Close to 40 years after he was went missing in action following the Battle of Sultan Yacoub, the body of Sgt. Zachary Baumel has been returned to Israel for burial.
Baumel’s body was repatriated to Israel via a third country several days ago aboard an El Al flight following an operation by Israeli intelligence agencies. He was identified by his DNA at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute, as well as by the Chief Military Rabbi Brig.-Gen. Eyal Karim, IDF Spokesperson Brig.-Gen. Ronen Manelis said on Wednesday.Manpower directorate head Maj.-Gen.Moti Almoz personally informed the Baumel family that he had been identified.
The battle of Sultan Yacoub, a skirmish between the IDF and the Syrian army, took place on the sixth day of the First Lebanon War in June 1982 in the Bekaa Valley.
At the end of the battle, the battalion and additional forces had suffered 20 dead and more than 30 wounded. Eight IDF tanks also remained in Syrian hands, two of which had three missing IDF soldiers who had been involved in two separate incidents about three kilometers apart: Sgt. Yehuda Katz, a gunner in one tank crew, and Baumel and Sgt. Zvi Feldman in another tank.
“This was a long-term effort by the intelligence community and the Missing Persons Division during which various operational activities were carried out to locate the missing soldiers, "the military said, adding that the military is “committed to continuing the efforts to locate Sergeant Yehuda Katz, Sergeant Tzvika Feldman and all the missing soldiers and captives, and all fallen IDF soldiers whose burial places are unknown.”
Manelis wouldn’t say where Baumel had been buried for all these years, but in September, Russia claimed that its military worked with Israel on an operation to locate the remains of the fallen IDF soldiers that were in Syrian territory, which had been under the control of Islamic State.
A Palestinian tried to stab Israelis with a knife in the West Bank on Wednesday and was shot dead by one of them, the Israeli military and a witness said.
A Palestinian official, however, questioned the Israeli account of the incident at Hawara junction, near Nablus.
The West Bank, among territories where Palestinians seek statehood, has seen surges of street attacks on Israeli residents and soldiers since US-backed peace talks stalled in 2014. Palestinians claim Israel’s armed response has been excessive.
Yehoshua Sherman, a West Bank resident, told Israel Radio that he was driving slowly through the intersection with his daughter when a Palestinian charged at their car.
“He jumped at me with a knife, trying to open the doors,” Sherman said. “I drew my handgun…wound down the window and shot at him from inside the car.”
A second motorist also fired at the Palestinian, hitting him, Sherman added.
The Israeli military said in a statement: “A terrorist was shot by a civilian and neutralized after he tried to carry out a stabbing attack.”
You forgot to mention he’s a Hamas terrorist, he entered a family’s car (father & children) and started to fire his gun hurting the father, before he was shot dead!
This week’s New York Times Magazine features an essay by the veteran Israel-hater Nathan Thrall titled “How the Battle over Israel and Anti-Semitism Is Fracturing American Politics.” Employing a variety of lies, half-truths, illogical deductions, and insinuations, it draws a contrast between wealthy Jewish donors to the Democratic party who are sympathetic to Israel and minority, primarily black, activists who are anti-Israel. Jonathan Tobin comments:
Thrall’s object is to justify [boycott-Israel] campaigns that anchor the debate about the subject in “Black-Palestinian solidarity” and the effort to view the war on Israel through the “racial-justice prism.” The result is an 11,000-word essay that seeks to . . . paint Zionism as inherently racist and efforts to destroy Israel as idealistic attempts to defend human rights, [while also seeking] to portray the pro-Israel movement’s effort to push back at anti-Semitic attacks as tainted by prejudice against African-Americans and fueled primarily by the heavy-handed efforts of Jewish donors to manipulate the Democratic party.
One of Thrall’s primary sources is the former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes. . . . The article . . . amplifies Rhodes’s specious claim that President Obama’s inability to persuade Israel’s supporters to back him on the [Israel-Palestinian] issue was due to racial prejudice. He claims that supporters of Israel assumed that Barack Obama was pro-Palestinian because he was black. Rhodes’s thesis, which Thrall endorses, is that this alleged fear of Obama was the result of the pro-Israel community’s understanding that the Jewish state really was “an oppressor.” According to Rhodes, Obama’s critics were “acknowledging, through [their] own fears, that Israel treats the Palestinians like black people had been treated in the United States.”
This argument has it backward. Jewish Democrats [went to enormous lengths] to maintain their faith that Obama had been sincere in his professions of support for Israel when he ran for president in 2008, in spite of evidence to the contrary, both then and later. Far from being prejudiced against him, most American Jews stuck loyally to Obama, despite his belief that more “daylight” was needed between Israel and the United States. They even supported his efforts to appease an Iranian regime that was bent on genocide.
The assumption that Palestinians and Israeli Arabs are treated the same way as the African-American victims of Jim Crow in the pre-civil-rights-era South is a big lie. . . . The standoff about the future of the West Bank exists because the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected offers of peace and statehood. They would have attained independence long ago had they been willing to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders might be drawn.
Former British prime minister Gordon Brown announced Monday he has joined the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) as an affiliate member, in a bid to combat rising anti-Semitism within the opposition party.
In a video released by the Hope not Hate organization, which works to challenge racism, the former Labour leader says the party has “let the Jewish community and itself down” over the past two years, in a reference to the anti-Semitism accusations that have dogged the party and its leadership.
The clip was filmed at London’s Liverpool Street Station, where there is a statue to commemorate the nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children who were rescued in the Kindertransport during World War II. The children were taken out of Europe and fostered in Britain and as a result were often the only members of their families to survive the Holocaust.
In the video, Brown speaks passionately of “the promises we made following the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust to the Jewish community: that you will never walk alone and we will never walk by on the other side.”
He also notes that the party “should never have allowed legitimate criticism — that I share — of the current Israeli government to act as a cover for the demonization of the entire Jewish people.”
This is genuine solidarity. I’d heard rumours that Gordon Brown was releasing a video. No one asked him to stand up to antisemitism and to stand by @JewishLabour He just did. pic.twitter.com/wGUPj3dg7A
Harold Wilson may be less well-known internationally than Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair, but he dominated British politics for much of the 1960s and 1970s — and remains the only modern-day prime minister to win four general elections.
His return to office 45 years ago this month was as unexpected as his defeat had been four years previously when, having rewarded him with a landslide victory in 1966, the voters unceremoniously ejected his Labour government in June 1970.
But, in many regards, Wilson’s roller-coaster ride in the decade between 1964 and 1974, from victory to defeat and back again, was completely predictable.
Famously pragmatic — critics claimed unprincipled — the former prime minister’s name became for a time synonymous with the wheeler-dealing and political game-playing in which he undoubtedly reveled.
As one contemporary newspaper columnist suggested, Wilson’s image was “a dark serpentine crawling trimmer, shifty and shuffling, devious, untrustworthy, constant only in the pursuit of self-preservation and narrow party advantage.” For the historian Dominic Sandbrook, Wilson was “a brilliant opportunist.”
There was, however, a limit to Wilson’s alleged opportunism. As the left wing and veteran Zionist Labour MP, Ian Mikardo, once argued: “I don’t think Harold … [had] any doctrinal beliefs at all. Except for one, which I find utterly incomprehensible, which is his devotion to the cause of Israel.”
Wilson’s leadership arguably marked the high point of the relationship between Labour and British Jews, a bond which has today been strained by Jeremy Corbyn’s strident anti-Zionism and the allegations of anti-Semitism which continue to rock the party. It is a reminder not simply of happier times, but of the staunch support that the left once offered to Israel and the rather more ambivalent stance adopted by British conservatives.
A 2017 United Nations-funded school textbook for Arab students offers a revisionist history of Israel as part of its goal to incite violence against Israelis.
“Since the Zionist movement established in 1856 its first settlement, known as ‘Montefioriyyah’ [Mishkenot Sha’ananim, built by Sir Moses Montefiore before the emergence of modern Zionism], south-west of the Jerusalem city wall, the series of division [actions] in Palestine has not stopped,” according to social studies book for ninth-graders funded by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, which was established by the UN General Assembly in 1949 to assist Arabs who became refugees during Israel’s War of Independence the previous year.
“It [i.e., the Zionist movement] established settlements that included training centers and arms depots. After the ‘Catastrophe’ [Nakba in Arabic] of 1948 it ruled over more than 78 % of Palestine’s territory,” continues the text. “More than 850 thousand Palestinians were made to emigrate and they and their families lived in refugee camps in Palestine and in the Diaspora. Nothing of it [Palestine] was left, except the Gaza Strip and the West Bank that were occupied [later] in 1967.”
An appeals court in Berlin has ordered the deportation of the convicted Palestinian terrorist, Rasmea Odeh. The Higher Regional Court was responding to an appeal filed by Odeh’s lawyer, challenging the earlier deportation order issued by Berlin State’s Home Affairs Department, or Innensenat, ordering her to leave the country.
That deportation was promptly carried out. Odeh is out of Germany.
Odeh, feted by anti-Israel activists across the world, is the mastermind of the 1969 Jerusalem supermarket bombing that killed two Hebrew University students, Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner. She was convicted of the bombing and served a 10-year sentence, only to be released in a prisoner exchange for a captured Israeli soldier in Lebanon. She later moved to the U.S. where she applied for citizenship, concealing her terrorist past.
German authorities ordered the deportation, claiming Odeh had not disclosed her public engagements while applying for a visa at the German embassy in Jordan, where she currently resides. Odeh’s lawyers denied their client hid the real purpose of her visit. On Friday, the appeals courts accepted the version presented by the German embassy and reinstated the prior deportation order.
On Monday, the newspaper Berliner Morgenpost confirmed Odeh’s departure from Germany. “The ex-terrorist Rasmea Odeh has left Berlin. The Jordanian national voluntarily left the country, [Berlin’s] Department of Internal affairs declared,” the newspaper reported. “The police oversaw her departure from Germany.”
Odeh, member of the terror outfit Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), has a history of making false claims on visa applications. In 2017, a Michigan court stripped Odeh of her U.S. citizenship for lying on her visa and naturalization forms. She was allowed to leave the country without a prison term as part of a plea bargain.
Foreign influence in the United States is a major problem, but it might surprise you to find out just who some of the biggest players are. You would certainly think of Russia given the massive coverage of their attempts to influence the 2016 US election. But one name you probably haven’t heard is Qatar, a small country in the Middle East which wields an outsized influence through a large and well-funded operation.
The characterization of Russia as a puppet master in US politics is, of course, utterly ludicrous to anyone familiar enough with the poorly funded, amateurish, and ham-fisted operations of Russia and her allies to influence US opinion in the 2016 cycle. This is not to say that foreign influence can’t be effective or that foreign nations and their lobbyists are not corrupting the policy-making process – they clearly are. A compelling case regarding this malicious influence is made in a new documentary called Blood Money, previewed at last month’s CPAC conference and set for release this week.
To illustrate the phenomenon of Washington, as a “playground for foreign interests,” the documentary tells the story of the Qatar lobby, and how they have effectively changed the conversation with regard to Middle East policy in establishment circles during the current administration. Under the Obama administration, the US threw its weight behind the Arab Spring movement on the theory that our support for democratization would lead to both greater stability and more pro-American outcomes. It was a bad bet. The overthrow of authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya simply empowered radical forces like the Muslim Brotherhood, at once undermining stability in the region and leading to an increase in support for terror activities worldwide.
It was an unexpected sight: A photo of Leila Khaled, the world’s first female airline hijacker, cradling an AK 47, featured in an adulating tweet from a young Socialist leader in the United States celebrating the 49th anniversary of Khaled’s hijacking of TWA flight 840.
Was it possible that an ambitious American political organizer was lionizing a terrorist who blew up a (then-empty) American plane?
The leader in question, Olivia Katbi-Smith, is co-head of the Portland, Oregon, chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America — the reformatted, millennial version of a once distinguished group whose Socialist roots extend back to Eugene V. Debs, five-time presidential candidate and one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
The membership of DSA has grown fourfold since Bernie Sanders’s presidential run in 2016. Likewise, its average age decreased from 68 to 33 between 2013 and now. After Sanders’s loss in the primary to Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump’s subsequent presidential win, on a national level the DSA’s new, young members marshaled their efforts to help elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Rashida Tlaib (MI), and Ilhan Omar (MN) to Congress on a progressive platform that promoted Medicare for all, quality housing, and free college tuition.
Since the election, the group has tipped further left and Katbi-Smith is part of a movement that is challenging traditional Democratic governance. But for supporters of Israel, there is a troubling side to her agenda: She helped lead the DSA to adopt a pro-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) plank in the group’s charter during its national convention on August 5, 2017, at the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. When 90 percent of the 697 delegates voted in favor of the BDS resolution, Katbi-Smith was jubilant. She and the other attendees waved a Palestinian flag and chanted, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.”
The political writer Paul Berman recently wrote in Tablet that, “Lately, DSA has had the misfortune to get taken over by a flash mob of fresh-faced hipsters just out of college. And the hipsters have naturally turned the august organization into a zoo of political fantasies of every preposterous and grisly sort, unto the people who … do not go very far to disguise the fact that they are chanting ‘Death to the Jews.’”
The father of an Israeli terror victim is calling on Twitter to shut down the account of one of his daughter’s killers.
Arnold Roth — whose 15-year-old daughter Malki was murdered in the August 2001 Jerusalem Sbarro bombing — is seeking action against Palestinian terrorist Ahlam Tamimi, who drove the suicide attacker to the restaurant and now resides in Jordan after being freed from an Israeli prison in the 2011 Shalit deal.
Two of the 15 people killed in the bombing — including Roth’s daughter — held US citizenship, and Tamimi has been put on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list.
Roth tweeted on Sunday, “The fugitive @FBIMostWanted terrorist who says she carried out the #SbarroPizzeria massacre, who is wanted in the US on terror charges, who has a busy Twitter account, who lives free in Jordan… still has an active Twitter account. Why?”
He added, “Yes, I’ve already asked @Twitter’s guardians of decency to shut #Tamimi’s account down. Their response so far: ‘You can learn more about reporting abusive behavior here. If we take further action, we’ll let you know.’”
“Are there other fugitive jihadists with @Twitter accounts?” Roth concluded.
American Jewry is at a crossroads. The vast majority of American Jews will continue to cling to their familiar ancestral belief system; it’s all they know. To change now would be to deny everything their family members and they, themselves, have lived for. But before they bury their heads in the sand once again, they should at least hear these simple truths:
When our enemies came for us during the Holocaust, they did not ask if we were Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or secular Jews. Neither were they interested in any past service we rendered for the state. WE WERE JEWS. That was all that mattered; and if history repeats itself, when our enemies come for us once again in the future; they will not ask if we are Israelis or Zionists. They will not care if we marched in Selma, Alabama; protested against apartheid in South Africa; supported equal rights for women; advocated for the LBGTQ community and campaigned for Hillary or Bernie. It will only matter that WE ARE JEWS.
Today’s anti-Semitism, unleashed by the left and Islamists is so visceral, virulent, vile, vicious, and vitriolic that it can no longer be justified under the guise of anti-Zionism. In form, content, and message, it is EXACTLY what was seen and heard during the heyday of the Third Reich. It is what made the Holocaust possible. What begins with a parade float in Belgium inevitably ends in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka. This is the fate our enemies want for us. This is why Tehran’s Ayatollah Khameini rejoices that more Jews are moving to Israel – for one grand target.
Meanwhile, most of the Jews will continue entrusting their safety to their religious and political leadership. They will continue to vote for, support, and finance the party and the ideology that will ultimately lead them to their own destruction and that of the state of Israel. Vladimir Jabotinsky recognized that, “The Jew learns not by way of reason, but from catastrophe. He won't buy an umbrella merely because he sees clouds in the sky. He waits until he is drenched and catches pneumonia."
History may yet prove that when it comes to the Jews, Jabotinsky was an optimist.
Critics of the U.S. decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights misread the legal significance of the preamble to UN Security Council Resolution 242, from November 1967, which contains a reference to the principle of the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.”
Legal scholars have drawn a distinction between the seizure of territory in wars of aggression, which is illegal, and the seizure of territory by a state exercising its lawful right of self-defense.
Writing in the American Journal of International Law in 1970, Stephen Schwebel, who became the legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State and then President of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, wrote about the legal significance of this difference. He also cited the great British scholar Elihu Lauterpacht, who argued that “territorial change cannot properly take place as a result of the unlawful use of force.”
What about cases of the lawful use of force? In the aftermath of the Second World War, significant territorial changes were implemented in Europe. For example, Germany lost considerable land to Poland and to the Soviet Union. It was clear that the UN Charter recognized the right of states to use force in self-defense, which is the case of Israel’s entry into the Golan Heights.
In 1967, when the Soviet Union undertook to obtain condemnation of Israel in the UN Security Council as the aggressor in the Six-Day War, it failed, losing the vote by 11 to 4. The Soviets then went to the General Assembly and failed yet again. It was clear for the member states of both UN bodies that Israel had acted in self-defense.
It is also not true that the Golan decision represents a major shift in U.S. policy. In 1975, President Gerald Ford wrote to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that the U.S. “will give great weight to Israel’s position that any peace agreement be predicated on Israel’s remaining on the Golan Heights.”
Arab leaders said on Sunday they would seek a UN Security Council resolution against the US decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and promised to support Palestinians in their bid for statehood.
Arab leaders, long divided by regional rivalries, also ended their annual summit in Tunisia calling for cooperation with non-Arab Iran based on non-interference in each others’ affairs.
Arab leaders who have been grappling with a bitter Gulf Arab dispute, splits over Iran’s regional influence, the war in Yemen and unrest in Algeria and Sudan sought common ground after Washington recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan.
But the abrupt departure from the summit shortly after it began by Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, who is locked in a row with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, suggested rivalries were not easily buried. No reason was given for his departure.
“We, the leaders of the Arab countries gathered in Tunisia … express our rejection and condemnation of the United States decision to recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan,” Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said.
German exports to Iran dropped 9% last year, Benjamin Weinthal reported in Sunday’s Jerusalem Post.
Large German banks like Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank stopped doing business with Iran. German engineering companies have stopped exporting engineering equipment to Tehran. Well-known companies like Volkswagen, BMW, Siemens and Daimler are withdrawing from Iran’s volatile market.
The reason? US sanctions on Iran – and the unyielding efforts of America’s Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell.
In fact, in the German state of Lower Saxony, Weinthal reported, trade with Iran rose in the first half of 2018, but then dropped drastically in the second half of the year, due to US sanctions on Iran and Grenell’s arrival in May.
Grenell has made sure that the American position is amply clear. On his first day on the job, he tweeted: “US sanctions will target critical sectors of Iran’s economy. German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.”
I had the opportunity to discuss this issue with U.S. President Donald J. Trump two weeks before he announced his decision. I provided him with the battleship analogy, which he seemed to appreciate. I told him that I thought the Sunni Arab world might complain, but that they really do not care about the Golan, which has no religious significance to Islam. There were in fact, some minor protests, but nothing of significance.
Predictably, the European Union opposed the U.S. recognition of the annexation. But it provided no compelling argument, beyond its usual demand that the status quo not be changed. Israel's control over the Golan Heights has been the status quo for more than half a century; and Israel's legitimate need to control the heights has only increased over time, with war in Syria, and the presence of Iranian and Hezbollah military in close proximity. Would the European Union demand that Israel now hand over the Golan Heights to Assad? Has any European country ever handed over high ground, captured in a defensive war, to a sworn enemy?
Recall that at the end of the first and second world wars, European countries made territorial adjustments to help preserve the peace. Why should the European Union subject Israel to a double standard it has never demanded of itself? The answer is clear: The European Union has always acted hypocritically when it comes to Israel, and this is no exception.
So three cheers for President Trump for doing the right thing. I will continue to criticize him if and when he does the wrong thing -- such as separating families at the U.S.'s southern border.
That is what bipartisan means: praising the President I voted against when he does the right thing, and criticizing presidents I voted for (such as Barack Obama) when they do the wrong thing (such as abstaining on the Security Council Resolution declaring Jewish holy places to be occupied territory).
Israel's continuing control over the Golan Heights increases the chance for peace and decreases the chances that Syria, Iran and/or Hezbollah will be able to use this high ground as a launching pad against Israelis. That is good news for the world, for the United States and for Israel.
This legislation was accompanied by an assurance, conveyed in Israel’s Knesset by Prime Minister Begin,12 as well as by Israel’s UN ambassador in a communication to the Secretary-General of the UN, according to which: The government of Israel wishes to reiterate that it is willing now as always to negotiate unconditionally with Syria as with its other neighbors for a lasting peace in accordance with Security Council Resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973). The Golan Heights Law does not preclude or impair such negotiations.13
While the laws of armed conflict address situations in which a state, in exercising its inherent right of self-defense, takes control of, or occupies territory of the offensive state, the question of the length of time such a situation of control or occupation may last is not addressed. Furthermore, a long-term continuation of belligerency, an ongoing threat of aggression by the state concerned, and a lack of any foreseeable chance of peace negotiations all generate a unique situation facing the state controlling the territory, with no foreseeable chance for a peace settlement.
In his publication “Justice in International Law:” “What Weight to Conquest? Aggression, Compliance, and Development” (1970) Stephen Schwebel, former judge in the International Court of Justice, refers to the situation of the Golan Heights as follows: …as regards territory bordering Palestine, and under unquestioned Arab sovereignty in 1949 and thereafter, such as Sinai and the Golan Heights, it follows that no weight shall be given to conquest, but that such weight shall be given to defensive action as is reasonably required to ensure that such Arab territory will not again be used for aggressive purposes against Israel.14
The recent civil war in Syria, the continued lack of any stable government, the flagrant and willful crimes committed by the Syrian president against those elements opposing his regime and against Syrian civilian population, as well as the emplacement of Iranian armed facilities on Syrian territory directed against Israel, all serve to indicate the utter lack of any hope that Syria will in the near future be prepared to recognize Israel as a legitimate neighbor, accept a common border, and enter into a peaceful relationship with Israel.
These factors are also indicative of a total lack of reliability by the Syrian leadership, and capability of genuinely taking upon itself any international responsibility, especially vis-Ã -vis Israel.
With this background, the proclamation by the U.S. President recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights is logical and necessary.
Following U.S. President Donald Trump's recognition of Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights, researchers at Tel-Hai College have discovered that prior the 1967 Six-Day War, even Syria recognized the Banias plateau – the site of a spring at the foot of Mount Hermon that feeds one the main tributaries of the Jordan River – as belonging to Israel.
The researchers discovered a map drawn by Syria's planning and construction agency in 1965, two years before the Six-Day War, which places Banias on the Israeli side of the border.
"Even before Israel was founded, Banias was part of the British Mandate in Palestine, flush up against the border of the French Mandate in Syria," explains Shalom Tarmachi, head of the Tel-Hai College map collection.
The 1965 Syrian map shows the Banias plateau in red
"In 1939, the Jewish National Fund purchased land in the area of Khan a-Duar at Banias, so the area belonged to Israel, both legally and politically. The cease-fire agreement of 1949 that ended the War of Independence decided that the area would be demilitarized, under the assumption that its status would be regulated in a future peace treaty. But until 1967, communities in the Hula Valley suffered heavy Syrian fire from Banias, and it became part of [Syria's] attempt to divert the sources of the Jordan River," Tarmachi said.
Tarmachi said that before the college's map archives began working with an advanced system that allows multiple maps to be overlaid on top of each other and adjusted to the same scale, it was "very hard" to identify to whom the Syrians assigned the territory in their maps. Now, he says, the new system makes it "very clear that the Syrians did not consider the demilitarized area as theirs, even though they used it for military activity."
Israeli maps, he explained, show Syrian tank posts, minefields, and attempts to divert the sources of the Jordan River, but it is actually the Syrian map that shows that the Banias plateau lies on the Israeli side of the border. (h/t Elder of Lobby)
Ben Rhodes, a former national security aide to President Barack Obama, told the New York Times this week that the “donor class” had prevented Obama from taking more anti-Israel steps than the administration had wanted to take.
Rhodes spoke to author Nathan Thrall for a feature article titled, “How the Battle Over Israel and Anti-Semitism Is Fracturing American Politics.” The headline describes “politics,” but Thrall focused on policy debates within the Democratic Party, which has seen the rise of an assertive anti-Israel constituency in recent years. That constituency has included overtly and unabashedly antisemitic critics, largely but not exclusively from the Muslim community.
Thrall writes about the “boycott, divestment, sanctions” (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate Israel as apartheid South Africa was once isolated — a comparison that BDS critics find not only factually wrong, but also offensive.
Enter Rhodes — one of the architects of the Iran nuclear deal, which was vehemently opposed by Israel and by pro-Israel Americans. He blamed Jewish donors for the Obama administration’s supposed restraint towards Israel:
According to Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national-security adviser and one of Obama’s closest confidants, several members of the Obama administration wanted to adopt a more assertive policy toward Israel but felt that their hands were tied. “The Washington view of Israel-Palestine is still shaped by the donor class,” Rhodes, who does not support B.D.S., told me, when I met with him at the Obama Foundation in October. “The donor class is profoundly to the right of where the activists are, and frankly, where the majority of the Jewish community is.”
Rhodes’s claims were echoed by “[a]nother former member of the Obama White House,” who told Thrall that the Obama administration had prevailed upon the United Nations Security Council to delay a vote against Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) to after the 2016 election. (The resolution also declared Israel’s presence in eastern Jerusalem — including the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, inhabited by Jews for millennia — to be illegal.)
Thrall noted: “The fear of losing Jewish donors as the party moves left on Israel may well be overstated.” He also observed that many Jewish donors to the Democratic Party have left-wing views on Israel. Yet the antisemitic canard that Jews use money to control U.S. foreign policy persists within the Democratic Party at the highest levels, and is used by insiders like Rhodes as an excuse — a scapegoat — to deflect criticism of insufficiently radical policy stances.
Notably, Rhodes was appointed by President Obama to the board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council in the closing days of his administration. It was a controversial appointment, given Rhodes’s role as the “Iran deal salesman,” and Iran’s leading role in promoting Holocaust denial worldwide as an official ideology.
Dimitri Lascaris, who was condemned for "vile antisemtic smear" by Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, reveals that his friend & ally Michael Lynk—the UNHRC's Palestine monitor—is lobbying to change the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement. Lynk did same as anti-Israel activist in the 90s. pic.twitter.com/h3Tv4fRhEY
The author of this Sunday's New York Times magazine cover story about the campaign to boycott, divest, and sanction the state of Israel works for an organization whose major donor, Qatar, is also the largest state funder of the terrorist group Hamas. Other significant donors to the author's organization, the International Crisis Group, are leading supporters of the anti-Semitic boycott movement the author describes in his piece.
The publication of the article, "How the Battle Over Israel and Anti-Semitism Is Fracturing American Politics," represents another salvo in the New York Times‘ continuing promotion of anti-Israel writers and views.
The author, Nathan Thrall, is tied to a large network of BDS supporters that are funded into the millions by the Qatari government, which has long been engaged in efforts to spy on the American Jewish community and pro-Israel officials. Qatar's foreign influence operations in Washington, D.C., have flown mostly under the radar, but are part of a larger proxy battle being waged by wealthy Middle Eastern governments eager to peddle influence in powerful D.C. circles.
Thrall, who the Times presents as a disinterested expert, serves as director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group, or ICG, a left-leaning advocacy organization that has received around $4 million from the Qatari government in the just the last year. Qatar's donations represent around 23 percent of ICG's total budget. Qatar is not mentioned in Thrall's 11,500-word piece.
Is The Left's Anti-Semitism A Problem For Leftist Jews?
The Economist labeled Ben Shapiro an “alt-right sage” in a headline, then apologized after the right-wing pundit protested the characterization.
The British weekly’s apology was added Thursday to a profile about Shapiro that originally carried the headline “Inside the mind of Ben Shapiro, the alt-right sage without the rage.” It also called Shapiro “a pop idol of the alt right.”
After an exchange on Twitter between Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, and Anne Mcelvoy, one of the article’s two authors, The Economist changed the headline to “Inside the mind of Ben Shapiro, a radical conservative.” The apology said the references to the alt-right — a loose right-wing movement that includes white nationalists and anti-Semites – was made “mistakenly,” adding “In fact, he has been strongly critical of the alt-right movement. We apologize.”
Founded in 1843, The Economist is one of the world’s most reputed [and anti-Semitic] periodicals.
In the exchange, Shapiro wrote: “This is a vile lie. Not only am I not alt-right, I am probably their leading critic on the right. I was the number one target of their hate in 2016 online according to ADL data. I demand a retraction.”
He added: “If you lump me in with people who are so evil I literally hire security to walk me to shul on Shabbat, you can go straight to hell.” (h/t Elder of Lobby)
The 1997 movie Wag the Dog stars Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman as a political strategist and a film director enlisted to do damage control in light of a sex scandal involving a president running for reelection. They concoct a fake war in Albania, releasing footage of fictional battles, destruction and a photogenic orphan.
When Palestinian terrorists shot rockets into central Israel and completely destroyed a house in Moshav Mishmeret, injuring all three generations of one family, some thought that instead of condemning Hamas for targeting infants, toddlers and their grandparents, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the real problem here.
A conspiracy theory in the style of Wag the Dog began to be floated in news outlets of varying levels of respectability – like the UK’s Independent – and on the social media accounts of anti-Israel organizations that Netanyahu wants a war, because it’ll somehow help him ahead of the April 9 election. They claimed that Netanyahu intentionally sparks wars right before elections to help him win.
“History shows a terrible pattern of Netanyahu heightening violence right before Israeli elections,” Jewish progressive group IfNotNow tweeted.
“We cannot give in to this pattern of fear – it keeps fascist leaders like Netanyahu in power.”
This claim is not only false, but is preposterous for many reasons.
First, the dry facts: the only wars – really operations – that have taken place while Netanyahu was in power were Pillar of Defense in 2012 and Protective Edge in 2014.
Protective Edge began eight months before the 2015 elections. It’s true that in Israel’s chaotic political system, an election could break out at any time, but July 2014 wasn’t a time when it seemed particularly likely. And the coalition was relatively united after the operation, reflecting a public rallying around the flag. It took a few more months for Netanyahu to summarily fire ministers in his coalition and trigger an election.
One thing I'll add to this excellent piece: the Steele dossier pushed a Jew-baiting conspiracy theory that cast Jews in America as disloyal. Everyone who just tossed this sh*t-schnitzel into the public consciousness ought to be making apologies and amends https://t.co/xpMS0vzqJh
Later this year, the Trump administration will release its oft-delayed plan for Israeli–Palestinian peace — the latest in a quarter century of American attempts to resolve one of the Middle East’s most intractable disputes.
At the heart of this effort — which has spanned five otherwise disparate post–Cold War presidencies — has been an enduring faith that American power can reshape the Levant much as it did Europe and Asia, conjuring a new, liberal, rules-based order in which former antagonists learn to live in peace, reaping the benefits of shared prosperity under a U.S. security umbrella.
Yet instead of Israel and its neighbors becoming more like the other countries in the American sphere of influence, the opposite has happened over the past 25 years: The other countries in the U.S.-led bloc are increasingly like Israel.
The notion that the liberal international order is assuming an Israeli character is, to put it mildly, counterintuitive. To its admirers and detractors alike, Israel has always been exceptional — a country whose very existence stands athwart the normal ebb and flow of history. As the only Jewish state in the world, surrounded by hostile Arab neighbors, Israel has long imagined itself as an isolated outpost whose unique circumstances make it a model for none but itself. With its founding in 1948, Israel was also a bet on the idea of the nation-state just when the Europeans, who had developed this concept three centuries earlier, began to grow ambivalent about it in favor of a new project of transnational integration.
Yet for all the distinctiveness of the Jewish state, the fact is that the strategic challenges and dilemmas that were once its special preoccupation are no longer quite so exclusive to it. On the contrary, they are much the same ones that other states in Washington’s strategic orbit find themselves grappling with. And, not coincidentally, the response that these countries have adopted in many cases resembles those pioneered by Israel.
This is manifest in several respects. First and most obvious has been the proliferation of the kind of nihilistic Islamist terrorism that has historically threatened Israel but that has now metastasized into a worldwide menace, not least in the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East. The suicide bombings and mass-casualty terror attacks such as Israelis endured in the mid 1990s and early 2000s have now become unrelenting threats for millions of others, from Manchester to Bali. Unlike the politically motivated terrorism that afflicted Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, moreover, the attacks aren’t inspired by discrete grievances that can be addressed but by an ideology that celebrates the murder of its victims as an end unto itself.
Why are so many Jews getting our vicious culture wars so very wrong?
“Cultural Marxism” is a term that refers to the strategy propounded by left-wing theorists in the last century to use the institutions of a society’s culture to bring about a revolution in society.
In a speech this week, a British Conservative MP, Suella Braverman, said that conservatives were engaged in “a battle against cultural Marxism, where banning things is becoming de rigueur; where freedom of speech is becoming a taboo; where our universities, quintessential institutions of liberalism, are being shrouded in censorship and a culture of no-platforming.”
Cue instant uproar, led by the British Jewish community. The Board of Deputies objected on the grounds that “the term ‘cultural Marxist’ has a history as an antisemitic trope.”
Others went further, accusing Braverman of using a phrase that was not only “a conspiracy laden with antisemitic undertones” championed by the “extreme Right” but had been cited by the white supremacist accused of murdering 50 Muslim worshipers at two New Zealand mosques earlier this month.
On the Left, “cultural Marxism” has long been labeled a demented conspiracy theory. Certainly, it has indeed been appropriated by neo-Nazis, white supremacists, antisemites and other conspiracy-theory fruitcakes.
But such people also routinely accuse the Jews of being the puppet-masters of global capitalism or globalism. Yet few claim that “anti-capitalism” or “anti-globalism” is a “conspiracy laden with antisemitic undertones” – even though it is – not least because it’s also a common trope on the Left.
It was a packed house of some 111 English-speakers that awaited Caroline Glick on a recent Sunday evening in a well-appointed apartment in Jerusalem’s Abu Tor neighborhood. There was last-minute scurrying by the grandsons of the gracious host couple, Barry and Dorraine Gilbert Weiss, for more folding chairs. The audience was made up of Glick’s faithful readers, already missing her regular weekend column in The Jerusalem Post. She dove right in, explaining she would be talking about herself, something, she said, she didn’t do as a journalist. This time she would be the topic.
Glick made aliyah in 1991, and immediately volunteered in the army, a lone soldier. When she left, in 1996, she held the rank of captain. After the signing of the Oslo Accords, September, 1993, she was assigned to coordinate the negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. During 1994 to 1996, she was part of the negotiating team, liaising with Arab officers, working out all the regulations. The signing had been the matrix; various arrangements needed to be made, different agreements implemented, following patterns set out by the accord.
She began to realize the thing was a “crock” (her word) and that only she seemed to think so. Towards the end of negotiations, she was required to translate a document in a totally secure room, alone, not even a pencil allowed with her. The document she had before her, she said, was “the dumbest thing I’d ever seen.” She was sure her professor at Columbia would have given it an F. Nevertheless, top secret or not, that same evening, on the 11 o’clock news, there it was, word for word, the material she had translated.
During those years after the signing of the Accords, multiple terrorist murders were committed in Israel almost every month. Israel petitioned the recently recognized Palestinian Authority to release the perpetrators they were protecting. The meeting to sign this latest document was held in Israel. Citizens lined the approaches and gathered outside the hotel, including families of victims, petitioning the Israeli negotiators to be cautious in formulating terms. (h/t Elder of Lobby)
A former Obama administration official said the administration orchestrated the delaying of a controversial anti-Israel United Nations resolution until after the 2016 presidential election, knowing it would pass when the United States abstained.
The official's claim contradicts on-the-record denials by Obama administration officials, who attacked critics at the time who suggested they were involved in its drafting.
Speaking anonymously to the New York Times, the official said the White House feared putting pressure on Hillary Clinton to either condemn or defend the resolution against Israeli settlements and potentially upset Jewish donors during her election fight against Donald Trump. The U.S. decision to abstain on U.N. Security Council resolution 2334 was widely viewed as a parting shot by Obama at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"There is a reason the U.N. vote did not come up before the election in November," the former official said, in a portion of the report flagged by Jewish Insider. "Was it because you were going to lose voters to Donald Trump? No. It was because you were going to have skittish donors. That, and the fact that we didn’t want Clinton to face pressure to condemn the resolution or be damaged by having to defend it."
The official said fear of donor wrath dictated not only "what was done but what was not done, and what was not even contemplated."
Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro strongly denied the anonymous quote, telling Jewish Insider it was a "garbage claim" and the administration, as it professed at the time, was caught by surprise by the Egyptian-Palestinian drafted resolution.
The U.N. Security Council voted 14-0 on Resolution 2334 on Dec. 23, 2016, to demand a halt to settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, deeming both areas to be illegally occupied by Israel. East Jerusalem is home to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, a Jewish holy site.
A cache of wiretaps originating in Turkey appear to show the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan aiding the passage of militant fighters tied to the ISIS terror group into and out of Syria, according to new reports that are raising questions about Turkey's commitment to its military alliance with Washington, D.C.
The wiretaps are said to show Erdogan's government working alongside ISIS fighters, despite its public rhetoric in support of the American campaign to decimate the Islamic terror group.
Turkey's alliance with the United States has been stressed for some time, as Erdogan continues his anti-Israel rhetoric and a series of policies that have strained relations between the Trump administration and Ankara.
The wiretaps shine light on what experts have described as Turkey's private efforts to aid ISIS and create further havoc in war-torn Syria.
"A review of hundreds of secret wiretap records obtained from confidential sources in the Turkish capital of Ankara reveals how the Islamist government of President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan has enabled—and even facilitated—the movement of foreign and Turkish militants across the Turkish border into Syria to fight alongside jihadists in the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant," according to a report published by the Investigative Journal, a long form reporting portal.
"Recorded conversations between ISIL operatives reveal a different story from the one the ErdoÄŸan government tells publicly," the report states. "They suggest the government has provided political cover, without which it would be impossible for ISIL to operate and evade prosecution. The wiretap records, obtained by authorization from the courts, were part of an ISIL legal investigation launched in 2014 by the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office."
There have probably been more words written about the Israeli -Arab conflict than any other post WW2 military dispute. I have no way to highlight this in a graph, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the words written about the Israeli – Arab conflict didn’t outweigh the words written about the largest ten or so of the global conflicts that have taken place in the same time period – combined. Too many words are written and the truth becomes lost in a tsunami of distortion. One death near Bethlehem yesterday became headline news about a teenage medic being killed, despite doubts about his innocence. The Guardian ran no such headlines about the lawmaker shot whilst on a peace-making pilgrimage in Sudan – a conflict that has taken 400,000 lives in just five years. Conflicts have different values, which is what this blog is about.
The conflict as a refugee crisis:
The Arab Israeli conflict created refugees. During the early civil and regional conflict of 1947-1949, many Arabs fled and some (especially those in openly hostile villages) were evicted. Some were offered rehousing inside Israel but still chose to leave (this puts paid to the ethnic cleansing accusation). After the conflict ended, some outside Israel were offered a return but refused (as it meant recognising Israel). Jewish communities also suffered throughout the region. Events in British Palestine were used as an excuse by rising national and Islamist ideologies. A trickle turned into a flood, the flood into a tsunami. Within a few short years the ancient Jewish Arab communities had been almost completely ethnically cleansed. Most of the Jewish refugees settled in Israel. These are the comparative numbers of refugees created by the Israeli/Arab conflict:
Arab Israeli conflict refugees
For the Arabs, I used the UNRWA figures even though these are without doubt exaggerated. It doesn’t matter – even when the Arab refugee numbers are artificially inflated, the conflict clearly created more Jewish refugees than Arab ones. This is what real ethnic cleansing looks like:
Nearly a dozen studies published in the past decade show that Jews — Ashkenazi, Sephardi Mizrahi — are more biologically related to one another than they are to their local populations. In particular, a 2009 study found that Jewish populations share a high level of genetic similarity and a common Middle Eastern ancestry, and over their history they have undergone varying degrees of admixture with non-Jewish populations.
It’s time to refocus on our identity, not just because it will be good for us and our children to fully come to terms with who we are. We need to do this to firmly and definitively show that Jews are indigenous to Israel.
“It is part of a carefully managed agenda in the United States to not permit Jews to be part of the discussions about ‘people of color’ or racism,” Frantzman writes. And the goal of that agenda is to make the case that Israel is a European colonial enterprise, so that it can then be destroyed.
The bottom line: We can no longer let others define us. We need to start defining ourselves. And the only way to do that is through learning about our ancestry, our genetics and our indigenous connection to the land, culture and language of Israel.
“The designation of being a Hebrew probably meant something similar to ‘one who crossed over,’ ” Ergas told me. “The term captures the concept of language, history and experience of eternal otherness — and potentially points toward us always being in the process of transformation.”
We are the Hebrews, the Israelites, the Jews. We create, innovate and transform — ourselves and the world. This is who we are: eternally other; eternally lit.
One of the days marked fervently by the Palestinian Authority is the anniversary in March of the most lethal terror attack against Israel - the Coastal Road massacre in which Palestinian terrorists murdered 37 civilians, among them 12 children. The attack was led by female terrorist Dalal Mughrabi who the PA since has turned into a role model and hero for Palestinian children and society in general.
To celebrate the anniversary this year, the PA Ministry of Education arranged a sports festival for girls named after the terrorist:
"The Dalal Mughrabi Sports Festival"
The sports festival was held at the Beitunia Upper Elementary School for Girls and participating girls wore shirts featuring the image of the murderer and the text "Dalal Mughrabi Festival":
[Facebook page of the Beitunia Upper Elementary School for Girls, March 13, 2019]
PA officials were also present at the festival honoring murderer Mughrabi, among them Bassem Erekat, director of the district's Education Directorate , which is a branch of the PA Ministry of Education, and Ribhi Dawla, mayor of Beitunia, where the festival was held. In addition, the District Governor of Ramallah and El-Bireh Dr. Laila Ghannam spoke at the event, stating that Palestinian children "are determined to continue on the path." Ghannam also praised Palestinian women for having "brought children into the world, fought, and built glory that will not be erased" - indicating that murderer Mughrabi had created lasting "glory" with her attack killing 37:
There is no question that Syria attacked Israel in 1967 (and again in 1973). And there is no question that, by the end of both conflicts, Israel was firmly in control of the Golan Heights. In fact, following legendary tank battles on the Heights in ‘73 (which are studied at West Point), the Syrian army had collapsed, and Israel was primed to push on and capture Damascus. A ceasefire agreement was in everyone’s best interests.
Since 2011, Syria has been ravaged by civil war, in which President Bashar al-Assad attacked his own citizens with chemical weapons on several occasions. Large swathes of Syria were controlled by ISIS until very recently, including areas directly abutting the Golan Heights’ border with Israel. Today, the Syrian state barely exists. It is an utterly dysfunctional, violent tinderbox of some of the most brutal regimes and movements on Earth. Syria can no more reclaim sovereignty over the Golan than it can the Eastern Bank of the Euphrates River. Even if it could, it isn’t in the interests of any responsible nation to see such an outcome.
Syria violated international law in 1967, 1973, and many other occasions by attacking Israel without provocation and pledging to destroy the country. Not only did Syria fail to accomplish its bellicose goal but it was forced to agree to a ceasefire to avoid total humiliation: an Israeli conquest of Damascus.
Welcome to the Middle East.
There are consequences to military attacks, particularly when the attacker loses. International law is silent on this point, and for good reason. Because it was, on a logical basis, incomprehensible.
People may hate president Trump and PM Netanyahu. They may be contemptuous of the timing of America’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. But it is not contrary to international law. And it does not impact the outcome of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict one iota.
Since Syria lost control of the Golan Heights the area itself has blossomed with vineyards and much more. But Israel is not holding the territory simply to make wine. It is holding it because since 1967 it has not been possible for Syria to rain down rockets and other munitions onto the Galilee, as it could – and did – before.
But as of this decade the third and equally powerful reason for Israel to hold onto the Golan has become irrefutable. For the last eight years the British Foreign Office and others have continued to claim that Israel should hand the Golan back. But to whom? As the civil war in Syria has raged, and up to half a million civilians have lost their lives there is something preposterous about the British government and others continuing to insist that Bashar al-Assad should be gifted the Golan Heights. Of all the territory over which the Assad dynasty aspires to rule, the Golan is the only place which it and its allies have not been able to barrel bomb, mortar and otherwise decimate with impunity. As the Syrian nation has fallen apart – largely aided by Iran, Turkey, Russia and the Gulf States – it should be a source of international relief that the Golan is being carefully looked after by the Israelis. There is something not just belligerent but perverse in this pretence that despite everything in Syria the Assad family should still be given the Golan Heights in order to further extend their apparently inadequate slaughter of recent years.
If the Israelis were ever going to return the Golan – and there has been no reason since 1967 why they should have done – then there is infinitely less reason now. Who knows what the workings of President Trump’s mind are? But his actions this week show that he is doing no more than recognising reality, while all the wise heads in the chancelleries of Europe continue to pursue a fool’s goal.
Rather than demanding that Hamas cease and desist from endangering the lives of Palestinians by sending them to clash with Israeli soldiers, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its leaders are condemning Israel for perpetrating "crimes" against Palestinians. According to the logic of the PA, the conflict started when Israel fired back.
Abbas and his officials have apparently not heard of the arson kites and booby-trapped balloons that have been launched from the Gaza Strip towards Israeli towns on nearly a daily basis over the past few months. They also apparently have not have not heard of the rockets and mortars that are fired from the Gaza Strip at Israel almost every day. The PA further appears unaware that Hamas has been sending thousands of Palestinians to attack Israeli soldiers with explosive devices, firebombs and rocks.
Abbas and the PA are simply doing the one thing they are good at: trying to frame Israel for Palestinian crimes against their own people. Clearly, the PA leaders are afraid to condemn the rocket attacks on Israel. They evidently do not want to be accused by their people of betraying the Palestinian "resistance" against Israel.
According to Open Secrets, AIPAC spent $3.5 million on lobbying in 2018, slightly more than the $3.4 million it spent in 2017. This is a relatively small number compared to the anti-Israel Open Society Foundation (OSF) which spent $31.5 million in 2018 – NINE TIMES what AIPAC spent. That figure is also almost four times the $16 million that OSF spent on US lobbying in 2017. This huge jump in lobbying dollars may coincide with George Soros’s transfer of $18 BILLION into OSF, making it the second largest “charity”/ largest lobbying group in the United States. (By calling itself a charity instead of a lobbying group, Soros was able to avoid paying any capital gains on the billions of investment dollars in his hedge fund.)
In addition to its work lobbying the US government, the OSF directly funds many anti-Israel organizations according to NGO Monitor, including Adalah, Breaking the Silence, Ir Amim and Al-Haq.
That’s just one giant far left-wing lobbying group countering most of AIPAC’s agenda.
The left-wing J Street has likewise repeatedly fought the current Israeli administration and lobbied aggressively against it, and spent more money lobbying Congress in 2018 than AIPAC, a total of $4 million. Not one dollar of J Street went to Republican candidates, which is not surprising as it is really an alternative to the Republic Jewish Coalition, not a broad-based bipartisan group like AIPAC.
When it comes to foreign countries lobbying the US government, the number one country was South Korea, spending $82.5 million in 2018. I do not recall hearing any of the Democratic candidates for president who ran to the defense of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s remarks about AIPAC talking about South Korea.
Perhaps that is because foreign governments and their companies are mostly lobbying about trade deals which are critical for their economies.
No other group is ever accused of having too much power and influence. That false claim – dating back to times and places where Jews had little or no influence – is an anti-Semitic trope that tells us more about the anti-Semites who invoke it that it does about the Jews.
History has proven that Jews need more power and influence than other groups to secure their safety. During the 1930s and early 1940s Jews had morality on their side, but they lacked the power and influence to save six million of their brothers and sisters from systematic murder.
"The truth is that if Israel were to put down its arms there would be no more Israel. If the Arabs were to put down their arms there would be no more war." -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
When Jewish power and influence are used in the cause of peace and justice -- as it is today -- there is nothing to be ashamed of. It should be a source of pride.
Two years ago, on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, just 20 percent of Democrats thought the U.S. was too supportive of Israel versus a combined 72 percent who thought current levels of support were about right or not enough. Today they’re at 38/41. Something has changed.
What is it?
There are two obvious possibilities, not mutually exclusive. One is that partisanship has infected this issue just as it’s infected every other. Democrats are less sympathetic to Israel because they hate Trump and are letting their contempt for him alter their view of the Jewish state. Trump hasn’t done anything dramatic to affect the balance of power between Israel and the Palestinians but he’s made some bold symbolic gestures of support towards the former, ordering that the U.S. embassy be moved to Jerusalem and just a few days ago recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Democrats might be looking at that, reasoning that “the friend of my enemy is my enemy,” and deciding that Israel should bear some of the brunt of their anti-Trumpism.
If you doubt that partisanship matters here, note that two years ago 63 percent of Republicans said that the U.S. isn’t supportive enough of Israel. Two years later, with Trump having succeeded Obama in office, 67 percent of Republicans now say U.S. support of Israel is “about right.” Some of that is a reaction to the embassy and Golan Heights — and some of it is certainly approval of Trump’s decision to exit the Iran nuclear deal — but I think in the main it’s a reflection of Republicans trusting Trump more on all matters. Saying current support is “about right” is really a vote of confidence in Trump. By the same logic, Dems’ dwindling sympathies for Israel might be a vote of no confidence in him.
In fact, Yair Rosenberg makes a fair point about why Democratic views of Netanyahu really might have changed in year 10. What if they hate Trump so much that Bibi’s very chummy relationship with him has belatedly soured them on Netanyahu and, by extension, Israel?
Interesting, but I’m not sure how to square that with strong-ish Democratic support for Israel prior to 2017 despite the often hostile relationship between Obama and Netanyahu. If Bibi’s warm embrace of a president whom Dems hate is enough to sour them on Israel, why didn’t his cold shoulder towards a president whom they love do the same?
Some have argued that Trump's "America First" beliefs will undermine America's position in the world and ultimately weaken Israel. But while that was a reasonable argument to make in 2016, before we knew how he would govern, it no longer makes sense in light of Trump's strong stance on Iran or his desire to persuade NATO allies to strengthen their defenses. Indeed, with France and Germany – whose leaders are supposedly the epitome of true Western values – bent on appeasing Iran, that argument now falls flat.
Nor has his inconsistent policy toward Russia – a combination of weak talk and strong policies that are much tougher than those of our European allies – endangered Israel, given that it was then-U.S. President Barack Obama who punted Syria to Moscow, not Trump.
Trump has done more than merely reverse Obama's goal of creating more "daylight" between the United States and Israel. He has promoted policies that have discarded decades of foolish conventional wisdom about the Middle East and replaced it with stances on the conflict that are rooted in realpolitik and recognition of Israel's rights and security needs.
That doesn't mean Trump is perfect and, as whoever wins the April election in Israel may find out, his peace plan may cause more harm than good. But it's past time that his critics acknowledge that what he's done with respect to Israel places him above any other American president with respect to friendship for the Jewish state, including Harry Truman (whom many Jewish admirers also spoke of in religious terms), Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush.
That doesn't make Trump Queen Esther. But whether or not you intend to vote for him next year, it is past time to stop pretending that this administration's policies toward Israel can be depicted as anything but a historic breakthrough that should be properly noted and applauded.
Again using the PA's constant messaging and indoctrination that the terrorist prisoners are legitimate "freedom fighters", Hamas also had to prove its bona fides as the protector of the terrorist prisoners.
Accordingly, here again, notwithstanding the "official" excuse the underlying motive for the launch of the rocket, has nothing to do with Israel, but rather the internal Palestinian power struggle to win the hearts of the Palestinians.
As if the internal Palestinian power struggle was insufficient, in the last few weeks the PA and Hamas received what they perceive to be additional, albeit expected support, from the international community, specifically the UN.
In the last few weeks, Hamas and the other Palestinian "factions" in Gaza have continued to launch rocket attacks against Israel, including two long range rockets (criticized by Qawasmi) that targeted Israel's heavily civilian populated Dan region. While often quick to condemn Israel, the UN Secretary General's Special representative to the Middle East, Nikkolay Mladenov, issued no condemnation of these attacks.
Last week, the UN Human Rights Council adopted several resolutions condemning Israel after adopting the PA and Hamas narrative that the violent clashes, organized and orchestrated by Hamas, on Israel's border with Gaza since March 30th 2018, are nothing more than peaceful demonstrations and that the Israeli response to them was excessive.
The combination of the internal Palestinian power struggle with the "stamp of approval" of the UN that Palestinian terrorism will constantly be downplayed and even ignored in order to serve the goal of vilifying Israel made the launch of the rocket attack inevitable. Now, when Israel responds, the PA and Hamas will again play their all too successful "victim card", in the hope of diverting attention from their own pugnacious policies in favor of condemning Israel.
Trump could well turn his attention now to recognising the legal right of Jews to live in Judea and Samaria.
The United Nations'
designation of Judea and Samaria as “The Occupied Palestinian Territories”and
retention of the term “West Bank” – first used in 1950 – rather than “Judea and Samaria” -used since biblical times
has similarly signalled the UN’s rejection of the Jewish peoples’ right to “close settlement” in Judea and Samaria – expressly recognised in article 6 of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and preserved until today by article 80 of the United Nations Charter.
Another Trump proclamation acknowledging the legal right of Jews to live in Judea and Samaria could happen at any time – irrespective of whether Israel has passed any law similar to that passed on 14 December 1981 declaring that ”the law, jurisdiction and administration of the state shall apply to the Golan Heights.”
Such a Trump proclamation would blunt the rising tide of rabid Jew-hatred within the United Nations, UNESCO, the United Nations Human Rights Council and the European Union resulting from these institutions having failed to acknowledge such vested Jewish rights under international law.
The Jewish people worldwide owe President Trump a huge debt of gratitude for championing and defending their right to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in the Golan Heights – and hopefully soon – in Judea and Samaria.
A conversation with Elisha Wiesel is like stepping into a Talmudic debate. Quietly spoken and urbane, he gives deep thought before delivering considered answers.
Despite his famous father’s larger-than-life legacy, he is his own man with his own ideas and strong opinions. He will take part in the March of the Living for the first time this year and is acutely aware of its significance – not simply from a personal perspective but as a powerful tool to strengthen Jewish identity and also create a deeper and more nuanced appreciation of Israel.
We live in an age in which we hoped that antisemitism would dissipate, where the world would take a step back and realize that words and actions have consequences, sometimes genocidal ones. But Europe and the United States are grappling with increasing levels of antisemitism, and one feature in particular caught Wiesel’s attention.
“What’s notable about the strain of antisemitism at the moment is that it is being masked as anti-Zionism and it is being embraced by the Left – and in America that is tragic. We are talking about causes where the Jewish people have been so closely aligned.
“Take the Black Lives Matter movement. It is incomprehensible to me that they have incorporated language from Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. Where is the connection? It is disappointing. If you look at the history of the NAACP, US Jews were there from the beginning. That BDS is being swept into BLM saddens and disappoints me.”
The BLM movement began in 2013, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, who shot and killed African-American teen Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. But its progression to becoming a more significant actor on the national stage followed the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014. At the same time, the BDS movement’s response to Operation Protective Edge drew the attention of the Black Lives Matter leadership, and it was at this point that two seemingly disparate issues converged into a fight, as the leadership of the movements’ saw it, against oppression.
Talking about the BLM and BDS movements brought the conversation to college campuses, where standing up as a proud Jew has become more challenging.
Not long ago, I heard emeritus professor of Tel Aviv University Asher Susser give a talk on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. He came to the following conclusion: The conflict is insoluble because the Palestinians and Israelis have two irreconcilable narratives. And the Palestinians will never give up their so-called ”right of return.”
Yet as I pointed out to him, two sets of refugees arose out of the conflict: one Arab and one Jewish.
The Jewish refugee issue has been solved, but there was an incontrovertible (and irrevocable) exchange of roughly equal refugee populations between what is now Israel and the Arab world. Such exchanges happened in the India-Pakistan conflict, and between Greek and Turkish Cyprus.
End of story.
Professor Susser acknowledged that Israel would never accept five million Arab refugees (this number, uniquely among all other refugees in the world, includes the descendants of the original refugees). The responsibility, he said, should be shared with the Palestinians and the other Arab states.
Maybe the professor was playing Devil’s advocate, but his reply is one I have heard from Arab sources: What have the Palestinians got to do with Jewish refugees?
When I replied that the Mufti of Jerusalem embodied Palestinian antisemitism, inciting the 1941 Farhud massacre of the Jews in Iraq, the professor countered by saying the Mufti was just one man, and there were other causal factors behind the Farhud.
Yes, the Palestinian Mufti was just one man. But he was the de facto leader of the Arab world, where popular opinion was overwhelmingly pro-Nazi. He aligned himself with pro-Nazi nationalists to overthrow the Iraqi government. He took refuge in Berlin with 60 other influential Arabs, and broadcast virulent anti-Jewish propaganda over Radio Berlin with a view to facilitating the extermination of the Jews not just in Palestine, but across the Arab world. Palestinian and Syrian pro-Nazi nationalists had taken control of levers of power in Iraq, and they too bore responsibility for inciting anti-Jewish hatred.
Michel Bacos, the pilot of the Air France flight from Tel Aviv which was hijacked in 1976 and landed in Entebbe has died at age 95.
Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice, where Bacos lived, announced the news on social media on Tuesday.
"He refused to abandon his passengers, who were taken hostage because they were Israeli or of Jewish origin, risking his own life," Estrosi wrote. "Michel bravely refused to surrender to antisemitism and barbarism and brought honor to France."
On June 27, 1976, Bacos was the captain of Air France Flight 139, from Tel Aviv to Paris, with a stop in Athens. After the plane departed Greece, four hijackers took control of the cockpit and forced Bacos at gunpoint to head for Benghazi, Libya, and then Entebbe, Uganda.
The terrorist "sat behind me with his gun pointed at my head," Bacos told Ynet in 2016. "Every time I tried to look in a different direction, he pressed the barrel of his gun against my neck."
Several days later, the terrorists split up the hostages between those who were Israeli or Jewish and those who were not. Bacos demanded the hijackers give him access to both groups.
Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank, is considered one of the world’s foremost analysts on the Middle East and Muslim history. Since 1994, the Forum, through its various projects, has promoted American interests in the Middle East and protected Western values from Middle Eastern threats.
The Israel Victory Project, which calls for a Palestinian defeat in the place of what the Forum considers failed diplomacy, is today the Forum’s most high-profile campaign.
Explains Pipes, “The reigning assumption for 30 years has been that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict can be resolved through negotiations, diplomacy mediation, compromise and painful concessions. It has not worked.” Rather, Pipes, suggests “a completely different approach, which looks at the historical record and notes that conflicts generally end when one side gives up.” A loss on the battlefield, says Pipes, does not necessarily mean defeat.
“The Six-Day War in 1967 was perhaps the greatest military victory in recorded history, but it did not lead to a sense of defeat. The only way for the conflict to be resolved is for one side to give up.”
Pipes points out that his proposal is not anti-Palestinian.
“If the Palestinians give up, they would gain even more than Israelis because the Israelis live in a functioning advanced, democratic, law-abiding country; Palestinians live in something quite worse. Only when the Palestinians abandon their irredentist claim on Israel can they make progress and build their polity, economy, society and culture.” Any resolution of the conflict, says Pipes – whether Israeli sovereignty on the West Bank, complete withdrawal from it, or something in between – is better achieved once the Palestinians accept Israel as the Jewish state.
Former Obama administration officials, and the left-leaning Israeli media, interpreted President Donald Trump’s March 21 decision to recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights as a bid to help Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s electoral prospects ahead of Israel’s Knesset elections on April 9.
But while the timing of the announcement — formalized Monday — may help Netanyahu and his Likud Party vis a vis his main opponent, former Israel Defense Force Chief of Staff Benny Gantz and his “Blue and White” party, in all likelihood the timing of Trump’s statement was a function of recent developments in Syria.
The war in Syria broke out in 2011. It pitted the regime of Bashar Assad and his sponsors – the Iranian regime and Iran’s proxy forces, including Hezbollah and Shiite militias manned by Afghans, Pakistanis and Iraqis — against Sunni opposition forces, largely dominated by jihadist groups.
During the Obama administration, the U.S. shifted from diffident support for the Sunni rebels through CIA programs and support for Turkish operations to train and equip them, to opposition to the Sunnis and support for Iran. The shift in U.S. policy owed to the rise of Islamic State as the dominant Sunni force in Syria in 2014, and to U.S. efforts to appease Teheran in the framework of U.S. nuclear talks with Iran ahead of the 2015 nuclear deal.
From Israel’s perspective, the main threat the war posed was the prospect that through the regime, Iran would take direct control over Syria and use it, along with Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, to wage a major war against Israel. To thwart that prospect, Israel supported Sunni militia fighting the regime along its border in the Golan Heights, and conducted repeated airstrikes against Iranian targets, particularly weapons shipments in Syria that were destined for Hezbollah forces in Lebanon.
In 2015, the strategic balance of powers in Syria shifted decisively in favor of Iran and Assad with the arrival of Russian forces. Russia’s decision to engage directly in the war on behalf of the Iranian side meant that Assad would survive.
Amid all of the breathless commentary on a report from special counsel Robert Mueller that has yet to see the light of day, the real news today came at the joint press conference between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
When the two leaders confirmed reports that the United States will recognize Israel’s right to the Golan Heights, they also struck a blow for real-world facts on the ground being superior to decades of diplomatic fiction.
When Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Tom Cotton, R-Ark., early this year urged Trump to recognize Israel’s sovereignty over parts of the Golan Heights, I argued: “Control of the heights is tremendously important for the safety of people living in the northern part of Israel. If hostile powers control the heights, they can use the advantages of the elevation to rain attacks on the Israelis below. That’s exactly what Syrian artillery did to Israeli farmers in the 1950s and 1960s. Israel particularly fears Iranian presence on the heights through its proxy, the terrorist organization Hezbollah.”
Israel has controlled key portions of the Golan Heights since capturing them during the Six-Day War in 1967. That war began after repeated attacks on Israel, including from the Golan Heights, by Palestinian terrorists, followed by Egypt’s blockade of an Israeli port and by a joint mobilization of most of Israel’s Arab or Islamic neighbors. Acting in defense, Israel crushed the joint militaries of those nations and kept captured territories so as to make new aggression against Israel far less likely to meet success.
Israel went from control to full annexation of the Golan Heights in 1981, with no effective pushback from Syria since. In effect, therefore, all Trump did on Monday was recognize a territorial reality in effect for nearly 52 years and a political reality in effect for 38. Those are among the reasons why, as Ben Hubbard reported in the New York Times, the official recognition of Israeli sovereignty there “was met across much of the Arab world with a shrug.”
Hitlers Bosnian Islamic Waffen-SS division Grand Mufti of Jerusalem with Himmler inspects the new recruits. Each Islamic SS battalion had an imam,each company had a Mullah 60K Jihadists fighting with Hitler received a Quran with a Swastika on it #StopTheRevisionism@Campaign4Tpic.twitter.com/soH6ErovS8
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Pope visits Iraq; but where are the Jews?
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*(With thanks: Edna, Sami and Gladys)*
*Pope Francis has made an historic visit to Iraq to give support to the
beleaguered Christians and other minoritie...
Steve Kramer – Is This a Joke (Iran)?
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Steve Kramer – Is This a Joke (Iran)? A Christian, a Muslim, and a Jew
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1) At the Fathom journal, David Hirsh explains ‘The Meaning of David
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Weekend long read
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1) At the Fathom journal, David Hirsh explains ‘The Meaning of David
Miller’. “According to Bristol University Professor David Miller, ‘Britain
is in the...
TE Lawrence's "the Jewish section"
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On September 7, 1917, this covering letter was sent by TE Lawrence to Gilbert
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...
SHINGLES!
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[image: Dry Bones cartoon, 2021,shingles, birthday, International Women's
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*Shin...
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Israel’s Supreme Court decided a few days ago that conversions to Judaism
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The Jewish Month of Nissan is rapidly approaching. Ladies, please join us
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Purim has started (or is starting) around the Jewish world, and we are
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Lockdown II thoughts: Day 1 Opposition politicians have been banging on
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Oped in the Jerusalem Post (with links)
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The Jerusalem Post published an oped of mine on the Al Durah affair. Here
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annive...