From The River To The Sea

"We are getting more and more phone calls and conversations of concerned people — if it’s Israelis who invest in Ireland and are concerned about their investment, if it’s Israelis who have relocated to Ireland into different tech companies and either are requesting to be relocated somewhere else or asking to return to Israel."

"I think it sends the wrong message about the location and the centrality of Ireland as a tech hub when there are more and more people who are concerned about moving to Ireland. I don’t think that this is the message that Ireland wants to send to the world … And this is not what we want to see."

"[Many Irish sympathize with Israel] behind the scenes. I think there is a lot of potential in our bilateral relations, if it’s cybersecurity or health care, climate change. I hope to be given that opportunity to continue that."

Israeli Ambassador to Ireland, Dana Erlich

Anti-Israel demonstrators stand outside the Israeli embassy after Ireland has announced it will recognize a Palestinian state, in Dublin, Ireland, May 22, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Molly Darlington

 A March poll by the Palestinian polling group elicited the data that seven in ten Palestinians approved of the October 7 sadistic barbarity that Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist operatives inflicted on southern Israel's kibbutz residents. Poll results rendered the information that Palestinians in the West Bank outdid their Gaza counterparts with a greater number supporting Hamas as the duly constituted government in both territories.

Israelis, looking back in appalled anger at the carnage wrought by the Palestinian terrorist operation of October 7 are almost equal in numbers in rejecting a renewed Palestinian enclave in  Gaza. It seems that in the West, in European countries in particular, Hamas and the other Palestinian terror groups are not held in any judgement. Israel, on the other hand, is held to a standard not expected of Palestinians. When Palestinians invoking their 'refugee' status as 'victims' everlasting as long as Israel exists, commit to the goal of destroying Israel, their ongoing violence against Israel and its population is considered irrelevant.

 

Israel's responses to deadly raids, however, are viewed through the magnified lens of international demands that restraint be the order of the day, not the wholesale intention of responding militarily to the rocket barrages, and suicide missions -- and above all the October 7 sadistic savagery with its death count, determined to prevent the promise of more October 7s, until Israel is destroyed -- by taking the initiative to destroy first those whose unremitting violence against Israeli existence must be final and complete.

 

Ireland has led the way in persuading Spain and and Norway -- all three countries known to be hostile to Israel -- to formally recognize the 'State of Palestine', rather than await a final agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority government on mutual recognition and a corresponding decision on conditions both agree upon, setting standards and boundaries as well as pledges of non-hostile cooperation. Israel has been available for talks in the critical issues involved, the Palestinians have evaded them.

Choosing instead their slow and steady scheduling of the poisoning of Palestinian minds against their Jewish neighbours, inculcating in those minds the need for 'resistance' against the 'occupation'; an occupation necessitated by the urgent call to protect Israelis of all ages against lethal attacks that Palestinians are taught by their governments it is their duty to carry out to martyrdom in the greater interests of opposing Israel's presence and committing to killing Jews.

Sovereignty recognition must pass some elemental standards, not the least of which under international law a state must have fixed borders, a permanent population, uncontested government with control of its security and commitments to amiable foreign relations. In light of the most recent of the ongoing attacks against Israel and its people, to proceed at this unresolved juncture to recognize a Palestinian state that refuses to negotiate with the neighbour it threatens, to agree on boundaries and future relations is beyond premature.

Granting that status for the Palestinians is not only premature, it represents a reprehensible decision to reward savagery committed against a neighbour where 1,200 lives of Israeli citizens were extinguished on one fateful day of carnage dedicated to terrorizing, slaughtering and hostage taking. Neither Palestinians, nor now Israelis favour the two-state 'solution' the West is anxious to hasten to reality, seemingly to solve a brutal, unresolved issue of two peoples rivalling one another in a competition for territory.

 

Israelis settled for a state on a small portion of their historical ancestral land mass; Palestinians rejected outright the opportunity offered them through the Partition Plan of the United Nations in 1947. Consistently since then when war after war broke out as surrounding Arab states attempted to dislodge the Jewish State from the Middle East, Israel successfully clung to its territory, militarily defeating its enemies and frustrating Palestinian aspirations to achieve a state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean sea.

 

Which is to say, without a presence of an Israeli state, leaving the entire area to the Palestinian Arabs. That remains the goal of both Fatah (West Bank Palestinian Authority) and Hamas (Gaza Strip). Fatah and Hamas oppose one another with a hostility born of ideological differences and factional rivalry. Their only area of agreement is the destruction of the State of Israel. That part of the West that is amenable to granting State status to Palestinian aspiration is effectively agreeing that the use of violent sadism was justifiable and awaited reward.

 

Countries that would never tolerate violence against their claims to sovereignty and against their populations, appear to feel that having suffered the intolerable, Israel should merely shrug and count its losses to satisfy the demands of a global community fixated with the entitlements and inalienable rights of a Palestinian population that chooses its method of persuasion, trumping lethal violence over the negotiating table. In the process the pretense for consumption by the West, frequent appeals to victimhood. Appealing for help from the international community to bypass normal international standards to qualify for statehood.

 

Looking ahead to the eventual agreement on statehood for 'Palestine', the issue of who would govern is critical to relations between Israel and the Palestinians. Palestinians make no secret of the fact that the majority reject 88-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, who was elected to his position as President decades ago, with no election keeping him in office for the past 20 years. Their choice of governance has been stated time and again in their admiration for Hamas's agenda. 

 

Ireland, Spain and Norway would never agree to live alongside another state with destructive tendencies and an agenda that included ongoing violence against a neighbour. Yet they deem it acceptable for Israel and they prefer to force the matter by supporting a Palestinian State that is loathe to bargain in good faith with Israel, since to do so would be to forego their ambition to have free reign from "The River to the Sea" in perpetuity.

 

 

Canada's Flirtation With Terrorism

"'Palestine' is, as it stands, a porous-bordered, non-contiguous hodgepodge, split governance-wise between two mutually suspicious parties united only by their antipathy toward Israel. It is less a sovereign state than a half-baked idea drawn on a cocktail napkin."

While Melanie Joly is joining the faddish call for Palestinian statehood, she must know deep down that the Palestinian territories look nothing like a state and likely won't any time soon. Her performative virtue signalling only further harms her credibility as Canada's top diplomat."

Rahim Mohamed, journalist, National Post

 

Nothing very 'diplomatic' in tone or expression, much less adherence to recognition of reality and loyalty to a fellow democracy in strained relations between the Trudeau Liberal government in Canada and its behaviour toward Israel under this 'post-national' administration that has embraced DEI-woke-Critical Race Theory full bore as an enlightened 'progressive' government dragging Canada kicking and screaming into a national culture of anything goes, which includes promoting LGBTQ-2 rights beyond reason in its support of transitioning children toward pharmaceuticals and surgeries that deny their biological genders.

 

As for giving credence and support to a fellow democracy located in the Middle East amongst Islamist theocracies, kingdoms, sheikhdoms and terrorism-guided countries loyal to the darkest issues of pure Islamism, that too has been abandoned in favour of leaning toward equating fantasies and slanders issued by terrorist groups on an equal footing with that of a legitimate sovereign government. Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly's recent declaration of Canada's willingness to support statehood for 'Palestine' a case in point.

 

Palestine, as a combination of the West Bank and Gaza, two territories that comprise 'Palestine' in the minds of outsiders, but not reflected in the aspirations of Fatah and Hamas each of which controls one-half of the Palestinian 'Territories', since they envision Israel off the map and 'Palestine' comprised of the entire region, 'from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean sea'. And they have worked assiduously over the years, since Israel's rebirth to persuade the international community of Israel's illegitimacy as a state on land purloined from the 'Palestinians'.

 

Yet from the authoritative and well-considered wellspring of a mind versed in international law we hear: "Canada is prepared to recognize the State of Palestine at the time most favourable to a lasting peace, not at the last step along the path". Alongside voting against Israel in the United Nations, Canada has now committed itself to full betrayal of international law with one eye cocked on the considerable Muslim voting base in Canada and the other at catering to the elements within the United Nations for which Israel's existence is an abomination.

 

Both the West Bank, administered by Fatah/Mahmoud Abbas and the Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas -- both illegitimate entities with a pretense at democracy well versed in the values of the West, and appealing to those values by discrediting Israel at every turn as an oppressor intent on perpetrating genocide against Arab Palestinians, while themselves in full practise of virulent Islamism, actually do make an effort at genocide against Jews, mocking the Holocaust they deny occurred, but promising another one -- are ill-prepared to govern.

 

While Mahmoud Abbas spews racial and religious epithets against Jews and Israel, mounting a never-ending campaign of abuse against Palestinians taught from cradle to grave that Jews are mendacious, untrustworthy, violently greedy, intent on looting more territory inscribed by the heavens above for Palestinian statehood, worthy of death brought to fruition by blessed martyrdom, inspiring and spurring children to aspire to become terrorists as a noble future for the faithful, Hamas goes straight to the core of dedicated mass murder to achieve its goal.

 

And this is prime material for statehood? Statehood with no potential responsible, lawful candidates available for administering a state to live in peace with its neighbours? Even other Arab regional states shudder envisioning what a nightmare that would be. Yet the international community is eager to consign Israel to a fate of everlasting, unending feral deadly attacks against its citizens by a neighbour 'state' that cannot govern sufficiently well to create security and prosperity for its citizens, yet conspires to make life hell for its neighbour.

 

On the other hand, if Justin Trudeau and his cabinet of Liberal progressives would agree to go to the new state permanently as its future executive administrators, most Canadians would be in full and total agreement.

 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada's longstanding position that a Palestinian state could only be recognized at the end of a process leading to a two-state solution has changed. "We now recognize that it may happen sooner than at the end of the process".   CBC

 

"Unlike resolutions in the Security Council, there are no vetoes in the 193-member General Assembly. Friday’s resolution required a two-thirds majority of members voting and got significantly more than the 118 vote minimum."

"U.S. allies supported the resolution, including France, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Australia, Estonia and Norway. But European countries were very divided."

"The resolution “determines” that a state of Palestine is qualified for membership — dropping the original language that in the General Assembly’s judgment it is “a peace-loving state.” It therefore recommends that the Security Council reconsider its request “favorably”."

Associated Press