‎“Why wasn't Auschwitz bombed?”‎

“It was easy for the Nazis to kill Jews, because they did it. The allies considered it impossible and too costly to rescue the Jews, because they didn't do it. The Jews were abandoned by all governments, church hierarchies and societies, but thousands of Jews survived because thousands of individuals in Poland, France, Belgium, Denmark, Holland helped to save Jews. Now, every government and church says, "We tried to help the Jews", because they are ashamed, they want to keep their reputations. They didn't help, because six million Jews perished, but those in the government, in the churches they survived. No one did enough." 

Jan Karski during an interview with Hannah Rosen in 1995. 

In August 1944 when Allied planes bombed the IG Farben plant, Eli Wiesel, noted author and survivor of Auschwitz who was imprisoned in Buna-Monowitz (Auschwitz III), the slave-labor camp of Auschwitz. Wiesel later recalled the event by writing;

“We were no longer afraid of death; at any rate, not of that death. Every bomb filled us with joy and gave us new confidence in life.”

For nearly three decades the failure to bomb Auschwitz during the Second World War and the Holocaust was a minor side issue rarely discussed. It was not until American historian David Wyman wrote an article in the magazine Commentary of May 1978 titled “Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed” was the issue awoken. His article included the startling photographs published by two leading Central Intelligence Agency photographic interpreters, Dino Brugioni and Robert Poirier.

Allied aerial reconnaissance units under the command of the 15th U.S. Army Air Force took photos during missions dating between April 4, 1944 and January 14, 1945.  A typical sortie employed two cameras equipped with lenses of different focal lengths. The photos were used to plan bombing raids,  determine the accuracy of bombing sorties, or make damage assessment. These 1944 US Air Force photos were redeveloped with technology available in 1978 gave a vivid demonstration of what U.S. intelligence could have known about Auschwitz-Birkenau, if only they had been interested.

One of these photographs clearly shows bombs dropping over the camp—because the pilot released the bombs early, it appeared that bombs targeted for the Farben plant were dropped on Auschwitz-Birkenau. Other pictures reveal rows of Jews on the way to the gas chambers. Wyman's claims gained considerable attention, and the failure to bomb became synonymous with American indifference.

 Aerial reconnaissance photograph of Auschwitz II–Birkenau extermination camp in German-occupied Poland taken in September 1944 during one of four bombing missions conducted in the area. Enlargement shows bombs intended for an IG Farben factory falling over gas chambers II and III.

The often asked question; “Why wasn't Auschwitz bombed?” Is not only a historical question but it is also a extremely moralistic question symbolic of the lack of Allied military response to the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust. The issue was launched in the late 1970s when aerial reconnaissance films, which had never been developed or seen by anybody during the war, were found by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts to show that U.S. bombers had flown over Auschwitz-Birkenau on their way to and from bombing other targets.

 

The first time an American president had ever explicitly acknowledged the refusal of the U.S. to take military action to disrupt the mass murder process was at the delivery of the keynote address at the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C., on April 22, 1993. President Bill Clinton said the construction of the museum would “redeem in some small measure the deaths of millions whom our nations did not, or would not, or could not save.” President Bill Clinton referred to America’s lethargic response to the Holocaust as constituting “complicity” in what happened. “For those of us here today representing the nations of the West, we must live forever with this knowledge--even as our fragmentary awareness of crimes grew into indisputable facts, far too little was done,” the president said. “Before the war even started, doors to liberty were shut and even after the United States and the Allies attacked Germany, rail lines in the camps within miles of militarily significant targets were left undisturbed."

The former Foreign Minister of Poland Władysław Bartoszewski in his speech at the ceremony of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 27 January 2005, said: "The Polish resistance movement kept informing and alerting the free world to the situation. In the last quarter of 1942, thanks to the Polish emissary Jan Karski and his mission, and also by other means, the Governments of the United Kingdom and of the United States were well informed about what was going on in Auschwitz-Birkenau."

Auschwitz-Birkenau “The Death Camp”

Auschwitz was the largest camp established by the Germans. It was a complex of camps, including a concentration, extermination, and forced-labor camp. It was located at the town of Oswiecim near the prewar German-Polish border in Eastern Upper Silesia, an area annexed to Germany in 1939. Auschwitz I was the main camp and the first camp established at Oswiecim. Auschwitz II (Birkenau) was the killing center at Auschwitz. Trains arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau almost daily with transports of Jews from virtually every German-occupied country of Europe. Auschwitz III, also called Buna or Monowitz, was established in Monowice to provide forced laborers for nearby factories, including the I.G. Farben works. At "least" 1.1 million Jews were killed in Auschwitz. Other victims included between 70,000 and 75,000 Poles, 21,000 Roma, and about 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war.

The capacity to hit targets in Silesia (where the Auschwitz complex was located) by the 12th Air force was possible as evidenced by the reconnaissance photos in July 1944. US and British officials decided not to bomb Auschwitz based on the technical argument that their aircraft did not have the capacity to conduct air raids on such targets with sufficient accuracy, and in part with a strategic argument that the Allies were committed to bombing exclusively military targets in order to win the war as quickly as possible.

As early as May 1944 the U.S. Army Air Forces had the capability to strike Auschwitz at will. The rail lines from Hungary were also well within range, though for rail-line bombing to be effective it had to be sustained. On July 7, 1944, American bombers flew over the rail lines to Auschwitz. On August 20, 127 B-17s, with an escort of 100 P-51 fighter craft, dropped 1,336 500-pound bombs on the IG Farben synthetic-oil factory that was less than 5 miles (8 km) east of Birkenau. German oil reserves were a priority American target, and the Farben plant ranked high on the target list. The death camp remained untouched. It should be noted that military conditions imposed some restrictions on any effort to bomb Auschwitz. For the bombing to be feasible, it had to be undertaken by day in good weather and between July and October 1944.

There are those who claim that the question of bombing Auschwitz first arose in the summer of 1944, more than two years after the gassing of Jews had begun and at a time when more than 90 percent of the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust were already dead. These detractors claim that it could not have arisen earlier because not enough was known specifically about Auschwitz, and the camps were outside the range of Allied bombers.

However the truth is, as I mentioned in the quote by the former Foreign Minister of Poland Władysław Bartoszewski in his speech,  that in 1942 a World War II Polish resistance movement fighter Jan Karski had reported to the Polish, British and U.S. governments on the situation in Poland, especially on the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust of the Jews. He had also carried out of Poland a microfilm with further information from the underground movement on the extermination of European Jews in German-occupied Poland. The Polish Foreign Minister Count Edward Raczynski provided the Allies on this basis one of the earliest and most accurate accounts of the Holocaust. A note by Foreign Minister Edward Raczynski entitled The mass extermination of Jews in German occupied Poland, addressed to the governments of the United Nations on 10 December 1942, would later be published along with other documents in a widely distributed leaflet

Karski met with Polish politicians in exile including the Prime Minister, as well as members of political parties such as the Socialist Party, National Party, Labor Party, People's Party, the Jewish Bund and Poalei Zion. He also spoke to the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, giving a detailed statement on what he had seen in Warsaw and Bełżec He then traveled to the United States and reported to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In July 1943 Karski again personally reported to Roosevelt about the situation in Poland.

With the German invasion into Hungary in March 1944 the Nazis confined the Hungarian Jews to ghettos. Between May 15 and July 9, the Nazis deported some 438,000 Jews on 147 trains from Hungary to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. To accommodate the large quantity of newly arriving Hungarian Jews, the Nazis built a special railroad spur directly into Auschwitz-Birkenau.

At this time the Free Polish Underground sent the Allies more explicit information about the process of mass murder from eyewitness testimony that the Nazis were sending four of the five arriving Jews directly to their death. On some days as many as 10,000 people were murdered in its gas chambers as the extermination camp was strained beyond capacity. The Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers were now operating around the clock, and the crematoria were so overtaxed that bodies were being burned in pyres in open fields with body fat fueling the flames.

Given here below is US Air Force Recon photographic proof of a  huge transport of some 85 boxcars is present at the Birkenau rail-head. Details of the compound, including the expansion into Section III necessitated by the large influx of Hungarian Jews, were observed.
A large column of prisoners, estimated at some 1,500 in number, is seen marching on the camp's main north south road. There is activity at Gas Chamber and Crematorium IV, and its gate is open; this may be the final destination of the newly arrived prisoners. In Auschwitz I, we have the other part of the drama, those sent "to the right," being enacted at Birkenau.
In front of the Main Camp Registration Building, a long line of prisoners is visible. This was undoubtedly the group spared death in the gas chambers but condemned to a living death in an SS work detail. They stand frozen in time, awaiting their tattoos and work assignments.
The prisoners sent "to the left" were deceived into thinking they were going to be showered and disinfected. After undressing in an anteroom, they were herded into the shower/gas chamber and put to death by means of Zyklon-B gas crystals introduced into the chamber through exterior vents. The bodies were then moved to the crematoria or external burning pits for disposal.

Approximately 310,000 out of the 438,000 Hungarian Jews where murdered by the Germans immediately upon arrival at the killing center between May 15 and July 11, 1944 a period of only 57 days or 5400 Jews exterminated per day.

In desperation, Jewish organizations made various proposals to halt the extermination process and rescue Europe's remaining Jews. A few Jewish leaders called for the bombing of the Auschwitz gas chambers; others opposed it both sides feared the death toll or the German propaganda that might exploit any bombing of the camp's prisoners. 

It is important to note that before the summer of 1944, Auschwitz was not the most lethal of the six Nazi extermination camps.
In actuality at Treblinka the Nazis had exterminated 750,000 to 900,000 Jews in the 17 months of its operation, or some 1780+ Jews per day 
At Belzec 600,000 Jews were  exterminated in less than 10 months or some 2000 Jews per day. The Nazis closed both camps these camps with the completion of their mission, the destruction of Polish Jewry in 1943. It was during the summer of 1944 that Auschwitz overtook the other death camps not only in the sheer number of Jews murdered but in the pace of their extermination. The condition of the remaining Jews of Europe was desperate.

In April 1944 two prisoners, Rudolf Verba and AlfredWetzler, managed to escape from Auschwitz made contact with Slovak resistance forces and produced a substantive report made contact with Slovak resistance forces and produced a substantive report on the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in great detail. They had documented the extermination process, replete with maps and other specific details. This was forwarded to Western intelligence officials along with an urgent request to bomb the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Once more the Polish Underground had provided information that they gave to the Allies together with intelligence gained from two other prisoners who had managed to escape shortly afterwards. This information became known as the "Auschwitz Protocols".

The report, forwarded to the U.S. government's War Refugee Board by Roswell McClelland, the board's representative in Switzerland, arrived in Washington between July 8 and July 16, 1944. The complete report, together with maps, did not arrive in the United States until October, since U.S. State Department representatives “neglected” to  mark the material as urgent.(see President Clinton's statement of "Complicity")

This was the first absolute and conclusive proof the Allies received that mass murder was taking place at Auschwitz. Limited information about the camp had reached the West before this date, but the Auschwitz Protocols removed any reasonable doubt about the scale and nature of the crime, and the Western media were quick to report the news. On 18 June the BBC broadcast a radio story about Auschwitz, and on 20 June the New York Times carried a report which explicitly mentioned the ‘gas chambers’ at Auschwitz/ Birkenau.

With the disclosures from Karski, Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr. together with his subordinate officials, demanded in late 1943 to remove responsibility for the refugee and rescue issues from the State Department- (Why was this done?)- in favor of an independent agency. At the same time, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, one of the major Jewish rescue organizations, persuaded a dozen influential Congress members to support such a move. Additional support and public interest consequently accumulated, and legislation seemed imminent.

Until early 1944, the Roosevelt administration declared policy was "rescue through victory," that is, rescue of Jews could only be accomplished through a military victory over the Germans on the battlefield.

Suddenly with these disclosures FDR issued an Executive Order on January 22, 1944 creating a War Refugee Board officially headed by the Secretaries of Treasury, State and War. Avoiding direct mentioning of “Jews”, the presidential Executive Order creating the WRB authorized it “to take all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death and otherwise to afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war.” The order directed all government agencies, and in particular the State, Treasury and War Departments, to provide the Board with whatever help it needed in fulfilling its mission. The Treasury Department housed the WRB and provided most of its staff, including its executive director, John W. Pehle.

In the War Department, because Secretary of War H.L.Stimson could spare almost no time out of his regular wartime duties, the responsibility in respect of the Board was relegated to his assistant, John J. McCloy, who in private was skeptical that the military should play a role in rescue efforts.

The Vrba-Wetzler report provided a clear picture of life and death at Auschwitz. As a result, Jewish leaders in Slovakia, some American Jewish organizations, and the War Refugee Board all urged the Allies to intervene. However, the request was far from unanimous. Jewish leadership was divided. As a general rule, the established Jewish leadership was reluctant to press for organized military action directed specifically to save the Jews. They feared being too overt and encouraging the perception that World War II was a “Jewish war.” Zionists, recent immigrants, and Orthodox Jews were more willing to press for specific efforts to save the Jews. Their voices, however, were more marginal than those of the established Jewish leadership, and their attempts were even less effective.

 By June 1944 information concerning the camps and their function was available—or could have been made available—to those undertaking the mission. German air defenses were weakened, and the accuracy of Allied bombing was increasing. All that was required was the political will to order the bombing.

In 1944 the World Jewish Congress implored the American government to bomb Auschwitz. In August, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy wrote to Leon Kubowitzki of the World Jewish Congress, noting that the War Refugee Board had asked if it was possible to bomb Auschwitz. McCloy responded:

After a study it became apparent that such an operation could be executed only by the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations elsewhere and would in any case be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant the use of our resources. There has been considerable opinion to the effect that such an effort, even if practicable, might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans.

The War Department had decided in January that army units would not be “employed for the purpose of rescuing victims of enemy oppression” unless a rescue opportunity arose in the course of routine military operations. In February an internal U.S. War Department memo stated, “We must constantly bear in mind, however, that the most effective relief which can be given victims of enemy persecution is to insure the speedy defeat of the Axis.” This was the internal policy of the Roosevelt administration to reject all the requests because it was opposed to diverting any military resources for humanitarian objectives from victory in the war effort.

There are those who assume that anti-Semitism or indifference to the plight of the Jews—was the primary cause of the refusal to support bombing, this may have been however the issue is much more complex. In a meeting of the Jewish leadership in Palestine embodied in the Jewish Agency executive committee, met on June 11, 1944 in Jerusalem and refused to call for the bombing of Auschwitz. Chairman of the executive committee David Ben-Gurion, said, “We do not know the truth concerning the entire situation in Poland and it seems that we will be unable to propose anything concerning this matter.”

Once the Vrba-Wetzler report arrived in Palestine, along with new information from the Zionistic Partisans and members of the Socialist Bund movement over the pace and extent of extermination. Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency executive committee had come to understand what was happening in Poland and they were forcefully calling for the bombing by July.

Jewish Agency officials appealed to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who told his foreign secretary Anthony Eden on July 7, “Get anything out of the Air Force you can and invoke me if necessary.” Similar requests were also made to American officials to bomb Auschwitz.

At the same time that the Jews were asking for the bombing of Auschwitz the Free Polish Army and underground were begging for aid in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 by bombing the city.

Yet the Americans denied the requests to bomb Auschwitz, citing several reasons: military resources could not be diverted from the war effort (as they were to support the non-Jewish Poles); bombing Auschwitz might prove ineffective; and bombing might provoke even more vindictive German action. On the other hand, the Americans did not evoke the claim that Auschwitz was outside the range of the most effective American bombers.

Military historians have challenged Holocaust historians in an ineffectual debate whole books have been written in recent years arguing about the practicalities of bombing Auschwitz. There is a general expert consensus that there would have been little point in bombing the railway lines to Auschwitz  since the Nazis would have simply diverted the transports to another track or found alternative means of getting the Jews to the camp.

So "What IF" if the gas chambers II and III would have been destroyed? 

The Germans had two previous gas chambers – known as Bunker 1 and Bunker 2 – which pre-dated these larger killing factories  which were still available for use at Auschwitz/Birkenau  that the Auschwitz Protocols had not mentioned

Bunker 1 and Bunker 2 would therefore not have been destroyed by any Allied bombing attempt, and they offered all the killing capacity the Germans needed from the summer of 1944 onwards, since by then the massive influx of the Hungarian Jewry had already been exterminated at Auschwitz/Birkenau.

So the debate rages on.

"Was bombing feasible, and when?" 

From what air fields would the bombers take off, and where would they land? 

What airplanes would be used?

What escorts would be required, and at what cost in men and material?

Could lives have been saved and if so how many?

And at what cost to the Allies?

But in addition to military considerations, political questions were at issue.

To whom and how deeply did the plight of the Jews matter?

Were Jews effective or ineffective in advancing the cause of their brethren abroad?

Did they comprehend their plight?

Were they compromised by their fears of anti-Semitism or by the fears they shared with American political leaders that the World War would be perceived as a Jewish war? 

Historians are uncomfortable with the counter-factual speculation “What if…” but we still bow our heads in shame and whisper "What if."

UNWRA: The Real Story

The subject of US Government funding for UNRWA has recently been addressed  in the news media following Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL) attempt to have an amendment attached to the funding bill for the State Department, for fiscal year 2013, that would require the State Department to provide to Congress:

1) the number of Palestinians physically displaced from their homes in what became Israel in 1948, and

2) the number of their descendants administered by UNRWA (that is, on UNRWA's rolls today as refugees).

UNRWA is the only international refugee agency in the world dedicated to one group of refugees, the Arab "refugees" of the League of Nations Mandated Territory of “Palestine”.  UNRWA was created by General Assembly resolution 302 (IV) on December 8, 1949, with the initial mandate to provide “direct relief and works programs” to Palestine refugees, in order to “prevent conditions of starvation and distress… and to further conditions of peace and stability”.

As stated on their web site:

• UNRWA is the main provider of basic services – education, health, relief and social services – to 5 million registered Palestine refugees in the Middle East.
• When the Agency started working in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees.
• One-third of the registered Palestine refugees, more than 1.4 million, live in 58 recognized refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

All other refugees of the entire world are cared for by the UNHCR -UN High Commission for Refugees under which, in total deference to UNWRA, works to get refugees resettled as quickly as possible so that they might get on with their lives.

UNHCR will assist these refugees in their resettlement even if the only alternative is settling them permanently in the place to which they had fled or to a third place.

UNRWA functions from an orientation that is not only highly politicized but extremely anti-Israel. It says that "its" refugees continue to be refugees even if they get citizenship elsewhere, that their status as refugees will end ONLY by "returning" to the area within Israel. UNRWA says that even the descendants of refugees are also refugees, indefinitely via the patrilineal line. Which means UNRWA promotes "return" to Israel of people who have never been here, and whose parents or even grandparents have never been here either.

So how did all this begin?

On December 11, 1948 the UN resolution (UNR194) which later created UNWRA, the United Nations Relief Agency, called for the return of ALL refugees to their homes and defined the role of the U.N. United Nations Conciliation Commission as an organization to facilitate peace in the region. UNR194 was adopted by a majority of 35 countries from among the 58 members of the United Nations on December 11, 1948; however all of the six Arab countries, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen who invaded the Mandated Area and participated militarily and lost were then represented at the UN and voted against it.

At the time of the vote Israel had yet to have been admitted to the UN. 

Only with United Nations General Assembly Resolution 273 was Israel admitted to the United Nations on May 11, 1949 after Israel consented to implement other UN resolutions including resolutions 194 and 181.

It is important to note that UN resolution (UNR194) was passed before the official hostilities of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War was ended in the 1949 Rhodes Armistice agreement.

Furthermore, the 1949 Rhodes Armistice agreement was a “Ceasefire” agreement that established Demarcation Lines between Israeli forces and the Arab forces most notably by that of the Transjordan Legion which occupied the West Bank, also known as the “Green Line”.  It was hoped that at this time that separate peace treaties would be negotiated within a short time.

This implies that there is in fact only a temporary ceasefire agreement still in place. That an actual state of war still continues to exist between Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen, the countries that invaded the Area of the Mandated Territory from 1948,

ONLY two Arab nations that invaded the League of Nations Mandatory Area in May of 1948 have signed negotiated and finalized peace agreements with the State Of Israel; Egypt March 26^th 1979 and The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan October 26^th, 1994.

Resolution 194 deals with the situation in the region after the majority of the Palestinian population who fled in mass, at the encouragement of the invading Arab “Liberators” and by mass hysteria spread by Arab propagandists of falsified atrocities, from areas of the Mandated Territory that came under Israeli control.

Hazem Nusseibeh, an editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service's, admitted that on the instructions of Palestinian notable Dr. Hussein Khalidi,  he fabricated a false press release stating that at Deir Yassin atrocities were committed including murder of children and rapes of pregnant women.  Another interviewee, Abu Mahmud, emphatically denied the atrocity and rape stories.

Nusseibeh, told the BBC that the fabricated atrocity stories about Deir Yassin were "our biggest mistake," because "Palestinians fled in terror" and left the country in huge numbers after hearing the atrocity claims.

As the signatories seem to be under the impression that all Israeli attacks on Arab villages were unprovoked, I strongly recommend that they visit Arab villages, which remained neutral in 1948 such as the flourishing village of Abu Ghosh. Mohammed Abu Ghosh has been quoted as saying;

"What we did, we did for Abu Ghosh, for nobody else. Others who lost their land, hated us then, but now all over the Arab world, many people see we were right. If everyone did what we did, there'd be no refugee problem . . . And if we were traitors? Look where we are, look where they are."

Little if any heed is taken of the Jewish population that had been similarly expelled by the Arab Legion from their homes in Jerusalem's Old City and in the West Bank. Nor of the Jewish refugees of the 22 Arab nations.

Some 900,000 Jews fled, or were forced to flee, their homelands following the creation of the State of Israel. As a result, the Jewish population of the Middle East (excluding Israel) and North Africa shrank from 856,000 to just 4,400 today. These Jews of Arab lands who were ethnically cleansed from their homes and properties did not wallow in victimization or becoming consumed by hatred and revenge, they resettled elsewhere with little fanfare and no attention whatsoever from the UN grateful to their adopted lands for making it possible.

Since the inception of UNR 194, not once have the "Arab refugees" of the Mandated Area of “Palestine”, through their leaders or those leaders of the Arab nations that invaded the area in 1948, have accepted any resettlement resolution.

The resolution called for the return of ALL refugees to their homes and defined the role of the U.N. United Nations Conciliation Commission as an organization to facilitate peace in the region.

The resolution consists of 15 articles, the most quoted of which are:

• Article 7: protection and free access to the Holy Places
• Article 8: demilitarization and UN control over Jerusalem
• Article 9: free access to Jerusalem
• Article 11: calls for the return of refugees

Many of the resolution's articles were not fulfilled, since they were rejected out right by the Arab states or were opposed by Israel for being too biased and untrue, or were overshadowed by war as the 1948 conflict continued until Armistice in 1949 between Israel and Transjordan.

Israel continues to reject the biased resolutions which call only on it to make concessions and to allow only “Palestinians” the right to return. Israel continues to point out that Arab countries expelled and have denied more than 900,000 Jewish refugees of their confiscated their property. 

Since General Assembly resolutions are not binding, and only serve as advisory statements, there can be no obligation or enforcement of Resolution 194

Now let us review some historical facts of how the conflict began.

In the aftermath of World War I the “Great Powers”, England and France, or as they are referred to in the League of Nations as the “Principal Allied Powers” divided the defeated Ottoman Turkish between them.

In this division of the Middle East new countries arose overnight where none had existed beforehand as stated in the Mandate Resolution:

"Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand-alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory."

The “Great Powers”, England and France, realized that they needed to appease the Arab leadership for there participation in World War I and to win concessions in the production of oil. They therefore conceded to the Pan-Arab Nationalistic movement and grudgingly allowed the creation of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and later Trans-Jordan.

Article 2 of the League of Nations Mandate For Palestine states that: “The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble...”

Under Article 22 of the League Of Nations, The United Kingdom – the Mandatory power -was appointed as the administration of the territory of Palestine as a “sacred trust”.

• Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country;

• Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,

The Europeans nations knowing full well their obligation towards the “Native Inhabitants” included:

it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

So who are the antagonists of this conflict?

The Jewish people, who with the establishment of the State of Israel in May of 1948 became “the Israelis”, and the Arabs or “non-Jewish” inhabitants of the Mandatory Area who since 1948 have come to identify themselves as the “Palestinian”.

For over one hundred years animosity primarily among the Moslem “Arab” inhabitants towards the native Jewish population began to grow. The slow but steady influx of religious Jewish immigrants prior to 1900, who yearned to return to a homeland lost known in biblical terms as Zion, had at times felt the hatred in acts of humiliation, violence and banditry.

The waves of a more Secular Jewish immigration envisioned in the birth of the Zionistic Movement in the post 1900 period began to settle outside of the five major religious centers in agricultural areas. These Jews with the help of philanthropists such as Baron Rothschild and the Jewish National Fund began to acquire land in areas though to be useless by absentee Arab landlords. With the successful conversion of these previously unmanageable swampy lands into fruitful areas the Arab neighbor’s animosity and anger grew.

During this same period the growth of the Pan Arabism nationalistic movement began to spread among the Arab peoples of the Ottoman Empire and with it the growth of hatred towards the Jews.

The influx of Jewish refugees from Europe during and after the Holocaust era and most particularly with that of the 900,000 displaced Jews of Arab lands, the fires of hatred in the Arab world grew proportionally.

“So then what of the rights of the “minority” Jewish population which had been "ethically cleansed and expelled by the Arab Legion from their homes in Jerusalem's Old City and in the West Bank”

Article 11 UNR194:

Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.

Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation,

So what exactly is the purpose of UNWRA?

Is it to perpetuate hatred and hostility by the "embarrassed" Arab countries who lost in their initial effort to eradicate Israel in the "Nakba" disaster of 1948?

Only in UNRWA's mandate is refugee status accepted as "hereditary."It's "Mandate" encompasses Palestinians displaced by the 1948 War in the Mandated Area of Palestine, as well as their descendants, including legally adopted children.

THEN

“If the UN recognizes Gaza and the area of the Palestinian Authority as a country called “Palestine” does this not terminate UNWRA?”

AND

"If so will not the Arab countries need to absorb those “Palestinian Refugees” born in Lebanon, Egypt, Gaza,Jordan and Syria?

“Where in resolution 194 is there a provisional allowing for the assisting of descendants of refugees of 1948 and the granting of them refugee status?”

Than if there is no provision than is UNWRA in violation of UNR194?

Who was Ernie Pyle?

Ernest Taylor Pyle was born on a tenant farm near Dana, Indiana on August 3, 1900 and he was “KIA"- killed in action on Ie Shima, an island off Okinawa, after being hit by Japanese machine-gun fire on April 18, 1945.  As a 1944 Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist, Ernie Pyle wrote as a roving correspondent for the Scripps Howard newspaper chain from 1935 until his death in combat during World War II. All of his articles were written in a folksy style, much like a personal letter to a friend. His stories were about the out-of-the-way places he visited and the ordinary people who lived there. His various articles were printed in columns in some 300 newspapers.

Pyle became a war correspondent following the entry of the U.S. into World War II, he reported stories from the United States, Europe, Africa, and the Pacific. As a war correspondent Pyle applied his intimate “folksy” style to relate his stories from the “Front”. Pyle strove to write “tales” from the perspective of the common soldier, instead of stories from “behind-the-lines” of movements of armies or the activities of “The Brass”. His literary approach of telling the story from the point of view and in the language of the “common man/soldier GI Joe” won him not only further popularity but also the Pulitzer Prize.  His stories of the GI’s won him their love and affection.

From his time spent in the front lines and in fox holes of the combat soldier, he wrote a column in 1944 urging that soldiers in combat get "fight pay" just as airmen were paid "flight pay." The members of Congress were so pressed by their constituents that they passed legislation, known as "The Ernie Pyle bill" authorizing $10 a month in extra pay for combat infantrymen.

Many now attribute the actual first publicized case of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome to that which Pyle publicly apologized to with his readers in a column on September 5, 1944, for being hospitalized with a “war neurosis”. He stated that he had "lost track of the point of the war" and that he hoped that a rest in his home in New Mexico would restore his vigor to go "war horsing around the Pacific”.

Among his most widely read and reprinted columns is "The Death of Captain Waskow." His wartime writings are preserved in four books: Ernie Pyle In England, Here Is Your War, Brave Men, and Last Chapter.

When Pyle decided to cover events in the Pacific, he admitted that his heart was with the infantrymen in Europe. Pyle’s comments, of the “soft life”, of the sailors of US Navy in comparison to the infantry in Europe, was openly criticized by fellow War correspondents in newspaper editorials, and even by his beloved GI’s for giving apparent short shrift to the difficulties of the war in the Pacific.

On April 18, 1945 Pyle was traveling in a jeep with Lieutenant Colonel Joseph B. Coolidge (commanding officer of the 305th Infantry Regiment, 77th Infantry Division) and three other men. The road they were on ran parallel to the beach two or three hundred yards inland.  As the vehicle reached a road junction, an enemy machine gun located on a coral ridge about a third of a mile away began firing at them. The men stopped their vehicle and jumped into a ditch. Pyle and Coolidge raised their heads to look around for the others; when they spotted them, Pyle smiled and asked Coolidge "Are you all right?" Those were his last words as Pyle was struck in the left temple and was killed instantly.

Pyle was noted for having premonitions of his own death and predicted before landing that he would not be alive a year hence. Though a war correspondent Pyle was among the few American civilians killed during the war to be awarded the Purple Heart.

He was buried with his helmet on, laid to rest in a long row of graves among other soldiers on Ie Shima, with an infantry private on one side and a combat engineer on the other. The remains of Pyle and the other fallen Americans was later reburied at the Army cemetery on Okinawa and then moved to Honolulu in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. After the war, when Okinawa was returned to Japanese control the Ernie Pyle monument was one of only three American memorials allowed to remain in place.

The Death of Captain Waskow

AT THE FRONT LINES IN ITALY, January 10, 1944 – In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas.

Capt. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. He had led his company since long before it left the States. He was very young, only in his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.

"After my own father, he came next," a sergeant told me.

"He always looked after us," a soldier said. "He’d go to bat for us every time."

"I’ve never knowed him to do anything unfair," another one said.

I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow’s body down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked.

Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack-saddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked.

The Italian mule-skinners were afraid to walk beside dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that night. Even the Americans were reluctant to unlash and lift off the bodies at the bottom, so an officer had to do it himself, and ask others to help.

The first one came early in the morning. They slid him down from the mule and stood him on his feet for a moment, while they got a new grip. In the half light he might have been merely a sick man standing there, leaning on the others. Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall alongside the road.

I don’t know who that first one was. You feel small in the presence of dead men, and ashamed at being alive, and you don’t ask silly questions.

We left him there beside the road, that first one, and we all went back into the cowshed and sat on water cans or lay on the straw, waiting for the next batch of mules.

Somebody said the dead soldier had been dead for four days, and then nobody said anything more about it. We talked soldier talk for an hour or more. The dead man lay all alone outside in the shadow of the low stone wall.

Then a soldier came into the cowshed and said there were some more bodies outside. We went out into the road. Four mules stood there, in the moonlight, in the road where the trail came down off the mountain. The soldiers who led them stood there waiting. "This one is Captain Waskow," one of them said quietly.

Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it in the shadow beside the low stone wall. Other men took the other bodies off. Finally there were five lying end to end in a long row, alongside the road. You don’t cover up dead men in the combat zone. They just lie there in the shadows until somebody else comes after them.

The unburdened mules moved off to their olive orchard. The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually one by one I could sense them moving close to Capt. Waskow’s body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him, and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear.

One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, "God damn it." That’s all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, "God damn it to hell anyway." He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.

Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain’s face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: "I’m sorry, old man."

Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said:

"I sure am sorry, sir."

Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.

After that the rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.

Epilogue: In his last will and testament, Waskow wrote:

“ God alone knows how I worked and slaved to make myself a worthy leader of these magnificent men, and I feel assured that my work has paid dividends—in personal satisfaction, if nothing else.... I felt so unworthy, at times, of the great trust my country had put in me, that I simply had to keep plugging to satisfy my own self that I was worthy of that trust. I have not, at the time of writing this, done that, and I suppose I never will."

The GI’s Cartoonist of WWII Bill Mauldin by Ernie Pyle

As a cartoonist foe the Stars And Stripes Bill Mauldin may have felt guilty that he was able to get out of combat. So when he drew his cartoons for the front line soldiers who did the actual fighting and dying. Along with the humor he was able to capture the grim and cynical side of the everyday routine of a soldier He incorporated some of the inside jokes of the “you had to be there nature” from their comments from his time spent among them. From his experiences and conclusions from his talks with the average “GI JOE” his cartoons showed an anti-war, anti authoritarian or pessimistic point of view. Though they were drawn for an army newspaper these cartoons were an honest and sympathetic view of the real combat soldier. Mauldin later wrote a book, Up Front, from these encounters were he attempted to explain what the average soldiers on the front line were like and what they were going through.

Ernie Pyle wrote this about Bill Mauldin:

IN ITALY, January 15, 1944 – Sgt. Bill Mauldin appears to us over here to be the finest cartoonist the war has produced. And that’s not merely because his cartoons are funny, but because they are also terribly grim and real.

Mauldin’s cartoons aren’t about training-camp life, which you at home are best acquainted with. They are about the men in the line – the tiny percentage of our vast army who are actually up there in that other world doing the dying. His cartoons are about the war.

Mauldin’s central cartoon character is a soldier, unshaven, unwashed, unsmiling. He looks more like a hobo than like your son. He looks, in fact, exactly like a doughfoot who has been in the lines for two months. And that isn’t pretty.

Mauldin’s cartoons in a way are bitter. His work is so mature that I had pictured him as a man approaching middle age. Yet he is only twenty-two, and he looks even younger. He himself could never have raised the heavy black beard of his cartoon dogface. His whiskers are soft and scant, his nose is upturned good-naturedly, and his eyes have a twinkle.

His maturity comes simply from a native understanding of things, and from being a soldier himself for a long time. He has been in the Army three and a half years.

Bill Mauldin was born in Mountain Park, New Mexico. He now calls Phoenix home base, but we of New Mexico could claim him without much resistance on his part. Bill has drawn ever since he was a child. He always drew pictures of the things he wanted to grow up to be, such as cowboys and soldiers, not realizing that what he really wanted to become was a man who draws pictures. He graduated from high school in Phoenix at seventeen, took a year at the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago, and at eighteen was in the Army. He did sixty-four days on KP duty in his first four months. That fairly cured him of a lifelong worship of uniforms.

Mauldin belongs to the 45th Division. Their record has been a fine one, and their losses have been heavy. Mauldin’s typical grim cartoon soldier is really a 45th Division infantryman, and he is one who has truly been through the mill.

Mauldin was detached from straight soldier duty after a year in the infantry, and put to work on the division’s weekly paper. His true war cartoons started in Sicily and have continued on through Italy, gradually gaining recognition. Capt. Bob Neville, Stars and Stripes editor, shakes his head with a veteran’s admiration and says of Mauldin: "He’s got it. Already he’s the outstanding cartoonist of the war."

Mauldin works in a cold, dark little studio in the back of Stars and Stripes’ Naples office. He wears silver-rimmed glasses when he works. His eyes used to be good, but he damaged them in his early Army days by drawing for too many hours at night with poor light.

He averages about three days out of ten at the front, then comes back and draws up a large batch of cartoons. If the weather is good he sketches a few details at the front. But the weather is usually lousy.

"You don’t need to sketch details anyhow," he says. "You come back with a picture of misery and cold and danger in your mind and you don’t need any more details than that."

His cartoon in Stars and Stripes is headed "Up Front . . . By Mauldin." The other day some soldier wrote in a nasty letter asking what the hell did Mauldin know about the front.

Stars and Stripes printed the letter. Beneath it in italics they printed a short editor’s note: "Sgt. Bill Mauldin received the Purple Heart for wounds received while serving in Italy with Pvt. Blank’s own regiment."

That’s known as telling ‘em.

Bill Mauldin is a rather quiet fellow, a little above medium size. He smokes and swears a little and talks frankly and pleasantly. He is not eccentric in any way.

Even though he’s just a kid he’s a husband and father. He married in 1942 while in camp in Texas, and his son was born last August 20 while Bill was in Sicily. His wife and child are living in Phoenix now. Bill carries pictures of them in his pocketbook.

Unfortunately for you and Mauldin both, the American public has no opportunity to see his daily drawings. But that isn’t worrying him. He realizes this is his big chance.

After the war he wants to settle again in the Southwest, which he and I love. He wants to go on doing cartoons of these same guys who are now fighting in the Italian hills, except that by then they’ll be in civilian clothes and living as they should be.

Upon Remembering A Lost Chance At Peace

After reading an article in Haaretz by Ephraim Sneh, I am reminded of the times when I ‎sat at Labor party meetings in Tel Aviv after the 1993 Oslo accords when the hopes for a ‎real peace where still alive. At that time we knew that there was a window of opportunity ‎to reach a peaceful solution to the “Palestinian Issue” and Yitzhak Rabin was brave and ‎understanding enough to attempt it. His vision was one of a peace built on the ‎understanding that a step must be made to advert continuous bloodshed and to give hope ‎to both our peoples.‎

"We can continue to fight. We can continue to kill – and continue to be killed. But we can ‎also try to put a stop to this never-ending cycle of blood. We can also give peace a ‎chance. We also promise that the non-Jewish citizens of Israel – Muslim, Christian, ‎Druze and others – will enjoy full personal, religious, and civil rights, like those of any ‎Israeli citizen. Judaism and racism are diametrically opposed.
‎...We view the permanent solution in the framework of the State of Israel, which will ‎include most of the area of the Land of Israel as it was under the rule of the British ‎Mandate, and alongside it a Palestinian entity, which will be a home to most of the ‎Palestinian residents living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank…We would like this to ‎be an entity which is less than a state, and which will, independently, run the lives of the ‎Palestinians under its authority. The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent ‎solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will not ‎return to the 4 June 1967 lines.”

‎

Yitzhak, as was in the case of most the Labor Party and it's members were against,“…the ‎establishment of blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria...” by those of the religious movements and their Likud associates who aspired to ‎the revisionist policy of the Greater Israel. ‎

It must be clearly stated here that ALL of Israel was created by re-settlement and yes the ‎pre-state settlement policy was similar in many cases. And it is true fact that ANY Jewish ‎presence in the “Palestinian Mandated Areas” was cause for Arab resentment and acts of ‎violence for over 100 years. The influx of Jewish refugees from Europe in Holocaust era ‎and most particularly that of the 900,000 displaced Jews of Arab lands, has fanned the ‎fires of hatred in the Arab world.
 ‎
What is ignored in all this debate is the fact that the disputed area of Judea and Samaria ‎was once part of the “Palestinian Mandated Area” allocated to the still born “Palestinian ‎State of 1947 whose leaders created the tragedy of the “Nachba” or Debacle. It was only ‎after it’s capture and occupation by Jordan from 1947 to 1967 that the area was termed ‎the “West Bank”.‎ And it was only after the defeat and withdrawal of the Jordanian Occupation forces that the Arab residents of the "West Bank" begin to consider themselves different as "Palestinians".

The brazen acts of many members of the “Settler” movement policy of “In your Face” or ‎‎“this was ours and will always be” heavy handed settlement policy in most cases did not ‎instill good neighborly relationships. It was and in many cases still is, the total lack of tact; by many of these New ‎Immigrant ‎settlers to the “West Bank”- the historical heartland of Judea and Shomron ‎whom ‎attributed to the rising Arab animosity and inspired the local “West Bank” ‎population to ‎rise up in the “Intifada. The brashness, defiance of any authority and superiority complex ‎of these Settlers who had no prior knowledge of the orient have made life unbearable to ‎most secular Israeli’s. ‎
The Arabs on the other hand have not been the perfect angels either. They have reacted ‎with some of the most heinous and revolting barbarous acts of violence.‎

Yes Israel should be able to create land swaps with the Palestinians as was proposed in ‎the Oslo Accords and to turn over some intensely Arab populated areas, such as Wadi ‎Ara and in compromise receive Rabin’s envisioned plan for the future border between ‎Israel and the new “Palestinian State” “...Changes which will include the addition of ‎Gush Etzion, Efrat, Beitar, and other communities, most of which are in the area east of ‎what was the "Green Line," prior to the Six Day War.‎"

Knowing Yitzhak personally through my meetings with him in the framework of the ‎Labor Party, as assistant local party secretary and as a backer of his, I knew of the deep ‎personal commitment he had to the people of Israel. Many of Rabin’s detractors ‎conveniently forget or choose to ignore the fact that Yitzhak was not naïve. He was born ‎in Jerusalem; to a Russian Born mother Rosa Cohen and an American father Nehemiah ‎Rabin, who was a veteran of the “Jewish Legion”- the 39th Royal Fusilier unit that helped ‎liberate Eretz Yisrael from the Ottoman Turks. As someone born in Jerusalem Rabin ‎knew the importance of Jerusalem

".‎..First and foremost, united Jerusalem – which will include both Ma'ale Adumim and ‎Givat Ze'ev – as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty, while preserving the ‎rights of the members of the other faiths, Christianity and Islam, to freedom of access and ‎freedom of worship in their holy places, according to the customs of their faiths."‎

As a Sabra and a Jew growing up during the 1930’s in the “Palestinian Mandate” he was ‎well aware of the growing Arab hatred of the Jews lead by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, ‎Amin al Husseini. He experienced first hand the murderous attacks upon innocent Jewish ‎residents by Arab “Marruaders” specifically during the "Arab revolt" in Palestine, which ‎took place between 1935-6 and 1939. Rabin knew fully well the difference between the ‎Moslem and Christian Arab mentality. ‎

"The primary obstacle today, to implementing the peace process between us and the ‎Palestinians, is the murderous terrorism of the radical Islamic terrorist organizations, ‎Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which are joined by the rejectionist organizations…We are ‎also repeating our demand that the Palestinian Authority fulfill its obligation, in ‎accordance with the agreements that we have signed with it, ..to intensify its actions ‎against the murderers and enemies of peace in the area under its control…"

Rabin had been raised in a pre-state culture of the Hagannah and the Palmach and he was ‎well aware of the price for Israel’s birth. These pre-state Sabras gained unique toughness ‎and a resilience from their clashes in defiance of the British rule. The oppressive ‎Imperialist British occupation force imposed upon the Jews of Palestine restrictions and ‎hardships in deference to the Arabs. These restrictions on weapons for defense forced the ‎Jews to use their wits to combat their Arab enemies.‎

Bravery in the face of death was known to Rabin as it is by all of us who have been in ‎combat. The famous term –“with you backs to the wall” is part and parcel of the ‎Israeli/Jewish mystic. Our knowledge of this term in Israel and as Jews is far greater. We hear ‎it constantly in the hysterical chants of the Islamists in all of the Arab countries that surround us who cry for our blood almost daily as ‎they cry to “Drive them into the Sea” or "Death to the Jews". As Israelis we know the truth of genocide when we ‎stand in reverence on Holocaust Remembrance Day in memory of SIX million ‎coreligionists who were murdered in cold blood simply because they were Jews and that there was no homeland to go to. The Arabs under the Grand Mufti made sure that the British kept the doors of the promised "Homeland Of the Jews" closed.

Yitzhak bore his sadness at the full knowledge of the cost that his soldiers under his ‎command paid for the establishment and continuation of the Jewish people in our ‎homeland inside of him. At a ceremony for the fallen soldiers I once noticed his deep ‎personal pain in his eyes, the quote often used 'Ut imago EST animi voltus sic indices ‎oculi'-"The eyes are the window to the soul" best describes what I saw that day in his ‎face.‎

In a conversation that we once had at the party offices on HaYarkon Street before his re-‎election to become head of the party and his subsequential election as PM, I told him ‎about the 26th president of US Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919) and I mentioned to ‎him two of my favorite quotes of Teddy’s from his Speech in Chicago, 3 Apr. 1903; ‎‎"The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything" and ‎in reference to speaking with Arafat and the PLO I recommended to him; "Speak softly ‎and carry a big stick; you will go far.".‎

We are also repeating our demand that the Palestinian Authority fulfill its obligation, in ‎accordance with the agreements that we have signed with it, ..to intensify its actions ‎against the murderers and enemies of peace in the area under its control…

Being a smoker is odious habit yet it allowed me to share many cigarettes together with ‎him in close conversation. Our times spent together were exceedingly short, with the ‎exception of a long conversation that I had the rare privilege of experiencing prior to a ‎meeting he had in the Birmingham JCC in 1983. His warmth, his honesty and ‎humbleness were exceptional for a man of his stature. On a personal basis one of my ‎greatest regrets is that I did not accept his invitation to be in Tel Aviv that fateful night.‎

If Yitzhak had not been murdered by assassin “the little man” Yigal Amir there would ‎have been a solution to the conflict. Yitzhak knew the Arabs, like Yigal Allon and ‎Alexander Zaid did and he knew how to pin Arafat down and make him understand. (In ‎the fashion of the original settlers of Eretz Yisrael) ‎

..From the depths of our heart, we call upon all citizens of the State of Israel, certainly ‎those who live in Judea, Samaria, ..., as well as the Palestinian ‎residents, to give the establishment of peace a chance, to give the end of acts of hostility a ‎chance, to give another life a chance, a new life. We appeal to Jews and Palestinians ‎alike to act with restraint, to preserve human dignity, to behave in a fitting manner – and ‎to live in peace and security.
..We are embarking upon a new path, which could lead us to an era of peace, to the end ‎of wars. "That is our prayer. That is our hope

It is too bad that dreams do not come true except in fairy tales. Where have all the real ‎brave leaders gone? The post Oslo scandalous and nefarious actions of the “Leader” of the Palestinians, ‎Yasser Arafat, destroyed the future of not only his own people but will cost the lives of many future ‎innocent Israelis and Palestinians.‎