Now that Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the United States are again talking about peace talks, we’ve heard much, and will likely continue to hear, about the “1967 lines” — also known as the Green Line or the 1949 armistice lines.

As Israel figures out what type of territorial sacrifices it is willing to make in return for potential Palestinian concessions, it is worthwhile for the rest of us to remember what the diplomats behind United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 felt about those lines. Some words they used: Fragile, vulnerable, rotten and temporary.

Read them in context here.

The European Union included Hezbollah’s “armed wing” on the list of terrorist organizations. But… only the “armed wing.”

Given this stated limitation, several questions arise.

1. What will Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah be considered – a terrorist or a political figure?

2. Who will decide the boundary between “armed” and “political”Hezbollah and how will they decide?

3. Will the ‘political arm’ continue to obtain its financing in Europe, using European banks?

The EU seems to have found a formula to make itself appear hard on terrorism without defining or undertaking anything at all. The 1990 International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism, states:

Recalling General Assembly resolution 51/210 of 17 December 1996, paragraph 3, subparagraph (f), in which the Assembly called upon all States to take steps to prevent and counteract, through appropriate domestic measures, the financing of terrorists and terrorist organizations, whether such financing is direct or indirect through organizations which also have or claim to have charitable, social or cultural goals or which are also engaged in unlawful activities such as illicit arms trafficking, drug dealing and racketeering, including the exploitation of persons for purposes of funding terrorist activities, and in particular to consider, where appropriate, adopting regulatory measures to prevent and counteract movements of funds suspected to be intended for terrorist purposes without impeding in any way the freedom of legitimate capital movements and to intensify the exchange of information concerning international movements of such funds.

But the EU is doing exactly that – leaving the funding door wide open. In that sense, the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported that:

The main consequence [of Hezbollah’s inclusion on the terrorist list] is the freezing of any asset that might have on Community territory. However, diplomatic sources admit that it is difficult to delimit if these assets belong to the branch of the military or the civil courts. Beyond the practical implications, the decision that the ministers took today is more a political message in the line of which Europe not tolerate terrorist activities in their own territory without punishing the perpetrators.

What is also striking is the timing of the EU decision to veto cooperation with Israel concerning the so-called “occupied territories” and the inclusion of Hezbollah’s “armed wing” on the list of terrorist organizations. The second decision appears to be an attempt by the EU to toss out a consolation prize that costs it nothing.

— Marcelo Wio

In an interview with The Tower published two months ago, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave a detailed description of his negotiations with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in September of 2008:

“In the last meeting I brought a big map, like the size of this whole table,” recalls Olmert. “With colors for all the regions that go over to us and the reverse. We would receive 6.3%, they would get 5.8%, but they also get a safe passage in a tunnel between Gaza and the West Bank that was the equivalent in territory of the remaining half percent.

[…]

“I completely gave up on having an Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley. That was because I could protect the line of the Jordan River through an international military force on the other side of the Jordan River. There was no opposition on the Palestinian side to our having a presence in warning stations along the mountain range.”

TheTower.org: But you essentially gave up on Israeli sovereignty on the Temple Mount [the holiest site in Judaism]?

Olmert: “Correct, I proposed a compromise on sovereignty over the Temple Mount. There would be no sovereignty for anyone else. There would be the joint administration of the five states [Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Palestine, the United States, and Israel].”

In addition, the article outlines Olmert’s proposal to take in 5,000 Palestinian refugees, 1,000 each year over five years, into Israel proper.

In other words, Olmert offered a territorial proposal based on the 1949 armistice lines –often incorrectly referred to as the 1967 borders– with “land swaps”, contiguity between Gaza and the West Bank, no Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley, relinquishing Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount, and absorption of some Palestinian refugees. This amounts to basically meeting all of the demands Abbas claims he seeks in final status negotiations. And yet, what was his response to Olmert? Olmert says, “I am still waiting for a phone call from him.”

Given the current efforts of Secretary of State John Kerry to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, you’d expect the details of this ground-breaking offer to be picked up widely by the media. However, aside from the Israeli or Jewish press and specialty Web sites, only The Washington Post even mentions Olmert’s spurned proposal.

One could argue that the Olmert offer is “old news,” and indeed, CAMERA covered it at the time.

However, the day before The Tower published the Olmert interview, the magazine also ran an article that includes important new information. After the final meeting between Olmert and Abbas, Abbas returned to Ramallah. Then:

Once there he immediately convened his associates and redrew the map from memory. The document also included text scrawled on its margins, and on the reverse side, details documenting the rest of Olmert’s offer.

The Tower obtained the map, drawn on the official stationery of the office of the president of the Palestinian Authority.

The fact that this deal, with its unprecedented Israeli concessions, was rebuffed by Abbas casts doubt on whether the Palestinian Authority president will accept any peace agreement with the Jewish state. This is essential information when the U.S. Secretary of State is shuttling back and forth between Amman, Ramallah, and Jerusalem simply trying to get negotiations started.

Can Kerry be successful when Abbas has already spurned everything he claims the Palestinians want? Will the Palestinian Arabs accept the existence of Israel within any borders? And… where’s the coverage?

This photo appeared in the September-October, 2000 issue of The Link, a newsletter published by the Saudi-funded organization Americans for Middle East Understanding.

By now, the descent of James M. Wall into anti-Semitic depravity has been pretty well documented. The former editor of Christian Century, a magazine that caters to mainline (liberal) Protestants in the United States, is now listed as associate editor at Veterans News Now, a magazine that traffics in nakedly anti-Semitic imagery and argumentation.

It’s a long way from where Wall started out. At the beginning of Wall’s career as a journalist, he was an ardent proponent of the civil rights movement in the United States. He was a fierce critic of white racists. He had his picture taken with Martin Luther King in 1967.

Now he helps edit a magazine that recently published an article written by White Supremacist David Duke. In the article, Duke blames American Jews for the Iraq invasion. (Sorry no link, but it’s there. You can go to Viola Larson’s blog for proof.)

Let’s make no bones about it. Veterans News Now is an anti-Semitic publication. The hostility the publication exhibits towards American Jews is on particularly shameful display in an article published in June. The article, titled “Zionist Washington Ensuring End of America,” is an ugly screed that depicts American Jews as an enemy within American government.

Here is one particularly ugly passage of the article:
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A screen shot of the Ha’aretz headline about CAMERA uncovering the false report about Willis and Ryan boycotting Israel

We have just learned that the Hebrew edition of Ha’aretz covered CAMERA’s May findings that contrary to a Toronto Star report, Meg Ryan and Bruce Willis never boycotted Israel. Nirit Enderman wrote in the May 23 Gallery section (CAMERA’s translation, “Contrary to reports: Meg Ryan and Bruce Willis Are Not Boycotting Israel”):

Hollywood stars Meg Ryan and Bruce Willis never boycotted Israel, it has been reported in response to a Toronto Star article published two weeks ago. The Canadian paper with the largest circulation published an article May 8 about physicist Stephen Hawking’s announcement that, in protest of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, he decided to cancel his participation in President Peres’ conference. In doing so, according to the Canadian paper, Hawking joined a number of celebrities, including musicians Stevie Wonder and Elvis Costello, and actors Bruce Willis and Meg Ryan, who in recent years chose to boycott Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.

In response, representatives of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) — an American pro-Israel organization — notified the paper’s editors that the information was incorrect. They clarified that Willis’ planned visit with Sylvester Stallone and Jean Claude Van Damme last July was cancelled at the last minute following the death of Stallone’s son, and was unrelated to political considerations. They sent editors a statement from the actors’ film producers confirming the information. In addition, CAMERA posted a pro-Israel ad condemning Hamas and Hezbollah, signed by Willis and published in the American media in 2006. As a result, Star editors published a correction stating that “Willis has never boycotted Israel.”

CAMERA did not stop there, however. They also turned to Meg Ryan’s publicist and asked for his response. A post yesterday on CAMERA’s site yesterday said that Steven Huvane, Ryan’s publicist, responded to CAMERA, “That report is untrue. Meg Ryan never participated in any boycott against Israel.”

In response to CAMERA’s follow up question, regarding the claim that Ryan was supposed to attend the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2010 but cancelled at the last minute, Huvane wrote: “I am her publicist and I am not aware of her committing to the Jerusalem Film Festival. She may have been invited although I dont [sic] have record of that but we never committed to attending.”

(All hyperlinks in the above translation were added by CAMERA, and did not appear in the original.)

Two days after Enderman’s article appeared, the Toronto Star commendably corrected the Meg Ryan error, as well as an error about Stevie Wonder, who did not boycott Israel, though he cancelled his participation in a Los Angeles Friends of the IDF benefit concert.

Rabbi Kenneth Cohen

The Huffington Post has not been one of the most reliable sources of information about the Arab-Israeli conflict, but every once in a while a HuffPo contributor writes something useful.

For example, Rabbi Kenneth Cohen, founder and Executive Director of the Vine and Fig Project, an interfaith educational venture, has written a piece condemning human rights organizations for failing to address anti-Semitic incitement in Arab media. The most recent example is Khaybar, an anti-semitic television that will be broadcast in the Middle East during the celebration of Ramadan. He writes:
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Not for the first time, BDSers are feeding media outlets with false information about Israel. This time, Chicago Tribune reporter Manya Brachear Pashman swallows whole some BDS falsehoods in her story about efforts to boycott Israeli-grown dates (“In midst of Ramadan, Chicago-area Muslims urged to boycott dates linked to Israel“).

First, Brachear Pashman reports that that American Muslims for Palestine “asks shoppers to boycott Israeli fruit companies and any brands distributed by an Israeli date consortium — business that represents about 35 percent of the world’s date market.”

According to most recent figures published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (see chart below, 2011), Israel ranks 14th among all nations in date production, and represents a tiny percentage of the world’s date market — some 3.4 million tons as of 1990. Those countries ahead of Israel include Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iraq, Algeria, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Sudan and Morocco. As of 2012, Israel exported a mere 13,000 tons of dates.

Even if Chicago area anti-Israel Muslims and their supporters managed to make a dent in the consumption of Israel’s limited date export, the boycott would hardly deliver “a powerful economic message” to a country which enjoys some $65 billion in exports. Somebody should tell Kristin Szremski, media director for American Muslims for Palestine.

Second, in an egregious falsehood about West Bank roads, the Tribune’s Brachear Pashman writes:

Marwa Abed, 24, of Palos Hills, said she sympathizes with the campaign.

She said she had seen the Jewish-only road built at the edge of her grandfather’s olive groves in the West Bank. (Emphasis added)

There are no “Jewish-only” roads in the West Bank. There are some West Bank roads prohibited to Palestinian traffic, there are no roads either in Israel or the West Bank reserved only for Jews. The difference is significant; while most Palestinians are restricted from traveling on a limited number of West Bank roads, Israeli Arabs — Christians and Muslims — most certainly may use those roads. Several media outlets, such as AP and the Washington Post, have corrected this falsehood in the past.

While there are no Jewish-only roads in Israel or the West Bank, there certainly are Muslim-only roads in Saudi Arabia, which produces three times as many dates as Israel. Only Muslims are allowed to even set foot in Mecca and Medina and the surrounding areas known as the Hejaz. See for example, the Saudi Embassy website, which on the Traveler’s Information page helpfully states that:

Makkah and Madinah hold special religious significance and only persons of the Islamic faith are allowed entry.

Here, in Arabic and English, are two of the Saudi highway signs openly enforcing this apartheid and discriminatory policy:

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A bombing on July 9 in Beirut’s Bir al-Abed suburb, a Hezbollah stronghold, reportedly injured more than 50 people and caused numerous fires. Rebels fighting Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose regime is backed by Hezbollah and its patron, Iran, claimed responsibility for the attack.

According to The Washington Post (“Dozens injured in blast in suburban Beirut’s Hezbollah bastion; Tensions over conflict in Syria ripple in Lebanon’s capital,” July 10), “Hezbollah lawmaker Ali Ammar called the attack ‘a despicable act of terrorism’ and implied that he held Israel and the United States responsible, without providing evidence.”

When it comes to “despicable acts of terrorism,” Ammar ought to know what he’s talking about. From the 1983 bombings of the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Lebanon through the 1992 and 1994 bombings in Buenos Aires, Argentina of the Israeli embassy and Jewish community headquarters, respectively, to the 2005 car bomb murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, Hezbollah has left a long and despicable trail.

Terrorism, to paraphrase U.S. law, is the threat or use of force against non-combatants to influence a larger audience and compel government policies to favor certain ideological, religious, economic or other objectives. The United States, Israel, Canada, the Netherlands and other countries have designated Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi’ite “Party of God,” as a terrorist organization.

But The Post, as in the above article, continues predominately to refer to the movement as “Lebanon’s most powerful political and military force.” Most powerful terrorist force, complaining about being treated as it treats others, would be more accurate.

Even before its candidate, Mohammed Morsi, won Egypt’s first democratic election in the summer of 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikwan al-Muslimin) had become many Western news media’s primary example of “moderate Islamism.” Relations between the Brotherhood and radical Sunni Muslim offshoots including Hamas (the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement) and al-Qaeda varied from strained to hostile.

The Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 to repel Western influence and restore the transnational Sunni caliphate that ended with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. But both before and after it disavowed violence in response to repression by Egyptian rulers, the credo of the Muslim Brotherhood was “Allah is our objective, The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

That makes it important to note a recent restatement of the organization’s anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-modern and anti-secular guiding principle. As reported by The Washington Post in an article about the aftermath of Morsi’s ouster by the Egyptian military, a Brotherhood spokesman found the credo well worth
repeating:

“‘God is our flag, and the prophet is our role model. The Koran is our book, and jihad is our path,’ [Brotherhood spokesman and ousted government official Yehia] Hamed bellowed to the crowd on the night the generals forced Morsi out. ‘To die for the sake of God is our highest wish,’” (“Muslim Brotherhood: At a crossroads, group faces a stark choice,” July 9).

On July 3rd, official Palestinian Authority (PA) television broadcast two adorable little girls reciting a poem. Nice? Not really. Here are some of the verses, as translated and posted by Palestinian Media Watch:

Oh, you who murdered Allah’s pious prophets [Jews in Islamic tradition] Oh, you who were brought up on spilling blood
You have been condemned to humiliation and hardship.
Oh Sons of Zion, oh most evil among creations
Oh barbaric monkeys, wretched pigs

This is not an isolated incident. Palestinian Media Watch has documented numerous examples of similar hate speech by children in PA and Fatah (the party of PA leaders) media.

A quick search of Google news turned up only five stories about this shameful episode, and those only in the Israeli press and some specialty media. However, if you type “Israel” into a Google news search you turn up 46,000,000 stories, including a New York Times review of an Israeli movie and an ABC News story about investors buying a bankrupt Israeli electric car company. Is this not at least as newsworthy?

By broadcasting these sentiments on its official television station, it is clear the Palestinian Authority endorses the sentiments in the poem. How difficult will it be to achieve a peaceful settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when these attitudes are taught to children?:

Jerusalem vomits from within it your impurity
Because Jerusalem, you impure ones, is pious, immaculate
And Jerusalem, you who are filth, is clean and pure.
I do not fear barbarity.
As long as my heart is my Quran and my city
As long as I have my arm and my stones
As long as I am free and do not barter my cause
I will not fear your throngs
I will not fear the rifle.

Young minds poisoned with hatred and bigotry. Children encouraged to embrace violence. And yet… Where’s the coverage?