Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, January 08, 2019

Is BDS already illegal under US law?

The Arab League imposed a boycott of Israel (or on Jewish businesses in Palestine) since 1945, and later added a secondary boycott of companies that do business in Israel and then a tertiary boycott of firms that do business with companies that do business with Israel.

One of the legal mechanisms that the US did to fight this boycott was the Export Administration Act of 1979, the other is the Tax Reform Act of 1976 . Their provisions are summarized:

Conduct that may be penalized under the TRA and/or prohibited under the EAR includes:
Agreements to refuse or actual refusal to do business with or in Israel or with blacklisted companies.
Agreements to discriminate or actual discrimination against other persons based on race, religion, sex, national origin or nationality.
Agreements to furnish or actual furnishing of information about business relationships with or in Israel or with blacklisted companies.
Agreements to furnish or actual furnishing of information about the race, religion, sex, or national origin of another person.
Implementing letters of credit containing prohibited boycott terms or conditions.
The TRA does not "prohibit" conduct, but denies tax benefits ("penalizes") for certain types of boycott-related agreements.

The Export Admnistration Act (EAA) specifies penalties for violations of the Antiboycott Regulations as well as export control violations. These can include:
Criminal:
The penalties imposed for each "knowing" violation can be a fine of up to $50,000 or five times the value of the exports involved, whichever is greater, and imprisonment of up to five years. During periods when the EAR are continued in effect by an Executive Order issued pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the criminal penalties for each "willful" violation can be a fine of up to $50,000 and imprisonment for up to ten years.
Administrative:
For each violation of the EAR any or all of the following may be imposed:
General denial of export privileges;
The imposition of fines of up to $11,000 per violation; and/or
Exclusion from practice.
Boycott agreements under the TRA involve the denial of all or part of the foreign tax benefits discussed above.
When the EAA is in lapse, penalties for violation of the Antiboycott Regulations are governed by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The IEEPA Enhancement Act provides for penalties of up to the greater of $250,000 per violation or twice the value of the transaction for administrative violations of Antiboycott Regulations, and up to $1 million and 20 years imprisonment per violation for criminal antiboycott violations.

The Export Administration Act lapsed in 2018, and was replaced with the Export Control Reform Act of 2018, which says:

Title II – Anti-boycott Provisions. This title incorporates the existing anti-boycott provisions from the expired Export Administration Act of 1979. These provisions discourage, and in some circumstances, prohibit U.S. companies from furthering or supporting the boycott of Israel sponsored by the Arab League, or certain other countries, including complying with certain requests for information designed to verify compliance with the boycott.

Section 201. Short Title. This title may be cited as the “Anti-boycott Act of 2018.”

Section 202. Policy. This section states that it is the policy of the United States to oppose restrictive trade practices or boycotts imposed by foreign countries or international governmental organizations against other countries friendly to the United States or against any U.S. person. It also requires the President to issue regulations prohibiting any U.S. person, with respect to that person’s activities in the interstate or foreign commerce of the United States, from taking or knowingly agreeing to take certain actions with intent to comply with, further, or support any foreign boycott against a country that is friendly to the U.S. that is also contrary to U.S. law or policy. Certain exceptions to this general prohibition also apply. It further provides that these anti-boycott restrictions shall also be enforced through foreign policy controls authorized under title I. This section imposes certain reporting requirements on U.S. persons who receive requests to implement restrictive anti-boycott measures. And it provides that this provision preempts other state and local laws regarding compliance with foreign boycotts.

Now, BDS is not a governmental organization, so it would appear that since these laws only apply to boycotts promoted by foreign governments, these laws might not apply here.

But...

According to Mondoweiss last January:

[T]he Central Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, officially announced its support for the BDS movement and called, for the first time, on the international community to “impose sanctions on Israel” to end its ongoing, grave violations of Palestinian rights as stipulated by international law.

This is the most explicit and official adoption of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement by the PLO.

Specifically, a statement released by the Palestinian Central Council, the second highest authority in the PLO, agreed to:

Adopt the BDS movement and call on states around the world to impose sanctions on Israel to put an end to its flagrant violations of international law, its continued aggression against the Palestinian people, and to the apartheid regime [Israel has] imposed on them.

The PLO, while not recognized as a country by the US, is certainly a quasi-government. For the purposes of this law it may very possibly be considered a country. Moreover, it called on other countries to essentially re-impose the Arab boycott.

Also, BDS proponents claim (falsely, but still) that the movement is a reflection of the desires of "Palestinian civil society." If the business is boycotting Israel based on the stated tenets of BDS, it sounds like it is complying with a "foreign boycott."

I am not a lawyer, but this law might already have some teeth to fight BDS on the federal level without having to create additional laws. Or, more likely, it could be slightly modified to cover the PLO and Hamas and other de facto governments.

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A fun Twitter discussion with CodePink's Ariel Elyse Gold

A Twitter thread:

"When Palestinians sell their homes to Israeli Jews, they are harming their fellow Palestinians in a very real way"

This needs to be understood w/in context of the occupation & ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestine

My latest in @jdforward https://t.co/GjXQgEut3q
— Ariel Gold 💕🔥💕 (@ArielElyseGold) January 7, 2019

"When white people sell their homes to blacks, they are harming their fellow white people in a very real way."

Any difference between the two, @ArielElyseGold ? https://t.co/wkFuaZWjM9
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 8, 2019

I would answer but it's beneath me to explain what morons you are
— Ariel Gold 💕🔥💕 (@ArielElyseGold) January 8, 2019

I read it. It's laughable. You note when Pals sell houses to Jews in Arab neighborhoods, the Jews have to be protected from being murdered - and that PROTECTION is what bothers you!

You are a joke.
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 8, 2019

Because you can't.

Thanks for playing.
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 8, 2019

For those watching at home, here's the money quote.

99% of Jewish homes in territories are not purchased from Arabs, the exception being Hebron and E. Jlem - where Jews would be massacred without protection. Ariel has no answer because she knows it's true. pic.twitter.com/PDMjz54cE8
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 8, 2019

They are also the cities that Jews have had an unquestionable attachment to and continuous residence in except when your friends decided to ethnically cleanse them - a practice you want to continue, TODAY.

You are a bigot. To you, Jews have no rights.

Again, thanks for playing.
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 8, 2019

I'm happy to demolish any other arguments you have. You have yet to answer any of mine.
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 8, 2019

It occurred to me that one thing that left wing Israel-haters and right-wing Jew-haters have in common is the denial of human rights to Jews that all other people have. This conversation proves it from the Left.

Here is the screenshot in case any of these tweets "disappear."

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I cannot believe I (and everyone else) missed this story in Al Arabiya last month:

A former Palestinian official involved in the Oslo negotiations affirmed that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had been assassinated because he was convinced that Solomon’s Temple, also known as The First Temple, was actually located in Yemen and not in Jerusalem.

Hassan Asfour added in his interview with the political program Political Memories, which will be broadcasted later this week on the Al Arabiya News Channel in a sit-down interview with Senior Anchor Taher Barakeh, that Arafat informed Israeli negotiators of his convictions when they demanded him to give the right of sovereignty over the Temple Mount.

Asfour said that Arafat rejected the demand and said to them: "For peace I could give you the right to build a temple in Nablus but not in Jerusalem since the Jews have been present in Yemen and not in Jerusalem”.

In the upcoming episode of the program, Asfour quotes Shlomo Ben-Ami and Amnon Shahak‘s response: “Arafat denied our history and culture, and whoever does this can no longer exist among us”.

He tells Al Arabiya that these words precipitated Arafat's assassination and expressing his conviction that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)’s leader had been in fact assassinated, regardless of the means by which it was achieved.

According to Dennis Ross, Arafat denied that the Temple was in Jerusalem and said it was in Nablus.

The idea that ancient Jews lived in Yemen instead of Israel has popped up from time to time, including on Palestinian TV.

It is of course not only ludicrous to think that the Israeli negotiators would say that Arafat must die for saying something absurd, but to think that they said it within earshot of the Palestinian negotiators is insanity.

But Arabs love their conspiracy theories.

(h/t Bill P.)

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01/07 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: How western humbug gives antisemitism a free pass; How Chaim Weizmann Crafted the First Arab-Zionist Alliance

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: How western humbug gives antisemitism a free pass

Of course they don’t accept that calling Israel’s policies racist and criminal is an example of antisemitism. But it is. That’s because it singles out Israel for an obsessional campaign of double standards, demonisation and delegitimisation based solely on malevolent falsehoods, distortion and selective reporting – treatment afforded to no other country, people or cause.

At the same time, such people ignore the true racism, prejudice and antisemitism displayed by Palestinians. They ignore the constant incitement to murder Jews, the relentless terror attacks against Israelis, the Nazi style deranged discourse demonising not just the State of Israel but also the Jewish people as a source of cosmic conspiracies and evil intent.

There was recently a graphic example of this egregious double standard. Jamil Tamimi was jailed for 18 years at Jerusalem district court for the murder of 21 year old British student Hannah Bladon whom he stabbed repeatedly with a seven-inch knife.

Her parents were outraged by what they as an unjustifiably lenient sentence. But the court had found that Tamimi was mentally ill, possibly trying to provoke the police into shooting him dead by stabbing someone. “This was not a terrorist incident,” the prosecutor told the court. “This was a terrible murder carried out by a mentally ill person.”

A few days later a Palestinian Arab, Issam Akel, did get a life sentence. He was convicted at Ramallah high court, in the Palestinian-run territories, of acting to broker the sale of a house in the Muslim quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem to a Jewish organisation.

Palestinian law deems it treasonous to sell land to Jews, a crime for which the maximum penalty is execution. It was commuted here to a life sentence with hard labour, possibly because Akel also held American citizenship.

So Israel showed leniency to a Palestinian Arab convicted of murder – while the Palestinians imposed a far harsher sentence on a Palestinian convicted of selling land to a Jew.

The Israelis saw the killer as a person just like any other human being whose mental illness had diminished his moral agency; they treated him accordingly with a total absence of racism. The Palestinians jailed for life a Palestinian who had dared reject the racist law requiring him to discriminate against Jews. The Palestinians thus made not just the Jewish people a victim of their antisemitism but one of their own, too.

How Chaim Weizmann Crafted the First Arab-Zionist Alliance

“No true Arab can be suspicious or afraid of Jewish nationalism. . . . We are demanding Arab freedom and we would show ourselves unworthy of it if we did not now, as I do, say to the Jews—welcome back home.” These words were spoken by Faisal al-Hashemi—the future king of Iraq—at a banquet in honor of Chaim Weizmann on December 29, 1918. T.E. Lawrence (a/k/a “Lawrence of Arabia”) served as the translator. While many today see the Israeli-Arab conflict as both eternal and inevitable, the idea of an alliance between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East seemed perfectly natural to Weizmann and to Faisal, who were seen by the British empire as the representatives of their respective peoples. Rick Richman tells the story of this alliance:

On January 3, 1919, a few weeks after World War I ended, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann met with Emir Faisal, the commander-in-chief of the Arab uprising against the Ottoman empire, at a London hotel. . . . At the meeting, Weizmann and Faisal signed an agreement, brokered over the preceding month by Lawrence, exchanging Arab acceptance of the Balfour Declaration for Zionist support of an Arab state in the rest of the Ottoman lands. In February, they traveled to the Paris Peace Conference, where the victorious Allies would remap Europe and the Middle East, and made complementary presentations about the future of the region. . . .

Faisal and his father, [King Hussein of the Hejaz], believed Zionism would bring financial resources and technical expertise to Palestine, transforming the economic circumstances of the Arabs in both Palestine and beyond. In January 1918, D.G. Hogarth, director of Britain’s Arab Bureau in Cairo, had traveled to Jedda to deliver to King Hussein a formal message regarding British policy: the Arabs would be given “full opportunity of once again forming a nation,” and “no obstacle should be put in the way” of the return of the Jews to Palestine. All holy sites would be protected, and the religious and political rights of all residents preserved. The message emphasized the importance of “the friendship of world Jewry” to the Arab cause.

In an article published in March 1918 in al-Qibla, the daily newspaper in Mecca, the king wrote that Palestine was “a sacred and beloved homeland” for “its original sons” [abna’ihi-l-asliyin], and the “return of these exiles [jaliya] to their homeland” would be beneficial to the region.

Devotees of the Liberal Order—Unlike Its Founders—Underestimated the Importance of Nationalism and Religion

The year 1948, writes Yehudah Mirsky, saw the birth of the basic elements of what came to be known—perhaps misleadingly—as the “liberal international order.” These included the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Genocide Convention, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the creation of Israel with the imprimatur of the United Nations. Mirsky argues that some of the failures of this order stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of those committed to defending it:

[Many] thought human rights and nationalism were antithetical, and that promoting the former meant pushing back on the latter. The architects of the world of 1948 understood better. As the historian James Loeffler has shown in his remarkable new book, Rooted Cosmopolitans, so many key figures in the human-rights revolution of mid-century were not only Jews but Zionists. For them, an international regime of protecting individual human rights as well as nation-states for persecuted minorities were necessary to overcome the Holocaust’s ghastly trauma of statelessness. The deep structural suspicion of the idea of state sovereignty woven into the human-rights framework, it seems, has unwittingly fostered the legalistic abstraction and airy disregard for political realities that has made that framework such a supple tool in the hands of dictators who couldn’t care less. . . .

[Moreover, many] underestimated the role of religion not only in people’s lives but in human rights and liberalism’s own foundations. Religion is about the search for the absolute and how that ultimate truth shapes what it means fully to be human. Liberalism and human rights are understood by many people in different ways, but there is no denying they make serious claims about the ultimacy of human dignity, so ultimate that there are certain things that no state, or collective body of any kind, can do to harm human dignity.

Why the US Diaspora Misunderstands Israel

What does the Diaspora find alienating about Israel? Eric Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, recently criticized the Israeli government for its treatment of the Palestinians, its attitude towards asylum-seekers, and the dominance of the Orthodox rabbinate in Israel.

But these concerns show a fundamental misunderstanding of Israel and of the conflict. Progressives (and not just in the United States) think that the two-state solution would fulfill Palestinian aspirations. In reality, the ultimate Palestinian objective is the “right of return” — overrunning Israel proper with Arab refugees. They believe that time is on their side.

The US Diaspora also misunderstands what makes Israelis tick. Israeli support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a response to rockets and terror tunnels. But many Israelis view the Palestinian jihad as just the latest chapter in a long story of Arab and Muslim antisemitism predating anti-Zionism. Anti-Jewish hatred goes to the very heart of the conflict.

More than 50 percent of Israeli Jews have their roots in Arab and Muslim states. The American Diaspora, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly Ashkenazi: Their background is European antisemitism and the Holocaust. They project a Eurocentric world view and their own Western values on the Arab and Muslim world.

Most Jews are in Israel because of the Arabs, not the Nazis (although Arabs and Nazis were allied during World War II). They vote for Netanyahu because of this legacy of bitterness and mistrust. Arabs will only respect a strong Israel, they believe. These Jews, their parents, and their grandparents left Arab countries due to pogroms, institutionalized inferiority, and state-sanctioned laws. Most left as destitute refugees with a single suitcase. Israel rescued them. Jews in the West may take their freedoms and rights for granted. Jews from the Middle East and North Africa do not.

Know How to Answer, part 10: "Israel must return to the internationally recognized borders of 1967"

Nearly six years ago I gave a lecture at Yeshiva University on how to answer anti-Israel arguments. Since the lecture was over an hour and twenty minutes, I decided to break it up into 20 sections, one each to answer one popular anti-Israel argument.

Here is part 10.

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Do As I Say

I recently created a new web site using the Wix platform, a nifty little system that apparently has over 100,000,000 users. Over the years, I’ve used Google Blogger and WordPress to create sites, including different incarnations of Divest This. And while Wix is not as infinitely expandable as WordPress, it was the preferred choice to get a good looking, simple site up and running fast.

Why the product placement? Well Wix is an Israeli company (Booga! Booga! Booga!) and thus should have a place of prominence on the BDS blacklist, given the millions the company brings into the dreaded Zionist entity (far more than other Israeli products, services, concerts et all that the boycotters insist be shunned by the world).

Except it’s not! In fact, it was just a few years ago that a brief dustup occurred once it was pointed out that a Student for Justice in Palestine (SJP) group at Cornell was using tainted Jewish (I mean Israeli) technology, i.e., WIX, to create their “why we should boycott all things Israeli” web site.

As long-time readers know, I tend to avoid the whole “if you want to boycott Israel, give up your computer/cell phone/Wasserman Test” theme, given that it’s used so much (by those better at presenting it than me), and because the boycotters tend to turn to their preferred tactic (ignoring you) when presented with this argument.

But, for some reason, the BDSers at Cornell took great offense at accusations of hypocrisy that flooded the Twit-o-sphere once they were outed as WIX users (i.e., Israel non-boycotters). And their OUTRAGED response demonstrates the rhetorical atrophying that takes place when you spend time shouting at your opponents, rather than actually debating them.

If you sweep away all the usual accusations of distortion and insincerity directed at critics, and wild (unsubstantiated) claims of growing success of the BDS “movement,” the nut of Cornell SJP’s argument can be summed up in their statement that “BDS is a tactic, not a principle, let alone a call for abstention.”

You might be surprised that I’m actually in sympathy with part of this argument, in that I’ve pointed out for years that BDS is simply a tactic (albeit the Cornell SJP does not explain the Apartheid Strategy propaganda campaign this tactic supports, nor the ultimate goal of the “movement”). And their reference to not being required to be “beautiful souls” was a welcome philosophical reference (even if they used rock lyrics rather than Hegel to explain the concept).

Now I could point out that throwing away every piece of technology that makes use of Israeli components or code requires genuine effort and sacrifice, while selecting one free (non-Israeli) web hosting service vs. WIX does not (implying that the boycotters are too lazy to live by even the simplest application of their alleged principles). But I think this lighter argument (which they actually address) missed a more important point (which they ignore).

As I have pointed out again and again on this site and elsewhere, the BDS goal/strategy/tactic is built around getting their accusations to come out of the mouth of a third party, be it a university, church, municipality, academic organization, food coop or other civic institution. And in order to do this, they must first claim that this university/church/municipality, etc. is already “taking sides” in the Arab-Israeli conflict by investing in companies or selling products somehow tied to the Jewish state (or, as they prefer to put it, “The Occupation”™).

Why kick off a divestment campaign at a college or university? Because the school’s investment portfolio includes stocks on the BDS blacklist (maybe). Why target this or that food coop? Because they sell Sabra Hummus or Israeli ice cream cones. Why protest in front of some hardware store in San Francisco or Cambridge? Because they sell SodaStream drink dispensers.

Now in each and every case, the BDSers have detailed explanations as to why these particular stocks or those particular products are the target of their ire. And, even when they don’t, they are ready to make up new excuses when the situation requires it.

But this brings up the question of why are they the only ones who get to choose which use of Israeli anything is evil vs. non-evil? After all, if a store selling hummus made in New Jersey is fair game in their battle against “Apartheid Israel,” why should use of a web hosting service that brings millions of dollars in investment into the Israeli economy (and thus the tax base of the state they so loath) be similarly sinful?

Indeed, the BDSers have given themselves license to create mayhem in community after community based on links to Israel far more tenuous than their own use of WIX. If they are so ready to declare themselves innocent, how can they then turn around and declare everyone else guilty unless they do what the boycotters say is their only moral choice?

This gets back to the claim of BDS as a tactic. For this tactic is designed to allow the BDSers to speak in someone else’s name, no matter what the cost to that someone else. And the basis for their demand that every civic organization they target give into their demands is the choices those organizations make regarding where to invest or what to buy and sell. But as the Cornell SJP informed us, involving yourself with the Israeli economy is perfectly OK/innocent/unavoidable – as long as you’re them, and not the people they have chosen to torment for their own political gain.

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01/07 Links Pt1: 'Anti-Zionist' Jewish teens allegedly kill Palestinian woman; Toameh: The Palestinians' Uncivil War; Rashida Tlaib Accuses Jews of Dual Loyalty

From Ian:

Khaled Abu Toameh: The Palestinians' Uncivil War

The biggest losers from this internal bloodletting are the Palestinians living under these leaders in the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas-ruled Gaza.

The dispute between Hamas and Fatah is not over who will bring democracy and a better economy to the Palestinians. They are not fighting over who will improve the living conditions of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by building new schools and hospitals. They are not fighting over who will introduce major reforms to the Palestinian government and end financial and administrative corruption. They are not fighting over the need for freedom of expression and a free media.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Hamas leaders correctly argue, is not a rightful or legitimate president. If Abbas were to sign a deal with Israel, people could come along later and say that he lacked the legal authority to do so; they would be right.

In order for any peace process to move forward, the Palestinians first need to stop attacking each other. Then, they need to come up with new leaders who actually give a damn about their people.

Melanie Phillips: The terrorist murder of Aisha Rabi

The security agency also reportedly claims to have identified an effort to slander and delegitimise its interrogation methods, which it maintains are carried out in accordance with the law and under the supervision of the State Attorney’s office.

It is unlikely that Israeli Jewish terror suspects would be treated worse than Palestinian Arab ones. It is unlikely that either group would be handled with kid gloves, but the details the lawyers have revealed of the boys’ treatment, although harsh, hardly amounts to torture:

“’From morning to night (my client) was shackled to a chair, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, in a small cell’… the interrogators had ‘cursed, spit on and even sexually harassed’ his client. He claimed that the Shin Bet agents had even performed a jailhouse informant exercise with cops posing as inmates who pressured the suspects to confess.”

More worryingly, when one of these lawyers, Itamar ben Gvir, was asked why he hadn’t criticised the Shin Bet’s interrogation tactics against Palestinian suspects, he denied that the murder of Aisha Rabi was terrorism at all.

“‘When a Jew throws a rock at a Palestinian, it is not terrorism. When a Palestinian throws a rock at a Jew, it is terrorism because it’s part of a larger effort to wipe us out from our land,’ he argues.”

That is wrong and repellent, hardly mitigated by his lame addendum that the “extreme” tactics used by the Shin Bet against his client should not be used against Palestinian inmates either.

The murder of Aisha Rabi was indeed a foul and murderous act of terrorism – violence against the innocent carried out for political motives. Whether or not it was committed by the boys currently in custody, not only the perpetrators but also those who tried to obstruct justice on their behalf should feel the full force of the law.

Unlike the Arab communities in the disputed territories, where the murder of Jews – whose incitement is institutionalised within Palestinian society – is celebrated with sweets and fireworks by jubilant throngs, Jewish terrorism is rare and is viewed by the vast majority of Jews with horror and revulsion.

But it exists; and however small, it is a foul stain on the Jewish conscience. It must be dealt with.

'Anti-Zionist' Jewish teens allegedly kill Palestinian woman

The five Jewish teenagers from Judea and Samaria who were arrested over the past several days were allegedly involved in the deadly attack that led to the death of a Palestinian woman, Aisha al-Rawbi, in October, Israeli authorities said on Sunday.

The five teens who were arrested are students at a yeshiva in Rechelim, close to where the attack took place, on a road near the community. The attack, investigators say, targeted a Palestinian car, causing it to veer off the road and crash. Al-Rawbi, from the Arab village of Badi and a mother of eight, suffered a fatal head injury. Her husband, Aykube, survived.

It is unclear if all five teens are suspected of being the direct perpetrators of the attack. According to the Shin Bet security agency, the breakthrough in the investigation was made possible in part by intelligence gathered close the scene of the attack. The detective work showed that a day after the attack, during the Jewish Sabbath, a group of settler youth traveled from the community of Yitzhar to Rechelim, where they were briefed on the tactics needed for countering Shin Bet interrogations.

The Shin Bet further said that the evidence collected showed "that the arrested had anti-Zionist and extremist views" that included a video in which some of them burn an Israeli flag. One of the arrested youths had also written "death to the Zionists" and drew a swastika on an Israeli flag.

In Tunisia, a rumor was started saying that the Jewish tourism minister, Roni Trabelsi, was setting up a series of concerts by Tunisian artists in Israel.

When a media outlet tried to reach Trabelsi on Saturday to comment on the rumor, it was told that the minister does not release statements on Saturday, his Sabbath.

As a result, Tunisian media has been critical of Trabelsi, asking "is Tunisia really a civil state?"

Lawyer Sanaa Dahmani said she was surprised by this and said all ministers must separate religion and work.

"It is unthinkable for a minister to refuse to make statements or to work because of his religion," she said on the radio.

The minister was ridiculed in Tunisian media, as they called for the appointment of a minister in charge of tourism on Saturday, as the minister is busy with his holy day.

There have been other op-eds criticizing Trabelsi. I would doubt that anyone would criticize a Tunisian Muslim diplomat for refusing to attend an official meal overseas during Ramadan.

Given that this originated with a rumor intended to smear Trabelsi to begin with as someone using his position to normalize relations with Israel, this almost seems like a setup.

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Malaysia denies Israeli swimmers in Paralympics, will @Para_Swimming org step in?

From YNet:

Malaysia will not allow Israel's Paralympics swimming team enter the country to participate in the World Para Swimming Championships in July, despite two months of efforts by the Israel Paralympics Committee.

The event, set to be held in the Malaysian city of Kuching, is a critical one since the results will affect the formulation of 2020 Paralympics in Tokyo. The city will play host to more than 600 swimmers from 70 countries. The fact that there are no diplomatic relations between the Jewish state and Muslim nation is making it hard for the Israeli team to obtain visas.

Tomer Ilan pointed out to the World Para Swimming organization that this is a direct violation of their own Code of Ethics:

They responded that they are looking into this and will provide a further update "in due course."

It should be emphasized that as far as I can tell, every time an international body threatened to drop support for an event in a Muslim majority country that disallowed Israeli athletes, the Muslim country caved in.

Let's hope that Para Swimmng will uphold their own ethical standards and not enable discrimination against Israeli athletes, a practice that is long overdue for extinction.

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"Normalization is a crime." (War is peace, white is black, up is down.)

I saw this amazing graphic at Shehab News Agency illustrating the news that three Iraqi delegations held secret meetings in Israel in recent months.

It turns out that this was a campaign launched in November by the Nasser al-Aqsa Organization in Lebanon and the Palestinian Center for the Resistance of Normalization.

That latter group, which has only a handful of Twitter followers, has a list of the evils of normalization:

Normalization - highest treason
No matter what the occupation does, it will remain a germ in this region, besieged by the immune system (resistance to normalization) in order to destroy it in time.
Normalization is a loss of honor and dignity, a surrender to the occupation
Normalization is to recognize the right thief who stole your brother's house and expelled him and his family to the street, and open your house to steal from you and to expel you and your family later
Normalization with the Zionists and recognizing them as a crime, it is morally treacherous, political suicide, historical falsehood and shame
Normalization with the Zionist entity is a waiver of the sanctities of the nation and the Aqsa Mosque, "the first Muslim qibla."
Normalization is a crime no different than being a traitor to one's religion, Arabism and homeland

Normalization, of course, just means treating the Jewish state like any other. You know, peace. The Palestinians are in an absolute panic over the wave of Arab nations who are more and more willing to move their covert ties to Israel to become overt - above the table, as this cartoon shows in "before" and "after" (read left to right:)

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Harry Lumish: May His Memory be a Blessing (Michael Lumish)

Harry Lumish: May His Memory be a Blessing

Michael Lumish

יהי זכרו לברכה

Hebrew Orphan Asylum,

373 Ralph Avenue, Brooklyn, New York

A few weeks ago my father, Harry Lumish, passed of natural causes just short of his 99th birthday.

The odds of a man born in 1920 and living to the age of 99 are about 200 to 1.

He arrived in this world in Medzhybizh, Ukraine -- the home of Baal Shem Tov and the Chasid Movement -- during a period of violent pogroms. I assume that many of those folks in Crown Heights are actually relatives of mine, but I do not know.

My grandfather, Beryl, fled with his immediate family, including my grandmother, Sarah, from Medzhybizh, because they were not fond of sword and rifle-wielding Kossacks. They were running for their lives. They sought legal access into the United States but were not obliged by the United States government. They were able, however, to relocate briefly to Argentina.

Shortly before the paperwork came through and my family received permission to legally migrate into the United States, my grandfather died and his daughter, my aunt Betty, was born in Argentina. Not long thereafter Sarah passed through Ellis Island with Harry and Betty in her arms on their way to Brooklyn. Before my grandmother got on her feet, they stayed at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of that borough. Family legend has it that Sarah actually scrubbed floors at that institution in the early-mid 1920s.

The rest of my father's side of the family who stayed in Medzhybizh were slaughtered by the Germans during World War II under Operation Barbarossa, which was the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Medzhybizh was simply on the road in one of the German routes to Russia. When the Nazis arrived they separated the Jews from the non-Jews of that small town and put both populations to road building. When that task was done they had the Jews dig ditches. When the ditches were dug they had the Jews line-up within those ditches.

I feel reasonably certain that you know what happened after that. That was when my family lost the great majority of my father's side.

His story, though, like that of many millions of other Americans, is a sort-of classic American truth. He and Sarah and Betty came through Ellis Island with nothing. My dad ran around Brooklyn as a child during the Depression. He described himself as a "wild kid" which is hard for me to grasp because the guy who raised me was a middle-class accountant and philatelist.

{And, I have to say, I have a great deal of affection for that mint Israeli stamp collection that he poured through over decades.}

Shortly before 7 December 1941, which Franklyn Roosevelt referred to as "a date which will live in infamy," he enrolled in St. John's College in New York. His intention was to become an accountant. Unfortunately, the world powers got in the way of that small personal endeavor and they dragged him off to the Central Pacific; Kwajalein, the Marshall Islands, Enewetak. He became a skinny twenty-year-old corporal with a rifle slung over his shoulder, sleeping in foxholes as Japanese snipers shot at United States soldiers from trees.

He lasted the duration of the American participation in the war, but he came through OK... otherwise I would not even be here.

Upon returning home to New York City, he met my mother, Rita, from the Bronx, finished his degree, built a family and moved into the suburbs while listening to Glenn Miller. He did it with practically nothing. What he had was the GI Bill of Rights which paid for the rest of his education.

And he had Glenn Miller which filled his soul.

This is for you, dad.

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01/06 Links: IDF strikes Hamas posts in Gaza after explosive flown into Israel; 'LA Times' publishes column excusing antisemitism; Fatah rally chant: "Blow up the head of the settler"

From Ian:

IDF strikes Hamas posts in Gaza after explosive flown into Israel

The Israeli Air Force struck two Hamas positions in the eastern Gaza Strip on Sunday in response to an explosive device that was flown into southern Israel earlier in the day, the army said.

On Sunday morning, a bomb was flown into Israel using a large cluster of balloons and a drone-like glider device, landing in a carrot field in the Sdot Negev region of southern Israel shortly before noon.

In retaliation for the cross-border attack from Gaza, Israeli military helicopters attacked two observation posts east of Khan Younis that are controlled by the coastal enclave’s Hamas rulers, the Israel Defense Forces said.

“IDF attack helicopters struck two military positions belonging to the Hamas terrorist group in the Gaza Strip in response to the balloon-borne explosive device, which was launched by a model drone,” the army said.

In addition to the posts near Khan Younis, Palestinian media reported that the IDF had attacked targets near Jabalia, in northern Gaza, and in the Zeitoun area of Gaza City, in the central Strip. The IDF refused to comment on those reports.

The military did not say who it believed flew the bomb into southern Israel, but said it held Hamas responsible as the rulers of Gaza.

“The IDF will continue to act in defense of the citizens of Israel and against terrorism from the Strip,” the army said.

Suspicious drone-shaped device from Gaza explodes in Israeli field; no injuries

A drone-shaped device from the Gaza Strip exploded in an agricultural field of an Israeli kibbutz northeast of the coastal enclave on Sunday, causing neither injury nor damage, police said.

Security forces had been sent to the carrot field in the Sdot Negev region where the object landed, the Israel Defense Forces said.

The object was shaped like an unmanned aerial vehicle, with a wingspan of over 1.2 meters (4 feet), and was carried into Israel by dozens of colorful helium balloons. Though similar to a drone in appearance, the device was apparently not capable of flight.

The name of a Gazan engineering college was printed on the side of the drone lookalike.

Police said the device exploded as a bomb disposal robot examined it. The drone lookalike was then carried away.

'LA Times' publishes column excusing antisemitism

The Los Angeles Times published a column on Friday evening excusing the charges of antisemitism against the leaders of the Women’s March.

The op-ed, written by the newspaper’s columnist Robin Abcarian was titled, “Can you admire Louis Farrakhan and still advance the cause of women? Maybe so. Life is full of contradictions.”

In the column, Abcarian claimed that she thinks “it is possible to be repulsed by [Farrakhan’s] hateful rhetoric about white people, especially Jews, and still appreciate some of the empowerment work that he has done in the black community.”

Though she criticized the Women’s March organizers for taking too long to respond to accusations of antisemitism, Abcarian wrote that the fruits of the march were so inspirational as to eclipse that.

“While organizers of the Women’s March battled over who said what to whom about Jewish people when, and the merits of a noted antisemite, American women stood up by the millions and changed the country,” Abcarian wrote. “For that, everyone involved in the Women’s March can take a bow.”

But many people – Jewish and non-Jewish alike – were far from moved by Abcarian’s dismissal of antisemitism by both the Women’s March and Farrakhan.

A tweet from the newspaper’s “L.A. Now” Twitter account with a link to the article was subject to what’s known on Twitter as “the ratio.” As of Sunday morning, the tweet had been liked just 294 times, while it had been the subject of close to 2,500 irate replies on the social media platform.

This is the paper that buried the Khalidi Tape, so this is poetic. https://t.co/BN364DuV9D
— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) January 5, 2019

Know How to Answer #9: "Israel was the aggressor in 1967"

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At the New York Review of Books, anti-Zionist Antony Loewenstein wrote an article called "Exporting the Technology of Occupation". The key paragraph:

Over more than half a century of occupation, Israel has mastered the arts of monitoring and surveilling millions of Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel itself. Israel is now packaging and selling this knowledge to governments that admire the country’s ability to suppress and manage resistance. Israel’s occupation has thus gone global. The country’s defense exports reached a record $9.2 billion in 2017, 40 percent higher than in 2016 (in a global arms market that recorded its highest ever sales in 2017 at $398.2 billion). The majority of these sales were in Asia and the Pacific region. Military hardware, such as missiles and aerial defenses, was the largest sector at 31 percent, while intel, cyber, and information systems comprised 5 percent. Israel’s industry is supported by lavish domestic spending: in 2016, defense expenditure represented 5.8 percent of the country’s GDP. By comparison, in 2017, the American defense sector absorbed 3.6 percent of US GDP.

The article decries how Israel is making so much money by selling weapons and cybersecurity software that, Loewenstein implies, are solely created to crush Palestinians.

The reason the story sounds reasonable is because Loewenstein is framing Israel's existence in terms of how Palestinian Arabs view it. When you use a flawed framework it is easy to make anything look bad.

But the real background for Israel's leadership in defense and cybersecurity tools isn't because of its supposed desire to repress the Palestinian people. It is because over the decades, Israel's enemies (including but not only the Palestinians) have sought to destroy it, and in many cases Israel had to create its own defenses from scratch.

So when Hamas shoots rockets into Israel, Israel creates Iron Dome (a notable example not mentioned in the article.) Of course Israel would like to export Iron Dome to other countries.

When Hamas and Iran (Hezbollah) dig tunnels into Israel, Israel has to devise new methods to detect and stop them. One day that technology may be commercialized.

Israeli spies, like those of every other country, look for new ways to hack phones and computers.Whether that technology should be exported to repressive regimes is a reasonable question, but it is hardly unique to Israel - every Western power exports weapons and cybersecurity software to other countries that may or may not use them in the most moral of ways. (Loewenstein's main example is the rumor that Saudi Arabia used software from an American-owned Israeli cybersecurity company to track Jamal Khashoggi's movements. Given that Khashoggi voluntarily entered the Saudi embassy where he was murdered, it seems unlikely that the Israeli software is responsible for his death, but that's Loewenstein's main example of the evil of Israeli security tools.)

In short, Israel has been for 70 years a country under siege from its neighbors, near and far. It needed to develop ways to defend itself. This is the primary job of every nation. To twist that into a horrible plot of how Israel is oppressing Palestinians and using that know-how to profit from it is an inversion of reality. But when one looks at the world through "occupation glasses" where Israel is viewed as nothing more than a single-minded oppressor of a group of people, then the story writes itself.

The readers of such trash usually don't understand that the Israel being written about is a funhouse mirror reflection of reality, because the cherry-picked facts are mostly correct - it is the context and framework that are far off base.

It is the job of editors to separate the propaganda from the reality, but the New York Review of Books employs editors that seek such anti-Israel propaganda to begin with.

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On the Arab-Israeli conflict and left-wing Jewish groups (Kamel Amin Thaabet)

This is from a Twitter thread by "Kamel Amin Thaabet."

_________________________

Not something I usually do, but here’s a thread with some thoughts on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the myopia of groups like IfNotNow, and J Street 1.

Over simple, I know, but I posit that there are 3 principal dimensions to the conflict.

First, the conflict over lands captured by Israel in 1967.

Second, the conflict over the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

Third, the conflict between open societies and the retrograde forces of radical Islam.

The first conflict is essentially solvable by trading land for peace. Although the peace with Egypt is cold, Israel traded the Sinai for peace some 40 years ago and it has held. Although it didn’t involve much land, the peace deal with Jordan has also endured since 1994.

The second conflict is not solvable by trading land for peace. The objective is to unwind the creation of the state of Israel, whether by force or creation of a binational state which would functionally be the death knell of self-determination for the Jewish people.

The third conflict is also not solvable by trading land for peace. The likes of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah view Israel as a cancerous tumor, and would excise it if they had the means. They subscribe to the maxim of thinking globally, but acting locally - Dar-al-Harb.

Basically, this is a three level game. If Israel yields every dunam captured in 1967, the move would end the conflict over those lands, but it would be a blunder in conflicts 2 and 3, strengthening the forces arrayed against Israel (which would not be liberal and democratic).

And the conflicts are also asymmetric in that Israel is being asked to yield something tangible– land – for something intangible – peace. This against the backdrop of a region in utter turmoil, where the Arab nation state as a concept isn’t working out all that well.

So even assuming that the likes of IfNotNow and J Street have good intentions (which is questionable), the mistake they make is discussing the conflict solely in terms of the “occupation” – i.e., the conflict over 1967. While I agree that Israel’s presence in the West Bank is inflammatory to the Palestinians (even though most live under full Palestinian control in “Area A”), that presence is not the cause of the conflict. The existence of sovereign Israel itself is the bone in the throat.

IfNotNow / J Street and their ilk ignore that Israel’s withdrawal from every inch of Gaza in 2005 did not pacify Gaza in any respect. This proved empirically, to all those who called for Israel to take “risks for peace,” that the conflict is not really about 1967.

These strident critics of Israel ignore that Israel’s blockade of Gaza is not the cause of Gaza’s bellicosity, but the result of it. The Gazans destroyed greenhouses and built attack tunnels.

These critics ignore that the PLO was founded in 1964 and that the Fatah logo still includes a map of the entire land of Israel and crossed rifles.

They ignore the “3 nos” of the Arab League at Khartoum in 1967: No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with Israel.

They ignore that until the end of the cold war, the Arab-Israeli conflict was an active front of that war. The Palestinians were aligned with the Soviet Union. It is no accident that the Madrid process began in 1991.

So essentially, since the end of the Cold War (during the course of which creating a Soviet-aligned state would have been utter folly), Israel earnestly sought to end the conflict over 1967. Oslo was based on the assumption that the conflict was about 1967.

Israel yielded much. They allowed Arafat (despite the ocean of Jewish blood on his hands) into the land with trappings of a head of state. They allowed Palestinians to police themselves. Palestinians gained something they *never* had in history – territory over which they had control.

But this was not enough. The Palestinians recognize only their rights, not their responsibilities. And they recognize only Israeli responsibilities, not Israeli rights. The failure of Oslo, empirically, should have made the other dimensions to the conflict manifestly clear.

Simply put, by fetishizing Israel’s presence in the West Bank as the cause of the conflict, the likes of IfNotNow and J Street strengthen the hands of those who seek to unwind 1948 and the hands of those who would like to raise the flag of militant Islam over the land.

This is not to say that Israel should not, in its own interests, try to reach a better accommodation with Palestinian residents of the West Bank, improve conditions in Gaza, and to do its part to provide carrots and not only sticks. Israel could do better. But myopic focus on the “Occupation”, ignoring difficult truths, and taking back up the boycott strategies propounded by the Arab League since 1945, does not serve the cause of peace.

To the contrary, it provides air cover for abject enemies of Israel to make gains in the conflicts over 1948 and over the rights of non-Muslims to enjoy sovereignty in the Middle East, all while cloaking themselves in the language of progressivism and human rights.

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