For Everything You Wanted to Know About the Balfour Declaration

I'd like to call your attention to the Balfour 100 website.

In addition to the 100^th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, 2017 is the 120^th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress, the 70^th anniversary of the UN General Assembly Partition Resolution, the 50^th anniversary of the Six-Day War, the 40^th anniversary of Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, and the 30^th anniversary of the first intifada.

Perhaps you have heard that the moderate Palestinian Arab camp wants to sue the British government for issuing the Declaration. 

That suggests that the Arab-Israel conflict is not about boundaries, settlements, or about this or that Israeli policy, but reflects unrelenting Arab refusal to accept the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland in any part of Palestine.

This is what the extremist Hamas Charter says about the Balfour Declaration:

You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They [the Jews] were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.

Whereas this is what the Palestine Liberation Organization still says in the Palestinian National Charter:

Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation. The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.

This Balfour 100 site http://www.balfour100.com/ simply puts the Balfour Declaration in factual context.

Where would Ze'ev Jabotinsky fit into today's Israeli political spectrum?

Summer Hiatus - Meantime Catch me on Twitter

I'm on Summer Hiatus

I'm taking a break from blogging - but catch me on Twitter.

Just Seven More Bombing Days Left in Ramadan 2016

Both Hamas and the PLO responded to the murder of 13 year-old Hallel Yaffa Ariel (while she slept in her bed), by lauding the Palestinian Arab killer as a holy martyr.

We are all engulfed by a perfect storm of hatred – all around Muslims are marking Ramadan with the traditional (mostly Muslim-on-Muslim) blood-letting; Istanbul +Yemen +Syria + Jordan +Orlando +Lebanon + Israel.

Muslim young people on social media are goading each other to violence; their clergy in the mosques are inciting to hatred of the other; and their political leaders in government, from the West Bank PLO to Hamas in Gaza are using their official media outlets to add fuel to the fire.

It is meritorious, in Palestinian eyes, to kill Jews.

It's not just young people. The mother of Ariel's killer was positively orgasmic that her monster-son's died "defending" the Muslim holy sites; and she expressed faith ins'allah that other youngsters would follow in her spawn's bloody footsteps.

Pretty sick, no?

But here is something still sicker.

Machsom Watch moved swiftly to burnish the Palestinian Arab image. It is organizing meetings between gullible Israelis (and English-speaking conflict tourists) with "still peace-loving" Palestinian leaders in the coming days.

Machsom Watch is an unregistered foreign agent of the EU, other European governments, and overseas foundations dedicated (in the first instance) to pushing Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines.

Meantime, "In Israeli-occupied Netanya" on Thursday night another Shahid-wannabe stabbed two shoppers at an open market. Recall that Ramadan began with an attack in "occupied-Tel Aviv."

In Britain, Jeremy Corbin, the anti-Zionist leader of the Labour Party, compared Jewish support for the Israeli government to Muslim support for ISIS. (He is against ISIS as he backs Hamas and Hezbollah.)  The occasion was his taking receipt of an internal report on Jew-hatred within his party. The report asked party members not to call Jews "Zios" and (fair is fair) asked Jews not to dig too deeply into the anti-Jewish histories of party activists.

Over at Haaretz, the strangely well-funded /understandably low circulation post-Zionist outlet, is cheering the rapprochement between the Netanyahu and Erdogan governments. 

Just as Turkey facilitated ISIS and flooded Europe with over 1 million Muslims  "asylum seekers" (and demanded protection money from the Germans to stop), so Vlad Putin's Russia exported Muslim "militants" to Syria. 

Now, as fate would have it, Turkey paid a price for Vlad Putin's policies. Turns out the Istanbul airport bombers were Russian-speakers from the Muslim-majority  "stans" -- former Soviet republics.

Speaking of Haaretz – the paper's luminaries are decamping to London next week where there will be some de rigueur criticism of "Israeli policies" lots of post-Zionist soul-searching and, for balance - criticism of Israel from another perspective: the PLO's thuggish minister-of-sporting-relations-with-the-gullible-Zios, Jibril Rajoub, will fly in from Occupied palestine. The entire festival is bankrolled by the Clore Foundation with a little help from Yachad (the J-Street clone). 

Of course, Rajoub will have to, somehow, get by all those Zionist roadblocks, traverse the apartheid roads, the checkpoints, avoid poisoned wells, circumvent fanatical settlers, gigantic walls that cut pastoral farmers from their fields, and other indignities to make it to London. Can he? Stay tuned.

Department of Agitprop. This week Haaretz devotes its Friday magazine to rehabilitating the still-darling of the Israeli peace camp Marwan Barghouti. He helped orchestrate the murders of scores of Israelis during the second intifada and now sits in prison (Israel has no death penalty.) 

Can We All Just Get Along? 

Haaretz favors Barghouti over Mohammed Dahlan, another PLO thug-in-waiting also seen as a plausible replacement to Mahmud Abbas, palestine's president-for-life.

As for next week: 2 July/27 Ramadan is Islam's' Night of Power.  Will it be bloodier than last year's?