Please Name With Whom Israel is to Negotiate?

 

Israel is consistently demanded upon to negotiate an end to the occupation and allow for an Arab Palestinian nation to be defined with the borders to be established along the 1949 Armistice lines with mutually agreed upon exchanges of lands. The question is with whom should Israel negotiate? Mahmoud Abbas refuses to sit with any Israeli delegations approved by the governing coalition though he gladly meets with members of the opposition who hold little power or with anti-Israel and anti-Zionist Jewish NGOs mostly from the United States, Europe and some from within Israel who are mostly if not completely subsidized by European NGOs or even the European Union or individual European national governments. These sit downs often are held in Ramallah and with a large map of what Mahmoud Abbas demands are the actual borders of Palestine which depicts all of Israel including the beaches of Tel Aviv and Nahariya with not even the slimmest segment of Israel left standing. One might inquire as to how Mahmoud Abbas plans on determining the government for anything which results in becoming the Arab state. Will he finally hold elections which would appear to be a normal result of the forming of a new nation? But Abbas has refused to hold elections totally skipping the scheduled 2009 election cycle out of fears that he would be voted from office. He is now in the tenth year of a four year term, which many would probably claim is very telling as to his actual legitimate power. Abbas has declared himself, for all intents and purposes, President for life, and that might not be too much longer should he actually agree to borders and the founding of the state he claims to desire above life itself, which very well might be the price he could pay. Israel would not have anything to do with his sudden demise as there are those from within Hamas, Islamic Jihad, ISIS and even his own Fatah Party, PLO and Palestinian Authority who would permanently remove him from office. It is interesting that Mahmoud Abbas holds those final three leading posts plus now signs documents as President of Palestine. The world has never known a man with so many titles who wields so little power and controls perhaps the few blocks of his fortified office complex. The one truism which should be made known, especially to the Europeans and United States President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry, is that Mahmoud Abbas is a man whose power ranges from the tip of his right hand to the tip of his left hand whenever he stands with his arms extended, and that is the largest area he can claim to control. Abbas is in no position to sign anything which would have any meaning ten minutes after it was signed, if it stood that long.

 

What makes matters even worse is that the leadership of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the other two main power brokers for the time being, have all abdicated their positions to Mahmoud Abbas officially despite retaining every ounce of control they held before the unification of the Arab Palestinian leadership. They claim they are still waiting for the promised elections, the elections which Abbas will never hold unless he has guarantees that he will retain his position whether deserved or not. Do not be too terribly surprised if President Obama with the backing of the European Union and European governments give Abbas a promise that he will be the only person permitted to run for President of any country if he would only reach an agreement and that write in votes will not be considered valid and still he would fear losing. Abbas, with good reason, has become a quivering mass of righteous paranoia which is fully justified after the executions carried out by Hamas at the end of Operation Protective Edge were largely actions utilized on without actual charges or trial simply going from arrest to execution with great efficiency ridding Gaza of numerous opponents and especially members of Fatah or other entities which might have loyalty to Abbas. Mahmoud Abbas got another dose of reality when a diplomatic team was dispatched to Gaza with the intended assignment to gather the name of the Hamas employees who had yet to be included on the paymaster’s roles and thus had not been receiving their paychecks and were less than thrilled over this situation but the team felt so under threat that they cut short their five day assignment after less than twenty-four hours and they never took a step out of their highly guarded hotel suite except to beat a hasty retreat to Ramallah without getting a single name of those Hamas employees. This might seem senseless that Hamas and Islamic Jihad would prevent the Arab Palestinian Authority to garner the names of their own people so they could be included on the payrolls and receive their wages but the reality is Hamas and Islamic Jihad are pushing for the Arab Palestinian Authority to collapse so they can pick up the pieces and be able to force the Europeans to deal through them and thus remove them from any terrorist roles and grant them political power and acceptance as the new chiefs for Israel to reach compromises and eventually reach a peace agreement. This would not be a huge step for most of Europe’s governments and political bodies and NGOs have, unofficially if not outright, removed Hamas from their terror roles and some even Islamic Jihad while the United Nations is set to recognize and legitimize the Palestinian Rights Center (PRC) which is a front group through which Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood operate and granting them full NGO status and all the legitimization which goes along with such. An extensive report on the PRC the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center released concludes that the group is closely affiliated with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood as well that several of its members are terrorists who have fled to Great Britain. Such recognition would confer “full access to UN facilities and participation in debates in New York, Geneva, and Vienna, and, perhaps most significantly, global legitimacy,” as well as all other benefits which are granted with being awarded “official UN badges.”

 

Before one starts to believe that things could not become even more bleak, there are a number of other developments which are peeking just over the horizon. Perhaps the more sinister and having the most dire long range ramifications is the threat to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Imagine a threat to Hamas and Islamic Jihad making the identical claim of being weak willed and not faithful or sufficiently devout in their manner and representation of Allah and having diverted from the true path. This challenge has been made by the only groups who might be believable when accusing Hamas and Islamic Jihad of temerity in purpose and inadequate devotion to the cause of Sharia and furthering Islam, ISIS. We have all likely seen reports which claim that ISIS has made inroads in the Sinai Peninsula and were taking control of much of the area closest to the Israeli border and ignored the fact that such positioning also brought ISIS close to the Egyptian border with Gaza and the heart of Hamas and Islamic Jihad power bases. This places ISIS in the perfect position to infiltrate Gaza in small numbers which would fairly soon become sufficient numbers to cause Hamas and Islamic Jihad great amounts of difficulty if not topple them both absorbing those who showed sufficient zeal for the ISIS cause while dispatching the leadership and others found wanting in spirit or purity mostly be depositing their bodies and heads separately. This might place Israel directly in the ISIS crosshairs or perhaps this would simply be the first stage to taking over the entirety of the Arab Palestinian cause and also making inroads to supplant the Arab Palestinian Authority including Mahmoud Abbas and also finding all of Fatah and PLO members to be wanting in their devotion and dedication to Sharia and Allah as these groups are nationalist secular or mildly Islamic and nowhere near the levels of self-proclaimed devotion and purity of spirit shown by ISIS, by their own proclamations, of course.

 

Such a turn of events would place Israel in a heavily compromised position, or that is what one would believe. What needs to remain in our consideration of the likelihood that ISIS would take control in Ramallah and replace Fatah, the PLO and the Arab Palestinian Authority are forgetting that the IDF and Shin-Bet operate an advanced and capable intelligence gathering network which was evident when preventing a Hamas coup through a general uprising such that in the confusion they could readily replace Mahmoud Abbas by whatever means were required and replacing the entirety of Fatah and the PLO from the upper echelons of the Arab Palestinian Authority. One could rightfully assume that any inroads made by ISIS would also cross the paths of the Israeli intelligence gathering infrastructure and their moves would be carefully monitored until the most critical moment and just before they struck their targets they would find themselves being welcomed to the Israel direct information gathering committee which operates from places unmentioned where discreet methods are employed to extract and glean any pertinent and necessary information which might have ramifications for Israel. ISIS taking the place of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza would not be in the better interests of Israel but there would appear to be little which could be done unless the Egyptians cared to assist in preventing such an event. The problem with this is that Egypt has just as much distaste for Hamas as it does ISIS and thus they may not care which evil takes its place in Gaza. All would come down to what the value of the people in Gaza had as far as Egypt is concerned. Where one might not see the connection immediately, allow us to give a hint on the one overriding reason which may give Egypt reason to act; there are numerous families who have Egyptian backgrounds and originated in Egypt and have large and numerous extended families who remain in Egypt and we all know how important clan ties can be, especially when members of one’s tribal group or even more severe, one’s relative from their clan faces an existential threat such as ISIS, the pressure placed on the government because of such ties could be overwhelming and Egyptian President Sisi may see the situation as an unavoidable necessity to intervene. The next question is whether President Sisi might request, through back channels and discreetly of course, for any assistance and intelligence Israel might desire to provide, especially to further the two nations’ unofficial relations and to have a card to play in the future. The truth is that it would be a dangerous development to have ISIS take a foothold anywhere in the region and their presence in the Sinai Peninsula must be unnerving for President Sisi and a concern for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Sometimes necessity makes for the strangest bedfellows and this is even more the case in the Middle East. Who would believe that Turkey and Saudi Arabia would be working together in Syria while at the same time as Saudi Arabia is working with Egypt in Yemen and Egypt with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States would be working with a silent partner in Israel against Iran who is working with Iraq, southern Iraq, Syria, less and less of Syria daily, and Hezballah in Lebanon as well as securing a naval port for the Russians with an assist likely to be provided by Hezballah. Iran will also need to protect as much of the Alawite areas as necessary which will require transferring some of the IRGC assisting against ISIS in Iraq and station them to fight ISIS in the areas Iran deems of military value, such as the roads from Damascus into the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon where Hezballah keeps many of its rockets stored.

 

Hezballah brings us to the final subject. This coming week, and even if this is a secret presently it will be fully evidenced as the week unfolds, Israel is running a full participation, country-wide defense in case of war scenario. This will include Israelis entering their shelters as if under rocket attack and every other contingency. The common prospect behind this according to some postulations is to ready the public for a potential conflict with Hamas and Islamic Jihad this summer. Close but no cigar. The real threat will be Hezballah who will need to make large points with the Lebanese after placing them in peril of attack by ISIS. The reasoning goes beyond just satiating the Lebanese hunger for another war with Israel as the last one proved to be so much fun, but Hezballah also will need to make headlines across the Western World which will supercede any news off of the front pages as Iran takes whatever steps are required in Syria to get Assad out and to solidify those areas which Iran considers vital for their desire which include an operative airport in Damascus through which to supply Hezballah, a safe port for the Russians to utilize in the Mediterranean Sea which is Latakia, Syria. And finally they also would desire to retain some of the natural resources such as mining operations and also have a staging area with direct access to the Golan Heights for wither Hezballah to utilize for an assault on Israel or for the IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or Pasdaran Persian: سپاه پاسداران انقلاب اسلامی) to have a launch facility to strike Israel or even to assault the Golan Heights. This all means that Iran will require another Hezballah war with Israel to divert attentions from their actions, which will be ruthless and potentially cataclysmic as well as to divert attention from the Iranian dash to produce a number of nuclear warheads and the final preparations for their launch at select targets. Thus Iran will require approximately six to ten weeks of conflict. With the known supplies of rockets and a fair number of larger missiles provided by Iran, Hezballah would be capable of launching over a thousand rockets daily for the entire six weeks and approximately eight-hundred rockets launched daily for ten weeks. Should any higher quantity be required they would need to utilize any Syrian rockets remaining under Iranian control or for Iran to provide a fair number of additional rockets which is why Iran requires the Damascus airport as they are unable to resupply Hezballah through Beirut probably because the Bekaa Valley lies along the Syrian border and the Alawite areas, how convenient. This leaves one with a serious question, what will be the Israeli reaction to a war with Hezballah. As Hamas has also threatened a confrontation this summer with Israel, it is entirely plausible that Israel will desire to keep any confrontation from escalating and to decisively end the conflict leaving little doubt as to who won. Thus any confrontation between Israel and Hezballah will result in Israel striking hard and fast swallowing up the lands south of the Litany River and then sweeping up the eastern banks of the Litani River through the heart of the Bekaa Valley taking out the training grounds, provisions, reserves and bases Hezballah has throughout that region. Any violence from Hamas should also be responded to with great prejudice and force of arms with nothing held back. With the growing challenges and rising threats throughout the areas of the Middle East, Northern Africa and the Horn of Africa, it is starting to appear that the whole area has lost their minds, possibly the whole world even. Then there is the continuing threat with Russia menacingly eying the old regions of her power before the fall of the Soviet Union and China literally building new islands and placing oil rigs and military airbases and other facilities in the South China Sea in order to widen her area of control and claim islands which are also claimed by her neighbors but China is the eight-hundred pound gorilla who can basically do whatever she desires unless the United States takes a stand against her, and that is seeming less and less a possibility as the islands grow. Furthermore, most of Europe is also looking at civil unrest in the near future as the growing immigrant population feels stronger and denied an equal opportunity to get a job and live an equal life. Add that they also desire to start a religious war forcing their religion on those they views as a people who have forsaken religion. Then there is violence threatening to break out full force both on the United States college campuses during the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic and anti-America demonstrations and potentially within many cities possibly escalating and spilling throughout the city, especially if the police are restrained and ill–equipped as was the case in Baltimore and has had continuing ramifications, especially in western Baltimore where the police have basically been chased from the streets. Similar situations are possible throughout the country, especially in the twelve largest cities. One would be hard pressed to find an area on the globe where there are no threats.

 

Even Kathmandu is still recovering from the series of earthquakes which struck there not that long ago. Will Shangri-La be next? Just because it is mythical might not except even Shangri-La from the ravages of societies gone mad. Maybe only the quiet places in our minds where we can concentrate on the peace and love in our hearts can the world be healed as we heal one soul at a time. But with the Churches, Synagogues, Temples and other religious houses all nearly empty even on the holiest of days, what hope will the world have against true and fanatical believers, especially those who cannot be tempted with baubles and glitter that shines at us in every store window beckoning us to worship consumerism. The hectic pace of modern life with so little time that one simply must collapse for those brief moments between the scheduled meeting, workout, night-school, and the children’s activities. Who has time for anything more? But unless we take the time to refresh our consciences and recharge our moral compasses society will continue spinning further and further out of control. What is it we seek with our frenetic paced lives; do we even know any more? Listen to the quiet little voice in the back recesses of your mind, it is still there, trust me. It will tell you secrets that you once knew but soon got squeezed from your life. I know the crippling schedule for those working two jobs, both full-time. The requirement that you take some time to recharge yourself does not disappear just because, it remains and eventually it will come screaming to the fore and demand you stop and take a deep breath. Sigh in from the mouth and let it out so slowly from the nostrils that you barely tickle the air. Again only deeper and with a more measured exhale. This is the easiest way to slow your pace and make you see reason. After you have done this at the end of each day or at lunch or whenever you can schedule your take a breath for sanity, then that voice can finally be heard and its message is simple, you know not every answer. Sure the news and science and everything you read tells how there is so little left that science does not know that is the lie told to make you forget. The little voice remembers and knows the bliss one can feel when we know that there is reason and value in life. Whatever manner of faith you are comfortable in, that is possibly just the recharging you need. It is just once or twice a week unless you desire more once you return and feel the encompassing warmth, love, acceptance, understanding and all those emotions and assurances which were missing in your life, there is a place where they can be found. We all want the world to be a better place but we seem lost in figuring out how. All each of us can do is our own part. Own, a strange word as it is in this case where it has so much meaning. There is our own part; the part assigned us even if that assignment comes from within us. There is the part in the world we own, we are responsible for and we get to structure it just how we desire others to know our part. Part from the business of life and take a moment with which we part from the fast paced caffeinated life and take a lemonade break on a hot day and you can part from the world and just enjoy the moment. We can take part in displaying that we have found the answer and then you can play the part which you know is what is really important. But the most important part is when you realize that the only real thing you can do to repair society and the world is make your little area, your part clean, warm and with its own sparkle and once you have done your part, then you can invite others to slow down and remember that they too can have a part in the world which they can be proud of and eventually the individual parts reach a point where they can change one small part of the world and from there who knows what they can part, maybe the Red Sea and again we can cross and be received. Just remember that the more we learn about the world the more we often realize how little we know, it is as if each answer spawns ten questions, and that’s what keeps scientists employed.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Can One be Pro-Arab-Palestinian and Pro-Israel

 

* Special at the end of the article is an extra piece I found which may be of interest. It is a video of Colonel Richard Kemp Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire when he addressed the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies on May 19, 2015. We found his address to be inspiring, informative, as well as right on target describing much of today’s societal ills along with their solution and hope all enjoy it as well.

 

 

Can one be supportive of the Arab-Palestinians and also be supportive of Israel as the Home of the Jewish People? At face value this question appears to be simplistic and completely ridiculous bringing the obvious answer of no, not in any manner. The assumption is if one is to support the Arab Palestinians one must also support the destruction of Israel as the Jewish State and if one supports Israel they must oppose the rights of the Arab-Palestinians. But there is no reason that these two sides need be opposites except that such is the entirety of the media portrayal of the conflict. One might claim that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the last place where there is a division such that only one side can claim victory in the end. It is the one conflict where one side must eradicate the other, or so the media line portrays the story and structures their coverage. It is a completely false narrative which recent events makes complete folly of the premise and the coverage, or should we say the lack of coverage. Let us look at one tale of Arab-Palestinian woes where Israel plays no active part and thus the media has given short riffed in their coverage.

 

The story of which we speak has been the fighting and open destruction being waged by both sides in this conflict in the Yarmouk refugee camp for Arab-Palestinian Refugees. This camp is on the outskirts of Damascus and originally housed tens of thousands of Arab residents with the last official census producing just over one-hundred-thousand Arabs held in the confines of the Yarmouk refugee camp. Even before the Yarmouk refugee camp became a contested area and was safely within the areas held by the Syrian military supporting Syrian Dictator Bashir al-Assad there began the initial problems for the Arab residents within. It was on the Yarmouk refugee camp that many of the initial infamous barrel-bombs were utilized in a blatant attack whose sole purpose was to murder the civilian population and punish the entirety of the population because of a small number who had joined the opposition fight against Assad. It did not matter that there were also those from the Yarmouk refugee camp who were members of the Syrian military and some others fighting by choice with the Syrian Army, all that mattered was the excuse that some small remnant had joined the al-Qaeda al-Nusra Brigades or the Syrian Liberation Army. For that crime Bashir al-Assad passed judgement on the tens of thousands including children, women, elderly and otherwise innocent refugees who had not joined either side and mostly just wished to be left to live their lives. The Yarmouk refugee camp was also one of those sights where chemical weapons were deployed as the barrel-bombs were not murdering the Arab-Palestinian residents quickly enough and some had taken upon themselves the only obvious means to reach safety and had started organizing to flee to Jordan. Reacting to this now framed disloyal act of betrayal for refusing to remain and be murdered, the Arab-Palestinians found loyal Syrian military troops along their route doing everything in their power to kill as many as possible and with the safety of Jordan within sight came the horrific sight of what must have appeared to be an impenetrable line of Syrian troops and heavy weapons waiting to intercept these refugees and prevent their making it to safety.

 

Of course some did make it across the border and joined the other Syrians living in the refugee camps being tended with as much kindness and sympathy as their Jordanian hosts are able to provide but this is still creating a humanitarian crisis just as it has in Turkey and in the Kurdish areas in northern Syria and Iraq. The world and especially the United Nations have largely given minimal efforts in caring for the refugees from the war in Syria and even less, if such is possible, to saving the Arab-Palestinians whose identity now has become Syrian refugees. There is an opportunity for the Arab-Palestinians to gain some advantage should they choose and provide a potentially better life for their children and their children by casting off their denotation as Palestinian and simply become a part of the greater Syrian refugee population. This should be a relatively easy transition as many traced their heritage back to the greater Syrian areas of the Ottoman Empire and are just as much of Syrian heritage as are the other Syrian refugees now struggling as a whole to simply survive. But such is only the end result where those fortunate enough to have made it into the camps outside of war torn Syria.

 

For those who insisted on remaining in the Yarmouk refugee camp their tribulations did not end with the barrel-bombs or the chemical weapons use, it continued with ISIS slowly and destructively sweeping across the camp as their war against Bashir al-Assad and against Hezballah and even other rebel groups all but obviated what remained of the Yarmouk refugee camp. And the devastating battle over the camp and its land was not the final end as ISIS has also taken vengeance on the remaining Arab-Palestinians finding many of them lacking in proper support and practice of ISIS and their defined form of Islam, a form which also requires great sacrifice for the cause of ISIS and for those of fighting ability joining their ranks or watching their entire family be slaughtered before being killed themselves. Where are the outcries against this horrific treatment of Arab-Palestinians? Where is Mahmoud Abbas, Saeb Erekat, Ismail Haniyeh, Mohammed Dahlan, Jibril Rajoub, Salam Fayyad, Nabil Shaath, Ahmad Qurei, Khaled Mashal, Mohammed Deif and the rest of the leadership from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, PLO and the rest of the alphabet Palestinian groups and their leaders? Why has there been no demonstrations, launching of rockets and suicide attacks into Damascus by Palestinian militant groups? Where is UNRWA to protect these Arab-Palestinians facing mortal dangers and a genocidal war waged by all sides against the survivors still living within the confines of the Yarmouk refugee camp? The answer is simple, they are all attempting to find some manner of blaming the tragedy on Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu or other Israeli leader as Syrian President Bashir al-Assad, the Syrian military, the Syrian Free Army, al-Qaeda, the al-Nusra Group, and ISIS obviously cannot be the reason as they are all groups who also are a part of the opposition to the existence of Israel, or at least would be if they were not so intent on murdering each other.

 

The problem for the residents of the Yarmouk neighborhoods are that they are being murdered by Syrian both against and supportive of Bashir al-Assad and in a final measure systematically slaughtered in a genocidal manner by ISIS and all of this being committed step-by-step starting with the Syrian Army shelling with tank fired artillery rounds destroying most of the structures of the Yarmouk neighborhoods, both residences and municipal buildings, then barrel-bombs were dropped targeting any pockets where the residents from the Yarmouk neighborhoods in an attempt to eradicate the remaining residents, then the Syrian Air Force and ground forces unleashed chemical weapons such as Sarin Gas followed by chlorine gas in attempts to slow ISIS advances and again murder the remaining residents of Yarmouk, and then ISIS completed the ethnic cleansing of Muslims as well as any Christians or others by the self-appointed religious inquisitors imposing a Muslim purity judgment on the surviving residents of Yarmouk much the way the Spanish Inquisitors passed sentence on their fellow Christians who were found impure and all others of the defined lesser faiths. Still, the fact that these horrific transgressions are being perpetrated on people formerly made separate as Arab-Palestinian refugees and not simply additional Syrian refugees.

 

Still, when perhaps there might have been some manner to have saved the majority of the Yarmouk residents there was no hue and cry as their tormentors, their murderers were not the correct kind and there was no manner for linkage to Israel as even the Arab-Palestinian leadership in Ramallah and in Gaza made no effort to offer sanctuary for their fellow Arab-Palestinian brothers and sisters. There was rarely a peep of protest raised about this mass-murdering of fellow Arab-Palestinians. As one would have been hard pressed to find a manner through which to link this as blame on the Israelis without their first being required to offer sanctuary and taken responsibility by the Arab-Palestinian leadership whose specialty is not caring for their brothers and sisters but rather raising funds from the Western elite by preying on their guilt over slights past and pocketing their percentage off the top and spending the remainder on weapons to murder Israelis, not care for their fellow Arab-Palestinians. Why would the Arab-Palestinian leadership show any more compassion, any more concern with the welfare, any feelings of responsibility, anything at all towards assisting their fellow Arab-Palestinians facing dangers and sure death when they feel little if any of this for the Arab-Palestinians they presumably represent and are tasked to actually care for and about. The reality is as the Arab-Palestinians from the Yarmouk refugee camp and the other Arab-Palestinians in camps located in either Syria or Lebanon are of little concern except if they can be utilized in some manner to assist in the destruction of Israel.

 

There is a really simply and obvious reason we heard nary a sound nor witnessed any action or compassion towards their fellow Arab-Palestinians whose lives were threatened and whose existence was in peril; there was no manner for taking these refugees and automatically forcing them onto Israel using the right of return argument as that must first be formalized through negotiations as without legal authority or even moral authority for forcing what would amount to illegal immigrants upon Israel these Arab-Palestinian refugees would require being brought within the semiautonomous Arab-Palestinian regions already in existence. By bringing any of the Syrian or Lebanese Arab-Palestinians into the existing areas controlled by the Arab-Palestinians having all legal rights and powers under their own presumed elected governance (even if it was one election one time in 2005 and not again since), that would have placed the lenses of world opinion on the fact that the Arab-Palestinians presumably living on lands under occupation by Israel and ruled over by Israel as being the falsehood that it is. The world would have been witness to the autonomous nature of Arab-Palestinian society and having the reality and truth played out in full portrayal for the world to see. This would be the end of the claims of oppression under the cruelty of the Israeli colonialists and the truth of the Arab-Palestinian oppressions being self-inflicted.

 

Perhaps the Arab-Palestinian leadership was completely unable to step up and take responsibility for the salvation, or at least the protection, of their fellow Arab-Palestinians simply because they have also never found the moral honesty to step up and take responsibility for those unfortunate Arab-Palestinians already betrayed by their own and very same leadership. The reality has been shown that only those Arab-Palestinians who can claim their misery and failures are because of Israel are to be the concern of the world because the truth is that there exists only an extremely small core who can claim to be Pro-Arab-Palestinian as the vast majority of the Pro-Arab-Palestinian are actually more interested in being Anti-Israel thus the truth is one can be Pro-Arab-Palestinian and Pro-Israel but the difficulty comes with being more Pro-Arab-Palestinian than one chooses to be Anti-Israel. The few who honestly care about Arab-Palestinians would have been sounding the outcry for the plight of the Arab-Palestinians at the hands of their brothers on both sides of the massacres as war taking place in Syria and Iraq, and both sides maliciously assaulted in a genocidal manner on the Arab-Palestinians as both sides saw them as an opposing force. That situation is something which should give the world pause to reason out how all sides could view the same subgroup amongst their midst as their enemy. Can it be true that there actually are none who would consider the Arab-Palestinians as potential friends in the tribal world that is the conflict in Syria and other places in the Arab and Muslim world or are they truly found to be abhorrence throughout the Arab world? If such proves true then the entirety of the Arab-Palestinian and Israeli conflict is a war against Israel without any real and honest concern for the Arab-Palestinian, just a burning hatred of Israel, of the Jew and their state, nothing more, nothing less.

 

I am unsure which is the more tragic, the complete lack of concern by the world, especially by the Arabs themselves from every corner, for the safety and protection of the Arab-Palestinians who play such a central role in the war against Israel or the fact that much of the world, its governments, people, organizations and institutions, are all allied set on the path to eradicate the Jewish state. How is this all happening again and so closely upon the witness of the Pogroms by the Czars, the Holocaust by the Nazis and their overly willing populations with those rare and humane exceptions, the Communist oppressive actions cleansing their society of much of its Jews, and now it is gripping all of Europe and beginning in the United States and Canada, especially in the colleges and universities which usually precedes acceptance into the society as a whole within a decade, two decades at the most. Who will be the first to stand against the oldest and seemingly purist hatred this time. Will any follow this leader or should the world simply slide once again towards an attempted genocidal conflict, this time against something the world had thought vanquished, the Jewish state at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea where it was last eradicated as a nation almost two millennia ago by the Romans, before them the Greeks, preceded by the Persians who stand ready to try once more this time as Iran but we remember them as Persia, and even earlier the Babylonians, Assyrians, Philistines and the initial wars in founding the Jewish state against the Canaanites after escaping ancient Egypt. It has been quite a long history reaching back further than any other groups which never grew to numbers which could be considered significant in the world yet always at the fore of everybody’s thoughts. How can such be and what causes this obsession with the Jews, just under two-tenths of one percent of the world population; that is 0.183% or 0.00183 of the world’s 7.6 billion people, and their percentage is in decline already without a world at war with its only Jewish population showing measurable positive growth, at least for now.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

 

* Below is a presentation on society, warfare, morality and a critique of the changes witnessed during his life by Colonel Richard Kemp Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire when he addressed the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies on May 19, 2015.

 

 

 

 

The Differing Dreams of Two Peoples

 

The basis for the “Two State Solution” is to share a land equally between two peoples who both have an attachment and love for the land. If only this were so there might be some means by which it would work. The problem is that this premise is a lie. There can never be a two state solution which will satisfy one side because they have no love for the land, they are driven by a different drummer, and then there are two groups who wish to live productively, so let’s compare and contrast the driving force behind each of the three groups. We will start with the Jewish desires of the two Jewish residents and then the Palestinian side after a few clarifying notes. There are two completely separate Arab cultures and two somewhat separate Jewish groups. These disparate groups can all but one live in this land relatively peaceably but that final group can never be appeased and has the same desires as the extreme groups currently spreading their insatiable drive across Europe and into the United States and Canada, a group with whom there is no middle ground.

 

The easiest group for us to define is the Zionist Jews. They are here to realize a dream which has lived simmering just below the surface sometimes breaking through as happened to a fervent group led by the likes of Theodor Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Rabbi Zalman Melamed, each at their own time and in their own way. The Zionist Jew has a desire to live once again in the ancestral home of the Jewish People, to live in Eretz Yisroel. The Zionist shares this dream with countless Jews throughout modern history and considers living outside of Israel as a form of punishment that though started by the Roman dispersal of the Jewish People to the farthest hinterlands of the Roman Empire in order to destroy the central pillars of Judaism which would necessarily lead to the death of the Jewish People within a couple of generations. This is what had happened to other peoples the Roman Empire had so treated but the Jewish People had a secret weapon, so to speak, called Torah. The attachment to the land of Israel was rooted in the Torah Scroll and thus Judaism is rooted in the Land and in Torah. Without the sacred and blessed land of our forefathers we were not completely lost and rudderless, we still had Torah; the Commandments, though some were to remain unfulfilled as they dealt with the land, the Priesthood, the Temple, the required Sacrifices; the rules for living a righteous life; the dietary laws; and other rules including the Oral Law which was for the first time written down. Torah became the link between one Jew and the next Jew and in Torah was the promise that in the future we would regain our land and rebuild the Holy Temple. The Zionist desire was to realize the dream of living in our Biblical and ancient lands. The Zionist dream was to live and rebuild our ancestral lands and reestablish the Promised Land to its place of prominence in our lives. This was always expected to be a realization which would take generations before it would be a dream fulfilled though the growing anti-Semitism may be the force which speeds up the return of the Jewish People to the land. The dream of the Zionist is one of rebuilding and restoration.

 

There are other Jews who were born in Israel who do not share or understand the significance of living in Israel. Many of them simply desire to live a normal life without complications and who want to find a solution to the conflict. There are also Jews born in Israel who are Zionist and thus share the dram described above and treasure their fortune of being native born and the reality that the dream has started to become a reality. There is little difference between the native born Zionist and their cousins who are returning to the lands; both have a deeply rooted tie to the land through Torah whether they can define it as such or not. Then there are the leftist Jews who do not share the Zionist dream and actually see the Jewish presence as denying the Arabs their lands and actively work to undermine any religious or secular drive to restore the Holy Lands as they see both secular and religious Zionism as being the problem and see both groups as actually being religious. Most of these Jews are referred to as post-modernist who have moved presumably beyond the primitive religions of the world and are now enlightened and thus true believers in this New Age leftist, and often environmental and so many other leftist progressive causes and thus more advanced than the simple minded Zionists who need to be awakened to the reality that they are invaders stealing the lands which has to be stopped. These Jews have so much in common with the anti-Israel activists found largely in Europe and throughout the Western World. They support the most extreme Arab claims seeing that desire to own the land as superior to any Jewish claims to the land. Many of these Post-Zionist Jews have over the past forty years or so been moving out of Israel seeing nothing special and placing no real attachment to the lands leaving it to live in Europe where their views on life are a better fit. Some of these Jews when faced with the vile and visceral anti-Semitism begin to understand some of the logic for a Jewish nation as a place of refuge from the hatreds and some even gain a further understanding of the Zionist love for a Jewish State, some solely the logic and fortunately the majority the religious. Still, there are the many who are so sold on their post-modernist lifestyle that they work ardently to destroy Israel as a national homeland of the Jewish People regarding such as a racist and supremacist set of values and one that has to be destroyed if the nirvana of the truly multi-ethnic society where all peoples are equal in value and there is no nationalist identity exists and everybody is a citizen of the world. These Progressive Jews are progressives first and foremost and secondarily Jewish if even remaining Jewish does not interfere with their progressive lifestyle and political socialist views and mores.

 

The indigenous Arab population, many of which arrived after the initial influx of Zionists had arrived and brought with them an economic outlook and productivity that increased the economic base of the area providing for more and better paying jobs. It was this economic environment of opportunity for a better life which attracted many of the first Arabs to move their families here to share in this opportunity for wealth and a comfortable life for their children when they grew up. These Arabs joined with the Jews though often the two groups lived in communities separate but in close proximity so as to share in the bounty of the land and the economic wealth. This influx started towards the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It was when the Arab nationalist movement first became a relevant segment of the Arab societies that the initial buds of the desire to take over the lands where presumably the plan was to establish one Jewish state amongst the fields of Arab states being established throughout the now defeated and defunct Ottoman Empire, and what would come to be seen as the last caliphate which must be rebuilt. This Arab nationalism was used by the Mufti of Jerusalem to whip up resentment for the Jews who had come and were stealing lands that were rightfully Arab lands. It was implied that the Jews were stealing the land and Arab wealth and it was the Arab economic opportunity which brought the Jews to the area being denoted under the British Mandate to form a Jewish state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, an area of extreme economic opportunity which had even built cities with commercial and manufacturing centers resembling the cities in Europe and the United States and the rest of the Western World. Even the mode of dress was largely Western in its appearance. Still, a large portion of the Arab population remained dedicated to raising their families and was not drawn into the nascent Arab-Israeli conflict. There were riots started which were stoked by some of the British who were set against the formation of a Jewish state and assisted the Arab nationalism as their weapon against these Jews who desired to form a Jewish state. They viewed the idea of Jews having their own nation as an affront to all they believed and held as holy. In their limited view of history, which started somewhere around the twelfth century, the Jews were a despised, small and petty group of undesirables to be scorned and looked down upon. These British anti-Semites, for lack of a better description as actually theirs was the mainstream view throughout most of Europe, saw the Jews in the Mandate lands as an oddity as they were proud and strong, completely unlike the Jews in Europe, these Jews obviously did not know their place. Their fellow Arabs who were working to build a nation that would no longer need the British heel on their collective throats ignored the British and their values as much as was possible and continued their lives. After World War II and the revelations of the Holocaust, the idea of finally acting on that promise given back in the San Remo Conference which was finally ratified in April of 1920 and backed by the League of Nations by unanimous affirmation and later agreed to by the United States in an agreement with the British. This was the point the Mufti of Jerusalem simply was unable to allow and thus he began assembling groups to fight against this idea.

 

That leads right into the final group, the Arabs who refused to permit anything which permitted Jews to rule over Arabs, even as equals before the law. They knew only Sharia by which the Jew would be cast off to the realm of the Dhimmi, the scorned and abused second class people who were subservient to their Islamic masters by whose grace they were permitted to exist. Eventually this led to the KGB established Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) which was established in 1964 and had as its charter the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel which would then be united with the rest of Jordan and the Jews subjugated or murdered. The PLO was a nationalist and socialist organization designed around the call to destroy Israel and remove any lands from Jewish ownership just as had been done by Jordan when they managed to retain Judea and Samaria from the initial war of eradication which pitted seven nations and militias against Israel the initial morning of her existence and before anything resembling a national military could be established. Still, somehow the separate Jewish organizations merged and formed a rudimentary military which would succeed in defending much of the lands. The PLO was organized and trained mostly in Jordan with many of its leaders taken to Moscow where they received specialized training by the KGB in guerilla warfare tactics and revolutionary ideals and the best manner of methods to use against the Israelis. Their basic premise was that if they committed sufficient numbers of horrific terrorist strikes the Jews would turn tail and run. There was one main error in their reasoning, that the Jews would have anywhere to run to that had the same meaning of their national homeland in which they had resided for more than three-thousand years, far outstripping the under two-thousand years of exile. The Jews had returned to their lands of promise and eventual salvation and could not think of a place they would ever accept replacing Eretz Yisroel. But the PLO eventually got an Islamist entity which would compete with them for the crown of the greatest enemy of the Jews, and not just Israeli Jews as Hamas in their charter call for the eradication of Jews throughout the world (and beyond if it should ever be found that the Jews really are from another planet and have their own mothership sitting on the backside of the Moon). Then there came an alphabet soup of groups all fighting to destroy the Jewish state which included Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Fatah, Abdullah Azzam Brigades, Abu Nidal Organization, Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Al-Quds Brigades, Arab Liberation Front (ALF), Army of Islam, Black September Organization, Popular Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PRFLP), Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), Force 17 (Security force for the leader of the PA), Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and Palestinian Authority (PA). There have been other such as those claiming to be followers of al-Qaeda and ISIS as well a smaller groups which surround a charismatic leader but many such groups eventually fall to the side and merge with one of the major groups. The table is currently set with Hamas and Islamic Jihad ruling in Gaza while the remainder of the PA, which is mostly comprised of Fatah and the PLO which overlap in membership and leadership with each other and the PA. The driving force behind most of the current PA is to play up their victimhood and play on the guilt feelings of the Western world in order to gain the one manner the Western world knows to perform penance, they send funding and promise further contributions to the cause. To continue to receive these guilt payments there is a necessary but unspoken second necessity, this oppressing group which is to be thought of as evil and a horrific injustice. For the Arab cause it is this anathema that is the Jewish state, Israel. This serves as a twofer for many in Europe, they are supporting the downtrodden Arabs and at the same time ridding their world eventually, should their Palestinian allies ever succeed, of that most unholy of things, a Jewish state. The argument many of the progressives make is that Israel is a theocracy which by definition must be oppressing all the non-Jews and exalting the Jewish religion. They refuse to allow the freedom of religion laws which are part of the Basic Laws which form a legal backbone to the nation of Israel. The fact that the Palestinian Arabs demand that their areas be made Jew free is completely understandable by the Europeans and the Western world. In their post-modern world view which has reached such heights of reason and truth that their nations are self-destructing through a refusal to bother to have children as such is such a bother and requires difficulties which are just too messy to put up with. That is the gift of having no religious moral underpinning which makes the dedication to others, especially the youth who are to come to the world you leave them, and replace that with a simplistic Cyrenaic Hedonism or other offshoot of Hedonism in place of the morality of the previous religiously guided, and considered restrained, life where the raising of children was held in high regard as such preserved the future of the system and guaranteed the central pillars of the society. Often those pillars were also shared by the religious institutions and have been cast aside completely as the post-modernist seeks to be rid of those old-fashioned codes. This makes Israel a reminder of their former restrained lives and the fact that Israel is succeeding while Europe finds itself in a quagmire of a quandary of where did it go so very wrong. Thus they cast Israel as the representation of everything they hated from within their history and cast the Arabs as the innocent indigenous peoples who are enslaved and brutalized by the colonialist, capitalist, racist, oppressive and, worst of all, religiously observant continuation of the old and evil European values. Never mind that the Jews were either the brutalized of the Europeans or of the colonizing, conquering, religious, enslaving and master oppressors who had burst from the Arabic Peninsula towards the end of the first millennia and spread their will of force across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and on into east Asia, southeastern Europe, Southwestern Europe, the Balkans, northwestern China and are currently attempting another expansion, their third, into south and central Africa and the Horn of Africa, southern Europe and beyond throughout Europe, and all of Western world taking a foothold in the campuses across the Western World and into government bureaucracies taking particularly into planning for school boards and other central controlling departments. The Europeans are willing to cut their own throats if it rids the world of that anathema and effrontery known as Israel, the Jewish State. In this hatred the Arab World stands in complete harmony with the Europeans and apparently the United States State Department except the Arab World’s reasons are very different as the Arab World’s reasoning is Islamic and based in a supremacist religious interpretation of the Quran. For a basic view into and describing the initial events and interpretations that guide much of Islam to this very day read our introduction to the duplicitous stories within the Quran explained Which Quran, Mecca or Medina?. The reality is that the European and the Islamists are in complete harmonious thought for diametrically opposite reasons, one fleeing anything religious and the other intent on the supremacy of their religion, holding the destruction of Israel as one of the prominent aims of their societal norms. Another difference is the Europeans are also destroying any hopes that their beliefs and societies will continue more than one or two generation forward and the Islamists are willing to assist this as long as their religious theocracy replaces the European post-modernist belief structure. So the Western world desires to take Israel down as its final achievement before disappearing while the Islamists simply want to steamroll Israel while also stretching their dominion over the remainder of the globe.

 

The saddest reality is the Islamists militancy will eventually destroy the peaceable Arabs who simply want to raise their families and bring them into a world which holds the greatest promise for their children’s children, a very similar desire shared by the Jewish People, especially the religious Jews. The Jews also have one other desire, to build their homelands to their former glory all held within the areas from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River and no further. The Jews have no desires to rule the world or even to influence the world beyond the hopes that the Noahic Code, seven laws on which to base any civilization be used to guide the rest of the world and we will attempt to live by example of what righteousness can bring and to make discoveries and insights which we will gladly share with all who desire knowledge, be that knowledge in medicine, computers, agriculture, manufacturing, resource preservation or any knowledge of discovery which would go to further the development of the better human spirit and the ability for all peoples to live harmoniously. That is the gift we will exchange for this little strip of land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. Fair enough?

 

Beyond the Cusp