Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, May 09, 2016

05/09 Links Pt1: Poll: Israel not occupying Judea-Samaria, peace unlikely with PA; Ross: M/E turning to Russia because we're weak

From Ian:

Saeb Erekat: Palestinians Have Never Agreed to Establish a State With Provisional Borders

In his opinion piece “Dear Abbas, answer Kerry, and establish a Palestinian state now”, Mr. Yossi Beilin provides several assertions that are not factual, including the allegation that Palestinians had agreed to establish a state with provisional borders in the past.
While the idea of “provisional borders” was an option according to the Road Map, President Yasser Arafat never accepted this formula. Under President Abbas’ leadership, the PLO never accepted such a formula either. President Abbas never declared the acceptance of this frame to Mr. Beilin.
While we appreciate the enthusiasm of Mr. Beilin, a man with proven credentials for pursuing the end of the occupation and a sovereign State of Palestine living side by side with the State of Israel, twisting facts is not the way to move forward [not satire].

Poll: Israel not occupying Judea-Samaria, peace unlikely with PA

Just days before Israeli Independence Day, a new poll conducted by Tel Aviv University in conjunction with the Israeli Democracy Institute’s Guttman Center has revealed that Israelis are more pessimistic than ever about the prospects for a true peace with the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Among Israeli Jews, only 5.7% strongly believe that negotiations could lead to peace between Israel and the PA in coming years. In total only 20.7% believe peace is possible in the foreseeable future, compared to 77.6% who do not.
A strong majority of Israeli Jews also believe that Israel’s control over Judea and Samaria does not constitute an “occupation," with 71.5% of Jews rejecting the notion Israel is “occupying” those territories, as opposed to just 22.7% who agree with that characterization.
Israeli Arabs, however, were far more likely to believe Israel is occupying Judea and Samaria, with 71.5% perceiving Israeli control as occupation, versus a mere 15.3% who disagreed.
Israelis were more divided over Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s declaration that “the Golan will remain part of the State of Israel forever," which many perceived as reaffirming Israel’s 1981 annexation of the area.

Abbas stop being a bully. Israel can’t occupy her own country

In order to keep Palestinians quiet for just a moment, like the teacher who appeases the “wicked” child, the UN, EU and USA mollify them hoping that there will be but a moment of peace and time to care for the others in need. But like all recalcitrant children who learn how to play the game, work the system, the Palestinians know if they apply enough pressure ,make enough noise that they will get the attention they want and the “cookie” that will silence them until the next tantrum.
Remember back in September when Abbas screamed
“We will not forsake our country and we will keep every inch of our land…The Al-Aqsa Mosque is ours. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is ours as well. They have no right to desecrate the mosque with their dirty feet, we won’t allow them to do that.”
Remember he screamed this after he had his bullies cowardly attack Jews over the Temple Mount.
Then later in October the Palestinians cried again about something (does it matter?) and in order to appease them UNESCO agreed to present a draft affirming “that the Buraq Plaza is an integral part of al-Aksa Mosque/al-Haram al-Sharif.”
This was done despite the fact that it is well known that the Temple Mount was built by and belongs to the Jews. Never let a fact get in the way of Jew hatred.

From Egypt Independent:

Egypt’s public prosecutor referred 67 defendants to criminal court on Sunday in the case of late public prosecutor Hisham Barakat’s assassination.

Barakat was killed on June 29, 2015 after a bomb targeted his motorcade. His assassination made him the most senior state official killed since militant attacks surged in Egypt in mid-2013.

The public prosecution's office said in a statement on Sunday that the State Security Prosecution’s investigation revealed that the defendants belong to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group and that they organised the assassination in coordination with the Palestinian movement Hamas.

The statement read that some of the defendants planned for the attack while others received combat training in Hamas camps on monitoring high-profile figures, preparing Improvised Explosive Devices and securing communication.

The prosecution’s referral order was accompanied with detailed confessions from 45 out of the 67 defendants, the public prosecution's office added in today's statement.

Interior Minister Magdy Abdel Ghaffar accused in March Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood group of having planned and implemented the assassination.

He added that a Hamas member in Gaza was involved in the assassination.

Hamas has repeatedly denied any involvement i terrorism cases in Egypt, but it will be interesting to find out the specific details that come out during this trial.

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Shuafat is one of the tragedies of Jerusalem. Jerusalem ambulances, garbage trucks and fire trucks cannot enter the neighborhood without being stoned. Much of it is officially an UNRWA camp where services are supposed to be provided by that organization, but UNRWA all but ignores it as well. As a result, Shuafat is a crime-ridden, drug-infested, dangerous place with open sewers, huge piles of trash and little hope. While most of it is in the Jerusalem municipal boundary, it lies outside the separation barrier - it is a failure of Zionism as well that the Israeli authorities, after many years, simply gave up on trying to control this part of Jerusalem.

Into this vacuum stepped a young man, Baha Nababta.

By all accounts, Nababta worked tirelessly to help the residents of his neighborhood. He founded a number of social institutions in Shuafat to help troubled youth. Nababta was also the head of a local, volunteer fire department that worked with tools as crude as hammers to rescue people from burning houses. He created an emergency response team with over 50 volunteers to respond to all kinds of local emergencies from snowstorms to a team of motorcyclists who could protect Israeli emergency teams who must enter the camp. He helped pave roads, get rid of garbage - essentially every service taken for granted by residents of every other urban area

Nababta was not shy about asking for help from Jerusalem authorities or from liberal Israeli organizations, asking for basic medical and firefighting equipment. His local groups received training from Jerusalem municipal firefighters and from Jerusalem medics, and from all accounts they were happy to help. His main contact on the Israeli side was Dr. Meir Margalit, a Jewish member of the far left Meretz party.

This is probably the reason he is no longer alive.

Haaretz reported last week:

Baha Nababta, a well-known social activist in the Shoafat refugee camp in northern Jerusalem, was shot to death on Monday by an unknown assailant.

The murder occurred at about 11:30 P.M. on Monday, while Nababta stood with a large group of local residents near the paving work they had initiated. Witnesses said an unknown person riding a motorbike was looking for Nababta, and when he found him he shot 10 bullets at Nababta, seven of which hit him. Nababta was rushed to hospital but died a short time later.

Camp residents said on Tuesday that they did not know who the murderer was, but thought the murder was connected to his social activism.

We don't know who executed Baha Nababta but it seems likely that Palestinians who are against "normalization" were behind the murder.

This is the one week anniversary of the murder. The story was covered, barely, in Israeli newspapers (Jerusalem Post buried it on page 10, for example.)

Palestinian media ignored the story completely. Outside of social media I couldn't find one news story about this murder of a prominent social worker.

His death did not receive the headlines of those who are killed while trying to murder Jews. Nababta did not have a huge funeral. His Facebook page - which was quite active - does not have one person expressing condolences after his death.

I'm sure I wouldn't have agreed with Baha Nababta's politics, but he deserved a huge amount of respect for actually working to help his people instead of choosing to spend his life complaining and protesting. His work was heroic and his death is a tragedy by any measure for Arabs and Jews alike.

But perhaps the bigger tragedy is that his murder has been so roundly ignored by his own people.

The Palestinian leadership and media do not want to publicize anything that cannot be blamed on Israel, because their entire existence is based on "resistance," not on doing anything positive for their people. Nababta was guilty of the cardinal crime of "normalization" with Jews who wanted to help him and his fellow Arabs, and to Palestinians, that is unforgivable - and his murder is understandable if embarrassing to mention.

The execution of Baha Nababta, and the silence about his murder from not only Palestinians but from so-called pro-Palestinian activists, sends a message to all Arabs that working even with left-wing Jews is an unforgivable crime.

A person who should be hailed as an example to all Palestinians has been relegated to one of the many piles of garbage that he worked hard to eradicate.

Peace is impossible with a society that treats a true hero like Baha Nababta as a villain.

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This may be the actual Talmudic ritual!

Arabic media on Sunday warned of a new way that Jewish "settlers" are "defiling" the "Aqsa Mosque."

They are visiting the area - and being silent.

Apparently at some point in their circumnavigation of the site, on the east wall, the evil settlers stop and stand silently, which is according to the media a Talmudic ritual. But a witness says that the tour guide uses this time to spin a tale of lies about how there used to be two Jewish Temples on the site of the mosques that everyone knows has been sitting there for thousands of years.

The heroic Muslims defending the Al Aqsa Mosque from such extreme forms of provocation as silence make sure that they scream non-stop at the Jews so their evil schemes are thwarted.

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"Intellectual" believes that Saudi Arabia gives Israel billions of dollars a year

Seventh-rate academic Juan Cole writes that anti-Zionism cannot have anything to do with antisemitism, and he has five "intellectuals" to prove it, quoting an article in TeleSUR.

One of the towering examples of intellect is David Palumbo-Liu, who I've shown can get an astonishing number of facts wrong in a single paragraph.

On that very same day, that towering intellectual Palumbo-Liu tweeted this:

Did Money Seal Israeli-Saudi Alliance? https://t.co/1W8cLIpOxG via @truthout
— David Palumbo-Liu (@palumboliu) May 9, 2016

The article he links to, at conspiracy-theory hotbed TruthOut, says this:

According to a source briefed by US intelligence analysts, the Saudis have given Israel at least $16 billion over the past 2 ½ years, funneling the money through a third-country Arab state and into an Israeli "development" account in Europe to help finance infrastructure inside Israel. The source first called the account "a Netanyahu slush fund," but later refined that characterization, saying the money was used for public projects such as building settlements in the West Bank.

So the "intellectual" that academic Juan Cole thinks is so trustworthy believes that Saudi Arabia sends far more money to Israel and the US does - $6 billion annually - in order to build Jewish settlements (and turn the "Israel Lobby" to their advantage, of course.)

And the source is impeccable: "a source briefed by US intelligence analysts." How much more reliable can you get?

It's fun looking at how easily anti-Israel "academics" can not only lie but also believe the most absurd things, as long as it fits with their pre-existing biases of Israel being the world's most evil regime. Any pretense of academic rigor is not only missing, but actively discouraged.

It is a wonder that colleges employ these quacks.

Meanwhile, I need to ask the Saudis to send me a few hundred million, because I am very influential, as Electronic Intifada admits. As the US head of the Jewish Electronic Media Lobby, I can definitely help the Saudis achieve their political aims.

For a price.

UPDATE: Another "alternative news" site is claiming that Saudi Arabia gave $80 million to Netanyahu's re-election campaign, pretending that this was a Panama Papers revelation. Can't wait to see which intellectual giants will retweet that one.

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Al Ahram, the most widely circulated Egyptian daily newspaper, has an op-ed today by Ali Gad called "Jewish Talmudic Plans":

We read about the many plots that revolve around us, and we follow the views of politicians and specialists and analysts on the Middle East to understand: Why we are in conflicts that do not end, losing many lives and paying a heavy price economically, socially and psychologically? Why are we lacking security and safety in our countries? Why are all the wars of the world concentrated in the Middle East? Why are our societies spending more for weapons than for food? Why are the Arab peoples and us alone the lowest and poorest and least secure and with the least progress? Many questions revolve in our heads

A convincing answer to some of these questions are found in how the Jews plan to control the world. It is worth mentioning that the conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and the intervention of Iran and Russia make the region politically divided, and that Israel is using this to implement the plan and achieve the teachings of the Talmud, where it instructs them to turn conflicts from political to sectarian. This is the secret of their attempts to ignite sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shiites to drain the Muslims' strength.

He goes on to "quote" Talmudic passages that supposedly prove it is a recipe for world domination, but I couldn't understand the examples well enough to translate.

Jewish Talmudic plans and their desire to enslave the world are written in the Talmud...The goal of the hidden conspiracy of the Jews is the actual control of the world, having has economic control and flood the world with their financial loans. America is living under a debt of $ 15 trillion, and France, hundreds of billions more, and like England, Italy, Spain and others, the question is: who lent these countries this money? Actual control does not come from conventional military occupation, but by placing all the existing governments and peoples under a unified global government.

If there was a crime against humanity don't look to the Arabs, but find the dominant force capable of moving the world between left and right, good and evil.

This is similar to the article last week we published a much smaller Egyptian publication, but this one concentrates on the Talmud as the reason for Jewish control.

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05/08 Links: Even Palestinian Leaders Want Jewish Doctors; Guardian claims Golan was ‘Palestinian’

From Ian:

Even Palestinian Leaders Want Jewish Doctors

Many Palestinian leaders frequently, and in utmost secrecy, ferry their loved ones to receive medical treatment in Israeli hospitals. They do not tell their people and they do not tell the Arab world. But when they need medical care, they reach out for the best medical care in the world—Israel.
Some would call it hypocrisy. Some expediency. When a loved one is ill, politics and enmities fall by the wayside. It is a game changer.
The cloak of secrecy is mandated because, in the Arab world, the optics would not look good at all. After all, Israel is portrayed as the oppressor, the evil persecutor, the murderer of Palestinians. How would it look across the world if it were known that privileged Palestinians utilize the skills of the forbidden and cursed Jewish Zionist State?
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ younger brother, Abu Louai, was recently treated in Assuta Hospital, a private hospital in Tel Aviv. Abu Louai is 76 years old and suffers from cancer. He lives in Qatar. The PA press has not and probably will not publish this information—neither will the rest of the Arabic press should they ever get the news.

Fred Maroun: The Arabs' Real Grievance against the Jews

The Arab world still does not today accept the concept of a Jewish state of any size or any shape. Even Egypt and Jordan, who signed peace agreements with Israel, do not accept that Israel is a Jewish state, and they continue to promote anti-Semitic hatred against Israel.
During Israel's War of Independence, Jews were ethnically cleansed from Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, and in the years that followed, they were ethnically cleansed from the rest of the Arab world.
Jews demand the right to exist, and to exist as equals, on the land where they have existed and belonged continuously for more than three thousand years.
We would rather claim that the conflict is about "occupation" and "settlements." The Jews see what radical Islamists are now doing to Christians and other minorities, who were also in the Middle East for thousands of years before the Muslim Prophet Mohammed was even born.
The real Arab grievance against the Jews is that they exist.

Guardian article claims that the Golan Heights were ‘Palestinian’

A Guardian article by Sian Cain (Michael Chabon witnesses ‘grievous injustice’ in occupied territories, May 6th) included the following paragraph, with background on the “Palestinian territories” Israel “entered” during the 1967 war.
Chabon and his wife, writer Ayelet Waldman, are contributing to and editing the as-yet-unnamed book of essays that will be published to mark the 50th anniversary of 1967’s six-day war, when Israel first entered the Palestinian territories: the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, parts of the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip.
Of course, the Golan Heights were seized from Syria during the Six-Day War, and were never ‘Palestinian’ – even in the broadest sense of the term.
The passage conflates the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza (which were controlled by Jordan and Egypt respectively before the war, and now claimed by some Palestinians as part of their future state) with the Golan Heights, which were controlled by Syria since 1944. Whilst referring to the West Bank and east Jerusalem as “Palestinian territories” – rather than the ‘disputed territories’ claimed by Palestinians – is itself misleading, saying the same about the Golan Heights is simply inaccurate.

The Elder of Ziyon has a piece entitled, "Peter Beinart cannot tell the difference between a 'narrative' and a fact."

Speaking before a group of Democrats and progressives, Beinart said the following concerning conservative billionaire Sheldon Adelson:

In 2008, when Tel Aviv University's Shlomo Sand published a book called "The Invention off the Jewish People," he was widely called anti-Semitic. When Adelson says the same about Palestinians, he's a Republican rock star.

This is an example of what the Elder calls the Assumed Symmetry Fallacy. He writes:

I am not a logician and do not know of a formal name for this fallacy, but let's call it the Assumed Symmetry Fallacy: the assumption that two sides - by virtue of their opposition - are falsely assumed to be symmetric.

This is a very important insight and one that we need to consider. The Jews of the Middle East, via the State of Israel, are now a powerful people and we should be very proud, as Jews and friends of the Jewish State, of their accomplishments. The success of Israel is nothing short of remarkable, given its humble beginnings. Israel has the most powerful military in the entire region and one of the best economies, given its relative size, of any country in the world. Israel is creative, innovative, technological, internationally-minded, and sophisticated.

However, the Jews of the Middle East also represent a tiny minority surrounded by a much larger, hostile majority of Muslims who have made it very clear, over the long and brutal course of 1,400 years, that they simply will not stand for Jewish sovereingty on historically Jewish land and will do everything within their power to make life miserable for the Jewish minority. They teach their children that Jews are the descendents of orangatans and swine and that killing Jewish people is pleasing to the heart of Allah. They wage war against us. They shoot rockets at us. They strap suicide belts onto women and children because when Muslim women and children commit suicide in an effort to murder Jews it is considered not merely a noble act, but the most noble spiritual act of the shaheed.

The truth is that in the Long Arab War Against the Jews of the Middle East, there is no symmetry. In terms of numbers, resources, land mass, every advantage goes to the Arabs. They outnumber the Jews by a factor of 60 or 70 to 1 throughout the region and if you include Muslims, more generally, the odds are over 100 to 1. They conquered and conrol over 99% of the entire Middle East, with the sole exception of the Jewish State of Israel, and are committing a genocide against the native Christian population. Muslims hold all non-Muslims under submission within imperial Islam since the rise of that religion in the 7th century throughout the Middle East with the lone, sole exception of Israel.

And now they literally created a brand-spanking new people, the "Palestinians," for the distinct purpose of countering Jewish sovereignty and freedom on historically Jewish land.

So, no, there is no symmetry in this fight.

The Jews are fighting to maintain freedom and sovereignty and the great Arab majority is dedicated to destroying that freedom and sovereignty and will ruin their own cousins, the Palestinian-Arabs, in order to keep them as the dagger pointed at the heart of the Jewish people on Jewish land.

Peter Beinart, it should be noted, is perhaps the single foremost example of Jewish dhimmitude in the public square today. He represents an excellent example of the kind of Jewish "progressive" who cannot only not bring himself to take his own side in a fight, but who has so incorporated the "Palestinian narrative" of pristine victim-hood into his apprehension of the conflict that he honestly believes that the besieged Jewish minority in the Middle East are the aggressors upon their former Arab-Muslim masters.

Finally, and most importantly, the Elder is generally correct when he writes this:

The Palestinian Arabs are a recently invented people. They exist today, to be sure, but they were not a "people" before 1948 at the very earliest. Westerners who drew the borders after World War I created what today's Palestinian Arabs laughably call "historic Palestine" - arbitrary lines that surrounded a people who had as much in common with those across those lines as with those within them. Arabs in the Galilee had more in common with those in Damascus than those in Bethlehem. Tribes and families trumped geography (and they often still do.) They became a "people" because of how their Arab brethren refused to allow them to integrate into their countries, forcing them to suffer as a separate group that eventually did turn them into a people. Arabs themselves admit freely that they kept Palestinian Arabs in miserable conditions in order to foster their nascent "unity."

And that, of course, is his primary point concerning the Assumed Symmetry Fallacy. The Jews have been a people for over 3,500 years and perhaps considerably longer. Among the peoples of the earth the Jews, along with the Chinese and other indigenous peoples, are among the oldest on the planet. Jews are also, along with native Americans, for example, among the most persecuted. The Palestinian-Arabs, by contrast, only emerged as an allegedly distinct people toward the end of the twentieth-century and did so for the specific purpose of beating up on the Jews.

And I suppose this is where I disagree with the Elder. Are the "Palestinians" a distinct and separate people from Jordanian Arabs or Syrian Arabs or Egyptian Arabs? The classical definition of nationhood would suggest not. So-called "Palestinians" share the same religion with other Arabs, the same food-stuffs, generally speaking, with other Arabs, the same language and traditions. The "Palestinians" are Arabs. Period. And, in fact, most of their grandparents immigrated into the area following the Jewish aliyahs around the turn of the century.

The Jewish people, or so it seems to me, are under no obligation to recognize a brand-new allegedly distinct people who came into existence for the explicit purpose of robbing the tiny Jewish minority of sovereignty on Jewish land.

The truth of the matter is that we owe them nothing, not even recognition. If this sounds rather harsh, I am sorry, but the "Palestinians" have turned down every single offer for a state in peace next to Israel since 1937. They are never going to accept a Jewish presence with autonomy on land that was once captured by the forces of Islam, because to do so contradicts the very reason that they came into existence as an allegedly distinct ethnicity to begin with.

What the Elder understands, and what Beinart clearly does not, is that there is no symmetry. Shlomo Sand is a racist and a traitor to his people. The very notion that the Jews are a recently invented people is historically preposterous and Sand is a fraud. Adelson, however, whatever one may make of his politics was correct if he suggested that the "Palestinians" are a newly invented people.

This is not a matter of opinion.

It is a matter of fact.

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After my takedown of Noura Erakat's lies on Friday she made a series of tweets aimed at (but not addressing) me. I found this one fascinating:

It must be incredibly frustrating to be on the wrong side of history & know that justice and love will prevail #SorryNotSorry #Gaza #Freedom
— Noura Erakat (@4noura) May 6, 2016

Here is an expansion on my response.

Is the right side of history the one that sided with Hitler, Nasser, the Assads, and Saddam Hussein?

Is the right side of history the one that cheered as thousands of Americans burned to death?

Is the right side of history the one that continued to support Osama Bin Laden years after other Arab regimes realized he is not a hero?

Is the right side of history the one that has consistently supported terrorism against Jewish civilians for a hundred years up until today?

Is the right side of history the one that has consistently rejected peace offer after peace offer?

Is the right side of history the one that insists that people whose entire lives are defined by their murdering children are heroes?

Is the right side of history the one that exerts all its energy into destroying a state rather than building one?

I can come of with lots of ways that the first democracy in the Middle East is on the right side of history, but it is bizarre to argue that Palestinians have been anything but on the wrong side of everything.

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Iran calls for worldwide terror attacks against "Zionist" targets

A day after meeting with a key Iranian adviser to Iran;'s Ayatollah Khamanei, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave a speech Friday where he characterized Hezbollah's fighting in Syria as just another way to show "resistance" to Israel.

Responding to biting criticism within Lebanon about how Hezbollah has dragged that country into the Syrian civil war, Nasrallah tried to spin it as "resistance" against the "US-Israel axis."

Creating his own history, Nasrallah claimed that Israel and the US have targeted Syrian "resistance" groups which have been an "incubator of support" for Palestinians, and Hezbollah is merely defending Syria against this aggression.

He also decried Saudi Arabia's reported ties to Israel, especially recent meetings between the two sides such as the debate between Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal and retired IDF general Yaakov Amidror in Washington last Thursday night.

Nasrallah railed against the transfer of the two islands of Tiran and Sanafir from Egypt to Saudi Arabia will open a door for declared coordination between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

He also proved yet again that he is an Iranian puppet rather than a Lebanese leader by parroting Iranian claims on Yemen, which have nothing to do with the country he resides in that he is helping to destroy.

Nasrallah is clearly feeling the pressure from Saudi Arabia declaring Hezbollah a terrorist group.

On Thursday, Nasrallah met with Ali Akbar Velayati, foreign affairs' adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader, along with the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, in his secret underground hideout.

As he laid a wreath at the grave of Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, Velayati said, "God willing, and through the blood of martyrs, the Islamic resistance will carry on with its resistance against the Zionist entity whether in the region or the entire world."

This is a thinly veiled call for terrorist attacks worldwide against Israeli and Jewish targets - attacks of the type that Hezbollah has already enthusiastically performed.

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Number of terror attacks continues to decrease

Last month I noted that the number of terror attacks in Israel have steadily decreased since October.

That trend continued in April.

In April, there were 3 attacks from Gaza versus 4 in March. (That number has already been surpassed in May, unfortunately.)

There were 110 attacks in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, compared to 117 in March.

There were 2 attacks within the Green Line in April - one stabbing and one firebomb thrown at a synagogue in Jaffa. March also saw 2 attacks, both stabbings.

There was one killed and 26 injured in March, versus none killed and 19 injured in April.

Things are largely back to what passes for "normal" in Israel - which would be unacceptable anywhere else.

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05/07 Links: A President Who Learned Nothing; Remembering Golda Meir’s African legacy

From Ian:

A President Who Learned Nothing

Most of the initial reaction has focused on the revelations about how Rhodes has manipulated the facts to sell the Iran deal. Samuels notes, for example, that the administration claimed that the nuclear talks got under way in 2013 because of the election of a supposed moderate, Hassan Rouhani, as Iran’s president. This “was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal,” he writes. The reality is that Obama was “eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency.”
Moreover, the administration claimed that the deal would help “moderates” in Iran to oppose a “hard-line” faction even though Leon Panetta, Obama’s former CIA director and secretary of defense, is quoted as saying that the CIA analysis did not support the contention that the “Iranian regime was meaningfully divided between ‘hard-line’ and ‘moderate’ camps.”
There is much more along these lines in the article, including Rhodes’ boasts about how he feeds the White House propaganda line to Washington journalists who faithfully parrot his talking points.
But what really struck me about the article is the supreme arrogance that grips this White House.
That is an occupational hazard in any White House, of course, but Obama and his closest aides take it to a new level. Samuels repeatedly notes that Rhodes has “contempt” and “aggressive contempt” for “anyone or anything that stands in the president’s way” and for “the groupthink of the American foreign-policy establishment and its hangers-on in the press.”
The story notes that Rhodes “referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.”

7 Shocking Revelations in NY Times’ Profile of Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru

The New York Times’ nearly 10,000-word profile of President Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes is filled with insider details on White House policy and administration strategy.
Here are the seven most surprising tidbits, enumerated in no particular order.
1 – The White House expects “message discipline” from the media.
2 – The Times describes Rhodes as “the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy,” yet writer Samuels concedes it is “startling” that Rhodes is lacking “conventional real-world experience.”
3 – The Times describes Rhodes as an almost ventriloquist who shapes the news media.
4 – The Obama administration utilized a narrative that was “often misleading or false” to sell the Iran nuclear deal to the public.
5 – Rhodes himself reveals some of the motivation for the Iran nuclear deal – that the agreement advances Obama’s general academic foreign policy philosophies.
6 – The timing of the effort to declassify the contents of redacted sections of the government’s 9-11 report on the eve of Obama’s visit to Saudi Arabia last month may not have been coincidental. The Times does not report anything specific on the matter, but it’s phraseology makes clear the peculiarities of the story and Rhodes’ relationship to his brother, CBS News President David Rhodes. CBS News helped to revive the 9-11 document effort.
7 – The use of social media to parrot Obama’s agenda.

White House blames allegations of Iran nuclear deal deceit on 'sour grapes'

Top Obama Aides: Childhood in Muslim Nation Influenced His Worldview

The details were contained in the Times’ profile of Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser titled, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru.” Jarrett is Obama’s senior adviser.
The Times cited Rhodes explaining:
Obama’s particular revulsion against a certain kind of global power politics is a product, Rhodes suggests, of his having been raised in Southeast Asia.
Continues the Times, quoting Rhodes:
“Indonesia was a place where your interaction at that time with power was very intimate, right?” Rhodes asks. “Tens or hundreds of thousands of people had just been killed. Power was not some abstract thing,” he muses. “When we sit in Washington and debate foreign policy, it’s like a Risk game, or it’s all about us, or the human beings disappear from the decisions. But he lived in a place where he was surrounded by people who had either perpetrated those acts — and by the way, may not have felt great about that — or else knew someone who was a victim. I don’t think there’s ever been an American president who had an experience like that at a young age of what power is.”