Google launches program to actually help Palestinians more than all the NGOs combined

What does it mean to be "pro-Palestinian?"

To most people who define themselves that way, it means to be anti-Israel. 

Even though NGOs spend tens of millions of dollars in their anti-Israel efforts, writing yet another report finding yet another way Israel is supposedly the worst abuser in the world doesn't help Palestinians one bit. 

Google just announced an initiative that will help more Palestinians improve their lives than anything Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, B'Tselem, the UN and the EU does  - combined.

Apply to Palestine Launchpad with Google

Future-proof your skills for the digital economy 

In our dynamic world, time and technology are vital. The digital and gig economies transcend borders, leveling opportunities for talent and ideas. The Palestine Launchpad with Google equips you with the skills, knowledge, and network to enter the global tech talent pool and become a top earner.

• Fully funded scholarship for a Nanodegree Programme

• Line-by-line code review with personalised project feedback

• Flexible self-paced learning schedule

• Live virtual sessions with top-tier mentors

• Career workshops (resume building, interview preparations, etc.)

• Exposure to freelancing and career growth opportunities

• Networking with local and international employers

💻 Become a Web Developer

🤖 Become an AI Engineer

📊 Become a Data Analyst

You are eligible for this programme if you are

• Currently residing in Palestine

• Looking to be part of tomorrow’s tech-powered economy

• Recently graduated from a computer science related field (or are in your final years of study)

• Want to upskill, reskill, or specialise in the various fields shaping this economy, this programme is your springboard.

They are offering free scholarships for 6,000 Palestinians to learn cutting edge skills where they can make money working for companies worldwide without leaving home.

I have been mystified that the EU and USAID have not prioritized this sort of training - training that would actually help Palestinians more than their other initiatives. The average Palestinian salary is now about $20,000 a year - imagine the impact from thousands making Western high tech salaries quintuple that.

The supreme irony is that while Google is doing more to help Palestinians than any other organization in the world, it is being targeted by BDS because it also does work with Israel. 

We've shown that BDS actually opposed Cisco doing a similar program to promote high tech jobs among Palestinians. 

Israel doesn't mind Palestinians getting high paid tech jobs. But "pro-Palestinian activists" do!

Which again goes to prove that the anti-Israel crowd really doesn't give a damn about helping Palestinians. 

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Some good editorial cartoons (for once)

I was looking through a collection of editorial cartoons, and many of them dealing with Israel are horrific - antisemitic, ignorant or both.

But there were a few good ones that hold up..

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Imagine if Israel boycotted Palestinian products

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics announced that in March 2023, the Palestinians exported goods worth nearly $150 million.

87% of those goods went to Israel. 

In contrast, "only" 54% of Palestinian imports come from Israel; that used to be much higher.

Now, let's imagine if Israel did what the BDS movement wants to see - and shut off all imports and exports to the territories.

The impact on Israelis would be minimal, since Palestinian trade accounts for less than 1% of all Israeli imports and exports.  

The impact on the Palestinians would be immediate and drastic. 

Which proves yet again that the BDSers don't care about Palestinian welfare. They are willing to fight Israel down to the last Palestinian, and that includes forcing them into poverty - while they themselves use Israeli products and technologies every hour of every day. 

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Denmark buys Israeli artillery systems, backfilling weapons sent to Ukraine - and upsetting BDSers

ATMOS truck-mounted howitzer

Defense News reported in March:

Israeli defense company Elbit Systems said it won several deals in Europe this month, including a $119 million sale of ATMOS truck-mounted howitzers and a $133 million contract for PULS artillery rocket systems.

The deals, which Elbit said are with a European NATO member country, come as several governments on the continent continue their shopping sprees to resupply their troops, having sent munitions from their own stocks to Ukraine, which is under invasion by Russia.

“We are witnessing a trajectory of an increased demand for advanced artillery solutions from militaries around the world, including European countries and NATO members, as part of their efforts to increase the effectiveness of their armed forces. Our operationally proven systems provide an advanced, cost-effective solution to meet that demand,” said Bezhalel Machlis, the CEO of Elbit.

Although the buyer was not named, it is widely believed to be Denmark, based on an earlier press release that Denmark was negotiating with Elbit for those systems.

I'm surprised that we have not yet seen conspiracy theories that Israel is behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine in order to increase its arms sales to NATO members.

Anyway, the BDSers are livid, because they claimed to have scuttled another contract between Denmark and Elbit in 2015, a claim denied by the Danish authorities. And Mondoweiss blamed the Danish Left for this sale, saying that they were silent during the negotiations, unlike in 2015:

Few voices have raised concerns about the unusual speed this deal has gone through without due process or vigorous political scrutiny from the opposition. Is the Danish left happy to support a deal for weapons tested on the Palestinian civilians in the West Bank? Has the priority of the war in Ukraine meant all debate regarding arms procurement from Israel is frozen? Are Palestinians to remain second-class citizens in the eyes of the international community, only to be exploited for political capital as a means to express one’s ‘humanism’? 

Well, you learn something new every day. Israel has been shooting artillery at Palestinian civilians in the West Bank! Somehow the media has missed this entire story, but Mondoweiss figured it out. It is amazing what scoops you can find when you don't know what you are talking about.. 

This little episode indicates that the 2015 arms sale was not blocked by BDS, and it was just another fake victory they claimed. 

And it also shows that while Israel has not been directly supplying weapons to Ukraine, it has been supplying them indirectly, by backfilling weapons being sent from European countries. This way the EU countries get to upgrade their supplies while sending older weapons systems to Ukraine, which needs them badly. Everyone wins.

Except for BDSers and their Russian allies.  

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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04/27 Links Pt2: Israel Is Antiracist, Anti-Colonialist, Anti-Fascist (and Was from the Start); Why the world has turned against Israel; Caroline Glick: An afternoon among the angels

From Ian:

Jeffrey Herf: Israel Is Antiracist, Anti-Colonialist, Anti-Fascist (and Was from the Start)

Nor did support for Israel come only from the Soviet bloc. Liberals and leftists in London, Paris, New York, and Washington heard Jamal Husseini, the representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations, reject a Jewish state in Palestine, because, he said, it would undermine the “racial homogeneity” of the Arab world. Such remarks resonated in a profoundly negative fashion with Americans who had followed the appalling news out of Germany during and after the war. In the Senate, Robert Wagner, a major author of New Deal legislation, extolled the Jewish contribution to the Allied cause. He had already denounced appeasement of the Arabs during the war. With the Allied victory, continuing to appease Arab rejectionism surely made no sense. In the House, Democratic Congressman Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn led efforts to focus attention on Jamal Husseini’s cousin, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, who had entered into a written understanding with Germany and Italy to “solve the question of the Jewish elements, which exist in Palestine and in the other Arab countries . . . as the Jewish question was solved in Germany and Italy.”

The liberal media also took note. Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis was thoroughly documented in the New York Post as well as in the left-wing publications PM and The Nation, by I.F. Stone, Freda Kirchwey, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Edgar Mowrer, who urged Husseini’s indictment at Nuremberg. Nevertheless, despite extensive State Department files on Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis, the American bureaucracy succeeded in resisting efforts to put him on trial and publish its evidence of his Nazi-era activities.

The brief confluence of Soviet and liberal Western sympathies for the nascent Jewish state was brilliantly exploited by Ben-Gurion. He understood better than anyone that it presented a unique moment to bring Israel into existence, with the assent of the world’s two great powers — and that it was an opportunity that would soon close, as indeed it did. During the “anti-cosmopolitan” purges of the early 1950s, Stalin reversed course, spread the lie that Israel was a product of American imperialism, repressed the memory of Soviet support for the Zionist project, and launched a four-decade campaign of vilification against Zionism and Israel. It was one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the Cold War.

Stalin succeeded in rewriting American history, too. His insistence that it was the Americans and not the Soviets who had wholeheartedly supported the establishment of the State of Israel carried the day. And yet the records of the Departments of State and Defense and the CIA clearly document their emphatic and consequential opposition to the Zionist project.

The differences between the international political landscape of the late 1940s and the one that emerged first in Soviet and then world politics in the 1950s and 1960s need to be reflected in American-Jewish discussions about the establishment of Israel. Contrary to what we’ve heard at the United Nations for decades, in international BDS efforts, and in academic descriptions of Israel, the Zionist project was never a colonialist one.

Just the reverse. The generation that created the state, and its supporters abroad, viewed it as part of the era of liberal and leftist opposition to colonialism, racism, and, of course, antisemitism. The evidence is clear: Whatever faults Israel may have, its origins had nothing to do with American or British imperialism. The argument to the contrary is a conventional unwisdom that has found a home in too much scholarship and journalism of recent decades. Israel’s establishment was not a miracle that eludes historical explanation. It was an episode of enormous moral and military courage for which space was created by canny and hard-headed political leaders in the cause of historical justice — in particular David Ben-Gurion, who seized a fleeting moment, Israel’s moment, to create an enduring achievement.

Daniel Ben-Ami: Why the world has turned against Israel

From Israel's foundation in 1948 through the 1960s, the left generally celebrated Israel as an expression of Jews' right to national self-determination. By the 1990s, however, Western elites started to reject the idea of national self-determination. Yet the denigration of the right to national self-determination undermines the Palestinian cause, too.

Indeed, many of today's anti-Israel activists aren't really interested in Palestinian self-determination. They are mainly concerned with attacking Israel as a symbol of everything they dislike. This leads them to uncritically endorse Hamas, the leading Islamist representative of the Palestinians, and often Islamism more broadly.

Islamism's goal is not national self-determination, for the Palestinians or anyone else. Rather, it wants to create an international Islamic order. The destruction of Israel - and not the creation of a Palestinian state - is seen as central to achieving that objective. Islamists regard Jews as an expression of "cosmic Satanic evil," who should be physically exterminated if Islam is to flourish.

The Palestinian slogan, "from the river to the sea" (meaning from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean), is popular among both Islamists and Western leftists. Islamists often state openly that they want to murder most if not all of the Jews living there. So when they chant "Palestine should be free," they typically mean free of Jews.

Stephen Daisley: Why I love Israel

[T]here are plenty of reasons for Zionists to be gloomy on this, Israel’s 75th birthday, but there is one reason for optimism that outshines them all: Israel is 75. Israel was created; survived an immediate Arab effort to annihilate it; ingathered the survivors of the death camps; settled the land and built kibbutzim; struggled through the lean and lonely years; triumphed in the Six-Day War and reunited Jerusalem; pulled through the Yom Kippur War; endured two intifadas; rescued Beta Israel and welcomed the refuseniks; lost Yamit, lost Rabin, lost Gush Katif; made the desert bloom with fruits and microchips; and made peace with Arab nations. All of that in 75 years and, despite impossible odds, Israel lives yet.

Israel is a hard country and for many a hard country to love. It is flinty but whiny, eager for the world’s love but diplomatically tin-eared, unsentimental but gripped by existential angst. It is a country that adores its army and reveres military discipline but is so hectically informal that you wonder how it made it to 75 days, let alone 75 years. It also boasts the highest density of rude people in the known universe, although I find that strangely endearing. I have never loved Israel more than the time the manager of a Tel Aviv minimart yelled at me for a) not speaking Hebrew, b) being a foreign journalist, and c) coming in to shop when she was trying to watch TV. Only in Israel, the innovation nation, could they invent the inconvenience store.

If Zionism is the theory, Israel is the practice and like all practical translations of idealism it is compromised, haphazard, sometimes unsightly, and occasionally disheartening. But that tension between Zionism and Israel, between ahavat and ha’aretz, is where the great debates take place and where the course of Jewish history can be set or changed. Israeli independence, as it reaches 75 years, is still a miraculous application of a mundane idea: Jewish self-determination.

Israel Independence Day: Celebrating 75 Years with Natan Sharansky

Former Prisoner of Zion Natan Sharansky's personal journey reflects that of the Jewish people, and the centrality of Israel in his life and Jewish identity mirrors the experiences of so many Jews around the world.

Sharansky: "The existence of Israel and, in a way, the existence of the Jewish people is the best demonstration of the importance of these two basic desires of people - to be free and to belong."

"For a thousand years, what were we fighting for? For our right to live freely in accordance with our identity. And then Israel was established. It could not be created as a non-Jewish state and it would never have succeeded in gathering all the Jews if not for its freedom." "There is no other nation or any other state which embodies the strength of this connection. And if you look at history and compare us with Israel 50 years ago, we have much more freedom and much more identity. We have far more of a Jewish and democratic state, so that's the direction we're heading in....Our history and our triumphs are the best proof of how important it is for these two things to go together." "I grew up [in the Soviet Union] having zero connection with anything Jewish except through antisemitism....It was Israel that came in a very powerful way to the center of our life, from the Six-Day War, and it allowed us to discover our identity, that we have a history, we are a people and we have a state. That gave us the strength to fight for our Jewish rights and for a better world."

"When people simply want tikkun olam [repairing the world] without any identity...your life is very shallow. Look at how all these Birthright kids - whose bar mitzvah was the last time they've had a connection to being Jewish - suddenly discover that it's cool and even interesting to live inside history....Suddenly, they have energy, meaning and understanding....In this age, there is no better way to quickly give Jews a brief injection of the importance and meaning of discovering their Jewish identity than coming to Israel."

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By their own success criteria, BDS has been a massive failure

The website for the BDS Movement has a FAQ section that asks, "What has the BDS movement achieved so far?"

The very top achievement is listed as:

BDS was a major factor behind the 46% drop in foreign direct investment in Israel in 2014, according to a UN report.

How have direct investments in Israel done since then? 

 

If BDS is taking credit for the 46% drop in direct investment in 2014 then the 255% increase since then must be viewed as a huge BDS failure.

Also, the UN report did not say what BDS claims. It quoted a Newsweek article which in turn quoted a YNet article where one of the authors of the report said:

"We believe that what led to the drop in investment in Israel are Operation Protective Edge and the boycotts Israel is facing," Dr. Roni Manos of the College of Management and one of the authors of the report's summary told Ynet. According to her, these are only conjectures that can explain the sharp decline, but there is another reason. "In the past there were large transactions such as Waze and ISCAR Metalworking which boosted investment, but over the past year there were not enough such deals.

So BDS is not only trying to hide the statistics since 2014 that disprove its "victory," it even lied about the reason for the 2014 anomalous decline itself.

The BDS Movement FAQ goes on: 

A Rand Corporation study predicts BDS could reduce Israel’s GDP “by 1 to 2 percent” annually over the next 10 years.

That Rand study says, "Historical evidence from other countries suggests that financial and trade sanctions associated with boycott, divestment, and sanctions could reduce GDP by 1 to 2 percent. "

In other words, it was a wild guess for the purposes of making economic forecasts based on various scenarios, not a prediction for Israel.

Rand wrote that in 2015. How has Israel's GDP done since then?

Israel's GDP increased from $314 billion in 2014 to $488 billion in 2021, an increase of 55% and an average increase of nearly 8% a year.

It doesn't appear that BDS has hurt the Israeli economy at all. On the contrary, Israel has thrived and BDS has not affected it in the least. 

By the Israel-haters' own standards, on their own FAQ today, BDS has failed.

Now, I have said that economic damage is not really BDS' aim - demonization of Israel is. By that criterion, they have been successful. But part of that success is because they have been lying about Israel to the world and too many people are believing them. 

Here we see that they lie repeatedly to make themselves look successful, when by any economic criteria they have been an abject failure. 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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The haters are now demanding Trader Joe's stop selling matzoh made in Israel

This Mondoweiss article reads like a parody:

Trader Joe’s prides itself on delivering great products at fair prices. And we agree that they deliver on that promise. So, when we saw that our favorite food store is now selling Passover Matzo made in Israel we had to act. 

Trader Joe’s also has a reputation for being responsive to customers, so we started this campaign to tell them how disappointed we are in their decision to sell house branded Matzo prominently marked as a “product of Israel” or any other products labeled as “made in Israel.”

In support of the Palestinian Civil Society’s call to boycott all Israeli products, we never purchase Israeli-made products at Trader Joe’s or anywhere else, but that no longer feels like enough.  It is important that we tell stores, and the good people who work in them, why we boycott Israel and how badly it reflects on stores when they sell products made in Apartheid Israel.  

We hope that many people will join us by printing out this note to Trader Joe’s, signing it, and giving it to a manager in every Trader Joe’s that you shop in:

 

The funniest part of the Mondoweiss article was a selfie of co-author Seth Morrison smiling in front of the matzoh display with his "Palestine 1948" T-shirt. His smile makes it look like he is promoting the matzoh, not boycotting it!

This is way beyond activism and well into obsession territory. No one on Earth thinks that Palestinians are helped one iota from these ridiculous stunts, and it is obvious to all who care to think about it that this is not  animated by concern for Palestinian human rights but visceral hate for the Jewish state.

Trader Joe's sells other Israeli products, including their own branded Bamba snack and "Israeli Feta Cheese."  Horrors!

I can't wait for Sukkot when the haters start a campaign to boycott Israeli etrogim. 

(h/t Roger K)

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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