Peace Now attacks the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations

 The American group is calling large parts of Jerusalem illegally occupied territory—and going after the Conference for not doing likewise.  So much for Lyndon Johnson’s belief it’s better to have someone inside the tent pissing outside, than someone on the outside pissing in.

 (September 24, 2021 / JNS) It’s the ultimate case of biting the hand that feeds you.

Americans for Peace Now (APN) has launched a public assault on the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations—the very organization that risked its good name and credibility by welcoming Peace Now into its ranks, despite plenty of reason to turn them away.

And just to make this whole episode even uglier and more ironic, the attack by APN on the Presidents Conference is over the issue of Jerusalem—the very issue that nearly torpedoed APN’s admission to the conference back in 1993.

The new controversy started innocently enough. The Presidents Conference last week issued a routine press release applauding the decision by the State of Arizona to divest from the British Unilever company. Unilever owns Ben & Jerry’s, the ice-cream manufacturer that is boycotting numerous Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem, as well as communities in Judea and Samaria.

 There was nothing unusual or improper about the Presidents Conference release; it’s simple good manners to thank your allies for their efforts. The people of Arizona and the state authorities need to know that the American Jewish community appreciates their stance against the boycott of Jerusalem.

But that was too much for Peace Now, which issued a sarcastic public attack on the Conference of Presidents for daring to laud Arizona. The APN press release accuses the Conference leadership of hypocrisy for—get this—opposing those who divest from Israel but supporting those who divest from Unilever.

That’s “hypocrisy”? That would be like saying that since Jews boycotted products from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, they had no right to complain when anti-Semites boycotted Jews.

Apparently, the folks at APN don’t realize that the problem is not the concept of divesting or the concept of boycotting. The problem is the difference between right and wrong. Divesting from Israel is morally wrong. Boycotting enemies of Israel is morally right, just as boycotting Nazi Germany in the 1930s was morally right.

What makes the APN attack on the Presidents Conference even more galling is its entire premise. APN claims that the Ben & Jerry’s boycott is legitimate (and therefore should not be protested) because it is boycotting “communities that are illegal under international law.”

Experts on international law are divided on whether Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are legal or illegal. But the key point here is that those who say they’re illegal also say that many of the Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem are illegal.

The basis for calling those Jewish communities illegal is that they are in territories that Israel won in the 1967 Six-Day War. Well, Israel won large sections of Jerusalem in that war, too. So what APN is saying is that the following neighborhoods and sites are illegally “occupied” by Israel and therefore should be boycotted, according to international law:

The Temple Mount. The Western Wall. The Jewish Quarter of the Old City. The Mount of Olives cemetery, which is the oldest Jewish cemetery in the world. Ramot. French Hill. Gilo. Ramat Shlomo. And the mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhoods of Shimon HaTzadik (Sheikh Jarrah) and Kfar Shiloah.

For APN to call those Jerusalem neighborhoods “occupied territory” and therefore support the boycott of them is a flagrant violation of an explicit promise that APN made in order gain admission to the Conference of Presidents.

During the debate over APN’s application, back in 1993, pro-Israel activists warned that APN could not be trusted to uphold the Conference’s consensus position that all of Jerusalem belongs to Israel and should remain Israel’s undivided capital.

The activists had good reason to worry. A number of statements and actions by APN or its parent body, the Peace Now movement in Israel, had raised serious questions about the organization’s commitment to Jerusalem.

Just moments before the members of the Conference of Presidents cast their votes on the APN application, the APN leadership sent a telegram that was read aloud at the meeting, pledging to adhere to the Conference position on Jerusalem.

The Conference’s member organizations decided to take a chance. They gambled that APN would be true to its word and be part of the consensus on Jerusalem—sort of like Lyndon Johnson’s belief that it was better to have some people inside the tent than outside the tent. They put the Conference’s good name and credibility on the line.

Their gamble did not pay off.

Within two years, APN was violating its pledge. In 1995, APN leaders met with a senior PLO official in Jerusalem. As a result, the Conference of Presidents leadership sent a letter to APN, reprimanding it.

That 1995 meeting was bad enough, but the latest violation is much worse. Now, APN is in effect calling large parts of Jerusalem illegally occupied territory—and attacking the Conference for not doing likewise. It’s time for the Presidents Conference to reconsider whether APN should be allowed to continue as one of its member organizations.

APN has broken its pledge to the Conference of Presidents on Jerusalem. There have to be consequences for such outrageous behavior.

Stephen M. Flatow is an attorney and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He resides in Jerusalem and is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.”

 

 There's no such thing as a Palestinian terrorist

Readers of the NYTimes and Wash Post, note: The 6 escaped prisoners called "militants" by your media murdered innocent civilians.

My latest column at Israel National News

Which of the following actions by "ideologically-motivated" Palestinian Arabs should be considered terrorism?

 (A) Placing a bomb at a bus stop in downtown Tel Aviv, killing an Israeli teenage girl.

 (B) Kidnapping an Israeli teenage boy and shooting him point-blank in the head.

 (C) Throwing flaming bottles of gasoline at Israelis, in order to burn them alive.

 (D) Firing automatic weapons at Israeli civilian buses.

 The answer, according to the New York Times and the Washington Post, is “(E) None of the above.”

Fatah Terrorists

The terrorist attacks listed above were just a small sample of the violent crimes against civilians committed by the six Palestinian Arabs who recently escaped from an Israeli prison. Yet in the coverage of the escape by America’s two most prominent and influential newspapers, the word “terrorist” never appears.

 According to articles by the New York Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Patrick Kingsley, the murderers are “prisoners,” “militants,” or simply “the six men.” Kingsley’s computer keyboard appears to be incapable of producing the word “terrorist” when Palestinian Arabs are involved. Maybe the tech support folks at the Times should have a look at his laptop. Clearly something is malfunctioning when no act of Palestinian Arab violence, no matter how heinous, is considered terrorism.

 Even when Kingsley gets around to describing the crimes they committed, he cannot bring himself to admit that it was “terrorism.” The six were “convicted or accused of militant activity,” he writes. No, they weren’t. The Israeli prosecutors’ bills of indictment did not use euphemisms such as “militant activity” to cover up the nature of the crimes, as Kingsley does. They were indicted for terrorism and murder.

 What about the terrorist groups to which the six belong? Kingsley of the Times re-brands them, too. Five are members of Islamic Jihad, the terrorist gang that has murdered hundreds of Jews, including my daughter, Alisa, in 1995. Kingsley labels them simply “a militant group.”

 The sixth escaped terrorist was a leader of—here’s how the Times puts it—“the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group loosely linked to Fatah, the secular political party that dominates Palestinian institutions in the West Bank.”

 What’s all this gobbledygook about being “loosely” linked to Fatah? Why do Kingsley and the Times come up with these kinds of verbal gymnastics, instead of acknowledging the indisputable fact that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade is part and parcel of Fatah?

 Because Fatah is chaired by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. Acknowledging that Fatah sponsors terrorism would force the Biden administration to end all relations with the PA. So, the PA and its sympathizers play a game in which they pretend that Fatah doesn’t really control the Al-Aqsa terrorists.

 If you doubt that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are really part of Fatah, don’t take my word for it. Consider what sources that are not friendly to Israel have to say on the subject.

 The official BBC News profile of the Brigades states: “The al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades is an armed Palestinian group associated with Yasser Arafat's Fatah organisation.” Perhaps the BBC has no choice but to admit the truth, because it was its own team of journalists which in November 2003 uncovered the fact that Fatah was paying $50,000 monthly to the Brigades.

 National Public Radio has described it as “Fatah’s armed militant wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades.” A Council on Foreign Relations report on the Brigades found that they are “aligned with Fatah” and “affiliated with former Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat’s Fatah faction.”

 A June 2005 study by the U.S. government’s own Congressional Research Service reported: “On December 18, 2003, Fatah asked the leaders of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to join the Fatah Council, recognizing it officially as part of the Fatah organization.”

 How about the Palestinian Authority itself? What do PA leaders say about the Al-Aqsa gang? In June 2004, then-PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei openly declared in an interview with the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper: “We have clearly declared that the Aksa Martyrs' Brigades are part of Fatah. We are committed to them, and Fatah bears full responsibility for the group." (Jerusalem Post, June 20, 2004)

 The New York Times’ coverage of the escaped terrorists has been bad enough—but the way the Washington Post has handled the story has been even worse.

 Post correspondent Ellen Francis called them “prisoners” and “fugitives”—not even “militants,” much less “terrorists.” In her reporting, Islamic Jihad is not even “a militant group” (as the Times calls it)—it’s just “the Islamic Jihad movement.” And Fatah is not even mentioned by Francis—it’s merely “the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.” Readers of the Post were not given the slightest indication as to what those two groups are all about.

 Earlier this summer, a poll by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, at Oxford, found that just 29% of Americans trust the news media. The United States placed dead last, out of 46 countries surveyed, in media trust.

 Perhaps the blatant attempts by America’s two most influential newspapers to cover up the nature of Palestinian Arab terrorism might help explain why so many people distrust the media.

 

Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is an oleh chadash and the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.”