Dateline Jerusalem — Iran claimed this week to have test fired two ballistic missiles with “Israel Must be Wiped Out” written in Hebrew on them. A year ago, Bibi Netanyahu spoke to the U.S. Congress about Iran’s threat to Israel’s existence. The world not only ignored the importance of the speech, various American politicians and government officials were outright insulting and demeaning to the U.S. ally and leader of the only democracy in the Middle East.
Since that time, the European Union, the U.S. and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which reports to the U.N., entered into an agreement with Iran. They have bent over backwards to appease Iran with easing of nuclear sanctions and by giving them a windfall $150 billion. As a “thank-you,” Iran continues to provide military and financial support to the Palestinians, Hamas in Gaza, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. In addition to its past support, last week Iran promised a reward of $7,000 to each of the families of Palestinian terrorists involved in attacks against Israelis in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and of the “Jerusalem intifada.” Bibi responded by saying, “this shows that Iran, even after the nuclear agreement, is continuing to aid terrorism, including Palestinian terrorism…”
The Deadly Toll
In the past six months, 40 Israelis have been murdered and almost 400 injured in stabbings, shootings, fire bombs, rock and boulder throwing, and vehicular attacks by Palestinian terrorists. Have world leaders or the U.N. condemned this terror? Of course not. But this week the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women adopted a resolution condemning Israel for Palestinian men abusing Palestinian women and committing domestic violence against them! It is as absurd as when Israeli soldiers were accused of discrimination because they did not rape Palestinian women during times of war! The Commission’s recommendations were adopted by a great majority of U.N. members! Only Israel and the U.S. opposed it. The E.U. abstained. Yet the Commission’s member states include some of the worst violators of women’s rights. But only Israel is demonized in the U.N.
Therefore, when the U.S. president is allegedly looking to the U.N. Security Council to create another Palestinian state (Jordan was the one created by the San Remo Resolution), and force Israel to divide Jerusalem and make it the Palestinian capital while he refuses to allow Israelis born in Jerusalem to call themselves Israelis and demands Israel build no homes for Israelis but only for Palestinians, I tend to be more than a little concerned. Not only this will affect the lives of all Israelis, not just those living in Jerusalem, but, according to U.S. officials, it will “determine the direction of U.S. policy for the president’s successor.” A Security Council resolution will be binding and continue after the president leaves office. So those hoping a new administration will be more favorable toward Israel will be bound by the current administration’s pro-Palestinian policies. Undoubtedly such a move would be overwhelmingly accepted by the anti-Israel U.N.
Historical Record
In 1919 the League of Nations gave the British a mandate to create a national home for the Jewish people from land formerly occupied by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. This included the Golan, Judea and Samaria, and what is now known as Jordan. This was reaffirmed in 1920 at the San Remo Conference and in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1922. From the 16th to the early 20th century, the Ottomans did not even call it Palestine, but referred to the Land of Israel as “southern Syria.” Only after World War I, when the British Mandate took over the area from the Ottomans, was the area called the British Mandate of Palestine.
The Jewish people were the only ones known as Palestinians in this land, not the Arabs! When modern-day Palestinians claim they come from Philistines, a word coined by Romans to describe the inhabitants of the area northeast of Egypt, the Land of Israel, they are incorrect. The Philistines were Aegean, more closely related to Greeks. They had no ethnic, linguistic, or historical connection with Arabs. Arabs did not call themselves Palestinians. Nor did the term come into common usage until the 1960s under Yasser Arafat.
Furthermore, it wasn’t until Jordan invaded and occupied parts of the new State of Israel in 1948 that Judea and Samaria was called the West Bank.
Just as Iran was rewarded with billions of dollars and removal of sanctions by the U.S. administration and the E.U., despite continuing to fund and supply weapons to terrorists, it looks as though the Palestinian Authority and Hamas will also be rewarded by the U.S. and the E.U. Their prize for the murder and maiming of Israelis and the current Intifada will be the creation of another Palestinian state, the occupation of Jewish holy sites, and the division of Jerusalem. G-d forbid.
L’hitraot. Shachar
