Sitting round waiting for the phone to ring

This afternoon I sat by the phone for 30 minutes expecting the BBC to call me. In vain.

I listened to Any Questions and was frustrated and angry to hear the panel suggest that Israel is the hindrance to peace in the Middle East and that President Obama should therefore not exercise the US veto when the PA President Mahmoud Abbas asks the UN Security Council to recognise a Palestinian State on 23 of this month.

As soon as the programme finished, I called Any Answers to say I wanted to make a point. A young woman who sounded like she was suffering from terminal boredom answered.

‘Any Answers...’

‘Hello. I’d like to respond to the question on Palestinian statehood.’

‘What’s your name?’ I told her.

‘Where do you live?’ I gave her the information.

‘What do you do?’ I told her I was the General Secretary of a Christian charity.

‘What’s your point?’ I said I disagreed with the panel and that Israel has been the one party in the peace process that has actively pursued peace.

‘And what’s point are you’re trying to make? That President Obama should veto any UN vote to recognise a Palestinian state until the Palestinian Authority is willing to make peace with Israel.’

‘Right.... and will you be near your phone between two o’clock and half past two?’ I would be.

‘Alright... stay by your phone and someone from Any Answers might call you.’ Click.

I stayed by the phone but no one called me. As I listened to the programme, listeners wanted to talk about the Euro and its imminent collapse, trade unions, pensions, rogue traders and spoilt unhappy children.

Oh well… And I’d prepared so well.

What I wanted to point out was that Israel has made all the running throughout the peace process. It was the Jews that agreed to the United Nations Partition plan in 1947; the Arabs turned the plan down.

Following the Six-Day War when Israel captured the Sinai from Egypt, she handed it back to Egypt in return for a guarantee of peace. Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat was later assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood for making peace with the Israelis. Now there is talk in Egypt about tearing up Sadat’s peace agreement.

In 1996, Israel made peace with Jordan.

Israel has withdrawn from Palestinian towns and cities; she has removed checkpoints; she has provided water and electricity to Palestinians and allowed humanitarian aid to be transported into Gaza.

Israel has dismantled Jewish settlement and forcibly removed thousands of its own citizens from Gaza in 2005. The Palestinian response to that major peace effort was to increase aggression against Israel.

Israel Prime Minister announced to the US congress earlier in the year that he will be the first to welcome a Palestinian state if President Abbas is prepared to recognise a Jewish state. Abbas has refused to do so, making it clear that an independent state of Palestine will be Jew-free.

The Palestinian authority must do something to merit statehood. I can think of nothing that the Palestinians have done since Oslo to further the peace process.

However, Mr Abbas knows he is in a win/win situation. Whatever the outcome of his bid for Palestinian statehood he cannot lose. If he fails to persuade the UN Security Council to support him, or if the US vetos a pro-vote, the PA will continue to receive billions of dollars in US aid while the nations step up their boycotts on Israeli goods.

As Barry Rubin observes so perceptively:

Will the United States cut off all aid? Of course not. Will it make them more unpopular at home? No. If it kills talks with Israel? That’s good. They don’t need or want them. If it delays the creation of a real state? Since the PA can’t and won’t negotiate for a compromise agreement it doesn’t matter. The PA will get a huge majority in the General Assembly and that will seem a diplomatic victory. If the United States vetos, the PA has an excuse for not succeeding.

If you don’t confront the reality of why a country or group act the way it does–and why a weak Western policy makes radical behaviour possible – any discussion of the issue is a waste of time.
(Read Rubin’s blog here)

What's Arabic for Hutzpah?

And another thing, the issue of Palestinian statehood was featured on Newsnight (see my previous blog).

Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal (pictured) has demanded that the US support Palestinian statehood…or else.

To make matters worse, he published his demands on September 11 — the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack on America. Seventeen of the 19 hijackers that flew the planes into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon were Saudis.

The director of the Saudi intelligence service at that time was none other than Turki al-Faisal, who met repeatedly with Osama bin Laden during the 1990s and personally intervened to block bin Laden’s extradition and execution.

Now al-Faisal writes:

The United States must support the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations this month or risk losing the little credibility it has in the Arab world. If it does not, American influence will decline further, Israeli security will be undermined, and Iran will be empowered, increasing the chances of another war in the region. Moreover, Saudi Arabia would no longer be able to cooperate with America in the same way it historically has.

Al-Faisal is addressing the country that saved him and his entire nation when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991. American blood was spilled, and American dollars were spent to defend him and his ungrateful nation. Now he presumes to lecture the USA on ethics!

Clear and present danger for Israel

Even while Jewish families were sitting shiva, seven days of mourning for their dead, after the cowardly attack on Israel citizens that took place on 18 August, a pro-Palestinian rally in Trafalgar Square was accusing Israel of war crimes and calling for the death of the Jewish state.

Then, in America, posters which call for the US to halt the supply of weapons to Israel began to appear on buses in San Francisco.

And while the BBC announced that there was a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza, missiles continued to rain down on southern Israel. On the weekend following the attrocity, more than a hundred rockets, mortars and anti-tank missiles were fired from Gaza at Israeli towns and villages along the southern border. At the Israeli-Egyptian border, a suicide bomber blew himself up and on the Jewish Sabbath a rocket hit a home in Beersheva, killing a Jewish civilian and wounding four others. Dozens were hospitalized for treatment of shock.

And in a few weeks, the United Nations looks set to vote for the establishment of an independent sovereign Palestinian state. Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Ron Prossor, estimates that more than 130 of the 193 members of the UN will vote in favour of a Palestinian state, and that most nations that oppose the plan will not have the courage to vote against it but will instead abstain.

Last Friday, President Ahmadinejad of Iran made a public declaration that the creation of a Palestinian state would be “only one step forwards toward the goal of liberating the whole of Palestine.”

Ahmadinejad, who has called repeatedly for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” flatly rejects a two-state solution, saying that the entire land of Israel should be a Palestinian state.

“The Zionist regime”, said Ahmadinejad, is a centre of microbes, a cancer cell, and if it exists in one iota of Palestine, it will mobilize again and hurt everyone. It is not enough for them to have a weak, powerless state in a very small piece of Palestine. They should unite to establish a state, but the ultimate goal is the liberation of the whole of Palestine. I urge the Palestinians never to forget this ideal. Forgetting this ideal is equal to committing suicide. It would be giving an opportunity to an enemy which is on the verge of collapse and disappearance.”

If the vote goes in favour of a Palestinian state, the Arab Spring will become Israeli Winter. Tiny Israel will be surrounded by a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Egypt to the south, a Hamas-governed Gaza to the west, a Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon to the north and a beefed up Palestine, Jordan, Syria to the east. Hamas now has weaponry capable of striking at Tel Aviv and the nearby towns where my colleagues in Israel live.

If you think the Palestinians only want "the West Bank", just look at the logo of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.



















When will world leaders and the media face up to the reality that the Muslim nations really do mean it when they say "Death to Israel".

Have a look at the issues on the 15-minute video Give Peace a Chance.

The UN's hostile obsession with Israel

From Israel Today

In September, two important events, both dangerous to Israel, will take place at the United Nations headquarters in New York City.

The first is the Palestinian Authority's effort to win international support for its unilateral bid for statehood.

The second is closely related: the third World Conference Against Racism, dubbed "Durban III."

The first such conference was held in Durban, South Africa. Both that and the second Durban conference quickly disintegrated from legitimate discussions on racism into orgies of anti-Israel sentiment.

The question both of those gatherings raised, and which Durban III is certain to raise again, is why the world has such an unnatural obsession with bashing Israel?

This enormously informative video presentation put together by the Messianic-led Jerusalem Institute of Justice explains how an organization that claims to protect human rights is doing just the opposite when it comes to Israel.

This clever little video explains why.