Dear Family & Friends,

Shimon Peres was buried today on Mt. Herzl. Herein are many stories about some of the achievements regarding the “settlement enterprise”. To allow for smooth traffic for the many foreign VIPs arriving for the levaya, roads have been closed off & on all day (& last night) – so I must run to Shabbat very quickly.

Also some photos of demolishing AMONA in 2013. More before Yom Kippur. Let it be a cautionary tale.

All the very best for a wonderful Shabbat before Rosh HaShana Sunday night, Monday & Tuesday.

Gail/Geula/Savta/Savta Raba x 2/Mom

2.’Peres played a role in the settlement enterprise’: Daniella Weiss

3.’Peres was proud of Ofra’

4. Amona Photo Wins Pulitzer 3 years ago

5.Choosing which Peres to remember By Michael Freund

6.Settlers eulogize Peres, too, for helping to create their West Bank enclaves

7.NY Gov. Cuomo, NJ Gov. Christie Cancel Trip to Peres Funeral Due to Deadly Train Crash in Hoboken

Tower Click here to read the latest issue of THE TOWER MAGAZINE!

1.Shimon Peres, Last Founding Father of Israel, Dies at 93

by Aiden Pink | 09.27.16 8:28 pm

Shimon Peres, the Nobel Prize-winning former Prime Minister and President of Israel, died Wednesday morning local time at the age of 93. He entered the hospital September 13 after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke.

The last of Israel’s living political leaders who had been involved in the founding of the Jewish state, Peres was instrumental in shaping Israel’s politics, and particularly its defense and foreign affairs, for nearly 70 years. Peres will be remembered for his decisive contributions to Israel’s defense and strategic capabilities in the state’s first three decades, his economic leadership during the country’s most acute crisis in the 1980s, his controversial and dramatic attempts at achieving peace in the 1990s, and, as President, his restoration of the institution of the presidency in the 2000s. He served as a top aide to Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, a cabinet member for Golda Meir, a bitter rival-turned-political ally of Yitzhak Rabin, and a surprising supporter of Ariel Sharon.

Peres also served as Prime Minister three times, for a total of nearly three years—two months in 1977 following the resignation of Yitzhak Rabin, two years in the 1980s as part of a power-sharing agreement with the Likud’s Yitzhak Shamir, and seven months following the assassination of Rabin, his longtime Labor Party colleague and rival, in 1995. Peres, Rabin, and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the previous year for their roles in negotiating the Oslo Accords. After Rabin’s death, Peres was unable to complete his vision of a “New Middle East”—the title of his most famous book—in which an Israel at peace with a Palestinian state would forge economic partnerships with Arab countries. After a wave of Palestinian terror attacks, which much of the Israeli public believed Arafat to have directed but blamed Peres for failing to have stopped, the prime minister lost the subsequent Knesset election to Benjamin Netanyahu. Nonetheless, he continued to play an important role in Israeli politics, joining with Ariel Sharon to create the Kadima party in 2005 and culminating in his 2007-14 tenure as Israel’s president.

Peres was born Szymon Perski on August 2, 1923 in Vishnyeva, a town in what is now Belarus. He was the son of Yitzhak, a wealthy merchant, and Sara, a librarian. At the age of four, Yitzhak took him to visit Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan (the writer of the seminal book of ethics Chofetz Chaim), who gave him a blessing. Yitzhak immigrated to Tel Aviv in 1932, with the rest of his family joining two years later. While some family members had already left Europe by that point (including the grandfather of movie legend Lauren Bacall), most who remained in the town were killed in the Holocaust.

Thirteen-year old Shimon Peres in Poland. Photo credit: GPO

Peres was active in Labor Zionism from an early age, working on kibbutzim and leading youth groups, where he caught the eye of Ben-Gurion, the leader of the pre-state Yishuv government-in-waiting. In 1945, Peres married Sonya Gelman, with whom he would have three children. Sonya died in 2011.

Ben-Gurion made Peres his protégé, choosing him and Moshe Dayan to serve as delegates for the 1946 World Zionist Congress. The following year, Ben-Gurion made Peres responsible for all arms purchases for the Haganah, the pre-state Jewish military. In this role, Peres coordinated the sales—and in some cases, the smuggling—of weapons from all over the world to help prepare the Haganah for what all knew would be a bloody and difficult war for statehood. Peres proved to be a highly effective manager during Israel’s War of Independence, and quickly rose up the ranks in the military sphere. In 1953, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion appointed him Director-General of the Defense Ministry. He was 29 years old.

Shimon Peres, Dir. Gen. of the IDF at the age of 29. Photo credit: GPO

Peres’ creativity and negotiation skills helped transform the Israel Defense Forces from ragtag refugees with cast-off and often faulty equipment into an elite military force with state-of-the-art supplies. He did this despite continued arms embargoes on the country by, for example, purchasing parts of fighter planes piece-by-piece, assembling them in rural California, and then having volunteer pilots fly them to Israel via the North Pole to avoid detection.

Nearly single-handedly, Peres engineered Israel’s first military partnership with a major power by forging close personal and professional ties with political and military elites in France. Israel needed better weaponry to dissuade an increasingly belligerent Egypt from invading again; France, still recovering economically from World War II, needed cash, as well as intelligence to help quell the revolution in Algeria.

The partnership, which was forged in the 1956 Suez Crisis, grew so close that Peres was able to persuade the French to help build Israel’s domestic nuclear program in Dimona. The initiative was to have profound consequences for the future of the country. “Dimona helped us to achieve Oslo,” Peres told Time in February. “Because many Arabs, out of suspicion, came to the conclusion that it’s very hard to destroy Israel because of it, because of their suspicion. Well, if the result is Dimona, I think I was right.”

Peres was elected to the Knesset in 1959 as part of Ben-Gurion’s Mapai party (the predecessor to today’s Labor Party). Ben-Gurion appointed him Deputy Defense Minister, one of many cabinet positions he served in 48 years in parliament (among the others: Minister of Immigrant Absorption, Minister of Transport and Communications, Minister of Information, Defense Minister, Finance Minister, and Foreign Minister).

Peres was never entirely able to escape his reputation as a wheeler-dealer; compared to Rabin, the war hero who was his decades-long rival for Labor Party leadership following Golda Meir’s retirement, Peres was perceived by the public to be an elitist bureaucrat. His strategic acumen was usually a boon: As Prime Minister from 1984-1986, he led the “Economic Stabilization Plan” that saved the country’s economy and lowered inflation from 450 percent to 14 percent.

But his implacable optimism, desire for peace, and steadfast belief in his own negotiating skills nearly torpedoed his political career multiple times—such as a failed House of Cards-esque maneuver in 1990 that would have toppled the governing coalition in favor a smaller, more dovish one that he would lead, a move that was dubbed “the stinking trick.”

PM Shimon Peres takes notes in his seat in the Knesset, 1986. Photo: Nati Harnik GPO

As foreign minister to Rabin, who retook control of Labor in 1992, Peres was the official supervisor of secret [Gail sez: & illegal] negotiations with the PLO, which ultimately culminated in the Oslo Accords and a Nobel Prize. But after Peres assumed the premiership following Rabin’s assassination in November 1995, Israelis began to sour on continued negotiations with Arafat, who was widely seen as responsible for the rise of suicide bombings and other terror attacks.

The May 1996 election was the first time that the prime minister was elected directly (a system that has since been cancelled). Netanyahu upset the favored Peres 50.5% to 49.5%. Peres actually led in the first reported exit polls, spawning the phrase that the country “went to sleep with Peres and woke up with Netanyahu.”

Though still a member of the Knesset, Peres was replaced as Labor leader by Ehud Barak and essentially cast into the political wilderness. But after Arafat walked away from peace negotiations with Barak and U.S. President Bill Clinton, the beginning of a series of events that culminated in the Second Intifada and the election of Ariel Sharon, Peres in 2001 once again became Foreign Minister as part of a Labor-Likud unity government—at the age of 78. He helped Labor support Sharon’s Gaza disengagement plan, before leaving the party in 2005 to serve as the deputy leader in Sharon’s new Kadima party.

In 2007, Peres completed his final political reinvention when the Knesset appointed him as Israel’s ninth president. The largely ceremonial office of the president was tarnished after the previous officeholder, Moshe Katzav, resigned after being accused of rape, sexual harassment, and obstruction of justice (crimes for which he was eventually convicted). Peres, from the ages of 84 to 90, reinvigorated the position, strengthening Israel’s image abroad while working on Israeli-Palestinian peace and cooperation initiatives through the government and through his foundation, the Peres Center for Peace.

When his term expired in 2014, Peres promised to maintain his presence on the political stage. He remained active through the Peres Center, on the internet, and at international conferences and ceremonies, where he received the Congressional Gold Medal and the French legion d’honneur, among other prizes.

“I will not give up my right to serve my people and my country,” he said in his July 2014 farewell speech, which took place during the third war between Israel and Hamas in seven years. “And I will continue to help build my country, with a deep belief that one day it will know peace.”

[Cover photo: Hadas Parush / Flash90]

Shimon Peres, Last Founding Father of Israel, Dies at 93

2.’Peres played a role in the settlement enterprise’ says Daniella Weiss by Benny Tocker, 29/09/16 04:46

Nachala movement leader Daniella Weiss:

Daniella Weiss points out Peres’s contribution to the settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria, but also can’t forget Oslo.

Shimon Peres by Flash 90 Daniella Weiss, former mayor of Kedumim & leader of the Nachala settlement movement, on Wednesday recalled Shimon Peres’s contribution to the settlement enterprise in Judea & Samaria.

“The left talks about Peres’s sin, the beginning of the massive settlement in areas liberated during the Six Day War. Even though the breakthrough was in Gush Etzion and in Hevron with Rabbi Hanan Porat and Rabbi Levinger, the signing of the Sebastia agreement with Shimon Peres was actually the beginning of the massive Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria,” Weiss told Arutz Sheva.

“It is not for nothing that the left refers to the Sebastia agreement as Shimon Peres’s ancient sin. I remember we gave him a bouquet of flowers. He took this historic step even though he did not agree with our being in Judea and Samaria,” she added.

At the same time, Weiss continued, one cannot ignore the Oslo Accords and in this regard, Peres made a huge mistake.

“He thought of a new Middle East, but the exact opposite happened and Peres made a bad mistake,” she said. “Peres’s contribution to the breakthrough in Samaria compared to the damages of Oslo and the illusion of a new Middle East is an historic contribution, and I am happy that there is settlement in the midst of the terrible chaos of Oslo.

“Oslo was a disaster with all the terror that followed it, but I do not want to judge on a day like today. Thank God that the settlement enterprise began 40 years ago, and we will only grow from here,” concluded Weiss.

3.’Peres was proud of Ofra’

Former Binyamin Regional Council Head recounts how Shimon Peres was proud & supportive of the fledgling community in Judea & Samaria.

O

OFRA

Pinchas Wallerstein photo by Eliran Aharon

Former Head of the Binyamin Regional Council Pinchas Wallerstein told Arutz Sheva about Shimon Peres’ role in the establishment of, and support for, communities in Judea and Samaria – though he was hard-pressed to reconcile these actions with the Oslo Accords that Peres initiated.

Wallerstein said that he did not believe that Peres’ support for Judea and Samaria communities stemmed from narrow interests related to his political rivalry with Yitzhak Rabin, nor did it stem from his being a Land of Israel activist.

“When Ofra was a temporary labor camp, then Defense Minister Peres came [to Ofra] to plant a tree; more than that, he instructed military industry personnel in the Ministry of Defense to enable the metal shop in Ofra to manufacture ladders for Kfir fighter jets, so [the metal workers in Ofra] would have a livelihood.”

In a later period, on his 80th birthday, Peres sent BBC journalists to Ofra to take pictures in Ofra so that they could see what the community had built. “This shows how, decades after the founding of Ofra, he was proud of the community’s establishment. How does this mesh with his support of the Oslo Accords? That is impossible to explain,” Wallerstein said.

UPROOTING AMONA

‘Uprooting Amona rewards radical left-wing groups’

UPROOTING AMONA

Jerusalem Post.com 09/28/2016 21:13 There will be plenty of time and opportunities for future historians and analysts to assess the totality of the individual, his accomplishments and failings.

Shimon Peres during an interview with Reuters at his residence in Jerusalem, June 2013. (photo credit:Reuters)

The demise this week of former president and prime minister Shimon Peres, who served as one of the last living links with the heroic generation that founded this country, is a milestone event, the kind of moment in a nation’s life that cannot but evoke collective and personal introspection.
In death, as in life, Peres remains an intriguing conundrum. Few historical figures have left such an indelible and undeniable mark on the nation they helped to forge and lead, leaving behind a complicated legacy that stirs up a broad range of sentiments among differing sectors of the population.

For those of us on the Right, in particular, Peres’ career encompassed a complex array of actions, prompting many to wonder how best to remember the man and his legacy.
Consider the following: As defense minister in 1974, Peres played a key role in the revival of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria.
Despite opposition from prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Peres pushed for and granted the approval for the establishment of Ofra, north of Ramallah, which is now a thriving community of more than 3,000 Jews.
There is a well-known photo of Peres planting a tree at the site, and it is said that the sapling remains in place until today.
And yet, barely two decades later, in 1993, Peres served as one of the architects of the Oslo process, which ultimately sought to undermine the very same Jewish presence in the territories that he had previously championed.
The Jewish presence in the holy city of Hebron also owes a debt of gratitude to Peres.
In an interview last year with the Israeli news site Walla, Hebron Jewish community spokesman Noam Arnon told a remarkable story about a meeting with Peres that took place toward the end of 1975, when he was part of a delegation of Jews headed by Rabbi Moshe Levinger who went to see the defense minister.
At the time, the Jewish community of Kiryat Arba, adjacent to Hebron, was already in existence, but no Jews yet resided in the heart of the ancient city itself.
Speaking with Peres, Rabbi Levinger raised the subject of the Avraham Avinu synagogue, which was built in 1540 in Hebron’s Jewish Quarter but had stood empty after the 1929 Arab massacre of Hebron’s Jews. When Jordan seized control over the area in 1948, they turned the site of the synagogue into a goat and donkey pen.
According to Arnon’s account, when Rabbi Levinger began to explain the sanctity of the site and its importance, Peres cut him off and said, “Do you think I am a goy and that I don’t know what a synagogue is?” Shortly thereafter, Peres granted permission to rehabilitate & refurbish the synagogue, thereby laying the groundwork for the ultimate reestablishment of Hebron’s Jewish community.
“Not that there weren’t further struggles over the matter,” Arnon recalled, “but the greatest and most important breakthrough was the meeting with Peres.”
Nevertheless, in March 2007, while serving as deputy prime minister, Peres described the presence of Jews in Hebron as an “unbearable situation.”
So what is a right-winger to make of all this? Like many of my ideological compatriots, over the past two decades I was adamantly opposed to Peres’ policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians, and especially his embrace of PLO terrorist chieftain Yasser Arafat and his willingness to cede parts of the Land of Israel to our foes.
I believed then, as I do now, that the Oslo process was the single greatest strategic disaster in the modern State of Israel’s history & that its ramifications continue to cast a deep shadow over the country.
But I also believe there is no denying that Peres was a man who dedicated himself to the State of Israel, and that now is not the time to engage in political diatribes or denunciations.
Simply put, Peres is one of the most fascinating figures in the annals of the country, a man who took part in the uphill struggle to carve out and secure a sovereign Jewish entity in the Middle East.
His contributions to Israel’s defense, such as the development of the Jewish state’s nuclear program in the 1950s and 1960s, are indisputable, and have made us all safer.
Whatever one may have thought of the man and his policies, Peres’s death is a time to focus on his role in some of the country’s greatest triumphs, rather than to harp on his part in some of its grandest disasters.
Human beings are complex creatures, full of incongruities, and Peres was no exception.
So while I disagreed with his vision over the past 25 years, and believe it to have been decidedly misguided, the Shimon Peres I prefer to remember in light of his death is the one who demonstrated just how much one person can accomplish over the course of a lifetime.
There will be plenty of time and opportunities for future historians and analysts to assess the totality of the individual, his accomplishments and failings.
But for now, let us recall with admiration Israel’s “greatest generation,” and the man who embodied its challenges and contradictions, in all their vigor and robustness.

Then-PM Shimon Peres in settlement of Ma’ale Efraim, West Bank. 1985 Hananiya Herman, GPO

6.Settlers eulogize Peres, too, for helping to create their West Bank enclaves

Related Articles

Was Shimon Peres a man of peace?

Shimon Peres: From nuclear pioneer to champion of peace

The message was clear; after his passing, the settlers also want to embrace Peres.

Then-prime minister Shimon Peres in settlement of Ma’ale Efraim, West Bank. 1985 Hananiya Herman, GPO

Read more on Shimon Peres: The countless contradictions of the late and great Shimon Peres | Obama, world leaders mourn Peres | Shimon Peres, the eternal immigrant | Peres’ quixotic battle for Israeli-Palestinian peace | Peres, 1923-2016: an interactive timeline

Peres and the settlers had a complex relationship – more complicated than what ultimately became entrenched in global public perception. He was an architect of the Oslo Accords, and even as president he was a driving force behind promoting Israeli-Palestinian peace.

But branding him as someone who categorically opposed the settlements is misleading. Just as Peres was the spirit behind the peace process, he was also the spirit that enabled some of the first Israeli settlements built on the West Bank to arise.

The West Bank settlement of Ofra, in 2012. Chaim Levinson

The statement issued by the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria upon his death pretty much summarizes this complexity.

“At this time, we choose to remember the great contribution Shimon Peres made to establishing Israel’s security infrastructure from its first days, and his substantial contribution to Jewish settlement in Samaria. He was one of the founders and trailblazers of the state, and despite the various disputes over the years we will remember his consistent support for settlement as the defense minister who brought about the breakthrough in Samaria & the establishment of the settlements of Ofra & Kedumim & for his laying the groundwork for the establishment & consolidation of additional communities.”

Indeed, Peres made a very significant contribution to the establishment of Ofra and Kedumim. In 1975, when members of Gush Emunim, the prominent settler movement of the time, tried to set up an outpost at the abandoned train station in Sebastia, Peres came to visit them.

Although he did insist that the settlers leave the site, he subsequently allowed a few dozen families to settle in the nearby Kadum military base, which eventually became the settlement of Kedumim. That same year, the first settlers moved in to Ofra, as well.

Benny Katzover, one of the early Gush Emunim members among those who demonstrated in Sebastia, says that when Peres came to the site he was welcomed with cries of happiness.

“We were happy because the assumption was that the issue would finally be taken care of,” he said. “Eight times we went there, and eight times we were removed. He would express publicly that we had the right, that we have settle the Samarian mountain ridge, and there was the feeling that his arrival pointed to some kind of arrangement.”

They were surprised to hear Peres say he had come to remove them.

“He told us he’d been sent by the government to demand that we leave. [Ariel] Sharon, who was with us the whole time, gave us the feeling and many hints that things could work out,” Katzover said.

“During that period Zionism had been condemned by the United Nations as a racist movement. [Then Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin recruited all the world’s Jewish leaders to come to Jerusalem.

Some of them we even managed to bring to the train station at Sebastia. The feeling was that it was going to work out, but against all expectations, Peres insisted that we leave.”

Peres left the site, but a short time later summoned the group’s leaders to his office in Tel Aviv.

“We come to the office in Tel Aviv, and there Peres opened with the announcement, ‘I’m interested in closing this up. Let’s not conduct negotiations like the Histadrut.’

“We wrote up three-four clauses, after each clause he went to a side room and spoke to whomever he spoke to – I understood it to be the prime minister, but he never told us – about every clause, and that’s how we ended up with what is now called the Sebastia compromise, when we were moved to Kadum,” Katzover said.

The connection with Peres continued, and the feeling was that he supported the West Bank settlers, Katsover said. “When he was still the postal minister he set up four telephone centers for us in Kiryat Arba, and his opinions, which today are considered right-wing, were well known. He visited us afterward in Kadum.”

As Katzover sees it, Peres veered leftward at the end of the 1970s.

“He contended for the Labor party leadership twice against Rabin and he came to the conclusion that if he didn’t turn left he had no chance. He donned the cloak of a left-winger in a pretty sharp turn, and I think that since 1979 or something like that he was already talking like a leftist. Until then he had been clearly right wing.”

After a while, Peres was viewed by many of the settlers as a bitter political rival, particularly after the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, giving Palestinians a measure of self-rule in parts of the West Bank.

“In my opinion he brought about this disastrous agreement, the Oslo agreement, which led to 1,500 murders,” said Katzover. “It was out of a desire to benefit the people of Israel, I have no doubt about that, but it did incredible damage.”

“Perhaps only Sharon’s disengagement was comparable in terms of a cow spilling all the milk it had given,” the settler leader added, referring to a 2005 pullout under Sharon’s rule, in which thousands of settlers were evacuated from Gaza and the northern West Bank.

7.NY Gov. Cuomo, NJ Gov. Christie Cancel Trip to Peres Funeral Due to Deadly Train Crash in Hoboken NY Gov. Cuomo and NJ Gov. Christie both remained Stateside to serve their living constituents after a deadly train crash, rather than go to Israel for the Peres funeral. By: Hana Levi Julian Jewish Press.com Published: September 30th, 2016

NYS Gov. Andrew Cuomo & President Reuven Rivlin met in Jerusalem, 8/13/14 Photo Credit: Flash 90

New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey State Governor Christ Christie both cancelled their plans to fly to Israel Thursday night after a commuter train derailed and crashed through a barrier, straight into the reception area at New Jersey Transit’s Hoboken Terminal. The train originated in Spring Valley, New York.

Both governors, who spoke with media at a joint news conference held at the crash site, were slated to attend the funeral on Friday of 93-year-old former President Shimon Peres at Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem.

Governor Christie confirmed that the train’s engineer, who was operating the train at the time of the crash, “was also critically injured. He is at a local hospital and cooperating with law enforcement officials in the investigation.”

Neither Christie nor Cuomo was willing to speculate on whether the crash had any connection to terrorism or other intentional act to kill.

“These have been difficult times over these past weeks and months, between terrorist attacks and natural disasters, Cuomo told reporters. The comment was a reference to a recent series of bombings in New York and New Jersey earlier this month by accused terrorist Ahmad Khan Rahami, who was charged with attempted murder and other crimes after a manhunt ended in a shootout with police.

“The train was carrying a large number of New Yorkers,” Cuomo said in a statement Thursday several hours after the accident. “The state is working closely with New Jersey Transit and New Jersey authorities, as well as all local and federal partners to provide assistance and keep travelers safe.

“New York State Police, MTA, Metro North, Port Authority Police Department, Department of Health and emergency officials from the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services are traveling to New Jersey to assist in ongoing response efforts in the aftermath of the crash. The NYS OEM Emergency Operations Center has been activated at the enhanced monitoring level and will continue to provide updates throughout the day.

“My thoughts and prayers go out to all those who were hurt, and I extend my deepest condolences to the families of those whose loved ones were lost in the fatal accident. The state continues to work around the clock to help those in need, and we will continue to provide the public with more information as it comes in.”

The death toll in the crash was originally reported as three, but officials now confirm one person killed in the accident, although more than 100 other people were hurt, including many with critical injuries.

Hana Levi Julian

About the Author: Hana Levi Julian is a Middle East news analyst with a degree in Mass Communication and Journalism from Southern Connecticut State University. A past columnist with The Jewish Press and senior editor at Arutz 7, Ms. Julian has written for Babble.com, Chabad.org and other media outlets, in addition to her years working in broadcast journalism.

NY Gov. Cuomo, NJ Gov. Christie Cancel Trip to Peres Funeral Due to Deadly Train Crash in Hoboken

8.Lessons for the next US president By Prof. Louis René Beres Special to Israel National News: Oslo’s still conspicuous failures must be noted and addressed. 28/09/16 06:43

Prof. Louis René Beres, (Ph.D, Princeton, 1971) is emeritus professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue University. He is the author of many books, monographs, and articles dealing with Israeli security matters, nuclear strategy and nuclear war.

If anyone had thought that the core premises of Oslo might still be valid, and that there was still room for a meaningful “Two-State Solution,” Mahmoud Abbas recently offered a sobering response. According to the PA President, speaking at the U.N. General Assembly on September 22, 2016, the “conquered territories” and “illegal settlements” can never be limited to “West Bank” (Judea/Samaria). Rather, they must always pertain as well to all of Israel, including Jerusalem, an argument that is clearly rooted in certain retroactive manipulations of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 (the partition resolution).

In essence, Abbas’ position here could make legal or diplomatic sense only if, inter alia, there had in fact been no immediate Arab rejection of 181, and if there had been no subsequent multi-state Arab aggressions in 1948-49. It is vital that this PA manipulation of law be understood by the next American president, whether it be Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. To date, ever since 1948, there have been many examples of U.S. presidential misunderstanding of such issues. For example, U.S. State Department policy never recognized Israel’s post-1948 settlement of Ashdod, Ashkelon, Beersheba, and certain areas of the Negev. In that context, the U.S. still funds UNRWA education that focuses on the Palestinian “right to return” to all villages lost in the 1948 war.

From Oslo’s formal beginnings, in 1993, the Arab Palestinian side sought to embrace the U.S.-brokered pact purely as an expedient means of improving its own power position. Even then, in unhidden sentiments that have become even more explicit during the “Third Intifada,” the Palestinians had been seeking only a One-State Solution. Never, not even for a moment, did a single Palestinian Arab faction display any authentic interest in living “side-by-side” with a Jewish State.

In other words, never did any such faction actually favor a “Two-State Solution.”

There are other relevant elements of Palestinian Authority (PA) misrepresentation that cumulatively doomed the Oslo “peace process.” Most obvious and incontestable is the undiminished commitment to incitement and terror, and, as a relentless corollary, to continuing Palestinian Arab insistence on a “right of return.” On its face, this alleged “right” persists as a not-so-coded message calling for Israel’s incremental destruction.

Prima facie, this seemingly “just” expectation actually represents the PA’s complete rejection of Israel’s physical continuance as a separately sovereign state. To wit, on all of its official maps, Israel is identified only as “Occupied Palestine.” Where, then is the “Two State Solution?”

Extradition of terrorists

There is another important reason to explain incessant Palestinian Authority noncompliance with Oslo. This most widely overlooked explanation centers on the uniform and recurrent Palestinian Authority violations of international criminal law; here, the utterly “peremptory” obligation to extradite wanted terrorists to Israel. This incontrovertible obligation stems from: 1) the actual language of the codifying agreement; and 2) the always-binding principles of underlying international law.

…the basic and universally-binding requirement to extradite major criminals…lies most enduringly in “Natural Law,” which also happens to be the indisputable foundation of all United States domestic and Constitutional law.
Significantly, such jurisprudential principles do not depend for their implementation upon any specific treaties or legally-binding pacts. Sometimes, they are binding perpetually, as “jus cogens” norms. These core expectations are drawn, inter alia, from Article 38 of the U.N.’s Statute of the International Court of Justice, and also from the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

From Oslo’s formal beginnings, on September 13, 1993, the Palestinian Authority steadfastly refused to honor its express obligation to extradite Arab terrorists to Israel. Moreover, even if the Oslo Agreements had not contained unambiguous provisions for terrorist extradition, the PA would still have been bound to “extradite or prosecute” terrorist murderers, according to the more general, customary, and pre-existing rules of international criminal law. Ultimately, the basic and universally-binding requirement to extradite major criminals (Hostes humani generis, or “Common enemies of humankind“) lies most enduringly in “Natural Law,” which also happens to be the indisputable foundation of all United States domestic and Constitutional law.

This “higher law” exists at the normative center of all civilized national and international legal systems, most prominently, of course, in the jurisprudential foundations of the United States of America. This general legal obligation to extradite, therefore, is far more than anecdotal. It even has a proper legal name. It is specifically referenced, in law, as aut dedere, aut judicare; “extradite or prosecute.”

Over the past twenty-three years, the PA did prosecute and imprison some Arab terrorists, but even this tiny handful of criminals was detained only for brief periods, and then, only for public relations purposes. A conspicuous example of such contrivance was the case of Wa’al Salah Nasr, who had then plotted to carry out a particularly brutal suicide bombing attack against Israeli children. Following his Palestinian “trial,” which produced a sentence of five years in prison, Nasr was released after three weeks, during which time he had been treated as a celebrated Arab hero.

Not surprisingly, President George W. Bush, on December 5, 2001, had already warned presciently: “Arafat’s jails have bars in the front, and revolving doors in the back.”

Remember Arafat? Plus ce change….In Palestinian Arab leadership circles, nothing has really changed. In part, this is because successively misguided Israeli prime ministers were all willing, under varying levels of US presidential pressures, to release Arab terrorists in the search for Palestinian “good will.” Also worth noting is that PA Presidents Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas both understood that there would never be tangible Israeli sanctions for any Palestinian instances of non-compliance.

The Palestinian police

It gets worse. Not only did the PA invariably fail to “extradite or prosecute” terrorists. It routinely hired these very same murderers into the Palestinian “police” or “security services.” It continues to do this even today.

If this particular failure were not serious enough, these starkly anti-American Palestinian terrorists, all of whom had openly celebrated 9/11 harms against the United States, were later given weapons training by certain American intelligence agencies, and by the Pentagon. It was General Keith Dayton, operating under authority of two American presidents, who led the incoherent and counter-productive American effort to train Fatah “security forces” in nearby Jordan.

In time, it is now plausible, these Palestinian forces will be supplanted by still another band of Arab terrorists, namely ISIS. Then, looking back, it will finally become evident that U.S. sponsorship of one murderous Palestinian Arab terror faction (Fatah) against another Palestinian Arab terror group (Hamas) had effectively been to the benefit of ISIS.

Credo quia absurdum. “I believe because it is absurd.” Somehow, American presidents and European political leaders had earlier believed that “moderate” Fatah could be suitably employed as a useful sub-contractor against “extremist” Hamas. From any informed American or Israeli point of view, such thinking was always wrongheaded. As America’s next president should finally understand, there had never existed an iota of consequential difference between Palestinian terror organizations.

For those who seek detail, there is a long history on this matter, a deeply humiliating narrative of error, one from which only the Arab side has seemingly learned anything important. For a start, Osama Abu Tayeh was arrested by the PA for March 1996 bombings in Jerusalem. Rejecting Israeli requests for extradition, the PA proudly hired Tayeh for the Palestinian Police, in October, 1996.

Yusuf Malahi, the murderer of two Israeli civilians in Ramle on August 26, 1994, was arrested by the PA, and then set free several weeks later to join the Palestinian Police. Other known Palestinian terrorists currently or recently serving in the PA Police include Bassam Issa; Atef Hamadan; Imad Abbas; Bassam Aram; Yasser Aram; Iyad Abu-Shakafa; Iyad Basheeti; Ibrahim Shaheed; Ahmed Samarah; and Jamal Abu-Rob.

Palestinian heroes, all.

Every country, our next American president should surely understand, has an overwhelming and irreversible obligation under international law to seek out and to prosecute terrorists. This obligation, which derives from ancient Jewish Law, is known generally as Nullum crimen sine poena, “No crime without a punishment.” It is codified directly in many different sources, and is also deducible from the universally binding Nuremberg Principles (1950).

Principle One, adopted by the UN International Law Commission on August 2, 1950, stipulates: “Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore, and liable to punishment.”

Terrorism is always an established crime under international law. An authoritative listing of constituent offenses that comprise this particular crime can be found in the 1977European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism. Moreover, many Palestinian terrorists had also been complicit in related crimes of war and crimes against humanity, crimes so serious that perpetrators are singled out in law as Hostes humani generis or “common enemies of mankind.”

A clear and now completely forgotten example would be the active Palestinian Liberation Army (PLA) assistance extended to Saddam Hussein’s torturers, during and after the 1991 Gulf War. As the world has already forgotten the irrepressible jubilation of Palestinian Arab celebrations on 9/11, so too has it pushed out of its accessible memory the intimate and mutually supporting ties that had existed earlier, between PA President Yasser Arafat, and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Today, as our next president will likely witness the complete collapse of civil order in Iraq and Syria, a vital lesson might still seem elusive. It is that any Palestinian state, soon after its de jure independence, would almost surely fall to even more vicious bands of Sunni terrorists, most plausibly, of course, ISIS or ISIS-affiliates.

Following Operation Desert Storm many years back, Amnesty International had identified at least thirty different methods of torture used by the Iraqis and their then-close Palestinian Arab allies. These methods ranged from burning alive, to electric shock, to gang rape, to forcible starvation. In one instance reported (2003) in The New Yorker, more than 2000 women and children were crammed into a single large room, and given nothing to eat or drink. When many began to die, the bodies were passed to the Iraqi and Palestinian guards, who then tossed them playfully onto a nearby field. One mother recalls pushing her way to a window to see what had become of her child’s corpse. Immediately, she witnessed dozens of dogs roaming hungrily in the field.

“I looked outside and saw the legs and hands of my son in the mouths of the dogs. The dogs were eating my son.”

The Palestinian Authority no longer comments on its earlier full support for Saddam Hussein, but it does continue to appoint Islamic clerics who systematically denounce the United States and Israel in their weekly sermons. A typical sermon on PA Radio proclaims: “Oh Allah, grant victory to the Muslim people over the hateful America.” There is also regular and ecstatic praise of Palestinian Arab suicide bombers, both male and female. More than anything else, the PA promises its terrorists “martyrdom,” or “power over death.”

Shahid mothers and sons

Years ago, an issue of the Hamas magazine for children had featured the picture of a Palestinian girl, with her severed head lying nearby. The caption read: “Suicide bomber Zainab Abu Salem. Her head separated from her pure body, and her Ra’ala (Islamic head scarf) remains to decorate her face. Her place is now in Paradise.”

The “new and improved” post-Arafat Palestinian authority still teaches children to aspire to Shahada – martyrdom – which it calls “sweet.” Palestinian Arab mothers of suicide bombers now elicit special praise in their communities. “There goes the mother of a Shahid,” is what they most yearn to hear.

Rejecting the normal mother’s instinct to protect her own child, these women find ultimate solace not in life, but rather in the most hideous death cult of contemporary political life. For them, the simultaneous killing of their own children, and the children of specifically despised others (“the Jews”), is the undisguised source of their most palpable pride.

Back in mid-March, 2005, PA TV offered special promotions related to International Woman’s Day. To help commemorate this day, Sheikh Yusuf Juma’ Salamah, in a March 11 Friday sermon to an audience that included “President” Abbas, likened the ideal Palestinian woman to Al Khansah. This heroine of Islamic tradition celebrated her four sons’ death in battle by thanking God for the honor. Salamah, the PA Minister of Waqf, quoted Al Khansah: “Praise Allah, who granted me honor with their deaths.”

Today, Al Khansah has become the archetypal mother of all Shahids. From a very early age, Palestinian girls are now urged to adopt this “mother” as a role model. A current music video for these children, broadcast again and again on Abbas’ PA TV, includes the farewell letter of a child Shahid: The farewell words…..”Mother, don’t cry for me, be joyous over my blood.” Not surprisingly, the Palestinian Authority has named five girls schools “The Al Khansah School For Girls” (in Bethlehem, Jenin, Nablus, Han Yunis, and Rafah).

Illegal immunity

In refusing Israel’s proper and formal extradition requests for terrorists, the Palestinian Authority, still an aspiring sovereign state, and now already a UN “nonmember observer state,” (one with legal capacity to bring charges against Israelis in the International Criminal Court) has effectively elected to remove itself from the civilized community of nations. In law, however, such volitional removal is not a permissible act. In short, no government, and certainly no “Authority,” has any right to lawfully pardon or grant immunity to terrorists, with respect to criminally sanctionable violations of international law.

In the United States, our next president should hopefully understand, it is also evident from the Constitution, that the President’s power to pardon does not encompass violations of international law, and is strictly limited to “Offenses against the United States.”

This limitation stems from a broader prohibition that binds all states, namely, the persistently overriding claims of pertinent rules derived from Higher Law, or the Law of Nature.Although PA inaction on extradition is not, strictly speaking, a pardoning or immunizing action, it has exactly the same practical effect.

Are Palestinian insurgents “freedom fighters,” as they still insistently claim, not just common terrorists? Under explicit international law, the answer is “no.” Even if one were able to argue convincingly that homicidal Palestinian violence is somehow being generated by the legal principle of “Just Cause” or jus ad bellum (a problematic argument, on its face) it would still lack all necessary elements of “Just Means,” or jus in bello.

Because any insurgent violence that fails to meet the longstanding expectations of humanitarian international law is terrorism – that is, the expectations of “discrimination/distinction,” “proportionality,” and “military necessity” – there can be no residual doubt that these killers are in fact terrorists.

Under law, freedom fighters do not intentionally murder infants sucking on pacifiers, in kibbutz nursery schools, or choose to run amok in cities with sharp knives, expressly and unapologetically seeking “Jewish blood.” Freedom fighters, at least under law, do not plunge their knives into selected passerby, and then launch complaints that Israel’s national authorities had responded with “excessive force.”

Under formal international law, any willful refusal to extradite or prosecute terrorists is always inexcusable. The principle is well-established in law that, by virtue of any such refusal, the authority in question must assume legal responsibility for past criminal actions, and even for future ones. This means that ongoing PA refusals to extradite correspondingly implicate that “Authority” for a “denial of justice.” Our next American president should be made aware of this legal conclusion.

Such legal wisdom could have substantial practical results. Although it is unclear that punishment, which is central to all justice, necessarily deters future crimes, the deliberate protection or exoneration of any terrorist necessarily undermines the universal obligation to incapacitate that particular criminal from committing further acts of murder. In the case of protected Palestinian terrorists, hundreds of Israelis who are alive today might still be murdered tomorrow as a direct result of the steady PA refusal to extradite or prosecute.

Naturally, the manifestly lethal consequences of such refusal could be enlarged by Israel’s own sequential terrorist releases over the years. It has happened already, on too-many occasions.

The next American president must finally understand that terrorism must be combated at both operational and jurisprudential levels. More precisely, terrorism is a crime that can and must always be punished. After all, in the absence of a reliable expectation that terrorists will be extradited or prosecuted, international criminal law would simply fail to operate.

To ensure that such any such expectation will be fulfilled, and that international criminal law will work somehow, the next American president should systematically demand that authoritative Israeli extradition requests be honored, just as the law demands. In this connection, the president should recall that international law is part of U.S. law, largely by virtue of Article 6 of the Constitution (the “Supremacy Clause”), and of assorted U.S. Supreme Court decisions, most notably the Paquete Habana (1900).

The next president of the United States will need an abundantly clear vision of what the Palestinian Authority still seeks. In fashioning this vision, he or she will need merely to recall that the PLO was founded in 1964, three years before there were any “Israel Occupied Territories.” What, exactly, was the PLO – forerunner of the PA – trying to “liberate” before the Six-Day War? The answer, later reaffirmed in the PLO’s 1974 “Plan of Phases,”[1] remains sobering and inescapable.

It is the State of Israel.

Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) lectures and publishes widely on international law, in particular regard to Israel and the Middle East. His most recent writings have appeared in Israel National News; The National Interest; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); The International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law; Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College; International Security (Harvard); The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs; The Brown Journal of World Affairs; Oxford University Press; US News & World Report; The Jerusalem Post; and The Atlantic. Professor Beres was born in Zürich, Switzerland, at the end of World War II. His twelfth book, Surviving amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy, was published by Rowman and Littlefield earlier this year. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442253254/Surviving-Amid-Chaos-Israels-Nuclear-Strategy

[1] This was the PLO’s now still “valid” 10-point program for incremental destruction of the Jewish State.

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Visitors watch a demonstration at the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) booth in the IMDEX Asia maritime defence exhibition in Singapore 5/19/16 Reuters/Edgar Su/File Photo By Steven Scheer | Jerusalem

Israel’s defense industry faces layoffs, closures and a scramble to set up shop in the United States following the signing of a new U.S. military aid package that phases out Israel’s ability to spend a quarter of the funds on its own businesses.

The 10-year, $38 billion agreement, signed on Sept. 15 after a year of negotiations, comes into effect in U.S. fiscal year 2019. It constitutes the most military assistance Washington has ever provided to an ally, but was clinched only after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted concessions.

Key among those is the gradual phasing out of a clause allowing Israel to spend 26.3 percent of the funds on its own defense sector, which competes actively with U.S. firms such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Raytheon.

That means Israeli defense companies will miss out on up to $10 billion that might otherwise have been spent on home-made drones, missiles, tanks and other equipment, depending on the precise terms of the phase-out, which remain unclear. Once that phase-out is completed, all the funds in the agreement will have to be spent in the United States.

“It’s quite a problem,” said one Israeli defense industry official, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue. “The bigger companies and most advanced ones with the best technology and capabilities will be able to survive, but the smaller you are, the bigger the problem is.”

Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on the domestic consequences of the aid deal but has said the agreement “will greatly strengthen the security of Israel”.

Israel has about 700 defense-related firms, most of them with only 50 to 150 employees. They mainly act as subcontractors to Israel’s four largest defense companies — Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries, Israel Military Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.

Israel’s defense exports totaled $5.7 billion in 2015, about 14 pct of all exports & a major driver of the economy.

OPTIONS

None of the companies asked by Reuters to discuss the aid package were willing to speak on the record, mentioning concerns about future business. But several executives, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that as a result of the deal they were already considering contingency plans.

One option would be for larger firms to open subsidiaries in the United States, like Elbit has done, to compensate for the loss of business. They might also acquire smaller U.S. firms.

As one executive put it: “This should be translated into an opportunity for the Israeli industry, which should penetrate new markets and improve their competitive ability.”

“We should face the global trends and the fact that Israel is losing its ability to compete,” the official said, adding the company where he works would “accelerate the process” of searching for a U.S. company to buy.

Another area of concern is the loss of Israeli know-how, with aerospace engineers and scientists potentially moving abroad if there is a decline in inward spending and investment.

The executives said they hoped that when the time comes, the government will find the nearly $1 billion a year extra needed to keep the sector afloat under terms of the agreement, although the sum may be hard to come by given the fractured political environment.

According to Israel’s Manufacturers’ Association, even a 1 billion shekel ($265 million) cut in the defense budget will lead to the layoff of more than 2,000 workers, mostly from small- and medium-sized subcontractors that have a “to be or not to be” dependence on orders from the Israeli defense establishment.

A source close to Netanyahu said the prime minister didn’t anticipate any closure of small defense companies, and noted the procurement changes would go into effect only in time.

Avraham Bar David, a former general who works with some 200 small Israeli defense contractors through the Manufacturers’ Association, predicted that “70 to 100 of them” will not survive the local procurement restriction.

“These companies are too small to sell abroad,” he said. ($1 = 3.7734 shekels)

(Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Giles Elgood)

JPost.com 09/29/2016 20:44 The West maintains that Israel occupies Palestinian territory in the “West Bank.” This is untrue. There has never been any “Palestinian territory.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addresses UN General Assembly. (photo credit:Reuters)

After the death of Shimon Peres, BBC radio’s flagship current affairs show Today interviewed Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Mark Regev.
The presenter persistently suggested to him that Peres’s record as a peacemaker ran contrary to Israel’s subsequent record of failure to make peace with the Palestinians, and that the absence of a two-state solution was all the fault of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Her questioning reflected the grotesque false assumption underlying Western hostility toward Israel: that if only it wasn’t so belligerent there would be peace. Repeatedly challenged with this claim, Regev refused to engage. Instead he mouthed platitudes about how Peres would always have answered such a question with hope and optimism about a peaceful solution.
This was a missed opportunity. The overwhelming requirement for Israel is always to nail the big lie behind the questions thrown at it.
Regev should have said that the reason for the absence of a two-state solution was displayed last week at the UN, where the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas made a speech expressing hostility to Israel’s very existence.
Abbas falsely presented the Jews of Israel as squatters in the Palestinians’ own land. He even demanded that Britain apologize for the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which first committed Britain to reestablish the Jewish homeland in what was then called Palestine.
Through this declaration, said Abbas, Britain had given “without any right, authority or consent from anyone, the land of Palestine to another people.”
This preposterous speech was notable for three things. First, it rewrote the Jews out of their own history by fabricating an entirely fictitious Palestinian story. The only people for whom the Land of Israel and the disputed territories have ever been their national kingdom are the Jews.
Second, Abbas blamed Israel for his own people’s aggression and murderous violence over the Temple Mount.
Third, his speech showed that the Palestinians’ complaint is not about the absence of a state of their own. It is about the existence of Israel which they want gone.
The full speech received no mainstream coverage in the West. Abbas could be confident, however, that it reflected two entirely false Western beliefs: that Israel acts in contravention of international law, and that the land originally belonged to the Palestinians.
With the West duly softened up, Abbas is thought to be planning a maneuver at the UN. He says he will be pushing a UN Security Council resolution against the settlements. What worries Israel more is the rumor that President Obama will refuse to veto a proposed French UN resolution recognizing a Palestinian state.
If Obama does this, the US will be complicit in tearing up international law and bringing into being a terrorist state whose existential purpose is the extermination of Israel.
As the international law expert Prof. Eugene Kontorovich argued in The Washington Post in September, the proposed French measure repudiates UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed in the wake of the Six Day War. Resolution 242 represented a territorial compromise, with Israel agreeing to cede some but not all the territories it seized during the Six Day War in return for peace.
According to Kontorovich the French resolution, which would push Israel back behind the 1949 “Auschwitz” armistice lines, would repudiate 242 and amount to “a fundamental reversal of 50 years of Middle East diplomacy.”
Instead of a negotiated settlement, the US would therefore not only be aiding the unilateral imposition of a new terrorist entity in the Middle East but would also show its contempt for international law.
In fact the US, Britain and Europe have long displayed this contempt by supporting the big lie that Israel behaves illegally or belligerently.
The West maintains that Israel occupies Palestinian territory in the “West Bank.” This is untrue. There has never been any “Palestinian territory.”
Israel’s presence in the disputed territories cannot be legally defined as an occupation. Under the Hague and Geneva conventions, an occupation can only take place on sovereign land. The territories were never anyone’s sovereign land.
Israel is furthermore entitled under international law to continue to hold onto them as a defensive measure as long as its Arab aggressors continue to use them for belligerent ends.
The West says Israel’s settlements are illegal. This is also untrue.
In the 20s, the Mandate for Palestine gave Britain the legally binding duty to settle the Jews throughout what is now not just Israel but the disputed territories too. That Jewish right has never been abrogated.
The Geneva conventions, cited as the reason the settlements are illegal, prohibit an occupying power from transferring people en masse into occupied territory. This was drafted after World War II to prevent any repetition of the Nazis’ forced displacement of peoples. Israelis resident in the disputed territories, however, have not been transferred but moved there through their own free choice.
Kontorovich has looked at every modern example where occupied territories have been settled. In none of them did the international community denounce such action as illegal or demand that settlers had to vacate the land as a condition for peace or independence. If world powers asked the occupying force to withdraw, they referred only to the army and not the settler population. The only exception has been Israel.
The West makes a fetish of international law. Yet it denounces Israel, the one Middle East state that upholds it. It’s time to call out the US, Britain and Europe for aiding the repudiation of law and justice and thus helping promote the Arab agenda of exterminating Israel.
Melanie Phillips is a columnist for The Times (UK).