12/24 Links: “Rabbi” Who Said Kaddish for Hamas Threatens to Boycott Israeli Government; Police release body cam footage from Kfar Qassem terror attack

From Ian:

Far-right MKs said to agree not to impede Netanyahu efforts to normalize with Saudis

The far-right elements of Israel’s incoming government have agreed not to hinder any efforts by incoming prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reach a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia, according to a Saturday report.

Such a deal has been one of Netanyahu’s greatest goals since signing the historic Abraham Accords with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates in September 2020, as he has stated several times since.

While Morocco and Sudan also joined the accords later, Saudi Arabia has been reluctant.

The Saudis have been widely reported to maintain clandestine ties with Jerusalem. Though Netanyahu himself is reported to have flown to the country in secret to meet with Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, Riyadh has continued to insist publicly that a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians was a “requirement” for any normalization agreement.

Still, Netanyahu is optimistic that such a deal can be reached with the Gulf state and his political partners understand this, according to Channel 12.

The report said there was an understanding between Netanyahu and far-right lawmakers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich to not sabotage any effort to normalize relations with the Saudis.

As one example, the unsourced report cited the vague wording of Netanyahu’s agreement in principle to advance annexation of West Bank land as part of the coalition deal with Smotrich, head of the far-right Religious Zionism party.

The agreement was worded in a way that could allow Netanyahu to make no movement on the issue if he chooses. And the report said Smotrich understands that such a scenario is dependent on US approval, which would only be feasible under a Republican president. It hinted he may remain quiet on the matter for the time being to allow Netanyahu to make overtures to Riyadh.

A second example given was Ben Gvir’s statement that though he wants to advance bills providing security forces with immunity from prosecution and looser open-fire rules, he has also agreed to adhere to international law — another apparent agreement not to rock the boat.

Ron Dermer meets Netanyahu, will only join gov’t if made foreign minister — report

Incoming prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly met this week with Ron Dermer, a close confidant and a former Israeli ambassador to the US, to continue talks on bringing Dermer into the government in a top role.

Netanyahu is said to have been considering appointing Dermer as foreign minister, an idea that has been contested by senior Likud members who, in recent weeks, have seen a number of key cabinet portfolios handed over to the Likud’s far-right and ultra-Orthodox coalition partners as the Likud leader has tried to cobble together a coalition. As the number of top jobs dwindled for lawmakers within his own party, Netanyahu has faced tough criticism for such decisions.

Netanyahu announced Wednesday that he has finally come to agreements with his coalition partners to form Israel’s 37th government. The Likud leader has yet to finalize coalition agreements with any of his party’s intended partners, however. Knesset Speaker Yariv Levin will announce the development during Monday’s legislative session. Netanyahu will then have until January 2 to swear in his coalition.

On Friday, Channel 12 reported that Dermer and Netanyahu met a day prior and that the ex-envoy expressed a strong willingness to be part of the incoming government but only in the position of foreign minister. The unsourced report also said Netanyahu was pitched the idea of appointing two foreign ministers, Dermer and a senior member of the Likud, but this move was deemed unlikely.

The report said Netanyahu sees Dermer as very closely aligned with his right-wing ideology and a future part of the Likud. Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition

Palestinians slam Israeli coalition deals, warn of Middle East ‘explosion’

Palestinians have expressed deep concern over the agreements signed between Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners, especially Otzma Yehudit head MK Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionists Party (RZP).

They warned that the policies of the incoming government will lead to an “explosion” and urged the Palestinian Authority and the international community to prepare for the worst scenarios.

The Palestinian Authority called on the international community, the US administration, and the European Union to link their relationship with the Netanyahu government “to the extent of its commitment to international law, international legitimacy decisions, and human rights principles.”

The Palestinian foreign affairs ministry said that it views “with great seriousness” reports in the Israeli media regarding Netanyahu’s “ill-fated agreements with his far-right fascist coalition partners.”

Palestinians fear move giving West Bank control to Smotrich
KAN News reported Friday that as part of the coalition agreement with RZP, Netanyahu has agreed to relinquish significant control over the approval process for settlement construction to Smotrich.

Netanyahu reportedly agreed to hand authority over the two key bodies responsible for Israeli control in the West Bank – the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) and the Civil Administration – to Smotrich’s party.

The Palestinians fear the move would pave the way for the new government to extend Israeli law to large portions of the West Bank, especially Area C, which is exclusively controlled by Israel.

The Palestinians, in addition, are concerned about Ben-Gvir’s insistence on including a clause in the coalition agreement that imposes a death sentence on convicted terrorists.

“Rabbi” Who Said Kaddish for Hamas Threatens to Boycott Israeli Government

Israel has a new conservative government and its enemies, and by that, I mean anti-Israel leftists, couldn’t be angrier. Ron Kampeas at the JTA has another anti-Israel press release disguised as a news story promoting a push by anti-Israel activists to boycott members of the incoming Israeli government.

“More than 330 American rabbis, including some who occupy prominent roles in major cities, are pledging to block members of the Religious Zionist bloc in Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government from speaking at their synagogues,” Kampeas gushes.

The list largely consists of anti-Israel clergy, many, if not most of them, also members of the ‘Rabbis for Hamas”. This was a list that Annie of Boker Tov Boulder put together back in the day of leftist clergy who signed a letter urging “constructive engagement” with Hamas.

Over the years I’ve noted the same bunch of names on assorted anti-Israel letters as the ‘Rabbis for Hamas’.

Sure enough, Melanie Aron, a speaker at the Islamic Networks Group, has signed both letters. As did Elliot Baskin, James Bennett, Phil Bentley, Leila Berner, Jonathan Biatch, Rena Blumenthal and Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus. And that’s just the A’s and B’s.

That’s impressive considering that a number of these people must have died or retired since then.

While I won’t bother going through the list, a few names do pop out. Most notably, Sharon Kleinbaum.

Sharon Kleinbaum, the girlfriend of teachers’ union boss Randi Weingarten, is infamous for her role at a gay temple in New York City where her hatred of Israel was so extreme that it drove the members away.

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12/13 Links Pt2: Landes on Why Leftists Embrace Islamist Ideas about the West; The history of the media intifada against Israel; Brandeis Center: FBI Report Grossly Understated Antisemitic Crimes

From Ian:

Richard Landes on Why Leftists Embrace Islamist Ideas about the West

Richard Landes, chair of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) and author of Can the "Whole World" Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad, was interviewed in a December 5th Middle East Forum Webinar (video) by Dexter Van Zile, editor of the Middle East Forum's Focus on Western Islamism (FWI), regarding the left's embrace of Islamist ideas about the West.

Landes said Edward Said's 1978 book, Orientalism, had "pretty much taken over academia" with its premise that any criticism of Islam was a form of "Western racism." By 2000, said Landes, Said's ideas had "crystallized into a basic feature of the Western public sphere." In 2001, a further significant watershed in this process was the U.N.-sponsored Durban conference, an international forum purportedly held to fight racism. At the conference, "You had the NGOs ... their sacred theme was human rights ... lining up with and joining forces with some of the most regressive groups on the planet. And so as a result ... And the key thing in that unification was the adoption by both sides .... They had already both more or less developed this thought, but they jointly targeted Israel and the United States as, in millennial terms, the Antichrist. Or in Muslim terms, the Dajjal."

Landes described the alliance formed at Durban, followed three days later by the jihad against America on 9/11, as a "red-green alliance" between the "progressive left and jihadis." He referred to it as a "marriage between post-modern sadism and post-modern masochism." The poisonous seeds of that merger account for the Islamists' marching in lockstep with the left, targeting both Israel and the U.S.

Landes said their joint strategy to undermine the West is "demopathy," i.e., using democracy to destroy democracy. Both groups used their platforms to channel their hostility, often publicized at anti-U.S. and anti-Israel protests in the form of symbolic imagery on placards linking swastikas with the American flag and the Jewish star. Landes noted that Islamist propagandists have grown "bolder and bolder. Initially, they didn't think they could get away with saying the things that they say now, so they couched it in human rights terms." He said that "what's happened over the last 20 years is that they've just seen how foolish Western leaders are and that they can get away with just about anything. But I think they still, by and large, don't openly say in English what they say in Arabic."

Phyllis Chesler: The history of the media intifada against Israel

From the moment Yasser Arafat launched his long-planned second intifada against Israel in 2000, the most brazen lies about both Jews and Israel were relentlessly told and widely believed. For years, master propagandists in cyberspace, the Western media and academia managed to diabolically invert reality. The entire world believed an utterly false narrative.

Richard Landes’s new work Can the Whole World Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad fearlessly, carefully, relentlessly and brilliantly documents this history.

Landes is a historian and a scholar of apocalyptic movements. He is the author of eight books and countless articles. He maintains a formidable website, The Augean Stables. He is also a consummate wordsmith. For example, he coined the phrase “Pallywood” (Palestinian Hollywood) to describe the Palestinians’ tactic of staging theatrical productions in war zones in order to create anti-Israel propaganda disguised as news.

In his book, Landes proceeds blood libel by blood libel, beginning with the iconic death of Mohammed al-Dura, a Gazan child allegedly murdered with malice aforethought by cruel Israeli soldiers. With his death caught on video and immediately blamed on Israel, even though the video proved no such thing, al-Dura became the boy whose image has graced a thousand mugs and t-shirts, inflamed the entire world and led to countless Muslim atrocities, including suicide bombings, shootings, knife attacks and car-rammings against Israeli civilians.

As Landes notes, the initial reporting on the incident was malicious and incendiary: “The (flawed) footage and its accompanying narrative immediately went viral, then mythical. The footage was spectacular, as emotionally powerful as the dogs attacking Black protesters in Birmingham (1963), and the terrified Vietnamese girl running down the road naked, aflame with napalm (1972). … Despite extensive problems with the footage … journalists piled on the story. … It became the icon of hatred for the 21st century. One cannot overestimate its impact.”

“The role of al-Dura as incitement is clear,” Landes writes, “and if the damage was less than the old European pogroms, it’s only because the Israelis could defend themselves as the Jews of Kishinev could not.”

Landes also reminds us that Osama bin Laden used al-Dura in a recruiting video for global jihad and that the first Palestinian suicide bombers featured al-Dura in the videos they left behind.

EU source says anti-Israel measure 'tainted' in wake of Qatar corruption scandal

A source that has been privy to the European Parliament's behind-the-scenes deliberations over an anti-Israel resolution has told Israel Hayom it was problematic to have this measure come up for a vote at this time in light of the recent revelation that Qatar allegedly bribed senior officials in the legislative body in exchange for treating it with kid gloves over human rights.

"This corruption case involving the parliament raises the question of whether this is the right time to vote on this [anti-Israel resolution]," the source said.

The parliament's subcommittee on human rights has been at the center of the scandal and its chair Maria Arena has had to step down due to possible involvement (it is unclear if she is among the four being charged, who include EU Parliament's Vice President Eva Kaili, who was arrested).

Arena, who has initiated the anti-Israel motion, has stepped aside as chairperson in the wake of the investigation and her office has been sealed off, but the subcommittee has continued working on the draft. "This is the same subcommittee that has initiated the effort to hold the vote on the Israel resolution," the source said. "Considering this, perhaps it would be inappropriate to have these measures stay on the subcommittee's docket; perhaps they should be shelved for the time being until the picture becomes clearer."

On Monday, the various elements in the parliament tried to reach an agreed language, but all the drafts currently being circulated are not good for Israel, with some outright hostile. All call for the adoption of the two-state solution. The most pro-Israel draft has been sponsored by the right-wing parties, as it condemns Palestinian terrorism and demands it come to an end. The other resolutions call on Israel to avoid approving new communities in Judea and Samaria and voice criticism over the Abraham Accords, while also coming out against the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism.

NGO Monitor: Report: Potential Abuse of German Development Resources by Terror Affiliated Palestinian NGOs

Development and cooperation aid is seen as one of the most effective strategies for promoting democracy and fundamental rights, as well as building sustainable and inclusive societies, particularly in places where these processes are in their initial phases. To be sure, the path to building a democratic society is a political process, traversing existing ideological and social rifts, and subject to passionate debates between different political camps.

Especially in conflict ridden areas, politicization can result in development aid lending a platform to radical voices and amplifying inflammatory, hateful narratives. Such aid is particularly susceptible to abuse by groups that promote radical political narratives.

This is even more pronounced in the Palestinian-controlled areas, including Gaza, where many of the political factions are designated as terror groups by Europe (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [PFLP]).

This paper provides a case study that examines the ways that political actors propagate and legitimize radicalized narratives – namely, local Palestinian civil society organizations affiliated with the PFLP terror group, which receive European and more specifically German development aid.

The PFLP is multifaceted, consisting of overlapping functions including militant operations, local partisan political activity, and international advocacy via a “human rights” NGO network. These aspects are complementary, all contributing to the broadening of the PFLP’s sphere of influence and to achieving its goals.

The overlapping character of PFLP activities was illustrated acutely when several senior NGO employees (including those in financial leadership positions) were arrested for a PFLP terror attack in 2019, in which Rina Shnerb, a 17-year-old Israeli, was murdered. A subsequent investigation run by the Israeli Ministry of Defense (MoD) concluded that six PFLP-affiliated NGOs had diverted public funds. Ultimately, all six were designated as terror entities.

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12/07 Links Pt2: Every Time You Wish Someone ‘Happy Hanukkah’ You Acknowledge The Historic Jewish Claim On Jerusalem; Israel is 5th safest country in the world for tourists

From Ian:

'Herzl is our George Washington and Thomas Jefferson all wrapped in one'

"Today, Theodor Herzl is best known for his beard, not his books," laments Gil Troy, editor of "The Zionist Writings of Theodor Herzl," in his introductory essay to a new edition of Herzl's diaries.

Troy, a professor of history at Canada's McGill University now living in Israel, wants to make Zionism's founders come alive for the next generation. His latest effort is a three-volume collection of Herzl's writings.

The brainchild behind the series is Matthew Miller, owner of Koren Publishers, a Jerusalem publishing house producing mainly religious texts. Drawing inspiration from the Library of America, a publisher of notable American classics and historical works, Miller decided to create a Library of the Jewish People to bring together the best writings from Jewish history in the fields of religion, the arts and politics.

"The Zionist Writings" are the first titles in that ambitious effort. They include a fairly comprehensive collection of Herzl's diaries and other works, including his play "The New Ghetto" (1894), of which Herzl biographer Alex Bein said, "Herzl completed his inner return to his people"; Herzl's 1896 manifesto "The Jewish State"; and important essays, like "The Menorah" (1897), showing how, through Zionism, Herzl reconnected with his Judaism.

The series uses translations from the original German made by historian Harry Zohn in the 1960s. Other works, like "The New Ghetto," are newly translated by Uri Bollag.

Troy, who spoke to JNS the day after the book launch at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, said the Herzl series is his fourteenth book project and the first where he stood before an audience and said "Shehecheyanu" – a Jewish prayer to give thanks for special occasions – both to mark the 75th anniversary of the date the UN General Assembly voted in favor of a Jewish state (Nov. 29, 1947) and to celebrate the launch of Library of the Jewish People.

"It's an attempt to invite the Jewish people to build a bookshelf, because we've been building a bookshelf for thousands of years, but most of us don't know the Jewish texts, the Jewish canon," he said.

Troy sees no better place to start than Herzl. "He's our George Washington and our Thomas Jefferson all wrapped in one," said Troy. "Washington's diaries are interesting, but they're not ideological. That's why, when talking about Herzl in American terms, we say he's a cross between Washington and Jefferson, because he's also a conceptualizer."

Troy, who pored through 2,700 pages of Herzl's diaries, described them as "a political-science version of an artist's sketchbook."

"Herzl draws in the contours of the Jewish state. He plans different dimensions from a flag to the architectural aesthetic, from labor-capital relations to the dynamics between rabbis and politicians," Troy writes in one essay.

Every Time You Wish Someone ‘Happy Hanukkah’ You Acknowledge The Historic Jewish Claim On Jerusalem

On Hanukkah eve, I tweeted out a somewhat reductionist thought commemorating the bloody Maccabean rebellion against the Seleucid Empire and their traitorous Hellenized Jewish accomplices. It seemed to upset some of my followers.

Every time you wish someone a Happy Hanukkah you are acknowledging the historic Jewish claim on Jerusalem. — David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) December 12, 2017

Why are you politicizing such a pleasant holiday? Does wishing someone a “Merry Christmas” now mean that you accept Jesus as your lord and savior?

Well, first of all, the story of Hanukkah isn’t pleasant. Violent, brutal, and passionate, maybe. But not pleasant. And of course wishing someone a “Happy Hanukkah” isn’t an endorsement of any theological position, any more than wishing someone Merry Christmas is (although we appreciate the recognition of the Jewish presence in ancient Bethlehem). Mostly it’s convention and good manners. Thank you.

Fact is, there isn’t a ton of theology to worry about. Hanukkah is not a Jewish “yom tov,” which in the literal translation means “good day” but in religious terms means the holiday was not handed to the Jewish people through the Torah. Unlike Passover or Yom Kippur, there are no restrictions on work. The two books that deal with the Maccabees aren’t Jewish canon. The “miracle of the lights” — which you might be led to believe is the entire story of the holiday — is apocryphal and was added hundreds of years later in the Talmud. (To be fair, the story of miraculous oil is far more conducive to the holiday gift-giving spirit than, say, the story of the Jewish woman who watched her seven sons being tortured and slaughtered by Antiochus because she refused to eat pork.)

But whatever reasons you have for offering good wishes, Hanukkah itself is a reminder that Jews have a singular, millennia-long historic relationship with Jerusalem. By the time Mattathias rebelled against Hellenistic Syrian king Antiochus, who had not only ordered a statue of Zeus to be erected in the Holy Temple but that swine be sacrificed to him, Jerusalem had likely been a Jewish city for more than 1,000 years. As some readers have suggested, Hanukkah might be the only Jewish holiday that celebrates events confirmed by the historical record. The Hasmonean dynasty, founded by Mattathias’ son Simon, is a fact.

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12/06 Links Pt2: Jewish Life Is Cheap; How academia omits facts to make Palestinians the perpetual victim; It sucks to be a Jew on the left; Glick: The US liberal Jewish establishment is failing at fighting antisemitism

From Ian:

Jewish Life Is Cheap

For the past five years, the dominant media narrative about race—perhaps the dominant media narrative, period—has built up a hierarchy of racial justice. At the top are the perennially marginalized “BIPOCs,” victim to the lash of the ever-present colonial whip. At the bottom lurks the “white male,” inherently and ineluctably racist, even when (or perhaps especially when) they’re trying hard not to be.

In a manner true to our history, Jews have been sucked into this Manichean whirlpool, cast by radical academics and their media acolytes as an essential, almost distilled element of the global system of racial oppression. We are not just white; we are the plotters and financiers of the entire sysyetm of white supremacy.

Worse still, if Jews are white then they are not, well, Jews. The largely successful effort to assign Jews to the white race means Jews do not have the moral privilege of determining our own identity. The perverse result of dispossessing Jews of their own history is that it grants the mantle of Jewishness to our enemies. Thus Ye, in the same Twitter thread where he threatened to go “death con 3” on Jews, also claimed: “I actually can’t be antisemitic because Black people are actually Jew also.”

When Whoopi Goldberg asserted on The View that the “Holocaust was not about race,” she was advancing a version of the same arguments made by virulent Black Hebrew Israelite hate preachers, professors who insist on the indelible whiteness of Jews, and anti-Zionists who deny the legitimacy of Jewish historical identity. It’s true that only the last two groups tend to have their ideas promoted by the media, but all three share the idea that “Jew” is not a meaningful or legitimate category. Palestinians can be Jews—thus the Democratic political activist and Louis Farrakhan fan Linda Sarsour is invited to participate as an expert in a prominent panel on antisemitism. And by the same logic, Black Hebrews can be Jews. Ye can be a Jew. Only Jews are not allowed to be Jews.

Over and over, Jews have watched this trend play out, and largely we’ve been silent.

In a key scene in the 2014 Oscar-nominated Selma, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. leads a group of activists and protesters across a bridge alongside Black civil rights leaders. Not pictured in the scene was a man who walked in that front line of protesters, fighting for civil rights: the great American Jewish rabbi and leader Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Why would Ava Duvernay, the film’s director, compromise the film’s historical integrity to erase one of America’s most prominent Jewish spiritual figures out of the image? The answer is that over the past decade, the anti-racist movement that has been the media’s single most championed social cause has turned a syllogism into a truism: Whites are by definition white supremacists; Jews are the whitest of whites because they falsely hide behind their fake ethnicity; Jews, therefore, are at the top of the white supremacy totem.

The media has actively spread these ideas by turning woke racialism into the defining moral cause of our time, while at the same time ignoring the consequences of this campaign. While Ye was “canceled” for making open threats and affirming his love for Hitler, little more than a week earlier hundreds of Black Hebrew Israelites marched through central Brooklyn, uniformed and in formation, chanting “we are the real Jews.” Save for some coverage in the New York Post and in Tablet’s daily newsletter, The Scroll, the rest of the media was virtually silent. The media is still talking about the alt-right’s 2017 hate march in Charlottesville, treating it as one of the defining events of the modern era, but when hundreds of virulent antisemites march in Brooklyn—the mecca of America’s media establishment—it was crickets. The silence was appalling but also unsurprising given that the same media has largely ignored the routine violent attacks against religious Jews in New York.

Ben-Dror Yemini: How academia omits facts to make Palestinians the perpetual victim

Recently, Prof. Shay Hezkani claimed in an article he wrote for “Haaretz” newspaper that I misled my readers when I wrote that the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine faced an existential threat in 1947 and 1948.

I challenge Hezkani to an intellectual debate. I am even willing to provide him here with some of the arguments at my disposal - shall he answer my call.

“Every week Ben-Dror Yemini tells readers of ‘Yedioth Ahronoth’ about Arab leaders in 1947 who called to throw the Jews into the sea, planning to systematically murder them,” Hezkani wrote in his Haaretz column last week.

“Throughout 15 years of my research, looking into hundreds of propaganda pieces from 1947-1949, I ran into only one case in which Hassan al-Banna - founder of the Muslim Brotherhood – mentions the ‘sea’ and ‘Jews’ in the same sentence - while calling to expel the Jews from Egypt,” Hezkani wrote.

“The quote [used by Yemini and attributed to ex-Secretary General of the Arab League in Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam] is not backed by credible sources in Arabic, and it’s unclear whether or not it was actually ever said.”

I read the Haaretz article and could not believe my eyes. In the book I published titled “Industry of Lies,” I presented a more detailed list of threats made against the Jews, with credible sources, during that time period.

But, Hezkani looked into hundreds of documents and somehow found nothing. It’s a little weird that I did not spent 15 years researching this topic in an academic setting, yet found so much more information. To clear all doubts, prior to publishing the research-backed chapters of my book, they were reviewed by three prominent academics.

It could be that Hezkani has difficulty reading books. So, let’s start with the leader of the Palestinian Arabs, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who in 1941 arrived at Nazi Germany and called to kill every Jew, before returning to lead the Palestinians.

If Hezkani believes that al-Husseini had changed his mind later on, he should refer us to the relevant sources. In an interview to the “Al Sarih” newspaper, al-Husseini said the Arab goal during the 1948 War of Independence wasn’t to undo the UN Partition Plan for Palestine, but to “continue to fight until the Zionists are dead.”

Hadley Freeman: It sucks to be a Jew on the left

As Hadley Freeman leaves the Guardian for the Sunday Times, she opens up about her Jewish experience

Honestly, what a dumpster fire that whole period was, to the point that it’s almost hard to remember what actually happened. But just off the top of my head, here is a list of things I remember lefty non-Jews saying to me back then:
1. “I don’t think you should write about antisemitism because you obviously feel very passionately about it.”
2. “What, exactly, are Jews afraid of here? It’s not like Corbyn is going to bring back pogroms.”
3. “Jews have always voted right so of course, they don’t like Corbyn.”
4. “It’s not that I don’t believe that you think he’s antisemitic. It’s just I think you’re being manipulated by bad-faith actors. So let me explain why you’re wrong…”
5. “Come on, you don’t really think he really hates Jews.”

All of the above were said to me by progressive people, people who would proudly describe themselves as anti-racism campaigners. And yet. When Jews expressed distress at, say, Corbyn describing Hamas as “friends”, or attending a wreath-laying ceremony for the killers at the Munich Olympics, or bemoaning the lack of English irony among Zionists, we were fobbed off with snarky tweets and shrugged shoulders.

What we were seeing, they said, we were not actually seeing. You could not design an exercise more perfectly structured to cause madness. It was, to be blunt, gaslighting.

Anyway, that’s all in the past now, right? Well it is for me, because I’m walking away. A lot of illusions were broken, and I lost a lot of respect for a lot of people I thought I knew, but it turned out I didn’t. Not really. Not at all. So I have left the garden. And it feels bloody great. (h/t messy57)

A rock star channels Jewish outrage at antisemitism

The antisemitic utterances of Kyrie Irving and Ye (formerly Kanye West) prompted condemnations from many celebrities, both those with Jewish backgrounds and those who weren’t Jewish but who issued solemn pledges of support for their Jewish friends and colleagues. Oscar-winning actress Reese Witherspoon went as far as to tweet, “This is a very scary time,” to which one follower chimed in with an anti-Israel rejoinder.

Solemnity, however, unexpectedly yielded to outrage at the annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Los Angeles. What was no doubt expected to be one of the evening’s least momentous junctures, the honoring of lawyer-agent Allen Grubman, turned into a consciousness-raising session when rock star John Mellencamp took the stage for a profanity-laden introduction speech.

“Allen is Jewish, and I bring that up for one reason,” Mellencamp said. “I’m a gentile, and my life has been enriched by countless Jewish people.”

Mellencamp then turned it up a notch. “I cannot tell you how f***ing important it is to speak out if you’re an artist against antisemitism,” he continued. “Here’s the trick: Silence is complicity. I’m standing here tonight loudly and proudly with Allen, his family and all of my Jewish friends and all of the Jewish people of the world. F*** antisemitism!”

Whoa.

What was surprising about Mellencamp’s speech was not his principled stance, but the sheer indignation and the unbottled emotion that gave voice to it. For millions of Jews who have fearfully observed the growing normalization of antisemitic motifs in today’s popular culture, such a righteous outburst was surely a welcome surprise, but it begged a question for the entertainment industry: “Where have you been until now?”

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12/02 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: Diaspora Jews keep making the same mistake; Trivializing antisemitism based on politics; Not just Kanye – it’s an online coalition of hate

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Diaspora Jews keep making the same mistake

A perverse feature of the Jewish people is that they make one particular mistake over and over again. They are persecuted. They frantically try to assimilate into their host community in the belief that this will avert future persecution. They are persecuted again. They frantically assimilate again.

This week saw the publication of the first collected works of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of modern Zionism. The set initiated the Library of the Jewish People, a new series of works by classic Jewish writers issued by the Koren publishing house.

Publishing this now is particularly fitting because of striking similarities between Herzl's time and today.

Gil Troy's masterful introduction to the collection draws attention to the complexities of Herzl's tortured life. This rings a loud contemporary bell, not just about the persistence of antisemitism but about the current attitudes of Diaspora Jews.

Assimilated and sophisticated, Herzl had an ambivalent attitude towards his Jewishness. Infatuated with the German high culture that was dominant in Europe, he refused to circumcise his son and lit Christmas tree candles for his children.

Jews had risen to the highest levels of German and Austrian political, professional and cultural society. Yet at the same time, Germany and Austria were becoming more and more pathologically hostile to the Jews.

Herzl was caught in a permanent identity crisis – a conflict between his "enlightened" Europeanized self and the Jewish culture whose fundamental importance he only gradually came to understand.

As he reeled from one antisemitic shock after another, he repeatedly tried to reconcile the high degree of assimilation achieved by European Jews with the fact that, for non-Jewish Europeans, the Jews were unassimilable.

Not just Kanye – it’s an online coalition of hate

Some dismiss TikTok as an innocuous forum for children who want to be creative. Yet TikTok’s pattern of catering to young, impressionable, naïve audiences, combined with the impact of bad-faith actors who post hateful content, must be taken more seriously. Despite claims that TikTok and other platforms are monitoring content, a new variety of antisemitism has emerged in which hatred is articulated through “dog whistles” or coded language used for a specific audience. Jews, for example, are referred to as Skypes (to rhyme with kikes). Black people are “Googles,” Latinos are “Yahoos,” and Muslims are “Skittles.”

Current concerns also extend to more mainstream platforms like Twitter, whose acquisition by Elon Musk casts doubts on whether the social media giant will engage in any form of content moderation – even when it comes to hate speech. Advertisement

But it is on the Dark Web where antisemitic content truly thrives and festers. Inaccessible via what’s known as the “Surface Web,” where you and I search for restaurants, order books and play Wordle, the Dark Web operates in the vast walled-off realm of the Deep Web. It’s a lawless and faceless environment where hateful groups find a comfortable home not only on their own but more concerningly together, as a coalition that amplifies their individual and collective impact.

While it may be tempting to shrug off Ye’s defenders as a hateful nuisance, it is crucial to remember that violent terrorist groups spew similar rhetoric and also have access to the Deep Web. ISIS had to use cloud storage when navigating mainstream platforms became impossible. Thousands of films from Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, and Hezbollah are floating in internet archives.

In an ideal world, Ye’s words should not matter. However, they reflect the cesspool of online hate that translates to violence on the streets. The Anti-Defamation League has documented a rise in antisemitic incidents in the US from 927 in 2012 to a record-high 2,717 in 2021. That is no coincidence.

We are missing a vital opportunity to call out not just Ye the individual, but the chronic trend of Jew-hatred itself. And what starts with Jews never ends with them. It spreads to other groups and reflects a decay in the moral fiber of society.

Let’s not talk about Ye. Let’s redirect the conversation toward forming a new coalition that counters the fusion and coalition of hate. While the Dark Net presents a tough challenge and there is no way to regulate it, however, it can be studied. Because words — whether they are uttered by an anonymous source or a celebrity — can and do kill.

Trivializing antisemitism based on politics

After news broke that former President Donald Trump carelessly dined with both Ye and avowed holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at Mar-A-Lago, Ben Shapiro, who has been outspoken about his support for Ron DeSantis should the Florida governor run for president in 2024, was quick to voice his disgust. "A good way not to accidentally dine with a vile racist and antisemite you don't know is not to dine with a vile racist and antisemite you do know," Shapiro posted, setting off a back-and-forth Twitter squabble between the defamed rapper and Daily Wire executives that had me reaching for the popcorn.

No doubt, Trump's meeting deserves public condemnation. But it's unfortunate that Shapiro can see the splinter in Trump's eye and not the log in his own. Shapiro coming down on Trump for associating with antisemites rings hypocritical in the face of his absence to do just that as his colleague, Candace Owens, continues to prattle on regularly about Ye being her "friend." Waving Owen's defense of an antisemite, presumably because of a shared, mutual interest says much more about Shapiro's character than Trump's dinner says about him.

According to a recent article by Dennis Prager, Owen's former boss, Owens is wrongly being smeared as an antisemite. Prager provides a laundry list of evidence that points to her allegiance with the Jewish people and her support of the Jewish state. But that woman who Prager stands behind has been nowhere to be found this past month. And after Ye's embrace of Fuentes, Dennis should ask himself some tough questions about her. That Shapiro and Prager refuse to publicly identify the brute that she has become on this issue not only has former supporters wondering if they are suffering from a mercenary conflict of interest but if they, like the ADL's Jonathan Greenblatt and other establishment Jewish leaders, have become so comfortable in their untouchable elite status, that they are now detached from the harsh realities of hatred their fellow Jews face every day on the streets of New York and Los Angeles.

If Shapiro and Prager honestly respected Ms. Owens, they would hold her to a higher standard, the standard that both the Daily Wire and Prager U profess to hold all people to. And certainly, the standard that Shapiro is currently holding Trump to. And no, this does not mean firing her, but it does mean straightening out their priorities by taking her to task for her concrete thinking and moral failings. What a fantastic exercise in free speech that would be, would it not?

Israel Advocacy Movement: Ben Shapiro is wrong about Kanye

In this video we examine the Ye effect

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11/28 Links Pt2: IHRA Definition of Antisemitism Is Only "Polarizing" to Israel's Detractors; Anti-Israel activists and human sacrifice; Ye x Milo x Fuentes

From Ian:

IHRA Definition of Antisemitism Is Only "Polarizing" to Israel's Detractors

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's (IHRA) "working definition" of antisemitism is not polarizing to anyone other than Israel's detractors and antisemites.

The IHRA definition has been adopted by three dozen nations, at least six Canadian provinces and numerous states in the U.S.

The IHRA's detractors refuse to acknowledge that modern antisemitism is often tied to the Jewish State (e.g., Jewish soldiers being called Nazis).

They accuse those of us who defend the definition of being "right-wing" and of "weaponizing antisemitism" in order to defend Israel.

This is meant to undermine our efforts to protect ourselves against hate.

In the case of the IHRA definition, it's often the same people who call for universal rights and freedoms who oppose those very same rights for the Jewish people, particularly as they define their relationship with the State of Israel.

The IHRA definition is not "polarizing" to anyone other than those who either lack an historical understanding or are with an agenda to exacerbate the problem of hate and defame the Jewish state.

Anti-Israel activists and human sacrifice

In the anti-Israel context, there is the more recent case of Rachel Corrie. A college senior, Corrie became a member of the International Solidarity Movement, a terror-connected NGO that exploits foreign activists in service of the Palestinian cause. It is likely that she had already been indoctrinated in anti-Israel ideology, but the ISM almost certainly compounded it by orders of magnitude via a cult-like environment of hate.

Corrie lived for some time in Gaza, where she became infatuated with the people and decided that Israel was committing genocide against them, in which, as an American, she was complicit. In 2003, she knelt in front of an Israeli bulldozer, ostensibly in protest of a house demolition. The driver could not see her, and she was crushed to death.

She has, of course, become a martyr, and her letters and emails have been transformed into books and plays. Yet what they reveal is a deeply insecure and troubled young woman, possessed by existential guilt and desperate to redeem herself. Corrie’s death, in other words, was less a tragic accident than a kind of seppuku—a ritual suicide that she hoped, perhaps unconsciously, would be a moral expiation. She did not come to this conclusion on her own. She was the victim of unscrupulous people who wanted, or at least knew they were likely to acquire, a martyr.

One should not look away from what this means: Emotional blackmail kills. It is a kind of murder. Murder at third hand, perhaps, but murder nonetheless.

It is also part of a very ancient tradition. What the blackmailers are after, in the end, is the most primal of all forms of absolution: the human sacrifice. It is sometimes an emotional sacrifice, but far too often it is also physical.

From their origins in prehistory, such sacrifices were, almost invariably, expiatory acts. They were attempts to redeem a person or a community from their sins, to appease the gods and turn them away from stern judgment. And above all, such sacrifices made the victim a sacred object.

There are many among us, often young and vulnerable, who wish to become sacred objects and are told that if they sacrifice themselves, whether in life or in death, they will become so. It is tragic that many choose to believe this, but that does nothing to redeem those who lead them to the altar.

Judaism has always seen human sacrifice as an abomination, which indeed it is. We should not forget this admonition. No one, however righteous they consider themselves to be, has the right to demand such things from anyone. Like the priests of Moloch, those who use emotional blackmail of vulnerable individuals to achieve such an end stand accused.

Ye x Milo x Fuentes

Stop me if you've ever heard this one before:

Fueled by his hatred of Jews, one of the most recognizable black man of his era decided to forge an alliance with one of its most high-profile white nationalist, or, at the very least, the one whose juvenile stunts attract the most attention. One of the men behind the scenes who worked on arranging the meeting is himself Jewish, though he has long repudiated his heritage, is known to have engaged in antisemitism, as well as for being a grifter, and is distrusted by many in the movement. On the other hand, he has shown an uncanny ability to ingratiate himself with its leaders and keep the spotlight on himself. All of this revolving around grand political ambitions on both sides.

Obviously, I'm referring to the infamous 1961 entente of George Lincoln Rockwell, Malcolm X, and Daniel Burros which culminated in years of friendly relationships between the American Nazi Party and the Nation of Islam.

On June 25th, 1961, ten members of the American Nazi Party quietly arrived at the Nation of Islam rally in Washington, DC. In the Uline arena, they were surrounded by more than 8000 members of the Nation of Islam. They were not there to disrupt, attack the attendants, to protest the speech; instead, they were front-row guests. That night, Elijah Muhammad had called in sick, so Malcolm X took the stage to give the keynote speech in his stead. Rockwell contributed $20 to the cause and, while having his picture snapped by Jewish photographer Eve Arnold, he barked at her, 'I'll make a bar of soap out of you.' (She answered, "As long as it isn't a lampshade”).

At first glance, it would seem highly bizarre that members of the American Nazi Party, in full regalia and occasionally Sieg Heiling, would be tolerated amongst the Black Nationalist movement. Still, it more than made sense once you realized that they shared the same antisemitism and views on racial separatism. There was also a historical precedent; the units described as the most vicious, brutal, and antisemitic of the SS were the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar, composed almost entirely of Muslims.

Eight months after their first public meeting, George Lincoln Rockwell addressed more than 12,000 black audience members at the Chicago International Amphitheatre, urging them to ally with Nazis to be truly uplifted. "You know we call you niggers," he addressed the crowd. "But wouldn't you rather be confronted by honest white men who tell you to your face what the others all say behind your back?". He later praised the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad as the 'Adolf Hitler of the black man.'

The Decline of Islamism, and the Rise of the Muslim-American Far Left and Far Right

Born in St. Louis, Umar Lee (né Brett Darren Lee) converted to Islam at the age of seventeen, and was quickly drawn to its stringent Salafist form, and to Islamist political radicalism. He subsequently broke with extremism, although he remains a committed Muslim. In conversation with Dexter Van Zile, Lee discusses his own experiences—including a recent visit to Israel—and his observations about Islam in the U.S.
Islamism is no longer popular. Back in the day, it was very popular. . . . I attribute that to reality—the failure of the Arab Spring, the disaster of what happened in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. Islamist politics has become so unpopular in the Muslim world that historians in 100 years are going to write that there was a 40-year period—from the mid-to-late seventies until the late 2010s—of Islamist political revival that faded away after the Arab Spring. In the U.S. we don’t see people talk about Islamist politics.

Conversion had some negative consequences [for me]—a period of extremism and Islamist politics—but it also kept me out of trouble and away from a criminal lifestyle. You have to remember that a very high percentage of guys who grew up where I did ended up addicted to drugs, or alcoholics. Many didn’t live to see forty and quite a few didn’t make it to twenty-one. For all of the problematic aspects of the Muslim experience in America, there is a track record of conversion keeping some men off the streets and clean.

On the subject of how American Muslims fit into contemporary political divides, Lee comments:
What you’re increasingly seeing in the Muslim community in America is a gender divide. You’re seeing that progressive politics [are] very popular, especially with women, especially young women. We know after 9/11 there was [a] leftward shift in the American Muslim community. . . . But you’re [now] seeing an insurgency led by men, particularly younger men, that are rejecting this progressive shift. They’re rejecting it in very harsh terms and going very far to the right. What you’re seeing in the Muslim community is—especially the young people—the left, and now this segment of the far right, are really taking up all the oxygen and moderate politics is very unpopular.

Unfortunately, there is more uniformity when it comes to attitudes toward the Jewish state:
By far, the least popular thing you can do [in the Muslim community] is support Israel. I could get on video and drink liquor [or] smoke weed and people would say, “Hey everybody, no one’s perfect. Everyone makes mistakes.” I could be in a [pornographic film] and people would say, “Hey, well, . . . ” But support Israel? That is the worst thing that you can do.

When it comes to Israel, everyone is still unhinged. It doesn’t matter what segment of the communities they’re in. There are very few rational people. And even the rational people I talk to, [who] agree with me in private, won’t say anything in public.

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11/09 Links Pt2: The Jewish Studies Professors Who Traffic in Antisemitism‘; Thomas Friedman: Equal-opportunity Israel-basher; Chilling, newly discovered photos show Nazi Kristallnacht up close

From Ian:

The Jewish Studies Professors Who Traffic in Antisemitism

What is particularly disturbing is the fact that Jewish studies scholars have no compunction in deploying antisemitic tropes to further their agenda. Myers and Sokatch write: “The apparent return of Benjamin Netanyahu to power in Israel is a gut punch to people concerned about the state of democracy and the rule of law in the world. Netanyahu has been a key pillar in the global movement of illiberal leaders who have taken control and altered the rules of the democratic game—including in Turkey, Hungary and the United States in the Trump era.” While at first glance such a statement may seem little more than an anti-Netanyahu screed for his dictatorial propensities and underhanded machinations (which to be fair, is not unreasonable), a closer reading of this op-ed’s opening salvo reveals its perniciousness, the antisemitic trope embedded in their choice of words. Suggesting that Israel is a “key pillar” in a “global movement” to subvert democracy implies that the tiny Jewish state exerts disproportionate power in world affairs and it is exercising such power through collusion with actors who seek to enshrine white supremacy (or a local variation of fascism) in their own domains. Interestingly enough, they do not impugn Russia, China, Saudi Arabia or Iran, who are regional hegemons, in a manner that little Israel could never be, except in the minds of those who have read the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The wording is subtle yet clear, hiding in plain sight, echoing fantasies of Jewish power that have led to unimaginable violence against Jews in modern history.

Less subtle is the use by some Jewish studies scholars of the term “Jewish supremacy.” Professor Joshua Shanes of the College of Charleston has repeatedly used it in his op-eds and public Facebook posts. Although he is applying this phrase to the land “between the River and the Sea” and not to any global Jewish conspiracy, the very construction of this locution is antisemitic, insofar as it was a staple piece of Nazism and continues to be used by David Duke and others today (I invite readers to Google “Jewish Supremacy” and examine the results). “Jewish supremacy” is idiomatic and by definition it evokes images of the racial war between the Jews and Western civilization forewarned by Wilhelm Marr, Houston Steward Chamberlin and, of course, Adolf Hitler. However oppressive Israel’s policies vis-à-vis the stateless Palestinians may be, using this slogan to describe it is irresponsible and endangers the security of diaspora Jewry.

What’s even worse is that uttering “Jewish supremacy” today inexorably leads one to think of “white supremacy.” This is no accident, insofar as the Jewish people have been branded as white adjacent and even “hyper-white,” enjoying all the benefits of (and complicity in) whiteness while simultaneously claiming to be an oppressed minority. The centering of the Palestinians as the universal victim in the social justice movement has necessarily led to the branding of the Jews as a global oppressor. Paradoxically, “Jewish supremacy” marks the Jew as a racial scourge upon the world in addition to being an extension of the white European imperialists who not only enslaved Africans and decimated Native Americans but also committed history’s most systematic genocide against these very same Jewish people.

Myers and Shanes are professors of Jewish studies. They have written and taught extensively on the history of antisemitism. They cannot but know that their choice of words is pleasing to the ears of antisemites, all across the political spectrum. The people who hate the Jews, whether attendees at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville or eminent academics like Marc Lamont Hill who celebrate Palestinian terrorists, yearn for confirmation of their fantasies of Jewish power. For if the leading Jewish experts insist that the world’s only Jewish state is a key pillar in the global campaign to subvert democracy in order to institute Jewish supremacy at home, then their fantasies cease to be illusions, and their struggle against us becomes defensible. As such, liquidating “Jewish power” becomes a matter of ethical urgency.

‘Arab Jew’ is another manifestation of Arab denial

The Juifs d ‘Orient: une histoire plurimillenaire exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris earlier in 2022 broke with conventional taboos and commendably illustrated Jewish history and culture in their own right, although the Arab antisemitism that precipitated the Jewish exodus was glossed over – presumably so as not to upset the IMA’s Arab funders. At the time, an open letter from a group of Arab intellectuals and artists objected to Israel ‘usurping Arab-Jewish culture’ for the purposes of the exhibition. Elie Beressi and Noémie Issan-Benchimol writing in K. magazine take issue with the expression ‘Arab Jew’ beloved of the letter-writers, which reduces the Jews to a subset of Arab identity (with thanks: JIMENA and Edna):

Starting with the Nahḍa, the Arab renaissance of the nineteenth century, and under the influence of European nationalist ideas being imported the former Ottoman Empire, Arab identity was to be constructed as a national category, including Christians, but excluding Jews, despite the important contribution of the latter to the intelligentsia and state apparatus, particularly in Iraq, Egypt and Morocco[6].

This is why it is appropriate to question the use of the expression “Arab Jews” by Arab intellectuals and artists. How can we interpret this a posteriori recognition of the Arabness of these Jewish populations, after they have left the Arab territories, after having ceased to be an important element of Arab societies? The general rhetoric of the above mentioned open letter gives us the answer. In the expression Arab Jews, the function of the adjective is to abolish the nature of the noun Jew, to make it only a facet of the real subject, the Arab subject. Less than a Jewish-Arab culture, there would in fact be only a “Jewish component of the Arab culture“. The Jews are not a reality in their own right, but a part of the Arab heritage. Consequently, it is only possible to talk about them in terms approved by the Arab intelligentsia, and this is precisely what the IMA exhibition does not do, as it gives the floor to Jews from Arab countries, but not the “good” ones according to Elias Khoury, who puts forward an Israeli anti-Zionist academic, Ella Shohat. Born in Israel in 1959 to Iraqi Jewish parents, professor of Cultural Studies at New York University – author of “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the standpoint of its Jewish victims”. Social Text (1988) – Shohat sees the category “mizrahim” as a Zionist artifice to uproot Jews in Arab countries from their Arabness in favour of a uniquely Jewish identity, which she sees as being contrived, with a purpose to enlist them in the oppression of the Palestinian people. For her, the Mizrahim category is constructed in mirror image of the Ashkenazim category and is imbued with the negative archetypes linked to Orientalist representations.

These theses of Shohat are perhaps worth considering, but her claims to define Arab identity as the only authentic identity of the Mizraḥim and the irreducible opposition she portrays between this Arabness and Zionism as well as the claim of the Jews to self-define themselves as a people distinct from Europeans and Arabs, are nonetheless very objectionable.

How did Medieval Jewish Tombstones End Up in an Italian Monument?

In 1960, the Italian city of Ferrara undertook the renovation of the columns that flank the entrance to the ducal palace—which are among the city’s most important architectural landmarks. Workers soon discovered that one of the columns had been constructed using 36 fragments of local Jewish tombstones from the 16th and 17th centuries. Henry Abramson writes:
A noted patron of the arts, [the 15th-century duke Borso D’Este] and his immediate successors also made Ferrara a haven for Jews, especially those expelled from Spain and refugees from the Inquisition in Italian territories to the south. Under the House of Este, Jewish life flourished in Ferrara 1598, when the Papal States exerted control over the northern Italian city. The Jewish badge was instituted shortly thereafter, and Ferrarese Jews who once lived and worked throughout the city found themselves shut in the confines of yet another ghetto.

The column was first erected in the 1450s, and it had stood for over 200 years before it was heavily damaged by a fire on December 23, 1716. A chronicler of the period, Nicolò Baruffaldi, mentions that Marquis Francesco Sacrati secured the stones from the Jewish graveyards, “paying in full for their value to the masters of the ghetto.” It is highly unlikely that the Jewish community would have willingly surrendered the gravestones of their ancestors, especially since many of the graves belonged to people the contemporary Ferrarese Jews would have actually known—the grandparents and even parents of the generation alive at the time.

As Abramson explains, there is evidence of the confiscation of Jewish tombstones in contemporary Jewish records, although there is no extant mention of those used for the column. He adds:
Amazingly, [the fragments] were not returned to the Jewish community; they were rather put back into the column where they remain to this day. In fact, they were desecrated still further, with pieces removed and discarded to make room for a reinforced concrete core to protect the column from seismic activity (a devastating earthquake had hit Ferrara in 1570, which Pope Pius V blamed on the Este family for their historic protection of the Jews).

Matti Friedman: The Rich Past, and Promising Future, of the Middle East’s Date

If there’s one thing that unifies the people who live in the area stretching from Morocco to India, writes Matti Friedman, it is their appreciation for the fruit of the date palm:
Long before refrigeration, dried dates could keep for years, making them invaluable for travelers across seas and deserts. They can be turned into honey by boiling and straining the fruit; in fact, the biblical phrase “land of milk and honey” refers to honey from dates, not bees. They can also be fermented into liquor, like the date wine enjoyed by ancient Babylonians, according to the historian Herodotus. The tree itself was a source of fiber for ropes and baskets, fronds for shelter and shade and columns for construction. That led one rabbi to remark at least 1,500 years ago, long before environmentalism was cool, “This date palm—no part of it is wasted.”

“A righteous person will flower like a date palm,” goes the verse in Psalms, one explanation being that the date palm, like the righteous, grows straight and sustains others with its fruit. A scientifically minded rabbi in 12th-century Yemen, Netanel al-Fayyumi, explained that just as the pinnacle of the animal kingdom is people, and the pinnacle of the human species is prophets, the pinnacle of the plant kingdom, according to God’s design, is this tree. “And among the plants,” wrote the rabbi, “He created the most honorable species, which is the date.”

And perhaps even more than Iran, it might be the threat posed to the crop by the red palm weevil that will bring Israelis and Arabs together:
The enemy is at the gates, and this is what brought me to Abu Dhabi, the scene of the International Date Palm Conference. . . . Of particular interest at the conference was the presence of a few Israelis, which would have been hard to imagine a few years ago, before the American-engineered agreements known as the Abraham Accords inaugurated official ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. If we understand the date palm as a unifier in a divided part of the world, dates offer an obvious field of cooperation. A weevil sensor manufactured by an Israeli company, for example, has already been drilled into thousands of trees in the UAE and Morocco, as well as in Arab countries that won’t trade directly with Israel but purchase the sensors through a third party. The sensor picks up the vibrations of weevil larvae and sends a warning to an app installed on the farmer’s smartphone.

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