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.”

Rescuing Biden from Afghanistan

 Rescuing Biden from Afghanistan

The think-tank crowd and Jewish former officials of the State Department are desperately trying to undercut the notion that the U.S. debacle demonstrates American unreliability where Israel is concerned.

 (August 30, 2021 / JNS) The obvious lesson for Israel from America’s abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban is that it can’t count on the U.S. to protect it from the consequences of ceding more territory.

Sgt. Nicole Gee, killed in Kabul

 This reality, however, is a disaster for those who have been banking on the idea of offering “American security guarantees” to facilitate additional Israeli withdrawals. It explains the recent flurry of statements from the think-tank crowd and Jewish former officials of the State Department trying to undercut the notion that the Afghanistan mess demonstrates U.S. unreliability.

 Writing in The Hill on the eve of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s arrival in Washington, ex-State Department “peace processor” David Makovsky urged Bennett to publicly express “confidence that the U.S. is a steadfast ally” of Israel. That, Makovsky asserted, is needed as a “rebuke to the new narrative”—coming out of Afghanistan—“that the U.S. has given up fighting extremism.”

 Meanwhile, Washington think-tanker Lucy Kurtzer-Ellenbogen told The New York Times: “A lot of the criticism about Afghanistan is that it’s an abandonment of traditional U.S. allies. [Bennett’s meeting with President Biden] was an opportunity to sit with a longstanding, steadfast ally and say this is still a focus and we will work side by side.”

 Two other failed “peace processors” weighed in with strikingly similar advice. Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer told The Forward that the events in Afghanistan “change nothing” concerning America’s reliability and Israel. “I don’t think [Afghanistan] will impact the [Bennett-Biden] meeting at all,” he said, claiming that “the American people are very happy” with Biden’s actions in Afghanistan.

 Kurtzer’s colleague, Aaron Miller, writing on CNN.com, urged Bennett to “be supportive rather than demanding” with Biden, by “strengthening the Palestinian Authority” (meaning, making more concessions to the P.A.) and “taking steps to avoid provocation of the Palestinians in Jerusalem” (meaning, banning Jews from living in some parts of the city).

 What these commentators have in common (aside from Makovsky and Kurtzer-Ellenbogen oddly using the same language) is that they are all trying to achieve the same goal: to rescue Biden’s image from the rubble of Afghanistan, lest Israelis derive the obvious lessons from that debacle.

 And there’s a specific reason they are so anxious to do that.

 Makovsky, Kurtzer, Miller and Kurtzer-Ellenbogen all advocate creating a Palestinian state in Israel’s back yard. That would reduce Israel to just nine miles wide and leave its security dependent on the good graces of the P.A. But they know that most Israelis think the statehood proposal is too risky. So Makovsky et al think they can sugarcoat the pill by offering American “security guarantees.”

 For years, pro-Palestinian pundits and State Department officials have been floating various versions of this scheme. They speak of stationing American or multinational forces along Israel’s border or setting up American-manned “early warning” posts.

 Occasionally, they have pushed for a U.S.-Israel mutual-defense treaty. Perhaps they could model it on the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty that the U.S. signed with South Vietnam.

 The U.S. abandonment of Afghanistan is a disaster for Makovsky and his colleagues, because it exposes the fragility of America’s overseas commitments. It reminds Israelis that, in the end, no U.S. president can “guarantee” something that one of his future successors might not uphold. The ex-peace processors are desperate to get that Afghanistan lesson out of the limelight as quickly as possible.

 But carefully orchestrated soundbites will not suffice to pull the wool over the Israeli public’s eyes, because Israelis have long memories.

 The Israelis remember how they withdrew from the Sinai after the 1956 war in exchange for a U.S. guarantee of freedom of passage in the Straits of Tiran. When Egypt closed the straits on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War, the Johnson administration suddenly couldn’t remember the promise that the Eisenhower administration had made.

 They remember how the Nixon administration pressured Israel to accept a premature ceasefire in the 1970 War of Attrition, in exchange for a U.S. promise to stop Egypt from moving missiles close to the Suez Canal. But when the Egyptians went ahead and moved their missiles forward, President Nixon didn’t honor that promise. Israel paid a heavy price when those missiles were deployed in the Yom Kippur War three years later.

 There have been American technicians stationed in the Sinai Desert since 1975. That was how former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger got the Israelis to give up strategically vital mountain passes and oil fields there. In fact, ex-Ambassador Martin Indyk—Makovsky was his right-hand man—has just written a book glorifying that Kissinger mission.

 Indyk obviously sees the involvement of Americans on the ground as a useful way to get Israelis to take extreme risks, then and now. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that those Americans in the Sinai have never been tested. You can bet they would be on the first plane out if a new Egyptian regime sent its tanks into the Sinai.

 Afghanistan is another vivid, tragic illustration of the fact that, in the end, Israel is on its own. And Israelis can see that with their own eyes in the scenes of desperate Afghans clinging to the wheels of American planes departing from Kabul. That’s an image that’s hard to erase.

 Stephen M. Flatow is 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.”

Joe Biden supports the "Occupation"

 

Biden supports the "occupation"

By Stephen M. Flatow, Israel National News

 

The Biden administration has announced that it supports “The Occupation.”

 No, not that “occupation,” it’s the British-American occupation of territory which belongs to the nation of Mauritius.

 Yes, the same Biden administration that opposes Israel’s “occupation” of Judea-Samaria and that demands creation of a Palestinian Arab state there, has now publicly declared its support for the colonialist, imperialist, and possibly racist occupation by Britain of islands belonging to the Indian Ocean country of Mauritius.

Chagos Archipelago

 It’s an occupation in which the United States is complicit because the British allow the U.S. to maintain a military base there. So, since the U.S. benefits from this particular occupation, suddenly all those high-sounding principles that our State Department regularly hurls as accusations against Israel— “self-determination,” “illegal occupation” and all the rest—are out the window. 

 And guess who’s going along with this British-American Occupation? That’s right—all the folks who rail about “colonialism,” “imperialism,” “racism” and “occupation” when it comes to Israel. 

 Bernie Sanders. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. J Street. Ben & Jerry’s. Not a word from any of them about The Occupation—that is, when a Democratic administration is the party to blame. They’re only interested when they can blame Israel.

 The name “Mauritius” is familiar to those who know the history of England’s attempts to keep Jews out of the Land of Israel. In 1940, some 1,600 Jews whom the British caught trying to enter the ancient Jewish homeland were deported to Mauritius, which is 1,200 miles off the southeastern coast of Africa.

 Mauritius was just one of the many small countries around the world that British colonialists illegally occupied and exploited for centuries. The British authorities chose that remote island for the Jewish deportees in the hope that the world would forget about them. The fact that Mauritius is so remote has no doubt contributed to the ability of the current British and American governments to keep their ongoing Occupation out of sight. 

 But no longer. A series of recent diplomatic exchanges and little-publicized United Nations actions has shed light on the whole sordid story of the Occupied Mauritian Territory and its hypocritical enablers.

French racist colonialists invaded and occupied Mauritius in 1715. British racist imperialists conquered it in 1810. The newly acquired territory included a series of islands called the Chagos Archipelago.

 In 1966, the British allowed the United States to build a military base there. But the world was changing, the British empire was crumbling, and in 1968 London granted Mauritius its independence.

 But the Brits kept the Chagos Archipelago. Not that they ever asked the indigenous inhabitants what they wanted. “Self-determination” is only for Palestinian Arabs. The black and brown residents of the Chagos Archipelago were not only ignored, but persecuted. Between 1968 and 1973, the British violently expelled all 1,500 of the native Chagossians. 

 According to documents revealed in a lawsuit by one of those deportees, the U.S. and the United Kingdom agreed at the time that it would be “awkward” if the expulsions became known, so they suppressed all publicity about it. In the pre-internet age, colonialists got away with a lot of stuff like that.

 In 2019, the United Nations General Assembly voted, 116 to 6, that Britain had to leave the Chagos Archipelago within six months. The British ignored the UN resolution. Can you imagine how the international community—including Britain!— would respond if Israel ignored some six-month deadline set by the United Nations?

 The Washington Post this week pressed the Biden administration to explain its position. The State Department spokesman responded that the U.S. “unequivocally supports UK sovereignty” in the Occupied Mauritian Territory. He said: “The specific arrangement involving the facilities on Diego Garcia is grounded in the uniquely close and active defense and security partnership between the United States and the UK.”

 Oh, I see. If an Occupation is useful to the Biden administration, then it’s perfectly fine. If nobody is talking about the Occupied Mauritian Territory in trendy Manhattan cocktail parties or on MSNBC, then J Street stays silent, and Ben & Jerry’s can continue selling its ice cream to the personnel in that Occupation Military Base. 

 Nobody is demanding a “right of return” for Chagossians to go back to their archipelago. Nobody claims that the British and American governments are in danger of “losing their souls” because of their Occupation of other people’s land. Nobody is calling for boycotts, or divestments, or sanctions against the Occupation Regime. Nobody is criticizing the American military “settlement” in Chagossian territory. 

 File this one under “H” for hypocrisy. There could be no more blatant example.

 Stephen M. Flatow is 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 a member of the board of Nishmat and author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.”

 

Abba Eban and the "Auschwitz Borders"

 What exactly are ‘Auschwitz borders’?

 Longtime Israeli statesman Abba Eban made no bones about what would happen if Arab forces overran the nine-mile-wide coastal plain he was referring to.

 By Stephen M. Flatow

 (August 17, 2021 / JNS) Politicians and pundits sometimes invoke the term “Auschwitz borders,” but all too often, they completely misunderstand the meaning of the term.

 Consider Professor Shaul Magid of Dartmouth College. Writing this week in 972, an extreme-left online Israeli magazine, he complains about what he calls “Holocaust-centrism” and “Holocaust messianism.”

 He continues: “This worldview led Israeli politicians as disparate as Abba Eban and Yitzhak Shamir to assert that Israel’s borders are ‘the borders of Auschwitz.’ The utter incoherence of such a claim—that a sovereign state with a modern military is comparable to disempowered masses rotting in a concentration camp—is not only grotesque but a sign of deep collective failure.”

 Wrong, wrong and wrong again. 

In a letter to the editor that was published in The Jerusalem Post on Aug. 13, 1993, Eban explained that the phrase “Auschwitz lines” originated in the famous speech that he delivered at the United Nations on June 19, 1967.

 Less than a week had passed since the Six-Day War, and the Soviet representative in the United Nations was already demanding that Israel retreat to the narrow borders that had prevailed before the war.

 Eban told the world body that going back to the old borders was “totally unacceptable.” He pointed out that during the conflict, Israel on its eastern front was faced by “the mobilized forces of Jordan, with their artillery and mortars trained on Israel’s population centers in Jerusalem and along the vulnerable narrow coastal plain.”

 That coastal plain was just nine miles wide—narrower than Washington, D.C., or the Bronx. Eban made no bones about what would happen if the Arab forces overran that narrow stretch.

He called it “the approaching stage of genocide.” He recalled that with the Arab armies massing on its borders and blockading its waterways, Israel was “hemmed in by hostile armies ready to strike, affronted and beset by a flagrant act of war, bombarded day and night by predictions of her approaching extinction.”

 Eban did not hesitate to invoke memories of the Holocaust: “June 1967 was to be the month of decision,” he declared. “The ‘final solution’ was at hand.”

 He reminded the United Nations that the population of Israel was “the remnant of millions, who, in living memory, had been wiped out by a dictatorship more powerful, though scarcely more malicious, than [Gamal Abdel] Nasser’s Egypt.”

 And more. Eban compared Israel’s self-defense action to “the uprising of our battered remnants in the Warsaw Ghetto,” to “the expulsion of Hitler’s bombers from the British skies” and to “the protection of Stalingrad against the Nazi hordes.”

 Eban did not actually mention Auschwitz anywhere in that speech. But he obviously had the Holocaust on his mind then, and later— because in that 1993 letter to the Jerusalem Post, recalling how the term “Auschwitz lines” began, he wrote that in response to the Soviet delegate’s advice to retreat, “I said that a people that has suffered the agonies of Auschwitz is not likely to take such suicidal advice.”

 Eban added, in his letter to the Post, that “a German correspondent once ascribed a similar expression to me.”

 So, the editor of The Jerusalem Post then added an explanatory note: In an interview with the German newspaper Der Spiegel on Nov. 5, 1969, Eban had said, “We have openly said that the map will never again be the same as on June 4, 1967. … The June map is for us equivalent to insecurity and danger. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz.”

 So, Professor Magid got it all wrong. Eban was not saying that “a sovereign state with a modern military is comparable to disempowered masses rotting in a concentration camp” (as Magid put it). Eban wasn’t an idiot. He understood the difference between the State of Israel and the death camp of Auschwitz.

 What Eban was saying, obviously and repeatedly, is that borders that are nine miles wide are so incredibly vulnerable that Israel would again be in extreme jeopardy. With advanced weapons, the Arab forces attacking that narrow region would be able to inflict severe damage and casualties on the Jewish state. Israel could find itself on the verge of destruction—the equivalent, for the Jewish people, of a second Auschwitz

.Obviously, the Arab armies in 1967 would have killed every Jew they could. That’s why Eban called their approaching attack “the approaching stage of genocide.” Not literally Auschwitz; not gas chambers and crematoria. But, once again, enormous numbers of dead Jews.

 Eban’s position was neither “grotesque” nor “a sign of deep collective failure,” as Magid puts it. It was a realistic assessment of the dangers that Israel faced when it was just nine miles wide.

The only “collective failure” I can see is that of some of our professors and other intellectuals to appreciate the dangers Israel still faces. It’s their attempts to belittle and mock that very real danger, which is grotesque.

 Stephen M. Flatow is 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 a member of the board of Nishmat and the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.”