Treason, Kidnappings...Take Your Head Out Of The Sand...

Take Your Head Out Of The Sand…
by Gerald A. Honigman

Or be buried in it forever.

Since last summer’s disastrous war against Hizbullah, Israel has continued on a suicidal downward slope.

Just as Lebanon 2006 failed due to years of inexcusable poor planning and political decisions (regardless of admitted external pressures from “powerful friends”), Israel will face even worse to come if it persists in acting like the proverbial ostrich.

As is well known by now, many in the Arab/Muslim world have been deeply encouraged by Israel’s lack luster performance against Hizbullah. The Syrians are said to be setting up traps similar to those encountered by Israel in south Lebanon to add to their formidable arms and troop modernization and build up. Scores of thousands of more advanced rockets and missiles are ready to do far more damage than those Hizbullah tasted success with…despite Israel’s advantage in the air.

Hopefully, Baby Assad understands that if he starts something, Damascus will look like the Hizbullah part of Beirut last year. But--with the current Israeli leadership--that’s not necessarily the case...and it should be.

Emboldened by Hizbullah’s relative success and Israel’s willingness over the decades to repeatedly trade hundreds or thousands of Arab prisoners--many with blood on their hands, who get released only to kill more Jews again and again--for one or two of their own (or sometimes just the latters’ bones), Hamas is now threatening to kidnap more Israelis and Jews worldwide.

There is nothing we can do to change the nature of the beast Israel faces.

It is what it is…regardless of what Dr. Condoleezza Rice, her State Department, and unfortunately the President, himself, say or try to make it look like.

Fatah…Hamas…when it comes to the subject of living in peace and accepting the permanency of the Jewish State of Israel, it makes no difference. The recent Mecca Accords should have proved this to any doubters who had their brains, eyes and ears functioning properly.

So, there is no one more to blame for Israel’s current predicament than Israel itself.

Recently, a group of Jews having an Independence celebration picnic were surrounded by thousands of Israeli Arabs threatening them with violence, waving Hamas and PLO flags, and so forth. And Olmert’s Government’s reaction was stalled, minimal, and late in coming.

A bit earlier, the same thing happened to Jews in Jaffa.

Indeed, these stories--like those involving actions against the state by Arab members of Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset--have been on the rise and not uncommon for many years.

Decades ago, the late Rabbi Meir Kahane warned of such things and the need to take solid action and was branded a racist and extremist.

He was as correct then as he is now.

What nation would put up with the events mentioned above committed by its own citizens…in this case, the freest Arabs anywhere in the Middle East? Over twenty thousand Arabs who opposed Hafez al-Assad in Syria were eliminated in short order in his Hama Solution.  Ditto in Iraq and all over the Arab world…and those folks just opposed the regime--not the very state in which they lived.

The time is running out for the Israeli Left’s delusions and cowardice to continue.

The time to act--and act decisively--is now.

Israel must unabashedly confront this problem head on.

It must try its best to reason with its Arab citizens. Some will undoubtedly prove to be loyal.

Some, indeed, know how good they have it--especially when glancing at what Abbass and Hamas have to offer.

But, for those who take aim at their Jewish neighbors and the very state in which they live, the time for play has passed.

Arabs have almost two dozen states to date, conquered mostly from non-Arab peoples.

Trials for treason must be forthcoming with expulsion as the punishment. These are long overdue.

Let the guilty choose from those above states or the Palestinian Arab territories where to go.

Jews just have one, tiny, reborn state--and they don’t need to be intimidated in it by fellow Arab citizens who have more rights in Israel than they would have in any Arab and/or Muslim state.

Just as half of Israel’s Jews are from refugee families who lived in so-called Arab states, Israel’s Arab citizens live in a Jewish state. Why is it alright for the one but not the other?

I don’t care how politically incorrect it sounds…As Kahane wrote decades ago, They Must Go.

No nation would tolerate a potentially deadly fifth column openly aiding and abetting avowed enemies sworn to that very nation’s destruction. Putting these folks in jail will just cost the Israeli tax payer money and will be yet more temptation for the blackmailers.

Israel must send a new message in this post-Lebanon ‘06 era if it wants to avoid utter catastrophe.

Leaving the treason issue and moving onto another, Israel must enact swift execution for those who murder Jews and their accomplices. That will also mean getting rid of Lefty suicidal judges as well.

Murderers of Jewish babes and other innocents need to be dispatched quickly…or not taken alive in the first place. Such folks think nothing about blowing buses and restaurants up along with everyone inside. If Arabs insist on continuously using their folks as human shields, then let the international community intervene since this is most certainly against the Geneva Conventions--the Perfidy Clause, among others. If this is continued to be ignored, then those same Conventions authorize Israel to do what needs to be done anyway to engage its deadly enemy.

By swiftly executing capital offenders, Israel will avoid the constant blackmail it is subjected to (and going on right now yet again) for the return of a few prisoners who, unlike the Arab ones, have never been visited by the International Red Cross to determine if they’re even still alive. 

Next, as stated in the beginning, the Arabs have boasted that they’re hunting for more Jews to kidnap.

So what’s Israel going to do about it? React and call for more alerts?

Not anywhere near enough…

Israel needs to be more proactive, not reactive…like in the good ‘ole days.

And it needs to be unpredictable. Very unpredictable. I’ve been screaming this for years…

It must leave all Arabs worrying about what it’s next move may be. “Militants” having their next meeting must fear having that next meeting.

Arab leaders must come to fear for their own lives if they threaten Jews this way…and they are doing just that. Israel knows how to do this well. It just needs to start once again...and even better this time around.

Israel needs to have surprises waiting for those Arab gatherings where hundreds of “militants“--amassed together, with rifles firing into the air--are screaming for Jewish blood. The latter need to be taken out en masse…not just one or two at a time, a waste of very expensive missiles.

Anything less than fighting to win is unacceptable at this point.

The Arabs have made clear (if there was ever really any doubt) both with their Mecca Accords and the Saudi Peace (of the grave ) Plan what their intentions are…the same as they always have been--regardless of what their assorted whitewashers say.

Israel must have exponentially devastating increments of justice awaiting enemies sworn to the death of both Jews and The Jew Of The Nations…and it must not hesitate at putting it into effect--regardless of what the hypocrites elsewhere will say. Worrying about the latter is what has gotten Israel into the mess it’s in right now.

And, again, it’s time for Arab leadership itself to also pay the price for its behavior.

Both the head and the body of the snake must be dealt with.

If a state can’t or won’t control (or actually promotes) the violence of its citizens against its neighbors, then it can’t complain when those neighbors do what’s necessary for their own security.

America’s own Powell Doctrine calls for massive retaliation against our own enemies.

An Israel roughly the size of New Jersey can’t afford to do less--especially given the neighborhood it lives in. It must put fear back into the Arabs’ thinking. While this is unfortunate, it’s true. I wish there was another way. Unfortunately, for Arabs, there isn’t--short of Israel’s disappearance.

The earlier peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan came about not due to any Arab love for Jews.

The fear of Pyrrhic victory did the trick.

But 1967 and 1973 are long in the past…memories have faded, and so forth.

Israel must take extreme care not be lured to fight according to the Arabs’ game plan as it did in Lebanon last summer. It must come up with major, conclusive new shocks of its own.

The Jews did not ask for this war. But if the Arabs insist on deliberately waging it from amidst their own non-combatants, using them as human shields, then--as the Geneva Conventions say--the consequences will rest upon their own heads. Israel must lose no sleep over this. If it means withdrawing from the United Nations, taking cuts in American aid, or whatever…so be it.

Enough of fighting a murderous, inhumane enemy--which deliberately targets Jewish children and uses its own kids as shields--with one hand tied behind the back.

Both Hamas and Fatah must be taught the long overdue, excruciatingly painful lesson Hizbullah was unfortunately spared.

The State Department and the President won‘t like this (not to mention others), as they’re still trying to shove Fatah’s latter day Arafatians down Israel’s throat as “moderates.”

Israel must act decisively anyway. It’s very existence is at stake at this point.

It may mean that new Israeli elections must be ushered in, if at all possible, first. Olmert’s crew and their delusions brought about Lebanon 2006 and other potential disasters.

If Israel does what it takes to follow through on all of this, it may yet avoid the next costlier war with Syria and perhaps Iran as well.

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Litmus Test...National Public Radio

The Litmus Test…

by Gerald A. Honigman

To my Jewish brothers

To my Arab brothers

so that we can all

be free men at last

In honor of Holocaust Memorial Day, National Public Radio had a program focusing on Israel’s nominating a deceased man from Tunisia, Khaled Abdulwahab, as its first Arab Righteous Gentile…one of the non-Jews who risked their own lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

It was a great program and interviewed family members from both sides…a Tunisian Jewess and her new friend and Arab counterpart.

Having given NPR its due, this all begs the question…

Why the silence over all the years about the other side of this story?

Hajj Amin al-Husseini--the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the era of World War II--was Hitler’s great friend and ally. Among other things, he personally recruited the Bosnian Muslim Hanjar (Saber) Division of the Waffen SS. And there were not a few other examples of Arab/Muslim collaboration with Nazis as well.

The normal Arab response has often been that in their war against the Jews, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And, “After all,“ Jew hatred and the Holocaust were a “Western” problem.

Nice try…and the often all-too-willingly gullible--like NPR--buy into it.

Were politics involved in the Arab decisions to join the Nazis?

Sure…

For Arabs, politics mixed with religion are always involved.

During the very same NPR program, the subject of Darfur came up…another genocide against another people.

Yet--surprise (not)--while the hero of the Holocaust ‘s identity, Arab, was highlighted (while ignoring Arab collaboration with the Nazis), no mention was given to the identity of the perpetrators of the decades old massacres, rapes, expulsions, enslavement, etc. and so forth of some two million black African Sudanese…Arabs.

A little comparison, please.

Imagine the unimaginable…Jews raiding Arab villages and doing the above to millions of Arab civilians posing no threat, harboring no terrorists, or committing no aggression against them.

Would the world have stood by for decades and not stopped this? Would the identity of the perpetrators have been ignored or, at best, placed in the umpteenth paragraph of the news article where it could be very likely missed altogether? Would it have taken NPR decades to do a program about this? Do I even need to ask these questions?

You see, there is, unfortunately, a good analogy here.

Arabs opposed the rebirth of Israel because of religio-politcal reasons. But religion and politics are virtually always intimately intertwined in Islam.

Once a land is conquered in the name of Islam, it can never revert back to its non-Islamic identity--the age-old Dar ul-Islam vs. the Dar al-Harb thing.

The rebirth of Israel--half of whose Jews who are descendants of refugees from Arab/Muslim lands--was thus opposed on religious grounds.

But the other, political side of this coin is that upon the collapse of the Ottoman Turkish Empire (which ruled most of the region for over four centuries), Arabs declared the whole area to be purely Arab patrimony. And woe unto those who didn’t play ball.

Scores of millions of non-Arabs were caught up in this racist Arab game…including fellow non-Arab Muslims.

That’s what Darfur is about today, Arab genocide against black African fellow Muslims. But you would have never known this listening to that NPR program discussing Darfur while praising Abdulwahab. Decades earlier, the main Arab targets in the Sudan were non-Muslim blacks in the south whose crime was wanting freedom from the oppression of the Arab north.

A similar story can be told about Arab actions and attitudes towards Kurds, Assyrians, Copts, Berbers, and so forth…massacres, gassings, subjugation, outlawing of native cultures and languages, etc. and so forth. As I frequently point out, how dare others demand a sliver of the justice Arabs so forcefully demand for themselves.

Now, please revisit the opening quote at the very beginning of this article..

It is the beginning of Professor Albert Memmi’s book, Jews And Arabs.

Memmi--like the Jewish family saved by Khaled Abdulwahab--is a Tunisian Jew.

Despite having actively fought for independence against the French, Memmi and the vast majority of Tunisia’s Jews felt unable to stay upon the creation of the new Muslim state. Most went to Israel or France and became part of the other side of the refugee coin--created after the attack by a half dozen Arab nations on a miniscule, resurrected Israel in 1948--no one ever talks about.

As for the Arab line--too often repeated by the ignorant abroad--that Jewish suffering was solely a Western Christian problem, “so why should Arabs be ‘victimized’ for it?,” please listen to how Memmi, the Tunisian Jew who fought for Tunisian independence and whose ancestors very likely predated the Arab conquest of Berber Tunisia, answers this…

“…The truth is that we lived in the Arab countries amidst fear and humiliation. I will not take the time here to recite another litany, that of the massacres that preceded (Memmi’s own emphasis) Zionism, but I can make it available to you whenever you wish. The truth is that these young Jews from the Arab countries were Zionists before Auschwitz. The State of Israel is not the result of Auschwitz but of the Jewish condition everywhere, including the Arab countries.”

Indeed.

Now, NPR travels the world to conduct interviews for its programs. Too often those interviews are slanted against Israel.

Memmi has been a world famous academic and author for decades--and, by the way, very much a “left-winger” as well. Should be right up NPR’s alley, don’t ya think?

The litmus test for fairness and objectivity when it comes to the study of any conflict should be whether the same lenses of moral scrutiny are used when critiquing the parties involved.

So, to answer my own question about that proposed NPR Memmi interview…

Don’t hold your breath.

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Jews, Arabs, and Human Shields

Jews, Arabs, and Human Shields

by Gerald A. Honigman

Reading The Daytona Beach News-Journal on April 12th while getting ready for work, I was unfortunately not shocked at seeing an extensive AP article titled, in large bold print, “Israel’s human shield practice draws fire.”

This is the same newspaper which, despite continuous deliberate targeting of Israeli civilian buses, restaurants, pizza parlors, teen nightclubs, pregnant women, shopping malls, Passover Seders, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and so forth never once mentioned the word “barbarism” until one of its editorialists, Pierre Tristam, wrote his extensive op-ed, “Barbarism Under Israel’s Boot.” After all, how dare those Jews have checkpoints and such to try to deal with the above!

The News-Jazeera, as it is locally known to not a few of us, unfortunately has lots of company among the world media and other practitioners of the moral double standard when it comes to the conflict between Jews and Arabs.

The April 12th article focused on Israeli troops entering a town in Judea or Samaria (the “West Bank”), and awakening a “terror-stricken” Arab civilian to lead them on their hunt for Arab “militants.”

Please notice the selective use of words here.

The Arab was “terrorized” by Jews, but those who deliberately murder, disembowel, and target Jews whom the Israeli soldiers are hunting down--hiding amid their own non-combatant population-- are “militants.”

No accident here…

Nauseating.

While I regret any civilian being put in harm’s way, where has the outrage been at what Arabs typically have been doing for years?

After deliberately blowing Jewish teens up out for a night’s fun in Israel proper--not disputed territories--such “militants” have typically run back to their rat holes in Arab towns…in the same apartment complexes as their non-combatant neighbors. And when suicide/homicide bombers were involved, their handlers were at home there as well.

After deliberately disemboweling Jewish families at pizzerias, shopping malls, and so forth, those “militants” did likewise. Arabs would set up a museum honoring such heroism not long afterwards, complete with model body parts of Jews.

Sick…and do you recall extensive articles about this in the mainstream media? Perhaps my memory fails me.

America, itself, has become all too familiar with such Arab practices in Iraq.

So, given all of this, a bit more detail and perspective are called for…especially since the April 12th article had the audacity to quote the Geneva Conventions prohibiting placing civilians in harm’s way.

Arabs have typically set up shop on/in their own school grounds, mosques, hospitals, apartment buildings, and so forth. Pictures of Arab antiaircraft guns placed on top of apartment buildings, in alleys between buildings, and the launching of rockets and such from such sites are indisputable…as are tons of other evidence.

Indeed, Arab “militants” have made a practice of deliberately setting up offices and holding meetings in the middle floors of civilian apartment buildings, counting on the moral qualms of the Jews to protect them.

Again, think of the irony of the “villain” of the April 12th article.

After the Jews went after Hamas’ Sheikh Yassin the first time (despite his physical disabilities, he got to visit his 72 virgins on the second attempt), they only wounded him and other top Hamas commanders because they made the decision to use minimal explosives to avoid killing Arab noncombatants.

Since the News-Journal and the Associated Press are such fans of the Geneva Conventions, lets see what they really have to say about all of this.

The Geneva Conventions make perfectly clear that “militants” are not permitted to use their own non-combatants as human shields; that those non-combatants do not prevent an army from pursuing combatants; and that any harm occurring to the civilian population as a consequence falls on the heads of those using their own people this way.

Here are some excerpts from the Preamble and the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977…

The High Contracting Parties,

…Believing it necessary nevertheless to reaffirm and develop the provisions protecting the victims of armed conflicts and to supplement measures intended to reinforce their application…

Art 37. Prohibition of Perfidy

1. It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy. Acts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or is obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence, shall constitute perfidy. The following acts are examples of perfidy:

(a) the feigning of an intent to negotiate under a flag of truce or of a surrender;

(b) the feigning of an incapacitation by wounds or sickness;

(c) the feigning of civilian, non-combatant status; and

(d) the feigning of protected status by the use of signs, emblems or uniforms of the United Nations or of neutral or other States not Parties to the conflict.

2. Ruses of war are not prohibited. Such ruses are acts which are intended to mislead an adversary or to induce him to act recklessly but which infringe no rule of international law applicable in armed conflict and which are not perfidious because they do not invite the confidence of an adversary with respect to protection under that law. The following are examples of such ruses: the use of camouflage, decoys, mock operations and misinformation.

This knowledge has been available for all to see and literally at our fingertips in the computer age for a long time now. So why the deafening silence from Israel’s detractors?

Where have the articles been in the News-Jazeera and elsewhere? Where are The Associated Press reports?

Where have the academics--so great at putting Israel under the high power lens of moral scrutiny--been on all of this? And our own State Department, frequently claiming an alleged moral equivalence between those murdered and those attempting to stop the murder?

While I don’t advocate blowing up Arab buses, restaurants, schools, and such the way Arabs deliberately do, any building, town, or whatever harboring murderers and their collaborators must be recognized for what the Geneva Conventions say it is: A fair military target.

Article #51/7:

The presence of the civilian population shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attack…

Article #58b:

The parties to the conflict shall...avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas.

The rats’ dens are typically set up in or adjacent to civilian apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, etc., as America has learned for itself in Iraq.

Article #51/2:

The civilian population...shall not be the object of attack. Acts of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited...Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited.

Arabs typically target Israeli civilians.

It is obvious by now--especially after the recent Mecca Accord and the resurrection of the Saudi Peace (of the grave) Plan--that Arabs don’t just want to create their 22nd state--and second, not first, Arab one in “Palestine,” but wish (as many of us have always known) to destroy the sole, miniscule, resurrected one that millennially persecuted and victimized Jews have finally lived to see reborn.

Shame on the media and others who, in this month commemorating the Holocaust and Jewish suffering in the Muslim East as well as the Christian West, hold Israel up to such hypocritical double standards.

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No Peace 'Til Withdrawal From Territories...

No Peace ‘Til Withdrawal From Settlements And…

by Gerald A. Honigman

end to colonialist occupation.

This has been a heck of a month for our British friends.

Those who have fought among themselves over the centuries’ old British conquest of Irish lands have shook hands (among others, the Scots were forced to go along with this earlier); thousands of miles away from home--as in the days of the British Empire--British sailors and marines were captured defending the interests of the Crown; and, again, thousands of miles away from home, Argentina is once again demanding that the British acknowledge Argentine sovereignty over the Las Islas Malvinas--aka the Falkland Islands. The two fought a war over this several decades ago.

Note, please, that the Brits--like too many others--have jumped on the Arab bandwagon claiming that there cannot be peace in the Middle East until Israel withdraws from “occupied” territories and settlements.

Note also, please, that any objective look at the historical record will show the presence and sometimes sovereign control in/of these adjacent areas by Jews in Gaza, the Golan, Judea, Samaria, and so forth. These were not lands conquered far away from home, but lands totally within the area of the Hebrews’ millennial tribal and other presence. Hanah cried to G_d for a child in Shilo. It was the first capital of the Jewish nation after the Exodus. If you’re trying to locate it, simply turn to directions found in the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Judges (21:19). It’s north of Beth El, east of the road heading from there to Shechem, and south of Levona.

Any similar British directions for the Falklands around that time? And who, indeed, even were “the Brits” at that time?

Abraham buried his family in Hebron, King David had sons born to him in Hebron, and the Jews could be found there long afterwards as well. Indeed, they lived and owned land there until massacred by Arabs in the 1920’s and 1930s. And keep in mind that Jerusalem itself--established by David as the Jews’ capital over three thousand years ago--is itself in what British imperialism renamed the “West Bank (of the Jordan River),” Judea.

Arab (Trans-)Jordan was carved out of the East Bank of the original 1920 Palestine Mandate in 1922 by the Brits as a gift to their Arab allies in World War I, the Hashemites of Arabia--who were in the process of getting their derrieres booted out of the Arabian Peninsula by the rival clan of Ibn Saud (hence, Saudi Arabia today). But don’t take the Zionists’ word for this, read British East Bank representative, Sir Alec Kirkbride’s A Crackle of Thorns, Jordan’s King Abdullah’s own memoirs, and other works for corroboration.

While these territories traded back and forth between various empires after the Roman conquest of the Jews’ land, Judaea (Roman, Byzantine, Persian, Arab Caliphal, Turks, Brits, etc.), there is no doubt about a continuous Jewish presence here for thousands of years--despite the devastating effects of the various conquests. As the Arabs, themselves, burst out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century C.E. and arrived as imperial and colonial occupiers and settlers, these lands are more accurately described as disputed territories, not occupied “Arab” lands. This is even more the case since Arabs lost said territories in a war they started for the extermination of their Jewish neighbor in June 1967.

On the recent Iranian hostage issue, the Brits managed to get their sailors and marines--taken if not in, very close to, Iranian territorial waters and captured thousands of miles away from home in the name of Her Majesty’s national security interests--back within a few weeks. The latter interests are the successor to His Majesty’s imperial interests in the region--especially oil and connections farther east to India--of a bit earlier era…interests which would lead to British Mandates over Mesopotamia and Palestine after the conquest of the Turks’ imperial hold on the region for centuries. Brits also became intimately involved in Egypt and elsewhere in the region from the days of Napoleon onwards…Disraeli, the Suez Canal, the 1882 occupation, and so forth.

I guess in the world of realpolitik, might does indeed make right.

Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier stationed in Israel proper--not disputed territories (although in the Arab mindset, most, if not all, of the region is purely Arab patrimony)--was captured by Arabs stationed in Gaza around a year after total Israeli withdrawal from that land, land where Jews have also lived and ruled over the millennia, and land which has been constantly used since the days of the Pharaohs to attack Israel.

It’s been almost a year since Shalit was taken--not like the Brits’ forces thousands of miles away from home, but right from within the armistice lines/borders of his own microscopic state--and the Jews have been told that in order to get him back they’ll have to release thousands of Arab murderers or wannabes with Jewish blood on their hands. Yet this is largely the Jews’ own fault. There’s no way that such folks would still be of this world if they acted this way and were caught by Arabs who they intended to victimize. Such folks should be executed rather than kept alive...only to be traded later, as usual, for the bones of dead Jews.

Moving on, check out information on what the Brits call the Falkland Islands today.

Two prominent locations are known as Weddell and Green Goose Settlements. They were indeed colonized, occupied, and settled by Brits just within the past few centuries, thousands of miles away from home and off the coast of Argentina.

I am writing this on Easter Sunday--for Christians, the holiest day of the year, for without it, Jesus was just another Jew tragically caught up in the deadly struggle for his people’s freedom and independence against Roman oppressors and occupiers. And, as in all occupations, Rome had its native collaborators as well. Think Vichy France, Soviet era stooges in Poland, and so forth. Rome crucified and murdered hundreds of thousands of such “trouble making"-Jews, as the records of their own contemporary historians, like Tacitus and Dio Cassius, testify to.

A reading from Matthew 2:1 in the Christian Scriptures (New Testament) about that other essential Christian holiday, Christmas, pointing to Jesus’ birth, states, “ Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king…”

Note, please--Judea, land of the Jews--not Palestina (land of the Philistines, a non-Semitic--i.e. non-Arab--sea people from the Aegean or eastern Mediterranean Sea region).

Indeed, Bethlehem, Hebron, Bethel, Shilo, and numerous other sites in Judea and Samaria have become known to us via the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament for non-Jews).

For Jews to live in historical Judea and assert rights there is thus quite different from Brits claiming sole rights over islands thousands of miles away from home and located a relative stone’s throw away from Argentina.

Las Islas Malvinas traded back and forth between British, French, and Spanish/Argentine sovereignty for the past several centuries. When the British Empire came to rule the seas, might indeed make right…and so the Argentines withdrew in the early 19th century. That British “right” had also led the United States to ignore its own “Monroe Doctrine” (a similar “right").

Whatever one’s views are about all of this (and there are usually two sides to an issue, even if they are rarely of equal weight), at a time when Israel is constantly expected to totally withdraw from disputed lands it came to “occupy” (and how, again, did Arabs who lived there come to live there if not via continuous occupation and their own settlement?) as the result of a war forced upon it in self defense, and to yield those territories to jihadists still sworn to the destruction of the Jews’ sole state no matter how large it is, justice demands that we think about such things as Weddell and Goose Green Settlements as well.

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Saudi Peace (of the grave) Plan: Quoting That Hebrew Sage

Quoting That Famous Hebrew Sage…

by Gerald A. Honigman

“It’s good to be the king.”

Or, at least a prince.

No, this observation didn’t come from Isaiah, Amos, Micah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Samuel, or any of those other famous ancient Jews. In fact, Samuel didn’t even want the latter to have a mortal king. He feared the corrupting influence of power. Truer fears never existed, as our current case in point testifies to.

Our Hebrew sage of the day is Mel Brooks, and I quoted him as he lusted after a young French woman in the days prior to the French Revolution in his movie, History of the World: Part I.

On March 28th the Arab League held its latest summit in Saudi Arabia, and, among other things, London’s The Daily Telegraph quoted Prince Saud al-Faisal as stating …

It has never been proven that reaching out to Israel achieves anything…Other Arab countries have recognized Israel and what has that achieved? The largest Arab country, Egypt, recognized Israel and what was the result? Not one iota of change happened in the attitude of Israel towards peace.

Saud was commenting on the Arabs’ offer to Israel to accept the Saudi Peace (of the grave) Plan--or else !

How’s that for negotiations?

This followed in the wake of the recent Saudi brokered good cop/bad cop deal between Hamas and Fatah’s Abbas to form a new Palestinian Arab Unity Government.

As discussed in greater detail in my last analysis, Hugo’s Peace Plan, among other things, that Arab “peace” demands that a nine-mile wide Israel accept millions of allegedly “returning” jihadi refugees. The Jews must replace blown buses, teen night clubs, pizzerias, and restaurants with their own suicide…or return to the blown buses and worse again.

Such a bargain!

Power indeed corrupts--in all kinds of ways.

And in this case, it exacerbates an already present Arab predilection to dismiss anyone else’s justice but their own as illegitimate.

Think also about those blatant, outright royal lies above.

Reaching out to Israel achieves nothing?

How about this, for starters…

Historically, empires, kingdoms, and nations have lost territory repeatedly when they used--or let others use--such territory to attack neighbors or threatened others’ “national interests.”

For the sake of a very cold peace, Israel returned the biggest protective buffer zone and tank trap it ever had, the Sinai Peninsula, to an Egypt which had repeatedly invaded, blockaded, and terrorized it from that territory and the adjacent Gaza Strip. Indeed, Egypt had used the latter as its key invasion route to attack Jews since the days of the Pharaohs.

But, after the late Egyptian President, Anwar al-Sadat, flew directly to Jerusalem for the sake of peace, Israel responded with relinquishing the oil fields that it largely developed at Abu Rudeis (its chance at energy self-sufficiency), key air fields and other military bases, and the only semblance of somewhat meaningful strategic depth that it ever possessed in modern times.

How’s that for Arabs getting something for their “overtures?”

Keep in mind that repeated Egyptian blockades of Israel, not to mention its outright military aggression, were recognized casus belli.

No doubt, others have permanently lost (and America and others gained) territory for far less…not to mention how Arabs acquired most of “their” territory in the first place--by conquering and forcibly Arabizing it from others, like those native Copts and Nubians in Egypt (since the Prince brought that nation up as an example) who predated the Arab conquest by millennia.

Want more Hebrew overtures?

How about Gaza?

After handing it over to Hamas, Fatah, and other jihadis--knowing full well that it would only bring the latter’s rockets, mortars, etc., that much closer to Israel proper, what did Israel get in return? Just what those of us with functioning neurons expected…hundreds of additional rockets and such launched at Israeli towns and cities in Israel proper.

Next…that famous Oslo Peace…

With the forced Rabin-Arafat handshake at President Clinton’s Whitehouse, Israel withdrew from disputed--not purely Arab--lands and got the highest casualties due to Arab terror in return for that overture.

Several decades ago, Israel was forced to go after the PLO in southern Lebanon because of the unceasing terror it launched from that territory and the Lebanese refusal or impotence to do anything about it. When Israel, despite continuing problems, gave up that land as well and the United Nations confirmed that Israel had indeed withdrawn from all Lebanese territory, Israel got renewed attacks from Hizbullah anyway in return--leading to last summer’s war.

In a move towards Syria--which had bombarded Israel for almost two decades from the Golan Heights--Prime Minister Barak offered to give virtually the entire Golan back. Syria lost this strategic territory in the Six Day War in ‘67, which it was also key in instigating.

Note that the Golan was originally slated to be part of the Mandate of Palestine, from which only a small part (one fifth) was resurrected as Israel. This came after Arab (Trans-)Jordan was carved out of the lion‘s share of the territory in 1922. The Arabs subsequently refused the ’47 partition plan which would have divided the 20% of the land left after the creation of Jordan roughly in half…so Arabs would have wound up with about 90% of the entire pie. The Brits and the French did some imperial trading upon the breakup of the Turks’ earlier four centuries old empire, and so the Heights became part of modern Syria.

The deal Barak offered fell through because the Syrians insisted on controlling several hundred yards Israel needed to insure that its water sources wouldn’t fall under Syrian control. And, after all, Secretary of State James Baker III had promised Saddam’s twin butcher in Damascus, Hafez al-Assad, a total Israeli withdrawal. Note that this is the same Baker--Bush family best friend--whose law firm represents the Saudis today...including against fellow Americans currently suing them over 9/11. And Baker’s law partner is the American Ambassador to Riyadh.

This story could go on and on, but I think you get the picture.

As revealed, once again, in the Hamas-Fatah Mecca Accord and more recently in the Arab League Summit in Saudi Arabia, Israel wasn’t given that supposed offer that it simply couldn’t refuse.

The Arabs are simply up to their same old rejectionist games, but this time they are emboldened even more by Israel’s worst performance ever last year--for whatever reasons--in a war against Hizbullah and its Syrian and Iranian sponsors; billions of dollars in petrobucks at their disposal and the assorted international sycophant supporters such money can buy; huge quantities of state-of-the-art armaments supplied by America and others as well; and knowing that Israel is outnumbered some 60 to 1 by them--and that figure doesn’t include hostile non-Arab Iranians and others as well.

The Arabs also think that Israel will have to fight with one hand tied behind its back, not striking out, for example, at Saudi strategic assets--i.e. oil--for fear of provoking the wrath of other nations, including the United States.

America, with the State Department in the lead, has pressured Israel repeatedly over the decades into going along with such one-sided deals that were contrary to its own national interests and very survival.

The time for this American behavior must now come to an end. That others so indulge is no excuse.

Despite America’s best efforts to coax some virtually meaningless words out of Israel’s alleged Arab “peace” partners, it should be obvious by now, with Abbas and the Saudi prince’s recent remarks, that even that is too much to ask. And for this, those who care about Israel should in fact be grateful.

Honesty is indeed better than lies. And the State Department--with the President’s continued backing--will be totally exposed as being hostile to Israel’s very existence if it pressures Israel further at this point.

There are scores of millions of Americans who indeed care and can see through what’s gong on. And many of them do indeed vote.

Despite the above Saudi accusations about Israel, nothing but an Arab takeover of Israel--peaceful or otherwise--is still all that is being offered by those alleged “moderate” Arab peacemakers.

And the State Department’s darling, Mahmoud Abbas, has been saying the same things all along. He has always insisted--long before the Saudi plan--that Israel would have to consent to being overwhelmed by “returning” jihadis, and this after Israel is forced to return to its pre-’67, 9-mile wide armistice line existence. He ran on a platform proclaiming this, and has always insisted that he won’t budge on this issue. The State Department and at least two American Presidents have known about this all along--even while they continuously tried to sell Arafat, Abbas and their muderous Fatah as Israel’s “peace partner,” the alleged good cop as opposed to the Hamas bad cop.

In light of Prince Saud’s comments, the question that now really needs to be asked, considering the Mecca Accord and the current Saudi peace of the grave initiative, is how Arabs, not Jews, have responded to real peace overtures--not counterfeit ones like the Arabs themselves have made.

Yet, again, the Arabs should be commended for their honesty.

And Israel must, unfortunately, plan for a war that will make us recall the early days of June ‘67 once more.

Many wish there was a better alternative. But the Arabs need to wish that too.

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