The Gaza War 2014: The War Israel Did Not Want and the Disaster It Averted

2.Preface

What follows is a researched and documented narrative of the 2014 Gaza war. While written from an Israeli perspective, this is not a document intended to negate criticism of Israel’s actions during the war or improve Israel’s image in the eyes of the world.

It has but one goal: to relate the truth as it happened; a truth obfuscated by the fog of war and lost in the immediacy of reportage from the battlefield; a truth perverted by those who had interest in doing so, and abused again by the one-sided mandate issued by the UN Human Rights Council on July 23, 2014, which calls for an investigation into events surrounding the war in the “Occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem and particularly the occupied Gaza Strip” – blind to the fact that Israel was the target of thousands of rockets and mortar attacks, all against civilian populations, and with some targeted Israeli areas having three times the population density of Gaza.

There is a school of thought that claims Israel wanted this war. The opposite is true. But, though this was a war Israel did not want, it was a war for which it had planned meticulously, thereby denying Hamas its main weapon: victimhood. Though the images of the moment may have reflected massive damage in Gaza, the truth is that America’s highest-ranking military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, announced in November 2014 that he had sent a Pentagon study group to Israel to learn about the “extraordinary lengths” Israel had undertaken to “limit collateral damage and prevent civilian casualties in the Gaza conflict.”

And it was a war that inadvertently preempted a terrorist massacre against Israel’s heartland, principally through a network of sophisticated tunnels built deep under the border, and intended to stream hundreds of dedicated terrorists, many on suicide missions, in the quiet of night, to destinations where they could kill as many innocent people as possible, and leave Israel mauled as never before.

These are the essential truths of the 2014 Gaza war, truths backed by research, evidence, and accounts of events as they happened. The chapters of this study can leave no doubt as to which party should be in the dock for war crimes and crimes against humanity. More importantly, however, it rings a bell of warning that if Hamas is allowed to escape its crimes, the seeds of the next conflict will be planted.

Hirsh Goodman Dore Gold Jerusalem 2015

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3. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

§ The Gaza War 2014: The War Israel Did Not Want and the Disaster It Averted is a researched and documented narrative that relates the truth as it happened. Israel was the target of thousands of rockets and mortar attacks against its civilian population, with some Israeli areas targeted that had three times the population density of Gaza. Israel clearly acted out of self-defense.

§ Though the images of the moment may have reflected massive damage in Gaza, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, announced on November 6, 2014, that Israel had gone to “extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and prevent civilian casualties in the Gaza conflict.” A team of senior U.S. officers was sent to learn from Israel’s tactics. An analysis of UN satellite photos taken during the war shows that 72 percent of all damaged areas in Gaza were “within two miles of the Israeli border.”

§ While this was a war Israel did not want, it was a war that inadvertently preempted a terrorist massacre inside Israel’s heartland, principally through a network of sophisticated tunnels built deep under the border, and intended to stream hundreds, if not thousands, of dedicated terrorists, many on suicide missions, in the quiet of night, to destinations where they could kill as many innocent people as possible and leave Israel mauled as never before. This was potentially Hamas’ terrorist version of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Egypt and Syria launched a joint surprise attack on Israeli forces in Sinai and the Golan Heights.

§ Israel suffered 74 dead in the war. Had the Iron Dome system not intercepted 735 rockets fired from Gaza, the Israeli casualty count would have been incalculably higher. Had Hamas accepted the Egyptian ceasefire proposal of July 15, as did Israel, Palestinian wartime fatalities would have numbered less than 200, as opposed to more than 2,100 who died by the time Hamas agreed to a final ceasefire on August 27. Thus, Hamas was fully responsible for more than 1,800 Palestinian deaths.

§ Moreover, while UN and Palestinian sources claimed that 72 to 84 percent of Palestinians in Gaza killed during the war were civilians, there are strong reasons to argue that the percentage of civilian casualties was less than 50 percent, a low one-to-one combatant-to-civilian ratio that is unprecedented in modern-day warfare. In addition, we don’t know how many Palestinians in Gaza died as human shields or of natural causes during the 50 days of war, or how many were casualties of the 875 Palestinian rockets known to have landed inside Gaza.

Yet many in the international community uncritically accepted the narrative about the war advanced by Hamas and its allies. A discerning look at the facts of what happened, however, would lead to the conclusion that it is Hamas, not Israel, which should be in the dock for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

CONTENTS

Executive Summary
Preface
Israel’s Narrative – An Overview: Hirsh Goodman
Telling the Truth about the 2014 Gaza War: Ambassador Dore Gold
Israel, Gaza & Humanitarian Law: Efforts to Limit Civilian Casualties: Lt. Col. (res.) David Benjamin
The Legal War: Hamas’ Crimes against Humanity and Israel’s Right to Self-Defense: Ambassador Alan Baker
The Limits of the Diplomatic Arena: Ambassador Dore Gold
Hamas’ Strategy Revealed: Lt. Col. (ret.) Jonathan D. Halevi
Hamas’ Order of Battle: Weapons, Training, and Targets: Lenny Ben-David
Hamas’ Tunnel Network: A Massacre in the Making: Daniel Rubenstein
Hamas’ Silent Partners: Lenny Ben-David
Gazan Casualties: How Many and Who They Were: Lenny Ben-David
Key Moments in a 50-Day War: A Timeline: Daniel Rubenstein
About the Authors

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Administration’s rhetoric on inspections shifts, backtracking from verification promises

6.‘UNRWA, Hamas are two sides of the same coin’

Hamas maintains a tight grip on the U.N. Relief and Works Agency’s facilities in the Gaza Strip, and the two’s symbiosis is growing stronger, despite the U.N.’s denials • Israel is reluctant to have UNRWA removed over its strategic value in Jordan.

Little is known about the second U.N. report on Operation Protective Edge, waged in the Gaza Strip last summer. While the U.N. Human Rights Council’s fact-finding mission, headed by American jurist Mary McGowan Davis, looked into alleged war crimes committed during the fighting, the second, 207-page report, penned by retired Dutch Maj. Gen. Patrick Cammaert, focused solely on the damaged sustained by U.N. Relief and Works Agency facilities during the 50-day military campaign.

Cammaert’s report is classified, and only a fraction of it, some 27 pages, has been made public, garnering little attention. The findings concluded that 44 Palestinians were killed and 227 others were injured while taking shelter in U.N. facilities in Gaza. An addendum to the report said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon was “shocked that militant groups had endangered U.N. schools by using them as weapons caches.”

One can understand why the Cammaert report was downplayed. Terrorist groups’ continuous use of UNRWA facilities across the coastal enclave is a source of much embarrassment to the U.N. The “shock,” however, should be taken with a grain of salt, as Israel has been warning for years about the interaction between Hamas and other terrorist groups and UNRWA. These ties have been recorded in dozens of files, and two new reports published in recent days, one by the Institute for Zionist Strategies and one by the Center for Near East Policy Research, indicate that the symbiosis between Hamas and UNRWA in Gaza is only growing stronger.

UNRWA itself recorded the terrorists’ use of its facilities in the Strip, and the findings were corroborated in the Cammaert report, detailing dozens of cases when weapons, munitions, and missiles were hidden in schools, and how school buildings were used as cover for rocket launching sites.

A report by Institute for Zionist Strategies fellow Lt. Col. (res.) Nir Amran, released earlier this week, called for Israel to pursue and end to UNRWA activities in Gaza. Amran’s research cited incidents dating back further: In 2001 one of the agency’s facilities hosted a mass gathering headed by late Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin; in 2002, during Operation Defensive Shield, wanted terrorists hid in UNRWA schools, and weapon mills were hidden in and around the agency’s office building; in 2004 several UNRWA employees were convicted of hurling Molotov cocktails at Israeli buses; and the military, according to Amran, has recorded numerous incidents when UNRWA ambulances were used to secretly transport terrorists and weapons across Gaza.

The manipulation of good will

The ease in which terrorist groups in Gaza have manipulated UNRWA over the years is linked to the interaction between Hamas and the U.N. agency. In their report, Center for Near East Policy Research Director David Bedein and research associate Lt. Col. (res.) Jonathan Dahuah-Halevy, argue that Hamas and the UNRWA are, in fact, two side of the same coin and that they are inextricably intertwined. Hamas, they cite an example, has been controlling the UNRWA’s workers union for years.

The relationship goes beyond mere control of a workers union. According to Bedein and Dahuah-Halevy, UNRWA employed senior Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists in its facilities in the past, and several of them were killed by Israel over the years over their terrorist activities.

UNRWA denies currently employing any would-be terrorists. Dahuah-Halevy, however, is skeptical, saying Hamas’ educational arm, al-Kotla al-Islamiyah (“Islamic Bloc”) still operates in the agency’s schools in Gaza and the West Bank on all levels, from elementary schools to universities, and therefore the real answer to this question will become evident only after the next military campaign in Gaza.

“The Islamic Bloc’s strategy in elementary and middle schools focuses on an attempt to engage students in a variety of activities the organization offers,” he explained. “These activities are designed to strengthen students’ Islamic faith and gradually introduce them to Hamas ideology, until they become Hamas operatives. There is a Hamas representative in every school, including those run by UNRWA.”

Islamic Bloc activities are an important indoctrination tool for Hamas, which eyes the younger generation attending both its state schools and UNRWA schools in the Gaza Strip, seeing it as future of its military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades.

According to Dahuah-Halevy, dozens of Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades operatives began their “careers” as Islamic Bloc members in UNRWA school, later joining the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas’ military wing, and carrying out terrorist attacks against Israel and the Israel Defense Forces.

The information he gathered also indicates that Islamic Bloc activities in UNRWA schools in Gaza have remained robust even after Operation Protective Edge. Given this close relationship there is no wonder that Hamas took the liberty of using UNRWA facilities for its terrorist activities.

Perpetuating the refugee status

UNRWA is very different from the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, which aids refugees everywhere in the world except the Gaza Strip. Pressured by the Arab states, the U.N. formed the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East in 1949, as an independent agency operating under different criteria than the UNHCR.

Amran noted in his report that while the UNHCR has successfully helped tens of millions of refugees worldwide rehabilitate their lives, the majority of Palestinians under UNRWA’s care still reside in refugee camps, raising a fourth generation in poverty.

UNRWA’s mandate fails to clearly define who is a Palestinian refugee. Left to its own devices, the agency has determined that any individual who lived in Mandatory Palestine two years prior to the 1948 War of Independence, and who lost his home and livelihood because of the war, is a Palestinian refugee. The definition extends to the refugee’s immediate family through the generations, meaning his grandchildren can also claim refugee status. Absurdly, UNRWA has created a “genetic” refugee status, thus perpetuating the problem.

The agency’s original mandate was to aid 700,000 Palestinian refugees. Today, across Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the Gaza Strip, and Judea and Samaria, UNRWA’s records list some 5.5 million refugees. UNRWA has an annual budget of $1.2 billion, while the UNHCR, which aids 40 million refugees worldwide, has a budget of $2 billion.

Amran noted that rather than help the Palestinians develop income sources, UNRWA has become the largest employer in the Strip, with over 13,000 workers. “While the UNHCR deliberately avoids employing refugees from among the population its aids, to avoid any conflict of interest, UNRWA employs [Palestinian] refugees, creating employer-employee dependency, which perpetuates the problem and prevents finding a solution that helps refugees find independent work,” he said.

The public criticism over UNRWA’s ties to Hamas may have prevented the latter from using agency facilities to hold its semi-military summer camps for Gaza’s children, but it has not kept Hamas indoctrination out of UNRWA’s schools, where the Palestinian refugees’ so-called “right of return” is preached alongside the need for a violent struggle against Israel.

Center for Near East Policy Research fellow Dr. Arnon Gross reviewed over 150 Palestinian textbooks used by UNRWA schools, from first to 10th grade. Some books, he said, link the term “jihad” with the right of return, effectively lauding martyrdom as a noble death.

The Palestinian Media Watch, a nongovernmental organization the documents cases of incitement by the Palestinian media, supports the argument that these textbooks are ridden with anti-Israel incitement, saying they are rife with false information describing Jewish and Israeli presence in the area as transient, and presenting places Judaism holds sacred as Muslim holy sites seized by the Jews.

Prominent Palestinian human rights and political activist Bassam Eid believes UNRWA is being used by Hamas, especially since the terrorist group violently took over the Gaza Strip in 2007. UNRWA, he said, is facing a $101 million deficit, which is poised to get worse, as many of the Arab nations that have pledged donations to the agency in 2015 have failed to deliver, leaving it to rely on donations from the U.S. and Canada.

Will the next round of hostilities between Israel and Hamas reveal the symbiosis between Hamas and UNRWA is as strong as ever? As a U.N. agency, UNRWA recognizes Israel’s right to exist and refrains from preaching jihad and opposes terrorism, but its loose oversight of its own employees and the fact that it employs refugees in Hamas territory, means it cannot truly sever ties with Gaza’s rulers.

In a 2007 report commissioned by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, former UNRWA general counsel James G. Lindsay noted that the agency has “failed to take steps to detect and reject terrorists from the ranks of its staff or its service recipients, and has avoided measures that may deter members of organizations such as Hamas from joining its team.”

Has UNRWA changed following Operation Protective Edge? There is little to indicate as much at this time. Nevertheless, despite the criticism leveled at the agency by Israel, the latter has so far refrained from officially demanding it be disbanded, both over knowing UNRWA’s services do aid a large population in need, as well as over the fact that removing UNRWA would spell the collapse of the refugee camps in Jordan, whose regime Israel seeks to preserve for strategic reasons.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=26617

Home Israel Resource Review

7.UNRWA ADMISSION OF HAMAS MILITARY PRESENCE IN UNRWA SCHOOOL

by David Bedein – 2 Tammuz 5775 (June 19, 2015)

Only eight months ago, UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness viciously attacked our agency on Fox News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s%20fWxBrz9c

And https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k8gVzqoRWs claiming that our agency acts in a fraudulent manner without “evidence” when we documented that the Hamas military wing had been present in the UNRWA schools in Gaza, as revealed in our bookhttp://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9659233906

Gunness said over and over that there was no “evidence”.

Now the UNRWA director admits that Hamas military presence in the UNRWA schools was there all along

· ?ENGLISH:? http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4669541,00.html

Recently, anxiety sprang up in Israel over anti-Israel boycotts. Ministers met, sessions were held at the Knesset, and commentators pontificated. Yet the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement against Israel is a decade old. Moreover, the excitement was provoked mainly by two high-profile incidents, the FIFA and Orange affairs, which were resolved in Israel’s favour.

Nothing, in fact, has greatly changed in the overall situation. As before, some petty boycotts have succeeded, major boycotts have failed, and Israel’s relations with the rest of the world continue to expand — for now.

Although boycotters forced an Israeli cosmetics firm to close its shop in London’s West End, for instance, the value of mutual trade between Israel and the UK has doubled over the last four years. The retiring British Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, published a farewell letter in the Israel press, listing the vast expansion of commercial and scientific relations during his five years in “the country he loves.”

Sajid Javid, the British Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, recently denounced boycotts of Israel and insisted: “My department will be working hard to boost Anglo-Israeli trade and investment, and I as Business Secretary will do anything I can to support and promote it.” Stating that he had “long admired” Israel, he added that “the values that make Israel such a success are values that matter a great deal to me. I share Israel’s love for freedom and democracy. I admire its tenacious determination when the odds are stacked against it.”

Israelis are irritated by European bureaucratic busybodies who seek to label goods as “Made in the West Bank.” The impact on Israel’s trading figures, however, is minimal, as goods from the West Bank amount to under one percent of what Israel sends to Europe. Moreover, most of these goods are not whole products, which would require such labels, but components for use in European products, which require no labeling; they are invisible.

Meanwhile, other European bureaucrats eagerly helped Israel to become members of CERN and the OECD, potentially far more important developments. The common Israeli perception that “Europe hates us” needs to be qualified: the vast European bureaucracy contains friends as well as enemies.

The political leadership of European Union countries is also mostly against boycotts of Israel. Among others, the UK’s David Cameron, France’s François Hollande and Germany’s Angela Merkel have expressly rejected BDS against Israel. Likewise, the then and recently re-elected President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, emphatically declared in his speech to the Knesset: “Let me seize this opportunity to make a clarification: the EU has no intention to boycott Israel. I am of the conviction that what we need is more cooperation, not division.” Unfortunately, this affirmation went unnoticed in Israel because of the hasty and ungrateful reaction of some lawmakers to a speech full of praise for and

support of Israel.

Nevertheless, even if the BDS movement’s successes have been limited and grossly exaggerated, the phenomenon needs to be combated, both because it is inherently unjust and lest it become a more substantial danger. Tim Marshall’s recent summary puts it well: “…it is necessary to look at the BDS in two ways. It is a failure insofar as the Israeli economy has doubled in size in the period BDS has been in operation, but it is a success when you see the effect of the campaign on thousands of university students, many who will go on to become opinion formers. It is a decades-long strategy.”

Martin Schulz

So far, official Israel has done little in this regard, although Prime Minister Netanyahu’s personal intervention was significant in respect of both Orange and FIFA. Rather, the burden has been carried by a number of hard-working private initiatives, such as BDS in the Pews, CAMERA, Campus Watch, Creative Community for Peace, Divest This, MEMRI, NGO Monitor, Palestinian Media Watch, Presbyterians for Middle East Peace and Shurat HaDin. (A longer list of organizations, many of which are partly concerned with fighting BDS, can be found here.)

While these organizations have done a magnificent job — considering their limited means — in identifying BDS threats, much more could be done in putting to good effect the information that they gather. Put simply, the usual strategy adopted is to complain loudly that “It’s not fair!”

Certainly, it is ridiculously unfair that Israel is singled out for boycotts while the world’s monstrous violators of human rights can fill the shelves of shops worldwide (China), sell raw materials worth billions of dollars (the Gulf states) and dominate United Nations institutions (the Organization of Islamic Cooperation). But “It’s not fair!” can have an impact only on those whose charters or professional standards require them to be fair, such as the major Western news media, and even these are often slow to admit errors.

Similarly, Palestinian Media Watch has had some success in lobbying European parliaments about the Palestinian Authority’s use of donor money to pay salaries to convicted terrorists. It is because that misuse breaks rules that European institutions are obliged to observe.

Most boycotters have no commitment to fairness and regard the idea with derision. Against them, one has to use tactics that fall under the rubric “this is going to hurt you more than us.” As we shall see, anti-boycott operations have used this approach sporadically with remarkable success. But the approach needs to be conceived more systematically and implemented far more widely.

Such strategies can be summarized under at least four headings: lawfare, counter-boycotts, digging up dirt and self-harming. On the other hand, some Israeli ministerial decisions inadvertently facilitate boycotts; this area, too, needs to be considered.

Lawfare

Although the term “lawfare” has existed since the 1970s, its current use follows the definitions offered by Charles Dunlap, the earliest and simplest of which (2001) was “the use of law as a weapon of war.” For some, such as those behind The Lawfare Project, it has come to signify the abuse of law to that end.

The latter pejorative meaning of “lawfare” is the one adopted by NGO Monitor under its rubric NGO Lawfare:

“Lawfare is the exploitation of courts in democratic countries in order to harass Israeli officials with civil lawsuits and criminal investigations for ‘war crimes,’ ‘crimes against humanity,’ and other alleged violations of international law. While NGOs claim these cases are about obtaining ‘justice’ for Palestinian victims, they are actually part of the larger political war against Israel.”

NGO Monitor adds that the US and the UK have also been assailed with lawfare of this kind, but the principal target has been Israel. It ascribes the initiation of lawfare against Israel to the infamous Durban Conference of 2001.

It is a conceptual mistake, however, to define “lawfare” in this narrower way. Instead, one should follow Dunlap, the acknowledged expert in this field, by defining “lawfare” in a morally neutral sense, then go on to distinguish between proper and improper uses of law in the pursuit of war. Just as in other areas, the law has uses and its abuses in the form of lawfare.

Dunlap’s seminal paper (coincidentally published in 2001) began by noting the spread of lawfare in the pejorative sense, but it also considered the proper uses of lawyers by armies. During the recent hostilities initiated by the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip, Israel employed experts in the laws of warfare and international law to approve or veto military actions. This precisely exemplifies the proper use of lawfare that Dunlap had in mind: his paper included a section on “how law and lawyers are integrated into the planning and execution of air operations conducted by the United States.”

In any case, there are certainly proper uses of the law as a means of checking and deterring boycotters of Israel. The possibilities may be limited in the US on account of its broad interpretation of free speech, but anti-discrimination laws in Europe offer ample opportunities.

A key point here is to start from the apartheid lie, but to turn it on its head, as we shall now explain. The boycotters frequently claim, or tacitly presuppose, that Israel is an “apartheid state,” such that boycotts can target Israeli Jews alone. Israel’s defenders then typically respond by citing the thorough integration of Arabs into Israeli public life. That is, they limit themselves to rejecting the apartheid lie because “It’s not fair!” Instead, they should use that integration of Arabs and Jews in order to pursue lawfare against the boycotters, telling them: “This is going to hurt you.”

Consider the recent vote by the National Executive Committee of the UK’s National Union of Students to recommend a boycott of Israeli educational institutions by its members. That committee consists of leaders of unions of individual universities and colleges. Thus the motion was proposed by the students’ union of the School of Oriental and African Studies.

The lawfare approach should proceed in two stages. The first stage consists of a lawyers’ letter sent to all those who proposed or voted for the resolution and asking them to answer whether the boycott applies only to Israeli Jews or also to all the many thousands of Israeli Arabs who teach at, study at or have graduated from Israeli universities. The letter could point out that even the University of Ariel in the West Bank has several hundred Arab students.

If any of the addressees of the letter answer that the boycott does not apply to Arabs but only to Jews, then they can be prosecuted immediately under the UK’s anti-discrimination legislation. It was on these grounds that teachers’ unions in the UK were advised by their lawyers to rescind boycott resolutions.

If the addressees concede that the boycott must apply also to those Arabs, the lawyers can proceed to stage two. This is to send a letter claiming that the addressees wholly failed to make it clear to their constituencies that all the many Arab teachers, students and graduates at Israeli universities must henceforth be professionally boycotted. Consequently, the letter would continue, a legal challenge to the decision shall be mounted on the grounds that the addressees willfully misled their constituencies or even tacitly expected those constituencies to practice discrimination on the basis of race and religion, targeting only Jews and nobody else.

There is still time to challenge the National Union of Students in this manner. It requires only as much imagination as has been outlined above, and mustering the necessary lawyers’ fees. The latter should be no problem for Israel, if it truly wishes to stifle that boycott.

Clearly, the above approach can also be applied in all parallel cases, such as the medical sector in Israel, where Arabs and Jews are thoroughly integrated. The approach should have been applied when the UK’s trade unions decided to boycott their Israeli counterparts.

As was said, the approach exploits the falsity of the apartheid lie as a weapon against its propagators. A boycott of segregated South African universities would not have fallen afoul of the UK’s anti-discrimination legislation, but a boycott of integrated Israeli universities can.

Counter-Boycotts

A story that recently made headlines in Israel stemmed from the decision, at the urging of pro-Palestinian groups, of three supermarkets in Varberg, Sweden, to withdraw Israeli produce. The Ambassador of Israel to Sweden, Isaac Bachman, mobilized friends of Israel to lobby the leadership of the supermarket chain (655 branches in all) against the boycott on the grounds that “We didn’t talk about the righteousness of Israel, rather we spoke in the name of fair trade and avoiding discrimination of any state.”

What proved decisive, however, was not this “It’s not fair!” argument, but the fact that “Thousands of people heeded the call and threatened to boycott the supermarket chain if it continues its boycott against Israel.” Result: “This led the chain’s national management to reject the boycott and threaten that if the Varberg stores do not stop the boycott, they will no longer be a part of the chain, effectively putting an end to the boycott.”

Let us be precise: we do not disparage the “It’s not fair!” argument, nor do we claim that “This will hurt you” on its own is a cure-all. The secret is to use both in tandem. “It’s not fair!” is needed to reassure friends of Israel that their cause is just and to motivate their mobilization. “This will hurt you” can then be used to deter whoever promotes boycotts or — as with the Swedish supermarket chain’s national management — whoever complacently tolerates them.

The FIFA affair provides another example. Jibril Rajoub, whose terrorist credentials are impeccable, presides over the Palestinian Football Association and the Palestinian Olympic Committee. At the recent FIFA Congress, on May 25, 2015, he sought to have Israel expelled from FIFA on the basis of various petty excuses. In advance of the FIFA Congress, Prime Minister Netanyahu lobbied the president of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, who expressed strong opposition to Rajoub’s initiative, which eventually failed.

It happens that Palestinian Media Watch has assembled vast amounts of information on how Palestinian sport, under Rajoub’s leadership, is used to glorify terrorists who murdered many Israelis. This information, too, was reportedly cited by Netanyahu.

Though commendable, this does not go far enough. It would have been even more effective to mount an Israeli counter-initiative to have the Palestinian Football Association suspended from FIFA as long as it uses sport in the service of terrorism. In such cases, where two members try to expel each other from an umbrella organization, the standard reaction is to ask both sides to drop their mutual claims, thus ending the issue. As long as the claim comes from one side only, the issue remains on the agenda.

It has, in fact, been left to another Israeli initiative, Shurat HaDin, and not to official Israel, to take up this approach. Shortly after the FIFA Congress, Shurat HaDin wrote to FIFA giving “examples of PFA president Jibril Rajoub calling for terror against civilians while serving simultaneously in Fatah.” The organization provided “a slew of examples of Rajoub’s calls for violence and discrimination against Israelis” and demanded his expulsion as head of the Palestinian Football Association.

Maybe it is more effective for official Israel to let others pursue such initiatives, but it can certainly do much to encourage them. Likewise, it would have been inappropriate for the Israeli Ambassador to Sweden personally to call for a counter-boycott of the supermarket chain, but he mobilized thousands of people who did just that.

Fresh evidence against Rajoub is a Palestinian football tournament in which the competing teams were named after terrorists mass-murderers. Since Rajoub also heads the Palestinian Olympic Committee, Palestinian participation in the Olympic Games can be challenged as well. The point is that the more Rajoub himself is put under pressure and forced to account for himself, the less chance he has to cause trouble for Israel. And — who knows — maybe one day he will be replaced and Palestinian sport will cease to glorify terrorists. But this will not end Israel’s excuses for counter-harassment of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Israel can switch, among other things, to citing the PA’s naming of streets and squares after terrorist mass-murderers.

A third example starts with the Tricycle Theatre in London. In 2014, after eight years, it decided to stop hosting the UK Jewish Film Festival on the grounds that the Israeli Embassy was giving financial support. It changed its mind “after many of its own Jewish sponsors withdrew their funding in protest” and promised that in future the festival would be hosted “with no restrictions on funding.”

Maybe that partly explains why a similar call in 2015 was ignored by participating cinemas, namely, when 40 figures in the British film industry sought to stop the London Israeli Film and Television Festival. They claimed that they were not seeking to prevent the showing of Israeli films in general but only when the shows were sponsored by the Israeli government. Their argument is specious, of course: national film festivals everywhere are sponsored by national governments, and the 40 people themselves have doubtless benefited from UK public money.

Most conveniently, the 40 supplied all their individual names in a published letter. As many films today are hardly profitable if they are not distributed internationally, this necessity provides opportunities to boycott anywhere any film in which the boycotters participate. The fact that only two of the 40 are well-known names is irrelevant. A professionally produced film always ends with several minutes of credits in which everyone who has contributed in the slightest regard is listed. So with a little effort and modest financing, one could build a database checking new films and tracking the presence of any of the 40.

In general, wherever a seemingly impressive list of names is published in support of a boycott, it provides truly impressive opportunities for counter-boycotts. These are particularly important regarding cultural boycotts, where the BDS movement has enjoyed some rare successes in contrast to its failures in most fields.

Another suitable area is academics who call for boycotts of Israeli academics and academic institutions. Even if, as in the US, the prospects of lawfare are limited, the prospects of a counter-boycott are not. Very helpfully, too, such people tend to publish lists of fellow-boycotters, as they realize that an individual voice carries little weight.

Likewise, the list of those institutions whose students’ unions voted for the boycott adopted by the UK’s National Union of Students is available. Commendably, some of those institutions responded that they would ignore the call of their own students. Any institutions that did not so respond should be asked to do so and, if they fail to affirm unambiguously their opposition to the boycott, they make themselves targets for a counter-boycott. Here too, the counter-boycott can be international, since foreign students are particularly lucrative for universities.

Digging up Dirt

The basic principle here is the following: anti-Israelism typically is not an isolated practice. Rather, anti-Israelism is a symptom of institutions in crisis. Consequently, if you find an institution that has become obsessed with hostility to Israel, look at other aspects of that institution’s functioning and you are likely to find other things that are going wrong, even elements of corruption. Then start your counterattack from those other symptoms of decline by exposing them and demanding resignations. The same approach can be used to contend with individuals who are obsessed with hatred of Israel.

The present author pointed this out already in the 1990s, but the article (“Anti-Israélisme, symptôme de crise des institutions”) appeared in French and at a time when such articles did not automatically become available on internet. So it is worth going over the ground again.

There are many examples of anti-Israelism as a symptom of institutions in crisis. In the 1970s, for instance, the countries most fervently engaged in anti-Israel agitation were not the Arab states but East Germany and the Soviet Union. Neither country exists any more. For that matter, the inability of the Arab states to come to terms with the existence of Israel is just one symptom of their internal crises, such as their dismal education systems, their grave violations of human rights and now their multiple civil wars. A Google search for “Arab states failure” brings up a host of lamentations, stretching over decades, such as “Self-doomed to failure” (The Economist, 2002), “The failure of governance in the Arab world” (The Guardian, 2011), “The era of failed Arab states” (Asharq Al Awsat, 2013), and “The tragedy of the Arabs” (The Economist, 2014).

Western politicians who for decades have desperately sought a solution to the Palestinian problem, thinking that this would heal the ills of the Middle East, mistakenly inverted the relationship of cause and effect. The insolubility of the Palestinian conflict is simply one symptom among many of the inability of Arab states to solve major problems of any kind; it is not the cause of that institutional deficiency.

The current effort of François Hollande and Laurent Fabius to promote a new UN Security Council resolution on the Palestinian problem, decreeing an 18-month deadline for its solution, is the latest example of this folly. It was France, remember, that initiated the assault on the Gaddafi regime in Libya, precipitating the current disintegration of the country. Even under Gaddafi’s tyranny, no one was slaughtering Christians on the beaches and smashing up the Christian cemeteries that house the war-dead of World War II.

Among news media, the BBC has long been a subject of complaints that its reporting about Israel was biased. As early as 2004, he BBC was obliged to make an internal inquiry into the complaints, the Balen Report, which it kept secret; it spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on legal fees to defeat demands to make the report’s findings known.

Again, this was just a symptom of a wider failure within the organization. It coincided with the Hutton Inquiry (2004) into the events surrounding the death of David Kelly (2003), who committed suicide after being misquoted by a BBC journalist and after his name was revealed despite his request for confidentiality. Lord Hutton found that there had been mistakes all the way up from the journalist to the top of the BBC, especially in their refusing to admit that any mistake had been made. Eventually not just the journalist and his immediate superior resigned, but also the BBC’s chairman and director-general.

Though not always justified, of course, criticism of the BBC has continued from many sides up to this day; it is a factor in the renewed debate over the BBC’s future. A whole article in Wikipedia lists and discusses the BBC’s critics; remarkable here are confessions of bias by various former senior figures in the BBC.

When we look at churches, we can see that the fastest growth in numbers, today as in the 1990s, is found among Evangelical Christians, who commonly have a positive attitude to Israel. The Roman Catholic Church, which has undergone a beneficial revolution of attitudes to Jews and Judaism in the decades since 1965, is maintaining its position worldwide. The churches that are undergoing an increasingly rapid decline in membership are precisely those long-established Protestant churches that have become obsessed with promoting the Palestinians.

This has been documented for US churches in an exemplary study by Dexter van Zile. In the UK, the British Methodists and the Church of Scotland provide similar examples of churches that have plunged into decline simultaneous with their embracement of the Palestinian cause. Thus the one danger to the spread of Evangelical Protestantism may come from the emergence of a small number of professed Evangelicals who are urging their fellows to identify with Palestinian demands. An example is Gary Burge, who is ensconced in Wheaton College, where he leads whole generations of young impressionable Evangelicals down the same broad path. Many of the Protestant churches now in decline used to be foremost — when they still flourished — in desiring the return of the Jews to their biblical home.

To take a specific case, when Edmond L. Browning became Presiding Bishop (1985-1997) of the Episcopal Church of the USA (ECUSA), he led the way in pro-Palestinian solidarity. Out of the same misjudged liberalism, he failed to grasp the dangers inherent in demands to ordain practicing homosexuals and consecrate them as bishops, an issue that subsequently led to a split of the church and its alienation from other members of the Anglican Communion. The end of his tenure was marked by a major scandal in his office: the treasurer of the ECUSA, Ellen F. Cooke, was found to have embezzled over $2 million. It came to light only after Browning had dismissed her in 1995 on other grounds. Up to then, he had tolerated the thoroughly improper procedure whereby she was both treasurer and chief administrator, had absolute control over auditing, and had prevented any outside checking of accounts.

The example shows how pro-Palestinian activism was not an isolated phenomenon but bound up with other grave errors of judgment that both facilitated corruption and threatened the very existence of the institution. From this we learn the way to deal with a resolutely anti-Israel institution, or policy of its leaders, is not to confine oneself to complaining about its unfairness, but to search for other things wrong with it and dig them up. Whatever discredits the institution will also discredit its attitude to Israel.

Another case is the unfairness of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHCR). The justified complaint is that Israel alone is a permanent object of condemnation in all its meetings, “Item 7? on the agenda, whereas there are other countries whose human rights record is manifestly far worse than that of Israel. That is, the focus on Israel is just a symptom of the total failure of UNHRC do its job.

The UNHRC’s recent resolution on last year’s hostilities in Gaza, which can be downloaded as a document from its website or read on-line, is full of typical absurdities. For instance, it bemoans the “unprecedented levels of destruction, death and human suffering caused.” The representatives of 41 countries endorsed those words, although each of them knew that in the last four years a hundred times as many have died in Syria, the destruction there is also far greater, and the millions of Syrian refugees vastly outnumber the thousands of Gazans who lost their homes.

Merely complaining about this unfairness has achieved nothing. What might force a change would be to exploit that gross malfunction of the organization by organizing, whenever it meets, demonstrations on behalf of Iranians or Sudanese or Saudi Arabians or Chinese or whatever, demanding that each of

these countries, too, should be permanent items on the agenda. If this went on for months and years, UNHRC would either be forced to accept those demands, diluting its focus on Israel, or become an object of general contempt.

Any UN Resolution, too, includes the list of its sponsors. Just mentioning.

A similar approach can be applied to individuals. Consider academics who are fanatically hostile to Israel. You can be sure that they indulge in other forms of incompetence. So do not just complain of imbalance with regard to Israel, look for all the other elements of that individual’s defective teaching. Examine his or her publications for sloppy scholarship. (Manfred Gerstenfeld has informed us verbally that his new book, The War of a Million Cuts, contains examples of this kind.)

Today it is also easy to investigate plagiarism. Google provides a service called “Google Books,” which lets you write whole sentences and search for where they have appeared in print. To protect copyright, Google deliberately omits random pages from the books or journals that turn up, so one still has to buy the source or find it in a library if one wants to read more. But this suffices to check, for instance, whether a student’s term paper consists of passages copied from elsewhere — and likewise to check whether a university teacher is doing the same.

So far we have been describing the use of what may be called the “lower principle” — that anti-Israelism is a symptom of institutions in crisis. But there is also a “higher principle,” which may prove even more effective in the long run. To explain it, let us recall two nostrums from the world of business.

Thomas Mann earned the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 above all for his novel Buddenbrooks (1901), which describes the peak, decline and death of a family firm. In the meantime, the novel has given its name to the so-called “Buddenbrooks syndrome,” the tendency of family firms to fail in the third generation of the family.

But the novel also illustrates another nostrum: the so-called “corporate headquarters relocation challenge.” It is widely known that one of the dangerous moments in the life of a firm is when it moves into grand new headquarters. In not a few cases, the firm drifts into a steady decline for reasons that can only be speculated. This, too, happens in Buddenbrooks. The firm was flourishing as long as it was run from its old ramshackle premises. But after the confident move to an elegant new building, relationships deteriorated and faulty decisions were made.

The “higher principle,” then, is to spread awareness that anti-Israelism is a symptom of institutions in crisis; to spread it at every opportunity and so widely that it becomes a commonplace, like the Buddenbrooks syndrome and the corporate relocation challenge. Then institutions will be deterred from indulging in anti-Israelism in the first place, for fear of attracting suspicion and unpleasant attention. If there is any panacea against anti-Israelism, this might be it.

Self-Harming

Over the last decade, the Presbyterian Church of the USA (PCUSA) has seen a massive attempt by its leadership to impose a pro-Palestinian policy against the wishes of half or more of its membership. The conflict plays itself out at the meetings of the General Assembly, held every two years. In advance of the meetings, both sides mobilize funds and advocates on a massive scale. When the matter comes to a vote, victory goes sometimes to the one side, sometimes to the other, but only until next time.

In the meantime, other issues are neglected in yet another church that is steadily losing membership. A root problem is alienation between the local churches and the national headquarters in Louisville, of which the battle over Israel is just one example among others. Hence, this battle is both a symptom of internal crisis and accentuates the crisis.

On the other hand, there is no evidence that the Palestinians have benefited one whit from all this agitation or that it has affected Israel in any way. The leadership of the church is engaged in an exercise of pure self-harming.

The motions at the General Assembly focus on boycotting certain US firms, above all Caterpillar, which allegedly help Israel to maintain its presence in the West Bank. Among other things, this infuriates the many members of the PCUSA who work for Caterpillar in Peoria (four congregations in the city and five more nearby). But they need not be worried: Caterpillar’s profits are holding up and their jobs are unaffected by the follies of their church leaders. Even the Palestinian Authority itself uses Caterpillar products, and there is a Palestinian firm that has the local franchise to sell them.

In such cases, this provides a further strategy for dismaying boycotters. You simply tell them, while trying not to gloat excessively, that they are doing nothing to help the Palestinians, that they have no impact whatever on Israel, for better or for worse, but they are just harming themselves and maybe accelerating a decline toward their own extinction.

Another such church is the United Church of Christ (UCC). Its own statistics show that its membership has declined from 2,123,792 in 1955 to 943,521 in 2014. Moreover, the decline has accelerated since the year 2000, precisely when it began its obsession with Palestinians. At its latest General Synod, a motion to divest from companies “profiting from the occupation” passed overwhelmingly and a truly loony resolution, equating Israel with apartheid, also gained a small majority.

The new UCC General Minister and President, John Dorhauer, appears to be wiser than those who elected him. His comment: “I will be obligated as the officer of this denomination and by mandate of General Synod to speak publicly the action taken here. But I will do so with a deep awareness at the pain that I will cause to people who I care about deeply. And I will do so, to be quite frank, wondering if the benefits of our divesting from those companies is equal to cost to the relationships that we have with people who are critical to our movement towards justice, not just in Palestine but in many other places.”

He is sadly correct: this is another self-harming decision.

What these churches have not internalized is that nobody, whether in business or in government, is influenced by their solemn declarations, not even leading politicians who may be among their members. Even the Roman Catholic Church today has negligible influence in what used to be considered Catholic countries in Europe.

In the academic sphere, the unfinished saga of Steven Salaita, who harmed himself via Twitter, shows that social media are also a useful pitfall for boycotters. (He advocates BDS against Israeli academics, but demands immunity from it for himself.) Another, though sadder, example of self-harming is Norman Finkelstein. If, instead of intemperate denunciations of other authors, he had devoted the same energy to self-criticism, his native talents might have achieved something of worth. He is unique as a sympathizer with BDS who accuses the official BDS movement of pretending to work for peace while pursuing the destruction of Israel.

Self-harming is not confined to churches and academics; its impact can be discerned upon most kinds of boycotters. At least some Arabs have understood it: a considerable amount of Israeli-produced goods are marketed in Arab states after the labels have been changed on the way in some other country.

Indeed, it has frequently been pointed out that the contributions of Israelis to contemporary technology and medicine are such that a systematic boycott of Israel “would mean significant lifestyle changes for some consumers,” such as abandoning their computers and smartphones and choosing nobly to suffer and die from certain ailments.

The process of self-harming is autonomous. It can be enhanced, of course, by implementation of the other strategies mentioned above.

Ministerial Decisions

In the US, legislatures have adopted significant measures to combat BDS. Besides Congress itself, the legislatures of Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York State have taken such steps. More initiatives are underway. Some of these resolutions are the inverse of those adopted by churches and promise to have greater impact: they mandate divestment from companies that refuse to sell to Israel.

Back in Jerusalem, a recent investigation suggests that official Israel has so far been much more active in debating what to do about BDS than in actually doing anything about it. Moreover, the scope of the debate was narrow: Should left-wing organizations, like J-Street and B’Tselem, be mobilized to promote (guess what!) the “It’s not fair!” argument? What we have seen above shows that however and whenever this debate ends, the result will make little difference. J-Street, by the way, was opposed to the decision of Congress to combat BDS.

So with some exceptions, like Ambassador Bachman, official Israel’s contribution to combating BDS has been ineffective. To make things worse, there are official decisions that unwittingly facilitate it.

While many Christian churches freely operate in Israel, only ten have an official autonomous status. Nine of them acquired that status before the establishment of the State of Israel; the tenth, the Episcopal (Anglican) Church was granted that status in 1970. Recently, there has been constant lobbying of Israeli officials by churches abroad to add one more church to the list. The church concerned has a few hundred members, almost none of whom live in Israel. It does have a congregation in the Old City of Jerusalem, but the church itself refuses to recognize the Old City as part of the State of Israel.

What makes the request most problematic, however, is that although some of the pastors are sincere Christians who stick to their pastoral concerns, the most likely replacement for the current bishop, who is close to retirement age, is one of the most prominent advocates of BDS and an author of the notorious Kairos Palestine Document. He is a regular lobbyist at the General Assembly of the PCUSA, among other churches in North America and Europe. His so-called “sermon” at the recent General Synod of the UCC earned him a standing ovation and swayed minds; without it, at least the “apartheid” motion might not have passed. Granting his church the coveted official status would strengthen his position in the case of him becoming bishop, but attempts to explain this to Israelis are met with incomprehension.

More serious than that is the current narrow-minded debate over the massive natural gas fields discovered in Israeli territorial waters. As was pointed out two years ago, this elevates Israel to the status of a Gulf state: namely, a state whose natural resources are so much in demand that attempts to boycott it are unthinkable. Specifically, Israel has the opportunity to achieve the status of Qatar, which is invulnerable to criticism despite its disregard of the human rights of its foreign workers and fomenting Islamic extremism worldwide.

What makes Qatar unusual is that whereas other Gulf states have oil, of which there are many alternative suppliers, Qatar has a rich supply of natural gas. When it comes to natural gas, Western Europe is faced with the awkward choice between terrorist supporter Qatar and Russia, with which it is embroiled over the Ukraine and which could threaten to turn off the taps. So an alternative supply from Israel and Cyprus, which have agreed to cooperate, would be highly welcome and confer Qatar’s invulnerability on Israel.

All well and good, until Israeli politicians became resentful of the amazing success of Noble Energy in discovering the gas fields, after British Gas had withdrawn in despair at ever finding worthwhile quantities of gas. Their agitation led to a law in 2011 that retroactively imposed large new taxes on top of the contracts signed by Israel with Noble.

As Caroline Glick has pointed out in an accurate analysis, the decision caused dismay in the international business world, and is at least a factor in the halving of foreign direct investment in Israel from $11.8 billion in 2013 to $6.4 billion in 2014. If so, Israelis have succeeded in harming themselves to an extent that boycotters could only dream of.

Noble and its fellow investors, including the Israeli firm Delek, reluctantly agreed and signed new contracts with Israel. Then, last December, the Israeli official charged with investigating monopolies used his statutory powers to tear up all those contracts, claiming that ownership of the gas fields must be split up to encourage competition. Despite Netanyahu’s best efforts, Israeli institutions have not yet removed this obstacle. An attempt to do so in the Knesset has just failed, since Netanyahu could not muster a majority, thanks to the usual attempts of minor politicians to gain traction.

Other necessary requirements, such as the construction of pipelines and gas liquefaction plants, cannot even be discussed until this issue is dealt with. Note that while Noble and its partners already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in finding the gas fields, exploiting the gas will require billions more. But any investor will be deterred by Israel’s record of revoking signed contracts. The exploitation of the biggest discoveries may be years away.

What nobody involved has noticed is that to get Israel’s natural gas flowing to Europe may contribute more to combating BDS than everything else put together. But that prospect has been deferred to the indefinite future.

9.Turkey’s View of Terror by Burak Bekdil http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6114/turkey-terrorism July 7, 2015 at 4:00 am

Turkey’s Islamist government, now squeezed in a political drama in which it lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since 2002, has in many recent years boldly challenged its Western allies by calling them to join an allied fight against terror. But the target was not al-Qaeda, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or one of the dozens of different Islamist groups designated by the civilized world as terrorist.

Instead, Turkey wanted the West to fight the “terrorist state, Israel.”

Turkey’s Islamist rulers have a deeply corrupted perception of which acts count for terror and which ones do not: Anyone who kills in the name of a cause other than Islamism is probably a terrorist.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan once publicly declared a 15-year-old boy, who was shot by the police and died after many months in a coma, “a terrorist.”

In a claim never proven, Erdogan said the boy was carrying a slingshot in his pocket. He was hit in the head by a tear gas canister fired by anti-riot police. In Erdogan’s thinking, the boy was a terrorist because he was hit during anti-government protests, he was carrying a slingshot and he was an Alevi (a member of a heterodox Muslim Shi’ite religious minority).

In 2013, the world was shocked at the dramatic death tolls in Kenya and Pakistan, when jihadists, in separate attacks over one weekend, killed more than 150 innocent people — with the Kenya attack claiming victims aged between two and 78.

Erdogan, then prime minister, looked very sad indeed — but not for the victims of the terror attacks. He was mourning Asmaa al-Beltagi, a poor, 17-year-old Egyptian girl who had been shot dead by security forces in Cairo, as she was protesting the ouster of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, in a coup d’état. Asmaa’s father was a senior Brotherhood figure; after her death, Erdogan once even shed tears during a televised interview. He then commemorated the girl at almost every election rally.

One of Erdogan’s favorite statements is his famous line, “There is no Islamic terror.” Erdogan also rejects outright any link between Muslims and massacres or genocide.

Last November, after a meeting in Paris with French President François Hollande, Erdogan accused “those who try to portray ISIS as an Islamic organization….” Fortunately, he did not claim that ISIS was a Jewish organization. But funny, the organization he says is not “Islamic,” flags itself as the “Islamic State”…

The Turkish Islamist show of ridiculous denials continues on at full pace. The latest wave of Islamist violence, in five different corners across the world, once again unveiled Turkey’s hypocritical take on terrorism. On June 25, ISIS attacked a Kurdish town in northern Syria and slaughtered over 140 people, including women and children.

Then, on June 26, there was the terrorist attack at a tourist hotel in Sousse, east Tunisia. The attack left at least 37 people dead, including many foreign tourists, and injured 36 others. In a separate attack the same day in Kuwait, 25 people were killed and 202 were injured in a suicide bombing that targeted a Shia mosque during Friday prayers. ISIS claimed responsibility for both attacks. Meanwhile, Yassin Salhi, who murdered one man (his employer) at a U.S.-owned industrial gas factory in southern France, was reported to be well known to the French intelligence service for his alleged links with Salafist groups.

Finally, on July 1, the Islamic State killed 50 people in attacks in Egypt’s north Sinai.

That put the one-week death toll at nearly 260.

Did the Turks watch a weeping president on television in the face of such violent human tragedy, as he had wept for the poor girl from the Muslim Brotherhood? Not at all.

Instead, quite dry statements from Erdogan’s office and the Turkish foreign ministry merely condemned the killings in Tunisia, Kuwait and France. “These bloody assaults, which target Kuwait and Tunisia’s peace and stability and aim to trigger sectarian clashes in Kuwait, reveal the importance of regional and international cooperation in fighting against terrorism,” Erdogan said in a written statement.

Erdogan should be able to understand that fighting terrorism cannot succeed without a necessary first step: Why are these terrorists terrorizing? What is the ideology they fight for? Are they fighting to impose onto others by force the laws stipulated in Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Shintoist holy books? If their acts of terror are not related to Islam, to what are they related?

Erdogan will never be viewed as a reliable partner in any anti-terror fight before he gives honest and public answers to those questions.

This must be how Erdogan’s Western partners engage in private, top-secret dialogues with him in their anti-terror fight:

President of an ally: “You know, Mr. President, the acts of terror they commit in the name of Islam…”

Erdogan: “No, shut up, they have nothing to do with Islam.”

President of an ally: “But President we all know why they kill, and mostly they kill other Muslims…”

Erdogan: “It has nothing to do with Islam.”

President of an ally: “But Mr. President…”

Erdogan: “Nothing to do with Islam.”

Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the Hürriyet Daily & Fellow at the ME Forum.

10.Western Scandals in the Middle East by Bassam Tawil

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6126/western-scandals-middle-east July 9, 2015 at 5:00 am

The Islamic world is currently marking the month of Ramadan with day-long fasts; during this time every Muslim must give a reckoning to Allah on the personal level, the familial level, the local level and the level of the nation of Islam. Like the Israelis, Palestinians are now taking stock of the year that has passed since the 50-day war between Hamas and Israel — what the Israelis call “Operation Protective Edge,” and Hamas calls “Operation Solid.” The report of the commission that investigated the conflict, written by pro-Palestinian Prof. William Schabas and signed by Ms. Mary Davis, did not surprise anyone in Palestine.

Even before the report was published, we knew what it would say: every investigatory committee dealing with the Palestinian cause always sides against Israel, but never changes anything or influence the situation on the ground. As a Palestinian, I was glad the report made both Hamas and Israel equally responsible for the aggression, but to what avail? The result of this — and all the previous reports — only perpetuates the Palestinian problem.

All the UN agencies condemn Israel, but no one ever helps the Palestinians. UNRWA has its own reasons for not resolving the issue of the Palestinian refugees (it is nearly impossible to close down a jobs program) and it provides Hamas terrorists with convenient installations from which to attack Israel with rockets.

It is scandal of global proportions that the UN in general and UNRWA in particular — as well as the EU — ignore the hundreds of thousands of killed and maimed and the millions of refugees desperately in need of aid in neighboring Arab countries. Apparently Qatar has bought their leaders, as it bought the World Cup from the heads of FIFA.

The UN’s Schabas-Davis Report is biased in favor of the Palestinians, which at first glance would seem to serve our interests, but in reality it hurts us, because it gives Hamas moral legitimacy at the expense of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Thus Hamas’s popularity accelerates, so the various Palestinian factions will never be able to overcome their differences, resolve our internal issues and establish a state.

The sad truth is that Hamas started the last war against Israel. It began close to the time when Hamas and the Palestinian Authority had decided to establish a national consensus government. PA leader Mahmoud Abbas was willing to establish a government with Ismail Haniyeh’s illegal de facto administration in the Gaza Strip, and conveniently to forget that in 2006, Hamas had thrown Fatah leaders and commanders from the roofs of the highest buildings in the Gaza Strip, expelled some and shot others.

Abbas’s motives for establishing a national consensus government were honest. He wanted to be the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and to mend the deadly internal schism that had created two Palestinian states, one in the Gaza Strip and one in the West Bank. His motives were positive, but Hamas’s were negative. Hamas wanted to use the national consensus government as a conduit to transfer funds from Qatar to the Gaza Strip, because the president of Egypt had closed the tunnels Hamas needed to smuggle arms and money into the Gaza Strip.

Thus, as soon as the national consensus government was established, the Gazans demanded that the PA transfer funds from Qatar to pay for the weapons and tunnels used to attack Israel, and to pay the blood money of its terrorist operatives and the bloated “administration” of its cronies.

Abbas agreed, but conditioned the transfer on using Palestinian Authority representatives as middlemen who would man checkpoints on the Gaza Strip’s borders with Israel and Egypt. He assumed that in this way, the PA would be able gradually to return to control the Gaza Strip. Unfortunately, Hamas rejected the proposal, and to this day Hamas refuses to allow any senior Palestinian Authority official to enter the Gaza Strip.

Part of the national consensus government agreement was that elections would be held within six months of its forming, but Hamas abducted three Jewish youths and murdered them to effect the release of Palestinians from Israeli jails, to gain more popularity and to take control of the elections in the West Bank.

Hamas also planned a putsch in the West Bank to kill Abbas in case its electoral plan failed, but its terror cells and their weapons were exposed by the Israelis in collaboration with the PA security forces, and the plot failed.

In response to Israel’s actions after the three youths were murdered, Hamas initiated a barrage of rocket fire targeting Israeli towns and cities, and infiltrated squads of its terrorists into Israel through the tunnels under the Israel-Gaza border, and by sea, exploiting Gazan civilians as human shields.

The Israeli response to Hamas’s attack was harsh and determined: more than 2,500 Gazans were killed, about half of them terrorist operatives, and the destruction wreaked upon the Gaza Strip and its infrastructure was unprecedented.

The money promised by the Arab states for Gaza’s reconstruction never arrived, and the real question is: Why was all this necessary? And why did Hamas not use the billions it received over the years to build what should have become the Singapore, or the Riviera, of the Middle East?

It is therefore no wonder the Israelis feel that if they withdraw from the West Bank, they — and Jordan — will have to contend not only with another Hamas-run state on their eastern border, but with ISIS on their border as well. It is no secret that Hamas and ISIS in the Sinai Peninsula are presently menacing both Israel and Egypt.

Despite being in the middle of Ramadan, introspection or not, Hamas has evidently learned nothing from the past year. Hamas has stopped attacking Israel with rockets — not only because it fears Israel’s response, but because Israel allows food and cement to enter the Gaza Strip. Hamas and Israel are apparently are holding discussions for a long-term hudna [temporary cessation of hostilities].

However, discussions or not, while ignoring its damaged buildings, Hamas clearly has sufficient funds to rebuild its attack tunnels and replenish its rocket arsenal — while it exports its terrorism to us on the West Bank. It operates terrorist cells to attack Israeli civilians and to embroil the Palestinian Authority in another intifada, with the goal of toppling it. And Hamas does it all under the sanctimonious aegis of investigatory commissions that arrive from the clueless West, and end up justifying its actions.

Israeli security forces recently detained 80 Hamas terrorists in Nablus, in the West Bank. Shortly thereafter, the Palestinian preventive security forces detained 104 Hamas operatives and dismantled a giant Hamas network that had been planning to overthrow the Palestinian Authority, all funded by Qatar (again) and Turkey.

To this day, it is unclear why the Americans remain silent in the face of Qatar’s continuing activity as a global terrorism-sponsoring state. Is it because an American military base is stationed there, or is there is some other reason?

During the war last summer, which took place during Ramadan as well, Hamas fired rockets at Jerusalem, home to the Al-Aqsa mosque and the holy sites of the other monotheistic religions. As a Muslim, I hang my head in shame when Palestinians claim “Al-Aqsa mosque is in danger” under the Israelis, when it is we who endanger it.

This year Ramadan is again rent by mutual Palestinian accusations, with senior Palestinian Authority security official Adnan Damiri claiming, logically, that Hamas wants to destroy the PA and collaborate with ISIS. Hamas spokesmen Musheir al-Masri and Izzat al-Rishq claim, on the other hand, that the Palestinian Authority collaborates with Israel and, during Ramadan, is “stabbing Hamas in the back.”

Hamas Musheir al-Masri

Hamas’s hypocrisy has gone beyond the confines not only of good taste, but of logic. While Hamas is currently in the process of discussing a hudna with Israel, Israel allows cement and other humanitarian merchandise to enter the Gaza Strip, and Hamas uses them to rebuild terrorist tunnels.

While Hamas’s leaders are afraid to take direct action against Israel, they are trying to use Hamas and ISIS terrorists to destroy the West Bank, and then they have the nerve to accuse the Palestinian Authority of collaborating with the enemy.

Adnan Damiri was right: if we look around, it is clear that the only safe places in the Middle East are Israel and the occupied territories in the West Bank. We cannot allow ISIS to visit mass destruction on the Palestinians and destroy what we still have left in the West Bank.

Given the current situation, it is obvious why the Israelis are afraid to abandon their control over the border with Jordan, and why they trust only themselves. If they abandon the border with Jordan, millions of Palestinians, along with ISIS and Hamas operatives and other terrorists, will flood the West Bank and destroy both us and the Israelis.

Anyone who believes in international guarantees need only look at the massacres in the Arab states: these slaughters are carried out openly without anyone lifting a finger to stop them. The UN forces in the Golan Heights also do nothing to stop the massacre of Syrians, just as the UN forces in south Lebanon did nothing to prevent Hezbollah from rearming. In fact, about a week ago, Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyadh al-Maliki courageously referred to the collaboration of Hamas and ISIS in the Sinai Peninsula as part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s war against the regime of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Do we really want to endanger the Jordanian Kingdom in the same way?

When we take stock this Ramadan, another surreal situation made its presence known. While Mahmoud Abbas and his followers are afraid to enter the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset, Basel Ghattas, joined an international flotilla trying to break Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza Strip. The blockade was put in place to keep weapons from entering the Gaza Strip by sea.

The stupidity of Basel Ghattas, who swore allegiance to the Israeli Knesset, strengthens Hamas — which would destroy the Palestinian Authority before it would destroy the Jews and the State of Israel. What was Ghattas thinking? Does he want to strengthen Hamas, which will mean the collapse of the PA in the West Bank and harm to Jordan — all while Hamas and ISIS threaten the security of Egypt?

Meanwhile, the recent declaration of Saudi Arabia’s Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal regarding open Saudi-Israel cooperation is a good beginning for a new alliance — and there is no better time than Ramadan to do it. Bassam Tawil is based in the Middle East.