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Wednesday, August 30, 2023

08/30 Links Pt2: 30 Years Ago, Israel’s Left Illegally Established a Palestinian State with the Oslo Accords; How The ‘Golda’ Movie Became a Vehicle to Spread Hate

From Ian:

30 Years Ago, Israel’s Left Illegally Established a Palestinian State with the Oslo Accords
A secret cabinet meeting was held on August 30, 1993, 30 years ago to the date. You can read the protocol here. It included Rabin, Peres, several Labor ministers, Shulamit Aloni and Yossi Sarid from Meretz, which had peaked in the 1992 election, with 12 MKs. It also included a gifted newcomer from a religious Sephardi party: Aryeh Deri.

Deri later recalled: “At 6 PM, I received a message that there was a government meeting at 8 PM and that I should come if I wanted to see the Oslo agreements, which no one knew then what they were.”

According to Haim Ramon, who held the Health Services portfolio in Rabin’s government, not only the citizens of Israel were shocked, but also the army. “This agreement was made behind the army’s back,” said Ramon. “Military personnel were not involved in this agreement, unlike their involvement in all the agreements until then and since. They got to read the agreement almost at the same time the ministers did.”

Deri recalled, “Ehud Barak, who was the Chief of Staff at the time, sat next to me and during the entire meeting was telling me quietly that the agreement was dangerous, that there are holes in it bigger than Swiss cheese, and that it would harm the security of the state.”

Some of Barak’s vehement objections are omitted from the protocol as “top secret,” to be released for publication in 90 years. That’s 60 years today… Comments made by Binyamin “Fuad” Ben-Eliezer, who was Housing Minister in Rabin’s government, but had served as the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, were also censored for 90 years.

Barak’s comments that were not removed included an astute observation of just how difficult it would be for the IDF to prevent the rise of a terrorist infrastructure in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip should the PLO’s cooperation not be as enthusiastic as Rabin was expecting it to be.

“When we have information about wanted persons in Jabaliya or about the preparation for an attack taking place inside one of the refugee camps, it won’t be easy to take effective action against it,” Chief of Staff Barak told the meeting. “There’s always a danger that the field ranks in the Palestinian police will leak or be infiltrated with sources from among the perpetrators of the attack.”

It’s amusing that the people who shot him down during the meeting, namely the folks from Meretz, would later become his biggest partners in his attempt to bring down the Netanyahu government using sabotage and street violence.

Rabin opened the meeting by saying this is not a simple agreement, representing one of two alternatives his government was facing: withdrawal from the “Syrian” territories in the Golan, or the “West Bank.” Of the two, the “Palestinian” option was more likely, especially since the Clinton White House had taken it up with vigor, to the point where the Americans had become the go-between for both sides.

Rabin said he also supported the “Palestinian” option because the Syrians were demanding a complete withdrawal, whereas the PLO would settle for a partial return of “occupied” lands. Rabin made clear that he saw no security value in the Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria. As far as he was concerned, they were political ventures, and so their viability had to be measured based on their current political value, which included their full or partial removal.

As far as Rabin was concerned, it all came down to PLO Chairman Arafat’s ability to deliver security within the Palestinian Authority, especially his ability to control Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Foreign Minister Peres then shared his surprise that the PLO did not insist on uprooting the settlements. Having to attempt that would have presented an impossible situation, morally and physically. He suggested that in that context, it was for the better that the peace talks with Syria had not been concluded, because the Syrians would have demanded a return of everything, and then the “Palestinians” would have insisted on the same demand.
Oslo protocols declassified: Rabin doubted Palestinian elections
Rabin told the cabinet that in his eyes, the first test of the Accords would be if the PLO could control Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Rabin additionally noted that "the rise of Hamas in particular and radical Islam in general in the Arab world is a problem. I think we are seeing this rise among the Palestinians as well. I believe that, in most of the elections in the territories today, Hamas is rising."

When asked if there was an assessment of what would happen in the elections for the Palestinian National Council, Rabin responded "I have no way of knowing, because the problem is who will threaten more, who will be with guns near the polling stations, and who will count the votes."

"Basically, for me, Gaza is a case test for the ability of those who support peace and support the PLO to deal with Hamas. Will it go in this direction or in other directions - I estimate, it mainly in this direction, but there is no certainty. There is a good chance," said Rabin. "But the IDF exists. There is a closure on Gaza from all directions, no one can enter or leave without our consent, not from the sea, not from the Egyptian border, not from the territory of Israel."

The prime minister admitted that the main worrying point of the deal is that it included a lot of commitments from the Israeli side, but very few commitments from the Palestinian side. Rabin added that the Palestinians were formulating some kind of statement that they would stop violent actions, but added that the exact formulation remained unclear.

Then foreign minister Shimon Peres stressed that the deal needed to succeed both politically and economically and explained that he and Rabin had asked European and American institutions to begin heavily investing in Palestinians in the territories.

Peres warned, "there is a possibility that the whole PLO business will fall apart and there will be a kind of Hamas-like Iran here."

"We also need to be careful. There is no certainty that they will last, with all the rebellions, with all the begging, with all the pressures and all the things that exist. I say this is a very serious matter. I simply do not see an alternative in the Arab street, with all the shortcomings there are, that is better than the current coalition that exists."

Peres stressed that the Israeli negotiating team had not given up an inch of territory. "We did not remove a single settlement, we preserved the unity of Jerusalem, we ensured Israel's security."
Guardian op-ed fails miserably in effort to malign Israel
Pogrund has offered nothing in the way of actual evidence that Israel has become – or is becoming – an apartheid state, and he’s provided no concrete examples of what has changed in the country since 2017, when he stated unequivocally that “South African apartheid rigidly enforced racial laws. Israel is not remotely comparable“.

So, what has changed in the past six years?

First, a few radically anti-Israel NGOs published legally, factually and politically flawed reports accusing Israel of apartheid – ideologically motivated conclusions in search of evidence that, in effect, argued that Zionism, by its very nature, is racist. These ‘reports’ have served to embolden those who reject Israel’s right to exist within any borders, and have given succor to mainstream ‘journalists‘ who have never hidden their visceral animosity towards the Jewish state.

The other change relates to the contentious debates both in Israel and the diaspora concerning Israel’s new government. But, without minimising the legitimate concerns about judicial reform and the presence of two extremists in the coalition, by the standard that Pogrund himself set for such a debate, there’s been no move towards anything resembling an apartheid reality.

Israel is still a multi-ethnic, multi-racial democracy that’s, by far, the most progressive nation in in the Middle East; where its Arab minority has the right to vote and enjoys full citizenship; where the rights of the media and individual free expression are protected; where Arabs and Muslims serve in every sector of society, including in the Knesset and in the nation’s highest court; and where – as Pogrund himself showed – no codified racial segregation of any kind exists.

However, despite the fact that the apartheid charge is easily undermined with minimal critical scrutiny, we know with something approaching metaphysical certainty that media outlets like the Guardian will continue to wield the smear amidst their ongoing campaign of maligning Israel and its diaspora Jewish supporters.
There are no anti-Arab 'apartheid' roads in the West Bank
There are those who falsely claim that travel in Israel is restricted for the Arabs of Judea and Samaria. But that is not the reality.

Judea and Samaria contains close to 2,500 km. of roads for intercity traffic – and travel between communities – of which 1,600 km. are located in Area C.

Arabs of Judea and Samaria can use all the roads, including those in Area C, apart from those that provide access inside Jewish communities and security zones controlled by the IDF, which comprises only 3% of the area.

Adversely, Israelis are permitted to drive in Area C, but entry into Area A constitutes a criminal offense. It therefore follows that almost 35% of the region’s roads are off limits for Jewish Israeli (meaning Jewish) traffic.

The ban on Israeli traffic can be construed as racist, seeing that an equal ban is not enforced when it comes to Israeli Arab citizens. In fact, their entry is encouraged by state authorities in order to strengthen the economy of the cities under Palestinian Authority rule.

To use a personal example: Route 57 extends from my community of Avnei Hefetz to Elon Moreh. It passes through the city of Shechem and skirts by Joseph’s Tomb. For security reasons, travel on this road is prohibited for Jews, and I have to take a long detour to Elon Moreh via Route 60, which adds a lot of travel time until I reach my destination.

The same applies to residents of Gush Dolev and Talmonim, in the Mateh Binyamin district, who need to get to the Binyamin Regional Council offices. They have to detour through Jerusalem instead of traveling a direct route past the outskirts of Ramallah and through Beit El.

Bottom line: Travel restrictions apply primarily to the Jewish-Israeli demographic.


How The ‘Golda’ Movie Became a Vehicle to Spread Hate
Even before the big-budget biopic of Israel’s first and only female prime minister Golda Meir had hit screens around the world, it was causing controversy.

For some, there was an issue with the casting of Academy Award-winning British actress Helen Mirren, who is not Jewish, to depict the iconic Israeli leader during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

And now that the film has been released, some are using it as a vehicle to attack the Israeli state in general.

Among the professional critics to lambaste the film was freelance journalist Noah Berlatsky, who claimed it promotes “whiteness” in a blistering review for CNN:
In ‘Golda,’ casting Mirren — a White, internationally renowned, British actress — is a metaphor for the way the film blurs Israeli identity with a generalized White, Western identity. By doing so, it attaches Israel’s moment of crisis to a tradition of triumphalist American military films that validates the virtue of the US, of Israel and of whiteness.”

Of course, Berlatsky’s view that the film “blurs Israeli identity with a generalized White, Western identity” is absurd and reflects an insidious trend in which Israel is viewed through the lens of US identity politics.

Even more disturbingly, Berlatsky went on to compare the film to other “stories of White military underdogs struggling to overcome non-White foes,” including, he contends, movies like “Birth of a Nation.” For those who are unfamiliar with this 1915 epic, it has been dubbed the “most racist film ever made” that “depicts lynching [black people] as a positive thing.”

Movie website AwardsWatch used its review of the film to bizarrely blast Meir as a “settler” and criticize it for including “no mention of Palestinians or anything of the like in the film,” which is technically not true because it does include a montage that shows Arabs fleeing during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

Jewish Voice For Peace, the radical anti-Israel group that backs the BDS campaign, took to Instagram to issue its verdict on the film, branding Golda Meir a “racist who oversaw war crimes” and claiming the biopic celebrates a leader whose “legacy is one of violent ethnic cleansing.”

Naturally, JVP conveniently ignores the fact that Meir attempted to forge peace with neighboring Arab nations, including by offering Egypt most of Sinai just months before President Anwar Sadat joined Syria in launching a surprise invasion of Israel on Judaism’s holiest day.

The movie ends with Meir speaking to Sadat about the peace treaty reached with Egypt after she left office and credits her for starting the path toward peace even in the midst of war.

What’s more, documents that were declassified earlier this year show that Meir was open to the possibility of a Palestinian state.


Echoes of History: From “Nazi Jewish Studies” to “Critical Zionism Studies”
How, exactly, will Critical Zionism Studies change the world? Abdulhadi and Schotten are likely counting on it to provide academic legitimization for what they see as a necessary first step: expunging Zionism and its supporters from the academy. This, of course, is the goal of the antisemitic academic boycott campaign, whose guidelines demand the shutting down of all university activity supporting “the normalization of Israel in the global academy” and promote the vilification and exclusion of faculty and students involved in such activity.

As USACBI co-founder and board member, respectively, Abdulhadi and Schotten also undoubtedly believe that as an arm of the BDS movement, USACBI’s efforts to rid the academy of Zionism and Zionists, legitimated by “research” coming out of their Institute, will play a crucial role in the larger campaign coordinated by the Palestinian BDS National Committee, whose member organizations include terrorist groups committed to the murder of Jews in Israel and worldwide. Not only do the BDS movement’s three conditions for the boycott’s removal demand Israel effectively commit geographic, political, and demographic suicide, but the movement’s founders and leaders themselves have openly articulated their goal of using BDS to effect the elimination of the Jewish state, home to more than seven million Jews - nearly half of world Jewry.

Current efforts to promote antisemitic initiatives such as Critical Zionism Studies are not officially government-backed, but it is troubling to recognize that academic conditions in the U.S. today are increasingly hospitable to the proliferation and amplification of such openly biased initiatives.

The rampant politicization of many disciplines in the Social Sciences and Humanities has opened the door to the normalization of anti-Zionist advocacy and activism in classrooms and conference halls on American campuses. Consider: thousands of U.S. faculty not only support an academic boycott of Israel but have pledged to bring the boycott onto their campuses and into their classrooms; several academic associations, including, most recently, the large American Anthropological Association, have adopted academic BDS; and entire academic departments on more than 100 campuses have taken official anti-Zionist stances, with some embracing academic BDS. Against this backdrop, faculty who promote Critical Zionism Studies and its goal of eliminating Zionism and Zionists from the academy are likely to be applauded at their universities.

Furthermore, many anti-Zionist faculty are in positions of power and influence, facilitating their ability to spread their antisemitic “scholarship” within and beyond the academy. Three members of ICSZ’s Founding Collective are heads of their university departments. One is past president of the American Studies Association, which voted to endorse academic BDS. Another is spearheading a proposal to make a course in “critical” ethnic studies, including its promotion of anti-Zionism, an admissions requirement at the University of California. That proposal, which is currently making its way through the U.C. academic senate, would ensure that virtually every high school in the state will offer an ethnic studies course that embraces anti-Zionism.

Those who ignore the deeply antisemitic nature of Critical Zionism Studies and the warm reception it is likely to receive in the academy and beyond, do so at their own peril.
Daniel Greenfield: ADL Joins Sharpton for Crown Heights Pogrom Anniversary
In August 1991, racist mobs roamed the streets of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, attacking anyone they thought might be Jewish. Black rioters stabbed, stoned and beat their victims. Community members huddled in their homes watching gangs smash their windows. Al Sharpton appeared to denounce the Jews at an event that included the banner, “Hitler did not do the job.”

In August 2023, the ADL ignored the anniversary of the Crown Heights Pogrom and instead joined Sharpton in Washington D.C. The ADL urged its members to take part in Sharpton’s ‘March on Washington’ headlined by his National Action Network and co-chaired by the ADL.

The ADL not only failed to commemorate the 32nd anniversary of the Crown Heights Pogrom, it partnered with the hatemonger who was front and center at the pogrom. ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt issued a press release together with Al Sharpton about the recent murder of three people in Florida, while forgetting about the three people who died in Crown Heights.

They include Yankel Rosenbaum, a visiting Australian student, who was surrounded and stabbed to death, Anthony Graziosi, an Italian-American salesman, dragged from his car and murdered because his hat and beard make him look like an Orthodox Jew, and Bracha Estricher, a Holocaust survivor who seeing the thugs pounding on her door committed suicide rather than fall into their hands. Not to mention a woman who suffered a miscarriage after being chased by the mob.

“Hate still exists,” Greenblatt declared in D.C. at an event headlined by the most lucrative bigot who used the Crown Heights Pogrom as a springboard to running for president, becoming a Democratic Party kingmaker, and securing a role as Obama’s envoy. He implied that critics of the ADL’s relationship with Sharpton were practicing “cancel culture”, when what we really needed to do is “embrace them” and “educate them about our history.”

Like the time that Sharpton taunted, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”

The ‘March on Washington’ was not Greenblatt’s first collaboration with Sharpton. The two men have repeatedly worked together and participated in joint appearances, events and press releases on various leftist causes, often having nothing to do with either Jewish or black issues, such as condemning the Trump administration’s efforts to secure the border in 2018.
Commie Chic Invades American Grade Schools
Every day, my son, who is in seventh grade, sees a quotation from Angela Davis painted on his school’s wall: “Radical simply means grasping things at the root.” (The line actually comes from Karl Marx.) Four years ago, during Black History Month, a poster of Davis beamed down from the wall of his public elementary school in Brooklyn.

I eagerly praise my son’s charter school to other parents. It’s full of dedicated teachers who urge their students to debate politics and history with an open mind. So I wrote to the administration, proposing that they should balance the school’s homage to Davis with a quotation from Andrei Sakharov or Natan Sharansky, who fought to free the millions of Soviet bloc citizens that Davis wanted to keep locked up. After all, I reasoned, some of the school’s families are themselves refugees from communist tyrannies. My suggestion was met with silence.

Davis, who is now euphemistically celebrated as an “activist,” was in fact a loyal apparatchik who served working-class betrayers, some of whom were murderous bureaucrats, and others outright maniacs who defy any normative political description. Among the objects of her adoration were dullards like the East German leader Erich Honecker and the stupefied (and stupefying) Soviet Communist Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev, as well as the Reverend Jim Jones. Before the grotesque mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, Davis broadcast a worshipful speech about Jones to the imprisoned Black women who were murdered by his cult.

There’s hardly a more famous American communist than Davis, who twice ran for vice president on the CP ticket and stayed true to the party until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. For decades, she tirelessly defended the brutalities of the elderly white men who ran the Eastern bloc. Now entering old age herself, Davis has escaped her rightful place doing penance at a memorial to victims of Stalinist tyranny to become a beacon for American millennials who make Soviet-style Black History Month posters. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has named Davis her “idol.” Omar, like rest of her Squad, is cut from Davis’ pattern: Spurning the legions of African American women who stood up for freedom, she instead celebrates a dedicated lifelong bootlicker of communist-bloc tyrants. What redeems Davis, in the eyes of Omar and her fellow progressives, is apparently the fact that she was put on trial for supplying guns to the Black Panthers who murdered hostages during a 1970 shootout.

My son’s school is not the only one with an enthusiasm for Davis. In 2021, City Journal reported on an elementary school in Philadelphia that led fifth graders in a simulated Black Power rally in which they shouted “Free Angela!,” a reference to Davis’ incarceration on murder and conspiracy charges, and adorned the walls of the school with murals of Davis and Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton. Last year, a high school in Rockland County, New York, invited Davis to speak on campus (the speech was canceled due to parental outrage). And the website of the National Women’s History Museum offers a lesson plan—Common Core compliant!—on Davis’ thought, which promises to help students “better make sense of the struggles of women and historically marginalized communities.”

Praise for communists like Davis is a sign of the times. After all, the argument goes, they fought for the oppressed and against the evils of capitalism. A colleague who teaches Russian history tells me that in each class a handful of his students announce that they are communists. The students come equipped with handy rationalizations to explain away monstrous Soviet crimes. They argue, for instance, that Stalin was needed to defeat Hitler; if there had been no Stalin, many more Jews would have died in the Holocaust, so the numbers of Stalin’s dead are outweighed by the people Hitler would have killed.
NY court rejects suit against Unilever over Ben & Jerry’s Israel boycott
A Manhattan judge dismissed a lawsuit against Unilever on Tuesday that claimed the company misled U.S. investors by not immediately disclosing a decision by its Ben & Jerry’s unit to stop selling ice-cream in Israeli territory over the 1949 armistice lines (“Green Line”).

The City of St. Clair Shores Police and Fire Retirement System, a Michigan pension fund, filed suit in June 2022, seeking damages for a drop in the price of Unilever shares after Ben & Jerry’s announced in July 2021 that it would end sales in eastern Jerusalem, as well as in Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, commonly known as the West Bank.

U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield found that Unilever was not required to disclose the boycott when Ben & Jerry’s board decided on it in 2020 because Unilever had ultimate control over whether to implement it.

While Ben & Jerry’s board oversees its “social mission,” Unilever retained authority over financial and operational decisions when it bought the Vermont-based ice-cream company in 2000.

The self-described socially conscious Ben & Jerry’s said in 2021 that selling ice cream in the territories was “inconsistent with our values.”

Last December, Unilever announced that it had resolved a legal battle with the independent board of Ben & Jerry’s.
Shellfish dumped on UC Berkeley’s Jewish fraternity house on first Shabbat of semester
Local police are investigating after a Jewish fraternity at the University of California, Berkeley, reported finding hundreds of shellfish dumped across its property.

The shellfish were also thrown through a window at Berkeley’s chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi, in what the fraternity is calling “an act of antisemitism vandalism.”

“We go outside, we saw crayfish had been thrown all over our deck, all over the side driveway, through the windows into someone’s room and scattered all around the backyard,” said Jadon Gershon-Friedberg, a Berkeley senior and the AEPi chapter president, who lives in the fraternity house. A fraternity brother had noticed a half-dozen people with a bucket approach the house just before 1 a.m., he said.

Gershon-Friedberg and other fraternity brothers immediately checked around neighboring fraternity houses to see whether shellfish had been dumped on their property too. They believe theirs was the only target.

“We realized this is more than just a prank,” Gershon-Friedberg said.

Given that the perpetrators used shellfish, a food forbidden under the laws of keeping kosher, and that they targeted the Jewish fraternity on the first Shabbat of the school year, AEPi considers the incident to be antisemitic, according to a statement released Sunday. “This incident was undoubtedly deliberate, aimed at intimidating our chapter,” AEPi’s statement said.

The vandalism comes two weeks after AEPi’s national office launched a partnership with the Anti-Defamation League. Under the partnership, the fraternity’s umbrella organization will hire a staffer to train members across its 150 chapters to respond to antisemitism and advocate for Israel. AEPi was founded more than a century ago after Jews were excluded from a New York University fraternity, and in a statement, AEPi CEO Rob Derdiger said chapter members are “on the front lines of this battle on college campuses.”


US said to investigate El Al’s alleged discrimination against Palestinian-American
An El Al spokesperson rejected the woman’s claims of discrimination, telling The Times of Israel in July that the inspection of her luggage sparked “several alerts” that required additional security checks.

“All of the operations were done in accordance with the security procedures and the instructions of the authorized bodies for the purpose of maintaining the safety of the aircraft and all passengers and for these reasons only,” the spokesperson said.

In a statement to Kan on Tuesday, the US Transportation Department confirmed its decision to launch an investigation into Wazwaz’s case, saying it is “committed to protecting the right of passengers to fly without any type of discrimination.”

An El Al spokesperson told Kan that it was aware of the US probe and would respond to the inquiry in an orderly manner.

The investigation comes roughly one month before Israel hopes to be accepted into the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP).

In order to enter the VWP, Israel is required to treat all US travelers equally, regardless of national origin, religion or ethnicity.

This has been a sticking point for the US amid longstanding complaints of discrimination against Palestinian, Arab and Muslim Americans by Israeli airlines and authorities.


University president who hired controversial anti-Israel professor resigns
A senior City University of New York (CUNY) president has resigned just weeks after helping to hire a controversial academic with pro-Palestine views.

Robin Garrell, president of CUNY’s Graduate Centre for three years, sparked backlash after Marc Lamont Hill was hired this month.

Hill was hired to be a presidential professor of urban education in the school’s Graduate Centre.

However, Hill was let go from CNN in 2018 after a speech he gave led to condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League and Temple University, where he holds an endowed chair role.

The speech, which Hill gave for the United Nations International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people, called for countries around the world to boycott Israel.

In prepared remarks, Hill said: "We have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit to political action, grass-roots action, local action and international action that will give us what justice requires and that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea.”

ADL’s senior vice president for international affairs Sharon Nazarian says the use of the “river to the sea” phrase is widely felt to be code for a call for the destruction of Israel.


BBC News again fails to fully inform on Arab sector crime
With no attempt made to explain that allegation of “a failure of representation” in a country in which all citizens of whatever ethnic background have equal votes and which has always had Arab members of parliament – including ten in the current Knesset on four different lists – Bateman and Gritten go on to devote seven paragraphs to the topic of statements made by various government and opposition politicians.

In other words, what readers once again take away from this portrayal of the issue of crime in the Arab sector of Israeli society is that it can be blamed on inadequate policing and contemporary politics. That, however, is by no means the whole story.

A report recently released by the INSS notes the link between the gender of those killed and the types of crime:
“Between January 2012 and June 2023, 856 men and 143 women were murdered. The average age of male and female victims was 33 and 34, respectively. The number of female victims has remained constant over time, with twelve victims annually, whereas the number of male victims has risen considerably. This supports the claim that most of the increase in the number of murders can be attributed to the increasing activity of criminal organizations and power struggles between clans, which affect the number of murdered men, and not to domestic violence, which mostly affects women.”

While noting the connection of organised crime gangs to the “spiralling murder rates”, Bateman and Gritten fail to provide any explanations for that increase in their activities in recent years.


Natural gas royalties jump 23%, top NIS 1 billion in first half of year
Israel collected more than NIS 1 billion ($263 million) in natural gas royalties in the first half of the year, representing an increase of 23 percent over the same period in 2022, the Energy and Infrastructure Ministry said on Tuesday.

The increase in revenue from royalties was attributed to the rise in the amount of production of natural gas for exports, the production of hydrocarbon liquids, as well as the weakness of the shekel versus the dollar, according to a report by the Energy Ministry’s Division of Royalties, Accounting and Economics.

More than half of the revenue from natural gas royalties, some NIS 590 million ($155 million), was generated from exports mainly to Egypt and Jordan, according to the report. For 2023, Israel is expected to collect a total of NIS 2 billion ($526 million) from natural gas and other natural resources royalties, the ministry estimated.

The boost in royalties comes as natural gas from Israel’s offshore Karish field started flowing in October 2022, which generated NIS 145 million ($38 million) from the production of about 1.97 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas and about 947,000 barrels of hydrocarbon liquids.

Karish is Israel’s third offshore field after the Leviathan natural gas field, the nation’s largest, started pumping in December 2019, and natural gas started to flow in 2013 at the nearby Tamar well, the second largest, which holds some 10 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas, half of the amount held in Leviathan.
Turkey-Israel gas pipeline once again on the table to increase gas exports
A Turkey-Israel gas pipeline is once again on the table: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has instructed an inter-ministerial team to examine alternatives to Israel's current gas exports


Imagine Dragons defy boycott calls to play sold out show in Tel Aviv
An American band has defied calls to boycott Israel, playing a sold-out show in front of 60,000 people in Tel Aviv's Yarkon Park.

Imagine Dragons, an indie pop band formed in Las Vegas, were urged by pro-Palestine campaigners to ditch their show in Tel Aviv over claims about Israel's human rights record.

Holocaust survivor and activist Dr Gabor Maté urged the group to pull out of the show, saying: "I respectfully urge the progressive and humane-minded artists Imagine Dragons to stand by their principles and support both Palestinians and courageous Israelis by not performing in this apartheid country.”

But the band ignored activists calling for a boycott and addressed the crowd warmly at their show.

Lead singer Dan Reynolds told the audience “It’s not normal to have such a big crowd,” adding: “Tel Aviv, we love you.”

The band's Jewish drummer Daniel Platzman was also on stage and joined his bandmates in performing at Reading and Leeds festival last weekend before jetting off to Tel Aviv.


Historic ‘Glory of Israel’ synagogue set to reopen overlooking Jerusalem’s Temple Mount
When Florida lawyer Brian Sherr first visited the ancient synagogue in Jerusalem’s Old City more than four decades ago, the site lay in ruins. The area around the demolished structure was filled with garbage, the remaining wall was in shambles, and it still had remnants of the purple paint that Arabs had painted on it to keep people’s spirits away.

But in Sherr’s mind, he saw the synagogue in all its turn-of-the-century grandeur based on the childhood stories he had heard from his Jerusalem-born grandmother of the towering jewel of the Old City in the decades before the establishment of modern-day Israel.

It wasn’t just a fad or something in vogue, but something deeply personal and in his genes: Sherr’s great-great-great-grandfather had been involved in the original building project in the 19th century.

“I always thought I should have been born in Jerusalem,” the 79-year-old New Jersey native recounted in an interview with JNS. “I prayed that one day when I was alive it would be rebuilt.”
Jerusalem find dating back to biblical kings baffles archaeologists
An unprecedented channel installation dating back to the First Temple period was uncovered in the City of David National Park in Jerusalem, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced on Wednesday.

The excavation thus far has uncovered two installations about 10 meters apart, which may have composed one large installation. The first installation includes a series of at least nine channels that were smoothed. On top of the rock cliff that encloses the installation to the south can be found seven drain pipes, which carried liquid from the top of the cliff.

Such structures have not been found anywhere else in Israel and their purpose remains elusive.

“We even recruited the help of the police forensic unit and its research colleagues around the world, but so far—to no avail,” said Yiftah Shalev, a senior researcher at the Antiquities Authority.

One theory posits that these channels were used for soaking products, possibly agricultural produce such as flax or dates.

“The production of linen, for example, requires soaking the flax for a long time to soften it. Another possibility is that the channels held dates that were left out to be heated by the sun to produce silan [date honey],” Shalev explained.

The latter would be in line with similar structures found in Oman, Bahrain and Iran, though never before found in Israel, he said.

“We looked at the installation and realized that we had stumbled on something unique, but since we had never seen a structure like this in Israel, we didn’t know how to interpret it. Even its date was unclear,” Shalev said.

According to Professor Yuval Gadot of Tel Aviv University, which is also involved in the excavations, “This is an era when we know that Jerusalem covered an area that included the City of David and the Temple Mount, which served as the heart of Jerusalem. The central location of the channels near the city’s most prominent areas indicates that the product made using them was connected to the economy of the Temple or Palace.”




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