Joe Biden returns to immoral equivalency

 My column- 

Biden returns to immoral equivalency

Halting incitement and stopping policies that incentivize terrorism are not “good ideas” or “confidence-building measures.” They are the P.A.’s signed, sworn obligations.

 It took less than a week for the Biden administration to return to the Obama-Biden policy of moral equivalency, or what I prefer to call immoral equivalency—the policy of viewing Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and their respective actions, as being on the same moral plane.

On Jan. 26—just six days after the inauguration—U.S. President Joe Biden’s acting representative at the United Nations, Deputy Ambassador Richard Mills, announced that the administration supports creating a Palestinian state. In practical terms, that means making Israel nine miles wide again, as it was before 1967.

In order to facilitate that goal, Mills said, the United States is “urging” Israel and the Palestinian Authority “to avoid unilateral steps” that would make the creation of a Palestinian state “more difficult.” Those steps include “settlement activity,” “demolitions,” “incitement to violence” and “providing compensation for individuals imprisoned for acts of terrorism.”

Thus, the Biden administration is putting two Israeli actions that are legal, peaceful and permitted by the Oslo Accords in the same category as two P.A. policies that are illegal, violent and prohibited by the Oslo Accords. That’s outrageous.

There is nothing in the Oslo Accords that prevents the creation of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. It happens that since 1992 (prior to Oslo), the consistent policy of successive Israeli governments has been to refrain from authorizing the establishment of new communities there. But that’s a matter of choice, not an Oslo obligation.

There is also nothing in the Oslo agreements that prohibits construction within existing Jewish communities in the territories, which is probably what the Biden administration means by the term “settlement activity.” Building apartments, or anything else, there is legal and peaceful. It does not deprive Arabs of their homes. It does not interfere with the possibility of peace. All it does is continue normal life in those communities.

And there is nothing in the Oslo Accords that prevents Israel from continuing its longstanding policy—fully authorized by Israel’s left-leaning High Court—of dismantling the homes of terrorists.

By contrast, what Mills called “incitement to violence” and paying “compensation” to imprisoned terrorists—that is, incentivizing terrorism—are prohibited by the many anti-terrorism provisions in the Oslo Accords.

I’ll cite just a few. These come from the September 1995 agreement known as Oslo II.

• Article XV, paragraph 1 says that the P.A. must “prevent acts of terrorism” and “take legal measures against offenders.” Obviously, inciting and incentivizing acts of terrorism violates that provision, and also violate these similar provisions:
• Annex 1, Article II, Paragraph 1(b): “The Palestinian police will act systematically against all expressions of violence and terror.”
• Annex 1, Article II, Paragraph 2: The P.A. must “immediately and effectively respond to the occurrence of anticipated occurrence of an act of terrorism, violence or incitement and shall take all necessary measures to prevent such an occurrence.”
• Annex 1, Article II, Paragraph 3(b): The P.A. must “actively prevent incitement to violence.”
• Annex 1, Article II, Paragraph 1(c): The P.A. must “apprehend, investigate and prosecute perpetrators and all other persons directly or indirectly involved in acts of terrorism, violence and incitement.”

There are more passages like these, but you get the idea.

Halting incitement and stopping policies that incentivize terrorism are not “good ideas” or “confidence-building measures.” They are the P.A.’s signed, sworn obligations. The Biden administration cannot just hope that the P.A. fulfills them; it has to insist that they do. Because otherwise, no treaty or agreement ever signed by the P.A. will ever have any value.

And that goes to the heart of the problem with the Biden administration’s emerging policy towards Israel and the P.A.: It appears to be based on ideology, not behavior. Biden’s Mideast advisers are shaping an approach based on ideological predilections—what they believe an ideal peace settlement would look like, what they believe would be appropriate borders, what they believe is fair or reasonable. It’s all based on belief—not on how the P.A. has actually behaved since the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993.

A realistic Mideast policy would look to what happened between 1993 and 2020 in order to gauge expectations for the years ahead. See what the P.A. has done in order to understand what it is likely to do in the future. See whether it has fulfilled its Oslo obligations before asking Israel to make more concessions in exchange for more promises.

That would be a sensible U.S. policy. Right now, the Biden administration is moving in exactly the opposite direction.

Stephen M. Flatow

Stephen M. Flatow is a vice president of the Religious Zionists of America, 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 the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.”

This column may be read on JNS.ORG.

#Israel #moralequivalency #Osloaccords #PalestinianAuthority #violence # terror

Yossi Beilin, still undermining Israel after all these years

It’s been more than a decade since Yossi Beilin retired from Israeli politics, yet he continues to use his stature as a former government official to sometimes take positions that blacken Israel’s good name.

 This past summer, he appeared alongside Israel-haters Hanan Ashrawi and James Zogby in a panel discussion organized and hosted by the U.N.’s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

The Anti-Defamation League describes that committee as “the single most prolific source of material bearing the official imprimatur of the U.N. which maligns and debases the Jewish State. … The meetings and conferences organized by [the committee] are replete with anti-Israel statements such as false claims that Israel is an ‘apartheid state’ and blatantly anti-Semitic comparisons to the Nazis.” How sad that Beilin would choose to grant legitimacy to the committee by appearing at its forum.

Former Israeli minister Yossi Beilin attends a Constitution, Law and Justice,
 Committee meeting at the Knesset on July 9, 2017.
 Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90.

Beilin is best known for his role in Israeli diplomatic and political affairs. As deputy foreign minister in 1993, he was one of the architects of the Oslo Accords. He claimed that he had brought peace in our time, but PLO chief Yasser Arafat used the accords to create a de facto mini-state, smuggle in tons of weapons and launch wave after wave of suicide bombings.

 In 1997, Beilin established a movement within the Knesset to lobby for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Three years later, Israel pulled out. Hezbollah took over the vacated area and began stockpiling tens of thousands of missiles, terrorizing northern Israel and kidnapping Israeli soldiers—eventually provoking the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Today, Hezbollah has more than 150,000 missiles stationed along the Israel-Lebanon border.

 Beilin competed for the leadership of the Labor Party, was defeated, and then defected to the far-left Meretz Party. In 2004, he became chairman of Meretz, promising to lead the party to greater glory. At the time, it had six seats in the Knesset. In the next election, under Beilin’s leadership, it dropped to five. When it became clear that he would be defeated in the next race for the party’s chairmanship, Beilin withdrew his candidacy and retired from politics.

Over the past decade-and-a-half, he has taken some positions that have surprised and alarmed many friends of Israel.

 One involved former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. In late 2006, Carter shocked and outraged the American Jewish community by authoring a book titled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. Abraham Foxman, then the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, charged that Carter was “engaging in anti-Semitism” by promoting the apartheid libel. Fourteen board members of the Jimmy Carter Center in Atlanta resigned in protest over the book. Even the ultra-liberal Central Conference of American Rabbis announced that it was canceling its forthcoming visit to the Carter Center. It seemed as if the entire Jewish world was—with justification—furious at the former world leader.

 But not Beilin. Writing in The Forward, he heaped praise on Carter as “one of the world’s most accomplished statesmen” and “a public figure of enormous moral clout.” Then, while not directly endorsing the apartheid charge, Beilin in effect justified it by claiming that Carter’s accusation was no different from what “has been said by Israelis themselves.”

 It’s true that there have been a few Israeli extremists, including some of Beilin’s Meretz colleagues, who have accused Israel of apartheid. But the overwhelming majority of Israelis reject that charge as an outrageous falsehood.

An incident earlier this year suggests that Beilin has no real quarrel with the “apartheid” libel. A small group of current and former Meretz leaders, including Beilin, staged a “protest tour” of the Jordan Valley in June. The group’s spokesman absurdly declared to reporters that if Israeli law is extended to the 30 percent of Judea and Samaria where Jewish communities are located, it would create “an apartheid map” reminiscent of South Africa.

Not only did Beilin not dispute the apartheid accusation, but he piled on, telling the reporters that the Israeli government secretly plans to carry out “more annexation” beyond the 30 percent, even though there is no evidence of that.

 A prominent Jewish columnist writing recently in The Forward surprisingly included Beilin on a list of six notable “Jewish thought-leaders” who are “fostering identity-building” among young Jews. Including Beilin on that list was a serious error. His actions and statements are more likely to erode, not foster, Jewish and Zionist pride and identity. Whether by pushing for territorial concessions to Arafat and the terrorist group Hezbollah, taking part in that anti-Israel U.N. forum or siding with promoters of the apartheid slur, Yossi Beilin has proven that he is not a thought-leader at all, but rather, an utterly thoughtless leader.

 Recent events demonstrate that while he and his ilk remain mired in the tired old clichés of yesterday, more thoughtful leaders in the Middle East are beginning to recognize that there are new options for finding ways to a better tomorrow.

* * * 

Well, that's what I have to say.

Stephen M. Flatow

To read more of my columns go to JNS.ORG.

The fable of the frog in the cooking pot. Well, Israel is no frog.

How to squeeze Israel, gradually

David Makovsky is at it, again

Squeeze Israel more gradually!

That’s the advice a former U.S. Mideast emissary is offering Jared Kushner, courtesy of the op-ed page of Tuesday’s Washington Post.

David Makovsky, formerly the right-hand man to the Obama administration’s top Mideast envoy, Martin Indyk, was given the front-and-center spot on the Post’s op-ed page in order to tell Kushner what he’s doing wrong in his Mideast peace efforts.

There is more than a little irony in the fact that Makovsky presumes to lecture the current U.S. Mideast negotiators, after he and Indyk spent years at the exact same task and completely failed. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

According to Makovsky, Kushner’s big mistake is that he is trying to achieve too much, too soon. Kushner should seek “short-term gains” instead of “a grand peace deal.” What Makovsky has in mind is “incremental economic progress,” meaning that Israel should make one-sided economic concessions to the Palestinian Authority and the United States should start pouring money into the PA again.

Such economic “progress” would “create the political space to deal with tough policy issues later,” Makovsky claims, because it “would give Palestinian something to lose and would mitigate the chances of an explosion.”

Makovsky apparently wants us to forget that it’s all been tried before, with dismal results. From 1994 until last year, the U.S. donated a total over $10-billion to the Palestinian Arabs. Other countries around the world gave billions more. The Palestinians have had plenty “to lose,” yet they have continued to wage war against Israel anyway.

The notion that economic improvements will “mitigate the chances of an explosion” is an absurd fallacy that State Department Arabists have been promoting practically since time immemorial. Yet it has never proven true. Even at the peak of post-Oslo international largesse, the Palestinian Authority—not just Hamas, but the PA, too—actively sponsored suicide bombings, sniper attacks, stabbings, and the lynching of Jews.

The essence of the Makovsky Plan is to gradually squeeze Israel. He knows it’s too hard to get Israel to surrender everything at once, so he counsels doing it step-by-step, slice-by-slice.

 Here are some of the other “small steps” he has previously recommended:

 — Allow the PA to build in areas that the Oslo accords do not give them the right to build. (Politico, 3-30-15)

 — Admit 100,000 workers from Gaza into Israel every day. (JNS, 7-3-15)

 — “Stop [Jewish] building in 92 percent” of Judea-Samaria, and stop building even in existing communities that are “on the edge of the security barrier.” (Wash. Post, 2-26-16)

 — A U.S. declaration that moving the American embassy did not mean that the U.S. recognizes the Old City of Jerusalem as part of Israel’s capital. (NYTimes, 1-22-17)

 — Immediate restoration of $200-million U.S. aid to the PA. (The Hill, 9-23-18)

 And where will all this lead? What does Makovsky have in mind when he says that the U.S. will “deal with tough policy issues later”?

We know the answer to that because we know the demands that Makovsky and Indyk were making of Israel during the Obama years. They wanted to establish an independent Palestinian Arab state alongside an Israel that would be nine miles wide at its mid-section.

We know that’s where the border will be, because that’s where the Palestinian Arab cities of Tulkarm and Qalqilya are located. They are two of the largest cities under PA rule. There’s no way they will ever revert to being ruled by Israel. Tulkarm and Qalqilya will sit on the western-most edge of Makovsky’s State of Palestine. And only nine miles of Israel will separate them from the Mediterranean Sea.

In the days leading up to the 1967 war, Israeli mothers living in the narrow coastal region kept their children home from school, because they feared that an Arab tank column would cut the country in half, and they didn’t want their children to be trapped on the other side. That’s the kind of precarious fate that will again await Israel if Makovsky’s Gradual Squeeze Plan is ever implemented.

For those who sit on the comfortable banks of the Potomac and pontificate about what Israel should do, it’s all a matter of semantics and clever arguments and theoretical lines drawn on theoretical maps. But for every citizen of Israel, it’s a matter of life and death.

This column appeared in Arutz7, Israel National News.  It, and other columns by me,  Stephen M. Flatow, can be read here.

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

The Trump administration just doesn’t get Gaza

My JNS.ORG column-

The Trump administration just doesn’t get Gaza

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-trump-administration-just-doesnt-get-gaza/

The Trump administration’s conference on the situation in the Gaza Strip this week “focused on the need for the Palestinian Authority to take control over Gaza,” a White House official told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. If that report is accurate, it means that the United States still doesn’t understand the basic problem in Gaza—or how to solve it.

The idea that Hamas is the “bad guy” and the Palestinian Authority is the “good guy” is a fallacy that began with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, and is still the mindset of too many people in Washington.

The attempts to distinguish between the “moderate” P.A. and the “extremist” Hamas always foundered on the reality that the P.A. regards Hamas as its brother, not its enemy. Brothers may quarrel from time to time—they may get into a scuffle now and then, or even try to kill each other—but they remain brothers.

The P.A. leadership promised, as part of Oslo, to disband all terrorist groups, seize their weapons and outlaw them—in short, to put them out of business. But here we are, 25 years later, and Hamas still has active terrorist cells throughout the P.A.-controlled parts of Judea and Samaria.

There’s no doubt that the P.A. has the means to eliminate Hamas in the territories; it has one of the largest per-capita security forces in the world. Yet it has never even outlawed Hamas. It has never made a real effort to capture its members or confiscate its weapons. It has not extradited a single Hamas terrorist to Israel, even though the Oslo agreement obligates it to do so.

Even The New York Times, a longtime cheerleader for the P.A., has occasionally conceded that Hamas and other terrorists roam free in P.A.-run cities. On March 23, 2014, the Times reported that Israeli troops were forced to enter the Jenin refugee camp in pursuit of terrorists because although Jenin is under the “full control” of the Palestinian Authority, “the Palestinian [security forces] did not generally operate in refugee camps.”

When the P.A.’s newspapers, television and radio glorify terrorists as “martyrs” and “heroes,” they don’t talk about only Fatah terrorists. They glorify Hamas murderers, too.

When the P.A. pays salaries to imprisoned terrorists and the families of dead terrorists, they don’t give out the payments only to Fatah members. They pay Hamas murderers and their families, too.

So there’s no reason for surprise that the P.A. boycotted this week’s conference on Gaza in Washington. No matter how hard the State Department crowd wishes it, the P.A. is not going to fight Hamas for control of Gaza. In fact, it’s not going to fight Hamas at all.

The solution to Gaza’s various ills is not to pump more international money into the region. That has been tried for decades, and it hasn’t worked. The solution is regime change. But a change from Hamas to the P.A. —even if it were possible and even if the P.A. were amenable to that— would not represent genuine change. It would mean replacing one corrupt, violent Palestinian dictatorship with another corrupt, violent Palestinian dictatorship.

Not every group of people with a grievance deserves, or is ready for, self-rule. Some have too little experience with the culture of democracy to establish and run a free society; the last thing the world needs is more dictatorships. Some are too violent to live in peace with their neighbors; that is the danger Israel faces.

For years, advocates of Palestinian statehood urged Israel to grant self-rule to the Arabs in Gaza. They claimed that if the Gazans were allowed to rule themselves, they would become peaceful neighbors since surely they wouldn’t want to risk losing their self-rule. It would be an experiment to see if giving them a fully sovereign state could succeed. Yitzhak Rabin took that risk (my family paid a high price for it) and then Ariel Sharon decided to take that risk.

The tens of thousands of rockets fired from Gaza at Israel over the years have demonstrated that the experiment was an abject failure. Gaza proves that the Palestinian Arabs are not yet ready for self-rule. Neither conferences in Washington nor handouts from the international community will change that.

Lessons from the life and death of a Palestinian Arab terrorist

American Jews could have done something about Naif Zaid

A Palestinian terrorist who murdered a yeshiva student was found dead in the Palestinian Authority's embassy in Bulgaria last week. Before we all turn the page and forget the names of both the killer and his victim, it's worthwhile pausing to consider some lessons from this episode.

Naif Zaid ambushed and murdered a young yeshiva student, Eliahu Amedi, in Jerusalem in 1986. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. But it did not take him long to figure out how to manipulate the system. In the spring of 1990, Zaid announced that he was going on a hunger strike. After forty days, the Israeli authorities transferred him to a hospital in Bethlehem.

Being situated in an all-Arab city created an opportunity for Zaid to escape, which he soon did--from the hospital and from Israel. By 1994, Zaid was living in Bulgaria. There he married, fathered three children, and generally enjoyed life as Eliahu Amedi never will.

While Zaid was enjoying his new life in Europe, Amedi's name was forgotten by everyone except his immediate family and friends. And that, sadly, is what happens to almost all victims of Palestinian terror.

But an unusual development brought the story back into the headlines in December 2015. Apparently fearing that Israeli agents were about to capture him, Zaid took shelter in the Palestinian Authority's embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria's capital.

Israel asked the PA to hand him over, in accordance with Annex IV, Article 2, Par.7(f)(1) of the Oslo II agreement that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the PA signed in 1995. That clause specifically obliges the PA to comply with every Israeli request for extradition. But the PA refused, just as it has refused Israel's dozens of other requests for the extradition of terrorists.

For more than two months, the yeshiva student's murderer remained in the PA embassy, eluding justice--and nobody did anything.

Of course, in most instances of Palestinian terrorism, there's not much that American Jews can do. We rely on the Israeli security authorities to pursue the attackers and bring them to justice. We are merely spectators, hoping that the Israelis will catch the bad guys and finding ourselves powerless to do much beyond collect tzedaka for the victim's family.

But the case of Naif Zaid was different. The pursuit of justice left the security realm and entered the political arena. Once the PA refused to hand him over, the question became how to put pressure on the PA to change its mind. And that's where American Jewish protests could have played a role.

There are those in the Jewish world who speak out forcefully when yeshiva students are threatened with being drafted into the Israeli army, or when yeshivas are in danger of receiving less government funding. Why weren't those voices heard in protest against the PA sheltering the murderer of a yeshiva student?

There was so much that could have been done to put pressure on the Bulgarian authorities to intervene.

-There could have been a rally outside the Bulgarian Consulate in New York City.

-A delegation of Jewish leaders could have visited the Bulgarian Embassy in Washington.

-Jewish groups that sponsor tours to Europe could have dropped Bulgaria from their itinerary. (Recall how the Jewish boycott of Mexico in 1975 forced the Mexicans to withdraw their endorsement of Zionism-is-racism.)

And there was so much that could have been done to put pressure on the Palestinian Authority. There could have been a petition to President Obama, urging him to pressure the PA to surrender Naif. Members of Congress could have been mobilized to reassess U.S. aid the PA. Jewish peace activists could have announced that they would cut off contacts with Palestinian leaders until Zaid was surrendered.

The story of Naif Zaid has an unusual ending. One day last week, he was found dead in the PA's embassy. News reports claimed he was involved an unspecified "altercation" in the embassy. The Palestinians are--naturally--accusing Israel of killing him. The truth may never be known, and the names of Zaid and Amedi will soon vanish from the news.

Still, it's only a matter of time before some similar situation arises again, and American Jews will again face the choice between silence and activism. Let's hope they make the right choice.

This post originally appeared on IsraelNationalNews.com.

With the Oslo dream shattered, Israel must do the creative thinking

Every now and then, the editors of Israel's Haaretz newspaper get it right.

An op-ed by Shlomo Avineri, whom many would call a member of Israel's left wing society, succinctly addresses the bottom line of the Palestinian's position regarding Israel.  He writes

Oslo’s sponsors saw the conflict as one between two national movements and believed – as did I – that direct negotiations between Israel and the PLO could find a solution to the territorial and strategic issues that were the cornerstones of the dispute. It wasn’t easy to convince Israelis, even those in the Labor Party, that the other side was a national movement – one that admittedly had terrorist facets but was fundamentally entitled, just like the Zionist movement, to exercise national self-determination.

We were wrong.

The Palestinians don’t think this is a conflict between two national movements. From their perspective, this is a conflict between a single national movement – the Palestinian one – and a colonialist, imperialist entity that is destined to vanish from the world. Therefore, the analogy that appears in Palestinian textbooks is Algeria: not the West Bank as Algeria, but all of Israel as Algeria. And the Israelis will disappear one way or another, just as the French settlers in Algeria did.

Well, that's all good, but his column then veers towards the bogeyman of Israel's politics--the settlements.  He has a proposal for his left wing colleagues, pay people to leave the West Bank, but he then fails to address his own realization that the Palestinians want all of Israel.

Nice try Mr. Aveneri

Read the full column here.

Will Palestinian cult of death destroy hope of peace?

As many others were in the early 1990s, I was optimistic that peace would come to Israelis and Palestinians with the signing of the Oslo Accords. I was woken from my reverie by the attack in which Alisa was murdered. It took several years more for mainstream folks to understand the implications of what the late Israeli Prime Minister personally told my wife and I,

"Yassir Arafat was a terrorist, is a terrorist, will always be a terrorist, and is surrounded by terrorists."

With the so-called "direct negotiations" about to take place between the two sides, the recently made threats by Jibril Rajoub and Ahmed Qurei to renew attacks against Israeli civilians, must thoroughly dampen, if not eliminate, any optimism that this new round of negotiations will have the desired result.

We previously wrote about the naming of a square in a Palestinian city after a mass murderer. They've just done that again. This worship of murderers is sick and I can think of no other society that does it so well. How do you reconcile yourself with people who glorify those who killed your children?

It says on the Jerusalem Post editorial page,

The Israeli government, with mainstream support, has signalled that it will consider the painful concessions necessary for a viable accord – provided that the PA, for the first time, both internalizes Israel’s sovereign legitimacy and emphasizes that legitimacy to its own people, creating the climate for mutual compromise and long-term reconciliation.

If only the Palestinian leadership will meet them half-way.

That's what I think.