Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

10/17 Links Pt1: Rocket fired from Gaza hits house in Beersheba; Haley: The Palestinians are not a UN member state or any state at all; 77% of Israelis favor strikes on Iranian assets in Syria

From Ian:

Rocket fired from Gaza hits house in Beersheba; causes heavy damage, no injuries

Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip fired a rocket at the southern city of Beersheba early Wednesday that landed and exploded in the courtyard of a house, causing serious damage, but no injuries.

The Israel Defense Forces said it had identified two launches from Gaza. One targeted Beersheba located some 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the Strip. A second rocket was fired out to sea and landed off the coast of a major city in the Tel Aviv area.

Rocket attacks on Beersheba are rare and considered a major escalation. The attack came after Israel’s defense minister warned the military was gearing up for a major strike on Gaza to stop ongoing violence.

Rocket warning sirens blared at 3:40 a.m. and residents reported hearing a loud blast. The rocket landed in the courtyard of a private house. No one was hurt in the explosion but five people were being treated for anxiety.

A Magen David Adom medic said among those treated were a mother and her three children. The woman had lightly hurt her head when she fell running to the bomb shelter when the siren went off, he said, adding that they were taken to a hospital.

It was only the second rocket fired at Beersheba since the 2014 Gaza war. The previous rocket struck a field north of Beersheba on August 9 and came as Palestinians fired dozens of projectiles at Israeli communities along the Gaza border.

Join @LTCJonathan live from the house in Be'er Sheva that was hit by a rocket from Gaza last night. https://t.co/Bt3kWbl4zt
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDFSpokesperson) October 17, 2018

Netanyahu: Israel will act with 'great strength' against Hamas

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held an emergency cabinet meeting in light of the rocket attacks against Israel from the Gaza Strip Wednesday, according to a statement released by the prime minister's office.

"Israel views very seriously the attacks against it along the fence, in the Gaza border region and in Beersheba, everywhere. I said at the opening of the cabinet meeting this week that if these attacks do not stop, we will stop them.

"I want to say today: Israel will act with great strength," the prime minister said.

Netanyahu met with the snipers who identified the unit of Palestinian balloon launchers who were killed this morning in an IDF strike.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Israeli Air Force struck 20 Hamas terror targets across the Gaza Strip early Wednesday morning after long range rockets struck a home in the southern city of Beersheba while another fell in the sea next to a central Israeli city.

IDF Spokesperson Brig.-Gen. Ronen Manelis held Hamas responsible for the attack.

Hamas "creates an atmosphere of terror in the demonstrations near the border fence, where grenades have been thrown in recent weeks," Manelis said.

ICC issues harsh warning to Israel of possible war crimes in Gaza

With Israeli-Gaza fighting heating up, the International Criminal Court Prosecution on Wednesday gave its sternest warning yet to Israel on Hamas and the Khan al-Ahmar dispute.

"I am...alarmed by the continued violence, perpetrated by actors on both sides, at the Gaza border with Israel," Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said in a statement.

Continuing, she said, "As Prosecutor seized of the situation in Palestine, I therefore feel compelled to remind all parties that the situation remains under preliminary examination by my Office. I continue to keep a close eye on the developments on the ground and will not hesitate to take any appropriate action, within the confines of the independent and impartial exercise of my mandate under the Rome Statute, with full respect for the principle of complementarity."

While the statement had several qualifications to it which could still allow the ICC Prosecution to decide to stay out of criminally investigating Israel and Hamas for alleged war crimes relating to the ongoing border conflict, the timing and the threat were unmistakable.

Following rocket fire from the Gaza Strip early Wednesday morning, which destroyed a home in the city of Beersheba, and an IDF strike on the Palestinian coastal enclave in response, IDF Spokesperson Brig.-Gen. Ronen Manelis held Palestinian faction Hamas responsible for the attack.

Rocket sirens were heard in Gaza border communities on Wednesday morning at 8:32 a.m. In response, the Israeli Air Force hit several terror targets across the Gaza Strip. According to Palestinian reports, at least ten Gazans were injured and one was killed in the strikes which occurred across the coastal enclave.

Her unprecedented statement also seemed to tip its hand toward considering demolitions of Beduin housing as war crimes.

Elizabeth Warren has come under fire -- again -- for her contested claim to being descended from Indians. Donald Trump, in particular, has hammered away at this claim, and in response Warren had herself tested.

The results of Warren's DNA test, appearing in The Boston Globe, seemed pretty impressive:

Senator Elizabeth Warren has released a DNA test that provides "strong evidence" she had a Native American in her family tree dating back 6 to 10 generations, an unprecedented move by one of the top possible contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president.

Warren, whose claims to Native American blood have been mocked by President Trump and other Republicans, provided the test results to the Globe on Sunday in an effort to defuse questions about her ancestry that have persisted for years. She planned an elaborate rollout Monday of the results as she aimed for widespread attention.

The analysis of Warren's DNA was done by Carlos D. Bustamante, a Stanford University professor and expert in the field who won a 2010 MacArthur fellowship, also known as a genius grant, for his work on tracking population migration via DNA analysis.

He concluded that "the vast majority" of Warren's ancestry is European, but he added that "the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor."

Senator Elizabeth Warren. Public Domain.
Credit: Wikipedia

So far, so good.

Almost.

Later, the article admits

The inherent imprecision of the six-page DNA analysis could provide fodder for Warren's critics. If her great-great-great-grandmother was Native American, that puts her at 1/32nd American Indian. But the report includes the possibility that she's just 1/512th Native American if the ancestor is 10 generations back.

The number 1/1024 has also been bandied about.

This dilution of Warren's possible Indian ancestry gave rise to the following response on Twitter:

But there is another problem with Elizabeth Warren's DNA test:

According to a report by the Boston Globe, there is no Native American DNA available for genetic testing "because Native American leaders have asked tribal members not to participate in genetic databases." (RELATED: Boston Globe Issues Major Correction On Liz Warren's Ancestry Claims)

Therefore, in order to test for Native American ancestry, genetic researchers have to use samples from other parts of the world.

Carlos D. Bustamante, a Stanford University professor, used samples from Mexico, Peru, and Colombia to attempt to calculate how much Native American ancestry is in Warren's DNA.

To make up for the dearth of Native American DNA, Bustamante used samples from Mexico, Peru, and Colombia to stand in for Native American. That's because scientists believe that the groups Americans refer to as Native American came to this land via the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago and settled in what's now America but also migrated further south, the Boston Globe explained. [emphasis added]

That lack of Native DNA did not stop Bustamante.
Lack of proof does not stop those who claim Ashkenazic Jews are descended from the Khazars either.

There is a Christian Conference that is attacking Israel -- and Jews:

For example:

And also this:

Shlomo Sand, an historian with no background in genetics, is not alone in making this claim.

Eran Elhaik, described by Wikipedia as "an Israeli-American geneticist and bioinformatician [who] uses computational, statistical, epidemiological and mathematical approaches to fields such as complex disorders, population genetics, personalised medicine, molecular evolution, genomics, paleogenomics and epigenetics" has also come out in favor of the Khazar theory.

And he claims to have proof.

In 2013, he wrote, "The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses" -- basing his proof on the comparison of genomes.

Somewhat similar to Warren's DNA test.

But this is where Elhaik's proof gets busted -- by historian Shaul Stampfer in a review of Elhaik's article:

...The trouble with obtaining Khazar DNA is that no population group today is recognized to have descended from the Khazars. Elhaik acknowledges this difficulty and deals with it efficiently. According to him, Caucasus Georgians and Armenians were considered proto-Khazars because they are believed to have emerged from the same genetic cohort as the Khazars...Moreover, elsewhere in the article Elhaik himself refers to a study by Balanovsky et al., but fails to mention that it concludes that of all the national groups in the Black Sea region, the Georgians and Armenians were the least likely to have absorbed significant populations from other national groups. In other words, while there was DNA from eight Ashkenazi males in Elhaik's study, there was no Khazar DNA at all. This makes it a bit difficult to come to significant conclusions about the Khazarian ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews. [emphasis added]

Just how prevalent is this kind of sloppiness in academia?

Elder of Ziyon has recently been posting debunkings of academic journals which feature this kind of slipshod research and hypothesizing.

Unfortunately, it is nothing new.

From the New York Times, April 4, 1966:

JERUSALEM (Jordanian Sector), March 30 -“The Arab states will not integrate the Palestine refugees because integration would be a slow process of liquidating the Palestine problem." Ahmed Shukairy. chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. declared in an interview today.

“Consequently. the refugees don’t want to be integrated.” he continued. “If there are no Palestinian people. there is no Palestinian cause. We can't conceive of a Babylonian cause today because there are no Babylonians. But we start from the premise that we will achieve the liberation of Palestine soon."

The then-PLO leader is explicitly saying that he doesn't want the Arab nations to integrate the refugees because the "Palestinian cause"is more important then their human rights.

(The claim that the refugees didn't want to be integrated is a lie. Every time they had the chance to gain citizenship, in Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon or the West, they eagerly took that opportunity.)

The very end of the article makes this even more explicit. The reporter interviews a Palestinian who is about to go to Sweden for training as a mechanic. Even so, he insists that he would return - but there is a PLO official in the room during the interview.

Hamdi Hizrallah. 40 years old. a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was present at the interview. A native of Beersheba. now part of Israel. he said with great intensity:

“I will tell you something. and I wish you would quote me. If they try to leave. we will stop them, by force if need be."

I'm happy to quote him. It proves that creating and perpetuating the myth of a Palestinian people is more important to their leaders than their very lives.

And it also proves that Palestinian identity was so weak in the 1960s that the PLO was convinced that without a perpetual refugee problem, no one would want to identify as Palestinian.

Without UNRWA, they really would have gone the way of the Babylonians - and they would today be happy Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Kuwaitis and Egyptians.

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All the major terror groups in Gaza issued a joint statement that not only denied any of them shot the rockets this morning at Beersheva and off the coast near Bat Yam, but that denounced whoever shot them.

Even the Hamas Al Qassam Brigades published the statement.

The "Joint Operations Room" that represents all major Gaza terror organizations issued what appears to be an unprecedented statement that says they "reject all irresponsible attempts that try to sabotage the Egyptian (reconciliation) effort, including the rocket fire last night."

I have never seen any terror groups condemn any rocket fire from Gaza, or any terror operation.

The factions said that when they fight Israel, they do it openly and proudly and not "hiding behind any curtain" as the unknown group that shot the rocket has been doing.

This remarkable statement seems to be an attempt to avoid an escalation from Israel.

As far as I can tell, the "Joint Operations Room" includes Hamas, Islamic Jihad, DFLP and PFLP as well as Fatah.

If these groups are telling the truth (which is a big assumption,) then who did it?

Every once in a while we see stories about Salafist and ISIS-associated groups in Gaza who hate everyone else. Fighting flares up between them and Hamas. From all reports they are tiny.

The rockets that were shot this morning were not small homemade Qassams. They has a much longer range. Either they were smuggled in - which is very difficult nowadays - or they were built in Gaza, which would require a significant workshop.

Perhaps someone from one of the major terror groups defected with the rockets.

The thought that there is a wildcard group with that capability in Gaza is unsettling, to say the least.

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John Lyons is an award winning journalist in Australia who has recently written a book about Israel. The book is apparently an anti-Israel hatchet job.

He tweeted this:

LIVING IN JERUSALEM for 6 years taught me the importance of the city. For 70 years, every President of both sides refused to move the US embassy there as that would kill any 2-state solution. For 70 years, every Australian PM refused such demands. Then along came Donald Trump...
— John Lyons (@TheLyonsDen) October 16, 2018

How many wrong assumptions can be in one tweet?

"For 70 years, every President of both sides refused to move the US embassy there as that would kill any 2-state solution."

The reasons that the US didn't move the embassy has had little to do with the two state solution before Oslo. Until then, it was because of the legal fiction that Jerusalem should be a "corpus separatum" as the UN insisted, even though there is no legal basis for that. Then, when Israel declared sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, the UN Security Council passed a biased resolution saying that no country can put an embassy or diplomatic post in Jerusalem for Israel (they could serve Arabs, though.)

We're not done with that sentence. Because there is no logical reason why a two-state solution is dependent on where the US puts its embassy. Over 170 nations somehow manage to exist without Jerusalem being their capital; why can't "Palestine" be one more? What exactly is the dependency?

It doesn't exist.

But wait, there's more. To blame the lack of a two state solution on the US Embassy move is ridiculous. Embassies can be in the western part of the city that everyone agrees is Israeli. How can they impede peace?

In fact, the Palestinians have been offered a state. Multiple times. They rejected it. Multiple times. Isn't that a more reasonable explanation for no two state solution than the location of an embassy?

Palestinians are the ones who blew up the Oslo process, quite literally. After rejecting the Clinton parameters they chose terror instead. This isn't ancient history. They abrogated the Oslo agreement where they claimed to abandon terror.

I made a pithy tweet for those who always blame Israel for lack of peace:

Since everyone is sure that recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital dooms peace, please explain why there is no peace now.

Since everyone is sure that
"occupation" dooms peace, please explain where peace was before 1967.

And explain why there was no peace before 1948, too.
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) October 16, 2018

Lyons' statement seems like it makes sense on the surface - but that is only because of decades of reporters and journalists who simply refuse to report the facts in context. The world has been brainwashed by hacks like Lyons.

There is an underlying racism there as well. Palestinian Arabs are not expected to make peace; only Israeli Jews must keep trying. Even in the face of terror. Even in the face of peace plans being rejected. The Jews simply must try harder!

Jerusalem is Israel's capital. No one can deny that. Pretending otherwise does not bring peace - on the contrary, it gives Palestinians more reasons to be even more intransigent.

If journalists like Lyons really cared about peace, they would do their jobs and report the actual reasons there isn't peace today, not these fictional narratives about the location of third-country embassies.

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10/16 Links Pt2: Telling the Truth about the IDF; 'Anti-racism' rally in Berlin calls for destruction of Israel; The Japanese Man Who Saved 6,000 Jews With His Handwriting

From Ian:

Telling the Truth about the IDF

Next week, Harvard University will be hosting the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence (BTS), an organization funded by anti-Israel groups that incites against the State of Israel and defames the IDF.

I served in the IDF during the Second Intifada. I also stood at checkpoints, stood guard, arrested people and fought in the Second Lebanon War. As an Israeli Arab and IDF solider in the Golani Brigade, I served together with Jews of all backgrounds, Druze and Bedouin. We were all equal, we were all brothers fighting side by side, and I can testify that I served in the most humane and moral army in the world, with the highest code of ethics and human values.

The IDF is an army that is level-headed and always keeps as its ultimate highest value human life. The IDF is an army that will bend over backwards to save lives and to ensure that innocent individuals are not harmed, even if it means complicating the military operation.

It is possible that there were incidents that did not live up to these standards, but these were the exceptions; they were not the norm and they were not the code by which the IDF is guided. They do not reflect the IDF nor the State of Israel.

During the Second Lebanese War, I was badly injured after I was hit by a Kornet missile that was fired by Hizbullah. My fellow soldiers saved my life while under attack; they risked their own lives to save mine.

Two days after BTS takes it stand at Harvard University, I will be there to speak to the students with Reservists on Duty.
The truth will prevail.

The writer, a resident of Nazareth, is an Arab Israeli Christian.

Eisenhower, the Rebbe and the bombs that weren’t dropped

It is sometimes assumed that public criticism of the Allies’ failure to bomb Auschwitz began only in the late 1960s, when historians first began writing on the subject.

But a powerful new documentary film, to be screened in Jerusalem later this month, sheds light on a rabbi who publicly raised the issue just months after the war ended – and did so in the presence of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The Rumanian-born hassidic sage, Rabbi Yekutiel Yehudah Halberstam, better known as the Klausenberger Rebbe, was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 along with his wife and nine of their 11 children. He managed to survive the rigors of a slave labor brigade in Warsaw, as well as several death marches on the eve of the Allies’ liberation of Europe.

Rebbetzin Halberstam and 10 of their children were murdered by the Nazis. Their eldest son survived the Holocaust, only to die in a displaced persons camp shortly after.

The Rebbe ended up in Feldafing, a DP camp operated by the American occupation forces near Munich. That’s where he was on Yom Kippur in 1945, when Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and future president of the United States, was visiting the region.

Earlier this year, I spoke with Moshe Reich, whose father-in-law, Rabbi Yaakov Yitzhak Barminka, was an aide to the Klausenberger Rebbe. Reich (who has since passed away) shared with me his father-in-law’s eyewitness account of the Rebbe’s encounter with Eisenhower that Yom Kippur.

According to Barminka, the communist and Zionist DPs were at odds over who should have the honor of greeting Eisenhower and speaking at the welcoming ceremony. The compromise choice was the Rebbe. On Yom Kippur afternoon, the Rebbe ascended the podium where Eisenhower was seated.

Both the communists and the Zionists wanted to focus on postwar issues, rather than the Holocaust, but the Rebbe had other ideas. He spoke at length about what the Jews endured at the hands of the Nazis, then declared: “The Americans and England share in the guilt along with Hitler, because the Americans knew, for at least several years [what was happening in the death campus]. And they had the ability to bomb the railway lines [leading to Auschwitz] and they could have bombed the places [where Jews were being murdered]. A million Jews could have been saved [including] all the Jews of Hungary. If the Americans had intervened just a little bit earlier, it wouldn’t have happened.”

THE REBBE made his remarks in Yiddish. A simultaneous translation in English was provided to Eisenhower by Lt. Mayer Birnbaum, a young Orthodox soldier from Brooklyn who had been assigned to the American forces governing the DP camps. “Lt. Birnbaum told me that Eisenhower had tears in his eyes when the Rebbe finished,” Reich said.

We were saddened to see our tube poster at Russell Square defaced this morning. We have reported this graffiti & continue to welcome all to learn about Kristallnacht by visiting our exhibition pic.twitter.com/Bs3JmrI3aW
— The Wiener Library (@wienerlibrary) October 16, 2018

When the EU bans dual-use items, it is just fine. Only Israel gets attacked for doing that.

Except under specific circumstances, Israel allows pretty much anything into Gaza that cannot be used to attack Israel.

There is a list published by the IDF of "dual use" items that could be used for both innocuous and malicious purposes that are restricted from entering Gaza, like metal pipes that can be used to build rockets.

So-called "human rights" organizations routinely rail against these restrictions.

But read about the sanctions that the EU imposes on Libya:

- The European Union introduced in 2017 restrictions on the export or transit of inflatable boats and outboard motors to Libya.

The reason is to help limit human trafficking from Libya.

There are exceptions for, say, fishing boats, but Israel allows exceptions as well for clear humanitarian needs where the materials can be accounted for.

When the EU does it, they are "sanctions." When Israel does it, it is a "siege."

(h/t Irene)

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Check out this abstract for the paper "Palestinian women in Israel: embodied citizen strangers" written by Kim Jezabel Zinngrebe and published in Settler Colonial Studies:

Palestinian women’s bodies constitute a central site of the struggle between the Zionist state and Palestinian ‘citizens’ in Israel.

Note the scare quotes around 'citizens' as if Arabs are not truly citizens of Israel.

At the intersection of critical feminist and settler colonial studies scholarship and drawing on empirical data collected in 2013–2014, it will be argued here that Israel’s continuous drive to control Palestinian women’s bodies plays a pivotal role in the completion of the Zionist project.

I wish I could read the paper to understand exactly how Israel is trying to control the bodies of its Arab female citizens, but I'm more interested in how the author defines "the completion of the Zionist project." It sure sounds like she defines Zionism as ethnically cleansing all non-Jews from Israel.

In line with classic settler colonial logic, this project has always closely linked native women’s bodies and native land in its discourses and practices.

I read a fair amount of Zionist literature and I don't recall seeing anything that linked Arab women's bodies with the "native land" - since Zionism defines Israel as the Jewish native land and Jews as the natives of the land!

Therefore, Zionist settler colonialism must be considered a not only racialised but also gendered process.

If one could find these fictional proofs that Zionists care so much about Arab women and treat them differently than Arab men, sure.

Palestinian women’s stories are complex and contradictory and cast the body as the key medium through which they experience citizenship in Israel as a continuation of settler colonialism by other means.

So they are citizens. They can vote and create Internet startups. They can drive, become Knesset members and news anchors and reality TV stars. But somehow their citizenship is a continuation of the equally nonexistent settler colonialism.

This paper claims that it is, in fact, via citizenship that the Palestinian women’s forced exclusion from the Israeli body politic is realised, thereby debunking prevailing Zionist myths of citizenship in Israel and the Nakba as a one-off event.

So by giving them full rights of citizenship, Israel is really taking away their rights! How insidious these Jews are!

Please, please, someone send me the full text so we can see how the author debunks obviously verifiable facts about Arab women citizens of Israel.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

10/16 Links Pt1: Hamas Turns Israeli Border Into ‘24/7’ War Zone in New Bid to Kidnap Israeli Soldiers; Khashoggi to Post in 2007: Nakba no different than Holocaust

From Ian:

Hamas Turns Israeli Border Into ‘24/7’ War Zone in New Bid to Kidnap Israeli Soldiers

Hamas has intensified its violent demonstrations against Israel, turning the border between the Jewish state and the Gaza Strip into a "24/7" war zone as the terrorist group amps up its efforts to kidnap Israeli soldiers, according to Israeli security sources and regional reports.

Hamas ramped up this past week its months-long violent demonstrations along the Gaza border as part of new plans to "kidnap soldiers so that it will have a bargaining chip to use against Israel for speeding up the removal of the blockade," according to an investigation into new ways Hamas is probing Israel's defenses provided by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, or JCPA, a security research institute.

Violence raged throughout the weekend and into late Monday, with some 20,000 Palestinians participating in the demonstration, which have grown increasingly violent as Hamas operatives begin to deploy explosive devices, grenades, incendiary balloons, and other makeshift weapons.

Hamas's goal is create as much confusion and violence on the border as possible to elicit a response from the Israeli Defense Forces that could provide the terror group with an opportunity to kidnap soldiers. The renewed border violence is part of an effort by Hamas to test Israel's will and provoke a violent response.

"Over the past few weeks, Hamas has intensified the violence on the border after the failure of talks with Egyptian intelligence services in Cairo about reconciliation and calm and after the refusal of [Palestinian Authority] chairman Mahmoud Abbas to remove the sanctions that he imposed on the Gaza Strip," according to the JCPA's report.

"The number of participants in the demonstrations has risen to 20,000 people," the group disclosed. "Extensive use has been made of lethal tactics such as throwing explosive charges and grenades at IDF soldiers, and there has been a rise in terror attacks caused by sending incendiary balloons and kites into Israel."

Hamas's chief priority: The kidnap of Israeli soldiers so that they can be used as pawns in the terror group's campaign against Israel.

Defense minister: Israel needs to deal Hamas a heavy blow

"We have reached a red line. Israel needs to deal a heavy blow to Gaza and Hamas," Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said at the culmination of a security assessment near the Gaza border Tuesday.

As clashes between Israel and Palestinian rioters in Gaza steadily escalate, Lieberman indicated that the remark was prompted specifically by events last weekend, when "in the morning we permitted the U.N. to bring four truckloads of fuel into Gaza, and in the evening we sustained an outburst of violence – unlike any violence I can remember in a long time."

Lieberman called on the "entire cabinet" to reach a decision on the matter, saying the escalating violence has dictated "the direction we must take in terms of security."

The Diplomatic-Security Cabinet was expected to convene on Wednesday to discuss Israel's steps in Gaza.

Referring to increasingly violent border protests and a months-long Palestinian campaign involving firebombs launched across the border into Israel on kites and balloons, Lieberman said that "we tried to resolve the problem nicely by cooperating with the international community, with U.N. bodies and with anyone who wanted. We have exhausted the options and now the time has come to make a decision."

"My position has been very clear, and I have only grown more resolute," Lieberman continued. "We need to deal a heavy blow. It's the only way to restore the reality to what it was before and lower the violence level down to zero."

Khashoggi to Post in 2007: Nakba no different than Holocaust

Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who disappeared in suspicious circumstances in early October, described the relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia as only a "political," not a religious problem in an exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post years before his disappearance.

"Yes, we have a problem with Israel, but it's a political problem," Khashoggi told the Post at a 2007 Capitol Hill reception condemning antisemitism, when he was part of the diplomatic corp of Prince Turki Al Faisal, then Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States.

"It should be a known fact that the Arabs never had a problem with antisemitism, but we need to state that over and over again," Khashoggi added, justifying the surprising Saudi presence at the event.

Speaking of the Holocaust, Khashoggi called the chapter a horrible episode in history, but also said that there were other terrible events throughout history, such as the burning of Baghdad by the Mongols in the Middle Ages or the Palestinian Nakba.

"I know Jewish people don't like this comparison, but everyone has his own Holocaust," he said.

Every time I hear about a movie being made from one of the stories of Israel, I cringe. On one hand our stories are the best stories. On the other hand, all too often, instead of being told as they were, our stories are twisted to fit an agenda, perverted, even to the point of becoming vehicles for modern day anti-Israel propaganda, perpetuating antisemitic lies, denigrating our legacy and connection to our ancestral homeland (see
From Exodus to Munich: How did we get here?, Operation Thunderbolt).
When I saw the video of Ben Kingsley explaining why he took on the role of Adolph Eichmann, I knew I had to see this movie.

Ben Kingsley, promised Elie Wiesel, the voice of morality and Holocaust Memory that he would, at the next appropriate opportunity, take on a role and dedicate it to him – and that is exactly what he did.

Eichmann is not an easy character to take on. Sir Ben Kingsley, one the greatest actors who has walked the earth, is a total actor who seems to actually become the people he portrays. He turned himself into Gandhi just as completely as he did Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List. Who would willingly step into the dark refuse of the spirit of Adolph Eichmann?

Kingsley found the task utterly repugnant but he did it willingly, in honor of Wiesel, because he believes in the importance of teaching the message of the Holocaust that remains unlearned – evil does not common in the form of slavering horned monsters but rather in average people who become twisted enough to do monstrous, unspeakable things.

When Nazis are dismissed as monsters we make them not real. We let down our guard, turn a blind eye and allow new monstrosities to encroach.

This movie is a service to humanity. A warning. But will anyone listen?

Thankfully, as far as I saw, there was no veiled agenda in this movie. Unlike in Spielberg’s Munich where the Mossad operators are morally conflicted, here morality is very clear – a dead Nazi is a good thing and yet the goal is justice, not vengeance. After all, no type of revenge would be enough to balance the horrors of the crime and we are not like those who terrorize, torture and murder our people.

It was important to not allow the masterminds of the Final Solution to end their days in freedom and comfort but it was more important to give the victims, the survivors an opportunity to be heard and to let the world know that the incomprehensible suffering they experienced was real.

Many like to talk about “nuance” in relation to the telling of our stories. This is the first time I have seen realistic nuance in the depiction of Israeli perspective, where it is possible to recognize the innocence of children who did not choose to be born to parents who committed crimes against humanity, against our humanity and at the same time, unflinchingly execute justice on the criminal. It is possible to be enraged at the evil abuse our people have experienced and yet hold back on becoming an abuser ourselves.

This is the nuance no one wants to see in regard to Israel. Many of those who say they support Israel feel the most comfortable with the weak Jew, the Jewish victim. Those who do not want to admit the evil perpetrated against our people prefer to spin the tall-tale of the powerful Jew who has now become the abuser of others (namely the “poor Palestinians”). This movie, thankfully, did neither.

I finished watching this movie with a kind of empty feeling. How much of the story was accurate? Perhaps I was distracted by some of the strange casting choices, actors who did not look or sound anything like the real people they were depicting. The un-Israeli look of some of the scenes that took place in Israel made it difficult for me to be swept away by the story itself. Would a historical movie about any other people or location go forward with so little attention to the details that make it seem like it really was?

I’m left with a feeling of uncertainty and concern. Perhaps Operation Finale was too subtle for the average viewer. Will anyone who doesn’t feel directly connected, make the effort to understand? Can a viewer who is unfamiliar with this story comprehend its enormity?

Will Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of this average man with a demonic hate inside him be enough to explain the horror that was Eichmann? , a survivor of Auschwitz told me of Eichmann’s visits to the camp and how he would come in a big shiny car and if there was a column of Jews walking in front of his path (for example doing forced labor outside the camp), he’d just drive through them, as if they didn’t exist.

Will the viewer understand what this meant to Israel? Will they understand the bravery of those whose families were stolen from them, who went on to build a nation? Will they understand the significance of a State brining to her people a man whose talents were utilized to run the machine designed to exterminate us? Or the supreme effort it took not to execute Eichmann at first site? Or the horror of a Jew who believed the Holocaust over, seeing the same Jew hate rising up in new ways and places?

My lack of certainty drove me to look for historical documentation to reinforce the fictional depiction. Amazingly I found an old video, in poor quality, of Peter Malkin, who was depicted as the main character in Operation Finale, explaining what it was actually like to capture Eichmann. Watching this reinforced Operation Finale, many of the details in the movie (including ones that seem unrealistic) come from this testimony.

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Palestine Times (Hamas-leaning) has a report about Dr. Imad Mohamed El Masry, a Gazan who has lived in Ramallah for ten years.

El Masry, who works for the Palestinian Ministry of Health, has recently become an outspoken critic of Mahmoud Abbas' policies to punish all of Gaza over the past 18 months.

After he held a protest in Ramallah, he received threats to his job and his life last Thursday from the Ministry, according to the report.

And then he was kidnapped on Sunday.

His family found him yesterday, in a semi-conscious state, and his wife posted about it on Facebook.

The story is plausible, although the source is problematic. There have been plenty of reports of Palestinians arrested for political reasons over the years, and there are still Fatah military groups active in the West Bank.

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In the 1994 peace treaty between Jordan and Israel, two areas were decided to be leased to Israel for 25 years while officially considered Jordanian territory: Naharayim (Baqoura) near the Kinneret, and part of Tzofar (Al Ghamr.)

The peace treaty refers to Naharayim as an "area which is under Jordan's sovereignty with Israeli private land ownership rights and property interests." Jews had bought that land in the 1920s to build an electricity plant, and the "Island of Peace" is there.

The treaty refers to the lands of Tzofar across the 1949 armistice line as an "area which is under Jordan's sovereignty with Israeli private land use rights." The IDF seized some of the land after Fatah terrorists used it as a base of attacks after 1967, and subsequently the people of Tzofar started to cultivate it.

The agreement says "this Annex will remain in force for 25 years, and shall be renewed automatically for the same periods, unless one year prior notice of termination is given by either Party, in which case, at the request of either Party, consultations shall be entered into."

The one year deadline is coming up on October 25.

There has been mounting pressure in Jordan to not renew this lease, and multiple parties have banded together to pressure the government to end the agreement.

An article written last year in a Jordanian website claims that Pinchas Rutenberg, who purchased the land for Naharayim, was only allowed to use what he needed for the electric plant and was obligated to return the unused lands to Transjordan. Instead, he sold the land to the Jewish Agency.

This article upset the Jordanians who now claim that Jewish private land ownership there is illegal.

It seems unlikely that the king will change the current agreement but the pressure is increasing on him.

This is going to become a major story in the upcoming days.

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