What to Do With Lemons

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman proposes a solution to untangle the Palestinian Authority-Israeli problem in his column What to Do With Lemons: The United Nations 1947 Partition Plan

He proposes an amendment  should be voted upon in the UN:

 “This body reaffirms that the area of historic Palestine should be divided into two homes for two peoples — a Palestinian Arab state and a Jewish state. The dividing line should be based on the 1967 borders — with mutually agreed border adjustments and security arrangements for both sides. This body recognizes the Palestinian state as a member of the General Assembly and urges both sides to enter into negotiations to resolve all the other outstanding issues.”  

His arguments are interesting - read them. As are two criticisms posted:

• Thomas Friedman's "What to Do With Lemons": A Lemon of a Proposal
• Thomas Friedman ‘Solves’ the 'PA Homeland' with Sour Lemons

What Friedman and his critics seem unable to grasp is the pivotal point of his proposed resolution as applied to the party who originally accepted the United Nations' Partition Plan in 1947.

He wishes "This body recognizes the Palestinian state...".

Israel rightly expects all to recognize the State of Israel and this State's right to exist within secure borders.

Unless all interested parties can accept this fundamental truth then any lemonade made by any body will be undrinkable.

Assad paid Golan demonstrators $1,000 apiece

Syrian President Bashar Assad's security machine is creaking judging by its failure to raise thousands of Palestinian and Syrian volunteers to brave the Israeli troops manning the Golan Sunday, June 5 - three weeks after his success in staging the first mass border incursion.

Intelligence sources reveal that even the few hundred willing to turn out demanded a fee: $1,000 for every demonstrator who managed to cut a piece of razor wire from the Israeli border fence – and exorbitant fee in Syrian terms - and $10,000 for the families of volunteers shot by Israeli troops before they reached their goal.

Syrian state TV reported 20 killed and 277 injured in clashes with Israeli border troops - figures which are not reliably confirmed.

Assad's home front is sinking fast, which was why he tried to stage a piece of nation-cementing drama on the Israeli border. He hoped the Golan dead would outnumber the many hundreds killed in his three-month crackdown on the protest movement against his regime and is therefore likely to keep on trying.

Sunday alone, scores died in Syrian tank-backed attacks on protesters in northwest Syria who are now using live fire against his troops. Sources report that Syrian security agents captured by protesters were hanged in broad daylight from electricity poles on city high streets Sunday, June 5, causing troops and police to flee in panic.

"We are deeply troubled by events that took place earlier today in the Golan Heights resulting in injuries and the loss of life," the State Department said in a statement.
"We call for all sides to exercise restraint. Provocative actions like this should be avoided. Israel, like any sovereign nation, has a right to defend itself," the US statement added.

DEBKAfile

Obama blows it in Middle East speech - no RESPECT!

The President of the USA  Barack Hussein Obama produced the usual red herring whilst he mildly castigated his best friends and totally ignored Saudi Arabia.

Despite his moral rhetoric and his offer of economic aid to the emerging democracies together with his condemnation of the regions bad boys - Gadaffi ("when Gaddafi inevitably leaves or is forced from power, decades of provocation will come to an end, and the transition to a democratic Libya can proceed.") and Assad ("President Assad now has a choice: he can lead that transition, or get out of the way"); his softy lines on Bahrain and his inability to remember what and where Saudi Arabia is (or maybe he did - and therein lies the rub) -, all media attention has concentrated on his undermining and incorrect statement:  "The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.".

President Obama does not realize this fundamental truth about the State of Israel: what Israel wants is negotiated peace and secure borders. What happens to the Palestinians - their own state etc. - is a detail dependant on peace and secure borders, not the reverse. Convince the Arab - not just Hamas but also those endemically anti-Jewish states such as Syria and Iran, to recognise and respect the State of Israel and everything will fall into place. Unless this happens - nothing will change.

Besides, it is an error of puerile proportions to consider a return to a situation from a time past.  From whom did the Israelis occupy the land of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the first place? Not from the Palestinians, but from the Kingdom of Jordan who had occupied these lands illegally since the end of the British Mandate in Palestine. Perhaps, with the possible declaration of a Palestinian state by the UN imminent, we should consider returning to 1947 when the UN first offered the two states  (only for Israel to accept and the Palestinian partition to be violently rejected by the Palestinian representatives and all the Arab countries)?

Of course not.  Different conditions prevail. There have been causes and there have been consequences. Time moves on from when the President of the USA  Barack Hussein Obama was 6 years of age. Whilst little Barack played with his toys, the Prime Minister of the State of Israel Benyamin Netanyahu (the democratically elected head of the USA's best ally in the region) was signing  up for his first tour of duty in the Israeli Defence Force.

 I was 20 years old in 1967 and selectively remember these events from that year of different mind sets, with the Vietnam War, race riots, an elected segregationist governor in Georgia etc. (what Obama needs to show for Netanyahu is a little R*E*S*P*E*C*T):

January 6 - Vietnam War: USMC and ARVN troops launch Operation Deckhouse Five in the Mekong River Delta.

January 8 - Vietnam War: Operation Cedar Falls starts.

January 10 - Segregationist Lester Maddox is sworn in as Governor of Georgia.

January 14 The New York Times reports that the U.S. Army is conducting secret germ warfare experiments.

February 14 - Respect is recorded by Aretha Franklin (to be released in April).

April 2 - A United Nations delegation arrives in Aden due to approaching independence. They leave April 7, accusing British authorities of lack of cooperation. The British say the delegation did not contact them.

April 4 - Martin Luther King, Jr. denounces the Vietnam War during a religious service in New York City.

April 7 - Six Day War (approach): Israeli fighters shoot down 7 Syrian MIG-21s.

April 10 Oral arguments begin in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), challenging the State of Virginia's statutory scheme to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications.

April 14 - In San Francisco, 10,000 march against the Vietnam War.

April 15 - Large demonstrations are held against the Vietnam War in New York City and San Francisco.

April 28 In Houston, Texas, boxer Muhammad Ali refuses military service.

May 6 Four hundred students seize the administration building at Cheyney State College, now Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, the oldest institute for higher education for African Americans.

 May 17

• Syria mobilizes against Israel.
• President Gamal Abdal Nasser of Egypt demands withdrawal of the peacekeeping UN Emergency Force in the Sinai. U.N. Secretary-General U Thant complies (May 18).

May 18 Tennessee Governor Ellington repeals the "Monkey Law" (officially the Butler Act; see the Scopes Trial).

May 23 - Egypt closes the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, blockading Israel's southern port of Eilat, and Israel's entire Red Seacoastline.

June - Moshe Dayan becomes Israel's Minister of Defense.

June 1 - The Beatles legendary release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, nicknamed "The Soundtrack of the Summer of Love"; it would be number one on the albums charts throughout the summer of 1967.

June 5 Six-Day War: Israel occupies the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai peninsula and Golan Heights after defeating its Arab neighbours.

June 8 - Six-Day War - USS Liberty incident: Israeli fighter jets and Israeli warships fire at the USS Liberty off Gaza, killing 34 and wounding 171.

June 10

• Israel and Syria agree to a United Nations-mediated cease-fire.
• The Soviet Union severs diplomatic relations with Israel.

June 11 - A race riot occurs in Tampa, Florida after the shooting death of Martin Chambers by police while allegedly robbing a camera store. The unrest lasts several days.

June 12 Loving v. Virginia: The United States Supreme Court declares all U.S. state laws prohibiting interracial marriage to be unconstitutional.[4]

June 13 - Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall is nominated as the first African American justice of the United States Supreme Court. [5

June 23 - Cold War: U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, for the 3-day Glassboro Summit Conference. Johnson travels to Los Angeles for a dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel where earlier in the day thousands of war protesters clashed with L.A. police. [7]

June 26 The Buffalo Race Riot begins, lasting until July 1; leads to 200 arrests.

June 28 - Israel declares the annexation of East Jerusalem.

July 12 After the arrest of an African-American cab driver for allegedly illegally driving around a police car and gunning it down the road, race riots break out in Newark, New Jersey, and these riots last for six days.

Free bus trip to Golan in support of Assad and Hizballah

Intent on extending their day trip  from Syria into Israel

President Bashar Assad had more than one objective in bussing thousands of demonstrators to Israel's Golan border Nakba Day, Sun. May 15. Showing how easily he and his Hizballah partner could capture a village on the Israeli side of the enclave was only one. The other was to put a spoke in Egypt's wheel for transferring Hamas' command centers from Damascus to the Gaza Strip as part of its moves for taking the Gaza Strip and its Hamas rulers under Cairo's wing against Israel.

In the light of this contest, the case for renewing peace talks with the Palestinians, argued interminably between Israel's government and opposition leaders (despite the Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas's two-year refusal) has lost its relevance. The rejectionist Syria, Hizballah and Hamas are now calling the Palestinian shots..

“The Syrian regime is intentionally attempting to divert international attention away from the brutal crackdown of their own citizens to incite against Israel,” said Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, an Israeli military spokeswoman.

Israel’s military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, told Channel 2 TV he also saw “fingerprints of Iranian provocation and an attempt to use ‘nakba day’ to create conflict.”

Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV was in place to film much of the day’s clashes, and defense officials said the activists were bused in from Palestinian refugee camps throughout Syria. Many of them held European passports and told interrogators they had been flown in from abroad for the march.

“It’s our land,” one of the infiltrators, Sufian Abdel Hamid, told Israel’s Channel 2 TV. “We won’t stop trying to come back.”

Israel unhappy at orchestrated invasion

An explosion of unrest along the border could play into the hands of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who has faced two months of popular protests against political repression and rights abuses in his country. The uprising, in which human rights groups say more than 800 people have been killed, is the most serious challenge to the Assad family’s 40-year dynasty.

Assad has cast himself as the only person who can bring stability to Syria — a country with a volatile mixture of religions and sects, and with a hostile neighbour in Israel.

Thank God they are not Jews

The Jews in their desire to establish independence and realize control of their own democratic institutions accepted the UN partition of Palestine in 1947. They were attacked by the surrounding Arab nations who had rejected the UN partition plan. After a hard fought War of Independence the Jews were not "pushed into the sea", the State of Israel was declared and established. 500,000 Arab refugees were created - a sad fact that was to be manipulated and distorted and misused far outweighing in the eyes of so-called impartial third party observers the criminal acts of the rejectionists of the UN partition.

And who are these rejectionists who have constantly supported terrorist actions and promoted, participated in wars against the State of Israel? Who are these rejectionists who took the high moral ground when judging Israel’s almost impossible task of policing the intifadas that were fuelled by these rejectionists' anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli rhetoric?

They are the same toilets (Gadaffi and Assad et al.) who are indiscriminately killing their own people for the terrible crime of wanting control of their own democratic institutions.