Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

06/24 Links Pt1: UN report denies Israel's right of self-defense, advocates arrest of Israelis instead

From Ian:

Anne Bayefsky: UN report denies Israel's right of self-defense, advocates arrest of Israelis instead

Arrest Benjamin Netanyahu and any other “suspected” Israeli war criminals wherever and whenever you can get your hands on them. That is the shocking bottom line of a scandalous report released today from the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.
The report emanates from a board of inquiry the Council created in the midst of the 2014 Gaza war. In legalese, the call to arrest Israelis either for trial before the International Criminal Court (ICC), or before any court in any country that the U.N. labels “fair,” reads like this:
The board “calls upon the international community … to support actively the work of the International Criminal Court in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory; to exercise universal jurisdiction to try international crimes in national courts; and to comply with extradition requests pertaining to suspects of such crimes to countries where they would face a fair trial.”
To be fair, the U.N. report says this could apply to both parties. In other words, the democratic state of Israel, with a moral and legal obligation to defend its citizens, and the Palestinian attackers bent on genocide are moral equals. Throughout the 183-page tome, the U.N. council “experts” play the old “cycle of violence” trick, otherwise known as “it all started when you hit me back.”
An infamous photo from the Third Reich shows eminent Jewish lawyer Michael Siegel, beaten and bloodied after going to police headquarters on behalf of a Jewish client who had been sent to Dachau, forced to walk through the streets of Munich with a sign around his neck saying: “I am a Jew, but I will never again complain to the police.”

Lawfare Blog: What to Make of the UN's Special Commission Report on Gaza?

Perhaps most frustratingly, even the IDF’s efforts to protect civilians are apparently grounds for incrimination. On page 63, the Commission notes that “according to official Israeli sources, the IDF abandoned air strikes when the presence of civilians was detected.” This Israeli claim is taken at face value, but not for the purposes one might think. Rather than reflecting a policy of minimizing civilian casualties, for the Commission, this information simply demonstrates that “the IDF had the capacity to determine the civilian nature” of its targets and victims. And given the number of civilian deaths, the Commission’s conclusion was that Israel had frequently and unjustifiably failed to deploy this capacity—thus violating its obligation to use all “feasible” means to reduce civilian damage.
Our point here is not to defend Israeli conduct in any of these specific situations. It is merely to suggest that the commission has drawn a set of conclusions it cannot possibly draw with rigor, and it has done so using standards that are very difficult to defend.
But don’t take our word for it. The commission all but admits that it lacked the information to draw the conclusions it drew. In an interview with Haaretz’s Barak Ravid, the Commission’s chairperson Mary McGowan Davis had this to say:
I certainly think it would have been different if Israel had cooperated… We could have met with Israeli victims and seen where rockets landed, talked with commanders, watched videos and visited Gaza. We talked to a lot of witnesses but of course an investigation needs to be as close to the scene as possible and it would have looked different.
McGowan Davis clearly intended this comment as a criticism of the Israeli government’s non-cooperation with the investigation. But she’s actually admitting, apparently unawares, that the material with which the Commission was working was simply insufficient to its task.
What does one say about a report whose author forthrightly admits that, had she had real information, “it would have looked different”?

Volokh Conspiracy: Is it “OK to drop a one-ton bomb in the middle of a neighborhood” if you’re at war and that’s where enemy forces are located?

Mary McGowan Davis, who headed the U.N. commission that investigated last summer’s Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza, tells Ha’aretz (paywall): “We wanted to make a strong stand that the whole use of explosive weapons in densely populated neighborhoods is problematic and that the policy needs to change…. Because it is not OK to drop a one-ton bomb in the middle of a neighborhood.”
Of course, one shouldn’t gratuitously drop a one-ton bomb or any bomb in the middle of a neighborhood. But Davis’s critique doesn’t seem limited to gratuitous bombings, but includes the bombing of military targets located in civilian neighborhoods.
If the rule was “you may never bomb [use “explosive weapons”] in a residential neighborhood if civilian casualties may result, regardless of the value of the military target,” it’s pretty obvious what would happen — enemy forces would simply plant themselves in residential neighborhoods knowing they would be immune from attack.
So, for example, Hamas could launch all the missiles it wanted at Israel from the middle of Gaza City, and use apartment buildings, schools, etc. as staging grounds and headquarters, and Israel would be helpless to respond.

Chairman of Joint Chiefs: "Israel went to extraordinary lengths to limit civilian casualties"

Israel went to "extraordinary lengths" to limit civilian casualties during the conflict in Gaza earlier this year, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said yesterday.
Israel dropped leaflets and did "roof-knocking, to have something knock on the roof" to warn civilians to move out of the area, Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey said during a forum at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York.

Peter Beinart has joined the chorus of hysterical voices slamming Michael Oren for his recent interviews and book.

Beinart says that it is Oren, not President Obama, who is naive.

Let's fact-check Beinart:

Let’s start with a few quotes from Oren’s recent media blitz. In a recent interview at New York’s 92nd Street Y, Oren declared that American Jews must oppose an Iran deal that “everybody in the Knesset agrees is emphatically bad.”

Everybody? Thirteen of the Knesset’s 120 seats are held by Palestinian citizens of Israel (often called “Arab Israelis” by American and Israeli Jews). Earlier this year, they were elected on a platform calling “for nuclear disarmament in the Middle East, including Israel.”

These Palestinian Knesset members, in other words, don’t think Obama’s nuclear diplomacy is too soft on Iran. They think it’s too soft on Israel, whose hundreds of nuclear weapons they consider as grave a threat to regional peace as Iran’s nuclear program. With a single phrase, Oren makes them disappear.

If the 13 Arab Knesset members are against nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, how does Beinart conclude that they support a deal which from all indications will give Iran a path to nuclear weapons?

I don't know if Oren's statement is 100% true, but Beinart has no proof for his dismissal of it, and his supposed proof is knowingly deceptive since it doesn't prove anything one way or the other.

Let’s take another example. In an interview with the Jewish Journal’s Shmuel Rosner, Oren recently called Israel “one of the few democracies in the world that have never known a second of non-democratic governance.” This statement makes sense only if Palestinians didn't exist. If they do, then Israel’s Palestinian citizens lived under military law until 1966. And to this day, millions of West Bank Palestinians live under Israeli control but lack citizenship and the right to vote for the government that dominates their existence. In other words, they’ve been living under “non-democratic governance” every second of their lives.

It is true that Arabs in Israel were under military rule until 1966. It is also true that they could vote. So while there was discrimination, it was still democracy.

No state in the world allows non-citizens to vote. If Israel is not a democracy, then neither is the US, where millions of actual citizens cannot vote.

Oren is correct, Beinart is wrong.

But these factual errors only hint at Oren’s true detachment. His deepest naivete stems from his assumption that Israel can maintain the status quo indefinitely because Palestinians will submit indefinitely to their lack of basic rights.

Beinart does not give a source for this statement. Certainly nothing in Oren's book even hinted at this. Beinart is wrong.

Oren rests this contention on two assumptions. The first is that Palestinians don’t have it so bad. In the West Bank, he wrote in February, “More than 90% of the Palestinian population enjoys de facto sovereignty. Israeli soldiers don’t patrol the major Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Jericho and Bethlehem, and are largely absent from other towns.”

De facto sovereignty? West Bank Palestinians live as permanent non-citizens under military law. The government of Israel – a government for which they cannot vote – controls the air space above them, the borders around them and the natural resources below. They are crammed into an archipelago of cities and towns, which cannot expand because Israel controls virtually all the land in between, land it doles out to settlers who, unlike Palestinians, enjoy full citizenship rights.

What makes sovereignty? There are different definitions. Wikipedia lists four:

domestic sovereignty – actual control over a state exercised by an authority organized within this state,[6]

interdependence sovereignty – actual control of movement across state's borders, assuming the borders exist,[6]

international legal sovereignty – formal recognition by other sovereign states,[6]

Westphalian sovereignty – lack of other authority over state than the domestic authority (examples of such other authorities could be a non-domestic church, a non-domestic political organization, or any other external agent).[6]

The PA fits under three of these definitions. Hamas has three as well, although a different set. Beinart's assertions that control of airspace, for example, is a prerequisite to sovereignty is fiction.

Oren is right, Beinart is wrong.

The second assumption is that Palestinians will submit because if they don’t, Israel will respond with overwhelming force.

Beinart again does not give a quote where Oren says this, and again Oren says no such thing in his book or interviews. Beinart is making it up.

For Netanyahu and Oren, this is what passes for realism: Pretend that Palestinians will be happy living under occupation, and bludgeon into submission those who aren’t. It’s the same kind of “realism” that people throughout history have used to justify denying others basic rights. And it rests on the contention that the oppressed will accept forms of servitude that we never would, either because their aspirations are lower or because their spirits can be more easily crushed.

Again, fiction. However, it is notable that Mahmoud Abbas has said explicitly that Palestinians don't have such bad lives:

" I will wait for Israel to freeze settlements," he said. "Until then, in the West Bank we have a good reality . . . the people are living a normal life."

Beinart claims that Oren is naive, but it si Beinart who is proven in this article alone not only to be naive but knowingly deceptive and even a liar.

Iran issues new list of nuclear "red lines"

Iran's Supreme Leader has published a convenient list of his "red lines" for a nuclear deal.

They include:

No long-term restrictions
Continuation of R&D and construction during limits
Immediate removal of economic, financial and banking sanctions with signing of deal and other sanctions gradually by a reasonable timetable
Not stipulating for implementation of Iran commitments in lifting sanctions
IAEA verification for any step is not accepted
No unconventional inspection, interrogation or military site inspections
Time frames of 15 or 25 years for some topics not accepted

Will the White House push back, or spin this as if it doesn't contradict what they have been saying for years?

I think we have already seen the answer to that question.

I can't wait to see how J-Street will try to spin this, though, in light of their new website. Someone should ask Jeremy Ben mi what he considers a red line beyond which the US must not accept a deal. His evasion should be funny to watch.

UNHRC report didn't mention Hamas threatening Israeli civilians - a war crime

Rule 2 of ICRC's Customary IHL is "Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited." It quotes Article 51(2) of Additional Protocol I prohibits “acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population.”

During last summer's Gaza war, Hamas explicitly threatened Israelis. They sent a SMS message to many Israeli phones:

Your government claimed yesterday that it stopped the battle, but without our consent and meeting our conditions - and it thought we were rash enough to [agree to a] cease-fire. On the contrary, we hurried to strike anywhere in Israel - from Dimona to Haifa - and we made you hide in shelters like mice. . .

Again, we warn you - if your government does not agree to all of our conditions, then all of Israel will legally remain open to our weapons fire.

Izz - Eddine al-Qassam Brigades

Hamas also released Hebrew langiage videos explicitly threatening Israeli civilians.

But the UNHRC Davis report doesn't mention any of this. The only messages that they mention from Hamas to Israel are those that they interpret as possible "warnings" to Israeli civilians to seek shelter:

Airlines were warned in advance of the possible targeting of the airport, providing them with the time to suspend flights. Warning civilians in Tel Aviv that a rocket would be fired in the direction of the city at 9 p.m. provided the opportunity for residents to seek shelter. Warning civilians to evacuate communities located in the vicinity of the Green Line could also realistically be acted upon because -- unlike in Gaza -- residents could flee to other areas of Israel less exposed to threats, in great part due to the existence of the Iron Dome system.

Of course, these warnings were threats. When Hamas said they would shoot rockets at the airport, their intent was to shut down Ben Gurion and isolate Israel from the world, not to save lives.

Other "warnings" of theirs never materialized, so the purpose was to terrorize, not to save lives.

In other words, Hamas' threats that are violations of international law were, when noted, regarded as possible mitigation to violations of international law by the David commission!

(h/t Bob K for graphics)

Egypt's Morality Police arrest a man for gay text chat

From Egypt Independent:

A Syrian refugee was sentenced to one year in prison on Tuesday on an array of charges related to sexual debauchery after an officer from the Morality Police set up a fake gay hookup date online.

The undercover police officer, who was posing as a gay man on social media, chatted with the refugee, arranged to meet him and arrested the man as soon as he arrived on location. The officer later submitted all information, including chat history, to public prosecution, which was used to convict the man.

While in custody, the defendant was forced to undergo an anal examination, a controversial practice that authorities claim can prove whether the client engages in anal sex. Many international rights groups, such as Human Rights Watch, and health specialists have denounced the examinations as medically baseless and amounting to torture.

Though the forensic doctor said the anal examination showed no evidence of gay sex, the defendant was convicted nonetheless for charges including “inciting debauchery”, “solicitation to commit immoral acts in public”, “habitual debauchery” and “debauchery”.

“The case contained lots of null procedures, like the arrest itself,” the defendant's lawyer Ahmed Hossam told Egypt Independent. “There wasn’t a crime in the first place. The crime was in the imagination of the officer himself. No debauchery happened. Second, sending personal messages is unconstitutional? Searching an innocent person isn’t allowed according to criminal procedure code in Egypt.”

The undercover officer kept pressuring his client to meet after he bailed multiple times, which Hossam argued shows clear entrapment on the officer’s part.

Hossam immediately filed a court appeal on Tuesday, to be held on July 8, and hopes the judge will see the faults in the state’s case against his defendant. “Practically speaking, the conservative sides play an important role in this cases,” he says. “It’s not about legal reasoning and facts in this case. Society considers the LGBT community sinners and... forgoes professionalism to satisfy their urge to punish them.”

Since the ouster of Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s new military-backed regime has stepped up its arrests of local LGBTQ community members. Approximately 200 people have been arrested on charges related to sexual deviance after October 2013, according to Dalia Abd Elhameed from the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR).

I didn't realize that Egypt had "morality police" but a search on that website, as well as searching for terms like "debauchery," finds they are quite active in looking for LGBTs in Egypt.

06/23 Links Pt2: Lumish: The Jewish Ghetto in Hebron; Flotilla of illusions

From Ian:

Michael Lumish: The Jewish Ghetto in Hebron

The city of Hebron (or Hevron) is among the most ancient of Jewish cities and is the home of the Tomb of the Patriarchs where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah are said to be buried.
Today Jews inhabit about 3 percent of this old Jewish town and the Arab residents very definitely do not want them there.
My friend Yosef, of Love of the Land, alerted us to this:
Jews peacefully confronted this racial and religious persecution, showing their objection by leaving their ghetto which comprises approximately 3-percent of the city to walk quietly through the marketplace. They were faced with threats, physical and verbal intimidation, followed by stones -- for no other reason than that they dared to cross the line in protest of apartheid. Israeli residents then left the market as the hostile population chanted Allah Hu Akbar, pushing against the gate which protects the Jewish population from their neighbors. Stun grenades afterward were necessary to scatter the threatening mob.
The video below is a production of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and therefore in its opening blurb suggests that Jews walking through Hebron represent some sort-of assault on the great Arab majority in that city. Those Jews were protected by Jewish soldiers, which is why the video focuses on soldiers.
At about the 40 second mark the Arabs start chanting "Alahu Akbar! Alahu Akbar!" which, given recent history - if not ancient history - is essentially a call for violence.

Establishing a Palestinian Islamist State

The United Nations' verdict of guilty to Israel, in its "Schabas Report," issued yesterday, was written even before the trial began.
Only the wide-eyed West still does not believe that Mahmoud Abbas is telling the truth when he assures the Palestinians of his intent to destroy Israel.
All public opinion polls in the Palestinian Authority (PA) indicate that if elections were held today, Hamas -- whose only openly-stated reason for existing is to destroy Israel -- would win in a landslide, as in 2006. Gaza has already been lost to Hamas and perhaps soon to ISIS. All evidence reveals that to establish a Palestinian state now would turn it into an Islamist terrorist entity.
Abbas thought that forming a Unity Government with Hamas would give the PA a unified front with which to harvest more money and diplomatic concessions from Europe. But last summer, Abbas was informed of a Hamas murder plot against him.

Jewish Home revives bill limiting foreign funds for left-wing groups

Knesset member Yinon Magal (Jewish Home) on Tuesday presented a new version of a controversial bill aiming to limit foreign funding for organizations that support the prosecution of IDF officers in international courts or campaign for boycotts of Israeli institutions or products.
The proposed legislation stipulates that Israeli non-government organizations receiving funding from foreign governments of over $50,000 will pay a 37 percent tax on the contribution, the Walla news site reported. The bill also adds that Israeli government ministries and the army must avoid collaboration with such NGOs.
“It is important to remember that the law is supposed to maintain our identity as a sovereign state that acts according to the will of the majority and not the agendas of foreign governments or on behalf of organizations that spend tens of millions in order to tarnish our reputation,” Magal said, according to Walla.
The bill, Magel continued, aimed to “make it difficult for those organizations that voluntarily serve the perceptions of foreign governments, those organizations that submit information to the haters of Israel, who make a fortune from tattling on settlers and IDF soldiers and slander Israel’s name in the world.”

Uri Ariel Cancels National Service Volunteers for Leftwing NGOs

It’s turning into a banner day for Bayit Yehudi in the Knesset as they take on the leftwing NGOs.
Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Uri Ariel (Bayit Yehudi), who is also in charge of Sherut Leumi (National Service), instructed the managing director of the Sherut Leumi Authority Sar-Shalom Gerbi to cancel all national service programs for NGOs who acted against IDF soldiers, according to a report in Srugim.
Ariel’s decision came in response to the UN’s Schabes anti-Israel report that relied on reports and testimony from dozens of leftwing NGOs.
Ariel explained that the whole point of National Service is to serve the state of Israel and its citizens. He explained he will not allow a situation where Israel finances programs that act against Israel’s own soldiers.

J-Street is assuming that people are idiots.

They just came out with a "hail Mary" website meant to convince everyone that the deal being negotiated with Iran is wonderful. It is very slick, filled with animations, and it claims to debunk the major 8 arguments against the deal.

It fails miserably.

J-Street says:

Opponents of this agreement say Iran will cheat their way to a nuclear weapon.

Not without us knowing in time to stop them. That's why this deal is so important: by subjecting Iran to the most intrusive inspections regime in history, it leaves nothing to trust.

Inspections at all nuclear sites. 24/7/365 monitoring. Tracking every ounce of uranium. It all adds up to unprecedented assurance that Iran cannot cheat their way to a weapon undetected

No. Iran has not agreed anytime/anywhere inspections of its military sites, and never will. But they are critically important.

We have heard many assertions by Iranian officials since the P5+1/Iran framework was reached that International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors will not be allowed into military sites in Iran. The blanket assertion seems to suggest that this could be the case even when the IAEA has evidence of undeclared nuclear activities at these sites. Some Iranian officials have even asserted that no country would ever let inspectors into their military sites. But what kind of agreement would that be? What better place to hide a covert centrifuge plant or a plant to develop the nuclear weapon itself?

J-Street says:

Opponents of this agreement say Iran must admit to all its past nuclear-weapons related research.

Yet it would be foolish to sacrifice knowing what Iran is doing now and in future just to insist that it admit all it did wrong in past.

This deal ensures that we’ll know what Iran is up to now and going forward--and give us ample time to stop it--because Iran will be subject to the most intrusive inspections regime in history

This is wrong too. As summarized by Omri Ceren from the TIP mailing list:

(1) No way to have a reliable breakout estimate without PMD resolution - That information could also shape the world’s understanding of a crucial question: Iran’s “breakout time,” or the amount of time it would take Tehran to dash to a bomb if it chose to do so, said Olli Heinonen, a former IAEA deputy director now with the Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. “You need to know how far they got,” Heinonen said.
(2) No way to have a reliable verification regime without PMD resolution - On Tuesday, Kerry hinted at why the U.S. might be satisfied with such an outcome. U.S. intelligence, he implied, paints a clear enough picture of Iran’s weapons research to make Iranian cooperation unnecessary. “We have absolute knowledge with respect to the certain military activities they were engaged in,” Kerry said. But that statement was quickly challenged by critics of the talks. “I know of no American intelligence officer who would ever use that description to characterize what we know and do not know,” former CIA director Michael Hayden wrote in the Washington Times.
(3) Lets Iran cement its 'we did nothing wrong' narrative, kneecaping the IAEA and gutting the nonproliferation regime - Some experts said the issue is as much political as it is religious, however: Iran appears determined never to concede that it did anything to warrant punitive international sanctions, and to maintain its posture as a victim of western aggression. “Our program always has been — and always will be — exclusively peaceful,” insisted Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in April. Evidence of military research, Sadjadpour said, “can be explained away as an elaborate Mossad-CIA conspiracy.”

J-Street says:

Opponents of the agreement say that it lifts sanctions on Iran in exchange for little or nothing but promises.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Sanctions only lift when the international inspectors, part of the most intrusive program in history, verify that Iran is complying with the deal.

And if Iran is found to be violating the agreement? Sanctions snap right back into place.

Are they freaking kidding? Yes, of course they are. They know this is garbage, and they even say so in answer to a later concern:

Opponents of this agreement say the United States should impose tougher sanctions and insist on a “better deal.”

However, new US sanctions would actually result in less pressure on Iran to concessions, not more.

If Congress rejects a deal that prevents Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, we will be blamed, not Iran. China, Russian and other countries would resume their business with Iran, collapsing the tough sanctions regime, while Iran could kick out inspectors and resume concerning activities, paving the way for it to develop a bomb.

So if we can't trust Russia and China to back up the US if Congress rejects a deal, why does J-Street believe that they will snap back sanctions if Iran cheats?

Opponents of this agreement say it only lasts for 10 or 15 years.

They're wrong: after rolling back Iran's nuclear program, this deal keeps in place permanent enhanced inspections to prevent it from acquiring a bomb.

That’s a far better result than the mere two to four years experts say a military strike would set back Iran’s nuclear program.

See above - Iran will always be able to build a bomb in a secret military facility. After all, Fordow was a secret military facility that, under this deal would not be discovered by the IAEA!

J-Street says:

Opponents of the agreement argue that this deal allows Iran to still engage in some nuclear research and development.

In fact, this deal severely restricts Iran’s nuclear R&D, including by prohibiting the testing of advanced centrifuges using uranium. It also drags Iran’s R&D program out into the light of day, subjecting it to the most intrusive inspections and verification regime in history.

Iran will be able to build advanced centrifuges, as long as it tests them with non-nuclear materials. So the research is hard;y being limited at all.

And when J-Street says (repeatedly) that the deal subjects Iran to "the most intrusive inspections and verification regime in history" that is meaningless, because if the inspections aren't enough to stop a bomb, then who cares how they compare to others? As we've shown, they will not stop inspections of sites Iran deems to be military.

In recent weeks there has been serious skepticism of the Iran deal, not from right-wing critics but from mainstream media who are watching incredulously as successive State Department briefings turn into fiascoes of the government abandoning red lines to make a deal. But J-Street, supposedly pro-Israel, shows not the slightest skepticism about the chances that the deal could provide Iran with a pathway to a nuclear weapon. So exactly what is J-Street's position?

The answer is that J-Street will always ensure that its policies are identical to those of the White House, even when the White House changes its policies. If President Obama declared tomorrow that the US is giving nuclear bombs to Iran. J-Street would back him 100%. Because the entire organization is built around a symbiotic relationship with the White House where they back Obama in return for providing him with "Jewish" cover for his anti-Israel actions.

If you’re a visitor to London this Northern Hemisphere summer (here in Australia we’re beset by winter) and find yourself, as is not unlikely, admiring the great edifice, packed with tombs of kings and queens, that is Westminster Abbey, cast your mind back to the Middle Ages – not a hard thing to do in that environment – when the Jews, useful to the Crown as moneylenders, were the chattels of successive kings, to be protected or persecuted as those kings pleased.

When William the Conqueror’s great-grandson, the Crusader Richard Coeur de Lion, was crowned at the Abbey in 1189, representatives of Anglo-Jewry, barred from the holy ceremony itself, appeared at the subsequent banquet with gifts for the king they were set upon, beaten, and flung from the premises. Pogrom-like rioting ensued, in which Jews were killed and property destroyed, and the following March, while Richard was overseas on a Crusade, there was the infamous massacre at Clifford’s Tower in York.

England’s sovereign for much of the thirteenth century (1216-72) was Richard’s nephew King Henry III, whose bones, unlike those of Richard, who was buried in France, rest in the Abbey. His long reign was not a happy one for the Jews of England. From 1218 Jews were forced to wear a distinguishing badge – representing the Tablets of the Law, the earliest instance of compulsory badge-wearing in Europe. Missionary efforts intensified amid a climate of deepening intolerance (whereas in the previous century several Christians had adopted Judaism without reprisal, in 1222 an Oxford deacon who did so and wed a Jewish wife was burned at the stake), constructing new synagogues was prohibited, and so on. Moreover, wealthy Jews were compelled to contribute large sums towards Henry’s enthusiastic rebuilding of Westminster Abbey that began in 1244-45.

When Henry hatched his plan for refurbishing the Abbey, Aaron of York, the country’s richest financier, who was constantly fleeced by the king through levies and fines, was compelled to donate a large sum towards the shrine of King Edward the Confessor in the Abbey “for the salvation of the king and queen and their children”. When the rebuilding started, the twice-widowed financier Licoricia (who was fated, much later, to be a murder victim along with her Christian servant, Alice) was fleeced of over £2500 and Moses of Hereford of £3000. Elias le Eveske, who was at that time archpresbyter – Anglo-Jewry’s officially-recognised communal leader – was forced to donate a silver-gilt chalice. And other Jewish individuals had to defray the cost of the Abbey’s internal embellishments.

To add insult to injury, the Torah Scrolls used by the justices of the Jews for administering oaths were compulsorily sold off in order to pay for new liturgical vestments for the Abbey’s clergy and other ritual items

And all this didn't save the community from rapine and persecution, either under Henry or his son Edward I, who following draconian legislation against them expelled them from the country in 1290, warning that any who remained would be put to death.

However, in the interval between the Expulsion of 1290 and the formal Readmission of Jews by Oliver Cromwell in 1656, a tremendous change occurred in England and Wales that had significant implications for Anglo-Jewry. This was, of course, the Reformation, which, inter alia, abolished the cults of English boys supposedly ritualistically murdered by Jews and consequently venerated as martyrs by the Church: William of Norwich (d. 1144; focus of the first blood libel in medieval Europe), Robert of Bury St Edmunds (d.1181) and, in particular, Little St Hugh (d.1255), whose shrine at Lincoln Cathedral had been a popular place of pilgrimage.

Crucially, King Henry VIII had the Bible translated into English (and Welsh), making its contents accessible for the first time to ordinary men and women in his realms, and commanding a copy to be placed in every parish. Thus people hearing the scriptures read in the vernacular became aware that the Roman governor Pontius Pilate had ordered the crucifixion of Jesus – and the Jews-killed-Christ canard was compromised as a result. (It seems, at least from anecdotal evidence, that it was comparatively infrequently invoked by members of the Church of England and other Protestant denominations.)

But it was the beautiful language of the translation of the Bible produced in 1611 with the authorisation of King James I that endeared the Scriptures to large swathes of the Protestant public, thus consolidating what Henry had begun.

Thus the country embarked on what the nineteenth-century English biologist T.H. Huxley (quoted in Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword (1956), p. 81) called “the national epic of Britain,” so closely did British men and women identify with the story of Israel.

The nineteenth-century writer Leigh Hunt exemplified such people. During his London boyhood he loved to visit the Great Synagogue in Duke’s Place – he had acquired a smattering of Hebrew – and would later write that whenever he saw “a Rabbi in the street, he seemed to me a man coming, not from Bishopsgate of Saffron Hill, but out of the remoteness of time”. Similarly, the Anglican priest Father Ignatius, an early gentile Zionist who also visited the Great Synagogue as a boy and continued to visit synagogues in adulthood, wrote: “Whenever I met a Jewish old clo’ man, I could not forbear from taking my hat off to him, and rendering him the homage which I felt due to a representative of the aristocratic race of humanity.” And J.E. Budgett Meakin, an Evangelical and orientalist who wrote sympathetically of Jews in the Near East, declared that if he could choose his ethnicity “it would most assuredly be that of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”.

David Lloyd George, during whose prime ministership the Balfour Declaration was adopted, who was brought up in the Welsh chapel-going tradition, recalled (Jewish Chronicle Supplement, 29 May 1925:

“I was brought up in a school where I was taught far more about the history of the Jews than about the history of my own land. I could tell you all the Kings of Israel. But I doubt whether I could have named half a dozen of the Kings of England and not more of the Kings of Wales… On five days a week in the day school and … in our Sunday schools, we were thoroughly versed in the history of the Hebrews.”

In previous columns regarding British policy during the Mandate era I’ve mentioned at some length the pro-Jewish, pro-Zionist Colonel Josiah Wedgwood. He reflected this sort of philosemitism when he stated in his book The Seventh Dominion (1928), pp. 119-21:

“The Anglo-Saxon, more than any other race, wants to sympathise with the Jews … no doubt we understand the Jew better than can those to whom the Old Testament is not familiar from infancy. To the foreigner the word Jew is a hissing in the street; to us the word suggests Solomon and Moses and a thousand cradle stories. So often have we used their names for our own children that they now seem to be our fathers, especially our Puritan forefathers … Towards such a people one has a feeling almost of awe, they are so well known.”

It almost goes without saying that many a Bible reader must have identified with Israel against Pharoah and Haman, and would by extension identify with the Yishuv and with the State of Israel against their foes.

Once upon a time Scripture lessons were part and parcel of every British boy and girl’s state school education. Those days have gone, swept away by secularism and political correctness and the evident demands of a multicultural society. Also, since the twentieth-century regular church-going in England has been in decline, though not to such an extent among Catholics, whose numbers have been in recent years been bolstered by immigration from Poland.

The bottom line is that few British people are familiar with the Old Testament Scriptures any more, and, in Britain though not, it seems, in the United States, the scriptural fount of support for Jews and Israel’s cause has, regrettably, been fading.

06/23 Links Pt1: Another Outrageously Flawed Gaza Report; Prosor: UNHRC are 'Soldiers of Hamas'

From Ian:

NGO Monitor: Another Outrageously Flawed Gaza Report

The UN Human Rights Council, many of whose state members are world champions in violating the moral principles the Council is obligated to protect, issued its Commission of Inquiry (COI) report on the 2014 Gaza War today. The eighth such attempt since 2002 to single out Israel as guilty of war crimes, this was the first replay since the discredited Goldstone document in 2009. This time, some lessons were learned, but any serious analysis of the COI would find it seriously flawed. At best, it is Goldstone lite, with little lasing impact; but at worst, it will accelerate the dirty political war begun at Durban 2001, seeking the “total international isolation of Israel.”
The COI is clearly written in two voices: the harsh ideological accusations of William Schabas, interspersed with the more reasonable caution of Mary McGowan Davis. This was expected—Schabas, the anti-Israel warrior originally selected by the UNHRC’s Islamic bloc majority, neglected to mention his paid job with the PLO, and was replaced after the research was completed by Judge Davis. But instead of throwing out the draft, she added and revised the original sporadically, leaving a fundamentally flawed document, drafted by the same UN-based staffers.
As a result, the report is premised on the immoral and absurd equivalence and parallelism between a terrorist group (Hamas) and a democratic state under attack (Israel). The recommendations at the end, which call for investigations, enforcement of international legal principles, cooperation with the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, and other measures, are ostensibly addressed to Israel and to Hamas. This can be compared to placing the police and mafia on an equal moral plain.

NGO Monitor: UN Report on Gaza: Improvement over Goldstone, but NGO Reliance Hurts Credibility

The report of the Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza War is different both substantially and methodologically than its predecessors, including the 2009 Goldstone Report, according to NGO Monitor. However, it still quotes extensively from biased and unreliable political advocacy NGOs. By repeating the unverified and non-expert factual and legal allegations of groups such as Amnesty International, B’Tselem, Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and Al Mezan, the UN investigation is irrevocably tarnished.
“The UNHRC report would be entirely different without the baseless and unverifiable allegations of non-governmental organizations,” said Anne Herzberg, Legal Advisor at NGO Monitor. “Despite efforts to consult a wider array of sources, the report produced by McGowan Davis and her team lacks credibility as a result of NGO influence.”
NGO Monitor’s initial review of the Commission of Inquiry’s “detailed findings” shows that NGOs were referenced, cited, and quoted at a high volume: B’Tselem was the most referenced NGO with 69 citations, followed by Amnesty International (53), Palestinian Center for Human Rights (50), and Al Mezan (29). UNWRA and UN-OCHA were also featured throughout the report. As repeatedly demonstrated by NGO Monitor, these groups are not appropriate for professional fact-finding.

Soldier from Operation Protective Edge responds to UN report: 'We have paid for morality in blood'

I served in the Shejaiya rescue force. Certain rules of engagement were made clear for our six days there. The night before the ground incursion, a Shin Bet officer came to us and explained that there was a large civilian population in the direction that we were headed. Because of this, we did not enter Shejaiya at that time, although that was what we had practiced and it was the correct tactical maneuver.
After consideration, we went the following day in the anticipated direction, where Hamas gunmen were awaiting our arrival. Hamas understood our strategies, and how each of our operations had humanitarian and moral considerations, and because of this they were ready to receive us. They had set up observation posts in the surrounding areas, and they anticipated our arrival because of the previous decision not to enter into a civilian population.
On the first night we went in, we were attacked. Five of our soldiers were killed and 20 others were injured. In spite of the claims made against the IDF that they have gone against international law, in this instance it is understood that our morality cost us our lives.

Amazing how no one ever has a cell phone when "settlers chop down trees"

From Ma'an:

Israeli settlers chopped down more than 70 olive trees between the towns of Yasuf and Jammain in the northern West Bank districts of Salfit and Nablus on Monday.

Palestinian farmers said the trees, which lay close to the illegal Israeli settlements of Ariel and Taffuh, had been cut down using chainsaws.

A local, Khalid Maali, said that because the land lay close to settler roads near the Zaatara checkpoint it had been easy for the settlers to flee afterwards.

Yet again, there is not a single photograph of these trees.

70 trees chopped down with chainsaws would take an enormous amount of effort - and leave lots of evidence. Israellycool recently showed how long it takes to chop down just one part of an olive tree with a chainsaw:

How easy is it to cut down an olive tree?
Brian here. Every year Jews are accused of chopping down thousands of olive trees maliciously: watch just how hard it is to saw off a small, dead part of a healthy olive tree. And realise how necessary this is to keeping these trees healthy.
Posted by Israellycool on Monday, June 8, 2015

But, in an unbelievable coincidence, no one who witnesses this devastation which is reported weekly ever has a cell phone with them to snap some photos!

However, the media does manage to find completely spontaneous file photos of Arab women crying next to their olive trees.

UNHRC Gaza report didn't mention how Hamas used Shifa Hospital as headquarters

Further research into the UNHRC report issued yesterday shows plenty of omissions about Hamas crimes.

Two in particular stand out as far as Hamas using medical facilities for terror.

The report does not mention, even once, that Hamas - and Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades - used Shifa Hospital as a military headquarters, thereby endangering patients. The fact was confirmed by newspaper reports at the time, and one detailed report was removed by a French news site after Hamas threats:

After four blocked attempts to leave Gaza without explanation over weeks, the Palestinian journalist was summoned by the security services of Hamas on Sunday. "I received a call from a private number. They summoned me to Al-Shifa Hospital in the Gaza City center, " explains Radjaa. He carried with him his two phones, his press card and a small camera.

A few meters from the emergency room where the injured from bombings are constantly flowing, in the outpatient department, he was received in "a small section of the hospital used as administration" by a band of young fighters. They were all well dressed, which surprised Radjaa, "in civilian clothing with a gun under one's shirt and some had walkie-talkies " . He was ordered to empty his pockets, removing his shoes and his belt then was taken to a hospital room "which served that day as the command office of three people."

We even have a photo (that was also removed after Hamas threats:)

Also, Hamas fired rockets from next to Shifa Hospital:

The UNHRC report also says:

[S]everal allegations were made concerning the alleged use by Palestinian armed groups of ambulances to conduct military operations. However, only one specific allegation was provided in the documentation available from Israel and this lacked a date or location for the incident. The commission has received no additional allegations concerning the improper use of ambulances.

The footnote they used was from Israel, "The 2014 Gaza Conflict: Factual and Legal Aspects," but in fact the IDF released at least two videos showing Hamas terrorists using ambulances.

The same paragraph that UNHRC used to mention the "allegation" of Hamas using ambulances was the one that mentioned that they used Shifa Hospital as headquarters.

Which means that the Schabas/Davis report purposefully ignored a major violation of international law by Hamas that they were clearly aware of. Commandeering a hospital for military purposes is certainly more serious than using ambulances. Both of them are war crimes.

This is just one indication that the UNHRC report is just as biased as Goldstone was - but it worked harder to give the appearance of objectivity.

How DARE anyone psychoanalyze a national leader! (Hypocrisy alert)

Lisa Goldman, who normally writes for +972 magazine, is incensed at Michael Oren's analysis of Barack Obama's mindset he did while he was Israel's ambassador to the US:

How dare he!

Goldman indignantly writes:

[It is... difficult to believe that a man who has a PhD in history from Princeton University, and who spent years in the diplomatic arena, would think it remotely appropriate to indulge in cheap anti-intellectual speculation about a president’s relationship with his daddy as a means of explaining his foreign policy.

It's awful!

Except that Lisa's +972 magazine did exactly that to...drumroll, please....Binyamin Netanyahu!

Yes, the leftist magazine gave a rave review to a self-published e-book by amateur psychologists to analyze Bibi.

The review includes this:

The thesis is that there’s a psychological triumvirate or holy national-political-security trinity in his mind, comprised of Netanyahu the elder, Bibi’s legendary father, and his slain brother Yonatan, a fallen mythical hero if there ever was one. It is Bibi’s trapped-animal status between these two that compels him to seek his own defeat, in the authors’ view.

They observe that Benzion Netanyahu made no secret of his preference for his eldest son, Yoni, or of his hopes that Yoni would lead the country to fulfill the father’s grandiose mighty-man dreams for Israel. Bibi of course has awe and respect for both his father and his brother. His ambitions would lead him to the top offices, his insecurities meant that when he got there, his inner will not to steal his dead brother’s birthright meant that he never wanted to be too good, too successful, too loved – his deep anger against his father, but also at himself for disappointing his father by not being his brother, leads to self-fulfilling prophecy of permanent failure.

Saying Bibi has daddy issues is valuable analysis, based on...not much.

But saying that Obama has daddy issues - based on the only autobiography that Obama has written - is crude and disrespectful.

This is the consistency of the anti-Zionist Left.

(h/t EBoZ)