Sunday, June 02, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
Sunday, June 02, 2024Elder of Ziyon
All United States persons, wherever located, are reminded that, with respect to their activities in United States commerce, the Export Administration Regulations prohibit taking certain actions in furtherance or support of an unsanctioned foreign boycott maintained by a country against a country friendly to the United States and require reporting of receipt of a boycott-related request to BIS. U.S. companies operating in Türkiye, in particular, are cautioned to be alert to their receipt of any requests to refrain from importing or exporting goods to or from Israel or to provide certification that the goods are not of Israeli origin or do not contain Israeli-origin components or materials.
Prohibited Boycott Condition in a Purchase Order:"In the case of overseas suppliers, this order is placed subject to the suppliers being not on the Israel boycott list published by the central Arab League."Reportable boycott condition in an importer’s purchase order:"Goods of Israeli origin not acceptable."Reportable boycott condition in a letter of credit:"A signed statement from the shipping company, or its agent, stating the name, flag and nationality of the carrying vessel and confirming ... that it is permitted to enter Arab ports."Prohibited Boycott Condition in a Contract:"Israeli Clause: The Seller shall not supply goods or materials which have been manufactured or processed in Israel nor shall the services of any Israeli organization be used in handling or transporting the goods or materials."
The Contractor shall comply in all respects with the requirements of the laws of the State of Bahrain relating to the boycott of Israel. Goods manufactured by companies blacklisted by the Arab Boycott of Israel Office may not be imported into the State of Bahrain and must not be supplied against this Contract.
"All goods to be supplied as a part of this order must comply with the Israel boycott rules stipulated by the Royal Oman Police""The Contractor whether an Establishment or Company, National or Foreign, shall not import or enter into Agreement with any Foreign Company or Establishment as Sub-Contractor particularly if such Company did not have previous dealing in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, except after contacting the Regional office of the Arab Boycott to Israel, or one of the two Sub-Offices of the Ministry of Commerce at Jeddah or Dammam, to ensure of the status of the said Foreign Company, in light of the Rules and orders issued by the office of the Arab Boycott of Israel."
Sunday, June 02, 2024Elder of ZiyonFrench President Emmanuel Macron voiced outrage on Monday over Israeli strikes on a tented camp for displaced Palestinians in Rafah that Gaza officials said killed at least 45 people and demanded an "immediate ceasefire.""These operations must stop. There are no safe areas in Rafah for Palestinian civilians," Macron said on X in English."I call for full respect for international law and an immediate ceasefire."
The destruction, capture, or neutralization of the property must offer, in the circumstances of time and place, a specific military advantage. It is contrary to IHL to launch an attack which offers only indeterminate or possible advantages.
From the principle of distinction comes the prohibition of carrying out indiscriminate attacks. Here are three [examples] of these: attacks which are not directed against a specific military objective, such as example a soldier who fires in all directions without aiming at a specific military objective; attacks in which combat methods or means are used which cannot be directed against a specific military objective, such as for example long-range missiles which cannot be directed at their target with precision; and attacks in which combat methods or means are used whose effects cannot be limited, such as the use of a bomb of particularly high power in relation to the limited military gain expected to destroy a building in an urban area and heavily populated.
The principle of proportionality targets the incidental effects of attacks on civilians and civilian objects. These incidental (collateral) effects can be linked to multiple factors: proximity to a military objective, precision of the weapons used, nature of the military objective targeted, etc. All these factors must be taken into consideration before each attack. Thus, collateral effects on civilians must be taken into account, whether direct or indirect (or cascading), provided that they are predictable.
The proportionality of an attack is assessed on a case-by-case basis, by comparing the foreseeable damage of the attack and the concrete and direct military advantage expected from this attack, in light of the information available at the time of the decision-making. The ICTY held that to determine whether an attack was proportionate, it was necessary to assess whether the person had sufficient knowledge of the situation and whether he judiciously used the information available to him at the time of the attack, so that he could have predicted that the attack would cause excessive losses among the civilian population.
No one in any army in the world, current or future, could possibly have predicted that the target was near a secret weapons cache that would explode and spark a fire that would kill civilians.
Sunday, June 02, 2024Elder of Ziyon
...The professor saw a trend among the topics Israeli and Jewish colleagues were pushed to pursue. Those who continued their academic work in international law either wrote about Palestinians as victims or Israel’s violations of humanitarian international law. “Israelis would either write about IP law or business law, or about how Israel is being awful, violating human rights and all of that.”This stood out because the professor noticed their colleagues from Latin America and China weren’t expected to work on topics that criticize their home countries as a condition for receiving faculty support. Yet when it came to Israelis, it was “clear to us this is what we need to deliver on.”In the professor’s discussions with the senior faculty, especially the progressive liberal Jewish faculty, it came through clearly that support for Israeli students was conditioned on being the right type of Israeli, “and there were fellowships and scholarships and grants available to students who are willing to do that. In Hebrew we say that a person knows which side of the bread is buttered, right? So it’s pretty clear what pays off is to distance yourself from a mainstream Israeli kind of discourse.”Understanding who holds the power and influences decisions is important in any profession, the law included. “You need to have the support and the mentors to advance in your career,” the professor explained, “and for that, you look for cues on what should I do, how do I make these people like me. Why would you bother, why would you take the risk of saying something that is controversial or put yourself in the position of protecting Israel or speaking on behalf of Israel when there is only a price to pay for that?”“For example, there is an institute that gives out scholarships to doctoral students who are writing dissertations about Israel. I was advised not to take their money because then it’s going to be on my CV and people will interpret that as if I don’t have the right kind of politics. So even when there are economic incentives to write different kinds of scholarship,” under the current academic incentives, the professor concludes, scholarships and point-interventions will not work “because it’s more about selection and authority and networks and connections and less about economic incentives.”
The anti-Zionist blacklist is the most extreme example of an anti-Israel wave that has swept the mental health field since the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks and the resulting war in Gaza, which has seen the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians. More than a dozen Jewish therapists from across the country who spoke to Jewish Insider described a profession ostensibly rooted in compassion, understanding and sensitivity that has too often dropped those values when it comes to Jewish and Israeli providers and clients.At best, these therapists say their field has been willing to turn a blind eye to the antisemitism that they think is too rampant to avoid. At worst, they worry the mental health profession is becoming inhospitable to Jewish practitioners whose support for Israel puts them outside the prevailing progressive views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Over the past several months, a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel. This phenomenon has been unfolding in progressive spaces (academia, politics, cultural organizations) for quite some time. That it has now hit the rarefied, highbrow realm of publishing — where Jewish Americans have made enormous contributions and the vitality of which depends on intellectual pluralism and free expression — is particularly alarming.
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Saturday, June 01, 2024Elder of Ziyon
French authorities have banned Israeli defense firms from exhibiting at a trade show next month near Paris, organizers said on Friday.“By decision of the government authorities, there will be no stand for the Israeli defense industry at the Eurosatory 2024 fair,” organizers Coges Events said.Coges did not offer an explanation, but France’s defense ministry released a statement saying that “the conditions are no longer right to host Israeli companies at the Paris show, given that the French president is calling for the cessation of IDF operation in Rafah.”The announcement came days after an Israeli strike targeting two top Hamas terrorists in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah sparked a fire in a complex housing displaced Palestinians, killing dozens of civilians and triggering international outrage and protests in France.An Israel Defense Forces probe into the strike found that a hidden store of weapons may have been the actual cause of the deadly blaze, and that the airstrike that targeted an adjacent area had used small munitions that would not ignite such a fire on their own.Responding to the fatal blaze, in which Hamas-run health authorities in Gaza said 45 civilians were killed, French President Emmanuel Macron said he was “outraged” and demanded an “immediate ceasefire.”
This has nothing to do with Rafah. French officials already started creating new rules, just for Israel, back in March, as Calcalist reported:
In the shadow of the ongoing war in Gaza, France is taking an unusual step to toughen conditions for the participation of defense companies from Israel in the Eurosatory arms exhibition scheduled for Paris in June, Calcalist has learned.
Companies intending to participate in the exhibition, showcasing new developments and central weapon systems, have been informed in recent days that the equipment they wish to reveal must obtain an import license granted in advance by the French Ministry of Defense. Without this license, they will not be able to present their products on French soil. According to a source in one of the companies, the French Ministry of Defense will have the authority to prohibit the presentation of Israeli weapons at its discretion.
Senior officials in the defense industries, in conversations with Calcalist, have expressed resentment towards the new French demand, calling for an in-depth investigation at the political level. Many of them have extensive experience participating in security exhibitions worldwide. France hosts two of the most prestigious and respected arms exhibitions globally, the Paris Air Show at Paris–Le Bourget Airport and the Eurosatory military exhibition, held in rotation once every two years.
"I have participated in many exhibitions like this, and there has never been such a demand, which simply diminishes Israel's status," an executive at one of the companies told Calcalist. "Requiring prior approval from authorities to bring exhibits to the exhibition is humiliating and cannot stand."
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This is post-colonial rhetoric at its most threadbare. The perspective he formulates in the least attractive way possible, has nothing to do with real racism since all the players involved embody not race but ideological and cultural phenomena. Calling it by the inflated term ‘racist’ impoverishes the historical debate and crams our vision into 75-year old struggle for Palestinian rights, not an 85-year old marriage of Nazi and Palestinian Muslim eliminationist antisemitism. If such accusations were carry weight (and apparently they do), it would forbid us from discussing the role of Hamas since 1988 in carrying the millennial aspiration of that hadith into an active apocalyptic phase, where the first order of business is to kill a Jew, and barring that, get a Jew to kill a Palestinian.Elliott Adrams: American Jewish Anti-Zionist Diasporism: A Critique
In what historical seminar studying movements such as these, say, of the Annales school of mentalités, would someone analyse a case where two such unusually dangerous movements appear two generations apart, and share such striking similarities, without discussing the many connections and parallels? Who would begin an historical reconstruction of the later movement in the three years after the defeat of their predecessors and allies in 1945, and begin with (their own failure to commit genocide in) 1948 when Israel ‘deprived Palestinians of their rights,’ rather than the late 1930s, when Jihadis and Nazis first joined forces? What historian of mentalités would discuss the rise of multiple, genocidal Jihadi cults in the Muslim world in the subsequent generations, without examining their relationship to the double genocidal failures of the 1940s? Not any seminar I or Omer attended back in the early 1970s, the years before Orientalism took over.
If ‘civilisation’ arises from the organisational treasuring of life, then is this conflict not a civilisational battle with a death cult, which even Muslims find alarming? And is that cult not showing alarming strength? There are historical cases when an active cataclysmic apocalyptic movement ‘took’ inside a given civilisation. And none have happy endings.
And just as it is appropriate to see the two world wars of the 20th century as one ‘thirty-year’s war’ with a brief respite, how much the more likely, in the perspective of an historian, is it to see this battle over the land twixt river and sea as the only, still active, battle front of World War II? Or, worse, the opening of the next round of a global struggle with totalitarian cults of hatred and death that is, apparently, far from over.
Back in the 1990s, when people began to warn about Caliphators (Jihadis, Islamists), about a religious war brewing between the agnostic West and the zealous Middle East, most of us who heard that these true believers were fighting to take over the world and create a global Caliphate, dismissed it as ludicrous fantasy, or, especially after 9-11, dangerous ‘Islamophobia.’ And the only way a millennial historian could respond to that incredulity was to point out that in millennial movements, wrong does not mean inconsequential. Look at the damage done by twelve years of the Tausendjährige Reich.
Now, a generation later the landscape looks more menacing. While we slept…
One of the key moments in the history of all movements that, as millennial analyst Henri Desroche put it, ‘take’ like a forest fire, is the moment they show their real face in public. In most cases, the public gaze repels them and their radical, impossible ideas, sometimes violently. But in the rare and famous cases where ‘going public’ sparks excitement and enthusiasm, the movement gains public authority and a path to taking and exploiting power.
7/10 was the day of revelation. Faced with the savagery of their brethren, the civil-society, human rights Palestinian community cheered. And they were joined by people who, in principle, supported them according to their progressive claims. What is the meaning of these demonstrations on our campuses and around the country. These celebrations of savage sadism, with their attendant cries of ‘revolution’ and accusations of ‘genocide,’ bode ill for the liberal societies in which they appear. They hail a death cult. Why on earth would progressives jump for joy?
Go to enough anti-Israel protests in the U.S., and you’ll inevitably see a few members of the stridently anti-Israel haredi group Neturei Karta, which has taken to mimicking the slogans of radical leftists and Islamists. Elliott Abrams observes that left-wing Jewish anti-Zionists share with these religious opponents of Israel the basic assumption that “a Jewish state cannot exist until the messianic age arrives because the one we have, built by men and women, is not pure enough.”Mob Education at the Ivies
This view exhibits what Abrams calls “moral blindness,” which he illustrates with an anecdote about the Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertesz, told by the Jewish activist Andres Spokoiny:
During a visit to Israel, a foreign journalist, aware of Kertész’s humanist and pacifist leanings, asked him, “How does it feel for you to see a Star of David on a tank?” “Much better than seeing it on my concentration camp uniform,” he answered.
For Kertesz, moralizing about the existence of a Jewish army made little sense when the alternative was the mass murder of Jews. But for today’s generation of American Jews, who share the liberal leanings of their parents and grandparents and face anti-Israel sentiment of unprecedented ferocity, Kertesz’s straightforward answer will seem anything but obvious. And they will have to make difficult choices, especially since, as Abrams writes, the principles of liberalism are themselves changing:
we have seen the many efforts to redefine them on American campuses since October 7. No doubt this was a joyous moment for many leftist Jews, as they watched tent encampments built, classes disrupted, and Israel defamed. But for other American Jews, not quite so far left, it was no doubt painful. Among Jewish students themselves, many had to choose between supporting the Jewish state and the Jewish people—or being ostracized by former friends, excluded from clubs and cliques they had happily joined, and even facing physical danger.
The American Zionist movement dates back to the end of the 19th century and the Zionist consensus dates back over 80 years. The anti-Zionist efforts now underway to shred it are the most energetic, the best financed, and the most dangerous American Jews have experienced. . . . Will younger American Jews see a model for how to live as a Jew and a moral human being in their behavior—or in the siren song of the left as it maneuvers to undermine the Jewish people and the Jewish state?
The developments at Princeton, Brown, and Harvard demonstrate that these institutions of higher learning have lost sight of why they exist in the first place—educational excellence.
Education—especially an Ivy League education—involves acquiring values and priorities that will carry over beyond the four years within the walls of any university. These values are meant to shape young students, who enter college in their late teen years and emerge as adults.
Being an adult means internalizing that actions have consequences and that accountability is vital for the functioning of civil society. On campuses across the country, students are taking away a very different message—a message of entitlement. You can interfere with the learning of your fellow students, trespass on private property, and blatantly disobey direct orders without fear of serious repercussions. In fact, if you double down on the path of obstinacy, intimidation, and harassment, the world will accede to your demands.
What I have found most troubling these last seven months is that this ethos, which represents an inversion of the values an American university ought to impart to its students, has been mainstreamed.
This is the same message that the world has long sent the Palestinians and that our own government has broadcast since Oct. 7. Hamas brutally murdered, raped, mutilated, and burned alive innocent Israeli civilians. In return, they received hundreds of millions in aid, a U.N. General Assembly resolution urging the Security Council to grant Palestine member status, and the U.S. prioritizing the creation of a Palestinian state. Today’s college students are learning the lesson Hamas has internalized: Violence brings rewards.
The most basic function of all governments is to provide for the collective defense of the governed. The most basic foundation of sovereignty is a state’s right to defend its country from aggression. Take away a state’s right to self-defense, and you’ve effectively transformed it into a non-sovereign state.Douglas Murray: International Criminal Court runs wild, threatening Israel and anyone who criticizes it
Six Biden administration actions and policies subvert Israel’s right to self-defense. Whether analysed separately or all together, they make it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the administration’s ultimate end is to undermine to the point of ending Israel’s right to self-defense, and so end Israel’s sovereignty, for all intents and purposes.
The six policies the administration is undertaking relate to the battle in Rafah, Gaza’s border town with Egypt; its posture vis-à-vis the International Criminal Court amidst the ICC’s stated intention of issuing arrest warrants against Israel’s leaders on false war crimes charges; the administration’s effort to coerce Israel into accepting Palestinian Authority control over post-war Gaza as a stepping stone towards the swift establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, and parts of Jerusalem; the administration’s policies in relation to Saudi-Israeli normalization; and finally, the administration’s determination to block Israel from taking any effective action to prevent Iran from building a nuclear arsenal.
Rafah
Sunday, the IDF carried out an airstrike targeting two senior Hamas terrorists in Rafah. Some 45 people Hamas asserts were civilians were also killed in the bombing. Immediately after the incident, the administration harshly criticized Israel for the operation. Vice President Kamala Harris said “the word tragic doesn’t even begin to describe” the loss of human life in the incident. Other senior officials voiced similar revulsion at Israel’s alleged killing of innocent civilians as a result of its killing of two senior terrorists. The U.S. State Department announced it would investigate the incident, which it referred to as “heartbreaking.”
Within moments of the airstrike, IDF forces on the ground were reporting that the fire that caused the deaths of the additional Palestinians was sparked by a secondary explosion. Early assessments were that the explosion was caused by Hamas rockets hidden adjacent to the encampment.
It was also clear, immediately after the bombing, that the operation was not carried out in a humanitarian safe zone, as Hamas alleged. At Israel’s urging, in recent weeks nearly a million residents of Rafah fled to the zones, which the IDF set up to protect them from the crossfire of battle. The bombing was carried out in the war zone, where civilians had already left.
It was also known immediately after the incident that the Air Force used the smallest ordnance permitted to limit to the greatest degree the possibility of the attack causing additional deaths beyond the two terror commanders Israel targeted.
In the two days after the incident, the IDF released intercepted phone conversations between people on the ground who stated outright that the fire in the tents that caused the additional deaths was the result of a secondary explosion of Hamas munitions. Israel played no role in the carnage. Hamas was entirely responsible for everything that had happened.
Given the fact that Israel’s careful prosecution of the war has led to the smallest ratio of civilians to militants killed in the history of modern war, its ally, the United States, could have been expected to give it the benefit of the doubt and not rush to pile on international condemnations of the Jewish state based entirely on Hamas footage and propaganda.
But the fact is that for months, Washington did everything possible to block Israel from carrying out its vital operation in Rafah, knowing all along that Israel cannot defeat Hamas if it leaves the international border under Hamas’s control. The administration’s latest effort to delegitimize Israel’s operation in Rafah by embracing Hamas’s quickly discredited rendition of events follows the administration’s now-established pattern of undermining the operation.
The ICC is not just threatening US senators. It is saying they are already criminals in the eyes of the ICC prosecutor. Making the ICC effectively impossible to criticize.A Progressive Pogrom – Of Shani Louk, Jean Améry, and the anti-Zionist left
An almost divine institution.
Criticize the ICC and you become a war criminal-in-waiting too, apparently.
Well, the puffed-up prosecutor might note several things.
Not least that the USA is not a signatory to the Rome Statute.
And so, threatening US senators with a statute that the US does not recognize is as scary as threatening someone with your imaginary black belt in karate.
But all this should be a reminder of a serious truth.
In recent decades, there have been repeated pushes to make America join the court.
There has been much international criticism of this country for not coming under the court’s jurisdiction.
But America was completely right not to do so.
And the response of the prosecutor to the senators is a fine example of why.
The ICC’s current case is being backed up by such luminaries as Amal Clooney, who has a career-long dislike of the state of Israel, and whose involvement in the case against Israel reveals that hatred.
If Americans don´t think that senators, soldiers or anyone else should be threatened by Amal Clooney and a couple of rogue foreign judges, they are right.
But our allies shouldn’t be subjected to this either.
I hope Americans continue to tell these pompous political judges where to sling it.
I cannot join the protesters on the barricades for the elemental reason that too many of them have explicitly sanctioned the murder of my friends. Pretty basic stuff really. If faced with Columbia student protest leader Khymani James, in fact, it would be as much self-interest as fraternal solidarity which caused me to run. For James would murder me, too. ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live,’ you see. James assures us that ‘I don’t fight to injure or for there to be a winner or a loser, I fight to kill,’ but I am not much mollified by the thought that my end would be quick. The Columbia disciplinary panel to which James spoke these words was apparently rather less concerned than I, since they acted only when the clip went viral.
Show me a protest which hates the war and Hamas in equal measure; which seeks desperately a free Palestine alongside a secure Israel; which is possessed of a moral clarity and a belief in the sanctity of all innocent life: I will be there, placard in hand, in a heartbeat. There has been no such protest because there is no anti-war left presently capable of it. A note to them: if you want to see how it is done, follow the extraordinary exiled Gazan writer Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. Alkhatib has so far lost 31 members of his extended family to the war and manages to hate and protest it while also inveighing against the evils of Hamas, consequently making many enemies amongst other supposed proponents of the Palestinian cause who would justify 7 October. His is a truly moral position.
A LEFT THAT CAN ACCOUNT FOR SHANI
The road to this squalid reaction to 7 October has been a long one, with many a disastrous turn leading the far left into ever more dangerous and bankrupt territory. It is what happens when dogma becomes more fashionable than critical thought; when radicalism trumps reason; when the antidote to Orientalism is taken to be Occidentalism; when the counter to cultural imperialism is moral relativism; when it is ‘better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron’; when Foucault decides, for us all, that Iranian women and Iranian democrats can go to hell – the Ayatollah is, after all, just too damned exciting.
Yes, the present swamp was fed by myriad fetid tributaries. So too does it inevitably become more and more contaminated. Generations raised on blather masquerading as profundity and on nihilism masquerading as radical chic. This next generation has far exceeded Butler in both irrationality and the explicitness of its contempt for Israeli life. Butler at least offered a condemnation of 7 October, of sorts (though it was still ‘armed resistance’, not ‘terrorism’) only to find that the beast they have played a not inconsiderable part in creating now considered them rather a copout. And your sons and your daughters are beyond your command…
Yes, the left of the 21st century needed the children of Victor Serge and Sophie Scholl, of Dr King and Nye Bevan. In too many places has it received instead the children of Nechayev and Che, of Mao and Ulrike Meinhof. For many this treason has led to a self-imposed exile, an auto-excommunication from the left. For me, as for Améry before me, this is impossible. Whether we are capable of a consequential renaissance remains to be seen. It is a Sisyphean task and one which 7 October has shown us cannot be left to the gatekeepers. No, as Améry noted, ‘the answer must come not so much from those who hold positions of responsibility but primarily from those possessed of an actual sense of responsibility.’ Go with Orwell, if you prefer, and that the answer lies with the proles.
The wait may be a long one. In the meantime, I would encourage the emerging leftist who senses something wrong in all this but is not quite sure where to start, to begin by adapting the famous proposition of Rabbi Greenberg. After the holocaust, said the Rabbi, ‘No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children.’ Well, henceforth, brook no statement from the left on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would not be credible if uttered on that truck with Shani. It is the best – perhaps it is all – you can do for her now.
Friday, May 31, 2024Elder of Ziyon
cartoon of the day, ElderToonsFriday, May 31, 2024Elder of ZiyonThe Vancouver Comic Arts Festival banned a Jewish artist on Saturday following backlash from anti-Israel activists about her participation in the exhibition due to her past service in the IDF.VanCAF issued an “accountability statement” after Jewish nonfiction and autobiographical comics artist Miriam Libicki participated in the May 18–19 festival.In 2008, Libicki published a graphic novel about serving in the IDF, which the festival described as recounting her “personal position in the said military and the illegal occupation of Palestine.”“The oversight and ignorance to allow this exhibitor in the festival, not only this year but in 2022 as well, fundamentally falls in absolute disregard to all of our exhibiting artists, attendees, and staff, especially those who are directly affected by the ongoing genocide in Palestine and Indigenous community members alike,” said VanCAF. “This exhibitor will not be permitted to return to the festival.”The festival assured that it would revise its policies and submission guidelines and adhere to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott [BDS] of Israel’s guidelines.
An incendiary device was thrown at the front doors of a Vancouver synagogue on Thursday evening, causing minor damage and no injuries, the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver announced.The Vancouver Police Department and Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services conducted a search of the Schara Tzedek synagogue after the arson attack damaged the building's entrance at around 9:30 p.m., according to the Federation, and the emergency services declared the site safe for use.
Law enforcement is reportedly still investigating the incident and has increased patrols around local Vancouver Jewish institutions. The Federation said that it was contacting and advising Jewish institutions to remain vigilant and follow security protocols.
Nah, a complete coincidence that an epicenter of anti-Israel hate in Canada is also a scene of classic antisemitic hate.
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Friday, May 31, 2024Elder of Ziyon
Friday, May 31, 2024Elder of Ziyon
Israel could have used smaller weapons against Hamas to avoid deaths in Gaza tent fire, experts say
...Even the smallest jet-launched munition may be too big when civilians are near because of how they explode and can send fragments far, defense experts said.Based on images and satellite photos of the debris field, two defense experts said the bombs used were likely U.S.-made 250-pound (113-kilogram) GBU-39 small-diameter bombs.Though they're smaller than many other weapons the U.S. has provided to Israel, these bombs can still create a wide swath of damage. The entire 250-pound shell and components are designed to spew fragments that can travel as far as 2,000 feet (600 meters).“You essentially have two bombs they use that the fragments can travel 600 meters in a densely packed area. So that just doesn’t check out if they’re trying to limit casualties,” said Trevor Ball, a former Army explosive ordnance demolition technician.
The GBU-39 is known as the SDB - Small Diameter Bomb. As far as I can tell, it is the smallest bomb available for deployment by fighter jets. It was designed specifically to minimize collateral damage. It carries only 17 kilograms of explosives.
I have no idea where this "expert" got the information that the GBU-39 can send fragments 2000 feet away. The blast radius for the bomb is generally known to be 26 feet, Videos I've seen show it is used to destroy objects the size of trucks, not ships.
Perhaps some fragments can anomalously travel a couple of hundred feet, but to say they are "designed" to spew fragments 2000 feet is an out and out lie.
To give perspective, the "kill radius" of a modern hand grenade is 16 feet. That means that the GBU-39 blast radius is about equivalent to three hand grenades (2,200 square feet.)
If the GBU-39 is the smallest bomb possible to launch from the air, then what else could Israel do to eliminate Hamas leaders?
One expert answers:
Israel, for example, in this strike could have used a smaller anti-personnel weapon called the mini-Spike, which would not have created as wide an area of debris, if it was targeting specific Hamas leaders, Cancian said.
I do not pretend to be a military expert by any means. But the mini-Spike is a weapon carried by a soldier on the ground and has a range of only 1,200 meters. Were there IDF soldiers, equipped with mini-Spikes, within 1,200 meters of the target, ready and waiting to deploy? Doesn't that seem improbable?
When intelligence comes in about high value targets that can move, an army prioritizes killing them while they know where they are and doesn't have the luxury to come up with elaborate alternative plans that might have a slightly lower chance of collateral damage.
This armchair quarterbacking is absurd. These "experts" know next to nothing about what the actual, in the moment battlefield conditions were that made Israel apparently choose a GBU-39 as the best weapon at that point in time.
Maybe the people interviewed are experts in explosives, but they know nothing about real-time targeting decisions. Real military experts praise Israel in that arena.
From everything we know, the civilians nearby were not killed by debris from the bomb but from the fire that was ignited by secondary explosions of Hamas munitions. The people were killed by a fire ignited by Hamas explosives, not Israeli bombs! This is not even mentioned in the AP article. Anticipating such a result is the domain of psychics. The actual facts of the incident destroy the entire premise of the article. After all, even a single bullet could have accidentally set off Hamas explosives, too.
Beyond that, the entire article is written with the implication that if there were a couple of civilians "scattered" nearby then Israel should not have shot the Hamas leaders at all. Yet under international law, if the value of the target is high enough, the attackers are absolutely allowed to target it even with civilian casualties. AP and the "experts" are demanding a standard for Israel than no army in history has ever achieved, and that no army in history has ever been expected to achieve.
To write an entire article like this applying double standards to only Israel is not analysis - it is antisemitic libel.
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It has become conventional wisdom after Oct. 7 that Israel for years had the wrong policy toward Gaza. While the unfathomable catastrophe of that day has rightly forced a critical examination of all the factors that led to it, it’s arguable that Israel’s broad pre-Oct. 7 policy toward Gaza, in contrast to its strategic conception and military preparation, was at least understandable, if not correct. In contrast, there has been less criticism of Israel’s policy toward Hezbollah in Lebanon over the past two decades. Not only does the policy toward the northern front raise even more troubling questions than Gaza, but also, now more than ever, it looks like a major strategic failure.Live by the Law or Die on the Cross
Ever since Hamas took control of Gaza by force in 2007, Israel has fought several small wars with the genocidal terrorist organization, in response to rocket attacks from the Strip: in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, and 2021. There were also shorter Israeli military campaigns against the Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in 2022 and 2023. In each of these conflicts, Israel would have been justified to enter Gaza and destroy Hamas in self-defense, but never felt so compelled—until Oct. 7.
It has been frequently reported that Israel, or at least its military intelligence agency, had a faulty strategic conception, the so-called “konceptzia,” that Hamas was deterred for now and more focused on governing Gaza than on attacking Israel. Many pundits in the Israeli and American media, who are overwhelmingly hostile to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, contend he was driven to prop up Hamas over the years with the help of Qatari money in order to divide the Palestinians and reduce pressure for a Palestinian state in the West Bank. Netanyahu, who has waged several wars against Hamas, has repeatedly denied this claim. While there have been plenty of leaks in the media already, Israeli military and government probes are expected to reveal what the military intelligence’s konceptzia was, what was motivating Netanyahu and other Israeli political and military leaders, and what contributed to the IDF inadequately preparing for, and/or ignoring signals of, a major Hamas attack.
In the meantime, it’s worth exploring why Israel did not invade Gaza and uproot Hamas from power years ago, based on the premise that Oct. 7 was not inevitable.
The threat from Gaza, however challenging, appeared increasingly manageable to most Israeli military and civilian leaders, despite the short wars with Hamas and PIJ. This misplaced confidence appears to have been partly driven by an overreliance on technology and missile defense. The 2011 deployment of Iron Dome, Israel’s 90%-plus-effective, short-range air defense system, seemingly minimized the rocket threat. With Iron Beam—a laser version that will be at the very least a powerful supplement to Iron Dome—soon to be deployed, Israel believed it was poised to have an even better counter to rockets fired from Gaza. One Israeli military expert told me a few years ago that once Iron Beam was deployed Israel won’t care what happens inside Gaza.
Hamas’ subterranean (tunnel) threat, which already seemed significant a decade ago, was thought neutralized with the installation along the border of underground sensors and barriers. Israel also believed it had neutralized the threat of a land invasion by installing an expensive fence with sensors and cameras. Moreover, the Israeli Air Force continued to operate at will in Gaza, often successfully killing Hamas and PIJ commanders and destroying terrorist infrastructure with precision strikes.
Secure in the belief that these measures had militarily neutralized the Hamas threat, Israel’s civilian and military leaders were mostly averse to destroying Hamas and removing it from power in Gaza.
Israel remained loath to reoccupy Gaza, which it occupied in 1967 and from which it withdrew in 2005, out of concern that any attempt to do so would result in significant Israeli military casualties. Worse, it would bog Israel down in an unwanted occupation of Palestinians in what was viewed as a secondary or tertiary theater compared to the far more potent and immediate threat of Hezbollah to its north and Iran’s nuclear program. Also, Israel had tried its hand at shaping domestic Arab political arrangements in Lebanon in 1982, where it failed spectacularly, and its leaders opposed trying it again ever since. Further, Israeli leaders understood that such an effort in Gaza would be met by fierce international opposition. Indeed, it faced such opposition every time it launched a military campaign in retaliation for Hamas or PIJ firing rockets.
Moreover, when it comes to who could or would responsibly rule Gaza post-Hamas without threatening Israel, there simply never were serious candidates. Egypt did not want Gaza back after losing it to Israel in the 1967 war. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat wisely sought every inch of Sinai and not one inch of Gaza in Egypt’s peace agreement with Israel four decades ago. After the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) spectacular rout at the hands of Hamas two years after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Israeli governments increasingly doubted they could rely on the PA to govern the Strip. The PA’s endemic mismanagement, corruption, and radicalism helped spawn overwhelming support for Hamas among its West Bank populace, and its financial rewarding of terrorism is especially anathema to the Israeli political right.
Israel must stop pretending it is a nation like any otherUNRWA Head Demonstrates Moral Bankruptcy in Whiny New York Times Op-Ed
The Jews do not venerate the image of a more-divine-than-usual human who achieved an abstract victory for all of humanity by dying horribly. And because we do not, we cannot accept the Western exhortation to be suicidally gentle with our enemies in order to receive a Christian burial on their “moral high ground.”
There are many things about the Jewish state, both as it currently is and as the Torah imagines it could be, that meet the loftiest ideals of the liberal, crypto-Christian West. Jews by and large love living in the liberal, secular West because our culture has great intuitive affection for freedom of speech and conscience, as well as the need for each unique individual to be given the freedom to discover his God-given purpose.
But as a reflection of the oneness of the God described therein, the Torah is obstinately balanced when it comes to simple principles. It insists on justice, but makes room for mercy. It cherishes human life, but acknowledges deadly violence can be correct. It sees all people as created in the image of God, but it commands the nation of Israel to play a unique priestly role, through example rather than through world-dominating force, in leading the world to greater knowledge and service of God.
Put into practice in 2024, this means that Israel must stop pretending it is a nation like any other, begging to be judged fairly by whatever standards the current hegemon has decreed we all agree upon. We need to look for standards from within our tradition to set a moral example for the whole world, while making it more practically possible to defend our homeland.
Instead of bragging about the extra danger our soldiers experience for the sake of sparing enemy noncombatants, we should reject the premise that we Jews bear any responsibility for protecting the human shields employed by our enemy.
Instead of threatening Jews with arrest for praying on the Temple Mount, we should take a hint from the “Al-Aqsa” moniker our attackers gave to their day of savage invasion and let kohanim up there on the hill to slaughter lambs for Passover.
And above all—given that land is nearly all that matters to this death-worshipping foe—instead of repeatedly withdrawing troops from areas we have just taken over so we can deny having unchristian territorial ambitions, we should conquer, annex, and resettle parts of Gaza so that Jews and friendly gentiles both can live there safely.
If our own, unsurpassably subtle ethical tradition guides us to these policies, then it is only our lingering ideological subjugation to the Western tradition that makes them seem scandalous. Like the Jew among nations, Israel constantly struggles with its half-successful attempt to blend in with the crowd and pretend to be a member like any other, and it is time to put an end to this paralyzing charade. We did not stick to our Law through 3,000 years of human civilization to continue national life as the perpetual defendant. It is our job to know that Law, to teach what we know—and, most of all, to live by it.
How do children react when they are caught red-handed? They blame someone else and cry.
Which is exactly what the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) did on Thursday (May 30), in an op-ed published by The New York Times.
In the article, titled “Israel Must Stop Its Campaign Against UNRWA,” Philippe Lazzarini whines that his organization is under attack by the Jewish state, which has accused it of having links to Gaza terror groups.
The gist of his over-simplistic argument, that omits Hamas as the real target of Israel’s war effort, is as follows: UNRWA is attacked by vicious Israelis for no reason, and the world must do something about it.
Related Reading: Media Outlets Continue To Conceal the Appalling Truth About UNRWA
In his own dramatic words, it sounds like Israel’s war aim is to target and harass innocent UNRWA employees and not Hamas terrorists:
As I write this, our agency has verified that at least 192 UNRWA employees have been killed in Gaza. More than 170 UNRWA premises have been damaged or destroyed. UNRWA-run schools have been demolished.
Israeli officials are not only threatening the work of our staff and mission, they are also delegitimizing UNRWA by effectively characterizing it as a terrorist organization.
How can this be possible? Where is the international outrage? Its absence is a license to disregard the United Nations and opens the door to impunity and chaos.
While Israel has long been hostile to UNRWA, following the abhorrent attacks of Oct. 7 it unleashed a campaign to equate UNRWA with Hamas and depict the agency as promoting extremism.
All of the above allows Lazzarini to deflect criticism and avoid holding himself and his organization accountable in the face of Israeli allegations.
While he refers to the dozen UNRWA employees who have been accused by Israel of participating in the October 7 massacre, he treads lightly: He says that UNRWA investigates Israel’s allegations but at the same time creates the impression of a false dichotomy between the organization and its employees.
In fact, he ignores evidence suggesting that UNRWA has become a Hamas front:
Israel has said that 190 UNRWA employees, including teachers, have doubled as Hamas or Islamic Jihad terrorists.
Israel uncovered a Hamas facility under UNRWA headquarters in Gaza.
The IDF regularly releases data showing that Hamas terrorists use UNRWA schools in Gaza.
UN Watch exposed that 3,000 UNRWA teachers were in a Telegram group that celebrated the October 7 attack.
Why does Lazzarini not address these allegations head-on in an apologetic op-ed?
Interestingly, in his frenzy to attack Israel, he seems to admit that Hamas uses UNRWA facilities in Gaza.
Thursday, May 30, 2024Elder of Ziyon
My family will also testify, if necessary. We're waiting here in an Israeli-made refugee safe zone outside Rafah, in case you need to reach us.
It was horrible! Starting long before October 7, when Gaza was an open-air prison under harsh blockade, we had plenty of access to all the food and luxury restaurants the heart desires. But now Israel has destroyed that paradise, and only allows in hundreds of trucks per day, meaning that the quantity of food that enters the territory now is a paltry 1.5 times the amount we had before the genocide.
We died in late November. Then again in January and April. It was horrible! Local independent media can confirm this in multiple video clips that made their way around social media. Please ignore any lack of resemblance between the skeletal corpses in the images and our appearance in other, concurrent materials, and any non-skeletal appearances we have in those other media.
Also please disregard the parts of the videos labeled "Syria," "Yemen," or "Sudan." We had a hard time cropping them out during post-production, being dead of starvation and all.
Not that the application for an arrest warrant addresses this specifically, so my testimony in its regard might not prove strictly necessary, but I am also willing to testify that the IDF fatally shot me and three of my sons during the Gaza border demonstrations a few years ago. My sons might be unavailable, though, come to think of it. Something about "Sabaya" women. the point is, they might be busy. But my wife will testify she was raped by Israeli soldiers, which is why I had to have her killed to preserve the family's honor.
Her brother Anas did it, but then he, too, fell victim, crushed under the rubble of an Israeli bomb. He was also burned to death after that, by white phosphorus, He can testify as well. Just call us!
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