How I wish the Arabs would stop being the biggest crybaby losers in the world.
How I wish Netanyahu and the rest of the government would tell the world this reality in order to counter the Palestinian lies that have become the world’s idea of truth.
Thank you, Mr. Cohen, for writing this very important piece.
Abbie Applestein
Netanya, Israel
Israel’s Anti-Jewish Apartheid (II)
As the leader, for the past twenty years, of the semi-annual missions to Israel sponsored by Americans for a Safe Israel, I can strongly support the sentiments expressed by Mark Cohen in “Yes, Israel Is an Apartheid State.”
His description of the flagrant violations of Israel’s laws by Arabs is totally accurate. The rampant illegal Arab building, the Arab squatting on Jewish land, and the impossibility of a Jew safely entering an Arab village while Arabs roam freely throughout the land are all obvious to anyone who ventures out of his hotel in Israel.
We ascend the Temple Mount on each one of our trips and are subjected to humiliating delays, inspections, and police and Waqf escorts who quickly push us along our path lest we stop and pray. Prayer for Jews on Har HaBayit is strictly forbidden.
The administrative detention of Jewish youth is a deplorable device that appears to be used by the Israeli government to break the backs of the Zionist pioneers who devote their hearts and souls to reclaiming the land for the Jewish people. They do this at daily risk to their lives by menacing Arabs.
Jewish homes in Amona are threatened with demolition, hilltop synagogues are destroyed, while Arabs conduct a reign of terror that should get them banished from the land. All of this is intolerable in the Jewish state, the promised land of the Jewish people.
The question is, when will the Israeli government put an end to these injustices? It can’t be soon enough.
Helen Freedman
Executive Director
Americans for a Safe Israel /AFSI
No One To Talk To
As mayor of Efrat, a month ago I hosted leaders of the NGO originally called V15 and now known as Our Way. (This organization made international headlines in 2015 with its all-out campaign to defeat Prime Minister Netanyahu, hence its original name – Victory 2015)
As I occasionally do at such get-togethers, I introduced them to residents of neighboring villages to speak about reality from their perspective. Not from the standpoint of the media, not from their non-elected leadership, but rather directly from them.
Regularly, these representatives say they believe in co-existence. During this particular visit, one of our neighbors expressed an opinion that shocked the management of Our Way.
“In your democracy you put a prime minister and president in jail; with us, the president puts the democracy in jail,” he said. “We don’t want independence, we want to be part of your democracy!”
V15/Our Way advocates a two-state solution, so its leaders were shocked when they heard this and went back home with quite a lot to think about.
When Netanyahu several years ago declared his support for a two-state solution, he brought upon himself a considerable amount of criticism from the right, and since then he has repeatedly amended his initial statement with the observation that “there is nobody to talk to.” It turns out that Yitzhak Herzog, head of the opposition, also realizes there is no one to talk to.
With more and more Israelis beginning to understand that the Palestinians have no interest in ending the conflict, maybe the time has come to stop insisting on fulfilling the fantasy of peace at the present time or of unilateral separation.