Ma'an reports that Israel today allowed five pieces of earth moving equipment into Gaza after four years of refusals.
The equipment is meant to be used by the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility.
The vehicles, valued at $876,350, were purchased in 2015 with funding from the World Bank within the Gaza Water and Sanitation Systems Improvement Project.
The UNDP negotiated with Israel and an agreement was struck where Israel equipped the vehicles with GPS systems to ensure that they are used only on water projects and not for Hamas to dig tunnels.
Whether that control will be effective is anyone's guess. I don't know what would stop Hamas from simply removing the GPS units at night, digging tunnels and then returning the equipment. Drones would see if the vehicles are moving through Gaza, though.
Ironically, the equipment is from Caterpillar, the company that Israel haters want the world to boycott.
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The Israeli colonial state is taking advantage of the 75th anniversary of the Holocaust in Europe during World War II to accuse Palestinians of being anti-semites when in fact it is the Arabs, including the Palestinian people, who are Semites, and they are afflicted by Zionist antisemitism, which the Israeli colonial state implements using the tools of repression for more than seventy years since the Palestinian Nakba in the year 1948 and until this day.
And the Palestinian people, and with them all the Arabs, were and are still more in solidarity with the followers of the Jewish religion, who were subjected to the Holocaust in Europe in the 1940s, and which was led by the Hitler regime for its determination against millions of innocent people in Germany, Poland and other western and eastern European countries. Nevertheless, the Zionist movement, supported by all the evil forces in Europe and America, exploited the Holocaust against the Jews to implement the evacuation project at the expense of the Palestinian people, and the catastrophe of its people by expelling its sons from their motherland Palestine to the exiles, and did not respond to the implementation of the international partition resolution No. 181 issued in November 1947, her crime continued to occupy and control 78% of historic Palestine, and not only did that, but in 1967 it occupied all historic Palestine in addition to the Egyptian Sinai, the Syrian Golan, the Shebaa Farms and the Lebanese village of Ghajar. She claimed on all occasions that she wanted "peace." But in reality, it tore up all the international legitimacy decisions related to the Arab-Zionist conflict, struck the foundations of the peace process references, and worked around the clock to criminalize Palestinian national rights and interests in full view of the world, and closed every horizon to avoid reaching an acceptable and possible political settlement determined by the agreements concluded between them and the leadership of the PLO, which made significant and unprecedented concessions by accepting the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital over the area of land it occupied on June 5, 1967, which equals 22% of the area of Palestine, and less than half of what is guaranteed by the Palestinian state partition resolution.
...[The Palestinians] are Semites, not Khazars, who are the Jews who came from Russia, Central Asia and the countries of Europe and other countries in the world....
One of the important lessons from the Holocaust was not to reproduce the Holocaust against the Semitic Palestinian people....
It is not enough for world leaders to shed tears for the victims of German Nazism, but their duty to shed tears for the victims of Zionism...
This laundry list of lies is the official Palestinian narrative about Jews, Israel and the Holocaust.
Ten years ago Palestinians and Arabs routinely denied the Holocaust in their media. The publicity was bad and they mostly abandoned this argument. Now they are just claiming to be the major victims of the Holocaust, that Jews aren't really Jews, and that they were more supportive of Jews in Europe than Zionists were.
When one lie stops getting traction, there are always ten more that can take its place.
This article was also published in other Arabic newspapers. As always, there is not a single Arab in official media who is publicly disagreeing with the lies.
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The Shakshuka dish is one of the most popular dishes among the people of Israel, and its history goes back to the Jewish immigrants from North Africa, and it consists traditionally of pieces of cooked and spiced tomatoes with boiled eggs🍅🇮🇱
There is nothing inaccurate there - it is talking about how Israel learned about and fell in love with the dish. It doesn't say Israel claims to have invented it.
Roya News showed the post and after going through the supposed history of how Israel stole falafel and hummus, it says, "In the most recent theft of Palestinian and Arab heritage, they stole Shakshuka, and claim it is a Jewish breakfast!"
The Israel Foreign Ministry has certainly hit the jackpot with its Arabic pages. They attract a large audience, many fans, and they make Arabs who complain about it look infantile.
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The sordid history of the May 1939 British White Paper, the notorious document with which the British all but slammed shut the doors of Palestine to European Jewry, has been documented many times. Less-remembered is how the (Jewish-owned) New York Times took British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s side the day after the White Paper was issued, incurring the wrath of Chaim Weizmann and the Zionist leadership. Virtually unknown, however, is that the Polish Jewish community had sent a desperate plea two months earlier to Chamberlain — a telegram begging him to keep the gates of Palestine open.
This is the story of that plea.
Although the dispatch of the telegram was reported at the time, this article apparently marks the first time the document itself is being published.
The missive was discovered after 82 years in a British Colonial Office file; there is no evidence that Chamberlain or anyone in his office discussed it or, indeed, ever even saw it.
By late 1938, the Jewish position in Europe, already precarious in Germany and countries under the threat of German invasion, had worsened dramatically. On September 30 of that year Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement, allowing Hitler to annex the Sudeten areas of Czechoslovakia.
Chamberlain naively believed appeasement would bring “peace in our time,” but in actuality, the opposite occurred — Chamberlain’s weakness emboldened Hitler to launch World War II just 11 months later. By June 1940, Hitler was bombing the civilian population of London.
The Munich Agreement also paved the way for the Holocaust, which began less than six weeks later with the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9, 1938. Thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues were destroyed throughout Nazi Germany. Hundreds of German Jews lost their lives in the overnight orgy of violence, a precursor to the fate awaiting six million other Jews throughout Europe. After Kristallnacht, no one could claim ignorance of Hitler’s intentions toward the Jews.
Whack a mole is a popular game based on a repetitive and futile task. You are faced with numerous holes in the ground and you can never be sure out of which one the mole will appear. Your role is to ‘whack them’ wherever the pesky animals surface. The task is endless.
Most of those who are seriously fighting antisemitism understand this concept perfectly. It is what most of us do. In the real world however, we are not waiting for a mole, but an antisemite. Our ‘holes’ are newspapers, institutions and educational environments such as the BBC, the Labour Party, national unions and on the university campus.
There are dozens if not 100s of skilful, dedicated fighters against antisemitism who have their eyes firmly fixed on the ‘holes’ – waiting for the antisemites to appear. They always do appear – we catch whichever ones we can and the task is endless.
The mole, the hole and the task at hand
This is one of the reasons I rarely publish news of success stories. The research behind this blog has been at the forefront of the battle against antisemitism for years. I have been responsible for countless headlines in every major media outlet in the UK and many abroad. On Saturday it was the Telegraph and yesterday I even made the Bookseller. Many exclusives give credit to my research – some do not. Publicity is never sought for publicity’s sake. The problem is inherent in the game we play – ‘catching an antisemite’ or ‘whacking the mole’ is of limited value if we do not follow through and ensure the hole itself is filled.
Is Pearson a victory?
I can use Pearson Education as the first example. Over the last few days I have received dozens of congratulatory messages over the withdrawal of the Pearson Education book. On the face of it, the story is a success. The Zionist Federation and UKLFI turned to me to with concerns about the bias in a school textbook. They asked me to do a proper analysis, which I did. I was left in no doubt – the textbook carried major historical distortions and many of the usual anti-Zionist messages. It wasn’t just a slight bias – but a rewrite of the historical pillars upon which the conflict was built. I published the report – Pearson went off to conduct a review – and recently announced that the book has indeed been withdrawn. Success claimed – the book is no longer available. Mole duly ‘whacked’.
But look closely at Pearson’s announcement. They claim they found ‘no overall evidence of anti-Israel bias’. This is a lie. I know it is a lie – and I am pretty certain that they know it is a lie. In their own response they claim they need to ‘rebalance’ sources. How can there be no bias if the sources are unbalanced? Might I suggest they invest in lessons in verbal reasoning or logic solving. They can order helpful textbooks from their own warehouse.
None of this matters. Pearson has shareholders and a duty to look after its own credibility. We do not need a public admission that their processes are flawed.
Less than half of the French public, Jews and non-Jews alike, have confidence that the country’s leaders can tackle what is seen as a widespread problem of anti-Semitism in the country, a survey released Monday found.
Nearly three-quarters of the public said that racism against Jews is plaguing all areas of French society, according to the American Jewish Committee’s Paris branch.
“But alignment on the antisemitism threat to French society, and the government’s weak responsiveness, does not mitigate the fears of Jews about their safety and future in France,” the group said in a statement.
Only 47 percent of Jews and 48% of the general public have confidence in French President Emmanuel Macron tackling anti-Semitism, the survey found. The government had the confidence of just 46% of Jews and 41% of the public in dealing with the issue, while local elected official fared better, with 58% of Jews and 56% of the public expressing confidence in their abilities.
Overall, 73% of the French public and 72% of Jews said that anti-Semitism is a problem that affects all of French society.
However, there were significant differences between how Jewish and non-Jewish people felt about the severity of anti-Semitism in the country.
The level of anti-Semitism is high according to 67% of Jewish respondents, while only 47% of the general public agreed. Just 27% of Jews felt the level is low, compared to 22% of the general public.
My series of re-purposing single-panel cartoons continues...
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Now, how many members of IfNotNow bother to learn Yiddish? How many really care about Yiddish culture? The article about YIVO laying off its librarians was just used as an excuse to say that, look, Jews are giving more to an awful Israel than to a vital effort to preserve Yiddish culture.
If you care about Judaism, where should your charity dollars go? What should be your priority?
This Yiddish topic indicates how anti-Zionists think.
The Yiddish that YIVO preserves, and that organizations like the Workman's Circle celebrate and study, is essentially a dead language. For historical and sociological reasons it is nice to study the history of Jews arriving in the US in the 19th and 20th centuries and their media, but outside a tiny number of people who keep it barely breathing there is nothing left.
They are interested in pretending to preserve a culture that exists only in history, one that doesn't affect their lives today. That is the Judaism of the socialist Left.
But there is another Yiddish that is thriving - the Yiddish of the Chassidic communities in New York. They have newspapers, magazines, children's periodicals and books. It doesn't need preservation - Yiddish newspapers have hundreds of pages in an era where secular newspapers are shrinking.
No one in the secular Yiddish community is interested in current Yiddish culture. Because it is the Yiddish of a living, breathing people who are committed to living Yiddishkeit. Even though it is centered on the anti-Zionist Satmar chassidic community, this is not something that the socialist Left wants anything to do with.
Yiddish is the microcosm of how people think of Judaism.
If you care about Judaism, you would want to prioritize Jewish education, Jewish culture, and Jewish living today, not yesterday. Preserving the memory of the Holocaust is important but preserving Judaism today is more important. Living Jews are a higher priority than martyred Jews. Keeping them Jewish and proud should be the project that proud Jews support.
Right now, Israel is where that is happening more than anywhere else. The most innovative and creative Jewish education and cultural initiatives are in Israel. If anything, we need to export their ideas to Jews in the diaspora. American Jews are hanging on, Israeli Jews are thriving. In Israel, Judaism is happening today, not the turn of the 20th century.
There may be exceptions but "progressive" anti-Zionist Jews are more interested in dead Judaism than in Judaism that demands participation, creativity and innovation.
If they cared about Judaism, they would care about Israel.
UPDATE: I received a response that is worth reading.
Elder,
In your recent post, you started off by attacking If Not Now? for pretending to care about Yiddish, and segued straight into attacking those who actually do care about Yiddish.
I don’t get offended easily, but I was surprised to learn that my attitude toward Yiddish is a microcosm of my attitude toward Israel, so that if I study and enjoy Yiddish I am a progressive anti-Zionist, who turns his back on living Jews to hang out with dead ones. I am 69 years old. My father’s first language was Yiddish. I have been studying Yiddish for nine years, mostly in his honor, and have made some progress. He is dead, but he can’t help it, and I try not to hold it against him when we chat, as we do now and then.
As a young man I studied in Israel and learned Hebrew. I speak it much better than I do Yiddish. I am a strong supporter of Israel. Where did you get the idea that loving Yiddish and support for Israel are mutually exclusive? That’s not true among my friends. Nor is it true of Ruth Wisse, the most distinguished, intelligent and humane living Yiddishist. I doubt that you know who she is. I also doubt that you know Yiddish, the language in which your ancestors expressed their Yiddishkeit for a thousand years.
Your view of Yiddish and Yiddishists is both inaccurate and 40 years out of date. Yiddish scholars of today study the living Yiddish of the Hasidim all the time, both as a spoken language and as the basis for a newly emerging journalism and literature. The Yiddish-speaking world is also newly aware that the Yiddishists have created and preserved resources (dictionaries, grammars, immense quantities of Yiddish texts) which they may find useful.
But I have a confession to make. I belong to the League for Yiddish, mostly because I studied with its former head, Sheva Zucker, and she is a friend. I also am a member of YIVO—just before this news broke I sent them $54. And I belong to the Yiddish Book Center That’s about $150/yr. I invest in this appalling dead language, when I could be supporting living Jews. Sorry!
Next time try to think a little before you attack whole classes of Jews about whom you know nothing. This is sin’at khinam. And this isn’t the first time I have encountered this unreasoning hatred among Jews of the handful of us who express our “khibas tsiyon” partly through Yiddish. What harm are we doing you?
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On the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again drew a parallel between the Nazi genocide of Jews and Iran’s nuclear program.
“So we now have the capacity to defend ourselves, and I think the lesson of Auschwitz is: One, stop bad things when they’re small, and Iran is a very bad thing. It’s not that small but it could get a lot bigger with nuclear weapons, and I think the first thing is stop that,” he said in a television interview with TBN.
“And second, understand that the Jews will never ever again be defenseless in the face of those who want to destroy them. These are the two things that I think are important.”
The full interview with the Christian network will be broadcast on Tuesday evening. In a short clip released earlier during the day, the prime minister lamented the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust and stressed that attempts to wipe out the Jewish people have not ceased.
“A third of the Jewish people went up in flames. There was nothing we could do,” he said.
“Now, after the Holocaust and the State of Israel was established, the attempts to destroy the Jewish people have not disappeared,” Netanyahu said. “Iran openly declares every day that it wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. And by the way, Israel has today a population of more than six million Jews.”
In an interview with TBN that airs in full Tuesday night, a preview of which has been released exclusively to The Daily Wire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed President Trump’s decision to target Iran’s top military leader, Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force. The removal of Soleimani, said the Israeli leader, is a “tremendous achievement” that accomplished two key priorities at once.
Asked how Soleimani’s death will “change the Middle East,” Netanyahu told TBN Television Networks President Matthew Crouch that he believes that, first of all, “it sends a message of American determination and American strength — it’s a deterrence, a very powerful one.”
“Secondly, Soleimani himself was the architect and the generator of Iran’s empirical [goals], the Iranian empire,” Netanyahu continued. “Iran is predominantly Shiite. [Soleimani] would go into a neighboring country, say Iraq, and he would find Shiites and would create Shiite militias … manned by Iraqi Shiites but commanded by his own officers, Iranian officers. The same he would do in Syria, same he would do in Yemen.”
“He was beginning to choke the Middle East,” the prime minister stressed. “He wanted to conquer the entire Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula and ultimately destroy Israel. He was beginning to push his forces right next to Israel in Syria — and we responded to them very forcefully, we hit back.”
“But it is important to understand that Iran’s expansion into this horrible empire that brings misery and death to untold numbers of people in the Middle East—by the way, Jews and Arabs alike, Christians Muslims Jews, everyone,” said Netanyahu. “This man was an engine of destruction and conquest and subjugation. And his removal, I think, helps roll back these forces of tyranny.”
The United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), which maintains a buffer zone on the Israeli-Syrian border, issues regular reports of violations by both sides.
In September, it mentioned that Israel reported a projectile being shot at Mount Hermon:
The Israel Defense Forces informed UNDOF that, on 1 June, projectiles had been fired from the Bravo [Syrian] side towards a ski resort on Mount Hermon on the Alpha [Israeli] side. On 2 June, military observers of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) in Observer Group Golan, who are under the operational control of UNDOF, inspected the site, which was about 100 m south of an Israel Defense Forces position, and found a crater and an indication that a projectile had been fired from an east-south-easterly direction.
Israel was also found to violate the cease fire:
The military violations on the Alpha side included the presence of Iron Dome systems and multiple rocket launcher systems within 10 km of the ceasefire line, which are considered unauthorized military equipment in the area of limitation pursuant to the terms of the Disengagement of Forces Agreement.
Iron Dome, which is completely defensive, was called out as a violation.
The US, when writing a memo in support of continuing UNDOF operations in December, noted this jarring fact:
The United States believes UNDOF continues to have a vital role to play in preserving stability between Israel and Syria. We respect and recognize the Mission’s impartiality. This Council should be under no illusion however, that there is any equivalence between the noted violations on the Israeli and Syrian sides.
On November 19, four rockets were fired towards Israel from inside Syria. Those rockets were all intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome system, likely saving the lives of civilian men, women, and children. While UNDOF has flagged Iron Dome emplacements as technical violations of the Disengagement agreement, no comparison should be drawn between these defensive systems and Syrian violations.
Another interesting point from the US about how UNDOF might be affected by President Trump's recognizing the Golan as part of Israel:
Much has been said about President Trump’s announcements earlier this year recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Today’s renewal demonstrates that the United States is committed to the 1974 Disengagement Agreement, and that this announcement in no way undermines UNDOF’s mandate.
(h/t Irene)
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The harvest of resistance in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem enabled the resistance to kill 5 Zionists, injure 153 others, carry out 38 shootings, 30 stabbings and attempted stabbings, 11 car rammings and attempted assassinations, 87 planting of explosives and throwing explosive devices.
7 February 2019 - Ori Ansbacher, 19, of Tekoa, was brutally assaulted and murdered by a Palestinian terrorist while walking in the Ein Yael forest southwest of Jerusalem. 17 March 2019 - Gal Keidan, 19, of Be’er Sheva, a sergeant in the Artillery Corps’, was stabbed and killed in a terror attack at the Ariel Junction. After stabbing him, the Palestinian attacker subsequently stole his weapon before shooting him and two other people in separate locations. 18 March 2019 - Rabbi Achiad Ettinger, 47, father of 12 from the settlement of Eli, was critically wounded while driving past the scene of the terrorist attack at the Ariel Junction in the northern West Bank on Sunday, 17 March 2019. He succumbed to his wounds the following day. 8 August 2019 - Dvir Sorek (19) from the settlement Ofra, a soldier in the IDF Hesder program, was abducted and brutally murdered while returning to his yeshiva from a trip to Jerusalem. His body was found in the early hours of Thursday morning. 23 August 2019 - Rina Shnerb (17), a resident of Lod, was murdered when terrorists detonated an IED device near a popular tourist and recreation site situated near the West Bank settlement of Dolev. Her father and elder brother who were with her were seriously wounded.
This doesn't include the victims of rocket attacks last year:
5 May 2019 - Moshe Agadi, 58, father of four from the city of Ashkelon, was critically wounded while standing outside his house early on Sunday morning (5 May). Magen David Adom paramedics provided emergency medical treatment at the site and immediately evacuated him to Ashkelon’s Barzilai Medical Center, where he was unfortunately pronounced dead on arrival. 5 May 2019 - Ziad Alhamada, 49, father of seven, was critically wounded when a rocket hit the factory where he worked in Ashkelon. The second victim in today’s attacks, he was rushed to hospital but died of his wounds shortly thereafter. 5 May 2019 - Moshe Feder, 68, of Kfar Saba, the third of four victims in today’s attacks, was on his way to his place of work at Kibbutz Erez when his car was struck by an anti-tank missile. He was evacuated to the Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon where he succumbed to his injuries. 5 May 2019 - Pinchas Menachem Prezuazman, 21, of Ashdod, a rabbinical student and member of the ultra-Orthodox Gur sect, was the fourth casualty in today’s attacks. The father of an infant child, he was critically wounded by shrapnel while rushing to a shelter in Ashdod. He was evacuated to a hospital but later died of his wounds. 7 July 2019 - Rivka Jamil (89) of Ashkelon died on Sunday from wounds sustained while running for a bomb shelter during the last round of violence from the Gaza Strip in May 2019. 17 September 2019 - Nina Ganisdanova (74) of Ashkelon succumbed to wounds sustained during a rocket barrage launched from the Gaza Strip which hit her apartment building in Ashkelon on 12 November 2018. Another tenant of the building, Mahmoud Abu Asba (48), a Palestinian father of six from the village of Halhul, north of Hebron in the West Bank, was also killed in the attack.
Hamas commented on the Shin Bet report, saying that it is proof that the Palestinian Authority is disgracefully cooperating with Israel.
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Arabic media is reporting that international BDS movement expressed its strong condemnation and rejection of the participation of Israel in the Dubai International Expo 202
In a statement issued on Monday, the campaign called on all countries and parties participating in the exhibition, which is scheduled to be held in October, to boycott the expo and withdraw from participation. It also called on the United Arab Emirates to refuse to receive the delegation of Israel on its soil and cancel Israel's participation from the exhibition
The campaign said: "The boycott of the Israeli occupation state and confronting the phenomenon of normalization in all its forms is a collective responsibility and a necessity for the struggle in order to deprive the occupation and its institutions of some of the most important tools of its hegemony and control over our society and our capabilities."
Back in the early days of Israel, when the Arab boycott was explicitly against Jews and not Israel, the Arab League expanded the boycott to include boycotting anyone doing business with Israel (the secondary boycott.) No one could have ever imagined that an Arab League state would be the object of such a boycott for its relations with Israel.
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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.
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.
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.
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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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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Dry Bones Golden Oldies in the fond memory of Yaakov Kirschen (Dry Bones)
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One Choice: Fight to Win
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Closing Jews Down Under Website
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With a heavyish heart I am closing down the website after ten years.
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‘Test & Trace’ is a mirage
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Lockdown II thoughts: Day 1 Opposition politicians have been banging on
about the need for a ‘working’ Test & Trace system even more loudly than
the govern...
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
Elder of Ziyon
