Trump, CNN, the Kurds, Normandy - and Israel? - by Alex Safian PHD

...So while the Jews of the Palestine Mandate (later Israel) fought on the British side, the leader of the Palestinians, Haj Amin al-Husseini, did everything in his power to help the Nazis defeat the Allies, and to murder the Jews. Perhaps Brooke Baldwin and her colleagues at CNN might want to consider tweeting about that — and covering it.

Alex Safian PHD..
CAMERA..
14 October '19..

After President Trump announced his controversial decision to pull some US troops from Northern Syria near the Turkish border, opening the way for a Turkish offensive against Kurds who had been allied with the US, the president attempted to explain his policy by noting that the Kurds are:

… fighting for their land, and as somebody wrote in a very, very powerful article today, they didn’t help us in the Second World War, they didn’t help us with Normandy, as an example, they mentioned names of different battles …

The president was apparently referring to a column by writer and US Army veteran Kurt Schlichter, which in its relevant section said:

Let’s be honest – the Kurds didn’t show up for us at Normandy or Inchon or Khe Sanh or Kandahar.

So the president wasn’t just referring to Normandy, he was following Schlichter in citing a number of notable US battles in World War II, the Korean and Viet Nam wars, and the post-911 battles against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Which brings us to CNN – covering the controversy, anchor Brooke Baldwin approvingly quoted a CNN contributor’s tweet:

BALDWIN: Before we talk about what President Trump said last night, there was a tweet that caught my eye this morning from one of our standing contributors, Wajahat Ali. And I just wanted to read it for you. He said, here are the countries that did not fight with the U.S. at Normandy whose leaders Trump nonetheless helps or praises, Saudi Arabia, Russia, North Korea, Israel, Turkey, Philippines, Egypt, Hungary. But he decides to single out the Kurds.

There are two notable things about the tweet that Baldwin approvingly cites:

1. The president didn’t just refer to Normandy, so harping on who fought at Normandy is a distraction from the larger point the president was making, whether one feels it is a valid point or not.

2. Why bring in Israel?

Some who have criticized President Trump’s rationale pointed out that in fairness to the Kurds, they don’t have a state now and didn’t have one during World War II either, so it would have been impossible for them to fight at Normandy or in the other cited battles as if there had been a country of Kurdistan.

Of course, Israel also didn’t have a state, and so organized Jewish forces didn’t fight at Normandy either. But what Baldwin and most of her viewers don’t know is that organized Jewish forces did fight in World War II, on the side of the Allies. Under the British-ruled Palestine Mandate (which ended in 1948), some 30,000 Jewish volunteers from the territory fought with British forces during the war, and in 1944 the British finally agreed to form a Jewish Brigade of some 5000 soldiers, which fought alongside British forces in Europe, and therefore also alongside United States forces.

While the British also attempted to enlist Arabs from the Palestine Mandate to serve the war effort, in the end very few did.

Perhaps this is because the founder and first leader of the Palestinian national movement, Haj Amin al-Husseini, known as the Grand Mufti, was an ally of Nazi Germany almost from the inception of Nazi rule, and fled to Berlin at the outbreak of World War II, where he closely collaborated with the Nazi leadership. Among the Mufti’s notable achievements during his Nazi years was his creation of a special Muslim Waffen SS Division in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Known as the Handschar Division, it committed brutal war crimes against Serbian Christians and Jews, leading the postwar Yugoslavian government to indict the Mufti as a war criminal.

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A plan that might save both Israeli Jewish and Arab lives alike - by Prof. Hillel Frisch

Engendering economic well-being does not solve deep-seated political conflicts, but it holds out the prospect that differences can be expressed in less violent ways. Trump’s plan might save both Israeli Jewish and Arab lives alike – provided, of course, that it is not followed by a delusional peace process.

Prof. Hillel Frisch..
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,234..
23 July '19..
Link: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/trump-economic-plan-peace/

None of the three actors in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict envisions peace in the foreseeable future.

Hamas can’t entertain the idea of real peace for ideological reasons. It would mean openly acknowledging that the dream of Palestine “from the river to the sea” is no longer attainable, and in so doing, it would lose its legitimacy in favor of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is recognized by the international community. Peacemaking would also mean the end of Iranian military aid and Turkish and Qatari support.

Hamas would be threatened by the same marginalization that doomed once-strong Palestinian factions like the Popular and Democratic Fronts for the Liberation of Palestine. To court oblivion for the sake of the Jews is, to say the least, unpalatable.

Even less eager to make real peace is the PA under Mahmoud Abbas. Real peace would mean the cancellation of the daily penetration of Israeli security forces, which, in close coordination with PA security forces, currently protects the PA from their common foes – Hamas and Islamic Jihad – by arresting the lion’s share (70%) of their supporters. If the IDF is forced to withdraw for the sake of peace, the PA and its political elite will be threatened with nightmarish scenarios.

At best, Hamas and Islamic Jihad would emerge strong enough to engage in a long civil war in areas controlled at present by the PA. The outcome could be a division into a sort of Palestinian Judea and Samaria, with the former controlled by the Khalaileh (the Hebronites), who form the majority of east Jerusalem and south of it, and Hamas enjoying considerable support among Palestinian Judeans from Ramallah northward. That area would be controlled by Fatah factions and overlords who would either be divided or act in unison.

At worst (from the perspective of the PA), Hamas and Islamic Jihad would be able to achieve a complete takeover along the lines of Hamas’s success in Gaza in 2007.

Unlike the PLO elite of the past, which always found a refuge – first in Amman, then in Beirut, then in Tunis, and finally in Ramallah – the political elite of today’s PA has literally nowhere to flee.

Not one Arab country, including Jordan, will offer them refuge, meaning a bleak future under Hamas rule. For a glimpse into that future, Abbas and his coterie have only to look at how Fatah supporters fare in the one-party Hamas state of Gaza.

Nor can most Israeli voters envision peace in the near future, much as they would like to achieve it. Not only have they internalized the bitter lessons of Oslo – dubbed a peace process, but in fact a war process – which increased Israeli casualties five-fold and doubled Palestinian casualties, but they have only to contemplate the ramifications of enabling Hamas to replicate its actions along the Gaza border over the past year on the Green Line between Israel and the PA. Consider what fires, incendiary bombs, and daily to weekly attacks along the security fence between Afula and Jerusalem would mean.

What the Trump peace plan cannot accomplish - by Jonathan Tobin

The economic vision for the Palestinians isn’t new and won’t work. But the problem isn’t the plan. It’s that its intended beneficiaries have other priorities. 

Jonathan Tobin..
JNS.org..
24 June '19..

When the Trump administration released the economic portion of its Middle East peace plan last week, the avalanche of criticism was immediate and harsh. Even though the president’s foreign-policy team couched the plan as a “vision” of peace rather than an intricate blueprint, its critics weren’t wrong in pointing out that there was little in it that was new, and that its chances of success were nil.

Yet in analyzing the effort, it’s important to note that there’s a difference saying that the plan won’t succeed and saying that putting it forth was the wrong thing to do. That’s because the problem with it isn’t the content, but the context. An effort to shift the focus from a push on Israeli concessions, which are never enough to satisfy the Palestinians, to one in which Palestinian society could be transformed—economically and hopefully peaceably—was long overdue. But as long as the intended beneficiaries aren’t interested in such programs, the “ultimate deal” is simply not going to happen under any circumstances.

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Jonathan S. Tobin is the Editor-in-Chief of JNS — Jewish News Syndicate. He is also a contributing writer for National Review and a columnist for the New York Post, Haaretz and other publications.