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Friday, March 27, 2020

From Ian:

Four more Israelis die of virus, bringing COVID-19 death toll to 12
Four more Israelis have died of the coronavirus, bringing the country’s death toll to 12, as the number of infections nationwide climbed to 3,035.

The Soroka Medical Center on Friday morning said 93-year-old Avraham Aroshas was brought to the hospital from the nursing home where he lived. He had a fever and shortness of breath and had “complicated and difficult underlying illnesses,” the Beersheba-based hospital said. He tested positive for the virus and hours later succumbed to the illness, according to the statement.

A 76-year-old woman with preexisting health conditions also died of the virus, the Sharon Hospital in Petah Tikva announced Friday morning.

Hours later, a 73-year-old man was pronounced dead as a result of the virus at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa. He was identified as Shaul Farhi. He reportedly caught the virus on a trip to Tenerife in Spain.

On Friday afternoon, the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon said that an 80-year-old man had died. He had been in a serious condition for several days.

The number of Israelis diagnosed with the coronavirus has risen to 3,035, the Health Ministry said Friday morning. Of them, 49 are in serious condition and 60 are in moderate condition.

Some 45 Israel Defense Forces soldiers have been diagnosed with COVID-19, the illness caused by coronavirus, while 4,156 are in quarantine, the IDF said on Thursday.

Of the 12 fatalities in the country, three died on Thursday.

One of the three was an 89-year-old woman being treated at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem.

“This is a patient with preexisting conditions who a week ago already was categorized as being in critical condition and was treated with devotion during her entire hospitalization by the department staff, who did everything possible to ease her suffering,” the hospital said in a statement.

Another was an 83-year-old man from Bnei Brak who had preexisting conditions. Wolfson Medical Center in Holon said earlier that the third victim was a 91-year-old woman.
IDF Prepares for World War C
It’s come to this: The whole country on lockdown, the civilian population locked away in their homes, hiding from a deadly and invisible enemy. The only people on the street are police officers and IDF troops. It’s World War C.

The coronavirus crisis, a global pandemic on a level not seen since the Spanish flu in 1918, reminds many of the 2013 zombie movie World War Z. For Israelis, the “Jerusalem scene,” in which healthy Jews and Arabs are quarantined in the Old City singing songs of peace until zombies breach the walls, is extremely poignant.

It is as though the movie has come to life, but instead of the enemy being zombies, Israel is afraid that the invisible enemy - Coronavirus - could breach its walls and infect the population, as it did in Asia.

Israel had quickly closed its borders and quarantined all travellers returning to the country for two weeks. But the virus seeped in, and slowly the numbers of those infected with coronavirus started to rise. At the time of this article’s writing, 2,000 are reported sick and five are dead.

On Wednesday, Defense Minister Naftali Bennett warned that Israel is facing “severe morbidity levels” in the coming days.
“We are in accelerated growth in patients in serious condition; the number of positive tests is increasing. Severe morbidity levels are approaching,” he said. “Within 10 days there will be a significant rate of serious patients, but this is not a matter of fate. We can work to change the situation."
Mossad Brings another 400,000 Coronavirus Test Kits to Israel
The Mossad intelligence service on Thursday helped bring another 400,000 coronavirus test kits to Israel from an undisclosed foreign location, the Prime Minister’s Office said.

That was in addition to the roughly 100,000 test kits the spy agency brought to Israel last week.

The Prime Minister’s Office, which is responsible for the Mossad, said the intelligence service had imported the chemical reagents needed to perform approximately 400,000 tests. The swabs needed to carry out the task are being sourced both internally and from a number of foreign countries.

The PMO refused to comment further on the matter, specifically on the country or countries that sold it the testing components, leading many to assume that it was a country that does not have strong or formal ties with Israel.

The Mossad’s first operation to bring the chemical reagents needed for 100,000 coronavirus tests sparked a minor controversy last week, after Health Ministry officials lamented that what they’d actually needed were more swabs. After a small flurry of accusations and reversals, the ministry released a statement affirming that the test kits were “important” and “necessary” in the fight against the disease.

Israel has significantly stepped up its testing over the past week, performing several thousand each day, with the goal of increasing that level further.

The other arms of Israel’s defense establishment have also enlisted in recent days to tackle the virus threat.

Friday, March 13, 2020

From Ian:

Israel Now Looks Like a Coronavirus Containment Visionary
The walls went up, and Israel is now a fortress. In a dramatic decision the government made this week, all those entering the country from abroad – regardless of where they have been – must be quarantined for two weeks to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Many other Western countries have begun taking similar measures, including the US, which barred entry from Europe on Wednesday night.

But when Israel first started pulling up the drawbridges, it was taking the most extreme measures in the West to contain COVID-19. After the government announced it was stopping flights from China, there was talk about adverse diplomatic effects.

China is very sensitive to its image in the world, and as a result, Israel made efforts to show that its problem was with the virus, not all of China. Those efforts included a video, produced by the Foreign Ministry, of Israelis saying that they stand with the Chinese in this difficult time; it was such a success that major Chinese newspapers and official TV channels reported on it. Israeli aid organizations also tried to send supplies to Wuhan, where COVID-19 first broke out.

The challenge is to try to maintain economic ties as normally as possible, even when people are not moving between the countries because of steps necessary to maintain the public’s health, sources in the Foreign Ministry said. (h/t Zvi)

127 Israelis infected with coronavirus, 2,479 health workers in quarantine
The Israeli Health Ministry confirmed that 2,479 healthcare workers had entered quarantine as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases rose to 127 people on Friday.

Some 1,174 hospital workers are in quarantine, as well as 171 MDA employees, 24 IDF healthcare workers, 93 psychiatrists, 128 geriatric care workers, 106 east Jerusalem healthcare workers, 20 administrative workers and 763 community staff.

Furthermore, the ministry reported that 949 doctors, 635 nurses, 127 assistants, 81 lab technicians, 64 logistic workers, 40 administrators, 83 pharmacists, 14 dietitians, 31 social workers, 108 physiotherapists, 171 paramedics and 176 others have entered quarantine.

Two of the coronavirus patients are in serious condition, five are in moderate condition and 119 are in fair condition. The others have recovered and been released.

The Health Ministry shared the epidemiology of many of the sick patients Friday morning, including four new cases - siblings between the ages of six and 18 - who had been in "close contact with a known coronavirus patient." These four, numbered patients 119-122, have gone to their respective schools and preschools before being put into isolation, those being the "Orot" school in the town of Or Yehuda, and the "Tzivoni" and "Dekel" kinder-garden, as well as the "Ulpana Tzfira".
Corona Is Slowing Down, Humanity Will Survive, Says Biophysicist Michael Levitt
Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, an American-British-Israeli biophysicist who teaches structural biology at Stanford University and spends much of his time in Tel Aviv, unexpectedly became a household name in China, offering the public reassurance during the peak of the country’s coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak. Levitt did not discover a treatment or a cure, just did what he does best: crunched the numbers. The statistics led him to the conclusion that, contrary to the grim forecasts being branded about, the spread of the virus will come to a halt.

The calming messages Levitt sent to his friends in China were translated into Chinese and passed from person to person, making him a popular subject for interviews in the Asian nation. His forecasts turned out to be correct: the number of new cases reported each day started to fall as of February 7. A week later, the mortality rate started falling as well.

He might not be an expert in epidemiology, but Levitt understands calculations and statistics, he told Calcalist in a phone interview earlier this week.

The interview was initially scheduled to be held at the fashionable Sarona complex in Tel Aviv, where Levitt currently resides. But after he caught a cold — “not corona,” he jokingly remarked — the interview was rescheduled to be held over the phone. Even though he believes the pandemic will run its course, Levitt emphasizes his support of all the safety measures currently being taken and the need to adhere to them.

Levitt received his Nobel prize for chemistry in 2013 for “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.” He did not in any way intend to be a prophet foretelling the end of a plague; it happened by accident. His wife Shoshan Brosh is a researcher of Chinese art and a curator for local photographers, meaning the couple splits their time between the US, Israel, and China.

When the pandemic broke out, Brosh wrote to friends in China to support them. “When they answered us, describing how complicated their situation was, I decided to take a deeper look at the numbers in the hope of reaching some conclusion,” Levitt explained. “The rate of infection of the virus in the Hubei province increased by 30 percent each day — that is a scary statistic. I am not an influenza expert but I can analyze numbers and that is exponential growth.” At this rate, the entire world should have been infected within 90 days, he said.

Monday, February 24, 2020

From Ian:

Netanyahu threatens war as sirens continue to wail in southern Israel
Rockets fell near a playground in the college-town of Sderot as well in a yard of a residential home. There were no reports of physical injuries. In Netivot, rocket shrapnel fell near a house.

The PIJ claimed responsibility for the rocket fire on Monday afternoon, saying that the launches were in response to the killing of two PIJ terrorists in Damascus. "In the Al-Quds Brigades, we confirm that we are ready to confront any aggression and let the enemy know that if it continues, we will respond with full force and might," said the military wing of the terrorist group in a statement.

After a barrage of rockets was fired towards the city of Netivot in southern Israel, Hamas warned that the response to the Israeli strikes in Gaza came within a unified understanding between all the factions in Gaza that "Palestinian blood is a red line." The terrorist group warned that if the IDF expanded its strikes, Israel would face "resistance like it's never seen."

Since yesterday, over 60 rockets were fired from Gaza to southern Israel, prompting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to warn that Israel may launch a broader campaign against Hamas in Gaza if it does not totally stop firing rockets.

“I am not hurrying into war. I know the price that our soldiers and the families of the fallen pay,” Netanyahu, whose brother Yoni was killed in action, said.

Still, the prime minister said that if there is no choice: “Woe to Hamas and Islamic Jihad when that day comes! It’s their choice.”
“We will do what it takes to bring back total security for the residents of the south,” he vowed.

"If you don't shoot them, we will shoot you. I'm talking about a war," Netanyahu said earlier on Army Radio. "I only go to war as a last option, but we have prepared something you can't even imagine."

His interview was interrupted by fresh sirens warning of incoming rockets.
Over 40 Gaza Rockets Fired At Israel; A Playground Suffered a Direct Hit




Normal Places Have Snow Days, Israel's South Has Rocket Days




Sunday, February 23, 2020

From Ian:

Seth Frantzman: A secret Mossad Qatar trip, Hamas outreach to Egypt and Iran’s threat
In Saudi Arabia, Al-Arabiya is very interested in what a previously unknown “Mossad trip to Qatar” means for the region. “Egypt and Qatar are angry with Hamas, and they intended to cut ties with it,” the network reported, while noting that the recent Israeli discussions with Doha about continuing to fund Gaza are noteworthy. Hamas also thinks they are noteworthy, bragging over the weekend that it met with Qatar’s envoy Mohammed al-Emadi and $15 million was distributed in Gaza.

In Israel, the Mossad-Qatar-Hamas story was revealed by Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman over the weekend and was reported locally. The story goes that Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and IDF Southern Command Maj.-Gen. Herzi Halevi met with top Qatari officials. Halevi was in the news before, in January, when he commented on the killing of IRGC general Qasem Soleimani. “We must look at the assassination as part of a fight between Iran and the US over Iraq’s character.” Halevi is known for his achievements in a three-year term running Military Intelligence. He has spoken about using deterrence in a way that does not escalate a situation and of the importance of information supremacy over Israel’s enemies, according to an article at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in 2018. This is a key to Israel’s “campaign between the wars” in which Israel must prepare for future struggle with Iran and its allies.

Israel now has a dedicated headquarters for the “third circle” threat of Iran in light of the IDF’s new Momentum plan. It is worth understanding this larger picture to understand some of what Hamas is up to in Gaza. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad both are supported by Iran. PIJ is an Iranian proxy whereas Hamas is more an ally. But Hamas has been isolated over the years and also failed to achieve results in confrontation with Israel. Over 2,600 rockets fired over the last two years achieved little, and its “Great March of Return,” launched in 2018, also failed. In March 2018, two years ago, Palestinian prime minister Rami Hamdallah survived an assassination attempt in Gaza. Today, Hamas is bragging about opposing the US “Deal of the Century.”

It is important to consider the calculus to see the larger picture of Qatar’s role in Gaza. Qatar has supported Gaza for more than a decade. The Emir of Qatar even visited Gaza in 2012. In January 2019, the third $15 million payment via Israel and Hamas to Gaza was made by Qatar as part of a deal in 2018. Mohammed al-Emadi has been Doha’s point man throughout. He has visited Israel more than two dozen times, according to a Reuters interview in 2018. He also cited talks between Israel and Hamas in that year. Qatar has said its aid to Gaza helps prevent a conflict. Emadi has ruffled feathers in Gaza sometimes due to his outspokenness.
Netanyahu promises sovereignty over Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to apply Israeli sovereignty to the Tomb of the Patriarchs and to the Jewish community of Hebron.

He spoke during a visit to the nearby West Bank Kiryat Arba settlement, where he also stated that he was authorizing the elevator project for the tomb, that would allow those with disabilities to visit the cave.

All West Bank settlements are slated to become part of sovereign Israel under US President Donald Trump’s peace plan, but according to the map, the status of Jewish Hebron is unclear.

Prior to Netanyahu's speech at a celebratory event to mark the inauguration of a new neighborhood in Kiryat Arba on Sunday, Defense Minister Naftali Bennett, who heads the Yamina Party, addressed the crowd. Bennett spoke of the need to clarify with the Trump administration that the Tomb and Hebron's Jewish community would be part of sovereign Israel under the "Deal of the Century."

Bennett said that a Jewish state without the Tomb of the Patriarchs is like Washington without the Lincoln Memorial. He also spoke against the portion of the Trump plan that calls for the creation of a Palestinian state.

The defense minister noted that "the plan speaks 159 times of a Palestinian state and references Israeli sovereignty" only 13 times.


UK left activists attended events with far right antisemites
Former Labour party members have regularly met elements of the far right to discuss and propagate antisemitic conspiracy theories, an undercover investigation has found.

Infiltration of the conspiracy theorist group Keep Talking found that Jeremy Corbyn supporters and confidantes of former Labour MPs have attended meetings addressed by Holocaust deniers.

During one gathering in London last year, suspended Labour supporters heard James Thring, an infamous antisemite linked to the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, speak openly and unchallenged about Holocaust denial.

A covert recording of Thring at the meeting captured him claiming that no deaths were recorded at the Auschwitz Nazi death camp, where 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were systematically murdered.

“The archives from the listening posts show no evidence that they heard anything about deaths in Auschwitz; we didn’t know that this was going on … because it wasn’t,” Thring can be heard saying.

Nick Lowles, chief executive of Hope Not Hate, which along with the Jewish charity Community Security Trust monitored Keep Talking over three years, said: “Our investigation shows what the politics of some of the far left and the far right have in common – antisemitism. It’s important that these groups are not just seen as eccentric or harmless; they give conspiracies a space to survive and grow and they encourage people to keep disseminating falsehoods.” (h/t Zvi)

Friday, February 21, 2020

From Ian:

Who Will Protect the Children of the Holy Land From Palestinian Adults Who Serially Brainwash Them to Hate?
According to a new report by a coalition of NGOs, an estimated 10,000 children are trained in Hamas’ terrorist camps each year, and at least 160 have died digging terror tunnels into Israel. Those statistics alone should ring alarm bells about the generational child abuse of Palestinian children.

But that’s not how Congresswoman Betty McCollum (D-MN) sees it. Her US House “Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act” — seeks to protect Palestinian children from Israelis, not Palestinian adults — among them terrorists.

Barring an unforeseen miracle, another generation of kids will be brainwashed in school by war curriculum and trained to spend their summers learning how to shoot with live ammunition or filling booby-trapped balloons with explosives targeting Jewish kindergartens, fields, and nature preserves:

UN Watch identified 40 Palestinian teachers who use Facebook to encourage their students to model themselves into the next generation of Palestinian terrorists. Here are just three examples:

- Ghanem Naim — whose students venerate him as “Dear Professor” — posted pictures of Hitler identified as “our beloved” and “Hitler the great.”
- Teacher Khader Awad indoctrinates his students with an image of a Jew with three guns and a knife trained on his head over the Hebrew caption: “Blood = Blood. #Kill Them.”
- A post by “senior UNRWA” teacher Mohammad Alsayyed praised the “awesome kidnapping” of three Israeli teenagers killed in a Hamas terrorist operation which precipitated the 2014 Gaza war.

For years, such teachers were largely funded by hundreds of millions of American dollars and international largess given to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to care for “Palestinian refugees” — chief among them hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children enrolled in schools where they supposedly receive “a modern secular education.”

Palestinian Child Soldier Week Launched to Combat Child Abuse
This past week, about 30 NGOs joined the Coalition to Save Palestinian Child Soldiers to raise public awareness and to put an end to the use of Palestinian children as soldiers against Israel. Too often, Palestinian children (as well as children around the world) are used as political pawns during war and conflict. In fact, the United Nation reported about 300,000 children used as soldiers from 20 countries around the world. About 40% of child soldiers are young girls, who are often used as sex slaves and taken as “wives” by male fighters.

Palestinian children are often used as human shields to carry out terror attacks by Hamas operatives. Terror groups like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine exploit Palestinian children and raise them to become combatants, human shields, rioters, laborers, support staff, and even suicide bombers. These groups, along with the Palestinian Authority have allowed antisemitic propaganda to seep into their education system by providing school textbooks that teach Palestinian children to kill Israelis and become martyrs. In the Gaza strip, Hamas trains about 10,000 children and teens every year in terrorist “summer camps”. These training boot camps are practical lessons that are meant to be implemented in warfare and battle. fight and die alongside adult militants and terrorists. Hamas and other terror groups fully use trained child soldiers for battle, with the knowledge and intention that these children will die alongside adult militants and terrorists.

The international community has turned a blind eye to the abuse of Palestinian children as soldiers by these militant and terrorist groups and it’s time for the world to hold these perpetrators accountable.

Join the campaign now:


The rise of Trump’s new pro-Israel and anti-Iran intel director - analysis
Some critics assert Grenell lacks intelligence credentials. Grenell, however, has been immersed in intelligence and counter-terrorism matters for years. He is a veteran diplomat and foreign policy expert.

His years as ambassador to Germany coupled with his time as the longest serving US spokesman at the UN have equipped him to confront threats to the US and its allies.

Writing in the Washington Examiner, Tom Rogan, said, "In Grenell, Trump now has a smart, loyal voice to guide him on matters of national security. But the intelligence community also gets something: a leader with Trump's ear, and someone who is keen to impress. Both sides, then, can forge common ground in America's interest.”

Grenell will become the first openly gay cabinet member in the history of the US. Last year, the new intelligence director launched an international campaign to decriminalize homosexuality across the world.

Rogan, the political journalist, said that “appointing Richard Grenell as the new acting director of national intelligence. It's bad news for Iran, Huawei.”

Grenell will continue as US ambassador to Germany. That means the political camp – and it is not minor – that supports communist China’s Huawei network for Germany, Iran’s totalitarian regime, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia Nord Stream 2 energy project for the federal republic will not be pleased.
Rubin Report: US Ambassador: The Insane Ways The UN Wastes Money (Pt.2)| Richard Grenell
Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report talks to Richard Grenell (US Ambassador to Germany) about what it’s like to be the US Ambassador to Germany under President Trump. Richard also gives an insider’s look at how the UN really operates. He describes what he sees as the extreme waste due to the UN general assembly policy of distributing resources like jobs evenly whether or not countries have people with the necessary skills or not. People end up being hired who don’t have the necessary skill set to fill quotas, and money and resources are wasted. Richard also discusses how Donald Trump has been successful at being a disrupter and breaking up groupthink. Richard details what he calls the Trump doctrine to foreign policy and whether or not it’s effective.


Tuesday, February 18, 2020

From Ian:

PMW: Fake news in real time: Palestinian reporter demonizes Israeli soldier seconds after soldier protected him and other journalists
Question: How long does it take a Palestinian Authority TV reporter to rewrite history and deceive Palestinians into hating Israelis?

Answer: 10 seconds.

This is a classic example of how the Palestinian Authority lies to its own people to demonize Israelis and create hatred of them among Palestinians.

At a Palestinian protest against US President Trump’s Middle East peace plan, an Israeli officer instructed Palestinian journalists to move to the other side of the road to be safe from oncoming cars.

But in the PA TV reporter’s instantaneous rewriting of history – during his live broadcast – this was distorted into a lie, turning the Israeli officer’s attempt at protecting the Palestinians into a racist statement. The PA TV reporter told viewers that the Israeli soldiers ordered them to move because “this is an Israeli road and Palestinians are not allowed on it.” In truth, the Israeli officer stressed that the soldiers were trying to “look out for” the lives of the Palestinians, because they were in danger of being “run over.” It is worth noting that the Israeli officer and the PA TV reporter spoke Hebrew together.

Israeli officer (in Hebrew): “Stand over there.”
PA TV reporter (in Hebrew): “We are journalists.”
Israeli officer (in Hebrew): “Journalists over there.”
PA TV reporter (in Hebrew): “Where?
Israeli officer (in Hebrew): “Across the street. They’ll run you over. It’s your life. Go over here.”
PA TV reporter (in Arabic): “As you can hear –”
Israeli officer (in Hebrew): “You’ll get killed. We’re looking out for you.”
PA TV reporter (in Arabic): “One of the occupation soldiers is making us move away on a false claim that this is an Israeli road and Palestinians are not allowed on it.” [Official PA TV, Jan. 29, 2020]


Iran Threatens to Destroy Ancient Jewish Site and Build Palestinian Consulate
Iranian authorities are threatening to destroy the historic tomb of Esther and Mordechai in the city of Hamedan, 200 miles west of Tehran, in favor of constructing "a consular office for Palestine," ARAM, the Alliance for Rights of All Minorities in Iran, said in a Twitter post on Sunday.

The organization claims that members of Iran's formidable Basij paramilitary force attempted to raid the historic site in what it called "an act of revenge against the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan by President Trump."

"Ester and Mordechai were biblical Jewish heroes who saved their people from a massacre in a story known as #Purim. Their burial site has been a significant Jewish landmark for Jews and history buffs around the world," ARAM said.

In December 2010, Iranian protesters tried to breach the compound citing fears that Israel might damage the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Saturday, February 15, 2020

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Rot Inside American Jewish Organizations
What’s happening here is more than a skirmish over a peace plan, or a distressing glimpse into the way American Jewry’s leaders privilege their partisan leanings over the fact that their leadership roles in American society are due to their Judaism and not their Democratic Party membership. What we are seeing is the way American Jewish leaders fail to take seriously the rising tide of anti-Semitism that masquerades as “anti-Zionism”—and even the way progressive groups enable it. Attacking an American plan for its pro-Israel lean is nonsensical for those who should, by the very nature of who they are and what they do, want the United States to have a pro-Israel lean.

There is no future for Jewry without a strong and surviving Israel. Indeed, for the modern Diaspora, no idea has more successfully preserved the notion of an egalitarian Jewish peoplehood—one that crosses languages and religious boundaries—than Zionism. Long before the reestablishment of the State of Israel, Zionists were the Jews dedicated to arguing compellingly for a coherent Jewish identity and thus for Jews as a minority deserving of the rights and recognition afforded others. If American Judaism is to have a chance at survival, it must first realize that that is what it is fighting for.

What does it look like when a national Jewish community understands what’s at stake? The United Kingdom offers a good example. Heading into the December elections, the Labour Party was (and is, for the moment) led by Jeremy Corbyn. He attempted to pass off his admiration for terrorists and his party’s harassment of Jewish politicians and Jewish voters as “anti-Zionism”—as though that were a good thing—but he still ended up proving that the word “Zionist” is just a stand-in for “Jew” in leftist discourse. He claimed that “Zionists,” even those who have lived their whole lives in Britain, “don’t understand English irony.” The Jew, to leftists like Corbyn, will forever be an outsider.

A full 87 percent of UK Jews denounced Corbyn as an anti-Semite. “What will become of Jews and Judaism in Britain if the Labour Party forms the next government?” Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis wrote in late November in the London Times. “This anxiety is understandable and justified.” Jewish Labour groups fought to expose their own party’s bigotry, even as whistleblowers faced retaliation. Jews abandoned Labour. In the event, Labour lost the election in a historic landslide.

Such communal solidarity has become distressingly unthinkable in the United States. Consider the story of the anti-Semitic crime spree in New York. For nearly a year, the steady low-level harassment of visible Jews in the Big Apple spiraled deliberately into an open-ended, slow-rolling pogrom outside the city—a broad-daylight massacre at a Jersey City kosher market followed by a Manhattan man driving 30 miles to the Haredi town of Monsey, where he stormed into a rabbi’s house with a machete and hacked away at stunned victims.

The media ignored the violence until there was blood in the streets; the organized Jewish world reacted like a deer in the headlights; non-Orthodox rabbis sneered at the Haredi community as it absorbed daily assaults; Jewish intellectuals pretended nothing was happening. Well into the Brooklyn violence, anti-Semitism chronicler Liam Hoare insisted that “despite the endless handwringing about anti-Semitism on the left, it is far-right extremism which constitutes the paramount threat to American Jewish life today.” It was a line the Anti-Defamation League had been pushing hard as well. But the renewed violence in the New York area wasn’t coming from white nationalists or alt-right posers. Many of the attacks caught on tape featured African-American suspects in outer-borough neighborhoods where religious Jews were framed as land-grabbing outsiders, with some residents telling interviewers they viewed Israel as the point of origin for these Jews. In Jersey City, the shooters were reportedly Black Hebrew Israelites, a kind of extreme black nationalist group, apparently motivated by a conspiracy theory that Jews pull the strings of the police to kill black people—a calumny that took original form as a claim that Israel was training U.S. cops to persecute minorities. “Israel” very quickly becomes “Jews.”
Melanie Phillips: Denying their parent and embracing their assassin
Christians are arguably the most committed supporters of Israel in the world. At the same time, different kinds of Christians are among the Jews’ worst enemies.

In America, the ones who defend Israel so passionately are (mostly) the “red state” evangelicals. It is these people in their millions, not the so-called and vastly over-hyped Jewish lobby, who make America so pro-Israel.

Many American Jews, however, believe these Christians are antisemites. This is because some want to convert the Jews to Christianity and believe that this will happen at the “end of days.”

None of that, though, poses a serious danger to Jewish interests. A far greater threat is posed by those Christians who appear more reasonable because they sound like secular liberals.

Next month, the executive committee of the World Council of Churches (WCC) is due to elect a new general secretary. One of the two candidates is Dr. Jerry Pillay, a member of South Africa’s United Presbyterian Church who has urged support for the BDS movement against Israel “for the sake of just peace.”

The WCC has played a key role in turning much of the world against Israel. Through its “liberation theology,” it has for decades infused liberal churches with neo-Marxist, anti-capitalist, anti-west attitudes — thus placing a virtual halo over the antisemitism of the left.

In Britain, the Church of England and other liberal denominations are institutionally hostile to Israel. Such churches, along with immensely influential Christian NGOs such as Christian Aid, Christ at the Checkpoint or KAIROS, disseminate boiler-plate distortions and falsehoods that demonize Israel and sanitize Palestinian-Arab aggression.

In the United States, a number of churches — most notably the United Church of Christ and the Presbyterian Church USA — have passed BDS resolutions against Israel.

According to Dexter Van Zile, the Christian analyst with the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), the “Never Again” coalition of liberal Protestant denominations created after the Holocaust has attacked the primary victims of the Holocaust with a flood of dishonest propaganda.

Its message, he has written, is that “Israeli Jews abuse the rights accorded to them as a sovereign people in the Middle East,” and that “by exercising undue influence in the democracies where they live, Diaspora Jews help Israel get away with its crimes.”

“It’s a ‘cleaner’ version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” says Van Zile, “but the implications are just as demonic.”

Monday, February 10, 2020

From Ian:

Abbas’ Palestinian Authority Hurts Everybody
By perpetuating the conflict, the Palestinian Authority also forces international donor countries to indefinitely waste their taxpayers’ money on supporting terror and incitement against Israel, financing P.A. corruption, and eternalizing the Palestinian refugee problem. Moreover, it forces the international community to adopt its false narrative, such as ignoring the historical Jewish connection to Jerusalem in U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334 and in several UNESCO resolutions, mutating basic historical facts that are central not only to Jewish history but to Western history as a whole into historically illiterate gibberish.

The United States has tried hard in recent years to put an end to this unacceptable situation. It has cut economic aid to the Palestinian Authority due to its payment of salaries to terrorists, stopped financial support to UNRWA, and closed the PLO office in Washington. The United States also defied the P.A. narrative by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and by clarifying that Israeli settlements are not illegal. It is hard to overstate the importance of these moves, all of which came in response to the P.A.’s abject failures.

The Trump administration’s new peace plan signals clearly that this Palestinian Authority has to be replaced with a P.A. that first and foremost cares about the well-being of its citizens and respects their rights, fights corruption, and has well-functioning institutions. It has to be replaced by a P.A. that disarms Hamas and thereafter is able to govern the Gaza Strip. It has to be replaced with a P.A. that has a narrative of peace and is ready to accept Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. It has to be replaced by a P.A. that fights terror, stops the “Pay-for-Slay” policy, and ends incitement and hate indoctrination at home and abroad. And ultimately, it has to be replaced by a P.A. that respects the outstanding readiness of the Arabs and the international community to support it and rises to their expectations. If this cultural change takes place, the new P.A. will turn into an independent state and will be provided with an abundance of new resources.

Unlike any previous peace plans, this new plan tells the Palestinian Authority that if it does not choose to change in the coming four years, the United States, Israel, and the pragmatic Arabs are not going to wait any longer and will not enable the P.A. to have veto power over their will to move forward for the good of Palestinians, Israelis, and the entire region. Time is ticking.

The P.A. has grown used to being spoiled by those it hurts. As Mahmoud Abbas revealed in his address to the Arab League foreign affairs ministers, previous American administrations spoiled the Palestinians so much that, in spite of the P.A.’a refusal to accept President Barack Obama’s peace plan after it was presented to Abbas in March 2014 (he replied that any Palestinian compromise is impossible), the Obama administration was still the driving force behind UNSCR 2334. This resolution defined all the territories as occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem with the Temple Mount and Wailing Wall, and declared Israeli settlements illegal. No more.

The U.S. peace plan marks a paradigm shift in the American approach to the Palestinian Authority. Will this P.A. change? Chances are slim, but only time will tell. One thing we know already—the paradigm that was adopted until now, which was largely based on willful blindness, did not yield the expected fruits. Let us hope that this new paradigm, which is based on the realities on the ground, will help heal the wounds that this P.A. has inflicted on its many victims—Palestinians, Israelis, moderate Arabs, and international donor countries whose money has been spent on murder and hate—and help us build a road to peace.
Israeli Arabs are Israeli, not Palestinian
The raising of Palestinian flags in protest against the "Deal of the Century deal" and the proposal to transfer sovereignty over the Triangle (a cluster of Arab towns and cities near the Green Line) to a future Palestinian state has caused a small yet familiar storm.

Many Jews, and indeed quite a few Arabs, have asked how it is possible to wave the flag of the Palestinian Authority while resisting falling under its sovereignty.

I am positive that there is not one Arab citizen of Israel who wants to live under the control of any Arab ruler in any Arab state, including the State of Palestine.

In Arab society, there is even a saying that "Israeli Jewish hell is better than the paradise of the Arab states."

Yes, the Arab states have civil equality among its residents, but you will not find liberty and or freedom of speech.

There is neither human dignity nor liberty nor a high court of justice.

An Israeli Arab who is used to demonstrating and yelling in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv against the policy of the government and those who lead it would not be able to do that - and survive – in Damascus or any of the Gulf states.

The reign of eternal tyrants in Arab nations is as far removed from the experiences of Israeli Arabs as we are from the Stone Age.

Raising the Palestinian flag during the protests against the Trump plan was an act of identification, not identity.

PMW: After PMW's exposure: TikTok removes video glorifying four actual terror attacks
Last Wednesday, Palestinian Media Watch exposed that a user of the social network TikTok had posted a video animation glorifying four lethal terror attacks that were committed against Israelis. PMW is pleased to report that TikTok responded immediately and removed the terror glorifying video.

The following is PMW’s original bulletin exposing the terror promotion:
Animated video of real murder of Israelis
- on social network popular among children

An animated video that encourages murdering Israelis by showing graphic recreated scenes of real terror attacks has appeared on TikTok – a social network popular among children, where users can create and share short videos.

The video shows four lethal terror attacks that were committed against Israelis – a terrorist who rammed his car into Israelis at a Jerusalem light rail station, another who shot at Israeli police, and two stabbers. An eagle – possibly symbolizing the eagle in the emblem used by the Palestinian Authority and the PLO – flies above the carnage throughout the video, at one point moving in unison with 19-year-old Palestinian terrorist Muhannad Halabi as he stabs a religious Jew in the Old City of Jerusalem. The video carries the text “Jerusalem is the dread of the Jews," followed by a red heart.

The following are screenshots from the animation paired with details of the Palestinian terrorists and the attacks they apparently portray:


Thursday, February 06, 2020

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory


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Rafah, February 6 - The departed spirit of an American activist who sought to shield a terrorist armaments cache with her body but ended up crushed by a bulldozer must spend the rest of eternity looking on as Israeli soldiers and machines continue to dispose of war materiel intended for use by the terrorist groups she tried to defend, sources in the transcendental realm disclosed today.

Reporters in the World of the Souls confirmed to PreOccupied Territory Thursday morning that Rachel Corrie's spirit suffers everlasting torment in the form of being forced to watch every instance of the IDF interdicting, destroying, or otherwise rendering inaccessible any weapons, explosives, ammunition, or other instruments of war in the possession of Hamas or allied Palestinian terrorist groups, or such materials on their way to said groups.

"Ms. Corrie inhabits the eternity she created for herself," a spectral representative stated. "Her choice in 2003 to enter a closed military area - effectively a war zone -  to serve as cover for terrorists and to prevent soldiers from stemming the flow of arms to those terrorists, all while claiming the mantle of 'human rights' among other dubious goals, led her to stand in front of an armored bulldozer whose driver had limited visibility, and who was trying to destroy a weapons-smuggling tunnel. Her decision to side with murderous thugs who target children and other innocents as a core part of their ideology, and who would otherwise target Corrie herself for her non-Islamic allegiances and lifestyle, brought her to this place."

Corrie took part in an operation by the pro-Palestinian group the International Solidarity Movement to disrupt IDF activities in this town bordering Egypt, where an unknown number of smuggling tunnels and weapons caches ran under the frontier. Most of the passages led into homes or other civilian structures near the Philadelphi Road running parallel to the boundary, structures that also often served as cover for Palestinian snipers firing on IDF troops patrolling the area or engaged in operations to find and destroy the tunnels and weapons. Israel withdrew its soldiers and uprooted thousands of residents from the Gaza Strip in a unilateral disengagement two years later; the smuggling and armed attacks on Israelis have continued.

Corrie's ghost remained unavailable for comment; a spokespecter told journalists that until other materials come to light, her eternal consciousness will be forced to view video of the capture of a Hamas armaments-smuggling boat in an operation that took place this past November.


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Wednesday, February 05, 2020

From Ian:

Palestinian ‘right of return’ is really about ending Israel's existence
According to UNRWA, any Palestinian Arab descendants from the 1948 conflict are considered “refugees” until they “return” to Israel.

Thanks to this dubious definition, UNRWA considers there to be more than 5.3 million “Palestinian refugees” who have a “right to return.” In an Oct. 28, 2018, speech, PA President Mahmoud Abbas even claimed that there were 6 million. The actual number of surviving refugees from the 1948 war is closer to 30,000, according to an unreleased State Department report.

Demanding that 6 million Palestinian “refugees” have a “right” to "return" to a place where most of them never lived runs counter to Palestinian claims that they want to have their own independent state. As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis noted in the Washington Post, this demand negates the idea of Palestinian statehood — unless that state means, by its definition, the demographic end of the Jewish nation of Israel. As the American Jewish International Relations Institute observed, such a move would "end the existence of the majority-Jewish state" in Israel.

In their unguarded moments, Palestinian leaders and their state-controlled media have said as much. Palestinian Media Watch, which monitors Arab media in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, has highlighted that official PA television promotes the “right of return” by showing a map of “Palestine” that simply erases Israel. PA-approved textbooks also hail that demand.

Defenders of the “right of return” often cite U.N. General Assembly Resolutions 194 and 394 and Security Council Resolution 224 to buttress their claims. But the Arab states voted against 194 in part because it did not establish a “right to return.” Indeed, it only “recommended” that original refugees from the conflict, not descendants, be permitted to return, and only after they agree to live “at peace with their neighbors.” (It should also be noted, as the late historian Martin Gilbert has documented, that these resolutions can be applied to the Jewish refugees as well.)

For decades, Palestinian leaders have rejected offers for statehood and peace while citing a “right” that doesn’t exist. Both the press and policymakers should speak honestly and openly about what it would truly mean and perhaps reflect on why Palestinian leaders continue to demand it.

David Singer: Trump Plan to end Jewish-Arab Conflict sees PLO implode
Jordan and Israel are the two successor States to the Mandate for Palestine – currently exercising sovereignty in 95% of former Palestine. Sovereignty in the remaining 5% – Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and Gaza – remains undetermined.

The PLO refusal to negotiate with Israel on the Trump plan - will have the following results:
· No second Arab state - in addition to Jordan – will be created in former Palestine
· US$50 billion in development aid will not be required to build and develop that new State
· Gaza and the West Bank will remain politically divided

Jordan should now replace the PLO in negotiations with Israel on Trump’s plan because:
· Jordan was the last sovereign Arab state to occupy the West Bank between 1948 and 1967 when the PLO expressly rejected any claim to sovereignty.
· Jordan conferred Jordanian citizenship on the Arab residents of the West Bank between 1950 and 1988
· The 1994 Jordan-Israel Peace Treaty will ensure good-faith – not confrontational – negotiations

The areas designated for A Future State of Palestine in the Trump Plan (pictured below) now become possible areas for transfer to Jordanian sovereignty in negotiations with Israel.

Successful Israel-Jordan negotiations would be a real game changer – holding out great prospects that the long-running Jewish-Arab conflict could finally be achieved.

Failure by Jordan to negotiate with Israel could see Israel extend its sovereignty to all of Area C in the West Bank.

President Trump needs to phone King Abdullah of Jordan and persuade him to embrace Trump’s “deal of the century”.

The PLO has blown its chance to do so.
PA must halt pay-for-slay policy for ‘peace and prosperity’ - analysis
Palestinian incentivization and the rewarding of terrorists would come to a halt if the “Deal of the Century” is implemented.
The “Peace for Prosperity” plan mentions the need for the Palestinian Authority to cease its “pay-for-slay” terrorism-funding program in four different instances – as much as or even more than the plan refers to Israeli sovereignty over Area C settlements or security.

“This is obviously a major obstacle to peace,” said Maurice Hirsch, director of legal strategies for the Israeli watchdog Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). “The antithesis of peace is taking money to reward terrorists for being terrorists. Terrorism undermines peace. You cannot have a state that rewards terrorism – this is something contradictory to the whole world order.”

On pages 4, 34, 43 and 51 of the 181-page peace plan, the Trump administration makes clear that the PA’s law “incentivizes terrorism… Billions of dollars have been squandered and investment is unable to flow into these areas to allow the Palestinians to thrive.

“The Palestinians shall have ended all programs… that serve to incite or promote hatred and antagonism toward its neighbors, or which compensate or incentivize criminal or violent activity,” the document says.
PMW: Animated video of real murder of Israelis - on social network popular among children
An animated video that encourages murdering Israelis by showing graphic recreated scenes of real terror attacks has appeared on TikTok – a social network popular among children, where users can create and share short videos.

The video shows four lethal terror attacks that were committed against Israelis – a terrorist who rammed his car into Israelis at a Jerusalem light rail station, another who shot at Israeli police, and two stabbers. An eagle – possibly symbolizing the eagle in the emblem used by the Palestinian Authority and the PLO – flies above the carnage throughout the video, at one point moving in unison with 19-year-old Palestinian terrorist Muhannad Halabi as he stabs a religious Jew in the Old City of Jerusalem. The video carries the text “Jerusalem is the dread of the Jews," followed by a red heart.

The following are screenshots from the animation paired with details of the Palestinian terrorists and the attacks they apparently portray:

Car ramming attack: Palestinian terrorist and Hamas member Ibrahim Al-Akari from East Jerusalem deliberately ran over several Israelis with a white van at a light-rail station in Jerusalem on Nov. 5, 2014, murdering Jidan Assad, 38, and Shalom Aharon Badani, 17, and wounding at least 13 others. The terrorist was shot and killed by Israeli police officers who arrived on the scene.

Stabbing attack: 19-year-old Palestinian terrorist Muhannad Halabi murdered 2 Israelis, Rabbi Nehemiah Lavi and Aharon Bennett, and injured Bennett’s wife, Adele, and their 2-year-old son in a stabbing attack in the Old City of Jerusalem on Oct. 3, 2015. Following the attack, the terrorist was shot and killed by Israeli security forces.


Tuesday, February 04, 2020

From Ian:

Einat Wilf: How Trump's peace plan can strengthen Arab-Israeli relations
There is growing evidence of decreased willingness to place the Palestinian cause above domestic Arab interests. Voices that in the past would have never been heard in the Arab world now appear on local Arab television and social media, questioning why their countries continue to hitch their wagons to the Palestinians, who are prone to rejecting compromise. In some cases, these voices even express open support for Israel.

In the past, Palestinians could generally count on the Arab countries — not just to openly fight wars for their cause, as they did in 1948 and 1967, but to stand firmly behind them, accepting what the Palestinians accept and rejecting what the Palestinians reject. This is no longer the case.

So although the Palestinians were still able to rally the Arab League — a group of Arab countries, which is already a shadow of its former powerful self — to join in their rejection of Trump’s plan, their isolation in the Arab world is growing more apparent.

This is the most important aspect, and the greatest news, to come out of the plan’s introduction. Not only does the plan reflect the political preferences of the vast majority of Israel’s Jews — with the Likud, Blue and White and Israel Beiteinu parties endorsing the plan — but it has been cautiously welcomed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar as at least a legitimate basis for negotiations.

It also makes vital regional cooperation more likely to continue and strengthen over time.

Israel, for its part, must endorse and adopt the plan in its entirety if it is to serve as a framework that enables the Gulf countries to pursue ever closer cooperation with Israel. It is crucial that even if Israel ultimately annexes the territory designated for Israel in the plan, it does so while making it clear that the remaining territory, assigned in the plan to a Palestinian state, would not be annexed and will be kept for a future Palestinian state.

It is tempting to ridicule the American president’s vision, but the plan does offer the prospect of greater peace and prosperity for Israel — at least in relation to those in the greater Arab world that accepts its presence. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
Barry Shaw: Basic Middle East facts
The Middle East is characterized by the following 14-century-old intra-Muslim features which can be summed up as:

No intra-Muslim peaceful coexistence, but constant unpredictability, instability, religious and ethnic fragmentation, violent intolerance, terrorism, subversion, and a drive to fulfill Islam-driven goals including the unacceptance of an “infidel” entity in the “abode of Islam.”

Most of the Middle East is not driven by a desire to improve its standard of living, but by religious/ideological visions.

Western imposed concessions, appeasement and gestures actually embolden them to more aggression and terrorism.

The assumption that a Palestinian Arab state could be effectively demilitarized and de-terrorized should be assessed against the track record of the Palestinian Arabs themselves.

The 1993 Oslo Accord and the 2005 Gaza Disengagement were supposed to demilitarize and de-terrorize the Palestinians in return for dramatically enhanced political and economic benefits. Instead, both events intensified terrorism in a dramatic manner.

A direct correlation exists between the degree of Palestinian Arab sovereignty and the level of Palestinian terrorism. For example, in 1968-70, Jordan provided the Palestinian Arabs with an unprecedented platform of operation. Consequently, they triggered a civil war, attempting to topple the pro-US Hashemite regime.

Noah Rothman: You’re Going to Be Hearing a Lot More About Syria Soon
At the end of 2019, just after the Trump administration announced withdrawal from Syria, Operation Inherent Resolve’s commanders estimated that ISIS maintained only about 2,000 fighters in the Middle Euphrates River Valley. But while ISIS-backed attacks on coalition positions continued and anti-ISIS airstrikes were ongoing, this paltry force was “not enough” to make “significant or lasting gains.” The balance has since shifted in this terrorist organization’s favor.

Last week, the United Nations Security Council revealed that ISIS is reconstituting itself under new leadership. The group has again begun mounting “bold insurgent attacks” against both Western and Syrian government positions in Iraq and Syria’s poorly policed border areas. The UN mission’s findings dovetail with the assessment of U.S. Special Representative for Syria Ambassador James Jeffrey, who painted a similarly grim picture on January 30. “[W]e are seeing ISIS come back as an insurgency, as a terrorist operation, with some 14- to 18,000 terrorists between Syria and Iraq,” he told reporters at the State Department. With thousands of new fighters and an estimated $100 million in the bank, ISIS has begun retaking control of territory that once briefly constituted the Islamic State caliphate.

American voters have never been fond of U.S. obligations in Syria, but why would they be? When confronting the threats brooding in that near-lawless state, U.S. lawmakers have routinely led with the reasons why America should not engage in this contest. From Barack Obama’s September 10, 2013, primetime address to Donald Trump’s October 2019 tweets disparaging the American mission, the public is routinely bombarded with the reasons why America, the world’s only superpower, must avoid the Syrian entanglement.

It’s no wonder those voters might be confused as to why those same policymakers have subordinated their objections to the imperative of defending U.S. interests in Syria. America’s political class has never had enough faith in the voting public to level with them about what’s at stake. But Western interests in Syria did not cease to exist. Indeed, those interests seem increasingly imperiled by unabated violence and political chaos in the Levant. If Syria’s trajectory continues along its present course, Americans are going to be hearing a lot more about it. And soon.

Monday, February 03, 2020

  • Monday, February 03, 2020
  • Elder of Ziyon
Egyptian security forces announced the discovery of a smuggling tunnel from Gaza to the heart of Egyptian Rafah.

The tunnel was about 3 kilometers long.

Egyptian security sources said, "The tunnel is intended for infiltration of terrorist elements from the Gaza Strip to plant improvised explosive devices on the Egyptian side and to support terrorist elements supporting the ISIS organization in Sinai and transport weapons and explosives."

Egypt says it seized ammunition and explosives inside the tunnel.

Egypt has claimed that Gaza elements, almost certainly with Hamas' knowledge, are supporting ISIS attacks in the Sinai. Hamas strenuously denies any involvement, and it would be a fairly stupid thing for Hamas to do. So it is hard to know how much to believe the Egyptians, although if they recovered weapons in the tunnel, it it better to destroy it no matter whether they were being smuggled into Gaza or out of Gaza.




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From Ian:

Rock, Paper, Scissors in the Middle East
On the Israel front, Trump nullified the 1967 lines, the cornerstone of the Arab rejectionist position that Obama had attempted to enshrine in UNSCR 2334. He did this by moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, and then by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The latter move eliminated the 1967 framework altogether with regard to Syria and Lebanon. As far as the United States is concerned, there are no more disputed territories: The land is Israel’s.

The current plan extends that same approach to the Jordan Valley, in addition to existing settlements. “If the State of Israel withdrew from the Jordan Valley, it would have significant implications for regional security in the Middle East,” the president’s vision states, expressing a positive desire for Israel to remain there. An extension of Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley would therefore serve U.S. regional security interests. Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates’ acceptance of the Trump plan as the basis for any future talks between Israel and the Palestinians indicates that the United States’ regional allies have accepted the president’s nullification of the 1967 lines framework. The significance of this is that the Saudis and the Emiratis have accepted that the starting point for any movement going forward is not the so-called Arab Peace Initiative, which the Saudis originally sponsored almost 20 years ago, and which has subsequently been loaded with additional rigid language, especially regarding the so-called right of return for Palestinian refugees, by rejectionists led by the Assad regime. The Trump peace plan is the new starting point.

The truth is, none of these frameworks matter anymore. Trump has made it clear that he is not bound by the fantasies of previous American peace processors—who today show contempt for the president’s plan even as they admit their own decades-long failure. Trump’s deal is designed to underscore Israel’s special relationship with the United States—and it slams shut the rusty gates of the peace processing factory for good. It doesn’t much matter how the Palestinians respond. The American position is not dependent on the outcome of future negotiations.

Israel’s political class now has a clear window in which to determine its own fate. Israel can then live with the consequences of its own choices.
The two-step solution
Let us imagine that Jordan changes its mind and agrees to become the Palestinian state in place of the one that fails to materialize pursuant to the Deal of the Century. This change of mind can come about either through the King's agreement or by his giving over the reins of leadersihp to someone who will.

Were this to happen, all Palestinian Arabs in both sides of the Jordan R. would become full Jordanian citizens. without restrictions. The two roads connecting the proposed “state” to Jordan would be completed facilitating transportation between the Palestinian Arabs on both sides of the Jordan R.

Jordan would take over the administration of Areas A and B and Gaza in place of the PA and Hamas. Jordan would also fulfill the role of UNRWA in providing education, welfare and health care to all the current day refugees.

Rather than build the tunnel connecting Gaza to the rest of the “state”, pursuant to the vision, at a cost exceeding $15 Billion, Jordan can invite all residents of Gaza and Judea and Samaria (aka West Bank) to relocate to Jordan to receive these benefits. Also immigrants could be offered free housing in Jordan with international aid to sweeten the deal. It is not too far-fetched to believe that 2 million Arabs living in these areas could be incentivized to relocate to Jordan which is only 100 miles away or to any other country prepared to accept them.

It would not be necessary for Israel to give up any parts of its territory.

Israel would extend its law to all the lands west of the Jordan R including Gaza and the Arabs would become foreign residents in Israel with Jordanian citizenship.

The $50 Billion pledge in support of this vision could be provided to Jordan to enable it to become the home for all Palestinian Arabs and to provide them with jobs, education and healthcare.

Instead of investing in industrial parks in Area C in Israel to benefit the Arabs as proposed by Min Bennett and PM Netanyahu, these zones will rightly be created in Jordan thereby incentivizing Arabs to emigrate to Jordan.

This is a two step solution.

The first step is to change the vision as above set out.

The second step is to make Jordan, Palestine.

The New York Times Dreads Peace
When President Donald Trump’s peace plan was released, assuring Israel of sovereignty along the Jordan River, the security of settlements in Biblical Judea and Samaria, and the entirety of Jerusalem including the Old City under Israeli jurisdiction, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (and Israelis in general) had every reason to exult.

But The New York Times had every reason to lament. Reporter Megan Specia, a story editor based in New York with little evident familiarity with the Middle East, Israel, or Palestinians, reported on the plan and its deficiencies (January 29). Her conclusion, that the proposal “strongly favors Israeli priorities,” is indisputable, as is her perception that it is “a sharp departure from decades of American policy.”

Worst of all, as the Times has repeatedly complained, “is American recognition of Israel’s claim over the Jordan Valley and all Jewish settlements in the West Bank.” After all, she writes in an endlessly reiterated Times cliché, “Most of the world regards the settlements as illegal.” They have “steadily encroached” on land, by implication, that is Palestinian — unidentified by Specia as the Biblical homeland of the Jewish people.

In their familiar duet of complaints about Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu and settlements, Jerusalem Bureau Chief David Halbfinger and his colleague Isabel Kershner sadly concluded that a viable Palestinian state is now “quickly slipping away.” Rather than focus on the decades of Palestinian intransigence that have obstructed that possibility, they predictably (for the Times) blamed President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu for imposing their will on beleaguered Palestinians. President Mahmoud Abbas, they suggested, should “try to weather the storm” in the hope that Trump and Netanyahu will be defeated in forthcoming elections. That is also the Times’ endlessly reiterated hope.

The Times drumbeat continued. On the Opinion page, Nathan Thrall, widely praised for his plea (in The Only Language They Understand) to force compromise on Israel and the Palestinians, offered his own laceration of the Trump plan. It “gives Israel cover to perpetuate the status quo of occupation and sovereignty,” he complained, thereby “depriving millions of stateless people of basic civil rights and dispossessing them of their land.”

Thrall, clearly not enthralled by Zionism or Israel, refers to an “indigenous Palestinian population” whose rights to the Biblical Land of Israel have been ignored. He does not acknowledge that this “indigenous Palestinian population” did not assertively define itself in national terms until after the Six Day War in 1967, when the Jordanian land on the West Bank where they lived was returned to the Jewish people. He is convinced, without offering a shred of evidence or confronting evidence to the contrary, that Israel “illegally established settlements” in Biblical Judea and Samaria.


Sunday, January 19, 2020

  • Sunday, January 19, 2020
From Ian:

PMW: PA daily calls for murder to stop Holocaust ceremony in Jerusalem
“One shot will disrupt the [Holocaust] ceremony and one dead body will cancel the ceremony” – call for murder in op-ed in official PA daily

As over 40 world leaders gather in Jerusalem this week to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz at the event Remembering the Holocaust: Fighting Antisemitism, the Palestinian Authority wants to disrupt the ceremony. The official PA daily published an op-ed yesterday literally calling for murder in order to ruin the ceremony:

“One shot will disrupt the ceremony and one dead body will cancel the ceremony.”
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Jan. 18, 2020]


Before calling for murder, regular PA daily columnist Yahya Rabah criticized the international community for recognizing that the “Jews' Holocaust is terrible” while accepting as “insignificant, beautiful, [and] spectacular” what he called the “Palestinian holocaust by Israel that still continues.” Rabah warned: “It can be assumed that they [Palestinians] will resist the ceremony being held in Jerusalem itself, as Jerusalem is theirs.” His suggested solution to stopping the international ceremony from taking place – and which the official PA daily printed - is murder.

Palestinian Media Watch has reported on Palestinian Authority justification of terror and murder to achieve political goals.
Jonathan Tobin: Holocaust Politics Is Bad for the Jews
Poles suffered more cruelly at the hands of the Nazis than any other occupied country, save the Soviet Union. But while the Poles were horribly persecuted, the fate of the Jews was far worse. Approximately 18 percent of all Poles were killed during the war compared with a mind-boggling 90 percent of all Polish Jews.

But there’s more at stake here than a natural desire on the part of many Jews to express anger about revisionist history. As is true of other Eastern European governments, Poland does not share the antipathy towards Israel that is so common in Western Europe. Promoting warm relations between Israel and Poland isn’t so much a matter of Netanyahu practicing realpolitik but a policy based in the realization that the conflicts of the past should not doom Jews and Poles to conflict in the present and future.

Moreover, the politics behind the decision to exclude the Polish president from the list of Yad Vashem speakers is particularly troubling.

Moshe Kantor, head of the European Jewish Congress, chairs the Yad Vashem event. Kantor is a Jewish philanthropist. But he’s also a Russian business oligarch who is close to Putin. That authoritarian leader is clearly interested in undermining Poland and separating it from allies like Israel. It’s likely that the insult to Poland was orchestrated by Moscow.

Russia is also guilty of its own outrageous revisionism. The invasion of Poland and the start of World War II were made possible by the Soviet-Nazi pact of August 1939, in which the two totalitarian governments divided up their neighbor. But Putin’s foreign ministry has the chutzpah to claim it was the Poles’ fault, and that Stalin was justified in collaborating with the Nazis.

Kantor could have been overruled by Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin, but he failed to heed Netanyahu’s plea to avoid the dispute. The only explanation for that is that Rivlin’s antipathy for Netanyahu and a desire to thwart the prime minister’s policy goal prevailed over common sense. And it has created an incident that hurts Israel and helps no one but Putin. Indeed, the absurdity of the decision is one that has created a rare agreement between columnists from the right-wing Israel Hayom and the left-wing Haaretz.

Poles and Jews shouldn’t be doomed to continued enmity by a shared tragic history. Nor should the interests of Putin or the absurd rivalries of Israeli politics determine how the Holocaust is remembered.
Israel Advocacy Movement: Bernie Sanders is the American Corbyn… and this isn't good.


Apple’s Siri says Israeli president is ‘President of the Zionist occupation state’
Apple users from around the world were surprised to learn overnight Saturday that Israeli President Reuven Rivlin is the “President of the Zionist occupation state,” according to the giant tech’s vastly popular Siri app.

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After the story broke on social media, angering many people in the process, it was understood that Rivlin’s English Wikipedia page was hacked which caused the unpleasant malfunction.

Siri is a built-in “intelligent assistant” application that enables users of Apple devices to voice commands to the app in order to perform a string of tasks.

When Siri is asked about a public figure, the answer is usually extracted from the person's Wikipedia page. (h/t vwVwwVwv)


Friday, January 17, 2020

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Right from wrong - Neda Soltan’s message from the grave
ON JUNE 29, nine days after Neda’s cruel end, Iran’s Guardian Council conducted a “vote recount” at the behest of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – who had declared Ahmadinejad’s victory a “divine assessment” – and concluded, of course, that the election results were sound.

Shouts of “death to the dictator” from balconies throughout Iran ensued. Though the chanting was in Farsi, placards denouncing Ahmadinejad all were written in English – a clear signal of the protesters’ plea for outside sympathy and aid.

Unfortunately for the trapped and subjugated Iranian people, however, the administration in Washington was now headed by Barack Obama. Obama had entered the White House a mere few months earlier with the aim of reversing the policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush, especially those relating to the Middle East in general and the Iranian threat in particular.

Believing that the path to ridding Iran of its nuclear and hegemonic ambitions would be through goodwill gestures to the mullahs, Obama not only abandoned the Bush-coined term “axis of evil” to define state sponsors of terrorism – with Iran at the top of the list – but referred to the militia-monitored election process there as a “robust debate.”

He then continued to stress that America was going to engage in diplomacy with the Islamic Republic, regardless of who was at the helm.

Well, the proud “leader from behind” certainly kept his word on that one. As the regime in Tehran jailed, tortured and mowed down enough demonstrators to make the others recoil in fear – and Neda’s image faded from global consciousness – Obama got busy with his P5+1 counterparts in China, France, Britain, Russia and Germany orchestrating and pushing for the bogus nuclear deal with Iran that was reached in July 2015.
There's a revolution going on in the Mideast. Why doesn't the West see that?
Surveying the anti-government protests in Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran, as well as the refusal of the Syrian revolutionaries to surrender, the Canadian journalist Terry Glavin writes:

There is a revolution going on. It has been underway in fits and starts for years. It unites Lebanese, Syrians, Iranians, and Iraqis. Its object is the sundering of a bloody Khomeinist despotism that runs from the [Islamist dictatorship] in Tehran through the Assad regime in Damascus to Hizballah in Lebanon, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and the Hashd al-Shaabi militias in Iraq, which have now insinuated themselves into every branch of the Iraqi state.

It’s all very well for Canada’s Justin Trudeau and the United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson and Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron to want to force Tehran to get back in line with Barack Obama’s nuclear-rapprochement arrangement, which Donald Trump has renounced. But the genie will not be put back in the bottle so easily.

It was Obama’s nuclear deal that freed up [Iran’s] Quds Force to enforce its ghastly Khomeinist hegemony throughout the region in the first place, and now, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani is warning that European soldiers in the region, not just American soldiers, may soon find themselves on the Quds Force’s target list. Counseling a return to the Obama-era status quo is not a call to de-escalation. Don’t believe it.

It is profoundly ill-advised. It may suit the purposes of some Canadian and European firms that are scraping for a place for themselves in the Iranian economy, much of which is owned and controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But it would be a profound betrayal of the people of Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, who have already known little but betrayal from six successive Democratic and Republican administrations in the United States, and from the “West” generally, Canada included.
UK adds entire Hezbollah movement to terror blacklist
Britain's finance ministry on Friday said it had added Lebanon's entire Hezbollah movement to its list of terrorist groups subject to asset freezing.

The ministry previously only targeted the Shiite organisation's military wing but has now listed the whole group after the government designated it a terrorist organisation last March.

The change requires any individual or institution in Britain with accounts or financial services connected to Hezbollah to suspend them or face prosecution.

The group had "publicly denied a distinction between its military and political wings," the Treasury said in a notice posted on its website.

"The group in its entirety is assessed to be concerned in terrorism and was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK in March 2019," it added.

"This listing includes the Military Wing, the Jihad Council and all units reporting to it, including the External Security Organisation."

A finance ministry spokesman said the change followed its annual review of the asset freezing register, and brought it into line with the 2019 decision by the interior minister to blacklist all of Hezbollah.

"The UK remains committed to the stability of Lebanon and the region, and we continue to work closely with our Lebanese partners," the spokesman added.

Thursday, January 16, 2020

From Ian:

Mark Twain’s Land of Israel
Published in 1869, Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad was the book that launched him to literary stardom. It is based on the dispatches he wrote from a steamship tour that took him to various Mediterranean and Black Sea ports of call, including Jaffa and Jerusalem. To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Innocents Abroad, the New-York Historical Association has mounted an exhibit on Twain’s visit to the Holy Land, where, writes Diane Cole, he found his tour’s “main attraction”:

Throughout the trip, Twain highlighted the disparity between the desire of his guidebook-led companions to see what they had been promised and the reality of what was actually in front of them. The contrast reached its peak once they arrived in the Holy Land. “I must studiously and faithfully unlearn a great many things I have somehow absorbed concerning Palestine,” he commented, beginning with the reality of the relatively small size of the local grapes he saw, as opposed to the enormous vines portrayed in his favorite Bible-story illustrations.

Similarly, Jerusalem itself seemed “[s]o small! Why, it was no larger than an American village of four thousand inhabitants,” he wrote.

But beyond Twain’s 1867 [visit to the Holy Land] . . . it was his later travels to Europe in the 1890s that brought to the fore his rejection of anti-Semitism. In Paris, he was shocked by the visceral anti-Semitism exhibited in the Dreyfus affair. Visiting Vienna, he was condemned by the increasingly anti-Semitic press there for meeting with leading Jewish intellectuals such as Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl.
Pittsburgh native Bari Weiss wins book award for work on anti-Semitism
Pittsburgh native Bari Weiss won a 2019 National Jewish Book Award for her book “How to Fight Anti-Semitism.”

Weiss, who grew up in Squirrel Hill and graduated from Shady Side Academy, won the Myra H. Kraft Memorial Award in the category Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice. Hers was one of two 2019 books on anti-Semitism cited as “important and timely” in the Jewish Book Council announcement.

Weiss, 35, of New York, wrote the book in response to the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue, where she celebrated her bat mitzvah 21 years earlier.

“Weiss’ cri de coeur is an unnerv­ing reminder that Jews must nev­er lose their hard-won instinct for dan­ger, and a pow­er­ful case for renew­ing Jew­ish and Amer­i­can val­ues in uncer­tain times from one of our most provoca­tive writ­ers,” according to her publisher, Crown.
Why are African Americans silent amid anti-Semitism?
The response in too many cases was silence. It was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who said, “At the end of our lives, it won’t be the words of our enemies that wound us most, but the silence of our friends.”

What is the knot in the throats of African Americans that keeps us from speaking out against anti-Semitism? Why have we remained silent in the face of hate-filled speech directed at the Jewish community by Black leaders like Minister Louis Farrakhan whose venomous sermons call secular Jews the Synagogue of Satan? Aren’t we the ones blessed with internal radars sensitive to the nuances of racism by even the most unsuspecting white bigot (“But Kristina, some of my best friends are black!)? Does our moral compass only include Black people? If that is the case, then ours is a false morality. The reason we admire righteous men like Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Barack Obama is precisely because their leadership extended humanity to all people.

If I can say Black Lives Matter in the face of police corruption and brutality, then I should also be able to say that Jewish Lives Matter when members of their community are gunned down in cold blood. Because anti-Semitism is racism, and because, as the German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

During the last three years, I have seen a rise in anti-Semitism in the Black community. Part of this stems from a rise in hate speech across our nation that is being pushed at the highest levels of leadership. Teachings rooted in hatred of the other, left unchecked, lead to incidents like Jersey City – and Charlottesville. But there is another issue, a specific issue, that gives otherwise morally-courageous Black leaders pause when dealing with the issue of the Jews? That issue is identity. There is a desperate cry in the heart of every African American surrounding issues of identity that our Jewish friends, even after the Holocaust, do not understand. (h/t Yerushalimey)



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