Who is responsible for the security of Israel?

For a year-and-a-half, from September 2000, we suffered one terrorist attack after another. We suffered and demonstrated self restraint. We wanted "to prove to world public opinion," as if it cared, how cruel the Palestinians are. "The Palestinian Authority," said the prime minister and his ministers after every attack, "must fight terrorism." Until Operation Defensive Shield came and cut the succession of attacks. Yesterday, instead of launching another such operation, "the most senior sources" once again reiterated the jaded mantra: "The Palestinian Authority must finally make a decision to fight terrorism."

Those who are morally and governmentally responsible for the attack in Jerusalem's Shmuel Hanavi quarter are those who once deluded us that "this time," despite all we've learned about the Palestinians, "it is different." The guilty ones are those who stopped at its peak - and very close to its successful ending - the war on the leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terror organizations who were running for their lives for fear of the targeted strikes closing in on them from every direction. Yes, as far as we're concerned the guilty parties are those who received, although they knew it to be fictitious, the "hudna," thus enabling the murderers to get organized and initiate in the past month hundreds of violent incidents, culminating in Tuesday's mass bombing.

The deputy director-general of Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital, Professor Shmuel Shapira, was full of praise for the restrained people who sat reading chapters of Psalms, instead of rushing around and harassing the medical teams. He, who has seen so many horrors in recent years, did not think of the blood-curdling symbolism of the spectacle. In the independent State of Israel, with its rare military capabilities, Jews are forced to put their trust - as in times and places where there was no one to protect them from attacks - in saying psalms.

But the secular Israeli government's call on the Palestinian Authority "to finally fight terrorism" is not essentially different, either: that too is an incantation which cannot effect a change in reality. Those who must "finally start fighting terrorism" are the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces and the rest of the defense forces at the order of the Jewish nation's government.

The prime minister's decision to "sever contact with the Palestinian defense people" like the "closure" and "siege," is similar in its effectiveness to saying psalms. It was not the Palestinian Authority that was elected to protect the citizens of Israel, but the Likud government. Even though it knew the hudna would result in brutal attacks, it gambled, as the Oslo governments did, on our lives and the lives of our children. It took a "calculated risk," as commentators and other public opinion makers called it. They, who backed the wrong move, also bear part of the responsibility. Even the IDF, so we heard and read, was, only a day before the attack, in favor of continuing the "gestures" and "calculated risks."

Incredible? It's a fact. But there was no calculated risk here at all. A calculated risk also has a chance of succeeding. As for this "calculated risk," the hudna, there was no serious person in Israel who did not know or warn that these, more or less, would be the results. Instead of reacting to them as we did after the Passover Eve attack, in an operation resembling Defensive Shield, Sharon and his ministers and officers made decisions as if the attack had occurred at the beginning of the terror war and not after about three years of incessant terror attacks.

At the end of the Yom Kippur War, then Colonel Dan Shomron happened to drive General Muhammed Al-Rani Gamasi, commander of the Egyptian forces, to a meeting with Major General Aharon Yariv. Shomron, later to become chief of staff, says the Egyptian commander told him on the way that only now that the IDF is sitting 101 kilometers from Cairo and some 40 kilometers from Damascus as a result of Egypt and Syria's strategic surprise - instead of the Egyptian and Syrian armies sitting that distance from Tel Aviv - does he understand that there is no point in fighting Israel any more.

Only some two months ago the Palestinians also came close to a similar understanding. What was missing, like in the Yom Kippur War, was the last effort, including the ability to stand up to the Americans and tell them that the road map too is conditional on vanquishing terror, and that only Israel can vanquish it. But the incomprehensible - but actually very understandable - weakness of Israel's leadership, which accepted the hudna and thus severed the military move that was supposed to bring the Palestinians to understandings the Egyptians reached 30 years ago, prevented the Palestinians from reaching that awareness.

This is the forgotten lesson of the Yom Kippur War - on the fronts we defeated the enemy unequivocally, there is, at least from the military point of view, a total ceasefire for a generation. It can be like this against terror as well. But every time we are on the brink of defeating it, we again succumb to the temptation of all kinds of interim "solutions", whose end is even more intensive, more cruel terror.

http://english.pravda.ru/columnists/2002/09/06/36102.html

Pravda.RU:Columnists:More in detail

14:20 2002-09-06

U.N. supports terrorist camps

The given article is published within the framework of the agreement on cooperation between PRAVDA.Ru and WorldNetDaily

At a time when the United States is being asked to double its contribution to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, not a day goes by that we do not hear about the benefits of these refugee camps.

The benefits are as follows: Suicide bombers come from the refugee camps to produce carnage on the streets of Jerusalem; killers take asylum in the refugee camps; mortars are fired from the refugee camps into Israeli settlements; food warehouses in refugee camps have been transformed into storage facilities for artillery shells, ammunition and mortar rounds; al-Qaida terrorist squads are based in the refugee camps; refugee camps organize official celebrations in honor of suicide bombers who kill Jews in Jerusalem.

This is really a terrific "benefit package," funded entirely by the United Nations who is asking the United States to double its contribution. What's wrong with this picture?

Who runs the "refugee camps"?

There is one agency with absolute authority over Palestinian refugee camps ... it is not the PLO, Hamas, Islamic Jihad or any other Arab entity.

The agency which runs these refugee camps is none other than the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

UNRWA was established by the U.N. after the 1948 war of liberation, with a mandate to administer "temporary shelters" until such time as the refugees were granted the right to return to the homes and villages they had fled in 1948, even if these villages no longer exist.

UNRWA remains the only refugee agency in the world whose apparent purpose is to perpetrate the status of refugees as refugees. There is no intention of solving the problem, only creating perpetual suffering for the world media to criticize Israel for its abuse of the poor Palestinians.

Every American should remember that on May 15, 1948, when Israel was declared a sovereign state by the U.N., the next day Israel was attacked by five Arab armies in an attempt to massacre the Jews and abort the birth of a Jewish state. To the shock and amazement of the Arab world, they lost that war!

When you declare a war v and lose that war v you must be prepared to live with the consequences of that war. The solution to the Palestinian refugee camps is for Arab nations to allow these people to immigrate. They have plenty of land, the same religion, speak a common language and are swimming in wealth created by OPEC oil. Why won't the Arab nations permit the inhabitants of these refugee camps to immigrate? Because a geo-politically ignorant American society sees CNN's 60-second film clip of the squalor in the camps and blames Israel for the problem. The problem has been sustained by the United Nations and the Arab League of Nations.

The official curriculum of the free United Nations Relief and Works Agency is based on the idea that refugees must remain refugees until such time as they are repatriated to their homes. The problem is that their homes no longer exist because of a war they declared and lost.

Sammy Meshasha, head of Public Affairs of UNRWA in Jerusalem, acknowledges that UNRWA is well aware of the fact that thousands of armed Palestinian Authority security personnel make their homes in UNRWA camps and that UNRWA does not object to such a bizarre arrangement.

Leading Palestinian Arab media analyst and Arafat cabinet member, Ghassan Khatib remarked to CNN, in a February 2002 interview, that every young man in the UNRWA Balata refugee camp now has his own personal weapon.

Where did the UNRWA Balata refugee camp residents get their weapons?

Each UNRWA camp hosts a local steering committee which is in charge of distributing the funds received as charitable donations from relief organizations and donor countries around the world. And it is that committee which decides whether to provide food rations or weapons with the money at their disposal.

UNRWA now runs 18 refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Employing a staff of 22,000, 99 percent of whom are Palestinian, the agency spends more than $700 million annually. The United States v which is by far the largest contributor v kicks in $64 million a year.

Its time for Americans to tell our president and elected officials we are tired of our tax money funding terrorist camps supervised by the United Nations to attack Israel.

John Hagee
WorldNetDaily

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