Addressing the United Nations General Assembly last month, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared that he had come "from the Holy Land, the land of Palestine, the land of divine messages, ascension of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and the birthplace of Jesus Christ (peace be upon him)."
No mention of Kings David and Solomon, nor of the prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Amos, or of the great Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva, or of Hillel and Shammai, the most prominent members of Jerusalem's Sanhedrin, the Jewish High Court, around the very time of Jesus Christ's birth. Abbas failed to recall Yokhanan ben Zakkai who established his yeshiva at Yavneh only decades later, or, for that matter, Yehuda Ha-Nasi, who compiled and edited the Mishna, the compilation of the oral tradition that forms the first section of the Talmud, in the second century of the Common Era. All these men lived in Abbas's "Holy Land, the land of Palestine" long before the birth of Muhammad. Indeed, the very words "Jews" and "Jewish" are conspicuously absent from Abbas's speech.
Abbas's deliberate refusal to acknowledge that before either Christianity or Islam ever appeared on the historical or theological scene, Judaism had been firmly ensconced in what is today the State of Israel, speaks volumes.
And when Reuters reports that "The issue of whether and how to suggest that Israel should be a Jewish state ultimately sank" the Quartet's recent diplomatic efforts to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, it is time for all of us, in particular those of us who have long supported a legitimate peace process, to draw our line in the sand.
"My people," Abbas declared, "desire to exercise their right to enjoy a normal life like the rest of humanity. They believe what the great poet Mahmoud Darwish said: Standing here, staying here, permanent here, eternal here, and we have one goal, one, one: to be."
Our unambiguous response must be that we insist on precisely the same rights Darwish demands for the Palestinians. For us, a permanent, eternal Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel is not only non-negotiable but must be, especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust, one of the cornerstones of any authentic and hopefully lasting peace.
When the remnant of European Jewry emerged from the death camps, forests and hiding places throughout Europe in the winter and spring of 1945, they looked for their families and, overwhelmingly, discovered that their fathers and mothers, their husbands, wives and children, their brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins, had all been murdered by the Germans and their accomplices. And yet, they did not give in to despair.
On the contrary, almost from the moment of their liberation, the Holocaust survivors' defiant affirmation of their Jewish national identity in the Displaced Persons camps of Germany, Austria, and Italy took the form of a political and spiritually redemptive Zionism. The creation of a Jewish state in what was then called Palestine was far more than a practical goal. It was the one ideal that had not been destroyed, and that allowed them to retain the hope that an affirmative future, beyond gas chambers, mass-graves, and ashes, was still possible for them.
At Bergen-Belsen, the largest of the DP camps, a popularly elected Jewish leadership headed by my father, Josef Rosensaft, made Zionism the order of the day. At the first Congress of Liberated Jews in the British Zone of Germany, convened in September 1945 in Belsen by my father and his colleagues without permission from the British military authorities, the survivors formally adopted a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and expressing their "Sorrow and indignation that almost six months after liberation, we still find ourselves in guarded camps on British soil soaked with the blood of our people."
Two months later, my father denounced the British government's stifling of "Jewish nationalists and Zionist activities" at Belsen in the pages of the New York Times. He further charged "that the British exerted censorship over the inmates' news sheets in that the Jews are not allowed to proclaim in print their desire to emigrate to Palestine."
In December 1945, my father told representatives of American Jewry assembled at the first post-war conference of the United Jewish Appeal in Atlantic City, according to a report in the New York Herald Tribune, that the survivors' sole hope was emigration to Palestine, the only place in the world "willing, able, and ready to open its doors to the broken and shattered Jews of war-ravaged Europe." The following week, the New York Journal American quoted him as declaring at an emergency conference on Palestine at the Manhattan Center in New York City, that, "We know that the English are prepared to stop us with machine guns. But machine guns cannot stop us." In early 1946, he told the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine that if the survivors would not be allowed to go to Palestine, "We shall go back to Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and you will bear the moral responsibility for it."
Small wonder, then, that according to British Foreign Office documents, my father was considered an "extreme Zionist" and a "dangerous troublemaker."
My father, who taught me that a love of the Jewish people and of the State of Israel is the most important element of Jewish leadership, understood that the goal of a Jewish state was a spiritual lifeline that gave the survivors of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, and all the other centers of horror a sense of purpose and a basis for hope. He died 36 years ago this week during the Days of Awe, midway between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I cannot think of a worthier way to honor his memory than by evoking his spirit and his uncompromising dedication to the creation of a new Jewish commonwealth to refute each and every refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft is General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress, Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School, Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Syracuse University College of Law, and Vice President of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants
There are the Arab colonizers and imperialists!
Free the Middle-East and North Africa from the Arab colonial occupation!
No it doesn't. - IV Geneva Convention,Part III, article 49.
History is constantly in the move; people have been invaded, massacred, expelled, mingled with other cultures, got extinguished. There isn't much one can do for things that happened centuries or milennia ago,but some redress can be achieved for contemporary tragedies.
Arabs didn't steal anymore than other cultures did in a time of war and conquest - From Genghis Khan to Alexander the Great, from the Persian to Ottoman Empire, from the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese conquest from the XVI century onward. The fact is that Jews have been, in Modern and Contemporary History, a very small minority (4% in 1850, 19% in 1920, 32% in 1948) in Palestine. And whatever happened 2,000 years ago is irrelevant, because nobody on this planet holds an eternal land deed.
As to Arabs being a majority...well, they are - so what? Would you give up your house to some aliens because they argue that; one, that it had once belonged to their ascendants and two, that your immediate family has many other properties?
i doubt it very much.
It says: Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.
The government of Israel has done none of those.
In 1948 the Arab states intervened in the massacre of Palestinians by the Jewish colony. They largely failed to stem the tide of Palestinian blood nor their expulsion from their homes and lands.
In 1967, the morning of 6/5, Israel attacked Egypt and subsequently Jordan and Syria. You know this is true.
Israel was not attacked in 1973. The only attack was on IDF positions in Israeli-occupied Egypt and Syria. That's NOT Israel.
The Palestinian presence pre-dates and post-dates the Jewish presence. The Palestinians were there when the Jews wondered in, when most left, and when the Zionist boated in from Europe.
Israel will have secure borders only when the Palestinians can return to their lands and property stolen from them. Besides, IT"S THE LAW!
From September 19, 2011, less than 3 weeks ago:
"A prominent settler rabbi on Monday slammed so-called "price tag" acts of violence against Palestinians and the Israeli army, saying they undermined Jewish presence in the occupied West Bank.
"We condemn the actions termed 'price tag' against the IDF (army), mosques and innocent Arabs," says a petition penned by Rabbi Yaakov Medan, one of the heads of the Har Etzion yeshiva, or Jewish seminary, near the southern town of Bethlehem.
"These deeds are totally unacceptable from a moral and national perspective, and endanger the entire settlement movement in Judea and Samaria," it reads, using the biblical term for the West Bank."
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/israeli-settler-rabbi-slams-price-tag-violence-192605611.html
Gosh isn't that self-serving? Condemning the wanton and planned attacks on innocent Palestinian civilians because it might 'endanger' the illegal colonizing of Palestinian land!
I would also add that according to at least one poll that I know off:
"Nearly half of Israel's Jewish population believes the "price tag" activities executed by extreme rightists against Palestinians are justified to a certain extent, according to a survey conducted for Ynet and the Gesher educational organization". See: http://tiny.cc/1pqzf
Imagine that, nearly half of Israeli Jews think it is acceptable to attack unarmed innocent Palestinian civilians out of 'revenge'!
No, not good enough! So not good enough!
The people whose flag you display think it is acceptable to attack unarmed innocent Israeli civilians all the time, so I wouldn't point fingers if I were you.
Sadly, the Jewish community of Eretz Israel (Land of Israel) has experienced, since 1920, an organized war-of-attrition-through-terror carried out the Muslim-Arabs - not by Christian-Arabs or Druze-Arabs, mind you!! - aiming to spread terror among the civilian population by attacking those in society who lack protection: young and elderly civilians.
In this historic context the concept of 'amaleq has been used during the past nearly a hundred years, and understandably so, while at the same time stretching a hand of reconciliation and peace, which so far has been rejected.
That's true--which is why Rubal favors such actions.
"Or Tel Aviv University, which recently ranked number 11 in citations per faculty member. That's above Oxford, Cambridge and Yale. There's no comparison in terms of budgets involved," he said.
Through a mixture of determination and doggedness, Israel had excelled in both academia and start-ups, he said.
"Israel has gotten very good at doing this sort of thing," he said.
"The dynamics of being determined, creative, and doing more with less -- and also trying to solve big problems -- you see that at both the academic level and the start-up level."
Credit where credit is due, Israel has excelled in many areas, however no amount of Nobel prizes will disguise the fact that Israeli has kept millions of civilians under military occupation for over 60 years, denied them their basic human rights and illegally colonized their land.
Simply put the discovery of quasicrystals or the number of Israeli companies listed on Nasdaq pales into insignificance compared to the liberation and freedom of the Palestinian People.
FALSE:
There was no occupation before 1967. That also implies your refusal to accept the state of Israel no matter how small the borders may be proving occupation as you call it is not at the core of the issue but religious dogma for non acceptance of a Non Muslim State or just plain hatred towards Jews.
I find it somewhat amusing that pro-Israel posters have to be reminded, and corrected, on the matter of Israeli history.
Between 1949-1966 Arabs within Israel were subjected to martial law which included: expulsions, curfews, administrative detentions etc. In effect Arab areas in Negev, Galilee, etc were under Israeli military occupation and control.
Between 1967-2011 Arabs in the WB and Gaza were also subjected to Israeli martial law and occupation.
Combined that is 61 years in which Arab civilians have lived and suffered under Israeli occupation.
Israeli professor Dan Shechtman on Wednesday became the tenth Israeli to become a Nobel laureate when he won the prize for chemistry for his discovery of quasicrystals, which overturned scientific theory on the nature of solids.
Over the past 45 years, Israel has won a total of 10 Nobel prizes -- a major achievement for a country of just 7.8 million people.
Israel is the country which counts the most engineers per head and ranks second only to the United States in the number of companies listed on Nasdaq.
Almost all the big names in technology -- from Intel and Google to Microsoft -- have important research and development centres in Israel, and there are 500 new start-ups every year.
Three of the Nobel chemistry laureates, including Shechtman, were graduates of the Technion, the prestigious technological university in the northern port city of Haifa, which has turned out 70 percent of the country's engineers and 80 percent of the executives of Israeli firms listed on Nasdaq.
Israel's fourth chemistry laureate, who won the award in 2009, came from the Weizmann Institute of Science near Tel Aviv, one of the country's leading research institutes, which has twice won the Turing Award, otherwise known as the Nobel prize of computing.
Three of israel's ten Nobels are peace prizes.
The irony of israel supporters boasting of those Nobel awards from one side of their mouth and vocally supporting the occupation out the other side of their mouth is laughable.
What is laughable in your post is YOU yourself who wrote a rubbish.
btw, who you think wants to sue you for boycotting products from the settlements ?
If you live in a democratic country you can buy what you want.
As usual, Arabs and their supporters shoot in their legs. Arabs who work peacefully in the factories are loosing their jobs and are first to be hurt by your boycott.
Reality is that while many things have changed, as things change in the dynamic life and dynamic world in which we live, some fundamentals have been there all along.
Indeed, Judaism, the civilization of the Hebrew/Israeli/Jewish people, is still one of the few living civilizations on earth that can consider itself an ancient civilization that has survived for thousands of years.
We, Jews, are proud of it. Why shouldn't we, I ask the poster...??
Shana Tova. have an easy fast
F&F
Seeing as that is his entire claim to the land, his claim seems pretty weak
It is well documented that, over time, various ethnic groups converted to Judaism (eg: the Khazars, the Himyarites, etc) thus it can said that a percentage, be it large or small, of Jews nowadays are *not* actually descendants of Jacob.
Yet Jews in general are quite willing to ignore this simple fact and continue to focus on the myth of divine birthright. According to Jewish scripture ‘god’s promise’ (eg: Genesis 26: 4; 28:13-14) *only* applies to the direct descendants of Jacob and *not* to those (and their offspring) who convert to Judaism.
In short the religious ideology that that only Jews (‘the descendants of Jacob’) have a divine right to live in the land of Palestine/Israel is not a ideology which is held by the majority of the World population and those few who do believe in this religious myth can’t even distinguish between the true descendants of Jacob and those who converted.
At first glance, Anatot is a pastoral gated community close to Jerusalem, inhabited by law-abiding citizens, many of whom are employed by the Civil Administration and the police.
But despite its benign appearance, Anatot is a settlement, located in Palestinian territory occupied in 1967. Anatot was built in 1982 on land allocated by the Israeli government, and inexpensive housing was offered to police officers and other government employees in order to encourage them to live and work in the otherwise unattractive area known by the Israeli government and settlers as “Judea and Samaria,” and by the rest of the world as the West Bank.
Peter Beinart.
http://www.en.justjlm.org/617
"It should be all about me"
Why should a Palestinian leader asking the world to finally recognize his people need to mention Kings David and Solomon. What have they to do with recognizing the the Palestinians.
Palestine never existed. Is 'hypocrisy' a compulsory subject in Israeli schools?
Titus 1.14
This willful blindness to the displaced indigenous population is a subconsious reaffirmation of the Zionist myth about "a people without a land, a land without a people." In its worst manifestations, this particular myth can result in some Zionists stooping to denying the very existence of such population (the posts you see about "there are no Palestinians)."
While such population is now ignored by many Zionists, their existence and need for "transfer" was at the forefront of Zionist thought during the late 19th and early 20th century. It should be noted that the concept of "population transfer" was embraced by all shades of opinion in the Zionist movement, from the Revisionist Right to the Labor Left, including the "Moderate" Moshe Sharett and the socialist Arthur Ruppin. See:
http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Famous-Zionist-Quotes/Story637.html
Accordingly, what truly "speaks volumes" is how over-consumption of the Zionist narrative can, and in this instance, has resulted in NO mention of those displaced in order to create the safe haven from the atrocities mentioned in the above article.
A) The land was virtually empty and not being used and their was never a Palestine.
B) They left their homes willingly.
C) They also love to show how many countries in the world that have Muslim majorities (i guess this some how justifies their actions).
Others, who deny that those points are true need to be convinced that they are false.
Not true. There was no necessity to remove all the Arabs living in the land during 1948 to establish the Jewish State. There was alternative, called the Partition Plan, which would have allowed both our people's to live together without expulsions and in peace. The Jews willingly accepted the plan, the Arabs rejected it and opted for war. It was the war that necessitated the evacuations, NOT the establishment of the Jewish State. The expulsion of what has now become known as the Palestinian people lies SOLELY on the Arabs who rejected coexistence and chose to start a conflict.
While you may believe that "there was no necessity to remove all the Arabs ... to establish the Jewish State," the founders of the Zionist movement (of nearly all political shades) had no such illusions, and were quite clear that this is exactly what had to be done.
I provided a link that contained the thought of nearly every major Zionist on the "transfer" and other issues. Rather than simply say that this is "not true," I respectfully encourage you to respond to the existence of such "Transfer Committees," and how these comports with your contention that there was no plan to create a Jewish state without removing the indigneous Arabs.
Again, this is not to say that there should not be an Israel, but to point out how many of the myths that make up the Zionist narrative are counter-productive to identifying the true cause of the conflict, and impede the finding a just a lasting peace.