Smooth Stone

Israeli security forces today, under orders from the detestable Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, amassed in Hebron – the world’s oldest Jewish city – where they destroyed a synagogue and forcibly evicted two Jewish families from a Jewish-owned market place located within the city’s Jewish community.

Two Jewish families. In the meantime, arab squatters infest the Holy City of Hebron, but the diseased Israel government evicts two Jewish families. Never before in history has there been a nation that evicts its own citizens in order to pander to its enemies.

Hebron is home to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the second holiest site in Judaism. The tomb is believed to be the resting place of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah.

More than 3,000 Israeli solders and police officers surrounded a key section of Hebron’s Jewish community today to expel the two Jewish families. The government maintains their residency in Hebron is illegal, since the families’ arrival wasn’t coordinated with the Israeli military. The families say they moved in after the military reneged on an agreement.

The families’ eviction was widely regarded in Israel as the opening salvo of more planned major evacuations of Jews living in the West Bank’s biblical Jewish communities.

Excellent points made here. From Amid General Amnesia:

It’s a curious thing: Although the map that was changed by the Six-Day War had been in existence for less than 20 years, starting with Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, and more than twice as many years have gone by since then, that map of the Middle East continues to be regarded by the world as the “right” map, while the map that replaced it is considered a temporary aberration that needs to be canceled or reversed.

Similarly, the world has forgotten what the pre-1967 map was really like. Far from being demarcated by clear and accepted borders, it showed Israel separated from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon by mere armistice lines, frontiers created by the ceasefire that ended the 1948-1949 war and considered temporary by all Arab countries, not one of which recognized Israel and all of which looked forward openly to its destruction – an easily imaginable eventuality in view of the fact that these frontiers narrowed to a few miles’ width along the Mediterranean coastal plain where Israel’s population was most concentrated.

It is no longer remembered that immediately after the June 1967 war, Israel was ready to return nearly all of the land conquered by it in return for peace and was answered by a monolithic Arab refusal to negotiate, accompanied by a partial recommencement of hostilities by Egypt in the 1968-1970 “War of Attrition.” The history of the 1967 war and what came before it has been so successfully written by the losers that the winners’ account is scoffed at incredulously today even by supposedly knowledgeable people.

From The Most Justified War:

As Ha’aretz’s correspondent in Paris before the 1967 Six-Day War, I was at the Israeli Embassy when half a million people rallied in the streets to show their solidarity with Israel. There was a sense that the Arabs were about to wipe out the Jewish state. On television, people saw Egyptian troops marching into Sinai; they heard Nasser’s warmongering speeches. Ahmed Shukeiry, the secretary of the Arab League, declared that the Jews of Israel would be sent back to the countries they came from and native Israelis would be slaughtered. What those now denouncing the 40th anniversary of the “occupation” do not understand is that the Six-Day War was the most justified war Israel ever fought – because it knocked out of the Arabs’ heads the idea that Israel could be destroyed by force.

From The Six-Day War: A Defensive War:

International law makes a clear distinction between land “occupied” during a war of aggression and land taken as a result of a defensive war. On June 5, 1967, Jordan attacked Israel. Suburbs of Tel Aviv were shelled by artillery. Israel’s largest military airfield, Ramat David, was shelled. Jordanian warplanes attacked the central Israeli towns of Netanya and Kfar Saba. Thousands of mortar shells rained down on western Jerusalem, targeting Israel’s parliament building and the prime minister’s office. Twenty Israelis died in these attacks; 1,000 were wounded; 900 buildings were damaged. Only after coming under fire and sustaining casualties did the Israeli military respond against Jordanian forces in the West Bank.

From No Pyrrhic Victory:

It is often said today that the Six-Day War humiliated the Arabs and propelled the region into future rounds of fighting. Yet only a few days before the outbreak of the war, Iraq’s then-President Abdul Rahman Aref saw it as “our opportunity…to wipe Israel off the map,” describing the war as the Arabs’ chance “to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948.”

It is said that the Palestinian movement was born from Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Yet the Palestine Liberation Organization was already in its third year of operations when the war began [having been established with the singular intent to destroy Israel as early as 1964].

To read some recent accounts, a more sagacious Israel could have followed up its historic victory with peace overtures. In fact, the Israeli cabinet agreed on June 19, 1967, to offer the Sinai to Egypt and the Golan to Syria in exchange for peace deals. In Khartoum that September, the Arab League declared “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.”

On June 5, 1967, Israel was a poor, desperately vulnerable country, which threw the dice on its own survival in the most audacious military strike of the 20th century. It is infinitely richer and more powerful today, and sure in its alliance with the U.S. If these are the fruits of Israel’s “Pyrrhic victory,” it needs more such of them.

From How the Six-Day War Reshaped the Mideast:

The great irony of the Six-Day War of 1967 was that it began with a hoax – a piece of faulty Soviet intelligence given to the Egyptians. On May 13, the Soviet ambassador to Cairo informed the Egyptians that Israel was massing “10 to 12 brigades” on the Syrian border in preparation for a big push against the radical regime in Damascus. In response to that Soviet report, Nasser mobilized his troops on May 14 and dispatched them into the Sinai. The casus belli would come on May 22, when Nasser announced the closing of the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. Euphoria gripped the Arab world; Nasser hadn’t fired a shot, but great gains had come his way. On May 30, King Hussein of Jordan rushed to Cairo to place his army under Egyptian command.

At the remove of four decades, we should not overdo the importance of that Soviet report about the phantom Israeli brigades. At the heart of the war lay the willful Arab refusal to accept Israel’s legitimacy and statehood. Israel’s victory in 1967 delivered a message: that the state that had fought its way into the world in 1948 is there to stay.

Contributing Editor Fouad Ajami is Majid Khadduri professor of Middle East studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and author, most recently, of The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq.

From the great Charles Krauthammer:

There has hardly been an Arab peace plan in the past 40 years — including the current Saudi version — that does not demand a return to the status quo of June 4, 1967. Why is that date so sacred? Because it was the day before the outbreak of the Six Day War in which Israel scored one of the most stunning victories of the 20th century. The Arabs have spent four decades trying to undo its consequences.

The real anniversary of the war should be now, three weeks earlier. On May 16, 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Nasser demanded the evacuation from the Sinai Peninsula of the U.N. buffer force that had kept Israel and Egypt at peace for 10 years. The U.N. complied, at which point Nasser imposed a naval blockade of Israel’s only outlet to the south, the port of Eilat — an open act of war.

How Egypt came to this reckless provocation is a complicated tale (chronicled in Michael Oren’s magisterial history “Six Days of War”) of aggressive intent compounded with fateful disinformation. An urgent and false Soviet warning that Israel was preparing to attack Syria led to a cascade of intra-Arab maneuvers that in turn led Nasser, the champion of pan-Arabism, to mortally confront Israel with
a remilitarized Sinai and a southern blockade.

Why is this still important? Because that three-week period between May 16 and June 5 helps explain Israel’s 40-year reluctance to give up the fruits of the Six Day War — the Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza — in return for paper guarantees of peace. Israel had similar guarantees from the 1956 Suez War, after which it evacuated the Sinai in return for that U.N. buffer force and for assurances from the Western powers of free passage through the Straits of Tiran.

All this disappeared with a wave of Nasser’s hand. During those three interminable weeks, President Lyndon Johnson tried to rustle up an armada of countries to run the blockade and open Israel’s south. The effort failed dismally.

It is hard to exaggerate what it was like for Israel in those three weeks. Egypt, already in an alliance with Syria, formed an emergency military pact with Jordan. Iraq, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Libya and Morocco began sending forces to join the coming fight. With troops and armor massing on Israel’s every frontier,
jubilant broadcasts in every Arab capital hailed the imminent final war for the extermination of Israel. “We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants,” declared PLO head Ahmed Shuqayri, “and as for the survivors — if there are any — the boats are ready to deport them.”

For Israel, the waiting was excruciating and debilitating. Israel’s citizen army had to be mobilized. As its soldiers waited on the various fronts for the world to rescue the nation from peril, Israeli society ground to a halt and its economy began bleeding to death. Army Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, later to be hailed as a war hero and even later as a martyred man of peace, had a nervous breakdown. He was incapacitated to the point of incoherence by the unbearable tension of waiting with the life of his country in the balance.

We know the rest of the story. Rabin recovered in time to lead Israel to victory. But we forget how perilous was Israel’s condition. The victory hinged on a successful attack on Egypt’s air force on the morning of June 5. It was a gamble of astonishing proportions. Israel sent the bulk of its 200-plane air force on the mission, fully exposed to antiaircraft fire and missiles. Had they been detected and the force destroyed, the number of planes remaining behind to defend the Israeli homeland — its cities and civilians — from the Arab air forces’ combined 900 planes was … 12.

We also forget that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank was entirely unsought. Israel begged Jordan’s King Hussein to stay out of the conflict. Engaged in fierce combat with a numerically superior Egypt, Israel had no desire to open a new front just yards from Jewish Jerusalem and just miles from Tel Aviv. But Nasser personally told Hussein that Egypt had destroyed Israel’s air force and airfields and that total victory was at hand. Hussein could not resist the temptation to join the fight. He joined. He lost.

The world will soon be awash with 40th anniversary retrospectives on the war — and on the peace of the ages that awaits if Israel would only return to June 4, 1967. But Israelis are cautious. They remember the terror of that unbearable May when, with Israel possessing no occupied territories whatsoever, the entire Arab world was furiously preparing Israel’s imminent extinction. And the world did nothing.

Be berry, berry qwiet. Don’t look now, but Jordan wants to resume its re-occupation of Jerusalem that it had previously occupied from 1948 to 1967, where no Muslim, Jew, or Christian was allowed to pray, with no peep of outrage from the international community. Yet, when Jews are in their indigenous homeland, and open up the Temple Mount so that Muslim, Jew and Christian could pray, the world is infuriated. Arab occupation of Jewish land = good. Jewish occupation of Jewish land = bad. That’s Arabist logic for you. Not surprising from a culture whose greatest gift to civilization is their claim to inventing the number zero. From WND:

Jordan has been quietly purchasing real estate surrounding the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in hopes of gaining more control over the area accessing the holy site, according to Palestinian and Israeli officials.

The officials confirmed to WND the Jordanian Kingdom has been using shell companies during the past year to purchase several apartments and shops located at key peripheral sections of the Temple Mount.

The officials said Jordan also set up a commission to use the companies to petition mostly Arab landowners adjacent to eastern sections of the Temple Mount to sell their properties. They said profits from sales at any purchased shops would be reinvested to buy more real estate near the Mount and in eastern Jerusalem neighborhoods. The shell companies at times have presented themselves as acting on behalf of the Waqf, the Muslim custodians of the Temple Mount, WND has learned.

Sheik Azzam Khateeb, who was installed last month as the new manager of the Waqf, is known to be close to the Jordanian monarchy. The previous Waqf manager, Sheik Adnon Husseini, was loyal to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party and had relations with Israel and some Jewish groups.

The Israeli and Palestinian officials said Jordan recently placed a bid to purchase Jerusalem’s Intercontinental Hotel, which is situated on an important road that leads to an ancient cemetery on the Mount of Olives, adjacent to the Temple Mount. Informed sources tell WND the hotel is owned by groups representing the Israeli government and is leased every 10 years to a new company. The last lease was signed in 1997 and expires later this year. It was not immediately clear whether Jordan’s bid was accepted.

The Mount of Olives is site of many biblical events and is considered important to Judaism and Christianity.

Real estate ownership in Jerusalem’s Old City is widely considered a sensitive matter. Previous Israeli-Palestinian peace proposals tentatively divided parts of the city based on Jewish or Arab residence.

Jordan previously controlled eastern Jerusalem and the Temple Mount from 1948 until Israel liberated the territory in the 1967 Six Day War. During the period of Jordanian control, Jews were barred from the Western Wall and Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest sites, and hundreds of synagogues were destroyed. Jordan constructed a road to the Intercontinental Hotel that stretched across the Mount of Olives, bulldozing hundreds of Jewish gravestones.

Jordan the past few months has boosted its public profile on the Temple Mount. The appointment of Khateeb as the new Waqf manager for the Temple Mount was widely seen as a nod to Jordan.

From IsraelNN.com:

Syria has stationed thousands of missiles along the Israeli border, Agence France-Presse reported, relying on unnamed military sources who said the rockets are camouflaged or hidden underground and can strike from the Kinneret to Haifa.

IDF officials responded that they have not noted any unusual activity and that Syria is not preparing to attack Israel, but increased arms sales from Russia to Syria have brought back bitter memories of 1973. Top military and intelligence advisors convinced Golda Meir, who was then Prime Minister, that her fears of war were exaggerated. The day before the Yom Kippur War broke out on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts, “We received a report that worried me,” the
former Prime Minister wrote in her book My Life. She gathered top officials in her office hours before the beginning of Yom Kippur and, referring to the days before the Six Day War in 1967 told them, “I have a terrible feeling that this has all happened before.”

Other indications that Syria is planning for war are reports by Golan Heights residents of massive construction along the border, possibly barracks for troops and underground bunkers, copying Hizbullah’s strategy. Another sign of Israeli concern is a report that the army has staged massive training exercises in Samaria.

More proof that anti-Zionism is racism. An excellent article from the excellent New York Sun, Gall of the Hashemites:

Jordan’s King Abdullah II, speaking before a joint meeting of Congress Wednesday, seemed to blame Israel for all the world’s problems. “The denial of justice and peace in Palestine,” the king said, “is the core issue. And this core issue is not only producing severe consequences for our region, it is producing severe consequences for our world.”

Balderdash is the kindest way to describe it. If the terrorists are upset about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, why are they setting off bombs in Indonesia and Spain and Saudi Arabia and Iraq, which are hardly in the vanguard of support for Israel? Given that the terrorists state publicly that their end goal is to make all of Europe and America subject to Islamic law, why should we believe that in fact they have the far more modest goal of merely seizing land belonging to the Jewish state?

The gall of the son of King Hussein, who perpetrated what the Arabs call Black September on the Palestinians [when Jordan expelled the PLO in 1970], to lecture the Americans on Palestinian Arab dispossession is astounding. Abdullah well knows that Jordan controlled the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967. If the Palestinian Arabs were dispossessed during that period, it was no one’s fault but the Hashemites’, who didn’t exactly use those decades to establish a Palestinian Arab state.

Abdullah made reference to a Saudi proposal from 2002 that he described as the “Arab Peace Initiative.” That plan would be more accurately described as the Arab Destruction of Israel Initiative. Its aim was to give the Palestinian Arabs half of the Israeli capital of Jerusalem, [force an Israeli] retreat to militarily indefensible borders, and absorb within those borders enough Arab “refugees” so that its character as a Jewish state would be eradicated.

One of the effects of the Islamist terrorist onslaught of recent years is that more Americans have thought more deeply about these matters. They will not be gulled by a foreign potentate
offering up Israel as a scapegoat for troubles that originate with the failings of the Arab and Islamic world and their nondemocratic leaders, Abdullah among them.