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Wednesday, May 03, 2023

05/03 Links Pt2: Enemies wage an ‘unconventional’ legal war against Israel; How anti-Semitic tropes crept back into the mainstream; New Ireland Boycott Bill

From Ian:

Enemies wage an ‘unconventional’ legal war against Israel
Having reluctantly realized that traditional wars—with tanks, bullets and fighter planes—have failed against Israel’s military prowess, enemies of the Jewish state have turned to unconventional tactics in an effort to defeat it. That includes “weaponizing” international law to delegitimize Israel, according to Michal Cotler-Wunsh, a former member of Knesset who is now a senior policy adviser and research fellow.

During a speaking tour from April 17-21, which took her to the campuses of the law schools at Columbia, Yale and New York universities, as well as to the City University of New York (CUNY) and Rutgers University, Cotler-Wunsh spent an hour on the phone with JNS describing the main thesis of her lectures.

An attorney by training, Cotler-Wunsh knows that legalese can confuse people and seem removed from everyday life. So she turns to an example that non-lawyers will understand demonstrates that selective application of rules and principles undermines the entire system.

“When I say to a 3-year-old that we’re going to play a game, and you’re going to play according to the rules but I’m not, that 3-year-old will turn around and say to me, ‘I don’t want to play with you. You’re cheating,’ ” Cotler-Wunsh told JNS. “The game is finished. There’s no game.”

As preschooler games go, so goes international law. “The rules-based order has to be applied equally and consistently,” she said. Instead, many seek to apply rules selectively to the detriment of the lone Jewish democracy in the world.

Attacks on Israel are often couched in what some would call “progressive” or “woke” liberal values, but Cotler-Wunsh doesn’t think they are progressive at all. “I think in many ways, they cause regress,” she said.
Polish Responsibility for the Holocaust Was Not Minor
There are two central questions of the Holocaust: why it happened and how. A recent book, Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland, edited by the historian Jan Grabowski and by Barbara Engelking, the director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, is a significant addition to our understanding about how the Germans pursued the so-called Final Solution in Eastern Europe—namely, with the help of local non-Jewish populations.

The German effort to find and murder every Jew was a vast undertaking encompassing three continents. The Germans and their collaborators persecuted Jews from North Africa to Norway. They deported Jews to their deaths from the Channel Islands in the West and hunted Jews in the Caucasus in the East. The Germans killed Jews throughout the war, shooting Jews and their Christian companions barely 300 yards from the U.S. Army in Pisa in August 1944. Even within a global conflict that mobilized over 100 million men, the so-called Final Solution required considerable manpower and effort. Night Without End, a 546-page edited and abridged English version of a 1,700-page, two-volume Polish study, is part of a wave of recent historiography demonstrating how much of that effort came from the Jews’ neighbors.

Poland was the center of the slaughter. Of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, some 3 million were Polish Jews. There were 108,149 Jews in the eight Polish counties under examination before the mass killings of “Aktion Reinhardt” during 1941-43. Night Without End examines the fate of the 9,543 who survived this mass slaughter. By the end of the war, only 2,387 were still alive. The Germans called this final stage of the Holocaust—the elimination of the survivors of the initial waves of mass killings—the Judenjagd (hunt for Jews). It was a shared enterprise, involving Germans, the Polish authorities, and Poles who lived near the Jews.

The eight essays in the book use a microhistory approach, patiently sifting through inconsistent and difficult sources to describe the fates of individual Jews. One microhistory technique is to note evidentiary gaps, forcing readers to confront the absence of testimony and records resulting from murder and impunity. We learn, for example, that Władysław Węgrzyn, a member of the Home Army (Poland’s main resistance), agreed to hide Sabina Blaufeder and Genia Raber, prewar acquaintances. Węgrzyn later betrayed the women. We do not know why.

The Germans organized a system of control that spread terror throughout the Polish countryside, a system based on what Engelking and Grabowski term “German law and lawlessness.” The village security apparatus also targeted escaped Soviet POWs and peasants, weaving a web of fear and death. German terror unleashed dark forces in Polish and Ukrainian societies. While the Germans destroyed the Polish nation, many Poles exploited the assault on the Jews to settle scores, enrich themselves, promote nationalist and antisemitic politics, or to survive at the expense of Jewish friends and neighbors.

Microhistory, as the name suggests, is particularly effective at reconstructing specific episodes in great detail. For instance, Grabowski details hour by hour the murder of Jews in the Węgrów ghetto on Sept. 21, 1942—Yom Kippur—the same day as the final mass deportation from the Warsaw ghetto. During the killings, the 16-year-old son of Müller, the head of the German Schutzpolizei, donned his Hitlerjugend uniform and participated.

Similarly, Tomasz Frydel analyzes the social dynamic in the Polish countryside set in motion by the German occupation. Germans brutally retaliated against some Poles who helped Jews, thereby exploiting Polish fear. The Germans and Polish police sometimes killed Poles who hid Jews, which in turn led other Poles to preemptively murder Jews they were concealing—either with their own hands or by surrendering them. Dagmara Swałtek-Niewińska provides the example of Wojciech Gicala, who asked his village leader what to do with the 18-month-old Jewish infant from the Pinkes family he was sheltering. A Polish policeman shot Gicala and the child.

The book provides a vital service by dispelling the connected Polish myths of Jews as passive victims and of Poles as rescuers. The tale that the Jews went to slaughter silently absolves Poles morally of their failure to become involved. As elsewhere in Europe, local non-Jews invented tales to remove themselves from history. Many later claimed not to know what the Germans were inflicting upon the Jews. Or they claimed that the Germans always killed those who aided Jews, thereby excusing their lack of assistance.
Jonathan Tobin: Jews don’t need a heritage month, and neither does anyone else
For some community members, it’s exactly what Jews have always wanted and needed. In 2006, following up on a resolution passed by Congress, President George W. Bush was the first to declare May to be Jewish American Heritage Month. His successors have happily done the same.

President Joe Biden’s proclamation is full of the same fulsome praise for the role that Jews have played in the history of this republic, similar to Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and, like theirs, is peppered with self-referential language seeking to position himself as a true friend of the community. As has become the custom and much like the way other declarations of other months, weeks or days dedicated to various ethnic, racial and religious groups, as well as a never-ending list of philanthropic causes and efforts to combat various diseases and maladies, the states have also chimed in with their own proclamations about the commemoration of American Jewish heritage.

The fuss made over Jewish American Heritage Month may not equal that accorded celebrations such as those for Black History (February), Hispanic Heritage (September), Women’s History (March) or LGBTQ+ Pride (June), and it does have to share May with Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage. But it is gaining a lot more attention with each passing year. And a lot of serious people, including those who are advocates in the battle against antisemitism like former U.S. State Department envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism Elan Carr, think it ought to be made an even bigger deal than it is now.

This pleases a lot of people in the Jewish community who have long thought that Jewish history deserved to be singled out in the way that all those other heritages have been. To an older generation of Jews that remember a time when Jewish participation in mainstream culture was noteworthy and a source of great pride to a community largely made up of immigrants struggling for acceptance, any amount of hoopla made over Jewish Heritage Month is especially satisfying.

But there’s more to this than a group ego trip. Many in the community believe that promoting interest in Jewish life and history among the general population can also play a role in combating antisemitism.


How anti-Semitic tropes crept back into the mainstream
We live in a time when even the slightest hint of racism can lead to uproar from the media. Yet the dehumanisation of Jewish people is treated as simply ‘controversial’. The condemnation of these kinds of cartoons, if it comes at all, tends to be relatively tame and muted.

Partly, this is because, as far as the media are concerned, anti-Semitism is a problem confined to men in brown shirts sporting swastikas. The liberal-left media, in particular, find it difficult to spot anti-Semitic tropes, especially when they emanate from within their own ranks.

Then there is the fact that these sections of the media are implacably hostile to Israel. They are so eager to condemn Israel for all the evils of the world that they tend not to notice when they cross a line from criticising Zionism to racism against Jewish people.

The response to anti-Semitic tropes is often so casual because the people who now peddle them see themselves as the good guys. Good guys who just make honest mistakes from time to time. It never seems to occur to anyone on the liberal-left that there is a serious blind spot when it comes to Jews and anti-Semitism.

Modern anti-Semitism may manifest itself very differently to old-school Jew hate, but that is no excuse for this level of indifference.
Rabbi Whose Family Was Murdered in West Bank Terror Attack Urges Further Action Over ‘Antisemitic’ Guardian Cartoon
The British rabbi whose wife and daughters were murdered in an April 7 attack by Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank has issued a statement calling on The Guardian newspaper to fire the cartoonist responsible for an antisemitic caricature of the outgoing chairman of the BBC.

The offending image of Richard Sharp — showing him with a hooked nose and a sinister grin while holding a box labeled with the name of the Goldman Sachs investment bank, where he previously worked — was published last week and later withdrawn following a generalized outcry. In an apology, The Guardian noted that the “cartoon does not meet our editorial standards, and we have decided to remove it from our website. The Guardian apologizes to Mr Sharp, to the Jewish community and to anyone offended.” Separately, the cartoonist, Martin Rowson, described his creation as “a failure…on many levels: I offended the wrong people.” He said that “what I’m feeling now is enormous regret, idiocy and deep shame,” admitting that he was aware that Sharp was Jewish but that this “fact never crossed my mind as I drew him.”

In a statement emailed to journalists on Wednesday, Rabbi Leo Dee — whose wife, Lucy, and teenage daughters Rina and Maia were shot dead on April 7 as they traveled to their home in the West Bank settlement of Efrat — dismissed Rowson’s apology and urged The Guardian to fire him.

“Two and a half weeks ago I lost my beloved wife and two of our daughters to the vile evil of antisemitic, Palestinian Arab terror funded by the terror state of Iran,” Dee wrote.

He added that “today’s terror is rooted in such gratuitous antisemitic tropes as yesterday’s hateful media characterization & cartoons of Jewish people of which [pro-Nazi publicist Julius] Streicher and the Nazis would be proud.”
Does anime have a Nazi problem? Some Jewish fans think so.
Oskow says recent portrayals of Nazis and fascism in anime and manga lack the depth necessary to confront an issue like the Holocaust, but that some subtext in shows like “Attack on Titan” is likely missed by Western viewers since it is created for a Japanese audience.

Still, he says, as a Jew, there is a discomfort with these depictions, and the problems with simplifying themes like fascism and genocide should not be ignored just because the product came from Japan — particularly as stereotypes about Jews as having outsize influence remain common. In Japan, as in other East Asian nations such as South Korea, China and Taiwan, books and classes on how to become as smart and wealthy as Jews — believed to be among the most powerful people in media and finance — are not uncommon.

“In my years of discussing Jews with Japanese people…they really think of Jews as an ancient historical people or the people who were killed in the Holocaust unless they have some sort of conspiratorial idea. But most people have no conception of Jewish people,” Oskow said. “So when they’re portraying Jews in manga or anime or any sort of media, and when readers or viewers are engaging with that media, I just don’t think there’s this thought of how a Jewish person would perceive how they’re being portrayed.”

Jessica, a 29-year-old Jewish and Chinese anime fan from Vancouver who also requested her last name be left out of this article, said she deliberately chooses not to watch shows such as “Attack on Titan” and “Hetalia” because she finds the discussions about them among fans to be unproductive and frustrating. Desiree echoed Jessica’s experience of being ignored when raising the topic of antisemitism within the medium or within the fan community on platforms such as Reddit.

“I saw the reactions of other Jewish fans and, more importantly, saw the reaction of the goyish fans — the way ‘Hetalia’ fans did the sieg heil in front of a Holocaust memorial, the way that [‘Attack on Titan’] fans would swarm concerned Jewish fans in droves to tell them that they should perish in an oven, and I decided I didn’t want anything to do with anime that attracted that sort of fanbase,” Desiree said.

“Attack on Titan” returned to streaming services on March 4 with the first part of its final season. In the first episode, the protagonist Eren, whom audiences have followed for a decade, begins carrying out a global genocide known as “the rumbling” with the end goal of destroying all Titans for good and bringing peace. The end result is a wipeout of 80% of humanity, an act that Eren believes was the only path to freedom. He thinks humans must all suffer as a consequence of being born into the world — a nihilistic philosophy that can be found among the manifestos of school shooters and incels.

In the original manga series, Eren’s supporters on the island militarize in order to defend Eren’s violent act, chanting a slogan: “If you can fight you win, if you cannot fight you lose! Fight, fight!” The ending was seen as morally ambiguous and was not popular with fans, who mostly refuted it due to poor writing. Many hope that the anime series will go a different route in its final episodes, which have not yet been released or given future release dates.
The Caroline Glick Show: Dave Rubin: Israel can Help US through its Identity Crisis
Caroline’s guest in this week’s Caroline Glick Show was superstar podcast host David Rubin of the Rubin Report. Rubin is visiting Israel this week with his team, preparing a documentary about Israel, its balance between modernity, tradition and its ancient history.

In this far-reaching interview, Glick and Rubin discuss
- What America can learn from Israel in its particular identity crisis between progressive and conservative ideals
- What role Judaism and Israel have played in his life
- Why anti-Semitism is rising in the US
- Trump vs. DeSantis
- Dave's journey from progressive left to conservative


NGO Monitor: New Ireland Boycott Bill
Five years after failing to enact anti-Israel BDS into law, the Irish Parliament is again considering enacting BDS legislation.

Reflecting years of NGO lobbying, on March 8, 2023, Sinn Féin spokesperson for Foreign Affairs and Defence TD John Brady introduced the “Illegal Israeli Settlements Divestment Bill 2023” in the Irish Parliament.

The bill proposes amending regulations of the National Treasury Management Agency to prohibit government agencies from investing in companies listed on the discriminatory UN Human Rights Council “blacklist” of Israeli and international firms operating in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. If enacted, it would compel the Irish Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF) – Ireland’s sovereign wealth fund – to divest holdings in companies on the UN Blacklist.

The UN’s BDS blacklist operates under the false premise that international law prohibits business activity in occupied territory. In reality, such behavior is common, and occurs in conflict zones around the world.

The new bill is supported by a prominent Irish NGO, Trócaire, a leader in BDS advocacy.

Trócaire’s funders include: Ireland (€24 million from Irish Aid in 2022), the EU (€5.6million), the UN (€3.4 million), Sweden (Sida; €1 million), and church-based Caritas agencies (over €4.6million). In 2021-2022, Trócaire spent €1.2 million on the “Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
When ‘Fact-Finders’ Don’t Care About Facts: A Case Study on Amnesty International
Last week saw the leak of an internal report that was sharply critical of Amnesty International’s conduct and conclusions related to an August 2022 press release, which claimed that Ukrainian forces were illegally endangering civilians.

For those who follow Amnesty’s work on other conflicts, the report’s conclusions are unsurprising. The review panel found that the organization used insufficiently substantiated evidence and “ambiguous, imprecise, and in some respects legally questionable” language to categorically accuse Ukrainian forces of violating the laws of armed conflict.

The identified substantive and professional shortcomings have only been compounded by the news that Amnesty worked to “soften” the criticism, and keep it from the public eye. Rather than taking its role seriously as “human rights” organization, by employing rigorous and reliable fact-finding procedures and employing careful and credible legal analyses, Amnesty is once again showing a preference for politics and public relations over factual accuracy and human rights.

Lest one think that the Ukraine press release debacle was an exceptional case, consider my efforts to get Amnesty to correct a particularly egregious, and demonstrably false, claim.

The specific claim is just one of many factual errors and omissions in Amnesty’s 2022 report that accused Israel of “apartheid.” But it’s a particularly noteworthy error for a few reasons. For one, it’s directly contradicted by the very source Amnesty cited. Two, the error is such that it implies either the authors deliberately misrepresented casualty figures or they do not understand the very laws they accuse Israel of violating. But most importantly, it’s noteworthy because at least two Amnesty officials have been directly confronted with the incontrovertible evidence of the error, and yet no correction has been issued.
MEMRI: Berlin Becomes A Scene Of Protests Led By PFLP-Affiliated Samidoun Group, Calling For Extermination Of Israel; Hundreds Of People March In Solidarity With Palestinian Arabs
Amidst the renewed violent clashes between the Israeli security forces and Palestinians on Temple Mount in Jerusalem during the coinciding Ramadan and Passover holidays, the German capital once again became a scene of public calls for the extermination of the Jewish state. On April 8, approximately 500 pro-Palestinian protesters marched through the street of the Berlin districts of Neukölln and Kreuzberg, both with large Arab and Turkish populations, chanting antisemitic and anti-Israel slogans and calling for the destruction of Jews and Israel. Some of the chants heard were: "Death to the Jews! Death to Israel!", "I generate the bloody body!", as well as "Tel Aviv, the answer will come!" Protesters openly glorified terrorist violence and praised the military arm of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades that is responsible for numerous suicide attacks against civilians, rocket attacks, and hostage taking. The protest was organized by the German branch of the "Samidoun – Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network," a direct affiliate of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which simultaneously mobilized a protest gathering in Cologne.

On April 6, Samidoun posted on its Telegram channel an event flyer announcing the protest march held under the slogan of "Solidarity With the Steadfast Defenders of the Al-Aqsa Mosque." The protest started in the center of Neukölln district and ended at Kottbusser Tor station in the neighboring Kreuzberg district. An additional gathering was to take place in the center of Cologne at the Heumarkt square.[1]

Although Samidoun is banned in Israel as a terrorist organization, given its extensive overlap with the PFLP and its involvement in planning and networking, the organization is still free to operate in Europe. Despite PFLP being listed as a terrorist organization in Israel, the U.S., the E.U., and elsewhere, Samidoun is not subjected to a ban in Germany where operates freely. Regardless of the evidently illegal slogans at the Samidoun-organized protest, the police forces present at the scene and provided with official Arabic interpreters, remained idle and refrained from intervening and dispersing the demonstration.

Images from the protest in Berlin and Cologne have circulated on various social media platforms including Telegram, Facebook, as well as TikTok, shared by individual attendees as well as by the Samidoun Network itself.

On its Telegram channel, the Samidoun Network posted on April 9 images and video footage of the protest.
‘A Farce’: Joseph Borgen, Victim of Antisemitic Attack, Lukewarm on Assailant’s Punishment
Joseph Borgen, a Jewish Long Island resident whom five men assaulted and pepper-sprayed in a May 2021 antisemitic attack that shocked the New York Jewish community, voiced mixed feelings about the legal punishment for one of his attackers, Waseem Awawdeh, who pled guilty late last month to attempted assault as a hate crime and now faces up to 18 months in jail.

Borgen was wearing a kippah while walking in Manhattan during protests and counter-protests by supporters of Israelis and Palestinians when Awawdeh along with four other men ambushed him without being provoked, prosecutors said. Awawdeh continuously struck Borgen with a crutch while allegedly joining the others in shouting antisemitic epithets at him. He will, per a plea bargain negotiated with Manhattan assistant district attorney Jonathon Junig, serve 18 months at Rikers Island, a spokesperson from the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a statement shared with The Algemeiner.

“It’s great that he’s is going to jail for a year, at the same time, two weeks ago, he was taunting me in court,” Borgen told The Algemeiner during an interview on Tuesday. “His apology, his remorse, everything…it’s all kind of a farce. The last court day before he accepted the deal, on the way out [of the courtroom], he made sure to stare me down and smirk at me.”

Another of Borgen’s assailants, Faisal Elezzi also pled guilty to attempted assault as a hate crime and will be sentenced to 3 years of probation. In accordance with their plea agreements, Awawdeh and Elezzi apologized for their actions in court. Three other men involved in the attack — Mohammed Othman, Mohammed Said Othman, and Mahmoud Musa — will appear in court on May 11.
Soccer and politics mix at Chilean club that plays in Palestinian colors
At the beginning of the 20th century, Christian Arabs from the towns of Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Beit Sahur arrived in distant Chile and founded a South American community that today numbers around half a million people — the largest outside the Arab world.

They became successful textile merchants, and their descendants entered the political sphere: 35 have been ministers or congressmen.

Three decades after it was formed in 1920, the club made its professional debut.

“Palestino is Palestine and Palestine is Palestino. We are always very concerned with the cause,” said Roberto Bishara, a former club player.

The team has won two national titles (1955 and 1978) and made it to a semifinal in the Copa Libertadores in 1979.

In 2014, the team changed the number 1 on the back of their jersey to the elongated shape of the Palestinian territory before 1948, but was fined and banned from wearing it by the Chilean soccer association after a complaint.

Once, the players also caused controversy when they wore the keffiyeh, a traditional headdress worn by Middle Eastern men, onto the pitch.

In 2019, the club arranged giant screens for the fans in Ramallah to follow an international duel against Argentina’s River Plate.

Today the squad no longer has players of Palestinian origin. The last was Nicolas Zedan, who left the club in 2021.

But the team continues to represent “all those Palestinians who are there having a hard time. Each Palestino triumph… is a small joy among the suffering they have every day,” Miguel Cordero, a 49-year-old lawyer of Palestinian origins, told AFP.


PreOccupiedTerritory: Demonizing ‘Zionists’ Allows Me To Engage In Classic Religious Behavior While Pretending Atheism by Alex Dewitt, BDS Activist (satire)
Religion is such a primitive phenomenon. As a society we have, or at least should have, grown past it. This is what I assert to myself and my colleagues when relevant, which is whenever I have the sobering realization that my treatment of Israel, and of Jews in general, bears eerie similarity to the way my Christian upbringing treated the Devil, the personification of evil. As the veteran nun said to the novice in the convent laundry room, old habits die hard.

I’m not religious – I’d swear it on a sacred text if I could, but obviously I can’t. Please do not be misled by the teleological, theological, and classically eschatological sensibilities animating my political rhetoric. It’s just a coincidence that I assign what can only be described as supernatural powers to the Jewish nation-state. I’m not a believer.

I just *sound* religious. For example, I need you to accept that there’s objectively something morally outrageous about Zionism and the people who produced and pursue it – my politics depends on that. To do so, I must use language that perforce carries with it objective right and wrong – which could only come from an objective creator, since otherwise morality is arbitrary and undefined. And *my* definition of what’s moral, not to mention what’s factual, represents the higher truth. You can’t have higher truth in a godless universe, at least not in any inherently meaningful sense. I feel the justice of my cause, and I act upon it. But I’m not religious.
Economist promotes 'eloquent critic' of Israel's existence
An Economist article (“Why Israel is becoming a partisan cause in the United States”, April 27), in attempting to contextualise American progressives’ putatively increasing “unease” with Israel, includes the following:
The American left’s objections go beyond Israel’s policies to the very nature of the state. As living memory of the Holocaust fades, many progressives, including Jews, see a contradiction between struggling for a multiracial democracy at home and supporting a Jewish state in the Middle East. “Many younger progressive Jews see white Christian nationalism as a form of ethnocracy that parallels Zionism,” says Peter Beinart, an eloquent critic of Israel whose intellectual evolution over the past 15 years has tracked, and advanced, the shift on the left.

First, Peter Beinart isn’t merely a “critic” of Israel. Though he once fancied himself a “liberal Zionist”, he announced his conversion two years ago to the anti-Zionist movement. So, he opposes Israel’s continued existence, within any borders, as a Jewish state – a view the overwhelming majority of U.S. Jews not only reject, but view as antisemitic.

He’s also become an apologist for some anti-Semites, claims that the US Jewish establishment’s fight against antisemitism is a threat to human rights, charges that antisemitism is cynically used to silence Israel’s critics, defends those using Israel-Nazis analogies, and suggested that Zionism is a form of Jewish supremacy.

In other words, Peter Beinart’s rhetoric has become indistinguishable from many of the Corbyn-supporting anti-Semites who were subsequently expelled from the Labour Party.

As Shany Mor wrote, Beinart demands that “American Jews must choose between their liberalism and their Zionism, between membership in good standing in the community of the good or, sounding almost like someone who tags a synagogue with graffiti, ‘our community’s complicity in the oppression of Palestinians‘”.

Regarding Beinart’s claim, uncritically quoted by the Economist, that “Many younger progressive Jews see white Christian nationalism as a form of ethnocracy that parallels Zionism,” it’s unclear what “many” means, as he doesn’t cite polls on how many Jews hold this view. But, more importantly, it’s an intellectually unserious analogy.
Dissecting the ‘Medical Apartheid’ Myth
In “Medical apartheid in Palestine,” Barhoush and Amon claim to have identified three alleged Israeli practices that they argue amount to “medical apartheid” (a term that, crucially, has no formal definition in international human rights law). These purported policies include “systematic[ally]” depriving the Palestinian health system of funding, “frequent attacks” on healthcare infrastructure, as well as requiring Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to obtain permits to seek treatment in Israel or abroad.

Firstly, the claim that Israel deprives Palestinian health facilities of funding is highly misleading, to say the least. As pointed out by Dr. David Stone, Israel between 1967 and 1994 invested in an “outstanding” child immunization program, developed hospitals, and provided physicians and nurses with “high quality” training. Then, on August 29, 1994, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Agreement on Preparatory Transfer of Powers and Responsibilities, officially transferring responsibility in the health sphere to the newly created Palestinian Authority. Hence, the PA has been in charge for 29 years, whereas Israel’s military government only managed the health system for 27 years (1967-1994).

According to research by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), however, Ramallah has since prioritized “pay-for-slay” payments to terrorists and their families over improving Palestinian health services. Last year, PMW revealed that the PA spends 33.34 times more per capita paying terror rewards than it spends on health services for the civilian population. As a matter of fact: some terrorists in Israeli jail “earn” more than doctors, and even amid a global pandemic, the PA refused to reallocate terror funds so it could buy coronavirus tests and ventilators.

Notably, the Palestinians did acquire millions of COVID-19 vaccines — some of them supplied by Israel — and became among the first in the region to start administering booster shots in August 2021. Yet, in their apparent quest to promote a “blame Israel first” narrative, Barhoush and Amon nevertheless accuse the Jewish state of “vaccine apartheid,” despite there being no clear legal obligation for Jerusalem to inoculate Palestinians who are subjects of the Palestinian Authority government.


District Judge Rejects Pittsburgh Synagogue Gunman’s Appeal to be Spared Death Penalty as Trial Looms
The neo-Nazi gunman who murdered 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in Oct. 2018 could still face execution after the judge in his forthcoming trial ruled that the defense had failed to make a case to remove the death penalty as a punishment.

US District Judge Robert Colville said on Tuesday that the legal team representing the accused killer, Robert Bowers, “fails entirely to establish a basis upon which the court could conclude that the government has arbitrarily sought the death penalty in this case.”

Pittsburgh resident Bowers has been charged with 63 criminal counts in the massacre he carried out during shabbat services at the synagogue, which housed three congregations. The charges include 11 counts of obstruction of free exercise of religion resulting in death and 11 counts of hate crimes resulting in death.

Attorneys for Bowers, a 50-year-old trucker, had already offered a guilty plea in return for a life sentence without parole, but prosecutors refused and are seeking the death penalty, a move most of the victims’ families support, the AP news agency reported.

In a legal filing last month, Bowers’ lawyers argued the Justice Department lacked “a discernible, principled basis” for seeking the death penalty against Bowers but not for defendants in comparable cases. The defense also objected to the procedure by which the government considered Bowers’ request to reconsider its pursuit of capital punishment.

Colville agreed with the Justice Department’s argument that Bowers failed to account for the differences between his case and the other cases for which the government did not seek the death penalty.
Study: Holocaust Education Reduces Hate Crimes Against Minority Communities
Mandated Holocaust education in US schools reduces hate crimes both against Jews, as well as across a wide swath of minority communities, according to data from RealityCheck Research, a new nonprofit based in New York, Tel Aviv and London.

Hate crimes against black communities went down more than 55% in states with Holocaust-education laws, while antisemitic crimes dropped 54.8%.

Those states also saw drops in hate crimes against Muslims (24%), LGBTQ people (43%), Latinos (34%) and Asian Americans (13%), as well as disabled Americans (48%), according to RealityCheck data.

The nonprofit used FBI hate crime and US Census data to calculate the per capita rate of hate crimes against each group, and it compared states with and without Holocaust education laws.

“For people who understand Holocaust education, this isn’t surprising. We know the fundamental principle that when you see antisemitism, that’s not just hatred against Jews. That’s a breakdown in the fundamental systems that protect us all,” Daniel Pomerantz, CEO of RealityCheck, told JNS.

“But communities outside of Jewish communities don’t necessarily know this,” he added.

When RealityCheck shares its results with non-Jewish communities, the latter “discover that supporting our work benefits their own self-interest as well. This is fundamentally true, but for the first time, we actually have data to prove it,” said Pomerantz.
Christie's to sell off $150M worth of jewelry belonging to the widow of a Nazi Party member who made his fortune buying out Jewish businesses
Famed auction house Christie's is planning to sell off 700 jewels worth an estimated $150million that all belonged to the widow of a Nazi Party member who made his fortune buying out Jewish businesses.

Anthea Peers, the president of Christie's Europe, Middle East and Africa touted Heidi Horten's collection as 'one of the most beautifully curated' to 'ever come up in the jewelry world.' It includes a sapphire and diamond necklace worth $1.5million and a jadeite and diamond necklace valued at $16.5million.

But all of the jewelry was purchased using money her husband Helmut made off the backs of Jews in the Holocaust, when they were forced to sell their businesses — often at greatly reduced rates.

Helmut, who was once a member of the Nazi Party, used those businesses to build his eponymously named department store franchise.

By the time he died in 1987, Helmut left Heidi with nearly a $1billion inheritance.

According to David De Jong, author of 'Nazi Billionaires: The Dark Side of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties,' Horten made his first business acquisition — a modest department store purchased from his Jewish employer in 1933.

The owner felt pressured to flee Germany as the Nazis came to power and sold his business at a fair price.

But from then on, journalist Stephanie Stephan said, 'Horten developed a routine for seizing Jewish businesses' in a process called Aryanization in which Jews were forced to sell their businesses to Aryans at reduced rates.


‘The Six-Day War changed my life,’ says Alan Meltzer, whose name adorns American University’s Israel studies center
American University’s Center for Israel Studies is now the Meltzer Schwartzberg Center for Israel Studies, recognizing an April 16 joint “multimillion-dollar commitment” from Alan—a trustee at the private university in Washington, D.C.—and Amy Meltzer, and Jaime and Andrew Schwartzberg.

The donation came as the center—which then-former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who would later become president, inaugurated in 1998—celebrates its 25th year, and Israel celebrates its 75th.

In addition to being a university trustee, Meltzer completed a bachelor’s degree at American in 2021. He told JNS that he attended American in 1969 on a wrestling scholarship but dropped out some five classes before graduating to run a bar that he purchased full-time.

“In all honesty, if I didn’t have a scholarship, I wasn’t intellectually thinking about going to college to become real smart, to become a doctor,” he said. “I went there because the alternative was the Vietnam War or to go to college and wrestle, which I loved.”

When Meltzer was growing up in Needham, Mass., his family had no money, and he always worked. In college, he worked at a bar, saving up enough money to buy it. The business proved successful, and so he bought another bar and then another, he told JNS.

For five years, he dated the woman who would become his wife, and the two agreed that his running the three bars would not be conducive to the kind of marriage and family life they wanted. So he sold the bars and went into the insurance business.
Alibaba founder Jack Ma to become visiting professor at Tel Aviv University
Chinese billionaire and Alibaba founder Jack Ma will come to Tel Aviv University (TAU) as a visiting professor.

He will focus on the school’s research efforts in sustainable agriculture and food, the university said in a statement.

“We are honored and delighted to welcome Mr. Jack Ma to Tel Aviv University,” said TAU President Ariel Porat. “His appointment is a testament to the importance of collaboration between academia and industry, and we look forward to learning from his insights and experience.”

Ma received an honorary doctorate at Tel Aviv University in 2018.

“We considered Israel among three countries in which to establish offices. We invested in five different companies here, and I am being accompanied by 40 senior managers. I believe we will continue to invest here,” said Ma when accepting his honorary doctorate.

“Arriving here was nothing like I expected,” said Ma at the time. “I was told it wasn’t safe here, that there were bombs and guns everywhere. But when I arrived I saw this place was so peaceful, and the economy is booming. I think you shouldn’t read about Israel, you should come here, feel Israel, touch Israel.”


From pre-state to present, political cartoons paint picture of a dynamic Israel
The famous American editorial cartoonist Herblock once wrote, “If the prime role of a free press is to serve as critic of government, cartooning is often the cutting edge of that criticism.”

This certainly applies to Israeli political cartoons, as is shown in a new book by British historian Colin Shindler titled, “Israel: A History in 100 Cartoons.” Published earlier this year, it is timely reading as the Jewish State marks 75 years of independence at a point when two-thirds of Israelis oppose the current government’s plans for judicial overhaul, with hundreds of thousands protesting weekly against a threat to the country’s democracy.

The book includes editorial cartoons by Israeli artists spanning from a few years before the establishment of the state in 1948 through 2020. They are a stark reminder that visual satire has always been a way for Israelis to lampoon their leadership and cope with ongoing adversity from within and without.

“A cartoon can tell you so much in an instant,” author Shindler said in a recent interview from his home in London.

Shindler, 76, is an emeritus professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He became the first professor of Israel Studies in the UK in 2008 and was the founding chairman of the European Association of Israeli Studies (EAIS) in 2009. He is the author of 12 books, many of them on Zionism and Israeli history and politics.

Inspired by a trip nearly a decade ago to the Israeli Cartoon Museum in Holon, Shindler decided to take a deep dive into the subject. The project picked up steam during the COVID pandemic lockdowns when he spent hours searching through the National Library of Israel’s digitized newspaper collection of the Yishuv (pre-state Jewish community) and the State of Israel. He was also in touch with other cultural and historical institutions, as well as Israeli cartoon artists and their families.
The killing of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics by members of Black September reflected badly on both the Olympics Committee and the city’s police force. (Mike, Yediot Aharanot, September 1972/ Courtesy of Colin Shindler)




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