Arab media on Wednesday morning has many stories about a warning issued by the "Lion's Den" terror group.
The Lions' Den group said on Tuesday that Israel "will stand in shock and awe before the splendor of the Lions' Den's fighters, the severity of their strikes and their surprises."
The statement added, "As the resistance surprised you when you assassinated martyr (Raed) Al-Karmi, with hundreds of deaths, you will be surprised by Jenin, Al-Khalil, Nablus and Ramallah."
It concluded saying that "those who think that our fire has subsided, [let them be aware that] we are a boiling volcano."
This message did not exactly strike fear in Israelis. I could not find a single Hebrew or English language media outlet with this story, with the exception of Lebanese Hezbollah mouthpiece Al Mayadeen.
The intended audience for the message wasn't the Israelis, but the Palestinians. And the reason for the message was because the major leaders of the Lion's Den have been turning themselves in to the Palestinian Authority rather than expose themselves to being killed, as Israel took out their founder and leader Wadee al-Houh and killed or arrested a number of other senior leaders.
While the leaders are cowering under PA protection, they want to give Palestinians a message that they are still strong - because if they are perceived as weak, that would be the end of them. In an honor.shame society, the worst thing possible is to be shamed, so the message they want to give is of unrelenting strength and "surprises."
Ironically, calling themselves a "volcano" is the biggest proof that they have been severely damaged by the IDF raids. While some criticized the IDF and the government for going after the Lion's Den in Nablus, some saying that it will encourage a cycle of violence, this statement shows that it was exactly the right thing to do.
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This morning, at a checkpoint near Beit Horon, a Palestinian rammed an IDF soldier with a van, seriously injuring him. The terrorist then exited the vehicle with an axe and attempted to kill the soldier who was lying on the ground.The officer managed to shoot the terrorist, killing him.
Here is security camera footage of the incident:
The terrorist in this case was Habis Abdel Hafeez Youssef Rayan, who is 54 years old.
It is unusual for a man of that age to be directly involved in a terrorist attack. What could be his motivation, and will this be the start of a new wave of older male terrorists?
According to the Palestinian Shams news agency, two of Rayan's sons are members of Islamic Jihad from the town of Beit Dukko. One is Qusay Rayan, who is in Israeli prison, and Assem Rayan, who was released from prison.
I assume this is Assem with Habis.
Abu Ali Express notes that someone named Ra’ed Yosef Rayan, of Beit Dukko, has been on a hunger strike for administrative detention and that detention was just extended yesterday. It seems likely that Ra'ed is another relative of Habis, but it seems unlikely that he would go on a suicide attack for a nephew's detention extension when his own son has been in prison for longer.
When young Arab women attack soldiers at checkpoints, it is often discovered afterwards that they had faced some sort of humiliation - often caught in an illicit relationship - and their "martyrdom" is an attempt to end their shame. We will not learn it from Palestinian media, but it is possible that Habis Rayan was facing serious business problems or bankruptcy, and this is a surefire method to ensure a salary for his family for as long as the Palestinian Authority exists.
One person isn't a trend, but we need to see if other older Palestinian men decide to follow Habis - especially since he is getting widely praised in Palestinian media as a heroic martyr.
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Egypt's El Balad and Jordan's Ammon News describe an Israeli TV report that some 12,000 Israelis visited Jordan during the Jewish holidays over the past month, as many Israelis felt that it was less expensive than going overseas. Most of these visitors went to Aqaba as a cheaper alternative to Eilat.
That's a fairly significant number of visitors, and Jordan's tourism sector no doubt benefited a great deal.
But when the TV station wanted to interview a representative of Jordan's Ministry of Tourism, a fairly innocuous request to get some generic quotes, the Jordanian government didn't grant the request.
How childish can they be? They are afraid of being seen, or quoted, on TV along with Israelis in any context. They'll take money from Israeli "settlers" (as the articles described all the tourists) but they won't deign to speak to Israeli TV.
Do they think they are going to destroy Israel through microaggressions? Because that sometimes seems to be the prevailing mentality.
The microaggressions don't end there.
Both articles headline the fact that Jordan refused to speak to the Israeli news crew, even as they eagerly covered what the news channel had to say about Jordan. They seem to want to give the impression to their readers that they are so strong and mighty that they can refuse a request from the all-powerful Jews.
It's sort of pathetic.
The news producers didn't lose a minute of sleep over the snub. The story ran without any problems. The mighty Jordanian decision to boycott Israeli TV was taken as par for the course by the Israelis.
Also, neither one of the news outlets deign to mention which Israeli TV station it was that tried to get the interview. As if mentioning a specific channel is a sign of weakness.
And that is the point. Their attempts to appear consequential by refusing to answer a couple of softball questions makes them look even weaker.
They are utterly clueless.
This immaturity is accepted as part of Arab culture by the world. But nothing will change until people ask - what is wrong with these guys?
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An editorial at Amad shows anger at various Arab states for declaring days of mourning for Queen Elizabeth, saying that this is an insult to...Palestinians.
Hassan Asfour, the editor of Amad, wrote an article saying that various Arab countries who declared days of mourning and that flags should fly at half-mast are showing support of the British Balfour Declaration and of Zionism, and insulting Palestinians.
The Arab countries that declared days of mourning include Jordan, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait.
Asfour notes that none of these countries did anything similar when Yasir Arafat was "assassinated," or when Gamal Abdel Nasser died.
Far from empty compliments, what these countries have done is a new attack on the Palestinian people and their national cause, as if they are blessing what [Great Britain has]done. Just days ago, the Prime Minister of Her Majesty’s Government announced that if Israel did not exist, it would need to be created..and that it is more Zionist than the Zionists themselves.
(I couldn't find that Liz Truss quote.)
As always, Palestinians need to make everything about themselves, and when any other world event happens that knocks their position in the daily news items down a peg or two, they are livid that they aren't the top story.
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Islamic Jihad is holding a large rally today to celebrate its great victory in the Gaza fighting earlier this month. Here's a video featuring victory music and children with the same kinds of rockets that killed many of their friends:
There's only one problem: Islamic Jihad lost. Badly.
Their military leaders were killed. They didn't convince Hamas to join the fighting. Most Gazans didn't support the fighting, which they understood correctly to be risking Gaza lives only for Islamic Jihad's glory. The prisoners that they claimed Israel would release are still in custody.
Islamic Jihad cannot credibly point to a single accomplishment.
But they don't have to. They just declare victory! And the worse you lose, the louder you claim to have won.
We see a similar dynamic with the recent examples of Arabs withdrawing from sports competitions, or even purposefully losing matches, when they would otherwise be competing with Israelis.
Forfeiting a match is about as far from victory as possible. Quitting instead of competing is the most cowardly thing imaginable. But look how this columnist in Al-Binaa spins it:
There are resistance heroes who did not carry a rifle, did not fire a bullet, and did not undergo military courses, who were able to defeat the arrogant Zionist entity with all its techniques, tools, military arsenals...Youths in sport defeated the Zionist enemy by refusing to confront its representatives, so they became lions and resistance heroes. They may have lost medals , but they won the medal of the nation that crowned them fighters and liberators. With their blows, they brought down the legitimacy of the occupying Zionist entity of Palestine.
No, they just lost.
There is a simple reason for this bizarre twisting of total defeat into massive victory: the Arab honor/shame culture.
Losing is shameful. Losing to weak, dhimmi Jews is unforgivable. Living with this shame is unbearable. Better to fool yourself and claim you won, and try to confidently convince everyone else of your "victory."
There is a secondary benefit of declaring victory after a loss. It is difficult to recruit people to your cause when you are viewed as a loser, but Gaza terror groups never admit defeat. On the contrary, their media is filled with stories about how inevitable and total their ultimate victory over the Jews will be.
As long as Palestinians and their supporters twist reality, and refuse to learn from their mistakes that they deny ever making, Israel has little to worry about.
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There's a very interesting op-ed by Peter Pomerantsev in the New York Times that says how the West should understand Vladimir Putin:
To humiliate people is to exploit your power over them, making them feel worthless and dependent on you. It is clear, then, that the Russian military seems intent on humiliating Ukrainians, taking away their right to independence and their right to make their own decisions. ...
Kremlin propaganda claims Russia revels in isolationism, but it is also addicted to seeking approval from abroad.
And Mr. Putin’s success as president of Russia has rested for some time on his ability to mete out daily humiliations to Russians and then act as if he feels their rage as they do, as if he alone knows where to direct it — toward the West, toward Ukraine, anywhere except toward the Kremlin.
Mr. Putin likes to perform both sides of the humiliation drama: from the seething resentment of the put-upon Russian everyman to cosplaying Peter the Great. This allows him to appeal to Russians’ deep-seated sense of humiliation, which the Kremlin itself inflicts on people, and then compensate for it. It’s a performance that taps into the cycle of humiliation and aggression that defines the experience of life in Russia, and now Ukraine is the stage.
This is similar (although not identical) to how the Arab world had traditionally looked upon Israel, and how the Palestinians still do. The honor/shame society is not only obsessed with looking honorable and avoiding shame, but also to inflict shame on enemies. They honestly do not understand why Israelis aren't depressed at seeing Israeli flags burned.
Pomerantsev says that the West needs to understand the mentality in order to counter it:
In the face of such threats, it can be tempting to try and placate Russia. The editorial board of The New York Times has said that Ukraine will likely have to accept territorial compromises. Mr. Macron has said that the West should avoid humiliating Russia. Such proposals are fundamentally misguided: Russia’s sense of humiliation is internal, not imposed upon it. To coddle the Putin regime is merely to participate in the cycle. If you yearn for sustainable security and freedom, abusive partners and predators cannot be indulged.
Absolutely. And this applies to Iran as well as Palestinians. When the EU foreign policy chief says the current text of the Iran nuclear deal is the best possible outcome, he is coddling Iran. When the West makes it appear that the Palestinian issue is the most important problem that must be solved before other Middle East problems, they are indulging a corrupt and would-be genocidal regime that would destroy Israel in a second if it had the strength to.
You don't compromise with bullies, terrorists and those who support them. It should be obvious to all. And that applies to Iran and Palestinians as well as Putin's Russia.
(h/t Scott)
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Written and edited by southeast Asia-based academic Priscilla Roberts, it attempts to be even-handed and there is little that is offensive or too inaccurate (it certainly has mistakes.)
But when I searched the book for "antisemitism," it mentions only the European version. It says nothing about Arab antisemitism. It doesn't have a separate entry on the Mufti of Jerusalem and his virulent hate nor anything about his Nazi collaboration. It mentions the Hebron pogrom of 1929 only as an aside in the article on United Kingdom Middle East policy: "Sporadic armed conflict between the two communities simmered until, in August 1929, 67 Jews were murdered by rioters in Hebron. This shocking event eroded what little confidence Jewish leaders had in a binational compromise future for the region and led to the rapid expansion of the paramilitary Jewish self-defense force known as the Haganah."
Throughout the book, Arab antipathy towards Jews is framed as a logical response to Zionism and the history of Islamic and Arab antisemitism is simply not there.
This is what we see in the media as well as academia. Jew-hatred is fundamentally irrational and no one wants to accuse Arabs or Muslims of being irrational, because that sounds Orientalist. Ignoring the very real history of antipathy towards Jews in the Arab world is not doing anyone any favors, though - if one ignores a fundamental reason for the conflict, one cannot possibly pretend to explain it.
Since the beginning of Islam, Jews were regarded as dhimmis in Muslim-majority (mostly Arab) lands. They were second class citizens with limited rights. They were tolerated, mostly, as long as they kept in their place. When they were perceived as having crossed some imaginary line, they were subjected to pogroms no less violent than those in eastern Europe. And the very existence of a Jewish state in the midst of Arab lands is hated not because of pro-Palestinian sentiment: it is from the shame that the weak, hated, dhimmi Jews defeated the combined Arab armies.
To ignore that history in describing the Arab Israeli conflict is to effectively censor an important narrative. Even worse, it ignores the antisemitism that is still seen in Arab media, today.
Its entry on antisemitism concentrates on how historic European antisemitism has animated modern Zionism, while Arab and Muslim antisemitism is mentioned only as a logical result of Jewish ambition. Even the Mufti's antisemitism, which is well documented from his own writings and radio broadcasts, is downplayed as a response to Jewish power or realpolitik:
The figure of Haj
Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem, serves as an excellent
indication of growing anti-Jewish sentiment during this period. A
significant leader of the Palestinian Arabs, al-Husseini moved incrementally toward anti-Semitism as he opposed Jewish ambitions in
the region. While he had economic dealings with the Jewish population, he also inspired and organized the growth of Arab paramilitary groups intent on thwarting the growth of Jewish power.
When disputes over access to the holy places in Jerusalem led to
open conflict in 1929, he proved unable to control his followers and
ultimately gave assent to their actions.
...The grand mufti of Jerusalem gained notoriety for his active
courting of the Axis powers. However, his motivations also
involved significant anti-British sentiment, for he viewed the Germans as the likely victors in the war and sought to gain influence
with them.
This is ahistorical but it reflects the general attitude of scholars towards Arab antisemitism: when it is mentioned at all, it is regarded as an unfortunate consequence of Jewish greed and power or an unintended result of other historical events. It is never considered on its own, and it is not mentioned as a continuation of centuries of Muslim attitudes towards Jews, as well as the influence of virulent Christian Arab antisemitism on Arab nationalism in the early 20th century which converted the Arab attitude towards Jews into full blown hate.
The bias is clear when we see the full-page entry on "Anti-Arab Attitudes and Discrimination:"
Anti-Arab attitudes, especially toward Muslim Arabs, as well as formal and informal policies and codes of conduct that unfairly target Arabs and are sometimes known as anti-Arabism have been especially virulent in Israel since 1948.
From reading this encyclopedia, one would believe that the only irrational hate in the conflict is that of Jews towards Arabs!
There is a major gap in scholarship towards the Middle East, and there are no signs that anyone is interested in filling it.
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NPR has a segment pretending to analyze the very valid reasons why Palestinian terrorists from Jenin try to kill Jews in Tel Aviv cafes by interviewing his gracious host, one uncle of the terrorist who murdered three in a Tel Aviv cafe in April.
NPR justifies terror and humanizes terrorists.
What compelled a young Palestinian man to open fire at a bar in Tel Aviv last month? It was one of several deadly attacks in Israel that has sparked a military crackdown in the occupied West Bank, where a prominent journalist was recently killed covering an Israeli raid. NPR's Daniel Estrin visited the Jenin refugee camp to trace one early spark that ignited the latest flames.
DANIEL ESTRIN: Amin Khazem invites us to his rooftop porch in the Jenin refugee camp.
From your rooftop, you can see the whole camp.
AMIN KHAZEM: Yes.
ESTRIN: What are you growing here? All these rooftop plants, what are these?
KHAZEM: Small oranges.
ESTRIN: Amin is also raising two parrots ...And looking after his 5-year-old grandson, whose T-shirt, shorts and shoes feature the silhouette of an M-16.
Here, the culture in the refugee camp is a culture of jihad and martyrdom," Amin says. They carry the memories of their families' old villages, destroyed when Israel was created.
KHAZEM: (Speaking Arabic).
ESTRIN: Wow. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine - can't even count how many bullet holes are - oh, on that wall, too.
KHAZEM: From the Israeli army.
In his Twitter thread on the story, Estrin says that the IDF took over Khazem's rooftop in 2002 in Jenin - meaning that the bullet holes are likely from Palestinians shooting at the Israelis, not from the IDF. But he doesn't bother to clarify that in the NPR story.
ESTRIN: Scars from a major battle with Palestinian militia 20 years ago. It was the Palestinian uprising. Young men from this camp were going to Israel to carry out deadly attacks. Israel stormed the camp and destroyed hundreds of homes. Amin's 29-year-old nephew Raad watched all of this when he was this little boy's age. One night last month, Raad wasn't home in the camp.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST: A Palestinian assailant opened fire inside a crowded Tel Aviv bar, killing three Israelis.
ESTRIN: Hundreds of Israeli officers and armed civilians launched a manhunt through the streets of Tel Aviv. Officers say they found Raad at dawn and killed him in a firefight.
KHAZEM: (Speaking Arabic).
ESTRIN: Amin says the family was shocked. Raad was a techie. He invested in Bitcoin and was financially stable. But his uncle says neighbors shot Raad in the legs several months ago in a dispute over a loan. He says Raad wanted to shoot them back, but the family convinced him to reconcile. He did, and a week later, he was in Tel Aviv. Did this personal anguish drive him to kill Israelis, knowing he likely wouldn't come back alive?
KHAZEM: (Speaking Arabic).
ESTRIN: Amin denies any connection. He says Israel links Palestinian attacks to personal hardship to undermine the fight for Palestinian rights. Raad's father was a senior commander in the Palestinian security forces, trained by the U.S. to round up gunmen, bring order and prepare the ground for an independent Palestine. But here, Palestinians are fed up with their own security forces who brought no security and no independence.
KHAZEM: (Speaking Arabic).
ESTRIN: He says, "we fell in love with the United Nations Security Council and the International Criminal Court in the Arab states and ended up with delusions. People have reached a dead end. There's no horizon that we we will be liberated without us liberating ourselves." He says the camp is full of guns.
It doesn't take much to realize that Ra'ad was humiliated at not being able to take revenge on being shot by his neighbors, but once his family convinced him not to, he had to regain his honor somehow - and killing Jews is always a reliable method to do that.
In fact, this was alluded to in a video from another of Ra'ad's uncles, who praised the murderer for shooting Israelis instead of his fellow Palestinians - which is what he wanted to do!
Khazem can be seen is in the background of this video of the other raving uncle.
Estrin simply accepted the words of the terrorist's uncle - which is the Palestinian narrative that justifies all murders of Jews as a natural response to Israeli actions.
Notice that they aren't featuring any interviews with the victims' families. Only the terrorists must be understood and sympathized with.
Earlier this week, Haaretz published an op-ed by B. Michael which I still cannot tell if it is parody or not. Excerpts:
I’m a proud exilic Jew. I’m an internationalist and a cosmopolitan. I’m also devoid of any relationship to my geographic birthplace, and “land” to me is just the dirt in which food grows and people are buried. It doesn’t have a single milligram of sanctity, and it isn’t worth even a single drop of blood.
...
In our own day, we’ve learned that we owe our survival to being geographically dispersed rather than geographically concentrated. To diversity rather than unity. To communities rather than a state.
We’re really terrible at being a “nation.” We very quickly become as stupid, violent and greedy as most of the other nations of the world, and within a short time we brought destruction and exile on ourselves. Only there, in exile, do we regain the sense we lost and resume being a people that survives.
Apparently, being a majority doesn’t suit us – ruling, running an army and a state. We’re good at being a minority. Even a little persecution suits us. It brings out the best in us.
And now, we’re once again playing at being a “nation.” Ostensibly, that’s our eternal answer to the Holocaust that befell us. But in reality, it’s the continuation of the Holocaust. Not, heaven forbid, the burning of our bodies, only the crushing of our souls.
It’s the growth of another shoot from the Jewish tree that does harm to everyone around it. A rotten, poisonous brother of the Zealots, the Sicarii, Rabbi Akiva’s blind students and Simon bar Kochba’s foolish disciples. They ought to be called Jew-oids. They’re like Jews who took the trivial and wicked parts of Judaism and turned it into the essence.
... Consequently, there’s no choice but to admit that Zionism was a naïve mistake and to go into exile again to regain our strength and refresh our values.
B. Michael is the pen name of Michael Bryzon, a screenwriter and satirist. At first glance this seems like satire, but there is no punchline - and people with no sense of humor like Judith Butler also believe that the Diaspora is where Jews properly belong.
But satire or not, Arab media is reporting heavily about this article without the slightest doubt it is meant seriously. Many Haaretz articles excite Palestinians, but this one is being reproduced all over.
It reminds me of the interview last month where Ehud Barak expressed his worries about Israel making it successfully past its eighth decade. Arabic articles are still being published about the "curse of the eighth decade."
There is nothing wrong with self criticism, but the Arab world always misinterprets anyone asserting Israel has made mistakes as an indication of the demise of the Jewish state, rather than an indication of a thriving, open society.
The anti-Israel Arab world, humiliated at their inability to destroy Israel in 1948., pathetically grab onto any Jews who says that Jews will destroy the state themselves.
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I noted last week that for a week before Yom Yerushalayim, Palestinian terror groups and media were in a frenzy anticipating a massive terror response to the Flag March, threatening a religious war if Jews would march through Jerusalem and all but promising that Gaza rockets would be fired and a new terror wave begun.
It appears that Israel contacted their Arab friends and those states pressured Hamas not to respond. It worked, and here is a case where the Abraham Accords - derided by "experts" as a meaningless agreement that doesn't affect the core conflict - actually helped avert a war.
However, Hamas and Islamic Jihad now have to explain to their audiences why they didn't attack after a week of inciting them to war.
Muhammad Al-Hindi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Islamic Jihad Movement and official in the political department, confirmed today, Sunday, that the battle with the enemy is open and long and takes different forms, and the resistance is the one who determines the appropriate time for its intervention.
Hamas' Al Resalah has a column directly addressing why Hamas didn't attack:
Whoever is aware of politics knows that the resistance in the Gaza Strip operates according to its assessments of the situation, and is not tempted or dragged behind passion or what the occupation plans.
The resistance didn't respond for considerations that it is more aware of than those who watch from the outside. The occupation forces were ready for the confrontation, through which they wanted to restore deterrence power, but the resistance ...is proceeding according to an integrated and extended plan, and it has its information and estimates, and if its assessment is otherwise. , the decision would have been different, because the scenes [of the Flag Msrch] were enough to make them rain the lava of the occupation’s rapists with their rockets, and turn Tel Aviv into a mass of flames.
I've also seen other articles spinning the fact that Hamas didn't attack: articles with pride that Israel was forced to keep planes in the air over Gaza based on only threats, stories pointing out that there were still lots of minor terror attacks over the weekend, pointing out that Israel had to deploy so many police to protect the Flag March which proves that it doesn't control Jerusalem, and saying that Israel begged Hamas not to attack so Hamas was the stronger party.
In honor/shame societies, backing down from a promised fight is a huge humiliation, and lots of ink is being spilled to turn this humiliation into a victory.
Which brings up another factor that helped convince Hamas not to launch an attack: Hamas leaders really liked getting all these phone calls from Arab national leaders asking them not to attack. This increased their prestige considerably, at the expense of Mahmoud Abbas, who was reportedly fuming at being left out of the loop. This pro-Hamas cartoon summarizes this:
The honor at being treated like the national leader of Palestinians outweighed the shame at not attacking Israel as promised.
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Palestinians are gathering excuses to attack Israel next Sunday, Jerusalem Day.
Ma'an is not affiliated with any terror organization. Yet even that news outlet is saying that there is no reasonable alternative to attacking Israeli Jews next Sunday with rockets, terrorism or both.
Last year's Jerusalem Day was marked with Hamas rockets towards Jerusalem - endangering the very holy places that Muslims claim are so important to them. To Palestinians, the war was a net positive because it showed that they could still affect Israel and stop Jews from celebrating the reunification of Jerusalem.
They don't look at a war that killed hundreds and that destroyed part of Gaza as a loss - to them, it was a victory, and Hamas rode a wave of popularity for months afterwards, as it took on the mantle of "defender of Al Quds and Al Aqsa."
All the Palestinians need is an excuse to repeat their purported victory. And they are collecting them.
1.) The march itself, which is an unacceptable provocation to the feelings of millions of Muslims.
2.) A court decision, not being enforced by Israeli police, allowing Jews to pray aloud on the Temple Mount.
3.) Jews continuing to visit and silently pray at the holy site, as they have done for years now.
4.) "Price tag" attacks by far right settlers, even though they are denounced by almost all Jews.
5.) Naftali Bennett not even mentioning Palestinians at his UN speech last September, which they find disrespectful.
6.) Israel rooting out terror cells in Jenin.
7.) The death of Shireen Abu Akleh.
8.) Israeli police attacking people trying to take her body on a different route at her funeral.
9.) The US taking Kahana Chai off the list of terrorist organizations.
None of these are remotely a reason to start attacking Jewish civilians. But in the Palestinian honor/shame system, not attacking Jews is being framed as unacceptable and shameful.
The editorial ends with not a threat but a virtual promise:
The statement of the Palestinian Authority and the statement of the Kingdom of Jordan to hold the occupation responsible for the upcoming religious war represents more than a warning of what will happen.
The question is no longer if a new battle will take place next Sunday. Rather, the more accurate question: What is the miracle that can prevent the occurrence of such a battle?
Palestinians are being primed in all their media for a war.
Israel needs to plan accordingly. And it should say, in no uncertain terms, that while the accusations against Israel are false and exaggerated, anyone who starts a war on May 29 will not be pleased with the outcome.
And it needs to publicize and translate the threats today, not next week.
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TEHRAN (IQNA) – The leader of an extremist Israeli group has called on illegal settlers to demolish the Dome of the Rock in the upcoming so-called “flag march”.
Bentzi Gopstein, head of extremist group Lehava invited the illegal settlers to take part in the event which will be held later this month and mark it by demolishing the Dome of the Rock in the occupied East Jerusalem al-Quds.
He shared a photo on social media that showed a bulldozer beside the Dome of Rock which is situated in the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound.
"We will come to demolish the Dome of the Rock," read the photo's caption.
The march is due to take place on 28 May.
It shows part of a poster that they claim Gopstein posted:
First of all, May 28 is a Saturday. There is no march set up for a Shabbat.
It turns out that this picture is a detail of a poster posted by Gaza Now, and maybe other places:
Look at the logos on the bottom of the poster. Peace Now? Breaking the Silence? These are all left-wing Israeli organizations - not exactly the people who one would expect would want to demolish the Dome of the Rock!
It turns out that the poster is completely fake. Someone Photoshopped a real poster published by left-wing Israeli groups where they claim they will go and demolish the outpost of Homesh - on Saturday, May 28, this year.
I don't know if the fake poster was created by Arabs to spread a libel about Jews or if a Jew created the Photoshop to respond to the left-wing promise to demolish an outpost that had previously been demolished by Israel.
Thousands of Arabic speakers, however, are convinced that Jews are readying to demolish Al Aqsa on May 28. Since I first saw this fake poster this morning, the "destruction" has condemned by PA Adviser for Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations Mahmoud al-Habbash, who parroted the story that right-wing Jews from Lehava posted this graphic. So did the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
When these rumors pop up, people sometimes get killed.
The Israeli government has started to debunk rumors in an effort to forestall violence, for example their denial that they will allow a Passover sacrifice on the Temple Mount was reported in Arab media. Perhaps they should set up a webpage to monitor these rumors and instantly debunk them. Even though Arabs will say that the Jews are liars, over time the site can show over history how these rumors never come true and perhaps their denials will at least be read.
UPDATE: Gopstein did post this on his Telegram channel. It was obviously a joke to make fun of Peace Now et. al., but it is a stupid and irresponsible thing for him to post. He is literally putting Jewish lives at risk for lolz with his buddies? No, thanks, we don't need him to represent those who love the entire Land of Israel.
(h/t DigFind)
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An Arab writer, in a column ahead of the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, notes that plenty of Arabs sold their lands to Jews, and that if they hadn't done that, there would be no Jewish state.
Nahd Zaquout starts off his piece by quoting a poem from 1929 by Ibrahim Toukan expressing the frustration of the writer that Arabs were selling lands to Jews. The name of the poem is "To the seller of the country."
Extend / They sold the country to their enemies in greed for money,
but their homelands were sold. They
may be excused if hunger forced them, and by
God, they would never be thirsty or hungry.
If you say: its name is “a homeland,”
they do not understand, and without understanding greed,
think of your death in a land in which you grew up and
leave your grave a land the length of which he sold
Zaquot then goes on to list the specific Arabs who sold large tracts of land to the Jews in the years after the Balfour Declaration.
The Sursock family (Michel Sursock and his brothers) sold 400,000 dunams to the Jews.
The Salam family sold 165,000 dunams to the Jews,
The Tians, Qabbanis, Bayhem, Sabbagh, Al-Quwatli, Al-Jaza’iri and Mardini families, most of them from Lebanon, are listed as having sold thousands of dunams to the Jews.
Given that Arabs like this author are steeped in an honor/shame mentality, why would he bring up this topic of shame that is rarely discussed in the Arab world?
Because some of his fellow Arabs behaved in a way he considers honorable.
The author takes it as a given that those who sell lands to Jews should be killed. He brings a story of some of those heroes who murdered land sellers:
Honorable Palestinians were strict in the issue of selling land, and they punished by death anyone who sold his land or worked as a broker to sell land. They exposed them to the public. The Arab press mentions the story of a broker from Jaffa who was shot dead while on his way to his house at night, and he was famous for brokering and selling land to the Jews. In the Muslim cemeteries, they transferred his body to the village of Qalqilya, his original town, and there was a reluctance to bury him in the Muslim cemetery. It was said that he was buried in a Jewish settlement called "Benjamina", and that his grave was exhumed at night and his body was dumped 20 meters away.
What a heartwarming story of Jew-hatred, vengeance and....honor!
Perhaps the current mainstream Arab anger at Lebanon is being manifested by trying to call the entire country traitors for having its richest people sell lands at a handsome profit to Jews in the 1910s-20s.
He doesn't mention that most of the lands sold were considered uncultivable. Last year I noted that maps of swamp areas in 1920s Palestine largely coincided with the areas Jews built up.
The land was not only legally bought by the Jews, but they worked hard to make it livable - which the "honorable Arabs" didn't consider important enough to do.
When the six prisoners, most of them Islamic Jihad terrorists, escaped from Gilboa Prison, the Palestinian street went wild. Palestinians were proud. This tweet from "human rights attorney" Noura Erakat captures the glee, praising the "six Palestinian political prisoners who self-liberated themselves using spoons against nuclear weapons and grotesque racial domination."
Why?
It was very clear that they would be caught - or killed during a capture attempt - eventually. Four of them have been caught as of this writing. Islamic Jihad is blaming the "apartheid wall" for their capture saying that this was why they couldn't escape to the West Bank (and indirectly justifying the security barrier.)
So why the celebrations?
The celebrations and praise had nothing to do with "freedom" for the terrorists. Everyone knew that their freedom will end one way or another.
They were celebrations of Jewish humiliation.
To be sure, the problems at the prison that led up to the escape were inexcusable. But the Israeli prison system will lick its wounds, examine its mistakes, and fix the problems. That's what Israelis do - keep improving and learning from mistakes.
Palestinian Arabs don't think that way. To them, everything is about honor - the Jews must be not defeated but humiliated. Victories are based on perception, not facts.
The honor/shame society, with its emphasis on how things look and not ho they are, cannot win against a society that is fact-based. One needs to be able to admit mistakes to improve, and the Palestinians who blame all of their problems on the Jews cannot grow beyond their own myths.
This is why the Arab states have been turning away from the Palestinian cause - because the Palestinian refusal to accept a state and to stop their internal fighting is shameful to the entire Arab world, and at some point the shame has caused them to stop wanting to be associated with people who have shamed the entire Arab world.
Palestinian groups are trying to escalate this prison escape into something much bigger, into a new intifada. They will use any excuse to try to do that, and there are multiple attempts to do that every year, as we saw when Israel placed cameras near the Temple Mount. The groups try to direct Palestinian emotion of any kind into a new war. Usually such attempts fail, but this is hard to predict. Palestinian prisoners are heroes and new measures to frustrate future escape attempts will upset the masses. The Palestinian Authority is trying to ride this wave of emotion just as Hamas and Islamic Jihad are.
Both the "honor" of the escape and the "shame" of the captures elicit emotions, and the Palestinian groups want to gain power based on these emotions. The Gaza groups try to shame the PA and the PA tries to shame Hamas. Facts are secondary.
You simply cannot understand the Middle East without understanding how pivotal the honor/shame culture is - and how self-defeating it is. Arab nations are starting to catch on, but there is a long way to go.
The vaccine debacle shows again a
fundamental difference between the Israeli and Palestinian mentality
- and why peace with Palestinians is impossible.
Israelis want to find solutions to
problems. Ideally, the solutions are win-win – both sides get what
they want and everyone is ahead of where they were previously.
Israel had vaccines that were coming
close to expiration. Palestinians were way behind in vaccinating
their population, and their vaccines – which they ordered many
months ago – were delayed.
I don't know who came up with the
solution – Israel or Pfizer – but Israel had a chance to not
waste the vaccines while allowing the Palestinians to get a head
start on over half a million jabs.
However, Palestinians do not have a
win/win mindset. They have a zero-sum mentality.
The two cannot mix.
From the Palestinian perspective, “if
my enemy wins, I lose.” Israel cannot be allowed to win – whether
it is in PR, or in not losing millions of dollars of vaccines. If
Israel wins, then Palestinians lose, in this bizarre mindset.
Even if Israel's win can also save the
lives of hundreds of Palestinians
A lose/lose is preferable to a win/win,
when you hate your enemy enough.
And Palestinians are taught to hate Israelis from birth.
The zero-sum mindset is tied with the
honor/shame mentality. If your enemy wins, it is shameful for you.
How can anyone make peace with people
whose top priority is for their opponents to lose and be humiliated –
more than they care about their own people?
The answer is – you cannot. Until the
Palestinians grow up and think like adults, they will never get
anywhere.
There is a glimmer of hope. The vaccine agreement was hammered out over months, and as late as Friday morning it was being praised from both sides.
But then other Palestinians - probably political opponents to the PA - started making a stink about how dare the Palestinians make an agreement with the hated Israelis.
Since the PA cannot allow itself to look like a collaborator with Israel, it made up a story about the expiration date of the vaccines, even though that had been spelled out in the agreement.
For a brief moment, the Palestinians acted like adults, like people who actually care about their own. But that way of thinking is fragile and easily smashed when a political opponent accuses the other of being weak or being too conciliatory towards the enemy.
That's what happened. And unless a Palestinian leadership can emerge that cares about its own people more than ridiculous notions of "honor," we cannot expect any fundamental change.
Following the news of Israel's peace agreement with the UAE and Bahrain, we
had a laugh at John Kerry's expense when we watched the 2016 video of Kerry
assuring his audience that peace between Israel and the Arab world without
first resolving the Palestinian question just wasn't possible.
And Kerry knew this because he had, even a week earlier, spoken to
"leaders of the Arab community."
It would be interesting to know just what Kerry said to those Arab leaders
-- and what exactly they said to him in response.
Did he misinterpret what they said to him?
Did those leaders intentionally mislead Kerry?
It certainly wouldn't be the first incident of an apparent 'miscommunication"
between Arab leaders and a member of the US government.
Once again, Arab officials apparently misled a US politician as to what they
were thinking about Israel.
Joe Biden (YouTube screencap)
But apparently, this is not limited to US politicians.
As a matter of fact, Arab leaders have been known to mislead other Arab
leaders as well.
In his book The Arab Mind, Raphael Patai tells a story from the eve of the 1948
Israeli War of Independence:
Musa Alami, the well-known Palestinian Arab leader, made a tour of the Arab
capitals to sound out the leaders with whom he was well acquainted. In
Damascus, the President of Syria told him:
I am happy to tell you that our Army and its equipment are of the highest
order and well able to deal with a few Jews; and I can tell you in
confidence that we even have an atomic bomb...Yes, it was made
locally; we fortunately found a very clever fellow, a tinsmith...(p. 53-54)
[emphasis added]
Patai gives another example, this one from the Six Day War, when on the first
day (June 5, 1967) the commander of the Egyptian forces in Cairo sent a
message to the Jordanian front:
that the Israeli air offensive was continuing. But at the same time,
he insisted that the Egyptians had put 75 per cent of the Israeli air
force out of action. The same message said that U.A.R. bombers had destroyed the Israeli bases
in a counter-attack, and that the ground forces of the Egyptian army had
penetrated into Israel by way of the Negev! (p. 109)
If Egypt had been honest with Jordan from day 1, Hussein might not have
entered the war, and Jordan would have retained control of Judea and Samaria
-- and the Kotel.
But behind these examples of miscommunication, there are issues of Arab
culture.
For example, the story about the tinsmith is pure exaggeration, what Patai
refers to as the "spell of (Arabic) language," namely the "prediliction for
exaggeration and overemphasis [which] is anchored in the Arabic language
itself" (p. 55)
As for Egypt's deception of Jordan, Patai describes it as wajh, or
an attempt to avoid loss of face. In fact, Patai blames King Hussein's years
in England for his failure to see this for what it was:
Had Hussein not lost, during his formative years spent in England, the ear
for catching the meaning behind the words which is an indispensable
prerequisite of true communication among Arabs, he would have understood
that a real victory over Israel would have been announced by Amer and
Nasser in a long tirade of repetitious and emphatic assertions, and that the
brief and for Arabs, totally unusual factual form of the statement betrayed
it for what it actually was: a face-saving device, a reference not to a
real, but to an entirely imaginary victory. [emphasis in original] (p.
112-3)
But what about Biden and Kerry?
Again, without knowing what each side actually said, it is impossible to know
what went on.
But their misunderstanding of their Arab hosts might be due to the Arab
concept of shame.
Patai distinguishes between shame, which is "a matter between a person and his
society," and guilt which is "a matter between a person and his conscience" --
or as he puts it: "A hermit in a desert can feel guilt; he cannot feel shame."
One of the important differences between the Arab and the Western
personality is that in the Arab culture, shame is more pronounced than
guilt...What pressures the Arab to behave in an honorable manner is not
guilt but shame, or, more precisely, the psychological drive to escape or
prevent negative judgement by others. [p. 113]
We tend to associate the Arab concept of shame/honor with of 'honor killings,'
but there are implications on a national level too.
In his preface to the 1976 edition of his book, Patai writes that although
Egypt lost the Yom Kippur War, the fact that they caught Israel by surprise
and were able to initially gain the upper hand, allowed the Egyptians to
perceive the war as a victory, and cleared the way for peace negotiations:
A manifestation of this new Arab self-confidence is the willingness to enter
into disengagement agreements with Israel. It is, in this connection,
characteristic that it is precisely Egypt, the country that won what it
considers a victory over Israel, which has embarked on the road of
negotiation with her....It is quite clear that the feeling of having demonstrated strengh is for
an Arab state a psychological prerequisite of discussing adjustments and
reaching understanding with an enemy.
[emphasis added] (xxiii - xxv)
How would shame/honor manifest itself in discussions between Arabs and
Westerners?
In his 1989 book, The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs, David Pryce-Jones writes about
Kenneth Pendar, an American intelligence officer whose task it was to
persuade Moroccans to side with the Allies during the last war, expressed
the difficulties of conducting a negotiation in which
he expected a yes or a no from people unable to commit themselves to
either,
because they could not tell who would win the war and acquire honor or who
would lose and be shamed. [emphasis added] (p. 45)
Pryce-Jones goes on to quote Henry Kissinger, who complained of the
difficulty of negotiating with the Saudis because of their style that was
"at once oblique and persistent, reticent and assertive" based on the
allocation of honor or shame.
Based on this, one can imagine that Kerry and Biden could each have easily
misinterpreted what they heard in accordance with what they wanted to pass on
to their respective audiences.
Interestingly, when Patai writes about the confidence the Yom Kippur Was
instilled into the Arab world in 1973, he contrasts Egypt -- which considers
the Yom Kippur War a victory -- with other Arab countries that either cannot
make such a claim or have never fought Israel, and are therefore opposed to
negotiation.
That would seem to rule out Jordan and Sudan, on the one hand, and the UAE and
Bahrain on the other.
But King Hussein making peace with Israel is not surprising, considering his
tenuous control over his country, the majority of whom are Palestinian Arabs.
There was leverage the US could apply, even if the peace treaty itself could
cause trouble for Hussein at home.
Considering the leverage that the US applied to Sudan, that country also had a
lot to gain. But both Egypt and Jordan have a cold peace with Israel and the
Arabs in both countries have expressed their hatred of Jews and Israel. It's
not clear that the situation in Sudan is any better.
What about UAE and Bahrain?
Some have belittled the Abraham Accords because those 2 countries have never
actually been involved in a war with Israel.
But maybe that is the point.
Egypt and Jordan fought against Israel, and whatever the considerations on the
government level -- on a national level, Israel remains an enemy in the eyes
of the Egyptian and Jordanian people, regardless of the benefits Israel has to
offer and are nowhere near normalizing relations. There is an absence of a
state of war, but the mood of belligerence persists.
Not so with UAE and Bahrain, which has never fought Israel.
The intent of the Abraham Accords is not to bring peace in order to end a
state of war -- instead the point is to normalize relations, a goal that is
conceivable for UAE and Bahrain, but not for Egypt and Jordan, which still
cannot go beyond a 'cold peace,' let alone a full, real peace.
In November 2017, Mordechai Kedar wrote The Ten Commandments for Israeli negotiations with Saudi Arabia, which he described as "immutable principles" for negotiating with Saudi
Arabia "and any other Arab nations who wish to live in peace with the Jewish
State."
One of those principles is the need for normalizing relations as
opposed to just making peace:
10. Peace with the Saudis must entail more than just a ceasefire with an
attached document ("Salaam" in Arabic) . Israel agreed to that in the case of
Egypt and Jordan as a result of the ignorance of those running the
negotiations on Israel's side.
Israel must insist on complete normalization ("sulh" in Arabic), which
includes cultural, tourist, business, industrial, art, aeronautical,
scientific, technological, athletic and academic ties and exchanges, etc.
If Israel participates in international events taking place in Saudi Arabia,
the Israeli flag will wave along with those of other countries, and if Israel
is the victor in any sports competition in Saudi Arabia, the Hatikva anthem
will be played, as it is when other countries win medals. Israeli books will
be shown at book fairs, and Israeli products officially displayed at
international exhibitions taking place in Saudi Arabia.
An economic
document, whose details I am not in a position to elaborate, but which must be
an addendum to the agreement, is to be based on
mutual investments and acquisitions as well as a commitment to non-
participation in boycotts. [emphasis added]
This is what we are seeing now.
A foreshadowing for what is possible is in another comment by Patai, where he
addresses the "Arab street" that today we are told is supposedly ready at any
moment to rise up in protest, yet whose anger Trump has somehow been able to
avoid these past 4 years:
The volatility of Arab reaction to the October War was paralleled four years
later by the rapid evaporation of Arab wrath over President Satat's
initiative in establishing direct contact with Israel. This was observed by
Fuad Moughrabi, professor of political science and co-editor of the
Arab Studies Quarterly, in 1980:
The Arab world reacted strongly and passionately to Sadat's visit to
Jerusalem. But contrary to what many had expected, the intensity of the
reaction was not followed by any concrete, effective steps to neutralize
the conseqauences of the visit. Sadat did the unthinkable and got away
with it. (p. 339)
Moughrabi wrote this in 1980.
Sadat was assassinated in 1981 -- by the extremist Muslim Brotherhood.
Back then, Arab opposition to Sadat was not directed against the idea of
peace, but against the Camp David Accords themselves, which removed Egypt as a
participant in the war against Israel -- a war which was supposed to benefit
the cause of the Palestinian Arabs.
Today, with the Arab support for the Palestinian Arab cause at its lowest ebb,
there are genuine prospects for continuing what the Trump administration
started.
That is, assuming that this time around Biden actually listens to what the
Arab leaders are saying.
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Elder of Ziyon
