Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

04/22 Links Pt2: Sermons in Solitude: Jews of Faith Are Never Alone; Let us remember what the survivors are unable to forget; Israeli Police Publicly Salute Holocaust Survivors Confined to Their Homes Due to Coronavirus Pandemic

From Ian:

Meir Y. Soloveichik: Sermons in Solitude: Jews of Faith Are Never Alone

On Thursday, March 13, my synagogue, Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City, announced it would not be holding services on Shabbat. To refrain from praying in a community is a traumatic moment for any house of worship. But for my community, the suspension of our communal Sabbath prayer due to the pandemic echoed down through history. Shearith Israel is the oldest Jewish congregation in America; tracing its origins to 23 souls that had landed in New Amsterdam, with a public synagogue first built in 1730, its members had joined one another in sanctifying the Sabbath for centuries. The last time Shearith Israel’s sanctuary had been abandoned by its congregants was 1776, when the patriot members of the congregation had fled in advance of the British taking Manhattan. But the very same Jews formed a minyan in Philadelphia, and the public rituals continued apace.

Now, however, it was the minyan itself that had been rendered impossible.

I delivered a sermon on Friday afternoon—by conference call. What, I asked, does it mean to be joined, as a Jew, to others, precisely when we are forbidden from engaging with others? In my words to my community, I noted that on the Internet, many had been mentioning breakthroughs achieved by men of genius in solitude to suggest that forced aloneness might have unexpected advantages. After all, the argument went, Isaac Newton discovered the rules of calculus while in quarantine. But what interested me more, I said, was what I had learned about another insight achieved by Newton while in a period of solitude created by a plague: his conceptualization of gravity. A student described Newton’s eureka moment:
In the year he retired again from Cambridge on account of the plague to his mother in Lincolnshire & whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the same power of gravity (which made an apple fall from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but must extend much farther than was usually thought – Why not as high as the Moon said he to himself & if so that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit…

In his solitude, Newton conceived of a gravitational bond that could exert its power over long distances—that could even span heaven and earth. It is, I suggested, a spiritual form of just such a bond that we now must discover, one that binds us to others and indeed binds those in Heaven and those on Earth. The Hebrew term for synagogue is Beit Knesset, a house of gathering, and it is called so because, in the rabbinic tradition, the phrase Knesset Yisrael refers to the mysterious bonds that connect Jews to one another. A synagogue is not merely a physical gathering of individuals, but rather, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik explained, it reflects “an invisible Knesset Yisrael, which embraces not only contemporaries, but every Jew who has ever lived.”

The synagogue is meant to embody this bond, this connection to all Jews past and present. But there are other ways to experience it, and those other ways can have a singular power of their own. Anatoly Sharansky concludes his prison memoir by reflecting that at times, in the solitude of his cell, he felt more connected to his people than in the prosaic bustle of his newfound freedoms:
How to enjoy the vivid colors of freedom without losing the existential depth I felt in prison? How to absorb the many sounds of freedom without allowing them to jam the stirring call of the shofar that I heard so clearly in the punishment cell? And, most important, how, in all these thousands of meetings, handshakes, interviews, and speeches, to retain that unique feeling of the interconnection of human souls which I discovered in the Gulag?

Our challenge, I said, was to attempt a Newtonian insight, to find what Sharansky had felt: to ponder the meaning of relationships, and our bond as Jews with one another, until we were able to see each other in synagogue once again.

Returning to Auschwitz on Holocaust Remembrance Day

Unlike every other Holocaust Remembrance Day over these past few decades, on Monday and Tuesday the gate at the entrance to the Auschwitz extermination camp remained empty. The thousands who usually visit the camp every year have stayed at home due to the coronavirus epidemic - but we will be back, strong and with our heads held high.

Auschwitz was here with us, in our generation, before the eyes of the entire world. Most of the world knew about Auschwitz as early as 1942, more so in 1943, and all the more in 1944, while trains filled with 50,000 Hungarian Jews to be exterminated were dispatched daily to the camp.
Some of the people who perpetrated these atrocities had even graduated from universities after studying enlightened German philosophers and
spiritual leaders such as Goethe, Heinrich Heine, and Immanuel Kant.

Auschwitz was a factory of death. It was there that the cursed Dr. Josef Mengele stood, and with a glance decided who was worthy of staying alive to bolster the camp's workforce, and who was to be sent to the gas chambers.

This year we could not walk the same route that those sentenced to death walked so many years ago, and no rendition of the Israeli national anthem HaTikvah will be heard in this valley of Jewish suffering. Even so, every one of us knows that the memory lives on of the Nazis, who threw millions of innocents into gas chambers and planned to eradicate an entire people from the face of the Earth.

But it is this people, our people, who are the people of eternity and will remain so until the end of time.

Ruthie Blum: Let us remember what the survivors are unable to forget

Holocaust survivors do not need annual ceremonies to remind them of the Nazi atrocities that they endured or of the family members that Adolf Hitler's henchmen slaughtered during World War II. No, those memories are just as inked in their hearts and minds as the numbers tattooed on their forearms.

Indeed, it is not those people who require the admonition "Never Forget," but rather the rest of the world. It is also a mantra for subsequent generations of Jews to repeat and forge a collective memory of events that we did not experience firsthand, but which require our ongoing attention. If, that is, we are to recognize and combat anti-Semitism in all its ideological – and military – manifestations.

The Knesset thus ruled in 1951 that Holocaust Remembrance Day would be marked on the 27th of the Hebrew month of Nissan, which falls between Passover and Israel Independence Day – two celebrations of freedom, victory, and a return to the Jewish homeland.

In Israel, then, Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) is particularly significant. Not only was the Jewish state established in the wake of the Holocaust, but many survivors fought and were killed in the 1948 War of Independence.

Their stories of unparalleled heroism in spite of unfathomable victimhood are recounted each year at the main ceremony at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on the eve of Yom Hashoah and at other locations during the following 24 hours. On the day itself, everyone in the country stops in his/her tracks at the sound of a siren to stand in silence for two minutes.

But not this year.

Thanks to coronavirus lockdowns – the emphasis of which ostensibly is to protect the elderly – the ceremonies are void of participants. With the exception of speeches by prominent politicians and performances by singers to empty halls, all commemorations and survivor testimonies have been held online and televised.

What makes this especially sad is the fact that the aging survivors – most of whom are not adept at Internet communication – have been living in isolation for weeks as it is. One survivor told Channel 12 on Monday evening that the hardest part about being alone is the lack of distraction from his daily traumatic memories. He explained that without people around, he finds it harder to push away the ghosts of his past.

Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust Day, from the night of April 20, through April 21, meant that depressing coronavirus news shared somewhat equal billing with solemn Holocaust-related news items, at least for a few days. A news piece in the Jerusalem Post in that genre, spoke of the resurgence of the Dortmund, Germany Jewish community, which today numbers 3,000 souls, around the same as in 1938, when an evil madman with a mustache unleashed the eternal hatred in the German breast for the Jewish people. Dortmund, it seems, has recovered so nicely that they’ve gone ahead and built the first Jewish school in that city since 1942.

Presumably, we are supposed to see this resurrection as an achievement, perhaps even something miraculous: a murdered people coming back to life, as strong as ever.

It makes me sick. What? You didn’t get the message the first time around? You’ve come back for another go?

But I’ve written about my feelings on this before. I wrote about this in 2018, in a piece I called, “The Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave” which described my anguish at reading about three orthodox rabbis ordained in Berlin, after an 80-year “interruption.”

No one should be reviving Jewish life in Germany. No Jews should live there, ever. It’s a place that does not want us. It’s a place that hates us, now as then, even when the hate is maintained at a slow simmer—with bubbles that only occasionally poke above the water line—instead of a rolling boil.

A resurgence of Jewish life in Germany is not a good thing and should not be encouraged. Especially when it is today, so easy to hop on a plane to live in Israel, in Jewish indigenous territory, the place we prayed to return to all these thousands of years.

By coincidence, on the same day I read about the resurgence of Jewish life in Germany, I read a different news piece about dead Jews clamoring to be buried in Israel, an expensive proposition made even more costly, due to the global pandemic. The rising costs of burial in the Holy Land for Diaspora Jews are due not only to costs associated with coronavirus precautions, but also, it seems to price gouging. The Jewish Press, nonetheless, reports that over 200 coronavirus victims, wrapped and packed according to Israel’s Ministry of Health strict guidelines, have been brought to the Jewish State for burial. With COVID-19 taking so many lives in the Jewish community, dead Jews are practically an entire industry. This at a time when unemployment in Israel has risen to unseemly heights and the Israeli economy has plunged.

גופות של 18 יהודים, שנפטרו בחו"ל לאחר שחלו בקורונה, הובאו לפני כניסת שבת לישראל כדי להיקבר באדמת ארץ הקודש. הגופות הובאו מליאז' בבלגיה במטוס ג'מבו של "אטלס אייר" הפועל בשירות אל על. בתוך שבועיים הגיעו מעל 200 גופות של חולי קורונה שנארזו ע"פ פרוטוקול מיוחד. @Yossi_eli @avischarf pic.twitter.com/jYQyXn8K0t
— איתי בלומנטל Itay Blumental (@ItayBlumental) April 18, 2020

Exactly how much does it cost to be buried in Israel? There’s the burial plot, which in non-pandemic times can cost as much as $35,000. There’s the airfare ($1k-$3k on El Al, $30,000 to $40,000 if using a private jet), with added costs for pandemic precautions (another $200-$300). But the cost to transport dead American Jews has zoomed ever upward, as the demand rises, to some $200,000 a flight. ZAKA Chairman Yehuda Meshi-Zahav claimed that one family paid $270,000 to fly a body to Israel in a private jet.

The costs do not end here. There’s a fee from Ben Gurion Airport to the burial society, which may reach a cost of $1,300. Then there’s cleansing the body which can cost around $800.

In short, it costs as much for Diaspora Jews to be buried in Israel as it does to purchase a modest Israeli apartment. Framed another way, it costs as much to be dead in Israel as it does to live in Israel. And by the way, Israel’s National Insurance Institute “pays burial expenses and related services for every person who dies in Israel and is buried in Israel, and for every Israeli resident who dies outside of Israel.”

It seems to me that the two news items, one detailing the resurgence of the Jewish community in Dortmund, Germany, the other detailing dead Jews clamoring to be buried in the Holy Land, express a kind of backward Jewish ghetto mentality that must be addressed. Jews should not live in Germany, but in Israel. Jews should not be clamoring to be dead in Israel, but to live in Israel.

The Torah teaches “Chai B’hem,” that we should live and not die by the precepts handed down to Moses at Sinai. We should not be focused on the resurrection of the murdered or on where we wish to be buried, but where we will live now, in the present. Our entire focus should be on building the Jewish community in Israel, and only in Israel, now and forever.

Once someone lives in Israel and subsequently dies, after living a long life, to 120, the burial costs nothing, so you don’t even have to think about it. It’s a twofer, Folks. The burial’s already covered. So you might as well make the best of it and spend your hard-earned cash dollars on life.

L’Chaim!

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

We found a chair on Tuesday morning. In Israel, unlike the USA, most people don’t have garages, basements, or attics to fill up with junk. When something is no longer useful to them, they often put it out on the street. And so we came upon a dining room chair, sound in frame but spattered with paint and with a damaged seat. We took it home, and I easily removed the paint spatters. Then I took off the seat and began the process of removing the countless staples that held the ruined vinyl cover on it. Whoever had put it together had been generous with staples, and they were driven into a chunk of that repulsive, hard particle board that seems to have replaced wood everywhere in recent years.

As I pried them out one at a time with an old screwdriver and pliers, I listened to the radio. A woman was describing her time in the hands of the Nazis. She was six years old at the time, and she remembered every horrifying detail. She talked very fast, but there were many details. She remembered everything, she said. Wasn’t it hard to carry all that around for so long, the radio host asked? That’s why I am telling you, dear, she said.

My wife came in to say that it was yom hashoah, as if I didn’t already know, and there was going to be a siren in a couple of minutes. I put down my pliers and we went out on our roof – one of my favorite things about this apartment is that it is on the top floor and we have a piece of roof for my wife’s plants and my antennas – as is our custom, and stood waiting for the siren.

The building is moderately tall, and when the sirens come on you can hear not only our own, which is located a few blocks away at the Magen David Adom compound, but others throughout the city, and maybe even as far away as Nes Tziona. First we hear our loud one, and then the sound arrives from sirens successively farther away, each one slightly weaker than its predecessor. The sirens sound continuously, rather than the rising and falling that warns of a rocket attack, which is the scariest sound you will ever hear.

We stood silently for two minutes, nothing moving in the street, and I could see someone standing still on their balcony in a building a few blocks away. As the sirens wound down, first ours, then the successively more distant ones, I imagined that I could hear hundreds of them from all over the Jewish state, and I thought that there were hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, all standing at attention to honor that woman who spoke on the radio, the rapidly dwindling group of survivors, and the memory of those who fought for their lives in the Warsaw Ghetto and even in the shadow of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor. And of course all those who didn’t survive.

From the roof I could see a small part of our Jewish state, roads, the green spot of the Hebrew University agricultural campus, a few tall buildings of the Weizmann institute. I am not sure exactly why, but I choked up, I couldn’t speak and I just hugged my wife, who is the emotionally tough one in our family.

Next week, the day before Independence Day will be another day of remembrance, this time for the soldiers, policemen, and terror victims lost in the struggle to preserve this beautiful Jewish state that makes me so proud to see. There will be two more sirens, and I will silently thank Hashem that my son, who spent nine years of his life in uniform, not including reserve duty, came home whole to his family.

***

So that was my morning. And then I read an article in the Forward (motto: “Jewish. Fearless. Since 1897”) , a debate between two youngish American Jews on the subject “Is anti-Zionism antisemitic?” Is anti-Zionism antisemitic? You are kidding me, right? Ask the woman who spoke on the radio.

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04/22 Links Pt1: Antisemitism in the age of the Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic; Shin Bet nabs 3 Palestinian men in Hamas plot to bomb Jerusalem soccer arena

From Ian:

Israeli UN Ambassador Danon: Palestinians getting coronavirus aid from Israel respond with outrageous claims

Israel has gone to great lengths and donated generously to protect Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from the coronavirus pandemic, but our lifesaving assistance has been greeted by Palestinians spreading lies and inciting hatred against Israel and the Jewish people.

The Palestinian Authority that governs much of the West Bank and the terrorist group Hamas that rules the Gaza Strip have been happy to accept massive amounts of Israeli assistance, which includes:

Professional medical training for Palestinians to share best practices and ensure they have tools and knowledge required to protect themselves against the coronavirus.

Thousands of coronavirus testing kits and protective gear for Palestinians.

Over 200 tons of medical supplies, 50 tons of building materials, and a dozen tons of food to help Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, despite the territory being ruled Hamas, which does not even recognize Israel’s right to exist and regularly launches rocket attacks on civilians in the Jewish state.

Under the leadership of President Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority is fabricating a false narrative about Israel that has taken on anti-Semitic undertones. The authority falsely accuses Israel of deliberately obstructing Palestinian efforts to combat the virus – but the exact opposite is true.

In official letters to the United Nations, Palestinian Authority slanders include the wild claim that Israel is smuggling Palestinian workers back into Palestinian-controlled territory via wastewater tunnels to avoid testing checkpoints, with the hope of infecting other Palestinians.

In perhaps the most obscene defamation – akin to the infamously anti-Semitic blood libels – the Palestinian Authority accuses Israeli soldiers of deliberately spreading the virus among the Palestinian population.

The Palestinian Authority is far more interested in escalating its diplomatic warfare against Israel than in saving Palestinian lives in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Abbas and his colleagues are trying to change the conversation away from cooperation with Israel and into slandering.

As the Palestinian Authority injects these poisonous lies into the global discussion, it is willing to accept not just aid from Israel but from the U.S., despite its repeated denunciations of President Trump and its refusal to even consider the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan that President Trump proposed and that Israel accepted as the basis for negotiations.

David Collier: Antisemitism in the age of the Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic

The Coronavirus antisemitism reports – failure of the Brits

There have been several reports produced by Jewish organisations focusing on the coronavirus antisemitism. Having read them it is clear that in the US, they understand the issue far better than we do in the UK. You CANNOT discuss antisemitism and focus almost exclusively on the neo-Nazi aspect. This type of reporting is lazy. Even people like Jackie Walker get neo-Nazi antisemitism. Like with Corbyn, anti-fascist Marxist activists have no trouble holding aloft the Jews as victims when it suits them:

No offence but it is almost formulaic. An event occurs and you quickly look for a couple of outrageous memes on neo-Nazi websites. You link to them and you have your blog. It is this single-minded blindness that helped create the environment for the rise of antisemitism in the first place. The neo-Nazi ‘holocough’ is a clear and easy image to spread. Yes, if you attack the neo-Nazis, there is no pushback. Everyone applauds you. But telling the truth without fear remains the only way of fighting antisemitism. You have to anger some of those who ally with you and open the eyes of people who do not see it. If you are not annoying anyone then you are treading water. You are not truly fighting anti-Jewish racism.

The CST report into antisemitism during the virus is disappointing and indicative of the prevailing mindset that we really need to break free from. ‘Israel’ is only mentioned once, ‘Zionist’ twice – with the central focus being the obscure shared content of neo-Nazi’s in places like the imageboard 4Chan. The word ‘Islam’ does not appear at all in the CST report- as if Islamist antisemitism using the virus to attack Jews is not even a thing. This single-minded anti-Nazi focus is self-defeating.
Anti-Zionism as the new antisemitism

Why is Israel only mentioned once in the CST report? The comparable Simon Wiesenthal Centre report on coronavirus antisemitism references Israel 16 times. This isn’t a difference to easily dismiss. We must address the tunnel vision attitude that allowed for the rise of left-wing anti-Jewish hate in our own neighbourhood. Some of the UK Jewish organisations monitoring antisemitism produced detailed statistics – which are then quoted by both press and politicians – that do not include tests for anti-Zionist antisemitism. How can you produce a statistic for antisemites which does not include someone who believes ‘Zionists’ run the banks and are involved in a plot to take over the world? This insanity allows for left wing antisemites to continually argue that antisemitism is chiefly a problem on the far-right:

To its credit, the UK publication Fathom display more clarity of thought – looking at antisemitism coming from across the spectrum. In not one, but two excellent articles, Lev Topor and Cary Nelson discuss widespread antisemitism related to the virus as well as the horrific exploitation of anti-Israel groups piggy-backing on the Coronavirus outbreak to attack Israel.
B’tselem and the Coronavirus blood libel

For the anti-Israel NGOs, the Coronavirus pandemic has provided a perfect opportunity to accuse Israel of all sorts of dastardly deeds. On Thursday, 26 March B’tselem reported that Israel had confiscated equipment intended for a Coronavirus field clinic. This is one of the lazy accusations that NGOs frequently make and that western media outlets swallow wholesale. Every piece of wood that Israel removes was going to be part of a classroom, every brick was to be the foundation stone of a new hospital. Israel never just removes a normal brick. In today’s climate – the path to the lie about Coronavirus was an obvious one.

Once the lie about the clinic is published as a B’tselem press release, the eager anti-Israel industry turns it into viral news. The fake news piece was reproduced in places such as Independent Catholic News, IMEMC, Mondoweiss, The New Arab, Palestine Chronicle, Palestine Return Centre, The Muslim News UK, and Albawaba News. COGAT can slam B’tselem for making up stories and ‘exploiting a global crisis to spread fake news’- but the damage is done.

Richard Kemp: Coronavirus: Another 9/11 Moment for the West

Commentators and politicians today worry that the current situation might trigger a new cold war with China. They fail to understand that, in a similar but much more far-reaching pattern to the jihadist conflict, China has been fighting a cold war against the West for decades, while we have refused to recognise what is going on.... Like 9/11, Covid-19 must now force the West to wake up and fight back.

For decades, China has been working on its three-pronged strategy: building its economy and fighting capability, including intelligence, technology, cyber and space as well as hard military power; developing global influence to exploit resources and secure control; thrusting back and dividing the US and its capitalist allies.

China's arms exports are not motivated primarily by revenue generation, but as a means to impose influence and control, create proxies and challenge the US.

Chinese investment penetrates every corner of the UK, giving unparalleled influence here as in so many countries. Plans to allow Chinese investment and technology into our nuclear power programme and 5G network will build vulnerability into our critical national infrastructure of an order not seen in any other Western nation. Even the BBC, which receives funding from China, has produced and promoted a propaganda video supporting Huawei, to the alarm of some of its own journalists. All this despite MI5's repeated warnings that Chinese intelligence continues to work against British interests at home and abroad.

Palestinians upset that Lebanese editorial cartoon compared them to the coronavirus

Lebanese newspaper Al-Jumhoria published a very anti-Palestinian editorial cartoon last week that caused outrage from Palestinian officials.

The cartoon shows two circular figures. One is labeled "April 13, 1975," the anniversary of the start of the Lebanese civil war, and the other "April 13, 2020." The 1975 figure is a Palestinian wearing a keffiyeh while the 2020 figure is the coronavirus.

Essentially, the cartoonist compared Palestinians to the coronavirus.

This caused an uproar. Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem Atallah Hanna said the cartoon "contradicts all human and moral values," and called on the Lebanese newspaper to apologize. He said, “To compare the Palestinian with the Corona epidemic is a crime against the noble human, moral and cultural values.”

The DFLP called it "an insult to the Palestinian people and their militant history."

The Democratic Forum of Palestinian Media in Lebanon issued a statement that the Lebanese newspaper's caricatures are "a moral fall and a sin and those responsible that must be held accountable." It added that "there is a difference between the freedom of opinion that we respect, and the abuse of human dignity of the Palestinian people."

Op-eds were written decrying the cartoon.

Hamas officials said the drawing is an affront to the Palestinian national personality and to the history and identity of the Palestinian people. "It contravenes the legal principles, charters of journalistic work, professional ethics and international laws," the terror group helpfully added.

Three points:

One is that while the cartoon is undoubtedly bigoted, the number of Lebanese deaths from COVID-19 is 21. The number of Lebanese killed in the 1975 civil war was over 120,000, and it was sparked by PLO fighting the Christian Phalanges. So, yes, there is still a great deal of animosity in Lebanon towards Palestinians, even as they usually take care to pretend to support them.

The second point is that there have been quite a few Arab cartoons comparing Jews and Israel to the coronavirus, and none of these Palestinians who are so sensitive to bigotry seemed to be too upset at those.

Even more interesting is the lack of coverage of this story in Western media. Lebanese bigotry against Palestinians is simply not a story. The reason seems to be that no one wants to disturb the narrative of Israel as the sole oppressor of Palestinians, if the Arab role in their misery was publicized as much as Israel's imagined crimes, it would reduce the pressure on Israel which seems to be the real goal of much of the international coverage of the region.

By objective standards, this is a newsworthy story. Yet the gatekeepers of news to the Western world don't want you to know about it.

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Wavel (Galilee) camp

As I have reported previously, while people who pretend to be pro-Palestinian activists concentrate on the risk of COVID-19 in Gaza, they are silent about the much worse conditions in the overcrowded camps in Lebanon that Palestinians are forced to live in.

Now the first COVID-19 case has been found in an UNRWA camp in Lebanon.

From AFP:

A Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon has been put on lockdown after the UN announced the first confirmed case of coronavirus in one of the country's numerous and crowded camps.

The patient, a Palestinian refugee from Syria, has been taken to the state-run Rafic Hariri hospital in Beirut, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said in a statement late Tuesday.

Medical experts were due to visit the Wavel camp in the eastern Bekaa Valley later on Wednesday to carry out tests, the agency added.

The testing will focus on the woman's relatives and people she has interacted with, as well as 50 others chosen arbitrarily "inside the camp and its surroundings", said Lebanon's official National News Agency.

In coordination with Lebanese security forces, Palestinian factions in charge of security have imposed a lockdown on the camp, preventing anyone from entering or leaving, the NNA report said.

The Wavel camp is tiny - a mere 250 meters by 210 meters in a rough rectangle. Lebanese law does not allow any of the camps to expand, so it is hemmed in.

There are wildly varying estimates for the number of people who live there, but it appears to be between 3000-7000, which would make the population density in the camp to be between 60,000 and 160,000 people per square kilometer, far higher than any major city in the world (but comparable to other UNRWA camps.)

If this person infected a couple of others in the camp, then all the horrifying scenarios that anti-Israel activists predicted for Gaza would be worse by an order of magnitude.

But since Israel cannot be blamed, there will be no alarming headlines or tweets about this in the supposedly pro-Palestinian echo chamber. Lebanese bigotry against Palestinians, a topic I will touch on in my next post, is studiously ignored by these social justice warriors. As of this writing, some three hours after wire services started reporting the story, only a handful of tweets mention "Wavel" - and zero from the people who pretend to care so damn much about Palestinians.

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A 23-year old prisoner in the Negev facility, Nour Jaber Al-Barghouthi, slipped and fell in a bathroom and later died.

Of course, the Fatah movement and other Palestinian officials are holding Israel responsible for his death, claiming that the prison authorities delayed coming to his aid for a half hour. Is it true? It depends on whether you believe convicted terrorists.

But one detail of his death is interesting. As Palestine Today reports:

The head of the Prisoners and Editors Affairs Authority, Major General Qadri Abu Bakr, ...said: "The prisoner Nour Jaber Al-Barghouthi, who was in room No. 15 in section No. 25, fell yesterday evening in the bathroom of the room and lost consciousness, and the prisoners of the room tried to open the door and were unable to and they summoned the administration that deliberately delayed for more than half an hour and did not show up until after a state of anger carried out by the prisoners where they shouted and knocked on doors."

Why couldn't the prisoners open the door of the bathroom? Could it be that in Israeli prisons, the bathrooms have locks?

The story makes no sense any other way, but if true, that would be amazing. It means that prisoners have private bathrooms. This 1991 book says that each prison cell has its own separate bathrooms. This was confirmed in this 2011 report:

Speaking with JTA in his family home, Issawi said most prisoners are held eight to a cell that is approximately 25 feet by 15 feet. Each cell has its own shower, bathroom, kitchenette and a TV that receives 12 channels, including Israeli channels and several Arabic-language channels, among them Palestinian TV.

This doesn't sound exactly like a Soviet-style prison.

A young man slipped and fell, probably in the shower, probably hit his head, and no one could help him in time.

This is the 223rd Palestinian prisoner to die since 1967. As I've recently shown, that statistic means that Palestinians are safer that virtually every prisoner in the world.

And if you want to know how terrible things are in Israeli prisons, read this list of demands by Palestinians prisoners in 2004.

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04/21 Links Pt2: Remembering the Holocaust in a post-'sacred survival' era; Worldwide population of 14.7 million Jews falls short of pre-war numbers

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Remembering the Holocaust in a post-'sacred survival' era

With each passing year, the number of Holocaust survivors – whose memories largely embodied the journey that Jews had taken from abject powerlessness and slaughter to current security and strength – decreases. With fewer of them to bear witness, the Holocaust could be fated to be viewed as one more piece of ancient history. Just as important, the growing willingness to universalize the Holocaust has lessened its ability to instruct Jews about their own history and fate.

That has led to a situation in which the Shoah is perceived by some as more of a weapon to be used against Israel and those seeking to perpetuate Jewish life as anything else. The canard that Israel is now as oppressive as the Nazis is the product of a desire by the Arab and Muslim world, and the Europeans, to justify their desire to erase history. But it has now been internalized by many Jews who have rejected both the idea of sacred survival, as well as the clear verdict of history that Zionism was the only logical and necessary response to the incurable virus of anti-Semitism.

Sacred survival as the sole motivation for Jewish identity was fated to collapse over time. Neither historical memory nor vicarious identification with Israel is enough to sustain Jewish life in the long run. Instead, its perpetuation of Jewish life requires a joyful embrace of all that is life-affirming in both Judaism and the heritage of Jewish peoplehood. To the extent that American Jewry will continue as a coherent community will be on the basis of choosing to embrace that positive vision.

But it would be a mistake to think that our focus on the Holocaust must be sacrificed in order to achieve a healthier Jewish future based on transmissible values.

To the contrary, the challenge for contemporary Jews is to incorporate the memories of the survivors and the sacrifice of the Six Million to forge a community that is forward-looking while still anchored in the same ideas of historical memory that have sustained Jews since they began recounting the story of slavery and the Exodus from Egypt thousands of years ago.

Nor, even as we rightly reject the narrow vision of sacred survival, should we forget that the fate of world Jewry is still linked to the tragedy of the Shoah. On the eve of Yom Hashoah this week, Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics noted that by the end of 2018, the worldwide Jewish population stood at 14.8 million – a figure that is still less than the estimated 16.6 million who were alive in 1939 on the eve of the Holocaust.

Jewish life cannot be solely justified, as in Fackenheim's lesson, as a response to the crimes of the Nazis and their collaborators. And thanks to the triumph of Zionism, the Jewish people are no longer helpless victims. But neither can we afford to forget that powerlessness is an invitation to future Jewish genocide.

Johnathan Sacks: A Lesson from the Torah: Vilification and Evil Speech Are Destroying the World

Judaism is, I have argued, a religion of words and silences, speaking and listening, communicating and attending. God created the universe by words — “And He said … and there was” — and we create the social universe by words, by the promises with which we bind ourselves to meet our obligations to others. God’s revelation at Sinai was of words — “You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a Voice” (Deut. 4:12). Every other ancient religion had its monuments of brick and stone; Jews, exiled, had only words, the Torah they carried with them wherever they went. The supreme mitzvah in Judaism is Shema Yisrael, “Listen, Israel.” For God is invisible and we make no icons. We can’t see God; we can’t smell God; we can’t touch God; we can’t taste God. All we can do is listen in the hope of hearing God. In Judaism, listening is high religious art.

Or it should be. What Tom Hanks shows us in his portrayal of Fred Rogers is a man who is capable of attending to other people, listening to them, talking gently to them in a way that is powerfully affirming without for a moment being bland or assuming that all is well with the world or with them. The reason this is both interesting and important is that it is hard to know how to listen to God if we do not know how to listen to other people. And how can we expect God to listen to us if we are incapable of listening to others?

This entire issue of speech and its impact on people has become massively amplified by the spread of smartphones and social media and their impact, especially on young people and on the entire tone of the public conversation. Online abuse is the plague of our age. It has happened because of the ease and impersonality of communication. It gives rise to what has been called the disinhibition effect: people feel freer to be cruel and crude than they would be in a face-to-face situation. When you are in the physical presence of someone, it is hard to forget that the other is a living, breathing human being just as you are, with feelings like yours and vulnerabilities like yours. But when you are not, all the poison within you can leak out, with sometimes devastating effects. The number of teenage suicides and attempted suicides has doubled in the past ten years, and most attribute the rise to effects of social media. Rarely have the laws of lashon hara been more timely or necessary.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood offers a fascinating commentary on an ancient debate in Judaism, one discussed by Maimonides in the sixth of his Eight Chapters, as to which is greater, the chassid, the saint, the person who is naturally good, or ha-moshel be-nafsho, one who is not naturally saintly at all but who practices self-restraint and suppresses the negative elements in their character. It is precisely this question, whose answer is not obvious, that gives the film its edge.

The rabbis said some severe things about lashon hara. It is worse than the three cardinal sins — idolatry, adultery, and bloodshed — combined. It kills three people: the one who speaks it, the one of whom it is spoken, and the one who receives it. Joseph received the hatred of his brothers because he spoke negatively about some of them. The generation that left Egypt was denied the chance of entering the land because they spoke badly about it. One who speaks it is said to be like an atheist.

I believe we need the laws of lashon hara now more than almost ever before. Social media is awash with hate. The language of politics has become ad hominem and vile. We seem to have forgotten the messages that Tazria and Metzora teach: that evil speech is a plague. It destroys relationships, rides roughshod over people’s feelings, debases the public square, turns politics into a jousting match between competing egos, and defiles all that is sacred about our common life. It need not be like this.

Jason Greenblatt: Humanity is in this together

I learned about the atrocities of the Holocaust when I was a child directly from those who suffered through it. The memories of my extended family and their close friends helped shape who I became. Their stories were captivating and horrifying. Against all odds, after the brutal destruction of European Jewry, these survivors had the strength to raise strong Jewish families, strong American citizens, and build new homes in their new country. The fortitude of that generation was a marvel to behold.

My parents were luckier than most. My father's family was able to flee Hungary in time to save themselves. My paternal grandmother painstakingly tried to line up all the necessary visas to enable her family to escape Hungary. It was a desperately frustrating task, where the consequences meant life or death. One day, after months of my grandmother trying and failing, a German diplomat gave her the visas that she was so desperately seeking. My mother's family was liberated by the Soviet army. After the war, her family made their way back to Debrecen, Hungary, where they were reunited. They continued living in Debrecen until the Hungarian Revolution, at which point they fled Hungary and moved to the United States.

When asked to recount some of my most memorable moments during my nearly three years at the White House, I often speak about a Holocaust-related experience. One day I was privileged to visit the memorial commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising with the Vice President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Israel, and the Prime Minister of Poland. For me to be able to stand there with them as a proud American, a proud Jew, and a Senior White House official was remarkable. Later that day I gave a speech in Warsaw and I was in awe when I realized that right in the front row listening to me were three elderly Righteous Among the Nations individuals who saved Jews during the Holocaust.

While I have remained on lockdown with my family for several weeks as a result of the COVID-19 crisis, I have had more time to reflect and try to grow as a person. Time to reflect and grow often eludes me during our fast-paced, normal lives. I hope to change this when we emerge from this isolation. I often think about the German diplomat and the three Righteous Among the Nations individuals who I met in Warsaw who, together with so many others, heroically put themselves and their families at great risk to save Jews.

Now that the boars are in Haifa, will the Palestinians stop claiming they are controlled by the Jews?

For years, we have documented that Palestinian authorities have blamed Israel for anytime wild boars would attack their fields or people. I found one example from only this past February:

But now Arab media is noticing that as Israeli cities are emptying from people, the boars are starting to take over the streets - especially in Haifa.

The boars used to come at night but now have no fear of walking about in daylight.

Residents are upset, especially since Haifa's policy has been against killing the animals for the past few years.

Is there any chance that this will stop the stories in Arab media of Jews raising the quite unknosher boars deliberately to release them in Palestinian farms and villages?

I somehow doubt it.

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.

Ronen Bergman's Rise and Kill First is an astonishing work of research. Through over a thousand interviews, Bergman managed to write a history of Israel's policy of targeted assassinations that bypassed the famous secretiveness of Israel's spy agencies as well as the Israeli censor. (The book itself is proof that the Israeli military censor is very reluctant to actually censor things.)

The nearly 700 page book is not merely a history of targeted killings by Israel but really a history of Israel's legendary spy agencies, the Mossad, Aman and Shin Bet. While the story concentrates on assassinations, and is as complete on that topic as one can imagine, nothing happens in a vacuum - killings are done for a reason, whether it is to discourage future terrorism or to send a message to past terrorists that they will never be safe. (The hunt for the Munich terrorists is an example.)

The agencies' growing pains are documented as Israel learns how to do spycraft. From the early pre-state days through the covert (and sometimes overt) war against the terrorists who intruded into Israel in the 1950s, Israel's spy agencies grew in capabilities. They had to pivot to new methods and tools as the enemies and tactics changed.

The action never stops. Bergman writes that his original manuscript was twice as long; he managed to shorten each episode to a couple of pages without the stories losing their punch.

This drama is not only in the successes but also the failures - and there were a lot of failures, with the inevitable political fallout from the government. The Mossad and Shin Bet are not infallible by a long shot, and there have been botched operations, as well as seemingly unnecessary assassinations.

Especially striking at this time of a worldwide pandemic is that decisions are often made with incomplete information. Acting based on assumptions backed by facts is necessary and moral. The alternative, of doing nothing, can endanger more lives than the action can. Sometimes, the assassinations can help avoid war. These are difficult moral arguments and Bergman objectively looks at both sides.

Some of the mistakes were extraordinarily embarrassing. The botched attempt on Hamas leader Khaled Meshal's life was a major setback. The assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai was successful but was a diplomatic disaster as the agents used international passports. Yet when mistakes were made, the security services improved their methods and procedures to ensure that every mistake is made exactly once.

Bergman's reporting goes well into the 21st century, with details on the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. He also details the assassinations of Hezbollah mastermind Imad Mugniyeh and of Syrian general Muhammad Suleiman in 2008, both of whom worked closely with Iran and the with the more recently departed Qassam Soleimani.

My only quibble is that Bergman sometimes allows his personal opinions to override the facts. He blames the second intifada on Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount even as he knows the evidence that it was pre-planned and Sharon's visit was only an excuse. His antipathy towards Netanyahu also allows one-sided reporting, with the other side of the story buried in footnotes.

But those are minor problems. Rise and Kill First was praised by both pro- and anti-Israel critics because he does such a good job of showing the ambiguity of the policies and of working in the shadows, breaking the normal rules of war, to help save lives.

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.

04/21 Links Pt1: Israel’s Coronavirus Death Toll Rises to 181; Poll: Only 7 Percent of Israeli Arabs Define Themselves as "Palestinian"; Monsey Hanukkah stabbing suspect not fit to stand trial

From Ian:

Israel’s Coronavirus Death Toll Rises to 181, Total Number of Cases at 13,883

Israel’s COVID-19 death toll rose to 181 on Tuesday, after four more people succumbed to the disease overnight Monday and on Tuesday morning.

Among the four fatalities was Aharon Turchin, a 48-year-old father of 14 with no preexisting health conditions. Turchin, who lived in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak, passed away at the Ichilov Medical Center in Tel Aviv after being transferred there over the weekend from Mayanei Hayeshua Medical Center in Bnei Brak after his condition deteriorated.

According to Israel’s Health Ministry, there have been a total of 13,883 confirmed cases of coronavirus infection in the country since the beginning of the pandemic, including 170 new cases since Monday night. While 4,353 Israelis have officially recovered, 142 are still in serious condition, 113 of whom are intubated. However, the number of Israelis recovering from the virus has exceeded the number of new infections for four days in a row, according to the ministry.

The update comes just days after officials tentatively rolled back some of the strict limitations placed on movement and commerce in the last several weeks, as well as lockdowns on Bnei Brak and two dozen neighborhoods in Jerusalem with particularly high coronavirus infection rates.

Bnei Brak continues to have the highest per capita coronavirus infection rate in the country, but residents are now subject to the same regulations as all other Israelis.

Jpost Editorial: The Holocaust and the coronavirus

It is even more tragic that survivors such as Even and Levin had to spend their last days alone, away from their families, and had to be buried after tiny funerals due to the virus.

As we honor the memories of six million Jews who perished during the Holocaust and salute the estimated 400,000 survivors still alive today, we should also pause to remember the dozens of survivors who have recently died from corona complications.

The opening ceremony for Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day was broadcast via the Yad Vashem website, YouTube and Facebook Live on Monday night. Its theme was “Solidarity in a disintegrating world” and included the gripping stories of the six torchlighters and heartfelt prayers from the chief rabbis.

Thousands uploaded messages on virtual plaques on a special memorial site established by the March of the Living organization, which was forced to cancel its annual march from Auschwitz to Birkenau this year for the first time in 32 years, due to the virus.

“The combination of hatred and technology is the greatest danger threatening mankind,” Simon Wiesenthal once said. “Technology without hatred can be a blessing. Technology with hatred is always a disaster.”

As we grapple with the current pandemic, Wiesenthal’s words ring true. But so does the refrain of the “Partisan Song,” posted in English by The Jerusalem Post’s Greer Fay Cashman on Facebook: “Never say that you are walking on your final way. Though blue skies are hidden by days of gray, the hour for which we yearn will yet arrive; The earth will tremble with our tread; We are here!”

Despite the many tragedies experienced by the Jewish people, it has proven to be a resilient nation which today has a state of its own. Israel is a source of strength in fighting antisemitism and hate around the world.

That is why, even as we are separated today due to the coronavirus, we stand together and declare “Never again” for the entire world to hear.

Michael Doran: Coronavirus: How Will It Change the World?

The Coronavirus crisis will likely strengthen nationalism and weaken globalism, Gadi Taub tells Mike Doran.

Poll: Only 7 Percent of Israeli Arabs Define Themselves as "Palestinian"

According to preliminary data from the Jewish People Policy Institute's (JPPI) upcoming annual Pluralism Index for 2020, over the past year there has been a significant change in the way Israeli Arabs identify themselves.

According to the survey, conducted by Prof. Camille Fuchs of Tel Aviv University, about a quarter of Israeli minorities (23%) define themselves primarily as "Israeli" and half (51%) self-identify as "Israeli-Arab."

The proportion of non-Jewish people who define themselves primarily as "Palestinian" now stands at around 7%, down from 18% this time last year.

Moreover, there was a sizable increase in the number of Arabs who define themselves as Israeli - that number rose from 5% last year to 23% this year.

This video was taken last Thursday at the Taj Mall, a new supermarket in Gaza.

Forget social distancing. Look at the product selection, including exotic imported cheeses.
Look at how spacious it is, in "one of the most crowded places on Earth."
Look at the lighting and refrigerated section where we are told there is no electricity.

I would love if my local supermarket looked like this.

This is what it called a "prison" without any shame by a large number of educated people.

(h/t Irene)

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