause of the fighting is Hamas’s desire to push the wooden nail into the heart of the Oslo accords, the “undead” that haunts Palestinian politics with the elusive prospect of a two-state solution.

Fatah bought into the two-state philosophy in the 1990s. It regards Gaza and the West Bank as pieces of a jigsaw that, put together, would make an independent Palestinian state that would exist alongside Israel. The constitution of Hamas, however, commits it to the creation of a single state. Gaza and the West Bank are regarded as bases from which the struggle for the liberation of the entire mandate of Palestine, that is to say the elimination of Israel, is pursued for as long as necessary.

The longer-term cause of the duel is the deep ideological divisions in Palestinian society: Hamas is religious, Fatah secular. Hamas is pan-Islamist, Fatah Palestinian nationalist.

Although Gaza has been Hamas’s principal base for a decade, the presence of Fatah’s armed security networks prevented the pan-Islamist movement from reshaping the enclave according to its radical ideology. Hamas is part of the Muslim Brotherhood, an international movement dedicated to creating a single global Islamic state. For it, Palestine is no more than a small corner of Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam) that must one day defeat Dar al-Kufr (the House of the Infidel) to unite mankind under its banner.

In a talk to students at Tehran University a few months ago, Ismail Haniyah, the Hamas Prime Minister fired yesterday by President Abbas, cautioned against “the trap of nationalism”, which he described as a “Zionist-Crusader conspiracy” to divide Muslims across national lines. To be sure, Haniyah wants a Palestine as much as Dahlan does, but not just any old Palestine. Haniyah wants a Palestine that covers the entire 22,000sq km of the old British mandate, not the 5,000 sq km of Gaza and West Bank that Fatah has accepted. He also wants an Islamic Palestine in which Sharia, not Western-style law, is in force.

Having won the general election 18 months ago, Hamas launched a drive to “Islamicise” Gaza, forcing women to wear the hijab and men to grow beards. It burnt down the last beer factory in Gaza and banned the sale of alcoholic drinks. Bands of youths calling themselves “Brigades of Enforcing the Good and Combating Evil” raid homes in search of alcohol, Western music and videos, unIslamic T-shirts and other “sinful items”. Young men and women found together in public, or even in private cars, are stopped and interrogated to make sure unmarried couples do not violate Sharia rules.

Hamas is convinced that time is running out for Israel and that, with Islam experiencing a global renaissance, the chance of victory against the “Infidel”, in this particular corner of the world, is rising by the day. Exclusive control of Gaza will enable Hamas to devise a low-intensity pincer war against Israel with the help of Hezbollah in Lebanon, supported by Iran and Syria. Hamas is also encouraged that, for the first time in two decades, several regional powers, including Iran, Syria, and Libya, support its “one-state” strategy.

Fatah’s analysis, however, is based on the assumption that the longer the “two-state” solution is delayed, the smaller the chances of creating a viable Palestinian state.

By expelling Fatah, Hamas will have exclusive control over an area that accounts for almost half of all Palestinians in the occupied territories. Fatah has retaliated with “cleansing” operations against Hamas supporters in the West Bank. As things are shaping up, Gaza could end up as Hamas-land while the West Bank becomes Fatah-land. And, that, if anything, looks like a three-state scenario: a Jewish one in Israel, a secular Arab nationalist one in the West Bank, and an Islamist one in Gaza. And that means bigger troubles ahead.

“THE WAY OF THE GUN HAS BEEN PAYING DIVIDENDS FOR 40 YEARS”

Arafat’s children
Editorial
The Wall Street Journal
June 16, 2007

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118195901651137457.html

Scores of Palestinians were killed this week in Gaza in factional fighting between loyalists of President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah and those of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas. As if on cue, it took about 24 hours before pundits the world over blamed the violence on Israel and President Bush.

This is the Israel that dismantled its settlements in Gaza in August 2005, a unilateral concession for which it asked, and got, nothing in return. And it is the U.S. President who, in a landmark speech five years ago this month, called on Palestinians to “elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror.” Had Palestinians done so, they could be living today in a peaceful, independent state. Instead, in January 2006 they freely handed the reins of government to Hamas in parliamentary elections. What is happening today is the result of that choice – their choice.

That election didn’t simply emerge from a vacuum, however. It is a consequence of the cult of violence that has typified the Palestinian movement for much of its history and which has been tolerated and often celebrated by the international community. If Palestinians now think they can advance their domestic interests by violence, nobody should be surprised: The way of the gun has been paying dividends for 40 years.

* * *

In 1972 Palestinian terrorists murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Yet only two years later Yasser Arafat addressed the U.N.’s General Assembly – the first non-government official so honored. In 1970 Arafat attempted to overthrow Jordan’s King Hussein and tried to do the same a few years later in Lebanon. Yet in 1980, the European Community, in its Venice Declaration, recognized Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization as a legitimate negotiating partner.

In 1973, the National Security Agency recorded Arafat’s telephoned instructions to PLO terrorists to murder Cleo Noel, the U.S. ambassador in Sudan, and his deputy George Curtis Moore. Yet in 1993, Arafat was welcomed in the White House for the signing of the Oslo Accords with Israel. That same year, the British National Criminal Intelligence Service reported that the PLO made its money from “extortion, payoffs, illegal arms-dealing, drug trafficking, money laundering and fraud.” Yet over the next several years, the Palestinian Authority would become the largest single recipient of foreign aid on a per capita basis.

In 1996, after he had formally renounced terrorism in the Oslo Accords, Arafat told a rally in Gaza that “We are committed to all martyrs who died for the cause of Jerusalem starting with Ahmed Musa until the last martyr Yihye Ayyash” – Musa being the first PLO terrorist to be killed in 1965 and Ayyash being the Hamas mastermind of a series of suicide bombings in which scores of Israeli civilians were killed. Yet the Clinton Administration continued to pretend that Arafat was an ally in the fight against Hamas. In 2000, Arafat rejected an Israeli offer of statehood midwifed by President Clinton and instead initiated the bloody intifada that left 1,000 Israelis and 3,000 Palestinians dead.

In 2005, only months after Arafat’s death, Israel dismantled its settlements and withdrew its forces from the Gaza Strip. Palestinians have used the opportunity to intensify their rocket fire at civilian targets within Israel. Last month, Israeli security services arrested two Gazan women, one of them pregnant, who were planning to enter Israel on medical pretexts in order to carry out suicide attacks. Yet the same month, the World Bank issued a report faulting Israel for restricting Palestinian freedom of movement.

Now it appears Hamas has taken control of the Gaza Strip’s main road, its border with Egypt as well as the offices of the so-called Preventive Security Services, traditionally a Fatah stronghold. “They are executing them one by one,” a witness told the Associated Press of Hamas’s reprisals against the Preventive Security personnel.

We do not pretend to know where all this will lead. On Thursday, Mr. Abbas dissolved the government and declared a state of emergency, though he seems powerless to change the course of events in Gaza. Israel could conceivably intervene, as could Egypt, and both states have powerful reasons to prevent the emergence of a Hamastan with close links to Iran hard on their borders. But neither do they wish to become stuck in the Strip’s bottomless factionalism and fanaticism.

At the same time, pressure will surely mount on Israel and the U.S. to accept Hamas’s ascendancy and begin negotiations with its leaders. According to this reasoning, the Bush Administration cannot demand democracy of the Palestinians and then refuse to recognize the results of a democratic election.

But leave aside the fact that Mr. Bush did not simply call for an election: Is it wise to negotiate with a group that kills its fellow Palestinians almost as freely as it does Israelis? And what would there be to negotiate about? The best-case scenario – a suspension of hostilities in exchange for renewed international funding – would simply give Hamas time and money to consolidate its rule and rebuild an arsenal for future terror assaults. Then, too, the last thing the Palestinians need is yet further validation from the wider world that the violence they now inflict so indiscriminately works.

* * *

The deeper lesson here is that a society that has spent the last decade celebrating suicide bombing would inevitably become a victim of its own nihilistic impulses. This is not the result of Mr. Bush’s call for democratic responsibility; it is the bitter fruit of the decades of dictatorship and terrorism as statecraft that Yasser Arafat instilled among Palestinians.

“HAMAS SEES ECONOMIC DEPRIVATION AS A FORM OF POLITICAL OPPRESSION”

Fundamentalists threaten Israel from all sides
By Con Coughlin
The Daily Telegraph
June 15, 2007

Welcome to the new Islamic Republic of Hamas-stan, where every Palestinian woman is obliged to wear the veil and all traces of corrupting Western influences, from pop music to internet cafés, are strictly banned.

The creation of a mini Islamic state in Gaza now appears the most likely outcome as the militant Palestinian group Hamas strikes against the more secular-minded government of President Mahmoud Abbas.

And with fighters loyal to Mr Abbas’s Fatah movement either surrendering or fleeing, it seems that not even the might of Israel can prevent Hamas from fulfilling its long-held ambition of establishing an Islamic state within the Palestinian territories.

The Gaza Strip, the 20-mile stretch of desert scrub wedged between Israel and the Sinai Desert, has never been a happy place. The majority of the 1.4 million Palestinians who live there are mainly refugees from Israel’s 1948 war of independence and have rarely seen their living standards rise above subsistence level. But the addition of religious fanaticism to economic privation has severely worsened their plight.

Even before this week’s violence, activists had been busy attacking cafés, video shops and restaurants that serve alcohol or sell what are regarded as subversive Western films.

An internet café at the Jabaliyah refugee camp was bombed because zealots believed its customers might be exposed to pornography or pop music. The desire to enforce a strict interpretation of Islamic law even resulted in a gunman attacking a UN primary school because it allowed young boys and girls to mix together in the playground.

And all this with Ismael Haniyeh, the Palestinian Prime Minister who came to power on the back of Hamas’s surprise election victory in the 2006 elections, yet to establish his de facto Islamic state. Even if Gaza remains under Mr Abbas’s nominal control, the implications of it becoming a self-contained Islamic entity are alarming not just for Israel, but for the wider region.

Hamas makes no secret of the fact that it now receives most of its financial and military support from Iran. The Iranian government signed a memorandum of understanding with the Hamas leadership in June last year, in which it agreed to fund the militant group to the tune of £400 million.

Until then, most of the Palestinian Authority’s funding came from the EU and America, but this dried up when Hamas came to power and refused to give up its long-standing policy of seeking Israel’s destruction or to renounce its terrorist past.

In addition to financial support, Iran provides training to members of the military wing of Hamas by sending them to camps in Lebanon and Iran run by the elite Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards.

Past Iranian attempts to supply the Palestinians with military hardware have been less successful, with the Israeli navy intercepting a ship laden with explosives destined for Gaza in early 2002. But earlier this year, the Iranians sought to establish new supply lines to Gaza.

On February 24, Khaled Mashaal, Hamas’s supreme leader, travelled to the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, where he met senior Quds Force officials and Sudanese politicians who are broadly sympathetic to Hamas’s political objectives.

The main topic of conversation was setting up a supply route that would enable Iran to smuggle rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank missiles, guns and explosives through the porous border between Gaza and Egypt.

The dispute over tightening the border is now one of the issues at the heart of the current violence; Hamas refuses to countenance the deployment of an international force that would seriously curtail the activities of the arms and money smugglers who use a sophisticated network of tunnels to transport their contraband into Gaza.

Pro-Palestinian campaigners frequently claim that the main reason Gaza is in crisis is that the economic blockade imposed by America and Israel following Hamas’s election victory has reduced the civilian population to penury. This was the essence of the argument advanced by Alvaro de Soto, until recently the UN’s special co-ordinator for the Middle East, who seems happy to blame anyone for the Palestinians’ plight except the Palestinians themselves.

Ordinary Palestinians, it is true, in both Gaza and the West Bank, are suffering hardship. But this is not because of a lack of funds entering the Palestinian territories: it is because successive Palestinian administrations have made no effort to distribute the resources available equably among the population.

Hamas, on the other hand, sees economic deprivation as a form of political oppression. The World Bank reported that donors contributed about £375 million to the Palestinian territories in 2006, twice the amount they received in 2005. But since taking power, Hamas ensures any funds are spent on Islamic causes and its 6,000-strong militia, leaving the majority to fend for themselves.

The bonus for Hamas is that, by forcing the majority of Palestinians to exist in dire poverty, it succeeds in attracting widespread sympathy from international do-gooders who do not understand the sadistic economic manipulation that is taking place.

Not surprisingly, many Palestinians who were previously agnostic about their Muslim heritage have found themselves embracing the Hamas cause, more out of economic necessity than religious obligation.

Hizbollah – another Iranian-funded militia – used similar tactics to establish its power base in southern Lebanon during the 1980s. Hizbollah, of course, has now become a dominant force in Lebanese politics.

Hamas is trying to replicate Hizbollah’s success in Gaza, not a pleasing prospect for Israel, which now faces the threat of having two Iranian-backed, Islamic fundamentalist organisations dedicated to its destruction camped on its northern and southern borders. It is not a thought that will help Israelis sleep easy.

“AUSTRIA-HUNGARY AND THE BOURBONS ROLLED INTO ONE”

“Our ‘friend’ Fatah”
By Barry Rubin
June 17, 2007

During World War One, Germany concluded that its chief ally, Austria-Hungary, was more of a burden than an asset. As one German official put it, that alliance was like being “shackled to a corpse.”

And more than a century earlier, it was said of the doomed French dynasty, the Bourbons, that they learned nothing and forgot nothing.

Welcome to the alliance with Fatah, sort of Austria-Hungary and the Bourbons rolled up into one. It is now ruler of a West Bank-only semi-state after Hamas captured the Gaza Strip from it. The United States is now backing Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas with aid and probably military assistance. Israel’s government will do everything possible to preserve that regime, too.

This is a completely logical policy decision. It makes perfect sense given the balance of forces and the overall situation. I understand why it is being done. The problem is that it isn’t going to work. And if we know that now, perhaps this fact should shape policy just a bit?

But first, let’s sweep the floor of all the debris that belongs in the garbage can. There are now those who argue for backing, or at least parlaying with, Hamas. Reportedly, the European Union is going to keep giving aid to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, to avoid a humanitarian crisis.

As I recall, in wartime one does not send aid to enemy-ruled states, even to help the civilians there. Putting on such pressure is a way to defeat the enemy. Of course, the United States and Europe are not at war with Hamas, or Hizballah, Syria, or Iran for that matter. The problem is that these countries generally don’t understand that these forces are at war with them.

If you send aid to the Gaza Strip, it will strengthen Hamas’s rule. Aid will be diverted to pay terrorists and buy arms. The schoolteachers whose salary you pay will teach the children that their highest duty is to become a suicide bomber and that Christians and Jews are sub-human. The salaries paid are used to buy support for Hamas. Those loyal get money; those who oppose Hamas don’t. Is all this so hard to understand?

And if one wants to do something humanitarian, take the money that would have gone to the Gaza Strip and give it to poor people in Africa, Asia, South America, Iraq, even the West Bank. Don’t finance terrorism, antisemitism, and radical Islamism for goodness sake. Is that so hard to understand?

The second piece of nonsense is that this is some great opportunity for advancing the peace process. Have no doubt. The United States and Israel may give Fatah money, trade some intelligence, and try to get them to stop cross-border terror attacks. But serious negotiations? Forget it.

In understanding the Fatah world view let’s try a simple test. You are a Fatah official. You receive money. What do you do with it? Answer: put it into your foreign bank account. Why? Because aside from pure greed and a mentality of corruption, you are afraid that Hamas will take over the West Bank, too. You will need a bankroll so that you and your family can flee abroad and live comfortably, very comfortably.

As for Abbas, he is a loser and only if he is replaced can one even begin to believe in Fatah’s survival. He is the closest thing in the Palestinian movement to a French intellectual, not the kind of person you would like to have by your side in a knife fight.

Consider his first two decisions. Who did Abbas make prime minister? Muhammad Dahlan, who has been warning about the Hamas threat for more than five years, or some other warrior? No, Salam Fayyad, a professional economist. Why, does Abbas intend to launch a major development and anti-poverty campaign? No, it’s because Fayyad, an honest and experience guy it is true, but certainly no wartime consigliore.

In addition, he has refused to outlaw Hamas on the West Bank. Perhaps he hopes for reconciliation? Or wants to avoid a confrontation on his remaining turf? If Abbas is thinking like a European Union bureaucrat he is really doomed.

There is something deeper in the desire to believe in an alliance with Fatah, an organization which still carries on terrorist attacks and doesn’t believe in Israel’s right to exist. This is the obsession with the peace process idea.

Now peace is a very good thing. It is certainly preferable to war. Such a condition far better serves the interests of average people. But, unfortunately, a comprehensive, formal peace is not going to happen. Get over it. Smell the coffee. Deal with unpleasant reality.

OK, so we have to deal with the cards which have been dealt. But this means a tough policy, showing adversaries that it is costly to be enemies; pressing supposed allies to deliver the goods.

What lesson does Iran draw from Western weakness in opposing its nuclear weapons’ program? To paraphrase the words of the Union admiral during the Civil War, “Damn the diplomatic notes! Full speed ahead!”

What lesson does Syria draw from Israel’s failure to retaliate against it last summer and the stream of Western suitors bearing gifts? Escalate the war against Lebanon!

What lesson does Hizballah draw from Western refusal to get tough on arms smuggling and Europeans trembling lest it attack the UNIFIL peacekeeping forces in Lebanon? Rearm, rebuild positions in the south and start firing rockets against Israel again!

So, all right, work with Fatah but have no illusions or expectations. And don’t give something for nothing.

THE JEWISH STATES IS AT ITS MOST VULNERABLE FOR THREE DECADES

Iran’s long game sets stage for war
By Uzi Mahnaimi
The Sunday London Times
June 17, 2007

Israel awoke last Friday to find itself encircled by enemies with its most determined foe, Iran, entrenched on its southern doorstep in Gaza.

Hamas’s stunningly swift victory in a brief civil war has left the Jewish state at its most vulnerable for three decades.

Inspired by a philosophy of militant Islam and backed by Iranian weaponry and military training, Hamas poses a direct threat to Israel and, if left unchecked, will soon be in a position to step up its lethal rocket attacks on towns and villages across the border.

In Lebanon to the north, Israel faces Hezbollah, the militant Syrian-backed militia, which has rebuilt its frontline forces – also with Iranian help – since last summer’s war exposed the shortcomings of the Israeli defence forces. The Lebanese government can do little to curb Hezbollah’s growing strength.

“Tehran has succeeded in planting an Iranian division in the north and now they have a foothold in the south by establishing their southern division - Hamas,” said a source in Israel’s defence ministry.

Then there is Syria, with which Israel is still officially at war. Damascus is demanding the return of the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967. Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, said recently his country did not want war with Syria but warned that a “miscalculation” could spark one.

To the east – beyond Jordan – lie the deeply unstable Iraq and the greatest threat of all in Israeli eyes, Iran. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, has declared that Israel should be “wiped off the map” and continues to advance a nuclear programme in defiance of the United Nations security council.

Israeli intelligence has little doubt that if Israel or the US attacks Iran’s burgeoning uranium enrichment programme, much of the retaliation will come from Tehran’s clients on its borders.

They are also watching a fierce debate inside the US administration between doves led by Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, and hawks such as Vice-President Dick Cheney, on the repercussions of any military strike against Iran.

With the doves seemingly holding the upper hand in Washington, US support for a hardline Israeli response may be fading. But Israeli leaders continue to warn that they will prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Ehud Barak, who is expected to be appointed defence minister tomorrow, met Olmert to agree a crisis plan to deal with the threat of Hamas before Olmert left for Washington to meet President George W Bush this week.

“Israel will not tolerate a Hamastan at its back door,” said one of Barak’s close associates.

GAZA’S CHRISTIANS FEAR FOR THEIR LIVES

Gaza’s Christians fear for their lives
By Khaled Abu Toameh
The Jerusalem Post
June 18, 2007

www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1181813061916&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Christians living in Gaza City on Monday appealed to the international community to protect them against increased attacks by Muslim extremists. Many Christians said they were prepared to leave the Gaza Strip as soon as the border crossings are reopened.

The appeal came following a series of attacks on a Christian school and church in Gaza City over the past few days.

Father Manuel Musalam, leader of the small Latin community in the Gaza Strip, said masked gunmen torched and looted the Rosary Sisters School and the Latin Church.

“The masked gunmen used rocket-propelled grenades to storm the main entrances of the school and church,” he said. “Then they destroyed almost everything inside, including the Cross, the Holy Book, computers and other equipment.”

Musalam expressed outrage over the burning of copies of the Bible, noting that the gunmen destroyed all the Crosses inside the church and school. “Those who did these awful things have no respect for Christian-Muslim relations,” he said.

He estimated damages at more than $500,000. “Those who see the destruction will realize how bad this attack was,” he said. “Christians have been living in peace and security with Muslims for many years, but those who attacked us are trying to sabotage this relationship.”

He said Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas phoned him on Sunday night to express his strong condemnation for the attack. “President Abbas promised that he would do his utmost to prevent such attacks on Christians here,” he said.

Fatah officials blamed Hamas militiamen for the attack on the church and school. However, Islam Shahwan, spokesman for Hamas’s Executive Force in the Gaza Strip, denied responsibility.

He nevertheless admitted that a large group of Hamas militiamen had been near the area during the attack. “We have instructed all our men to withdraw from the area,” he said. “We will punish anyone who targets churches and public institutions.”

MAMMA MIA! COULD BE THE FIRST CASUALTY

The price of British Jewish criticism of Israel
Tel Aviv gets ready to silence Mamma Mia!
By Sonia Verma
The Times (of London)
June 11, 2007

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article1913110.ece

The Abba musical Mamma Mia! could be the first casualty of a growing Israeli backlash against a proposed British academic boycott of Israeli universities.

The British production, due to open in Tel Aviv in a few weeks, has been jeopardised by threats from local theatre companies who refuse to stage it in retaliation over threats from the University and College Union to boycott Israel for occupying Palestinian land.

But the musical is only the beginning, says a group of Israeli politicians who drafted a law that could trigger a consumer boycott of an estimated £1.2 billion of British imports sold in Israel every year.

“The British people should know we are very disappointed in England,” said Otniel Schneller, an Israeli parliament member who helped to draft the Bill aimed at punishing Britain.

On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the six-day war, stances taken back then still loom over the Middle East peace process.

“For me, the cost of lost business is not important. It is impossible for us to have economic relations with a country that promotes such antiSemitic policies,” he said. Britain is Israel’s third largest trading partner, behind the US and Germany, according to the country’s Ministry of Trade.

If adopted by the Knesset, the law would require British imports to be labelled clearly, making it easier for shoppers to shun the goods. Machinery, electronics, pharmaceuticals, cars and diamonds are among Israel’s top imports from the UK.

Political observers say that there is growing public support for the Bill. The Israeli Government, leading Israeli academics and newspapers have roundly condemned recent moves by Britain’s largest trade and lecturers’ union, with some commentators branding its actions antiSemitic and the result of the influence of Britain’s growing Muslim community.

In Israel travel agencies are discouraging tourists from travelling to Britain. Some union workers are refusing to unload British imports and some Israeli importers have threatened to cut ties with British suppliers in protest.

A number of prominent Israeli academics, including Itamar Rabinovitch, the former president of Tel Aviv University and a leading author, have expressed outrage at British unions for targeting the wrong people, arguing that Israeli academics are among the most fervent opponents of Israel’s occupation.

But among some Palestinians, the view is different. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel called boycotts a valid tools to end the occupation.

“The Palestinian call for institutional boycott of Israel, which is principally inspired by the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa, is the most morally and politically sound resistance strategy to counter Israeli apartheid and colonial policies,” Omar Barghouti, a Campaign leader, said. He has organised a tour next month of British universities and colleges for pro-boycott Palestinian academics.

A visit to Israel yesterday by Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, to show solidarity with Israeli academics did little to quell the controversy. Speaking at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he called the planned academic boycott of Israeli universities fundamentally wrong. He also criticised Israeli restrictions that stop Palestinian students attending Israeli universities, or students from Gaza travelling to study in the occupied West Bank.

Hitting where it hurts

– Exports from the UK to Israel amounted to about £1.2 billion

– British imports from Israel amounted to just over £700 million

– Eleven Israeli companies are listed on the London Stock Exchange

– Almost 30 other Israeli companies, including Elron Investments and Sky Vision, are planning to float stock on London’s AIM market this year

– Britain exported more than £110 million of military equipment to Israel during its occupation of Palestinian territories and war with Lebanon

Source: Israel-British Chamber of Commerce

ISRAEL DISCOVERS OIL

Israel discovers oil
By Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times
June 10, 2007

Lucien Bronicki is one of Israel’s foremost experts in geothermal power, but when I ran into him last week at Ben Gurion University, in Israel’s Negev Desert, all he wanted to talk about was oil wells. Israel, he told me, had discovered oil.

Pointing to a room full of young Israeli high-tech college seniors, Mr. Bronicki remarked: “These are our oil wells.”

It was quite a scene. Once a year Ben Gurion students in biomedical engineering, software, electrical engineering and computing create elaborate displays of their senior projects or – as in the case of a student-made robot that sidled up to me – demonstrate devices they’ve invented.

On this occasion, Yossi Vardi, the godfather of Israeli venture capitalism – ever since he backed the four young Israelis who invented the first Internetwide instant messaging system, Mirabilis, which was sold to AOL for $400 million in 1998 – brought some of his venture capital pals, like Mr. Bronicki, down to Ben Gurion to scout out potential start-ups and to mentor the grads.

The first student exhibit I visited was by Yuval Sharoni, 26, an electrical engineering senior, whose project was titled an “Innovative Covariance Matrix for Point Target Detection in Hyperspectral Images” (which has to do with military targeting). When I told him I was from The Times, he declared: “This project is going to make the front page, I’m telling you.” The cover of Popular Mechanics, maybe, but it could one day make the Nasdaq, where Israel now has the most companies listed of any nation outside of the United States.

“Today, every Israeli Jewish mother wants her son to be a dropout and go create a start-up,” said Mr. Vardi, who is currently invested in 38 different ones.

Which gets to the point of this column: If you want to know why Israel’s stock market and car sales are at record highs – while Israel’s government is paralyzed by scandals and war with Hamas and doesn’t even have a finance minister – it’s because of this ecosystem of young innovators and venture capitalists. Last year, Vcs poured about $1.4 billion into Israeli start-ups, which puts Israel in a league with India and China.

Israel is Exhibit A of an economic phenomenon I see a lot these days. Of course, competition between countries and between companies still matters. But when the world becomes this flat – with so many distributed tools of innovation and connectivity empowering individuals from anywhere to compete, connect and collaborate – the most important competition is between you and your own imagination, because energetic, innovative and connected individuals can now act on their imaginations farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before.

Those countries and companies that empower their individuals to imagine and act quickly on their imagination are going to thrive. So while there are reasons to be pessimistic about Israel these days, there is one huge reason for optimism: this country has a culture that nurtures and rewards individual imagination – one with no respect for limits or hierarchies, or fear of failure. It’s a perfect fit with this era of globalization.

“We are not investing in products or business plans today, but in people who have the ability to imagine and connect dots,” said Nimrod Kozlovski, a top Israeli expert on Internet law who also works with start-ups. Israel is not good at building big companies, he explained, but it is very good at producing people who say, “Wouldn’t it be great if you could do this...” then create a start-up to do it – which is later bought out and expanded by an Intel, Microsoft or Google.

“The motto here is not work hard but dream hard,” Mr. Kozlovski added. “I had some guy come see me the other day and say, ‘You know Google? They make a lot of money, very famous, right? They’re not that good. We have a much better system that correlates to the cognitive process of searching. Google is worth $50 billion? Probably we can match their numbers.’ He was dead serious.”

My guess is that the flatter the world becomes, the wider the economic gap we will see between those countries that empower individual imagination and those that don’t. High oil prices can temporarily disguise that gap, but it’s growing.

Iran’s ignorant president, who keeps babbling about how Israel is going to disappear, ought to pay a visit to Ben Gurion and see these rooms buzzing with student innovators, with projects called “Integration Points for IP Multimedia Subsystems” and “Algorithms for Obstacle Detection and Avoidance.” These are oil wells that don’t run dry.

DERSHOWITZ TO “DEVASTATE AND BANKRUPT” LECTURERS WHO SUPPORT BOYCOTT

Harvard legal expert vows to sue lecturers boycotting Israel
By Jon Boone
The Financial Times
June 2, 2007

www.ft.com/cms/s/56cb5b92-10a7-11dc-96d3-000b5df10621,dwp_uuid=34c8a8a6-2f7b-11da-8b51-00000e2511c8,print=yes.html

A top American lawyer has threatened to wage a legal war against British academics who seek to cut links with Israeli universities.

Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor renowned for his staunch defence of Israel and high-profile legal victories, including his role in the O.J. Simpson trial, vowed to “devastate and bankrupt” lecturers who supported such boycotts.

This week’s annual conference of Britain’s biggest lecturers’ union, the University and College Union, backed a motion damning the “complicity of Israeli academia in the occupation [of Palestinian land]”.

It also obliged the union’s executive to encourage members to “consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions”.

Prof Dershowitz said he had started work on legal moves to fight any boycott.

He told the Times Higher Educational Supplement that these would include using a US law – banning discrimination on the basis of nationality – against UK universities with research ties to US colleges. US academics might also be urged to accept honorary posts at Israeli colleges in order to become boycott targets.

“I will obtain legislation dealing with this issue, imposing sanctions that will devastate and bankrupt those who seek to impose bankruptcy on Israeli academics,” he told the journal.

Sue Blackwell, a UCU activist and member of the British Committee for Universities of Palestine, said: “This is the typical response of the Israeli lobby which will do anything to avoid debating the real issue – the 40-year occupation of Palestine.” Jewish groups have attacked the UCU vote, which was opposed by Sally Hunt, its general secretary.

“ANTI-SEMITISM IS BECOMING NOT JUST TOLERATED BUT EVEN FASHIONABLE”

Shame on the left and its vicious hatred of Israel
By Leo McKinstry
The Daily Express
May 31, 2007

www.express.co.uk/ourcomments/view/8463/Leo+McKinstry

Anti-racism is supposed to be one of the guiding principles of our society, preventing discrimination on the grounds of ethnic origin or nationality.

Yet it is a bizarre paradox of modern Britain that there is now a climate of increasing hostility towards Jews, particularly in those Left-wing intellectual circles which otherwise make a fetish of their concern for racial sensitivities.

Dressed up as criticism of the state of Israel, anti-Semitism is becoming not just tolerated but even fashionable in some of our civic institutions, including the universities and parts of the media.

Thanks to the Left’s neurotic hatred of Israel, we now have the extraordinary sight of self-styled liberal campaigners launching McCarthyite witch-hunts against anyone deemed to have Israeli connections, as in this week’s debate at the University and College Union’s annual conference at Bournemouth calling for a boycott of all Israeli academic institutions.

Respect for democracy, individual rights and freedom of speech are being crushed beneath the juggernaut of shrill indignation.

What is particularly disturbing is the way opposition to the Jewish state descends into vicious antagonism against Jews themselves, as shown by this sickening recent outburst from writer Pamela Hardyment, a member of the National Union of Journalists, which in April voted to boycott Israeli goods.

Explaining her support for the NUJ’s stance, Ms Hardyment described Israel as “a wonderful Nazi-like killing machine backed by the world’s richest Jews”.

Then, like some lunatic from the far-Right, she referred to the “so-called Holocaust” before concluding: “Shame on all Jews, may your lives be cursed.”

Such words could have come straight from Hitler or the most fervent supporter of Osama Bin Laden.

But Ms Hardyment is hardly unique.

This sort of seething resentment can be found throughout the Left, whether in demands that Israel be treated as a Typical of this pariah state or in connivance at anti-Semitic propaganda. approach was the opinion of Ulster poet and darling of the BBC Tom Paulin, who once argued that “Jewish settlers in Israel They are Nazis, should be shot dead. I feel nothing but hatred for them.”

Yet Paulin would no doubt be outraged if some English extremist uttered the same sentiments about radical Muslims settling in Britain.

One of the most nauseating rhetorical devices used by hysterical campaigners such as Paulin and Hardyment is to draw an analogy between the Nazi regime and the modern government of Israel.

Such a link is not only historically absurd, since Israel is by far the most democratic and liberal country in the Middle East, but it is also offensive because it demonises the Jews and devalues the horror of the Holocaust.

The pretence that Israel’s actions in its own defence against Islamic terrorists are somehow the equivalent of Nazi Germany’s gas chambers is a lie worthy of Dr Goebbels himself. And the tragedy is that this continual assault on Israel has led to a rise in anti-Semitism in Britain, much of it fuelled by Islamic radicals.

In 2006 there were 594 anti-Semitic race-hate incidents in this country, a 31 per cent rise on 2005 and the highest total since records began in 1984.

I should perhaps stress that I do not come from a Jewish Like Tom Paulin, I hail from the family. Belfast middle-class. But I have been repelled by the anti-Semitism – disguised as support for the Palestinians – of parts of the British Left.

I first became aware of this nasty phenomenon when, in 1985, I attended the annual conference of the National Union of Students at Blackpool. There I was appalled to hear delegates calling for a ban on student Jewish societies, on the grounds that because such groups supported the state of Israel they were essentially fascistic in nature.

Yet, more than 20 years later, this sort of intolerance is no longer confined to the student debating floor. It now exists in large swathes of education, the press and the arts.

The boycott of Israel by academics was started by Professor Stephen Rose of the Open University, like Paulin another BBC favourite, who told his colleagues that “you have no right to treat Israel as if it were a normal state”.

The boycott is now so widespread that, in one grotesque incident, an Israeli PhD student had his application for Oxford initially rejected purely because he had served in his country’s army.

The professor dealing with the case, Andrew Wilkie, said he had “a huge problem with Israelis taking the moral high ground from their appalling treatment in the Holocaust and then inflicting gross human rights abuses on Palestinians”.

Professor Wilkie would not have dreamt of turning down a Zimbabwean because of Mugabe’s tyranny, or a Chinese applicant because of his own opposition to the occupation of Tibet.

This is what is so contemptible about the intellectuals’ fixation with Israel.

They are guilty of the most bizarre double standards.

While they scream about the Jewish state, they remain silent about human rights abuses carried out by brutal regimes across the world.

And it is ironic that, on the day the lecturers debated a boycott of Israel, they also voted to refuse to co-operate with any attempt to crack down on radical Islam on campuses, claiming such a move would be an infringement of free speech.

Given some of the lecturers’ enthusiasm for silencing Israeli opinion such a position is laughable in its hypocrisy.

United by anti-Semitism, the bigots of the academic Left and Muslim fundamentalism are destroying freedom of thought in this country.

“I DON’T WANT TO DIE!”

A letter to the British academic
Yair Lapid responds to UK academics’ criticism, reminding them he might pay for the removal of roadblocks and checkpoints with his life
Yediot Ahronot
June 12, 2007

www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3411227,00.html

It was with great interest I read of the British University and College Union’s call for an academic boycott of Israel. I was glad to discover that the association has not yet made a final decision as to how best to boycott us. Their highnesses are still pondering the decision. The blue-gray smoke wafts from their pipes, their foreheads wrinkle, a watch on their wrist sits underneath the sleeve of a Harris Tweed jacket with its leather elbow patch. Maybe they say to themselves, perhaps we’ll boycott them immediately or maybe we’ll wait a bit.

No reason to be hasty, these sweaty baby-makers somewhere in the Middle East, won’t stop killing each other in the near future. In the meantime let’s have another pint and study the rare 18th-century manuscript that we found in the library.

We Israelis know that the decision has a comic side to it. Our academic institutions have always been the fortresses of the radical left, opposed to the occupation with all its heart. We sort of suspected that the Brits don’t really get what is going on here but this is the kind of ignorance that elicits the same kind of wicked laughter from students who catch their teacher making a mistake.

And yet maybe it is me who is making a mistake? Maybe I am too easily ridiculing the opinions of people who care, who are innocently trying to make the world a better place? For every human group that has adopted a lofty cause, there are always the cynics like me who believe that these idealists don’t understand the real world.

Those who opposed apartheid were told that the struggle against international communism was more important, environmentalists were called ‘tree huggers,’ and Tony Blair was told repeatedly that the struggle in Northern Ireland would never end. It is possible that instead of ranting and raving, getting angry, feeling insulted and canceling plans to travel to London to see some theatre in the West End, it is worthwhile to try and help the honorable lecturers in their deliberations. Perhaps this is immodest of me but I believe there is one small thing I can add: I don’t want to die!

While it may be true that the humane thing is to remove the roadblocks and checkpoints, to stop the occupation immediately, to enable the Palestinians freedom of movement in the territories, to tear down the bloody inhumane wall, to promise them the basic rights ensured to every individual. It’s just that I will end up paying for this with my life. Petty of me perhaps to dwell on this point. After all, how important is my life when compared to the chance for peace, justice and equal rights. But still, call me a weakling; call me thickheaded – I don’t want to die.

Make no mistake. Should we do what the honorable British lecturers are demanding, I will die. Maybe not immediately but the waiting won’t be fun. It will take two or three months until my death (don’t worry; it won’t take longer than that). I will always ask myself how I am going to be killed. Will a Katyusha fall on my home burying me in the ruins? Will a suicide bomber explode his charge at the mall as I am buying my small daughter a pair of new shoes? Will someone run pass me with an axe on Allenby Street in Tel Aviv and slice off my head? Or maybe a sniper will take me down on my way to pick up my son from school? If I could choose I would prefer the last option. It seems the most painless. At the very least, my wife will pick up our son a little late and explain to him that his father is dead. Unfortunately I don’t really have the choice of how I am to die, and the curiosity, if you’ll pardon the pun, is killing me.

However, in contrast to me and my ridiculous insistence on staying alive, academics – certainly those lecturers who wander the hallowed, silent halls of the distinguished English university – know how to look at the big picture. From the historic vantage point, my death is really marginal compared to the major effort to end what they are calling “Israeli apartheid”. Their use of this phrase concerns me a tad. Is it possible that even lecturers sometimes miss the lecture? Apartheid? Why apartheid?

The oppression causing the occupation (and yes the opposite is also true) is not there to turn the Palestinians into slaves. We never sent them to look for diamonds in our mines; to pick cotton in our fields or force them to use public toilets reserved for ‘Arabs Only.’ The separation between Israelis and Palestinians has nothing to do with race, creed or color. In fact, Israel is one of the only countries in the world that has banned racist politicians from being elected to the Knesset. Some 20 percent of the population is Arab – they will tell you that no one has ever dared to demand that they sit at the back of the bus.

The only thing that concerns us is that the bus won’t explode and yes my daughter travels on it to her gymnastics class twice a week. Promise this to us, and see how quickly the checkpoints come down and the wall crumbles. Promise us this and see how Israel rallies to help the Palestinians establish a state, to save their economy, to aid them in their most important war: the fight against poverty, ignorance, and Islamic messianic fundamentalism. This is all I ask of the Brits; not money, service or even friendship. Just understand the annoying fact that I don’t want to die.

I am aware of the argument that the occupation is the root of all this horrible violence. It’s just that this is an argument, well, how shall I say it – okay, academic. After all, Arab terror started long before we occupied even one piece of this land. Every major wave of Palestinian terror came as the chances of a peace treaty came closer. It was the situation when there was the wave of terror bombings on public busses in the “Black March” of 1996, which destroyed the prospects of the Oslo Agreement. This is how it was when the second intifada erupted as it did just after Ehud Barak proposed giving up nearly all the occupied territories including part of Jerusalem. That is the way it is now with the wave of Qassam rocket attacks in the wake of Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza strip.

I still believe in peace. I am interested in the occupied territories, the bloodshed and cruelty. I believe in peace as I have all my life and I know that a price will have to be paid to achieve it. All I am asking for in the meantime is a fair chance to still be alive when it comes.

FULL ARTICLES

TARGETING THE DOCTORS

Gaza hospital on strike after violence
The Associated Press
June 9, 2007

Medics at a northern Gaza Strip hospital walked off their jobs for a few hours Saturday to protest the kidnapping and shooting of a doctor by Palestinian militants, the first physician targeted in months of deadly infighting.

Dr. Fayez al-Barrawi, a known Hamas supporter, was blindfolded, handcuffed and shot six times in the legs, including a kneecap, and then tossed on the street Thursday. Hamas has said Fatah militants were behind the kidnapping.

Al-Barrawi worked at Beit Hanoun hospital in the northern Gaza Strip, close to the border with Israel.

Hundreds of Hamas and Fatah supporters have been kidnapped in recent months by rival gunmen. The treatment of the hostages, who are usually released after a few hours, has become increasingly harsh, and captives are often shot in the legs.

It is the first time a doctor was seized. However, militants often fire on paramedics and ambulances during gunbattles.

“We strongly condemn that medical officials should be the victims of security chaos,” said hospital director Jamil Suleiman, in a statement faxed to The Associated Press.

Scores of doctors and medics later marched to the office of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, demanding that the attackers be brought to justice. However, none of those involved in internal fighting were ever put on trial.

Medical institutions are often unwilling parties to the conflict. Hospitals in areas of militant strongholds often only treat parties from one side of the conflict, to ensure tensions do not break out in the hospital itself.

Militants have also used hospital rooftops and grounds as firing points, prompting their rivals to fire upon hospitals, threatening staff and patients.

“THEY NOW WISH THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION WOULD TAKE OVER IN GAZA”

Palestinians say fed up with gunmen
By Wafa Amr
Reuters
June 7, 2007

http://uk.reuters.com/articlePrint?articleId=UKL0740541820070607

For most Palestinians, black-hooded gunmen have long been respected symbols of resistance against Israeli occupation.

Now, frequent internal fighting and lawlessness gripping the Palestinian territories have transformed the militants into no more than gangsters in the eyes of many of those who once saw them as heroes.

“It’s very ironic but I’m relieved the Israelis have started a bombing campaign. The gunmen killing each other on the streets were forced to go into hiding,” said Mai, a Gaza housewife, referring to strikes aimed at halting rocket attacks on Israel.

Reflecting mounting public concern over recent fighting between Islamist group Hamas and his Fatah faction that killed some 50 people, President Mahmoud Abbas said this week Palestinians were on the verge of civil war.

The threat posed by internal bloodshed, he said, rivaled the dangers presented by Israeli occupation.

Gunmen, who once battled Israeli soldiers in the alleyways of towns and refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, have turned against each other in an on-going power struggle between Hamas and Fatah – partners in a unity government.

Some of the militias formed by Fatah and Hamas are no longer controlled by their political leaderships and owe loyalties to clans or criminal gangs that enforce their own rules.

“Many of these groups are now a burden on society. They were created to fill a security vacuum under the pretext of national resistance, said legislator Nasser Jum’a, once a leading member of Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

“They then blackmailed people, attacked them and confiscated their freedoms as the weak official security forces failed to punish them,” he said.

FED UP

Jum’a said ordinary Palestinians were so fed up with the armed groups “they now wish the Israeli occupation would take over in Gaza or hope for the return of Jordanian rule in the West Bank” to get rid of them.

In one recent incident in the West Bank city of Nablus, gunmen told shopkeepers to close their businesses as a sign of solidarity with a Fatah leader arrested the day before in an Israeli raid.

The gunmen shot in the air, stole a bulldozer from the Nablus municipality and closed the main road with mounds of sand, dividing the city in the same way Israeli forces had during their operation.

For the first time in the city, a bastion for militants, most of the shop owners refused to close down.

“These people have caused us a lot of suffering and are not involved in national resistance,” said Najah al-Jabaji, who works in an advertising agency in Nablus.

But while sentiments seem to have turned against the militants, Israeli raids to detain them elicit strong public condemnation among Palestinians, who have long demanded the release of those held in Israeli jails.

Gunmen spearheaded a Palestinian uprising that began in 2000 and gained strength when Israeli military operations effectively destroyed the infrastructure of the official security services, some of whose members also belonged to militant groups.

The power vacuum was filled by militias loyal to a variety of political factions and rivalries spiraled into bloodshed after Hamas trounced Fatah in a January 2006 election.

More than 600 Palestinians have been killed in factional fighting since the vote, the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens’ Rights says, a figure approaching the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the same period.

In a poll conducted by the Palestinian independent pollster NearEast Consulting in the West Bank and Gaza in May, 70 percent of those surveyed said they feel more insecure since Hamas came to power last year.

The poll, which coincided with a surge in internal fighting, also found 92 percent of respondents described themselves as depressed or very depressed, up from 22 percent in April.

“The internal crisis in the occupied territories was the main issue that made Palestinians feel depressed in May. It can also be noted that the problem of the Israeli occupation took a back stage in May,” commentary accompanying the poll said.

“The message is that people are tired of inter-Palestinian fighting. They are fed up with both Fatah and Hamas, and all they want is to live in security before any thought of fighting Israel,” Palestinian analyst Bassem Izbedi told Reuters.

(Additional reporting by Atef Sa’ad in Nablus and Said Ayyad in Bethlehem)

“A GRAVE DEVELOPMENT”

Palestinian journalists slam use of ‘TV’ vehicle in Gaza attack
Reuters
June 10, 2007

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/869112.html

The Palestinian journalists’ union criticized militants Sunday for using a vehicle marked with a “TV” sign to approach Gaza’s frontier border with Israel and attempt to kidnap an Israel Defense Forces soldier from a position across the border.

“The use of vehicles that carry ‘Press’, ‘TV’ or other signs... expose journalists’ lives to danger, gives the Israeli occupation a pretext to target and kill journalists and restricts their ability to perform their professional and national duties,” the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate said.

“We stress our rejection of the use of media vehicles and the involvement of the press in any existing conflict, and we demand all parties stop using these methods,” said the group, the sole journalists’ union in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

News photographs showed the white armored vehicle, with “TV” in red letters on the front, at Kissufim Crossing after the attack, bullet holes in its windshield.

The Israel-based Foreign Press Association said in a statement the use of a vehicle marked with TV insignia represented “abuse of this recognized protection for the working journalist” and was “a grave development.”

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in broadcast remarks at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, said Sunday that the attackers used “a vehicle marked ‘TV’ in order to fool Israeli soldiers.”

He said the gunmen had tried “to take advantage of the special sensitivity that we have in a democratic country such as ours, to the right of the media to operate freely and independently in security-sensitive areas.”

Abu Ahmed, spokesman for Islamic Jihad’s armed wing, accused the IDF of fixing the TV sign to the armored car.

GAZANS MUCH MORE DEPRESSED SINCE ISRAEL LEFT

Poll: Most Palestinians depressed by violence
By Joshua Mitnick
The Washington Times
June 10, 2007

www.washtimes.com/world/20070610-122525-9811r.htm

More than nine in 10 Palestinians show signs of depression caused by despair over violence between Hamas and Fatah gunmen and the apparent demise of the Palestinian unity government, according to a West Bank pollster.

Jamil Rabah, the director of Ramallah-based Near East Consulting, said he found that 92 percent of Palestinian survey respondents suffer from depression-related anxiety, a jump of 15 percent compared with a poll in October and more than double the level from November 2005.

“The higher the level of depression, or discontent, the higher this score comes out, the higher the social fragmentation of society,” Mr. Rabah said.

Mr. Rabah said he built a depression index with questions used by the World Health Organization to study the Balkans.

The group polled 801 Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem for the latest survey, which has a margin of error of 3.4 percent.

The poll was taken last month, following a deadly flare-up between Hamas and Fatah gunmen that left dozens dead in Gaza and laid bare a dysfunctional unity government. The unrest cuts across region, political affiliation and social class, according to the poll findings.

Analysts fear the growing despair will cause more grass-roots Palestinians to be drawn into an internecine conflict, which has been largely limited to militias from rival parties and families. Other reactions include rising support for radical Islamic militant groups as well as increasing waves of emigration.

“There’s a high level of frustration. It’s getting dangerous. There isn’t any value to life,” said Ibrahim Habib, field-work coordinator for the Israeli chapter of Physicians for Human Rights. “A lot of people feel the [Palestinian] Authority is irrelevant.”

Cairo Arafat, a psychologist and an official in the Palestinian Planning Ministry, said that, though the survey doesn’t address levels of clinical depression among Palestinians, it indicates an erosion of Palestinians’coping mechanisms developed over seven years of daily clashes with the Israeli army.

In addition to the internal fighting, Palestinians are hemmed in by Israeli restrictions on their movement, as well as an international aid boycott of the government.

The government is divided, with the presidency controlled by the secular Fatah movement and the Islamist Hamas, which refuses to recognize Israel, forswear violence and recognize peace accords.

“We’ve never [before] been a society where we’ve had any type of significant internal struggles,” Miss Arafat said. “Internal violence with the continuing levels of poverty and unemployment was a significant marker for many people that the situation was deteriorating further.”

Palestinians have become more critical of their leaders because of the chronic lack of security, but they also blame the international community for supporting parliamentary elections in 2006 and then turning their backs on the democratically elected Hamas government.

Though they realize the current Hamas-Fatah government is a failure, there’s little confidence that a new election will produce a more stable result.

“There’s a better diagnosis of the problem, but there’s no clear solution,” she said. “We’ve tried this, and we’ve tried that, and it’s not working. When you get in a position of not knowing what to do, it creates a situation of helplessness.”

Palestinians see the infighting as a significant blow to their decades of struggle for a sovereign state.

In Gaza, where the lawlessness is most acute, that situation has provided fertile ground for Islamic militants who are more radical than Hamas to lay down roots.

“The depression will move in more than one direction,” said Iyad Barghouti, a scholar who studies Islamic movements. “We will witness a multiplication of radical and fundamentalist groups.”

FULL ARTICLES

THE ECONOMIST IS WRONG

The Economist is wrong
Six Day War had significant positive effects and is not a ‘wasted victory’ as The Economist argued
By Sever Plocker
Yediot Ahronot
May 27, 2007

“Israel’s Wasted Victory,” this is the headline of The Economist’s editorial marking 40 years since the Six Day War. The Economist boasts a circulation of more than one million copies and its readership comprises members of the world’s financial, political and cultural elites. The articles written by its authors (the majority of which go unsigned) are perceived as God’s words. “The Economist says” – is a ruling that goes unchallenged in many circles.

Nonetheless, in describing the Six Day War as a “Pyrrhic victory” and “a calamity for the Jewish state no less than for its neighbors,” The Economist is making a grave mistake. The Six Day War changed the course of history for the better, ensured Israel’s existence and convinced the Arabs to come to terms with it. Thanks to Israel’s full and shining victory, the rulers of the Arab states relinquished their vision of eliminating Israel, and by lack of choice engaged in dialogue based on the concept of “land for peace.”

In his book “The Six Day War,” historian Michael Oren wrote that events in the Middle East, which until 1967 only culminated ahead of the conflict, could have moved towards peace even after the war. He added that diplomatic breakthroughs considered unrealistic became almost commonplace after the war.

In November of that year, the UN Security Council passed resolution 242, which since then has constituted a cornerstone for every diplomatic effort in the region including the recent Saudi Initiative.

Resolution 242 called for “just and lasting peace” between Arabs and Jews; Israel endorsed it immediately. It took Egypt another decade to internalize 242 and to sign a peace agreement with Israel in exchange for return of the Sinai.

The maturation process took Jordan an additional 20 years. Syria announced its willingness to sign a full normalization agreement with Israel in January 2000. Here is therefore, a basic fact: Due to Israel’s military victory in June 1967, Israel was accepted by the Arab world as a legitimate “Jewish State” entitled to exist within peaceful borders, land that until then was deemed Zionist occupation.

Hubristic folly

Somehow, The Economist manages to ignore these developments and minimizes their significance. The editorial focuses on Israeli-Palestinian relations. Israel, wrote The Economist, “embarked on its hubristic folly of annexing the Arab half of Jerusalem and - in defiance of law, demography and common sense – planting Jewish settlements in all the occupied territories to secure a Greater Israel.” And “When, decades later, Egypt and Jordan did make peace with Israel, the Palestinians did not recover Gaza and the West Bank.”

The Palestinians did not recover Gaza and the West Bank? Until 1967, Gaza and the West Bank were territories administered by Egypt and Jordan. It may well be assumed that that the Jordanian regime would not have permitted Palestinian refugees, their children and grandchildren to realize their national sovereignty in Gaza and the West Bank and to establish the Palestinian state there.

As to criticism regarding Israel’s acts of annexation and settlement since 1967, large parts of the Israeli population share these sentiments, including the author of this article. Under the charismatic and destructive influence of Moshe Dayan, at the end of the Six Day War the government chose to prevent Palestinian autonomy, oppressed Palestinian rights and subjugated the Palestinian workforce to the interests of Israeli employers. This is indeed “hubristic folly.”

But is it only ours? The “Land for Peace” movement immediately challenged the Greater Israel movement, and they divided Israeli society from within. Not Palestinian society.

Palestinians prefer ‘state of no state’

It should be said unabashedly: Had the Palestinians really wanted a state of their own it would have been established long ago; even Israel’s excessive military might would not have sufficed in preventing its establishment within some type of border.

Yet the Palestinians prefer a state of “no state,” no responsibility, no commitments and no solution, alongside ongoing terror. Generation after generation, Palestinian nationalism has excelled in denouncement. Had Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres not unwillingly dragged the PLO leadership to the Oslo Accords in 1993 it would not have initiated a thing by itself.

The Economist is very wrong. For Israel, the victory of 1967 was not wasted. Israel’s population grew from 2.6 million to 7.1 million, 2 million of whom were new immigrants. The Gross National Product grew by 630 percent. Real per capita product, the benchmark for measuring economic development, grew by 163 percent and last year crossed the $21,000 mark. The average standard of living in Israel is only 22 percent lower than in Britain; on the eve of the Six Day War there was a 44 percent gap. And The Economist has often noted Israel’s information technology achievements.

Among Palestinians, however, the situation has deteriorated drastically. Are we to blame? Yes, it is our fault as well as theirs. Two states for two peoples: If this vision was wasted, it was not so because of the Six Day War, but despite it. And if it is realized, it will be another outcome of the Arab plan’s defeat in June 1967.

UK-BASED HUMANISTS WHO DON’T CARE FOR JEWS

U.K.-based humanists who don’t care for Jews
By Bradley Burston
Ha’aretz
May 29, 2007

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/864500.html

There’s been a refreshing note to much of the overviews, analyses and reconsiderations accompanying the imminent 40th anniversary of the Six Day War – balance.

The early entries, those of the Economist, for example, and the New Yorker, are notably free of the slavish leanings that have poisoned much of the writing on the subject for decades.

A notable companion to these accounts is “Gaza, The Jailed State,” an article by author and journalist Zaki Chehab, writing in this week’s New Statesman. Nuanced and knowing, the piece examines the performance of the Hamas-led Palestinian government in dispassionate detail.

The article is all the more valuable for the one which follows it, “Children of the Dust,” by the London-based Australian writer John Pilger. A political cartoon in the guise of factual exposition, it discusses with minute resolution and admirable compassion the effects of occupation and warfare on the children of Gaza, while writing off the post-traumatic stress of the blitz-plagued children of Sderot as the negligible, they-had-it-coming whining of the faceless offspring of callous brutes.

There have always been two sides to the imbalance story: On one hand, there is the humanist who cries out against the violence and slander dealt to the Jews of the Holy Land, suggesting, with respect to what has happened to the Arabs, that they’re only getting what they deserve.

Then there are writers like John Pilger, the kind of humanist who doesn’t much care for Jews.

Why, after all, should we care about the people of Sderot at all, when, as Pilger reminds us as the opening of the piece, the only issue that should move anyone, is the fact that Israel’s single-minded imposition of hardship on the Palestinians could be seen in the anguish of all distressed peoples everywhere:

“Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is being allowed to imprison an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond.”

Pilger scorns British reporters for what he sees as their overt and consistent pro-Israel bias. He takes them to task for mentioning in reports on Israeli airstrikes “the rockets fired at Israel from the prison of Gaza which killed no one.”

Contrast this with the balance and the breadth of the lead sentence of Chelab’s article: “As hundreds of Israeli families leave the town of Sderot in southern Israel to escape Hamas-designed Qassam rockets and mortars, Palestinians in turn are fleeing the wrath of Israeli air strikes on Gaza, which in the past week have killed more than 30 people, many of them civilians.”

For Pilger, any suggestion of anything smacking in the least of equivalence, or of Palestinians mounting deadly attacks – for example, a British Channel Four reporter’s mention of an “endless war,” rather than a unilateral Israeli onslaught against the Palestinian people as a whole – is indicative of unforgivable pro-Israeli pandering:

“There is no war,” Pilger writes. “There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by the world’s fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices, bankrolled by the superpower.”

In Pilger’s kindergarden class of the left, the basic legitimacy of Palestinian suicide bomb, rocket, and drive-by sniper attacks ? most of them aimed at civilians – is both self-evident and intentionally omitted from BBC and other wildly pro-Israel press accounts:

“Under international law an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier’s forces. This right is never reported.”

Here’s another point that’s never reported: Any Jew who has ever worked for a British news outlet knows which members of staff are anti-Semitic. Any Jew who has ever worked for a British news outlet knows how that Jew-hatred can insinuate itself into news copy.

I have no evidence that John Pilger falls into that class. He may even be Jewish for all I know. I think it entirely legitimate that he may at once detest Israel and have not a molecule of anti-Semitism in his entire constitution.

Which is all the more reason that I believe he owes the Jews of this place a little more consideration as human beings.

The problem goes beyond Jews, after all, because the Israeli people on Israeli soil who are in the line of Palestinian fire are both Jew and Arab, Semites all. The crux of the matter is this:

To argue that attacks on civilians is justified, is to declare those civilians to be sub-human.

Come to think of it, perhaps this is why a humanist like John Pilger can’t be bothered to bring himself to care about them.

“EVERYONE EXPECTS THE JEWS TO BE THE ONLY REAL CHRISTIANS IN THIS WORLD”

Israel’s peculiar position
By Eric Hoffer
The Los Angeles Times
May 26, 1968

The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.

Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese – and no one says a word about refugees.

But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.

Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover, but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June, he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews.

No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on. There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him.

The Swedes, who are ready to break off diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway.

The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts and Jewish resources.

Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general. I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel, so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.

“THE ALTERNATIVE IN 1967, AS WELL AS TODAY, REMAINS UNTHINKABLE”

The heavy burden of victory
By Jonathan Tobin
The Jewish Exponent
May 31, 2007

www.jewishexponent.com/article/13142/

Lamenting the ‘occupation’ won’t make the facts that led to ’67 conflict go away

French writer Alexandre Dumas the elder wrote in 1854 that “nothing succeeds like success.” But when it comes to the State of Israel, it appears that nothing seems to fail as abysmally as victory.

As the world notes the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War this coming week, much of the coverage and commentaries about the topic seem to center on the same theme: How Israel’s historic triumph has become an intolerable burden that is itself the primary “obstacle” to peace.

Once upon a time, the great victory of 1967 that was achieved against great odds and at a moment in history – when much of the world expected that Israel was about to suffer a catastrophic defeat – was emblematic of Jewish pride. Yet that event is now increasingly seen as emblematic of unhappiness with the Jewish state.

40 YEARS OF… ‘OPPRESSION’?

After all, the critics note, the anniversary’s not so much of battles fought and won against great odds, but of 40 years of Israeli “oppression” of Arabs in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, the territories “conquered” in 1967.

The toll exacted by Israel’s presence in the territories is seen as being responsible for the country losing its soul. Settlements and checkpoints have become deeply negative symbols of the country. In the Diaspora, it is the villainous Israel of “occupation” that has become the pariah despised by intellectuals and academics, and increasingly shunned by Jews who are not eager to identify with an oppressor.

Among those who do still embrace Israel, the war’s anniversary inspires nostalgia for the state that existed before the unification of Jerusalem, and access to places where our history began to topple the existing Israeli political applecart. It was, as the Israel Policy Forum’s M.J. Rosenberg, recently wrote, the Israel of the book and film “Exodus,” a place he asserts, that could be admired without apology.

The war set in motion a series of events that led inevitably not just to settlements, but to the end of Labor Party domination of Israeli politics and the mainstreaming of forces such as the nationalist right, religious and Sephardi Jews, who had hitherto been marginalized by the Ashkenazi elite.

The Israeli right has had its failures, but the idea that the country was better off under the rule of the paternalistic Labor-dominated government of Israel’s pre-war era is more myth than fact. The socialism embraced by that governing elite didn’t merely retard the nation’s economic progress. An era in which the government prevented the development of local television – to cite just one example of the excesses of this time – is nothing about which we should wax nostalgic.

Yet Rosenberg is right when he says that a more powerful Israel than the idealized early pioneer state “is a hard sell to those under 50, and particularly to young Jews of college age.” But the problem is that those, like Rosenberg, whose main agenda is “to end the nightmare” of the occupation, seem to forget what the alternative to the actual outcome of the Six-Day-War was.

That is the crux of much of the teeth-gnashing about Israel’s 40 years of post-1967 sin. The main point of contention between Israel and the Palestinians, and their supporters, is the same as it was 40 years ago: the existence of a Jewish state within any borders.

What then was the alternative to victory and “occupation?”

The answer is simple. Had Israel been defeated, then the oft-repeated threats of extermination of both the State and her people by Arab leaders such as Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser and Palestinian leader Ahmed Shukairy, might well have been fulfilled.

We are told, ad nauseum, that the “occupation” is the reason for the ongoing conflict. Yet in 1967, Israel’s dominion was limited to the exact boundaries that we are told are the only solution to the conflict. The world of June 3, 1967, was one in which not a single Jew lived in Judea and Samaria, nor in the eastern part of Jerusalem. No Jew prayed at the Western Wall, or could even visit any Jewish historic or religious site in the West Bank.

The war’s anniversary ought to bring to mind the fact that the issue then is largely the same as it is today. There is not a shekel’s worth of difference between the rhetoric and the goals of Hamas, Al Qaeda, or that of the leadership of Iran and that of the pre-’67 war Arab and Muslim world.

Compare the Jews of Sederot, who are subjected to missile attacks from Gaza today, and those slain by cross-border terror attacks that emanated from the same area prior to June 1967. The only difference is that prior to the Oslo peace accords and Israel’s complete withdrawal from the territory in August 2005, we could still harbor illusions about the willingness of the Palestinians to embrace a chance for peace.

LONGING FOR DEFEAT?

All the introspection about 1967 ought to lead us to wonder why so many of us here are so uncomfortable with an Israel that is identified with power rather than weakness. Was the Israel that so many believed to be fated for imminent extinction in May 1967 more virtuous than the contemporary Jewish state? No. The “occupation” that fuels Arab and Muslim fury refers to every inch of the country. Israel’s victory did not create Islamist extremism, it’s just another excuse for a hatred that already existed.

Conversely, the joy with which the Jewish world greeted the events of June 1967 stemmed not only from being reunited with places like the Kotel, as identification with a proud, successful Jewish people. Like the creation of the state in 1948, the Six-Day War changed the lives of every Jew. For centuries, Jewish identity was bound up with homelessness and powerlessness. These victories allowed Jews to hold their heads up higher not only here in the United States, but even in the Soviet Union, where a movement for emigration to Israel was launched in its aftermath.

The Israel that emerged from that war has made its share of mistakes – though some of those errors were rooted more in a naive belief in the possibility of peace than triumphalism. But what the war demonstrated to the world was that the Jewish re-entry into history that Zionism represented was not to be erased after a mere 19 years.

That is a verdict some would like still to reverse. Yet the “occupation” so many lament was created by Arab aggression, and is rooted in the alienable right of the Jewish people to their own country rather than in some aberrant variant of Zionist imperialism. More territorial compromise will come when Israel’s enemies give up their war to destroy it. Sadly, as recent events have again proved, that moment is nowhere in sight.

Until it does, those supporters of Israel here who spend so much time apologizing for it would do better to apply themselves to the task of asserting the justice of Israel’s right to self-defense. Success in war has its drawbacks, but the alternative in 1967, as well as today, remains unthinkable.

“BATTERED NATION SYNDROME”

A classic case of ‘Battered Nation Syndrome’
By Michael Freund
The Jerusalem Post
May 30, 2007

www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1180450948991&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

It was 40 years ago next week that tiny little Israel , facing destruction at the hands of its enemies, miraculously emerged triumphant from the 1967 Six Day War. Existential fear quickly dissolved into breathtaking joy as the Jewish state decisively vanquished its foes, reuniting Jerusalem and reclaiming large swathes of our ancient homeland.

Our adversaries, who had gleefully pledged to feed us to the fish in the Mediterranean Sea , were forced to look on as their troops beat a hasty and humiliating retreat.

The stunning victory of 1967 had all the markings of Divine intervention. It was a gift from Heaven to a besieged and beleaguered people. After nearly two millennia we were reunited at last with the cradle of Jewish civilization in Judea and Samaria , and with the heart of the nation, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

And yet, it seems, four decades later, many Israelis still just cannot forgive themselves for winning.

In what has become an annual ritual, a variety of media pundits, left-wing activists and even some officials launch into mournful sessions of hand-wringing and breast-beating. They bemoan the outcome of the Six Day War, grumble about Israel’s success in reclaiming Judea, Samaria and Gaza , and sound as if they would have preferred going down in defeat.

Displaying an extraordinary lack of appreciation and an exceptional lack of historical perspective, these critics long to give up the hard-earned fruits of that war of self-defense, all in the vain hope of mollifying an incorrigible foe.

How could so many forget so much in so short a time? Even now, as Palestinians fire rockets daily at southern Israel from the very same Gaza Strip that we handed over to them two years ago, the proponents of appeasement still refuse to acknowledge the error of their ways.

It seems the only way to explain this phenomenon is to borrow a term from psychology: Certain parts of the Israeli public and its leadership are clearly suffering from what I refer to as “Battered Nation Syndrome.” Like a victim of ongoing domestic abuse, the advocates of surrender to the Palestinians cannot muster the wherewithal to hit back at the abuser. All the hallmarks of the syndrome are there: low self-esteem, a belief that the violence aimed against us is somehow our fault, and a tragic pattern of preferring to appease those who terrorize us rather than confront them.

Naturally, this distorted world-view results in an almost obsessive focus on Israel’s perceived faults as lying at the root of the conflict with our neighbors.

Consequently, the actions of the Palestinians are downplayed and minimized, excused and ignored, and Israel’s policy-making process instead begins to resemble a good, ol’-fashioned self-inflicted guilt trip.

But it is time to break out of this collective funk and start viewing the world the way it really is.

To begin with, Israel should stop apologizing for defeating the Arab states in 1967. Like any other nation, we have the right to defend ourselves, and we have the right not to be thrown in the sea.

What many of the defeatists conveniently choose to ignore is what led up to the 1967 war: increased Palestinian terror, massive Arab military buildups, and public threats by Arab leaders to annihilate the Jewish state.

They also forget that two years prior to 1967, back when Israel did not yet “occupy” the territories, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol put forward a proposal that could have resolved the Arab-Israeli conflict once and for all.

Speaking to the Knesset on May 17, 1965, Eshkol suggested turning the 1949 armistice agreements into peace treaties, and offered to hold direct talks with the Arab states in order to do so.

Pointing out that Egypt , Jordan , Syria and Lebanon , combined had 60 times the land area of the Jewish state, the premier noted that there was no logical reason for the Arabs to continue to pursue war. Instead, he offered a vision of peace that included open borders, bilateral trade, economic cooperation and freedom of access to the holy sites.

All he asked in return, said Eshkol, was “full respect for the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of all the States in the region.”

But Israel’s offer of peace was met two years later with a clear and unequivocal Arab response. Egypt and Syria mobilized their armies and their people, and vowed to destroy the Jewish state.

Hence, Israel neither asked for war nor initiated it in 1967, so let’s stop acting like we did. We do not owe the Arabs anything for defeating them, and we certainly do not need to give them any further territory from which to attack us.

They tried to kill us. We won. Get over it.

“WE FORGET HOW PERILOUS WAS ISRAEL’S CONDITION”

Prelude to the Six Days
By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
May 18, 2007

There has hardly been a Middle East peace plan in the past 40 years – including the current Saudi version – that does not demand a return to the status quo of June 4, 1967. Why is that date so sacred? Because it was the day before the outbreak of the Six-Day War in which Israel scored one of the most stunning victories of the 20th century. The Arabs have spent four decades trying to undo its consequences.

In fact, the real anniversary should be now, three weeks earlier. On May 16, 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Nasser ordered the evacuation from the Sinai Peninsula of the U.N. buffer force that had kept Israel and Egypt at peace for 10 years. The United Nations complied, at which point Nasser imposed a naval blockade of Israel’s only outlet to the south, the port of Eilat – an open act of war.

How Egypt came to this reckless provocation is a complicated tale (chronicled in Michael Oren’s magisterial “Six Days of War”) of aggressive intent compounded with miscommunication and, most fatefully, disinformation. The Soviet Union had reported urgently and falsely to its Middle East clients, Syria and Egypt, that Israel was massing troops on the Syrian border for an attack. Israel desperately tried to disprove this charge by three times inviting the Soviet ambassador in Israel to visit the front. He refused. The Soviet warnings led to a cascade of intra-Arab maneuvers that in turn led Nasser, the champion of pan-Arabism, to mortally confront Israel with a remilitarized Sinai and a southern blockade.

Why is this still important? Because that three-week period between May 16 and June 5 helps explain Israel’s 40-year reluctance to give up the fruits of that war – the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza – in return for paper guarantees of peace. Israel had similar guarantees from the 1956 Suez war, after which it evacuated the Sinai in return for that U.N. buffer force and for assurances from the Western powers of free passage through the Straits of Tiran.

All this disappeared with a wave of Nasser’s hand. During those three interminable weeks, President Lyndon Johnson did try to rustle up an armada of countries to run the blockade and open Israel’s south. The effort failed dismally.

It is hard to exaggerate what it was like for Israel in those three weeks. Egypt, already in an alliance with Syria, formed an emergency military pact with Jordan. Iraq, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Libya and Morocco began sending forces to join the coming fight. With troops and armor massing on Israel’s every frontier, jubilant broadcasts in every Arab capital hailed the imminent final war for the extermination of Israel. “We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants,” declared PLO head Ahmed Shuqayri, “and as for the survivors – if there are any – the boats are ready to deport them.”

For Israel, the waiting was excruciating and debilitating. Israel’s citizen army had to be mobilized. As its soldiers waited on the various fronts for the world to rescue the nation from its peril, Israeli society ground to a halt and its economy began bleeding to death. Army Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, later to be hailed as a war hero and even later as a martyred man of peace, had a nervous breakdown. He was incapacitated to the point of incoherence by the unbearable tension of waiting with the life of his country in the balance, knowing that waiting too long would allow the armies of 100 million Arabs to strike first his country of 3 million.

We know the rest of the story. Rabin did recover in time to lead Israel to victory. But we forget how perilous was Israel’s condition. The victory hinged on a successful attack on Egypt’s air force on the morning of June 5. It was a gamble of astonishing proportions. Israel sent the bulk of its 200-plane air force on the mission, fully exposed to antiaircraft fire and missiles. Had they been detected and the force destroyed, the number of planes remaining behind to defend the Israeli homeland – its cities and civilians – from the Arab air forces’ combined 900 planes was... 12.

We also forget that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank was entirely unsought. Israel begged King Hussein of Jordan to stay out of the conflict. Engaged in fierce combat with a numerically superior Egypt, Israel had no desire to open a new front just yards from Jewish Jerusalem and just miles from Tel Aviv. But Nasser personally told Hussein that Egypt had destroyed Israel’s air force and airfields and that total victory was at hand. Hussein could not resist the temptation to join the fight. He joined. He lost.

The world will soon be awash with 40th-anniversary retrospectives of the war – and exegeses on the peace of the ages that awaits if Israel would only to return to lines of June 4, 1967. But Israelis are cautious. They remember the terror of that June 4 and of that unbearable May when, with Israel in possession of no occupied territories whatsoever, the entire Arab world was furiously preparing Israel’s imminent extinction. And the world did nothing.

ISRAEL STOOD ALONE

The days before the Six Days
By Patrick Goodenough
CNSNews.com
May 31, 2007

www.cnsnews.com/ViewCommentary.asp?Page=/Commentary/archive/200705/COM20070531a.html

With the approach of the 40th anniversary of a short but momentous war that changed the face of the Middle East, brace yourself for a barrage of propaganda and revisionism. Prepare for reports and commentary focusing on the themes of upheaval, dispossession, refugees and, naturally, four decades of brutal Israeli occupation.

Less common will be accounts of what led up to the Mideast war of June 1967, when Israel for six days fought the combined militaries of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, supported by personnel from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Algeria and Kuwait.

By the time the gunfire subsided, Israel had seized the Golan Heights from Syria; the “West Bank” from Jordan; and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt .

Oft-forgotten fact #1: Prior to 1967, the Jordanian-named West Bank and the Gaza Strip weren’t controlled by Palestinian Arabs at all, but were ruled by Jordan and Egypt, respectively.

The result of the war, of course, is what the United Nations calls the Occupied Territories. The conventional wisdom parroted by pundits and politicians is that if only that pesky little Jewish state would hand back the land it captured in 1967, the Arab-Islamic world would accept Israel. The fringe goes further, envisaging the emergence of a “new Middle East” of love and brotherhood.

And pigs might fly.

Let’s look back at the weeks before the war, when there was no Israeli occupation of these lands. How did Israel’s neighbors view it, and how did they act on those views?

Start with the Palestinians.

Oft-forgotten fact #2: Yasser Arafat’s Fatah was created in the late 1950s, and the Palestine Liberation Organization he dominated was established in 1964 – yes, three years before Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza. So its goal was not to liberate those areas but to liberate all of “Palestine” – by which it meant pre-1967 Israel. Sure, the Six Day War elevated the PLO to a new status, but remember: Fatah was mounting terrorist operations from Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank before the war.

Move on to Egypt, a Soviet client state at the time and the PLO’s main benefactor.

Here’s what that country’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser did in the weeks leading up to the war :

May 15 – moved two divisions of troops into the Sinai, an area between Egypt and Israel which since a 1956 conflict had been monitored by a U.N. force;

May 16 – ordered the U.N. buffer force to withdraw immediately. It complied;

May 22 – closed the Straits of Tiran, a Red Sea waterway through which Israel obtained its vital oil supplies;

Moved seven more divisions (infantry, armored and mechanized) into Sinai;

May 30 – signed a defense pact with Jordan’s King Hussein.

Throughout this period, Nasser and others repeatedly declared that Israel was facing destruction. At the end of May, he said: “The armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are poised on the borders of Israel ... the Arabs are arranged for battle, the critical hour has arrived.”

On Israel’s northeastern flank, meanwhile, the Soviet-allied, Baath Party-ruled Syria was flexing its muscles, stepping up attacks from the strategic Golan Heights onto Israeli communities in the Galilee valley below.

Damascus then announced it was invoking a defense treaty with Egypt, and once Jordan joined a pact with Egypt on May 30, the threat appeared both severe and imminent.

Rather than await the expected assault, Israel chose pre-emption. In a spectacularly successful operation on June 5, Israeli planes destroyed the bulk of the considerably larger, Soviet-supplied Egyptian air force before the planes could leave the ground.

Israeli tanks, paratroopers, infantry and armored divisions swept into Sinai, and within four days had defeated the Arab world’s strongest army.

Meanwhile, Jordanian forces launched attacks against Israeli positions in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on June 5, and the following day Israel struck back. In two days, Israel had seized major West Bank towns and on June 7, Israeli paratroopers captured eastern Jerusalem, including the Old City and Temple Mount, Judaism’s most revered location.

Back on June 5, Israel’s air force had returned from Egypt and headed for Syria, where night-time air strikes destroyed two-thirds of that country’s air force.

Syria then mounted a massive shelling of Israeli towns, and Israel over the following days launched a hard-fought and costly assault. By June 10, the Syrians had fled the Golan Heights.

And on the seventh day, Israel rested.

It’s precisely because of what Israel experienced during the weeks leading up to the war that its governments and people since then have been so reluctant to relinquish the territory won in 1967.

Consider having Bashir Assad’s forces again overlooking northern Israel (on a clear day you can see the Mediterranean from the Golan – that’s how tiny the country is).

Imagine heavily-armed Palestinian fighters holding sway over Gaza and the West Bank, well within rocket-range of Israel’s main population centers (with Arabs controlling the West Bank, Israel at its narrowest is some eight miles wide).

Throw into the mix Hizballah in Lebanon and the terrorists ruling Tehran – neither of them a factor in 1967 – and you begin to get a glimpse of why so many Israelis oppose surrendering more territory. Look what evacuating Gaza got them.

Oft-forgotten fact #3: When Israel faced the growing clamor of war in May 1967 the world largely looked the other way. The U.N. caved to Nasser’s dictates; France, formerly Israel’s key arms supplier, applied an arms embargo against Israel; the Johnson administration, focused on Vietnam, would not intervene forcibly.

While most of the world views the upcoming anniversary from the Palestinian viewpoint, Israel will be remembering the harrowing weeks leading up to the war 40 years ago – when it stood alone.

“A SOVIET SCHEME TO ELIMINATE ISRAEL’S NUCLEAR FACITLITY AT DIMONA?”

The Soviets’ Six Day War
By Daniel Pipes
The Jerusalem Post
May 30, 2007

One of the great enigmas of the modern Middle East is why, 40 years ago next week, the Six-Day War took place. Neither Israel nor its Arab neighbors wanted or expected a fight in June 1967; the consensus view among historians holds that the unwanted combat resulted from a sequence of accidents.

Enter Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, a wife-husband team, to challenge the accident theory and offer a plausible explanation for the causes of the war. As suggested by the title of their book, Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War (Yale University Press), they argue that it originated in a scheme by the Soviet politburo to eliminate Israel’s nuclear facility at Dimona, and with it the country’s aspiration to develop nuclear weapons.

The text reads like the solution to a mystery, amassing information from voluminous sources, guiding readers step-by-step through the argument, making an intuitively compelling case that must be taken seriously. In summary, it goes like this:

Moshe Sneh, an Israeli communist leader (and father of Ephraim Sneh, the country’s current deputy minister of defense) told the Soviet ambassador in December 1965 that an advisor to the prime minister had informed him about “Israel’s intention to produce its own atomic bomb.” Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues received this piece of information with dead seriousness and decided – as did the Israelis about Iraq in 1981 and may be doing about Iran in 2007 – to abort this process through air strikes.

Rather than do so directly, however, Moscow devised a complex scheme to lure the Israelis into starting a war which would end with a Soviet attack on Dimona. Militarily, the Kremlin prepared by surrounding Israel with an armada of nuclear-armed forces in both the Mediterranean and Red seas, pre-positioning mat riel on land, and training troops nearby with the expectation of using them. Perhaps the most startling information in Foxbats over Dimona concerns the detailed plans for Soviet troops to attack Israeli territory, and specifically to bombard oil refineries and reservoirs, and reach out to Israeli Arabs. No less eye-opening is to learn that Soviet photo-reconnaissance MiG-25s (the “Foxbats” of the title) directly overflew the Dimona reactor in May 1967.

Politically, the scheme consisted of fabricating intelligence reports about Israeli threats to Syria, thereby goading the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian forces to go on war-footing. As his Soviet masters then instructed, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser moved his troops toward Israel, removed a United Nations buffer force, and blockaded a key naval route to Israel - three steps that together compelled the Israelis to move to a full-alert defense. Unable to sustain this posture for long, they struck first, thereby, it appeared, falling into the Soviet trap.

But then the Israel Defense Forces did something astonishing. Rather than fight to a draw, as the Soviets expected, they quickly won what I have called “the most overwhelming victory in the annals of warfare.” Using purely conventional means, they defeated three enemy Arab states in six days, thereby preempting the planned Soviet invasion, which had to be scuttled.

This fiasco made the elaborate Soviet scheme look inept, and Moscow understandably decided to obscure its own role in engineering the war (its second major strategic debacle of the decade – the attempt to place missiles in Cuba having been the first). The cover-up succeeded so well that Moscow’s responsibility for the Six-Day War has disappeared from histories of the conflict. Thus, a specialist on the war like Michael Oren, has coolly received the Ginor-Remez thesis, saying he has not found “any documentary evidence to support” it.

If Foxbats over Dimona is not the definitive word, it offers a viable, exciting interpretation for others to chew on, with many implications. Today’s Arab-Israeli conflict, with its focus on the territories won in 1967, accompanied by virulent anti-Semitism, results in large part from Kremlin decisions made four decades ago. The whole exercise was for naught, as Israeli possession of nuclear weapons had limited impact on the Soviet Union before it expired in 1991. And, as the authors note, “21st century nostalgia for the supposed stability of the Cold War is largely illusory.”

Finally, 40 years later, where might things be had the Soviets’ Six-Day War not occurred? However bad circumstances are at present, they would presumably be yet worse without that stunning Israeli victory.

WISDOM OF WAITING

Wisdom of waiting
Lessons of Six Day War still applicable in face of ongoing rocket attacks
Michael Oren
Yediot Ahronot
May 20, 2007

www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3402180,00.html

The Palestinians are resorting to terrorism to attack Israel, Syria is threatening to embark on a war, hostile elements exploit southern Lebanon as a base for launching attacks on Israel – and the world condemns any Israeli attempt to defend ourselves through revenge attacks.

This scenario is very familiar to us through our daily existence, but it also describes the situation Israel found itself in 40 years ago, during the process that led to the Six-Day War’s outbreak.

Then as now, Fatah members carried out terror attacks from the West Bank, while other Palestinian groups emerged from southern Lebanon with the aim of hitting Israeli targets. Syria, which at the time was also controlled by the Baath party, frequently called for war to liberate “occupied Arab land.”

Israel did not sit idle in the face of these threats, but rather, carried out defensive operations such as the paratroop raid on a terrorist stronghold in the West Bank village of Samua in November 1966. This operation was harshly condemned by the international community, and particularly by the US Administration.

On the face of it, there can be no comparison between the 1967 Israel, a relatively poor country surrounded by hostile regimes and lacking any powerful allies, to current-day Israel: A high-tech powerhouse boasting peace agreements with two of its neighbors and a close alliance with the world’s only superpower.

Yet despite the changes, Israel still faces the threat of terrorism, which could turn large sections of Israeli territory into no-man’s land, along with existential threats – which today originate in Iran rather than in Egypt – that may lead to an all-out war that could last six minutes rather than six days.

Therefore, instead of merely marking the Six-Day War’s 40th anniversary, we should examine the Israeli government’s decision-making process in the pre-war period and learn the appropriate lessons. We can point to two decisions that significantly affected this process.

The first decision was taken in November 1966, when the revenge operation in Samua was approved. Although Syria, rather than Jordan, was behind Fatah attacks, ministers were concerned about punishing Damascus because of the possibility of confrontation with the Syrian army and its Soviet patrons. Therefore, the government preferred to approve an operation against Jordan.

Eshkol rejected generals’ recommendation

However, en route to their targets the paratroopers encountered a Jordanian force, and the operation turned into a battle. This incident had two results: The Americans slammed the operation and referred to it as madness, while Jordan’s King Hussein, who was greatly humiliated, attempted to cast the blame for the disaster on his archrival, Egyptian President Nasser, claiming that he was hiding “behind the dresses” of the UN force in the Sinai and Gaza.

The latter, in response, sought any pretext to remove the UN force – a pretext provided by the Soviets in mid-May 1967, after they told Nasser that Israel seemingly intends to attack Syria.

Nasser quickly discovered that the story was baseless, yet he used this pretext to remove UN forces and deploy his troops in Sinai, block the Tiran Straits that lead to Eilat, and form military alliances with Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. As it was surrounded by tens of thousands of Arab soldiers excited about the prospect of eliminating it, Israel was forced to decide whether it should resort to a pre-emptive strike.

The second decision was undertaken by then-Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, who rejected the recommendations submitted by IDF generals and senior ministers to attack Egypt at once. Eshkol insisted on waiting another three weeks in order to prove to the world, and particularly to the Americans, that Israel exhausted all possibilities to resolve the crisis through diplomatic means.

This “waiting period” is remembered today as a highly tense period, and Eshkol was harshly condemned for it. Yet Israel used this period in order to prepare the IDF for action and justify its position to international public opinion. Therefore, once the war broke out on June 5th, the IDF was ready and Israel enjoyed broad sympathy in European capitals and in Washington.

It would be worthwhile to take note of two lessons from the Six-Day War: First, instead of rushing into battle, we should utilize the period of (relative) “restraint” in 2007 to make Israel’s case – we cannot sustain Qassam rocket attacks on a daily basis. The second lesson is that undue fears, rather than exaggerated bravery, could lead to escalation, and that there is no alternative to addressing the source of the threat.

In other words, we should be waiting enough time in order to strengthen, improve our just argument, and prepare to thoroughly address those who stand behind the attacks – the Palestinians and Syrians.

“A RETURN TO WESTERN 1967-LIKE AUDACITY WILL BE NECESSARY”

The audacity of 1967
By Saul Singer
The Jerusalem Post
May 31, 2007

This week I joined a tour of the Six Day War battle for Jerusalem, led by historian Michael Oren and author Yossi Klein Halevi for the new Adelson Institute of the Shalem Center.

Standing in places where fierce, sometimes hand-to-hand fighting took place, it was difficult to mentally transport ourselves back just 40 years, when Jerusalem was a small town in a cul-de-sac sealed by a wall and Jordanian snipers. And to the few hours of brutal struggle that changed all that.

The tour began at the Sherover Promenade in Talpiot, which has been transformed from a strategic strip of no-man’s land to one of the most magnificent vistas of the united city. We heard how, contrary to Jimmy Carter and others who blithely claim that Israel preemptively attacked Jordan, Israel went to extraordinary lengths to avoid opening a front in Jerusalem, even as the IDF pummeled Egypt’s air force.

Before the war, one paratrooper was so sure the fighting would be confined to the north and south that he sent his nine-months pregnant wife to family living on the border with Jordan in Jerusalem. He was part of the Paratroop Brigade that had trained to fight in the south, and yet was sent on the second night of the war to respond to the unexpected Jordanian attack on Jerusalem.

On the war’s first day, June 5, Jordan launched massive and indiscriminate rocket fire into civilian west Jerusalem, killing and wounding dozens of residents. Jordan also rocketed Tel Aviv from Jenin. Further, Jordanian troops assaulted Jerusalem from the south, on the ridge where the Promenade is today. They retreated after Rachel Kaufman, the wife of the director of an experimental farm on that ridge, opened fire with an old machine gun.

Even after these Jordanian attacks, Israel’s leadership was torn over how to respond. Paratroop Brigade commander Motta Gur sent two of his battalions to secure Mount Scopus, and one to take over the Rockefeller Museum, which overlooks the walls of the Old City. By sending part of his force to the Rockefeller, Gur was clearly anticipating an order to take the Old City.

Careful planning and preparation, however, is not what characterized the battles that day. The soldiers sent to capture Ammunition Hill, on the way to Mount Scopus, were not expecting the Jordanians to be so heavily fortified in trenches and bunkers. Nor did they know, as the pre-dawn battle raged, that the Jordanian tanks they were being sent to ward off were being destroyed by the Israeli air force a few kilometers away.

The brigade that was sent to the Rockefeller, which did not even have enough street maps of the city, took a wrong turn on to Nablus Road, where the US consulate still stands, came under hails of Jordanian fire and took many casualties.

There are never commissions of inquiries into victories, but if there were, the Winograd Committee’s standards for preparations, training and decision making would not have been remotely met by the battle for Jerusalem. Yet, as in all of Israel’s wars, there were battles that were won despite everything, because each soldier knew he could not let his comrades down, and he was fighting for the existence of his family and country.

At the conference preceding the tour, Adelson Institute scholar Martin Kramer said, “The memory of 1967 is the basis of an implicit understanding between the [Arab] regimes and the peoples: the regimes will avert war, and in return the people will stay loyal, even docile... The skill of rulers in averting war has helped to secure and entrench them. The collective Arab memory of 1967 explains why no Arab state has entered or stumbled into war with Israel in over 30 years. It’s the underpinning of such peace and stability as the region has enjoyed.”

In this view, the 1967 war ended the Arab-Israeli phase of the conflict and started a Palestinian-Israeli one. We have now, however, entered a third phase in which the conflict has expanded outward again, to a global battle between Islamofascism led by Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas and al-Qaida; and the West, including the US, Europe and Israel.

The idea that the Six Day War actually ushered in this third phase, however fashionable, does not hold water. Though Islamofascism rose over the ashes of pan-Arabism, there was nothing inevitable in the West’s toleration of this new and growing threat, which had little to do with Israel.

Even when Osama bin Laden was fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan with American help, the Islamofascists saw the West as the next obstacle in their quest for world domination, and the easier one to beat.

Some wonder whether the powerful effect of 1967 has faded. Particularly since last summer’s war, they claim, Israel does not look so invincible any more. Even if this is so, phrasing the problem this way largely misses the point.

The bigger problem now is that the global equivalent to 1967 in the current struggle, the dispatching of the regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 is now seen to be unraveling. The new US Iraq strategy is succeeding on the ground, but perhaps not fast enough to stem the erosion in domestic support for seeing the struggle through.

Nasser’s pan-Arabist bubble was not fully popped until the defeat of the Arab’s Yom Kippur War counterattack six years after 1967. We are seeing a similar Islamofascist counterattack now. This menace will grow until its center, the Iranian regime, is defeated.

On May 26, just days before the Six Day War, as Egypt massed 80,000 troops and 900 tanks on the border, Nasser said, “We intend to open a general assault against Israel. This will be total war. Our basic aim will be to destroy Israel.”

Iran has been equally blunt about its intentions. The international response to Iran’s gathering storm has been as feckless as its inaction while Egypt and Syria openly prepared to destroy Israel 40 years ago. Today, however, the Islamofascist threat, while most acute against Israel, is global in scope. Barring an unforeseen burst of effective sanctions, such as imposing a total banking and import ban, a return to Western 1967-like audacity will be necessary.