Thursday, March 25, 2021
Elder of Ziyon
Elder of Ziyon Haggadah 5769 by Eldad Tzioni
Thursday, March 25, 2021Elder of Ziyon
David MillerLord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con) (responding for the Government)Universities are independent and autonomous organisations. Accordingly, the Government have not intervened directly in this case, but we consider that the University of Bristol could do more to make its condemnation of Professor Miller’s conduct clear to current and future students. Students also can and should inform the police if they believe that the law has been broken. Professor Miller has expressed some ill-founded and reprehensible views and the Government wholeheartedly reject them.Lord Austin of Dudley (Non-Afl)Academics do have freedom of speech, including to criticise Israel, but Professor Miller does not have the right to attack Jewish students as being part of an Israel lobby group that makes Arab and Muslim students unsafe. Bristol should not be employing someone to teach students wild conspiracy theories about Jewish people. His behaviour has resulted in Jewish students being subjected to weeks of harassment and abuse. Bristol must support its students and take this much more seriously.Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)The noble Lord gets to the nub of the issue with his questions. Academics of course have the right to espouse views that many might find offensive, perhaps even idiotic, and universities should be places where such views can be rigorously and vigorously debated. What makes this case concerning is Professor Miller’s comments about his own students, suggesting that their disagreement with his views is because they are political pawns of a foreign Government or part of a Zionist enemy, which has no place in any society. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism draws the important distinction between legitimate criticism of the Government of Israel and their policies and holding Jews collectively responsible for them. We are glad that the University of Bristol has adopted that definition and we hope that it will consider it carefully.Lord Mendelsohn (Lab)
Thursday, March 25, 2021Elder of Ziyon
Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity. Motto, Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.
Thomas Jefferson modified the idea somewhat:
Pharaoh sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his head and a Sword in his hand, passing through the divided Waters of the Red Sea in Pursuit of the Israelites: Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Cloud, expressive of the divine Presence and Command, beaming on Moses who stands on the shore and extending his hand over the Sea causes it to overwhelm Pharaoh. Motto: Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.
The American story is the story of the Israelites. A people fleeing persecution, going through the wilderness and journeying across a body of water, to build a new nation of a type never built before, based on a covenant and ideals, utterly unlike every other nation that existed in their respective eras.
Even the thirteen colonies uniting to become one nation, but maintaining their own distinct laws and customs, echo the twelve tribes of Israel.
The American idea was described by Governor John Winthrop in 1630, as he was en route to Massachusetts, with purely Hebrew Scripture quotes and sensibilities:
[F]ollow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory...And to shut this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel, Deut. 30. "Beloved, there is now set before us life and death, good and evil," in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it.
Thomas Jefferson, in 1805: "I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old, from their native land, and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life..."
Abraham Lincoln once referred to Americans as God's "almost chosen people."
This idea is renewed again and again in America. Bill Clinton said in the introduction of his second Inaugural address, "Guided by the ancient vision of a promised land, let us set our sights upon a land of new promise."
The story of America is the story of the Exodus. It is the story of Passover, taught to children generation after generation. It is the story of a people with a mission to spread universal ideas of freedom, liberty, justice and equality around the world.
This is one major reason why America has always been good to its Jews, and why the United States is always going to be a friend of Israel's.
It also explains another interesting phenomenon.
Antisemites, on both the right and the left, hate America as much as they hate Jews. American exceptionalism and the American dream are abhorrent to them, just as the idea of the Chosen People and a successful Israel enrages them.
Antisemites want to destroy America, because they see in America the things they hate about Jews.
The far-Right antisemites claim to be patriotic, but they want to tear apart the nation, as we've seen recently, throwing out the Constitution and all American ideals when they disliked how an election turned out. Waving the flag is not the same as loving America.
The far-Left antisemites use old Soviet socialist tropes and methods to sow discord among Americans. They spend countless hours publishing screeds about how terrible America is. They are trying to divide Americans into classes and races and saying that these artificial divisions are not reparable, when the American dream is precisely the opposite - that anyone can succeed no matter what their social standing and these divisions are abhorrent. They want to destroy the American story and recast it as horror; they want to change the American dream into a nightmare.
Those who want to fight antisemitism must also fight for America, because if America turns into the type of nation that the far-Left or far-Right want it to be, it will not be a welcome place for Jews.
The American story is the Jewish story. Our fates are intertwined. In this age of custom Haggadot where any political or social position overtakes Passover's message of freedom, American Jews could add a prayer of thanks for living in a great nation that shares so many ideals with the Jewish people.
Wednesday, March 24, 2021Elder of ZiyonOpinion, Vic RosenthalWeekly column by Vic Rosenthal
Avraham Burg (b. 1955) today is best described as a post-Zionist, or even an extreme anti-Zionist. But he was not always thus. The son of long-time religious Zionist politician Yosef Burg, he served as an officer in the IDF, became Speaker of the Knesset on behalf of the Labor Party, was Chairman of the Jewish Agency, and even served as interim President of the State of Israel for ten days. Always left-leaning, he became more and more extreme, and in 2015 renounced Zionism and joined Hadash, the Israeli communist party. More recently, he responded to the passage of Israel’s Nation State Law by announcing his resignation from the Jewish people.
Burg’s psychological story may or may not be interesting, but he is not lacking in intelligence, and so I feel obliged to consider his arguments carefully. They appear in this interview, by Ravit Hecht in Ha’aretz.
Burg’s objections to the [Nation-State] law itself begin with its very first article, which defines the Land of Israel as the historical homeland of the Jewish people. “The patriarch Abraham discovered God outside the boundaries of the Land of Israel, the tribes became a people outside the Land of Israel, the Torah was given outside the Land of Israel, and the Babylonian Talmud, which is more important than the Jerusalem Talmud, was written outside the Land of Israel,” he asserts. “The past 2,000 years, which shaped the Judaism of this generation, happened outside Israel. The present Jewish people was not born in Israel.”
He is correct in detail, but he ignores the content of the Torah itself, which – whether or not one is an observant Jew – must be seen as the “charter” of the Jewish people. The narrative of the Torah, which describes the entry of the people into the land of Israel and the conditions under which they earn (or lose) the right to stay there, is nothing if not an assertion of the connection of the people to the land. And the 2000 years of diaspora was characterized by the combination of Jewish alienation from alien surroundings with a yearning to return. Religious Jews prayed every day for the rebuilding of a Jewish Jerusalem.
Unsaid but implied is that the Palestinian Arabs are the true owners of the land. But their historical connection to it is much shorter than that of the Jews, since almost all of the population is descended from migrants who arrived in it no earlier than 1830; the majority only goes back to the early 20th century. Most did not even identify as “Palestinians” until the 1960s. The Palestinians are aware that their claim to being long-time “natives” that were dispossessed by colonialist European Jews who had no connection to the land is tenuous. That’s why they go to such lengths to try to destroy evidence of ancient Jewish habitation here, and why they make fanciful claims of descent from Canaanites or Philistines.
Burg is committed to the idea that the most important (and the most Jewish) of political principles is that of equality. The simplest way to understand it is that the rights and obligations of a citizen are invariant over ethnicity, religion, race, sex, and numerous other characteristics, the number of which has been increasing recently in Western societies. There is no doubt that any definition of a Jewish state must violate the principle.
In a recent article, Burg argues that the demand for equality invalidates the concept of a Jewish state, which the Nation-State Law explicates:
Every supporter of [Israel’s political] parties is prepared to swear that their issue is the most important in the world: Gender, ethnic background, orientation and religious beliefs – everyone seeks equality for themselves and are committed to preferential treatment for their community and its interests. Just theirs. They aren’t capable of rising above, of uniting and running together in this election for the greatest idea of all: a state of all its citizens, committed to true and meaningful equality for all Israelis. The real, profound election campaign is one that is pitting the secular perception of the civilian State of Israel against the zealots of Jewish supremacy, who are prepared to sanctify discrimination, distinction and exclusion to preserve this tribal power.
Burg is wrong about “Jewish supremacy,” which is not essential to the idea of a Jewish state. One is not required to believe that Jews are superior to anyone else in order to understand the need for a state that – admittedly – must practice some form of “discrimination, distinction and exclusion” in order to guarantee the continued existence of the Jewish people.
There are numerous “states of all of their citizens” in the world, mostly Western democracies, although there are none in the Middle East. The USA is a an example of one that was founded on the very principle of being such a state, although it took some years and a civil war for full citizenship to be granted to former slaves, and even longer for female citizens to obtain full rights. But Israel is different, and the reason is that Israel was founded according to the principles of Zionism, and not on the Enlightenment concept of the Rights of Man.
The Jews of the West expected that the principles of the Enlightenment would apply to them. It seemed at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, that they might. But as time passed it became clear that the promise of equality would not be extended to the Jewish people. Herzl and other Zionists realized that the only way to ensure that Jews would be able to live normal lives without needing to choose between persecution or assimilation would be in a state in which Jews were the sovereign power. And for Jews outside of the West, in the empires of Eastern Christianity and Islam, there was not even the glimmer of the Enlightenment.
The fundamental idea of Zionism is that there must be at least one state in the world that is not a state of its citizens, but which is defined as the state of the Jewish people. This is why there is a Law of Return for Jews to Israel, and not one for descendants of Palestinian refugees. This is why the state’s holidays, and calendar are Jewish, and why the Hebrew language has a special status. Although the state can and does have a commitment to providing equal political rights to all of its citizens, it does not pretend to treat them all equally in every respect. One way to express this is to say, as the Nation-State Law does, that “the exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People.”
This means that non-Jewish citizens of Israel must compromise. Like Jews throughout diasporic history – although with more rights and privileges – they must come to terms with living as an ethnic minority in someone else’s nation. In return, they have the advantages that come with living in a stable, prosperous, and democratic country in the midst of failed states and vicious dictatorships.
Most Arab citizens of Israel understand this, even if Avraham Burg doesn’t.
***
One final word: yes, I know we have just had an election. It looks like there will be some form of coalition led by Bibi. But the results aren’t clear as I write this, and small movements one way or another could result in a big change. Tune in next week for more. Meanwhile, have a happy and kosher Pesach.
The University of Bristol is investigating one of its own professors, David Miller, for comments he made about Jewish students that attracted widespread protest, including from hundreds of other academics and from parliamentarians. Many of Miller’s critics have defended his academic freedom while condemning his depiction of Bristol’s Jewish Society as local agents of a foreign power trying to subvert British freedoms. This is a convenient distinction that sidesteps a crucial fact: Miller’s conflicts with Jewish students flow from the same analysis of “Zionist” power that he teaches in class. They are inseparable in a way that tests the limits of both academic freedom and a university’s duty of care towards its students.
Professor Miller has said that there is “an all-out onslaught by the Israeli government” to “impose their will all over the world”, and that all university Jewish societies (including Bristol’s), plus the Union of Jewish Students, are “directed by Israel” as part of this effort. More broadly, he says that Bristol Jewish Society belongs to a “Zionist movement” that he has characterised as “the enemy of the left, the enemy of world peace, and they must be directly targeted”. Miller says the goal is to “defeat the ideology of Zionism in practice” and “to end Zionism… as a functioning ideology of the world”. While many consider Miller’s comments to be so inflammatory as to endanger Jewish students, he claims it is university Jewish societies that render Muslim and Arab students unsafe.
At the heart of all this is Miller’s belief that Islamophobia is generated and encouraged by “parts of the Zionist movement”, and that it is “fundamental to Zionism to encourage Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism”. In February 2019 he taught this theory to undergraduates at Bristol using a PowerPoint slide with a network map of Jewish, Israeli and pro-Israel organisations and individuals that he had first drawn up in 2013 under the title of “the British Zionist scene”. As the sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris has pointed out, this map was a meaningless mass of names and arrows with no real academic or analytical value. Even worse, by the time Miller taught it to students in 2019, most of the individuals named on the map had either left their posts or died. Jewish students in Miller’s lecture complained and the slide has come to represent, for Miller’s critics, the anti-Semitic nature of his work.
Bristol University was familiar with this aspect of Miller’s research, and even with this specific image, when it hired him in 2018, because Miller had used this same PowerPoint slide in a talk at an academic seminar held by the university’s Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship three years earlier. Speaking to an audience of Bristol academics, Miller described it as showing “the transnational Zionist movement”, which he said connected Israeli state institutions and UK Jewish organisations such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council. “It’s important to see this as a transnational affair”, he told his academic audience, which is not limited to supporting Israel but is also a “social movement” that engages in “domestic politics”, including “ultra-Zionist funders” who are “active in Islamophobia”; while the Israeli government, he claimed, “is directly involved in trying to sabotage and undermine the role of Muslims in public life”.
@LordIanAustin opening today's debate in the House of Lords on the comments of David Miller and the response by @BristolUni.
— SussexFriendsofIsrael (@SussexFriends) March 24, 2021
"His behaviour has led to Jewish students being subjected to weeks of harassment and abuse"
Lord Parkinson calls Miller's comments 'idiotic' in response pic.twitter.com/8uYH9qspPt
The official Twitter account of the University of Warwick ‘liked’ a tweet endorsing recent inflammatory comments by the academic and conspiracy theorist David Miller, with the University subsequently deleted the ‘like’ and blaming “unauthorised access” to the account.
The tweet, which was part of a thread from an account called Socialist Campaign Group Highgate, read: “We agree with Dr Simon Behrman, @Warwick_Law and @Warwickuni of @RussellGroup that David Miller @Tracking_Power is right to say that Jewish students are agents of a Foreign Power and would like to male a job offer. Name your price.”
A spokesperson for the University said: “The tweet in question was ‘liked’ following unauthorised access to the account. The unauthorised access and ‘like’ was quickly spotted by the social media team and the tweet was soon ‘unliked’, and the matter has been referred to Twitter.”
The University of Warwick has had problems with addressing antisemitism on its campus in the recent past, and was reluctant to adopt the International Definition of Antisemitism, which it ultimately did under pressure on 12th October 2020.
Campaign Against Antisemitism monitors the adoption of the International Definition of Antisemitism by universities.
Labour is facing calls to suspend a councillor who posted a message claiming Priti Patel, now Home Secretary, was “hatched” in Israel.
He also shared a post of a highly offensive cartoon branding Israel a “blood-thirsty racist Zionist war machine”.
Newham Borough Councillor Suga Thekkeppurayil shared the “war machine” post from the Let’s Save Palestine account which includes a cartoon of headless corpses and dismembered bodies in Gaza.
The cartoon also shows UK and US broadcasters ignoring the butchered bodies and focusing their cameras on a crying baby in Israel.
The 2014 post says: “This is still how Western media routinely cover Operation Genocidal Edge, committed by the blood-thirsty racists Zionist war machine”.
Cllr Thekkeppurayil also shared a Guardian opinion piece in March, 2019, that said Jeremy Corbyn had “nothing to apologise for being the first Labour leader to oppose Zionism on moral grounds”.
The former Labour leader was suspended from Labour in October last year after refusing to apologise in the wake of damning findings from the EHRC that the party acted unlawfully in its handling of the antisemitism crisis.
He was readmitted just two weeks later but has still not had Labour’s parliamentary party whip restored.
Now let's take a look at Ahmad Al-Issa's Trump hating, Christian hating, Jew hating, white hating daddy's Facebook posts. Curiously he was not banned by Facebook. Wonder why. pic.twitter.com/lnOYcTpn9B
— Carmine Sabia (@CarmineSabia) March 23, 2021
Wednesday, March 24, 2021Varda Meyers Epstein (Judean Rose)Judean Rose, Opinion, Varda
Palestine, the Israel-Palestine conflict, Palestinians. All
day long, it seems, there is a merciless barrage of agitprop to brainwash us
into believing that “Palestine” is an actual Arab country peopled with “Palestinian”
nationals. This, despite the fact that there has never been a sovereign state
known as “Palestine” and certainly not a sovereign Arab state known as “Palestine.”
Many writers, commentators, and just plain regular folks
have long given up trying to call the Arabs of the PA and Gaza anything but “Palestinian.”
It’s just become too hard for people to go against that overwhelming tide of
propaganda. And what should one call them instead? Calling them “Arabs,” just
generically, sounds wrong, and almost racist, being that the term has no
connection to any specific location.
So where do we go from here, when you want to be accurate,
without sounding racist, in describing what is essentially a group of ragtag
migrants who found a good place to settle and dug in their heels? I figured the
best person to ask would be my late friend Robert
Werdine. Robert grew up in Michigan, but his mother’s family was Lebanese. “What
do you call them?” I asked.
“I call them ‘Arabs,’” he said.
And that was good enough for me.
It makes sense: the Arabs of the PA and Hamas, along with
the Arabs who left Israel in 1948, have no single nationality, as they
originate from not one but several Arab countries in the Middle East. That
means that the best we can do is identify them as “Arabs,” just as you might more
broadly identify someone as Asian or Native American. When you don’t know a
person’s country of origin or their tribe, you’ve got to go broad. That’s not
racist. It’s inclusive, and even respectful.
What’s not respectful is calling indigenous Jewish land “Palestine”
and pretending that Arabs, and not Jews, are native to the territory. And
still, every day, people are out there, ramming the lie down our throats,
incessantly. I’m a stubborn cuss, however, and so I continue to fight this
dishonest nomenclature. I fight it on Twitter.
If you are an Arab, you are from ARABIA. Just as Jews come from JUDEA.
— (((Varda Epstein))) (@VardaEpstein) March 10, 2021
But mostly I fight the lie of this fictitious Arab nation
and its people on Quora. The people who pose questions on this topic are
disingenuous. They are uninterested in my answers. They only want to assert the
premise of the question—the lie—as fact.
I see them and what they are doing, but I answer them over
and over again, mostly the same way. They are tireless in trying to get us to
swallow the lie, just by saying “Palestine, Palestine, Palestine,” and “Palestinian,
Palestinian, Palestinian” at us all day long, and they have been all too
successful in training us to repeat after them. To my mind, the best way to
deal with this is to counter them all day long, by telling the truth.
By way of example, here are several “questions” along with my
answers, on the topic of the imaginary country of Palestine and its pretend
nationals:
Varda: Israel would still exist and Palestine would still be nonexistent.
Varda: Of the two, only Israel exists.
Varda: I assume that when you say “Palestinians” you mean the Arabs
who live under the Palestinian Authority or Hamas, as there is no such place
called “Palestine” and therefore there cannot exist such a nationality as
“Palestinian.”
There will never be a two-state solution because neither side desires one. This is something that Trump understood, and for some reason others refuse to understand, even when the writing on the wall is plain to see. Hamas and the PA pretend they want this, in order to accrue maximum benefits from the American and Israeli governments, meantime, they tell the truth in Arabic, to their people. See:
Why doesn't Quora show posts related to the Israel and Palestinian conflict?
Varda: If this were the case, I would not be able to see your question.
Varda: Your question is a contradiction in terms. If there were a
place called “Palestine” there would already be two states. If that is the
case, what is meant by the “two-state solution” and why has it not brought
peace?
There is no reason for the Jewish people to give up any of their land, and especially not to those who threaten to annihilate them.
Varda: Israel has no desire to annex land. Not in Judea and
Samaria, and not anywhere else.
“West Bank” is propaganda term that people substitute for
the geographical area known as Judea and Samaria, part of indigenous Jewish
territory. The term is used to suggest that this land sits on the west bank of
the Jordan River, hence belongs to Jordan. The territory is nowhere near any
body of water except for the body of water known as the Dead Sea.
Judea and Samaria was returned to the Jewish people by dint of a defensive war imposed on the Jewish State. There is no need to annex land that already belongs to you. There is, however, a need to exercise sovereignty, because at present, the territory is under martial law, and it is necessary to bring law and order to the area. Also, Israel has a right to declare its sovereignty over all its land, including Judea and Samaria, which was returned to its rightful owners, the Jewish people, in 1967.
Varda: That’s a very good question. There is no state called
Palestine. If there were such a state, there would be no clamor for a two-state
solution, as such a “solution” would already exist, there being two states:
Israel and “Palestine.”
The other reason this is a good question is that those who speak of “Palestine,” cannot name its borders unless it is to say that the borders of “Palestine” are exactly the borders of the Jewish State.
What are some Palestinian building archetypes?
Varda: There is no such thing, as there is no state of Palestine, hence no such nationality.
Varda: There is no Israel/Palestine issue, because one of these countries does not exist. Biden has already sworn to restore aid to the PA and Hamas which will no doubt go toward their terror-incentivizing pay-to-slay program, so he is not as uninvolved as you suggest in the move to rid the Middle East of its Jewish presence.
Varda: I wouldn’t call it an “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” to begin
with, because there is no sovereign Arab country called “Palestine” and as
such, there can be no such nationality as “Palestinian.”
Also, it’s not a conflict if one side wants to live and the
other side doesn’t want them to live.
All in all, I guess I’d have to say I disagree with Jared
Kushner, because it’s not just about real estate, but about the fact that the
PA and Hamas want this real estate to be “judenfrei” or free of a Jewish
presence.
Aside from the land, and who may and may not live there, the PA and Hamas want to destroy the Jewish people and are working toward that eventuality (God Forbid) by inciting the people under their rule to commit terror attacks. The PA even pays stipends to the families of those who murder Jews to incentivize others to follow suit.
Varda: Presumably, you refer to the Arabs who settled in what is the State of Israel. A resolution to the state of war will occur when the Arabs lay down their arms, as they are the belligerent party.
Varda: No such conflict exists as there is no such thing as a
“Palestinian” being that there is no such place as “Palestine.” There was never
an independent state called by this name, and there was never an independent
sovereign Arab state by this name, either. As such, there can be no nationality
called “Palestinian.”
There is, however, a state called “Israel” that is
indigenous Jewish territory and has been for thousands of years. Presumably,
you would like to take this land from the indigenous Jewish people and give it
to the Arabs and pretend it is called “Palestine.”
Perhaps that is your conflict, in a nutshell: that the Jewish people have a tiny sliver of land and you would like to take it away from them and give it to the Arabs. Perhaps you are not aware that even the Quran refers to the Jews as the Bani Isra’il, the “sons of Israel.”
Do you think the conflict between Israel and Palestine will ever end?
Varda: There’s no such conflict, as only one of these countries
exists.
***
Anti-Israel, hence antisemitic Quorans, will continue to bombard me with these stupid questions, and I’ll keep
coming back with the same honest answers. Will it help? Maybe, maybe not. At least not unless everyone
else who knows the truth makes an effort to stop using the language of “Palestine,”
the country that doesn’t exist and never has.
Wednesday, March 24, 2021Elder of Ziyoncartoon of the day, humorWith 87% of the vote counted in Israel’s 2021 elections, the political ground appeared to shift on Wednesday, with Naftali Bennett’s Yamina party falling from the position of kingmaker and the Arab party Ra’am emerging as a possible decisive force.Outcome still up in air, officials to start count of 450,000 absentee ballots
Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the “pro-Netanyahu” bloc of parties has fallen from 56 seats to 52, while the “anti-Netanyahu” bloc — a diverse group of parties that seek to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — dropped slightly to 56 mandates.
Netanyahu’s Likud party won 30 seats, Yair Lapid’s opposition Yesh Atid 18, and the religious parties Shas and Yehadut HaTorah 9 and 7, respectively. The results show Benny Gantz’s Blue and White with 8, Labor with 7, and Yisrael Beiteinu, the Joint List, New Hope, and Religious Zionism with 6 apiece, with Meretz winning 5.
Crucially, the Yamina party received 7 seats, while Ra’am is now slated to win 5 — despite appearing to fall below the threshold to enter the Knesset during much of Tuesday night.
Initial exit polls Tuesday showed Yamina’s Bennett set to play kingmaker, with his party’s 7 seats able to swing the balance between the pro- and anti-Netanyahu blocs. Now, however, those seats would not be enough to give Netanyahu a majority to form a government.
However, if both Ra’am and Yamina join with Netanyahu, he would have such a majority. By the same token, if either or both of them joined the anti-Netanyahu bloc, it would theoretically be able to form a government, although such a coalition forming is unlikely.
Even with most results in, they appear close enough that it remains possible the map will continue to change as the final ballots are counted.
Both blocs have to some extent declared victory, with Netanyahu pledging to form a right-wing government but leaving his options open.
The Central Elections Committee was preparing on Wednesday afternoon to begin counting some 450,000 absentee ballots, and said it hoped to conclude the tally by Friday morning.
The ballots, cast in special double envelopes, account for some 10 percent of the national vote, and could yet determine whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is able to form a new government, whether his rivals do so, or whether the political gridlock continues and Israel heads for yet another election after four inconclusive rounds.
As of 5 p.m., 97 percent of regular votes had been tallied, with the Central Elections Committee expected to add the final 3% shortly.
The double-envelope system is used for anyone voting outside a regular polling station assigned to them according to their place of residence. They are all brought to the Knesset to be counted by CEC representatives. The process takes longer than the regular count as officials cross-reference the person’s details on the outer envelope to ensure they have not also voted elsewhere. After this is completed, the anonymous inner envelopes are amassed together and the ballots within can be counted like all other votes.
Absentee ballots are usually cast by members of security forces, prisoners, diplomats and persons with mobility issues who can not reach their assigned polling station.
In the previous three elections, the number of people voting by double envelope rose from 240,000 to 280,000 to 330,000, but this year jumped significantly as it now includes isolated COVID-19 patients and those in quarantine.
Not only are Palestinians capable of securing vaccines from abroad, they have in fact done so—though, according to media reports, they have misallocated early doses to ruling party officials and even re-exported many to Jordanian royals. The Palestinians get to choose which vaccines they want—typically not the Pfizer doses preferred by Israel—and how much they are willing to pay for them. Israel got its shots early because it paid top taxpayer dollar for quick delivery. The Palestinians are not taxed by Israel.
Again, the experts waving around Art. 56 are surely aware of the ICRC commentary that makes clear it does not mean what they say it does. But they disingenuously choose not to mention that inconvenient fact.
The official commentary also makes clear that even when an occupying power does provide public health services, it does not have to do so for free. But Israel does not control the Palestinian budget, and it is surprising that Jerusalem's critics insist that it impose its spending priorities on the Palestinian government. Part of having one's own government is the ability to set budgetary priorities. According to a State Department report, the PA spends hundreds of millions of dollars on its "pay for slay" program that incentivizes terror against Israeli Jews. The funding for that program would be more than enough to buy vaccines for its entire population. But the PA has put killing Jews ahead of protecting its own people.
The claim of Israeli responsibility for vaccinating the PA's populace was never made before Israel achieved global renown for its rapid vaccine rollout program. The accusations against Israel now are designed to besmirch and belittle this remarkable achievement. But absolutely nothing in the Geneva Convention says that an occupied territory is unable to "look after the health of its population" if it does not vaccinate them with the speed of the fastest country on earth. This idea is baseless and preposterous. In fact, the PA is receiving vaccines at roughly the same speed as are comparable governments.
And of course, none of this even touches upon the dispute as to whether Israel actually illicitly "occupies" Judea and Samaria in the first instance.
Pandemics throughout history have seen Jews blamed for the spread of disease. Today, such claims come dressed in legal robes—and get amplified by progressive U.S. legislators.
Wednesday, March 24, 2021Elder of Ziyon
Wednesday, March 24, 2021Elder of Ziyon
As many as 50,000 Nazi collaborators infiltrated Polish forces in the later stages of World War Two, historian Martin Dean, who worked on the government inquiry and for the Metropolitan Police’s War Crimes Unit, says.About a third of them ended up in the UK.
Wednesday, March 24, 2021Elder of Ziyon
The Founding Fathers recognized freedom of expression and religious liberty as core elements of diversity and tolerance. Now, nearly 250 years later, Congress is acting to stamp them out, ushering in a new era of government-sanctioned anti-religious bigotry.For Election Day: The famous 1961 debate over the claim that the 'Jews are a fossil race'
While no one could argue this is motivated by anti-Jewish bias in particular, the disproportionate repression of Jewish religious practice — by a law unironically billed as an “Equality Act,” no less — is far too significant to ignore.
On Jan. 1, 2020, almost three months before COVID-19 limits on gatherings, more than 100,000 observant American Jews filled MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, and other locations across the country for a unique gala honoring religious education. Called simply “The Siyum,” meaning “the completion,” it honored the tens of thousands of religiously motivated men — and significant number of women — who completed a seven-and-a-half-year cycle studying the Oral Torah.
The Siyum celebrates not only education, but Jewish resilience in the face of persecution. The 2,711-day cycle was first set in motion in Poland in 1923, where the first Siyum ensued in 1931. In 1945, the main venues of the third Siyum were in Israel, but, incredibly, one was also held by Holocaust survivors in a displaced persons camp in Germany. Since 1990, the largest celebrations have taken place in the United States, each exponentially larger than the one before it.
But now the Land of Liberty might never allow another. With the Equality Act, Congress is waging a legislative effort to prohibit the next Siyum, scheduled to take place in June 2027, and other such “discriminatory” violations of human rights. Under the Act, observant Jews will no longer be legally permitted to gather to celebrate religious education, or any other occasion, in accordance with their beliefs.
The reason is simple: not only prayer services, but family lifecycle events of all kinds — from circumcisions to bar mitzvahs to weddings to funerals — are commonly divided by biological sex in traditional Orthodox Judaism. This is true whether or not ceremonies are held in synagogues.
Whether in restaurants, catering halls, funeral homes, or elsewhere, all of these gatherings are often observed in what the law describes as “public accommodations.” Every major Siyum event over the past century has observed this same strict separation of the sexes. The Equality Act would ban them all.
Recently, Melanie Phillips wrote in an article posted on Arutz 7 "...The controversy started with a tweet by the Labour Party’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, congratulating the new head of the Scottish Labour Party, Anas Sarwar, on his appointment. Rayner described Sarwar, who is of Pakistani descent, as “the first-ever ethnic minority leader of a political party anywhere in the U.K.”Swastikas in Damascus
Sarwar is certainly the first Muslim or Asian leader of a political party. But there have been four Jewish party leaders in the United Kingdom—from Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in the 19th century to Labour Party leader Ed Miliband in the last decade.
...This erupted on the BBC’s daily show, “Politics Live,” which chose to respond to protests from British Jews over Rayner’s remark by hosting a discussion with a title card: “Should Jews count as an ethnic minority?”
To many Jews, even to ask this question was demonstrably absurd. How could they not be counted as such? And why were non-Jews suddenly presuming to tell Jews what they were or were not?
Back to the 1961 debate
The claims that Jews are not an ethnic minority are not new, I would like to describe a debate that happened in 1961 at Montreal's McGill University and became world famous - what we today would call viral - with recordings still existing. It was between the famous historian Dr. Arnold Toynbee, professor at the London School of Economics, and Israeli Ambassador to Canada Rabbi Dr. Yaakov Herzog. Herzog's brother, Chaim Herzog, would later become the sixth president of Israel. He was also the son of the second Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Yitzhak Herzog.
The debate probed among other topics whether Jews today are a vibrant continuation of a people rooted in antiquity. Rabbi Yisroel Meir Lau describes the debate in which Toynbee described the Jews as a fossil race.
"Dr. Toynbee insisted that Israel is not truly a nation, and does not deserve a state. The Jews, he claimed, are a religious sect with a mission to guide mankind in monotheism, morals and ethics in the Diaspora, but are not a nation. Permit me to use an imaginary voyage to develop a point made by Dr. Herzog."
A new death notice appeared in a Lebanese village north of Beirut last September, glued to a public wall. As residents of the village went about their days, some of them probably stopped, out of habit, to read the name of the man who had recently died. It would have been a scene repeated every day in Syrian and Lebanese villages: Those who didn’t know the deceased proceeded to peruse the names of his surviving family members to find out whether condolences were in order.
There was more to this particular death notice, however, than the news of the death itself. People took pictures of it and posted it to social media, where it immediately went viral. Incredulous, people read the name of the deceased man, written in big, bold font in the center of the poster: Hitler Zakhia Bassil.
Not much was shared about Mr. Bassil himself. But the names of his sons, Adolf and Addie, hinted at something of a family tradition. I was aghast when a photo of the poster reached me via WhatsApp, from a friend looking for a laugh.
I spent my life between Aleppo, Damascus, and Beirut before moving to Paris a year ago. I’ve encountered countless such anecdotes, which seem to be the haphazard leftovers of some combination of enduring government propaganda and a lack of actual World War II and Holocaust education.
Despite the rejection of the ideology by the vast majority of the population in Syria and Lebanon, symbols associated with Nazism were there, out in the open, and having a swastika tattoo or waving a Nazi flag did not land a person in jail or lead to a financial penalty. The first time I remember seeing a swastika was at the all-boys Presbyterian school I attended for 12 years in Aleppo. Al-Saleeb al-Ma’qouf, the Hooked Cross, was one of many symbols that boys would mindlessly carve into their desks, scribble on the walls of the bathroom, or sketch in textbooks. Most of them, I would learn, didn’t even know what the symbol meant. Those who did, didn’t know much.
School management didn’t rush to remove those symbols, or try to ban them, more than they did any other symbol or writing on the wall.
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PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
