SCOTUS hands Terror Victims a win and the PLO and Palestinian Authority a defeat

 The US Supreme Court just restored a measure of justice—
for Ari Fuld and for us all

(June 22, 2025 / JNS)

In a decision that affirms both the power of American law and the dignity of American lives, the United States Supreme Court has ruled that the family of Ari Fuld, a U.S. citizen murdered in a 2018 terrorist stabbing in Israel, may pursue justice in an American courtroom.

In Fuld v. Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Supreme Court on June 20 reinstated the right of American terror victims and their families to sue the perpetrators of attacks committed overseas, so long as those groups deliberately maintain a presence in the United States.

It is a decision that resonates deeply with me. My daughter Alisa, then 20 years old, was murdered in a suicide bombing in 1995 while studying in Israel. Like Ari, she was an American citizen targeted simply for being who she was—Jewish, idealistic, full of life.

To read the entire article at JNS.ORG go here.

Thanks for reading, Stephen M. Flatow

Yoram Hazony - Trump in the Middle East: Note Who Curses America, and Who Blesses It - National Review

Hazony says -

The administration’s foreign policy is a welcome break from the preexisting Washington consensus.

He's right!  Some excerpts-

President Donald Trump has promised that in the Middle East under his presidency, “there are many things that can happen now that would never have happened before.” Two speeches of the last ten days offer dramatic confirmation of the emerging reconfiguration of America’s relationship with Israel and the Middle East under his leadership. 

In a two-hour speech before the Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) last week, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, denounced the British, Dutch, French, and Americans for having conspired, ever since the 1650s, to create a Jewish colonial outpost that would “erase the Palestinians from Palestine.” As Abbas tells it, all this reached a climax on the eve of World War I, when the West realized that it was on the verge of collapse and that the Islamic world was “poised to inherit European civilization.” To put an end to this threat, the Western nations went about carving up the Muslim world so that it would be forever “divided, backward, and engulfed in infighting.” As for the United States, it has been “playing games” of this sort ever since then, importing, for example, the disastrous Arab Spring into Middle East.

More - 

But in the ensuing 30 years of talk, the only major agreements signed have been those the PLO leadership could find a way to fit into its narrative: Agreements such as the 1993 Oslo Accords, which could be portrayed as inflicting a bitter defeat on Israel and the West — and as a step on the road to ultimate triumph.

President Trump, Vice President Pence, and United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley are pioneering an alternative policy, which can be summed up in Haley’s words: “We’re not going to pay to be abused.” If players like the PLO, North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran (hopefully, Turkey gets added to this list soon) want to cultivate a civilizational hatred of America, double-talking while they give aid to global terrorism and conjure diplomatic scandals at the U.N. — well, then they don’t get to be allies. They don’t get funded. They don’t get grants of land, authority, and prestige. Those things will be reserved for actual allies.

For long decades, Washington has crafted policies based on the tacit assumption that America needs the PLO if it is to bring peace to the Middle East. In its effort to “balance” the demands of this extremist organization against Israel’s concerns, American policy inflated the PLO’s importance, and it learned to tolerate and even embrace an organization whose views have always been profoundly anti-Western, not to mention anti-Semitic.

Read the full article - National Review

Sokolow case: Palestinian terrorism verdict shatters long-held myths and illusions

Palestinian terrorism verdict shatters long-held myths and illusions

 

By Stephen M. Flatow/JNS.org

 

The illusion is shattered. When confronted with claims of complicity in terror attacks, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) can no longer lift their hands and say in puzzlement, “Who, me?”

 

The jury in the just-decided terrorism case—Sokolow v. Palestine Liberation Organization, which awarded $218.5 million to 10 American families victimized by Palestinian terrorism in Israel—has said the opposite. “Yes,” the PA and the PLO do bear responsibility for the death, pain, and suffering brought about in a series of terror attacks against innocent civilians a decade ago. The myth of PA and PLO innocence has been shattered, I hope for all time.

 

Some other myths have been shattered, including the myth that suicide bombers are “lunatics”—in the words of Israel’s late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, as he told my wife and I when he visited us in our home a month after Islamic Jihad’s murder of our 20-year old daughter Alisa in April 1995.

 

A lunatic is mentally ill and does not know right from wrong, or cannot appreciate the consequences of his or her actions. The “lunatics” who carried out Palestinian terror attacks didn’t design and manufacture the bomber vests, or stuff a backpack with explosives and then conduct the attack on their own. The bomber vests and backpacks were designed and made by terrorists of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—the last two being the largest groups in the PLO, and the first two aided by the PLO.

 

The men and women who strapped explosives impregnated with ball bearings, nuts, bolts, and screws to their bodies, and shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is greater) as they pushed the detonator, fully appreciated the consequences of their actions—they wanted to kill Israelis. As many as they could, in any location they could find. So what if it was a pizza shop, or a bus, or a university cafeteria? So what if an American citizen or an Arab Israeli got caught in the attack? Who cared? They didn’t, and neither did those who recruited them and then drove them to the target.

 

When the FBI went to Gaza to investigate the murder of my daughter, what cooperation did the PA provide? None. And when the PA had the ability to arrest Alisa’s murderers, what did it do?  Only because it wanted to relieve the pressure America brought to bear, it arrested and then furloughed her killers.

 

And what else has the PA done to combat terrorism in the years since the 1993 Oslo Accords? It refused Israeli requests, required under the Oslo Accords, to turn over to Israel those Palestinians wanted by Israel in connection with terror attacks. It pays terrorists who serve time in Israeli prisons and send a monthly pension payment to the families of so-called martyrs. It honors the murderers of innocent civilians by naming parks and sporting events after them. It turns a blind eye to those who planned and carried out terror attacks from within PA-controlled territory until the construction of the security fence by Israel put an end to them.

 

And what will the court ruling do?

 

First, it will help the Western world to understand that the long-held fiction that the Palestinians are not responsible for their actions must be discarded. He didn’t get many things right about the Middle East, but what Edward Said called the “orientalism” of the West—the treatment of Palestinians as children who did not know better—allowed the PA and PLO to duck from responsibility for terrorist acts carried out under their watch, and worse, with their supervision and/or material support.

 

Second, it should convince the U.S. government that the victims must be allowed to collect their financial awards. If not out of the of the $400 million in U.S. aid money sent annually to the PA, the reparations should come out of other assets of the PA in the U.S. and assist the victims to reach PA money in Europe.

 

Third, hitting the PA hard—in the pocketbook—should force the Palestinian leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, et al., to accept the fact that they cannot continue to pay terrorists sitting in prison or provide stipends to the families of murderers. More importantly, it might force the Palestinians living under their thumbs to say, once and for all time, “no” to the continued sponsorship and glorification of terrorists.

 

While no amount of money will ever bring back the murdered children, fathers, mothers, and loved ones, nor adequately compensate the survivors, the jury’s message was clear: terrorism has a price, and the terrorists and their sponsors must pay for it—not with lip service, but in hard, cold cash.

 

Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in a Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is a candidate on the Religious Zionist slate (www.VoteTorah.org) in the World Zionist Congress elections.

From the New York Sun - Understanding Israel can't be pushed

Well, opening the editorial page of the New York Sun, brought this:
Hope for Talks in Middle East Lies in Recognition That Israel Can Not Be Pushed

Some highlights-

The recent exchange of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit for a thousand Palestinian prisoners in Israeli hands is regarded as a cautiously hopeful sign even by Israeli hawks, as it appears the only possible de-escalation from the absolute collapse of the peace process that was almost implicit in the Palestinian bid for full membership as a state in the United Nations. The Israeli Right was fiercely opposed to Palestinian statehood from 1948 until relatively recently, when it realized that the Palestinians could not be induced to leave territory Israel occupied after the 1967 war; could not be physically expelled, because neither domestic nor international opinion would tolerate such an outrage; and could not be assimilated, both because of natural Arab resistance, and because of the danger of Israel’s ceasing to be a Jewish state and homeland, which has always been its only raison d’être. (There were Israeli bi-nationalists, jolly progressives who wanted to share; Canaanites, i.e. complete secularists; and territorialists who had wispy dreams of settling in Uganda or Ethiopia — but none of them ever had any grasp of reality.)

In 1917, in the desperate days of World War I, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour promised “a Jewish homeland” in what was called, resurrecting Roman terminology, Palestine. In the same declaration, it was assured that this would not compromise the rights of the Muslim and Christian Arabs in the same and adjoining territory. As Britain was selling the same real estate to two different and hostile parties, before it was itself in possession of it, there was never going to be a solution that didn’t divide it in two. Nor has there been.

Apart from Anwar Sadat and the kings of Morocco and a few relatively enlightened people in the Persian Gulf, no Arab leader has really accepted the legitimacy of the Jewish state, despite promises at Oslo and elsewhere, and this was confirmed by Mahmoud Abbas in his address to the U.N. a few weeks ago. Every agreement except the Sinai-Suez Camp David agreement with Sadat (who was rewarded with assassination by the Muslim Brotherhood, now contending with the military for control in Egypt) has been designed to exploit Israel’s desire for peace with promises of what amounted to a truce, in exchange for concessions on the ground by Israel. And a vast swath of world opinion, partly thirsting for Arab oil, has cravenly accepted this protracted Arab confidence trick: land for a truce that is cancelable without notice.

Actually, this is a disservice.  Read the full article and learn something.

Well, that's what I have to say.

Stephen M. Flatow

Alisa kfar darom terrorism

PLO official: Palestine should be free of Jews. So what's the surprise?

YNET is reporting on comments made by the PLO ambassador to the US that Palestine must be free of Jews.  The people need "separation" he says.  And they gripe about apartheid?

I have seen Palestinian Arabs interact with Jews on many levels.  (I'm talking about the average Palestinian in the street, before you think otherwise.)  And the interactions are good.

Elliott Abrams, a former US National Security Council official, said in response that according to such plans, Palestine will be the first to officially prohibit Jews or any other faith since Nazi Germany, which sought a country that was judenrein, or cleansed of Jews.

Before we get worked up, remember, the PLO is headed by, in the words of Yitzhak Rabin, a terrorist, Abu Mazen, who also moonlights as a Holocaust denier.

We should expect nothing less from people trying to have their own state, should we?  Sad, very sad.

Read the full post from YNET.

stephen flatow alisa israel