Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

09/24 Links Pt1: Daniel Pipes: Should Israel Invade Gaza?; "The machine gun and the bullet are the essence of the path" - song at PA university graduation ceremony for terrorist prisoners

From Ian:

Daniel Pipes: Should Israel Invade Gaza?

So, what should Israel’s goal in Gaza be?

The occasional show of force against Hamas interests has failed, as has destroying Gaza’s infrastructure; so too the opposite policy of good will and the prospect of economic prosperity. It’s time for something altogether different, a goal that transcends sending signals and punishing misdeeds, something far more ambitious.

Victory is such a goal. That is, aim to impose a sense of defeat on Gazans, from the head of Hamas to the lowliest street sweeper. Aiming for an Israel victory is entirely in keeping with historical war aims, but it is out of step with our times, when even the words victory and defeat have dropped from the Western war lexicon. The Israeli security establishment seeks just peace and quiet vis-a-vis the Palestinians; Mr. Inbar speaks for them in dismissing the goal of victory over Hamas as “naive.”

Negotiations, mediation, compromise, concessions and other gentle means have replaced victory. These sound good; but they have failed in the Palestinian-Israeli arena since 1993, and blindly persisting with them guarantees more destruction and death.

With imposing a sense of defeat on Gazans the goal, what are the strategy and tactics? These cannot be decided on in advance. They require a contemporaneous and detailed study of the Gazan population’s psychology. Questions to be answered might include:

• Does the deprivation of food, water, fuel and medicine in retaliation for attacks on Israel inspire a sense of resistance (muqawama) and steadfastness (sumud) among Gazans or does it break their will?

• Same question about the destruction of homes, buildings and infrastructure.

• Would knocking out the Hamas leadership paralyze the population or prompt an insurrection?

Israel’s security establishment needs to explore these and related issues to map out a sound strategy and to offer reliable counsel to the political leadership. That done, with victory as the goal, Israel finally can address the hitherto insoluble problem of Gaza.

David Horovitz: 7 things to know as Rivlin tries to impose unity coalition on Netanyahu, Gantz

3. Anonymous sources close to Rivlin told Channel 13 that the president has not made up his mind who to charge first with the task of building a coalition. “He does not have a name in his head,” the TV station quoted an unnamed source as saying.

The president has until Wednesday, October 2 to make a choice — which happens to be the same day as Netanyahu’s hearing pending indictment. Rivlin could choose one of the two to form a government as early as this Wednesday or Thursday, the TV report said, but would be perfectly prepared to wait another week, enabling them to reflect on his unity appeal during the two-day Rosh Hashanah holiday, which begins Sunday.

4. If Netanyahu and Gantz cannot agree between themselves on a process of coalition building, Rivlin will indeed face a complex choice. Neither would-be prime minister has majority support or a clear path to a coalition. Fifty-five MKs (from Likud, Shas, United Torah Judaism and Yemina) have recommended Netanyahu as prime minister, compared to 54 for Gantz (from Blue and White, Labor-Gesher, the Democratic Camp, and 10 of the 13 Arab MKs from the Joint List). By that measure, Rivlin could opt to give Netanyahu the first shot at mustering a majority. But Blue and White party has 33 seats, compared to 31 for Likud. So that favors Gantz.

In 1984, when elections also produced political deadlock, the Labor Alignment had 44 seats to Likud’s 41, and the Alignment’s leader Shimon Peres took the first two years as prime minister, before the role rotated to Likud’s Shamir.

Israel's top court hears appeal for activist expelled for boycott activity

Israel's Supreme Court on Tuesday heard the appeal of the local director of Human Rights Watch, who is seeking to block an attempt by the government to expel him for allegedly supporting the international boycott movement against Israel.

A lower court in April upheld a decision not to renew Omar Shakir's work visa and ordered him to leave the country, saying his advocacy against Israel's settlements in Judea and Samaria amounts to support for the Palestinian-led boycott movement.

"We want to be able to do the same work we do in nearly 100 countries across the world and here in Israel," Shakir said, speaking to reporters outside the courtroom.

"The kind of work we've been doing in Israel for three decades, the kind of work that we've done with Palestinian Authority, with Hamas, with every country in the Middle East and North Africa."

Human Rights Watch says neither it nor Shakir has called for an outright boycott of Israel. It says Shakir, who is a US citizen, is being targeted for the rights group's opposition to the settlements and its calls for companies to stop working with the settlements.

Tuesday's hearing had been delayed for months and an immediate ruling was not expected.

YESTERDAY: Human Rights Watch joins Iran, Syria, North Korea in demanding UNHRC blacklist "of companies working in settlements"—a form of anti-Israel BDS, per UNHRC reps like Leilani Farha.

TODAY: Human Rights Watch tells Israel Supreme Court it doesn’t support anti-Israel BDS. pic.twitter.com/VGWu8XbwWP
— Hillel Neuer - watching #UNGA #UNGA74 (@HillelNeuer) September 24, 2019

The Left's Love For Ferocity Is Getting 'Progressively' Worse (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Last week, the controversial group Women's March informed us about a changing of the guard.

Gone were Bob Bland, Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour. While Carmen Perez remained, the other three were replaced on the group's board by an assortment of new names and faces:

But one name stood out from the rest: Zahra Billoo.

Billoo's vile tweets were soon plastered all over Twitter, with different people offering their own personal collection of the Worst of the Worst of her attacks on Israel, Zionism and Jews.

Billoo combined unhinged accusations against Israel with whatever conspiracy theories were available:

Nor did Billoo limit herself to Israel, attacking Jewish rights groups that fight antisemitism, such as the Anti-Defamation League:

As a big fan of the terrorist group Hamas, Billoo came up with various analogies to defend the murder of Israeli civilians:

Like this:

And this:

And when her brother, Ahmed ibn Aslam, publicly wished in a fit of pique at Ben Gurion Airport that all Jews in Israel be killed...

...Billoo responded with her support for her brother against the evil Customs and Border Protection:

The uproar on Twitter was so loud and angry that Women's March dropped Billoo from the board.

But not everyone was upset by Billoo's assorted vicious attacks.

Some saw Billoo's assault on Israel and Jews very differently.

Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace was ecstatic over Women March's new board and saw them all as a natural continuation of Sarsour, Mallory and Bland:

Somehow, vile and vicious attacks on Israel, Zionism and Jews are all part of being impactful, fierce and even inspiring.

What's going on here?

Last week, writing about the short-lived second wave of accusations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Peggy Noonan examined Why They’ll Never Stop Targeting Kavanaugh. More than a specific attempt to delegitimize the Supreme Court in order to head off an anticipated attack on Roe vs. Wade or a fixation on finishing off what Christine Blasey Ford started -- Noonan found a more general and pervasive issue underlying last weeks witch hunt:

the crazier parts of the progressive left increasingly see politics as public theater, with heroes and villains, cheers and hisses from the audience, and costumes, such as outfits from “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Because modern politics is, for the lonely and strange on all sides, entertainment and diversion. And one’s people must be entertained. [emphasis added]

Based on the gusto with which the nasty comments were being tweeted and retweeted by the likes of Billoo, Sarsour, Tlaib and Omar it was clear that people were reveling in these attacks on twitter -- not just the people carrying out the attacks and perpetuating them, but also the people on Twitter who were merely following on Twitter, and cheering them on in the comments.

It's almost like a sport.

Here is a video from 3 years ago of political commentator Cenk Uyghur talking with John Iadarola in the days leading up to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, discussing picking representatives for drafting the Democratic Platform. Uyghur personifies the sports metaphor for politics taken to its logical conclusion, referring to Sanders' picks as "the aggressive progressives -- the change gang," and calling the choice of Cornel West "a bold pick." Uyghur refers to them as "a great crew...when you bring these all-stars."

Watch the first 2:30 of the video:

(As an aside, at one point, Uyghur worked for MSNBC, where he replaced Keith Olbermann, who actually switched off between sports broadcasting and news.)

On the progressive left, the value placed on the inspirational value of such attacks makes for the adoption of some unexpected heroes.

During a 2006 teach-in at UC Berkeley about the Israel-Hezbollah war, American philosopher Judith Butler was asked a "bundle" of 4 questions:

1. Since Israel is an imperialist, colonial project, should resistance be based on social movements or the nation-state?

2. What is the power of the Israel Lobby and is questioning it antisemitic?

3. Since the Left hesitates to support Hamas and Hezbollah “just” because of their use of violence, does this hurt Palestinian solidarity?

4. Do Hamas and Hezbollah actually threaten Israel’s existence, as portrayed in some media?

She started off by talking about "The Israel Lobby." Butler made no mention of AIPAC at all, but named instead the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League -- the reference to that last organization being a precursor to the attacks to come a few years later by Billoo -- and Sarsour.

Butler's whitewash of Hamas and Hezbollah was just what the audience was looking for:

Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important. That does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements. It doesn’t stop those of us who are interested in non-violent politics from raising the question of whether there are other options besides violence. [emphasis added]

The terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah do not feel limited to military targets and have deliberately killed civilians.

But according to Butler, these are not terrorist groups.
They are merely not "interested in non-violent politics"

According to the text of her answer, her response was met with applause.

This is not a 21st problem.
It is an enduring one.

In his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, Harvard professor Allan Bloom writes:

I have seen young people, and older people too who are good democratic liberals, lovers of peace and gentleness, struck dumb with admiration for individuals threatening or using the most terrible violence for the slightest and tawdriest of reasons. They have a sneaking suspicion that they are face to face with men of real commitment, which they themselves lack. And commitment, not truth, is believed to be what counts. [emphasis added]

Bloom is speaking to those like Vilkomerson who are enthralled by the ferocity of these attacks on Twitter, mistaking their attacks as a commitment worthy of emulation and adulation.

From Che Guevara and Yasir Arafat, the progressive left has now settled on Zahran Billoo, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

And Butler is no better, with her twisted excuses for terrorist groups as progressive social movements.

Like Bloom, the late Justice Antonin Scalia recognized the problem as well. In 2010, Scalia offered his advice during the commencement address at Langley High School, in Virginia, where his granddaughter was graduating:

And indeed, to thine ownself be true, depending upon who you think you are. It’s a belief that seems particularly to beset modern society, that believing deeply in something, and following that belief, is the most important thing a person could do. Get out there and picket, or boycott, or electioneer, or whatever. I am here to tell you that it is much less important how committed you are, than what you are committed to. If I had to choose, I would always take the less dynamic, indeed even the lazy person who knows what’s right, than the zealot in the cause of error. He may move slower, but he’s headed in the right direction.

...In short, it is your responsibility, men and women of the class of 2010, not just to be zealous in the pursuit of your ideals, but to be sure that your ideals are the right ones. That is perhaps the hardest part of being a good human being: Good intentions are not enough. Being a good person begins with being a wise person. Then, when you follow your conscience, will you be headed in the right direction. [emphasis added]

Social media in general, and perhaps Twitter in particular, is a petri dish of a society where passionate attacks have long replaced any semblance of normal discussion.

And in this age of intersectionalism where a whole gamut of causes are being interwoven and championed with unheard-of ferocity -- Israel, Zionism and Jews are increasingly being targeted, with a reemergence -- and acceptance -- of antisemitism that we thought we would never see again.

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Gideon Levy's fake olive trees in Haaretz

Gideon Levy in Haaretz writes about how cruel Israelis are destroying Palestinian olive trees, seemingly for no other reason but to persecute their owners:

Two days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, on Tuesday last week, his intention to annex the Jordan Valley after the election, forces of the Civil Administration carried out yet another brutal operation of destruction. The target this time was particularly remote: a rocky hillside adjacent to the village of Tamoun in the northern valley. The goal was singularly vicious: the uprooting of hundreds of olive trees that were about to yield their first fruit...

Four days later, on Monday, the groves’ owners stood next to their felled trees and their ruined cisterns, sadly rolling bits of olives from the felled trees between their fingers. The first crop of these seven-year-old trees was set to be harvested in another few days, but the Civil Administration’s terminators got here just before – as if to rub salt in the wound. The butchered trees are withering on the ground; their fruit is dying on the slashed branches.

Here is the photo of the uprooted trees from the story:

There's only one slight problem. These aren't olive trees.

To be certain, I asked people on Twitter who know trees better than me, and it was unanimous - not one person identified these as olive trees. The color and shape of the leaves, the thickness of the trunk - all show that these are not olive trees and Levy's claim that they were cut down right before they were ready to produce fruit is simply not true.

But if they are not olive trees, what are they, and why is Israel uprooting them?

According to the Regavim NGO - who have a much better track record than Haaretz for telling the truth - these trees are acacia saligna trees, known as coojong (and other names.) They are the tree equivalent of weeds - invasive, non-indigenous, fast growing trees that disrupt the ecosystem and destroy the water table.

Regavim says that the PA plants these trees, considered pests throughout the world, because they grow like wildfire and give the appearance of "old" agricultural work at the site. This way they can take advantage of a loophole in Ottoman Land Law that gives squatters rights if they have been using the land for several years without any objections having been registered against them. Young, fast growing coojongs look like much older trees for their age, so they are ideal as a means for a land grab.

Israel is destroying the trees not only because the land they are planted on is state land, but also because the trees themselves are a threat to the ecosystem. The Palestinians, who claim to love their land so much, prefer to plant invasive, non-indigenous trees that are close to unkillable (their seeds can survive fire) and that destroys other plants.

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For some reason, Jewish Currents chose rabid anti-Israel ideologue Judith Butler to review Bari Weiss' "How to Fight Anti-Semitism," a book that describes in detail why modern anti-Zionism is a new form of antisemitism just as toxic as white supremacism, a thesis with which Butler violently disagrees.

Butler's "gotcha" of Weiss is this:

Intersectionality theory does have much to say about the possibility of being oppressed in one respect and responsible for oppression in another respect—a part of that theory that Weiss does not address. The mechanics of the concept do not seem to elude her; in fact, we might describe her as arguing in an intersectional spirit when she claims, for instance, that Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is subject to racist attacks at the same time that, in Weiss’s view, she is guilty of antisemitism. “Two things can be true at once,” Weiss reminds us. Indeed they can. This situation is well-known by many Jews who vigilantly oppose antisemitism and yet also bear responsibility for a continuing and unjust occupation of Palestine.

But that tension remains oblique in this ahistorical text. Weiss regards Israel’s founding as a state based on Jewish political sovereignty as the end of a “clear line” that ran from biblical times through the aftermath of the Holocaust, spanning “two thousand years of history [which] have shown definitively that the Jewish people require a safe haven and an army.” The Holocaust, in other words, necessitated “the fulfillment of a biblical promise” to establish a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. And yet another line of history runs through and past the Naqba, a history that intersects with the story Weiss tells: state Zionism provided sanctuary for Jewish refugees even as it dispossessed more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes, producing more refugees for whom there is no clear sanctuary. 1948 was a year in which multiple histories intersected. There is no one line of history. If we accept wholesale Weiss’s proposition that Israel exists and is therefore legitimate, then we are excused from asking too many historical questions about why it was established in the way that it was—on what legal terms, and at what price, and through the vanquishing of what alternative possibilities.

But if two things can both be true at once, shouldn’t we be able to think through the paradox of a dispossessed population gaining sanctuary only through the dispossession of another population? Shall we not name this as a founding contradiction, one that remains unsolved, and whose resolution could lead to less violence and more common life—cohabitation on equal grounds? Unfortunately, that order of complexity does not enter into this book and seems rather rigorously excluded.

OK, let's deal with the issues that Butler brings up that she says is excluded. (I haven't yet finished reading Weiss' 'book.)

Butler falsely claims that Weiss is referring only to the Holocaust when she says “two thousand years of history have shown definitively that the Jewish people require a safe haven and an army.” This is obviously wrong, since the Holocaust took place over only a tiny slice of the two thousand years of Jews being persecuted that Weiss refers to. Butler chooses to ignore that in implying that the Holocaust is the only reason for Israel to exist, to provide sanctuary for Holocaust victims and no one else, and therefore the Shoah is used as an excuse for dispossessing Palestinian Arabs. It isn't. Zionism came before the Holocaust and its arguments are based on Jews being treated as any other nation.

Butler then moves onto her next false assumption: that considering Israel to be a legitimate state somehow stops people from delving into the details of how it was established, a process that Butler clearly thinks was on the whole immoral. This is also obviously not true. The United States and Australia may have done immoral things to aboriginal peoples when they were founded, but no one questions the legitimacy of those and most other countries the way Israel's legitimacy is questioned daily, including in this very essay. No one says that one cannot question the historical details any state including Israel Yet to Butler, only Israel's very legitimacy is dependent on the moral "price" she claims it paid. Butler even seems to also be saying that Israel's legality is open to question - a Jewish state that the UN itself recommended be established, that the UN accepted as a full member, a Jewish homeland accepted by the League of Nations decades earlier - it is difficult to find a state that has more legitimacy in international law than Israel.

If the only state whose legitimacy is questioned is the only Jewish state, then we also have the right to ask questions: Why it Israel singled out to adhere to standards that no other state has ever reached? Why is the Jewish state the only one that is assumed to be illegitimate? Why are people like Butler obsessed over Israel and only Israel? The only answer that fully explains the visceral hate for Israel is indeed antisemitism. Weiss shows how the Soviets used Jews to spearhead antisemitic initiatives - and how those Jews ended up being persecuted themselves, despite their being as "good" as they could be. Butler fits exactly into that mold. It is not surprising she doesn't mention that part of the book.

Butler claims that Zionism necessitated the dispossession of Arabs from the land. This is nonsense; one has to truly cherry pick Zionist quotes from the first half of the 20th century to build that case (which is exactly what anti-Zionists like Butler do.) If one reads actual Zionist literature from the period - just peruse any random issue of the Palestine Post during the 1930s - the idea of ethnically cleansing Arabs not considered. On the contrary, it is assumed that Jews and Arabs would live together in harmony and that the influx of Jews would improve the lives of Arabs. One could argue whether that is true or even if that is a colonial mindset, but one cannot seriously argue that Zionism caused the flight of Arabs from the area. War is what caused the flight, and it was not a war that Zionists started.

Judith Butler has a different vision of a wonderful world where Jew and Arab live together in peace, one that necessitates dismantling the Jewish state and replacing it with a single state where Palestinians can "return" and make the Jews a minority. Instead of relying on Jewish ideas of equal rights for an Arab minority we should rely on the Arab majority to protect the rights for a Jewish minority. This will, she says, resolve the "founding contradiction" of Israel - by destroying the Jewish state.

But this is no longer 1948, and we have over seven decades of evidence of what these competing visions look like. On the one hand, we have an Israel that provides legal equal rights to its Arab minority and that, in fits and starts, has been trying to live up to that vision in all spheres. On the other hand, we have abundant evidence of how Arab nations treated their Jews both before and during Israel's establishment.

Egypt created nationality laws in the 1920s that defined as someone who was an Arab or Muslim, pointedly excluding Jews. Libya stripped Jews of the right to vote in 1951. In Iraq, Jewish history and Hebrew language instruction were prohibited in Jewish schools during the 1920s and Jews were expelled from public service and education in the 1930s. In Yemen, Jews were excluded from public service positions and the army during the 1920s. Jews could no longer purchase property in Syria in 1947. In 1948, Iraq prohibited Jews from leaving the country, and Yemen followed in 1949. In 1951, Libyan Jews were no longer allowed to have passports or Libyan nationality certificates.

These Arab laws were aimed at all Jews, citizens of their countries, not "Zionists." And today, Jews who venture into Arab areas controlled fully by the Palestinian Authority put their lives at risk. Israel was and remains the only country in the Middle East where Jews can live without fear. Pretending that a binational state would protect the Jews is to ignore a century of evidence that proves otherwise - Jews ostensibly had equal rights in Egypt and Libya and Algeria and Lebanon, and they were forced out. By any rational yardstick, Arabs are more protected under Jewish rule than Jews ever have been under Arab rule.

Considering Butler's kumbaya solution and comparing it with the reality of Israel today is indeed what gives Israel its moral legitimacy. The Holocaust was unique, but Jewish persecution is not. Israel is the refuge for Jews from Arab lands untouched by the Holocaust as well as from the Soviet Union, Ethiopia and other places they were persecuted or tolerated as not-quite full citizens. Weiss reminds us of the statement of the prime minister of France in 1980, Raymond Barre, after a synagogue bombing that killed two Jews and two non-Jews: ”They aimed at the Jews and they hit innocent Frenchmen.” With few exceptions, Jews have never been considered full citizens of the countries they lived in, and today's white nationalists as well as leftists who want to exclude Jews from student government on campus show that this thinking exists even in the US today.

No one is silencing anyone. All questions about Israel should be asked and forthrightly answered. But Butler isn't just asking questions - she is attacking the very idea of Jews as a people having the same rights as any other people to self-determination. She is disingenuous when she characterizes her criticisms as merely asking questions, since she is not interested in the answers, which an honest academic would welcome. She is singling out Israel for vitriol that is way out of proportion to its supposed crimes, to the point that it is the only state in the world that is assumed to be illegitimate. That isn't debate - that is hate. And it is hate that is identical to the hate that Jews have been subjected to throughout history, that also was justified as merely asking questions.

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Hooy meeting Palestinian diplomat earlier this year

One of the strongest diplomatic messages that a state or pseudo-state can give is to summon the ambassador of another country to show how upset the host country is over some egregious act done by the other.

From Wafa:

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry today summoned an Australian diplomat over the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s remarks in favor of Israel.

Undersecretary of the Foreign Ministry, Amal Jadou, stated that the Acting Director of the Australian Representative Office, Warren Hooy, was summoned following Foreign Affairs Minister Riyad Malki’s instructions over Morrison’s remarks in favor of Israel.

Jado met with Hooy to express Palestinian “dissatisfaction and resentment” of Morrison’s remarks in which he underscored a shift by his government to take “an even stronger stand against the biased and unfair targeting of Israel in the UN General Assembly.”

Yes, Morrison said he would fight the UN bias against Israel, and the PLO was so incensed that it summoned the closest thing they could find to an ambassador from Australia.

The full statement that Morrison made about Israel to US Vice President Pence at a luncheon a few days sgo was:

Beyond our region, we share a commitment to the sovereignty, also, and prosperity of Israel. For 70 years — and especially recently — we have, in Australia, together, consistently advocated for the nation of Israel and for a peaceful future for the region.

Most recently, under my government, we have taken an even stronger stand against the biased and unfair targeting of Israel in the U.N. General Assembly, together with the United States. And, Mr. Vice President, we will continue to do so. (Applause.)

Notice that nothing Morrison said implies any less of a relationship with Palestinians. But to Palestinians, if Israel wins anything, they lose.

Usually a summoning will make the news because this is the biggest weapon in the diplomatic pouch.

This story is in Palestinian media, an obscure Latin American news site - and that's it. Apparently, Palestinian rage over trivia is so normal that even something like this makes no waves.

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09/23 Links Pt2: The Shakir Case: Human Rights Watch vs. Israel; Don’t Cheer on the Joint List; Mahathir Mohamad, Elan Carr, and the pandemic of Muslim Antisemitism

From Ian:

Gerald M. Steinberg: The Shakir Case: Human Rights Watch vs. Israel

Both ostensibly and legally, the Omar Shakir case coming before the Israeli High Court on September 24 is not about Human Rights Watch (HRW) per se. The formal question is whether Shakir, the “Israel and Palestine Director” at HRW, violated both the terms of his visa and the law that mandates the exclusion from Israel of leaders of the BDS movement.

The government’s case, reinforced by amicus briefs filed by Israeli watchdog groups (including NGO Monitor), includes overwhelming evidence of Shakir’s BDS activity. HRW’s legal team argues that the case is political, asserting that Israel is targeting HRW for alleged human rights work that is critical of Israel. The organization claims that Shakir’s BDS work ended when he arrived in Israel in 2016.

The Jerusalem District Court was unimpressed by the HRW spin, and its ruling accepted the government’s position. Shakir was nevertheless allowed to stay in the country pending the High Court appeal.

Although its language is narrowly legal and technical, this case reflects major issues not only for Israel but in the wider realms of lawfare, soft power, and public diplomacy. The arguments on human rights and nebulous aspects of international law are proxies for a multi-front war that has been escalating for 20 years around soft power de-legitimacy. This 21st-century political, legal, and economic war seeks to demonize and thereby destroy Israel, much as the wars fought by armies and missiles attempted to defeat the Jewish state on the battlefield.

From its opening shots almost 20 years ago, HRW has been a leader in the attacks against Israel, and the Shakir case is an important milestone in this history. HRW brings an annual budget of $92 million ($641 million over the past decade) to the battlefront and provides a vast array of skilled social and mainstream media warriors. The image of a small group of volunteers sacrificing their spare time to promote universal human rights values is a façade. These are highly paid mercenaries waging propaganda wars with all the weapons money can buy. (h/t IsaacStorm)

Don’t Cheer on the Joint List

When the Joint List, the Arab party that emerged as Israel’s third largest in the recent round of elections, endorsed Benny Gantz as its candidate for prime minister on Sunday, pundits took to every available perch to declare the moment historic. After all, no Arab party has ever endorsed a Jewish leader, and Ayman Odeh, the party’s Obama-esque leader, seized the moment properly by tweeting a line from Psalms. To many, this felt like a breath of fresh air, a surge of coexistence and compromise after Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-line policies.

The hosannas, however, are premature: The Joint List, sadly, remains a vehemently anti-Zionist party whose members have often expressed their support for convicted terrorists. All it takes is a brief look at the party and its principles to learn why Gantz—whose Blue and White party is currently Israel’s most popular, with 33 Knesset seats—should immediately and forcefully reject this endorsement.

Most egregious among the party’s members, perhaps, is Heba Yazbak. A doctoral student studying gender and colonialism at Tel Aviv University, Yazbak has occasionally taken to Facebook to praise convicted terrorists, most notably Samir Kuntar. On April 22, 1979, Kuntar, the teenage son of a wealthy Lebanese family, landed a rubber dingy on the shore of the northern Israeli town of Nahariya. Together with three other terrorists, he shot and killed a police officer before breaking into the apartment of the Haran family and taking them hostage. Smadar, the family’s mother, managed to hide with her 2-year-old daughter, Yael. Fearful that the toddler’s cries will give them away, she stifled the child’s whimpers, accidentally suffocating her to death. Kuntar then led the family father, Danny, to the nearby beach, together with his 4-year-old daughter, Einat. When IDF soldiers arrived to free the hostages, Kuntar executed Danny in front of his daughter’s eyes. He then grabbed Einat, and, using the butt of his rifle, smashed her head against a nearby rock.

Kuntar was released from Israeli prison in 2008 in return for the bodies of two fallen Israeli soldiers. He received a hero’s welcome from Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, and continued to plan attacks against Israelis, earning himself an international terrorist designation from the United States Department of State. He was killed in 2015 in a strike south of Damascus, which many believe was orchestrated by Israel. (h/t IsaacStorm)

Mahathir Mohamad, Elan Carr, and the pandemic of Muslim Antisemitism

Such direct admonitions appear to have helped prompt Special Envoy Carr, to, paraphrasing the bard, “show us the mettle of his (intellectual) pasture.” Rising to the occasion, without hesitation, Elan Carr replied: “So, first of all, there is no question that’s the case,” openly acknowledging the ADL findings demonstrating a disproportionate prevalence of extreme Antisemitism amongst Muslims, worldwide.

Carr then added, emphatically,
Virtually all of the violence against Jews in Western Europe has been from the Arab [Muslim] and [broader] Muslim population—virtually all. So, we cannot ignore that fact, we can’t downplay that fact. That is, we’re stuck with it, and that is something we have to acknowledge.

Although Carr further suggested going “to the source,” the Arab Muslim Middle East, and encouraging “these countries to change the way they speak about Jews,” he failed to identify the canonical Islamic Antisemitic motifs inculcated by the Middle East’s most authoritative religious teaching institutions, notably, Sunni Islam’s Vatican, Al-Azhar University, which animate this Jew-hating discourse.

Kudos to Elan Carr for courageously shattering the prevailing, enforced silence of our national political class regarding the global pandemic of Muslim Jew-hatred, embodied by Malaysian Prime Minister, and 2019 Muslim Man Of The Year, Mahathir Mohamad. It is my fervent hope Mr. Carr will next acknowledge how this pandemic of hate is rooted in mainstream Islam. Such acknowledgment must be followed, in turn, by intellectually honest admonition of institutional Islam to begin its own mea culpa-based process—akin to Vatican II/Nostre Aetate—for removing theological Islamic Jew-hatred from the minbar.

One of the things Israel's supporters rely on to try to get our message across are arguments supported by facts.

Our reliance on fact and argument is not a function of our being Israel supporters, nor does it derive from our ethnicity, religion, or nationality (any more than it derives from our race, class, age or gender). Rather, facts and arguments form the basis of our case for the simple reason that we live in a society where persuasion is a reasonable alternative to coercion.

I choose the word "reason" with great care, since our belief that differences can be settled through discussion, argumentation and debate can only be sustained if, through repeated personal experiences, we come to see that people routinely get their way by virtue of having the strongest arguments (vs. the biggest gun).

While it is an extraordinary thing to live in a society where reasoned discourse stands even the slightest chance over raw power, there is a downside to living in such a society: the assumption that those we engage with politically must share our devotion to reason.

The trap this leads to is a belief that if we can just construct the perfect argument, one which builds unchallengeable, objective facts into a framework of air-tight logic, presented with the most compelling rhetoric, we can win the day. You can see this on this site, or in the countless newspapers, magazines and web sites offering editorial opinion (i.e., persuasive arguments) in support of the Jewish state.

But as we have seen again and again, Israel's opponents are not even interested in objective facts, much less strong arguments built on them.

To cite just a few examples, while we are fond of describing the Middle East conflict as complex (because it is) there are some facts that are just too powerfully supported to wish, deny or shout away.

The Jewish historic connection to the land of Israel is one such fact (a fact which does not deny other people's parallel historic connections to the same land, by the way). Similarly, the fact that Israel's neighbors attacked the newly born Jewish state in 1948 is as apparent as the marching of thousands of Arab troops into the territory can be.

More recently, it is an objective fact that Israel made substantial offers of land to the Palestinians at various negotiating tables in order to settle the conflict. One can argue from our side as to whether such offers were wise or foolish, just as the other side can argue whether such offers were worth giving up other things (such as the so-called "Right of Return") in exchange. But pretending that such offers were never made (or were not significant – never mind generous) requires just that: pretending, not refutation.

I could continue on through the various "genocides" Israel has been accused of (from Jenin to Gaza) where the low ratio of civilian to combatant casualties was unprecedented in the history of warfare. But by now you should be getting the idea that facts do exist – even in a place where the environment in which such facts play out might be extraordinarily complex.

But it is just at this level of fact that Israel's critics stake so much on their own refusal to acknowledge objective truth. Palestinian denial of Jewish history is as long documented as it is absurd and obscene. But just take a look at what lengths supporters of the Palestinians go to deny facts such as military invasions, peace offers and the cause and result of wars. Books are published demonstrating that black is white. Conferences are held where panels discuss how night is day. Journals run for decades publishing article after article proving that up is down. All in an effort to destroy any basis of fact upon which argumentation can proceed.

When I and others point out that our arguments are directed not at the Israel haters themselves but to a broader, uncommitted public, we acknowledge an understanding that Israel's opponents play by a different set of rules. And it's all well and good that we don't waste our time trying to argue with people who insist they get to rewrite the rules of reality to suit their purposes.

But even if we are trying to convince a different audience by following our rulebook, our opponents are trying to convince that same audience by using theirs. Which makes it all the more important that we understand where they are coming from since simply dismissing them as hypocrites and liars may not give us the information we need to achieve genuine understanding of what we're up against.

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Haaretz doesn't mention the terrorists in the house that Israel bombed

Haaretz' Amira Hass does her usual apologetics for terror. She describes the issue of a Dutch citizen suing Israel in Dutch court to receive damages for an Israeli airstrike that killed members of his family in terms of "David vs. Goliath."

The family name is Ziada, and Israel did indeed bomb their home on July 20, 2014, killing several innocent members. (Haaretz wrongly says January.)

But what Haaretz doesn't mention is that there were two terrorists in the home of the Ziada family. One was Omar Shaaban Ziada , field commander of Hamas' Al Qassam Martyrs Brigades:

The other was an unrelated Qassam Brigades member, reconnaissance expert Mohammed Mahmoud al-Maqadma:

While Hass is spending time talking about how Israel is saying that the Dutch do not have jurisdiction over the case - which they don't - she doesn't mention that these two terrorists prove that the Ziada house was a legitimate military target, and the family members were being held as human shields for Hamas. Omar Ziada was so evil that he put his family in danger by seemingly turning his house into a command and control center to meet with al-Maqadma.

(Also, Jamil Ziada was a Hamas police officer, it is unclear if he was part of the Qassam Brigades. Yousef Ziada was a Fatah member as well.)

Of course Amira Hass won't mention these two legitimate military targets, and potentially more. She wants the world to believe that Israel wantonly bombs civilian houses. Yet even B'Tselem acknowledged that al-Maqadma was a Hamas terrorist (they didn't know about the others, and neither did I until today.) The information is not hard to come by.

If only Haaretz cared about the truth.

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09/23 Links Pt1: Kicking off unity bid, Rivlin invites Netanyahu and Gantz to meet; Arab voters feel more Israeli than Palestinian; Jason Greenblatt And The Inconvenient Truth Of Palestinian Rejectionism

From Ian:

Kicking off unity bid, Rivlin invites Netanyahu and Gantz to meet

After completing meetings with party representatives to hear their recommendations as to who should form the next government, and with neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz receiving majority support in the new Knesset, President Reuven Rivlin on Monday issued an invitation for a meeting between the two in an attempt to move forward in the coalition-building process.

Netanyahu and Gantz both confirmed that they would attend the meeting, called for Monday evening.

Shortly after Rivlin’s appeal, Netanyahu, speaking at a Likud party faction meeting at the Knesset, said that “the only government that can be formed is a broad unity government” between his Likud and the centrist Blue and White.

Netanyahu, who received 55 MK recommendations to Gantz’s 54, made his own plea for Gantz to agree to a meeting “to achieve unity and compromise between the national camp headed by me… and the left-wing camp headed by Gantz.”

Gantz has so far rejected an invitation to meet with the prime minster “with no preconditions,” a call Netanyahu made immediately after signing an agreement according to which his Likud party and all the parties on the religious right agreed to only enter a coalition as a single unit and negotiate the terms of the new government together.

As Rivlin concludes talks with parties, Netanyahu wins 55 backers to Gantz’s 54
President Reuven Rivlin on Monday ended his round of consultations with representatives of all the Knesset parties ahead of his decision on

whom to task with forming the next government, with no candidate securing the backing of the necessary 61-strong majority needed for a governing coalition.

After the final two parties that Rivlin consulted with, the center-left Labor-Gesher and left-wing Democratic Camp, recommended Benny Gantz as expected, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has the support of 55 lawmakers in the 120-member Knesset to Gantz’s 54. That seemingly gives the incumbent leader a slight edge over his rival, although Gantz’s Blue and White party is bigger than Netanyahu’s Likud.

Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu party is in the kingmaker position with its eight seats, having refrained from recommending either candidate. The three-member Arab faction Balad within the Joint List also opted to back neither Netanyahu nor Gantz.

Rivlin is expected to try to force a unity government comprising Likud and Blue and White, although significant disputes remain as to who would be prime minister and what other parties would be members of such a coalition. He is expected to make a decision later this week or early next week.

Liberman meets Gantz, says unity government a certainty

Yisrael Beytenu chief Avigdor Liberman said a unity government was no longer a question, after meeting with Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz ahead of talks between the two prime ministerial candidates initiated by President Reuven Rivlin and set to take place Monday evening.

Liberman said the only point of contention remaining between Gantz and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was who would lead the unity government as prime minister first.

Netanyahu and Gantz both lack majority support to form government, after Rivlin consulted over the past two days with parties elected to the Knesset in last week’s elections.

Liberman has refrained from recommending either one as a candidate for prime minister.

The secularist Yisrael Beytenu leader campaigned on forcing a unity government between his party, Likud and Blue and White if neither could build a coalition without him and now holds the balance of power in the Knesset with Gantz and Netanyahu likely needing his support to secure a ruling majority.

Arab voters feel more Israeli than Palestinian

On Tuesday, Arab voters flocked to the polls, defying expectations of a low turnout.

Arab turnout skyrocketed compared to the April 9 election, reaching 59% on Tuesday, almost as high as the Jewish turnout.

This could suggest that the Israeli Arabs are no longer trying to distance themselves from the state's institutions.

Although Arab voters voted for the Joint Arab List, the only Arab list on the ballot, their high turnout sent a message to the Jewish public. The Arab voters essentially said that they viewed themselves as Israelis and want to take part in the Israeli experience.

Likewise, during the campaign Arab candidates put aside their solidarity with the Palestinian Authority in its struggle against Israel, and scaled back their rhetoric on changing Israel’s Jewish character.

Instead, the Arab politicians campaigned on better education, employment, housing, education and so forth, highlighting the need to address the festering problems in the Arab sector.

Arab candidates had realized that their attempt to drive a wedge between Arabs and Jews and their refusal to accept Israel as the nation-state of the Jews were turning off voters. Consequently, they figured they could only win back the Arab street if they changed the discourse and promised a course correction.

Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, Mark R.Cohen, in 2013 wrote a chapter for a book on the history of Jewish-Muslim relations. This chapter, titled “Muslim Anti-Semitism: Old or New?,” has recently been released publicly.

Cohen is a recognized researcher on Jews in Muslim lands. His research is sound. But in this article, I think that his central thesis is based on an incorrect assumption:

In presenting my own views, I should ﬁrst deﬁne what I mean by anti-Semitism because of the fuzziness that prevails in contemporary discussions of anti-Semitism in Islam. This fuzziness emanates especially from representatives of the counter-myth school, for whom every nasty expression about Jews in the Qur’an, the hadith and other Arabic literature, and every instance of harsh treatment or violence experienced by Jews in the past, is deemed anti-Semitic. But this is decidedly not anti-Semitism. It is, rather, the typical, though nonetheless unsavory, loathing for the“other” found in most societies even today, a disdain that, in the Middle Ages, was shared by all three Western monotheistic religions in relation to pagans and rival monotheist claimants to divine exclusivity and the right to dominate society.

The proper deﬁnition of anti-Semitism, which is shared by most students of the subject, is a religiously based complex of irrational, mythical, and stereotypical beliefs about the diabolical, malevolent, and all-powerful Jew, infused, in its modern, secular form, with racism and the belief that there is a Jewish conspiracy against mankind. Deﬁned this way, I can say with a great deal of conﬁdence, in agreement with other seasoned scholars, that such anti-Semitism did not exist “under the crescent” in the medieval Muslim world.

I agree with Cohen that Jew-hatred in the Muslim world throughout history has been nothing close to how it was in Christian Europe. But his definition of antisemitism - which he claims is shared by most academics! - is almost comical in how limited it is.

The view of the Jew as "all powerful" is relatively recent, pretty much from the 19th century. Cohen's definition doesn't include Christian supersessionism or charges of deicide, accusations of the blood libel or Jews spreading plagues, or Voltaire's or Marx' more philosophical antisemitism which were not based on any religious viewpoints. No one can seriously say that there was no antisemitism in Europe before the 19th century but if you accept this definition, that's pretty much what you are saying.

Muslims have eagerly incorporated not only traditional Christian antisemitism in their everyday discourse (the first Muslim blood libel was in 1840) but also the conspiracy-theory antisemitism of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, modified to explain how weak Jews could have defeated the proud warrior Arabs. But before that infestation of Western-style antisemitism in the Muslim world, it had its own flavor, which is reflected in writings about Jews by Muslims today.

The major qualities of Jews based on the Quran, as described by an Arab professor a few years ago, are:

Jews steal money
Jews use usury to enrich themselves and impoverish non-Jews
Jews don't care about human life
Jews are cowards, hiding behind fortified walls
Jews betray all agreements and covenants
Jews distort words of holy books
Jews are killers of prophets and other fine people
Jews want to extinguish the light of Allah
Jews bring corruption to the lands they are in

There are some variants but the basic list seems to be consistent.

These attributes are a very specific Muslim form of antisemitism. They seem to predate Western influence on Muslim thinking about Jews. None of them fit Cohen's definition of antisemitism.

Redefining antisemitism may make one feel better, but the hate is still there. Antisemitism morphs into ascribing to Jews whatever is considered the biggest evil of the day. Giving it a narrow definition that ignores thousands of years of Jew-hatred does not help matters at all - it obfuscates what it is pretending to illuminate.

(I emailed Professor Cohen to explain his definition a bit better, but he never responded.)

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Palestinian PM Shtayyeh cutting ribbon on new cancer center

Palestinian Authority prime minister Mohamed Shtayyeh, speaking at the opening of the National Center for Diagnosis of Cancer and Genetic Diseases, said "We have 6251 cancer patients, a high percentage compared to neighboring countries, because the Israelis use our land as a landfill...This is a big number, and the main reason is the Israeli occupation's nuclear and chemical waste. We will sue them for this criminal act against the citizens and the land."

This is a complete and utter inversion of the truth.

In reality, the (crude) Palestinian cancer rate is 89 per 100,000 people, far less than the world average of 237 and less than one third the Israeli rate of 316. (The age standardized rates are closer, but still significantly lower for the West Bank and Gaza - 159 - that the world average of 198 and the Israeli ASR of 234.)

Palestinians get cancer at a much lower rate than Israelis. Perhaps they should thank the "occupation!"

Why do Palestinians get cancer? Well, their rate of cigarette smoking among men is 40%, so that would be the obvious explanation - unless you want to politicize your own people's cancer deaths as a weapon against Israel.

Shtayyeh further lies by falsely claiming that Israel dumps nuclear waste in the territories. It doesn't.. At the moment it is buried near the Dimona nuclear plant in Israel. (Syria makes the same false claim against Israel, charging that nuclear waste is buried in the Golan.)

What other world leader, especially one dependent on foreign aid, is able to lie with such impunity?

The Palestinian prime minister is telling the world baldfaced lies about Israel. As usual, no reporter for any major media outlet bothers to check the facts and publicly show him to be a liar. This is the media's job. Yet when it comes to Palestinians, the media abdicates its responsibility in favor of pushing a false narrative about the conflict.

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