Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, July 01, 2016

EoZTV in Israel: Interview with Nobel-prize winner Yisrael Aumann part 2

This has little to do with Israel but it was a very nice anecdote from Nobel laureate Yisrael (Robert) Aumann about the "uselessness" of pure mathematics. From his office at Hebrew University.

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UNRWA issued a press release against a planned demolition of a home where a terrorist lived.

Look at the wording they use:

The demolition orders were given for stabbing attacks perpetrated by individual members of the families outside Jaffa gate, Jerusalem Old City on 23 December 2015. Two Israeli civilians died during the attack while a third civilian was seriously wounded. The perpetrators were shot dead by Israeli Security Forces.

Israelis just happen to die by coincidence when they are involved, somehow, in stabbing attacks. But Palestinians who are involved in those same attacks are "shot dead."

The United Nations has repeatedly condemned all attacks against Israeli or Palestinian civilians, including in statements by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.

This seems to imply that the stabbers were civilians who were "shot dead" by Israel. The only other interpretation is that UNRWA is trying to minimize the targeting and stabbing of Israeli civilians by saying, hey, both sides have people dying. The UN simply cannot condemn an attack on Jews without watering it down.

On 16 November 2015, during a punitive demolition in the same refugee camp, 19 Palestine refugees were displaced and 46 persons were affected. Two Palestine refugees were also killed during the clashes that erupted during the operation.

Again, Palestinians who are in the act of throwing rocks are "killed" but Israelis who are stabbed simply "die" during attacks. The passive voice is used to minimize Jewish deaths and Palestinian responsibility while the active voice is used to emphasize Palestinian deaths as well as Israeli culpability.

This is not an isolated incident, either. From an UNRWA report in 2002:

Following the killing by Israeli forces of a leading Palestinian militant on 14 January in Tulkarm, another wave of violence began. Six Israelis died in a suicide attack in Hadera on 17 January, and Israel responded the next day with air attacks against Tulkarm. One Palestinian was killed and 60 were reported injured in the raids.

The writers of UNRWA press releases don't do this with malicious intent. They try very hard to ensure that they are seen to be even-handed. But the wording betrays their subconscious bias that Israeli terror victims are somehow culpable for their own deaths while Palestinians are wantonly killed for no reason.

Deep down, they are against the very existence of Israel and they regard the Jewish residents of the land as invaders who do not belong. UNRWA teaches this to generations of students. They try to stifle their true feelings when writing press releases and speaking to the media, but they cannot stop their subconscious feelings.

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Iran has distanced itself from Hamas in recent years as Hamas did not support the Assad regime in Syria. Iran has concentrated more efforts on funding Islamic Jihad and other Gaza groups, and Hamas has been scrambling to make up for the lost cash by raising Gaza taxes and other means.

In what appears to be an attempt to repair the rift, top Hamas official Mahmoud Zahar has lavished praise on the late Ayatollah Khomeini for creating "Quds Day" on the last Friday of Ramadan, which is today,

Zahar told Iran's FARS news agency that a day dedicated to liberating Jerusalem from the Jews should not only be a single day every year, but it should happen every day, and Muslims must never forget Jerusalem for even a minute.

He then added, "Those with the proper priorities have driven out the Jews from Gaza in 2005, and inshallah they will remove them from Palestine and Jerusalem, God willing."

Zahar did not say "Israelis" or "Zionists," but "Jews."

It is notable that this interview was published in FARS, which is semi-official Iranian news agency. It indicates both that Iran is open to rapprochement with Hamas - and that antisemitism is part of Iran's policy, despite their denials.

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Abbas claims he doesn't want a religious conflict. His people disagree. (video)

Mahmoud Abbas has said on multiple occasions - to the UN, to the media, even to his people at times - that he doesn't want a religious war and that Israeli actions in Jerusalem threaten to turn the conflict into one.

Most recently he said to the EU Parliament, "I assure you that we are not in favor turning the political conflict into a religious conflict, but peace is the interest of all."

Now watch this video of a Fatah fighter from the Al Aqsa Brigades whose mother lovingly prepares his Ramadan iftar meal as he puts on his uniform, mask and weapons.

The religious themes are direct and deliberate. The spiritual components of Ramadan are directly associated with war. (Incidentally, so is the keffiyeh.)

Even more direct is this poster that the Al Aqsa Brigades has on their site of their fighters praying.

Abbas and Abbas' own people are the ones who want to inflame passions based on religion.

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Yemen Arabic paper features EoZ article!

On Tuesday, I wrote that for the past two years, Egyptian Ramadan dramas have not been antisemitic, as many had been in years before.

Algemeiner expanded on my post by quoting from previous posts of mine on the topic, especially how the star of last year's blockbuster Ramadan series "Jewish Quarter" caused its lead actress to explain, in response to social media criticism, that just because she played a Jewess on TV doesn't mean that she is in any way a Zionist.

Yemen newspaper Bawabatii liberally quoted the Algemeiner article, calling me an Israeli who specializes in the Middle East.

Erem News may be the original Arabic source of the report.

The last time I was quoted in Arab media, I think, was 2008 when a Hamas-leaning website mentioned that I had been keeping count at the time of how hundreds of Palestinians had been killed by their own actions that year, between clan clashes, infighting and honor killings.

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06/30 Links Pt2: EU Acclaims Abbas Whilst Flogging Farage; Corbyn Compares Israel to ISIS

From Ian:

David Singer: European Union Acclaims Abbas Whilst Flogging Farage

Abbas’s address contained a litany of lies based on a fabricated reality from the outset:
“I would also like to thank you all for all the different kinds of aid you have given, aiding us in institution-building and helping us establish the bases for a democratic regime which will be stable in the future and which will be able to comply with international criteria for democracy, and in particular we want to establish a proper rule of law and proper respect for human rights.”
EUP parliamentarians – including Shulz and Juncker – silently swallowed these soothing words despite:

Gazan and West Bank Arabs having been denied the right to vote since 2006 or to choose a President to replace Abbas whose term of office had expired in 2010.

The “Palestinian National Authority” having been unilaterally disbanded by Abbas by decree on 3 January 2013

Honour killings and victimisation of gays continuing under Abbas’s regime

Life imprisonment being imposed for selling land to Jews.

A duplicitous Abbas further claimed:
“Our history has been, frankly, one of a continued existence in this territory since the dawn of civilization until now”
Utter nonsense.
The “Palestinians” were defined for the first time in history in 1964 by article 6 of the PLO Charter:
“The Palestinians are those Arab citizens who were living normally in Palestine up to 1947, whether they remained or were expelled. Every child who was born to a Palestinian parent after this date whether in Palestine or outside is a Palestinian.”
The Arab citizens of Palestine formed part of the “existing non-Jewish communities” in the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.
Exclusively high-jacking the term “Palestinians” constitutes racist-inspired semantic fraud.

Australia's most popular political commentator Andrew Bolt contrasts Farage's reception at the EU to Abbas blood libels.
Bolt Report Editorial - June 29 (Abbas bit starts at 5min)

Abbas and the European Parliament: Incitement in Spades

It is vital that European and American leaders make clear to Abbas that his anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories about Israel are unacceptable and will be rejected out of hand.
Further, it needs to be said that, not only must he and the PA stop the incitement against Israel and Jews, but President Abbas should stop propagandizing against Israel to the Europeans and others.
It would be far more productive for him to finally sit down and conduct direct negotiations with Israel. This is the only path to peace and a two-state solution.
And yet, Abbas rejected Israeli President Rueben Rivlin’s offer to meet during their shared time in Brussels. To a certain degree, one can understand this decision. Why meet with an Israeli leader when European officials roundly will endorse his canards and not force him to explain his baseless accusations?
The world must stop encouraging Abbas’ hateful and counterproductive path. If not, we will only hear more outlandish statements by him, which harm peace efforts, which harm Israel and which harm the Palestinians most of all.

Elliott Abrams: The Positive Side of Nationalism

In the Brexit vote, Brits chose to reject those patronizing views and express their nationalism. By this, they seem to have meant that they want to make the key decisions about their future, and about how they live, through their own democratic institutions. On the BBC on Friday morning, a typically biased interviewer spoke with Radek Sikorski, the former foreign minister of Poland, who denounced Brexit as dangerous and malevolent. His anger and resentment were so great that they finally moved even the BBC to defend the vote. How? On democratic grounds. Don’t people have a right to vote? Isn’t self-rule sacred? It was half amusing, half inspiring to see the interviewer rise to the defense of his countrymen and -women when they were treated with contempt for choosing Westminster over Brussels.
There is a message here for Israelis — and for Americans.
For Israelis, the referendum fight helps explain their unpopularity among European elites. If nationalism is primitive and infantile and dangerous, it is no wonder that Israel is criticized endlessly and its efforts to defend itself are seen as excessive. Its basic demand — to be understood and acknowledged as a Jewish state — is itself considered illicit; ethno-national states are out of the question these days. Defending your state with actual guns is positively medieval in the eyes of today’s European leaders.
Americans beg to differ, and that’s a reason that Israel is more popular here. Believing in your country and defending it with your army is considered patriotic here, not primitive. The sacrifice of sovereignty to bureaucrats abroad would offend Americans just as it offends so many Britons. All this helps explain Donald Trump’s successes this year, for he speaks a language of nationalism: defending borders and controlling immigration, for example, which was also a central issue in the British debate. That call to “Make America Great Again” is a reflection of nationalism, and it has found a wide audience.

From COGAT:

Today, Israelis and Palestinians gathered at an international exhibition of agriculture in the heart of Tel Aviv, in which the Civil Administration arranged participation for Palestinians in order to learn about cutting-edge agricultural technology to develop their businesses.

Here, an opportunity was presented to create ties with Israeli farmers, network with experts in the industry, and learn about advanced innovations in the agricultural market.

The exhibition was AgroMashov. According to Ma'an Arabic, 150 Palestinian Arab farmers attended

About a thousand Palestinian farmers are helped every year by the efforts of COGAT - which is part of the IDF.

This sort of thing flummoxes the boycotters. If a thousand Palestinian farmers are anxious to work with Israel on growing and marketing their goods, then don't they know what's best for themselves without having holier-than-thou hypocrites tell them to voluntarily starve for the cause?

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

Everyone says Israel does a poor job of hasbara, but the question is “what is the job?”

Hasbara is information, propaganda, public diplomacy, clarification of policies, telling the truth about Israel or telling lies. It depends on whom you ask. Folks who don’t like what I write sometimes call me a ‘hasbarist’, which is apparently something like a pederast.

One form of hasbara – defensive hasbara – responds to what Richard Landes likes to call ‘cognitive warfare’. Cognitive warfare is a real thing that nations and ideological activists expend a lot of effort and money on and which can have serious, concrete effects.

Cognitive attacks can be targeted at different populations and intended to produce different effects. It can be aimed at an enemy population to demoralize it, reduce support for its leadership, destroy will to fight, create confusion, or cause the leaders to make mistakes. It can also be aimed at third-party nations, to keep them from supporting the target. Cognitive warfare techniques can also be used to strengthen one’s own population’s identification with particular policies.

Israel’s enemies flood the world’s media and institutions like the UN with descriptions of the IDF’s ‘disproportionate’ use of force, ‘excessive’ civilian casualties, use of prohibited weapons, cruelty and even deliberate targeting of children. Defensive operations are portrayed as unprovoked aggression. These accusations are either exaggerated, presented out of context or made up from whole cloth – sometimes they are based on faked or doctored video, the so-called ‘pallywood’. Documentation is often no more than unsupported statements from Palestinians, laundered via the NGO ‘halo effect’ (“if Human Rights Watch reports it, it must be true”) to give them credibility. Organizations like ‘Breaking the Silence’ spread unsubstantiated allegations of war crimes both in Israel and abroad. A massive quantity of accusations are made in order to overwhelm our capacity to respond.

The campaign gets results: the IDF adopts tactics to reduce collateral damage even further, to the extent that its operational effectiveness and morale of its troops are impacted. Israel is deterred from initiating operations that might result in legal action against its officers and soldiers. Unfriendly regimes in the US are unopposed when they act to turn Israeli military victories into political defeats or cut off deliveries of weapons in wartime. Sympathy for terrorist entities like Hamas and Hezbollah make it possible for them to ‘stay in business’ between conflicts and rearm. Israeli young people may even be influenced by the smear campaign to avoid military service so as not to be involved in what they are told is an immoral enterprise.

The BDS campaign that is being waged all over the world, including Europe, South Africa, Australia and the US, is a major cognitive offensive. While it is doubtful that it can ever amount to more than an economic pinprick against Israel, that isn’t its primary objective. What it has already been successful at doing, whether or not resolutions to boycott, sanction or divest are passed, is to give currency to the idea that Israel’s behavior is so egregious that decent people are expected to shun it. Even where anti-BDS laws or resolutions have been passed, these are spun as a response by ‘Jewish power’ to justified grass-roots outrage.

Defensive hasbara counteracts these sorts of cognitive warfare. Although the sheer volume of false accusations makes it difficult, they must be refuted before they can be turned into concrete legal or diplomatic challenges.

The role of the government and the army in responding to false accusations is key, because only they have the access and authority necessary to find out the truth about incidents that happened in war or in confrontations between soldiers and civilians. The record of the Israeli authorities in this arena has been spotty at best. One of the worst failures was the case of the alleged killing of Mohammed al-Dura in 2000, which almost certainly was a scripted ‘Pallywood production’ in which neither the young al-Dura nor his father were wounded. A map showed that IDF soldiers could not have shot them. Nevertheless, shortly after the incident, the IDF officially apologized for the young al-Dura’s ‘death’!

Defensive hasbara is one piece of the puzzle, a necessary response to cognitive attacks, but in itself not sufficient to win the cognitive war. If all we do is defend ourselves, the result is that we simply help spread the accusations (I’m reminded of an anecdote about Lyndon Johnson advising his PR person to spread the story that an opposing candidate had sex with chickens in order to force him to publicly deny it). We can’t afford to ignore specific accusations, but we also need to ensure that people on our side have access to a correct account of our historical, moral and legal rights to the land of Israel as well as the justification of specific policies.

The thrust of Palestinian Arab propaganda – and it indeed is thrust at the world continuously – is that the Jews stole the land from an indigenous Palestinian people and Israel occupies it today (on both sides of the Green Line) as a cruel racist, colonialist oppressor. As long as this story is believed, then there will continue to be pressure for ‘justice’, which usually involves changes to borders and security features (e.g., the elimination of the security barrier or the blockade of Gaza) that will advance the Arab program to destroy the Jewish state and kill or disperse its people.

Just as the Palestinians and their supporters have a logically consistent (but false) narrative of history and current events to justify their demands, we too need to develop and broadcast our (in this case true) narrative. In contrast to defensive hasbara, I’ll call this positive hasbara.

If we were doing this, we would advocate for our narrative in both the inward and outward directions, in our own educational system and also in our informational efforts to the outside world. The narrative would rest on a Zionist philosophical foundation, accurate historical scholarship and solid legal argumentation. All our organs of state – the Prime Minister and government, the Foreign and Defense Ministries, the army, the Broadcasting Authority, and more – would be on the same page when it comes to our basic right to have a Jewish state here, why we must maintain military control of the territories, why Jews have a right to live anywhere in the land of Israel, and why our security measures are justified.

Needless to say, this is not the case today. We tell the world how much we want peace with the Palestinians, how beautiful our beaches are, how gay-friendly we are, how we have a lot of high-tech startups, how our medical technology is the best in the world, how our soldiers are nice to cute Arab kids, and how the terrorists murder us. The world responds by saying that terrorism is our fault because we don’t ‘end the occupation’, ‘stop settlement activity’ and ‘free Palestine’.

The necessary messages are not getting through because they are not being sent. Why is this?

We have a political and social culture that is very tolerant of political diversity. A small percentage of Israelis tend to be extremely, even pathologically, critical of the state, and at the same time sit in key positions in our most important information-related institutions, not to mention the ministries, the courts, even the army. There are academics, media personalities, artists and intellectuals who are anti-Zionist and anti-state. Instead of Naomi Shemer we have Aviv Geffen. University faculties are ludicrously unbalanced toward the Left.

These individuals can directly create roadblocks, but they also foster a lack of confidence on the part of others who don’t share their point of view. In Israel, unabashed Zionists are considered at least naïve and often extremists. Nobody wants to look silly.

Because we don’t project a consistent message that justifies our existence, we should not be surprised that people all over the world don’t bother to sort through the contradictory messages – including many that can only be called suicidal – that emanate from Israel, and instead prefer the simple call for ‘justice for the Palestinian people’.

I don’t have a solution for this problem. We aren’t Yasser Arafat, who created a unitary voice for the Palestinians by murdering anyone who disagreed with him. We aren’t the Soviets, who tightly controlled all means of expression and sent people to the Gulag for illegally using a typewriter. But as long as we don’t unite behind a Zionist ideal, we won’t be able to present a counter-view for the Palestinian narrative. And indeed, we won’t have an answer for the nihilism of the post-Zionist Left among us.

Shimon Peres said that you don’t need hasbara if you have good policy. This is wrong for many reasons, but one of them is that you can’t have good policy if you don’t have a consistent understanding of who you are and what your objectives are. You can’t fight a cognitive war over your legitimacy if you don’t know what the basic arguments for that legitimacy are. You can’t negotiate if you don’t know what you can compromise and what you can’t. Positive hasbara is more than propaganda, it’s also getting our own selves clear about what we ought to do and why.

***

Cognitive warfare is real and dangerous. Defensive hasbara is the necessary response. We can improve our execution of it by adding money and manpower to the effort to counter the enemy lie machine. It’s difficult, but we know how to do it. And we should.

Positive hasbara, answering the Palestinian narrative with a persuasive one of our own, is a much harder task, because it requires that we have a consistent national narrative that we feel comfortable asserting. And we don’t.

And that’s the answer to the question at the beginning of this post: “the job” we need to do is a political one, not just a PR operation: it is no less than to unite Israel’s Jews under a Zionist ideological banner. Until we are successful at this, the only hasbara game we can play will be the defensive one.

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06/30 Links Pt1: Fatah quick to honor murderer who killed 13-year-old girl in her sleep; The Palestinian ‘Refugee’ Dodge

From Ian:

Girl, 13, dies of wounds after stabbing attack in West Bank bedroom

A 13-year-old girl died after being stabbed repeatedly by a Palestinian assailant who entered her bedroom in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba Thursday morning. Another man was seriously wounded in the terror attack.
The victim, Hallel Yaffa Ariel, was rushed to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem unconscious, not breathing and in critical condition, where doctors said they were unable to save her.
A 31-year-old man also suffered multiple stab wounds and shooting injuries in the attack, according to rescue and hospital officials.
It appears the man, a civilian guard responding to the attack, was accidentally shot by other guards in an effort to neutralize the terrorist, according to initial reports.
The assailant was shot and killed, the Israel Defense Forces said.
The Palestinian health ministry identified him as Muhammad Nasser Tarayrah, 17, from Bani Naim, adjacent to Kiryat Arba.
Local officials said the home lies on the edge in the Ramat Mamre neighborhood, adjacent to a fence surrounding the settlement. A picture released by the IDF showed the bedroom with blood smeared on beds and the floor.
According to an initial account, the attacker jumped the fence — a breach that sent an alert to the IDF and civilian security guards in the area — and broke into the girl’s bedroom, where she was sleeping.

‘A terrorist murdered my daughter in her bed,’ tearful mother says

The mother of a 13-year-old girl murdered in her bedroom in a terror attack Thursday morning tearfully recalled her daughter’s last moments, as politicians and others expressed outrage over the stabbing attack inside a West Bank settlement home.
“Like all adolescents during summer vacation, my daughter was asleep — tranquil, calm — and a terrorist came and murdered her in her bed,” Rina Ariel, the mother of Hallel Yaffa Ariel, told reporters outside Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem where the teenager was taken after sustaining critical injuries in the attack earlier Thursday.
She arrived with multiple stab wounds to her upper body and was pronounced dead shortly after.
Ariel was stabbed to death in her room on Thursday morning when a Palestinian teen, identified as Muhammad Nasser Tarayrah, 17, from Bani Na’im, jumped the fence into the settlement, broke into her house and stabbed her to death, before also stabbing a civilian security guard who arrived at the scene. Tarayrah was shot and killed by other guards.

9 Facts You Need to Know about Hallel Ariel, Who Was Murdered in Bed by an Arab Terrorist

Hallel Yafa Ariel, 13 and a half years old, was on summer vacation, having just finished the 8th grade.

Hallel was related to Israeli Minister Uri Ariel.

The terrorist-murderer was 17 years old, Muhammad Taraiyre, from the village of Bani Naim. He climbed the fence at 8:44 AM, was spotted by security cameras, but made his way quickly to the Ariel house and murdered Hallel Yafa by stabbing her dozens of times while she was asleep in her bed.

The terrorist was neutralized by a member of the civilian Rapid Response Team. Another member of the team, Yehoshua Gilboa, was severely injured. The determination and drive of the RRT stopped this terror event from spreading any further.

The funeral will begin at the family’s home in Ramat Mamre “Kharsina” neighborhood of Kiryat Arba. The procession will conclude at the Ancient Jewish Cemetery in Hebron where the burial will take place. The funeral is expected to draw Ministers, Knesset Members, Rabbis and other spiritual and cultural leaders.

EoZ speaking in Jerusalem July 10

I'm going to be speaking on July 10 in Jerusalem:

You can sign up for it with Facebook (just so I have an idea of how many are coming, a few people told me they would come but didn't sign up...)

Hope to see many of you there!

In case you are wondering, the venue is outside the Green Line. So Amnesty, HRW, the UN and the EU may consider this speech a "settlement activity" and a violation of international law - because I happen to be Jewish.

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EoZTV in Israel: Interview with Nobel Prize winner Yisrael Aumann (part 1)

Ever since Yisrael (Robert) Aumann won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his pioneering work in game theory, I've wanted to ask him whether game theory can accommodate irrational actors such as Israel's enemies.

I got my chance as I met him in his office at Hebrew University on Tuesday.

His answer to me was that the question itself was wrong - Israel's enemies, and even suicide bombers, are rational, and the goals that they are pursuing are important to understand if we are going to come up with a good strategy against them.

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Haaretz repeats lie that Israel pressured Ethiopian women to take Depo-Provera

From an op-ed in Haaretz:

Israel commits racist crimes. A prominent example is the police’s violence during the demonstrations by young Ethiopian men and women a year ago. (Police violence, incidentally, isn’t limited to young Ethiopians; many young Arabs encounter it as well.) Another example is the investigation that revealed the pressure on Ethiopian women to receive shots of the birth control hormone Depo-Provera before immigrating.

There was no pressure whatsoever to tell Ethiopian women that they must receive Depo-Provera before immigrating. The only organization that provides contraceptive counseling to Ethiopian women before coming to Israel was the American Joint Distribution Committee, and they emphatically and specifically denied any such practice. My own investigation showed that many Ethiopian women were volunteering to take the contraceptive because it could more easily be kept secret from their husbands, but Haaretz' libel (then and now) that the State of Israel pressured the women to take Depo-Provera before immigrating is 100% false.

An multi-year investigation by the state comptroller also showed that there was no evidence of requiring Ethiopian women to take Depo-Provera before coming to Israel.

No one is denying that racism exists in Israel, but this article in Haaretz is attempting to prove that there is institutional racism, and that is simply a lie. I spoke with MK Avraham Neguise, the only Ethiopian member of Knesset, yesterday, and he was emphatic about that point. (Full video coming soon.)

If I would have known that Haaretz would be resurrecting the libel, I would have asked him about this specifically.

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