Potential Harris VP pick Josh Shapiro on defense over Israel after decades-old college essay surfaces

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has had to defend his stance on Israel after an op-ed he penned more than three decades ago, in which he wrote of being an Israeli army volunteer and disparaged the Palestinian people, resurfaced.

“Since he wrote this piece as a 20-year-old student, Gov. Shapiro has built close, meaningful, informative relationships with many Muslim-American, Arab-American, Palestinian Christian and Jewish community leaders all across Pennsylvania,” Shapiro’s spokesman Manuel Bonder told Fox News Digital in a statement.

“The Governor greatly values their perspectives and the experiences he has learned from over the years – and as a result, as with many issues, his views on the Middle East have evolved into the position he holds today,” Bonder continued.

The Philadelphia Inquirer uncovered the essay that Shapiro wrote for the Campus Times, the student newspaper of the University of Rochester, from which Shapiro graduated in 1995. In the article, Shapiro stressed his view that “Palestinians will not peacefully coexist,” because “they do not have the capabilities to establish their own homelands and make it successful even with the aid of Israel and the United States.”

“They are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own,” Shapiro wrote, identifying himself as a “past volunteer in the Israeli army.” He referred to the Arab world as divided and “belligerent.”

The comments have resurfaced as part of a thorough review of Shapiro as he edges closer to a potential vice-presidential nod for the Democrat ticket topped by current Vice President Kamala Harris after she secured the nomination this week.

Shapiro’s support for Israel has been controversial inside the Democratic Party due to the strong pro-Palestinian views of the party’s far-left flank.

He wasn't wrong. Look at their history. "Palestinians" do not relocate, they infiltrate.

The so-called "Palestinians" are simply Syrian and Jordanian trouble-makers who were kicked out of those countries for following the paramilitary group Fatah led by Yasser Arafat (a native of Egypt) in the 1960s.

In 1957, Arafat obtained a work visa to enter Kuwait as a civil engineer. While in Kuwait he met up with two old friends from Cairo and formed Fatah, a resistance group dedicated to armed struggle to "liberate Palestine." By the time Arafat moved his operations to Syria in 1962, he had amassed a following of about 300 people.

While in Syria, Arafat continued to recruit new members. In December 1964, Arafat began to attempt raids from Syria to infiltrate Israel. Arafat was eventually arrested for the murder of a Syrian military officer who was conducting meetings to ease tensions between Arafat and other faction leaders. Arafat was convicted and was sentenced to death, but was pardoned by the President of Syria. Arafat moved his operations to the West Bank territory of Jordan.

In November 1966, Fatah launched a roadside bomb attack from Jordanian territory which killed three members of the Israeli security forces. Israel retaliated with a raid into the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, where dozens of Jordanian security forces were killed and 125 homes were razed. This engagement was one of the precursors to the Six Day War that led to Israel gaining control of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank/Golan Heights. After the other Palestinian political factions collapsed as a result of defeat to Israel, Arafat snuck into the West Bank and began recruiting more fighters for Fatah. At this point, Egypt's President Nasser proclaimed Yasser Arafat to be the "leader of the Palestinians."

The Jordanian military sided with Arafat as Fatah continued attacks against Israeli forces in the occupied areas of the West Bank. Israel was planning a major attack against Fatah's headquarters in the Jordanian town of Karameh, which was launched after an Israeli school bus hit a Fatah mine, killing two children. The attack was ultimately a draw despite Israeli forces destroying Arafat's camp in Karameh. Israeli forces withdrew at the end of the day, and Jordan and Fatah declared a political victory and Arafat was elected as the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Arafat and Fatah, joined by other sympathetic paramilitary groups, began asserting themselves in the civil life of Jordan, essentially creating a state-within-a-state. King Hussein of Jordan offered Arafat the position of Deputy Prime Minister of Jordan, but Arafat refused citing his desire for a self-ruled Palestinian state. By 1970, Arafat's militancy continued to grow within Jordan, including airplane hijackings. In August 1970, Arafat declared: "Our basic aim is to liberate the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River..." In 1971, Arafat called for King Hussein to be overthrown. Hussein responded by ordering the Jordanian military to oust Arafat and his followers from Jordan. Arafat and 2,000 followers eventually fled Jordan for Lebanon.

Because of Lebanon's weak central government, the PLO was able to operate virtually as an independent state. Arafat formed Black September, the military wing of Fatah to take revenge upon King Hussein and the Jordanian Armed Forces in northern Jordan. Black September later committed the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes.

After that, Arafat aligned the PLO with Lebanese rebels during their civil war in the late 1970s. From Lebanon, Arafat continued to launch attacks into Israel, causing Israel to launch counter-attacks into southern Lebanon to push Arafat north into Beirut. In 1982, Israeli forces eventually laid seige to Beirut to capture Arafat, and the Lebanese government negotiated a safe-passage ceasefire with Israel to expel Arafat and the PLO to Tunisia.

Arafat then settled in Tunisia where he orchestrated a movement of coordinated riots and civil uprisings in Gaza and the West Bank in Israel consisting of throwing stones, Molotov cocktails, and burning tires. At this point, a new paramilitary militant group called Hamas emerged and began targeting Israeli civilians with the new tactic of suicide bombings.

After Arafat sided with Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, other Arab nations cut off funding of Arafat and the PLO. After Arafat signed the 1993 Oslo Accords, he relocated to the Gaza Strip, and later Ramallah where he died in 2004.

In 2005, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip and turned control of the area over to Fatah. In 2007, Fatah was defeated by Hamas, an Islamic Jihadist group that instituted Islam Law, forced out all Christian schools and businesses, and began its campaign of continuous indiscriminate rocket attacks against Israel.

The point of all this is that the so-called "Palestinians" are really the descendants of cast-off radicals from Egypt, Syria, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia. Let those countries take them in again. They cause trouble wherever they go, and we don't need them to gain a foothold here to continue their Jihad from within the United States.

-PJ

Then they’d better dig up the dirt on how Shapiro as AG killed an investigation into the supposed suicide of Ellen Greenberg, a 27-year-old teacher in the Philadelphia area, who was stabbed and slashed 20 times in the neck and the back of her head in 2011.

Her family has been trying for thirteen years to get the death ruled a homicide or at least suspicious. But Shapiro reviewed the medical examiner’s revised findings and agreed it was a suicide. How does one kill oneself by sticking a knife in the back of one’s head? In addition, a later review of the autopsy revealed that two of the knife wounds were delivered post-mortem.

Her boyfriend’s family were prominent, big money contributors to Democrat politics in Philadelphia. Shapiro probably benefitted from their largesse.

Here is a real issue to investigate. The PA Supreme Court just agreed to look at the case at the behest of the victim’s family. This case has been the subject of intense interest for years. Why was AG Shapiro apparently determined to sweep the whole thing under the rug?

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