Judea, Samaria and what those 107 Democrats got wrong - by Stephen M. Flatow

The letter claims that the new US policy could “lead to a more entrenched conflict.” More entrenched than a 100-year-long Palestinian Arab war against Jews and the existence of a Jewish state?

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
27 November '19..

The letter from 107 Democratic members of Congress declaring that Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, and much of Jerusalem, are illegal is wrong on so many levels that I wonder if even most of the signatories themselves understand the implications of what they signed.

Members of Congress are busy men and women. I get that. They don’t have time to carefully read every request that comes across their desks. They can’t familiarize themselves with every nuance of the issue under consideration. They often must rely on their senior staff to provide guidance. If that’s what happened here, then they received very poor guidance indeed.

Most of the letter consists of predictable slogans and irrelevancies. For example, it warns against “settlement expansion into the occupied West Bank,” which is irrelevant because the new U.S. policy refers to existing Jewish communities and has nothing to do with whether or not they “expand.”

The letter also claims that the new U.S. policy could “lead to a more entrenched conflict.” More entrenched than a 100-year-long Palestinian Arab war against Jews and the existence of a Jewish state? More entrenched than the Palestinian Authority’s refusal even to negotiate with Israel? More entrenched than an entire generation of Palestinian Arab youth being raised—in the aftermath of the Oslo accords—on hatred of Jews and glorification of terrorism?

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Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terrorism,” now available on Kindle.

A Triumph of Clarity: When the Dutch Stopped Funding the PA’s ‘Pay-for-Slay’ - by Maurice Hirsch

The question now, is whether the UK, under the leadership of Boris Johnson or any other prime minister, and the EU will have enough moral fiber and desire to promote peace, to condition their continued aid to the PA on the PA abolishing its “Pay-for-Slay” policy. If they do not, peace will continue to elude the region.

Maurice Hirsch..
TOI Blog..
27 November '19..
Link: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/when-the-dutch-stopped-funding-the-pas-pay-for-slay/

In a demonstration of moral clarity, and setting the continental precedent, Holland just became the first European country to discontinue aid to the Palestinian Authority because of its “Pay-for-Slay” terror reward policy.

Since its creation, the PA has been paying ever increasing salaries to terrorist prisoners and released terrorist prisoners and allowances to wounded terrorists and the families of dead terrorists, including suicide bombers. These payments, have become known as the PA’s “Pay-for-Slay” policy. In 2018 alone, the PA admitted to spending 502 million shekels (over €131 million) on the salaries to the terrorist prisoners and released prisoners and it is estimated that it spent an additional 241 million shekels (€63 million) just on the allowances to the families of the dead terrorists. The salaries and the allowances are paid irrespective of any needs based criteria. Rather they are paid solely as a reward for terrorism.

When the Dutch parliament was originally exposed to the PA’s noxious policy, its first steps were cautious, calling on the government to further investigate. As the unequivocal evidence of the policy grew, the parliament decided to reduce their aid to the PA by a symbolic seven percent – a sum equivalent to the percentage the PA devoted from its entire 2018 budget to its policy. Having further engaged with the PA, and noting the PA’s refusal to cease funding the policy, the Dutch government decided to discontinue all the aid.

The Dutch decision was monumental, not only because it was the first European country to cut all aid to the PA, but rather because the Dutch knew definitively that their aid was not supporting the “Pay-for-Slay” policy. The Dutch were actually supporting the PA judicial system.

Nonetheless, the Dutch reasoning was clear: Why should the Dutch taxpayer subsidize the PA’s legal system, if the PA itself has hundreds of millions of shekels spare to squander, paying substantial financial rewards to terrorists and their families?

* * *

World governments have been acutely aware of the details of the PA’s “Pay-for-Slay” policy since Palestinian Media Watch traveled to the US Congress and many parliaments in Europe to expose new regulations and huge salary increases to terrorist prisoners passed by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in 2011.

Despite that knowledge, individual European governments and the European Union have plowed billions of pounds and euros of aid into the PA. According to EU figures, since 2007, over €9 billion of aid has been donated by the EU members to the PA and different Palestinian causes. The European Commission provided €4.8 billion of the aid, Germany contributed over €1 billion and the UK contributed over €724 million.

HRW's Shakir Is No Human Rights Defender - by Becca Wertman

At best, Shakir has abused his platform to promote discriminatory BDS campaigns aimed at delegitimizing the Jewish State. At worst, Shakir “stands with” an NGO linked to an internationally designated terrorist organization, instead of the innocent children murdered by the terrorists.

Becca Wertman..
TOI Blog..
25 November '19..
Link: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/shakir-is-no-human-rights-defender

On November 5, Israel’s Supreme Court rejected the demand that Israel renew a work visa for Human Right Watch’s (HRW) local representative, ending a nearly two-year long legal ordeal. The decision confirmed that Shakir has been a consistent and active promoter of BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanction) campaigns against Israel for years –grounds for denying entry into the country.

Whether or not you agree with the merits of Israel’s BDS law, ample evidence shows that Shakir overtly promotes boycotts and sanctions against Israel. This includes his efforts to have FIFA sanction the Israel Football Association, supporting US legislation to sanction Israel by restricting military aid, and his involvement with HRW’s ongoing BDS campaign targeting Airbnb and Booking.com.

Without missing a beat, HRW and Shakir’s loyal supporters have cried out in the defense of their beloved “human rights defender” who is being “deported.” However, putting his obsession with Israel aside, Shakir’s human rights priorities appear to be highly questionable, at best.

On August 23, 2019, Israeli 17-year-old Rina Shnerb was brutally murdered when a terrorist hurled an explosive device at her and her family, injuring her father and brother, while they were hiking. A Palestinian by the name of Samer Arbid, who worked in a financial role at the NGO Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) and had previously served in a similar capacity at Addameer, was later arrested for his leading role in making, planting, and setting off the explosive device. It would seem impossible for a true human rights organization or activist to ignore this horrific incident of violence, terror, and the exploitation of human rights organizations. Yet this is exactly what Shakir did.

Despite the fact that Shakir always seems to make time for attacking Israel on his Twitter account, this self-proclaimed human rights defender apparently failed to craft even a few characters to condemn this clear violation of human rights. There were no calls for an investigation into the incident, no condemnation of the overt violation of the rights of the child, and no cries denouncing the abhorrent abuse of the universal human right to life.

However, when it comes to defending the terrorist and affiliates of the terrorist organization he belonged to, Shakir’s words flow.

Dear Washington Institute for Near East Policy: Is it that their questions about their murdered child simply aren't worth the trouble of acknowledging?

We're baffled and pained by every aspect of how the Washington Institute for Near East Policy has conducted itself in this exceedingly shabby affair. We're especially troubled by how its leadership disdains us and our questions and acts as if we, our questions and our murdered child simply don't exist or aren't worth the trouble of acknowledging.

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
24 November '19..

No one from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy bothered to respond to us or any of our emails, tweets or opinion pieces (one on the home page of the Times of Israel, one on our blog) in relation to their giving an award called "Scholar-Statesman" to Jordan's ruler this past Thursday night.

The issue concerns how Jordan, an absolute monarchy, brazenly shields a mass murderer who happens also to be the killer of our child, a US citizen.

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan's embassy in Washington, where the ambassador Dina Kawar blocks us on Twitter, has just published the kind of report we have learned to expect, emphasizing and re-emphasizing King Abdullah II's wisdom, wise policies and how he "confronts" extremism.

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Israel hardly needs another Oslo-like disaster, which confused painful realities with pastoral visions - by Prof. Hillel Frisch

The wedge between Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the recent Gaza conflagration is a clear sign that Israel is deepening divisions between the two terror groups. Nevertheless, the payoffs to Hamas enhance its firepower in possible future rounds, meaning that Israel has to reduce the payoffs as much as possible rather than as the center-left suggests, show largess towards Gaza.

Prof. Hillel Frisch..
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,351..
21 November '19..
Link: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/hamas-tamed/

There are two possible solutions to the violence emanating from Gaza.

Either embark on a massive fourth round of conflict like the 2014 confrontation and hope that it will bring Hamas to non-belligerency, as the five wars between Israel and the Arab states did, or as arguably happened after Operation Defensive Shield in 2002 against the PA and Fatah; or adhere to the “taming Hamas” approach used by Netanyahu since “the Return processions” began at the end of March 2018, which minimizes the sticks and maximizes the “carrots” for keeping the peace.

Each of these two solutions have obvious drawbacks.

Initiating a massive round, including a ground offensive into Gaza, to exact a threshold of pain Hamas will not be able to tolerate, plays into the hands of Tehran’s regional strategy to use the Palestinian card to deflect the focus from its buildup in Syria, and entails other obvious costs in terms of lives and treasure.

The wider linkage to Iran and its prioritization, in Netanyahu’s strategic thinking, is what led him to adopt the taming paradigm of negotiating with Hamas to keep the peace on Israel’s southern border.

The costs of this strategy are equally obvious. Any carrots offered to Hamas (Blue and White under Benny Gantz will offer Hamas even more) might buy peace and ameliorate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, but those same carrots will obviously be used to enhance the military capabilities of Hamas in the future. In other words, today’s carrots will be converted necessarily into sticks wielded by Hamas against Israel in the future.

Rest assured that as the welfare of Gaza’s population improves, Hamas will dig more and deeper tunnels and storage centers within Gaza itself, improve the firepower and payloads of its missiles and try to dig offensive tunnels into Israel – and this is all the more the case if it is provided with a deeper offshore port, the reopening of the airport and other projects that have been bandied by Blue and White and certain Likud leaders.

PFLP’s post-Oslo résumé: Abbas’s dirty little secret - by Stephen M. Flatow

The entire premise of the Oslo accords and various “peace processes” that followed was that the Palestinian Arab leadership, headed by Yasser Arafat and his deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, had sincerely given up terrorism and the goal of destroying Israel.

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
20 November '19..

Amid all the hubbub over the latest wave of Palestinian Arab rocket attacks against Israel, one extremely important part of the story passed almost unnoticed. I call it Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’s dirty little secret.

A news brief carried by one of the wire services reported that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) announced that it has “expanded its rockets’ range beyond Gaza border communities.”

The significance of the news, as presented by the media, was that a terrorist faction was boasting of new rocket ranges that could intensify the conflict. But the real significance is the fact that the PFLP is being coddled by “moderate” Palestinian leaders, even as it continues to play an active role in the terrorist war against Israel.

Remember: The entire premise of the Oslo accords and the various “peace processes” that followed was that the Palestinian Arab leadership, headed by Yasser Arafat and his deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, had sincerely given up terrorism and the goal of destroying Israel.

Arafat and Abbas claimed that they had become “moderate,” and that the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian Authority—which Arafat led, and which Abbas now leads—were committed to peace. The PLO consists of 10 individual factions. The largest, headed by Abbas, is Fatah. The second largest is the PFLP.

Since joining the PLO at its inception in 1967, the PFLP has perpetrated numerous heinous terrorist attacks, including hijackings of airplanes and the murder of an Israeli cabinet minister. That was all supposed to have come to an end when the PLO claimed to give up terrorism at the Oslo signing in September 1993.

Except that the PFLP never gave up terrorism. It’s just that nobody talks about it.

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Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terrorism,” now available on Kindle.

Hebron: Where Jewish history in the Land of Israel began - by Jerold S. Auerbach

Whether Zionism retains any connection to the ancient sources and sites of Jewish history is entwined with the future of the Hebron Jewish community.

Jerold S. Auerbach..
JNS.org..
18 November '19..

In the upcoming Torah reading of Shabbat Chaye Sarah (Genesis 23:1-20), Abraham reveals his need to purchase a burial site for Sarah. The local Hittites, praising him as “the elect of God,” offer “the choicest of our burial places,” the Machpelah cave. Declining their generous gift, Abraham asks them to intercede with the owner, Ephron, so that he may buy it “at the full price.” Ephron emerged from the group, and repeated the offer of his cave and the surrounding field as a gift. When Abraham insisted on paying full price, Ephron sold it to him for 400 shekels of silver. Abraham’s purchase marked the beginning of Jewish history in the Land of Israel.

Following the first-century Roman conquest, no Jews remained in Hebron. Centuries later, after the rise of Islam, Muslim sources would claim that the prophet Mohammad had stopped in Hebron during his night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem. Like the Western Wall, embraced by Muslims as the place where Mohammad’s horse was tethered, Machpelah—crowned by a massive Herodian edifice—became a Muslim holy site.

Jewish pilgrimages to Hebron were tolerated, and Jews were even granted permission to inhabit their ancient holy city, only to be expelled after the 11th-century Crusader conquest. In 1267, a Muslim edict prohibited non-Muslims from entering Machpelah; Jews were permitted to ascend only as far as the seventh outside step. A visitor watched “poor Israelite pilgrims … prostrated, stretching their necks like a burrowed fox in order to try to press their lips against their ancestors’ tomb.” That prohibition endured for exactly seven centuries. Dependent on the mercy of local rulers, Hebron Jews could only hope for a life of piety and burial near their ancestral tombs.

Jews came to Hebron, a visitor observed, only “to pray and die.”

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Jerold S. Auerbach, professor emeritus of history at Wellesley College, is the author of “Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel” (2009).