...At a recent meeting the Arab League passed by consensus vote a resolution calling for an end to Jewish immigration to Israel. (The League also drew a distinction between terrorism and "resistance to foreign occupation" and demanded a boycott of scientific meetings in Jerusalem.) Among those joining in the resolutions were the ambassadors from Egypt and Jordan, two countries which have actual peace treaties with Israel. Michael Sonnenfeldt, chairman of the Israel Policy Forum (the Labor Party's front organization in the U.S.), dismissed the resolutions as "just a lot of polemics." Incidentally, this event, reported as a front page story in the Forward of April 7, went unnoticed elsewhere...
...An organization calling itself "LAW," the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment, has mounted a campaign to pressure the National Geographic Society and the California-based University Games Corporation to change their board game named "Mystery Voyage." The game's offense is to have a game card identifying Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. LAW declares that according to international law Jerusalem is "occupied territory"...
...Arab Israeli Knesset Member Hasheem Mahmeed, in his capacity as member of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, attended a NATO meeting in Brussels in late November. Mahmeed introduced himself to the summit participants: "I am a Palestinian Arab who is a member of the Palestine Knesset." Back in Israel, a few months later, Mahmeed, at a rally of Israeli Arabs, declared: "Israeli Arabs must learn from Hizbullah how to f ight for their lands, in the same way that Hizbullah forced Israel out of Lebanon." (Note that Mahmeed is a member of the Knesset committee privy to the most sensitive information about Israel's military preparedness.) ...
...The Jordan Bar Association in March urged all members of the Jordanian Parliament to boycott an international parliamentary conference in Amman in April in which a delegation from Israel was scheduled to take part...
...In April hundreds of Arab students at Haifa University (now 18% of the student body) engaged in a mini-riot. Waving PLO flags and shouting "Death to the Jews" they assaulted Jewish students and then encircled and blocked a police van arriving to summon earlier rioters for interrogation...
...Mahmud Abbas (nom du guerre Abu Mazen), second in command to Palestinian Authority chief Yasser Arafat, has publicly demanded that Israel withdraw from the Galilee, i.e. northern Israel. Said Abbas: "Our position on the issue of Jerusalem and all the occupied Palestinian territories is clear and what applies to Jerusalem also applies to Hebron, Nablus, Galilee and Tulkarm"...
...Israeli embassy officials in Egypt who went to Cairo University to attend a seminar on Jews, Judaism and Zionism, were denied access to the university campus with the explanation that the university's governing authority does not allow Israelis to enter...
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the Extremists"), and given the content, that may have been just as well for their mental health. Sample (courtesy of Israel Media Research and Analysis) of the "intellectual" fodder from prominent political writer Mohamed Sid-Ahmed: "[T]he counter-persecution paradigm...explains the persecution...Israelis are inflicting on the Palestinians and...the delight which prevails in Israel following atrocities such as the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, the bombing of southern Lebanon and the killling of innocent civililans."
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be sanguine about what will happen to America's Mideast policy whether under President Bush or President Gore. The next president will surely face the strong temptation to be seen as a "peacemaker," despite the steep price that Israelis and Americans will pay, or the harm that American strategic interests will suffer. Our efforts now will help shape the contours of the debate that will continue well into the foreseeable future.
Herbert Zweibon is chairman of Americans For a Safe Israel.
April 2000 - 9 - Outpost