Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, February 06, 2017

Academic Boycott Blowback (Divest This!)

As everyone on the planet knows by now, an executive order by the new US administration regarding immigration has triggered tsunamis of controversy across the globe. Given that we’ve been chest deep in commentary regarding that decision since it was made, I’ll forgo talking about debate over that policy in order to focus on one specific reaction to it.

Over the last week, more than 4000 academics have signed a petition calling on scholars to boycott academic conferences in the US until the immigration ban is lifted. As far as I know, that boycott does not extend to refusing Americans access to conferences outside the US, nor have I yet heard calls for international academics to shun their US colleagues by, for example, refusing to review or publish their research, or rejecting graduate students or grants applications based on nationality.

Still, this measured approach is grounded in the assumption that punishing American academics for actions taken by the US government is an appropriate choice of action. I’ve not yet heard that this assumption is based on alleged culpability of American academics (or academic institutions) for US policy. We’ve heard people make that case in other academic boycott debates by applying a principle that says any college or university taking government money or performing research that contributes to government decision-making is automatically complicit in the actions of that government. So far, however, the only direct criticisms I’ve heard are complaints that some academic associations have not taken official stands protesting Trump’s controversial immigration policy quickly enough.

Absent the assignment of blame, it might be that international academics – lacking other ways to protest US immigration policy – are doing what they can, regardless of whether it will have any impact on those setting that policy. In which case, American scholars are being asked to serve as “mere means” towards the protestor’s political ends.

Regardless of motivation, a principled stance against any academic boycott of any kind says that research, scholarship, and the free flow of ideas should transcend politics. Cary Nelson – former leader of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) – sums up this argument [behind a paywall, unfortunately], which should be read alongside his masterful work which provides the historic backstory to our society’s choice to grant one profession – academia – special privileges which fall under the category of “Academic Freedom.”

Given that it is academics who benefit most directly from special considerations granted to no other profession, one wonders why some of those academics seem so trigger-happy to act in ways that undermine this global societal compact by trying to punish or exclude one another on political grounds. As ever, the dynamite that has been laid which undermines an important principle of civil society is labeled BDS.

Recall that the only significant academic boycott over the last decade is the one directed at the Jewish state. And in this debate, none of the aforementioned cautions or qualifications are in place. One can argue whether a French academic refusing to attend a conference in Chicago is punishing someone else, or just making a personal choice. The same argument cannot be made, however, by those pushing academic institutions, associations and individuals to shun their Israeli colleagues in every possible way.

So if a conference boycott does take hold targeting American academic meetings, the gate is already wide open to escalate it to include all the things the BDSers want done to Israeli scholars (refusal to cooperate, rejection of papers, etc.). And as the construct of academic freedom unravels, what will keep others (including supporters of the current President) from calling for boycotts of other academic institutions or associations based on a different set of political gripes?

While we’re on the subject of BDS talking points, what about the argument that the proposed sweeping academic boycotts only target Israeli institutions and thus in no way should be seen as an attempt to punish individual scholars? Well academic conferences and the organizations that run them are also institutions, yet it’s hard to imagine that one can harm an institution that consists solely of people talking to each other without harming the participants in those conversations. This case study that describes the personal suffering caused by an “institutional boycott” of University of Illinois also provides an empirical nail for the coffin of the “intuitional-boycotts-don’t-harm-individuals” argument.

Finally, one of the reasons I described that argument made by AAUP’s Cary Nelson argument against all academic boycotts as “principled” is that it is universal, which allows him to consistently fight against academic boycotts of Israel and the US, Trumps immigration ban, and other issues that stand in the way of scholarly discourse.

In contrast, look at how much the boycotters must tie themselves into knots trying to jibe their claims to stand for universal principle (like human rights and academic freedom) with the narrowness of their target list (currently standing at one, maybe two, with the greatest abusers of scholars, students and free inquiry permanently off their agenda).

As noted previously, academic freedom is not a natural phenomenon like gravity or even a natural corollary of the Rights of Man, but remains a relatively recent social invention that benefits scholars by preventing the vagaries of politics from impacting their work. To throw all that away in the name of “Israel Must Go” seems a pretty big sacrifice for such ugly and immoral ends.

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The entire reason that UNRWA has different definitions of "refugee" than the rest of the world is because UNRWA existed for a year before the UN Refugee Convention was drafted, and the Refugee Convention included an exception in its definition of refugee to accommodate UNRWA's somewhat different definition. The UNHRC, when it was created, understandably didn't want to leave hundreds of thousands of needy people who were already defined as refugees by the UN without protection, so the Refugee Convention allowed for this differing definition of UNRWA's to be allowed for very specific circumstances.

Here is the wording of the UNRWA exception (it also applied to an agency that was meant to help Korean refugees, UNKRA), in Article 1, paragraph D, "Definition of the term'refugee'":

This Convention shall not apply to persons who are at present receiving from organs or agencies of the United Nations other than the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees protection or assistance.

When such protection or assistance has ceased for any reason, without the position of such persons being definitively settled in accordance with the relevant resolutions adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, these persons shall ipso facto be entitled to the benefits of this Convention.

The wording makes it sound like UNRWA's definition is only valid under this exception provided by UNHCR. In other words, the UNHCR definition of "refugee" is the only operative definition, and UNRWA's exception is part of the Refugee Convention. It isn't an independent definition but is dependent on the conditions that the Refugee Convention allows it.

Those conditions include a crucial phrase, "persons who are at present receiving from organs or agencies of the United Nations other than the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees protection or assistance. "

"At present" seems to me to mean that only those UNRWA refugees who were alive in 1951 are granted the exception to be defined as refugees by UNRWA.

UNRWA only officially added descendants to its definition of refugees later in the 1950s, after the Refugee Convention. But if I am reading this correctly, UNRWA never had that right to begin with. It could not redefine "refugees" outside of the Refugee Convention framework to include unborn people who were not receiving protection at the time of the drafting of the Convention. The writers of the Refugee Convention certainly did not intend for the UNRWA exception to last for decades and to have an entire class of millions of "refugees" created under the narrow exception they granted to UNRWA-protected refugees. The UNRWA exception was meant to be a stopgap until there were no longer any refugees being supported by UNRWA; the drafters did not intend for UNRWA to create new definitions that would increase, rather than decrease, the number of refugees under its purview.

In short, the Refugee Convention does not give UNRWA the right to further expand its definitions of "refugee" beyond the exception explicitly allowed in its language - applying only to those living UNRWA refugees receiving assistance in 1951 and no one else.

Beyond that, there is another contradiction between UNHCR's exception and UNRWA's definitions that seem to indicate that there are far fewer "refugees" than UNRWA claims. UNWRA's definition of refugee includes anyone descended patrilineally from people who lived in Palestine from 1946 to 1948. But that includes people who left the five areas of UNRWA control (Gaza, West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria) who returned. But the UNHCR says explicitly that if anyone loses that protection - for example, by moving to a Gulf country or Europe - they are no longer allowed to return to become protected by UNRWA, but rather their status becomes defined by UNHCR. Meaning that for them to be considered refugees, they must adhere to the much more stringent definition of UNHCR's. UNHCR does not allow people who left UNRWA's places of operation to return and claim refugee status from UNRWA.

Moreover, the phrase "When such protection or assistance has ceased for any reason" says that anyone who ceased to be under UNRWA protection cannot regain that protection - and this would include a fortiori those who never had such protection to begin with, namely those who weren't born.

I cannot find any language in the 1967 Refugee Protocol (which extends the definition of refugee beyond the specific World War II refugees that were the subjects of the 1951 Convention) to contradict what I am saying here. In fact, it would seem to strengthen my argument a bit, in the absence of any clarifying language.

UNHCR certainly interprets the 1951 Convention to exclude any Palestinian in the areas of UNRWA operation. It says in its 2011 interpretation of the Refugee Convention:

143. With regard to refugees from Palestine, it will be noted that UNRWA operates only in certain areas of the Middle East, and it is only there that its protection or assistance are given. Thus, a refugee from Palestine who finds himself outside that area does not enjoy the assistance mentioned and may be considered for determination of his refugee status under the criteria of the 1951 Convention. It should normally be sufficient to establish that the circumstances which originally made him qualify for protection or assistance from UNRWA still persist and that he has neither ceased to be a refugee under one of the cessation clauses nor is excluded from the application of the Convention under one of the exclusion clauses.

But this may be more convenient than legal. UNRWA has no cessation clauses, and the "circumstances which originally made him qualify for protection" do not seem to apply. They should not apply to those who are descendants of original Palestine refugees who didn't exist when the Refugee Convention was written. And they certainly should not apply for Palestinians who are citizens of Jordan (Jordan gave them citizenship after UNRWA was created) nor for those who live in the areas of British Mandate Palestine - which the UN itself now calls "the State of Palestine." All of these are conditions that did not exist when UNRWA originally created its criteria for eligibility and therefore should not be applicable to continue to define these people as refugees after the Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol have become international law.

I once again emphasize that I am not a lawyer, but perhaps some international lawyers can shed light on this. Because it sure looks to me that UNRWA's ability to expand its definition of refugees is a violation of the terms given for the exception grandfathered in by the Refugee Convention.

Which would mean that the legal refugees under UNRWA's definition (which cannot exist outside the Refugee Convention framework) would only include people who are now over 66 years old, never having lived anywhere outside the five areas of UNRWA's operations.

UNRWA can give services to non-refugees if it wants to, of course. But unless I'm missing something, it does not seem to have the right to refer to those people as refugees under international law, it cannot fund-raise by referring to them as refugees, and UNHCR should be the agency that provides services to Palestinians who have fled from Syria, not UNRWA, since their refugee status is not determined by events of 1948 but by events of recent years.

Any legal experts are invited to comment, of course.

(h/t Daled Amos)

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From Iran's FARS News Agency:

A senior member of the Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission and former Islamic Revolution Guards Corps official warned that the slightest aggression by Washington against Iran will be responded by razing to the ground the US military base in Bahrain.

"The US army's fifth fleet has occupied a part of Bahrain, and the enemy's farthest military base is in the Indian Ocean but these points are all within the range of Iran's missile systems and they will be razed to the ground if the enemy makes a mistake," Mojtaba Zonour, a former advisor to the Iranian Supreme Leader's Representative at the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), said on Saturday evening.

Stressing that Tehran has prepared its forces for asymmetric war and attained great achievements in the missile field, he said if the enemy fires a missile against Iran, the country will immediately retaliate it with firing a missile at Tel Aviv.

"And only 7 minutes is needed for the Iranian missile to hit Tel Aviv," Zonour said.

His remarks came after US officials repeated threats to Iran in the last few days.

Yesterday, Commander of the IRGC Aerospace Force Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh played down the recent allegations by the US officials against Iran's defense program, but meantime warned Washington to avoid hostile action or wait for a harsh response.

"If the enemy makes a mistake our roaring missiles will hit their targets," General Hajizadeh told reporters on the sidelines of massive military drills dubbed 'Modafe'an Harim-e Aseman Velayat' (Defenders of the Velayat Skies) in Semnan province in Northern Iran on Saturday.

No one seems to ask why Iran would attack Israel if they are responding to perceived US actions.

Saudi Arabia is also an ally of the US, and they aren't threatening to hit their much closer neighbor in the event of the US doing something they don't like.

The reason that they choose to threaten Israel is because the West is worried that Israel would fight back and it would escalate into a major conflict rather than a regional one. Iran knows that the West, especially Europe, is frightened of war, so the threat against Israel is meant to be heard not so much by the White House or Israel, but by Europe to beg the US to keep on Iran's good side.

There is also a subtle threat of terrorism here. When it mentions "asymmetric war" that is not a war of missiles against missiles - it is a threat of terrorism, via Hezbollah.

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Who's the war criminal? (poster)

A poster in response to yet another tweet by Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch about how terrible it is for Jews to live in Judea and Samaria.

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"International Conference on the Suffering of the Palestinian Child Under Israeli Occupation" scheduled for May

Kuwait will host the "International Conference on the Suffering of the Palestinian Child Under Israeli Occupation" in the first half of May.

Really.
The conference will be held under the auspices of the Emir of Kuwait, the Secretary General of the Arab League, and they will invite Arab foreign ministers and the ministers of social affairs in the Arab League countries, along with "experts" in the field of children's rights.

The conference is not about the suffering of the Palestinian child under Lebanese rule, where they are forced to live in overcrowded camps by Lebanese law.

It is not about the suffering of Palestinian children under Syrian rule, where they don't know if they will be able to eat tomorrow.

No, it's about these kids, having fun in a water park:

Or these kids enjoying a day in Jericho.

This is what the Arab League wastes its money on. All because of hate of Israel.

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02/05 Links: Five myths about anti-Semitism; Sam Harris: Left Has Allied With Islamists

From Ian:

Yair Rosenberg: Five myths about anti-Semitism

For a phenomenon often dubbed “the world’s oldest hatred,” anti-Semitism is not well understood. From top Iranian officials who blame the Talmud for the international drug trade to British political activists who claim that the Mossad is stealing their shoes, anti-Jewish bigotry can be bewildering and bizarre. But given the prejudice’s longevity, virulence and recent resurgence in Europe and America — witness the waves of bomb threats against dozens of Jewish centers nationwide in the past month and the controversy over the Trump administration’s repeated refusal to include Jews in its Holocaust memorial statement — it’s well worth debunking common misconceptions that impede our ability to fight it.
Myth No. 2 Anti-Semitism comes predominantly from the right.
This past election season, the ascendant alt-right, a band of reactionary white nationalists with a penchant for harassing Jewish journalists, filled Twitter with neo-Nazi memes, Photoshopped reporters into gas chambers and concentration camps, and chanted anti-Semitic slogans at political rallies. (My critical reporting on Trump made me the second-most-harassed Jewish journalist on Twitter, according to an Anti-Defamation League study.) One could be forgiven for assuming that such bigotry flows from one primary political source.
But anti-Semitic outbursts were taking place on the left at the same time. At liberal Oberlin College, a writing instructor named Joy Karega shared Facebook memes about Jewish control of the global economy and media, alongside posts asserting Israeli responsibility for the Islamic State and 9/11. Yet when school officials and others criticized her conduct, the student council dismissed it as a “witch-hunt.” In New York, despite a local outcry, the hip leftist hub Brooklyn Commons hosted Christopher Bollyn, a conspiracy theorist who argued that “Zionist Jews” were behind 9/11. During the Democratic primaries, Jewish candidate Bernie Sanders was confronted by a questioner who declared that “the Zionist Jews . . . run the Federal Reserve, they run Wall Street, they run every campaign.” Surveying this scene, TBS comedian Samantha Bee aired footage of an anti-Semite ranting at a Trump rally, then cracked, “To find anti-Semitism that rabid, you’d have to go to, well, any left-leaning American college campus.”
This bipartisan bigotry shouldn’t surprise. Anti-Semitism could never have attained its impressive influence without forging coalitions across ideological and religious lines. Hatred of Jews has long thrived on its ability to ensnare utterly opposite worldviews. Thus, the 2013 E.U. survey found that Italian and Swedish Jews perceived more anti-Semitic statements coming from the left, Hungarian Jews heard them overwhelmingly from Christians and the right, and French Jews reported abuse largely from Muslim extremists. It’s tempting to cast anti-Semitism as the sin of other people, but that’s usually a way to avoid confronting the problem within one’s own community.

WaPo Ignores Islamic/Muslim Anti-Semitism

Later in the article, Rosenberg acknowledges how French Jews’ report their experiences with anti-Semitism as "largely [coming] from Muslim extremists.” His next sentence, however, warns readers against “[casting] anti-Semitism as the sin of other people [in order to] avoid confronting the problem within one’s own community.” In other words, Rosenberg is uncomfortable with acknowledging anti-Semitism as a pathology more virulent among certain cultural, religious, and/or ethnic groups than others.
Anti-Semitism, according to Rosenberg's implication, is somehow equally distributed across all political, religious, cultural, and ethnic groups.
While touching on anti-Semitism in Europe, Rosenberg ignores its worst recent manifestations, all of which were functions of Islamic terrorism.
Rosenberg similarly ignores the relationship between modern anti-Semitism on American campuses and the rapid growth of America's Muslim population in recent decades, particularly with respect to student bodies across the country's universities and colleges. He neglects to mention the Muslim Students' Association - an anti-Zionist, left-wing, and Democrat-aligned organization - as a primary driver of anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist agitation across American campuses:

Illinois warns European Union on boycotting settlements

In the wake of the UN anti-settlements resolution, the governor of Illinois warned the European Union that companies complying with boycotts of Israel or of its West Bank settlements face divestment by the governments of Illinois and other states.
Gov. Bruce Rauner, in his January 31 letter to Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, outlines Illinois law banning state pension plans from investing in companies that boycott Israel.
“Under our law, the term ‘boycott Israel’ means ‘engaging in actions that are politically motivated and are intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or otherwise limit commercial relations with the state of Israel or companies based in Israel or in territories controlled by the State of Israel,’” Rauner wrote in the letter, which his office released to JTA on February 3.

Maher & Sam Harris: Left Has Allied With Islamists; "Self-Loathing" Liberals Think We're Just As Bad

Maher said people need to stop equivocating the Ku Klux Klan to radical Islamic armies.
"And again, size matters," Maher said. "There are entire terrorists armies -- ISIS, obviously, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda. People talk about the KKK like it's an equivalent. The KKK is not seeking nuclear weapons."
"When you take jihadists and Islamists who want Sharia law, they just want to use the leverage of a state that are not committing violence immediately, and then you have a larger subset of conservative Muslims who may not have any alliance to jihadists they still have attitudes about free speech and the rights of women and the rights of gays that are deeply at odds with our own and we have to win a war of ideas with these people. This is not -- we don't fly drones to solve this problem. And so this is why we need to empower real reformers.
Harris admonished Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian-American who often appears on MSNBC and spoke out the D.C. Women's March, for defending Saudi Arabia for giving women work leave for pregnancy, defending Sharia law, and attacking "a real feminist hero" like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, telling her she needs an ass-whipping. Harris said Sarsour is a "theocrat."
"I know you were having a bit of a Twitter spat sometimes with this woman Linda Sarsour," Maher said to Harris. "She was at the march and you mentioned that she tweets things that are semi-supportive of Saudi Arabia because they give women maternity leave more than we do."
"This is a problem," Harris said. "The left has allied themselves with Islamists and closet Islamists. She's not too closeted. She has an hijab and the hijab was promoted as one of the empowering symbols of feminism in this march and she was in the march."

Real Time with Bill Maher: Sam Harris: Winning the War of Ideas

This is the most pathological moment in US political history since 1968.

I come out of the progressive-left, but the movement lost me when I started noticing Nazi Swastikas entwined with Stars of David at anti-war rallies in San Francisco.

Once it became clear that anti-Zionists were making homes for themselves within the Obama administration, I knew that it was time for me to leave the party. Asking Jews to sit across the Democratic Party table from anti-Semitic anti-Zionists, such as Linda Sarsour, is something akin to asking black Americans to sit across the Democratic Party table in political kinship with the Klan.

It is suggesting common-cause with an anti-Zionist seeking to bring Sharia into the United States under the cover of feminism. (Of feminism, for chrissake.) This is not a criticism of Muslims as people, but it is very definitely a criticism of Sharia. Whatever else Sharia may be, it is a theological-political ideology and thus open to public scrutiny and criticism. This is particularly true when the head-chopping of non-submissive women or the throwing of Gay people off of rooftops is seen

as a moral imperative for so many within the Islamic faith.

Jewish people need to draw the line at anti-Semitic anti-Zionism of the type represented by Sarsour who once twittered that "nothing is creepier than Zionism."

In the meantime the progressive-left, the Democratic Party, and Clinton Incorporated have turned Trump into the Devil, but what they fail to understand is that their intense and overblown hatred immunizes the guy from their own criticisms.

Whenever they lambaste Trump as a "fascist," or something akin to Hitler, he garners quiet sympathy while making his accusers look malicious, ignorant, and untrustworthy in their conclusions.

The Accelerating Ideological Drumbeat

The intense hatred for Donald Trump is, in part, a result of the accelerating ideological drumbeat around issues of race, gender, and class as derived from the New Left and the Vietnam War. During the 1960s we saw the rise of Second Wave Feminism, the anti-war movement, Gay rights, environmentalism, Black Power, Brown Power and on and on. This churning political chaos blended progressive-left identity politics with socialism eventually resulting in the remarkable challenge by Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2016.

There are, quite obviously, very good historical reasons for all of this. Does anyone really need reminding of how long women in the United States were non-citizens? Or how long black people were slaves? Thus, the New Left take-over of the universities was a response to centuries of unjust marginalization and displacement of the allegedly inferior other.

The problem is not that in speaking up for women, or in opposition to war, or in favor of minority rights, that the Left had nothing to say. They clearly had plenty to say. The problem is that they refused to acknowledge their winnings on the table.

That is, the less racist and sexist the West became in recent decades the harder and faster the drumbeat of race, gender, and class became, eventually emerging, during the Obama administration, as the high-pitched shrill of identity politics that we know today.

And that really is the saddest part.

The faltering liberal West represents the most socially just and welcoming form of political organization in human history, yet it is lambasted by a significant portion of its own citizenry as among the very worst.

Instead of joining with the white American middle-class for the purpose of moving forward in relative harmony, the progressive-left demonized those people, particularly the conservatives among them, as precisely what is wrong with the West today.

One Reason Why Hillary Got Beat

In the months leading into te 2016 presidential election the tempo of progressive-left accusations of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, disaster capitalism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and generalized badness, approached a crescendo.

One of my favorite examples was when transgender Inside Edition reporter Zoey Tur (née Robert Albert Tur) threatened violence against Brietbart-associated writer and radio talk show host, Ben Shapiro, because Ben referred to her as a "Sir" during a panel discussion on Caitlyn "Bruce" Jenner.

The rather burly Ms. Tur subsequently threatened Shapiro with a "curb stomping" which anyone who has ever seen the movie History X can tell you is a rather unpleasant form of getting one's ass kicked... if not, more likely, dead. Shortly thereafter Shapiro suggested that such brutality might be considered a tad "unladylike" thereby revealing that someone obviously needs to give him a good mansplaining.

Shortly after the election, the MTV "2017 Resolutions for White Guys" video nicely summed-up the progressive-left, politically-correct, coastal zeitgeist that nudged Trump into the winner's box.

While no one ever accused the people over at MTV of being big thinkers, the truth is that during the brief historical moment between World War II and the present the West actually made tremendous gains in social justice. Yet it is precisely at this moment that the cries of racism and sexism and fascism dramatically increased in direct proportion, ironically enough, to the diminishment of racism, sexism, and fascism.

Never before was a society so free and, yet, so despised by so many for its alleged lack of freedom.

In retrospect, therefore, it is not particularly surprising that as the Clinton campaign conjured the "alt-right" as an object of hatred with which to smear Donald Trump that many less partisan Americans refused to buy into that hatred.

The more the Clintonistas pointed the trembling finger of accusation toward all those politically-incorrect heinous "deplorables" - otherwise known as their fellow Americans - the more those people either adopted that attribution as a badge of honor or dismissed the Left as a bunch of anti-white racist, anti-American hate-mongers.

In other words, each time progressives spit the notion that regular Americans from places like Lexington, Kentucky or Provo, Utah or Ottumwa, Iowa were essentially a bunch of bigoted, heteronormative, neanderthal, pig farmers another Republican-operative angel received its wings.

Immunization

By turning Donald Trump into "Genghis Hitler," as my friend Trudy put it, the Left leaves no room for negotiation, discussion, or even thought. By accusing Trump of anything and everything - up to and including "golden showers" in Russian luxury hotel rooms - it immunizes the guy from genuine criticisms.

It means that people who seek some reasonable objectivity in their understanding of what is actually happening must slog through an endless miasma of bullshit to get at a kernel of truth.

And what this means is that the kind of key honest criticisms that could sway the general American citizenry back toward a left-leaning direction are lost in the political swamp, thereby freeing president Trump to do damn near anything he wants. After all, if almost everyone left-of-center is willing to string the guy up for putting his shoes on in the wrong order, why should he not just go forward and do whatever he wants, anyway?

An important question is, will this hatred topple the guy or will it feed his strength?

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.

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Four babies have been deposited in front of mosques and social assistance centers in Gaza so far this year, and Arab media is buzzing about it.

The latest was on Saturday morning when a baby was found in front of a mosque in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood. The week before, a baby was left in front of an orphanage in Gaza City.

Gaza Sheikh Samih Hajjaj said that these children were probably illegitimate. He blamed the problem on a number of factors, including young people not complying with Islamic Sharia law, young men and women mixing in universities and other public places without any controls and without regard to the consequences, and a Turkish soap opera named "Forbidden Love" may be responsible for an increase in incest.

This 2012 article describes how popular Turkish soaps are in Palestinian Arab homes:

Palestinians are in rapture with Turkish soap operas. They do not merely provide nightly entertainment but their influence shapes the image and style of the young viewers. Shirts, dresses, tights, styles of clothes, handbags, belts, and jewellery worn in the Turkish soap opera are highly coveted among Palestinian young women. The image: what and how to combine items of clothing, how to comport oneself, how to walk and what to talk is a style gleaned from Turkish televised dramas. Young men design their haircuts in emulation of their heroes; they put on stylish jackets, shirts, and pants whose styles fluctuate with the seasonal changes of Turkish fashions. The diversity, range of characters portrayed, and endless twists and turns of the plot attract a great cross-section of Palestinian devotees. Palestinians of all ages - grandparents, husbands, wives, young men and women, adolescents, children, and even toddlers - congregate nightly to see a mirror image of their “life” reflected on the screen and idealised into a polished legend; a surrogate reality.

And here is how "Forbidden Love" is described:

Al Ishq el Mamnu’ [Forbidden Love] is a contemporary social drama of love and incest. It is the story of one big extended family all sharing the same rambling house, buzzing with incestuous desires. Samar, the heroin, falls in love with the much younger handsome nephew of her husband, hence the title “Forbidden Love.”

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Last week, Peter Beinart in The Forward asked why God forced Jews to endure slavery in Egypt and gave one answer based on a modern Haggadah commentary that most Jews never heard of, that it was meant:

to sensitize the People of Israel to the suffering of others, to teach them what it means to be alienated and oppressed, so that when they set up their own society, they will be sure not to impose such suffering on others.”

Slavery, in other words, was meant to ensure that Jews would remember powerlessness once they gained power. Jared Kushner is what happens when that memory fails.

Rae Kushner was the daughter of a furrier in the Belarusian town of Navahrudak. The Nazis murdered her mother, her elder sister and her younger brother. She survived, with her father and younger sister, by climbing through a tunnel out of the ghetto and then living in the forest for a year.

Jared Kushner, her grandson, has lived a very different life. He attended Harvard after his father gave the university $2.5 million; he bought a newspaper company when he was 25, and now he advises his father-in-law, the president.

Their lives illustrate the revolution in Jewish fortunes that has occurred over the past 75 years. In remarkable ways, modern Jewish history echoes the passage from powerlessness to power that begins in the Book of Exodus. Therefore, the challenge for Jared Kushner, and everyone in our extraordinarily privileged generation, is to remember our ancestors’ suffering and honor their memories by defending the weak, vulnerable and oppressed today.

How could Kushner — a Modern Orthodox golden boy — fail to internalize that? How could he invite Donald Trump’s Cabinet to his house for Shabbat dinner only hours after his father-in-law’s executive order banning refugees from entering the United States? How could he pose in a tuxedo alongside his wife, Ivanka Trump, on Saturday night as that executive order wreaked havoc on innocent people’s lives simply because they hailed from the wrong countries?

Kushner’s failure is not his problem alone; it should chill every Modern Orthodox educator, rabbi and parent in the United States. How could the Modern Orthodox community, a community that prides itself on instilling in its children Jewish knowledge and ideals, have failed so profoundly?

This little essay of Beinart's fails on multiple levels.

It is exactly because of Shabbat that the Kushners had no idea of the firestorm that Trump's executive order engendered last Saturday - one that is hugely out of proportion to the actual contents of the executive order Trump signed that was fully aligned with his campaign promises.

Moreover, the Kushners have not sought to be the poster children of modern Orthodoxy.

Furthermore, it is a family's responsibility to support each other. To expect Jared and Ivanka to speak out against their own family is the height of chutzpa.

But the part of this essay that bothers me the most is that Beinart, characteristically, takes a very small section of what being Jewish is about and magnifies it out of proportion to reality.

Being Jewish is not synonymous with "tikkun olam," "repairing the world." That is the view of people who are more liberal than they are Jewish.

Jews are more than a nation - we are a family. And families, like nations, prioritize each other over others.

I read an article over Shabbat by an immigrant to Israel and how she routinely gives rides to hitchhikers, as well as how she allows her daughters (under some conditions) to hitchhike themselves. This is because most Jews in Israel act like family, not only like mere citizens. They'll start loud arguments with strangers because they know that the other party is not likely to pull out a gun. They grieve as one when there is an attack and celebrate as one when there is a victory.

Families take care of each other before they take care of the rest of the world - and taking care of the rest of the world cannot happen at the expense of taking care of your own people. The same applies to how nations treat their own people and people who want to join.

When the Torah tells the Jew to love the stranger, it is not referring to the entire world. It is referring to the "ger" - in some cases, people who convert to Judaism, and in other cases people who choose to live in the Land of Israel as part of a social contract that they accept the basic laws of society.

It is reasonable to argue as to how much this applies to a sovereign nation and its immigration policies. A policy of unlimited immigration is national suicide; but a policy of no immigration allowed for anyone is cold-hearted. Any reasonable person knows that the correct policy is somewhere in between. And Judaism - real Judaism, not Beinart's faux liberalism-as-Judaism - says that allowing immigration is a two-way street; there are obligations on both the sovereign nation and on the would-be immigrant, for the latter must accept the social mores and laws of the society that they want to join.

That is the moral starting point for any discussion, let alone a discussion based on Jewish sensibilities.

Peter Beinart is not basing his critique on the Kushners on anything that Judaism has to say. He is twisting Judaism to fit his outrage over Donald Trump and at the same time throwing the Kushners - his supposed family - under the bus, in his zeal to show the world how damned moral he is.

So the question isn't how modern Orthodox Judaism could have produced Kushner, It is how modern Orthodoxy could have produced such a hateful, self righteous prig as Peter Beinart.

I wonder if the teachers and principals at Peter Beinart's Jewish schools are proud of him today as the leading critic of the Jewish state and the self-appointed smug arbiter of morality, or if his hateful writings in Haaretz and The Forward and appearances on CNN fill them with pain and embarrassment for being the product of their schools and environment?

UPDATE: Beinart belongs to a modern Orthodox shul and identifies with its community but does not define himself that way and grew up Conservative.

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