09/19 Links Pt2: The dangerous double standards of Britain, Canada and Germany; The fundamental problem behind the BBC’s anti-Israel bias

From Ian:

Arsen Ostrovsky: From Kfar Aza to the world: A powerful portrait of Israel’s solitude

Bernard Lévy recounts his harrowing experience in Israel following the October 7th Hamas attack, capturing the deep isolation and suffering of the Jewish state and highlighting its isolation.

Though the book is titled ‘Israel Alone’, in some respects, it may as well be titled ‘The Jews Alone’. Simply put, with the exception of some heroic voices, we have been abandoned. Abandoned by world leaders, abandoned by self-righteous politicians, abandoned by civil society and abandoned by all those with whom the Jews stood with, defended and fought for.

Reflecting on this unabated unleashing of Jew-hate and abandonment after October 7th, and even downright support for Hamas in the West, Lévy comes to the painful, reluctant, yet tragically accurate realization that, “no land on this planet is a shelter for Jews.” Invoking ‘Amalek’, the Jewish people’s evil pre-cursor to Hitler and Sinwar, Lévy declares “he has come out of limbo to bang on our doors and drum in our ears.”

In short, as Lévy concludes “Yes, the Jews are more alone than they have ever been”, however, he adds an important caveat, that “tragedy is Greek, not Jewish”.

Despite taking his readers on a journey of utter despair, agony and questioning the Jews place in the world, Lévy ends with an inspiring affirmation in our faith, our history and the indispensable centrality of Zionism and Israel to our future.

Lévy understands that the Jewish people are not defined solely by heartache, loss and the pain that history’s ‘Amaleks’ seek to inflict upon us, but that our collective story is also one of unyielding hope, courage, liberation, and resilience.

Indeed, “the soul, mind, and genius of Judaism are standing firm amid tumult and torment” says Lévy, in his concluding words.

The Tradition of Jew-Hate

If the demonstrators really cared about Palestinians, as the Muslim Arab journalist Bassam Tawil points out, "they would be speaking out against the repressive measures and human rights violations perpetrated by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.... instead of improving the living conditions of their people, Hamas and PIJ leaders are imposing new taxes and leading comfortable lives in Qatar, Lebanon and other countries. Instead of bringing democracy and freedom of speech to their people, the terror groups are arresting and intimidating journalists, human rights activists and political opponents."

"Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people," said an eyewitness. "I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers held up their babies to see the 'fun.'" — Eyewitness to the November 9, 1938 Kristallnacht.

Jihadist media efforts, and especially massive donations to universities from Qatar and other oil-rich Islamic countries, have been so successful that many academics and students in Western tertiary educational institutions have been captivated by the narrow ideology of Jew-hate.

"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism." — Zuheir Mohsen, PLO official, Trouw, March 1977.

In the jihadist view, Islam is the one true faith and therefore Christians, Jews, Hindus, and all other "disbelievers" are following a false religion and therefore can be righteously killed as apostates.

"[T]he Crusaders conquered Eretz Israel, reaching Jerusalem in 1099. Once there, they gathered all the Jews of Jerusalem into the central synagogue and set it afire. Other Jews, who had climbed to the roof of Al-Aksa mosque on the Temple Mount, were caught and beheaded." — 'The First Crusade,' chabad.org

The dangerous double standards of Britain, Canada and Germany

Williams also recalled that in March, the former U.K. government, led by Rishi Sunak, reportedly conditioned continued arms supplies to Israel on its allowing the Red Cross or international diplomats to visit the detained terrorists of Hamas’s elite Nukhba force. The foreign secretary at the time, David Cameron, had even warned Israeli officials that Europe as a whole would impose a weapons embargo on Israel.

According to Williams, the U.K.’s arms embargo “appears to represent nothing so much as pure racist perfidy.”

Lammy “completely ignores the extreme lengths to which Israel has gone to avoid civilian casualties, as well as the huge amounts of humanitarian aid it has facilitated into the Gaza Strip,” he added.

Williams quoted the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, John Spencer, who wrote, “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history—above and beyond what international law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Richard Kemp, a former British Army officer and commander, has echoed these sentiments supporting Israel and the IDF.

According to Coughlin, Lammy’s “blatant anti-Israel agenda will place the U.K.’s long-standing strategic alliance with Israel under intense strain.”

Unfortunately for Israel, Britain is not alone. Sadly, Germany and Canada have also felt it is appropriate to sanction Israel by imposing an arms embargo exactly at a time when Israel is trying to fight Islamic extremism that is already rising in those countries.

Germany, under Chancellor Olaf Scholz, has delayed nearly all of Israel’s requests for arms sales since the start of the war. Sales to Israel in 2023 amounted to more than 300 million euros and, in 2024, they allegedly dropped to just 14 million.

But when juxtaposing these policies against Israel alongside other countries, the hypocrisy becomes clear.

Astonishingly, Germany has massively armed Qatar, which, alongside Iran, is the most significant backer of Hamas, and one of the main sources of evil in the world today.

“In the first half of 2024, the federal government approved arms sales worth just over 100 million euros to the rulers in Doha, who are probably the most important supporters of the terrorist organization Hamas,” Bild journalist Björn Stritzel noted.

Likewise, Canada has also decided to punish Israel over baseless and false accusations of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

For the past several months, Ottawa has not approved new arms export permits to Israel, halting about 30 such permits, including a deal between the Canadian subsidiary of American company General Dynamics and the U.S. government, according to a recent announcement by Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly.

“First and foremost, our policy has been clear since Jan. 8, we and I have not accepted any form of arms export permits to be sent to Israel,” she said.

She also said that she asked her department “to look into any existing permits of arms or parts of arms that could have been sent to Israel.”

Alan Baker, a former Israeli ambassador to Canada and current director of the Institute for Diplomatic Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, told JNS that Canada’s decision is “absurd.”

“I wouldn’t call the policy in and of itself antisemitic, but it is certainly misguided,” he said. “It is based on ignorance or naivete, and not on an understanding of the situation.”

Baker called out Joly, “who seems to be completely persuaded that Israel is involved in a genocide. She doesn’t want to understand the facts and get down to the true situation.”

Baker pointed to hostile anti-Israel organizations based in Quebec that “seem to be influencing her whole policy.”

“What’s sad about this is that she seems to be pulling the Canadian prime minister by the nose when he should be sufficiently responsible to rein her in,” Baker said.

“You expect someone who has been prime minister for so long to be somewhat more circumspect and to consult and take into consideration those who perhaps have a less politically driven point of view and a more facts-based point of view,” he added.

Baker noted that the previous Canadian premier, Stephen Harper, gave a speech before Israel’s Knesset toward the end of his term and said that Canada will always have Israel’s back. He said it is inconceivable that Canada could ever act against Israel’s interests.

“But here we are,” said Baker. “Canada is being held hostage by an irresponsible foreign minister who seems to have great influence on the prime minister, based on political assumptions that are fed by propaganda that has no relation to the truth.

“Rather than trying to ascertain the facts and being in contact with those elements, whether in the United States or Israel, that are conversant with the statistics and the truth and genuine data, she and Trudeau prefer to base themselves on the accusation of genocide. And they come to the wrong conclusions.”

Canadian aid organizations have called for a complete embargo on military exports to Israel, warning that it is impossible for them to provide basic support to Palestinians while Israel operates in Gaza.

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09/19 Links Pt1: Operation Grim Beeper: Melanie Phillips: Hoist with their own devices; Hezbollah hides death toll from exploding devices; Hamas is an idea

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Hoist with their own devices

Today’s developments suggest, however, that Israel hadn’t yet finished its task of disabling the enemy before any such all-out attack. There may therefore be more such disabling attacks to come as a precursor to the long-promised war to finish the job.

And then, of course, there’s Iran. The regime in Tehran must now be in a state of panic. Not only is Hezbollah, the proxy army whose missile batteries form the principal threat to Israel from the Iranian regime, now on its knees for the moment as the result of Israeli out-of-the-box thinking. The Iranian regime will be wondering that, if Israel can pull off this kind of tactic against Hezbollah, what might it be about to do to themselves and their spear-carriers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps?

Of course, we don’t yet know what Israel’s strategy actually is. We know that the Biden administration is putting Israel under enormous pressure not to wage all-out war on Hezbollah. Maybe Israel is buckling to that pressure. There have also been reports that the pager attack was indeed intended as a pre-emptive strike for an all-out assault on Hezbollah, but Israel was forced to make it a stand-alone event because it had become compromised by some Hezbollah operatives becoming suspicious of their pagers.

Despite all that, maybe we’ll see that all-out attack very soon. Israel has long feared such a war, though, because of the certainty of thousands of Israeli victims from enormous barrages of Hezbollah rockets and other weaponry that might overwhelm Israel’s defences. We don’t know whether the events of the past 36 hours have reduced that threat. But there may be no better opportunity than this to take that gamble.

What has long been crystal clear, however, is that Hezbollah has to be defeated once and for all. And so does Iran. The October 7 pogrom put steel into the Israeli public’s backbone. Never again must Israel face the threat of another October 7 or worse. The endless war of attrition by Hezbollah must be stopped. And the head of the snake in Tehran must itself be lopped off. The Israeli public will stand for nothing less.

What has also been clear is that the Biden administration has been doing everything it can to stop Israel from defeating its mortal enemies.

Israel has long observed that — contrary to the west’s moral cretins who so falsely claim that Israel’s responses to Hamas are themselves war crimes — it has used only a fraction of its firepower against Hamas and Hezbollah and that it has far more up its sleeve than anyone can imagine. In the past 36 hours, we’ve seen some evidence of the dramatic surprises that Israel can indeed spring.

But this has also shown us that, given what it does indeed have up its sleeve, Israel could have finished off Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran too long ago if it hadn’t been prevented from doing so by America — which has been intent instead on appeasing and empowering Iran, creating a state of Palestine in Gaza which would become yet another Iranian terror proxy, and cynically weaponising the grievous plight of the hostages to force upon Israel a ceasefire which would led to the survival of Hamas.

Jonathan Tobin: Why is Hamas so confident that it’s winning?

Claiming U.S. ‘recognition’
But above all, Hamas views American pressure on Israel as its ace in the hole. As Mashaal pointed out, the way that the hostage negotiations have been handled by Washington has amounted to American “recognition” of Hamas as a diplomatic partner as opposed to a despised and outlawed terrorist organization. He’s right about that.

While it’s not clear just how closely they are observing the presidential election or counting on one outcome over another, they obviously prefer Harris’s stand in favor of an “immediate ceasefire” to former President Donald Trump’s comments, which amount to a green light to Israel to “finish the job” of eliminating the terrorists.

Hamas’s military position inside Gaza is not completely eliminated, but it is a shadow of its pre-October self. And there are even reports now starting to circulate about Gazans drawing some obvious conclusions about the high cost of letting Hamas lead them into disaster after disaster. Even as Israel’s focus is increasingly turning towards its northern border and the imperative to stop the Hezbollah fire that has depopulated a large area in the direct line of terrorist fire, the need to continue the work of demolishing tunnels and rooting out remaining Hamas elements is not over. It may take years—something that discourages Israelis, and that infuriates Biden and Harris. But the notion that there is any realistic alternative to continue fighting that would ensure Israeli security—whether in the form of a ceasefire/surrender or bringing international forces into Gaza to stop Hamas—is a pipe dream.

The reality of Palestinian politics
As the Times article makes clear, Hamas will never budge from its demands that Israel hand back Gaza to them. And as long as they are useful to their cause, they will hold onto many of the hostages, despite the belief among some Israelis that it is Netanyahu’s stubbornness or political ambition that is the obstacle to their freedom. Moreover, Hamas leaders are right to believe, despite the understandable anger in Gaza, that the basic equation of Palestinian politics remains unchanged. Over the last century, Palestinian groups and leaders have always gained credibility primarily by shedding Jewish blood. Hamas thinks that it will eventually reap a great benefit from the atrocities of Oct. 7 in the form of broad support that will enable it to topple and replace Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah Party in Judea and Samaria as well as Gaza. All they have to do to cash in on that is to survive the war, and they think they’ve found the formula to enable them to do just that.

If left to carry out its tasks without foreign interference, the IDF will eventually eliminate Hamas, though that task will not be accomplished easily or quickly. It can certainly prevent it from returning to power in Gaza, thus ensuring that its reign of terror over Israel as well as Palestinians is over. Still, Mashaal and the rest of the terrorist group are counting on feckless American politicians, ideologically motivated leftist demonstrators and political activists, a media that is always prepared to demonize Israeli efforts at self-defense, as well as war-weariness and anguish about the hostages inside Israel to guarantee their survival. We may hope that they are wrong about that, but it’s easy to understand why the terrorist leader is confident that he can outlast the Israelis … with American help.

Clifford May: Hamas is an idea

Their goal is to kill the Zionist idea. Which is what exactly?

Prior to 1948, Zionism was the belief that Jews had the right and should have the opportunity to exercise self-determination in part of their ancient homeland.

There were reasonable arguments against this idea—not least that it would prove too arduous. For one thing, most of what was to become Israel was either desert or malarial swamp.

Following the re-establishment of the Jewish state—and a failed war launched immediately thereafter by the Arab countries surrounding Israel—Zionism took on a different meaning.

If you agree that Israel—the only democratic society in the Middle East, the only nation-state in the region where Jews, Muslims, Druze, Christians and other ethnic and religious groups enjoy a broad spectrum of rights and freedoms—has a right to continue to exist then, congratulations, you are a Zionist.

If, on the other hand, you demand the eradication of Israel “from the river to the sea,” if you support mass-murdering Jews or are indifferent regarding that eventually, then you may consider yourself an anti-Zionist.

Borrell has expanded upon his assertion that you “don’t kill an idea” by adding that “you have to provide an alternative that’s better.” His better idea is (did you guess?) a “two-state solution.”

As he must know, Hamas forcefully rejects such a compromise based on its theological conviction that any territory ever conquered by Muslims—as the land the Romans re-named Palestine was by the imperialist/colonialist army that marched from Arabia in the 7th century—is a waqf, an endowment from Allah to the Muslims for eternity.

I might also note that a proto-two-state solution was what existed after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. Two years later Hamas violently ousted the Palestinian Authority and seized power, tolerating no competitors or dissenters.

Huge amounts of aid poured in from “the international donor community.” The United Nations provided social services such as health care and education, which soon included anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish indoctrination.

Hamas spent its energies building a mammoth and elaborate subterranean fortress to be used for the “military solution” it was planning. Hamas leaders have sheltered in it, surrounded by hostages abducted from Israel.

Above the tunnels, Gazan civilians have served as human shields. Hamas leaders knew from the start that Israelis would be blamed by U.N. officials, faux “human rights organizations,” much of the media, and others for those human shields who were killed.

Keener minds than Borrell’s have pondered terrible ideas and what to do about them. In World War II, Churchill sought to if not kill, at least cripple Nazi ideas. He understood that required defeating Nazis on the battlefield.

Of course, there are still Nazis, neo-Nazis and Nazi apologists in Europe and America.

One of their fundamental ideas, a Europe “cleansed” of Jews, has morphed into the idea behind the Tehran-led multifront war being waged against Israel—a Middle East “cleansed” of Jews.

Borrell is neither a Nazi nor a jihadist. But he and many others are helping keep a genocidal idea alive.

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Rhetoric That Inspires Violence Is Wrong! Unless It's Pro-Palestine Rhetoric, by Rashida Tlaib (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Rhetoric That Inspires Violence Is Wrong! Unless It's Pro-Palestine Rhetoric.  

by Rashida Tlaib, Congresswoman, 12h District, Michigan

Detroit, September 19 - Donald Trump and J. D. Vance have continued their irresponsible, reckless speech even after the atmosphere they created with such talk resulted in two attempts on Trump's life. Aside from being dangerous, such talk is simply wrong. Well, if it isn't in favor of Palestinian resistance it's wrong. No amount of violence on behalf of Palestine could disqualify the cause.

Republicans and conservatives in general have long resorted to inflammatory rhetoric that inspires violence. Activists such as Libs of TikTok do the same. But they refuse to take responsibility for that rhetoric, which threatens lives - even their own! - and safety. Anyone who votes for politicians who speak they way Trump and Vance speak automatically support political violence, which betrays all of our fundamental values.

That is, if the perpetrators commit political violence on behalf of ordinary causes. On behalf of Palestine, however, both the violence and the rhetoric that prompted it attain sacred, unassailable status.

Anti-abortion protesters accuse providers of murder, and then someone bombs an abortion clinic; Libs of TikTok posts a clip from a trans teacher, and the teacher's school gets bomb threats; President Biden tweets that Trump is "a genuine threat to this nation" and "a threat to democracy," and someone tries to shoot Trump.

Hmm. Maybe that last one is okay, as well. I will have to consider it. Trump is pretty pro-Israel so perhaps it counts as "pro-Palestine" rhetoric.

My point is, we must not, cannot, as a civilization, tolerate talk that calls for, or implies support for, harming people or property to advance a political agenda. Except the agenda of Palestine, which we must liberate By Any Means Necessary™. When it comes to Palestine, unleash your inner rape-apologist and Nazi-analogy-maker. Everything goes.

Journalists and politicians have a responsibility to call out and challenge talk that incites violence, wherever, and by whomever. Trump, Vance, and their acolytes must tone down their inflammatory speech, which has already raised tensions among immigrants in Ohio and sparked torrents of online harassment and hate speech. As a child of Muslim immigrants, I have developed a special sensitivity to rhetoric that makes marginalized people afraid.

It's still alright for you to make Jews afraid, though, because you're doing it in the name of a Free Palestine, through blood and fire, as the chant goes. Also the "From the water to the water Palestine will be Arab" chant, which we western Muslims sanitize as "will be free."

Stop the violent speech!

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Respected NGOs (and the EU's Josep Borrell) knowingly deceive the world in their press statements about Israeli restrictions on food to Gaza

Yesterday, 15 international NGOs including Oxfam, Save the Children and CARE International issued a press release accusing Israel of denying lifesaving food and medicine from Gaza:

15 aid organizations demand international pressure for an immediate ceasefire, arms embargo, and end to Israel’s systematic aid obstruction

New data has revealed the scale of aid obstruction, and the consequential drastic fall in aid entering Gaza. This is driving a humanitarian disaster, with the entire population of Gaza facing hunger and disease, and almost half a million at risk of starvation. 

While Israeli military attacks on Gaza intensify, lifesaving food, medicine, medical supplies, fuel, and tents have been systematically blocked from entering for almost a year. 

Data analysis by organizations working in Gaza has found that as a consequence of the Israeli government's obstruction of aid: 

-  83% of required food aid does not make it into Gaza, up from 34% in 2023.This reduction means people in Gaza have gone from having an average of two meals a day to just one meal every other day. An estimated 50,000 children aged between 6-59 months urgently require treatment for malnutrition by the end of the year.

Look carefully at the wording. It is not saying that food is not making it into Gaza, but "food aid." 

Because Israel has made up for the difference by encouraging commercial food and supply deliveries.

This has advantages - the private drivers are more likely to go into somewhat dangerous areas that the professional aid workers refuse to enter, and commercial deliveries are less likely to be intercepted by Hamas which still essentially controls all the aid coming in to Gaza. And then Hamas sells the aid meant to be free to Gazans. So in the end, the aid that goes through humanitarian organizations are not any easier for Gazans to access than the commercial goods. 

The NGOs know this. The press release includes a link to the UN-OCHA statistics, which mentions that they are not counting commercial goods  in very tiny letters:

But when you look at the COGAT reports, you see that there is more food coming in on commercial trucks than aid trucks:

The NGOs aren't directly lying, but they are quite deliberately withholding information that makes it little different from a lie. They know that the media doesn't know enough to note these distinctions.

But speaking of liars, last week EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell claimed:

I learned that the energy bars - which is the best way of feeding, the less weight and the less volume for the same amount of calories – have been rejected at the border, because they [Israel]consider that it is a luxury product. We will see the item that has been rejected and they are still being rejected.  

The COGAT site mentions specifically that "high energy biscuits" are part of the "other" category of food items entering Gaza:

Borrell may have been mislead by whoever he heard this from, but he should still tell the truth. 

The people making official statements to the media about Israel are knowingly deceptive. And no one calls them out on it.

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Arabic memes mocking Hezbollah after pager attack

Here are some of the memes I'm seeing in Arabic social media.

This is very important, since Arab culture is so frightened of shame, Hezbollah losing respect is a big deal. 

Text autotranslated.

An entire music video:

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Human Rights Watch again beclowns itself in its claim that Israel violated the prohibition of booby-traps

Here is Human Rights Watch's response to the incredible attack on Hezbollah's pagers:

Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use – precisely to avoid putting civilians at grave risk and produce the devastating scenes that continue to unfold across Lebanon today. The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military target and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction. A prompt and impartial investigation into the attacks should be urgently conducted.

HRW clearly employs teams of corrupt international law experts to twist the law in such a way.

Communications devices used by an armed group are valid military targets. 

This is not in dispute. This is international law. Israel accepts the definition of a military objective from Article 52(2) Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, "Insofar as objects are concerned, military objectives are limited to those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage."

Beyond the clear success of directly attacking the devices, Israel also accomplished the destruction of two entire military communications networks - the pager network and the "walkie talkie" network. Hezbollah is no longer using those networks. This is as clear a military target as one can imagine. 

HRW doesn't mention these facts because HRW is not interested in international law - it is only interested in twisting international law as a weapon to attack Israel.

What about their main point that booby traps are themselves prohibited?

HRW's own language proves how absurd their interpretation of the law is. In 2024 in Lebanon, pagers and bulky radio transceivers are not "associated with normal civilian daily use" - almost no civilians use them and none of those used by civilians were targeted. 

The actual Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices paragraph 7(2), when you squint a certain way, makes it appear that booby-trapping pagers is illegal: "It is prohibited to use booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material."

However, the AR-924 pager device was not specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material. It existed for years before this attack and was sold worldwide. Explosive materials were added to the device after its original design and manufacture, from all accounts so far. Hezbollah obviously chose to purchase them before anyone tampered with them. 

But beyond that, the previous paragraph 7(1) of the convention gives a clue as to what the authors intended with this rule. It lists civilian objects that must never be booby-trapped, like human bodies, animals, medical equipment and food. But this one entry in the list makes the intention of the law clear: "kitchen utensils or appliances except in military establishments, military locations or military supply depots."

Innocuous objects that are used for even indirect military purposes, like kitchen utensils, may be booby trapped under this convention.  

If that is true, then certainly pagers whose entire purpose is directly for military communications are allowed to be booby-trapped. The only people carrying the pagers are themselves part of Hezbollah.

What about the claim that Hezbollah has non-military members who would be considered civilians and exploding their pagers would be prohibited?

Hezbollah itself emphatically refuses to distinguish between its military and civilian functions. "We don't have a military wing and a political one; we don't have Hezbollah on one hand and the resistance party on the other...Every element of Hezbollah, from commanders to members as well as our various capabilities, are in the service of the resistance, and we have nothing but the resistance as a priority," its Hezbollah Deputy Secretary General Naim Qassem said. 

In Hezbollah's own self-definition, every member is considered support personnel for their "resistance," meaning that they are just as much targets as any support personnel for any army would be, such as cooks, drivers, maintenance workers, supply quartermasters and clerks.

Even though Israel haters are scrambling to find reasons to declare the attacks to be illegal, they do not have a leg to stand on. 

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The bombs in Lebanon were quite legal under IHL. @AOC is an ignoramus.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted this on Wednesday:

Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon detonated thousands of handheld devices across of a slew of public spaces, seriously injuring and killing innocent civilians.

This attack clearly and unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines US efforts to prevent a wider conflict.

Congress needs a full accounting of the attack, including an answer from the State Department as to whether any US assistance went into the development or deployment of this technology.

I had already anticipated that anti-Israel morons would take that avenue of attack on Tuesday, as I tweeted then. Here is a slight expansion of that  mini-essay.

Since there are already armchair "international law experts" pretending that the pager attack is a violation of international humanitarian law, it is perhaps the most legal large scale attack in history against people hiding amongst civilians.

The principle of distinction says that belligerents must distinguish between combatants and protected civilians. Only Hezbollah operatives would have the pagers, no one else. Having one proves you are a militant. They are the cyber equivalents of uniforms. 

The principle of proportionality says that any harm to civilians must be proportional to the military advantage gained from the attack. The explosives were tiny - the vast majority didn't kill even the people carrying them. 

From all appearances, the pagers themselves were purposefully chosen by Hezbollah to be battle ready. They were especially hardened (assuming they were the Apollo AR-924.)  Their entire purpose was military communication for a terror army. The pagers themselves were not civilian objects - they were military objectives on their own.

The question for the fake "experts" and "human rights professionals" like AOC is the same as always: what could Israel have done to achieve a valid, legal military objective better than it did? With fewer injuries to civilians? 

As always, they can never answer that question except for insisting that Israel should just surrender and let the terrorists have the right to murder Jews. 

Hezbollah has shot hundreds of rockets at Israel, killed many, and tens of thousands of Israelis had to evacuate their homes.  This is a war. Israel just managed to sideline hundreds of fighters in an instant with close to zero collateral damage. 

Nobody could adhere to the laws of armed conflict better than Israel (apparently) did this week. Saying it is a violation of IHL is the exact opposite of the truth - no one has ever mounted an attack that neutralized so many of the enemy in the middle of civilian areas, with almost no civilian casualties, in the history of warfare.

AOC is following the antisemitic playbook. Declare everything Israel does as illegal, and then make everyone think it must be true by calling for an investigation into the nonexistent crime. 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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09/18 Links Pt2: An Executive Order that Targets Jews; International donors are complicit in Hamas’ presence in Gaza – and key to its demise

From Ian:

An Executive Order that Targets Jews

The sanctions are being imposed on people who are neither settlers nor violent. The list of sanctioned entities includes Tsav 9, an organization that engages in nonviolent protest to prevent humanitarian aid from being captured by Hamas. You’d think that this administration, or any U.S. government, would have exactly the same goal: It can’t be a good idea to let Hamas capture humanitarian aid, because we know—as reported by Israeli TV again recently—that Hamas sells the aid, at exorbitant prices, to the Gazans to whom it’s directed, and then uses that money to fund Hamas terror operations.

The Israelis who are trying to right this obvious wrong are engaging in exactly the kind of protests we see all the time. When such tactics were used to protest judicial reforms, President Biden praised the riots as an “enduring protest movement that is demonstrating the vibrancy of Israel’s democracy.”

But the same tactics deployed by Israeli Jews against Hamas get a different response, and this administration is committed to stopping them even if they take place entirely in Israel, entirely among Israelis and are entirely nonviolent. What does this mean in practice? It means that the organization Tsav 9 and one of its organizers, a mother of eight living in a development town in Southern Israel, have been debanked.

As shocking as it is, this Executive Order didn’t come out of nowhere: Within weeks of President Obama’s first inauguration, IRS and State Department officials began considering whether they could deny or revoke tax-exempt status for organizations that provide material support to Jews living across the Green Line—the nonborder that delineates pre-1967 Israel from the territories Israel acquired in the Six-Day War. The theory was that a Jewish presence in those areas is inconsistent with U.S. policy. The IRS drew up lists of such organizations based on information from anti-Israel websites such as Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss. A case successfully challenged that policy, with a federal appellate court opinion holding that the IRS couldn’t discriminate on the basis of viewpoint when processing applications for charitable status.

One of the most troubling things about this Executive Order is how it’s targeting Jews. There are plenty of Islamist terrorists operating in Judea and Samaria, and in fact the Palestinian Authority itself officially pays monthly stipends to the families of terrorists who have been convicted of killing Jews. (Those payments are an explicit violation of the U.S. law known as the Taylor Force Act, but the Biden administration doesn’t care and allows such payments.) Not one Arab individual has been sanctioned under this Executive Order.

The only sanctions “imposed” on any non-Jewish person or entity was the Lion’s Den terrorist cell in Nablus. But the terrorist cell is just that—a cell. It has no bank accounts or credit cards in its own name, and nobody else was sanctioned along with it—no individual people or leaders, no banks that service those people. And aside from this “sanction,” the Biden administration has done nothing under this Executive Order to sanction any non-Jew for any action, including the actual or attempted murder of Jews, which you can read about every few days in the newspaper.

As a matter of Constitutional law, the president has the authority to treat allies and enemies largely as he wishes, and it’s not illegal for the President to discriminate among different groups of people when none of them is a U.S. citizen. But it’s disappointing that Israel, which for the Biden administration is formally categorized as an ally, has its citizens subject to financial sanction while the people who are trying to kill them not only get virtual immunity, but also get paid with money provided as U.S. aid.

Seth Mandel: Hamas’s Fitting Embrace of a Nazi Symbol

Ambiguity is in the eye of the beholder. That seems to be the lesson of the quadrennial fight over political symbols in U.S. presidential elections. Four years ago, an inverted red triangle in some of the Trump campaign’s Facebook ads caused a scandal, and the ads were eventually taken down and replaced with triangle-free versions.

The Nazis had used the inverted red triangle—and triangles of other colors—on prisoners’ uniforms to sort them into categories. Since the Trump ads took aim at the pretend anti-fascist rioters who called themselves Antifa, and the red triangle in German camps represented Communist political prisoners, we were told the symbol was proof of Trump’s Nazi role-playing games.

“If your reaction is, ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,’” wrote a contributor to Psychology Today, “consider also that the first sentence of the ads contained 14 words, and a total of 88 ads were purchased by the campaign to be run on Facebook.” Fourteen is the number of words in an alt-right slogan, she pointed out, and 88 is shorthand for “Heil Hitler,” since H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. (Remind me never to watch Sesame Street with this person.)

It was doubtful Trump or Facebook’s moderators understood the full implications of this—the campaign had seen the triangles in Antifa material and assumed the group had adopted it, which some actual anti-fascists did after World War II—but both were scolded for it and the ads were changed.

Contrast that with the chin-stroking over the inverted red triangle used by Hamas to indicate its battlefield targets.

Because its origins (in this context) lie in Hamas’s use of the triangle for one specific purpose, its meaning contains no ambiguity. But in the grand tradition of Western play-radicals who want to have their cake and eat it too, Hamas’s supporters have begun to reverse-engineer the symbol into vague respectability.

To understand the truly demented nature of this, you’d have to be in the unlucky position of having watched some of Hamas’s battlefield propaganda videos. At their tamest, they show the triangle hovering over an Israeli tank in the distance before the tank is shelled. Often these videos are a cross between a snuff video and a horror film, and glorify the execution of people.

The adoption of the red triangle by pro-Palestinian activists is a badge of derangement. This is not the watermelon, which is used as a stand-in for the Palestinian flag because of its similar color scheme. The triangle is a specific marker of vicarious violence.

Seth Frantzman: International donors are complicit in Hamas’ presence in Gaza – and key to its demise

It’s important to understand here how deeply Hamas has infiltrated all facets of life in Gaza. It infiltrates media and also healthcare workers. It exploits schools, universities, shelters and hospitals. For Hamas, all these NGOs and UN organisations are targets to be exploited, and each large civilian building is a potential hideout. Hamas conducts itself both as a terrorist group and a kind of mafia in this respect. The armed men that it sends to hijack aid convoys, for example, pretend to be there for “protection”. This is the kind of protection that the mafia also offers in other settings. It’s how cartels operate. Separating the civilians from the mafia-cartel aspect of Hamas is key to uprooting Hamas.

Gaza’s misfortune is to have an international community that has worked in Gaza for decades and been unwilling to confront Hamas. The NGOs and other groups that work there want to get their aid to local people. They see working with Hamas as a lesser evil than the aid not being delivered. They aren’t willing to condemn Hamas or monitor their aid convoys for the presence of gunmen, because it’s easier to look the other way and just let a system that is in place continue. As long as they can say aid came across the border, they can say it was delivered, even if it never reaches the people in Gaza and even if Hamas and armed gangs take the aid and sell it, fuelling the Hamas war machine. To separate Hamas from local people in Gaza, donor countries should mandate that any NGO or UN organisation working in Gaza must monitor and report on Hamas and other groups’ presence in institutions that receive funding. It’s not enough to call on “armed groups” not to enter schools. Monitoring Hamas, as the ruling power, is needed.

This can be done. Schools can set up CCTV cameras and they can provide transparent lists of who enters and exits the school. Convoys can track where aid goes and make sure it is not stolen. UN institutions are strong enough to have a special rapporteur tasked specifically with reporting on Hamas’s presence. Hospitals can monitor each floor and each room in their facility.

This can also be done by shifting the way organisations operate in Gaza. Rather than pretending Hamas doesn’t exist and calling it an “armed group” it should be named and monitored. NGOs and UN organisations know how to do this in other conflicts. They know how to keep armed men out of their facilities or report the presence of armed men in places such as eastern Congo. If the UN and NGOs can report armed men entering schools or hospitals or taking over aid in other places in the world, they can do it in Gaza.

Separating Hamas from civilians in Gaza and ending the exploitation and use of civilians as human shields is key to defeating Hamas. This starts at the level of donor countries who back the UN and NGO efforts in Gaza. They can mandate reporting on Hamas presence. After October 7 it is imperative that a paradigm shift takes place in how the international community relates to Gaza. The international community can also work toward a day without Hamas, and a day when Gazan children can attend school without Hamas men illegally occupying their classrooms.

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09/18 Links Pt1: The ‘Bionic Jew’ Theory of the Universe; Day 2: Hez-noballah Walkie Talkies Explode; UNGA res. calling for Jerusalem Old City to be Jew-free

From Ian:

Eli Lake: Hezbollah’s Exploding Pagers

All of these operations demonstrated an operational cunning and competence that are the stuff of spy novels. And yet Iran today is closer than ever to obtaining a nuclear weapon, according to the U.S. government’s own recent estimates.

“I think it’s fair to say the Israelis have tended to look at strategy as an accumulation of tactical victories,” Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA operations officer who is now a distinguished fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Free Press. “That obviously has been tested to the max with the Islamic Republic of Iran. I think the Israelis are aware it hasn’t worked.”

This failure of Israeli covert action to improve its strategic standing in the Middle East is perhaps best demonstrated by its recent killing of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh. At the end of July, Haniyeh lost his life in an explosion at the guest house where he was staying during the inauguration of Iran’s new president.

Not only did Israel’s agents reportedly manage to sneak a bomb inside a guest house in the capital city of their mortal enemy, but after Iran vowed revenge, to this day it has yet to follow through on its threat. That sounds like an unbelievable success. But there’s a catch. Because of Iran’s mere threat of retaliation, most commercial airlines have stopped their flights to Israel, further isolating a country maligned for fighting a war in Gaza started by Iran’s proxy, Hamas. Indeed, after the pager explosions, Air France and Lufthansa have canceled flights to Tel Aviv, fearing Hezbollah’s retaliation.

In this respect, the real story is not that covert action for Israel is worthless. Gerecht stressed that the tactical success of these operations have value. The prospect of every encrypted Hezbollah pager exploding at the same time may be a psychological deterrent for the organization’s middle managers and others.

But they will not deter Hezbollah from launching the missiles and rockets into Israel that make it impossible for 100,000 citizens to return home. As Gerecht said, “Israel’s tactical brilliance is no substitute for serious hard power and military interventions.”

Put another way, Israel cannot defeat its enemies by waging war only in the shadows.

Seth Mandel: The ‘Bionic Jew’ Theory of the Universe

There is another, less amusing thought process at work here, however. And that is that the morality of Israel’s operations is inversely correlated with their level of success.

Israel’s critics insist the Jewish state carry out individually targeted attacks. Blowing up a terrorist’s personal pager, maiming him and him alone, is obviously in compliance with this demand. But what if Israel does exactly that to thousands of individual terrorists simultaneously? That’s no good, for reasons that are difficult to explain but which feel obvious to the public intellectuals keeping score.

You can see how this approach has been applied to Gaza for the duration of the ongoing war. If Israeli soldiers encounter an empty house rigged with explosives but which has an entrance to a subterranean tunnel system used only by the terrorist army and the hostages the IDF is trying to rescue, what can it do? The obvious answer is: it can detonate the explosives from a safe distance and then enter the tunnels. After all, the war crime here is Hamas’s, and such an approach allows the IDF to neutralize the threat without harming civilians.

But what if Hamas illegally rigs a house again? And again? “An aerial photo recovered by the Israeli military from a Hamas commander’s post shows three dozen hidden tunnel entrances marked with color-coded dots and arrows in one crowded neighborhood,” reports the New York Times. The underlying facts haven’t changed: Hamas has committed the crime, Israel is pursuing the approach most closely aligned with humanitarian concerns. But because Hamas has replicated its crime many times over, Israel will knock down many houses. Suddenly, the public criticism is of Israel’s conduct, its supposed “domicide,” its appetite for destruction.

In this upside-down world, the more war crimes Hamas carries out, the less Israel is morally permitted to do in self-defense. Hence, the problem in Lebanon is not that there are thousands of Iranian terrorists there but that Israel wants to take out all of them.

What’s the upper limit here? How many terrorists can Israel target before it violates the international humanitarian law known as It’s Enough Already?

The pager operation reportedly required a year of planning and meticulous execution, because Israel is not in fact a nation of Bionic Jews. But in the minds of Israel’s critics, the more powerful the Jews become, the more evil they automatically become. Therefore you don’t actually have to make a case against what Israel does on the merits, you merely have to assert Israel’s power and success. Which hopefully will continue to outpace that of its enemies by leaps and bounds.

Brendan O'Neill: This wasn’t a war crime – it was an audacious assault on anti-Semites

Yet beneath the double standards, which are painfully predictable, there is something else, too. Something even worse. It’s the flagrantly bigoted belief that everything Israel does is a war crime. This nation can’t do right for doing wrong. If it fights its Islamist foe from the air, as it is doing in Gaza, it is committing a crime. Yet if it plants deadly weapons directly in the pockets of the Islamists who want to destroy it, that is also a crime. If it bombs neighbourhoods in Gaza where Hamas lurks, that is ‘indiscriminate slaughter’. Yet if it behaves in a highly discriminating fashion and puts mini-bombs in the trousers of terrorists, that is ‘barbarism’.

The list of things that become ‘crimes’ when Israel does them grows longer every day. Following the butchery of 7 October, when Hamas’s pogromists raped, kidnapped and murdered Jews in southern Israel, Western leftists described Israel’s bombing of Hamas positions in Gaza as criminal. Yet when Israel went to extraordinary lengths to warn Gazans to leave the places it planned to bomb, dropping tens of thousands of Arabic-language leaflets from the sky, that was called criminal, too – it was the crime of ‘forced displacement’, apparently. Kill Palestinian civilians and you’re a criminal; try not to kill Palestinian civilians and you’re a criminal. Likewise, when Israel bombed Aleppo in Syria earlier this year to take out the Hezbollah militants based there, it was noisily damned as the vilest of military aggressors. Yet now its meticulous planting of mini-bombs in Hezbollah pagers is branded wicked aggression, too.

That many in the West view Israel’s every action as criminal is depressing, but not surprising. Fundamentally, they think it is a crime for Israel to defend itself. They think it is a crime for Israel to take any action that might limit the threat posed by the apocalyptic anti-Semitism of Hezbollah and Hamas. And they think this because they think Israel’s very existence is a crime. They view the Jewish State as a criminal enterprise, a vile, law-defying blot not only on the Middle East but also on the reputation of humankind itself. When you harbour such intense, irrational hatred for one nation, it is a short step to telling that nation to down its weapons, lower its defences and let itself be attacked.

Make no mistake, this is what the radical accusers of Israel are saying when they tell it to stop bombing Hamas, stop attacking Hezbollah militants, stop arming itself, stop everything. They are saying leave your enemy be, and let your people be murdered. They can call this ‘anti-Zionism’ as much as they like, but to many of us their bizarre and cruel singling out of the world’s only Jewish nation as the only nation that is forbidden from fighting its enemies smacks of anti-Semitism. If you are stony-faced when Jews are murdered, but furious when their murderers have 20 grams of explosives put in the batteries of their pagers, then please remove the word ‘anti-fascist’ from your social-media bio, please refrain from calling yourself ‘anti-racist’, and please cease all future use of the word ‘progressive’.

Through those weaponised pagers, Israel sent an important message not only to Hezbollah but also to the world. It let the world know that you cannot kill Jews with impunity anymore. Those days are gone. Kill Jews now – as Hamas and Hezbollah have both done, as part of their fascistic war on the Jewish State – and there will be consequences. You might lose a bollock, you might lose your life. That the racist militants of Iranian-sponsored Islamism are peeved that Jew-killing is no longer acceptable makes sense. That so many ‘progressives’ in the West also seem put out by the fact that killing Jews is a riskier business today than it was in earlier centuries is more disturbing. Paging the Western left: racist terrorism must always be resisted.

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Miriam Kresh: Israeli food writer and online cooking coach (Judean Rose)

Miriam Kresh was 17 when she learned to make rice by her mother’s side, in the style of Latin America. Producing the perfect bowl of rice, each grain separate and with the right amount of bite, was for Miriam a revelatory process. The cook needs only to follow the age-old steps, step by step, for flawless results. Miriam did just that, following the steps as she stood alongside her mother, cooking rice. It was in those moments that Venezuelan-born Miriam Kresh, a food writer, cook, and cooking teacher, first encountered kitchen magic.

In the years following that first pot of rice, Miriam, now 70, moved from place to place, living in the United States, Venezuela, and Brazil before making Aliyah in 1976. Today, Miriam Kresh makes her home in Petach Tikvah, Israel. The food she cooks, the recipes she develops and teaches, all reflect her journey, and all of it is delicious.

You don’t have to imagine it—tucked into the following Q&A is a mouthwatering recipe from Miriam’s Kitchen. Miriam Kresh is gracious like that.

Varda Epstein: What can you tell us about your background? You come from an intriguing mix of cultures. 

I was born in Venezuela, of an American dad and Nicaraguan mom. I lived in the States for ten formative years, during which English became my most important language. My parents were cultured, cosmopolitan people who enjoyed cooking and eating foods from many different cuisines. Mom had a fine palate and a fine hand in the kitchen. While cholent and chicken soup were Shabbat standards, she would occasionally produce a sumptuous dish like duck a l’orange. She set a high standard in home cooking, and I’ve done my best to keep it.

Varda Epstein: Who taught you how to cook? How do those early cooking adventures impact on your cuisine and your methods, today? I remember you once telling me that you always have to have a tomato in there, somewhere!

Miriam Kresh: Yes, I love a juicy tomato, but I was probably talking about garlic. I love garlic, to the point where my family and friends make fun of it.

My mother taught me the first dish I ever cooked, when I was age 17. It was rice, Latin American style. Mom taught me to first toast the rinsed, drained rice in a little oil, then add salt and crushed garlic. Next, to stir in boiling water, and cover the pot tightly. Cook at very low heat for 20 minutes until all the water has been absorbed and each grain is separate and tender. Rice made this way goes through frying, seasoning, and steaming. This taught me multiple lessons, not only about flavor, texture, and timing, but also about focus. The essential lesson was to pay attention. Cooking has taught me a lot about mindfulness.

Once I understood that cooking involves a flow of successive stages, learning other dishes was natural. As I became more confident and discovered a certain culinary talent, I made a point of learning from other cooks whose food I admired. Having kept kosher now for 50 years, I’ve learned to adapt certain well-loved dishes from treif to kosher. One example is Brazilian feijoada, a stew of beans and about four kinds of pork. I found substitutes and developed a kosher feijoada that’s pretty darn good, if I say so myself. The recipe was published on the Forward and picked up by the NY Times, who linked to it.

I’ll talk to anyone about food and cooking, and shamelessly solicit recipes. As a food writer and reporter, I’ve had great opportunities to learn from professional chefs. 

Eggplant Stuffed with Bulgur and Herbs (photo: Miriam Kresh)

Varda Epstein: I remember you won the contest for the cooking column at “Green Prophet.” Do you still write there? Where else have your cooking columns appeared? 

Miriam Kresh: I still write for Green Prophet. At the moment, I’m working on a review of The Eucalyptus Cookbook, by Moshe Basson, chef of the famous Jerusalem restaurant bearing that name. The review should appear in Green Prophet by the end of this month (September 2024). My first food writing was self-published: a blog I used to run named Israeli Kitchen. An online magazine called “From The Grapevine” bought the blog – domain, content, and all. I was ready to move on anyway and welcomed the opportunity to sell it. Subsequently, they sold their content to a different online magazine, Jewish Unpacked. My recipes are still online there, and I still get fan mail
from there. I understand that some individual now runs a blog under the name Israeli Kitchen; they never asked permission to use the name.

I’ve had recipes and articles published across the English-language Jewish spectrum, from left-leaning the Forward to the Haredi HaModia. I wrote a chef interview column at the Jerusalem Post for several years, besides features on non-cooking-related issues. Many of my freelance articles appear across the Net. Sometimes I Google my own name and am surprised to find my work copied onto sites I had no idea existed. That’s the way it is.

Roasted Butternut Squash with Shallots and Parmesan (photo and recipe: Miriam Kresh)

 

RECIPE: Roasted Butternut Squash with Shallots and Parmesan

You can easily make this recipe vegan by omitting the cheese and adding 1 tablespoon Balsamic vinegar to the olive oil indicated in the recipe.

Some prefer to eat butternut squash with the peel on. It’s perfectly edible, with a crisp/tender texture.

Serves 4-6

Ingredients:

·        4 cups butternut squash, peeled and chopped into 1″ cubes

·        3 medium shallots or 1 large red onion, peeled and cut into medium-sized chunks

·        3/4 cup white flour

·        1/2 teaspoon baking powder

·        1 teaspoon finely chopped dried rosemary, or dried thyme, or za'atar

·        1/2 teaspoon salt

·        1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

·        1/3 cup grated Parmesan, Kashkeval or other aged cheese

·        2 large garlic cloves

·        1/3 cup olive oil

Directions:

1.      Preheat oven to 400° F (200° C).

2.      Put the flour and dry seasonings, except the cheese, in a large bowl.

3.      Dredge the vegetables in the flour/seasoning mixture. Place the pieces on a parchment- lined baking sheet, leaving a little space in between the pieces.

4.      Sprinkle the cheese over the vegetables.

5.      Crush the garlic. Scrape it into a bowl with the oil (and the Balsamic vinegar, if doing this vegan). Drizzle the garlicky oil over the vegetables.

6.      Bake for 30-40 minutes. The butternut squash should be soft and caramelizing slightly.

Varda Epstein: You’re also a dab hand at descriptive writing, with an ongoing series on Substack. Tell us about that, if you would.

Miriam Kresh: I write fantasy fiction, something I’ve always wanted to do, and now have time for. The stack is named Fantastical Fiction. I do my conscientious best to write quirky stories about strange people and strange events…but can’t seem to keep food out of them. Recently I published a short story where a woman goes out to buy butter and meets the Mad Hatter from "Alice in Wonderland."

Varda Epstein: Why did you make Aliyah? What is your general philosophy about Aliyah? Is it something you feel every Jew should do?

Miriam Kresh: My family are Zionists from way back. My Dad, as a youth, did fundraising among American Jewry to buy weapons for the Hagana. My family weren’t 100% religiously observant, but there was always Shabbat, chagim, Hebrew lessons, shul: we were part of the Jewish milieu, wherever we lived.

I made Aliyah from the conviction that Israel is the place where a Jew should live. I was living in Caracas, Venezuela again, in my early twenties. It was a peaceful and prosperous country then. No noticeable antisemitism. The Jewish school had functioned for decades and was still going. Chabad had established a kindergarten and a Kollel. One building in a middle class part of Caracas housed the various youth groups, the Jewish Agency and the Israel National Fund. There was a Jewish social center, a handsome building in a good part of town. A Jewish bookstore, two kosher butchers, at least three shuls that I can remember.

All that’s gone now, under a communist dictatorship. But I couldn’t know that would happen. Nobody could.

What I did know was that I was out of place. The Jewish kids my age were away at university, often abroad, or were getting married. I was a footloose single, feeling empty. I became religiously observant in a search for meaning; became close to other religious families. But I wasn’t fitting in, either too old to be with the cool kids or too young to be comfortable among the marrieds. The more I looked around, the clearer it became that I needed to live not just with Jews, but in Jewish society. To prepare for Aliyah, I read up on Jewish and Israeli history and closely followed current events in Eretz Israel.

Then Entebbe happened. I made a bargain with God: get those Jews home safe, and I’ll make Aliyah. As we know, Yonatan Netanyahu tragically lost his life in that rescue mission; somehow it hardened my determination to get to where being Jewish matters most.

So here I am, all those years later. Now, should every Jew make Aliyah? Historically, Diaspora Jewry has supported Jews in Israel since ancient times and until today. We still need that support. What I say is, yes, send us all kinds of support, we need it – and send your children.

I hope the time comes when every Jew will live here. But doubt it’ll happen in my lifetime. On the third hand - who knows? 

Swiss Chard Stuffed with Potatoes (photo: Miriam Kresh)

 

Varda Epstein: What made you choose Petach Tikvah as your home? What do you like about this city?

Miriam Kresh: I lived for years in Jerusalem, then in Safed. I moved to Petach Tikvah with my late husband and youngest daughter because my aging parents lived here and needed me. My tsadik late husband promised we’d move to be near them when the time came, and it came. Now my folks are gone, and I comfort myself knowing that we were there for them till the end.

Petach Tikvah is a butt for jokes around the country, regarded as an industrial town with no night life, sort of a drab suburb of Tel Aviv. But there are important schools and hospitals here, and between my parents’, my husband’s, and my children’s needs, not to mention my own, I’ve been well served here.

There’s city development with a new eco-consciousness going on all the time. There’s a big movement of hi-tech businesses to Petach Tikvah. The shuk (open-air market) is open every day. The mayor, Rami Greenberg, is accessible and menschlicht. And transportation is good. Don’t mean to sound like a promotional brochure, here… But Petach Tikvah has been good to me. 

Varda Epstein: Aside from writing about food and cooking, you’ve also taught classes. I remember you teaching virtual cooking classes during the pandemic. It was so chill and pleasant. A really lovely break from the fear and isolation. Can you describe how that worked for our readers? What are some of the menus you cooked in tandem with your students?

Miriam Kresh: I began the Israel Cookalong with a clutch of international participants - friends, and friends of theirs. We were all so lonely and bored, being stuck at home. We cooked together in real time, via Zoom, every Sunday. It was safe and fun, like having a party in the kitchen every week. And each had a delicious fresh dish by the end of the session. That version of the Cookalong had a good run of three years. Some people came and went, but a core group formed. We’re all still good friends and stay in touch.

My focus is on Israeli/Mediterranean/North African dishes like humus and majadra (spiced lentils and rice), expanding to fancier foods like artichoke bottoms stuffed with meat and pine nuts, and baklava. I teach a lot about Israeli foodways. My students enjoyed learning about typical culinary herbs and spices - like za’atar, the fresh herb, and za’atar the spice blend, which is based on it.

There was one month when I taught classic Ashkenazi cooking. Blintzes, knishes, kugel, cholent. The week we cooked cholent, my Japanese-American student in Ohio served it to guests. She said they loved it! You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy cholent.

I’m proud of having taught the group a different world of food. But I’m happiest that one nervous participant who thought she’d never master cooking gained the confidence to cook, and cook well. I love knowing that she gained an important life skill through the Cookalong. 

 

Varda Epstein: Tell us about your latest foray into the world of cooking and sharing about food. What are you cooking these days, and with whom?

Miriam Kresh: My new project is a Cookalong for English-speakers in Israel. It’ll be via Zoom, twice a month, on Thursdays. The sessions will be one hour long, sometimes an hour and a half if we’re cooking more than one recipe, or if the recipe is more elaborate than usual.

By popular request, this Israeli Cookalong will be vegetarian, at least in the beginning. That might change, according to the wishes of the group.

The sessions are for pay, but you don’t subscribe to X number of sessions. You just choose which Thursday’s menu appeals to you, and register ahead of time. I send out the monthly menus the first week of the month, and email the recipes by Sunday to give participants time to shop.

I also give private cooking classes, via Zoom. These one-on-one sessions are great, because you get 100% of my attention, and cook the recipes in your own kitchen with me coaching. 

Tajine of Sweet Potatoes and Prunes (photo: Miriam Kresh)

Varda Epstein: What’s your favorite food/dish? 

Miriam Kresh: Now that is a question. There are foods I’ll gladly eat every day, like black beans and rice as my Mom used to cook them. Then I have a weakness for lamb. I’d say my favorite is a festive tajine of lamb cooked in the Moroccan way, with dried fruit, and funky spices like saffron and cumin. But I couldn’t eat it every day! Or even every month. That’s a dish for birthdays and holidays. 

Miriam Kresh

Varda Epstein: What’s next for Miriam Kresh?

Miriam Kresh: The new Israeli Cookalong! Can’t wait to begin. Spoiler alert: the first class of the year will be salmon baked in coconut sauce. While the fish is in the oven, we’ll cook turmeric rice.

I also teach a floating class where participants make homemade condiments, relishes, dips and spreads. That’s available on demand either privately or as an extra session for a group.

Betayavon (bon appetit)! 

 Contact Miriam Kresh at miriamkresh1@gmail.com for full details about the Israeli Cookalong, or to book a private class. Or WhatsApp Miriam at 050-786-7211. Outside of Israel, it’s +972 507-867-211.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

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