Here's a video of Islamic Jihad female terrorists learning how to use guns. Most of them are using wooden replicas of guns, but some are actually shooting. The video is interspersed with photos of female "martyr" heroes who have blown up and stabbed Jews.
It is a sick society that produces, promotes and condones stuff like this.
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National identity was replaced by factional interest groups. Morality was replaced by a Marxist view of the world based on competing power blocs. Biblical morality was replaced by man-made, universalizing ideologies, such as moral and cultural relativism or multiculturalism.
Above all, the Western nation could never defend itself by force. Every conflict had to be resolved through negotiation, compromise and peace processes – even with non-negotiable, genocidal agendas. Hence the terrible Iran nuclear deal, and the reframing altogether of the Arab war of extermination against Israel as a conflict between two rival claims to the land.
In the Western progressive mind, therefore, Israel is damned many times over: as a (supposedly) Western, ethnic nation that defends itself with force.
Perhaps even more enraging to the Left than that, the ancient kingdom of Israel was the original paradigm nation, on which at some level America and Britain modeled themselves.
The current resurgence of antisemitism in the West is part of a far deeper and wider struggle. It’s a fight between two views of the world and of humanity itself. A fight over how we should live in this world, what it means to be moral and what it means to be human. And Jews are on both sides in this great battle.
But if the West is ever to learn to love the Jewish people and their nation in Israel, it will first have to learn to love again the Western nation itself.
Twenty years ago almost no one in the West had heard of Female Genital Mutilation. Then in the 2000s, thanks to a few brave and vocal campaigners like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, knowledge of this barbaric practice began to spread.
Originally there was some queasiness about taking up the subject at all. Lawmakers and opinion formers took a while to work out their line. There was an early question mark over whether FGM wasn’t just the same as male circumcision. Most people swiftly learned that the difference was, gynaecologically speaking, almost everything. There were some hold-outs among people who thought that since FGM was practiced among Muslims there might be something ‘Islamophobic’ about objecting to the mutilation of young girls’ genitals with knives. On such fine judgement calls (‘child mutilation’ vs the suspicion of prejudice?) is the modern liberal conscience formed.
Eventually by this decade most countries in the West had settled on a consensus that FGM was wrong. Although the question of exactly what to do about it remained.
In the UK, a law banning the practice has actually been on the books for three decades. Yet to date only a handful of people have been charged with the offence and there has not been a single successful prosecution. Some of the reasons are understandable. Collecting evidence in such cases is difficult, and it often relies on children giving evidence about someone close to them. Nevertheless there is a huge question mark over the whole matter. If thousands of girls are being tortured and mutilated in your country every year why would the state not move heaven and earth to bring all those responsible to justice?
Sadly, for most Israelis and Jews around the world, it is just another day. However, according to a law passed in 2014 by Knesset member Dr. Shimon Ohayon, November 30 is now the official day of commemoration for Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
It should be an important day on the official global Jewish calendar, because the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa are an essential part of Jewish history, even for those of us who did not come from there.
One of the issues I was able and proud to raise during my time in government was the ethnic cleansing of almost a million Jews from the Middle East and North Africa — communities massively predating Islam and the Arab conquest of the region in the seventh century — and the appropriation of their assets, estimated in today’s prices to be many billions of dollars.
Unfortunately, this history — the forced exodus of Jews who, along with their descendants, constitute the majority of Jews in Israel — is barely studied, mostly ignored, and seemingly of little interest to the general population and Diaspora Jewry.
Apart from the great work of organizations like Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, and Harif, I was amazed that the issue had only seldom been raised in any meaningful way around the world.
Growing up in a thriving Jewish community, attending a Jewish school, and being involved in the Jewish community and Zionist organizations, I am astounded now, thinking back, how little was taught about the long and illustrious history of the Jewish communities of the Middle East and North Africa, and their subsequent expulsion.
I recently unveiled an algorithm to determine what people or groups of people have the highest "victimhood" scores, which in today's environment means that those with higher scores are automatically considered more righteous than those with lower scores. Read there for details on how it works.
Thanks to L. King, I can now present an interactive version of the calculator, where you simply check off the categories that apply to whoever you want to rank and it will calculate the total!
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So alongside being the only country that pop stars refuse to play in, and the only country whose academics are boycotted on Western campuses, and the only country whose dancers and violinists cannot perform in cities like London without gangs of people screaming them down, and the only country whose produce is routinely avoided by luvvies and liberals, now Israel is the only country that has been politically punished by holiday app cum conscience of the Twitterati, Airbnb.
Airbnb has taken the extraordinary decision to stop advertising homes for rent in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It is extraordinary because Airbnb still advertises places to stay in Tibet, a place many Tibetans consider to be unjustly dominated by China. And in Crimea, recently annexed by Russia. And in Northern Cyprus, a Turkish-ruled statelet since the mid-1970s, which only Turkey recognises as a legitimate state, and to which Turkey has sent huge numbers of settlers in recent decades. Why are Turkish settlers less offensive to the Western conscience than Jewish ones? Why is it OK to rent a holiday apartment in Turkish-settled Northern Cyprus but not in Israeli-settled parts of the West Bank? Anyone?
What’s more, you can still get Airbnb places in countries which in recent years have executed far worse acts of war and militarism than Israel has. Saudi Arabia, for example, which has plunged Yemen into one of the most barbaric crises of humanity of recent decades: no Airbnb pangs of conscience about doing business in Saudi. And in Turkey, whose recent treatment of Kurds in Syria, and in Turkey itself of course, has been bloody and chilling. But never mind all that — roll up, roll up, get yourself an Airbnb hangout in the state that has repressed and murdered huge numbers of Kurds!
It is only Israeli-claimed territory that is singled out. It is only Jewish settlements that are punished. It is only apartments being offered for rent by Jewish people who believe in the idea of Greater Israel that are delisted. Only those people. But we shouldn’t be surprised. It is always only those people. Israel is always singled out. It is treated by right-on Westerners as being more wicked, more toxic, more evil and more destructive than any other state on Earth. That is why they boycott it, rage about it and take to the streets about it in a way they never do about Turkey, Saudi Arabia or anywhere else. They hate Israel more than any other place. The question is: why?
Why indeed. Certainly antisemitism is there in the mix. So too is leftist ideology which ludicrously regards Israel as a colonialist oppressor.
The question remains, however, why the Palestinian cause rather than any other became the issue of issues for the western left. One crucial factor is surely the strategic alliance in the 1970s between the PLO leader Yasser Arafat and the former Soviet Union to turn it into precisely such a defining cause.
Millions of dollars were spent on bombarding the universities and other western institutions with lies about Palestinian and Middle East history. Arafat and the Soviets had a joint interest in creating an entirely fake Palestinian identity, intended not only to bring about the destruction of Israel by casting it as the pariah of the world but also to undermine and destabilise the west by destroying its ability to understand the true threats to life and liberty and to mistake its friends for its enemies and vice versa.
The demonisation of Israel thus exhibits the signature motif of Soviet totalitarianism: a passage through the mirror into a nightmarish world where black is white and lies are truths and everything is the negation of reality, and those who state the facts are stamped upon as enemies of the people.
Which is why the extreme animus against Israel as displayed by the Quakers, Airbnb and a myriad others in so-called “progressive” circles isn’t just a double standard and vicious prejudice but also seems utterly, surreally, brain-fryingly mad.
PORTNOY, the British-Israeli singing duo, released a song late Thursday slamming Airbnb for its recent decision to remove listings in West Bank settlements.
"I'm gonna take you off my phone/ Until you stop discriminating on my home," the brothers sing in the new catchy clip. "I'm gonna take you off my phone/ Just like you wiped us off of your own."
The brothers, Sruli and Mendy, were outraged by the Airbnb decision this week, and wanted to add their voices to the call for the company to "stay out of politics... we should all boycott them instead," Sruli told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
On Wednesday, they posted a clip to their Facebook page with a short version of the song "we wrote in about 20 minutes." But they were shocked and furious when it disappeared from the site with no explanation.
"Three hours after we released it, it just vanished from Facebook," Sruli said. "We didn't get a message from Facebook that there was a violation - it just disappeared as if it was never there... it felt very violating."
Many people have found the Official EoZ Intersectionality Victimhood Calculator that I released ths week to be very helpful in figuring out who is the bigger victim in any conflict, according to today's "progressive" groupthink.
However, the Calculator's utility goes beyond comparing people or groups in conflict. It can also explain individual events.
I saw this tweet:
Seriously - one tweet wrecked Roseanne.
What does it take for Sarsour?
Roseanne Barr's score in the calculator is a very bad -17:
Woman +6
White -1
Republican or conservative -3
Jew -3
Identifies proudly as Zionist -8
Trump supporter -8
Anyone with a score below zero is presumed to be immoral or evil. A single wrong step is enough to justify this prejudice by the supposedly colorblind "progressive" crowd. So a single tweet from Roseanne with her horrendous score and she is not given the opportunity to apologize, or to explain - her tweet is viewed as confirmation of what everyone "knew" about her to begin with. The media, including her bosses at ABC, are not going to give her a second chance. Her tweet confirmed the existing bias inherent in her poor intersectionalist victimhood score.
Now let's look at Linda Sarsour's score:
Woman +6
Muslim +5
Arab, other Middle Eastern +5
Wears hijab +2
Palestinian +2
That is a +20, an excellent score for the left-wing and their sympathizers.
In this case, Sarsour presumed to be righteous, because she checks off so many of the "victimhood" boxes which give a moral authority to anyone who happens to fit the "correct" categories. She can say whatever she wants and she is given the benefit of the doubt, and when she seems to cross a line or ten the progressive crowd is more than willing to overlook her words and judge her purely based on her intersectional victimhood score.
Sarsour has an additional advantage, which is that any reporter who might consider objectively documenting the many outrageous things she has said that prove her hate and bias needs to worry about appearing misogynist, Islamophobic and anti-Arab. The fear of blowback has a chilling effect on what gets reported in most media. People with scores below zero are enthusiastically attacked by most mainstream media reporters, people with high scores are treated with kid gloves.
There you have it. The idea that the world is fair is a joke - the only real way to measure people's righteousness is by using the Calculator and embedding the scores' bias into your consciousness. That is what a significant percentage of "progressive" time is spent doing.
The bias that the calculator exposes is real, and it affects real people. The irony is that the very people who bristle at the idea that they are biased are actually the real bigots.
UPDATE: For the record, I believe Roseanne's explanation for her tweet not being intentionally racist. There have been many people of color who I never identified as such based on their light skin without seeing articles that identified them as such, most recently Meghan Markle.
Full disclosure: A couple of years ago Roseanne had donated to EoZ.
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Tiyach and Tayach is a company that specializes in preservation and restoration projects of historical buildings in Israel.
One of its projects is to restore the historic Hassan Bek mosque in Jaffa.
Its description of the history of the mosque includes a disturbing detail: (apparently taken verbatim and autotranslated from the Wikipedia Hebrew page on the mosque):
Between 1914 and 1916 Hassan Bek built a magnificent mosque in the northern part of Jaffa, in the Manshiyeh neighborhood, to block the expansion of Tel Aviv.
The mosque, designed by Ben Zion Gini, the Jewish city engineer in Jaffa, was built with a tower disproportionately high for the building itself, and it controls all of its surroundings.
For the purpose of establishing the mosque, which he dedicated to himself, Hassan Beck employed a lot of forced laborers (a custom in the Ottoman Empire), which he ordered to work day and night to complete the task quickly.
The effort was so great that many of them were injured or even died during the construction.
...
Construction materials were taken from residents of the area who were forced to sign that they give the materials as a gift.
During the mosque construction, Ottoman army soldiers kidnapped Jewish youths from Tel Aviv and especially from the “Yemenite vineyards” for forced construction of the mosque.
Two of these young men were: Zechariah (Yahya) Valani and Shalom (Salem) Massuari.
Hassan Bek did not finish the construction of the mosque before he left his post in March 1916.
The Supreme Muslim Council, which understood the importance of the mosque for the Arab national cause, invested the necessary funds and the construction of the mosque ended in 1923.
Officially, the Ottoman empire ended slavery in the late 19th century but I cannot find any other source at this time of forced laborers for Islamic or state projects.
If accurate, this is a disturbing chapter in history that has not been researched fully.
(h/t Michelle)
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Faisal al-Fayez, chairman of the Jordanian Senate, issued a statement on what is necessary to achieve a two state solution.
"There must be pressure on Israel by the superpowers, including the United States," he said.
He said that it is up to the Palestinians to decide what is acceptable in any deal. "If the Palestinians accept the solution we will accept the solution and if they do not accept it, we will not accept it," he said.
His statements on Jerusalem seem at odds with the official Palestinian position, however. While Palestinian leaders insist that there is no peace without them being in control of every inch of what Jordan illegally annexed in 1949, Jordan seems to want to maintain some control over that area itself.
Al-Fayez stressed that "The king can not give up Jerusalem. The subject of Hashemite tutelage is very important, there is a spiritual relationship between the Hashemite kings and Jerusalem."
"Jerusalem and the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders is a red line, there can be no solution except for the satisfaction of the Palestinian people."
At no point did al-Fayez say that Jerusalem must be the Palestinian capital. Moreover, he seems to be insisting that Jordan maintain control over (at least) the religious sites in Jerusalem even if Palestinians gain it as their capital.
This means that Jordan does not intend for Palestinians to have complete control over what the world calls east Jerusalem in any peace deal!
Any sovereign state would be insulted at the idea of another country controlling part of its capital, but Jordan seems to be insisting on having some control over Jerusalem even under Palestinian sovereignty.
Al-Fayez is contradicting himself by saying on the one hand that Jordan will accept whatever solution the Palestinians accept, and then saying that Jordan must maintain some control over Jerusalem separate from Palestinian control.
This is a fundamental disagreement between the Palestinian leadership's public statements and Jordan's official position.
The common denominator is that all Arabs agree that Jews must not have any control over the city that has been the central part of Jewish spirituality and identity for some three thousand years. Everything else is mere details.
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A video from Students Supporting Israel (SSI) shows attendees at the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) conference in UCLA chanting “Long live the intifada!” when a couple of pro-Israel activists infiltrated the conference.
The conference, which was held on Nov. 16-18, was “hermetically sealed” off from the public, but SSI President Ilan Sinelnikov and activist Rudy Rochman were able to sneak in and come on stage holding an Israeli flag and a sign reading “Jews are indigenous to Judea” before being escorted out by security.
SSI’s video shows one of the attendees, identified by the Algemeiner as Mohammed Nabulsi, leading chants of “Long live the intifada! Intifada intifada!”
Sinelnikov can be seen saying, as security is about to escort him out, “These guys scream ‘intifada’ over here, that’s [the] murder of the Jews.”
Intifada has typically been associated with waves of Palestinian terrorism against Israeli Jews.
Sinelnikov told the Journal in a phone interview that they were able to find an area where they were able to get by security and enter the building where the conference was being held. When they walked in, the attendees were dancing and chanting “Free Palestine!” before being led back to the main program, where Sinelnikov and Rochman went onstage.
He added that the conference attendees were “shocked” by them coming on stage.
On November 20, following Airbnb’s announcement that it was “removing listings” in “Israeli settlements in the Occupied West Bank,” NGO Monitor sent a letter to the company, asking it to clarify key aspects of its new policy. (See here for more information on the NGOs involved in this campaign.)
Airbnb Corporate Relations
888 Brannan Street, 4th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94107
United States
We have read your policy, “Listings in Disputed Regions” and have the following questions:
How does Airbnb define “Israeli settlements in the Occupied West Bank”? Does this mean Airbnb will be delisting properties in Jerusalem? The Old City of Jerusalem? The Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem?
You write, you “Consult with a range of experts and our community of stakeholders.” With which “experts” and “stakeholders” did Airbnb consult on this policy?
Please specify what constitutes a “safety risk” as mentioned in your release?
What other “disputed regions” is Airbnb currently evaluating to determine whether to remove listings?
Sincerely.
Brooke Goldstein on Airbnb dropping apartments in the West Bank "settlements"
"Даже если меняли национальность это не спасало от антисемитов:бьют не по паспорту а по морде."
Even if people changed their nationality, it doesn't save them from antisemites: they beat Jews not by the passport but by the face.
There is something deeply endearing about the no-nonsense way FSU Jews of my Babushka's (and my parent's) generation understand and speak of antisemitism. Of course, when you come from a place where antisemitism was not only common but was *normal* it colors your view of the world.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the antisemitism Babushka and my mom faced in light of the latest shenanigans from Linda Sarsour & @WomensMarch.
The rhetoric they have deployed has frustrated many Jews, and especially many progressive Jewish women. For Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union, @lsarsour's rhetoric & posture evokes a different and altogether more disturbing experience.
The rhetoric of the contemporary far-left in the West regarding Israel and Jews didn't spring from nowhere. It didn't happen organically. It was a part of Soviet foreign and domestic policy for decades.
Abroad, it was used to help shape leftist movements to advance Soviet objectives in the Middle East. Namely, to undermine Western, and especially American, ties with Arab countries.
At home, the "anti-Israel" politics was used to silence two million Soviet Jews.
Israel was demonized in pop culture and Jews were often coerced into denouncing Israel. Those that sought to move there were accused of being reactionaries and fascists.
The Soviets weren't big on moral imagination since it's hard to run a totalitarian state that way. But the reality is that their nation and the one they inherited (Czarist Russia) played a huge role in triggering successive waves of Zionism.
Czarist Russian policy of segregating, impoverishing, and periodically raping and murdering Jews drove over 2 million to emigrate, many to America.
It also drove the rise of Zionism.
It is not a coincidence that so many early Zionists were from the Russian empire.State-sanctioned pogroms, which featured both murder and widespread sexual violence, radicalized many Jews.
Names like Jabotinsky, Netanyahu, Begin, etc... All hail from Czarist Russia (and what's now Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine.)
The Bolsheviks promised a better future. In some ways, they delivered. Soviet Jews were no longer segregated to the Pale of Settlement. Many began to get a higher education.
But it came at a heavy price.
Synagogues were shut down. Yiddish papers & schools were shut down. Rabbis were imprisoned or shot. Hebrew poets were criminalized as reactionaries. The lucky few, like Chaim Bialik, escaped to Tel Aviv. Many others perished.
In the place of Jewish culture came a sanitized Soviet one which preached equality and officially condemned antisemitism--as the Soviets defined it.
When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, an estimated 900,000 Soviet Jews were evacuated to the east, to places like Siberia, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan.
The Soviet record on saving Jews is, to put it mildly, far better than that of other Eastern European nations. And even with this colossal state effort, 1.5 million Soviet Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis with the help of local collaborators.
Despite ending Czarist policies on segregation, most Soviet Jews still lived in or near the Pale of Settlement. The former Pale would be among the first Soviet territories invaded by the Nazis and among the last to be liberated as the Red Army marched west.
The atrocities the Nazis committed are, frankly, too horrific to repeat here. Once again, violence against Jews was both systematic and included rampant sexual violence against Jewish women.
The scale was, of course, massively larger.
When the war ended, the Soviet Union had more dead civilians than soldiers, by several million. The systematic targeting of Jews sat uncomfortably with Soviet propaganda about the war and was largely whitewashed.
Jews who returned to the craters that were their homes discovered what they had largely suspected: their loved ones were gone, likely burned or buried in a mass grave.
The first memorials Soviet Jews tried to erect, in places like Babi Yar and the woods near Riga, were swiftly demolished by the Soviet authorities and the people involved were punished. Despite preaching a rhetoric of equality, systematic discrimination against religious and ethnic minorities, including Jews, was rampant.
In the early 1950s, Stalin began planning a new Holocaust against the remaining Soviet Jews.
Luckily, he died and the plan was abandoned. Still, discrimination persisted.
If you know any Russian-speaking Jews, you likely know programmers, mathematicians, etc...
The reason for that was that many career paths, such as diplomacy and intelligence, had large barriers to Jewish entry. They worried about dual loyalty.
Speak to Soviet Jews over the age of 40 and you'll hear stories of antisemitic rhetoric and violence that began in elementary school.
My mother recalled how she dreaded the start of the school year because teachers would always have the Jews identify themselves on the first day.
Through mass media and their social environments, Soviet Jews had it repeated to them daily that they were weak, less than, unattractive, and generally inferior. Leaving school entailed regular run-ins with gangs of teenagers who beat Jews for sport.
Is it any surprise that Jews wanted to leave? That they began to take pride in the things they were hated for? That they grew to feel contempt for a rhetoric of equality that never seemed to apply to them in practice?
To be sure, Linda Sarsour and the Women's March do not have a fraction of the power of the Soviet government and they do not operate in nearly the same social climate.
But the way they think about Jews brings to mind, for Jews like me, a past & a country we left for good reason.
Linda and the Women's March deploy rhetoric of equality that is not matched by their actions. Statements about opposing antisemitism are at odds with familiar accusations of dual loyalty.
As you watch this cycle of antisemitic drama from Linda Sarsour repeat itself again and again, learn from Soviet Jews when they tell you that nice words mean very little in light of repeated actions that suggest radically different intentions.
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Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman quits his job and takes his party out of the coalition in anger over Netanyahu’s perceived weakness toward Hamas in Gaza, leaving the coalition with a 1-seat margin in the Knesset.
Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked of the Jewish Home party indicate that they may do the same unless Bibi makes Bennett the new Defense Minister. If they quit, it would ensure that new elections would be called, probably in February or March. They schedule a news conference for the next morning. The TV news people lick their chops.
Bibi gives a speech that evening in which he asks Israelis to trust him, says he knows things we don’t know, the security situation is very complex, and now is not the time to have new elections. The fate of the country is more important than politics, he says. He makes himself Defense Minister (he is already Foreign Minister, Communications Minister, and Regional Cooperation Minister).
Bennett and Shaked hold their news conference the next morning. Bennett starts out saying that they are very disappointed with our mild reaction to the heaviest rocket barrage in Israel’s history, and that our deterrence has been compromised. But instead of the expected resignation, he says that they agree that politics must take a back seat to security and they will stay in. The TV news people are excited. I decide that it is easier just to listen to what the politicians say than to the TV news people trying to explain it.
Moshe Kahlon, the leader of another small party and the Finance Minister, decides to stick with Bibi. For now, the coalition remains in power, although precariously.
The opposition parties plan to introduce motions to dissolve the Knesset and hold new elections. Each bill must receive a preliminary reading, followed by three others. In order to pass, a motion has to get a simple majority of those present in the Knesset for the first three readings, and a majority of all the members (61) in the last one. But if it doesn’t get a simple majority in the preliminary reading, they can’t reintroduce it for six months. When they count votes, they realize that they don’t have enough, so they pull the bills.
Both the coalition and the opposition call for all their members who are out of the country to return home to participate in voting. Likud MK Sharren Haskel comes to the Knesset from the hospital with an IV attached to her arm.
For comic relief, the police recommend that the Interior Minister, Arye Deri, be indicted for corruption. It will probably take months before there is an indictment, so this is unlikely to have any immediate effect. This would be the second time for Deri, who was also Interior Minister back in 1993, when he was forced to resign on similar charges (he later went to prison for three years).
All this was great drama, but not much has changed. Elections are now less likely in February or March; they may still happen in April or May, or the Knesset may serve out its full term until November 2019.Today the electorate is angry at Netanyahu, with 74% believing that he should have taken a much tougher line with Hamas. But if, as he suggests, future events will show that his policy of restraint at this point was the right one, then he’ll be forgiven.
The army – at least, the present army leadership – is solidly behind him. But it seems to me, and to a lot of people, that our primary enemy, Iran, is pulling the strings both of Hamas in the South and Hezbollah and Syria in the North. Russia’s position is ambiguous, as always, but the recent supply of S-300 antiaircraft systems to Syria, and the blaming of Israel for the downing of a Russian plane by Syrians operating an older Russian antiaircraft system, seems to indicate that Russia may be limiting Israel’s freedom of action in Syria.
This is problematic because Iran is trying to introduce technology to increase the accuracy of Hezbollah’s missiles into Lebanon via Syria. One gets the feeling that our enemies, under Iran’s direction, are putting the pieces together for a difficult multi-front war, in which Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, and perhaps Palestinians from Judea and Samaria will all take part.
On the one hand, some think that it would be better to defang Hamas now, before such a major confrontation, and they see the recent incident as a missed opportunity. On the other, it seems as though Hamas was trying hard to provoke an escalation, possibly to that multi-front war. Netanyahu and the IDF would like to finish defensive fortifications on both the Gazan and Lebanese borders first.
The arguments go on and on. Has our restraint eroded our deterrence? Has our humiliation – because that is how it appears in the region – encouraged our enemies? Who will rule Gaza if we destroy Hamas? What will the Russians do if we go all-out against rocket launchers in Lebanon and Syria? Should we take the fight to the Iranian homeland itself? Does Bibi really have a plan or doesn’t he?
These issues don’t lend themselves to use by the opposition. Sitting to the left of the coalition, they have a hard time criticizing it for not being tough enough. Bibi is Mr. Security, and everyone knows it. The opposition has some former Chiefs of Staff on their side, but they are not convincing. Bibi’s strongest criticism comes from the Right, from the likes of Bennett, but it’s hard to imagine Bennett’s party, a combination of religious and nationalistic factions, having wide enough appeal to be elected to lead a government. And the parties further to the right have difficulty even making it into the Knesset.
So I don’t envision any big changes. We’ll have our elections, probably in May or November. The Likud will probably form the next coalition, which will look a lot like the present one. If the big regional war is inevitable, it will happen before the next US election. We can’t predict the outcome of that election – or take the risk of fighting a major war while there is a hostile administration in Washington.
There are wild cards. There are the police investigations into Netanyahu, which could result in an indictment and pressure to resign or at least not stand in the next election. The Left has been pushing this, but does the State Prosecutor and the legal establishment want to introduce chaos into our system now? There can always be an incident that thrusts us into the middle of an unplanned conflict. If Hamas’ antitank missile that struck an empty military bus last week had been fired a few moments earlier when it was full of soldiers, there would have been little chance but to strike back at Hamas, very hard.
When Israelis are under pressure they tend to come together. Bibi is right that the security situation is extremely complex, as dangerous as it has ever been in the short history of our country. People understand this, even if they are opposition politicians (like Bennett!), even if they see an opportunity to score points. We really don’t have any option other than to trust our leaders, the ones we’ve elected to make decisions in situations like this, and the IDF, whose job it is to carry out their orders. And I think that after the dust settles, that’s what we’re going to do.
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Given that strong incitement against the Trump administration and its policies, as well as the continued boycott of White House officials, it is hard to see how Abbas or any other Palestinian would be able to accept anything that comes from the Americans.
This move is precisely parallel to the one they have taken with Israel. Abbas and his representatives in Ramallah have radicalized their people against the Israeli government to a point where meeting or doing business with any Israeli official is tantamount to treason. That is why Abbas does not and cannot return to the negotiating table with Israel and also why Abbas cannot change his position toward the Trump administration.
Rather than building state institutions and imposing reforms, democracy and accountability, the Palestinian Authority leadership is now focusing its energies on foiling the US peace plan. Apparently, this effort is more pressing than improving the living conditions of the Palestinians.
Wasel Abu Yousef, a senior Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) official, summed up the current Palestinian strategy when he said this week that the Palestinians were moving on three levels to thwart Trump's upcoming plan: rallying worldwide support for the Palestinian position against the plan, uniting all Palestinians, and opposing attempts to normalize relations between the Arab countries and Israel.
Were Palestinian leaders to impose a small portion of these efforts to bringing democracy, freedom and accountability to their people, the Palestinians would be further from the brink of disaster. But the two Palestinian governments -- in the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- are far from interested in doing something so positive for their own people. On the one hand, these regimes are still engaged in a struggle to the death over money and power; on the other, they agree on sabotaging a peace plan they know nothing about. A peace plan just might include something positive for the Palestinians -- something else the Palestinian leaders know precious little about.
The left’s ideological radicalization became undeniable over the past summer. In July, the Knesset passed a new law called the Jewish Nation State Law. The law did nothing more than give quasi-constitutional weight to Israel’s national identity as the nation state of the Jewish people, and to its national symbols, including its national anthem and flag. It declared that Israel’s national language – Hebrew – is Israel’s national language. And so on and so forth.
Rather than shrug their shoulders and vote in favor of this uncontroversial piece of legislation, Israel’s political left had a collective apoplectic fit. They insisted that Israel’s national ethos and symbols were exclusionary and therefore passing the law was a racist act.
Their position was shocking because consistent survey data of the Israeli people have demonstrated that the public is nationalist, proud, and unapologetic. A mere eight percent of Israeli Jews identify as leftists. And yet, far-left and center-left parties spent several months competing to see who could condemn the law most vociferously and hysterically. In so doing, they effectively wrote the Likud’s political campaign in the next elections.
It isn’t clear that Netanyahu’s government will live out its days or whether Israel will go to early elections. Some commentators claim that the next elections will take place in late May, after Israel’s Independence Day.
But what the political dramas of the past several days made clear is that whenever Israel holds its next elections, their results will be unlikely to deliver a new government that is significantly different from the current one.
In a speech at Al-Quds Open University, Fatah Central Committee member and Fatah Commissioner Abbas Zaki urged new students to seek death for Jerusalem. Zaki shouted to the young people:
"Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Cursed is anyone who doesn't sacrifice for Jerusalem!"
Zaki continued: "What did [Arafat] say? He said: 'Rise! The gates of Paradise have opened.' He who asks for death - life will be given to him. Those who die [naturally] are the cowards. But real men approach death with a smile. Do not be afraid - death is in the hands of Allah. Rush toward death and life will be given to you!" [Official Facebook page of Abbas Zaki, Nov. 19, 2018]
This is a prime example of how the PA and Fatah poison the minds of Palestinian children and youth, teaching them to aspire to die for Jerusalem, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and "Palestine." For two decades, Palestinian Media Watch has documented these messages from the Palestinian leadership to the Palestinian people. Zaki's inciting speech shows that encouraging the young generation to seek death for "Palestine" is not merely a historical artifact from the period of the PA terror campaign (the second Intifada, 2000-2005), but rather an integral part of the Palestinian narrative, culture, and society today - and worse yet: an integral part of PA policy.
In a speech at Al-Quds University, a Fatah official urged new students to seek death for Jerusalem. This is a prime example of how the PA and Fatah poison the minds of Palestinian youth, teaching them to aspire to die for Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa.
For more: https://t.co/C9oM4izbIGpic.twitter.com/nrFW5AgyjZ
James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, wrote an essay earlier this month that was translated and reproduced in Arabic news sites.
Called "Normalization Doesn't Advance Israeli/Palestinian Peace," the first sentence is all you need to read: "For as long as I can recall, Israelis have sought recognition and acceptance from the Arab World without reciprocity."
He brings some bizarre "proofs" - mainly that the US promised to pressure Israel about the settlements in 1992 in exchange for Arabs ending the secondary boycott of Israel, and Israel didn't stop building (even though there have been very few new settlements since 1992.) Israel never promised anything, and Zogby knows that.
His ending is as sweeping as his beginning, as he rails against Arab nations softening their stance on Israel:
Israelis have simply never operated in good faith vis-à-vis their dealings with the Arab World, and most especially with the Palestinians. They take and they do not reciprocate. That is why I say "Don't be fooled. Normalization doesn't advance peace and it most certainly doesn't advance Palestinian rights."
Well, let's see. Egypt's economy was helped a great deal by peace with Israel, and Israel has helped it against ISIS in the Sinai. Jordan effectively uses Israel to defend itself. They both gained lots from their official but cold peace with Israel, including intelligence cooperation.
But Israel offers much more to the Arab world in exchange for peace. Israel wants to help the Arab world with water management, with setting up economic zones of cooperation, with direct trade (and there is already lots of trade under the table), and not least with defending against Iran.
Moreover, peace with Israel can result in the Arab nations having a means to trade goods with Europe through the Mediterranean, as Israel is proposing with a rail line. That is not a small concession!
Zogby is lying, and he knows it.
As a major contributor to the Democratic Party platform, he has bitterly complained that he is typecast as the "anti-Israel guy." This essay alone proves that he absolutely is.
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Saturday, November 24, 2018
Elder of Ziyon
