Obama Urged Israel To Do What It Has Already Done Many Times

Published in the Connecticut Post March 28, 2013 under the title "Israel has made many concessions" and in the Greenwich Time and Stamford Advocate on April 2, 2013 under the title "Israel has compromised."

To the editor:

Re: the article "Obama urges Israel to compromise" published March 22:

Israel has already made enormous, painful compromises and is clearly ready to make more if it will bring about peace.

Even before the reestablishment of Israel, the Zionists acquiesced when Great Britain severed the East Bank of Palestine, comprising nearly 80 percent of Palestine, to create what is now Jordan, and then agreed to every further partition proposed, including the United Nations Partition Plan, even as each was rejected by the Arabs.

After it captured the currently disputed territories in 1967 after being attacked by Jordan, Israel made clear its readiness to return it all to Jordan and Egypt if those countries would agree to peace, only to be met with the infamous "Three Nos" of the Arab League: no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no peace with Israel.

At least twice it has offered virtually all the disputed territory to the Palestinian Arabs, despite the fact that Israel's historical, legal and moral claim to that land is at least as great as that of the Arabs.

The first time, Yasser Arafat responded to Israel's offer with a wave of terror. The second time, Mahmoud Abbas responded by refusing to negotiate and has publicly insisted, "I can't allow myself to make even one concession."

Peace requires compromise. The Israelis remain ready. The Palestinian Arabs clearly aren't.

Alan Stein

The writer is president emeritus of PRIMER-Connecticut (Promoting Responsibility in Middle East Reporting).

Policies and the Law

This letter was published in The Jerusalem Post Magazine, March 29, 2013. A copy was also sent to President Obama.

As an American who resides part-time in Israel, I have long been astounded by the counterproductive strategies of the executive branch of the US government.

The explanations given by Efraim Cohen ("undiplomatic severance," Letters, March 15), former cultural attache at the only American embassy in the world which is not located in the host country's capital, omit crucial facts which show the policies Cohen describes are in contravention of American law.

The Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, passed overwhelmingly by Congress, states "Jerusalem should remain an undivided city," that it "should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel" and that the US Embassy in Israel should be "established in Jerusalem no later than May 31, 1999," while giving the president the authority to delay the relocation.

All the more absurd is Cohen's explanation that the consulate in Jerusalem represents the US vis-a-vis the Palestinians. This is akin to Great Britain having a consulate in Washington for the Cubans while locating its embassy in New York.

Moreover, statements by American officials regarding negotiations over the status of Jerusalem, including a possible division, clearly conflict with the official American policy signed into law by President Clinton nearly two decades ago. The actions of the executive branch are also counterproductive to any peace process, since they encourage Arab intransigence that is the heart of the conflict.

One of the most productive actions President Obama could take would be to finally move the US embassy to where it belongs, in Jerusalem, and move the consulateto Ramallah.

Alan H. Stein
Netanya

BDS and Abraham's Tent

(This was sent by Maurice Ostroff.  You can find his group at https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/maurice-ostroff.)

This year in Cape Town, opponents of BDS decided to show another side to the coin. Although totally outmatched by the well-financed and professionally organized BDS movement, these Capetonians adopted a proactive, imaginative approach with an “Israel Peace Week.”

At the center is an enormous “Abraham’s Tent” on the main plaza of the University of Cape Town campus. There, visitors will enjoy the patriarch’s hospitality – falafel, pita, Israeli salad, coffee and juices.

To support the Capetonians a new voluntary organization in Israel known as TRUTH BE TOLD (TBT) in cooperation with the IDC Herzliya and the SA Zioniist Federation in SA organized to send five Ethiopian students to South Africa to appear on campuses and  among non Jewish and Jewish groups. 

It was really heartwarming to meet these students at a briefing with TBT before they left. They are charming, sincere and intelligent. They are proud of their African Jewish heritage and proud to be Israelis.  All have either served in the IDF or completed meaningful national service.

And this is the reaction from one of the Capetonians who hosted the students

"Your five superb Israeli/Jewish/Ethiopian IDC students arrived in CT last week.

We could not have had any better emissaries to dispel the Israel Apartheid analogy and present a very different Israel to the one depicted in South Africa. 

As an Israeli and as a member of the Jewish/Zionist community I was so proud of them.

They spent 2 days with our Jewish youth in our Jewish day schools interacting with the kids and enabling them to see beyond what they read or hear in the media.

They have gone onto campus interacted with the students, addressed church service and spoke to 'man in the street', the bouncer at the club etc etc and dispelled many preconceived ideas about Jews and Israel

So,  thank you

Tamar "

Click here for more http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=306089

Regards
Maurice

PS. Diarize the evening of May 13 for a panel discussion organized by TBT on the information war to be  moderated by IBA personality Leah Zinder.  In addition to the panel discussion, one of the students will report back briefly on the events in Cape Town.

Between the Lines: More of Mahmoud's Mendacity

The Thursday, February 28 Jerusalem Post contained a totally factual article by Khaled Abu Toameh entitled "Abbas Reiterates opposition to E1 plan to British delegation." The article may be viewed in full on the Jerusalem Post website at <http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=304749>. Mahmoud was at his mendacious best.

Here are some excerpts, along with some comments.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reiterated his opposition on Wednesday to Israel’s plan to build in the area known as E1 between Jerusalem and Ma’aleh Adumim.
...
Abbas’s remarks came during a meeting he held in his office in Ramallah with Nigel Kim Darroch, the National Security Adviser for the British government.
...
Abbas told the British diplomats that the E1 plan would divide the West Bank into two parts and prevent geographical continuity between Palestinian territories.

Comment: One can be fairly certain Abbas is familiar enough with the geography of Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") to know this is absolutely false. While it might require some Palestinian Arabs to alter their routes when traveling between portions of Judea and Samaria, their detours would actually be far less than the distance I have to detour to avoid Palestinian Authority controlled areas when traveling between Netanya and Jerusalem.

Abbas said that the plan would also isolate east Jerusalem from its “Palestinian surroundings.”

Comment: More nonsense.

Reiterating his commitment to the two-state solution, Abbas said that the PA remained committed to a just and comprehensive peace with Israel.

Comment: Abbas has a rather strange way of acting on that alleged commitment, given that he has assiduously avoided negotiations with Israel since ignoring an incredibly one-sided (in the PA's favor) offer way back in 2008 from the Israeli government that would have given the Palestinian Arabs the equivalent of all the disputed territory.

Abbas complained that the continued imprisonment of Palestinians and settlement construction “jeopardized efforts to break the current statement (sic) in the peace process.”

Comment: One litmus test Abbas repeatedly fails: Insisting on the release of terrorists is not the position of someone interested in living in peace. Insisting on making Judea and Samaria judenrein is also not the position of someone living in peace; rather it is the position of someone who wants to create a state that is worse than an apartheid state.

The stalemate in the so-called peace process is almost totally Abbas' doing. Efforts by third parties, or even Israel, to break the stalemate will continue to be useless unless and until Abbas makes the fundamental decision to work for, rather than against, peace.

Meanwhile, Abbas Zaki, a senior Fatah official, called on Palestinians to take to the streets in the thousands to block highways used by settlers in the West Bank.

Comment: Hardly a clarion call for peaceful coexistence.

Zaki said that the Palestinians can no longer remain idle as “our sons are being executed in Israeli prisons.”

Comment: No Palestinian Arabs have ever been executed in Israeli prisons. The only prisoner ever executed by Israel since its reestablishment was Adolf Eichmann. But why should Zaki be any less mendacious than Abbas?

He said, however, that Fatah was opposed to an armed struggle against Israel at this stage because of the divisions among the Palestinians and the preoccupation of the Arab countries with the Arab Spring.

Comment: In other words, it's not that Fatah has anything against murdering innocent Israelis. Indeed, the Palestinian Authority repeatedly lionizes brutal murderers and Article 19 of the Fatah Charter insists "Armed struggle is a strategy and not a tactic, and the Palestinian Arab People's armed revolution is a decisive factor in the liberation fight and in uprooting the Zionist existence, and this struggle will not cease unless the Zionist state is demolished and Palestine is completely liberated."

It's just that, at this moment, there are tactical reasons for not using too much violence - especially since it can count on its cohorts to keep trying to kill Israelis while maintaining implausible deniability.

In fact, even Fatah can continue "armed struggle" without anyone paying attention. Just the other day, it was Fatah which launched a missile from Gaza which landed in Ashkelon. And Fatah, like the PA and PLO, is led by none other than the mendacious Mahmoud Abbas.

It doesn't take much reading between the lines, even of this one, relatively short article, to understand there's virtually no chance of an Arab-Israeli peace until there's a sea change in the mindset of the leadership of the Palestinian Arabs.

Explanation in Pictures: Why There's No Arab-Israeli Peace

This is what the Palestinian Arabs chose to build
when it snowed on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

This is a typical expression of Israeli desires,
on the beach in Netanya.

They just live in two different worlds: one wants peace, the other just hates.

Sleeping Through the Revolution

By Dr. Charles Asher Small

This may be found in the Connecticut Jewish Ledger and at http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/01/07/Sleeping-Through-the-Revolution.

Historically, antisemitism has provided the perfect diversionary ploy for dictators and demagogues. Today is no different.  From Tehran to Timbuktu, radical political Islamism (not to be confused with Islam the religion), and the governments and institutions they control are employing antisemitism as a highly effective means of distracting the masses. Demonize Jews and Israel as you transform your society into an intolerant theocracy.

Yet little is heard from the Obama Administration in protest – or from the mainstream media, or the self-proclaimed human rights progressives from Western academia. The inconvenient truth is that global antisemitism is alive and well – openly throughout the Muslim world, and, under the cloak of so-called political correctness, in the West.

Case in point: Egypt has just adopted a Sharia-based constitution that dooms millions to second-class status, including women, religious minorities, gays and lesbians and, of course, Jews. Its Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government and president, Mohamed Morsi, cynically promote antisemitic venom such as denial of the Holocaust and the vicious canard of a Jewish conspiracy behind 9/11.  And they remain ideologically adamant in their overarching goals: the implementation of Sharia to redefine society at all levels, and Israel’s elimination.

In the face of this, the Obama Administration and the mainstream media have been largely silent. In fact, eager to appease their supposed new friends in Cairo and elsewhere, they are now busily promoting for U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a former senator who has a problematic history with Jews and Israel.

The situation has reached a point where the political and academic elites actually believe that speaking out against present-day antisemitism somehow equates to opposing the valid aspirations of millions of Muslims. They resist applying any honest analysis to political reality on the ground, continuing instead to cling to failed notions like the Arab Spring. They refuse to acknowledge the ascendance of a hate-filled, anti-democratic revolutionary wave that is inflicting incalculable harm on people throughout the Muslim world.

Interesting how those same elites rarely miss an opportunity to denounce Israel’s political leaders and the policies they must uphold to ensure their nation’s survival in a violent unstable region that refuses to recognize the Jewish state’s basic right to exist. 

The time has come for President Obama to act. The world must not witness a repeat of 2009 when pro-democracy Iranians were slaughtered in the streets of Teheran by agents of the regime – while the President did nothing.

Sadly, history seems to be repeating itself in Egypt, as Washington continues to soft peddle the base nature of the Brotherhood and its ascent to power in the region’s most important country. It’s a disturbing trend that began with the President’s 2009 Cairo speech, when he invested the Muslim Brotherhood with undeserved prestige by insisting on their attendance, as he embarked on his policy of engagement with the Islamic world. If Obama does not act to change course soon, that speech will become his Neville Chamberlin moment.

Incitement to genocide against the Jewish people is a basic tenet of radical political Islamism. President Obama and his Administration must confront it head on. Surely he knows the core lesson of the civil rights movement: that blaming the victim only emboldens those who hate. To be blunt, the President can take a principled stand in support of human rights and against antisemitism. Or he can allow the forces of intolerance to aggregate even more power. 

How can the U.S. turn a blind eye to a doctrine of antisemitism that literally incites to mass slaughter? When the elites make excuses for extremists in the name of mutual understanding and engagement then, one fears, we have lost our way. To borrow the words of Martin Luther King Jr., we must not sleep through this revolution.

Dr. Charles Asher Small is Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), and Distinguished Scholar at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

"The Mascot" - Truth or Fiction?

By Colleen Fitzpatrick

Barry Resnick spoke about this at the Bet Israel Masorti Congregation in Netanya on December 25, 2012. With its relevance to the media, we thought it appropriate to post this article, recommended by Barry, on the PRIMER web site. It originally appeared on JWIRE. 

The Mascot is the international best-selling Holocaust biography of Alex Kurzem written by his late son, Mark. The book centers on the elder Kurzem’s recovery of his identity as Ilya Galperin, his family’s lone survivor of the 1941 Jewish massacre in Koidanov, Belarus, and an eyewitness to the murder of his mother and two siblings...writes Dr Colleen Fitzpatrick.

The story was made into an award-winning documentary financed by the Australian Broadcasting Corp, and has been published by Penguin and its subsidiaries in 13 languages. The French company, Healthcliff Productions purchased the rights to the book and is planning to produce a full length feature motion picture.  After an exhaustive international three-year search for evidence, my colleague Dr. Barry Resnick and I have discovered no proof that Mr. Kurzem’s story is true, nor has it been established that he is Jewish.

Initial suspicions about Mr. Kurzem arose in the late 1990s during his first appearance at the Melbourne Holocaust Centre when he offered to say he was Jewish in return for $17,000 At the time, he was in debt because of a failed business deal.



Mr Phillip Maisel OAM, Testimonies Director at the Centre, nevertheless recorded Kurzem’s story and had the distinct impression that his interviewee was not being entirely truthful. “There was something strange about his story, something didn’t add up,” he told Michelle Coleman of Jwire’s Melbourne Bureau.

During a subsequent visit to the Holocaust Centre, Mr. Kurzem was overheard commenting that “the Holocaust is big business”. He was asked to leave.

We have copies of emails exchanged by Mark Kurzem with a cousin in 1998, commenting that it was “in his [father’s] best interests that as much money [as possible] is derived from his story to solve his problems”, along with attempts to obtain a “substantial cash advance” from this relative for the right to author the book.  In a subsequent email, the cousin commented that, “…it all boils down to money and [Alex’s] debt.   Mark plans to erase that debt any way he can. And I mean any.”


More recently, when Mr. Kurzem was asked to take a DNA test to prove his relationship to his alleged half-brother Erik Galperin, he told us he would do so if we paid him $100,000. At that moment, the DNA kit was in front of him on the table.

The financial motivations of Mr. Kurzem aside, there are doubts that he is Jewish, never mind being a survivor of the Koidanov massacre.  When he gave two video testimonies at the Melbourne Centre, unlike thousands of other survivors, Mr. Kurzem placed an embargo on the testimonies, forbidding their viewing in his lifetime without his permission.  Maisel, who has recorded about 2,000 testimonies including Mr. Kurzem’s, and who himself is a survivor, has stated that he does not believe Alex Kurzem is Jewish.  One reason he cites is that when a male survivor  is asked the critical question about how he hid the fact he was circumcised, the answer is usually complex and emotional.  According to Mr. Maisel, Mr. Kurzem couldn’t remember.

Even accepting that Mr. Kurzem might be Jewish, there are important historical inaccuracies in “The Mascot” that contradict his claim that he is Ilya Galperin, his family’s lone survivor of the Koidanov massacre. These include:

- No such Ilya Galperin is listed in Yad Vashem’s historical records as a victim of the massacre. Numerous Pages of Testimony for Galperin family members were submitted by Ida Krupitsky, the Galperin family genealogist, and Alex’s purported first cousin whose mother Fania died in the massacre;

-  According to The Mascot, as the massacre was underway, the Nazis halted it because of a bad thunderstorm, telling the remaining victims to come back the next day so the executions could resume, thus allowing young Ilya to escape that night. The Koidanov Yizkor book records a more believable scenario, typical of Nazi massacres. The killings were unannounced, efficient, and over in a matter of hours.

Mr. Kurzem has under his control several items that could confirm or disprove his story.  Yet he has not fulfilled his repeated promises to release them.  Besides the video testimonies mentioned above, and the DNA test that he has demanded $100,000 to take, Mr. Kurzem has not provided us with a copy of his application for reparations to the Jewish Claims Conference which could help substantiate his whereabouts during the Holocaust.

The Conference initially rejected Mr. Kurzem’s application, but later reversed its ruling so that he is now receiving reparations.  Mr. Kurzem widely claims that this reversal was based on the endorsement of his story by Minsk GILF Society Director Frida Reizman .  Close examination of the GILF certificate of endorsement indicates that the document might have been altered.  When confronted with this possibility, Mr. Kurzem told us that he has the original Russian version of the certificate and that “mistakes” were made in translating it into English.  We were recently contacted by an attorney for the Claims Conference in Germany who asked us if we had a copy of the Russian version of the certificate.  Evidently, Mr. Kurzem did not submit the original Russian version with his application, but rather his own English translation that he knew was not accurate. Why is that?

Having been instrumental in the exposure of two recent Holocaust literary frauds, Misha Defonseca’s Surviving with Wolves and Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence, I have become knowledgeable about the back story of the creation and marketing of such tales. In each case, the story emerged during a time of financial distress of the author. Over time, the story experienced substantial changes, both to enhance its entertainment value and to apply patches to explain discrepancies.  Each also contained numerous glaring historical errors.  Both stories took place a long time ago, in a place far away, making it difficult to confirm them. Each author concealed information that would have exposed the truth.  The similarities that The Mascot back story shares with these two works of fiction have raised questions about its veracity.

I met with Mr. Kurzem during a recent visit to Melbourne.  Although I was hoping for some evidence of the truth of his story, I was disappointed with his vagueness.  Once again, Mr. Kurzem told me he would send his video testimonies after he copied them, and he said he would think about taking the DNA test, but that first, he wanted to ask his half-brother Erik about it when he sees him in Belarus later in the year.  Although in interviews with the international media, Mr. Kurzem supplies explicit details of the murder of his mother and siblings, when I asked him if he was sure he saw his family killed, he told me that he had witnessed so much violence during the war, he couldn’t separate one memory from another. “A traumatic event like that, you remember in great detail,” says Maisel.

Mr. Kurzem not only has and will continue to experience substantial financial gain and recognition from his books and his movie, he also lectures internationally to school children, thereby feeding the next generation with what may be distortions of the truth. In the interest of preserving an accurate history of the Holocaust, and putting an end to suspicions that he is exploiting it for money and fame, we ask Mr. Kurzem to provide evidence that he is telling the truth, or we ask him to stop.

If Holocaust denial is evil, isn’t distortion of Holocaust history for financial gain, just as bad?

In the two Holocaust frauds cited above, relatives, friends, and acquaintances of the authors who knew them during the war were aware that their stories were fabrications. These individuals wanted to come forward with the truth, but either failed to get to the right people, or feared being attacked for their negative comments.  Once sufficient evidence was discovered contradicting each story, and one or two of these informants went on record, a flood of information came in from others that allowed us to debunk what was being sold as Holocaust truth.

We appeal to anyone who may have known Alex Kurzem during or after the war to provide us with information that either confirms or disproves his story.

J-Wire spoke to a representative of the Claims Conference who confirmed that Mr Kurzem had successfully applied for funds. The representative said that the German Government had been given the files for investigation.

Colleen Fitzpatrick, PhD is the President of Identifinders International.

Michelle Coleman contributed towards this article.

December Ponderings

Beryl Ratzer, author of "A Historical Tour of the Holy Land," periodically sends out an interesting newsletter. This is her December newsletter, which may also be read on her web site. 

Shalom!

Here we are, almost halfway through both Hanukah and December and I still haven’t fully processed the events of November. It began with a few days of long-awaited rain and, for me, with twelve days exploring the country, from the snowcapped Hermon Mountain in the north to sunny Eilat in the south, with twenty six delightful Australian tourists, interested in absolutely everything. 

What none of us expected was that their Israel experience would include a brief war, “Pillar of Defense” (in Hebrew “Pillar of Cloud” Ex 13:21), a rush to the bomb shelter in our Jerusalem hotel and a chance meeting with a family who were taking a vacation from their Ashkelon home which had been repeatedly attacked over the last months by rockets fired from Gaza Strip, that very same Gaza Strip which they had left when Israel evacuated it in 2005. 

For months the world turned a blind eye on the thousands of rockets, missiles and mortars raining down on Israeli towns and villages, fired from the Gaza Strip. When Israel decided to retaliate the world very briefly supported the Israeli precision bombing of strategic targets before returning to the customary condemnation of Israel and our “disproportionate” actions.

Then came the 29^th of November the very date when, sixty five years ago, the UN voted to partition Palestine, then under British Mandate rule, into two entities, one for the Jewish Palestinians and one for the Arab Palestinians. Resolution 181 was joyfully accepted by Jews and vehemently rejected by the Arabs. The Jews established the State of Israel. As they had no claims of nationhood instead of doing the same, the Arabs declared war on the nascent Israel, a war which they lost and then called this missed opportunity a Naqba, a disaster.

On 29^th November this year, 2012, the UN voted to recognize the Palestinians as a non-member state. In one fell sweep, UN resolutions 242 and 338 were tossed into the rubbish bin along with all the agreements between Israel and the Palestinians, from the Declaration of Principles signed by PM Rabin and Yasser Arafat in 1993, the Wye River Memorandum in 1998, the Camp David Agreements and the Road Map.

The Palestinians no longer feel the need to recognize Israel, to negotiate a final settlement with Israel or to stop their attacks on Israel. Why should they? By winning the media war, the PR war, which has denied the history of the Jewish people in this land, despite written and archeological proof and virtually erasing all the previous agreements signed with Israel, all calling for direct negotiations, the world has given them all they asked for, and more, with no strings attached.

It has taken a long time but I think that most people here in Israel have come to realise that we have no one to rely on but ourselves. The world turned a blind eye while over six million Jews were slaughtered during WWII and the world is turning a deaf ear to threats to “wipe Israel off the map”, to the Palestinian glorification of those who will commit suicide if they can kill a few Jews at the same time, Jews – not Israelis, to the claim that Israel does not and has not any right to exist.

Nor is it concerned that the Palestinian demand for a state includes the proviso that it be totally Judenrein, absolutely without one Israeli or one Jew, which is the same thing as far as they are concerned, thereby proving that anti-Israel, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are one and the same thing. Hitler failed to achieve this in Europe but there are Arab and Moslem countries which have succeeded. 

Not surprisingly, overlooked is the fact that the more than a million Arabs, Moslem, Christian and Druze,  living in Israel are Israeli citizens with the right to vote in elections and have 16 members (out of 120) in the outgoing Knesset.  

Please take the time to see these two brief presentations, directly from ‘the horse’s mouth’.

http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=8126,   http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=8164 

In a world rife with civil wars, massacres, military revolts, starvation, human trafficking, women and child abuse, dictatorships and economic upheavals the world is pre-occupied with a potential plan to perhaps build a few thousand homes in Jerusalem, the three thousand year old capital of the Jewish people, area E1 which adjoins it and Israeli ‘settlements’ in general.

I doubt if there are many people that know the area E1 is a barren hilly piece of land a mere twelve square kilometers (4.6 square miles) in size, on the road which descends through the Judean desert from Jerusalem to Jericho. Try and picture the size. I also doubt also if many people know that the ‘settlements’ take up a mere 2% of all the land of the West Bank.

The world obsession with Israel is disproportionate to say the least. And it explains why we are beginning to realise how accurate were the words of the first century sage, Rabbi Hillel, who said "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if not now, when?"

This is the same Rabbi Hillel who, when asked to explain Judaism while his interlocutor stood on one leg, replied:  "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn."

In these days of political correctness I end with the innocuous “Seasons greetings”!

Beryl Ratzer

Author of "A Historical Tour of the Holy Land" 

www.ratzer.com

Hallucinations

The Torrington Register Citizen allows readers to post opinions anonymously in a feature called "Soundoff." This provides a service in allowing readers to express views that are unpopular, but it is also subject to abuse. Anti-Israel fanatics have used "Soundoff" as a vehicle for spreading their hatred with venomous attacks generally laced with lies. One such screed was published on December 8, 2012. That screed is included here, followed by a letter submitted in response.

Soundoff

In response to "..it's clear that Israelis want nothing more than to live their lives in peace." Sound-off, Dec. 4. Really, that's all that they "want?" How about their plans to build thousands of new homes in West Bank "settlements" (aka land grabs? Don't they want those? How about the "Apartheid Wall?" How about the hundreds of nuclear bombs Israel possesses (while disallowing inspectors to examine, and refusing to sign nuclear non-proliferation treaties...something that Iran has already done a long time ago, by the way ). How about the two lines on the Israeli flag, flanking their symbol, that signify the Tigris and Euphrates rivers...their penultimate boundary goal? The Israelis want all of that, and lots more! The last thing that the Israeli government and many Israeli citizens want, is peace. Their actions and history are proof of that! Their most recent provocation, in which they bombed and incinerated a Hamas leader, touching off the Palestinians' determined but feeble bottle rocket response, is just more evidence of unbridled Israeli aggression. Peace? You must be hallucinating!

The Response

To the editor:

To partially respond to the cowardly hate-monger who repeatedly hides behind and misuses the anonymity of "Soundoff" to launch his error-filled diatribes against America's only real friend in the Middle East:

The Israeli flag has blue lines because its design was based on the tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl; the absurd claim that they represent the Tigris and Euphrates would be laughable if it has not been used to incite so much violence and hatred already.

If those two rivers were Israel's "penultimate boundary goal," then that democracy is certainly going about achieving that aim in a very strange way. It gave the massive Sinai back to Egypt. That area is now being used to smuggle large quantities of massive Iranian rockets to the terrorists in Gaza, rockets the anonymous writer refers to as "bottle rockets." It gave all of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, has already given about 40 percent of Judea and Samaria (aka the "West Bank") to the PA and has offered virtually all of the rest.

Thousands of those "bottle rockets" were launched at Israeli civilians - a war crime under international law - before what the anonymous writer refers to as Israel's "most recent provocation." As they say, the hostilities started when Israel began to fight back.

Recently, the Hamas Politburo Chief Khaled Mashaal gave a well-publicized interview to CNN's Christiane Amanpour. He was praised as becoming more moderate when, out of one side of his mouth hs said "I accept a Palestinian state according to 1967 borders with Jerusalem as the capital ..."

But even more recently, speaking in Gaza at a rally commemorating the 25th anniversary of the founding of Hamas, he spoke out of the other side of his mouth: "Palestine is ours from the river to the sea and from the south to the north. There will be no concession on an inch of the land. … We will never recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation and therefore there is no legitimacy for Israel, no matter how long it will take. … Jihad and the armed resistance is the only true path to liberation."

This is the nature of Israel's genocidal adversaries. The anonymous Soundoff writer, like so many anti-Zionist propagandists, falsely accused Israel of precisely what the Palestinian Arabs are trying to do.

Israelis want peace. Israelis dream of peace, Unfortunately, it takes two to tango. Until the Palestinian Arabs give up their dream of destroying Israel, those dreams of peace will remain a fantasy.

Sincerely,

Alan Stein, Ph.D.

President Emeritus, PRIMER-Connecticut

Setting the Record Straight: Distortions of Commission and Omission

Alan H. Stein, Ph.D.

The degree of misinformation and misunderstanding relating to the issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict is astounding. Patently false information is pervasive yet is often taken as common knowledge and falsely transmitted in conversations, over the Internet, in the traditional media and even by governments.

The dissemination of misinformation ramped up even further than usual recently in the aftermath of the vote at the United Nations giving "non-member state status" to the Palestinian Authority, an entity that in some ways resembles a state but falls far short of meeting the standard criteria. Misinformation also followed the announcement by Israel about planning for building in its capital and in a suburb and about preliminary planning for building between them in what's known as the "E1 corridor."

One article published had the headline "Israeli settlement plan would split West Bank." Many news reports said the same thing while using different terminology, falsely asserting it would make a contiguous Palestinian Arab state impossible.

Some of the same articles included maps which conclusively illustrated the absurdity of the assertions.

The E1 corridor connects the suburb of Ma'ale Adumim with Jerusalem. It's a tiny area, roughly 4.6 square miles, jutting a tiny bit into the area known for thousands of years as Judea and Samaria, until recently when Jordan began calling it the West Bank. In no way would keeping E1 in Israeli hands split the West Bank.

In actuality, not keeping E1 in Israeli hands would split Israel. Ma'ale Adumim, less than 10 miles from Jerusalem, has a population of approximately 40,000 people. There's absolutely no way Ma'ale Adumim would not remain part of Israel in any conceivable peace agreement; everyone knowledgable accepts that. If E1 wasn't retained by Israel, then Ma'ale Adumim would be split from the rest of Israel, which would no longer be contiguous.

The portions of the West Bank given to the Palestinian Arabs would still be contiguous, but there's also no way a Palestinian Arab state in both the West Bank and Gaza can be contiguous, at least not without splitting Israel in two.

It must be noted that while contiguity is certainly a nice attribute, it's hardly necessary for the viability of a state. Our United States is split into no fewer than three areas, with Hawaii separated from the mainland by thousands of miles of ocean and Alaska separated by one of the largest countries in the world. If there is an Arab-Israeli peace, it will be far easier to travel between Ramallah and Gaza than it is to travel between New York and Anchorage.

The media is also guilty of contributing to false impressions by failing to include documented facts relating to items they do report.

As one example, the interim agreement signed by Israel and the PLO in 1995 included the provision "Neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations."

The action by Mahmoud Abbas of going to the United Nations to gain status as a "non-member state" was a blatant violation of that provision, something one would never know from the general media.

This is not just a technicality, since it relates greatly to the question of the trust necessary for the "partners" to negotiate in good faith.

Related to that are the repeated references to a Palestinian Arab state based on the "1967 borders." These references ignore the fact that there were no borders in 1967, but merely armistice lines. More important, negotiations based on  those lines are a violation of the armistice agreements.

The armistice agreement between Israel and Jordan contained the provision: "It is also recognised that no provision of this Agreement shall in any way prejudice the rights, claims and positions of either Party hereto in the ultimate peaceful settlement of the Palestine question, the provisions of this Agreement being dictated exclusively by military considerations."

Similar provisions were contained in all the armistice agreements, ironically at the insistence of the Arabs!

One may reasonably ask how one can trust negotiations when they are based on a violation of previous agreements?

Newspapers and other media have a responsibility to be accurate, to point out when officials are saying things that aren't true and also to include highly relevant information. When it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, they are failing on all three counts.