You must always believe the threats of your enemies more than the promises of your friends.
Professor Alan Dershowitz, Speech at the recent AIPAC.
•
Thank you. Thank you. Wow, what a wonderful conference. What a great show of support for Israel at a critical time. (Applause.)
The world should today be standing in awe and appreciation of Israel's amazing accomplishments and contributions. No country has ever contributed so much to the world in a mere 61 years. Israel's — (applause) — Israel's medical technology exports have saved more lives per capita than exports from any other country. Israel has saved more Muslim and Arab lives than all of the Arab and Muslim countries combined. (Applause.)
Israel's high technology accomplishments exceed those of all of Europe and most of Asia. Israel has accomplished more for the environment than virtually any country in the world. Israel has taught the world how to fight wars against terrorism ethically and with concern for avoiding civilian casualties. (Applause.)
Israel — no country in the world faced with comparable threats has a better record of human rights than Israel does. And if you don't believe it, listen as you will to Richard Kemp when he describes how Israel compares to the other armies of the world facing threats from terrorists who hide among civilians.
When Justice Brennan, probably the most liberal justice to serve on the Supreme Court went to Israel he said, "If terrorism ever comes to the United States there is only one country from which the United States can learn how to balance human rights against the need to fight terrorism, and that country was Israel." Israel should be so proud and appreciative of Israel, but instead — (applause) — but instead, Israel is the only country in the world today whose legitimacy continues to be questioned, constantly questioned; constantly challenged.
It's more than ironic since no country has ever been established on a firmer foundation of law. Israel was established, after all through declarations accepted by the League of Nations, by the United Nations, by international law, yet its legitimacy remains challenged. Compare it to other countries that started with the revolutions or simply grabbing a land of other people, Israel paid for every inch of its land, paid for it by money and paid for it by the blood of its children.(Applause.)
This process of delegitimation began in earnest in 1975 when the United Nations took so much time and so much energy debating whether Zionism was racism. And do you know what else was happening in 1975 at the time the United Nations was involved in this ridiculous, bigoted debate? A million people were being murdered by genocides in Cambodia and the United Nations paid no attention to that at all. They were too busy to delegitimate and condemn Israel. And then it moved from 1975 to the Durban Conference in 2001 where the Durban strategy of delegitimation took root. What they did is they turned everything around. They accused Israel of racism, Israel of apartheid, Israel of genocide, Israel of creating a holocaust.
What it did is they inverted the entire concept of human rights and turned it against Israel. There were efforts of the result of Durban to boycott Israeli institutions, institutions of learning, institutions that are trying to cure cancer and heart disease and Parkinson's and yet efforts are made, to this day, in Nor—- Norway as we speak, in England as we speak to boycott Israeli academic institutions. You know what happened last time when they tried to boycott Israel and England? A few of us got together and put together a petition saying, "You know, if you boycott Israel, your universities, we will not speak at your universities." And we circulated a petition. We thought we'd get 400 or 500 signatures, 11,000 American academics, Nobel Prize winners, presidents of universities — (applause) — signed onto that petition.
And the message was clear, "If you try to boycott Israel it is you who will be boycotted and it is your universities that will suffer." Israel's universities are among the greatest in the world today and nobody should try to boycott its great academics and its great places of science. And then came the concept that we call "guerilla lawfare," efforts to try to delegitimate Israel by using legal tactics, legal means, using international law, using the law of humanitarian aspects, using all of it to try to turn it against Israel, divestment campaigns, distortion of human rights. When it came to Durban II, the attempt to redo it again last year we were ready and we went to Geneva and we fought back. And we won Durban II. They invited Ahmadinejad. We invited Elie Wiesel.
We said, "Who is the person who speaks for human rights here today?" (applause) One of the proudest moments — one of the proudest moments of my life was when I was arrested by the Swiss police for daring to try to confront Ahmadinejad and just ask him a simple question, "Do you deny the Holocaust? Have you ever been to Auschwitz? Which books have you read about the Holocaust?" Challenging him to debate his Holocaust denial. He denies the Holocaust while trying to bring another one upon the Jewish people of Israel and yet I was arrested for trying to confront him in a peaceful way. But at Durban the students stood up against Ahmadinejad and he was booed and people walked out on him and we won the second Durban encounter. (Applause.)
And the important message is, "We fight back. We don't take these kinds of abuses sitting down." And when Richard Goldstone — (applause) — when Richard Goldstone, through his everlasting disgrace, agreed to serve on a commission that was so one-sided, we fought back, "One-sided?" Do you know who the three people serving on the commission were? One of them, a colonel from Ireland, who before he ever served on the commission believed that Israeli soldiers had taken out Irish soldiers and killed them in cold blood and he was going to get revenge. He believed Israel had no right of self-defense. He was serving on the commission. A British woman, who before she heard a piece of evidence said Israel was guilty of war crime. She was serving on the commission.
And a Muslim woman from Pakistan said, "You have to believe Palestinians, they always tell the truth." She was serving on the commission. And then, of course to give the commission the certification of Kashrut, the Heksher, they put Richard Goldstone on the commission to sign on as the token court Jew so that when people argued with the contents of the Goldstone Report or tried to debate him, as I tried to debate him his answer was, "No. I'm a Jew. My daughter lives in Israel. I must be correct. You can't question me, because I'm a Jew."
An argument ad hominem and at which had nothing to do with the demerits of the Goldstone Report, which got everything backwards. And we now have videotaped evidence showing everything that Goldstone said was wrong. Israel tried desperately to avoid civilian casualties while Hamas — (applause) — fired — while Hamas fired from behind civilian shields. The point is that delegitimation efforts, until now, have been limited primarily to the United Nations and European countries. It has never ever succeeded in the United States.
Why? Because in the United States, thanks to AIPAC and thanks to the fact that we have tremendous support among Congress people and among the people of the United States Israel is known to be America's great friend and Israel gets high ratings every time their public opinion polls and that's why every effort to delegitimate in the United States up to now has failed. But I want to tell you about a new effort that's just beginning and that has the potential to succeed if we don't fight back. The newest threat, the newest attempt to import delegitimation into the United States comes from people, like Walton Mearsheimer who wrote a book which gets it all backwards.
Walton Mearsheimer, obviously says a lot of good things in some ways about AIPAC. He thinks you're the most powerful organization in the world, you control what the United States does. What he fails to understand is that the reason AIPAC is strong and may you go from strength to strength and increase your strength is because Americans support Israel and because Americans support Israel, Congresspeople support Israel.
There is a lobby in Washington that has no public support, which is very powerful that Walton Mearsheimer could've written about. It's called the Saudi lobby — no public support, great influence and power. That's a paradox. It's not paradox to the democracy that a law before a group that's completely popular and supported by the American public should have some influence in Washington. And then comes Jimmy Carter in an attempt to delegitimate Israel by using that word, apartheid. Jimmy Carter, a man who wouldn't use the word genocide what was going on in Darfur, because he says, "You have to be careful about how you use language," uses the word apartheid to describe Israel's only democracy.
But now the most recent argument and the most serious argument ever made against Israel in modern times is one that's recently been all over the Internet, namely that Israeli actions endanger American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's all over the Internet and it's creeping into the mainstream media. Headlines, "Israel, a danger to U.S. troops." CNN, Rick Sanchez, "This is starting to get dangerous for us, Biden purportedly told Netanyahu, 'What you're doing here undermines the security of our troops,' [inaudible].
United States tells Israel, "You are undermining America, endangering troops." "Israel is empowering Al-Qaeda, Petraeus warns." "Petraeus, Israel's intransigents could cost American lives." Variations of this false and dangerous argument have now been picked up by Joe Klein in Time Magazine, Roger Cowen in the New York Times, Walton Mearsheimer, Brzezinski and others. Both Vice President Biden and General Petraeus have apparently disavowed this argument, though their statements continued to be sited in support of its conclusion.
Whatever the source the argument has taken on, unfortunately a life of its own and is being used in an effort to bring the delegitimacy campaign to the United States of America. It is the most dangerous argument ever put forward in the ongoing campaign against Israel, because its goal is directly to reduce support for Israel among mainstream Americans, who like every one of us in this room support our American troops fighting abroad. (Applause.)
It is an ironic and insidious argument, primarily because the pillar of Israel's policy with regard to the United States troops is that Israel never wants to endanger our troops. That's why it never asks the United States soldiers to fight for Israel as many of allies, in fact, do by seeking the scapegoat Israel for the deaths of American troops at the hands of Islamic terrorists. This argument has become a powerful weapon in the campaign to demonize and delegitimate Israel in the minds of mainstream Americans. Most of all, it is an entirely false argument factually, entirely false. There is absolutely no relationship between Israel's actions and the safety of American troops, none. Consider the year 2000-2001, what was Israel doing in 2000-2001 in — in November, December, January?
They were offering peace to the Palestinians at Camp David and Taba. They were offering the Palestinians a state on 100 percent of the Gaza, 97 percent of the West Bank, a divided Jerusalem, $35 billion reparation package. What was going on during those months? Osama Bin Laden was planning the destruction of the World Trade Center.
No relationship between Israeli actions and hatred and actions by Islamic extremists against the United States. In 2005, Israel leaves Gaza, leaves Gaza — unilaterally leaves Gaza. That's exactly what everybody has been asking for and at the same time there was a slight increase against American troops in Iraq. During Operation Cast Lead and the Jerusalem building recent announcement there's been no significant escalation of violence against American troops in Iraq. There is no relationship. It's made up out of whole cloth. I challenge those who are offering this argument, put up or shut up. Prove your point or stop making these bigoted arguments. (Applause.) They are wrong. And think — think of the implications — think of the implications of this argument. The implications of this argument are the delegitimization of Israel in the minds of Americans. Why? Because for Muslim extremists it's not what America does. It's not what Israel does. It's what Israel is. It's what America is.
Islamic extremists cannot accept the concept of a secular democracy, a democracy that grants equal rights to women, equal rights to all. It's what they are that they hate, not what we do. That's why it's an important part of the delegitimization campaign, Israel cannot do anything that would satisfy the Islamic extremists to threaten the United States troops. There's nothing Israel could do. If Israel made peace tomorrow unilaterally giving up all of its rights it would have no impact whatsoever. As long as Israel exists that is the grievance of Islamic extremists and Israel is not going to stop existing to satisfy Islamic extremists. (Applause.)
Nor can the United States — nor can the United States do anything to stop Islamic extremists from threatening Americans unless it were to pull out all of its troops in the Middle East, which it's not going to do. The point is there's nothing that Israel or the United States can do to stop these Islamic extremists. There is something, however, the Palestinian authority can do, by stopping the daily incitements against the United States from extremists. Just go on Memory.org. Just watch it on a daily basis on PA television, that's the incitement that puts American troops in danger, by stopping teaching its children to hate us, by stopping the naming of public squares in the West Bank after murderers of Americans and the murderers of Israeli children and civilians.
This square is being named after a murderer who killed an American woman and who killed many Israelis. When you do that and you say that you're naming the square in order to encourage your children to follow in the path of that murderer you're inciting violence against American troops and against American citizens. So let us focus on those who hate America and those who incite terrorism against our troops rather than on a brave nation that loves America, that helps it militarily and with intelligence and that never asks the United States for troops to protect it. I want to mention just two propositions that I ask anybody who makes the case against Israel to dispute, two simple propositions.
Number one, if Israel's enemies were to lay down their arms, stop terrorism and stop firing rockets there would be peace. Does anybody dispute that? Number two, if Israel were to lay down its arms there would be genocide. That is the reality. That's the truth and those two statements must be kept in mind.
And then I want to talk just very briefly about three lessons of the Holocaust that I know I've learned in my friendship with Elie Wiesel. The first lesson is that morality without military power is not enough. We had morality on our side during the Second World War, but we didn't have the ability to defend the Jewish community. Thank God for Israel. Thank God for its military. Thank God for the ability that we now have to defend our morality.(applause)The second lesson — the second lesson is that military power without morality is dangerous. That's why the Israeli military learns lessons and ethics. That's why it has the concept of holiness of arms. That's why it has professors helping to shape ethical policies for the military. And the third one, and perhaps the most important one that Israel and all of us must keep in mind when dealing with Iran is that you must always believe the threats of your enemies more than the promises of your friends. (Applause.)
And that's why Israel must be totally self-reliant. And so — and so in closing, I want to thank you for showing support for this great embattled nation. I want to tell you that the United States- Israel alliance is good for America for Israel, it's good for democracy and it's good for humanity.
Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts
Friday, March 26, 2010
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
BIPARTISAN SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL IN OZ PARLIAMENT
USUAL SUSPECTS TRY TO BLAME ISRAEL FOR THE PALESTINIANS' LACK OF SELF-DETERMINATION.
Advertisement in The AUSTRALIAN tries to undermine today's bipartisan Motion.
The Friends of Palestine and their associates would do better to spend their moneys and energies in encouraging their Arab brethren to become responsible citizens and prove, like Israel has done, that they can form themselves into a responsible national entity which can live in peace and harmony with its neighbours.
.
In 1947 there was no national group calling itself "Palestinian" among the Arab inhabitants and therefore there was no one to take up the UN offer of the Partition Plan to form themselves into another State alongside Israel. While the combined Arab armies surrounding the fledgling Jewish nation of Israel attacked it from all sides in '48/'49, they had no intention of doing anything other than obliterating Palestine altogether.
Hamas and the hard-line Islamists continue and are still intent on fulfilling their infamous aims even after 60 years. Which other sovereign nation and UN member has to argue for its legitimacy? How dare these signatories to the advertisement argue against our Government's principled stand in protecting the right of Israel to exist in secure and legitimate boundaries?
Congratulations to the Editors of THE AUSTRALIAN newspaper for its fair and unbiased coverage of the true situation vis-a-vis Israel and its neighbours!
Advertisement in The AUSTRALIAN tries to undermine today's bipartisan Motion.
The Friends of Palestine and their associates would do better to spend their moneys and energies in encouraging their Arab brethren to become responsible citizens and prove, like Israel has done, that they can form themselves into a responsible national entity which can live in peace and harmony with its neighbours.
.
In 1947 there was no national group calling itself "Palestinian" among the Arab inhabitants and therefore there was no one to take up the UN offer of the Partition Plan to form themselves into another State alongside Israel. While the combined Arab armies surrounding the fledgling Jewish nation of Israel attacked it from all sides in '48/'49, they had no intention of doing anything other than obliterating Palestine altogether.
Hamas and the hard-line Islamists continue and are still intent on fulfilling their infamous aims even after 60 years. Which other sovereign nation and UN member has to argue for its legitimacy? How dare these signatories to the advertisement argue against our Government's principled stand in protecting the right of Israel to exist in secure and legitimate boundaries?
Congratulations to the Editors of THE AUSTRALIAN newspaper for its fair and unbiased coverage of the true situation vis-a-vis Israel and its neighbours!
Monday, November 05, 2007
ANNAPOLIS: address by Israeli PM Olmert, November 4, 2007.
MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS. ISRAEL.
MFA Newsletter
Address by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at the Saban Forum
Annapolis is a landmark, it is an international seal of approval, on the path to negotiations and of the genuine effort to achieve the realization of the vision of two nations.
Distinguished Guests,
At the outset, I wish to say something personal.
Today, November 4, is the anniversary of the tragic murder of the late Yitzhak Rabin. We held the official memorial service according to the Hebrew date two weeks ago, and last night masses of people gathered in Rabin Square to commemorate his memory as they do every year.
However, today, November 4, is the day seared in our collective consciousness as the day of the murder. He will never be forgotten.
I bow my head in profound sorrow to the memory of Yitzhak Rabin. He was a special man who left his mark – which will never be erased – on the life of our country.
I mentioned that I would say something personal: from where I am now, I understand the difficult dilemmas and the power of the suffering Yitzhak Rabin dealt with. Rabin did not charge towards the peace process with excessive enthusiasm. More than anything, he exhibited doubt, hesitation, and was repeatedly tormented by the cost of peace and the risks it entailed.
However, when he saw a chance, he acted to realize it. When he recognized an opportunity, he did not undermine it, but rather he was willing to take chances, to expose himself to criticism, to face the accusatory voices both domestic and international. He did everything in order to realize the opportunity.
He made no political considerations. He did not take into account temporary benefits, inter-party balances of power, and what could be worthwhile. He weighed all the doubts against the hopes, the fears against the chances, the horrible loneliness against the weight of responsibility – and acted.
This is Rabin’s legacy. All the rest are slogans which often cover up the lack of desire to act. This is a legacy to which I am obligated; this is a legacy according to which I intend to lead the State of Israel over the coming months – before the meeting in Annapolis, during it and most importantly after it.
Tonight, I wish to remember my predecessor, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Exactly two years ago, in this place, I sat together at the head of the table with the Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon. This was only days after the implementation of the Disengagement Plan, and ahead of the upcoming elections.
I have no doubt that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon intended to continue advancing the peace process between ourselves and the Palestinians.
Disengagement was not meant to be isolated from the wider context of our relations with the Palestinians. Arik contemplated the continuation of the path, versus the need to realize the Roadmap. It was necessary to reach purposeful, substantial, open and daring negotiations with the Palestinians.
I am committed to this inheritance with all my heart, with all my strength. I do not intend to be satisfied with statements. Chances and opportunities are not slogans, but rather a working plan – and they obligate me.
Why Annapolis?
Annapolis is a landmark, it is an international seal of approval, on the path to negotiations and of the genuine effort to achieve the realization of the vision of two nations: the State of Israel – the nation of the Jewish people; and the Palestinian state – the nation of the Palestinian people.
There will not be negotiations on the vision; there will be no bargaining about this fundamental goal which the U.S. President, George Bush, declared so eloquently: “Two countries for two peoples". A Jewish state for the Jewish people – a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people.
We will not negotiate about the right of existence for the State of Israel as a Jewish state. We will not bargain about the right of the Palestinian people to their own state.
Both are fundamental conditions, basic positions, obvious understandings which cannot be denied. All the basic questions, all the substantive problems, all the historic questions which are pertinent to the disagreement between us and the Palestinians are on the agenda. We will avoid none of them, we will not run from discussing any of them.
Annapolis will not be a place for negotiations, but it will certainly be a starting point. Annapolis will be the jumping-off point for continued serious and in-depth negotiations which will not avoid any issue or ignore any division which has clouded our relations with the Palestinian people for many years.
That is why – Annapolis.
Why now?
Because it is time. Years ago, the Oslo Accords were signed. I was not among its supporters. I feared its negative effects. At the time, I estimated that its results would not lead to peace between us and the Palestinians. The opportunity which ripened then collapsed under the furor of terror; the lack of credibility of the Palestinian leadership at time and the stormy disagreement in Israeli society, which ended with three bullets in Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s back.
There was another chance developing in 2000 – the special effort made by the State of Israel which reached its peak at the Camp David summit in July of that year. That meeting unfortunately ended with an explosion that led to the bloody Intifada, which even today continues in the most sensitive areas of our lives.
Now is the time. The Palestinian leadership is headed by men committed to all the agreements previously signed with the State of Israel. We do not ignore their weaknesses; we are completely aware of the failures of the Palestinian Authority – of the lack of stable governing mechanisms, of the total disintegration of the security mechanisms in Judea and Samaria, of the Hamas rule over the Palestinian parliament and of the violent control of the murderous organizations in the Gaza Strip. Their control allows for unceasing firing of Qassam missiles at residents in the south of the country.
We have abundant reasons to postpone Annapolis; we have very convincing arguments – why the conditions are not yet ripe in the Palestinian Authority to take practical and comprehensive responsibility to implement the understandings with the State of Israel which have yet to be enacted.
However, ladies and gentlemen, we are capable of facing these constraints. Under the existing circumstances, we have a partner and we are not willing to postpone negotiations to a later date, at which point our partner might not be capable of fulfilling the mission.
Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, and Salaam Fayyad, its Prime Minister, publicly state – without hesitation and despite the inherent difficulties of the complex relations within Palestinian society – that they want to live with us in peace. This is an opportunity – it should be taken.
We agreed that if and when we reach an understanding with the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, this understanding will be implemented according to the Roadmap, with all its phases and its sequence. The Palestinians are obligated to fight terrorism and to completely change their internal reality. It should be remembered that the Roadmap sets out a series of steps for the State of Israel. These steps, like the obligations of the Palestinians, have yet to be implemented. We will not concede to the Palestinians on any of the obligations outlined in the Roadmap, and we will not avoid fulfilling our own obligations to the letter. Some of them are difficult, some will create considerable political hardships – and I have no intention, no matter how difficult it is, of attempting to escape the obligations imposed on the State of Israel.
I recommend to each of the leaders and involved parties to deal bravely and unhesitatingly with all the components of this opportunity, this chance. Be open to hope and face the genuine and clear risks and difficulties so that the process may move ahead.
What next?
After Annapolis, we will enter into vigorous, ongoing and continuing negotiations. If we and the Palestinians act with determination, there is a chance that we can achieve real accomplishments perhaps even before the end of President Bush's term in office. There is no intention of dragging the negotiations on endlessly; there is no reason to suffer the same foot-dragging which previously characterized our discussions. There is no basis for the assumption that someone will attempt to circumvent dealing with the fundamental issues which are a condition for realizing the vision of two states living side-by-side in security and peace.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Distinguished Guests,
This is a good moment. I am excited by the chance to contribute to our chances. I know all the excuses and arguments why not, but I believe – from the bottom of my heart – that the time has come.
In this spirit, I will come to Annapolis; to extend my hand in friendship and good will to all those who come to the meeting, and I promise: the State of Israel will be there. Indeed, we will come with caution; we will examine every issue responsibly; we will consider every proposal sensitively; but we come in good will, happily and full of hope.
4 November 2007
MFA Newsletter
Address by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at the Saban Forum
Annapolis is a landmark, it is an international seal of approval, on the path to negotiations and of the genuine effort to achieve the realization of the vision of two nations.
Distinguished Guests,
At the outset, I wish to say something personal.
Today, November 4, is the anniversary of the tragic murder of the late Yitzhak Rabin. We held the official memorial service according to the Hebrew date two weeks ago, and last night masses of people gathered in Rabin Square to commemorate his memory as they do every year.
However, today, November 4, is the day seared in our collective consciousness as the day of the murder. He will never be forgotten.
I bow my head in profound sorrow to the memory of Yitzhak Rabin. He was a special man who left his mark – which will never be erased – on the life of our country.
I mentioned that I would say something personal: from where I am now, I understand the difficult dilemmas and the power of the suffering Yitzhak Rabin dealt with. Rabin did not charge towards the peace process with excessive enthusiasm. More than anything, he exhibited doubt, hesitation, and was repeatedly tormented by the cost of peace and the risks it entailed.
However, when he saw a chance, he acted to realize it. When he recognized an opportunity, he did not undermine it, but rather he was willing to take chances, to expose himself to criticism, to face the accusatory voices both domestic and international. He did everything in order to realize the opportunity.
He made no political considerations. He did not take into account temporary benefits, inter-party balances of power, and what could be worthwhile. He weighed all the doubts against the hopes, the fears against the chances, the horrible loneliness against the weight of responsibility – and acted.
This is Rabin’s legacy. All the rest are slogans which often cover up the lack of desire to act. This is a legacy to which I am obligated; this is a legacy according to which I intend to lead the State of Israel over the coming months – before the meeting in Annapolis, during it and most importantly after it.
Tonight, I wish to remember my predecessor, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Exactly two years ago, in this place, I sat together at the head of the table with the Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon. This was only days after the implementation of the Disengagement Plan, and ahead of the upcoming elections.
I have no doubt that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon intended to continue advancing the peace process between ourselves and the Palestinians.
Disengagement was not meant to be isolated from the wider context of our relations with the Palestinians. Arik contemplated the continuation of the path, versus the need to realize the Roadmap. It was necessary to reach purposeful, substantial, open and daring negotiations with the Palestinians.
I am committed to this inheritance with all my heart, with all my strength. I do not intend to be satisfied with statements. Chances and opportunities are not slogans, but rather a working plan – and they obligate me.
Why Annapolis?
Annapolis is a landmark, it is an international seal of approval, on the path to negotiations and of the genuine effort to achieve the realization of the vision of two nations: the State of Israel – the nation of the Jewish people; and the Palestinian state – the nation of the Palestinian people.
There will not be negotiations on the vision; there will be no bargaining about this fundamental goal which the U.S. President, George Bush, declared so eloquently: “Two countries for two peoples". A Jewish state for the Jewish people – a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people.
We will not negotiate about the right of existence for the State of Israel as a Jewish state. We will not bargain about the right of the Palestinian people to their own state.
Both are fundamental conditions, basic positions, obvious understandings which cannot be denied. All the basic questions, all the substantive problems, all the historic questions which are pertinent to the disagreement between us and the Palestinians are on the agenda. We will avoid none of them, we will not run from discussing any of them.
Annapolis will not be a place for negotiations, but it will certainly be a starting point. Annapolis will be the jumping-off point for continued serious and in-depth negotiations which will not avoid any issue or ignore any division which has clouded our relations with the Palestinian people for many years.
That is why – Annapolis.
Why now?
Because it is time. Years ago, the Oslo Accords were signed. I was not among its supporters. I feared its negative effects. At the time, I estimated that its results would not lead to peace between us and the Palestinians. The opportunity which ripened then collapsed under the furor of terror; the lack of credibility of the Palestinian leadership at time and the stormy disagreement in Israeli society, which ended with three bullets in Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s back.
There was another chance developing in 2000 – the special effort made by the State of Israel which reached its peak at the Camp David summit in July of that year. That meeting unfortunately ended with an explosion that led to the bloody Intifada, which even today continues in the most sensitive areas of our lives.
Now is the time. The Palestinian leadership is headed by men committed to all the agreements previously signed with the State of Israel. We do not ignore their weaknesses; we are completely aware of the failures of the Palestinian Authority – of the lack of stable governing mechanisms, of the total disintegration of the security mechanisms in Judea and Samaria, of the Hamas rule over the Palestinian parliament and of the violent control of the murderous organizations in the Gaza Strip. Their control allows for unceasing firing of Qassam missiles at residents in the south of the country.
We have abundant reasons to postpone Annapolis; we have very convincing arguments – why the conditions are not yet ripe in the Palestinian Authority to take practical and comprehensive responsibility to implement the understandings with the State of Israel which have yet to be enacted.
However, ladies and gentlemen, we are capable of facing these constraints. Under the existing circumstances, we have a partner and we are not willing to postpone negotiations to a later date, at which point our partner might not be capable of fulfilling the mission.
Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, and Salaam Fayyad, its Prime Minister, publicly state – without hesitation and despite the inherent difficulties of the complex relations within Palestinian society – that they want to live with us in peace. This is an opportunity – it should be taken.
We agreed that if and when we reach an understanding with the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, this understanding will be implemented according to the Roadmap, with all its phases and its sequence. The Palestinians are obligated to fight terrorism and to completely change their internal reality. It should be remembered that the Roadmap sets out a series of steps for the State of Israel. These steps, like the obligations of the Palestinians, have yet to be implemented. We will not concede to the Palestinians on any of the obligations outlined in the Roadmap, and we will not avoid fulfilling our own obligations to the letter. Some of them are difficult, some will create considerable political hardships – and I have no intention, no matter how difficult it is, of attempting to escape the obligations imposed on the State of Israel.
I recommend to each of the leaders and involved parties to deal bravely and unhesitatingly with all the components of this opportunity, this chance. Be open to hope and face the genuine and clear risks and difficulties so that the process may move ahead.
What next?
After Annapolis, we will enter into vigorous, ongoing and continuing negotiations. If we and the Palestinians act with determination, there is a chance that we can achieve real accomplishments perhaps even before the end of President Bush's term in office. There is no intention of dragging the negotiations on endlessly; there is no reason to suffer the same foot-dragging which previously characterized our discussions. There is no basis for the assumption that someone will attempt to circumvent dealing with the fundamental issues which are a condition for realizing the vision of two states living side-by-side in security and peace.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Distinguished Guests,
This is a good moment. I am excited by the chance to contribute to our chances. I know all the excuses and arguments why not, but I believe – from the bottom of my heart – that the time has come.
In this spirit, I will come to Annapolis; to extend my hand in friendship and good will to all those who come to the meeting, and I promise: the State of Israel will be there. Indeed, we will come with caution; we will examine every issue responsibly; we will consider every proposal sensitively; but we come in good will, happily and full of hope.
4 November 2007
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
ITALIANS MARCHING FOR ISRAEL
From Manfred Gerstenfeld: European-Israeli Relations: Between Confusion and Change?
Marching for Israel Against Ahmadinejad
An Interview with Giuliano Ferrara
On 26 October 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, made a genocidal call for the elimination of Israel at the "World without Zionism" conference in Teheran. Other speakers were terrorist leaders Hassan Nasrallah of Hizballah and Khaled Mash'al of Hamas.
Ahmadinejad's murderous statements prompted many condemnations, inter alia from the UN Security Council and the European Union. One of the West's strongest reactions was in Rome where, on 3 November, a torchlight march was held near the Iranian embassy. This protest was initiated by Giuliano Ferrara, editor of the conservative daily Il Foglio. An estimated 15-20,000 people took part in the demonstration, among them cabinet minister Roberto Calderoli who said he represented both the government and his Lega Nord party.
Ferrara, when asked why he took an initiative that was unique in the world, replies: "I felt it a political, cultural, and civil duty to organize a protest
against Ahmadinejad's call for genocide. I wanted this demonstration to have a simple goal: to proclaim that we uphold Israel's right to exist and object to a head of state who denies this."
A Great Political Success
Ferrara elaborates: "The demonstration was a great political success: it went beyond a gathering of about twenty thousand people who were determined to affirm their principles. Among those who marched or supported the demonstration almost the entire Italian political spectrum was represented, from the Center-Right to the Center-Left. The Rifondazione communists were the only party with a parliamentary faction that did not participate. Like other forces of the extreme Left, their prejudice is to support the national struggle of the Palestinians and their ideology tends toward anti-Zionism.
"Yet the party's leader, Fausto Bertinotti, said that even he would have participated if the demonstration had as its motto 'two states for two peoples.' I replied that since we were not marching for a political goal, we were not interested in negotiating compromises on wording to gain unified backing. I told him that the demonstration's motto was a simple one: to defend Israel and its right to exist against whoever threatens it.
"We succeeded in holding the demonstration one week after Ahmadinejad's initial anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist declarations. Our support went far beyond the political parties. Corriere della Sera, Italy's largest daily, came out in favor of the demonstration along with many other papers. Repubblica, the second largest daily, treated the rally benevolently, which was the maximum one could expect. The communist daily Il Manifesto opposed the demonstration but some of its journalists marched nevertheless. Numerous associations also came out in support and so did various other bodies of Italian civil society, from the Catholic sector and elsewhere. Many intellectuals and public personalities also expressed their backing.
"Also important, this was the first major demonstration of Europeans before the embassy of a Muslim country. We marched as close to it as we were allowed by the authorities. I called it a 'hybrid torchlight march' because persons and groups with very diverse views were present. But they showed unity in upholding Israel's right to exist."
Ferrara sums up: "The strong underlying message of the march against Ahmadinejad was that Israel had with its own forces defended its existence. Even for the Italian Left that has a great fascination, which is undeniable after all these years."
One Precedent: USADay
"The demonstration in favor of Israel was only possible because on two previous occasions I had taken similar initiatives. Il Foglio is a small opinion daily that informs about 20-30,000 readers among Italy's elite. I founded it with little money and a great liking for adventure. We have shown that we can intensively promote cultural and civil opinions within the Italian political system. We lead battles on cultural, political, economic, and social issues at the Italian, European, and global levels."
Ferrara founded Il Foglio in 1996. "The first time we organized a public demonstration was on 10 November 2001, less than two months after the attack by Bin Laden's followers on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. It seemed shameful that all one heard about the thousands of American victims of terrorism was cheap rhetoric. At the same time, other people were burning American flags to protest the bombardments in Afghanistan at the start of the military operation to dismantle Al Qaeda's training camps. This burning of American and also Israeli flags is an ongoing vice of small left-wing groups that are tolerated in Italy.
"We decided to organize a demonstration called 'USA Day' to show solidarity with the United States after 9-11. Italy's newly elected prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, spoke in Rome's Piazza del Popolo. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton sent a message as well, speaking on CNN. He called it a beautiful idea and said Americans needed more Europeans in the streets to express their support. This was a new type of political event, a newspaper that took the initiative as an opinion-leader to bring people out into the public square.
"Repubblica came out against USA Day saying it wasn't a bipartisan demonstration. Thereafter they were greatly embarrassed by the fact that Clinton, the so-much beloved former American president, so strongly endorsed what we did."
IsraelDay
"On 15 April 2002 we organized a second, even more important demonstration called 'Israel Day.' A year before the attack on the Twin Towers, the Palestinians had launched the Second Intifada with its murderous suicide bombings. The Israeli government reacted by suppressing terrorism in the West Bank and Gaza.
"It was very difficult to call for a pro-Israeli demonstration in Italy in the days after the battles in Jenin. People were shown on television what were called 'the tanks of Sharon.' These besieged the mukhata in Ramallah where Yasser Arafat was almost a prisoner. Israel's legitimate aim was to eliminate terrorism in the territories it had occupied for more than thirty-five years after winning a war of self-defense.
"We had anticipated well in advance how the media would react to Jenin. When the Israeli military action began, we warned that it would be strongly denounced. We explained that it would be very problematic to fight the terrorists in Jenin. We also knew how the anti-Israeli propaganda war functioned. We thus started to warn immediately that there would be newspaper headlines announcing the 'Jenin massacre.'
"Subsequently, Human Rights Watch found that fifty terrorists had been killed and the Israelis had also sustained many losses. Within the limits of what was possible, Israel had made an effort to avoid civilian casualties in the very difficult combat conditions of the Jenin camp. It was clear that Israel had behaved honorably. We were happy that the truth had come out. Rather suddenly in Italy, even an extreme left-wing journal such as Il Diario was inspired to send a journalist to Jenin who reported the truth."
A Very Successful Demonstration
"In those days it was not easy to organize a pro-Israeli demonstration, but we decided we had to do it. This event was again a great success, gaining the support of personalities from both the Right and the Left. The prime minister of the present left-wing Italian government, Romano Prodi, then president of the European Commission, expressed his sympathy. Among the backers on the Right was Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini, leader of the Alleanza Nazionale party.
"On Israel Day there was a massive show of Israeli flags. Already on USA Day there had been many such flags alongside the American ones. People gathered on the square of the Capitol and descended the steps. It was a massive, beautiful procession. We marched to the synagogues on the Tiber River, where the participants deposited small stones. There was a short speech. I must stress that all these demonstrations have been organized with little money by a small newspaper.
"The success of the first two demonstrations helped me decide that a similar one was necessary against Ahmadinejad's anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic campaign. We had to express intelligently our indignation toward the Iranian president and his political madness. Besides the Israeli flags there were also Italian and Iranian ones. A group of Iranians in exile took part in the protest and one of their slogans was, in the Persian language, 'Zendebab Israel'-wishing Israel to live.
"Initially many ministers of the Berlusconi government intended to participate. However, the afternoon before the march in Rome there were counterdemonstrations before the Italian embassy in Teheran. Italy is Iran's leading trade partner in Europe, and the Iranian government let it be known that there would be consequences for the countries' bilateral trade.
"There was also pressure from the Confindustria, the Italian manufacturers association, and from some in the government. Berlusconi hesitated and did not reply forcefully. This led to the decision of Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Fini not to participate. Also Defense Minister Antonio Martino chose not to come to the demonstration. Still, it was an event of major political importance."
Why Did We Do It?
When asked why Ferrara was the only non-Jewish person in the world to organize such a demonstration, he replied: "I have no answer. What I can say is that prominent French intellectuals such as Alain Finkielkraut and Andr? Glucksman were astonished by what we had done. They said it would never have been possible in France."
After some reflection he remarks: "Perhaps it can be explained by a mix of our national reality, the history of Il Foglio, and my personal experiences. Italy has a certain liberty of action that other European countries do not have. Furthermore, Il Foglio is not so sensitive to the market. We do not have a certain quota of people whom we have to please. For other papers this usually includes the pro-Palestinians and the pro-Israelis, as well as the left-wing and right-wing intellectuals."
Ferrara says it was very important that the pro-Israeli Berlusconi government was in power. "Fini's role was also significant. As leader of a postfascist party he needed Israeli legitimization. His attitude toward Israel was the main indicator that he had changed his political outlook. At the founding congress of Alleanza Nazionale he had the party condemn anti-Semitism and the prewar racial laws of the Mussolini government, which were an important element of fascism. As a result, Fini ultimately succeeded in being invited to Jerusalem. His trip there inspired much debate in his party. Mussolini's granddaughter Alessandra left the party and took with her a small group of members."
Israel's Strategic Role
"Berlusconi understood that Israel should play an important strategic role in Italy's foreign policy. Pro-Arab prime ministers in the previous decades, such as the Christian Democrat Giulio Andreotti and the Socialist Bettino Craxi, had created an imbalance in Italian positions toward the Middle East."
In the current coalition government led by Prodi, the socialist DS party consisting mainly of former communists is the largest. When asked what position it will take on the Middle East, Ferrara says it is too early to tell. "When Berlusconi was talking to Javier Solana, the European high representative for foreign and security affairs, or to people like the then French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin or his Spanish colleague Miguel Angel Moratinos, it was a dialogue of the deaf. Berlusconi was pro-Israeli and they were anti-American, anti-British, and anti-Israeli. Berlusconi's refusal to go along has prevented this position from advancing too much in Europe."
The Prodi Government
"Now Berlusconi is no longer prime minister, and the opposite tendency has returned. We will have to wait and see where Italy will stand. When our DS foreign minister, D'Alema, was in the opposition, he did realize that he had to march against Ahmadinejad. Will he now cave in entirely on Israel and become a loudspeaker in Italy for Europe's dominant anti-Israeli line? Or will he, which is much more in Italy's interest, be a brake on the fanatic anti-Israelis who form much of the European bureaucracy? Anything is possible, yet the key man in his party, Secretary-General Piero Fassino, has shown himself to be a very balanced person. He is convinced that defending Israel is a matter of priority. Thus it won't be easy for D'Alema to overcome that stance.
"Prime Minister Prodi has the habits of the old Christian Democrat politicians. He comes from a left-wing Catholic school. He believes in ecumenism and interfaith dialogue. He rejects the idea of a clash of civilizations. He can best be defined as a navigator. Prodi is no fighter against terrorism and Islamic fanaticism. He is unlikely to create great surprises that will detach him from the Brussels and Strasbourg orthodoxy.
"As president of the EU Commission he made some far-reaching anti-Israeli statements. This helped him in his relationship with Paris and Berlin, protecting him, in turn, from the evident contempt he faced from London and Washington. As Italian prime minister he is likely to navigate more carefully."
Ferrara repeats: "It is certainly possible that the Prodi government will take an anti-Israeli line. We do not yet see the first explicit signs of it, but as noted, it is too early to say."
In mid-July during the fighting in Lebanon, Ferrara attacked the Italian government and the parties that supported it. He charged that they were taking a summer vacation from their responsibility. In an article titled "The Tears of the European Crocodile Destroy Israel," Ferrara wrote that "they feigned not to know that Palestinian nationalism-polluted by the political and civil corruption of the revolutionary elites-was being substituted by the political Islamism of Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust-denying head of state."
Ferrara ended with a call to the Italian Left: "On one side you have people like Olmert, Livni, Peretz, and Peres. On the other side there is Sheikh Nasrallah and Mash'al, who is a fugitive in Damascus protected by the worst despots of the Middle East. For once, do-gooders, make a choice that reflects proportional use of intelligence and political dignity."1
-------------------------------------------------
Giuliano Ferrarais the founder and editor of the daily Il Foglio. He was born in Romein 1952 to a family of longstanding communists, and remained a communist until the age of thirty. He was a political columnist for Corriera della Sera and has published in several Italian weeklies. He has been the director of many television programs, first for the state-owned RAI and later for Mediaset of the Berlusconi Group. For five years he has been anchoring a daily news program on the independent network La7 owned by the Telecom group. Notes
------------------------
1 Giuliano Ferrara, "Le Lacrime del coccodrillo europeista annegano Israele," Il Foglio, 17 July 2006. [Italian]
-------------------------------------------------------------
The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
Other related articles:
The Cynical Use of Israel in Italian Politics - Interview with Fiamma Nirenstein (Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism #58, July 2007)
http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=0&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=381&PID=470&IID=1589&TTL=The_Cynical_Use_of_Israel_in_Italian_Politics
Neo Anti-Semitism in Today's Italy - Sergio I. Minerbi (Jewish Political Studies Review, Fall 2003) http://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-minerbi-f03.htm
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.
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Marching for Israel Against Ahmadinejad
An Interview with Giuliano Ferrara
On 26 October 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, made a genocidal call for the elimination of Israel at the "World without Zionism" conference in Teheran. Other speakers were terrorist leaders Hassan Nasrallah of Hizballah and Khaled Mash'al of Hamas.
Ahmadinejad's murderous statements prompted many condemnations, inter alia from the UN Security Council and the European Union. One of the West's strongest reactions was in Rome where, on 3 November, a torchlight march was held near the Iranian embassy. This protest was initiated by Giuliano Ferrara, editor of the conservative daily Il Foglio. An estimated 15-20,000 people took part in the demonstration, among them cabinet minister Roberto Calderoli who said he represented both the government and his Lega Nord party.
Ferrara, when asked why he took an initiative that was unique in the world, replies: "I felt it a political, cultural, and civil duty to organize a protest
against Ahmadinejad's call for genocide. I wanted this demonstration to have a simple goal: to proclaim that we uphold Israel's right to exist and object to a head of state who denies this."
A Great Political Success
Ferrara elaborates: "The demonstration was a great political success: it went beyond a gathering of about twenty thousand people who were determined to affirm their principles. Among those who marched or supported the demonstration almost the entire Italian political spectrum was represented, from the Center-Right to the Center-Left. The Rifondazione communists were the only party with a parliamentary faction that did not participate. Like other forces of the extreme Left, their prejudice is to support the national struggle of the Palestinians and their ideology tends toward anti-Zionism.
"Yet the party's leader, Fausto Bertinotti, said that even he would have participated if the demonstration had as its motto 'two states for two peoples.' I replied that since we were not marching for a political goal, we were not interested in negotiating compromises on wording to gain unified backing. I told him that the demonstration's motto was a simple one: to defend Israel and its right to exist against whoever threatens it.
"We succeeded in holding the demonstration one week after Ahmadinejad's initial anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist declarations. Our support went far beyond the political parties. Corriere della Sera, Italy's largest daily, came out in favor of the demonstration along with many other papers. Repubblica, the second largest daily, treated the rally benevolently, which was the maximum one could expect. The communist daily Il Manifesto opposed the demonstration but some of its journalists marched nevertheless. Numerous associations also came out in support and so did various other bodies of Italian civil society, from the Catholic sector and elsewhere. Many intellectuals and public personalities also expressed their backing.
"Also important, this was the first major demonstration of Europeans before the embassy of a Muslim country. We marched as close to it as we were allowed by the authorities. I called it a 'hybrid torchlight march' because persons and groups with very diverse views were present. But they showed unity in upholding Israel's right to exist."
Ferrara sums up: "The strong underlying message of the march against Ahmadinejad was that Israel had with its own forces defended its existence. Even for the Italian Left that has a great fascination, which is undeniable after all these years."
One Precedent: USADay
"The demonstration in favor of Israel was only possible because on two previous occasions I had taken similar initiatives. Il Foglio is a small opinion daily that informs about 20-30,000 readers among Italy's elite. I founded it with little money and a great liking for adventure. We have shown that we can intensively promote cultural and civil opinions within the Italian political system. We lead battles on cultural, political, economic, and social issues at the Italian, European, and global levels."
Ferrara founded Il Foglio in 1996. "The first time we organized a public demonstration was on 10 November 2001, less than two months after the attack by Bin Laden's followers on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. It seemed shameful that all one heard about the thousands of American victims of terrorism was cheap rhetoric. At the same time, other people were burning American flags to protest the bombardments in Afghanistan at the start of the military operation to dismantle Al Qaeda's training camps. This burning of American and also Israeli flags is an ongoing vice of small left-wing groups that are tolerated in Italy.
"We decided to organize a demonstration called 'USA Day' to show solidarity with the United States after 9-11. Italy's newly elected prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, spoke in Rome's Piazza del Popolo. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton sent a message as well, speaking on CNN. He called it a beautiful idea and said Americans needed more Europeans in the streets to express their support. This was a new type of political event, a newspaper that took the initiative as an opinion-leader to bring people out into the public square.
"Repubblica came out against USA Day saying it wasn't a bipartisan demonstration. Thereafter they were greatly embarrassed by the fact that Clinton, the so-much beloved former American president, so strongly endorsed what we did."
IsraelDay
"On 15 April 2002 we organized a second, even more important demonstration called 'Israel Day.' A year before the attack on the Twin Towers, the Palestinians had launched the Second Intifada with its murderous suicide bombings. The Israeli government reacted by suppressing terrorism in the West Bank and Gaza.
"It was very difficult to call for a pro-Israeli demonstration in Italy in the days after the battles in Jenin. People were shown on television what were called 'the tanks of Sharon.' These besieged the mukhata in Ramallah where Yasser Arafat was almost a prisoner. Israel's legitimate aim was to eliminate terrorism in the territories it had occupied for more than thirty-five years after winning a war of self-defense.
"We had anticipated well in advance how the media would react to Jenin. When the Israeli military action began, we warned that it would be strongly denounced. We explained that it would be very problematic to fight the terrorists in Jenin. We also knew how the anti-Israeli propaganda war functioned. We thus started to warn immediately that there would be newspaper headlines announcing the 'Jenin massacre.'
"Subsequently, Human Rights Watch found that fifty terrorists had been killed and the Israelis had also sustained many losses. Within the limits of what was possible, Israel had made an effort to avoid civilian casualties in the very difficult combat conditions of the Jenin camp. It was clear that Israel had behaved honorably. We were happy that the truth had come out. Rather suddenly in Italy, even an extreme left-wing journal such as Il Diario was inspired to send a journalist to Jenin who reported the truth."
A Very Successful Demonstration
"In those days it was not easy to organize a pro-Israeli demonstration, but we decided we had to do it. This event was again a great success, gaining the support of personalities from both the Right and the Left. The prime minister of the present left-wing Italian government, Romano Prodi, then president of the European Commission, expressed his sympathy. Among the backers on the Right was Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini, leader of the Alleanza Nazionale party.
"On Israel Day there was a massive show of Israeli flags. Already on USA Day there had been many such flags alongside the American ones. People gathered on the square of the Capitol and descended the steps. It was a massive, beautiful procession. We marched to the synagogues on the Tiber River, where the participants deposited small stones. There was a short speech. I must stress that all these demonstrations have been organized with little money by a small newspaper.
"The success of the first two demonstrations helped me decide that a similar one was necessary against Ahmadinejad's anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic campaign. We had to express intelligently our indignation toward the Iranian president and his political madness. Besides the Israeli flags there were also Italian and Iranian ones. A group of Iranians in exile took part in the protest and one of their slogans was, in the Persian language, 'Zendebab Israel'-wishing Israel to live.
"Initially many ministers of the Berlusconi government intended to participate. However, the afternoon before the march in Rome there were counterdemonstrations before the Italian embassy in Teheran. Italy is Iran's leading trade partner in Europe, and the Iranian government let it be known that there would be consequences for the countries' bilateral trade.
"There was also pressure from the Confindustria, the Italian manufacturers association, and from some in the government. Berlusconi hesitated and did not reply forcefully. This led to the decision of Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Fini not to participate. Also Defense Minister Antonio Martino chose not to come to the demonstration. Still, it was an event of major political importance."
Why Did We Do It?
When asked why Ferrara was the only non-Jewish person in the world to organize such a demonstration, he replied: "I have no answer. What I can say is that prominent French intellectuals such as Alain Finkielkraut and Andr? Glucksman were astonished by what we had done. They said it would never have been possible in France."
After some reflection he remarks: "Perhaps it can be explained by a mix of our national reality, the history of Il Foglio, and my personal experiences. Italy has a certain liberty of action that other European countries do not have. Furthermore, Il Foglio is not so sensitive to the market. We do not have a certain quota of people whom we have to please. For other papers this usually includes the pro-Palestinians and the pro-Israelis, as well as the left-wing and right-wing intellectuals."
Ferrara says it was very important that the pro-Israeli Berlusconi government was in power. "Fini's role was also significant. As leader of a postfascist party he needed Israeli legitimization. His attitude toward Israel was the main indicator that he had changed his political outlook. At the founding congress of Alleanza Nazionale he had the party condemn anti-Semitism and the prewar racial laws of the Mussolini government, which were an important element of fascism. As a result, Fini ultimately succeeded in being invited to Jerusalem. His trip there inspired much debate in his party. Mussolini's granddaughter Alessandra left the party and took with her a small group of members."
Israel's Strategic Role
"Berlusconi understood that Israel should play an important strategic role in Italy's foreign policy. Pro-Arab prime ministers in the previous decades, such as the Christian Democrat Giulio Andreotti and the Socialist Bettino Craxi, had created an imbalance in Italian positions toward the Middle East."
In the current coalition government led by Prodi, the socialist DS party consisting mainly of former communists is the largest. When asked what position it will take on the Middle East, Ferrara says it is too early to tell. "When Berlusconi was talking to Javier Solana, the European high representative for foreign and security affairs, or to people like the then French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin or his Spanish colleague Miguel Angel Moratinos, it was a dialogue of the deaf. Berlusconi was pro-Israeli and they were anti-American, anti-British, and anti-Israeli. Berlusconi's refusal to go along has prevented this position from advancing too much in Europe."
The Prodi Government
"Now Berlusconi is no longer prime minister, and the opposite tendency has returned. We will have to wait and see where Italy will stand. When our DS foreign minister, D'Alema, was in the opposition, he did realize that he had to march against Ahmadinejad. Will he now cave in entirely on Israel and become a loudspeaker in Italy for Europe's dominant anti-Israeli line? Or will he, which is much more in Italy's interest, be a brake on the fanatic anti-Israelis who form much of the European bureaucracy? Anything is possible, yet the key man in his party, Secretary-General Piero Fassino, has shown himself to be a very balanced person. He is convinced that defending Israel is a matter of priority. Thus it won't be easy for D'Alema to overcome that stance.
"Prime Minister Prodi has the habits of the old Christian Democrat politicians. He comes from a left-wing Catholic school. He believes in ecumenism and interfaith dialogue. He rejects the idea of a clash of civilizations. He can best be defined as a navigator. Prodi is no fighter against terrorism and Islamic fanaticism. He is unlikely to create great surprises that will detach him from the Brussels and Strasbourg orthodoxy.
"As president of the EU Commission he made some far-reaching anti-Israeli statements. This helped him in his relationship with Paris and Berlin, protecting him, in turn, from the evident contempt he faced from London and Washington. As Italian prime minister he is likely to navigate more carefully."
Ferrara repeats: "It is certainly possible that the Prodi government will take an anti-Israeli line. We do not yet see the first explicit signs of it, but as noted, it is too early to say."
In mid-July during the fighting in Lebanon, Ferrara attacked the Italian government and the parties that supported it. He charged that they were taking a summer vacation from their responsibility. In an article titled "The Tears of the European Crocodile Destroy Israel," Ferrara wrote that "they feigned not to know that Palestinian nationalism-polluted by the political and civil corruption of the revolutionary elites-was being substituted by the political Islamism of Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust-denying head of state."
Ferrara ended with a call to the Italian Left: "On one side you have people like Olmert, Livni, Peretz, and Peres. On the other side there is Sheikh Nasrallah and Mash'al, who is a fugitive in Damascus protected by the worst despots of the Middle East. For once, do-gooders, make a choice that reflects proportional use of intelligence and political dignity."1
-------------------------------------------------
Giuliano Ferrarais the founder and editor of the daily Il Foglio. He was born in Romein 1952 to a family of longstanding communists, and remained a communist until the age of thirty. He was a political columnist for Corriera della Sera and has published in several Italian weeklies. He has been the director of many television programs, first for the state-owned RAI and later for Mediaset of the Berlusconi Group. For five years he has been anchoring a daily news program on the independent network La7 owned by the Telecom group. Notes
------------------------
1 Giuliano Ferrara, "Le Lacrime del coccodrillo europeista annegano Israele," Il Foglio, 17 July 2006. [Italian]
-------------------------------------------------------------
The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
Other related articles:
The Cynical Use of Israel in Italian Politics - Interview with Fiamma Nirenstein (Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism #58, July 2007)
http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=0&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=381&PID=470&IID=1589&TTL=The_Cynical_Use_of_Israel_in_Italian_Politics
Neo Anti-Semitism in Today's Italy - Sergio I. Minerbi (Jewish Political Studies Review, Fall 2003) http://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-minerbi-f03.htm
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.
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Copyright belongs to the authors or owners of the original. Reproduce with
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Tuesday, May 29, 2007
The Islamic duty, according to the Koran, to respect Israel.
The Islamic duty to respect Israel
Posted By Melanie Phillips On May 28, 2007 @ 2:55 pm In Diary |
A reader wonders why more is not made of the fact that in several verses the Koran declares that Israel is the divinely appointed homeland of the Jews. The relevant verses are provided on the Arabs for Israel website and read thus:
2:47 Children of Israel! call to mind the favour which I bestowed upon you, and that I preferred you to all other nations. 2:122 O Children of Israel! call to mind the favor which I bestowed upon you, and that I preferred you to all other nations.
7:137 And We made the children of Israel, who were considered weak (and of no account), inheritors of lands in both east and west, - lands whereon We sent down Our blessings. The fair promise of thy Lord was fulfilled for the Children of Israel, because they had patience and constancy, and We leveled to the ground the great works and fine buildings which Pharaoh and his people erected (with such pride). 17:104 And We said thereafter to the Children of Israel, “Dwell securely in the land of promise”:
10:93 We settled the Children of Israel in a beautiful dwelling-place, and provided for them sustenance of the best: it was after knowledge had been granted to them.
20:80 O ye Children of Israel! We delivered you from your enemy, and We made a Covenant with you to give you the right side (the blessed side) of Mount Sinai, and We sent down to you Manna (special food) and quails.
26:59 Thus it was, but We made the Children of Israel inheritors of such things (the promised land)
45:16 We did aforetime grant to the Children of Israel the Book the Power of Command, and Prophet hood; We gave them, for Sustenance, things good and pure; and We favored them above all other nations.
44: 32 And We have chosen them (the Children of Israel) above the ‘Alamîn (mankind, and jinns) and our choice was based on a deep knowledge.
32.23] And certainly We gave the Book to Moses, so be not in doubt concerning the receiving of it, and We made it a guide for the children of Israel.
[32.24] And We made of them Guiding Lights and leaders to guide by Our command as they were patient, and they were certain of Our communications.
[17:104] And we said to the Children of Israel afterwards, “ scatter and live all over the world…and when the end of the world is near we will gather you again into the Promised Land”.T
he interpretation of these verses, which is believed by a handful of Muslims around the world, is that no Muslim can interfere with the ingathering of the Jews to Israel since this is the word of the Almighty himself.
Curious indeed that we don’t hear anyone else referring to this particular interesting theological insight.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Article printed from Melanie Phillips’s Diary: http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary
URL to article: http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1531
Click here to print.
Posted By Melanie Phillips On May 28, 2007 @ 2:55 pm In Diary |
A reader wonders why more is not made of the fact that in several verses the Koran declares that Israel is the divinely appointed homeland of the Jews. The relevant verses are provided on the Arabs for Israel website and read thus:
2:47 Children of Israel! call to mind the favour which I bestowed upon you, and that I preferred you to all other nations. 2:122 O Children of Israel! call to mind the favor which I bestowed upon you, and that I preferred you to all other nations.
7:137 And We made the children of Israel, who were considered weak (and of no account), inheritors of lands in both east and west, - lands whereon We sent down Our blessings. The fair promise of thy Lord was fulfilled for the Children of Israel, because they had patience and constancy, and We leveled to the ground the great works and fine buildings which Pharaoh and his people erected (with such pride). 17:104 And We said thereafter to the Children of Israel, “Dwell securely in the land of promise”:
10:93 We settled the Children of Israel in a beautiful dwelling-place, and provided for them sustenance of the best: it was after knowledge had been granted to them.
20:80 O ye Children of Israel! We delivered you from your enemy, and We made a Covenant with you to give you the right side (the blessed side) of Mount Sinai, and We sent down to you Manna (special food) and quails.
26:59 Thus it was, but We made the Children of Israel inheritors of such things (the promised land)
45:16 We did aforetime grant to the Children of Israel the Book the Power of Command, and Prophet hood; We gave them, for Sustenance, things good and pure; and We favored them above all other nations.
44: 32 And We have chosen them (the Children of Israel) above the ‘Alamîn (mankind, and jinns) and our choice was based on a deep knowledge.
32.23] And certainly We gave the Book to Moses, so be not in doubt concerning the receiving of it, and We made it a guide for the children of Israel.
[32.24] And We made of them Guiding Lights and leaders to guide by Our command as they were patient, and they were certain of Our communications.
[17:104] And we said to the Children of Israel afterwards, “ scatter and live all over the world…and when the end of the world is near we will gather you again into the Promised Land”.T
he interpretation of these verses, which is believed by a handful of Muslims around the world, is that no Muslim can interfere with the ingathering of the Jews to Israel since this is the word of the Almighty himself.
Curious indeed that we don’t hear anyone else referring to this particular interesting theological insight.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Article printed from Melanie Phillips’s Diary: http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary
URL to article: http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1531
Click here to print.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
DEMOCRACY: ITS MEANING IN PRACTICE.
THE MEANING OF DEMOCRACY
Democracy has to start at home!
In our home, we were and are very democratic.
When we were an extended family, we discussed everything and acted as the elders told us to.
When we were just 4, we discussed everything, but the kids did as they were told,- by the parents.
I.E. :
They were given freedoms on a long 'leash',- but that 'leash' was reined-in as soon as they took advantage of this freedom to their detriment!
Now when we are jus 2 of us,- we discuss everything, but we do ,- what?
We have to give and take!
That is democracy! A democracy which can work for two very easily,- or you divorce!
Institutional, national or company, etc. democracies are just the same on a grander scale: some take advantage of the freedoms of the individual, to the detriment of everyone else. They have to be reined in, restricted, locked-up, locked-out, expelled, legislated against, or whatever.
There is no one rule that fits all. There is no law that says: we are all equal, -full stop.
We are all equal before the law,- fair enough!
But kids, adults, the able and disabled, the old and the young,- the crooks, the saintly, the clever and the idiots,- the poor and the rich, etc., etc.,- sorry, not one of us would claim equality on all fronts all our lives with everyone else!
One can repeat one's "democracy dogma" as much as one likes. The ideal may be in heaven, but on earth, my/our home is my/our castle and I/we set the rules.
If my home is on Crown land,- or if someone else has claims on my land,- we still have tenancy rights enshrined in laws. I don't expect to be shot at and murdered by the landlord,- but if I overstep my rights, the landlord will have a right to evict me via the correct enforcers of the law. I will have to accept it, like it or not,- if I am normal, of course!
If my neighbors overstep their rights to build a structure which adversely affects my property rights,- then there are also laws and avenues to appeal for both parties. Both will have to accept whatever the rulings,- if we are normal human beings!
On the other hand, if a potential mass-murderer were to live next door to any of us,- whose rights take precedence in a democracy? His or ours? He stays and we move?
I wouldn't!
ISRAEL,- THE JEWISH PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL HOMELAND.
Every nation has its problems and every nation deals with it as it sees fit, including our Oz (AUSTRALIA).
Dictatorships a-la-Zimbabwe or Iraq or past and present others,- need outside help to free their citizens.
But I don't think that democratic Israel needs anyone's lecturing on how to deal with its potential enemies within, as long as no one comes to help her deal with her actual enemies,- i.e. the former's brethren-, without!
The following is a Letter to the Editor, of The Age newspaper, Melbourne.
Monday 21 May, 2007.
Disingenuous claim
THERE is no doubt that the Holocaust was a terrible crime against humanity and that the establishment of a refuge for Jews in 1948 was a justifiable step. It is also true that Israel has faced many difficulties from its neighbours.
However, to imply that all citizens in the Jewish state have equal rights, as Philip Chester and Danny Lamm do, is disingenuous.
Those with "Jewish nationality" have all sorts of privileges in terms of employment and loans for housing and education. Most land is reserved for Jewish use. Immigration, quite obviously, favours Jews over non-Jews. The fact that the Israeli Government may not discriminate between citizens does not appear to prohibit non-state institutions from doing so.
Israel would like to be seen as a democratic state like any other. However, no other democracy privileges a particular ethnicity the way Israel does. There is a real conflict between a state being defined as "Jewish" and it being truly democratic. This is, no doubt, a difficult acknowledgement to make, but it is an issue that must ultimately be faced.
Instead of being the Promised Land for the Chosen People, if Israel would move to becoming a secular state embracing compassion, freedom and justice, for all citizens equally, it would truly be a light to the world.
John Perkins, St Kilda
-------------------------------------------
My reply to the Editor, The Age.
Disingenuous claim indeed, by John Perkins, St Kilda
If the world had stopped the evil killing and hatred of the Jewish people long, long ago, then perhaps Jews would not have needed to be a "people apart" in their own ethnic State.
But I don't know about being a "chosen people",- I would rather God and the world chose someone else for a change!
As for democracy,- if her neighbors and detractors were trying even 1% to be as fair and reasonable as Israel is trying to be towards all its citizens,- the whole world would be a better place.
For the time being, democracy in Israel is as good as its enemies allow it to be. It is a beacon of light to her neighbors.
But to be a "light on to the nations" requires a willingness by the nations to live in light, not in darkness!
MM
Democracy has to start at home!
In our home, we were and are very democratic.
When we were an extended family, we discussed everything and acted as the elders told us to.
When we were just 4, we discussed everything, but the kids did as they were told,- by the parents.
I.E. :
They were given freedoms on a long 'leash',- but that 'leash' was reined-in as soon as they took advantage of this freedom to their detriment!
Now when we are jus 2 of us,- we discuss everything, but we do ,- what?
We have to give and take!
That is democracy! A democracy which can work for two very easily,- or you divorce!
Institutional, national or company, etc. democracies are just the same on a grander scale: some take advantage of the freedoms of the individual, to the detriment of everyone else. They have to be reined in, restricted, locked-up, locked-out, expelled, legislated against, or whatever.
There is no one rule that fits all. There is no law that says: we are all equal, -full stop.
We are all equal before the law,- fair enough!
But kids, adults, the able and disabled, the old and the young,- the crooks, the saintly, the clever and the idiots,- the poor and the rich, etc., etc.,- sorry, not one of us would claim equality on all fronts all our lives with everyone else!
One can repeat one's "democracy dogma" as much as one likes. The ideal may be in heaven, but on earth, my/our home is my/our castle and I/we set the rules.
If my home is on Crown land,- or if someone else has claims on my land,- we still have tenancy rights enshrined in laws. I don't expect to be shot at and murdered by the landlord,- but if I overstep my rights, the landlord will have a right to evict me via the correct enforcers of the law. I will have to accept it, like it or not,- if I am normal, of course!
If my neighbors overstep their rights to build a structure which adversely affects my property rights,- then there are also laws and avenues to appeal for both parties. Both will have to accept whatever the rulings,- if we are normal human beings!
On the other hand, if a potential mass-murderer were to live next door to any of us,- whose rights take precedence in a democracy? His or ours? He stays and we move?
I wouldn't!
ISRAEL,- THE JEWISH PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL HOMELAND.
Every nation has its problems and every nation deals with it as it sees fit, including our Oz (AUSTRALIA).
Dictatorships a-la-Zimbabwe or Iraq or past and present others,- need outside help to free their citizens.
But I don't think that democratic Israel needs anyone's lecturing on how to deal with its potential enemies within, as long as no one comes to help her deal with her actual enemies,- i.e. the former's brethren-, without!
The following is a Letter to the Editor, of The Age newspaper, Melbourne.
Monday 21 May, 2007.
Disingenuous claim
THERE is no doubt that the Holocaust was a terrible crime against humanity and that the establishment of a refuge for Jews in 1948 was a justifiable step. It is also true that Israel has faced many difficulties from its neighbours.
However, to imply that all citizens in the Jewish state have equal rights, as Philip Chester and Danny Lamm do, is disingenuous.
Those with "Jewish nationality" have all sorts of privileges in terms of employment and loans for housing and education. Most land is reserved for Jewish use. Immigration, quite obviously, favours Jews over non-Jews. The fact that the Israeli Government may not discriminate between citizens does not appear to prohibit non-state institutions from doing so.
Israel would like to be seen as a democratic state like any other. However, no other democracy privileges a particular ethnicity the way Israel does. There is a real conflict between a state being defined as "Jewish" and it being truly democratic. This is, no doubt, a difficult acknowledgement to make, but it is an issue that must ultimately be faced.
Instead of being the Promised Land for the Chosen People, if Israel would move to becoming a secular state embracing compassion, freedom and justice, for all citizens equally, it would truly be a light to the world.
John Perkins, St Kilda
-------------------------------------------
My reply to the Editor, The Age.
Disingenuous claim indeed, by John Perkins, St Kilda
If the world had stopped the evil killing and hatred of the Jewish people long, long ago, then perhaps Jews would not have needed to be a "people apart" in their own ethnic State.
But I don't know about being a "chosen people",- I would rather God and the world chose someone else for a change!
As for democracy,- if her neighbors and detractors were trying even 1% to be as fair and reasonable as Israel is trying to be towards all its citizens,- the whole world would be a better place.
For the time being, democracy in Israel is as good as its enemies allow it to be. It is a beacon of light to her neighbors.
But to be a "light on to the nations" requires a willingness by the nations to live in light, not in darkness!
MM
Friday, May 04, 2007
ETHNIC CLEANSING OF JERUSALEM 1948.
The One State Final Solution to the Judenfrage - is it a serious subject for debate??
"http://zionism-israel.com/israel_news/2007/05/one-state-final-solution-to-judenfrage.html ">
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ethnic Cleansing of Jerusalem - 1948
This page gives eye-witness accounts of the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem. The entire world acquiesced in this war crime of the lackeys of imperialist powers, because of the interference of powerful lobbying interests. This war crime took place in Palestine, in 1948, when the Transjordan Legion, directed and financed by British imperialism, expelled the Jews of the old city of Jerusalem, depriving them of their legitimate rights.
The expulsion of the Jews was part of the racist genocidal Arab plan for ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem and Palestine in 1948. This was announced by the Arab league, but it was instigated and planned in part by the Nazi Grand Mufti Hajj Amin Al Husseini, and his able relative, Abdel Khader Al-Husseini. The strategy included ambushes such as this one, constant shelling and sniper fire, a blockade of the Jerusalem road that resulted in near starvation, and invasion by armies of the Arab states. Over a thousand Jewish civilians were killed in Jerusalem during this campaign.
Jews had been expelled by force from Jerusalem in the past by Christian Roman emperors and by the crusaders, only to return to the eternal capital and national and religious center. The expulsion of the Jews was the culmination of the Arab plan for ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem in 1948, planned by the Nazi Grand Mufti Hajj Amin Al Husseini, and his able relative, Abdel Khader Al-Husseini. The strategy included ambushes such as the convoy massacre, constant shelling and sniper fire, attacks of Irregulars and of the Jordan legion on the Jewish quarter and a blockade of the Jerusalem road that resulted in near starvation. Over a thousand Jewish civilians were killed during this campaign.
The Jewish Quarter had been under attack by Arab irregulars for many months and in desperate straits. Following the invasion by the Transjordanian Arab Legion, pressure increased. Despite the empty propaganda statements of anti-Zionist historians, the fledgling Jewish army was no match for the Jordan legion with its artillery, armored vehicles and British officered troops. Those who insist on Jewish superiority in numbers must explain why there were no soldiers available to rescue the Jews of the old city of Jerusalem. Troops that were sent to its defense were either so battle weary that they fell asleep on duty, or so unfit for battle that they didn't know how to use their weapons.. For many months a tiny Haganah force tried to defend inhabitants of the Jewish quarter, who numbered over 2,000 - mostly religious Jews and many non-Zionist. A large part of the original Jewish community of 5,000 had fled in the pogroms of 1936. These were Jews whose families had lived in Jerusalem for many generations. They had built some 59 synagogues and a rich tradition. On May 28 the defense of the old city finally collapsed, and Abdullah Al-Tell, commanding the Transjordan Legion, evacuated the Jewish civilians to West Jerusalem, taking the Haganah defenders prisoner. Al Tell had no choice, because otherwise Arab mobs would have murdered the civilians. So he claims. Of course, al-Tell had the choice of not conquering a defenseless civilian position, and of course he had the obligation, having conquered it, of ensuring the safety of its civilian residents, their belongings and their holy places. But nobody examines such issues if an Arab army is involved.
No "right of return" was invoked for these refugees, expelled from homes where their families had lived in peace for hundreds of years. Nobody in the world protested this ethnic cleansing. Nobody protested the fact that the Jordanians destroyed 58 of the 59 synagogues of the Jewish Quarter, or that they used the headstones of graves in the Mt. Olives cemetery to pave walkways for their latrines.
In the Six day war of 1967, Jerusalem was re-conquered by Israeli forces. Every Israeli felt that we had completed the task left undone in 1948.
A summary of the Hadassah convoy massacre only, is provided here: The Hadassah Convoy Massacre
The detailed account is provided on these pages:
Hadassah Convoy Massacre-Prologue
Hadassah Convoy Massacre-Preparations
Hadassah Convoy Massacre-The Attack
The Ethnic Cleansing of Jerusalem
Conclusion - Later Phases of the war and Armistice
A similar genocidal campaign was planned and announced in 1967. However, instead of resulting in the ethnic cleansing of the Jews, it brought on the Six day war which liberated Jerusalem from the longest occupation in history, and returned it to its rightful historic owners.
Massacres and Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine
The massacre of the Hadassah convoy and the expulsion of the Jews from the Old City of Jerusalem, continued a well established pattern in the land of Israel, that began even before there were Zionists, and reflected the relations between the Arab community and their Jewish subjects.
Other massacres and instances of genocidal violence, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing in Palestine include:
Palestine Massacre: The forgotten pogrom: Safed 1834:
The Kfar Etzion Massacre
Arab Riots and Massacres of 1929
Hebron Massacre
The Arab Revolt of 1936
Ami Isseroff
Following is adapted from http://www.hadassah.org/education/content/StudyGuides/Convoy_ITAD.pdf
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Hadassah in the Ethnic Cleansing of Jerusalem - 1948
Desperate situation in Mount Scopus
The night before the massacre, Rose Halprin and Bertha Schoolman had flown home and heard the news on arrival in New York. Judith Epstein and Rebecca Shulman, who remained in Tel Aviv, were having dinner at their hotel when a newspaperman came up to their table: “I have terrible news for you. Yassky was killed today.” On her return to New York Rebecca told the Board in New York, “I doubt whether we will be able to use Scopus again soon. I recommend that we start building somewhere else.” To Ethel Agron and Eli Davis the Board cabled in May: “We dedicate ourselves to the task of maintaining services and rebuilding Hadassah.” The British reinforced Antonius House and warned both Jews and Arabs that they could countenance no further military activity in Sheikh Jarrah. Nevertheless, on April 25, the Haganah under a young Palmach officer named Yitzhak Rabin, occupied Nashashibi House. But the next day he was shelled out by the British. The Israelis would not return for good until nineteen years later when, under Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, they occupied the entire Arab sector of Jerusalem.
Shelling and sniping made life on Scopus impossible and the road impassable despite the British presence. Fresh food and water were scarce. Davis had to find a way to get the more than 700 people down and contacted Major Jack Churchill: Major Churchill told me there was a slight chance of getting through to Mount Scopus, because the Arabs saw the British meant business. He agreed to make the trip up to Scopus and invited me along. The Major took a jeep and his driver. I sat while he stood in the jeep twirling his stick. He looked as though he were on parade in London. Nothing happened as we went through Sheikh Jarrah. On Scopus we were embraced. We had shown it was possible to get through.
Davis decided on the spot to risk a major evacuation because of the low morale. Ben- Gurion had told Hadassah and University representatives several days before the disaster that the hill was to be held at all costs. But Ahron Brezinsky, who was acting as medical director of the hospital, told Davis, “You cannot hold a front-line with sick people who do not want to stay. The atmosphere here is that of a refugee camp. With all the strategic importance of this place, we must get out with what we can.” Davis returned to town to organize the evacuation. A decision was taken to retain a 50-bed hospital on Scopus, demonstrating that the hospital was not being abandoned.
Davis scrounged the impoverished city for fuel for the partial evacuation. So empty was the city that he was reduced to collecting gasoline from private homes, institutions, friends--bottle by bottle. Four convoys made it. Brought into town were 200 patients, 100 student nurses and 300 staff members, as well and 600 tons of equipment and supplies. Not a shot was fired. Left behind were 150 persons, including eight student nurses who ran the kitchen and forty patients. In the university buildings were another 150 men.n.
On May 6, Haim Halevy, who administered Scopus, reported, “The hospital no longer exists for all practical purposes.” Water and flour were sufficient for two weeks, power was rationed to only four hours daily and “soon there won’t be any refrigeration.” Compounding the problem were intelligence reports that King Abdullah was about to shell Scopus before making a full-scale assault.
Hadassah “A” and Hadassah "B"
By the beginning of May, Davis and members of the Hadassah Council had managed to set up reasonably good facilities in Jerusalem’s Hadassah “A” and two blocks down the street in St. Joseph’s Convent, now known as Hadassah “B,” but the accommodations were hardly luxurious. St. Joseph’s, leased on April 29, had been a school for 600 Arab girls run by French nuns. After shells hit the converted hospital, the top floor was evacuated and patients were moved to the dank basements where there was neither water nor electricity. Shelves that stored potatoes were cleaned and became emergency beds. Nurses knelt on the stone floor to change bandages and physicians sat on the floor to examine patients. Together with “A” and “B,” the Straus Health Center and the Hasolel Street Clinic, Hadassah improvised 300 beds, nearly as many as it had on Scopus. Heroic volunteer work temporarily made up the difference. Nurse Madeline Lewin-Epstein, who had come with the AZMU in 1918, turned her large apartment into a twenty-bed hospital. She often braved sniper’s bullets and mortars to pick up the wounded in the streets and pull them into her home. Hers was the first military hospital in Jerusalem; many of her patients were wounded underground soldiers who could go nowhere else. British police officials would be sitting in a chair in the dental clinic of her popular husband, Sam Lewin-Epstein, while in the living room, only a few yards away, were the men they were hunting.
The fall of the Old City and Ethnic Cleansing
At the height of Hadassah’s problems, the Old City of Jerusalem fell to the Arabs on May 28.
Hadassah had staffed the hospital in the Old City’s Jewish Quarter early in the fighting, but the position of the Jews was hopeless against overwhelming numbers of Arabs. They fought until they were too few, too starved, too fatigued to go on. Avraham Laufer, one of the surgeons who was sent into the Jewish Quarter, reported that the top floors of the hospital had been shelled and seventy patients had to share mattresses and wooden benches in a synagogue and in basements. Laufer told of one young soldier who had shrapnel in an eye but refused to wait fifteen minutes for an operation to remove it because the situation at his post was desperate. “An hour later they carried him back.. His handsome face was blown away by a shell.” About 1,300 women and children were evacuated to the Jewish side of the city, while the men were taken to a prison camp in the Jordanian desert. Three among the POW’s were Hadassah physicians: Egon Rys, Eli Peiser and Laufer. Two weeks later, while Rys was in the prison camp, his wife, Hava, a Hadassah nurse, was killed in the last pre-truce shelling of the city.
The Old City refugees were put up in the abandoned houses of the Katamon quarter, a large neighborhood of Arab villas that had been conquered in bloody fighting by the Haganah .. There, Jerusalem’s meager food supplies were tightly rationed by volunteers, who themselves were now on starvation diets. Under the supervision of Sara Bavli, head of Hadassah Nutrition, these 1,300 and twenty thousand others were given frugal daily meals in what was known as a “battle of the calories.” One of the Hadassah volunteers who cared for the Old City refugee mothers and children was Betty Levin. She was given charge of a three-room abandoned apartment in which each corner served as “home” for ten refugees--120 in all. Recalls Betty: They told me that at the end of the fighting in the Old City they fled to a synagogue where they huddled together until the Arab Legion found them.
The Legion expelled them with only the nightgowns and slippers they wore.. My job was to feed them. In the morning, they got two slices of bread each and, for the children, four teaspoons of jam. One day, a distraught mother threw the bread down and cried, ‘My children are filthy: their heads are full of lice. I need soap.’ But there was no soap. Betty remembered that before the siege began, her absentee landlady had locked ten large blocks of laundry soap in a room.. Disregarding the mortars exploding around her, she walked back to her apartment, a kilometer distant, broke into the locked room and took the soap back to Katamon. There she sliced each block into sixteen squares. The lice were subdued and peace was restored to the apartment.
A State is Born
In the turbulence of siege, Friday, May 14, 1948 was no more than just another day of hunger and death in Jerusalem. No street celebrations marked David Ben-Gurion’s proclamation of the State of Israel in the Tel Aviv Museum. Hardly anyone knew about it until the following day, for few in Jerusalem had electricity and news was passed by word of mouth. Only on Sunday, May 16, did The Palestinian Post t appear with its headline: STATE OF ISRAEL BORN.
The highway to Tel Aviv had been sealed again by the Arab armies. Daily rations were down to starvation levels. The Holy City’s only link with the outside world was a small one-engine plane that landed under fire in the Valley of the Cross. While great military advances were being made in the rest of the country, at the end of May, Jerusalem appeared to be doomed. The last of the British had left Jerusalem on May 14-- except for those officers who remained behind to command Abdullah’s Arab Legion.
Residents of the city knew these officers were in command because the merciless shelling would stop precisely at 4:00 pm daily, so British officers could enjoy their tea. It was during that hour that most Israelis dared to go outside for their rations. Scopus was no exception to the bombardment. The buildings suffered badly, but casualties were few because the underground tunnel between the nursing school and the hospital served as a perfect shelter.
In mid-April, after a British peace effort was rejected by the Mufti, the UN Security Council authorized the Consuls-General of the United States, France and Belgium to try to arrange a truce in Jerusalem. At the same time, American Consul-General Thomas Wasson, the most congenial and effective diplomat in the city, worked to secure Mount Scopus from attack. At the end of the month he was killed by Arab fire near his consulate.
Hadassah doctors fought twelve hours in vain to save his life.
Mt Scopus Comes Under UN Protection
Immediately after May 15, the British established a consulate in Jerusalem proper and appointed two consuls to handle Arab and Israeli affairs. Consul John Guy Tempest Sheringham applied himself to the Scopus problem and on May 31, a phone conversation with Hebrew University Administrator Dr. Werner Senator, he advised Israel to surrender Scopus. Senator left a record of the talk:
Sheringham: ‘The best way to safeguard the University and Hadassah buildings would be to accept King Abdullah’s offer to put them under the protection of the Arab Legion.’
Senator: ‘The best way it seems to me would be to advise King Abdullah not to shell the University and Hadassah.’
Sheringham: ‘Your military situation is not very bright. You have not succeeded in driving the Arabs out of Jerusalem.’
Senator: ‘The responsibility for the Legion’s acts against the University and Hadassah lay with the British Government.’
In Washington, innumerable pleas were made to every imaginable source to help relieve Scopus. The State Department was helpful in one respect: Secretary of State George Marshall agreed that cables from the National Board could be relayed through the consulate in Jerusalem to Davis and Ethel Agron.
In the end, an agreement was worked out whereby the United Nations would assume control of Scopus, over which it would fly its flag and provide observers to maintain the area as a demilitarized zone. Eighty-four Jewish police would guard installations at Hadassah and the Hebrew University while 40 Arabs would guard Arab property on Scopus. The UN agreed to supply and exchange the Jewish police in regular fortnightly convoys through the Arab Sheikh Jarrah Quarter.
Hadassah and the University were evacuated on July 6 and demilitarization was completed on July 7 when the first police, Israeli soldiers in police uniform, went up.
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Ethnic Cleansing of Jerusalem - 1948
This page gives eye-witness accounts of the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem. The entire world acquiesced in this war crime of the lackeys of imperialist powers, because of the interference of powerful lobbying interests. This war crime took place in Palestine, in 1948, when the Transjordan Legion, directed and financed by British imperialism, expelled the Jews of the old city of Jerusalem, depriving them of their legitimate rights.
The expulsion of the Jews was part of the racist genocidal Arab plan for ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem and Palestine in 1948. This was announced by the Arab league, but it was instigated and planned in part by the Nazi Grand Mufti Hajj Amin Al Husseini, and his able relative, Abdel Khader Al-Husseini. The strategy included ambushes such as this one, constant shelling and sniper fire, a blockade of the Jerusalem road that resulted in near starvation, and invasion by armies of the Arab states. Over a thousand Jewish civilians were killed in Jerusalem during this campaign.
Jews had been expelled by force from Jerusalem in the past by Christian Roman emperors and by the crusaders, only to return to the eternal capital and national and religious center. The expulsion of the Jews was the culmination of the Arab plan for ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem in 1948, planned by the Nazi Grand Mufti Hajj Amin Al Husseini, and his able relative, Abdel Khader Al-Husseini. The strategy included ambushes such as the convoy massacre, constant shelling and sniper fire, attacks of Irregulars and of the Jordan legion on the Jewish quarter and a blockade of the Jerusalem road that resulted in near starvation. Over a thousand Jewish civilians were killed during this campaign.
The Jewish Quarter had been under attack by Arab irregulars for many months and in desperate straits. Following the invasion by the Transjordanian Arab Legion, pressure increased. Despite the empty propaganda statements of anti-Zionist historians, the fledgling Jewish army was no match for the Jordan legion with its artillery, armored vehicles and British officered troops. Those who insist on Jewish superiority in numbers must explain why there were no soldiers available to rescue the Jews of the old city of Jerusalem. Troops that were sent to its defense were either so battle weary that they fell asleep on duty, or so unfit for battle that they didn't know how to use their weapons.. For many months a tiny Haganah force tried to defend inhabitants of the Jewish quarter, who numbered over 2,000 - mostly religious Jews and many non-Zionist. A large part of the original Jewish community of 5,000 had fled in the pogroms of 1936. These were Jews whose families had lived in Jerusalem for many generations. They had built some 59 synagogues and a rich tradition. On May 28 the defense of the old city finally collapsed, and Abdullah Al-Tell, commanding the Transjordan Legion, evacuated the Jewish civilians to West Jerusalem, taking the Haganah defenders prisoner. Al Tell had no choice, because otherwise Arab mobs would have murdered the civilians. So he claims. Of course, al-Tell had the choice of not conquering a defenseless civilian position, and of course he had the obligation, having conquered it, of ensuring the safety of its civilian residents, their belongings and their holy places. But nobody examines such issues if an Arab army is involved.
No "right of return" was invoked for these refugees, expelled from homes where their families had lived in peace for hundreds of years. Nobody in the world protested this ethnic cleansing. Nobody protested the fact that the Jordanians destroyed 58 of the 59 synagogues of the Jewish Quarter, or that they used the headstones of graves in the Mt. Olives cemetery to pave walkways for their latrines.
In the Six day war of 1967, Jerusalem was re-conquered by Israeli forces. Every Israeli felt that we had completed the task left undone in 1948.
A summary of the Hadassah convoy massacre only, is provided here: The Hadassah Convoy Massacre
The detailed account is provided on these pages:
Hadassah Convoy Massacre-Prologue
Hadassah Convoy Massacre-Preparations
Hadassah Convoy Massacre-The Attack
The Ethnic Cleansing of Jerusalem
Conclusion - Later Phases of the war and Armistice
A similar genocidal campaign was planned and announced in 1967. However, instead of resulting in the ethnic cleansing of the Jews, it brought on the Six day war which liberated Jerusalem from the longest occupation in history, and returned it to its rightful historic owners.
Massacres and Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine
The massacre of the Hadassah convoy and the expulsion of the Jews from the Old City of Jerusalem, continued a well established pattern in the land of Israel, that began even before there were Zionists, and reflected the relations between the Arab community and their Jewish subjects.
Other massacres and instances of genocidal violence, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing in Palestine include:
Palestine Massacre: The forgotten pogrom: Safed 1834:
The Kfar Etzion Massacre
Arab Riots and Massacres of 1929
Hebron Massacre
The Arab Revolt of 1936
Ami Isseroff
Following is adapted from http://www.hadassah.org/education/content/StudyGuides/Convoy_ITAD.pdf
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Hadassah in the Ethnic Cleansing of Jerusalem - 1948
Desperate situation in Mount Scopus
The night before the massacre, Rose Halprin and Bertha Schoolman had flown home and heard the news on arrival in New York. Judith Epstein and Rebecca Shulman, who remained in Tel Aviv, were having dinner at their hotel when a newspaperman came up to their table: “I have terrible news for you. Yassky was killed today.” On her return to New York Rebecca told the Board in New York, “I doubt whether we will be able to use Scopus again soon. I recommend that we start building somewhere else.” To Ethel Agron and Eli Davis the Board cabled in May: “We dedicate ourselves to the task of maintaining services and rebuilding Hadassah.” The British reinforced Antonius House and warned both Jews and Arabs that they could countenance no further military activity in Sheikh Jarrah. Nevertheless, on April 25, the Haganah under a young Palmach officer named Yitzhak Rabin, occupied Nashashibi House. But the next day he was shelled out by the British. The Israelis would not return for good until nineteen years later when, under Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, they occupied the entire Arab sector of Jerusalem.
Shelling and sniping made life on Scopus impossible and the road impassable despite the British presence. Fresh food and water were scarce. Davis had to find a way to get the more than 700 people down and contacted Major Jack Churchill: Major Churchill told me there was a slight chance of getting through to Mount Scopus, because the Arabs saw the British meant business. He agreed to make the trip up to Scopus and invited me along. The Major took a jeep and his driver. I sat while he stood in the jeep twirling his stick. He looked as though he were on parade in London. Nothing happened as we went through Sheikh Jarrah. On Scopus we were embraced. We had shown it was possible to get through.
Davis decided on the spot to risk a major evacuation because of the low morale. Ben- Gurion had told Hadassah and University representatives several days before the disaster that the hill was to be held at all costs. But Ahron Brezinsky, who was acting as medical director of the hospital, told Davis, “You cannot hold a front-line with sick people who do not want to stay. The atmosphere here is that of a refugee camp. With all the strategic importance of this place, we must get out with what we can.” Davis returned to town to organize the evacuation. A decision was taken to retain a 50-bed hospital on Scopus, demonstrating that the hospital was not being abandoned.
Davis scrounged the impoverished city for fuel for the partial evacuation. So empty was the city that he was reduced to collecting gasoline from private homes, institutions, friends--bottle by bottle. Four convoys made it. Brought into town were 200 patients, 100 student nurses and 300 staff members, as well and 600 tons of equipment and supplies. Not a shot was fired. Left behind were 150 persons, including eight student nurses who ran the kitchen and forty patients. In the university buildings were another 150 men.n.
On May 6, Haim Halevy, who administered Scopus, reported, “The hospital no longer exists for all practical purposes.” Water and flour were sufficient for two weeks, power was rationed to only four hours daily and “soon there won’t be any refrigeration.” Compounding the problem were intelligence reports that King Abdullah was about to shell Scopus before making a full-scale assault.
Hadassah “A” and Hadassah "B"
By the beginning of May, Davis and members of the Hadassah Council had managed to set up reasonably good facilities in Jerusalem’s Hadassah “A” and two blocks down the street in St. Joseph’s Convent, now known as Hadassah “B,” but the accommodations were hardly luxurious. St. Joseph’s, leased on April 29, had been a school for 600 Arab girls run by French nuns. After shells hit the converted hospital, the top floor was evacuated and patients were moved to the dank basements where there was neither water nor electricity. Shelves that stored potatoes were cleaned and became emergency beds. Nurses knelt on the stone floor to change bandages and physicians sat on the floor to examine patients. Together with “A” and “B,” the Straus Health Center and the Hasolel Street Clinic, Hadassah improvised 300 beds, nearly as many as it had on Scopus. Heroic volunteer work temporarily made up the difference. Nurse Madeline Lewin-Epstein, who had come with the AZMU in 1918, turned her large apartment into a twenty-bed hospital. She often braved sniper’s bullets and mortars to pick up the wounded in the streets and pull them into her home. Hers was the first military hospital in Jerusalem; many of her patients were wounded underground soldiers who could go nowhere else. British police officials would be sitting in a chair in the dental clinic of her popular husband, Sam Lewin-Epstein, while in the living room, only a few yards away, were the men they were hunting.
The fall of the Old City and Ethnic Cleansing
At the height of Hadassah’s problems, the Old City of Jerusalem fell to the Arabs on May 28.
Hadassah had staffed the hospital in the Old City’s Jewish Quarter early in the fighting, but the position of the Jews was hopeless against overwhelming numbers of Arabs. They fought until they were too few, too starved, too fatigued to go on. Avraham Laufer, one of the surgeons who was sent into the Jewish Quarter, reported that the top floors of the hospital had been shelled and seventy patients had to share mattresses and wooden benches in a synagogue and in basements. Laufer told of one young soldier who had shrapnel in an eye but refused to wait fifteen minutes for an operation to remove it because the situation at his post was desperate. “An hour later they carried him back.. His handsome face was blown away by a shell.” About 1,300 women and children were evacuated to the Jewish side of the city, while the men were taken to a prison camp in the Jordanian desert. Three among the POW’s were Hadassah physicians: Egon Rys, Eli Peiser and Laufer. Two weeks later, while Rys was in the prison camp, his wife, Hava, a Hadassah nurse, was killed in the last pre-truce shelling of the city.
The Old City refugees were put up in the abandoned houses of the Katamon quarter, a large neighborhood of Arab villas that had been conquered in bloody fighting by the Haganah .. There, Jerusalem’s meager food supplies were tightly rationed by volunteers, who themselves were now on starvation diets. Under the supervision of Sara Bavli, head of Hadassah Nutrition, these 1,300 and twenty thousand others were given frugal daily meals in what was known as a “battle of the calories.” One of the Hadassah volunteers who cared for the Old City refugee mothers and children was Betty Levin. She was given charge of a three-room abandoned apartment in which each corner served as “home” for ten refugees--120 in all. Recalls Betty: They told me that at the end of the fighting in the Old City they fled to a synagogue where they huddled together until the Arab Legion found them.
The Legion expelled them with only the nightgowns and slippers they wore.. My job was to feed them. In the morning, they got two slices of bread each and, for the children, four teaspoons of jam. One day, a distraught mother threw the bread down and cried, ‘My children are filthy: their heads are full of lice. I need soap.’ But there was no soap. Betty remembered that before the siege began, her absentee landlady had locked ten large blocks of laundry soap in a room.. Disregarding the mortars exploding around her, she walked back to her apartment, a kilometer distant, broke into the locked room and took the soap back to Katamon. There she sliced each block into sixteen squares. The lice were subdued and peace was restored to the apartment.
A State is Born
In the turbulence of siege, Friday, May 14, 1948 was no more than just another day of hunger and death in Jerusalem. No street celebrations marked David Ben-Gurion’s proclamation of the State of Israel in the Tel Aviv Museum. Hardly anyone knew about it until the following day, for few in Jerusalem had electricity and news was passed by word of mouth. Only on Sunday, May 16, did The Palestinian Post t appear with its headline: STATE OF ISRAEL BORN.
The highway to Tel Aviv had been sealed again by the Arab armies. Daily rations were down to starvation levels. The Holy City’s only link with the outside world was a small one-engine plane that landed under fire in the Valley of the Cross. While great military advances were being made in the rest of the country, at the end of May, Jerusalem appeared to be doomed. The last of the British had left Jerusalem on May 14-- except for those officers who remained behind to command Abdullah’s Arab Legion.
Residents of the city knew these officers were in command because the merciless shelling would stop precisely at 4:00 pm daily, so British officers could enjoy their tea. It was during that hour that most Israelis dared to go outside for their rations. Scopus was no exception to the bombardment. The buildings suffered badly, but casualties were few because the underground tunnel between the nursing school and the hospital served as a perfect shelter.
In mid-April, after a British peace effort was rejected by the Mufti, the UN Security Council authorized the Consuls-General of the United States, France and Belgium to try to arrange a truce in Jerusalem. At the same time, American Consul-General Thomas Wasson, the most congenial and effective diplomat in the city, worked to secure Mount Scopus from attack. At the end of the month he was killed by Arab fire near his consulate.
Hadassah doctors fought twelve hours in vain to save his life.
Mt Scopus Comes Under UN Protection
Immediately after May 15, the British established a consulate in Jerusalem proper and appointed two consuls to handle Arab and Israeli affairs. Consul John Guy Tempest Sheringham applied himself to the Scopus problem and on May 31, a phone conversation with Hebrew University Administrator Dr. Werner Senator, he advised Israel to surrender Scopus. Senator left a record of the talk:
Sheringham: ‘The best way to safeguard the University and Hadassah buildings would be to accept King Abdullah’s offer to put them under the protection of the Arab Legion.’
Senator: ‘The best way it seems to me would be to advise King Abdullah not to shell the University and Hadassah.’
Sheringham: ‘Your military situation is not very bright. You have not succeeded in driving the Arabs out of Jerusalem.’
Senator: ‘The responsibility for the Legion’s acts against the University and Hadassah lay with the British Government.’
In Washington, innumerable pleas were made to every imaginable source to help relieve Scopus. The State Department was helpful in one respect: Secretary of State George Marshall agreed that cables from the National Board could be relayed through the consulate in Jerusalem to Davis and Ethel Agron.
In the end, an agreement was worked out whereby the United Nations would assume control of Scopus, over which it would fly its flag and provide observers to maintain the area as a demilitarized zone. Eighty-four Jewish police would guard installations at Hadassah and the Hebrew University while 40 Arabs would guard Arab property on Scopus. The UN agreed to supply and exchange the Jewish police in regular fortnightly convoys through the Arab Sheikh Jarrah Quarter.
Hadassah and the University were evacuated on July 6 and demilitarization was completed on July 7 when the first police, Israeli soldiers in police uniform, went up.
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Thursday, May 03, 2007
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21660439-25377,00.html
THE AUSTRALIAN
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rare support for democracy in a sea of misunderstanding
Despite its mistakes, Israel is a legitimate nation should not be treated as a pariah, writes foreign editor Greg Sheridan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
03may07
WHEN you're young, you think that every piece of mail is going to be that special letter that recognises your brilliance. As you get older, you realise that most pieces of mail are bills. But recently I did get a remarkable piece of mail. It told me that if I would accept, I would be awarded the Jerusalem Prize.
Sponsored jointly by the Israeli Government and the local Jewish community, it is awarded to people who have supported Israel conspicuously.
Since I believe that Israel is a democracy in good standing I was delighted to accept the award, which has been won by sundry heads of government, foreign ministers, social democrat and conservative European politicians and many others over the years.
Its previous Australian recipients include Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, and Frank Sartor, formerly lord mayor of Sydney and now a minister in the NSW Labor Government.
Since the award was announced I have had a certain amount of mail urging me not to accept it. I must disappoint these folks, many of whom have written in good will and some detail, for I am greatly honoured to receive the Jerusalem Prize. I cannot accept the idea that Israel is an illegitimate state, or not really a democracy, or that it should be treated as a pariah.
It goes without saying that in accepting this award I do not compromise my independence as a commentator. I have often been critical of Israeli policies. Last year I opposed its military operation in Lebanon.
My views are unusual in the commentator class but they are mainstream in Australian politics. In a fine address to a gathering of Labor Friends of Israel last week, Labor
leader Kevin Rudd praised the "vibrancy of Israel's democracy". He said that both Hamas, the dominant political grouping among the Palestinians, and Hezbollah, are terrorist organisations and "you can't negotiate with terrorists".
"Israel's strategic challenges," he said, "are great and that's why it's important that the modern state of Israel and its govern-
ment has friends around the world. And I simply state unequivocally that we remain a strong and close friend of Israel in good times and bad."
This is truly a bipartisan position in Australia. Israel has probably never had a better friend as Prime Minister than John Howard. This was evident in Howard and Downer's decision, along with only a handful of others, to vote at the UN in 2004 against a resolution to condemn Israel's security barrier, following a ruling against Israel in the International Court of Justice.
Again, Rudd's view is enlightening. He criticised the vote but argued not that Canberra should have voted against Israel, merely that it should have abstained. Rudd's star new candidate for Eden-Monaro, the distinguished former colonel and military lawyer, Mike Kelly, has argued in a legal journal that the ICJ was wrong and that Israel's security barrier is legal.
But let's pull back and look at a bit of history. There have always been Jews in Palestine. Israel was created by a resolution of the UN to partition Palestine between the Jewish and Palestinian populations. When Israel was founded in 1948 it was immediately attacked by the massed armies of five Arab neighbours.
Twice more Israel had to fight wars of national survival against the armies of its Arab neighbours - in 1967 and 1973. And all through from that time to this, with only fairly brief pauses, it has been subject to terrorist attacks.
In 2000, in Camp David and in subsequent negotiations, the government of the then Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, offered the Palestinians their own nation on more than 95 per cent of the West Bank, all of Gaza and part of East Jerusalem. There was also the offer of some land from Israel proper to compensate for that part of the West Bank which is in effect predominantly Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem.
But this offer of land was in exchange for the Palestinians, and Israel's Arab neighbours, embracing peace - accepting Israel's legitimacy, ending their hate-filled and anti-Semitic propaganda designed to make schoolchildren despise the Jews, and stopping terrorist and other attacks on Israel.
The then Palestinian Authority, led by Yasser Arafat, walked away from this offer and did not even make a counter offer, because, like some of the leaders of neighbouring nations, he had never accepted that Israel had a right to exist at all.
None of this means that Israel is beyond criticism. Israel, like any democratic nation, makes plenty of mistakes and sometimes it makes moral mistakes. But it is a robust democracy founded on decent values and it tries to correct its mistakes. This week's Winograd Report on last year's Lebanon action was fiercely critical of Ehud Olmert's Government. That suggests Olmert made some mistakes. But the bigger story is what a vibrant, genuine, problem-solving democracy Israel is to commission such a report and let its findings go where they may. Moreover, the question is not whether Israel is perfect, but are its actions reasonable for a democracy under such constant threat and attack. How would we react in circumstances similar to those Israel faces?
Anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment are all different, yet they are all intimately related. They draw from diverse sources, yet they are all, in their virulent forms, fundamentally irrational and evidence of psychological and ideological dysfunction rather than genuine analysis.
Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the deaths of near enough to 1.5 million Iraqi Arabs and Iranians. He killed 300,000 to 400,000 of his own citizens deliberately and a million or more died in the wholly unjustified war he launched against Iran. Anyone who was seriously concerned about Muslim suffering in the Middle East would have concentrated on Saddam all the years he was in power.
Yet the UN, and the Left internationally, focuses with obsessive zeal on Israel. I once interviewed Abdurrahman Wahid, the former president of Indonesia and a great Muslim leader, and asked him about the Middle East. Israel, he told me, "is a democracy in a sea of misunderstanding".
Commentators should write about Israel the same as they write about any other nation, with a desire to tell the truth, know the facts and make judgments based on civilised values. I agree with Wahid. Israel is a democracy - that fact speaks for itself.
privacy terms © The Australian
THE AUSTRALIAN
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rare support for democracy in a sea of misunderstanding
Despite its mistakes, Israel is a legitimate nation should not be treated as a pariah, writes foreign editor Greg Sheridan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
03may07
WHEN you're young, you think that every piece of mail is going to be that special letter that recognises your brilliance. As you get older, you realise that most pieces of mail are bills. But recently I did get a remarkable piece of mail. It told me that if I would accept, I would be awarded the Jerusalem Prize.
Sponsored jointly by the Israeli Government and the local Jewish community, it is awarded to people who have supported Israel conspicuously.
Since I believe that Israel is a democracy in good standing I was delighted to accept the award, which has been won by sundry heads of government, foreign ministers, social democrat and conservative European politicians and many others over the years.
Its previous Australian recipients include Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, and Frank Sartor, formerly lord mayor of Sydney and now a minister in the NSW Labor Government.
Since the award was announced I have had a certain amount of mail urging me not to accept it. I must disappoint these folks, many of whom have written in good will and some detail, for I am greatly honoured to receive the Jerusalem Prize. I cannot accept the idea that Israel is an illegitimate state, or not really a democracy, or that it should be treated as a pariah.
It goes without saying that in accepting this award I do not compromise my independence as a commentator. I have often been critical of Israeli policies. Last year I opposed its military operation in Lebanon.
My views are unusual in the commentator class but they are mainstream in Australian politics. In a fine address to a gathering of Labor Friends of Israel last week, Labor
leader Kevin Rudd praised the "vibrancy of Israel's democracy". He said that both Hamas, the dominant political grouping among the Palestinians, and Hezbollah, are terrorist organisations and "you can't negotiate with terrorists".
"Israel's strategic challenges," he said, "are great and that's why it's important that the modern state of Israel and its govern-
ment has friends around the world. And I simply state unequivocally that we remain a strong and close friend of Israel in good times and bad."
This is truly a bipartisan position in Australia. Israel has probably never had a better friend as Prime Minister than John Howard. This was evident in Howard and Downer's decision, along with only a handful of others, to vote at the UN in 2004 against a resolution to condemn Israel's security barrier, following a ruling against Israel in the International Court of Justice.
Again, Rudd's view is enlightening. He criticised the vote but argued not that Canberra should have voted against Israel, merely that it should have abstained. Rudd's star new candidate for Eden-Monaro, the distinguished former colonel and military lawyer, Mike Kelly, has argued in a legal journal that the ICJ was wrong and that Israel's security barrier is legal.
But let's pull back and look at a bit of history. There have always been Jews in Palestine. Israel was created by a resolution of the UN to partition Palestine between the Jewish and Palestinian populations. When Israel was founded in 1948 it was immediately attacked by the massed armies of five Arab neighbours.
Twice more Israel had to fight wars of national survival against the armies of its Arab neighbours - in 1967 and 1973. And all through from that time to this, with only fairly brief pauses, it has been subject to terrorist attacks.
In 2000, in Camp David and in subsequent negotiations, the government of the then Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, offered the Palestinians their own nation on more than 95 per cent of the West Bank, all of Gaza and part of East Jerusalem. There was also the offer of some land from Israel proper to compensate for that part of the West Bank which is in effect predominantly Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem.
But this offer of land was in exchange for the Palestinians, and Israel's Arab neighbours, embracing peace - accepting Israel's legitimacy, ending their hate-filled and anti-Semitic propaganda designed to make schoolchildren despise the Jews, and stopping terrorist and other attacks on Israel.
The then Palestinian Authority, led by Yasser Arafat, walked away from this offer and did not even make a counter offer, because, like some of the leaders of neighbouring nations, he had never accepted that Israel had a right to exist at all.
None of this means that Israel is beyond criticism. Israel, like any democratic nation, makes plenty of mistakes and sometimes it makes moral mistakes. But it is a robust democracy founded on decent values and it tries to correct its mistakes. This week's Winograd Report on last year's Lebanon action was fiercely critical of Ehud Olmert's Government. That suggests Olmert made some mistakes. But the bigger story is what a vibrant, genuine, problem-solving democracy Israel is to commission such a report and let its findings go where they may. Moreover, the question is not whether Israel is perfect, but are its actions reasonable for a democracy under such constant threat and attack. How would we react in circumstances similar to those Israel faces?
Anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment are all different, yet they are all intimately related. They draw from diverse sources, yet they are all, in their virulent forms, fundamentally irrational and evidence of psychological and ideological dysfunction rather than genuine analysis.
Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the deaths of near enough to 1.5 million Iraqi Arabs and Iranians. He killed 300,000 to 400,000 of his own citizens deliberately and a million or more died in the wholly unjustified war he launched against Iran. Anyone who was seriously concerned about Muslim suffering in the Middle East would have concentrated on Saddam all the years he was in power.
Yet the UN, and the Left internationally, focuses with obsessive zeal on Israel. I once interviewed Abdurrahman Wahid, the former president of Indonesia and a great Muslim leader, and asked him about the Middle East. Israel, he told me, "is a democracy in a sea of misunderstanding".
Commentators should write about Israel the same as they write about any other nation, with a desire to tell the truth, know the facts and make judgments based on civilised values. I agree with Wahid. Israel is a democracy - that fact speaks for itself.
privacy terms © The Australian
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