Monday, January 28, 2013

Gatestone Update :: Malcolm Lowe: "Palestine" as a Source of International Dysfunction, and more



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"Palestine" as a Source of International Dysfunction

by Malcolm Lowe
January 28, 2013 at 5:00 am
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The world heritage program of UNESCO, which was a mechanism for driving governments to preserve valuable sites, has become a mechanism for their neglect. There is no plan for the Church of the Nativity, and the Palestinian Authority is relieved of the obligation to formulate one. The state of the church will deteriorate precisely because it has been registered as a world heritage site.
The phenomenon of "Palestine" is becoming a misfortune for any international institution in which it crops up. This is because those institutions are governed by councils whose members are states. Whenever "Palestine" is on the agenda, these states vote according to the policies of their respective governments, regardless of any principles that are supposed to guide the institution in question.
The oldest example is of course UNWRA. Whereas all other refugee problems in the world are dealt with by UNHCR, which seeks to reduce the numbers of refugees, Palestinian refugees are in the hands of UNWRA, whose function is to multiply their numbers.
The most recent example is the recognition of "Palestine" as a non-member state by the General Assembly of the United Nations. In reality, there is an independent state of Hamasistan in Gaza and a semi-independent fiefdom of Abbasistan (aka the Palestinian Authority, PA) in the West Bank. For years they have had nothing in common, apart from the distant aspiration of destroying Israel.
According to Palestinian reports, the latest attempted reconciliation between the respective leaders was also ineffective: "Each side… is happy with the status quo." To call Gaza and the West Bank collectively "Palestine" is an anachronism. This is why "Palestine" will be written here in inverted commas.
Yes, both Gaza and the West Bank contain people who call themselves "Palestinians," but by "Palestine" they mean the whole area, including Israel. So the continuing babble about a "two-state solution," Israel and Palestine, when the three-state solution has already arrived, is simply befuddling minds worldwide.
Leaving those examples aside for a moment, let us examine a case that reveals how "Palestine"-driven confusion is ruining one of the better-run UN institutions. It is the recent decision of the governing council of UNESCO to recognize the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as a world heritage site.
Unfortunately, the nature of the issue was obscured by the behavior of the governments of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Both of them treated such recognition as a trophy to be hung on the wall and gazed at with admiration. In fact, it is nothing of the kind. On the contrary, it consists of a severe obligation imposed upon the government responsible for the site.
As to which government that would mean, the answer is unambiguous: it could only be the government in Ramallah, since Bethlehem lies in Area A of the West Bank, the administration of which Israel relinquished to the PA rule long ago. UNESCO's rules oblige it to register a site under an entity that controls the site.
For instance, UNESCO agreed to Jordan's request to register the Old City of Jerusalem in 1981, although only one state in the world, Pakistan, had ever recognized Jordanian sovereignty in Jerusalem. What counted for UNESCO was not international recognition but rather that in 1981 the Jordanian Waqf was still permitted by Israel to run affairs on the Temple Mount; thus Jordan was a relevant party. In adopting the proposal, however, UNESCO insisted that "nothing in the present decision, which is aimed at the safeguarding of the cultural heritage of the Old City of Jerusalem, shall in any way affect the relevant United Nations resolutions and decisions, in particular the relevant Security Council resolutions on the legal status of Jerusalem."
The issue, then, was whether the Ramallah government could fulfill the obligation demanded by UNESCO's rules. Specifically, it had to convince the secretariat of UNESCO that it had a comprehensive plan for the maintenance of the church, for ensuring its accessibility to visitors, etc.
The UNESCO Secretariat does not take those decisions on its own; it commissions other expert bodies to evaluate such plans. In this instance, the body chosen was the International Commission on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), which was well-acquainted with the West Bank, since it was already involved in the preservation of other sites there. In its comprehensive report, ICOMOS urged refusal to recognize the Church of the Nativity as a world heritage site because the PA had totally failed to fulfill the necessary requirements.
UNESCO provides for two paths to recognition as a world heritage site: the normal path and the emergency path. The normal path, as mentioned, requires the government controlling the site to submit a comprehensive plan satisfying all kinds of criteria. ICOMOS ruled that the PA had made no serious attempt whatsoever to formulate such a plan; it had not even supplied an adequate description of the site. ("No detailed plans of these complexes have been provided.")
It is worth reading the whole ICOMOS report in order to grasp the abysmal incompetence of the PA officials. Paragraph after paragraph ends with a statement that essential information was missing.
Indeed, the PA had barely pretended to have such a plan. Rather, it had bet upon the emergency path, according to which a site can be recognized even without a plan if it is in serious danger. The PA claimed that "the Israeli occupation" (which ended in Bethlehem in 1995) was imperiling the site. ICOMOS dismissed all that; it noted that there had been a problem of a leak in the roof of the church, but the roof had been repaired adequately by Israel before it handed over Bethlehem to Palestinian control.
So the agenda of the Council of UNESCO contained a recommendation, based on the ICOMOS report, that recognition of the Church of the Nativity be deferred until the PA came up with an adequate comprehensive plan. Nevertheless, the member states voted for recognition by a majority of 13-6. That is, there is no plan for the site and the PA is relieved of the obligation to formulate one.
ICOMOS had concluded: "ICOMOS considers that the main threats to the property are lack of conservation of the Church of the Nativity and possibly lack of maintenance and repair of the wider complex. Largely unregulated tourism and development pressures are combining to destroy key elements of the urban fabric that provides the context for the Church and monasteries and to impact on its spiritual qualities." The decision of the Council of UNESCO means that nothing will be done about these problems, since the PA has no further interest in the matter. The state of the church will deteriorate precisely because it has been registered as a world heritage site.
But the damage does not stop here. The ICOMOS report notes that the PA has further schemes in mind: "The nomination dossier states that a second nomination will include the Historic Town of Bethlehem, which forms the Buffer Zone for the current nomination, and that further nominations could include the Historic Town of Beit Sahour, the Shepherds' Field, Beit Sahour, and Mar Saba Monastery in the Desert to the east. The link between these sites will be their association with the story of the birth and life of Jesus."
This, too, was rejected out of hand by ICOMOS. "The World Heritage Committee has indicated on several occasions that the link between component sites of a serial nomination should not be one person." We may assume, however, that when the time comes round the Council of UNESCO will accept any further requests in the name of "Palestine."
Thus the UNESCO Council has driven a horse and carriage through the whole process of approving world heritage sites. Other states can now use this precedent for demanding recognition of sites without any plan. The world heritage program of UNESCO, which was a mechanism for driving governments to preserve valuable sites, has become a mechanism for their neglect.
Non-member states recognized by the UN General Assembly can apply to enter other UN bodies. So "Palestine" can be expected to wreak similar havoc in them too. It is enough to recall how the UN mechanisms for investigating human rights violations have been clogged up by repetitive debates about "Palestine," while all the world's major systematic violators of human rights rarely reach the agenda, let alone incur condemnation.
As for UNWRA, its follies have been exposed afresh by a series of articles in the Fall 2012 issue of the Middle East Quarterly. But there is one looming folly that nobody has noticed. According to UNWRA rules, refugee status is bequeathed in the male line to all descendants, even if none of the mothers had that status. Sooner or later, it will be urged that restricting this status to patrilineal descent violates the rights of women. Then not just one but any of your eight great-grandparents will be able to make you a Palestinian refugee. Those rules, by the way, allow various sorts of persons who have some connection to a Palestinian refugee to register for UNWRA services even without being refugees themselves. Moreover, women's rights is an area where much commendable activity is currently going on among the Palestinians; the pages of Al-Quds constantly feature such initiatives. So there is great potential here for UNWRA to expand even further.
An elaborate "Palestine" folly (71 pages) in another field was the advisory opinion on Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, issued by the International Court of Justice in The Hague in July 2004. The court insisted (section 69) that it could call Israel's security barrier a "wall" throughout this document, despite acknowledging (section 82) that: "The approximately 180 kilometres of the complex completed or under construction... included some 8.5 kilometres of concrete wall. These are generally found where Palestinian population centres are close to or abut Israel (such as near Qalqiliya and Tulkarm or in parts of Jerusalem)."
The US judge on the court, Thomas Buergenthal, argued cogently in his minority report that the court should have declined to consider the case and that the parts of Israel's security barrier that ran inside the West Bank were not ipso facto illegal. The other fourteen judges declared that that those parts were illegal, claimed that Israel's right to self-defense could in no way justify them, and called for their quick demolition. With the exception of Judge Pieter Kooijmans of the Netherlands, they also called upon "all states" to "ensure compliance by Israel."
Fortunately, the view of the court was generally ignored. But let us note what the distinguished judges were trying to prevent. The security barrier became a major factor in ending the plague of Palestinian suicide bombers, doubtless saving hundreds of lives and thousands more from severe injuries. Tourists started to flow back not just to Israel but also to the Palestinian areas. In Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Arab-owned hotels reopened and Arab merchants were back in business. Many thousands of Arabs employed in the Israeli tourist industry also returned to work. The restoration of security enabled Israel to dismantle gradually most of the network of checkpoints in the West Bank, facilitating the recent rapid growth of the Palestinian economy All this and more because the court's zeal for "justice" and "Palestine" was disregarded.
The economic revival in the West Bank, alas, is another example of how "Palestine" is exempt from normal rules. It is fueled largely by foreign donors. An employee of one of them has assured me that eighty percent of the economic activity there is donor-dependent.
That the percentage is large is confirmed by a comparison between Israel and "Palestine" in respect of trade with the EU. The European Commission's figures for Israel show that in 2011 bilateral trade in goods amounted to €29.4 billion and that in 2010 (the latest figures available) bilateral trade in services was some €7 billion, with a balance in Europe's favor of €4.2 billion and about €1 billion respectively. Also in 2010, EU firms had invested €5.3 billion in Israel but Israeli ones had invested a whopping €22.3 in the EU. The figures for the "Occupied Palestinian Territory" are merely €0.1 billion imported from the EU and next to nothing exported to it. For that matter, UN data record that in 2009 the total imports and exports of the "Occupied Palestinian Territory" amounted to about $3.5 billion (77.6% from Israel) and $0.5 billion (89.4% to Israel) respectively.
On the other hand, according to EU data: "From 1994 to the end of 2011, the European Union committed approximately €5 billion in assistance to the Palestinians through various geographical and thematic instruments." As for last year: "Early in 2012, the European Union frontloaded €156 million for the Palestinian Authority's recurrent expenditures. Further allocations in 2012 included €11 million for the private sector reconstruction, €25 million for infrastructure development in Gaza and Area C, €27.5 million for institution-building projects in support of the Palestinian Authority and a further €8 million for projects in East Jerusalem."
To all that, add money from individual European governments, money supplied via NGOs, European support for UNWRA and who knows what else. With so much money flowing in as gifts, "Palestine" can survive without export industries. It is not that individual Palestinian workers are lazy. The Jewish settlements in the West Bank pay thousands of Palestinian workers good wages for work in their industries. The latest gripe of 22 pro-Palestinian NGOs, including Christian Aid and the British Methodist Church, is that those industries in the settlements export far more to the EU than Palestinian-owned ones.
Nor is the problem that Palestinians have no initiative. In other countries – including Arab ones and also Israel – there are Palestinian millionaires. Quite a number came back to the country after the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s, but they gradually left on account of the incompetence and corruption of the PA. Take "Bethlehem 2000" as an example. This was an ambitious plan, funded by many countries, to upgrade the town in time for the millennium. Streets were dug up everywhere to lay down new infrastructure. Palestinians from abroad invested in new tourist facilities. The scheme was completed in the middle of 2000. That same October, the PA under Arafat embarked on the second intifada and tourism collapsed. End of story.
Despite the flow of foreign money, the PA budget is now once again on the verge of collapse. It should surprise nobody. On the one hand, the PA pays salaries to Fatah members living under the government of Hamasistan and to Palestinian murderers in Israeli prisons. On the other hand, it has failed to induce Palestinians to accept normal modes of taxation.
The PA hardly has any tax income except for duties on imports collected by Israel on its behalf. Just lately, the Israeli government decided to deduct from those payments the money owed by the PA for electricity that it buys from Israel and resells to individual Palestinians. One would have expected the PA to react by trying to collect the vast sums outstanding in unpaid Palestinian electricity bills. Instead, the PA thereupon announced that all of those debts to itself would be canceled!
With that sort of behavior it is no wonder that that the PA is chronically bankrupt. Instead of making the effort to run its own financial affairs properly, it calls on donors to bail it out again and again. And not without reason. Last September, for instance, the EU promised to double its aid package to the PA.
Now, the World Bank is wont to issue periodic statements ascribing the precarious nature of the Palestinian economy to Israeli checkpoints and the like. In fact, the World Bank should rather be rebuking itself and all the donors for turning the Palestinians into a nation of international beggars by pouring funds upon them irrespective of their collective behavior. A cardinal rule of all international aid is to avoid donor-dependence, but the Palestinians have been given an unlimited waiver.
"Palestine"-inspired dysfunction is also to be found in the secretive European financing of pro-Palestinian NGOs, as NGO Monitor has conclusively demonstrated, and it is becoming rampant in those churches which have foolishly decided to import the Arab-Israeli conflict into their structures. Church assemblies fight over "Palestine" year by year, parishes are split and members leave in despair. Here the biggest culprits are the World Council of Churches and charities such as Christian Aid. The systematic mendacity of their propagandistic activities was recently exposed in a penetrating analysis by Denis MacEoin. But the point need not be pursued further here. See what I have written elsewhere (and about the pernicious Kairos Palestine Document) and especially the excellent studies of Dexter van Zile in CAMERA and in the New English Review. The Protestant Consultation on Israel and the Middle East was recently founded with the aim of restoring sanity in this area.
Finally, let us look at the source of all that dysfunction: the nature of the PA itself. In light of recognition by the UN General Assembly, Mahmoud Abbas has proclaimed that the PA will henceforth go under the name "State of Palestine." The appropriate name is rather "Abbasistan."
Abbas was President of the PA for exactly four years: from January 2005 to January 2009. For an additional four years, as no elections were held, he has continued to style himself president. That is, even if elections had been held and he had been reelected, his second term would now be over. The PA parliament stopped meeting years ago; new elections for it are also long overdue. In 2012, local elections were held in the West Bank; the winners were in many cases opponents of Abbas within Fatah.
Thus Abbasistan is indeed ruled by one self-appointed boss, Abbas, assisted by his two sons, various personal appointees and a multiplicity of security services. But the scope of his rule is limited: the foreign governments who finance the Palestinians have set up, wherever possible, their own mechanisms of operation so as not to lose money by giving it to the PA directly. Abbas does make numerous speeches, take trips abroad and receive pro-Palestinian delegations.
Whether Abbas wants to negotiate with Israel is moot. More likely, as I have explained elsewhere, he wants recognition as a state on the pre-1967 armistice lines without making any commitment to Israel, in order then to pursue the next item on the Palestinian agenda: the "right of return" for Palestinian refugees. But negotiations with him are pointless in any case, since his word is not seen as binding by those other factions in the West Bank, not to speak of Gaza.
Abbasistan is by far the biggest employer in the Palestinian areas. At least its schoolteachers, one might hope, are doing something useful in this ever-spreading bureaucracy. But Palestinian education is also dysfunctional. Whether they are studying Arabic, history or geography, children hear the same false messages: the Palestinians are Arabs who have lived here since time immemorial; the Jews have no connection with the land and there was never a Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount; Jesus was a Palestinian; the Palestinian Christians and Muslims have always lived together in joyous harmony; there was no Muslim conquest but rather the Christians welcomed the Muslims as liberators, and so on and so on.
Above all, children learn that the ultimate mission of Palestinians, to which all else must be subordinated, is the "right of return" for Palestinian refugees, the removal of the Jews to other countries and the expansion of Palestinian rule to the whole land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. To pass the Palestinian matriculation examination, the Tawjihi, youngsters are required to learn their textbooks by heart and reproduce sections of them verbatim on demand.
Here is where the dysfunction begins. It has already spread to various international institutions, and more are on the agenda.
Related Topics:  Malcolm Lowe

Britain's Little Anti-Semitism Problem

by Douglas Murray
January 28, 2013 at 4:45 am
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How bad must things get before people notice that their country has an anti-Semitism problem?
How bad must things get before people notice that their country has an anti-Semitism problem?
Three striking stories from recent days go some way to demonstrating that though Britain may not admit it, we have a problem.
Earlier this month the Israeli writer Caroline Glick came to London to take part in one of the Intelligence Squared debates. Intelligence Squared is a smart, up-market debating forum which attracts world-class speakers and a somewhat upper-echelon audience. The motion put before the audience on this occasion was: "Israel is destroying itself with its settlement policy. If settlement expansion continues Israel will have no future."
There are good places and reasons to debate Israeli settlement policy. But it is, to say the least, questionable to make the one Israel debate in a debate series a discussion proposing that it is settlements that threaten Israel's future. Rather than (plucking them off the top of my head) the promise of nuclear-bomb-owning Mullahs or say (admittedly old story) the seven-decade long refusal of any leading Palestinian to recognise the Jewish State? There is something obscene about presenting a debate in such terms. But debates need to be punchy and provocative. They also need to involve open minds. What Glick and the other Israeli guest on her side – Danny Dayan – had to witness was very far from a demonstration of that.
Glick rightly saw that the case for Israel needed to be made. But against her and Dayan were two young darlings of the London anti-Israel establishment. The undeservedly arrogant J-Street founder Daniel Levy enjoys a following in such London circles because of his father (Lord Levy)'s money. Meanwhile, the other member proposing the anti-Israel motion, William Sieghart, is a member of a prominent London family who did poorly in the family brains distribution and so has ended up promoting Hamas. Both are the sort of rich, privileged figures who mistake their own ignorance and stupidity for profundity with daring. Their careers are spent providing respectability to those who would erase the Jewish people.
Unfortunately, and predictably, the smart London audience sided overwhelmingly with the local idiots, heckling and shouting down points made by the visiting team. The hostility – heckling, booing and more – shown towards Glick and Dayan was unique and appalling. At the end the vote was 5 to 1 in favour of Levy and Sieghart.
In a searing response to what she had seen, Glick penned the article 'Bye-bye London', writing:
I can say without hesitation that I hope never to return to Britain. I actually don't see any point. Jews are targeted by massive anti-Semitism of both the social and physical varieties. Why would anyone Jewish want to live there?
Of course this is the sort of thing that is reacted to angrily by most British Jewish spokespeople. They claim such sentiments are "over-the-top," "unhelpful" or some other pseudo Foreign Office phrase.
Such panjandrums also point to the "successes" they have. These routinely include, for instance, the numbers of prominent politicians and "faith leaders" who take part in Holocaust Memorial Day events. Thus events around this year's Holocaust Memorial Day have been particularly instructive. Take the scandal which enveloped one Liberal Democrat MP in the days before this year's commemoration.
Until last week absolutely nobody had heard of David Ward MP. He is one of those one-man walking demonstrations of the need to have fewer MPs. But last week he became a minor figure when the ballsy "Commentator" website picked up on the fact that Ward had had a "Jihad-Jenny" moment. These are moments named after the disgraced Liberal Democrat peer, and former MP, Baroness Jenny "Boom" Tonge, whose track-record of slurs and libels against Jews and Israel mounted so significantly over many years, that finally even the Liberal Democrat party ended up saying she had gone too far.
Anyhow, in his "Jihad Jenny" moment, Mr. Ward was recorded saying:
Having visited Auschwitz twice – once with my family and once with local schools – I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.
Now Mr. Ward had a number of ways of explaining himself when a backlash against his comments got underway. But among them he explained that he had gone to Holocaust Memorial Day events in the past. Some people saw this as the anti-Semite's version of the old "some of my best friends are black" defense, famously made by racists caught on the back foot. It may, however, signify something else. Mr Ward was careful to stress that he had indeed taken something away from such events. And there is a serious problem: You may get someone to jump the low bar of attending a "commemoration" of the Holocaust. But they may still take from it – as Mr Ward clearly did – a profoundly anti-Jewish message. In a society that increasingly equates Jews with Nazis, it does not matter how many Holocaust "commemorations" someone has been pushed into going to. The culture has gone rancid.
The Sunday Times cartoon by Gerald Scarfe.
This was further demonstrated by the fact that this year on Holocaust Memorial Day itself, the Sunday Times of London – bastion of the moderate center of British politics – ran as its principal cartoon a characteristically witless "satire" by Gerald Scarfe. With the caption "Will cementing peace continue," the cartoon depicted a thuggish-looking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu building a wall made of bricks, blood and Palestinians. Perhaps Mr Scarfe attended the Intelligence Squared debate?
What these three things have in common is now unmistakeable -- as are the conclusions we must draw from them.
Jews will continue to live in Britain, and in the main, continue to live perfectly peaceful and pleasant lives. But there will be a price. And that price will be the volume of their support for Israel. For the "decent" mainstream has made a decision: Israelis are now what the Nazis were then. The Israelis are the easy target for needed outrage, the focal-center of pretended morality and the diversionary enemy in an era where the real problems seem too large to tackle.
Naturally there will be enough people to continue for a while to demand the odd complaint about this or that. They may manage to force a backtrack here and there. But these will be forced not because anybody has been persuaded of the complete wrong-headedness of what they have said – nor because they have realized the unbelievable wickedness and inaccuracy of their claims – but simply because the "timing" may have been inappropriate, or it should not have been said in this way, or on this or that day, or to these or those people. What all these events have in common is that they demonstrate that the friends of truth are losing. Any wins on these terms are skirmish wins in a war which has turned against the Jewish people.
Related Topics:  United Kingdom  |  Douglas Murray

Hamas's Talibanization of the Gaza Strip

by Khaled Abu Toameh
January 28, 2013 at 4:00 am
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The PLO's Department for Culture and Information said that the Hamas campaign was aimed at creating a Taliban-style entity. Foreign activists who continue to voice solidarity with Hamas need to know the are complicit in the effort to establish a repressive and brutal entity that has no respect for freedoms.
Those who thought that Hamas would ever establish a modern and liberal regime in the Gaza Strip received another reminder this week of how the radical Islamist movement is pursuing its effort to create a Taliban-style entity in the territory that has been under its control since 2007.
The reminder came in the form of a decision taken by the Al-Aqsa University administration in the Gaza Strip to force female students to dress in accordance with Islamic teachings.
This means that all female students would be required to wear the hijab or niqab which cover their heads and faces.
This latest measure is part of a Hamas campaign aimed at "inculcating [Islamic] values and virtues" in the Gaza Strip, Hamas officials explained.
As part of this campaign, Hamas last week imposed a ban on low-waist trousers, Western-style haircuts and tight gowns.
The decision to ban low-waist trousers and Western-style haircuts is directed against young Palestinian men in the Gaza Strip, who have apparently been exposed to Western fashions thanks to television and the Internet.
Adel al-Hour, a senior Hamas official, said that his movement was concerned over the spread of low-waist trousers among both men and women in the Gaza Strip. "This phenomenon is alien to the values and traditions of Palestinian society," he explained.
The Hamas official said that the campaign to enforce Islamic values and virtues was especially designed to "highlight the negative impact of the growing phenomenon of women who dress immodestly in order to highlight their charms."
Hamas, he added, is also strongly opposed to puff hairstyles that have become popular among young men and women in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas's latest campaign follows a series of restrictions imposed by the Islamist movement on women in the Gaza Strip over the past few years. These restrictions include a ban on smoking the nargila [waterpipe] in public places, forcing female lawyers to wear the hijab during their appearances in court and prohibiting boutiques from using female model mannequins.
But while these decisions have not been challenged by most Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the PLO's Department for Culture and Information said that the Hamas campaign was aimed at creating a Taliban-style entity.
Pointing out that the measures would have "grave political and social implications on the components of Palestinian society," the PLO said that Hamas's efforts to enforce Sharia laws "violated Islam's social and legal values and the principle of non-coercion.
Hamas, of course, is not going to listen to the PLO and stop its efforts to turn the Gaza Strip into a radical Islamist state.
Hamas feels confident enough because it is well aware of the fact that its campaign enjoys the support and sympathy of most Palestinians, not only in the Gaza Strip, but also in PLO-controlled parts of the West Bank.
Just last week, arsonists torched three restaurants in the West Bank town of Bir Zeit, a traditional stronghold of secular Palestinians, after accusing the owners of selling alcohol and allowing young men and women to sit together.
Under the current circumstances, there is nothing that could be done to stop the Talibanization of the Gaza Strip. What is happening in the Gaza Strip is one of the by-products of the so-called Arab Spring, which has seen the rise of Islamists to power in a number of Arab countries.
It is nice to see the PLO denouncing Hamas for its effort to enforce Sharia laws in the Gaza Strip. But then the PLO should be asking itself why its leaders are continuing to seek unity with a fundamentalist movement that has endorsed Taliban's tactics and lifestyle?
Instead of seeking unity with Hamas, the PLO leadership should be making a bigger effort to prevent radical Islam from extending its control to the West Bank. The PLO can achieve this goal only if it continues with its current policy of conducting security coordination with Israel.
Meanwhile, foreign activists who continue to arrive in the Gaza Strip to voice solidarity with Hamas need to know that they are complicit in the effort to establish a repressive and brutal entity that has no respect for freedoms and despises Western culture and values.
Related Topics:  Khaled Abu Toameh

Israel's Elections: Going Forward

by Yaakov Lappin
January 28, 2013 at 3:00 am
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Lapid is expected to support Netanyahu's main focus -- stopping the Iranian nuclear program.
The Israeli elections last week saw a meteoric rise of a centrist party, and disproved near-universal forecasts of a rise of the religious right.
What do last week's elections say about Israel's future defense policies?
Israelis returned Netanyahu to the prime minister's seat, meaning that the electorate would like him to continue to steer the country through this chaotic and dangerous era. The elections results also showed that voters backed Netanyahu's hard work on tackling the Iranian threat, but remained deeply concerned over domestic issues, which Netanyahu's last coalition of ultra-Orthodox and nationalist parties failed to address.
Lapid, located on the center-right of the political map, is no dove. He is pragmatic; he does not hold ideological or religious objections to an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. He has stated, rather, that Israel has no peace partner.
At the same time, Lapid and his party have expressed displeasure over the fact that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has been able to score victories over Israel in the diplomatic arena. Lapid has therefore called for reopening talks with Abbas, if only to prove Israel's willingness to pursue a peace plan.
Lapid has also advocated a unilateral dismantling of far-flung outposts in the West Bank, while consolidating the major settlement blocs -- with or without a peace agreement.
On the most critical question of all -- whether Israel should launch a military strike on Iran -- Lapid has limited himself to calling on Netanyahu to do a better job of coordinating Israel's position with that of the US.
He expressed concern over the dysfunctional state of relations between Netanyahu and President Barack Obama, and the ramifications of poor relations on future efforts to stop Iran.
In all likelihood, Lapid and his new party will join Prime Minister Netanyahu in forming the next coalition. If he joins the government, Lapid is expected to support Netanyahu's main focus -- stopping the Iranian nuclear program.
How did Yair Lapid and his Yesh Atid [There Is a Future] party -- whose members have never sat in parliament -- overnight become the second largest political force in Israel?
The answer resides in the quiet and growing alarm mainstream Israelis are feeling over the way the country's resources are diverted to serve narrow minority interests at the majority's expense.
Lapid merely pointed out problems that were known to all, but also promised to repair the glaring flaws, while enjoying a clean-cut image, free of the political baggage that had tarred the old guard in the eyes of much of the electorate.
Lapid's campaign highlighted the fact that middle class Israeli families -- the engine of the country's economy -- are struggling to make ends meet, yet significant funds are being diverted to support a parallel ultra-Orthodox society, which has its own education system. Many of those who study at ultra-Orthodox seminaries do not end up joining the workforce, and remain dependent on state subsidies.
While a majority of secular and Orthodox national-religious Israelis risk their lives to serve in the military and protect their families, most ultra-Orthodox do not (although a growing number are.)
Lapid's proposed solutions: A universal draft to the army or civilian national service for all Israelis, and limiting the number of state-sponsored seminary students to 400 (the current number of students is 60,000).
Lapid has also called for a change to Israel's proportional representation system, to decrease the number of political parties, thereby limiting the ability of small parties to extort special privileges from ruling coalitions.
Israelis are also outraged by economic oligopolies, which are inflating prices of basic commodities, as well as the failure of past governments to protect citizens from exploitative corporations. The only exception to this is the outgoing communications minister, Moshe Kahlon, who reformed regulations and introduced new competition into the mobile phone industry, resulting in plummeting prices, and as a result became a national hero.
A significant numbers of hardworking Israeli families are in perpetual debt, while others -- due to the inflated housing prices as a result of the state owning 93% of all lands, as well as bureaucratic red tape slowing down the construction process -- are unable even to dream of owning their own home.
The old guard of Israeli politics is perceived as being out of touch, and tinged by cronyism, as well as by apathy to the common person.
Neither foreign nor domestic media outlets were able to identify these undercurrents prior to the elections, but Lapid, previously a high profile newspaper columnist, talk show host, and news presenter, did.
While the media was enchanted by the fanfare surrounding the pro-settlements Bayit Yehudi [Jewish Home] party and its charismatic leader, Naftali Bennett, Lapid was appearing on live television programs with his political rivals, going head-to-head with leaders of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, and driving his message home.
He also made good use of Facebook and YouTube further to promote his points; he reached many potential voters at little cost, and tapped into their worries and frustrations.
Lapid made headlines by producing a diagram of a fuse bomb, in reference to the diagram produced by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu at the United Nations to highlight the dangers of Iran's nuclear program. Mimicking the visual aid, Lapid, instead of warning of a nuclear Iran, showed his audience how close the middle class is to collapse -- a development, he argued, as serious a threat to Israel as any security threat.
Many members of the public, as the election results showed, apparently agreed. Lapid's election success is a reflection of the widespread view among Israelis: that external threats do not mean that the country's house should not be put in better order.
Related Topics:  Israel  |  Yaakov Lappin

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