Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, February 04, 2020

02/04 Links Pt2: 80 percent of US Jews say they are pro-Israel; Melanie Phillips: Britain is losing the fight against extremism; Israel Comes Full Circle with Sudan

From Ian:

80 percent of US Jews say they are pro-Israel, study finds

The overwhelming majority of American Jews describe themselves as pro-Israel, and similar numbers say their attachment to Israel is as strong or stronger than it was five years ago, according to a new survey.

The poll, conducted for the Ruderman Family Foundation by the Mellman Group on a sample of 2,500 US Jews, found that more than half of the respondents defined themselves as pro-Israel but also critical of Israeli policy.

According to the survey, eight out of 10 Jews identified themselves as “pro-Israel,” and two-thirds (67%) said they were “attached” or “very attached” to Israel on an emotional level.

Additionally, more than 70% of the respondents said their personal relationship with Israel is the same or stronger than it was five years ago.
Although 80% identified as pro-Israel, more than half of American Jews, some 57%, identified as “pro-Israel but also critical of Israeli policy.”

There was a split between those who are critical of “some” policies (28%) and those critical of “many” policies (29%).
Less than a quarter (23%) are “pro-Israel and supportive of the current Israeli government policies.”

Melanie Phillips: Britain is losing the fight against extremism

For the second time in just over two months, terrorism on Britain’s streets has descended into lethal farce. On Sunday Sudesh Amman, an Islamist who had just been released from prison even though he was considered so dangerous that he was being shadowed by armed police officers, seized a knife from a shop in Streatham and stabbed two people before those officers shot him dead.

Last November Usman Khan, an Islamist released from prison 11 months earlier, murdered two people at a conference that he was attending on London Bridge organised by a prisoners’ rehabilitation project.

This provoked much head-shaking about the risks of letting terrorists out of jail too early and accepting too easily that they’d been de-radicalised. Now, some are saying we can’t go on like this.

Easier said than done. For what’s required is a step-change in attitudes which Britain has been unwilling to make.

For all the evidence suggests that de-radicalisation programmes both inside and outside prison are singularly ineffectual. That’s not just because of the chaos in the under-resourced prison and probation system. It’s because of a conceptual error: the belief that the power of reason can be used against fanatics who believe in killing infidels and “martyring” themselves in the name of God, and wear mocked-up bomb-belts to encourage the police to kill them.

Islam’s history features holy war and conquest, punctuated over the centuries by attempts at enlightenment and reformation that were suppressed. So could it be that these charismatic prisoners, who further radicalise other Muslim inmates, are more faithful to Islam than the hapless imams sent in to persuade them of the error of their ways?

MEMRI: Egyptian Liberal: Britain, Which Shelters And Cultivates Islamic Extremists, Shouldn't Be Surprised To Find Itself A Target Of Terror

On February 2, 2020, a 20-year-old named Sudesh Amman perpetrated a stabbing attack in London, injuring three people. Amman had been released from prison several days earlier, after serving three years on terrorism charges. This attack bears a close resemblance to the November 29, 2019 London Bridge attack, perpetrated by Usman Khan, also a released prisoner who had been jailed for involvement in terror.

Following the London Bridge attack, in which two people were killed, Egyptian liberal journalist Khaled Montasser published an article titled "Can a Terrorist Repent." In it, he wrote that terrorists are incapable of repenting since they are motivated by extremist ideas such as a rejection of nation-states, isolation from society and a desire to establish the Islamic Caliphate, and they rejoice at terror attacks perpetrated by Muslims in the West. He accused Europe, and especially Britain, of sheltering and cultivating Islamic extremists, including Salafis and activists of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is supported by Qatar, and allowing them to establish unsupervised schools and religious centers that become "bastions of backwardness" and "incubators of terror and extremism." He therefore urged Europe and Britain to wake up before they are overrun by the extremists and become extinct.

The following are translated excerpts from his article:[1]
"London woke up to a disaster: British police confirm that two people were killed and three were wounded in a stabbing attack against passersby near London Bridge on Friday [November 29, 2019]... The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said: 'We will not let terror threaten our city and our unity... or disrupt our daily lives.'[2]

"I [regret to] inform you, dear Mr. Mayor, that you are deluded. These people will threaten your city whether you like it or not, and take your daily lives back to the stone age if you continue to delude yourself that the scorpion will carry the frog on its back and bring it safely to the shore.

The artist for the grotesque, antisemitic cartoon shown above is Portuguese cartoonist Vasco Gargalo. He has a history of such antisemitic cartoons; he also entered in Holocaust cartoon contests from Iran.

Gargalo received an award entitled "Prix Plumes libres pour la démocratie" from the magazine "Courrier International" and the City of Strasbourg last November.

Gargalo has quite an oeuvre.

Even an Israeli winning Eurovision was too much for him to stomach. Because all Israeli Jews are evil and they must not win international competitions.

Yeah, he's an antisemite.

The president of B'nai Brith France, Phillipe Meyer reacted by calling the award an "aberration, provocation, infamy." As soon as this was publicized last week there were other strong condemnations.

Finally, the magazine and City of Strasbourg withdrew the reward, calling the Nazi cartoon above "heinous" and saying that had they known about the cartoons, they would never have awarded the prize.

(h/t Tomer Ilan)

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Cratersky, a Yemeni news site, says that it has the solution to the Middle East conflict:

Ethnically cleanse the Jews from the region and send them all to Birobidzhan, the Soviet Union's old "Jewish Autonomous Oblast" in far-eastern Russia on the Chinese border.

The writer, Mansour Al-Alhi, helpfully adds that the thousand Jews who still live there from the old days already speak the language of the Jews - Yiddish.

In case you aren't 100% certain that a plan to expel all Jews from the Middle East is antisemitic, Al-Alhi also says, "And the American pig and the Israeli monkey must think about a just plan to deport their Jews from the Arab lands in peace before they are deported by the sword."

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02/04 Links Pt1: The U.S. Peace Plan: A Return to the Rabin Doctrine of Defensible Borders; PA official: Whoever accepts Trump’s peace plan - "the filth of the century"

From Ian:

Einat Wilf: How Trump's peace plan can strengthen Arab-Israeli relations

There is growing evidence of decreased willingness to place the Palestinian cause above domestic Arab interests. Voices that in the past would have never been heard in the Arab world now appear on local Arab television and social media, questioning why their countries continue to hitch their wagons to the Palestinians, who are prone to rejecting compromise. In some cases, these voices even express open support for Israel.

In the past, Palestinians could generally count on the Arab countries — not just to openly fight wars for their cause, as they did in 1948 and 1967, but to stand firmly behind them, accepting what the Palestinians accept and rejecting what the Palestinians reject. This is no longer the case.

So although the Palestinians were still able to rally the Arab League — a group of Arab countries, which is already a shadow of its former powerful self — to join in their rejection of Trump’s plan, their isolation in the Arab world is growing more apparent.

This is the most important aspect, and the greatest news, to come out of the plan’s introduction. Not only does the plan reflect the political preferences of the vast majority of Israel’s Jews — with the Likud, Blue and White and Israel Beiteinu parties endorsing the plan — but it has been cautiously welcomed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar as at least a legitimate basis for negotiations.

It also makes vital regional cooperation more likely to continue and strengthen over time.

Israel, for its part, must endorse and adopt the plan in its entirety if it is to serve as a framework that enables the Gulf countries to pursue ever closer cooperation with Israel. It is crucial that even if Israel ultimately annexes the territory designated for Israel in the plan, it does so while making it clear that the remaining territory, assigned in the plan to a Palestinian state, would not be annexed and will be kept for a future Palestinian state.

It is tempting to ridicule the American president’s vision, but the plan does offer the prospect of greater peace and prosperity for Israel — at least in relation to those in the greater Arab world that accepts its presence. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

Barry Shaw: Basic Middle East facts

The Middle East is characterized by the following 14-century-old intra-Muslim features which can be summed up as:

No intra-Muslim peaceful coexistence, but constant unpredictability, instability, religious and ethnic fragmentation, violent intolerance, terrorism, subversion, and a drive to fulfill Islam-driven goals including the unacceptance of an “infidel” entity in the “abode of Islam.”

Most of the Middle East is not driven by a desire to improve its standard of living, but by religious/ideological visions.

Western imposed concessions, appeasement and gestures actually embolden them to more aggression and terrorism.

The assumption that a Palestinian Arab state could be effectively demilitarized and de-terrorized should be assessed against the track record of the Palestinian Arabs themselves.

The 1993 Oslo Accord and the 2005 Gaza Disengagement were supposed to demilitarize and de-terrorize the Palestinians in return for dramatically enhanced political and economic benefits. Instead, both events intensified terrorism in a dramatic manner.

A direct correlation exists between the degree of Palestinian Arab sovereignty and the level of Palestinian terrorism. For example, in 1968-70, Jordan provided the Palestinian Arabs with an unprecedented platform of operation. Consequently, they triggered a civil war, attempting to topple the pro-US Hashemite regime.

Noah Rothman: You’re Going to Be Hearing a Lot More About Syria Soon

At the end of 2019, just after the Trump administration announced withdrawal from Syria, Operation Inherent Resolve’s commanders estimated that ISIS maintained only about 2,000 fighters in the Middle Euphrates River Valley. But while ISIS-backed attacks on coalition positions continued and anti-ISIS airstrikes were ongoing, this paltry force was “not enough” to make “significant or lasting gains.” The balance has since shifted in this terrorist organization’s favor.

Last week, the United Nations Security Council revealed that ISIS is reconstituting itself under new leadership. The group has again begun mounting “bold insurgent attacks” against both Western and Syrian government positions in Iraq and Syria’s poorly policed border areas. The UN mission’s findings dovetail with the assessment of U.S. Special Representative for Syria Ambassador James Jeffrey, who painted a similarly grim picture on January 30. “[W]e are seeing ISIS come back as an insurgency, as a terrorist operation, with some 14- to 18,000 terrorists between Syria and Iraq,” he told reporters at the State Department. With thousands of new fighters and an estimated $100 million in the bank, ISIS has begun retaking control of territory that once briefly constituted the Islamic State caliphate.

American voters have never been fond of U.S. obligations in Syria, but why would they be? When confronting the threats brooding in that near-lawless state, U.S. lawmakers have routinely led with the reasons why America should not engage in this contest. From Barack Obama’s September 10, 2013, primetime address to Donald Trump’s October 2019 tweets disparaging the American mission, the public is routinely bombarded with the reasons why America, the world’s only superpower, must avoid the Syrian entanglement.

It’s no wonder those voters might be confused as to why those same policymakers have subordinated their objections to the imperative of defending U.S. interests in Syria. America’s political class has never had enough faith in the voting public to level with them about what’s at stake. But Western interests in Syria did not cease to exist. Indeed, those interests seem increasingly imperiled by unabated violence and political chaos in the Levant. If Syria’s trajectory continues along its present course, Americans are going to be hearing a lot more about it. And soon.

1934 survey of Palestine showed how Jews helped Arabs; Arabs flocked to live near Jewish areas

I had seen similar reports but this specific one is new to me.

It shows that Arabs flocked to Palestine because of Jewish economic success, and that there was essentially no negative effects of Jewish immigration.

Arab villages near Jewish population centers were shown to have improved in every way compared to the villages further away, which looked as they were a hundred years beforehand.

Similarly, Arab houses near Jewish communities went up in value, those further away lost value.

Some of it is a little hard to read, and most of it was not digitized.

From JTA, January 31, 1934:

The rest of it is in the JTA digital archives:

The beneficial effect of Jewish immigration is reflected not only in modernized Arab agriculture, but also in a remarkable expansion of Arab urban settlements. The 1931 government census shows a great increase in Arab population in the cities, with a resulting rise in building, commericial and industrial activities. On the other hand, in Arab centers removed from Jewish influence real estate and improvements have shrunk in value.

ARABS SWARM HOLY LAND“The most convincing proof of the economic improvement experienced by the Arabs is the fact that formerly thousands of Arabs emigrated annually. Today Arab immigrants are drawn to Palestine from other countries. Between the censuses of 1922 and 1931 the Arab population grew by 225,000, or forty percent. A further illustration is the sharp reduction in the number of nomadic Arabs. These inveterate wanderers of the desert cannot resist the powerful attraction of the thriving urban and rural settlements where the opportunities for labor are, due to Jewish enterprise, plentiful.

“Moreover, the benefits from Jewish immigration are not exclusively of an economic nature. Practically the entire government appropriation for education goes toward the maintenance of Arab schools. The Jews support their educational system from private funds. As a result illiteracy is disappearing among the Arabs. Of even greater benefit to the Arabs have been the Jewish medical services. The prevalence of trachoma, malaria, enteric diseases and typhoid has shown a steady decline in the last decade.

A LABOR SHORTAGE“Not only is Jewish immigration being speedily absorbed, but there is a shortage of labor, both Arab and Jewish necessitating the importation of Jewish immigration has resulted in an increase of the number of Arab industrial workers. From 1924 to 1928 their numbers rose by about 6,000, of whom 2,000 were employed in Jewish enterprises, representing twenty percent of the employees of Jewish capital, while the Arabs employ practically no Jews.”

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Who says Palestinians are inherently violent? Palestinians! (and their "allies")

I was struck by this paragraph in a Vox article by an American of Palestinian descent, Hanna Alshaikh, whining about the "Peace to Prosperity" plan:

To hear Trump’s condescending, hateful remarks that promulgate a narrative that Palestinians are inherently violent and will only change if the United States and Israel unlock their “extraordinary potential” is insulting.

Here's is where Trump uses the term "extraordinary potential:"

During my trip to Israel, I also met with Palestinian President Abbas in Bethlehem. I was saddened by the fate of the Palestinian people. They deserve a far better life. They deserve the chance to achieve their extraordinary potential. Palestinians have been trapped in a cycle of terrorism, poverty, and violence, exploited by those seeking to use them as pawns to advance terrorism and extremism.

Is that condescending - or accurate?

Any unbiased reading of Trump's words show that he is saying that Palestinian Arabs are caught in a terrible situation not of their own making, but by their leaders.

The idea that Palestinians are inherently violent is not part of Trump's speech.

It is part of the Palestinian narrative itself. And it is a major part of the narrative of supposed "friends" of Palestinians.

After all, the very logo of the Fatah movement shows an automatic weapon, a rifle and a hand grenade (besides a map of "Palestine" that excludes all of Israel and the word "storm" in large letters:)

Palestinian heroes are terrorists like Dalal Mughrabi - people who have schools named after them.

Palestinian children learn from birth how wonderful "martyrdom" is. Official Palestinian TV hammers home the theme of children sacrificing themselves to kill Jews.

Supposed "friends" of Palestinians also tell the world that Palestinians are expected to be violent when something happens that they don't like. Here's an example from yesterday, but there are hundreds of examples of leftist and liberal Europeans and Americans and fellow Arabs who "warn" that Israel or the US cannot do something because it will result in Palestinian violence and terror.

But the most ironic example of all is that the author Hanna Alshaikh herself:

Coming of age in the Oslo era, I saw how these so-called “peace” plans only paid lip service to Palestinian self-determination without addressing the core problems of their suffering, and how their failure usually ended in victim-blaming — which Trump and his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, the architect of the administration’s grand plan, have regurgitated.

What followed was the Second Intifada, or “uprising,” a reaction to the world’s indifference to their struggle and the futility of plans like Oslo. Watching the news as a child, images of the ensuing violence were seared in my memory, offering my generation’s Palestinian diaspora a visualization of what we are up against as a people.

It was the first time many of us understood what it meant to be Palestinian: our love for each other, our love for freedom, and our grief over the loss of our compatriots, of futures stolen from our youth, the trauma we see in the eyes of our parents and grandparents.

Alshaikh is romanticizing the suicide bombs, the Jewish body parts hurled over the streets of Israel, the pizza shop and Passover seder and discotheque bombings, as a critical part of her own Palestinian identity!

Her love of violence is a part of her very identity as a Palestinian!

The only people who say that Palestinians have free choice to reject violence are the Israelis and the pro-Israel voices like Donald Trump's. The bitter irony is that the people that Palestinian voices consider condescending and hateful are the only ones who can articulate a vision of Palestinians who reject violence as part of their culture and who can live with Israelis not as enemies but as friends, eventually.

Such a vision would require authentic Palestinian Arab voices to be heard. The people who interact with Israeli Jews (sadly, since the first intifada, this only happens in very limited situations.) The majority of Palestinians who are disgusted by their leadership and their unwillingness to even consider real peace. The ones who look over the border and see their fellow Arabs in Israel prosper as doctors, pharmacists and high tech workers, working together with Jews every day.

The Palestinian Authority has been working hard to silence the voices of Palestinians who truly want peace. So have self-appointed spokespeople for Palestinians like Hanna Alshaikh. And they have been largely successful.

I'm sad that the village that Alshaikh's grandparents lived in, near the 1949 armistice lines, was torn down in 1967. There are two sides to the story - it was done to allow Israeli Jews to have safe passage to Jerusalem without fear of Arab ambushes. Alshaikh and her Palestinian compatriots are not interested in the world knowing that there are legitimate Israeli security concerns as well. The topic is worthy of debate, not a one-sided condemnation.

People who want peace listen to the other side's perspective. Unfortunately, for the most part the Palestinian side simply wants to spout propaganda about how evil Israel is, not to actually engage in dialogue for peace. (Look for a single pro-Israel or anti-Abbas op-ed in any Palestinian media in the West Bank, and compare with the op-eds that are pro-Palestinian in Israeli media.)

In the end it is Israel that wants peace, and the Palestinians who are indoctrinated into a mindset of conquering Israel. This article proves it yet again. Until the Palestinians who truly want peace and dialogue are empowered - which is one major component of the Peace to Prosperity plan - people like Alshaikh will do everything they can to thwart peace, and to justify their rejectionism with high-sounding principles.

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It was a REALLY bad day for Palestinian leaders, with news from Uganda to Sudan to a video of Palestinian girls dancing with IDF soldiers (updated)

Monday was a really bad day for Palestinian leaders.

Not only did Netanyahu meet with Ugandan leaders and it appears that Israel and Uganda will establish diplomatic relations, Uganda's president said he would consider opening up his embassy in Jerusalem if/when it happens.

Saeb Erekat denounced the idea of a Jerusalem embassy.

Then, Bibi met with the president of Sudan, which is a huge shift for Sudan.

Erekat said the meeting was a "stab in the back" for Palestinians. Fatah's Jibril Rajoub condemned the meeting.

Then there was news that Israel is trying to strike a deal to establish diplomatic relations with Morocco.

But perhaps the worst was this event.

Edy Cohen, an Israeli journalist, upset many Arabs by posting a video of what he said was Palestinian girls dancing with IDF soldiers.

His tweet, in Arabic, said, "What makes me laugh the most is that the Palestinians dance with us in bars at night, and in the day they fool the (rest of the) Arabs, saying “You sold (out) the (Palestinian) cause, where are the millions (of Arabs coming to aid the Palestinians)?”

The song being played (probably overdubbed) includes lyrics like, "“Where are the Arab people?”, “Where are the millions?”, “Where is the Arab anger?”, “Where is the Arab honor?”“The sons of whores are relaxing while millions are miserable, there is a submachine gun in my heart that asks ‘Where are my (Arab) brothers’?” It is a song accusing Arabs of leaving the Palestinians in the lurch.

Among the people upset over this video was Prince Abdul Rahman bin Mosaed bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who said it wasn't funny, adding "The question of the Palestinians is our cause and you are an occupier of the state of Palestine and our position will not change from your insults or obscene scenes from some misleaders or haters of Palestinians."

It is one thing for Palestinians to see Arab countries act in their own self-interest and align themselves with Israel. But to see their own daughters dance with the hated IDF?

That must really sting.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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02/03 Links Pt2: #WeRemember: So should our journalists; Rise of far Right not the main source of antisemitism in Europe; Corbyn’s place in the history of antisemitism

From Ian:

‘#WeRemember: So should our journalists’

The leaders of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against Israel make clear that their purpose is not peaceful change but the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state, based on a double standard they do not apply to any other country. This squarely fits the international definition of antisemitism. Yet when reporting on BDS-related events, mainstream journalists rarely include this critical context, misleadingly casting the group as a peaceful protest movement.

When Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was denied entry to Israel in August 2019, most media painted her as a mainstream Democrat who happens to be critical of Israel, and omitted essential context: Just months earlier her own party had led the passage of House Resolution 241, “Condemning the antisemitic comments of Representative Ilhan Omar from Minnesota.”

Most media have been reasonably effective in providing context about the neo-Nazi and white supremacist backgrounds behind California synagogue shooter Robert Brewer and Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers, yet most failed to disclose that David N. Anderson, who shot and killed shoppers at a New Jersey kosher deli last month, was apparently inspired by recordings of the antisemitic preacher Louis Farrakhan.

Is it then any surprise that during this week’s ceremonies the BBC’s Orla Guerin equated Israel with Nazi Germany while reporting from Yad Vashem, Israel’s own Holocaust museum?

It is both the beauty and burden of the free world that hate preachers like Farrakhan, extremist organizations like the neo-Nazi and BDS movements, and fringe politicians like Ilhan Omar, have a right to express antisemitic views, as long as they don’t cross the line into the very specifically defined legal categories of incitement or defamation. However, the public should never mistake such hateful extremists for being “mainstream” or “reasonable,” and the free press has a professional duty to provide this context.

The late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis beautifully expressed the American philosophy: “To expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

In a healthy society, free speech cannot stand on its own, but demands even more free speech in the form of context, fact-checking and rebuttals. The result is that our safety as a society depends not only on politicians, judges and police, but also on the ethics and professionalism of our journalists.

Jeremy Corbyn’s place in the history of antisemitism

FARRAKHAN echoed Nazi language when he used the word “termites” to describe Jews. Farrakhan has said that “satanic Jews had infected the modern world with poison and deceit.” He has called Jews “poisoners and absolute evil.”

One only has to put these statements next to the most common definition of antisemitism – that of the International Holocaust Remembrance (IHRA) – to understand that Farrakhan is an antisemite. One can do the same with British politicians who are (part-time) antisemites such as George Galloway and Lady Tonge.

Doing so with statements and acts of Corbyn doesn’t get us very far. His antisemitism is greatly different, yet far more important than Farrakhan’s in view of the position he holds. That the act of calling two Arab movements which aim to commit genocide against Jews his “brothers” and “friends” is hugely antisemitic requires little explanation. Yet none of the definitions of antisemitism includes explicitly such extreme cases.

Upon becoming Labour chairman, Corbyn almost immediately appointed the Hamas supporter Seumas Milne as executive director of strategy and communications. His leadership led rapidly to an explosion of antisemitic statements by various elected party officials.

Corbyn nominally condemned antisemitism, yet Labour greatly underperformed in dealing with the complaints about it. From a BBC Panorama program one learned that he and his immediate staff even protected people who had made antisemitic remarks.

In order to understand Corbyn’s huge contribution to the contemporary history of antisemitism, one has to comprehend a basic issue about current times that are known as “post-modernity.” In it, many themes have fragmented in a multitude of tiny parts.

So has antisemitism. To define Corbyn’s antisemitism one can best say that he is a major post-modern antisemite, which expresses itself through many diverse acts and statements. Scholars of antisemitism will have to familiarize themselves with this new concept as it is recurring.

Corbyn’s indirect antisemitic impact is far larger than seems from the above. Telegraph columnist Zoe Strimpel, who is Jewish, recently wrote about the British chattering classes, “What no dinner party-attending Jewish person can now avoid noticing is that at elite social gatherings in Britain and the US, dressing up brazen antisemitism as a form of political morality has become cool, acceptable and easy.” Jeremy Corbyn is indirectly to a substantial extent at the origins of this disastrous development in the UK.

Stand With Us: Rabbi Sacks Speaking Out on Antisemitism

Rabbi Sacks Speaking Out on Antisemitism - We were thrilled to receive and screen this video message from the much-respected former British Chief Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks at our International Conference.

Rise of far Right not the main source of antisemitism in Europe – study

The rise of the far Right in Western Europe is not the primary source of antisemitism in the region in recent years, a study from the World Zionist Organization’s Institute for Zionist Strategies found.

“The rise of the extreme right and antisemitism: Three European case studies” focuses on France, England and Germany, which have the largest Jewish populations on the continent, examining whether there is a correlation between the deterioration in those communities’ security and the rise of far-right parties.

The Institute for Zionist Strategies is a nonpartisan research institution dedicated to preserving Israel as a Jewish and democratic state in the spirit of Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

Researcher Nicolas Nisim Touboul studied two variables in each country: the electoral growth of right-wing parties, and the trends in levels of antisemitism.

There were several notable attacks in France in the past decade, including the murder of a teacher and three pupils at the Otzar HaTorah school in Toulouse in 2012 and the murder of four in the attack on the Hyper Cacher supermarket in Paris in 2015. However, there was no clear trend of rising antisemitism in that time, with spikes in some years and a decrease in others. In 2003-2010, there were an average of 560 antisemitic incidents per year, and in 2011-2019 there were 444, according to official French records.

In 2011, Marine Le Pen won the leadership of the far-right National Front and it subsequently grew in electoral power. Touboul noted that the party rejected antisemitism, which “can be suspected to be a strategic decision to normalize the party,” but was serious enough that Le Pen expelled officials who made antisemitic statements, including her father, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Spikes in antisemitism in France mostly coincided with Israeli military operations. For example, 29% of violent antisemitic incidents in 2009 happened in January, during Operation Cast Lead, and 24% of them in 2014 were in July, during Operation Protective Edge.

Overall, the report found that increases in antisemitic violence were more likely to be motivated by anti-Israel sentiment or radical Islam than far-right views in France over the last decade.

Global Antisemitism on the Rise: New York is Taking a Stand

Egypt claims tunnel to Gaza used by ISIS for Sinai attacks

Egyptian security forces announced the discovery of a smuggling tunnel from Gaza to the heart of Egyptian Rafah.

The tunnel was about 3 kilometers long.

Egyptian security sources said, "The tunnel is intended for infiltration of terrorist elements from the Gaza Strip to plant improvised explosive devices on the Egyptian side and to support terrorist elements supporting the ISIS organization in Sinai and transport weapons and explosives."

Egypt says it seized ammunition and explosives inside the tunnel.

Egypt has claimed that Gaza elements, almost certainly with Hamas' knowledge, are supporting ISIS attacks in the Sinai. Hamas strenuously denies any involvement, and it would be a fairly stupid thing for Hamas to do. So it is hard to know how much to believe the Egyptians, although if they recovered weapons in the tunnel, it it better to destroy it no matter whether they were being smuggled into Gaza or out of Gaza.

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Abbas rejecting the Triangle is more proof his goal is the end of Israel

One of the stranger aspects of the Peace to Prosperity plan was where it floated the suggestion that the Israeli Arab communities in the so-called "Triangle" section of central Israel could be transferred to Palestinian control.

The residents of the Triangle rejected the idea immediately. And so did Netanyahu's office.

But the response from Mahmoud Abbas is worth examining. He rejected it as well, saying "We know the purpose of this proposal and we will not accept it."

If Abbas wants a viable Palestinian state, why would he reject the lands and "Palestinians" that would come with it, taking away land from Israel?

The reason is the same reason he insists that the "Right of Return" is part of any agreement. He wants Israel to become more than 50% Arab so the Jewish state can die and be replaced with another Palestinian state.

The welfare and strength of his own state is not a concern for him. Abbas is not a leader of a state in waiting - a leader would do what was best for his people. To Abbas, and virtually all of the leaders of the Palestinian Arabs in history, every single decision must conform with one rule: that it can eventually lead to the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

There is no other justification for Abbas to reject an offer of highly educated and trained Arabs, along with their land.

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02/03 Links Pt1: The New York Times Dreads Peace; Why even the Israeli Left has embraced Trump's peace plan; Israel-Sudan ties on the agenda for Netanyahu’s Uganda visit

From Ian:

Rock, Paper, Scissors in the Middle East

On the Israel front, Trump nullified the 1967 lines, the cornerstone of the Arab rejectionist position that Obama had attempted to enshrine in UNSCR 2334. He did this by moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, and then by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The latter move eliminated the 1967 framework altogether with regard to Syria and Lebanon. As far as the United States is concerned, there are no more disputed territories: The land is Israel’s.

The current plan extends that same approach to the Jordan Valley, in addition to existing settlements. “If the State of Israel withdrew from the Jordan Valley, it would have significant implications for regional security in the Middle East,” the president’s vision states, expressing a positive desire for Israel to remain there. An extension of Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley would therefore serve U.S. regional security interests. Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates’ acceptance of the Trump plan as the basis for any future talks between Israel and the Palestinians indicates that the United States’ regional allies have accepted the president’s nullification of the 1967 lines framework. The significance of this is that the Saudis and the Emiratis have accepted that the starting point for any movement going forward is not the so-called Arab Peace Initiative, which the Saudis originally sponsored almost 20 years ago, and which has subsequently been loaded with additional rigid language, especially regarding the so-called right of return for Palestinian refugees, by rejectionists led by the Assad regime. The Trump peace plan is the new starting point.

The truth is, none of these frameworks matter anymore. Trump has made it clear that he is not bound by the fantasies of previous American peace processors—who today show contempt for the president’s plan even as they admit their own decades-long failure. Trump’s deal is designed to underscore Israel’s special relationship with the United States—and it slams shut the rusty gates of the peace processing factory for good. It doesn’t much matter how the Palestinians respond. The American position is not dependent on the outcome of future negotiations.

Israel’s political class now has a clear window in which to determine its own fate. Israel can then live with the consequences of its own choices.

The two-step solution

Let us imagine that Jordan changes its mind and agrees to become the Palestinian state in place of the one that fails to materialize pursuant to the Deal of the Century. This change of mind can come about either through the King's agreement or by his giving over the reins of leadersihp to someone who will.

Were this to happen, all Palestinian Arabs in both sides of the Jordan R. would become full Jordanian citizens. without restrictions. The two roads connecting the proposed “state” to Jordan would be completed facilitating transportation between the Palestinian Arabs on both sides of the Jordan R.

Jordan would take over the administration of Areas A and B and Gaza in place of the PA and Hamas. Jordan would also fulfill the role of UNRWA in providing education, welfare and health care to all the current day refugees.

Rather than build the tunnel connecting Gaza to the rest of the “state”, pursuant to the vision, at a cost exceeding $15 Billion, Jordan can invite all residents of Gaza and Judea and Samaria (aka West Bank) to relocate to Jordan to receive these benefits. Also immigrants could be offered free housing in Jordan with international aid to sweeten the deal. It is not too far-fetched to believe that 2 million Arabs living in these areas could be incentivized to relocate to Jordan which is only 100 miles away or to any other country prepared to accept them.

It would not be necessary for Israel to give up any parts of its territory.

Israel would extend its law to all the lands west of the Jordan R including Gaza and the Arabs would become foreign residents in Israel with Jordanian citizenship.

The $50 Billion pledge in support of this vision could be provided to Jordan to enable it to become the home for all Palestinian Arabs and to provide them with jobs, education and healthcare.

Instead of investing in industrial parks in Area C in Israel to benefit the Arabs as proposed by Min Bennett and PM Netanyahu, these zones will rightly be created in Jordan thereby incentivizing Arabs to emigrate to Jordan.

This is a two step solution.

The first step is to change the vision as above set out.

The second step is to make Jordan, Palestine.

The New York Times Dreads Peace

When President Donald Trump’s peace plan was released, assuring Israel of sovereignty along the Jordan River, the security of settlements in Biblical Judea and Samaria, and the entirety of Jerusalem including the Old City under Israeli jurisdiction, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (and Israelis in general) had every reason to exult.

But The New York Times had every reason to lament. Reporter Megan Specia, a story editor based in New York with little evident familiarity with the Middle East, Israel, or Palestinians, reported on the plan and its deficiencies (January 29). Her conclusion, that the proposal “strongly favors Israeli priorities,” is indisputable, as is her perception that it is “a sharp departure from decades of American policy.”

Worst of all, as the Times has repeatedly complained, “is American recognition of Israel’s claim over the Jordan Valley and all Jewish settlements in the West Bank.” After all, she writes in an endlessly reiterated Times cliché, “Most of the world regards the settlements as illegal.” They have “steadily encroached” on land, by implication, that is Palestinian — unidentified by Specia as the Biblical homeland of the Jewish people.

In their familiar duet of complaints about Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu and settlements, Jerusalem Bureau Chief David Halbfinger and his colleague Isabel Kershner sadly concluded that a viable Palestinian state is now “quickly slipping away.” Rather than focus on the decades of Palestinian intransigence that have obstructed that possibility, they predictably (for the Times) blamed President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu for imposing their will on beleaguered Palestinians. President Mahmoud Abbas, they suggested, should “try to weather the storm” in the hope that Trump and Netanyahu will be defeated in forthcoming elections. That is also the Times’ endlessly reiterated hope.

The Times drumbeat continued. On the Opinion page, Nathan Thrall, widely praised for his plea (in The Only Language They Understand) to force compromise on Israel and the Palestinians, offered his own laceration of the Trump plan. It “gives Israel cover to perpetuate the status quo of occupation and sovereignty,” he complained, thereby “depriving millions of stateless people of basic civil rights and dispossessing them of their land.”

Thrall, clearly not enthralled by Zionism or Israel, refers to an “indigenous Palestinian population” whose rights to the Biblical Land of Israel have been ignored. He does not acknowledge that this “indigenous Palestinian population” did not assertively define itself in national terms until after the Six Day War in 1967, when the Jordanian land on the West Bank where they lived was returned to the Jewish people. He is convinced, without offering a shred of evidence or confronting evidence to the contrary, that Israel “illegally established settlements” in Biblical Judea and Samaria.

When the NYT says that Abu Mazen's life work has been to forge a peaceful 2 state solution with Israel do you think they're including his graduate school work blaming Jews for the Holocaust, his fundraising for the Munich massacre, & his decades working for terrorist PLO? pic.twitter.com/qnsQ0JevuE
— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) February 2, 2020

The "Peace to Prosperity" plan was doomed from the start. But it has, and will continue to, achieve a great deal.

It puts Palestinian political positions, which have been mostly aligned with the UN and Europe, on the defensive. They kept saying that they have international law on their side, but international law that is only enforced against Israel is not international law. Now there is a serious plan and pathway to peace and the Israel haters are forced to respond.

For the most part, the responses have been boilerplate. Absurd charges of it being an "apartheid plan" or "a one-state solution" are obviously not true to anyone who reads it, but these are the knee-jerk reactions because the usual suspects are waiting for some anti-Israel academic to come up with smarter counterarguments. (Both Human Rights Watch's Ken Roth and former HRW member Sarah Leah Whitson linked to Arab League description of the plan as "apartheid" as if that charge had validity.)

Many of the objections have been to the plan being seen as pro-Israel. Yet Palestinians were invited to participate, and moreover they are being invited to participate now to push back on whatever they want. They are refusing and this indicates not only that they do not have an answer to the plan, but they didn't even have a plan to respond to it with two years' notice. Without a counter-proposal (beyond the mantra of "1967 lines, capital in Jerusalem, right of return") they they prove they are not serious about peace.

Moreover, Jared Kushner's direct rebuke to the Palestinians for not accepting any previous plan is prompting an interesting response from many: they are saying that the previous plans were equally unsatisfactory, even though they were much more direct paths to an independent Palestinian state. It is easy in an era of Trump Derangement Syndrome to push back on the Trump aspect of the plan - many people would reflexively oppose anything with his name anyway. But when they say that the Clinton and and Olmert plans (as well as the Obama/Kerry framework), all rejected by Palestinians as vehemently as this one, are equally bad, they expose the truth that they were never interested in peace with Israel but in Israel's surrender. If Palestinians spurred peace ideas from the great liberal hero Obama, they will never accept peace.

Trump has changed the debate from the old, tired "Israel must do more for peace" to "Palestinians must do something for peace." When the response is dismissive, even though some parts of the plan are clearly advantageous to them, it shows the world that they aren't serious players.

The most salient point is that the plan is aimed at helping the Palestinian people more than any previous plan has. When their leaders reject it out of hand, they are saying that the status quo- which they cry to the world is unlivable - is suddenly much better than a plan that gives them more than double the land they have, the ability to live without a single Israeli checkpoint, the ability to freely go to Gaza, and Gaza would have triple the land it currently has, as well as many other economic incentives. Palestinian leaders could try to grab their gains and negotiate for more - if they cared about their people. Palestinians already don't like their leaders and those that read the plan will have more reason to distrust them. (Incidentally, the Hamas-oriented Al Resalah actually translated the entire plan to Arabic and published it.)

So even if the plan fails as a roadmap to peace, the effects are wholly positive. It shifts the focus and the onus on the Palestinians, whose main response is "rage" and "less cooperation with Israel" even if that hurts their people. It exposes the truth about Palestinians to the world, including many of their Arab brethren. The Arabs pay lip service to the Palestinian cause but for the most part they have not gone beyond that for many years.

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