Why Polls on a Palestinian State are a Mirage

Why Polls on a Palestinian State are a Mirage

My Jewish Press Column

http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/why-polls-on-a-palestinian-state-are-a-mirage/2018/02/05/

How can it be that despite the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) support for terrorism, violations of the Oslo Accords and non-stop anti-Israel incitement, so many Israelis seem to be in favor of establishing a Palestinian state next door? Could it be that the answer is found in the asking?

Just last week, newspaper headlines announced that according to a new poll, 47 percent of Israeli Jews still support Palestinian statehood. The poll was carried out by the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research, at Tel Aviv University.

But as with most news about Israel, you need to dig behind the headlines to find out the real story. In this case, the real story is the wording that the Steinmetz Center used. The question which got that 47 percent figure was loaded with false assumptions and completely unrealistic expectations. In other words, the poll offered a fantasy.

The Steinmetz Center asked respondents if they supported a “two-state solution” that would include:

1. It would be a “permanent settlement.” In reality, of course, nobody can guarantee that any settlement would be “permanent.” The Palestinian leader who signs an agreement could be overthrown the next day. Arab leaders are constantly being ousted and replaced by arch-rivals.
2. The agreement would include “demilitarization of the Palestinian state.” This, despite the fact that every Palestinian leader has rejected the idea of demilitarization. Even if they signed an agreement saying it would be demilitarized, what’s the likelihood they would abide by that? If a “demilitarized” Palestinian state started importing tanks that it claimed were needed for self-defense, Israel would face international condemnation and sanctions if it tried to intervene.
3. There would be “family unification in Israel of 100,000 Palestinian refugees.” Notice the use of the sympathetic term “family unification.” What cruel person would oppose unifying families? More important, the PA’s position has always been that millions of Palestinian “refugees”—not a mere 100,000—must be allowed to settle in Israel. The 100,000 figure is an illusion that Jewish supporters of the Palestinians trot out to try to sell their imaginary deal.
4. “The Palestinian state will fight terror against Israelis.” What a joke. The heart and soul of the Oslo Accords was that the PA would stamp out terrorist groups. Yet here we are, 25 years later, and the PA has never disarmed or outlawed any of the terrorist groups, never extradited any terrorists to Israel, never even expelled terror factions from the PLO. But now, when they have a state, they will suddenly “fight terror?”

So there you have it: The “Palestinian state” that 47 percent of Israeli Jews would favor is a creature of the Steinmetz Center’s imagination. A permanently peaceful, totally demilitarized, terror-fighting Palestinian state that won’t insist on flooding Israel with “refugees.” Who wouldn’t want such a neighbor? Frankly, I’m surprised only 47 percent of Israeli Jews voiced their support.

It’s not hard to understand why advocates of the Palestinian cause are so enamored of the Steinmetz Center. The center’s website reports that its polls of Israeli public opinion are undertaken “with funding from the European Union and the Netherlands Representative Office in Ramallah.” I guess the EU and the Dutch government, both of which are passionately pro-Palestinian, see the center’s work as helpful to the Palestinian cause.

You can bet the EU and the Dutch would be mighty unhappy if the Steinmetz Center asked questions that included factual statements about Palestinian statehood. How about questions such as these:

1. If a Palestinian state is established, Israel will be nine miles wide at its midsection. Is that a risk you are willing to take?
2. If a Palestinian state is established, a terrorist with a shoulder-fired missile, standing inside the borders of “Palestine,” will be able to shoot down a plane taking off from Ben Gurion Airport. Do you believe the PA can be relied upon to stop such attacks?
3. The PA has never honored its Oslo obligations to disarm our outlaw terrorist groups. Do you believe that a Palestinian state would take those actions?

Any chance of the Steinmetz Center ever asking such questions? I’m not holding my breath, and you shouldn’t either.

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Well, that's what I think.  Feel free to share.

Stephen M. Flatow

Group formed to support UK victims of terrorist attacks

Survivors Against Terror launched.

Who does a terror victim turn to to give voice to their dead child, parent, sibling? Unfortunately, sympathy abounds but it doesn't get you action.

In Great Britain, a new organization has been formed, Survivors Against Terror, that aims to be the voice of British victims of terror.

As reported by the London-based The Independent:

Survivors of terrorist atrocities committed on British soil and elsewhere will launch a new group to lobby the Government on counter-terror policies and improved support for victims.

The Survivors Against Terror group, which is being founded by survivors and bereaved relatives of victims of Islamist bombings, IRA attacks and far-right extremist murders, has urged others to join as it begins on Monday.

The group aims to campaign for more effective policies to combat terror and identify gaps in support for victims and the bereaved, as well as help the public tackle hate speech and the terror threat.

Good for them!

Read the full article here. 

The Shiva Call

The Shiva Call

http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/the-shiva-call/2018/01/28/

I got into Ben Yishai’s car outside my Jerusalem hotel with butterflies in my stomach. We were headed north to make a shiva call in the Shomron. A few days earlier, a terrorist attack took the life of 35-year-old Rabbi Raziel Shevach. Twenty-two bullets punctured his car as he drove on Route 60 to his home in the community of Havat Gilad.  Before he lost consciousness Rabbi Shevach called his wife and told her to call an ambulance. He died in that ambulance on the drive to the hospital.

On the way, Ben Yishai pulled off the road so we could look down on Nablus, the site of biblical Shechem. I had never seen it before. It’s a large city, with prominent buildings, soccer pitches, a sprawling UN facility, and Joseph’s Tomb.

Joseph’s Tomb is frequently in the news. Local Palestinian Arabs have tried to burn it down several times. They painted it green to turn it into a mosque, but it’s white once again. It’s been the site of bloodshed over the years. Rabbi Hillel Lieberman was murdered there as he tried to rescue Torah scrolls from a fire after control of the city had been turned over to the PA. And IDF soldiers lost their lives when their commanders didn’t act fast enough to come to their aid when they came under fire from terrorists.

After recent declarations by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, it’s hard to believe he once condemned an attack on Joseph’s Tomb, saying it “violate[d] law and order, and…distort[ed] our culture, our morals and our religion.” Apparently that statement was not taken to heart by his constituents; over the past two years there have been many attacks on the site and on worshipers – and just last week security personnel discovered an explosive device that had been wired for remote detonation right outside the tomb as masses of people would be arriving to pray there.

As you look down on the southern part of the city, you notice a change in the architecture and layout. Suddenly, white multi-storied buildings give way to an area of low structures seemingly packed together like sardines in a can. What you are looking at is the Balata refugee camp. I cannot answer the question why, 20 years after control of the city was given to the Palestinians, Balata’s residents, some 30,000 of them, continue to live in the camp.

Back in the car we continued on to Rabbi Shevach’s community of Havat Gilad, which is called an “outpost” because it’s not recognized as a settlement by the government that sits one hour away in Jerusalem. Outside the shiva house, a family friend explained to me that because it is built on private land bought many years ago by a businessman in memory of another terror victim, its status is in limbo.

Rabbi Raziel Shevach HY"D and his family.
Photo courtesy Shevach family

Since it’s an outpost, the community of 40 families with 130 children is not directly connected to Israel’s electric grid. Don’t misunderstand; they have electricity in Havat Gilad. But imagine a long extension cord running from Yitzhar, a settlement about two miles away, to Havat Gilad. That’s how the residents get their electricity.

However, that will now change according to Prime Minister Netanyahu, who ordered the Defense Ministry to connect the community to Israel’s national electricity grid. Said the rabbi’s widow in response, “It’s a joke that you’re trying to give us electricity when there is an entire village that needs to be legalized. I want to know that in 10 years’ time they will not move my husband’s grave because we waited too long [to legalize it].” I couldn’t laugh.

The community had no cemetery until the residents, at the request of Rabbi Shevach’s family, leveled a hill to create one. It’s not a pretty site, but neither is Havat Gilad after a rain.

The ground outside the shiva house was muddy, and the rugs that had been put down under a quickly erected blue plastic tarp to protect visitors from the sun sank into the mud.

The concrete patio in front of the house had muddy puddles and some young girls did an admirable job using a squeegee broom to move water into a drainage pit. It seems they were experienced at it.

An hour after the end of shiva, all the chairs were neatly stacked, the water and food pots and pans, were cleaned and removed. If you didn’t know that many hundreds of people had gone through the front door of the house over the preceding week, you could not tell from the way things looked now.

Survived by his widow, Yael, and six orphans – Renana, 10, Naomi, 8, Miriam, 6, Malka, 5, Ovadia, 3, and Benayahu, 10 months – Raziel Shevach was an incongruous man. He always dressed in a black suit, I was told, but wore a large white knitted kippah. He was a quiet man with a perpetual smile on his face who possessed many talents. He was a student, a teacher, the community rabbi, a mohel whose fees were turned over to the community children, a shochet, an emergency first-responder, and, to hear his neighbors talk of him, one of Hashem’s gifts to His people.

Rav Shevach’s senseless murder will not change anything for Palestinian Arabs, who praised it, other than lead to more death; the terrorist who murdered him has already been found and, in the IDF’s lexicon, “neutralized.” The residents of the Balata refugee camp will continue to be “refugees” under the thumb of the PA with the help of the United Nations.

We can hope the government recognizes Havat Gilad as a legal community, but as Kfar Darom and all the communities of Gaza were uprooted, including their graves, that does not guarantee anything. So you return to Jerusalem, you thank Ben Yishai for the ride, and you put a big smile on your face as you hug and hold tight your Israeli grandchildren, just as Raziel Shevach had held his children a week earlier.

May the memory of Rabbi Raziel Shevach be a blessing and may God avenge his blood.

Two vice presidential visits to Israel: what a difference!

Two vice presidential visits to Israel: what a difference!

By Stephen M. Flatow 

https://www.jns.org/opinion/two-vice-presidential-visits-to-israel-what-a-difference/

 

Anybody who watched Vice President Mike Pence's address to the Knesset had to be deeply impressed by his heartfelt solidarity with Israel. His repeated pledges of support for the Jewish state were authentic and unwavering.

On Nov. 10, 2016 Vice President Joe Biden , left,meets with then Vice President-elect Mike Pence at the White House. Credit Office of the Vice President of the United States.

Unlike the previous president, who seemed to think the Jews took an interest in Eretz Yisrael only because of the Holocaust, Pence did not shy away from affirming the Jewish people's ancient ties to the land of Israel.

 "It was the faith of the Jewish people that gathered the scattered fragments of a people and made them whole again, that took the language of the Bible and the landscape of the Psalms and made them live again," Pence said. "And it was faith that rebuilt the ruins of Jerusalem and made them strong again. The miracle of Israel is an inspiration to the world. And the United States of America is proud to stand with Israel and her people, as allies and cherished friends."

Watching Pence's address, I could not help but recall the very different actions of the last vice president who visited Israel.

Joe Biden visited Israel in March 2010. Almost exactly at the moment Biden was speaking at a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, "somebody" leaked to the press that the Israeli government supposedly had just announced plans to build 1,600 Jewish homes in "occupied East Jerusalem."

In fact, it was not some new plan, but an unexceptional housing construction project that had been slowly winding its way through the Israeli bureaucracy for years. The government did not make some grand "announcement" at the moment of Biden's visit; the old plan just happened to advance slightly through the normal bureaucratic procedures.

The plan was not for 1,600 "homes," which sounds as if Israel was going to build 1,600 separate houses. It was for 1,600 apartments in apartment buildings, meaning that it would take up less than one-tenth of the land that houses would require. In any event, nobody would be displaced by the new apartments; they were in Ramat Shlomo, an existing Jewish neighborhood in Israel's capital of Jerusalem.

But of course, the Obama-Biden administration, unlike the current U.S. government, did not recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. So, even apartments in the uncontroversial Ramat Shlomo neighborhood were suddenly branded "illegal Israeli settlements."

Time magazine declared that Israel had "publicly humiliated" Biden. An article in The Atlantic was headlined "Israel Humiliates Joe Biden." And so it went, a carefully choreographed "crisis" that sure sounded a lot like the infamous "echo chamber" which presidential aide Ben Rhodes later boasted about creating to promote the Iran deal. We may never know who leaked the Jerusalem "news" to the press, but I have my suspicions.

The only actual humiliation that took place was when Biden forced Israel to publicly apologize, even though it had done nothing wrong. The ugly episode would, of course, be followed by many other instances in which the president, vice president, secretary of state or other Obama administration officials chastised Israel or leaked anti-Israel accusations to the press.

Friends of Israel have not yet forgotten Biden's deeply disturbing decision to honor J Street by addressing its national conference in 2016. Legitimizing a group whose only purpose is to undermine Israel's positions was bad enough. But in his address, Biden outrageously accused Israel of being the obstacle to peace, because of what he called "the steady and systematic expansion of settlements."

Yes, that was the accusation made by the vice president whose administration had successfully pressured Israel into freezing Jewish housing construction for 10 months, in exchange for an unfulfilled U.S. promise that the Palestinians would resume negotiations.

Now contrast that vice president with his loquacious successor. "We stand with Israel because your cause is our cause, your values are our values, and your fight is our fight," Mike Pence said in the Knesset. "We stand with Israel because we believe in right over wrong, in good over evil, and in liberty over tyranny. We stand with Israel because that's what Americans have always done, and so has it been since my country's earliest days."

He might have added "except between 2008 and 2016" to that last sentence, however. The sad truth is that "standing with Israel" was not the policy of the Obama-Biden administration. But it is now, and that's what matters most.

Richard Kemp - We must end this appeasement and ban Hezbollah

Col. Richard Kemp makes a logical argument as to why "We must end this appeasement and ban Hezbollah"

Per Kemp- 

"Hezbollah is the most powerful terrorist organisation in the world. Yet Britain has proscribed only part of it: its military wing. This Thursday the MP Joan Ryan will lead a parliamentary debate aimed at designating the whole organisation, as the US, Canada and the Netherlands already do. Her chances are slim. The film Darkest Hour has reminded us of British ministers’ penchant for appeasement and, like Churchill, that is what she’s up against."

What's the problem with Hezbollah?

"Hezbollah, the creation of Iran, emerged onto the world stage in Beirut in 1983, killing 241 US Marines and 58 French paratroopers in the most devastating terrorist attack before 9/11. Since then it has attacked in Latin America, Europe and the Middle East and planned strikes from Cyprus to Singapore. Last summer US authorities charged two Hezbollah terrorists with planning attacks in New York and Panama. Hezbollah is fighting to keep Assad in power in Syria and maintains an arsenal of 100,000 rockets in Lebanon, pointed at Israel."

You can read the full article by clicking on the above link.