Saeb Erekat (photo, left), a top adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, announced on November 16 that the Palestinians have asked the European Union to support their plan to ask the U.N. Security Council to recognize an independent Palestinian state without Israeli approval. The Palestinians want to create a state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and east Jerusalem, all territories that Israel captured during its 1967 war with its Arab neighbors.

"We will seek the support of all members of the international community," Erekat told reporters in Ramallah. In addition to the EU, Palestinians also plan to seek U.S. approval, said Erekat. The proposal has the backing of the Arab League.

"If the Palestinians take such a unilateral line, Israel should also consider ... passing a law to annex some of the settlements," Reuters news quoted Environment Minister Gilad Erdan, a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel Radio.

A report in The Israeli daily Haaretz quoted from a response to Netanyahu and his allies  from the Labor Party’s Labor Industry and Trade Minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer, made to Army Radio:

The Jerusalem Post also reported that opposition leader Tzipi Livni, the current leader of Kadima, the largest party in the Knesset, asserted that the lack of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians is contrary to Israel's good.

"Unfortunately, there is currently no peace process," she said in a November 16 address to the Saban Forum in Jerusalem. "The sides must cease talking about negotiations and threatening, and simply pick up talks from the point we stopped. They will eventually end up there, and the time has come to do what is right."

"There is a price for the ongoing lack of action, and we are beginning to feel it. The reason the negotiations stopped was the elections, and not the failed talks. There was trust, which now is lost… nowadays there are talks for the sake of talks," said Livni, adding "It is time to stop with that and start pushing forward, because the passing time does not serve Israel's interests.”

If peace is ever to be found in the Middle East, particularly between Israelis and Palestinians, it must be done without interference from outside parties, including the UN and the EU. A strong part of today’s developments stems from the fact that the current national boundaries drawn up in the Middle East were done by the former colonial parties, including Britain and France, along with mandates from the fledging United Nations, without regard for historic rivalries between peoples of varying ethnic and religious backgrounds.

Furthermore, the interests of the Palestinian people are seldom served by the various bodies competing to represent them. These include the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its largest political faction, Fatah, the party of Mahmoud Abbas, based in Ramallah, West Bank. The Palestinian Authority is a subsidiary agency of the PLO, created pursuant to the 1993 Oslo accords between the PLO and Israel to administer Palestinian lands in the West Bank and Gaza.

The history of the PLO shows strong influence with the communist world, and that radicalizing influence has persisted through the PLO network, including the PA. Space precludes more detailed history here, but consider just a few examples of PLO-communist connections:

Following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the PLO began sending hundreds of recruits to terrorist training camps in the Soviet Union — in Moscow, Tashkent, Batum, Odessa, Baku, Simferopol — as well as East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Cuba. Arafat’s Fatah/PLO thugs, in turn, trained and aided Communist insurgents such as the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the FMLN in El Salvador, the ANC in South Africa, Khomeini’s revolutionaries in Iran, and Idi Amin’s butchers in Uganda.

In 1974, the Soviet Union invited Arafat to open a PLO office in Moscow. In 1979, Arafat led a PLO delegation to Moscow for a meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Boris Ponomarev, head of the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The minutes of that PLO meeting indicated that  the Soviets attached great importance to the PLO for Middle East strategy.

It is also noteworthy that the current PA president (and onetime Arafat protégé) Abbas earned his Candidate of Sciences degree (the Soviet equivalent of a PhD) at the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow. So highly did Abbas regard Arafat that he named one of his sons Yasser Abbas, after the PLO leader.

Until Palestinians can throw out their radical leaders, who are the descendants of communist-trained terrorists, Israel will always view them with suspicion.

It is also true that many Palestinian people were displaced from their homelands following the creation of Israel in 1948 and have suffered much economic hardship. It is to be hoped that a homeland for these unfortunate people can be established and will be governed by moderate individuals who can coexist alongside Israel as a peaceful and prosperous neighbor.







 

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rprew said:

What the Palestinians want and what they are entitled to "In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates:" - Genesis 15:18 "From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your coast." - Joshua 1:4 God gave Israel all of the land modern Israel currently possesses, plus all of the land of the Palestinians (the West Bank and Gaza), plus some of Egypt and Syria, plus all of Jordan, plus some of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. You don't have to like it, but if you have a problem with, it don't take it up with me. Complain to the person whose land it was to give, namely, God. God created it and He has the right and authority to do what He wants with it.

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rob wheeler said:

	... rprew, you've got to be kidding. How do you figure the "God" of 1/10 of 1% of the world's population is the rightful owner of anything. That is so off the deep end.
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Lee Gonzales said:

Covenants Our nation's first settlers - the Pilgims also made a covenant with God. The Mayflower compact serves as testimony to the very strictly religious people who came to America to practice religious liberty, preach the Holy Gospel and engage in the conversion of the native inhabitants. Much of our early American history is filled with examples of God's intervention in the early forming of this nation. There is no passage from which to quote from in the Old or New Testament, to show a contract between God the early settlers who arrived in America. Who can argue that a miracle occurred in Philadelphia in 1787. The people understood well this passage from Leviticus 25:10: "proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof" seriously, and helped to water and nurture the concept of liberty which bloomed in 1789 when the republic was born. Today Americans, who are the heirs of all of the wisdom of the ages on what constitutes good government, have been travelling on a path to destruction. We need to turn back on the road to liberty and the Constitution. Second Chronicles,7:14: "If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land."

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DDW said:

	Any nation/people/person Stupid enough to mess with Israer will end up completely and totally destroyed by none other that the Lord God himself. And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curseth thee: and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Genesis 12:3 And you, Rob Wheeler, are a fool.
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Lee Gonzales said:

	Rob jumped into the fool's pool DDW, people like rob say idiotic things beacuse they think it's cute and to blaspheme God. He obviously is the one who is off the "deep end."
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pasichoe said:

... rprew, remember that Jews are not the only middle easterners that are the children of Abraham. There is the rest of the house of Israel as well as the seed of Ishmael and Esau that have claim to God's covenant with Abraham. What right does the state of Israel have to claim all of it. "That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice. " Genesis 22:17-18 KJV

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rprew said:

The Bible is clear pasichoe, please not a couple of things. The land was given to Israel is mentioned twice. The first time was to Abram in Genesis 15:18. The second (and more extensive description) was given to Joshua in Joshua 1:4. This is clear indication that the promise was to Israel (Jacob) from his father Isaac from his father Abraham (Abram). Other claims are being made by other peoples who have no rightful claim. "And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of." - Genesis 22:1-2 Isaac was the only promised child of Abraham, a fact with which the Quran agrees. Ishmael had no part in the inheritance and promise given to Isaac through Abraham.

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