A released Palestinian prisoner relaxes next to a Gaza swimming pool, Jan. 8, 2012 (Reuters photo by Ahmed Jadallah)

A recently published BESA study by hydrologist Prof. Haim Gvirtzman of the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University refutes many of the false accusations concerning water leveled by the mainstream media and NGOs like Amnesty International, and most recently, the French government, which issued a report saying that water has become “a weapon serving the new apartheid.” According to BESA:

the Palestinian Authority claims that it suffers from water shortages in its towns and villages due to the Israeli occupation and cites international law in support of its claims. These claims amount to more than 700 million cubic meters of water per year (MCM/Y), including rights over the groundwater reservoir of the Mountain Aquifer, the Gaza Strip Coastal Aquifer and the Jordan River. These demands amount to more than 50 percent of the total natural water available between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

[C]ontrary to Palestinian claims, Gvirtzman demonstrates that Israel has fulfilled all of its obligations according to the agreements it signed in 1995 with the Palestinian Authority, and in fact has exceeded them. The PA currently consumes 200 MCM of water every year (with Israel providing about 50 MCM of this) – which, under the accords, is more than Israel is supposed to provide a full-fledged Palestinian state under a final settlement arrangement. . . . .

In contrast, the Palestinians have violated their part of the agreement by drilling over 250 unauthorized wells, which draw about 15 MCM/Y of water, and connecting these pirate wells to its electricity grid. Moreover, the PA has illegally and surreptitiously connected itself in many places to the water lines of Israel’s Mekorot National Water Company – stealing Israel’s water.

Palestinian famers also routinely overwater their crops through old-fashioned, wasteful flooding methods. Gvirtzman says that at least one-third of the water being pumped out of the ground by the Palestinians (again, in violation of their accords with Israel) is wasted through leakage and mismanagement. No recycling of water takes place and no treated water is used for agriculture.

In fact, 95 percent of the 56 million cubic meters of sewage produced by the Palestinians each year is not treated at all. Only one sewage plant has been built in the West Bank in the last 15 years, despite there being a $500 million international donor fund available for this purpose. . . .

It’s a cliché of the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic repertoire: The trusting young Jew who once believed in Israel’s righteousness, but learns the “facts,” wakes up to the reality that, actually, the nation is a criminal entity and then (heroically) speaks out. Young Jesse Lieberfeld not only produced a lurid screed on the theme, but won a prize for it sponsored by the Carnegie Mellon English department, Student Affairs, and the Office of the President.

Jesse laments that:

I was forever reminded … to be proud of all the suffering our people had overcome in order to finally achieve their dream in the perfect society of Israel.

This last mandatory belief was one which I never fully understood, but I always kept the doubts I had about Israel’s spotless reputation to the back of my mind. “Our people” were fighting a war, one I did not fully comprehend, but I naturally assumed that it must be justified…

Yet as I came to learn more about our so-called “conflict” with the Palestinians, I grew more concerned. I routinely heard about unexplained mass killings, attacks on medical bases and other alarmingly violent actions for which I could see no possible reason. “Genocide” almost seemed the more appropriate term, yet no one I knew would have ever dreamed of portraying the war in that manner; they always described the situation in shockingly neutral terms.

No one he knew would dream of portraying Israel harshly? How about Daniel Lieberfeld, his father, who signed an anti-Israel petition at the height of the terror war against Israel in August 2001?

Why is Jesse reminded of Martin Luther King in all this? When friends on his school bus are impervious to “a fresh round of killings” and urge him simply to “defend our race” Jesse recalls the civil rights leader:

Where had I heard that before? Wasn’t it the same excuse our own country had used to justify its abuses of African-Americans 60 years ago?

Hence the essay and the accolades. Jesse explains that speaking out against Israel is like King speaking out against white supremacists.

Jesse’s prize, part of a 2012 Martin Luther King Writing Award and brainchild of Jim Daniels, the Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English, is described in a university press release.

Among many questions is why and how poet Jim Daniels came to hold anti-Israel views so extreme that he apparently believes the country is perpetrating a “genocide” (against a population that has been growing at a healthy clip for 60 years) and disregarded Martin Luther King’s own strong support for the Jewish state.

Israel’s problems, real and imagined, are the focus of persistent media attention. The New York Times, for example, regularly chastises the Israeli government and finds fault with Israeli society wherever it looks. A recent Times op-ed on the treatment of gays chose to excoriate Israel, the region’s most tolerant society. Relentless criticism and condemnation of Israel obscures the extraordinary recent accomplishments of the Jewish state. These accomplishments, laid out in a summary report for 2011 published by Israel’s Finance Ministry, reveal a remarkable story of fiscal discipline and economic expansion.

Over the past year, while the world’s developed economies continue to falter and their fiscal situations grow ever more serious, Israel’s economy grew by nearly 5 percent. Its per capita gross domestic product increased by 3 percent. All of its major economic indicators were positive:

Unemployment declined to 5.6 percent.
Inflation was kept low at 2.6 percent.

The Israeli economy’s current picture of stability and growth is the culmination of years of fiscal discipline that pulled Israel back from the brink of fiscal collapse just 27 years ago, when it experienced runaway inflation of 445 percent in one year.
(more…)

You’d think someone who decries “a hasty, one-sided move, without the minimal amount of clarification” would take pains to clarify items about which he writes. But no. Apparently, for Uri Misgav, writing in Ha’aretz today, what’s not acceptable for others is perfectly permissible for him.

Thus, in his own haste he fails to clarify the so-called Nakba Law, referring to it as “legislation that forbids people to speak about the Nakba [the “disaster”, in Arabic, referring to the establishment of the state].” Of course, the law does no such thing, but rather gives the Finance Minister the authority to withhold state funds from organizations that are government funded. That’s it.

Mark Perry, the former advisor for Yasir Arafat and an advocate of U.S. engagement with Hamas and Hezbollah whose interpretation of General David Petraeus’ statements concerning U.S.-Israeli relations were discredited by Petraeus himself, is at it again. Ha’aretz reports:

A senior Israeli government official rushed to denounce a report Friday which alleged Mossad agents had posed as CIA officers in order to recruit members of a Pakistan-based terror group to commit assassinations and attacks in Iran.

The Israeli official called the Foreign Policy article “absolute nonsense.” Quoting U.S. intelligence memos, journalist Mark Perry’s story reported that the Mossad operation was carried out in 2007-2008, behind the back of the U.S. government and infuriated then U.S. President George W. Bush.

Ha’aretz‘s description of Perry, the former advisor to Arafat whose foray into the Petraus affair was discredited, as simply a “journalist” is as unconscionable as Ynet referring to anti-Israel activist Richard Silverstein as simply a “U.S. blogger.” (And Ynet was back in the act on this last week.)

A profile of John Mearsheimer in this month’s Atlantic is titled “Why John J. Mearsheimer is Right*.” The asterisk in the title offers some qualification: In the space normally reserved for a pull quote, readers are told that the controversial University of Chicago professor might only be right “*about some things.”

The article, by Robert D. Kaplan, focuses mainly on Mearsheimer’s realist theory of international relations, and how that guides his views on China. But Kaplan also spends some time discussing The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the widely criticized book Measheimer co-wrote with Stephen Walt.

Although the piece is largely complimentary (see its title), it certainly isn’t a hagiography (see the asterisk). Kaplan doesn’t hesitate to relay criticism, or to introduce some criticism of his own.

Readers are reminded, for example, that a former colleague of Mearsheimer’s described his book as “piss-poor monocausal social science,” and that other distinguished professors have said worse. They are reminded that The Atlantic rejected the essay on which the book was based because the magazine’s editors understood it lacked objectivity. Kaplan, too, questions the book’s objectivity, and acknowledges unnamed distortions and inconsistencies by its authors.

Still, he sees “nothing wrong or illegitimate” with the Mearsheimer’s argument that the U.S. should squeeze Israel harder, and that the pro-Israel lobby stands in the way of this. Perhaps not.

But it’s surprising that Kaplan doesn’t appear to have strong opinions on whether it’s illegitimate scholarship to “negatively distort[] key episodes in Israel’s history,” as he admits Mearsheimer does. And he describes the book as “a tightly organized marshalling of fact and argument,” though he isn’t especially concerned that many of Mearsheimer’s “facts” are, in fact, invented. (Kaplan alludes to this, and brushes it aside, when he refers to “nitpicking” about the book’s end-notes.)

Most surprising, though, is that while Kaplan’s article is generally measured, he seems to have total amnesia about the straightforward history of Israeli offers to withdraw from territory. After writing that “the Palestinians have been willing at times to make major concessions,” Kaplan argues that “the cost to Israel of its unwillingness to make territorial concessions will grow rather than diminish.”

Unwillingness? At Camp David, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians most of the territory they demand for a state, and accepted President Clinton’s plan that would have given them nearly all that territory. Israeli negotiators expressed willingness to withdraw from even more land at Taba. And Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, too, extended a generous offer of land for peace, which the Palestinian leadership openly acknowledges rejecting.

In other words, while the two sides were indeed divided by their respective willingness and unwillingness to make territorial concessions, Kaplan seems confused about which side was which.

When is a country so tiny its size – or lack of it – can’t be mentioned? Apparently when that country is Israel and The Washington Post is the mentioner.

A Post article on plummeting fertility rates in Latin America (“The incredible shrinking family”, December 30) referred in passing to “tiny Ecuador.” With 109,483 square miles and 15 million people, Ecuador is about 13 times less tiny than Israel in area and counts a population twice that of Israel’s 7.6 million.

Reporting on the “Arab Spring” early in 2011, The Post twice described Tunisia as tiny (“Overthrow delivers a jolt to Arab region”, January 16 and “Across Arab world, a sense of possibility”, February 12). Tunisia’s population totals 10.6 million and, at nearly 59,000 square miles, the country encompasses seven times as much territory as the Jewish state’s New Jersey-sized 8,000 square miles.

During the same period the newspaper also labeled Oman as tiny – though with 82,000 square miles for only 3 million people, the emirate is 10 times larger than Israel (“Despite oil wealth, Arab economies lack traction”, February 24).

As CAMERA has noted previously, Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Eritrea and Georgia, all at least twice as big as the Jewish state though with smaller populations, also have merited the diminutive in Post foreign news reporting. Though the newspaper refers to much larger countries as tiny, it does not so describe the Jewish state. One reason, perhaps, is because that to do so might conflict with “the Palestinian narrative” by highlighting the existential nature of risks Israel faces from hostile neighbors and might incur through unreciprocated concessions.

The first paragraph of a front-page article by Revital Blumenfeld in Ha’aretz warns today:

Thousands of immigrants could be forced to drop out of school if the Jewish Agency moves forward with a plan to end scholarship funding at the end of the current academic year.

Moreover, the fifth paragraph of the article in the print edition alleges:

Those caught in the middle of their degree programs when the scholarships end would have to come up with the rest of the tuition themselves, or be forced to drop out of school.

Oddly, this paragraph does not appear in the online edition. Generally, online articles contain more, not less, information than their print counterparts, since space is not an issue on the Internet. Perhaps that paragraph was quietly cut from the Web edition after a complaint from the Jewish Agency. IMRA published the Jewish Agency’s denial of Ha’aretz‘s claim that students will be left in a lurch, and forced to drop out:

We are shocked at the falsehoods published in this story. We were not given sufficient opportunity to respond before the article went to print. Our key message: No student will be hurt, no funds will be lost to the Student Authority. The Jewish Agency is indeed pulling out of funding the Absorption Ministry’s Student Authority, because it is the right and smart thing to do. But we have secured in recent weeks iron-clad guarantees from several government sources that government agencies will step in and make up the difference. It is altogether
appropriate that the government, rather than donors, take responsibility for long-term absorption and higher education of olim. The government agrees with us on this point. We promise now, as we promised in every meeting with the government: We will not pull out until the government steps in. Even after making this promise, the government has agreed to step in, because it recognizes its responsibility for the long-term success of olim in Israel.

We do not want to speculate on the motivations behind the publication of such an egregious misrepresentation of the facts.

—————————–
Haviv Rettig Gur
Director of Communications
Jewish Agency for Israel
Email: [email protected], [email protected]
Cell: +972-(0)50-205-2627

It seems that for the third time in less than one week Ha’aretz owes its readers an apology.

Ethan Bronner writes in the New York Times today:

The quartet has been trying to bring the Palestinians and Israelis back to direct talks by asking each to submit proposals on borders and security. The Palestinians have submitted their ideas but the Israelis say that if the goal is direct talks, the proposals should be given to the Palestinians once they meet. (Emphasis added.)

But it’s not just Israel which says the Palestinians should present their proposals directly to Israel. The quartet (Russian, the United States, the European Union and the United Nations) also says so. As reported in Ha’aretz:

The Palestinians presented the Quartet with two documents relating to the borders of a future Palestinian state and security arrangements with Israel in November, but the Quartet told the Palestinians that the documents would not be passed to the Israelis, according to the official.

Quartet representatives told Saeb Erekat, head of the Palestinian negotiating team, that the proposals he presented were not relevant, because they had not been presented in direct talks with Israel, the official said.

“We continue to call for a direct exchange between the parties, starting with the preparatory meeting that leads to a presentation of proposals on territory and security. And that objective has not been met, but we’re continuing to work towards that,” the official said.

The Americans have expressed displeasure with the Palestinians in part because of their refusal to engage in face-to-face talks with Israel. The Obama administration sees the Palestinian strategy of presenting proposals to the Quartet without engaging in direct talks as an attempt to change the rules of the game.