Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, September 05, 2021

Quick comparison of Israel and Hamas' goodwill gestures

Here is a summary of what Israel and Hamas have done over the past week:

Israel

Hamas

- Expanding the Gaza Strip’s fishing zone to 15 nautical miles — the most since 2007

- Additional goods and construction materials imported into Gaza via the Kerem Shalom Crossing

- An additional 5 million cubic meters (1.3 billion gallons) of water allowed into Gaza.

- 5000 more workers will also be allowed into Israel from Gaza

- Working on getting cash from Qatar to Gazans

- More incendiary balloons

- Rockets

- Violent riots at the fence

- Threats of escalation

People who say Israeli actions are what leads to Hamas terrorism have been proven wrong yet again. But they will keep on spouting their lies.

09/04 Links: Israel: Still the 'Strong Horse'; Rosh Hashanah, Abraham Accords' first anniversary, and what can change; Taliban Spokesman "Israel a ‘Tumor’ on Islamic World’s Body"

From Ian:

Israel: Still the 'Strong Horse'

Israel -- no longer diplomatically isolated -- appears to be assuming a more prominent political and military role in the Middle East. Following Israel's generous peace terms with its Arab neighbors, states such as Egypt and Jordan decided decades ago to establish diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. More recently, Islamic countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan also decided to normalize ties with Israel. Presently, these strong new ties appear to be leading to cooperation on an ever-deeper strategic level, especially regarding the destabilizing threat to the area posed by an increasingly aggressive and hegemonic Iran.

Currently -- excluding its ventures into South America from where it can more easily threaten North America -- Iran, sometimes via proxies such as the Houthis, Hamas or Hezbollah -- has successfully inserted itself into Yemen, in a seeming bid to overthrow and supplant Saudi Arabia, as well as in Iraq, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.

Iran's increasingly aggressive policies toward these regional states has accelerated the cooperation between primarily Sunni Muslim Arab Gulf states and Israel. The Sunni-Shia theological civil war within Islam still appears to be fueling the destabilization of the Middle East -- especially with the recently renewed courtship by the US administration of the Middle East's greatest disrupter, Iran.

The first time around, during the Obama years, one might understand the fantasy that enriching and empowering Iran might lead it to give up its long-desired nuclear program and expansionist activities, not to mention the extreme abuses of its citizens at home. Now, however, the world has seen that the plan did not work, and that Iran had been cheating all along, anyhow.

What in the world, then, is the US expecting from repeating this disastrous exercise? For both the Israelis and the Gulf's Arab monarchies, Iran's Shia regional empire and drive to lead the Muslim world is still justifiably considered an existential threat.

Houda Nonoo: Rosh Hashanah, Abraham Accords' first anniversary, and what can change

On Rosh Hashanah, we celebrate the completion of one year and the beginning of the next. It is a time when we set goals for the future. Rosh Hashanah this year coincides with the first anniversary of the Abraham Accords, which is quite apropos because in many ways the themes of the two are very intertwined. As a Bahraini Jew, I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunities which are ahead for our two countries. This past year brought with it many opportunities, but I firmly believe that year two will be even more successful.

Rosh Hashanah last year was also a very exciting time. I was honored and privileged to participate in Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayani’s delegation to Washington for the Abraham Accords signing ceremony on the White House lawn on September 15, and we flew back to Bahrain just in time for Rosh Hashanah three days later. It was a whirlwind of a week – in the span of seven days, Bahrain and Israel announced their new relationship (September 11), the signing ceremony was four days later (September 15) and Rosh Hashanah was three days after (September 18). Just as we ushered in the Jewish new year, we were ushering a new relationship and opportunity for the region.

Over the past year, we have seen successful collaboration in business, healthcare, travel, tourism and social activities. However, I predict that next year we will see activity double in each of these sectors as well as some new areas of collaboration.

We will see partnerships in healthcare, technology (including fintech, greentech and agritech), cyber security and education. Many of the leading companies and organizations in both countries have spent the past year working behind the scenes to build relationships and discuss how they can work together. Our two nations share several joint priorities, which make us prime partners for knowledge sharing.

Israel’s trade with Arab states has surged since 2020 peace deals, data shows

Trade between Israel and countries in the Middle East and North Africa has grown significantly this year, following the Jewish state’s normalization of ties with additional Arab states, new data revealed.

In the first seven months of 2021, trade grew by 234 percent compared to the same period in 2020, according to Central Bureau of Statistics figures cited by Yonatan Gonen, a Foreign Ministry cadet.

The statistics showed trade with the United Arab Emirates surged from $50.8 million between January and July 2020 to $613.9 million in the same period in 2021.

The UAE was the first of four regional states who normalized ties with Israel last year, following Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994 as the only Arab nations to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

Trade with Jordan has also increased this year, from $136.2 million to $224.2 million, and trade with Egypt went from $92 million to $122.4 million. With Morocco, trade rose from $14.9 million to $20.8 million.

According to the data, trade with Bahrain was practically non-existent in the first seven months of 2020. During that same period this year, $300,000 in trade was registered.

09/03 Links Pt2: Should’ve Kept Those Jews; Melanie Phillips: When lunatics control the academic asylum; EU Lawmakers ‘Unanimous’ in Denouncing Antisemitic PA Textbooks

From Ian:

Should’ve Kept Those Jews

The results, though, were arguably much worse for the expellers than the expelled. The journalist Lucette Lagnado, who herself fled with her family from Egypt, described what happened as a “cultural Holocaust.” The Jews were often multilingual business owners, with ties to Western countries and economies. The Jews had made Arab societies more open, and their departures brought with them significant losses in human capital and connectivity to the rest of the world, with damaging consequences for Arab economic development.

Another nation that lost out because of how it treated its Jews was the Soviet Union. The Communist regime mistreated, discriminated against, and imprisoned its Jews, leading them to clamor for expatriation. The era of glasnost and the fall of the USSR led more than 1 million Jews to leave in the late 1980s and 1990s for Israel, where they have helped create Israel’s “Startup Nation” economic miracle. Israeli tech leaders with Soviet origins include Demisto’s Slavik Markovich, Twistlock’s Dima Stopel, Luminate Security’s Leonid Belkind, Guardicore’s Pavel Gurvich, and Lightricks’s Zeev Farbman. Another Soviet Jew, Sergey Brin, came to America and cofounded Google.

Even North America, for all the benefits it has provided its Jews, is not immune to this negative development. In the 1970s, Canadian Jews, wary of the Québécois movement and its less-than-friendly attitude toward Jews, left Montreal for Toronto. An estimated 10,000 Jews decamped from Montreal to Toronto from 1976 to 1985. They weren’t the only ones. Many non-Jewish Anglophones left, too, and a number of major financial institutions relocated as well. The institutions did not openly admit that the Québécois challenge led to their moves, but the reason for the Jewish migration was clear. As the late political scientist Stephen Clarkson wrote in Uncle Sam and Us: Globalization, Neoconservatism, and the Canadian State, “no one denied that Montreal lost a large part of its anglophone, and particularly its Jewish population which emigrated westward to what they felt were politically safer sites.” Toronto has surpassed Montreal in population and GDP and is now Canada’s leading city.

Despite the problematic recent rise of anti-Semitic violence, America today is clearly nowhere near emulating these previous examples. Yet, as the Canada experience shows, Jews are willing to move not only between nations but within nations if they feel the need. The three states with the largest Jewish populations at the start of the twentieth century were New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. New York remains at the top, but California and Florida are now second and third, respectively. These shifts came largely because of the attractions of better weather and economic opportunity, but future shifts could result from more negative reasons. Should Jews feel unprotected in urban environments where public officials don’t take anti-Semitic incidents seriously, they might begin leaving those areas for more welcoming places.

The new hate crimes figures, as well as the recent and insufficiently denounced anti-Semitic incidents, are worrisome to the Jewish community, and should be disturbing to the nation as a whole. America’s Jews will continue monitoring the situation closely. It doesn’t take concentration camps or expulsion orders to send Jews looking for happier pastures. All that’s needed is for a government and its police forces to look away as Jews get attacked in the streets. We should all hope that the day never comes when the U.S. has to say, as other countries said before it, “We should have kept those Jews.”

Melanie Phillips: When lunatics control the academic asylum

The vicious doctrine of “intersectionality,” which links different categories of “victims” together and demonises their purported “oppressors” such as white people, men or those who believe in biological differences between men and women, also targets Zionism and the Jews.

Those who support Zionism often find themselves “cancelled.” That’s because the Marxist dogma of identity politics divides people into powerful and powerless according to crude economic or political status.

Consequently, tiny, besieged Israel is viewed as a white oppressive country (even though the majority of its people are brown or even black-skinned) simply because it’s considered a western nation, has a powerful military (albeit solely for its defence) and is supported by America. So on account of these supposed “crimes,” its supporters are targeted for vilification, too.

Andrew Pessin, a philosophy professor at Connecticut College and a Jew, experienced this in 2015 when he was falsely accused of having dehumanised the Palestinians by supporting Israel during its 2014 war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Branded a racist peddling “hate speech,” he was subjected to death threats and antisemitic abuse and forced to take medical leave from teaching for two years.

Now he has fashioned his experiences into a literary weapon in Nevergreen, a sparkling and savagely satirical novel about campus “cancel culture”.

The book is set in the ultimate “woke” environment of Nevergreen, a college situated on a remote island. The name alludes to an infamous event in 2017 at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

A biology professor there, Bret Weinstein, was hounded out of his post after he objected to the college asking white students to absent themselves for a day to attend a course on race issues. Like Pessin, Weinstein was physically intimidated and not allowed to defend himself against the accusations made against him.

People Love Dead Jews

In late 2019, antisemitic terrorists murdered three people at a kosher market in Jersey City. The killers, who had a large stock of explosives in their van (enough to destroy an area the size of five football fields, the police said), likely intended to bomb the Jewish school below the market.

Much of the news media addressed the Jersey City slaughter from a blame-the-victims angle. Dara Horn, in her new book, People Love Dead Jews: Notes from a Haunted Present, remarks that “The ‘context’ provided by local news outlets after this attack was breathtaking in its cruelty. As the Associated Press explained in a news report about the Jersey City murders that was picked up by NBC and other news outlets, ‘The slayings happened in a neighborhood where Hasidic families had recently been relocating, amid pushback from some local officials who complained about representatives of the community going door to door, offering to buy homes at Brooklyn prices.’”

Horn comments, “Like many homeowners, I too have been approached by real estate agents asking me if I wanted to sell my house. I recall saying no, although I suppose murdering these people would also have made them go away.”

The attackers were not from Jersey City, and in fact there was little ethnic tension there, according to both Black and Jewish residents. Looking back at media reports from other recent mass slayings like the 2016 Orlando nightclub massacre or the 2015 mass murder at a Black church in Charleston, Horn could locate no similar efforts to contextualize the acts of other terrorists—nothing, for instance, about “how straight people in Orlando ... were understandably upset about gay couples setting up shop in the neighborhood and disrupting their ‘way of life.’”

“Presenting such analysis as a hot take after a massacre,” Horn concludes, “is not only disgusting and inhuman, but also a form of the very same hatred that caused the massacre.” Where Hasidim are concerned, the root cause of antisemitic bloodshed becomes, just like in the old days, “Jews, living in a place!”

This is Dara Horn at her acerbic best. You couldn’t ask for a cleaner and more devastating swipe at the journalistic double standard that treats Hasidic Jews as, well, not particularly human, though perhaps useful “as a warning—because when Jews get murdered or maimed, it might be an ominous sign that actual people, people who wear athleisure, might later get attacked!”