May 10, 2024
Could a ‘Free Palestine’ truly be free?
Could a ‘Free Palestine’ truly be free?
Philosophically, politically, socially, morally – an Arab Palestine would not be free. Just look at its policies, says the writer.
By YISRAEL MEDAD, MAY 9, 2024, Jerusalem Post
The streets of the West, their college campuses, their public squares and halls of gathering and convening, and their museums and art galleries – all have been resounding regularly recently with the cries, chants and echoes of “Free! Free, Palestine!”
Drums are banged. Streets are clogged. Tents occupy quads. Keffiyehs are waved about. Flags held high. All for the cause of Palestine.
Posters display the words that Nelson Mandela spoke in Pretoria, South Africa, on December 4, 1997, when he said, “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” And they are echoed and repeated in a cadence that has the protesters, at times, jumping about ecstatically.
Palestine wouldn’t be the liberal haven they imagine
Jewish anti-Zionists, including IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, promote an additional slogan, that “Jews won’t be free until Palestinians are free,” creating a symbiotic relationship of supreme intersectionality.
The unfortunate truth for them, however, is that if an Arab Palestine will ever be free, no one in that state will be free.
It is true that the cause of a Free Palestine has grabbed the imagination and enthusiasm of every possible liberal and progressive group and organization. At times, however, some contradictions remain in the campaign that could present, at the minimum, a bit of awkwardness.
For example, how does one demand a ceasefire while shouting “Intifada! Revolution!” at the same time? Then again, pro-Palestine propaganda has rarely been concerned about the rationality of its assertions, not to mention their factual truth.
Do these protesters ever inquire as to the freedoms that will exist in this so-called “Free Palestine”? Have they reviewed its history? Its societal behavior? The ideology of the movements that champion its cause?
According to a May 2 news item in The New York Times, “most of the more than 100 people arrested in the sweep of Hamilton Hall and campus… were women.” As Phyllis Chesler asked in her recent piece in the American Spectator, “why are women in America cheering for Hamas?”
TO HIGHLIGHT the cluelessness that exists, one also could note the photograph snapped at Columbia University by Caitlin Ochs of Reuters. It displays a young woman, keffiyeh-headed, standing among a group of students blocking Butler Library. She is attired in a strapless crop top that bared not only her shoulders and upper chest but her midriff as well. One can only wonder how such fashion would go over not only in Gaza but Ramallah as well.
Western feminism is not a freedom that would flourish in an Arab Palestine; neither is queerism.
Regarding whether that’s true, one should have been able to ask Ahmad Abu Marhia, who lived in Tel Aviv until 2022 after escaping from Judea because he was gay and suffering discrimination. But that’s no longer possible, since his beheaded body was located near Hebron that October.
It was reported at the time that some 90 other Arabs from the Palestinian Authority who identify as LGBT were then living as asylum seekers in Israel. In Israel, to repeat.
Another group calling for a free Arab Palestine are those wishing that their university divest from investments in Israel. Have they any idea what a blow that would be to the health, science and industry advancement that they themselves benefit from?
One of the spokespeople for UCLA protesters added another aspect: “Given that the University of California is founded on colonialism, it’s inherently a violent institution” and therefore is a system linked to both foreign wars.
Is she aware that Arab Palestine itself is a result of an imperialist colonialism? After all, Arabs who came out of Arabia in the 7th century invaded, conquered, occupied and subjugated the Jewish and Christian communities that existed in Byzantine-occupied Judea. They even set about a process of Islamization, too. Is that a basis for freedom?
At New York’s New School, a banner reading “Death to Israel! Death to America! Glory to Palestine!” would seem to be a bit too free with Marxist rhetoric, but is nevertheless indicative of the extreme disconnect-with-reality approach, as well as danger, of those promoting a Free Palestine.
Nerdeen Kiswani of the Within Our Lifetime pro-Palestine group retweeted this message: “We either divest from imperialism or we get fascism. The ruling class is eagerly ushering in fascism at home to defend their fascism abroad.” She doesn’t want to admit that a “Free Palestine” means a very un-free world.
PHILOSOPHICALLY, an Arab Palestine will not be free because it is based on the principle of excluding Jewish national identity and sentiment. It is predicated on a negativism, an outlook of denial. It recalls its historical conquest and occupation and seeks to continue its unjustness, keeping the Jews as an oppressed minority as Jews have been and still are all across the Middle East, with very few exceptions.
Politically, an Arab Palestine will not be free. Neither Fatah nor Hamas are democratic – certainly not the Iranian proxy group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has not held legislative council elections since January 2006 and was himself last elected on January 9, 2005.
The results in any case were rigged and Hamas altered the situation in Gaza by conducting a coup. With Hamas the more powerful force, the first bloodbath to happen in a Free Palestine will be one of an internal civil war.
Socially, the current framework of the Palestinian National Council is one of human rights violations and repression against its own residents. Economically and financially it is an unsustainable polity. Its policies direct all possible funds to terror activities. Reports of embezzlement abound.
Morally, it is based on the false narrative that Jews do not possess any national identity. As a result, Palestinianism is an eliminationist movement that denies Jews any rights other than being a religious group of humans. It engages in genocidal operations, has continuously violated agreements, truces and ceasefires, and will continue to do so.
Can a free Palestine ever be truly free? The answer should be obvious.
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May 1, 2024
The inseparable link between the Jews and the Land of Israel must be taught
The inseparable link between the Jews and the Land of Israel must be taught
Why, and how, did this trend of indifference, outright ignorance, or assigning the topics a lower grade of interest take root?
By YISRAEL MEDAD, Jerusalem Post, MAY 1, 2024
My neighbor sat shiva during the week before Passover. Through her late mother’s family, she is a 7th-generation Jerusalemite, now residing in Shiloh. She is now a grandmother and so the generations extend. Her roots in the Land of Israel go back some 140 years, as her family was from the group known as the “students of the Gra,” the Gaon Eliyahu of Vilna.
Additionally, I know someone else whose roots go back to the Hassidim who came before, in the last third of the 18th century, in the footsteps of the 300 or so who arrived in 1777. As it happens, I was also acquainted with a descendant of the Jews who arrived in Hebron after the Spanish expulsion of 1492.
Jews are not foreign to the Land of Israel, nor are they colonialists. In fact, Jews have always been here, even if in small numbers at times. The attempts to return and resettle the country were constant and continuous. But how well-known is this aspect of the continuum of Jewish presence in the Jewish homeland?
Judging by results, whether in Israeli schools or throughout the Jewish Diaspora, the educational content relating to Zionism would appear to be quite unsuccessful in instructing and inculcating the history of the Jews in the Land of Israel throughout the centuries – and its centrality to Judaism and Jewish culture, literature, and art.
Why, and how, did this trend of indifference, outright ignorance, or assigning the topics a lower grade of interest take root?
One researcher, Yosef Charvit, suggested that Zionist historiography has sought “to ensure that the mighty process of return to the Jewish homeland is attributed exclusively to Zionism of the modern era,” by which he means the First Aliyah of the 1880s.
Moreover, he accuses historiographers of attempting “to ‘normalize’ history so that anything hinting at redemption is summarily excised.” Seemingly frightened by messianism, the history of the Jewish settlement of Eretz Israel over the many centuries has, in essence, been censored or, at best, relegated to a minor element. It is therefore disregarded, at best, in schools in Israel and in the Diaspora.
Whether that particular theory is true, there is certainly a woeful lack of educational content on the subject of the continuum of Jewish presence in the Land of Israel between 135 CE to the First Aliyah of 1882. In fact, Charvit focuses on what he considers a slight to the Sephardi communities in that “conscious or otherwise… Zionist historiography… detaches the sixteenth from the nineteenth” centuries.
In Hebrew, there are the Yoram Tzafrir’s two volumes: From the destruction of the Second Temple until the Muslim conquest. Michael Ish-Shalom’s In the Shadow of Alien Rule deals with the period from the Roman-Byzantine rule until the Ottoman conquest. A 126-page booklet was published by Dan Bahat in 1976, Twenty Centuries of Jewish Life in the Holy Land: The Forgotten Generations and is good, if compact. The problem, however, begins with readily available, serious English-language resources.
Moshe Gil’s A History of Palestine, 634-1099, presents too short a timespan. The recent two volumes by Rivka Shpak Lissak, When and How the Arabs and Muslims Immigrated to the Land of Israel focus more on the Jewish population and demography and, perforce, are limited. On the Foreign Ministry website, I found 139 words devoted to the “continuous presence in the Land of Israel for nearly 4,000 years” but it ends in 636 CE.
The two-volume 800-plus page Phantom Nation concentrates on the Arab population of the region of historic Palestine and marks 1870 as the start of Zionist settlement activities. Harold J. Margolis published Jewish Continuous Presence in the Land of Israel but it appears to be more of a travelogue. A very short treatment of some 1,000 words can be found online, issued by Dr. Yechiel Shabiy, a researcher at the BESA Center (Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies).
In short, all these books and articles are rather inadequate.
I returned to this subject after an X post of mine received a response to the effect that not only can Zionists not claim rights over what happened 3,000 years ago but that, in any case, the “Palestinians” preceded the Jews in this land. In addition, Jews only began settling in the late 19th century. And we came from Europe.
This is standard fare pro-Palestinian propaganda. But can the average Israeli or Jewish high school student disprove that framing? Are they able to confront the incessant undermining of the Zionist narrative and the reality of Jewish indigenousness in and ongoing return to its historical homeland?
For example, not only were there dozens of Jewish communities throughout the Golan in the 3rd and 4th centuries but in 1885, 35 Jewish families moved to Ramtiniyeh, north-east of today’s Katzrin, after purchasing 15,000 dunams. In 1888, another 3,690 dunams were purchased at Bir A-Shagum, near today’s Givat Yoav.
Centuries before that, Jews resided in Galilee, Samaria, and the South Hebron Hills. There were communities in Baram, Gush Halav, Eshtemoa, Halhoul, Arraba, and Sakhnin.
A RESULT of the Arab conquest was the altering of the Hebrew place names of existing Jewish towns. Shfaram became Shfa’amr, Ganim became Jenin, Ashdod became Isdud, and so forth. There was an ethnic cleansing in Mandate Palestine but it was perpetrated by Arabs against Jews in Hebron, Gaza, Tulkarem, Nablus, and Jerusalem.
All of the above, and so much more, indicates a very simple truth: Jews continuously resided in Eretz Yisrael despite the difficulties in arriving, staying, and living under foreign rule. Jews abroad sent money to support Jews in the Land of Israel. They clung to the land. They viewed it as a holy land in which to fulfill religious commandments. And even if they did not live in the country, they sought all possible connections with it, even if just to be buried in its soil.
Jews and the Land of Israel are inseparable.
Much of this history has been neglected and is not being taught. That needs to be changed. Our future depends on it.
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April 19, 2024
The savagery element of the conflict
The following column appeard in the Jerusalem Post on April17, 2024 but at present has not yet been uploaded and if it is, I will add the URL.
The savagery element of the conflict
Savage in thought, savage in words, savage in deeds
Yisrael Medad
Mohammed El-Kurd, a Sheikh Jarrah activist, stood at the podium in New York where he studies on March 2 last month and addressed a pro-Gaza rally. His remarks were closed with a series of savage shout-outs: “we are beyond debating our resistance, there is no right to debate our resistance…we are past persuasion…abolish Zionism!…f*ck Israel!”
At that same rally, actress Susan Sarandon spoke of Gaza’s 75 years “going through this”, referring to Israel’s engaging with; the Arab terror emanating from there. She then raised her right arm in a sort of revolutionary salute and shouted, “Free Palestine!”
Already in May 2023 we could have read Nada Elia who wrote: “Zionism cannot be reformed; it must be abolished”. She argued that justice for Palestine must go further by “dismantling the supremacist ideology of Zionism itself.”
That slogan of “Abolish Zionism” had already appeared in Neukölln, Berlin on February 10 this year on a no-parking marker. In Montreal, pro-Palestine protesters performed Nazi salutes and called for the death of Jews outside a March 6th event at the Jewish Community Foundation and Holocaust Museum building, of all places. That same week, Jewish students at Tufts University were spat on and told they stink during a contentious BDS vote on anti-Israel actions.
The anti-Israel voices have become anti-Zionist roars. The arguments have become drowning outs. Disputes have become demands. There is no dialogue but vociferous viciousness. There is a policy of pollution and cancellation. It is not about Israel but rather the negation of Jewish national identity.
Seth Mandel, after noting several outrageous statements uttered by Islamist anti-Zionists, characterized them in Commentary as “indistinguishable from the rhetoric of Hamas or neo-Nazi groups.”
It appears that it is just simpler for the pro-Palestine forces to accuse Israel of genocide, apartheid and ethnic cleansing and thus be away with their problem altogether. The debates over Israel’s policies have moved from the verbal to multiple forms of physical and psychological intimidation as well as actual physical injury. The atmosphere is disparaging, threatening and venomous. It is a new form a pro-Palestine terrorism.
In adopting this extreme position, the pro-Palestine forces have not only assumed that all the truth is on the side of the Arabs and not only are they positioning the conflict into another zero-sum game result as in 1948 but they are engaged in a major regression, rolling back the confrontation between Jews and Arabs to where it was over a century ago.
In doing so, they not only are ignoring what happened during those 100 years and more, but they are repeating the same mistakes by the Arabs during that time as well as acting blindly to what we Jews accomplished since then. Today’s reality is vastly different from the situation that Chaim Weizmann, Ze’ev Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion faced at the time.
Moreover, the acts of blacklisting Jews, banning them from appearances whether on the music stage or the academic conference panel, gathering outside synagogues during services as happened at Temple Emmanuel in Manhattan and worse acts that have occurred should raise an alarm of greater proportion than what we have witnessed. They are not going after Zionists but Jews. Do they want Jews to protest outside mosques demanding the Imams denounce Hamas? Do they wish to import the Middle East violence into faraway countries?
Looking towards the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, the Palestinian Authority announced in November 2016 it was preparing a lawsuit against the British government, being that 1917 letter Arthur Balfour signed had paved the way for the creation of the State of Israel. That had followed Mahmoud Abbas’ speech in the United Nations General Assembly at the end of September 2016 when the Palestinian Authority president said that Britain should apologize for that declaration. In an op-ed in The Guardian on November 1, 1917, Abbas wrote that Great Britain should “atone” for the act.
Aside from the downright ridiculousness of that attempt to rewrite history, there is a more invidious effort being pushed, if for years, that has assumed dangerous proportions with online social media platforms and that is the actual rewriting of history for the younger generations.
In response to a post of mine on X, I received this response: “Bible stories are not scientific. And even if was true, if you’ve left for 3000 years that doesn’t give you any right to take it from the people who have lived there for 3000 years since.”
Of course, archaeological finds as well as external to the Bible documentation such as the Merneptah Stele, the Mesha inscription or the Monoliths of Shalmaneser III lend important credence to the Biblical narrative. But more relevant is the shared ignorance that Jews have continuously been present in the territory of the Land of Israel throughout the 1800 years of our loss of political sovereignty. I know of no popular book tracing the continuum of Jewish residency in our homeland under Roman, Arab, Mameluke and Ottoman imperial rule.
And as for the matter of pro-Palestine propaganda that they either preceded the Jews by thousands of years as Saeb Erekat once claimed or lived here for only 3000 years, too many pro-Israel advocates feel uncomfortable in denying those prevarications. They neither confront the fact that Arabs were themselves a mighty colonialist power as well as engaged in the slave trade, the sins of which they accuse their opponents.
In essence, those portraying Zionism as an evil force suffer from their own warped psychological requirement to see Israel’s actions as evil which allows them to be evil. People seeking to be evil need to see others as evil. It was Nietzsche in his On the Genealogy of Morality who argued that the concept of evil stems from the negative emotions of envy, hatred, and resentment.
This latest development in the anti-Zionist campaign is savage: savage in thought, savage in words, savage in deeds.
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April 15, 2024
“I don’t expect peace”
Neus Deutschland, Socialist newspaper Interview, 09/02/2010
“I don’t expect peace”
The settler movement in the occupied territories was unwilling to compromise
Yisrael Medad is spokesman for the YESHA Council (YESHA stands for Judea, Samaria and Gaza), an organization of settlers in the occupied territories of Palestine. He himself has lived in Shiloh, a notorious center of radical settlers, since 1970. Medad writes regularly for newspapers and has his own website (myrightword.blogspot.com). Martin Lejeune spoke to him for New Germany.
ND: What do you expect from the peace negotiations between Abbas and Netanyahu that begin today in Washington?
Yisrael Medad: Above all, I don’t expect peace from the peace negotiations.
Why?
Leaving aside the major intractable problems such as a right of return for Palestinians and the status of Jerusalem, I believe that the Palestinian Authority is neither willing nor able to offer Israel the terms of peace that we can accept. At the moment, the Palestinian Authority cannot even ensure peace in the West Bank. Furthermore, they never stop teaching their schoolchildren to hate Israel, to later become resistance fighters against Israel and that cities within Israel would belong to Palestine.
There is currently unrest again in the Silwan district of Jerusalem because Palestinians are being robbed of their land. Does Israel want to force all Palestinians out of Jerusalem?
No person in Israel, whether Jew, Muslim or Christian, has to move anywhere against their will. 20 percent of the Israeli population are of Arab origin and feel comfortable in Israel. The residents of Umm al-Fachem, for example, an all-Arab city in Israel with over 45,000 inhabitants, could stay where they are.
But Palestinians are being driven out of East Jerusalem every day.
Unfortunately, you are fundamentally misunderstanding something here. They think Jerusalem belongs to an Arab country that the Jews took over 150 years ago. But this is a Jewish land that was occupied by Arabs 1,300 years ago and is now gradually being liberated by us.
What will happen to the settlements in the West Bank? Should they all stay, or should some of them be evacuated so that they don’t stand in the way of peace?
All Jewish communities should remain. There is no reason why a Jew should be able to live in Berlin, Hong Kong or London but not in the territory that is the historic land of Israel. Leaving our holy land of Samaria (the occupied West Bank – M L.) is something we can never accept.
However, a Palestinian state would not be viable as a patchwork quilt.
I am not interested in a Palestinian state. I am not in favor of arrangements that could help establish a Palestinian state. But I am for peace and for giving all Arabs as many rights as possible – including autonomy and the right to manage their private property.
Gaza and the West Bank should be connected by a corridor. This was stated in the Oslo Treaty in 1993.
Thank God there is no such corridor through which Hamas operatives could travel unhindered from Gaza to Samaria.
Four settlers were shot dead on Tuesday. What impact will this have?
Very specific! We have just decided to continue building the settlement today at 6 p.m. in response to this crime. The moratorium is over!
______________
A video-recorded interview, April 14, 2024.
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April 10, 2024
Israel needs to fight its legal battles in the multi-front war
The war on Israel’s third-front, Yisrael Medad, April 10, 2024, Jerusalem Post
Israel needs better-trained warriors on its third-front battles.
Israel, Jews and indeed Zionism, have faced for over a century a multi-front war. The campaigns in this war have been fierce, vicious and injurious even if at times no blood is shed. And they are ongoing.
They have been waged on battlefields and conference rooms; in halls of powers and campus quadrants; in courtrooms and trenches; in newspaper columns and television broadcast.
The first front is, of course, that of the military effort designed to kill Jews and to eradicate Israel. From murderous riots outside Jaffa Gate in April 1920 to Hebron’s Jewish Quarter in August 1929 to the 1948 War of Independence and all successive battles since, from Fedayeen to Fatah, to Hamas and Hezbollah.
The second front is the diplomatic efforts to deny Zionism its legitimacy and Israel its raison d’etre. The front is shared by the information public diplomacy engagements where there are, according to Binyamin Netanyahu, “people who can’t put two words together [in English]”.
The third front, the focus of this column, is that of the legal assault on Israel, employing claims of law to deny the national rights of Jews by pushing a line that the Mandate for Palestine itself was a legal error, at best, and that Israel has no rights to Judea and Samaria.
One recent instance is what Melanie Phillips termed “a contemptible letter…a disgrace to the legal profession”. She was referring to a letter sent to the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister and signed by 600 British lawyers. They asserted Israel is breaking international law and potentially committing genocide in Gaza. As Ms. Phillips pointed out, their ability to quote correctly from the January ruling of the International Court of Justice was not only a failure but in doing so, they misrepresented the Court’s findings, essentially lying.
On a previous occasion, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International simply redefined the term “apartheid” in order to have in applied to Israel in its new form. NGO-Monitor released a report in December 2021, authored by Joshua Kern and Anne Herzberg, titled “False Knowledge as Power”. It addressed the legal vacuum that existed and how it permitted the charge of the apartheid calumny to invade the debates over Israel’s policies and provided a full analysis based on international law. That campaign is ever ongoing.
A recent post, a rebuttal and a rejoinder at the prestigious OpinioJuris blog is worthy of attention. The prestigious blog seeks to inform discussion of international law by and among academics, practitioners and legal experts. It is read in 70+ countries daily on the average. The posts have been cited by international and domestic courts, international arbitrators, and government officials.
Dr. Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg of Kings College touted that Israel possess no sovereign claim to Judea and Samaria, that is, the “West Bank” a la Dunkelberg. His arguments were refuted by Kohelet’s Avraham R. Shalev and were countered by Dunkelberg, all this over a two-month exchange.
While my legal training is limited, it quickly became obvious that Dunkelberg’s knowledge of history was central to his interpretation of law. Moreover, that knowledge was one of a rigid ideological approach and a misrepresentations of history while his background is Latin America. He had armed his view with illegal ammunition.
To deny Shalev’s assertion that Zionism is not a “colonial endeavor”, Dunkelberg points to the 1899 established “Zionist Colonial Trust” and Ze’ev Jabotinsky writing in 1923 about Zionism’s “colonising aims”. That, of course, is etymological claptrap.
The term colonization there and then used was simply a synonym for “settlement”. Kibbutzim were “colonies”. Zionists engaged in resettling Jews on their national land, planting it and rebuilding it. Moreover, they were required to do so by buying it back from Arabs and others who had themselves occupied the country, conquering it centuries earlier.
In another section, he argues on behalf of “Arab Palestinians” and their rights as if they existed as a distinct people. Yet, at the time, those Arabs themselves denied Palestine’s independence. Orientalist Philip Khoury Hitti was active in 1918 in an anti-Zionist Arab-American movement. The group lobbied for the establishment of a Greater Syria and at the 1919 peace conference, they asked that Palestine not be independent and not detached from Syria.
The First Palestinian Congress of January-February 1919 resolved: “We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria…we desire that our district Southern Syria or Palestine should be not separated from the Independent Arab Syrian Government”. The King-Crane Commission was also so informed. The Emir Feisal, the most senior Arab diplomat, meeting with Chaim Weizmann in January 1919, accepted that there would be an Arab state and a Palestine for the “Jewish people”. Article VII of their agreement recognized a “Zionist Organization”.
In arguing that Israel was created “in Palestine” but itself is not “Palestine” nor did “Palestine” disappear, Dunkelberg conveniently ignores the existence of Jordan in Palestine territory in a colonial maneuver by Great Britain. In addition, in his logic, the Ottoman Empire somehow wasn’t a colonial empire, occupying Judea, the Jewish national homeland but rather possessed sovereign rights that should only be transferred to Arabs, not Jews.
Despite never existing as a separate, distinct state entity with an Arab character in any form, Dunkelberg suggests the territory cannot have a Jewish national identity. Ignoring that a Palestinian nationality was specifically legislated in 1925 so that Jews could obtain naturalization status, Dunkelberg traipses through a purposeful misreading of history to the downgrading and disadvantage of the legal rights of the Jewish people.
His method is shared by many other denigrators of Zionism and is but a form of a totalitarian newspeak. As George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” And as he added, “debased language…is in some ways very convenient.”
Israel needs better trained warriors on its third front battles.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and opinion commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.
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MEDAD'S WORDS 