J Street: For sale to the highest bidder

MAY 26, 2016, 11:30 PM

ile never monolithic, the pro-Israel community has been mostly unified since Israel became independent. That has all changed since the emergence of J Street as a lobby that explicitly set out to challenge the establishment. The group claims it is pro-Israel, but it is fundamentally divisive and philosophically more in tune with the Arab lobby than the pro-Israel lobby.

This was most recently apparent when J Street decided to support President Obama’s catastrophic nuclear deal with Iran despite the opposition of both the Netanyahu government, the opposition Labor Party, and, according to the polls, approximately 80 percent of both the Israeli and American population.

Now we learn that its campaign to mislead Congress and the American public about the Iran deal was paid for by the Ploughshares Fund. Ironically, Ploughshares seeks to eliminate the world’s nuclear stockpiles and yet supported an agreement that encourages nuclear proliferation. The Fund paid J Street an astounding $576,500 – the equivalent of nearly one-third of the lobby’s entire 2014 budget — to help the Obama administration undermine Israel’s security.

According to deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, the Ploughshares Fund was a key partner in the campaign to recruit nongovernmental organizations, proliferation experts and “friendly” reporters to create an “echo chamber” to support the Iran deal. J Street’s executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami had numerous meetings with White House officials, including Rhodes, and the organization created a website, Iran Deal Facts, to echo the administration’s talking points. Blogger Elder of Zion described J Street succinctly as “nothing but a paid shill for the White House to split the U.S. Jewish community and put it at odds with how Israelis feel.”

The Iran case is just one example, however, of J Street’s malevolent influence.

When President Obama criticized Israel for building homes in its capital, Elie Wiesel published an ad calling for support for the unity of Jerusalem. In response, J Street published its own ad, reprinting an article from Haaretz by Yossi Sarid calling for the division of Israel’s capital. Sarid summarized J Street’s philosophy by asking President Obama to use his clout to save us from ourselves.

This idea that Israel must be saved from itself is not new. It has been a staple of Arabist thinking at the State Department for decades and was reflected in an article written by former undersecretary of state George Ball entitled, “How to save Israel in spite of itself.” The view has always been popular among critics of Israel who, like J Street, believe that Israelis are either too stupid, immature, or foolish to know what is best for them and therefore must be helped to see the error of their ways by Americans who know better from the safety and comfort of their homes 6,000 miles away.

The followers of this school like to assert that they represent the true opinion of Israelis. Yet, when Israelis have the opportunity to vote their preferences they do not choose governments that have the policies of J Street. Could it be that rather than being foolish and immature, Israeli voters actually know their history and make decisions based on their experience?

One of the early examples of J Street being out of step with the pro-Israel community was the group’s opposition to Israel’s policy toward the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Hadar Susskind, vice president of policy and strategy for J Street wrote in the Washington Post that the issue was not whether Israel had a right to enforce the blockade of Gaza, but whether it makes Israel more secure. It does not, he asserted.

Israelis, who have caught Hamas smuggling rockets and other weapons, disagree. And, by the way, so does Egypt, which enforces its own blockade, and without which Israel’s would be ineffective.

The Washington Times revealed that at a time when Israel and the pro-Israel community were documenting the bias and inaccuracy of the Goldstone report alleging that Israel committed war crimes while defending itself against thousands of Hamas rockets (Judge Goldstone later recanted), J Street was arranging meetings for Goldstone on Capitol Hill. When confronted, Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami denied its involvement, but the Times had a recording of an interview with J Street supporter Collete Avital proving their report was accurate.

J Street’s campaign financing arm also undermines Israel’s security. For example, in 2014, 11 members of the House of Representatives supported by J Street refused to support, or voted against, funding for the Iron Dome anti-missile system that has saved thousands of Israeli lives.

There is a fundamental distinction between the consensus of the pro-Israel community and those who claim to represent Israel’s best interests. The former do not substitute their judgement for that of Israeli citizens who must live with the consequences of policy decisions, and who must fight and sometimes die for their country.

Even more critically, J Street chooses to ignore Middle East history and all of the complex factors — religion, geography, history, politics, psychology — that make the conflict in the region so enduring and reduce the problem to Israel’s presence in the West Bank. It is particularly ironic that J Street emerged after the disengagement from Gaza, which should have put to rest once and for all the myth that occupation and/or settlements are the reasons that the Middle East is not Eden.

The Washington Post editorialized about the naiveté of those that adopt the J Street line that peace would follow from American pressure on Israel: It’s easy enough for global leaders to issue flowery appeals for action on the Middle East or to imply that progress would be possible if only the United States used its leverage with Israel. The stubborn reality is that there can be no movement toward peace until a Palestinian leadership appears that is ready to accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

Palestinian Authority dictator Mahmoud Abbas has refused, however, to negotiate with Israel’s prime minister for the last seven years, and their chief negotiator admitted that if Israel offered the Palestinians 100% of what they demanded it still would not satisfy them. The Palestinians have no interest in recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, or coexisting with Israel, even if a Palestinian state was established tomorrow. Such facts are critical to Israel’s survival, but of no importance to J Street.

Yet another example of J Street chutzpah is to call itself the pro-peace lobby, which clearly suggests that everyone else is anti-peace or pro-war. Of course, AIPAC and the rest of the pro-Israel community has been working for Middle East peace since before Ben-Ami was born, but the lobby that truly represents Americans who believe in peace and a strong U.S.-Israel relationship insists that Israelis should decide policies related to their security.

J Street maintains that it speaks for a constituency that has been silenced, but this is nonsense as well. It is the argument made by the losing side of a debate, as in the case of professors Walt and Mearsheimer, and the other detractors of the Israeli lobby who cannot accept the idea that their views are considered but ultimately rejected because they do not represent the national interest.

Another myth propagated by J Streeters is that their actions help Israel, not hurt it, but this shows a total ignorance of the nature of interest groups. Like it or not, as Alan Dershowitz observed, whatever Jews say comes through a megaphone, and J Street’s views are magnified and often misinterpreted as the position American Jews. State Department Arabists have long exploited such critics to defend anti-Israel policies by saying, in effect, “even the Jews agree with us.” J Street proved to be similar “useful idiots” to the Obama administration in the lobbying campaign for the Iran deal, and during its pursuit of the disastrous J Street/Arabist approach to peacemaking that has, predictably, failed.

But only now did we discover that J Street was basically bought off to lobby for the Iran deal with nearly $600,000 proving once and for all that J Street’s problem is not having the wrong policies but rather having policies that are sold to the highest bidder.

The pro-Israel community votes with its feet and its wallet and that is why 18,000 people attended this year’s AIPAC Policy Conference and AIPAC’s budget is roughly $100 million, compared with J Street’s $2 million. Rather than representing the alleged mass of disaffected Jews, it turned out the group’s largest initial funders were a lady in Hong Kong and George Soros. The former, apparently a non-Jew with no connection to Israel, gave a whopping $811,697 to the group. Soros is a billionaire known for his virulent criticism of Israel, who was originally rumored to be the money behind the group, but then reportedly decided not to finance J Street for fear of tainting it because of his reputation of hostility toward Israel. J Street lied about its dependence on Soros until it could no longer hide the evidence.

According to blogger, Lenny Ben-David, the group’s political action committee took money from “pro‑Saudi activists, Arab‑American leaders, Muslim activists, State Department Arabists, a Palestinian billionaire, and even a Turkish American who helped produce the anti-American and anti-Semitic film Valley of the Wolves.” These do not appear to be the silent majority of pro-Israel Jews J Street claims to represent.

Pro-Israel? Pro-Peace? Nah, just for sale to the highest bidder.

—

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach whom The Washington Post calls “the most famous rabbi in America” is the founder of The World Values Network and is the international best-selling author of 30 books, including his just-published, “The Israel Warrior: Fighting Back for the Jewish State from Campus to Street Corner.” Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.

Shmuley BoteachRabbi Shmuley Boteach is the founder of This World: The Values Network. He is the author of Judaism for Everyone and 30 other books, including his most recent, Kosher Lust. Follow him on Twitter@RabbiShmuley.

"The Jews have always paid the full price in blood for their tiny promised portion of the Earth's surface."

A female officer in charge of the range at the Hen women’s corps camp near Tel Aviv, Palestine, gives a demonstration in the handling of a Sten gun on June 15, 1948 in the Arab-Israeli War. Although non-combatants, members the new women’s Army in Israel are taught to use guns for defense. (AP Photo)

Expanding on the EoZ/Daphne Anson article, "Britain, 1973: That Was the Support That Was", citing Times of London letters pro-Israel and anti-Israel in response to the Arabs' attacking in the War of Atonement:

"There was the army major who, in a letter to The Times (30 October 1973) recalled that serving under General Sir Horatius Murray in Palestine during 1948 was “the period of my army service of which I am least proud”. Murray, in a letter to the same newspaper (26 October 1973) had written that back then he was “forced to shell Tel Aviv with 25-pounders and to attack with tanks -"

I checked the Times' archive. Gen'l Murray's letter is on p.21 of 10/26/73 and the major's response to his ex-commander is on page 17 of 10/30/73. I think this exchange is worth quoting in full to see the wildly different narratives between British military leader and their subordinate field commanders - and thus between ideology (that "the Jews" planned terror) and reality - that the Brits wantonly killed Jewish women and children in response to what were isolated "scare" attacks against property, probably by the soon-to-be-dissolved Irgun:

From General Sir Horatius Murray
Sir, As regards the exodus of Arabs from Palestine in 1948, I think David Lazar [writer of a 10/23 letter presenting the Zionist version of events] is unaware of the true position in that country during the weeks preceding and following the relinquishment of the mandate.
   I was commanding the 1st Division in Palestine from 1947 to 1948, covering the southern half of the country from about the line of Nathaniah. We were due to leave early in May 1948, and the British garrison was being steadily reduced from March onwards. Consequently we were, during this period, not in a position to provide the overall protection in the country as a whole on the scale we could have wished.
   The Jews seized this opportunity to launch a ruthless and sustained terrorist campaign against the Arabs. They commenced by dropping a few mortar bombs on isolated Arab villages at night and were sufficiently emboldened by their successes to launch, in April, a full-scale attack on Jaffa from Tel Aviv. I warned them that if they persisted in this I would be forced to intervene. They saw fit to ignore this warning, which forced me to deploy a battery of 25-pounders and shell Tel Aviv. I followed this up with a ground attack supported by a squadron of tanks. This action proved successful, and the Jews called it off.
   Nevertheless, by carrying out this operation, the Jews achieved their aim. So long as the British were there, the Arabs had the protection they needed, but when the mandate was given up they knew they would be defenceless, and therefore fled in terror. Within 48 hours Jaffa, which then, I believe, had a population of 30,000 became a city of the dead, and we had to send in patrols to prevent looting. The scenes on the road souut from Jaffa and elsewhere were heartrending.
The neighboring Arab states did, at some time, make announcements tot he effect that they had ordered the Palestinian Arabs to leave their homes. However, those of us who were there realized that this was a face-saving device for the benefit of the Arab world as a whole. They could not possibly make any impact upon the intended hearers who by this time were in full flight either for Gaza or the West bank of the River Jordan. They could not get away quick enoug, being terrified. The residual Palestinian Arabs were similarly dealt with as soon as we left the country.
None of us who were there at the time were in any doubt that the Jews organized a campaign covering the last few weeks of the mandate, and the period following our departure to ensure that they were in possession of as much of the soil of Palestine as possible. This was very easy for a well trained, well organized, and well equipped Jewish field army against defenceless, unarmed Arabs.
   It was not therefore surprising that, in these circumstances, the neighboring Arab states intervened as soon as we left.

Yours sincerely,
H. MURRAY
Middlesex
October 23.

-----------------

From Major Hary Mackinnon:

Sir, I served as a junior officer under General Sir Horatius Murray in the Middle East in 1948 and it is the period of my army service of which I am least proud.

   The General writes that he was "forced to shell Tel Aviv with 25-pounders and to attack with tanks" and that "this action proved successful".
   So it should! We found that to a large extent Tel Aviv was defended by women, children, and old men, and the sight of their sacrificed bodies sickened the most hardened British troops.
The Jews have always paid the full price in blood for their tiny promised portion of the Earth's surface.

Yours sincerely,

H. MACKINNON
Torquay, Devon

---------------------------------

So how did the General get such a warped perspective? Perhaps it was like this: in Robert St. John's biography of Abba Eban he describes how Eban discovered that during WWII "the real molders of British policy in that area of the world" were his superior the chief of British military intelligence and two "die-hard" British ambassadors. Captain Eban's job was "supposed to keep his eye on the Arabs" while his partner, Arab nationalist (and decades later best-selling writer) Albert Hourani, was "supposed to keep his eye on the Jews". 

After WWII Hourani remained in the Arab Office in Jerusalem and "put into the record Arab opposition to any partition scheme and warned that any solution would provoke conflict" before moving to London to work at Chatham House on anti-Zionist activities. The job of Chatham House was to provide analyses for the British Foreign Office.

With an ardent anti-Zionist Arab providing "perspective" - we'd say "narrative", nowadays - to both the British foreign office and the British military, and other voices absent (in the military) or disregarded (in the Foreign Office) is it any wonder that British generals and diplomats were primed to perceive Zionists as aggressors, rather than the Arabs?

G'mar chatima tovah 5775

EoZ wrote this and it's so good I decided - with his permission - to reproduce it here for myself:

 

I unconditionally forgive anyone who may have wronged me during this year, and I ask forgiveness for anyone I may have wronged as well.

Specifically (as enumerated in previous years, courtesy of The Muqata from a few years back):

• If you sent me email and I didn't reply, or didn't get back to you in a timely fashion -- I apologize. It is sometimes hard for me to answer everyone as I get busier, but I am sorry.
• If you sent me a story and I decided not to publish it or worse, didn't give you a hat tip for the story -- I'm sorry. (I sometimes get multiple tips for the same story and I usually credit the first one I saw, which is not always the earliest. And I cannot publish all the stories I am sent, although I try to place appropriate ones in the linkdumps, or tweet them. Whether I like it or not, I am an editor, as well as a writer, graphic designer, video producer, layout editor....so I really can't post everything.)
• If you requested help from me and I wasn't able to provide it -- I'm sorry.
• I apologize if I posted without the proper attribution, with the wrong attribution, or without attribution at all.
• I'm sorry that I don't give hat tips on things I tweet. 
• If I didn't thank you for a donation, I'm very, very sorry. 
• I'm sorry if any of my posts offended you personally.

May this be a year of life, peace, prosperity, happiness and security.

I wish all of my readers who observe Yom Kippur an easy and meaningful fast.

Column One: Why Israel is losing the information war

It doesn’t take a PhD to understand what the game is. And Israelis – even many with PhDs – understand what is happening.

By CAROLINE B. GLICK

08/20/2014 11:32

AN ISRAELI army officer explains to journalists how Hamas built tunnels to attack the country. Photo: REUTERS

For most Israelis, the international discourse on Gaza is unintelligible.

Here we were going along, minding our own business.

Then on a clear night in June, apropos of nothing, Palestinian terrorists stole, murdered and hid the bodies of three of our children as they made their way home from school.

Before we could catch our breath from that atrocity, they began shelling our major population centers with thousands of rockets, missiles and mortars, and infiltrated our communities along the border with Gaza through underground tunnels to kidnap and murder us.

And as the Palestinians did all of these things, they used their civilian population and the foreign press corps as human sandbags. They ordered their own people not to evacuate their homes from which Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad terrorists launched their missiles, rockets and mortars at Israel. And they launched missiles at Israeli cities from outside the hotel where the foreign reporters were staying.

It doesn’t take a PhD to understand what the game is. And Israelis – even many with PhDs – understand what is happening.

This is why so many Israelis are up in arms about our government’s failure to impact the wall of lies that comprises the discourse on Israel in the Western world.

The knee-jerk reaction of many Israelis to the sight of UN officials, CNN anchors and New York Times reporters accusing us of committing war crimes is to blame ourselves.

Our hasbara (public diplomacy) is a catastrophe, our defenders are incompetent idiots, we moan and scream.

But the truth is not so simple. Our speakers have gotten much better over the past several years. Some, like ambassadors Ron Dermer and Ron Prosor and IDF Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, are excellent.

Israel’s public diplomacy efforts have been unsuccessful in penetrating, let alone dismantling the edifice of lies that constitutes the Western narrative about the Palestinian war against us because our underlying strategy for contending with it is directed at the wrong goal.

Our PR gurus defined our hasbara goal as getting our story out effectively. To do so, Israel has operated on two parallel tracks. First, we have tried to adjust our policies to adhere to what we perceive as the West’s demands.

We have employed measures unprecedented in military history to protect the Palestinians from their elected leaders who use them as fodder in their propaganda war against Israel.

There is no precedent in the history of warfare to Israel’s practice of warning Palestinians when it is about to attack civilian installations that Hamas has unlawfully used to attack Israel.

Moreover, Israel has accepted interpretations of the laws of war – such as the specious assertion that Israel is required to provide free electricity to Gaza – that have no relationship whatsoever to international law.

The second component of getting out our story has been developing the sort of glitzy, media-friendly PR apparatus that everybody who is everybody says is the be all and end all of a successful media strategy. There is no foreign press corps more coddled than the foreign press corps in Israel. No government is more active on social media sites than Israel.

And yet, for all of our efforts, the UN Human Rights Committee appointed an open hater of Israel who doesn’t have a problem with Hamas to run a phony investigation of the IDF’s imaginary war crimes.

For all our efforts, The New York Times, MSNBC, the European media, CNN and all the rest demonize our soldiers and leaders. They ignore the fact that everything Hamas and its allies in Fatah and Islamic Jihad do is a war crime – from calling for the annihilation of Israel to shooting rockets at civilian population centers, to shooting rockets at civilian population centers from hospitals and from outside the hotel where their reporters are staying in Gaza.

So desperate are we for any truth in reporting that we seize as a major victory the fact that a Wall Street Journal reporter was nice enough to Tweet the fact that he interviewed a Hamas leader in Shifa hospital.

A casual glance at the mountain of distorted and simply false stories reported about Israel and its enemies makes clear that at a minimum, most of the Western media don’t care about the truth. The fact that they sent reporters to Israel and Gaza doesn’t mean they wanted those reporters to publish what is going on.

The reporters knew what they were supposed to say before they even got on a plane to Israel. True, Hamas has openly acknowledged that it prohibited the foreign press from filming its terrorists and their war crimes. But with rare exceptions, the media had no problem with Hamas’s rules.

So too, the UN Human Rights Council didn’t decide to form a commission of inquiry to criminalize Israel because we weren’t good enough at showing the lengths we go to protect Gazans from their elected leaders. And the UNHRC didn’t appoint William Schabas, who has called for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to be tried for war crimes, to lead its star chamber because it didn’t get the press release proving that Israel acts in compliance with international law.

The media, the US State Department and the UN attack Israel for crimes that Hamas commits because they are wedded to a narrative in which Israel is to blame for its enemies’ desire to destroy it.

As the UN, The New York Times and President Barack Obama see it, Israel is to blame because it is inherently guilty by its nature.

The White House and State Department can accuse Israel of conducting a “totally indefensible” and “disgraceful” strike against an UNRWA school, when no such strike occurred, and if it had occurred it would have been totally defensible, because as far as they are concerned, as Martin Indyk claimed in May, Israel’s right to exist is conditional on our willingness to accept their belief that we are inherently morally deformed and in need of direction by our betters.

Netanyahu is Schabas’s “favorite [to be placed] in the dock of the International Criminal Court,” because Netanyahu is the elected leader of the morally deformed Jewish state.

Given this situation, it is clear that Israel’s public diplomacy efforts are directed toward the wrong goal.

The goal of hasbara cannot be to educate the likes of TheNew York Times’ bureau chief Jodi Rudoren about the truth because the problem isn’t one of ignorance. The problem is that they consider the truth an impediment to their goal of reporting the narrative of Israeli criminality.

Rather than striving to educate, we must work to manipulate the Rudorens of the world into covering the truth.

For instance, there is no reason to provide reporters clearly dedicated to hiding the truth with access to national leaders and military commanders. Let them find their own sources. Israel is a free country. There is no reason for The New York Times to be invited to a press briefing by IDF commanders.

Another critical element of a strategy for forcing hostile media and international agencies to contend with the truth is to create events that they can’t ignore.

For instance, the chief military prosecutor together with the state prosecution should indict Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah leaders on war crimes charges and the relevant Israeli courts should begin adjudicating the cases.

The Knesset should begin deliberations on a bill to strip UNRWA of its legal immunity as a first step towards bringing its personnel up on charges of providing material support for terrorism.

True, such actions will be met with howls of condemnation and hysterical reproaches from all the usual suspects.

But at least they will be talking about Palestinian war crimes. At least they will be forced to acknowledge that UNRWA is a force of destabilization and radicalization, not of stabilization and moderation in the Arab conflict with Israel.

Our leaders and spokespeople cannot win the information war by devoting themselves to pointing out the West’s hypocrisy and double standards, or the rank mendaciousness and bigotry that stands at the core of their approach to Israel. No one ever won a war by only playing defense. And we won’t win this one by explaining why we aren’t war criminals.

We will only begin to make progress when we define the goal of our hasbara as forcing an unwilling media and international community to discuss the truth by taking deliberate actions that will make it impossible for them to ignore it.

The writer is the author of The Israeli Solution: A One- State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. caroline@carolineglick.com

Now I get it

With the discovery of dozens of terror tunnels reaching out to Israeli preschools I think I understand now why the three teens were kidnapped last month. Hamas, better than maybe anyone else, knows that their murderous militarism does not spring up overnight; it has to be cutlivated. Within the Gaza Hamas rules it's easy, but what about the world outside? So Hamas kidnapped the teens first. After some bargaining the teens would be returned, Hamas could declare a victory, and the world would be ready for the spectacle of 400 Jewish kindergartners stolen from their classrooms. But Hamas botched it and the teens were shot dead. The teens couldn't be paraded as a Hamas op, because when the kindergartners got kidnapped Israel would then have no expectation the children would or could be returned alive. So Hamas backtracked and denied everything. They probably judged that if they waited six months to a year everyone would forget about the teens and they could go forward with The Big Kidnapping as originally planned. (EoZ link)

Update, 8:15pm:  Seems I'm mistaken; the tunnels under kindergartens were filled with explosives!

The Apartheid Libel: A Legal Refutation

Eugene Kontorovich, professor of international law at Northwestern U., destroys many anti-Israel shibboleths.  This is just his latest example, published at The Tower: link

Response to Mirza

Mirza: Hamas has actually been formed by Israel and its support. This was to thwart the leadership of Fatah which according to Israel was a terrorist organization. One only negotiates with their enemies not friends. Nelson Mandela was branded a terrorist and put in jail for quarter of a century. Slavery, occupation, lack of hope and lack of respect and lack of basic civil rights breed terrorism and extremism. The argument “occupied are not ready for negotiation” is baseless. What negotiations when the occupier has all the powers and the other side none. Palestinians have never demanded an Islamic state, it was the Israel which started Hamas and to divert attention toward an Islamic state. It is a struggle for freedom nothing more or nothing less.


Hamas has actually been formed by Israel and its support. This was to thwart the leadership of Fatah which according to Israel was a terrorist organization.
Hamas was originally a social welfare organization; it developed a public appetite for genocide and terrorism afterward.

 One only negotiates with their enemies not friends.
Hamas says it will not negotiate away its self-declared opposition to the existence of the Jewish State.

Slavery, occupation, lack of hope and lack of respect and lack of basic civil rights breed terrorism and extremism.
Gaza and the West Bank are indeed occupied by organizations that enforce such conditions, primarily Hamas and the Palestinian Authority: Israel-hatred and terror-training are part of their school curricula and Arabs exercising deviations from the Israel-hatred line may be labelled "collaborators" and executed with little or no trial.  Thus, the only way to compete for political power is for rivals to assert that they hate Israel more than the party in power and the only check on exercising hatred through violence is external: cutting funds for hate-education, material support for armaments, or Israeli military action.

It is a struggle for freedom nothing more or nothing less.
The Jews of Israel re-settled through fair land purchase from Arabs, or had state lands formerly belonging to the Ottomans deeded to them for settlement under international law, or settled upon land vacated by Arabs who sided with Israel's enemies by flight, thereby surrendering their civil rights under the applicable international law: the British Mandate of Palestine, which references the civil and property rights that existed under the Ottomans. 

Arabs who did not rebel or join the ranks of enemy armies retained their civil and property rights; Israel today is over 20% Arab and its capital, Tel Aviv, boasts over fifty minarets.

The British Mandate also required Arabs to respect the civil rights of Jews who lived on Arab-controlled territory but this has been completely ignored by the international community for generations, even though the ejected Jews settled in Israel itself, often on top of vacated Arab villages.  The Jewish population of Israel's neighbors is nearly zero as a result. The property of the departed Jews was mostly used to bolster the power of ruling tyrants.

Thus the Jews of Israel owe the Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank absolutely nothing, either legally or morally.  There is no "Palestinian Arab struggle for freedom" from Israeli occupation; there is only the desire for conquest mandated by tyrants and reinforced by decades of war-promoting culture.
As long as people don't realize that due to external support the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza cannot escape the bonds of the Hamas and PA tyrants they can never have the hope to even struggle for freedom.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/704144/a-welcome-rapprochement/