Mideast Jews Had Assets Plundered Twice In The Past 70 Years

Victimized Again: The Jews of Arab States and the June 1967 War

By Dr. Edy CohenNovember 28, 2017

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Jewish refugees from Libya, photo via World Jewish Congress

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 660, November 28, 2017

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Much has been written about the historical marginalization of the 900,000 Jews expelled from Arab states in the wake of the 1948 War. Few know that the June 1967 War played a similar role in accelerating the final demise of these historic communities. It is high time the international community rectified this longstanding injustice by ensuring that these refugees are fully compensated for their suffering and stolen property.

Fifty years after the June 1967 War, the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem released scores of classified files related to this historic event. While most deal with the war and the events that led to its outbreak, some address the predicament of the Jewish communities in the Arab states during and after the war. The picture that emerges is one of pogroms and persecution, at times orchestrated by the government, at times through spontaneous eruptions that occurred with the tacit support of the authorities.

This maltreatment occurred in almost all Arab states, though the level of violence differed. In Tunisia, Morocco, and Lebanon, for example, the authorities protected the Jews from the rampaging mobs, while in Syria and Yemen, there were isolated attacks on Jews. The most severe persecutions occurred in Libya, Egypt, and Iraq. Israel refrained from any direct public action so as not to give credence to the depiction of these Jewish communities as fifth columns serving the Jewish state’s interests. Covertly, however, through its Washington, London, Paris, Rome, Geneva, Brussels, Ankara, and Lisbon embassies, the Israeli Foreign Ministry acted on behalf of these communities.

The American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the UN, and Jewish communities in the West were also enlisted to help out with protest gatherings and media publicity about the Jewish predicament in the Arab states. According to the documents, the Arab regimes tried to conceal the Jews’ persecution from foreign eyes, to deny any governmental involvement in the violent acts that were exposed, and to impose strict censorship so as to ensure that such acts were not publicized.

Egypt

Before the June 1967 War, some 6,000 Jews still lived in Egypt. On the first day of the war, when it transpired that the Egyptian air force and most of the airfields had been destroyed, President Nasser ordered the arrest of 600 Jewish men aged 16 to 70 in Cairo and Alexandria, among them the Alexandria chief rabbi, Haim Douek. The detainees were severely abused. They were beaten regularly and denied food and drink, especially in the initial days of their detention.

All detainees, it should be noted, were law-abiding citizens who were not involved in any illegal activity. They were sent to a number of prisons, including the notorious Abu Zabel, where they suffered three years of ongoing abuse that left post-traumatic impact on some of them to this day. They were released through the intervention of a number of countries, notably Spain, Italy, and France, on condition that they leave Egypt directly from prison, having been warned that harm would be visited upon their Egyptian family members were they to speak about their sufferings in prison. Ovadia Yerushalmi, a native of Cairo who was among the Jewish detainees and is now a pensioner living in Israel, recently published a book (in Hebrew) entitled The Long Five Minutes. In it he revealed for the first time, after 50 years of silence, the story of the Jews of Egypt from 1967 to 1970 within the prison walls and amid arrests and persecution.

Iraq

In June 1967, Iraq’s Jewish community numbered some 3,000, most of them in Baghdad and Basra. Immediately upon the outbreak of hostilities, about 70 Jews were arrested. They were released many months later after their families paid hefty bribes to the authorities and senior officials.

Along with the arrests, the authorities instilled fear and anxiety in the Jewish community. Jews were forbidden to sell their property or engage in commerce. Their residential telephones were disconnected, and their freedom of movement in Baghdad was curtailed. Many Jews locked themselves in their homes for fear of violent attacks à la the June 1941 Farhoud, in which hundreds of Jews were massacred by their rampaging Arab neighbors who also looted and destroyed their properties. As a result of the 1967 persecution, many of the remaining Iraqi Jews emigrated to Israel.

Libya

There were about 4,000 Jews in Libya at the time of the war. In June 1967, violent anti-Jewish demonstrations were held in Tripoli and Benghazi, leaving 18 dead and dozens wounded. Jewish stores were looted and burned, as were synagogues and residences. Numerous families locked themselves in their homes until their food began to run out.

The newly released files show that the pogroms were carried out on orders from the government, which wanted to put an end to the Jewish presence in Libya. The government accused the community of treason and supporting the “Zionist entity.” Many Jews were threatened by telephone and about 100 Jews were put in detention camps, supposedly to ensure their safety.

Fortunately for the community, the Italian government was enlisted to help with its rescue. Most of its members fled to Italy by air with only a suitcase and a small amount of cash. Despite its covert promise to the Libyan authorities, the Italian government asked Jerusalem to help with the absorption of these refugees, and indeed many of them came to live in Israel. Their arrival was hushed up by the censors so as not to jeopardize the remaining Jews’ departure from Libya. Ultimately only 100 Jews were left in the country, and they emigrated in the subsequent years. All Jewish properties in Libya were confiscated and are yet to be returned to their rightful owners.

Epilogue

The 1967 War led to the emigration of thousands of Jews from Arab states as a result of persecution, imprisonment, murderous attacks, cancellation of citizenship, expulsion, and expropriation of property. A small number left out of admiration for Israel’s astounding victory.

Sadly, as in 1948, the suffering and distress of the Jewish refugees of 1967 has not received its due attention, either in Israel or in the world at large. Moreover, the looted property of these refugees has become part and parcel of the ongoing saga of the 1948 Arab plunder of Jewish property, which is now estimated at about $400 billion. The Israeli government and the international community at large must therefore ensure an adequate compensation for this property, whether as an integral part of a future Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement or as an agreement in its own right to redress a grave historical injustice.

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Dr. Edy Cohen is author of the book The Holocaust in the Eyes of Mahmoud Abbas (Hebrew).

BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family

Now Palestinians Want Israel To Go Back To The 1949 Armistice Lines.

Any American, Israeli, European or Israel supporter should look at the lunacy of the Palestinian proposal as ludicrous and crazy.  The one proposal, which in our mind is dead on arrival, is that Israel go back to the 1949 Armistice lines therefore ignoring the victories of 1956, 1967  and 1973 upon which Israel made significant land and emotional gains.

To expect Israel to give up Jerusalem (captured in 1967) is so crazy, it has to be a throw away concession by Abbas. However, knowing the Palestinians as we do, we are sure they would die rather than give up that demand.

Additionally, having Israel go back to the 1949 armistice lines would be a signal to the world and the Arabs, that now was the time to destroy the tiny Jewish state. Many have argued that these lines are called "Auschwitz lines"  as they would be indefensible in today's military operations.

Lastly, why should Israel have to play with the Palestinians.  They should be dictating the peace and dictating the lines of demarcation rather than pleading for peace. Israel has lost the peace because they allowed the US and others to tell them to stop before destroying the enemy. In war, the only winners come when the losers sue to stop the war. Israel was not allowed to do that and we see the results. Palestinians dictating what they want rather than the other way around.

Peace will only come to Israel when she destroys her enemies and they sue for peace. That time is coming and coming soon.

Conservative Tom

Know Thine Enemy

By Caroline Glick March 20, 2017 , 8:00 am

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There are iron rules of warfare. One of the most basic rules is that you have to know your enemy. If you do not know your enemy, or worse, if you refuse to act on your knowledge of him, you will lose your war against him.

This basic truth appears to have eluded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This week we have been beset by the bizarre and sudden appearance of Jason Greenblatt, President Donald Trump’s negotiations chief.

Greenblatt’s mission is apparently to reinstate the mordant peace process between Israel and the PLO.

The peace process that Greenblatt is here to reincarnate died 17 years ago.

In 2000, PLO chief and Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat killed the peace process when he initiated a massive terrorist war against Israel, right after he rejected peace and Palestinian statehood at the Camp David peace conference.

In rejecting peace, the architect of modern terrorism made clear that his claim seven years earlier that he was willing to reach a compromise with Israel, based on partition of the Land of Israel between a Jewish and an Arab state, was a lie. As the nationalist camp had warned at the time and since, the PLO was not remotely interested either in statehood or in peace. Arafat’s willingness to engage Israel in negotiations that led to its transfer of security and civil control over Gaza and the Palestinian population centers in Judea and Samaria to the PLO was simply another means to the only end the PLO ever contemplated. It was a means of weakening Israel as a step toward achieving the PLO’s ultimate goal of destroying the Jewish state.

image: https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/BIN-OpEd-Experts-300x2501.png

In 1993, when then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin agreed to recognize the PLO, his implicit assumption was that if Arafat was lying, Israel would walk away from the peace process. It would retake control over the areas it had ceded to PLO control and things would go back to the way they were before he made the gamble, indeed they would be better. Whereas for years Israel had been under pressure from the Europeans and the Americans to recognize the PLO, if Israel recognized the terrorist group and the PLO responded by showing that it remained dedicated to Israel’s destruction, the world that had been pressuring Israel would end its pressure.

The Europeans and the Americans would rally to Israel’s side against the PLO.

In 2000, after Arafat blew up the negotiations table with his suicide bombers, then-prime minister Ehud Barak announced triumphantly that he had ripped the mask off of Arafat’s face.

Now everyone would recognize the truth about the PLO. Now the Europeans and the Americans would rally to Israel’s side.

Of course, things didn’t work out that way.

In the seven years between Rabin’s decision to gamble on Arafat, and Barak’s declaration that the truth had finally come out, the Europeans and the Americans and the Israeli Left had become addicted to the notion that the PLO was a peace movement and that Israel and its so-called settlers were the reason that peace hadn’t been reached.

That is, by the time the true nature of Israel’s enemy had become clear, it was too late. It didn’t matter. In recognizing the PLO, Israel had legitimized it. Refusing to recognize the nature of its enemy, Israel had empowered it, at its own expense.

By the time Arafat removed his mask, the legitimacy he had received from Israel seven years earlier had rendered him untouchable.

The West had become so invested in the myth of PLO moderation that rather than punish him for his terrorist war, the Europeans and the Americans punished Israel for complaining about it. Indeed, the more Israelis Arafat’s henchmen murdered, the more committed the Europeans and the American foreign policy establishment and political Left became to the PLO.

Israel, in the meantime, became a diplomatic outcast.

In the 17 years since Arafat showed his true colors, neither he nor his heir Mahmoud Abbas ever did anything to indicate that the PLO has changed its spots. To the contrary. The PLO’s leaders have made clear over and over and over again that Arafat’s decision to reject peace in favor of never-ending war against Israel was no fluke. It was the rule.

The PLO doesn’t want a state. If it did it would have accepted sovereignty in Gaza 12 years ago, when Israel withdrew and took its citizens with it. If it wanted a state, then Arafat and Abbas would have accepted Israel’s repeated offers of statehood over the years.

The PLO that is greeting Greenblatt in March 2017 is the same terrorist organization it was when Arafat announced its formation in December 1964.

Given this unchanging reality, it is deeply destructive for Israel to continue paying lip service to the fake peace process. And yet, that is precisely what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing.

Trump’s election gave Israel an opportunity to finally get the Americans to recognize the reality they have spent the past 17 years refusing to accept. Unlike Barack Obama, Trump was not wedded to the notion that Israel, and its religious Zionist community, is to blame for the absence of peace. He was not obsessed with appeasing the PLO as his predecessors have been for the past generation.

image: https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/wp-content/uploads/useful_banner_manager_banners/503-BIN-Causematch-ManKotel-600WIDE.jpg

Trump was not interested in getting involved with the Palestinians at all. But rather than seize the opportunity he was handed, Netanyahu seems to have decided to throw it in the trash.

He only agreed to discuss his strategic goal for dealing with the Palestinians after his cabinet forced him to do so on the eve of his trip to Washington last month.

At that meeting, Netanyahu said that he supports establishing a “Palestinian state, minus” that would have formal sovereignty but would be demilitarized. Netanyahu also offered that he envisions Israeli sovereignty being extended to the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria.

There are many problems with Netanyahu’s plan. But its most glaring deficiency is that it continues to treat the PLO as a legitimate organization rather than a terrorist organization.

By doing so, Netanyahu not only throws a lifeline to an organization that uses all the legitimacy Israel confers on it to weaken Israel strategically and diplomatically. He empowers Israel’s detractors in the US and Europe that have spent the past quarter-century blaming Israel for the absence of peace and acclaiming the PLO and its terrorist chiefs as moderates.

It is not surprising that Trump reinstated Obama’s demand that Israel curtail Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria after Netanyahu pronounced his support for Palestinian statehood. If Netanyahu won’t disavow the anti-Israel diplomatic unicorn, then why should Trump? And if Trump is maintaining allegiance to the myth of PLO legitimacy, then it only makes sense for him to also adopt the patently absurd, and virulently anti-Israel, assumption that Jewish home building is the reason there is no peace.

Similarly, with Netanyahu willing to accept the PLO, and the concomitant assumption of Jewish culpability for the absence of peace, why would Trump consider replacing Obama’s anti-Israel advisers with advisers supportive of the US-Israel alliance? After Netanyahu left Washington last month, Trump decided to retain Yael Lempert as the National Security Council’s point person for the Israeli-Palestinian portfolio. According to a report in The Weekly Standard, Democrats in Washington long viewed Lempert as one of the most radical opponents of Israel in the Obama administration.

Trump also decided to keep on Michael Ratney, the former US consul in Jerusalem, as the man in charge of the Israeli-Palestinian desk at the State Department. Ratney’s appointment brought shouts of joy from anti-Israel activists led by John Kerry’s former negotiations chief Martin Indyk.

Perhaps these personnel decisions would have been made even if Netanyahu hadn’t maintained his allegiance to the lie of PLO legitimacy. But Netanyahu’s support for the PLO made it much easier for these opponents of Israel to keep their jobs.

By all accounts, Jason Greenblatt is a friend of Israel and a supporter of the US alliance with the Jewish state. Greenblatt studied at a yeshiva in Gush Etzion many years ago. On Thursday, he took the step that no US envoy has ever taken of meeting with the heads of the local councils in Judea and Samaria.

And yet, whatever his personal views may be, this week he came to Israel to discuss limiting the legal rights of Israelis in Judea and Samaria.

He was accompanied on his trip by Lempert.

Greenblatt visited with Abbas in Ramallah and delivered no ultimatum when he asked the Palestinian Authority “president” (whose term of office ended in 2009) to scale back the murderous anti-Jewish propaganda that permeates all facets of Palestinian society under the PLO.

Greenblatt politely listened as Abbas demanded that Israel agree to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines in a future peace, agree to release terrorist murderers from its prisons and end all construction for Jews in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.

Greenblatt then discussed continued US economic subsidization of Abbas’s terrorism- steeped kleptocracy, in the name of economic development.

In other words, whatever Greenblatt’s personal views on the issues, as Trump’s envoy, he put us all back on the phony peace train.

Netanyahu argues that Israel has to give legitimacy to the PLO and support Palestinian statehood, because if it doesn’t, then the Sunni Arab states won’t work with Israel in its efforts to stymie Iran’s regional power grab and stall its nuclear weapons program. This claim, however, is untrue.

The Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians are working with Israel on countering Iran because they need Israel to help them to weaken Iran.

They need Israel to help them to convince the Americans to abandon Obama’s pro-Iranian Middle East policy.

In other words, Netanyahu is paying for Sunni support that he can get for free.

Rabin believed that Israel would emerge stronger from his decision to recognize the PLO, one way or another. Either Israel would achieve peace. Or Israel would get the Americans and the Europeans off its back once the PLO made clear that it was lying about wanting peace. Rabin was wrong.

Israel paid gravely for Rabin’s error in judgment.

It will pay a similarly high price, if not a higher one, if Netanyahu continues to repeat Rabin’s mistake of failing to know his enemy.

Reprinted with author’s permission from Caroline Glick

Read more at https://carolineglick.com/know-thine-enemy/#Goj5brEVLaAjjFVQ.99

Israel Has Always Gets The Raw End Of Public Relations

Israel's Public Relations: The Problem and the Solution

Author(s):  Bernhard Lazarus     Source: Gatestone Institute

 February 20, 2017   0 Comment

• It is worth noting that the Jewish State was effectively created through the efforts of the countries of the world in San Remo and Geneva years prior to the Holocaust.
• Jerusalem, except for fewer than 200 years in the 11th and 12th Centuries, when it was the capital of a short-lived Crusader State, has only been a capital city under Jewish rule. At other times since the Roman conquest it was not even considered by Muslims, or anyone else, a provincial city of consequence.
• In the War of 1948-49, Jordan illegally seized Jerusalem, ethnically cleansed its Jewish inhabitants, destroyed all the synagogues and on top of the ancient sacred Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, after taking ancient Jewish headstones to use as the floor of latrines, Jordan built a hotel.
• The aggression by Egypt, Syria and Jordan in June 1967 was overturned by Israel. Israel liberated Jerusalem, took control of the Golan Heights, from which Syrians had been shooting down at Israeli farmers, and entered the West Bank, which was under illegal Jordanian occupation.
• Anti-Apartheid movements in South Africa wanted equal political and other democratic rights for all — irrespective of race — but never advocated the destruction of South Africa.
• Israel currently has no Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the post of Minister of Information does not exist. This creates the message, as former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir put it, of being the “prime minister of six million prime ministers”.
• An even more urgent condition is that Israeli authorities refuse to deal with the considerable number of renegade Israeli academics (and others) harming Israel on the international scene, presumably for their personal reasons.

“War is the continuation of politics by other means,” said by General Carl von Clausewitz nearly 200 years ago, has now morphed into: “Politics is war by other means”.

Enemies who are inferior militarily have understood this; hence, from the height of admiration after the Six Day War, Israel has hit bottom, sharing the position with the likes of North Korea.

How and why is this?

A knowledge of history is essential; therefore it is the first thing one's enemies try to destroy. If one can falsely claim that biblical places such as Rachel's Tomb, the Cave of the Patriarchs, the Temple Mount or even Jerusalem are Islamic, even though Islam did not, historically, exist until hundreds of years later, one can consequently claim that there never was a Jewish connection to the land – so then why should the Jews have it?

If you do not know where you come from, you cannot know who you are or what values are worth defending. Shulamit Aloni, as Israel's Education Minister in 1992-1993, probably to accommodate the peace Israelis hoped wild come after the Oslo accords, purged Israel's history textbooks of anything that might be deemed “politically incorrect”. Although she undoubtedly meant well, she did the Israelis a major a disservice. The result was as if the U.S. government were to erase George Washington, the Federalist Papers and Abraham Lincoln from its textbooks and the ability to know one's past.

It is therefore essential that those who challenge Israel's right to exist and try to destroy Israel economically are met by historical reality. It is only through presenting facts rather than “narratives” that we can succeed in the media war. Israel should bring the old textbooks back — immediately.

Successive Israeli governments, in a combination of indolence, over-confidence and general neglect, have ignored this reality. Rectifying this overwhelming problem has often been left to underfunded and only partially-informed, if well-meaning, private individuals and NGOs.

Not so, however, in the Muslim world. Since the “oil crisis” and the start of Palestinian terrorism in the 1970s, the Muslim world, in concert with many European leaders, led by those in France, has fully occupied the media battlefield. They have using whatever fabricated, inaccurate arguments they and their public relations firms dream up. Meanwhile, despite much howling and crying foul, the Israelis have not met this information deficit with perceptible positive action.

Israel — the Jewish State

Israel, one of the world's smallest states, roughly the size of New Jersey, has, since its inception, been under constant attack, physically, academically and in the media — most destructively from its own citizens. They claim the right of “free speech” and often even seem to enjoy watching the fatal results, as if needing to confirm a need for malignant power.

The establishment of the Jewish State was Theodore Herzl's answer of turning the messianic dream of millennia into a political reality. After World War I, the victors dismembered the Ottoman Empire and created a number of new Arab states as well as Mandates, one of which was Britain's Mandate for Palestine. Palestine at that time was a geographic term only, invented by the ancient Romans in a still earlier attempt, by renaming Judea, to strip the land of its Jewish roots.

Britain's Mandate to create “a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine” was confirmed, in 1922, by all 52 member states of the League of Nations. Its heir, the United Nations, in 1947, by two-thirds majority, confirmed the establishment of a much-reduced Jewish State, as the bulk of the territory originally mandated to the Jews had been handed over to the independent kingdom of Transjordan.

It is worth noting that the Jewish State was effectively created through the efforts of the countries of the world in San Remo and Geneva years prior to the Holocaust.

Population

In 1882, an Ottoman census showed 141,000 Muslims in the country; in 1906, of the 60,000 inhabitants of Jerusalem, 40,000 were Jews. Jerusalem, except for fewer than 200 years in the 11thand 12th Centuries, when it was the capital of a short-lived Crusader State, has only been a capital city under Jewish rule. At other times since the Roman conquest it was not even considered by Muslims or anyone else, a provincial city of consequence.

In the War of 1948-49, Jordan illegally seized Jerusalem, ethnically cleansed its Jewish inhabitants, destroyed all the synagogues and on top of the ancient sacred Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, after taking ancient Jewish headstones to use as the floor of latrines, Jordan built a hotel, overlooking dead Jews.

During the British Mandate, which lasted until May 14, 1948, while the 1936 British White Paper restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine to 75,000 over a five-year period, Arabs from all the neighboring territories were allowed to flood, unrestricted, into the country.

The aggression by Egypt, Syria and Jordan, in June 1967, was overturned by Israel. Israel liberated Jerusalem, took control of the Golan Heights, from which Syrians had been shooting down at Israeli farmers, and entered the West Bank, which was under Jordanian occupation. Jordan's King Hussein, promised by Israel that his country would be left if peace if it did not attack, instead, presumably worried that he might miss out on the spoils, entered the war. If one initiates aggression, one should be prepared to lose. Never in history has the victorious victim in a defensive war been requested to return territory to the aggressor. Germany, as the aggressor, lost thousands of square miles to Poland, as would be expected.

In 1979, Israel returned all Egypt's land, held since1967, in exchange for peace. In 1994, a peace agreement was also signed between Israel and Jordan.

Meanwhile, in the West Bank, the Arabs demanded their own independent state – a demand not made when occupied by Jordan.

As to charges that there are Palestinian refugees and that Israel is an “Apartheid State,” the sad fact is that Palestinian refugees were caused by Israel's neighbors themselves through starting a war against the new state in 1948. Arabs were told by their Arab brethren to leave the area to make it easier to defeat the Jews — after which, the Arabs were promised, they could return to their homes. Arabs fled to neighboring territories, where to this day they are basically incarcerated for Arab political reasons.

As Israel has absorbed 600,000 Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries, surely Arab countries, with their vast wealth and territory, can absorb what was originally 600,000 refugees — who chose to leave Israel of their own free will. The Arabs who remain are full-fledged citizens of Israel with full equal rights, all job opportunities, their own political parties, judgeships on Israel's Supreme Court, and full membership in Israel's parliament, and make up about 20% of the population.

As Germany absorbed millions of refugees after World War II, and more than 14 million people are estimated to have been transferred during the difficult birth of India and Pakistan, there should be no problem unless one wants there to be one.

Anti-Apartheid movements in South Africa wanted equal political and other democratic rights for all — irrespective of race — but never advocated the destruction of South Africa. The promoters of the current so-called “anti-Apartheid” movement against Israel are, in fact, openly striving for its destruction.

Peace with Israel's neighbors

Most Muslim countries, in direct contravention of U.N resolution 181, do not recognize the State of Israel. To this day, their outspoken aim is the destruction of the county; hence a two-state solution and peace are impossible as long as the following reality exists:

• Palestinian National Charter: Extract Article 19: “The Partition of Palestine in 1947 and establishment of the State of Israel are entirely illegal regardless of the passage of time”.
• Fatah Constitution: Extract Article 12: “Complete liberation of Palestine and the eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence.”
• Hamas Charter: Extract Article 13: “Initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions — are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement…There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad”.

It is obvious that one cannot negotiate until Israel's neighbors rescind their destructive resolutions and show a genuine willingness for peace, in particular by educating their publics for peace instead of murder, and when everything can be put on the table for discussion.

It is also important to note that the UN Security Council Resolution 242, after 1967 war rejecting the word “the” before “territories” to be returned. Resolution 242 anticipated that Israel cannot be expected to go back to the 1949 armistice lines. Lord Caradon, one of the architects of the resolution, in a letter to The Times of London, explained:

“It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its position of June 4, 1967, because these positions were undesirable and artificial and just happen to be the places on the day the fighting stopped in 1948”.

The French, however, in their translation of the text of 242, inserted the “the”; since then, the English version has incorrectly inserted it as well, creating the totally false impression — “fake news” — that all territories are to be returned.

In Conclusion

Two other major problems in Israel have developed, which need most urgent attention.

Israel currently has no Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the post of Minister of Information does not exist. Presumably the former is handled by the Prime Minister when he has the time, whilst the latter falls between the cracks of other ministries. This creates the message, as former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir put it, of being the “prime minister of six million prime ministers”.

Israel has a diplomatic budget of approximately 0.15% of GDP — the lowest of all developed countries, although its needs are greater than any other. Canada, for instance, spends 0.25%; Germany 0.4% and the UK spends 0.75%.

An even more urgent condition, needing immediate attention, is that Israeli authorities refuse to deal with the considerable number of renegade Israeli academics (and others) harming Israel on the international scene, presumably for their personal reasons. It is incomprehensible how Israel's government and universities allow the claim of “abuse of 'academic freedom'” to justify those who support the openly anti-democratic forces advocating the destruction of the only democratic state in the Middle East. Never have the words of Abraham Lincoln in 1859 been more appropriate: “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves”.

As Benjamin Netanyahu summed it up in a 2006 Knesset speech, “if the Arabs lay down their arms there will be no more war, but if Israel lays down its weapons there would be no more Israel.”