A Few Inconvenient Truths About Israel And 'Settlements'

Today the WAPO featured an interesting letter to the editor entitled 'Israel Must Give Up The Settlements' by a Yale academic named Gregory Eow and a NY facial surgeon named Brian Rush Simpson. Both of them are huge Obama supporters by the way..what a shock, eh?

It's valuable to look at this because it showcased the ridiculously flawed reasoning and language currently in vogue to demonize Israel 'for peace' . Let's go through this bit by bit to see exactly how bigoted and wrong headed it actually is:

Last month, we traveled to the West Bank to see in person what was happening in this disputed land. Because seeing the Israeli settlement activities in the West Bank transformed our thinking on the Israeli-Palestinian question, we read with interest Elliott Abrams's remarks regarding settlements ["The Settlement Freeze Fallacy," op-ed, April 8].

Previously, we had thought it was Palestinian intransigence that prevented a two-state solution. A look at the settlements demolishes this explanation. The settlements and the maze of Israelis-only roads and military checkpoints to sustain them makes clear that successive Israeli governments -- Labor and Likud alike, as Mr. Abrams noted -- have actively pursued policies aimed at colonizing the West Bank.

For the record, I would be surprised if these men actually went to Judea and Samaria (AKA the West Bank). If they did, they certainly saw only what they wanted to see.

First of all, there's that loaded word 'settlements'. I discussed this before in some detail.

In 1948, when the Arabs attacked Israel at its birth and ethnically cleansed Jews from Judea and Samaria ( AKA the West Bank) and East Jerusalem, they simply appropriated a lot of Jewish homes and property...which is how the place CNN and al-Reuters refer to 'traditionally Arab East Jerusalem' came to be. It was 'traditionally Arab' for only 19 years, from 1948 to 1967. Yet somehow this illegally seized property somehow never got the label 'settlements.'

Gush Etzion, Ariel and many other areas in Judea and Samaria that comprise the Jewish communities there were in fact legally purchased by the Jewish national fund prior to 1948 from the Arab owners.These lands were STOLEN when the Jews were ethnically cleansed from the Arab world after `48 - something that did not happen to the Arab population living in what became Israel, many of whom chose to leave.

Even the UN never recognized the illegal occupation of this area by Jordan...who of course moved Arabs into the area with the idea of colonizing the area for itself, something Eow and Simpson conveniently forget to mention.

Even more ironically, when Israel retrieved these areas in 1967 after being attacked by Jordan, they let the Arabs who had participated in this theft hang on to their ill-gotten gains for the most part instead of retaliating in kind. So almost all the so-called settlements were built according to official Labor government policy on land that was either vacant or on Jordanian government land.

People like Eow and Simpson like the idea of depriving the legal owners of these areas of their land for a second time, regardless. And they fail to recognize that there is no reason whatsoever the legal owner's property rights could not be respected in a new Palestinian state no matter where the borders were - except for Arab racism and violence.

That's why the checkpoints and the separate roads exist, by the way. They were created out of necessity to protect Israeli civilians from indiscriminate Arab violence after Yasir Arafat unleashed a war on Israel's civilians. And I have a feeling that if Professor Eow or Dr. Simpson and their families were getting shot at on their way to work, they would see the whole thing differently. But let's move on:

That prevents the establishment of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state, and we are saddened that the conversation has degraded to the point that we now discuss whether illegal land grabs ought to be frozen rather than uprooted.

My goodness...an abysmal ignorance of geography, the history of the region, current events and law all in one paragraph.

First off, what stopped the emergence of a second Arab Palestinian state is simply the rejectionism, violence and infighting between the Palestinians themselves.

Just as it was illegal Jordanian aggression that created the 'West Bank' and so-called 'Arab East Jerusalem in the first place on land that was never theirs to begin with, it was the illegal Arab aggression against Israel in 1948 that torpedoed the original UN partition plan which set it up..which the Arabs rejected and Israel accepted, however grudgingly.

Likewise, the refugees of that war, almost a million Jews and about half that many Arabs if we go by the last British census of Palestine were created by the Arab states jihad against the Jews. Eow and Simpson have magically transferred the blame, the cost and the onus for a solution to Israel, the party whom was attacked!

As for an 'illegal land grab', we've already established that almost every one of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria were built either on land legally purchased by the Jewish national fund prior to 1948 from the Arab owners, on vacant land or on land owned by the Jordanian government that was forfeited after Jordan's unsuccessful attack on Israel in 1967.

The real illegal land grab took place at the hands of the Arabs, and not only in Jordan but all over the Arab world. as Jews were illegally deprived of their property as they were driven from their homes. Eow, Simpson and those of their ilk always conveniently forget that little detail...I wonder why?

As for contiguous - are these people forgetting that the Hamas reichlet in Gaza and the Fatah reichlet in the Palestinian occupied areas of Judea and Samaria are separated by Israeli territory as well as their own gangland rivalry? Both groups have avowed genocidal intentions towards Israel as official policy and at this point the chances of Israel willingly allowing a connection between the two via Israeli territory is slim and none.

This apparently is what passes for informed discourse among some academics - the notion that Hamas is Switzerland, and the Israelis can trust Hamas (or Fatah for that matter) to keep to agreements they make with a country they don't even recognize as having a right to exist!

Another mere detail that frequently gets lost in the shuffle is that Israel only signed on to the Road Map with the express acceptance by the US government that most of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria would remain part of Israel as as well as a unified Jerusalem..something that doesn't jibe with President Obama's acceptance of the Saudi peace ultimatum.

And now we get to the kicker, the reason this letter was written in the first place...to shill for the Obama Administration:

Unlike the previous administration, of which Mr. Abrams was a part, the Obama administration indicates that it values the international standing of the United States. We hope that President Obama will encourage the Israeli government to relinquish all of its settlements or forgo the considerable aid that implicates the United States in that government's activities in the eyes of much of the world.

Hmmm...Jordan gets aid from the US, and Jordan has killed and expelled far more 'Palestinians' than Israel has - remember Black September? Egypt gets $1.5 billion in aid from the US and actually turned machine guns on Palestinians trying to leave Gaza and cross the border. Iraq gets massive aid from the US and expelled Palestinians living there en masse..not to mention Christians. We give $1.5 billion to Pakistan, a major enabler of terrorism where churches get burned on a regular basis.

Yet Eow and Simpson single out Israel, which, unlike those other countries is a valuable US ally of long standing and spends most of its aid right here.

I wonder why...it couldn't be that Israel is the only country that has Jews in it? Now could it? Or could it be mere willingness on the part of Eow and Simpson to simply swallow the Arab position whole and ignore a few inconvenient truths for the sake of pushing that agenda?

Look for this kind of horse manure to be peddled a lot as the Obama Administration seeks to appease the Muslim world by trying to give them Israel. I have a feeling Eow and Simpson would be just fine with that. At least until they realized that the jihad wasn't going to stop with the Jews.

Oh, by the way -if anyone wants to see what a fair, realistic Middle East peace settlement might actually look like here it is...