Iran overshadows Palestinian issue at U.N.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at left, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas
/ AP/CBS(CBS News) JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will address the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, but the visions they will present to the world body are worlds apart.
Abbas wants to put the Palestinian issue back on the international agenda and will appeal to the U.N. to recognize the dispossessed Palestinian people as an independent state.
But the man who holds most of the cards with regard to granting the Palestinians statehood, Netanyahu, is playing an entirely different hand. In spite of the persistent threat of terrorism from Palestinian militant groups, Netanyahu has put the issue on a back burner.
In the Israeli leader's mind, that threat pales in comparison to the prospect of the Islamic Republic of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons. That is seen as an existential threat and Netanyahu has warned time and again that he will not allow Iran - which has threatened to wipe Israel "off the map" - to bring a "second Holocaust" on the Jewish people.
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Netanyahu will try to add a sense of urgency to the Iran issue, warning that the time for diplomacy is running out, and he has leverage: he has warned that if the international community fails to stop Iran, and if the U.S. fails to set clear "red lines" that spell out what would provoke American military action, Israel might launch a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities on its own.
Israel says Iran is burying its nuclear components deep underground in concrete and will soon reach a "zone of immunity" - the point where Israeli air strikes would no longer be effective.
Netanyahu's saber rattling is giving other world leaders the jitters. An Israeli attack could spark a major regional war, draw in U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, and skyrocketing oil prices could derail the delicate global economic recovery.
This looming crisis, coupled with the turmoil of the Arab Spring, has pushed the Palestinian issue off center stage. Israeli officials have pointed out that the Arab revolutions have nothing to do with the Palestinians, putting into question the traditional logic that the Palestinian issue is the source of all the region's problems and resolving it would bring peace and tranquility.
Furthermore, the Palestinians remain bitterly divided. While the moderate Abbas controls the West Bank, the Islamic militant group Hamas - classified by the U.S. as a terrorist organization - controls the Gaza Strip. Hamas' charter calls for the destruction of Israel.
Abbas says he supports a negotiated solution for a Palestinian state, but peace talks with Israel have been deadlocked since Netanyahu took office in March 2009. Abbas has demanded a freeze on all settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as a precondition for talks. Netanyahu, who is backed by parties which support the expansion of Jewish settlements, has refused.
The U.S. has virtually given up on trying to goad the parties back to the negotiating table. President Obama's special Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, resigned in frustration in 2011 after two years on the job, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has only visited Israel twice in the past two years.
As a result, Abbas has sought to sideline Israel and seek recognition for Palestinian statehood directly from the U.N.
The U.S. blocked the bid last year in the Security Council, saying that Palestinian independence can only be achieved through direct negotiations with Israel.
This year, Abbas has a new strategy: He will bypass the Security Council, where the U.S. has a veto, and he will ask the 193-member General Assembly to upgrade the Palestinians' status to a non-member "observer state," giving them the same U.N. ranking as the Vatican. This tacit statehood would enable the Palestinians to pursue Israel through the international courts and other global forums.
"The day after (we get) non-member statehood, life will not be the same," says Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat, noting that 120 nations have already recognized "Palestine."
"Yes, the occupation will continue, the settlements will continue, the crimes of the settlers may continue, but there will be consequences," says Erekat.
Israel describes the Palestinians' unilateral efforts for statehood as "diplomatic warfare," and as the specter of conventional warfare with Iran holds the attention of Israel, and the world, it's hard to see the Israeli-Palestinian peace process getting back on track anytime soon.
This story was filed by CBS Radio News correspondent Robert Berger.Popular on CBSNews.com
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One need not look beyond the company he keeps.
In an Oct. 16, 2010 sermon, spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef said:
"Goyim [derogatory term for non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world - only to serve the People of Israel. Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat."
According to Yosef:
"With gentiles, it will be like any person - they need to die, but [God] will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one's donkey would die, they'd lose their money. This is his servant... That's why he gets a long life, to work well for his Jew." [Source: Haaretz, "ADL slams Shas spiritual leader for saying non-Jews 'were born to serve Jews', October 20, 2010. If Harretz is too 'Lefty' for you, to borrow from Israeli vernacular for those who would disagree with Netanyahu, the same quote can be easily found at the Jerusalem Post's site.]
Here's a subsequent photo of Bibi beaming with admiration of Yosef, taken February 23, 2011: http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/strenger-than-fiction/israelis-will-still-follow-ethnic-and-religious-divisions-in-upcoming-elections-1.427816 .
President Peres attended this 2010 sermon, and the audience on hand voiced raucous approval of the Rabbi's words. You can find Yosef in photos with every Israeli leader of note, including Bibi and Barak: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4xMHVSZLyU
This same man also openly advocated wiping out the Palestinians and the Iranians, perhaps in the next breath sermonizing about the Holocaust.
If you require more recent confirmation of Netanyahu's admiration of Yosef and the latter's importance in the Iran decision-making, from a 'righty' source no less, look no further than the Jerusalem Post's August 20, 2012 piece entitled 'PMO seeking Ovadia Yosef's support for Iran strike'. Here's the URL: http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=281954
Yosef is not the only highly ranking Rabbi with a dim view of non-Jews. On June 28, 2011, Haaretz published "Israel's chief clergy decries arrest of top rabbi who called for killing gentiles". The following quote resonates:
'In an unusual step, Israel's two chief rabbis, Yona Metzger and Shlomo Amar, yesterday released a joint statement decrying "the severe damage to the dignity of an important rabbi and rabbinic judge, one of Israel's greatest rabbis."' The offending rabbi (Lior) was amicably questioned and released, while, "[c]onsidering the sensitive nature of the issue, the final decision [on whether to punish the rabbi] would be made by Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein."
On May 29, 2012, Haaretz reported Weinstein "...is closing the investigation of two revered West Bank rabbis who wrote a religious text, Torat Hamelech (The King's Torah ), which argues there are times when Jews are allowed to kill gentiles who pose no physical threat of violence. The authors are rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, while the text was endorsed by leading Chabad Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburg and Kiryat Arba Rabbi Dov Lior." http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/israel-s-ag-closes-probe-into-authors-of-allegedly-racist-book-1.433041
And Israel is allowed to maintain an uninspected, not-so-secret nuclear arsenal, thumbing its nose at the IAEA and NPT why, exactly?
Excerpt from "Israel Bars Rabin From Relating '48 Eviction of Arabs", by David K. Shipler, NY Times Oct. 23, 1979.
"A censorship board composed of five Cabinet members prohibited former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin from including in his memoirs a first-person account of the expulsion of 50,000 Palestinians civilians from their homes near Tel Aviv during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war...
A copy of [Rabin's] manuscript was provided to the New York Times by Peretz Kidron, who translated the book from Hebrew to English...
the manuscript continues. "The population of Lod did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the 10 to 15 miles to the point where they met up with the legion...
Mr. Rabin's account ... described "a calculated Israeli policy" to drive Arab residents from their homes, ... many elderly people and small children died in the over-powering heat during the forced march...
Many left in panic after the Israeli massacre at the village of Deir Yassin outside Jerusalem...
There, contingents of the extremist Stern gang and Irgun attacked the village and lined men, women and children up against walls and shot them, according to Red Cross and British documentation."
To your credit, you admit it's the truth. That is the first step to REAL healing.
"We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one - progressive, liberal - in Israel; and the other - cruel, injurious - in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day."
-- excerpt from "The war's seventh day" published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz March 3, 2002. Written by Michael Ben-Yair, Israel's attorney general from 1993-96.
"The centre of [Hebron,] a city of 175,000 people has been utterly emptied... thanks to a policy the Israeli army calls "sterilisation" [sic]... for Hebron's 800 Jewish settlers.
...A map shows purple roads where no Palestinian cars are permitted, yellow roads where no Palestinian shops are allowed to open and red roads where no Palestinians are even allowed to walk. ...Those unlucky enough to live on a red road have had their front doors sealed: they have to leave their own houses by a back door and climb out via a ladder. ...Israelis can walk freely down streets that are barred to Palestinians, ...the shuttered shops that have been covered with some of the most vile graffiti I have ever seen. The familiar "Death to the Arabs" is there, but so is "You have Arabs, you have mice," the words covered up, but still legible. ... Stars of David, daubed on Arab shopfronts [sic] and doors.
...[M]y guide, Yehuda Shaul, ... who served two long tours in Hebron and who now works with the Breaking the Silence movement ... believes that Hebron simply reveals the reality of the occupation ..."
-by Guardian's Jonathan Freedland (a Jew). Jewish Chronicle of London, Nov-7-11.
http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/columnists/57850/this-israel-not-one-i-love.
All the hasbara dweeb comments got removed and the hucksters disappeared.
Keep managing the message -- no matter what you do, the truth is coming out, ALL OVER THE PLACE!
Now is the time you should PANIC.
The Arabs started the '67 War, they lost. Israel's miraculous victory must have been according to the Jewish god's plan so Israel gets to keep the occupied territories.
The Facts:
"In June 1967 we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him."
-- Menachim Begin
In an address by Prime Minister Begin at the National Defense College, 8 August 1982.
"The entire story of the danger of extermination was invented in every detail and exaggerated a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territory."
-- Mordecai Bentov, a wartime member of the Israeli government, the Israeli newspaper Al-Hamishmar, 14 April 1971
"We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the Six-Days war, and we had never thought of such a possibility."
-- General Haim Bar-Lev, Rabin's predecessor as Israeli chief of staff, quoted in Ma'ariv, 4 April 1972.
"There was never any danger of annihilation. This hypothesis has never been considered in any serious meeting."
-- General Ezer Weizman, war-time Israeli Chief of Operations, a nephew of Chaim Weizman. Also quoted in Ma'ariv, 4 April 1972.
"I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions which he sent into Sinai on 14 May would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it."
-- Israeli Chief of Staff Rabin, Le Monde, 28 February 1968.
Now, along with all his formulaic, Zionist hasbara boilerplate, Sam just up and disappeared! I guess he was out of his depth.
The Facts:
"Any reasonable person, Zionist or non-Zionist, must acknowledge that the analogy drawn between Palestinians and Mizrahi [Arab] Jews is unfounded. Palestinian refugees did not want to leave Palestine....Those who left did not do so of their own volition. In contrast, Jews from Arab lands came to this country under the initiative of the State of Israel and Jewish organizations." (Yehouda Shenhav, professor at Tel Aviv University and of Iraqi heritage: Ha'aretz, 8 October 2004)
"We are not refugees, nobody expelled us from Iraq, nobody told us that we were unwanted. But we are the victims of the Israeli-Arab conflict." (Avi Shlaim, Israeli historian from Baghdad Ha'aretz, August 11, 2005).
Ran Cohen, member of the Knesset: "I am not a refugee....I came at the behest of Zionism, due to the pull that this land exerts, and due to the idea of redemption. Nobody is going to define me as a refugee." (Ha'aretz, 8/10/04)
The late Yisrael Yeshayahu, speaker of the Knesset:
"We are not refugees. [Some of us] came to this
country before the state was born. We had messianic
aspirations."
Shlomo Hillel, former minister and speaker of the
Knesset: "I don't regard the departure of Jews from
Arab lands as that of refugees. They came here because they wanted to, as Zionists."
Also, any legitimate grievances Arab Jewish emigrants may have with Arab governments can be pursued through international law. It must be noted, however, that whereas the expulsion of over one million Palestinians from Palestine between late 1947 and 1967, was carried out by Jewish forces (Irgun, LEHI, Sternists, Haganah) and the IDF, Palestinians played no role whatsoever in the departure of Jews from Arab countries. In short, apples and oranges.
Watch and listen to MK Danny Danon publicly advocate ethnic cleansing and reveal Likud's true position -- this guy has served as speaker in the Knesset and World Likud leader, (Likud being Netanyahu's party): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPVTC9frqMA
The Lie: Israel is serious about negotiating a two state solution and the only problem is Palestinian intransigence. Anyone who dares question the lie is subjected to vile insults, like being called an 'anti-Semite'. Palestinians must come to the negotiating table, 'without preconditions', subject to the preconditions Israel will keep any possible border in a state of flux by continuing settlement construction and 'outpost legalization' (only in Israel - legalizing the illegal) as negotiations proceed.
Before we can discuss this, we need some frame of reference. Where, EXACTLY, are these 'borders' you so adamantly insist are sovereign to Israel? Hmmmm?
Israel refuses to define its borders, because doing so would make the claim of being 'Jewish AND democratic' somewhat problematic. So the occupation continues without end.
There's a lesson for you Zionist shills: a country that has a vested interest in maintaining territorial ambiguity would do well to steer clear of that 'B' word.
The Lavon Affair clearly demonstrates how low the Jewish State will sink to further its own existence. They don't care how many of their 'allies' they have to kill to blame 'Muslims extremists' for the results. And let's not forget the USS Liberty.
The Lie:
Anyone who wonders aloud about what else they might be capable of is a 'conspiracy theorist'.
The 'historian' Michael Oren, presently Israel's censoring ambassador to the US, made the same claims about the Liberty being an 'accident'.
Well, the 'accident' went on for hours and recently released radio intercepts CLEARLY show Israeli pilots and torpedo boat personnel KNEW they were striking a US ship. Moreover, the LIES Israel told after the fact are a matter of VERY public record. Nobody believes anything Netanyahu says, because of this history. You are no more believable.
It sure is good to have friends.
"This is old irrelevant history ...as though it has some kind of relevance in the modern day!"
You mean like the holocaust? The Lavon Affair and the Liberty ambush BOTH postdate WWII. As for forgiveness, I double-dog dare you to say that face to face with the survivors. Then we'll see how much forgiveness you get. Be sure and take a copy of Ambassador Oren's book "Case Closed" with you and wave it in their faces.
And let's look at the rest of the record.
Iran's neighbors, not Israel, should be the most concerned about Iran's nuclear ambitions. After all, radiactive fallout knows no boundaries, and no one would win should Iran actually use it's weapons.
But even if we take Iran at its word, nuclear power is a bad idea.
Iran is prone to earthquakes. They cannot guarantee the safety of their nuclear plants. Should a metldown occur, Iran's neighbors would get the radiation. Apparently no one has learned nothing from Fukushima.
Also, we have no way of knowing what Iran will do with its nuclear wastes. If it entrusts the Russians to displose of it, the Russians might dump the stuff in the Persian Gulf. If the Persan Gulf starts to glow in the dark - we'll know why.
Also Iran really need to look across the Persian Gulf and Abu Dhabi which is investing heavily in solar energy. That's what Iran should be doing.
The Arabs and Israeli's need to work together to put a check on Iran's nuclear ambitions. Iran is a threat to Arab and Israeli alike.