SUMMARIES
 

The Origin of the “Occupation” Myth

Howard Grief

The pernicious myth that the State of Israel has been an Occupier of “Arab lands” since the Six-Day War, comprising Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the Golan and Sinai, originated, astonishingly enough, with the legal establishment of the State, which could not fathom the fact that all these territories were either integral regions of the Jewish National Home or historically connected with the Land of Israel. The jurist whose thinking on the subject principally led to the spread of this evil myth was Meir Shamgar, the Military Advocate-General from 1961 to 1968, subsequently the Attorney-General and President of the Supreme Court. In the early 1960s he conceived of a plan of action to be implemented in the event that Israel conquered what he called “enemy territory” from the surrounding Arab states. Under that plan, it was decided that the rules of international law concerning warfare would be applied to any such territory instead of Israeli law. To this end, he conducted special training courses for platoon officers of the Military Advocate’s Corps to familiarize these officers with the laws of war, particularly the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which they carried with them in “movable emergency kits”. In addition, Shamgar prepared a manual for the military advocate giving precise instructions and guidelines for the IDF to follow.

Shamgar’s plan came to fruition in the Six-Day War when it was adopted by the Levi Eshkol National Unity Government. A four-pronged military government was set up to administer all the Jewish territories liberated from Arab rule in 1967. The decision to set up a regime of military government for these territories rather than to apply Israeli law is the reason why the territories were logically considered “occupied territories” by neutral or even friendly foreign opinion, as well as by a large segment of Israeli society. The irony of the situation created by the Six-Day War was that Israel was never obliged to apply the laws of war to what were constituent parts of the Jewish National Home and Land of Israel, since several international law documents dating back to 1920 and 1922 had already recognized exclusive Jewish legal rights over them. Moreover, two important Israeli constitutional laws required the immediate application of Israeli law to all liberated Jewish lands, namely, the Area of Jurisdiction and Powers Ordinance of 1948, as well as the Law of Return of 1950. In ignoring these constitutional laws and the leading precedent established in the War of Independence when Israeli law was automatically applied to areas beyond the U.N. Partition lines repossessed by the IDF, Shamgar committed a staggering violation of the Rule of Law.

Two recent Supreme Court judgments have taken Shamgar’s folly to new heights of absurdity. The President of the Court, Aharon Barak, has ruled that Judea, Samaria and Gaza are indeed governed by the rules of belligerent occupation without naming the state or people whose land has been occupied or noting when that state or people were recognized as the sovereign of the land. As a result of his rulings, Barak has completely undermined the Jewish legal case for the retention of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. The only way to undo the tremendous legal and political harm committed by Israel’s most eminent jurists is for the Knesset to pass special legislation declaring that Judea, Samaria and Gaza are not occupied territories, but rather the national patrimony of the Jewish People in whose name the State of Israel acts.

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Assimilation, Normalcy and Jewish Self-Hatred

Shlomo Sharan

Assimilation of Jews into the Gentile environment is often accompanied by a sense that the Jews are abnormal. In its more advanced form, assimilation entails both cultural and national dimensions, the sense of the Jews being deviant, and a rejection of Jewish historical heritage or of Israel as a nation. This latter phenomenon is called self-hatred or Jewish anti-Semitism. Jewish self-hatred, while not a new phenomenon, has moved from being a peripheral to being a central manifestation in Jewish life today, along with the advance of assimilation.

Jewish “olim” do not simply discard their cultural background when they come to Israel, so that the problems of assimilation, a sense of Jewish abnormality and even self-hatred, are found in Israel society as in Jewish societies elsewhere. Emigration from Israel is one example of the inroads of assimilation in Israel, in addition to the absence of Jewish consciousness among many Jews in Israel, native-born and others. Jews as individuals are as normal as members of other groups, but the Jewish group thus far does not assimilate completely into Gentile societies and retains its distinctiveness in varying degrees, which can be construed as not being normal. Israel as a nation has also manifested many signs of not being a normal nation by reaching agreements with the PLO, a terrorist organization, when these agreements contradict the basic rule of nations to protect the safety and integrity of their populations, and to secure their historical survival. Jewish self-hatred has challenged the legitimacy of Israel as a nation, asserting that Israel should cease to exist as a Jewish political entity. Israel’s survival depends upon the success of its struggle against many external threats as well as against the internal struggle with self-hating Jews.

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Jews Against Israel

Manfred Gerstenfeld

Attacks on Israel by Israelis and Jews are frequently indistinguishable from those by Gentiles. Among the specific aspects in the anti-Israel writings of a number of Jews are the use of their family’s Holocaust experiences, their references to being Jewish, or their mentioning an association of some kind with Israel.

One can analyze texts for their classic and new anti-Semitic elements without knowing who their authors are. This method enables identification of Jewish and Israeli anti-Semites, some of which are extreme ones. Occasionally, even Jewish journals print essays of authors using anti-Semitic arguments. There have been many rewards with correspondingly limited penalties for some Jews who attack Israel.

Gentile assaults often use statements from Israeli or Diaspora Jewish defamers as a way of legitimizing their attacks on Israel or Jews. Furthermore, a small number of anti-Israel Jews enable the media to present a Jewish community divided on key Israeli policy. Anti-Semitic Jews have also become an important tool in the anti-Israeli campaigns of Western media.

Academic initiatives to discriminate against Israeli universities and scholars are an important aspect of the new anti-Semitism. Among the signatories and initiators of the various appeals shows Jews and Israelis played an important role.

The question of what drives Jewish and Israeli anti-Semites has only been partly answered. Probably a variety of motives play a role in Jewish self-hate. The phenomenon, known as the Stockholm Syndrome, is however, not specifically Jewish or Israeli.

There remains a substantial gap between the importance of the problem and the attention given to it in the Jewish world. A more profound analysis is required to assess the political, cultural, psychological, and social aspects of the phenomenon.

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Jews Against Zion

Alyssa Lappen

American Jews often give little consideration to the origins, philosophy and ultimate goals of Jewish causes with which they associate and to which they give. Under the assumption that all Jewish charities support the right of the Jewish state to exist with freedom from terror, Jewish individuals, groups and even some charitable federations have supported benign and peaceful-sounding organizations like the New Israel Fund, Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, Tikkun, and Americans for Peace Now. They give funds, or a speaking platform. They invite the groups to conferences. They sign their petitions. Yet upon close examination, the agendas and records of these groups indicate that their support for Israel is slender at best. In fact, they support divestment of investments in Israel and ethnic cleansing of Jews from everywhere outside Israel's 1948 Armistice boundaries, or Green Line, including Jerusalem. Occasionally, the groups even associate with supporters of terror, thereby doing Israel immeasurable harm.

Investigative reporter, Alyssa A. Lappen, takes a careful look at leftist Jewish groups, their policies and actions. She concludes that it is no longer safe to assume that all or even most American-Jewish groups support Israel. The implication is that American-Jewish individuals and leaders alike should be more cautious about which charities, institutions and programs they support, both financially and otherwise.

 

An Attempt to Understand
the Suicide Bombers Phenomenon

Aharon Yaffe

The suicide bomber’s phenomenon is an old one. It goes back to the Bible and to Greek mythology. In the modern age, it was painted with some religious colors especially during the Iran-Iraq War when tens of thousands of zealous Iranian fearless boys stormed Iraqi better-equipped strongholds shouting in the name of Allah. Soon this blood-freezing phenomenon spilled over to the Arab-Israeli frontier through the Shi`ite faction on the Lebanese front during the 1980s.

A society that produces suicide bombers in order to accomplish some of its unachieved goals is a sick society. This culture is in a dreadful, desperate position with a clear-cut feeling that there aren’t any conventional weapons left for it.

Killing yourself together with your enemy has been welcome in Palestinian society since the Lebanese War (1983). The Palestinians accept it as a supreme sacrifice. We, the Israelis, cannot understand nor accept it. Since most of the study’s objects destroyed themselves, we were left with nothing but to watch the rest of their close environment, which created a dreadful model like them.

All this serves as an overall explanation for the suicide bomber phenomenon, which can be found in Islamic Eastern countries today more than in any other civilization.

When launching suicide bombers to their irreversible missions, the leaders uncover fundamental weak points in Israeli Western society. They certainly exploit Israeli humanism and show its inability to act as a Western advanced society against terrorist infrastructure mixed with civilian population, as mistakenly happened in the Salah Shchade’s case when Israeli planes gunned him down together with his innocent family.

The article tries to characterize the suicide bomber’s profile. Despite many attempts made by Western intelligence agencies, they cannot reach an unambiguous profile. The main common characteristic is that it grows and flourishes from terrorists encouraging and fostering society. The article also deals with identifying and mobilizing suicide bombers. The vital link in the suicidal chain is undoubtedly the mobilizers. They can identify weak and helpless characters and propose to them to become Shahids. They even portray Paradise as their reward for this noble act, linked together with their survivors’ earthly rewards, which for most of them is very tempting.

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The Demographic Bomb

Yuval Brandstetter

The disengagement plan now being implemented by the sovereign government of Israel is the clearest sign that the Jewish State fears involution into the Arab ocean in which it is physically imbedded. While the plan focuses on separation from Arabs who are not Israeli citizens, it appears that this is the lesser concern, since it is the Arab citizenry that poses the far greater challenge to the Jewish hegemony, and therefore Jewish life in Israel. Nowhere is this danger more glaring then in the statistics relating to children. The National Council for the Child is a non-governmental organization that prides itself on impartial child advocacy, and as such the statistics it presents are inherently believable. Close scrutiny of such an annual report reveals that within Israel there is a foreign, Palestinian entity in active formation, which bears all the hallmarks of the Arab Palestinian entities which already exist, in numeric and qualitative terms.

In fact, it is the very same entity. Recognition of this peril to the survival of Israel as a Jewish Western democracy is essential, and time is running out.

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Captives of a Concept

Mark Silverberg

“Captives of a Concept” puts forth the premise that history, from Troy to Tehran, to the Sharon Plan, is replete with examples of political leadership being held “captive” to a false security paradigm (the “concept”) through which all threat assessments flowed. Without exception, disaster followed.

Numerous examples are cited in support of this thesis from Operation Barbarossa to Pearl Harbor, to the Yom Kippur War, to the Beirut bombings, to the Oslo Accords, to the events preceding 9/11, and finally, tragically, to the underlying premises of the Sharon Plan for the evacuation of Gaza and the northern West Bank.

Although much has been written on the “concept” thesis, I have not read any such thesis in regard to the Sharon Plan, although the parallels are most disturbing.

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The Myth of Hebrew Culture in the Golah

Michael Arfa (Summary by Shlomo Sharan)

Throughout its long sojourn in the Golah (Diaspora), Jewry brilliantly developed and utilized its cultural-religious-national heritage in a dual role as instruments of redemption and as instruments of exile. Jewry’s heritage, as embodied in the Hebrew language, in its vast religious systems, visions, hopes and social structures, kept alive its striving for the ultimate reunification of the nation-in-exile with its historic land. Yet, the very same heritage provided convenient means to ameliorate the effects of a hostile environment in the Galut and to sustain the body and soul of the Jewish nation. Following the Emancipation, Jewry’s instruments of redemption have become subverted into instruments of annihilation by cultivating the illusion that Jewry could withstand the inevitable erosion by the Golah of its national and cultural identity. “Cultural” (or spiritual) Zionism preached by Ahad Ha`am, for example, conceived of Jewry’s heritage as an instrument of Exile, to the effect that it could sustain Jewish life outside its national homeland until physical-political redemption became a possibility for the Jewish people. Hebrew writers and educators claimed that the Hebrew language could provide Jews with a culturally Hebraic environment in the United States. Both these doctrines actually served the purpose of misleading Jewry to believe in a vibrant future for its cultural and national existence in the Gentile world without the need to rebuild its historic homeland and civilization. Predictably, the palliatives failed to resist assimilation and the rapid disintegration of Galut Jewry’s ability for national and cultural survival outside the Land of Israel.

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Islamic Ethos

Ibrahim Mudayris

Ibrahim Mudayris is the Head of the Association for Memorizing Quran,
Ministry of Endowments & Religious Affairs.
The following sermon was delivered at Sheik Zayid Mosque in Gaza,
May 13, 2005.

There is no God but Allah, who warned His prophet [Muhammad] of the Jews, who murdered their prophets, and falsified their Bible. Had Allah not protected Muhammad [lit. the Beloved], he would have been a victim of the Jews’ treachery; he would have been one of the thousands of prophets who were murdered by the Jews.

With the establishment of the State of Israel, the entire Islamic nation was lost because Israel is a cancer spreading in the body of the Islamic nation. The Jews are a virus similar to AIDS, from which the entire world is suffering.

You’ll find Jews behind every conflict on Earth. The suffering of nations: the Jews are behind it!

Ask France! They tortured them, persecuted them and burned their Talmud for the conflicts that they tried to ignite in France.

Ask Portugal...

Ask Czarist Russia who invited the Jews and they plotted to murder the Czar! And he massacred them repeatedly.

Don’t ask Germany what they did to the Jews, since the Jews are the ones who provoked Nazism to fight the entire world. For they are doing something worse than was done to them in the Nazi war.

Possibly some of them were killed, possibly some were burned, but they’re exaggerating [the Holocaust] in order to win over world media, and world sympathy.

The Jews did not have a national home.

They lie when claiming that part of their faith is the establishment of a national home in Palestine.

Britain is the one that promised them the establishment of a national home on the land of Palestine. Why? Because Britain was upset by the Jewish presence in Britain, and wanted to be relieved of them, so it promised to establish a national home in Palestine.

Liar – he who says that the Jews have any rights to this land besides being occupiers. And they will disappear!

Allah is the one who says that the Jews have the character of cowards; they fear Muslims more than they fear Allah...

The Resurrection will not take place until the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Muslims kill them. The Jews will hide behind the rock and tree, and the rock and tree will say: Oh servant of Allah, oh Muslim, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him!

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