Hijacking Israeli Democracy; Ethnic Cleansing, The Spin

In a democratic system, if a head of state’s foreign policy initiative is rejected by his cabinet, government, legislature, and the political party of that head of state, such a leader would normally be expected to at least drop his foreign policy initiative, if not resign.

And so it is occurring that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s January 2004 initiative to demolish 21 Israeli farming communities in the Katif district of Gaza and hand them over to the PLO, now at war with the state of Israel, was not approved by the Israeli government, the Israeli security cabinet, the Knesset parliament or by the Likud central committee. As Hebrew University Law Professor Eliav Schochetman put it, an Israeli prime minister who wished to demolish or relocate Jewish communities would require a clear majority of the Israeli Knesset to support new legislation in that regard. Otherwise, notes Schochetman, the Prime Minister simply has no authority to act in that way.

Despite this, Sharon brings his Katif demolition plan to the White House this coming Wednesday, openly stating that he wants a situation where the U.S. government will endorse Sharon’s program for unilateral retreat and removal of Jews from anywhere in the Gaza strip. Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said it more explicitly, saying that that if the Israeli Knesset or the Israeli cabinet were then to reject the idea, then the U.S. and other nations would place international sanctions on Israel.

And since Olmert oversees the Israeli government controlled radio and television, he has seen to it that the Israel State TV and Israel State Radio, known as the Israel Broadcasting Authority, drum into the heads of the Israeli people that the 8500 Katif residents live “in the heart of Gaza”, even though the Katif farming communities were developed on sand dunes which are located far from the city of Gaza or from the UNRWA camps which dominate the Gaza strip.

Sharon and Olmert have engaged the services of PR experts to market the idea of the Jews in Katif as being a “burden on the people of Gaza” to both the American government and to Jewish organizations throughout the U.S. They do this to galvanize support for their plan. For the first time since the Israeli Labor Party left power in February 2001, the Israeli government will work with the Americans for Peace Now to lobby Congress to support a program that calls for unilateral eradication of Israeli communities established in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

Sharon’s closest friends and colleagues have abandoned Sharon. Sharon’s closest friend in the media for the past 55 years, Uri Dan, issued an open letter to Sharon on the day before Passover, in which Dan posed ten questions to Sharon which challenged the wisdom of the plan for the removal of the 21 Jewish farming communities of Katif. One of those questions warned Sharon that the vacuum left from unilateral retreat could very well transform Katif into an Arab terror haven.

Sharon has not responded to the hard questions put to him by Uri Dan.

Sharon has a new friend and advisor: Dov Weisglass. Weisglass acts as Sharon’s lawyer and office manager. Before directing Sharon’s affairs in government, Weissglass acted as the lawyer for the Director of PLO finances, Muhamad Rashid, and as the Lawyer and head of investments for the PLO’s casino in Jericho. In his position, Weissglass has renewed Israeli financial transfers to the armed forces of the Palestinian Authority that are directly involved in terror actions against Israeli citizens, throughout Israel.

To make matters worse, the man responsible for running the terror operations of the PLO for the past four years, Jibril Rajoub, will also be coming to Washington this week to ask the U.S. for appropriate weapons to help him take over the Gaza strip once Israel withdraws its civilians.

Rajoub is the same PLO official who requested and received sophisticated weaponry from the U.S. during the first stage of the Oslo process, under the pretext that the PLO was going to fight Islamic terror groups.

Israel was then under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, both of whom went along with the idea.

However, Rajoub openly incorporated Islamic terror groups within the PLO security forces who launched a terror war against Israel, while introducing police state control of his own people.

Today, the situation is repeating itself:

Rajoub asks for weapons from the U. S., again under the pretext of controlling Islamic terror, and proclaims he has the support of the Israeli security establishment and the Israeli government to take over Gaza. In other words, Rajoub intends to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its Jews– with the approval of Ariel Sharon.

And since the PLO claims the Negev and Israel’s coastal region under the premise of the “right of return” to lands lost in 1948, Rajoub’s army will not stop with Katif.

Katif will be only another step to taking the rest of Israel as Hamas has said it will do all the long.

Sharon’s office was asked if the Israeli Prime Minister would deny giving sanction to arming Rajoub. Sharon’s office would not deny giving sanction to arming the Palestinian warlord. The Israel Foreign Ministry and Israel Defense Ministry also refused comment.

Most recently, Rajoub addressed the board of governors of the American Jewish Committee and, indeed, endorsed terrorism against Israelis who live beyond the 1967 lines, in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria or Gaza. The director of the AJC Jerusalem office would issue no statement attacking Rajoub, saying that Rajoub’s appearance was approved by the Israeli government.

The question remains whether the Bush Administration will accept a situation of an Israeli government ruled by the arbitrary decrees of Ariel Sharon and a Palestinian Arab entity ruled by a thug. President Bush has long stated that his purpose is to see a democratic Palestinian Arab entity co-exist with Israel, the only democratic state in the Middle East.

If President Bush welcomes Sharon’s imposed initiative and arms Rajoub, the American government will snuff out one democracy and create yet one more Arab totalitarian regime in the Middle East.

Will this path only further serve to set the world on fire?

April 14th, 2004
Ethnic Cleansing Talks at the White House

April 14th, 2004 marked 139 years to the date of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the American president who issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

On that day, “Ethnic Cleansing” talks commenced at the White House between President George W. Bush and Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, as Sharon proposed the unilateral expulsion and ethnic cleansing of 8,000 Jews from 21 prosperous and productive farming communities, pioneered more than thirty years ago in the Katif district of the Gaza Strip on sand dunes where Arabs had laid no claim.

Until this time, only totalitarian regimes had suggested such forced ethnic cleansing policies, which in this case would quash the most fundamental human rights of families who are simple, productive home-owners and farmers.

Imagine, if you would, if Sharon had proposed a unilateral ethnic cleansing policy to exile residents of an Arab city or an Arab farming community.

We would witness an outcry from every possible voice in the world of human rights.

Where are the voices of human rights today?

Is this because we are dealing with the proposed ethnic cleansing of Jews, where other standards of human rights may apply?

Human rights advocates may have forgotten about the ethnic cleansing of Jews which took place when the old city of Jerusalem was under Arab control from 1949 until 1967, at a time when UN guarantees were ignored and when all Jews were expelled, all synagogues were burnt to a crisp, and even the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives was defiled by the construction of a hotel and army camp on the grounds of that cemetery.

The voices of human rights were silent to the policy of the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Old City of Jerusalem, while those same human rights advocates now demand that Israel should once again cede the old city of Jerusalem to Arab control.

And it does not seem to bother the world of human rights that the advocates of proposed Palestinian Arab entity promise to ethnically cleanse any Jews from any future Palestinian Arab state..

On April 13th, 2004, the day before the Sharon-Bush meeting, Moshe and Rachel Saperstein, American born school teachers and residents of Neve Dekalim in Katif, met with reporters and asked how it is that a government can make an arbitrary unilateral decision to expel citizens from their homes.

Moshe Saperstein, who lost his arm in the Yom Kippur War and two fingers in a PLO terror attack in Katif, said matter of factly that he had no intention to willingly leave his home. Rachel Saperstein put it succinctly, that “if you think that this will stop here, you are mistaken. This would be a precedent. Jewish communities anywhere in Israel or anywhere in the world could then be uprooted in Hebron, in Jerusalem, or in any other country. They can always say ËœYou see, Arik Sharon expelled Jews from their homes. We can do that too”.

April 15th, 2004:
The Bush Letter to Sharon:
Spinning a Disaster for Israel

Israeli government radio and TV offered an instant analysis that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had made a major accomplishment following his meeting with U.S. President George Bush. In the four hours before the Bush memo to Sharon was issued for the press and public to read and peruse, Israeli government airwaves featured tens of commentators who lauded what they surmised was a formal Bush commitment to endorse some Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), and that President Bush had committed the U.S. to abandon support for the “right of return” for Palestinian Arab refugees (the opportunity to go back to live inside Israel’s 1948 borders). This followed a build-up by Israeli government radio and TV commentators, who boasted that, indeed, the President of the United States would use the full weight of his office to help Israel in its time of need.

The PLO public relations people reacted according to script and denounced the results of the Sharon-Bush meeting as a sell-out by the Americans. PLO spokespeople appeared on CNN, BBC, Sky News and every other TV outlet possible to make their protestations heard. And the more the PLO attacked the Sharon-Bush meeting, the more the Israeli news commentators affirmed that, yes, Sharon must have made a valuable achievement with his friend, George W. Bush, because the PLO was so angry. It would seem that Sharon’s new spin-masters were hard at work to make Sharon look like a hero.

All that was before anyone released the text of the Bush memo to Sharon. Anyone who reads the memo will understand that Sharon accomplished nothing new in the US-Israeli relationship. In fact, he may have hurt Israel tremendously.

Bush’s letter does note that Israel may now wish to “further develop the Galilee and the Negev”, yet without offering any assistance to help Israel resettle anyone there. Meanwhile, Bush’s letter made it quite clear that the U.S. will accept none of the fourteen Israeli reservations to the Roadmap, such as a guaranteed end to terrorism, so vital to Israel’s survival, a proviso the Israeli government had conditioned for its acceptance of the Roadmap. The letter explicitly stated that the “United States will do its utmost to prevent any attempt by anyone to impose any other plan.”

Surprisingly, Bush’s letter also does not reject the “right of return” of Arab refugees to the sovereign state of Israel. Instead, the U.S. simply encourages Palestinian Arab refugees to settle in a future Palestinian state, “rather than Israel”. Bush could have said “only” in a Palestinian state. He did not. All this occurs exactly at a time when the US has added $26 million to its allocation for UNRWA, which operates UN refugee camps in the region. Those camps run intense educational programs that promote the “right of return” to homes and villages from 1948, inside Israel, effectively calling for Israel to be dismantled.

What the Bush letter does say explicitly is that Israel would be able to make decisions “regarding control of airspace, territorial waters, and land passages” only after Israeli withdrawals take place.

And for whatever reason, the Bush letter surmises that the U.S., working with Jordan and Egypt, will build “Palestinian institutions to fight terrorism and dismantle terrorist organizations,” despite ten years in which the PLO has done nothing of the kind. While the Bush letter charges the PLO with fighting terrorism, as President Bill Clinton did eleven years ago, the Palestinians have consistently refused to do so even up to now. In other words, the Bush administration is reenacting the 1993 Clinton-Rabin-Peres formula of arming the PLO to fight terror, even though all Palestinian fighting factions, even Hamas, are today united and coordinated under one command – under Yasser Arafat. It is as if the Bush letter does not take into account what has transpired over the past ten years and the trail of dead Israelis and Arabs that was wrought.

Were it not for the Israeli and PLO spin-masters, Jews and Arabs in Israel would read the text of the Bush letter to Sharon and know the truth.

Instead, in the hours after the Bush-Sharon press conference, the PLO is bitterly criticizing and attacking the Bush-Sharon meeting. And as Sharon returned to Israel to push his unilateral retreat, while under scathing attack of the misinformed PLO, he finds a way to convince his Likud party’s membership to support his plan and policy. After all, Sharon’s people are saying, if the PLO is attacking Sharon, he must be doing something right. The reality, however, has not changed.

Sharon seeks support to conduct the unilateral retreat and eradication of 21 prosperous Israeli farming communities in the Katif district of the Gaza Strip, an action the PLO and Hamas will later laud as a victory, as a step to taking all of Israel. Meanwhile, Sharon can now obfuscate his retreat policy by showing how the PLO attacks him as an aggressor, not another Neville Chamberlain leading the world to more strife.