The ‘Peaceful’ Movement to Destroy Israel
The immediate result of Israel’s recent election was a victory for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a close ally of American President Donald Trump. But the election results have also revived the perennial interest outside the country in the political lives of Israelis and Palestinians. Paradoxically, while formal relations between the governments of Israel and the U.S. appear to be at a high, anti-Israel political movements have also been getting stronger as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has inched closer to normalization in American progressive and to some extent liberal politics.Israel marks Holocaust Remembrance Day amid fears of resurgent anti-Semitism
The growth of the BDS movement in America presents a serious challenge. It means that even as the U.S. alliance with Israel may grow stronger on some fronts it will always remain vulnerable to changes in political administration and sudden setbacks and it has a negative impact on the relations between Israel and left-leaning Jewish Americans. It is imperative, therefore to confront the false premises on which the BDS case has been constructed and expose the great distance between the polite myths repeated by BDS supporters and the violent realities inherent in a political cause that holds as its ultimate goal the destruction of Israel.
Setting the record straight on the issue of the ‘two-state solution’
One place to begin examining the misconceptions surrounding BDS is with a long article written in The Guardian last August by the American journalist Nathan Thrall, which purported to explain the historical roots and current aims of the movement. In fact, Thrall’s thousands of words on the subject highlighted the fallacies animating the beliefs of progressive Americans on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Thrall mentions “two-states” 15 times in his Guardian article, but not even once does he mention “two-states for two-peoples,” which indicates his deep misunderstanding of the issue. Indeed, the Palestinian leadership is ready to have a “two-state solution” as long as it is not a “two-states for two-peoples, with a mutual recognition of their national identity” solution. The Palestinian narrative thus negates the existence of a Jewish people and of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine throughout history, and treats Zionism as a racist, colonialist movement created by the Europeans to promote Western interests. It therefore rejects the idea of a state for the Jewish people on any grain of soil in Palestine.
This is the core of the conflict and has been so since this narrative was formed after the Balfour Declaration in 1917, since, before 1900, namely before the emergence of Zionism, the Arab residents of this piece of land did not consider themselves Palestinians.
Israel will begin marking national Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday evening, launching 24 hours of ceremonies, services and events honoring the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during World War II and more who lived through the Shoah.
The annual remembrance is one of the most solemn days on Israel’s national calendar, with much of the country all but shutting down to honor the victims of the Nazi killing machine.
Cities, towns and schools throughout the country will hold ceremonies featuring candle lightings and the memories of survivors, TV and radio station will focus exclusively on memories of the genocide. At Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Museum, an official state event will feature six torch lightings from those who lived through the genocide and addresses by Israeli leaders.
The Yad Vashem event will begin at 8 p.m., and be attended by the president, prime minister and other dignitaries.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday his speech would include comments about a cartoon denounced as anti-Semitic that appeared in the New York Times last week. The Times has since apologized for the drawing.
The ceremony will air live on Israeli television. It will also be available with simultaneous translation into English, French and Russian on Yad Vashem’s Facebook page as well as on YouTube.
Yom HaShoah
“In 1942 the Italians, who had already determined to adopt a more radical policy against the Jews, used the Jewish community’s enthusiastic welcome of the Allied soldiers as a pretext to punish the Jews of Libya for their betrayal. Mussolini determined to disperse or remove the Libyan Jews; this campaign was called “sfollamento”. The sfollamento of the Libyan Jews was different depending on the area in which they lived. In the Cyrenaica area, the Jews were divided into three groups according to their citizenship:Holocaust Survivor Testimony: Iris Mozzeri
Giado (or Jado), on the border of the desert, 235 kilometers south of Tripoli, was the most brutal of the camps in Libya. Jado was a former army camp, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Its commandants were Italian, and the guards were Italian and Arab policemen. By June, 1942, the Italians had deported, in stages, a total of 2,584 Jews to Jado; all but 47 of them were Libyan Jews. Living conditions in the camp were miserable. The camp was overcrowded – tens of families slept in a space of four meters and separated only by bedding and blankets. Daily food rations consisted of a few grams of rice, oil, sugar and coffee substitute. Men over the age of 18 were sent out everyday to forced labor. Water shortages, malnutrition, overcrowding, and filth intensified the spread of contagious diseases. Inmates buried the dead in a cemetery on a hill outside the camp which had been an ancient Jewish cemetery. On top of this wretched existence, the Italian guards of the camp enjoyed humiliating the Jews. Out of the almost 2,600 Jews sent to Jado, 562 Jews died of weakness and hunger, and especially from typhoid fever and typhus. This was the highest number of Jewish victims in Islamic countries during World War II.”
- Jews with French citizenship or under Tunisian protection were to be sent to concentration camps in Algeria and Tunisia;
- Jews with British citizenship were to be sent to camps in Europe. Though initially they were thrown into detention camps in Italy, once the Germans occupied Italy in 1943 they were taken to Bergen Belsen, in Germany, and Innsbruck-Reichenau, an affiliate of Dachau, in Austria;
- Jews holding Libyan citizenship, especially those from the Cyrenaica region, were to be deported to concentration camps in Tripolitania, the most infamous of which was Giado (Jado). […]
Watch my new whiteboard animation which explores the connection between #Jews as a people, #Judaism as a religion, & #Israel as a state. It shows how this connection is intrinsic to the link between antisemitism and anti-Zionism; something too often overlooked or misunderstood. pic.twitter.com/zJjedgZ2ZX— Rabbi Sacks (@rabbisacks) April 30, 2019