What Palestinian problem

[Outstanding and to think it was written by a popular leftist. He gets it or is he being sarcastic.]

Encountering Peace: The Palestinian problem is gone!

By GERSHON BASKIN, JPOST

Two weeks ago you were told that there is no occupation and that settlements are legal; now you can sleep well at night – there is no Palestinian problem either.

I am struggling to make sense of the policies being implemented by our prime minister. Binyamin Netanyahu is an intelligent man. In keeping his coalition together and staying in power longer than most past prime ministers, he has proven that he is also a masterful politician. However, I can’t accept that his political strategy is only a game of survival. I believe Netanyahu cares deeply about the country and its people; he adheres to a defined worldview and does not only make difficult decisions under pressure, as many claim.

I assume that he has a coherent political strategy that he can articulate. I also assume that it goes beyond protecting Israel from a potential Iranian bomb. I am mainly referring to his strategy vis-à-vis the Palestinians and the future of the West Bank. The bottom line on his strategy is the following: there is no occupation and there is no Palestinian problem. Binyamin Netanyahu has eliminated the Palestinian problem. This is how I think he did it: Shortly after he was elected he surprised everyone with his famous Bar-Ilan speech endorsing the two-state solution. That removed international and internal pressure on his new government. Then he implemented his “economic peace plan,” removing checkpoints and enabling the Palestinian economy to expand. The Palestinians cooperated by issuing the “Fayyad Plan” to build the institutions of the state. That kept them and the international community busy thinking that they were actually planning for statehood.

The policy of separating Gaza from the West Bank, launched by Sharon, followed up by Olmert and completed by Netanyahu is now paying off after the elections of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Hamas, feeling empowered, is planning to make permanent the separation from the West Bank. At the same time, Egypt will slowly but surely integrate Gaza into the Egyptian fabric.

The Egyptians want to retake control of Sinai. They need to end smuggling in the area and that includes the tunnels into Gaza.

The Gazan economy will move above ground, which will require a cargo transport border in Rafah. The Rafah border will shortly be open 24/7 for movement of people in and out. Gaza will import more from and through Egypt, maybe El-Arish will become a semi-official Gaza sea port. Soon we will begin to hear about the use of the Egyptian lira as the primary currency in Gaza instead of the Israeli shekel. Bye bye, Gaza. We can say farewell to its 1.6 million people.

East Jerusalem Palestinians, some 300,000 in number, are lining up asking for Israeli passports. Israel has succeeded in detaching them from the West Bank as well. They lived under Jordanian rule for 19 years and under Israeli rule for 45 years.

Israeli policies threaten their residency status.

They no longer have hopes of seeing a Palestinian state. They don’t wish to live under the restrictions of life in the West Bank. They enjoy free movement, national insurance and health services. Why not take an Israeli passport? Maybe they will vote in the Jerusalem municipal elections, maybe they won’t.

Maybe they will vote for the Knesset, maybe they won’t. There is a sharp decline in the political participation of Palestinian citizens of Israel, why should the Jerusalemites be different? We can say goodbye to the thorny issue of Jerusalem and the 300,000 additional Israeli citizens are already counted in our official statistics, so this won’t change anything.

Ninety-five percent of Palestinians in the West Bank are living under the Palestinian Authority. The PA is on the verge of financial collapse, but fear not, the United States, the Europeans and Israel will not allow them to fall. The PA is too important for stability.

They provide services to the Palestinians in education, health, welfare. They provide work for more than 150,000. They have a security force with official uniforms and a chain of command. They run an economy with a tax system. They have banks and even a stock market. They have a pseudonational status with Palestinian Authority passports. They have a flag and a national anthem. As long as there continues to be economic growth, which is largely dependent on Israel, relative calm is not too difficult to ensure.

There is the problem of some of the more extreme settlers who provoke with violence, mainly in the relatively unpopulated areas, and their actions all too often wind up on YouTube causing some concern. But all in all, it is manageable. In those few areas where there is unrest, the IDF knows how to deal with it. When was the last time we heard about Israeli casualties in Nebi Salah or Bil’in? We just have to keep those damn internationals and anarchists out and it will be fine.

If the Palestinians decide to once again rise up, a little disproportionate response does wonders, e.g. Defensive Shield, the Second Lebanon War and Cast Lead. Those operations bought years of deterrence.

ON TOP of all of this, Netanyahu’s demographers claim that the Palestinian census figure of 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank is off by about one million.

So let’s recap – Gaza, with its 1.6 million, is out of the picture. East Jerusalem’s 300,000 Palestinians become citizens, but like their one-million-strong brothers and sisters who are already citizens; their political participation is increasingly insignificant.

The West Bank is really only 1.5 million strong. Many young people are leaving for better opportunities elsewhere and for most people, at least those not living right next to a settlement or those who have to work in Israel, life isn’t so bad. In fact, it is probably better than Spain.

The demography problem played up so high by the left is a chimera. And we all know the haredim (ultra-Orthodox) produce even more babies than the Arabs (maybe this explains Netanyahu’s passionate relationship with them – even if they don’t serve in the army – they serve in the maternity ward).

The world still believes Netanyahu intends to one day create a Palestinian state, but there is not much they can do as long as he keeps on declaring his willingness to negotiate and the Palestinian leaders keep staying away from negotiations.

So listen up, People of Israel: two weeks ago you were told that there is no occupation and that settlements are legal. Now you can sleep well at night – there is no Palestinian problem either.

The writer is the co-chairman of IPCRI, the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information, a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, a radio host on All for Peace Radio and the initiator and negotiator of the secret back channel for the release of Gilad Schalit.

July 24, 2012 | 44 Comments »

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  1. SHmuel HaLevi Said:

    The enemy will resist or attack and will have to be totally defeated, destroyed and anyone of them surviving may run if she or he can.

    The important thing is the direction in which we are going. What it is that we are creating. A Jewish state, or a multicultural, multi-ethnic, bi-lingual state with a growing Muslim population.
    This option was explored in Lebanon. There French wanted to make a “national home” for the Maronite Christians. Initially it worked OK, Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East. Prosperous and cultured. Then the musloids multiplied and revolted, 200,000 people died, and the country, is no more a country. It will most likely collapse.

    So if we don’t want a multiethnic country with Arabs/Muslim, we need to do something about it.
    Overwhelming majority will not become loyal reliable fully trusted citizens of a Jewish state. They may behave, out of convenience or fear, but when pressured by their own terrorists, they will side with them. This is already beginning to happen in parts of Galilee and in Arab occupied Jerusalem.

    So they must go. How they go depends on circumstances.
    In a major war, they can be expelled. A few massacres real or invented by media, will make them run away. It is easy to get al Jazeera, and other Arab media to publicize huge massacres of the poor Pal-Arabs, especially the imagined mass rapes and mutilations.
    They will believe, because this is what they invariably do when their armies advance.
    The Jews will not need to dirty our hands with such crimes. So this is one end the possibilities.

    The other, peaceful way, is to make life economically hard for them in Israel, and at the same time attractive in let’s say Jordan.
    That too is easy: Israeli Arabs as the whole are tax negative, they consume more tax money than they contribute. In other way they are parasitic. Israel must stop supporting them with any kind of welfare. All welfare should be community based, not government. Let Jews help other Jews privately through a real Jewish Agency, not this current Agency that gives money to Arabs. Given a choice, Jews would rater hire a Jew than an Arab for the same price. If cheap labor is needed, import foreign workers from Thailand, or Philippines. (Without families.) They are usually much better workers than Arabs.

  2. @ SHmuel HaLevi:SHmuel HaLevi: I do agree with you. The way to a lasting peace is a battle with the enemy and the enemy’s unconditional surrender. The problem in the past has been that when Israel has been battling the Arabs, the UN does nothing when Israel is behind, but steps in when Israel is ahead and prevents the unconditional surrender needed for peace. Compare the results after the end of World War I with an Armistice — war again in less than 20 years; with the results after the unconditional surrenders demanded by the Allies in WWII. Sixty five years later we are still on friendly relations with Germany and Japan.

    In order to have a final peace, Israel must find a way to defeat the enemy with their unconditional surrender. I have been trying to think a way around that barrier but to date I have not. It will take a Government of Israel that has a strong will.

  3. @ Viiit:
    Reality check.
    I agree with you on that the exit of the enemy if the only way adding the following end game surety.
    Neither expulsion or voluntary will do. The enemy will resist or attack and will have to be totally defeated, destroyed and anyone of them surviving may run if she or he can.

  4. @ Viiit:You have alleged that it was Ben Gurion that was responsible for driving out the Arabs who fled in 1948. You suggest I turn to google to find out. I have turned to google and I have found the contrary. I found that a few rich Arabs fled first at the first foreshadowing of violence. Most fled because of the urging of the Arab Higher Executive Committee who added that if they didn’t leave they would be considered traitors.. This fact seems well sourced as it was written up my Mahmoud Abbas himself in the official organ of the PLO, “Filastin”. The Arab Committee asked all the Arabs in Palestine to leave for a couple of weeks when the surrounding Arab armies would defeat the Jews and then they could come back and enjoy their property and their Jewish neighbors property too. An interesting story in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago affirmed that Abbas himself claimed that when the surrounding armies didn’t win, the surrounding countries betrayed them and threw them into prison camps.
    A third source of their fleeing was the false account of a massacre at Deir Yassin. This was revealed to be false by the account of the radio broadcaster who years later in a program of the BBC revealed that he was urged to turn the battle of Deir Yassin into an account of a massacre to give a reason for the surrounding Arab Armies to invade. This lie of a massacre was aided by the Haganah because the battle at Deir Yassin by carried out by the Irgun, their political enemies. My research shows that it was only at Lydda and Ramle that the Israelis expelled Arabs and they were relatively few in number. As to the numbers of Arabs who fled I have seen the range of 400,000 to 700,000 with the higher end of the range most commonly but that the number of Jews who had to flee from their homes in the surrounding countries after Israel won in 1948 was somewhat greater.
    What is your source for the proposition that the Arabs 400,000 Arabs you said had left were in fact expelled by the Jews?

  5. .@ Wallace Brand:

    Allegation — a claim or assertion that someone has done something illegal or wrong, typically one made without proof.

    I have not made any allegation.
    Expelling Arabs was a highly moral patriotic act from Jewish perspective. I am not engaging with the perspectives of the enemies of the Jewish people with whom you unconsciously enlist when using the term “allegation”.

    As for the source of information, presumably you have just as much to http://www.Google.com as I do.
    you will be able to find plenty sources.

    My point is that it really does not matter: People always escape out of fear. The fear can be of a gun pointing at them, or the stories they hear. In either case the end result is the same.
    My disagreement is whether the result was desirable or not. This is not something that can be proven objectively, it is my subjective preference. My preference is that Israel exists. And therefore I find expulsion or voluntary escape equally desirable.

  6. @ Viiit: Viiit: I am always willing to learn something new. What is your credible source for your allegation that more than the Arabs of Ramle and Lydda were coerced by Jewish soldiers into leaving?

  7. @ Wallace Brand:
    Ilan Pape disgusting parody of a man. A self-hating Jewish leftist dhimmy and antisemite.
    On the other hand Benny Morris is one of the best historians Israel ever had.
    I am not familiar with the others that you mentioned, but assume they are of Pape’s ilk.

    The problem with this frame is the claim that expulsions were immoral. So anyone who claims that there were expulsion is considered enemy of Zionism and of Israel. And indeed most people who write about it, are selfhating idiotic Jews who think that Arab hatred towards us is because of our misbehavior.

    What we need is historians who can describe the expulsions as necessary for the Jewish state’s survival.
    Also the the number of refugees is most likely exaggerated. From my reading somewhere between 400,000 and 700,000.
    Whether they escaped from fear, or from direct expulsion is a minor difference. The point is they would not be allowed to return. The orders were given to shoot Arabs who were trying to infiltrate Israel, to come back to their homes.

    Now was it cruel?
    YES, and was it the right thing to do. YES, YES, YES!

    The real war is quite different from Harvard where disagreements between the members of fraternities can be settled in a facilitated meeting, and a discussion won through a better legal argument.

    This was a matter of the existence versus extermination of the Jewish nation.
    At that point, it became absolutely clear to big portion of the Jewish nation that the never will Jews be secure as minority living among other nations. From all countries in the end of 19th Century, Germany was probably the most tolerant. The German Jews were assimilated and highly intermarried. They considered themselves “Germans” of Jewish heritage, and some times Jewish religion. Einstein was one such Jew. Yet, even that enlightened Germany transformed itself within one generation from tolerant to murderous towards Jews.
    The assimilationist were discredited, and nationalist were convinced that there is no other way.

    When the choice is between a death of a nation, and expulsion, then expulsion is a much smaller evil.

    This is to high degree analogous with the expulsion of the German minority from Czech.
    Though expulsion of Germans was much more drastic. Firs of all Germans were there much longer, secondly they were indeed settled people, not semi-nomadic like most Pal-Arabs. Thirdly, after WWII they did not pose as great a threat to Czechoslovakia as the seditious Palestinian Arabs who refused the formation of the Jewish state.
    Still while the Pal-Arab expulsion was absolutely and urgently necessary, the two expulsions were similar in principle.

    So what we need is honest historians who acknowledge that Pal-Arabs were expelled, and argue that this was necessary, and therefore “good”. More over the proper position is that regrettably they were not all expelled, and even more regrettably,the remaining Arabs were given citizenship and political rights.
    Likewise it is regrettable that Arabs were allowed to return after they escaped in 1967, and that the Temple Mount, the holiest Jewish place, was given to Arabs to destroy. Temple Mount, not the Western Wall is the holiest place. The Western Wall is only holy because Jews were not allowed to pray on the Mount!
    And now the psychologically sick Jews, after winning in 1967, excluded themselves from their holiest place.
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Cutting someone with a knife is a bad thing, but sometimes cutting someone may be the only way to save their life if that is a matter of surgery. Like wise with expulsions and other acts of war. They become moral because the alternative is worse.

  8. @ Viiit: Viit:
    I can only find that Jewish soldiers expelled Arabs in two small groups from Lydda and Ramle. This was explained as because these groups of Arabs had entered into an agreement with the Haganah and then broke it. The IDF did not want enemy in the rear of their lines.

    There was also an alleged plan Dalet but was only one of many military plans that were never carried out.

    Do you have a different view of the alleged expulsion of Arabs ordered by Ben Gurion? You seem to echo the views of the new historians on this. According to Anita Shapira in an article in the New Republic, “the ideas advanced by Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and Ilan Pappe, the vanguard of the “new historians,” were nothing new. An anti-narrative of Zionism, counterposed to the Zionist (and Israeli) narrative of Zionism, had existed since the very inception of the Zionist movement. Opponents of the movement, Jewish and non-Jewish, had created an entire literature explaining what was foul in Zionism and why Zionism was destined to fail, and later why the state of Israel was an illegitimate and unjust construct that had to be resisted. The Soviet propaganda machine excelled in developing this anti-narrative, and in proliferating it. Arab propaganda also did its work. And at the margins of the Israeli left, there had always been groups and currents that doubted the right of Israel to exist and stressed the wrongs that were perpetrated against the Arabs. Yet those heretical elements remained marginal in Israeli politics and culture, and failed to gain wide public support. The advent of the “new historians” changed all that. These views now gained a certain legitimacy, since they appeared in the context of a debate between ostensibly objective scholars.”

    Efraim Karsh’s excellent “Fabricating Israeli History” has cogently dismissed their out of context and fabricated quotations. Better yet is his response to reviews of the book. The Unbearable Lightness of my Cr

  9. But Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had sechel and said yes in 1947, though the Jewish state he said yes to did not include the Western Wall, our holiest site.

    Ben Gurion’s acceptance of the tiny Israel was strategic only. He had every intention and expectation of expanding it in the future wars. He was not stupid, and understood that there will be war with Arabs. He also knew that accepting the tiny Israel would give him propaganda advantage over the Arabs. Ben Gurion was a good Zionist who ordered “ethnic cleansing” of parts of Israel. The point is that if he did not, there would have been no Israel. If Arabs won, there would have been an unconditional ethnic cleansing of Jews with huge mass-murder, mass rapes, torture and mutilation. (This happens to be the Arab way. Even today, Arabs are perpetrating this on each other in Libya and Syria.)

    So the point is that the choice is not between having a nice multiethnic state and ethnic cleansing, but between ethnic cleansing of Jews, our of “Palestine” or of Arabs out of the Land of Israel.
    My choice is clear.

  10. Wallace Brand Said:

    Even sadder [some think but not I ] is that they still don’t have it. Camp David in 2000 gave them another chance to say yes, to have their own state, with Jerusalem as its capital. But again it was no.”

    I don’t agree with your evaluation.

    No, it was not sad. If I believed in God, I’d say that compassionate God gave us enemies that are even stupider than our selves. Just imagine the disaster that would have happen if that homosexual pedophile rapist Arafat, actually agreed to Camp David in 20001 We would now have a Judenrein al Qaeda ridden state in the Judea Samaria, shooting at Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and the Ben Gourion Airport.
    All meanwhile our friendly Nobel-prized homo-pedophile would be financing the terrorist. Jews will not be able to retaliate or pursue the terrorists, because this would be breech of peace.

    I am convinced that your views would change radically if you’d take some time and educate yourself about the essentials of Islam.
    Hopefully Ted is going to make available a course by Will Warner. Please listen to these discourses, and then come back and discuss the subject with me.

    One more thing:

    The one vital attribute of a Jew, be he an American jew or otherwise is “sechel”.
    The Palestinians, collectively, don’t have sechel.

    You only say that because you assume that they want a state. Why would they. They are parasites living of international welfare. This would change if they have a state.
    They are the darling underdogs fighting the Israeli Juggernaut, that too will change when they become yet another failed state ridden with divisions, endless corruption and oppression.
    They have plenty of sechel, because what they want is not to establish their state but to destroy the Jewish state. And so far they have succeeded to win the propaganda war and political victory against Israel. They have achieved incredible victory with almost no means.

  11. Wallace Brand Said:

    Facts, logic, and reason won’t make a dent in a poetic truth. You castigate me for relying on them.

    No I am not very young, or else, I’d not have the extended knowledge of history that you can clearly see from my comments.

    Neither am I interested in the “poetic truth”.
    On the contrary, I am only interested in truth.
    The truth is that legal arguments matter very little, as I have exemplified in a previous message.
    Mexico can hire 100 Harvard educated lawyers, with all of them writing 1000 pages legal argument proving that California belongs to Mexico. And all that is not going to make the slightest difference. Now if Mexico develops a new kind of war technology that will allow them to win the war, then all their legal arguments will shine and everyone will agree with them.
    For now, America is stronger than Mexico, and that’s the only valid argument in international disputes.

    What Harvard educated lawyers don’t realize, is that law can only has any meaning when there is a higher arbiter who can enforce the law on both sides. Inside each country the courts can enforce the law because there is the state that has the ultimate power within that state.

    For as long as we don’t have a world-state, the so called “international” law is plain fallacy. Instead we have the “law of the jungle”. Or the survival of the fittest. Of course this brutal reality has to be sugar coated with morality, and legality. I am not against them, I am just not deceived by them. I am happy to use all your legal knowledge as propaganda weapon in this total war between the Jews and Muslim/Arabs.
    The important thing to remember is that all this legalism is only a tool and not a goal.
    Even if all the international lawyers agreed that Jews has no right to form a nation in Israel, would not matter unless the stupid Jews themselves started believing in their enemy’s propaganda.

  12. Viiit: You continue to make assumption after assumption, leaping to conclusions without a shred of evidence. You must be very young and full of “poetic truth” just as those who fill themselves with the poetic truth of the Narrative of Perpetual Arab victimhood. African-Americans apparently have the same problem. See: Steele, The Narrative of Perpetual Palestinian Victimhood. http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2586/palestinian-victimhood-narrative Facts, logic, and reason won’t make a dent in a poetic truth. You castigate me for relying on them.

    The one vital attribute of a Jew, be he an American jew or otherwise is “sechel”.

    “Sechel is just plain smarts, a grasp on what really is and really counts, that cuts and sees through it all, that guides you to do the right thing the right way at the right time, to size up what’s really going on, to see where someone really comes from, to understand what does and doesn’t matter. You either got it or you don’t. If you do, you are blessed. If you don’t, oy va voy. The Jewish people, as a people, have sechel. Not every individual Jew has it, of course [I don’t think you do] but collectively we do. That, more than anything, has allowed us to navigate all we’ve had to navigate these last 3,000 years.

    The Palestinians, collectively, don’t have sechel. As former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban said, the Palestinians “have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” It takes no sechel to do that. The Palestinians, from 1947 to this very day, have shown absolutely no sechel. If they had, they would have had an independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital, and it would have flourished just as Israel has these past 50 years. But Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had sechel and said yes in 1947, though the Jewish state he said yes to did not include the Western Wall, our holiest site.

    The Palestinians said no and so still do not have their own state. [They also think with their hearts instead of their heads.] Just think how different everything would have been if they had only said yes in 1947. If they only had sechel.

    Even sadder [some think but not I ] is that they still don’t have it. Camp David in 2000 gave them another chance to say yes, to have their own state, with Jerusalem as its capital. But again it was no.”
    http://www.jewishchronicle.org/article.php?article_id=821

    With the Levy Report, and the growing recognition that Oslo is a loser, and the violation of Oslo by a unilateral effort at statehood, — a material breach justifying the remedy of nonperformance by the Jews — now it the time to annex the West Bank and take back Gaza with the law on your side. Don’t miss an opportunity.

  13. Wallace Brand Said:

    An an American Jew

    here is the first problem. American Jews think that they are a religious group. They don’t know that they are a part of the Jewish nation.
    Most of their great grand parents were refugees from Russia here they were being murdered, raped and tortured for being Jews a foreign nation.
    Jews in Russia did not think of themselves as “Russians of Jewish faith”. No, they were Jews. More foreign than a German, or a Tartar.

    So this is the problem:
    You are in denial of being a Jew. If you are a Jew, (not a recent convert), your ancestors were Jewish, your mind your personality, your ego structure is a result of centuries, even millennia of shared collective experience. You cannot change that, you cannot escape from that, but you can obfuscate it. As many American Jews do, to better it in with the Harvard culture.

    So you are saying that

    after my research into the history of Palestine I was willing to become a pro zionist activist.

    Such activism, motivated by intellectual opinion is quite worthless.
    Some argument convinced you, then some other argument can convince you the other way. Or someone like me can “turn you off”.

    There is no power in your Zionism. Because it is coming from your head, rather than from not from your heart and guts. I have no doubt that you have a beautiful heart, but it has been obfuscated by your Harvard trained head, for not no say anything about the guts.
    To say that I am turning you off, is to give me power over your convictions. Such convictions, coming from head only are weak, impotent.
    ===================================================

    One day when you have endured enough antisemitism you will either have to completely betray your Jewish roots, or accept that you are a Jew and that the Jewish people are your people, and that we are threatened with extermination.
    That the drive behind the Holocaust has not ended, it has only changed the from. The same drive today is trying to eradicate the Jewish state. The only place where the Jewish nation can survive for more than 2 generation. (By that time in Europe and America Jews will dissolve as distinct nation and civilization, as religions are becoming less and less important to modern people, and are replaced by nationalism as the source of the group identity. )
    That the Arab and Muslim attitude towards Jews is are MORE genocidal than Nazi Germans. (Surveys show that 98% of Egyptians have negative opinion about Jews, 100% of Saudis and 99% of Jordanians. In Nazi Germany that number was estimated to about 60%.) The only reason why Jews are alive rather than slaughtered is because they managed to fight off the genocidal Arabs.
    Islam is more antisemitic than Nazism. Quran has the same percent of antisemitic verses as Mein Kampf (9% of all paragraphs). Hadith and Sirat have 12% of verses dedicated to Jew-hatred.

    So if you understand that this is a fight for survival of your people, and that playing “nice” is suicide, then only you will become a true Zionist with heart and guts, not just a Harvard-head Zionist. And then no body will be able to “turn you off”.

  14. @ Viiit: An an American Jew, after my research into the history of Palestine I was willing to become a pro zionist activist. I tried to bring to students at Harvard and UCLA the same opinion that the Levy report recently brought to the Government of Israel. I even paid for an ad in the Crimson to spread this view when I could not do it at a Harvard conference on March 3,4 or in an op ed in the Harvard Crimson. This was a conference dominated by Arab intellectuals and Israeli history revisionists. Alan Dershowittz had referred to it as an anti-semitic and anti-Zionist Hatefest in an article he wrote for NewsMax. I sought to buy an ad in the Daily Bruin when my efforts to speak on the same subject in a UCLA “son of Harvard” conference on May 15 were unsuccessful and the Bruin had not replied to my letter seeking to write an op ed. . But your argument urging coercive transfers is now commencing to diminish my interest in pro Zionism activism. You are turning me off. Do you think you will be more successful with the rest of the world? If not, why do you continue?

  15. @ Wallace Brand:Wallace Brand Said:

    I have no quarrel with your facts. But that was the reason that the Geneva Convention prohibition

    And does anyone care what this convention prohibits? I don’t think so.
    They could as well prohibit wars!
    In fact they do, they prohibit aggression. Yet in every war each side claims aggression by the other side.
    In any case, if it is not during the war, then the population transfer can be done in a very elegant way: Stop supporting Arabs.
    Stop all welfare to Arabs in Israel. Make all welfare communal, rather than state based. So Jews could apply for support from Jewish organizations, and Arabs should not get a penny of Jewish tax money.
    This way Jews will stop supporting uncontrolled Arab breeding.
    Boycott Arabs in Judea and Samaria. (Only fair, as they have been supporting boycott against Israel). At the same time support Jordan economically and reward them for letting Pal-Arabs in. This way Jordan will become attractive and Israel unattractive to them.

  16. @ Wallace Brand:

    It was invented by Hitler. He called it ‘juden rein”, the ethnic cleansing of Jews.

    NO it was not, don’t make things up. Judenrein was invented by Hitler, Ethnic cleansing was invented by Yugoslavs. Two different terms.

    Ethnic cleansing (from Serbo-Croatian etni?ko ?iš?enje[1]) is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.

    Report of the Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 780 (1992), May 27, 1994 (S/1994/674), English page=33, Paragraph 130

    prevent religious jews from exercising their human rights

    The religious or not religious makes ZERO difference to our

    national

    rights.

    Much of what you are saying is relevant as part of propaganda war. But only as propaganda supporting the actual action. Once the Arabs are expelled, and the word is very clear that they ain’t coming back, then we can use all your fine points to explain why this is “right and just”.

    [Arabs who]prefer living under Jewish rule and would be willing to swear fealty to the Jewish state.

    There is some misunderstanding here.
    Some Arabs prefer living in Israel because of its much high living standards, more civilized, more free etc. However as long as they remain Muslim, they cannot be trusted.
    Islam is a disease. Just look at the Muslims in the Western Europe. They came there because they like the Western civilization better. They appreciate the freedom and the money. Yet, they support Islam and support those work to replace the local law with their Sharia. They don’t realize that Islam is the very reason why their mother countries are shit-holes. They think that Islam is the greatest. Allahu-Akhbar means Allah is the greatest. Meaning their god is greater than your god, their religion is higher and truer than yours. Their “civilization” [a misnomer] is higher than yours.
    They are like Jews who escaped from Nazi Germany, who in their new country advocate Nazism.

    The only way Arabs can swear fealty to the Jewish state is by becoming Jews themselves. Just like the only way you can be have fealty to America is by becoming an American.
    My estimate is that less than 5% of Muslim Arabs would be willing to apostatize. If they do, at leas I’d be happy to welcome them, if they don’t they will remain enemies, or potential enemies waiting for the day when “rocks and trees, which will cry: Oh Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!”

  17. Viit: I have no quarrel with your facts. But that was the reason that the Geneva Convention prohibition was written that is now wrongly said to apply to Jewish settlers in Judea and Samaria. It was written to prevent coercive transfers. That is what you propose and what the world agrees in the Geneva Convention should be banned.

  18. @ Viiit: It was invented by Hitler. He called it ‘juden rein”, the ethnic cleansing of Jews.
    I have heard the argument that so many groups were transferred to other lands by coercion and that no one remembers it now. I remember that Jews were expelled from East Palestine. It mattered a lot to the people at the time. It was prohibited by the Geneva Convention because many people thought it was immoral. But a lawyer for the Israeli government advised the military government in 1967 and it would be illegal to have Jewish settlers back in Judea and Samaria. He was wrong on many points. First he was wrong that the Jews did not have sovereignty over the West Bank as just shown in the Levy report. And second, he was wrong that a Geneva convention applied to a country that was not a signatory to it, and where the government of the country did not have sovereignty because it had gained the territory in an aggressive war, but most seriously that a convention drafted to stop those coercive transfers you want to effect, was used to prevent religious jews from exercising their human rights to move where they choose as provided in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. I am ashamed to say that he was a Harvard lawyer.

    You are right. People have short memories of injustice. Many already have forgotten the Fogel Family and I can no longer remember the name of the woman shot by the Arabs with her four young daughters, and shot through the belly so her son, still a fetus, would not live either. http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/72 But it matters now. The world now considers it immoral to coerce people to leave where they have lived for many years. The argument is weaker for Arabs in Palestine as many or even most are recent immigrants from other lands or their children., still speaking with other dialects. Instead of applying only to indigenous peoples as around the rest of the world, the UN treats those as refugees who were in Israel as short a time as two years. Almost all of them left at the time without seeing a single soldier and in fact most of them are children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren of the 700,000 who left and have never even seen the place from which they claim to have fled. So I have no sympathy for the alleged refugees. But those who stayed, some of which prefer living under Jewish rule and would be willing to swear fealty to the Jewish state, in my view deserve better than what you propose.

  19. @ Wallace Brand:
    In short. I am not advocating unnecessary cruelty. I am advocating abiding by the same standards as the rest of the nations.
    Anything short of that is stupidity. It is like being attacked by someone armed with a knife and insisting on the “moral way” of defending yourself is with your bare fists.

  20. Wallace Brand Said:

    What you are proposing is ethnic cleansing. When the British approved the Balfour declaration, they did so because it was moral to give the Jews exclusive political rights over Palestine,

    “Ethnic cleansing” is a fancy modern term invented during the recent Yugoslavian wars.
    In fact “Ethnic cleansing” is normal.
    Want to remind you again, that nobody is protesting today, the ethnic cleansing of 3 million Sudetendeutsche from Czechoslovakia. Not even in Germany. On the contrary Germany and Czechs enjoy excellent friendly relations.
    Likewise nobody complains about ethnic cleansing of 2.5 million of East Prussians, with the additional flavor of every female between 8 and 80 gang raped by drunk Russian soldiers. Today out of all European countries Germany has the closest cooperation with Russia.
    Nobody cries remembers or cares that Poles expelled some estimated 7 million Germans and murdered up to 1 million in the process.
    All of this is accepted and nobody disputes that.
    Likewise I don’t know of anyone proposing that 1 million Greeks should be returned to Turkey, nor an estimated 2.5 million Armenians expelled or killed by the Turks.
    When was it last time you heard about the millions of Hindus cleansed out of Pakistan and Bangladesh still in the process. And what about Christians cleansed out from Iraq, or Egypt? (200,000 Copts escaped Egypt during just one last year)
    This list is much to long to continue here, and it includes formation of the USA.
    Just one more relevant example, have you ever heard any condemnation of the Arab countries for expelling some 800 thousand Jews from the Arab occupied territories between Mesopotamia and Morocco?
    I have never heard anyone mention that. Yet, they were peaceful citizens of those countries, and in many cases they have lived there much longer than the Arabs.
    You are saying

    You are advocating ethnic cleansing. That is what the Nazis did.

    Wrong comparison: Nazis were not expelling the Jews, they were exterminating them.

    I would have nothing against Nazis if they expelled all the Jews from Germany to Palestine, or even just across the border to Switzerland, where they could speak the same language.

    ======================

    When the British approved the Balfour declaration, they did so because it was moral

    I don’t think that this was a major motive. I suspect that this was part of their design to divide and rule the M.E: Give a part to the Jews, rest to the Arabs and stay the overlord of both. Additional reason was their mistaken perception that the American Jews will re-pay their promise (to establish the Jewish National Home) by pushing America into join the WWI (In reality Jews did not have such political influence). Possibly they also wanted to remove a possibility of Jewish banking families switching alliance and supporting the German war effort, should the Germans promise the Jewish national home in Palestine.
    Whatever the British reasons, the moral aspect was only a sugar coating. That’s very easy to see, because right after the war they broke their promise: They gave Transjordan to Arabs, they allowed unlimited Arab immigration, and at the same time limiting the Jewish immigration.
    You are right that there were some Zionist among the British ruling class, but my point is that geopolitical considerations always trump the moral ones.

    Having said this, I am not suggesting that Jews should massacre large number of Arabs and gang rape all their females. Far from, I am suggest that the population transfer (a nicer term for ethnic cleansing) is done in the most humane way possible.
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    The important point I am making is that for a relative peace for a relatively long period, Jews need to expel the overwhelming majority of Arabs.
    The Israeli Arabs are a 5th column and rather than “integrating”, they are radicalizing. Only some 30% are radical, among them only some 10% are terrorist ready. However under an extreme situation, 90% will side with another Arab/Muslim power.
    If Hisbulah were to make incursion into Galilee and occupy any part of it, the Arab majority there would support them. And they’d have no other choice. The enemies of Israel, can easily find Arab terrorist inside Israel to act on their behalf. This situation is only going to get worse, and Arabs “integrate” more. (Just as I explained about Denmark, Belgium or England.)

    I can understand why you don’t know any Arabs who would like to integrate with the Jews. I hear differently from other Jews.

    I am not denying this, I am only saying that the peaceful 70% majority will harbor the violent 30% minority, and the only way to get rid of that 30% minority is to get rid of all 100%. Secondly the integration is partial. It is not possible for a Muslim to integrate into a non-Muslim society. They can only do so by becoming non-Muslim themselves. Never forget that ordered Muslims to kill Jews: There will be no salvation

    until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: Oh Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!

  21. @ Viiit:Viit, you say: “You are talking about this issue from legal perspective. However in real world the only thing that matters is power.” Viit, What you are proposing is ethnic cleansing. When the British approved the Balfour declaration, they did so because it was moral to give the Jews exclusive political rights over Palestine, a special rule, even though in all other places (except later, in Syria) the population majority received political rights. They applied a special formula in Israel just so they could do the moral thing — give it in trust, with the legal right to sovereignty not to vest until it had a population majority. It was right because of their long and historic association with Palestine. They inserted a savings clause to save the civil and religious rights of the non-Jews when the sovereignty vested. The French inadvertently weakened the rule by inserting a “process verbal” saying the savings clause meant that the non-Jews wouldn’t lose any rights.

    Civil rights include the right to own and retain property, to be safe in your home and on the public way, the individual right to vote, but not the collective right to establish self government. That, “political right” or “national right” , was severed and given to the Jews in trust

    You are calling for rules of law based solely on power. You are advocating ethnic cleansing. That is what the Nazis did. That is what Jordan did on the West Bank from 1948 to 1967. You are asking me to agree to an “Arab rein” solution.
    That is not a moral solution. That does not require World Jewry to keep within the bounds of what was given.

    I can understand why you don’t know any Arabs who would like to integrate with the Jews. I hear differently from other Jews.

  22. You are talking about this issue from legal perspective. However in real world the only thing that matters is power.
    If Arabs won the 1948 war, there would have been no Israel, and most Jews would have either been murdered, or evacuated from Palestine.

    You say

    I would not recommend doing anything that would violate the basis for Israeli sovereignty.

    You seem to think that sovereignty follows some legal rights, resolutions, or agreement. In real world sovereignty follows only one criterion control. Whoever has the control is the sovereign. They would not have had the “legal rights” to do that, and nobody would have given a rat’s ass about that.
    How would that be different from Arab control of Syria, previously Christian country. Or their control of Egypt, all of North Africa, Mesopotamia? All of these countries were conquered by violent Muslim barbarians, the native population decimated, native languages and religions nearly eradicated, and native ethnicity extinct through mass rapes.
    Does not sound exactly “legal”, and yet, nobody disputes the Arab Muslim sovereignty over Egypt, Libya, Algeria, or Iraq.

    Just like nobody cares if China had legal right to rule Tibet, or if Pakistan has any legal right to rule half the Kashmir, or for that sake if America has any right to rule the huge landmass that was robbed from the American Indians, or Hawaii.

    The greatest weakness of Jewish people is our irrational belief in law and legalities. After the defeat from the hands of Romans, we transformed ourselves from the nation of warriors to a nation of lawyers. Arabs are much more realistic. They know how to colonize.

    It is important to recognize the difference between strategy and tactics. The long term strategies must be to cleanse the Land of Israel of Arab Muslim invaders.
    The tactics of how to do that, depends on the ever changing circumstances. In scenario where there is a major war, a good tactic would be outright expulsion. Without a major war, a better scenario may be encouraging Arabs to leave Israel through carrot and stick. On one hand economical boycott, on the other hand, financial and other support for those who move to Jordan or other Arab countries.
    There are costs and benefits of each approach. The predictable reaction from the outside world is one of the costs. However such reaction is never long. On the other hand the ongoing “occupation” assures never ending bad foreign relations.

    If Jews were to transfer Arabs out of Israel, and make it absolutely 100% sure that there is on coming back, there will be as little reaction as there was to transfer of Germans from Sudetenland. In fact a strong Israel, would have many more true allies, because it is much more advantageous to ally one’s country with a strong Israel, than with a weak one.

    So everything you are saying, all the historical facts are very nice, if they can be used as part of propaganda. Otherwise it does not matter.

    Finally you are saying that there are

    difficulties of integrating two such different cultures

    The point is not that it is difficult, the point is that it is totally undesirable. I don’t know any Jews who would like to integrate with Muslims or Arabs.
    If Arabs want to integrate, they will have to say goodbye to their antisemitic Allah, and become Jews (not necessarily observant). I suspect that less then 10% would sincerely want to do that. And as far as I am concerned they should be welcome.
    The rest must go.

  23. @ Viiit: Dear Viit: “the Jews from everywhere in the world are welcome in Israel as citizens, but “Palestinians” are not.” Viit: That was the original plan of the British Mandate of Palestine. It was why instead of a state it was initially called a home. The trustee was to facilitate immigration so that the Jews would eventually become and remain a population majority. Then it would be a state. It was only then that the legal sovereignty would vest. Until then they were only intended to have a beneficial interest. That is because the Allies wisely thought that granting immediate sovereignty to a 10% minority of Jews would not be wise and would be antidemocratic. The express terms of the trust require the British to facilitate Jewish Immigration. Look at Syria now with a small Alawite sect exercising its bloody sovereignty. If the right of return of the Jews is discrimination, it is discrimination that was decreed by Lord Balfour as a way to grant exclusive political rights to the Jews in 1917 when they were only a 10% minority but had a long and historic association with Israel. The same discrimination was, adopted by the WWI Allies at San Remo on April 25, 1920 and affirmed by the League of Nations in 1922. It is therefore approved by International Law.

    But the grant under Internaitonal Law has a savings clause for the Civil and Religious Rights of the Non Jews. Getting rid of the Arabs by an indiscriminate transfer would violate the terms of the grant and destroy the legitimacy of the claim to sovereignty over all of CisJordan. In Judea and Samaria the young troublemakers will not want to take an oath of fealty to Israel and would likely prefer to take compensation to leave. In any event Israel would know who they are. I believe that an oath of fealty could be required of both the Jews and the Arabs in Judea and Samaria without dishonoring their civil rights. I also believe that this way could be better defended against criticism. And in Gaza the savings clause saving the civil rights of the non Jews was weakened by the French insistence on a “process verbal” in which they equated the civil rights clause to saying that the Arabs would not have to surrender any rights. They wouldn’t. They never had political rights. and if you give them home rule they would have just as much civil rights as they had for the 400 years of Ottoman Rule preceding British rule as trustee of the political rights under the Mandate.

    I agree with you on the difficulties of integrating two such different cultures but I would not recommend doing anything that would violate the basis for Israeli sovereignty.

    If you have access to Arlene Kushner’s newsletter, today she circulated talks at the Hebron meeting on Jewish sovereignty over Judea and Samaria. Look at the video of Caroline Glick’s consideration of the political costs if Judea and Samaria in their entirety are annexed. The video of Itzik Bam and Howard Grief are good too.

  24. Of course the thing about comparing the Jewish Arab population by weight was a joke.
    Wallace Brand Said:

    You would have to established that none of it is due to immigration through Egypt before 1967 or even after that time, from other parts of Israel.

    However,I don’t understand why you are saying about the number of Arabs in Israel moving from other parts of Israel.
    After the independence there were 200,000 Arabs in Israel. Today there are 1.5 million. The Jewish population grew through immigration, but there are very few sources of immigration left and they will soon be exhausted.

    About the loyalty of Arabs. Yes, the older ones do prefer to live under the Jewish rule, but not the young Arabs who have never lived under Jordanian, or Egyptian rule. They are living in a modern Jewish state which they have not created. In fact as a group they are parasitic, as they consume more tax money than they contribute. Never the less, they believe themselves equal and if not better to Jews, but the law is not treating them as equal. By law, Israel is a “Jewish State”. The national anthem of Israel is Jewish and Zionist, the Jews from everywhere in the world are welcome in Israel as citizens, but “Palestinians” are not.
    They are clearly not equal.
    Additionally there is an assault on their Muslim identity. There is no question that Islam is a primitive barbaric ideology, we can pretend that we respect it, but in fact we despise it. No amount of political correctness can cover up that fact. The natural reaction to that to identify with Islam. This is happening everywhere in the world, from former Soviet republics, where Islam was very weak, to 3rd generation Muslims born in Denmark.
    There too, the statistically parasitic Muslims are responsible for majority of crimes, especially rapes. This is also the case in Israel.
    Terrorist acts are perpetrated by the Israeli Muslims, against Jews. A person driving a car through Arab occupied parts of Jerusalem may end up wounded or killed by a rock, or lynched do death.
    Not all Arabs are terrorists and barbarians, but the terrorist among them cannot be cleansed out without removing out the entire Muslim population.

    No amount of “integrating” will help. It will actually cause the opposite.

  25. @ Viiit:Dear Viit: You admit the so called “Palestinian Women” are grossly inflating their figures but I don’t see why that is of concern. The relevance of your perceived growth in the Arab population is unclear to me. You would have to established that none of it is due to immigration through Egypt before 1967 or even after that time, from other parts of Israel. There are many polls I have seen that show Arabs prefer to remain under the more stabile and prosperous life they have when Israel is sovereign. Why should I be persuaded by one anecdote.

  26. Wallace Brand Said:

    Unless you can establish otherwise, Your source, index mundi, likely got its numbers from the official source, the Palestinian Authority, that has, according to the BESA study, has been grossly inflating its figures.

    According to CIA

    Population:
    1,710,257 (July 2011 est.)

    Birth rate:

    34.3 births/1,000 population (2011 est.)
    country comparison to the world: 30

    4.57 children born/woman (2011 est.)
    country comparison to the world: 27

    Life expectancy at birth:

    total population: 74.16 years
    country comparison to the world: 109
    male: 72.48 years
    female: 75.95 years (2011 est.)

    Median age:

    total: 17.7 years
    male: 17.5 years
    female: 17.9 years (2011 est.)
    (That is the age when children are getting ready to breed)

    CIA World Fact Book is considered a reliable source.

    According to the following source Population Statistics
    the Gaza population in 1950 was 240,000

    Even if CIA got it wrong, and if there are “only” 1 million Arabs in Gaza. This still would be over 4 times increase over 60 years.

    Current Arab minority in the smaller Israel is already presenting a serious and growing problem. Their ratio is increasing, and their loyalty to Israel is decreasing. In the smaller Israel

    there are legally 1.6 million Arabs, that’s 20.5%

    They are increasingly identifying themselves an “Palestinians”.
    When I traveled in Galilee 2 years ago, I asked some Arab there if they were Israeli, they said No, there were Palestinians.

    The percentage of Arab’s among children is still higher. Depending on ages I saw statistics up to 35% of all children. Have not done enough searches on that though.

    Also by weight there is the ration of Arabs is much higher as they are substantially more obese then Jews. Especially the Arab women — 41% obese as compared to the Jewish women 22%.

    My conclusion is that on long term Israel cannot afford to have such a large and growing hostile Arab minority.

  27. Unless you can establish otherwise, Your source, index mundi, likely got its numbers from the official source, the Palestinian Authority, that has, according to the BESA study, has been grossly inflating its figures. This official source of the PA contributes to the chimera that if Israel annexes all the land in CisJordan (Palestine West of the Jordan), over which it had been granted the political or national rights to in 1920, it would lose its population majority. In this statement I ignore TransJordan because of the Israeli Peace Treaty and Boundary Agreement with Jordan in the ’90s that in effect gave Jordan a quitclaim for TransJordan in exchange for Jordan’s quitclaim of its interests in CisJordan. . I think the thrust of what Yoram Ettinger and the BESA study is telling us, is that the PA numbers can’t be relied on.

    The trend of Arab births has been downward, I think likely because of the availability of Jewish Medical treatment has drastically lowered infant mortality. And family planning devices and medication are now easily available to Arab Women. {In the interests of objectivity, I should point out that the life expectancy of Arabs in the West Bank has also increased drastically. See Karsh, “What Occupation”) I don’t think that the rate of change in the growth of cancer cells is relevant to what we have under discussion. The orthodox families in the West Bank seem to have very large families — I understand because of their desire to replace the great numbers of Jews lost in the Holocaust. To my aging recollection, however, Ambassador Ettinger attributed the large numbers to the secular Jews.

  28. Wallace Brand Said:

    Have you made a count? If not, what source do you rely on?

    http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=gz&v=31
    Claims 4.74 fertility rate in Gaza.

    As for the future, Ettinger reports that there are 3.2 Jewish births for each Arab birth in Palestine West of the Jordan.

    That’s not a good way to make statistics.
    For example in the beginning stages of cancer, there are million times more healthy cell being produced than cancer cells, yet, the cancer cells grow faster.

    So it is not about the absolute number of births, but about the rate of change.

    My point is that Arabs should be encouraged to leave Israel.

  29. @ Viiit:Dear Viit: I haven’t made any personal count of Arab and Jewish births, but I don’t usually dream so I had to get my numbers from studies from credible sources or references to them from people I trust. These credible sources include the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and Ambassador Yoram Ettinger. These sources make me think you may be mistaken in your assumptions.
    The Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies. You can find this at http://www.biu.ac.il/Besa/MSPS65.pdf

    Citing these studies, former Ambassador Yoram Ettinger, has said ” …the Palestinian Authority claims a population of more than 1.25 Million people more than actually reside in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem combined: 2.49 million in mid-2004 rather than the projected 3.83 million reported by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.”
    http://arielzellman.wordpress.com/2010/09/20/interview-with-yoram-ettinger/

    As for the future, Ettinger reports that there are 3.2 Jewish births for each Arab birth in Palestine West of the Jordan. No problem there either. IMRA Analysis
    http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=56088

    Have you made a count? If not, what source do you rely on?

  30. Wallace Brand Said:

    Home Rule could continue until the Jewish population grew enough so that annexation of Gaza would not lose the Jews their population majority.

    Now get real and stop dreaming. How is Jewish population going to catch up with gaza Arabs having on average 6 children per woman?
    There are already 1.6 million Arabs in Gaza, they are growing fast, by the time Jews catch up there will be 10 million total. Now, that’s unbearable. Much better to create a situation where Arabs leave Gaza. Stop supporting them financially and they will all go. Of course ideally we should find some medicine that could lower their fertility to one child per family. Who know, then they may actually get civilized.

  31. @ SHmuel HaLevi: Furthermore, I would take over GAZA and get rid of Hamas and other layabouts that spend their time and your money thinking of how they can shell Israel. I would give the Gazans Home rule. This would not violate the savings clause of the Balfour Declaration and the San Remo Agreement, and Article 95 of the Treaty of Sevres. That is because at San Remo, the French, in agreeing to the document, attached a “process verbal”, their understanding of the savings clause that saved their Civil and Religious rights. The French process verbal equated this to the question of whether the Arabs would be surrendering any rights. They would not because they never had political or national rights. And under their civil rights, they never had the right to vote on Turkish Caliphate policies. The process verbal was agreed to by the Allies and became the meaning of the savings clause.
    Home Rule could continue until the Jewish population grew enough so that annexation of Gaza would not lose the Jews their population majority.

  32. @ SHmuel HaLevi:”Further. It is simply amazing how easily determined self hating Jews, former Jews that is and in my definition unJews, fabricated and maintain an urban legend such as the “palestinean” people. A massive PILTDOWN like creation…”

    The fabrication was carried out by the Soviet dezinformatsia. It appears three times in the preamble to the 1964 PLO Charter, drafted in Moscow in 1964. The preamble is corroborated only by the 422 first members of the Palestinian National Council, formed contemporaneously, each hand picked by the KGB. We owe this to Major General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking defector from the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. He had personal knowledge of the facts. By writing it three times I expect they were meeting the Alice in Wonderland Standard of Humpty Dumpty: “What I tell you three times is true.” See: Brand, Soviet Russia, the Creators of the PLO and the Palestinian People http://www.think-israel.org/brand.russiatheenemy.html and Brand, Was there a Palestine Arab National Movement at the End of the Ottoman Period? http://www.think-israel.org/brand.palnationalism.html

    I think Gershon Baskin has it right.

  33. Hopefully, this is true.

    I just read this morning in The Independent (an anti-semitic rag) an interview with Fayaad, who says the “palestinian” situation has never been worse. The rest of the world is distracted with other issues. They don’t have enough money to pay wages. The IDF are conducting nightly raids into “palestine”. The Zionist entity is building more settlements and is going to build a big army base just outside Hebron.

    I cried tears – of joy and laughter.

  34. With all Baskin’s sarcasm, pretending that Netanyahu has merely defined away the “Palestinian problem,” in fact he puts his finger on the ideal solution, except for incorporating 300,000 Arab Jerusalemites into Israel. Their villages (but not the Old City) should be severed from united Jerusalem and they should not be given citizenship. The Levy Committee was absolutely right about Israel’s legal right to the West Bank, but Israel should not attempt to recover Area A and much of Area B from Palestinian governance and only keep the rest. Any remaining “Palestinian Problem” is the problem only of the Palestinians, provided Israel holds on to the strategic high ground, so as to eliminate the rocket and terror attacks that would otherwise invariably originate from there, as per Gaza and south Lebanon. As for claims that the areas left to the Palestinians are not economically viable, no amount of additional land would make it so. You can’t have a viable economy based on producing pipe bombs and rockets, and what else can Arabs with no oil reserves produce or sell? Their only viability was being tied to the Jewish economy for employment and trade, and they pissed it away with their suicide bombings in 2000-2002. Any claim that their economic viability is impacted by the lack of contiguity between communities is nonsense — it makes no difference who builds and maintains the roads, on which both Jews and Arabs travel, and in fact it lessens the economic burden on the Palestinians if Israel builds and maintains the roads. Call what the Palestinians have now a “state” or two “states” or call it anything else you want, they rule themselves by their own thugs and conduct their own foreign policies, and those are what is important.

  35. The JPost publishes this schlepper because they need some comic relief. A terrible writer and a pathetic specimen of obsessive peace disease who is in over his head attempting to write satire.

  36. If the Arab Palestinians want to live in peace, things can be worked out, but fight the others to the end. Back Bibi.

    My computer is acting up. You may not hear from me for a while.

  37. [Outstanding and to think it was written by a popular leftist. He gets it or is he being sarcastic.]

    I got the impression he was being sarcastic.

  38. The assumption that peace is achieved by helping Arabs to be more prosperous is faulty. This only postpones the conflict.
    The Arabs inside Israel bread faster than Jews. Some 30% of all children under 6 in Israel are Arab.
    Soon the Arabs in the smaller Israel join hands with the Arabs in the “territories” and revolt against the Jewish oppression.
    Indeed they would be abnormal if they don’t.
    Why should they live in a Jewish country?
    Why should they sing the Jewish national anthem?
    Why should they have the Star of David as their symbol?
    Why should the celebrate Saturdays instead of Fridays?
    Why should they in effect be second class citizens in their own country?

    The only solution for that is to make it clear that this is not their country. If they want Israel to be their country, they will have to renounce Islam and join the Jewish nation. Then after one generation of good patriotic behavior, and no Islam or Christianity their children can be citizens, and can be considered Jewish.
    Before that they are guests, and if guests misbehave, they can be asked to leave.

    We need to create conditions that encourage them to leave. On one hand, open Jordan to them, on the other hand, make create hard economical conditions in Israel including Judea and Samaria. Basically do to them what they have been pushing the world to do against Israel. Boycott them: Don’t hire them, don’t buy their produce.
    At the same time, offer some incentives to move. If they move to Jordan, or wherever they want, offer some support to help them get started.

  39. How little we retain in our memory when it comes to historical facts.
    Further. It is simply amazing how easily determined self hating Jews, former Jews that is and in my definition unJews, fabricated and maintain an urban legend such as the “palestinean” people. A massive PILTDOWN like creation…
    That the marauding hordes hailing from various Arab and other Islamic origins would buy into the unJews “peace process” is also simple to understand. Easy takings from willing traitors.
    There was never a “peace process” but an internal sabotage plan that used Islamics as proxies. None of the so called “peace” treaties have ever anchored to stay.
    Judge Levi initiated a counter process and the ultimate results of the paradigms will not be long on showing. There are some signs of desperation in the Erev Rav’s, unJews” groups but that is the most dangerous stage.

  40. GERSHON BASKIN is using sarcasm instead of truth and logic to perpetuate a giant set of lies. It is not all his fault because Jewish leaders crated these lies decades ago. Now, when a tiny bit of truth is emerging many people think the truth is a lie. We must never tire of telling the truth. The Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish People alone. The Arabs are the occupiers. They stormed out of Arabia after Mohammed and grabbed ten million square miles of other peoples territory and imposed Islam on the conquered peoples. The Arabs invaded the land of Israel in 638, about 1,600 years after King David ruled in Jerusalem. The Arabs fight with everyone and even among themselves. Better to encourage Israeli Arabs to migrate elsewhere – perhaps to the former Jewish homes in Arab countries from where those Jews were robbed and expelled. That would be an exchange of populations.

  41. He gets it indeed. As I explained it to my granddaughter, we have wars because people are wicked. God needs to change their hearts; until that happens, we have to deal with wars. She is Chinese, and I am American; and relatives of her father may very well have been trying to kill my own immediate family sixty years ago. That’s quite a lot for a five-year-old to deal with; but she understands it.

    The bottom line is that the Jews belong in the land, and the Arabs don’t; and the latter have no intention of living peaceably with the former. This does not require rocket science to figure out.