Here's another example of how Arabs viewed the remaining Jews in their countries after the Six Day War as assumed to be ungrateful enemies and not regular citizens:
Monday, November 30, 2020
- Monday, November 30, 2020
- Elder of Ziyon
Here's another example of how Arabs viewed the remaining Jews in their countries after the Six Day War as assumed to be ungrateful enemies and not regular citizens:
- Monday, November 30, 2020
- Elder of Ziyon
All of Jerusalem is holy to three religions—Christian, Jewish and Moslem, and some of the religious sites in and around the Holy City are shared by two or even all three of the religions.....For the Jews, the holiest place is the Wailing Wall, where —until excluded after the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 — they lamented the destruction of the great Herodian temple of 40 B.C....Another holy site shared by the three religions is the tomb of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, which is situated at Hebron, south of Jerusalem. Christians and Moslems still go to the big mosque in Hebron to pay their respects to the patriarchs. Since the Arab-Israeli war it, too, has not been accessible to the Jews....Somewhat in dispute is the Tomb of Rachel, the wife of Jacob. According to tradition, Rachel died here in childbirth and Jacob erected a memorial over her grave.Still visible is the place on the wall where the Ten Commandments and prayer shawls were believed to have been hung. The Jews have not been permitted to visit the tomb since 1948.
The head of the largest organization of Orthodox rabbis in the country appealed to President Johnson tonight to use his influence in the United Nations to get permission for Jews to worship at the Wailing Wall in the old section of Jerusalem occupied bv Jordan.Specifically, Rabbi Abraham N. AvRutick, president of the Rabbinical Council of America, urged both the Federal Government and the United Nations to enforce a provision in the Jordan‐Israel armistice agreement “which affirms the Jewish right to access to the Wailing Wall, and to all sacred Jewish sites and shrines in old Jerusalem.”...The rabbi also cited the Israeli practice of permitting Christians to go through the Mandelbaum Gate on sacred Christian holidays to visit holy sites in Jordan.Rabbi AvRutick voiced regret that Jews were denied the same privilege in Jordan. He listed various sacred Jewish religious shrines, adding that “no Jew has been permitted to visit the graveside of his parents on the Mount of Olives in old Jerusalem.”
See also here, where the Agudath Israel organization in the US petitioned the UN to allow Jews to visit the Kotel, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, Rachel's Tomb and other holy places.
A member of the Canadian House of Commons was denied permission yesterday by the Jordanian authorities to enter the Jordan-held Old City of Jerusalem to inspect the Holy Places because he was a Jew.Leon D. Crestohl, of Montreal, who is a member of the nine-man Canadian parliamentary delegation currently visiting Israel, was barred by the Jordanians when he sought to accompany the delegation on a tour of the Holy Places. Mr. Crestohl urged his fellow delegation members to make the tour without him.“I am delighted that my colleagues have enjoyed a pilgrimage to the Holy Places,” he said later, “but I am disappointed that I was denied the same privilege to visit the Jewish Holy Places to which all faiths enjoy a recognized form of access according to the armistice agreements.”
Sunday, November 29, 2020
- Sunday, November 29, 2020
- Elder of Ziyon
Melanie Phillips: The Prospective Return of Global Appeasement
This week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized Biden’s prospective team for living in a “fantasy world.” He said, “They led from behind, they appeased. I hope they will choose a different course.”Pompeo Passes Torch to Biden Admin Touting a Fundamentally Realigned Globe
Biden’s choice as ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who was an assistant Secretary of State under Obama, declared this week that multilateralism and diplomacy were back.
In response, Pompeo snapped that the Trump administration had developed “coalitions that actually deliver real results and reflect the reality on the ground,” and that America’s best interests were not served by “multilateralism for the sake of hanging out with your buddies at a cool cocktail party.”
Opponents of appeasement are often called warmongers. Winston Churchill, who during the 1930s fruitlessly warned that Hitler’s aggression needed to be curbed, was dismissed as such until his country realized almost too late that Hitler had Britain in his sights, as well as half of Europe.
The fact that Biden’s team consists of so many Obama-era retreads is causing concern among those Americans who understand the harm Obama inflicted upon their nation’s foundational principles.
They are no less concerned that Biden would essentially continue Obama’s strategy to reduce America’s standing in the world and thus weaken both the United States and the West that it leads.
It was a strategy that, under Obama, empowered those bent upon evil. Rational people everywhere, in the developing world no less than the West, should shudder at its prospective return in America.
These policies make sense to Israel and their Gulf partners, Pompeo said.
"It fits with their understanding of the risk to their people," Pompeo said. "So whether it’s in the Gulf states or Israel, I think they have come to appreciate that the policies that this administration put in place are the ones that are best for them, for their relationship and partnership with the United States of America."
"I’m confident more will follow," Pompeo said of other Arab nations likely to make peace with Israel.
The peace accords also are a sign of deeper U.S. ties with Israel’s traditional enemies, Pompeo said. The UAE, for example, is in line to receive more than $20 billion in U.S. weapons, including 50 F-35 Lighting II aircraft, MQ-9B drones, and advanced munitions systems—a massive military package that only would have been approved for Israel in years past.
While Pompeo was assailed in the media for stepping foot in disputed areas of Israel, peace talks with Arab nations continued. The BBC, for instance, wrote, "Trumplomacy: Mike Pompeo eyes history on Israel swansong trip." The article accused Pompeo of inflaming Palestinian leaders and positioning himself as a contender in the 2024 presidential election.
Asked about these critics, Pompeo described the reports as "longing for a time that is based on fantasy, when in fact, I think the world has moved away from that understanding that the lefties at the BBC hold so dearly."
Pompeo said he is not focusing on what is to come next year, but spending his final months in office ensuring President Donald Trump’s "America First" policies continue to challenge the conventional foreign policy establishment.
"We didn’t spend any time talking about what the—what might happen in January of next year," Pompeo said. "We spent a lot of time thinking about what we ought to do in November of this year and how we ought to continue—collectively, not just the United States, but continue collectively—to increase security in the region and get an even broader coalition."
Why Is the Palestinian Authority Donating to U.S. Universities?
The Palestinian Authority (PA) seems to have no shortage of funds to pay terrorists in Israeli jails and the families of suicide bombers. In 2019, the PA distributed approximately $148 million to prisoners, a 3 percent increase from 2018. Meanwhile, the PA lacks funds to combat the coronavirus and has cut salaries to government employees, including teachers (who are paid less than the terrorists), and other civil servants. Palestinians and Americans might, therefore, be surprised to learn that the PA has money to spare to donate to American universities.
A new study that I compiled for the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise found that U.S. institutions received more than $10 billion in foreign gifts from Arab sources from 1981 to October 2020. While it is not surprising the wealthy Gulf countries were responsible for the lion’s share, it was startling to see the non-existent “State of Palestine” made nine gifts worth $4.5 million in the last four years. While the amount may sound relatively trivial, the impact can be exponential.
The universities that received gifts from “The State of Palestine” may feel obligated to report the money as the donors wish, but doing so in this case compromises their integrity by legitimizing the Palestinian claim to being a state, one that is not accepted by the United States government. Since no such state exists, the record should say Palestinian Authority. Furthermore, given that the PA relies largely on foreign aid to subsist and is in dire financial straits, questions arise as to where it came up with this money, why it chose to spend it in the United States, and whether the Palestinian public is aware of how its money is being used.
Until 2020, the Department of Education (DoE) did not report how foreign gifts were used by universities and, even now, many are not explained. Of the 259 PA gifts listing a purpose, roughly 177 were for some type of financial aid for Arab students. Only one of the foreign gifts was identified with a political purpose — a $643,000 contribution to Brown in 2020 from “The State of Palestine” to provide support for a professorship in Palestinian Studies within its Center for Middle East Studies.
- Sunday, November 29, 2020
- Elder of Ziyon
- cartoon of the day
- Sunday, November 29, 2020
- Elder of Ziyon
- Sunday, November 29, 2020
- Elder of Ziyon
The Arab terrorists wasted no time in starting what would become the War of Independence, killing Jews in multiple attacks within hours of the declaration.
Saturday, November 28, 2020
Melanie Phillips: The prospective return of global appeasement
Under former President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which at best would delay its ability to build nuclear weapons by only a few years, billions of dollars poured into Tehran while the regime steadily increased its power across the region and continued to ramp up its terrorist activities.
Only when Trump took America out of the deal and reimposed sanctions did the regime start to totter and hopes began to grow that it might implode without the need for war.
Under successive American presidents, whether or not they were well-disposed towards Israel, Palestinian appeasement took the form of an endless peace process.
In order to keep the Palestinians in this process, the United States, United Kingdom and European Union refused to bring up anything that would cause them to walk out.
This meant ignoring their incitement to violence, their incendiary anti-Semitism and their declared aim of using a Palestinian state as means of destroying Israel in stages. The result of this surrender to blackmail was not peace, but endless Palestinian attacks against Israel through terrorism, murder and war.
When Trump ended this lethal appeasement strategy and instead moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem as a defiant statement of the Jews’ right to the land, the foreign-policy establishment confidently asserted that this would cause the region to go up in flames.
Not only did this not happen, with no one other than the Palestinians and their acolytes turning a hair, but the Gulf states started to normalize relations with Israel. This ended the Palestinian veto on peace and advanced the prospect of an end to the Arab war against Israel more than at any time since the 1920s.
But now these gains may be put into reverse. Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State is Antony Blinken, the Jewish stepson of a U.N. lawyer and the ultimate foreign-policy establishment insider.
Blinken served as President Bill Clinton’s chief foreign-policy speechwriter, a national security adviser to Biden and deputy to Secretary of State John Kerry. He is said to be a centrist who won’t make aid to Israel conditional on its policy choices, will keep the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem and will support Israel at the United Nations.
But the label “centrist” means he is a liberal universalist, and thus committed to policies that ultimately rest upon the appeasement of evil people.
John Podhoretz: Trump’s leaving Biden a Christmas gift of Middle East peace — will Joe throw it in the trash?
First, there is a general sense among all Democrats that anything and everything Trump has touched is corrupted and diseased and must be discarded.UNSC Resolution 242 at Fifty
The Abraham Accords are in part an outgrowth of the Trump administration’s clear tilt toward Israel from the moment it took office and the move of the American embassy to Jerusalem. That may alone may render the accords suspect in Obamian eyes.
At the same time, Biden now presides over a Democratic Party whose antipathy toward Israel is growing, as represented by the left-wing activists in the House who have made their loathing of the Jewish state a key element of their Squad’s cheerleading. Ironically, the Squad is committed to a Palestinian cause that its Arab sponsors have now largely abandoned.
The Arab signatories have grown tired of, and uninterested in, the Palestinian cause, and they seem eager to move on and deal with the world as it is. As they change course, the Democratic Party writ large may be eager to take up the cudgels of Palestinian nationalism more openly than ever before.
Perhaps even more painful for the Biden team, the ultimate success of the accords would be a history-making achievement for two leaders detested by the administration in which they served — Netanyahu, the subject of some of the ugliest score-settling jabs in Obama’s new memoir, and MBS, who has more than earned the opprobrium of all civilized people due to his apparent role in the literal dismemberment of his critic Jamal Khashoggi.
A Middle East in which Israel and Arab states find they can live together, trade together and move into the 21st century in a normal way is an international blessing. The Biden team doesn’t have to do anything but reap the fruits of this new reality. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Let’s see if they screw it up.
Other factors explain the novelty of 242 as well, especially the impulse to “learn lessons” from previous rounds of postwar diplomacy and the inevitable over-learning that such an impulse generates. None of the four factors discussed above — multiple fronts, multiple players on one front, short duration, and inauspicious timing in the global order — is unique in its own right, but the combination of all four is. And the Six-Day War was not merely a unique war but a war in a unique conflict.
The wording of the resolution ignores the existence of a Palestinian national movement with real claims on the land, even while acknowledging their genuine historical grievance at the result of a previous war. And it ignores entirely that the very existence of Israel is at the center of the conflict of which the recent war was just one episode.
The standard model might work where the dispute is about land or resources or even holy sites and refugees. But when one side regards accepting the very existence of the other as an insufferable concession, any diplomatic process that makes overly ambitious demands (full peace instead of a truce) with no clear benchmarks (territorial compromises to be negotiated by all parties) among competing belligerents with vastly different interests is doomed to fail. When it leaves no room for any party or combination of parties to alter a status quo in any meaningful way by the adoption of half-measures, it has the inevitable result of cementing a reality of semi-permanent occupation.
The semi-permanent occupation has been reasonably tolerable for the Arab states that lost the war, allowing them to pursue their own means for disengaging from a conflict they had no hope of winning. But it has been a catastrophe for the Israelis and Palestinians themselves, who still find their very national existence questioned and threatened in a way nations in other conflicts, even bitter conflicts, do not.
- Saturday, November 28, 2020
- Elder of Ziyon
The NCRI said in the report that Fakhrizadeh was born in 1958 in the Shi’ite Muslim holy city of Qom, was a deputy defence minister and a Revolutionary Guards brigadier-general, held a nuclear engineering doctorate and taught at Iran’s University of Imam Hussein.A high-ranking Iranian source described Fakhrizadeh to Reuters in 2014 as “an asset and an expert” dedicated to Iran’s technological progress and enjoying the full support of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.The source added that Fakhrizadeh had three passports and travelled a lot, including in Asia, to obtain “the latest information” from abroad, but would not elaborate. Western security sources say Iran was long adept in obtaining nuclear materials and know-how from the international black market.
Friday, November 27, 2020
Natan Sharansky and the Meaning of Freedom
Natan Sharansky has been a computer scientist, a chess player, a refusenik, a dissident, a political prisoner, a party leader, a government minister, a nonprofit executive, and a bestselling author. He never expected to be a school counselor.
But the coronavirus dashes expectations. In early March, when the virus began to appear in Jewish communities outside New York City, Sharansky found himself online, in an unaccustomed position. He began to share with students and parents whose schools were closed how he had coped during years in confinement.
"At first, it seemed absurd, even obscene," Sharansky writes in his latest book, Never Alone, coauthored with the historian Gil Troy. "How could my experience of playing chess in my head in my punishment cell compare to being cooped up in gadget-filled homes wired to the internet—with computer chess—especially because this isolation is imposed to protect people, not break them?"
What Sharansky realized is that the costs of lockdowns do not depend on the reasons behind them. The sudden and seemingly arbitrary interruption of individual plans, movements, and relationships causes psychological harm. Sharansky recorded a brief YouTube video for the Jewish Agency—you can watch it here—offering his five tips for quarantine. Recognize the importance of your choices and behavior, Sharansky advised. Understand that some things are beyond your control. Keep laughing. Enjoy your hobbies. Consider yourself part of a larger cause.
"Surprisingly," Sharansky writes, "this short clip went viral, reaching so many people all over the world within a few days that it made me wonder why even bother writing this book." His reaction was another example of his droll and often self-deprecating wit. The video, however helpful it may be, does not match the power and wisdom of Never Alone. Part autobiography, part meditation on Jewish community, the book ties together the themes of Sharansky’s earlier work, from his prison memoir, Fear No Evil (1988), to his defense of cultural particularity, Defending Identity (2008). It is a moving story of emancipation and connection, of freedom and meaning.
Sharansky was born in 1948 in the Ukrainian city of Stalino. His given name was Anatoly. His parents were educated professionals who downplayed their Jewish identity. They did not want to risk political and social reprisal. "The only real Jewish experience I had was facing anti-Semitism," he writes. The precocious youth spent his early years playing chess. He learned to navigate a Soviet system that maintained its rule through fear. He became captive to doublethink. He repeated official lies and myths not because it was the right thing to do, but because it was the safe thing to do.
This Sunday- Nov. 29th - is the anniversary of UN GA Resolution 181, unsuccessfully calling for a complex, continuous partition of Mandatory Palestine. My new @KoheletForum webminar explains what 181 achieved, and why it was seen as so important https://t.co/x9yNcL5NSQ
— Eugene Kontorovich (@EVKontorovich) November 26, 2020
Caroline Glick: Justice (and anti-Semitism) you shall pursue
Over the past week or so we have been witnessing the emergence of a new sort of anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party. The new form of Jew-hatred is a combination of anti-Zionism and identity politics. It is convoluted and hard to follow. But contradictions and all, it has arrived. And Jewish Americans, sensing the partisan disposition, are adapting themselves accordingly.
The first place to look for the new Jew-hatred is in Joe Biden's appointments. Most of the attention this week has been focused on Biden's senior appointments. Biden appointed Tony Blinken, who is Jewish, to serve as his secretary of state. As John Kerry's deputy, Blinken played a major role in crafting the nuclear deal with Iran which, while billed as a non-proliferation agreement, gave the world's greatest state sponsor of terrorism an open path to a nuclear arsenal. Like his former boss, Blinken is faithful to the view that the Palestinians are the strategic nerve center of the Middle East. Without their agreement, it is impossible – or if possible, wrong – for Arab states to make peace with Israel.
Blinken is considered an establishment figure rather than an ideologue. But since he is a Jew, party ideologues view him as suspect. For instance, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib responded to the news of his appointment with an anti-Semitic tweet. Responding to socialist Senator Bernie Sanders' praise for Blinken's appointment, Tlaib averred, "So long as he doesn't suppress my First Amendment right to speak out against Netanyahu's racist and inhumane policies."
Two other appointments announced this week certainly were more to Tlaib's liking.
Biden appointed Reema Dodin, a Palestinian American to serve as the deputy director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. As the pro-Israel website Elder of Zion reported, in 2002, as a student at the University of California Berkeley, Dodin was the head of the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Muslim Students Association. In that capacity, she gave a speech at a church in Lodi, California where she justified suicide bombers. In her words at the time, "The suicide bombers were the last resort of a desperate people."
After her remarks were reported by Fox News, the Biden campaign issued a defensive response. Notably, the campaign made no effort to either deny or distance itself from Dodin's justification for the mass murder of Israelis by Palestinian terrorists. Instead, the campaign response read, "Reema is the first to tell you she has grown from her youth in her approach to pushing for change."
In other words, Dodin continues to justify the mass murder of Jews. But now that she's a grown-up, she presents it differently.
A lot of you are going to point out this analogy is disgraceful, but let's not ignore how bold it is coming from a bureau chief for the New York Times, which in 2015 published a yellow-highlighted Jew Tracker of lawmakers who opposed the Obama-Biden Iran deal. https://t.co/3hFG09Cg9J
— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) November 26, 2020
I prefer the more outright antisemitism of the Nation of Islam than I do of Women's March who masquerade as "progressives". pic.twitter.com/18cChUTWdN
— kweansmom (@kweansmom) November 26, 2020
- Friday, November 27, 2020
- Elder of Ziyon
- Tomer Ilan
Iran's nuclear program chief Mohsen Fakhrizadeh assassinated
Head of Iran's nuclear program Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, 59, was assassinated in Damavand, east of Tehran, local Iranian news reported on Friday.
Iran later confirmed the reports. "The nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated today by terrorists," the Iranian Defense Ministry wrote in a statement, while not blaming any specific entity for the incident.
However, Iran's foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif later stated on Twitter that "serious indication" pointed to Israeli involvement and urged the international community to condemn the attack.
Pictures from the scene show two vehicles, one blown up and one shot at from the front. Several local reports in Iran indicated that a suicide bomber was involved in the attack, but that has not yet been confirmed.
The Prime Minister's Office and the Pentagon have yet to comment on the reports.
A military adviser to Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei accused Israel for trying to provoke "a full-blown" war by killing Fakhrizadeh.
First photo of Fakhrizadeh's car attacked by the assassins today pic.twitter.com/ciMGv6n8Sw
— Reza Khaasteh (@Reza_Khaasteh) November 27, 2020
Warning from the past comes back to haunt Iran’s top nuclear scientist
“Remember that name” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned in 2018 of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who many referred to as the “father” of Iran’s nuclear weapons project.
But over the course of two years, no one remembered that name. Save for a few, including those who assassinated him on a busy street in Damavand, east of the capital of Tehran, on Friday.
Netanyahu made the comment when he divulged that Israel had obtained 100,000 files from Iran’s secret nuclear archives. He said that Fakhrizadeh, a brigadier general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and a professor of physics at the Guard’s Imam Hussein University, played a central role in the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.
Though he had been sidelined for several years, Fakhirzadeh returned to drive Iran’s nuclear program, Project Amad, specifically to develop nuclear warheads for the multitudes of ballistic missiles the Islamic republic already possesses.
While Iran was forced to shelve Project Amad in 2003, it continued with its nuclear ambitions and Western intelligence sources even revealed that in 2013 Fakhrizadeh had attended a North Korean nuclear weapons test.
"Remember that name – Fakhrizadeh."
— Daniel Rubenstein (@paulrubens) November 27, 2020
–Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, April 30, 2018 pic.twitter.com/7NF2DkElSU