Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, October 28, 2021

10/28 Links Pt1: US State Dept. official acknowledges Israel must approve consulate reopening; The Global War on Terror Comes for Joe Biden; Britain Ends Direct Funding of PA Teachers

From Ian:

US State Dept. official acknowledges Israel must approve consulate reopening

A senior official in the US State Department told senators on Wednesday that Israel’s permission would be required before the United States could reopen its consulate in Jerusalem serving Palestinians.

US Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Brian McKeon appeared before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to answer questions on a variety of issues. McKeon was asked by Senator Bill Hagerty, a Republican from Tennessee, about the potential reopening of that consulate.

“I just want to confirm something, on the record — is it your understanding that under US and international law the government of Israel would have to provide its affirmative consent before the United States could open or reopen the US consulate to the Palestinians in Jerusalem?” Hagerty asked McKeon. “Or does the Biden administration believe it can move forward to establish a second US mission in the Israel capital city of Jerusalem without the consent of the government in Israel?”

McKeon replied: “Senator, that’s my understanding — that we need the consent of the host government to open any diplomatic facility.”

In this case though, the facility the US is likely to operate the consulate out of is already under its control. The only Israeli approval required in this process will be in the decision to accept the credentials of whomever the Biden administration appoints to be the consul general in Jerusalem when they are presented to President Isaac Herzog.

US President Joe Biden has pledged to reopen the consulate, but the issue has been a sticking point between Israel and the United States, as well as among some members of Congress. The consulate was shuttered by then-US president Donald Trump in 2019 and its staff was folded into the US embassy — which had been moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem a year earlier — in what the Palestinians view as a downgrading of their ties with the US.

At last, @StateDept confirms #Israel would need to provide consent under American & international law for U.S. to open Palestinian consulate in #Jerusalem. Question is, how much pressure are they willing to exert on Israel? pic.twitter.com/GAP2bA5V8Y
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) October 28, 2021

From my @thejpc interview:

"You would have thought after 3,000+ yrs, we were past #Jerusalem being in contention or question as #Israel's capital. It's not if Next Year in East or West Jerusalem. Is JUST Jerusalem. Full stop. It always has been. It is. And thus it shall remain." pic.twitter.com/qB9CYHObaf
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) October 28, 2021

Noah Rothman: The Global War on Terror Comes for Joe Biden

On Monday evening, U.S. officials casually announced that a hostile foreign power was responsible for a “complex, coordinated, and deliberate” attack on an outpost operated by American soldiers.

According to the Pentagon, as many as five drones armed with explosives targeted a Syria-based garrison last week where U.S. forces and Syrian opposition fighters are stationed. The drones were Iranian in origin. The attack was encouraged and materially supported by Iran. And the targeting of this base has disrupted the U.S. mission in northwestern Syria to deter and contain the Islamic State in the Levant.

Just hours later, Colin Kahl, undersecretary of Defense for policy, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan represent a threat to the United States that is all but imminent. “I think the intelligence community currently assesses that both ISIS-K and al-Qaeda have the intent to conduct external operations, including against the United States,” Kahl said. Current estimates indicate that the Islamic State in Central Asia could mount attacks on the U.S. homeland anywhere from six to 12 months from now. As for al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the nation’s history will again be able to hit the homeland within a year or two.

These two episodes might appear unrelated, but only to those who have forgotten the objectives outlined by George W. Bush at the outset of the West’s Global War on Terror. That enterprise was never limited to non-state actors. That war was to be conducted against terrorists and their state sponsors—“any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism.” Afghanistan is once again just such a nation. Iran always was.

Khaled Abu Toameh: The Role of Iran's Palestinian Mercenaries

Hamas and PIJ, it seems, want to continue receiving funds and weapons from Iran, but they do not want to be seen by Arabs and Muslims as mercenaries serving Iran's interests in the Middle East.

Hamas and PIJ want the Palestinians and the rest of the Arabs and Muslims to believe that their only goal is to "liberate all of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea" -- a euphemism for driving the Jews out of Israel and replacing it with an Islamist state.

That is most likely why both Palestinian terror groups were quick to issue statements denying that their main goal is to defend Iran and serve its interests in the Middle East.

"Take your armies and go with them back to Iran, where you can fight your battles away from the peoples you occupy to achieve your agendas," said Sami Gemayel, head of the Lebanese Kataeb Party. He also criticized the failure of Lebanese leaders to respond to the admission that Hezbollah was created to serve Iran, and not Lebanon: "Are you ready now to face the truth?"

The Iranian commander's [Maj. Gen. Gholam Ali Rashid's] statements coincide with the Biden administration's delusional commitment to the fiction that the US will somehow convince Iran to abandon its plans to acquire nuclear weapons.

While the Biden administration is talking about "diplomacy" as the best way to rein in Iran's nuclear program, the mullahs are preparing for war and advancing their scheme to annihilate Israel and, with the help of their six "armies," occupy still more Arab countries.

In a press release on Monday denouncing Israel advancing a plan to build houses in Judea and Samaria, the EU stated - as it has literally hundreds of times before - "The European Union has consistently made clear that it will not recognise any changes to the pre-1967 borders, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by both sides."

The EU has used that phrase for as long as it has existed in its current form - literally hundreds of times. The specific language here is taken from a 2011 EU resolution supporting Palestinian statehood.

When resolutions such as that one are drafted, there are committees that meet for days or months crafting the language to be as precise as possible.

Why does the EU consistently refer to a set of borders that never existed?

Before 1967, Israel existed behind the 1949 armistice lines. Those lines were - at Arab insistence! - not borders. The Jordanian-Israel agreement said, quite explicitly, "The Armistice Demarcation Lines defined in articles V and VI of this Agreement are agreed upon by the Parties without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines or to claims of either Party relating thereto."

There was similar language in Israel's agreement with Egypt. But that was superseded by the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, which did demarcate international borders between the two.

What about the lines between Jordan and Israel?

The 1994 peace agreement between the two seems to be very clear-cut:

Annex I (a)
Israel-Jordan International Boundary Delimitation and Demarcation
1. It is agreed that, in accordance with Article 3 of the Treaty, the international boundary between the two states consists of the following sectors:

A. The Jordan and Yarmouk Rivers B. The Dead Sea C. The Emek Ha'arva/Wadi Araba D. The Gulf of Aqaba

This agreement does two things: it supersedes the 1949 armistice agreement that is the source of the "pre-1967 borders" myth, and it defines the international borders between Israel and Jordan to be the Jordan River, Dead Sea and so forth.

Not between "Palestine" and Jordan - between Israel and Jordan.

There is a tiny caveat, which does not seem to have any legal impact on the actual borders defined:

The orthophoto maps and image maps showing the line separating Jordan from the territory that came under Israeli Military government control in 1967 shall have that line indicated in a different presentation and the legend shall carry on it the following disclaimer: "This line is the administrative boundary between Jordan and the territory which came under Israeli military government control in 1967. Any treatment of this line shall be without prejudice to the status of the territory."

The agreement is not saying that the boundary between Israel and Jordan is in question. It is instructing any maps created based on this agreement to include language that says Judea and Samaria's legal status has not been determined.

Under accepted international law, maps themselves are generally regarded as evidence, but have no legal value in and of themselves. The text in a map does not have the same weight as a legal agreement, unless it is attached as part of the agreement itself. The ICJ ruled as such in 1986.

The crucial point is that there was no such map attached to the agreement itself. Without that, the agreement text is the only legal definition of the border between Israel and Jordan - meaning that under international law, Israel's border ends where Jordan's begins.

Whatever legal status Judea and Samaria have, the 1949 armistice lines were not legal boundaries (borders) in 1949, nor in 1967, and certainly not after this 1994 agreement.

The EU knows this. It calls the 1949 armistice lines "borders" anyway.

Which means that the EU is knowingly lying about the facts to push its own political agenda of creating a Palestinian state on borders that never existed in any way.

In any other context, this would be a huge scandal. But when it comes to Israel, facts suddenly become optional and narratives are what drives EU resolutions.

(h/t Irene)

Al Quds reports on a meeting between a senior Palestinian official and the head of UNRWA in Ramallah yesterday.

Ahmed Majdalani is a member of the PLO's Executive Committee and secretary-general of the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front. He met with UNRWA Commissioner-General Philip Lazzarini, ostensibly to support UNRWA's efforts to line up more donors to keep the agency going.

But Majdalani doesn't care about UNRWA helping people it calls "refugees." To him, and to Palestinian leaders as a whole, it serves an entirely different purpose: to help destroy the Jewish state.

According to the article, he told Lazzarini that he supports UNRWA not as an institution that provides services to Palestinian refugees, but because it represents a political basis for the "right of return": of millions of Palestinians to flood Israel and turn it into another Arab state.

To help achieve this, Majdalani said he opposed the US insisting that UNRWA teach that Israel has the right to exist and not teach incitement. He strenuously opposes the UNRWA's agreement with the US to ensure objectivity as a condition for funding, saying, "We consider this agreement to carry risks that target and threaten the refugee issue, in order to undermine and liquidate it. It also redefines the refugee, and this is considered a dangerous matter for us in the Palestine Liberation Organization."

He is not only speaking for himself, but for the PLO altogether.

UNRWA pretends to be a non-political, objective organization, but of course it isn't. It says it must exist until there is a resolution to the "refugee" issue, and since the Palestinians won't accept any resolution short of destroying Israel, UNRWA essentially agrees with Majdalani and the PLO.

In the meeting, Lazzarini apparently didn't say a word of disagreement to Majdalani's characterization of the agency, instead praising Majdalani for his words supporting UNRWA's goals of obtaining more funds.

His silence is admission. UNRWA will not say it out loud, but it regards itself as a crucial tool in the eventual destruction of Israel as well.

Over the past month, Palestinians have edged more towards supporting a peace agreement with Israel than they did previously.

According to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, when asked "the most preferred way out of the current status quo" 36% said “reaching a peace agreement with Israel” while 34% prefer waging “an armed struggle against the Israeli occupation.”

In September, 28% said a peace agreement while a plurarilty of 39% said they felt terror was the best way.

When asked a somewhat different question, as to the most effective way to end the "occupation," a smaller plurality than September prefers terror. 44% chose "armed struggle" and 36% negotiations, compared to September's 48% preferring terror and 28% preferring negotiations.

I think the reason is that after the May conflict, Palestinians identified more with Hamas, which they respected for shooting rockets at Jerusalem to "defend Silwan" or "al-Aqsa." A month after the fighting, the "end the occupation" question resulted in 49% chose armed struggle, 27% negotiations, roughly the same as September. Before the war, in April, 36% said that they prefer reaching a peace agreement with Israel and 26% said they prefer violence.

So the tilt towards supporting terror seems to have been a bump in support of Hamas' philosophy as a result of the war, and now disillusionment on how little that helped is starting to set in. (The poll also showed that Hamas' popularity has gone down in October.)

Another factor may be that Palestinians are reacting positively towards Israeli goodwill gestures under the Bennett government, like allowing 4G networking in the territories.

But as we are seeing, support for negotiations is not a solid position. Public opinion can easily turn towards supporting terror at any time, as it has many times before.

No one mentions the consistent pattern in the polls: acts of terror like suicide bombs and rocket barrages do not bring revulsion from the Palestinian public, but huge waves of support.

Refuting the Narrative and Winning the Tribal War (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

Last week, Elder of Ziyon described an interesting conjecture on the origin of the word “Palestine”: that it is derived from the Greek word for “wrestler,” which is part of the name taken by Jacob when he wrestled – “isra” – with an angel of God, “El.” So “Palestine” means “Israel.”

Is it true? Who knows? But it is ironic in the light of the assertions of the Palestinian Arabs that they are “natives,” an indigenous people that were “colonized” by the European Jews who, according to them, are not even a people but just a religious sect.

This is the heart of the Palestinian narrative that is presented as a justification for their violent struggle to expel the Jews from Eretz Yisrael. The post-colonial ideology that is current today, especially on the part of European former colonialists, demands that colonists turn control of the lands they exploited over to the indigenous residents. If the colonists refuse to do the right thing, then the natives are – if not entirely justified in turning to violence – at least understood and sympathized with. The Palestinians even make the absurd claim that the UN Charter, which permits victims of aggression to defend themselves, approves.

The oldest indigenous people on the land, and the most legitimate claimants for aboriginal rights, are the Jewish people. The fact that they won their battle – against British and Arab colonists of their ancestral land – does not change that. The fact that Jews may have been a minority in the land on any particular day from biblical times to the present, does not change that. The fact that most of the Jews living in Israel today are descended from Jews that had been living in exile in Muslim countries, Europe, Africa, India, and other places, does not change that.

The Palestinian Arab claim to being an aboriginal people that was invaded and colonized is false in two respects: first, specifically Palestinian peoplehood did not exist to a great extent before the mid-1960s, when it developed in opposition to Zionism. And second, few Palestinian families have a connection to the land that extends more than a couple of generations before the arrival of the Zionists.

Prior to the appearance of Palestinism, which was catalyzed by the KGB-advised PLO in the 1960s, Arabs in the land primarily viewed themselves as members of their extended families or tribes. The land itself was considered “southern Syria,” and there are numerous quotations from Palestinian Arab leaders, as late as 1977, that deny the existence of a Palestinian identity in favor of a pan-Arab one.

There may be Palestinian Arabs that are descended from people that lived in the land during biblical times, or arrived in the Arab conquest of the 7^th century. But almost all came no earlier than the invasion of Syria (which included Eretz Yisrael and Lebanon) by Muhammad Ali (not the boxer) around 1830, and many of them migrated from the surrounding countries to take advantage of the economic development of the land by the Zionists and later the British Empire. When the UN defined “Palestinian refugee” in 1948, it included “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948…”, to include numerous recent migrants.

The last time Eretz Yisrael was governed by its indigenous inhabitants was during the Hasmonean Dynasty (140-137 BCE), the folks that gave us Hanukah. Since then, it has been ruled by a succession of invaders, including the Romans, Byzantines, Persians, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamelukes, Turks, and British. Until the advent of the Palestinian Authority in 1993 and the Hamas takeover in Gaza, there has been nothing approaching Palestinian sovereignty anywhere.

A recent NY Times hit-job on Israel inadvertently made the oppositional nature of Palestinism clear. Asmaa Azaizeh, an Arab citizen of Israel and an intellectual, was quoted thus:

“Being a Palestinian is a way of resisting injustice,” she said. If there was nothing to resist, “I wouldn’t care if I was Palestinian or Egyptian or Lebanese or Jordanian.”

Palestinians are Arabs and they share the language, religious beliefs, and customs of Arabs in the surrounding countries. What makes them specifically Palestinian, as Ms. Azaizeh says, is their opposition to Zionism and the Jewish state. It doesn’t need to be said that in comparison, the Jewish people have a unique language and religion, as well as a relationship to this particular piece of land that goes back for millennia. As explained in the Torah, this land is inseparable from Jewish identity.

***

As I wrote last week, we are engaged in a conflict of tribes over the land. Regardless of the justice of their position, the tribe that prevails will have the land, and the loser will disappear.

The Arabs that call themselves Palestinians understand the importance of the land to their ideology far better than secular Jews do. That is why, with all the divisions and rivalries among them, they can agree almost single-mindedly on their goal of recovering their land and their honor.

One of the biggest mistakes that Israel makes in dealing with Arabs is in failing to understand the importance of maintaining her own honor. In the Middle East, honor is the greater part of deterrence. There is a Bedouin story about a rich man with many animals, several wives, and a number of sons. One day he sees someone steal a goat, and does nothing. He has many goats; maybe the thief is hungry, he thinks. The thief is emboldened and brings his friends. Little by little they take everything the man has. He has lost his honor, and without honor has no rights. Soon he finds his animals gone, his sons murdered, and his wives raped. He is left sitting outside the tent that used to belong to him.

Every time a Jew is humiliated on the street, every time they steal a car, burn a centimeter of land or make us afraid to walk on it, the Arabs move forward, closer to their goal. Every time a Jew moves away from the periphery of the country because of crime and insecurity, we lose ground. When we allow Arabs to shoot at us, or God forbid, kill us, without taking revenge, they gain and we lose.

There is a strategy for us to win in this conflict. It is to push forward in all parts of Eretz Yisrael to fully control the land, to make the Arabs understand that they have no hope of driving us out. It means increasing Jewish presence and control at the Temple Mount, and not the opposite, as has been happening since 1967. It means ending the no-go zones inside our capital. It means adopting a death penalty for terrorist murderers, and meeting Bedouin banditry in the south with overwhelming force. It means crushing the genocidal regime of Hamas, even if it requires a military occupation of Gaza. It means stopping the flow of money from the EU into illegal Arab building in Judea and Samaria, and encouraging hundreds of thousands of Jews to move there. It will probably also mean targeted killings and expulsions.

Life would not be as easy or pleasant for the Jews of Israel as it is now if they take on this task. It would require more military service, and it would cost money and lives. The state would have to become less open, liberal, and democratic. There would be opposition from the Israeli Left, Europe and America. The special position of the Jewish state as “the Jew of nations” ensures that, even if the nations of the world generally went out of their way to intervene on the side of justice, they would not choose our side.

On the other hand, if we don’t do it, if we allow the Arabs to continue their incremental gains and their erosion of our sovereignty, the day will come that we find ourselves outside our tent with no sons, wives or camels. There isn’t another alternative.

There is no doubt in my mind that we have the resources and the ability to win, to assert Jewish dominance over all of Eretz Yisrael. The harder question is this: how can we develop the will and the unity required to do it?

10/27 Links Pt2: Bari Weiss: When Your Body Is Someone Else's Haunted House; Emily Schrader: Boycotts Hold Universities Back; BU's Elie Wiesel Center mocks the Holocaust

From Ian:

Bari Weiss: When Your Body Is Someone Else's Haunted House

Tomorrow marks three years since the massacre at Tree of Life, the most lethal attack on Jews in American history and a watershed event in the lives of so many I love.

I find myself pulled back to that time. To the shock I felt. To the sense I had immediately that the country I thought I lived in was changing in radical ways, even if I didn’t yet fully understand them.

One of the people who helped me make sense of it all — who helped me see that the fate of Jews and the fate of liberty are intertwined; who helped me grasp that an assault on Jews was an assault on the very notion of difference — was Dara Horn.

Dara is a novelist and an essayist whose writings on Jewish history, culture politics has shaped my own thinking. Her new book is called “People Love Dead Jews.”

Here’s my review: My wife read it in a single sitting, pausing only to read lines out loud to me.

But don’t take my word for it. Read The Washington Post’s review. Or UnHerd’s. Or The Wall Street Journal.

This is a book deeply relevant to everyone who cares about the future of America, not just the future of American Jews.

Until then, here is an excerpt from “People Love Dead Jews”:
Sometimes your body is someone else’s haunted house. Other people look at you and can only see the dead.

I first discovered this at the age of seventeen in the most trivial of moments, at an academic quiz bowl tournament in Nashville, Tennessee—where, as the only girl from my New Jersey high school, I shared a hotel room with two girls from Mississippi. We were strangers and competitors pretending to be friends. One night we stayed up late chatting about our favorite childhood TV shows, about how we had each believed that Mr. Rogers was personally addressing us through the screen. We laughed together until one girl said, “It’s like Jesus. Even if he didn’t know my name when he was dying on the cross, I still know he loved me, and if he knew my name, he would have loved me too.” The other girl squealed, “I know, right? It’s just like Jesus!” Then the two of them, full of messianic joy, looked at me.

I said nothing—a very loud nothing. The girls waited, uncomfortable, until one braved the silence. “It seems like people up north are much less religious,” she tried. “How often do you go to church?”

Emily Schrader: Boycotts Hold Universities Back

Before becoming the resounding success it is today, the Cornell-Technion partnership came under fire from SJP and other anti-Israel hate groups. They continue to target science and innovation by opposing academic collaboration between the U.S. and Israel. As the Technion and other Israeli institutions build on the success of this program by creating new international partnerships with more universities, SJP persists in its attacks. It is notable that they only target the democratic state of Israel – as opposed to China, Russia, or any country with a poor track record on human rights. Their criticism is rooted in bad faith and should be dismissed out of hand.

The University of Minnesota has enjoyed a strong collaborative relationship with multiple universities in Israel throughout the past few decades. Since 1980, more than 1,400 documents have been co-authored between the University of Minnesota and various Israeli universities, and the numbers tend to follow an increasing trend. 16 documents were written in collaboration with Tel-Aviv University in 2018, and now 29 have been written thus far in 2021. Between 2018-2019, 10 documents were published in collaboration with Bar-Ilan University, whereas 31 were published between 2020-2021. Ben-Gurion University also saw increasing numbers, and although the Weizmann Institute of Science did not, it still had 15 documents published in collaboration with the University of Minnesota in 2021. In total 103 documents were published in 2021 with this co-authorship compared to 79 in 2018.

Cornell and the Technion’s partnership marks one of the most ambitious – and successful – international academic efforts in contemporary history. Bridging oceans, continents, and cultures, this relationship enables the best and brightest minds in both New York and Haifa to create a brighter future for the Middle East and the entire world. The Twin Cities, hopefully, will become the next great center of American-Israeli cooperation.

Gil Troy: BU's Elie Wiesel Center mocks the Holocaust

Honorees and donors to BU – and every other university – beware. As Elie Wiesel’s family has learned the hard way, once you lend your name to an academic institution, you’re powerless. And in today’s perverse academic world, when Jew-hatred is so mainstreamed it’s often undetected, such profanations of sacred names will only proliferate.

To exorcise this ugliness, recall Elie Wiesel’s courageous article in Le Figaro in 1975, after the UN declared Zionism “racism.” With his survivor-scarred skepticism about labels, Wiesel had resisted calling himself a Zionist. But he could smell Jew-hatred, even when perfumed with human rights rhetoric. “Reproaches, condemnations, indictments by other nations – the plot is clear. It leads to public humiliation, the forced isolation of a people whose suffering is the oldest in the world,” he wrote.

He understood that “to prepare ‘solutions’ to the ‘Jewish problem,’ the first step was to divorce the Jew from humanity.” And anticipating today’s crisis among young Jews, he added: “To weaken us they attempted to distort our self-image.... We are told that it is not about Jews, this is about Zionists. That, too, is hardly new. They try to divide us, to pit us one against the other after having pitted us against the world.”

Rejecting this anti-Zionist con game demonizing his people, Wiesel declared, “I have no choice but to consider myself a Zionist. To do otherwise would mean accepting the terms of reference used by Israel’s enemies. I wish our non-Jewish friends would do the same, and claim Zionism as a badge of honor.”

I honor the Wiesel family for extending “a hand” to tonight’s speaker. May he and others embrace Elie Wiesel’s challenge: learn what Zionism truly is, stop using it as a curse word, and celebrate it “as a badge of honor.”

When Palestine Was Kosher (Judean Rose)

Once upon a time, everyone knew that Palestine was Jewish land. It didn’t matter who was sovereign, who lived there, or how many Jews were there. The fact is, Palestine had always been Jewish land, and everyone knew it.

Palestine was also occupied land, only nobody called it that back then. Not even the Jews. Meekly, we prayed for return as the foreign ones came, one after the other.

So nu. We had the Brits. Before that the Turks. And before that EVERYONE else. Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Persians, Mamluks, you name it: they came, and it was ugly and brutal for our people.

Everyone wanted a piece of the action.

Everyone wanted our land. They still do.

Now all of this was foreign domination of Jewish land. And everybody knew it. Everybody knows it, still.

The Arabs know it. The world knows it. Even The Squad knows it.

Because it’s hard to deny history, which is this: Down through the ages, everyone and his dog has wanted our land—Jewish land—and they still do. Right now, thank God, we’ve got a sliver. But bad people want to drive us into the sea and give it to others, this one tiny sliver of our land. This time, the world wants to give it to Arabs.

Who will they give it to next, one hundred years from now? China? Korea? Mars?

It matters not. Take our land from us again and again. Expel us. Install another people, another government. Call it something else. Call it Palestine or Israel, Eretz Yisrael, or the Holy Land, it’s all the same. It will never matter. It is and will always be Jewish land.

In our daily lives we called it “Palestine,” because we knew it meant “Israel.” Palestine was the Israel of our prayers and holy books. The geography and history were identical. Go to Palestine and one could pick up ancient coins from the ground, mute testimony to Jewish tragedy and longing.

One time, during the Depression, my grandfather came home from work, and saw a small wrapped rectangular item on the table marked “Elite.”

“What’s this?” he asked my grandmother.

“Chocolate from Palestine,” said my grandmother, with reverence. She’d bought it from someone going door to door.

Grandpa unwrapped a corner and took a bite. “FEH,” he spat. “Tastes like ground-up Arabs!”

That's pretty much it in a nutshell: My grandmother saw “Palestine” as a holy cause. My grandfather, meanwhile, saw Arabs as pesky interlopers. They were both right. And that generation knew the truth. It’s only now our brains have been twisted into pretzels of inverted truth.

And still, once upon a time, it was no big deal to say these things out loud—a time when everyone knew that Palestine was a label applying to both Jews and the Holy Land. A sign on a Chicago storefront reading “Palestine Kosher” gave no one cognitive dissonance (except for its proximity to the phrase “Fried Shrimp”), because it made sense: Jews eat kosher and are from Palestine. (And not Arabs.)

More interesting, perhaps, is the fact that our storefront photo of an admittedly much older building is from 1963. Israel had already become a state. Yasser Arafat had not yet begun to talk narishkeit about Arabs being “Palestinians.” So there were no protests, riots, or talk of appropriation. What's clear is that “Palestine” the word, as late as 1963, still held fond associations for most kosher Jews. (Also, it took time for the new/old name “Israel,” to kick in.)

Indeed we did finally get up the courage, in 1948, to call Palestine by its real name: Israel. The “new” name just confirmed what everyone had already known. That it was Jewish land. That it was ours.

The Times got it as far back as September 1, 1929 and the Hebron Massacre. The Gray Lady called it as it was: the Arabs were invading Palestine (when Yasser Arafat was naught but a puling Cairo infant).

Even as late as 1948, the world still knew what was what, and who was who. One people was native, the other a belligerent outsider. The AP knew it, and the Boston Evening Globe repeated it. So did the Raleigh Times (and a slew of others, too numerous to mention).

The logic is simple, the conclusion inevitable: the Arabs invaded Palestine, they are the outsiders who forced their way in.

They invaded Palestine because it wasn’t theirs.

And they wanted it.

This column is l’ilui nishmat Sheina Zelda bat Eliyahu, my dear mother.

10/27 Links Pt1: Ruthie Blum: The bigger picture behind the narrow Gantz-NGO controversy; Col. Kemp: Jerusalem Consulate: A Nail in the Coffin of Peace

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: The bigger picture behind the narrow Gantz-NGO controversy

It's hard to believe that Israel's defense minister would lie about such an event, the veracity of which would be easy to check. Nor would it make sense for him to have targeted specific groups without evidence. Moreover, the watchdog group NGO Monitor said that Gantz's announcement confirms what its research has shown for years.

Whether the defense minister is right or wrong about the NGOs he singled out, however, the brouhaha brings to light two larger points that the Israeli government keeps trying to deny or sweep under the carpet. One is that false assertion that the "diversity" of political parties that make up the coalition is an advantage, not a hindrance.

The second is the ridiculous claim that the government – now led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett but squeezed hard by parties to his left – has the Biden administration in the bag. Oh, and that this "change government" will "bridge" the partisan Democrat-Republican divide on Israel that former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu supposedly created and cultivated.

Well, the PFLP-NGO scandal is only the latest among many internecine spats that have been rocking the shaky coalition. This doesn't mean that it's going to fall, mind you, as every one of its members still has more to lose than gain by quitting and toppling it.

But the explosion illustrates, yet again, that the only way for it to function is through the capitulation – not "compromise," as its champions like to euphemize – of one side to the other. And the right hasn't been winning the tug of war.

The genie that Gantz let out of the bottle belies the similar pipe dream of improved relations with the Democrats across the ocean. As anyone paying attention is aware, the battle in the United States, like that in Israel, is ideological.

Ironically, the left knows this full well. It's about time for Bennett and his buddies to acknowledge that the split within both countries and between the two cannot be mended with masking tape.

Gantz, who's being pummeled by the Palestinians and their apologists at home and around the world, is being forced to learn that lesson. As someone who himself campaigned on a ticket of "restoring" relations with the Democrats, he ought to be eating his hat – and a hunk of humble pie – while sticking to his guns against those groups whose work and cashflow should be stopped.

Richard Kemp: Jerusalem Consulate: A Nail in the Coffin of Peace

This may seem like just another diplomatic facility to issue visas, promote trade and take care of US citizens, with no greater consequence than the US consulate in Edinburgh, UK. But it is far more than a mere office for paper-shuffling diplomats. It amounts to a de facto US embassy to the Palestinians on Israeli territory. Its true purpose is to undermine Israeli sovereignty in its own capital city and will jeopardise future prospects for peace between Israel and Palestinian Arabs.

As well as betraying Israel, Biden's irresponsible diplomatic signalling — which also appeases his hard-left supporters — is a betrayal of the Palestinian people. They have suffered too long and too hard under the hostility of their leadership, which has consistently refused to entertain all proposals for peace with Israel that could lead to the establishment of their own state.

Successive Palestinian leaders have been encouraged in their intransigence by the US and Europe who have for decades extracted concession after concession from Israel while Palestinians make none.

The intended consulate in Israel's capital will... encourage greater support for Hamas, the terrorist group that rules Gaza....

That this is not mere bureaucratic reshuffling can also be understood from the Biden administration's determination to do it in the face of Israeli government opposition and despite it potentially breaching Israel's Basic Law, US law and the 1963 Vienna Convention, which does not allow a consulate to be opened without host nation consent.

In addition, opening a consulate in the same city as an existing embassy — an unprecedented move — reinforces its immense political significance. Especially as there is no practical purpose for the new facility, with the embassy already incorporating a department devoted exclusively to Palestinian affairs.

Following his validation in Afghanistan of this damning indictment, Biden now has a chance at last to get something right by abandoning his plan to undermine a close ally, reduce the prospects of peace and sentence the Palestinian people to more decades of suffering.

i24NEWS:'This is the beginning of undoing the recognition of Jerusalem' says Prof. Kontorovich

Interview with Prof. Eugene Kontorovich, Director of the International Law Department, Kohelet Policy program.

Kontorovich analyzes the latest on Israel-US relations

Amb. Alan Baker: Are the Palestinians Changing their Legal Tactics in the International Courts?

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ desire to petition the International Court of Justice on the “issue of the legality of the occupation of the land of the Palestinian state and the relevant obligations for the United Nations and States around the world in this regard” opens a “Pandora’s box” of questions.

A legal situation of “occupation” is, in and of itself, not inherently illegal. On the contrary, it is a legally acknowledged situation in international law and practice.

To raise the question before the international court as to whether there exists a “Palestinian state” would appear to be presumptuous and even pre-empt and prejudge the outcome of the negotiation process. There exists no internationally accepted and binding document attesting to the existence of any Palestinian state.

It is unclear if those advising the Palestinian leadership fully understand the distinction between the status and functions of the two different international judicial bodies, the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.

The Palestinian leadership alleging before the UN and ICJ that Israel is violating the Oslo Accords would be ironic, in light of the long list of fundamental breaches of those accords by the Palestinians.

It remains improbable that the Palestinian leadership could establish any viable cause of action in the ICJ against Israel, based on the Oslo Accords.

As the COVID-19 crisis started, the Palestinian Authority started the Waqfet Ezz fund to help out people who lost their jobs or otherwise couldn't afford to pay their bills.

They raised money from the private sector - mostly businesses. Citizens were urged to donate as well, and the current mufti of Jerusalem announced that funds given would be considered zaqat (Islamic charity.)

The board of directors of the Waqfet Ezz fund were rich businessmen who were expected to donate huge amounts.

Already last year, criticisms of the fund started. Citizens felt that the government was responsible for helping the people and shouldn't push the issue of funding to the private sector. Only $13 million was raised in the first month. 10 of the 29 board members didn't give a dime. People felt that the board should include citizens from Gaza, from academia and from NGOs, instead of only rich businessmen who raised their own prices for goods to take advantage of the coronavirus.

Now, an audit shows that the Waqfet Ezz fund misused its limited funds, and gave aid to many people who didn't deserve it. Some people who made handsome salaries still snagged benefits, and some families had as many as seven members each apply for and receive benefits when it was meant on a per-family basis.

Where there is money, there is Palestinian corruption.

Palestinian Authority stops fuel stations from selling gasoline in containers for Molotov cocktails

Palestinian terrorists are upset at a governmental decision to ban fuel stations from filling containers with gasoline.

The Palestinian Authority issued the instruction recently, saying it is prohibited to sell gasoline in plastic or glass containers to citizens, making it more difficult to get the crucial ingredient for Molotov cocktails.

"Resistance activists" said that this was meant to "protect the occupation." There are daily attacks against Israeli motorists and police using the crude firebombs. However, there have been many protests against the Palestinian Authority recently as well, and this decision might have been aimed at those.

Political activist Fakhri Jaradat told Felesteen that the PA aims to control the security situation in the West Bank and bury all kinds of resistance.

According to the Shin Bet, there were 187 Molotov cocktail attacks against Israel in September, more than double the incidents in August.

After the Abraham Accords, the Palestinian Authority announced it would boycott the Dubai Expo. They didn't.

In August 2020, in protest of the UAE normalizing relations with Israel, the Palestinian government announced quite publicly that it will boycott the Dubai Expo this year.

They can't even keep the promises they make to their own people, let alone to Israel.

There is a Palestine pavilion at the Dubai Expo. It must have taken months to build - after this announcement.

This week, the head of the Palestinian intelligence service, Majed Faraj, made an official visit to the expo.

He was accompanied by the ruler of Dubai, Mohammed bin Rashid.

The Emirates News Agency described Faraj as "the special envoy of President Mahmoud Abbas."

That's as official as it gets.

Palestinian media that is not part of the PA is noting the hypocrisy.

There is nothing wrong with changing one's position. Sometimes one has to bend to realpolitik,. But there is a mature way to do it, and a puerile way to do it.

The Palestinian Authority is now nearly thirty years old, yet it continues to act like a spoiled toddler, who hopes that no one will notice when they do something they weren't supposed to.

This drives another important point. The announcement about the boycott came from the Palestinian cabinet, led by the prime minister. But in the end, the cabinet is a joke - they don't make any decisions. Every week they make announcements but those are more declarations than governance.

The "State of Palestine" is a dictatorship, and what Abbas says, goes, with no regard to any other institutions or processes.

This is reason #10,432 why peace is impossible: the Palestinians cannot act like adults. They cannot admit their mistakes. They scream, threaten, bully, and mope but they never, ever take responsibility. They spent decades building the trappings of institutions to attract Arab and European money but those institutions are fig leaves on top of a core that is irredeemably corrupt and where the most moderate leader in their history is still a ruthless tyrant.

In 2010, a Quran was published that showed a six pointed star on the cover. When a private retailer imported the book to Algeria, the country went crazy. The government declared that the symbol on the cover "is not in keeping with the general ethics of the state". The importer was accused of "disrupting public order." Algeria's parliament blamed the religious affairs minister for the debacle.

Eleven years later, Algeria does not seem to have gotten over its hexaktinoasteriphobia (fear of six pointed stars, a word I just coined.)

Last summer, some Algerians were up in arms about perceiving a Star of David on the dome of the new Grand Mosque of Algeria, with conspiracy theories galore on social media.

Now, they are mobilizing to fight their latest enemy - imported pencils.

Algeria's Eshorouk Online reports, "The phenomenon of dumping the Algerian market with products bearing Jewish and Talmudic symbols continues to spread from time to time in our country by some importers who neglect the control of the quality of what they import."

An importer brought in a shipment of colored pencils that had a decoration of a six pointed star.

Some bookstores and school supplies stores in one of the western states [sold] boxes of colored pencils with the Star of David symbol.

The Directorate of Education urged students not to acquire these pencils and called for not using them in order to sensitize and raise awareness of the conflict of this type of supplies with the Algerians' faith and religion.

In turn, the Directorate of Education of the Wilayat of Al-Tariq carried out the same procedure and wrote to the directors of educational institutions across the state through a dispatch sent by the Education Department under No. 26/M/T/2021.

The letter stated, “It was recorded that there are colored pencils in school supplies stores with a symbol of the Star of David. This product is Chinese-made and imported by the “M.S.L. and LLC of Al-Baraka and Al-Ghazal, located in the Wilayat of Oran.”

The Directorate of Education asked the principals to take appropriate measures by sensitizing students to the meaning and danger of the symbol, and to withdraw these boxes, if any.

The funniest part is that Muslims have used six pointed stars as decorative motifs for centuries. Which makes it even more clear than before that the fear that Algerians have towards the symbol is pure Jew-hatred.

(I had no luck finding a picture of the actual pencils. I'll update if I find them. H/t Yosef for the "H.")

10/26 Links Pt2: Lipstadt: Sunrise DC move to boycott Jewish groups an ‘overtly antisemitic act’; David Collier: Academics against Jews – another shameful story

From Ian:

Lipstadt: Sunrise DC move to boycott Jewish groups an ‘overtly antisemitic act’

Deborah Lipstadt, the Biden administration’s nominee to be the State Department special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, discussed her nomination, the recent antisemitism controversy involving the Sunrise Movement’s D.C. chapter and her approach to and concerns about modern antisemitism at an event on Monday night.

The historian and Emory University professor addressed a virtual audience from the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston. Her participation in that event was a somewhat unusual move for a nominee awaiting Senate confirmation, but offered clues as to how she might tackle the position if confirmed.

Lipstadt addressed a recent statement from the D.C. chapter of the climate activist organization Sunrise Movement, in which the group announced it would not collaborate on voting rights issues with several pro-Israel Jewish groups.

“It was an overtly antisemitic act,” Lipstadt said. “If you support the existence of the state of Israel according to this, then you are a racist… What it is saying is that, ‘You Jews, as a people, you do not have a right to a national identity.’”

She noted that the group did not have the same objections to non-Jewish groups that also support Israel, like the American Federation of Teachers.

Lipstadt also drew a distinction between the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement at large and individual supporters of BDS, particularly students on college campuses who she said may have “backed into antisemitism.”

“Young people on campuses who support BDS because they see it as a way of changing Israel’s policies, I don’t label them as antisemitic. I think they’re wrong. I think it’s a mistake,” she said. “But if you look at the founding documents of the BDS movement, you see an effort to destroy the state of Israel. There’s no question about it. That I find antisemitic.”

Soros Bankrolls Far-Left Group at Heart of Anti-Semitism Scandal

Left-wing billionaire George Soros is bankrolling the political arm of the Sunrise Movement, a far-left group engulfed in an anti-Semitism controversy after its Washington, D.C., chapter said it will no longer hold rallies with Jewish organizations.

As part of his eight-figure cash infusion during the 2020 election cycle Soros’s Democracy PAC gave $250,000 to Sunrise Movement’s political action committee, according to Federal Election Commission filings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. Sunrise PAC also received $500,000 from the far-left dark money group the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which received $9.6 million from the Soros-run Open Society Policy Center in 2019. Those two donations constituted nearly a third of the $2.35 million Sunrise PAC raised from Jan. 1, 2019, to Dec. 31, 2020.

Sunrise DC was widely condemned last week after it released a statement on "future coalition spaces with Zionist organizations." The group said it will not appear at a rally for Washington, D.C., statehood because other left-wing groups in attendance, such as the National Council of Jewish Women and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, support Israel’s existence as a nation. The group said the fight for D.C. statehood was "incompatible" with Zionism.

Soros did not respond to a request for comment on his future funding of the organization.

Soros and his allies have raised the alarm about anti-Semitic attacks against the billionaire, but his decision to bankroll a group purveying an anti-Semitic trope—and his silence in the face of it—raises questions about his sincerity.

"Zionism is not a theoretical concept: it is the ideology that has led to Palestinians being violently pushed out of their homes since 1948."

For some reason Sunrise is still talking, and it's going extremely well why do you ask https://t.co/8UXMuRxj7m
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) October 25, 2021

?Why would a climate change initiative - @sunrisemvmt - be so obsessed with the world's only Jewish state?

?? It was co-founded by Sara Blazevic, a "strategist" for the radical fringe group that says Kaddish (mourner's prayer) for Hamas terrorists - IfNotNow pic.twitter.com/w5mkVp3kNu
— StopAntisemitism.org (@StopAntisemites) October 26, 2021

CAMERA Prompts Religion News Service Correction on U.S. Congressional Criticism of Sunrise DC

After contact from CAMERA, Religion News Service changed an Oct. 21 , 2021 article which inaccurately claimed that Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) and Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY) are Jewish.

The dispatch asserted: “Several members of the U.S. Congress tweeted their opposition to Sunrise’s DC chapter, including New York Democratic Jewish representatives Grace Meng, Jerry Nadler and Ritchie Torres.“

Following contact from CAMERA, RNS changed the wording to read “Several members of the U.S. Congress tweeted their opposition to Sunrise’s DC chapter, including New York Democratic representatives Grace Meng, Jerry Nadler and Ritchie Torres.“

CAMERA commends RNS for its prompt correction and has reached out to the Washington Post, which carried the RNS article, for a correction, as well.