Israeli Settlement Facts and Falsehoods

Israeli Settlement Facts and Falsehoods

Yoram Ettinger

1. Judea and Samaria (Jewish roots) or West Bank (Arab roots)?

“Judea” (יהודה) is the origin of the term “Jew” (יהודי). Its Hebrew spelling combines one of God’s names: Jehova (יהוה) and one of God’s acronyms: ד’. Judea and Samaria are the cradle of Jewish history, religion, culture, holidays, ethos, language and yearnings. The official name of the area was “Judea and Samaria” from Biblical times until April 1950, when Jordan occupied/annexed the area, renaming it “West Bank,” as distinguished from the east bank of the Jordan River. Judea and Samaria was the official name used by the 1922-1948 British Mandate of Palestine, as well as by the U.N.

2. Are Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria an obstacle to peace?

Jewish settlements were established in Judea and Samaria after the 1967 War. However, it was pre-1967 Arab terrorism which annihilated the Jewish communities of Hebron, Gush Etzion and Gaza and raged in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the Galilee during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s — Arab terrorism aimed at preventing the establishment of an “infidel” Jewish state in the “abode of Islam.” Several Arab armies, and Palestinian terrorists, raided Israel in 1948 and persisted in anti-Jewish terrorism before the 1967 establishment of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria.

3. Is the strategic goal of Mahmoud Abbas to uproot the Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria?

Mahmoud Abbas is the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which supersedes and oversees the Palestinian Authority. The PLO was established in 1964, three years before the establishment of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria. The 1964 Covenant of the PLO referred only to the pre-1967 area of Israel. The current PLO Covenant targets Judea, Samaria and the pre-1967 area of Israel for “liberation.”

Abbas is, also, the leader of Fatah, which was established in 1959, eight years before the establishment of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria. The August 2009 Sixth Convention of Fatah called for the continued struggle “to eradicate the Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence.” The strategic goal of Abbas is to uproot the Jewish state and not, merely, the Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria.

4. Would the uprooting of Jewish settlements advance peaceful coexistence?

Peaceful coexistence on the one hand, and the uprooting of Jewish or Arab communities on the other, constitute an oxymoron. The 1.6 million Arabs, among 6 million Jews, within pre-1967 Israel do not constitute an obstacle to peace; nor do the 350,000 Jews, among 1.7 million Arabs in Judea and Samaria. The uprooting of Arab communities in pre-1967 Israel would be as immoral as would be the uprooting of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. “Judenrhein areas” contradict peaceful coexistence. In fact, the litmus test of Palestinian/Arab intent is the acceptance or rejection of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria.

5. Does Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria prejudge the outcome of negotiation?

Palestinian construction in Judea and Samaria — which is dramatically larger than Jewish construction there — presents facts on the ground, just as Jewish construction does. Western tendency to single out Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria, while ignoring Palestinian construction, prejudges the outcome of negotiations! Opposition to Arab presence in pre-1967 Israel should not be tolerated; so, too, should the opposition to a Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria. Israel’s government razes illegal Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria. Israel should, also, raze the 1,100 illegal Arab homes built annually in Jerusalem and the thousands of illegal Arab homes in Judea and Samaria.

6. Are Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria legal?

Judge Stephen Schwebel, former president of the International Court of Justice, determined that Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria was rooted in self-defense and therefore did not constitute “occupation.” Eugene Rostow, former dean of Yale Law School, former undersecretary of state and co-author of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which sets out the criteria for Israel-Arab peacemaking said U.N. Resolution 242 does not call for withdrawal to the pre-1967 boundaries; Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai amounts to a 90 percent withdrawal from post-1967 areas; the legality of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria “cannot be terminated except by a recognized peace between Israel and its neighbors, and perhaps not even then, in view of Article 80 of the U.N. Charter, ‘the Palestine article,’” which upholds the 1922 British Mandate for Palestine. This 1922 international legal instrument considered Judea and Samaria part of the Jewish national homeland: “Jews have the same right to settle [in Judea and Samaria] as they have to settle in Haifa.” The 1993 Oslo Accord does not prohibit the construction of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria.

The campaign against Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria is based on gross misrepresentations. It is not a peace-enhancer; it is an appeasement-enhancer, fueling terrorism and undermining the pursuit of peace.

This article was originally published by Israel Hayom.

http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/12/10/israeli-settlement-facts-and-falsehoods/

Abbas is a War Criminal: The Evidence

Abbas is a War Criminal: The Evidence

To whom is Israel relinquishing a Jewish town?

Giulio Meotti

Not only no word of condemnation has come from any Palestinian Arab  leader for the lynching and killing of two Israeli soldiers two days apart by Palestinian Arabs. But Mahmoud Abbas and his group of terrorists are responsible for the latest round of Jew murdering.

These days Palestinian Arab groups are meeting in Ramallah to campaign for an intifada against Israel. Terrorists, Mahmoud Abbas loyalists from Fatah, are marching in the PA capital calling for new violence against the Jews. Fatah’s armed wing, Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, are claiming responsibility for the slaughtering of the two IDF soldiers in Kalkilya and Hevron. After the killing of the soldier in the City of the Patriarchs, Abbas’ group claimed that “when Fatah says, it does. When Fatah promises, it fulfills”.

As far back as the 1970s, international law expert Yoram Dinstein argued that according to UN definitions, terrorism and incitement against Israelis constitute genocide. That is why the Palestinian Authority’s Chairman Abbas should be tried for crimes against humanity.

When the “moderate” Prime Minister Salam Fayyad took part to demonstrations in which products made in “Jewish settlements” were burned, he was guilty of incitement and should be tried for it.


According to Abbas, then, the 600.000 Jews of Judea and Samaria, and the soldiers who protect them, are legitimate targets for shootings, stabbings, bombings and lynchings.

The Palestinian Authority defined a terrorist as anyone “who occupies the lands of another people and displaces them by force and settles in their place”. According to Abbas, then, the 600.000 Jews of Judea and Samaria, and the soldiers who protect them, are legitimate targets for shootings, stabbings, bombings and lynchings.

Abbas is palpably guilty of inciting against the Jews and of supporting terrorism. While the two Jewish soldiers were ambushed and killed, Abbas’ television was broadcasting hate speeches against Israelis, in which Islamic speakers said that “the enemy is the Jews” and called Israel “Satan with a tail”.

Under Abbas, the PA has been waging a war of words against the Jewish state, engaging in anti-Semitic incitement of the vilest kind and using Holocaust denial, racial slurs, and Judeophobic epithets. It is a stream of hostility cultivated and implemented over the past decade under the Abbas leadership. A stream which is competing with “Der Ewige Jude”, the Eternal Jew, favored by Joseph Goebbels, in which Jews are compared to rats.

Abbas openly rewards terrorists. One of them, Mahmoud Awad Damra, who was sentenced in 2006 to 15 years in prison for his role in terror attacks against Israel, was promoted by Abbas to the rank of major-general. Abbas then bestowed the Star of Honour to Nayef Hawatmeh, the leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and convicted terrorist whose group took the lives of 22 Jewish children in Maalot.

Need more examples of Abbas’ death cult and anti-Semitic terrorism?

December 2012: Abbas honors 6 terrorists responsible for killing hundreds of Israelis and two American diplomats.

January 2013: Abbas pledges to “follow the path” of 15 terrorists responsible for killing hundreds of Jews.

March 2013: Abbas honors the murderer of 2 students.

April 2013: Abbas honors the planner of attacks that killed dozens.

May 2013: Abbas refuses to condemn his advisor who glorified a murderer, as requested by members of US Congress.

Last April, “President” Abbas receives the coffins of 91 terrorists who murdered more than 200 Jews and salutes them with wreaths and the firing of volleys of shots.

Mahmoud Abbas, who in his doctoral dissertation at Moscow Oriental College denied that gas chambers were used to murder Jews, who aims to expel and/or kill 600,000 Jews from Judea and Samaria, is like the piper in the famous Hamelin fairy tale. The real rats are the subhuman Muslim terrorists who have put his hatred into practice.

But the bigger question now faces the Israeli leadership: Is this the same “leader” you are granting sovereignity over the Samarian Jewish town of Homesh?

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13885#.Ukc8dSv08U5

New York Times op-ed: Wipe Israel off the map

New York Times op-ed: Wipe Israel off the map

 Gilead Ini

Thomas R. Dew was a president of the College of William & Mary. He was also an eloquent defender of immorality. “Look to the slaveholding population of the country,” he wrote in 1832 while a professor at the university, “and you every where find them characterized by noble and elevated sentiments, by humane and virtuous feelings.”

Clearly, even a professorship and some rhetorical skill don’t guarantee ideas that merit thoughtful debate. There is, after all, an entire website dedicated to “Scholars for 9/11 Truth,” and yet The New York Times has not once published an op-ed by the Texas A&M professor emeritus who expresses doubt that Boeing 767s were flown into the Twin Towers, or by the University of Colorado mathematics professor who similarly sees a conspiracy in the events of September 11. Their ideas are simply beyond the pale.


Nor has The New York Times offered space in its coveted opinion pages for debate about whether the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which is entangled in border disputes and burdened by extremism, should be annulled, folded back into India from which it was carved. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the newspaper promoting arguments in favor of the elimination of any recognized, democratic country. Such ideas, too, are beyond the pale. Except, of course, when it comes to Israel.

Not for the first time, The Times has published what amounts to a call for the destruction of the Jewish state. The latest piece, which appears on the cover of the Sept. 15 Sunday Review section and is written by University of Pennsylvania professor Ian Lustick, argues the current state of Israel should be replaced by a unitary country that includes its neighbors in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

The column is not all that different than an op-ed the newspaper published a few years ago by Muammar Qaddafi. And while that New York Times contributor is now remembered as a ranting madman who butchered his own people, and although Lustick is most definitely neither of those, the only real difference between their pieces is that Qaddafi’s op-ed calling for an end to Israel is less long-winded than Lustick’s 2,431-word piece, is more coherent, and at least sounds more moderate.

But never mind the tone and the drone of Lustick’s piece. And never mind the weakness of both the dictator and the professor’s arguments. The more important issue is that The New York Times seems intent on putting the very idea of Israel’s continued existence, the idea of real and functional Jewish national self-determination, up for debate. In effect, the newspaper has repeatedly raised the question of whether we should rewind history and return the Jewish people to the dark era in which being a Jew meant everywhere being an ethnic minority, subject to the decisions of often-hostile majorities. And it’s not only Jews who stand to suffer. Hussein Ibish and Saliba Sarsar, both affiliated with the American Task Force on Palestine, say Lustick’s views are “harmful” in that they encourage “an open-ended struggle in pursuit of impossible goals” and “reflect dangerous phantasms and fanaticism.”

In short, Lustick wants to discourage peace negotiations that most  Jewish and Arab Israelis support, and instead have the world sit back, watch the bloodshed he says is inevitable, and hope for the disappearance of the Jewish state. This should be beyond the pale.

The central problem isn’t that Lustick’s argumentation is weak (though it certainly is). It is that his argument is immoral. It is time that editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal use the discretion that his office practices every day in sorting through hundreds of op-ed submissions, and desist from promoting this unjust idea.

That being said, let’s have a closer look at Lustick’s arguments.

His bottom line is that the idea of separate Jewish and Palestinian states is an “illusion.” Lustick seems to understand that the Jewish majority in Israel will not volunteer to become a minority, especially in a region where xenophobic Arab leaders have long encouraged anti-Jewish attitudes, warfare and terrorism. And he surely knows that most of the world recognizes Israel. (The German chancellor said this just a few days ago: “For those who share my view that the Jews as a people have a right to self-determination, Zionism as a national movement of the Jewish people is the embodiment of this very right which its opponents want to deny.”)

This is why the professor, notwithstanding his own argument that a two-state solution should be opposed because it is not “plausible,” devotes so much of his op-ed to arguing that sometimes in international affairs “the impossible suddenly becomes probable.” He tells readers that “history offers many such lessons,” citing the division of warring Britain and Ireland into two states, and the separation of the ethnically distinct France and Algeria into two sovereign countries, and the breakup of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, and the end of the Soviet project that had tried and ultimately failed to encapsulate several diverse republics into one state.

Maybe Lustick doesn’t realize how thoroughly the history lesson destroys his case for joining two distinct, adversarial nations into one state. So he continues.

Readers, he argues, should consider what they “see vividly” across the Middle East. What they see, we know, is horrific bloodshed in Syria, where the unified state has fractured and where Sunnis, Alawites and Christians live in fear of each other. They see a Lebanon, a country in which an internationally designated terrorist group holds veto power, and which barely manages to withstand the centrifugal forces that have separated Shiite, Sunni and Christian Lebanese into violent enemies. They see car bombs exploding seemingly every day in Iraq, where the two main branches of Islam fail to coexist.

And he continues to make his case: “Strong Islamist trends make a fundamentalist Palestine more likely than a small state under a secular government,” he writes. But the Jews of Israel should intertwine their fates with, and put their futures in the hands of, these very fundamentalists? We’ve seen in Egypt and elsewhere what fundamentalist Islamism envisions for non-Muslims. Just one day after The New York Times gave Lustick his platform, the newspaper reported that an Islamist-dominated village in Egypt has “witnessed the most horrific sectarian violence in Egypt” since power changed hands a few months ago. A 1,650-year-old monastery, the village’s churches and dozens of Christian homes have “been burned or ransacked.” A Christian resident was recently murdered and dragged through the streets.

And still, Lustick’s piece concludes by urging those with a stake in negotiations, the Israelis and the Palestinians, to “see and then adapt to the world as it is.” Yes, he’s referring to the same world in which Arab Sudan was separated from non‑Arab South Sudan to spare the sides continued bloodshed.

To be fair, the author is right about one thing. There are observers who question the likelihood of a negotiated two-state solution. But if he agrees with them (he does), and if he wants dazzling geopolitical change (he does), what would make more sense: Watching while “blood” and “conflict” and “magic,” which Lustick envisions as a prerequisite to his one-state Utopia, does or does not fuse Israel and the Palestinian Authority into a single peaceful country, or joining the Gaza Strip and Egypt, two regions that overlap ethnically, religiously and culturally and which once coexisted with little dissent under the same rule? He doesn’t consider this option. This isn’t to recommend a Gaza-Egypt union, but merely to point out that even if one accepts Lustick’s gloomy diagnosis, his prescription does not necessarily follow.

And things aren’t actually all that gloomy. Realist professor Efraim Inbar recently made the case that the country looks to have a bright future:

Despite not everything being perfect in the Holy Land, long term prospects seem bright. Israel is a vibrant democracy that prospers and maintains strong social cohesion. Its international status has improved while support in the United States, its main ally and still the foremost international power, has remained very high. Moreover, the Jewish state is widely recognized as an entrenched reality, even by its Arab and Muslim rivals. It has built a mighty military machine that can parry all regional threats, and the IDF remains the most capable military in the region with the motivation, equipment, and training to overmatch the conventional capabilities of any regional challenger. Israel has managed to contain terrorist activities and has built an effective shield against missiles.
Inbar concluded that “While peace is desirable, it is not a necessary condition for survival.”

Lustick’s dire prognosis also depends on misinformation. Israel’s version of two states, he insists, envisions “huge Jewish settlements, crisscrossed by Jewish-only access roads.” But this is utter nonsense. The West Bank is not currently crisscrossed by Jewish-only roads, and no credible Israeli proponent of a two-state solution calls for creating such roads, either in Israel or in a future Palestinian state.  Lustick has seemingly dug up the old canard that describes roads on which Israeli Jews, Muslims and Christians can freely travel, but to which Palestinians have restricted access, as being Jewish only. Major media organizations that have made that mistake have subsequently published corrections.

But again, the key problem isn’t Lustick’s ridiculous argumentation or his dangerous vision, both of which he is entitled to, and both of which he has shared before. The real issue is with The New York Times decision-making. As Shmuel Rosner correctly pointed out, the foolish idea that the disenfranchisement of the Jewish people is up for debate is “based solely on the fact that a widely read and respectable publication has decided to print it.” It is an extremist concept that the newspaper is trying to push into the mainstream.

Times opinion editors will surely protest that they publish diverse views, and that they don’t necessarily agree with what is published. To some extent this is true. But this boilerplate defense does not justify the publication of anything and everything. No op-eds have made the case that the slaying of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School was actually a “false-flag” conspiracy. None have promoted female genital mutilation. None have revived the outrageous debate about the right to freedom for blacks in America. And none should revive the old debate about the right of the Jewish people to determine their own destiny in their ancestral homeland.

In other words — at least when it comes to issues that don’t involve the world’s one, small Jewish-majority country — free speech is not conflated with desirable speech. Arguments in The New York Times normally fall within the bounds of good taste and basic decency, and this guideline must be applied to the conversation about Israel, too.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-op-ed-wipe-israel-off-the-map/?fb_action_ids=10151838479808168&fb_action_types=og.recommends&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%7B%2210151838479808168%22%3A239549832864145%7D&action_type_map=%7B%2210151838479808168%22%3A%22og.recommends%22%7D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D

Did ancient beams discarded in Old City come from first and second temples?

A collection of neglected wooden beams from the Al-Aqsa mosque offer a glimpse at ancient Jerusalem — and possibly at the biblical temples themselves

BY MATTI FRIEDMAN    

Under a tarp in one little-visited corner of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem lies a pile of rotting timber that would hardly catch a visitor’s eye.

In a padlocked storage space under a building in the settlement of Ofra, in the West Bank, lies an even larger pile of similar beams, some with rusted metal nails. Still more of the same beams can be found in one of the rooms of the Rockefeller Museum, outside Jerusalem’s Old City.

Despite their unprepossessing appearance, the beams are unique and important to scholars because of their place of origin — the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount — and their age: Some were hewed from trees felled nearly 3,000 years ago.

The beams offer a fascinating historical record of Jerusalem, including Byzantine cathedrals, early Muslim houses of prayer and, not inconceivably, the ancient temple complex itself. But though there are signs of renewed interest in them — including an article this month in Biblical Archaeology Review, a US publication — the several hundred existing beams have never been subjected to a comprehensive academic study, and many are in danger of decay and disintegration.

The first iteration of Al-Aqsa was built in the late 600s CE on the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary. When the Muslim builders constructed the roof and supports they re-used timber that had been used in older structures nearby, common practice in the ancient world.

Those structures, scholars say, include not only materials dating to the time of the second Jewish temple in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago — but to the time of the first, as many as eight centuries before.

Beams (left) near the Golden Gate on the Temple Mount, this week (photo credit: Matti Friedman/Times of Israel)

Many of the beams were removed from Al-Aqsa in the late 1930s, during a renovation that followed two earthquakes, and some were taken by British scholars to the Rockefeller Museum, where they remain. Other beams were removed in a later renovation of the structure’s dome under Jordanian rule in the 1960s.

In 1984, a scholar from Tel Aviv University, Nili Liphschitz, published a brief scientific paper looking at 140 of the beams in a Hebrew journal, Eretz Yisrael, along with two other scholars.

Liphschitz, a dendochronologist — a specialist in determining the age of trees — found that most of the beams she examined were of Turkish oak, with a smaller number of Lebanese cedars. There were also beams of cypress and several other types of wood.

By analyzing the tree rings and using carbon-14 dating, she found, unsurprisingly, that some of the wood was from the early Muslim period. One of the cedars, for example, was about 1,340 years old, or roughly the same age as Al-Aqsa. (The margin of error for the rather inexact dating process was 250 years.)

But others were older, dating to Byzantine times, and still others dated to Roman times, around the era of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

Even more striking were her findings regarding one of the cypress beams. The age of the beam “was found to be 2,600 years,” she wrote, with a margin of error of 180 years. That placed it near 630 B.C.E. — around 50 years before the destruction of the First Temple.

And one of the oak beams was even older: 2,860 years. That meant the tree had been cut down around 880 B.C.E, early in the First Temple period.

The Temple Mount, with the black-domed Al-Aqsa mosque in the foreground (photo credit: Nati Shohat/Flash90)

There was no evidence connecting the beams to the temple itself, and in her paper Liphshitz seemed less interested in the possible human or biblical connections than in what the beams related about climate changes in the region. The truncated size of some of the tree rings, she wrote, seemed to indicate that a heavy drought had struck the region in the 5^th century C.E.

Her paper drew little public notice, but a lecture she delivered the same year happened to be attended by two residents of Ofra, one of the first communities established in the West Bank by Gush Emunim, the religious settler movement. One of the men was Ze’ev Erlich, today a well-known tour guide and historian. The other was Yehuda Etzion, a prominent settler leader and a fervent believer in the return of Jewish ritual to the Temple Mount.

“Yehuda walked out after the lecture and said — we have to get those beams,” Erlich recalled.

After the renovation of the 1960s, it appeared, the Waqf — the Islamic body still in charge of the day-to-day running of the holy site — had sold some of the beams as scrap to an Armenian dealer, Mussa Baziyan, who had a junkyard north of Jerusalem. Baziyan was selling the wood to carpenters. As it happened, the Ofra settlers had done business with the dealer, buying second-hand bunk beds from an insane asylum for use in a new dormitory.

Etzion arranged for the local government in charge of Ofra to pay, and had trucks ferry the 100 or so remaining beams from Baziyan’s yard to the settlement.

Later that year, Etzion was arrested as part of a Jewish underground that had killed Palestinian seminary students, maimed mayors of West Bank cities, planned to bomb Arab buses in East Jerusalem — and was plotting to blow up the Islamic shrines of the Noble Sanctuary to pave the way for the reconstruction of a Jewish temple on the mount.

The beams lay outside for a time. Later, Erlich had them transferred to an indoor storage space, where he showed them to a reporter this week. Six beams which were found to have carved decorations are stored at an undisclosed location elsewhere in the settlement. Samples from 14 of the beams at Ofra have been taken to the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot for carbon dating, and Erlich is currently awaiting the results.

Some of the Al-Aqsa beams include inscriptions in Arabic and Greek. One beam at the Rockefeller Museum, for example, bears the Greek words, “In the time of the most holy archbishop and patriarch Peter and the most God-beloved this whole house of St. Thomas was erected.” The Peter in question was patriarch of Jerusalem in the mid-500s C.E., and the beam must have been used in a Byzantine church of the time.

In a 1997 paper, Liphschitz and a second scholar, Gideon Biger, suggested that some of the wood for Al-Aqsa may have come from the ruins of the grandiose Byzantine church known as the Nea, destroyed by earthquake or war in the early 600s. Other beams might have come from an earlier wooden mosque that a 7^th-century pilgrim described existing on the Temple Mount before Al-Aqsa was constructed.

Beams in a storeroom at Ofra, this week (photo credit: Matti Friedman/Times of Israel)

Those structures also almost certainly used wood from earlier buildings. The story of the beams — moving from conqueror to conqueror and from one religion to another through the centuries — is the story of Jerusalem.

“The cypress timber, dated to the 1^st century BC, was probably taken from a more ancient monumental construction, built in or around Jerusalem in that era,” the two scholars wrote. That was the time of Herod’s massive rebuilding of the Second Temple complex.

In this month’s article in Biblical Archaeology Review, Israeli archaeologist Peretz Reuven singled out another beam, among those currently kept on the Temple Mount, in a pile next to the Golden Gate. It was cataloged by British Mandate officials in the 1930s as number 13.

Beam 13, he wrote, not only has Roman-style decorations but also signs of columns at intervals of 10.8 feet. “There was a similar interval between the columns in Herod’s Royal Stoa, a magnificent basilica that stood on the southern end of the Temple Mount,” Reuven noted. That is where Al-Aqsa now sits.

Might some of the beams lying around Jerusalem and elsewhere be from Herod’s temple complex? “I believe the answer is ‘yes,’” Reuven wrote. “Some of the beams may even be from the Temple.”

It is unusual for wood to survive for thousands of years, according to archaeologist Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University. At Maeir’s ongoing excavation of the three-millennia-old Philistine city of Gath, for example, only carbonized wood fragments survive.

But it is different if wood is kept indoors and cared for, he said.

“Usually, wood does not survive in Mediterranean climate — save when beams are used again and again and are curated long after they would have normally survived,” he said.

These pieces of wood, he said, “were probably used repeatedly over the ages, as large beams would be in many cases. So they are definitely archaeological materials, though of course whether they are from the temple is another question.”

http://www.timesofisrael.com/?p=515498

also interesting....  http://members.bib-arch.org/publication.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=39&Issue=3&ArticleID=3

A devastating truth

A devastating truth

by Melanie Phillips

The clear-eyed Palestinian journalist Khaled abu Toameh points out that, if the Palestinian Authority wants the world to take it seriously as a ‘partner for peace’ with Israel, it is going a mighty strange way about showing it.

In separate incidents in the past few days two Israeli soldiers were murdered in the West Bank – one of them having beenlured there from Tel Aviv to his death – with the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade claiming responsibility.

The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is the armed wing of Fatah. Fatah is the party of Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, who does not distance himself from such atrocities committed by his own armed wing.

The PA has also been involved in ‘a massive campaign of incitement’ against Israel, with some officials calling for an escalation of ‘popular resistance’ and with others disseminating inflammatory lies about Israeli behaviour – creating the kind of toxic atmosphere which fuels attacks such as the killing of the two Israeli soldiers.

The Palestinian Authority is deemed by Britain, the US and the EU to be a ‘moderate’ body with which Israel must negotiate an agreement for a Palestinian state.

How can the PA possibly be moderate when it openly and routinely supports murder and promotes incitement to hatred and violence against Israel?

The answer, of course, as I have been saying here for years, is that Mahmoud Abbas and the PA are not ‘moderate’ by any reasonable definition of that word; nor are they interested in peaceful co-existence with Israel at all.

More tellingly, they do not feel they have to convince the world that they are. And that is because they know that, whatever atrocities are carried out by their own people, whatever incitement they promulgate and whatever bad faith they show in a myriad different ways, they can rely on Britain, the US and EU to ignore it all and pretend that Abbas and co are indeed seriously interested in a settlement – and then blame Israel for the inevitable breakdown in the peace process.

So how can Britain, the US and the EU possibly subscribe to such a wicked travesty?

Because they have convinced themselves that, when terrorist godfathers in suits and ties tell them what they want to hear, that is because those terrorist godfathers really want nothing more than to become statesmen, turn their swords into ploughshares and build a peaceful and unthreatening society with those they have sworn to wipe out.

How can Britain, the US and the EU possibly be so deluded? Because they think there is no alternative if there is ever to be peace between Israel and the Arabs.

Why do they subscribe to such a muddled non-sequitur? Because they don’t want to face two demonstrable facts.

What are those facts?

The first is that the Arab-Israel nine decade-plus war is not a boundary dispute about the division of land. It is a war of extermination by Arab aggressors against the internationally-agreed right of the Jews to govern themselves in their own historic homeland.

The second fact is far more devastating. The single most important reason why this Arab-Israel war continues apparently without end is that, from the very start, first the British and then the Americans and the EU have rewarded Palestinian Arab aggression and punished its Jewish victims or pushed them to surrender. Not surprisingly, the Palestinians have therefore been encouraged to continue to attack Israelis with impunity, to this very day.

And so the devastating fact that Britain, the US and the EU refuse to acknowledge is that the main reason the Arab-Israel war continues is not the intransigence of Benjamin Netanyahu, nor the behaviour of the Israeli ‘settlers’, nor the absence of a Palestinian state.  It is nothing other than the behaviour of Britain, the US and the EU themselves.

https://www.embooks.com/blog/single/a-devastating-truth

Heed the broken mirror

by Sarah Honig 

What’s the likely outcome of the US-Russia accord on Syria’s chemical arsenal? Look no further than what happened to UN Resolution 1701 of seven years ago. That resolution, which ended the Second Lebanon War and which purportedly eliminated Hezbollah’s missile armories, is a mirror image of the non-disarmament-to-come.

It is also Tzipi Livni’s self-proclaimed crowning achievement during her stint as then-PM Ehud Olmert’s foreign minister. To any visitor from Mars who may be uninformed, self-same Livni is currently in charge of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.

Resolution 1701 is a sad object lesson about the immoral malfunction of high-minded international agreements to destroy dangerous weapons stockpiles. The Syrian counterpart may not evolve in identical patterns but its inevitable bottom line will be no different than that of the dismal gag that Resolution 1701 turned out to be.

Worst of all, no one seems to dwell on that out-of-mind resolution, no one remembers. The widespread affectation is that everything is peaches and cream, as if the international intervention worked wonders.  It’s as if wholesale deception has never been perpetrated.  It’s as if no one recognizes that nothing whatsoever went to plan.

The pretense is just too sweet and alluring an option to pass up. Truth is too painful, persistent and unpleasant a bother with which to cope.

And a footnote – the central protagonist of today’s chemical weapons saga, Bashar Assad, was also centrally complicit in hoodwinking the entire international community in the Resolution 1701 context. That gave him valuable and pertinent experience for extricating himself from the conditions lately imposed on him by Washington and Moscow. The British-trained ophthalmologist is a formidable, steel-nerved past master.

Here’s a brief reminder.

On the ordinary summer morning of July 12, 2006, Hezbollah terrorists killed eight Israeli soldiers on a patrol inside Israel. They further kidnapped two corpses and negotiated for ransom as if they held live hostages. That unprovoked aggression triggered the Second Lebanon War, which was to escalate into a month-long conflict during which the Lebanon-based Hezbollah fired over 4,000 rockets at Israeli civilians, caused death and destruction and brought life in the northern half of Israel to a veritable halt.

The trauma brought home the reality that in the years that had elapsed since the unilateral midnight retreat ordered by Prime Minister Ehud Barak in May, 2000, Hezbollah had amassed a rocket arsenal that poses a real danger to Israel. It is crucially distinct from an annoying nuisance.

The conclusion of 2006’s eminently unsuccessful war (from Israel’s vantage point) was facilitated by UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which appeared to salvage some vestiges of Olmert’s/Livni’s waning prestige.  The Resolution was embraced by Israel as well as Lebanon, including the Hezbollah contingent in the Beirut parliament.

It all seemed good and the promise encapsulated in the resolution was hawked enthusiastically by Livni as a glowing accomplishment.

But now, years later, we can take realistic stock. Did the missile stockpiles disappear from next door? Are we safer? Were the bright promises fulfilled?

The sad answer is that not only were the promises not fulfilled, but Hezbollah missile stockpiles actually multiplied hideously, and we are significantly less safe than in 2006 – when we already weren’t safe because of Ehud Barak’s easy-fix and gross misjudgment of 2000.

It’s no use to beat around the bush: We were taken for a ride. Hezbollah had brazenly and relentlessly violated the resolution that constituted the very foundation for the cessation of hostilities.

Hezbollah’s prime and direct enabler was Damascus despot Assad. It’s no wonder that Hezbollah now ferociously fights alongside his own army in the Syrian internecine strife. Hezbollah is Assad’s greatest and most natural ally. The future of both is inextricably intertwined.

And behind both Assad and Hezbollah lurks Iran, which supplied the hardware to Hezbollah and which Assad delivered in direct contravention of impotent Resolution 1701. Not to forget, pulling the strings of the Tehran/Damascus/Hezbollah axis behind the scenes is Moscow, the very architect of the current deal to save Assad from American punishment.

Article 8 of UN Resolution 1701 calls for “the establishment between the Blue Line and the Litani River of an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon.”

Is that southern Lebanese zone as clean as article 8 guaranteed?  Did Hezbollah indeed exit that region as Article 8 obliged it to do? In actual fact Hezbollah presence mushroomed.

According to a 2009 IDF intelligence report, Hezbollah had managed to construct a whopping one thousand military facilities within the very territory it was supposed to vacate. At the time, these new installations comprised well over 550 subterranean weapons bunkers and 300 other underground facilities.

That was over four years ago. In the interim, Hezbollah hadn’t been idle. It kept right on adding new fortifications and reinforcing existing ones. That of course is far from the full extent of the bamboozlement. Hezbollah strike capacity against Israeli civilian concentrations and vital urban centers has grown alarmingly, rather than be diminished – as Livni and the international sponsors of resolution 1701 pledged.

The most imperative ingredient of Resolution 1701, repeated numerous times throughout the text, is that “all non-governmental armies in Lebanon” – that foremost means Hezbollah – “must be completely and unconditionally disarmed.”

Yeah, sure! By very conservative estimates from prior to the Syrian mayhem, Hezbollah, far from disarming, had tripled its arsenal since Resolution 1701 was presented by Livni as a stunning triumph. Neither she nor anyone else mentions it these days.

Already before Assad found himself embroiled in civil strife, more than 60,000 Hezbollah rockets and missiles were trained on Israel. There’s no telling by what extent the number has now grown, since the turmoil has made any assessment hypothetical.

It is plainly obvious that Assad’s chief accomplice, Hezbollah, enjoys free supplies from the commandant in Damascus and that he indeed has spirited many of his own arsenals – conventional or chemical – beyond the nominal border with Lebanon.

This is just how Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had hidden some of his own stashes with Assad in Syria in advance of the American invasion of 2003. It’s a well-practiced Mideastern subterfuge, which the West refuses to acknowledge. Hence, conventional wisdom today is that Saddam was falsely accused of having hoarded poison gas and was wrongfully attacked.

It’s easier to ignore Arab proclivities and pretend that everything is on the up-and-up, that agreements on paper will be lived up to. Thus Article 8 insists on: “full implementation of the relevant provisions of the Taif Accords, and of Resolutions 1559 (2004) and 1680 (2006), that require the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon, so that, pursuant to the Lebanese cabinet decision of 27 July 2006, there will be no weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the Lebanese State.”

With mind-blowing gall and utter impunity, Hezbollah and its Syrian enablers are actually not merely violating Resolution 1701 but also two other previous worthless undertakings – Resolution 1559 (which called on all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias to disband) and Resolution 1680 (that reiterated the demand to respect Lebanese sovereignty).

The Taif Accord of 1989, negotiated in Saudi Arabia to end the Lebanese civil war and remove Syria from the Arena, was never more than a transparent sham.

The West cannot even claim lack of awareness. Oozing impudence, Hezbollah, hardly bothers to as much as maintain a low profile. It exultantly crows about its violations.

Less than a year ago, its chieftain Hassan Nasrallah boasted on Al-Manar TV: “If Israel was shocked by the number of Fajr-5 rockets which hit Tel Aviv, how will it be able to bear the thousands of rockets which will rain on Tel Aviv and other places if it invades Lebanon?

And back to Syria. Article 15 of Resolution 1701 declared that “all States shall take the necessary measures to prevent, by their nationals or from their territories or using their flag vessels or aircraft… the sale or supply to any entity or individual in Lebanon of arms and related materiel of all types, including weapons and ammunition, military vehicles and equipment, paramilitary equipment, and spare parts for the aforementioned, whether or not originating in their territories.”

Did Assad submissively toe the line? Did his Iranian allies meekly acquiesce with the international community’s instructions?

Heck no! What they did was to arm Hezbollah to the teeth right under the UN peacekeepers’ unwatchful eye. Syria and Iran had transported gargantuan stockpiles to Hezbollah.

Before the present Syrian upheaval, the IDF knew that Hezbollah possessed Iranian-manufactured Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets with a range of between 43 and 75 kilometers, Iranian-manufactured Fatah 110 rockets with a range of 250 kilometers and Syrian-manufactured 302mm rockets with a range of between 110 and 115 kilometers. Given Israel’s diminutive size these ranges are horrific.

In 2010, Former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates noted that Hezbollah “has more missiles than most governments in the world.” So what? Did anyone care? Was any outcry audible from the pompous pontificators who serially preach to Israel?

Hezbollah’s frightening missile hoards came in unhindered through Syria. Now that anarchy reigns in Syria and that Hezbollah has become a key player in its battlefields, the situation is doubtless unimaginably and immeasurably worse.

This is what International good intentions are worth on the treacherous ground in the Arab realm. Too bad no one mentions defiled Resolution 1701 in conjunction with the cushy deal to clean Syria of chemical warheads.

Can we place even minimal faith in international negotiators in the light of what happened to Resolution 1701? Can we truly trust Americans who mouth platitudes aplenty but studiously ignore precedents (that should engender wariness rather than promote optimism)? Can we trust any deal promoted by the Russians who dynamically and deliberately helped smash Resolution 1701 to smithereens?

Resolution 1701 offers a sobering reflection of what will become of the deal to disarm Assad of his WMDs. The broken shards of the 1701 mirror further forewarn us about how Obama’s America will thwart Iran’s nuclear designs. No propitious prospects ahead.

http://sarahhonig.com/2013/09/20/another-tack-heed-the-broken-mirror/#more-2647