By Isi Liebler

In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain proclaimed there would be “peace in our time” in defense of his disastrous Munich Agreement with Hitler. History testifies that his policy of appeasement and failure to confront the aggressive Nazi barbarians virtually made World War II inevitable.

In August 1993, just 20 years ago, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, strongly pressured by then Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, embarked on what he described as a “gamble for peace” and consummated the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization, an act which bitterly divided the nation.

Passionate debates ensued, but in our desperate yearning for peace, until recently many of us deluded ourselves that we were engaged in an “irreversible” peace process. Some of us even mesmerized ourselves into believing that Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, were genuine peace partners, despite clear evidence from their own statements that in referring to peace, they did so with forked tongues and their real objective was to end Jewish sovereignty.

In recent years the vast majority of us reluctantly concluded that the “gamble for peace” was a failure and that, in the absence of a Palestinian leadership genuinely committed to coexistence, any prospect for a genuine peace was a mirage. This has become especially obvious as Palestinian leaders even refuse to engage in negotiations without preconditions.

Yet, the vast majority of Israelis would still now endorse major concessions to the Palestinians if they were convinced that this would lead to a genuine peace.

Sadly, many — including some of our friends — fail to appreciate this and continue urging Israel to be more forthcoming about the peace process.

U.S. President Barack Obama reversed his former confrontationist stance toward Israel and now even publicly endorses Israel’s right to take preemptive military action to defend itself. Nevertheless, an “Alice in Wonderland” atmosphere still dominates U.S. Middle East policy.

Thus, Secretary of State John Kerry waxes eloquent over an allegedly revised and improved version of the so-called Arab League Peace Initiative.

The imperative of placating the U.S. obligates our government not to reject out rightly this initiative which “agrees” to accept minor territorial swaps from the 1949 armistice lines yet still incorporates the right of return of Arab refugees, which would result in an end to the Jewish state.

Moreover, the genocidal Hamas, with which the PA seeks to merge, has condemned the scheme and adamantly reiterated that it would never countenance any compromise.

No Israeli government could conceivably contemplate acquiescing to a formula in which the opening benchmark in negotiations requires acceptance of the 1949 armistice lines. This would entail east Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, as well as the major settlement blocs, effectively becoming Palestinian territory until an agreement to engage in swaps is consummated. Precedents indicate that it is highly unlikely that agreement on swaps could be achieved with the current intransigent Palestinian leaders.

In this context, we must not ignore the reality that both Arafat and Abbas refused, and even failed to respond with a counteroffer, when Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert offered them 97 percent of the territories over the Green Line.

Nor can we dismiss the criminal character of Palestinian society and the fact that the PA, no less than Hamas, inculcates children from primary school to kill Jews and become “martyrs,” and publicly sanctifies mass murderers and allocates state pensions to families of suicide bombers and terrorists in Israeli jails.

Indeed, even “respectable” Palestinian websites such as spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi’s Miftach recently published an article reviving medieval blood libels, explicitly accusing Jews of drinking gentile blood on Passover.

The Palestinian state-sponsored anti-Semitic brainwashing in the media, mosques and schools is in fact as lethal as the Nazi propaganda that transformed Germans into willing accomplices of mass murder.

It is thus not surprising that recent polls show that Palestinians are globally the most supportive Muslim nation favoring suicide bombings, with over 40% justifying them.

Those promoting Abbas as a “peace partner” or “moderate” would be hard-pressed to quote a single positive statement by him about Israel to his own people. He may tactically have reached the conclusion that diplomacy is more effective for promoting Palestinian goals than terror. But while he consistently stresses that this is a pragmatic strategic approach, his Fatah subsidiary continues engaging in acts of terror and the PA continuously threatens to revert to the “armed struggle” if it fails to achieve its objectives by diplomatic means.

According to Palestinian Media Watch, only this month Sultan Abu Al-Einem, a senior PLO official, “saluted the heroic fighter” who had stabbed an Israeli civilian to death. At the same time, Jibril Rajoub, cosigner to the Oslo Accords and deputy secretary to the Fatah Central Committee, stated that “popular resistance, with all it entails, remains on our agenda,” and that “if we had a nuke we’d have used it [against Israel] this morning.”

Despite the fact that Abbas has breached the Oslo accords by unilaterally obtaining U.N. diplomatic recognition and is now constantly threatening to charge Israel with war crimes at the International Court of Justice, the world continues today to pressure us to maintain the manifestly false charade of engaging with a nonexistent peace partner.

Moreover, the “peaceniks” and their Western supporters, including some misguided Jews and Israelis, still demand that the Israeli government be more forthcoming with concessions.

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From Max Samarov at The (LA) Jewish Journal:

Over the last month the UC Santa Barbara student government has been voting on a resolution to divest from companies doing business with Israel. As a UCSB graduate and former student leader, I spoke at two senate hearings and worked with current students to defeat the resolution. It should now be very clear that what we are fighting at UCSB is the local face of an organized, global propaganda campaign against Israel. 

Divestment activists at UCSB attempted to portray their campaign as grassroots and local. But evidence to the contrary abounds. Indeed, divestment is part of an increasingly organized and global movement. The language of the resolution introduced atUCSB was strikingly similar to those recently presented at UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and elsewhere. The Facebook pages set up in support of divestment at the different campuses werealso very similar. These campaigns were carefully synchronized. They hit Stanford first, then UC Riverside, then UC San Diego,  then UC Santa Barbara, then UC Berkeley, and finally UC Davis. As the drama was ending at one university it would begin anew at the next one down the line. 

Divestment did not happen overnight. It is the result of years of work by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and similar campus organizations. Their modus operandi is simple and extremely effective. They get involved in student politics, build relationships with student leaders, hone their talking points, and lobby. At some campuses, like UCSB, this issue has been elevated to the point where some candidates for student government run on a platform of divestment. The anti-Israel movement has evolved, drastically increasing its participation in the democratic process.  

It is clear that there is a well-oiled machine organizing and orchestrating this campaign behind the scenes…. 

BDS portrays itself as a progressive human rights movement, but nothing could be further from the truth. BDS uses anti-Israel propaganda to promote a fundamentally immoral and illiberal political agenda: the elimination of Israel as the democratic state of the Jewish people. Some BDS leaders and organizations hide this or avoid stating it explicitly. But the undeniable reality is that the third core demand of the BDS movement, the return of millions of Palestinian refugees to Israel, is a call to replace the Jewish state with a Palestinian state.

It is a very nice reference piece on the state of the campus BDS movement and their deceptions.

In 2003, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued a joint statement on antisemitism:

Recognizing anti-Semitism as a serious human rights violation, we also recognize our own responsibility to take on this issue as part of our work. It should not be left to Jewish groups alone to highlight this issue and to appeal to the international community to address it. We are firmly committed to joining their ongoing efforts and to helping to bring problems of anti-Semitism into the overall human rights discourse.

Now, in 2013, if you look through the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International websites, it is difficult indeed to find any condemnations of Arab or Muslim antisemitism. While they condemn anti-semitism in Western countries, I cannot find a single mention of the phrases “Arab anti-semitism” or “Muslim anti-semitism” on either of their sites. Their typical mentions of antisemitism are usually together with Islamophobia.

Given the daily antisemitic incitement in the Arab and Muslim worlds, this is yet another indication that “human rights” organizations have a significant blind spot and are anxious to judge Arabs and Muslims by quite different standards than they judge Westerners.

In the past two days I posted crazed Jew-hating diatribes shown on Lebanese TV, in a popular Egyptian newspaper. Also recently we saw two accusations of the medieval blood libel in Egypt, a newspaper series insulting Judaism in Jordan, as well as examples of antisemitism in the Iraq media, Saudi Arabia newspaper, a Palestinian Arab “human rights group”  and “peace activist,” and pan-Arab media, and many more.

It is endemic. But worse than that, the hatred is mass produced.

In 2001, a hugely popular 30-part Ramadan TV series aired in the Arab world based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was rerun in Egypt this year. 

Iran released an antisemitic movie last year.

Scene during filming of upcoming Khaybar seriesA purely anti-semitic TV series (“Khaybar”) is being filmed now in Egypt and Morocco to be shown in Arabic TV will be used to incite hundreds of millions of people against Jews duringRamadan next year to the Arab world. The filming of the series gets regular coverage in Arab media, and they make clear that it is meant to demonize Jews. The director doesn’t even attempt to hide the purpose of the film.

Naturally, “human rights” organizations are silent about that as well.