Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, April 01, 2021

Asa Winstanley is an idiot (and an antisemitic piece of trash), part 4/conclusion

Continuing the series showing what an absolute tool Asa Winstanley is based solely on a truly fatuous article he wrote for Middle East Monitor.

Winstanley wrote:

Prior to the rise of Christianity as the established religion of the Roman Empire, Judaism was very much a proselytising faith. As such, it spread widely all over the Mediterranean basin, into Egypt and further afield. Indeed, as late as the eighth century CE, the ruling classes of the Khazar Empire (a confederation of Turkic-speaking tribes in what is today the south-eastern part of European Russia) apparently converted en masse to Judaism.

As such, it is illogical to suppose – as Zionists do – that the ancestral "homeland" of all Jewish people in the world is Palestine. Such a view is actually anti-Semitic.

There is some evidence for some proselytizing by Jews from the first century BCE to the first century CE. Some scholars don't even agree with that. In fact, many think that while Jews didn't discourage conversion for those who wanted it, there was no active outreach or proselytization.

Winstanley, however wants to make it sound like the vast majority of Jews are descended from converts and therefore have no ancestral ties to Israel. DNA evidence shows this to be completely false, as well as the absence of any rabbinical writings that discuss the huge legal implications of mass conversions.

The Khazar theory is complete garbage and has been disproven a hundred different ways.

To claim that most Jews are descended from Jews is antisemitic???

Asa Winstanley is a blooming idiot.

And, of course, he is an antisemite too. He goes on to try to tie Zionist Jews in Europe with the Nazis, which is pure antisemitism. The Zionists who were trying to save the Jews in Europe are painted as collaborators with the Nazis, which is as disgusting as it gets.

Asa Winstanley is an antisemitic, lying, hateful piece of trash. And this article proves it over and over again.

Continuing this series of showing what an idiot Asa Winstanley is, based on a single article he published - appropriately enough - on April Fool's Day.

As Israeli historian Shlomo Sand describes in his book The Invention of the Land of Israel, before the Zionist movement, Palestine was never viewed by Jewish communities around the world as their homeland.

Wow!

What does he think "Next Year in Jerusalem" means in the Haggadah and Yom Kippur service? Major parts of the prayer book talk about Jews returning to Zion! A large section of the Amida prayer, said three times a day, asks for the restoration of a Jewish homeland in Israel!

Not only that, but Jews didn't start returning to Israel with Zionism. There were groups, often led by rabbis, who immigrated to Israel constantly for centuries before modern Zionism. It is so obvious that Israel is the homeland of the Jews that it is astounding to even think that someone has the gall to dispute it!

But, Asa Winstanley is an idiot.

Continuing our dissection of the absolutely moronic article published Thursday in Middle East Monitor, written by the Asa Winstanley.

He writes:

With the rise of Zionism – a European settler-colonial movement founded at the end of the nineteenth century – a new term was invented to describe Palestine: the "Land of Israel". Before then, the word "Israel" had generally been used only as a synonym for the Jewish people, as in the Biblical phrase "Children of Israel".

The first time the term "Eretz Yisrael" - "Land of Israel" - was used to refer to the land was in 1 Samuel 13:19.

"וְחָרָשׁ֙ לֹ֣א יִמָּצֵ֔א בְּכֹ֖ל אֶ֣רֶץ יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל"

The term is used constantly in the Talmud and later Rabbinical writings.

Asa Winstanley is an idiot. (More likely, he is a liar.)

I saw an astonishingly stupid article at Middle East Memo by Asa Winstanley on Thursday, so I decided to make a series of posts showing how thoroughly ignorant he is.

The title of the article is stupid enough: "It is necessary to be an anti-Zionist in order to reject anti-Semitism."

But let's go through only some of his specific "factual" claims, skipping his propaganda (like "apartheid") which has been debunked thoroughly many times before.

In reality there is only one country between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. It is called Israel at the moment, which is an apartheid state whose laws privilege Jews over everybody else. Historically, prior to 1948, the only name ever used for all of this territory was Palestine.

He is lying and he knows he is lying. Besides the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel, it was also called Canaan. No one called it Palestine before the second century AD.

The Torah calls it simply "The Land." This pre-dates any mention of "Palestine."

Not only that, but whenever people referred to Palestine before 1922, they meant the lands of the Twelve Tribes of the Children of Israel. The word "Palestine" in the vernacular meant the areas controlled by Jews in Biblical times - including parts of today's Jordan.

Winstanley is an idiot.

04/01 Links Pt2: Cornell West, Campus Politics, and BDS; Israel to pay for 10 Plagues?; Twitter suspends Jewish account key to UK Labour defeat

From Ian:

Cornell West, Campus Politics, and BDS

One of the most notable BDS related developments in March was the claim by Harvard Divinity School professor Cornell West that he was “denied tenure” as a result of his support for “Palestinian rights” and an organized effort by pro-Israel forces. West, 67, had been teaching at Harvard for five years as a non-tenure track professor of practice, and had been offered a 10-year contract and substantial raise. He rejected this and announced his return to Union Theological Seminary.

West blamed the “powers that be at Harvard” for his failure to be moved to a tenure track position, and stated, “In my case, my controversial and outspoken views about and critiques of empire, capitalism, white supremacy, male supremacy, and homophobia are tolerated, but any serious engagement around the issues of the Israeli occupation are rendered highly suspect and reduced to anti-Jewish hatred or prejudice.”

While claims that anti-Israel faculty are being denied tenure are not uncommon, this incident has the appearance of using the accusation as a means of blackmailing a university during a contract renegotiation. West received considerable support from student and faculty groups, which accepted his claims without question.

Responding to criticism, West stated his willingness to debate the issue, but then failed to accept an invitation to do so.

Celebrity academics using BDS and “Palestine” as tools for their own careers and left-wing bona fides is increasingly common. The emerging accusation “progressive except for Palestine” is a gloss on the title of Marc Lamont Hill’s new book, and is now regularly repeated in various settings.

In Britain, the parallel case of Bristol University’s David Miller, long accused of abusing students and of promoting elaborate antisemitic conspiracies, has finally produced a university investigation. Not surprisingly, hundreds of academics have expressed support for Miller, even as a separate police investigation has been opened against him regarding “a hate crime or hate incident taking place during lectures at the University of Bristol.”

Lies in the cognitive war against Israel Part 2

The Lie of Israelis Being the New Nazis
When SJP activists and their invited speakers demonstrate against Israel, their speech and literature is peppered with allegations about Israel’s alleged “crimes against humanity, “massacres,” genocide,” and, echoing comments by Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has demonstrated that “. . . their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”

The Nazification of Israelis—and by extension Jews—is both breathtaking in its moral inversion and cruel in the way it makes the actual victims of the Third Reich’s horrors a modern-day reincarnation of that same barbarity, at once ahistorical, disingenuous, and grotesque in its moral and factual inaccuracy.

What is the purpose of this grotesque campaign to transmogrify the Jewish state into the Third Reich? The insidious answer is that once Israel has been tarred with the libels of racism and Nazism, the Jewish state has been made an international outlaw, a pariah, losing its moral right to even exist—exactly, of course, what its foes have consistently sought.

What is more troubling is that the characterization of the Israeli as Nazi is a trope now promulgated by Western elites and so-called intellectuals, including a broad contingent of academics who are complicit in, and in fact intellectual enablers of, the campaign to defame Israel by Nazifying its people and accusing Jews again as being the world’s moral and existential enemies as demonstrated by their oppression and brutality toward the 'long-suffering Palestinians'.

Thus, campus anti-Israel hate-fests sponsored by radical student groups have such repellant names as “Holocaust in the Holy Land,” “Israel: The Politics of Genocide,” or “Israel: The Fourth Reich,” creating a clear, though mendacious, linkage between Nazism and Zionism—clear examples of both Holocaust minimization and inversion and both contemporary versions of anti-Semitic thought and expression.

That same trope is repeated and reinforced by other academics, such as Richard Falk, professor emeritus of International Law and Policy at Princeton University and the UN’s former, preposterously-titled “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” who wondered aloud if it was “an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity?” on the part of Israel, and then quickly answered his own question by saying, “I think not.”

Israel to pay for 10 Plagues?

Bible study meets modern litigiousness in a story that may one day yield a riveting courtroom drama.

Ahmad al-Gamal, an Egyptian columnist for Egyptian daily Al-Yawm Al-Sabi, advocated in the newspaper on March 11 that Egypt sue the State of Israel for damages caused by the 10 Biblical plagues,

“We want compensation for the plagues that were inflicted upon [us] as a result of the curses that the Jews’ ancient forefathers [cast] upon our ancient forefathers, who did not deserve to pay for the mistake that Egypt’s ruler at the time, Pharaoh, committed,” the cranky journalist wrote, according to a translation provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

According to the Biblical Book of Exodus, the Egyptian king prevented Moses from liberating the Jews and leading them out of Egypt.

The plagues that summarily struck Egypt in consequence included the Nile turning into blood, an outbreak of lice, diseased livestock, boils, and so on, culminating in darkness and the deaths of all Egyptian firstborn males. The telling of the tale features prominently in the Jewish observance of the spring holiday of Passover.

“For what is written in the Torah proves that it was Pharaoh who oppressed the children of Israel, rather than the Egyptian people,” Gamal continued, “[But] they inflicted upon us the plague of locusts that didn’t leave anything behind them; the plague that transformed the Nile’s waters into blood, so nobody could drink of them for a long time; the plague of darkness that kept the world dark day and night; the plague of frogs; and the plague of the killing of the firstborn, namely every first offspring born to woman or beast, and so on.”

Gamal also pressed suing Israel for the “precious materials” used by the ancient Israelites in order to construct their desert tabernacle.

“We want compensation for the gold, silver, copper, precious stones, fabrics, hides and lumber, and for [all] animal meat, hair, hides and wool, and for other materials that I will mention [below], when quoting the language of the Torah. All these are materials that the Jews used in their rituals. These are resources that cannot be found among desert wanderers unless they took them before their departure.”

By Sheer Coincidence, Anti-Zionists Find Selves AGAIN In Company Of Uighur-Genocide Deniers, Assad Apologists (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

jackpot New York, April 1 - For at least the sixth time this week, a group of activists opposed to the existence of a Jewish state just happened to express the same positions and promote the same attitudes as those who deny the government of China is suppressing and erasing Uighur Muslim culture despite overwhelming evidence it is occurring, and as those who support the mass-murdering, corrupt, terrorist-harboring regime governing Syria, a situation that has caught the activists by surprise, having happened only about a billion times over the last decade.

Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada voiced his surprise yet again Thursday that his political and ideological bedfellows deny as he does the seriousness of China's systematic violation of Uighur human rights, including forced labor, forced sterilization, mass incarceration, and other abuses. He also expressed wonderment that so many of his fellow anti-Zionist-not-antisemites also stan Syrian strongman Basher Assad as he does, and either justify, downplay, or ignore, as Abunimah does, the dictator's hand in the deaths of half a million Syrians over the course of the ongoing civil war in that Arab republic.

"I was just discussing this with some buddies from the UK Labour Party the other day," recalled Abunimah. "We all seem to agree on the same points again and again: that Israel is an Apartheid state that must be destroyed; that China has done nothing but improve the lives of the Uighurs, and that Basher Assad has killed no one but Islamist extremists."

"That coincidence is remarkable enough," he continued. "But then when you also figure into it the uncanny prevalence of Holocaust minimization - if not outright denial - in our respective ranks, well, that's just bizarre. I don't know what to make of it. We're all just so morally... consistent, I guess, is the word."

A member of the far-left segment of Labour's constituency offered an analysis of the intriguing phenomenon. "Diverting attention for even a short time from Palestinian grievances risks undermining the Left as a whole," explained Asa Winstanley. "Acknowledging a so-called 'genocide' taking place in Xinjiang would threaten to overshadow the paramount status that eliminating Jewish sovereignty and security must have for all true progressives. The same goes for the situation in Syria: allowing the world's attention to stray from Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestine - a cleansing so thorough that the Palestinian population has increased tenfold since Israel was established - can only end badly. These shared sensibilities govern the overlapping positions of our disparate groups."

04/01 Links Pt1: Saudi Journalist: Arabs And Jews Should Stop Fighting, Start Cooperating; Australian Labor recognises state of Palestine; PA Tortured Participants in American-Led 2019 Bahrain Conference

From Ian:

Walter Russell Mead [WSJ]: How to Bring Peace to the New Middle East

The old Middle East peace process is dead: The Israeli-Palestinian dispute no longer dominates the regional agenda. The old peace process developed at a time when the U.S. had no serious rival for world leadership, the Middle East mattered more to the global economy than it does today, and Arab states were more powerful in the region than they are now. Under those circumstances, promoting the peace process was a necessary aspect of America's diplomatic balancing act that helped maintain Washington's alliances with the Arab world while supporting Israel.

Since then, the leading Arab states have either fallen into chaos (Syria and Iraq) or become so worried about Iran that they have little energy to devote to the Palestinian cause. At the same time, Israel's attractiveness as a trading partner and source of technology and investment has dramatically increased. Any signal that the Biden administration intends to return to President Obama's Middle East policy would likely drive the Arabs and Israelis more closely together and increase the Arab states' willingness to overlook the Palestinians.

A new peace process would entail engaging the increasingly robust Israeli-Arab entente to resolve the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, with a credible U.S. commitment to regional security against Iran as the cornerstone of a new Middle East reality.

Saudi Journalist: Arabs And Jews Should Stop Fighting, Start Cooperating

Against the backdrop of the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab states, Prof. Safouq Al-Shammari, a Saudi physician, researcher and journalist, published a two-part article in the government daily Al-Watan, in which he called to stop the wars between the Arabs and Jews, strengthen the ties between them and cooperate with them in improving the state of the Middle East. Al-Shammari noted that, despite being a small minority in the world, the Jews have made great scientific achievements and significant contributions to mankind, including to the Arab world. Stressing that, throughout history, there was friendship between Arabs and Jews, and that today the conflict between them is confined to the issue of Palestine, he called to distinguish between Zionism and the state of Israel on the one hand and the Jewish people on the other, and to renew the historic ties between the Arabs and their Jewish cousins - in particular the Jews of the U.S. and Europe. This is especially crucial today, he said, in light of Iran's threat to perpetrate a second holocaust against both the Arabs and the Jews. Al-Shammari added that economic cooperation between the Gulf and the Jews of America - who include many of the world's largest tycoons - could boost the economic revolution that is already taking place in the Gulf, and this, in turn, could benefit the region at large and accelerate the resolution of the Palestinian problem.

It should be noted that Al-Shammari's first article sparked angry reactions from Arabs on social media who spoke against the Jews and urged him to support the Arabs rather than the Jews.

The following are excerpts from Al-Shammari's two articles.

Inventions Of Jewish Scientists Have Saved Billions Of Lives
In the first part of his article, Al-Shammari wrote: "Jews constitute 0.2% of the world's population, but 20% of the Nobel Prize winners, [that is,] 100 times their proportion in the population. Some 40% of the Nobel winners in economics are Jews, and 26% of the Nobel winners in physics and medicine. [Many people] are perhaps unaware that [the Jewish] Ernst Chain was a partner of [Alexander] Flemming in discovering the antibiotic properties of penicillin and thereby saving the lives of millions, or that the discoverer of the hepatitis C virus was a Jew. [They may also be unaware] that many inventors of vaccines were Jews, as was the discoverer of blood types, and the list goes on and on. Some assess that Jewish medical scientists saved the lives of 2.8 billion people with their discoveries and inventions. In the field of physics, the [world's] greatest physicist was Albert Einstein. And lest you think that [this list merely proves that] the West panders to the Jews, [let me add that] a quarter of the winners of the Japanese Kyoto Prize - one of the most prestigious prizes in science and literature - have [also] been Jews.

"The conflict between the two cousin peoples, the Jews and the Arabs, is relatively new… The resentment built up over decades of wars between the Arabs and Israel forms a kind of barrier… [but] we must distinguish between the Jews and Israel, and between the Jewish people, who are [our] cousins, and the Zionist political movement. There is a difference between people and political [movements]. There are [surely] Arab political movements that [you, the reader,] disagree with, but this does not mean that [you] disagree with all Arabs. This is also true with regard to the Jews.

"Sadly, this resentment, and the confusion between Jews and Zionists, caused the Jews to emigrate from the Arab countries after [living there] for centuries…and we [thus] lost an important component [of our societies]. Iraq lost its Jews, including the first finance minister of modern Iraq, Sassoon Eskell… who served five terms in this capacity, and is known, among other things, for refusing to grant the Iraqi king 20 dinars for building a fancy residence on the grounds that the parliament had not approved this. Some Arab countries have Jewish ministers and officials even today, such as Serge Berdugo, [a former Moroccan minister of tourism and a leader of the Jewish community there], and André Azoulay, [a royal advisor] in Morocco.

"Know that Arabs and Muslims respected their Jewish cousins throughout history. Abdelkader Ben Ghabrit, founder of the Muslim Institute of the Paris Mosque, saved hundreds of Jews from the Nazis by providing them with [forged] papers certifying them as Muslims. Hundreds of thousands of Jews lived for centuries in the Arab countries [and were treated well there], in contrast to the humiliation they suffered in the Western ghettos in those days…

Understanding the Abraham Accords is pretty straightforward and its benefits appear to be real.

On the one hand, the agreement unites Israel with Arab states that feel threatened by Iran, creating an alliance that allows them to counter that enemy and defend themselves against it.

On the other hand, there is also an economic component as well, creating all kinds of opportunities for business and investment that are beneficial for all sides.

Peace based on both military and business interests.

Foreign Policy magazine has its own understanding of the first component. According to one of its articles, the Abraham Accords is not a defensive reaction to a powerful threat, creating a binary Israel/allies vs Iran/proxies dynamic. Instead, according to the article, there is a 3-way struggle going on in the Middle East -- and the Arabs are not even part of it.

Vali Nasr, a professor of Middle East studies and international affairs at Johns Hopkins writes that The Middle East’s Next Conflicts Won’t Be Between Arab States and Iran. Nasr believes that the key competition in the Middle East is no longer between the Arab states and Israel or between Sunnis and Shiites. Instead, the key power struggle in the Middle East will be among 3 non-Arab "rivals," namely Israel, Iran and Turkey.

While Iran has been getting most of the attention in the Middle East, Turkey has also been busy, expanding its influence and presence in the region. As Nasr describes it, Turkey:

o occupies parts of Syria

o has influence in Iraq

o  is pushing back against Iran’s influence in both Damascus and Baghdad

o  has increased military operations against Kurds in Iraq

o  has inserted itself in Libya’s civil war

o  intervened in the dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh

o  are eyeing expanded roles in both the Horn of Africa and Lebanon

o  supports for the Muslim Brotherhood

o  claims to have a say in Arab politics.

Against this background of Iranian and Turkish expansion, Nasr writes that the Abraham Accords -- instead of setting the Middle East on the road to peace -- actually signal that the competition of these 3 countries is going to become more intense:

In fact, it could lead to larger and more dangerous regional arms races and wars that the United States neither wants nor can afford to get entangled in. So, it behooves U.S. foreign policy to try to contain rather than stoke this new regional power rivalry.

An interesting twist on what are intended as peace accords.

While Iran is working on expanding its power, influence and the number of proxies acting on its behalf as Turkey is pursuing its dream of a new Ottoman Empire -- how does Israel fit in?

According to Nasr:

Israel, too, has expanded its footprint in the Arab world. In 2019, Trump recognized Israel’s half-century-old claim to the Golan Heights, which it seized from Syria in 1967, and now Israeli leaders are planning out loud to expand their borders by formally annexing parts of the West Bank.

Compared with everything Turkey is up to while Iran is inserting itself into Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Libya -- we have Israel in comparison inserting itself into...the Golan Heights?

This is an area with security implications that Iran itself has shown an interest in for its strategic position overlooking Israel. The West Bank, formerly known as Judaea and Samaria, is an area with a long Jewish history where Jews lived for thousands of years, except for the 19 years it was illegally controlled by Jordan and ethnically cleansed of Jews. Not only was the "annexing" actually an issue of applying Israeli law and not physically taking it -- Israel put a hold on the idea anyway as a condition for the UAE agreeing to the Accords.

Nasr's case for Israeli expansion is less than overwhelming as he compares Israel with Iran and Turkey.

Perhaps that is why Israel alone does not comprise the 3rd component of that 3-way rivalry between Iran, Turkey and Israel. It is the addition of other Middle East countries:

Turkey’s current regional posture—extending into Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and the Horn of Africa while staunchly defending Qatar and the Tripoli government in Libya’s civil war—is in direct conflict with policies pursued by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt.

Taking all of the alliances and overlapping interests into account is what actually makes the situation so combustible.

But also confusing:

This all suggests that the driving force in the Middle East is no longer ideology or religion but old-fashioned realpolitik. If Israel boosts the Saudi-Emirati position, those who feel threatened by it, like Qatar or Oman, can be expected to rely on Iran and Turkey for protection. But if the Israeli-Arab alignment will give Iran and Turkey reason to make common cause, Turkey’s aggressive posture in the Caucasus and Iraq could become a worry for Iran. Turkey’s military support for Azerbaijan now aligns with Israel’s support for Baku [Azerbaijan], and Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have found themselves in agreement worrying about the implications of Turkey’s successful maneuver in that conflict.

As these overlapping rivalries crisscross the region, competitions are likely to become more unpredictable, as will the pattern of tactical alliances.

The analysis starts off with a description of Turkey and Iran making common cause against Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but ends with Israel and Turkey with a common interest in Azerbaijan while Iran worries -- along with the Saudis and the UAE -- about Turkey.

The inclusion of Russian and Chinese interests in the area only makes it harder to keep a scorecard.

And Biden may not be making matters any easier.

In an article by Anchal Vohra, a Beirut-based columnist for Foreign Policy, the Biden administration might be following in Obama's footsteps in strengthening the alliance against Iran:

Biden’s animus toward Mohammed bin Salman over the killing of the Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and in general over human rights violations in the kingdom as well as the UAE and Egypt, is actually cementing ties.

Or he may be undercutting what Israel can offer potential Arab allies:

Other Israeli analysts said they worried Israel may lose its leverage in the Gulf under Biden’s presidency. For decades, Arab nations have eased ties with Israel to seek U.S. pardons for their excesses at home. But as Israel itself is under the Biden scanner now, it can hardly put in a word for them.

Nasr concludes that the best way to achieve some kind of stability is for the US to step in. He makes the intercessionist argument that in order for the US to be able to remove itself from the Middle East and avoid future engagements, it will have to "counterintuitively" first invest more diplomatic resources now.

Of course, one could argue that it is the diplomacy that led to the JCPOA and the billions that were given to Iran that may have had a destabilizing effect on the region, to begin with -- and that the Abraham Accords are a way to address past decisions made by the Obama in the region.

The calculations of interests and cross-purposes of the various parties may be accurate, but if Biden wants to help stabilize the regions, perhaps he should just support the Abraham Accords and encourage other Arab states to join it.

No, the State Department 2020 human rights report does not refer to "occupied territories" (UPDATE)

Times of Israel reports:

In a partial return to a pre-Trump-era norm, the US State Department’s annual report on human rights violations around the world published on Tuesday referred to the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights as territories “occupied” by Israel.

This is highly misleading.

In the Obama era, the very title of the annual report, as well as the contents of the report, referred to all the territories as "occupied territories" as their official name:

Under Trump, "occupied territories" was replaced with "West Bank and Gaza":

Now, under Biden, the territories are still referred to as West Bank and Gaza:

The only difference is that the 2020 edition says, in the West Bank and Gaza section, only once, that the territories were occupied in 1967: not that they are considered occupied today, as the Obama reports said repeatedly.

This section of the report covers the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem territories that Israel occupied during the June 1967 war. In 2017 the United States recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Language in this report is not meant to convey a position on any final status issues to be negotiated between the parties to the conflict, including the specific boundaries of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, or the borders between Israel and any future Palestinian state.

Saying that Israel occupied the territories during a war - which it did - is not at all the same as saying that these are "occupied territories" today, and the report avoids using that phrase completely, except in quotes from NGOs.

During the press conference announcing the report, Acting Assistant Secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Lisa Peterson was asked about this specifically:

QUESTION: I want to know, do you guys believe that the West Bank is occupied by Israel or not?

AMBASSADOR PETERSON: So we have presented the section as we have stated in previous years. This Human Rights Report refers to the commonly used geographic names of the area the report covers. So Israel, West Bank, and Gaza. This is intended to delineate geographic areas and puts them in alignment with – puts these reports in alignment with the rest of the report.

In other words, it is biased to refer to a geographic area with a contested political term, especially when no other region in the world is referred to that way.

This doesn't mean that the US does not consider the territories to be occupied, or partially occupied. That question has not been answered by the Biden administration, as far as I can tell. But it does mean that the US is no longer using the Obama-era and the UN formulation of automatically referring to them as occupied territories, which is clearly false in the case of Gaza or Area A by any sane definition of "occupied."

This is a very good thing. It shows that the Biden administration is not reflexively accepting the Palestinian position that they are living under "occupation" as the UN and Europe do, and as Obama did.

UPDATE: In a State Department briefing, the spokesperson did say explicitly that the United States considers the West Bank to be occupied today:

It is a historical fact that Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights after the 1967 war. That’s precisely why the 2020 Human Rights Report uses that term in the current context of the West Bank. It has been the longstanding position of previous administrations of both parties over the course of many decades. Do we think that the West Bank is occupied? Yes.

So it seems that the Biden administration position is that the West Bank is occupied - but neither Gaza nor the Golan Heights is.

The Congressional Research Service is a public policy research institute of the United States Congress. it provides research services for members of Congress and it periodically updates its documents with new information.

It doesn't seem to keep the older versions of its research online, but various archive services keep older copies. And therein lies a tale.

Their document on the Palestinians, Background and US Relations (RL34074) has been revised several times.

In January 2010, the document said this:

Historians have noted that the concept of Palestinian national identity is a relatively recent phenomenon and in large part grew from the challenge posed by increased Jewish migration to the region during the eras of Ottoman and British control in the first half of the 20th century. Palestinian identity emerged during the British Mandate period, began to crystallize with the 1947 United Nations partition plan, and grew stronger following Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.

The footnote for the first sentence comes from Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. Palestinian identity was very weak before 1967, and, by any measure, and there was no serious desire to build a Palestinian state. Palestinians didn't even refer to themselves as Palestinians before the 1960s. (The 1964 PLO Covenant consistently says "Palestinian Arab people.") It certainly wasn't grassroots but a reaction to Zionism - the desire to stop a Jewish state more than building a Palestinian Arab state.

In 2012, the paragraph remains, but a new part was added that essentially contradicts it:

Since the early 20th century, the desire to establish an independent state in historic Palestine has remained the dominant Palestinian national goal.

This is doubly false.

I would argue that the Palestinians never had a goal of an independent state. They have had the opportunities to do that many times, from the Peel plan up through negotiations that they abandoned during the Obama years. Their goal, which used to be explicit and now is only mentioned in Arabic, is to destroy the Jewish state. But even if you have a more charitable view of Palestinian nationalism, it was practically nonexistent before the establishment of the PLO in 1964 (which only wanted the land controlled by Israel before "occupation") and only gained steam after 1967 when the Arab goal of defeating Israel militarily faded. There was little interest in an independent Palestinian state when Jordan annexed the west bank of the river and when Egypt controlled Gaza.

Secondly, the phrase "historic Palestine" is also a fiction. Historic Palestine, if you look at any map before 1922, is the land controlled by the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel in Biblical times - it includes large swaths of what is now Jordan, parts of Lebanon and very little of the Negev.

In November 2018, the paragraph that said that Palestinian national identity is recent and a reaction to Zionism disappeared from the report. All we see now is how it was dominant in Palestinian circles throughout the 20th century, which is simply false.

Oddly, all of these reports were written by the same person: Jim Zanotti, Specialist in Middle Eastern Affairs.

The 2007 edition, written by a different person, doesn't even mention any history of Palestinian nationalism at all. It briefly mentions Arab nationalism: "During the 1950s and 1960s, as the winds of Arab nationalism blew across the region, radical Arab leaders in Egypt and Syria pressed for military action against Israel."

In eleven years, Palestinian nationalism went from nonexistent to a recent phenomenon to the dominant Palestinian idea since the early part of the 20th century.

No new footnotes have appeared to defend the new narrative.

Is this history, or political correctness?

It’s All About Bibi (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

The whole story of Israeli politics today is Binyamin Netanyahu.

I won’t bore you with countless scenarios, most of which are about as likely as the one in which I become Prime Minister. Everything is contained in six numbers:

Number of Knesset seats needed to form a government: 61.
Number committed to join a coalition with Netanyahu: 52 (Likud, Shas, UTJ, Religious Zionism).
Number opposed to Netanyahu: 57 (seven parties).
Uncommitted: 7 (Naftali Bennett’s Yamina party).
Committed to supporting Netanyahu from outside the coalition: 4 (Ra’am party of Mansour Abbas*).
Number considered “right-wing”: 72 (Likud, Shas, Yamina, UTJ, Religious Zionism, Tikvah Hadasha).

What this tells us is that if it were not for the contentiousness of Binyamin Netanyahu, there would be a natural right-wing government. It’s what the majority of Israelis want. Bibi’s Likud party received almost twice as many seats (30) as his nearest competitor, Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party (17). The Center, Left, and Arab parties (except Ra’am) amount to only 44. The right-wing-but-not-Bibi group has 20.

The ideological differences between this last group and Netanyahu are small to nonexistent. It’s personal to a great extent: Bennett, Avigdor Lieberman (Yisrael Beiteinu) and Gideon Sa’ar (Tikvah Hadasha) were all formerly members of the Likud who were squeezed out by Bibi, who does not tolerate even theoretical competition for leadership of the party. Lieberman and Bennett had cabinet positions in several previous coalitions in which they were prevented from exercising their supposed authority by a micro-managing Bibi.

Netanyahu is presently on trial on several charges of corruption, and if he is convicted he will have to step down as Prime Minister. A great deal of what has happened in Israeli politics in the past two years revolves around his opponents’ attempts to bring him down by means of these charges, and his struggle to stay in power – and out of jail. The charges are a mixed bag: the ones considered most serious by the prosecutors are called by some “invented crimes” that are merely politics as usual. On the other hand, it seems clear that he (and his wife – who is a big part of the problem) took expensive gifts from foreigners who had business with the government.

Bibi is so hated by the Left that there have been demonstrations with thousands of participants going on outside his homes and in other locations every Saturday night for at least a year. They accuse him of “destroying democracy and the rule of law” for his attempts to rein in the judiciary, including the Supreme Court and the state prosecutor’s office. But while, obviously, he is pursuing his personal interest, it is still true that the left-leaning legal establishment has arrogated to itself almost unlimited power and has destroyed the balance of powers between the legislature, the government, and the judiciary that is essential for a truly just regime.

There is no question that Bibi jealously hoards his power, and does not delegate it in areas that he considers important. He breaks promises repeatedly, both to his constituents and to other politicians. He has on occasion been responsible for ugly campaigns of innuendo against his opponents, such as a rumor that Naftali Bennett’s wife worked as a chef at a non-kosher restaurant (Bennett is an observant Jew as are many of his supporters), and that Benny Gantz (Blue and White) had an affair with another government minister.

And yet…

And yet, Bibi has been a great Prime Minister, arguably Israel’s greatest. His reign, the longest in the history of the state, has been remarkably peaceful. Some say he has only “kicked the can down the road,” but others argue that he has managed the covert war against Iran and its proxies very effectively, preventing Iran from going nuclear and interdicting the supply of improved weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria. He has been criticized (unfairly, I think) for the poor relationship with former US President Obama (I blame Obama for this) but he presented Israel’s case to the US Congress forcefully, and galvanized opposition to the Iran deal, even if its opponents were ultimately outmaneuvered. On his watch the US finally moved its Embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israel’s sovereignty in the Golan Heights, and exited the Iran deal. Bibi achieved improved relations with numerous countries, including the ground-breaking Abraham Accords with several Arab nations that were formerly counted among our enemies.

He has been criticized for the handling of the airport during the pandemic, as well as being too easy on the Haredim, who kept schools and yeshivot open and held massive weddings and funerals against government rules. But he did the one thing that was most important with respect to the Coronavirus: he brought us the vaccines that made Israel one of the most successful countries in the world in dealing with it. Yes, it is annoying that he constantly brags about it, and how it was a personal accomplishment, as if he himself vaccinated millions of Israelis. But as a matter of fact, it was – he truly did “obsessively” call the CEOs of the vaccine manufacturers. He did take the difficult decision to pay a premium price for the vaccine and provide data to the manufacturers. He did this. He had help of course, from the HMOs and the Health Ministry that set up the distribution system, but he is right in taking credit for it. Thanks to Bibi, today we are reopening our economy and returning to ordinary life, while Europeans are still struggling with lockdowns and shortages of vaccine.

I did not vote for him. Although his accomplishments are many, I am convinced that it’s time for new leadership. I voted for Bennett, whom I believe is smart enough and creative enough, as well as ideologically committed to strengthening Israel, including the Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan valley, areas that are both the spiritual heartland of the nation as well as essential for its defense. And he has the moral qualifications, too. Is Bennett tough enough? Time will tell, although I think so.

But Bennett, whose party has a total of seven seats, is probably not going to be Prime Minister this time. I will go out on a limb and predict that Bibi will manage to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat once again, and Bennett and Sa’ar will join his coalition. He will either persuade the necessary two members of the Knesset from other parties to jump to his side, or he will convince the other members of his coalition to accept the support of the Ra’am party – an Arab Islamist party led by Mansour Abbas, who for pragmatic reasons will support Netanyahu and Likud.
If this happens, it will prove once again that in addition to being one of Israel’s greatest Prime Ministers, he is also an incredibly adroit politician. If he is also smart enough to understand that now is the time to step back and start thinking about retirement, that would also be good.
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* An Israeli Arab politician, not to be confused with the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.