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Israel Complied with UN Resolutions; Peace Never Came
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks at the UN headquarters in New York City, US, before a meeting about the conflict in Gaza, Nov. 6, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs
With demands that Israel leave Gaza’s Philadelphi Corridor and limit its operations in the West Bank, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called on the Jewish State “to comply with its relevant obligations,” adding that “only an end to the occupation… will bring an end to the violence.”
Yet since 1993, Israel has complied with all its obligations.
Israel repeatedly conceded territory, but the only result was more terrorism and more attacks on its citizens — a fact that seems to have escaped the UN chief.
A decade after withdrawing from the Sinai Peninsula and dismantling settlements — which bought Israel durable peace with Egypt — the Jewish State tried, in 1993, to repeat the exercise with Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Throughout the 1990s, however, Arafat upheld the Oslo Agreement only to force further concessions on Israel — all the while, plotting terrorism against it, and trying to destroy modern-day Israel.
Whenever Jerusalem balked, Arafat let Hamas’ violence obstruct peace, until he wrecked the whole process in 2000 by launching the Second Intifada.
Because negotiating peace with Arafat, Syria and Lebanon all failed, Israel opted to unilaterally concede territory, even without prior agreement.
In May 2000, Israel left Lebanon. In June of that year, the UN certified that Israel had met the requirements of Resolution 425, and expressed hope that this implementation “would be seen by all people of the region, especially Syrians, Palestinians and Israelis, as well as Lebanese, as an encouragement to quickly move ahead in negotiating peace treaties.”
But not so fast. Hezbollah thrashed the UN.
“We [liberated the land] not because of the UN that failed, over 22 years, in implementing Resolution 425,” said Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, in May 2000. Nasrallah called on the Palestinians to forget about the UN and its resolutions, and instead emulate his model.
“You can reclaim your land … and force the Zionist invaders to return from where they came from,” Nasrallah said. “The choice is yours and the model is before your eyes — serious resistance.”
Quiet on the Lebanese border with Israel did not last long. In July 2006, Hezbollah launched a major cross-border attack. A 33-day war ensued, and ended with Resolution 1701, which forced the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the 1978 UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) to do what Israel had requested in 2000 but never did: Deploy south of the River Litani to enforce UNSC 1701, including disbanding Hezbollah.
Yet with the LAF’s complicity and UNIFIL’s toothlessness, Hezbollah redeployed and rearmed all the way to the Lebanese border with Israel. Like Resolution 425 and Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, Resolution1701 did not make northern Israel safe.
Starting in 2022, Hezbollah intensified its harassment, this time demanding that Israel agree to allow Lebanon to explore the maritime border’s seabed for gas. In October, the Biden administration gave itself a pat on the back for helping reach “a historic” maritime border demarcation that would “advance security, stability, and prosperity for the region,” and that demonstrated “the transformative power of American diplomacy.”
A year later, on October 8, 2023, Hezbollah launched its war on Israel in support of Hamas, which had just murdered 1,200 people in southern Israel the day before. American diplomacy was not so transformative after all.
“Today, hope is greater than ever before that the liberation of Palestine, from the sea to the river,” will happen, Nasrallah said months before his October 8 war on Israel.
This time Nasrallah did not present his “armed resistance” as a model to the Palestinians, but declared his militia as a partner in the Iran-led “Axis of Resistance” that was fighting to “liberate Palestine,” a clear violation of Resolution 1701 and the Lebanese constitution.
In 2000, Israel did not foresee Nasrallah transforming his militia from defensive to offensive. Perhaps that was why, in 2005, Israel replicated its unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon by conceding Palestinian territories, even without prior agreement with the Palestinian Authority (PA) under Mahmud Abbas.
Israel dismantled settlements, pulled out 10,000 Israelis, and withdrew its forces from the Gaza Strip entirely and the northern part of the West Bank, around Jenin and Tulkarem.
Withdrawal was expected to boost the popularity of the PA, but its corruption and incompetence cost it the legislative election that Hamas won in 2006. By June 2007, Hamas had violently ejected the PA from Gaza. Palestinians now had two governments.
In the West Bank, under PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, the economy grew and security improved. Fayyad’s competence, however, deprived Abbas and his cronies of their public money spoils.
In 2013, Abbas ejected Fayyad, causing a backslide in the economy and security. Hamas started recruiting in Jenin, from where the terrorist group organized attacks — such as shootings, ramming cars, and knifings — against Israelis. The Israeli military was forced to operate in the West Bank, thus compounding Palestinian misery. When Abbas visited Jenin in July 2023, Palestinians chased him away.
Since October 2023, Israel has had to go into most of Gaza and intensified its incursions into the West Bank. Israel has also had to fight against Hezbollah to restore normalcy to its north.
Thirty-one years after Israel started experimenting with coordinated withdrawals with Palestinian leaders, 24 years after Israel unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon, 19 years after it left Gaza and Jenin, and only one year after Jerusalem signed on to a US-sponsored maritime border demarcation deal with Beirut, none of the deals or unilateral withdrawals brought Israel peace.
For its concessions, Israel got a Hamas massacre of 1,200 of its citizens on October 7, the biggest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. Then, on October 8, Israel found itself facing Hezbollah attacks that have depopulated its north.
And despite all of this, UN Secretary-General Guterres believes the end of Palestinian and Lebanese violence against Israel will only result from more Israeli withdrawals, as if three decades of Israeli concessions have not proven the futility of compromising — and that Jews, Israelis, and foreign citizens will die as a result.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy (FDD). Follow him on X @hahussain.
The post Israel Complied with UN Resolutions; Peace Never Came first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Anti-Israel Groups Oppose California Holocaust Education Bill That Passed Unanimously
Nihad Awad, co-founder and executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Photo: Screenshot
Major anti-Israel groups opposed a Holocaust education bill in California that passed unanimously in the state’s legislature.
Last week, the California State Assembly and Senate approved Senate Bill 1277 by margins of 76-0 and 40-0, respectively, representing rare unanimous, bipartisan agreement.
The bill established a state program called the “California Teachers Collaborative on Holocaust and Genocide Education.”
According to the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California (JPAC), the state “has required Holocaust and genocide education to be taught in public schools” since 1985. However, it continued, “most schools are not up to state standards, and there is no systematic teacher training to help bridge the gap. The Collaborative is led by JFCS [Jewish Family and Children’s Services] and brings together 14 leading Holocaust and genocide education institutions from across California.”
JPAC’s executive director, David Bocarsly, said in a statement that despite the importance of Holocaust education, “unfortunately, in many schools across California, we’ve seen how such education is simply non-existent or not meeting state standards.”
Despite the unanimous vote and the seemingly uncontroversial content of the bill, it garnered opposition from radical anti-Israel and progressive organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies.
The bill “was surprisingly opposed by Jewish Voice for Peace, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies,” JPAC wrote in a press release.
The root of this opposition, the group claimed, had to do with opposition to Israel: They argued that Holocaust educational institutions should not contribute to Holocaust education if those institutions also support Israel.”
But JPAC noted that “all major US Holocaust educational institutions do [support Israel].”
“Despite such disingenuous opposition,” JPAC added, “the bill’s overwhelming bipartisan support in the legislature demonstrated the desire for such education.”
The Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) was another organization that opposed Senate Bill 1277.
The legislation would “put genocide education in the hands of anti-Palestinian organizations that deny Israel is committing a genocide,” Lara Kiswani, executive director of AROC and a lecturer at San Francisco State University, told the progressive news organization Truthout.
The opposition to the bill was despite the fact the program would go beyond just Holocaust education.
“In addition to the Holocaust, educational groups about the Rwandan, Cambodia, Guatemalan, Uyghur, and Native genocides are members of the Collaborative,” JPAC noted. “Together, they develop curriculum, train 8,500 public school teachers, and educate one million students by 2027 – including teachers and students in every California local educational agency (LEA).”
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) has a long history of celebrating and justifying terrorism against Israel. It created and distributed flyers that read “L’Chaim Intifada” at the height of the second intifada, which featured more than 130 suicide bombings against Israeli civilians and countless shooting and stabbing attacks. The flyer also included a picture of Leila Khaled, a Palestinian terrorist who hijacked a plane in 1969 and attempted to do it again a year later.
JVP has also supported rallies calling to “globalize the intifada” and local chapters have celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, claimed Hamas treated the hostages it kidnapped well, and argued the terrorist group does not pose a threat to Jews.
Additionally, in November, CAIR co-founder and executive director Nihad Awad said “yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in,” referring to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, when the terrorist group killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.
“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on Oct. 7,” he said.
About a week later, the executive director of CAIR’s Los Angeles office, Hussam Ayloush, said that Israel “does not have the right” to defend itself from Palestinian violence. He added in his sermon at the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City that for the Palestinians, “every single day” since the Jewish state’s establishment has been comparable to Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught.
The post Anti-Israel Groups Oppose California Holocaust Education Bill That Passed Unanimously first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Journalist Linked to Terror Group Faces Backlash for Peddling Anti-Vaccine Conspiracies Amid Gaza Polio Crisis
Bisan Atef Owda in a scene from “It’s Bisan From Gaza, I’m Still Alive After Six Months Of Bombing.” Photo: YouTube screenshot
Bisan Owda is facing criticism from fellow Palestinian journalist Hind Khoudary for casting skepticism on the ongoing polio vaccination drive in Gaza, arguing that her misinformation could endanger the lives of the enclave’s civilians.
Khoudary took to social media to vent his frustrations with what he described as Owda’s attempts to derail the World Health Organization-led vaccination drive through peddling unsubstantiated conspiracy theories to the residents of Gaza. Khoudary claimed that Owda’s social media commentary risked undermining the efforts by humanitarian workers in Gaza to prevent a devastating disease from wreaking havoc on the war-torn enclave.
“We’ve spent weeks tirelessly working on the polio vaccination campaign, focusing especially on raising awareness among parents about the importance of vaccinating their children,” Khoudary wrote in an Instagram story.
“Now, a filmmaker with millions of followers has released a video urging parents not to vaccinate their kids, spreading conspiracy theories and undermining everything we’ve worked for,” Khoudary continued.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) are spearheading a campaign to distribute polio vaccines throughout the Gaza Strip. The organizations called for a seven-day temporary ceasefire to allow for the safe distribution of vaccines to approximately 640,000 children and families.
Polio appeared in Gaza in June. Israel agreed to pause military operations against the Hamas terror group in the enclave to allow children to be vaccinated. The highly infectious disease can cause irreversible paralysis and death. The Israeli military’s Southern Command and the Defense Ministry’s Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories agency (COGAT) have been coordinating with WHO and UNICEF to conduct the effort.
The drive is being staggered across three geographic regions of Gaza over the first week of September. Experts claim that Hamas is expected to use the temporary ceasefire to move key personnel, valuable assets, and weapons.
“Countless people at UNICEF, WHO, and the Ministry of Health have sacrificed sleep and worked around the clock on this campaign. This kind of misinformation threatens to undo all of that hard work,” Khoudary said of Owda’s comments on the effort.
Owda, a Gaza-based Palestinian journalist and filmmaker, has posted a series of videos urging Palestinians not to give their children polio vaccines. She argued that the “genocidal” country of Israel cannot be trusted to vaccinate Palestinian children, citing the “horrific” conditions in Gaza since the start of the war. She also suggested that Israel “intentionally entered” Polio into Gaza.
“I don’t trust humanitarian institutions. I don’t trust the occupation,” Owda said.
Owda has also made headlines recently because she was nominated for her documentary series “It’s Bisan From Gaza and I’m Still Alive” in the 2024 Emmy Awards for News & Documentary in the category of outstanding hard news feature story: short form. In the docuseries, Owda reports from Gaza and documents the daily life of Palestinians during the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. The docuseries was a collaboration with the digital media outlet AJ+ which is based in the US and is a subsidiary of the Qatari-owned media outlet Al Jazeera.
However, more than 150 entertainment industry leaders signed an open letter last month urging the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) to rescind Owda’s Emmy nomination because of her ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist organization.
The letter came a few weeks after the pro-Israel, nonprofit entertainment industry organization Creative Community for Peace (CCFP) similarly called on NATAS to revoke the Emmy nomination due to Owda’s links to PFLP.
Owda’s connections to PFLP were exposed shortly after her Emmy nomination was announced in mid-July. She attended and spoke at PFLP rallies, hosted events honoring Palestinians fighting Israeli soldiers, and the PFLP referred to her in 2018 as a member of its Progressive Youth Union. She also regularly makes anti-Zionist comments on social media while reporting from Gaza about the Israel-Hamas war.
NATAS has refused to rescind her nomination, pointing to its history of celebrating “controversial” works.
The post Journalist Linked to Terror Group Faces Backlash for Peddling Anti-Vaccine Conspiracies Amid Gaza Polio Crisis first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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‘Pigs Off Campus’: Canadian Anti-Zionist Group Sends Chilling Message to Jews, Police
Severed pigs head staked on the gates leading to the residence of University of British Columbia president Benoit-Antoine Bacon. Photo: People’s University for Gaza/Instagram
A pro-Hamas group placed a shocking display targeting Jews and law enforcement on the grounds of the University of British Columbia (UBC) during the early hours of Tuesday morning.
“Pigs off campus,” said a large banner which People’s University for Gaza at UBC (PUG) tacked to the double gates leading to the private residence of university president Benoit-Antoine Bacon. Next to the banner, the group staked on the finials of the structure the severed head of a pig. Before leaving the area, they photographed their work and issued a statement explaining its motivation on Instagram.
“UBC will not know peace until we get Palestine back, piece by piece,” PUG said. “Pigs off campus is one of our demands. KKKanada and ‘Isra-hell’ are both shared violent settler colonial projects built on the removal of indigenous peoples from their land with the use of police forces.”
The statement went on to rail against Bacon for cooperating with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which it accused of murdering “indigenous youth,” to increase campus security. It also cited as a grievance the university’s hosting of students who had served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
“We remind him this morning this morning and every morning that these tactics do not intimidate us,” PUG continued. “To all those … starting their classes today, we ask you to take more action this year. Find your comrades, wear your keffiyehs everyday, learn beyond these classroom walls, and shut this campus down.”
The incident prompted a rebuke from Honest Reporting Canada (HRC), a nonprofit organization which promotes media fairness and accountability.
“Horrific Jew hated last night at University of British Columbia, as Jewish students were ‘welcomed’ with a ‘Pigs of campus’ sign and a severed pig’s head,” it said. “Hey UBC and UBC President [Bacon], what are you doing to protect your Jewish students on campus from this open Jew hatred?”
UBC has seen its share of antisemitic incidents before. In 2021, mezuzahs, prayer scrolls hung on the doors of Jewish residences, were twice stolen or vandalized. Earlier this year, pro-Hamas activists waged a campaign to expel Hillel from campus, arguing that doing so would advance the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israe. Other years saw the posting of neo-Nazi propaganda and swastika graffiti, and according to local media outlets, pro-Hamas students and faculty have perpetrated unrelenting abuse of anyone perceived as being a Jewish supporter of Israel, a problem that the university has been slow to address and which earlier this year led to the resignation of a family medicine professor who taught and conducted research there for three decades.
Other Canadian universities have allegedly failed to deter or punish anti-Zionist hatred.
In May, Jewish students attending Concordia University in Montreal told The Algemeiner that they have been left to fend for themselves when their anti-Zionist classmates resort to assault and harassment to make their point. No single incident, they said, evinced their alleged abandonment by school officials more than one on March 12 in which Jewish students were trapped in the school’s Hillel office while members of the anti-Zionist club Supporting Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR), concealing their faces with keffiyehs and surgical masks, banged on its windows and doors and stomped on the floor of the room above it.
When campus security officers arrived on the scene, they refused to punish the offenders and accused Jewish students of instigating the incident because they had filmed what transpired.
“We only filmed because they were harassing us, for evidence, and we didn’t feel safe,” Chana Leah Natanblut told The Algemeiner during an interview. “Security obviously told them to disperse and that they couldn’t act that way, but they didn’t say what would happen and it felt almost as if they had taken their side. Who’s to say they won’t do it again? What kind of message does it send to do nothing about it?”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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