"Pay to Slay" and Joe Biden

 My latest JNS column asks:

Will Biden tolerate ‘pay for slay?’

Through whatever financial or other pressure is available, we need to force the Palestinian Authority to stop paying terrorists, stop naming schools and streets after terrorists, and stop using their media to portray terrorists as heroes.

Supporters of the Palestinian cause are openly clamoring for the Biden administration to let the Palestinian Authority wriggle out of the ban on U.S. aid over the “pay for slay” policy. Friends of Israel should vigorously oppose these efforts.

Taylor Force

“Pay for slay”—the P.A.’s system of giving financial rewards to imprisoned terrorists and the families of dead terrorists—should not be a partisan issue for Americans. Remember: There was broad bipartisan support for the 2018 legislation known as the Taylor Force Act, which bars U.S. aid to the P.A. until that policy stops.

The vote in the House of Representatives was 256-167 (Republicans had a 238-201 majority at the time). The vote in the Senate (where the Republicans had a 51-47 majority) was 65-32. And many of the “no” votes in both chambers were not meant as a “no” on Taylor Force; they were connected to other segments of the package to which Taylor Force was attached.

Taylor Force, an army veteran and Vanderbilt University graduate student murdered in Jaffa in 2016, was one of the more than 140 Americans who have been killed in Israel by Palestinian Arab terrorists. They were not killed because they were Republicans or Democrats. Every American, regardless of his or her political affiliation, should want to do everything possible to deter Palestinian Arab terrorists

Giving terrorists and their families financial rewards incentivizes terrorism. Forcing the P.A. to stop doing that will take away those incentives. That’s the key—forcing the P.A. to stop. Not coming up with gimmicks and sleight-of-hand maneuvers in order to avoid the Taylor Force restrictions.

The idea of coming up with such a gimmick was promoted in a major New York Times article on Nov. 19. It claimed that P.A. officials are planning to “overhaul” the system of paying terrorists in order to convince the United States to resume sending $500 million in aid annually.

What P.A. officials told the Times is not what they have been telling the folks back home. Palestinian Media Watch reports that “nearly every day since the Times report,” one or more senior P.A. officials have reaffirmed in Arabic that the payments to terrorists will continue.

What’s the gimmick that the P.A.’s American friends are promoting? Acting on “the advice of sympathetic Democrats” and “Washington think tanks,” according to the Times, the P.A. would give out the payments “based on their financial needs instead of how long they are behind bars.”

I’m sure it was just a coincidence that a former Obama administration official who is now with a Washington think tank, David Makovsky, told The Jerusalem Post last week that “the Palestinians would be smart [to adopt] a compromise plan that would allow for a welfare system that would avoid giving money” based on terrorism, but instead would be based on financial needs.

That’s not a “compromise.” It’s not a genuine “welfare system.” It’s a trick. And it’s the most contemptible kind of trick—the kind that is performed openly, right before our eyes, as if we’re all too stupid to realize what they’re doing.

It’s easy enough to imagine how it will proceed. An official of the P.A.’s Ministry of Prisoner Affairs will stamp a piece of paper that says, “You are hereby given X amount of money based on our determination of your financial need.” The amount of money given to each family of a terrorist will be the same as before, only it will come with the piece of paper that —presto!— certifies the money is now being given for “financial need.”

The great irony is that the “peace” activists who are trying to get American money to the P.A. in this fashion are actually undermining peace, not advancing it. The only hope for a real peace is to wean Palestinian Arab society away from its glorification of terrorism. Through whatever financial or other pressure is available, we need to force the P.A. to stop paying terrorists, stop naming schools and streets after terrorists, and stop using their media to portray terrorists as heroes.

The Palestinians need to genuinely recognize that terrorism is morally wrong and expunge their terrorists from their society—just as the Allies compelled the German people, after World War II, to recognize that Nazism was evil and to expunge it from their society. Sticking to the Taylor Force Act is one way to advance that goal. Helping them trick their way around it will only encourage terrorism and prolong the Arab-Israeli conflict.

* * * 

This column and others may be read at JNS.ORG here.

Well, that's what I think.

Stephen M. Flatow

Israel-Palestinian security cooperation. Fact or myth?

Israeli-Palestinian “security cooperation”—myth or reality?

The number of Israelis harmed by terrorists during “cooperation” months was more than twice those harmed in “no cooperation” months.

By Stop The Wall - https://www.flickr.com/photos/stopthewall/8579046337/,
CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91522920

 By 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.”)

The Palestinian Authority announced with great fanfare last week that it is resuming “security cooperation” with Israel. But did anybody even notice it had stopped?

The news media and assorted “experts” are all pointing to the PA’s announcement as a major Palestinian Authority “concession” for which Israel is supposed to be eternally grateful. In fact, already the drums are beating for Israel to “reciprocate” by making some concession of its own.

For those who hadn’t noticed, PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas (now in the 14th year of a 4-year term) declared an end to the “cooperation” six months ago, on May 18, 2020, to protest an Israeli policy decision that he imagined was going to be taken, but never was.

So, I thought it would be interesting to compare the number of Israelis killed or injured in Palestinian Arab terrorist attacks during the past six months of “no cooperation” to the preceding six months of “cooperation.” The statistics are available on the websites of the Israeli Foreign Ministry (mfa.gov.il) and the Israeli Security Services, or Shin Beit (shabak.gov.il).

During these six months without “cooperation,” one Israeli was murdered, and 16 were injured, in Arab terrorist attacks. You can hear all the J Street and Jewish Voices for Peace types crowing, “See? One dead and sixteen injured! Look how bad things got because there was no cooperation!”

Then I checked the numbers for the six months before Abbas’s dramatic announcement—six months when the PA supposedly was cooperating with Israeli security forces to combat terrorism. Well, guess what: One dead, 39 injured.

The number of Israelis harmed by Palestinian Arab terrorists during the “cooperation” months was more than twice the number who were harmed during the “no cooperation” months.

Obviously, these two six-month periods provide only a snapshot of the situation. And it’s not that “security cooperation” has provided Israel with no benefits at all. Occasionally, as part of some internal Arab rivalry, the PA will temporarily detain small numbers of terrorists. And every day a terrorist is behind bars—no matter what the reason—is good.

But let’s be clear: the “cooperation” that the PA undertakes does not even remotely resemble what the Oslo accords require. According to Oslo, the PA security forces are required to disband terrorist groups, seize their weapons, arrest the terrorists, and extradite them to Israel for prosecution.

The PA is more than capable of doing that job. It has one of the largest per-capita police forces in the world. They know the terrain. They know where the weapons depots and safe houses and training sites are. They could do the job if they wanted to. They just don’t want to 

Because as far as the PA is concerned, the various terrorist groups—Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—are their brothers. Occasionally quarrelsome, occasionally rivalrous. But brothers. And the Israelis are their enemies, peace agreement or no peace agreement.

This reality was dramatically demonstrated a few years ago in, of all places, the pages of the New York Times, a newspaper not known for its great sympathy for Israel.

On March 23, 2014, the Times published a news article about Israeli troops entering the PA-ruled area of Jenin in pursuit of terrorists. The lead author was the then-chief of the Times’ Jerusalem bureau, Jodi Rudoren. The troops set out to arrest a terrorist named Hamza Abu El-Hijja, whom an Israeli official said was a “ticking time bomb” with a long record of terrorist attacks who was “in the advanced stages of planning further attacks.” 

Ms. Rudoren paused to explain why the Israelis, and not the PA police, were doing the pursuing. Although Jenin is, as she put it, is under the "full control" of the PA, Israeli officers said “the Palestinian [security forces] did not generally operate in refugee camps.”

“Refugee camps” are notorious hotbeds of terrorist activity. But as far as the PA security forces are concerned, they are the equivalent of “No-Go Zones.” In Europe, that term describes neighborhood where the local population is very hostile to the police, so the police don’t go there. In the PA areas, it means places where there are a lot of people that the PA police don’t want to arrest, so they don’t go there.

When the Israeli forces approached El-Hijja’s house, he opened fire on them. He was assisted by two other terrorists, Omar Abu Zaina and Zain Jabarin. All three were killed in the shoot-out. The Times noted matter-of-factly that Zaina was “a member of Islamic Jihad,” and Jabarin was a member of “the armed wing of Fatah.”

What? The “armed wing of Fatah”? But we are always being told that Fatah—the Yasir Arafat/Mahmoud Abbas faction of the PLO—laid down its arms when they signed the Oslo accords.

And a “member of Islamic Jihad”? How can that be? We are always being told that the Muslim fundamentalists of Islamic Jihad are enemies of the “secular, moderate” Fatah. Yet here we have a trifecta of supposed rivals—El-Hijja, of Hamas; Zaina of Islamic Jihad; and Jabarin, of Fatah—all working closely together in pursuit of their common goal, that is, murdering Jews. And all operating freely in PA territory, while the PA turns a blind eye to their activity.

So, let’s not kid ourselves. “Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation,” as commonly described by the international media, is largely a myth. The only ones genuinely looking out for Israel’s security are the Israelis themselves.

(This column originally appeared on Israel National News)

 

 

 Thomas Friedman lectures about lying

The problem is that the columnist himself seems to disagree with his own words.

Thomas Friedman, The New York Times columnist who built his career on a lie about his pro-Palestinian past, has just authored a column bemoaning the legitimization of lying in American culture. Then, just a few hours later, he publicly urged Democrats around the country to temporarily relocate to Georgia and lie about their intentions in order to vote in the upcoming U.S. Senate runoff races there.

Photo - Charles Haynes

In his Nov. 11 column in the Times, Friedman announced that “the worst legacy of the Trump presidency” is that “lying has been normalized at a scale we’ve never seen before.” According to Friedman, “It is impossible to maintain a free society when leaders and news purveyors feel at liberty to spread lies without sanction.”

Can’t disagree with any of that.

The problem is that Friedman himself seems to disagree with his own words. Later that same day, he was interviewed on CNN. As a “news purveyor,” he is often invited by major television networks to pontificate on the news.

“I hope everybody moves to Georgia, you know, in the next month or two, registers to vote, and votes for these two Democratic senators,” he urged. But Georgia state law specifically prohibits prospective voters from “residing in the state briefly with the intention just to vote and then move away,” the Washington Free Beacon pointed out.

In other words, Friedman was urging Democratic activists to lie about their residency intentions in order to take part in the upcoming Senate runoff elections in Georgia.

What makes Friedman’s behavior all the more remarkable is that his own career is built on a colossal lie—the lie that he was a strong supporter of Israel until Israel’s actions in Lebanon in 1982 supposedly compelled him to become a critic.

Thomas Friedman was an unknown staff reporter for The New York Times when he was assigned to cover the Lebanon War. He rose to fame by writing front-page articles in the Times in which he tried to blame Israel for the killings of Palestinians by Lebanese Christians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

Friedman then turned those articles into a prize-winning book, from Beirut to Jerusalem. There, he portrayed himself as the quintessential “Disillusioned Jew,” the one who allegedly was a passionate supporter of Israel until he witnessed Israel’s aggressive, militarist, barbaric, awful actions in Lebanon. That’s when he opened his eyes. That’s when he saw the light.

But it was all a lie. In 1989, my late colleague, Benyamin Korn, exposed the truth about Thomas Friedman: He had been a harsh public critic of Israel long before he was hired by the Times or went to Lebanon.

Friedman’s political résumé began in 1974, when he was a student at Brandeis University and one of the leaders of a campus organization that was misleadingly named the “Middle East Peace Group.” The group’s recipe for peace was for Israel to bow to the demands of Yasser Arafat.

Who can forget the infamous sight of Arafat speaking at the United Nations in 1974 with his gun holster on his hip? Those were the days when Arafat didn’t even pretend that he was interested in making peace; he openly demanded the destruction of Israel and continually sponsored massacres of Israeli women and children. Anybody remember Ma’alot and Kiryat Shemona?

Friedman and his comrades in the “Peace Group” authored an open letter, which was published in the campus newspaper, The Brandeis Justice, on Nov. 12, 1974, in which they condemned the American Jewish community for criticizing Arafat’s speech.

They warned that Jewish protests against Arafat would “only reinforce Jewish anxiety and contribute to Israel’s further isolation.” They called on Israel to “negotiate with all factions of the Palestinians, including the PLO.” Of course, “negotiate” was a euphemism for setting up a “Palestine” in Israel’s backyard and forcing Israel back to the indefensible nine-miles-wide borders.

All that was eight years—eight years!—before Friedman went to Lebanon. The “Disillusioned Jew” theme of his later reporting and book was a lie.

Thomas Friedman has every right to champion the Palestinian cause. He has every right to campaign for whichever candidates he fancies in Georgia. But he has no right to lie about his own background, to urge others to lie about their residency intentions and then to hypocritically lecture the rest of us about the evils of lying.

* * * * 

This column, and others I have written for JNS.ORG can be seen on-line here.

 Two news articles, seven big Palestinian lies

When you think the Palestinian media cannot sink any lower, it manages to do so

How many really big lies can fit into two articles in the official Palestinian Authority daily newspaper? At least seven, to judge by this year’s Balfour Day outburst from Ramallah.

Balfour Day, November 2, is the anniversary of England’s Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised to help create a “Jewish national home” in Palestine. Palestinian Arabs consider it a day of mourning, and usually mark it by trying to stone Jews to death in Judea-Samaria and elsewhere.

A then-ailing Mahmoud  Abbas reading the newspaper,
Note the anti-Semitic cartoon

Now, if the Palestinian Arabs were truly moderate and peace seeking—as State Department Arabists and Jewish left-wingers are always claiming—they would have no problem with Balfour Day. After all, Balfour did not define the borders of the future Jewish state. The declaration said only that there would be a Jewish “national home” of some size, someday, somewhere in the country. But the existence of a Jewish state of any size is what enrages the Palestinian Arabs—hence the mourning and violence and hysteria.

By hysteria, I am referring to two foaming-at-the-mouth essays which appeared on November 3 in the Palestinian Arab newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida. (All translations courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch.)

Note that Al-Hayat Al-Jadida is not some fringe publication. It is the official newspaper of the Palestinian Authority. It is the authorized voice of the ruling regime of Mahmoud Abbas.

Also note that the articles in question were not written by some unknown, one-shot, un-vetted freelancers. They were written by two of the newspaper’s regular columnists, Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul and Muwaffaq Matar.  The number of insane fabrications that Al-Ghoul and Matar managed to cram into their articles is almost breathtaking.

First, let’s have a look at Al-Ghoul. He started by claiming that the “beginning” of the “theft of Palestine” was “the Campbell-Bannerman conference” of 1907. That conference of leaders of the United Kingdom and prime ministers of some British colonies discussed calling those territories “dominions” instead of “colonies” and debated self-rule in Ireland and India. It had nothing to do with Palestine, which would not come under British rule until more than a decade later.

Lie #2 from Al-Ghoul was his description of the Jewish community in pre-Israel Palestine as a “foreign colonialist body.” Jews, of course, have been living in the country continuously for more than 3,000 years, while the Arabs arrived from the Arabian Peninsula only in the 7th century CE. So, who, exactly, are the real foreigners?

Lie #3 was his claim that the British “planted” the Jewish state “in the land of the Palestinian people.” In other words, that the British created Israel. In reality, the British allowed modest Jewish immigration in the 1920s, and then severely restricted immigration and Jewish land purchases in the 1930s. Anybody remember the notorious White Paper of 1939?

All the while, the British authorities allowed unchecked illegal Arab immigration into Palestine. And in 1948, British officers led the Arab invasion of the newborn state of Israel and British weapons filled the Arab armies’ arsenals.

Al-Ghoul’s fourth big lie was the one which attracted the most attention last week, because it was so bizarre that it has not even appeared previously in the usual Arab propaganda outlets. The reason that the British “created” Israel, he wrote, was that Europeans wanted to “settle historical accounts with the Arabs and Muslims in response to the defeats of the Crusaders.”

For the record, those Muslim defeats of the Crusaders took place in late 1200s and early 1300s. In other words, about 700 years before the establishment of Israel.  After seven centuries, how many Englishmen do you suppose could even name the leaders, years, or locations of the Crusades, much less care enough about them to want to avenge them?

Now we turn to Matar, for Lie #5: To find the truth about the historical background to the conflict, he declares, one needs to read Mahmoud Abbas’s book on “The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism.” That’s where Abbas claims that the Zionist movement collaborated with the Nazis to kill Jews, so that it could gain sympathy after the war.

Lie #6 reeks of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. According to Matar, “Zionism has control over tools of leadership, money, communications, security, and intelligence in large states and world powers.”

And, finally, we have Lie #7, which both Al-Ghoul and Matar trotted out: the weird claim that “the believers of the Jewish religion” are peace-loving anti-Zionists who have been “exploited” as “pawns” by the evil Zionist movement. We all recall, with horror, how Yasir Arafat used to promote this argument by holding meetings with the leader of the tiny fanatical anti-Zionist “Neturei Karta” sect. Arafat would declare that Neturei Karta was the real representative of Judaism. He couldn’t understand why the world refused to take his insane claim seriously.

Reasonable, rational people don’t take any of these seven big lies seriously. Yet even while everyone acknowledges that these are all insane fantasies and fabrications, the international community continues to demand that Israel agree to the establishment, in its back yard, of a sovereign Palestinian state headed by these delusional hate-mongers. That is the real problem.

(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.”)

Archaeology is the Palestinians' most dangerous enemy

Palestinians’ most dangerous enemy is … archaeology

 The mikvah was the latest in a series of discoveries in Israel during the past year, each of which contradicted the Arab propaganda narrative.

 

(October 6, 2020 / JNS) Pundits will tell you that the most dangerous enemies of the Palestinian Arab cause are the Gulf kingdoms that have decided to recognize Israel, or the European countries that are moving their embassies to Jerusalem, or the American politicians who refuse to keep underwriting the Palestinian Authority’s debts.

I disagree. I say that the Palestinians’ most formidable foe is … archaeology. 

Excavated mikvah at bottom of photo

A 2,000-years-old mikvah (ritual bath) was recently uncovered in the Lower Galilee. Most people probably would never have heard about the discovery if not for the dramatic photos of the entire structure being carried by truck to a nearby kibbutz for preservation.

 

The remarkable sight of a truck-borne mikvah, however, also makes one pause and reflect on the remarkable implications of the archeological find.

 It means that 2,000 years ago, the residents of the Lower Galilee were practicing the exact same religious rituals that Orthodox Jews throughout the world practice today. Those Galileans, in other words, were Jews. They weren’t “Palestinians.” The word “Palestine” had not yet been invented. They weren’t Arabs or Muslims—the invasion of the Land of Israel by Muslim fundamentalists from the Arabian Peninsula was still 600 years in the future.

 The news of the ancient mikvah must have been quite a disappointment to Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas. On Sept. 25, he told the U.N. General Assembly: “The Palestinian people have been present in their homeland, Palestine, the land of their ancestors, for over 6,000 years.”

 Those meddling archaeologists and their discoveries keep getting in the way of Palestinian propaganda!

The airborne mikvah ready to travel

 To make matters worse for Abbas, the directors of the excavation were Walid Atrash and Abd Elghani Ibrahim. You can tell by their names that they are not exactlyodox Jews. The P.A. will have a hard time getting anybody to believe that Atrash and Ibrahim are agents of a Zionist conspiracy.

 The mikvah discovery was just the latest in a series of archaeological finds in Israel during the past year, each of which contradicted the Palestinian Arab propaganda narrative.

 In the Givati Parking Lot excavation in Jerusalem, archaeologists discovered Hebrew-language inscriptions dating back 2,600 years. One was a stone seal with the words “belonging to Ikkar son of Matanyahu.” The other was a clay seal impression that read “belonging to Nathan-Melech, servant of the king.” They weren’t in Arabic. And the names weren’t Yasser or Mahmoud.

 Elsewhere in Jerusalem, archaeologists uncovered a 2,000-year-old paved road that was used by Jews who made the annual pilgrimage to the capital at the time of the festivals of Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot. It wasn’t used by Arabs, or Muslims or “Palestinians”—because there weren’t any of them around in those days.

 Meanwhile, excavators from the University of North Carolina discovered two stunning mosaics at the site of a 1,600-year-old synagogue near Huqoq in northern Israel. One depicts a scene from the exodus of the Jews from ancient Egypt. The other shows images based on verses in the Torah’s book of Daniel.

 Note that the mosaics do not show scenes from the Koran. There is nothing Arabic of Islamic or “Palestinian” about them. They are Jewish, they are situated in Israel, and they are 1,600 years old.

 Every new archaeological discovery about the ancient Jews constitutes another stick in the spokes of the wheels of the Palestinian Arab propaganda machine. Every physical fact in the soil of the country shatters the P.A.’s lies. Every stone or seal or shard of pottery reminds us who are the real indigenous people of the Land of Israel.

 

 

 

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. His book, “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror,” is now available on Kindle.