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They are Jews and they are Israelis, period


The Israeli deputy consul general could not, for all his humble sagacity, see the future.

Yet Benjamin Krasna’s heart was heavy. It was June 28, 2006 — two weeks before Israel and the Iranian terror proxy Hezbollah would fight a bitter, monthlong war in which Hezbollah would succeed in causing the deaths of hundreds of Lebanese civilians in addition to the Israeli casualties of the war. But as he spoke that night to the Jewish Federation of Ocean County, there was still some hope that 18-year-old Itamar resident Eliyahu Asheri was alive. Asheri had been kidnapped by Palestinians earlier that week, and his body would be found only hours after Krasna’s speech.

When asked about Asheri, Krasna said he wanted to make one thing clear: “He is an Israeli,” Krasna said. We don’t, he continued, perform the crass act of pretending to better understand Asheri’s kidnapping in light of the fact that Itamar is a Jewish village near Shechem — a “settlement.”

Krasna was clearly irritated by the media’s portrayal of Asheri as a “settler” — as if that made his kidnapping OK.

Two years later, on July 3, 2008, a Palestinian terrorist would drive a bulldozer over Jewish pedestrians and motorists in Jerusalem, killing three and wounding more than 60. Haaretz, the Israeli daily, via its columnist Bradley Burston, was in utter disbelief at the savagery of “the man behind the wheel of a bulldozer, who has taken it upon himself to kill Jews. Not Israeli security force personnel, not occupation troops, not the Shin Bet. Jews. Women and children and the elderly and the infirm. Jews who may be in favor of an independent Palestinian state. Jews who have nothing against Arabs. Jews who may work to end the occupation. Jews.”

The ideologues behind Haaretz, who have admitted to covering up corruption and last year told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Israel has to be “raped” into making concessions for peace, were aghast. Where, they wanted to know, have all the good terrorists gone? You know, the ones with the decency to target settlers and occupiers and soldiers. Why target Jews unaffiliated with Israel’s settlements?  

On July 7, almost 100 Israel Defense Forces reservists from the Rabbinate Corps were called up to active duty for the purpose of exhuming bodies of foreign fighters that are to be returned to Hezbollah as part of a prisoner swap. Hezbollah will receive hundreds of prisoners and bodies, as well as Samir Kuntar, who is currently serving consecutive life sentences in Israel for his murder of Einat Haran. Einat was 4 years old when Kuntar smashed her head repeatedly against a rock with the butt of his rifle until he crushed her skull, next to the lifeless body of the girl’s father, Danny Haran, who Kuntar had executed moments before in order that Einat’s last sight would be the murder of her father.

It is doubtful that there is any air on this planet more wasted than that which circles Kuntar’s lungs, giving life to someone who exists only for death.

Yet he will be free, and he will kill again. And in return, Israel will receive the bodies of two of the IDF’s fallen heroes, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, whose kidnapping by Kuntar’s masters touched off the war.

Goldwasser and Regev were taken from within Israel’s borders. But to the purveyors of self-hating collaboration such as Haaretz, are they still tools of the “occupation”? Upon their return, as the worldwide Jewish community cries for its sons of Israel, mourns for its two faithful servants of God and country, sees the tragic end of a story that compelled it to say Tehillim every day for two years, feels the weight of failed hope and fights the onset of hope’s loss: what will we think?

To those of us who watched Goldwasser’s wife and mother plead for his return last year in New York, standing across the street from that nest of corruption, that cathedral of depravity known as the United Nations building, we will think simply that we have lost two of our own. There are no categories; there is no caveat — regardless of on which part of biblical Israel they stood when they were taken from us.

After all, international law unequivocally sides with us on this one. Ex iniuria non oritur ius. An illegal act cannot produce a legal result, roughly translated. That’s the principle of international law that removes any recognition of Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank. An illegal act (Jordan’s occupation of the West Bank from 1948-67) cannot produce a legal result (accepted claim of sovereignty over that land by Jordan and the Jordanians now living there as a result, known as West Bank Palestinians).

Additionally, it is not disputed that Jordan shelled Israel before any Israeli guns were aimed at Jordan during the Six-Day War in 1967, so the West Bank was land that Israel won in a defensive conflict. International law, as scholar Julius Stone wrote, considers Israel’s actions perfectly lawful — an obvious but important edict.

International law, he wrote in International Law and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, “does not so forbid [taking land], in particular, when the force is used to stop an aggressor, for the effect of such prohibition would be to guarantee to all potential aggressors that, even if their aggression failed, all territory lost in the attempt would be automatically returned to them. Such a rule would be absurd to the point of lunacy. There is no such rule.”

Which means Haaretz, the New York Times, et al. are wrong about Asheri and his fellow Itamar residents. They’re Israelis. And so are the Jews in the oldest Jewish community in the world, Hebron. And the tumultuous modern history of Jews in and around Shechem (now home mostly to a large Palestinian settlement called Nablus) makes them no less Israeli. Same goes for the flourishing Jewish community in Ariel, which is separated from Jerusalem by random Palestinian settlements along the way but is of great value to the state and the Jewish people.

And what about Jerusalemites? They’re Israeli, too! Despite this, in January, just before President George W. Bush was to visit Israel, Condoleezza Rice admonished Israel over a planned housing complex in Jerusalem called Har Homa. “Har Homa,” Rice carped, “is a settlement the United States has opposed from the very beginning.” The very beginning of what? On July 16, 1997, the U.N. voted to criticize the housing project. The United States voted against that resolution.

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) offers the reasons why then-U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson voted with the Israelis, instead of voting against them or even simply abstaining. First, the land is 1,850 dunams, about 460 acres, which the Israeli government acquired via eminent domain, and 1,400 of the 1,850 dunams were owned by Jews. Much of that land was owned by Jews prior to 1948. Every single dunam of the entire planned housing project is currently vacant — not a single home would have to be knocked down nor anyone displaced.

Additionally, in the Oslo Accords, Jerusalem is specifically separated from settlements: “1. ... the jurisdiction of the Council will cover West Bank and Gaza Strip territory as a single territorial unit, except for: a. issues that will be negotiated in the permanent status negotiations: Jerusalem, settlements, ... (Interim Agreement, Article XVII).” Building in Jerusalem is not only a feature of the final status agreements (not the interim agreements or Declaration of Principles), but it is also a distinct feature from settlements.

Fortunately Rice, whose strange ruling on Har Homa contradicts Bush’s opinion on the matter, managed to defuse the situation when she couldn’t even answer questions about building in Jerusalem. For example, reporters asked her, do you consider other Jewish neighborhoods outside the Green Line, such as Gilo and Ramot, to be “settlements?”

“The important point here is that one reason that we need to have an agreement is so that we can stop having this discussion about what belongs to Israel and what doesn’t,” she responded.

In other words, she has no idea.

But the answer is that while Jerusalem has the greatest significance for Jews and the Jewish state, Jews have every right, as Israelis, to live in the West Bank, and the brave men and women of the IDF have every right to defend them. Terrorism against Jews in the West Bank is murder, and it cannot be justified or explained away any more than the Mercaz Harav massacre in Jerusalem in March. The Palestinians want Tel Aviv as much as they want Ariel or Hebron or Beersheba, and they want West Jerusalem cleared of Jews, too. That, Mr. Burston, is what Husam Taysir Dwayat, the 30-year-old driver of the bulldozer and resident of a southeast Jerusalem neighborhood, was doing.

Walid Shoebat, the former PLO terrorist turned Israeli advocate once said: “There are only two choices when it comes to terrorism. The first is to make excuses for it. The second is to say there is absolutely no excuse for it. There is no third choice.”

Settler, soldier, secular, or scholar, the second choice should always be our first response.


{This column first appeared in the July 18, 2008 issue of The Jewish State.}


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The U.N., where 'Judaization' is a human rights violation

(Author's note: This was originally published in the March 14 edition of The Jewish State)

With the new report by Special Rapporteur John Dugard, it can no longer suffice to say that the United Nations has egg on its face, for egg has simply become the world body's permanent visage.

Dugard is due to present his new report "on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967" to the UN Human Rights Council. In the section titled "Human rights in the West Bank and Jerusalem," Dugard reveals "the instruments that most seriously violate human rights" by Israel.

Among them, tellingly, is "the Judaization of Jerusalem."

Dugard, a South African lawyer, is responsible for investigating only Israel's potential human rights violations for the UNHRC, and has prepared his verdict, in the form of a 25-page report, for the council's first regular session of 2008.

The report is replete with the same types of factual errors, misrepresentations, alarmingly obvious bias, and preposterously uneducated contentions that we have all come to expect from Dugard and his employers, all written in a Narcissus-inspired third-person, with Dugard only and always referring to himself as "the Special Rapporteur."

But the kind of venomous anti-Semitism jubilantly offered to us on page 13 reveals that Dugard has stooped so low he would need an elevator to reach the Palestinians' weapons smuggling tunnels whose existence he so dutifully ignores.

Dugard was picked for this mission in part because of his South African residence, making him a perfect choice to level "apartheid" charges at the Jewish state. But that should be, for him, a double-edged sword; as a white South African he should also understand the sensitivity inherent in the way descriptions of race, religion, and nationality are couched. Indeed, he probably does.

So would Dugard dare call Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe's policy of confiscating land from white owners "the blackification of Zimbabwe"? Would we hear him whine about the ongoing "Islamization" of Mecca or London? How about "the Orientalizing" of public universities?

Of course not, with good reason; such terms are racist, hateful, hurtful, discriminatory, and wildly inappropriate.

And "the Judaization" of anything belongs in that same category. As an indication of the phrase's nefarious intent, it was used by Adolf Hitler after he became Fuhrer of Germany's National Socialist Party.

"Internationalization today means only Judaization," Hitler told an audience in September 1922. "We in Germany have come to this: that a 60-million people sees its destiny to lie at the will of a few dozen Jewish bankers. This was possible only because our civilization had first been Judaized.... Eisner said in 1918 that we had no right to demand the return of our prisoners -- he was only saying openly what all Jews were thinking. People who so think must feel how life tastes in a concentration camp."

Yasser Arafat used the term in 1998 as he threatened to launch what would soon be known as the Second Intifada.

"The Palestinian Authority has taken steps to actively struggle against the Israeli Judaization scheme.... The Palestinian Authority is ready to restart the intifada in order to stop the assault on the Arab character of Jerusalem," Arafat told the Algerian newspaper Sawt al-Ahrar on Aug. 1, 1998. A year earlier, Arafat had delivered a similar warning to then-Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

The term is also a favorite of Sheikh Ra'ad Salah, the leader of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement, who routinely calls for anti-Jewish riots in Israel and issues death threats to Israeli public officials, as he did to then-Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman in November 2006. Salah also uses the term as a way to de-legitimize Israel and the Jews: "The claims of the Jews are big lies and they have no right to any speck of dust here," he said on March 10.

That's quite a legacy; from Hitler's prewar rhetoric, to Arafat's pre-intifada warning, to Sheikh Salah's death threats, to Dugard's rant. That means that the newest member of this club is also a member of the United Nations, which is something the world should watch very carefully.

Dugard's treatment of terrorism is also characteristic. In the report, he uses the word "terrorism" interchangeably with "terrorize," which enables him to equate Israeli actions, such as "sonic booms," with actual violence, like Palestinian "suicide bombs and Qassam rockets" -- all of which "must be condemned."

And although al-Qaeda and its Iranian associates have established themselves in Gaza, Dugard goes to great lengths to insist that Palestinian terrorism -- often enabled and sometimes carried out by al-Qaeda -- is quite different from terrorism enabled or carried out by, say, al-Qaeda.

"Common sense, however, dictates that a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror, such as acts committed by al-Qaeda, and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation against colonialism, apartheid, or military occupation," Dugard states in his report. "While such acts cannot be justified, they must be understood as being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid, or occupation."

Ah, "common sense." Something tells me Israelis won't sleep any better knowing that the murderous rockets landing daily on Sderot, the recent deadly suicide bombing attack in Dimona, and the March 6 massacre of eight yeshiva students in Jerusalem weren't "mindless," but, rather, "inevitable."

But Dugard clears the whole mess up when he divulges "the root cause of Palestinian violence -- the occupation."

It's a Chico Marx "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" moment for Dugard. Palestinian violence is taking place because of the Israeli "occupation," which makes the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza quite prescient: the Arabs who massacred Jews in Hebron in 1929 did so because they saw the "occupation" coming. Ditto for the 3,000 fedayeen attacks in the year 1952 alone.

But maybe Dugard is referring to acts of violence in the Negev, where Sderot and Ashkelon are regular targets of Gaza-based terrorists. He must be forgetting the March 1954 ambush by terrorists of a bus traveling from Eilat to Tel Aviv, during which the terrorists shot every passenger one by one.

Or a year later, when terrorists attacked a Jewish wedding in the Negev town of Patish.

The list of those attacks is quite long, so perhaps Dugard is just referring to attacks around the Gaza border area. But then he'd have to exclude the 1957 murder of two Israeli civilians by Gazan terrorists at Nir Yitzhak.

No, that list is unfortunately too long to disregard as well, so he must be referring only to towns that are regularly directly attacked by Palestinians today. But that can't be, either, because then he'd have to ignore the 1956 murder of a woman in Ashkelon who was killed when terrorists threw hand grenades into her home.

Maybe he means terrorist attacks that are simply self-defense measures on Arab land. But then he'd have to explain why Arabs in Gaza killed or wounded several Israeli civilians by planting landmines on the Israeli side of the Gazan border in 1957.

I wonder what he thinks about all the Fatah terrorist attacks -- explicitly "Palestinian," as part of the PLO -- that began in 1965, two years before any "occupation."

Of course this is just a sampling, but the point is that Dugard exposes himself and the U.N. He decries the Road Map, because it forces Palestinians to swear off violence -- something he doesn't think should be a precondition for statehood. He claims Israel is still occupying Gaza thanks to "technological developments."

He blames Israel for conditions that "could produce chaos in the Gazan monetary system"; for the fact that Gaza's schoolchildren "lag behind refugee children elsewhere"; for a system of "road apartheid"; for obstructing Palestinian freedom of movement with "earth mounds"; for threatening "the social fabric of [Palestinian] society"; and for creating an ominous-sounding "permit regime."

He explains: "houses and structures may not be built without permits. The bureaucratic procedures for obtaining permits are cumbersome and in practice permits are rarely granted. As a result, Palestinians are frequently compelled to build homes without permits."

He complains that Israel's release of 779 prisoners was "such a small number of prisoners" so as to render the gesture meaningless. He then, inexplicably, mentions that there was a riot at Ketziot prison that resulted in one death and 250 injuries -- presumably, by Dugard's logic, a sure sign that these prisoners should be released into society.

All this buildup would certainly put a substantial amount of pressure on Dugard to provide a spectacular grand finale of his report. He does not disappoint.

Most American and European leaders, and certainly many Israelis and Palestinians, would respond in similar fashion if asked what a final status agreement would look like. They would probably describe it as the creation of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, with territory swaps to include major Jewish enclaves in Israel and major Arab enclaves in Palestine.

Such an agreement, however, would be illegal according to Dugard.

He states: "any agreement between the Palestinian authorities and the Israeli Government that recognizes settlements within the occupied Palestinian territory, or accepts the annexation by Israel of Palestinian land within the wall, will violate the Fourth Geneva Convention."

So, according to Dugard's interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, a non-nation that's not a signatory to the Conventions is not at liberty to enter into a formal agreement if its new borders would not conform to Dugard's interpretation of an agreement it never entered into.

I guess it's good for the Palestinians that, ironically, when the PLO smugly tried to volunteer to follow some cherry-picked parts of the Geneva Conventions in 1989, the PLO and the all the signatories received a response from the Swiss Federal Council stating that it had no idea what kind of relevance or legality the PLO's letter had, "due to the uncertainty within the international community as to the existence or non-existence of a State of Palestine."

I'm sure John Dugard would be happy to explain it to them.

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