Reflections on the Biden vs. Begin Collision
For the Delaware Democrat, mean-spirited ignorance remains the rule.
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Back on May 10, Hamas fired seven rockets into Jerusalem, followed in short order by 3,200 rockets into Israeli cities. Targets included homes, apartment blocks, schools, kindergartens and an oil storage tank. Israel responded with strikes on targets in the Gaza Strip, and that prompted Joe Biden’s call to Benjamin Netanyahu, pushing for “a significant de-escalation today on the path to a ceasefire.”
Biden also encountered Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who was on record that “apartheid-in-chief Netanyahu will not listen to anyone asking nicely.” Biden told her, “You’re a fighter and God thank you for being a fighter.” Back on June 22, 1982, Sen. Biden met a fighter of a different sort, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, a veteran of Israel’s war of independence and survivor of Arab wars against Israel from 1948 onward.
Under the Camp David Accords, brokered by President Jimmy Carter, Israel returned to Egypt the Sinai Peninsula, occupied during the 1967 war. Begin and Anwar Sadat were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1978. On June 22, 1982, while Israel was tangling with the PLO in Lebanon, Menachem Begin appeared in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. Sen. Biden told Begin that if Israel did not immediately cease building settlements in Judea and Samaria, the United States would cut off economic aid to Israel.
“Don’t threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work,” Begin responded. “I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”
Biden then raised his voice at Begin and banged twice on the table.
“This desk is designed for writing, not for fists.” Begin said. “Don’t threaten us with slashing aid. Do you think that because the US lends us money it is entitled to impose on us what we must do? We are grateful for the assistance we have received, but we are not to be threatened. I am a proud Jew. Three thousand years of culture are behind me, and you will not frighten me with threats. Take note: we do not want a single soldier of yours to die for us.”
According to the New York Times, after the meeting Begin said, “I enjoyed the session very much. I believe in liberty, that free men should freely discuss problems and if they have differences of opinion they should voice them in sincerity.” Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York Democrat, spoke in support of Begin, as did Republicans S.I. Hayakawa of California, and Rudy Boschwitz of Minnesota.
One might think that Biden, from a state of 1900 square miles, might have shown more understanding of Israel, a nation of 8,550 square miles, less than the area of New Jersey.
As Dan Gelernter notes in “Palestine Shouldn’t Exist,” when Israel declared independence in 1948, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Yemen immediately invaded. The invaders “encouraged the Arabs living in Israel to flee, promising they’d get a much better deal on land once the Jews had all been killed,” but they weren’t. The fledgling state defeated the invaders, who refused to settle the Arabs they encouraged to leave Israel. Syria offered free land to potential cultivators, “provided he was neither Jewish nor Palestinian.”
By contrast, as David Horowitz shows in “Why Israel is the Victim,” the sole Jewish state has welcomed Palestinian Arabs and “there are more than a million Arabs living safely in Israel where they enjoy more citizen rights than the Arabs living in any Arab country, or for that matter the Muslims living in any Muslim country. If Arabs treated Jews half as well, there would be no Middle East ‘problem.’” Unfortunately, “the ethnic cleansing of the Jews has always been the objective of Arabs and Palestinians.”
The late David Fromkin charted the background of this conflict in A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. Joe Biden shows little familiarity with that book or scholarly works of any kind. As Mark Bowden explained in a 2010 Atlantic profile, “Biden is not an intellectual,” and “makes few references to books and learned influences in his speeches and autobiography.”
In a presidential debate last October, Biden said Hitler “in fact invaded Europe,” the sort of ignorance one would expect from the drunk at the end of the bar. Joe Biden opposed the operation to kill Osama bin Laden and criticized President Trump for taking out Iranian terrorist Qassem Soleimani. Now Biden ignores Hamas, cozies up to Iran, and as in 1982, tightens the screws on Israel.
“As over 3,000 rockets are fired into Israel, the establishment of the Democratic Party seems paralyzed over how to respond to the latest Middle East war,” Victor Davis Hanson explains in “Why Does the Left Hate Israel?” Democrats are “in terror also that anti-Israelism is becoming synonymous with rank anti-Semitism. And soon the Democratic Party will end up disdained as much as was the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.”
Everything You Needed to Know About the Escalation in Israel
A message from the State of Israel.
Editors Note: Below, Frontpage is running a message directly from the Israeli Government Press Office -- aimed to counter the sea of leftist propaganda about the conflict we are now witnessing in Israel. The message contains common questions with answers provided, including what role the international community can play in ending the current crisis and preventing future ones:
Q&A
Everything you needed to know about the latest escalation in Israel
Why did all of this start?
The massive rocket attacks from Gaza that began on 10 May came after weeks of Palestinian terrorism, rockets and incendiary balloons launched from the Gaza Strip, massive riots and other attacks on Jewish civilians in Jerusalem.
Although the Palestinians and their supporters have tried to justify these violent acts by linking them to a variety of Israeli actions, in fact they are the result of Palestinian plans, made in accordance to Palestinian interests, often based on internal Palestinian struggles and on Palestinian goals.
The Palestinian Authority is trying to divert attention away from its own decision to postpone elections, thereby deflecting any potential criticism. Hamas is attempting to strengthen its position, both in eyes of the Palestinian population and the Muslim world, by igniting violence and unrest, all the while trying to claim the role of Jerusalem’s defender.
This escalation was directly caused by Palestinian incitement. The Palestinian leadership has been deliberately and publicly inciting to violence over the past several weeks with the Hamas terrorist organization in particular exploiting sensitive national sentiments during the Ramadan period to stoke tensions.
How did all of this start?
This week’s flare-up follows several weeks of escalating Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians. The Hamas terrorist organization fired over forty rockets at Israel in April alone. Incendiary balloon devices launched from Gaza caused dozens of fires, resulting in widespread environmental and economic damage throughout southern Israel. In a shooting attack at the Tapuah Junction in early May, a Palestinian terrorist killed a 19-year-old yeshiva student and injured two others. Border police stopped an attempted stabbing attack in Hebron and prevented a serious mass attack when they diverted a minibus carrying three heavily armed terrorists to the Salem Junction border police base. Combined, these attacks left almost seventy Israeli civilians injured in just the past month – before the current escalation.
Violent rioters led by the Hamas terrorist organization and the Palestinian Authority met in planned clashes, with the goal of igniting violence and unrest in the city of Jerusalem. Deliberately manufactured flashpoints were used to stoke the flames. Every Israeli attempt to deescalate the situation was either ignored or drove the Palestinians to focus on a new issue after the removal of their contrived excuse for unrest.
How did Israel respond to the escalation?
Throughout the past several weeks, Israel has taken every measure possible to deescalate the situation. When Jerusalem was being used as the excuse for unrest, Israel stopped allowing the entrance of Jews to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif and changed the route of the Jerusalem Day Flag March – before cancelling it entirely due to rocket fire – while the Supreme Court delayed a court hearing on the issue of Sheikh Jarrah. Each and every one of these steps was taken in order to prevent violence and restore calm.
Hamas responded to these measures with more violence, more incitement, and more rockets.
What’s happening on the ground in Israel?
When Gaza’s terrorist organizations began their campaign of massive rocket fire on 10 May, 1500 rockets were fired in the first 24 hours, including 7 aimed at Jerusalem. Since then, over 4,000 rockets have been fired at Israel (as of 19/05/2021). Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are firing these rockets and deliberately aiming them at key metropolitan areas throughout Israel with the purpose of killing and injuring as many Israeli civilians as possible. So far, this barrage of rocket attacks has killed several Israeli civilians and injured dozens more.
Isn't Jerusalem the center of the current escalation?
No. This is a false claim. As always, Israel is taking every step possible to prevent escalation, unrest and violence, and to ensure freedom of worship in Israel.
Are the holy sites in Jerusalem still open to visitors?
Absolutely. Israel is a pluralistic democracy and guarantees the freedoms of religion and worship for all citizens and visitors. The sole exception is the limitations placed on Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, undertaken to prevent friction.
In fact, since the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967, Israel has safeguarded freedom of worship for all faiths in the city and nurtured rapid economic, demographic, and cultural growth. Israel will continue to uphold freedom of worship for all.
Who is Hamas?
Hamas is an Islamist terrorist organization whose ultimate goal is to annihilate the State of Israel entirely and establish a caliphate. The Hamas Charter – the organization's manifesto – is an antisemitic document that calls for the murder of Jews simply on the basis of their religion. Hamas has been internationally recognized as a terrorist organization since 1993 in the united states, with many countries following suit, including by Canada, and the EU.
Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in a violent military coup in 2007, which caused the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians. It had hoped to take control of the West Bank through Palestinian elections this year, which were ultimately postponed by the Palestinian Authority.
Hamas is responsible for the death and injury of tens of thousands of Israeli and Palestinian civilians. It deliberately targets civilian population centers throughout Israel with rockets and other weapons. Hamas uses its own population as human shields, firing rockets from within civilian spaces in Gaza and hiding its leaders, terrorists and military facilities there as well. This is effectively a double war crime: not only do they indiscriminately fire rockets at Israeli civilians, but they do so from areas densely populated with Palestinian civilians.
I've heard that Sheikh Jarrah was the catalyst for the current escalation of violence…
This is a false claim that simply does not stand up to scrutiny. The Sheikh Jarrah issue is essentially a real estate dispute between private parties, to which the State of Israel is not party. This legal matter was deliberated in several different courts, which determined that the current tenants do not have ownership over the property in dispute and violated their duties as tenants for decades. Nonetheless, the issue is now pending before Israel’s Supreme Court, which decided to delay the scheduled Court hearing on the issue specifically in order to prevent violence and calm tensions.
This private legal dispute involving four families is being exploited to inflame passions and attack Israel. Linking the Sheikh Jarrah issue to Hamas’ attacks and rocket launches only plays into the hands of this terrorist organization.
Can reports from Gaza be trusted?
As opposed to Israel, which is a strong democracy that respects freedom of the press, Gaza is ruled by a terrorist organization that limits press coverage. Moreover, Hamas controls the government bodies that supply basic information, such as the Ministry of Health, and does not hesitate to falsify data when it serves its purposes.
Hamas has a long history of misrepresenting and even faking facts. In previous conflicts, it provided civilian casualty figures that were later proven to include large numbers of terrorists and other combatants. It presents civilians who were used as human shields as victims of Israeli aggression. Similarly, the deaths of Palestinians killed by rockets that failed inflight (it is estimated that approximately 20-30%15 of the rockets launched at Israel land in Gaza instead) are blamed on Israel.
What role can the international community play?
The international community can play an important role in both ending the current crisis and in preventing future ones.
The first and primary task is to communicate to Hamas that terrorism will not be tolerated, let alone rewarded. As long as this internationally-recognized terrorist organization believes that it stands to gain from the violence, rockets will continue to reign down on towns and cities, forcing Israel to respond.
Hamas has a long history of creating the same scenario: it designs a situation that leaves Israel with no choice but to react, deliberately places Gaza’s civilian population and infrastructure in harm’s way, and then reaps the rewards by claiming victim status. The importance of not falling into Hamas’ trap cannot be overstated.
World leaders who support Israel in its fight against terrorism are not lacking in compassion towards Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Rather, they are acknowledging the reality of the situation: Hamas instigated this conflict with no concern for civilian life on either side of the border and with the expectation that it can exploit Palestinian suffering to delegitimize the State of Israel. Suffering on both sides will most quickly be alleviated by focusing the blame on those responsible for starting and perpetuating the violence while denying Hamas its objectives.
Hamas, like many other terrorist organizations, seeks to undermine the legitimacy of democratic nations acting in self-defense. Its actions cannot be condoned, while attempts to create equivalence between a terrorist organization that provokes conflict and a democratic state that seeks to protect its population is not only morally offensive, it encourages future terrorist attacks.
The Anti-Israel Left Supports Ethnic Cleansing in Jerusalem
What the battle over a few homes in Jerusalem is really about.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
In 1948, the armies of seven Arab nations invaded Israel. They failed to wipe out the newly reborn nation, but Jordan occupied part of Jerusalem and ethnically cleansed its Jews.
Among the former Jewish neighborhoods was a small area named Shimon HaTzadik or Simon the Righteous after a high priest who became famous for talking Alexander the Great out of putting up an idol in the Temple. The Arab Muslim colonists who had occupied the area however called it Sheikh Jarrah after an associate of the Iraqi invader Saladin.
Saladin had invaded Israel some 1500 years after Shimon HaTzadik’s death. His associate settled in Jerusalem and died there. A mosque was built over the house of the invader, Jarrah, which later gave its name to the neighborhood when the Husseini family set up shop there in the 19th century. Hitler’s Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, grew up in the first house in the neighborhood.
Seven years after he got a pledge from Hitler to invade and kill all the Jews, the Islamic leader tried to finish the job with the Army of the Sacred Jihad backed by thousands of Muslim Brotherhood Jihadis. Aside from blowing up the newspaper that would later be known as the Jerusalem Post, the Jihadis performed poorly in battle and fell apart when their commander, another Husseini, was killed trying to cut off Israeli supply convoys to the siege of Jerusalem.
The Jordanians desecrated the synagogues of East Jerusalem, used Jewish tombstones to pave roads, and seized Jewish property through their Custodian of Enemy Property.
In 1956, UNRWA worked with the Jordanian occupiers to settle “Palestinian refugees” in this Jewish neighborhood. The UN agency had been entirely dedicated to caring for the Arab Muslim settlers who had failed in their invasion of Israel and was settling them in violation of international law in the homes of the Jewish residents who had fled the illegal occupation.
Once the UNRWA had “resettled” its “refugees” in homes stolen from their Jewish owners through ethnic cleansing, it deemed them to no longer be refugees. The actual refugees however were the Jewish residents who had their homes stolen by the UNRWA.
The only thing more disturbing than a UN agency collaborating in ethnic cleansing was that after Israel liberated and unified Jerusalem, the illegal Arab Muslim occupiers of the homes not only refused to leave, but their right to remain in homes stolen from their Jewish inhabitants was taken up by the UN and the international community. Not to mention a lot of lawyers.
It took the original Jewish owners five years to even win legal rights to the homes in court. But they didn't actually get the property back. In an attempt to avoid just the kind of international incident going on now, the Israeli authorities brokered a deal in which the Muslim squatters would pay rent and accept the legal rights of the Jewish owners of the trusts.
The rent on the homes was a fraction of what they would go for on the open market. But even that money was never actually paid. The next three decades were spent trying to evict the illegal Muslim settlers who wouldn't pay rent or leave.
The recent court decision on evictions, which was used by Hamas and the PLO as a pretext for the war that they had been planning on starting anyway, is the latest in a string of legal decisions over these homes going back 50 years.
These decisions came from independent courts, not the Netanyahu government, in a legal battle that began when he was a college student studying at MIT. There isn’t a single argument for why the Jewish trusts that owned the homes should have lost the right to them when Jordan invaded and seized those homes, or why the UNRWA’s decision to illegally collaborate in ethnic cleansing by settling members of an occupying nation in those homes was legal.
All their arguments come down to shouting, “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” when the only time there was apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem was under Arab Muslim occupation.
Every anti-Israel radical in public office from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Bernie Sanders, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and the rest of the gang have denounced evictions from ‘Sheikh Jarrah’.
"We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. Israeli forces are forcing families from their homes," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tweeted.
"The evictions of Palestinian families must not go forward,” Bernie Sanders ranted.
“The Administration should make clear to the Israeli government that these evictions are illegal and must stop immediately,” Senator Elizabeth Warren declared. Despite being a lawyer, she declined to identify how the Israeli court ruling was "illegal".
The Biden administration also got into the act.
“We are deeply concerned about the potential eviction of Palestinian families in the Silwan neighborhood and in Sheikh Jarrah, many of whom have lived in their homes for generations," State Department spokeswoman Jalina Porter, a former cheerleader who had falsely accused America of genocide, claimed.
The only way to argue that the homes were “theirs” is by recognizing the legitimacy of occupation and ethnic cleansing, at least when it’s practiced by Muslim invading armies.
The moral principle for which AOC, Sanders, Warren, and the State Department are fighting is that when Arab Muslims drive out the Jews and seize their homes, it’s their property now.
The entire legal basis for the court case by the squatters is their claim that the property had been given to them by Jordan’s Custodian of Enemy Property office. This claim has standing in Israeli courts which chose to wrongly recognize those seizures. And so the court cases have revolved around whether the squatters could ever prove that an illegal occupying power had transferred title to them during its ethnic cleansing campaign. The squatters couldn’t even meet this low bar because they were never given title to the homes, but the vicissitudes of local real estate law aside, there’s still the invasion, the illegal occupation and the ethnic cleansing.
When AOC, Warren, Sanders, Tlaib, Omar, the UN, and the Biden administration treat the occupiers of Sheikh Jarrah as the rightful owners, they’re defending ethnic cleansing.
And it should be called what it is.
The fundamental issue at stake in Shimon HaTzadik and Sheikh Jarrah are crystal clear. Unlike some parts of Israel where territory changed hands in more complex ways, we know exactly what happened and why it happened. And those simple facts tell a story of the UNRWA’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Jews, not just today when it serves as a storehouse for Hamas missiles and an employment agency for Hamas propagandists, but back in the 50s.
Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem after an invasion and occupation. The United Nations, through UNRWA, violated international law by taking part in population transfer by an occupying power which had expelled the indigenous population. This is the charge that the UN and the anti-Israel politicians and media have repeatedly lobbed at Israel.
And they’re the ones guilty of it.
Their Sheikh Jarrah argument is that ethnic cleansing and occupation are moral and legal when Arab Muslim armies do it. It’s that Arab Muslim squatters who moved into Jewish homes in 1956 had gained an immutable moral right to live in them by 1967 that outweighed those of the Jewish trusts which had owned them since the 19th century.
There’s no better way to show the hypocritical double standards of an anti-Israel movement that cries about occupation, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid while practicing those very things.
AOC, Sanders, Warren, the UN, the Quarter, the EU, and the Biden administration are demanding that the Arab Muslim occupation of Jerusalem continue. They are ordering a free country to overturn the legal ruling of a court in case that goes back to the 1970s because they believe that Arab Muslim occupiers have a right to live in Jerusalem… and Jews don’t.
That’s what this was about in 1948. That’s still what it’s about in 2021.
The occupiers cry about the “occupation” and the ethnic cleansers cry about “ethnic cleansing” as they fight to bring back the state of apartheid that drove the Jews out of Jerusalem.
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