In 2005, the Palestinian Authority passed an anti-smoking law, law number 25. It limits and bans smoking in various public areas and in schools. It also prohibits tobacco advertisements, forces cigarettes to have warnings, and institutes fines and other punishments for non-adherence.
Six years after the law was passed, a committee was established in September 2011 with the aim of following up the implementation of Law No. (25). The PA never followed up to activate the executive regulations and judicial controls and community awareness needed to support the law.
As far as I can tell, nothing has changed. Kids are smoking in schools, as are teachers (but generally not in front of students.)
Ironically, Hamas has implemented anti-smoking measures that are effective. While 26.9% of the West Bank Arab adults are smokers; only 14.6% in the Gaza Strip are.
The Health Ministry itself didn't bother to ban smoking in its own facilities until now!
This is only a single example among many about how incompetent the Palestinian Arab leaders are at actually running a government. These types of stories are unreported for whatever politically correct reason, but the fact remains. The EU comes in and spends hundreds of millions to teach them how to run a country and they do the minimum necessary to get that cash, but show little interest in pro-actively governing on their own. Sure, there are lots of committees and meetings but nothing to show for it.
One reason is that the government is a dictatorship, with Mahmoud Abbas controlling Fatah, the PA, the PLO, the cabinet and the judicial system. This is why the priorities are paying terrorists and opposing Israel in international venues as opposed to actually trying to build a state.
When will Western media and diplomats start to wake up?
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The Palestinian leaders' true intention is to thwart in advance any Israeli or international initiative that would put them on the road to genuinely and ideologically accepting the existence of the State of Israel, which could be interpreted as confirmation of the Jewish people's right to a state in any part of Palestine.
It is more important for PA President Mahmoud Abbas to go down in Palestinian history as one who stood firm against this eventuality rather than to take practical measures that would ease the hardships of his own people.
The recent meeting in Bahrain had a precedent: the Casablanca Conference following the Oslo Accords. There, too, politicians and businesspeople gathered from all over the world, including a few Arab countries. The Israeli delegation prepared detailed plans for economic cooperation with all the parties, the Palestinians first and foremost.
But the unofficial Palestinian representatives (there were no official ones) announced right from the start: "No cooperation with Israel." Thus, Shimon Peres' vision of the "New Middle East," the main project of that conference, died before it was born.
How did the choosy beggars respond? “Absolutely not,” they said. “We have conditions. Honorable people like ourselves will not agree to accept handouts unless our conditions are met.”
Throughout its existence, leaders of the Palestinian Authority have set standards of corruption unmatched by any crooked country, infamous junta or unelected dictatorship anywhere in the world. These “public servants” in the impoverished PA have become rich beyond words. How? By stealing from their brothers. Rejecting the assistance being offered is no skin off their back. They have everything they could want. So what if the citizens are suffering? The cries for help won’t reach their corrupt ears.
They also refuse to accept the tax revenues transferred by Israel. Why? Because of the sacred principle they uphold: to pay the people who blow up buses and stab elderly women and children. Israel deducts a small percentage of the tax monies, only the amount designated for murderers and their accomplices through the PA “pay-to-slay” policy. And what do the choosy beggars say? “All or nothing.”
This same century-old attitude has led them to where they are today. But that doesn’t matter to the head of the PA. He has already looted the funds meant for his destitute citizens, and lined his own pockets with enough for himself and his own, down to his great-great-grandchildren. He and his family are certainly not going to pay any price for peace.
“Palestinian honor is not for sale,” say the corrupt leaders. What honor are they talking about? Within a sea of poverty and deprivation, a small, filthy-rich cadre speaks eloquently about “honor” that can’t be bought. But they’re not the ones who will suffer the consequences.
However bad we may feel about what could have been and will never be – whatever sense of missed opportunity about the potential blossoming that quickly became a desolate wasteland before the first seed was ever planted – it is what it is. This offer of prosperity will never materialize because of one simple, immutable fact: Our neighbors don’t recognize our right to live here in Israel, within any borders whatsoever. As long as their desire to destroy us is stronger than a desire to improve their own lives, nothing will change – and no economic or political plan can alter that fact.
Would you name a kids’ summer camp after the perpetrators of 9/11, the New Zealand mosque shooter, or the Pittsburgh synagogue killer?
You wouldn’t, right?
But the PLO readily names kids’ summer camps after murderers of Israelis.
At least 2 PLO summer camps for Palestinian children are named after such murderers this summer. Both are held under the auspices of the PLO Supreme Council for Sport and Youth Affairs.
One was named after the PA's role model terrorist murderer Dalal Mughrabi who led the most lethal terror attack in Israel’s history, when she and other Fatah terrorists hijacked a bus on Israel's Coastal Highway in March 1978, murdering 37 civilians, 12 of them children, and wounding over 70:
Would you name a kids’ summer camp after a murderer? -The PLO did!
At least 2 PLO summer camps for Palestinian kids named after murderers: -The Dalal Mughrabi Summer Camp - after murderer of 37 - The Omar Abu Laila Summer Camp - after murderer of 2 More: https://t.co/R6pBbz9c1Bpic.twitter.com/DxI1cFvE80
Posted text: “’In the name of Allah we will say our words, [in the name of] the revolution and the cause, in the name of our righteous Martyrs, in the name of the prisoners of freedom’ - with this shout the girls of the [summer] camp named after Dalal Mughrabi, which is being held in the Tubas district, received the supervisory staff of the [PLO] Supreme Council [for Sport and Youth Affairs], who are visiting the district in order to monitor the running of the summer camps.”
[Facebook page of the PLO Supreme Council for Sport and Youth Affairs, July 9, 2019]
Fatah and PLO summer camp teaches children to honor arch-terrorists who murdered hundreds:
Kids chant song asking for "mercy" for souls of Yasser Arafat, his deputy Abu Jihad, Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin, head of Black Sept. terror org Abu Iyad
With the presidential campaign heating up and Democratic support for Israel apparently ebbing, the radical left-wing group IfNotNow has now re-formed itself as a 501(c)(4) and is out raising money.
“Our focus is going to be trying to push the candidates past giving lip-service to a two-state solution,” said IfNotNow co-founder Emily Mayer, “without recognizing the underlying dynamics and explicit moves by the Israel government that are creating a one-state reality where Palestinians are denied basic rights.”
The organization is also taking a page out of the playbook of groups such as Black Lives Matter and the American Civil Liberties Union: It plans to “bird-dog” presidential candidates at public events to create viral moments and prod the Democratic Party leftward on the issue of Israel.
a great tactic used to directly engage or confront candidates and MoCs [Members of Congress] on our issues at their public events. It lets them know how important these issues are to everyday constituents. The goal of bird-dogging is to put tough questions to MoCs and force them to answer when they are in front of their constituents, voters, and the media.
Bird-dogging can be used to make sure MoCs can’t escape answering questions about important issues and to ensure that we are setting the terms of the debate.
MoveOn.org's playbook provides a checklist on how to prepare for bird-dogging.
For example:
Craft your question.
Ask a yes-or-no question, not an open-ended question. Your goal is to get your member of Congress on the record about a critical issue. Here are some example questions:
■ “Do you understand that by voting to take away the Affordable Care Act, you are taking away my health care?”
■ “Can my fellow constituents and I count on you to vigorously oppose any cut to Medicare, including privatization, which would threaten my ability to retire?”
These are manipulative questions that are meant more to put the person in a corner and pin them down than to get into a substantive discussion.
The goal is supposed to be to push the Democratic candidates to take more left-wing positions against Israel, clarify their stands and draw public attention to the changing attitudes of the Democratic Party. In the Politico article, Emily Mayer -- a co-founder of IfNotNow -- considered Biden and Booker out of sync with the Democratic base on Israel.
In the past, Warren has regularly spoken of Israel as a strong ally in a tough neighborhood and has appeared at AIPAC events and used right-wing talking points. But as her career has gone on, her views on the issue have grown to be farther in line with her progressive values: She was one of the 60 Democrats to boycott Netanyahu’s speech in Congress, she supported the Iran Deal, spoke out against the Embassy move, and opposes efforts to criminalize the BDS movement.
Down the road, they may try to pin Warren down to specifics, but it's not clear what she said in the first place. Considering all the billion-dollar plans Warren is going around promising, saying yes to a vague question is not likely to cause her problems down the road.
Did Warren even pay serious attention to what they were saying?
Here is what happened, without the window dressing from the first video:
Two kids gushed about how much they admired Elizabeth Warren and she shepherded them into a photo op and quickly sent them on their way.
Considering the Democratic presidential field, IfNotNow is not likely to corner anyone who is not more than willing to agree on the issue of occupation.
On the other hand, if they instead ask more pointed questions that address other more controversial issues like the Gaza "protests", then we may see sparks fly.
The candidates are unlikely to be prepared for the simplistic one-sided questions that IfNotNow may soon be throwing at them.
While the media has made a point of not pinning down the candidates on how they plan to pay for the numerous plans they are proposing, the candidates may soon find themselves being held responsible for the stands they claim to take on Israel.
That may not be such a bad thing.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
David Halbfinger of the New York Times wrote an infomercial for J-Street in his story about their trip to Israel:
Birthright’s avoidance of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank has made it the target of angry protests by left-leaning Jewish activists. But for sheer ambition, no critique has approached this week’s attempt by the liberal lobbying group J Street to map out an alternative route for Birthright’s tours.
"Sheer ambition?" As he writes later on, nearly all of the people who attended were already J-Street:
Many of the young people on the tour had been to Israel before, some on Birthright trips, and most were already activists with J Street’s campus arm.
Which means that hundreds of synagogues arrange trips to Israel every year for their members that are equally "ambitious."
The slant of the piece can be seen in every paragraph:
The ride to Har Gilo, just south of Jerusalem, took the bus through an Israeli checkpoint. Hagit Ofran, a leader of Peace Now, addressed the group over a microphone and described how soldiers decided which motorists to stop: “To look suspicious,” she said, “you need to look Arab.”
It was a bracing how-do-you-do for liberals unaccustomed to blunt racial profiling.
Isn't the entire point of the checkpoint to stop Arab terrorists? Would it make sense to stop Jews when they don't try to stab other Jews? Are Arabs with Israeli license plates stopped?
These questions aren't asked, of course, Israel is simply accused of "racial profiling: without a single voice to delve deeper. (Which is the supposed point of this farce of a tour.)
But it was atop Har Gilo, peering out over the southern West Bank, that the travelers began to see troubling aspects of a country they had mainly loved from far away.
Down below was the separation barrier, with decorous brickwork beautifying the side facing an Israeli settlement. The Palestinian village on the other side looked upon a crude concrete slab.
Once upon a time, both villages faced an ugly concrete slab. The Jews decided to beautify it. The Palestinians decided to leave it there, or to use it for political graffiti. Whose fault is that?
Another fact about Gilo that J-Street apparently didn't want their members to know: There was once another concrete barrier between Gilo and Beit Jala, because Jews there had been subjected to constant sniper fire during the second Intifada. When the security improved, Israel took down the wall.
But since that doesn't fit the narrative of evil Israel, J-Street won't say it.
Many of the young people on the tour had been to Israel before, some on Birthright trips, and most were already activists with J Street’s campus arm. But they were still unprepared for Susiya.
Nasser Nawajah, a Susiya resident and activist with the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, told Susiya’s story: Evicted from their old homes just downhill to make way for an Israeli archaeological site, Susiya’s shepherds had set up a ramshackle collection of tents and huts here in their fields, lest their grazing lands be taken from them as well.
Did J-Street mention that little tidbit, or did they let the students believe that Israel was demolishing a centuries-old village?
Of course, Halbfinger cannot resist reporting on how the trip changed a long time, dyed in the wool Zionist into someone who is now disgusted by Israel:
By dinnertime, two participants said they were reconsidering their belief in a Jewish state. Jesse Steshenko, 19, of Santa Cruz, Calif., who has a Star of David tattooed on his right wrist, said he was “disgusted” with Israel’s government.
“I came in here a very ardent Zionist,” he said. “You never know when a Holocaust might happen again. Yet, coming here, I’m starting to doubt whether a two-state solution is possible — and whether Zionism is even worth pursuing anymore.”
Interestingly, someone his age with his name was a member of Junior States of America, a mock Congress, and he introduced a resolution that called Israel an apartheid state and demanded that the US recognize Palestine on the "1967 borders" - including the Western Wall and Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem.
Does that sound like an ardent Zionist to you?
Reporters are supposed to think critically. But sometimes, some groups get exceptions.
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Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has approved the measurement phase ahead of the construction of a huge 40-dunam international field hospital with 16 different departments near the Erez crossing, to be managed by an international medical team.
The Yediot Aharonot newspaper reports that the hospital will be funded by a private American organization and is meant to ensure a significant improvement and a response that is not currently available in the Gaza Strip to Palestinian Arab patients.
If Israel agrees to build a hospital to help Palestinians, you know what will happen next.
The main objective of this hospital is to establish a separation between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, particularly in the medical field. The occupation seeks to control the transfer of patients to the West Bank. Instead, the hospital will contribute to full separation between the West Bank The Gaza Strip and the prevention of the establishment of a Palestinian state.
In this context, Prime Minister Mohammad Ashtiyyeh said in a press statement: "No one coordinated with us about the hospital, which is intended to be funded by a private American institution, and with Israeli approval on the northern border of the Gaza Strip. We do not know what this institution is."
Health Minister Mei al-Kila said that the field hospital to be built on the northern border of the Gaza Strip by the American and Israeli sides is part of the "deal of the century" in order to completely separate the West Bank and the Gaza Strip under humanitarian pretext.
She added: "We welcome any health services to support our people in the Gaza Strip, but not at the expense of our national values, knowing that the government provides medical and health services for the people of the sector as they are in the West Bank."
"The essence of the matter is that any international projects in the Gaza Strip must be coordinated with the legitimate Palestinian government, and any projects away from the government and from the PNA means stabilizing dealing with Gaza as an entity outside the Palestinian context," said Mahmoud al-Zaq, a member of the political bureau of the Popular Struggle Front. "Only one Palestinian government must be dealt with and anyone who does not deal with this government means that it is launching the idea of a political entity in the Gaza Strip. "
Al-Zaq added that "the idea in essence is suspicious and we can not be convinced that America intends to do good for the Palestinian people. Rather, it is devising a political project at the expense of the humanitarian issue in order to end the political right of our people. "
He said that "the establishment of this hospital is not humanitarian, but to deepen the division. It is a malicious conspiracy project that has nothing to do with the Palestinian people, and any movement towards Gaza under humanitarian pretext without passage through the Palestinian Authority is a threat to the Palestinian cause."
Hamas went on to slam the PA for being against the hospital.
Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said that "the attempts of the government of Ashtiyyeh to disrupt the construction of an international hospital in the northern Gaza Strip [notice how Hamas claims Israeli territory as its own - EoZ] to resolve the worsening health crisis caused by the Israeli occupation, and caused by the retaliatory actions by Abbas and his government against our people in the sector, comes in the framework of their ongoing attempts to tighten restrictions on our people in Gaza and exacerbate their crises and hit the elements and factors of their steadfastness."
The takeaway quote comes from the health minister Mei al-Kila: "We welcome any health services to support our people in the Gaza Strip, but not at the expense of our national values." In other words, Palestinian political power is far more important than human lives.
Which has been the position of the Palestinian Authority throughout the years up to the Bahrain economic workshop.
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And then—out of nowhere, the magazine also hopes that “Judaism Will Decolonize Itself.” This entry was written by a Black Jew, Professor Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, whose black maternal ancestors were “enslaved in Barbados,” and whose father was a Russian Jew. On Twitter, she identifies as “queer and black” but not as Jewish. Prescod-Weinstein, a theoretical physicist, writes: “Jews need to engage in deep conversations about the very idea that we’re entitled to a homeland. The Israeli government denies Palestinian people the right to live or be there and has made very clear that Jewish people are to be treated as first-class, which of course means there are second-class citizens. That does not make a democracy. ....But also, let’s remove the borders around gender...If we decolonize ourselves from what we have been taught, adapted, miscarried under imperial and colonial rule—we can be free.”
No mention of the Torah, the Talmud, rabbinic learning, Jewish intellectuals, Israel’s—and Israeli’s—great accomplishments, Israel's historical, religious and legal rights, Israel’s granting of asylum to Palestinians in flight from persecution in Gaza or on the 'West Bank' because they are homosexuals—and, of course, no mention of the ceaseless pogroms or the Shoah that made a return to our homeland a matter of existential survival.
Even more outrageous, this anti-Israel “decolonizing” propaganda is paired with the following: “Islam Will Return to its True Nature by Centering Justice.” It is written by the Organizers of Masjid Al-Rabia Muslim Community Center in Chicago, a gay and transgender friendly mosque founded by Mahdia Lynn, a “white bisexual transgender Muslim activist” who is shown wearing hijab. S/he states that “the role of imperialism in Islam” meant that “Christian Crusaders invaded Muslim lands and castigated the “permissive attitudes towards gender expression and homosexuality” that characterized Islam.
Has this author ever read the Qu’ran? Or the history of Islam from the 7th century until the Crusades began in 1095, three or four centuries later—after Muslims had killed an untold number of Christians and taken over or destroyed their churches.
Finally, the Chicago mosque organizers state: “Islam is a framework by which one can lead a better life.”
And Judaism is not?
The penetration of the gay movements by pro-Palestine propaganda has borne poisonous fruit. And please be advised: These marches are not feminist. The issues chanted, the banners held aloft, do not focus on abortion under siege, the equal rights amendment, or violence against biologically born women. It is pro-surrogacy and pro-prostitution which is not the view of abolitionist feminists who are themselves under siege and who are often viewed as “transphobic” for criticizing the physical violence against them by transgender activists who want no feminist analysis to limit them in any way.
Maybe, in a sense, all these Pride Marches are Odes to the Eternal Feminine, whereas many feminists are those who have demanded the right to make choices.
Beginning in 2017, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)—an anti-Israel group that is neither for peace nor especially Jewish in its membership—launched its “Deadly Exchange” campaign, which takes the fact that some American police departments have visited Israel to meet with law-enforcement agents there as evidence that Israelis are training U.S. police officers to commit unnecessary shootings and other abuses, especially against racial minorities. In reality, these visits, many of which are arranged by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), are used to study Israeli strategies for dealing with terrorism and mass-casualty situations. Miriam Elman describes JVP’s insidious logic:
Heavily promoted today by a host of U.S.-based anti-Israel organizations, the “Deadly Exchange” campaign . . . traffics in tropes about Jewish power in order to accuse Israel and Jewish American organizations of conspiring to encourage police brutality and increased deportation and imprisonment rates of American people of color. It follows that if you care about social-justice issues like policing problems and prison reform or the Black Lives Matter movement, then you must also revile Israel and detest its supporters, who now stand accused of complicity in the suffering of American blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans. . . . .
Racial issues in the U.S. unrelated to Israel have long been hijacked by BDS activists keen on turning them against Israel, and for years prominent progressive activists have been blaming Israel for police shootings of African Americans. . . . JVP’s innovation was to package that patently false [account] into a full-blown campaign that turns American Zionists into co-conspirators with Israel in some nefarious mission to hurt their fellow Americans. . . .
City councils are being aggressively lobbied by activists promoting the campaign, and at least one municipality—Durham, North Carolina—has now aligned its policing policy with the Deadly Exchange agenda. . . .
Israel Advocacy Movement: Debating Labour Antisemitism with David Collier, Joseph Cohen and Dipak Rajgor at London PalExpo
We spoke to Dipak Rajgor, the anti-racist who can't stop being racist, at the London PalExpo 2019.
Dipak: Antisemitism is a concern for any good decent human being
A few minutes later...
Dipak: Jews control the police 🤪
You need to watch this debate.
Coordinating with Hamas, Israel increased the number of Palestinian laborers from the Gaza Strip allowed to work in the country, and this seems to be the main reason for the relative quiet along the border with the coastal enclave in recent days.
The move was not announced to the Israeli public. Like other relief efforts recently approved by Israel's political leadership and defense establishment as part of the understandings reached through mediation by Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations, this decision, too, was not officially disclosed in Israel.
Gaza's head of the Chamber of Commerce, Maher Tabbaa, told the Saudi-owned Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper over the weekend that Israel promised to greatly increase the number of permits for Gaza businessmen to enter Israel. The number of permit holders rose by two-thirds, from 3,000 to 5,000, he noted, adding that the minimum age for entering Israel was lowered from 30 to 25, said Tabbaa.
This is an old trick, which Israel has used occasionally for the past few years. The permit holders are described as businessmen but in practice it seems the majority of them are workers – manual laborers. Before the rounds of escalation began in March 2018, such laborers were a rather rare sight in Israeli cities in the south.
I have seen in the past that COGAT would list hundreds of Gaza businessmen as exiting and returning to the sector, I didn't know they were laborers.
I see nothing wrong with Israelis employing laborers from Gaza, as long as the proper security checks are done.
For there to be calm, Israel needs Palestinian leaders to support calm. The only way to accomplish that is to give them something they will lose if there are attacks.
Thousands of Gazans who simply want work will energize the Gaza economy with Israeli salaries, and Hamas wants that to happen. More importantly, it doesn't want to lose it.
Over the past week, a relative calm has returned to the Gaza border region: The number of incendiary balloons has dropped and Hamas has also avoided renewing the violent night-time protests, which it sometimes held along the border fence. Last Friday's protest was also relatively quiet. Now, we can understand why.
it is also why Netanyahu increased the fishing zone a couple of weeks ago - even immediately after attacks. Hamas must have something to lose in order step up and act against the other terrorists.
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The Arab media has been intensely interested in the demonstrations by Ethiopian Jews in Israel. They love framng the rallies in terms of proving that Israel is a racist state.
Egyptian newspaper Al Masry Al Youm made this explicit, with an article entitled "Experts: The Arabs should exploit Israel's violations against the Falasha Jews to expose their ugly face."
It canvassed a couple of academic "experts" on Israel on how to best exploit the demonstrations.
Tariq Fahmi, a professor of political science at the American University of Cairo, stressed that Arabs need to convey the image of Israel as a racist state to the international public opinion through the Western media through op-eds and the like.
A director at the Salman Zayed Center, Ibrahim Matar, said, "The Arab League should condemn the violations against the Falasha Jews and reflect the image of the international community." He added that Arab and Palestinian communities in Europe and the United States should bring the issue to international public opinion through human rights networks, organizations concerned with democracy and the elimination of discrimination, and "pro-Palestinian lobby groups such as J-Street."
Yes, the Arabs have lots of partners who are more than willing to portray Israel as a racist society. It is instructive that while J-Street claims to be pro-Israel, even the Arabs don't believe that.
Arabs aren't offended by racism, and most "human rights" groups aren't offended by Arab racism. But they all fall over themselves to condemn Israel no matter what the excuse, and racism is as good an excuse as any.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Tehran on Tuesday that Israel’s F-35 fighter jets can reach “anywhere in the Middle East,” following threats against Israel in recent weeks by senior Iranian officials.
“Lately, Iran has been threatening Israel with destruction,” Netanyahu said, standing in front of an F-35 Adir jet during a visit to the Nevatim Air Force Base in the south. “It should remember that these planes can reach every place in the Middle East, including Iran, and of course also Syria.”
The F-35 stealth jet is not believed to have an effective range to reach Iran unassisted, but it could conduct operations there with in-air refueling, a capability possessed by Israel’s air force.
Netanyahu visit to Nevatim included meetings with IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kohavi, Air Force chief Maj. Gen. Amikam Norkin, and the air force’s top command echelons.
Norkin last year said that Israel had used the fifth generation fighter jet in operations in the Middle East. At the time, Norkin did not specify in which countries the aircraft had been used.
Israel has long seen Iran as its greatest threat, while Iranian officials regularly threaten to destroy the Jewish state.
In April an Israeli airstrike struck an Iranian base in Syria on the road to the ancient city of Palmyra. The target, according to an Israeli report, was an Iranian 3rd Khordad air defense system. Two months later a U.S. Global Hawk drone flying over the Gulf of Oman was struck by a missile fired by a 3rd Khordad system in Iran, almost leading to war.
The two incidents highlight the shared threats faced by the U.S. and Israel, not only from Iran but also from hybrid groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, and Islamic State, which operate as both parastate entities and terrorist organizations. The result of these shared threats and the close political ties between Washington and Jerusalem is a uniquely close relationship between the two country’s militaries. Often the Israel-U.S. defense relationship is seen through the lens of U.S. foreign military financing for Israel, which comes to more than $3 billion a year. Far less attention is paid to the fact that since the 1980s Jerusalem has become a key supplier of advanced military technology to Washington. To name one recent example, the kibbutz-owned Israeli vehicle manufacturer Plasan supplied add-on “modular armor kits,” exterior platings that covered American military vehicles and protected U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. “That armor which was developed in Israel has saved many hundreds or thousands of lives of U.S. troops of vehicles hit by IEDs,” recalls Dan Shapiro, former U.S. ambassador and visiting fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies.
Israel now has three of the largest defense companies in the world, Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. With $7.5 billion in exports in 2018 it is the eighth largest arms exporter in the world. The country has excelled in supplying the U.S. in areas where Washington requires a technology quickly. American companies—encumbered by a lengthier and more bureaucratically involved bidding and defense-acquisition process—can’t always move as quickly as their Israeli counterparts to meet the dynamic requirements of the modern battlefield. “There is a range of technologies where things were brought to market faster than in the U.S. or with no U.S. counterpart and once they see the effectiveness and use they [the U.S.] want it and it is mutually beneficial,” says Shapiro, who concludes that the U.S.-Israel alliance is unique in this respect. “I’m sure there is no other country where we see so many examples of it.”
The increasingly popular Twitter account called @Imshin disseminates videos, blog posts, and news from the middle-class and wealthy world of the Gaza Strip that never make it into the mainstream media.
According to the UN, 53% of Gazans live in poverty, despite humanitarian assistance. But while world media outlets choose to focus solely on photographs of destitute Gazans carting off sacks of UNRWA flour by donkey cart, the swank world of high-class hotels, black-tie restaurants, and gourmet supermarkets stocked to overflowing with Israeli products are ignored, presenting a misleading picture of what life in Gaza after Israeli "occupation" is truly like.
Under the hashtag #TheGazaYouDontSee, Imshin, who prefers to keep her identity anonymous, shares diverse vignettes from life in Gaza that are a far cry from the oppression and misery that "everybody knows" is the lot of the Gazan population. From shopping sprees to swimming academies, bumper cars to the upscale Palmera Restaurant, Imshin opens our eyes to the fact that life in Gaza is more complex than what anti-Israel propagandists would have one believe.
"Tala and Ameer share their day with us," Imshin tweets. "They start with lunch at the Palmera Restaurant. They've obviously been there before, they know exactly what they want and don't need on the menu."
"The reason I started following children's vlogs was that reading and listening to Palestinian news accounts, sites and radio stations was depressing and started to make me anxious," Imshin told Arutz Sheva. "I wanted a lighter non-political input, which still exposed me to the local dialect. I was very surprised with what I found."
AP has a story about a Yiddish music concert in Israel:
In a musty basement hall of an unassuming building nestled among modern high-rises in the heart of Tel Aviv, a few hundred spectators are kindly requested to turn off their cellphones. What makes the typical scene surreal is that they are asked to do so in Yiddish — the playful, lyrical language of Diaspora European Jews.
In its first performance in Israel, a Grammy-nominated concert had arrived to play the lost songs of lost Jews in a nearly lost language. More than 70 years after the purged poems of Holocaust survivors, victims and Jewish Red Army soldiers were first composed and curated, a Canadian historian has brought back to life works thought to be long gone.
The result is "Yiddish Glory," a collection of songs describing the harrowing World War II experience of Soviet Jews. Even amid the horrors of the Holocaust, Jewish musicians created a vibrant cultural life in camps and ghettos, with the arts providing a refuge, a sense of meaning and even a form of resistance.
"The last thing a lot of Yiddish speaking people did was to write a song," said Anna Shternshis, the University of Toronto professor behind the project. "Before Yiddish was killed, it was sung."
Yiddish is a lot more vibrant than most people realize.
Children's books aren't nostalgia-driven. These children's publications, as well as many Yiddish language magazines, newspapers and books for adults, exist because there is a real demand for them from the chareidi community.
It is true that chareidim are insular, but that is not an excuse for reporters or scholars to ignore their existence. Nostalgia for the shtetl will not keep Yiddish alive - it is being kept alive by real Jews who speak the language every day, in shops and in parks and at work.
These are Jews that for some reason the larger Jewish community doesn't want to think about.
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Last month, I wrote an article on how the British Mandatory government offered the Arabs of Palestine an official Arab Agency, parallel to the Jewish Agency, where their opinions could be given the same weight as those of the Jews in Palestine.
The Arabs rejected the idea, and this rejection is still being looked at as a proud moment today by Arabs, even though it resulted in the Jews being politically organized and ready to take over the government institutions in 1948. Had the Arabs accepted the offer, there might very well have been a Palestinian state in the West Bank in 1949.
American Zionism found a formerly secret British document on this incident. While the document I linked to gave many official reasons that the Arabs rejected the formation of an Arab Agency, there was another reason that they rejected it.
The Arabs felt that if they reject the British offer, the British would offer more. And they got that impression from the Parliament members who were pro-Arab and anti-Jewish:
This was seen in a telegram from High Commissioner Herbert Samuel to the Secretary of State:
By rejecting the Arab Agency, the Arabs rejected the entire concept of Arab agency. They rejected the idea that they themselves could do the work to achieve their goals. Instead, they listened to their supposed Western allies, who gave them bad advice, but advice that fit their worldview.
They chose to wait for the West to do their bidding.
It has now been ten years since Mahmoud Abbas literally bragged about his own rejection of a peace plan with Israel in an interview with the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl, using the exact same logic as his 1923 predecessors. The offer might be good - but if we wait, it will get better:
In our meeting Wednesday, Abbas acknowledged that Olmert had shown him a map proposing a Palestinian state on 97 percent of the West Bank -- though he complained that the Israeli leader refused to give him a copy of the plan. He confirmed that Olmert "accepted the principle" of the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees -- something no previous Israeli prime minister had done -- and offered to resettle thousands in Israel. In all, Olmert's peace offer was more generous to the Palestinians than either that of Bush or Bill Clinton; it's almost impossible to imagine Obama, or any Israeli government, going further.
Abbas turned it down. "The gaps were wide," he said.
Abbas and his team fully expect that Netanyahu will never agree to the full settlement freeze -- if he did, his center-right coalition would almost certainly collapse. So they plan to sit back and watch while U.S. pressure slowly squeezes the Israeli prime minister from office. "It will take a couple of years," one official breezily predicted. Abbas rejects the notion that he should make any comparable concession -- such as recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, which would imply renunciation of any large-scale resettlement of refugees.
Instead, he says, he will remain passive. "I will wait for Hamas to accept international commitments. I will wait for Israel to freeze settlements," he said. "Until then, in the West Bank we have a good reality . . . the people are living a normal life." In the Obama administration, so far, it's easy being Palestinian.
Palestinian Arabs simply refuse to think critically about themselves. This is because they have created a culture where critical thinking is discouraged, practically forbidden in the media or in academia. When Western "experts" tell them things they want to believe, they will latch onto that - that Jews are Khazars, that the Temples never existed, that the Holocaust was exaggerated and was the Jews' fault anyway.
This is why they still believe that world pressure will force Israel to make concessions to them without them making any of their own. Or that if Netanyahu loses the elections, there will be a better peace offer than Olmert's.
This is wishful thinking, not actual analysis. It is encouraged by their supporters in the West, who tell them what they want to hear. They will simply refuse to even consider that there are other facts.
If their Western fans really wanted a Palestinian state, they would tell the Palestinians the truth - that they need to negotiate seriously, that Israel has red lines that will never be crossed no matter which party is in power, that they have already lost much of Arab public opinion and are in danger of losing the rest, that Europe is not as much in their pocket as they like to believe, that anti-Israel UN resolutions won't make Israel compromise on its security to be better liked at that failed institution.
Instead, Abbas will hold court in Ramallah as leftist Jews and EU officials come to kiss his ring and tell him how wonderful he is. Not one Palestinian newspaper will dare tell him that his worldview might be skewed. Not one Westerner will tell him that a Palestinian state is further away than it has been since Oslo.
Palestinian leaders choose to live in a fantasy world where the European and leftist American dhimmis will jump and do their bidding while they sit back and wait for things to get better. This is preferable to them actually making decisions and doing actions to help their people
Just like 1923.
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Iran's Mehr News has a panicky article about how Zionists - and Jews - have infiltrated Russia.
These days, mainstream media mentions very little about the proliferation of Zionism in the Russian Federation. And when there is any mention what is mainly referred to is the presence of Chabad movement and perhaps a strong lobby of Zionism in Kremlin.
However, in reality, the situation is much more severe. To begin with, we should have a closer look at how Zionist business is quite firmly settled in the Russian outback. Representatives of Israeli business are operating in major Russian cities such as Yekaterinburg, Tyumen, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Surgut and so on. However, in this piece, I would like to single out the Republic of Bashkortostan and its capital Ufa. Why chose this particular region? The major significance here plays the presence of "the central Muftiat of the Russian Federation". It would seem that Muslims must resist the cooperation with the main enemies of the Ummah and all freedom-loving people, but in our strange world, not everything is as it meant to be. In fact, special relationships between Ufa Muftiat and Zionism are not something new.
This is garden variety Islamic antisemitism, calling Jews the "enemies of the Ummah." But the target audience here is not only the Muslims who make up some 38% of Bashkortostan's citizens, but also the ethnic Russians.
The Soviet style dog-whistle comes out next:
Zionism is present in Ufa in several ways, for the most part reflecting the traditional foreign policy of cosmopolitan radicals.
"Cosmopolitan radicals?"
Later on the language becomes more explicit:
Zionism has launched tentacles in many areas, from the power grid complex to the rural farms. It is not enough that all of Moscow and St. Petersburg are at the complete disposal of the rootless cosmopolitans, they are now active throughout northern Eurasia and especially its central part.
The reference to "tentacles" is also not coincidence. Jews depicted as spiders and octopi were recurring motifs in antisemitic Soviet cartoons.
The article touches on other antisemitic conspiracy theories, such as asking why the rabbi of Bashkiria is not a local Jew - as if the local Jews have major yeshivas that can ordain rabbis.
The article ends off by appealing to traditional Russian patriotism, which has also tended towards the antisemitic:
We also see that there is no real patriotism among the rather large Russian-speaking population, we see no protests and let alone the fight against the dominance of the Zionist business in the Republic.
Of course, nothing gets published in Mehr News that the Iranian leadership does not approve. This article shows that antisemitism is a mainstay in Iranian media, if often hidden behind dog whistles and code words.
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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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Wednesday, July 10, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
