Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, March 13, 2021

03/13 Links: Only Arabs in Israel have true democracy; Largest Pro-Israel Group in US Launches Ads Against Biden Pentagon Pick; Black Lives Matter is a politically correct ISIS

From Ian:

Only Arabs in Israel have true democracy

Which of the hundreds of millions of Arab citizens in the Middle East will be able to vote in free and fair elections this year?

It’s obviously not Syria. Even before a brutal civil war that killed half a million people and made almost half the population refugees, the country was a brutal dictatorship. Libya is in carnage and Yemen is still the world’s biggest humanitarian catastrophe.

Egypt is under a state of emergency and the President’s main opponents were banned from the last election. Whilst there are varying degrees of political development in the Arab monarchies, the unelected Monarch retains the final say in all of them.

The first election for nine years eventually took place in Lebanon in 2018, after being called off by the government three times. Elections also take place in Iraq but are marred by corruption and Baghdad comes down hard on anyone who really tries to exercise self-determination, as the Kurds found out with the military action and blockade they faced after their referendum in 2017.

Many won’t want to hear it, of course, but apart from Tunisia, the likelihood is that the only Arab citizens in the whole of the Middle East who will get to elect the people who run their country in free and fair elections live in Israel.

Almost 380 million Arab citizens live in two dozen countries stretching across five million square miles and the only ones who truly have a say in who runs their country are the 1.9 million in the tiny state of Israel.

Later this month, all nine million Israeli citizens, whatever their religion, race, ethnicity or heritage, will have exactly the same rights at the ballot box. All citizens of Israel vote on an equal basis and Arab voter turnout for the 2020 election reached 64.8%, its highest level in the last two decades.

Visit the Knesset and you will see one of the most diverse and disputatious legislatures in the world representing every shade of opinion from the far left to the extreme right.

MEMRI: Gaza Ceremony On International Women's Day Lauds Palestinian Women Terrorists Shadia Abu Ghazaleh, Leila Khaled, Dalal Al-Mughrabi

The Palestinian Authority's Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs held a ceremony in Gaza in honor of freed female prisoners on International Women's Day. It was aired on Palestine TV on March 8, 2021. The governor of Gaza Ibrahim Abu Al-Naja spoke on behalf of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. He condemned the new UAE ambassador to Israel and added: "Damn him and his country!"

Senior official of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) Maryam Abu Daqqa lauded Palestinian women and said that they have been an integral part of the armed-struggle and resistance against Zionism, from the early days of the "Zionist invasion" to the "modern-day Palestinian revolution." She said that Palestinian women are part of a "triangle of terror" threatening the Zionist entity – on land, at sea, and from the air. She gave the example of PFLP member Shadia Abu Ghazaleh who was killed while preparing a bomb in 1968, Leila Khaled who was the first female plane hijacker, and Dalal Al-Mughrabi who had participated in the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre in Israel.

Gaza Governor Al-Naja: "Palestinian Women Have Sacrificed Like No Other Women In The World; [They] Send Their Sons... To Go [Fight] For The Sake Of Their Cause"

Announcer: "And now to the speech by President Mahmoud Abbas, Abu Mazen, which will be delivered on his behalf by the governor of the Gaza Governorate, Ibrahim Abu Al-Naja, Abu Wael, please. "

Gaza Governor Ibrahim Abu Al-Naja: "Palestinian women have sacrificed like no other women in the world. Palestinian women are still role models, because they are seekers of freedom, they are mothers, they are sisters, they are fighters, they are martyrs and they are bereaved.

"Look at how these women send their sons, one after the other, telling them to go [fight] for the sake of their cause, for the sake of freedom in the world, and for the sake of human rights.

"This is the message that the world has ignored. This is the message that was rebuffed by the enemies of our nation and our people. This is the message that our [Arab] brothers do not want to understand. They want to erase our history. This is a disgrace. We reject and condemn this and we do not want this to be recorded in the annals of our nation's history.

"Yesterday, an ambassador of a country we used to call 'brotherly' presented his credentials...

French Jews Remember Anniversary of 2012 Terror Attacks That Culminated in Massacre at Jewish School

France on Thursday began commemorations for the ninth anniversary of a devastating Islamist terror spree that claimed the lives of seven people, including three children at a Jewish school and two soldiers in the French army.

The tributes to the victims — murdered in the Toulouse region by Islamist terrorist Mohamed Merah between March 11-15, 2012 — coincided with the Europe-wide national memorial day for the victims of terrorism. That event takes place on March 11 to commemorate the 2004 terror attack on the same day upon the Atocha train station in the Spanish capital, Madrid.

The French Jewish communal organization CRIF tweeted a tribute to the first of the seven victims, Imad ibn Ziaten, a parachutist in the French armed forces from a Muslim family of Moroccan origin. Ziaten was shot dead by Merah at point blank range after refusing to obey the terrorist’s instruction to lie on the ground.

“A few days later, six people including two other soldiers, three children and a father were also murdered,” the CRIF tweet noted.

On March 19, 2012, Merah launched a gun attack on the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse. He murdered Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, who taught at the school, together with his two sons, six-year-old Aryeh and three-year-old Gabriel.

Merah then grabbed another child, eight-year-old Miriam Monsonego, and shot her through the head before escaping. Following a 30 hour siege at his apartment building in which six agents were wounded, Merah was shot dead by a police tactical unit on March 22.

03/12 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: Meghan Markle and the Jewish question; UK Jews are fooling themselves; The Western cultural Stockholm Syndrome

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Meghan Markle and the Jewish question

The secular world, including many secular Jews, tells itself the opposite. It claims that the West’s most valuable achievements, such as science and the promotion of freedom and equality, come from having dumped the Bible as mere mumbo-jumbo involving punitive codes of behavior that destroy freedom.

On the contrary, these are values and achievements that could not have existed without Judaism and Christianity. And every one of the ideologies which has replaced the Hebrew Bible—ideologies that have helped extinguish freedom and equality and undermined scientific integrity—is anti-Judaism or anti-Israel.

Moral relativism denies the Mosaic moral codes. Egalitarianism denies the differentiation and distinctiveness that underpin the very idea of right versus wrong.

Environmentalism, which denies the superiority of humankind over the natural world, devalues humanity in favor of the planet. Materialism, or the belief that everything in the universe has a material explanation, denies the existence of God. Transnationalism dismisses the importance of the individual nation with its particular culture and laws, which is the very essence of Judaism.

Responsibility for the crisis in the West, however, doesn’t only lie with the liberals—and liberal Jews—who subscribe to these ideas. Conservatives have conspicuously failed to fight them.

After the fall of communism, conservatives thought their anti-Western fox had been shot. They turned instead to defending liberty against the state at home. But liberty shouldn’t be an end in itself. It should be the means to a more important end: how to live a civilized life and help create a civilized society.

The failure of conservatives to understand this, coupled with their tendency to view the world through the prism of economics, meant they were largely blind to the urgent need to defend the West’s core values of individual and collective moral responsibility.

When the culture war against the West morphed into a lifestyle free-for-all and the growth of identity politics, these so-called conservatives gave up and decided to go with the flow.

In general, observant Jews tend to be politically conservative. So are some religiously liberal Jews, but these are vastly outnumbered by politically liberal Jews who are either secular or are trying to refashion Judaism itself into a secular and liberal Golden Calf.

The challenge for Jewish conservatives is to find the language to reclaim and communicate Jewish values to both the Jewish and non-Jewish world, and to use these values to drive the defense of the Western nation and its culture against the forces that seek to obliterate it through the moral chaos we now see all around us.

UK Jews are fooling themselves

English Jews are experiencing a wrenching time. They struggle with anti-Jew hatred from migrants, knife attacks, vandalism to their synagogues and Jewish schools. The perfidious anti-Semitism in all its vizards once pervading the Labour Party gave it gravitas until the exorcism. It lingers in the larger society and on public display as pro-Palestinian activism.

Tenenbom wants to learn about Brexit but gets caught up in the Jewish questions. How pervasive is anti-Semitism in the United Kingdom? How are Jews responding? He takes to the streets and reports his findings in a new book.

Tenenbom chronicles his capers roaming through Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. He is more of a participant than a detached journalist. Anti-Semites, he reports, commonly disguise their positions as pro-Palestinian fulminations. Underneath it all lie traditional crude blood libels. For instance, a favorite indictment of the Jews is they purposely kill or support the killers of Palestinian Arab children.

Tuvia reports the findings in a solid, entertaining, and informative book, and best-selling e-book, titled The Taming of the Jew (Gefen Publishing, 2021/5781). His favorite theme is exposing the place of Jews living in free societies, in the age of tolerance, and how Jews respond.

Enjoy the humor and self-deprecation of Tenenbom’s writing. They are his hallmarks, but don’t give short shrift to the importance of his findings. He is genuine, remarkably sensitive to the surroundings, and insightful per Mead and Benedict, but funnier. Methods include driving the back roads, walking neighborhood streets, drinking in local pubs, eating in family restaurants, sleeping in off-beat hotels and engaging ordinary folk and influencers.

Tenenbom is relentless in questioning Christians about the Jews. He is no less relentless when talking with Jews about anti-Semitism. He presses everyone about the pro-Palestinian love affair promoted by politicians and NGOs.

The Western cultural Stockholm Syndrome

I spend a lot of time reading about and writing about worrisome cultural trends in what have traditionally been the liberal democracies of the West, including America, Canada, Australia, Israel and a weakening Europe.

I am saddened when I contemplate the extent to which our traditional free society has succumbed to:
1. an excessive tolerance of evil (which, in a book by the same name, I term “tolerism”);
2. a masochistic self-hatred, leading to threats to our fundamental liberties; and
3. ultimately a submission or surrender to what I call the Leftist-Islamist-Globalist alliance.
- We make compromises in our freedoms to accommodate fascist collusion among leftist Democrats, big Tech censorship, our education and university systems, and media that blatantly ignores stories that challenge their bias.
- We accept, even welcome, a totalitarian Islamist theocracy.
- We tolerate attempts from offshore to terrorize us, to make us submit to their values, instead of defending ours.
- We allow citizens of totalitarian states that regularly print anti-Semitic cartoons to dictate to us in our country not to print cartoons they find “offensive”.
- I have had, as far back as 18 years ago, a lecture shouted down by “Islamofascists” who said I had no “right” to speak if I disagreed with their views, and our civil liberties groups were silent.
- We cower in the face of threats that this policy or that policy may “inflame the Arab street” or Black Lives Matter.

Our tolerance and submission to Islamism has clearly paved the way for our tolerance and submission to Black Lives Matter, and the increasing number of violent domestic terrorists, who, despite media falsehoods, are predominantly on the left. As recently as last Saturday, the American city of Portland, Oregon was still seeing rioting in its streets.

We allow Big Tech censors to delete anything that offensive fascists say offends them. Our ideology of Tolerism combined with our ready adoption of the Stockholm Syndrome has laid down the path for large groups of our young people to respond to their alienation from a culture and economy that makes their prospects difficult by a great “transformation” or “re-set”.

This recalls when Judith Butler referred to Hamas and Hezbollah as "social movements that are progressive."

03/12 Links Pt1: Is the Biden Administration Planning on Violating the Taylor Force Act?; Exposing the ICC’s anti-Israel bias; UAE announces $10 billion fund for investments in Israel

From Ian:

Stuart Force, Sander Gerber and Mike Pompeo: Is the Biden Administration Planning on Violating the Taylor Force Act?

The Biden Administration has signaled its desire to resume aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a way to jump start the moribund Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” The obstacle to peace, however, is not the absence of US assistance but the PA’s incentivizing of terrorism. The bipartisan Taylor Force Act blocks US funding for the PA until it changes this behavior. There is no indication that it has, making any resumption of US taxpayer aid a contravention of this important law and a further hindrance to peace.

The PA’s “pay-for-slay” policy was highlighted by the 2016 murder of an American tourist in Israel by a Palestinian terrorist. The tourist, named Taylor Force — a West Point graduate, US Army veteran, and son of one of the authors of this post — was in Tel Aviv on a school trip when he was stabbed to death.

Force was neither Israeli nor Jewish. Yet, the PA celebrated the killer repeatedly as a “heroic Martyr” and held a large, festive funeral where he was hailed as a national hero. The murderer’s family soon began receiving benefit payments from the PA.

The PA spends massively on these payments to terrorists and their families and treats this perverse benefits system as a sacred obligation. Codified in PA law, the system adds bonus payments for Israeli Arabs and Arab residents of Jerusalem who have Israeli IDs and therefore more freedom of movement to carry out attacks. The longer the prison sentence, the greater the payments — meaning the deadlier, the more lucrative. The PA employs some 550 people in its pay-for-slay bureaucracies and devotes over seven percent of its budget, or $350 million, to the program, compared to just $220 million for non-terrorist welfare programs.

To address this despicable system, Congress passed the Taylor Force Act (TFA) — a bill the ACLJ has long supported — cutting off US aid to the PA until the pay-for-slay bureaucracy is dismantled and the laws governing it are repealed. The logic is simple: since money is fungible, aid that supplants the governance responsibilities of the PA frees up PA money to reward terrorists.

The Taylor Force Act corrected a profoundly immoral policy that had American taxpayer funds being laundered unwittingly through PA accounts to incentivize murder. The bill also offered a simple litmus test of the PA’s seriousness about making peace: If the PA cannot revoke the laws and infrastructure conferring special treatment for terrorists, then the PA itself remains an obstacle to the “peace process.”

Yet, the Biden Administration claims renewed aid for the Palestinian people will not violate TFA, which bars aid programs that “directly benefit” the PA. And news reports indicate the PA believes it can satisfy the Administration by making terrorist compensation “needs based” rather than based on the success of attacks, as it is now.

The Administration also appears set to endorse and empower the PA by giving it preemptive rewards, such as re-opening the PLO mission in Washington, DC, the office that directly administers the pay-for-slay program.

European, Arab diplomats attempt to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts

Leading European and Arab world diplomats announced potential “small steps” Thursday toward reviving Middle East peace efforts after upcoming Israeli and Palestinian elections.

The officials — from the UN, EU, Egypt, Jordan, Germany, and France — did not release any specific details, however. And the meeting came amid new tensions between Israel and Arab countries around Jerusalem.

There have not been any serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in over a decade and it is unclear what the diplomats can do concretely to create conditions to bring the two sides closer together, especially without the participation of the US.

The Biden administration has called on both sides to refrain from unilateral steps that could harm peace efforts but has yet to announce any major effort to resolve the decades-old conflict as it focuses on the coronavirus, the economy, and other domestic issues.

“We are going to initiate meetings with both parties within a timeframe built around the electoral calendar to identify, with them, the steps they are in a position to take to kickstart mutual trust,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said. He mentioned possible health and economic measures, without elaborating.

Any next moves will depend on the outcome of the Israeli election on March 23, as well as Palestinian elections later this year.

Progressives who say “we oppose illegal settlements in the West Bank”, who then say nothing when those settlements are built by Arabs… are really saying “we oppose Jews living in the West Bank”.

How very progressive.

Follow @RegavimIsrael to learn more. https://t.co/hxDQuIVxqB
— Israel Advocacy Movement (@israel_advocacy) March 12, 2021

Why is Norway, the Custodians of the Oslo Accords and who seek to advance peace in the Middle East, further investing in @UNRWA, one of the main impediments to peace, that is inciting violence & Antisemitism? @NorwayMFA @NorwayinIsrael @miffno @NGOmonitor https://t.co/HU2vtQ9rBL
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) March 12, 2021

A love song to murderous terrorist Dalal Mughrabi on the anniversary of the Coastal Road Massacre

For the 43rd anniversary of the Coastal Road Massacre, the independent Ma'an newspaper - as well as the Saudi Arabia based Gulf Eyes - published a loving paean to the leader of the murderous attack, Dalal al-Mughrabi, a terrorist whose stature has remained undiminished by supposed acceptance of peace and rejection of terror by the PLO.

The poetic tribute to a mass murderer is as ugly as it gets. Excerpts:

She reveals herself again the one who made the myth of love ... a brown woman inhabited by nostalgia of the earth ... and tired of living in the confines of asylum ... so she exercised her right to return ... so she rode the sea from there and said what she said in the presence of the night, her curtains pulled down for the last time on the shores of her dream... She decided to embrace her grandmother's stories and make a miracle of returning to the thirsty land .... a representative of all dreams of the elderly whose faces were tanned in the sun of the groves of the Galilee ... she took out her black rifle and prepared and evoked all the stories of the women of Karbala and al-Khansa ... She knew when to cry and how her tears would be sparkling crystals on her cheeks ... She was fluent in the language of her smiles ...She ran in the middle of the rain without being touched by that wetness ... She would sing the love songs formed in her perceptions .... and she would come open her arms to take you and her towards the act of life...the butterflies caught her while flying in the sky of its clouds. ... and the wind caught her while she was rising above the roof of her dreams ... She traveled towards eternity, and she had immortality in the wild olive land ... She inspired all the scribes and poets to write the elegies of the beautiful time for a girl who decided to go and went towards her sun and sea ...It is Dalal who will return after her killer realized that he had not killed her dream of her return, and she stayed here for thirty years against his will ... trying to tear it apart and mulch dirt with her hair, but he did not realize that she decided that this dirt should be henna for her hair ...

Dalal al-Maghribi returns to the bosom of the truth .... they killed her because she had openly expressed her love ... and she had to dance the dance of death ... So death also has a decision ... and you are now returning to us, can we ask again .. ??

38 Israelis including 13 children were murdered in the terror attack.

I have not once seen a single Palestinian article questioning whether Mughrabi is a hero or a role model. On the contrary, she is universally adored by Palestinians.

And as long as that remains true, there is no chance for peace.

The best argument against Israel being a "racist state" has just come from one of Israel's most prominent Arab critics.

Ayman Odeh, the head of the main Israeli Arab political party, was interviewed on Israel's Channel 13 - and his words could easily be included in a Likud campaign commercial to attract Arab votes:

When I look at the Rambam Hospital I see that 31% of the doctors are Arabs.
In the Rothschild-Bnei Zion hospital there are 15 departments, 8 of them are headed by Arabs.
When I look at the Technion I see that 23% of the male students are Arabs. 35% of the female students are Arabs.
When I look at the University of Haifa I see that 46% of the students are Arabs.
In high tech, in the last five years alone, there's an increase of 13%...1300% in participation of Arabs.
Do you understand? Do you understand what is happening?
We are a successful population! Successful!

Most of these gains happened under Israel's "right wing" governments headed by that supposed racist, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Odeh himself has called Israel an "apartheid" state. Maybe he should debate himself.

(h/t Yoel)

From Globes:

Last week's announcement by the Ministry of Transport that the rail link from "Haifa Bay to the Persian Gulf" was officially moving ahead in the National Planning Commission remained under the media radar.

The idea of such a link was first raised in 2017 by the then Minister of Transport Israel Katz who has continued promoting the plan before international organizations in his brief stint as minister of foreign affairs under the name "The Peace Railway." But now operative measures are being taken including depositing a plan for expanding and extending the existing Haifa - Beit Shean rail link on to the nearby Jordanian border at an estimated cost of NIS 3.5 billion.
...
The idea of such mega-railway projects was revived by the Chinese government, which is striving for a 'silk railroad' connecting Asia and Europe and over the past decade has injected hundreds of billions of dollars in building a transcontinental railway. The railway has played a vital role in trade during the Covid-19 crisis with international aviation and shipping routes disrupted.

Now the countries of the Middle East have discovered that rehabilitating their railways and integrating them into the overall plan of the Chinese government, opens up new trade opportunities connecting Europe, Asia and the Persian Gulf.

The article goes into some detail, plus emphasizing the political roadblocks to such a project. Part of the incentive for China is that a Chinese firm is building and will be operating the Haifa Bayport container terminal, and China wants to use rail lines to trade goods via the Mediterranean. The Israeli decision to award that port to the Chinese has been controversial.

(h/t Daniel)

Outrageous: Mass murderer Ahlam Tamimi taken off the Interpol "Most Wanted" list

From various Arabic media outlets:

Interpol has removed the freed prisoner deported to Jordan, Ahlam Al-Tamimi, from its wanted list.

Her husband, Nizar Al-Tamimi, said that after a legal battle that lasted for a year and a half, the Defense Committee for the freed captive, Ahlam Al-Tamimi, proved the invalidity of the red notice issued against her by the International Interpol, the judge of habeas corpus.

He added, "With this legal victory, her name was removed from the wanted list of Interpol, with the grace of God."

He continued, "Our struggle will continue until its file is completely closed."

Ahlam Tamimi is the monster who was responsible for the Jerusalem Sbarro pizza shop bombing in 2001 that killed 15, including eight children. She has said in numerous interviews how proud she is of the attack. She was released in a prisoner swap and now lives a protected life in Jordan.

She is on the FBI's most wanted list and the US has requested her extradition for her role in murdering two Americans. Jordan has refused, instead protecting the murderer.

The story may be accurate. She was on the international Interpol red list in 2017, and her name is not on it now. Taking this unrepentant Palestinian terrorist off the list is absolutely outrageous.

03/11 Links Pt2: From Durban to The Hague: 20 Years of NGO Lawfare; UN Women’s Palestinian Youth Leaders Glorify Terrorism; South Park's citizens vaccinated against COVID-19 thanks to Israel

From Ian:

Gerald Steinberg: From Durban to The Hague: 20 Years of NGO Lawfare

It was only after the UN Human Rights Council’s 2009 Goldstone Report on Gaza repeated the NGOs’ accusations and threatened a referral to the ICC that the Israeli government began paying attention to this campaign. Israel’s foreign and defense ministries published rebuttals of the accusations mentioned in the report. In parallel, Goldstone was confronted with the unsubstantiated claims and inconsistencies that characterized it. (He later acknowledged these failures, but the damage was done, and the campaign gained momentum and visibility.)

Supported by the NGO network, Palestinians gained UN General Assembly approval for calling themselves a state in 2014, despite the absence of the necessary criteria (such as a government in total control of a defined territory), and immediately used this dubious achievement to join the ICC and file complaints against Israel. In 2015, ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced that she would consider jurisdiction. The Israeli government focused on convincing her to reject the Palestinian claims to statehood and on highlighting the integrity of Israel’s legal system. In theory, this should have prevented ICC involvement according to the Rome Statute, which states that ICC is only authorized to intervene (or “complement”) national courts in situations in which the states involved lack the ability to bring suspected war criminals to trial.

In practice, Israel’s claims were insufficient in the face of the powerful political forces promoting the lawfare strategy. In December 2019, Bensouda claimed jurisdiction and “a reasonable basis” for investigating possible Israeli war crimes, and in February 2021, after two of the three judges who reviewed her claims declared their approval, she moved quickly to open a formal investigation.

Major damage in the form of demonization of Israel has already been done, but if enough counter-pressure can be applied, including by negating the power and resources of the NGOs behind this process, the ICC travesty might be stopped. The current prosecutor is finishing her term, and her successor, Karim Khan, from the United Kingdom, might be persuaded to halt the pseudo-investigations, particularly if the survival of the ICC is at stake.

In parallel, European funders of the campaign must be confronted directly and consistently. Anyone who is concerned about the abuse of the ICC for political campaigns, including Americans and Israelis, should demand to end the demonization under the façade of human rights and international law. Germany, for instance, is one of the main funders of the ICC and the largest single supporter of the NGOs leading the campaigns. The absurdity of German funding for anti-Israel NGOs has not yet received the necessary priority.

September 2021 will mark the twentieth anniversary of the UN’s antisemitic Durban conference and the NGO Forum, where both ICC lawfare and the BDS campaigns against Israel were launched. The best way to mark this date is to ensure that the perpetrators and their allies have nothing to celebrate.

We Went Inside a Palestinian Village (get ready to bust some myths)

This week’s show is different! We went into Palestinian villages, met the people, and captured normal Palestinian life on camera.

Undercover, Joshua and Luke visit Rawabi, a Palestinian western city built for 40,000 people right in the middle of Samaria. How many people actually live there? You’ll be blown away by the answer.

After visiting another abandoned village, the team heads into Turmus Ayya, a place considered the “America of the West Bank”. 12,000 people claim this village as home, but less than 4,000 live here. Filled with villas and mansions, this place looks like it came straight out of Hollywood. Joshua even got to interview the mayor on camera!

This week’s show is truly on the front lines of Israel’s heartland. Get ready for some mythbusting adventure!

UN Watch: UN Women’s Palestinian Youth Leaders Glorify Terrorism

As the world marks International Women’s Day this week, the UN agency for gender equality should explain why they have selected Palestinian youth leaders who glorify women in acts of terrorism.

UN Women’s Palestine branch recently announced its new youth forum for dialogue and advocacy around gender, and “31 young leaders from Palestine were selected for their leadership and demonstrated contribution to promote gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.”

Members of this Youth Gender Innovation Agora, according to UN Women, are “committed to the core values of the United Nations.” Yet a glance at the social media of some of these young leaders suggests that UN Women Palestine chose many young leaders with a demonstrated record of glorifying terrorism, and of opposition to core United Nations values of human rights and peace.

UN Women’s gender equality youth leader Mohamad Abu Samra could be credited with promoting female role models, except that his idea of female empowerment is the terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, who participated in the 1978 Coast Road Massacre in which 38 Israelis, including 13 children, were murdered.

In Mohamad Abu Samra’s Facebook post, his text accompanying a picture of Mughrabi details with reverence the heroism of Dalal to fulfill “the necessity to carry out a daring and qualitative operation to hit Israel in the heart of its capital.”

Abu Samra isn’t the only one of the GIA’s youth leaders who admires Mughrabi. Samar Saleh Thawabteh also commemorates the anniversary of Mughrabi’s “martyrdom” with her own post celebrating the terrorist attack which, in her words, caused “hundreds of dead and wounded on the Israeli side.” This UN gender equality leader gives Mughrabi further credit for exploding the bus she was in and killing the passengers and Israeli soldiers on board.

Unpacked: Can You Be Zionist and Progressive? | The Israeli-Palestinian Context

From global movements to college campuses, the intersection of progressivism and Zionism is one where nothing is black or white. In the complex political and social climate of the world today, the lines between fact and opinion have become increasingly blurred. One of those “gray zones” lies at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What does it mean to be a proud Jewish Zionist in today’s liberal spaces?

Mideast Couple Pays Premium For No-Drone-Strike Option At Wedding (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Predator drone Sana, March 11 - Families of a man and woman hoping not to be dismembered by missiles from an American Predator aircraft at the celebration of their nuptials lamented this week that securing a venue that can accommodate such a preference will cost them a metaphorical arm and leg.

The Jabari and Hufri clans agreed last month to a marriage between Ahmad, a scion of the Jabaris, and Asma, of the Hufris, to take place in mid-March, but planning has bogged down and the event postponed twice already because all parties to the arrangement have agreed on at least one condition that catering halls and other facilities have declared all but impossible: no American drone strikes during the ceremony or party. The only available option, they discovered, involves an underground facility that must undergo significant modifications to attain the 200-person capacity that the event requires, and as such much charge more than ten times the prevailing rate for above-ground venues of similar size.

"We knew, in the abstract, that Biden's election would mean a return to the Obama-era phenomenon of drone attacks on weddings," acknowledged patriarch Hussein Jabari, the groom's great uncle. "But that was before Ahmad got engaged. Now it's real, and personal, and we have to address the down-to-earth details and implications. So far the drone strikes under Biden have been confined to remote areas of Syria, but the Americans are somehow both unreliable and entirely predictable, so at one point we even considered calling off the wedding. But the two of them are so cute together, and it's not fair to put life on hold just because lives are at risk. The Americans have made that mistake, too, with their excessive school closures and lockdowns, when less severe mitigation measures would suffice."

"Anyway," he continued, "we did finally find a guy with a bunch of caves on his property and the remnants of some tunnel, but it's going to take weeks of work to make it safe for our purposes, let alone hooked up to electricity and the proper kitchen facilities. And I don't even want to talk about how much livestock this is going to set us back. The security deposit alone cost me some of my finest ewes."

"It wasn't just the venue," agreed Fatima Hufri, who has taken charge of some of the other logistical arrangements for the affair. "Try getting a band that's willing either to risk its members' lives at an event prone to drone attack or to perform underground where the acoustics are terrible. And don't get me started on florists. Though since they do funerals, too, it was easier to persuade them to make a deal since they're getting our business either way."

03/11 Links Pt1: Why Saudi Arabia, MBS are important to Israel, regional peace; Netanyahu visit to UAE cancelled due to diplomatic spat with Jordan; Murderers of the Fogel family set to get 50% salary increase from the PA

From Ian:

Seth Frantzman: Why Saudi Arabia, MBS are important to Israel, regional peace - analysis

The crown prince has been the lightning rod of harsh human rights criticism in many US circles because of accusations, backed by the CIA, that he was involved in the killing of former Saudi insider Jamal Khashoggi. Others, however, point out that MBS has been key to Saudi Arabia’s shift toward a less repressive society.

They describe the crown prince – who has driven these changes – as “a visionary.” He is moving his country to a different place, say those who have met him. Therefore, Saudi Arabia should not be pushed into a corner by US policies that are critical of the kingdom.

It has already lost US support for offensive operations in Yemen, but it should be listened to regarding Iranian threats, even as Washington has been messaging a desire to recalibrate relations with Riyadh because of the Khashoggi murder. as well as taking a tougher line on human rights issues in Egypt.

It may be that a tougher line toward the Saudis from the US, and renewing the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, will accelerate Israeli relations with Riyadh. But Saudi Arabia has been cautious. Last year, when rumors spread that it might normalize relations with Israel, it waited.

Saudi Arabia is carefully assessing elections in the US and Israel. In recent days it has held high-level meetings with Jordan, Malaysia, Sudan and other countries. Unsurprisingly, this dovetails with other high-level meetings that link Israel and Egypt, Israel and several countries in Europe, and a growing relationship between Greece, Cyprus, France, Egypt, Israel and the UAE.

A constellation of broader questions mark Saudi Arabia’s relations with this regional realignment. These include Riyadh’s and Abu Dhabi’s views on Syria’s role in the Arab world, concerns about Lebanon’s stability, its relationship with Russia, patching up the aftermath of the crisis with Qatar, and keeping an eye on Turkey’s ambitions.

They involve finding solutions to the conflict in Libya and increasing Gulf influence in east Africa, in Sudan, and farther afield in Pakistan. Israel’s growing sense of being part of the region now puts it increasingly at the crossroads of these discussions as well. While Israel wants the US to stay vitally connected to the region, the overall trend binding Israel and the Gulf and partners from central Europe to India is visceral.

Middle East: The Ghosts of Sovereigns Past

The State of Israel continues to enforce Jordanian law [in the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria] -- despite its clearly racist and backward underpinnings.

No matter what side of the political divide you view it from, a legislative and legal time-warp has trapped the residents of these territories – Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians – in amber for more than five decades. The result: legal chaos, injustice and incessant conflict.

Ironically, Israel's legal reticence continues to fuel the endless conflict over the land itself... that could be avoided by simply completing the process of land survey and registration initiated by the Ottoman Empire and continued by the British Mandatory and Jordanian governments in turn.

Surveying and registering land ownership was not perceived as an act of sovereignty when the British caretakers undertook it; there seems no reason why it should be regarded that way now.

This same vacuum has made it impossible to formulate forward-thinking policy for land use, environmental protection, settlement policy, and perhaps most critically, a negotiated resolution of the status of the territory. Without establishing who owns what, it is impossible to proceed toward a just division of resources or a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

The time has come to banish the antiquated ghosts of Ottoman, Jordanian and British Mandatory rule, and to fill the legal void in Judea and Samaria with a modern, humanist, democratic system of law for everyone.

Netanyahu visit to UAE cancelled due to diplomatic spat with Jordan

Israel and Jordan were working to calm the waters on Thursday after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's scheduled historic first visit to the United Arab Emirates was cancelled following a diplomatic incident between Israel and Jordan.

Netanyahu's scheduled visit to the United Arab Emirates was held up on Thursday morning when Jordan announced it would not allow Netanyahu's aircraft to cross its airspace en route to the United Arab Emirates,.

Officials think that the Jordanian decision, which was announced only shortly before the flight was scheduled to take off, was a response to Israel's decision to cancel a visit to the Temple Mount that had been scheduled for Jordanian Crown Prince Hussein bin Abdullah on Wednesday over disagreements about security protocols.

Israel Hayom has learned that the prince intended to visit the Temple Mount to pray prior to making the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca.

Officials in the UAE told Israel Hayom on Thursday afternoon that it appeared that Netanyahu's visit would most likely not take place as originally scheduled.

A senior government official in Amman told Israel Hayom that "high-ranking Israeli political officials and former Israeli security officials cooperated with Amman to torpedo Netanyahu's visit to the UAE, after Prince Hussein's visit to the Temple Mount was called off."

The official added that "Jordan and Israel will need to find a way to lower the flames and end the diplomatic incident, which has embarrassed both sides. King Abdullah has taken many calls from Israeli officials, who argued that the instruction not to allow some of Prince Hussein's armed security detail to cross Allenby Bridge came from the Prime Minister's Office."