Saturday, January 31, 2009

Tackling a Fallacy in Gaza

Michael GersonFriday, January 30, 2009; Page A19

Israel's recent operations in Gaza began in an atmosphere of criticism, including the widespread prediction that the use of force wouldn't "solve anything." Since, in this view, a negotiated peace is the only eventual answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is a mistake for Israel to engage its enemies in an endless cycle of violence. Hamas in particular would only be strengthened. This augury of futility was wrong. Israeli forces, responding to an intolerable provocation, inflicted lopsided casualties on Hamas, which displayed a discrediting combination of cowardice and brutality. Hamas fighters used civilians as shields instead of shielding civilians -- and some Palestinians seemed to resent it. Hamas leaders hid in the basements of hospitals while ordering public executions for Palestinian rivals, acting more like members of a criminal gang than a nationalist movement. Allies such as Iran, Syria and Hezbollah provided little practical help to Hamas, probably calculating that its rocket campaign against Israel was suicidal or at least foolishly premature. The international boycott against Hamas is holding. And the scale of missile attacks on Israeli citizens has been dramatically reduced.

"This hasn't solved the problem," retired Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser, told me. "But it has introduced a completely different cost calculation for Hamas." The launching of Hamas rockets against civilians now has a predictable price -- the essence of deterrence. The smuggling of weapons to Gaza through Egypt remains a challenge. But Hamas leaders are currently occupied, Eiland argues, "not just rebuilding buildings, but rebuilding their political standing and legitimacy." And this makes Hamas more likely to keep a cease-fire.

While Israel's military operations didn't accomplish everything, they also didn't accomplish nothing. But the "force doesn't solve anything" argument runs so deep for some that real-world outcomes matter little. Military action by Israel is always counterproductive, because Israel must eventually negotiate with its most bitter enemies. The sooner the better.

Call it the Fallacy of the Eventual Answer. It is true that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is two states living side by side in peace. But it is false to say that the fight against terrorists and the security of Israel have no part in achieving that goal.

Peace negotiations generally have preconditions, including the security of both parties. If Israelis are convinced that the "peace process" really means impunity for terrorists who attack them, Israel will want no part of that process. If Hamas leaders remain confident in their impunity -- convinced that their most effective strategy is to kill Israeli citizens while hiding behind their own -- they will not be in the proper mood for meaningful negotiations, either. Recent military operations have addressed some of Israel's justified fears and, perhaps, tamed some of Hamas's murderous arrogance.

According to Daniel Schueftan, a senior research fellow at the University of Haifa, Israel faces a "strategic challenge -- a civilian population that lives a few miles from terrorists -- for which we don't have a strategic solution. But we have found some operational answers. In Defensive Shield [the building of Israel's security wall], we brought down suicide bombings by 95 percent, exclusively with coercive force, not politics."

"It is a fairy tale," he says, "to say there are no answers through coercive force. The only things in life that have solutions are crossword puzzles. We have not solutions, but answers -- operational answers that reduce terror to a tolerable level. It is what we do with crime. It is what we do with terrorism."

Would peace negotiations be even a remote possibility if Israel were still besieged by suicide bombers, leaving bloodstains and bitterness at Israeli cafes? So the ugly but effective security wall actually served a purpose in peace negotiations. The same can be said of the establishment of deterrence through the Gaza offensive.

It is amazing that this argument remains an argument, especially after America's experience with the surge in Iraq. For years, military and diplomatic experts have argued that the ultimate solution is Iraqi political reconciliation rather than military force. Which was true, eventually. But the achievement of security through force, it turns out, was a precondition for the process of reconciliation to move forward. The Fallacy of the Eventual Answer actually delayed the peace.

We can try to imagine a world of diplomats without soldiers, but it would be no more peaceful than a society of therapists without policemen. Coercion is not the ultimate source of peace -- but peace is sometimes unachievable without it.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE US PRESIDENT MR. OBAMA

rom Israel at the Crossroads

by Arieh Stav (Ariel Center for Policy Research Publishers, 1997) Reprinted courtesy of the Ariel Center for Policy Research

WE WISH YOU WELL IN YOUR MOST CHALLENGING AND DIFFICULT JOB.

We find it rather surprising that you chose to make Middle East peace a priority, considering the many challenges before you, one need hardly enumerate them. Many of your predecessors have tried and failed, not because peace is not possible or desirable, in our region. They failed because theyignored or chose to ignore the core obstacle to peace, namely Arab intransigence and hostility towards our people and our state.

"Land for Peace" and the "Two State Solution" are code words for eliminating Israel in stages (See Phased Plan Resolution, Cairo, June 9, 1974). "Two states living side by side in peace," sounds positive and reasonable, for people, who do not understand the core problems.

Israel is a small country. Including Judea and Samaria (and now, no longer including Gaza) it consists of all of 10,801 square miles. The Arabs, on the other hand possess among their 22 states 5,300,000 square miles. The map above says it all.

There is simply no room for two viable states on our land.

Please note: UN Resolution 242, makes no reference to "a Two State Solution" nor to a "Palestinian" People. Resolution 242 followed the Arab war of intended annihilation against Israel in 1967. In defeating the combined forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, Israel retook Judea and Samaria, which had been illegally annexed by Jordan in 1948.

UN resolution 242 merely recommends - among others - withdrawal to "secure and recognized borders" in the context of total peace. In respect to that recommendation, I would draw your attention to a 1967 memorandum by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in response to a request by then President Lyndon Johnson for their assessment of the "minimum territory Israel might be justified in retaining in order to permit a more effective defense against possible conventional Arab attack and terrorist raids." As stated by the Joint Chiefs, none of whom were reported to be Zionists, and signed by their chairman, General Earle G. Wheeler, the memorandum declared that "minimal defensible borders, based on acceptable tactical principles" would require Israel to hold on to all of Judea south of Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, key portions of Sinai, the Golan Heights and most of Samaria, contiguous with a thickening of the Jerusalem corridor.

Mr. President, nothing has really changed in this violent and dangerous region. Anyone who expects Israel to give up Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights is expecting our nation to commit suicide!

The Jewish People's right to the Land of Israel, recognized and confirmed by all 52 members of the League of Nations in San Remo, Italy in 1920, is encoded in American law. It was reaffirmed by the Anglo-American convention on Palestine, ratified by the US Senate and proclaimed by President Calvin Coolidge on December 5, 1925. This treaty remains in force today as the supreme law of the land. Moreover, the Jewish settlement rights recognized at San Remo included all of the territory east of the Jordan River, arbitrarily handed over to the Hashemite clan by Britain in clear violation of its Mandatory obligations. It comprised 78% of the land projected by the Balfour Declaration for the creation of a national Jewish homeland. The Jewish people have no intention of turning back the clock, but if "occupied land" is the favorite subject of our enemies and ill-wishers, let it be known that 80% of our prescribed national Jewish homeland is currently "occupied" by Jordan.

The Arabs who now belatedly refer to themselves as "Palestinians"have been mercilessly exploited by an Arab world that can think of them in no terms other than as a gun aimed at Israel's head. While we in Israel hope for a better future for them, resettled as citizens rather than perpetual "refugee" hostages in the Arab states in which they now reside, we will remain vigilant and ever ready to defend our people and our patrimony.

Again, we wish you Mr. President and the American people well.

.

COP: Shelve the Stimulus


Lawrence Kudlow
Friday, January 30, 2009

Wednesday night’s House tally on the Democratic stimulus package, where not a single Republican voted in favor, was another shot across the bow for this incredibly unmanageable $900 billion behemoth of a program that truly will not stimulate the economy. Sure, the Democrats won on a party-line count. But Team Obama is now regrouping in the face of mounting criticism of this package. GOP economist Martin Feldstein revoked his prior support of a stimulus plan in Wednesday’s Washington Post. "In its current form," Feldstein wrote, "[the plan] does too little to raise national spending and employment. It would be better for the Senate to delay legislation for a month, or even two, if that’s what it takes to produce a much better bill. We cannot afford an $800 billion mistake."

Clinton economic adviser Alice Rivlin made the same point in testimony before the House Budget Committee. Her message: Divide up the package and slow down the process.

And Sen. Richard Shelby told CNBC that Washington should "shelve the stimulus package" and instead attack the banking and credit problem first -- probably with a government-sponsored bad bank that would relieve financial institutions from their toxic-asset problem. Mr. Shelby believes the credit crunch remains the biggest obstacle to economic recovery.

Later in the day when I interviewed Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, he agreed with Shelby that the stimulus plan should be shelved. For the first time -- as far as I know -- McConnell pledged to vote no on the package. Instead he wants larger tax cuts and smaller spending. McConnell might be willing to change his mind if the package changes, but he told me he didn’t expect that to happen.

And in what may prove to be the biggest stimulus-package hurdle of all, news reports suggest that Team Obama is contemplating as much as $2 trillion in TARP additions to rescue the banking system in one form or another. That would be $2 trillion on top of the nearly $1 trillion stimulus package.

Government spending, deficits, and debt creation of this magnitude is simply unheard of. So the added TARP money will surely imperil the entire stimulus package as taxpayers around the country begin to digest the enormity of these proposed government actions. Financing of this type would not only destroy the U.S. fiscal position for years to come, it could destroy the dollar in the process. What’s more, the likelihood of massive tax increases -- which at some point will become front and center in this gargantuan funding operation -- would doom the economy for decades.

By the way, Scott Rasmussen’s latest poll shows that already -- before the new TARP money is included -- public support for the humongous stimulus package has dropped to 42 percent.

It remains to be seen whether Republicans can in fact stop the stimulus package, but that certainly would be a very good idea. The long-run financial consequences will certainly force higher future tax rates -- a prosperity killer feared by Arthur Laffer. And while all the social spending gets baked into the long-run budget baseline, the short-run implications of the plan have little economic-growth potential.

Meanwhile, there’s no shortage of alternative tax proposals that would truly re-ignite the economy. Former Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush economist Larry Lindsey criticized the Democrat package in Wednesday morning’s Wall Street Journal, describing it as "heavily weighted toward direct government spending, transfers to state and local governments, and tax changes that have virtually no effect on marginal tax rates." Instead, Lindsey proposes a big payroll tax cut that would slice three points off the rate for both employer and employee.

Rush Limbaugh also made an appearance in the Journal. He has a clever idea to give Obama 54 percent of the $900 billion package -- equating that amount to the new president’s electoral majority -- while 46 percent, which was John McCain’s electoral tally, would go to a plan that would halve the U.S. corporate tax rate and provide a capital-gains tax holiday for one year, after which the investment tax would drop to 10 percent.

It was Sen. John McCain on Fox News last Sunday who started the stimulus revolt when he said he couldn’t support the package and called for less spending along with a large corporate tax cut. Over in the House, Republican leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor have successfully launched an opposition drumbeat by attacking congressional Democrats rather than directly hitting President Obama. Now all eyes will turn to Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell to see if he can keep up this drumbeat.

Will commonsense Americans really support a massive overdose of government run amok? I seriously doubt it. This whole story has to be completely rethought.



Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

Obama 'friend': End of Israel 'within reach'


Aaron Klein


Ali Abunimah


JERUSALEM – Accusing the Jewish state of "genocide," an anti-Israel Palestinian activist once commended by President Obama has predicted the end of Israel, which, he boasted, is "within reach, in our lifetimes."

In a piece earlier this month titled, "Why Israel won't survive," Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada, a pro-Palestinian online publication, accused Israel of war crimes and gloated, "Now, the other pillar of Israeli power – Western support and complicity – is starting to crack. We must do all we can to push it over.""It is Israel as a Zionist state, not Palestine or the Palestinian people, that cannot survive this attempted genocide. Its problem is legitimacy, or rather a profound and irreversible lack of it," wrote Abunimah.

Abunimah previously was described as close to Obama and has introduced the politician at pro-Palestinian events. Referring to a time period in the late 1990s, Abunimah said that "Obama used to be very comfortable speaking up for and being associated with Palestinian rights and opposing the Israeli occupation."

Abunimah was quoted stating Obama was "quite frank that the U.S. needed to be more evenhanded, that it leaned too much toward Israel."

He noted Obama's unusual stance toward Israel, commenting "these were the kind of statements I'd never heard from a U.S. politician who seemed like he was going somewhere, rather than at the end of his career."

In his piece this month, Abunimah blasted Israel's three-week campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, accusing the Israel Defense Forces of "massacr[ing] civilians in the hope that the population would turn against those fighting the occupier."

"The death toll keeps rising as more bodies are pulled from carpet-bombed neighborhoods," Abunimah claimed.

Israel did not carpet-bomb any area in the Gaza Strip. It carried out surgical precision strikes against specific Hamas targets. The IDF regularly warned civilians of incoming attacks with phone calls or text messages. The IDF routinely employed what it terms "roof knocking" – just prior to a targeted bombing, the building in question would receive a telephone call in Arabic warning that the structure was going to be bombed.

Hamas, on the other hand, was widely condemned for utilizing civilians as human shields and storing weapons and military infrastructure in civilian zones, including apartment buildings.

But Abunimah asserted: "Israel simply cannot bomb its way to legitimacy. What choice will Israel make? In the absence of any political and moral legitimacy the only arguments it has left are bullets and bombs. Left to its own devices Israel will certainly keep trying – as it has for sixty years – to massacre Palestinians into submission."

He claimed "Israel's real goals (in Gaza) were to restore its 'deterrence' fatally damaged after its 2006 defeat in Lebanon (translation: its ability to massacre and terrorize entire populations into submission) and to destroy any Palestinian resistance to total Israeli-Jewish control over historic Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea."

Zionism, he asserted, is an ideology of "racial supremacy, extremism and hate, is a dying project, in retreat and failing to find new recruits. ... It is within reach, in our lifetimes."

Obama, anti-Israel activist raised funds for Islamic causes

In the 1990s, Obama was a speaker at events in Chicago's large Palestinian immigrant community to raise funds for U.N. camps for the so-called Palestinian refugees. Abunimah recalls introducing Obama at one such event, a 1999 fundraiser for the Deheisha Palestinian camp in the West Bank.

"I knew Barack Obama for many years as my state senator – when he used to attend events in the Palestinian community in Chicago all the time," stated Abuminah during an interview last year with Democracy Now!, a nationally syndicated radio and television political program.

"I remember personally introducing [Obama] onstage in 1999, when we had a major community fundraiser for the community center in Deheisha refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. And that's just one example of how Barack Obama used to be very comfortable speaking up for and being associated with Palestinian rights and opposing the Israeli occupation," Abunimah said.

Abunimah previously described meeting with Obama at a fundraiser at the home of Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, reportedly a former PLO activist.

"[Obama] came with his wife. That's where I had a chance to really talk to him," Abunimah recalled. "It was an intimate setting. He convinced me he was very aware of the issues [and] critical of U.S. bias toward Israel and lack of sensitivity to Arabs. ... He was very supportive of U.S. pressure on Israel.

According to quotes obtained by Gulf News, Abunimah recalled a 2004 meeting in a Chicago neighborhood while Obama was running for his Senate seat. Abunimah quoted Obama telling him "warmly" he was sorry that "I haven't said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race."

"I'm hoping when things calm down, I can be more up front," Abunimah reportedly quoted the senator as saying.

Abunimah said Obama urged him to "keep up the good work" at the Chicago Tribune, where Abunimah contributed guest columns that were highly critical of Israel.

Abunimah serves on the board of the Arab American Action Network, or AAAN, a controversial Arab group founded by Khalidi's wife that mourns the establishment of Israel as a "catastrophe" and supports intense immigration reform, including providing driver's licenses and education to illegal aliens.

WND broke the story the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based nonprofit on which Obama served as a paid director alongside a confessed domestic terrorist, provided $75,000 in grants to the AAAN.

'Very active terror apparatus'

Obama's 1999 fundraising for the Palestinian Deheisha camp raised the eyebrows of one senior Israeli security official who was contacted for comment on the issue. The official, who was not aware of Obama's fundraising, noted Deheisha, which is located near the city of Bethlehem, had a "very active" Palestinian terror apparatus in 1999, carrying out scores of deadly shootings against Israeli civilians that year.

Two of the most deadly suicide bombings in 2002 also were planned from Deheisha, where the suicide bombers originated, said the security official. In one such bombing, in March of that year, 11 people were killed and over 50 injured, four critically when a Deheisha bomber detonated his explosives next to a group of Jewish women waiting with their baby carriages for their husbands to leave a nearby synagogue.

The question of so-called Palestinian refugees is a sensitive one for supporters of Israel. All Israeli prime ministers have stated a final peace deal with the Palestinians cannot include the "return" of "refugees."

When Arab countries attacked the Jewish state after its creation in 1948, some 725,000 Arabs living within Israel's borders fled or were flushed out when the Jewish state pushed back attacking Arab armies. Also at that time, about 820,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries or fled following rampant persecution.

While most Jewish refugees were absorbed by Israel and other countries, the majority of Palestinian Arabs have been maintained in 59 U.N.-run camps that do not seek to settle the Arabs elsewhere.

There are currently about 4 million Arabs who claim Palestinian refugee status with the U.N., including children and grandchildren of the original fleeing Arabs; Arabs living full-time in Jordan; and Arabs who long ago emigrated throughout the Middle East and to the West.

Other cases of worldwide refugees aided by the U.N. are handled through the international body's High Commission for Refugees, which seeks to settle the refugees quickly, usually in countries other than those from which they fled.

The U.N. created a special agency – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA – specifically to handle registered Palestinian refugees. It's the only refugee case handled by the U.N. in which the declared refugees are housed and maintained in camps for generations instead of facilitating the refugees' resettlement elsewhere.

The U.N. officially restricts the definition of refugee status worldwide for nationalities outside the Palestinian arena to those who fled a country of nationality or habitual residence due to persecution, who are unable to return to their place of residence and who have not yet been resettled. Future generations of original refugees are not included in the U.N.'s definition of refugees.

But the U.N. uses a different set of criteria only when defining a Palestinian refugee – allowing future generations to be considered refugees; terming as refugees Arabs who have been resettled in other countries, such as hundreds of thousands in Jordan; removing the clause requiring persecution; and removing the clause requiring a refugee to be fleeing his or her "country of nationality or habitual residence."

Palestinian leaders, including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, routinely refer to the "right of return," claiming it is mandated by the U.N. But the two U.N. resolutions dealing with the refugee issue recommend that Israel "achieve a just settlement" for the "refugee problem." The resolutions, which are not binding, do not speak of any "right of return" and leave open the possibility of monetary compensation or other kinds of settlements..

Friday, January 30, 2009

Obama and a Settlements Freeze

Steven J. Rosen

http://www.meforum.org/article/2057

Nothing has more potential to undermine the relationship between the United States and Israel than the issue of settlements. Mideast Peace Envoy George Mitchell said in 2003, "Opposition to the government of Israel's policies and practices regarding settlements…has been consistent through the Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush administrations; just as consistent has been the continued settlement activity by the Israeli government."[1] ] If the Obama team is not able to come to a workable set of understandings with the Government of Israel on this issue, both the peace process and the United States-Israel relationship will suffer. During the George H. W. Bush administration, particularly from 1990-92, tensions over settlements so severely strained ties between Israel and its American ally, that direct communication between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Israel ground to a halt. If not managed very carefully by both sides, the settlement issue could again become a point of friction leading to diplomatic paralysis.[2]

It is safe to predict that the Obama administration will call for a settlement "freeze." George Mitchell has been associated with the freeze concept since the Commission he headed in 2001 concluded that "Israel should freeze all settlement activity, including the 'natural growth' of existing settlements." The Bush Administration signed on to the idea in 2003, when it joined with the E.U., Russia, and the Secretary General of the U.N. to promulgate the "Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict." The Roadmap requires, in Phase I, that, "Consistent with the Mitchell Report, the Government of Israel freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)."[3] The Obama Administration's commitment to the Roadmap was reaffirmed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her confirmation hearing, and no doubt she means to include in this the call for a settlement freeze.[4]

The idea of a freeze on settlements, including natural growth, seems eminently sensible to many Americans. A majority in this country think that settlements are an obstacle to peace, and that their continued expansion undermines the confidence of the Palestinians by creating an impression of "creeping annexation" of the West Bank by Israel. If their complete removal must be postponed until there is a final status agreement, a freeze on growth of settlements should be an interim step, a "confidence-building measure" to help negotiations succeed. And the prevailing American view of a settlement freeze is simple: no new settlements, no geographic expansion of existing settlements, and no more construction in settlements. Basically, no anything beyond what already exists.

A majority of the public in Israel, and the leaders of all three of the largest political parties (Kadima, Labor, and Likud), have at times expressed a willingness to agree to a settlement "freeze" as part of a package of confidence building measures undertaken by both sides, depending on what is meant by the term "freeze". All the major parties have indicated that they can accept a freeze on the establishment of new settlements, on further expropriation of land for existing settlements, and on the appropriation of government funds for expansion of settlements beyond agreed limits.

But, with regard to a freeze on natural growth in the settlement communities that already exist, Israeli governments insist on three limiting principles which are regarded as fundamental. These principles have had various degrees of acceptance by different figures in the United States government, but they are seldom discussed in the public debate. The real heart of the Obama team's policy toward settlements, will be determined by how it responds to these three principles that Israelis consider essential.

First, Jewish communities in Jerusalem cannot be put in the same basket as settlements in the West Bank. No major party in Israel, and no significant part of the public, is willing to count as "settlements" to be "frozen," the Jewish neighborhoods that fall within the juridical boundaries of Jerusalem that were recorded in the "Basic Law--Jerusalem" in 1980, regardless of whether they are on land that was under Jordanian rule before 1967 or not.[5] To Israelis, Jewish neighborhoods in the nation's capital are not "settlements" subject to negotiation and possible compromise. They are an integral part of the sovereign state of Israel. Even among those who might be willing to relinquish Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem to achieve a comprehensive peace agreement (perhaps half the Israeli public), there is no support at all for sacrificing or impeding the Jewish communities inside the city limits.

Outside Israel, the "Basic Law—Jerusalem" has no standing. In fact, the Israeli statute was repudiated by the U.N. Security Council in Resolution 478 (1980) which described it as "Null and void…a violation of international law."[6] The Arab League, including the Palestinian Authority, and many other countries following their example, consider East Jerusalem to be "occupied territory" and Jewish communities there to be "settlements." The United States does not treat East Jerusalem as occupied territory, but neither has it recognized Israel's sovereignty over the area. As a practical matter, the State Department does not tabulate Israeli communities within Jerusalem as part of its "settlements" statistics. Tacitly the U.S. has given a degree of recognition to the distinction between East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The Obama Administration will have to go one step further by formally excluding East Jerusalem communities from a "settlement freeze," if it hopes to make any progress toward a resolution.

Second, with regard to settlements in the "West Bank," excluding East Jerusalem, the Government of Israel and the Israeli public draw a further distinction. Israel puts in a special category what became known in the Oslo talks as the "settlement blocs." These are mostly bedroom suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem that were given a unique status in the Oslo negotiations, separate from the "outlying" settlements deeper in the interior of the West Bank. At the Camp David peace talks in July 2000, President Clinton proposed, and Yasser Arafat accepted, that these "settlement blocs," comprising only 5% of the land of the West Bank but including about 80% of the settlers, would come under Israeli sovereignty, provided also that there would be a "swap" of land given by Israel from its own pre-1967 territory to compensate for the perceived Palestinian sacrifice. Settlements outside the blocs would be relinquished by Israel, but those inside the blocs would remain Israeli.

While the understandings reached at Camp David had no legal standing after the negotiations collapsed in 2001, the concept of agreed settlement blocs has become one of the basic assumptions in subsequent Israeli thinking about a two-state solution. Israel sought some recognition from the Bush Administration that it too would recognize such distinctions, and Israeli officials believe they got that recognition in 2004. In an exchange of letters on April 14, 2004, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon acknowledged "responsibilities facing the State of Israel" under the Roadmap, including "limitations on the growth of settlements." President George W. Bush acknowledged in response that, "As part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and recognized borders… In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949…It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities."[7]

Israel understands this to mean that, since this Executive Agreement, settlements in the blocs that would remain part of sovereign Israel in a future negotiation, will be treated differently by the United States than settlements outside the blocs agreed at Camp David, even before a future agreement is reached. The Government of Israel believes it has a commitment from the United States to accept that a "freeze on natural growth" need not apply to settlements inside these blocs, provided that the construction remains within the territorial limits understood at Camp David. Sharon's successor, Ehud Olmert, said in April 2008. "It was clear from day one to Abbas, Rice and Bush that construction would continue in population concentrations -- the areas mentioned in Bush's 2004 letter. I say this again today: Beitar Illit will be built, Gush Etzion will be built; there will be construction in Pisgat Ze'ev and in the Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem. It's clear that these areas will remain under Israeli control in any future settlement."[8]

The Obama Administration has decided that it will accept the Bush commitment of April 14, 2004, but not yet whether it will accept these implications of the agreement. If it does not, it will be at odds not only with the Likud, but also with Kadima and Labor. It is difficult to imagine any Government of Israel agreeing, for example, to freeze all construction and natural growth inside a community like Ma'ale Adumim, a huge bedroom suburb of Jerusalem ten minutes away, with a population of 33,000, established by a Labor government more than thirty years ago.

The third distinction that Israelis make about a settlement freeze, on which the Obama team will need to decide its position, is about the kind of "freeze on natural gowth" that is to be imposed on the settlements that are outside the blocs and outside East Jerusalem. The Sharon and Olmert governments were willing to ban outward geographic expansion of these established settlements, but they reserved the right to continue what Shimon Peres dubbed "vertical growth," meaning upward or infill expansion inside the existing "construction line" of established houses. If outward horizontal expansion affects the Palestinians and gives the impression of "creeping annexation", vertical growth has much less impact. As a condition for an agreement to curtail "natural growth," Israel wants to retain the freedom to permit communities to add a room or build between existing houses, as long as there is no outward expansion of the settlement.

Israel believes it received a commitment from the Bush Administration to accept such "vertical" growth inside the construction line of each settlement. In a letter from Sharon's top aide, Dov Weissglas, to National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice in June 2003, Weissglas stated that there were "understandings reached between Israel and the U.S. regarding the Jewish settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza: ... No new towns will be built, and construction will be frozen in the existing towns, except for building within the existing building lines, as opposed to the municipal border."[9] Prime Minister Ariel Sharon implied such agreement publicly in his speech at the Herzliya Conference on December 18, 2003[10]: "Israel will meet all its obligations with regard to construction in the settlements. There will be no construction beyond the existing construction line, no expropriation of land for construction, no special economic incentives and no construction of new settlements."

A few months later, on April 18, 2004, Sharon's aide Dov Weissglas asserted, in another letter to Rice, "the following understanding, which had been reached between us: 1. Restrictions on settlement growth: within the agreed principles of settlement activities, an effort will be made in the next few days to have a better definition of the construction line of settlements in Judea & Samaria. An Israeli team, in conjunction with Ambassador Kurtzer, will review aerial photos of settlements and will jointly define the construction
line of each of the settlements."[11]

The Government of Israel quickly acted to enforce the distinction. On August 5, 2004, a settler newspaper reported that, "The Defense Ministry has completed a large-scale project to mark the existing built-up borders of all the Jewish communities and towns in Judea and Samaria - and no further construction will be allowed beyond them. Yediot Aharonot reports today that aerial photos will be sent to the United States, which will monitor every building aberration. Though the towns will be allowed to appeal the decision, every building beyond the marked borders could be subject to immediate demolition. The above program is in accordance with the commitment Prime Minister Sharon gave U.S. President George Bush three months ago."[12]

The Bush Administration was reluctant to acknowledge publicly that it had arrived at such an understanding with the Government of Israel, but there were several public indications that it had. The New York Times' Steve Weisman reported on August 21, 2004, "The Bush administration…has modified its policy and signaled approval of growth in at least some Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, American and Israeli officials say…The administration now supports construction of new apartments in areas already built up in some settlements, as long as the expansion does not extend outward…according to the officials."[13] The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler reported on October 30, 2004 that, "during an interview with Egyptian television [in September 2004], Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage mused openly about a definition of natural growth. ‘If you have settlements that already exist and you put more people into them but don't expand the physical, sort of, the area -- that might be one thing,' he said. ‘But if the physical area expands and encroaches, and it takes more of Palestinian land, well, this is another.'" The Post added that "a senior administration official told reporters at a briefing that the purpose of a settlement freeze is to make sure additional settlers would not impede Palestinian life or prevent the formation of a viable Palestinian state. It makes no difference, he said, if the Israelis add another house within a block of existing homes." And the Post added that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the administration was negotiating with Israel over whether its settlements in the West Bank can grow within existing settlement boundaries.[14]

While the Administration's background statements and the absence of denials implied that the Israeli assertions that there was an agreement were accurate, the Administration never quite said so in a clear way. But no denial was issued after August 21, 2004, when a front page story in the New York Times story appeared under the headline "U.S. Now Said to Support Growth for Some West Bank Settlements", claiming loudly that such an agreement existed. Nor was there any correction after the Guardian published an article headlined, "Secret US Deal Wrecks Road Map for Peace" on August 27, 2004, reporting that "The United States was accused this week by Palestinian leaders of …giving its covert support to Israel's expansion of controversial settlements in the West Bank. American officials are privately admitting they have…given Jerusalem tacit permission to build thousands of new homes on the disputed land…A European diplomat said this week, ‘The US has tacitly agreed that [Israel's] position has validity and has shown that limited building is permissible.'"[15]

There were some carefully parsed partial denials nearly four years later, when Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post revisited the issue on April 24, 2008. But Kessler also reported an on-the-record confirmation from Daniel Kurtzer, then the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, who said he had argued at the time against accepting the April 2004 Weissglas letter that asserted there was a U.S.-Israel understanding on the construction line concept. Kurtzer told the Post, "I thought it was a really bad idea. It would legitimize the settlements." Kurtzer said that, in the end, the White House did not send the team to define the construction lines, "when it became clear it would not be easy to do."[16] It appears that, as an alternative, the Israeli Ministry of Defense provided the United States with aerial photographs marking the construction line of each settlement (reported by Yediot Aharonot on August 5, 2004.)

The Obama team may find it difficult to obtain a clear and consistent record of these American-Israeli understandings about the construction line principle, because many of the commitments were expressed orally rather than in writing, in conversations with select White House officials. Apparently these were not reported to other officials of the Bush Administration. Sharon's representative, Dov Weissglas told the Washington Post's Kessler in 2008, that in April 2004 he had negotiated a "verbal understanding" with deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams, and then Rice and Sharon approved the deal. He told the Post, "I do not recall that we had any kind of written formulation," except his own letters back to Rice stating that the agreements existed.

Those who want to drive a wedge between Barack Obama and the next Prime Minister of Israel know that settlements could become the "third rail" of their relationship. Settlements did not cause the conflict in Gaza, and the removal of settlements there certainly was not a cure. When Ariel Sharon took every last settler out of Gaza four years ago, it did not end the Hamas attacks. The withdrawal of the settlers was instead followed by a sevenfold increase in Kassam rockets fired into Israeli communities. Obama is going to hear a lot of assertions that pulling the Israeli settlements out of the West Bank will bring peace. If nothing is done about the real cause of the violence—the networks of Palestinian extremists supported by Iran—further Israel withdrawal could be followed by a still greater and more dangerous escalation of violence, the opposite of peace. Settlements are not the cause of the violence, and their removal is not the cure.

An interim settlements freeze that meets the essential objectives of the Roadmap can be achieved. A carefully nuanced final resolution of the settlement issue can be achieve in the final status negotiations. To accomplish these objectives, the Obama team will have to understand and respect the fundamental concepts and working arrangements that Israelis consider to be critical to their interests. A simplistic, absolutist mindset about settlements will certainly lead to an impasse.

Steven J. Rosen is director of the Middle East Forum's Obama Mideast Monitor, and former Director of Foreign Policy Issues for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

[1] http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2003/comm-mitchell-speech.html
[2] http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CEFDB1031F934A25752C0A964958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
[3] http://www.un.org/media/main/roadmap122002.html
[4] http://www.meforum.org/blog/obama-mideast-monitor/2009/01/clinton-today-no-decision-on-mideast-peace.html
[5] http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/1980_1989/Basic+Law-+Jerusalem-+Capital+of+Israel.htm
[6] http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/399/71/IMG/NR039971.pdf?OpenElement
[7] http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace+Process/Reference+Documents/Exchange+of+letters+Sharon-Bush+14-Apr-2004.htm
[8] Quoted in Washington Post, April 24, 2008
[9] Quoted in Settlement Report, May-June 2004, Foundation for Middle East Peace, and in Arutz Sheva, August 5, 2004
[10] http://www.israelpr.com/sharonspeech1006.html
[11] http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace+Process/Reference+Documents/Letter+Weissglas-Rice+18-Apr-2004.htm
[12] Arutz Sheva, August 5, 2004
[13] http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B06E5DF173EF932A1575BC0A9629C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
[14] http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10520-2004Oct29?language=printer
[15] http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianweekly/story/0,,1291598,00.html
[16] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/23/AR2008042303128_pf.html


Tackling a Fallacy in Gaza

Michael Gerson
Washington Post
Friday, January 30, 2009; A19

Israel's recent operations in Gaza began in an atmosphere of criticism, including the widespread prediction that the use of force wouldn't "solve anything." Since, in this view, a negotiated peace is the only eventual answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is a mistake for Israel to engage its enemies in an endless cycle of violence. Hamas in particular would only be strengthened. his augury of futility was wrong. Israeli forces, responding to an intolerable provocation, inflicted lopsided casualties on Hamas, which displayed a discrediting combination of cowardice and brutality. Hamas fighters used civilians as shields instead of shielding civilians -- and some Palestinians seemed to resent it. Hamas leaders hid in the basements of hospitals while ordering public executions for Palestinian rivals, acting more like members of a criminal gang than a nationalist movement. Allies such as Iran, Syria and Hezbollah provided little practical help to Hamas, probably calculating that its rocket campaign against Israel was suicidal or at least foolishly premature. The international boycott against Hamas is holding. And the scale of missile attacks on Israeli citizens has been dramatically reduced.

"This hasn't solved the problem," retired Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser, told me. "But it has introduced a completely different cost calculation for Hamas." The launching of Hamas rockets against civilians now has a predictable price -- the essence of deterrence. The smuggling of weapons to Gaza through Egypt remains a challenge. But Hamas leaders are currently occupied, Eiland argues, "not just rebuilding buildings, but rebuilding their political standing and legitimacy." And this makes Hamas more likely to keep a cease-fire.

While Israel's military operations didn't accomplish everything, they also didn't accomplish nothing. But the "force doesn't solve anything" argument runs so deep for some that real-world outcomes matter little. Military action by Israel is always counterproductive, because Israel must eventually negotiate with its most bitter enemies. The sooner the better.

Call it the Fallacy of the Eventual Answer. It is true that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is two states living side by side in peace. But it is false to say that the fight against terrorists and the security of Israel have no part in achieving that goal.

Peace negotiations generally have preconditions, including the security of both parties. If Israelis are convinced that the "peace process" really means impunity for terrorists who attack them, Israel will want no part of that process. If Hamas leaders remain confident in their impunity -- convinced that their most effective strategy is to kill Israeli citizens while hiding behind their own -- they will not be in the proper mood for meaningful negotiations, either. Recent military operations have addressed some of Israel's justified fears and, perhaps, tamed some of Hamas's murderous arrogance.

According to Daniel Schueftan, a senior research fellow at the University of Haifa, Israel faces a "strategic challenge -- a civilian population that lives a few miles from terrorists -- for which we don't have a strategic solution. But we have found some operational answers. In Defensive Shield [the building of Israel's security wall], we brought down suicide bombings by 95 percent, exclusively with coercive force, not politics."

"It is a fairy tale," he says, "to say there are no answers through coercive force. The only things in life that have solutions are crossword puzzles. We have not solutions, but answers -- operational answers that reduce terror to a tolerable level. It is what we do with crime. It is what we do with terrorism."

Would peace negotiations be even a remote possibility if Israel were still besieged by suicide bombers, leaving bloodstains and bitterness at Israeli cafes? So the ugly but effective security wall actually served a purpose in peace negotiations. The same can be said of the establishment of deterrence through the Gaza offensive.

It is amazing that this argument remains an argument, especially after America's experience with the surge in Iraq. For years, military and diplomatic experts have argued that the ultimate solution is Iraqi political reconciliation rather than military force. Which was true, eventually. But the achievement of security through force, it turns out, was a precondition for the process of reconciliation to move forward. The Fallacy of the Eventual Answer actually delayed the peace.

We can try to imagine a world of diplomats without soldiers, but it would be no more peaceful than a society of therapists without policemen. Coercion is not the ultimate source of peace -- but peace is sometimes unachievable without it.

Don't strengthen Hamas

Mark A. Heller

TEL AVIV:

A week after his appointment as President Barack Obama's special Middle East envoy, George Mitchell is traveling in the region to implement the new president's promise to aggressively pursue the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Mitchell's highest priority would seem to be making sure the fragile cease-fire in Gaza holds. It is not. Like Hezbollah in 2006, Hamas has suffered a severe setback and, like Hezbollah since 2006, it will avoid provoking another major confrontation right away. The challenge, rather, lies in the other measures Hamas is already taking to rehabilitate its reputation and validate its defiant declaration of victory in the last round of violence.

If Mitchell does nothing to discredit that claim and allows Hamas to save itself, Hamas and the world view it shares with Hezbollah and their Iranian sponsors will appear even more to be on the winning side of history.

As they survey the devastation around them, the residents of Gaza must surely suspect - as a few have publicly conceded - that any more such victories and they are undone. But whatever reservations they may have about the path down which Hamas still seems intent on leading them, they are unwilling or unable to persuade it to change course.

Hamas has already begun to rebuild the tunnels to the Egyptian Sinai destroyed during the fighting. These tunnels will be used to smuggle in rockets and other weaponry. They will also be used to smuggle in the cash - from a financial supply chain that also leads to Iran - to finance Hamas compensation and reconstruction plans and to cement at least the compliance of beneficiaries, if not their loyalty.

At the same time, Hamas and its supporters continue to exploit the genuine deprivation of Gazans to ratchet up pressure on Israel to reopen border crossings, which Hamas will control on the Gaza side (while refusing any quid pro quo in the form of the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier abducted some 30 months ago).

Finally, Hamas has made discussion of a Palestinian national unity government conditional on agreement by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to end peace negotiations with Israel.

There is a growing chorus call in the analytical community to "engage" Hamas, presumably on the assumption that a movement founded on the premise that there is no solution to the Palestinian problem "except by jihad" and committed to "raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine" can somehow be sweet-talked into accommodation.

There is not a shred of evidence to support this assumption. So Mitchell's task should be to isolate Hamas in order to "disengage" it from Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere.

The most critical lever to accomplish this is to clarify to Israelis and those Palestinians who are interested in a settlement precisely what they must decide with respect to borders, Jerusalem, refugees and security arrangements.

In practice, this can only begin to happen after the formation of a new Israeli government following national elections scheduled for Feb. 10.

Meanwhile, and even more urgently, Mitchell needs to keep alive the possibility of a viable negotiating process by preventing the re-empowerment of Hamas.

Specifically, he should begin to coordinate an effective, multi-pronged effort with America's NATO and regional allies that will 1) prevent the reopening of the tunnels and interdict the supply chains pouring weapons and cash into Hamas hands; and 2) provide direct access for needy Gazans to the outside world and to alternative humanitarian support and reconstruction funding, to be administered by or channeled through a multilateral consortium and the Palestinian Authority.

There is no doubt that Hamas will resist any steps to bypass and undercut its authority. The response should be that an American-led consortium will not collaborate in the rehabilitation and entrenchment of Hamas power, and that if Hamas insists on standing in the way, it will bear responsibility for failure to improve the lives of the ordinary Palestinians.

Benita Ferrero-Waldner, External Relations Commissioner of the European Union, has made clear that while emergency relief will continue no matter what, Europe should not support the reconstruction of Gaza under Hamas rule.

America under Obama needs to show the same understanding of the strategic issue at stake, and Mitchell's visit is the proper occasion to do that. If it is used instead to help Hamas save itself, this will doom any chances not only for a durable cease-fire, but also for the revival of any viable peace process.

Mark A. Heller is principal research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv University, and co-author of "No Trumpets, No Drums: A Two-State Settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict."

FAQ - Answers to questions on the operation against Hamas


MFA

1. Q: Will Israel cooperate with investigations of war crimes?

A: Israel takes every report of war crimes seriously, provided it comes from a credible source. However, no official body or organization has presented any evidence of war crimes allegedly committed by Israel. All accusations have been based on rumor, half-truths, anonymous reports from unconfirmed sources, and manipulations of the truth.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) routinely and thoroughly scrutinizes its operational activities and when necessary, is subject to oversight by judicial and governmental authorities. Therefore, there is no need of outside intervention. It is important to emphasize that no credible evidence or proof of war crimes allegedly committed by Israel has been presented.
On the other hand, proven war crimes have been committed by Hamas. Over many years, Hamas has targeted civilians with rockets and mortars, as well as committing suicide attacks, which are deemed "crimes against humanity" by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. In addition, the tactic of using Palestinian civilians as human shields, which Hamas is openly proud of, also falls in the realm of war crimes. 2. Q: Will Israel investigate the illegal use of phosphorus?

A: During the operation in Gaza, there was no illegal use of phosphorus or any other material. The President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Jacob Kellenberger, told the New York Times on 14 January that no evidence was found of illegal use of phosphorus by Israel. The investigation of this matter, which was reported by the Israeli media, were routine IDF checks of its internal operating procedures and in no way indicated any illegal use.


3. Q: Does Israel permit humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip?

A: Even during the military operation, massive amounts of humanitarian aid entered Gaza. Already before the end of the fighting, 40,000 tons of humanitarian aid had entered the Gaza Strip via Israel. The ICRC sent Israel a letter of thanks for its assistance. Now, with the end of the fighting, Israel is interested not only in continuing to facilitate the entry of aid, but also in helping with Gaza's reconstruction, in full coordination with the international bodies involved.

One of the reasons that the aid did not always reach the civilian population in need despite Israel's best efforts was because Hamas confiscated it. This has happened regularly over the past year (in February 2008, the Jordanian Red Crescent condemned Hamas for confiscating an entire aid shipment from Jordan), and it continues to occur. Since the operation, there have been a growing number of media reports (most recently, from Jordan again) concerning the confiscation of aid as well as about violent attacks, including shootings and executions, by Hamas against its opponents.

The international community should take careful measures to ensure that the aid they send to Gaza reaches the right hands and is not confiscated by Hamas, which is manipulating the civilian population's distress to its own advantage.


4. Q: The UN accused Israel of shooting at schools; it also claimed that Israel changed its story afterwards.

A: When IDF forces were shot at, they returned fire towards the source of the shooting. Defensive actions of this type are explicitly allowed under the Geneva Convention.

The IDF did not fire directly at UNRWA schools; clearly had a school been targeted directly, it would have been completely destroyed, and there would have been countless casualties among those civilians sheltering there. Rather, in the tragic incident which caused civilians casualties, the IDF justifiably returned fire at the Hamas cell that had launched mortar shells at Israeli forces from a position adjacent to the building. Unfortunately, the return fire hit the building and caused casualties. Israel mourns the loss of innocent life, however responsibility for all injuries and damage lies fully with Hamas, which deliberately drew the fighting into a civilian facility.

In the case of the school in Jabalya, two independent media reports (AP and New York Times) confirm Israel's version that mortar fire came from a position located very close to the building. The reports by these respected media outlets contradict the claim made by a UNRWA spokesperson that there is no evidence to support Israel's investigation. Rather, Hamas was launching mortars from a distance of mere meters from the walls of the school, which explains how the return fire hit the building.

Contrary to claims, Israel did not "change its story" regarding this incident. More accurately, it gave out details as they became available during the fighting, and corrected minor discrepancies which were revealed with further investigation. These incongruities were indeed insignificant, and concerned whether the launches came from the school compound versus from its immediate vicinity. Despite Israel's best efforts, it is not reasonable to expect a conclusive and definitive investigation during the heat of battle.


5. Q: Why were women and children killed?

A: Israelis were profoundly pained by the sight of dead children and the Prime Minister officially expressed his deep sorrow over the civilian casualties. However, it should be asked who is responsible for their deaths and whether the causes have been thoroughly examined.

It is no secret that Hamas used human shields as one of its primary tactics - many reports have described how Hamas recruited civilians, indoctrinated them, and publicly bragged about it. Civilians who tried to flee the fighting were threatened by Hamas gunmen, while many were killed in crossfire initiated by Hamas. It is obvious that some civilians were hurt in booby-trapped houses and by bombs placed by Hamas throughout the Gaza Strip. These are the real reasons why many civilians were killed.

As for the numbers of civilian casualties, extreme caution should be exercised concerning statistics emanating from Gaza. Throughout the past year, Hamas has dismissed doctors, nurses and teachers identified with Fatah and replaced them with its own supporters. This political cleansing process was reported in the media and criticized harshly by the Palestinian Authority. Gaza's hospitals are now staffed only with Hamas supporters and Hamas officials are the primary sources of information. Clearly Hamas representatives have a vested interest in propagating the illusion that a majority of the injured were civilians rather than terrorists.


6. Q: Will Israel place limitations on the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip?

A: Israel has a strong interest in the rehabilitation of the Gaza Strip. Israel will work together with the donor states and the moderate Arab regimes to bring a better life to the Palestinian residents.

At the same time, it is important to ensure that the aid reaches the people who need it and does not fall into Hamas' hands. Hamas could confiscate part of the aid and exploit it for its own needs, as it has done in the past (for which it was condemned by the Jordanian Red Crescent, for example). Now, however, the situation is more sensitive than ever. The international community must be extremely vigilant to ensure that the aid it donates will be used only for the benefit of the civilians and not for the material, political or military rehabilitation of Hamas.


7. Q: Why does Israel relate to Hamas as a terrorist organization?

A: In addition to its long history of horrific suicide attacks, shootings and rocket fire aimed at civilian targets, Hamas' charter calls for the violent extermination of the State of Israel and the murder of Jews - simply for being Jews. Article 7 of its charter states: " The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say 'O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him'." It is not possible to negotiate with those who call - based on extremist religious justifications - for your destruction.

Indeed, Israel is not the only country which defines Hamas as a terrorist group. The European Union, US, Canada, Australia and other states have all officially classified Hamas as a terrorist organization. On 12 September 2003 - after a series of Hamas terrorist attacks that violated the 2003 hudna (cease-fire) - the European Union added Hamas' "political wing" to its terrorist list, having already included the military wing years before.

The international community has given Hamas the opportunity to become a legitimate partner for negotiations, by setting out three simple conditions: recognizing Israel, accepting previous agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and the cessation of terrorist activity. These conditions were formulated by the International Quartet (the US, EU, UN and Russia), and while acceptable to Israel, have been repeatedly rejected by Hamas.
For these reasons, negotiating with Hamas is not only rejected by Israel but by the international community.

Analysis: EU-funded Palestinian NGO leading the 'Spanish inquisition'

Jan. 30, 2009
GERALD M. STEINBERG , THE JERUSALEM POST

The case in Spain against Israeli officials, which stems from the 2002 air force attack that destroyed the home of a senior Hamas terrorist and killed several of his children, is based on the universal jurisdiction provisions in the legal systems of a number of democratic countries.

While designed to bring heinous dictators to justice, "lawfare" - as this tactic has been dubbed - is exploited by non-governmental organizations that use the façade of universal human rights to promote their political goals. The pattern emerged in 2001 when Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Badil (which focuses on refugee claims) and other NGOs used Belgium as the venue for allegations of war crimes against then-prime minister Ariel Sharon. The case was eventually dismissed and the law changed after Belgian officials linked to African dictators realized that they, too, were vulnerable to prosecution.

In 2005, Maj.-Gen. (res.) Doron Almog, who had retired from the IDF and was traveling to London to raise funds for the treatment of autism, stayed on an El Al plane at Heathrow Airport after NGOs targeted him with legal proceedings. This case, too, was later dropped, but the damage had been done.

The Spanish example of "lawfare" was initiated by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR). With a large budget provided by the European Commission, Norway, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland and other European governments, PCHR is among the leaders of the anti-Israel demonization strategy.

The strategy was developed in the NGO Forum of the 2001 Durban Conference, the goal being to use boycotts and legal processes to brand Israel an "apartheid" state, while legitimizing terrorism. During the recent Gaza operation, PCHR issued over 50 statements, most of which included allegations of "war crimes."

In contrast, top Israeli government figures have been very slow to recognize these threats and devise a counter-strategy. While "lawfare" has been around for a number of years and PCHR filed its request with Spanish authorities in June, it has failed to register in the IDF and elsewhere.

After the Gaza operation, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged to provide legal support for officials caught up in the harassment - a belated and irrelevant approach. In response to the developments in Spain, Defense Minister Ehud Barak reacted angrily and Pubic Security Minister Avi Dichter expressed hope "that common sense will prevail" among Europeans.

Somewhat more concretely, the Foreign Ministry has pressed European governments to amend their legal codes to prevent NGOs from bringing such cases to court, but scant attention has been paid in Israel to EU and government funding for PCHR. There has been no cost to European officials, such as the Spanish prime minister, who are still welcomed by Israel as peace mediators.

After the surprise attack delivered by the Spanish court, the Israeli government will have to give much higher priority to preventing "lawfare" cases before ministers and IDF officers are met by police in the arrivals hall and taken for interrogation.

Prof. Gerald M. Steinberg is executive director of NGO Monitor and chairs the Political Science Department at Bar-Ilan University
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1233050212794&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull

Comment: Imagine the financial possibilities for the "Palestinian People" if all of the jihadist monies were coupled with all of the NGO's monies-the sum total could easily create the necessary infra-structure that these groups ignore. The monies could establish commerce exchanges, both of these groups ignore. Thus, once again the man on the street in "Palestine" aka disputed territories, is betrayed by their own-and the international community says nothing and is complicit with the current state of affairs.

Account of Israeli attack doesn't hold up to scrutiny

PATRICK MARTIN
Globe and Mail

JABALYA, GAZA STRIP — Most people remember the headlines: Massacre Of Innocents As UN School Is Shelled; Israeli Strike Kills Dozens At UN School.

They heralded the tragic news of Jan. 6, when mortar shells fired by advancing Israeli forces killed 43 civilians in the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. The victims, it was reported, had taken refuge inside the Ibn Rushd Preparatory School for Boys, a facility run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.The news shocked the world and was compared to the 1996 Israeli attack on a UN compound in Qana, Lebanon, in which more than 100 people seeking refuge were killed. It was certain to hasten the end of Israel's attack on Gaza, and would undoubtedly lead the list of allegations of war crimes committed by Israel.

There was just one problem: The story, as etched in people's minds, was not quite accurate.
Physical evidence and interviews with several eyewitnesses, including a teacher who was in the schoolyard at the time of the shelling, make it clear: While a few people were injured from shrapnel landing inside the white-and-blue-walled UNRWA compound, no one in the compound was killed. The 43 people who died in the incident were all outside, on the street, where all three mortar shells landed.

Stories of one or more shells landing inside the schoolyard were inaccurate.

While the killing of 43 civilians on the street may itself be grounds for investigation, it falls short of the act of shooting into a schoolyard crowded with refuge-seekers.

The teacher who was in the compound at the time of the shelling says he heard three loud blasts, one after the other, then a lot of screaming. "I ran in the direction of the screaming [inside the compound]," he said. "I could see some of the people had been injured, cut. I picked up one girl who was bleeding by her eye, and ran out on the street to get help."But when I got outside, it was crazy hell. There were bodies everywhere, people dead, injured, flesh everywhere."

The teacher, who refused to give his name because he said UNRWA had told the staff not to talk to the news media, was adamant: "Inside [the compound] there were 12 injured, but there were no dead."

"Three of my students were killed," he said. "But they were all outside."

Hazem Balousha, who runs an auto-body shop across the road from the UNRWA school, was down the street, just out of range of the shrapnel, when the three shells hit. He showed a reporter where they landed: one to the right of his shop, one to the left, and one right in front.

"There were only three," he said. "They were all out here on the road."

News of the tragedy travelled fast, with aid workers and medical staff quoted as saying the incident happened at the school, the UNRWA facility where people had sought refuge.

Soon it was presented that people in the school compound had been killed. Before long, there was worldwide outrage.

Sensing a public-relations nightmare, Israeli spokespeople quickly asserted that their forces had only returned fire from gunmen inside the school. (They even named two militants.) It was a statement from which they would later retreat, saying there were gunmen in the vicinity of the school.

No witnesses said they saw any gunmen. (If people had seen anyone firing a mortar from the middle of the street outside the school, they likely would not have continued to mill around.)

John Ging, UNRWA's operations director in Gaza, acknowledged in an interview this week that all three Israeli mortar shells landed outside the school and that "no one was killed in the school."

"I told the Israelis that none of the shells landed in the school," he said.

Why would he do that?

"Because they had told everyone they had returned fire from gunmen in the school. That wasn't true."

Mr. Ging blames the Israelis for the confusion over where the victims were killed. "They even came out with a video that purported to show gunmen in the schoolyard. But we had seen it before," he said, "in 2007."

The Israelis are the ones, he said, who got everyone thinking the deaths occurred inside the school.

"Look at my statements," he said. "I never said anyone was killed in the school. Our officials never made any such allegation."

Speaking from Shifa Hospital in Gaza City as the bodies were being brought in that night, an emotional Mr. Ging did say: "Those in the school were all families seeking refuge. ... There's nowhere safe in Gaza."

And in its daily bulletin, the World Health Organization reported: "On 6 January, 42 people were killed following an attack on a UNRWA school ..."

The UN's Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs got the location right, for a short while. Its daily bulletin cited "early reports" that "three artillery shells landed outside the UNRWA Jabalia Prep. C Girls School ..." However, its more comprehensive weekly report, published three days later, stated that "Israeli shelling directly hit two UNRWA schools ..." including the one at issue.

Such official wording helps explain the widespread news reports of the deaths in the school, but not why the UN agencies allowed the misconception to linger.

"I know no one was killed in the school," Mr. Ging said. "But 41 innocent people were killed in the street outside the school. Many of those people had taken refuge in the school and wandered out onto the street.

"The state of Israel still has to answer for that. What did they know and what care did they take?"

Honest Obama and Iran

Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

In his first week and a half in office, US President Barack Obama has proven that he is a man of his word. For instance, he was not bluffing when he said during his campaign that he would make reconstituting America's relations with the Islamic world one of his first priorities in office.

Obama's first phone call to a foreign leader was to PLO chieftain Mahmoud Abbas last Wednesday morning. And this past Tuesday, Obama gave his first television interview as president to the Al-Arabiya pan-Arabic television network.

In that interview Obama explained the rationale of his approach to the Muslim world "We are looking at the region as a whole and communicating a message to the Arab world and the Muslim world, that we are ready to initiate a new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest," the new president said.

Obama distanced his administration from its predecessor by asserting that rather than dictate how Muslims should behave, his administration plans "to listen, set aside some of the preconceptions that have existed and have built up over the last several years. And I think if we do that, then there's a possibility at least of achieving some breakthroughs."

In short, Obama argues that the root of the Islamic world's opposition to the US is its shattered confidence in America's intentions. By following a policy of contrition for Bush's "cowboy diplomacy," and acting with deference in its dealing with the Muslim world, in his view, a new era of US-Islamic relations will ensue.

Obama's honesty was a hot subject during the presidential campaign. Many analysts claimed that he was a closet moderate who only made far-left pronouncements about "spreading the wealth around," and about meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "without preconditions," to mollify his far-left partisan base.

Others argued that Obama was a man of his word. From his voting records in the Illinois Senate and the US Senate, and in light of his long associations with domestic and foreign policy radicals, these commentators predicted that if elected, Obama's policies would be far to the left of center.

Judging by his actions since entering office last week, it appears that the latter group of analysts was correct. Obama is not a panderer.

Between his $819 billion economic "stimulus" package, which involves a massive intrusion by federal government on the free market; his decision to close the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay; his dispatch of former senator George Mitchell to the Middle East to begin pushing for a Palestinian state two weeks before Israel's general elections; his announcement that he will begin withdrawing American forces from Iraq; his repeated signaling that the US will no longer treat the fight against Islamic terrorism as a war; and his attempts to engineer a diplomatic rapprochement with Iran, Obama has shown that his policy pronouncements on the campaign trail were serious. The policies he outlined are the policies with which he intends to govern.

ON A strategic level, the most significant campaign promise that Obama is wasting no time in keeping is his attempt to diplomatically engage with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Teheran is the central sponsor of the global jihad. Hizbullah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are all Iranian proxies. And, as is becoming increasingly undeniable, al-Qaida too enjoys a close relationship with the mullahs.

The 9/11 Commission's final report noted that several of the September 11 hijackers transited Iran en route to the US. And in recent weeks we learned that after spending the past six years in Iran, where he played a major role in directing the insurgency in Iraq, Osama bin Laden's eldest son Sa'ad has moved to Pakistan.

Beyond its sponsorship of terrorism, due to its nuclear weapons program Iran is the largest emerging threat to global security. Together with its genocidal rhetoric against Israel, its calls for the destruction of the US, and its incitement for the overthrow of the governments of Egypt and Jordan, among others, Iran is the single largest source of instability in the region. Moreover, as US Defense Secretary Robert Gates made clear in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Iran is working actively in South and Central America to destabilize the western hemisphere.

Obama caused an uproar when during a Democratic primary debate last spring he said that he would meet with Ahmadinejad without preconditions. In subsequent months, he sought to soften his declaration. It is now apparent that his statement was not a slip of the tongue. It was a pledge.

The Iranians, for their part, have reacted to the new president with a mixture of relief and contempt. On November 6, two days after the US election, Ahmadinejad sent a congratulatory letter to Obama. Ahmadinejad's letter was considered a triumph for Obama's conciliatory posture by the American and European media. But actually, it was no such thing. Ahmadinejad's letter was nothing more than a set of demands, much like those he had set out in a letter to then-president George W. Bush in 2006.

In his missive to Obama, Ahmadinejad laid out Iranian preconditions for a diplomatic engagement with America. Among other things, Ahmadinejad demanded that the US send all its military forces back to America. As he put it, the US should "keep its interventions within its own country's borders."

Ahmadinejad further hinted that the US should end its support for Israel and withdraw its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. In his words, "In the sensitive Middle East region... the expectation is that the unjust [US] actions of the past 60 years [since Israel was established] will give way to a policy encouraging the full rights of all nations, especially the oppressed nations of Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan."

The Western media made much of the fact that some conservative press organs in Iran condemned Ahmadinejad for sending the letter. They claimed that this meant that Ahmadinejad himself was tempering his animosity toward the US in the wake of Obama's election. But in fact, most of the conservative media in Iran viewed the letter as an attack on Obama, whom they attacked with racial slurs.

The Sobh-e Sadegh weekly, published by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wrote in an editorial on November 10 that negotiations with Obama would only be worthwhile if "coexistence with a nuclear Iran and acceptance of its regional role are part of the US negotiating position."

On November 11, the Borna News Agency, which is aligned with Ahmadinejad, called Obama "a house slave."

In general, Iran's government-controlled media outlets reported that Ahmadinejad's letter was an ultimatum and that if Obama did not submit to his demands, the US would be destroyed.

This week Ahmadinejad made Teheran's preconditions for negotiations even more explicit. In statements at a political rally on Tuesday, and in a television interview given by his adviser on Wednesday, Ahmadinejad said that Iran has two conditions for engaging Washington. First, the US must abandon its alliance with Israel. In his words, to have relations with Iran, the US must first "stop supporting the Zionists, outlaws and criminals."

The second condition was communicated Wednesday by Ahmadinejad's adviser Ali Akbar Javanfekr. Echoing Sobh-e Sadegh's editorial, Javanfekr said Iran refuses to stop its nuclear activities.

Notably, also on Wednesday, the US-based International Institute for Strategic Studies released a report concluding that Iran will have a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium to make an atomic bomb in a matter of months.

To summarize, Iran's conditions for meeting with the Obama administration are that the US abandon Israel (which as Ahmadinejad reiterated at his annual Holocaust denial conference on Tuesday, must be annihilated), and that Obama take no action whatsoever against Iran's nuclear program.

FOR ITS part, the Obama administration is signaling that Iran's conditions haven't swayed it from its path toward a diplomatic engagement of the mullahs. In her first statement as US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice said Tuesday, "We look forward to engaging in vigorous diplomacy that includes direct diplomacy with Iran."

And in his Al-Arabiya interview, Obama implied that the US may be willing to overlook Teheran's support for terrorism when he referred to Iran's "past" support for terrorist organizations. Obama placed a past tense modifier on Iranian sponsorship of terrorism even through just last week a US Navy ship intercepted an Iranian vessel smuggling arms to Hamas in Gaza in the Red Sea. Due to an absence of political authorization to seize the Iranian ship, the US Navy was compelled to permit it to sail on to Syria.

The most sympathetic interpretation of Obama's desire to move ahead with diplomatic engagement in spite of the mullocracy's preconditions is that he has simply failed to countenance the significance of Iran's demands. This means that Obama remains convinced that the US is indeed to blame for the supposed crisis of confidence that the Islamic world suffers from in its dealings with America. By this reasoning, it is for the US, not for Teheran, to show its sincerity, because the US, rather than Teheran, is to blame for the dismal state of relations prevailing between the two countries.

If in fact Obama truly intends to move ahead with his plan to engage the mullahs, then he will effectively legitimize - if not adopt - Teheran's preconditions that the US end its alliance with Israel, which Iran seeks to destroy, and accept a nuclear-armed Iran. And under these circumstances, Israel's next government - which all opinion polls conclude will be led by Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu - will have to adopt certain policies.

First, in keeping with his campaign rhetoric, Netanyahu will have to make preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons his most urgent priority upon entering office.

And second, to withstand US pressure to allow the Obama administration time to develop its ties with Teheran, (time that Iran will use to build its first nuclear bomb), Netanyahu will need to form as large and wide a governing coalition as possible. All issues that divide the Israeli electorate between Right and Left must be temporarily set aside.

In the age of Honest Obama, Israel is alone in recognizing the necessity of preventing Iran from acquiring the means to destroy the Jewish state. Consequently, Netanyahu's government will need to proceed with all deliberate speed to take whatever actions are necessary to prevent Israel's destruction.

caroline@carolineglick.com

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Palestinian Myth Machine

Mona Charen
Friday, January 30, 2009

"Israel has committed the war crime of the 21st century," cried a Palestinian representative. Using massive force against a crowded refugee camp, Saeb Erakat claimed, the Israelis had "massacred" hundreds of Palestinian civilians. A CNN reporter used the figure of 300-400 dead. Peter Hansen, the commissioner general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) told a Danish newspaper that 300-400 Palestinians had been killed. The place was not Gaza in 2009, but Jenin in 2002. The great Jenin massacre turned out to be another in a long series of false atrocity stories manufactured by the Palestinians and credulously repeated by the international press (which likes nothing so much as the image of vicious Israelis). Cartoonists across Europe delighted in drawing Israelis in Nazi uniforms. Le Monde ran a cartoon comparing the destruction of Jenin with the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.

In fact, in August 2002, the United Nations and Human Rights Watch (neither very friendly to Israel) put the final fatality figures at 26 Palestinian fighters, 26 civilians and 23 Israeli soldiers. The Israeli casualty figures were comparatively high because the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) decided to fight street by street with soldiers on foot instead of using air power or tanks precisely to minimize civilian casualties. The houses in Jenin were booby-trapped. The terrorists surrounded themselves with civilians.

Now we are told that Gaza suffered 1,300 killed and up to 4,000 wounded. These numbers come exclusively from Hamas sources and have not been independently verified. In fact, the numbers have been challenged by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, which put the number of dead at between 500 and 600, the majority of whom were young men. Others suggest that as many as 1,000 may have been killed, the majority Hamas fighters.

Certainly the humanitarian crisis in Gaza evokes sympathy. But the full and complete responsibility for that crisis lies at the feet of Hamas. The Palestinian daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (published on the West Bank) reported on the Abd Rabbo family. The Abd Rabbos had the misfortune to own a farm that overlooked the Israeli town of Sderot. This, the newspaper reports, turned it into an ideal military position for the Palestinian fighters, from which they have launched hundreds of rockets into southern Israel during the last few years. "The Abd Rabbo family members emphasize that they are not (Hamas) activists and that they are still loyal to the Fatah movement, but that they were unable to prevent the armed squads from entering their neighborhood at night. One family member, Hadi (age 22) said: 'You can't say anything to the resistance (fighters), or they will accuse you of collaborating (with Israel) and shoot you in the legs.'"

As in Jenin, Israel took extraordinary measures to limit civilian casualties in Gaza. Reporting in the Weekly Standard, Max Boot notes that the IDF made hundreds of thousands of phone calls and dropped hundreds of thousands of leaflets warning civilians to vacate sites of impending attacks. "When the Israeli Air Force detected Palestinian civilians atop buildings," Boot writes, "it dropped tiny bombs designed to cause little damage. Only when the civilians had cleared off did the air force drop larger munitions that flattened the structure."

Unlike the Israelis, Hamas was keen to increase Palestinian casualties of violence. Gaza is full of munitions, smuggling tunnels, and incitement videos exhorting the faithful to kill Jews, but it's nearly impossible to find a bomb shelter in the Strip. By contrast, the Israeli town of Sderot, where my 12-year-old son visited last week, is covered with them. He sat in the living room of an 80-year-old woman whose son had urged her to take cover in the newly built bomb shelter in her basement. Five minutes after she reluctantly rose from her sofa and left the room a Kassam rocket crashed through the ceiling.

Sderot is home to 23,000 long-suffering people. Boot reports that at no time during the past eight years has Sderot enjoyed more than four consecutive days without a missile attack. I cannot imagine how they bear the anxiety. I felt a tiny shred of what they must go through when I worried about my son's recent visit.

Operation Cast Lead has brought a respite. In the face of an enemy like Hamas, it is the only way.



Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

'I Slept in Your Gaza Home'


sraelNN Staff 'I Slept in Your Gaza Home'

Hello,

While the world watches the ruins in Gaza, you return to your home which remains standing. However, I am sure that it is clear to you that someone was in your home while you were away.

I am that someone. I spent long hours imagining how you would react when you walked into your home. How you would feel when you understood that IDF soldiers had slept on your mattresses and used your blankets to keep warm.

I knew that it would make you angry and sad and that you would feel this violation of the most intimate areas of your life by those defined as your enemies, with stinging humiliation. I am convinced that you hate me with unbridled hatred, and you do not have even the tiniest desire to hear what I have to say. At the same time, it is important for me to say the following in the hope that there is even the minutest chance that you will hear me.

I spent many days in your home. You and your family's presence was felt in every corner. I saw your family portraits on the wall, and I thought of my family. I saw your wife's perfume bottles on the bureau, and I thought of my wife. I saw your children's toys and their English language schoolbooks. I saw your personal computer and how you set up the modem and wireless phone next to the screen, just as I do.

I wanted you to know that despite the immense disorder you found in your house that was created during a search for explosives and tunnels (which were indeed found in other homes), we did our best to treat your possessions with respect. When I moved the computer table, I disconnected the cables and lay them down neatly on the floor, as I would do with my own computer. I even covered the computer from dust with a piece of cloth. I tried to put back the clothes that fell when we moved the closet although not the same as

you would have done, but at least in such a way that nothing would get lost.

I know that the devastation, the bullet holes in your walls and the destruction of those homes near you place my descriptions in a ridiculous light. Still, I need you to understand me, us, and hope that you will channel your anger and criticism to the right places.

I decided to write you this letter specifically because I stayed in your home.

I can surmise that you are intelligent and educated and there are those in your household that are university students. Your children learn English, and you are connected to the Internet. You are not ignorant; you know what is going on around you.

Therefore, I am sure you know that Kassam rockets were launched from your neighborhood into Israeli towns and cities.

How could you see these weekly launches and not think that one day we would say "enough"?! Did you ever consider that it is perhaps wrong to launch rockets at innocent civilians trying to lead a normal life, much like you? How long did you think we would sit back without reacting?

I can hear you saying "it's not me, it's Hamas". My intuition tells me you are not their most avid supporter. If you look closely at the sad reality in which your people live, and you do not try to deceive yourself or make excuses about "occupation", you must certainly reach the conclusion that the Hamas is your real enemy.

The reality is so simple, even a seven-year-old can understand: Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, removing military bases and its citizens from Gush Katif. Nonetheless, we continued to provide you with electricity, water, and goods (and this I know very well as during my reserve duty I guarded the border crossings more than once, and witnessed hundreds of trucks full of goods entering a blockade-free Gaza every day).

Despite all this, for reasons that cannot be understood and with a lack of any rational logic, Hamas launched missiles on Israeli towns. For three years we clenched our teeth and restrained ourselves. In the end, we could not take it anymore and entered the Gaza Strip, into your neighborhood, in order to remove those who want to kill us. A reality that is painful but very easy to explain.

As soon as you agree with me that Hamas is your enemy and because of them, your people are miserable, you will also understand that the change must come from within. I am acutely aware of the fact that what I say is easier to write than to do, but I do not see any other way. You, who are connected to the world and concerned about your children's education, must lead, together with your friends, a civil uprising against Hamas.

I swear to you, that if the citizens of Gaza were busy paving roads, building schools, opening factories and cultural institutions instead of dwelling in self-pity, arms smuggling and nurturing a hatred to your Israeli neighbors, your homes would not be in ruins right now. If your leaders were not corrupt and motivated by hatred, your home would not have been harmed. If someone would have stood up and shouted that there is no point in launching missiles on innocent civilians, I would not have to stand in your kitchen as a soldier.

You don't have money, you tell me? You have more than you can imagine.

Even before Hamas took control of Gaza, during the time of Yasser Arafat, millions if not billions of dollars donated by the world community to the Palestinians was used for purchasing arms or taken directly to your leaders' bank accounts. Gulf States, the Emirates - your brothers, your flesh and blood, are some of the richest nations in the world. If there was even a small feeling of solidarity between Arab nations, if these nations had but the smallest interest in reconstructing the Palestinian people – your situation would be very different.

You must be familiar with Singapore. The land mass there is not much larger than the Gaza Strip and it is considered to be the second most populated country in the world. Yet, Singapore is a successful, prospering, and well-managed country. Why not the same for you?

My friend, I would like to call you by name, but I will not do so publicly. I want you to know that I am 100% at peace with what my country did, what my army did, and what I did. However, I feel your pain. I am sorry for the destruction you are finding in your neighborhood at this moment. On a personal level, I did what I could to minimize the damage to your home as much as possible.

In my opinion, we have a lot more in common than you might imagine. I am a civilian, not a soldier, and in my private life I have nothing to do with the military. However, I have an obligation to leave my home, put on a uniform, and protect my family every time we are attacked. I have no desire to be in your home wearing a uniform again and I would be more than happy to sit with you as a guest on your beautiful balcony, drinking sweet tea seasoned with the sage growing in your garden.

The only person who could make that dream a reality is you. Take responsibility for yourself, your family, your people, and start to take control of your destiny. How? I do not know. Maybe there is something to be learned from the Jewish people who rose up from the most destructive human tragedy of the 20th century, and instead of sinking into self-pity, built a flourishing and prospering country. It is possible, and it is in your hands. I am ready to be there to provide a shoulder of support and help to you.

But only you can move the wheels of history.

Regards,

Yishai, (Reserve Soldier)

The above was a letter that was originally published in the Hebrew-language daily newspaper Ma'ariv, and translated into English by the Independent Media Review and Analysis (IMRA).