The authors are members of the board of the Religious Zionists of America. This is the third in a series. To view previous installments, please visit www.phillyreligiouszionists.org/lessons-from-the-gaza-war/.)

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is anchored in the premise that the mainstream Palestinian leadership has truly given up its old terrorist ways. Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement --the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization-- put down their guns and "recognized" Israel. The bad guys became the good guys, and the only bad guys are left are a small minority of Hamas extremists.
The Gaza war provides an opportunity to test that theory. Hamas kidnaps and murders Israeli teenagers, and fires hundreds of rockets into Israel. How has Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, responded?

On the first day of the Gaza war, Philip Gordon, the Obama administration's "Coordinator for the Middle East," lectured the Israelis on why they should make more concessions to the Palestinians, including apparently taking down security checkpoints in the territories.
On the third day of the Gaza war, the Palestinians reminded everyone why those security checkpoints should be remained--and even expanded.
Gordon began with the usual rhetoric about how "both sides" have not made the necessary decisions for peace, how both sides have engaged in "mutual dehumanization," and how "both sides" need to use restraint. In doing so, he underscored the inability of the Obama administration to distinguish between aggressor and victim, between a corrupt pro-terror regime and a reliable democratic ally--in other words, between right and wrong.

(The authors are members of the board of the Religious Zionists of America.)
The world's praise for Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas's opposition to the kidnapping of the Israeli teenagers has been as loud and frequent as the world's condemnation of the kidnapping itself.
President Obama, in his statement following the discovery of the victims' bodies, went out of his way to claim, not once, but twice, that Palestinian leaders were just as opposed to the kidnapping as Israel's leaders.
 

I am writing these words in my home, Kiryat Arba-Hebron, Israel. Forty-seven years ago this week, Israel liberated all of Judea and Samaria, Israel’s biblical heartland, in six days. On 28 Iyar (June 7th that year), they liberated the Temple Mount, where the Temple will one day be rebuilt, and the next day they liberated Hebron, where the Patriarchs and Matriarchs of the Jewish People are buried. Ever since that year, many Jews in Israel have commemorated 28 Iyar each year, thanking G-d for the miracles of those times.

You may have heard more and more talk recently about the BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanctions) movement against Israel. This radical, anti-Semitic movement is gaining strength and financial support in the United States. Its purpose is to delegitimize and denigrate Israel and its defenders, to isolate Israel and hold it to double standards, to cast Israel as an exiled pariah, and ultimately to wipe the Jewish country from the face of the earth.

The Notorious Durban Conference

Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions began in 2001, at the UN World Conference Against Racism, held in Durban, South Africa. A policy was adopted by 1,500 NGOs (non-governmental organizations) “of complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state,” and called for “the imposition of mandatory and comprehensive sanctions and embargoes, the full cessation of all links (diplomatic, economic, social, aid, military cooperation, and training) between all states and Israel.” This is referred to as the “Durban Strategy.” (Canada, the U.S., and Israel walked out as a show of protest against the one-sided anti-Israel charges.)

Hundreds of thousands of people from the charedi community gathered in Jerusalem late Sunday afternoon in one of the largest demonstrations in Israel’s history, to protest against a reform of the conscription law that would draft ultra-Orthodox men into the army or compulsory national service.

The huge crowd of people congregated from under the Bridge of Strings at the city entrance, stretching past the Jerusalem International Convention Center and down Shazar Avenue, branching off along large sections of Jaffa Road, Yirmiyahu Street, Sarei Yisrael Avenue, and other major thoroughfares.

                                                                  from the Jerusalem Post, March 2, 2014