The Israel Victory Project (IVP) of The Middle East Forum (MEF) made headlines this week when huge billboards went up along the Ayalon Freeway in Tel Aviv depicting a happy Hamas leader Ishmail Haniyeh wearing a bikini.
‘Shukran (Thanks in Arabic) Israel’ a banner above the image of Haniyeh carrying a suitcase full of dollars read.
The billboards mark the beginning of a campaign which demands a radical change in Israel’s policy of appeasement vis-a-vis the Palestinian Arab terror movements, especially in Gaza, under the slogan ‘Enough being scared. Demand victory for Israel’.
“Victory means imposing one’s will on the enemy; history teaches that conflicts end when one side gives up. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict will end only when Palestinians realize they cannot achieve their goal of eliminating the Jewish State of Israel,” Daniel Pipes president of MEF and founder of IVP said.
The billboard campaign coincided with the publication of a poll conducted in Hebrew by New Wave Research.
The poll with 703 likely Jewish voters and a 3.7 percent margin of error showed that a large majority of Israelis no longer believe in the so-called peace process and think Israel is losing the protracted conflict with the Palestinian Arabs.
The survey found that a staggering 84 percent of Jewish Israelis say it's somewhat or very important "to achieve victory in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," according to MEF which added that “58 percent deem it very important, 26 percent somewhat important.”
“It’s time to stop managing the conflict and begin winning it,” 70 percent of the participants in the survey think while 76 percent think “negotiations with the Palestinians should take place only after they consistently show they accept Israel."
“Between 79 and 82 percent of Israelis agreed that the Israeli security establishment is too timid vis-à-vis the Palestinians” while “82 percent say the Israeli government is too soft in its policies towards Hamas,” according to the pollsters.
“These numbers suggest a sense of exasperation not just with the Palestinians but also with Israel's government and even its semi-sacrosanct security establishment,” Pipes wrote in an op-ed.
“West Bank and Gaza Palestinians hang like an albatross from Israel's neck. They alone, not Iran, Turkey, Syria, or Israel's Arabs, spur the global phenomenon of anti-Zionism, with the attendant anti-Semitism, United Nations resolutions, and economic boycotts,” the MEF president claimed. READ MORE
