The EU Sanctions Against Israel - How to Lose influence & Credibility

On the week that Israel has agreed to release hundreds of Palestinian terrorists from its prisons  - people with much Jewish blood on their hands - as a one sided gesture, merely to bribe the Palestinians to come to the table for talks that benefit Palestinians more than Israelis (and which are almost certain to be doomed to failure), the EU seems to think that now is the time when Israel needs pressuring and that this is the time for economic sanctions. Did the great and wise heads of the EU ever wonder why, if the Palestinians want a state so badly, if they long for freedom and for Israel to withdraw to  the 1949 armistice line (which is what is meant by pre-67 borders), if they waste a great deal of time and energy going to the UN to get some kind of meaningless demi / semi statehood in order to pressure Israel...if they are that keen for this to work, why do the need to be bribed to come to the table, and even then very reluctantly?

In any case, the EU has issued its sanctions and the immediate result is...the Palestinians are being hurt - not the healthy growing Israeli economy, which makes the collapsing European Union look like economic morons  - but the Palestinian people, where the EU is engaged in a multitude of projects, that without Israel's support, cannot continue. Well guess what - a thoroughly and justifiably pissed off Israel is disinclined to continue that support making the EU's humanitarian efforts almost impossible. It is normative practice before any state issues sanctions, to consider the imopact, not only on the target of the punishment, but other effects such as minority impacts and economic damage to the enacter of the sanctions. it is clear the EU did not consider these issues at all.

Further more, a European Union, desperate for sources of energy, has just placed sanctions on the only democracy in the Middle East - a state that has recently become a major oil & gas producer - potentially the 1/3 largest in the Middle East according to some estimates -  with the ability to find customers anywhere it wants, but an inclination to sell to Cyprus, Greece, Italy & Spain...all EU members with collapsed economies. More than likely, their contract  negotiations for that non Arab supply of Mid East oil & gas is not with Israel, the  willing exporter, but a sullen and angry Israel.

Moreover, morally, for the EU to look at the complex, volatile situation in this region and believe that the place it should direct punishment  - for that is what sanctions amount to - exclusively against Israel, is absurd and impossible to fathom. Every Mid East state enacts racist anti Palestinian laws; 100,000s dead in Syria, Lebanon a fractured racist society virtually run by terrorists; Egypt shooting protesters in large numbers as democracy fails there after just a few months; Saudi Arabia which has laws suppressing women's rights that England was ahead of 150 years ago.... I could go on...but from this violent, racist, oppressive region, with 330,000,000 people living without rights, it has chosen Israel - the only free country in this region - for sanctions - please someone explain how there is an iota of justification for this move or any possibility for this to forward the cause of the Palestinians.

So Israel is angered, EU efforts to aid Palestinian development have suffered a major set back, EU's ability to in anyway act as brokers in the Israeli Arab negotiations have virtually gone, Palestinians themselves are often employed by these israeli firms (so their jobs are endangered as the PA has said) and Israel's willingness to share its incredible technological and academic  achievements with Europe have almost certainly become more expensive for the Europeans. Their banks collapsing, their currency hanging on by a thread and now with this stupid move, their credibility in international diplomacy in tatters - who, if anyone, is running the EU - what a joke! 

Pushing The Palestinians to Violence

At the risk of repeating the point I made in my last blog (which now seems almost prophetic!) President Obama & his sidekick John Kerry are pushing very hard to bring Israel & the Palestinians to the table. The only outcome I can see from this is bloodshed - particularly Israeli civilian bloodshed - the fact that Obama does not recognize this danger is simply a continuation of his astounding failure over past 5 years to understand the Arab &  Islamic world - this failing  has caused chaos in the Middle East.

The Palestinian Authority have excellent reasons for not wanting to negotiate at this time - indeed they really cannot go forward in good faith, knowing full well they do not carry the Palestinian people with them and that they are unable to make any guarantees that Israel needs. The Palestinian people are split between the PLO / Fatah Palestinian Authority and  Iranian backed Islamists such as Hamas who will never accept any agreement that leaves Jews in Israel; The Arab world is in turmoil, and therefore no regional agreement can be produced, which is vital for any agreement to hold and for a Palestinian state to succeed (its failure would be a disaster for Israel as well as the Palestinians); there are powerful elements in the Arab & wider Islamic world that have no interest in seeing an end to the Israeli  / Palestinian conflict, most obviously Iran. Lets not ignore the all pervasive antisemitism that affects Arab thinking - it is an almost medieval hatred as Prof Robert Wistrich explained to me in this interview a couple of years ago, that reaches incredible levels within the palestinian world, thanks to the institutional incitement every Palestinian is taught from birth.  I've mentioned the Palestinian refugees in several posts - millions of people maintained as stateless generational refugees in countries they, their parents and grandparents were born in - the minute a Palestinian state is declared, we can expect the majority of these refugees to ethnically cleansed - oh, it'll be called "right of return" but it will be the sending of millions of people to a tiny poor newly founded state in a land they have no familiarity with. It will crush Palestine, and both Fatah & Hamas know this...they just can't say it!

So what happens if the Palestinians are placed in the impossible position of having to negotiate by Obama & Kerry? If their standard tactic of producing unacceptable preconditions are trumped by Israel's gestures (such as releasing Palestinian terrorist prisoners merely to get its enemies to talk)  history has shown clearly that backing the Palestinians a corner of talks or agreement they don't want - but can't say they don't want - leads to violence. This was how Arafat dealt with the aftermath of Camp David (when then Israeli PM Barak offered him more than anyone ever expected) - Arafat's reaction has a name - the Second Intifada - which the Mitchell Report (the investigatory committee set up to look into the causes behind the breakdown in the peace process), the government of Israel asserted that:

the immediate catalyst for the violence was the breakdown of the Camp David negotiations on July 25, 2000 and the "widespread appreciation in the international community of Palestinian responsibility for the impasse." In this view, Palestinian violence was planned by the PA leadership, and was aimed at "provoking and incurring Palestinian casualties as a means of regaining the diplomatic initiative."

So at a time when the Mid East is in turmoil, when the Palestinians are deeply divided and their leaders are suffering unprecedented unpopularity and when external influences have a vested interest in the Israeli conflict continuing, how can President Obama consider it appropriate to place the Palestinians under this pressure to negotiate with Israel ? It is doomed from the start and that means people - mostly Israelis & primarily women and children - will die - There are times to push and times to back off - Mr Obama...Mr. Kerry BACK OFF BEFORE MORE MIDDLE EAST RESIDENTS ARE HURT! 

The Very Real Cost of John Kerry's Foolish Peace Efforts

US Sec. of State Kerry has been working all out on solving what is without argument the least pressing issue in the Middle East - the  Israel / Palestinian conflict - and his heavy handed efforts will almost certainly cost lives.

As I've written previously , the Palestinians are unable and unwilling to enter into final status talks - unable because they are split between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah controlled Palestinian Authority. Worse, the Abbas led PA is deeply unpopular and seen as a "Zionist tool" by much of the Palestinian street, therefore rendering any agreement unpalatable to the Palestinian people & an anathema to Hamas. Worse, the many years of incitement in Palestinian society, which starts when their children are very small, has led to  a people who truly believe that a Palestinian state will include Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Ramallah. Then there is the issue of the so called Palestinian refugees - 65 years of being kept in slum camps, with no rights by their Arab brothers, they will almost certainly be "repatriated" to the new & very poor state of Palestine, crushing it before it even gets established. Abbas knows this, and knows he can't accept these refugees, nor can he (or any Palestinian leader) ever say this to the Palestinians, who have been brought up on the mantra of "right of return" for 65 years.

We've seen in the past that when the Palestinian Authority has seen no way to walk from talks, it turns to violence, making the situation worse. If Kerry pushes them this time, we can expect to see images of blown up buses and bombed cafe's again - the Palestinians will resort to violence to stop this impossible agreement ever being negotiated - certainly Hamas & other Islamist will resort to violence forcing Israel to defend itself, creating the pretext for Abbas to walk away. Nothing achieved but dead and maimed Israelis, and ordinary Palestinians suffering from increased security measures by the IDF.

Add to that the question as to whether anyone seriously looking at the Middle East, with rampant Islamist clashing with autocratic regimes, and chaos surrounding all of Israel's borders, believe that Israel can  trust the Palestinians & other Arab states to be able to honor an agreement? After all any Palestinian state will occupy the high ground above Israel's center, a military nightmare for the IDF, and yet the Palestinian Authority  cannot even guarantee it won't become a Hamas organization within a year! The what? Certainly a situation far far worse for both sides than that which exists today. The states that neighbor Israel are in position to offer anyone security guarantees - even Jordan, the most stable state in the area, could easily succumb to 'arab spring' violence at any moment. 

I'm not saying there shouldn't be talks or that the potential for agreement does not exist - but this is not the time: Iran & their Islamists have caused chaos across the Mid East, hijacking the  Arab Spring with the potential to drag Lebanon & Jordan into the hell of Syria's civil war; diminished power of Arab oil (along with Israel's newly discovered oil & gas) has started a process of changing attitude to Israel from the Gulf States - a process that could eventually produce regional allies to support a peace agreement..but not yet; a deeply; and a  violently divided Palestinian state in no way ready for statehood - the only the Kerry can achieve here is instability and violence. A regional solution is needed, with regional guarantees & regional involvement in any negotiations, to deal with the issue of the refugees, security, etc...only a fool could believe that in the midst of the current chaos, such an agreement can be reached at this time.

The Obama administration has shown that every time it has dipped its heavy handed toes into the Mid East  it has failed miserably, causing far more misery than existed before they butted in - so Mr. Kerry...your kind of help, we can do without! 

Egypt: Last Straw in Obama's Middle East Foreign Policy Disasters

President Obama's knee jerk reaction to the original Tahrir Sq uprising forced the military to oust long time US ally Hosni Mubarak - the reason? "Well democracy must be better right?"!  No real thought appears to have been given to who or what might have filled that power vacuum, even though it seemed obvious to those of us who follow Middle East politics, that only the Muslim Brotherhood - with values inimical to democracy - had the organization in place to fight elections. The Brotherhood, recognizing this, pushed for early elections. Obama saw this as an embracing of the democratic values that america loves and so the Brotherhood won the first ever free elections in Egypt, because nobody else stood a chance! I have written here repeatedly that democracy is not "one person, one vote, one time" and in fact elections do not equal democracy, they are the result of democracy - something that has to be understood by the state & citizenship and ingrained into the national psyche, as it in Israel. What happened in Egypt was that a non democratic group of Islamic extremists manipulated democratic ideas to gain power. Obama had no choice, but to to back "democratically elected" Morsi, even after he granted himself semi-dictatorial powers after only 5 months into his year in office. This was a year marked by government censorship, and anti Christian racism as well as one of having no answers to Egypt's rapidly declining economy which led to 22,000,000 Egyptians signing a petition calling for his resignation! Obama's not so calculated risk could have even ended the Egyptian / Israeli peace agreement, and may well would have, without the non democratic influence of Egypt's military!

When the massive anti-Morsi protests hit the streets a couple of weeks ago, Obama and his new (light weight) secretary of state John Kerry, had little to say, and only when the Egyptian army stepped in did Obama make a halfhearted statement in support of Egypt's now cancelled democracy that had never really existed in the first place, thanks to US supporting Morsi! What a mess. Its interesting to note (as several Israeli newspaper editorials did this past week) that two years ago the Egyptian army interceded to oust Mubarak only after the Obama administration turned against him. Now that same military have totally ignored Obama and ousted Morsi (and this despite the fact that congress may be forced by its own rules to block further aid to Egypt's ailing economy until democracy is 'restored'!)  - how the mighty US has fallen in a year.

Looking across the Middle East, Obama has failed to tackle or understand the growing threat represented by Iran, or even place them under enough pressure to slow them down, which has allowed Iran the room to continue its drive to dominate the Arab world and fill the vacuum left by Egypt's demise, interfere in Lebanon, Syria and Turkey not to mention provide the support Hamas needs to maintain its Fortress Gaza policy & prosecute its terrorist war against Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

In Syria Obama has been shown to be weak and ineffectual when faced by an emasculated UN and

intransigent Russia - where is the decisive foreign policy of a superpower protecting its foreign interests and human rights? You would think it was the USA that had collapsed 20 years ago & not the USSR / Russia! The Obama administration's failure not only to act but to even formulate a coherent policy toward Syria has in part led to the death of 100,000 people, the further arming of Hezbollah, the involvement of Al Qaeda in Syria, the gradual destabilization of Lebanon and even a possibility of Turkey, Israel & Jordan being dragged reluctantly into the conflict. It has also created a huge refugee crisis.

Meanwhile what has Hilary Clinton's replacement as Secretary of State been focused on over the past few months? Well yes...The Middle East issue - but unfortunately the wrong one - Kerry has spent a huge amount of time racking up air miles in an unprecedented shuttle diplomacy attempt to reignite the long stalled Israel / Palestinian peace process!! He declares that he has made "real progress" - This despite the clear and obvious signs that now is not a time when the Palestinian side is in a position or mind set to enter talks - it is deeply split between Fatah and Hamas, the Palestinian Authority is unable to hold internal elections, its President's mandate having ended years ago and its current leadership vacuum in its Prime Minister's office. it is telling that literally as Kerry flew back to the US, talking about his successful talks with the Palestinians and their willingness to enter negotiations, Palestinian president Abbas was busy on Palestinian TV, honoring a terrorist leader, with the blood of multiple Israelis, including many children, on his hands   - this incitement is a direct snub to Obama & Congress, which has long criticized the Palestinians over incitement and the glorification of terrorists. Meanwhile on the Israeli side, the new Netanyahu government has other more pressing & divisive internal issues to focus on, before it will want to enter the politically difficult and contentious  [and quite probably fruitless talks] with the Palestinians. 

So while the Arab Spring turns into another Arab Disaster; Iran heads towards nuclear arms and consequential conflict with Israel & other Mid East states; and in Syria (where Iran where not coincidentally, is interfering) the mass slaughter continues, threatening the entire region, John Kerry is wasting his time on an issue that should not (at this time) be even close to the top of his agenda and its not as if he is making headway! A few years ago, former President Bush was criticized for taking a heavy hand in the Mid East, but at least we can say that he had influence and that right or wrongly, his administration was listened to - Obama has turned US's role into that of a minor player on the word stage and because of that, people are dying - that will be his legacy here and that is unforgivable.

Truth of Israel Exposes Lies of BDS

Its been a bad week for BDS campaigners - already suffering from having their motives questioned even by left wing Peace campaigners and genuine pro-Palestinians, because they exclusively advocate boycotting all things Israeli, defying logic and reason, while 100,000 have been slaughtered in Syria, and 330,000,000 arabs live with limited democratic rights, they see democratic Israel as the evil state of the Mid East, if not the world.  So in defiance of the BDS calls for boycott, yesterd ay my wife and I - and 29,700 others - went to "Teddy Stadium", Jerusalem's newly enlarged sports arena (which now sits 34,000) for the final of the Euro U21 football (soccer) tournament which has been played in Israel this month. The demographic of the crowd would cause BDS haters to lose bladder control -  I sat on a row filled with american visitors (none of whom understood the offside rule!), in front of a group of  Jewish Israeli 12 and

13 year old kids-  whose parents had no concerns about them coming to the game unsupervised - and behind a group of Palestinian youth, who on hearing my english accent , spent several minutes debating Manchester United's future with me, in Hebrew & English. This pretty much reflects the makeup of the crowd at this match and throughout this superb tournament and quite frankly, is pretty much a  microcosm of life in Jerusalem

If this wasn't enough to have BDS bigots & fanatics reaching for the adult diapers, we had Formula 1 cars racing through the streets of Jerusalem last week, with crowds of Israelis and Arabs standing shoulder to shoulder, each making way for the others kids to squeeze through to enjoy the spectacle. 

Last night in Jerusalem - in celebration of Israel's 89 year old President - Barbra Streisand has finally come to the Jewish state, while America's former President, Bill Clinton & daughter Chelsea (+ Jewish husband)  were spotted praying at the Western Wall - one can feel BDS fanatics  worldwide chomping on their antacids - add to that the savaging in the press by the pop duo the Pet Shop Boys & Alicia Keys dismissal of their rantings - and one can imagine hospitals around the world prepping for an influx of hypertensive, incontinent Israel hating fanatics! 

All this activity has brought the world press to Israel, and not the usual jaded Middle East journos, but rather a broad range of sports and entertainments writers - you can see the result of this in a rash of stories about day to day Israeli life and recent achievements they've spotted in their free time. This is the last thing BDS crusaders want - they peddle in lies - they lie about their real objective, they lie about the situation on the ground in Israel and they lie about Israel & Palestinian history. Press stories exposing what life is really like in israel is a disaster for them - they don't want people knowing more, they want them knowing less, allowing BDS hate to fill that void of ignorance with their lies.

They lie about "apartheid" - and mixed arab Jewish events in Israel demonstrate that clearly; they lie about 'peace' being their objective - it isn't - destruction of Israel is their objective, whilst two state solution ideas cause them to vomit - indeed we have seen in the past that BDS supporters go out of their way to undermine palestinian leaders who move toward negotiations - for example  writing in the Guardian, Clayton Swisher, head of Al Jazeera’s Transparency Unit & BDS supporter,  referred to the then advanced state of negotiations as “a peace process run amok.” !! A peace agreement with Israel would not only mean a future for the Palestinians, but also for Israel - they don't want any  future for "the illegal Zionist entity" and they have no problem with lengthening the Palestinian suffering across the Middle East that they pretend to be motivated by.

So lets make it clear - BDS fanatics are NOT pro-Palestinian, they're ANTI-Israel - they know that talking about apartheid, gender cleansing and any other slur they can find is at best an extreme exaggeration and at worst a downright blatant lie, but they don't care - talking about the real issues and problems creates conversation and ideas, which in turn can lead to negotiations. 

Before I end this on a positive note, let's not forget the hypocrisy of BDS - they call on you to boycott all things Israeli from fruit to orchestras, sports to science, but do their leaders boycott Israel, avoiding its contributions to the world the way a vegan avoids animal products? BDS hypocrites have made no suggestion of not using Google, despite it's recent our chase of Waze (the Zionist GPS!), I've never heard any suggestion that BDS urges people not to use disk-on-keys (Zionist technology!) or any other important Israeli invention. They are liars & hypocrites who cause  harm & unemployment to Palestinians and manipulate other well meaning people into doing the same. Their policy isn't new! 

So wheres the positive: Its Israel!! BDS are a pathetic failure - Israel an incredible success - its a success in democracy, its a success militarily, its a success economically, its a success culturally. Utopia it is not - there are very real difficult issues, but the BDS haters are not talking about them, so they are not talking about real solutions - if you genuinely want to see life improve for israelis & of course palestinians, then put your ideas out there - but don't be taken in by hatred - no answers lie in hate. In the meantime look at Israel & its contributions that so outweigh its small size and population - what an achievement for Zionism!  

The Palestinians, badly treated by the Arab world, must turn to Israel to build a lasting future

The Palestinians have no friends in the Arab world - they are to some states pawns, to others parasites and to yet others, the "untouchables" of the arab world - Across the Middle East the so called 'refugees' are denied passports & citizenship by the countries they, their fathers  and grandfathers were born in. The aim, aside from clear racism and lack of basic humanity, seems to remain the same since 1948 - the politicization of the Palestinians: 

"The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it an open sore, as an affront to the UN and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die." Ralph Galloway, former Director of UNRWA, August 1958 

Arafat himself said "We refuse to talk about the resettlement of refugees [where they are currently living] because this is a crime….It is the Palestinians' right to return to their homeland." Yasser Arafat, Al-Quds (Palestinian newspaper) September 11, 1999

Arab states treatment of the Palestinians born in these countries - their countries -  is beyond awful - it is deeply racist - in Lebanon they can not own property or study any course of higher education or professional qualification;   Saudi Arabia, during their labor shortage of the 1970s and 80s , chose to employ foreign workers rather than resident unemployed Palestinians.

In fact, it often seems that the only time Arab states even pay lip service to Palestinian concerns is when they are connected to Israel. 

Meanwhile, the Palestinians themselves, kept poverty bound and stateless in their 'refugee camps' (essentially a policy of Nazi era style ghetto-ization) are taught that all their woes are because of "Zionists" who caused this Nakba (calamity). They are taught to hate from kindergarten -" Zionism caused your problems...Zionism is evil...one day the Zionist state will fall" say their Arab "brothers" and the Palestinians know no different. They hate the Zionists, believing with great faith, the Pallywood lies of apartheid, genocide and child murder.They see Israel as the perpetrator of the horrors in truth are occurring daily in virtually every other state in the Middle East APART from Israel! They see no irony in Israel being the only country in the Middle East where all its citizens, including Arabs, have the rights 330,000,000 other arabs can only dream of; They probably never hear that israel is the safe haven for minorities persecuted in Palestinian society (gays, Druze, Bahai, christians etc) - they only know that their Arab brothers say everything bad is Israel's fault - look at Twitter: Syria is a zionist plot, riots against Morsi in Egypt - Israel caused that; Hamas persecution & oppression - if Israel wasnt there it wouldnt happen; 9/11 - Mossad - even the Japanese tsunami is widely believed in Arab world to have been caused by Zionism.

The truth however is that for them to have any future, it can only be with Israel. The Arab states hold no solutions for the people against whom they have perpetrated a racist crime against humanity for 65 years, and if & when a Palestinian state is born, they'll offer little more than lip service. More than likely they will expel their Palestinian 'refugees' forcing millions of people to emigrate to the tiny Palestinian state which will be unable to receive them.

A future Palestinian state will need port access, it will need water , gas and oil, food even. That isn't going to come from Lebanon or Syria, and probably not too much from Jordan - only Israel can provide the trade agreements that Palestine will need - without Israel they will be doomed - indeed as I have already said, if the Arab states unload their refugees on this state, it will be doomed anyway and Israel will find itself with a worse situation on its hands than it currently faces.

Further more, the Palestinian position in the Arab world became weaker as Israel recently became a gas producer, and shortly will be the 3rd largest gas and oil exporter in the Middle East. The oil producing Arab states are aware of this and are already signalling a shift in their entrenched positions toward Israel, with some of their smaller allies and proxies trading openly with the Zionist entity. Iran (not an Arab country) is making a power-play for political control and influence within the Arab world, and has chosen Israel as the method of gaining that power - this too makes it worthwhile for those Arab states ranged against Iran, to change their position on Israel. All this does not bode well for the Palestinians, whose policy - sometimes stated, sometimes not - has always been "all or nothing" - they have avoided negotiations on final settlement agreements even when they have had this in their hands, because  they have sold their people the lie that there really is only a one state solution - Palestine - after all, how can they tell the people they are making a deal with the source of all evil? So Arafat started an intifada rather than sign an agreement, and Abbas twists and turns, offering any reason and objection he can find why he can't negotiate. 

There is a glimmer of hope in all this for both Israel & the Palestinians - the possibility, rarely mentioned, of a regional agreement. As Arab states start to need Israel more than they need it gone, they may become more able to pressure the Palestinians to the table, more willing to offer citizenship to 2nd and 3rd generation 'refugees' born in their countries. This offers Israel the security guarantees that it seeks, and opens for the Palestinian state the opportunity for trade and goods to travel through their small country. Its a small window of hope, and if this doesn't come to be, I see no future for the Palestinian people, who history will probably judge as a people who, in the words of Israeli elder statesman, the late Abba Eban  "never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity"

The Lowest Kind of Jew Hatred: Silencing The Holocaust

Over and over we hear the slogan "I'm not antisemitic, I'm anti Zionist" - let me clarify one thing at the start - if you are "anti Israel's policies" then that does not make you antisemitic, but as soon as you say you declare that you are anti the very concept of Jews having a state (antizionist) then, yes, you are almost certainly an antisemite.

In any case, today is Israel's holocaust memorial day, known as Yom HaShoa. Its a day when radio's play no music, flags fly at half mast, and just minutes ago, at 10am here in Israel, sirens sound for two minutes and the entire country stood, heads bowed, on buses, airports, shopping malls..in factories, during meetings, in homes..it makes no difference, all citizens of the Jewish state share the collective pain of the methodical slaughter of 6,000,000 Jews by the Nazis. The loss of almost half of all the Jews living at that time is still felt today and always will be in this country forged by survivors: Last night six aging survivors lit memorial flames at the national memorial 
ceremony. These six people had settled in Israel after the war and between them had around 12 children, 30 grandchildren and 16 great grandchildren. How many Jews were never born because of the loss of the 6,000,000? What contributions to Judaism, art, literature, science and world economy would those 60 or 70 million people have made? We mourn this too. It is unfathomable that the Holocaust would not be deeply ingrained into the national psyche of the Jewish people, and of course the Jewish state and beggars belief that anyone should not understand and respect this, or worse could resent it.

Turn then to our enemies, who use holocaust and Nazi imagery to describe so many debates conflicts or clashes they have with Israel and Zionism: Minor's arrested for stone throwing = Fascist Zionists; Israel returns Hamas fire = Nazi genocide; Gaza =  a concentration camp; Bibi is compared with Hitler and so on. If this cheapening of what the holocaust was and stealing its imagery for propaganda against Jews were not enough, yesterday (on the eve of Holocaust day)  we saw Israel's enemies launch a cyber attack on Israel called 'Op Israel' - admittedly this effort was an embarrassing failure for the not so 'anonymous' hackers, but never the less, it is telling that their tagline was "silencing Israel" and their websites did not contain political messages, but extreme Islamic ones. What was sickening is that one of the handful of websites they managed to bring down was an NGO working with children with cancer, and the most extreme effort of the day was against Yad Vashem, the holocaust memorial & educational organization. They wanted to bring down the world's most important holocaust site hours before Yom HaShoa - how is that political? How is that about building a Palestinian future? It is an attack not on Israel - it is an attack on the Jewish people, an effort to tell them that 70 years after the holocaust, there are still people out there that want Jews gone, that they want talk of the holocaust silenced. 

Perhaps they fear the images of a people little more than walking skeletons in 1945, beating the combined arab armies 3 years later in Israel? Perhaps the religious Islamists see the hand of G-d in the Jews remarkable survival and subsequent success and they seek to dispel their fear with denial. I don't know, but I do know that stealing the holocaust, using its imagery against the Jewish state and worse seeking to deny it occurred, silencing it's websites - essentially attempt to rip the holocaust away from the Jewish people, I know that this has nothing to do with Israel & The Palestinians, nothing to do with final agreements or settlements - it is hatred of Jews and anything that may give the wider world an understanding of the Jewish people - it  is antisemitism in its purest, Jew hating form.