Time to Permanently Put the Saudi Plan Permanently to Rest

 

Once again the United States President and who knows who else are likely to echo granting their voices in agreement with the call by Mahmoud Abbas for Israel to return to talks based on the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, originally known as the Saudi Plan. Abbas is claiming that such a call comes without any preconditions which is interesting as, would not the Arab Peace Plan from 2002 count as a precondition or is the backing from multiple Western leaders become so automatic when this is presented that Abbas can feel comfortable claiming that this is an understood starting point which holds nothing particularly controversial. Unfortunately that has become the case so maybe a quick and cursory review of the main particulars is in order before addressing anything further. Such a review might actually prove to make the Arab Plan be a little less appetizing after understanding all it entails.

 

The main features which will be discussed and assumed to be the actual main points applied are that the 1949 Armistice Lines, the Green Line or the pre June 1967 Lines will be the initial starting point for all discussions for final borders. This includes the following parts of the contested lands being granted to form the twenty-second Arab State in the Middle East and North Africa; Area A, Area B, and Area C. This agreement grants Israel possession of the following parts of the contested lands; none, not a single square millimeter. The Arab Plan calls for the sharing of Jerusalem with it being divided such that the Eastern parts of Jerusalem are granted to the Arab State and Western Jerusalem to Israel. In theory it calls for all of the holy sites shared by the three religions to be have shared access but leaves them under Arab control, policing and enforcement of all sharing rights, something that many in the leadership of the Fatah Party, the PLO and also within the Palestinian Authority have claimed will never be permitted to come to fruition as they refuse to permit non-Muslims to tread on such Muslim holy places as the Temple Mount and the Western Wall (Kotel), referred to by Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif (Arabic: الحرم القدسي الشريف‎), the Noble Sanctuary and the Al-Buraq Wall (Arabic: البُراق). So, the first lie in the Arab Plan of 2002, which was first proposed by the leadership of Saudi Arabia, was that the Temple Mount and Kotel would remain accessible to Jews and the Temple Mount to Christians throughout the year. Currently the only times during the year that the Temple Mount, Nazareth and Bethlehem are made readily available to Christians without any bothersome wait times or threat of harm are during the Christian Holy Periods around Christmas and Easter. This is largely for economic purposes as they have a market in souvenirs and service industries such as hotels and restaurants, many of which depend on the Christian visitors’ business to make their annual profits. As far as Jews being able to visit, there are not any Jewish holidays where easy access is permitted, proof of which can be verified by searching on Jewish visitations to another site which is supposedly to permit universal access, Joseph’s Tomb (Kever Yoseph, Hebrew: קבר יוסף) in Shechem (Nablus). So, summing up the initial state of the Arab Plan from 2002, the Arabs get initial promise of ownership of all of the contested lands and the Israelis get none of the contested lands.

 

I can hear the more informed screaming at me about the minor land swaps which are mutually agreeable such that the Israelis get to keep their major settlement areas in exchange for lands from the Negev Desert and the Galilee or other lands. Yes, there is the stipulation that mutual land swaps can be permitted such that the Israeli communities, many which were started within the first years after the Six Day War in June of 1967 with such communities being both in East Jerusalem and Area C. Many of the places which became under Jewish residence were homes which the families had been forced to abandon under threat of death by the Jordanian Army after Jordan occupied the areas of Judea and Samaria which they renamed the West Bank so as to conceal their Jewish history. Others were rebuilt areas which had belonged to Jews and were abandoned and afterwards either destroyed or inhabited by Arabs. In some cases where former Jewish homes were now inhabited by Arabs then new neighborhoods were built relatively close to these former communities and these Jews took up residence in the new locations along with other Jews seeking to form a religious community or even in some instances to be close to work either in Israel or within the businesses in new industrial parks, industries and businesses which employ Jews and Arabs working side-by-side. The problem with the lands swaps part of the equation is the part where it states only under mutual agreement. That small inclusion means that if Abbas and the Arabs simply refuse to mutually agree then there are not going to be any land swaps and bordering on eight-hundred-thousand Jews will need to be relocated to areas within Israel and a sizeable number of industrial and other sites owned by Jews employing both Jews and local Arabs will also need to pick up and relocate within Israel or simply pack it up and not reopen simply abandoning their dream. This would be particularly true for the supermarkets and some other chain stores that will simply be closing their stores and moving their inventory to their other stores within Israel. Still, simply to force the relocation of near to 800,000 Jews and numerous other ventures back within the Green Line at a cost so prohibitive as to make such an idea unconscionable. The Gaza disengagement cost in excess of one-billion-dollars and has still yet to be concluded as there exists far too many people still not resettled, not with new employment, lost businesses as many worked and lived within Gaza and many of those employers also lived in Gaza and have yet to be able to relocate or relocation is unfeasible and they are simply still seeking work. Should there be a need to now absorb numbers approaching an additional one-million Jews and potentially also Christians, Druze and even those who may have been part of the Jordanian public from before the Six Day War who would prefer to reside in Israel over residing in the Arab state should it be formed to include their residences. There is a known possibility that there may be a fairly sizeable population who might attempt to be included in the relocation of people from the Jewish communities and Jews residing in East Jerusalem and in the guaranteed confusion, or even if there are those who have friends they may have worked alongside of who are willing to assist them in relocating within Israel along with the Jews. The imposing difficulties in relocating the Jews residing within East Jerusalem and the Jewish communities east of the Green Line could lead to an entire new facet of the negotiations.

 

Even if all of these were conceivably settled, most people would claim that there would now be peace and the negotiations and all are completed. They would be wrong to think so because there is still one last item to be addressed, the “Right of Return” for what probably number at least four to five million Arab refugees. There will be a secondary difficulty when considering this area, the Arab refugees who have been forced from their refugee camp in Syria and are now double refugees. There will also be the problem that without accurate numbers and names as UNRWA has probably not been the most prodigious of bookkeepers or the most trustworthy travelers of the straight and narrow so there just might be a propensity to fudge the numbers and names of the Arab refugees from the camps which were in Syria to include possibly countless Syrian refugees who simply desire a safer place to live, or possibly a place to live as anywhere would be an improvement, or so they would think; and I would find disagreeing with such sentiments to be quite difficult. So, in addition to the somewhere between four-and-a-half-million to six-million actual refugees and their children and their children and in many cases their children and even one more generation after that all from the 1948-9 Arab initiated war to annihilate the Jewish nations immediately after its birth plus those actually displaced from the 1967 Six Day War, there could be any number of additional refugees whose names are similar to the names of actually registered refugees largely because they were likely family members who remained in Syria when their cousins, uncles, aunts or whomever had decided to seek their fame and fortune within the British Mandate lands which laid west of the Jordan River. To give an easier to understand example let us look to New York City and neighboring New Jersey. New York City will be the British Mandate lands with Manhattan representing the lands west of the Jordan River, Central Park representing West Bank and the rest of New York City being Jordan. Before the Six Day War Jordan occupied Central Park and the rest of Manhattan was Israel and there were refugees living in camps throughout the region including across the rivers and tunnels in New Jersey representing Lebanon and New York State representing Syria and any other location with any Arab refugee camps from the war. After a subsequent war where the Jews in Manhattan liberated the occupied lands of Central Park thus finally having control as it should have been according to every applicable treaty up to that point. Now the world is claiming that all of Central Park is occupied now by Israel who is controlling Central Park area they won in a purely defensive war and to whom the land was to be used solely to establish the Jewish State of Israel. The only theory which allows for the lands of Central Park to belong to a group of Arabs referred to as Palestinians in order to fabricate a history which implies that when Israel defeated the Jordanian Army, they actually defeated the Palestinian Arab Army, who were wearing Jordanian uniforms, probably because their uniforms were on backorder, you know how those problematic orders from advertisements found on matchbook covers can be. That is where the situation stands with one change, about a quarter to three fifths of Central Park which represents Judea and Samaria (West Bank) are currently governed by Mahmoud Abbas as the Chairman of the Fatah Party and the last person to win the election to the Chairmanship, or President as he changes which one we should refer to with the utmost ease, after the death of Yasser Arafat and who was presumably to stand for the next parliamentary elections later in 2005 but after realizing the sizeable victory that Hamas had won in the Parliamentary election it was decided by Abbas that he did not need to stand for election a second time in such a short period and thus put his election off until 2009. Well, that election never occurred as Mahmoud Abbas decided that because Hamas had pushed the Palestinian Authority, or at least most of the Fatah Party members of the Palestinian Authority, out of Gaza and taken control of the enclave and basically became the independent state of Hamastan. These events were preceded by the Israeli complete withdrawal of Jewish residents and IDF bases and patrols, a complete and total withdrawal presumably for the reason of allowing the Arabs to rule themselves which they have done repeatedly electing Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist group known to receive assistance from Iran and to be fomenting much of the terrorist activity in the Sinai Peninsula, a series of attacks and other crimes which Egyptian President al-Sisi is attempting to quell. Hamas along with Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood and other terror and criminal entities regularly launch rockets and mortars into Israel. These assaults, which almost universally targeting civilian targets including homes, schools, synagogues, shopping areas and especially large yellow school buses, often ramp up into the hundreds of missiles with a serious number striking farther and farther north with each instigation which eventually requires IDF intervention to curtail these assaults. What is even more surprising is that Hamas has a refugee camp just outside of Gaza City which they have taken no effort to allow these people to be integrated into the society and instead often use them for digging the more dangerous tunnels. So, now back to the regular story which follows our example near perfectly, or such is our hope.

 

These refugees were placed under the care of UNRWA (The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) which unlike every other refugee agency or legislating body all of which agreed that only those residing in the location at the time of there being forced to flee were considered refugees and only until they could be repatriated or assimilated into the nation where their camp was located or where they were residing after fleeing. The approximately 850,000 Jews who were forced from their homes either through legal means or threats of violence were covered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and those refugees who virtually all came to Israel and were integrated into Israeli society no question asked, well, other than name and general history and such. These refugees arrived from the founding of the state of Israel through the early 1960s and led to the numbers of Jews residing today in Israel being a near perfect split between the Ashkenazim from Europe, the United States, Canada and the rest of the English speaking world and the Sephardim from the Middle East, North Africa, Portugal, Spain and across South and Central America and some even from the southeastern United States. (for an interesting story on some families who can trace their roots and the roots of their community back to when the Spanish Inquisition came to their small community in what would become the southwestern parts of the United States titled, The Next Exodus? New Mexico’s Crypto-Jews Seek Liberation ) .

 

Unlike the UNHCR which was where the Jewish refugees both from Europe after the Holocaust (Shoah) and those from throughout the world of which the majority were from the Muslim and Arab worlds while every Arab refugee claiming status of returning to lands within Israel were placed under UNRWA thus assuring that their decedents would into perpetuity be classified as refugees and be imprisoned within the refugee camps barred from obtaining any reputable or decent waged job and definitely not an occupation other than terrorism as these camps regularly produce a greater than average share of terrorists compared to other populations and would reside in the camps until somehow a miracle would place them back into a house which likely does not exist, if it ever did. It is simply unbelievable, incredulous, farfetched, and approaching impossible that all of the Arab refugees resided within the Green Line and none in Judea, Samaria (West Bank) or Gaza or anywhere else in the world. Still these Arab brethren of their minders, their keepers continue to sit around day after day simply living for that singular event to come in their lives where Allah comes and takes them by the hand and settles them into the house they believe they abandoned either voluntarily or by demand of the Israeli military during any of the wars. This is one of the two main sticking points.

 

The other sticking point would come as to when haggling over the land swaps. It is not like the Palestinians do not know exactly what areas the Israeli desire; there are large built-up residential areas and the necessary shopping malls and shops. They also know full well that Israel has already announced and passed a resolution annexing all of Jerusalem making it the undivided historical and permanent Capital City. Sharing any part of Jerusalem is beyond reason for the Jewish people as we remember the pains and difficulties which came as a result of an unfortunate act of generosity allowing the Waqf to maintain their jurisdiction over the Temple Mount, a decision which has steadily become a greater and greater imposition as they have tightened a noose of religious oppression against any non-Muslim religious claims to anything they can even imply as theirs. The Waqf has permitted heavy excavation equipment to dig large trenches and simply dumping anything which has even the slightest possibility of containing historical relics from before the times of Islam. This act of desecration went further than any other act which the Arabs have perpetrated against the Jews. Such willful destruction of priceless artifacts which could have served as such a great witness to the Jewish ties to the land and its history went beyond the criminal destruction of historic artifacts and entered a realm only witnessed as the sacrilege committed in the name of Communism which served the purpose of replacing the religious institutions with the worship of the State as the provider of all which was to be determined as goodness and we have borne witness to the horrors spawned by Communism from the starvation of the peoples of the Ukraine to the murderous implementation of Communism by Mao Tse-tung in China to the killing fields under the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot in Cambodia.

 

The efforts of Israeli Archeologists who went to the dumping grounds location and sifted through tons of what was now debris which had been crushed and pulverized attempting to break any object into dust and for their efforts a few small items were recovered while these items themselves bore witness to the attempted and largely successful theft of the artifacts and history which would have served further to telling the story which binds the Jewish People to this land, but that was exactly their intent. Where the Arabs may not know the extent that the lands mean to Judaism, they are not completely blind to the fact that they hold claim to the very heart of what was once the central hub of the political and religious life in ancient Israel and Judea and it is this heart they intend to keep from the Jewish people. The Arab Palestinians know that their retaining possession of these areas is akin to the theft of the rich history which once adorned the museums and in many cases the buildings themselves throughout the areas under control of ISIS where these objects are destroyed simply because they were not part of a history which paid homage to Allah. It is such blindness which would lead to the destruction of the Pyramids, the Sphinx and the other wonders of Egyptian history solely because they were structures which attested to the greatness of the civilization under the Pharos which predated Islam and thus is of no importance in the reasoning, the mad reasoning and fanaticism which is ISIS. That same wonton destruction and radicalized thinking which drives many of those who attempt to destroy ancient artifacts and relics simply because they might serve to provide witness and further tie the Jewish People with their great history which was attempted to be destroyed once before by Rome and now are facing again, this time by a destructive and retrograde force driven by misbegotten primitive religious zeal bent on the destruction of all which does not serve their narrow views. It is simply to deny any of the lands placed in trust with the British for the formation of a Jewish State which has driven the efforts of the Arabs initially to attempt to steal just over three-quarters of these lands with the formation of Jordan and are now attempting to steal the remaining twenty-two percent in stages no matter how long these efforts take. The drive by the Arabs in the name of Palestine, a place that has no history or rights to any of this land but who are sworn to deny it from the Jews taking it by leaps or by mere dots of land on a map if that is what is required. For the reason of denial of any parcel of land from the Jewish State that there will be no lands swaps considered viable by Abbas and his minions as by refusing the continued existence of the Jewish communities beyond the Green Line that they can inflict the greatest trauma and difficulties for the Jews and perhaps just drive even ten Jews to forget their desires to build their future in the lands promised them which will serve as sufficient victory. Even the recognition provided this misbegotten conception of an Arab Palestinian people with a history reaching back thousands of years is a function of desired destruction of the Jewish history. Examine their purported history and you will see it is nothing more than a bastardization of the Biblical story of the Jewish story being applied with the willful cooperation and allying of the European and Western media which sees the Arabs as being the put upon party by their Jewish oppressors, a story and perception carefully molded by the Arab leadership in conjunction with the leftist and their media allies who view any and all Western religion as a tool of oppression which must be destroyed by any means possible. This attempt to destroy any vestige of Judeo-Christian ethics, and there can be none stronger than the Jewish State, the originator of the entire base on which Western culture rests, which thus must garner efforts beyond any others towards its destruction. We can view a small corner of this war on Judeo-Christian ethics and morality in the fight to destroy the Judeo-Christian definition of marriage from its traditional meaning of one man with one woman to instead virtually anything one’s heart desires. This effort could not be made any more ludicrously evidenced by the marriage of a Japanese man to a mannequin back in the ancient history of the last century, a story which has led others to places best left uninvestigated. There will be no peace promised by Abbas until the entirety of Israel has been replaced by the Arab state and the western world is playing the leading role in complicity. It is the simple story of death by a thousand cuts, in this case the carving up of Israel until the Jews are once again homeless and left at the untender mercies of the rest of the world. For some this is exactly how it is supposed to be as should the Jews reestablish their homelands in Israel it would destroy much of the structure built around the forsakenness of the Jews by G0d as punishment for their sins and their replacement. The initial replacement was by the Christians who were in turn replaced by Islam when they supposedly entered into sinfulness and diverted from the true word of G0d as given by Allah. Islam made one major adjustment to the replacement of Judaism and Christianity by also incorporating into their religion the concept that they were the final replacement and only true religion for all time. This is the other leg behind the desire to destroy Israel before it gets any further and to deny the Jews the Old City of Jerusalem, the core and center to Jewish life and where the Temple sat in centuries past.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Palestinians Prove Statehood Not the Target, Israel Is!

The mantra from much of the world and most emphatically from the Western, Muslim and Arab worlds is that whatever offer Israel presents to the Palestinians, it is insufficient and thus must be rejected. Part of the Palestinian demands is for the right of return for the refugees which are still unsettled from the war lost by the Arab forces from more than six nations in an attempt to wipe Israel from existence immediately after her founding. Resulting from this war and the ensuing decade of sporadic violence against the Jewish populations across the Arab world forced almost two million total refugees from their homes, businesses, lives and history resulting in their influx to Israel. These refugees were of comparable numbers with approximately seven-hundred-thousand Arab Palestinian refugees and eight-hundred-fifty-thousand Jewish refugees from across the Arab world who were forced from their homes and dispossessed of their wealth and properties as well as the hundreds of thousands of European Jewish refugees who were survivors of World War II and all of its persecutions as well as many Jews who were rejected from their homes in a number of places throughout Europe. The basic truth is that a comparable number of Jews were forced into exile as Arabs fled or were dispossessed during the war against the founding of Israel which spanned 1948 and 1949 before a ceasefire was reached and an Armistice Line produced which has since been known as the Green Line. The difference is that the Arab refugees were forced into camps and prohibited from citizenship, right to own property, right to work in all but the most menial of professions and basically shunned socially and politically by their Arab brethren while the entirety of the Jewish refugees were accepted into Israeli society and their children and their children’s children makeup about half of the Israeli population. It also bears noting that the Arabs who chose to remain in Israel are today citizens of Israel with full rights to vote, hold office, serve as judges, physicians, lawyers, or any profession of their choice and may reside and own property same as any Israeli Jew, their lives are legally as equals.

Egyptian president General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has this past week offered Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas to cede 160 square kilometers of land in the Sinai Peninsula bordering Gaza at the Rafah junction, which is equal to five times the size of Gaza, to place the refugees and relent on the demands for right of return thus making the return to the Green Line as demarking the border with Israel acceptable. This land offered by President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi would be in addition to the lands of Gaza and Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and to be used solely for the resettlement of the refugees permitting them to begin a normal form of life. It was reported that Mahmoud Abbas refused the offer without stopping to blink his eyes. Immediately and completely out of hand Abbas refused to consider, debate or even offer some counter-proposal to President al-Sisi’s generous offer and providing a viable end to the otherwise inexorable standoff between the Palestinians and Israel. This offer had the approval and acceptance by Israel, the United States and one may assume the European Union as well if approached would have also approved. Abbas simply refused without even the hint of an explanation. So, what ever could be the reasoning which forced Abbas to once again discard and reject a generous offer which would have given the Palestinians lands almost twice that of even the most generous offer Israel could ever grant, that being a complete withdrawal to the Green Line and dividing Jerusalem.

The reason has been understood and has been stated regularly in Arabic by Abbas as well as his predecessor, Yasser Arafat. The reason was the sole and announced reason that the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded upon in 1964, a full three years before the Six Day War in June of 1967 and thus before Israel controlled any lands beyond the Green Line or her borders with Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. The PLO Charter called for the liberation of all of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea also calling for the destruction of Israel. The Palestinian Arab refugees have been kept in refugee camps and under refugee status with their own United Nations organization, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), taking responsibility for their care and setting the rules by which somebody is to be considered a Palestinian refugee with rights to return to their homes in Israel. This places the Palestinian Arab refugees as a separate entity to the whole of humanity’s refugees who are adjudicated and cared for by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) whose mission statement demands that this agency take all measures necessary to incorporate the refugees under their care into the national population within which they are located. The UNHRC recognized only those who were displaced and realized refugee status at the time of inception and cannot be transferred to their children or their children’s children or any other relative, thus any refugee group which comes under the normal care of the United Nations can last no longer than a single generation. UNRWA has a completely different set of rules and objectives. UNRWA not only permits the passing of refugee status from one generation to the next but also includes and others who may become a member of the household such as a spouse upon marriage. When a Palestinian refugee marries, even if they wed somebody who is not only not a Palestinian refugee, and not even a Palestinian, and not even Arab but, for example, they marry a French Canadian, then that French Canadian and their immediate family are now admissible as Palestinian refugees. Between this and simple reproduction the original Palestinian Refugees now number over five-million. And even if a Palestinian Refugee or their prodigy were to leave the refugee camps and take up residence with citizenship in another country, say San Diego, California in the United States, they retain their refugee status under UNRWA as well their children and their children’s children into perpetuity. Another remarkable trait of these Palestinian refugees is that every last single one of the families left their homes which were within Israeli Green Line and none fled from Judea, Samaria or Gaza. These refugees cannot be permitted to be normalized and relieved of their refugee status in any manner except by being accepted as Israeli citizens as a part of any agreement Abbas might consider, an effect which would alter Israel into simply another Palestinian Arab state and the Jewish People would no longer have their homelands. That is the reason behind the refusal of al-Sisi’s generous and logical offer for a solution to the refugee situation. Since his offer did not include the destruction of Israel as the Jewish homelands, it was completely unacceptable as the end result of the formation of the PLO instituted in order to bring about the end of Israel and her Jews throughout its metamorphosis to Fatah, the Palestinian Authority, and now, according to Abbas, the State of Palestine. Very simple, any solution that would be acceptable to Abbas and the Palestinian leadership can be summed up as follows; To Know Israel leads to No Peace but to Know Peace only if it Produces No Israel.

The aims have not altered one iota from 1964 when the PLO first demanded the purging and purification of all of Palestine from its Jewish presence. There is no difference in the view of reaching a peace with Israel between the PLO, Fatah, Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, ISIS, IRAN, Hezballah and still much of the so-called Arab Street. And furthermore, they mostly agree with Hamas in the call for the eradication of the Jewish People wherever they may reside on the entirety of planet Earth. Where Abbas and Fatah, the PLO and, for as long as Abbas can avoid elections, the Palestinian Authority desire an Arab State in place of Israel and spanning from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea with an elected governance and a secular governance, Hamas desires the same state for the Palestinian Arab also called Palestine but under Sharia exactly the same as ISIS (now referring to themselves as IS though their claim to Caliphate is weak and debatable) and as ISIS desires spreading Sharia across the globe, so does Hamas and their ally Islamic Jihad and their parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. It may start with Israel and the Jews, but it will not end there and eventually Hamas, ISIS, Fatah, Boko Haram, Islamic Jihad, Hezballah, al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda, Wahhabis, Iran, Turkey, Qatar, and numerous other terrorist entities and Arab and Muslim nations will, after eradicating the Jews of Israel, spread their hatred and Sharia into Africa, across Europe, sweeping through Southeast Asia, spreading over South America and eventually, if not sooner, into the United States and Canada. Their desire and aim is no different than any of the other forces which made their vain attempts to conquer the known world and must be prevented from attaining their goal the exact same way. The one truth that must be stressed in the hopes that it is not realized in its potentially worst case scenario, they must be met with greater strength of arms and dedicated warfare to annihilate their chance to achieve even a limited form of their goals just as every other tyrant with delusions of world conquest before them. The longer this battle is postponed, the more costly in blood and treasure the conflict demand be borne. That has been true every time in the past and will prove just as valid in the twenty-first century.

Beyond the Cusp

Why Israel Must and Should Build Everywhere

Israel is once again receiving scornful condemnations simply for announcing their intent to complete plans but not to actually build housing for Israelis, which has been interpreted as for Jews as if only Jews can own housing in Israel. Apart from the fact that housing in Israel is available for purchase or rental by anyone without reference to religion with very few and honestly understandable exceptions, these houses are under fire for their location in the vicinity of Jerusalem in the surrounding suburbs, all of which would remain within Israeli borders under any but the most strident of expected final border agreements. This comes after the near constant flow of condemnations and threats cast at Israel during the months of fruitless talks over announced taking of tenders for possible future construction of housing despite it being fully known by the United States Administration and State Department that Prime Minister Netanyahu had intervened and blocked any building plans for the remainder of the negotiations in order to placate Chairman Abbas’s demands for a building freeze. One would probably not believe such due to the near constant protestations from Abbas demanding a building freeze be applied and announced and the State Department backing his claims as if there were an actual threat of houses being constructed. Why would the State Department echo so completely and march lockstep with Mahmoud Abbas knowing that there was, for all intents and purposes, a full-fledged building freeze put in place by Israeli Prime Minister? The reason is actually revealed by parsing their demands which included two main demands, first was the building freeze which had been satisfied, the other was for the building freeze to be announced to the public. The intent was for the building freeze to become publically known so that it would have the potential and very likely succeed in bringing down Netanyahu’s coalition government. The rather obvious objective, or at least not all that well concealed, was not so much to prevent building as it was to force Netanyahu to announce a building freeze had been instituted thus causing sufficient members of the coalition such as Jewish Home Party to bolt the coalition forcing new elections and, if all went as hoped, the new government be a coalition of Labor, Meretz and other leftist and pro-Arab parties which would be more likely to make full concessions granting anything Abbas could possibly demand. It must be also noted that the Europeans were in complete agreement and reinforced every demand made by either the State Department or the Palestinians and also must have had some amount of knowledge that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu had intervened to block construction.

 

So, what are the conclusions Israel should take from this experience? First off, it is obvious that no matter how much Israel attempts to meet demands from the State Department, the Palestinians and the Europeans, it matters little as there will always be some complaint, either Israel is only meeting the minimal amount of the request or Israel is not going far enough or there are many more areas Israel must compromise and numerous more concessions necessary before we will agree that Israel actually desires peace and is negotiating seriously. Of course these demands will never be satisfied and Israel will always be conveyed by the Palestinians, State Department, Europeans, and mainstream media in a way which will always minimize Israeli attempts to work for peace and entertain any additional demands as being completely valid and necessary demanding Israel immediately complies. Israel must decide where they wish to go from here and with the knowledge that there is nothing they can possibly do which will satisfy any of those who have chosen to always take an adversarial role in all things concerning Israel. The question Israel needs to answer before going forward is whether it has been at all beneficial constantly playing the subordinate role always taking risks and making concessions in a vain attempt to mollify those who stand as adversaries pretending to befriend and support Israel through guiding her into ever more dangerous positions and constantly backing every Palestinian demand on Israel while informing Israel why anything she desires or demands is beyond the pale and something they really need to rethink or simply forget. Israel’s other choice is to take a new track and choose to walk down the avenue of her desires while shutting out the expectant cacophonous caterwauling and petulant protestations and listen exclusively to her own heart’s desires.

 

Israel was founded despite every effort by the British to deny them their rightful space by first by lopping off a full three-quarters of the British Mandate lands out of which Britain had been mandated to form the Jewish State in order to establish Transjordan, later simply became Jordan, pay their debt to the Hashemites who had lost their rule over the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina to a takeover by the Family Saud, and due to having aided Britain in World War I, just as had the Jewish troops which made up the Palestinian Brigade. This had been accomplished by the Churchill White Papers which in exchange for the lands east of the Jordan River being surrendered by the Zionists, the British promised that the lands west of the Jordan River would remain inviolate and undividable into perpetuity for the Jewish State. When the stalling and limiting of Jewish immigration finally failed to prevent the drive of Jewish Zionists to settle and form a Jewish State in their ancient homelands and the world decided the time had come, the British once again turned against the Jews and reneged on their promises and voted and supported the United Nations partition General Assembly Resolution to form yet another Arab state out of half of the remaining Mandate Lands. This British perfidy is actually the norm when it comes to much of the world’s treatment when it comes to everything Israel. Other representations of such hostility can be found in the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) global campaign, the entire series of World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance known as Durban Conferences, the campus violence and hatred displayed against Jews on college campuses during the annual Israel Apartheid demonstrations, the fact that the start of every United Nations Human Rights Commission meeting is required to entertain a denouncement of Israel before any other business can be entertained, and the almost constant denunciations in the world mainstream media and at international conferences as well as from numerous national governments and European Union among others.

 

The time has come for Israel to behave in the same manner as all other nations, in her own best interests. Any other nation which had gained territory resulting from a defensive conflict where they were responding to external threats to their existence, they would retain those lands at least until a peace could be reached with their former adversaries and even then it would be acceptable for the aggressor nation to surrender land in order to be granted final peace. Additionally, the people residing on lands which had been lost during a war of aggression by the aggressor could be made to resettle themselves within the new and smaller borders of their native nation. This is all part of suing for peace by the losing nation of a war; especially if the nation losing such a conflict was the nation whose aggressive acts were what spawned the conflict such as the actions of Syria, Egypt and, undeniably, Jordan during the Six Day War. Apparently, not so much if Israel proves to be the victor in such a conflict. Despite the facts that three Arab nations attacked Israel and cut off her access through the Red Sea at the Straights of Tiran, the world has demanded since the end of that war that Israel must return every millimeter of land to the aggressors thus setting up a rematch from the exact same disadvantage which instigated the initial adventurism in an attempt to completely destroy the Jewish State. Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula when she reached a peace accord with Egypt and returned the Gaza Strip in a unilateral move meant to provide the Palestinians with a place with which they could prove their intents and ability to have a normal and productive society. That unilateral gift resulted in Hamas taking control of the Gaza Strip and then launching thousands upon thousands of rockets and missiles including the launching of an antitank guided missile at a large Yellow school bus murdering the one student remaining after the bus had just let off the other students who had filled the vehicle. That singular attack stands as unarguable proof that Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the other terrorists populating the Gaza Strip aim to murder civilians, and in this case a school child.

 

Israel needs to take her own needs and future into consideration. Already Israel is facing a housing shortage which has only been aggravated by the building freezes established around Jerusalem, Israel’s eternal capital city. Israel made a peace with Egypt who surrendered the Gaza Strip and with Jordan who surrendered Judea and Samaria, mislabeled West Bank to remove the Biblical names which are steeped with Jewish and Hebrew connotations, presumably those areas were given Israel as compensations for the aggressions committed against her by Egypt and Jordan. Israel gave away the Gaza Strip but still has recognized her rightful claim to the contested areas of Judea and Samaria. Time has come for Israel to simply annex as much of Judea and Samaria as she decides is advantageous and provides Israel a defendable border. This could include the entirety of the lands west of the Jordan River of which, should Israel choose, an area could be provided for a semiautonomous region within which the Palestinian Arabs could live under their own leadership. This semiautonomous zone would remain under the security protection of the IDF and the Palestinian Security Forces would need to be disarmed. The Palestinian autonomous zone would be closed to immigration with such coming under the control of Israel which would choose whether or not to permit limited immigration with special consideration for family reunification within strict limits.

 

The remainder of the so-called Palestinian refugees, these descendants are often second or third and even fourth generation descendants, would necessarily need to be permitted to reside in their present country where they have been imprisoned in refugee camps consisting of large apartment buildings, not the tents and other claimed obviously insufficient conditions, and denied work or other normal endeavors of life keeping them as a weapon with which to threaten Israel by gaining them a return into Israel altering the population from a majority Jewish into a majority Arab and Muslim and simply voting Israel into an Arab, Muslim nations. Israel should simply state that these refugees who mostly fled heeding the demands that they vacate their lands thus allowing for the invading half dozen or so Arab armies to utterly and completely destroy the nascent Jewish State one day after her becoming a state in May of 1948 and allow the invading armies the capability to simply slaughter every last person they found assured that the Arab and Muslim residents had left and all would thus be only Jews. This invasion failed and Israel survived though Israel did lose lands in this conflict with Egypt retaining Gaza and Jordan retaining Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem. The residual problems from that war need to be closed and considered a settled matter. The UNRWA needs to be disbanded and the Arab refugees transferred to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHRC Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) which is tasked with resolving refugee situations by assisting in the return into the national populations. The difference between these two refugee agencies is while the UNHRC does everything they are capable of to reintegrate refugees into the national population where they are located and only consider the initial population to be actual refugees with their descendants not so considered while UNRWA is in the business of making every relative possible a new refugee and transforming the refugee status to generation after generation into perpetuity with the intent of flooding Israel with these refugees and destroying the Jewish State.

 

Once these areas have been defined, Israel would inform the United Nations that Israel was annexing all of Judea and Samaria and establishing a limited autonomous zone where the Palestinians would rule themselves but would come under Israeli security provided by the IDF with a Palestinian police force which would be limited to sidearms and shotguns but restricted from usage of military capable weapons. Then Israel necessarily should build and build like there was no tomorrow. These houses would be made available to any Israeli just as current housing and other residential buildings are available within Israel’s green line. This availability would be equal for Druze, Bedouin, Arab, Christian, Bahá’í, Zoroastrians, Jews and any other Israeli citizen. Israel would need to initially monitor any transit from the autonomous Palestinian areas into Israel with such restrictions lessening as time and conditions permit eventually having no restrictions once terrorism had reduced or been eradicated, then full transit and making full availability of Israeli employment and other benefits, possibly even citizenship and total incorporation into Israeli society should such be desired. Meanwhile, the added available homes would finally begin to reverse the increasingly difficult housing market and provide many moderately and economical priced housing which, given time, would force prices of housing lower, or at least make them more reasonable, over time. There will be those who will claim, especially within Israel, that such actions would only serve to bring scorn and protestations from much of the rest of the world. They would claim that Israel might be removed, thus losing representation, from the United Nations and forced from many conventions and treaties by an angered and stunned world. There would be angry denunciations from the United Nations, United States (especially from the State Department), European Union and numerous countries. Well, all I can say in defense of this plan is, does not this sound exactly like the conditions described earlier in the article describing exactly what Israel is facing currently? Well, actually it does not sound as bad as at least once Israel had made such a decision to annex Judea and Samaria allowing generously for a Palestinian autonomous zone, she can ignore much of the protestations and wait until with time the protestations slowly subside into silence. It would be difficult to paint a picture which would picture a world any more antagonistic towards Israel as the current state. Israel might even permit any Palestinian who so desired, to relocate to Gaza and be part of the wondrous state of Hamastan. With the slow gaining of acceptance and even allies and actual applications of their plans by the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement and some nations actually bringing such actions to a vote, how long before such an idea becomes mainstreamed and starts gaining acceptance worldwide, annexing our ancestral lands might accelerate such a problem, but maybe not. Time has come for Israel to do what serves Israel and her people and end the constant threats and antagonisms dictating our actions because, if we have figured out anything, we have figured that there is nothing Israel can implement short of dissolving the Jewish State and leaving for another planet in a star system far, far away, and I bet that would even garner denunciations claiming we were attempting to take a whole planet for ourselves.  Believe me when I claim that Israel and the Jews need to act for their own interests as nobody will ever grant us a fair chance and we need to make our own breaks. So, annex all of our ancient lands, build for the future, make an inviting homeland which will make and enticement so wondrous that the seven to eight million Jews of the Diaspora will desire nothing else but to make Aliyah. We can already see how unwelcomed Jews are in many nations and the disease of anti-Semitism is spreading and growing across the entirety of this world. Already the Jews in France are fleeing persecution as are the Jews from the Ukraine while simply from a great and undefinable desire the Jews who have been lost to their brethren are returning home, the Jews of Ethiopia, India, China and from nearly every other nation in the world. These Jews will require homes and these homes need to be built and made affordable and that takes land, all our ancient lands.

 

Beyond the Cusp