Today we’d like to feature an editorial by Amir Hanifes a member of the Druze community in Israel.

As published on Judeoscope:

Exposing the bigotry of UK anti-Israel boycotters
Amir Hanifes
As a holder of two degrees from the University of Haifa and a PhD student at the University of London, I traveled to Bournemouth for the meeting of the British University and College Union (UCU) as an Israeli delegate on behalf of the Israeli Council for Academic Freedom.

The discussions at the meeting regarding the imposition of a boycott on Israeli academia took place in a hostile environment while ignoring all the facts we presented regarding freedom of expression and academic freedom at Israeli institutions of higher learning.

Evidence that Israeli lecturers who hold pro-Palestinian views are able to express their positions uninterrupted both in their research work and lectures, as well as in the media, had no effect whatsoever on the discussions.

Even when we presented a list of organizations and research centers that operate in the framework of Israeli universities and boast Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Arab cooperation, with the promotion of ties between the peoples their top agenda, it did not make a difference.

The same was true when it came to calls by Palestinian lecturers and figures, including al-Quds University President Sari Nusseibah and Minister Raleb Majadele urging the UCU to refrain from boycotting their Israeli colleagues.

Boycott leaders in Bournemouth ignored the figures I presented to them regarding the University of Haifa and the fact that close to 20 percent of students there are members of minority groups in Israel – apparently, we will also be subjected to the boycott.

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As published in The Guardian. From our Prime Minister:

1967: Israel cannot make peace alone
We must pursue a comprehensive solution with energy and vision, writes Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert

Wednesday June 6, 2007
The Guardian

Six days, 40 years ago. Looking back to the weeks preceding the war, it may be difficult for you to imagine just how desperate life seemed for Israelis, ringed by peoples whose armies pointed their weapons towards us, whose leaders daily promised the imminent destruction of our state and whose newspapers carried crude cartoons of Jews being kicked off the face of the earth. As we consecrated mass graves in expectation of the worst, we were once again people facing annihilation. We had no alternative but to defend ourselves, no strategic allies to ensure our survival. We stood alone.

Our victory in those six days in June 1967 – swift, complete and totally unexpected – showed us and the world we were not going to be wiped off the map that easily. Israel fought an unwanted war to defend her very existence, and today there are still leaders who call for Israel to be wiped off the map. But there is a danger that that will be forgotten, overtaken by a re-reading of history. Our survival in 1967 is now, in the eyes of the world and, with worrying consequences in the UK, the original sin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Our opponents argue against the ongoing “occupation” as if it were the Gordian knot of the conflict. If only we were to leave the territories the conflict would end. And they threaten international isolation if we do not.

If only the conflict were so simple; if only the answer were so simple. Over the last 15 years, successive Israeli governments have initiated talks with the Palestinians in every conceivable permutation in an attempt to reach a settlement. In the 1990s, Israel withdrew from all the Palestinian cities in the West Bank, handing its affairs over to a Palestinian Authority. Nearly two years ago, Israel withdrew its troops and civilians from Gaza, with no preconditions. Last year my Kadima party came to power on an agenda promising further withdrawals. In the face of concessions that have threatened our own domestic consensus, the constant refrain has been the Palestinian refusal to end its violent attacks on our citizens.

Palestinian violence is not a response to the capture of the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian nationalism’s roots are not so shallow. From the emergence of the Zionist movement over 100 years ago, Arabs have opposed our claim to independence on our historic homeland, often violently. Our conflict is not territorial, it is national.

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Ynet News put together a very interesting special report today on the 40th anniversary.

Here it is.

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**Video courtesy of Hollyyyyy on YouTube**

We think the NYT did an important job of addressing these disturbing and incredibly hypocritical trends among Britain’s unions to single out the Jewish State for censure regarding a decades old conflict fraught with complexity.

As the Times points out, Israeli journalists and academics are some of the state’s harshest critics as are Israel’s vibrant, creative, loving and humane citizens. Being a critic, however, means just that. Engaging and criticizing not slandering and de-legitimizing.

We want to solve this conflict more than anyone else in the world. We want to have a normal life without fear of missiles, rockets, suicide bombs, regional wars, and nuclear annihilation. We want to have peace with our neighbors as we have done with Egypt and Jordan and tried with the Palestinians in 2000, and will continue to try. But how can we feel secure when Iran’s leader continually calls for our destruction, Hamas continually call for our destruction, Hezbollah continues to call for our destruction, and the British Unions turn around and boycott us.

From the New York Times Editorial Board:

June 3, 2007
Editorial
Malicious Boycotts
The University and College Union, a newly formed British union of college teachers, shamefully called last week for a boycott on contacts and exchanges with Israeli academic institutions. That follows on the shameful call in April by the National Union of Journalists in Britain to boycott Israeli goods.

It is hard to imagine two organizations that should be less given to such nonsense. Who would respect the judgment of a scholar who selects or rejects colleagues on political grounds? Who would trust the dispatches of a reporter who has been openly engaged against one side of a conflict? The unions argue that they have an obligation to demonstrate labor-union solidarity with the oppressed, as they did in opposing apartheid. That is absurd.

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Here’s a video of Qassam missiles collected by the Sderot police department.

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This says it all.

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**The video above is of an earlier Qassam missile attack on Israel**

Palestinian terror groups, namely Hamas and Islamic Jihad, continue with their campaign of missile fire on Israeli civilians, and have murdered a 35 year old woman today while she sat in her car. Over 100 missiles have been launched into Israeli cities and towns in the past week alone.

Israel left Gaza two years ago in the hope of creating a space to build peace. Since then Hamas has come to power, and cynically they continue spending their energies and money on weapons to terrorize innocent civilians both in Israel and amongst their Palestinian co-nationals in Gaza. Instead of investing in the institutions of statehood like education, health services, infrastructure, jobs, etc, Hamas chooses to smuggle tons of munitions, guns, missiles and bombs into Gaza.

As Hezbollah proved in Lebanon, and Hamas is proving now in the Palestinian territories, when terror groups bent on the destruction of their neighbors are elected into office, they do not moderate their positions. In fact, their incorporation emboldens their apocalyptic goals and they wind up dragging the region into conflict.

From YNET:
Woman killed in Sderot rocket attack

Qassam hits car near southern town’s commercial center, critically injuring a woman and moderately wounding another man. More than 10 rockets fired from Gaza Strip since Monday morning

Roi Mandel

A woman was killed and another man was moderately injured Monday evening as a Qassam rocket hit a car at a commercial center in the southern town of Sderot, near a bakery.

Five rockets were fired at the southern town at around 8 pm.Two landed south of Ashkelon, one landed in Sderot and two in the western Negev.

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The recent conflicts unfolding in Southern Israel/Gaza and in Northern Lebanon/Nahr el-Bared camp are eerily similar in that in both cases you have terror groups cynically hiding behind civilians while provoking a fight with another power. As long as extremists are allowed to sow their violent ideologies and practices, whether it is launching missiles into Israel or spreading unrest in Lebanon, these conflicts will continue without resolution.

To create the conditions for peace these extremists must be confronted one way or another.
Here is some background on the conflicts raging in Lebanon and Southern Israel/Gaza.

From YNET:
Lebanese troops tighten siege of camp

Soldiers pound Palestinian refugee camp with artillery day after worst eruption of violence since end of1975-90 civil war

Lebanese troops tightened a siege of a Palestinian refugee camp Monday where a shadowy group suspected of ties to al-Qaeda was holed up, pounding it with artillery a day after the worst eruption of violence since the end of the 1975-90 civil war.

The death toll from Sunday’s violence climbed to near 50, but it was not known how many civilians have been killed inside the Nahr el-Bared camp on the outskirts of the northern port city of Tripoli, the scene of the heaviest fighting. No new deaths on Monday have been reported.

Lebanese officials said one of the men killed Sunday was a suspect in a failed German train bombing — another indication the camp had become a refuge for Fatah Islam militants planning attacks outside of Lebanon. In the past, others affiliated with the group in the camp have said they were aiming to send trained fighters into Iraq and the group’s leader has been linked to al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The rest is here.

From HAARETZ:
Hamas, Fatah officials: Internal fighting in Gaza is far from over

By Avi Issacharoff

Members of both Hamas and Fatah said Monday that internal infighting was far from over, just one day after Egyptian mediators announced a new cease-fire aimed at ending nine days of fighting that has left roughly 50 people dead.

The fighting between Fatah and Hamas has abated in recent days, as Israel has responded to a heavy Qassam rocket fire with a bombing campaign against Hamas targets, but tensions remain high.

“The Israeli attacks will only postpone the internal fighting but will not end it,” said senior Fatah official Ziad Abu Ein. “As long as there are many guns out on the streets it is very easy to renew Palestinian-Palestinian fighting.”

The rest is here.

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This issue has been a topic of constant debate. How do journalists cover the Israeli/Arab conflict, or for that matter any conflict, in a fair and balanced way when journalists are threatened with kidnapping and death? Alan Johnston is still missing, and as the report below highlights, others have been killed and many are now avoiding the Gaza Strip altogether. There are also persistent reports of journalists being threatened by terror groups if their reports reflect those groups’ actions in a negative way.

Ultimately, this raises the point that open societies struggling against terror groups sometimes become media victims of their own openness. When a journalist is free to cover every aspect, political debate and flaw of one society, but is unable to move and report freely about the other society engaged in the conflict the news will surely be skewed.

How can this be addressed?

From Haaretz:
For Gaza journalists, kidnap is no longer the biggest fear

By Avi Issacharoff

What happened last Friday to Abd a-Salem Abu Askar, the head of Abu Dhabi television in the territories, is the nightmare of every journalist in the Gaza Strip.

At about 7:30 P.M. that day, Abu Askar left his house in Gaza City. Some 200 meters away, he ran into a roadblock manned by masked gunmen, who demanded his identification card. Then one radioed: “We’ve detained Abu Askar.” Abu Askar managed to call his office and say that he had been kidnapped; a few minutes later, a van carrying 10 gunmen arrived, removed him from his car, beat him up and took him to an unknown location.

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