Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Poland

Showing posts with label Poland. Show all posts

Sunday, August 13, 2023

Nazis insisted on humane cattle cars - for cattle, not Jews. The logic behind it is relevant for "human rights defenders" today.

In the summer of 1942, Fritz Sendel, chief of staff of the German Order Police in occupied Poland, sent a message to the force’s commanding officers. Its subject: protecting the rights of animals that were transported on trains. “In the spirit of the Reich Animal Protection Act, I order, with immediate effect, that the officers of the stations (German and non-German) intervene immediately in cases of cruelty to animals, put a stop to it and report the offenders,” he wrote.

Sendel noted that “the majority of cases involving the cruelty to animals until now have been observed in regard to the horses used by the police forces.” On top of this, “the crowded conditions in the railway cattle cars, especially for animals being sent to slaughter, have also led to many credible complaints.”

The document in question was found in Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance by Eliyahu Klein, a PhD candidate at Tel Aviv University, whose dissertation, under the supervision of Prof. Havi Dreifuss and Dr. David Silberklang from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, focuses on the relationship between Jews and non-Jews under the German occupation in Poland and elsewhere.

Sendel added an appendix containing precise instructions, ordering the police officers to take action to prevent cruelty to animals and to report on any colleagues who mistreated them. The recommendations included reducing the number of animals per railcar, allowing them to have time to rest and monitoring their condition.

“The text mentions the need to oversee the conditions of the animals being transported,” Klein says. Officers were urged to ensure that the railcars were properly ventilated, to take note of the capacity of the cars and keep track of the number of animals loaded onto each one, and to make note of their physical condition, including details of injuries, respiratory problems and other symptoms. In addition, the German personnel were to see to it that the animals were not struck unnecessarily while being loaded onto the train, and asked to report on cases of sickness or death during the transport.

Klein mentions an exchange of correspondence in the summer of 1942 between two high-ranking Nazi figures. In it the deputy transport minister of Nazi Germany, Albert Ganzenmueller, updated Karl Wolff, chief of staff of Gestapo head Heinrich Himmler, about the transports to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto. In response, Wolff wrote, as quoted in Kerstin von Lingen’s 2013 book “Allen Dulles, the OSS, and Nazi War Criminals”: “I note with particular pleasure after reading your communication that a train with 5,000 members of the chosen people has been running daily [to Treblinka] for 14 days and that we are accordingly in a position to continue with this population movement at an accelerated pace. ..."

Notice how Ganzenmueller sarcastically refers to Jews as the "chosen people" in a way not dissimilar to how we see the term used by today's anti-Zionists.

The seeming contradiction between how Nazis treated Jews and how they treated animals is not a new topic. I found a very interesting 1992 article that tried to explain this dichotomy in terms of Nazi ideology and its German antecedents.

It would be easy to dismiss the apparently benevolent Nazi attitude toward animals as “hypocrisy,” but this would be a facile way of evading an examination of the psychological and social dynamics of Nazi thinking and behavior. Rather than questioning the authenticity of the motivations behind Nazi animal protection—a question that is unanswerable—it may be more useful to ask how such thinking was possible and what significance it had.

One motivation was the German desire to distinguish themselves morally from Jews. The practice of Jewish ritual slaughter was attacked in the 19th century by German animal rights activists and banning kosher slaughter was one of the first acts of the Nazi government. Propaganda films that attempted to show how cruel Jews were to animals were widely distributed. Moreover, Nazis framed animal experimentation as a "Jewish" practice which should be curtailed (although laws to that effect had many loopholes.)

More interestingly, the paper argues that while there was no consistent Nazi ideology, to a large extent Nazis regarded all humans as animals, with Aryans as the highest form of animal that had to be protected from intermixing with lower forms such as Jews (untermenschen.) It quotes one SS document:

The subhuman—that creation of nature, which biologically is seemingly quite identical with the human, with hands, feet, and a kind of brain, with eyes and a mouth—is nevertheless a totally different and horrible creature, is merely an attempt at being man—but mentally and emotionally on a far lower level than any animal. In the inner life of that person there is a cruel chaos of wild uninhibited passions: a nameless urge to destroy, the most primitive lust, undisguised baseness… But the subhuman lived, too… He associated with his own kind. The beast called the beast… And this underworld of subhumans found its leader: the eternal Jew!

In the hierarchy of the animal kingdom, the Jews occupied the lowest possible position:

When groups of people, most commonly Jews, were likened to specific animal species, it was usually “lower” animals or life forms, including rodents, reptiles, insects, or germs. Hitler (1938), for instance, called the Jews a “pack of rats,” and Himmler, in order to help soldiers cope with having just shot one hundred Jews, told them “bedbugs and rats have a life purpose…but this has never meant that man could not defend himself against vermin” (Hilberg 1961, 219). The propaganda film Triumph of the Will superimposed images of rats over presumed “degenerate people” such as the Jews, and the 1940 film The Eternal Jew portrayed Jews as lower than vermin, somewhat akin to the rat—filthy, corrupting, disease carrying, ugly, and group oriented (Herzstein 1978, 309). ... Jews were also likened to bacteria and “plagues” of insects (Herzstein 1978, 354).

But the Germans even regarded Aryans, in a sense, as animals. Nazis proposed ways to breed superhumans the same way that animals are bred, reducing even Aryan human beings to little more than breeding stock:

Much of Himmler’s knowledge about animal breeding practices was directly applied to plans for human breeding to further Aryan traits (Bookbinder 1989). One of Himmler’s obsessions was the breeding of many more superior Nordic offspring (Shirer 1960, 984). Financial awards were made for giving birth if the child was of biological and racial value, and potential mothers of good Aryan stock who did not give birth were branded as “unwholesome, traitors and criminals” (Deuel 1942, 164–65). Encouraging the propagation of good German blood was seen as so important that several Nazi leaders advocated free love in special recreation camps for girls with pure Aryan qualities. In one of Himmler’s schemes, he argued that if 100 such camps were established for 1000 girls, 10,000 “perfect” children would be born each year (Deuel 1942, 165). Despite the criticism of the Reich Minister of the Interior, who opposed the “idea of breeding Nordics” when it reached the point of “making a rabbit-breeding farm out of Germany” (Deuel 1942, 203), plans were developed for a series of state-run brothels, where young women certified as genetically sound would be impregnated by Nazi men. The intent was to breed Aryans as if they were pedigreed dogs (Glaser 1978).

This viewpoint of all living beings as on the same continuum where the higher animals must be protected from the lower animals is, on its own terms, a coherent moral philosophy that was twisted into a monstrous reality.

It is all too simple to relegate Nazis to cartoonish villains as being evil for evil's sake. But the frightening part is that they justified their evil in the language of ethics. Their position towards animal rights were the most advanced in the world at the time and (unconsciously) influences animal rights activists' philosophy today. Similarly, Nazi Germany was in the forefront of medical ethics, using the same kind of logic described here to justify persecuting Jews as an ethical imperative to protect Aryans.

We see this same perverted twisting of ethics in the 21st century.

Today, there is an unmistakable singling out of Jews as the world's worst violators of ethics, just as the Nazis positioned Jews as morally reprehensible in their treatment of animals.

And today we see "human rights defenders" justifying murdering Jews as an ethical imperative of "resistance.".

Today's supposed "human rights" leaders believe that they have the moral high ground and cannot even see their own bigotry is being justified by their bizarre, twisted sense of ethics. Like the Nazis, they are writing long, seemingly well-researched papers to justify their foregone conclusions in the name of social justice.

Their justifications for attempting to destroy Israel are an eerie echo of the Nazis' ethical justifications for destroying the Jewish people.

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!

55 years ago: Polish communist leader admits that "anti-Zionism" is antisemitism

From the Daily Telegraph, July 10, 1968:

The Guardian adds more detail:

Today's left-wing anti-Zionism is rooted in communist "anti-Zionism" which was obviously thinly-disguised antisemitism from the post-war years. The number of stories of Soviet and other communist country repression of Jews are well known. Here's an account from 1949 that was originally published in the New York Herald Tribune:

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!

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."

Israel Says Yes, Poland Says No: On the Resumption of Israeli Youth Trips to Poland (Judean Rose) (update)

One day after the Netanyahu government issued a statement claiming that Israel and Poland had reached an agreement over the resumption of Israeli youth trips to Poland, Poland denied that any such agreement had been reached. The trips were suspended a year ago due to a dispute over security arrangements. Israeli students are accompanied on these trips by armed security guards from the Shin Bet. Poland, however, says that Israel’s insistence on providing its own Israeli security for the students is a slap in the face to Poland, making it look like a hateful, antisemitic country.

Here is the Israeli press release on the supposed agreement between Israel and Poland:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Comments on Resumption of Youth Trips to Poland

After a prolonged stalemate in Israeli-Polish relations, and pursuant to contacts and a round of talks led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, together with Minister of Foreign Affairs Eli Cohen and Education Minister Yoav Kisch, a solution was found today (Tuesday, 7 March 2023), to the crisis that prevented the arrival of youth trips to Poland.

Prime Minister Netanyahu:

"After a wasted year, we are returning the youth trips to Poland. There are many ways to study the lessons of the Holocaust but the best is with one's own eyes. I welcome our success in the resumption of our pupils' trips to Poland in order to study the horrors of the Holocaust from up close.

I thank Foreign Minister Eli Cohen and Education Minister Yoav Kisch for their contributions to the effort. 'Know from whence you came and where you are going.’"

Three years after the halt to the arrival of youth trips to Poland, and pursuant to the contacts led by Prime Minister Netanyahu with the Polish government, the almost to-year stalemate in bilateral relations has ended; the sides have agreed on the resumption of Israeli youth trips.

Pursuant to the round of talks between the two countries led by Prime Minister Netanyahu with his Polish counterpart, and to the talks held by Minister of Foreign Affairs Cohen with the Polish Foreign Minister approximately one month ago, in the framework of which he sought to move forward on a solution for the resumption of the trips to Poland, a representative of the Polish Foreign Ministry announced today that Poland views positively the resumption in the arrival of youth trips to Poland and recognizes their importance to continued progress in bilateral ties.

This morning, however, Tovah Lazaroff, who is no fan of the Netanyahu government wrote:

“Poland denied that Israeli high school trips to visit the concentration camps in Poland are set to resume after a one-year suspension, one day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Office announced the return of the trips.”

Lazaroff offers no source for her assertion of Polish denial. What is the truth of the matter? Did Israel and Poland reach an agreement regarding the Israeli student trips? And what is the real reason for what still looks like a stalemate? Is it really about security? Or something else.

Łukasz Jasina, spokesperson for the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tweeted a link to the MFA statement on the affair, an embarrassing slap in the face to Israel/Netanyahu, and likely the source for Lazaroff’s claim.

Statement on the state of arrangements regarding the return of trips of organized groups of Israeli youth to Poland https://t.co/uZl5ShHffY
— Łukasz Jasina (@RzecznikMSZ) March 8, 2023

From the statement:

Although a final agreement has not been reached yet, during talks held in recent days through diplomatic channels we have been observing a convergence of positions, giving hope that a comprehensive agreement on the visits of organized groups of Israeli youth to Poland can be signed between Poland and Israel in the near future.

Poland is sensitive to accusations of antisemitism, hence the passing of a 2018 Polish law penalizing public speech attributing responsibility for the Holocaust to Poland or the Polish nation. The passing of the law appears however to only underscore the idea that Poland is antisemitic, but doesn’t want to be seen as such. Why else shut down free speech on the subject of where blame for the Holocaust rightly lies? To paraphrase Hamlet, Poland “doth protest too much, methinks.”

Back when the Polish law denying complicity in the Holocaust was passed, I argued that parents of Israeli teens should not be sending their children to that country to visit. Not because of the security issue, though I agree that Israel should be allowed to use its own people for this purpose, but because I don’t believe in supporting the economy of a country I see as absolutely antisemitic, law or no law:

This year, when it came time for my son, the youngest of 12 children, to register for the class trip for Poland, I was ready. I sat Asher down for a talk and explained that he wasn’t going, that even if we had the money for such a trip, even if the school were to give him a full scholarship, he wasn’t going. I wasn’t going to allow my son to become a source of income for a country of antisemites . . . why, of all countries, should the Jewish State be propping up Poland’s economy with these trips that have become a rite of passage for Israeli high school students? We’re talking some 30,000 children, spending at the very least, a few thousand shekels each for this “privilege.”

At the same time, I acknowledged the fact that many see the trip as a valuable tool for teaching the Holocaust:

What of the people who say the experience of visiting Poland is moving, and a good way to teach the Holocaust?

I say hogwash. I never traveled there and I have an acute understanding of the Holocaust and so do my children. In fact, I’d say that boycotting the place is every bit as powerful a teacher as going there.

I still believe today that we don’t need to send kids to Poland to make them “feel” the horrors of the Holocaust. And I still believe that Poland is antisemitic to the bone. In fact, the very day that Netanyahu claimed an agreement with Poland had been reached, the Algemeiner reported that the National Bank of Poland will be issuing a special commemorative coin honoring a Polish antisemite:

Poland’s National Bank has announced that it will issue a special silver coin commemorating a leading figure in the post-war anti-communist underground who was accused of murdering Jews in the country’s Podhale region . . .

. . . Several historians have charged that Kuraś was responsible for the murder of dozens of Jews in the Podhale region during his struggle against the communists. In his book “Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz,” Prof. Jan Gross of Princeton University described Kuraś as as “legendary outlaw in the mountainous region of Podhale, where he battled the regime by killing Jews who were fleeing Poland by one of the Brikha exit routes.”

Gross specified that Kuraś had recorded the murder of Jews in his diary, citing the killing of twelve Jews near the village of Kroscienko on May 6, 1944.

A separate article by Karolina Panz — a Polish historian based in the town of Nowy Targ, where Kuraś was active — concluded that during 1945-47, “the number of Jewish victims exceeded thirty, including children from Jewish orphanages. Among the perpetrators of those acts of terror were partisans from the group commanded by Józef Kuraś ‘Ogień’ – one of the most important symbols of anti-communist resistance.”

Poland’s leading anti-racist organization condemned the coin’s issuance as another example of the Polish state lionizing wartime figures with established records of antisemitism.

The Algemeiner quotes a response from Rafal Pankowski, executive director of the “Never Again” Association:

“Since the publication of Jan Gross’s groundbreaking books in the 2000s, Poland made a lot of progress as a democratic nation in dealing with the legacy of antisemitism – but over the last years much of that progress has been reversed and a far-right nationalist outlook on Polish history has prevailed in many institutions . . . This is one more instance of a glorification of a notorious antisemitic figure by an important state institution.”

It is obvious that Polish antisemitism is alive and well. Why then does Israel seem so desperate to reach an agreement to prop up the Polish economy with high school trips? Why does Israel want its children to think of Poland as a hospitable country that has learned its lesson, when quite clearly, it has not.

One might argue that Netanyahu has failed to see the true meaning of the quote he used in his statement to the press: “Know from whence you came and where you are going.”

That quote, from Ethics of the Fathers, was used by Netanyahu to suggest that high school trips to Poland are a form of experiential learning: that only by traveling to the land of Auschwitz can one come to understand what happened there. But one could just as easily interpret that quote as a cautionary tale or warning: Know when you go there that Poland was and still is an antisemitic country, even as it makes it illegal to discuss that fact. Know that Poland is a place where the soil is soaked with Jewish blood. Know that Poland, even now, issues commemorative coins honoring as heroes those who murdered Jews. Know that if you go and spend your hard-earned shekels to support Poland and the Polish people, you betray the memory of the millions of Jews who were sent there, not by choice for a learning experience, but to be gassed and burned, their generations to come, ended forever.

UPDATE: After I contacted her on Twitter, Tovah Lazaroff commendably updated her piece to reflect that her source is the Polish Foreign Ministry.

The source should be there now . .
— Tovah Lazaroff (@tovahlazaroff) March 8, 2023

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!

03/08 Links Pt1: Leave the IDF out of the protest; IDF kill Palestinian terrorist responsible for Huwara attack; Israel slams 'disgraceful' South Africa vote to downgrade diplomatic ties

From Ian:

Overhaul protesters gear up for ‘day of resistance’ throughout the country Thursday

The protest movement against the government’s judicial overhaul plans was set to conduct a second major campaign to disrupt daily life in Israel on Thursday, in what activists are calling a “day of resistance.”

The day notably includes plans to block roads around Ben Gurion Airport in an attempt to make it difficult for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to get there for his flight on an official visit to Italy. This in addition to marches, temporary workplace strikes, the blocking of main thoroughfares, disruption of train services and rallies outside the homes of top government officials.

The protest events were laid out in detail on a dedicated website and map (Hebrew), with organizers promising “many surprises,” indicating there were more planned actions that had not been announced publicly.

“It is a civic duty to resist the dictatorship and this is the only way to return Israel to the path of democracy. This is a great battle for the independence of Israeli citizens against the tyranny that will destroy what we have built here for over 70 years. We call on the entire public to participate in protests,” the organizers said in a statement.

Protest heads have specifically called for demonstrators to block roads around Ben Gurion Airport when Netanyahu and his wife are scheduled to depart on their flight to Italy. The trip previously faced setbacks when national carrier El Al was unable to find a crew to man the prime minister’s flight — an issue blamed on crew shortages but which may have also been affected by growing public anger at the government as it pushed forward with efforts to weaken the justice system.

Some media reports indicated Netanyahu was looking at possibly taking a helicopter to the airport to avoid the expected road disruptions.

A major rally in Tel Aviv was to set off from the city’s Habima Square. In addition, protests by workers from the tech sector were planned at 15 locations around the country.

Police said they too were preparing for the demonstrations, with 3,000 cops set to be deployed across the country.

Ruthie Blum: IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi should call his troops to order

Those who defended Bar’s remarks (delivered several weeks before the Knesset election) did so on the grounds that terrorists apprehended by the Shin Bet told their interrogators that internecine strife in the Jewish state was bolstering their confidence and resolve. In other words, since perception influences enemy actions, security bigwigs have a responsibility to monitor and caution about pitfalls in this realm.

It’s a logical position, particularly in view of the gleeful way in which the international Arab and Iranian media outlets are depicting the present crisis in the country. That they’re being given a serious boost by the Israeli press may be extremely disconcerting, but it’s the price—and privilege—of free speech.

Soldiers don’t enjoy this luxury, however. On the contrary, their individual ideologies are irrelevant to the assignments they are charged to execute. Halevi has the duty to remind them of this in no uncertain terms. His failure on this score only encourages the very foes that the IDF, thankfully, is still fighting on more than one front.

“When we are on the battlefield, we don’t look to the right and left to discern the political views of our brothers and sisters,” said Netanyahu on Monday, after attending a Purim megillah reading at a Border Police base in the Jewish community of Beit Horon. “We [do it] with the knowledge that together, shoulder-to-shoulder, we are storming our enemies, in order to safeguard our security and future.”

This, he stressed, “is the first and most important foundation of our existence in our land. It rests on the deep understanding that whatever the controversies among us, we are always united against those out to kill us. This is how it was during all of Israel’s wars.”

He went on: “Refusal to serve threatens this existential foundation, and thus has no place in our ranks. Israeli society always condemned the refusal to serve.… We never allowed it a foothold—neither in the regular army nor in the reserves; neither in the security forces nor anywhere else. It had no place in the War of Independence, the Oslo Accords or in the disengagement [from Gaza]. There is no room for it now, nor should there be in the future…. because the minute that we give this illness legitimacy, it will spread and become systemic…in controversies to come.”

Netanyahu concluded with a Purim analogy.

“When Haman sought to find the Jews’ weak spot, he said, ‘There is one people that is scattered and divided.’ But…we rose as one; we banded together and achieved victory for generations. We will do it again this time, as well.”

It’s a message that Halevi would do well to hear, heed and repeat.

Ben-Dror Yemini: Leave the IDF out of the protest

This is one of the most legitimate protests in Israel's history.

Some have tried to quash it by pointing out a handful of Palestinian flags flown at rallies, but for every such flag, a thousand Israeli flags were raised, so that fell flat.

Others claimed the protest wasn't about the judicial overhaul at all but rather an attempt to overrule the will of the voter, but that too missed the mark. This protest's success lies in its expansion to more and more audiences, it's not merely a left-wing protest. Prominent religious and right-wing figures have also joined in, and while most of them don't take the streets, they make their voices heard by appealing for dialogue and broad consensus.

Are they too anarchists? Who are you trying to fool?

As for those screeching voices on the margins flying the BDS flag, let them, they clearly do not represent anything.

But the protest also brings the pain. The fissure is here. And 37 out of 40 pilots of the Israeli Air Force's elite 69 Squadron declaring they won't report for training is the closest thing to mutiny.

We must not allow this terrible scourge to become the face of the protest for there is a fine line where a protest shifts from an opposition to the government to an opposition to the state. There are too many elements on the left that had done so, there's no need for the protest to tread the same line.

Crossing that red line would only harm the protest since it draws its success from the fact that it has become a consensus in and of itself, and public opinion polls show as much.

As soon as the protest crosses these red lines, it will become a sectoral protest of the extreme left. This was not the intention of the pilots who declared that they won't report for reserve duty, but this may be the result. So yes, we must apply pressure to prevent harm to democracy. But there is no need for the protest to exacerbate that harm.

The Caroline Glick Show: Politics is poisoning the IDF

Mob violence against Sara Netanyahu; 37 out of 40 elite Air Force reservist pilots refusing to show up to duty. These are, but two of the most recent examples of the protests against the judicial reform proposed by the Netanyahu government.

To discuss the shocking turn of events and the leading role that retired leftist generals are playing in the left’s efforts to coerce the government to shelve its efforts to restore Israeli democracy, the guest on this week’s show is Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi.

Avivi is the founder and CEO of the Israel Security and Defense Forum (Habithonistim), a social movement and think tank comprised of retired senior officers, soldiers and concerned citizens working to reinstate the Zionist ethos in the IDF. Glick and Avivi also discuss at length the issue of Iran, which the United States now acknowledges had become a threshold nuclear state..

In addition, Glick devotes her opening remarks to an analysis of the central (hostile) role the Biden administration is playing in the events on the ground in Israel.

01/17 Links Pt2: Even the PLO knows the Jews are indigenous to Israel; The NYTs and the PLO are made for each other; The real reasons Ken Roth was bounced by Harvard’s Kennedy School

From Ian:

A New Study Shows That the U.S. Has More Anti-Semites Than Jews

According to a recent survey conducted by the Antidefamation League (ADL), disturbingly large numbers of Americans answered “yes” when asked if they believe Jews “go out of their way to hire other Jews” or “are more loyal to Israel than to America,” and to other similar questions. Kevin Williamson reflects on these results, and what they say about the persistence of this “strange prejudice.”
About 3 percent of Americans agreed that all of the anti-Semitic tropes in the ADL survey are “mostly or somewhat true,” suggesting that there are millions more anti-Semites in the United States than there are Jews. This is not entirely surprising, given the small size of the Jewish population.

Anti-black racism has of course been the most consequential prejudice in American history, but anti-Semitism remains strangely vital. Like its cousin, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism is more than a prejudice and more than a visceral hatred—it is, in its most extreme form, a kind of “theory of everything” in politics. Anti-black racism may exist with or without an attendant conspiracy theory, but anti-Semitism is almost without exception rooted in a conspiratorial view of the world. The fact that anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise on college campuses is entirely predictable in that campus culture is as much conspiracy-driven as talk-radio culture or Fox News culture, with different villains and a slightly more refined rhetoric: not “Jews” pulling the strings from the shadows, but “Zionists.”

Williamson also notes the confusion, and the bad faith arguments, that have emerged from the term “anti-Semitism.”
The Semitic languages famously include both Hebrew and Arabic, but also Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre, Aramaic, and Maltese. But when T. S. Eliot wrote, “But this or such was Bleistein’s way:/ A saggy bending of the knees/ And elbows, with the palms turned out,/ Chicago Semite Viennese,” he wasn’t talking about the Catholics down in sunny Malta.

The real reasons Ken Roth was bounced by Harvard’s Kennedy School

The claim that Jewish influence and money can force non-Jews to serve the selfish interests of the Jews is, of course, a classic antisemitic trope. In the modern context, this trope usually claims that these Jewish conspirators are doing their dirty work to benefit Israel.

Roth also claimed that Elmendorf’s decision was “a shocking violation of academic freedom.” Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), agreed, saying, “If Harvard’s decision was based on HRW’s advocacy under Ken’s leadership, this is profoundly troubling from both a human rights and an academic freedom standpoint.”

It appears that Roth and Romero do not understand the nature of academic freedom. An applicant for a fellowship or faculty position does not enjoy academic freedom at the institution—in this case, Harvard—where they wish to work. They have freedom of speech to express their ideology and beliefs like all other citizens, but Roth would not have enjoyed the protection of academic freedom, which would allow him to express his views, no matter how corrosive or biased, until he became part of the Harvard community. Obviously, this never took place.

Moreover, hiring committees normally vet applicants during the application process. It appears that in the initial stages of Roth’s application, the committee inadvertently, or perhaps purposely, ignored Roth’s hostility to Israel. So, it is very likely that when the choice of Roth was made public, Harvard stakeholders had the opportunity to inform the dean about the darker aspects of Roth’s career. Dean Elmendorf then did what the hiring committee at the Carr Center should have done in the first place: Examine HRW’s and Roth’s defective scholarship and singular focus on Israel, objectively.

One particularly grotesque example of Roth’s shoddy scholarship and tendency toward outright falsehoods was a 2021 HRW report titled, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” the title of which makes its content clear.

No apartheid exists in Israel, but that did not prevent HRW from presenting the 217-page report as fact, effectively redefining apartheid to make their case. The Israel-based watchdog organization NGO Monitor, however, produced a report of its own that eviscerated HRW’s libels. NGO Monitor concluded that “the HRW publication is fundamentally flawed, using lies, distortions, omissions and blatant double standards to construct a fraudulent and libelous narrative demonizing Israel.”

“A careful examination of the text shows that HRW conducted almost no primary research,” NGO Monitor noted. “Rather, the text is bloated with cut-and-paste phrases, and quotes and conclusions taken from third-party sources—notably, other political NGOs participating in the same ‘apartheid’ campaign against Israel.”

“The omissions are even more egregious than the errors and misrepresentations, rendering HRW’s report as nothing more than propaganda,” the watchdog group asserted.

Even the PLO knows the Jews are indigenous to Israel - opinion

To deal with the inconvenient historical fact that Jews are the indigenous population of Israel, the drafters of the PLO charter created an arbitrary dividing line to determine who would be considered a Palestinian. First, the PLO charter deems any Arab who had lived in the entirety of what is now modern Israel prior to the re-establishment of the Jewish homeland to automatically be Palestinian, without regard to whether they were residents in the land. Further, the PLO charter deemed any Arab (but not Jews) born after 1947 to a Palestinian father to be a Palestinian.

Jews, on the other hand, were excised from their own national identity under the PLO charter. Only Jews who had resided in what is now modern Israel prior to “the Zionist invasion” would be considered Palestinian. And what did the PLO even mean when they called it “the Zionist invasion,” 1948 or the 1800s? The latter, of course.

Jews were forcibly removed from Israel after the destruction of the Second Temple and dispersed across the globe, making Palestine, as conceived by the PLO charter, a nearly Jew-free land before the Zionist movement was ever founded.

Imagine if, at the time of the founding of modern Israel, Jews had made a similar declaration with regard to Arabs. To wit, Israel would only recognize those “Arab Palestinians” who resided in the land and identified as “Palestinian” prior to the time of Abraham. This would obviously be an impossibility since the term “Palestinian” was created by the Romans after the Bar Kokhba revolt in around 130 C.E., while Abraham arrived in the Land of Israel approximately 2,000 years before the first use of the term Palestine.

Recently, antisemitic activists have escalated their attacks on Jews, claiming we are “settler-colonists” of a land they call Palestine. In my latest new law review article, I examine the question of colonialism and Israel. Part of my research involved tracing the history of the Jewish presence in Israel and comparing it to the waves of actual settler-colonists, ending with Palestinian Arabs, who displaced the indigenous Jewish population.

The only way that anti-Israel activists can strip Jews of our status as the indigenous people of the land and eliminate Jewish self-determination is to do as the PLO charter did: ignore history and designate a time when Jews had been ethnically cleansed from our own homeland as the point in time when Jewish history in Israel starts.

There are settler-colonists in Israel, and they are Palestinian Arabs. Nonetheless, Israel welcomes these settler-colonists and provides them with rights that no other country would provide to invaders and occupiers. It’s time for Palestinian Arab activists and their supporters to accept history and thank Israel for the gracious hospitality extended to newcomers.

Based on a true story. Israel has never occupied another people’s land in all her 4,000-Year recorded history; Israel is the world’s most accused country of illegally occupying another peoples’ land.
Ten Deceptions: https://t.co/4qiCALoxOJ #israel #palestine
— Joseph Shellim (@PhotoshopTruth) January 17, 2023

Large cache of Jewish objects hidden by Jews in Lodz in 1939 unearthed (lots of photos)

From Times of Israel:

About 400 items believed to have been hidden in the ground by their Jewish owners during World War II have been accidentally uncovered during home renovation work in a yard in Lodz in central Poland.

History experts say that the objects found in the city’s Polnocna Street include Hanukkah menorahs and items used in daily life, TVN24 reported.

Another Polish media outlet, o2.pl, said that perfume bottles and cigarette holders were also found in the trove, located some 70 centimeters underground.

The stash was found in December, and two of the menorahs were lit on December 22 during Hanukkah celebrations organized by the city’s Jewish community.

Some of the items were found wrapped in Polish, Yiddish, and German language newspapers, which were dated to around October 1939, Israel’s Ynet news site said.

Gazecie Wyborczej, an archaeologist in Lodz, said that the items appeared to have been buried in a hurry, likely when the owners were ordered to appear in the Lodz Ghetto. According to Wyborczej, the site of the building used to be a synagogue.

The items are mostly silver-plated tableware, menorahs and glass containers for cosmetics, according to the regional office for the preservation of historic objects. The office’s experts said on Facebook last week that the objects will be handed over to the city’s archaeology museum.

This is a heartbreaking story, especially when you look at the recovered objects themselves. They aren't for the most part made out of silver or gold but rather silver-plated; they were not objectively that valuable - but they were valuable to the owners. These were personal items that the Jews wanted to keep in their families.

YNet shows some of the objects: