יום חמישי, 6 באוקטובר 2011

Elder of Ziyon Daily Digest

Elder of Ziyon Daily Digest

The whopper of a lie gets even bigger

Posted: 05 Oct 2011 06:52 PM PDT

In the summer of 2009, the Addameer organization testified before the Goldstone commission that some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs had been arrested since 1967. As I showed at the time, this is a completely made-up number, an exaggeration so absurd that it takes only a minute of thought to realize it.

That didn't stop Goldstone from believing it and quoting it uncritically in his infamous report. And that hasn't stopped this ridiculous lie to be found all over the Internet.

In early 2010, Addameer inflated this already absurd number even more, to "nearly 800,000."

And now, thanks to an article written by the Fatah Foreign Relations Commission that was published in Ma'an, we see that another hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs have been supposedly arrested in the past 20 months - 5000 every month!

The article, supposedly a rejoinder to AP's fact check on Mahmoud Abbas' speech that I had discussed briefly last week, is filled with so many lies that it would take a couple of hours to go through it. But this one is enough to show that Fatah has zero interest in truth:
AP omits that since the Israeli occupation began in 1967, almost 900,000 Palestinians have been detained by Israeli forces.

(PCHR counts about 80 arrests for September, which was a relatively high number of arrests due to the violence at the beginning of the month - and quite a bit less than 5000!)

The capacity of Palestinian Arab spokespeople to lie is infinite.

I am looking forward to the date in 2012 when Israel will be blamed for its millionth arrest, and when credulous media reports the lie without any skepticism.

(h/t CHA)

Rare biblical treasures, smuggled out of Syria, displayed today in Israel

Posted: 05 Oct 2011 02:19 PM PDT

A fascinating story from AP:
Precious Bible manuscripts originating in the Jewish community of Damascus, Syria, went on display for several hours Wednesday, offering a rare glimpse at a collection that includes books spirited to Israel in clandestine operations before the ancient community disappeared at the end of the 20th century.

The books are held at Israel's national library. Because of security and conservation concerns, most of the collection has been on display just once before, also for just a few hours, more than a decade ago.

The collection includes 11 volumes. Three, including the oldest and most important book in the collection, were brought out of the library's vaults and displayed during a symposium Wednesday evening.

Ranging from 700 to 1,000 years old and written in the Middle East and Europe, the parchment manuscripts include meticulous Hebrew penmanship and illustrations in ink and gold leaf. Some boast intricate micrography - decorations made up of thousands of tiny Hebrew letters.

Genesis 12
Syria is accusing Israel of stealing the manuscripts - as if they ever belonged to Syria:
Zionist occupation security forces, with the help of Israeli Mossad, have succeeded in stealing 11 Old Testament books, some dating back 1,000 years.

But some of the details show that they were jealously guarded by the Jewish community; none of them were written in Syria:

The oldest of the Damascus Crowns was written in the late 10th century A.D. in what is now Israel. Because it shows the influence of two rival schools of textual scholars, it has provided modern researchers with important information on how the Biblical text evolved. It was purchased by a famed British collector of manuscripts, David Solomon Sassoon, in 1914 and taken to Britain. The library purchased it in 1975.

Another of the books displayed Wednesday, a 700-year-old Bible that scholars believe was written in Italy, had a riskier journey to Jerusalem.

Beginning in the late 1970s, a Canadian Jewish woman, Judy Feld Carr, undertook an effort to smuggle Jews out of Syria, raising money from North American synagogues, bribing Syrian officials, dispatching envoys and running an independent immigration operation for more than 20 years from her living room in Toronto. All told, Feld Carr's endeavor facilitated the emigration of more than 3,000 Syrian Jews.

Feld Carr learned of the manuscript, she said, from Jews who had already fled, and dispatched a contact to Damascus in 1993. She would identify the man only as a Western Christian who died last year.

Feld Carr orchestrated a meeting in Damascus between her envoy and the community's rabbi, she recounted. The rabbi slipped him the book, and the man then smuggled it out of the country hidden under his raincoat in a black shopping bag. The book reached Feld Carr in Canada and came to Israel the next year.

While the book was in her possession, Feld Carr saw there were two records of purchase appended to the manuscript. One showed it had changed hands in Spain before Jews were expelled from the country in 1492, and the second recounted another sale in the Ottoman Empire, where many Jews found refuge.

"It went from Italy to Castille, to Constantinople, to Damascus, and then to Toronto - this book was the story of the Jewish people," she said.

The eight books that were not put on display at the library Wednesday arrived in Israel in the 1990s in murkier circumstances, smuggled out of Syria via the West in an operation conducted by Israel's intelligence services. Few details of that smuggling operation have been disclosed. Aviad Stollman, the library curator in charge of the collection, said the eight books were not displayed to avoid putting a spotlight on a story that remains largely classified.

In Damascus, the manuscripts were guarded in some of the 24 synagogues that existed before the community's emigration. They were taken out only on special occasions or with permission from community leaders, said Shlomo Baso, a Damascus-born rabbi.
From what I can see in the photo that shows the text, it looks beautifully written, a bit more artistic than the Aleppo Codex.


Hamas vs. UNRWA

Posted: 05 Oct 2011 01:09 PM PDT

From Reuters:

Thousands of Gaza teachers quit classes Wednesday to protest at a U.N. refugee agency's suspension of a Palestinian staffer, raising tension between UNRWA and Gaza's Islamist Hamas rulers.

The Local Staff Union, a pro-Hamas body, called for a general strike Wednesday, the second such action in a week, to protest at UNRWA's suspension of the head of the union, Suhail Al-Hindi. Hamas sources said the U.N. agency had accused Hindi of meeting with Hamas political officials.

Buses took some 7,000 teachers employed at UNRWA-run schools to U.N. headquarters in Gaza city where they held a sit-in, calling for an end to "UNRWA political punishment of employees."

"Death rather than humiliation" read a banner held by striking teachers. "Deception, lying and hypocrisy have become the core values of UNRWA," read another.

The strike affected all of UNRWA's 243 schools in Gaza.

Hindi told the teachers he would stand against "oppression and injustice" but added that Palestinians saw UNRWA as a symbol of the cause of refugees and that its role should be preserved "until the Israeli occupation is removed."

Hamas lawmakers often criticize UNRWA's education policies and some accuse it of trying to teach material that encourages normalization with Israel or educate pupils about the Holocaust.

UNRWA denies this is part of its curriculum.
Islam Online writes:

Palestinian political analysts described the conflicts taking place between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and Hamas as a "hidden war" between the two. This conflict has been taking place for over five years with regards to who has authority to manage Gaza's affairs.

The conflicts between Hamas and UNRWA never seem to subside; whenever the tension between the two over an issue ends, another begins.

...UNRWA media advisor Adnan abu Hasneh denied Hamas' accusations. He said during his speech with Islam Online that UNRWA is offended by the repeated accusations made by Hamas, adding: "the decision to terminate the union chairman was due to his participation in a political activity, which is against UN laws that ban its workers from engaging in political activities…This applies to everyone with no exceptions."
The rhetoric increased at today's rally, as the terminated union head said that UNRWA is pushing its own agenda and is engaging in "intellectual terrorism" fro creating a curriculum not to Hamas' liking. He also said that UNRWA didn't protest the Palmer report.

A Hamas-oriented columnist flatly stated that UNRWA is a tool of the CIA and Mossad.

Meanwhile, the official WAFA news agency of the PA published UNRWA's press release without identifying it as such.

This seems more serious than the usual bickering between UNRWA and the people it pretends to help. If UNRWA caves to Hamas demands and allows its teachers to openly associate with terrorists, it will lose all of its US funding (and perhaps more.) But if it holds its ground the Hamas-led union will cripple it.

Hey, maybe it will be forced to leave Gaza. UNRWA has no business existing in the territories, and the care of Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank should properly be done by their leaders. UNRWA's being a crutch allows Hamas to spend more on weapons and less on medicine, food and education.


Fisking Nusseibeh's "Why Israel can't be a 'Jewish State'

Posted: 05 Oct 2011 11:29 AM PDT

A couple of days ago Al Jazeera published an article called "Why Israel can't be a 'Jewish State'" by Sari Nusseibeh.

It has garnered over 5000 Facebook recommendations and hundreds more retweets.

Like the idea that the Neturei Karta represent "True Judaism," this article gives people who already made up their minds a thread of scholarly-sounding nonsense for them to grab onto to justify their opinions.

And it is, indeed, nonsense.

If we consider the subject dispassionately, the idea of a "Jewish State" is logically and morally problematic because of its legal, religious, historical and social implications. The implications of this term therefore need to be spelled out, and we are sure that once they are, most people - and most Israeli citizens, we trust - will not accept these implications.

...First, let us say that confusion immediately arises here because the term "Jewish" can be applied both to the ancient race of Israelites and their descendants, as well as to those who believe in and practice the religion of Judaism. These generally overlap, but not always. For example, some ethnic Jews are atheists and there are converts to Judaism (leaving aside the question of whether these are accepted as such by Ultra-Orthodox Jews) who are not ethnic Jews.
This is true. Judaism is more than a religion and Jews are more than just adherents of a religion - they are a people, they are a nation, and they have been recognized as such way before the establishment of modern Israel.

This is not to say that Israelis are congruent with the Jewish people, as obviously they are not. But that doesn't contradict the idea that Israel is a Jewish state.

Second, let us suggest also that having a modern nation-state being defined by one ethnicity or one religion is problematic in itself - if not inherently self-contradictory - because the modern nation-state as such is a temporal and civic institution, and because no state in the world is - or can be in practice - ethnically or religiously homogenous.
This is a red herring, as no one is saying that Israel must be ethnically or religiously homogenous. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find even the most extreme right-wing Zionist advocating that Israel kick out its non-Jewish citizens or residents (or forcibly convert them), which is what Nusseibeh is implying.
Third, recognition of Israel as a "Jewish state" implies that Israel is, or should be, either a theocracy (if we take the word "Jewish" to apply to the religion of Judaism) or an apartheid state (if we take the word "Jewish" to apply to the ethnicity of Jews), or both, and in all of these cases, Israel is then no longer a democracy - something which has rightly been the pride of most Israelis since the country's founding in 1948.
.More nonsense. Keep in mind that Israeli leaders have considered Israel to be a Jewish state since its inception, and by any yardstick Israel cannot be considered a theocracy nor an apartheid state. Israel's policies are created by its own leadership, not by the rest of the world - so why would recognition of this reality by the outside world affect Israel's internal policies? It's being recognized as a Jewish state by outsiders would not change Israel's internal character one bit.
Fourth, at least one in five Israelis - 20 per cent of the population, according to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics - is ethnically Arab (and are mostly either Muslim, Christian, Druze or Bahai), and recognising Israel as a "Jewish State" as such makes one-fifth of the population of Israel automatically strangers in their own native land and opens the door to legally reducing them, most undemocratically, to second-class citizens (or perhaps even stripping them of their citizenship and other rights) - something that no-one, much less a Palestinian leader, has a right to do.
Again, almost complete nonsense. I would be the first to admit that there is a certain amount of tension between the concepts of a "Jewish state" and a pure democracy; a Jewish state would give small amounts of preference to Jews in terms of citizenship and perhaps a couple of other areas. Other countries have other criteria for citizenship that discriminate between desired immigrants and undesired immigrants. European countries do not allow most Muslim Arab immigrants to become citizens very easily. This just shows that no one is purely democratic and similar tensions exist everywhere - it does not repudiate the idea of a democratic state that identifies with some people more than others.
Fifth, recognising a "Jewish State" as such in Israel would mean legally that while Palestinians no longer have citizens' rights there, any member of world Jewry outside of Israel (up to 10 million people perhaps), should be entitled to full citizens' rights there, no matter wherever they may be in the world today and regardless of their current nationality. Indeed, Israel publicly admits that it does not hold the land for the benefit of its citizens but holds it, in trust, on behalf of the Jews of the world for all time. This is something that happens in practice, but that obviously Palestinians in the occupied territories - including Jerusalem - do not see as fair, especially as they are constantly forcibly evicted off their ancestral homeland by Israel to make way for foreign Jewish settlers, and because Palestinians in their diaspora are denied the same right to come and live.
Here Nusseibeh shows that he is knowingly being deceptive.

He admits that Israel already has this policy, and therefore nothing would change if the world would admit that Israel is the Jewish state. The rest of his discussion about occupation and settlements is meant to inflame, but it does not inform. Obviously Israel's policy towards areas it has not annexed and towards non-citizens is going to be different from areas that are within the Green Line and Jerusalem and towards Israeli citizens.

Sixth, it means, before final status negotiations have even started, that Palestinians would have then given up the rights of about 7 million Palestinians in the diaspora to repatriation or compensation; 7 million Palestinians descended from the Palestinians who in 1900 lived in historical Palestine (ie what is now Israel, the West Bank including Jerusalem, and Gaza) and at that time made up 800,000 of its 840,000 inhabitants; and who were driven off their land through war, violent eviction or fear.
Those rights are nonexistent, and if Arab leaders had been honest with them and treated them like other refugee populations they would have normal, productive lives today. In the same decade of their losing their homes, tens of millions of other people lost theirs - and yet today they are no longer refugees! The "refugee" problem is an artificial issue kept alive for one reason only - to destroy Israel demographically.

And I have to re-emphasize that the majority of Palestinian Arabs did leave because of fear - fear that was largely unfounded, fueled by wild rumors and by the fact that their leaders fled first. Beyond that, they never imagined that their Arab brethren would turn them into pariahs. Every single time Palestinian Arabs had the chance to become citizens of their host Arab countries, they enthusiastically grabbed the opportunity. Even if you want to blame Israel for the initial displacement, the only party that has kept this issue alive are Arab leaders by enforcing what can only be considered apartheid against their Palestinian brothers.
Seventh, recognising a "Jewish state" in Israel - a state which purports to annex the whole of Jerusalem, East and West, and calls Jerusalem its "eternal, undivided capital" (as if the city, or even the world itself, were eternal; as if it were really undivided, and as if it actually were legally recognised by the international community as Israel's capital) - means completely ignoring the fact that Jerusalem is as holy to 2.2 billion Christians and 1.6 billion Muslims, as it is to 15-20 million Jews worldwide.
More nonsense. Israel has not erased any Muslim or Christian history from Jerusalem. Israeli archaeologists regularly uncover and publicize ancient Muslim sites, just as they do for Byzantine and Jewish sites. The only people who tried to excise a religion from Jerusalem were the Arabs in 1948, as the Jordanians bragged about destroying some 70 synagogues in the course of a single month.

[I]t remains true that, in the Old Testament, God commands the Jewish state in the land of Israel to come into being through warfare and violent dispossession of the original inhabitants. Moreover, this command has its roots in the very Covenant of God with Abraham (or rather "Abram" at that time) in the Bible and it thus forms one of the core tenets of Judaism as such, at least as we understand it. No one then can blame Palestinians and descendents of the ancient Canaanites, Jebusites and others who inhabited the land before the Ancient Israelites (as seen in the Bible itself) for a little trepidation as regards what recognising Israel as a "Jewish State" means for them, particularly to certain Orthodox and Ultra Orthodox Jews. No one then can blame Palestinians for asking if recognising Israel as a "Jewish State" means recognising the legitimacy of offensive warfare or violence against them by Israel to take what remains of Palestine from them....

In short, recognition of Israel as a "Jewish State" in Israel is not the same as, say, recognition of Greece today as a "Christian State". It entails, in the Old Testament itself, a Covenant between God and a Chosen People regarding a Promised Land that should be taken by force at the expense of the other inhabitants of the land and of non-Jews. This idea is not present as such in other religions that we know of.
This is beyond ridiculous. Even the most religious extremist Zionist Jew isn't calling for the genocide of all non-Jewish inhabitants of Biblical Israel, and in fact nothing of the sort has happened. Nothing would change in that regard by Arabs recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.

I can find plenty of Arab and Muslim quotes from the past century that echo the most violent parts of the Bible - and the Koran, for that matter - mostly against the very Jews that Nusseibeh is trying so hard to paint as bigoted ethnic cleansers.

And this is a crucial point. In 1947, scared by the chance that the UN would partition Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state, the Arab leaders scrambled to come up with a plan for a single state where the Muslim majority would treat its Jewish minority impeccably - which is, they said, how they always had treated Jews. Yet immediately after the UN vote - before the State of Israel was declared - Arabs attacked and killed Jews in other Arab countries!

In fact, how Jews were treated by the Arabs in the 1940s and afterwards is the major reason why a Jewish state is correct, moral and necessary. The Jews of Arab countries at the time, whether they were Zionist or not, were scapegoated and subjected to a reign of terror. Their only recourse was to flee, penniless, to the new Jewish state.

Nusseibeh never deigns to mention why a Jewish state is necessary, why the Jewish people have the right to self-determination as well as anyone else does, why the existence of such a state could have saved millions of lives in the 1940s. He uses tunnel vision to frame the argument in terms of "rights" - but only Arab rights. The Jewish right to have a physical nation as much as, or more than, any other people is completely ignored. It is not an issue of Arab human rights - it is an issue of competing human rights between two groups of people.

One of those groups claims to be part of a larger nation that stretches across hundreds of millions of square miles across two continents. The other has nowhere else to call home, has fervently wished to return to its home for millennia, and indeed has rarely felt to be full citizens of any other country that hosted them.

This is why Zionism is a moral expression of Jewish nationalism. As much as possible, Zionist leaders have and continue to do everything possible to give the most possible rights to non-Jewish citizens and others under their control - up to the point of endangering the human rights of Jews themselves. The line between the two exists and it sometimes moves from one side to the other as Israeli leaders wrestle with the difficult ethical issues of how to maximize human rights for all - non-Jews and Jews alike. For the most part, they have been spectacularly successful in finding the best way to balance the two, and Arabs in Israel have far more rights than any Jews have ever had in Arab countries.

There is one other point that Nussibeih pointedly ignores. All Arab countries define themselves in their respective constitutions as Arab countries, and almost all of them define themselves as Islamic countries. The exact same arguments that Nussibeih posits here apply to all of them, including "Palestine." If Israel calling itself a Jewish state is so problematic, then every Arab country is on much weaker rhetorical ground - especially since their discrimination against non-Arabs and often against non-Muslims far outstrips the worst Israel could be credibly accused of. Where are Nusseibeh's anguished articles  in Al Jazeera about how Arab countries need to stop being defined as Arab and Muslim?

This article is high-minded, pseudo-intellectual, hypocritical claptrap.

UPDATE: Elliott Abrams looked at it as well, and noticed a few things I missed - especially some very egregious selective history at the beginning of the article.. (h/t David G)

Lotsa links

Posted: 05 Oct 2011 10:00 AM PDT

Martin Kramer on the Middle East circa 2016

Khaled Abu Toameh: Iran's Well-Attended "International Conference on the Palestinian Intifada"

Jewish Ideas Daily: Career Corps (A military conference at Bar Ilan)

Assad threatens to shoot rockets at Tel Aviv if NATO attacks

David Solway: A meditation on overcoming Jewish self-hatred

Jonathan Schanzer: Congress needs to investigate a corrupt Palestine Investment Fund

Syria attacks army deserters

Elliott Abrams: Samir Kuntar, award-winning terrorist

Dexter Van Zile: Broadcasting a Lethal Narrative: The World Council of Churches and Israel

Giyus: Change in small dosage is promising, swift and radical changes are deadly

Giulio Meotti: The Pogrom on Israeli "Settler Children"

Robert L. Bernstein in WaPo: Why do human rights groups ignore Palestinians' war of words?

Yaakov Lozowick: Hanan Porat, RIP

Video of a couple of Wall Street protester idiots

Lauren Booth visits Israellycool, and hilarity ensues

Israel Action Network video: Peace needs partners


This should keep you busy for a while....

(h/t David G, Brian of London, Yoel, Richie Miller, Challah Hu Akbar, T34, Hadassah, sophie)

PA employees want to be paid in shekels, not dollars

Posted: 05 Oct 2011 08:59 AM PDT

Palestine Press Agency reports that PA employees in Gaza are complaining that their salaries are now being paid in US dollars or Jordanian dinars, rather than good old Israeli shekels.

They received their September salaries on Tuesday.

They claim that they are being ripped off because the banks that they withdraw their salaries from are paying some 10% less than the exchange rate between dollars and shekels.

Keep in mind that most, if not all, of the PA employees in Gaza do nothing. They are being paid to not work for the Hamas government there, which has been the situation since Hamas' takeover of Gaza.

Also, if they are so upset at being paid in other currencies, why not start their own "Palestinian pound"? There had been talk about it last May. The world says that it supports a Palestinian Arab state - it would be fun to see how successful the PLO currency might be.

I have a feeling that the do-nothing employees would still prefer shekels.

For the tenth time, an Israeli wins a Nobel Prize

Posted: 05 Oct 2011 07:58 AM PDT

From YNet:
Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman has won the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday.

The Academy honored Shechtman for the discovery of "quasicrystals" – patterns in atoms which were thought impossible, adding that Shechtman's discovery in 1982 had fundamentally changed the way chemists look at solid matter.

"Contrary to the previous belief that atoms were packed inside crystals in symmetrical patterns, Shechtman showed that the atoms in a crystal could be packed in a pattern that could not be repeated," the RSAS said.

"His discovery was extremely controversial. In the course of defending his findings, he was asked to leave his research group. However, his battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter," it said

Shechtman, 70, is a distinguished professor at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa [Technion].

In 2009, Israeli scientist Ada Yonath was awarded the Nobel Chemistry Prize for showing how ribosomes function, work that has important implications for antibiotics.

Before Yonath eight Israelis have won the prestigious prize: Shmuel Yosef Agnon (Literature); Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres (Peace); Avram Hershko, Aaron Ciechanover (Chemistry); Robert Aumann and Daniel Kahneman (Economics).
Mazel tov to Dr. Shechtman!

The denial of PalArab shoe-throwing at US diplomat

Posted: 05 Oct 2011 06:59 AM PDT

From Ma'an:
Palestinians rallied Tuesday against US diplomats who were visiting the occupied West Bank, shouting slogans outside a restaurant, onlookers said.

Police kept the protesters away from the Ramallah restaurant where diplomats were hosting an event for graduates and other beneficiaries of US programs, a Ma'an correspondent said.

About 20 activists watched by the police had chanted defiant slogans in English, shouting "No to American funding" and "Yes we can -- boycott America", Reuters reported.

Demonstrators also chanted "USAID go home", and "Shame on you". One man hurled his shoe.

Palestinian Authority police denied intervening in the demonstration, which they said was peaceful. In a statement, the police also denied that protesters had thrown shoes at the diplomats.
Palestinians yell at a U.S. diplomatic vehicle during protest against U.S. in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2011. Angry Palestinians accosted a top American official Tuesday during a celebratory West Bank visit in honor of Palestinians who graduated from American-funded education programs. About 30 protesters blocked the convoy of Daniel Rubinstein, the U.S. consul-general in Jerusalem, chanting "shame on you" and hurling shoes at his vehicle. Throwing shoes is deeply insulting in Arab culture. (AP)
That last paragraph is a great encapsulation of the Arab honor/shame mindset.

Of course the police intervened. And certainly the protesters threw at least one shoe - reporters from Ma'an and AP witnessed it.

So why are the Palestinian police denying it?

The PA doesn't want to be embarrassed by the anti-American hatred of its people, so it looks like they instructed the police to issue a statement supporting the purity and peacefulness of the protesters that the police pushed back!

In an honor/shame culture, truth is far less important than appearance. Lying to avoid embarrassment and shame is expected. Since the Arabs are obsessed with using shoes as symbolic objects of hate it is particularly important to distance the real hate from appearances.

What is particularly interesting in the context of this incident is that when the denial was reported in one Arabic media outlet associated with Fatah, virtually every single talkback supported the concept of throwing shoes at the Jewish American diplomat.

Internally, the people look at throwing shoes as a way to defend their own honor, but the official line must be the opposite - with the motivation being avoiding shame to the world.

"Palestine" given status in Council for Europe; Israel doesn't object

Posted: 05 Oct 2011 05:20 AM PDT

From the Council of Europe:

Strasbourg, 04.10.2011 – The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) today voted to grant "Partner for democracy" status to the Palestinian National Council – only the second time such status has been accorded.

Presenting the report at today's debate, Tiny Kox (Netherlands, UEL) said the status "created new opportunities for the Palestinian people" and could be seen as part of the Arab Spring. The Speaker of the Palestinian National Council Salim Al-Za'noon hailed the decision as "historic" and said it could contribute to establishing peace in the region.

A six-member delegation of Palestinian elected representatives will be able to speak in the Assembly and most of its committees, and propose subjects for debate, but cannot vote.

In return, the Palestinian National Council – in a letter from its Speaker – has pledged to pursue the values upheld by the Council of Europe, hold free and fair elections and work towards abolishing the death penalty, among other commitments.

The Assembly will monitor other key issues such as concluding negotiations for a government of national unity, and making the Palestinian National Council a democratically-elected body. Other points include refraining from violence, rejecting terrorism, recognising the right of Israel to exist and freeing the soldier Gilad Shalit. The Assembly will review progress on these points within two years.

In June this year, the Parliament of Morocco became the first to be granted the new status, which is intended for parliaments from regions neighbouring the Council of Europe who wish to benefit from the Assembly's experience of democracy-building and to debate common challenges.

The President of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is due to address the Assembly on Thursday.
Here are the promises that the Palestinian National Council made in order to be granted this status:

4. The Assembly takes note that, in his letter, the Speaker of the Palestinian National Council, in line with the requirements set out in Rule 60.2 of the Rules of Procedure, reaffirmed that "the Palestinian National Council is committed to the same values as those of the Council of Europe, namely pluralist and gender parity-based democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms", and committed itself to:

4.1. "continuing [its] efforts to raise the awareness of the public authorities and the main players in politics and civil society of the need to make progress in the discussion of issues relating to the abolition of the death penalty and to encourage the authorities concerned to maintain the de facto moratorium that has been established on executions of the death penalty since 2005";

4.2. "making full use, in [its] institutional and legislative work, of the experience of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, as well as the expertise of the European Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission), bearing in mind that the Palestinian National Authority has an observer status with the Venice Commission";

4.3. "continuing [its] efforts to create favourable conditions for holding free, fair and transparent elections in compliance with relevant international standards";

4.4. "encouraging equal participation of women and men in public life and politics";

4.5. "encouraging the competent authorities of the Palestinian National Authority to accede to relevant Council of Europe conventions and partial agreements that are open for signature and ratification by non-member states, in particular those dealing with human rights, the rule of law and democracy issues";

4.6. "inform[ing] the Assembly regularly on the state of progress made in the implementation of the principles of the Council of Europe".
Remarkably, the Israeli observer at the Council of Europe - Doron Avital of Kadima - supported this initiative in the debate:

On behalf of the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, I want to convey our hopes that this step, when and if – only if – its commitments are consistently taken seriously, will in the end prove beneficial first to the welfare, well-being and future of the Palestinian society and, secondly, to the prospect of peace and reconciliation between our two societies.

I also express my appreciation and respect for the work done in the Political Affairs Committee and, specifically, by Mr Kox. I commend his emphasis on presenting in the document the story of Gilad Shalit, and I remind the Council that Gilad Shalit has been in captivity and in Palestinian hands for the past five years, without being afforded any basic human rights. He has not even been allowed a visit by a representative of the International Red Cross. I emphasise that that issue is part of the commitment which the Palestinians take upon themselves in the context of this application, and I commend Mr Kox for including it in his document.

It is, frankly, no secret that in the Israeli Parliament there are voices who either recommend extreme cautiousness with respect to this step or bluntly object to it, yet I make it clear, as the head of the Israeli parliamentary delegation from the Knesset, that I have here today a full mandate to convey to you on behalf of our parliament, and on behalf of Israeli society at large, our hopes and belief that this step, as it represents a general drive in Palestinian society towards democracy and democratic ideals, will indeed prove helpful to the peace process and to the negotiations between our two societies, which I urge Palestinians to join.

A commitment to democracy and to democratic ideals, as all of us in this room know, is an ongoing and demanding process. We Israelis know that very well, as the most recent events on our streets have proven. I am glad that Palestinian society has expressed the will to take this big commitment upon itself, and I wish it success in this important endeavour.

I have no doubt that strengthening the democratic foundations of Palestinian society will prove a constructive and helpful step with respect to the peace process and, I hope, towards a historic resolution of the conflict between our two nations.
Palestinian Arabs are trumpeting this as a step on the way to statehood.

The Council also called upon its members in the UN Security Council to vote to allow "Palestine" to become a full member of the UN.


Last PalArab keffiyeh manufacturer stays afloat by selling to Western anti-Zionists

Posted: 05 Oct 2011 03:09 AM PDT

From AFP:
Joudeh Hirbawi is not sure why young Palestinians do not want to wear the iconic black-and-white keffiyeh scarves his factory makes. But he has found another way to stay afloat.

Instead of selling to a dwindling local market of old men and young activists, he is working with a group of Palestinians overseas to market the scarves abroad, even harnessing social media to connect with customers.

For decades, the keffiyeh has been an international symbol of the Palestinian people and their cause.

It was most famously worn by the late President Yasser Arafat, whose carefully-styled headdress served as both a fashion statement and a political one.

Chinese-made keffiyehs began flooding into the West Bank and Gaza after the Oslo peace agreement was signed with Israel in 1993, lifting trade barriers.

The scarves are thin and lower quality, the Hirbawis say, but they also cost a lot less than their home-grown counterparts. At wholesale, the Hirbawis sell their keffiyehs for around 11 shekels ($3) a piece, while the Chinese ones sell for seven ($1.90).

...The factory has found a lifeline from outside, in the form of a group of activists of Palestinian origin who reached out to the family, fearing the family-run business was on the brink of closure.

"This is something that we're doing for the keffiyeh itself," said Noora Kassem, one of the Young Professionals for Palestine group.

"The Palestinian keffiyeh is a really strong political symbol and that's one of the reasons that we decided to focus on it," she told AFP by telephone from Amman where she is based.

"It would be a real tragedy if the keffiyeh itself is no longer made in Palestine."

The group reached out to online retailers, setting up a website and eventually a Facebook group called "The Last Keffiyeh" where customers from Europe, the United States, Latin America and elsewhere can place their orders.

The Hirbawis were "hesitant at first," she admits.

"What they want to do is focus on making their scarves, that's their business and that's fine," she said. "We are doing what we can from out here, which is the marketing side."

So far, the collaboration has been a success, with Hirbawi saying the factory has seen its overseas business grow steadily, now accounting for hundreds of keffiyehs each month.
There was a remarkably similar article about the plight of the poor Hirbawis by AP a few years ago that noted that even the Fatah movement bought their keffiyehs from China.

The foreigners who are so anxious to save the Hirbawis charge a markup of at least 600%, selling the $3 keffiyehs for between $18 and $20. So they make far more off of this little capitalist venture than the people they are pretending to help.

Two companies who make Zionist versions of the Keffiyeh, with Stars of David, can be found here and here. The latter now even makes an American flag keffiyeh, something that the  US-based fake supporters of "Palestine" would never wear.
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