Israel Matzav: The true apartheid

The Myth of "Palestinian Rights"

As Israel considers again concessions for "peace," we bring you this frank talk by Jerusalem Post editorCaroline Glick.

Caroline Glick is the senior contributing editor of the Jerusalem Post, director of the Israel Security Project at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a senior adjunct fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs a the Center for Security Policy.

American Thinker wrote about this speech: "Glick's powerful presentation at Intelligence Squared, directly countering the basic premise that Israel is destroying itself through expanding settlements on their own land. Glick also frames her argument to highlight the double-standard of ignoring the civil rights of Jews in the debate."

Palestinians: "No Jews Allowed!" by Khaled Abu Toameh

The next time U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visits Ramallah, will he actually violate U.S. law to make sure there are no Jews among his entourage, lest he upset his Palestinian hosts?

"We will approve the meeting on condition there are no Jews."

This is what you are likely to hear these days if you request a meeting with any senior Palestinian Authority official in the West Bank.

Palestinian journalists who try to arrange meetings or interviews with Palestinian Authority representatives for Western colleagues have become used to hearing such things almost on a daily basis.

Just last week, for example, a journalist who requested a meeting between Western journalists and a top Palestinian Authority official was told "to make sure there were no Jews or Israelis" among the visitors.

The official's aide went on to explain: "We are sorry, but we do not meet with Jews or Israelis."

Another Palestinian journalist who tried to arrange an interview with a Palestinian Authority official for a European colleague was turned down "because the man's name indicates he is a Jew."

In yet another recent incident, a Palestinian Authority ministry instructed its guards to "prevent Jewish reporters" from attending an event in Ramallah.

It is not clear at this stage if the Palestinian Authority leadership is behind the boycott of Jews and Israelis who seek to meet with its representatives.

What is clear is that Palestinian Authority officials do not hesitate to state in public that they do not want to meet with any Jew or Israeli.

The Palestinian Authority representatives assume that if you are a Jew, then you must be pro-Israel or anti-Palestinian.

The only people with whom they want to meet are those who support the Palestinians and do not ask difficult questions.

That is why the Palestinian Authority earlier this year imposed severe restrictions on the work of non-Palestinian journalists in the territories under its control in the West Bank.

Now, any journalist who wants to visit a Palestinian city or meet with a top Palestinian official needs to get permission in advance from the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Information.

Even the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate in the West Bank has come out in support of the restrictions. The syndicate has even gone a step further by urging the Palestinian Authority leadership to ban Israeli journalists from entering Palestinian cities and working there without permission.

Some Israeli journalists covering Palestinian affairs, however, continue to defy the ban by visiting Ramallah and other Palestinian cities -- putting their lives at risk.

There were days when Israeli and Palestinian journalists used to work together and help each other in reporting the news. But those days were long before the Palestinian Authority and its representatives started promoting boycotts against Israelis.

It now remains to be seen how Palestinians will react when and if they see their leaders in the West Bank return to the negotiating table with Israel, or meet with a Jewish Congressman or politician.

The next time U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visits Ramallah, will he actually violate U.S. law to make sure there are no Jews among his entourage lest he upset his Palestinian hosts?

The Palestinians’ Jew-Free History Posted by Dennis Prager

About five years ago, I was invited by the Hoover Institution to lecture at Stanford University over the course of a week. Coincidentally, Israel’s Independence Day fell during that week, so I was invited to speak at the celebration held by pro-Israel students. In my talk, I noted that the crux of the problem in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was that most Palestinians wanted Israel to cease to exist.
After my talk, a woman walked over to me and introduced herself as a peace activist. She told me that she could not agree with me because Palestinians, in her view, were quite willing to accept Israel’s existence.
As it happened, about 50 feet behind the pro-Israel celebration was an anti-Israel demonstration led by Palestinian students. So I told the woman to go over and introduce herself to the Palestinian students as a peace activist — that way they would immediately trust her — and ask them if they were willing to acknowledge the right of the Jewish state of Israel to exist. I told her that I would bet her $5 that they would not answer in the affirmative.
She accepted the bet and walked over the Palestinian students.
After about 10 minutes, she returned.
“So,” I asked her, “who won the bet?”
“I don’t know,” she responded.
“I don’t understand,” I replied. “Didn’t they answer you?”
“They asked me, ‘What do you mean?’” she answered.
I told her she owed me $5 but that I wouldn’t collect.
Earlier this month in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority, I interviewed Ghassan Khatib, director of government media for the Palestinian Authority and the spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. I asked him the same question: Do the Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state?
He was more direct than the Palestinians students at Stanford.
His long answer amounted to: “No.”
There is no Jewish people, he told me, so how could there be a Jewish country? The Palestinian position is that there is a religion called Judaism, but there is no such thing as a Jewish people. (Interestingly, the Jews are referred to belonging to a religion only once in the entire Hebrew Bible — in the Book of Esther, by the anti-Semite Haman.)
In other words, Palestinians — people in a national group that never existed by the name “Palestine” until well into the 20th century — deny the existence of the oldest continuous nation in the world, dating back over 3,000 years.Now, that’s real chutzpah.
Indeed, the Palestinians deny that the Jews ever lived in Israel. That is why Yasser Arafat could not even admit that Jesus was a Jew; rather, according to Arafat, “Jesus was a Palestinian.” To acknowledge that Jesus was a Jew would mean that Jews lived in Israel thousands of years ago, in a Jewish state, moreover — long before Muslims existed, long before Arabs moved there, and millennia before anyone called himself a Palestinian.
In the Palestinian president’s speech to the United Nations last week, this denial of Jewish history was reaffirmed. Thus, in a speech about Israel and the Palestinians, he never once uttered the word “Jew” or “Jewish.”
Here is an example of Abbas’s Jew-free view of the history of Israel/Palestine:
“I come before you today from the Holy Land, the land of Palestine, the land of divine messages, ascension of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and the birthplace of Jesus Christ (peace be upon him) …”
No mention of Jews. Apparently, only Christians (Does Abbas know that Jesus was a Jew?) and Muslims have lived in “the Holy Land.” And for Abbas, the Holy Land is not Israel, it is Palestine. That it was the Jews who made that land Holy is a fact of history denied by the Palestinians.
Israel, in the Palestinian view, is an Israeli state, not a Jewish state.
As Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, wrote in The Washington Post this past Friday:
“Two Israeli peace proposals, in 2000 and 2008 … met virtually all of the Palestinians’ demands for a sovereign state in the areas won by Israel in the 1967 war — in the West Bank, Gaza and even East Jerusalem. But Palestinian President Yasser Arafat rejected the first offer and Abbas ignored the second, for the very same reason their predecessors spurned the 1947 Partition Plan.
Each time, accepting a Palestinian State meant accepting the Jewish State, a concession the Palestinians were unwilling to make.
That is the issue. Not settlements. Not boundaries. The Palestinians, like most of their fellow Arabs and like many Muslims elsewhere, have never acknowledged that the Jews came home to Israel because they have never acknowledged that the Jews ever had a national home there. And they don’t even acknowledge that the Jews are a people.
Do the Palestinians want peace? I have no doubt that they do. Just not with the Jewish state.

Lieberman Orders Embassies to 'Protest PA Apartheid State'

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has instructed Israeli embassies in Europe and the U.S. to file strong protests with the governments of their host countries against comments by the Palestinian Authority representative delegation's United Nations observer, who said that the Arab state the PA plans to declare in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem will be “free of Jews.”

In response to a reporter's question Tuesday, the PA official, Maen Areikat, said that “after a military occupation of 44 years, I think it would be best for the two nations to split.” He added that Jews would not be welcome to live in the PA state. The implication, said Lieberman, was that more than 350,000 Jews who live in areas the PA claims for its state would have to leave their homes.
The Palestine Liberation Organization, however -- tasked with making the formal request to the United Nations for recognition of the PA as a new Arab country, and accepting the entity into its ranks as a full member -- has announced that the new state would "welcome all faiths."

Lieberman said Thursday that Areikat's comments were similar to other statements made directly by Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who has spoken of the need to deport all Jews from PA controlled areas. Both Areikat's and Abbas' statements, said Lieberman, prove that the PA plans to make its state “Judenrein,” borrowing a term describing the Nazis' policy of destroying Jews and murdering them. “The nations of the world should take these comments into account when deciding how to vote on the PA's demand to set up a state,” Lieberman said.

In June, Abbas himself made a similar statement. Telling reporters that he would under no conditions recognize Israel as a Jewish state, Abbas said that he would agree to an international force to ensure enforcement of a peace agreement between Israel and the PA state to prevent terrorism. But, he said, “I will not agree to allowing Jews to participate in this force, and I will not agree to allow even one Israeli to live among us on Palestinian land.”

Earlier, Yuli Edelstein, in charge of the government's public information efforts, said that “after endless attempts by the PA to delegitimize Israel and attempts to brand us as an apartheid state, it turns out that the Palestinians are the ones who are interested in apartheid.”

PLO ambassador confirms: Palestine would be Judenrein

From USA Today:

The Palestine Liberation Organization's ambassador to the United States said Tuesday that any future Palestinian state it seeks with help from the United Nations and the United States should be free of Jews.

"After the experience of the last 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated," Maen Areikat, the PLO ambassador, said during a meeting with reporters sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor. He was responding to a question about the rights of minorities in a Palestine of the future.

Such a state would be the first to officially prohibit Jews or any other faith since Nazi Germany, which sought a country that was judenrein, or cleansed of Jews, said Elliott Abrams, a former U.S. National Security Council official.

Was he misquoted? Could he have really said "Israelis" or "Zionists"?

Nope. Areikat was interviewed in Tablet last year and said this explicitly:

So, you think it would be necessary to first transfer and remove every Jew—

Absolutely. No, I’m not saying to transfer every Jew, I’m sayingtransfer Jews who, after an agreement with Israel, fall under the jurisdiction of a Palestinian state.

Any Jew who is inside the borders of Palestine will have to leave?

Absolutely. I think this is a very necessary step, before we can allow the two states to somehow develop their separate national identities, and then maybe open up the doors for all kinds of cultural, social, political, economic exchanges, that freedom of movement of both citizens of Israelis and Palestinians from one area to another. You know you have to think of the day after.

About two thirds of the nations of the world represented in the United Nations supports the establishment of a state that is, by definition, anti-semitic.

 It would not just an "apartheid" state - it would be a state whose very basiswould be the ethnic cleansing of every single Jewish man, woman and child.

 We should be hearing the outraged condemnations from human rights groups any minute now. Of course.

PLO ambassador says Palestinian state should be free of Jews

WASHINGTON – The Palestine Liberation Organization's ambassador to the United States said Tuesday that any future Palestinian state it seeks with help from the United Nations and the United States should be free of Jews.
"After the experience of the last 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated," Maen Areikat, the PLO ambassador, said during a meeting with reporters sponsored by TheChristian Science Monitor. He was responding to a question about the rights of minorities in a Palestine of the future.
Such a state would be the first to officially prohibit Jews or any other faith since Nazi Germany, which sought a country that was judenrein, or cleansed of Jews, saidElliott Abrams, a former U.S. National Security Council official.
Israel has 1.3 million Muslims who are Israeli citizens. Jews have lived in "Judea and Samaria," the biblical name for the West Bank, for thousands of years. Areikat said the PLO seeks a secular state, but that Palestinians need separation to work on their own national identity.
The Palestinian demand is unacceptable and "a despicable form of anti-Semitism," Abrams said. A small Jewish presence in a future Palestine, up to 1% of the population, would not hurt the Palestinian identity, he said.
"No civilized country would act this way," Abrams said.
Israel has often complained of anti-Semitic views in Palestinian discourse. Palestinian media frequently publishes and broadcasts anti-Semitic sermons by Islamic religious leaders, while the Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV shows programming for preschoolers that extolls hatred of Jews and suicide bombings, according to a 2009 State Department human rights report.
The PLO seeks a U.N. vote on Palestinian statehood when the U.N. General Assemblymeets in New York City next week. Areikat said Palestinian negotiators have been stymied in peace talks with the Israelis because of the two sides' unequal status before international legal institutions such as the U.N. and the International Criminal Court, where Israel is a full member and the Palestinians are not. The Palestinians hope the increased pressure will push the Jewish state to agree to their demands.
"We are trying to preserve the concept of a two-state solution," Areikat said. "And to make the Israelis understand there will be consequences for their actions."
The Obama administration has promised to veto the statehood bid if it reaches the U.N. Security Council.
"This shortcut is not going to create a Palestinian state," U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice said. "We continue to urge them and convince them that would be self-defeating."

Palestinians have problems with Obama’s Mideast speech, too _ especially over ‘Jewish state’

JERUSALEM — U.S.-Israel tension over Barack Obama’s endorsement of Israel’s pre-1967 borders is obscuring a flip side of the Middle East coin: The past days’ speeches by the U.S. president contained difficult challenges for the Palestinians as well.
Addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Sunday, Obama reiterated his request that the Palestinians drop their plans to appeal for recognition at the United Nations this fall, and — as he did in another Mideast speech Thursday — raised tough questions about an emerging Palestinian unity government that is to include the Hamas militant group.
Most difficult for Palestinians is Obama’s call to recognize Israel as the Jewish homeland, essentially requiring the Palestinians to accept that most refugees will be denied the “right of return” to what is now Israel.
Perhaps for this reason, the Palestinians have remained largely quiet about the substance of Obama’s speeches, seemingly content to watch Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clash with the U.S. administration over Israel’s future borders.
“It’s really premature to jump into any of these details,” said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, when asked by The Associated Press about the demands Obama made of the Palestinians.
The fate of Palestinian refugees is one of the most emotional and explosive issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians either fled or were expelled during the war surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948. Today, the surviving refugees, with their descendants, number several million people.
The Palestinians claim they have the right to return to their family’s lost properties. Israel rejects the principle, saying it would mean the end of the country as a Jewish democracy. Israeli leaders say the refugees should be entitled to compensation and resettled in a future Palestine to be established next to Israel, or absorbed where they now live.
In his speech last Thursday, Obama did not explicitly mention the refugees. But by saying a final peace deal must recognize “Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people,” he appeared to back the Israeli position.
The issue is so central to Palestinian policy and society that no Palestinian leader can be seen as abandoning the rights of the refugees, particularly at a time when peace efforts are at a standstill and so many other difficult issues, such as borders and the final status of Jerusalem, remain unresolved.
Nabil Shaath, a senior Palestinian official, said recognition of Israel as a Jewish state would sell out not only the refugees, but potentially open the door to Israel expelling its roughly 1.5 million Arab citizens as well. This idea has never been seriously raised in Israel.
He said the Palestinian recognition of Israel’s right to exist, without any reference to national character, should be sufficient.
“We recognize Israel as a state,” he said. “It’s a recognition of a state to a state.”
In his two recent speeches, Obama took aim at two other central planks of Palestinian policy: plans to ask the U.N. in September to recognize an independent Palestine, with or without a peace agreement; and a unity deal struck between President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement and the Iranian-backed Hamas militants.
In Thursday’s speech, Obama warned that “symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won’t create an independent state.” And referring to Hamas in Sunday’s address to AIPAC, a powerful pro-Israel lobby, Obama stated: “No country can be expected to negotiate with a terrorist organization sworn to its destruction.”
“We will hold the Palestinians accountable for their actions and their rhetoric,” Obama said.
Erekat insisted the world must embrace the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation, meant to end the split that has left rival governments in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Palestinians claim both areas, along with east Jerusalem, for their future state, and Erekat said there can be no independence without reconciliation.
In any case, he said Abbas, and the umbrella Palestine Liberation Organization, dominated by Fatah, are the parties to negotiate peace with Israel — not the “unity government” of the Palestinian Authority which would be backed by both parties.
Erekat, like other Palestinians officials, declined to discuss most of the specifics of Obama’s speech, including the issue of the Jewish state. For now, he says the border issue should be the focus of Mideast diplomacy.
The Palestinians demand a return to the pre-1967 lines, which would require an Israeli pullout from the West Bank and east Jerusalem, though they are open to Obama’s idea of agreed-upon modifications through land swaps — as long as they are small.
Erekat said if Netanyahu accepts the 1967 lines he could raise any other matter in negotiations. “Before I hear the prime minister of Israel saying that he accepts this principle, I think it would be a waste of my time to discuss any other issue,” Erekat said.
Netanyahu says the 1967 lines are “indefensible,” and his anger toward the U.S. president seemed palpable at a White House meeting Friday.
But even Obama’s reference to the 1967 lines may not be entirely to the Palestinians’ liking.
Clarifying his position Sunday, Obama said those lines should be the basis for a peace deal, but that the final borders could be adjusted to accommodate “new demographic realities.”
That was seen as a recognition that Israel could keep at least some of the occupied area where it has settled Jews. Some 500,000 Israelis live in Jewish settlements, which are considered illegal by the Palestinians and the international community.
Obama also noted the 1967 lines have long been considered a basis for a final peace deal, most recently in previous negotiations that broke down in 2008. So his embrace of those borders is not revolutionary. “What I did on Thursday was to say publicly what has long been acknowledged privately,” he said.
After initial shock and anger toward Obama, members of Netanyahu’s hard-line coalition have begun to soften their opposition.
Limor Livnat, a Cabinet minister in Netanyahu’s nationalist Likud Party, called Obama’s speech on Sunday “excellent.” She praised his tough line against Hamas and support for Israel as a Jewish state.
“Following the prime minister’s words, the president sharpened his message and said things that he didn’t say clearly beforehand,” she told Channel 2 TV. “These are important things.”
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Josef Federman can be reached at www.twitter.com/joseffederman

PA president says US has failed to pressure J’lem, accuses Israel of ‘deception’ for blaming PA for impasse in talks.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced on Saturday that when a Palestinian state is established, it will have no Israelis in it.

“We have frankly said, and always will say: If there is an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, we won’t agree to the presence of one Israeli in it,” Abbas told reporters in Ramallah.

He was commenting on unconfirmed reports suggesting that the PA leadership might agree to the presence of the IDF in the West Bank after the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“We are ready to have peace on the basis of international legitimacy and the road map, which we have accepted, as well as the Arab Peace Initiative,” Abbas said. “But when a Palestinian state is established, it would have no Israeli presence in it.”

The PA president criticized Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and accused him of placing obstacles on the road to peace.

“He who prefers settlements over peace is responsible for the obstacles to peace,” he added.

“If he really was interested in peace, he would have at least preferred peace to settlements.”

Abbas accused the Israeli government of “deception” with the purpose of blaming the Palestinians for the current impasse in the peace talks. He also criticized the US administration for failing to put pressure on Israel to stop the construction in the settlements and east Jerusalem.

“The US administration has tried to stop the settlements, but Netanyahu refused,” he said. “We know that there’s a clear American position, but these days we don’t hear it any more. We hope we will hear it in the future.”

Abbas said that the PA has presented in writing to the US its position regarding all the core issues, but has still not heard Israel’s reply.

“All the final-status issues must be solved according to international resolutions,” he said. “All these issues will be resolved at the negotiating table, and this includes the issue of the refugees, which Israel tried to get rid of, but to no avail.”

On Friday night, Abbas met in Bethlehem with members of the tiny Christian community in the Gaza Strip who received permission from Israel to travel to the West Bank for Christmas.

Abbas expressed hope that his Fatah faction and Hamas would be able to resolve their differences so that the Gaza Strip would be part of the future Palestinian state. He also voiced hope that he would be able to travel to the Gaza Strip in the near future.

Abbas hailed Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador, which have recognized a Palestinian state with the 1967 borders. He said that the Palestinians were now hoping that other countries, especially the EU, Russia, Canada, the US and Japan, would follow suit and declare their recognition of a Palestinian state.

“The whole world is now with us,” Abbas said. “These countries have recognized us because they love peace and want to support peace.”