EU urges Abbas, Netanyahu to meet Quartet
AFP, Strasbourg Wednesday, 28 October 2015/EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini on Tuesday urged Israel Premier Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to meet Quartet representatives “within days” in the hope of kick-starting stalled peace talks. “I have asked both Netanyahu and Abbas to receive the Quartet envoys in the coming days, not weeks,” Mogherini said, stressing the need for speed if an upsurge in violence between Israelis and Palestinians is not to spiral out of control. The Quartet comprises the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia and was set up in 2002 to promote what is known as the Middle East Peace Process. The peace talks, always difficult, stalled completely in 2014 despite the best efforts of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry but he has returned to the fray in recent weeks against a backdrop of worsening Israeli-Palestinian violence and Russia’s direct intervention in the bloody Syrian conflict. Mogherini warned the European parliament that there is a risk the Israeli-Palestinian dispute could get caught up in new conflicts in the region if the parties do not make an effort now to secure peace based on a two-state solution. “This is a risky time for Israelis and Palestinians alike… it is not business as usual in managing the old conflict,” she told the parliament in the eastern French city of Strasbourg. “If anyone believes we can just contain this… they are wrong. Every cycle of violence is going to be worse (than the previous one),” she said. Mogherini said it was essential to build confidence, to show the two sides by concrete actions on the ground that “they have a future in their lands”. Mogherini met Abbas in Brussels on Monday and Netanyahu last week in Berlin as part of efforts to revive the peace process.
Abbas to UN: Protect us from Israel, we need you
TOVAH LAZAROFF, JPOST.COM STAFF /10/28/2015
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addressed the UN Human Rights Council on Wednesday, saying that Israel’s actions against the Palestinian people have led to the current “explosion” of violence by Palestinian youth and that the time has come for the international community to move from words to actions to stop Israel’s violations of international law. Abbas accused Israel of carrying out extrajudicial killings, detaining corpses, terrorizing people, applying collective punishments and carrying out illegal house demolitions. “Israel acts as a state above the law, undeterred, unpunished and without accountability,” he charged. “I have warned for years of the consequences of what has been happening in Jerusalem and its surroundings,” he said in reference to the wave of violence against Israel. He accused successive Israeli governments in power since the year 2000 of systematically seeking to change Jerusalem’s historical and demographic character. Israel is “tightening the noose around the necks of the population by different means in order to drive them out of the holy city. I have warned that the pressure will cause an explosion,” he said. He accused Israel of trying to alter the status quo on the Temple Mount compound in Jerusalem, saying that this threatened to change the conflict from a political one to a religious one. He called for strong and decisive intervention by the UN and its member states, particularly the UN Security Council. The Palestinians do not want to continue fruitless negotiations for the sake of negotiations, he said. “The Security Council must shoulder its responsibilities and protect the Palestinian people. We can no longer bear the attacks by the settlers and the Israeli army. Protect us, we need you,” he said. He reiterated his vow made in his speech last month at the UN General Assembly in New York, that the Palestinians would not continue to be bound unilaterally by the Oslo Accords. “If Israel fails to commit to them, we will also not commit,” he said. Israel must bear all its responsibilities as an occupying power, the status quo can not continue, he said. “We will start to implement this declaration by all peaceful means,” he said.
Abbas invited the Israeli people to a “rights and justice-based peace.” Peace is still within reach if the occupation of Palestinian land is ended and settlement expansion is ceased, he said. “The formula is actually very simple.”This might be the last chance for the two-state solution, he warned. “After that who knows what the winds of change will bring.” He added that security cannot be obtained through occupation, but only through recognition of the other. He attacked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “justifying Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians” with his comments last week in which he said that Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Husseini had given Adolf Hitler the idea to kill Jews in the Holocaust.
Palestinians shot dead for ‘stabbing’ Israeli soldier
By Jeffrey Heller Reuters, Occupied Jerusalem Wednesday, 28 October 2015/Two Palestinians were shot dead after allegedly stabbing and wounding an Israeli soldier in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday. Religious and political tensions over a Jerusalem site sacred to both Muslims and Jews have fueled the worst wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence since the 2014 Gaza war. The Israeli military said that soldiers had approached two Palestinians they found acting suspiciously at a junction near a Jewish settlement. When the suspects stabbed and wounded one of the soldiers, they were shot and killed, a military spokesman said. Their families said they were 17 and 22 years old. Since Oct. 1, at least 58 Palestinians, 31 of whom Israel has said were armed assailants, have been shot dead by Israelis at the scene of attacks or during protests in the West Bank and in Gaza. Many of those carrying out attacks have been teenagers. Palestinians are angry over what they see as excessive use of force by Israeli police and soldiers. Israel says it is justified in using lethal force to meet deadly threats. Amnesty International said on Thursday that it has found some of the killings of Palestinians have been unjustified and that Israeli forces were using “extreme and unlawful measures.” In a statement the rights group said it has documented at least four cases in which Palestinians were deliberately shot dead without posing an imminent threat, “in what appear to have been extrajudicial executions.” The number of Israelis killed in Palestinian attacks rose to 11 after the death of American-Israeli Richard Lakin, 76, who had been wounded in a Palestinian stabbing and shooting attack on a Jerusalem bus.
Cameras
Lakin, a former school principal in Glastonbury, Connecticut, moved to Israel in the early 1980s. A Facebook page that appeared to have been set up by his family said that in Jerusalem, he had taught students of an Arab-Jewish school which is a rare example of co-existence in the city.Lakin was stabbed and shot in an Oct. 13 assault that killed two other bus passengers. His death was announced by Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital, and on Twitter, the U.S. ambassador to Israel called it “devastating news”. Israeli security forces, responding to the bus attack, shot dead one of the assailants and captured the other, police said. While tensions remain high, the focus of the Palestinian attacks appears to have shifted over the past few days from Jerusalem and cities across Israel to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and their frequency has also declined. But there has been no apparent action toward implementing a Jordanian proposal, promoted by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, to try to stem the bloodshed – by installing cameras to monitor Jerusalem’s flashpoint al-Aqsa mosque compound. Increasing numbers of religious Jews visiting the compound – which is Islam’s holiest site outside Saudi Arabia and revered in Judaism as the location of two destroyed biblical temples – have led to Palestinian allegations that Israel is violating a “status quo” under which Jewish prayer there is banned. Israel has pledged to abide by the long-standing arrangement. In a statement on Tuesday, the Palestinian Authority complained of “continued assaults on sacred sites” and said Palestinians would press on with what it termed a “peaceful uprising” until Israel’s occupation of land captured in a 1967 war ends. In a speech on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to continue to fight what he called Palestinian “incitement and terrorism.” On Tuesday, a Jerusalem District court sentenced Israeli-Arab Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the Islamic Movement’s northern section to 11 months in jail for incitement to violence over comments he made in a 2007 sermon. Netanyahu has accused the Islamic Movement’s northern section of stirring up the violence and has moved to have it outlawed.
World Jewish Congress slams Palestinian ‘culture of hate’
Sam Sokol/J.Post/October 28/15/The World Jewish Congress issued a scathing rebuke of the Palestinians on Tuesday, lamenting what it termed a “culture of hate in the Palestinian media, in schools and on social networks.”In a resolution passed during the organization’s Governing Board meeting in Rome, the international Jewish representative body both reaffirmed its endorsement of a two-state solution while casting blame for a recent escalation of violence on the Palestinian leadership. “The series of attacks against Jews in Israel is the direct result of incitement by radical elements who call upon Palestinian youth to murder Jews,” the board asserted. The WJC urged Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, along with the leaders of regional Arab states, to refrain from the spreading of “malicious claims against Israel, especially using inflammatory rhetoric.”Such rhetoric is used to “treat terrorists as heroes.”
Radical Islamists who brought weapons to the Temple Mount were singled out as “endangering this holy site and attempting to turn it into a battlefield,” while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts in “maintaining the status quo” and decision to prevent Knesset members from ascending the mount were lauded. The WJC also condemned UNESCO, both for its recent statements on the Temple Mount, which it termed a “litany of demonstrable falsehoods,” and for its description of both the Tomb of Rachel in Bethlehem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron as being exclusively holy Muslim sites.
The group did, however, describe UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova as having shown “great courage” for repudiating her body’s “flagrant distortion of history.” While the WJC said it felt great concern over Abbas’s apparent repudiation of the Oslo Accords during his recent appearance at the UN General Assembly, it did state that “two-states for two peoples is the only workable, realistic basis for a true and lasting peace,” and called for the immediate resumption of direct negotiations. WJC General Counsel Menachem Rosensaft said “it was a very well attended meeting representing Jewish communities from literally around the world and President Lauder stated his view that the two-state solution was the only viable option, essentially reaffirming what he wrote in his opinion piece in The Jerusalem Post and he stated his reasoning was this was his strongly held view and the governing board adopted a resolution reaffirming the position of the World Jewish Congress in support of a two-state solution.” Writing in the Post on Sunday, Lauder called for a swift resumption of talks, stating that “Rather than lay blame for what has caused this recent outbreak of violence, I am keenly focused on where we go from here.
“As we speak, Israelis are living in a constant state of fear. And lone, disaffected Palestinians are taking matters into their own hands, carrying out brutal acts. Some would say that there is no way to have constructive talks in this environment, but I believe now is precisely the time for dialogue,” Lauder wrote.
He called upon Abbas to reign in extremists while also stating that Netanyahu must “reach across boundaries with magnanimity and generosity to acknowledge the fact that President Abbas is the commanding voice for the Palestinian people, which deserves a state of its own.”
Earlier this year WJC President Ronald Lauder met with Abbas in Amman. The pair had previously met in London in 2012. While Lauder recently told attendees at The Jerusalem Post Annual Conference in New York that “no serious discussion about peace for the Jewish people of Israel can take place without a strong agreement for a viable two-state solution,” he has also been a consistent critic of Abbas. Speaking with the Post last year, Lauder said Abbas does not want peace. The Palestinian leader “could not have done more to destroy the peace process,” he said.
The leadership of the WJC is slated to meet with Pope Francis on Wednesday to mark the 50th anniversary of the Nostra Aetate declaration, a papal document that, which among other decrees, absolved the Jews from culpability in the death of Jesus.
