Amnesty tries banning Jewish history
Amnesty International has long sought to isolate Israel by lobbying governments, international bodies, and civil society to adopt boycotts against the Jewish state.
The organization reached new levels of discrimination in its recent report, “Digital Tourism and Israel’s Illegal Settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” In it, the international NGO superpower attempts to criminalize Jewish and Christian tourism to holy sites in Jerusalem and the West Bank, erasing the Bible, and denying the Jewish people’s connection to its historic homeland.
According to Amnesty, travel platforms such as Airbnb, Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com, TripAdvisor and others, are “contributing to human rights violations” by facilitating and advertising travel to Judaism and Christianity’s holiest sites, because these lie beyond the 1949 Armistice line – the “Green Line.” Specifically, Amnesty presents as deeply problematic tourism to Old Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter, the Western Wall, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, as well as to Jewish historic locations in the West Bank.
For Amnesty, biblical sites in particular, alongside other locations of importance and interest in Jerusalem and the West Bank, are inconvenient, legitimizing Israel’s historical narrative as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Regardless of the political future of these areas, there can be no denying their historic Jewish significance. Amnesty, however, is attempting to sever, erase, and even ban these ties.
In diminishing these religious and cultural connections, Amnesty accuses Israel of creating a “settlement tourism industry” to help “sustain and expand” communities beyond the Green Line. Israel’s interest in Jewish archaeology is reduced to artificial manipulation, used “to make the link between the modern State of Israel and its Jewish history explicit,” while “rewriting of history [which] has the effect of minimizing the Palestinian people’s own historic links to the region.”
The possibility that Jews and Christians would visit holy sites, and want to see archaeological remnants of biblical locations for their religious and historical significance, is not entertained.
Are France and the EU helpless against anti-Semitism?
As Mauricette Rouffignat stood before yet another desecrated Jewish site on a recent sunny morning, it seemed like a playback to darker days. "I experienced World War II and all the suffering, the Jews who were deported," said 84-year-old Roussignat, who is not Jewish, but a resident of Saint-Geneviève-des-Bois, a quiet town on the outskirts of Paris. "We cannot remain unresponsive to these events, to this growing racism and insensitivity."Democrats Tacitly Support Anti-Israel Movement While Pretending Not To
Nearby, local politicians blasted intolerance and laid wreaths next to a portrait of a smiling young man, as trains rumbled by overhead. Twenty-three-year-old Ilan Halimi was dumped at the spot where they stood, barely alive, after being kidnapped and tortured for weeks. Because he was Jewish, his abductors thought his family could pay a steep ransom. They couldn't, and Halimi died on his way to hospital.
That was 13 years ago. Since then, France has experienced a raft of other horrific anti-Semitic incidents, from a 2012 shooting at a Jewish school in Toulouse, to 2015 terrorist attacks targeting a Paris kosher supermarket. Last year, 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll became the second elderly Jewish women murdered in as many years.
Once again, anti-Semitism is on the rise in France, with the government reporting this week a 74 percent uptick in anti-Jewish acts last year, compared to 2017. "The government has to do more," said Rabbi Michel Serfaty, who heads a Jewish-Muslim friendship association. "The fight against anti-Semitism can't just be carried out by citizens and communities. It has to become a national cause."
Congressional Democrats don’t want to talk about the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. And many of them really don’t want to be asked to vote on it.
In spite of such reluctance, Sens. Marco Rubio, Joe Manchin, and their allies passed S. 1, the Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019, 77-23 last Tuesday. The bill combined four Middle Eastern security-related bills. For many Democrats, though, the fly in the ointment was the Combating BDS Act of 2019, which affirms state and local governments’ right to avoid working with firms that support the anti-Israel BDS movement. More than 25 states currently have anti-BDS laws or executive orders, and BDS supporters have begun challenging them in court.
Rubio introduced his bill January 3 and spent more than a month fighting excuses and strawmen, as Democrats attempted to thread the needle of being anti-BDS while opposing Rubio’s economically focused anti-BDS bill and wishing the whole discussion would just disappear.
Democrats said it was improper to vote on such things during the government shutdown. They also asserted the bill was a threat to the First Amendment and attempted to filibuster it. Rubio addressed falsehoods about the bill’s constitutionality on Twitter and in a New York Times op-ed, while Republicans were repeatedly accused of politicizing Israel in an attempt to fracture Democrats.
President Obama’s former ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro told Bloomberg: “There’s a desire by Republicans to use Israel as a wedge issue . . . Not a single Democrat in the Senate supports BDS, so there is an opportunity to craft the provision on BDS in a way that reflects that consensus and make sure it passes constitutional muster.”
Israel should never be a political wedge issue, but Democrats need no help with divisions on this issue. As The Daily Beast acknowledges, “the Democratic Party is heading into a slow-motion, three-way car wreck [“the pro-Israel old guard, pro-Palestine young progressives, and anti-censorship liberals,” as they call them] when it comes to Israel/Palestine.” I’m skeptical that the “anti-censorship” middle ground is a meaningful long-term category, but the point remains. Democrats are undergoing a generational shift. Israel is now a subject of intra-party conflict.