Jewish babies illegal under a new UN international law.

Think upon this...

Did you know that if you are an Israeli Jew and live in towns such as Maale Adumim, Ariel, Gilo or parts of Jerusalem you can't have children and continue living there?

Find this shocking? You should. It is an integral part of the infamous Security Council Resolution 2334 which clearly states that "natural growth" is forbidden in these locations if you are a Jewish family.

“Recalling the obligation under the Quartet Road map, endorsed by its resolution 1515 (2003), for a freeze by Israel of all settlement activity, including “natural growth”, and the dismantlement of all settlement outposts erected since March 2001”

3. Underlines that it will not recognise any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations;

4. Stresses that the cessation of all Israeli settlement activities is essential for salvaging the two-State solution, and calls for affirmative steps to be taken immediately to reverse the negative trends on the ground that are imperilling the two-State solution;

The OECD definition of natural growth is when births outnumber deaths which is, well, natural.

https://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=2239

God forbid a Jewish couple should have a baby. They may be in breach of international law.

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Ethnic cleansing of Jews goes unnoticed

One of the false mantras of the so-called Palestinian leadership and their BDS supporters is that they are being ethnically cleansed by brutal Zionist occupiers. This despite that the Arab population is increasing by leaps and bounds and thanks to Israel their health and medical care has improved greatly.

So where is the ethnic cleansing?  It is against Jews by the Palestinian leadership supported by the BDS activists and now with the help of the United Nations.

On a visit to Cairo in July of 2013 Mahmoud Abbas said that “no Jew, civilian or otherwise, would be permitted to live in the future Palestinian state.”  He repeated it several times to his own people before someone whispered in his ear that this was being construed as anti-Semitic and not helpful to their cause, so he switched the word “Jew” to “Israeli.” But it was too late. He had already set the marker. This Holocaust denier had said what he meant. Further proof  that the main obstacle to a two-state solution is not the settlements, as UNSC 2334 would have us believe, but the absolute refusal of Abbas to acknowledge the presence of the Jewish state of Israel. This is too abhorrent a reality for Mahmoud Abbas and certainly also Hamas on the other side of the Palestinian political divide.

The most egregious errors of UN Resolution 2334 is that it attempts to replace Resolution 242 with a demand that all of the territories, known as Judea & Samaria in Israel but defined as “illegally occupied Palestinian territory” dated 4 June 1967 by the Security Council, must be considered as “Palestinian.”

As both sides of the Palestinian divided leadership demand that a Palestine must be Judenrein – cleansed of Jews – this UN resolution by default calls for the ethnic cleansing of Jews and is therefore an anti-Semitic decision in the spirit of the notorious Nuremberg laws of Nazi Germany.

Further evidence of this was the inclusion of “east Jerusalem” into 2334. Putting aside that an undivided Jerusalem is not only the capital of Israel but a working municipality, by calling for splitting the eastern side of the city and calling it Palestine cuts out the central beating heart of Judaism and hands it over to a malevolent and proven anti-Semitic entity.

East Jerusalem means the Old City that contains most of Judaism’s precious treasures. The Kotel (Western Wall), the Temple Mount, the Jewish Quarters with its numerous synagogues and study centers, the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives as well as major institutions such as Hadassah Hospital, Hebrew University, the Rockefeller Museum and of course the archaeological discover of David’s City, including the palace of the Jewish King David of biblical fame.

People should be made to understand, as the Palestinians and their followers clearly do, that by removing the most holy Jewish sites from Israeli possession would leave Israel spiritually bankrupt and unable to call itself a Jewish state no matter how many Jews are its citizens.

The anti-Semitism of the Palestinians, and the Muslim world as a whole, is undeniable, but this is not a new phenomenon. Ethnic cleansing by Arabs has being going on for a hundred years in this part of the world.

My upcoming book   ‘1917. From Palestine to the Land of Israel’ reveals the expulsion of tens of thousands of Jews from Jaffa and Tel Aviv in 1914 and 1917. It details the background to the Nebi Musa Arabs riots in Jerusalem in 1920 that left Jews killed, raped and wounded. That was before the 1929 wholesale massacre of Jews by local Arabs in Hebron. All this before there was a state of Israel.

When Israel was established in 1948 the first act of the Arabs was to invade the nascent state in a multi-force war of aggression. One consequence was the expulsion and murder of Jews by the Jordanians in Gush Etzion, Kalya and other places. The ethnic cleansing of Jews by murder and expulsion from the Old City of Jerusalem added to the destruction of all its synagogues by the Arab Legion remains a car on our collective memory.

No Jews remained in Judea & Samaria, called the West Bank by the occupying Jordanians, or in east Jerusalem. It was ethnically cleansed and the United Nations had little concern.   Only now do they agitate to remove Jews from Judea & Samaria and the Old City of Jerusalem, once again turning our ancient heritage into Judenrein territory as demanded by the Palestinians – and they think they are doing this in the name of justice and human rights. For shame!

Jordan occupied territory captured from the newly-born Israel from 1948 until they lost another aggressive war in 1967. Nothing was said in the United Nations. No outcry from Palestinian supporters because there weren’t any. No Palestinian leaders pressed claims of Jordan illegally occupying Palestinian land because there weren’t any Palestinian leaders and there wasn’t any Palestine to lobby for.

What we are witnessing is a continuation of the evil Arab tradition of murdering and expelling Jews. When we see the hand of Britain approving of its implementation we are reminded, as I have laid out in my book, the duplicity and moral corruption of the British government when it came to Jews in Palestine and now to Jews in Israel.

This has to be a time when Western nations in particular rediscover their moral compass. It does not lie in appeasement of the grievances of haters and anti-Semites.

We cannot expect better from the Arab world with its ancient culture of violence and Jew hatred but we do expect better from a democratic world that has lost its tradition of enlightenment and replaced it with a misguided sense of secular morality that has allowed those who do not share once cherished values to make our world a far more dangerous place.

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.  He is the author of the upcoming book ‘1917. From Palestine to the Land of Israel.’

The Security Council vote was not about settlements.

The Security Council vote was not about settlements. It was about something far worse.

The UNSC vote was not about “settlements.”  It was an Arab subterfuge, a trap into which the United States, the UK, New Zealand and other naive or cynical diplomats took an active role.

It was all smoke and mirrors, a con trick holding up the settlement issue to dazzle the voters while the real intent was to disown Israel of territories to which they have genuine claim and turn them into “illegally occupied Palestinian territory.”

For certain, President Obama latched on to the idea. It was pay-back time, a golden opportunity not to be missed to hit back at Bibi before handing in the keys to the White House. For shame!

Now we know that Obama was cooking up this evil brew back in November.

Not too many people noticed that Obama’s Secretary of State sneaked into New Zealand in November for a quick visit. The visit was to discuss the impending Security Council meeting. The press was given to believe that the burning issue was Syria, but nobody is putting it past Kerry that he didn’t get into a huddle with Kiwi leaders about supporting this anti-Israel settlement resolution. New Zealand has a seat in the Security Council.

When Egypt withdrew their sponsorship of the anti-Israel proposal due to the intervention of President-Elect Trump it probably took nothing more than a quick phone call to get New Zealand to step up and join Malaysia, Senegal and Venezuela in sponsoring the treacherous United Nations act.

That Obama’s finger was all over it was confirmed by Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Obama was pulling the strings but it was the Palestinian/Arab narrative that was written into the resolution. Israel’s voice, its legitimate rights and claims to all or parts of the territory, were ignored.  

So, how did it go beyond the issue of settlements?

The wording of a flagrantly biased resolution wrongly claimed that “settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including east Jerusalem has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.”

This is blatantly incorrect.

It corrupted UN Resolution 242 of 1967 that called on Israel armed forces to withdraw from territory according to a timetable. 242 did not call on Israel to withdraw from all the territory as does this UNSC demand.

Resolution 242 acknowledged Israel’s right to protect itself and live in peace within secure and recognized borders. Although the UNSC resolution restates these essential prerequisites it has the chutzpah to impose where these borders should be by renaming anything beyond the so-called 1967 lines “occupied Palestine territory.”  As such, the Security Council converts a false definition into international law.

It also ignored ongoing Palestinian belligerency (terror) and their absolute lack of respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial claims and political independence of every State in the area to live in peace, particularly Israel, as demanded in UN Resolution 242. Formally, the UN Resolution 242 was sent to and approved by the Security Council. They have now obliterated these commitments. Packed with demands of Israel to meet specific obligations, it makes no such demand of the Palestinian Authority and not of Hamas. Actually, Hamas is not mentioned once. It is as if Hamas didn’t exist.

Instead the UNSC Resolution blankets Israel as the sole perpetrator of international lawlessness overlooking ongoing Palestinian belligerency save for asking the PA to confront those engaging in terror as if those engaging in terror had nothing to do with the Palestinian Authority and their incitement to and glorification of Palestinian terrorism against Israel.

There are international laws that permit states to retain territory acquired in wars inflicted on them by aggressive enemies for the defensive state’s security and its citizen’s safety. That was the case of Israel which acquired territory in defensive wars against invading Arab armies.  This gives international legitimacy to Israel’s claims to territories gained not in one war of aggression against the Jewish state (1948) but two (1948 and 1967).

All this was ignored by a Security Council determined to plough its way to legal impositions against Israel in their haste to establish a Palestinian entity on land on which Israel has longstanding and legal claims.

The United Nations brushes aside the fact that the Palestine they crave to establish is and will remain a dysfunctional, divided, violent, undemocratic society that refuses to recognise Israel’s right to exist as the Jewish state. Both sides of the Palestinian political divide have permanent agendas to eradicate the Jewish state at some convenient future time. As proof, the charters of both the PLO and Hamas call for the eventual destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews. As further proof just listen or read the exhortations emanating out of their official statements and the official Palestinian media.

This was not addressed by the UNSC. It was not called unlawful. It was ignored, irrelevant to their sole ambition to create this monster and leave the parties to sort out the consequences.

The UNSC vote also obliterated the Oslo Accords signed on the White House lawn between Yasser Arafat and Yizhak Rabin in the presence of President Bill Clinton and witnessed by the EU and Russia.

The Oslo Accords divided the territories known as Judea & Samaria or the West Bank into three zones. Area A was put under the civil and security administration of the Palestinian Authority. Area B was given to the PA for their civil rule while the security elements were agreed to be a joint Israeli-PA project.  Area C was designated to be under complete Israel civil and security control until some future permanent peace agreement depending on the terms and conditions of such an agreement.

Currently in Area C there are almost 600,000 Jews and just under 100,000 Arabs residing there although the Palestinian Authority with the physical and financial assistant of European countries and the EU are creating facts on the ground by transferring Bedouin Arabs into Area C. These people live in buildings provided by the EU in defiance of the provisions of Area C.

According to the Oslo Accords, Area C will be negotiated in the permanent status negotiations which have not taken place because the Palestinian Authority, and certainly not Palestinian Hamas, has any inclination to sit with the Israeli leadership to negotiate mutual recognition, borders, or any other final status provisions.

The wording of new UNSC vote would have us believe that this Oslo Accord provision is null and void. Area C has been replaced and given the status of “illegally occupied Palestinian territory.” Not so.  The presumption that Israel must withdraw from all territories or that Jews will not continue to live and work on Judea & Samaria is a gross and deliberate aberration.

What was most abhorrent in the wording of the unanimously approved UNSC resolution was the removal of all Israeli claims to the most holy Jewish sites placing them at the feet of the Palestinians.

When the United Nations Security Council calls the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem with its synagogues, yeshivot, Jewish population and businesses, the Jewish Temple Mount and the Western Wall and all its antiquities, and the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, the Hadassah Hospital and other profoundly Jewish/Israeli institutions and heritage as “Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem” it is a surrender that no Israeli government or any caring Jew are prepared to accept.

I doubt that many Jews in the global community would permit the United Nations to dispense so glibly with three thousand years of Jewish history.

The fact that the United States, New Zealand, the UK and France lent their hand to this infamous act is appalling.

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies and the author of the upcoming and timely book ‘1917. From Palestine to the Land of Israel.’

DENIAL. The connection between a Holocaust denier and BDS.

I was reading a review of a new movie called ‘Denial’ in the Jerusalem Post.

The movie depicts the libel suit brought by Deborah Lipstadt, portrayed in the movie by Rachel Weisz, against the infamous Holocaust denier, David Irving.

There is a scene in the movie where Irving taunts a young and inexperienced Lipstadt as she was trying to deliver a college lecture about the Holocaust and I was struck by the similarities between that incident and the anti-Israel bullies who intimidate anyone presenting an Israeli perspective.

Lipstadt explains that she felt like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck, without a strategy, uncertain how to respond. 

How familiar this emotion sounds to anyone confronted by BDS antagonists.

Explaining the feeling she had in compiling her case against Irving she described Irving as employing what TV comedian, Stephen Colbert, later called “truthiness.” That is compiling a list of half facts and distortions and yelling about it to make it stick you give it credibility and prove your point to a wide audience. But, deeply and profoundly Irving was a fraud and an anti-Semite. 

Pro-Israel advocates are very familiar with the “truthiness” of the BDS bullies.

She was increasingly disturbed by students asking her if Anne Frank’s diaries were genuine or questioning whether gas chambers really existed. She began to realise that Holocaust denial was making inroads into students’ minds.  She understood that something profoundly wrong was happening.  So Lipstadt began to research Holocaust denial making Irving her test case.

By comparison, we can see the relevance to the inroads that have been made by Israel deniers. They get into people’s heads with insinuations that sound reasonable even emotionally seductive in their imagery and too many people are caught in the headlights of onrushing criticism and condemnation of the Jewish state, floundering to find the right answers.

Deborah Lipstadt did the research. Methodically she went through every statement made by Irving and began to find discrepancies. As a historian bringing a case against this noted Holocaust denier she was aware that the accuracy of her work was essential to expose the fraud. She had to prove that he distorted the truth. She studied how he constantly changed facts, lied and obscured events and avoided unpleasant truths that would have exposed his ultimate intention to besmirch the murder of six million Jews.

People like David Irving are people driven by prejudice and hate.  So it is with people obsessed in bringing down Israel. Like David Irving they can be humiliated by studying their distorted arguments and exposing them.

I have made it my obligation to prove that the majority of BDS activists who profess to be passionately pro-Palestinian are, quite bluntly, using the Palestinian cause as the instrument to attack the Jewish state and that they do not really care a hoot for Palestinian human rights and are firmly against any justice or Israeli human rights, not even the right to exist.  I have researched their arguments and discovered they are as flawed as David Irving’s denials.  Here are just a few examples;

They spend a week on global campuses promoting the notion of an Israeli apartheid, yet have nothing to say about the apartheid practices of many Arab regimes against fellow Arabs who claim to be Palestinian including keeping them stateless and deprived of many of the rights of normal citizens in their countries. 

Worse still, these activists have nothing to say about the apartheid policy of a Palestinian Authority that has a United Nations organisation house and feed thousands of Palestinians in refugee camps under their territorial and administrative control for fifty years. How obscene is that? One would expect BDS to demonstrate against this if they really cared about the abuse of Palestinian human rights. But they are totally silent.

The same applies with the slander that Israel is “ethnically cleansing” Palestinians when statistics show that numbers have dramatically increased under Israeli supervision. On the other hand, pro-Palestinian human rights groups have failed to protest the Assad-led ethnic cleansing of Palestinians living in Syrian camps.

Just as Irving lied so do anti-Israel activists in solidarity for Palestinian rights. They accuse Israel of imposing a total and “illegal” blockade on Gaza when, in fact, up to a thousand trucks a day roll into the Strip carrying materials and equipment that Israelis know will fall into the hands of Hamas and be used to reconstruct their anti-Israel terrorist infrastructure at the expense of the Palestinians these protesters profess to support.  No protest against the oppressive and cruel Hamas regime. No demand to ‘Boycott Egypt’ while this Arab country maintains an almost total blockage on Gaza.

Just as David Irving was exposed for conducting a fraudulent campaign of denial against the Jewish people so BDS, SJP and other haters are conducting a fraudulent campaign of denial against the Jewish State.

At the heart of both lies an anti-Semitism that cannot be denied.

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.  

He is the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism’ and the Amazon 2016 best-seller ‘BDS for IDIOTS.’  

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Fighting+Hamas%2C+BDS+and+Anti-Semitism

OBAMA’S INACTION DISGRACED THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Attempts to achieve peace through inaction are bound to fail. Just ask the people of Aleppo. Attempts to achieve peace through appeasement are bound to fail. Just ask Neville Chamberlain. Peace only comes from assertive action that destroys a rampaging enemy’s will to survive. Just ask Winston Churchill.

World War Two should have taught us that. Doing nothing in the face of an Assad-inflicted genocide - supported by Iran and Russia – has shown us where inaction leads.

Obama’s legacy to live up to the vain philosophy of the Nobel Peace Prize panel lies in the ashes of Aleppo.

Obama’s dereliction of his international and humanitarian responsibilities by failing to implement his infamous “red lines” warning made a mockery of the Nobel Peace Prize. His non-violent policy and impotence to act decisively to save lives gave the green light to the resultant Syrian genocide.  

It follows in the awful tradition of Ruanda, Darfur, Sudan. Collectively it shows us that only force against evil-doers will protect innocent lives against acts of unchallenged heinous massacre.

When good men of influence do nothing but complain evil triumphs.  Obama was a complainer, not a doer.

In the summer of 2013, John Kerry called Assad’s early chemical attacks on his citizens “a moral obscenity” for which there needed to be “accountability.”  We have yet to hear from the accountants as the death toll reaches half a million souls.

The world was watching and waiting as Obama did nothing. Was he burdened by the weight of his Oslo peace medal, or was he an eager proponent of “doing nothing brings peace”? Either way, the lofty goal of peace does not come without action or sacrifice.

The Middle East remains the same Middle East as it was before the misnamed “Arab Spring.” Powerful dictators retain their seats of power. Erdogan, Assad, Sisi, the Ibn Sauds, the Mullahs in Tehran. Al-Qaida has been outmatched by the more lethal ISIS, another hideous apparition that was dismissed and untouched by Obama.

To stay alive in this bloodbath of a region one must remain strong, tough and vigilant. Appeasement is not an option. It is perceived as weakness and the weak are devoured by the predators of which there are many, hunting alone or in packs for their prey.

To intolerant regimes with global agendas, extending an olive branch is a joke. Realism, sharp awareness of the reality of the neighbourhood, a clear-eyed identification of the players and their ambitions is required. This, not the faulty pretence of viewing a virtual utopian world, is the only strategy to navigate the dangerous course to calmer waters.

So, although Obama, in his final days, tells whoever cares to listen that Russia is the evil enemy. Putin is no Mr. Nice-Guy but neither was Josef Stalin. He killed more people than Hitler but that didn’t stop Roosevelt and Churchill from collaborating with this bloody dictator in the war against Nazi Germany.

Israel is an example of the application of pragmatic politics. It has collaborated with Moscow in its national security needs. Recently it has taken essential military actions against selected targets within Syria. Israel is well aware that Moscow controls Assad’s territory. There is an operational agreement borne out of a number of high profile meetings between Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu and Russian leader Putin and lower level coordination between the two sides that allows Israel to take out and destroy sophisticated weaponry supplied by Iran via the Syrian regime to Lebanese Islamic Hezbollah that could be used in potential future attacks against the Jewish State.  The silence from Russia to these Israeli attacks is significant.

With Assad regaining territory strengthening his once teetering grip on power it seems increasingly certain that no one is going to remove this Syrian dictator. Obama had the chance and blew it.

Assad, for all his faults, never seriously threatened Israel. Under a Trump presidency, the possibility opens up to coordinate with Putin over a future Syria in which the Russians will continue to protect Assad, but also coordinate with America and operate jointly to defeat ISIS, persuade the Iranians to withdraw their Hezbollah proxies so as not to threaten Israel from the Golan Heights, and to dedicate safe zones in which Syrian refugees can be returned, housed and fed until it becomes possible for them to be more permanently housed. 

This could be a joint Russian-American led operation with the funding coming from the surrounding Arab states and supervised by United Nations agencies. 

In other words, the noble purpose of the Nobel Peace Prize will be revived through affirmative, even military, action.

Barry Shaw,

Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy,

Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.