Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, January 20, 2020

01/20 Links Pt2: David French: ‘And No One Will Make Them Afraid’; Australia’s ABC News Considers the ‘Case Against Zionism’; From the Alfred Dreyfus Case to the Sara Halimi Case

From Ian:

David French: ‘And No One Will Make Them Afraid’

Wait. Locusts? Now, obviously, those are not Zachary Evans’s words. He does not agree with the sentiment—he’s reporting its existence. And while many people were outraged to see that sentiment in the pages of National Review, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that his editors are not anti-Semites. But it’s extraordinarily jarring to read those words. We overuse the term “dehumanizing” in modern discourse, but a person comparing people to insects is the very definition of dehumanizing. And over what? Zoning disputes? Local elections? Job choices?

Moreover, there’s another key sentence in the article: “There is no indication that [the Jersey City and Monsey attackers] attacked Jewish targets for reasons related to outmigration from New York City to the surrounding region.” So why the extensive focus on the thing that doesn’t seem material to the attacks?

In fact, to the extent that we know the attackers’ motivations, their hatreds ran very, very deep. The Monsey attacker searched the question “Why did Hitler hate the Jews?” One of the Jersey City attackers followed “Black Hebrew Israelite theology,” a fringe belief that, as Evans writes, holds that “African Americans are the true descendants of the ancient Israelites and that Jews are essentially pretenders to the faith.”

As I read Evans’s piece, I had a singular thought: He’s waving away the mountain and focusing on a pebble. He’s missing the ocean for the puddle. People do not launch machete attacks over zoning disputes. They don’t open fire in kosher supermarkets because their new neighbors don’t make good salaries. There might be “simmering local conflicts” over zoning (welcome to America; there are always “simmering local conflicts” over zoning), but none of that is truly relevant to deadly violence.

Australia’s ABC News Considers the ‘Case Against Zionism’

It might be hard for Abu Sita and his ilk to stomach, but the concept of a Jewish nation goes back millennia. The Hebrew term Am Yisrael, meaning the Nation of Israel, is found regularly in ancient Jewish texts.

Abu Sita is so busy condemning Zionism that he cannot bring himself to recognize that anti-Zionism is riddled with antisemitism. Halfway through his piece, he writes that “anti-Zionism from the outset was not antisemitic”. This is a stunning rewriting of history. As long as Zionism has existed, there have always been antisemitic elements present among those objecting to it, and these have elements only become more prominent with time. Abu Sita utterly ignores the antisemitism which riddles anti-Zionism.

Throughout the piece, Abu Sita makes numerous contentious claims. For example: “At the time of the Basel Congress, some 95 percent of the population were Arab Palestinians who owned 99 percent of the land.”

In reality, most of the land was owned by absentee property owners from other parts of the Ottoman Empire. That’s how the Jews managed to buy such a large amount of the land.

ABC Australia Does Journalism a Disservice
The op-ed section of a newspaper or media outlet is often its most vibrant and expressive. A good op-ed supplement will contain pieces from a range of perspectives, and allow writers to compete in the battleground of ideas.

As Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC Australia owes its citizens a platform upon which a wide range of ideas should be aired and discussed. Nevertheless, there should be fair limits as to what can and cannot be published. ABC Australia does journalism a disservice when publishing barely-disguised hate speech.

Pieces which serve to totally delegitimize an entire nation, articles which undermine the right of millions of people to live where they are, do not promote peace and do not deserve a platform in the form of one of a country’s most cherished institutions.

Virulent hatred of this kind has no place on the website of a national broadcaster such as ABC Australia.

The Palestinian delusion

Renowned jihad watcher Robert Spencer's latest book is a sobering look at the impossibility of reaching a lasting agreement with the Arabs living in and out of the only Jewish State.

“From beginning to end, the conflict with Israel is all about Islam,” writes world-renowned jihad watcher Robert Spencer in his latest superlative book, The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process. He documents in detail how jihadists and their allies worldwide have skillfully weaponized an invented Palestinian Arab identity against the Zionist struggle for a Jewish state.

Spencer dissects a decades-old “propaganda success that Josef Goebbels and the editors of Pravda would have envied,” namely the global myth that Palestinians are an “indigenous population.” So declare institutions like the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), while Palestinian leaders fantasize about a “link between the ancient Canaanites or Jebusites and the modern-day Palestinians.” In reality, Roman occupiers in 134 first derived the name Palestine after the “Israelites’ ancient enemies, the Philistines,” in order to eradicate the identity of defeated Jewish rebels. The self-named "Palestinians" descend from the Arabs who invaded in the 7th century.

In subsequent centuries most Jews entered diaspora exile, leaving their ancestral homeland to decay under largely disinterested imperialists such as various Muslim powers following seventh-century Arab conquest. Mark Twain's 1869 travelogue The Innocents Abroad thus states that “Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.” Historian William B. Ziff wrote in 1938 that at the 20th century’s beginning Palestine's 40,000 Jews "and about 140,000 others of all complexions...had no other feeling for this pauperized, diseased-ridden country than a fervent desire to get away."

This wasteland transformed when Zionist Jews, beginning in the 1880s, sought to reestablish a Jewish state. Their regional development investment ironically increased the Arab population which came seeking employment. Particularly the League of Nations Palestine Mandate entrusted to Britain in 1922 as a “Jewish national home” on territory lost by the collapsing Ottoman Empire in World War I witnessed significant Arab immigration.

Israel's Foreign Ministry Arabic social media accounts published photos of the beginning of construction of the Israeli exhibition building at the Dubai Expo 2020.

Arabic news media follow those accounts closely and the news was widely spread.

Hamas read the stories and got very upset.

Spokesman Hazem Qassem issued a statement, "calling on the parties that seek to normalize with the occupier to stop this behavior.

"This (behavior) encourages the occupation to raise the pace of its crime against our Palestinian people and increase its violations against the sanctities of the [Islamic] nation.

"The Zionist entity must remain the central enemy of the nation, maintaining the conflict with it, and facing its policy that aims to undermine all opportunities for the nation's rise and development."

It wasn't that long ago that Hamas or the PLO could issue a statement like this and the Arab world would be shamed into following their demands. Those days are now over, and the Palestinians who have rejected peace for so long as their main tactic, knowing that the Arab world backed them up, have no ideas what to do.

Because actually negotiating in good faith is not imaginable to them.

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It’s cold outside. The rain beats on the windows and thunder rumbles in the distance. Night is approaching and the warm bed beckons with the promise of a cozy embrace.

The closeness of comfort seems so utterly wrong, knowing that he is outside, alone, in the dark, setting off for a night of strenuous effort. He will be carrying one third his own body weight, wet and cold, navigating to the pre-determined point.

He will walk somewhere between 20-30 kilometers (13-18 miles). My drive from home to work every day is 22 kilometers. He will walk further than that, alone, sometimes through the hills, sometimes through villages, as it pours and the ground turns to mud that engulf his boots, sucking him down, making his already heavy load even harder to carry.

By the end of the night he will arrive where he was directed to go. Cold, wet, hungry and exhausted.

And the next day he will do it again.

For a parent few things are as difficult as knowing that your son is alone in the dark, cold and possibly in pain and there is absolutely nothing you can do to help. The little boy you watched grow up is being put through deliberate difficulties so that when war comes (or he has to go on special missions) he will be able to survive.

The little boy who used to come home from school and show you the bruises he got playing soccer with his friends doesn’t show you the bruises he gets now. He might come home limping but he won’t mention it. He just gives you a hug hello and when you ask about his week he says: “It was fine.”

In 1955 David Ben Gurion gave a speech concluding the IDF Officer’s course with the instruction: “Every Jewish mother must know that she put her sons [lives] in the hands of officers who are worthy of that [responsibility].” This is the spirit of the IDF and for the most part it works. You have to trust the officer in charge that their decisions are the best possible to protect the life of your boy but when your son is cold, wet, hungry and exhausted you want to be there. To take care of him.

There are lots of Israelis who do kind things for IDF soldiers but every once in a while there are people who go above and beyond anything you could imagine.

One little lady is known to many as “the mother of the soldiers.” Unlike others who call attention to their good deeds, because they enjoy the limelight and because being noticed helps raise funding for further activities, she shies away from any attention.

She’s a doer, not a talker.

She doesn’t lack anything. She’s not trying to fill a void or even honor someone who passed on. She simply has a heart that expanded beyond the doors of her own home, beyond the members of her family, her children, to include as many soldiers as possible, as if they too were hers.

She wants no attention, no media mentions, no photos, interviews or financial assistance. She’s not part of any organization and she’s certainly not some official institution. When she heard that I am a writer she said: “Oh no! That’s very bad for me!”

She just wants the opportunity to wrap IDF soldiers in a mother’s love – and not just individual soldiers, entire units.

In other countries military training would never be set up so that units could pause to be mothered by a civilian. Israel is different. Soldiers she once took care of become officers who bring their soldiers to her. They schedule training so that, when the area and the timing are right, they bring their unit to her, so that she can take care of them as well.

She waits for them at the break of dawn, knowing full well what they experienced in the night. As they straggle in, she watches their feet, looking to see who is limping. This isn’t the first time the soldiers have ended a training exercise with spreads of food but it is the first time the food wasn’t brought by one/some of their parents or funded by some organization.

It’s the first time a woman they don’t know looks up at them, declaring: “While you are here, I am your mother.” And while they eat hot food, sandwiches and cakes with coffee, tea and cold drinks, she helps them wash the mud off their boots and puts their dirty uniforms in the laundry.

She moves between them, giving each what he needs. She sees so many soldiers she doesn’t remember all their names but she remembers their faces – the soldier who had a cold and she convinced to take medicine, the soldier who lost his phone, the soldier who asked her advice about problems he has at home and on and on.

Wanting to better care for the soldiers who come to her, she revamped part of her property so that dozens of soldiers can sleep there at a time. There are beds, clean sheets, piles of towels, new toothbrushes and mountains of fresh, new socks waiting to be used.

Soldiers always need socks.

She showed me the stock she had ready for the next group scheduled to arrive included bags and bags of neck warmers she had just purchased.: “There aren’t very many coming,” she said, “only 70.”

Stunned I asked: “But how do you do it?! 70? It’s just you, how do you take care of so many?”

Smiling softly, she answered: “The same way you take care of 30” and then she proceeded to show me the extra showers and lavatory she built because what she had wasn’t enough when large groups came to her.

“You know the soldiers love to have hot showers after long, hard training exercises. There’s nothing that pleases me more than looking out the window and seeing steam come up from their showers.” Just like any mother, she finds comfort when the boys are clean and warm, well fed and can relax someplace safe.

And each time she mothers a soldier, she not only takes care of him but she also provides balm for the aching hearts of his parents.

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Just yesterday I reviewed "Harpoon," the account of how Israel was going after terrorists by going after their sources of money, and how lawsuits against banks that paid terrorists were a very effective method of doing exactly that.

Here are excerpts of a Mondoweiss article published just now that shows that this works:

Palestinian community orgs and ex-prisoners say the Arab Bank is closing their accounts

When [Aida Youth Center (AYC)'s Anas Abu Srour] asked why the account was being closed, Abu Srour said he was told it was an “internal policy” decision. “They refused to elaborate more than that,” he said.

The incident with the AYC came just a few days after a class action lawsuit was filed against the Jordan-based Arab Bank by the families of Israeli victims of Palestinian attacks.

The plaintiffs, numbering over a thousand Israelis, are suing the bank for NIS 20 billion ($5.8 billion) in compensation, claiming the bank “knowingly supported and financed terror groups that carried out attacks that claimed hundreds of lives,” the Times of Israel reported in December.

The suit claims that the Arab Bank played an integral role in the attacks, knowingly funding individual Palestinian attackers as well as organized groups.

Mondoweiss learned that the incident with the AYC was not an isolated event, and that in recent months the Arab Bank has reportedly been closing the accounts, or refusing to open new accounts, for other community-based organizations, former Palestinian prisoners, and the families of Palestinians killed by Israelis.

30-year-old Ahmad Salah from the al-Khader village, was recently notified that his application to open up an account with the Arab Bank was denied.

Salah, a former prisoner, wanted to switch from his current bank to the Arab Bank, which has a branch that is closer to his home.

“When I returned two weeks after applying to check on my status, the employee checked my file, and he suddenly became shy, as if he was ashamed,” Salah told Mondoweiss.

The employee asked Salah to take a seat, and his manager would come to explain the situation to him. When the manager arrived, Salah was shocked to hear his answer.

“The manager came and told me ‘we can’t open an account for you because you were in Israeli prison,” Salah recounted. “I asked, ‘what does this have to do with anything?’ This is a Palestinian bank, not an Israeli bank.”

Salah alleges that the manager told him the bank was “having a lot of issues in court with the Israelis,” and due to pressures from the Israeli government, couldn’t “take the risk” of opening an account for someone with his profile.

This is the best article I've ever read at Mondoweiss.

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01/20 Links Pt1: How can the Middle East change?; Shin Bet: We thwarted 560 terror attacks this year; The British soldier who won't stop defending Israel

From Ian:

How can the Middle East change?

The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still widely supported by the international community, despite the fact that neither Israel nor the Palestinians are moving any closer to that solution.

It is unfortunate that the international community is so attached to current borders, even if those borders are unjustly drawn up against the popular will of the people.

Indeed, most of the borders in the Middle East, not to mention Africa, some of Asia and the Americas, were established by the former colonial powers of Europe with little regard for the native inhabitants. People of different ethnicities and religions were forcibly incorporated into new countries like Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

It is also ironic that the European powers imposed most of the Middle East’s current borders without taking into consideration the ethnic and religious makeup of the region, because in Europe itself, following the World War I, they were doing the exact opposite.

After the war ended, the victorious Allied powers decided that there would no longer be multinational empires ruling the continent. Hence, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up and its territory was divided into separate states based on nationality. This is how the current states of Hungary and Austria were born, as well as the former states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

Michael Lumish: An Alternative Solution

What I am considering is more along the lines of Caroline Glick and Martin Sherman. It is one possible answer to Enno's question. Annex Judea - Samaria, up to the Jordan River. Those hillsides above Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are traditional Jewish land. The Arabs, along with others, conquered it, but the Jews are the only extant indigenous people to that land. That is our land and we should not respect the rights of conquerors to steal it from us, particularly within living memory of the Holocaust (Shoah).

There are two major fears concerning the Jewish annexation of Jewish land. The first is demographic and the second is international reaction. What I propose -- with some modesty, thank you -- is that Israel annex Judea - Samaria up to the Jordan. The demographic problem need not be a problem if it is dealt with in a straightforward manner. A reasonable percentage of non-Israelis who live on that land would need to be interviewed. Those who despise Jews would need to move elsewhere. Those who do not express any such hatred would need, just like Jewish citizens of Israel, to do a few years of national service. Those who complete that service with good report should be offered Israeli citizenship.

The international reaction to a Jewish annexation of Jewish land is more complex. Western-Europe, the European Union, the United Nations, and the Democratic Party leadership essentially despise the Jewish people and our state. If Israel were to annex our own land they would throw a fit. But if we fail to do so in coming years than we will never be able to do so and we will remain forever back on our feet. We will always be at the mercy of Europeans who think that persecuting Jews is a matter of "social justice" and Arabs and Muslims who simply want us dead or gone from our own historical homeland.

But if there was any a moment in recent Jewish history to claim our land, now is probably the time. Not only do we have an ally in the White House, but we have greater economic, technological, medical, scientific, and diplomatic reach than in any time in Jewish history.

What I would suggest to my friend, Enno, despite the fact that I am sitting in my perch in northern California, is that perhaps now is the time for bold action.

Shin Bet chief Argaman: We thwarted 560 terror attacks this year

Shin Bet director Nadav Argaman said on Monday that his agency thwarted 560 significant violent attacks this past year, more than 300 of them shooting attacks.

Argaman was speaking at a ceremony to give prizes to top performers in the country's intelligence agencies.

He gave credit to the entire Shin Bet and other agencies for their efforts in nabbing terrorists before they could kill Israeli civilians.
Operatives who participated in six key operations were given awards.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also spoke at the ceremony, emphasizing that Iran remains the country's main threat.

He said that Iran threatens Israel using conventional warfare, and is a potential nuclear threat in the future and via proxy terror groups.
Netanyahu thanked the intelligence agencies for both keeping the Israeli public safe and giving them a relative sense of safety in the midst of a dangerous region.

Tarek Khoury, a member of Jordan's parliament, wrote a Facebook post where he complained about how the US is stopping countries, including Jordan, from trading with Syria. Even countries that have trade agreements with Syria are being pressured not to honor them.

But then he adds a thought about the deal where Jordan is buying natural gas from Israel, saying, "As for the Gas Agreement, all the arguments [against it] come to us from the people of our flesh ...

"Our scourge with the Jews of the inside is more severe than the Jews of the outside."

Khoury seems to be saying that since real Jordanians are all against the gas agreement, the only way it has gone through must be from "Jews on the inside," the people who facilitated it, who are even worse than "Jews on the outside" - in Israel and worldwide.

Whether he means "Jews on the inside" literally or metaphorically, the statement pretty much proves he is an antisemite.

Since the Arab world insists that it is not antisemitic and has no problem with Jews, I'm sure that there will be a huge outrage in Jordan about such blatantly antisemitic statements by a member of Parliament, certainly a censure and a bunch of angry op-eds against such blatant use of the word "Jew" as an insult.

Any day now.

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Iran's official PressTV scoured the depths of US conspiracy theory sites to find a way to possibly blame Israel for Iran's shooting down the Ukraine Airlines Flight 752.

A former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer has raised the possibility of a cyber attack, carried out by the United States and possibly Israel, playing a part in the accidental shoot down of Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 early this month.

“What seems to have been a case of bad judgments and human error does, however, include some elements that have yet to be explained,” Philip Giraldi argued in a recent article published by the American Herald Tribune.

“The Iranian missile operator reportedly experienced considerable ‘jamming’ and the planes transponder switched off and stopped transmitting several minutes before the missiles were launched. There were also problems with the communication network of the air defense command, which may have been related,” the former CIA specialist said.

It should come as no surprise that Girardi is an antisemite and Holocaust denier who also blames Israel for 9/11.

And the transponder stopped working when the first missile hit the plane, so even his theory is complete garbage.

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Historian and scholar Martin Kramer writes in Times of Israel:

Not a year goes by without an attempt by someone to associate the name of Martin Luther King, Jr. with the Palestinian cause. It’s particularly striking because while he lived, no one had much doubt about where he stood. Here, for example, is the late Edward Said, foremost Palestinian thinker of his day, in a 1993 interview:

With the emergence of the civil rights movement in the middle ’60s – and particularly in ’66-’67 – I was very soon turned off by Martin Luther King, who revealed himself to be a tremendous Zionist, and who always used to speak very warmly in support of Israel, particularly in ’67, after the war.

Kramer goes on to show how King was an unabashed Zionist even though today the anti-Israel crowd tries to steal his legacy.

The Edward Said quote is fascinating, though. It seems to indicate that all of the good King did - all of the progress he made towards equal rights for all people - is worthless to Said because of this one position. Never mind that King's position of support for Israel is entirely in line with his support for equal rights for all; after all, King saw the justice of having a Jewish state which in fact allowed Jews to be considered equals with other peoples in the world. But to Said, all of MLK's legacy seems to be worthless because of his Zionism.

Further reading into Said's writings show that this is in fact consistent. He addresses King briefly again in his memoirs, where he says:

Eleanor Roosevelt revolted me in her avid support for the Jewish state; despite her much-vaunted, even advertised, humanity I could never forgive her for her inability to spare the tiniest bit of it for our refugees. The same was true later for Martin Luther King, whom I had genuinely admired but was also unable to fathom (or forgive) for the warmth of his passion for Israel's victory during the 1967 war. (141)

Said didn't just disagree with these icons of human rights. He was revolted by them if they also were sympathetic to Jews and Jewish aspirations to self-determination.

(Roosevelt did visit the Middle East after Israel was reborn, and contrary to Said's words she expressed sympathy for Palestinian refugees, saying the situation in the camps was "dreadful," but she noted that Arab nations did not want to resettle them and wanted to keep them in misery. There is an entire book by an academic in Ireland expanding on Said's hate for Roosevelt.)

Said didn't really care about human rights if he couldn't tie them to the Palestinian cause. The essay, The Politics and Poetics of Exile: Edward Said in Africa by

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza notes that Said was silent altogether in his memoir about the civil rights movement in America:

Said's representation of the United States also remains strangely silent on racism, the country's original and enduring sin rooted in the ravages of European settler colonialism that led to the genocide of the native peoples followed by the enslavement of Africans. ...

He only mentions in passing that at the Princeton of the 1950s "there wasn't a single black" (274), offering no comment as if this were an inconsequential fact for a country then in the throes of the civil rights struggle, which he does not even address.

Edward Said, the leading Palestinian intellectual who came of age on American college campuses during the height of the civil rights movement, did not offer a word of support for the blacks of America struggling for equal rights.

Real human rights champions care about all people. MLK didn't care only about black people's rights, but about all human rights.

But when Palestinians speak about human rights, they are invariably trying to hijack the cause, not promote it. They demand women and blacks in the US include pro-Palestinian agendas in their "resistance" platforms but there is no reciprocity, something that Zeleza mentions about Said:

Support for Israel's aggression against the dispossessed and oppressed Palestinians does indeed deserve censure, but reciprocity is required, in this case in terms of support for African American civil rights struggles, which is noticeably absent in this memoir.

The case of Eleanor Roosevelt is even more stunning. Roosevelt chaired the drafting committee for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - but to Said, her including Jews as deserving of such rights makes her not mistaken but revolting. He is so disgusted by her that he discounts everything else she ever did, doubting her "much-vaunted, even advertised humanity" as if it was a scam and her entire life is defined by her supposed silence on Palestinian Arabs.

Is there anything that describes Palestinian Arab attitudes more accurately than this? Jews, the most persecuted people in history, have always been in the forefront of civil rights movements for everyone. For Palestinian Arabs, however, everything is looked at through the tunnel vision of their exclusive rights to being considered the victim, and other victims are only tools to push their own narrative.

Anyone who doesn't share their view of being the biggest victims is not considered merely wrong. They are the enemy.

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Latest "Apartheid?" poster

Time to get ready for this year's months-long "Israel Apartheid Week" with some new examples of how Israel accepts people of all colors, faiths and backgrounds.

Full story here.

(h/t Irene)

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01/19 Links: PA daily calls for murder to stop Holocaust ceremony in Jerusalem; Bernie Sanders is the American Corbyn… and this isn't good.

From Ian:

PMW: PA daily calls for murder to stop Holocaust ceremony in Jerusalem

“One shot will disrupt the [Holocaust] ceremony and one dead body will cancel the ceremony” – call for murder in op-ed in official PA daily

As over 40 world leaders gather in Jerusalem this week to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz at the event Remembering the Holocaust: Fighting Antisemitism, the Palestinian Authority wants to disrupt the ceremony. The official PA daily published an op-ed yesterday literally calling for murder in order to ruin the ceremony:

“One shot will disrupt the ceremony and one dead body will cancel the ceremony.”
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Jan. 18, 2020]

Before calling for murder, regular PA daily columnist Yahya Rabah criticized the international community for recognizing that the “Jews' Holocaust is terrible” while accepting as “insignificant, beautiful, [and] spectacular” what he called the “Palestinian holocaust by Israel that still continues.” Rabah warned: “It can be assumed that they [Palestinians] will resist the ceremony being held in Jerusalem itself, as Jerusalem is theirs.” His suggested solution to stopping the international ceremony from taking place – and which the official PA daily printed - is murder.

Palestinian Media Watch has reported on Palestinian Authority justification of terror and murder to achieve political goals.

Jonathan Tobin: Holocaust Politics Is Bad for the Jews

Poles suffered more cruelly at the hands of the Nazis than any other occupied country, save the Soviet Union. But while the Poles were horribly persecuted, the fate of the Jews was far worse. Approximately 18 percent of all Poles were killed during the war compared with a mind-boggling 90 percent of all Polish Jews.

But there’s more at stake here than a natural desire on the part of many Jews to express anger about revisionist history. As is true of other Eastern European governments, Poland does not share the antipathy towards Israel that is so common in Western Europe. Promoting warm relations between Israel and Poland isn’t so much a matter of Netanyahu practicing realpolitik but a policy based in the realization that the conflicts of the past should not doom Jews and Poles to conflict in the present and future.

Moreover, the politics behind the decision to exclude the Polish president from the list of Yad Vashem speakers is particularly troubling.

Moshe Kantor, head of the European Jewish Congress, chairs the Yad Vashem event. Kantor is a Jewish philanthropist. But he’s also a Russian business oligarch who is close to Putin. That authoritarian leader is clearly interested in undermining Poland and separating it from allies like Israel. It’s likely that the insult to Poland was orchestrated by Moscow.

Russia is also guilty of its own outrageous revisionism. The invasion of Poland and the start of World War II were made possible by the Soviet-Nazi pact of August 1939, in which the two totalitarian governments divided up their neighbor. But Putin’s foreign ministry has the chutzpah to claim it was the Poles’ fault, and that Stalin was justified in collaborating with the Nazis.

Kantor could have been overruled by Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin, but he failed to heed Netanyahu’s plea to avoid the dispute. The only explanation for that is that Rivlin’s antipathy for Netanyahu and a desire to thwart the prime minister’s policy goal prevailed over common sense. And it has created an incident that hurts Israel and helps no one but Putin. Indeed, the absurdity of the decision is one that has created a rare agreement between columnists from the right-wing Israel Hayom and the left-wing Haaretz.

Poles and Jews shouldn’t be doomed to continued enmity by a shared tragic history. Nor should the interests of Putin or the absurd rivalries of Israeli politics determine how the Holocaust is remembered.

Israel Advocacy Movement: Bernie Sanders is the American Corbyn… and this isn't good.

Bernie Sanders is the American Corbyn… and this isn't good.

You can now support our work on Patreon: https://t.co/ljkZpJWqs7 pic.twitter.com/02LNIB05Ma
— Israel Advocacy Movement (@israel_advocacy) January 19, 2020

Apple’s Siri says Israeli president is ‘President of the Zionist occupation state’

Apple users from around the world were surprised to learn overnight Saturday that Israeli President Reuven Rivlin is the “President of the Zionist occupation state,” according to the giant tech’s vastly popular Siri app.

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After the story broke on social media, angering many people in the process, it was understood that Rivlin’s English Wikipedia page was hacked which caused the unpleasant malfunction.

Siri is a built-in “intelligent assistant” application that enables users of Apple devices to voice commands to the app in order to perform a string of tasks.

When Siri is asked about a public figure, the answer is usually extracted from the person's Wikipedia page. (h/t vwVwwVwv)

Appears to have been fixed in Siri now too pic.twitter.com/XHurR4j1T2
— 𝗠𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗮𝗱 𝗦𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘀𝘁 (@MadMikeOfficial) January 19, 2020

Harpoon: Inside the covert war against terrorism's money masters by Shurat HaDin's Nitsana Dershan-Leitner, published in 2017, is an important chronicle of how Israel, as well as the US, identified the importance of cutting off the money supply to terrorists.

Traditional anti-terrorism methods would follow the operational organization chart of the terror groups, using human and electronic intelligence to find the top people and arrest or kill them. But Israeli intelligence officers in the 1990s realized that when you starve terrorists of their funds, they can't mount any attacks. How to do that is a challenge, though.

The book follows Meir Dagan, legendary head of the Mossad, as he learned the importance of the money trail and became also the head of a task force, codename Harpoon, across Israel's financial, legal and intelligence experts aimed at disrupting and stopping terror financing.

As time went on, several methods emerged of going after the money. Dagan ensured that when Israel went after terrorists during the Second Intifada, they would take all financial records and computers that would allow them to reconstruct the networks of payments and sources.

Another, cruder method was to directly attack sources of money during wartime. Israel bombed banks in Beirut during the 2006 Lebanon War, which meant that Hezbollah couldn't pay their fighters, and - according to the book - Hezbollah asked for a ceasefire when they ran out of money. Similarly, Hamas gave up in the 2014 war after Israel traced a huge cash shipment that was smuggled in through Gaza tunnels to Hamas' main money man, Mohamed el-Ghoul, and blew up his car and all the money.

Also in this category was the spectacular assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, Hamas commander and financier of Hamas rockets, in Dubai. Such acts ensured that any of the accountants and money-men for terror groups would think twice and spend much more time protecting themselves, meaning less time to do damage.

A very effective method, and one that Derahan-Leitner knows well, is using the legal system to sue terror groups and their financial institutions in friendly countries. Some of these break new legal ground, and now banks are much more responsible for keeping track of who they provide services to.

The book's blurbs talk about how it "reads like a thriller." Not really. There are a couple of interesting episodes, though not directly attributed to Israel or the US, where a major Hezbollah financier was convinced to invest in a sure-thing investment in Doha; after seeing astonishing returns he convinced Hezbollah leaders including Hassan Nasrallah to invest a total of about a billion dollars. The company vanished along with their cash.

The sources of terror financing were Islamic charities throughout the world, Iran, the PLO skimming money from aid given to them by Europe and the US to build a state, and a huge criminal enterprise that Hezbollah and Iran set up in Venezuela and Africa (as well as the US) to make money off of illegal drugs, prostitution, cigarette smuggling and the like, and laundering these through purchases of items like cars.

Many of the episodes mentioned in the book were tactical successes but the major money machine from Iran and Hezbollah criminal enterprises continued to churn out huge amounts of cash for terrorists. Mentioned although not stressed in the book are US sanctions against terror groups and their sponsors, mostly Iran. Israel cannot do this alone - it had to lobby the US over years to understand the importance of money for worldwide terror. The current sanctions against Iran are one of the single most important things possible to choke off terror financing in the Middle East.

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Palestinian media are reporting that for the third time this week, Israel opened up some (nonexistent) dams to flood farmland where Gaza farmers planted wheat, barley, legumes and other crops.

Quds News Network, which recently was honored by Google and the news NGOs, said:

Abdellatif Qannou’, a spokesperson for Hamas, said that the Israeli ongoing assaults on farmers and their properties are a crime and a form of the Israeli attacks on the Palestinian people.

Qannou’ added that this is an example of the Israeli barbarism, arrogance, and blatant violation of all humanitarian laws and international norms, which require an international intervention to leash the occupation and end its barbaric policy against our people.

Apparently news awards don't care about things like "truth" as long as the news source attracts youth.

There was severe and deadly flooding in Iran this past week as well. It took days before Iran's president acknowledged the disaster.

I wonder if Israeli dams are powerful enough to flood Iran? Hmmm.

Meanwhile, even the UN says that Israel has nothing to do with the flooding.

Some 235,000 people residing in 39 low-lying areas lacking adequate infrastructure across the Gaza Strip are at risk of flooding during the upcoming winter season due to possible overflow of stormwater facilities and sewage pumping stations, according to estimates by the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Cluster for the oPt. This may expose an already vulnerable population to waterborne diseases, property losses, disruption in access to livelihoods and services, and displacement.

The immediate reasons behind this risk are gaps in maintenance and repairs of the relevant WASH facilities, compounded by the shortage of fuel to operate backup generators during long electricity outages: both factors are driven by significant funding shortages.

In 2019, less than 74 per cent of the amount needed to operate Gaza’s 484 water and sanitation facilities was funded, leaving a critical gap of $18 million.

According to the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU), Gaza’s main provider of water and wastewater services, the running costs of Gaza’s 484 public water and sanitation facilities are US$68 million per year, including staff salaries, fuel, electricity, chemicals and spare parts. In 2019, less than 74 per cent of this amount was funded, leaving a critical gap of $18 million. According to the Palestine Water Law, the main source of funding for the operation and maintenance of these facilities is the recovery of bills from consumers. However, recovery rates in Gaza currently stand at around 20 percent, forcing CMWU to rely primarily on support from international donors, which has significantly declined in 2019.

80% of Gazans aren't paying their utility bills that would keep them safe from disasters like this.

(h/t Irene)

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