Newt Gingrich is correct. The Palestinians were invented as a nation.

So what? There are a great many invented nations in the world today. No one suggests that Timor is “invented” or that the bloody Congo is “invented”.

History will not change the present. Israel has to deal with the Palestinians in 2011, no matter who they were in 1948 or 1917 or 800 AD. The harsh reality that everyone resists is that you ALWAYS have to deal with things as they are, and not with things the way you wish they would be.

Obama has muddied the waters in the Middle East very badly. Rick Perry said it best in last night’s debate. “This president is the problem, not something Newt Gingrich said.”

Our priority as a nation should be the support of Israel. They may make mistakes and we can deal with those as allies do, not with public condemnation and petty wrist slapping. No other nation in the Middle East ought to be closer to the United States as Israel.

But, and it is a big but, only Israel and the people who call themselves Palestinians can solve their issues in the end. We can support a process but they are the ones who will have to live with each other. Only those two parties can agree upon a solution that both can support. Our meddling helps nothing.

President Barack Obama gave a major foreign policy address at the U.S. State Department on May 19. The topic was America’s future relationship with the people and the nations of the Middle East and North Africa. President Obama laid out a series of core principles by which future policy will be guided.

As part of the speech, perhaps the most controversial portion, Obama discussed a new approach to the Palestinian issue. He describes the status quo as “unsustainable”. At several point in his speech, the President referred to the “occupation” of Palestinian lands. He spoke out for a peace settlement based upon Israel’s return to its borders in 1967 and Palestinian agreement recognizing Israeli right to exist and peace with Israel. He acknowledged that Israelis have a right to mistrust the Palestinians as long as their security continues to be threatened.

It does appear that all sides must overcome the resort to history and face the facts on the ground today. There is a Palestinian state. It will not go away. It is in the economic and security interest of both the Israelis and the Palestinians to work together.

In the earliest history of the current state of Israel, extremist groups had to be suppressed by the Jewish majority. The Stern Gang and the Irgun were outlawed, and some of the leaders jailed. The Palestinians face the same conditions as they try to form a viable state.

Israel has also faced the social stress of immigrants from many differing lands and cultures, Ethiopian, Yemeni, French, Polish and Russians Jews and more have emigrated to Israel. Some were socialists, some were religious zealots, some were illiterate and others had multiple degrees. Palestine will face similar stresses if emigration is allowed from Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza and other areas where refugees have been kept in camps by Arab governments for the last 60 years.

Both Israel and the Palestinians are the recipients of billions of dollars in aid. Interests in both nations are heavily vested in the continuation of that aid. Much of the aid given to the nations of the Middle East, Israel included, might be viewed as bribes to keep the peace. President Obama proposes no changes in this. Indeed, he proposes even more assistance to Egypt and Tunisia.

The gist of the President’s address is this: His administration will espouse a set of values that we do not typically see in the Middle East and North Africa. The United States will increase assistance in the region by billions of dollars in an effort to increase the popularity of and belief in those values. He hopes that all nations in the region, along with the Israelis and the Palestinians, will recognize the value to their people of these core principles.

Upstate New York resident Charles Simmins brings 30 years of accounting and finance experience and a keen interest in military affairs to the news of the day. His years of experience working with the personnel of the Secretary of Defense’s New Media activity on Bloggers’ Roundtables provide insights often overlooked by other reporters.

Click on photo to find out more about opportunities for women in the Israeli Defense Forces.

To honor women’s service in the IDF in celebration of International Women’s Day, the following is a collection of some of the interesting and noteworthy roles women are taking on throughout their service. Women have served in the IDF since its inception, and in Israeli defense organizations before the creation of the State of Israel (exceptional women such as Hannah Senesh and Sarah Aaronsohn, for example). Each year, 1,500 female combat soldiers are drafted into the IDF, a number which has remained consistent in recent years. Female soldiers also play crucial roles in command and control, commanding positions, and many others.

IDF

Photo of a new mall that opened today, July 17, 2010. If there “are no building materials allowed into Gaza” how did they build this shopping center? Photo by Tom Gross

Tom Gross has been writing about the misinformation coming out of Gaza for some time. His photos illustrate that the poverty and misery of the people living in the Gaza Strip may be just a little be exaggerated.

A little research on the Internet and I have found some statistics, from Palestinian and international sources, that seem to suggest the same conclusion. For example, there are a lot of unemployed in Gaza. Click for a larger chart.

I know what it’s like to be unemployed. finding something to do must be very difficult amidst the poverty in the Gaza Strip.

Besides watching television, playing on the Internet or talking on your cellphone. Click on the graphs for a larger version.

Of course, if these poor, impoverished people could read, they could read books to kill the time while they’re unemployed.

94.9% of adult Gaza residents are literate.
31.5% of households have Internet access.
93.2% of households own a television set.
83.8% of households are connected to a public sewer system.

Take some time to go through Tom Gross’s website. Many of the photos are from Palestinian and news wire sources, not just his own work. We just are not seeing these photos.

The statistics used in this report were found at the following sites:

CIA World Factbook – Gaza Strip

Palestine National Authority – Palestine in Figures 2009

NationMaster

I recently received two e-mails from a person who wanted to discuss the situation in Gaza and compared it to the Nazi Holocaust. I replied to his first missive but ignored the second.

The word “genocide” is tossed around a lot these days. It once meant the extermination of an entire nation or race. It now seemingly means the killing of several hundred people.

The Israeli actions in Gaza come no where near to approaching genocide. If the Israelis intended such a solution to terrorism, they have the ability to level both Gaza and the West Bank with purely conventional weapons. The actions they have taken since 1949 clearly show that they are restraining themselves from committing such horrific acts.

My position on the Israeli issue has been stated here in the past. 1949 is long past. There exists at this time an Israeli nation and a Palestinian nation. These two nations must learn to exist together for there to be peace. Both sides must recognize that the other is not going away, can not disappear.

The “plight” of the Palestinians may be laid at the feet of their leadership and that of the Arab nations that the original refugees found themselves in.

The Palestinian leadership, once in the camps, and now in the West Bank and Gaza is corrupt and incapable of governing. The billions of dollars of assistance that the West has provided this leadership has been stolen or squandered with little effect.

The Arab nations that took in the refugees after every Israeli victory bear a huge amount of the responsibility for Palestinian poverty. There was never any need to keep the refugees interned in camps for generations. They could have been allowed to move freely within their host countries, engage in business and participate in society. Instead, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan took every possible measure to prevent the Palestinians from being anything but refugees confined to camps. Both Lebanon and Jordan defeated militarily attempts by Palestinians to change that circumstance.

Gaza is a near desert parcel of land, barren of natural resources. It serves only as a place of confinement, and that confinement was orchestrated by Egypt and the leadership of the Palestinians. The ability to move with their lives was and is denied to the people living in Gaza. The Arab world intends for it to be a festering sore and its people to suffer.

The same is true for the camps in Lebanon. No Arab government wants the camps dissolved. If they did, they would have opened their arms to a people that, in 1949, were highly educated, well-to-do, and many of which were Christian. Israel did not create the camps, the Arabs did.

I have a site that illustrates what genocide is. I built it some years ago as a mirror site for one that another blogger had built. His site seems to have vanished. My site is still up, and I have added to it a bit.

Genocide is what the Germans did in World War II. The Ohrdruf Photos

The Germans are quick to denounce Holocaust denial. Yet, they have removed every trace of camp after camp until only the main camps remain. All the satellite camps are being erased.

When a Holocaust denier says that the existing camps could not possibly have killed six million people, he is correct. The Germans have made every trace of dozens of camps disappear. It took a vast network of camps to kill that many people. If the camps are gone, so, soon, will be the truth about the murders committed there.