The U.S. Should Defund UNIFIL and UNRWA

I previously explained that The United Nations is Antisemitic, Worse Than Useless, and Should Be Disbanded. Two of its constituent organizations are particularly despicable: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). I discussed UNRWA in depth in The Pathetic "Progressive" Response to Hamas' War Against Israel:

During Israel's War of Independence, several hundred thousand Arabs fled from Israel, exhorted by Arab military leaders to temporarily evacuate in order to make way for the planned massacre of Israel's Jewish residents. These Arabs expected to triumphantly return to a land with no Jews but instead Israel defeated the combined armies of her Arab neighbors. In most wars, the losing side is responsible for resettling its refugees or else a de facto population exchange occurs (few people talk about the fact that, at the same time that hundreds of thousands of Arabs voluntarily left Israel, hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled from Arab countries, with most of those Jews fleeing to Israel). Not only did the Arab countries refuse to resettle their Arab brethren who they had exhorted to leave Israel but the so-called Palestinian Arabs are the only group in the world that has an entire UN organization devoted exclusively to their particular concerns: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). All other refugee crises in the world are dealt with by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. At the end of 2012, the UNHCR listed listed 45.2 million displaced people worldwide, the largest such number since 1994. The biggest single displaced person crisis in the world is focused in Pakistan, a result of decades of war, tyranny and instability in that region. The disproportionate attention paid to a fictional Palestinian nation and a real--but eminently solvable--Arab refugee problem not only does injustice to both Israel and the refugees in question (who have been exploited as political pawns by Israel's enemies for decades) but it also hinders efforts to solve other more severe refugee crises.

It is bad enough that there is an entire UN organization focusing on refugees of a fictional nation, people who share a common language, culture and religion with most of the other Arab countries in the Mideast and who should have been accepted by those countries decades ago, much like Israel welcomed Jewish refugees from Arab countries--but what really makes the UNRWA completely disgusting is that the UNRWA is complicit in war crimes committed against Israel. Three times in the past month, Hamas rockets have been found at UNRWA facilities. The first time that rockets were discovered in a UNRWA facility during the current conflict, the UNRWA handed over the rockets to Hamas, a flagrant violation of the UNRWA's purported neutrality.

Note that I wrote the above passage in 2021, two years before Hamas' October 7, 2023 mass casualty terrorist attack against Israel. UNRWA actively collaborated before, during, and after October 7, 2023, further demonstrating the extent to which the organization has been completely corrupted by Hamas.

UNIFIL is just as bad as UNRWA, and Eugene Kontorovich persuasively argues that Donald Trump should make a campaign pledge to defund UNIFIL:

Created in 1978 to monitor an Israeli withdrawal in a long-forgotten skirmish with the Palestine Liberation Organization, the UN "interim" force has remained and grown, with a mission creep inversely related to its record of success. UNIFIL failed to prevent or ameliorate the Second Lebanon War in 2006, which Hezbollah began with a cross-border raid to take Israeli hostages and continued with a heavy rain of rockets on Israel...

Hezbollah has placed its armed positions within sight of UNIFIL observation posts. Yet the UN peacekeepers have done nothing to stop Hezbollah as it has turned southern Lebanon into an armed camp from which to attack Israel...

On Oct. 8, 2023, the magnitude of UNIFIL's failure became clear when Hezbollah joined Hamas' attack on Israel. Hezbollah's missile fire has continued all year, killed dozens of Israeli citizens, and made much of the tiny country's north uninhabitable. 

Now that Israel has finally moved into Lebanon to clear out Hezbollah, UNIFIL is getting in the way--knowingly providing the terrorist group cover...

U.S. taxpayers pay nearly 30% of UNIFIL's $550 million budget--essentially subsidizing indirect assistance to Hezbollah. But unlike other dysfunctional UN organizations, which are structured to be unaccountable and weather reform, UNIFIL is easy to fix. Its mandate must be reauthorized every year, or it simply ends...

UNIFIL's current mandate expires in August 2025, and there is no rational basis for reauthorizing it.

Yonah Jeremy Bob notes that Hezbollah--emboldened and financed by Iran--has spent 17 years making a mockery of UN Resolution 1701 that prohibited Hezbollah from operating in southern Lebanon:

Imagine a generation of children growing up believing that it is normal living among weapons of war. This is the monster that Hezbollah built across dozens of villages in southern Lebanon. I saw it first-hand on Oct. 10, riding in a convoy of Israel Defense Forces humvees. The IDF asked me not to identify the village lest it endanger their operations.

Almost half the village was destroyed by a mix of room-to-room battles and the Israeli military's exploding Hezbollah weapon stockpiles. IDF soldiers in tanks or bulldozers rumbled from house to house to catalogue weapons Hezbollah had buried, then demolished the homes. The terror group had hoped to tap its infrastructure in southern Lebanon to invade northern Israel in a replay of Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023 attack...

As Israel tears apart Hezbollah's presence in southern Lebanon, it is also wiping out the West's view that this is an Israeli problem that can be solved by diplomacy alone. Since the invasion of southern Lebanon began on Sept. 30, the IDF has showered the West with evidence of weapons and materiel hidden in every third or fifth house...

The West should be raining fire and brimstone down on Hezbollah and its sponsor, Iran, for making a farce of United Nations Resolution 1701. That resolution, adopted in 2006, said that Hezbollah couldn't operate in southern Lebanon.

The West can no longer deny that Hezbollah is out of control and must be restrained, preferably by diplomacy but if necessary by force. Yet the West's priority seems to be reaching a cease-fire so it can go on ignoring the dangers of these Middle Eastern actors...if the West presses Israel into a cease-fire that merely reverts to Resolution 1701--which has been ignored for 17 years with no consequences--all of Israel's successes will have been for nothing.

Rendering Israel's unprecedented successes versus Hamas and Hezbollah into nothing is precisely the tragically misguided policy being followed by President Joe Biden and fully endorsed by Vice President/presidential candidate Harris. After Hamas' October 7, 2023 mass casualty terrorist attack against Israel, Biden gave lip service to supporting Israel and then consistently took steps to restrict Israel's ability to defeat Hamas (and Hezbollah). Biden declared that if Hamas diverted humanitarian aid to their coffers then "it will end," but instead Biden has publicly insisted that Israel keep providing aid that he knows is sustaining Hamas--and thus prolonging the suffering of Hamas' hostages, including American citizens. Biden keeps bleating "Ceasefire!" with full knowledge that a ceasefire would not end Hamas' war to destroy Israel but would only give Hamas time to rebuild and reload. If Israel had listened to Biden then Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah would still be alive sowing mayhem and destruction. 

Israel is defeating Hamas and Hezbollah despite Biden, not because of him--and if Harris is elected, the Mideast and the rest of the world will be set on fire in a way that will make the last four disastrous years of Biden's rule look like a pleasant walk in the park.

Menachem Begin Understood How to Respond to Calls for a "Two State Solution"

Proponents of the so-called "two state solution" overlook the fact that a two state solution was implemented in Palestine decades ago: Jordan was formed by slicing off nearly 80% of the Palestine Mandate's territory, controverting the League of Nations plan that Palestine would be the location of the reborn Jewish State after the Jewish people had suffered in exile for nearly two millennia. 

Menachem Begin, Israel's Prime Minister from 1977-83, understood that a "two state solution" is based on a lie that Palestine has not already been divided into two states, and is proposed as a means for destroying Israel. In 1981, when West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt stated that Germans have a moral obligation to facilitate the creation of another Palestinian state in addition to Jordan by carving territory out of Israel, Begin did not mince words:

From a moral point of view, Schmidt's statements certainly rank as the most callous ever heard. It seems that the Holocaust had conveniently slipped his memory and he did not make mention of a million and a half small children murdered, of entire families wiped out.

The German debt to the Jewish people can never end, not in this generation and not in any other. The entire nation cheered on the murderers as long as they were victorious. But what do we hear? We hear of a commitment to those who strove to complete what the Germans had started in Europe.

Begin declared that Schmidt "must have concluded some very lucrative business deals with Saudi Arabia."

Begin's conclusion about Schmidt's motivations is the same conclusion that I have reached about both President Trump and President Biden. President Trump's so-called "Deal of the Century" envisions a two state solution and thus puts Israel's survival at risk. President Biden's funding of the PLO's "Pay for Slay" program compensates terrorists for murdering Jews, and President Biden's impotent response to Iran's nuclear program and sponsorship of terrorism has emboldened the Iranians to attack U.S. and Israeli targets in the Mideast. I believe that President Trump, President Biden, and many other leaders are well compensated for their advocacy of the "two state solution" and other policies that clearly do not represent the best interests of the United States (or anyone else other than Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and others who stand to make money from brokering such deals).

President Biden is not as overtly hostile to Israel as his predecessors Barack Obama or Jimmy Carter, but Biden--like most U.S. Presidents--has an agenda that is at best indifferent to Israel's survival, and Begin understood this when he confronted then-Senator Biden in 1982 regarding the possibility of U.S. aid to Israel being reduced if Israel dared to allow Jewish people to live in Judea and Samaria (often erroneously called "The West Bank," a name which makes no sense geographically or politically, as the territory in question is part of the Palestine Mandate and does not constitute the entire western bank of the Jordan River):

Don't threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.

The notion that any place in the world should be "Judenrein"--let alone places within the Land of Israel such as Judea and Samaria--is despicable. Even if yet another Arab state is carved out of the territory of the former Palestine Mandate, why wouldn't Jews be allowed to live there? For that matter, why are Jews not welcome to live in Gaza, and in many Arab/Muslim countries? 

Instead of blaming Israel for problems that Israel did not cause and cannot unilaterally solve, it should be noted that Jews are not welcome throughout most of the Arab/Muslim world: after Israel's rebirth in 1948, more than 800,000 Jews were expelled (or fled to avoid being killed) from Arab/Muslim countries. It also should be noted that the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan--accepted by Jewish leaders but rejected by Arab leaders--further divided what little remained of the Palestine Mandate. What should have happened in 1948 is a population exchange, which is what typically happens after a war: the expelled Jews should have found homes in Israel (which most of them did, though some went to other countries), and the Arabs living in the western 20% of Palestine that became Israel should have either accepted Israeli citizenship (which many did) or else moved to Jordan or other countries to become full citizens. The world's cynical manufacturing, manipulation, and perpetuation of a "Palestinian refugee crisis"--including but not limited to the creation of a corrupt UN agency (UNRWA) separate from the UN agency that deals with every other refugee crisis around the world--has resulted in much misery for both Arabs and Jews.

The reality is that a two state solution has already been implemented, and it has failed because (1) creating two states in Palestine has not brought peace, (2) the "Palestinian refugees" have not been resettled in Jordan (or any other Arab country), and (3) Jordan is a non-democratic state that is barely functional. It does not make sense to assert that carving a third state out of the Palestine Mandate's territory would lead to peace, or solve the "Palestinian refugee crisis" (which should have been solved decades ago, and could be solved tomorrow if Arab nations were willing to take care of their brethren instead of exploiting them for public relations purposes). It is delusional to think that carving a third state out of the Palestine Mandate's territory would even result in the creation of a stable, functioning nation: the Gazans spent the past two decades using billions of dollars of foreign aid to build a terrorist stronghold, not a functioning state. It cannot be said that Hamas does not represent ordinary Gazans when the evidence shows otherwise: Gazans voted Hamas into power, polls have repeatedly shown that most Gazans support Hamas, and Gazan civilians were active, enthusiastic participants in Hamas's October 7, 2023 mass casualty terrorist attack (and UNRWA personnel actively collaborated with Hamas before, during, and after the attack).

For several decades, outside forces have coerced Israel into failing to achieve decisive victory each time she has been attacked by her Arab/Muslim neighbors, but Israel must not permit that to happen now. Israel's war against Hamas must continue until all of these events happen:

1) Hamas is eliminated as a functioning terrorist, military, and political entity.

2) Hamas' state sponsors--including but perhaps not limited to Iran and Qatar--must pay reparations for the killed, for the injured, and for the destruction of property.

3) All hostages held by Hamas must be released immediately and unconditionally.

Israel is under no legal or moral obligation to waste more money funding terrorist organizations in Gaza. Hamas attempted to use Gaza as a launching pad to destroy Israel, Hamas failed, and now Hamas and the Gazans who voted Hamas into power will have to live with the consequences of their bad choices and their military defeat. Name one other terrorist entity in world history that launched a failed war of extermination (Hamas' stated goal regarding Israel) and then was rewarded by being granted statehood in the very territory from which it launched the failed war of extermination? That is not how the world works.

"Two state solution" is just the polite way of saying "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." As I noted in the immediate aftermath of Hamas' October 7, 2023 mass casualty terrorist attack against Israel, "When Israel's Arab neighbors and their self-proclaimed 'progressive' supporters chant 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free' those words must be understood for their literal meaning and intention: every Jew from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea is to be killed, Israel is to be destroyed, and yet another authoritarian Arab/Muslim state is to be established. The Arabs don't want 'land for peace'; they want to kill Jews and take control of all of the land from the 'river to the sea.' They mean exactly what they say. This is a sad and scary reality, but denying that reality will not change it. Israel's policies--and America's policies--must be grounded in reality and must be directed toward making sure that 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free' is a slogan consigned to history's dustbin."

The Arabs/Muslims control most of the territory spanning from Morocco to Pakistan, and they will have to be satisfied with not controlling an area barely twice the size of Los Angeles County that is the historic homeland of the Jewish people. What many Arabs/Muslims and others fail to understand is that the Jewish people did not colonize the Land of Israel. The Romans, Turks, British, and others were the colonizers. The Jewish people returned home, and triumphed over the colonizers. The Jewish people have as much right as any other nation to live peacefully in their homeland.

October 7, 2023 is a defining historical moment. Anyone who still advocates for the "two state solution" after October 7 is either clueless, paid off, or trying to destroy Israel. Zionism is a just cause and a successful movement, regardless of the slanders and lies promulgated about the Jewish people. There is fear and shame at the heart of antisemitism and anti-Zionism because of how much the Jewish people have accomplished in Israel: triumphing over the British colonists and sending them packing back home, repeatedly defeating Arab aggressors despite being vastly outnumbered, and building a thriving democracy with a modern economy.

Israel is a role model for what post-colonialist nations can accomplish with hard work and the right mindset; her enemies provide examples of the depravity to which humanity can sink with an entitlement mentality and an ideology based on "loving death more than you love life," which is the opposite of the Jewish worldview.

Who Are the Invaders, and Who are the Invaded? An Analysis of Inversions of Truth

I wonder what an extraterrestrial being would think if he/she landed on Earth and observed the way that politics, history, economics, and other subjects are depicted by many mainstream media outlets. For example, if you believe what you are told by some media outlets and many self-proclaimed "progressives," Israel--a country that is less than half the size of San Bernardino County, California, and is in the middle of a hostile neighborhood of over 20 Arab and/or Islamic countries extending from Morocco all the way to Pakistan--is a powerful imperialist and colonialist apartheid state, or (if that slander is not considered to be sufficiently attention-grabbing/outrage-provoking) is dominating not only the Mideast but also the United States, and maybe even the world's entire economic system.

Look at a map of the world. You can cover Israel with a child's fingernail clipping. Is it rational to believe that a tiny country is bullying an entire region, let alone controlling a superpower and the world's economy? How does that even make sense?

Part of the confusion may stem from the map shown by many media outlets when they report about the Mideast: they often do not show a map of the entire region, but instead they show a map with Israel front and center, next to Lebanon and tiny portions of Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt; that distorted perspective makes Israel look like a huge regional power, not a tiny nation located in a region filled with much larger countries that are not democratic and that are actively trying to destroy her. 

Then, another layer of nonsense is added when we are told that Jews are not a persecuted minority but are in fact participants in white supremacy and beneficiaries of white privilege (which must really be a newsflash to Nazis, neo-Nazis, members of the Klan, and a host of others who consider Jews to be anything but white). 

In a world where so many dangerous delusions are presented as important facts, it is refreshing to catch a glimpse of truth emerging from the darkness. In How the true story of Mizrahi Jews defeats anti-Zionist mythology, James Sinkinson writes:

What most anti-Zionists miss is that despite the perception that resettling Israel was largely (though not completely) an Ashkenazi initiative, the majority of today's Israelis are ancestors of refugees from the Middle East and Africa. Most are brown-, black- or olive-skinned—not what anyone could describe as white—and as a group are called Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews...

While for millennia Jews lived with unbroken continuity in the land of Israel, many Jews also lived in neighboring countries, predating the birth of Islam and the Arab conquest, occupation and colonization of the region. While many think of the region today as "Arab," places like Morocco, Syria and Egypt were invaded 1,300 years ago by Muslims, and their indigenous populations killed or forced to convert and adopt the Arabic language and culture.

In Iraq, for example, Jews had lived for almost 2,500 years—since the destruction of Jewish sovereignty in the First Temple period—but all this ended just a couple of generations ago with an orgy of bloody pogroms and public hangings.

Few indigenous populations survived the centuries of onslaught on their authentic identity, and simply disappeared. Despite having second-class, dhimmi status imposed on them by Muslim rulers, Jews refused to relinquish their culture and tradition. They were made subservient to the majoritarian Muslims, who had arrived via invasion and colonization.

This history of conquest, occupation and colonization is one many anti-Zionists would like to hide, since it turns every popular Middle East narrative on its head. Today, strong forces and lobbies ensure that anything exposing Muslim colonial history is censored.

Far too few people know the real history, and far too many people refuse to read/listen/learn. In addition to the points that Sinkinson makes, it is worth thinking about why the United Nations created a separate organization (United Nations Relief and Works Agency--UNRWA) to deal with the "Palestinian" refugees but every single other refugee situation in the world--which includes the fates of tens of millions of refugees--falls under the domain of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). It is also worth thinking about why there is no UN agency to help the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who were expelled from Arab/Islamic countries in the late 1940s.

Much has been said and written about the "Palestinian" nation and about "Palestinian " rights. I agree with anyone who fights for the basic human rights of every single human being, but I have some questions about Palestine as a nation. When did a sovereign country named "Palestine" exist? What was its capital, and what were its borders? What distinct, unique language was spoken there? Such questions arouse outrage and venom from some people, but I have yet to hear or see any answers--and there is a simple reason for that: it is a demonstrable historical fact that no such sovereign country ever existed. 

Palestine is a geographic term, much like the term Midwest is used to describe the portion of the United States that includes Ohio, Michigan, and a few other states. In the early 20th century, the geographic term Palestine was used to describe a territory including what is now known as Israel, Gaza, the so-called West Bank (the areas properly called by their historic names Judea and Samaria), and Jordan; after World War I, the League of Nations approved a Mandate granting control of Palestine to Great Britain with the express understanding that the territory would be a homeland for the Jewish people. Great Britain sliced off the eastern 80% of the Palestine Mandate to create Transjordan (which later became the independent Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan). After the demise of the League of Nations and after World War II, the United Nations proposed that the remaining 20% of the Palestine Mandate be divided into a Jewish state and a second Arab state (in addition to Jordan). The Jewish leadership in Palestine accepted the UN's proposal--but the Arab leadership in Palestine rejected the UN's proposal and joined forces with armies from the surrounding Arab nations in what they expected to be a war of annihilation against the nascent Jewish State--but Israel won the war, and ended up controlling less than 20% of the original Palestine Mandate, with most of the remaining territory under Jordanian control (Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip, which has never been historically part of Egypt). 

There has never been a sovereign country called Palestine, nor is there a distinct Palestinian people. If you don't believe me, then consider the words of Zuheir Mohsen, who was a high-ranking PLO leader in the 1970s. In a March 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw, Mohsen declared:

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct Palestinian people to oppose Zionism.

For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

The word Palestine has nothing to do with Arab or Islamic history, but it dates back to the Latin name that the Romans gave to Judea (the second Jewish Commonwealth) after conquering and subjugating the Jewish people (and the Latin name is derived from a Greek word). After destroying the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, the Romans renamed the city Aelia Capitolina, and they proudly printed coins bearing the words "Judea Capta." The Roman Empire was long ago consigned to history's dustbin, but the Jewish people are still here and the Jewish people have reestablished their historical state in their historical land. We know when the first Jewish Commonwealth was founded (roughly 3000 years ago), we know its approximate and fluctuating borders, we know that Jerusalem was its political capital and main religious center, we know when that state was conquered by the Babylonians (roughly 2500 years ago), we know when the Maccabees established a second Jewish Commonwealth (roughly 2200 years ago), we know when the second Jewish Commonwealth was conquered by the Roman Empire (roughly 2100 years ago), and we know when the final Jewish revolt against Rome was defeated (less than 2000 years ago). We know that the people in the first and second Jewish Commonwealths spoke Hebrew. 

In contrast, the notion of a distinct Palestinian Arab nation is quite recent, and has no historical basis. The PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) was founded in Cairo, Egypt in 1964, with funding and support provided by the Soviet Union. What exactly was the PLO founded to "liberate"? In 1964, Egypt controlled Gaza, while Jordan controlled Judea and Samaria plus the eastern portion of Jerusalem. If the PLO had been truly interested in creating a Palestinian national state in Gaza plus the West Bank then why was the PLO conducting terrorist attacks against Israel, a nation that had no control over the areas that the PLO supposedly wanted to "liberate"? Of course, the reality is that the Soviet Union helped create the PLO to destabilize Israel and thus increase the Soviet Union's influence and power in the region. This was all about oil and about expanding Communism's reach, and had nothing to do with helping "Palestinians" or creating a "Palestinian" nation. That is why the PLO and other Arab/Islamic terrorist groups are still waging war against Israel decades after Israel gave up control of Gaza and of portions of the so-called West Bank: the goal is not creating a "Palestinian" state but rather destroying the Jewish State. The PLO has not even attempted to create a functioning government in Gaza, because the PLO was not created to govern, does not know how to govern, and has no interest in governing. 

This is a tragedy not only for Israel, but also for the innocent Arabs who are not terrorists and who just want to live in peace; being placed under the control of the PLO was the worst thing that happened to those Arabs, but many media outlets would rather blame Israel than examine and explain historical truths.

After one understands the historical facts and timeline, then one realizes that the creation of one UN agency to treat one set of refugees differently and separately from every other group of refugees in the world is not a decision that was made on a rational or humanitarian basis, but rather for propaganda reasons: the "Palestinian" refugees are used as a propaganda tool against Israel, as Zuheir Mohsen admitted. That explains why Arab/Islamic countries generally refuse to welcome "Palestinian" refugees, or expel them shortly after welcoming them.

Most refugee situations in world history have been resolved by repatriating the refugees somewhere else, usually in a nearby country. Only one group of refugees has their own special UN agency, and only one group of refugees has been living in refugee camps for decades instead of being resettled like every other group of refugees in world history. "Palestinians" who live in the Gaza Strip are still officially listed as refugees even though they have been under the control of the Palestinian Authority since Israel ceded control of most of Gaza in the Oslo Accords; it is a tactical, political decision by the Arab/Islamic countries and their media supporters to never resolve the "Palestinian" refugee situation as long as the existence of that situation has propaganda value. 

Here is another question to ponder: Out of all of the nations in the world, why is Israel the only nation that is asked to make tangible concessions in exchange for recognition of its basic right to exist? No one questioned the right of the Soviet Union to exist, no one suggested that Germany should cease to exist even after Germany started two World Wars and killed most of Europe's Jews, no one questions China's right to exist, no one questions Iran's right to exist--name any country that committed or is currently committing atrocities, and there has never been a question that those countries have a right to exist. Israel is the only functioning democracy in the Mideast, yet among all of the world's nations only Israel's right to exist is questioned, and is actually considered to be a bargaining chip: Israel has repeatedly traded "land for peace," which means that Israel relinquished control of territory not for strategic or economic considerations (which is how countries normally behave) but in exchange for a simple acknowledgement of her right to exist. 

One could argue that Israel is at least partially responsible for this absurd situation, because no other country in history would consider its right to exist to be a bargaining chip, but it is a bit harsh to blame a tiny nation for doing what she thinks she has to do to survive in a world that treats Jewish blood as very expendable.

Many illogical and nonsensical thought processes have become so deeply ingrained that they are no longer questioned or challenged. Perhaps the most dangerous thing to do intellectually is to be a passive consumer of information. Don't blindly accept and believe what you are being told when what you are being told makes no sense. If you are being told that a nation that never existed has been destroyed or is being destroyed by a nation that is smaller than a large U.S. county--and that this tiny nation is controlling the policies of the most powerful nation in the world--take a moment to think about how ridiculous that sounds.

Let's also be crystal clear that setting the historical record straight is not meant to state or imply that individual "Palestinians" do not have or should not have basic human rights, nor is it meant to state or imply that "Palestinians" have not suffered; indeed, they have suffered tremendously due to the shortsighted polices of Arab and Islamic countries that have focused on trying to destroy Israel at the expense of the quality of life of all people in the Mideast.

An extraterrestrial being looking at the Mideast with fresh eyes and a neutral perspective would be puzzled that the least successful and least advanced countries in the region keep trying to destroy their smallest but most successful and advanced neighbor instead of learning from Israel how to make the desert bloom, how to build a functional economy, and how to create a scientific and technological infrastructure that is among the best in the world.

When lies are no longer presented as sacred truths, and when one nation's very right to exist is not treated as a bargaining chip, there will be an opportunity not just for Mideast peace but for Mideast prosperity. Sadly, that is unlikely to happen any time soon. The media outlets and the self-proclaimed "progressives" who promulgate falsehoods are perpetuating the suffering of Jews and Arabs alike, instead of speaking truths that could form the basis of coexistence; as long as lies are told, wars will be fought, and that has been the real story of the Mideast for over 100 years.

Eyeless, Clueless and Senseless in Gaza

"I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the Holocaust will be upon us."--Eric Hoffer (May 1968 letter)

The Jewish people in general and Israel in particular are the canaries in the world coal mine. Most of the world found it easy to dismiss Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party during the 1930s when Hitler's rhetoric and actions focused on demonizing and dehumanizing Jews. By the time the world realized the full extent of Hitler's evil and the true nature of his goals, Hitler had plunged the world into war--a war that the Nazis nearly won.

Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, is fighting for her very survival, battling against a well-trained and well-equipped Hamas terrorist organization that is funded and supported by Iran. Iran's cold-blooded attempt to destroy Israel foreshadows the fate in store for the United States and other Western democracies if those countries do not rally behind Israel. It is important to understand the historical dimensions and future implications of Israel's war against Hamas.

Forget the false message disseminated by perhaps the most successful propaganda campaign in world history; there is no such thing as a Palestinian Arab people and there has never been an Arab country named Palestine or indeed any independent Arab country where the State of Israel now exists. The Roman Empire, after subduing the Judean Revolt nearly 2000 years ago, renamed Judea "Syria Palestina" and renamed Jerusalem "Aelia Capitolina." The former term, shortened to "Palestine," refers to the geographical areas known in modern times as the State of Israel, Jordan, Gaza and Judea/Samaria. It cannot be emphasized enough that Palestine is a geographical term; it does not refer to a nation nor is there such a thing as a Palestinian language or a distinct Palestinian culture. After the Roman Conquest, various empires conquered Palestine but no one established an independent country there. Jews prayed for and dreamed about reestablishing a Jewish State in their ancestral homeland but this did not become a practical idea until the 1800s, after the birth of modern nationalist movements. The Jewish modern nationalist movement, Zionism, turned the ancient Jewish dream into a reality as Jewish people who lived in Palestine, plus Jews who returned home to Palestine after fleeing persecution in Europe, built up Palestine from a desolate and sparsely inhabited wasteland into a place where the desert bloomed. That in turn attracted Arab immigration to Palestine from throughout the region. During the early 20th century there were various nascent Arab nationalist movements but there was no such thing as a Palestinian national movement (other than the Jewish Palestinian national movement); indeed, before the founding of the modern State of Israel, the terms "Palestine" and "Palestinians" almost exclusively referred to Jewish organizations and Jews: the major Jewish newspaper in pre-state Israel was the Palestine Post (now known as the Jerusalem Post) and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra was founded as the Palestine Symphony Orchestra.

The term Palestine was not understood to mean a separate Arab nation until an anti-Israel propaganda campaign transmogrified the meaning of that word after the founding of the modern State of Israel. Indeed, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964 in Cairo as an Egyptian puppet at a time when Jordan controlled Judea and Samaria and Egypt controlled Gaza. The PLO, sponsored at that time by the Soviet Union and other totalitarian countries, was not trying to "liberate" land from Israel, because the land that the PLO was supposedly trying to "liberate" was at that time under Arab control; the PLO was founded to destabilize and destroy Israel as part of the Soviet Union's Mideast designs during the Cold War. The PLO never represented the interests of an underdog, oppressed people; the PLO has always been a well-funded tool of various totalitarian regimes and the PLO's goals have always focused on destroying Israel, not on "liberation."

During Israel's War of Independence, several hundred thousand Arabs fled from Israel, exhorted by Arab military leaders to temporarily evacuate in order to make way for the planned massacre of Israel's Jewish residents. These Arabs expected to triumphantly return to a land with no Jews but instead Israel defeated the combined armies of her Arab neighbors. In most wars, the losing side is responsible for resettling its refugees or else a de facto population exchange occurs (few people talk about the fact that, at the same time that hundreds of thousands of Arabs voluntarily left Israel, hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled from Arab countries, with most of those Jews fleeing to Israel). Not only did the Arab countries refuse to resettle their Arab brethren who they had exhorted to leave Israel but the so-called Palestinian Arabs are the only group in the world that has an entire UN organization devoted exclusively to their particular concerns: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). All other refugee crises in the world are dealt with by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. At the end of 2012, the UNHCR listed listed 45.2 million displaced people worldwide, the largest such number since 1994. The biggest single displaced person crisis in the world is focused in Pakistan, a result of decades of war, tyranny and instability in that region. The disproportionate attention paid to a fictional Palestinian nation and a real--but eminently solvable--Arab refugee problem not only does injustice to both Israel and the refugees in question (who have been exploited as political pawns by Israel's enemies for decades) but it also hinders efforts to solve other more severe refugee crises.

It is bad enough that there is an entire UN organization focusing on refugees of a fictional nation, people who share a common language, culture and religion with most of the other Arab countries in the Mideast and who should have been accepted by those countries decades ago, much like Israel welcomed Jewish refugees from Arab countries--but what really makes the UNRWA completely disgusting is that the UNRWA is complicit in war crimes committed against Israel. Three times in the past month, Hamas rockets have been found at UNRWA facilities. The first time that rockets were discovered in a UNRWA facility during the current conflict, the UNRWA handed over the rockets to Hamas, a flagrant violation of the UNRWA's purported neutrality. Michael Curtis makes a strong case that Hamas should be indicted for war crimes:

In its behavior towards Israel, Hamas is guilty of both crimes against humanity and war crimes according to Article 7(1) of the Rome Statute, which applies to murder and extermination. Hamas is guilty of a government policy in which those two crimes are part of a widespread or systematic practice. Its actions are more than isolated inhumane acts and constitute a consistent pattern of behavior. The stated aim of Hamas is not simply to harm Israeli civilians, but rather a policy of genocide, the killing of Jews, and the elimination of the State of Israel. Hamas has really only one grievance: the existence of Israel.

Article 8(2)(b) of the Rome Statute deals with the war crime of using protected persons as shields. Hamas has been guilty on numerous occasions of this crime--the intention to shield a military objective from attack or shield, favor, or impede military operations. The major war crime of Hamas is to use children for this purpose. Golda Meir, in her straightforward manner, once commented, "We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us." In contrast, Hamas has stated that preserving the capacity to bomb civilians in Israel is more valued than the loss of Palestinian children.
 
Those children have been used not only as human shields to protect the terrorists. They have also been used for actions such as being messengers and couriers for the terrorists, for digging tunnels into Israel, and for smuggling. Hamas has used them for military activities, including throwing grenades and rocks, and even for suicide bomber missions. Schools and kindergartens have been used to store missiles and mortars and as launching sites, in the same way as hospitals, mosques, and public places have been used. The sad reality is that Gaza children do not dream of becoming rocket scientists; they dream of firing rockets and becoming holy martyrs.

There is ample evidence to present to the International Criminal Court, including the outspoken statement of the U.N. secretary-general, the discovery that tunnels used for aggression are located under hospitals and private property, and the videos of Hamas actions. One video clearly shows rockets being fired next to civilian buildings. Another shows a demonstration of human shields as civilians were forced to gather on top of the home of a known Hamas terrorist to prevent an attack by Israel. Ban Ki-moon has spoken of the need to address the "root causes" of instability in Gaza. A case brought against Hamas before the International Criminal Court would find that the basis of instability in Gaza is the crimes against humanity and the war crimes committed by Hamas.

In "Hamas has win-win tactic," UK colonel tells ‘Post,’ UK Col. (ret.) Richard Kemp tells Seth J. Frantzman, "I have thirty years of experience in exactly this type of conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans, where the tactics were similar. I find a great deal of media reporting outside of Israel is grossly distorted and doesn't comprehend the reality of what’s happening."

Frantzman adds:

Kemp argues that Israel has persevered very well despite being at a "natural disadvantage" in the media and international spotlight, saying that "Hamas used this tactic of human shields. It is win-win for them. The first win is if they can stop the IDF from attacking a target, whether it is a headquarters or ammunition point. Equally, if the IDF does attack the target and there are civilian casualties, they also win, because it means they scored a propaganda victory."

In meetings with pilots, soldiers and naval personnel, he related stories where they had frequently refrained from attacking targets where civilian casualties might have resulted.

Although the perception is that the IDF is harming civilians, he argues that many armies actually look to Israel to learn how the country minimizes casualties while fighting in an urban environment.

"I don't know of any method used in this kind of scenario to [further] reduce civilian casualties. When [US President Barack] Obama and [British Prime Minister David] Cameron say that [there is], then they should [say] how to," he said.

He sees international criticism of Israel's actions as encouraging terrorists to copy the Hamas strategy of using human shields and undermining Israel's ability to defeat the group.

It is not difficult to ascertain both the historical truth about Israel and the truth about Israel's current war with Hamas, but that does not stop the mainstream media from covering these issues mendaciously. In Why Do People Hate Israel?, Dennis Prager declares that there are only two possible reasons that this is the only time in history that "in a war between a free state and a police state, the free state was deemed the aggressor. That’s because it never happened before Israel and its enemies." Prager explains the reasons for this "moral anomaly":

One is the nearly worldwide embrace of leftist thought and values. According to this way of thinking, Westerners are almost always wrong when they fight Third World countries or groups; and the weaker party, especially if non-Western, is almost always deemed the victim when fighting a stronger, especially Western, group or country. Leftism has replaced “good and evil” with “rich and poor,” “strong and weak,” and “Western (or white) and non-Western (or non-white).” Israel is rich, strong and Western; the Palestinians are poor, weak and non-Western.

The only other possible explanation is that Israel is Jewish.

There is no other rational explanation because the fixation with, and the hatred of, Israel are not rational. Israel is a particularly decent country. It is tiny--about the size of New Jersey and smaller than El Salvador; and while there are more than 50 Muslim countries, there is only one Jewish one. She should be admired and supported, not hated to the extent that there are dozens of countries whose populations would like to see Israel annihilated--again, a unique phenomenon. No other country in the world is targeted for extermination.

As hard as it is for modern, rational and irreligious people to accept, Israel’s Jewishness is a primary reason for the hatred of it.

Isi Liebler spoke truth to power in Candidly Speaking: Obama is abandoning Israel:

The Western media’s sympathy for Hamas, inciting hatred against Israel by its excessive display of gruesome images of dead children, was completely out of context. That Israel possesses the firepower to level Gaza, if it intended to do so, was ignored. Rarely did it acknowledge that Israel had accepted cease-fires which Hamas had rejected. Or that Israel maintained a flow of humanitarian aid, electricity and water to Gaza and that terrorist casualties were treated in Israeli hospitals. In fact, Israel even established a field hospital for the sole purpose of treating Gazan civilians.

The media behaved unconscionably in failing to highlight the fact that most of the civilian casualties in Gaza were incurred because Hamas had ordered women and children to ignore Israeli early warnings to evacuate, obliging them to act as human shields at rocket launching sites and command posts. Schools, hospitals, mosques, and UNRWA headquarters were used to stockpile armaments and launch missiles. By this behavior, Hamas is responsible for every civilian casualty, and is unquestionably guilty of war crimes.

As (Israeli Prime Minister) Netanyahu stated, "Israel employs missile defense to protect its citizens; Hamas uses its civilians to protect missiles."

Whereas no army in history has ever gone to the extremes of the IDF to minimize civilian casualties, the obscene UN Human Rights Commission, dominated by dictatorships and rogue states, has launched an investigation of what it has already defined as "Israeli war crimes." In what is clearly intended to be a repeat of the notorious Goldstone Commission, there is not even the pretense of objectivity and no call to investigate Hamas.

Caroline Glick bluntly explained why Hamas violated the August 1 ceasefire:

Hamas acted as it did, because it thinks it can get away with it. And Hamas thinks that it can get away with it because Hamas is convinced that it will win this war.

And as long as Hamas is convinced that it will win this war, it will continue to attack, no matter what its situation is on the ground in Gaza. It will continue to attack Israel no matter what Israel does.

As a consequence, there is no way for Israel to disengage. There can never be a ceasefire with Hamas for as long as Hamas is convinced that it will win this war.

To understand why Hamas is convinced that it will win, it is necessary to understand first why Hamas is fighting in the first place.

Hamas went to war with one goal, to reopen Gaza to the world.

Hamas is fighting to open Gaza’s border with Egypt, to end Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza coast, and to reinstate its lines of finance.

Today Hamas’s leadership, snug in their multi-million dollar villas in Qatar and well-equipped bunkers under Shifa Hospital in Gaza City are that they will achieve their goal. They will win.

Glick notes that the UNRWA is at best powerless and ineffectual and at worst actively collaborating with Hamas, who she rightly calls "a genocidal terrorist organization dedicated to the annihilation of the Jewish people and our state as a first step towards Islamic world domination":

During this war--and in previous Hamas campaigns against Israel--we have seen Hamas use UNWRA schools as missile storage sites and missile launching pads. This week three soldiers were killed trying to seal a tunnel whose entry shaft was located in an UNWRA clinic booby trapped with over a ton of explosives built into one of the walls.

At a minimum, this tells us that UNWRA is subservient to Hamas. All UNWRA installations and personnel are controlled by Hamas. As a result, UNWRA is a subsidiary--willing or unwilling--of Hamas and all funds to UNWRA must be suspended until Hamas is no longer in control of Gaza.

Again, the central point is that for as long as Hamas exercises control over Gaza, everyone in Gaza and every entity operating in Gaza is controlled by Hamas. All assistance to Gaza assists Hamas and communicates the message that Hamas will win the war.

Israel's enemies often cite the casualty disparity in the current war, noting that Israel has suffered far fewer deaths and injuries than her enemies--but, as indicated by the Golda Meir quote cited above, the reason for this is that Israel's enemies hate the Jews more than they value their own lives. Furthermore, Israel's effectiveness at minimizing her own casualties should not be held against her. The important point to remember is that Hamas is a state-sponsored terrorist organization whose sworn goal is to destroy Israel, a peaceful and democratic country. According to a July 25, 2014 article published by YNetnews, if Israel had not dealt with Hamas' underground network of tunnels now then the Jewish State would soon have been confronted with a massacre on the scale of the 9/11 attacks:

Hamas had been preparing a murderous massive assault on Israeli civilian targets during the upcoming Jewish New Year holiday, Rosh Hashanah--this according to anonymous sources in the Israeli security services cited by the Israeli daily Maariv.

Hamas had been planning a surprise attack where 200 fighters would have been dispatched through the dozens of tunnels dug by Hamas under the border from Gaza to Israel. The terror organization aimed to seize kibbutzim and other communities while killing and kidnapping Israeli civilians.

In total, thousands of Hamas terrorists would have been swarming across Israel, wearing IDF uniforms, which would have further complicated an Israeli response. Reports further indicate that Hezbollah may have planned to join the attack as well, opening another front in the north.

The source stressed that the current unplanned war with Hamas inadvertently thwarted a catastrophic event on an apocalyptic magnitude such as the Yom Kippur War, which would have ‘brought the State of Israel to its knees.’ The destruction of these tunnels takes away from Hamas a strategic weapon it has been working on and investing in heavily for years according to the source.

Each tunnel has arteries, veins, offshoots as well as offshoots of offshoots designed in intricate and complex arrangements. As one Israeli spokesman said, "There are two Gazas, one above ground and one below ground: an underground terrorist city."

The materials used by Hamas to manufacture these tunnels of death were ostensibly imported for civilian construction and could have been used to build hospitals, schools and homes. Keep that in mind the next time you hear anti-Israel commentators spewing nonsense about Israel's responsibility for Arab living conditions in Gaza.

Despite the vicious attacks launched against Israel--both physical and psychological--Zionism is a great success story, as noted in Michael Oren's In Defense of Zionism:

Elsewhere in the world, indigenous languages are dying out, forests are being decimated, and the populations of industrialized nations are plummeting. Yet Zionism revived the Hebrew language, which is now more widely spoken than Danish and Finnish and will soon surpass Swedish. Zionist organizations planted hundreds of forests, enabling the land of Israel to enter the 21st century with more trees than it had at the end of the 19th. And the family values that Zionism fostered have produced the fastest natural growth rate in the modernized world and history's largest Jewish community. The average secular couple in Israel has at least three children, each a reaffirmation of confidence in Zionism's future.

Indeed, by just about any international criteria, Israel is not only successful but flourishing. The population is annually rated among the happiest, healthiest and most educated in the world. Life expectancy in Israel, reflecting its superb universal health-care system, significantly exceeds America's and that of most European countries. Unemployment is low, the economy robust. A global leader in innovation, Israel is home to R&D centers of some 300 high-tech companies, including Apple, Intel and Motorola. The beaches are teeming, the rock music is awesome, and the food is off the Zagat charts.

The democratic ideals integral to Zionist thought have withstood pressures that have precipitated coups and revolutions in numerous other nations. Today, Israel is one of the few states—along with Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the U.S.—that has never known a second of nondemocratic governance.

These accomplishments would be sufficiently astonishing if attained in North America or Northern Europe. But Zionism has prospered in the supremely inhospitable—indeed, lethal—environment of the Middle East. Two hours' drive east of the bustling nightclubs of Tel Aviv—less than the distance between New York and Philadelphia—is Jordan, home to more than a half million refugees from Syria's civil war. Traveling north from Tel Aviv for four hours would bring that driver to war-ravaged Damascus or, heading east, to the carnage in western Iraq. Turning south, in the time it takes to reach San Francisco from Los Angeles, the traveler would find himself in Cairo's Tahrir Square. 

In a region reeling with ethnic strife and religious bloodshed, Zionism has engendered a multiethnic, multiracial and religiously diverse society. Arabs serve in the Israel Defense Forces, in the Knesset and on the Supreme Court. While Christian communities of the Middle East are steadily eradicated, Israel's continues to grow. Israeli Arab Christians are, in fact, on average better educated and more affluent than Israeli Jews. 

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Postscript:

Eyeless in Gaza, Clueless in India: Why We Shouldn't Care refutes the idea that India (and other non-Western countries) should reflexively vote against Israel in international forums like the UN:

At its root, the problem is the Arab refusal to grant Israel the very right to exist, and their insistence that Israel and Jews must vacate the land. This stand does not allow for any compromise, and causes all the bloodshed and violence. Clearly, Israel is the aggrieved party on this front.

It is also easy to forget what caused the current round of bloodletting. It was the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers by the militant Palestinian group Hamas. They could have anticipated that this would lead to harsh Israeli reprisals (that is Israel’s habit); and, in fact, they probably did. They wanted large civilian casualties in Gaza as a stick to beat Israel with, and presumably a means to generate more jihadis against Israel.

Moreover, it is evident that Hamas intended to cause as many civilian casualties as possible. To this end, they hid rocket batteries in civilian areas, using civilians as a human shield and daring the Israelis to shoot back; which the Israelis did, in the interest of protecting Israeli civilians.

That article's author, Rajeev Srinivasan, is not impressed by the anti-Israel, pro-Arab propaganda that is so popular in the West. Although he does not acknowledge that a distinct Palestinian nationality is a myth, he recognizes that the refugees who are called "Palestinians" could have and should have been resettled by their Arab brethren a long time ago:

The entire issue of Palestinian victimhood is a travesty in that Palestinians, traditionally the best-educated of the Arabs, could easily have been absorbed into the empty and rich oil kingdoms of West Asia without much trouble. Indeed, much of the original Palestine is now in the kingdom of Jordan (which admittedly doesn’t have any oil, but is fairly peaceful, as the Alawite monarchs keep a leash on Palestinians). If the Saudis, Qataris, Kuwaitis, et al had wanted to emancipate the Palestinians, they could have resettled them in their own countries and helped them to prosper.

Incidentally, that is exactly what has been expected of Kashmiri Pandits ethnically cleansed from Jammu and Kashmir. It is assumed that over time they will get absorbed into Indian territory where they are living in refugee camps--despite noises being made about sending them back, Muslim militants and even the government of J&K suggest that it may be difficult for the Pandits to return. So why is there some sacrosanct right to return only for Palestinians?