Via JTA:

Like the people and governments of Israel, the pro-Israel community in the U.S. has long sought a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through direct negotiations between the parties that would lead to a lasting peace agreement and Israel’s acceptance by all its neighbors. The Israeli people dream of peace, and their governments have worked and sacrificed for it.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared his vision for peace – for two states – last June in a landmark speech at Bar-Ilan University, saying he supported the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state alongside the Jewish State of Israel. Netanyahu declared a 10-month moratorium on all Israeli construction in the West Bank – a concession that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called “unprecedented” in advance of negotiations.

Israel also has taken significant steps to ensure that life improves for Palestinians in the West Bank, such as dismantling hundreds of West Bank roadblocks and checkpoints, which have helped produce double-digit economic growth at a time of global recession.

While the current Israeli government has proven its desire for peace, the leader of the Palestinian Authority refuses to meet or even speak on the phone with his Israeli counterpart, despite American demands that he do so. Abbas has said that his strategy is not to make concessions in negotiations but to encourage the U.S. and the international community to pressure Israel for unilateral concessions.

In recent months, the PA has intensified its efforts to delegitimize Israel in the international arena and increased the incitement against Israel. The PA media carries outrageous programs portraying Israel and Jews in the most negative ways.

As American friends of Israel we must continue to remind our leaders about how badly Israel wants peace – and how tragically the PA has only increased its demands and pulled away from the negotiating table. Don’t blame Israel for the lack of progress.

If Muslims are against Zionism, then they should stop touting palestinianism.  The question that Muslims must answer is why are only Muslims entitled to self-determination?  What the Jew-hating international community fails to remember is that both Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews were residents of the Mandate of Palestine — therefore,  Muslims have no absolute, natural right to “the land” nor to self-determination without the reciprocal absolute natural right of the Palestinian Jew.  Palestinian Arabs can not veto the “rights” of the Palestinian Jew since the Palestinian Jew had a prior right to create a national existence in the lands of the Mandate of Palestine thousands of years before Islam was even invented.  Read below for another example of Muslim hubris.  Via MEMRI:

In an interview with the weekly Kul Al-Arab, which is published in Israel, Mas’oud Ghanaim, member of the United Arab List (Ra’am-Ta’al) in the Israeli Knesset, from the southern branch of the Islamic Movement, called for establishing a Great Islamic Caliphate that will include Israel, and said that all means were valid for defending Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa mosque. Ghanaim also expressed support for the Iran-Syria-Hizbullah axis, and called for recognizing the legitimacy of the Hamas government in Gaza.

The following are excerpts from the interview:

“…Q: As an Islamist, do you believe that there is a need to establish an Islamic state or Islamic regime in Palestine and in the Arab and Islamic homeland?

“A: There is a need for the return of the Islamic Caliphate, and I think that this is the ideal solution to the weakness, collapse, and crumbling afflicting the Arabs and Muslims… I think that a [new] Islamic caliphate is [also] in the interest of the Jews themselves, since their golden age as Jews came during the [medieval] Islamic Caliphate.

“Q: What are your conclusions about our people’s Nakba [i.e. the results of the 1948 war], and what is the solution?”

“A: We, as an Islamic movement, present a view that is different, and an interpretation that is different, from those of the other parties regarding the reasons and circumstances of the Nakba. We do not focus on external elements such as colonialism and occupation, nor [do we focus] geographically only on Palestine. In our view, the Nakba is the result of the weakness and collapse of the overall Islamic body, and therefore we must not isolate ourselves [from the rest of the Muslim world], and must strengthen the Islamic body and entity.”

“Q: What is to be Israel’s fate in such a situation?”

“A: Israel must be part of the great Islamic state. We are not against the Jews, just against the Zionist movement and its racist ideas. But we must not forget our responsibility [for our fate] and the causes of the Nakba…“

Via Ynetnews:

The Palestinian Authority is starting to be portrayed as the side against peace. Two moves by Netanyahu managed to change the picture: First, his willingness to endorse a Palestinian state, and then the temporary settlement freeze. Israel made a move, so why is Abbas refusing to negotiate? He is being asked this by world leaders at a time when his PA continues to incite against Israel.
While Israel is ready for negotiations, here and now, the Palestinians are presenting preconditions and are losing the West’s support. Preconditions for talks with Israel? As if we never had Oslo, mutual recognition, and signed agreements?

The Palestinians failed to realize that hatred for Israel does not equal sympathy for the Palestinians. They confused anti-Israel sentiments with pro-Palestinian sentiments. They failed to understand that many in the world hate Israel, but are using the Palestinians as the fig leaf for this hatred. The Obama administration is increasingly having reservations about them.

More mendacity from the fabricated entity commonly referred to as “Palestine”.  Via Palestinian Media Watch:

In an interview on official PA television on Oct. 22, historian Nabil Alqam first denied thousands of years of documented Jewish history in Israel, then replaced it with “4,000 to 5,000 years” of fictitious Palestinian history.

Placing Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims in Israel in biblical times is historically impossible: The name “Palestine” was coined by Rome only in 136 CE, and for nearly 2,000 years Jews were the only Palestinians the world recognized.
Islam was established only in 610 CE. Arabs first arrived in Israel with the Muslim invasion in 637 CE.

In 1948, five Arab armies attacked the newborn legitimate and sovereign State of Israel. Transjordan annexed the area intended for an Arab state, and renamed itself the Kingdom of Jordan, calling the annexed area the “West Bank”. At the same time, Egypt took over Gaza.

No Arab suggested making the West Bank and/or Gaza into an Arab state until 1967, when Israel was again attacked by the Arabs and in defense, took those areas.

From 1948-67 when all of the “West Bank” (including Jerusalem) ended up under Arab [Jordanian] control, no effort was ever made to create a palestinian state for the Arabs living there, nor were their attempts by the “poor palestinian people” to wrangle their “homeland” back from Jordan.

It is curious how Arafat and his PLO (formed in 1964, three years BEFORE Israel was attacked by Arabs and therefore makes Israel incapable of “occupying” any “palestinian” land) discovered their fabricated “ancient” identity and a need for “self-determination” and “human dignity” on this very same “West Bank” only AFTER Israel regained this territory (three years later in 1967) following Jordan’s attempt to destroy Israel.

Why was no request ever made upon King Hussein of Jordan who “occupied” the West Bank for all those years?

Is it logical that the PLO was formed in 1964 to regain the lands they would lose three years later in 1967?

This sort of logic makes sense only to those who who have not learned that the PLO was formed to DESTROY Israel.

The destruction of Israel was Arafat’s goal. He failed. Arafat, the Egyptian, failed to destroy Israel and now his diseased body is rotting in a cement tomb, along with his mildewing soul.

Arafat was born in Cairo, folks.

His father, Abd al Ra’uf Arafat Al-Qadwa, was the son of a well-known family from Gaza and nearby Khan-Yunis, who had married Zahava Abu-Sa’ud from Jerusalem. In 1927, the couple had emigrated from Jewish Palestine and settled in Egypt. Two years later their son Yasser was born. When Yasser was three, his mother died and his father sent him to spend some time with his mother’s family in Jerusalem. During the 1930s, Yasser lived alternately in Jerusalem and in Gaza, and after his father remarried, his family sent him back to Cairo, where he spent the rest of his youth.

Many arabs who volunteered to serve the pLO immediately after the Six-Day War noted that their barbaric leader, Arafat, spoke Arabic with an Egyptian accent.

Arabs from Middle Eastern countries can easily recognize the country of origin of any other arab they meet by his accent – and here the man who claimed to be a warrior representing and leading the “palestinian people” spoke with an Egyptian accent.

That’s right, folks. Everything you’ve read about the palestinians is fabricated, embellished, tricked up, falsified and exaggerated.

There is no “palestinian land.” It is only the constant repetition that makes people believe that the “West Bank” belongs to the “Palestinians.” Judea/Samaria (the “West Bank”) is part of the Jewish homeland. Any land that Israel might eventually yield to the Arabs to establish some kind of autonomy would be an act of generosity and accommodation unprecedented in world history.

Because unlike the political Arabian Nation, the Zionist movement to Palestine/the Land of Israel represents a return, not an invasion.

But let’s face it, folks, it’s all academic: Israel is not going anywhere, so get used to it:  Israel is here to stay.

Originally posted on Smooth Stone at Blogger.com

For Jew-haters and Israel bashers, boycotting films is an easy choice, considering how stupid and brain-washed the Canadian terrorist-apologizing palestiniasts are.  h/t DailyAlert via National Post:

The usual suspects are deploring the Toronto Film Festival’s spotlight on Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv can indeed be highlighted as a beautiful city by the ocean, founded near Jaffa a century ago by idealists who dreamed of Jews being accepted as just another nation among nations. Secular and diverse, Tel Aviv is a success story.

Ironically, Israel is the only state in the Middle East where films are made freely and without censorship of any sort. Its film industry benefits Israelis of all racial and religious backgrounds. It is the only country in the region where a film festival like the Toronto Film Festival could be held.

Jeffrey Goldberg repeats my own statement that if Palestinianism is valid, so then is Zionism.  One must answer the contradiction why the international community believes that only Palestinian Arabs are entitled to self-determination while believing that Palestinian Jews are not.  Jews were an ancient people already when Mohammad appeared on the Arabian peninsula.  It only makes sense that the Jewish people live near and among their ancient holy sites.  Just because Muslims built their mosques on top of Jewish sites in acts of war, superiority and hubris 1,400 years ago, does not invalidate the indigenous rights of Jews nor the historical entitlement that Jews have earned to rightfully live near, in and amongst their own Holiest sites, tombs, synagogues, and archaeological remnants. And let it be known that those remnants, artifacts and actual buildings that are being revealed and discovered almost every week by scientists and archeologists prove Jewish preeminence in the land and region.

Archaeology is the veracity that Muslims won’t tolerate which is why the Muslim waqf discards all debris and dirt without sorting it while it cowardly digs out dirt underneath the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem for fear that Jewish artifacts will be discovered proving the preexistence of the Jewish people thousands of years before Mohammed was ever born. Via DailyAlert from michaeltotten.com:

Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic Monthly said in an interview:

* “The settlements aren’t the central question. They’re a tragedy in part because they obscure the central question of this conflict. The only question is: can the world of Arab Islam accept the idea of Jewish national equality?…The Six-Day War wasn’t started because of the settlements. If you study the history of the last one hundred years, you’ll see that this [accepting Jewish national equality] is the central animating cause of the conflict. And I don’t see much evidence that Arab Islam can assimilate this idea right now.”

* “The question of Israel is the question of what happens to all minorities in the Middle East. The Arab Muslim Middle East has 300 million people. It has a very hard time treating Coptic Christians with equality, treating Maronites in Lebanon with equality, treating Southern Sudanese in an equal way, treating Kurds in an equal way, and dealing with Jews – not only in their national expression, but even as minorities within their own countries. There was never a golden era for Jews who lived in Arab countries.”

* Q: You have talked to Hamas people. Should the Israelis or Americans talk to them?

Goldberg: “I don’t know what they’d get out of it….People in the United States find it hard to understand how people in Hamas and Hizbullah think. It’s alien to us. The feverish racism and conspiracy mongering, the obscurantism, the apocalyptic thinking – we can’t relate to that….We’re talking about whole societies that are captive to this kind of absurdity.”

* “Just because a belief sounds ridiculous to you doesn’t mean it’s not sincerely held. So I think it’s best to err on the side of taking people at their word….I believe Hamas when it says it wants to eradicate Israel….Why not? Palestinians, over the years, have proven that they’re willing to sacrifice generations of people to achieve their goal of a Jewish-free Palestine.”

* “Arabs are misreading history if they believe Israel is a temporary phenomenon. Nothing like this has ever happened in history. A dead tribe came back and seized the land it had, and did so after a devastating tragedy. Jews are also good at waiting, apparently. They’re a small group, but there’s a survival impulse that’s embedded in many Jews, and certainly in the Jews of Israel today. It says: ‘You want to wait? We’ll wait, too.’ Jews were an ancient people already when Mohammad appeared on the Arabian peninsula.”

* “I’m negative about the intentions of Palestinians. If their goal were statehood, they could have had statehood. Therefore, you have to give serious credence to the idea that their goal is not statehood, that it’s more important to rid the Arab world of Jewish nationalism than it is to have a Palestinian state that would improve the lives of individual Palestinians now.”

Critical evidence negating the claim that the Arabs in the Land of Israel had been there “from time immemorial.”  Via IsraelNN.com:

Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas says the Arabs of the Galilee city of Tzfat left in 1948 not because they were driven out, but on their own volition.

Many biographies of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas imply that his family became “refugees” because of the War of Independence in 1948. For instance, a BBC profile on Abbas when he succeeded Yasser Arafat as PLO chairman in 2005 writes, “In the light of his origins in Safed in Galilee – in what is now northern Israel – he is said to hold strong views about the right of return of Palestinian refugees.” Answers.com states, “As a result of the Arab-Israel War of 1948, he became a refugee.” Wikipedia articles on the topic say the same – all giving the impression that the Abbas family was driven out and became homeless.
It is notable that the Abbas family moved back to Damascus, as that is likely the place where it had originated less than 90 years earlier.

However, Abbas himself – co-founder of Fatah with Arafat, and known as Abu Mazen – now tells a different story. Speaking with Al-Palestinia TV on Monday, Abbas admitted that his family was not expelled or driven out, but rather left for fear that the Jews might take revenge for the slaughter of 20 Jews in the city during the Arab pogroms of 19 years earlier.

In the words of Abbas (engineer of the “Black September” terror attack during the Munich Olympics, which killed 11 Israeli athletes and a U.S. citizen on September 4, 1972)

“I am among those who were born in the city of Tzfat (Safed). We were a family of means. I studied in elementary school, and then came the naqba [calamity, namely, the founding of the State of Israel – ed.]. At night, we left by foot from Tzfat, to the Jordan River, where we remained for a month. Then we went to Damascus, and then to our relatives in Jordan, and then we settled in Damascus.

“My father had money, and he spent his money systematically, and after a year, the money ran out and we began to work.

“The people’s basic motives brought them to run away for their lives and with their property. These [motives] were very important, for they feared the violence of the Zionist terrorist organizations – and especially those of us from Tzfat felt that there was an old desire for revenge from the rebellion of 1929, and this was in the memory of our families and parents.”

The “rebellion” Abbas referred to was a series of brutal Arab attacks on Jewish towns in the summer of 1929. Nearly 70 Jews were slaughtered in their homes in Hevron, 20 in Tzfat, 17 in Jerusalem, and others were murdered in Motza, Kfar Uriah and Tel Aviv.

Mahmoud Abbas, aka Abu Mazen, the current Palestinian Authority chairman, was also behind the Maalot High School Massacre in which 26 Israeli school children were killed and 66 were wounded, not including the immoral palestinian Muslim terrorists. This slaughter was planned by Mahmoud Abbas, the current “moderate” head of the PLO.

Here is a PowerPoint Presentation on Mahmood Abbas, a.k.a. Abu Mazen, via Israel Behind the News. (You will need to have a PowerPoint Player to view this). The 22 slain youths are referred to as the “22 Flowers”. They are buried together in a special enclave in the Safed Beit Olam.

This archaeological discovery illustrates the veracity of the Jewish Bible and deconstructs the historical revisionism that is at the heart of palestinianism and the manufactured entity known as “ancient Palestine”. Via AP:

Israeli archaeologists have uncovered an ancient quarry where they believe King Herod extracted stones for the construction of the Jewish Temple 2,000 years ago, the Israel Antiquities Authority said Monday. The archaeologists believe the 1,000-square-foot (100-square-meter) quarry was part of a much larger network of quarries used by Herod in the city.

The biggest stones extracted from the quarry would have measured three yards (meters) long, two yards (meters) across, and two yards (meters) high.

The archaeologists said the size of the stones indicates they could have been used in the construction of the Temple compound, including the Western Wall, a retaining wall that remains intact and is Judaism’s Holiest Site.

Mon Jul 6, 9:36 AM ET

This image made available by Israel’s Antiquities Authority Monday, July 6, 2009 shows workers at the excavation site of an ancient quarry in Jerusalem. Archaeologists in Jerusalem have uncovered an ancient quarry where they believe the Bible’s King Herod extracted stones for the construction of the Jewish Temple 2,000 years ago, the Israel Antiquities Authority said Monday.

(AP Photo/IAA, Assaf Peretz)

If Arabs have a right to self-determination, so then do Jews.  If Palestinianism is valid, so then is Zionism.  From WSJ via DailyAlert:

* On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu delivered a detailed speech in which he hailed President Obama’s “desire to bring about a new era of reconciliation in our region.” He said he was “willing to meet” with Arab leaders “at any time, at any place, in Damascus, in Riyadh, in Beirut and in Jerusalem as well” to make peace. He invited Arab entrepreneurs to “assist the Palestinians and us to give the economy a jump-start.” He committed his government to all of Israel’s international agreements. He said “we have no intention to build new settlements or set aside land for new settlements.” “In my vision of peace,” he said, “there are two free peoples living side by side in this small land, with good neighborly relations and mutual respect, each with its flag, anthem and government, with neither one threatening its neighbor’s security and existence.”

* To this, the Palestinian reaction was to say the speech was “worthless,” “nothing but a hoax,” that it had “destroyed all peace initiatives and [chances for] a solution,” and that Mr. Netanyahu was “a liar and a crook.” And that was the reaction among the Palestinian moderates.

* The transformation of the Gaza Strip into an armed and hostile Hamas enclave is evidence enough of why any future Palestinian state would have to be demilitarized. Nor should the thought of Israel as a Jewish state be controversial: That’s how it was conceived by the UN resolution that helped bring it into existence, and that’s how it was recognized by Harry Truman minutes after it declared independence.

* For too long the Palestinians have practiced a kind of fantasy politics, in which all right was on their side, concession was dishonor, and mistakes never had consequences. Mr. Netanyahu’s speech now offers them the choice between fantasy and statehood. Judging from early reactions, they’re choosing wrongly again.