30-Sep-16: As Peres is remembered, some keep looking backwards as others face the future

The scene outside Israel's parliament, the Knesset, yesterday as Israelis
lined up to pay their last respects [Image Source]

It's a gorgeous Friday morning here in Jerusalem. The air is still, the sun is bright, the cloudless sky is a luminescent blue.

But residents of the city, like us, know to expect chaos and it's already noticeable how light the road traffic is in our part of town. Many of the capital's major thoroughfares are already closed by the police and others, including the main highway from Tel Aviv, will be shut down for long intervals during the day.

Foreign delegations from dozens of countries are either already here or making their way to the national cemetery on Mount Herzl at this hour for this morning's state funeral of Shimon Peres, former president, major figure on the Israeli stage for the entire seven decades of Israel's renewed existence, and global statesman.

How are our neighbours dealing with this?

Sadly, in ways that remind thoughtful observers of how tightly they continue to hold to backward-facing conceptions even as booming, sparkling Israel along with most of the world is busy trying to build a better future and resolve a generations-long conflict.

Start with Israeli Arab political figures: they, at least the higher profile among them, seem likely to avoid taking part altogether ["Arabs boycott funeral of Shimon Peres", New York Post, September 29, 2016], though we won't know till we know.

As for the Arabic media, the one part we regularly follow - the English-language version of Ma'an News Agency - has devoted a total of two stories to Peres this week. One reports his death and asserts without embarrassment that Peres

ordered and oversaw the Qanaa massacre in Lebanon, in which the Israeli military killed and injured hundreds of civilians and UN peacekeepers. ["Former Israeli President Shimon Peres dead at 93", Ma'an, September 28, 2016]

There's another yesterday about the funeral which makes no mention about the huge foreign presence and global outpourings of respect and appreciation for what the work of Peres stands for, but focuses intensely on how

Israeli authorities have canceled this week’s visit of Gazan worshipers to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem... ["Israel cancels Gaza worshipers' Friday visit to Al-Aqsa for Peres funeral", Ma'an, September 29, 2016]

The savages of the Hamas regime have vociferously called from Gaza for what they term a(nother) “Day of Rage” to mark, as Times of Israel describes it, both

the one-year anniversary of the beginning of a wave of terror attacks, including stabbings and car-rammings throughout the West Bank and in Jerusalem, that launched in September 2015 [Times of Israel]

and what its spokesperson Sami Abu-Zuhri says is how

"the Palestinian people are very happy at the passing of this criminal who caused their blood to shed... his death is the end of a phase in the history of this occupation and the beginning of a new phase of weakness." [Times of Israel]

No one can predict quite the form that this orchestrated, regime-dictated is going to take. But we can assume they won't confine themselves to banging the walls of their apartments and raising their voices at people. Israel's security forces are on high alert with massive deployment of personnel throughout the country, and particularly here in Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, the so-called moderate head of the Palestinian Authority and of Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas, ["10-Mar-15: The not-so-moderate Palestinian Authority and the terrorism it enables"] is widely reported to be on his way to Jerusalem today after having

sent a condolence letter to Peres’s family expressing “sorrow and sympathy.” He called Peres a partner in reaching a “peace of the brave” with the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. [Times of Israel, September 30, 2016]

The PA faction which Abbas heads, Fatah, put out its own statement in which it called Peres

"the spiritual father of all the wars against Arab states" [Source: PMW]

That hostile message was, naturally, published in Arabic only, intended for consumption by Fatah's rank-and-file constituency as well as, presumably, its rivals in Hamas.

Equally naturally, Fatah put out an entirely different and contradictory message in the English language yesterday, intended for unsuspecting non-Arabic-speakers oblivious to the torrent of hatred and bigotry pumped out daily by the Fatah propaganda machine. In English, their message is that:

Abbas wanted to “send a strong message to Israeli society that the Palestinians are for peace, and appreciate the efforts of peaceful men like Shimon Peres”... Abbas will be joined by a delegation comprising senior negotiator Saeb Erekat, Civil Affairs Minister Hussein al-Sheikh, security chief Majid Faraj and Muhammad Al-Madani, who heads up relations with Israelis. Former Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qurei may also attend... [Abbas also] sent a condolence letter to Peres’s family [in which he] expressed his “sadness and sorrow,” and wrote that “Peres was a partner in making the brave peace with the martyr Yasser Arafat and prime minister (Yitzhak) Rabin.” [Times of Israel, yesterday]

It won't be news to people who keep track of these things that there's plenty of Palestinian Arab double-speak on display here. It's a sadly familiar part of the landscape. And note the loathsome use of the word "martyr" in reference to Arafat. (It doesn't appear, for some odd reason, in today's Times of Israel re-statement of that Abbas statement here.)

The PA's clear and explicit position, contrary to all the available evidence and several lengthy third-party investigations, is that the Israelis martyred Arafat by murdering him. A PA civil servant was even arrested last year and charged with denying the "truth" of Arafat's alleged martyrdom - or as Times of Israel ["PA employee arrested for claiming Arafat was ‘not a martyr’", April 28, 2015] quoted them in its report at the time -  for “attacking and harming the martyr, eternal leader and symbol of the Palestinian people Abu Ammar”, Arafat's nom de guerre.

Arafat's alleged victimhood is evidently too precious an asset to be surrendered for something as ephemeral as baby-steps toward peace. It continues to play a central and highly influential role in the moulding of Palestinian Arab opinion and its obsessive grip on extreme violence [see "15-Jun-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?"]

Worth remembering that funerals continue to play their traditional role in their culture as well. For a reminder of how that works, see "5-May-14: The making of a martyr: it takes more than a village".

Let's hope this glorious Jerusalem day runs its course peacefully  and in the spirit of forward-lookingness.

02-Aug-15: Violence, incitement, double-talk, more violence

Site of the child's death: Intensive IDF and Israel Police investigation
[Image Source]

In the wake of Friday morning's apparent attack on a sleeping Palestinian Arab family in their home, the death of their infant and widespread Arab rioting, there's a poisonous atmosphere of unrestrained incitement to revenge and further acts of violence and murder.

Not so much from the Israeli side: the president condemned the awful events, addressed an anti-violence-and-incitement rally in downtown Jerusalem on Saturday night and conveyed the same message to the Arabic media on Friday. The prime minister visited the injured family in hospital (as did the president) and told them and the media that

we’re shocked, we’re outraged,.. We condemn this. There is zero tolerance for terrorism wherever it comes from, whatever side of the fence it comes from. We have to fight it and fight it together. [Jerusalem Post, July 31, 2015]

During Saturday night, there were reports of incoming explosive missiles emanating from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and directed at Israelis. Readers of this blog know better than most that rocket attacks by Palestinian Arab terrorists are very far from new in southern Israel, or rare, and those doing the firing have never needed a trigger like the death of a Palestinian Arab child.

Two rockets fell near the Israel-Gaza border fence late on Saturday night. No warning sirens were heard and the military was initially unsure whether the projectiles struck the Israeli or Gazan side of the border... The [IDF] army’s official policy is to retaliate to attacks based on their damage, not the attackers’ intent. Misfired rockets landing on the Gaza side of the fence do not generally elicit an Israeli response. [Times of Israel, today]

If, as is the case with many of the previous Gazan Fell Shorts (Palestinian Arab rockets that misfire and hit something Gazan instead of something Israeli) someone was hurt or something was damaged on the Arab side, this will almost certainly go unreported. (Check out some of our past Fell Short reports.)

Though no news channel, to our knowledge, quotes Gazan sources on the subject of last night's rocket attack, this morning we checked the European Union-funded GANSO website which we have mentioned numerous times in the past. Visit their Incident Alerts page right now, as we did (see image below) and you see their report of four, not two, Gazan rockets last night, all of which crash landed on the Gazan side of the border.

Was anyone killed? Were any houses destroyed? No one, but literally no one, seems ever to report on such Arab-on-Arab casualties. Why? Ask the foreign media reporting from there. They're sure to find a justification.

From the GANSO website, Sunday morning August 2, 2015. Published in Gaza, GANSO say 4 rockets were fired at Israeli targets last night, not just 2 as reported in Israel. And not one managed to get as far as the Gazan border. Our sympathies to the hapless Gazans who have to live with this kind of catastrophe daily/nightly.

In the background - the very distant background to judge by the almost entirely absent media news coverage - there have been dozens of attacks on Israelis during Friday and the Sabbath day. This Hebrew-language report provides a summary and a time line, replete with photographs depicting the aftermath at some of the attack sites. One of them [here] shows a fire bomb (a so-called Molotov Cocktail) being hurled at an Israeli bus inside Jerusalem on Saturday evening. Israel National News [here] provides its customary close-the-action reports on the weekend's wave of anti-Israel violence.

In the Palestinian Arab media, the call to arms is unmistakable:

Clashes broke out across occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank on Friday night in response to the death of an 18-month-old Palestinian who was burned alive in an arson attack carried out by suspected Israeli settlers earlier that day... [Maan News, Saturday]

It's almost comical to witness the straight-faced reporting of old/new threats emanating from the terror-addicted ranks of the Islamist Hamas regime in Gaza whose rockets and thuggish "security" agents have been - and continue to be - the cause of so many Palestinian Arab deaths:

Hamas said Friday that every Israeli is now a legitimate target following the deadly terror attack in the village of Duma in which a Palestinian toddler was killed, Israel Radio reported. In an official message to the public, Hamas also called for a "day of rage" to protest the deadly terror attack and "in order to protect al-Aksa mosque..." Israeli and Palestinian Authority security forces are on high alert in Jerusalem and the West Bank as Hamas calls for "day of rage." [Jerusalem Post, Friday]

Alert readers understand that declaring Israelis now to be legitimate targets for the rage and murderous hatred of the ranks of Hamas is a cynical joke. The Hamas Charter, its constitution, lays down the foundation for "legitimizing" the murder of Israelis, and virtually every public statement by its spokespersons reinforces the message. Friday's declaration is entirely directed at foreigners, and in particular foreign news reporters.

But not all. This Hamas statement was plainly directed at Palestinian Arab society:

Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri has accused Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas with bearing responsibility for the death of an Arab infant in the village of Duma in Samaria on Friday, which came during an arson attack the IDF suspects may have been committed by Jewish extremists. "I call on Abbas to stop pursuing Hamas in the (West) Bank, and place on him personal responsibility for the burning of the infant Ali Dawabsha, due to his harassment of resistance fighters," said the terrorist spokesperson. "If Hamas had a free hand to act in the (West) Bank, the settlers wouldn't be able to commit crimes like this and burn our children," claimed Abu Zuhri. [Israel National News, August 1, 2015]

(Abu Zuhri's non-stop venom has been the subject of some of our previous comments.)

Some other selected voices from this weekend (all direct quotes):

• Palestinian officials say Israel is "fully responsible" for the death of an infant in an arson attack blamed on Jewish settlers... [T]he Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which dominates the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, said it held the Israeli government "fully responsible for the brutal assassination" of the child, Ali Saad Dawabsha. "This is a direct consequence of decades of impunity given by the Israeli government to settler terrorism," it said. [BBC, Friday] The head of the PLO is Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority.
• Husam Badran, a key Hamas leader in Judea and Samaria... [said] that "this crime has turned IDF soldiers and settlers into legitimate targets, in any location and situation... Badran called for every "free person who can harm the occupier to start conducting revenge activities" because "the enemy doesn't understand anything but the language of force." [Israel National News, July 31, 2015]
• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the firebombing "an act of terrorism in every respect" and made a rare telephone call to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas... Abbas said he had ordered his foreign minister to file a complaint at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. "We want true justice, but I doubt that Israel will provide that," he said of the attack in Duma, near the northern city of Nablus. [AFP, July 31, 2015]
• The US State Department condemned the "vicious terrorist attack" in "the strongest possible terms," urging Israel to "apprehend the murderers" and calling on both sides to "avoid escalating tensions". [AFP, July 31, 2015] 

That last point causes us personal heartburn, and here's why.

The State Department and especially its now-departed spokesperson Marie Harf, have a history (with us personally) of being mystifyingly unable to label certain kinds of acts of murder as terror, let alone characterize them as vicious. That's astonishing (we feel) when you take into account the plain nature of the crimes of those people, determined in a court of law and with the terrorists mostly confessing to their savagery, and even taking credit for it. (For a reminder of the background: "14-Sep-13: Memo to Secretary of State Kerry: Your staff need some urgent guidance").

We're offering no prizes for readers who can figure out which vicious acts by which people are ranked as terror by State's clever professionals, and which are not. It's about as obvious and clear as such matters ever get. You have to be a certain sort of diplomat to be blind to the nature of what's happening.

Meanwhile. the intensive police and army manhunt for the perpetrators of the Duma village fire-bombing is still underway.

28-Feb-15: That was shocking and dangerous, whine the sadistic, murdering thugs

Shocked: Inner circle of Hamas child abusers, with Haniyeh and Meshaaal in the
central roles [Image Source]

The terror-addicted Hamas Islamists who boast of kidnapping and murdering teenagers, of executing a massacre outside a night spot frequented by youngsters, of bombing a pizzeria filled with children are outraged. Yes, outraged.

From Reuters today:

Hamas says Egypt listing it as terrorist organization is 'shocking and dangerous' | GAZA Sat Feb 28, 2015 7:45am EST | (Reuters) - An Egyptian court decision to list Hamas as a terrorist organization is "shocking and dangerous," the Islamist group said a statement from Gaza on Saturday. "The Egyptian court's decision to list the Hamas movement as a terror organization is shocking and is dangerous, and it targets the Palestinian people and its factions of resistance," the statement said. "It will have no influence on the Hamas movement, which enjoys the respect of all the nation and the leaders of the nation."

Xinhua this evening quotes Hamas calling the Egyptian ruling

"a coup on history...  a despaired (sic) Egyptian attempt to export the internal Egyptian crisis, but it will never influence Hamas' status which (has) gained the respect of Arabs and Muslims all over the world"

The growing isolation of Hamas is a work in progress. A year ago, the Egyptian Urgent Matters Court, the same legal forum that handed down today's decision

banned all activities by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas and ordered the seizure of its offices and assets... Egypt's interim government designated the Brotherhood a terrorist group in December [2013], five months after President Mohammed Morsi was ousted by the army. A Hamas spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri, condemned the court ruling. "The decision harms the image of Egypt and its role towards the Palestinian cause," he told Reuters news agency. "It reflects a form of standing against Palestinian resistance." [BBC]

Hamas is regarded as an outlaw by a long list of states [see this Wikipedia table].

• Canada lists Hamas as a terrorist entity. 
• The European Union designated Hamas as a terrorist group from 2003 to 2014, a status annulled for now by its General Court in December 2014 for "technical" reasons: see "17-Dec-14: Has Hamas just been whitewashed by Europe?". The EU and its 28 member states are maintaining its funding freeze and sanctions against Hamas and Hamas members for now. 
• New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Egypt (on January 31, 2015) and Australia all list Hamas' so-called "military wing" as a terrorist organization. Japan froze Hamas assets in 2005, 
• The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan banned Hamas in 1999 but (typically for the country) gives it considerable on-again/off-again freedom to operate. 
• Saudi Arabia outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot, in 2014, terming it a terrorist organization; several Hamas insiders have been quoted in the past month expressing optimism about a new Saudi "openness" since the January 23, 2015 death of King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud.
• Hamas is designated by the United States as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. 

The demonstrable Hamas devotion to extreme violence, cold-blooded murder, bombings, shootings, stabbings and sadistic child abuse are not incidental to their approach to life and to Jews. They are central to it:

Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to [Hamas] principles... There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors... [from Hamas Charter, Article 13]

Many people know (though far fewer have actually read it) that Hamas has a Charter in which they give confident, full-volume publicity to their blood lust and (in their own words) its Islamic underpinnings. Their boastful strategy works with huge effect in the Arab world and among non-Arab Moslems for whom bloodshed appears to serve as a kind of grotesque magnet.

When the president of the United States says, as he did on Wednesday 18, 2015 in the White House, that

We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam... No religion is responsible for violence and terrorism. People are responsible... We have to make sure ... that we do not stigmatize entire communities... [Aljazeera]

he reminds us ("we are at war" and "people are responsible") how much of a mistake it can be to attack people for their religious beliefs. It's clear to us that Hamas acting in the name of Islam is a matter for them - and much less so for us. For us, what's important is the things they do: the viciousness of their hatred, the amorality of their murderous violence, the utter absence of any recognizable Hamas moral compass.

The Egyptians are right when they say the people of Hamas are terrorists. And President Obama is right when he says we are at war with them. Now if only we could get the US State Department ["14-Sep-13: Memo to Secretary of State Kerry: Your staff need some urgent guidance"] to finally pay attention to those truths.

08-Feb-15: Iran says Hamas chief heading to Tehran to mend bridges, say Iranians. No he's not, say Hamas

Meshaal with Iran's Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, four years ago [Image Source]

This past Friday morning, the oddly named Iranian state-owned online mouthpiece PressTV announced [here] that Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas, "is to travel to the Iranian capital of Tehran soon". It bases this on something said by Ahmed Yousef, senior adviser to Ismail Haniyeh who is prime minister of the Hamas regime in Gaza. The Iranians say "The trip is mainly aimed at improving the ties between Iran and Hamas."

What's the state of those ties? According to The Guardian, Iran and Hamas have a

"rapprochement... three years after a breach over the Palestinian party's refusal to back the Syrian government in the civil war, and amid its current political isolation following the demise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The rebuilding of the relationship is likely to dismay Israel and the US... Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas's political bureau, based in Qatar, has met Iranian representatives in Ankara and Doha in recent months, and may visit Tehran in the coming months." [The Guardian UK]

Trouble is, that Guardian report is from January 2014, more than a year ago.

Meanwhile down in Gaza, the official spokesperson for Hamas is busy denying that Meshaal is heading to Iran anytime soon. And why is he not going? Because

"Hamas's relationship with Tehran is good"

says Sami Abu-Zuhri, so

"Currently, there are no arrangements for Meshaal to travel to Iran."

It's not that hard to understand how Hamas messaging tends towards the incoherent. The Hamas mouthpiece, Abu-Zuhri (a loathsome thug, a serial molester of women, and a mule about whom we last wrote a month ago - see here) is confined to the Gaza Strip. So face to face meetings have probably been scarce. Meshaal had never been there until making a flying visit in December 2012.

Meshaal has for decades lived in a succession of well-appointed locales far from "Palestine" and Gaza: first Kuwait from 1967 until Iraq invaded in 1990; then in Jordan until expelled from there in 1999; then in Doha, Qatar for two years before removing himself to the pleasant and hospitable Damascus, Syria in 2001. He fled Syria in February 2012, for Qatar, where he has been a "dear guest" for some years, reportedly ensconced in a luxury hotel suite.

Several weeks ago, the New York Times said "Qatar's top diplomat" denied "rumours" that Meshaal was being expelled from there. But when your expulsion has to be officially refuted at the foreign ministry level, there might be trouble afoot. The word last month was that Meshaal might be about to try his luck in Turkey where the leadership's patience might be less thin that of Qatar's, and where an official said on the record that it would be okay with them if he settled there.

As for the Hamas and Iran warming-up, the evidence continues to be not so clear.

• "Hamas says ties with Iran strategic" | Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran, January 10, 2015
• "Reconciliation Between Hamas and Iran Delayed Due to Disagreements over Nuclear Program, Syria" | The Tower, January 14, 2015 
• But then... "Hamas begins rapprochement with Hezbollah, Iran", Al Monitor, January 27, 2015
• "Hamas calls on Iran to give it more funds for weapons" | Haaretz, January 31, 2015
• "Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal to visit Tehran soon: Resistance group member" | PressTV Iran, February 6, 2015
• "Iran and Hamas have almost mended their relationship, even though Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal has yet to visit Tehran... Iran and Hamas reached what has been called a “memorandum of understanding”" | Al Akhbar (Egypt), February 7, 2015 

Against this confused and confusing background, friends of Israel will have noted with disquiet some recent Iran-focused statements from US government sources including among others

• The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff U.S. Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey: "... I think Iranian influence will be positive" [January 8, 2015]
• "AP EXCLUSIVE: US, IRAN DISCUSSING NUCLEAR TALKS COMPROMISE" | Associated Press, February 3, 2015
• "When President Obama initiated talks with Iran on its nuclear program, both he and Iran’s leaders insisted they would be limited to the outstanding nuclear dispute. But it soon became clear that Obama had higher hopes and had begun to see the talks as a prism through which to view, and even solve, the region’s troubles." | Washington Post, February 6, 2015

We will definitely be continuing to watch this space.