“All of the world knows what happened here in 1948,’ Daoud Abu Lebdeh says, while leaning against a table in a coffee shop on the Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus.
“The Israeli soldiers or the Israeli militias like the Hagana, Kahane, the Irgun and Lehi came here and they [kicked] the people outside from their homes.”
Daoud is a nondescript man of 24 from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi Joz. A correspondent and blogger with the Palestinian website the Middle East Post, Daoud has come highly recommended as an expert on the Nakba, the “catastrophe” of the birth of the State of Israel, and concurrently, the start of the Palestinian refugee problem, by Fatah Youth activist and Jerusalemite Mousa Abassi.
Richard Falk, Princeton University professor emeritus of international law and United Nations Human Rights Council special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, is well-known for his hostility towards Israel. Indeed, this antagonism, and his high-profile involvement in any number of anti-Israel organizations, led to his expulsion from the country in 2008.
A recent lecture at Stanford Law School entitled, “Imagining Israeli-Palestinian Peace: Why International Law Matters,” provided a platform for more of the same vitriol. Approximately 100 people attended, about evenly split between students and local residents. One of the latter, when asking a question, described himself as an “activist” and an elderly couple sporting keffiyehs and political buttons sat in the front row, nodding enthusiastically in agreement throughout the lecture.
Aish.com has produced another great video which is, “a musical satire about the real obstacle to peace in the Middle East.” The real obstacle: The twisted Arab/Muslim World and mindset — teaching children to hate Jews, using Jews as a scapegoat for all problems, and an ultimate quest to annihilate Israel. Watch, enjoy, or just cry:
There is a constant effort — especially by the anti-Israel left–to portray those who express mainstream Israeli public opinion and the views of professional analysts as “right-wing” or “Likudnik.” This leads me to wonder what one would have to say to please these people. What would be the equivalent of a “liberal” position for Israel according to them? What kinds of positions would they see as legitimate?
What follows is not meant to exaggerate in any way but is, I believe, a genuine list of what they demand. To please them, I presume one would have to say the following:
Thus far the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has weathered the storm that has swept across the Middle East since the beginning of the year. But the relative calm in Amman is an illusion. The unspoken truth is that the Palestinians, the country’s largest ethnic group, have developed a profound hatred of the regime and view the Hashemites as occupiers of eastern Palestine — intruders rather than legitimate rulers. This, in turn, makes a regime change in Jordan more likely than ever. Such a change, however, would not only be confined to the toppling of yet another Arab despot but would also open the door to the only viable peace solution — and one that has effectively existed for quite some time: a Palestinian state in Jordan.
On September 28th, the world was supposed to celebrate, but conveniently forgot the anniversary of the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement, widely known as the Oslo Accords. Three political stooges, Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Perez received the Nobel Peace Prize for signing this worthless piece of paper, which was based on fake promises made by Yasser Arafat in a letter to then Israeli Prime Minister Rabin on September 9, 1993.
As September approaches, many are waiting with bated breath to learn if Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will deliver on his threat to unilaterally declare an independent Palestinian state and seek recognition of it through the U.N. But in putting the Palestinian demand for statehood to a vote, Abbas will end up subverting the international organization’s longstanding solution to the Arab Israeli-conflict — U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 — with unpredictable results.
The 18th annual Dr. Manfred R. Lehmann Memorial Israel Day Concert in Central Park set the tone for an ebullient celebration of Israel’s 63rd birthday as premiere entertainers and prominent speakers appeared before thousands at the Summer Stage in the park. Thousands of “Celebrate Israel” parade participants and spectators filed into Central Park after the conclusion of the 47th annual parade for some traditional Jewish entertainment and enlightenment.
Recently, UCLA professor of English and advocate of a single state solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict Saree Makdisi spoke in the student union at the University of Pennsylvania. The lecture, sponsored by the Penn Middle East Center (MEC), the English Department, the Greenfield Intercultural Center, and the Penn Arab Student Society, represented another in a series of events sponsored by the university-funded Middle East Center that brought known anti-Israel speakers to Penn, including UCLA’s James Gelvin, Stanford’s Joel Beinin, artists Reza Kanazi and Radio Rahim, and numerous film screenings. To get a better sense of the level of bias at MEC, consider the following: in the first four months of 2011, the MEC underwrote eight events co-sponsored by Penn for Palestine and associated groups, but none by the Penn Israel Coalition or other pro-Israel campus groups. Moreover, by inviting an English professor like Makdisi, whose academic specialty is eighteenth and nineteenth-century British poetry, MEC privileges his anti-Israel politics over his lack of specialized knowledge of the Middle East.
Editor’s note: This article was written in response to a post on the “Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism’s” website promoting a one-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Stating the truth that Judea and Samaria are parts of Israel (historically, biblically and according to all agreements and UN resolutions) is not a claim, it is a fact. Withdrawing from those lands completely and leaving it in the hands of “Fatas” — the new Fatah-Hamas alliance — will make Israel more vulnerable and that is not only according to Jews, it is the basis of the planned, stepwise hudna (a Muslim tactical ceasefire for the purposes of regrouping before again attacking the enemy) that the Palestinians are counting on to subdue Israel.
What surprised me more about President Obama’s speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than its content was the way the audience fawned all over him and clapped at his every platitude. It was like a meeting of the Soviet Politburo in the 1960’s. He reiterated his views on shrinking Israel (with land swaps but he knows that Israel has no significant amount of land to swap). America, he assured us, will be at Israel’s side during this entire process to hold her hand as she gets used to the inconvenient truth, based in Marxist ideology, that the proletariat (the Palestinians) need more room to expand at the expense of the successful bourgeoisie Israelis. Building a new country not based on Western standards and without asking it to stop its annihilationist charters and Islamist conquest is fine with the Obami. Israel is being asked to turn over the keys to people who have in mind its future destruction.
In a recent major speech at the State Department, President Obama, addressing the “democratic” revolution in the Middle East and North Africa — predictably Israel became the main point of attention again. Obama, like many of his predecessors (Carter, both Bushs, and Clinton) has made another attempt to resurrect the peace process between Israel and so-called Palestinians.
“Our mood is not one of celebration. Our mood is one of caution and concern. Unease sits heavily on our shoulders”, declared US Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) at the 2011 AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, DC. Expressing concern about the security of Israel he said, “At no time in Israel’s history has her future faced such tension and such serious tests. Uncertainty awaits us on many fronts.”
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