Israel’s critics have a new slogan
Every couple of years, critics of Israel come up with a new slogan that they hope will pressure the Israelis into making more concessions to the Palestinian Authority. They’ve just trotted out their latest model: “Shrinking the conflict.”Do the EU and the UN Know They Are Supporting Scholarships for the Children of Terrorists?
Such slogans are usually invented to try to overcome some obstacle that’s interfering with the left’s campaign to force Israel to accept a Palestinian state in its back yard. The current obstacle is that it’s been more than seven years (!) since Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas has been willing to negotiate with Israel.
If Abbas won’t talk, there’s no way to talk Israel into surrendering half its country. So, Israel’s leftwing critics figure they will wait him out—after all, Abbas, now in the 16 th year of his four year term of office, is 85 and facing various domestic problems. He can’t last forever. While they wait, the pressure-Israel crowd is looking for other ways to engineer Israeli concessions. Hence “shrinking the conflict.”
The Israel-critics think they’re being very clever with this one, because it actually comes from a phrase that was spoken by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. But of course, they’ve taken it out of context and tried to turn it into a weapon against him.
The concept that Prime Minister Bennett has mentioned is that since there’s no way of ending the conflict, then all that’s possible is to “shrink” it somewhat, through small steps aimed at economic improvement for the Palestinian Arabs.
But critics of Israel see “shrinking the conflict” differently—they see it as a new formula for building a Palestinian state, just more gradually. So, they’ve seized on the phrase and are running with it.
A promotional flier for a course run by an internationally-funded Palestinian NGO shows how the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestinian NGOs abuse international donors, duping them into funding ostensibly worthy causes, but at the same time supporting terror.Ben & Jerry Struggle to Defend Israel Boycott Decision in Sanctimonious Interview
While Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) welcomes European Union (EU) and United Nations (UN) funding for training courses for Palestinians, the problem arises when the courses offer full scholarships to the children of terrorist prisoners and dead terrorists, thereby rewarding the terrorists for their crimes.
A new flier — posted by Fatah Central Committee Deputy Secretary Sabri Saidam, the former PA Minister of Education and current advisor for communications and information technology to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas — promotes a Digital Academy for Scientific Innovation (DASI) program run by the Palestinian NGO Al-Nayzak.
According to the flier, while the children of law-abiding Palestinian families are potentially entitled to a 65% discount for the course, the children of “Martyrs and prisoners” are entitled to a full scholarship.
In other words, children of terrorists and murderers — be they imprisoned, released, or dead (so-called “Martyrs”) — are rewarded and can study for free.Text on image: “Hurry to register at the following link:This means that Safa, the daughter of Abdullah Bargouhti, an imprisoned Palestinian terrorist convicted for the murder of 67 people in multiple terror attacks, and the children of Marwan Barghouti, convicted for his part in the murder of 5 people, are entitled to special privileges, simply because their fathers are mass murderers.
Dasi.ps/register
With a possibility to receive a full scholarship for the children of Martyrs and prisoners.
And a discount of up to 65% for the rest of the recipients.”
[Facebook page of Fatah Central Committee Deputy Secretary Sabri Saidam, Sept. 18, 2021]
Bennett Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the founders of the eponymous ice cream brand, sat down for an interview with Axios political reporter Alexi McCammond as part of an Emmy Award-winning docuseries.
The in-depth conversation saw the famously progressive duo grilled about the Vermont-based firm’s divisive decision to end sales of its products in “Occupied Palestinian Territory” — that is, the disputed West Bank — as well as the subsequent fallout that included numerous US states divesting funds from Ben & Jerry’s parent company Unilever.
After acknowledging they were aware of having waded into an “emotional issue,” Greenfield was quizzed by McCammond on why the company only took a stance on the issue recently when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been ongoing for many years.
Greenfield replied:
The policy of the Israeli government has been to endorse these settlements in the occupied territories that keep on making it harder and harder to actually have a two-state solution.”
In fact, Israeli peace plans have been rejected repeatedly by Palestinian leaders, including those that would have seen the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
If anything, it is the actions of the Palestinian Authority that have stymied the peace process, not those of the Israeli government.
Greenfield later described the steps taken by US states to divest from Unilever as “largely based on misinformation,” before clarifying, “I think Ben & Jerry’s and Unilever are being characterized as boycotting Israel, which is not the case at all. It’s not boycotting Israel in any way.”
However, a noteworthy point of contention that is conspicuously absent in this exchange is that the Ben & Jerry’s independent board did want to boycott Israel in its entirety.
Ben & Jerry suffered an AOC moment - comment
Like AOC, Cohen hooked onto the settlements, because that’s easy, because it takes a very complicated issue and reduces it to one source of all the problems. Because it’s acceptable and in vogue and “progressive” to bash settlements.
And how is the boycott of settlements good for business? Greenfield hinted at this when he said that Ben & Jerry’s “publicly supported Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, but over the years the company continues to sell more ice cream and thrive.”
Perhaps the “but” here is out of place. Perhaps he should have said, “Ben & Jerry’s publicly supported Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and as a result, over the years, the company continues to sell more ice cream and thrive.”
Might that also have been one of the rationales for the company taking its move now on settlements? Get behind an issue seen as cutting edge ‘woke,’ in the hopes that by virtue signaling on a popular Progressive issue, it may boost sales.
Or, as Nick Kostov wrote in the Wall Street Journal piece last month about various states divesting from Unilever stocks because of the Ben & Jerry/settlements brouhaha, the fallout for Unilever “comes as more companies take public stands on societal issues, an approach Unilever has put at the heart of its strategy. For decades, companies largely tried to avoid wading publicly into social and political debates, preferring to influence policy through lobbying efforts, campaign contributions and membership in industry groups. But in a reversal for many big businesses, brands have embraced what has become known as purpose marketing, which many believe helps to drive sales growth.”
What Israel-supporters opposed to Ben & Jerry’s move are seeking to do, is show that when it comes to the Jewish state, this type of “purpose marketing” will have the opposite effect.
We are woke foreign policy on Israel, and this is our MasterClass. pic.twitter.com/NKRgMwU46k
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) October 11, 2021