Tuesday, May 06, 2014
With songs and pageantry, nation transitions from mourning to celebration
Israel crossed over from mourning to celebration on Monday night, as Memorial Day came to a close at sundown and Israel’s 66th Independence Day began.Google Doodle (h/t Yenta Press)
Mourning and somber speeches gave way to fireworks, concerts and parties across the country as the nation transitioned to Independence Day, with flags raising from half-mast back to full.
The juxtaposition of the two days is a key part of Israelis’ experience of national mourning, ensuring that no commemoration completely excludes the achievement wrought by the sacrifice, and no that the elation of independence is never far removed from an awareness of its cost.
PM Netanyahu's Greeting for Independence Day 2014
IDF Blog: Happy Birthday Israel!
Israel’s Declaration of Independence printed in US papers
A full-page advertisement reproducing Israel’s Declaration of Independence appeared in The New York Times and USA Today.Jewish nationalism is a lot older than the Zionist movement
The Helmsley Charitable Trust funded the ads in Monday’s editions on the eve of Israel’s Independence Day.
“By publishing Israel’s founding document in two of the most widely read newspapers across the country, we will reach many Americans who often don’t have the chance to learn about the deep similarities between our countries due to media coverage that focuses primarily on conflict,” Helmsley trustee Sandor Frankel said in a statement. “The promise of Israel’s founders to uphold, in a Jewish state, social and political equality of all citizens without distinction of race, creed or sex; to guarantee the full freedom of conscience, worship, education, and culture; to safeguard the sanctity of holy places of all religions; and the call for peace with all neighboring states, resonates with America’s own deepest values.”
As Israel enters its 67th year of existence as a modern state, Jews throughout the world will join together in celebration of Jewish freedom and nationhood.What is the Status of the Israeli Flag?
Although many erroneously link Jewish nationalism with Theodor Herzl, and consider Israel to be the end result of western guilt for the Holocaust, few are actually aware of the uninterrupted presence of Jewish life in Israel after Rome's decimation of Judea in the years 132 to 136.
Throughout the ages, pilgrims, Crusaders and travellers attested to this in numerous accounts of their voyages.
In fact, even accounts of Saladin's life recount his having permitted Jews banned by the Crusaders to resettle in Jerusalem.
From generation to generation, Jews have always maintained a spiritual link with Israel, a land that gave birth to our prophets and the liturgical Hebrew language that still unites us in faith.
The Israeli flag has become a national symbol for the Jewish people, an emblem of Zionism and hope.66 things I love about Israel
One new book probes deeper into the flag's significance - including its historical roots and a wealth of rabbinic opinions on its status.
Rabbi Ari Shvat's upcoming book, To Raise the Flag, will reveal several little-known facts about the ultimate symbol of Israeli pride. The Rabbi, a professor at Orot Israel College, gave Arutz Sheva a preview in a special interview Monday night.
It’s that time of year again, when comedian Benji Lovitt lists things he loves about Israel, and this year’s list (all new, every year) is 66 things long in honor of Israel’s 66th birthday. Enjoy, share the love, and Happy Independence Day from The Times of Israel!Israel by the Numbers
Celebrate Israel’s birthday with this comprehensive infographic.Caroline Glick: Rand Paul’s support for Israel
The hard truth is that while American isolationism is bad for the US, it isn’t necessarily bad for Israel. To date, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, there has been a direct correlation between the level of US involvement in Israel’s affairs and US hostility towards Israel.Hey John Kerry, What Would A Palestinian State Look Like?
Paul’s pro-Israel detractors note that he also supports cutting off US military aid to Israel. But that doesn’t necessarily make him anti-Israel.
Despite the protestations of AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups, it is far from clear that Israel would be worse off if it stopped receiving US aid. Indeed, it is likely that Israel’s economy and military strength would both be enhanced by the strategic independence that an aid cut-off would bring about.
Yes, Paul is a complicated character. But that doesn’t make him Israel’s enemy. His bill was an act of friendship. And Israel can use more friends in Washington who actually do things that help it rather than suffice with declaring their support for Israel while standing by as its reputation is trashed.
Perhaps an independent Palestine would be different than every other Arab country that exists. But there is really no good reason to believe so. The West Bank’s semi-autonomous government is hardly a model of freedom. Gaza is even worse. Not too long after Israel left Gaza in 2005, the terrorist group Hamas established a religious despotism there. If any Jews actually lived in Gaza, you can bet they would be second-class citizens, if they weren’t murdered outright. Apartheid would probably be something to long for if you were a Jew living in Gaza.US denies report that peace team has been dismantled
While Kerry is fretting over the imaginary threat of an “apartheid” Israel, the Jewish state continues to be the only country in the region where Arabs have the type of rights we in the West take for granted. Israel is the only country in the Middle East and North Africa region to get Freedom House’s top rating of “free.” That doesn’t mean Israel is perfect. But Israeli Arabs serve in Israel’s parliament, sit on Israel’s Supreme Court, have served in Israel’s cabinet and have succeeded in the media and private sector. Just last week, Samer Shalabi, an Israeli Arab, was elected chair of Israel’s Foreign Policy Association.
Deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf also dismissed reports that US Secretary of State John Kerry had decided to dismantle the team of American negotiators who have been based on the ground in Jerusalem for months trying to push forward the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.The Big Lie: Prelude to Murdering Jews
Special envoy Martin Indyk, a former US ambassador to Israel, had returned to Washington for consultations, Harf confirmed, after last week’s April 29 deadline for a deal passed in a stalemate.
“We’re going to see where this goes from here and, you know, figure out what makes sense in terms of staffing,” she told reporters, saying “we have some senior officials that will be going soon” to the region, without going into specifics.
The idea that Israel is violating Article 49 makes no sense. The Geneva Convention applies only to territories belonging to a sovereign power, yet Judea/Samaria are unallocated territory under international law. There has been no determination of their status by any internationally binding agreement. Nor are Palestinians being deported from Judea/Samaria to another territory. Further, Jews choose to live in Judea/Samaria — Israel is not deporting them to Judea/Samaria.Turkish Finance Minister Questions Israel’s Rights as Jewish State Over Twitter
The premise of Israeli “occupation,” based on which Jewish settlement has been falsely deemed illegal or illegitimate, has been debunked by many legal scholars, including a recent legal commission headed by former Israeli Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy. If anything, Israel has the superior title to the land. As stated by Stephen Schwebel, formerly President of the International Court of Justice, a country acting in self-defense lawfully conquers territory when that territory has been used to attack it.
Yet, despite the groundlessness of the claim of illegal settlement, the Big Lie serves as the pretext for anti-Israel voting and campaigning, including the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to stifle Israel economically and turn Israel and Jews who support her into pariahs.
On Sunday, Simsek replied via Twitter to an article in the Israel Hayom daily about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement that Israel would seek to add the notion of the Jewish state to its founding documents.Rabbi at Shelly Dadon Funeral: ‘Her Only Sin Was Being Jewish’ (VIDEO)
The Israel Hayom headline on Twitter was: “PM: #Israel is the nation state of the #Jewish people only.”
Simsek replied to that: “Apartheid – Isn’t it an int’l crime?”
While many responded to his tweet in Turkish, one English speaker wrote on Monday: “#Turkish Finance Min is giving democracy lesson to #Israel the only democratic country in #MiddleEast”
A thousand people attended the Saturday night funeral of 20-year-old Shelly Dadon, found murdered outside the northern Israeli town of Migdal Haemek last Thursday in an abandoned parking lot, according to Israel National News on Monday.Ultra-Orthodox quietly joining Israeli military
Rabbi Yitzhak David Grossman, the rabbi of Migdal Haemek who spoke at the funeral, said, “Her only sin was being Jewish,” in reference to suspicions that the crime was committed by an Arab to show his distaste for the Israeli nation, as reports said there was no sign of robbery or sexual assault.
“We are here in pain, sorrow and astonishment,” Rabbi Grossman said. “This tragedy, this brutal murder happened in our town.”
Moshe Prigan starts his day off just like many other men in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak with his morning prayer. It's only later that the routine takes an unexpected twist, when he puts on his air force uniform and heads to the Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv.Close Up: Paramedic on the Syrian Border
The 30-year-old captain doesn't just serve in the military. He also recruits other ultra-Orthodox Jewish men to enlist, something the cloistered community traditionally has avoided doing. (h/t Bob Knot)
5-May-14: The making of a martyr: it takes more than a village
"The funeral of the remains of the martyr who gave his soul for the struggle of a nation that strives for freedom" (that's a direct quote) received significant coverage on the government-controlled official Palestinian Authority news outlet, PA Television, this past Wednesday, April 30, 2014.US aid indirectly helps Hamas, under deal with Palestinian Authority
The televised [see brief YouTube extracts here and here] and widely photographed (see below) event was made possible, first, by Israel's incomprehensible handing over last week of the decomposed remains of Izz Al-Din Al-Masri. He was the human bomb whose explosion caused a massacre in the center of Jerusalem on August 9, 2001.
The savagery celebrated by the Palestinian Arab crowd cost 15 human lives, 8 of them children, all of them Jews. One was our daughter Malki, 15.
The woman who set up the massacre and selected the site - the Sbarro pizza store at the corner of Jaffa Road and King George Avenue in the commercial heart of Jerusalem - has gone on record proudly asserting that she sought a target where she and the human bomb could murder a large number of (a) religious Jews and (b) religious Jewish children. (A sixteenth victim, a young mother, has been left in a comatose state for more than a dozen years.)
The Palestinian Authority's announcement that it will send 3,000 police officers to Gaza as part of a unity agreement with Hamas could mean U.S. taxpayers are now at least indirectly helping an officially designated terror organization maintain law and order -- and its grip on power.Hamas Activity in West Bank Fuels Fear Unity Deal Becoming a Lifeline to Terror
The police deployment came as part of a deal between the mainly secular government of the West Bank and the radical Islamist regime of Hamas that rules in Gaza. That agreement effectively ended hopes for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process championed by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, but it also raises questions about U.S. foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority going forward. Since the U.S. subsidizes the PA budget to the tune of approximately $400 million per year, any effort to help Hamas indirectly spends U.S. dollars, say observers in Israel. That could be prohibited by U.S. policy, if it is read as part of a power-sharing agreement.
Hamas’s command and control infrastructure, as well as huge swaths of its advanced arsenal, had been severely degraded during an eight-day Israeli air campaign in November 2012 that came in response to a sharp escalation in the amount and sophistication of projectiles that the group was using to target Israeli civilians and soldiers.Hamas Releases Fatah Prisoners from Gaza Prisons
Less than a year later, in the aftermath of the ouster of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-linked then-president Mohammed Morsi, the Egyptian army undertook a systematic campaign to destroy the smuggling tunnels that linked the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip to the Sinai Peninsula and which served as Hamas’s economic channel to the outside world.
By October of last year, Hamas officials were publicly bemoaning that they had been “sentenced to death,” and by February 2014 analysts were predicting that Hamas was facing “a very bad year.” Subsequent months seemed in line with those assessments, with Hamas diplomatically isolated and seemingly caught in a downward economic spiral.
The Hamas-run Gaza government released six prisoners affiliated with the Fatah movement on Monday, an official said, according to the Ma’an news agency.Obama’s Swelled Head Hinders Hiding It In Sand On Iran, Hamas (satire)
Iyad al-Bazim, spokesman for the Gaza Interior Ministry, told Ma'an that the prisoners had received a pardon from Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh as part of the April 23 PLO-Hamas unity deal.
The six were convicted of various felonies, al-Bazim said, without elaborating.
With the help of Secretary of State John Kerry and several advisers, Obama has studiously tried to ignore Iran’s manipulation of Western powers and the UN’s nuclear watchdog agency, dismissing as exaggerated the Israeli protestations that the Islamic Republic is on track to threaten global interests within months. However, the ongoing crisis in Ukraine elicited several grand pronouncements from Obama that proved useless in keeping Russia out of the Crimea and exposing him to questions about his will and ability to defend other allies living in the shadow of a nuclear-armed Iran.Daily Beast: Analysts Believe Assad Has Secret Unconventional Program
The administration’s swelled head also encumbered efforts to minimize the importance of the Fatah-Hamas unity deal, as earlier proud, unequivocal statements by the president and his spokespeople, to the effect that Hamas participation in Palestinian Authority governance would be a deal-breaker in American-mediated negotiations, were referred to, at the same time that Hamas – and even some Fatah officials, contradicting Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas – loudly insisted that Hamas would neither disarm nor recognize Israel.
The Daily Beast on Thursday cited a range of Western intelligence analysts converging on the assessment that Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime not only has a secret cache of undeclared chemical weapons – which the outlet said included “crude chlorine-filled bombs, secret stockpiles of sophisticated nerve gasses or their components” – but also the stored institutional knowledge to “rebuild a larger-scale, higher-grade chemical weapons effort” once the international community has turned its attention away from Syria.Lebanese leader urges Syrian rebels to shun Israeli aid
The outlet noted that widely broadcast reports regarding the eradication of Assad’s chemical arsenal only take into account “the chemical arsenal Assad admitted he had” as part of a deal under which Damascus agreed to turn over its chemical weapons in exchange for the West suspending what appeared to be imminent airstrikes.
The Monday statement by Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) head Walid Jumblatt came a week after a senior Syrian opposition figure told The Times of Israel rebels were looking for help from Jerusalem.Iran foreign minister: I won’t allow official Holocaust denial
“We refuse and condemn any resorting to Israelis, as some leaked information [suggested] a security and intelligence cooperation between some rebel parties [and Israel],” Jumblatt said in a column published by the Al-Anbaa news site, according to Lebanese media reports.
Mohammad Javad Zarif was summoned to parliament and questioned in a session that was broadcast live on state radio on Tuesday.Misplaced Optimism Over Iran
Comprised of religious figures, former lawmakers and officials as well as some current MPs, the critics were unhappy about Zarif’s more moderate foreign policy, including what they call his “reactionary stance towards the bastard (Israeli) Zionist regime and the Holocaust.”
Zarif said that, as long as he is foreign minister, he will not allow Iran’s reputation to be damaged with statements about “Holocaust denial.”
Zarif fought back against the increasingly scathing criticism from the hardliners, saying his pragmatic approach to diplomacy had stolen Israel’s thunder.
After years of bellicose rhetoric from ex-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the foreign minister added that the new government had managed to put an end to Israel’s portrayal of Iran as “a danger” over its nuclear ambitions.
Finally, the regime is undergoing yet another crisis of legitimacy in the eyes of its own people. Visitors to Tehran report seeing large numbers of young people with their heads shaved in a gesture of solidarity with political dissidents incarcerated in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, many of whom were viciously beaten by members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps at the beginning of April. At the same time, the economy is suffering: the price of gas has increased by a colossal 75 percent, while the value of Iran’s currency, the rial, has dropped 9 percent against the U.S. dollar.
When you recall that 25 percent of Iran’s workforce is unemployed, the prospect of social unrest—culminating in a typically brutal response on the part of the authorities—cannot be discounted.
Critically, we are no closer to answering the questions that have hovered over the nuclear crisis from the beginning: Can Iran’s leaders deliver a political solution that satisfies all parties? Are they willing to submit to an inspection regime that will prevent them weaponizing? On both counts, the answer remains negative, which is why all that optimism is better understood as wishful thinking.
