John Kerry: U.S. views all Jewish communities beyond pre-1967 lines as ‘illegitimate’
(JNS.org) Reacting to Israel’s announcement of 1,200 new housing units in eastern Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday that the U.S. “views all of the settlements as illegitimate.”
Israel is “only building within the borders of communities established before [the 1993] Oslo [Accords] on unallocated land that Jordan illegally occupied from 1948 to 1967, that the UN never recognized as sovereign Arab land,” Morton A. Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, told JNS.org.
“Why isn’t Kerry complaining about illegal Arab building [within those borders], and [PA President Mahmoud] Abbas’s racist proclamation that no Jews will be allowed in Palestine?” Klein asked, referring to Abbas’s recent statement that ruled out the “presence of a single Israeli” in a future Palestinian state.
Sarah Stern, founder and president of the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), told JNS.org that Kerry’s statement was “almost racist.” She said it is ironic that Israel, the Jewish state, would be asked to remove all Jews from certain communities.
“Why should Israel be the only country that has certain areas within it as Judenrein (clean of Jews)?” Stern asked.
The territories acquired by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War are considered disputed and subject to the result of final status negotiations. In 2004, President George W. Bush wrote in a letter to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that it is “unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.”
“Ever since the Six-Day War, countless presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have said that the 1967 lines were indefensible, and that there was no way that Israel should go back to the 1967 lines,” Stern told JNS.org.
Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, wrote in a November 2011 for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs that the U.S. “has historically backed Israel’s view that UN Security Council Resolution 242, adopted in the wake of the Six-Day War on November 22, 1967, does not require a full withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines.” Gold wrote that the U.S. position on Israel’s borders is important because it “directly affects the level of expectation of the Arab side regarding the depth of the Israeli concessions they can obtain.”
“To the extent that the U.S. limits its demands of Israel through either presidential declarations or statements of the secretary of state, then the Arab states and the Palestinian Arabs will have to settle for less in terms of any Israeli withdrawal,” Gold wrote.
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Palestinian terrorist group, after rocket attack, says Eilat ‘will never enjoy security’
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) Hours after a Grad rocket was intercepted by an Israeli Iron Dome battery in the southern city of Eilat for the first time, a Salafi Palestinian terror organization claimed responsibility for the attack. The group claimed the rocket attack was in retaliation for a weekend drone strike, attributed to Israel by foreign media, which killed four Palestinian terrorists as they were readying to launch a rocket into Israel.
The Salafi group—The Mojahideen Shura Council Environs of Jerusalem—which operates in Sinai and the Gaza Strip, issued a statement on Tuesday saying, “We bombed Umm al-Rashrash (the Arabic name for Eilat) with a Grad rocket was a rapid response to the crime committed by Jews recently, in which four jihadi fighters were killed by drone in Sinai.”
The organization went on to issue threats, saying, “The Mojahideen have infused fear and awe into the hearts of the criminal Jews who were forced to scurry into bomb shelters in the middle of the night. Some of them got scared and announced that three rockets had been fired, and some of them were intercepted.”
“We want to emphasize that Eilat and other Jewish cities will never enjoy security, tourism or a flourishing economy. The Jews will pay for the jihadi fighters who died in Sinai. Sinai will stand strong against Israeli aggression,” the statement said.
Security forces rushed to Eilat after loud explosions were heard over the city at 1 a.m. Tuesday. Preliminary investigations showed that the Grad rocket had been fired from the Sinai Peninsula as part of a salvo of rockets fired toward Eilat. The Iron Dome only intercepted the rocket that was calculated to have been heading toward a populated area. The IDF Spokesperson’s Office confirmed that it was Iron Dome’s first successful interception in Eilat.
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Aliyah 2013: Nefesh B’Nefesh flight brings 331 immigrants, 125 future IDF soldiers to Israel
(JNS.org) NEW YORK—At a pre-departure ceremony on Monday in the El Al Airlines terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, Rabbi Yehoshua Fass, co-founder and executive director of the Nefesh B’Nefesh aliyah organization, welcomed 331 soon-to-be Israelis, including a record 125 men and women who will enlist in the Israel Defense Forces, to their life-changing flight.
“For 11 years, on 29 flights, I have welcomed thousands as they make their way to Israel,” Fass said. “And, it doesn’t get any less emotional. All of you, from diverse backgrounds, are coming together in a unified dream—to make Israel your home.”
Forty-one families and 88 children were on the aliyah flight chartered by Nefesh B’Nefesh (NBN). Upon arrival in Israel on Tuesday, a formal gathering of some 1,600 people greeted the new immigrants. Government officials, an IDF general, and Jewish organizational professionals welcomed a group of olim that—besides for the record number of future soldiers—included doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, and accountants who began their new lives in Israel.
“These are Jews who want to come home,” NBN’s Fass told JNS.org. “They feel viscerally connected to the Jewish people. Their emotional connection to Zionism is palpable.”
—Maxine Dovere
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Preceding provided by JNS.org