Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, June 13, 2015

06/13 Links: Israel ‘exceeded legal standards’ in Gaza conflict, military group tells UN

From Ian:

Key Preliminary Findings of the High Level International Military Group on the Gaza Conflict

From 18th – 22nd May 2015, the High Level International Military Group, made up of 11 former chiefs of staff, generals, senior officers, political leaders and officials from the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Holland, Spain, Italy, Australia and Colombia visited Israel for a fact-finding mission on the 2014 Gaza conflict. We were led by General Klaus Naumann, former Chief of Staff of the Bundeswehr and Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, the most senior officer in the Alliance, and Giulio Terzi, former Foreign Minister of Italy. Also in the group were Ambassador Pierre-Richard Prosper, formerly US State Department Ambassador at Large for war crimes issues; and Mr Rafael Bardaji, former National Security Adviser to the Government of Spain.
This was part of a longer term project by our group, whose principal concern is how civilian lives can be protected and military forces can fight effectively when operations must be conducted in a densely packed civilian area. We will be producing a full report this autumn.
Our mission to Israel was unprecedented. We were the first such multi-national group of senior officers to visit the country. We were granted a level of access to the Israeli government and Defence Force that has not been afforded to any other group, from the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Minister of Defence, Moshe Ya’alon, right down to the field commanders responsible for fighting the battle on the ground.
We were well aware of the allegations made by some governments, the United Nations, human rights groups and the media, that Israel acted outside the laws of armed conflict in Gaza. Some have suggested that the IDF lacked restraint or even deliberately targeted innocent civilians.
Our findings lead us to the opposite conclusion. We examined the circumstances that led to the tragic conflict last summer and are in no doubt that this was not a war that Israel wanted. In reality Israel sought to avoid the conflict and exercised great restraint over a period of months before the war when its citizens were targeted by sporadic rocket attacks from Gaza. Once the war had begun, Israel made repeated efforts to terminate the fighting. The war that Israel was eventually compelled to fight against Hamas and other Gaza extremists was a legitimate war, necessary to defend its citizens and its territory against sustained attack from beyond its borders

Major-General Jim Molan (Ret.): “Israel’s war was just,” reports Australian general after mission on Gaza conflict

Given our examination of the cause of Operation Protective Edge, it would be indefensible to argue that Israel wanted it, initiated it or sustained it, or that Israel acted in anything other than defence of its citizens. On this basis alone, Israel’s war was just. It will be interesting to see if the imminent UNHRC report and the ICC inquiry can deliver fairness. Many do not understand it is not illegal to kill civilians in war as long as that is not the purpose of your actions, hence the appalling term “collateral damage”. Unlike our fight in Iraq or Afghanistan, Israel fights repeatedly in the same neighbourhood, and so its understanding and its intelligence is far superior to anything that I have enjoyed in similar targeting decisions that I have made.
While acknowledging the tragedy of death in war and given the immense capability of the IDF, it stands to Israel’s everlasting credit that far more did not die. But from the very top of the command chain down to the infantry and pilots, the personal moral position that individuals took was mirrored in the targeting processes, decisions on the ground and in the real care taken.
War can brutalise, but the Israelis scrupulously “cared” for the Palestinians. By contrast, Hamas was an enemy whose central strategy was to directly target the Israeli population and who repeatedly used their own population as human shields, both of which in any fair system would constitute major war crimes.
The women of the kibbutz were proud of their sons, but they would also be proud of what one senior Israeli commander whose soldier son was about to deploy to Gaza, recounted.
“Come back alive,” he said in farewell, “but come back human.” I wonder what the Hamas version of this farewell would be.
Jim Molan is a retired major-general in the Australian Army.

Who is Guilty of War Crimes in the Gaza War?

Israel is accused of a disproportionate response to Hamas rocket attacks. Is this accusation true? How does Israel compare to other military forces fighting asymmetrical wars?

Amnesty does it again - context free Israel bashing (update)

Amnesty USA put out a petition, tweeted by Amnesty International, demanding that the US punish Israel for arresting Palestinian minors:

7,000 kids arrested over twelve years! Sounds terrible!

I wondered how the US stacks up against Israel in arresting minors. After all, if Amnesty USA is telling Congress to protect Palestinian children from arrests, then certainly Israel must have a much worse record than the US in arresting juveniles.

Now, the West Bank has about 4.5 million people*, so to be fair I only looked at states that have a similar population to see how many kids are arrested over the same 12 year period.

We have the statistics for most of the analysis..

Kentucky, Oregon and Oklahoma have roughly the same or fewer people than the West Bank.

In Kentucky, between 2010 and 2012 there were over 7000 kids arrested every year.

In Oklahoma, 200,000 were arrested since 2003..

In Oregon, some 270,000 were arrested since 2003.

Even Wyoming, with less than 600,000 people, arrests more kids in a single year than Israel does in twelve.

Why doesn't Amnesty-USA make any online petitions against the nation it resides in - a nation that arrests minors at 30 times the rate that Israel arrests Arab kids!

This is beyond a double standard. It shows no standards at all.

UPDATE: I was very wrong in the population of the West Bank - it is somewhere between 1.7 million and 2.7 million. So I should compare it with West Virginia - about 2,500 arrests a year, compared to less than 700.

Nebraska, also around the lower number, arrests between 12,000 and 15,000 a year.

06/12 Links Pt2: Jewish Voice for Peace? Not really; A new low in fake "moral equivalence"

From Ian:

Jewish Voice for Peace? Not really

In the saturated market of pro-Palestinian activism, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) has emerged as a major player.
On its website, JVP now boasts over 60 member-led chapters across the country and more than 200,000 online Facebook and Twitter supporters.
These days it’s also flush with new funding sources.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which describes JVP as the “largest and most influential Jewish anti-Zionist group in the United States”, until very recently the organization reported an approximate average of $300,000 in annual contributions.
By 2013 that figure had jumped to over $1 million.
It’s been a pretty busy couple of years for an organization that’s operated in relative obscurity for much of the last twenty.
You’ve got to hand it to JVP’s new leadership team and their savvy marketing skills.
They’ve managed to carefully craft and disseminate a brand that draws on the appealing language of rights along with Jewish culture and values to justify vilifying the planet’s only Jewish state, expressing an utter hostility to the notion of Jewish peoplehood and self-determination, and lending support to Israel’s enemies.
But now that JVP has a real shot at playing in the big leagues of American organizational life, it also has a strong incentive to clean up its act.
Cavorting with obvious Jew-haters and being attacked for whitewashing anti-Semitism is counterproductive.
All it does is tarnish the brand.
So now JVP is quietly trying to scrub its online presence of past partnerships with sketchy anti-Semites.

A new low in fake "moral equivalence"

Australia's distinction as a major source of recruits joining "Islamic State" has been used as a pretext for a variety of commentators to defame Israel, through the morally vacuous argument that the phenomenon is no different to that of Jewish Australians who serve in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF).
A typical example was Phillip Adams writing in his Weekend Australian column that "the government is understandably concerned by the indoctrination of local youth who head off to Iraq or Syria, though we've not expressed concern about the generations of young Australian Jews who've headed for Israel to join the army."
In the Canberra Times, ANU Professor Amin Saikal wrote, "some Western countries, including Australia, have had no qualms over some of their Jewish citizens either joining or fighting for the Israeli security forces, and have not viewed their return with trepidation. It is not surprising to hear Muslim voices raised about double standard."
And in the Courier Mail columnist Paul Syvret wrote that "all religions and societies tend to breed their own brands of extremist ratbaggery", and then inveigled against "young Jewish Australians who ‘make Aliyah' with a return to Israel and service in that (foreign) country's military - an armed force well schooled in bloody regional and religious conflict".
There are many other examples I could provide.
This tendency to react to any mention of the problem of Australians going to join ISIS by immediately responding "What about Israel?" is now so common that one could be forgiven for thinking that Jewish Australians are enjoying some unique dispensation to serve in a foreign power's armed forces.

Denis MacEoin replies to Guardian letter calling for a boycott of Israeli Film & TV Festival

The signatories to the letter about the Israeli film festival have never, to my knowledge, called for the banning of any Iranian film, based, not on individual merit, but on the human rights abuses of the country in which they were made or the nationality of their directors, producers, and actors.
The Guardian has published, before this, praise for several North Korean films, including A Flower Girl. But North Korea is one of the world’s most repressive and dangerous states, governed by a regime that might even make the Ayatollahs of Iran hesitate. So why no letters in the Guardian boycotting their films? Oh, I forgot, nobody ever calls for a boycott of North Korea or any really repressive state.
The activists never march against Saudi Arabia, which has just confirmed the sentence of a blogger, Raif Badawi, to a flogging of 1000 lashes, “very harshly” as the flogging order read, as a punishment for writing thoughts such as, “My commitment is… to reject any oppression in the name of religion… a goal we will reach in a peaceful and law-abiding way.” They never march against Qatar, Iran, North Korea, Russia, China or Sudan. They only protest about the actions of one of the freest liberal democracies in the world, and the only country in the Middle East that gives human rights to all its citizens.
Each of those forty signatories should feel ashamed. To uphold human rights by supporting a murderous terrorist state, while condemning a democracy forced to defend itself against outside forces bent on its destruction — do any of these writers know what free speech and human rights are about, what democracy means, or what international law consists of? One suspects not.
Meanwhile, Seret will go on. Genuine lovers of cinema and television will watch the films and go away satisfied, hoping to see more like them.

From the NY Times:

A 2,500-year-old Islamic cultural heritage site in Yemen’s capital was obliterated in an explosion early Friday, and witnesses and news reports said the cause was a missile or bomb from Saudi Arabia-led warplanes. The Saudi military denied responsibility.

The top antiquities protection official at the United Nations angrily condemned the destruction of ancient multistory homes, towers and gardens, which also killed an unspecified number of residents in Al Qasimi, a neighborhood in Sana’s Old City area.

“I am profoundly distressed by the loss of human lives as well as the damage inflicted on one of the world’s oldest jewels of Islamic urban landscape,” said the official, Irina Bokova, the director general of Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Given that Islam is less than 1400 years old, how can there be a 2,500 year old Islamic cultural heritage site?

UNESCO's website gives background:

Inhabited for more than 2,500 years, the city was given official status in the second century BC when it was an outpost of the Yemenite kingdoms. By the first century AD it emerged as a centre of the inland trade route. The site of the cathedral and the martyrium constructed during the period of Abyssinian domination (525-75) bear witness to Christian influence whose apogee coincided with the reign of Justinian. The remains of the pre-Islamic period were largely destroyed as a result of profound changes in the city from the 7th century onwards when Sana'a became a major centre for the spread of the Islamic faith as demonstrated by the archaeological remains within the Great Mosque, said to have been constructed while the Prophet was still living.

...The houses in the old city are of relatively recent construction and have a traditional structure.

Ah, so the city is 2500 years old but the Muslims destroyed the original buildings. The layout is Islamic and the more modern structures respected the style of the older ones.

It is not clear that the buildings destroyed were ancient at all.

Sanaa is indeed a very nice example of Islamic architecture, but it sure isn't a 2,500 year old example of that.

(h/t abeleehane)

UPDATE: It was corrected. The original tweet is still online.

Holocaust survivors understand how important Israel is

I recently saw a video, produced for a synagogue dinner, asking Holocaust survivors what their message was to future generations.

It is an open ended question. Some spoke about the importance of maintaining Jewish culture and faith, others about being happy with what you have and to be kind to others.

A surprising number, unprompted, spoke about the importance of Israel.

One said that Israel must be strong to ensure that there would never be another Holocaust. He mused what would have happened if an Israeli air force existed during the Holocaust.

Another said for Jews to go to Israel and volunteer to help because Israel is there to help all Jews, wherever they are.

One women survivor said "The Jewish people should have a Jewish state and we should be proud of it."

The people who saw the face of absolute evil viscerally understand how important it is to have a Jewish state. To them, Israel is not only a refuge but also an actor that would go anywhere in the world to help Jews. This idea is very powerful for those who lost so much..

It is a moral argument in a world that has forgotten what morality is.

06/12 Links Pt1: BDS and Hamas: The New Partnership; EU Funds Illegal Construction in Area C

From Ian:

Khaled Abu Toameh: BDS and Hamas: The New Partnership

Hamas is pinning high hopes on BDS to pave the way for the destruction of Israel through boycotts, divestment and sanctions. Hamas believes that such tools are no less important than rockets and suicide bombings, which have thus far failed to achieve the goal of wiping Israel off the face of the earth.
U.S. universities that allow the BDS activists to disseminate their hate against Israel are unaware that these people are serving as Hamas ambassadors. Moreover, Western governments, above all the U.S., are unaware that Hamas and BDS allies also consider them enemies of the Palestinians.
What Bahr is actually saying is that the BDS campaign should be intensified until Israel is forced to surrender and accept all the demands of Hamas, which include, of course, ending the existence of Israel.
While the anti-Israel activities of the BDS movement have emboldened Hamas, they have also undermined those Palestinians who believe in peace and coexistence with Israel. If BDS supporters really care about Palestinians, why don't they go to the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian territories to promote reforms, democracy, freedom of speech and the rights of women under the rule of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority? BDS seems to be more about promoting Hamas's agenda than advancing the cause of peace.

How the EU Funds Illegal Construction in Area C

Chaos continues to reign: months have passed since Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered the destruction of all illegal buildings built by the EU in the E1 area · Mida checked and found that no actual change has happened on the ground · The State authorities are paralyzed, and Zionists NGOs are left alone in the struggle to cut of the EU pipeline

It is a story of unending frustration: the Palestinian illegal takeover of Area C is in full swing and no-one's trying to stop it. It didn't start yesterday. The originator of the idea, former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, described already in 2009 his plan for a "creeping annexation," by creating corridors and territorial contiguity, which will serve as the starting point for any future Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. By all accounts, he seems to have succeeded.
This impression is strengthened by the fact that one of the reasons for the Palestinian success in this land grab is the massive intervention of a foreign power. In recent years, the EU has acted to implement a "humanitarian plan for the occupied Palestinian territories." These innocent-sounding terms are a cover for active support and funding for the Palestinian illegal takeover of the plane of Mishor Edumim (E1), to the tune of hundreds of millions of Euros.

Important update from @LTCPeterLerner on Military Advocate General report on #Gaza beach incident

One of the most sensational Guardian reports during the summer war involved a July 16th IDF attack on a Gaza beach which killed four Palestinian children. Yesterday, Israel’s military advocate general’s office issued its report on the tragedy. Here’s the Facebook update from Lt. Peter Lerner, IDF military spokesman, on the report.
Today the Military Advocate General announced his decision on one of the most tragic cases of last year’s conflict with Gaza. I believe it is one of the most covered incidents that was reported on by the media, it was the incident of an air force strike on Gaza beach that resulted in the tragic death of four boys, Ahed Atef Bakr, Zakariya Ahed Bakr, Mohammad Ramiz Bakr, and Ismail Mahmoud Bakr.
The military police carried out an extensive criminal investigation. During the investigation testimonies were collected from a large number of IDF soldiers and officers who were involved in the planning and execution of the attack. Additionally, an extensive number of documents relating to the attack were reviewed, along with video footage documenting the attack in real time, as well as media images and video footage which documented parts of the incident. Efforts were made to collect the testimonies of Gaza Strip residents who were, allegedly, witnesses to the incident. In this context, the collection of testimony from three witnesses was coordinated. Regretfully, despite the prior coordination, the witnesses eventually declined to meet the investigators, and instead provided affidavits in regard to the incident.
From the factual findings collected by the investigators, it revealed that the incident took place in an area that had long been known as a compound belonging to Hamas’s Naval Police and Naval Force (including naval commandos), and which was utilized exclusively by militants. The compound in question spans the length of the breakwater of the Gaza City seashore, closed off by a fence and clearly separated from the beach serving the civilian population. It further found in the course of the investigation (including from the affidavits provided by Palestinian witnesses), that the compound was known to the residents of the Gaza Strip as a compound which was used exclusively by Hamas’s Naval Police.

From AP:

Spain's lower house of parliament gave final approval Thursday to a law setting a citizenship path for descendants of Jews forced to flee the country after all Jews were told in 1492 to convert, go into exile or risk being burned at the stake.

The law allows Sephardic Jews to start applying for Spanish citizenship in October, granting them a three-year window to seek a Spanish passport complete with the right to work and live anywhere in the 28-nation European Union.

"Today begins a new stage in the history of relations between Spain and the Jewish world," the Spanish Federation of Jewish Communities said in a statement. "A new period of reunion, dialogue and harmony re-integrating a branch of the nation that was unjustly torn off in its day."

Many would-be applicants thought the Spanish law in the works since 2013 would carry few requirements beyond thorough vetting of applicant ancestry by Jewish organizations. That's the case with the Portuguese law, which was proposed after Spain's but went into effect in March 1.

But Spanish lawmakers ended up drafting a citizenship process for Sephardic Jews similar to that faced by permanent residents seeking Spanish citizenship.

The hurdles are significant: Sephardic applicants must learn and be tested in basic Spanish and must also pass a current events and culture test about Spain.

And they must establish a modern-day link to Spain, which can be as simple as donating to a Spanish charity or as expensive as buying Spanish property.

Muslims are upset, saying that they too should have the same rights after their expulsion from Spain.

Moroccan media calls this rule hypocritical. A group of activists in Morocco and Spain criticized the decision, describing it as a policy of double standards. One analyst said that the Muslims who were expelled from Spain after hundreds of years of ruling Andalusia are more important than the minority of Jews who lived there. He said, "Moroccans and the world strongly condemns this distinction that does not make sense, and we demand equality in the granting of citizenship for each of his Andalusian origin. "

There is one significant difference, though. Many Muslims claim that Andalusia is still Muslim land and they want it back. As Yoram Ettinger wrote in 2012:

The collapse of Israeli-Palestinian agreements from the 1993 Oslo Accords until today stems from the fact that both Israeli and US leaders ignore the real root of the conflict. The heart of the conflict is the denial of the existence – and not the size - of any non-Muslim entity on land that, in the eyes of Muslims, is Waqf – an inalienable religious land endowment.

On Jan. 9, 2012, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, a close associate of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, stated that all of Israel has been Waqf since 637 C.E. and will be forever. The statement was made at the annual rally of Fatah, which Abbas heads. It was broadcast on the official Mahmoud Abbas television station, and called for the killing of Jews to hasten the Islamic Resurrection.

The principle of the Waqf land is permanent, and transcends leaders and policies which are provisional. It applies to any land that was ever under Islamic control. It is an inseparable part of the legacy of Muhammad and Islamic law, especially at this time of the surge by the trans-national Muslim Brotherhood, which views Allah, the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad, jihad and martyrdom as the goal, the law, the leader, the way and the exalted aspiration respectively. Their loyalty to the Waqf land obligates Muslims to "holy wars" and the restoration of sovereignty in the Philippines, Thailand, parts of China, Kashmir, Chechnya, Israel, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Spain, Portugal and elsewhere.

The centrality of the Waqf land in the Muslim experience can be understood from the precedent of Andalusia, the Arabic name for most of the Iberian Peninsula, which was under Islamic rule from 711-1492 C.E. The Muslim Golden Age did not take place between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, but rather in Andalusia, especially in the Alhambra palace/fortress in Granada. At the beginning of the 8th century, the Muslims conquered the Iberian Peninsula, southern France, Sicily and the Italian coastline and declared it "the Abode of Islam." In 1492, Spain was liberated from the occupation by Muslims, who today still view "Al-Andalus" as Waqf. The March 2004 Muslim terrorist plots in Madrid, which murdered 191 people and wounded around 1,800, intended to rectify the "Injustice of Andalusia."

Sephardic jews are not planning to take over parts of Spain. But many Muslims want to do exactly that.

This may explain why Spain is in no rush to provide "equal rights' between those those whom it expelled capriciously and those who were expelled in the course of reconquering their land.

Dave Zirin's deranged hate of Israel

Dave Zirin is a sports reporter for The Nation. But he doesn't only cover sports - he uses sports to bash Israel.

Last year he wrote two columns claiming that Israel routinely attacks Palestinian soccer players, and that some of them were deliberately shot in their feet by Israel.

Bob Knot demolished every single one of Zirin's arguments and exposed him as a liar. His last piece of evidence, that he was trusting the reporting of Haaretz, was found to be wrong as well, as Haaretz plagiarized its report and was forced to take it down.

Yet The Nation and Zirin, full of venomous hate for Israel, didn't adhere to the slightest shred of journalistic standards and no corrections were made.

This week Zirin finds another tenuous sports story to hang his anti-Israel hate on: the NBA finals.

David Blatt, born in Framingham, Massachusetts, holds dual citizenship in Israel by virtue of being of the Jewish faith. His Israeli citizenship (which I could also claim by virtue of my own familial Judaism) gives him a set of political and civil rights that non-Jews born on this land 5,500 miles from Framingham do not possess. After playing and coaching in Israel following a Princeton education, Blatt became in his own words, “much more Jewish and much more Zionist.”

Blatt’s proud Zionism means that he has been a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces (the IDF), an experience described in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz as “his most significant bonding experiences with the country.” He is also on a first-name basis with the nation’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. This friendship, which ABC broadcaster Jeff Van Gundy described at high decibels as “impressive” during Tuesday night’s primetime Finals broadcast, is so intimate, that Blatt boasts of being able to call Netanyahu “Bibi” when they speak. Blatt told The Plain Dealer that the prime minister “said all of Israel is behind the Cavaliers. That was great.”

What went unmentioned by Van Gundy, not to mention The Plain Dealer, are the ethical implications of an NBA coach beaming about his friendship with Netanyahu. “Bibi’s” last campaign was so riven with virulent anti-Arab racism, it was condemned across the globe. The aforementioned Israeli newspaper Haaretz printed an editorial about feeling “shame” that their “prime minister was a racist” after Netanyahu’s March election victory. The New York Times editorial page credited his triumph to a “desperate and craven” campaign that relied on a “racist rant” against Arab citizens of Israel to pull out a victory. Time’s Joel Klein wrote that Netanyahu’s victory represented an “appalling irony” that “brought joy to American neoconservatives and European anti-Semites alike.” I use these examples because they represent how even staunch supporters of Israel were nauseated by Netanyahu’s toxic political platform.

Blatt has evidenced no such concerns, but this should not surprise. Last year, as NBA players were being excoriated for just posting messages about the loss of innocent life during Israel’s war on Gaza, Coach Blatt, without consequence, publicly cheered a venture that, according to the United Nations, killed more than 2,200 people and over 500 children, 1,500 of whom were civilians. Israel lost six civilians in the fighting. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Globes, Blatt said, “In my opinion, this war is Israel’s most justified war I can remember in recent years. I’m really sorry about what’s happening in Gaza, but there’s no doubt that we had to act there, so that Israel will have quiet there once and for all.” He then reprimanded the people of the United States for not supporting Israel’s war more heartily, saying, “There’s support, although sometimes it’s not enough.”

The absence of public criticism or even discussion about Blatt’s politics represents a head-spinning double standard.

So an Israeli citizen is proud of his friendship with his adopted nation's leader and supports its war against terrorism.

But to Dave Zirin's twisted mind, this means he supports the murder of children and anti-Arab racism. (Counterexamples showing how Bibi supports Arab citizens in Israel of course must be censored from the pages of The Nation. We can't let facts get in the way of a false narrative.)

The other irony of the column is that the father of the Golden Warriors coach was murdered by"Islamic Jihad" in Beirut, which has the same name as one of the terror groups that Israel was defending itself against in Gaza.

Does Dave Zirin know how many children have been killed by the US military since President Obama has entered office? For some reason, those numbers are hard to come by, but they seem to be well over 150 from drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan alone. We don't know how many were killed in airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Libya. If Zirin supports Obama, then by his logic he must support killing babies too!

A high school essay couldn't get away with this ridiculous attempt at logic. But to The Nation, it is impeccable.

Zirin once wrote, "It's always dangerous, but never boring, when a newspaper sports columnist uncorks a political thesis." In his case, it reveals his ignorance and sickening hate.

I have some bad news for Zirin, though. Other people call Bibi their friend, and they even say the same about IDF generals.

Will Zirin find a way to write the same hateful words against General Martin Dempsey? Or does that apply only to Jews who dare to be proud of Israel?

Hundreds of merchants cross Gaza border every day

From the news articles about Gaza, one would think that Israel only allows medical patients, foreign dignitaries, NGOs and journalists into and out of Gaza.

But COGAT's statistics for the last several months show that the largest category of people crossing the Gaza border are actually the people we hear about least - merchants.

On Wednesday, 966 merchants crossed the border - more than all other categories combined.

That's the way it was all week, with 1,253 merchants crossing on Monday.

For a territory under "siege," there sure is a lot of business going on.

Other statistics on COGAT's new Facebook page:

115,000 Gazans crossed Erez for medical treatment in Israel and abroad in 2014
Nearly 900 tons of goods were exported from Gaza in 2014
100 mobile homes were donated by Oman to Gaza and COGAT is coordinating their entry

On that last point, the homes are too large to take up one lane of the road leading to Gaza, he effectively close the road. COGAT must coordinate with the police to allow them to be transported at night.

You won't read this in the media.

06/11 Links Pt2: The Six Day War, and the Origin of the Left’s Hatred for Israel; Beheadline goes viral

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: Exposed: Orange telecom involved in war crimes in occupied territories, according to French official

First, let us review developments thus far. Last week the French telecom giant caused an international fracas by saying it was going to “drop” its business with Israel – apparently in response to Arab boycott calls.
After first suggesting that the divestment was designed to ingratiate Orange to to Arab countries, and before saying it was a routine business decision, the CEO said it was due to the local affiliate’s activities in “occupied territory.” The French ambassador to the US, Gerard Araud, backed this claim, declaring on Twitter that “Contributing to settlements in an occupied territory is illegal”.
To be sure major French companies, like Total, are quite active in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, with the apparent approval of the French government. But it turns out that Orange itself directly and openly operates in occupied territory. Orange provides cell phone service in Nagorno-Karabakh, an area of Azerbaijan that has been occupied by Armenia since seizing it in a bloody 1992-94 war. The U.N., along with the E.U. and U.S., considers the area occupied territory. Nonetheless, Armenian settlers have moved into the occupied territory in in significant numbers, amid constant complaints from Baku and others.
Nor is this Karabakh some long-forgotten frozen conflict. Fighting broke out this year across the line of control, killing dozens, and a full scale war over the occupied territory is looming.
In other words, Orange, and the French government, is committing what a senior French official just described as a war crime. Indeed, by the theoretical international law standards applied to Israel, Orange’s behavior in Armenia is particularly egregious. Having cell phone towers in the West Bank (the purported crime of Orange’s Israeli licensee) does not involve any recognition of Israeli sovereignty or any judgement about the status of the territory.

The Six Day War, and the Origin of the Left’s Hatred for Israel

June 10, 1967, marked the end of the Six Day War and the beginning of the radical left’s hate affair with the Jewish State.
Although Israel neither welcomed nor wanted this conflict, the Left declared that Israel, not the invading Arabs, had been ‘militaristic,’ ‘colonialistic,’ and ‘fascistic.’
Was Israel really that bad, or was the Left biased, twisting or ignoring inconvenient facts to fit a prepackaged verdict – and has been biased ever since?
By 1967, Vietnam-war, civil-rights, and feminist protestors joined with hippies, yippies, flower-power pacifists, and not so pacifistic Hells Angels to form a vast anti-Establishment counterculture. The 1960s had become the Sixties. It was not the most rational of times.
Amorphous, anarchic, and contradictory, the movement nevertheless enjoyed basic principles and a single voice: America was Amerika. Revolution was imminent. Frantz Fanon’s Marxist anti-colonial Wretched of the Earth was the radicals’ book of the month.
Facts – such as who actually started the war, and why – were irrelevant. The left was Manichean, pitting the evil West against the good Third World. Israel – a western nation and ally of America – was on the wrong side. It was guilty on all counts.

UN Watch: Beheadline goes viral

Was the alleged typo in our viral headline “Saudi Lose Bid to Behead of UN Human Rights Council” intentional, or not?
Autocorrect will do just the darnedest things when the word “Saudi” is in context?
One thing is sure: the faux typo caught the attention of the world’s leading news agencies, whose reporters posted it all over Twitter — turning a global spotlight on Saudi Arabia’s shockingly cruel system of gross and systematic human rights abuses.
The buzz sparked a feature debate on Twitchy.com, which concluded: “Amazing UN Watch ‘typo’ regarding Saudi Arabia ‘has to be on purpose’.”

Pinkwashing, in summary (ElderToons)

I was inspired to create this cartoon after seeing a Twitter debate sponsored by Haaretz this morning that effectively legitimized the absurd charge of Israel "pinkwashing" its supposed crimes by engaging in progressive policies.

In fact, anti-Israel "progressives" created the "pinkwashing" charge to inoculate their fellows from being sympathetic to Israel's progressive agenda.

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column:

Israel’s Declaration of Independence calls for a Jewish and democratic state. This is creatively ambiguous because very few people agree on precisely what each of these characteristics entails, although they have very strong opinions. This isn’t a theoretical discussion; both of these concepts have a direct bearing on Israel’s policies, in particular the question of a “Jewish State Law” and the possible annexation of all or part of Judea and Samaria. Today I’m interested in the ‘democratic’ part.

As everyone knows, the ancient Greeks gave us the word δημοκρατία, democracy. What they had in Athens, of course, wasn’t terribly appealing by modern standards, since only free males had the right to vote (and there were plenty of slaves). Here is a modern definition of democracy:

1. A political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections.
2. The active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life.
3. Protection of the human rights of all citizens.
4. A rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens.

Significantly, this definition, and most others, refer to ‘citizens’ as the beneficiaries of democratic governance. But who is a citizen? Some things are clear: as in the case of Athens, a definition of citizenship which excludes women is not acceptable. An extreme view is that anyone who resides within the borders of a polity is automatically a citizen of it, regardless of any other considerations (how he or she came to be there, etc.)

Although some immigration activists in the US would like to see this criterion adopted, it has not been and probably will not be anywhere in the world. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, says that “everyone has a right to a nationality,” but not that a state needs to offer one to anyone who lives within its boundaries.

In Saudi Arabia, a citizen must either have lived in ‘Saudi land’ before 1914 and not have taken non-Ottoman citizenship, have a Saudi father, or apply for naturalization. In the US, anyone who is born on US soil receives citizenship automatically, but otherwise must undergo naturalization. In Germany, those residents who do not have at least one German parent must apply for citizenship (but there are exceptions for children born in Germany of long-time residents).

Under some conditions states can revoke citizenship. In Canada, a dual citizen who is convicted of treason, espionage or membership in a group engaged in armed conflict with Canada can lose his Canadian citizenship. In the US, naturalized citizens can have their citizenship revoked for various reasons, including membership in a subversive organization or refusal to testify before Congress. This has happened more than a few times.

Today it is considered wrong to grant or deny citizenship on the basis of race, religion or ethnicity, although some Arab countries require all citizens to be Muslims. Prior to 1965, the US had immigration quotas based on national origin; but these were considered unacceptable and replaced by a system based on family unification, skills, etc. with per-country caps. Nevertheless, many countries (e.g., Greece) are adjusting their citizenship laws to deal with the reality of ‘irregular’ population migrations.

What happens when a country annexes territory? When Israel extended its authority to eastern Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, Israeli citizenship was offered to existing residents. Those who didn’t accept it were granted residency, along with the right to vote in local (but not national) elections. When Russia annexed Crimea, it offered Russian citizenship to the inhabitants — and let them know that after a month anyone that refused it would be barred from government jobs. In 1950, Jordan gave most Arab residents of Judea and Samaria (the Jewish ones had been expelled during the conquest) Jordanian citizenship, although lately it has been revoking the citizenship of ‘Palestinian refugees’ whom the ruling Hashemites see as a demographic threat.

What would happen if Israel annexed all or part of Judea and Samaria? One thing that’s certain is that Israel would not refuse to grant citizenship to anyone on the basis of ethnicity or religion. But as we’ve seen, it would not be exceptional to limit full citizenship on the basis of other criteria, such as criminal convictions or membership in terrorist organizations, or to require a process of naturalization.

Would it be ‘democratic’? When we talk about democracy, it’s important to understand that it is a more limited concept than fairness or even human rights in general. Strictly speaking, democracy resides in the relationship of a state to its citizens, and therefore the process for obtaining citizenship doesn’t bear on the democratic nature of the state. Of course, fairness demands that the process not be based on irrelevant factors like skin color or gender. But — just like screening airline passengers — it is not necessarily unfair to allow security considerations to affect decisions to grant citizenship or not.

Viewed in this light, much of the tension between Jewishness and democracy in Israel evaporates. The Law of Return, a prime target for those who claim that a Jewish state can’t be democratic, is a criterion for immigrationwhich does not apply to those who are already citizens — and there are no states in the world that don’t assert the right to make rules about immigration. The expressions of national identity that are essential to a Jewish state — the flag, national anthem, holidays, etc. — may be disliked by minority citizens, but they do not affect their participation in the democratic process. And it’s quite a stretch to argue that there is a basic human right to an approved national anthem.

Israel, by any reasonable definition, is a democracy. It will remain one if a Jewish State Law is passed, and even if it annexes all or part of Judea and Samaria without granting citizenship to all their inhabitants.

This is not the dream of the post-nationalist, post-Zionist, post-everything Left which believes that the Hatikvah is ‘racist’ and that economic migrants from Africa and ‘Palestinians’ who have never lived in Palestine have as much right to be citizens of the one tiny Jewish state as the descendents of Jacob. But it may be the reality that will sustain the democratic Jewish state.