Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, June 12, 2017

Haaretz destroys Haaretz' narrative of "ultra-right wing intransigent Netanyahu"

For the second time in a week, Haaretz has a reluctant exclusive on how Israel's hated, right-wing, war-mongering, intransigent, anti-peace prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has actually been working behind the scenes to try to find a permanent peaceful solution.

Last week it reported that Netanyahu's negotiators accepted an American framework for peace - and Abbas rejected it. Abbas then ignored a later American framework that tilted more his way.

This week Haaretz reports that Netanyahu held a secret meeting with Egyptian leader Sisi along with Labor party leader Isaac Herzog to see if he could put together a coalition government that could make peace.

This doesn't exactly jibe with the way that Haaretz normally reports on Netanyahu and Likud.

But don't worry: Haaretz won't change its reporting just because it has proven its own bias to be wrong.

In this very article about the meeting with Sisi, Haaretz throws in this sentence:

In mid-May, shortly after that meeting, Sissi gave a memorable speech at the dedication of an Egyptian power plant, calling on Palestinians and Israelis to take advantage of “a realistic and great opportunity” and reach an agreement that would end the conflict. He even called on Israeli political parties to agree to the process.
These talks, like the regional initiative, failed due to Netanyahu’s refusal to give the Palestinians what was required.

Not what Palestinians "demanded" -but what Haaretz states as fact is required for peace.

Abbas' intransigence is swept under a rug, while Netanyahu's flexibility is dismissed as just more intransigence. Palestinian demands are "requirements for peace" while Netanyahu's demands for security are just posturing to avoid peace.

Haaretz did some great reporting, but it is so blinded by hate that it cannot even understand what it is writing.

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Playing dumb about BDS at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (Petra Marquardt-Bigman)

By Petra Marquardt-Bigman

According to a recent report published at Tablet, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) has supported “groups working to advance a boycott of the world’s only Jewish state” with “at least $880,000” since 2013, and this support for BDS advocates “is virtually unique among major American institutional funders.”

It is interesting to note in this context that in 2013, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) listed ten of the “worst of the worst” groups engaged in vicious anti-Israel activism that seeks to de-legitimize the Jewish state as “the worst violator of international human rights.” Among the groups listed by the ADL is the misleadingly named Jewish Voice for Peace – which received $140,000 from RBF in 2015.

RBF’s funding for groups dedicated to demonizing the world’s only Jewish state has been repeatedly exposed and criticized. A year ago, Ziva Dahl of the Haym Salomon Center wondered why “the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a premier philanthropy based in Manhattan” would “finance non-governmental organizations intent on annihilating the Jewish state,” but apparently, no one at RBF could be bothered to answer this question.

It seems that Tablet’s Armin Rosen was luckier. As Rosen rightly points out: “RBF has given money to groups that serve mutually reinforcing purposes within the BDS movement’s ecosystem, targeting a variety of publics within a range of political, social, national, and even religious contexts. It is impossible to argue that these grants are being made without the advancement of BDS in mind.” And indeed, RBF’s president Stephen Heintz was only too happy to justify the funding for BDS groups:

“Given that the occupation has continued for 50 years and there have been numerous failed efforts to negotiate peace, we are looking for ways to disrupt this status quo […] and some of our grantees, a relatively small number, are either groups that have officially endorsed the BDS campaign, or undertake some related forms of what we might call economic activism in order to protest the ongoing occupation.”

Right, Mr. Heintz, let’s call it “economic activism” – and let’s recall who was among the first to advocate this kind of “economic activism” as a form of “war by other means” almost 90 years ago. As Professor William Jacobson has pointed out, “BDS is a direct and provable continuation of the Arab anti-Jewish boycotts in the 1920s and 1930s and [the] subsequent Arab League Boycott, restructured through non-governmental entities to evade U.S. anti-boycott legislation and repackaged in the language of ‘social justice’ to appeal to Western liberals.” A JTA report from September 1929 – published a month after the notorious Hebron massacre and the subsequent Arab violence that left 133 Jews dead – reveals the strategy of Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had incited the violence, and who was now advocating the kind of “economic activism” that RBF president Stephen Heintz is happy to support.

Under the title “‘My Hands Are Clean,’ Grand Mufti Asserts in Interview,” the report shows that the man who would eventually become known as “Hitler’s Mufti” felt rather confident that the Jews would soon be forced to leave British Mandate Palestine. He asserted (rightly) that “it is untrue that the world is siding with the Jews” and then proceeded to explain: “We are … assured of the solidarity of the entire Moslem world and have actually offers of armies to help us if necessary. Help is unnecessary. We will win through an economic boycott. The boycott in Moslem countries against Jewish industries is tight and daily growing tighter, until the industries will be broken.” The mufti expected that eventually, the “English friends” of the Jews would be “moved by pity” and would proceed to “remove the last remaining Jews [from British Mandate Palestine] on their battleships.”

According to another report from 1948 – which called the mufti “Hitler of the Holy Land” and described him as “a master of terrorism” – al-Husseini explained that “the sword of Islam” had been “unsheathed in Palestine” because the “fighting in Palestine has been inevitable since the first Jew set foot there.”

While the mufti was surely disappointed that his economic boycott and the “unsheathed … sword of Islam” were not able to “remove” the Jews from their ancient homeland during his lifetime, he couldn’t have imagined in his wildest dreams that in the 21st century, there would be groups like “Jewish Voice for Peace” celebrating Palestinian terrorists and enthusiastically campaigning for BDS with the generous support of a renowned philanthropic foundation in the US.

Just how cynical the RBF officials responsible for BDS funding are becomes apparent when Rosen asked Ariadne Papagapitos, director of the RBF Peacebuilding Program, “if she understood why some Jews would find it problematic that RBF funded organizations that believed Israel’s existence to be dispensable or undesirable—like JVP, Zochrot, and other pro-BDS grantees do.” According to Rosen, this “didn’t bother” Papagapitos in the least; as she explained: “I think what is most problematic is that there would be a monopoly on the solution or on what the correct approaches are […] And so long as they are striving for the same kind of peaceful and just values or values of justice and peace for the region and for all people, then I think that’s OK, and I don’t see what makes Zochrot or JVP any less Jewish than a different Jewish group.”

The ADL has noted that “JVP uses its Jewish identity to shield the anti-Israel movement from allegations of anti-Semitism and to provide the movement with a veneer of legitimacy,” and apparently, Papagapitos is more than happy to hide behind the “shield” provided by JVP. When it comes to Israel, Papagapitos is all for diversity of opinion: who would want “a monopoly on the solution or on what the correct approaches are” when there is an opportunity to fund people who work so hard to make the case that the world’s only Jewish state is too evil to be allowed to exist?

So presumably, Ms. Papagapitos can see nothing wrong with the “solution” favored by prominent BDS advocate Omar Barghouti, who gloated in a programmatic essay published during the murderous Al-Aqsa Intifada at Ali Abunimah’s Electronic Intifada:

“The current phase has all the emblematic properties of what may be considered the final chapter of the Zionist project. We are witnessing the rapid demise of Zionism, and nothing can be done to save it, for Zionism is intent on killing itself. I, for one, support euthanasia.” [Emphasis original]

As far as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund is concerned, people advocating “euthanasia” for Zionism – i.e. for the world’s only Jewish state – are worthy recipients of philanthropic funding: according to Tablet, Al-Shabaka – which lists both BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti and ardent Hamas fan Ali Abunimah as “policy advisors” – has received “$130,000 from RBF since 2013,” and Rosen rightly notes that this sum is “an important backstop for an organization that reported $127,000 in total revenue in its 2014 tax filings.”

The former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks has pointed out that “[in] the middle ages, Jews were hated because of their religion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, they were hated because of their race. In the twenty first century, they are hated because of their nation state. Anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism.” And it’s not so surprising that in the twenty first century, this new anti-Semitism is legitimized as worthy of philanthropic funding – after all, for anti-Semites, “philia,”i.e. love, for “anthropos,”man or mankind, has never included the Jews.

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06/12 Links Pt1: How the Balfour Declaration Became Part of International Law; The occupation festival

From Ian:

Nicholas Rostow: How the Balfour Declaration Became Part of International Law

What has this interesting history to do with today? The mandate system revolutionized colonialism. The victorious allies took control of German colonies and parts of the Ottoman empire as trustees obligated to discharge “a sacred trust of civilization” (as the League of Nations Covenant put it). The goal was self-determination. In the case of the Palestine mandate, that meant Jewish self-determination in a manner that respected the rights of non-Jewish inhabitants. Similar mandates for Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and what became Jordan were intended to result in Arab self-determination.
In legal terms, the mandates were trusts—and so, with the demise of the League of Nations, they were carried forward under the trusteeship system of the United Nations. Specifically, the UN Charter undertook to maintain each mandate until it was replaced by a new agreement between the responsible state and the United Nations. Up to that point, as the UN Charter’s chapter on trusteeships stipulated, nothing “shall be construed in or of itself to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.” In other words, where Palestine was concerned, the terms of the League of Nations mandate, incorporating the Balfour Declaration, became part of international law.
In 1945 when the UN Charter was created, the territory of the Palestine mandate theoretically included what is now Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and Jordan. But two decades earlier, in 1922, the British, with League of Nations concurrence, had barred Jewish settlement east of the Jordan River and created the emirate of Trans-Jordan, which eventually became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Thus amended, the Palestine mandate designated only the territory west of the Jordan as the Jewish national home: the same territory, further diminished by the UN partition resolution of 1947, that would become the state of Israel when Britain relinquished its responsibilities as mandatory power in 1948.
Violence between Arabs and Jews, restricted Jewish immigration in the 1930s, World War II and the Holocaust, the establishment of Israel, the June 1967 and October 1973 wars and their consequences—all of these developments and other, more recent ones have changed the demographics and politics in what was the Palestine mandate. But they have not by themselves changed international law.

In Photos: The Story of the Liberation of Jerusalem a Century Ago

On Yom Yerushalayim, which this year falls on May 24, Israel will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Jerusalem’s unification in June 1967. Marking the climax of a swift defensive victory over the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, the battle for the Holy City resulted in dramatically altering its political, religious, and geographic status.
But this year also marks another anniversary: the centenary of a fierce World War I battle that not only saved Jerusalem from physical destruction but rescued its entire Jewish population from squalor, starvation, plague, exile, and death. In the scope of Jewish history, the liberation of Jerusalem in December 1917 ranks with the salvation holidays of Hanukkah and Purim.
Early in World War I, with the encouragement of its German allies, the Ottoman army in Palestine began preparations to attack British positions along Egypt’s Suez Canal, a critical artery linking Great Britain to its colonies in the east. The attack took place in January 1915.
To bolster their forces, the Turks declared universal conscription in Palestine, a territory that had been under Ottoman control since the late 15th century. Supplies, livestock, and equipment were plundered from the local population. A letter to an American supporter from the American Colony, a community of Christians in Jerusalem, summed up the situation in the city and the country at large:
[The Turkish] government commandeering not only animals but every requirement of life, the wholesale drafting of the manpower, and the dearth of business, since being entirely cut off from communication with the outside world—all of these things [have] brought people to an unbelievable state of poverty.
Jews, who already then constituted a majority in modern Jerusalem, were especially hard hit as Jewish men were rounded up and sent to the front lines. On August 31, 1914, the American ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, sent an urgent telegram to the New York Jewish tycoon Jacob Schiff. “Palestinian Jews facing terrible crisis,” he wrote. “Fifty-thousand dollars . . . needed [to] support families whose breadwinners have entered army.”

Jewish recruits for the 40th (Palestine) Battalion, Royal Fusiliers in Jerusalem, summer 1918. Imperial War Museum Q 12670.

The Lebanese Jewish Housewife Who Spied for Israel

Born in Argentina and raised in Jerusalem, Shulamit Kishik-Cohen—who died last week at the age of one-hundred—was married to a wealthy Jewish businessman in Beirut when she was only seventeen. Her career in intelligence began before Israel became a state and lasted until her arrest in 1961. After the Six-Day War, she was released as part of a prisoner exchange and lived out the rest of her life in Israel. Ofer Aderet writes:
Due to her prominence in the local Jewish community, Kishik-Cohen managed to develop good relations with the Lebanese authorities and to gain the confidence of key people in the country’s leadership. Without ever planning to take such a path, she found she had access to valuable intelligence information. Then, just prior to the outbreak of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, she began to hear talk of the “extinction of the Jews of the land of Israel,” and knew immediately that it related to military preparations for war against the Jews of Mandatory Palestine. . . .
She contacted officials in the Jewish community in British Mandatory Palestine and offered her services as a spy. In [her memoir], she describes the roundabout way in which she sent her first message to members of the Haganah (the underground, pre-independence army of Palestine’s Jews). She wrote a concealed message, using a method she had learned in the Girl Scouts, in a seemingly innocent-looking letter that on the surface appeared to be asking about how a sick relative was faring. Merchants who worked with her husband in the market in Beirut saw to it that it was passed along, and ultimately it reached its destination in Mandatory Palestine.
The message was understood loud and clear, and a short while later she received her first assignment in her new “profession.” From then until 1961, she operated a spy network that supplied Israel with intelligence information and engaged in smuggling Jews from Arab countries over the Lebanese border into Israel.

Looks like Thom Yorke of Radiohead has joined countless other rockers giving the boycotters the finger, this time from the pages of Rolling Stone magazine (which, apparently, is still published), a turn of events that got me reflecting on previous instances and thoughts regarding BDS and celebrity.

For obvious reasons, BDS hits the newswires whenever it intersects with fame, which is why the “movement” tries to glom onto any publicity (good or ill) related to a rock or movie star (be they up and coming, has been, or never was).

The underlying problem with such an approach is that it equates being newsworthy with being noteworthy. But why should the opinion of a rock guitarist or drummer, no matter how talented, mean more than that of the crossing guard, or the guy working the supermarket checkout counter?

The eloquence of actors makes them a bit trickier to deal with than those who communicate through electric instruments pumped into enormous amplifiers. Keep in mind, however, than even the best paid actors are simply craftsmen, like fine carpenters or chefs. And if they have a reputation as being wiser than members of these other professions, perhaps it is because: (1) their craft is the ability to convincingly deliver clever and articulate dialog; and (2) that dialog is provided to them by teams of writers who hone and polish words to ensure that they are clever and articulate before being placed into an actor’s mouth.

This is a long way of asking whether we should care about which celebrities are or are not choosing to visit Israel this year, or any other year. After all, if a major university or church chose to boycott or divest from Israel, that would imply that the moral weight of these centuries-old institutions was now bearing down in judgment on the Jewish state. But can the same moral weight be assigned to Meg Ryan?

Calibrating Israel’s moral credibility on the whims of pop and movie stars is particularly problematic, given the strategy the BDSers use to get their way, demonstrated by moral blackmail and disruptions Radiohead has had to contend with since announcing their latest Israel gig. In other words, the boycotters have made it clear that they have every intention of making a celebrity’s life hell if they keep their commitments to perform in Israel and have already demonstrated that they will exploit the name of any celebrity who caves into their demands.

Celebrity BDS is clearly part of the boycotter’s “Apartheid Strategy” predicated on the notion that if stars can be made to boycott Israel the way they boycotted Apartheid South Africa, then that will turn Israel into the next South-Africa-like pariah. From this fallacious premise (equivalent to “All dogs are animals, all cats are animals, therefore all dogs are cats.”) the boycotters have constructed a strategy crippled by three fatal flaws:

First, given the high profile of BDS bullying campaigns directed at bands like Radiohead, who can take seriously the claim that any band choosing to skip Israel is taking a moral stance, vs. getting a bunch of harassers off their back?

Second, by turning decisions over whether or not to perform in Israel into political statements, the boycotters themselves created a formula that says the thousands of artists visiting the Jewish state each year must be doing so as defiant demonstrations of support for Israel.

Finally, the whole celebrity boycott plan rests of the assumption that a nation which has withstood invasion, war, terror, economic blockade and decades of propaganda assault to build a vibrant and successful nation are going to buckle because Elvis Costello screws his Israel fans, or Roger Waters say something mean whenever his nurses at the geriatric ward let him near a computer.

In a word, the entire plan is fakakta.

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Young Judaea outsources some of its gap-year Israel curriculum to J-Street U, Breaking the Silence

The Zionist group Young Judaea has a gap-year Israel program for college credit.

Most of it looks very reasonable, with the kids volunteering at many places throughout the land.

But one part of the course, with three days of fact finding about the conflict, was prepared not by Young Judaea itself but by J-Street U.

It pretends to be even-handed but it includes a tour of Hebron by Breaking the Silence and the syllabus includes the implicit idea that the kids will be brainwashed with J-Street U ideology.

Here is the syllabus for this past year's program, filled with leading questions and implicit criticism of Israel's government, with pro-settlement Israelis subtly treated as the "other" and Breaking the Silence appearing to be moderate (with no discussion on how controversial the group is in Israel itself):

"Not everyone will come out a J-Street-er" - but clearly the program is expected to do exactly that. And the emphasis on "change" means that the message given to the kids is unequivocally anti-settlement.

I am told by a parent of one of the students who attended that the final roundtable with J-Street U students included "how great it is to have a space to dialogue with BDS".

When challenged on the contents, a Young Judaea representative wrote back to the parent:

We work with our academic partner, the American Jewish University in California, whose main responsibility is to ensure that we maintain the highest academic standards. To this end, we are audited on a rotating basis, with various members of their faculty reviewing our course materials. In fact, we are currently in the midst of such a review. It might be interesting for you to hear that the university has asked us to rebalance one of our core courses, as their evaluation suggests it is too heavily slanted to the right-wing in its Israeli politics.

I would love to see the criteria for such an evaluation.

The fact is that no printed curriculum can capture what actually happens in the trips. The heads of the program can accurately point to the fact that the students are meeting with Yishai Fleisher and Ari Zimmerman as well as BtS and anti-Israel activists. But the glue that holds it all together is J-Street U, which is ideologically biased against settlements and against the Israeli government, it is impossible to think that this part of the course is anything but anti-Israel propaganda. The only way to say for sure would be if the "debriefings" are recorded and supplied to interested parties. The printed materialc certainly don't mention that BDS is brought up as a legitimate voice on Israel's future.

It seems to me that including Breaking the Silence in any capacity, and praising BDS as just another viewpoint that contributes to a vibrant Zionist culture, is out of the pale.

I don't know how many parents sending their kids to this program are aware how much J-Street U (which is more to the left than J-Street is) is involved in this curriculum and how they are the main way for these young people to make up their minds about Israel, complete with "debriefings" to ensure that any right-wing comments are belittled and left-wing opinions amplified before students get a chance to think too much for themselves.

One of the members of the Board of Directors at Young Judaea, David Stone, is associated with both J-Street and the leftist, George Soros-funded New Israel Fund.

Young Judaea is a good organization, but something here is very rotten.

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The UN Coordinator for Humanitarian Aid and Development Activities, Robert Piper, gave a statement last week about the 50th anniversary of an unsuccessful war meant to murder millions of Jews. Here's how he framed it, though:

This week marks 50 years since the start of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. For humanitarians this is the most long-standing protection crisis in the UN’s history.

I had never noticed the term "protection crisis" before, and I looked in vain to find an official UN definition.

The only place I found any loose definition of the term was in a 2006 paper by the Humanitarian Policy Group entitled "The ‘protection crisis’: A review of field-based strategies for humanitarian
protection in Darfur":

The two main determinants of civilian (in)security in any violent conflict are the actions and motives of the parties to the conflict, and the steps that civilians take to protect themselves from the direct and indirect consequences of this (Darcy and Srinivasan, forthcoming). If the Sudanese government and the other warring parties were adhering to their obligations under international law, or if Darfuri civilians were able to find viable ways of remaining secure in their home environments or in a place of refuge, the need for third party intervention to protect civilians might not arise. Unfortunately, neither of those conditions applies in Darfur.

While the level of insecurity faced by civilians in Darfur is acute, the nature and scale of the violence are not without precedent, either within or outside Sudan. However, the way in which this situation has been characterised by the humanitarian community is different: Darfur is the first emergency to be labelled a ‘protection crisis’.

So the term "protection crisis" simply did not exist before 2006. Even this paper notes that there had been similar situations beforehand but Darfur was the first place that the international community mobilized specifically to protect a vulnerable community rather than in response to acute humanitarian needs from war or natural disaster.

The UN uses the term "protection crisis" now to apply to the Central African Republic (2011), famine in Somalia (2011), violence and persecution in Central America (2016), widespread wartime famine in Yemen (2017), and the Syrian crisis (2016) which is called "the world's largest protection crisis."

Yet the UN now says that the Palestinians suffer from a "the most long-standing protection crisis in the UN's history" - where no one is starving, no one is fleeing persecution (except for thousands fleeing from Hamas which the UN doesn't care about), and no civilians are being targeted. Where some 98% of Palestinians live under self-rule.

Not only has the UN elevated the Palestinian issue into a false crisis, but it has now retroactively declared that this crisis started in 1967, with "occupation." So Darfur is no longer the first protection crisis, but "Israeli occupation" is.

Yet the Palestinian Arabs who lived in much worse conditions in the territories before 1967 are not considered to have been in "crisis" by this UN definition. Similarly, the Palestinians who live in worse conditions in Syria and Lebanon and even in some Jordanian camps are not considered to be part of this "protection crisis." No, the only people who need "protection" are the ones for which Israel can be blamed. Apparently, taking a half hour to go through a checkpoint to get to a job in Israel is a "crisis."

Even the situation in Gaza, bad as it is under Hamas rule and with official Palestinian Authority policy to stop medicines and power to the sector, is far better than Syria and Somalia and Yemen and the CAR.

In 2009, as Operation Cast Lead was being waged, the UN said that "A humanitarian and protection crisis [is] unfolding," meaning that at the time the UN did not consider Gaza to be a "protection crisis" before the war. Now, Robert Piper is saying it was under a "protection crisis" for decades beforehand. Just no one noticed.

The use of this term "protection crisis" is the context of Israel is political, not factual. And to retroactively say that there was a crisis that started in 1967, when the lives of the people under Israeli control improved by every important health and human services metric compared to how they were beforehand - and having the same UN ignore the far worse situation of Palestinians under Arab rule - just proves yet again that the UN keep on finding new ways to target only Israel, and doesn't really give a damn about Palestinians.

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Astonishing ignorance from Luke Baker of Reuters (@LukeReuters)

One would assume that the bureau chief of a major wire news service dedicated to writing about Israel who has been in the region for years would have the slightest idea of what's going on.

If UN agency for Palestinian refugees were dismantled, would Israel take responsibility for those under occupation? https://t.co/P8aYrlEid9
— Luke Baker (@LukeReuters) June 11, 2017

Virtually all of the people UNRWA calls "Palestine refugees" live under PA control. Why should Israel have to take responsibility for people who claim to be refugees yet who have lived in "Palestine" all along?

Moreover, why doesn't the PA dismantle the camps - today? Why on Earth are humans kept in these camps when they live under PA rule where there is nothing stopping their leaders from building new houses for them?

But it gets worse. Going back in history...(from a Christian Science Monitor article from 1992)

It actually was worse - the UN passed resolutions forbidding Israel from building decent homes for these Palestinians. Here's one of them, but there were a few:

Baker believes that Israel wants Palestinian "refugees" to rot away. On the contrary, Israel is virtually the only nation that wants them to stop being "refugees" and being treated like any other responsible people, not as welfare recipients forever.

But Baker's ignorance doesn't end there. After the 1948 war, UNRWA declared some of the Arabs in Israel to be "refugees" as well and wanted to "help" them. The new state of Israel informed UNRWA that not having the Arabs integrate into Israeli society as full citizens would be, and I quote, "repugnant." from UNRWA's 1950 report:

31. Recent discussions with the Israel Government indicate that the idea of relief distribution is repugnant to it, and the Agency was informed that already many of the 24,000 remaining refugees were employed and that all able-bodied refugees desiring employment could be absorbed on works projects if they would register at the government registry offices for that purpose. It was stated that they all have status as citizens of Israel and are entitled to treatment as such. It was claimed that after cessation of relief, aged and infirm refugees would be cared for under the normal social welfare machinery of Israel.

Since 1948, Israel is the only country in the Middle East to treat Palestinian refugees from 1948 as normal human beings and not as cannon fodder.

This is a story that Reuters' Middle East bureau has somehow missed for nearly 70 years.

Baker's snarky comment shows his utter ignorance around one of the most important issues in the region.

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06/11 Links: UN rights chief compares ‘Palestinian suffering’ with Holocaust; Is Ramallah afraid of Wonder Woman?

From Ian:

Hillel Neuer: UN rights chief compares ‘Palestinian suffering’ with Holocaust

UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, a former Jordanian ambassador and member of the royal family, should apologize for profoundly offensive remarks (see below) in which he compared “Palestinian suffering” with the Holocaust, and Palestinian refugee camps with Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The odious analogy was immediately endorsed by Qatar.
While he disingenuously insisted that the two cases were different, and though he made a point of predicting that he would be criticized by those acting ‘mechanically almost’, the fact remains that Mr. Hussein not only unfairly singled out Israel by dedicating the opening part of a major UN speech to the Palestinian situation but repeatedly juxtaposed the alleged suffering of Palestinians at the hands of Israelis with Jewish suffering at the hands of the Nazis.
Hussein spoke on Tuesday to open the 35th session of the UN Human Rights Council. I took the floor to respond—see below.
While the high commissioner addressed the U.S. Holocaust Museum in 2015, his odious analogy — unless he fully apologizes — renders him unfit to be invited back.

Netanyahu urges UN refugee agency for Palestinians be shut down

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday called for the closing of UNRWA, the United Nations’ agency dealing with Palestinian refugees, saying he had already urged the US envoy to the world body to consider pushing for it to be shuttered.
On Sunday, two days after the announcement of a tunnel that was discovered June 1 underneath a UNRWA-run school in Gaza, Netanyahu said he told US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley during her visit to Israel last week that it was time to reconsider the agency’s existence.
“Hamas uses schoolchildren as human shields. This is an enemy we have been fighting for many years and committing a double war crime: On the one hand, they deliberately attack innocent civilians, and on the other hand they also hide behind children,” Netanyahu said at the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem.
Netanyahu, who is also foreign minister, said he instructed the Foreign Ministry’s director-general, Yuval Rotem, to file an official complaint at the UN Security Council. On Saturday, Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon wrote a letter of complaint to the president of the Security Council.

IsraellyCool: UNRWA’s Terror Tunnel Condemnation Rings Hollow

Leaving aside my incredulity that UNRWA did not suspect anything beforehand – terror tunnel construction tends to make a lot of noise and it is not like UNRWA is not aware of their existence in general – the condemnation, like the tunnels themselves, rings hollow.
Look at the wording again. UNRWA is condemning the violation of their supposed neutrality – the fact the tunnels ran under their premises – and not the general existence of these terror tunnels.
This reminds me of their flacid condemnation when rockets were found on their premises. Again, the condemnation was for the “violation of the inviolability of its premises under international law” and not the existence and use of these rockets against Israeli civilians.
Why won’t UNRWA condemn Hamas for siphoning of money earmarked as aid and using it to construct these tunnels and manufacture the rockets? Surely as a so-called relief agency, they should be outraged the money is being wasted in this way.
Unless….they are not.

From Asharq al-Awsat:

Hamas has rejected a request by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to reveal the fate of Israeli soldiers that have gone missing in the movement-controlled Gaza Strip.

Hamas spokesman Abdul Latif al-Qanou said: “The case of Israeli soldier prisoners is in the hands of the movement and it alone takes decisions over this issue.”

“It will not comply with such demands from the Red Cross,” he added.

The ICRC had called on Hamas to respect it commitments to International Humanitarian Law in regards to its Israeli soldiers. It had demanded that the movement submit a report on their fate.

Head of the ICRC delegation in Israel Jacques de Maio said that regardless if the prisoners were civilians or soldiers, they are all protected by International Humanitarian Law.

The pan-Arab newspaper doesn't mention that the people Hamas are presumably holding alive are not soldiers. They are Israeli civilians Hisham al-Sayed and Avraham Mengistu, both of whom seems to be mentally ill and who sneaked into Gaza. A third man, Jumaa Abu Ghanima, entered Gaza in July 2016, "but there is no further information on him and it is unclear if he was arrested or joined a militant group" according to TOI.

Hamas also commented on the tunnel found under an UNRWA school:

UNRWA said that the existence of the tunnels violates all UN privileges and immunities that are granted to it by International Humanitarian Law.

Hamas for its part rejected the UNRWA statement, saying that the movement is not performing any “resistance operations” near the schools.

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There was a very troubling sentence in the middle of another Haaretz article trying to spin Netanyahu's concessions for peace with Palestinians as somehow being evil:

In the course of negotiations with the Palestinians over the framework document at the beginning of 2014, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded that the Obama administration insert a provision stating that Israeli settlers and settlements in the West Bank would be allowed to remain in a future Palestinian state under Palestinian jurisdiction. This is according to a working draft of the document obtained by Haaretz and from conversations with senior Israeli and U.S. officials who were involved in the talks at the time.

The Americans were willing at one point to insert the provision into the document, but ultimately it was removed at Netanyahu’s request due to political pressure from Habayit Hayehudi Chairman Naftali Bennett, as well as from several senior members of the prime minister’s Likud party.

The senior Israeli officials noted that Netanyahu had asked the Americans to insert the provision into one of the principles provided in the framework agreement that Kerry was developing. In a draft of the document obtained by Haaretz from the beginning of February 2014, there was a provision stating that Israelis choosing to remain in the State of Palestine would live under Palestinian jurisdiction, without discrimination and with full rights and protections.

The prime minister’s position was the background for a notation in parenthesis stating: “[U.S.] negotiators need to check with PM [Netanyahu] on whether he wants to keep this section. They believe that if so he will push strongly for [keeping the Jewish residents] ‘in place.’ ‘In place’ is inconsistent with U.S. policy and therefore unacceptable to us as well as the Palestinians.”

That is an astonishing sentence. It says that allowing Jews to remain in their homes in Judea and Samaria, under Palestinian rule and jurisdiction, is against US policy!

There is a possibility that the US objections were to the specific term "in place" rather than explicitly saying "in the State of Palestine," but US officials quoted in the article said that the terms were practically the same thing and that Netanyahu wanted the "in-place" formulation for internal political reasons, not as a practical suggestion that the Jews would have any status besides being under Palestinian Arab rule.

If this is true, and the reporting seems sound, then this may be an incredible example where the US State Department policy is officially antisemitic, saying that Jews - not Israelis, but Jews - have no rights to live in the Biblical Jewish homeland.

(h/t Avi B)

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Oh, so THIS is the horrible thing Gal Gadot wrote about Palestinians

I am idly reading an absurd pseudo-intellectual Mondoweiss piece about how terrible and Zionist Wonder Woman is, where the author writes:

During Operation Protective Edge, Gadot, just cast as Wonder Woman, used her new platform to defend direct attacks on civilians, including women and children. Gadot celebrated Israeli propaganda that every such casualty was Hamas’ fault for storing weapons close to them in the most densely populated open-air prison camp on earth. The most frustrating thing to me is how obviously this invalidates Gadot as a feminist icon, and Wonder Woman as well, when the character is brought to life by Gadot. If gender is shared by all racial groups, feminism cannot be Zionist, just as it cannot be neo-Nazi—feminism that doesn’t have an understanding of how it intersects with racial and ethnic oppression is simply a diversification of white supremacy.

I've seen this claim before. But they include a screenshot:

Where, exactly, is Gadot supporting killing civilians? (Later in the essay, the author characterizes Gadot's posts as "openly call[ing] for the death of women in a neighboring state.")

On the contrary, Gadot is - like Wonder Woman - trying to save civilians, and only wants to fight the bad guys!

Furthermore, Gadot's critics are showing that they are the ones who conflate Hamas with ordinary Palestinians - to them, being anti-Hamas is being anti-Palestinian. They are the ones who are implying that all Palestinians are terrorists, not Gadot!

Yes, we live in a world where self-defined "liberals" and "feminists" are more pro-terror than the decidedly anti-liberal and anti-feminist Arabs who have come out strongly against Hamas as a terror group.

It takes a special kind of perversion to take this short Facebook post about defending Israel from terror rockets and to twist it into support for murdering innocent people.

But the anti-Israel side is nothing if not perverted.

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06/10 Links: Dershowitz: Bernie Sanders: Knave or Fool?; Vogue: Israel’s ‘Stunning Beaches’ Have ‘Something for Every Type of Sand Lover’

From Ian:

Alan Dershowitz: Bernie Sanders: Knave or Fool?

It is clear that if Corbyn were anti-black, anti-women, anti-Muslim or anti-gay, Sanders would not have campaigned for him. Does this make him a self-hating Jew? Or does he just not care about anti-Semitism? The answer to that question requires us to look broadly to trends among the hard left of which Sanders is a leader.
Increasingly, the "progressive wing" of the Democratic Party and other self-identifying "progressives," subscribe to the pseudo-academic theory of intersectionality, which holds that all forms of social oppression are inexorably linked. This type of "ideological packaging" has become code for anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Israel and anti-Semitic bigotry. Indeed, those who consider themselves "progressives" – but who are actually repressives – tolerate anti-Semitism as long as it comes from those who espouse other views they approve of. This form of "identity politics" has forced artificial coalitions between causes that have nothing to do with each other except a hatred for those who are "privileged" because they are white, heterosexual, male and especially Jewish.
It is against this backdrop that Sanders's cozying up to bigots such as Corbyn can be understood. Throughout the presidential campaign and in its aftermath, Sanders has given a free pass to those who are anti-Israel – which is often a euphemism for anti-Jewish. Consider, for example Sanders's appointments to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Platform Committee last summer. Seeking to satisfy his radical "Bernie or Bust" support base, Sanders appointed James Zogby and Cornell West -- both of whom have peddled anti-Semitic conspiracy theories throughout their careers. Professor Cornell West -- who was a Sanders surrogate on the campaign trail -- has said that the crimes of the genocidal terrorist group Hamas "pale in the face of the US-supported Israeli slaughters of innocent civilians," and is a strong advocate of trying to eradicate Israel through the vehicle a campaign of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions.
He has also repeatedly accused Israel of killing Palestinian babies -- an allegation that echoes historic attacks on Jews for "blood libel."
Mr. James Zogby of the Arab American Institute once described the motivations behind Israel's interventions in Gaza as "putting the natives back in their place," and has compared the "plight of Palestinians" to the experience of Jews during the Holocaust.

Sanders ‘delighted’ by Corbyn’s strong result in UK election

Former US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has congratulated Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour Party for winning unexpected gains in Britain’s snap general election on Thursday.
“I am delighted to see Labour do so well,” the Independent senator from Vermont said in a Facebook post Saturday.
“All over the world, people are rising up against austerity and massive levels of income and wealth inequality. People in the UK, the US and elsewhere want governments that represent all the people, not just the 1 percent,” Sanders said. “I congratulate Jeremy Corbyn for running a very effective campaign.”
According to a report in the UK’s The Guardian, members of Sanders’ campaign team helped Corbyn in campaigning ahead of the June 8 vote.
A number of Sanders’ campaign aides held training sessions for Labour activists to teach them how to effectively campaign.

‘Corbyn surge’ in London faltered in ‘bagel belt’ suburbs with strong Jewish vote

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has long been a bête noire for the British Jewish community. His anti-Israel activism, combined with the spate of allegations of anti-Semitism in the party on his watch, triggered a visceral reaction.
As the elections results Friday showed a drift back to Labour that cost Theresa May’s Conservative Party its parliamentary majority and left May battered and discredited, British Jews seemed to move sharply in the opposite direction. A poll last week for the Jewish Chronicle had indicated that 77 per cent planed to vote Tory and only 13 per cent Labour, and nothing in the results appeared to contradict those findings.
Corbyn’s surge in support during the campaign – evident as the results came in overnight – was powered by young people. Young Jews, however, remained largely immune to his appeal: the JC poll indicating that less than one-quarter of those aged 18-34 planning to vote Labour.
Given the closeness of the result, Jewish voters, who are concentrated in a small number of highly marginal seats, may potentially have helped preserve May’s premiership.
Early indications had predicted that – in line with its strong performance in the capital – Labour would pull off a number of upset victories in the north London “bagel belt”. Finchley and Golders Green, Hendon and Chipping Barnet were all slated to fall to Corbyn’s party. Finchley and Golders Green – where an estimated one in five voters are Jewish – and Hendon would have been particularly sweet victories for the party. Both were contested by leading lights in the Jewish Labour Movement who had faced criticism within the community for attempting to unseat pro-Israel Tory incumbents.

06/09 Links Pt2: Hamas tunnel discovered underneath UNRWA school; There Were Once Jews Here

From Ian:

UNRWA uncovers Hamas-dug tunnel under school in Gaza

The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees uncovered a tunnel belonging to Hamas under a boys’ elementary school in the Gaza Strip, according to a statement released by the organization on Friday.
The tunnel was discovered by workers of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) on June 1 under the school, which is part of a compound comprising other schools in the Maghazi refugee camp in the Gaza Strip near the city of Deir al-Balah.
The tunnel, between two and three meters underground, passes under the Maghazi Elementary Boys A&B School and the Maghazi Preparatory Boys School, and was built both eastward into the Palestinian enclave and westward toward the security fence with Israel, according to UNRWA.
“The discovery was made during the summer vacation, at a time when the schools are empty, and in the course of work related to the construction of an extension of one of the buildings,” UNRWA said in a statement, adding that the tunnel “has no entry or exit points on the premises nor is it connected to the schools or other buildings in any way.
The agency said it condemns “the existence of such tunnels in the strongest possible terms,” adding that it was “unacceptable that students and staff are placed at risk in such a way.”
“We demand they desist from any activities or conduct that put beneficiaries and staff at risk and undermine the ability of UN staff to provide assistance to Palestine refugees in safety and security,” the agency said.

Hamas member killed, 6 wounded in clashes with IDF soldiers near Gaza border

A Hamas fighter was killed and six were wounded during clashes with IDF troops on Friday near the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip.
“Aeid Jumaa, 35, was killed and six other Palestinians were wounded during clashes along the Gaza border (with Israel) north of Jabalia,” the Hamas-run Interior Ministry’s spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said.
The terror group issued a statement saying that Jumaa was one of its members.
The group said he was killed by Israeli gunfire, a charge the IDF could not confirm.
An Israeli army spokeswoman, contacted by AFP, said hundreds of Palestinian demonstrators had burned tires and been throwing stones the length of the security fence between Israel and Gaza.
“Our forces had to arrest suspects to prevent damage to the security fence,” she said, but was unable to confirm the casualties from gunfire.

UK Board of Deputies' '10 Commitments' include Palestinian State

British Jewish leaders urged both candidates for British premiership to support Palestinian statehood and get Jewish votes in return, Israel National News has learned. Israeli members of government, most of whom strongly oppose this request have expressed their displeasure privately.
The Board of Deputies is considered the main representative body of British Jews. Yesterday, the Board distributed an email linking to videos sent to the Jewish community by the two prime-ministerial candidates, Conservative candidate Theresa May and Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The Board’s email explains the video messages were “sent in response to the Board of Deputies'...10 Commitments we have asked all prospective parliamentary candidates to sign up to” - that is, before trying to get the Jewish community's vote.
The “10 commitments” drafted by the Board of Deputies were obtained by Israel National News. They mainly relate to “issues of concern to Jewish voters” such as kashrut, Shabbat observance, anti-Semitism, Holocaust remembrance, faith schools and culturally sensitive youth and social care services.
However, “Commitment 5” insists that the British leaders accommodate their Jewish constituents by advocating for a “viable” Palestinian state.

From Arutz-7:

A Hamas terrorist tunnel was discovered under a school in Gaza run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA), Israeli media reported on Friday.

The tunnel was discovered a week and a half ago, according to the reports.

The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, confirmed the discovery of the tunnel in a post on his Facebook page in Arabic.

“The tunnel was discovered underneath a school for boys in Al-Maazi...It is clear that the entire Arab world understands that it is the Hamas terror organization that destroys Gaza and eliminates any chance of a good future for Gazans,” wrote Mordechai.

Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon reacted harshly to the revelation of the existence of the terror tunnel.

“This tunnel verifies what we have always know, that the cruelty of Hamas knows no bounds as they use the children of Gaza as human shields. Instead of UN schools serving as centers of learning and education, Hamas has turned them into terror bases for attacks on Israel,” said Ambassador Danon.

COGAT points to the Facebook page of the Maghazi Boys Prep School B in Gaza. The page hasn't been updated since 2014.

The school also had its own UNRWA school webpage, but UNRWA took all of those down after I discovered that they sometime posted antisemitism.

I don't know if UNRWA discovered this or it was discovered some other way. Waiting to hear the statement from UNRWA about this.

UPDATE: UNRWA condemned it, and the condemnation was not bad, mentioning Hamas by name.

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Fatah official admits that Palestinians never abandoned violence

From MEMRI:

Top Fatah Official Nabil Shaath: No Problem with Engaging Simultaneously in Armed Struggle and Diplomatic Efforts

Former chief Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath, who is the Commissioner for International Relations for the Fatah movement and Advisor to President Abbas on Foreign Affairs, said in an interview that he had "never thought that there was any problem with engaging in armed struggle, and at the same time, engaging in political and diplomatic efforts in support of your cause." Speaking on the Palestinian Awda TV channel on May 29, Shaath said that the Palestinians’ right to engage in armed struggle is "indisputable."

Nabil Shaath: "Our cause is just, and our right to engage in armed struggle is indisputable. The Israelis have not come here through negotiations. It is not that they got our permission to come here. They are plunderers who have come here through weapons and killing, attempting to banish… and they succeeded in banishing a large part of our people by force. So our right to engage in armed struggle is indisputable.

Everyone that follows Fatah knows this. But no one reports it.

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