This article from JTA, published in September 1939, sounds like it could have been written today in regard to "anti-Zionists."
DISCUSSES ANTI-JEWISH ATTITUDE
Priest Assails Those Who Say They Are Not. Opposed to "Good Jews."
PITTSBURGH—Those who mask their anti-Semitism with the assertion that they are not opposed to "good Jews" were assailed by the Rev. Charles Owen Rice in an address he delivered yesterday at St. Joseph House of Hospitality here.
"One of the features connected with the present wave of anti-Semitism that is being stirred up is that some of the leading purveyors of anti-Semitism hotly deny that they are anti-Semites," he said. "They employ a clever sophistry in their attempts to escape the stigma. They define anti-Semitism in a certain restricted sense and then they claim that their teachings and utterances -do not bring them under the term. "
"For instance, these enemies of the Jew will define anti-Semitism as persecution of the Jew because he is a Jew. They will hold that because, to their anti-Jewish attacks, they affix a rider saying that they exempt good Jews, therefore, they are automatically absolved of anti-Semitism. "
"As a matter of fact the unctuous employment of the 'good Jews' qualifier generally intensifies that anti-Semitism of the statements as whole. Also we can have attacks upon Jews, as Jews, without direct statements. The brutal crude, direct anti-Semitic utterances, are far less harmful than the subtle ones.
"Off hand I can give a partial list of some of the more commonly used anti-Semitic statements and inferences.
"It is anti-Semitism to exaggerate the power of Jews, whether it be power in finance, in industry, in newspaper publishing, in radio or anything else.
"It is anti-Semitism to say or hint there is a mysterious central controlling Jewish, national or international. leadership.
"It is anti-Semitism to exaggerate the clannishness of Jews.
"It is anti-Semitism to speak of deliberate controlled Jewish campaigns against Christianity.
"It is anti-Semitic to exaggerate Jewish participation in Communism and similar movements.
"It is anti-Semitism to hint at, or charge, a tie-up between 'International Jewry' and International Masonry. The very term 'International Jewry' has definite ant-Semitic implications.
"You will note that these effective types of anti-Semitism consist of lies. and exaggerations. Their harmfulness consists in their engendering a feeling of mixed fear and anger in the breasts of non-Jews. All of them have been proved false. They are damnably un-American, un -Christian and anti-social."
Then, like now, antisemites denied being antisemitic.
Then, like now, antisemites attempt to re-define "antisemitism" to exclude themselves.
Then, like now, antisemites defend themselves by saying that there are some "good Jews" who agree with them.
Then, like now, the subtle antisemitism that hides as social justice is often more dangerous than the explicit kind.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
This week, for at least the third time, a fan with an Israeli flag was forcibly removed from a Roger Waters show and the flag desecrated.
Former Pink Floyd star Roger Waters, who has lately featured repeatedly in the news for all the wrong reasons, has stated that wearing a mock Nazi uniform in his concerts was actually a "statement against fascism", but that does not explain why a fan who was waving an Israeli flag was manhandled by security and escorted off site.
"There was no intent on my part to provoke anyone," said Gilad Emilio Schenkar, who arrived at the concert with his partner. "And I certainly did not plan on being thrown out."
"Both I and my partner are huge Pink Floyd fans, and this was dubbed a farewell tour, so we just had to buy tickets. Since we've been noticing the antisemitic displays in his concerts lately, we decided to take an Israeli flag with us.
Shortly after displaying the Israeli flag, he was summarily ejected from the venue. "It was brutal. They grabbed and dragged me out. It was quite painful. They took me to a side room and interrogated me. Who I am, what I was doing there and all that. They firmly held my hands while they searched me. They then took the flag, threw it in the garbage and kicked me out. I told them that I thought this was a democracy, so why is a Palestinian flag allowed but an Israeli one isn't?"
Unlike the earlier incidents, in this case there was no written message, no chanting. The man simply displayed the Israeli flag quietly. It is not blocking anyone's view. It is not disruptive in the least.
And that was too much free speech for Roger Waters.
When Waters says "We remember Kristallnacht," it appears to mean that he remembers it from the Nazi point of view. Because his treatment of peaceful protesters at his concerts are right in line with how Nazis dealt with protests.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
Raseef22 is an Arabic language online magazine that centers on issues of human rights. Even a glance at its home page shows that it cares more deeply about real human rights in the Arab world than politicized Western NGOs do.
It recently featured an article about how entrenched antisemitism is in how Tunisians speak - a topic that Western media avoids at all costs.
Most Jews interviewed in the article stress that they are treated with respect...and then they admit that, yes, there are plenty of examples of hate that they have been exposed to.
“Jacob,” who works in the gold trade with his relatives in the Al-Baraka market in the old city of Tunis, asks: “Do you notice any difference between me and any Tunisian Muslim?” And he adds, after I answered him in the negative, as he shows me a small hat that he took out of his pocket: “In the capital, I avoid putting a kippah (a cap worn by religious Jews) on my head, because it symbolizes my Judaism, and we are very few here and I would be subject to racism, while in Djerba I put it with pride, with my head held high, without fearing anything, because there we have coexisted with Muslims for thousands of years like brothers."
The young man, in his twenties, spoke to Raseef22 about incidents of racism that he encountered, which he described as “normal.” However, his trembling voice and frequent sighs between words and the next expressed the depth of the impact they left on him. He says: “Once I asked a Muslim friend about the price of a smartphone of the last time he had bought it. He said to me without thinking, 'I paid the fat of the Jews into him.' I changed the subject, but the incident remained in my mind.”
In Tunisia, the expression, “It cost me the fat of the Jews,” means it was very expensive . Accounts differ regarding the true meaning of this phrase, but the most widespread of them is that the fat is considered forbidden by the Jews.
There are many expressions that denote racism in the Tunisian dialect. We find expressions such as: “Hasak, Jew.” The term “Hasak” is used in Tunisia to disavow a bad and disgraceful act, and the phrase “Hasak, Jew” is said to every person who commits a shameful act.
Likewise, the expression “Latif Mullah Jew” is said, which means “This person does not fear God in his creation,” and other outrageous phrases that are based on discrimination on the basis of religion.
...David Ozan (66 years old), retired, lives in the city of Meknine in Monastir Governorate, on the eastern coast, and has lived in Sousse Governorate for 40 years. He says: "I have never been subjected to racist practices during the sixty years that I have lived."
David tells Raseef22 about the peaceful coexistence between him and his Muslim neighbors, without disturbing his relationship with them: “I used to own two grocery stores in Sousse. My Muslim brothers, just as most of my friends and family members are Muslims, I congratulate them on their holidays and they congratulate me on my holidays, and none of us bears a grudge against the other."
....
David is silent for a while and then adds: "I do not deny the fact that there are some occasional racist practices against the Jews. To judge our Muslim brothers through the hybrid practices of individuals who can be counted on the fingers of the hand... If accidental discriminatory practices happen, we do not base our relations on them and do not pay any attention to them in the first place, because the haters are everywhere, and we should not judge a group based on the behavior of reckless individuals."
Jewish cemeteries in Tunisia are sometimes subjected to vandalism and destruction, similar to what happened in the Jewish cemetery in Sousse last March.
Tunisia is undoubtedly one of the more tolerant Muslim countries, and there is nothing described in this article that doesn't happen in parts of the US (when car shopping in the 90s, one sales representative told me "I don't want to Jew you down.") Yet the article does not try to downplay the antisemitic expressions that have become part of everyday language and the dangers that this represents.
It is impressive to see such a fair, unbiased article about Arab antisemitism in any Arabic language media.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
[H]ate-motivated violence can flourish only in an enabling environment. In the United States, such an environment historically has been conditioned by the activity-and inactivity-of the state. State practices, policy, and rhetoric often have provided the formal framework within which hate crime-as an informal mechanism of control-emerges. Practices within the state-at an individual and institutional level-that stigmatize, demonize, or marginalize traditionally oppressed groups legitimate the mistreatment of these same groups on the streets. This chapter examines the ways in which state rhetoric, policy, and practice provide the context for violence against minorities.
She brings examples of how political figures, by invoking or dog-whistling tropes against oppressed groups, enable hate crimes against the same groups.
The theory seems to have merit. After all, when bigotry is normalized, then the environment is riper for people who want to act in a bigoted way. They don't feel like they are outliers and they believe that there would be fewer consequences for their actions.
There was a cottage industry of people warning that Donald Trump's alleged bigotry would increase hate crimes, and then magically finding such correlations. (The increase in hate crimes began in the second term of the Obama administration, but for some reason no one seems to blame him.)
Relatively few people noted that there was a similar increase in hateful speech from the Left in the same time period - much of it directed at Trump voters.
To be sure, hate from the Left doesn't usually translate into direct hate crimes, while far-Right hate sometimes does. But hate is always directed at the Other - and it is just as reprehensible when the Other is black or gay, or whether The Other is Republican or live in flyover states.
A major barrier to having feelings of hate is that no one wants to believe that they are bigots. They want to believe that their hate is a righteous hate towards a group of people who richly deserve it. It just so happens that groups like Black people, gays, or women are easily categorized and hate towards them is more easily analyzed than hate for political opponents. However, the emotions are the same, and just as destructive - the same feeling of superiority versus the Other and the same imperative that the Other not have the same rights as those of the hater.
Which brings us to modern hate of Jews.
Jews are indeed a defined group with a rich history of victimhood. Outside of the fringe that are white supremacist or neo-Nazi, people don't want to think of themselves as having the label "antisemite.". The Holocaust is still in living memory and no one wants to be on the side of the Nazis.
But lots of people are itching for an excuse to hate Jews without being called antisemitic, indeed while claiming that they are against antisemitism. They want someone to give them permission to hate in a way that they can still look themselves in the mirror - or better yet, to consider themselves paragons of morality.
The UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other "human rights organizations" have been happy to jump in and provide exactly that permission.
Have you ever noticed that the thorough, multiple debunkings of the "apartheid" slander against Israel get no attention? It is partially because the modern antisemites aren't looking for real reasons to hate Israel and Israeli Jews - they are looking for permission to act on the hate they already had beforehand. Once an Amnesty or a UN gives them that permission, by giving Israel a label of "racist" or "Jewish supremacist," they can pretend that their hate is not toxic Nazi-style bigotry but righteous moral indignation. They have no desire to look beyond the modern slanders of accusing Jews of moral crimes - they have "experts" on their side, and that is all they need to legitimize this new bigotry. The 200 page papers don't need to be read or analyzed; they are meant to simply give permission for the masses to hate Jews eight decades after Auschwitz.
This is the same permission that Barbara Perry noted for bigotry on the Right. NGOs fulfill the functions of the Perry's state-supported hate - in fact, they are in some ways more respected because they position themselves as having no political agenda, only a moral one.
Apologists might argue that this Leftist antisemitism, if they even admit it exists, is still much less serious than far-Right antisemitism. The neo-Nazi antisemites are more likely to have guns and to directly murder Jews, while the Leftist antisemites are merely boycotting Israel. If you define the consequences of antisemitism merely by counting the bodies killed directly by the bigots, they would have a point.
However, we have seen in recent years that while the Leftist version of the world's oldest hatred might not directly attack Jews, it encourages Palestinians and Iranian proxies to attack them - and gives them their own moral cover.
They have created an additional false intellectual framework that claims that Palestinian terrorism is legitimate self defense, and that Israel has no right to defend itself or its citizens from Palestinian terror. They push lies that US military aid to Israel has no oversight and that US arms are being used for war crimes - with the intent to destroy Israel's ability to defend Jews from Palestinian terror. They fund "charities" and Palestinian NGOs that are tightly tied to, and often fronts for, terror groups like the PFLP.
This is simply another layer of looking for, and finding, permission to hate and dehumanize.
Jews killed by right-wing crazies in a synagogue in the US are just as dead as Jews killed by Palestinian Jew-haters while driving in their cars in Judea or exiting their synagogue in Jerusalem. But the Left doesn't consider the latter to be victims of antisemitism - the cognitive dissonance would be too painful So they construct yet another castle in the sky, backed up by academics, pretending that the Palestinians who openly admit and publish their hatred for Jews don't really hate Jews and that they are the victims, not the dead Jews.
The entire house of cards of Leftist justifications for hating Jews (and only Jews) in Israel would collapse in an instant if the "progressive" anti-Zionists would spend five minutes looking at the critiques of the "apartheid" slanders and absurd arguments justifying murdering Jews. Or ten minutes to compare Israel's supposed "crimes" with the acts of any other country in the history of warfare. But truth isn't their goal - they only want to have permission to engage in the same kind of bigotry that they claim is exclusive to the Right. Facts get in the way of their deep desire to put those uppity Jews in their place.
Today, in the streets of London, you can get a crowd of thousands to openly cheer the idea that Palestinians have the right to target and murder Jews, and only Jews, in Israel. They just change the word "murder" to "resistance" and terrorism magically transforms from a crime against humanity into a heroic action.
These bigots have permission from the UN, from Amnesty and HRW, from The Nation and Electronic Intifada, from Peter Beinart and Marc Lamont Hill and dozens of other "intellectuals," to hate Jews - and from there to incite the murder of Jews.
People wonder how the Holocaust could have happened. How, centuries after the Age of Enlightenment that normalized the concepts of human rights and equality, could an entire country be so brainwashed to hate Jews? How could such a hate be not only accepted but enthusiastically promoted by ordinary Germans?
The intellectual groundwork for such an event is being put in place in front of our eyes today.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
Walking in the footsteps of Jesus, huge crowds of Christian pilgrims have this month thronged Jerusalem's ancient streets where the Easter story unfolded.
"It's very emotional, I already cried a little," says Marina, who is visiting from Belgrade and joined the Orthodox Good Friday procession carrying a wooden cross. "It's something you have to feel to be here."
Local Christians also stand out as they join the devotions, with Palestinian and Armenian scout groups leading religious processions.
But in recent months, Christians living in the occupied East of the city say they have seen increased harassment and violence.
The first crime of omission is the biggest.
Palestinian Christians belong to the most extreme doctrinal antisemitic churches in the world. The Greek Melkite Church and the Greek Orthodox Church, which make up the majority of Jerusalem's Christians, still hold on to the classic Christian supersessionist philosophy that regards Judaism itself as an aberration. The most vicious doctrinal antisemitism in pre-Zionist Palestine came from local Christians, not Muslims, and in fact their antisemitism shaped modern Muslim Jew-hatred.
The church leaders in Jerusalem have been the most extreme anti-Zionists and antisemites, and have been deathly afraid of saying anything negative about the Muslims who have indeed been oppressing them for centuries. They have enthusiastically taken on the role of dhimmi and defended that second-class status assigned to them by the larger Muslim world.
When they say they are oppressed by Jews, one must be skeptical at the very least.
The main Christian interviewed by the BBC, Bishop William Shomali of the Latin Patriarchate, was quoted in a Vatican magazine in 2012 as saying, “The Talmud, the holy book studied by the ultra-orthodox, more highly venerated than the Bible itself, invites religious hatred, speaks badly of Jesus, and even worse of Mary and, in general, of Christians. In Israeli schools love for the other is not taught but rather the destruction of the other.”
This is pure antisemitism - with a dollop of anti-Zionism on the side.
The BBC then lists some recent examples of Jewish vandalism or disrespect towards Christian sites in Jerusalem. Some of them are legitimate - and the Israeli police arrested the perpetrators. One came from an American. There is no indication that things really are worse than in previous years outside of what the Jerusalem Arab Christians are claiming, and furthermore no proof outside of speculation that this alleged increase is a result of the current Israeli government making extremist Jews bolder.
The Talmud quote above was a response to anti-Christian graffiti in 2012, so there have always been extremist Jews who have attacked church property. They were outliers then and they are outliers now. Any blanket blame of all Jews or all Israel for the actions of a minority who act in opposition to Israeli policy is just another form of antisemitism - of generalizing the actions of a few to the larger population.
But the BBC's antisemitism is not only from quoting antisemites without context, which is bad enough. The reporter shows her own bias here:
The holy city of Jerusalem lies at the heart of the Christian faith. However, the number of Christians living here has dropped from a quarter of the population a century ago to under 2%. Many have emigrated, escaping the painful daily realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and seeking better opportunities elsewhere.
The clear implication is that Israeli policies are driving an exodus of Christians, and the article goes on to say that "Many Christians feel that the growing hostility towards them is meant to push them out."
However, if one looks at the demographic history of Jerusalem, one sees that the only major exodus of Christians came under Jordanian rule - from 19% of Jerusalem residents in 1944 to only 4% in 1967, with far more than half of the Christians of Jerusalem fleeing during those years.
The reason that the percentage has gone down from 4% to 2% today is not because of Israel forcing Christians out but because Israel expanded Jerusalem to include more Jews and more Muslims. In absolute terms, the Christian population has slowly grown in Jerusalem, and the only times it has ever gone down in history have been under Muslim rule. Indeed, Israel's Christians are overwhelmingly satisfied with living in Israel.
That paragraph shows that the BBC is not interested in the truth, but in anti-Israel and indeed antisemitic propaganda.
If the BBC had included any of the context mentioned here, it wouldn't have an article. So it airbrushes Muslim abuse of Christians and Palestinian Christian antisemitism out of the picture, leaving only an ugly lie that blame Jews as a nation for persecuting Christians.
(h/t Martin)
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
On Dec. 1, Netflix started streaming the Jordanian film "Farha," which depicts fictionalized, heartless Israeli soldiers viciously killing Palestinian men, women and children in cold blood. These events never actually happened and the film admits that it is "dramatized." But that does not mean it will not have an outsized impact on anti-Jewish hate and violence.
The movie offers a fanciful retelling of the 1948 war in which the would-be genocidal Arab armies failed to destroy a newborn Jewish state (and kill all its inhabitants in the process). Those who tried to help them do it are romantically recast as the helpless victims of a horrible catastrophe.
Yet primary sources - from the Arab side - attest to the fact that the vast majority of Arabs who left their homes did so voluntarily, or under orders from the invading Arab armies, not the Israeli armed forces.
This is not a matter of perspective or worldview. A movie that malevolently depicts Israeli forces murdering defenseless Arab children in order to feed the nakba mythology is nothing short of a modern blood libel.
In a world of rising antisemitism, it is dangerous and disgusting for Netflix to feed false and anti-Jewish information to the masses by giving a film like this a platform.
Netflix is under fire for screening a movie depicting Israeli soldiers executing a Palestinian family in cold blood, made by filmmakers who have a track record of inflammatory comments about the Jewish state.
The film, Farha, set in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, is being launched on Netflix in most countries from 1 December, and is likely to be Jordan’s entry to next year’s Oscars.
Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, told the JC that the film was intended to “destroy [Israel] by all means possible”.
He said: “I find it deeply troubling that Netflix has apparently failed to do the most basic due diligence before supporting and promoting this project.”
In an investigation into the filmmakers, the JC and activist group GnasherJew discovered that producer Ayah Jardaneh tweeted last year that “Israel is the real terrorist” and posted a “map of Palestine” that erased all trace of Israel.
She also tweeted that Mike Pence was supporting “an apartheid state, an occupier and Zionism”.
Addressing Mr Pence, she wrote: “If you love them so much give them your land and leave your house live as a refugee and let them live there instead”.
In 2014, Ms Jardaneh retweeted a post that said “Hamas or his firecracker rockets is not a problem, but seven decades of Israeli brutality and oppression is”.
She has also used the hashtag #27027KM, described as “the area of all Palestine from the river to the sea”.
Ms Jardaneh, who works at the Amman-based company TaleBox, is not the only member of the team to have made such controversial statements online, the JC found.
The Jordanian movie "Farha" – which shows Israeli soldiers executing a Palestinian family - became available on Netflix several days ago, but it seems not for all the subscribers of the popular streaming service.
Although many Israelis have expressed outrage and terminated their Netflix subscription after the streaming platform announced that it would upload the film, Israelis who chose to keep their subscription would not be able to view it after it was blocked for them.
Many Netflix subscribers in Israel said that when they tried to upload "Farha" in the Netflix search engine, and could not find it, while others received a message saying "this title cannot be viewed in your country."
It should be noted that for some subscribers who had an English interface, the film remained available for them, but still many had an error message and couldn't watch it.
Last week, Far-right lawmaker and destined National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir slammed the new Jordanian film.
"The inciteful Jordanian film that will be broadcast on Netflix demonstrates how hypocritical the world could be," Ben-Gvir said.
"Israel has been attacked by murderous terror before it was even established, this consciousness engineering should be handled by the Foreign Ministry with advocacy that shows the real picture, and who the real bloodthirsty murderers are," he said.
The Jewish/Arab conflict in the Middle East is not about the relative merits of Jew or Arab to live on the Land; there is enough land in what was formerly known as “Palestine” for all without Israel giving up any of the area it now possesses. The ongoing war in Israel is the fulcrum of the intellectual/spiritual conflict between the worldviews that oppose G-d’s rule on earth, and its manifestation through the return of the Jews to the Land.
They say: "Come, let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel will be remembered no more. The consult together with a united purpose; against Hashem do they make a covenant. The tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites, Moab and the Hagrites. Gival, Ammon and Amalek; Philistine and the residents of Tyre. Assyria is also joined with them; they have become an appendage of the children of Lot, selah. (Psalm 83)
A sovereign Israel is an existential threat to the adherents of Christian & Moslem replacement theologies; it shakes their worldviews to the foundations. A thriving Jewish Commonwealth puts the lie to their system of beliefs. The destruction of the State of Israel and the re-expulsion of the Jews are critical to Christian and Moslem worldviews, in order to correct the “aberration” of the Ingathering of the Exiles, kibutz galuyot. All efforts to hobble and constrict the State of Israel, to push her back to indefensible borders, to murder Jewish women and children, especially new immigrants, are important milestones toward their ultimate goal of rolling back history to the good old days when the Jews were scattered to the four corners of the globe, easy prey for the Jew haters.
So the UN passes yet more Jew hating resolutions. Pish Tush, as Gilbert & Sullivan would say.. Should they ever succeed in uprooting the People of Israel from the Land of Israel, you can rest assured they would trip over themselves building elaborate memorials to the failed Jewish enterprise.
However, Israel and the settlement enterprise will endure because it is the mitzvah she’kol ha’mitzvot t’luyin bah (i.e., living in the Land of Israel is the mitzvah upon which every other mitzvah is predicated). Witness the open miracles in the battles of 1948, 1967, 1973. Nowhere in Biblical Prophecy does it suggest that Hashem will return us to our land only to be expelled again.
In a certain sense, Theodore Herzl was wrong: the establishment of Der Judenstaat has failed to solve the problem of Jew hatred. Israel is now reckoned as the Jew among the nations. But their strenuous objections to the Jewish State serve merely to reinforce the fundamental integrity of our worldview, our mission, and our hopeful vision for humanity.
So let’s celebrate Nakba Day! The proper response to the exasperated last gasps of our detractors is to build, build, build. Build up the Land. Build more houses in Yehuda, Shomron and the periphery.
And finally: let us extend our hand in brotherhood to those gentiles who see the Hand of G-d in historical events, and who wish to join with us to bring us closer to the day when G-d is One and His Name is One in the world.
What is the function of the Kohelet Policy Forum?
The Kohelet Policy Forum promotes Israeli national sovereignty and individual liberty. This makes it a “small c” conservative center. It was founded in 2012 by Prof. Moshe (“Moish”) Koppel, an American-born oleh and a true polymath. A specialist in machine learning and artificial intelligence (specifically, natural language processing), he also has written on the metalogic of Halacha and on constitutional law.
He recently wrote a witty book about Jewish identity in the modern age, Judaism Straight Up, which examines the differences between traditional societies and contemporary cosmopolitan ones.
Kohelet is basically a “libertarian” shop. This means that it seeks to broaden individual liberty and promote free-market principles in Israel. Much of its efforts have been aimed at driving deregulation, cutting government bureaucracy, reforming local and national government bodies, and eliminating impediments to free and fair trade (like tariffs, quotas, cumbersome product standards, and licensing requirements). In this it has been enormously effective.
Kohelet has tackled the (mis-)management of government corporations and pension funds, land use and housing policies, labor and social welfare policies, food cartels, the regulation of cannabis cultivation and export, policies meant to better integrate Arab women and haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men in higher education and the productive workforce, and more.
Kohelet also singlehandedly has put on the national agenda the demand for reform of the legal system and the need to re-balance the anchors of Israel’s democratic system – the Knesset and the courts.
In many ways, legal or constitutional reform is the hottest and most acute partisan issue on the domestic agenda, something akin to abortion as the most piercing issue in American politics. And Kohelet put it there (correctly so, in my view). I am sure that Kohelet’s thinkers and legal experts will play a sizeable role in the coming debate over the contours of judicial reform.
If then-justice minister Ayelet Shaked gets credit for appointing approximately 300 judges largely in a conservative and libertarian mold (out of a grand total of some 800 judges in the entire judicial system), then Kohelet shares part of that credit. Kohelet specialists raised national consciousness about the importance of who gets appointed to the bench and how, and helped Shaked make wise choices.
Kohelet also emphasizes “national sovereignty.” Indeed, Prof. Koppel wrote the very first draft of Israel’s so-called nation-state bill. Working with Avi Dichter MK and then many other parliamentarians on both sides of the Left-Right divide in Knesset, the Forum successfully drove passage of the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People.
As could be expected, the media is having a field day criticizing Israel for allowing citizens in a democratic election to choose some despicable characters to represent them in the next government. Outside of those who voted for them, you do not hear much support from Israelis for the views of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Nevertheless, their inclusion in the government is being portrayed in apocalyptic terms. The media has no such concern for the state of the U.S. government, with antisemites like Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Minn.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) in Congress.
The Washington Post devoted nearly an entire page in its “The World” section to the article, “Palestinians fear for their children after Israeli vote.” Several Palestinians are quoted about their fears to give the impression that Israelis are targeting children. One says he tells his children to be careful around soldiers “because any kind of movement, and they will shoot them.” Similarly, another Palestinian says she won’t let her young children walk to school for fear they will be targeted by soldiers.
Claire Parker mentions Ben-Gvir’s position on giving security forces greater latitude to use live ammunition but provides zero evidence that Palestinian children are in any danger following the election, or that soldiers are shooting children on their way to school or by simply moving in an unthreatening way.
The article references a “spate of Palestinian attacks” but does not label the perpetrators terrorists or mention the number of Israeli civilians who have been murdered this year by terrorists. It does refer to the number of Palestinians killed and injured without any explanation of the circumstances.
What made the article especially galling, and just one more example of anti-Israel bias, was that a short article appeared below it about the protests in Iran. This merited four short paragraphs and did not mention that as many as 63 children have been murdered by Iranian security forces. So, while Iranian children are being killed, the Post devotes most of its attention to the parents of Palestinian children who have not been harmed.
The coverage of the twin bombings in Jerusalem by the Post and others was also problematic. In keeping with past practice, reporters could not bring themselves to use the word “terrorist” to refer to the attacks or the perpetrators. Some stories mentioned that Israelis have been victims of violence numerous times this year but, again, refused to label them as victims of terror. Many also could not simply report the facts about the bombings and were compelled to mention the number of Palestinians who have died in clashes with Israeli forces.
I originally wrote this for publication in a major media site, but they do not publish from pseudonyms, so here it is.
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On December 4, Time magazine published an article partially entitled "Here’s What You Need to Know About BDS" by Sanya Mansoor.
BDS stands for the demand to Boycott, Divest from and Sanction Israel. The Time piece pretends to be an objective look at the controversial movement to treat Israel as a pariah state, but it is a one-sided and inaccurate, reading more like a press release for the BDS movement than an informative article.
It turns out that "all you need to know" leaves out a lot of important information.
Here is an accurate description of BDS' history, goals and philosophy.
How did BDS start?
BDS advocates claim that it was started in 2005 by a group of Palestinian civil society organizations and that it is a Palestinian-led movement.
In fact, the strategy was created in 2001 during the NGO Forum of the infamous Durban Conference, the United Nations World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance - an event that was so anti-Israel and antisemitic that even the conference secretary-general, Mary Robinson, said included "horrible anti-Semitism."
The NGO Forum published a lengthy statement, of which paragraphs 424 and 425 are the blueprint for the BDS movement that would be declared four years later:
424. Call for the launch of an international anti Israeli Apartheid movement as implemented against South African Apartheid through a global solidarity campaign network of international civil society, UN bodies and agencies, business communities...
425. Call upon the international community to impose a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state as in the case of South Africa which means the imposition of mandatory and comprehensive sanctions and embargoes, the full cessation of all links (diplomatic, economic, social, aid, military cooperation and training) between all states and Israel.
However, even this was preceded and inspired by the League of Arab States boycott of Jewish-owned businesses in the Middle East that started in 1945 and is actually still in force today in Syria and Lebanon.
What are BDS' goals?
The movement claims not to care as to whether there is one state or two states in the area of what used to be British Mandate Palestine.
However, it demands the so-called "right to return" of the descendants of Palestinians displaced in the 1948 war, a right that simply doesn't exist anywhere else - there were between 10 and 20 million people displaced after World War II and no one seriously claims their descendants have the right to return to their ancestors' homes.
The so-called "right to return" has been used to keep Palestinians stateless and without protection for over seven decades. The reason, as Arab leaders have admitted candidly, is to use them as cannon fodder against Israel. It is one unyielding demand by the Palestinians - not to have the Palestinian diaspora come to build a Palestinian state but to have them "return" to Israel by the millions and ensure an Arab majority there.
In short, BDS does not and cannot accept the concept of a Jewish state. It would accept one Arab majority state or two Arab majority states, but it vehemently opposes the existence of any Jewish state - even as there are plenty of states that identify themselves as Arab states (and Muslim states) without anyone accusing them of apartheid or racism.
Is BDS antisemitic?
BDS leaders insist that they are not antisemitic. However, their demand for "return" and their refusal to accept Jewish self-determination while insisting on Palestinian self-determination shows that they are the ones who are discriminating against Jews.
Beyond that, the BDS movement and their allies in the far Left insist that Jews are held to standards that no one else is held to. Jews who wish to become leaders in feminist, LGBTQ or other causes must renounce Zionism - the right of Jews to a homeland of their own. Jews who want to become student leaders are examined to see if they support Israel's existence, and saying they do makes them suspect at best, disqualified at worst. Israeli Jews who want to speak on campus are likewise subjected to litmus tests to have the simple right to speak.
BDS says that they want the world to boycott Israeli businesses, but in fact the entire list of businesses listed by BDS groups are owned by Jews. Even though there are Arab owned businesses in Israel and in the disputed territories, only Jewish businesses are targeted.
For all practical purposes, BDS is an ant-Jewish movement. Even the German parliament recognizes this fact, and they know a thing or two about what boycotting Jewish businesses looks like.
Is BDS pro-Palestinian?
The BDS Movement claims that it follows the will of the Palestinian people, listing some 170 "civil society" organizations - many of which had only one or two people - that signed on.
Ilan Pappe, a prominent BDS supporter and critic of Israel, has suggested that the international anti-Israel NGOs created BDS and part of the fiction was to pretend that it was a Palestinian-led movement - and it is important to maintain that fiction.
The BDS movement and its leaders have very little to say about improving Palestinian lives, whether in the territories or in places like Lebanon and Syria.
It goes without saying that most Palestinians do not boycott Israeli goods themselves, including luxuries like chocolates and ice cream.
The highest-paying Palestinians work for Israelis, with an average income of double what they can make domestically according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. A significant part of the Palestinian economy is dependent on workers in Israel. BDS wants all of these people to lose their jobs with no plan on how new jobs could replace them.
In fact, when BDS pressure succeeded in getting Sodastream to move its factory from the West Bank to the Negev, hundreds of Palestinians lost their well-paying jobs. BDS leaders were happy at this "victory."
Given the assumption that Israel is not going to be destroyed in the foreseeable future, BDS advocates have a choice: work towards helping Palestinians within this reality, or working towards the destruction of Israel anyway, to the detriment of the people they claim to represent.
Invariably, BDS chooses the latter.
The BDS apathy towards actual Palestinian lives goes well beyond Israel and the territories. Palestinians in Lebanon who have lived there since the 1950s are banned, by law, from many jobs. They cannot buy land. They cannot build new housing even in overcrowded camps. Yet you would be hard pressed to find a BDS advocate that demands that Lebanon offer basic human rights protections to their Palestinian residents. On the contrary, Lebanese bigotry against Palestinians is ignored and silenced, since the BDS narrative is that Israel is the only evil that may be discussed.
Even more horribly, during the first months of the Syria civil war, Israel offered to allow Syrians of Palestinian heritage to move to the West Bank to save their lives, if only they would sign a paper saying that they forego the "right to return" to Israel proper. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas angrily rejected the offer, saying that it was better for the Syrian Palestinians to die in Syria. He didn't offer the Palestinians of Syria a choice of their own, but made their choice for them. No BDS group objected to this decision that may have contributed to the deaths of thousands.
Does BDS support peace?
BDS advocates are emphatically against any peace initiatives that treat Israeli Jews as human beings. They denounce anyone who participates in peace initiatives, whether it is bereaved Israeli and Palestinian mothers speaking to each other or sports programs for Palestinian and Israeli youth.
The Muslim Leadership Initiative, which allows Muslims to learn Israel's point of view, had its participants boycotted by the BDS leaders.
Their intransigence extends even beyond that. When popular artists decide to perform in Israel, while the official BDS movement doesn't support threats, the effect is the same - some artists are bullied into canceling their shows, and the BDS movement celebrates these as victories.
Do American Jews support BDS?
BDS advocates claim that they have dozens of Jewish progressive organizations on their side, and use them as proof that they are not antisemitic. Yet every poll shows that the number of anti-Zionist Jews is minuscule in the US.
A 2018 Mellman poll of Jewish voters found that while plenty of Jewish Americans had plenty of criticisms of Israel, only 3% of them self-identified as "generally not pro-Israel." Although the question wasn't asked of that minority, but many or most of that 3% would not identify as an actively anti-Zionist subset. It can be assumed that only those very few who self-identify as anti-Zionist would wholeheartedly support BDS.
So while anti-Zionist Jewish groups like "Jewish Voice for Peace" and "IfNotNow" manage to get a large amount of press relative to their actual numbers, they are on the fringes of US Jewish life today, and their influence among Jews is similar to the all-but-forgotten anti-Zionist "American Council for Judaism," an anti-Zionist group that likewise gained publicity but very few adherents in the 1950s.
Is BDS successful?
By the standards of actually harming Israel economically or diplomatically, the answer it clearly no. Israel's economic growth is the envy of the world and it has relations with more nations than ever before. Only in the UN is Israel still somewhat of a pariah.
Yet using the yardstick of whether BDS has managed to demonize Israel in the eyes of the world since 2001, the answer is certainly yes. After all, this very Time magazine article quoted BDS leaders, without comment, saying flatly that Israel is a racist and apartheid state - an absurd statement given that some 20% of Israeli citizens are non-Jews, mostly Arabs, and they have equal rights under the law and enjoy more freedom than anyone living under Arab rule. When major media parrots false or contested BDS claims as facts not worth checking, it shows huge inroads in BDS attempts to brainwash the world to hate Israel, especially youth.
Ironically, it is the same Arab world which started the idea of boycotting Jews in Israel to begin with that is the biggest threat to BDS today. Israel's treaties with the UAE and Bahrain, along with unofficial ties with Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states, has hurt BDS and its claims of being the only solution. Emiratis walking around Tel Aviv and enjoying the company of Zionist Jews - while still working to help Palestinians - reveal a model of peace and prosperity that is transforming the Middle East, a model where BDS is not only irrelevant but positively backwards.
BDS is not progressive, it does not support peace, and it is increasingly aligned only with Iran and its allies. This is the truth about BDS that its adherents don't want the world to know.
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