Ten Basic Facts about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

David Harris offers alternate facts in here, and I would urge a moderate Jew and a moderate Palestinians to counter check these facts.  The bottom line is security for the people of Israel and Justice for the people of Palestine, blaming must be done with now, unless they are fresh inflictions.

Mike

Courtesy - Huffington Post

David Harris, Contributor

AJC Chief Executive Officer, Edward and Sandra Meyer Office of the CEO

In all the discussion about this decades-long conflict and the quest for a solution, some basic facts are too often missing, neglected, downplayed, or skewed.

Not only does this do a disservice to history, but it also contributes to prolonging the conflict by perpetuating false assumptions and mistaken notions.

Consider:

Fact #1: There could have been a two-state solution as early as 1947. That’s precisely what the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) proposed, recognizing the presence of two peoples – and two nationalisms – in a territory governed temporarily by the United Kingdom. And the UN General Assembly decisively endorsed the UNSCOP proposal. The Jewish side pragmatically accepted the plan, but the Arab world categorically rejected it.

Fact #2: When Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, it extended the hand of friendship to its Arab neighbors, as clearly evidenced by its founding documents and statements. That offer, too, was spurned. Instead, five Arab armies declared war on the fledgling Jewish state, seeking its total destruction. Despite vastly outnumbering the Jews and possessing superior military arsenals, they failed in their quest.

Fact #3: Until 1967, the eastern part of Jerusalem and the entire West Bank were in the hands of Jordan, not Israel. Had the Arab world wished, an independent Palestinian state, with its capital in Jerusalem, could have been established at any time. Not only did this not happen, but there is no record of it ever having been discussed. To the contrary, Jordan annexed the territory, seeking full and permanent control. It proceeded to treat Jerusalem as a backwater, while denying Jews any access to Jewish holy sites in the Old City and destroying the synagogues there. Meanwhile, Gaza was under Egyptian military rule. Again, there was no talk of sovereignty for the Palestinians there, either.

Fact #4: In May 1967, the Egyptian and Syrian governments repeatedly threatened to annihilate Israel, as these countries demanded that UN peacekeeping forces be withdrawn from the region. Moreover, Israeli shipping lanes to its southern port of Eilat were blocked, and Arab troops were deployed to front-line positions. The Six-Day War was the outcome, a war that Israel won. Coming into possession of the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, Sinai Peninsula, West Bank, and eastern Jerusalem, Israel extended feelers to its Arab neighbors, via third parties, seeking a “land for peace” formula. The Arab response came back on September 1, 1967, from Khartoum, Sudan, where the Arab League nations were meeting. The message was unmistakable: “No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations with Israel.” Yet another opportunity to end the conflict had come and gone.

Fact #5: In November 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat broke with the Arab rejectionist consensus. He traveled to the Israeli capital of Jerusalem to meet with Israeli leaders and address Israel’s parliament and speak of peace. Two years later, underscoring the lengths to which Israel was prepared to go to end the conflict, a deal was reached, in which Israel – led, notably, by a right-wing government– yielded the vast Sinai Peninsula, with its strategic depth, oil deposits, settlements, and air bases, in exchange for the promise of a new era in relations with the Arab world’s leading country. In 1981, Sadat was slain by the Muslim Brotherhood for his alleged perfidy, but his legacy of peace with Israel, thankfully, has endured.

Fact #6: In September 1993, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) reached an agreement, known as the Oslo Accords, offering hope for peace on that front as well, but eight months later, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat confirmed the suspicions of many that he was not honest, when he was caught on tape in a Johannesburg mosque asserting that this agreement was nothing more than a temporary truce until final victory.

Fact #7: In 1994, Jordan’s King Hussein, following in the footsteps of Egyptian President Sadat, reached an agreement with Israel, again demonstrating Israel’s readiness for peace – and willingness to make territorial sacrifices when sincere Arab leaders come forward.

Fact #8: In 2000-1, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, leading a left-of-center government and supported by the Clinton administration, offered a groundbreaking two-state arrangement to Arafat, including a bold compromise on Jerusalem. Not only did the Palestinian leader reject the offer, but he shockingly told Clinton that Jews had never had any historical connection to Jerusalem, gave no counter-offer, and triggered a new wave of Palestinian violence that led to more than 1,000 Israeli fatalities (proportionately equivalent to 40,000 Americans).

Fact #9: In 2008, three years after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew all Israeli soldiers and settlers from Gaza, only to see Hamas seize control and destroy another chance for coexistence, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went even further than Barak in extending an olive branch to the Palestinian Authority. He offered a still more generous two-state proposal, but got no formal response from Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s successor. A Palestinian negotiator subsequently acknowledged in the media that the Israeli plan would have given his side the equivalent of 100 percent of the disputed lands under discussion.

Fact #10: At the request of the Obama administration, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to a ten-month freeze on settlement-building in 2010, as a good-faith gesture to lure the Palestinians back to the table. Regrettably, it failed. The Palestinians didn’t show up. Instead, they have continued to this day their strategy of incitement; attempts to bypass Israel – and face-to-face talks – by going to international organizations instead; denial of the age-old Jewish link to Jerusalem and, by extension, the region; and lifetime financial support for captured terrorists and the families of suicide bombers.

Isn’t it high time to draw some obvious conclusions from these facts, recognize the many lost opportunities to reach a settlement because of a consistent “no” from one side, and call on the Palestinians to start saying “yes” for a change?

Nabi Saleh is where I lost my Zionism

The Israeli Government's  ( not Jews, Judaism or the nation of Israel) policies will continue to build resentment from around the world. Six nations out of 200 nation's support Israel - that Includes US, Israel, Guatemala, Solomon Islands and other beggars that feed on US money. 194 Nations resent the bullying of Israeli government, violation of international treaties, illegal forcible usurping of the homes from the Palestinians.  Israel needs our support no doubt, but we should make it conditional to peace and not the brutalities.

Please read my article at Huffington Post - https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/anti-semitism-is-augmented-by-netanyahu-and-trump-jerusalem_us_5a2a6ea9e4b0d7c3f26221b6

If Americans ever get to know the truth, they will demand Israel to behave to international rules and guidelines. We have every right to demand in exchange for the money we give them every year.

Mike Ghouse
# # # 

By Lisa Goldman

 |Published December 24, 2017

Nabi Saleh is where I lost my Zionism

By the time I began going to Nabi Saleh, I had spent about four years reporting on what I saw in the West Bank and Gaza, watching detachedly as my politics moved ever leftward. What I witnessed in that small West Bank village was the last straw.

Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops during a protest to show solidarity with Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike, Nabi Saleh, West Bank, April 21, 2017. (Flash90)

A short video of 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi slapping an Israeli soldier has dominated the Israeli media for the past week, and received prominent coverage internationally as well. Ahed, a Palestinian girl from the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, makes a big impression with her eye-catching mane of blonde hair, the fierce, intelligent expression in her blue eyes — and her fearlessness.

One of the most striking aspects of the immense discussion generated by the video is the near-binary contrast between what Israelis and their advocates see, and what everyone else sees.

For Israelis, one of their soldiers was provoked, almost unbearably, but still managed to rise above the situation. For almost everyone else, the video shows an unarmed adolescent — who could easily, based on her appearance, be an Israeli teenager shopping at the mall — bravely confronting an armed soldier in her own village. Even without knowing the circumstances, a fully-grown man in combat gear and carrying a powerful weapon refraining from hitting a much smaller, unarmed adolescent girl, seems not remarkably praiseworthy but rather a response predicated on basic humanity and ethics.

The conversation between the three men is salutary because it provides real insight into the 

The Israeli media has, for the most part, promoted the army’s narrative about the incident — of a restrained and mature soldier who dealt admirably with a difficult and stressful situation involving enemy actors.

In the segment below, Yaron London, the host of an eponymously named primetime news magazine program on Channel 10, mirrors the perspective of the army. London’s guests are Or Heller, the station’s military affairs correspondent, and Jonathan (Yonatan) Pollak, a veteran anti-occupation activist:

The conversation between the three men is salutary because it provides real insight into the mentality of mainstream Israeli society. First we hear Or Heller, an experienced military affairs correspondent, repeating the army’s narrative. He expresses pride in the soldiers, makes the claim that the Tamimi family provoked the confrontation as a means of creating an anti-Israeli propaganda video, and asserts that the soldiers were only in the vicinity to prevent Palestinian residents from throwing rocks.

Yaron London, an intelligent and educated man who does, I am sure, identify as a liberal, fails to question Heller’s narrative. Both men are completely focused on the challenge those unarmed adolescent girls supposedly present to “their” soldiers, rather than on the actual violence that those soldiers visit upon the village week after week.

Jonathan Pollak was in Nabi Saleh when the incident occurred. Watch as he calmly provides the context, and note how shocked Heller and London are when Pollak refers to “your” army — rather than “our” army. (Pollak refused to serve, which is a radical act in Israel.)

An Israeli soldier warns photographers during clashes following the funeral of Mustafa Tamimi in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, December 11, 2011. (photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

This segment encapsulates the Achilles heel of the Israeli media — i.e., its willingness to report communiqués issued by the army as straight news, without any fact checking. Even though the Israeli security establishment has been caught lying on countless occasions, journalists who report for mainstream media outlets continue to accept without question the information they are given about events they neither witnessed nor verified independently.

Throughout the many months I attended Friday demonstrations in Nabi Saleh, I never saw a single reporter from an Israeli media outlet. And yet, during the drive home after those long and distressing days, the news presenter on Israel Radio would report that there had been “riots” in a West Bank village and that “our forces” responded with crowd control measures.

The Tamimi family has been demonstrating every Friday for about a decade, protesting the takeover of Nabi Saleh’s natural water spring by nearby settlers. As Bassem Tamimi once explained to me, in quite fluent Hebrew, the villagers said nothing when the army built the settlement of Halamish (originally Neve Tzuf) on their land. But when the settlers confiscated their spring, and the army then prevented the Tamimis from accessing it, Bassem and his extended family decided to draw a red line.

Palestinian protesters sit in front of Israeli soldiers during a protest against the occupation and in solidarity with the Palestinian prisoners hunger strike, in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, May 12, 2017. (Haidi Motola/Activestills.org)

Every week they gather at the top of the hill inside their village, carrying flags and banners, and walk toward the road that separates them from the spring. The goal is simply to cross the road and walk to the spring. And every week, the army deploys security forces inside and around the village to stop the protesters from reaching their destination.

The way it works is this: at around noon, military vehicles enter the village and park at the bottom of its bisecting road. Security forces, heavily armed and wearing combat gear, descend from the vehicles, load their weapons, and wait. Sometimes they start shooting as soon as the demonstration begins, and sometimes they wait for a teenager to throw a stone in their direction before opening fire.

As Ben Ehrenreich notes in his New York Times Magazine article about Nabi Saleh, the army spokesperson told him there has never been a single case of a soldier being injured by a stone at those demonstrations. But over the past few years, soldiers have injured and killed several demonstrators.

Palestinian, Israeli and international women enjoy a picnic near a water spring in Nabi Saleh, April 22, 2012. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

In one now notorious incident, a soldier cracked open the rear door of his armored jeep as it was on its way out of the village, and shot a tear gas canister directly into the face of Ahed’s 21-year-old cousin Mustafa, killing him. No-one was ever censured or prosecuted for that act of murder.

These are just a few of the things I saw in Nabi Saleh.

Once, I was standing on the roof of a home with three teenage girls who lived there. We were watching the demonstration from a bit of a distance — maybe 150 meters. Suddenly one of the soldiers standing down the road pivoted in our direction, raised his weapon, aimed, and shot tear gas canisters directly at us. He shot another couple of canisters at the house, shattering the living room window. The older girl told me that her family had stopped replacing it every time the soldiers broke it; the glass had become too expensive.

I also witnessed soldiers deliberately blanketing a small house in tear gas until its occupants, coughing and retching long streams of mucus, were forced to emerge. They were two elderly women, wrinkled and bent over, and a young woman in her twenties.

Mustafa Tamimi, a 28 year-old Palestinian from Nabi Saleh, is seen seconds before he gets hit with a tear gas canister shot by an Israeli soldier from a short distance during the weekly demonstration in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, December 9, 2011. (Haim Scwarczenberg/Activestills guest photographer)

I’ve seen soldiers grab crying children and shoving them into military vehicles, pushing aside their screaming mothers.

I’ve seen soldiers grab a young woman by her arms and drag her like a sack of potatoes for several meters along an asphalt road so hot that it melted the rubber soles of my running shoes, before tossing her into a military vehicle and driving away.

I’ve had my ankles singed black when a security officer looked me straight in the eyes and threw a stun grenade at my legs.

Israeli army sharp-shooters regularly shoot unarmed demonstrators in Nabi Saleh with both rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition. They break into houses and drag people out, arresting them on the claim that they allowed demonstrators to hide in their garden.

And then I would go back to Tel Aviv and be told by my friends that I could not have seen what I saw, because “our soldiers” do not behave that way. Soon, I had to distance myself from those friends in order to keep my own emotions in check.

An Israeli Border Police officer beats a Palestinian protester with a club during a demonstration in Nabi Saleh, January 15, 2010. (Yotam Ronen/Activestills.org)

I write these sordid descriptions of what I saw at the demonstrations as a means of explaining how and why that place radicalized me. After Nabi Saleh I was, in a way, broken. The impact of the violence on my psyche was exhausting and traumatic, with long-lasting effects that I still experience today.

By the time I began going to Nabi Saleh, I had spent about four years reporting on what I saw in Gaza and the West Bank, and watching detachedly as my politics moved ever leftward from the liberal place in which they started, as a consequence of what I saw on the ground. But it was in Nabi Saleh that I lost the last remnants of what I would call — for lack of a word to describe my nostalgia for the idea of a state for the Jews — my Zionism.

My radicalization was not only a consequence of witnessing brutal violence perpetrated right in front of my eyes, by soldiers of the army that was supposed to protect me. It was also a result of my seeing the Tamimi family endure that violence week after week, seeing their relatives injured, arrested and killed, and still not coming to the conclusion that the price of resistance is too high. They simply refuse to submit.

Nariman Tamimi (left), Bassem Tamimi (center), and Ahed Tamimi seen in their home in Nabi Saleh, February 2017. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

Week after week, they welcome strangers into their home with kindness and hospitality. No one in Nabi Saleh ever expressed an ideological political opinion to me. They didn’t have to. The situation is clear; the actions of the Israeli government and security forces there are impossible to defend, on any level. And of course that is the source of the Tamimis’ strength — the knowledge that their cause is just, and that they are fighting it with ethical, nonviolent means.

The Tamimis clearly understand the power of social media. But they don’t manufacture those confrontations. In fact, I have never seen a video that comes remotely close to conveying the true brutality I saw in Nabi Saleh. Maybe you need to smell the tear gas and feel the smallness of the place to see how outrageous it is for soldiers to act as they do there: to, with a sense of entitlement, enter a village and break up a gathering of unarmed demonstrators; to kick open the doors of homes and drag off to jail unarmed people who pose no threat; to break into a house at 4 a.m., to roust a teenage girl from her bed and drag her off to jail, denying her even the right to be accompanied by a guardian.

I am sure Ahed understands very well the effect of her striking appearance. I am sure that Bassem Tamimi knows his genuine warmth and hospitality go a lot further in winning over hearts and minds than didactic political lectures ever could. With no money, and by sacrificing their own bodies and emotional well being, the Tamimis are drawing world attention to the hundreds of Palestinian children sitting in jail, who don’t have blonde hair and a strong, supportive family. They are showing the world what the occupation means, in tangible terms, to real people. They taught me, purely by example, what grassroots resistance means.

Is Israel, with all the money and manpower it pours into sophisticated advocacy campaigns via social media, really in a position to criticize the Tamimis for understanding how to publicize their own cause? As Jonathan Pollak says to Yaron London, the reason those Nabi Saleh videos make Israel look bad is because Israel is doing bad things.

For additional original analysis and breaking news, visit +972 Magazine's Facebook page or follow us on Twitter. Our newsletter features a comprehensive round-up of the week's events. Sign up here.

 

Trump’s United Nations Vote is a Strategy

Trump and Nikki Haley know that demanding vote from the community of nations for Jerusalem is pure stupidity. Trump also knows that he can buy more time and feel secure by throwing red meat to his base. The base has nothing to gain but they will stand by their man, they are good loyal humans who are taken for a ride by Trump.

Nasty calls

Thanks to Rabbis and many of my Jewish friends for appreciating the article and I forgive the nasty callers from among Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Christians who could not swallow pluralistic solutions to the issue. I urge them to read it again and look at the long term picture. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/anti-semitism-is-augmented-by-netanyahu-and-trump-jerusalem_us_5a2a6ea9e4b0d7c3f26221b6

The following video is about recognizing Israel and Palestine; it was made in 2015 and just released, you can hear new paradigms and new solutions to the conflict.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFEvKrgdbNM

Mike Ghouse – www.IsraelPalestineDialogue.com and Center for Pluralism.

Jerusalem decision by Trump will increase Anti-Semitism

Now, the rise of this ugly evil of Anti-Semitism can be squarely attributed to Prime Minister Netanyahu. He should be held accountable for the long term insecurities heaped on the people of Israel. Let me share the information in simple terms while my extensive research article is in the making.

Anti-Semitism is a wrong label in most cases, it is actually resentment born out of violation of international treaties by Israeli government. Please separate Judaism, Jews, Israel and the Israeli Government, the world has no problem whatsoever with the first three but resent the 4th one.

Full story at Huffington Post

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/anti-semitism-is-augmented-by-netanyahu-and-trump-jerusalem_us_5a2a6ea9e4b0d7c3f26221b6

Now this video:

Mike Ghouse is committed to working towards building cohesive societies and offers pluralistic solutions on the Political, religious, cultural and societal and human rights issues of the day. He is the President of Center for Pluralism and can be reached at www.CenterforPluralism.com  

Mike Ghouse at CPAC 2017 about Israel Palestine

Dave Sussman interviewd me on the floor of CPAC about Israel Palestine issue

Bernie Sanders on Israel Palestine

Bernie's view has been my view as well and I have articulated it for nearly two decades in over 100 articles at this site www.IsraelPalestineDialogue.com 

In fact the Caution has been around since the beginning, this site is not for Jews and Muslims who do not have the capacity to see another point of view. 
Senator Sanders’ Big Speech

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) made headlines with his J Street Conference debut speech, connecting strong diplomacy, the pursuit of a two-state solution and the fight against bigotry to long-standing American and Israeli values. The Senator had the audience on their feet when he said that “to oppose the policies of a right-wing government in Israel does not make one anti-Israel or an anti-Semite. We can oppose the policies of President Trump without being anti-American. We can oppose the policies of Netanyahu without being anti-Israel. We can oppose the policies of Islamic extremism without being anti-Muslim.” Watch the speech here.

http://jstreet.org/conference-highlights/?akid=5570.207051.g44KB0&rd=1&t=4#.WLrsMX9P-Uk

The Communal Conversation

Our plenary on the role of the American Jewish community in the Trump era featured a riveting discussion among major communal leaders, including our own J Street U president Brooke Davies. Watch their conversation on what the community can and should do to defend the two-state solution and resist rising xenophobia.

Those are just a few of the most memorable moments from a weekend that was full of them. Click here to watch highlights and full videos of many of our 2017 conference sessions. And check out some of the press coverage in JTA and Haaretz.

We know there are tremendous struggles and challenges ahead.

But I do want to take a moment to celebrate -- and to congratulate you for the contribution you’ve made to J Street’s success.

We heard speaker after speaker tell us how valuable, how unique and how urgently needed our voice and our movement are. Leader Pelosi told us that “With courage candor and passion ... you have honored the call to defend our values and fight for our future." Senator Chris Murphy, in a major speech on US policy in the Middle East, thanked us for being “a critical partner for those of us who still believe in the transformative power of diplomacy.” And New York Times columnist Tom Friedman described us as “the actual heart and soul of the American Jewish community.”

We’ve all built this together. I couldn’t be more proud, or more sure that we are ready for the pivotal fights that we face ahead.

Thank you,
Jeremy Ben-Ami
Founder and President of J Street