Sunday, May 21, 2023

05/21 Links: The ‘Nakba’ narrative is nonsense; Netanyahu calls out Abbas lies about Jewish history in Jerusalem; The whitewashing of Mahmoud Abbas

From Ian:

The ‘Nakba’ narrative is nonsense
In the years since Israel’s rebirth in 1948 a narrative has taken root, a story of well-armed and financed Jewish immigrants overrunning peaceful Palestinian villages, brutally expelling Palestinians from home and country. This narrative is summed up in the Arabic word “nakba,” or catastrophe.

In contrast, Israelis view their War of Independence as a battle of the few against the many, a battle forced on a beleaguered Jewish community by Palestinian militias and five invading Arab armies.

If, as is believed almost uniformly throughout the Arab world, Israel was born in original sin, if the Jews really did ransack placid Palestinian villages, murdering children in front of parents and parents in front of children and expelling whoever was left, then Palestinian hatred for Israel and Jews would be understandable, as would their fundamental refusal to really make peace with Israel.

Though this Palestinian narrative is credulously accepted by many Europeans and an increasing number of “progressive” Americans, it is nonetheless false, and contradicts basic historical facts. Israel was not born in sin—with a few justified exceptions there were no expulsions (for one of the justified expulsions, Lydda and Ramle, see here), nor was there any policy of harming innocents. On the contrary.

Thus, even as early as 1937, Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in a letter to his son Amos: “We do not wish and do not need to expel Arabs and take their places. All our aspiration is built on the assumption—proven throughout all our activity … that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs.”

Ten years later, despite much violence and conflict, Ben-Gurion’s core beliefs about living in peace with the Arabs had not wavered. In a speech on Dec. 13, 1947, he said: “In our state there will be non-Jews as well—and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in everything without exception … The attitude of the Jewish state to its Arab citizens will be an important factor—though not the only one—in building good neighborly relations with the Arab states.”

Despite the Jewish community’s attempts to live peacefully with their neighbors, the primary leader of the Palestinians, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, chose to make common cause with the Nazis, declaring through his spokesman that the Arabs’ goal was “the elimination of the Jewish state.”
Netanyahu calls out Abbas lies about Jewish history in Jerusalem
The Jewish people have been in Jerusalem for thousands of years and will remain for thousands more, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday, responding to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s recent claim that Israel is lying about its historic ties to the city.

“Abbas said days ago at the UN that the Jewish people has no connection to the Temple Mount and that east Jerusalem is part of the Palestinian Authority,” Netanyahu said. “Well, it should be brought to his attention that we are holding a special cabinet meeting in honor of Jerusalem at the foot of the Temple Mount that on which King Solomon built the First Temple of the Jewish people, and again, it should be brought to Abbas’s attention, the heart of the historic State of Israel, the City of David, was here 3,000 years ago.”

Netanyahu made the remarks in a cabinet meeting at the Western Wall Tunnels, honoring Jerusalem Day, celebrated last Thursday to mark Israel’s reunification of the city and liberation of the Old City in 1967. The cabinet approved a NIS 60 million budget increase for the Western Wall over the next five years, to upgrade infrastructure and encourage visits to the holy site, as well as archaeology and educational activities.

Abbas claimed at the UN event in honor of “Nakba Day,” marking the “catastrophe” of Israel’s establishment, that Israel “dug under al-Aqsa… they dug everywhere, and they could not find anything.”

“The ownership of al-Buraq Wall [the Western Wall] and al-Haram al-Sharif [Temple Mount] belongs exclusively and only to the Islamic Wakf alone,” he added.

The Temple Mount, is the holiest site in Judaism and the third-holiest to Muslims. Al-Aksa is the mosque on the Mount. The Western Wall is a retaining wall of the Mount, dating to the Second Temple.
The whitewashing of Mahmoud Abbas
Abbas isn’t just corrupt and a dictator, he is also an antisemite. His hatred of Jews stretches back at least to the late 1970s, when he studied for a doctorate at Moscow’s Institute of Oriental Studies. Abbas titled his doctoral thesis “The Connections Between Zionism and Nazism Between the Years 1933–1945.”

The doctorate claimed that Nazism and Zionism had much in common and that Nazis and Zionists collaborated. At the U.N. commemoration of the Nakba, Abbas stated that Jews lie just like Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. It would have been more accurate for him to say this about himself.

World leaders hoped Abbas was a moderate who would sign a deal with Israel and end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Unfortunately, Abbas has done anything but. Even when he met with Israeli prime ministers, he was not serious about negotiating, and he has spent the last decade refusing to meet Israeli prime ministers at all.

Instead of putting down Hamas, Abbas has signed multiple deals with the terrorist organization. Most damning, Abbas has continued the P.A.’s “pay-to-slay” program that funds Palestinian terrorists and their families on a sliding scale based on the heinousness of their attacks.

Most surprisingly, instead of being shunned by the world—as a corrupt, antisemitic and terror-supporting dictator should be—Abbas has been embraced by world leaders. American presidents Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden have all met with and honored Abbas. Abbas is regularly given the podium of the U.N. Incredibly, he still receives billions of dollars in foreign aid for him to steal.

“Whitewashing” is a term used to describe glossing over crimes and immoral behavior by focusing on other aspects of the criminal. Ironically, many of Israel’s best policies, including providing medical treatment to people from around the world, sending help to natural disaster zones and providing equal rights to Israel’s most downtrodden citizens, are often besmirched as whitewashing.

This is ironic, because if there is whitewashing going on between the “river and the sea” it isn’t on Israel’s part. It’s the international community granting legitimacy to a corrupt Abbas and his Palestinian Authority when they are nothing but a crime syndicate.

Israel and Zionism stand for justice, pluralism and peace. From its inception, Zionism sought peaceful coexistence with its neighbors and Arabs living in the Jewish people’s homeland. Mahmoud Abbas embodies the exact opposite of every Zionist value.
Abbas’s war of instruction at the UN - opinion
Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was quoted as saying: “During a war, news should be given out for instruction rather than information.”

It is therefore highly ironic – and not a little instructive – that the President of the Palestinian National Authority Mahmoud Abbas compared Israel and the Jewish people’s history to Goebbels.

Abbas has spent much, if not most of his professional life obsessed with the Nazis as a political and military tool in his aim to end the State of Israel as the national, ancestral and indigenous homeland of the Jewish people.

In his doctoral thesis from Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia in Moscow in 1982, Abbas at the same time claimed that Jews helped perpetrate the Holocaust, and disputed the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Abbas' lifelong Holocaust obsession

He has never walked back these claims, and the thesis has been republished multiple times in various book forms, and still appears under Abbas’ list of publications on the official PA website.

It is this life-long obsession with the Holocaust, that led Abbas to even brazenly claim that Israel committed “50 holocausts” at a news conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin last year.

Abbas’ obsession with the Holocaust is part of a violent strategy to change a narrative and to put in its place a new one.

The first is to seek to change the nature and centrality of an event which he sees as ensuring the world’s sympathy in the late 1940s in favor of a Jewish State.

There is certainly some truth to the fact that coming so soon after the systematic annihilation of six million Jews, many nations felt both guilt and sympathy for helping to perpetrate this atrocity, or simply standing by and letting it happen. Others saw the moral justification of providing or returning national sovereignty to a people who could not defend themselves against genocide.

By belittling the numbers and scale, and claiming that it was somehow conducted with Jewish acquiescence, Abbas has attempted to place the blame on the victims.


PMW: Fatah: 80-year-old Israeli woman murdered in rocket attack against Rehovot was “a settler”
During Israel’s recent confrontation with the Islamic Jihad terror organization and others in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian terrorists fired over 1,000 rockets at Israel. 80-year-old female Israeli civilian Inga Avramyan was murdered in such an attack, when a rocket directly hit her apartment building in the Israeli city of Rehovot, 30 km south of Tel Aviv.

According to Fatah, Inga was “a settler” and Rehovot is “a settlement”:
Official PA TV reporter in Gaza: “The occupation has gotten what it wanted, because these rockets hit one of the settlers’ houses with a direct strike, and the Hebrew media is reporting on the death of a settler.”

[Official PA TV, May 11, 2023]

Fatah posted a video and text showing damage to “the settlement of Rehovot south of Tel Aviv” caused by the rockets fired by the terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip:
Posted text: “The destruction created as a result of the resistance’s rocket striking the settlement of Rehovot south of Tel Aviv”

[Fatah Commission of Information and Culture, Facebook page, May 11, 2023]

Another video posted by Fatah shows rockets fired at Israeli civilian population centers, including “the settlement Rehovot”:
Posted text: “The moment of launching rockets at the settlement of Rehovot (i.e., an Israeli city)”

[Fatah Commission of Information and Culture, Facebook page, May 11, 2023]

Rehovot has been a part of the State of Israel since its creation. It is located 14 km from the Mediterranean coast, 30 km south of Tel Aviv. While the entire international community recognizes Rehovot as an Israeli city not a part of any negotiations, the PA and Fatah, which do not recognize Israel's right to exist in any borders, define Rehovot as a "settlement" in “occupied Palestine.”
Biden Appoints Holocaust Museum Board Member From Org That Accused Israel of Apartheid
I have written about the problems with the Holocaust Museum in D.C. before. It’s a government museum and like most of those pursues predictable political agendas that have nothing to do with the Holocaust or Jews.

The Holocaust Memorial Council acts as the board of trustees, but like a lot of government institution boards, it’s a prestigious line to add to the biographies of major donors or political allies. There have been some whoppingly bad appointments by past administrations In a final insult to the Jewish community, Obama appointed Ben Rhodes, the lead advocate for the Iran nuke sellout, to the council.

Biden has appointed Kimberly Marteau Emerson. Kimberly, the wife of John Emerson. a Democrat operative and financial bigwig, picked by Obama to be his ambassador to Germany.

Kimberly Marteau Emerson.has been on the board of directors for Human Rights Watch since 2012.

HRW has repeatedly and falsely accused Israel of “apartheid”. Its personnel have done little to conceal their desire for the destruction of the Jewish State and the extermination of its population.
Joe Stork, who served for many years as HRW’s Deputy Director of Middle East issues. Before being hired by HRW, Stork openly supported Palestinian terror attacks against Jewish civilians, and opposed any and all peace treaties between Israel and Arab states.

Stork even traveled to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for a conference on “Zionism and Racism.

Analyzing Israel’s victory in the 1967 War, Stork suggested what would be needed for the Arab states to reverse the outcome and destroy Israel:

This was part of a pattern.
In 2009, HRW bizarrely defended its senior military analyst Marc Garlasco following revelations that he was an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia and had even authored a book about Nazi-era medals. According to The Guardian, Garlasco once commented that a leather SS jacket made “my blood go cold it is so COOL!”


New 'Forgotten Exodus' project to shine a light on Jews expelled from 1960s Poland
A new pioneering initiative dedicated to capturing and disseminating the previously untold stories of Jews who fled Poland in the late 1960s following a wave of antisemitic purges launched this week.

Co-founded by the Vice-President of the Jewish Leadership Council, Daniel Korski CBE, and scholar Dr Daniel Schatz, the “Forgotten Exodus Project” will gather testimonies from victims, many of whom are Holocaust survivors, to “document their experiences and ensure their history is not erased.”

Following the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbours in 1967, then-communist Poland officially broke off diplomatic ties with Israel. By 1968, Polish Jews were declared enemies of the state and became the center of a Soviet-backed “anti-Zionist” campaign which saw them stripped of citizenship, expelled from political parties, and driven out jobs.

It is estimated that more than half, up to 25,000 people, of Poland’s already decimated post-Shoah Jewish community were forced into exile between 1968-1970.

The project, which will engage various forms of media, including video interviews, written narratives and archival materials to create a comprehensive historical record, will provide a platform for the victims and their families “to share their firsthand accounts, ensuring that their stories are preserved for future generations.”

The effort also aims to “leverage historical narratives as a potent instrument to combat hatred, totalitarianism, and antisemitism in our modern society.”

Korski said: "Forgotten Exodus is an essential effort to commemorate the experiences of those who were expelled from their homes, seeking refuge due to antisemitism. By gathering and documenting their stories, we aim to spotlight this overlooked historical period, fostering comprehension and compassion in today's world.”
Warsaw slams Noa Kirel’s Shoah comments
Israeli pop star Noa Kirel’s comments on the Holocaust following her third-place finish at the Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool last week elicited a strong reaction from Poland and reopened a debate about the country’s role in the Jewish genocide.

Kirel, in an interview with Ynet after the competition concluded, said the maximum 12 points given to her by the Polish jurors for her performance of “Unicorn” was a “victory” after many relatives on her father’s side of the family were murdered in the Holocaust.

“I feel like a winner. For me, the fact that I received the most points from Poland, after what my family went through there during the Holocaust, was a real moment of triumph. My greatest success was that Israel was noticed, we left a mark, I made my country proud of me—these are my greatest achievements,” she said.

The 22-year-old IDF veteran from the central Israeli city of Ra’anana visited the Auschwitz concentration camp in Oświęcim in 2019 with her father, Amir, where 220 members of her family were murdered by the Germans and their helpers. Kirel’s mother, Ilana, is of Moroccan Jewish descent.




Jordan blasts Ben-Gvir over Temple Mount visit
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on Sunday morning visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem's Old City, the site's administration said.

This is Ben-Gvir's second visit to the Temple Mount as a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government. It drew condemnation from Palestinians and elsewhere in the Muslim world, including Jordan.

This is "a provocative step that is condemned, and a dangerous and unacceptable escalation," Jordan's Foreign Ministry said.

A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Ben-Gvir's "incursion at an early hour, like thieves, into the Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyards will not change the reality and will not impose Israeli sovereignty over it."

A Hamas spokesman said Israel would bear the consequences for Ben-Gvir's "savage assault" on the mosque and it called on Palestinians to step up their visits and "stand as a rampart in the face of all attempts to defile it and make it Jewish."

"Happy to go up to the Temple Mount, the most important place for the people of Israel. It should be said that the police are doing a wonderful job here and once again proving who owns the house in Jerusalem. All the threats of Hamas will not help, we are the owners of Jerusalem and the entire land of Israel," Ben-Gvir said, apparently responding to recent threats made by Palestinian terrorist groups on the occasion of Jerusalem Day.
Palestinians upbeat as Israel-Saudi normalization hits road bump
The 32nd Arab League Summit might have gone almost unnoticed were it not for the return of Syrian President Bashar Assad. The fact that the meeting was held in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and hosted by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also gave it more importance and increased the political and media attention surrounding the event.

While the Palestinians kept their fingers crossed for their leader, President Mahmoud Abbas received a warm welcome in Jeddah and his address was reciprocated by an embrace by the family of Arab nations.

Abbas hoped that MBS would not disappoint in terms of the Palestinian issue, and he truly didn't as the matter took center stage at the event.

The Palestinian issue was and remains the central issue for Arab countries, and it is at the top of the kingdom's priorities," MSB said.

This was exactly what Abbas had hoped for, to receive a renewed pledge that Arab nations will only normalize ties with Israel if a Palestinian state is established first.

Abbas himself made this request a month ago when he visited Jordan, the first such meeting to take place between Ramallah and Riyadh in two years.
What was achieved in the latest round of clashes in Gaza?
BG. (RES.) Assaf Orion speaks to i24NEWS on the latest round of fighting in the Gaza Strip and the changing paradigm of the Middle East


Terrorists open fire on military post in Samaria; no casualties reported
An Israeli military post near Irtah in northeastern Samaria was targeted in a drive-by shooting overnight Saturday, according to the Israeli military.

Israeli forces operating nearby identified the assailants and opened fire on their vehicle, hitting it, the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement.

During a subsequent sweep of the area, several bullet casings were found.

No Israeli casualties were reported.

Separately on Saturday night, Israeli forces arrested a terror suspect in Hebron and seized dozens of crates of fireworks, according to the IDF.

The Israeli troops came under attack during the withdrawal from the city, and responded with riot-dispersal tools.
Palestinians accuse PA of cracking down on university students
Palestinian Authority security forces have resumed their crackdown on university students suspected of affiliation with Hamas, Palestinians said on Sunday.

The crackdown comes on the eve of the elections for the student council at Bir Zeit University, north of Ramallah, which are scheduled to be held later this week. Hamas scored a landslide victory in the last elections at Bir Zeit University in May 2022.

It also comes days after a Hamas-affiliated list won the student council elections at An-Najah University in Nablus. The victory of the Hamas-affiliated list at the largest Palestinian university in the West Bank is seen by many Palestinians as a blow to the ruling Fatah faction headed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Ongoing dispute between Fatah and Hamas
The latest clampdown by the PA on university students is seen by Palestinians in the context of the ongoing dispute between Abbas’s Fatah faction and Hamas.

The PA security forces regularly arrest or summon for interrogation many political activists and students suspected of membership in, or affiliation with, Hamas.

A Palestinian human rights advocate said the recent arrest of several students by the Palestinian security forces is an indication that the Ramallah-based PA leadership is worried about Hamas’s rising popularity on university campuses.


Egyptian journalist rebukes union for retaining boycott of Israel
A series of media articles from Israel’s largest Muslim nation neighbor Egypt provide a window into anti-Israel sentiments within the Arab country, as well as to scarce objections to Egypt’s Journalist Syndicate voting unanimously to extend its ban on normalization with the Jewish state.

One Egyptian journalist and politician, Osama Al-Ghazali Harb, bucked the anti-Israel boycott measure of his fellow journalists.

The Middle East Media Research Institute located the article by Harb and translated excerpts on May 1 of his column. MEMRI also published and translated other reports in the Egyptian and Arab media that reveal Egyptian civil society’s frosty relations with Israel and antisemitic attacks on Jews. MEMRI said "the peace between them has remained cold and normalization between the two countries is limited.”

The shocking action comes against the background of Israel-Egypt peace agreement
The shocking punitive action by the Journalists Syndicate comes against the background of a more than forty-year-old peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. The Egyptian Writers’ Union also outlaws normalization with Israel.

Harb, who is also a politician, wrote in a March column in Al-Arham “Personally, I am totally against the decision passed by the general assembly of the Journalists Syndicate against normalization with the Zionist entity. In my opinion this decision is mistaken from the professional, national and legal perspectives, because a journalist is not an ordinary citizen, but a professional whose job is to seek information and verify [the truth about] incidents and events. This certainly applies to a neighboring country, and even more so when that country is a rival and a competitor.”
Hezbollah invites reporters to watch group simulate war with Israel in south Lebanon
Lebanese terror group Hezbollah put on a show of force Sunday, extending a rare media invitation to one of its training sites in southern Lebanon, where its forces staged a simulated military exercise.

Masked fighters jumped through flaming hoops, fired from the backs of motorcycles, and blew up Israeli flags posted in the hills above a barrier simulating the one at the border between Lebanon and Israel.

The exercise came ahead of “Liberation Day,” the annual celebration of the withdrawal of Israeli forces from south Lebanon on May 25, 2000, and in the wake of a recent escalation between Israel and Gaza. Gaza’s terrorist Hamas rulers and Hezbollah have longstanding ties.

The recent heightened tensions also come months after Lebanon and Israel signed a landmark US-brokered maritime border agreement, which many analysts predicted would lower the risk of a future military confrontation between the two countries.

The Israel Defense Forces declined to comment on the Hezbollah exercise.

Senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine said in a speech Sunday that the exercise was meant to “confirm our complete readiness to confront any aggression” by Israel.
Iran says 'terrorist' group linked to Israel arrested
Iran's intelligence minister said a "terrorist" group linked to Israel was arrested on the western borders of Iran on Sunday, according to the semi-official Nour News agency.

"A terrorist group associated with the Zionist regime which entered the country from the western borders was arrested," said Esmail Khatib.

The statement comes amid ongoing heightening tensions between Iran and Israel over Tehran's nuclear program.


Iraqi team withdraws from fencing tournament to avoid Israelis
Iraq's national fencing team withdrew from the World Fencing Championship in Istanbul after being pitted against the Israeli national team, Iraq's national Iraqi News Agency reported on Friday.

"The Iraqi national team withdrew from the individual races in the World Cup fencing championship, which is taking place in Istanbul and qualifies for the Paris Olympics after the lottery pitted it against the team of the 'occupying Israeli entity,'" said the Iraqi Fencing Federation, according to the report.

"The decision to withdraw came in compliance with the law criminalizing normalization approved by the Iraqi parliament, in rejection of the occupying Israeli entity, and in solidarity with the Palestinian cause.”

Israeli fencers will compete in the team competition in the Fencing World Cup in Istanbul on Sunday. In the individual competition on Saturday, Yonatan Cohen was knocked out in the round of 32, while Yuval Shalom Freilich was knocked out in the round of 16.
Emily Schrader: 'You killed Jesus!': Israel's actions affect Jewish students in UK
Like most Western countries today, the United Kingdom is facing an unprecedented rise in acts of antisemitism. Jewish communities in the UK are frequently threatened and targeted by extremists, and security concerns are one of the leading issues for British Jewry.

At the same time, the United Kingdom's Jewish community is still reeling from the scandals of the British Labour Party, which under Jeremy Corbyn became a hub for antisemitism just a few years ago. While the trend is slowly improving within the Labour Party under new leadership, at British schools and universities, the opposite is taking place.

The Community Security Trust (CST), which works to protect British Jews from antisemitism, reported in January 2023 that there have been 150 university-related antisemitic incidents reported in the last two academic years across 30 universities in the UK, representing a 22% increase. Nearly half of the reported incidents occurred in May 2021, during Israel’s Operation Guardian of the Walls, indicating a connection between a rise in antisemitism and what is happening in Israel.

Jewish students on UK campuses say they are routinely subjected to a hostile, sometimes dangerous, environment where they encounter violent antisemitism in the form of anti-Israel activism, and that when it’s reported it often is not dealt with appropriately.

Elie Kraft, communications and research officer at the Campaign Against Antisemitism, explains that students used to face limited antisemitism in primary and secondary school, but once in university, there was a massive increase in harassment – including on social media, which exacerbates the problem. Today, that phenomenon is trending younger.

“It's quite concerning that we're seeing kids at such a young age because 10 or 15 years ago antisemitism for students would have been limited to in-person interactions. Now they can just stumble across it on their phones without their parents even realizing,” Kraft says. But the online attacks still pale in comparison to the threats and actual assaults Jewish students face on campus or in secondary school. Kraft says that he personally was a victim of antisemitic assault when he was a student. “I did get slapped and punched in the back of the head, which wasn't fun. ... I do remember sitting on a bus and someone just shouting at me, ‘you killed Jesus!’ ... But, to be honest, I consider myself getting off light. I vividly remember a student, I think a year or two below me, getting properly beaten up, bloody nose and everything,” he recalls


BBC portrayals of shortfall missiles again compromise audience understanding
As anyone who has followed BBC reporting – or lack of it – on the topic of shortfall missiles over the years will be aware, there is sadly nothing novel about the lack of journalistic curiosity displayed in those portrayals and the amplification of denials and accusations from a terrorist organisation.

The BBC’s failure to independently verify the number of fatalities resulting from shortfall missiles and to distinguish between those and the casualties resulting from IDF operations means that it unquestioningly promotes the misleading claim regarding the ratio of combatant/civilian casualties put out by the health ministry run by the Hamas terrorist organisation which leads the Joint Operations Room that was behind the missile fire between May 9th and May 13th.

Hence, rather than the actual ratio of two combatants to one civilian resulting from IDF operations, BBC audiences were told that “[a]bout half of the 33 people killed in Gaza were civilians”, without adequate clarification concerning deaths caused by Palestinian terrorist organisations.


Yad Vashem rejects Christie's donation after it sold Nazi jewelry
Christie’s, the prestigious British auction house, has offered to donate large sums of money to Jewish and Israeli organizations that focus on the Holocaust, after drawing criticism because of selling jewelry with ties to a Nazi.

Last Monday, Christie’s sold jewelry that belonged to the late Heidi Horten, an Austrian art collector whose husband, Helmut Horten, was a Nazi Party member and who made his fortune by buying department stores from Jews at a very low price during the Holocaust. The items fetched a total of $202 million, making the auction the largest jewelry sale in history.

The Jerusalem Post has learned that a number of Jewish organizations around the world as well as in Israel received an offer for a donation from Christie’s commission of this sale, as part of their recognition of the fact that Horen’s funds were based on the fact that he benefited from the Holocaust.

Israeli orgs. including Yad Vashem reject Christie's donation
Among the organizations are Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust and the Claims Conference, an organization that represents Jews in negotiating for compensation and restitution for victims of Nazi persecution and their heirs. The Post has reached out to the Claims Conference and has not yet received a response.

A senior source at Yad Vashem told the Post on Sunday that they were approached by Christie’s about three weeks ago regarding a possible donation on their behalf. Yad Vashem has officially commented on approving this offer by Christie’s, stating that they have declined to accept any donation because of the source of the funds.

Another Jewish organization was offered a donation of $100,000 but has also declined to accept the funds for the exact same reason, according to a source close to the organization.

Christie’s site has said that it has committed to donate “a significant portion of its commission [from this sale] to organizations that contribute to vitally important Holocaust research and education. It will be up to these organizations, if they so wish, to communicate about these donations,” the Christie’s site said, with a hint of understanding that many organizations wouldn’t agree to receive donations from this sale.
Mark Regev: Moshe Dayan: Israel’s flawed hero
DAYAN UNDOUBTEDLY bears much responsibility for the failures of the 1973 war – including not fighting hard enough in the cabinet for his own proposal that contained the possibility of averting the conflict in the first place.

After stepping down from the Defense Ministry in June 1974, Dayan spent three years on the back benches. Then, to the great chagrin of his Labor Party colleagues, he crossed the floor to be Begin’s chief diplomat. But if Labor saw Dayan as selling out to the intransigent Right, he was to surprise.

At the September 1978 Camp David peace summit, Dayan became president Jimmy Carter’s go-to person whenever a problem in the talks seemed insurmountable. According to the American negotiators, Dayan had an acute awareness of Egypt’s real positions, together with the uncanny ability to produce a compromise formula acceptable to the ideological Begin.

After succeeding in helping forge Israel’s first-ever peace agreement with an Arab country, Dayan fell out with his prime minister. He felt Begin was not serious about the talks on Palestinian autonomy and in October 1979 resigned in protest.

In the June 1981 Knesset elections, Dayan ran as an independent centrist. Receiving a disappointing two seats, his political career was ending just as cancer was destroying his physical being. He died on October 16, 1981, aged 66.

During his life, Dayan drew criticism for his personal behavior: The stolen archaeological artifacts, multiple liaisons with women, and tortured ties with his three children.

But Dayan’s public and private faults do not eclipse his greatness, and maybe his shortcomings make for a more representative hero of his era and his country.




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