Avskaffa Israel?

Bush notes that he was supportive of Olmert going after Hizbullah following its cross-border attack on IDF soldiers.

He also held the international community at bay to give time for Israel to badly damage the terrorist group and its backers in Damascus and Teheran.

“Unfortunately they mishandled their opportunity,” he says, pointing to Israel bombing campaigns “of questionable military value,” including of sites in northern Lebanon.

http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=194170

Bush writes in the memoir that he believes that Olmert’s “execution of the strike” made up for the humiliation and loss of confidence that Israelis had suffered following their 2006 war against Hizbullah in Lebanon, which Bush feels was bungled.

http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=194170

Bush writes positively about the importance of the US relationship with Israel and the Jewish state’s justified concerns over its security, relating how a helicopter ride he took with Ariel Sharon, “a bull of a man,” in 1998 while he was governor of Texas made him “convinced that we had a responsibility to keep the relationship strong.”

http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=194538

WASHINGTON – Former US president George W. Bush indicates that both Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas were willing to publicly back Olmert’s proposed peace agreement before Olmert’s ouster as prime minister ruined the deal, according to a memoir to be released on Tuesday.

[...]

“We devised a process to turn [Olmert’s] private offer into a public agreement,” Bush writes of the secret peace deal worked out between the then-prime minister of Israel and Palestinian Authority president. “Olmert would travel to Washington and deposit his proposal with me. Abbas would announce that the plan was in line with Palestinian interests. I would call the leaders together to finalize the deal.”

That agreement was to include handing over the “vast majority” of the West Bank to the Palestinians, building a tunnel to connect it to the Gaza Strip, allowing a “limited number” of Palestinian refugees into Israel, establishing Jerusalem as a joint capital and entrusting control of the holy sites to “a panel of nonpolitical elders.”

But then Olmert was forced to resign his premiership because of corruption allegations, and Abbas “didn’t want to make an agreement with a prime minister on his way out of office,” Bush relates.

http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=194538

Bush also castigates Olmert for declaring that he wouldn’t attack Syria, a major Hizbullah patron.

“Removing the threat of retaliation let Syria off the hook and emboldened them to continue their support for Hizbullah,” he chides. Eventually, as more of the world shifted against Israel, Bush lifted his opposition to a UN-brokered cease-fire, to avoid alienating the international community he wanted to join him in isolating Syria and Iran.

http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=194538

My point is this: Who cares when the Bilal ibn Rabah Mosque was built? If UNESCO is saying Rachel’s Tomb is holy to three religions, why do we have to insist that’s it’s only holy to one, to our religion?

And even if it’s true that the Palestinians only put up a mosque at Rachel’s Tomb to compete with the Jewish claim to the site, we Jews have been doing the same thing to them all over this country. Muslims destroyed Jewish synagogues and cemeteries? Israel destroyed Muslim mosques and cemeteries.

“[T]he history of the struggle on the holy sites is not about the war of the Jewish sons of light against the Palestinian sons of darkness, but the story of a war in which both sides have committed barbaric acts to the other’s holy sites,” wrote Meron Benvenisti, a historian and former Jerusalem deputy mayor, in Haaretz in 2005.

After the War of Independence, Israel destroyed some 100 of the 140 mosques that had stood in the emptied-out Arab villages, he wrote. The 40 mosques left standing were put to use by Israeli Jews. “The mosque of an abandoned village in the Irron Valley serves [as] a kibbutz carpentry. A mosque in an artists’ community in the Carmel serves partly as a restaurant and bar. Other mosques serve as museums and galleries,” Benvenisti wrote. He added: “And we haven’t even mentioned yet the tombs of sheikhs that have become graves of holy Jewish figures...”

But we’re not supposed to think about that kind of stuff – we’re only supposed to go on hollering “delegitimization!” at UNESCO. And at the next anti-Semite of the month. Remember: When anybody accuses Israel of lording it over the Arabs, the best defense is a good offense.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=194807