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Wednesday, February 17, 2021

From Ian:

Clifford May: Despots dominate UN agencies
He [Blinken] added: "When it works well, the Human Rights Council shines a spotlight on countries with the worst human rights records and can serve as an important forum for those fighting injustice and tyranny."

But when has the UNHCR ever worked well? Can you think of one country whose record on human rights has improved thanks to the UNHRC? Does anyone believe that the UNHCR's occasional resolutions on North Korea keep Kim Jong-un awake at night? Here's a clue: At a UNHRC session last month, the North Korean envoy took the stage to accuse Australia of "deep-rooted racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia."

Blinken said he believes that "the best way to improve the Council is to engage." But the Obama administration, in which he served, spent eight years engaging with the UNHRC to no effect.

And, again, why not at least demand a few fundamental reforms in exchange for American participation?

For example, why not insist that the UNHRC stop treating Israel as its whipping boy, year after year issuing more condemnatory resolutions against the Jewish state than any other country? The UNHRC aims to de-legitimize Israel, even as Iran's rulers threaten and incite genocide against that nation – a violation of international law about which the UNHRC is silent.

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I understand President Biden's desire to shore up the international order which, not so long ago, could be characterized as liberal and based on equitable rules. But a growing number of the organizations that give the international order structure and substance are now dominated by despots.

That has increased the peril to the world's health, while both distorting and eroding the very concept of human rights. You think most people around the world see through the lies? I'd be pleased to see evidence to suggest that.

Must we continue funding these organizations? Should we consider establishing alternatives? Are we not at least able to disabuse ourselves of the quaint notion that American engagement alone will – as if by wizardry – transform them?
Ruthie Blum: When abundance breeds contempt
In a recent phone call, a friend complained about the pressure that the Israeli government, media and much of the public have been applying to citizens who refuse to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.

As someone who felt that she had been virtually "bullied" into getting inoculated, she was protesting, in particular, the latest carrot-and-stick element of the campaign to rid the country of coronavirus: a proposal to grant certain privileges to those possessing the Health Ministry double-dose certificate.

Among the epidemiological benefits being discussed – aside from the existing exemption from quarantine after exposure to infection – are unhindered entrance into malls, theaters, stadiums and other venues when they reopen.

"Why does it matter whether everyone complies?" she asked, pointing to the warning by officialdom that even after full vaccination, the virus can still strike and be spread. As a result, we've been told, mask-wearing and social distancing will continue to be required for a long time.

She clearly hadn't heard the more encouraging research revealing a serious drop in viral load after a single shot – indicating not only a less severe reaction to infection but a lower chance of transmitting the virus to others. Nevertheless, she is not alone in her resentment on behalf of the anti-coronavirus-vaxxers.

This might seem odd to foreigners envious of the fact that more than half Israel's 9-million-strong population has already received the first dose of the vaccine, and about a quarter has gotten both shots, which means that the country is moving steadily towards Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's stated goal of inoculating everyone over the age of 16 by the end of March.
Superman Was There When Jews Needed Him Most
In the Spring of 1938, Cleveland was abuzz with talk of “The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.” He was never apprehended, although Cleveland’s Public Safety Director — Eliot Ness, of Untouchables fame for nabbing Al Capone — tried his best.

Instead, the date became famous when two teenagers from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who had worked together on their high school newspaper, saw the first publication of their comic strip — subsequently named “Superman.”

Siegel had never quite recovered from seeing his father die of a heart attack after being beaten up in the family store. Shuster earned nickels delivering newspapers.

Their hero, newspaperman Clark Kent — otherwise known as Superman from planet Krypton — was the creation of two Depression-era Jews, the children of poor immigrant parents.

Jerry Siegel later described his motivation for creating the character as, “Hearing and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless, oppressed Jews in Nazi Germany … [and] seeing movies depicting the horrors of the downtrodden.”

But did his unconscious inspiration reach further back to the avenger of Jews, the Golem of Prague? And like Moses’ parents, Superman’s parents had launched him, alone on a perilous journey, to escape doom. Superman’s birth name on Krypton was Kal El — in Hebrew, “Voice of God!”


Biden has yet to phone Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, though it has been a full 4 weeks since Biden assumed office as president of the United States. The more time goes by, the more speculation by the media on what, exactly, the lack of a phone call to the Israeli premier signifies, or whether it means anything at all. Is the lack of a phone call a snub, a slight? Or is Biden holding back until the results of the upcoming Israeli election are clear?

My host for this column, Elder of Ziyon, is on record as saying the no phone call to Israel is no big deal:
Some think that the symbolism of Biden not calling Netanyahu is important. I don't. Unless he calls Abbas first, this is not something to waste time on.
It’s true, as far as we know, that Biden has not yet called Mahmoud Abbas. Biden did, however, have Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr reach out to Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Shtayyeh. So claimed Shtayyeh during an interview on France 24 Arabic TV on February 7, 2021, that was documented by MEMRI TV:

Interviewer: "Have you opened a channel of communication with the new Biden administration?"

Dr. Mohammad Shtayyeh: "Yes, there has been a phone call between myself and Mr. Hady Amr – Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israeli and Palestinian affairs. Mr. Amr reaffirmed what this administration declared during the election campaign: It will restore the aid, it will reopen the PLO office in Washington, and it will open a U.S. consulate in East Jerusalem. This is an important political message. In addition, the administration intends to restore aid to UNRWA and aid to the Palestinian people. These issues, as far as we are concerned, fall under the definition of confidence-building measures between this administration and us.”

[...]

"We requested that this administration reverse all the decisions that were made by the Trump administration, including the decision [to move the] U.S. embassy [to Jerusalem]. However, we know that the new administration, might not go this way, and instead choose an alternative option, which is opening a U.S. consulate in East Jerusalem in order to deal with the Palestinians directly. I believe that it sends a [clear] political message."

How important is this exchange? It’s hard to gauge, because first of all, it’s anecdotal. We weren’t there, and we don’t know if Shtayyeh’s account is faithful to the truth. But we do need to acknowledge that while Biden hasn’t spoken to Netanyahu, there have been contacts between the Biden administration and Israel. Haaretz, in fact, said that the first official contact between the two administrations took place on January 23, when U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan spoke with Israeli counterpart, Meir Ben-Shabbat.

The exchange with Ben-Shabbat, oddly enough, took place on a Saturday, when Israeli officials generally refrain from official business out of respect for the Jewish Sabbath, “Shabbat.” This phone call, like the lack of a phone call from Biden to Netanyahu, could, in theory, be seen as a slight by the Biden administration to Israel. Having his guy call Bibi’s guy on Shabbos? It’s certainly an affront to Israeli sensibilities.*

But I may be reading too much into this—it is likely that there are meetings and phone calls with Israeli officials on Shabbat all the time, they just aren’t advertised for fear of public backlash. As a result, when such meetings or phone calls take place on a Saturday, they tend to fall below the radar, and go unmentioned by the media. In this case, it may very well be that Israel wanted the media to put out the word that the phone call, in fact, took place, in order to take the sting out of the fact that Biden has yet to call Bibi.

Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, notes that Biden is the first president in 40 years to delay contact with an Israeli prime minister on taking office:

He called Xi. He called Putin. But three weeks into his presidency, Old Joe has pointedly refrained from calling the head of the government of our most reliable ally in the Middle East, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And so it’s clear now: Biden’s handlers intend to put immense strain on the U.S.-Israel alliance over the next four years, at a time when Israel and the rest of the free world are threatened by Iranian mullahs who are newly emboldened amid all the signs that Biden’s handlers plan to readopt Obama’s appeasement policies toward them.

Of the phone call between Hady Amr and Mohammad Shtayyeh, Spencer says:

The import of that call was as clear as the import of the snub of Netanyahu: the money will flow again, the jihad will be enabled again, the Israelis will be treated with contempt again, the peace accords that Trump enabled will be put on the back burner, if not repudiated outright. Everything is back on track now after a four-year speed bump.
The Washington Free Beacon, meanwhile, describes the lack of a phone call from President Biden to Prime Minister Netanyahu as a “diplomatic slight” and says that “congressional Republicans are piling on the White House for not speaking with Netanyahu, with multiple members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee telling the Free Beacon it is a slight that endangers the close U.S.-Israel alliance at a time when the world’s only Jewish state is facing down multiple terrorist threats.”

The Free Beacon lists a number of prominent Republicans who have spoken out against the slight:

· Rep. Michael McCaul (Texas), the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee

· Rep. Lee Zeldin (N.Y.), a top HFAC Republican

· Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee

· Rep. Ronny Jackson (R., Texas), another member of HFAC member

· Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), who sits on both the HFAC and the House Judiciary Committee

· Rep. Mark Green (R., Tenn.)

· Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R., Fla.), also on the HFAC

· Rep. Joe Wilson (R., S.C.), ranking member of the House's Middle East Subcommittee

Former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon also spoke out against Biden’s snub in this tweet of February 10th, tacking on Netanyahu’s phone number at the end for a bit of snarky emphasis:

In an earlier piece, the Free Beacon enumerated the history of US presidents contacting Israeli leaders over the past four decades:

Upon assuming office in January 1981, Reagan made overtures to Israel, vowing to protect its interests, and sent Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to meet with Israel’s leaders to build "Israeli confidence in the administration of President-elect Ronald Reagan," according to an Associated Press report from the time.

President George H.W. Bush followed this trend. He called then-Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir on Jan. 25, 1989, five days after he entered the White House.

President Bill Clinton reached out to Israel even sooner. He called then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin on Jan. 23, 1993, three days after being sworn in.

President George W. Bush phoned former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak on Jan. 27, 2001, a week after taking the White House, to express his support for the U.S.-Israel alliance.

President Barack Obama, who faced criticism from Republicans for policies they branded anti-Israel, called the Jewish state’s leaders on his first day in office. Obama also called Palestinian leaders that day, laying the groundwork for that administration’s failed bid to foster peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

President Donald Trump not only called Netanyahu but made the historic decision to invite him to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 22, 2017, two days after he took the oath of office.
From Biden, however? Crickets. Of more concern to some, however, is the inability of White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s inability to confirm Israel as a US ally. Elder of Ziyon covered this story in White House press secretary cannot say that Israel is a US ally. This is very bad. Here too, Elder once again opines that the failure of Biden to call Bibi is no big deal. He does, however, see the failure of the White House press secretary to clearly state that Israel is a close US ally as an ominous and significant harbinger of doom:

I don't think that it is a big deal that Biden hasn't called Netanyahu, but the inability to say that Israel is an ally is mind-boggling. Even if she didn't want to answer the same question about Saudi Arabia so she avoided answering about Israel, it is a big deal, because this points to Biden as being the third term of Obama, and the idea that the White House believes that a tilt towards Iran and away from US allies is a good idea is a very bad harbinger for the next four years.

Note also that even President Obama had no problem saying that the US was a strong ally of Israel.

Perhaps, as Elder suggests, the absence of a phone call, in and of itself, is not very important. Or maybe that was true, up to a point. Now, however, it points to a deliberate diss, as time goes by—an entire month in which a certain phone in Israel just doesn’t ring.

People are talking about it, leaders are speaking out, calling the lack of a phone call from Biden to Bibi an insult. It means something that the phone call hasn’t happened. The delay is a statement of malignant intent.

Taking a step back and looking at the big picture only makes things look worse. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican, is stripped from her committee roles as a result of airing her despicable conspiracy theories among them some that are antisemitic. Far left antisemite Ilhan Omar, on the other hand, is elevated in status, having been appointed vice chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Global Human Rights.

Should someone like Ilhan Omar have a say on foreign affairs? Someone who applauds Biden for stripping the Houthis of their designation as a terrorist organization?
Someone who tweets: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and let them see the evil doings of Israel.” Someone who publicly expresses hunger for the ICC to prosecute American ally Israel for imaginary war crimes?
But then again, Jen Psaki can’t say that Israel is a US ally. And that is the new reality: Israel, apparently, is no longer America's greatest ally in the Middle East. Which just goes to show that with Jobama in office, you can lead Netanyahu to wait and wait by the phone, but you can’t make it ring.

 *On reviewing this piece, Elder pointed out the time difference between Israel and the US. It would have been Shabbos in Israel only if Sullivan called Ben-Shabbat before 11 am EST. 

UPDATE: Biden finally called Netanyahu just as this piece was coming out. But the point was made. It took Biden an entire month to call, as the whole world was watching, and talking. We got the message: this will not be an Israel-friendly administration.




From Ian:

Israel negotiating release of Israeli woman held in Syria
Israel and Syria are intensively negotiating a prisoner exchange deal with Russian mediation, in which two incarcerated residents of the Israeli Golan could reportedly be released in exchange for a young Israeli woman who entered Syrian territory by mistake.

The woman has not been identified. According to Channel 12, she is a 25-year-old formerly Haredi woman from Modi’in Ilit who left the ultra-Orthodox community. It is not clear why she crossed into Syrian territory.

Syrian state media announced on Wednesday: “The exchange is taking place through Russian mediation to liberate the Syrians Nihal Al-Maqt and Dhiyab Qahmuz, the Syrian prisoner from the occupied Syrian Golan, in an exchange during which a young Israeli woman who entered the Syrian territories by mistake will be released. She entered the Quneitra region by mistake and was arrested by the Syrian authorities.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an interview with Army Radio, declined to comment on the negotiations but said: “We are working to save lives. I can just say I’m using my personal connections” with Russian President Vladimir Putin to secure her release.

Israel is “at the height of sensitive negotiations” on the issue, he said. “I believe we will resolve it.”

National Security Adviser Meir Ben Shabbat and hostage coordinator Yaron Bloom left Wednesday morning for Moscow to negotiate the release of the Israeli woman, according to Hebrew media reports.

The two prisoners Israel has reportedly been asked to release are residents of the Golan Heights. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967 during the Six Day War and annexed it in 1981. Many residents of the region retain Syrian citizenships and identify as Syrian.
Not Again: NYT Op-Ed Pushes Utopic, Unrealistic Israel/Palestine Vision
It’s unbelievable how often the very concept of Israel as a regular sovereign state comes under attack in the New York Times, and indeed across the media.

A recent article, titled “Want Israeli-Palestinian Peace? Try Confederation“ by Bernard Avishai and Sam Bahour encourages readers to toy with the concept of Israel as a state like any other and view it as a theoretical plaything that can afford to, “share a capital city, a transportation and urban infrastructure, and a business ecosystem.” Before proceeding with an analysis of this piece, it’s vital to note one fundamental fact: this view is not so much a minority opinion amongst Israelis and Palestinians as practically non-existent.

That the New York Times affords such a perspective means it gains prominence amongst the influential. But while the idea of doing away with Israel as a sovereign state with control over its population and a capital city like any other nation gain currency amongst outsiders, back in the Middle East – where people have to grapple with reality – such impractical ideas are laughed at by Arabs and Jews alike.

The New York Times’ Distortions and Impractical Ideas
Back to the New York Times’ piece. Among the impractical ideas and distortions of reality that the op-ed promotes are:
A “dotted-line border in Jerusalem”

The suggestion that Jerusalem can be split is something many Israelis and Zionists – as well as Palestinians, by the way – have extreme difficulty accepting. For millennia, Jerusalem was a single city. For precisely 19 years, it was divided by an ugly barrier, the frontier between Israel and Jordan. Since 1967, the city has been reunited, and while life is far from perfect, it has become immeasurably better for citizens of both sides. Not least because there are no more no-mans-land zones that citizens cannot approach out of fear of being fired upon by soldiers on the other side.

Nevertheless, Avishai and Bahour suggest that “Confederal institutions would permit dividing sovereignty in Jerusalem with a dotted-line border, actually keeping the city open to all.” As if the presence of armed Palestinian police in Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods, with no real border separating them from Israeli citizens, is something Israel could tolerate. Even more so when considering the reality that over 25% of Jerusalem’s Jewish population live in the neighborhoods of Gilo, Pisgat Ze’ev, and Ramot, all of which are on what would be on the Palestinian side.

All told, over a third of Jerusalem’s Jewish population live in such neighborhoods. Trusting the Palestinian security administration with the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews, or effectively creating Israeli enclaves surrounded by Palestinians with the means of attacking them, and hoping for the best is no more than a wild fantasy.


Seth Frantzman: NYT accused of whitewashing Turkey’s Afrin occupation
The New York Times has been accused of whitewashing Turkey’s military occupation of Afrin and the ethnic cleansing of Kurdish people. This surprised many, given that the newspaper has covered other conflicts by giving both sides a voice but when reporting in Afrin it appeared to only give Turkish military occupation officials and pro-Ankara voices a place.

An illegal military occupation. Stolen olives shipped to the occupying power for resale. Far-right settlers rampaging and attacking indigenous communities. Religious persecution. Locals kidnapped in extrajudicial raids, imprisoned in secret military detention centers. Ethnic-cleansing. All of this has happened in Afrin in northwest Syria, an area that was once Kurdish and was invaded and occupied by Turkey and Turkish-backed extremist militias in 2018. Since then, it has been ethnically-cleansed of Kurds, and minority graveyards and religious sites have been ransacked and destroyed. The New York Times is now accused of whitewashing Turkey’s occupation of Afrin in an article on Tuesday.

Experts, activists, former residents and commentators expressed shock at the article online noting that it failed to mention human rights abuses and the displaced people forced out of Afrin. Some compared the article to state-run Turkish media propaganda. For a US press that prided itself on confronting the far-right in the US and critiquing an authoritarian leader, or “speaking truth to power,” the article was slammed for not including any critical or dissenting voices.

Titled “In Turkey’s Safe Zone in Syria security and misery go hand in hand,” the article claims that while Turkey’s invasion three years ago was widely criticized, “today, the Syrians they protect are glad the Turks are there.” The article hints at the fact that 160,000 Kurds were ethnically cleansed. “Thousands of Kurdish families fled the Turkish invasion, along with the Kurdish fighters. In their place came hundreds of thousands of Syrians from other areas, who have swollen the population, taking homes.” Usually, when the indigenous population is expelled and other populations are moved in, it is called ethnic cleansing. In this case, Kurds were removed by Turkey and far-right religious extremist militias it controls, and Sunni Arabs and Turkmen were moved into Afrin.

 

During those eight years [of President Bush], 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, July 13, 2009

With each passing day, speculation is mounting as to what to make of Biden's failure to call Netanyahu.

Lahav Harkov of the Jerusalem Post quotes sources that there is not really a big deal going on here and no snub of Netanyahu, per se.

She quotes sources that claim Biden simply does not want to be seen as interfering with Israel's upcoming March 23rd elections by allowing Netanyahu to make political hay out of a phone call from the president of the United States -- this according to 2 Israeli political parties who have been in contact with the Biden administration.

That explanation might be taking for granted the respect that Israelis are supposed to have for Biden.

But take into account that Israelis favored Trump over Biden in last year's election and it is just as likely that the impression will be that Biden is specifically trying to interfere and influence the upcoming election against Netanyahu by refusing to make that phone call.

The fact that Biden has not contacted any other leaders in the Middle East is supposed to support the claim that there is nothing personal in that phone call not being made. 

And in addition to the phone call, Biden's putting his selection of an ambassador to Israel on hold until after the Israeli elections -- because some of the people being considered, such as former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel, have a poor relationship with Netanyahu.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Schanzer of The Foundation for Defense of Democracies points out that there is still plenty of communication going on between the US and Israel -- Secretary of State Blinken is speaking with Israeli Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is speaking with Meir Ben Shabbat.

With talk of returning to the Iran Deal, it's all very well for Biden to indicate a return to Obama's foreign policy, but those days are not the kind that Israel is eager to return to.

Those 2 sources Lahav quotes both claim that Biden wants to convey the message that “there is no special relationship with Bibi.” That may be, but in the process, Biden is also conveying the message that there is no special relationship with Israel either.

And that is something that conflicts with the readiness of past presidents to quickly connect with Israel's leaders.
Schanzer gives a short history lesson, pointing out that
Clinton called Prime Minister Rabin on January 23 and met with him 2 months later. 
o  Bush called Prime Minister Sharon on February 6. 
o  Obama spoke with Olmert on January 2 (before his own inauguration) and then called Netanyahu on April 1, the day after Netanyahu was sworn in. 
o  Trump spoke with Netanyahu on January 22, and hosted him the following month. 
Abbas is no doubt relieved to see Biden push off making that phone call -- imagine what kind of message Hamas might see in this.

But there is more going on than just a delay in making a phone call.

Last Friday, during a White House press briefing, press secretary Jen Psaki was asked what seemed to be a straightforward question:
Can you please just give a broad sense of what the administration is trying to achieve in the Middle East? For example, does the administration still consider the Saudis and the Israelis important allies?
Her response was a painful attempt to avoid giving an answer:
Well, you know, again, I think, we, there are ongoing processes and internal interagency processes, one that we, I think confirmed an interagency meeting just last week to discuss a range of issues in the Middle East where we've only been here three and a half weeks.

And I think I'm going to let those policy processes see themselves through before we give kind of a complete lay down of what our national security approaches will be to a range of issues.
If the Biden administration cannot even call Israel an ally when Biden is barely a month into his presidency, then we really are going to a very contentious 4 years.

And then there is the issue of some of the staff Biden has chosen for influential posts in his administration -- people about whom Mort Klein of ZOA has warned:
The new secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, has ‘publicly said the IRGC, the Iranian terror group, should never have been put on [the State Department’s] terror list, because that would “provoke” Iran’. Robert Malley, the chief negotiator of the Iran Deal, is a ‘public, unabashed supporter of the mullahs, an unabashed supporter of Hamas’.

Not forgetting lesser luminaries like Maher Bitar, who used to be on the board of the racist Students for Justice in Palestine and is now the NSC’s senior director for intelligence programs. Or Hady Amr, who used to be national coordinator of the anti-Israel Middle East Justice Network, has written of being ‘inspired’ by the Palestinian intifada, and threatened vengeance after Israel assassinated a Hamas leader. Amr is now deputy assistant secretary of state for Israel-Palestine.
The choice of Malley, Bitar and Amr are concerning.
But Israel is not the only country on edge.

Walter Russell Mead of The Wall Street Journal writes about Biden’s Rough Start With the World, claiming that "this has been one of the shortest and coldest diplomatic honeymoons on record," referring to Biden's boast that "America is back" not being welcomed by US allies quite as enthusiastically as Democrats may have expected. In Europe, American "wokeness" is being rejected by France while Russia and China are being viewed as attractive trading partners by Europe, ignoring Biden's talk of human rights.

And in the Middle East:

Iran is showing no eagerness to ease the administration’s path back into the 2015 nuclear deal. And both Israel and the conservative Arab states resent the American shift in that direction.

After just 4 years of Trump, Biden might just discover that this is no longer Obama's Middle East.
Or world.




  • Wednesday, February 17, 2021
  • Elder of Ziyon
Peter Beinart recently started a webcast at his position at the Foundation for Middle East Peace.

It doesn't seem to have gotten too many fans.

Last week, his guest was Ben Rhodes (40 YouTube views). Rhodes, of course,  was a Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama and helped architect that administration's pro-Iran,. anti-Israel policies.

Here are three clips from the interview.

In this one, Rhodes claims that the US media is "pro-Likud." Really.




Here we see Rhodes say (to Beinart's delight) how sick he was to hear about Palestinian intransigence, because to his mind no one ever gave them a chance to accept a peace deal. Except maybe once. 

Really.




He flatly says that the Obama administration never gave them an opportunity for peace either, when in fact the Palestinians ignored  a framework that John Kerry gave them that would have given them far more than anyone else offered including a capital in Jerusalem.

Finally, here is Rhodes trying to get into Netanyahu's head, and the best he can guess is that since Jews have been persecuted throughout history, they justify being cruel as well. This is a watered down version of the antisemitic Jews as Nazis theme so popular amongst the Left.




Rhodes has literally no clue of what he is talking about - yet he is a contributor to NBC News. 

(h/t Brad)




Tuesday, February 16, 2021

From Ian:

Why Israel should be considered to join NATO
The recent Abraham Accords between Israel and several Arab countries could also trigger the idea that in admitting the State of Israel, NATO would be playing globally, on one hand, and on the other hand, open the doors to further members around the World.

With a solid democracy and values driven society, Israel military capabilities would fit perfectly the present and future needs of the Alliance. The military quality hardware, technology or intelligence would enhance NATO’s existing capabilities. In a moment where NATO’s budget burned share is at the centre of many debates, Israel’s military budget is near the singular value of 4.5% GDP.

To be part of an Alliance, also means that one loses partial autonomy and such issue is remarkably pivotal for a nation that faces singular and constant security challenges. One of the core, if not the main, debates about an Israel NATO membership, will always be focus on NATO’s Article 5 (collective defence) activation over a potential attack from Iran or any of Iran’s proxies, such as the Hezbollah. The odds of such an attack are high and such an event would put the Alliance in a difficult position as this could prompt an armed conflict of years in the Middle East and even some regions in North Africa.

It is also clear that the full membership would not depend only NATO members, especially if Turkey will not veto that same membership, but also in Israel willingness in joining it.

In the balance, if one looks to NATO core values of: “individual liberty, democracy, human rights and the rule of law”; with three essential core tasks: “collective defence, crisis management and cooperative security”; one sees here the natural place for Israel to be part of.

On the opposite side, Turkey’s membership, despite its overwhelming present issues, should remain unchanged even if Ankara will suffer different sanctions from NATO member countries as the US and face high political pressure from Paris or London.

Looking at future picture, it is time to start building on Israel’s full membership to NATO.


Mordechai Kedar: The Truth About Financial Aid to the Palestinian Authority
In the past, the donor states have at times sought to circumvent the Palestinian Authority, opting instead to finance specific projects. This idea failed because of the mahsubiya method practiced in the PA: a contractor who gets foreign funding for projects transfers part of the money to the “right people” in the PA, thereby serving as a pipeline for the funneling of “kosher” funds to the instigators of terror.

Another problem is the Israeli government, which is well aware of the situation and yet continues to give artificial respiration to the corrupt PA. Following the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993-1995, many in Israel sobered up and realized that the PA’s continued rule could lead to the growth of a terror state in the West Bank compared to which the dangers posed by the terror state that arose in Gaza would pale into insignificance. But no Israeli government has taken the necessary steps to put an end to the Oslo delusion.

After 15 years with no elections in the PA, it was recently announced that elections would at last be held for the Legislative Council and the presidency, a move that will afford the terror Authority a democratic stamp of approval. The question immediately arose as to whether Hamas will be allowed to run in these elections. Many fear that the democratic process would result in Hamas again winning the majority of seats on the Legislative Council and possibly the presidency as well. But what kind of democracy does not permit a preeminent organization to run in elections that are supposed to be free?

The holding of the elections appears to be fully supported by key officials in the Biden administration: both those who favor the establishment of a Palestinian state because of their blind faith in the two-state solution, and those whose sympathies lie with Muslim Brotherhood organizations in the US and elsewhere. The latter group would see a Hamas victory in the PA elections as a desirable outcome.

Muhammad Aref Massad understands that a terrorist Authority has been set up alongside Israel that could give rise to a terrorist state. When will the policymakers in Israel, Europe, and the US understand this?
Blinken’s Worrisome Golan Heights Hedge
On Monday, instead of endorsing President Trump’s 2019 decision to recognize Israel’s claims of sovereignty over the Golan Heights — the disputed territory it seized from Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967 — Secretary of State Antony Blinken hedged. He noted, during a CNN interview, that Israel’s control of the territory is “of real importance, to [its] security. Legal questions are something else. . . . And over time, if the situation were to change in Syria, that’s something we would look at.”

Asked about whether Blinken’s comments should be taken as a sign that he’s open to reversing Trump’s recognition of Israel’s claims, a State Department spokesperson told National Review on Thursday that, “The Secretary spoke to this earlier in the week and we have nothing further.” Although Blinken has also pledged to build on the Abraham Accords and view Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, his decision to leave the Biden administration’s stance on the Golan Heights ambiguous raises serious questions about the new administration’s commitment to Israel, its strongest regional ally, in the face of the growing threat from Tehran.

Downplaying legal recognition of Israel’s Golan claims further strained an alliance weakened by the new administration’s push to reenter the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his chief rival, Minister of Defense Benny Gantz, immediately pushed back against Blinken’s comments. “The Israeli position is clear. In any possible scenario, the Golan Heights will remain Israeli,” Netanyahu’s office told the Times of Israel earlier this week.

Though Israeli officials may be displeased by Blinken’s comments, they can also rest easy in the knowledge that, for the moment, the U.S.’s official position on the Golan claims has not changed: Reversing Trump’s sovereignty-recognition proclamation would require an official act of unrecognition, a move the administration hasn’t yet said it’s considering. “The Golan is, for the purpose of U.S. policy, part of Israel,” said Eugene Kontorovich, a George Mason University law professor who advised the State Department on the 2019 move. “He doesn’t have to call it part of Israel every time he speaks to make that true.”

The key question concerns the likelihood that Biden formally reverses Trump’s decision. Kontorovich calls Blinken’s comments a “trial balloon,” an effort to see what the domestic and global reaction might be if the administration were to use unrecognition of Israel’s Golan claims as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Iran. “Here they’re playing with something, which was not a card that was theirs to play,” Kontorovich said. “It would just be an extremely radical policy to unrecognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan for no productive end.”

Monday, February 15, 2021

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Navigating Israel's ship of state through the Biden storm
In a media briefing Friday, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki refused to say whether the Biden views Israel as an ally.

Psaki's behavior was easy to understand. Although Israel is America's strongest and most reliable ally in the Middle East, Israel cannot follow where the Biden administration is now leading. President Joe Biden's policy steps and foreign policy appointments since taking office have made it abundantly clear that his first priority is to return the US to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

The so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action which was negotiated by Biden's top advisors when they served with him in the Obama administration is not a non-proliferation agreement. It is a blueprint for Iran to achieve independent military nuclear capability and regional hegemony.

Neither Israel nor the US's Arab allies in the Persian Gulf can partner with Biden and his team in advancing this policy. It puts them all in danger. This is the simple explanation for Biden's refusal to date to speak to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to other regional leaders. Quite simply, given his commitment to a policy that places their countries in jeopardy, Biden would prefer not to hear what they have to say.

Netanyahu adopted a three-pronged foreign policy when he was faced with a similar situation with Washington during the Obama presidency. After a four-year hiatus, the time has come to reinstate the policy.

The first component of that policy is a recognition that the US is irreplaceable. No other ally can provide Israel with the partnership that the US provides. That doesn't mean that Israel's government must bow and scrape before Biden and his advisors as they rush to empower Iran at Israel's expense. On the contrary. Facing a hostile administration, Israel must unapologetically stand up for itself and defend its interests and rights.


My Telephone’s Not Ringing
There is genuine concern in Israel about several of Biden’s top advisers, in particular U.S. envoy to Iran Rob Malley, widely seen to be soft on Iran and less than sympathetic to Israel’s security concerns. There are also, though, significant yings to Malley’s yang, key among them the widely respected Secretary Antony Blinken, and others.

Which leads us to the second tweet. Jumping into the “phone call” fray two days after Danon, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, tweeted a sensible thread stating the obvious; that Biden assumed leadership of the free world at a particularly tempestuous time and was personally taking on only the most pressing and urgent domestic and global matters, reflected in the order of his days and his calls (well, with that Canada exception, eh?)

On Saturday night, the phone call question was put to Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Gilad Erdan, on the most-watched post-Shabbat political talk show in Israel. His response, was, well, exactly what one might expect. A seasoned political operative, Erdan, with a bemused countenance, told the interviewer that the conversation is not so important.

“Until there isn’t one,” she ricocheted.

As he must do, Erdan focused on the many sidebar conversations that have taken place at the highest levels between the most senior Israeli and Biden administration officials in State, Defense, and the NSA. The well-oiled relationship between the US and Israel is humming along nicely, Erdan reassured. No need for any concern.

Biden is also sensitive to the fact that Israel is in perpetual election mode and would not want to appear to be boosting a particular candidate. But, that seems to be a chronic feature of the Israeli condition, making it almost irrelevant.

Truth is, for the last four years Israel had become accustomed to being treated as a constant priority in the Oval Office, with the formidable and combined muscle of Ambassadors Friedman and Dermer, Jared Kushner brought to bear, combined with Trump’s reported lack of discipline in his approach to, well, everything.

If there is a message in the non-phone call phone call, it is likely far less dramatic than some may be thinking, and more like: “You’re important, Israel, but perhaps not always the most important.

Let’s hope so.


JN INVESTIGATION: How UK gives annual nod to hate-filled Palestinian education
British taxpayers are continuing to pay for a Palestinian education system in which school pupils are routinely taught incitement, hatred of Israel and glorification of terrorism. Many of the textbooks are written by vetted officials, whose salaries are paid by the UK.

Despite numerous assurances from the Palestinian education minister, detailed reports from the Israel-based Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) show that as recently as September last year, Palestinian school students were still learning maths by adding up the number of ‘martyrs’, including those who have led suicide bombings on buses and shopping centres. The curriculum is taught in Palestinian Authority and UNRWA schools in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem.

Not only does Britain continue to pay – in the past five years it has spent an estimated £105 million on Palestinian education professionals, including on the salaries of teachers who write the textbooks – but it appears to have a blind spot when it comes to challenging the Palestinians on the content of those books.

The UK and the Palestinian Authority (PA) have a Memorandum of Understanding, or MoU, which supposedly commits the Palestinians not only to “uphold the principle of non-violence”, but to take action against “incitement to violence, including addressing allegations of incitement in the educational curriculum”.

Money paid by Britain to the Palestinian partner is supposedly contingent on the PA’s performance on “curriculum reform”.

Sunday, February 14, 2021

From Ian:

David Collier: Lies and more lies. PSC and the viral BDS fake news circus
I am just coming to the end of a project that has taken almost a year and had promised myself that I would not get distracted in the final stretch. But when this week highlighted just how badly anti-Israel activism is dependant on fake news and lies, I decided to take a slight detour to share it with you.

Divestment and the lies of BDS
The boycott movement against Israel is a complete failure. Israel’s hi-tech economy is booming (Covvid aside – tourism was booming too) and BDS has nothing to show for 16 years of effort but a few activists taking selfies next to avocados on a supermarket shelf.

Sure, in confined political student circles, 14 students can force through a pro-BDS vote whilst the 22000 non politically active students on campus are busy with their actual studies, but in the real world – all of these students use Israeli hi-tech to communicate with each other.

BDS is a noise that spreads antisemitism, demonises Zionism, and hurts Jews in the diaspora but it doesn’t actually do damage to Israel. Worse than this, where it does have some effect, it just ends up hurting Palestinians.

Because of this failure, what the BDS movement is forced to do is engage an absurd fake news strategy – any divestment of any Israeli stock or product for any reason – is promoted as a BDS victory.

For example – even when a football club changes kit supplier – something they all do every few years- if it is the brand of kit used by the Israeli team – BDS will falsely claim it is a ‘divestment’. In the end, the embarrassed club can even be forced to issue a statement rejecting the claim. This happened to Luton Town FC just last year. Think for a while how pathetic this all is.

And if the evidence is not even there, they make it all up anyway. BDS and toxic organisations such as the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign just love to spread lies. It is all they have.

The latest PSC fiction
This week provided a perfect example. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign ran with a story that the East Sussex Pension fund had divested from Elbit, a successful Israeli arms company.

The news went around. The official BDS movement bragged about it, the thugs at Palestine Action sang about it, and Middle East Monitor wrote an article in celebration.

Ben Jamal, the hapless director of the PSC followed suit. Incredibly, an industry magazine, ‘Pensions Age‘ ran with the story too, in an article written by Jack Gray, their Brighton-based ‘News Editor‘.

Except of course the story is simply not true.


Christian Post: Wanted: Christians to declare to the World Council of Churches 'not in our name'!
The World Council of Churches (WCC) has put on its theological anti-Semitic brass knuckles in its long-standing war against the Jewish State. The time has come for Christians to declare “Not in our name.” For their good, more than ours.

Rev. Frank Chikane, moderator of the WCC’s Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, lost no time in a recent Zoom call to ask Christianity to revert to its worst medieval Jew-hatred. For those who will not work towards delegitimizing the entire system (aka the State of Israel) that facilitates daily “brutality” against Palestinians, he intoned a curse, “The blood of the people of Palestine will be upon them.” This was an obvious reference to Matthew’s “His blood be upon us and on our children!” These words were used for centuries to prop up the charge that it was specifically Jewish sin – not the sins of all humanity – that caused the Crucifixion. That charge of deicide was the most important source of violence against Jews, persisting till today. Rev. Chikane is not concerned that his words might inspire violence, since he regards the potential targets not as human but as “demons,” the same demons responsible for apartheid in his South Africa. And it’s worse this time, he said, because these demons have invited other demons to make the Palestinian struggle more difficult.

“Every day people get killed” – a blatant fabrication, unless he means those who are stopped in their attempt to thrust knives into Israeli civilians. He had not a single syllable of criticism for those, nor the ones who try lobbing rockets into Israeli kindergartens.

Rev. Chikane didn’t invent the WCC’s anti-Israel policy, he just upgraded and supercharged it with New Testament imagery. Just three years after Auschwitz, the WCC – which claims 500 million Christians in its affiliates – chose not support the establishment of the Jewish State in 1948, warning instead that its political complexity might invite more global anti-Semitism. In the decades since then, they have strived mightily to convert their analysis into prophecy. It’s reaction to the Jewish state’s astounding Six Day War in 1967, when it defeated surrounding armies whose announced intention was to drive the Jews into the sea, was to blame Israel for the immediate threat of annihilation by its neighbors, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Israel was faulted for allegedly inspiring the fears of its neighbors because of Israel’s “dynamism and possible expansion.” If those darn Jews hadn’t been so successful in nation-building, their neighbors wouldn’t have to murder them…
New report by human-rights group responds to anti-Israeli bias perpetuated at UNHRC
Geneva-based independent human-rights group UN Watch published a detailed report in advance of the 46th session of the U.N. Human Rights Council, which is scheduled to open this month on Feb. 22 in Geneva and run until March 23. The study debunks more than 20 different major accusations leveled by numerous different countries—accusing Israel of violating Palestinians’ religious freedom, damaging their health and practicing racism.

In its first-ever report that thoroughly fact-checked and responded to the UNHRC’s anti-Israel claims, UN Watch released its 58-page “Agenda Item 7: Country Claims & UN Watch Responses” examining 23 accusations made by various countries under Agenda Item 7 against Israel in the period covering the six UNHRC sessions held in 2019 and 2020.

According to report researcher and writer Dina Rovner, legal adviser of UN Watch, the paper sets the record straight regarding distorted statements, including: “Israel hinders the Palestinian fight against COVID-19;” “Israel has occupied Palestinian territory for 70 years;” “Israel commits apartheid against the Palestinians;” “Israel damages Palestinian holy sites” and “Israel’s blockade of Gaza is illegal.”

“The truth is very different from what is being put on the record at the United Nations,” she told JNS. “When Israel is accused of hindering the Palestinian fight against COVID-19, it is actually helping and coordinating with the Palestinians. When Israel is accused of violating the rights of Syrians on the Golan, the opposite is the case—the Golan Syrians have more rights and freedoms than their counterparts in Syria, and are flourishing economically. Israel damages Palestinian holy sites? No. History shows that only under Israeli control are the holy sites of Jews, Muslims and Christians fully protected.”

According to Hillel Neuer, UN Watch executive director and editor of the report (with contributions from managing editor of UN Watch Simon Plosker), it is being sent to all U.N. ambassadors in New York and Geneva “to make clear to all delegates who tell lies that, from now on, their countries will be called out by name before the international community and refuted with the facts.”

UN Watch has also submitted several written statements that will be circulated to delegates as official U.N. documents of the session, calling out the lie that Israel’s vaccination campaign—one of the best-run in the world—is “racist”; exposing UNRWA teachers’ incitement to terrorism and anti-Semitism; and documenting the Palestinians’ illegal use of child soldiers.

Saturday, February 13, 2021

From Ian:

Meir Y. Soloveichik: The Jew Who Ran Away
Forty years ago this month, a small movie was released in England by the name of Chariots of Fire. One year later, it won the Oscar for Best Picture, defeating the out-and-out favorite, Warren Beatty’s Reds. Both were about real people; Reds tells the story of leftist journalist John Reed while Chariots is a portrait of two British runners who competed in the 1924 Olympics. Strikingly, the Academy ultimately honored a film that celebrates Christian faith and religious liberty rather than Beatty’s multi-hour tribute to a famous American Communist.

The two runners we see in Chariots are a Jew named Harold Abrahams and a devout Christian named Eric Liddell. Abrahams is a Cambridge student angered by the subtle anti-Semitism he experiences; he determines that he will “take them on, one by one, and run them off their feet.” Liddell, in contrast, competes in adherence to the advice of his missionary father: “Run in God’s name, and let the world stand back and wonder.” The two are set against each other in the hundred-yard dash to determine who will be “the fastest man on earth,” but the qualifying heat is on a Sunday, the Christian Sabbath, and Liddell refuses to run.

I have long been obsessed with the film; I have read what I can about its historical background, corresponded with its producer, and attended a staged 2012 version in the London theater. The recent death of Ben Cross, who played Abrahams, inspired me to return to it again. And the more I watch it, the more I have come to understand the terrible Jewish irony that lies at its heart.

In the film, Abrahams’s response to anti-Semitism is not Jewish pride but assimilation. We see him ebulliently belting out lyrics from the ultimate British musical, HMS Pinafore: “In spite of all temptations / to belong to other nations / he remains an Englishman.” When he is confronted at Cambridge by anti-Semitic dons who accuse him of interest only in his own glory, Abrahams indignantly insists: “I am a Cambridge man first and last, I am an Englishman first and last; what I have achieved, and what I intend to achieve is for my family, for my university, and for my country.”

All this accords with the real life of Harold Abrahams. In an interesting doctoral dissertation on “Jews and British Sport,” David Gareth Dee notes that “Abrahams claimed the most important factor in Jewish sporting success was a willingness to ‘Anglicise’ and to move away from one’s religion.” In the 1920s, the precise moment in which the film is set, Abrahams wrote an article in an Anglo-Jewish publication encouraging English Jews to ignore Jewish Sabbath restrictions in order to compete.
Pfizer CEO shares his family's tragic story during the Holocaust
Pfizer CEO Dr. Albert Bourla joined the Sephardic Heritage International on January 28th for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, where he shared his Greek Sephardic family's story of tragedy and survival during the Holocaust.

"It’s a story that had a great impact on my life and my view of the world, and it is a story that, for the first time today, I share publicly," said Bourla during the January 28 virtual event. "Many Holocaust survivors never spoke to their children of the horrors they endured," he added.

Bourla's parents were of 2,000 survivors from a community of 50,000 nearly eradicated by the Holocaust in Thessaloniki, Greece where he was born. He began by retelling the story of his father.

"My father's family, like so many others, had been forced from their homes and taken to a crowded house within one of the Jewish ghettos," recounted Bourla. "It was a house they had to share with several other Jewish families. They could circulate in and out of the ghetto as long as they were wearing the yellow star."

"But one day in March 1943, the ghetto was surrounded by occupational forces and the exit was blocked. My father and his brother (my uncle) were outside when it happened. Their father (my grandfather) met them outside, told them what was happening and asked them to leave the ghetto and hide because he had to go back inside as his wife and two other children were home. So later that day, my grandfather, Abraham Bourla, his wife Rachel, his daughter Graziella and his youngest son David were taken to a camp outside the train station and from there, left for Auschwitz. My father and uncle never saw them again," Bourla recounted.


Coronavirus: Infection down, vaccination up - cabinet to meet Sunday
The coronavirus cabinet will meet Sunday to discuss the next phase of the country’s exit strategy, as the infection rate continues to decline, and the number of people vaccinated is on the rise.

The next phase of the exit strategy is expected to include street shops, as well as a number of other arenas that could be open only to people who have been vaccinated or recovered from coronavirus.

Those areas include shopping malls, cultural and sporting events, hotel (rooms only) and gyms.

“If all goes well, we hope we can open street shops and malls, and start carefully opening cultural shows for which entry will only be allowed for green passport holders,” Health Ministry Director-General Chezy Levy said in a weekend interview with KAN.

The Health Ministry has targeted February 23 as the start of the next phase of its plan, requiring a staged exit as was hoped for in the past, so that the impact of reliefs can be monitored. Levy said that the country will only fully understand the results of the various reliefs rolled out last week in about 10 days.

“I would recommend continuing to open carefully and thoughtfully,” he said.
  • Saturday, February 13, 2021
  • Elder of Ziyon



This is very, very concerning:


White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki gave a vague, rambling answer Friday when asked at a briefing to reporters whether the Biden administration considers Saudi Arabia and Israel to be “important allies.”

“Can you please just give us a broad sense of what the administration is trying to achieve in the Middle East?” a reporter asked — in follow-up to an earlier question asking why President Biden has yet to call Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“For example,” the reporter asked, “does the administration still consider the Saudis and the Israelis important allies?

Rather than saying simply, “Yes,” Psaki gave this answer, according to a White House transcript of the late-afternoon briefing.

“Well, you know, again, I think we — there are ongoing processes and internal interagency processes — one that we, I think, confirmed an interagency meeting just last week — to discuss a range of issues in the Middle East. 

“We’re — we’ve only been here three and a half weeks, and I think I’m going to let those policy processes see themselves through before we give, kind of, a complete laydown of what our national security approaches will be to a range of issues,” she added.
On two consecutive days, Psaki said that the US has an important relationship with Israel. On Thursday:

The President looks forward to speaking with Prime Minister Netanyahu.  He’s obviously somebody that he has a longstanding relationship with.  And obviously there’s a important relationship that the United States has with Israel on the security front and as a key partner in the region
.  

And on Friday:
 
It is not an intentional diss.  Prime Minister Netanyahu is someone the President has known for some time.  Obviously, we have a long and important relationship with Israel, and the President has known him and has been working on a range of issues that there’s a mutual commitment to for some time.
 I don't think that it is a big deal that Biden hasn't called Netanyahu, but the inability to say that Israel is an ally is mind-boggling. Even if she didn't want to answer the same question about Saudi Arabia so she avoided answering about Israel, it is a big deal, because this points to Biden as being the third term of Obama, and the idea that the White House believes that a tilt towards Iran and away from US allies is a good idea is a very bad harbinger for the next four years.

Note also that even President Obama had no problem saying that the US was a strong ally of Israel. 

I fully expect Psaki to walk this back on Monday but that will be looked upon as firefighting, not policy.



Friday, February 12, 2021

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: The ICC's European puppet masters
More than 60% of the ICC's budget is funded by European governments. Germany is generally the ICC's largest or second largest funder. A German government representative quoted in a Reuters' report of Israel's request said that Germany "couldn't imagine" scaling back, much less defunding of the political court.

So without the actions of European governments like Germany, Holland, Switzerland, France, Norway, Britain and Sweden, and without the EU as a whole – the ICC would never have opened its bigoted proceedings against Israel, the purpose of which is to reject Israel's right to exist. At every point, the Europeans had the power to prevent or end the ICC's bigoted treatment of the Jewish state. And at every point, the Europeans took active steps to ensure that the targeting would continue. Indeed, by funding and directing the efforts of the likes of NGOs Breaking the Silence and Al-Dameer, (which is affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terror group), the Europeans were the puppet masters directing the passion play.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas criticized the ICC's ruling move in a statement he put out shortly after it was announced. Maas didn't condemn the immorality of pursuing fake war crimes allegations against an innocent nation. Rather, Maas's criticism focused on the fact that despite the efforts of the ICC and the UN, the fact remains that "Palestine" is not a state. "The court has no jurisdiction," he tweeted, "because of the absence of the element of Palestinian statehood required by international law."

This is, to be sure, the key legal problem with the ICC's ruling. But the much larger problem with the judges' decision is that the investigation is a politically motivated effort to cause material harm to Israel, as the Jewish state. Israel abides scrupulously by the rules of war, and everyone knows that. The reason German politicians like Maas should oppose the ruling is because the court's behavior is part of a larger effort to undermine international acceptance of the Jewish people's right to their state. But then, as a major funder of both the ICC and the NGOs behind the fictitious, libelous allegations, and as a state that failed to oppose the Palestinians' legally groundless bids for the status of state at the ICC and the UN, Maas clearly doesn't have a problem with the immorality of the enterprise. To the contrary, he is playing a key role in moving it forward.

In a way, the ICC's efforts to harm the Jewish state is a modern-day version of the Dreyfus trial. The Dreyfus trial was an anti-Semitic reaction against France's decision to grant the full rights of citizenship to French Jews in the framework of the Emancipation. Anti-Semitic officers in the French General Staff needed a scapegoat to blame for acts of treason they had committed. By choosing Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jew, for the role, the officers enjoyed the cover and support of powerful anti-Semitic clerics, anti-Semitic intellectuals and newspaper publishers, and anti-Semitic politicians. All of the figures involved realized that by framing Dreyfus "the Jew," they advanced their efforts to discredit the idea that Jews could be full partners in French public life.

The big difference between the people that produced and directed the blood libel against Dreyfus 125 years ago and the people that are producing and directing the blood libel against Israel today is that in France at the turn of the 20th century, people were proud to attack Jews openly. Today, their contemporary successors prefer a passive aggressive approach. They pretend to oppose the efforts to delegitimize and criminalize the Jewish state while they pay for and direct them.
Melanie Phillips: The absurd malevolence of the International Criminal Court
Yet western liberals maintain that the Palestinian cause is a worthy one. That’s why the US Secretary of State Tony Blinken says the Palestinians are “entitled” to a state.

It is in fact hard to envisage any group that’s less entitled than the Palestinians, who are not only bent upon colonial occupation of Israel but support the murder of Israelis and preach deranged hatred against Jews.

Meanwhile, the British government continues to peddle the legal fiction that Israel is in illegal occupation of the “Palestinian” territories.

The west’s support of such falsehoods and injustice has incentivised the Palestinians’ rejectionism, terrorism and war against Israel. It has further encouraged them to try to bring about Israel’s destruction through “lawfare,” the strategy of deploying international law as a weapon of destruction and of which their case before the ICC is a major offensive front.

But there’s a deeper issue still which will make both the British and the Biden administration reluctant to admit the fundamental nature of the ICC’s flaws.

This is their commitment to the ideology behind its foundation — the belief that crystallised after the Holocaust that there had to be a way of bringing to justice human rights abusers who were immune from redress in their own countries. This impulse fuelled the post-war development of international law and trans-national legal tribunals.

But laws draw their legitimacy from being passed by nations rooted in specific institutions, history and culture. Without the anchor of national jurisdiction, laws can turn into instruments of capricious political power.

The ICC has no such national jurisdiction but is made up of many nations. That’s why, from its inception, it was in essence a political court.

That’s why it’s an existential foe of Israel — the principal target of some of the world’s many human rights abusers who have grasped that international law provides them with a potent weapon.

And these make common cause with American Democrats and the western political establishment through their belief in liberal universalism, the doctrine that trans-national institutions trump the authority of national ones.

The legal and moral illiteracy of the ICC’s ruling is not a temporary blip. It follows from the campaign that lies at the very core of liberal universalist beliefs: to negate the authority of the sovereign nation.

As early opponents of international law realised, however, only a sovereign nation can properly defend itself. That’s why Israel knows it must always rely only on itself. It’s a lesson that many liberal western politicians have yet to realise.
David Singer: The “State of Palestine” remains a United Nations mirage
The International Criminal Court (ICC) Pre-Trial Chamber 1 decision that the ICC has jurisdiction to investigate alleged war crimes committed in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem has infuriated Israel – but should bring no joy to Hamas, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) or the United Nations which continues to support the PLO’s claim for the creation of a second Arab State in former Palestine – in addition to Jordan.

The ICC Prosecutor believes:
‘there is a reasonable basis to believe that members of Hamas and Palestinian armed groups […] committed the war crimes of: intentionally directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects (articles 8(2)(b)(i)-(ii), or 8(2)(e)(i)); using protected persons as shields (article 8(2)(b)(xxiii)); wilfully depriving protected persons of the rights of fair and regular trial (articles 8(2)(a)(vi) or 8(2)(c)(iv)) and wilful killing (articles 8(2)(a)(i), or 8(2)(c)(i)); and torture or inhuman treatment (article 8(2)(a)(ii), or 8(2)(c)(i)) and/or outrages upon personal dignity (articles 8(2)(b)(xxi), or 8(2)(c)(ii))’ (para 94)

The Prosecutor further concluded in para 94 that these potential cases would be currently admissible for prosecution once jurisdiction was established.

The Court noted:
“The identification of potential cases by the Prosecutor and her evolving investigation, which is likely to be protracted and resource-intensive, entails that the question of jurisdiction under consideration has concrete ramifications for the further conduct of the proceedings. The initiation of an investigation by the Prosecutor also means that States Parties are under the obligation to cooperate with the Court pursuant to part 9 of the Statute. It is, therefore, all the more necessary to place the present proceedings on a sound jurisdictional footing as early as possible.”(para 86)

The PLO and Hamas will be kept very busy answering the ICC Prosecutor’s enquiries regarding those Palestinian war crimes identified in para 94.

The Court further emphasised that:
“the present decision is strictly limited to the question of jurisdiction set forth in the Prosecutor’s Request and does not entail any determination on the border disputes between Palestine and Israel. The present decision shall thus not be construed as determining, prejudicing, impacting on, or otherwise affecting any other legal matter arising from the events in the Situation in Palestine either under the Statute or any other field of international law.”(para 60)

Any expectation Israel will return to the negotiating table after the PLO’s flirtation with the ICC is hard to visualise.

Thursday, February 11, 2021

From Ian:

Natan Sharansky with Gil Troy: The Doublethinkers
It was easy enough to remind myself and them who was really free and who is a scared doublethinker. All I had to do was tell some joke about the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev. Thank God, there were plenty of yarns about his arrogance, his crudeness, his senility. One kidded about him forcing Soviet cosmonauts to outdo the American astronauts who landed on the moon by rocketing to the sun, then reassuring them they wouldn’t be incinerated because they’d be launched during the night. As I’d tell my interrogators a joke, I’d laugh. And, as normal Soviet doublethinkers themselves, they would want to laugh. But they couldn’t, especially if two of them were there together. Laughter would end their careers.

So they’d covered up that temporary glint in their eyes with a tantrum. They’d pound the table, shouting, “HOW DARE YOU?”

“Look,” I’d say to them calmly, “you can’t even smile when you want to smile. And you claim that I’m in prison and you’re free?”

I did this to irritate them, because they spent so much time trying to irritate me. But, mainly, I was reminding myself that I was free, as long as I could laugh or cry in accordance with my own feelings.

Over the last three decades in freedom, I have noticed that—with apologies to Tolstoy—every dictatorship is oppressive in its own way, but the doublethinkers’ mental gymnastics are all alike. The feeling of release from the fear and giddy relief when crossing the line from doublethink to democratic dissent is also universal across cultures. This understanding prompted the Town Square Test I use to distinguish between free societies and fear societies: Can you express your individual views loudly, in public, without fear of being punished legally, formally, in any way? If yes, you live in a free society; if not, you’re in a fear society.

In the West today, the pressure to conform doesn’t come from the totalitarian top—our political leaders are not Stalinist dictators. Instead, it comes from the fanatics around us, in our neighborhoods, at school, at work, often using the prospect of Twitter-shaming to bully people into silence—or a fake, politically-correct compliance. Recent polls suggest that nearly two-thirds of Americans report self-censoring about politics at least occasionally, essentially becoming a nation of doublethinkers despite the magnificent constitutional protections for free thought and expression enshrined in the Bill of Rights

To preserve our integrity and our souls, the quality of our political debate and the creativity so essential to our cultural life, we need a Twitter Test challenging bottom-up cultural totalitarianism that is spreading throughout free societies. That test asks: In the democratic society in which you live, can you express your individual views loudly, in public and in private, on social media and at rallies, without fear of being shamed, excommunicated, or cancelled? Ultimately, whether you will live as a democratic doublethinker doesn’t depend on the authorities or on the corporations that run social media platforms: it depends on you. Each of us individually decides whether we want to submit to the crippling indignity of doublethink, or break the chains that keep us from expressing our own thoughts, and becoming whole.


Coffin Problems
Luck was a defining factor in determining the fate of many in the Soviet Union, and it is the common vein that unites the subjects of this story. Yet the stories recounted here are not representative. Such stories can never be completely told because the Soviet system intentionally left much undocumented. Critical marks on examinations were often written in erasable pencil. Written exams were eschewed in favor of oral ones. Some who lived through the period do not feel they have anything to add; others may find the experience too painful to contemplate, much less talk about. Even among the small cohort described here, there is consensus on a few things but not on many others.

Kac quit his job in 1976 and applied for an exit visa to Israel. He received permission to leave quickly. He secured a position immediately at MIT where he remains today. Zelmanov eventually secured a role at Novosibirsk State and left in 1990. For his breakthrough work on a century-old problem, he was awarded a Fields Medal in 1994—the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize.

Eliashberg was less lucky. He became a refusenik after his visa request was denied in 1979. He had returned to Leningrad before applying, and was forced to support himself at various temporary jobs. This promising mathematician found himself working as a night watchman at a car garage in the city. One of his friends put his own career on the line in order to secure for Eliashberg a job in an accounting software company. He remained there until 1987, when he was finally able to leave the Soviet Union. He was not sure if he would be able to rehabilitate himself as a mathematician. But he succeeded. In the decades since, he has won many of the most prestigious awards in mathematics including the Veblen, Crafoord, and Wolf prizes. Today, he is on the mathematics faculty at Stanford.

For her part, Julia Rashba recalled a poignant moment in the elevator with the MGU examiner who had failed her on the entrance exam. In many ways, she felt unprepared for what had just happened to her. She had experienced anti-Semitism in her childhood with bullies and cruel taunts. Once, as a little girl, she ran away from a day camp where the bullying was too much. She was not aware that the sorts of anti-Semitism that lived in adult institutions would be less benign. She was raised, however, to believe that even in such a discriminatory system, where her own father had experienced nearly insurmountable travails to rise to the top of the Soviet physics establishment—that she needed only to work hard and act with integrity and things should work out.

They had not. The examination she “failed” was not even for medical school, it was for a chemistry program that offered some biomedical tracks. She had hoped that she could contribute to medicine as a scientific researcher, even if she would not be allowed to be a clinician. The system would not even allow this tenuous finger hold on her dream. She recalls that the examiner, perhaps seeking absolution for the shame of what he had just done, quietly apologized and asked for her forgiveness. She refused.
Eli Lake: America in the World: Sheltering in Place
That exchange tells us a lot about the Quincy Institute. The think tank’s foreign policy agenda and arguments echo the anti-interventionism of the 1930s. Most of its scholars are more worried about the exaggeration of threats posed by America’s adversaries than the actual regimes doing the actual threatening. In May, for example, Rachel Esplin Odell, a Quincy fellow, complained that Senator Romney was overstating the threat of China’s military expansion and unfairly blaming the state for the outbreak of the coronavirus: “The great irony of China’s military modernization is that it was in large part a response to America’s own grand strategy of military domination after the Cold War.” In this, of course, it resembled most everything else.

The institute has hired staff that come out of the anti-neoconservative movement of the 2000s. Here we come to a delicate matter. The anti-neoconservatives of that era flirted with and at times embraced an IR sort of anti-Semitism: the obsession with Israel and its influence on American statecraft. Like the America Firsters, the anti-neoconservatives worry about the power of a special interest — the Jewish one — dragging the country into another war. A few examples will suffice. In 2018, Eli Clifton, the director of Quincy’s “democratizing foreign policy” program, wrote a post for the blog of Jim Lobe, the editor of the institute’s journal Responsible Statecraft, that three Jewish billionaires — Sheldon Adelson, Bernard Marcus, and Paul Singer — “paved the way” for Trump’s decision to withdraw from Obama’s Iran nuclear deal through their generous political donations. It is certainly fair to report on the influence of money in politics, but given Trump’s well-known contempt for the Iran deal, Clifton’s formulation had an odor of something darker.

Then there is Trita Parsi, the institute’s Swedish-Iranian vice president, who is best known as the founder of the National Iranian American Council, a group that purports to be a non-partisan advocacy group for Iranian-Americans but has largely focused on softening American policy towards Iran. In 2015, as the Obama administration was rushing to finish the nuclear deal with Iran, his organization took out an ad in the New York Times that asked, “Will Congress side with our president or a foreign leader?” a reference to an upcoming speech before Congress by the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The National Iranian American Council’s foray into the dual loyalty canard is ironic considering that Parsi himself has been a go-between for journalists and members of Congress who seek access to Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister.

This obsession with Israeli influence in American foreign policy is a long-standing concern for a segment of foreign policy realists, who believe that states get into trouble when the national interest is distorted by domestic politics — an affliction that is particularly acute in democratic societies which respect the rights of citizens to make their arguments to the public and to petition the government and to form lobbies. The most controversial of the realists’ scapegoating of the domestic determinants of foreign policy was an essay by Stephen Walt and John J. Mearsheimer (both Quincy fellows) that appeared in the London Review of Books in 2005. It argued that American foreign policy in the Middle East has been essentially captured by groups that seek to advance Israel’s national interest at the expense of America’s. “The thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby,’” they wrote. “Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country — in this case, Israel — are essentially identical.”

Walt and Mearsheimer backed away from the most toxic elements of their essay in a subsequent book. The essay sought to explain the Iraq War as an outgrowth of the Israel lobby’s distortion of American foreign policy. The book made a more modest claim about the role it plays in increasing the annual military subsidy to Israel and stoking American bellicosity to Israel’s rivals like Iran. They also took pains to denounce anti-Semitism and acknowledge how Jewish Americans are particularly sensitive to arguments that present their organized political activity as undermining the national interest. Good for them. But the really important point is that events have discredited their claims. The all-powerful “Israel Lobby” was unable to wield its political influence to win the fight against Obama’s Iran deal. It was not able to stop Obama’s public pressuring of Israel to accept a settlement freeze. Decades earlier, it had not been able to thwart Reagan’s sale of AWACs to the Saudis. Anyone who believes in an omnipotent AIPAC is looking for conspiracies.

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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 14 years and 30,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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