How Jews Living in West Bank Affect the Palestinians

We hear so much noise about the areas known historically as Judea, Samaria and Benyamin which were recently retagged as the West Bank in order to make them sound less Jewish. We hear about the need for the Palestinian Authority to be granted full autonomy of an independent nation with complete control over this West Bank as well as Gaza. Part of the problem with this presentation is that the Palestinians have two completely separate, mutually exclusive, actively competitive, viciously antagonistic governing agents with Hamas controlling and ruling over Gaza while the Palestinian Authority Fatah organization controlling and ruling over Area A the West Bank. Hamas is led by Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh while the Palestinian Authority leader is President Mahmoud Abbas. Since the two factions split after the Hamas violent coup which placed them in control of Gaza in June 2007, all efforts to reunite the two groups have utterly failed. Part of the problem is that Hamas is based in Islamic religious governance while the Palestinian Authority is aligned with Fatah which is secular socialist governance and such philosophies are very much similar to oil and water, they do not mix well. The power struggle between these two groups drips with the avarice and hatreds such that the resultant atmosphere is not conducive to healthy economic policies therefore depressing economic growth potentials due to crippling corruption. The situation has resulted in totally failed governance in almost every category which has become completely reliant on foreign generosity lurching from one financial catastrophe to the next. Such poor governance constantly leads to the need to plead to the world for emergency funding. This has resulted in high unemployment for the Palestinian Arab people living under the direct controlling rule of either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority in either Gaza or Area A in the West Bank. Yet there is one group who has 100% employment as the Palestinian Authority places every Palestinian terrorist or criminal who has been sentenced to prison in Israel, whether they are members in the PLO, Fatah, Hamas, or any other terror related group, where they receive some of the highest salaries which are directly proportional to the number of Israelis they were able to maim and murder. This would almost be the guaranteed condition over the entire areas of Gaza and the West Bank should the entirety of these areas be placed under solely Palestinian governance.

 

Should anybody desire to find a more optimistic and promising atmosphere where the overwhelming majority of the people are employed and making significantly higher salaries resulting in a higher standard of living, one need not leave the West Bank, one simply needs to visit the areas where modern governance encourages economic ventures and the size and scope of government is limited. These areas are not under either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinians living in these areas are largely employed with comparatively no unemployment when compared to the Palestinians living in Area A. The major difference in the condition for these Palestinians is they live among Israeli settlers. Much of the world decries the supposed conditions under which Palestinians are forced to live in areas where they share the lands with the Israeli settler who are mostly Jewish. There are so numerous different origins of the Israelis living in Samaria and Judea that any attempt to stereotype them as just religious Jews is not only pointless but in complete denial of reality. The Jews who have chosen to live in what the world refers to as the West Bank consist of religious and secular Jews, Israeli Arabs both Christian and Muslim, Secular Jews, Zionist Jews, Jews seeking a more relaxed atmosphere in which to live, farmers, people working locally as well as many whose work is in Tel Aviv who commute, IDF soldiers, physicians, nurses, computer programmers, entrepreneurs, and people from every walk of life one can find. There is a major Israeli University in Ariel called, oddly enough, Ariel University.

 

But what is most interesting is the completely impossible situation under which the Jews and Palestinian Arabs face living close to each other with all the serious relationship problems which are the constant fare in the mainstream media coverage of the Jewish settlers living beyond the Green Line. For the best example of how all of this has an effect, all one need do is visit Ariel University, Barkan Industrial Park, Shahak Industrial Park, and the other industrial parks, farms, vineyards, wineries, business parks, and other businesses and witness a bit of the truth about the Israeli controlled areas of Judea and Samaria. What becomes evident very quickly is that there is no distinction between Jews, Muslims, Christians and those of other religions, Jews and Arabs, Asian ancestry and European ancestry, or religious and secular. Approximately half of the employees along with their supervisors and management in both large and small industrial enterprises are West Bank Arabs employed there right next to West Bank Jews. The same goes for students and professors to a great extent at Ariel University. Throughout the main settlement areas of the West Bank the Jews and Palestinian Arabs live and work together in harmony without any trouble, violence, oppressions or any of the myriad of misconceptions that spring from a media more interested in forcing the issue of the oppressor Jews dispossessing the unfortunate Arab victims of Jewish hegemony. The fact that the Palestinian Arabs who live and work among the Jewish settlers in Judea and Samaria have a much higher standard of living is a little secret of which the mainstream media refuses to inform the world. The fact that the rule is cooperation and an improved life for those Palestinians fortunate to reside in the developed mixed Jewish and Arab areas and that the terrorism and violence are the exception must be suppressed as there exists an entire industry based upon the Jewish oppressions of the Arabs. The problem is people living and working in harmony just does not sell newspapers or newscasts anywhere near as well as explosions and violence. The real truth is that the standard of living for the Palestinian Arabs throughout Gaza and the West Bank was among the fastest growing GDP of anywhere in the world from 1973 through 1992. Then, starting in 1993 when Yasser Arafat returned and the very same Palestinians were placed in a semi-autonomous self-ruled areas under the Palestinian Authority the GDP and standard of living reversed and has continued to drop ever since. The wonderful and hopeful truth which the media insists does not exist is that where Palestinian Arabs live together in relative harmony and mutual tolerance with Jews in Area C of the West Bank, sharing the advantages of the rule of law and entrepreneurial opportunity live better lives than their Palestinian brothers living in Area A and Gaza where the leadership is under the Palestinian Authority or Hamas which consist of dictatorial regimes. If people throughout the world truly wish the best of possibilities for the Palestinian people, perhaps they would be better able to decide where to place their efforts after taking an actual investigation of the separate Areas in the West Bank and Gaza and ask the Palestinians who reside within and amongst the Jews in Area C and those living in Palestinian autonomous areas of Area A and Gaza and then decide which group lives a more productive and preferred life. Finding the truth would definitely be an eye-opening experience which would likely deliver a viewpoint not covered by the mainstream media and actually actively hidden by the mainstream media.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

World Suffers from Palestine Fever

Last Friday Finland and Denmark became the latest European countries to upgrade the status of the Palestinian Authority diplomatic missions to full-fledged Embassy status placing them on an equal status with every other nation in the world. The Palestinian entity is now treated by the United Nations, UNESCO, many countries, NGOs, many religious organizations as well as their ruling councils and now also by Google as being a real nation despite their glaring deficiencies. The Palestinians have no independent currency, no borders, no established capital city, and the population possesses no individual identity which serves to differentiate them from the surrounding native populations. But why allow such minor items get in the way of granting premature recognition to the Palestinian entity and in the process snub Israel presenting them with what amounts to a preemptive establishment of Palestinian statehood without demanding them to reach an agreement and have an actual treaty with Israel when one can simply forgo such technicalities. I would like to be able to believe that when Mahmoud Abbas has gathered sufficient nations who have granted them equal status as a national state as they have such others as the United States, France, England, China, India, Brazil, Australia, and the rest of the almost two-hundred nations of the United Nations that he will also receive their support in declaring whatever borders he chooses.

 

I can honestly visualize the day coming within a decade when Mahmoud Abbas will stand before the United Nations General Assembly and demand that they resolve to have the member nations to assist in every manner necessary to establish the state of Palestine within its natural borders from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean sea and receiving a standing ovation right before an overwhelming consensus vote affirming his request. This vote would necessitate another vote follow it where the United Nations finally would affirm that it has discussed but never approved before, a vote to rescind the United Nations General Assembly declaration which allowed the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel. Then the world will have chosen to stand behind the Palestinians and enforce their desire to not just form their state within borders sharing the land with Israel, but to form their state in place of and atop the corpse of the state of Israel. Can there be much doubt as to the inevitability of such a ruling when the vote to establish a Palestinian state over the objections and in denial of United Nations Security Council resolutions pertaining to the establishment of said state by the astounding affirmation of one-hundred-thirty-eight votes in favor, nine votes against and forty-one abstentions? And once this precedent has been established, what country would remain safe, independent, and free from being dissolved by a vote of the United Nations that was then used to align all the power of all the world’s militaries against them to erase whatever state fell on the wrong side of the masses who would then hold the powers of fate to thusly destroy any nation they so desired.

 

Would anybody actually be surprised if the United Nations General Assembly once they had established the legitimate power to dissolve any nation that the Non-Aligned Movement groups of one-hundred-twenty member nations and seventeen observer nations would not use their overwhelming majority in the United Nations General Assembly to realign the world in their favor at the expense of those whom they accuse of having oppressed, exploited and pilfered them and their resources by the colonial and imperial nations as well as the industrialized world? The only reason such has not yet been acted upon has been that limitations placed on the powers of the United Nations General Assembly while the main authority and the right and power to resolve for the use of force was reserved solely to the United Nations Security Council. This is much of what has been behind an ever growing demand to reform the Security Council to allow a realignment of those countries holding permanent status, removal of the veto power of the permanent status members allowing them to prevent any action by their simple vote without having to give any reasons, and strip or dilute the powers of the Security Council and transferring many of those powers either exclusively to the General Assembly or at a minimum a share of such powers. Once such a revolutionary reconstruction and redefinition of the powers and responsibilities within the branches of the United Nations has been enacted even should it require a complete rewrite of the United Nations Charter, does anyone really feel safe that this would not lead inevitably to a conflagrative conflict that would envelop the world and leave in its wake a world in ruins with most of its major cities having been laid waste and starvation being the normal state of existence persisting for an indeterminate amount of time while the world attempted to rebuild from the ashes. This would not be the aim or even the desire of those who would initially support dissolving the Jewish state of Israel and replacing it with the twenty-second Arab state established for those claiming to be a separate peoples known as Palestinians, but it would be the eventuality which such inevitably would spawn. That is the one problem when expedience trumps thought, there will always be unexpected consequences hiding in the shadows of the future, and they would often be dire and extremely undesirable. But caution has proven not to be a welcome element when emotions run hot and actions are the result of the moment coming into fruition free of restraining contemplation. I have realized that if you do not think things through before acting you usually find yourself later asking yourself what was I thinking.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

A Lesson from the Holocaust

Today is Holocaust Heroes and Martyrs Remembrance Day in Israel where time is taken to assure that the Holocaust is never forgotten. This year it falls on the 70^th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis where half-starved Jews with almost no weapons other than a few handguns and rifles stood against an entire battalion of the Nazi army and held them at bay for over a month before the entire ghetto was annihilated. This desperate final stand was a response to the planned slaughter of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis which had been scheduled for the first day of Passover in order to celebrate the Jewish holiday of liberation with what the Nazis saw as a celebration of the denial of G0d and the promises to the Jewish People. Throughout the years since the Holocaust there have been many lessons drawn that mainly lead to the one singular goal, the promise Jews must revere and keep to themselves and their posterity, “Never Again!” There has always been one manner of keeping that promise which has always seemed of paramount importance which I will try to explain.

Before the horrors that were the Nazi execution of plans to conquer the world and reshape it in their own image, Germany was the leading country of the modern world with the best minds and most advanced culture. The majority of the world’s leading scientists resided there, especially in the disciplines of physics. Germany was viewed as the new renaissance with benevolent governance under the Weimar Republic. Germany was the leading republic of freedom and thought making their society the envy of many. But there was a problem with this near perfect scene that lay underneath it guaranteeing it would fail in a drastic manner. Germany was suffering under punitive laws placed on her after World War I which undercut her economic health. This eventually led to the printing of monies in order to meet payments levied against the German government. These payments along with large outlays of “investments in the future” led to runaway inflation as the German money became devalued. This led to a cycle which eventually caused unemployment and economic strife which the Nazis promised a solution and blamed it on the outside world and the plotting of those who wished to destroy the German race. Germany had also bought wholesale into the eugenics movement which had blossomed in the United States and spread through Europe. Take all these individual difficulties and social upheavals, shake well, and you do not get a happy ending.

Once in power the Nazis began to implement purity laws which were more about punishing the impure than it was about aggrandizing the pure or master race. This, of course, was not supposed to be possible in the country which a few short years earlier had been the most liberal and socially advanced nation in the history of the world. The overriding thought to many while the initial plots were being enacted by the Nazis was one of, “It cannot happen here,” Nowhere was this denial of reality stronger than in the assimilated Jews of Germany. Many of these Jews had arrived from Russia where they suffered the pogroms under the Czars and then persecution under Stalin and the Communists. Upon their arrival in Germany the Jews tried to assimilate and weave themselves into the German society attempting to be as much like their non-Jewish German neighbors as they could. Assimilation was the answer to pogroms as they happened because the Jews had lived separately from the Russian society preferring to keep amongst themselves. It was the otherness that had caused the pogroms, not the fact that they were Jews. True, there were still some religious Jewish communities which attempted to live apart from the rest of society much as exist today in areas of Europe and the United States. But the Jews in Germany had lived assimilated and integrated into the German society more so than in previous European societies. The Jews lived lives the epitome of, “It cannot happen here.” Yet somehow it happened here in a way beyond anything that had ever come before. One of the first steps taken by the Nazis was to pass laws forbidding the Jews and other undesirables from owning firearms. They went from house to house disarming those determined to be part of the “other” in German society. Yet even this disarming of the Nazis’ future victims did not alarm anybody as they accepted that this was just being done to make society safer by removing guns. It was all done for a better tomorrow and to save the children etc.

I had mentioned that many of these Jews had fled Russia and the Czarist and Communist pogroms. One would tend to believe that these Jews who were but one or at most two generations removed from experiencing the pogroms would have been more sensitive to what befell the Jews starting in Germany and spreading throughout Europe. But what about the Jews from the Russian pogroms, why did they not realize and see the warning signs? Was it because of their separateness? Unlikely as many of the Jews provided needed skills for the Russian people amongst whom they resided. But where had these Russian Jews arrived from? Many of the Russian Jews came to Russia via numerous places throughout Europe which could be traced back to a series of singular events which inevitably nudged and shoved them to Russia. For many of these Jews the previous residence had been Germany, Britain, France, Italy and lastly, Poland. In each and every one of these countries the Jews had faced persecution. One could trace these families’ history simply be tracing where they had faced persecution and managed to get out before the final cleansing and they would flee to the nearest, or sometimes the farthest, safe haven where Jews were not persecuted. This would increase the presence of the Jews in the new country which inevitably led to the next persecution as soon as disease or hard economic times gave way to finding the others who were to blame. This was the coming to fruition of the worst of all curses which were prophesized to inflict the Jewish People. The verse is well known as it is taught in every Jewish Bible study as it is one of the most frightful passages in the Torah.

Leviticus 26:36-38 As for those of you who are left, I will fill their hearts with anxiety in the lands of their enemies. The sound of a driven leaf will frighten them, so that they will flee as one flees from the sword and fall when no one is pursuing. 37 Yes, with no one pursuing they will stumble over each other as if fleeing the sword — you will have no power to stand before your enemies. 38 And among the nations you will perish; the land of your enemies will devour you.

This history of being chased from persecution to persecution where once Jews had fled the country or province in which they were being hunted or even slaughtered as a reaction to times of trouble had one thing common to all of these troubles and persecutions, the Jews were not permitted to own weapons. Originally the laws against owning weapons were applied to entire groups or classes of societies. Only the nobles and those in their employ were permitted weapons even if one could afford such luxuries. Eventually weaponry became affordable and everybody could own them. This is when governments began the real exercise of disarming the citizenry. When the peoples under a ruler were disarmed, it was not always universal. Still, unless everybody was permitted to own weapons, the Jews were usually among those disallowed such privilege. The two most known cases were in Czarist Russia and Nazi Germany where Jews were explicitly disallowed to possess weapons and their homes and businesses searched and all weapons removed some time before the actual persecutions were begun. That is the lesson that the Holocaust and all of the similar persecutions, pogroms, purifications, inquisitions, and other oppressions throughout the ages have taught me, never allow myself to be disarmed and that if such should become the law of the land and I am not living in the Jewish homeland, move. It is that simple and I choose not to even discuss the supposed realities and niceties which always come along with those who will disarm the people before enslaving the people or worse. I forbid my continuing to reside amongst those who would disarm me. It is that simple, a lesson learned.

Beyond the Cusp