The Secretary General of the Executive Committee of the PLO, Saeb Erekat, spoke there and railed against the normalization of relations between Arab nations and Israel.
Erekat said that the prerequisites for any relations with Israel are "when Israel withdraws from the occupied Arab territories and ends its occupation, including East Jerusalem, the occupied Arab Golan, the rest of Lebanese territory and solves the refugee issue."
Which is pretty much full Israeli surrender.
He said, "normalization with the occupation authority is a stab in the Palestinian blood and a reward for the occupation authority, which practices terrorism of all kinds against our people, in addition to field executions, colonial settlement and arrests and closure."
Erekat added: "We hope that no Arab-Israeli meetings will be held on the sidelines of the upcoming Warsaw Conference. What President Trump's administration wants is to change the Arab peace initiative and to reward Israel with normalization. This is totally unacceptable. We hope that our Arab brothers will speak the language of interests. 3 resolutions issued by previous Arab summits, namely, Amman, Baghdad and Cairo, stipulated that the Arab countries sever their relations with any state that recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and transfers its embassies to it and what is required to implement it."
Of course, all of these Arab resolutions are roundly ignored by the Arab world. Not one Arab country, as far as I know, has severed relations with any country that recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. And, remember, Russia does as well, at least part of Jerusalem.
The Arab League will talk a good game of support for Palestinian aspirations but in reality they are sick of the issue, sick of the Fatah/Hamas split and sick of the Palestinians refusing all Israeli initiatives for peace. They still cannot say this quite so publicly but op-eds in official Arab media are starting to change their tune from being gung-ho pro-Palestinian.
Erekat better get used to being stabbed in the back.
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Instead of viewing anti-Semitism against Israelis as the irrational bigotry that it is, the world often attributes it to rational motives, part of a legitimate national struggle.
Western apologists justify violent rioters shouting “Jews, we’re coming to slaughter you!” at the Gaza border, claiming such hateful outbursts are an understandable reaction to the “occupation.” Ditto for the 17-year-old Palestinian who last year murdered Ari Fuld, an Israeli-American Jew, in cold blood.
People who would rightly condemn violence against Jews for being Jews as anti-Semitism lose their moral bearings when it comes to Israel, where political, territorial or economic reasons are offered as alibis for what is, at the core, anti-Semitism.
And when Israel is forced to defend itself, world leaders often draw a false moral equivalence between a Jewish democracy and its terrorist enemies. Naturally, they blame Israel for any resulting casualties. The inability or unwillingness to unequivocally condemn the anti-Semitic perpetrator is uniquely applied to Israel — the “Jew” among the nations.
Such biased attitudes allow the boycott, divest and sanctions movement to conceal its true goal of destroying the Jewish state. They also enable the likes of Corbyn to normalize overt hostility against Israel, something that was once considered beyond the pale in the West. Finally, elite tolerance for Israel-focused anti-Semitism has led to Jews being ostracized from supposedly “progressive” rallies in the West. You can claim that you find Zionism “creepy” when really you detest Jews.
This new form of anti-Semitism is especially pernicious, as it will bide its time until an ever-changing political climate allows it to reveal its true nature and turn on its ultimate target: the Jewish people everywhere.
It is imperative for the world to recognize that, to paraphrase the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., anti-Semitism anywhere is a threat to Jews everywhere. An attack against a Jew for being a Jew must be condemned for what it is — bigotry — regardless of whether it occurs in New York, Paris or Jerusalem.
American Jewish leaders took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times on Thursday to thank President Donald Trump for his efforts to combat anti-Semitism across the globe and criticize Democrats for their open embrace of causes advocating the destruction of Israel.
The advertisement, signed by more than 50 leading American Jewish voices, comes on the heels of Trump appointing Elan Carr as the new State Department Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism, a post that has become increasingly important in recent years as anti-Semitism and violence against Jews flourishes across the globe, particularly in Europe.
"Thank you, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for the appointment of Mr. Elan Carr as Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism," states the ad, which was purchased by the Republican Jewish Coalition.
"Anti-Semitism must be confronted and defeated," the advertisement declares. It also contains a direct quote from Trump in which he declares, "The scourge of anti-Semitism cannot be ignored, cannot be tolerated, and it cannot be allowed to continue."
Israel was founded on the land of historic Palestine... the leaders of the Zionist movement planned to achieve this goal soon after they held their first World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897 under the chair of Theodor Herzl, founder of the hateful Zionist movement.
Its planners developed strategic plans to control the world politically, economically, intellectually and through the media. They called these schemes the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", which is what the leaders of Israel have been following and implementing with great precision from that date until the present day.
It is wise to review the most important of these satanic protocols. Perhaps we may learn lessons, and see the scope of the wits, intrigues and machinations that our Zionist enemies dream up.
Poisoning more minds, day by day.
(h/t WC)
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Ori Ansbacher, 19, from the West Bank town of Tekoa, was named Friday as the murder victim whose body was found a day earlier on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
President Reuven Rivlin sent a message of condolence to the victim’s family, saying “the heart breaks at the loss of life.”
On Thursday evening, Ansbacher’s body, with “signs of violence” on it, was found in Ein Yael to the south of Jerusalem, police said.
She had been reported missing since early Thursday.
Ansbacher’s parents, Noa and Gadi, told Hebrew-language media their daughter was “a holy soul seeking meaning, with a sensitivity for every person and creature and an infinite desire to correct the world with goodness.”
Israeli security forces search the scene where a body of a 19 year old woman was found in Ein Yael, in the outskirts of Jerusalem, February 8, 2019 Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
One of her high school teachers told Channel 13 news that Ori was “a smart and honest girl with an original and creative intellectual openness. She cared for the environment and was sensitive to others.”
Ansbacher was carrying out a year of national service at a youth center in Jerusalem at the time of her death.
Hundreds of mourners attended on Friday the funeral of Ori Ansbacher, 19, whose body was found a day earlier in the outskirts of Jerusalem. The funeral was held in the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, where Ansbacher lived.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement on the murder, saying Ansbacher was killed “with shocking brutality.”
“At this difficult hour we all embrace the Ansbacher family and the people of Tekoa. The security forces are investigating the murder — we will find those responsible for it, and we will bring the matter to justice,” the prime minister pledged.
President Reuven Rivlin sent a message of condolence to the victim’s family, saying “the heart breaks at the loss of life.”
Ansbacher’s sister, Tama, eulogized Ori to the gathered mourners. “Last Saturday you said that you do not believe that you will be 20 years old at the end of the year, and now you have gone. You taught me so much — to sing, to dance with all your light. All the time you tried to fix things and to grow. I love you so much and I’m sorry I didn’t always tell you that, goodbye Ori,” she said.
Ansbacher’s father, Rabbi Gadi Ansbacher, tearfully told mourners that he was at a loss for words.
“I do not believe it, I do not know what to say. I think about you now – how you saw everything so sharp and clearly. In the last year you did it, Ori, you won. You lived a whole life,” he said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed great sorrow at the murder of Ori Ansbacher of Tekoa, who was murdered Thursday in Jerusalem.
"In this difficult hour, all of us embrace the Ansbacher family and their home town of Tekoa. Security forces are investigating the murder; we will find those responsible and bring them to justice," said Netanyahu on social media.
President Reuven Rivlin also mourned Ansbacher's death, saying "the heart shatters when faced with such a loss of life at the peak of bloom, and the pain is too great to bear, Ori's generous doing to help others and her kindness will shine even after her great light was put out."
I get no satisfaction over writing these posts, but I think it is important to expose what the other side is about. May Ori's memory be for a blessing. #Israelhttps://t.co/Qm5eP5XVzM
In 2017, UNRWA issued this memo in response to a report on how UNRWA schools in the West Bank and Gaza used PA textbooks that included hate.
23 of the books reviewed in the report are being used in our schools and we have reviewed them rigorously under our curriculum framework, which aims to ensure that our curriculum is in line with UN values. In the small number of instances where issues of concern were found, we have created enriched complementary materials for use in our classrooms and we will be rolling out training on this to our teachers in the coming months. UNRWA’s condemnation of all forms of racism is a matter of public record.
Now that a GAO report on how the State Department report on UNRWA curricula was inaccurate has been made public, we can see what the truth is.
It is true that UNRWA created supplementary material for the classrooms. But they were never distributed to teachers!
I have a copy of the report (without the tables and illustrations, unfortunately) and it says that when UNRWA attempted to train teachers on these supplementary materials, either they opposed using the materials or boycotted training.
A normal organization would fire employees who refuse to do what they are told. But UNRWA caved - if the teachers want to teach hate for Jews, then that's OK.
Worse, Congress was falsely told that the supplementary materials were being taught when they weren't:
The State Department seems to have found that UNRWA was still teaching incitement - and it didn't tell Congress!
Beyond that, the report doesn't address whether problematic parts of the textbooks found by independent NGOs were considered to be violations of UN guidelines for UNRWA. If UNRWA doesn't consider certain problematic texts to be hate - a good example would be materials that praise the concept of martyrdom - then the UNRWA review is close to useless anyway.
(h/t /Miriam Elman)
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In 2016, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages, based on a recommendation by the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
At the time, the Forum said that 40 per cent of the estimated 6,700 languages spoken around the world were in danger of disappearing. The fact that most of these are indigenous languages puts the cultures and knowledge systems to which they belong at risk.
In addition, indigenous peoples are often isolated both politically and socially in the countries they live in, by the geographical location of their communities, their separate histories, cultures, languages and traditions.
And yet, they are not only leaders in protecting the environment, but their languages represent complex systems of knowledge and communication and should be recognized as a strategic national resource for development, peace building and reconciliation.
They also foster and promote unique local cultures, customs and values which have endured for thousands of years. Indigenous languages add to the rich tapestry of global cultural diversity. Without them, the world would be a poorer place.
In a world that isn't antisemitic, Hebrew would be featured as the one and only success story in reviving a language to everyday use. If you want to learn how to preserve and revitalize an indigenous language, you should be sending all your experts to Israel.
But Hebrew isn't mentioned as an indigenous language by the UN.
Everything this site says about indigenous peoples apply to the Jews throughout most of the past two millennia - "often isolated both politically and socially in the countries they live in, by the geographical location of their communities, their separate histories, cultures, languages and traditions."
Hebrew is indeed the language of the indigenous people of Israel and Judah. But the UN and UNESCO will never acknowledge that, because that would show that it it the Jewish people, not the Arabs, who are the original (or oldest remaining) inhabitants of the area later to be known as Palestine.
Sometimes, antisemitism isn't seen in what is said, but in what is studiously avoided. Ignoring Jews and Hebrew in this initiative is not only an indication of deep hatred, but it is also counterproductive to the entire point of the celebration - because the Jewish people are probably the only success story of an indigenous people who were reborn with their own political entity, using their own original (but modernized) language.
Jews and Hebrew and Israel are the models that should be emulated, and they would be if the UN wasn't so incredibly filled with hate.
(h/t Irene)
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AMMAN — The government on Tuesday warned Israeli occupation authorities against its recurrent attacks on Islamic awqaf employees and Al Aqsa Mosque.
Awqaf Minister Abdul Nasser Abul Bassal, in a statement carried by the Jordan News Agency, Petra, warned against the increasing number of break-ins at Al Aqsa Mosque.
The Israelis are playing with fire, he said.
Citing 5,000 raid incidents in 2005, Abul Bassal added that occupation forces and settlers carried out 30,000 raids in 2018.
30,000 raids? In 365 days?
Obviously he means the number of Jews who visited the Temple Mount in 2018, counting each as a "raid" and each group as a "raid incident." But even that number is a bit nutty.
Given that Jews aren't allowed to visit on Fridays and Saturdays, as well as during Islamic holidays, it still comes out to about 20 "raid incidents" a day.
Needless to say, there are no "break-ins" and very few "raids" - occasionally the Israeli police go in to quell riots.
This is nothing but incitement for Jordanians to hate Jews.
Abul Bassal expressed his utmost rejection of these provocative practices and the attacks by extremists and extremist ministers, Knesset members and military personnel, who enter the facilities of the mosque by force of arms.
The only reason any military presence is necessary is to protect the Jews from being murdered by the Muslims who are taught that any Jew stepping foot in the area is desecrating it.
These acts provoke the feelings of the faithful and Muslims all around the world, he said, calling on the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the Arab League, Arab and Islamic countries, UNESCO and relevant international organisations to pressure Israeli escalatory measures and attacks against Islamic and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem to a stop.
Meaning he wants the UN and UNESCO to officially say that Jews have no religious rights to their holiest spot. (And, of course, they have already said that, which is more outrageous than these statements.)
He also called for supporting Jordan in the face of Israeli aggressions that, if continued, will take the region to a religious war that His Majesty King Abdullah has always warned against.
Who is inciting a religious war? This statement itself is more inciting that anything any Jew or Israeli official ever says. But this incitement, which is seen daily in Arab media, is ignored by the world.
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To advance their goal of criminalizing the act of being Jewish while present in Judea, Samaria or Jerusalem, Amnesty refers to Israel as an “apartheid regime.”
In so doing, like its fellow antisemitic political groups that pose as human rights organizations, Amnesty distorts the language of human rights and international law to libel Israel. In the real world, Israel is the only human rights respecting democracy in the Middle East.
Apartheid was the South African regime for forced legal separation between whites and blacks and other racial groups, and the subjugation of the latter to lower legal status. Apartheid South Africa forbade blacks from living in white areas unless in domestic servitude. Blacks were forbidden to use white bathrooms, white parks, white movie theaters and white beaches. And, of course, blacks were denied the right to vote. The laws were inherently discriminatory.
Israel’s legal code in contrast rejects any form of discrimination. Minorities in Israel have the same legal rights as Israel’s Jewish majority. And yet, here is Amnesty finding “inherent discrimination” in Israel’s legal code, which allows persons of all ethnicities – including Jews — to open up their homes to tourists.
By asserting a separate legal system for criminalizing Israeli Jews, by applying legal norms against Israeli Jews that are applied to no other group, Amnesty and its fellow antisemitic activist groups that are seeking to institute a quasi-apartheid regime – against Israel.
This is not simply a gross abuse of the very concepts of law and human rights. It is the negation of the concepts of law and human rights. Those who ascribe to Amnesty’s thinking view the law not as an instrument to serve justice blindly but instead is a means to discriminate against hated groups.
It is appalling that Amnesty has stooped this low. And of course, the pit of antisemitism is bottomless, so there is no reason to believe that it won’t go even lower in a month or two.
But the worst part about Amnesty’s galling report is that it shows that the powers-that-be in fake human rights group, with annual budgets in excess of $300 million, think that it is acceptable to wear their Jew-hatred on their sleeve.
In 2002, following an Israeli military operation in the West Bank city of Jenin in response to the Passover massacre in Netanya, in which a Palestinian suicide bomber murdered 30 civilians during a celebratory feast, Amnesty accused Israel of carrying out war crimes and massacres of Palestinian civilians. The allegations, promptly reported by the BBC and other news outlets, placed the Palestinian civilian death toll at more than 500. But 52 Palestinians died, the majority of them combatants, along with 23 Israeli soldiers, in fierce urban combat.
False allegations of a massacre made by Amnesty lubricated the machinery of the political campaign against Israel, leading to street protests, campus hearings, reams of condemnations and anti-Israel resolutions across civil society and government.
In 2015, Amnesty was forced into a humiliating admission that it had lobbied the Australian government to accept murderous Lindt Cafe terrorist Man Haron Monis as a genuine refugee.
Last April, Amnesty’s secretary-general called Israel’s democratically elected government “rogue”. In 2010, the head of its Finnish branch called Israel a “scum state”. Its British campaign manager has likened Israel to Islamic State and been condemned for his attacks on Jewish parliamentarians.
Perhaps as revealing as Amnesty’s fixation on Jews living on the “wrong” side of a long-defunct armistice line has been its relative silence on the disturbing trend of rising anti-Semitism. In April 2015, Amnesty UK rejected an initiative to “campaign against anti-semitism in the UK”, as well as “lobby the UK government to tackle the rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Britain” and “monitor anti-Semitism closely”. It was the only proposed resolution at the annual general meeting that was not adopted.
The skewed morality revealed by Amnesty’s obsession with Israel reflects a broader decline in the non-governmental sector. Whereas groups such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch once led the struggle against Soviet tyranny and actively defended the rights of political prisoners, today they serve an increasingly narrow political agenda, one aligned with anti-Western, anti-capitalist forces. Amnesty’s apparent contempt for Israel, its ho-hum attitude to anti-Semitism, and its inordinate condemnations of democracies all stem from this malaise.
Of course, the settlements are a point of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Indeed, the parties identified settlements as a final status issue in the historic Oslo Accords signed between the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Israel in 1993. It was agreed that the questions of which settlements will be annexed to Israel and which will be dismantled or transferred to Palestinian sovereignty are to be resolved in direct negotiations in the context of a final peace agreement. But the pursuit of peace is not aided by Amnesty’s political manoeuvres and attempts to isolate Israel, which perpetuate conflict by other means.
Why are Labour members not speaking out loud about the need to boycott or overthrow such a regime as Iran, but instead focus all their venom on Israel, a country they demonize on wholly false grounds, especially considering the full IHRA definition of anti-Semitism which Labour has technically adopted -- while reserving the right, however, to criticize Israel as an apartheid or Nazi state?
Whatever its faults, Israel is a utopia for human rights that many self-congratulatory moralists identify as their personal preserve. Israel is the only Middle Eastern country to uphold all the rights the Labour Party claims to hold precious. Yet, Israel is the only country in the world that the Labour party reserves for its censure, while other countries are ignored, mildly rebuked or even cosied up to.
In reality, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have largely governed their own people since 1994, following the signing of the Oslo Accords. The Palestinians, however, continue to go through inconceivable suffering due to the atrocious governance by their own often corrupt and manipulative leaders. They continue to blame Israel and the Jews -- preferable, apparently, to blaming themselves.
"Victimization is the pain-orientated version of privilege. If it suffices to call oneself oppressed in order to be in the right, everyone will fight to occupy that slot." — Pascal Bruckner, An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt.
I recently attended a very pretty funeral and was surprised to discover that it felt wrong to me. Living in Israel has changed my perspective on so many things, it turns out that I have developed a new way of seeing funerals too.
A mother of a neighbor died. She had a long good life although her youth was marred by the horrors of the Holocaust that never really left her. Her son arranged her burial in the cemetery where his father had chosen to be buried, a private cemetery where he could have a non-religious funeral.
The Holocaust caused his father to develop a problem with religion.
The funeral was in a private cemetery in a kibbutz near Haifa. The location is beautiful. The graves are spaced out, each with its own unique style.
Unlike the municipal cemeteries run by the Hevra Kadishah who also conduct the funeral ceremony according to Jewish tradition, in the private cemetary you can have any kind of ceremony you want. Some of the people who choose this route are not Jews. Some are Jews who for whatever reason developed a distaste for the religious. Others simply like the freedom of choice and the prettier location.
In general Israelis are horrible at ceremonies. Pageantry takes timing, care of details and “prettifying” reality – Israelis don’t do that.
The first Israeli funeral I went to shocked me to the core. I was in 10th grade and the brother of a girl in my class died in a training accident in the army. The first thing that struck me was the ambulance waiting outside the cemetery in case, in their anguish, any of the relatives collapsed and needed medical care. Then came the gut-wrenching howls from some of the women of the family. Then the father saying Kaddish for his son, crying and asking God why the natural order of the world had been flipped on its head, why he had to say Kaddish for his boy when it was the boy who eventually should have said kaddish for him.
Raw, gut-wrenching pain I will never forget.
I have been to many different funerals since. Too many. The way the families react is different. When and how much they choose to speak is different. The funeral ceremony itself is very spartan. The area where family and friends gather before the funeral is usually an empty, unadorned space, designed to fit large crowds. The body is brought out, wrapped in a shroud. There is no coffin (unless it’s a military funeral).
The body wrapped for burial usually looks much smaller than the person seemed in life.
It is considered a mitzvah to escort the dead to their final resting place. It’s considered a mitzvah to take part in the actual activity of burying the dead. While most of the ceremony consists of prayers for the deceased, at the end of the ceremony a direct request is made from the soul of deceased, asking for forgiveness if any offense was caused, with an explanation that if something was done that disturbed the body, it was done out of respect and in accordance with the traditional methods of preparing the deceased for their final journey. Before leaving attendees place a stone on the grave, symbolizing the permanence of memory.
It’s a utilitarian ceremony with no real thought given to beauty or comfort.
Municipal cemeteries tend to be overcrowded and unattractive, even when they are in beautiful locations (as is Haifa’s cemetery). There is none of the charm of an old cemetery you might find in the USA or Europe. This private cemetery was different. It was tranquil and pleasant.
And it felt wrong.
The place created for families to speak before the ceremony was lovely. It had a podium and pews to sit in. The deceased was brought out in a coffin, covered in a cloth that made it look more like a table than a body prepared for burial.
(The family did choose to have a Rabbi conduct the service so that part was like in standard funerals.)
My internal conflict surprised me. On one hand my natural desire for beauty and peacefulness was answered. The environment provided everything I had previously felt lacking in other funerals I attended. On the other hand, it felt wrong to me.
Israeli funerals aren’t prettified because death isn’t pretty. Other people might have customs designed to make it easier for the bereaved, to distance the living from death - such as not having anything to do with the physical act of burying the deceased or even leaving before the coffin is placed in the ground. Our funerals aren’t designed to disguise the ugliness of grief. The bereaved often have intense emotions clawing at their guts and the funeral is the place to let it out – and however it comes out, it’s ok.
It surprised me how much the coffin disturbed me. It seemed fake, artificial, an unnecessary, unwanted barrier between the deceased and the land that is a living player in the eternal love story of the Nation of Israel. Does that seem strange? It must…
Living in this land has changed me. I will always love the beautiful but I have learned to understand the beauty of truth and truth is often unpleasant, messy and even harsh.
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Israel has dived head on into pre-election madness, with commercials on social media (TV and radio commercials are not allowed until 26 March, thank goodness), text messages, wild and not-so-wild accusations and allegations, and – until the deadline for presenting party lists in two weeks – rumors of shifting alliances between parties and factions. It is hard to believe that on 9 April this will be over.
The actual contest is between the blocs of parties representing the Left and the Right. The Left continues to chant its mantra of democracy in danger, while the Right warns of a left-wing government that will repeat the errors of Oslo and the withdrawal from Gaza. While the poll numbers of the individual parties go up and down, the totals for the competing blocs change very little.
The fact is, there is a right-wing majority in Israel, for the very good reason that the twin traumas of Oslo and Gaza taught most of us a serious lesson. The Left pretends that its ideas today are more sophisticated than they were in 1993, but nobody is fooled. Even if the Left should propose to take the Arabs into the coalition – something that has never occurred before – barring the very unexpected, we will have another right-wing coalition.
Incidentally, the indictment of PM Binyamin Netanyahu for alleged corruption is not “unexpected.” It will happen, because the legal establishment, which leans leftward, wants it, and the similarly-biased media have been clamoring for it. Netanyahu and the Right have tried to weaken the power of the unelected establishment in media and the legal system, and the elites are fighting back with everything they have. But most voters who prefer Bibi believe that the things he is accused of are either small enough to be ignored, or constitute politics as usual. The probable indictment is already “priced into” the polls.
The major threat to the Right is the new Hosen l’Yisrael party (Resilience for Israel) party led by former Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, and including Moshe Ya’alon, a former Defense Minister and COS himself, probably along with yet another former COS, Gabi Ashkenazi. One would think that all this brass in one place would produce a right-wing party, but in Israel, ex-generals are often lefties (this is for historical reasons, and probably won’t be true in the future as more religious and Mizrachi officers are promoted). Gantz seems like a pleasant, honest, and dignified person, and some claim that he has the charisma that previous opposition figures lacked.
The party defines itself as “centrist” – Gantz claimed to be “neither Left nor Right,” but even in his initial speech, which was heavy on platitudes and vague promises, there were hints of a willingness to surrender parts of Judea and Samaria to the Arabs. He referred to the Jordan Valley as the “security border” of the state, something which leaves the door open to arrangements in which it would not be under full Israeli sovereignty. Apparently lacking political sense, he even praised the “disengagement” from Gaza in an interview published Wednesday. His party did well in initial polls after its launch, and may gain strength if Ashkenazi joins; it may even absorb Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party. But I don’t think it will ultimately take any right-of-center votes. The blocs are solid.
The Left argues somewhat shrilly that Netanyahu is destroying Israeli democracy and introducing fascism, citing his attacks on the media, and the legal establishment; his support for the Nation-State Law, and what they consider his populist style. None of this really hits the mark, except with those who are already opposed to him. The media and the legal establishment are biased against him, and shouldn’t be surprised when he hits back.
The accusations that Netanyahu is destroying democracy are not convincing, either. Polls consistently show that Netanyahu is the person that more people consider suitable to be Prime Minister than anyone else, which is prima facie evidence that democracy is functional. What his opponents mean, of course, is that Bibi opposes the unelected “gatekeepers” of liberalism in the form of the media and the legal and academic-cultural elites, who wish to turn the clock back to before 1977, when they controlled the political system. The public intuitively understands this, and likes the clock where it is today, thank you.
The Right has its problems, too. It has been unable to form a coalition without the Haredi parties, a real irritant for Israel’s secular majority, particularly the nearly 1 million from the former USSR, many of whom can’t satisfy the Haredi Chief Rabbinate that they are Jewish enough to get married in Israel. They would prefer to let localities make up their own minds about whether or not to allow stores and public transportation to operate on Shabbat.
Both sides promise to reduce the cost of living and especially the cost of housing, which has skyrocketed in recent years. I am not sure of the explanation, but here in Rehovot, there are new buildings under construction everywhere, and they are filling up. Enough people seem to be able to afford the expensive new apartments to keep the developers busy. Food and clothing are also expensive. The health-care system is stretched very thin: emergency rooms in some parts of the country are overflowing, there is a shortage of doctors and nurses, there are long waits for some procedures, and other problems. It’s not clear that anyone has a serious program to improve these things.
But nothing is more important than security. Israel will not forget Oslo and the consequences of it. The country was dragged by the delusional Left, into a situation in which we introduced our deadliest enemies into our midst, provided them with weapons and money, and watched them kill us. More than a thousand of our relatives, neighbors and friends, were murdered while riding buses, eating pizza, or attending Passover seders, as a direct result of the Oslo accords; and today, sixteen years after, we are still paying a price in terrorism. Instead of being honored, Shimon Peres and the others who let this happen – who made this happen – should have been prosecuted, or at least permanently banished from public life.
There is a good reason that the majority of Jewish Israelis simply don’t trust anyone to the left of the Likud, and this is it. Many Israelis would sooner have a picnic on the grass inside the lion exhibit at the Ramat Gan Safari park than put their lives in the hands of the ideological heirs of these criminally incompetent egotists.
I don’t think there is a harder job in the world than being Prime Minister of Israel. There’s no room for mistakes, and the consequences of making one follow quickly. If he screws up, he – and the nation – pay the price right away. At the same time, the constraints placed on the PM by the exigencies of the coalition system, the too-powerful Supreme Court and Attorney General, and the intrusive and hostile media, limit what he can do. He bears all the responsibility, but has insufficient authority to do his job.
Although military experience is a necessity for a Prime Minister or a Defense Minister, in order to understand the soldiers, and to be able to respond in their language. I think, though, that a professional soldier with no civilian political experience is rarely a good candidate for PM. Military politics are not the same as civilian politics, and international politics are another world entirely. Armies have interests, and they are not always identical to the nation’s interests. This is why civilian control of the military is necessary, and why someone who has recently stepped down from the role of Chief of Staff may not have the broad perspective necessary for a Prime Minister. The three former chiefs who became PMs (Rabin, Barak, and Sharon) were, in my estimation, poor Prime Ministers.
As I write, there are 63 days remaining until I exercise my right and responsibility again, to place a small piece of paper in a box to help choose the next Knesset and Prime Minister.
I can hardly wait!
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At Tuesday night’s address to the American people, writes Abe Greenwald, the president made multiple pronouncements of particular relevance to the Jewish people—all of them for the good:
President Trump used his State of the Union address in part to celebrate the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, call out Iran on its genocidal hatred of Jews, confront anti-Semitism generally, and tie his conception of American greatness to the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. . . .
For Trump, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was, as he put it, a matter of “principled realism.” Based on that realism, his administration “proudly opened the American embassy in Jerusalem.” Nothing here about both sides having to bend or about Israel now having to “do its part for peace.” The president of the United States simply noted that he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital because it is. And that’s the most powerful thing he could have said on the matter.
The president [also] called Iran “the world’s leading state sponsor of terror” and emphasized that “it is a radical regime.” He went on: “We will not avert our eyes from a regime that chants ‘death to America’ and threatens genocide against the Jewish people.” No garbage about make-believe moderate mullahs, no specious conflation of the Iranian people and the regime, no wishful fantasies about Iran’s tyrannical theocracy showing heartening signs, and, finally, no equivocating about the nature of its obsessive anti-Semitism. In all, a welcome return to moral sanity.
Trump talked about a great many other things [as well], but it’s remarkable the extent to which his speech acknowledged, celebrated, and urged on America’s doing right by the Jews. It would be welcome enough if he emphasized such things in an address to an exclusively Jewish audience, but this was a State of the Union speech, and so his words were meant to shape our very understanding of America.
President Donald Trump linked his actions on Iran to the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, pivoting during his State of the Union address from his decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal to a declaration that anti-Semitism must be confronted “anywhere and everywhere it occurs.”
Trump also bookended his speech with references to D-Day, including salutes to troops, among them Jewish-American veterans, who helped liberate Europe, and Holocaust survivors who were liberated thanks to the American-led action. The salutes earned standing ovations.
Containing Iran is fighting antisemitism
“My administration has acted decisively to confront the world’s leading state sponsor of terror: the radical regime in Iran,” Trump said Tuesday evening, delivering his address in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“They do bad, bad things. To ensure this corrupt dictatorship never acquires nuclear weapons, I withdrew the United States from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal,” he said, referring to the 2015 sanctions-relief-for-nuclear-rollback agreement negotiated under President Barack Obama. “And last fall, we put in place the toughest sanctions ever imposed by us on a country.
“We will not avert our eyes from a regime that chants death to America and threatens genocide against the Jewish people,” he continued, to applause, mostly from the Republican side. “We must never ignore the vile poison of antisemitism, or those who spread its venomous creed. With one voice, we must confront this hatred anywhere and everywhere it occurs. Just months ago, 11 Jewish Americans were viciously murdered in an anti-Semitic attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.”
The October 2018 shooting, in which 11 people died, was the worst attack on Jews in American history. It was carried out by a man shouting anti-Semitic epithets, and appears to have been principally motivated by hatred of pro-immigration policies favored by HIAS, a Jewish immigration advocacy group. The alleged attacker bought into the notion that migrants from Mexico pose a national security threat, a theme also favored by Trump, who devoted much of his speech Tuesday night to securing the border. There’s no evidence that the attack was related in any way to the Middle East.
Jewish model Elizabeth Pipko kept her work for President Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign a secret, fearing she would be ostracized by the liberal fashion world. Last month she came out as pro-Trump, and she's already being called a Nazi.
The 23 year old started off as a volunteer for the campaign, but was eventually hired full-time. Late last year she got married to a man she met on the campaign, and who is already working on Trump's reelection campaign.
The wedding was at Trump's Mar-a-Lago. She said the president didn't make it because he was dealing with negotiations over the government shutdown, but she wore a Make America Great Again hat on the dance floor anyway.
She came forward with her story to the New York Post in January, telling the paper she is "hoping to take part in the reelection in some capacity" and has no plans to hide her support for Trump this time around.
"Now that it’s been two years since the election, I don’t want to keep silent any longer," she said. "Even if that means saying goodbye to modeling forever."
Lenny adds, "It was real! Outside of Damascus Gate. Discussed in Talmud Yuma 68a as 'Beit HaDeshen.' The site was cleared in early 1900s for housing."
The idea that actual ashes from Temple sacrifices were easily seen only 120 years ago is intriguing. I looked a little further into this and found two fascinating letters about this in the 1855 "Journal of Sacred Literature."
Discovery of Altar Ashes at Jerusalem.—Mr. James Finn, Her Majesty's Consul at Jerusalem, to whose intelligent care of literary and antiquarian interests in the Holy Land our readers are indebted for much agreeable information.
Jerusalem, April 2. Outside of this city, towards the north-west, and not far from the Nablus Road and the Tombs of the Kings (so called), are some considerable heaps of blue grey ashes, on which no grass or weeds ever grow. One of them may be 40 ft. in height. They are remarkable objects in themselves, especially as contrasted in colour with the dark olive groves around them. These are commonly believed by the people of the city to be heaps of refuse from the soapboilers' works of former times. Some of our English residents here, having conceived a different idea of their origin, namely, that it was not impossible they should be ashes from the ancient sacrifices, begged of Dr. Roth, of Munich, when here in 1853, to carry away samples for analysis in Germany, which he did; and Dr. Sandreczki has now laid before the literary Society of Jerusalem an account, in English, of a letter received from Dr. Roth on the subject. After some remarks on the beetles and mollusca which he collected in Palestine, and tendering generous offers of assistance, he proceeds thus: "Hitherto it has been questionable whether the two ash-hills without the Damascus Gate have been heaped up from the ashes of the burnt sacrifices, or from the residuum of the produce of potash in the soap manufactories here. Dr. Roth, who had taken with him two samples, states that their analysis in our famous Liebig's laboratory bears evidence to the supposition that those ashes are the remnant of the burnt sacrifices, because they are chiefly of animal, and not of vegetable origin; and even contain small fragments of bones and teeth burnt to coal; and yet it would be impossible to ascertain the species of the animals to which they belonged.' The analysis exhibits a small percentage of silicic acid, which is never found in the ashes of flesh or bones. Dr. Roth is of opinion that we may account for this circumstance by supposing that the ashes of the meat-offerings in which silicium may be found, were likewise carried off to the hills in question. The samples were taken both from the top and the basis of the larger hill,—not just from the surface, nor from a considerable depth either. Dr. Roth, intends to send the whole account of that analysis, together with a new analysis of the mineral waters near Tiberias.
This almost unexpected result is one that leads to important antiquarian consequences,—not only exciting wonder at the confirmation of Holy Writ, and bringing our feelings back to immediate contact with those of the Aaronic priesthood, but as helping among other facts to determine the course of the ancient walls, since these ashes must have been thrown beyond the wall.— Yours, &c.
"James Finn."
The second letter is even more astounding:
The insertion of the above letter in the Athenaeum called forth the following— The Valley of the Ashes.—
Referring to the letter from Mr. Finn, Her Majesty's Consul at Jerusalem, whose courtesy and hospitable kindness it has been my privilege to share, 1 beg to make one or two remarks.
I visited Palestine in 1852, it having beforehand been mutually arranged with Dr. Robinson that I should meet him there, and accompany him on his journey. Finding, when I reached the country, that our plans and objects did not coincide, I gave up the arrangement; and thereafter visited almost every place of interest, "from Dan to Beersheba," accompanied only by my Arab attendants.
While at Jerusalem, some remarks of my friend Mr. Caiman, of the London Jews' Society's Hospital there, in reference to the mounds to the west of the Damascus Gate, suggested the probability of the view referred to in Mr. Finn's letter. I proceeded, in company with Mr. Caiman, carefully to examine the mounds; believing that if I were correct in supposing that they were the ashes of the ancient temple sacrifices, proof to that effect might probably be found.
Digging, both at the top and near the base of the largest heap, I was struck with the fact that the whole seemed homogeneous, there being no earth, stones, pottery, or rubbish of other kind apparently mixed with the grey-blue mould. This seemed unfavourable to the popular idea of their being formed from soapboilers' ashes. Continuing to dig, I was greatly interested soon to find among the ashes, (which appeared to me to be animal, though I never have had them analyzed) small portions of bone, still strengthening my belief that I was surrounded by the remains of the burnt-offerings of Israel during a thousand years. But the proof appeared to amount to demonstration when I discovered, a foot or more from the surface, fragments of bone sufficiently large to leave no doubt as to the kind of animal to which they belonged. I have in my possession a number of specimens, among which is one, three inches long, evidently the leg-bone of a sheep or lamb; another, a fragment of the skull or nose-bone; and two others, fragments of ribs, which it seems impossible to mistake for any other but the same animal. The first mentioned of those specimens has marks, in some parts, of having been charred or blackened by the action of the fire.
Since I returned from the East, I have frequently, both privately and in public, mentioned the above circumstances, and my intention to have the ashes analyzed, that it might be ascertained whether they consisted chiefly of animal matter. Further inquiry on this point is rendered unnecessary by the analysis of Dr. Roth, as stated in the letter of Mr. Finn.
While upon the spot, I was also struck with the light which the position of those mounds seemed to throw upon the vexed question of the ancient course of the city wall. It seemed to confirm the theory of Dr. Robinson, that instead of running considerably within the present city boundary, as is contended for by those who maintain the authenticity of the so called Holy Places,—the ancient wall must have run considerably to the westward of the present Damascus Gate, it being most probable that the ashes would be deposited immediately outside the wall, and not carried so far from it as the heaps are now found.
If these ideas be correct, do they not seem to throw light also upon an expression,—to which I am not aware any definite meaning, as to the locality, has ever been attached,—in the boundaries of the city referred to in Jeremiah xxxi. 40 ?—" the valley of the dead bodies, and of the ashes." If by "the valley of the dead bodies" is meant the Valley of Hinnom, it seems likely, from the connexion of the passage, that by "the valley of the ashes," is meant the locality where the ashes are now found. It is not improbable that anciently, when the wall ran close by, there was a descent outside to the westward, accounting for the expression valley, the hollow now being filled up or levelled by the accumulated rubbish of the city's "long desolations."
While I am glad that the attention of others has been directed to this interesting matter, I trust that it may not seem uncalled for thus to advert to it, that I may not seem to be entering into other men's labours, should I ever be able to publish notes of my journey.
I am, &c., William Dickson.
20, George Square, Edinburgh, April 24.
Dickson claims to have seen animal bones that were charred in the mound.
A skeptical note can be found in Dr. William Smith's Dictionary of the Bible (1877), where he writes that similar mounds were found in Shechem, Lydda, and Gaza, where no sacrifices were made, so he believes the theory that these were refuse from soap manufacturing, without explaining why animal bones would be there nor verifying that the other mounds really were made out of the same material.
Charles Wilson's maps of Jerusalem from 1865 identifies two ash heaps:
An article in Hebrew about this identifies the locations in relation to the discovery of the buried ancient wall of Jerusalem, discovered afterwards but adjacent to it. The ashes would have been dumped outside the city walls.
Here's a map of where this is today:
This is what the area looks like now (as close as I could get with Google Street View):
From the other direction:
The building is the Legacy Hotel, formerly a YMCA.
A formerly 40 foot high mound of ashes outside Jerusalem seems worth exploring. (By 1898, it was already much lower.)
With Wilson's maps, perhaps it is worth the Israel Antiquities Authority exploring to see if there are any residual animal ashes in that area, perhaps in the parking lot.
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Elder of Ziyon
