Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, August 17, 2014

08/17 Links: Gaza war seems to be ending, but who won?; Arguing against dead Gazan kids

From Ian:

This is not an “Israeli Palestinian” conflict this is a conflict between extremists and everyone else. This truth is something journalists ignore every time.
The demands being made by Hamas right now are the perfect example of this divide. There is nothing extreme about going to war demand freedom of movement for your populace or the free flow of trade and goods into Gaza. But when you take into account the fact that these measures were only imposed after Hamas murdered the members of the ruling Fatah they overthrew and turned Gaza into a giant playground for terrorists you understand their necessity. Israel is dealing with Hamas and has no reason to believe that their demands are coming from anything other than a desire to get as many guns into the Strip as possible.
So while the world has been watching dead Palestinians being brought into the hospital which doubles as Hamas military HQ they are in no mood to hear the rational Israeli worries about a rearmed, re-equipped Hamas shooting into Israel once again in two years time.
The truth is that the extremists have won this round. Rationality has been swept aside. All thoughts for the majority of Israelis and Palestinians who are being dragged along for the Hamas ride are gone, replaced by an image of a dead kid and a hole in a roof.

What my visit to Israel has taught me about the war in Gaza

Israelis have been there before. This is deeply embedded in the national psyche. Sadly I think some of the one-sided nature of the reporting in Europe and the US has strengthened the feeling that they are in this alone.
My visit to Israel was fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. Britain and Conservative MPs have a choice. We can either defend the right of a democratic nation to defend itself as our Prime Minister has done so well or we can align ourselves with people who pick this conflict, perhaps because of more sinister reasons, while ignoring other conflicts in Iraq or Syria where more people are dying.
Of course we must question Israel, review our arms deals with it and push them to develop a strategy for peace that will relieve them of the horrors of their current existence. What we must not do is yield to those who conveniently forget that it is the terror organisation Hamas that seeks the destruction of an entire people and that uses its own children as shields.
Balance in this debate seems to have been lost. A terrorist network has been made to look like the victim with some asking incredibly why Hamas isn’t allowed a missile defence shield! While Jewish people get attacked in the streets of Western Europe for simply being Jewish, Hamas terrorists are relieved of the responsibility for the plight of their own people.

In a hospital under fire from Gaza, we see the best of Israel

A general surgeon, Dr. Darawasha has been intimately involved in saving many Israeli soldiers throughout the conflict. “Everyone sees you as a doctor,” says Dr. Darawasha. “But when the war started, I thought soldiers would look at me strangely — that they would be angry with me. But they were so kind and understanding.”
Dr. Darawasha is open about his views. I asked him if treating Israeli soldiers was difficult for him. He replied, “The Hamas do not represent me. The soldiers represent me. I feel like I did something for this country as a doctor.” He added, “Gaza does not represent me. This is my country; my family is here.”
Israel has been good to Dr. Darawasha and his family. He comes from Iksal Village, in the Northern part of Israel. His father and uncle, he says, have always had positive interactions with the Jewish people — both socially and professionally. As an Arab, he has never felt discriminated against or treated as a second-class citizen by Israel.
In fact, he feels he owes his country a great debt. When he graduated from medical school in Romania and returned to Israel, it was Israel that embraced him, gave him money to continue his studies and gave him job opportunities. He has always felt at home in Israel.

David Harris-Gershon's, What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife? is a fascinating read.

Harris-Gershon is a progressive-left American Jew who supports the anti-Semitic BDS movement and spends much of his time bashing Israel before a non-Jewish left-leaning audience.

I, as a matter of public disclosure, have been highly critical of his writings in the past.

Nonetheless, I would say that the first one hundred pages of Harris-Gershon's book are terrific. There is no question but that the man can write and that this is a quirky and sad and heart-felt page-turner.

In 2002 Harris-Gershon's wife, Jaime, sat in the cafeteria of Hebrew University atop Mount Scopus in northeastern Jerusalem, speaking with fellow students, when Mohammad Odeh ignited a bomb killing nine people and injuring Jaime, among numerous others.

This, needless to say, was a cause for celebration in Gaza City, where they presumably handed out cakes and candies to children in joy upon this great victory over the "Zionist entity."

Harris-Gershon's book was written, therefore, as part of a healing process. It is deeply personal and demonstrates a braveness of character. It is not everyone, after all, who has the strength to bare oneself to the world in the way that Harris-Gershon does, as he tries to understand the motivation of the killer and what that means not only to himself and his wife, but to the State of Israel, if not the Jewish people, as a whole.

As someone familiar with Harris-Gershon's writings on Israel I expected an anti-Israel narrative in his book and, through the first third, was pleasantly surprised to find none of the usual malicious insinuations, self-righteousness chest-beating, acidic implications of Jewish-Israeli racism, or the kind of general contempt one usually finds within a Harris-Gershon Daily Kos "diary."

Slowly, however, mid-way through the book, the narrative becomes increasingly negative not toward the people responsible for nurturing a culture of hatred toward their Jewish neighbors over the course of fourteen centuries, but toward the Jews, themselves. For reasons that he never makes entirely clear, at least not to my satisfaction, Harris-Gershon comes to relate to the Palestinian narrative of pristine victim-hood while blaming his fellow Jews, or at least those in the Israeli government, for the bombing at Hebrew University and the conflict with Arabs, more generally.

Harris-Gershon's turn against Israel, a country that he claimed to love, begins with an apology.

Apparently after his capture Mohammad Odeh apologized for the lives he destroyed and that apology loomed large for Harris-Gershon.

He writes:

“But those words – he was sorry – backlit everything, threw shadows upon the walls which the darkness had concealed. I saw myself. I saw Mohammad. I saw the destruction. And for the first time, I felt an intense need to speak with Mohammad, to understand him.”

For some reason it does not occur to Harris-Gershon that perhaps Odeh apologized in order to help ease his situation as much as possible. While it is true that good Jihadi ideologues are not likely to apologize for anything, it is also true that good Jihadi ideologues are human beings many of whom, under duress, will say almost anything to keep their interrogators at bay.

Due to this apology, genuine or not, Harris-Gershon contacts the Israeli government out of a desire to meet with the murderer. In my estimation, there is nothing particularly unusual about Harris-Gershon wanting to meet the man who injured his life and almost killed his wife. Had I been in his situation I might have wanted to meet Odeh as well... although, perhaps not to have a heart-to-heart conversation.

Harris-Gershon writes:

“I had no interest in reconciliation, had no interest in some granola-caked forgiveness trek toward Mohammad. I just wanted to square the words ‘terrorist’ and ‘sorry’ so that I might be able to, once again, sleep through the night.”

That seems more than fair, although I have to wonder why throughout the book he refers to the Jihadi murderer by the familiar first name? This may sound like a rather strange criticism, I suppose, but imagine that Charles Manson almost killed your husband or wife. In reference to the guy would you likely call him "Charles" or "Manson"? I am pretty sure that most people would not use the familiar and friendly term "Charles" under such circumstances, yet throughout the book Harris-Gershon refers to Odeh as "Mohammad."

It was just one of those little things that raised an eyebrow for me as I read. It is clear that Harris-Gershon sought to humanize the murderer in order to understand his motivation and that is, I suppose, an admirable inclination.

There were, however, two other little eyebrow raisers toward the middle of the book.

The first is concerned with a discussion of apartheid South Africa seemingly out of nowhere. What Harris-Gershon claims is that in his Google investigations into the experiences of others who have faced "perpetrators" the term "reconciliation" kept coming up. This, allegedly, led him to the example of apartheid South Africa which he therefore felt a need to discuss in the middle of the book.

There is no reason to include a discussion of apartheid South Africa in this book unless one wishes to plant into the mind of the reader a highly unjust, malicious, and dangerous comparison.

Yet another eyebrow raiser was Harris-Gershon's assumption that because Israel turned down his request to visit with Odeh in prison, on the grounds that Odeh did not want to see him, that the Israelis were obviously up to no good.

“I began to suspect that the Israeli government might not have given my request any consideration, that Ruti Koren, Bureau Manager, Ministry of Public Secrurity, might have used Mohammad’s refusal as easy cover.”

Easy cover for what is entirely unclear.

At this point Harris-Gershon turns to left-wing anti-Israel activists who are willing to help him meet with Odeh and it is among them that he discovers his true soul-mates.

“As I sought the assistance of these peace activists, I began to sympathize with their mission: working for the human rights of both Palestinians and Israelis. Things were not black and white, as I had been led to believe. It was not good versus evil.”

Just who it was that deceived Harris-Gershon is entirely unclear. Was it his parents? His teachers? The Israeli government? His rabbis? Random Jews on the street? Someone apparently led him to believe that Arabs are "evil" and Jews are "good" and he was rather shocked to discover, as a full-grown adult, that others disagree. This led to a great opening of the soul to such an extent that he wrote the following to the family of the murderer.

“If you can find it in your heart, I ask that you speak with Mohammad and let him know why I would like to speak with him. And if you find my motivations pure, I humbly ask that you encourage him to agree to speak with me.”

I have to say, it is not everyone who is quite so pious as to grovel before the family of the man who hospitalized and almost murdered his wife.

{As anyone who knows me can tell you, I am not nearly so holy... you can be sure.}

The final third of the book is essentially a repetition of Arab complaints concerning Jewish malfeasance in that part of the world and Harris-Gershon's success in bringing presents to the children of the murderer.

It took professor Mordechai Kedar from Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv to make that happen through his sympathy with Harris-Gershon's desire to meet with the killer. It should also be noted that Dr. Kedar has recently been defamed by people on Harris-Gershon's own Daily Kos blog who shamelessly and falsely claim that he favors rape as a tactic in war.

One would think that since this allegation is absolutely outrageous nonsense meant to undermine the integrity and reputation of the Jewish Israeli scholar that helped Harris-Gershon, he might come to his patron's defense in the defamatory "diaires" published at his home blog.

He did not, however, neither here nor here nor here..

At the end of the day, I feel bad for Harris-Gershon. There is no doubt that he and his wife, Jaime, went through a traumatic experience that altered their lives and his book is a well-written testament to that fact. I find nothing the least bit dishonest in Harris-Gershon's memoir. On the contrary, I have little doubt that he means every word that he says.

Where he fails to convince, however, is in his explanation for his transition from pro-Israel ideologue to anti-Israel ideologue. There is little in his story that accounts for this beyond the fact that the Israeli government refused to give the man permission to visit a murderer in prison.

Certainly, his brief dipping of the toes into Israeli history for a few pages toward the end of the book is little more than a repetition of the so-called "Palestinian narrative," which is actually a negation of Jewish history in the sense that it refuses to acknowledge thirteen hundred years of Jewish subjugation under Arab-Muslim imperial rule within the system of dhimmitude.

That Harris-Gershon is an anti-Israel ideologue is beyond doubt. Even pro-Israel people who despise my own contribution to the discussion, and who are familiar with the man's blogging, would agree that Harris-Gershon is a toxic individual when it comes to Israel.

He even casts a gimlet eye upon the Balfour Declaration which he considers unjust toward the local Arabs.

There is no doubt that he and his wife went through something horrific and life-altering.

In my opinion, however, he would have done better to spend that money on a gift for his own kid, rather than the kid of the guy who tried to murder his wife.

I know where my loyalties lie, but not all of us can be - or should be - quite so saintly as David Harris-Gershon.

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

The terrorist in the "righteous gentile" family house

This story was on the front page of the New York Times and has been reported all over. The irony of a person who saved Jews during the Holocaust now accusing Israel of war crimes is too rich to ignore:

In 1943, Henk Zanoli took a dangerous train trip, slipping past Nazi guards and checkpoints to smuggle a Jewish boy from Amsterdam to the Dutch village of Eemnes. There, the Zanoli family, already under suspicion for resisting the Nazi occupation, hid the boy in their home for two years. The boy would be the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.

Seventy-one years later, on July 20, an Israeli airstrike flattened a house in the Gaza Strip, killing six of Mr. Zanoli’s relatives by marriage. His grandniece, a Dutch diplomat, is married to a Palestinian economist, Ismail Ziadah, who lost three brothers, a sister-in-law, a nephew and his father’s first wife in the attack.

On Thursday, Mr. Zanoli, 91, whose father died in a Nazi camp, went to the Israeli Embassy in The Hague and returned a medal he received honoring him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations — non-Jews honored by Israel for saving Jews during the Holocaust. In an anguished letter to the Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands, he described the terrible price his family had paid for opposing Nazi tyranny.

...Dr. Zeyada (older brother) said last month that none of his family members were militants. Israel says that it takes precautions to avoid killing civilians, and that Hamas purposely increases civilian casualties by operating in residential neighborhoods. It has offered no information on whether the Zeyada family home was hit purposely, and if so, what the target was and whether it justified a strike that killed six civilians. The military told the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which first reported Mr. Zanoli’s decision, only that it was investigating “all irregular incidents.”

Once can understand why the IDF is unwilling to discuss details that could reveal its intelligence assets during a war. But there is information that is freely available out there - information that the media like the NYT hasn't bothered to check - that indicates that there was a valid military target in that house.

Here is the list of people killed in the July 20th attack, from PCHR:

At approximately 14:00, an Israeli warplane launched a missile at a 3-storey house belonging to Jameel Sha’ban Ziada, in which 20 people live, in al-Boreij refugee camp. The house was destroyed and 6 members of the family, including 2 women and a child, and a guest were killed: Jameel Sha’ban Ziada, 53; Yousef Sh’aban Ziada, 43; ‘Omar Sha’ban Ziada, 32; Sha’ban Jameel Ziada, 12; Muftiya Mohammed Ziada, 70; Bayan ‘Abdul Latif Ziada, 39; and Mohammed Mahmoud al-Maqadma, 30.

Hmmm...one of those names is a bit different.

What do we know about Mohammed Mahmoud al-Maqadma?

Well, you can ask B'Tselem. When they list the people killed in the house, they laconically mention that Maqadama was a "military branch operative."

He was a member of Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades.

Haaretz reported that he was a "militant" ...but only in Hebrew.

Here is his Al Qassam Brigades martyr poster:

Suddenly, it looks like there might have been a valid military target at the Ziyada house.

I don't know if Maqadameh was the target, or if his presence there indicated that this house was on top of a weapons cache or a bunker. I don't know if the family was purposefully protecting their "guest" or if they were being used as human shields. My guess is that during battles, Hamas members were going to their command and control centers and not hiding among families, which would indicate that either the Ziyada house was a valid military target or it was on top of one.

The point is - this information is available. The New York Times first discussed the bombing of that same house on August 4, and by then the identity of the "guest" was known to NGOs. The anomalous name among the victims is a point that a decent reporter should have checked out.

This is really the proof of media bias against Israel. Any thinking person knows that Israel has an active interest in minimizing civilian deaths, and every knowledgeable reporter knows that Israel has good intelligence in Gaza.

The same research that people can do on the Internet is available - along with much more - to the staffs of major media outlets like the NYT.

Yet the media report, without skepticism, every claim that there were no military targets in each flattened home. The information that contradicts this claim is out there - if they would bother to look for it.

They don't.

They would rather believe that Israel is indiscriminately bombing civilians than take the extra hour or two to do some basic research - the type of research that the public relies on the media to do to begin with.

I don't know what really happened at the Ziyada home. But there is enough information to indicate that this is not the open-and-shut case that the media is characterizing it as. Their refusal to go the extra mile - their willingness to accept Palestinian Arab lies without question and to assume Israeli maliciousness without question - is indeed a clear bias, especially since in the past the IDF has managed to explain details of the circumstances months later - explanations that have never been debunked.

There was a terrorist at the Ziyada house. A decent reporter would ask, why?

A biased reporter would cover it up.

(h/t Bob Knot, EBoZ, EoL)

Report: Hamas received millions in aid but gave it to its leaders

Egypt's Youm7 reports "from a senior Palestinian source" that the Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey sent millions of dollars to Hamas to help rebuild Gaza.

According to the report, Hamas' financial officer Essam Da'las received the money, but instead of distributing it to the families in Gaza who have lost their homes, the money is going to fighters and Hamas leaders. 3 leaders of the Qassam Brigades are listed specifically.

While the story is quite believable, as Hamas has a history of taking the lion's share of international aid, most Egyptian media hates Hamas and will sometimes make up stories.

Here is Essam Da'las with Hamas leader Haniyeh in January:

And Da'las' house was bombed on July 12:

08/16 Links: Britain's "Murky Anti-Semitic Subculture"; Occupation hypocrisy: Gaza vs. Cyprus

From Ian:

Britain's "Murky Anti-Semitic Subculture"

Recent anti-Israel protests have been attended by thousands across Europe. These protests come in opposition to attempts by Israeli forces to quell the rocket fire aimed at Israeli citizens by the Palestinian terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
In Britain, the protests in support of Hamas have been chiefly organized by a mixture of Sunni Islamist groups and groups aligned with the Socialist Workers Party. The attending protestors, though, seem to come from across the political and religious spectrums.
European hatred for the small Jewish state, or Jews in general, apparently continues to transcend all ideological differences to the point where pro-Assad activists can march alongside Sunni Islamists, while neo-Nazis stand shoulder to shoulder with Marxists.
Parliamentarians such as Andy Slaughter MP and George Galloway MP walked next to Islamist activists such as Ismail Patel, a supporter of the late French Holocaust Denier Roger Garaudy. Patel advocates the killing of adulterous women and has previously stated: "Hamas is no terrorist organization…we salute Hamas for standing up to Israel." Marching between Andy Slaughter and Ismail Patel was Hafiz al-Karmi, an official from the Palestinian Forum of Britain, one of the UK's leading pro-Hamas organizations.

The Muslim Colonists: Forgotten Facts about the Arab-Israeli Conflict

The current Palestinian narrative is that all Muslims in Palestine are natives and all Jews are settlers. This narrative is false. There has been a small but almost continuous Jewish presence in Palestine since the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome two thousand years ago, and, as we will see, most of the Muslims living in Palestine when the state of Israel was declared in 1948 were Muslim colonists from other parts of the Ottoman Empire who had been resettled and living in Palestine for fewer than 60 years.
There are two important historical events usually overlooked in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
One is the use that Muslim rulers made of the jizya (a discriminatory tax imposed only on non-Muslims, to "protect" them from being killed or having their property destroyed) to reduce the quantity of Jews living in Palestine before the British Mandate was instituted in 1922. The second were the incentives by the Ottoman government to relocate displaced Muslim populations from other parts of the Ottoman Empire in Palestine.

Occupation hypocrisy: Gaza vs. Cyprus

Cyprus is a beautiful island, but it has never recovered from the Turkish invasion of 1974. Turkish troops still control nearly 40 percent of the island — the most fertile and formerly the richest portion.
Some 200,000 Greek refugees never returned home after being expelled from their homes and farms in Northern Cyprus.
The capital of Nicosia remains divided. A 112-mile demilitarized “green line” runs right through the city across the entire island.
Thousands of settlers from Anatolia were shipped in by the Turkish government to occupy former Greek villages and to change Cypriot demography — in the same manner the occupying Ottoman Empire once did in the 16th century. Not a single nation recognizes the legitimacy of the Turkish Cypriot state. In contrast, Greek Cyprus is a member of the European Union.
Why, then, is the world not outraged at an occupied Cyprus the way it is at, say, Israel?

Weekly EoZ roundup 8/15

By far the most popular post of the week was the story about the antisemitic posters in Rome, apparently put up by a right-wing group, listing Jewish-owned shops to be boycotted. This blog was the first to report this in English.

Yet for some reason the similar ultimatum by South Africa's trade unions to boycott Jewish stores did not get the same coverage - even when the author of that demand went further and called for "an eye of an eye" against South African Zionist Jews when any child is hurt in Gaza.

Other notable posts:

Shabbat Shalom!

08/15 Links Pt2: My Jewish Family’s Incredible Shrinking World; 4 Types Of Anti-Israel Leftists

From Ian:

4 Types Of Anti-Israel Leftists

In recent weeks, debates have been flaring up on social media about who is to blame for the Arab-Israeli conflict in Gaza. Even celebrities such as Joan Rivers and Selena Gomez have gotten involved, dividing friends and fans. As someone who leans pretty left myself, I have always been baffled at how people who have rational, intelligent viewpoints that I agree with on every other issue somehow lose their minds when it comes to this conflict. The scientist that I am, I have investigated the reason for this discrepancy, and have noticed some patterns. The four categories displayed below seem to follow their own distinct flavour of anti-Zionism. They all have common threads in that they love to cite the heavily-biased UN for “evidence” of Israeli war crimes, to argue that criticizing Israel or even being anti-Zionist doesn’t make them anti-Semitic, and to nitpick at even the smallest of Israel’s faults, while obscuring the far more egregious faults of Hamas, to use as reasons for its nonexistence – something I never see done about any other country. However, the four schools of anti-Zionist thought are distinctive in their approach.
4. The Leftie Who Is Actually A Right-Winger
Common Giveaways:
-Mention of the “AIPAC lobby” or other implications that Jews control the government through their pockets.
-Accusing you of being paid to be pro-Israel by the Israeli government or Hasbara.
-“Jews love to accuse anyone who is anti-Zionist or has legitimate criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic in order to invalidate any opposition” – all four types of anti-Israel leftists use this line, but this wolf in sheep’s clothing has a particular affinity for it, as they are quick to try to hide that they are anti-Semitic knowing full well know that if their anti-Semitism was revealed, it would invalidate their claims.

Tunnels as war crime

The tunnels built by Hamas in Gaza, in particular, present novel issues for international law. Gaza’s tunnels are different from traditional military objectives like army bases or weapons depots. In their design, the tunnels burrow under an internationally recognized border, they traverse civilian areas, and their primary objective and effect – contrary to international law – is to harm and endanger civilians, both Israeli and Palestinian.
While being constructed, Gaza’s tunnels pose a substantial risk to those building them – often children – and to the civilian structures under which they are dug. The last few weeks have shown us that most tunnel digging begins within homes, hospitals, mosques and other “protected objects”. Filled with explosives and weapons, tunnels can detonate at any time, risking not only the lives of the diggers and operatives who use them, but also the civilians living above them. And this is only on the Palestinian side of the border.
Equally challenging are the conditions in which these tunnels may be eliminated. In Gaza, which does not have the open spaces found in Vietcong-controlled Vietnam or al Qaeda-controlled Afghanistan, the destruction of a tunnel inevitably results in the destruction of civilian structures above the subterranean passage, and in many cases the loss of civilian lives.

My Jewish Family’s Incredible Shrinking World

The Middle East is even more fraught, of course. “You can go to United Arab Emirates, certainly to Dubai,” people say. Can I? “Don’t be too open about being Jewish but they don’t care there. They’re very modern.” My husband was born in Israel and it says so on his American passport. They don’t allow Israelis into the United Arab Emirates, at least that’s the official policy of this “modern” country. Even if he wasn’t marked for exclusion, I’m not keeping my Jewishness a secret. If Saudi Arabia opened its doors to me tomorrow, I still wouldn’t go. I’m not covering my head. I’m a woman of the free world, I have spent my life being grateful for this, knowing that a twist of fate gave me freedom I could have so easily not have had.
I wore a Star of David around my neck the entire time I lived in Scotland. I think I’d be uncomfortable doing the same now. The rage emanating from Europe toward Jews is white hot. A synagogue in Surrey was defaced. Another synagogue was vandalized in Miami of all places. But what’s lacking when it happens in Europe is any sense of outrage from the Europeans. In Miami the atmosphere was “how could this happen here?” In Europe there is no such question. Of course it happens there. In France, when synagogues get firebombed, as they do with alarming frequency, there isn’t a national movement to say they won’t stand for it. They very much stand for it. French Jews are the scapegoats for the real problems in France, between the French and those the French call “the Arabs,” even though “the Arabs” have lived there for decades and should just be French by now. Forget Turkey, a country I once enjoyed visiting. They went off the rails years ago. It’s an election year in Turkey now, so obviously Israel is the top issue in a country with 9% unemployment.
Israeli performers get disinvited from a festival in Edinburgh as if disinviting artists from countries whose politics you don’t like is a normal thing to do. Where is the outrage? They pretend it’s because of Israel, not because they’re Jews. Then the Jewish Film Festival gets canceled in London. An embarrassment. Britain should hang its head in shame. It doesn’t. A crowd in Germany (in Germany!) shouts “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.” Where is Germany’s soul-searching that this goes on within its borders? Forget Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem signing an anti-Israel letter in a Spanish newspaper. No big deal when the second-biggest newspaper in Spain prints a piece arguing Jews “are not made to co-exist,” with references to how good they are with money, how they deserved expulsion, wondering how they still exist (“persist”) at all.(h/t Phil)

Ten years ago today, I started a really crappy blog.

For a few months, all I did was link to or copy stories I collected around the web. Some of the stories were interesting, but no one was much interested in another collection of articles.

Although, looking back, it is astonishing how little things changed. For example, here's a children's video (from Palestinian Media Watch) I reported on in October 2004.

By mid-2005, I was starting to hit my stride, with some original analysis that holds up pretty well. This post explained why pulling out of Gaza was a mistake. This 2006 article where I compare how the West treats Arabs to how families treat their crazy Uncle Ned.

Ten years (and four wars) later, EoZ is still here, and doing better than ever.Last week I had nearly as many hits as I got in all of 2007. I've given lectures, created wildly popular posters, and made hundreds of videos. scores of cartoons, and hundreds of essays. I've tried to maintain the highest standards of truth and accuracy, and although I sometimes fall short, I think my record stacks up pretty well compared to most professional writers, pundits and reporters.

The total output of EoZ over the years is over 11 million words in over 20,000 posts.

A week ago I received an email that really touched me:

I've probably spent more time reading your blog than taking care of my children or hanging out with my husband throughout the past month, and while that's a seriously depressing realization, I'm grateful for all of the time, knowledge, and resources you share. My Zionist family roots, which stretch all the way back to the 1800s, sort of withered as everyone ended up settling in the US. It was only in the past year or so that I started looking more closely into family history and discovered that the Hebrew lullaby I still sing to my own kids every night (Numi, numi, in case you've heard of it) is actually a folksy tribute to Zionist settlers laboring in the fields. Anyhow, I was (and continue to be) totally stunned and caught off guard by this wildly fact-free, anti-Semitism-under-the-guise-of-anti-Zionism campaign that exploded worldwide in recent weeks and is inclusive of seemingly dissimilar groups (angry mobs of unassimilated French Muslim youths + all my nice Unitarian Facebook friends + terrorists + all Europeans + the media sources I used to rely on for factual information??).

Clearly, I was not paying enough attention.

I have never been to Israel, I did not even really think about Israel, but I know anti-semitism when I see it and I know more about Israel than the vast majority of the people who suddenly think themselves qualified to challenge its very existence. As naive as this must sound to someone who has covered these issues for years, I woke up in this bizarro world where I was the only one who noticed the glaringly obvious bias in stories from news outlets I've always trusted, and couldn't relate to or even trust people whose views and values I usually share. More unsettlingly, my new team consisted of Joan Rivers, Christian evangelicals whose enthusiasm for The Jews makes me feel like I'm being hugged too tightly, and Fox News. Still, I have the obligation of speaking loudly and clearly on this issue and for that, I have relied heavily on your posts to fill in the gaps in my knowledge and challenge misinformation with solid sources like the ones you provide. Responding to outright hateful comments that "friends" ignore on their own FB pages, trying to sort through my own feelings about the human toll, and reeling from the magnitude of the world's hatred towards Jews has been emotionally draining and lonely. Your blog has been a reassuring presence as I reorient myself to this world.

Wow.

I couldn't have done it without you. Thanks to all the readers, and thanks for your support, comments, story tips, tweets, retweets, compliments, cross-posts and donations.

UPDATE: I am remiss in not mentioning the other people who have either blogged here or guest posted more than once: Ian, Zvi, Mike Lumish, PreOccupied Territory, and Challah Hu Akbar are the ones I can think of offhand, apologize if I missed any.

This is fun:

In an interview published Thursday by local daily Al-Akhbar, Sayyed Nasrallah said “Israel” is a cancerous tumor that needs to be eradicated, which should be the nation’s ultimate goal.

Secretary General pointed out that the most serious problem we now face, whether in Lebanon or the Arab world, is that people are now recognizing the existence of “Israel” as natural.

Nasrallah is arguably the most powerful man in Lebanon today. while he cannot drive policy, he has veto power over anything the government tries to do.

This man wants to orient the entire country to set as its ultimate goal to destroy another country. Not to improve the lives of its citizens, not to make peace treaties, not to work to calm down the upheavals in Syria that spill over into the country, not to build a vibrant economy - but to destroy Israel.

And the worst problem in the Arab world? Not education. Not poverty. Not terrorism. Not civil wars. Not Iraq or Syria or Egypt or Libya. No, the most serious problem in the Arab world is that some Arabs don't foam at the mouth at the idea of Israel existing.

Nasrallah, of course, is completely subservient to Iran. His words are Iran's words.

Pathological hate is at the root of Hezbollah's and Iran's policies.

08/15 Links Pt1: Supporting Hamas is Anti-Semitic; Groundhog Day in Gaza; Better Off Without UNWRA

From Ian:

Alan M. Dershowitz: Supporting Hamas is Anti-Semitic

Some of those who support Hamas, such as Jimmy Carter and Mary Robinson, claim that they support its political goals, but not its anti-Semitic policies. (We must recognize "its legitimacy as a political actor".) Others, such as the Turkish Foreign Minister and the leaders of Qatar, support its military goals. (We support the Palestinian Resistance Movement Hamas "because it embraces the Palestinian cause and struggles for its people.") These distinctions hold no water, since Hamas' anti-Jewish policies are central to its political and military actions. Some supporters of Hitler made the same argument, claiming that the Nazi Party and its leaders espoused good economic, educational and political policies. No reasonable person today accepts that excuse, and no reasonable person should accept the excuses offered by supporters of Hamas who claim to be able to slice the bologna so thin.
The same is true for those who argue that Hamas is preferable to ISIS or other Jihadist groups that might replace it. A similar argument was made by fascists who claimed that their parties were preferable to the Communists. The reality is that Hamas is an anti-Semitic organization, based on a Jew-hating philosophy, with the goal of destroying the nation state of the Jewish people and killing its Jewish inhabitants. It is evil personified. There is no excuse or justification for supporting Hamas, and anyone who does is supporting anti-Semitism.
Some Hamas supporters — such as those who chant "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas" — proudly acknowledge this reality. Others, such as Cornell West, who according to the American Spectator "headlined a high profile pro-Hamas demonstration," deny it. But all are complicit, even if they are themselves Jewish or have Jewish friends. Supporting an organization that at its core is anti-Jewish and whose charter calls for the killing of all Jews is anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent. And those politicians, academics, entertainers and others who support Hamas — and there are many — must be called out and condemned, as Roger Waters of Pink Floyd has been. So must those, like Navi Pillay, the head of the United Nation's Human Right Council, who see a moral equivalence between this anti-Semitic terrorist group and the democratic nation state of the Jewish people. She demanded that Israel share its Iron Dome system with Hamas, without condemning Hamas for using Palestinian civilians as its own Iron Dome.

Caroline Glick: Anti-Semitism and its limitations

A survey of Britons taken at the end of last month by YouGov showed that 62 percent believed that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza. This includes 72% of Labor supporters and 57% of Conservatives.
In other words, nearly two-thirds of Britons believe that Israel has no right to defend itself. And since Israel is surrounded by forces that seek its destruction, we can extrapolate that nearly two-thirds of Britons would, at a minimum, have no problem with Israel being wiped off the map.
This rising political force of anti-Semitism is already impacting previously supportive governments’ policies toward the Jewish state. Bowing to the anti-Israel positions of his Liberal-Democrat coalition partners, British Prime Minister David Cameron decided that arms exports to Israel will be suspended if Hamas continues its current round of war with Israel.
The primary engine propelling Western nation after Western nation to abandon their support for Israel and deny the protection of law to Jewish communities is the rising power of Muslim minority communities in these countries. As Douglas Murray explained in an essay published by the Gatestone Institute this week, when it comes to Israel and Jews, otherwise integrated, moderate Muslims in Europe are quick to join jihadists in denouncing Israel and rallying behind anti-Semitic curses and threats.
The unanimity of anti-Semitic prejudice among Muslim communities in the West, and its impact on the politics of Western nations, indicates that in the future, Western nations’ polities toward Israel may have more in common with the positions of Sunni Arab states than with those of the US.

Sarah Honig: Groundhog Day in Gaza

It took Hamas’s takeover of Gaza, countless rocket barrages of ever-increasing ranges (all the way to Zichron Ya’acov), ambushes, abductions and mega-scale weapons arsenals to impress average Israelis with the truth.
Yet some political Phils still want to drag us back to their Punxsutawney in the sand, and force us to wake to another Groundhog Day with Abbas once more in charge of Gaza, quite regardless of his proven perfidy, quite regardless of what has already happened under his watch in Gaza, quite regardless of the fundamental fact that he couldn’t hold on to Gaza in the first place, that he was the incompetent who lost it Hamas.
What Livni, Herzog, Gal-On and their hangers-on prefer we forget is that this isn’t a classroom exercise in conjuring outlandish screenplay outlines. It’s doubtful that they believe their own folly-mongering. There’s something beyond the cynical in trying to cause others to blunder through the identical ghastly experience time and time and time again.
It’s nothing less than unconscionable to deceptively inspire false optimism in others and urge them to stake their lives serially on what has miserably failed for 20 years, assuring all and sundry that it would this time end up really well.
Weatherman Phil was a fictional fellow. Yes, he became desperate, even suicidal, but his exploits were side-splitting and destined for a Hollywood happy-end. Our interminable ordeal, however, is anything but a funny flick. Our infatuation with the homegrown version of Groundhog Day firmly belongs in the horror genre.
Our nightmarish ordeals are for real and we can’t awaken to another reality. We, alas, aren’t in pastoral Punxstawney. There’s nothing humorous about Hamas and nothing amusing about its enabler, Abbas.

StandWithUs: Col. Richard Kemp on the IDF & Hamas in Gaza (47 Min)

The idiotic "Gaza war was for natural gas" meme (updated)

I am amazed at how many articles have been written in the past month with the same stupid theme, that the Gaza war is really about Israel's desire for natural gas off the Gaza coast.

Counterpunch. Daily Sabah. Middle East Monitor. The Guardian.

The meme goes like this: Israel has always hungered after the gas that BP is said to have found off of Gaza's coast in 2000. But it doesn't want Hamas to get hold of it because it will be used to fund terror, and also because Israel needs the gas badly. So Israel has been trying to negotiate with the PA to get the rights to the gas, and it tries to destroy Hamas every few years to take it out of the game.

A couple of these articles are savvy enough to note that since 2000, Israel has made some major gas discoveries as well. But, we are told, those will not be commercially available until 2017 or 2020 (depending on the article) and Israel wants the Gaza gas now.

OK, how stupid is this?

First of all, the Gaza gas is much further away from being commercially available than the Leviathan and Tamar gas fields that are within Israeli territorial waters according to everyone (except the people writing these articles who claim they are disputed, which is wrong.)

Secondly,the Tamar field is already pumping gas today.

Thirdly, while these articles breathlessly tell us that the Gaza fields hold 1.4 trillion cubic feet of gas, they don't mention the size of the Israeli fields:

Tamar - proven reserves of 7.9 trillion cubic feet, and 3 trillion more in probable reserves.
Leviathan - 16 trillion cubic feet.
Sarah and Myra - a 54% probability of 6.5 trillion cubic feet

The Gaza gas field is small potatoes compared to existing Israeli fields, very far from ever being commercialized, and subject to attack by terrorist rockets. Why would Israel wage a war under those circumstances?

Ah, but if you think of the stereotype of the greedy Jew, then it all starts to make sense...

UPDATE: The estimated value of the Gaza gas field is about $4 billion. Protective Edge has cost the Israeli economy about $3.6 billion; this is not counting Pillar of Defense and Cast Lead.

Those greedy Jews aren't very good at math, are they?

(h/t Bacon Eater)

Hamas admits intimidating, deporting journalists whose coverage they didn't like

From MEMRI:

Isra Al-Mudallal, head of foreign relations in the Hamas Information Ministry, admitted, in a phone interview with Mayadeen TV on August 14, that journalists who filmed the places from where missiles were launched were deported from the Gaza Strip. "The security agencies would go and have a chat with these people," she said.

Following are excerpts:

Interviewer: How did you manage to maintain contact with the foreign journalists, and how did you convey your point of view to them?

Isra Al-Mudallal: Since the beginning of the aggression against the Gaza Strip, a state of emergency was declared at the border crossings, especially at the Beit Hanoun Crossing, also known as the Erez Crossing, and journalists were allowed in without any bureaucratic procedures, except for registration to guarantee their safety.

Our problem was that [we didn't know] who was entering the Gaza Strip. Who were they? Most of them were freelancers, and the others were from news agencies.

Fewer journalists entered the Gaza Strip during this war than in the previous rounds, in 2008 and 2012. Therefore, the coverage by foreign journalists in the Gaza Strip was insignificant compared to their coverage within the Israeli occupation [i.e., Israel]. Moreover, the journalists who entered Gaza were fixated on the notion of peace and on the Israeli narrative.

So when they were conducting interviewers, or when they went on location to report, they would focus on filming the places from where missiles were launched. Thus, they were collaborating with the occupation.

These journalists were deported from the Gaza Strip. The security agencies would go and have a chat with these people. They would give them some time to change their message, one way or another.

The Israeli missiles do not distinguish between fighters, civilians, or children.

We suffered from this problem very much. Some of the journalists who entered the Gaza Strip were under security surveillance. Even under these difficult circumstances, we managed to reach them, and tell them that what they were doing was anything but professional journalism and that it was immoral.

Hamas merely had friendly "chats" with the reporters they felt were "collaborators." Nah, no threats there.

But some people seem to know better:

Nearly four weeks ago, I called the one-sided dispatches from Gaza that adhered to Hamas' published guidelines of how and what to report a scandal. Journalists tried to hide their being intimidated, and the consequences of how it affected their reporting from Gaza, for as long as they could.

Journalistic ethics has been trampled upon in Gaza, and now those lapses are being covered up. Too bad there seem to be no journalists who are willing to do an investigative report on fellow journalists.

(h/t Yoel)

The New York Times doesn't want to make any assumptions:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York was sweating, his shoes caked in dust. He had just climbed out of a tunnel near the Gaza border that Israel says was covertly built by Hamas, the militant group that dominates Gaza.

...Israeli officials seemed eager to use the occasion, and their sympathetic audience, to highlight what they presented as evidence of Hamas’s malevolence.

...Mr. Cuomo climbed into an armored truck, which took him to a field that had been excavated to reveal a tunnel that Israeli officials said Hamas had dug.

See how careful the NYT is? After all, you cannot be 100% certain Hamas dug these tunnels, even when they brag about it. It might have been an Israeli false flag operation. Or a series of natural cave formations that happened to all run in parallel between Gaza and Israel and are just now being discovered.

The New York Time has an obligation to verify everything before it reports things as facts. Just like it did on July 18:

Around noon, an airstrike killed three children in their bedroom. Three more strikes in the afternoon killed an additional four children. And after 9 p.m., an artillery shell killed eight people in their home, including four children.

No doubt the reporters checked each incident and determined that they were airstrikes or artillery, and not Qassam rockets or Hamas mortars. They didn't rely on third parties, but on their own military forensics skills, to make this flat determination. No need to qualify those facts.

(h/t POT)

EoZ Q&A at MJE (Video)

Due to popular demand, I made a video of the question and answer session after my lecture at the Manhattan Jewish Experience on Tuesday. There is a lot of material I cover here, and the questions were quite good.

08/14 Links Pt2: Rebuilding a Demilitarized Gaza Is the Road to Peace; Reagan & Israel the Real Story

From Ian:

Alan Johnson: Rebuilding a Demilitarized Gaza Is the Road to Peace

Britain, France, and Germany have now proposed a plan. Gazans would not just get emergency humanitarian assistance, but long-term and large-scale economic development, as well as much greater freedom to trade and travel. Hamas, on the other hand, would get disarmed. The Israeli government and opposition are in favor of the idea, so too the United States, and the policy would likely attract support from regional Arab states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates.
Crucially, it also offers a framework to re-establish the authority of those Palestinians who oppose terror, recognize Israel, and want to negotiate a two-state solution—the Palestinian Authority and its president, Mahmoud Abbas.
I interviewed six Israeli and American policy experts this week—Matthew Levitt, Michael Herzog, Gershon Baskin, Jonathan Spyer, Jonathan Rynhold, and Asher Susser—about the viability of “reconstruction for demilitarization.” Could it be a political solution to the Gazan tragedy? As I sat and edited the transcripts, I identified these ten rules for success.
1. Only this policy paradigm can avoid the next round of violence. “If you want to stabilize Gaza over the long run and prevent the repetition of violent rounds of conflict, you have to support this,” said Michael Herzog, a former adviser to several Israeli defense ministers. The periodic restoration of deterrence over Hamas by airstrikes and ground invasions is simply “not a tenable plan anymore,” Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute told me. Jonathan Rynhold, head of the Argov Center for the Study of Israel and the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University, argued that it is vital to show that “Israel’s war is against Hamas, not against the Palestinian people.” The policy “puts the onus on Hamas to explain why they are unprepared to give up their rockets in exchange for reconstruction.“

Spoerl Captures Insanity of Hamas Coverage in New Hampshire Union Leader

Joseph Spoerl, Ph.D., a professor of philosophy at St. Anselm’s College in New Hampshire, highlights a huge problem in the coverage enjoyed by Hamas during the ongoing conflict in Gaza. In a piece published today in the New Hampshire Union Leader, Spoerl puts forth the following scenario:
"Imagine that [during World War II American and British reporters had sent back a steady stream of news stories and photos highlighting the plight of German civilians: photos of ruined homes and apartment blocks, wailing women and children, overwhelmed hospitals and so forth. Suppose, further, that these reporters never mentioned anything about the ugly ideology of Hitler and the Nazis, their genocidal hatred for Jews, their plans for world conquest, their persecution of political opponents, etc.
We would all agree that reporters acting in this way would be guilty of a serious breach of journalistic ethics. They would be actively misleading their audience by telling only a small portion of the truth."
Spoerl observes that such a scenario is taking place today as reporters highlight the suffering of the residents of the Gaza Strip without addressing the agenda of the fascist organization that controls the territory. “As absurd as it sounds, the imaginary scenario sketched out here has been unfolding before our very eyes in the Gaza strip over the past month.”
He concludes his piece as follows:
Hamas is an imperialistic, totalitarian political movement driven by genocidal hatred for Jews — in short, an Islamic Nazi Party. It exists beside the world’s only Jewish state, a liberal democracy.
No aspect of the conflict is more important, or more ignored by the mainstream media, than this one.

Mark Steyn: Young Turks

A Tweet from Yasmina Haifi:
"ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. It's a preconceived plan by Zionists who want to deliberately blacken Islam's name."
Who is Yasmina Haifi? She's an official at the Dutch Ministry of Justice who serves as project leader at the Netherlands' National Cyber Security Center. And she thinks Isis is a Zionist plot to make Islam look bad.
She could be right. On the other hand, maybe Yasmina Haifi is a Zionist plot to make Islam look bad - or at any rate deranged. Presumably the many Dutch Muslims out on the streets holding pro-Isis demonstrations would disagree with her - because they surely wouldn't be demonstrating in favor of a Zionist front group, would they? Unless, of course, they're also in on the Zionist plot...
Look at Yasmina Haifi in the photograph at right - she's not a burqa-wreathed crone, but a modern western career woman in a foxy red jacket with just a hint of cleavage. And yet she cannot bear the truth about her religion and what is done in its name. So she takes refuge in the laziest conspiracy of all. In the Netherlands, an "extremist" Muslim supports Isis because it's chopping the heads off infidels, but a "moderate" Muslim opposes Isis because it's a Zionist front group.
This is the human capital with which the Netherlands has chosen to build its future.

Dutch Official Suspended for Saying ISIS is 'Zionist Plot'Elad Benari Thursday, August 14, 2014

The Ministry of Security and Justice and the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security (NCTV) responded by saying they were opposed to Haifi’s tweet.
“Security and Justice and the NCTV distance themselves from her remarks,” the government said in a statement quoted by NL Times. “And since [the comment] relates to the work of the NCTV and the National Cyber Security Center, cause is shown to terminate her assignment NCSC/NCTV and outsource her work with immediate effect.”
In an interview with the local Radio 1 on Wednesday, Haifi said she will not take back her statements, saying she has the right to speak her mind.
“Freedom of expression is apparently only for certain groups,” she was quoted as having said.
“I have taken the liberty to express myself and obviously I have to pay for it. I do not know why I should take it down; this is what I think,” Haifi declared.