One of the reasons that most Israelis now recognize that the peace process is a hoax is that the PLO continues to signal that a “final” accord will not settle all Palestinian claims against Israel. The PLO intends to use a “Palestine” in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and Gaza to threaten and weaken Israel’s sovereignty in its remaining territory. The PLO’s demand that Israel free its own citizens from prison for acts of treason and murder is a clear indication that this is in fact the group’s long-term plan.
Kerry’s support for the PLO’s demands on terrorists shows Israel two things.
First, at a minimum, Kerry doesn’t have a problem with the Palestinian claim that Israel’s sovereign rights over non- Jews – and hence Israel’s right to sovereignty generally – is limited at best. Second, it shows that there are no concessions that Netanyahu can make to Kerry that will not have dire long-term consequences for Israel.
Walking away from the phony negotiations will be painful. But as Kerry’s demands indicate, the price for remaining at the table gets higher by the day.
The plight of the Palestinian refugees in Syria serves as a reminder to all Palestinians that their Arab brothers do not care about their suffering. In several Arab countries, especially Lebanon, Palestinians continue to be treated as a "fifth column" and an "enemy from within."
The Palestinians once again feel betrayed by their Arab brothers, who continue to pay lip service to the Palestinian cause while at the same time starving them to death, killing them and displacing them.
As for the international community, no one seems to be worried about the starving Palestinians in an Arab country. After all, this is not taking place in
Israel and no Israelis are involved.
An increasing body of evidence has begun pointing to a major shift in American foreign policy in the Middle East. Over the course of the Obama Administration’s tenure, amid the turmoil of the Arab spring, the United States has shown itself unwilling to defend some of its traditional allies (such as the military in Egypt), or to stand by its own threats and red lines (such as punishing the Syrian regime for using chemical weapons); in many cases willing to cede significant influence to other outside powers (such as Russia); and to attempt to reach a nuclear agreement with Iran that is far more conciliatory to Iranian demands than had been the previous policy (such as allowing for uranium enrichment).
Thousands of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs have added the tagline ‘Death to the Jews’ to their Facebook profiles, Israel’s 0404 News reported on Thursday. Facebook has been “flooded” with the murderous phrase, written in Hebrew, 0404 said. An initial inquiry by the website found over 300 profiles of Israeli residents, “from Jerusalem all the way to the towns up north,” bearing the hateful tagline on their pages.
In response, some Israelis posted, “Death to the Arabs” on their profiles, 0404 said. The site suggested that pro-Israel users instead use the phrase “Am Yisrael Chai” (“the nation of Israel lives”) as a less hateful alternative.
“This would be the best response towards these who want to destroy us,” said the report. The website also encouraged Facebook users to take screenshots of pages carrying the phrase “Death to the Jews” and report them to the police. (h/t Alexi)
Human rights activist David Keyes was in Vienna for the nuclear negotiations with Iran and punked several Iranian negotiators.
The United States and other world leaders are currently in tense negotiations with Iran, but Keyes looks to ease the tensions. Keyes used humor and satire to confront several Iranian negotiations about their country’s abuse of human rights. “Who is your favorite political prisoner?” Keyes asked several Iranian officials.
Keyes also compared United States human rights violations to Iran violations with reporter Oliver Towfigh Nia.
“I don’t think human rights in the United States is much better, you know?” Towfigh Nia said. “You have some problems too. Kill a few blacks and shooting them and like you know. And talking about gays you know.” “No, that’s true. There are some similarities,” Keyes said. “America just allowed gays to marry and Iran hasn’t hung a gay person in at least a few hours.”
President Obama is right to say that no ideology can be destroyed on the battlefield alone. The destruction of Nazi fascism in the 1940s was completed not only by its wholesale military defeat but by the world's awareness of the evil of the Nazi ideology and its wholesale moral and ethical failure. If the destruction of ISIS's ideology is to be complete, this too will have to be understood. But the U.S. and its allies ought to be wondering what is going wrong here. Although the numbers of citizens we are losing to ISIS constitute only tiny pockets of our own societies (if larger numbers across the Middle East and North Africa), we ought to consider how we are even losing people in ones and twos in a public relations war with this group. While the Nazis tried to hide their worst crimes from the world, the followers of ISIS repeatedly record and distribute video footage of theirs. Between free and open democratic societies, and a society which beheads women for witchcraft, throws suspected gays off buildings, beheads other Muslims and Christians, burns people alive, and does us the favour of video-recording these atrocities and sending them round the globe for us, you would have thought that there would be no moral competition. But there is. And that is not because ISIS has "better ideas, a more attractive and more compelling vision," but because its appeal comes from a specific ideological-religious worldview that we cannot hope to defeat if we refuse to understand it.
That is why David Cameron's interjection was so important. The strategy Barack Obama and he seem to be hoping will work in persuading the general public that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam is the same tactic they are adopting in the hope of persuading young Muslims not to join ISIS. Their tactic is to try to deny something that Muslims and non-Muslims can easily see and find out for themselves: that ISIS has a lot to do with Islam -- the worst possible version, obviously, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, but a version of Islam nevertheless.
ISIS can destroy its own credibility among advocates of human rights and liberal democracy. The question is how you destroy its credibility among people who want to be very Islamic, and think ISIS is their way of being so. Understand their claims and their appeal, and work out a way to undermine those, and ISIS will prove defeatable not only on the battlefield but in the field of ideas as well. But refuse to acknowledge what drives them, or from where they claim to get their legitimacy, and the problem will only have just started.
When the UN Human Rights Council voted last week to back the report by Mary McGowan Davis on the 2014 Gaza war, the behavior of two council members in particular provoked protests in their home countries. The report, which used skewed and selective reports falsely to condemn Israel for war crimes along with the true war criminal, Hamas, was a travesty. The resolution, which failed to blame Hamas for war crimes but accused Israel of such behavior not just last year but also in the 2008/2009 war, piled malice upon malice.
Only the US voted against the UNHRC resolution. Five countries abstained: Kenya, Ethiopia, Macedonia, India and Paraguay. But what caused a stir was that two countries, the UK and Germany, voted for it. In Germany, this was denounced by the Christian Democratic Union party. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron was accused of hypocrisy. Only last April he had robustly supported Israel’s actions in Gaza, declaring there was “such a difference” between indiscriminate attacks upon Israel and its attempt to defend itself against them.
Yet now the UK had voted for a motion that inverted this difference.
What’s more, the UK had also voted against Israel last May when, by 104 votes to 4, Israel was singled out by the World Health Organization as the only nation on earth to be condemned for violating health rights. Voting twice in support of motions designed to demonize, delegitimize and destroy Israel was behavior scarcely fitting one of its allies.
Israelis and Palestinians want to separate from one another, but the major political solutions to the conflict do not appeal to them, according to an in-depth study by the RAND Corporation released to The Jerusalem Post.
The research found that, overall, “mistrust, broadly defined, is likely the greatest impediment to peace.”
RAND, a leading global policy think tank, conducted the peer-reviewed research via 33 focus groups from 2018 to 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic, collecting detailed views of over 270 individuals. This widely used research approach combines quantitative data and qualitative insights, and is meant to complement the many random-sample polls taken on these topics.
Seeking “to assess whether there were any viable alternatives to the current status quo” between Israel and the Palestinians, the researchers found that Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, West Bank Palestinians and Gazan Palestinians were more likely to be uncertain about any of the five alternative solutions to the conflict offered – two-state solution, confederation, one-state solution, Israeli annexation of area C, or the status quo – than they were to support them.
The questions allowed for uncertainty and support at the same time, yet the only option a majority of Israeli Jews found to be acceptable was the status quo, and none were supported by a majority of any of the other populations.
“There is widespread skepticism that any alternative would be feasible,” the report states. “There was widespread distrust among Israelis and Palestinians of their own leadership, the leadership of the other side, and the people from the other side. As a consequence, there was great skepticism that a deal could be reached and that either side would abide by the terms of the deal.
“In addition, the majority of Israelis and Palestinians in our focus groups indicated that none of the alternatives would end the conflict,” the researchers wrote.
Dear Liberal American Jews,
Congratulations. Many of us democracy-loving Israelis cheered America’s political resilience as power transferred peacefully on January 20, defying Donald Trump’s rantings. And many of us join you in wishing President Joe Biden good luck. But we’re nervous too. We’re not sure Biden has Israel’s back regarding our greatest enemy: Iran. Heck – we’re not sure if you have our back regarding Iran either.
It’s confusing. Much of Biden’s foreign policy team boasts about having crafted the shameful, dangerous Iran deal Biden vows to restore. Yet he said “no” to lifting sanctions to woo Iran to negotiate. Biden’s persuadable. So why are you, our key allies, American Jews AWOL? Why are you still fighting the now-blessedly-less-relevant Trump wars, dodging this nuclear-powered battle between democracy and dictatorship, which could determine the future of the Jewish state, the Jewish people, the West itself?
Clearly, Iran isn’t on your mattering map. You refuse to acknowledge how dangerous the Iranian regime is – to America not just Israel; how urgent the issue is; and how harmful – not just useless – Barack Obama’s 2015 JCPOA agreement with Iran was.
I know I am being too Israeli; inconvenient and impolite. Trump’s polarizing presidency has made everything Obama did above criticism and any position Trump took beneath contempt. But in recovering from Trump’s assault on democracy, America needs nuanced thinking, not partisan cheerleading. Restoring a commitment to truth in all its messiness requires some self-criticism and intense debate among the “good guys” too. The Republicans have proven what constant toadying to a president does to your party, your country, your soul. Why be Biden’s lapdogs – especially when he may appreciate lobbyists demanding a hard line with the mullahs?
So ask yourself two questions: 1) Israelis are crazily polarized too – isn’t Israel’s left-to-right military and political consensus rejecting the Iran agreement striking? 2) Isn’t it even more striking that so many Middle Eastern enemies, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE so feared Obama’s softness toward Iran that they buried decades-old hatchets and started cooperating?
Clarke clearly had no problem with Martin’s trafficking of Nation of Islam-fomented conspiracy theories, even though his “scholarship” was so egregiously anti-Semitic that it prompted the American Historical Association to issue a policy resolution in 1995 about Jews and the slave trade. “The Association therefore condemns as false any statement alleging that Jews played a disproportionate role in the exploitation of slave labor or in the Atlantic slave trade,” that rebuke read.
And Clarke hasn’t distanced herself from those views, either. In 2019, she signed a letter supporting Women’s March co-founder Tamika Mallory after Mallory told white Jewish women to check their privilege and, according to an exhaustive investigation by Tablet, “asserted that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people—and even, according to a close secondhand source, claimed that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade.” Like Clarke, Mallory seems both familiar and comfortable with some of the most egregious anti-Semitic conspiracy theories promoted by the Nation of Islam and “scholars” like Tony Martin.
When asked recently about her support for such views, Clarke told The Forward that it had been a “mistake” to invite Martin to campus, but also claimed her words had been “twisted.” She added, “I unequivocally denounce anti-Semitism.”
But this is disingenuous—as Clarke herself perhaps inadvertently revealed when she refused to extend her condemnation of anti-Semitism to the anti-Semitic statements of Tamika Mallory. As Clarke sees it, there is a clear hierarchy of victimization, and she and Mallory rest atop it: “The marginalization of women of color is a threat to disrupt democracy, and what led me to join that letter was a grave concern about seeing another woman of color marginalized and silenced,” she said. “Let me be clear, I denounce anti-Semitism wherever and whenever it shows up.”
But one can’t defend Mallory while denouncing anti-Semitism, given that Mallory is an unapologetic anti-Semite (she once referred to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as “the greatest of all time”). After all, Mallory is only promoting the same vile conspiracy theories that Clarke’s favorite Afrocentric scholar, Tony Martin, legitimized when Clarke gave him a platform to do so.
This does not inspire confidence in Clarke’s ability to deal with serious issues of civil rights and justice. The group most often targeted and victimized by hate crimes in the U.S. are Jews. If Clarke is happy to overlook the hateful views of someone like Tamika Mallory merely because Mallory is black, then what will she do when tasked with enforcing civil rights law under the aegis of the Justice Department?
Some of the country’s most prominent, self-described "anti-Zionists" are rushing to defend the Biden administration’s possible selection of a top Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) aide to serve at the State Department.
Following a Washington Free Beacon report last week on Matt Duss’s anti-Israel history, anti-Zionists including Peter Beinart, the Jewish writer beloved by anti-Israel activists, are coming to his defense. Beinart wrote in a self-published piece on Monday that Duss is being unfairly maligned by the pro-Israel community and Republican leaders because he is a Christian who cares "about the powerless and the abused, whatever their race, religion, or nationality."
Beinart, the former editor of the New Republic and an Iraq war supporter, called for an end to the Jewish state of Israel, and American support for it, in an essay last year.
The possible selection of Duss, like Beinart a defender of the anti-Semitic Israel boycott movement, has become a flashpoint between pro- and anti-Israel activists. Both groups see Duss's potential elevation as a signal about what direction the Biden administration's foreign policy will take. The prospect of Duss appointment is being cheered by the Democratic Party’s far-left flank, which is pressuring the Biden administration to hire nearly 100 people, including Duss, who are hostile to the U.S.-Israel alliance and want to see an end to the close cooperation between the two. Critics, including the former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and freshman Rep. Ronny Jackson (R., Texas), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, say Duss’s "disdain for the Jewish people and the American-Israel alliance would be a cancer on the U.S. State Department."
It is unclear what position Duss is under consideration for, but he would join a growing roster of Biden administration hires who have displayed animus toward Israel, promoted boycotts of the Jewish state, and advocated for a Palestinian "right of return" that would destroy the country's Jewish composition. This includes Robert Malley, the administration's new Iran envoy who once held unauthorized talks with Hamas, and Maher Bitar, a White House National Security Council member who spent his youth organizing in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.
Beinart's praise for the Sanders aide was well-received by Trita Parsi, vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, an isolationist think tank bankrolled by billionaires George Soros and Charles Koch. Parsi, who has faced accusations of acting as an unregistered lobbyist for the Iranian regime, said Duss’s critics are being led by war "hawks trying to prevent the best in Washington from getting into the Biden administration." Parsi also was included on the far-left's list of 100 foreign policy hands they hope to see hired by the Biden administration.
The United Arab Emirates does not plan to resume funding to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, which was halted last year, until steps are taken to manage funds more efficiently, a UAE government official said.
The Gulf state, current chair of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) advisory committee, provided the agency with $50 million in 2019 and $20 million in 2018, but made no contributions last year, although the official said UAE charitable groups donated $1 million.
“We are in dialogue with UNRWA’s leadership on how to enhance effectiveness of aid,” Minister of State for International Cooperation Reem al-Hashimy told Reuters this week.
She said the decision to halt funding was taken when the oil producing country revised its aid programme at the end of 2019 and was not related to the UAE establishing ties with Israel under a U.S.-brokered deal in September.
“COVID was a revealing time and led us to push the reset button. We believe that we have a moral responsibility but not under the same mechanism,” she said. “We want to see how international organisations are revising their approach - we are looking for more efficacy, and a wiser way of utilizing funds.”
HonestReporting: Webinar, Deconstructed: 'Palestinians Exposed: Hate in the Classroom'
In case you missed it, HonestReporting recently hosted an eye-opening webinar – Palestinians Exposed: Hate in the Classroom – that answered a fundamental question: How is it that Palestinian children born generations after Israel’s establishment are still being educated to envision themselves as residents of cities stolen by Jews, and as refugees temporarily living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip?
The webinar featured Itamar Marcus, Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch, who analyzed the disturbing world of the Palestinian child – spanning sports, culture, music and education. As a result of their exposure to blatantly antisemitic and anti-Israel tropes, Palestinian youth grow up believing that in the future they will “liberate” modern-day Israel, effectively ending Jewish self-determination.
Israel should see this as just another front in the over-100-year war against Jewish sovereignty in its ancestral and indigenous homeland, and respond accordingly.
It should use all of its tools available to defeat the Palestinian Arabs on this and every front.
The Palestinians have taken off their gloves, if they ever even had them on. Israel should do likewise.
Bringing Israel or Israelis into the international dock is more than a declaration of war, it is an aim to defeat Israel by other means. It is an attack on those who protect us. Its chilling aim is to weaken our defenses and make every Israeli more vulnerable.
We can not sit idly by, merely condemning and talking about hypocrisy.
We must act, and act now.
We must break the Palestinian Authority leaders’ will to continue this process. They can stop it at any time, and they should be pressured intensely and ruthlessly to do so.
Only overwhelming strength will win the day on this battlefield that the Palestinians have chosen for us and achieve an Israel victory.
The ball is now in the court of Israel’s decision-makers. Harshly worded press releases and empty threats will not protect our soldiers.
Only an Israel victory will.
Eugene Kontorovich: The ICC's unique approach to Israel
The Biden administration has reestablished ties with the United Nations Human Rights Council three years after former United States president Donald Trump exited the contentious body over its anti-Israel bias.
“The United States will engage with the Council as an observer,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement he issued Monday.
When the Trump administration left the UNHRC, it had been one of 47-member states with that held three years terms on the council, which gave it voting power.
It not only gave up its seat, but severed all ties and refused to publicly engage in meetings.
Blinken clarified that the US is now reestablishing those ties, but in an observer capacity, and not as a member state, a move that can happen only when annual elections are held by the UN General Assembly.
The US “will have the opportunity to speak in the Council, participate in negotiations, and partner with others to introduce resolutions,” Blinken said.
“It is our view that the best way to improve the Council is to engage with it and its members in a principled fashion,” he added.
“We strongly believe that when the US engages constructively with the Council, in concert with our allies and friends positive change is within reach,” Blinken said.
“We recognize that the Human Rights Council is a flawed body, in need of reform to its agenda, membership, and focus, including its disproportionate focus on Israel,” Blinken said.
“However, our withdrawal in June 2018 did nothing to encourage meaningful change, but instead created a vacuum of US leadership, which countries with authoritarian agendas have used to their advantage,” he added.
Ever since the United Nations Human Rights Council was established 15 years ago, the American position on it has swung back and forth like a pendulum, staying out, joining, leaving, and now rejoining.
The problems at the UNHRC run deep. UN Watch, an NGO promoting UN reforms and transparency, has a database that shows just how badly the UNHRC has failed to do its stated job.
The UNHRC’s Executive Board is currently made up mostly of non-democratic countries, including notorious human rights violators like Venezuela and Pakistan, among others. At the UNHRC dictatorships are allowed to take leading positions.
Israel remains the only country about which the UNHRC has a permanent agenda item. Since the council was established, it condemned Israel 90 times, Syria 35 times, North Korea 13 times, Iran 10 times and Venezuela twice. Among the countries that have never been condemned by the UNHRC are China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Zimbabwe.
The UNHRC has held eight special sessions on Israel, as opposed to one on Libya, two on Myanmar and five on Syria, and has had eight commissions of inquiry on Israel, as opposed to one on North Korea and two each on Libya, Myanmar and Syria.
And the number of inquiries and special sessions is not the only issue; it’s their content. The UN’s expert on “Palestine” is only supposed to investigate Israel’s supposed violations, and not the Palestinian Authority and Hamas abuses of Palestinians and Israelis.
Every US administration since the UNHRC’s establishment in 2006 has admitted that it is a deeply problematic institution. The question is, in what way should the US use its considerable influence and budget in relation to the Council.
The UN Human Rights Council doesn’t improve human rights. It covers for dictators & human rights abusers like Russia, China, & Venezuela. Sad to see the Biden admin legitimize an org that has become a farce to human rights advocates around the world. https://t.co/1tsJTG0oix
Israel has led the world in rapidly vaccinating much of its population, so naturally the global left has to find fault: hence the drive to condemn Jerusalem for not taking responsibility for vaccinations in Gaza and the West Bank.
In a series of tweets, Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth accused Israel of racism for this supposed failure; a week later, Palestinian officials decided to join the blame game, announcing that Israel is responsible for vaccinating Palestinians despite past statements to the contrary.
In reality, as UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer notes, the 1995 Oslo II Accord designates responsibility for the health care and vaccinations of its people to the Palestinian Authority.
And while the two countries are supposed to cooperate in terms of handling epidemics, Palestinian Health Ministry officials admitted back in December that they didn’t ask for help in obtaining vaccines from Israel.
Top Palestinian officials routinely go to Israel for major medical care, but PA propaganda discourages it for everyone else, with dark hints that Jewish doctors will offer Arabs only substandard care — if they’re not secretly experimenting on Palestinian patients.
From Obama’s perspective, Iran was the state with which to develop a relationship. The mullahs have the will, aggression and desire to destroy Israel, which they have expressed continuously. However, Iran’s nuclear ambitions posed a PR problem. Therefore, Obama relied on the belief that Iran could not be stopped, and as a result the US and some of its European partners negotiated a deal, which on the surface could be sold to a compliant and ever helpful main stream media, which in turn would sell it to the world’s public. Iran would agree not to develop a nuclear weapon for at least ten years, after which they would be free to do so. This could follow without any international interference. Obama, by then, would have “kicked the can down the road” for a future President to deal with along with the possible fate of Israel.
Whether Iran would comply didn’t really bother anyone, and clauses contained in the agreement limited inspections to civilian sites only whilst excluding military sites -- which is, of course, exactly where nuclear weapons would be developed. This was not only an awful and extremely bad agreement, which appeared to be Obama’s intention, but it has never been ratified by the US Congress. Part of the “deal” was that Obama would transfer huge amounts of cash to the Iranians in the amount of $150 to $170 billion. It remains questionable as to how much of it would find its way into Obama’s pocket. If this was so, a Democrat aligned media would be part of the conspiracy in covering it up.
During the signing and lead up to the JCPOA, I was always struck by the arrogance and cocksureness of Mohammad Javad Zarif so much on display I suspected and speculated that he possibly had Obama and Kerry in his pocket.
This whole scheme essentially threw the USA’s Sunni Arab allies “under the bus” abandoning them with Iran simultaneously threatening them. The great unintended irony, which had not been clearly thought through or even imagined, was that this would encourage the Sunni Arabs to make peace with Israel for their mutual defence as they no longer trusted America. As a result, these states were no longer bound by a ridiculous Palestinian-imposed veto. Their interests and defence obviously took precedence and under a Biden presidency, this situation would be even more relevant, with Obama very likely in the background pulling the Biden strings.
What appealed to Obama and his useless sidekick, John Kerry, was more the potential destruction of Israel, and perhaps to a lesser extent, limiting Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The JCPOA agreement said nothing about the development of missiles, which should have been a logical inclusion. Why something so fundamental was omitted remains a mystery. What should have occurred to them during negotiations was that a nuclear bomb has to be delivered. Iran has an antiquated air force which could not manage such a task. It could of course acquire aircraft from Russia or China. However, the obvious and only alternative was via a ballistic missile. This is precisely what Iran has been developing and testing for years.
Indian terrorist group Jaish-ul-Hind has claimed responsibility for the blast that took place near the Israeli embassy in New Delhi on Friday, local media reported.
No one was injured in the explosion, which took place on the 29th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between India and Israel.
According to the India.com news site, the investigation so far has recovered social-media chatter according to which Jaish-ul-Hind operatives boast about carrying out the attack.
The Indian Express reported on a police source as saying that the bomb appeared to have been planted in a flowerpot on the road divider. According to the report, a letter found on the scene, addressed to “Israel Embassy ambassador,” said that the blast was a “trailer,” suggesting that it was a prelude to future attacks against the embassy or other Israeli targets in the country.
The note also refers to “Iranian martyrs” Qassem Soleimani, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force commander killed in a US drone strike in Iran on Jan. 3, 2020, and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, head of the Iranian military nuclear program, who was assassinated near Tehran on Nov. 27 in a hit for which Iran has blamed Israel.
New Delhi Blast: 2 Suspects Seen on Security Footage
“Right now, Jews are in a very precarious and strange position,” said author and former New York Times editor Bari Weiss in a wide-ranging interview Friday, with former Fox News and NBC host Megyn Kelly.
“Jews don’t count,” she argued. “If someone said to another editor at the New York Times, ‘are you writing about the Blacks again? Are you writing about the trans again? Are you writing about the gays again?’ — think about how that sounds to your ear; it’s disgusting. And yet some people think it’s acceptable to say about Jews.”
The former opinion section editor resigned from The New York Times in July 2020, publishing an open letter that criticized colleagues for “harassing” behavior.
“They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again,'” she wrote in the letter.
Kelly, the former news anchor who launched The Megyn Kelly Show podcast in 2020, asked Weiss on Friday why antisemitism had recently become more prominent.
“In the antisemitic conspiracy theory … Jews or the Jewish state comes to stand for whatever a given culture or civilization defines as its most loathsome or disgusting qualities,” said Weiss, who in 2019 authored the book How to Fight Anti-Semitism. “That’s how the Jews can be so many things at once,” under ideologies like Nazism and Communism.
“You have the accusation that comes from the far-right — from people like the killer who stormed into my synagogue in Pittsburgh two years ago, and he said ‘all Jews must die,’ and he killed eleven of my neighbors,” said Weiss, referring to the 2018 Tree of Life massacre in her home town.
Fighting Terrorists while respecting International Law
Fighting Terrorists while respecting International Law: Col. (ret) Adv. Pnina Sharvit Baruch, former head of the IDF's international law department and Col. (ret) Richard Kemp CBE, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, chaired by Natasha Hausdorff, Barrister.
Two exceptional speakers discuss the challenges facing moral armies when confronting terrorists, while seeking to avoid civilian casualties and comply with international law.
Col. Adv. Pnina Sharvit Baruch is a senior research fellow and the head of the program on law and national security at the Israel Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). She is also vice president of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists (IJL) and active in Forum Dvorah - Women in Foreign Policy and National Security.
Pnina retired from the Israel Defense Forces in 2009 with the rank of Colonel after twenty years in the International Law Department, heading the Department from 2003. She was responsible for advising on international law, including the laws of armed conflict. Pnina served as a legal advisor and member of Israel's delegations to the negotiations with the Palestinians and with Syria.
After 2009 Pnina taught courses on public international law and on the legal aspects of the Israel – Arab conflict in the law faculty of the Tel Aviv University and at the National Security College. She has published numerous articles on issues relating to these topics. She holds an LL.B and LL.M from Tel-Aviv University.
Col. Richard Kemp CBE served in the British Army for 30 years, retiring in 2006. He completed eight operational tours fighting terrorism in Northern Ireland, including intelligence work, and was wounded in action. He took part in the 1990-91 Gulf war in Iraq and Kuwait. He served with the UN Protection Force in Bosnia in 1994 and was counter terrorism adviser to the Prime Minister of Macedonia in 2001.
He commanded British Forces in Afghanistan in 2003 and subsequently served again in Iraq during the second Gulf War. From 2002-2006 he was head of the international terrorism intelligence team at the British Cabinet Office and a member of COBRA.
Since leaving the Army he has addressed the UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva, refuting allegations of war crimes aimed at the IDF. He has also addressed the Knesset and several legislatures around the world on these issues as well as the threat from Iran. He is a media commentator and writer on defence, security, terrorism and intelligence and author of "Attack State Red", an account of the war in Afghanistan.
Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the notorious mufti of Jerusalem in the 1920s and 1930s who spent much of World War II in Berlin as a Nazi collaborator and war criminal, must be spinning in his grave. In Jerusalem has learned that the landmark hilltop mansion he built 88 years ago in affluent Sheikh Jarrah between the Old City and Mount Scopus is slated to become a synagogue in a future 56-apartment Jewish neighborhood in east Jerusalem.
The 500-sq.m. manor house, called Qasr al-Mufti (the Mufti’s Palace) in Arabic, today stands deserted at the center of a largely completed 28-apartment complex, which itself lacks a tofes arba occupancy permit. The reason the new neighborhood is not being finished – and indeed has not been marketed in the 10 years since demolition and construction began – is that the developers have applied to rezone the 5.2-dunam site to double the number of units to 56, according to Daniel Luria, a spokesman for Ateret Cohanim, which backs the housing project.
Luria was unclear when the rezoning application, originally meant to build 70 apartments, would be approved. The historic house at the core of the site will be preserved and repurposed for communal needs including a synagogue and perhaps a day care center, he said.
“There is a beautiful poetic justice when you see the house of Hajj Amin al-Husseini crumbling down,” Luria noted.
Though al-Husseini built the mansion, he never lived in it. Following the outbreak in 1936 of the Arab Revolt against the British Mandate government, the mufti became a fugitive hiding in the Old City’s Haram ash-Sharif. When the British attempted to arrest him in 1937, he fled Palestine and the British made do with confiscating his property. The al-Husseini clan owned numerous properties in Jerusalem, among them the Palace Hotel (today the Waldorf Astoria), the Orient House, and the mansion subsequently turned into the Shepherd Hotel in Sheikh Jarrah on a plot of land known as Karam al-Mufti, named for al-Husseini.
No Jews have been as relentlessly maligned as the Jews of Hebron. From the time of their arrival following the 1967 Six-Day War—40 years after the murderous annihilation of its Jewish community by rampaging Arabs—they have become the pariahs of the Jewish people. Their presence in the city where the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people are entombed, and where King David reigned before relocating his throne to Jerusalem, is deemed to be an unlawful and immoral Israeli intrusion on the Palestinian residents of Hebron.
The most recent contributor to this enduring falsehood is Tamara Neuman, an anthropologist and Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute at Columbia. The first page of her Introduction to Settling Hebron: Jewish Fundamentalism in a Palestinian City displays the misinformation that reveals her embedded bias. Gazing at the Machpelah shrine where, according to the biblical narrative, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah are entombed, she nonetheless discerns its “staunch witness to the site’s Islamic character.” Muslims, however, first appeared in the seventh century C.E. long after the reign of King Herod, when the towering Machpelah enclosure was built.
It was, for Neuman, “impossible not to notice the deadening effects of the many [Israeli] soldiers deployed throughout a Palestinian urban area”—in translation, the ancient Jewish Quarter that was “established illegally” following the Six-Day War. (Her tour guide was a founder of Breaking the Silence, a renegade group of ex-soldiers who oppose Jewish settlements.) In a repetitive inversion of historical reality, she accuses Jewish settlers of “the remaking of many Palestinian areas into a geography of biblical sites and origins,” as if Palestinians superseded millennia of Jewish habitation in Hebron. In Neuman’s convoluted (and occasionally incomprehensible) rendering, “Jewish settlers establish a putative sense of the real, which arises from the very materiality of the scene.”
Historically myopic, ignoring millennia of Jewish history in Hebron, she can only discern the “colonial backdrop” of a “land takeover” with “Jewish observance and forms of direct violence in order to erase the presence of an existing Palestinian population.” As for erasure, it was Hebron Arabs who murderously obliterated the centuries-old Jewish community in 1929. She imaginatively, but falsely, describes their targeted violence against a tiny community of several hundred Jews and yeshivah students as “anticolonial riots.”
Are the Jews to blame for spreading COVID-19 throughout New York City? That’s what Mayor Bill de Blasio suggested in an inflammatory tweet back in April, which, in his typical bumbling fashion, he defended for six months before kinda, sorta walking it back.
Never mind all that. The city is serious! It believes in science! Earlier this week, the mayor’s office launched its “NYC Vaccine for All” campaign, announcing that it will begin offering the COVID vaccine soonest. Who will get it first? Naturally, the neighborhoods “hardest hit” by the pandemic, the mayor’s office assured us, 27 of them in total.
Hallelujah! So now we have an official record of the hardest hit corners of New York, which means that if the mayor’s criticism was correct, we should find many familiar ZIP codes among those singled out for urgent care. Let us, then, turn to the list and search for the neighborhoods heaviest populated by Orthodox Jews, the clear target of the mayor’s ire.
What about, for example, the venerable 11213, at the heart of which lies 770 Eastern Parkway, Chabad’s headquarters? Nope, not on the list. Maybe 11218, 11219, and 11230, representing Borough Park? Not on the list either. Now, surely that massive Hasidic funeral that drew thousands and spurred the NYPD to launch a criminal investigation led to a massive outbreak that sent the neighborhood right into the hardest-hit list, right? Check again: That funeral was launched from the Yetev Lev D’Satmar yeshiva, ZIP code 11249. Good luck finding it on the mayor’s list. You can play this game with most NYC neighborhoods that are home to vast populations of Orthodox Jews; you won’t find them on the list.
None of this is to say that no Jews live in any of the neighborhoods most distressed by the pandemic. Take a close look, and you’ll find some neighborhoods that do have strong Jewish populations, like the border between Bushwick and Williamsburg, say. But look closely, and the picture grows complicated: Wallabout Street, for example, one of the neighborhood’s main Hasidic thoroughfares, is largely uncovered by the mayor’s announcement. So while a significant number of Williamsburg Jews do live in areas that get vaccine priority, the densest part with the largest Jewish population in Williamsburg isn’t in any of the priority neighborhoods. Neither are the central Satmar shuls, or the popular restaurant Gottleib’s.
This exclusion of the lion’s share of the city’s heavily populated Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods from the mayor’s list suggests that one of two things are true.
The first possibility is that the list is an accurate, science-based representation of the virus’s spread rates and patterns. In that case, the absence of most Orthodox Jewish enclaves from the list means the mayor was being both a criminally irresponsible public official for pinning the plague on one blameless minority group, as well as a filthy anti-Semite for picking on the Jews.
The second possibility hardly portrays de Blasio in a better light. According to the mayor’s office—which did not return Tablet’s request for more information—the vaccine’s distribution will be spearheaded by the Taskforce on Racial Equity and Inclusion, which is chaired by the city’s First Lady, Chirlaine McCray, not a medical doctor. In fact, the only prominent physician on the committee, Dr. Raul Perea-Henze, resigned in September, joining a wave of senior officials departing the grossly inept administration.
A federal court of appeals ruled that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s capacity limits on houses of worship in areas with rising COVID-19 cases constituted a violation of religious liberty.
The ruling on Monday comes after a Supreme Court injunction last month blocked Cuomo from enforcing the rules until the lower court could reevaluate an earlier ruling that upheld state guidelines limiting synagogue attendance to 10 or 25 people.
The case, brought by the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Agudath Israel of America, an advocacy organization representing ultra-Orthodox Jews, was one of the first religious liberty cases to be decided by the court’s new conservative majority. The appeals court ruling was celebrated by Agudath Israel as confirmation that it had achieved a victory for religious liberty.
“The courts have clearly recognized that the restrictions imposed by New York State violate the constitutional rights of those seeking to attend religious worship services,” Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America, said in a statement Monday.
The court of appeals did not rule on the constitutionality of percentage capacity limits, which would have impacted smaller houses of worship. Houses of worship in zones with the highest rates of COVID-19, so-called red zones, were subjected to capacity limits of ten people or 25% of building capacity, whichever is fewer. In orange zones, the limit was 25 people or 33% of capacity, whichever is fewer.
Benjamin Strasser, a German politician of the Free Democratic Party, also expressed his concern and told JNS, “false school materials can cement hatred and prejudice for decades. Neither German tax revenues nor our contributions to the Palestinian Authority may be used to promote antisemitism and hatred against Israel.”
Steve McCabe MP, chair of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), blamed the British government for spending taxpayers’ money “on a review which appears deeply flawed and which we may never have the chance to see.”
He accused the government of “hiding behind the EU to escape accountability for its own inaction,” and demanded that the United Kingdom “immediately suspend all PA aid related to the delivery of the PA curriculum until wholesale and urgent revisions are guaranteed.”
LFI vice chair and Member of Parliament John Spellar sent a letter to the government on this same issue, asking for an explanation.
In an emailed statement to JNS, a spokesperson for the Delegation of the European Union to Israel defended the flawed GEI study as “being carried out according to best international standards with native Arab speaking experts being part of the research team.”
The statement said that the EU’s Final Report “will be finalized by the end of the year. … Given that the final report has not even been published yet, any criticisms at the stage are clearly premature in our view, in particular as they have been based on alleged leaks regarding a preliminary report which had no other value than to inform the scoping of the study. … We should clarify that the EU does not fund and will not fund Palestinian textbooks.”
Reflecting on the proximity between the deaths of two towering figures in, respectively, literature and the arts, Howard Jacobson sees a certain symmetry between the philo-Semitic Gentile and the uncomfortable Jew:
Quite what Miller supposed he achieved by refusing his Jewishness in “the face of other Jews,” or in what spirit he affirmed it only to those who hated it, is hard to fathom. But in both instances he stripped Jewishness of its amity, making it a thing of hostility and even confrontation. Wouldn’t it have been easier just to say he was a nonpracticing Jew?
Well, not if you were Alec Berman, the hero of Betty Miller’s novel Farewell Leicester Square, whose Jewishness lay like a curse on him and those who loved him. A thing “he never forgets for one moment ... it’s always there, at the back of his mind, whatever he does and wherever he is. It haunts him …” Betty Miller was Jonathan Miller’s mother. Farewell Leicester Square was written, remarkably, when she was only 22 and described the agitations of a young Jewish filmmaker in 1930s London. The London Jonathan Miller had to make his way in, 20 years later, was less hostile to Jews and so less likely to induce such paranoia as Betty Miller described. But it’s a reasonable assumption that her son read his mother’s novel at an impressionable age. He grew up in an upper-tier intellectual milieu, bristling with discomfort in the matter of being alien. Not for him, one might imagine him deciding, the enervating Jewish self-consciousness of Alec Berman.
Nothing unusual or reprehensible in that. You have to get yourself up off the canvas. But Miller continued uncomfortable and sneering. Israel displeased him in the usual, unthinking ways. To the question where else Jews could look to for refuge come the next catastrophe, he posited a sort of Darwinism of destruction: The time might have come, he said, for Judaism to die out.
Clive James sometimes gave the impression that he’d have liked to be a Jew. That’s a luxury, of course, that only a non-Jew can afford. And, unlike Miller, he was a schmoozer. I knew him well enough to benefit from his schmoozing but not so well as to get beyond it. His curiosity, though, was always genuine, as was his disappointment when he learnt I hadn’t made myself a Talmudic scholar, hadn’t learnt Yiddish, and couldn’t read more than a few words of Hebrew. He learnt Russian in order the better to read Tolstoy and would certainly not have written a novel about Jews without mastering both their ancient and their modern languages. I don’t think it was his intention to make me feel I’d failed his expectations, but I did. He was a staunch supporter of Israel and saw through the fashionable denunciations of Zionism made by people “dedicated to knowing as little as possible about the history of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.” If there was one thing that tried his magnanimity it was partisanship built on ignorance. His own knowledge was formidable and principled, as witness Cultural Amnesia, his extraordinary 800-page tribute to 20th-century art and thought—not a feat anyone could have pulled off had they not liked keeping company with the imaginations of Jews. Maybe Jonathan Miller possessed as wide a store of knowledge but, if he did, he didn’t employ it to such generous purpose.
Israel established full diplomatic relations with Bhutan for the first time on Saturday night.
Ambassador to India Ron Malka and his Bhutanese counterpart Vetsop Namgyel signed the final agreement normalizing ties on Saturday night.
The countries’ foreign ministries held secret talks over the past year towards the goal of forging official ties, which included delegations between the two capitals Jerusalem and Thimphu.
The effort to make relations between the two countries was not connected to the Abraham Accords, in which four Arab countries – United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco – normalized ties with Israel in as many months, with American mediation.
In fact, Bhutan does not even have official diplomatic relations with the US.
Bhutan is a Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas, bordering on India and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. It has gone to great lengths to keep itself isolated from the rest of the world in order to avoid outside influences and to preserve its culture and natural resources. The country limits tourism, especially from outside South Asia.
The landlocked country has formal diplomatic relations with only 53 other countries – a list that does not include the US, UK, France or Russia – and has embassies in only seven of them.
Neither does the country have ties with China, having closed its border to the country on its north after China’s 1959 invasion of Tibet.
At first glance, the State of Israel and the Kingdom of Bhutan — two small Asian countries separated by nearly 5,300 kilometers of bone-dry deserts and snow-capped mountains — appear to have little in common besides the fact they occupy the same continent.
Highly urbanized Israel, no bigger than New Jersey, is one of the most wired countries on Earth. Of its nine million inhabitants; 88% have smartphones and 75% are Jews. Immensely popular with tourists, Israel will receive 4.7 million foreigners of all religions this year.
Isolated Bhutan, by contrast, is nearly twice Israel’s size but has barely 800,000 people, all of them Buddhists. Fewer than 200,000 tourists annually visit this Himalayan Shangri-La, which as late as 1980 had just 1,200 phone lines in service. Television came to Bhutan only in 1999.
Despite mutual feelings of admiration, the two countries don’t have diplomatic relations … not yet. But the day that happens, Yeshey Tshogyal — who prefers to see similarities instead of differences — would make an ideal choice as the Forbidden Kingdom’s first ambassador to Israel.
“The people here are very warm and welcoming. They’re also open-minded, at least the ones I’ve met,” the 22-year-old told me in Tel Aviv just before her flight back to New York, where she’s pursuing a double major in psychology and intercultural communications at Baruch College.
Last week, Yeshey wrapped up a two-month internship at the Israel-Asia Center, a nonprofit organization based in Jerusalem.
In July 2009, President Barack Obama met with Jewish leaders at the White House. America, he told them, had been mistaken in trying to adhere to its goal of “no daylight” with Israel. During the previous eight years of the George W. Bush administration, Obama told Jewish leaders, “There was no space between us and Israel, and what did we get from that? When there is no daylight, Israel just sits on the sidelines, and that erodes our credibility with the Arab states.” Obama wanted to put some space between the U.S. and Israel, and proceeded to do exactly that. His experiment was a flop: He was the least successful president regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict since the end of the Cold War.
Trump sought to correct this. He recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the U.S. Embassy there. Trump also had the U.S. recognize Israeli sovereignty over its Golan Heights in the north. When Friedman was announced as the pick for ambassador to Israel, liberal figures insisted he was too pro-Israel and too supportive of what they viewed as the Israeli Right. But success followed.
Kushner, thus, began his push for peace with the wind at his back: Pundits and so-called “experts” had all promised there would be bloodshed from Trump’s Jerusalem moves, but none had materialized because they fundamentally misunderstood the region’s politics. The Palestinians rejected Kushner’s “economic peace” model out of hand, just as they have rejected every peace plan before it. But it turned out he had some surprising takers.
The Palestinians’ legitimate drive for statehood and self-determination had taken on an outsize role in the region’s affairs. Ramallah effectively was given a veto over Arab normalization with Israel. But when Trump called their bluff over Jerusalem, it shattered the myth that you had to go through the Palestinians if you wanted public cooperation and reconciliation with Israel. Trump’s decision to leave the Iran nuclear deal also showed America’s Sunni Gulf allies that he could be trusted to restore the bonds broken by Obama’s attempts to favor Iran over traditional allies.
Much like the ancient ghosts of ethnic conflict that haunt the Balkans, the Middle East was a place where the Palestinians didn’t hold the only veto; history had one too. But the Trump administration approached it with an unsentimental proposal: Don’t be ruled by inherited rivalries and the trauma of the past; if you have the chance to make your lives better right now, take it. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain did, striking recognition deals that include trade and civil aviation plus joint efforts to combat anti-Semitism. Sudan joined the party, agreeing to normalize relations with Israel and having the U.S. remove it from a list of terror-sponsoring states. On Dec. 10, Morocco entered the normalization-with-Israel parade in return for the U.S.’s recognition of its sovereignty over Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony.
None of this is to say this tack will always work — it won’t. But in several fraught regions weighed down by the bloodshed of history, it offered a path out of the desert. Future administrations, very much including the incoming Biden White House, should study these lessons carefully, adding one more tool to America’s diplomatic arsenal.
“The Arab countries have made clear that they will not make peace with Israel without resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That’s not where their loyalties lie. That’s not where their politics are.” - @JohnKerry 12/28/2016 https://t.co/LUQzsQpasqpic.twitter.com/nCz68u2cJd
While many American Jews were scared that Netanyahu's courageous challenge of Obama's central foreign policy would provoke anti-Semitism, in fact, it empowered many Americans to oppose the deal. Republicans rallied against it. Every Republican presidential candidate in 2016 pledged to abandon the deal, and President Donald Trump kept his promise.
By being a leader, Netanyahu also empowered the American Jewish community to defy Obama, even as he and his advisors channeled anti-Semitism by demonizing the deal's opponents as being in the pockets of nefarious donors and foreign interests.
AIPAC launched a major campaign to oppose the nuclear deal in Congress and tens of thousands of otherwise uninvolved American Jews attended demonstrations across the US to voice their opposition to the deal that paved the way for Iran to become a nuclear power.
Netanyahu explained that in dealing with leaders like Obama, with whom he had profound disagreements, "You seek compromise where you can, but you have to avoid compromise where you can't and you have to distinguish between the two and that's what I tried to do."
This lesson in leadership is perhaps the key message of our time. Like the Greeks of yesteryear, the progressive elites today insist that, to be accepted in polite society, Jews have to give up an essential part of their identity – and their civil rights. The Greeks demanded that the Jews give up the Torah. The progressives demand they give up their Jewish peoplehood. These are things that cannot be compromised, only fought, even when those demanding their forfeiture are Jews themselves.
Dan Senor, co-author of Start-Up Nation and host of the new “Post Corona” podcast, joins us today to talk about the electoral college and who intimidated whom (answer: Democrats sought to intimidate Trump electors in 2016) and how the transformative Abraham Accords might be derailed by a Biden administration just as Bibi Netanyahu finds himself in existential trouble as his trial is getting ready to begin. Give a listen.
Glasgow University is ranked as a top UK university. The University is a member of the Russell Group. It runs a platform called esharp which is an ‘international online journal for postgraduate research.’ The University is very proud of the outlet. It states that all the paper are ‘double blind peer reviewed’. The university claims that the ‘rigorous and constructive process is designed to enhance the worth of postgraduate and postdoctoral work.’
A paper on the ‘Israel lobby’ appeared in issue 25 volume 1 (June 2017). It was written by Jane Jackman, an academic product of the universities of Durham and Exeter. There isn’t much to be found about Jackman online. She spoke at events in Exeter and SOAS and was an active member of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES). In 2017 Jackman was being supervised by Willaim Gallois at Exeter. Unsurprisingly, the conspiracy theorist and ‘liar’ Ilan Pappe was a co-supervisor.
There is almost no sign of public activity from Jackman on social media. There is an inactive Twitter account in her name, which only follows accounts linked to Israeli advocacy or the fight against antisemitism. Given her academic focus on the ‘Israel lobby’, it is a safe bet to assume it is hers. She did spend some considerable time commenting on blogs and articles, including mine.
Jackman’s paper was titled ‘Advocating Occupation: Outsourcing Zionist Propaganda in the UK‘. The key thrust of the argument is that people like myself (I feature prominently) have been recruited by Israel to spread disinformation. I have studied the entire article. My key questions would be –
How did Glasgow University ever permit this to appear in their journal?
How is it possible that this was peer reviewed?
The paper isn’t just laden with conspiracy, antisemitism and errors – much of the time the reference material does not even support what the article is suggesting. The work is beyond shoddy. Jackman makes unsupportable outlandish statements, that are far more fitting for gutter press journalism such as the Independent than an academic journal. The paper frequently contradicts its own logic. This is in no way an academic piece of work. It should be hung on the walls at Glasgow university as a reminder of the shame that they ever allowed this to be published. The only justification for ‘peer reviewers’ to have accepted this piece is that they agreed with its content and wanted it published. The entire process is rife with heavy antisemitism. Who were the editors that sat around a table and accepted this submission?
Not in Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities, by Cary Nelson (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2020)
It is fundamental and axiomatic on the international left, an unexamined article of faith, that the State of Israel suppresses the academic freedom of Palestinian students and faculty. Not in Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities, a new 180-page book by Cary Nelson sets out for the first time to ask what evidence supports this claim and determine whether or not it is true. The evidence gathered here shows that Palestinian students and faculty in fact do not have the protections they need to exercise freedom of speech; indeed they are coerced and threatened to conform. But it is not Israelis who do so.
An excerpt from the book is below:
From 1978 to 1991, Professor Sari Nusseibeh taught philosophy at Birzeit University on the West Bank. He had studied at Oxford and received a doctorate in Islamic Philosophy from Harvard. In September 1987, at the end of a lecture on John Locke, he learned that a group of masked students armed with clubs were outside his classroom seeking “a traitor” — whom he shortly learned was himself. Keeping his colleagues at bay with knives, they beat him “with fists, clubs, a broken bottle, and penknives.” Thanks to adrenaline, he was able to escape his attackers, though “my heart was pounding hard enough to pop my eardrums.” His colleagues, now free to help, drove him to the hospital where his forehead wound was stitched up and his broken arm set. The reaction of the university and the public was essentially non-existent. He had been identified as a traitor for participating in discussions of Israeli-Palestinian possibilities for peace.
Nusseibeh’s narrative is far from unique. When higher education institutions worldwide carry the name “college” or “university,” we often assume that these institutions are roughly similar everywhere. It’s true that an accounting or engineering course in one country will resemble courses in the same subject elsewhere. But a Religion course in a theocracy that imposes a state religion on its people will be different from a course of that same name in countries where religious and democratic freedoms prevail. Similarly, a course on Government or Politics in a dictatorship will not resemble comparably named courses elsewhere.
Around twenty years ago, there were few experts in Israel on the Gulf and a paucity of knowledge about the monarchies and the countries that stretch from Oman to Kuwait. Israel had spent most of its formative years in conflict with powerful states like Egypt in the 1950s, and the Jewish state had relations with countries like Iran and Turkey.
Now things are a bit reversed: Iran is a major threat, Turkey is hostile and the Gulf states offer the promise of peace and prosperity.
Among Israel’s leading experts on these states is Yoel Guzansky, a senior Research Fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies. Twenty years ago, he felt the need to concentrate on the Gulf, he says in an interview. There were just a handful of researchers then, mostly gathered around Yossi Kostiner at Tel Aviv University.
“I fell in love with the Arabian Gulf. And I was fortunate enough when I left the [Prime Minister’s] Office that I could start going to the Gulf. I was invited many times with my Israeli passport and it wasn’t a problem – and for a decade I went back and forth, and I met Gulfies in the US and Europe,” he says.
According to Guzansky it’s important to make a distinction between diplomatic and security ties. Israel has had connections in these countries going back many years, but most of this was not public.
For instance, he recounts a story relating to Oman where Omanis thanked him for Israel’s support. “I said what are you talking about? I knew about some of the connections,” but not the depth of the ties. “Israel helped Sultan Qaboos and others, and even the Saudis in the war in Yemen, so the connections are long term,” he says. After the Oslo Accords, a new era began and Israel had limited open ties in the 1990s.
Ahead of the three-year anniversary of US President Donald Trump recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, more than three-dozen Republican members of Congress have called for language in an upcoming must-pass appropriations bill that would prohibit American funding from being used to move the US embassy in Israel from Jerusalem.
In a Dec. 4 letter, a group of 43 Republicans in the US House of Representatives called on Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to ensure that the 2021 State, Foreign Operations and Related Agencies bill, primarily funding the US State Department, which oversees embassies, includes language that prohibits funding from “being used to move the United States’ embassy out of Jerusalem.”
Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital on Dec. 6, 2017, and moved the US embassy to there from Tel Aviv five months later.
“In a time when we are seeing the increasing normalization of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, we must ensure that the United States does not take a step backward by moving the US embassy out of Jerusalem, which is why we seek the prohibition of any FY21 funding in the State, Foreign Operations and Related Agencies bill being used to move the United States’ embassy out of Jerusalem,” wrote the GOP congressional members.
The United Nations General Assembly called on Israel to “renounce possession of nuclear weapons” in a 153-6 vote on Monday, with 25 abstentions.
Israel was asked “not to develop, produce, test or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons.”
The UNGA further called on the Jewish state “to renounce possession of nuclear weapons and to place all its un-safeguarded nuclear facilities under full-scope Agency safeguards as an important confidence-building measure among all States of the region and as a step towards enhancing peace and security.”
Israel is presumed to be one of the world’s nine nuclear powers, but it has never admitted to the possession of nuclear weapons.
There are eight countries acknowledged to be nuclear powers, five of which having signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The five signatories are: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Three additional countries, which are not signatories to the treaty, have admitted to testing and possession nuclear weapons: India, North Korea and Pakistan.
Overall, 191 countries are party to the treaty, including Iran but not Israel.
In New York on Monday, 153 countries called exclusively on Israel to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty and renounce its weapons in the resolution titled, “The Risk of Nuclear Proliferation in the Middle East.”
Here's a news flash for Saudi Arabia: Presumptive President-elect Joe Biden is looking to fundamentally restructure the U.S.-Saudi relationship. The only way for Riyadh to stop what's coming might be to normalize relations with Israel right now.
Biden's nominee for secretary of state, Tony Blinken, reportedly held regular calls with far-left foreign policy activists during the presidential campaign and expressed an openness to cutting off arms sales to Saudi Arabia. In an interview shortly before the election, Blinken announced that a Biden administration would "undertake a strategic review of our bilateral relationship with Saudi Arabia to make sure that it is truly advancing our interests and is consistent with our values." Translation for Riyadh: Buckle up for a rough ride.
Absent a seismic shift—like a normalization agreement with Israel—the Saudis should prepare for the worst. Congress has the votes to send a bill to the president's desk to halt U.S. arms sales to the kingdom. Such a bill passed the Senate just last year, when Republicans held a wider margin than they will in 2021—and before the kingdom angered a number of oil state Republicans by crashing the price of oil and pummeling the U.S. energy industry. This time around, when that same bill reaches the Oval Office, there will be nobody to veto it.
The incoming State Department brass will also likely reopen an investigation into the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to determine whether U.S. human rights sanctions should be imposed on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or "MbS," as he is known. To preserve the bilateral relationship, the Trump administration shielded MbS from direct sanctions retribution in 2019—a decision likely to be reversed in a Biden administration.
Against the backdrop of a complete reset in U.S.-Saudi relations, President-elect Joe Biden is also making it clear that he will press for a full re-entry into the Iran nuclear deal without any preconditions. He could very well turn back the clock four years and flood the Islamic Republic with billions of dollars in sanctions relief, which would enable Tehran to recapitalize both its Revolutionary Guard and its sprawling terror operations throughout the Middle East. Biden could renew American support for the enrichment of uranium on Iranian soil and acquiesce to the expiration of international restrictions on transferring advanced arms to the mullahs.
Saudi Arabia said it remains open to fully normalize ties with Israel and join the Abraham Accords. According Saudi Arabia Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan it was critically important to get Palestinians and Israelis back to the negotiating table that delivers a Palestinian state within the “lines that are globally understood to eventually constitute a Palestinian state.” The remarks were made at the International Institute for Strategic Studies Manama Dialogue Conference which is taking place from December 4 to 6.
Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister says that Palestinian statehood would deliver peace and noted the King Fahad peace initiative at Fez in 1982 and 2002 Saudi plans have suggested full normalization in the past with Israel. “Israel will take its place in the region but in order for that too happen and for that to be sustainable we need for the Palestinians to get their state and settle that situation.”
The remarks were made at the annual and important conference that is held in Bahrain. The conference took place this year at the Ritz Carlton in Manama. Israel participated openly for the first time with several participants and press releases from the conference said Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi was scheduled to address the event virtually.
According to Al-Arabiya the remarks by the foreign minister are part of the speculation that Saudi Arabia could follow the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to join the Abraham Accords. In November reports indicated that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu travelled to Saudi Arabia, although Riyadh denied he met the Crown Prince. Saudi Arabia is seeking to repair its image in Washington with the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden. It has also hinted that it may be open to some mending of fences with Turkey and Qatar. Turkey and Qatar are allies and Saudi Arabia led other Gulf states to break relations with Doha in 2017. Turkey sent troops to Qatar. Turkey has been openly opposed to Saudi Arabia and Qatar has used its media to try to undermine global support for Riyadh.
This isn’t what Israelis want to hear right now, but it’s nonetheless true. They need to hold another election. The prospect of a new administration in Washington is cause for concern, even if it may not prove to be the end of the world. But the challenge that this will pose requires Jerusalem to speak with one voice.
An Israeli government with the prime minister’s office at odds with both the defense and foreign ministries is a luxury the Jewish state might have been able to afford as long as President Donald Trump was in the White House, and the U.S.-Israel relationship was one rooted in close cooperation and a common vision about strategic issues. But with President-elect Joe Biden about to take office with a foreign-policy team committed to the failed Middle East policies of the Obama administration, Israel’s margin for error is about to be reduced. Even if that means that Israelis must suffer through the agony of a fourth election inside of two years, a divorce between unity government partners Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Benny Gantz has become a necessity.
After having held three inconclusive elections inside of a year, yet another trip to the ballot box would seem to be the last thing the Jewish state needs. In April and September of 2019, and then again in March of this year, Israelis headed to the polls to elect a Knesset. Each time resulted in a stalemate with neither Netanyahu nor his chief rival—Blue and White Party leader Gantz—able to muster a majority.
The standoff finally ended in April of this year, when Gantz split his party by joining a unity government with Netanyahu. Doing so made no political sense for him since the only point of Blue and White was to topple the prime minister rather than to enact different policies. Indeed, on all of the important war and peace issues, Gantz tried to run to the right of Netanyahu. But realizing the futility of the continued stalemate and responding patriotically to the crisis that the coronavirus pandemic presented to the nation, he decided that throwing in with his nemesis was the right thing to do.
In the final days of the Obama administration, it was fashionable for the deal’s defenders to dismiss its critics by contending that Iran was in full compliance with the terms of the accords. But those critics did not disagree. Their problem was always that “full compliance” was not difficult to achieve.
Iran provided inspectors access to declared nuclear sites but not military sites where illicit activities were likeliest to occur. A subsequent agreement allowed inspectors the opportunity to access suspect sites but only with at least 24-days-notice—enough to dispose of the evidence of small-scale work on components related to a bomb. But functionally, that 24-day timeline could be reset by Iran, which could stretch the delays out for weeks—ample time to deceive inspectors.
The IAEA routinely insisted that they had ample access to sites like Natanz and Fordow, though the uranium-enriching centrifuges at those sites were only mothballed and could be quickly restored (as they were last year). But inspectors were blocked from accessing sites like the Parchin military complex, where Iran allegedly conducted nuclear explosives and hydrodynamic testing before bulldozing the area and layering it with asphalt. To satisfy observers unnerved by Iran’s intrigues, Tehran was allowed to use its own inspectors to take environmental samples from around Parchin. Shocking though it may be, neither the Iranians nor the IAEA inspectors who checked their work found anything untoward.
The IAEA also insisted that it regularly conducted snap inspections of various civilian and military sites, but Western diplomats noted that nearly all of those inspections were of places like university laboratories or manufacturing plants with little sensitive intelligence value. When pressed by the former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley in 2017 to reinspect some suspicious military sites to satisfy the Trump administration’s concerns, the IAEA declined—insisting, correctly, that the terms of the deal required a specific and credible basis to request such intrusive inspections.
The deference afforded to Iran didn’t end there. In 2018, a spectacularly successful Israeli intelligence operation recovered a cache of documents related to the Iranian weapons program that clearly illustrates the extensive work the Islamic Republic had done in pursuit of a fissionable device. Those documents were hidden away, presumably to be pulled out of storage after the deal had expired and Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon had been fully legitimized. But Iran was under no obligation to disclose those documents, even though it had repeatedly claimed (and former secretary of State John Kerry affirmed) that all of Iran’s past nuclear-weapons work was on the table.
The JCPOA was never designed to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear-nation status. It was only aimed at dragging that process out while reshuffling the region’s geopolitical deck in Iran’s favor and ultimately providing a patina of legitimacy to Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Any talk about exhuming and reanimating this agreement that glosses over its weak verification regime suggests that the Biden administration, like the Obama administration, will settle for any deal—even a bad one. When Iran is on the ropes, it’s Joe Biden who is committed to negotiating from a position of weakness.
Iran's mullahs love the nuclear deal because of its fundamental flaws, especially the sunset clauses that remove restrictions on Iran's nuclear program after the deal expires soon. The nuclear deal, rather than preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, as it was falsely touted to do, in fact paves the way for Tehran to become a legitimized nuclear state.
With the nuclear deal, the regime would gain global legitimacy, making it even more difficult to hold Iran's leaders accountable for any malign behavior or terror activity across the world.
Finally, Iran's ruling clerics want immediately to rejoin the nuclear deal because it would again alienate other governments in the Middle East and inevitably lead to a worsening of relations between the US and its traditional allies, especially Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.
This flawed deal, in favor of Iran, failed to recognize the rightful concerns of other countries in the region about Iran's potential nuclear capability, missile proliferation or funding of violent proxies -- both within and next door to their territories.
Iran‘s Guardian Council watchdog body approved a law on Wednesday that obliges the government to halt UN inspections of its nuclear sites and step up uranium enrichment beyond the limit set under Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal if sanctions are not eased in two months.
In retaliation for the killing last week of Iran‘s top nuclear scientist, which Tehran has blamed on Israel, Iran‘s hardline-dominated parliament on Tuesday approved the bill with a strong majority that will harden Iran‘s nuclear stance.
The Guardian Council is charged with ensuring draft laws do not contradict Shi’ite Islamic laws or Iran’s constitution. However, the stance of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on all matters of state, is not known.
“Today in a letter, the parliament speaker officially asked the president to implement the new law,” Iran‘s semi-official Fars news agency reported.
Under the new law, Tehran would give two months to the deal’s European parties to ease sanctions on Iran‘s oil and financial sectors, imposed after Washington quit the pact between Tehran and six powers in 2018.
In reaction to US President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy on Tehran, Iran has gradually reduced its compliance with the deal.
The law pushed by hardline lawmakers would make it harder for US President-elect Joe Biden, who will take office on Jan. 20, to rejoin the agreement.
This makes no sense. Once you give Iran JCPOA 1.0, you have given it everything, including a bomb. It has no incentive to agree to JCPOA 2.0. Anybody who has read the text will understand this. https://t.co/gW0Z9HDvzZ
Look at who were the top figures in the Muslim world from different countries that came out and issued provocative and reprehensible statements subtly or overtly justifying the terrorists in the recent weeks. All of them belonged to one ideological spectrum, albeit minor differences between them – political Islam. While religion as faith always elevated human beings to heights of nobility and grace, religion as ideology unleashed mindless violence on a genocidal scale.
We stand with the victims of all terror attacks. We disagree with the controversial cartoons, and, as a Muslim, I am offended by them but I can realize the underlying politics, ongoing exploitation and manipulation that are pursued behind this issue for political purposes. Linking the Prophet Muhammad, who represents a great sanctity amongst Muslims and is far too great to have his name and status exploited in cheap politicized campaigns, to violence and politicization is unacceptable.
Terrorist attacks are not Islam, they are the Islamist interpretation of Islam, and will always deserve our unqualified condemnation, and whole-hearted support in uprooting its terror.
That is precisely the spirit with which our Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan participated at the unity rally where hundreds of thousands of the French people and tens of world leaders gathered in Paris in 2015 to condemn terror attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo killing of hostages in a restaurant and a Jewish supermarket.
The sad truth, however, is that we are exactly where we were five years ago because nothing was done to curb the murderous Islamist propaganda in Europe. It is high time European authorities paid closer and urgent attention to the tumor spreading far and wide in their midst. As for the UAE, we are clear-headed in our opposition to extremism and terrorism in all forms and speak out against them without the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ customary in some circles. We believe that opposition to extremist ideas, alongside promotion of cultural and religious tolerance and harmonious coexistence, is the only way to root out the scourge of terrorism.
Gone are the days when people in the Arab media could tell lies and incite against Israel without a response.
The Palestinian decision to renew ties with Israel comes at a time when the Palestinian media is continuing to condemn other Arabs for engaging in normalization with Israel.
"They [the Palestinians] were trampling on the pictures of our leaders. But we have not seen them trampling on the pictures of Abbas." — Emirati social media user BintUAE1900, Twitter, November 18, 2020.
Several Palestinians and Arabs took to social media to demand sarcastically that the PA withdraw its ambassador from Ramallah to protest its own decision to "normalize" relations with Israel.
The PA leadership's decision to restore ties with Israel and return the Palestinian ambassadors to the UAE and Bahrain is viewed by some Palestinians as an apparent attempt to cozy up to a possible new US administration under the presumptive new President-elect Joe Biden. Abbas is also likely hoping that in return, the US and some Gulf states will resume pouring money into the PA coffers -- for a start.
Belgium is providing financial and political support and sponsorship to illegal Palestinian construction projects in Area C of the West Bank and is demanding compensation for Israel’s dismantling of these illegally constructed buildings.
The Oslo Accords between the PLO and Israel provide that Area C is under the sole administration and control of Israel, pending negotiation of a permanent status agreement between them.
In supporting and financing such illegal construction, Belgium openly admits to undermining the internationally accepted Oslo Accords, to which, as a member of the European Union, Belgium is a signatory as a witness. As such, Belgium is openly supporting endeavors by the Palestinian leadership and hostile organizations aimed at undermining and obstructing Israel’s legal and security control in Area C with a view to influencing the outcome of any future negotiation between the parties.
Belgium’s own national legislation prohibits illegal building in violation of its Belgian planning and zoning regulations and enables the destruction of structures built without the requisite permits.
In openly supporting and encouraging illegal building in Area C, in condemning Israel’s actions to prevent such illegal building, and in its demand for compensation, Belgium is acting with audacity and hypocrisy.
Belgium has a sad history of political and legal activity aimed at undermining the legitimacy of Israel’s security policies, including active support for organizations acting against the legitimacy of Israel and a failed attempt in its courts to accuse a former Israeli defense minister and senior military officials of involvement in war crimes.
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