Slinging Mud on Jerusalem, King David's City

Nadene Goldfoot

Israel has a rough road to hoe when friendly nations like England put out distorted programs creating history to suit themselves and to salve Muslim's ideas and goals. We've had a few programs about Israel ourselves on CNN that were more than disappointing. Yet it's a station I've been watching a lot during the Haitian earthquake because they've been doing the best job. One criticism I have of them is that they only mentioned Israel's aid in about a 5 second segment. They could have done more. NBC did better yesterday. Even good stations can do sloppy and slanted programs and cause much more harm than they help. Israel may be one of the smallest nations in the world, but gets more reporters than anyone.

BBC has created a 30 minute program called "Panorama" where they have interpreted international law themselves which dissolves any connection Jews have to Jerusalem, especially before 1948.

"The only time that the eastern part of Jerusalem was exclusively Arab was between 1949 and 1967, and that was because Jordan occupied the area and forcibly expelled all the Jews." This is from Historian Michael Bard, someone I know is accurate.

When listening and reading historical books, one has to be aware of the authorship and what goals the author may have. So much can be distorted. I doubt if they have ever read "From Time Immemorial" the origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine by Joan Peters. She was a reporter who was researching to defend Palestinian Arabs and came across so much information to the contrary that her book backs the claims of Jews in Israel completely. She's not the only researcher, either. I beg people in England and the United States to read and investigate on their own and be aware of authors. Read Victor Sharpe's Politicide book I and book II, which will soon come out.

http://www.honestreporting.co.uk/articles/critiques/new/BBC_Denying_Jewish_Jerusalem.asp

Kiryat Shimona Under Rocket Attack-1980-1985

Nadene Goldfoot

My favorite town north of Safed received rocket fire from Lebanon again. I remember living in Safed from 1980 to 1985 and this situation happened all the time. Kiryat Shimona was populated by a lot of American Jews and they were in dire need of a psychologist to soothe their anxiety. We were attending a 10 month ulpan at the time, and at Spring Break one of our friends went there to visit and wound up living in the bomb shelter for about two weeks. She was out of communication and we had no idea what had happened to her. The town held my favorite department store, the Hamishbeer, so similar to Meier and Franks here in Portland. I loved that store. When they were under a lot of fire I prayed that the department store would be spared. It was.

Now it's happened again, and I can feel the angst of the people living there. Though it missed its target and caused no damage or injury, it surely causes a lot of hearts to beat faster and mothers to feel a lot of concern for their children. The rocket came from the village of Houla.

Israel answered with artillery fire at Lebanon. The Lebanese reported that we fired at least eight shells toward that area in response. The border may now be quiet but it is tense.

Both sides accuse each other of violating a UN brokered ceasefire from 2006 that ended a month-long war between Israel and the Hezbollah terrorists. Lebanon is accusing Israel of planting listening devices and to overflight of an unmanned drone surveillance aircraft over southern Lebanon. Israel accuses Lebanon of two recent blasts involving weapons storage depots in southern Lebanon, and two rockets fired from Lebanon at northern Israel last month. A militant group connected to al Qaeda took responsibility for the rocket attack then.

It looks to me like Lebanon is involved with hiding weapons (to use against Israel, of course) and of taking pot-shots at Israel when they so want to, and Israel is trying to use surveilance to find out what they're planning to do to Israel. Of course Lebanon doesn't want Israel to find out, so again with the complaints and shootings.

We used to drive to Kiriat Shimona in order to get to the Good-Neighbor Fence between the two countries. I wonder what has happened to it.

Comment 10/27/09 from Victor Sharpe: The "good neighbor fence" died because Ehud Barak let our Lebanese allies, under General Hadad, down by withdrawing Israeli troops suddenly from the 10 mile wide security zone. He did this dreadful act in response to the campaign of the "Women in Black" who agitated for Israel to leave the security zone in Lebanon, which had protected Israel's northern border. Predictably, the vacuum was immediately filled with Hezbolah, and the Lebanese Christian allies who had supported us were left to twist in the wind. Barak did this and should be covered in shame. Israel cannot afford to lose such good friends. That was the ending of the "good neighbor fence" because we betrayed those neighbors and succumbed to the Israeli leftist "Mothers in Black." Now we have sixty thousand missiles pointing at Israel from Lebanon. Meshugas!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091027/wl_nm/us_lebanon_israel_2/print Rocket from Lebanon hits Israel; Israel fires back

A Two-State Solution on Both Sides of the River Jordan

by Victor Sharpe

Very few people understand why Israel is now balking at a two-state solution and are against Obama's plan. This is an excellent explanation of why and what has been happening to the area. -Nadene Goldfoot

The phrase "Two State Solution" has been embraced by politicians and journalists alike, repeated endlessly, and touted as the panacea for a "just and equitable" solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

It has assumed the repetitious role of a muezzin's call to Islamic prayer. But it is based on erroneous geography and history; on a mixture of wishful thinking, naiveté and a brilliant Arab propaganda campaign of disinformation and falsehood. To understand why, it is necessary to learn a small but vital chapter of Middle Eastern history.

Shortly after the conclusion of the First World War and the total defeat of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which had ruled most of the Middle East for 400 years, Britain was made trustee by the League of Nations for the whole of the geographical area known as Mandatory Palestine.

Incorporated within the Mandate was the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which specifically referred to the historical connections of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the moral validity of reconstituting within it a Jewish National Home.

The British Mandatory power, however, arbitrarily tore away 80% of the Palestine Mandate in 1922, giving it to the Hashemites, a Bedouin tribe with links to Mecca. Only the land west of the River Jordan remained from the original territory promised to the Jewish people as a National Home.

Jewish residency was immediately forbidden in all the lands east of the River Jordan, which in time became known as Trans-Jordan and then the Kingdom of Jordan.

The U.N. Partition Plan of 1947 created two states, Jewish and Arab, which were roughly equal in size. But these two states were to occupy only the remaining western geographic area of Mandatory Palestine - from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan - barely 50 miles wide and a mere 20% of what now remained of Mandatory Palestine.

This plan was accepted by the Jewish leadership with deep reservations but as a pragmatic solution to the plight of the 850,000 Jewish refugees who were being driven from Arab lands at the time of Israel's rebirth.
The miniscule size of the state was also reluctantly accepted in order to facilitate the absorption of the surviving Jewish remnant still languishing in European refugee camps following the Holocaust.
The State of Israel, thus reconstituted in part of its ancient and biblical homeland in May, 1948, was immediately invaded by seven Arab armies in order to completely destroy it and drive the surviving Jews into the sea.
The Jordanian Arab Legion, led by British officers, occupied the eastern half of Jerusalem along with Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), driving the Jews out of their towns and villages. In the south, the Egyptians occupied the Gaza Strip, similarly driving the Jews from their homes.

The Jewish state astonished the world by surviving the Arab aggression. The Arab states, however, totally rejected the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East and an uneasy armistice remained in force routinely broken by acts of Arab terror.

In June, 1967, the Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians, launched a new aggression against Israel with the avowed intention of annihilating it. Israel defeated her Arab enemies in six amazing days and in so doing liberated the eastern half of Jerusalem, along with Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), from the Jordanians. At the same time, Gaza was freed from Egyptian occupation.

Despite subsequent and repeated offers by Israeli governments to give away territory in return for a true and lasting peace with the Arab belligerents, the Arab world continued to support terror and refused to accept a Jewish state within the Middle East.

Interestingly in April, 2009, the Holocaust denying leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, Israel's supposed peace partner, rejected any willingness to accept Israel as a Jewish state; a sure indication of the falsity of any Arab claim to live in full and lasting peace with Israel.

True, a peace exists today between Israel and Jordan and between Israel and Egypt but it is a frigid, cold and precarious peace with neither Jordan nor Egypt truly interested in full and mutually beneficial relations. Thus ends the history lesson.

The creation of a Palestinian Arab state within the mere 50 miles separating the Mediterranean and the Jordan River is a recipe for war and for the piecemeal destruction of the Jewish state. Such an Arab state will more than likely soon fall under the control of the Islamist Hamas movement, itself a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks a worldwide Islamic Caliphate. Gaza, and what it has become, is living proof.

The Iranian mullahs, perhaps soon armed with nuclear weapons, will have a command and control base within the territory given away to the Arabs. They will be ensconced in Gaza on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, determined upon launching ever more lethal terror against what is left of Israel and threatening Europe itself.

Israel will again be reduced to a nation a mere nine miles wide at its most populous region. When President Bush was still Governor of Texas he flew over Israel's tiny waist and remarked, "...why, in my state we have driveways longer than that."

That is the most likely outcome of the current proposed Two State Solution west of the Jordan River, which the Obama Administration is pushing with the flawed zeal of a misguided zealot. But to truly create a just and equitable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I propose a Two State Solution on both sides of the River Jordan.

To repeat: The present day Kingdom of Jordan occupies four-fifths of geographical Palestine. This territory consists of the land east of the River Jordan, extending north to Syria, east to Iraq and south to Saudi-Arabia.

Compared to Israel, it dwarfs the Jewish state yet it originated in an act of unprincipled perfidiousness by the British government of the day and remains an Arab state that has from its inception forbidden Jewish habitation within its borders,

This is even though it includes territory promised in Britain's 1917 Balfour Declaration and by the League of Nations as a Jewish National Home.

Jordan's population is currently made up of 75% Arabs who call themselves Palestinians with the remainder being Hashemite Bedouins. As it is exists on land originally forming four fifths of Mandatory Palestine, and as the population is three fourths Palestinian Arab, it follows that the "just and equitable" solution to the creation of a Palestinian Arab state should be within the present day Kingdom of Jordan and, therefore, east of the River Jordan.

The Arabs who call themselves Palestinians and who choose to remain in Judea and Samaria should be required to end all terrorism against Israel - hardly an onerous demand - and by finally living in peace could flourish within an Israel whose territory would now formally extend west from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. That would still only be a distance of barely 50 miles at its widest. The United States in comparison is some 3,000 miles wide.

Israel would now formally give up 80% of the originally mandated territory but would now possess all of her biblical and ancestral Jewish lands - with the exception of biblical Gilead east of the Jordan River, which is in present day north-western Jordan.

If there is a desire within the international community to truly arrive at a "just and equitable" solution, then this would be it. Of course, if this was a perfect world, it would satisfy historical, geographical, religious and ethnic considerations. But, alas, it is anything but a perfect world and the fanatical desire among so many Arab and Muslim nations to wipe out all vestiges of a Jewish state is, perhaps, insurmountable.
Nevertheless, it can do no harm to raise it in the corridors of power and promote and articulate it forcefully as a truly "just and equitable" solution.

When Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu arrives for his fateful meeting with President Barak Obama on May 18, 2009, it is unlikely that this solution will be raised. That is a shame because the accepted wisdom, now exercising the minds of Obama, the neo-libs who surround him, his problematic advisors, and the legions of people around the world who have succumbed to the churning mills of the Arab propaganda machine, is that there exists a people called Palestinians with a distinct history who lived in an independent Arab state called Palestine.

It is a lie, perhaps one of the greatest scams in history, swallowed in direct proportion to the amount of times it has been repeated. It is a fraudulent history of a fraudulent people in a fraudulent land.
Indeed, there has never in all of recorded history existed an independent, sovereign Arab nation called Palestine.

Here are the words of a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, speaking in 1937 before the Peel Commission, which was considering partition of the Palestine Mandate, west of the River Jordan:
"...There is no such country as Palestine! ...That is a term the Zionists invented! ...There is no Palestine in the Bible."

Professor Philip Hitti, the Arab-American history professor at Princeton, said in unambiguous words before the 1946 Anglo-American Committee:
"...There is no such thing as ‘Palestine' in history, absolutely not."
President Obama has made it crystal clear that he is not prepared to let such inconvenient truths deter him from his strange obsession in forcing through the creation of a terror supporting Palestinian Arab state during his term of office.

He intends to shower the Arab and Muslim world with favors. No favor could be more eagerly snatched at than that of the Israeli democracy abandoned by this American President to the tender mercies of the ever circling mullahs, imams, dictators and oligarchs.And as the President prepares to leave on his strange mission to Egypt to give a speech to the Muslim world he will also no doubt ignore the fact that from the Al Azhar University in Cairo spews forth a constant stream of Islamic hatred towards non-Muslims; those they call "infidels."

Doubly strange that President Barak Hussein Obama should choose Egypt whose government controlled media routinely drips anti-Jewish poisonFor Binyamin Netanyahu, May 18th, 2009 may therefore, to paraphrase Dickens, be the best of times and the worst of times. He may surprise us yet by being a leader not made of petroleum jelly, but one who finally stands up to President Obama and simply says, No.
After all, the stakes are harrowingly high - the very survival of modern Israel. But it is worth doing the right thing, or, as Mark Twain put it:
"... always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest."

If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem

Here's an answer to Ben Ehrenreich and his article: The Root of Israel's Problem: Zionism -found in the Sunday Oregonian. I think Ben did forget. Nadene Goldfoot

By Victor Sharpe

Nadene Goldfoot
Jerusalem has been described as the eternal city of the eternal people.Let me quote the words from 1918 of the great Rabbi J.H. Hertz, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, at the thanksgiving service for the liberation of Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks by British forces. He spoke of the nearly 4,000 years of history that bound the Jews to their spiritual and physical capital city and of their fate in defending it against its many conquerors.“Like the Jew, this Holy City of Israel is deathless; fire and sword and all the engines of destruction have been hurled against it in vain.

 The Babylonians burnt it and deported its population; the Romans slew a million of its inhabitants, razed it to the ground, passed the ploughshare over it and strewed its furors with salt; Hadrian banished its very name from the lips of men, changed it to Aelia Capitolina and forbade any Jew from entering it on pain of death. Persians and Arabs, Barbarians and Crusaders and Turks took it and re-took it, ravaged it and burnt it; and yet, marvelous to relate, it ever rises from its ashes to renewed life and glory.”Rabbi Hertz was talking on the very day that 2,080 years earlier, Judah Maccabee, the wondrous Jewish hero who had led his warriors against the Greek-Syrians to liberate the Holy City from its heathen occupiers, entered the Temple and re-dedicated it to the glory of the One and Only God, invisible and indivisible.

 Rabbi Hertz ended his speech by proclaiming the prophetic teaching of the Maccabean festival, we know as Hanukah, in Zechariah, 4:6: “Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.”It is well to dwell on what has been said by both Jews and non-Jews in the past about Jerusalem for there is a government and a prime minister in Israel today preparing to abandon eternal Jerusalem and give it away to those who hate the Jewish people and have set their face against accepting any Jewish independence or sovereignty in the Land of Israel.

The tireless Zionist leader, Theodor Herzl, wrote in 1897: “The return to Zion must be preceded by our return to Judaism.” We should remember that Herzl knew full well that the word Zion is, and always has been, synonymous with the eternal city of Jerusalem.Mordechai M. Noah wrote in 1824 that “We will return to Zion as we went forth, bringing back the faith we carried away with us.”Again, Herzl wrote in 1898 about the Zionist cause and the restoration of Jerusalem: “One thing is to me certain, high above any doubt: the movement will continue. I know not when I shall die, but Zionism will never die.”

And here is a quote in the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1910. In it Lucien Wolf wrote as follows: “Zionism is the lineal heir to the attachment to Zion, which led the Babylonian exiles under Zerubbabel to rebuild the Temple and which flamed up in the heroic struggle of the Maccabees against Antiochus Epiphanes. The great bulk of the Jewish people have throughout their history remained faithful to the dream of a restoration of their national life in Judea.”One can go back through the mists of time and read the same sentiments in every generation; as far back as the towering words in Isaiah 2:1 and Micah 4:2: “For out of Zion shall come forth the Torah, and the word of God from Jerusalem.”

 These are just two of the 821 times that Jerusalem and Zion appear in the Tanach (Holy Bible) – Jerusalem 667 times and Zion, 154 times.According to the much loved correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, the late Moshe Kohn, “Jewish sources speak of the seventy names by which Jerusalem is referred to in the classical Jewish sources. These include Ariel/lion of God (Isaiah 29:1); Kirya Neemana/Faithful City (Isaiah 1:25); Ir Ha’emet (City of Truth (Zechariah 8:3); Klilat Yofi/Paragon of Beauty (Lamentations 2:15); Yefay Nof/ Beautiful Panorama (Psalms 48:3); and the ancient commentary of Rabbi Akiva in Sanhedrin 58a on 1 Chronicles 29:11 Hanetza/Eternity.”

But what of now? The modern State of Israel endures a prime minister willing, even anxious to divide Jerusalem again and to give away ancestral and biblical Jewish lands to an enemy led by a Holocaust denier whose own Fatah organization continues to murder Jews and gleefully claim credit for its crimes.This Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, is now being investigated on four separate charges of corruption, yet Israelis seem paralyzed and unable to remove him politically from office. Olmert is the Prime Minister under whose watch the Second Lebanon War was grotesquely mishandled and who has recently been blamed for the needless deaths of thirty Israeli soldiers in the waning days of the war. Yet he has not done the honorable thing: resign.This is the Prime Minister who applauded the national shame known under its duplicitous euphemism, the “Disengagement Plan.” In it, Israeli policemen and women were ordered to drag 10,000 Jewish souls from their homes in villages throughout the Gaza Strip, land known as Gush Katif, and to then destroy those homes and their flourishing Jewish farms. This is the man who has allowed the Arabs in Gaza, who have shown their contempt by not creating a civilized society in Gaza but by sliding into 7th century barbarism and Islamism, to rain thousands of missiles upon the Israeli towns and villages adjacent to the terror-infested Arab-occupied Gaza Strip. Ehud Olmert and his regime continue to allow what no other nation on earth would ever tolerate.

And this Prime Minister, under whose reign tens of thousand of Israelis in Judea and Samaria now fear a new deportation will soon descend upon them, is soon to represent Israel at an International Conference in Annapolis called for by the U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.Ms. Rice has made it a personal commitment, even an article of faith, to create a Palestinian state side by side with Israel within the mere fifty miles width separating the Jordan River from the Mediterranean Sea. It is reported that her advisers include men who are not well disposed toward the Jewish State. They include Jimmy Carter, James Baker lll, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski.At this ill conceived Conference, Olmert will likely make far-reaching concessions to the Arabs with nothing in return. That has been the sorry pattern of Israel’s suicidal policy of “land for peace” whereby the Palestinian aggressors receive land from which to launch new terrorism against Israel, but Israel never receives peace.

 This failed policy has been pressed upon Israel by successive American Secretaries of State and Presidents.Olmert and his ministers seem unable to learn any lessons from their earlier futile withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza. Soon, Heaven forbid, the very ancestral homeland in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) will be lost, not by the ravages of an enemy host but, to its eternal shame, from an Israeli government itself. As Frank Gaffney wrote in a recent article, “Condi Rice is demanding that Israel now relinquish the West Bank and east Jerusalem to yet another terrorist organization: Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah.

 The entire Annapolis house of cards is built on the fraudulent foundation that the Palestinian faction established by Abbas’ mentor, Yasser Arafat, is a reliable partner for peace. Only a zealot who has altogether lost any sense or reality could make such an assertion.”So will Olmert sell out Israel’s ability to remain a viable state with an undivided capital city in eternal Jerusalem? Will Israel be able to defend itself after being forced back within pre-1967 borders, which an Israeli statesman, Abba Eban, once described as the “Auschwitz borders?”

 Or will Ehud Olmert, at this eleventh hour, find within himself the spiritual essence and wisdom that has guided so many Jewish leaders before him? Will he remember Zion and not turn his face away from it? Perhaps he will yet turn from the false gods of secularism and find again the still small voice heard so long ago in the words of the great Jewish prophet, Isaiah 42: 6-7. “I the Lord have called thee in righteousness and have taken hold of thine hand, and kept thee, and set thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the nations, to open the blind eyes, to bring the prisoners from the dungeon, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.”

Source: Article submitted by the author, an IHC Featured Writerhttp://www.infoisrael.net/Published 3 December 2007

Israel Hasbara Committee - http://www.infoisrael.netYou can find this article online at www.infoisrael.net/cgi-local/text.pl?source=4/b/viii/031220071&lang=
on my blog with permission from Mr. Sharpe.

WAITING FOR PEACE? FORGET IT.

by Victor Sharpe

I've never posted anyone else's essays before, but Victor is an old friend of mine and an excellent writer who has something very important to say. His essays have been on other websites, and he is also an author of a book, Politicide. Nadene

Islam will never accept Israel unless Islam itself undergoes a reformation. But by its very nature it cannot do so and still be called Islam. That said, there is no future for the Jewish state if it keeps on believing that one day the Muslim world will accept it and live in a true and lasting peace as, for example, Holland and Belgium live peacefully side by side.

The only way forward for Israel is to accept the dismal fact that so long as it remains a Jewish and non-Arab state it cannot ever have peaceful neighbors who will not at every opportunity wish to destroy it. That being so, Israel must continue to prosper and thrive as a state in the knowledge that it can never let down its guard. It must ever be on its guard as were the biblical watchmen on the ancient walls of Jerusalem.

But even with such a threat hanging over it like some Arab sword of Damocles, Israel can survive and grow. Even though the Jewish state yearns for peace, as all other civilized societies do, the very external threat can be turned to great advantage militarily, politically, socially and economically. Nothing keeps internal division at bay and concentrates the mind more than when the barbarians are at the gate.

What is remarkable is that since the great Zionist leaders of the likes of Herzl, Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, Begin and Shamir have passed, there has been a long and depressing parade of weak and incompetent Israeli leaders and politicians who have brought unnecessary disaster down upon the state. The worst ever is the present caretaker prime minister, Ehud Olmert, whose idiocy is simply incomprehensible. Here is a man, deeply flawed and under police investigation for alleged corruption who seems driven by some infernal force to harm his own nation and aid and support her enemies by turning a blind eye to every Palestinian Arab provocation and act of naked aggression.

Along with defense minister, Ehud Barak, who is arguably one of the worst and most incompetent men ever to be entrusted with that vital portfolio, Olmert grovels at the feet of the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas. In response to veiled threats from Abbas that Israel must give to him everything he demands or else, the Israeli premier ignores the suffering of his people under bombardment in Sderot and Ashkelon and, instead, frees 250 Arab thugs who will immediately return to murdering Israeli civilians. Abbas is a miserable Holocaust denier whose very crime should place him beyond the pale for every Israeli leader.

From prime ministers, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu and Sharon down to Olmert and would be prime minister, Tzippi Livni, all have been resistant to accepting the sad but awful truth that even if Israel shrunk to one down town city block in Tel Aviv, the Arab and Muslim world would still not recognize a Jewish state or agree to live with it in peace and harmony. Why not? The answer to that question is Islam itself.

True peace can never be achieved between Muslim and non-Muslim nations. Islam mandates the faithful to spread their religion through territorial conquest or, as in the case of Israel, by reclaiming what Muslims believe they have lost.

Even though the native and indigenous peoples of Israel are the Jews, and even if the Land of Israel was given to the Jewish people in an eternal covenant with God, it does not matter to the Muslim, for wherever the Muslim foot has once trod triumphal, that territory is forever regarded as Islamic. If such territory is lost to Muslims, then the belief is that Allah has been diminished and the land must be retaken, however long it may take.

So Islam cannot and will not accept Israel. After all it is a Jewish state, governed by its Jewish inhabitants, and living in its very own ancestral and biblical homeland. But for the Muslim faithful, every part of it must become Muslim again. Until that time comes it will be considered by Muslim Arabs as within the Dar al Harb, the House of War. Peace then is merely a mirage in the desert sands.

World leaders, essentially those who are secular and western, fail to understand the Muslim mindset. Israeli leaders, who of all people should understand and know better, still fall into the fatal trap of believing that the western model of lasting peace between nation states can equally apply in the Middle East between Muslim and non-Muslim nations. It is a fallacy.

These leaders cling to the notion that the conflict between Israel and the Arabs in general, and between Israel and those who call themselves Palestinians in particular, is territorial. It is not. It is theological. It is, indeed, part of the existential conflict that has existed between Islam and the rest of the world since the 7th century.

Judaism and Christianity are considered by the followers of Islam to be in error. The Muslim belief is that Mohammed was given the final and complete divine revelation and Islam is therefore superior to the earlier two faiths, whose followers it calls the “People of the Book.” So now the Muslim cry is, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammed is his prophet.” Islam, therefore, is considered by the faithful as superior over all other faiths and peoples. It is a theological, “Islam uber alles.” Herein is the fundamental fault line, which may never be bridged.

Much of the Islamic world now feels empowered, as perhaps, never before, and seeks global domination with renewed vigor. This is the tangible and growing threat to the world; not global warming.

There are many Muslims who remain faithful adherents to Islam but who have rejected the jihadist call for Islamic supremacy throughout the world. Hopefully the West will find some Muslim nations who have learned to accept a “live and let live” policy with their non-Muslim neighbors. But the overwhelming strength of the jihadists may be too much for them to overcome and it seems a bleak and remote possibility that true moderates within Islam will one day prevail.

That may come in time, but for Israel that time is still far, far away. Tolerance and pluralism must remain a goal but it can only be achieved by world leaders understanding finally that Israel has yet to find within the Arab and Muslim world a true and genuine peace partner.

The policies of the Jewish state must be ordered within the recognition of that reality; somber and depressing as it may be. But only when world leaders understand the nature of Islam’s theological rejection of a genuine and irrevocable peace with Israel, and Israeli leaders realize the uselessness of trading tangible and ancestral land for a delusional “land for peace,” will a long and overdue reality finally enter the conflict.

I firmly believe that the majority of Israelis yearn for a valiant, honorable and stalwart leader, versed in his people’s history and faith, who will arise to tell those Arabs and Islamists who remain wedded to violent jihad against Israel that they will now find a new Israeli resolve to concede not one inch to their implacable aggression, enmity and deceit. Nor will the groveling that has characterized too many Israeli leaders in the past continue.

Dhimmitude, the humiliating condition that Muslims historically imposed upon both their Jewish and Christian subjects, must not ever again be tolerated in any future relationships between Israelis and their Arab enemies.

What we witness today is Israeli caretaker Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, bending the knee constantly and making endless concession to the deceitful leader of the Palestinian Authority, the Holocaust denying Mahmoud Abbas.

This Arab leader is not interested in peace with Israel. He is interested only in taking what ever he can from the foolish Olmert and giving nothing, absolutely nothing, in return. And that is because as a Muslim he is not permitted to make peace with a non-Muslim. Yet the terminally obtuse Olmert, and so many liberal and leftwing Jews inside and outside of Israel, remain infuriatingly blind to these simple facts.

Israeli leaders of the future must understand that the frigid cold peace that exists between Israel and Egypt, and Israel and Jordan, is no more than an armistice. They must realize once and for all the historical fact that Islam does not and cannot make a permanent peace with a non-Muslim neighbor.

Islam mandates that only when the non-Muslim enemy is stronger and cannot at the time be defeated, can a ceasefire (dressed up as a peace treaty) be accepted for the good of the umma (Islamic community).

But as soon as the enemy is considered weak and foolish through making, for example, pointless peaceful overtures and concessions, then war is an obligation demanded by the Quran. For this reason, the Arab and Muslim world launched its many wars against the Jewish state. Only by God’s grace did Israel survive but at a terrible cost in Jewish blood.

Such new Israeli leaders must look to the Torah and into their own people’s biblical history. They must see again the nature of their enemies as spelled out in crystal clarity by the Almighty through the words of the Jewish prophet Jeremiah:

“They dress the wound of my People as though it we’re not serious saying, Peace, peace, but there is no peace. We looked for peace, but no good came; and for a time of health, and behold trouble!”

I think of the disasters that Israeli leaders like Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin brought upon the Jewish state. They were the architects of the Oslo Accords, which we now more accurately call the Oslo War.

The premise of those failed accords, which have inflicted terrible suffering on so many Israelis, was for Israel to accept that its ancestral and biblical lands can be given away to implacable enemies in order to make them peaceful and accept what was left of the Jewish state. It predictably failed for all the reasons stated above.

The Midrash teaches that we are like a sheep among seventy wolves. Only the great Shepherd (God Almighty) can protect us from all of our enemies. We are instructed to do what we can to defend ourselves. But at this time it seems that no recent Israeli government has been able to face the task of protecting the residents of Israel. Look how the communities of southern Israel groan under the Arab missile blitz from the Gaza Strip while the Israeli Government of Ehud Olmert remains ever timid to the point of national humiliation. We must pray to God, the true guardian of Israel, to protect us.

In this I am mindful of the Jewish prophet, Joel, who reminded the ancient Jews that the covenanted land must never be given away, for as he said:

“In those days and at that time when I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem, I will gather all nations and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. There I will enter into judgement against them concerning My inheritance, My people Israel, for they scattered My people among the nations and divided up My land: Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision.”

Joel, speaking God’s words, then proclaimed: “The Lord will roar from Zion and thunder from Jerusalem; the earth and the sky will tremble. But the Lord God will be a refuge for His people, a stronghold for the people of Israel.”

Copyright © Victor Sharpe 2008

Victor Sharpe is the author of the highly acclaimed book: Politicide – The attempted murder of the Jewish state.