Israel in the News Jan/Feb 2015
Arafat’s Widow: Recognize Israel
Suha Arafat, widow of the late terrorist and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, said recently, “We need to clearly express the recognition of Israel; no one can doubt its existence.”
Speaking to Italy’s La Repubblica in November on the 10th anniversary of her husband’s death, Mrs. Arafat said, “Hamas has taken the people in the Gaza Strip as hostages. When I see what is happening in Gaza, it’s just genocide. This generation grew up with violence, without education, with only a hope of emigrating. I hope that Hamas will finally understand that it should work towards peace negotiations. They said my husband was an obstacle to peace. [But] we saw what happened to peace after his death.”
Breitbart.com noted Mrs. Arafat’s words contrasted sharply with her late husband’s: “In calling for the elimination of the state of Israel, he [Arafat] once said, ‘We shall never stop until we can go back home and Israel is destroyed….The goal of our struggle is the end of Israel, and there can be no compromises or mediations….We don’t want peace, we want victory. Peace for us means Israel’s destruction and nothing else.’”
Kissinger’s Advice
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told a crowd of 500 at a black-tie affair in New York City’s Waldorf Astoria recently it would be a mistake right now for Israel to pursue peace with the Palestinians.
Kissinger, 91, who brokered the ceasefire between Israel and the Arabs after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, said the United States must realize Israel has been “a representative of the principles in which America believes. It is the one country on whose geopolitical support America can always count,” reported The Algemeiner.
He said America must keep in mind “what it will defend or seek to achieve even if it has to do so alone. What it has to achieve only together with others, and finally, what is beyond its capacity. The survival of Israel…is one of those principles that we will pursue even if we have to do so alone.”
Israeli Security Foils Pirates
An Israeli shipping company’s security guards recently repulsed an attack by pirates in the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, adjacent to Somalia, Arutz-7 reported.
The ship was making its way from East Asia back to Israel when two pirate ships snuck up alongside the vessel, and the pirates attempted to board. The Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb links the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden in the Indian Ocean and is filled with extensive pirate gangs, some of which are affiliated with the Islamist al-Shabaab terrorist group.
Israeli Wix Ad at Super Bowl
Israeli do-it-yourself website construction platform Wix is set to advertise during Super Bowl XLIX, according to Jewish Business News.
The company will air a 30-second spot in the fourth quarter of the game, which will be broadcast on NBC on February 1. It will cost $4.5 million and highlight Wix’s mission to simplify website creation, specifically for small business owners.
Arutz-7 (IsraelNationalNews.com)
EU: Jews Should Cede Jerusalem
“Jerusalem can be and should be the capital of two states,” declared Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s foreign affairs chief.
She said a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital is a “global” objective and that Israel is obstructing this important and worthy goal by continuing to allow Jews to live in areas claimed by the Palestinian Arabs.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again responded, “Jerusalem is our capital and as such is not a settlement,” stressing, “The neighborhoods in which we are living…and we’ve been building, have been there for close to 50 years….Everybody knows that in any peace arrangement they will remain part of Israel.”
Palestinian leaders say they won’t accept a peace deal that doesn’t give them control of half the city, including the Old City and Temple Mount.
Arutz-7 (IsraelNationalNews.com)
Israel to Aid California!
California’s severe three-year drought has cost the state’s economy at least $2.2 billion and ruined 500,000 acres of what was once rich, productive farmland.
So where did California turn for help? Not to the Obama White House, but to Israel, the world’s acknowledged expert on irrigation and water use. California’s Gov. Jerry Brown has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to receive help from Israel.
“If we managed to overcome the water issues in the Middle East, we can do it anywhere in the world,” said Prof. Eilon Adar, a world expert in groundwater flow systems. Israel is the only country in the entire Middle East that is self sufficient in water.
Israel Today (israeltoday.co.il)
Israel Helping Ebola Nations
Israel was making final preparations in November to send a field hospital and medical supplies to the West African nations afflicted with the Ebola virus, Reuters reported.
Six cargo containers containing all the equipment needed to set up the portable field hospitals Israel is so well-known for were going to Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. Israel also planned to send staff.
“We are donating these clinics to the three governments. In addition we are putting in touch Israeli NGOs with the local governments in order for them to send Israeli volunteers, medical staff, doctors, paramedics and nurses from Israel,” said an Israeli minister. Ebola killed almost 5,000 people by the latter part of 2014.
On the Anti-Israel Front
An international panel of “experts” appointed to investigate human rights violations during the Gaza war last summer is due to make its first report to the United Nations in March. Like all other UN reports, this one is expected to condemn Israel, which has called the investigation a “kangaroo court.”
In addition, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has been working hard to persuade the UN to adopt a definition of terrorism that excludes so-called armed struggles for liberation. Such a definition would officially sanction all Arab terrorism against Israel.
Meanwhile, the UN fails to address Hamas’s human rights violations, including its use of child labor to dig tunnels into Israel. According to reports confirmed by Hamas, more than 160 children died digging the tunnels used for smuggling and terrorism.
Along with the UN, the news media has long been swinging in an anti-Israel direction. In October, when a Palestinian Arab deliberately slammed his car into a crowd at Jerusalem’s light-rail station, killing a Jewish 3-month-old girl, the Associated Press filed a story titled “Israeli police shoot man in east Jerusalem.” To its credit, it later changed the headline to read, “Palestinian kills baby at Jerusalem station.”
Agence France-Presse also turned the story around to highlight the police action, rather than the terrorist attack: “Jerusalem driver shot after ramming pedestrians.”
And CNN and other news organizations drew a moral equivalence between the death of the innocent 3-month-old and that of a 14-year-old Arab boy killed by the Israel Defense Forces after heaving a Molotov cocktail onto a main road in the West Bank.
If the OIC gets its way, the UN will make official what is now unofficial: It will sanction murdering Jewish people, particularly those in Israel, and condemn the deaths of all Arab terrorists.
Meanwhile, while the world was censuring Israel for defending itself against Hamas last summer, Israeli doctors were treating the daughter of leading Hamas operative Ismail Haniyeh at an Israeli hospital in October for complications following a routine procedure in Gaza. His granddaughter and mother-in-law were previously patients at Israeli hospitals. Israeli hospitals have been treating a flood of Arabs from Gaza since the incursion ended.
Compiled from news reports
