The Jews of Israel are facing a cruel dilemma. They came home to find peace and safety in their homeland of Israel; to find an end to that vulnerable status of a perpetual wandering minority; an end to exile, alienation, and powerlessness; and the beginning of a normal national existence. Instead, they found neighbors who were not reconciled to their living again together in this tiny piece of land the Jews have regarded as home for 4,000 years. How do you share a home with someone who says, "You have no right to be here"?
The Arab assault on the Jews that began immediately and has continued for more than half a century made it clear the Jews could not control 2 million Arabs without eroding the moral character of their tiny state and, with that, its support in the world. So leader after leader decided to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine and any pretense that Israel could become a binational state in which one people ruled another. After Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres promoted the Oslo agreements, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert, prime ministers all, made dramatic proposals in search of a live-and-let-live relationship with the Palestinians -- and all were rejected. They offered to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza in words and withdrew from them in deeds. Did this bring peace? No, it brought terrorist attacks by suicide bombers who menaced any kind of normal life within Israel. Prime Minister Sharon voluntarily withdrew every last Jewish settler and soldier from Gaza. It meant forcing close to 10,000 Jews out of their homes. Did it bring peace? Did the Gazans say, "Good riddance," and get on with building their own society? No, they hunted the Jews who had left. They turned Gaza into a launching pad for thousands of rockets against the Jewish people. Never even for one day did they cease. This was true even before Hamas seized control. Then, when Hamas did take control, the terrorism escalated.
In yet another effort to find peace, the Israelis risked their own security by dismantling security barriers and checkpoints -- down from 147 to 14 in the West Bank -- and so providing mobility for people in commerce. They have "not been getting much credit for it," in the words of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, but the economic results are dramatic. Wages in the West Bank were up 24 percent in 2008 over 2007; agricultural exports from the Palestinian Authority to Israel increased from 30,000 tons in 2007 to 92,000 tons in 2008; the number of permits for Palestinians to work in Israel rose from 21,000 to 23,000.
The trouble has been the absence of any responsible governance among the Palestinians -- no capacity to deal with terrorism and violence, no command-and-control structure, no political backing for Palestinian officers to go after sensitive targets, and no legal apparatus to try those who might be arrested. Terrorist operatives have gone in one door one day and out the next. So when successive American administrations have pushed for negotiation between the parties, the Americans have all discovered, as the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea put it, "that they want an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement more than the Israelis and the Palestinians want it."
The Obama administration began unwisely. The president made an uncompromising demand for a full freeze on construction in the settlements, imposing no requirement on the Arabs. That missed the real point of contention. According to a recent poll of Palestinians, halting construction in the settlements is not important to them. The evacuation of the settlement outposts is much more important to them. For the Israeli public, the settlement issue was a nonstarter without a compensating concession by the Palestinians. In any event, the previous Olmert government had greatly reduced permits for construction settlements, and very few permits remain.
Now the administration has initiated a more promising policy. At September's three-way summit in New York, it achieved an agreement by all parties to commence negotiations with no preconditions. Everything is on the table.
Israel is now committed fully to two states for two peoples. At the United Nations, Obama voiced his unreserved support for Israel as the state of the Jewish people, one of the core issues. The peace negotiations were to begin in a matter of weeks.
Obama's previous efforts had been rebuffed. His speech in Cairo in June, which he thought would open a door to the Muslim world, did not gain any takers. The Arab rulers refused to enter the room, and most kept their distance. According to a recent poll released by the International Peace Institute, public hostility to the United States and to Obama remained high, and it appeared that only 1 in 6 Palestinians has a positive opinion of America, and only 1 in 4 has a positive opinion of Obama. The only one who responded to Obama was Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who made public his commitment to have two states for two peoples. Here we had a government built around right-wing parties yet able to pass a resolution supporting the two-state solution.
Netanyahu's approach holds that peace will come from the bottom up, not the top down. It is both about economic development and about bringing security under control. The PA had been paralyzed, its security organizations scattered and ineffective, so it was left to the Israeli Defense Forces to control things on the ground while the terrorists hid. Several hundred gang leaders created chaos in the territories, holding back commercial and economic life, demanding protection money, killing and wounding Arabs and Jews alike. The PA simply didn't have the capacity to deal with these gangs.
A new approach came from Israel's General Security Services in 2007. The GSS director approached the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, offering the wanted men a deal. If they ended their involvement in terrorism and violence, gave up their weapons, and placed themselves under the protection of the PA, they would be taken off the wanted list and would neither be arrested nor killed.
There was to be a three-stage trial period. First, the wanted men would be under the protection of the security services, restricting their movements; second, they would be given relative freedom of movement in the area; and third, they would be allowed to return home and live a normal life as long as they adhered to the terms of the agreement.
The plan worked. Nine rounds of wanted men who have been processed, almost 80 percent of the members of the original list of gang leaders, have left the world of crime and terrorism, and the ground is quiet. Now terrorists from other organizations such as Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front have approached the Palestinian security organizations wanting to come in from the cold and get on the list of parolees. They want to go home, and they are willing to abandon terrorist attacks and crime.
The security organizations that had lacked control over the territory were suddenly in charge. Add to this the projects of American Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, who, also in 2007, began training the special Palestinian forces and helped begin security cooperation with Israel. The new security forces began to take over responsibilities for the cities. Nablus was the first city, Jenin the second. Terrorist activities in these cities virtually collapsed, as the terrorist infrastructures were located and dismantled and the public police took over on the ground and, this time, did it seriously.
Today, Hamas is as much of a danger to the PA as it is to Israeli citizens. In fact, these Palestinian security services have now confronted wanted Hamas operators and done it much more brutally than the IDF would have done it. As Ben Caspit reported in Maariv, an Israeli newspaper, "The Palestinians are not fighting for us but for themselves. They are not protecting our lives, but their own. The terrible scenes from Hamas's takeover of Gaza, the executions in the streets, the kneecapping, the officer who was thrown off the 15th floor have all done their part." The Fatah organization realized that if it did not hit Hamas with all its might, Hamas would hit it.
This doesn't mean that the terrorism capability of these organizations is completely gone, but the success has fed on itself. Most of the credit is due to Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister. He has changed the way things are done. He asserts he will be the Ben Gurion of the Palestinians -- i.e., he will build the foundations of a state before the Palestinians declare a state, so that when they do, the infrastructure of governance will exist. A critical part is that the PA is starting to exert control over the territories.
The president, Mahmoud Abbas, has also gained confidence as the leader of Fatah. He has focused on consolidating his own authority and gaining the upper hand over the rival Hamas movement, breaking both its social infrastructure and its terrorist network. Now his popularity is growing. In a recent poll, he was supported by 55 percent, compared with only 32 percent in support of Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas in Gaza; 64 percent believe that Haniyeh is harmful to the interests of the Palestinians.
This progress will take more time. The Israelis will not buy words; they will buy only deeds. They will not accept the West Bank as a platform for rocket attacks that could reach every major Israeli population center. That is why they believe that the IDF should have complete freedom of action in the West Bank to respond to terrorism and crime. That is why the only Palestinian state that Israel can accept is, in Blair's words, "one that is secure and properly governed."
The peace process must be the beginning of the future, not the beginning of the end. There is still a ways to go, but the progress being made by the Palestinians, especially in terms of controlling the terrorists and criminal gangs, is one of the most promising developments to have occurred in decades.
The Palestinian people are a case study in ignorance and futility.
Anyone saying the same thing about the Jewish people would immediately be called an anti-Semite.
After what looked like a hopeful swing, we have all regressed again.
Israel is a fact. The Jews will not give up their state, and their capital in Jerusalem without horrible consequences.
The Palestinians deserve to live under their own leadership, in peace and dignity, wihtout threat, without threatening; and they deserve compensation for their losses.
How do we get from here to there? What do the Palestinians absolutely need, which they cannot exist without, that does not preclude the secure existence of an independent Jewish state?
Why define a "secure Jewish state" as a state that must have a Jewish majority?
How Jewish can any Jewish state be, if it resorts to immorality to maintain a Jewish majority?
Israel expelled 700,000 Palestinians in 1948. West Bank Palestinians live in conditions that Desmond Tutu called "worse that Apartheid". There is serious malnutrition. Gazan's have trouble getting the most basic supplies.
If Israel wanted a "Jews only" state or even a permetual Jewish majority state, it would have been better for them (a 33% minority) to take 33% of Palestine in 1948 instead of 78%, and the rest in 1967.
Right of return for Palestinians and living in a multi-cultural state is now a moral imperative for Israel. Israeli historians recognize this. Some so called "Israeli supporters" do not.
"White" people have never been at risk for extermination, not even in an immoral state like Zimbabwe. Throughout the millenia, the Jews, as a minority, in every country, in every epoch of history, have been limited in their social, civic, and relgious rights, have been exiled, shunned, tortured, murdered, burnt at the stake, drawn and quartered, gased and blown to bits, simply for the fact that they professed the Jewish faith. Even in their own homeland, in their small numbers, they were outcasts, living at the benificence of their rulers. Their numbers have dwindeled to near extinction.
It seems the very existence of Jews, or a Jewish state are considered "immoral" and an "aggression".
Finally, after 2000 years, the world, as a collective, recognized, if only for a moment, that the Jews had a right to return a national home, as did all the other nations and religions on earth. In that recognition, a Jewish state was re-born in a tiny portion of its ancient homeland, to share with the countries around it, and to allow for the expression of yet another Arab nation to join the existing 23. But it was immediately challenged for survival, simply for the fact that "a Jewish state cannot be allowed to exist on holy Muslim soil". Despite overwhelming odds, and repeated wars, Israel survived, prospered, built one of the most vibrant societies on earth, produced multiple Nobel Laureates, contributed immensely to the progress of mankind, while the attacking armies brought defeat to themselves, misery to their people, and a loss of physical territory to their countries. Now, in a world that turns a blind eye to Darfur, Chechnya, Tibet, the Congo, and tens of thousand of rockets fired against innocent civilians, you say that the extermination of this state is a "moral imperative," without which a Palestinian state cannot exist, and which the world requires.
I say to you, it ain't gonna happen. Live with it, and try to build what is needed without destroying what is needed, as much or more.
or those who are so sure that "Palestine", the country, goes back through most of recorded history", I expect you to be able to answer a few basic questions about that country of Palestine, and its respective citizen that demand so many rights and priviledges..
When was it founded and by whom?
What were its borders?
What was its capital?
What were its major cities?
What constituted the basis of its economy?
What was its form of government?
Can you name at least one Palestinian leader before Arafat or the Grand Mufti?
Was Palestine ever recognized by a country whose existence, at that time or now, leaves no room for interpretation?
What was the language of the country of Palestine?
What was the name of its currency?
Choose any date in history and tell what was the approximate exchange rate of the Palestinian monetary unit against the US dollar, German mark, GB pound, Japanese yen, or Chinese yuan on that date?
And, finally, since there is no such country today, what caused its demise and when did it occur?
http://www.mideastweb.org/briefhistory.htm
Actually "Palestinians" was a generic term that referenced any person Muslim, Christian or Jew who lived in Palestine. Because there never was a country named Palestine.
Palestinians have as much right based on ancestry to claim the ancient state of Judea as their heritage as do Ashkenazi Jews. The name they choose to call themselves, or the religions they practice are irrelevent to their rights to have a country of their own. The answers to questions like whether they had a currency are utterly irrelevent. European Jews can't answer the questions any better than Palestians can. Zionism is based on ancient biblical myths that have little or no historical basis. Despite these phony questions the Palestinians are in the process of being ethnically cleansed from their homeland by foreign invaders.
"Palestinians have as much right based on ancestry to claim the ancient state of Judea as their heritage as do Ashkenazi Jews. The name they choose to call themselves, or the religions they practice are irrelevent to their rights to have a country of their own." Today, no one, including Israel dispute that right. Israel has offered, today, to help establish a state for the Palestinians in most of Judea and Samaria and gaza.
The only obstacle is that you, and the Palestinians would deny the same rights you claim, to the Jewish people to a state of their own. As you said, the Jews have "AS MUCH RIGHT".
Who do you think the Arabs are descended from? They may not have been called Arabs then, but they are called that now.
Do you really think that they would allow the Palestinians (their enemy) to own land and have equal rights? They would soon be outnumbered and the Palestinians would own all the land with time.
And again, you are confused. Israeli Arabs own land, have full rights of all Israeli citizens, except to enlist in the armed forces. They have been shortchanged in their socio-economic rights. That needs to be fixed. And given the current population ratios, Israel will remain a Jewish majority state without resorting to any manipulations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel
I am not a victim of propaganda. The British Empire may have owned the land, but when they left it, they should have given it back to the indiginous people, not to Russians. They have no claim to that land anymore after thousands of years. In fact, the Palestinians are probably more related to the original Israelites than the "Jews" that are there now. Your argument is supporting imperialism, and the idea that the will of an empire trumps the rights of the people who live there.
These peoples lived in that land between the river and the sea for many many centuries prior to the arrival of Abraham and the jews from mesopotamia.
Palestinians are not descendants of judeans, but rather they are descendants of the canaanites and the philistines who were there first.
Honest and accuracy is very very important.
The jewish religion began with Jacob, the son of Isaac, and the grandson of Abraham.
Abraham immigrated to the holy land from Ur, a city located in southern Iraq near Basra.
That means that the ancestral home of the jews is southern iraq, NOT Palestine !!
The israelis are responsible for all the violence. They have been stealing land for 61 years and are stealing land now. They have been brutalizing the Palestinians for 61+ years and are brutalizing them now. All Palestinian violence and most "Arab Terrorism" worldwide is a response to the situation of the Palestinians.
If Mr Zuckerman, and others who assert similar things, really believe the underlying premises in his article then they have lost touch with reality and should be stopped or restrained by the international community.
If Mr Zuckerman, and others who assert similar things, are posturing and lying so they can continue their criminal behaviors, then they should be sanctioned severely for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Muslims, while completely free to practice their religion, as are all others, are NOT native. They came to the area in 700C.E., long after Judaism had been established there. The Taliban, on the other hand, indeed, many Muslim countries, such as saudi Arabia, permit no other religion to be practised.
How is Israel going to remain a Jewish state without trampling on the rights of their existing Muslim population, which appears to be reproducing faster than the Jewish population?
What about the "Modesty Guard" in Israel? How does it differ from the Taliban?
thery are like fish in a barrell...they just dont want their land occupied.
The basis for the existence of Israel is a big mistake and the real descendants of the Jews, the Palestinians, are being persecuted once again.
this is the reason that there are so many Jews that came from Russia and Poland -- they were from Kazakstan centuries ago.
kind of ironic, no?
The day after Israel declared independence the Arabs boasted that they would wipe the Jews off the face of the earth and drive them into the sea. But as it turned out the Arabs lost, and so did the Palestinians.
The Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
The partition of Palestine has/had nothing to do with the indigenous people, it had to do with the legal division of land to the Jews by the rightful owners, the British.
Those Arabs who rejected the Partition Plan had a perfect right to do so. We are talking about Palestinians who had lived there for centuries.
Besides not having a right to partition anyones land. The Partition Plan gave a 33% minority 57% of the land. Jewish groups started driving Palestinians from their homes before any Arab armies arrived. By the end of the war Israel had 78% of Palestine, 700,000 Palestinians had been expelled, and 500 Palestinian villages were leveled.
Israel has never made a fair offer to end this conflict.
There is a big difference between giving land to people who already live there, and giving control of land and the people on it. over to a recently arrived minority. Much more land than this minority already occupies.
The British and French had the job of carving up the Ottoman Empire. The Babylonians
had the job of carving up the Levant after they took much of it from the Assyrians in 586 BC. But that doesn't mean the resident Jews had no rights, now does it?
Building settlements does not advance "peace" but it sure does nail down another "piece" of the Holy Land.
On the latter, there is an interesting "piece" by Gideon Levy in Haaretz.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1119642.html
The only offer you get from the Palestinians is give us back what we lost when we bandoned our property because the Grand Mufti of Jersalem told us to get out of the way so that the mighty Arab armies can drive those filthy Jews into the sea. . Our ancestors stole it by force of arms and it is ours fair and square. They can point to North America as an example of stealing land and keeping it as though the aboriginal population willingly agreed to be placed in reservations and be starved to death by thieves who were political appointees.
My sincere hope is that more than just Mort's size of the argument are heard, especially in America. Too often in America are stories of the IDF killing 100 Palestinians justified by making the (understandable) distress that 10 Israelis, for example, experienced as the result of highly inaccurate Qassam rockets landing near southern Israeli towns.
In such an example, zero Israelis lose their lives, whilst many Palestinians do. And more than just 10 Palestinians experience distress. Yet far too often in American media are the two portrayed as somehow equivalent, if not portrayed as Israelis ending up with the shorter end of the stick.
And if I seem to be coming down hard against American media coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I am. Mort's article is proof of the real bias that exists. Want additional proof? Look to non-American media sources to see what isn't - such as the tense situation in East Jerusalem - being covered in the States.
The Israelis, and Moshe Dayan in particular, were naive fools to allow the Arabs to maintain religious sovereignty over the Temple Mount when it was liberated in 1967. No other victorious power has ever been so magnanimous. Israel, today, is paying a steep price for that.