An Equal Opportunity Palestinian Preacher (video)

"As a Palestinian, a Muslim, and Arab ... I say the time has come to sound the trumpet of Jihad .... initially in Palestine ... and eventually the whole world" thunders Sheikh Muhammad Nimr Zaghmout, head of the Palestinian Islamic Council in Lebanon. 

What's more, he says, it's “an individual duty” incumbent upon every Muslim man and woman.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmXMcfp12yk

To quote the uploader, Memri.org, he is seen here 'declaring Jihad for the “liberation” of the Al-Aqsa Mosque during a July 16 interview on Mayadeen TV'.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose ...

"The more things change, the more they stay the same."

So observed the French wit Alphonse Karr in 1849.

Looking through a newspaper collection recently for something entirely unrelated to the Middle East, I spotted the following, and thought of that phrase, though on second thoughts maybe it's not so apt, given that certain trends in history roll on and gain momentum.

Edinburgh Evening News, 22 March 1902:

Wanatah [Indiana] Mirror, 25 January 1912:

Ibid.  Opening paragraphs in close-up:

Bedford [UK] Daily Mail, 4 June 1912 (is this what drives Viktor Orban?):

The Globe [UK], 28 November 1913):

Daily Mirror [UK], 2 June 1914

Cambridge [UK] Independent Press, 10 December 1915:

I'm sure there are a lot more where those came from.
 
Meanwhile, in the Middle East some things have stayed the same since the 7th century, as this fine article observes:

True peace requires addressing the deep sources of the conflict. Those lay with the Arab and Muslim reaction to the return of the Jewish people to powerful sovereignty in their ancient homeland. As far as Muslim theology and Arab practice were concerned, the Jews were non-believers, only to be tolerated, never as equals. They should have never been allowed to undermine Muslim rule over the lands, which the Jews claimed as their homeland, but the Arabs viewed as exclusively theirs since conquering them in the seventh century.

The return of the Jewish people to restored sovereignty in their ancient homeland, required Arabs and Muslims to accept that a people, whom they have for centuries treated as inferiors, worthy of contempt, were now claiming equality and exercising power in their midst.

This historical “Chutzpah” is what drove the Arab League to violently reject any kind of plan that would grant the Jewish people equal sovereignty over any part of “Muslim land”​, free from their control. This unnatural historical development, in Arab eyes, led Arab governments to take revenge and forcefully expel hundreds of thousands of Jews, living in their midst, often in communities predating the birth of Islam, just after the establishment of the State of Israel.

It is also the reason why Arab states kept the Arabs who were displaced during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and their millions of descendants, ​ as perpetual “refugees” – to deprive the Jewish state of legitimacy and peace.  It is the reason that even after losing repeated military wars against the State of Israel, Arab countries have continued their diplomatic and economic war against it to this day. Even Jordan and Egypt, that have signed nominal peace agreements with Israel, have more of a ‘mutual non-attack’ agreements, rather than genuine peace.

The animosity to the concept of the Jewish sovereignty in the Arab Middle East is simply too big. This attitude towards the Jewish state is an Arab – and Muslim – issue, and not only a Palestinian one. The Palestinians have been at the forefront of this Arab and Muslim intolerance, but they are not its creators. They are the thin end of the wedge by which the Arab and Muslim world wages its war against a sovereign Jewish people.

If the word peace is ever to truly describe the situation between Israel and its neighbors, it requires the Arab and Muslim world to address the roots of their intolerance. It requires them to accept the Jews as their equals and as an indigenous people who have come home. This was always too large a task to be undertaken by the Palestinians. Only Arabs and Muslims together can legitimize a different theological interpretation of the Jewish presence in their midst: no longer inferiors and no longer foreigners. In doing so, they can enable and legitimize practical solutions in Jerusalem that accept the centrality of the city to the Jewish people, and to the manufactured problem of the “refugees”, by finally rehabilitating them and absorbing them as fellow Arabs...."

And as the Palestinian envoy to Iran, Salah Zawawi, reminds us in a recent interview on Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV:

"Our war is not only with this Zionist enemy. We are fighting a 100-year-old Western enterprise, which is ongoing. This enterprise does not target a part of Palestine, or even Palestine in its entirety. Its goal is to establish the Greater Israel, which would control disintegrated Arab and Islamic countries, and indeed, this is happening today in our Islamic world. ...This way, our enemy along with its defenders and masters, would complete their plan to turn us into servants, if not slaves, in this region, and to plunder our resources.

When they talk about the signing of the nuclear agreement and whatever, they are truly terrified. If Iran produces a nuclear bomb - and I pray to Allah that Iran will produce 1,000 nuclear bombs - it will not be directed against any Arab or Islamic country. It will be used to defend, at the very least, the Islamic republic and its principles."

Moreover, to quote a commenter on this article: 

Commenter:

"I have degrees in Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic. I've spent more time than I care to recall studying Islam and its adherents. I've lectured Army and DIA personnel on Salafist terrorism.

Islam has never, ever been a 'byword for benign enlightenment.' It has always, from its triumph at Yathrib, been a religion of oppression, slavery, and war. That reformers occasionally exist does not rescue the faith from the weight of its history. And note that the reformers always fail.

Reason #1: Reform is bid'a (innovation), and bid'a is heresy, and willing heresy is apostasy, and Muslim apostates are put to death."

A commenter in response:

'Excellent post but, "And note that the reformers always fail." is not true. I think what you mean is that the peaceful ones always fail, which is true. When Islam was pacified by the influence and strength of Western culture it was denatured and mutated into something quite different. Now the reformists are trying to purge the Munafiqun (the hypocrites) from their community and purify the faith into one strong, tight fist with which to smash the infidels into submission... just as Abu Bakr (The Sword of Allah) did during the Apostasy Wars. Islam goes through these undulating waves of dilution (under the influence of kaffir civilisations) and then purification, by reformists trying to return to the original source material found in the Hadith and Quran; the terrorist organisations are simply the peak of the iceberg in a much larger movement in the Islamic world.

Sadly, the reformists are winning.'

Original Commenter:

"I don't disagree, but Khālid ibn al-Walīd was called Sword of Allah, not Abu Bakr."

"The Basic Goal of Islam is to Conquer Territory or Win Converts ... Is it Not Time for Western Leaders to Get a Grip for Once?" (video)

The marvellous Professor Dennis McEoin tells some home truths about Jihadist goals, whether regarding Israel or any other part of the non-Muslim world (Gatestone Institute video):

 In this recent video for Prager University, Ayaan Hirsi Ali insists that for all our sakes the West should support Muslim dissidents just as it supported Soviet dissidents during the Cold War:

Colonel Kemp et al: Israel's Vital Defensible Borders (video)

"The Middle East is imploding in waves of violence whose impact has reached Israel.

To the north, radical Islamists in Syria linked to both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda are approaching Israel’s border on the Golan Heights and threatening Jordan as well. At the same time, Iran is sending thousands of rockets with increasingly accurate guidance systems to Hizbullah in Lebanon to again attack Israeli cities.

To the east, Israel faces an array of potential threats from hostile forces that include Iranian Revolutionary Guards, pro-Iranian Shi’ite militias, and radical Islamist terror armies.

To the south, the Islamic State is in Sinai, threatening both Israel and Egypt. At the same time, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza are working feverishly, with Iranian assistance, to rebuild their rocket capabilities to enable renewed attacks on Israel.

Israel must have defensible borders to protect itself against a broad range of current and future threats from radical Islamist forces."

A compelling video from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, in which that doughty student of war and defender of Israel Colonel Richard Kemp features, inter alia:

"O, Scoundrels, Let Me Deliver A Personal Message To You..." (video)

"We are preparing for you an army you cannot match ... to die for the sake of Allah"

With bloodcurdling ferocity a Hamas cleric promises Jihad against the Zionist Entity:

Meanwhile, regarding Australia ...

"Those Good Jews, Who Have Brought To The Muslim Arabs Civilization & Peace ... The Muslims Have Declared Holy War Against Them"

In Palestine, the Arab Riots broke out that same year

Wow!!!  What a discovery!  Elder of Ziyon has posted a truly remarkable document, a letter (as translated from the Arabic by Dr Mordechai Kedar) written against this background by the then leader of the Alawites (Bashir Assad's grandfather) to French prime minister Léon Blum in 1936.  Here is a taste, but the letter really must be read in full on Elder's blog:

"The spirit of fanaticism and narrow-mindedness, whose roots are deep in the heart of the Arab Muslims toward all those who are not Muslim, is the spirit that continually feeds the Islamic religion, and therefore there is no hope that the situation will change. If the Mandate is cancelled, the danger of death and destruction will be a threat upon the minorities in Syria, even if the cancellation [of the Mandate] will decree freedom of thought and freedom of religion. Why, even today we see how the Muslim residents of Damascus force the Jews who live under their auspices to sign a document in which they are forbidden to send food to their Jewish brothers who are suffering from the disaster in Palestine [in the days of the great Arab rebellion], the situation of the Jews in Palestine being the strongest and most concrete proof of the importance of the religious problem among the Muslim Arabs toward anyone who does not belong to Islam. Those good Jews, who have brought to the Muslim Arabs civilization and peace, and have spread wealth and prosperity to the land of Palestine, have not hurt anyone and have not taken anything by force, and nevertheless the Muslims have declared holy war against them and have not hesitated to slaughter their children and their women despite the fact that England is in Palestine and France is in Syria. Therefore a black future awaits the Jews and the other minorities if the Mandate is cancelled and Muslim Syria is unified with Muslim Palestine. This union is the ultimate goal of the Muslim Arabs."

The Nub Of The Matter: A British Muslim on Israel & the Palestinians

“How do you relinquish control when there’s a virulent Jihadist ideology and many Muslim leaders outside the region who say that not only shouldn’t Israel be recognized, but it shouldn’t be there at all?”

That question regarding Israel's presence in the Disputed Territories, came out of the mouth of a British Muslim physician of Pakistani heritage, Dr Qanta Ahmed, who visited Israel in May.

Observes an article by Evelyn Gordon in Commentary magazine picking up on the interview Dr Ahmed gave to Ha'aretz:

'[Although] Ahmed, whose parents became refugees when the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan sent 10 to 12 million people fleeing in both directions (the Ahmeds fled to Pakistan) .... understands how wrenching refugeehood can be, she’s seen her own parents create new lives–and “I also see how people came to Israel, some of them barely surviving the Holocaust, to a land where they were not used to the climate and where they had no family, and yet somehow managed to build this extraordinary, complicated nation.”

While she never says it explicitly, the implication is clear: The Palestinians’ current plight is due less to Israel’s creation than to their own insistence on living in the past, and Arab countries’ insistence on keeping them there. Instead of building new lives for themselves as other refugees have done, they clung to the dream of eradicating Israel and “returning” to its territory–a dream that has precluded peace for 65 years now, and shows no sign of dying. In 2011, for instance, the PLO’s ambassador to Lebanon asserted that a Palestinian state would still deny citizenship to all Palestinian refugees, even those already living there, in order to preserve the demand for their “return” to Israel.

Moreover ... this issue shows Israel to be “a just and moral actor,” in sharp contrast to Arab states: While it absorbed the Jewish refugees and allowed them to build new lives, Arab states refused to absorb Palestinians: They denied them citizenship and kept them in squalid camps to preserve them as a weapon against Israel.

Finally, it sheds new light even on “the occupation.” Ahmed, for instance, considers it unjustified, but admitted there’s no obvious alternative: “How do you relinquish control when there’s a virulent Jihadist ideology and many Muslin leaders outside the region who say that not only shouldn’t Israel be recognized, but it shouldn’t be there at all?” That’s a problem too few Westerners are willing to acknowledge. Yet the refugee issue highlights this ongoing desire to eradicate Israel....'

Read Evelyn Gordon's entire piece here

Coffins At The Kindergarten

Role-playing martyrdom: coffins in a Gaza kindergarten

Here's a taste of how little Palestinian children at a kindergarten in Gaza City are taught to hate Israel.

To quote a teacher:

"In every year’s kindergarten graduation ceremonies we focus on the children to represent the role of struggling and resistance in the way of Allah, in order to establish this path and grow up to love the resistance, and for it to have a prominent role in their lives to serve the cause of Palestine and Holy Jihad, as well as to make them leaders and fighters to defend the holy soil of Palestine."

To quote a boy brandishing a wooden weapon and attired in the uniform of the Al Quds Brigades of Islamic Jihad:

"I love the resistance and the martyrs and Palestine, and I want to blow up the most Zionists in a process of martyrdom and kill them."

For pictures of the infant jihadists practising, and a link to further ones, see here (from where I copied the photograph).  Alternatively, see this post of the remarkable blogger Challah Hu Akhbar – like Elder of Ziyon he never seems to sleep! –  who was, I believe, the first westerner to expose this school for small shahids)

Jihad Against Israel & "One Nation For A New Holocaust" (videos)

I thought this video was unsettling enough:

But then I saw this:

Read more here.

Hat tip: Vlad Tepes blog

It's Not About Land, It's About Jihad (video)

And lest it be forgotten, here's what two prominent Palestinian Arabs have had to say on the subject of  rapprochement with the Zionist Entity:

First, Hamas's Foreign Minister, Mahmoud Al-Zahar, in a television interview in July, translated by MEMRI:

"Palestine in its entirety is Islamic waqf land, which cannot be relinquished....

At this moment in time, we say to you, first of all: We want Palestine in its entirety - so there will not be any misunderstandings. If our generation is unable to achieve this, the next one will, and we are raising our children on this. Palestine means Palestine in its entirety, and Israel cannot exist in our midst."

He explained that Hamas would view any Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, or a compromise agreement with the Palestinian Authority as only a "first stage" towards the destruction of Israel in its entirety.

Second, Dr Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian Authority's Head of Foreign Relations, speaking on Lebanese television in July (translation also by MEMRI):

'The story of "two states for two peoples" means that there will be a Jewish people over there and a Palestinian people here. We will never accept this ...

We will not sacrifice the 1.5 million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who live within the 1948 borders, and we will never agree to a clause preventing the Palestinian refugees from returning to their country. We will not accept this....

The recognition of a [Palestinian] state is basically a bilateral action, which receives the blessing of the UN. This act, however, will make many things possible in the future. Eventually, we will be able to sign bilateral agreements with states and this will enable us to exert pressure on Israel. At the end of the day, we want to exert pressure on Israel in order to force it to recognize us and to leave our country. This is our long-term goal."

Pamela Geller On The Dangers Facing Israel (video)

As most people will be aware, Pamela Geller runs the celebrated Jihad-watch blog "Atlas Shrugs".  In this interview she tells of the dangers facing the tiny State of Israel now that the Arab narrative has managed to capture so much of world opinion.

Hat tip: reader Rita

The Muslim Brotherhood's Jihad against the Jews and Israel

A chilling and comprehensive report, scholarly and well-documented, has been prepared by Dr Harold Brackman for The Simon Wiesenthal Center. Entitled “Hitler Put Them in Their Place”: Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood’s Jihad Against Jews, Judaism, and Israel,” it is mandatory reading for all who seek to understand the true nature and objectives of an organisation which is being misunderstood and sanitised in so much of the Western media, not least the BBC.

Here’s a taste of the report:

Wishful Thinking in High Places:

“Ayatollah Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint.” Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young (1979)

“[The Muslim Brotherhood is] an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al-Qaeda as a perversion of Islam.” Director of National Intelligence (DNI), James Clapper (2011)

Sober Warnings:

The Global Threat: “A radicalized understanding of Islam has taken hold, possibly over a wider swathe than at any other time in the fourteen centuries of Muslim history, and it has driven out or silenced every serious
rival.” Director of the Middle East Forum, Daniel Pipes (2002)

The Mistake of “Engagement”: “To think that engaging the Ikhwan [the Brotherhood] will somehow reduce support for extremism is a misplaced notion that is to misunderstand the politics of the region.” Senior Research Associate at the Centre for International Studies, Cambridge University, Alison Pargeter (2010)

A Muslim Assessment: “The Muslim Brotherhood’s problem is that it has no shame. The beginnings of all the religious terrorism we are witnessing is in the Muslim Brother’s ideology of takfir [vilifying other Muslims]. . . . The founders of the violent groups were raised on the Muslim Brotherhood, and those who worked with bin Laden and al-Qaeda went out under the mantle of the Brotherhood.”  Kuwait’s former Education Minister, Dr. Ahmad al-Rab’i (2005)

In Their Own Words:

The Death Cult: “Degradation and dishonour are the results of the love of this world. Therefore, prepare for jihad and be the lovers of death. . . .
Death is an art, and the most exquisite of arts when practiced by the skilful artist.” Brotherhood Founder Hassan al-Banna (c. 1940)

Violence: “History does not write its lines except with [sic]. Glory does not build its lofty edifice except with skulls. Honor and respect cannot be established except on a foundation of cripples and corpses.” Brotherhood Leader and Osama bin Laden’s Teacher, Abdullah Azzam (2003)

Democracy: “Democracy contradicts and wages war on Islam. Whoever calls for democracy means they are raising banners contradicting God’s plan and fighting Islam.” Brotherhood Supreme Spiritual Leader, Mustapha Mashour (1981)

Kill the Jews: “The Versailles Treaty was a disaster for the Germans as well as the Arabs. But the Germans know how to get rid of the Jews. . . . the Germans have never harmed any Muslim, and they are again fighting our common enemy who persecuted Arabs and Muslims. But most of all, they have definitely solved the Jewish problem. Arabs! Rise as one to protect your scared rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. . . . God is with you.” Brotherhood Ally, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni (1943)

Hitler’s Final Solution: “Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place.” Muslim Brotherhood’s Current Spiritual Head Yusuf el-Qaradawi (2009)

The Future of Peace: “There is no dialogue between us [Muslims and Jews] except by the sword and rifle. . . . [We pray Allah] to take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people. . . . do not spare a single one of them. . . . count their numbers and kill them down to the very last one.” Muslim Brotherhood’s Current Spiritual Head, Yusuf al-Qaradawi (2009)

Plans for America: “[North America is] a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the all other religions.” Member of the Brotherhood U.S. Shura Council, Mohammed Akram, from a secret memo (1991)

War with Israel: “[We will] continue to raise the banner of jihad against the Jews, [our] first and foremost enemies. . . .  resistance is the only solution against the Zio-American arrogance and tyranny, and all we need is for the Arab and Muslim peoples to stand behind it and support it.
. . . We say to our brothers the mujahideen in Gaza: be patient, persist in [your jihad], and know that Allah is with you.” Current Brotherhood Supreme Leader, Mohamed Badi (2010)

Introduction: 9/11 and 2/11

“9/11” is inscribed in U.S. history for terrible reasons no American will ever forget. In the chronicles of global history, “2/11” is of momentous importance for three reasons. On February11, 1990, Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years imprisonment, mostly in South Africa’s Robben Island Bastille. On February 11, 1979, the Shah of Iran fell, ultimately to be replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini’s dictatorship. And now—on February 11, 2011—a popular Egypt Revolution has toppled President Hosni Mubarak, with ultimate consequences that are still unfolding.

The Muslim Brotherhood (in Arabic, al-Ikhwān al-Muslimūn) – Egypt’s Islamist opposition to the Mubarak regime with a followership probably between 10 and 20 million – contributed an estimated 15 to 20 percent of the demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Fortunately, it played second fiddle to young, overwhelmingly moderate and secular democracy protestors. This contrasts with Iran in 1979 where Ayatollah Khomeini from his exile in France was much better positioned from the first to play puppet master, pulling the strings on what went on in the streets of Tehran.

Yet the Egyptian situation is so uncertain and complicated – with a diverse but inexperienced army of young democracy activists, the real military which controls the transition and is playing its cards close to the vest, and the Brotherhood occupying the third corner of a political triangle – that it would be foolish to rule out the possibility that Egypt’s democratic revolution could also by hijacked by disciplined and ruthless, undemocratic actors. Real friends of peaceful progress cannot afford to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to pose as the heroes of a revolution which they did not make and whose democratic aspirations they do not share.

We should be especially troubled about one parallel between the Muslim Brotherhood and Khomeini’s movement: their shared obsessive hatred of Israel as an anti-Muslim “Zionist conspiracy” and their radical vision of a future apocalypse in which—not only the Jewish state – but Jews everywhere will be wiped from the face of the earth. In this respect, Iranian President [Mahmoud]“Wipe Israel From the Map” Ahmedinajed, is a true son of the Ayatollah Khomeini and potential model for the Brotherhood. This Report will put in context the theme of anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish genocidal paranoia that runs like a central thread though the Muslim Brotherhood’s 80-year history, commencing with its foundation in 1928.

The only thing that exceeds the wide-ranging, global influence of the Muslim Brotherhood – whose reach extends beyond Egypt and the Middle East to Western Europe and North America—is the widespread ignorance about its history and current character and purposes by western political and media elites and public opinion. (In 2006, Jeff Stein of Congressional Quarterly quizzed Congressmen about their knowledge of basic facts about Islam, and found their bipartisan ignorance astounding.)

If we do not want 2/11/11 to replicate 2/11/79 – marking the triumph of another Islamist extremist regime extinguishing the democratic hopes of what initially was “a people’s revolution” – then now is the time that we learn as much as we can about the past and present of the Muslim Brotherhood, its paranoid anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and the extent of the threat it poses to the future of democracy and peace in Egypt and beyond.

http://www.wiesenthal.com/atf/cf/%7B54d385e6-f1b9-4e9f-8e94-890c3e6dd277%7D/HITLER-PUT-THEM-IN-THEIR-PLACE_BRACKMAN_FINAL.PDF

"To Jerusalem We Go, Martyrs in the Millions"

Thus chant two million protesters in Tahrir Square...

And the BBC insists there's  been no anti-Israel rhetoric among the Egyptian protesters.
Jeremy Bowen better eat his words.

Recognition for Peace? Or Recognition for Jihad?



Map courtesy of Edgar Davidson's blog (see text)

 With the help of Arab money the Israel-delegitimisers in the UK have been hard at work.  Yet again.  The new UAE-funded Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics seems to know something the rest of us don’t about the composition of the Middle East – as Edgar Davidson shows on his blog, it’s produced a map in which Israel is conspicuous by its absence (http://www.http//edgar1981.blogspot.com/)

 Of course, this is the vision of the Middle East that the majority of Palestinians themselves seem ultimately to want to see, if the October poll that I posted about on 22 November (“Still Crazy After all These Years”) is an accurate reflection of their attitudes. As some commentators have pointed out, if the Palestinians were to recognise Israel as it is, "the Jewish state", and not as what they seem to want it to become, an Arab-majority nation, then they might convince the Israelis that their intentions are honourable. As things stand, it’s no wonder that there are widespread fears among Israelis and genuine friends of Israel that in the Palestinians’ eyes there is no place for Israel, long-term, in a Muslim-dominated Middle East: the Jews will either be in a position of dhimmitude or the Caliphate will be judenrein. The Hizb ut Tahrir Islamic fundamentalist movement has become active among Palestinians, and there are fears that independent statehood would not hold back the movement’s determination to bring about the eradication of Israel and its Jews.

Some observers , fearing that cries of “Itbar al-yahud” – “Kill the Jews” – will resound in the region one day, point to the Islamic concept of peace, which holds that a "peace" can be but a stop-gap measure,  a temporary truce, a self-serving prelude to the ultimate objective, the annihilation of the enemy with whom such a "peace" is signed.

Reinforcing that impression are statements by leading Palestinian figures themselves. Last month in Ramallah the Fatah Revolutionary Council in convention voted to "affirm its rejection of the so-called Jewish state or any other formula that could achieve this goal" well as its opposition to the principle of swapping land for peace, since "illegal settler gangs cannot be placed on an equal footing with the owners of the lands and rights". Abbas and his colleagues expressed support for "adhering to the basic rights, first and foremost the right of return for Palestinian refugees" and avowed their resistance to "pressure aimed at resuming the peace talks without achieving the demands of the Palestinians". Abbas also vowed not to return to the negotiating table unless Israel completely froze Jewish construction throughout the West Bank and all areas of Jerusalem claimed by the Palestinian Authority for its mooted new country. And at a separate ceremony he lavished praise Abu Daoud, "the shahid [martyr] commander Amin al-Hindi", who masterminded the slaughter of eleven members of the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

We’ve had their bizarre claims that Rachel’s Tomb and the Kotel are not Jewish holy sites but theirs. We’ve seen this performance by a dance group on the official PA TV station (chaired by Abbas) two days before the latest peace talks began(hat tip: Palestine Media Watch), making it quite clear that Israel proper, and not merely the “occupied territories” remains just as much the target for "liberation" as ever:

Band member recites a poem:
"Fight, brother, the flag will never be lowered,
the torches will never die out.”
On [Mount] Carmel and in the [Jordan] Valley,
we are rocks and streams.
In Lod we are poems, and in Ramle - grenades.
We, my brother, shall remain the revolution of the fighting nation.”

Vocalist sings:
"The Zionists went out from [their] homelands,
compounding damage and enmity.
But the Palestinian revolution awaits [them].
The orchard called us to the [armed] struggle.
We replaced bracelets with weapons.
We attacked the despicable [Zionists].
This invading enemy is on the battlefield.
This is the day of consolation of Jihad.
Pull the trigger.
We shall redeem Jerusalem, Nablus and the country."

On the same station there’s also recently been this:

"My brother! The oppressors [Israelis] have gone too far.
Therefore Jihad is a right, and self-sacrifice is a right.
Shall we let them steal the Arab nature -
the patriarchal glory and rule?
And only through the sound of the sword
They respond, with voice or echo.
Draw from the sheath your sword;
And let it not return.
My brother, my brother, O proud Arab
Today is our moment, not tomorrow.
My brother, the time of our nation's sunrise has arrived,
[the time] for you to repel those who are misled
And bring renaissance to Islam."

We’ve heard what the supposedly moderate and pragmatic Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar really thinks, when in an unguarded moment he declared that owing to their "crimes" Jews have been expelled from every country in which they’ve been domiciled, and will be and will be expelled from Palestine too. We’ve read of his recent statement "that the [Hamas] movement was launched to continue the jihad until the liberation of all Palestine", that he burned an Israeli flag and said :

"The journey of jihad and martyrdom began 23 years ago and will continue until the liquidation of the masses of aggression, treachery and even high banners of faith and bring us day after day, year after year from Palestine .. all of Palestine. The Jihad will continue until the liberation of the Palestinian city of Jerusalem to pray a prayer of thanks after the liberation of all Palestine..."

We know too, that the Hamas Charter states:

"For our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave, so much so that it will need all the loyal efforts we can wield, to be followed by further steps and reinforced by successive battalions from the multifarious Arab and Islamic world, until the enemies are defeated and Allah’s victory prevails.

Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad, which is a Jewish tree.

When our enemies usurp some Islamic lands, Jihad becomes a duty binding on all Muslims. In order to face the usurpation of Palestine by the Jews, we have no escape from raising the banner of Jihad. This would require the propagation of Islamic consciousness among the masses on all local, Arab and Islamic levels. We must spread the spirit of Jihad among the [Islamic] Umma, clash with the enemies and join the ranks of the Jihad fighters."

And we’ve read that Major-General Amos Yadlin, on his recent retirement as head of the Israel IDF's Intelligence Branch, warned in his final briefing to Cabinet that Iran is the major threat against Israel, and not only with regard to its nuclear ambition. "Iran is reaching out with octopus-arms to anyone who acts against Israel". Furthermore, "In the next confrontation, there is a chance that war will break out on more than one front, and that Tel Aviv will become a front. There is also a struggle against the very legitimacy of Israel's existence, and to face it we need intelligence and to mobilize the nation. Israel's deterrent power is very strong, but the quiet should not deceive us – to the contrary. Our enemies are getting stronger and arming themselves."

In the view of many a hawk (or should I say "clear-headed realist"?) who insists that the true solution to the conflict lies in the concept that “Jordan is Palestine”, the creation of a Palestinian State would spell suicide for Israel, squeezed between Hamastan on its western flank and Fatahstan on its eastern one. Within days if not hours, goes this doomsday scenario, Israel would be shelled from both Palestinian components, as well as from Hezbollah to the north.

However, despite Palestinian intransigence and well-grounded Israeli fears (look at this photo of Abbas this October with a stone model of his future state! Notice anything, well, ambitious about it?  Quite so!) , Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay have recognised a Palestinian State with the pre-Six Day War borders, and in retaliation for Israel’s refusal to renew the settlement freeze the European Union is threatening to do the same by next Spring, with Palestine being given a seat at the UN.

 If the European Union makes good its threat, such a move would mean that Abbas had achieved his aim (Israel pushed back to its 1967 boundaries) without the need to negotiate or make concessions to Israel. Not for nothing are the pre-Six Day War boundaries (the 1949 lines, dubbed by Abba Eban, not exactly the most hawkish of Israeli statesmen, the "Auschwitz borders") widely considered militarily indefensible – just consider the proximity of the West Bank to Tel Aviv and imagine the damage rockets would do – they could hardly be agreed to by an Israel that wishes to survive, and since that is so, the Jewish State would be set on a permanent collision course with Palestine and the rest of the world. (See Robin Shepherd’s analyses http://www.robinshepherdonline.com/first-big-step-to-unilateral-palestinian-%20declaration-of-independence-as-brazil-formally-recognises-palestini...
and
http://www.robinshepherdonline.com/argentina-and-other-latin-american-countries%20-to-follow-brazil-in-recognising-palestinian-state-on-1967-lines/).

Whether through ignorance, stupidity or malevolence, there’s a sizeable component of western public opinion that, forgetting why the Israelis “occupy “ the disputed territories in the first place – the refusal of the Arabs to recognize Israel and determination to eradicate Israel by force – would heartily concur with recognizing a Palestinian State – and damn the Israelis.

Israel got out of Gaza and was rewarded with terrorism. Would any territorial concessions that the Palestinians might accept be land for peace – or land for jihad? Would the Palestinians just be biding their time before an all-out strike or are they genuine partners for perpetual peace?  I wonder ...

In the present circumstances, as the Jewish State seems on the eve of being offered up on the slab (I refuse to call it "the altar") of appeasement by allies who themselves face global jihad, how bittersweet it is to read what a keen Zionist had to say thirty years ago:

'Israel’s present struggle to maintain its hold over Judea and Samaria touches on its fundamental capacity to assure the strategic requirements of national survival. What lies in the balance is Israel’s need to prevent this territory from falling into Arab hands whereby, through political extremism and military hostility, it will serve as a springboard for the final onslaught on the reconstituted state then squeezed into the narrow, exposed coastal strip, with Jerusalem encircled on the eastern border. However, no Israeli government since 1967 managed to convince the world (and most of the Jewish People) that the question of Judea and Samaria actually had little to do with regional negotiations or with Zionist “expansionism” – but with the very survival of the State.

On strategic, political, and ideological grounds Judea and Samaria are as vital to Jewish survival as Zionism was vital to Jewish survival at the close of the 19th century.

Then the massive misery of Jewry, particularly in Eastern Europe, helped galvanize the belief in a return to Eretz-Israel as the solution to the Jewish problem. It was credible to argue then that without the creation of a Jewish entity, home, or state, Jewry – or large parts of it – might be wiped out through sheer pauperism, exhaustion, persecution, and loss of collective will. All might be lost if Zion was not claimed and controlled by the Jewish People committed to the physical welfare and the dignity of the nation.

Today, the value of Judea and Samaria does not immediately rest upon its critical importance as a refuge for Jews in distress. That may certainly become the case when two conditions are realised:

• when diasporas like Iranian, South African, Russian, Moroccan, Argentinian, Quebec, and other Jewries overwhelmingly conclude that secure Jewish life is attainable only in Israel; and

 • when the authorities in Israel realize that considerations of population dispersion, quality, and ecology of life, strategic needs in conventional and nuclear terms, and ideological authenticity all demand that the abnormal Mediterranean statelet yield its primacy to the heartland of the country – historically and geographically – in the mountainous terrain of Judea and Samaria.

However, since neither of these two conditions obtain now the immediate value of Judea and Samaria for world Jewry is based on that area’s elemental importance for the security of Israel. The State of Israel is the domain of the entire Jewish People: Israel’s welfare is its welfare, and Israel’s demise could well be the spiritual, moral – perhaps physical – demise of Jewry everywhere.



View of Tel Aviv from the West Bank

 The analogy is then clear: Jewish sovereignty as the Zionist solution to the nation’s ills then is comparable to the need for Israeli sovereignty now over all Eretz-Israel, including Judea and Samaria. The original Zionist enterprise might well be undone and the state wither if Israel does not succeed in maintaining Judea and Samaria as integral parts of the territorial patrimony – in solid political terms – for the Jewish People.

...Historical analogy and contemporary circumstances both suggest that the impetus for more organized action regarding Judea and Samaria must come from the large Jewish community in the United States. That is the core of Jewish financial, demographic, and political power; and that is the major international arena for global pressure on Israel to relinquish Judea and Samaria to Arab rule. Therefore, for Jewish and non-Jewish reasons, the struggle must be fought in America – first and foremost.

There may not be in this era a Dreyfus Trial to focus Jewry’s attention on the abysmal condition of the marginal Jew – seemingly part of Gentile society yet subject arbitrarily to its sudden wrath. There may also not be a Herzl to raise up Jewish masses and instil into them the hope of national freedom and disgnity. Anti-semitism and the quality of Jewish leadership may both have waned considerably in our days. Jewish collective consciousness, leading to a Zionist formula, is pathetically weak; the external and internal conditions for its development are not propitious. [Remember, he was writing before the rise of Eurabia, and its inherent antisemitism.]

But something must be done and time is short. With the failures of the secular, and in part, religious Jewish establishment, a new radical beginning must be made to create an authentic Zionist framework for Jewish action....

If Gush Emunim has been (unjustifiably) accused of illegal settlement, the new Zionist leadership will fully support legal settlement. If settlement seemed to be the partisan endeavour of basically only religious Israeli society, then future construction in Judea and Samaria will be the enterprise of the national collectivity as a whole. If the Israeli government has sometimes behaved surreptiously, now everything will be open and public in all ways. There is nothing to be ashamed of, and there is nothing to fear.' ("A Herzlian Zionist Model for Judea and Samaria" by Dr Mordechai Nisan, in  Forum on the Jewish People, Zionism and Israel, Spring/Summer 1981, No. 41, pp. 85-90)