There are over 10 million olive trees in the West Bank, on which between 80,000 to 100,000 families rely for their income, including large numbers of unskilled laborers and more than 15 per cent of working women. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the olive oil yield for the 2019 harvest, which took place between September and November, is estimated to be 27,000 tons, including some 4,200 tons of oil in Gaza: this represents an over 80 per cent increase compared to 2018.
The vast majority of the report is about how Israel is supposedly making life impossible for farmers - yet somehow they reached a new record of 27,000 tons of fruit harvested.
Also, given that there are over 10 million olive trees in the area, it shows that even if you believe their figures of some 8000 trees damaged or destroyed by "settlers" this year - a highly unlikely scenario, given how difficult it is to actually destroy an olive tree - it means that "settler damage" is minuscule, less than one tenth of one percent of all trees. Given how much time the UN and Palestinian media spends on breathless reporting of every tree supposedly attacked by Jews, it shows that the UN has little interest in actual crop yields and great interest in smearing Jews.
(h/t Irene)
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"All my life I have lived here with Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze. We are part of the State of Israel We are all Israeli brothers. What you hear in the media about the state of Israel is far from the truth."
A growing number of Arab citizens in Israel are following this trend.
The Israel Arabic page is one of the most successful social media initiatives ever done by Israel.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is on track to win 59 seats for his bloc of right-wing and religious parties in Monday’s election, down by one from the 60 predicted by the initial exit polls. The new prediction leaves him two short of a majority in the Knesset.
The first polls indicated that Netanyahu’s Likud won 36-37 seats. Its allies in Shas, UTJ and Yamina won 9, 7-8 and 6-7 respectively. The polls showed Blue and White with 33 seats, its ally Labor-Gesher-Meretz with 6-7, the Joint List 14-15 and Yisrael Beytenu 6-8.
When Channel 13 updated its numbers at around 1 a.m. Israel time, however, Gantz gained one seat to 34 and the blocs shifted slightly, leaving the right-wing with only 59 seats.
Channel 12 also updated its numbers, giving Likud 37 seats, Blue and White 32, Arab Joint List 15, Shas 9, Yisrael Beytenu 7, UTJ 7, Labor-Gesher-Meretz 7 and Yamina 6.
However, by 4 a.m., Kan News gave Likud 36 seats and Blue and White 33, with the right bloc also holding a total of 59.
The numbers are expected to continue to change. The votes of soldiers, who tend to lean to the right, have not yet been counted and the Joint List tends to lose a seat when the soldiers’ votes are added. But, if the Right does not obtain its 61st seat, it could end up being because the far-right Otzma Yehudit Party refused Netanyahu’s repeated requests to quit the race.
As Israel awaits the final results from the elections for the 23rd Knesset, the most recent results from the Central Elections Committee (CEC) show Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc as having 59 seats in the new Knesset, meaning it will need two more members of Knesset in order to become a majority if the seat distribution remains the same after final results are received.
Here are the new members of Knesset according to the most recent results from the CEC:
The coalition may not yet be in the bag, but after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's impressive showing in Monday's election, it can now be said with complete certainty: the man is a political magician.
After already serving as prime minister for 14 years, 11 of them consecutively; just two weeks before the start of a trial on charges of bribery, breach of trust and fraud; with a good part – but by no means all – of the media against him; with a bevy of former security chiefs and diplomats declaring his continued rule would endanger democracy -- Netanyahu again defeated the odds and pulled out what, according to the exit polls, looks like a victory.
His path to building a coalition will not be easy, but with all the parties – and the public – sick of elections, this time Netanyahu is definitely in the driver's seat and should be able to pick up the seat or two he needs to finally give Israel a government.
And the key to his political magic is the fact that Netanyahu is simply a consummate campaigner.
No one campaigns better than Netanyahu. No one. He has energy, charisma, and a once-in-a-generation ability to talk to his voters at eye level. He knows what buttons to press – Jewish and Zionist pride, fear of the Left – and he presses them better than anyone else.
The president, Netanyahu and Gantz should use these elections as an opportunity to try to bridge the tribes. If Israel is to recover and rally now, after three harmful and costly elections, our leaders – especially the president – should see us as one people with one destiny.
Furthermore, the people need to know that we did not waste three elections for no benefit, and that a new government and Knesset will seek to operate on behalf of all the country’s citizens – to make Israel safe and secure, boost the economy and trade, maintain the rule of law, promote equal opportunity and recognize the legitimacy of all streams of Judaism.
There are critical budgets to be passed – from health to military. Key legislation awaits Knesset approval in a range of areas, from haredi conscription to civil marriage, and important appointments need to be made, such as a new police commissioner and state attorney. The country must come together to resolve such pressing issues as halting the ongoing terrorist attacks from Gaza, returning the two Israelis and the remains of two soldiers being held by Hamas, confronting Iran’s efforts to expand its regional tentacles and become a nuclear power, making progress on implementing the Trump peace plan, and countering the coronavirus threat.
The last thing Israel needs now is another stalemate that could force a fourth election. The country – led by the president and the politicians – must find a way to heal itself from the damage caused by the last three elections and move us all forward toward a brighter future.
Alan Dershowitz says, "Israel's Democracy is alive and well!"
Likud, chaired by Israel's caretaker Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, edged ahead of Blue and White alliance with 37-34 seats respectively, an exit poll by Channel 12 shows.
The initial results hint that the alliance led by Benny Gantz could see Likud take its status as Israel's largest party, boosting Netanyahu's position in the coalition talks that will follow. The PM was brief in his initial reaction, saying: "Thank you!"
We have reported on how top PLO official Jibril Rajoub has been using sports to demonize Israel as head of the Supreme Council for Sport and Youth Affairs for the Palestinian Authority as well as the president of the Palestinian Football Association and the Palestinian Olympic Committee.
A couple of years ago there were reports of how the Palestinian Scout Association had dedicated a training course to a terrorist, and how the World Scouts denied that the Palestinian Scouts were the official Palestinian Scouts - an absurd claim.
Now, looking at the Scouts Facebook page, one can see that they are just as political (against World Scout rules) as ever.
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No matter what atrocities are happening in the world, Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch feels compelled to post at least one anti-Israel tweet a day.
Here's today's:
UN expert is "deeply troubled" by the Israeli government's latest settlement expansion plan--a "highly disturbing development." Netanyahu's plan to add 8,000 settlement housing units is “a significant breach of international law” that must be opposed. https://t.co/9gXQVQq1rxpic.twitter.com/buO16P7Hus
The UN "expert" is Michael Lynk, the UNHRC's "Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967."
Although we've seen Lynk's bias before, I just found out that in 2009, he claimed Israel was guilty of "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians and havily implied that Israel itself is a mistake that must be erased.
In a report called "Peace, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law: Canada's Role in the Middle East" issued by the Group of 78 Annual Policy Conference, September 25-27, 2009," Lynk's presentation is paraphrased:
He used to think the critical date in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was 1967, the start of the occupation. Now he thinks the solution to the problem must go back to 1948, the date of partition and the start of ethnic cleansing. Canada’s role in partition was pivotal with Justice Ivan Rand, Lester Pearson and Elizabeth MacCallum (though she privately warned against it). What followed from this point needs review and needs to inform Canadian foreign policy going forward. Many increasingly feel that partition was a mistake.
Sure, it makes sense for the UN to hire an "expert" on Israel who thinks Israel shouldn't exist and never should have existed.
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A number of columnists and tweeters are upset that Bibi Netanyahu said, via satellite at the AIPAC conference, that Palestinians are “the pampered children of the international community.”
But by any measure, that is an accurate statement.
The latest numbers I have, from 2017, show that "Palestine" still gets more aid per capita than any other nation - and every other nation on the list is more deserving of aid than "Palestine:"
Things might change in 2019 after the US stopped direct aid to the PA and UNRWA, but maybe not.
However, according to all available statistics, Palestinians are indeed pampered, pretending to be more needy than nations that are far more deserving of humanitarian aid.
UPDATE: Adin found a really nice chart of the same issue:
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From Ian: Israelophobia and the West: The Hijacking of Civil Discourse on Israel and How to Rescue It
The new Jerusalem Center publication Israelophobia and the West exposes and evaluates the parallel phenomena of unprecedented anti-Semitic assaults against Jews in the West while simultaneously demonizing the Jewish State. It further exposes the deceptive representation of anti-Semitic rhetoric as legitimate political criticism of Israel. A special dialogue: Prof. Alan Dershowitz - Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus, Harvard Law School; Ben-Dror Yemini - Israeli journalist at Yediot Ahronot; Moderated by Dan Diker.
A 2014 survey of antisemitism by the US Anti-Defamation League (ADL) covered 100 countries. It found that all the countries in the top 10 most antisemitic locations were in the Middle East or north Africa region, with an overall figure of 73%. The West Bank and Gaza came at the top, with 93% of Palestinians expressing antisemitic views.
A smaller survey of 19 countries published by the ADL in the following year found that Muslim populations in general had the highest levels of antisemitism in Europe: For the first time, the ADL poll measured Muslim attitudes in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. An average of 55 percent of Western European Muslims harbored anti-Semitic attitudes. Acceptance of anti-Semitic stereotypes by Muslims in these countries was substantially higher than among the national population in each country, though lower than corresponding figures of 75 percent in 2014 for Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
In the United States, a 2017 report on antisemitism in general, identified much of the hatred as coming from the Muslim community, notably on college campuses: It is particularly disturbing that anti-Semitism appears to be relatively common in the American Muslim community, including among its leaders.
Muslim expression of anti-Semitic views has become especially common on American college campuses.
Several Muslim attacks on Jews, synagogues and more are listed in the report. Here, anti-Jewish prejudice is, as often as not, conflated with anti-zionist ideology and activism. Again, that distortion, in turn, leads many people, most often on the left, to indulge Muslim antisemitism, to join Islamic protests, and even, as Britain's Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn did for many years, to call Muslim terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah "friends".
Some anti-zionism is bolstered by the widespread rationalization that Palestinian resistance to Israel is in harmony with one's own secular political convictions. Palestinians and their supporters across the Islamic world are thought to be protesting and fighting for nationalistic, anti-colonial, and economic motives combined with an anti-apartheid pro-refugee set of priorities. Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization's leading party, for example, is proclaimed as a "secular, nationalist" entity. The first article in the PLO's 1964 Covenant reads: "Palestine is an Arab homeland bound by strong Arab national ties to the rest of the Arab Countries and which together form the great Arab homeland."
According to all elements of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, information received from the Israelis was unique in its detail and the subjects it shed light on, areas that for years were obscured from the West. Based on the intelligence provided, Washington was able to draw a detailed and fairly accurate picture of the structure and deployment of a substantial part of the Soviet Union's strategic missile divisions.[26]
How did the Israelis pull it off? Retracing the exact steps of clandestine activities is difficult, but one can reconstruct what likely transpired based on information made public after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Israeli agents who understood the Soviet bureaucracy in Eastern Europe became keenly aware of a major flaw in the system. The tendency to hoard information—itself a symptom of an obsession with secrecy—created an information glut in which untold numbers of paper-form military records were filed and stored. The more this information multiplied, the harder it became to keep track of. At the same time, Israeli spies managed to obtain the identities of several former members of the Soviet military and security establishments who had intimate knowledge of their government's missile capabilities. When these people were no longer in their positions—which undoubtedly meant the authorities paid less attention to them—it was easier for Israeli agents to convince them to share their technical knowledge. This was where Israeli intelligence reached its Cold War peak and aligned most closely with the intelligence goals of the West.
Conclusion
For many years, the Soviet ballistic missile threat was relatively low on the list of Israel's immediate security priorities. After all, Moscow's weapons were not aimed at Jerusalem or Tel Aviv but at New York and Washington. Israel had always been more interested in the MiG fighter's maneuverability and the T-class tank's endurance. So the effort to collect data on Soviet missile capabilities marked an important shift. Israeli intelligence moved from tactical concerns to a broader strategic narrative as Jerusalem understood that its long-term security interests were achieved not by narrow intelligence collection but by undermining the country that acted as the patron and arms supplier of its enemies.
And while the Cold War is over, and Israel no longer finds itself trapped between two rival superpower blocs, it continues to provide first hand and invaluable lessons on waging war and preserving national defense.
Hollywood mustered its creative forces in the 1940s when Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany sought to conquer the world, with Humphrey Bogart standing up to the fascist regime in “Casablanca” and director Ernst Lubitsch mocking it and its dictator in “To Be or Not to Be.”
More than 70 years later, an increase in hate crimes, emboldened white supremacists and political upheaval have prompted TV and film makers to revisit Nazism. The works are varied and their receptions mixed, but they share a goal: to use fiction to learn from 20th-century totalitarianism and its horrors, including the Holocaust that claimed the lives of 6 million Jews.
In Amazon’s “Hunters,” an unlikely group of 1970s New Yorkers target German Nazis who have brought their genocidal quest to America. HBO’s “The Plot Against America” is based on Philip Roth’s novel that posits a repressive early 1940s US government led by Charles Lindbergh, the real-life aviation hero and anti-Semitic isolationist. The Oscar-winning “Jojo Rabbit” is in Lubitsch’s satirical mode, deepened by tragedy.
Preceding them was “The Man in the High Castle,” the 2015-19 Amazon series based on Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi novel of the same name about a fallen America ruled by WWII victors Germany and Japan.
The war has had other screen comebacks. During the political and social turmoil of the mid- to late-1960s, cynical and irreverent films including “King Rat” and “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” were released alongside traditional battle epics such as the star-laden “Battle of the Bulge.”
“We seem to have waves of interest in both the Holocaust and World War II, not always at the same time,” said Sharon Willis, a film scholar and professor at the University of Rochester in New York. “I feel that, collectively, we return to these terrains when we have some kind of problem to work out that we think is related to them.”
Here is the abstract of the academic article "Was Jerusalem Part of Palestine? The Forgotten City of Ramla, 900–1900" by Zachary J. Foster of Princeton University, published in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies in 2016:
When the Muslims conquered the Levant in the seventh century they at times changed the meaning of ‘Palestine’. They preserved its erstwhile sense as a region but also came to see Palestine as synonymous with the city of Ramla. From the tenth to the early twentieth century, dozens of Muslim exegetes, travellers and chroniclers explained that Ramla and Palestine were the same place. Others thought Palestine was a small region based around Ramla, one that did not include Jerusalem, or that Palestine had much more to do with Ramla than it did Jerusalem. The association had much to do with the cultural tendency in the Arab Middle East to conflate cities and regions as well as the critical role Ramla played in Palestine for much of its history: it served as the capital of the District of Palestine for more than three centuries, its economic hub for many more and its imagined geographical centre up until the early nineteenth century.
The article brings large amounts of evidence from Arab geographers and writers that what they considered "Palestine" was really Ramla or the region around it, and Jerusalem was a completely separate place.
Most cities never came to mean the same thing as their parent regions. But Ramla was not like most cities. Ramla become the seat of the most powerful empire in the world when the seventh-century Umayyad Caliph, Sulayman ‘Abd al-Malik (d.717) moved the seat of Islamic power from Damascus to Ramla. Soon enough, the city emerged as the political, geographic and economic centre of the District of Palestine during the Umayyad (661–750) and most of the Abbasid (750–1258) periods, for it lay at the crossroads of the key trading routes within the District of Palestine as well as the route connecting Damascus and Cairo. Although a massive earthquake in 1068 left some 15,000 people dead and the city in total ruins, Ramla recovered during the Crusader (1095–1291), Fatimid (909–1171) and Ayyubid (1171–1260) periods and remained the most important regional trading hub well into the Mamluk period (1250–1517). The town recorded steady population growth even after the Ottoman conquest in the early sixteenth century. (Jerusalem, by comparison, was a small and sleepy town for most of Islamic history. It had never been located on any major trading routes and its defensive walls were destroyed by an Ayyubid ruler in the early thirteenth century and only rebuilt in the 1530s by Suleiman ‘the Magnificent’.) And so even though Ramla’s population size, economic prosperity and political relevance diminished significantly from the late sixteenth century onwards, names have never been so easy to change. And so the city continued to be associated with Palestine; indeed, it continued to be known as Palestine as late as the eighteenth century if not later.
The Persian traveller Nasr Khusraw (d.1088) was the very first Muslim to say it explicitly. ‘The city of Ramla is called Palestine in both Sham and the Maghreb’, he wrote...
Soon enough, a slew of other writers across the lands of Islam embraced the nickname. The Andalusian geographer and historian al-Bakri (d.1094) noted that Ramla was known as Palestine; the high official in Mamluk Syria Ibn Fadl Allah al-‘Umari (d.1349) claimed that Filastin was also called Ramla in his definition of the Holy Land and commented elsewhere that Sulayman bin ‘Abd al-Malik bin Marwan (d.717) founded the city (madina) of Filastin; the famous Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta (d.1369) also explained after his visit to Jerusalem and Ashkelon that he ‘traveled to the city of Ramla (madinat al-Ramla), which is Filastin (wa hiyya Filastin)’.
...But we have more explicit evidence that Palestine may have been considered a small region based around Ramla, one that did not include Jerusalem. Consider that the great historian al-Waqidi (d.822) consistently listed Jerusalem and the Land of Palestine separately in his account of the conquest of the Levant as if they were separate places. ...
Similarly, a number of other Muslims from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, including the famous biographer Ibn Khallikan (d.1282), Egyptian historian Ibn al-Furat (d.1405) and the Jerusalemite scholar and judge al-Din al-‘Ulaymi (d.1522), described the Kingdom of the Kurdish Ayyubid Sultan al-Mu‘azzam in the early thirteenth century as ‘expansive, from Homs to al-‘Arish, including the Islamic coasts, bilad al-Ghawr, Palestine and Jerusalem’. In this instance, there is no reason to assume that these writers meant Ramla only when they wrote Palestine, as this list included both cities and regions, leaving us with the impression that Palestine may have been considered a region based around Ramla that did not include Jerusalem.
Jerusalem was not even a part of "historic Palestine." It was Christian pilgrims who consistently associated Jerusalem as the most important city of what Christians considered Palestine, and that idea eventually influenced Muslims.
Finally, Foster notes that Palestinians consciously wanted to change history to de-emphasize Ramla and emphasize Jerusalem in the 20th century for purely political reasons:
In other cases there may have been wilful intent to delete Ramla from memory. The historian Muhammad al-Husayni wrote in his 1946 history book about Palestine that ‘we have chosen to focus on Jerusalem (Bayt al-Maqdis) because it has been, and remains, the political and religious capital of this Arab country since the Arabs and Muslims first arrived, save for a brief moment (burha wajiza) in which it was transferred to Ramla’. Whether or not we define the three and a half centuries that Ramla was the political capital of Palestine as brief, or the seven or eight centuries that Ramla was the most important regional economic hub as ephemeral, or the millennium of the linguistic and cultural role that Ramla played in Palestine as fleeting, al-Husayni probably wanted us to believe in Jerusalem’s time-immemorial importance and Ramla’s time immemorial irrelevance. But the record suggests that Ramla was a central part of Palestine’s history...
...And Jerusalem was not.
This is not to say that Jerusalem was not considered part of the Muslim world - of course it was. But it was not part of what Muslims - even colloquially - called "Palestine" for most of the history of Islam. Jerusalem was not a place of pilgrimage and it was not treated as important by most Muslims throughout history.
The claim that Jerusalem is the "eternal capital of Palestine" is complete fiction.
Zachary J. Foster is not a Zionist by any measure - his Twitter account is quite anti-Israel and he even throws in a gratuitous and irrelevant anti-Israel comment in a footnote of this paper. Which makes his research in this area even more compelling - he has completely ripped apart any historic claims that Palestinians have for Jerusalem as their traditional capital.
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Sometimes people believe something so much that even once the belief is no longer viable, they can’t quite let go of it, because it is now indistinguishable from their own sense of self. Case in point: I once asked a leader in the American Jewish community, a liberal Zionist, what he would think if the two-state solution were no longer possible. After a long pause, he responded, “That would be the end of my Zionism.” And so, he continued, he could not give up on the two-state solution.
This may be where liberal Zionists are today. As a University of Pennsylvania political scientist and longtime scholar of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Ian Lustick writes in his excellent and provocative new book, Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality: “Two states for two peoples was a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it is not a solution today.” For many liberal Zionists, this is a hard pill to swallow. But it also might be true.
In many Jewish circles, when talk of two states commences, it often very quickly devolves into: “If only we had a partner for peace!” It is imagined that Israelis are generally willing, but the other side is not. Lustick wants us to shelve that reflexive, and convenient, abdication of responsibility, and look at the situation from a different direction. Whatever the foibles of the Palestinian side, he wants to explore this notion of two states solely from within the structures of Israeli governments and society from the 1970s until today. What he concludes is that the possibility of two states was never really viable on the Israeli side, not because Israelis weren’t willing to try it—many were—but because the very structures of government and societal reactions to changes on the ground made sure it would not happen. In short, once the two-state solution emerged as a possibility in the early 1970s, it very quickly became obsolete.
Lustick begins his argument by suggesting that “two-state solution” or “one-state solution” are mistaken and obfuscating terms. Instead of “two-state solution,” he wants us to understand the “two-state paradigm.” And instead of “one-state solution,” he suggests the “one-state reality.” There is no one-state solution; but there is, from the river to the sea, one state. And that state is called Israel.
The United Kingdom has just passed emergency legislation that will stop the early release of convicted terrorists from prison. This decisive action comes on the heels of two recent terror attacks in London by jihadists who were released from prison earlier than the end of their sentences for terror-related crimes.
In November, Usman Khan, who had served eight years in prison before being granted an early release, killed two people and wounded three others in an attack near London Bridge. Khan was wearing a fake suicide vest when he committed the attack. Khan participated in a de-radicalization program. Clearly, the program did not guarantee that Khan was genuinely rehabilitated or would not re-offend.
The second attack came in February, when Sudesh Amman, 20, stabbed two people in the Streatham section of South London. Amman had been released from prison just a week earlier, after he had served about half of his 40-month prison sentence for a 2018 terror conviction.
Undercover police were watching Amman, but they were not able to stop his stabbing spree. He was shot and killed by police within a minute.
The legislation enacted Wednesday blocks early release for about 50 imprisoned extremists, a statement from the UK Ministry of Justice said. It requires that any inmate convicted of a terror-related crime, such as training for terrorism, membership in a terror organization, or disseminating terrorist literature, must complete at least two-thirds of his or her sentence before being considered for release. Even then, the release is not guaranteed.
“No terrorist should be released early only to kill and maim on our streets,” said Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor Robert Buckland. “Protecting the public is Government’s first duty and our message is clear — enough is enough.”
Sanders surrogate Amer Zahr has never tried to hide his hatred for Israel, and like most anti-Zionists, he thinks it’s perfectly fine to talk about the Jewish state pretty much like the Nazis talked about Jews. But in order to illustrate how fanatic Zahr is, a
few pictures are worth a thousand words.
Zahr isn’t shy about announcing his agenda: getting rid of the world’s only Jewish state.
While Zahr will usually proclaim that his Palestine from the river to the sea should be democratic,
secular and open, his current Facebook cover photo reflects a different vision: Palestine is
Muslim and Christian, Judaism is erased.
Another photo Zahr used as his Facebook cover reveals his support for
terrorism: it shows him serenading convicted supermarket bomber and US immigration fraudster Rasmea Odeh. (Here is
another photo of Zahr and Odeh
having a jolly good time together; and last year, Zahr posted a photo of notorious terrorist Leila Khaled for International Women’s Day. He
also seems to be an admirer of the Tamimis, whose most celebrated family member is Sbarro massacre mastermind and
facilitator Ahlam Tamimi.)
Given Zahr’s intense hatred for Israel, it’s hard to describe how stunned I was when the awesome kweansmom recently found out that Zahr has Israeli citizenship. Inevitably, this
discovery also trains a spotlight on the truly breathtaking hypocrisy of Zahr’s
anti-Israel activism, and it’s hardly surprising that the stories he likes to
tell about the bitter “refugee” background of his family turn out to be not
particularly truthful.
Since this post is based primarily on material shared on Facebook, it
should be noted that all cited material is freely accessible at the time of
this writing; the links I provide are to archived copies of Facebook posts so
that I cannot be accused of making stuff up in case anything is deleted or
access is restricted.
Let’s first look at how the Jordanian-born Zahr got
Israeli citizenship. Ususally, Zahr claims that his parents were Palestinian “refugees” who were “driven from their birthplaces of Yafa and Akka by Israel.” Yet, as Zahr told TheJerusalem Post in
an interview four years ago, he “comes to the Palestinian
territories and Israel between one and three times annually” to perform his
“comedic routines” – which also means
that his BDS advocacy takes the form
of “do as I say, not as I do.”
During one of his visits to Israel in 2015, Zahr boasted on Facebook: “At Tel Aviv airport, Israeli security asked me, “What is the purpose of your visit?” I said, “What is the purpose of yours?” #colonizers”. Naturally, some of his followers then
wondered why the evil Zionist entity would let him enter the country – after
all, it would probably not be advisable to respond like this to a US border
security official.
Zahr then explained: “i hold their passport.” When asked how he got
“their passport,” Zahr responded: “israeli laws allow for the children of “israeli”
mothers to be “naturalized” even if they are born abroad. my palestinian mother
was born as an israeli citizen in akka after 1948. so even though i was born in
jordan, i could get the passport.” He added sarcastically: “i’m sure that law
was meant for cases like mine of course.” To which I’d like to add: I’m sure
that Amer Zahr realizes that his relentless demonization of Israel is
undermined by the fact that he could get an Israeli passport as the
Jordanian-born son of an Arab-Israeli mother who left Israel as a child.
And obviously enough, if Zahr’s “palestinian mother” was “born as an
israeli citizen in akka [Akko/Acre] after 1948,” and he was able to get an
Israeli passport because of his mother’s Israeli citizenship, it’s doubtful
that his claims about her being a “refugee” who was “driven” out by Israel are
true.
This apparent lie prompted kweansmom and me to dig a little deeper.
After all, Zahr is not only a surrogate who might remain influential if Sanders
becomes the Democrats’ presidential candidate or even wins the election, but
his anti-Israel activism will arguably benefit in the long run from the
visibility he now enjoys as a Sanders surrogate.
As is so often the case with anti-Israel activists, Zahr seems resolved
not to let facts ruin his demonization of the world’s only Jewish state. So
let’s try to find out how Zahr’s “palestinian mother” became a “refugee” who
was “driven” out by Israel while retaining her Israeli citizenship.
Zahr repeats the claim that his mother and her family “were
forced out of their homeland” in a
Facebook post from February 2018
that includes a photo which, according to Zahr, was taken in “Akka,
Palestine in the 1960s,” showing his mother
as a child along with one of her sisters and a cousin.
In another post that Zahr wrote when his maternal grandmother passed away in December
2016, he shares some further details: “In 1965, Laila [Zahr’s grandmother], Muhammad [Laila’s husband, i.e. Zahr’s maternal
grandfather], and their four daughters [incl. Zahr’s mother] embarked on a boat ride from Haifa to New
York, then a bus ride from New York to California, where Muhammad planned to
educate himself for two years and then return with his family to Palestine. In
1967, the Israeli state took the opportunity of this short absence to exile
Laila, Muhammad, and their children from their ancestral homes. The six became
refugees in California.”
Zahr seems to keep his story intentionally vague, but it is not
particularly credible for several reasons. From what Zahr writes in this post about
his grandmother, it is clear that she married in 1950, when she was just 16.
However, it is reasonable to assume that the man she married was at least a few
years older. If her husband was just 20 when they got married, he would have
been 35 in 1965 – which, at the time, was considered middle-aged. It would have
been rather unusual for a middle-aged man with a wife and four children to
decide to uproot the whole family to travel half around the world just “to
educate himself for two years.” Needless
to say, it would also have required considerable financial resources.
But there is another, much more credible version of this story that was
posted by Amer Zahr’s aunt, i.e. his mother’s sister (whom he had identified
and tagged in the previously cited post from February 2018). In August 2015, Zahr’s aunt posted an old family photo and wrote: “August
8, 1965, fifty years ago, my father, Mohammad Jardali, and my mother, Leila Hawari
Jardali, made a life changing decision to move the whole family to the U.S. I
am amazed by my parents’
courageous and bold move which encouraged many from our home town in Acca, and
family members from Nazareth to follow suit.”
There’s no denying that in 1965, it made a lot of sense for Israeli
Arabs to emigrate to the US in search of a better life. Israel was still a
fledgling state, surrounded by hostile neighbors bent on its destruction, and
the assumption that the Arab minority would be sympathetic to efforts to
eliminate the re-established Jewish state meant that until 1966, martial law
was imposed on Israeli Arabs. But the perhaps most compelling reason to
contemplate emigration was economic: when Israel was founded, its standard of living was just 30 percent of the US standard of living,
and particularly in its first decade, the country was still reeling from the
War of Independence and strained almost to the breaking point by the challenges
of absorbing hundreds of thousands of destitute refugees from all over the
Arab-Muslim Middle East.
Zahr proudly describes his grandfather Muhammad as “smart
and industrious,” and obviously, his
decision to emigrate turned out well: Muhammad “was able to find work
and made a respectable and comfortable life for himself, Laila, and his four
daughters.” And as we know from the post
of Zahr’s aunt, this American success story “encouraged many” from Akko, as well as “family members
from Nazareth to follow suit.”
Perhaps Zahr would like us to pity them all as “refugees” and blame
Israel for their decision to emigrate to the US?
But it was interesting to find out that there was at least one member of
Zahr’s family who apparently reconciled himself early on with Israel’s
existence – even though his motivation might have been that he simply hated the
Arab regimes more than the new Jewish state: meet Amer Zahr’s maternal
great-grandfather Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari.
I chanced upon Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari when I noticed a comment on the post Zahr had written about his maternal grandmother in December 2016. Zahr
mentioned that his grandmother Laila Muhammad Hawari was the daughter of “Muhammad … a well-known judge and lawyer in
mandate and post-mandate Palestine, hailing from a well-known family in
Nazareth.” A man named Faisal Saleh, who describes himself as “Founder
and Executive Director of Palestine Museum US”, posted the following response [emphasis added]:
“Our deepest condolences to the Jardali
and Hawari families for their loss. It is a small world but I have a
connection, though by friendship not blood, to the Howari [Hawari] family. My father […] was best friends with Muhammad
Hawari senior - the lawyer and judge - both of them were active members of
the Najjadeh movement in pre-1948 Palestine. Muhammad was the commander and
overall head of the organization headquartered in Yaffa and my father was the
commander of the Salameh area (5 km East of Yaffa). After the 1948 Nakba, Muhammad
returned to his native Nazareth choosing to live there rather [than] under the corrupt Arab regimes.
[…] Muhammad Hawari wrote a book
called سر النكبة The Secret of Nakba
covering the events and circumstances that lead to the loss of Palestine. A
copy of the book was donated to the @palestine Museum US […]. The book, on exhibit at the
Museum, was banned in most of the Arab countries.”
One might think that Zahr is bursting with pride that his
great-grandfather was among the first to devote a whole book to the “nakba” –
so wouldn’t it be a great idea for a committed anti-Israel activist like Zahr
to translate the book and use it in his activism?
Well, maybe not. The fact that “The Secret of Nakba” was “banned in most
of the Arab countries,” and even more the fact that its author preferred to
live in Israel rather than “under the corrupt Arab regimes” indicates that
Zahr’s great-grandfather blamed the plight of the Palestinians primarily on the
Arab leadership. (See also e.g. here: “Hawari, whose writing is very emotional, concentrates his efforts and
energy on attacking the corrupt Arab leadership, particularly the Mufti”.)
The biographicalinformation on Muhammad Hawari’s that
is available in English also suggests that he was a complex figure whose story
might not go well with his great-grandson’s simplistic anti-Israel activism.
For Zahr, the perhaps most uncomfortable aspect of his
great-grandfather’s remarkable story is that, due to his political pragmatism,
he was regarded as a “collaborator” in some circles. A very interesting article entitled “The Intimate History of Collaboration – Arab Citizens and the State of Israel” discusses Hillel Cohen’s book “Good Arabs” and claims that Israeli officials admired Hawari’s “charisma” and
sponsored him, hoping he would be able to establish a new anti-communist Arab
party:
“In the higher echelons of collaborative
politics, the state sponsored public figures such as Archbishop George Hakim as
anti-communist leaders. Another sponsored anti-communist was Muhammad Nimr
al-Hawari, founder before 1948 of the al-Najjada paramilitary brigades. Because
al-Najjada participated in the fighting against the Zionist militias, but also
because Hawari negotiated with Haganah to avoid fighting in Jaffa, by the end
of the war he became a refugee in Lebanon. Admiring his charisma, Israeli
intelligence decided to allow his return to Israel in 1950 as an alternative
anti-communist leader. The idea was that Hawari would establish a new Arab
popular party. Based on reports of collaborators from within Maki [Israeli Communist Party], Cohen covers the fascinating struggle
between Hawari and the communist organization, which ended with the former’s
defeat. When politics failed, Hawari became a judge in the municipal circuit
court in Nazareth.”
As a judge and public figure, Hawari was apparently greatly respected: a
1969 photograph from Israel’s National Library shows him as one of the prominent
members of a council that was established to investigate the devastating fire
that was set by a mentally ill Australian tourist at the Al-Aqsa mosque.
If Amer Zahr wasn’t a bigoted anti-Israel activist, he could be very
proud of his great-grandfather.
[…to be continued with
a post exploring why Zahr was born in Jordan, even though his mother had
emigrated from Israel to the US]
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Last week, Matti Friedman wrote an amazing article in the New York Times about Israel's number one pop star, an Arab convert to Judaism who sings modern Mizrahi music.
In China it’s the Year of the Rat, but here in Israel it’s the year of Nasrin Kadry, who began life on rough Arab streets near the docks in Haifa and has now, at 33 years old, ascended to the pinnacle of pop in the Jewish state. The biggest concert venues, the judging dais of “The Voice,” A-list duets — all belong to Nasrin. Her improbable rise has much to say about this society and specifically about the way it operates in the places where highbrow experts don’t look.
In a similar vein, here is a video showing a gay Tel Aviv Arab who hates the "Joint Arab List" and will vote for Netanyahu's Likud today, another person who simply doesn't exist if you read the Western media about Israel.
(h/t Yoel, @LikudnikTLV for the video, @MoranT555 for the translation, errors in placing the translation on top of the corresponding Arabic are mine.)
UPDATE: Sorry, I uploaded the video without the subtitles, fixed.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
It is midday here in Israel and the third time Israelis go
to the polls to try to elect a majority after two earlier, unsuccessful attempts.
This, in many respects, is the proof that Israel is a democracy: We have equal
numbers of people on the right and on the left. We are split straight down the
middle. And that is allowed!
How wonderful is that, after centuries of repression in
Russia, Poland, Germany? Syria, Morocco, and Spain?? We get to disagree. With
the government and with each other. With anyone we damned well please!
That is what we express with our vote: that it’s good to
have an opinion and it’s even better to be able to express it with your vote.
And I vote to use this liberty to strengthen the right.
It’s not yet time for someone to take over from Bibi. And Gantz
is capable of great damage on a scale of which I do not even want to dream,
God forbid.
So I got up early and I voted for Bibi.
Because the alternative is Gantz.
In Israel we have a saying, “Hold your nose and vote for Bibi.”
That’s what I did.
And that is my right.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 19 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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Tuesday, March 03, 2020
Elder of Ziyon
