What is the "Three NO(s)" resolution of September 1, 1967?

With typical Muslim hubris, the Three NO(s) resolution, also known as the Khartoum Resolution of 1967, was a result of a conference with heads of state from eight Arab countries in Khartoum, Sudan on August 29 to September 1, 1967.

The meeting formulated the Arab consensus that despite the fact that Israel has consistently reached out for peaceful coexistence with its neighbors, the Arabian nation would not do the same.

The resolution adopted September 1, 1967 called for the continued struggle against Israel, the creation of a fund to assist the economics of Egypt and Jordan, the lifting of an Arab oil boycott against the West and a new agreement to end the war in Yemen.

The best remembered action at Khartoum, however, was the adoption of the dictum of "Three NOs" with respect to Israel:

NO peace with Israel
NO recognition of Israel
NO negotiations with Israel

For more information on the Khartoum Resolution, see this.

For the text of the Resolution, see this, specifically paragraph #3.

Israel destroys synagogue near Judaism's 2nd holiest site

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

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

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

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

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

Amid General Amnesia

Excellent points made here. From Amid General Amnesia:

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

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

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

The Most Justified War

From The Most Justified War:

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

Forty Years Later, Doing Nothing Is the Best Policy

From Forty Years Later, Doing Nothing Is the Best Policy:

In this week's torrent of 40th anniversary recollections about the Six-Day War, one TV image cut straight to the chase: King Faisal of Saudi Arabia staring into a camera to say, "The essential point remains the total elimination of Israel." The king's statement of principles was captured in "Six Days in June," an impressive two-hour documentary that aired Monday on PBS. For all the noise about peace in the 40 years since, the Saudi monarch's silver bullet solution is still the basic Arab mindset.

As do-gooders and militants reflect on what Israel should have done, what Arabs failed to do, what the UN ought to do, I vote for doing nothing. Regardless of the peace treaties with Israel forged by President Sadat of Egypt and King Hussein of Jordan, the overwhelming majority of Arabs need more time to dismantle their war posture. At this point, Israel's primary antagonists in this conflict, the Palestinian Arabs, are no longer an entity that can be engaged. Having dissolved into a myriad of warring gangs, there is no one to settle with.

And still more time is necessary to contemplate whether what has been achieved can be retained. Egypt's 1979 peace accord will not survive a day if the Muslim Brotherhood succeeds in its decades-old effort to topple President Mubarak's dynastic military reign. The Brotherhood is significantly closer to that goal now. In Jordan, since the peace treaty of 1994, the anti-Semitic discourse has grown thick, leaving little room to imagine that peace with Israel could survive a change in leadership.

It is pointless even to think about structuring new accords with Arab societies that are relentlessly marching toward various stages of radicalism, Islamic or otherwise. It would not help, and it would not hold. As for Israel, going forward with more unilateral evacuations, as in Lebanon and Gaza, has only liberated land for terrorist operations.

The Six-Day War: A Defensive War

From The Six-Day War: A Defensive War:

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

No Pyrrhic Victory

From No Pyrrhic Victory:

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

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

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

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

How the Six-Day War Reshaped the Mideast

From How the Six-Day War Reshaped the Mideast:

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

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

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

For Israel, There Was No Peace Before The Land

From the great Charles Krauthammer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today in Jewish History - Iyar 28

Sponsored by Aish.com:

In 1967, Israeli paratroopers completed their capture of the Old City of Jerusalem, restoring Jewish control of the Temple Mount, Judaism's holiest site. Soldiers danced, sang and cried at the Western Wall, the site of Jewish prayers for centuries. A plaza was cleared in front of the Wall, and one week later, tens of thousands of Jews swarmed to the site on the holiday of Shavuot. Iyar 28 is celebrated today as Yom Yerushalayim, commemorating the reunification of the Holy City, which has stood as the capital of the Jewish nation for 3,000 years.

40th Anniversary of the Reunification of Jerusalem

Via Israel HighWay:

Most Jews in Israel and throughout the world barely remember a time when the Old City of Jerusalem and the rest of east Jerusalem were not an important part of the fabric of the city and the country. For 19 years, from the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 until the Six Day War in 1967, Jerusalem was a city divided by barbed wire and dangerous "no-man’s land" running roughly north to south separating the Jewish people from the Old City of Jerusalem. The Old City, the City of David, was the cornerstone of 2,000 years of Jewish longing for Zion. The long-held dream of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel was finally achieved, but the heart of the land was at once visibly close and miles away.

When Israel was born in 1948, its citizens and armed forces were unable to defend the Old City, and it fell to the Jordanian Legion. Jews were cut off from their holiest sites in Jerusalem, including the Kotel (Western Wall), the City of David just outside the Old City Walls, Mt. Scopus and the ancient Mount of Olives cemetery.

Throughout this time the Jewish character of the Old City was systematically destroyed by the Jordanian government. Thousands of Jewish residents of east Jerusalem and the Old City were driven from their homes. Fifty-eight Jerusalem synagogues, including some that were hundreds of years old, were destroyed or ruined and others were turned into barns for animals or public bathrooms. The entire Jewish Quarter was destroyed, houses were built immediately adjacent to the Kotel and all access to the ancient city was completely denied to Jews. Then suddenly, in the middle of the Six Day War, Israel found itself, unexpectedly, in control of the Old City.

With the news that Israel had taken control of the Old City and east Jerusalem, Israelis from all over the country began flocking to the Kotel to celebrate their young country’s miraculous victory. With Israeli sovereignty in all of Jerusalem, the holy sites of the world’s three great monotheistic faiths were opened to all, as they had never been under centuries of Muslim rule.

Now, 40 years later, many Israelis don’t know an Israel without a united Jerusalem offering free access to the Kotel and the important cultural and historic sites in the Old City. What was once "no man's land" dividing Israeli west Jerusalem from Jordanian-controlled east Jerusalem is now home to many landmarks and tourist attractions. One such place is the Haas Promenade, the first stop for many tour groups because of its scenic overlook of the entire Jerusalem panorama.

In recent years, Jerusalem has struggled as a growing and modern city. The city's narrow and winding streets are often snarled with traffic, and the city center, the site of frequent terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada, has struggled to keep shoppers and to attract people seeking entertainment who favor the modern indoor mall on the outskirts of the city. However, the city is in the midst of a major building campaign centered around the Jerusalem light rail system which will connect the outlying neighborhoods of the city with the center of town. The light rail, with its signature "Bridge of Strings" at the entrance to the city, will serve as a catalyst for new pedestrian malls, shopping areas and a reduction of traffic in and around the city center.

However, everything is not settled. To this day, 40 years after the unification of the city and almost 60 years after the founding of the State of Israel, the world refuses to fully accept Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Children born in Jerusalem to American parents are issued U.S. passports with the country of birth left blank. For decades, only two countries, Costa Rica and El Salvador, maintained their Israeli embassies in Jerusalem, and both of those countries announced last year that they would be moving their embassies to Tel Aviv.

The issue of Jerusalem has played a significant role in various diplomatic discussions in recent years and remains a key "final status" issue in the on-again, off-again talks between Israel and the Palestinians. The Oslo Accords, the negotiations at Camp David and the other interim discussions have all touched on the future of Jerusalem but opted to postpone the discussion. This year’s controversy over the Mugrabi Gate excavations shows just how sensitive an issue Jerusalem can be. The Mugrabi Gate serves as the entry point to the Temple Mount for all non-Muslim visitors. The bridge was built after the Six Day War to bring visitors to the Temple Mount. Recently it was heavily damaged during torrential rainstorms, and Jerusalem city architects ruled that is must be replaced with a more permanent and safer structure. In February, initial excavations of the site for the new bridge brought a swirl of controversy from the Muslim world, with Muslim and Arab leaders accusing Israel of seeking to undermine mosques on the Mount. Israel defended the decision to rebuild by inviting inspectors from various countries to observe and inspect the area themselves. A UN ruling on the incident cleared Israel of wrongdoing, acknowledging that they had acted with professionalism.

What is the future of Jerusalem? Will it remain the undivided capital of Israel or will the world demand official Palestinian sovereignty in parts of the Holy City? The answers to these questions remain unclear to all; but on this, the 40th Yom Yerushalayim, we should all stop to appreciate the Eternal City.

Take Action:

* Celebrate Yom Yerushalayim on May 16.
- Put an Israeli flag on your window or porch.
- Wear an Israeli flag pin.
* Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Attend a special service at your school or synagogue to mark the miracle of Jerusalem's reunification.
* Write a letter to your congressmen, senator, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice demanded that the American Embassy be moved to Jerusalem.

* Watch these video clips on Jerusalem:

- Jerusalem of Gold
- Matisyahu's Tribute to Jerusalem

Click here to listen to a live broadcast of the liberation of the Old City on June 7, 1967.

Today in Jewish History - Nissan 4

Sponsored by Aish.com:

In 1948, a convoy of 78 Jewish medical personnel, en route to Hadassah Hospital in the Jewish enclave of Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, were killed in an Arab ambush. The ambush cut off the hospital from the rest of Israel and forced Hadassah to relocate, eventually opening a larger medical center in 1961 at Ein Kerem. The Mount Scopus facility would reopen after Jerusalem was reunited in 1967.

Jordan quietly gaining Temple Mount control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Echoes of Yom Kippur War on Syrian Border

From IsraelNN.com:

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

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

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

Gall of the Hashemites

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yesha Council Slams Peace Now's "Lies Now" Report

By Hillel Fendel
A7 News
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
4 Shevat 5767
----------------
The Yesha Council highlights the deceptions in a recent study by the ultra-left wing Peace Now group purporting to show that 40% of Yesha communities are built on private Arab land.

"The so-called facts in the Peace Now report are from the true reality," the Yesha Council says.

The Yesha Council has named its report, currently underway, "The Protocols of Peace Now - the Great Deception." It includes maps, documents, quotations - and an itemized list of "simple, ridiculous mistakes, as well as the lack of sincerity, that typify the criminal negligence that characterizes this hate-motivated report."

Praised by Arabs

The Peace Now report received lavished praise from Palestinian Authority Arabs. The PA news agency Ma'an recently wrote that it "shows part of the true face of the Hebrew State... It shows that private Arab-owned lands were simply stolen by the Hebrew state to build settlements - disproving the claim of four decades... The report was not publicized by me or by a Palestinian organization, but by an Israeli organization - and Israel cannot deny it... Where are all the Israeli mottos about justice, democracy and civil rights?... This is now a 'ready-to-go' case for the International Court... Now that Peace Now has given this gift to the land-owners, we must thank this organization, and see what the land-owners and the PA will do; for this is much to do..."

"The Peace Now members are running around the world with this report," a Yesha Council source said, "in order to malign the State of Israel - but it is filled with distorted data and lies. All is apparently fair and acceptable in their war against the Jewish communities."

Peace Now members are currently lobbying U.S. Congressmen against Israel based on their report. Nationalist camp activists say that Peace Now's objective is to make the approval of U.S. aid to Israel contingent upon the withdrawal of Israeli financial support for all Yesha communities allegedly on private Arab land, as well as the destruction of all hilltop outposts.

No State-Owned Lands in Yesha?

The point of departure of the Peace Now report, the Yesha Council says, is that "all of Judea and Samaria is private Arab-owned land unless proven otherwise." The entire concept of state-owned lands essentially does not exist for Peace Now, says Council leader Pinchas Wallerstein.

Only a small percentage of Judea and Samaria is actually privately-owned, however. A legal expert familiar with the area told Arutz-7 that "perhaps 5%" of the uninhabited land there is privately-owned. "Vast areas in Judea and Samaria lay totally desolate in 1967 when Israel liberated them in the Six Day War," he said. Most of these areas were then designated as state-owned, in the absence of other documentation.

For instance, most of Maaleh Adumim - one of the largest cities in Judea and Samaria, just east of Jerusalem - appears on the Peace Now report as if built on private land, when in fact it was built on state-owned lands.

The Yesha report also shows that Peace Now falsely "expanded" the borders of Jewish communities into Arab-owned land. "Additional area around the communities was simply added to the Jewish towns," a Yesha source said, "as if to prove that the Jews had stolen the land - when in fact the communities don't claim these areas at all."

Peace Now even ignores a ruling by former Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak, Wallerstein states. Barak ruled in the past that the community of Etz Ephraim, near Elkanah, is built on Jewish-owned land - yet Peace Now has it on Arab land.

Neither does Peace Now recognize the sale of land, apparently. The Modiin-area community of Kfar Oranim, for instance, whose land was duly purchased from Arabs, appears in the Peace Now report as "mostly Arab-owned."

The Essential Goal: An End to Jewish Presence in Judea and Samaria

Peace Now's activities center largely on making life difficult, if not impossible, for Jews living in Judea and Samaria. One of its major campaigns in recent months has been waged against the construction of 33 high-rise buildings in a section of Modi'in Illit, some of which were built on land belonging to the nearby Arab village of Bil'in. A Peace Now spokesperson speaking with Arutz-7 at the time did not rule out the possibility that it would seek a court order to demolish the buildings - though Jewish families had already purchased and moved into many of the apartments.

This past December, the nearly 200 people of Migron, south of Beit El, learned that Defense Minister Peretz plans to forcibly expel them in several months if no "voluntary evacuation" agreement is reached. Though some of the land on which Migron was founded is officially listed as Arab-owned, these Arabs had never come forward to make their claim, nor had they ever cultivated or laid any claim to it - until Peace Now sought them out and encouraged them to do so.

Peace Now has also targeted new construction in Maaleh Adumim, Maaleh Rechavam, a neighborhood in Eli, and many more locations, and has demanded the destruction of some 120 hilltop outposts throughout Judea and Samaria. It frequently files suit in the Supreme Court against what it feels is the government's slow pace in demolishing areas of Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria. Last month, a petition by Peace Now has prompted Attorney General Mazuz to open a limited criminal investigation against government officials who arranged funding for Yesha outposts.

MK Uri Ariel said that the "deceptive Peace Now report is another attempt to foster conflict and ignite a war... Peace Now does not promote peace amongst the Jews, nor between us and the Arabs." Yaakov (Ketzaleh) Katz of Beit El, a veteran leader of the settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria, said about Peace Now's latest report, "They merely want to weaken us and the State of Israel." Gush Etzion settlement leader Nadia Matar has said that "members of Peace Now are spying and informing on behalf of the Arab enemy."

International Funding

Notably, Peace Now's costly expenses in detailing every new Israeli structure in Judea and Samaria are largely funded by foreign governments. Investigative reporter David Bedein says the organization is or has been effectively on the payroll of at least three European governments - Britain, Norway, and Finland - and has also been funded by the Economic Cooperation Foundation, a group funded directly by the European Union.

Britain and Norway are fundamentally opposed to the existence of Israeli communities in Yesha, thus that the money they give Peace Now invariably serves those governments' foreign policy interests. Despite this, the organization is not required under Israeli law to register as a foreign agent. In contrast, Bedein explained, if the organization were operating in the United States, it would have to register as a foreign agent with the U.S. Justice Department.

Bedein said Peace Now "was in effect spying on Israel for foreign governments," and engages in surveillance activities relating not only to Israeli communities, but also on military installations belonging to the IDF.

Outposts Have a Purpose

The Yesha Council report opens with a strong criticism of the type of work Peace Now does:

"The very decision to evacuate outposts, to the cheers of the Palestinians, as if we were disciplining third-graders along the style of, 'Get out, stand in the corner, show us your papers and then return,' without checking seriously even one time what the real objective of these outposts is and how they will contribute to less friction and a better atmosphere - for this alone the Knesset should vote no-confidence in the government." These words were uttered in the Knesset by then-MK Ariel Sharon on October 18, 1999.

Sharon explained at the time that one of the justifications for the outposts is to guarantee Israeli access to various routes in the area. "For instance," he said, " Elon Moreh, Itamar and the Shilo bloc must be connected to the Alon route in the Jordan Valley to their east. If we don't sit on important points along these routes, who will defend them?"

Jewish Withdrawal from Judea and Samaria Back on the table

The Israeli government has agreed in principle to withdraw from most of Judea and Samaria ("Yesha"), in secret talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Egypt and the European Union (EU) have been mediating the negotiations, according to the World Net Daily (WND) news website, which quoted high-level Egyptian diplomatic and intelligence officials, and an aide to EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana as saying they have been directly involved in the talks.

Negotiations have been quietly proceeding apace for the past two or three weeks, according to sources quoted by WND reporter Aaron Klein, after PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas suggested to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert late last month that the two men switch to “back channel talks” in order to avoid coverage by the media.

According to Egyptian and EU sources, one of the plans currently under consideration involves handing over control of central and southern Yesha to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s security forces. In northern Yesha, the transfer of responsibility to Abbas’ security forces over the area would be monitored by Jordan and EU observers.

Hamas’s role in the plan remains unclear. The terrorist organization has repeatedly vowed never to formally recognize the State of Israel, renounce terrorism or uphold agreements with Israel signed by the previous, Fatah-led, PA government. That stance is not accepted by the international community.

Talks toward a unity coalition between PA Prime Minister and Hamas chairman Ismail Haniyeh and Mahmoud Abbas, who heads the Fatah faction, are all but dead, leaving Hamas in control of the PA.

A blessing, the streets of Gaza have become a battlefield as Hamas and Fatah struggle for control of the PA government, with bloody clashes that have resulted in the deaths of both terrorists and innocent PA residents alike in what has become a militia war.

The situation may intensify further and eventually lead to escalated attacks against the Jewish State as well, in the wake of an announcement by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week that the Bush administration has agreed to finance, arm and train Abbas’ security force.

The force will reportedly include the Fatah-controlled Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, one of the most vicious groups engaged in the terrorist war against Israel. Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades has shared responsibility with the Islamic Jihad terror group for every suicide bombing in Israel in the past two years.

Rice said during her visit to the region last week that the U.S. will send Abbas $86.4 million to beef up his personal security guard, Force 17, which also polices PA areas in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. The Bush administration is hoping to strengthen Fatah – which it perceives as a moderate group – in its bid to wrest control of the PA government from Hamas.

The last time the U.S. transferred arms to Fatah in order to strengthen its ability to police the PA the weapons were ultimately pointed at Israel by a myriad of terrorist factions. When asked about that experience, Rice claimed that this time would be different.

“It was envisioned (then) that the Palestinian Authority would have security forces,” she said. “The problem is those security forces broke into essentially personal militias under [former PLO chairman Yasser] Arafat. They broke into too many that were often warring with each other.”

The current plan, she added, would be carried out in a way that would “move over time.” with the idea being that the U.S. would maintain control over what is being done with the weapons.

“This plan is not just to equip [Abbas’ security forces] and train them, [but] it is also to professionalize them, to unify them [and] to put them under a single command,” she said.

Now these newly-armed forces, trained and “professionalized” by the U.S. government would be given control over most of Judea and Samaria, placing them within rocket fire range of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion International Airport. They would also be within range of Arad and other cities and smaller communities located near the pre-1967 borders.

Diplomatic sources said talks are moving rapidly as the PA wrestles with Israel over the precise location of the new borders. Solana’s aide told WND that diplomats are expected to see a “historic political evolution and movement in negotiations in the next few weeks and few months, unseen since the Camp David peace talks in 2000.”

In 2000, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to give Arafat an official PA state in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and eastern neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Arafat turned down the offer, insisting the entire Israeli capital be transferred to the PA.

The Arab Lobby's scope and influence

The Arab Lobby's scope and influence, another excellent resource from Discover The Network:

Arab Lobby (Groups)

The Arab lobby consists of those groups and individuals that directly and indirectly seek to influence American policy to support Arab interests both in the U.S. and abroad. While focusing on Arab concerns, by no means is this lobby composed exclusively of Arabs. The lobby is defined by its ideology, not the ethnicity of its active constituents. That ideology tends to be pro-Arab on the one hand, and anti-Israel on the other. The Arab lobby in America generally seeks to promote its agendas by characterizing them as beneficial to U.S. national interests; conversely, it depicts pro-Israel policies as harmful to those interests.

The roots of the Arab lobby in America can be traced back to 1951, when King Saud of Saudi Arabia asked U.S. diplomats to finance a pro-Arab lobby to serve as a counterweight to the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs (later renamed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC).

While the pace of the Arab lobby's growth was initially slow, there were nonetheless signs of increased assertiveness. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, for example, the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) set up a fund to present the Arab perspective on the conflict. In May 1970, ARAMCO representatives warned Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco that American military sales to Israel would harm U.S.-Arab relations and jeopardize American oil supplies.

Driven by oil revenues, the Arab lobby's leverage in affecting American policy was demonstrated in early 1973 when Mobil published a pro-Arab advertorial in The New York Times. In July of that year, the chairman of Standard Oil of California (now called Chevron) distributed a letter asking the company's 40,000 employees and 262,000 stockholders to pressure their elected representatives to support "the aspirations of the Arab people." In a similar spirit, the chairman of Texaco urged the U.S. to reassess its Middle East policy.

When another Arab-Israeli war broke out in October 1973, the chairmen of the ARAMCO partners issued a memorandum warning the White House against increasing its military aid to Israel. Shortly thereafter, the OPEC oil embargo (enacted in retribution for Western support of Israel) ushered in an era where the Arab lobby became much more prominent and visible than ever before. "The day of the Arab-American is here," declared National Association of Arab Americans founder Richard Shadyac. "The reason is oil." Prior to October 1973 the price of oil had stood at $2.60 per barrel; within three months the price quadrupled to about $12 per barrel. Since then, it has risen to more than $60 -- for a commodity whose production costs are, at present, only $1.50 per barrel.

In 1977 President Jimmy Carter noted, in his diary, that the Arab lobby had pressured him mightily while he was involved in the peace negotiations between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. "They [Arab Americans] have given all the staff, Brzezinski, Warren Christopher, and others, a hard time," wrote Carter.

Among the more notable individual members of the Arab lobby in recent decades was the late Clark Clifford (died October 1998), who The New York Times described as a key adviser to four U.S. presidents, and as an influential paid lobbyist for Arab sources. In his memoir, Counsel to the President, Clifford wrote that he advised his clients: "What we can offer you is an extensive knowledge of how to deal with the government on your problems. We will be able to give you advice on how best to present your position to the appropriate departments and agencies of the government."

Another key figure in the Arab lobby has been Fred Dutton, former Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs and special assistant to President John F. Kennedy. On July 19, 2005, The Hill, a newspaper about the U.S. Congress, reported that Dutton (a lobbyist for Saudi Arabia) had worked assiduously to persuade Congress to approve two major arms sales to that nation.

Axis Information and Analysis (AIA), which specializes in information about Asia and Eastern Europe, rated Prince Bandar Bin Sultan -- a Saudi ambassador to the U.S. from 1983 to 2005 -- as the single most influential foreigner in America. With links to high-ranking officials in the State Department, Pentagon, and CIA, Sultan was a key participant in many clandestine negotiations pertaining to U.S. interests in the Middle East. According to AIA, in 1990-91 it was Sultan who pushed President George H.W. Bush to launch the military campaign to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. Moreover, his father -- Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz al Saud -- was a leading figure in the ruling Saudi dynasty. As such, he helped determine the extent of his nation's military cooperation with the U.S. in the Persian Gulf.

During a January 1998 U.S. Congressional Delegation briefing in Damascus, Syria, Congressman Nick J. Rahall (D - West Virginia), who is of Lebanese descent, said: "Our [Arab] lobby in the United States is growing in its influence and its participation in political campaigns across the spectrum. Our trip [was] sponsored by the Arab American Institute -- one of those most effective lobbying groups of the Arab groups in Washington -- and a relatively new group, the National Arab American Businessmen's Association. [Through] these groups … we are increasing our influence, and we are increasing our participation."

Some members of the Arab lobby in America are heavily financed with money from the Arab world. Before his death in 2005, for instance, Saudi Arabia's King Fahd made several large donations to the Center, including a 1993 gift of $7.6 million. As of 2005, the king's nephew, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, had given at least $5 million to the Carter Center. In 2001 the United Arab Emirates (UAE) gave the Center $500,000. The previous year, ten of Osama bin Laden's brothers had jointly pledged $1 million, as did Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman in 1998. The Saudi Fund for Development has been another major contributor, as has the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development. And Morocco's Prince Moulay Hicham Ben Abdallah has collaborated with the Carter Center on various initiatives.

It should be noted that the Arab lobby does not, by any means, speak for all Arab Americans. According to the Arab American Institute, there are approximately 3.5 million people of Arab heritage in the U.S. today, about half of them concentrated in five states -- California, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York. Nearly 40 percent of these Arab Americans are Lebanese, mostly Christians, who tend to be unsympathetic to the Arab lobby's anti-Israel perspectives. By contrast, only about 70,000Palestinian Americans reside in the United States -- a small percentage of the Arab American population. But because of their high level of political activism, their views and concerns have received hugely disproportionate attention from political leaders and the media alike. Indeed, the Palestinian cause heads the Arab lobby's list of concerns.

Because Arab Americans do not constitute a numerically large voting bloc, the Arab lobby has focused considerable effort on cultivating sympathies among the general public as a means of influencing U.S. policy. To further maximize its influence, the Arab lobby has also formed alliances with many anti-war, civil rights, civil liberties, and social justice organizations of the political left. The aforementioned Carter Center is but one of these.

For the reader interested in learning about the Arab lobby, a couple of definitions are in order. A lobby, strictly defined, is a group of persons -- be they volunteers or paid professionals -- engaged in an effort to persuade public officials to pass laws or implement programs that promote the lobbyists' goals. Lobbyists pursue their objectives in different ways: some (direct lobbyists) privately cajole legislators via telephone calls or face-to-face visits; others (grassroots lobbyists) urge the general public to contact their legislators; still others organize or participate in public actions such as mass demonstrations; and some employ a combination of all these approaches. In cases where a particular issue is to be decided through a ballot initiative or referendum, appeals to the public are technically classified as direct lobbying, because in those instances the public acts as the legislature.

Lobbyists are not necessarily members of groups or organized campaigns; they can also be independent individuals who feel strongly about the passage or the defeat of certain pieces of proposed legislation. Some are on the payroll of foreign governments.

There is technically a distinction between advocacy and lobbying. The former aims to influence some aspect of society, be it individual behavior (e.g., campaigns to discourage smoking or to encourage vegetarianism), employment policy (e.g., affirmative action in hirings and promotions), or legislation passed by elected government officials. Lobbying refers specifically to those advocacy efforts that attempt to convince legislators and public policy-makers to vote in a certain way.

This section of Discover The Networks profiles not only those pro-Arab organizations (both in the U.S. and abroad) that lobby to affect specific legislation, but also groups that engage in what might be defined, more precisely, as advocacy on behalf of Arab interests anywhere in the world. Through their press releases, official statements, publications, and direct actions, these organizations seek to shape public opinion as a means of influencing voter decisions and thereby indirectly affecting legislation passed by elected representatives.

According to terrorism expert Steven Emerson, "Assessing the influence and breadth of the Arab/Muslim lobby would be a difficult thing to do, since the metrics for assessing such things are not easily available. The lobby's real strength is felt on the local level, where its members receive community awards, participate in human relations councils, change the local educational curricula, persuade school districts to give them holidays off, and get local police and statewide officials to attend their events. Nationally, their influence is felt at the State Department in terms of their being invited to briefings, sponsored on road trips abroad, etc. The one recent time where they actually exacted an influence on President Bush was in persuading him to drop the use of the term 'Islamo-fascism.'"

While the Arab lobby has a few friends in Congress today, its effect is felt mainly as a result of its joint efforts with organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union to dilute anti-terror measures. The lobby, says Emerson, "is mainly in the process of building up a grassroots network around the United States, with the anticipation that, abetted by growing demographics, it will be in a position of political influence in the future."

Sources: Discover The Network, Arab Lobby (Groups), The Arab Lobby's scope and influence

Jimmy Carter: A compendium

"... I am opposed to an independent Palestinian state, because in my own judgement and in the judgement of many leaders in the Middle East, including Arab leaders, this would be a destabilizing factor in the Middle East and would certainly not serve the United States interests." --(Jimmy Carter at the United Jewish Appeal National Young Leadership Conference, February 25, 1980).

Folks, I"ve had my fill of reading about Jimmy Carter, because I think it's more important for you to read the hate speech that is in the Hamas Covenant and in the Palestinian National Charter, than ruminate how ex-president Carter sold out the Jews with his latest palestinian-propaganda-on-parade. In my opinion, Jimmy Carter and those who think like him, are dangerous because they are liars, but they are not as dangerous as Muslims who blow up Jewish toddlers in strollers. Let's be reasonable.

Nonetheless, Carter's book and the righteous criticism of it, are making the rounds and I have compiled several articles and links below for those of you who are interested in reading more on him. The links include articles from those who challenge him as well as other accounts relative to his mendacity. All links are worth reading; those links with an asterisk preceding them are especially worthwhile:

In 1980 Jimmy Carter declared his opposition to a "Palestinian" state

*Carter aside, Israel deserves total support

Carter defends Mideast book as accurate

*Dershowitz seeks to grill ex-president Carter on Israel book

The Carter trap

NY Times: Dennis Ross: Don't Play With Maps (Carter mispresents maps to hide Arafat's rejection of peace)

Jimmy Carter's Jewish Problem

*Michael B. Oren: A Religious Problem - Jimmy Carter's book: An Israeli view

*Jimmy Carter's own words

Jimmy Carter Interceded on Behalf of Nazi SS Guard

Ex-President for Sale - by Alan Dershowitz

Brandeis University to Allow Rebuttal After Carter Speech

Carter agrees to speak at Brandeis

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Emory Prof. Ken Stein resigned from the Carter Center. This is the note he distributed about it.

This note is to inform you that yesterday, I sent letters to President Jimmy Carter, Emory University President Jim Wagner, and Dr. John Hardman, Executive Director of the Carter Center resigning my position, effectively immediately, as Middle East Fellow of the Carter Center of Emory University. This ends my 23 year association with an institution that in some small way I helped shape and develop.

My joint academic position in Emory College in the History and Political Science Departments, and, as Director of the Emory Institute for the Study of Modern Israel remains unchanged.

Many still believe that I have an active association with the Center and, act as an adviser to President Carter, neither is the case. President Carter has intermittently continued to come to the Arab-Israeli Conflict class I teach in Emory College. He gives undergraduate students a fine first hand recollection of the Begin-Sadat negotiations of the late 1970s.

Since I left the Center physically thirteen years ago, the Middle East program of the Center has waned as has my status as a Carter Center Fellow. For the record, I had nothing to do with the research, preparation, writing, or review of President Carter's recent publication. Any material which he used from the book we did together in 1984, The Blood of Abraham, he used unilaterally. President Carter's book on the Middle East, a title too inflammatory to even print, is not based on unvarnished analyses; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments. Aside from the
one-sided nature of the book, meant to provoke, there are recollections cited from meetings where I was the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book. Being a former President does not give one a unique privilege to invent information or to unpack it with cuts,
deftly slanted to provide a particular outlook. Having little access to Arabic and Hebrew sources, I believe, clearly handicapped his understanding and analyses of how history has unfolded over the last decade. Falsehoods, if repeated often enough become meta-truths, and they then can become the erroneous baseline for shaping and reinforcing attitudes and for policy-making. The history and interpretation of the Arab-Israeli conflict is already drowning in half-truths, suppositions, and self-serving myths; more are not necessary. In due course, I shall detail these points and reflect on their origins.

The decade I spent at the Carter Center (1983-1993) as the first permanent Executive Director and as the first Fellow were intellectually enriching for Emory as an institution, the general public, the interns who learned with us, and for me professionally. Setting standards for rigorous interchange and careful analyses spilled out to the other programs that shaped the Center's early years. There was mutual respect for all views; we carefully avoided polemics or special pleading. This book does not hold to those standards. My continued association with the Center leaves the impression that I am sanctioning a series of egregious errors and polemical conclusions which appeared in President Carter's book. I can not allow that impression to stand.

Through Emory College, I have continued my professional commitment to inform students and the general public about the history and politics of Israel, the Middle East, and American policies toward the region. I have tried to remain true to a life-time devotion to scholarly excellence based upon unvarnished analyses and intellectual integrity. I hold fast to the notion that academic settings and those in positions of influence must teach and not preach. Through Emory College, in public lectures, and in OPED writings, I have adhered to the strong belief that history must be presented in context, and understood the way it was, not the way we wish it to be.

In closing, let me thank you for your friendship, past and continuing support for ISMI, and to Emory College. Let me also wish you and your loved ones a happy holiday season, and a healthy and productive new year.

As ever,
Ken
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*Criticism of Carter's book (list of blatant lies) makes it into the Congressional Record by Congressman Mark Steven Kirk on the floor of the US House. The following is now a part of the Congressional Record:

Congressman Mark Steven Kirk
Special Order
Peace Not Apartheid: More Fiction than Facts
January 18, 2007

Madame Speaker: In today's Washington Post, former President Jimmy Carter defended his book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid." President Carter wrote: "...most critics have not seriously disputed or even mentioned the facts..."

After reading the book, I have become a critic, and today will only correct the facts purported in his book.

Regarding our policy towards Israel, there is little room for mistakes, let alone outright misstatements of fact. For that reason, I want to present to the House eight factual inaccuracies found in President Carter's book.

#1: On page 62, President Carter quotes Yasser Arafat as telling him, "The Palestine Liberation Organization has never advocated the annihilation of Israel." No evidence is provided and the book does not contain one footnote. Fact check: Article 22 of the PLO's Charter stated that "the liberation of Palestine will destroy
the Zionist and imperialist presence." Yasser Arafat supported this charter and lied to President Carter.

#2: On page 57, President Carter writes, "The 1949 armistice demarcation lines became the borders of the new nation of Israel and were accepted by Israel and the United States, and recognized officially by the United Nations." Fact check: The "1949 armistice" lines were never accepted as official borders by Israel, the United States or the United Nations. This error reflects a poor attention
to detail in the book.

#3: On page 127, President Carter writes that there was "a surprising exodus of Christians from the Holy Land." Fact check: Israel is the only Middle East nation where the Christian population has grown in the last half century. Christian communities and other faith communities like Baha'is have dropped in size in many Muslim countries.

#4: On page 152, President Carter writes, "It was later claimed that the Palestinians rejected a 'generous offer' put forward by Prime Minister Barak with Israel only keeping 5 percent of the West Bank. The fact is no such offers were ever made." Fact check: According to President Clinton's lead negotiator, Ambassador Dennis Ross, Prime Minister Barak accepted Clinton's proposal - offering to withdraw from 97% of the West Bank, dismantle isolated settlements and accept a Palestinian state with part of Jerusalem as its capital. Arafat rejected the proposal. A quick call between Presidents Carter and Clinton would have corrected this error.

#5: On page 148, President Carter presents two maps he claims were considered at Camp David. One of them is labeled "Israel's interpretation of Clinton's proposal." Fact check: There were no maps ever created at Camp David. The map President Carter labeled as "Israel's interpretation" is a copy of a map created by Dennis Ross
for his later book, "The Missing Peace." Ambassador Ross' map is a representation of the final offer agreed to by Prime Minister Barak and rejected by Arafat. President Carter violated Ambassador Ross' copyright of this map.

#6: On page 197, President Carter writes, "Confessions extracted through torture are admissible in Israeli courts." Fact check: The Israeli Supreme Court banned the use of torture in interrogations in a decision handed down on September 6, 1999 by Supreme Court President Barak.

#7: On page 188, President Carter writes, "Kadima had been expected to gain 43 seats based on its pledge of a unilateral expansion of the 'great wall.'" Fact check: Israel's Kadima Party ran on Prime Minister Sharon's platform of disengagement - a pledge to dismantle settlements and unilaterally withdraw from territory.

#8: On page 215, President Carter writes that one option for Israel is "withdrawal to the 1967 border as specified in U.N. Resolution 242." Fact check: U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 does not define a border.

Madame Speaker, these errors diminish the credibility of President Carter's book. President Carter is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.

The errors I present here are only a sampling of those included in the book. Now in the twilight of his career and with many at the Carter Center resigning their posts, President Carter should recall this book and hire competent assistants to ensure his future work does not reflect poor scholarship.
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Correcting Carter's 242 Distortion

From Correcting Carter's 242 Distortion:

Jimmy Carter's error-ridden new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid includes myriad untrue statements of a kind newspapers routinely correct.

Carter writes on p. 57: "The 1949 armistice demarcation lines became the borders of the new nation of Israel and were accepted by Israel and the United States, and recognized officially by the United Nations."

This is false. The "1949 armistice" lines did not become the "accepted" borders of Israel. Nor did Camp David and Oslo specify a withdrawal to these alleged borders.

Carter writes on p. 215 that "[An option for Israel is] withdrawal to the 1967 border specified in UN Resolution 242 and as promised in the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Agreement."

Yet Britain's Lord Caradon, who introduced the resolution on November 22, 1967, after months of discussion in the wake of the Six-Day War, has explicitly emphasized the very opposite of Carter's claims: "We knew that the boundaries of '67 were not drawn as permanent frontiers; they were a cease-fire line of a couple decades earlier. We did not say the '67 boundaries must be forever."

Other publications that have made the same error, suggesting Resolution 242 calls for Israel's return to the pre-1967 armistice lines, have corrected it. The New York Times, during the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations at Camp David in the summer of 2000, did so three times, published three corrections, and has not repeated the error.

Carter writes on p. 62: "The Israelis have never granted any appreciable autonomy to the Palestinians."

But after 1993 and the Oslo agreements, Palestinians achieved "appreciable autonomy," attaining control of political, civic, security, medical and media institutions and gaining all of Gaza and 40% of the West Bank.

So pervasive is Carter's antipathy toward Israel that any expectation of redress of the factual errors by the author himself is clearly futile.

The question is why a publisher such as Simon and Schuster should be exempt from fact-checking a book billed and sold as non-fiction history - and from issuing forthright corrections when such serious errors have been printed.

The writer is Executive Director of CAMERA, Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.