Archive for March, 2010
Next Year in West Jerusalem
Mar 31st
By Victor Sharpe
It has thus come to this. Jerusalem may well be on the way to being re-divided. History will not look kindly upon those in this generation who have fallen into the trap of media distortion, Arab untruths, peace at any price and sheer apathy.
The Jewish Talmud and Midrash tell us from where the message of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) is to be broadcast to the world and from where its radiance is to shine forth. The name Zion is synonymous with Jerusalem and every time the Torah is taken from the Ark, during the synagogue service, Jerusalem and Zion are invoked. “For out of Zion shall come forth the Torah, and the word of God from Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2:1 and Micah 4:2).
The word Jerusalem and Zion are mentioned 821 times in the entire Jewish Bible (the Tanach) sometimes also referring to Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel). Jerusalem is mentioned 154 times in the Christian Bible and Zion seven. Jerusalem is not mentioned by name once in the Moslem Koran. Only well after the Arab invasion of Eretz Yisrael in 638 AD did the Arabs begin to refer to the city by name and then only from the tenth century with names of Jewish origin, e.g. Al Kuds, Arabic for the Hebrew Ir Hakodesh (City of Holiness) and Siyyun, Arabic for the Hebrew, Tsiyon, Zion.
The betrayal of Jewish and biblical history, which began at the Madrid Conference, led remorselessly to the Oslo Accords and to the nonsense called the “peace process” whereby Israel gives away land for peace but in return never receives peace. First Jericho, which Joshua bin-Nun liberated when the Jews entered the Promised Land, went to the Arab arch terrorist Yasser Arafat, then Hebron (the first capital of the Jewish King David), and then in rapid succession Nablus, (Biblical Shechem), and relentlessly the hills, mountains, fields and terraces of biblical Judea and Samaria (the West Bank).
All were given away to those who hate the Jews and who endlessly plot the total destruction of the Jewish State. Mahmoud Abbas, the Holocaust denying acolyte of Arafat, is presented to the world as a peace partner for Israel. What monumental sham is this? There are those within the present U.S. Administration who work to uproot perhaps as many as 300,000 Jewish residents from their homes in the outlying communities of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and a further 200,000 living in neighborhoods of north and northwestern Jerusalem. They seem intent upon forcing Israel to give away most of what’s left of the ancestral Jewish heartland to the Palestinian Arabs – in return for nothing.
Those within the Left and within the international corridors of power have learned nothing from Israel’s arbitrary withdrawal from southern Lebanon or from Gaza. As a result of those Israeli peace overtures to the Arabs, Hezbollah inflicted upon Israel the Second Lebanon War and from Gaza a relentless barrage of missiles upon Israeli towns and villages. On and on has continued the insane juggernaut of concession and abandonment of Israel’s biblical and ancestral homeland to the Arabs; urged on at every instance by American Administrations, the European Union, the so-called Quartet and the United Nations until the very gates of Jerusalem may now soon be breached.
Talk of dividing Jerusalem is uttered relentlessly. For the first time in recorded history, large areas of Judaism’s capital city would become the capital of a new, hostile and fraudulent Arab state called Palestine. The Temple Mount, the holiest of all Jewish holy sites, is now all but lost, and the prayers and anguished longing by generations of suffering Jews is being dismissed by those who have no love for the Jewish state. The previous Israeli government allowed the Moslem Waqf to blatantly destroy Jewish and Christian antiquities on the Temple Mount and to build a new giant mosque underneath it. Israeli archaeologists pleaded in vain to stop the Moslem bulldozers and desecration. Now ordinary Israelis have to sift through enormous piles of dirt that Muslim Palestinians dumped unceremoniously in the valley below the Holy City. Israelis and visitors from overseas now painstakingly search to see if they can find what remains of Jewish and Christian antiquities. Who knows what priceless archaeological evidence was destroyed by the Waqf. What humiliation is this?
We must not at our peril fool ourselves that the appetite of the Palestinian Arabs and the entire Moslem world will be satisfied by the abandonment of the Temple Mount and the eastern half of Jerusalem. We may be doomed to be the generation that will see before our very eyes the destruction of the Jewish State itself, for even if Israel shrinks to a small city block in Tel Aviv, its presence will still be a provocation to the Arab and Muslim world.
Is there an answer? Yes, but many will find it unpalatable. Most have been brainwashed into thinking that the giving away of ancestral Jewish land and the showering of billions of dollars of aid to the Palestinian Authority will bring “peace in our time.” It will not. The growing weakness and crumbling resolve of too many Jews in Israel and the Diaspora only serves to whet the appetite of the Arab world. The Arabs have boasted that they will wipe out what they consider the “insufferable Zionist entity” just as they finally destroyed the Crusader Kingdom.
It does not matter that, unlike the Jews who have returned to their ancient homeland, the Crusaders were foreign adventurers on land that they had no historical ties to. For Muslims, no non-Muslim state or nation that is on land once conquered by Muslim armies in the name of Allah will ever be tolerated.
This is the fatal flaw in the entire concept of the “peace process.” For the Muslim Arabs, peace is merely a means to an end – an armistice in place for only as long as the “infidel” is perceived to be strong. Once that perception has vanished, all promises, agreements and undertakings made with the “infidel” are to be ignored and abrogated. This has been the pattern for all the agreements signed between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, and every single undertaking and promise by them has been broken.
Unpalatable as it must be, the only solution for Israel is to make not one additional concession but resolve to face the entire world if need be rather than deny Jewish history, Jewish faith, and the Zionist cause. It is time to give victory a chance, not the endless and self-defeating concessions that have marred so many Israeli governments in the past. It is time – as it always has been – to look for support from the One source of ultimate strength above all: Almighty God.
In biblical times the Jewish people withstood for long periods the attacks of their neighbors, whoever they were. Today Israel faces a new U.S. Administration, which displays a growing hostility and coldness towards Israel. The deplorable manner in which visiting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was treated at the recent meeting in the White House is unprecedented and marks a clear and present danger to Israel’s very survival. Add to that the antipathy of the Moslem world, a hostile and deceitful media, the insidious influence of Arab oil power and, alas, latent anti-Semitism that lingers in international chancelleries, and you have a perfect storm of infernal pressure growing upon the tiny, embattled Jewish state. Satan has much to smile about.
There is still a faint glimmer of hope, but the candle’s flame is growing dimmer by the hour. Israel still has the precious few supporters who expose the cumulative deceits, the distortions, and the outrageous moral equivalence that is made between the Israeli victims of Arab terror and the Arab perpetrators of terror; so lamentably displayed by many of the media mavens who preside over how the news is presented. And the reconstituted State of Israel has the steadfast support of millions of Christians who have found and rediscovered the inextricable roots of their faith within Judaism. They, along with the many Jews who have not yet succumbed to liberal novelties present a resolute defense of an increasingly isolated and vulnerable Israel.
But if the siren calls of a fraudulent, beguiling and deceptive peace cannot be rejected out of hand then I fear a terrible betrayal of undivided Jerusalem, Jewish history and faith will occur. It will not be long before the time immemorial prayer uttered at the conclusion of the Passover meal, which tells the story of the Exodus from Egypt, the Covenant with God and the creation of the Jewish nation, will become a bitter joke. Instead of “Next Year in Jerusalem,” it will be, “Next Year in West Jerusalem.”
Copyright © Victor Sharpe 2010
Victor Sharpe is a featured writer with several websites and writes about Jewish history and the Arab-Israel conflict. He is also the author of Volumes One & Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
Faith Lessons: Calvary
Mar 30th
The Crucifixion, part 1
Luke 23:33, “And when they had come to the place called Calvary, there they crucified Him, and the criminals, one on the right hand and the other on the left.”
“There my burdened soul found liberty—at Calvary,” goes the chorus of a popular hymn. Every Christian immediately recognizes the place name, Calvary, as the location just outside the city gates of ancient Jerusalem where Roman soldiers executed Jesus Christ almost two thousands years ago, yet of the four gospel writers only in Luke 23:33 will one find a specific reference to Calvary in modern English translations. Writing in Greek, the language of all the New Testament books, Luke literally called it “kranion,” using the Greek word from which we get the English word, “cranium.” Actually, the word for Calvary never appears in the original manuscripts of the Bible. However, modern translators of the Bible follow the rich tradition of preferring the Latin term for cranium—“calvaria”—from which one will immediately recognize the familiar term, Calvary, and they routinely insert that place name into the text of Luke 23:33.
Another memorable hymn remembers, “On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and shame.” However, the New Testament never directly describes Calvary as a hill. Although a fair assumption based upon Calvary’s description as a cranium, which obviously has a rounded shape not unlike a hill, the only other possible clue in Luke’s gospel comes in Luke 23:49 where Jesus’ acquaintances and some of the women are said to be able to watch the crucifixion from afar, possibly due to Calvary’s elevation.
Today approximately 250 yards north of the Damascus Gate in eastern Jerusalem sits a bus station enveloped in the unmistakable smell of diesel fuel as Palestinians scurry to buy tickets for their rides home. Generally ignored by the locals, a steep bluff with an unusual shape rises up from the back lot of the station. In 1883 British General Charles Gordon spotted that same bluff from inside the Old City and popularized the site as the biblical location of Calvary, for two large sunken cavities in its sheer face look remarkably like the eye sockets of a cranium or skull. Although championed for a time by the Anglican Church as the location for Jesus’ crucifixion, several problematic questions persisted, leading many to doubt the site’s authenticity.
But Gordon’s Calvary, as it has come to be known, certainly stirs one’s imagination of that day when Roman soldiers chose a slow form of execution for our Lord that maximized human pain and suffering. Each breath upon the cross took enormous effort as Jesus lifted his body by pushing up on his feet and by flexing his elbows thereby forcing the weight of his whole body upon his nailed feet and causing a fiery pain. The open wounds from his earlier scourging rubbed against the rough surface of the cross with every attempt. Over time muscle cramps would make the effort even more difficult until, having exhausted his strength, Jesus died of asphyxia.
However, before his death, according to Luke’s account, Jesus audibly prayed between breaths, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do” (Luke 23:34). What an amazing love that Jesus loved even his enemies to his dying breath! Thankfully I am no longer an enemy of Jesus, for I have placed my faith in him and “now my raptured soul can only sing—of Calvary.”
Further Reading: Luke 23:33-49
Dr. Daniel McCabe is the pastor of Faith Bible Church in Spring, Texas. He is a contributing editor for The Jerusalem Connection Report. He can be reached via email at danielmccabe@juno.com.
Land for Peace or Oblivion?
Mar 21st
by Victor Sharpe
Immediately after the June 1967 Six Day War, a secret memorandum was issued by the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). Their conclusions were that any peace settlement between Israel and the Arab belligerents would only succeed if Israel retained certain territories vital for its continued existence and survival.
The areas the Joint Chiefs declared as the minimum defensible borders for the Jewish state included the Golan Heights, the western half of Samaria (the northwestern part of the West Bank), all of Judea (the southern part of the West Bank), the Gaza Strip and several portions of the eastern Sinai Peninsula.
This, of course, occurred before the world became obsessed with the creation of an Arab terror state within Israel’s narrow territory between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan.
Since that report in 1967, the Begin government gave away all of the Sinai. The first city that Joshua liberated during the Israelites entry into the Promised Land, Jericho, was given away by Binyamin Netanyahu during his first term as Prime Minister, followed by most of Hebron, King David’s first Jewish capital and one of Judaism’s four holy cities. Both cities are practically lost to the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. Under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his deputy, Ehud Olmert, Israel gave away the entire Gaza Strip in 2005, with catastrophic consequences for the Jewish state. These breathtaking concessions to the Arabs have all been made under the hope that it will bring peace with the Arab enemies. But it has not. “Peace, peace, but there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14.)
Ehud Barak, Israel’s present Defense Minister, had years earlier withdrawn from the southern Lebanon security strip, thus allowing the Islamist Hezbollah to fill the vacuum with dire consequences for northern Israel. A conflict broke out – the Second Lebanon War – disastrously mismanaged by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. It was launched too late and ended too soon.
After Israel endured over 12,000 incoming missiles from Hamas-occupied Gaza, Operation Cast Lead was finally launched by Israel. It ended too soon, and the Islamist Hamas continues to pursue its ambition of finally destroying Israel. Just this last week after the visit by Vice President Biden, who attacked Israel for planning to build apartments in a north Jerusalem suburb followed by a vituperative call from Secretary of State Clinton making yet more demands upon Israel, the Palestinian Authority gave the green light to launch riots by Arab mobs in Jerusalem, Hebron and throughout Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank). Suspicions that President Obama used an application for zoning approval for future housing in Jerusalem as the excuse to ratchet up unbearable pressure upon the Jewish state are more than persuasive. It may be that if the rioting continues, it will be henceforward known as the Obama intifada.
Israel is now under the greatest pressure in years from an American administration to give away the ancestral Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria. President Barack Obama is perceived by many to be a clear and present danger to the very survival of the reconstituted Jewish state. His deafening silence, along with that of his lieutenants, Biden, Clinton, Mitchell and his army of anti-Israel advisors, at the disgusting ceremony held in Ramallah by the Palestinian Authority honoring a female terrorist and her grisly accomplices who murdered 38 Israeli civilians in 1978, speaks volumes about the towering anti-Israel bias of this president: Barack Hussein Obama.
In the aftermath of the Six Day War, the US Joint Chiefs were not interested in Jewish patrimony or Biblical history. They were solely concerned with the strategic necessities for Israel’s survival in a very bad neighborhood. That is why they set out what the bare minimum retention of territory for Israel should be.
Col. Irving Kett (USA, ret.) also prepared an Army War College study on Israel’s security needs in 1974. His study was called, “A Proposed Solution to the Arab-Israel Conflict”. In it, he strongly suggested that, from a military point of view, Israel’s borders should be constituted to make it a compact state with natural boundaries on all sides – the Jordan River to the east, Golan Heights to the northeast, the Litani River in the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the west and the historic boundary with the Sinai Peninsula to the south. As a direct result and consequence of Arab aggression, most of those borders had been attained by Israel at one time or another.
Colonel Kett pointed out what the IDF has always known, but what too many Israeli politicians preferred to ignore; namely, that there is vital strategic value in the mountain range which forms the spine running through Judea and Samaria. The highlands run some 54 miles from Jenin in the north to Hebron in the south and dominate Israel’s coastline. The spine is 12 miles wide and Israel simply cannot afford to vacate it.
It was assumed for years by both the Israeli military and politicians that if a Palestinian Arab state came into existence it would have to permit an Israeli defense line on the Jordan River (the Allon Plan), and that such a state would have to be demilitarized.
The answer, of course, would be to have made permanent the suggested boundaries proposed in both Kett’s memorandum and the earlier JCS report of some 40 years ago. Events have moved on since then. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank would never agree to this and Hamas in Gaza would scornfully dismiss it out of hand. The Arabs have become even more vicious in their anti-Jewish rhetoric and behavior, and a jihadist Iran has all but encircled the Jewish state through its Islamist proxies in Gaza and Lebanon.
The Arab-Israel conflict is not, and never has been, merely a war over territory. It is, and always has been, a religious war. Islam will never accept a non-Muslim state, whatever size or shape it may be, within lands previously conquered by Muslims in the name of Allah. Even if Israel shrank to just one down town square in Tel Aviv it would still be a provocation to the Arab and Muslim world. “Land for Peace” and a “Two State Solution” are euphemisms that are no different to the dread slogan, which greeted the hapless Jews arriving at the Auschwitz death camp: “Arbeit macht frei – Work makes Free.”
The “Two-State Solution”, so beloved of President Obama, requires Judea and Samaria to be given away to the Palestinian Arabs. Obama has upped the ante. Now he wants those Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem built on land liberated from the Jordanian occupiers to also be given to the Palestinian Arabs. We are now talking about a potential plan to expel some 700,000 Jews from their biblical and ancestral heartland of Judea and Samaria along with many suburbs of the Jewish capital city: Jerusalem.
But the Arabs have no intention of making peace whatever territorial concessions Israel makes. That should be enough for an Israeli government and Prime Minister with intestinal fortitude to defy the world’s pressure for the Jewish state to slowly and surely disappear. After all, Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin and Yitzchak Shamir all said “no” to American presidents in the past and prevailed.
Interestingly, Colonel Kett had also suggested that the Palestinian Arabs be resettled in a state in the Sinai. The other famous suggestion is that Jordan is Palestine, which is based upon the historical fact of the first “Two-State Solution” enacted in infamy by Great Britain some 87 years ago.
Even President George W. Bush, when visiting Israel as Governor of Texas, was moved to utter, “The whole of Israel is only about six times the size of the King Ranch near Corpus Christie.” Yet even he, after becoming president, called for a “Two-State Solution” west of the Jordan River.
Pushing Israel back to the “Auschwitz borders”, as Abba Eban called them, where the Jewish state is only nine miles wide at its most populous region, is what the “Two-State Solution” is all about. That other dread euphemism “The Final Solution” then comes to mind.
Hopefully Binyamin Netanyahu will stress the territorial insanity of that fact during his visit to Washington, DC. Perhaps he will have the opportunity to do so with President Obama; provided the president does not give the Israeli head of state the cold shoulder.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state. Copyright ©Victor Sharpe 2010.
If Obama abandons Israel, what then?
Mar 19th
By Victor Sharpe
August 15, 2005, began as a day of infamy. It ushered in a great tribulation for the Jewish state, but one forced upon it by its very own Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon.
It began one day after the annual commemoration of the saddest day in the Jewish calendar, Tisha B’ Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av when, according to tradition, both Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed; the first one by the Babylonians in 586 BC and the second by the Romans in 70 AD.
On that August day, the Jews of Gaza began to be driven from their homes by Israeli soldiers and police acting on the orders of their Prime Minister. The tragedy ended one week later, known now by its euphemism — disengagement. Its self-imposed execution ushered in a needless catastrophe for Israel and eventually led to the occupation of Gaza by Hamas through an election engineered by Condoleezza Rice.
Hamas thus came to power using a democratic tool and subsequently destroyed its rival, Fatah, in a bloody massacre; the same Hamas, which proclaims its Constitution is the Koran and implacably calls for the destruction of Israel.
Israel woke up to relentless daily barrages of sometimes scores of missiles deliberately aimed at its civilian populations in villages and towns. The little town of Sderot, in particular, became Israel’s Stalingrad. Finally, after years of astonishing forbearance and thousands of incoming rockets from Gaza, Israel struck back against a cruel Islamic enemy, which gloried in using its own civilians as human shields. In the years during this Palestinian Arab aggression there were hardly any street protests anywhere.
The 2009 Gaza War, however, allowed pent up hatred of the Jewish state to be used as an excuse for vicious anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstrations exploding throughout Europe and the world. The snake pit for much of this venom originates now on College campuses.
After enduring hundreds of years of Christian and Moslem discrimination in exile, Jews felt that with the re-birth of their ancestral homeland, Jewish communities would no longer face the horrors of being dragged from their homes.
Ariel Sharon dealt a blow of seismic proportions to that belief. His rationale was that by disengaging from the Palestinians in Gaza it would grant Israel peace from Arab terror and end the genocidal ambitions of Palestinian Arabs. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, Sharon and his deputy, Ehud Olmert, created a roadmap leading to yet more worldwide pressure.
U.S. Ambassador George Mitchell is planning to remain in Jerusalem to do one thing only. By entrapping Netanyahu and Israeli leaders, in order to coerce Israel into giving away its ancestral and biblical lands in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), he works to create for the first time in history an independent Arab state called Palestine.
Jews will not be permitted to remain in their Judean and Samarian (West Bank) homes and will be expelled. Arabs may live in Israel but Jews are forbidden to live in Palestinian Arab territories. They are to be victims of ethnic cleansing. Apartheid! Arab style.
Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with her so-called dream team, is preparing to do the same as Ambassador Mitchell. Meanwhile, President Obama is reaching out to the terrorist enabling states of Syria and the Islamic Republic of Iran. He is promising nearly one billion dollars to the Palestinian Authority – three hundred million for Gaza – U.S. taxpayer money that will inevitably all end up in the coffers of Hamas.
And at the Sharm el Sheikh donor conference, 70 countries will reportedly pledge 2.8 billion dollars to Gaza reconstruction even as Hamas missiles continue their renewed daily barrage on Sderot using fresh Iranian missiles supplied through Egypt.
Palestinian Arabs will never accept the existence of a Jewish state on any of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Nor are they willing to abandon their belief, indoctrinated for decades, that all of Israel is “occupied territory.” Simply put, if Israel shrinks to one downtown square in Tel Aviv the Palestinian Arabs will still not be satisfied.
Imagine the unthinkable, that Israel ceases to exist; a desire that galvanizes Jew bashers everywhere into orgasmic delight. Or imagine that Israeli leaders continue to engage in further disengagements under the rubric of land for peace; a recipe for slow but certain Israeli extinction.
So what would a world without Israel be like?
For starters, the only true functioning democracy in the region will have vanished. Since there will still be autocratic Arab dictators, kings, emirs and sheikhs, corruption, over-population, and socio-economic dislocation, the unelected Arab despots will have to find a new scapegoat towards whom to deflect their population’s endemic anger and despair.
Palestine, the fraudulent state that Israel haters finally foisted upon the world, will remain as underdeveloped as most other Arab states despite enormous donor sums forever falling like manna into a black hole. Saddled with the highest birthrate in the world, most Palestinian Arabs will remain unemployed because of the inability of their terrorist government to create viable institutions and infrastructures and because there will no longer be an Israel for the Palestinian Arabs to work in.
Both Jordan and Egypt will be terrified of the fatal exposure on their borders of this new Iranian and Al Qaida backed Palestinian base for worldwide terror. Not a prospect the U.S. should be happy about either.
Syria will still menace and subvert the once predominately Christian state of Lebanon and still make territorial demands upon Jordan and Palestine, which it always considered historically part of southern Syria.
Those Arab states without oil will still envy those Arab states awash with the commodity, and water, always in short supply in the Middle East, will become the most precious liquid to wage war over.
The intra-Islamic animosity between the Sunnis and the Shia will not abate but become ever more violent in civil wars, especially after the U.S. finally withdraws all its forces from Iraq, now slated by Obama for 2011. No doubt Al Qaeda and Iran will have taken note and are plotting accordingly.
Egypt will still be discriminating against its Christian Coptic minority despite endless denials. Christians will continue to endure persecution in an increasingly Arab and Moslem dominated world from Africa to Indonesia.
Hindus will still be victims of Moslem terror and the Kashmir issue will remain a flashpoint between Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan — both nuclear powers. Buddhists in Thailand will still be battling Moslem insurgents in the south of that country as will the Christians in the south of the Philippines.
Cairo, the capital of the largest and most powerful Arab state, will continue vying with Damascus and Riyadh for leadership of the Arab world’s own version of the 19th century’s Great Game. And all the while the menace of non-Arab Iran will loom over them all.
The ever suffering Kurds, who truly deserve an independent state of their own, will still be pressing Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran for such a state and those countries will still be violently denying them their national aspirations.
Iran’s mullahs will still be hell-bent on developing even more Islamic nuclear bombs. Such weapons atop ever more powerful ICBMs and perhaps now located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean will inevitably threaten the West — and Israel will not be there to be blamed.
Al-Qaeda, even without Osama bin Laden, will still receive enormous funds from Islamic and Arab states and continue its campaign against the “infidels.” Even without the excuse of U.S. troops any longer in Iraq, the Islamists will target Europe and America with suicide killers, just as they perpetrated their grisly work among hapless Israeli civilians.
All this will be the reality in a world that can no longer have Israel to blame for its ills.
The world hated the stateless Jews and now it hates the State of the Jews. But Israel may yet survive and find leaders who present a strong, resolute defiance to the world’s siren calls for it to commit national suicide, all for the sake of an illusory peace.
From Madrid to Oslo to Camp David great demands were made upon Israel to take risks for peace, the majority of which Israel met. Far lesser demands were made upon the Palestinian Arabs, which they have hardly ever met.
President Obama, nevertheless, plans on perpetuating the discredited two-state solution and will press Israel to give away its biblical heartland to create the 23rd Arab state. That is the goal of Hillary Clinton and her so-called dream team. But dreams often become nightmares.
President Reagan at first believed the received wisdom that all problems in the Middle East stemmed from the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It was Israel’s Menachem Begin who disabused him of that fallacy and educated him on biblical and post biblical Jewish history in its ancestral homeland.
Prime Minister Begin and President Reagan, though from very different backgrounds, were both conservatives. Binyamin Netanyahu is a fiscal conservative while President Obama is anything but, and the President’s foreign policy as it relates to the Israel-Arab conflict is jarringly in opposition to that of Netanyahu and Israel’s conservative parties.
Netanyahu may yet educate the new American President to the ties that bind Israel to its land and to the immense dangers to all from Iran. Perhaps he will be the man to save both Israel and the United States from irreparable harm.
If not, all the democracies of the world will stumble before Iran’s ascendant theocracy and Israel will not be there for them to blame.
Victor Sharpe writes on Jewish history and the Arab-Israel conflict. He is the author of volumes One and Two of: Politicide – The attempted murder of the Jewish state. Both books are available at Amazon.com
Educating Biden?
Mar 18th
By Victor Sharpe, Family Security Matters
Vice President Joseph Biden was apoplectic in Jerusalem. Was it because of another Palestinian suicide atrocity against Israeli civilians, or that Mahmoud Abbas, the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, had yet again announced that he would never accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state?
No, it was because those wicked Israelis announced preliminary tenders for planning and zoning permission to the Jerusalem Municipality for the construction of apartments in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo (Solomon’s Heights).
Building houses for young Jewish couples and families? Terrible! Shocking! How can such aggression be allowed to continue? Biden’s angst exposed the Kafkaesque and groveling acceptance by the Obama administration of Arab and Muslim demands that Jews not be permitted to live in the eastern suburbs of Jerusalem or, for that matter, anywhere in land once conquered by Muslim armies in the name of Allah – and for the Palestinian Arabs that ultimately includes every square inch of Israel.
No matter that Jewish patrimony precedes Islam itself and Muslim occupation by millennia. The Arabs, who call themselves Palestinians, demand that the world, and the United States in particular, ignore history. For them, as always, myths matter more than facts.
Obama’s Vice President, Joseph Biden, came to sweet talk Israeli leaders into thinking that President Obama would not countenance Iranian nuclear threats against the Jewish state. But the Biden visit to Israel, far from meeting its avowed goal of smoothing over the differences between the Obama administration and the Jewish state, left Jerusalem and Israelis more distrustful than ever of Obama’s intentions.
Of course, the same Obama administration has done little or nothing to stop the relentless drive by the mad mullahs of Iran to build nuclear bombs or the missiles to deliver them. Nor, in all reality, does this administration ever intend to use truly effective means to stop Ahmadinejad in his quest to unleash nuclear hell upon everyone in order to usher in the perceived Islamic messiah, the twelfth imam.
So now Israel, for daring to add one brick upon another, is excoriated in the national, international and state run medias as endangering the so-called “peace process.”
There was no mention by Biden of the ceaseless Arab aggression against the very existence of Israel or of the terror and destruction Israel has been forced to endure from the Palestinian Arabs. Instead, Biden tells Abbas, while embracing this unrepentant Holocaust denier, that these same Palestinian Arabs, despite all their violence “deserve a state.” Nor did he mention that it would be carved out of tiny Israel and created in the very biblical and ancestral Jewish heartland: Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). No mention either that Jews would be forbidden to reside in the new Arab state. Apartheid-Arab style.
Of course, Biden, clueless as ever, expressed displeasure at the decision by Israel to build houses in the East Jerusalem suburb, while failing to disclose that the land, as with other suburbs in “disputed” parts of East Jerusalem, was originally home to many Jews who were driven out in 1948 by the British-officered Jordanian Arab Legion.
This territory was finally liberated by Israel from its Jordanian Arab occupiers during the defensive June, 1967 Six Day War Israel was forced to fight, 19 years after the Jordanians had illegally annexed it.
In those 19 years from 1948, during which the Jordanians occupied the region, they never remotely considered it as anything but Jordanian. Certainly they never thought it belonged to another Arab people who later called themselves Palestinians. As it was, Jordan’s illegal occupation of East Jerusalem, as well as of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), was recognized by only two countries: Britain and Pakistan.
But nevertheless, the Obama White House and the relentlessly anti-Israel State Department decided that they will echo the demands of the Palestinian Authority and call for Israel to stop building homes – not only in Judea and Samaria, but even within the very suburbs of Israel’s capital city, Jerusalem.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu reluctantly agreed to the Obama enforced freeze on home building for a 10 month period throughout biblical Jewish Judea and Samaria – but not in Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, Arab settlement building has continued unchecked and at a feverish pace without a murmur from President Obama. Double standards? To quote Sarah Palin: You betcha! It matters not to Obama or Biden that Jerusalem – east, west, north and south – has been described as the eternal city of the eternal people.
Rabbi J.H. Hertz, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, who spoke in 1918 at the thanksgiving service for the British liberation of Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks, referred to the nearly 4,000 years of history that bound the Jews to every part of their spiritual and physical capital city and of their fate in defending it against its many would-be conquerors. He said:
- “Like the Jew, this Holy City of Israel is deathless; fire and sword and all the engines of destruction have been hurled against it in vain. The Babylonians burnt it and deported its population; the Romans slew a million of its inhabitants, razed it to the ground, passed the ploughshare over it and strewed its furors with salt; Hadrian banished its very name from the lips of men, changed it to Aelia Capitolina and forbade any Jew from entering it on pain of death. Persians and Arabs, Barbarians and Crusaders and Turks took it and re-took it, ravaged it and burnt it; and yet, marvelous to relate, it ever rises from its ashes to renewed life and glory.”
Rabbi Hertz was talking on the very day on which, 2,080 years earlier, Judah Maccabee, the legendary Jewish hero, led his warriors against the Greek-Syrians to liberate the Holy City from its heathen occupiers, whereupon he entered the Temple and re-dedicated it to the glory of the One and Only God. Rabbi Hertz ended his speech by proclaiming the prophetic teaching of the Maccabean Festival, which we know as Hanukkah, in Zechariah, 4:6: “Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.”
Now the Palestinian Arab mufti in Jerusalem denies that there ever were Jewish Temples in the Holy City or that Judah, Israel and Judea ever existed or that Jews even lived throughout the Land for millennia. In doing so, he also denies Christianity’s early history and theology. But, sadly, such fantasies are all too common for most members of the “religion of peace.” Even Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, who is rapidly Islamizing once secular Turkey, has denied that the Tomb of the Jewish Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, in Hebron and the Tomb of Rachel in Bethlehem, are Jewish. Erdogan parrots the Islamic myths by calling them Muslim.
Now there is a government and a Prime Minister in Israel under assault by President Obama, who demands that Israel abandon parts of eternal Jerusalem and give it away to those who hate the Jewish people and who have set their face against accepting any Jewish independence or sovereignty in the Land of Israel.
It is instructive to dwell on what has been said by both Jews and non-Jews in the past about Jerusalem, for Jerusalem and Zion are interchangeable. Perhaps, Vice President Biden will come to understand that one can go back for such affirmation through the mists of time to the towering words in Isaiah 2:1 and Micah 4:2: “For out of Zion shall come forth the Torah and the word of God from Jerusalem.”
These are just two of the 821 times that Jerusalem and Zion appear in the Jewish Bible: Jerusalem 667 times, and Zion 154 times. The words also appear in the Christian bible, though fewer times. They do not appear at all in Islam’s Koran.
According to the much-loved correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, the late Moshe Kohn: “Jewish sources speak of the seventy names by which Jerusalem is referred to in the classical Jewish sources. These include Ariel/lion of God (Isaiah 29:1); Kirya Neemana/Faithful City (Isaiah 1:25); Ir Ha’emet/City of Truth (Zechariah 8:3); Klilat Yofi/Paragon of Beauty (Lamentations 2:15); Yefay Nof/ Beautiful Panorama (Psalms 48:3); and the ancient commentary of Rabbi Akiva in Sanhedrin 58a on 1 Chronicles 29:11 Hanetza/Eternity.”
But what of now? The modern State of Israel endures a world willing, even anxious, to divide Jerusalem again – even as it still celebrates the reunification of Berlin – and force it to give away ancestral and biblical Jewish lands to an enemy led by a Holocaust-denier, Mahmoud Abbas, whose own Fatah organization, alongside Hamas, continues to gleefully take credit for murdering Jews.
Israeli leaders may yet, foolishly and tragically, permit Jerusalem to again be divided with barbed wire and pill boxes marking a new and hateful border, just as it was before 1967 when Jordanian Arab snipers made life a living hell for the Jewish residents, with ancient synagogues destroyed and Jewish gravestones on the Mount of Olives desecrated and used as latrines for the Arab Legion.
If Barack Hussein Obama has his way, and his Vice President continues to do his bidding, the ancestral Jewish homeland in Judea and Samaria will also be lost – not by the ravages of an enemy host, but, to its eternal shame, by an Israeli government acquiescing in its own national suicide; its borders reduced to a mere nine miles wide at its most populous region from the Mediterranean Sea to the foothills of the Judean mountain range – a border, which the late Israeli statesman, Abba Eban, once described as the “Auschwitz borders.”
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state. This article originally appeared in Family Security Matters (www.FamilySecurityMatters.org).
An open letter to the world from Jerusalem
Mar 18th
By Victor Sharpe
The despicable insults heaped upon the State of Israel by members of President Obama’s Administration, namely his Vice President James Biden, his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and by David Axelrod, all presumably orchestrated by the president himself, have emboldened the real enemies of peace in the Middle East: Iran and its proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It has also encouraged the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, to add more and more preconditions to the so-called peace process talks with Israel; this itself a flagrant breach of the Oslo “peace” accords. Already Hamas has again begun firing multiple missile barrages into Israel, killing a civilian working in a kibbutz greenhouse. It is only a matter of time before Hezbollah decides to get into the act. After all, it now has nearly 100,000 thousand Iranian supplied deadly rockets aimed at northern and central Israel.
It was not long, therefore, before the PA’s Prime Minister, Fayyad, called out his Arab street thugs to riot in east Jerusalem. Clinton and Biden thus gave a green light for the Arabs to commit acts that are the very opposite of peace. Then there was the appalling double standard employed by Messrs. Clinton and Biden for even during the Vice President’s visit the Palestinian Authority began the process of renaming a city square in Ramallah in honor of a vicious, blood stained female PLO terrorist who, with her accomplices, committed one of the worst massacres of Israeli civilians.
Thirty two years ago, in 1978, Dalal Moghrabi and her PLO gang landed on the Israeli shore just south of kibbutz Maagen Michael. They had come from Lebanon armed with automatic rifles and grenades. They immediately murdered the highly acclaimed American photographer, Gail Rubin, who was filming nature scenes and wildlife, before ambushing a bus on the Haifa-Tel Aviv highway.
The PLO terrorists then began shooting at the thirty seven passengers on the hi-jacked bus while also firing at passing traffic from the bus as it headed south. Finally the bus was stopped by the Israeli police just north of Tel Aviv but the Arabs set fire to the bus, burning 37 men, women and children alive. The terrorists were filmed tossing babies into the fire. This was one of the worst Palestinian Arab atrocities committed against Israeli civilians.
Even as Biden was chastising Israel for its housing ministry going through the formalities of seeking zonal authority for eventual construction of apartments in a north-west Jerusalem suburb, the Palestinian Authority, so beloved of Vice President Biden, et al, was naming the square in Ramallah in Dalal Moghrabi’s honor. To date, there has been deafening silence form Biden and Clinton. Not one word of disapproval has been uttered by this administration or the State Department at the PA’s honoring of a woman terrorist who perpetrated such an appalling atrocity. I leave you to your individual thoughts about the future of the “peace process” with such Arab savages.
So an American Administration, which reaches out to the nastiest and most evil regimes in the world, which ignores the honoring of a vile terrorist by the Palestinian Authority (the so-called moderate Palestinians), which has allowed the Iranian monster, Ahmadinejad, to continue for over a year under Obama’s watch to rush ahead in building nuclear bombs and the missiles to carry them, screams at its most loyal ally, Israel, because it wants to provide homes for its people in its ancient and united capital: Jerusalem.
Perhaps the most passionate words about the inextricable, historical and spiritual attachment of the Jewish people to their 3,500 year old capital city were expressed by a man whose name was Stanley Goldfoot. He changed it to the Hebrew name, Eliezer ben Yisrael. He was a member of the Jewish underground that fought for independence from the British occupiers of Mandatory Palestine. His letter may appear intemperate and undiplomatic to some. But remember, his soul had been seared with the knowledge that Britain, who had been given the Palestine Mandate with the requirement that it establish a Jewish National Home, had torn away four fifths of the land in 1921/22 and given it to the Hashemite Bedouin tribe. Immediately, Jews were barred from living in the enormous territory.
All that remained for a Jewish homeland was the tiny sliver of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan – a mere fifty miles at its widest and now under immense pressure to be further divided again so that Israel is reduced to nine miles wide at its most populous region. In 1939, bowing to Arab pressure and fearing the loss of oil, Britain had imposed the notorious White Paper severely limiting Jewish immigration at the very outbreak of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Thus millions of Jews perished who were prevented from escaping to the geographical territory known as Palestine.
In 1969, two years after Israel was forced to fight the June 1967, Six Day War against Egypt, Syria, Jordan and several other Arab states, he wrote this impassioned open letter to the world. He had seen at first hand the liberation of the eastern half of Jerusalem, which had endured for nineteen long years the terrible occupation by the Jordanian Arab Legion.
The city had been divided by barbed wire, pill boxes and walls. Jordanian snipers had made life a living hell for the Jewish residents and the Arab Legion had systematically destroyed some 57 synagogues and had uprooted and desecrated the ancient Jewish grave stones on the Mount of Olives, using them as latrines for the Arab Legion.
One synagogue in particular, the Hurva synagogue, which was originally built 300 years ago, was one of the Jewish holy places the Jordanian Arabs destroyed. It is significant to know that just this last month of March, 2010, it was rededicated after being lovingly rebuilt. It stands again, magnificent in the Jewish Quarter as a reminder of the eternal links of the Jewish people to their eternal city. But, all a spokesman of the so-called partner in peace – the Palestinian Authority – could utter was that the synagogue was a provocation to the Arab and Muslim world. So let the late Stanley Goldfoot’s Letter to the World from Jerusalem be a fitting reply to the Bidens, the Clintons and the Obamas of this world:
- I am not a creature from another planet, as you seem to believe. I am a Jerusalemite – like yourselves, a man of flesh and blood. A citizen of my city, an integral part of my people.
I have a few things to get off my chest. Because I am not a diplomat, I do not have to mince words. I do not have to please you or even persuade you. I owe you nothing. You did not build this city, you did not live in it, you did not defend it when they came to destroy it.
And we will be damned if we will let you take it away. There was a Jerusalem before there was a New York. When Berlin, Moscow, London, and Paris were miasmal forest and swamp, there was a thriving Jewish community here. It gave something to the world which you nations have rejected ever since you established yourselves – a humane moral code.
Here the prophets walked, their words flashing like forked lightning. Here a people who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, fought off waves of heathen would-be conquerors, bled and died on the battlements, hurled themselves into the flames of their burning Temple rather than surrender, and when finally overwhelmed by sheer numbers and led away into captivity, swore that before they forgot Jerusalem, they would see their tongues cleave to their palates, their right arms wither.
For two pain-filled millennia, while we were your unwelcome guests, we prayed daily to return to this city. Three times a day we petitioned the Almighty: “Gather us from the four corners of the world, bring us upright to our land, return in mercy to Jerusalem, Thy city, and swell in it as Thou promised.” On every Yom Kippur and Passover, we fervently voiced the hope that next year would find us in Jerusalem.
Your inquisitions, pogroms, expulsions, the ghettos into which you jammed us, your forced baptisms, your quota systems, your genteel anti-Semitism, and the final unspeakable horror, the holocaust (and worse, your terrifying disinterest in it) – all these have not broken us. They may have sapped what little moral strength you still possessed, but they forged us into steel. Do you think that you can break us now after all we have been through? Do you really believe that after Dachau and Auschwitz we are frightened by your threats of blockades and sanctions?
We have been to Hell and back- a Hell of your making. What more could you possibly have in your arsenal that could scare us?
I have watched this city bombarded twice by nations calling themselves civilized. In 1948, while you looked on apathetically, I saw women and children blown to smithereens after we agreed to your request to internationalize the city. It was a deadly combination that did the job – British officers, Arab gunners, and American-made cannon. And then the savage sacking of the Old City – the willful slaughter, the wanton destruction of every synagogue and religious school, the desecration of Jewish cemeteries, the use by a ghoulish government of tombstones for building materials, for poultry runs, army camps, even latrines.
And you never said a word. You never breathed the slightest protest when the Jordanians shut off the holiest of our places, the Western Wall, in violation of the pledges they had made after the war – a war they waged, incidentally, against the decision of the UN. Not a murmur came from you whenever the legionnaires in their spiked helmets casually opened fire upon our citizens from behind the walls. Your hearts bled when Berlin came under siege. You rushed your airlift “to save the gallant Berliners”. But you did not send one ounce of food when Jews starved in besieged Jerusalem. You thundered against the wall which the East Germans ran through the middle of the German capital – but not one peep out of you about that other wall, the one that tore through the heart of Jerusalem.
And when that same thing happened 20 years later, and the Arabs unleashed a savage, unprovoked bombardment of the Holy City again, did any of you do anything? The only time you came to life was when the city was at last reunited. Then you wrung your hands and spoke loftily of “justice” and need for the “Christian” quality of turning the other cheek. The truth – and you know it deep inside your gut – you would prefer the city to be destroyed rather than have it governed by Jews. No matter how diplomatically you phrase it, the age old prejudices seep out of every word. If our return to the city has tied your theology in knots, perhaps you had better reexamine your catechisms. After what we have been through, we are not passively going to accommodate ourselves to the twisted idea that we are to suffer eternal homelessness until we accept your savior. For the first time since the year 70, there is now complete religious freedom for all in Jerusalem. For the first time since the Romans put a torch to the Temple, everyone has equal rights (You prefer to have some more equal than others.) We loathe the sword – but it was you who forced us to take it up. We crave peace, but we are not going back to the peace of 1948 as you would like us to. We are home. It has a lovely sound for a nation you have willed to wander over the face of the globe. We are not leaving. We are redeeming the pledge made by our forefathers: Jerusalem is being rebuilt. “Next year” and the year after, and after, and after, until the end of time – “in Jerusalem.”
Stanley Goldfoot was the founding Editor of The Times of Israel. He wrote this open letter from Jerusalem in August, 1969.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state. An extract from Stanley Goldfoot’s open letter appears in Volume Two of Politicide: The book, along with Volume One, may be purchased on line from Amazon.com Permission to reproduce the letter was given by Mr. Goldfoot’s cousin, Ms. Nadene Goldfoot.
Apartheid is Alive and Well in Araby
Mar 3rd
By Victor Sharpe, American Thinker
We stand in the midst of a new round of Israel-bashing called by the organizers of “Israel Apartheid Week.” Those doing the bashing are busy turning logic on its head. For them, up is down, day is night, and right is wrong. The collected hatemongers of the radical Left allied with the terminally hate-filled Muslim world, their ranks filled with empty-headed and gullible drones, are combining to shriek misplaced support for an Arab people calling themselves Palestinians, who, they allege, are suffering from apartheid. They make this false charge by slandering the Jewish state, equating it with what was once the South African apartheid regime.
According to the upside-down world of the “hate Israel” crowd, Arabs are separated from Jews within Israel just as the black Africans were segregated from the whites within South Africa. This is where facts retreat into the fantasy world one finds within the Thousand and One Arabian Nights.
The real apartheid that exists in the Middle East can be found not in Israel, but within the territories currently occupied by the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority and the Hamas-occupied Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Arabs ban all Jews from living amongst them. Any Jews found are summarily murdered in cold blood. This is sanctioned by Fatah and Hamas, who both delight in describing the Arab terrorist thugs as heroes — even naming streets and town squares in their honor. Any Arabs found to have sold property to Jewish purchasers are summarily executed – often in the public squares and streets of Palestinian Arab settlements.
The geographical territory known as Palestine has, of course, never existed as an independent, sovereign nation in all of human history, and certainly never as an Arab state. The current territory within the Palestinian Authority and the Gaza Strip formed integral parts of the ancestral and biblical Jewish homeland. Indeed, the Palestinian Authority sits upon the very Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria, known now by its Jordanian name, the West Bank.
The vast territory east of the River Jordan, now called the Kingdom of Jordan, includes large tracts of land that also formed part of the biblical Jewish and tribal lands. But now that same vast territory, which extends eastwards to Iraq, north to Syria, and south to Saudi Arabia (dwarfing tiny Israel in size), is also closed by the Jordanian authorities to Jews, who may not live within its borders upon pain of death. In contrast, Arabs, who make up 20% of the overall Israeli population, may live within the reconstituted Jewish state as citizens enjoying equal rights with justice for all.
The Jordanian regime instituted a law in 1954 prohibiting Jews from living in Jordan. They did this by conferring citizenship to all former residents of geographical Palestine — except Jewish ones. Israel’s population contains Jews who are white, black, brown, and yellow. It is not an apartheid state based on racial differences or concepts of racial purity and impurity. Under apartheid South Africa, blacks were not citizens of the country and were not permitted to vote. Yet the loony Left, allied with the hate-filled Islamic world, continues to accuse Israel of a mythical apartheid system while ignoring the Arab and Muslim perpetrators of the actual apartheid that so clearly exists in the Kingdom of Jordan, in the Palestinian Authority, and within the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
The tsunami of anti-Jewish bigotry and malice sweeping the universities in America and Europe is desolating. The boycotts of Israel generated from within academia are built upon a fraudulent ethos of Arab distortions and outright lies, yet thy are willingly accepted by gullible students and faculty alike. It seems that the intellectuals who utter their elitist drivel within the corridors of academe are all too often seduced by novelties. But what it sadly, and so often, reveals is an undeniable truth that intellectualism does not automatically confer intelligence or intelligent behavior.
It would be refreshing if the same students, professors, and assorted Israel-bashers could learn how the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians have created for themselves what can be described as anti-history. So insanely set are they upon a destructive denial of Jewish patrimony that these same Palestinian Arabs have created for themselves a fraudulent narrative denying even the existence of the Jewish Temples on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount — despite the overwhelming archaeological evidence of Jewish civilization and history in the land spanning millennia. This is why Palestinian Prime Minister Fayad called out the Palestinian rent-a-mob to riot in the streets of Hebron and Jerusalem after Israel declared the ancient Jewish holy sites of the Machpela Cave in Hebron and the tomb of the biblical matriarch, Rachel, as national heritage sites.
In Genesis 23:13, we read about the first Jew, Abraham, purchasing land in Hebron from Ephron the Hittite as a burial plot for his wife, Sarah. His son Isaac and grandson Jacob are also buried there along with their wives — the Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs. But this upsets the Palestinian Arabs because the Jewish tombs are within the territory they demand for a state — for them, these Jewish sites are an inconvenient truth. Another Jewish holy place in what the world likes to call the West Bank is Joseph’s tomb in Nablus, or what was once biblical Jewish Shechem. The good Palestinian Arabs recently desecrated the ancient tomb, filling it with rubbish and excrement, to prevent Jewish prayers and pilgrimage at the site. These are manifestations of apartheid — Arab style.
With breathtaking absurdity, the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians make claims of historical and lineal descent from the extinct Canaanites and Philistines. They have bred several generations of children in kindergartens imbued with such frightening nonsense, attended by a love of barbarism and a culture of death. They have been encouraged in this by the corrupt neighboring Arab leaders, who for some sixty years have stigmatized them as refugees yet at the same time have barred them from living within their own basket-case countries.
From this horrific Palestinian-Arab sectarianism, the culture of death has developed along with an Islamic refusal to ever make a true and lasting peace with the non-Muslim state known as Israel. Indeed, for the Jewish population and for the subsequent State of Israel, there has been relentless Arab terror since the 1920s.
Consider the massacre of Jewish civilians by their Arab neighbors in Judaism’s second-holiest city, Hebron — the city that not only houses the Jewish burial place of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but which King David first made his capital. That Arab atrocity took place in 1929 during the British Mandate occupation. For all those anti-Israel bigots who scream against Israeli occupation, they should know that the so-called West Bank and the Gaza Strip were not ‘occupied’ at that time. Indeed, the Jewish state was not reborn until nineteen years later, in 1948 — yet Arabs were murdering and terrorizing Jews all those years before. They should ask themselves why, after the Israel-Arab war of 1948, when the Egyptians occupied the Gaza Strip and the Jordanians occupied the so-called West Bank, neither Egypt nor Jordan felt the need to create a new Arab state to be called Palestine. Neither did the Arab residents demand it. Only after Israel defeated Arab aggression in 1967 and liberated the territories did the Arab world begin to demand the creation of a 23rd Arab state. They should also know that today, some 98% of Arabs calling themselves Palestinians live in both the Arab Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and the rival Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority. There is, in reality, no occupation. So what do they mean when they rant and rave about Israeli occupation, unless it is a call for the very extinction of Israel itself?
There is no such thing as Israeli apartheid against the Arabs. But there most certainly is Arab apartheid imposed upon Jews, who are denied the right to live amongst Arabs even in the ancestral and biblical Jewish heartland, which is occupied and controlled today by the Palestinian Authority and the Islamist Hamas.
It truly is an upside-down world, viewed now through a window so terribly distorted as to bewilder and confuse untold millions. It is much more than an Arab-Israel conflict over territory; it is much deeper than that. It is an Islamic refusal to accept a reconstituted Jewish homeland where once the Muslim foot trod triumphal. The very fact that the Palestinian Arabs, who are overwhelmingly Muslim, will never accept a tiny Jewish state within the enormous Arab landmass that stretches from Mauritania in the west to Iraq in the east is clear and present evidence of Muslim and Arab apartheid. This empirical fact must be understood.
In that context, I am reminded that it was the Indian leader Mahatma Ghandi who said, “While Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Parsees, and Jews, along with several million adherents of an animistic religion, all coexisted in relative harmony, one religion that would not accept compromise stood out from the rest: Islam.”
It would be an enlightening and seminal moment in these first years of the 21st century if the eyes and ears of the Israel-bashers could be opened with the realization that they have targeted the wrong nation, and that apartheid is alive and well within the Arab world.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of several published books including Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
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Firepan in the woodpile
Mar 2nd
by Stan Goodenough
In that day I will make the governors of Judah like a firepan in the woodpile, and like a fiery torch in the sheaves; they shall devour all the surrounding peoples on the right hand and on the left, but Jerusalem shall be inhabited again in her own place—Jerusalem. (Zechariah 12:6)
World leaders are beside themselves.
Israel – it is universally reported – sent an intelligence team to take out one of the Jewish people’s many enemies. The team used fraudulent passports and other people’s identities to carry out the operation.
Hamas’ murderer and senior member Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was found dead in his Dubai hotel room January 20.
According to first reports, he had died after “a long illness.” Hamas itself tied his death to “a medical issue.” Then, when his body arrived in Damascus, Syrian authorities called and told his brother that Mabhouh had been “assassinated by Israel.”
Almost a full month after his passing, Dubai police suddenly announced that they are “99 percent certain” the Mossad – Israel’s version of the CIA (only with a more impressive track record) – had eliminated him.
The Mossad – the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations – does not comment on such allegations.
After a full year of worldwide demonization since Israel launched a self-defensive military operation against Hamas in Gaza, the international community was poised to seize the accusation and run with it.
On February 21, the British newspaper – the Sunday Times – reported as fact that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered the killing.
Outrage is boomeranging round the world. The United Kingdom and France have expressed their hypocritical horror that Israeli spies would use Irish and French passports and false identities to perpetrate such an action. Israeli diplomats are being called onto the carpet to “explain.”
A few comments:
•As Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman stated Monday, the Arab states are always blaming Israel for all sorts of things – including perpetrating deliberate massacres of Arab civilians and stealing Arab lands.
•All nations – including England and France – employ spying techniques that break the laws of the countries they are spying on.
•As far as Israel is concerned, Mahbouh was an enemy combatant and a legitimate target. Hamas is in a state of war against Israel. Mahbouh – according to the terror organization and according to his own brother – was personally responsible for the kidnapping and killing of Israeli soldiers. Untold is the number of Israelis who have lost their lives as a direct result of this man’s actions in the Hamas.
•If Mossad agents did execute Mahbouh, it was not an act of murder but an act of warfare. Dubai, by allowing known terrorists and killers freely in and out of its borders, has no leg to stand on in protesting the movement in and out of its borders of other “undesirables” like intelligence agents.
•And my own personal view: Israel should train and send its agents after every properly identified and accurately accused foe. It should take out killers of its people in Cairo and Damascus, Dubai and Baghdad, Tehran and Beirut, England and France, Canada and the United States – wherever they may be.
•Let no murderer of Jews feel safe anywhere in this world.
In any case, as far as Lebanon and Syria, Iran and Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are concerned; Israel is set to do a lot more damage than merely remove individual foes here and there.
The Islamic-Arab world – specifically those states around Israel – is the woodpile. Judah’s governors – that is the Jewish leadership – are the firepan. The fate of the woodpile is to be devoured.
So says the prophet Zechariah, in the context of the very days in which we are living.
It’s going to happen. And when it does – the world is going to have an apoplectic fit.
My meeting with a PLO negotiator from Jericho
Mar 2nd
By Bill Koenig
I noticed at the Metro train stop by the White House on Tuesday, January 18 a newspaper called The Washington Diplomat that focuses on the very large diplomatic community here in Washington.
It captured my interest because January’s lead article was entitled “PLO Going Nowhere?”
I started reading the article to get the Palestinian perspective. The person being interviewed was Maen Rashid Areikat, the new head representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization to the United States — headquartered in Washington.
I thought to myself: That name sounds familiar. I looked through the article for his biography to see if he was who I thought he was. Sure enough, he was.
On my return flight from Israel to Dallas in the first week of January 2000, I was upgraded to Business Class on my oversold British Airways flight from Tel Aviv to London. The Lord had arranged for me to sit next to Maen Rashid Areikat of the PLO’s Negotiations Affairs Department.
Maen told me he was on the way to London for some backroom negotiations with the Israelis.
We talked for the entire length of the five-hour flight. We discovered that we had both graduated from Arizona State University. Maen also received his MBA at Western International University in Phoenix. He talked about how he loved living in Arizona.
Maen is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met — a really good guy.
I enjoyed discussing areas of mutual interest and, especially, hearing his perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and what it is like for him and his family to live in the Palestinian territories.
He said he was born in Jericho and attended Catholic schools. He spoke with much sincerity about wanting his family to live in peace and security. He showed no hatred or anger towards Israel.
I thought: If this man were leading the Palestinians, there would be an agreement with Israel such as the ones Israel achieved with Jordan’s King Hussein and Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat.
When I read his article, I saw his very sincere and hopeful side. While he seems totally removed from the radical side of the PLO as led by Yasser Arafat, Fatah and Hamas, I also see a person who doesn’t address the fact that Hamas is the greatest threat to his dream of his living in peace and security.
We know Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas redirected millions of dollars of foreign aid to their bank accounts and their cronies. This led to Hamas becoming a force in Palestinian politics, when they met the social needs of the Palestinians while gaining great favor, which led to their capturing 74 of 132 seats in the Palestinian Parliament in the January 2006 election.
As we continue to hear and read of the ongoing tensions between Fatah and Hamas, we realize that Maen’s job is extremely difficult.
I will contact Maen soon. I want to share with him once again the biblical perspective of what is taking place in Israel. He is the kind of guy who will listen. Who knows? He may be the Arab leader who signs the Daniel 9:27 covenant.
The following is the link to Maen’s interview and my final comments:
With widening Israeli-Palestinian gulf,
PLO envoy clings to statehood dream (Larry Luxner, The Washington Diplomat)
Click here for the full article.
Final comments: This is a Palestinian perspective from a man who was 4 years old in 1967 and whose father was a Palestinian activist.
The key point is that Maen sincerely wants his family and the rest of the Palestinians to live in peace. That dream has been stopped due to a corrupt Palestinian government and Palestinian terror groups.
Furthermore, “Palestine” was not all Arab: It was the home of the Jews of Palestine and the Arabs of Palestine.
Yasser Arafat and the terror groups have done great harm to the Palestinian people. Palestinians are living in refugee camps in many Arab countries and being treated as third- and fourth-class citizens. They have been pawns in the peace process. Many Palestinians would prefer to live in Israeli-controlled cities, not those managed by the Palestinians.
Hamas, the political party that is in control of the Palestinian Parliament, will not recognize Israel’s right to existence and is determined to have full control over all Palestinian property, which includes Ramallah.
Israel is not the Palestinians’ problem and never has been the Palestinians’ problem. Rather, it is their corrupt leadership and refusal to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. They can complain and call for actions against Israel, but it will never solve the Palestinians’ own political problems.
Israel’s “Non-Jewish Jews”
Mar 2nd
By Shelley Neese
When new immigrants (olim) arrive to Israel, the first step in the absorption process is attending ulpan—an intensive Hebrew language course for adults. It is an Israeli right of passage. When I moved to Beer Sheva in 2000 on a student visa, I electively enrolled in an ulpan at the local Mercaz Klita (absorption center). In a class of twenty-one students there were eighteen from the former Soviet Union states, two from Venezuela, and myself. Everyone except me had immigrated to Israel as a Jewish citizen.
For a field trip the class visited the old port city of Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv. After an organized tour and Hebrew lesson we broke off on our own to sightsee. I wandered over to the beautiful Franciscan St. Peter’s Church where, much to my surprise, three of my Russian-speaking classmates were already kneeling in prayer and making the sign of the cross. When they noticed my wide eyes, they gave me an amused shrug as if to say “this is no secret.” These classmates were my gateway into the complex world of Israel’s Russian-speaking Christians. But they were by no means my last.
The Influx
Israel has seen several waves of Russian immigration as Jews, under the Soviet Union, were cut off from Jewish learning and were regularly subjected to state-sponsored anti-Semitism. Zionists were accused of treason and denied the right to relocate to Israel. In 1970, a window opened as the Soviet Union briefly bowed to international pressure, lifting their tight quotas on exit visas. Jews clamored to get out, thousands moving to Israel, before the window closed again. The floodgates opened completely, however, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. From 1989 to 1993, 800,000 immigrants came to Israel—the largest aliya movement since the creation of the modern Jewish state. (Aliya, literally meaning “going up,” is the Hebrew word for immigrating to Israel.)
In 2008, there are 1.3 million Russian speakers in Israel, out of a total population of 6.5 million. As it stands, more Jews have immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union than from any other country in the world. A significant portion of these olim—as many as 500,000—are not considered Jewish according to orthodox laws (halacha) and are ignorant of Jewish tradition. In my ulpan class this was exemplified by the stunned silence when our teacher asked about the holiday of Passover.
The exact number of Christian olim is complicated because many maintain a low religious profile. According to the Israeli Bureau of Statistics, 23,000 Russian-speaking immigrants are self-classified as Christian. Thousands of others, who are probably Christian, declare their religion as “unclassified” or “other.” The unofficial count of Christian Russian immigrants is around 80,000.
The Controversy
The Law of Return in Israel states that any Jew can become a citizen of Israel. Under the “grandchild clause” in the Law of Return, anyone with a Jewish grandparent also qualifies for aliya. The idea is that since the Nazis targeted someone who was one-quarter Jewish for extermination, he or she should be granted protection by the Jewish state. In accordance with this clause and its extension to non-Jewish family members, Israel’s Ministry of Interior says that 15% of all Russian immigrants during the 1990s came as non-Jews. In recent years this percentage has risen to 58%.
Restricting the Law of Return to curb non-Jewish immigration is a controversial topic in Israel. Orthodox proponents, like the political party Shas, believe it is time to cancel the “grandchild clause.” They worry that Israel will lose its Jewish identity if it does not stop the entry of immigrants who are not Jewish by halacha. Opponents to any change in the Law of Return argue that it is the foundational principle of the state and that the law should not cater to the Orthodox. Plus on a practical level immigration helps tilt the demographics of the region in Israel’s favor.
The Israeli authorities hope most of the immigrants who are not halachically Jewish assimilate into the Jewish majority or participate in one of the several conversion programs for olim. Shuvu is the nationwide school system with an enriched Jewish curriculum that teaches young immigrants Jewish traditions. The IDF has its own “friendly” conversion process for Russian-speaking soldiers. They offer courses in Judaism and Zionism and have seen over a 15% conversion rate among immigrant soldiers. Outside the military, however, the conversion process is much more restrictive with only half of one percent of immigrants converting each year.
The Jewish factor
Immigrants from the former Soviet Union—be they Christian or secular—have in a short period dramatically changed the cultural and religious backdrop of Israel. It is no longer difficult to find grocers selling pork, and at Christmas there is an abundant selection of tacky Santas and plastic ornaments. The IDF is currently providing no small number of New Testaments at the request of Christian immigrants who prefer it to the Hebrew text for their swearing-in.
Russian Christians have created a new religious minority in Israel. Like any immigrant population the first generation has struggled to assimilate, but the second generation has been absorbed into the flexible definition of what it means to be Israeli. They speak Hebrew, watch Israeli television, serve in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), and marry other Israelis. Some have converted to orthodox Jewry but many have integrated socially while retaining their Christian faith. Though they are unaffiliated with Judaism, they do affiliate with the Israeli-Jewish culture and do not oppose Judaism’s place in public life. They are sometimes referred to by Israelis as the “non-Jewish Jews.”
For many of these “non-Jewish Jews,” serving in the IDF is an opportunity to prove their patriotism. The casualty rate for Russian immigrants is around three times higher than the norm because many of the immigrants volunteer for the more dangerous army units. In the Second Lebanon War, nearly one-quarter of those who received medals of valor were Russian-speaking immigrants and almost the same proportion received military burials.
Despite their patriotism, the Christian olim experience a certain level of institutional discrimination. Israel’s Orthodox Chief Rabbinate controls issues of “personal status,” such as marriage, divorce, and burial. There is no option for a civil marriage ceremony if citizens are not halachic Jews. They have to leave the country if they want to marry or use an approved Christian clergyman. Furthermore, non-halachic Jews are not supposed to be buried in Jewish cemeteries, even if they are IDF soldiers who died in combat.
The Sensitivities
The subject of Russian Christian immigrants in Israel is a sensitive one that most are hesitant to discuss because there are still many obstacles to overcome. But for a country that prides itself on its complicated ethnic makeup, Israel is certainly capable of finding that delicate balance that will protect the Jewish character of the state and still ensure the religious freedoms of this new Israeli Christian minority. After worshiping in a two-thirds Russian speaking congregation in Beer Sheva for several years I rejoice in the vibrancy the olim have brought to the Israeli-Christian community. Personally, I can no longer imagine an Israel without the extra cultural religious layer that the Russian immigrants provide. I have my ulpan classmates to thank that I still to this day speak Hebrew with a hint of a Russian accent.
Shelley Neese is managing editor for the The Jerusalem Connection Report.