Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, March 03, 2019

03/03 Links: Texas blacklists Airbnb over Israel boycott; Pinkwashing or Brainwashing the Israeli Eurovision?; Afghanistan donates $1 million to UNRWA

From Ian:

Texas blacklists Airbnb over West Bank settlement boycott

The state of Texas has blacklisted the global vacation rental company Airbnb over its boycott of West Bank settlements.

“We welcome this decision very much and we hope that it will be emulated by other states and other countries in the world,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon said on Saturday night.

On Friday, the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, Glenn Hegar, publicly updated the list of businesses on the state’s “List of Companies that Boycott Israel” to include Airbnb.

Texas’s move followed a decision by Florida in January to place Airbnb on its list of scrutinized companies.

Airbnb has a 90-day period to prove that it has not boycotted Israel before any action is taken against it. Under the Texas regulation that governs the list, should the Israel boycott continue, “the state governmental entity shall sell, redeem, divest, or withdraw all publicly traded securities of the company, except securities.”

HonestReporting: Pinkwashing or Brainwashing the Israeli Eurovision?

Anything good Israel does is just an insidious way to distract the world from the “occupation” of Palestine.

Planting trees to make the desert bloom? That’s what critics call greenwashing the occupation. Israeli humanitarian to disaster zones abroad is bluewashing. Israeli ties with indigenous North American peoples is redwashing while ties with African-Americans is blackwashing.

When it comes to Israel, trees, a helping hand and friendship — things the world needs more of — are purely perfidious plots against the Palestinians. Period.

Which brings us to one more example of Palestinian activists wrecking the color wheel. The Independent gave an op-ed soapbox to Haneen Maikey and Hilary Aked to take Israel to task for “pinkwashing” — which is exploiting the Jewish state’s LGBTQ+ rights to distract everyone from “its systematic denial of Palestinian rights.” Aked’s a third-rate academic writing a book on the Israeli lobby for a company that publishes anything disgusting about Israel.

They myopically argue:

It could not be clearer that nothing is apolitical where Israel is concerned. That’s why the idea that holding Eurovision in Israel is “just a bit of fun”, is so misguided.

Translation: Israel’s acceptance of gays means absolutely nothing as long as the Mideast conflict — which is not a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transgender (LGBT+) issue — remains unresolved.

Palestinians have a reputation for homophobia in the West Bank and in Gaza, but rather than have an honest conversation about it, Maikey and Aked blame Israel.

Iceland band planning anti-Israel protest gets Eurovision nod

Iceland on Saturday made its pick to represent the country at the upcoming Eurovision song contest, choosing a band that has threatened an onstage protest against Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and has issued a challenge to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a bout of Scandinavian combat known as trouser wrestling.

Hatari themes its performances on bondage, domination, and sadomasochism, known as BDSM — not to be confused with BDS, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.

The group won the local selection contest with its song “Hatrid Mun Sigra,” Icelandic for “Hatred will prevail” and will now go on to compete in the semifinals scheduled for May 16, in Israel.

In a February interview with Iceland’s biweekly Stundin newspaper, band members spoke of their strong identity with the Palestinian cause, saying they felt it was their duty to use the Eurovision contest as a platform to broadcast their views.

Under the terms of the contest, participants are prohibited from making political statements at the event.

Hatari criticized its home country for not boycotting the contest because it is being hosted by Israel, a country it said violates human rights.

Cartoon of the day: Chez Hamas

Continuing my re-captioning of single-panel cartoons....

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Maher Abu Sabha, head of the Land Authority in the Gaza Strip, announced that Hamas will not tolerate illegal homes built on public lands.

He said that the phenomenon of Gazans building illegally on public lands is not proper.

Abu Sabha noted that in 2018, Hamas removed buildings on about 260 dunums. He listed out how Hamas moved people from illegal buildings , about 4000 people so far in 560 houses.

This sounds a lot like what Israel is doing to Bedouin who are building illegal structures and communities, haphazardly, all over the Negev. Israel is trying to move them to towns that have infratructure and proper planning.

And human rights groups are insisting that when Israel does this - something that every government on the planet would do - it is encroaching on Arab rights to build wherever they want, willy-nilly.

Just another data point among thousands of how Israel is assumed to be evil, no matter what.

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Quite a few years ago, in 2007, I discussed why Zionism is not colonialism, as has been argued ad nauseum by academic critics of Israel. Essentially, colonialism relies on a "metropole," a mother country, which extends its mores onto a weaker, indigenous society. But Zionism does not have a metropole - it never relied on Britain (the most obvious candidate) or Russia or anywhere else as its mother country.

In more recent times, perhaps as a rebuttal to that argument, came the academic field of "settler colonialsm," meant to incorporate places like the United States and Australia as places where the indigenous populations are replaced with an invasive settler society that, over time, develops a distinctive identity and sovereignty. Israel is considered a prime example of settler colonialism - the academic journal "Settler Colonial Studies" has had a number of issues dedicated solely to the idea of Israel as a settler colonial entity.

Perhaps the father of the entire field of settler colonialism is Lorenzo Veracini, and he wrote a paper in "Interventions : International Journal of Postcolonial Studies" that defended the idea of Israel as a paradigm of settler colonialism.

He brings two counterarguments and answers them. The first is nonsensical:

To contextualize this outline, I will begin with two oft-repeated statements.They are routinely used to deny that Zionism can be interpreted as an instance of colonialism, let alone settler colonialism. The first one asserts Zionism cannot be considered settler colonialism because such a rubric obscures its inherent specificity. I remain unconvinced. It is like saying that Newton was wrong to think in abstract terms and that his theory of gravitation was inappropriate because it neglected the specific characteristics of a particular apple. More to the point: abstracting does not rule out specific observation. On the contrary, it is necessarily premised on it. At the same time, appraising Zionism and settler colonialism in the same interpretive frame does not amount to saying that Zionism is just like other settler colonialisms, or an imitation of previous iterations of this mode of domination. This approach is primarily about Zionism’s relationship with the indigenous collective it encounters and how this relationship reproduces the relationships other settler-colonial projects establish with other indigenous collectives. It is a statement of political geometry, not an exercise in morality. Indeed, it is not even about a similarity between colonization movements but about a relational similarity. It is not about comparing apples but about comparing their falling. It may be a great apple, but the fact remains that apple fell in Palestine If I were a Palestinian, I would develop a keen interest in the physics of apples, but even if I were personally committed to the project of settling in Palestine I would still be interest in ‘appledynamics.

Veracini fails to specify what exactly is the specific nature of Zionism that might distinguish it from "other" settler colonialisms, claiming that it doesn't really matter because it is in the end a discussion of the relationship between Zionists and the "indigenous collective." But that characterization is itself biased, because Zionism considers Jews to be the indigenous population, that has been displaced throughout the millennia from their land, especially from the destruction of the Temple through the Muslim conquest, which is the time that Jews became a minority.

Yet there are no papers on the settler colonialism of the Arabs of the 8th and 9th centuries CE.

His next argument claims to dispense with the one mentioned above, about the absence of any metropole:

The second statement I’d like to address is about the ostensible absence of a directly colonizing metropole. Colonialism must be performed for the benefit of a colonizing centre, it is argued. If it is missing this direction, and Zionism is, as it relies on the institutions of a diaspora rather than those of a colonizing centre (even though it is crucially relying on the support of colonial/imperial and neocolonial powers – the British during the Mandate era and the United States afterwards), then it is not colonialism. Others have countered this assertion by pointing to Zionism’s ability to rely on a ‘diffusely integrated’ or ‘diffuse transnational’ metropole (Wolfe 2016, 228, 247), but for the purposes of this essay I’d like to note that settler colonialism is crucially distinguished from colonialism as a mode of domination precisely because of the settlers’ collective ability to subtract themselves from the supervisory control of an overbearing metropolis while following an autonomous course. Triumphant settlers are always emancipated from a colonizing metropole; they famously declare their independence. The absence of a colonizing national metropole, or the presence of a transnational one, is a shared trait of settler-colonial phenomena, including Zionism, not a distinguishing feature. These defenders of Zionism are actually arguing that Zionism is not a colonial movement because it is … a settler-colonial one. They may be onto something, but do they want to be onto this something?

The answer to this is that the very nature of Zionism is not to be a colonizing movement but to be a national liberation movement - for Jews.

By casting Jews as the colonialists - whether traditional or settler-colonialist - the very basis of Zionism and Jewish nationalism is discarded a priori. Given that Jews have remained connected to the land, both emotionally and physically as many have returned throughout the last thousand years, the belittling of the Jewish desire to return to Zion is at the most charitable a huge blind spot, and at worst antisemitic.

A number of other arguments against Zionism being settler-colonialist have been posited. Wikipedia lists a few. Perhaps the most cogent is this one:

S. Ilan Troen, in 'De-Judaizing the Homeland: Academic Politics in Rewriting the History of Palestine', argues that Zionism was the repatriation of a long displaced indigenous population to their historic homeland, and that "Zionists did not see themselves as foreigners or conquerors, for centuries in the Diaspora they had been strangers". Troen further argues that there are several differences between European colonialism and the Zionist movement, including that "there is no New Vilna, New Bialystock, New Warsaw, New England, New York,...and so on" in Israel. He writes that "mandates were intended to nurture the formation of new states until independence and this instrument was to be applied to Jews, even as it was for the Arab peoples of Syria and Iraq. In this view, Jews were a people not only entitled to a state but that polity was naturally located in a part of the world in which they had originated, had been resident since the ancient world, and still constituted a vital presence in many areas of the region, including Palestine" and that "perhaps the most manifest or visible evidence—for those who would be willing to acknowledge—were found in the revival of Hebrew into a living language; the marking the landscape with a Jewish identity; and the development of an indigenous culture with roots in the ancient past." He concludes that "casting Zionists as colonizers serves to present them as occupiers in a land to which, by definition, they do not belong."

Exactly. And beyond his excellent argument about there being no "New Bialystock" in Israel - the communities that were built by Jews were, by and large, given the very names that they had in Biblical times, names that in many cases had been replaced by Arabic equivalents - of the Arab colonizers.

Veracini has one point. The Jews who returned to Israel did often look at themselves as being superior to the Arab population in Palestine, and in that narrow sense there may be something to be learned from cases of settler-colonialism in the US or Canada.

One answer is that early Zionists always envisioned a society where the undeniable Jewish superiority in technology, politics, and industry would positively affect the local Arabs, a rising tide that would lift all people. One would be hard-pressed to find any early Zionist writings that encouraged ethnic cleansing of Arabs of the type done in the US to native Americans. Jewish boys aren't playing an Arab-Israeli version of "Cowboys and Indians." The biggest exodus of Arabs came about from a war that was meant to wipe out the Jews. In 1948 there was never the intent to drive most of the Arabs out - although in a minority of cases that indeed happened - most left because of panic and the lies that the Arabs would win so they can return.

At any rate, positioning Israel as a settler colonialist state indeed is a moral position - one that claims that Jews somehow don't belong in their ancestral lands. And that is a bigoted position to take, no matter what the intention.

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03/02 Links: Shapiro: Stop Treating Ilhan Omar Like A Child. Her Anti-Semitism Isn't 'Sad.' It's Consistent, Vicious, And Vile; Ahed Tamimi Incites Against MK Yehuda Glick, Saying It’s ‘Permissible to Kill’ Him

From Ian:

Matti Friedman (NYT$): Israel’s Secret Founding Father

The members of the Arab Section were one part of what later became the Mossad. When Cohen died in 2002, having spent much of his life under an assumed identity, he was described by a military historian as one of Israel’s most successful agents: “We never heard of him because he was never caught.” Saman, the mastermind, eventually ran Eli Cohen, Israel’s most famous spy, who penetrated the Syrian regime as the businessman Kamal Amin Thabet before he was exposed and hanged in 1965. But the point I’d like to make here is not about what they did, but instead about who they were and what it says about the country they helped create.

Were they the “ones who become like Arabs”? Or was that identity real?

This is an important question beyond the particular case of these spies. The divide between Jews from Christian countries (known as Ashkenazim) and from Muslim countries (generally called Mizrahim) has always been the key fault line in Israeli society, with the former clearly on top. But in recent years it has become more acceptable to admit or even celebrate the Middle Eastern component of Israel’s Jewish identity. The Hebrew pop style known as Mizrahi, long scorned, now rules the airwaves. The dominance of the political right in recent years comes far less from the settler movement, as foreign observers tend to think, than from the collective memory of Israelis who remember how vulnerable they were as a minority among Muslims and grasp what this part of the world does to the weak. In the country’s official view of itself, it might still seem as if the Jews of the Islamic world, by coming to Israel after the founding of the state, joined the story of the Jews of Europe. But in 2019 it’s quite clear that what happened was closer to the opposite.

As the young Jamil Cohen found when he was recruited in the 1940s, the world of military intelligence is, ironically, one corner of Israeli society where Arab identity has always been respected. The Israeli scholar Yehouda Shenhav opens his 2006 book “The Arab Jews” with an anecdote about his father, who came to Israel from Iraq and found his way into the secret services. Looking at a photograph of his young father on a beach with friends from those early days, the author is forced to consider his father’s tenuous position in Israeli society and his utility as a spy: His appearance, Mr. Shenhav wrote, “confronted me with my complex location within what is often represented as an ancient, insurmountable conflict between Arabs (who are not Jews) and Jews (who are not Arabs).”

To an Israeli viewer, that ethnic blurriness runs clearly beneath the surface of “Fauda,” the popular Netflix thriller. In the second season it’s embodied in the character of Amos Kabilio, who confuses us when he first appears on screen — he’s speaking Arabic and it’s not clear which side he’s from, until we realize that he’s the father of Doron, the Israeli agent who’s the main character. Amos is a Jew from Iraq, and when he speaks to his son, the Israeli spy, it’s partly in his mother tongue, Arabic. We’re meant to grasp that when Doron “becomes like an Arab” as part of his mission, it’s not entirely artificial.

“Espionage,” John le Carré once observed, “is the secret theater of our society.” Countries also have cover stories and hidden selves. The identity of Israel’s spies teaches us who Israel has to spy on, of course. But it also has much to say about what Israel is — and how that country differs from the country we know from stories. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Ben Shapiro: Stop Treating Ilhan Omar Like A Child. Her Anti-Semitism Isn't 'Sad.' It's Consistent, Vicious, And Vile.

This is simply the soft bigotry of low expectations – or, more insidiously, an attempt to soft-pedal anti-Semitism in order to preserve the intersectional hierarchy. Omar is, you see, a Muslim woman from Somalia, and that means that she ranks higher than Americans Jews do on the victimhood scale – and thus she must be treated with kid gloves when she targets said American Jews. Omar will still be cheered, despite her open and unapologetic Jew-hatred, by the same media members who place her alongside Nancy Pelosi on the cover of Rolling Stone. And Nancy Pelosi will continue to cover for her, all the while claiming to be an advocate of anti-bigotry.

Now, imagine, for just a moment, that Omar were instead a white Congressman from Iowa who said something bigoted. Would the media react with “sadness” and advice? Or would the media correctly react with outrage?

You don’t have to theorize. When Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said, according to The New York Times, that he didn’t understand how the language “white nationalist” became “offensive,” he wasn’t accorded any of the hemming and hawing surrounding Omar. There was no weepy talk about learning curves and ignorance of “tropes.” There was appropriate and universal condemnation.

Not so with Omar, who will continue to get away with her anti-Semitism, as Democratic Party leaders and their allies in the media simply shake their head and tut-tut softly while elevating her to a position of public leadership. We don’t have to speculate. They’re already doing so.

The Line Between Criticism of Israel and Anti-Semitism

Criticism becomes bigotry when it involves demonizing and delegitimizing Israel. Accusing Israel of genocide—or of running an apartheid state, as Omar did on Wednesday—is a shameful lie that cannot be labeled legitimate criticism. The same goes for describing Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, as a human rights abuser on the level of China and North Korea. Those who support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel employ such rhetoric as part of their campaign of economic warfare against the Jewish state. Such efforts seek to destroy the Jewish state through international pressure, undermining Israel to the point that it effectively ceases to survive as we have come to recognize it. Think about the implications for Israeli Jews, who live in a region in which most governments have shown indifference to if not support for slaughtering Jews. Moreover, now that the Jewish people have Israel and are not prepared to surrender it after 2,000 years of exile and persecution, the only way to replace Israel with Palestine, or a bi-national state, or whatever else Omar and her allies envision, is by forcibly taking it. That would mean killing many Jews. Those who do not realize this reality cannot plead ignorance and absolve themselves.

Imagine if someone demonized and sought to de-legitimize another country—say, Ireland—with the same obsessive hatred that Omar shows Israel. Would they not be bigoted against the Irish? Of course they would.

But no one targets Ireland, or any other country, like so many target Israel. And here we get to the bigger point. Anti-Semitism, to paraphrase the eminent historian Bernard Lewis, has two special features that make it a distinct form of bigotry: Jews are assigned restrictive, disadvantageous double standards, and more importantly, a cosmic, satanic evil is attributed to them unlike anything else in this world. What do these criteria look like today? Treating Israel differently than all other countries and accusing it of being a nefarious puppet master controlling world events—maybe even hypnotizing the world.

Separating anti-Semitism from criticism of Israeli policy is not that hard. As with pornography, "I know it when I see it."

In today's world, where hatred and persecution based on race and religion are supposed to be no longer tolerated, anti-Semitism is based primarily on the Jewish people's nation-state. Anti-Zionism, or opposition to Israel's continued existence as a Jewish state, is the chief medium through which anti-Semites push their agenda. Those who may not have a personal animus toward Jews at large—like Omar (one certainly hopes)—but who support the BDS movement and other efforts to destroy the Zionist project—again, like Omar—are complicit in anti-Semitism. As nefarious and troubling as her comments peddling anti-Semitic canards are, her efforts to isolate, hurt, and ultimately destroy the world's only Jewish state pose a much greater threat. Those who want to fight anti-Semitism need to fight the policies toward Israel that Omar and like-minded progressives support. In other words, those who support such policies, those warriors for social justice, are part of the problem.

Netanyahu’s Downfall?

One of Netanyahu’s most bellicose and loyal supporters, Culture and Sport Minister Miri Regev, responded to the bombshell by helping a woman advance her claim that Gantz exposed himself to her while they were both teenagers. Jacobs’s trauma was triggered only recently when she learned that Gantz had a shot at becoming the next PM. Apparently, Gantz’s promotion to Chief of the IDF years ago did nothing to ruffle her sensitivities.

Israeli politics is a notoriously murky cesspool, but this episode seems a little dirtier, uglier, more pungent. It involves hundreds of individuals, more than a handful of ruined lives and careers, and a lot of collateral damage.

Most worrisome is how it further sullies public office and the very noble and important work that so many fine people do in these positions. We tend to remember the scandal, tumbles from grace, corruption. We forget quiet competence.

Should Netanyahu be indicted and found guilty of one or more charges, it will also mark the downfall of a man of towering intellect, ability and, I believe, boundless devotion to the well-being of the state of Israel—a man who lost his way.

Cartoon of the day

Continuing my re-captioning of single-panel cartoons....

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03/01 Links Pt2: Progressive Replacement Theology; Phillips: Why Labour’s antisemitism is a crisis for the world; Europe's Ubiquitous Anti-Semitism

From Ian:

Progressive Replacement Theology

Instead, a new faith emerged: progressivism. A time traveler, unaware of the developments of the last eight decades, might’ve been forgiven for listening to a modern-day progressive speak and mistaking her for a fundamentalist Christian: Jesus’ observation that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven sounds like something Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in a moment of inspiration, might say to an adoring interviewer on CNN. With its emphasis on social justice, criminal justice reform, elevating the poor, and rejecting the rapacious policies of the greedy and the affluent, progressivism sounds a lot like Christianity. Except that it has chosen to reject Christianity and all other forms of faith as silly superstitions, to abolish history by proposing that it has but one throughline—progress!—and to set up instead a religion that fails to see itself as one and, as such, is condemned to repeat Christianity’s worst transgressions.

Beginning, sadly, with the Jews. In Ilhan Omar’s suggestion that none in Congress before her had been refugees, in Salazar and Ocasio-Cortez’s sudden and questionable claim of Jewish heritage, even in the rush of many on the far left to argue that Jews of color are the real Jews and that the rest of us are somehow complicit in Klan-like prejudice—in all these we see the old wheels of replacement theology turning. Judaism may have given us much understanding of justice, but if progressivism is to claim its modern-day mantle, Judaism has to be argued away, which begins by anointing the progressives the real new Jews.

If you doubt that any of this is true, try for a moment to think rationally about the way most progressives talk about Israel. Let us, for the sake of argument, assume for a moment that those who assiduously claim that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are not interchangeable are correct. Let us accept that one may have a host of pressing critiques of Jerusalem and its policies. What, we may now ask, are those all about? To hear many American progressives tell it, Israel is worthy of special attention because of the inordinate amount of American foreign aid it receives. If that were the case, we could safely assume that as Israel receives about twice as much aid as, say, Egypt, we might expect our media to write one story about Egypt’s transgressions for every two they write about Israel. The ratio, sadly, is very different. It’s skewed, too, if you compare the uproar about Israel to the attention paid to other areas of conflict and human rights violations around the world: Everywhere you look, the world’s only Jewish state is singled out for calumny. The reason is simple: Israel provides progressivism’s zealots with a convenient opportunity to mask their theological decrees as rational, reasonable, and worldly politics. By focusing all of your attention, energy, and rage on the Jews, you may declare yourself, just as Origen and Hippolytus had centuries ago, to be the rightful heir to an enlightened tradition abandoned by those who were once God’s chosen people but who are no longer.

You’d hope that the tenured hordes that make up so much of progressivism’s vanguard would know all this, but religious extremism, as Jewish history has tragically proved again and again, is blinding. We can only hope that one day soon a progressive Augustine may arise and temper the hate of his new secular faith. Until then, we Jews should do what we’ve done so gallantly for millennia and protect ourselves against the spurious claims of fanatics with dangerous ideas. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Melanie Phillips: Why Labour’s antisemitism is a crisis for the world

Mahmoud Abbas – viewed by the Western Left as a statesman-in-waiting – has a doctorate in Holocaust denial, explicitly venerates the Palestinian Nazi-ally Haj Amin al-Husseini who undertook to slaughter every Jew in the Middle East in the event of Hitler’s victory, and uses his media outlets to transmit medieval and Nazi-style demonization of the Jews.

His followers claim the Jews were behind 9/11, that Israel is out to destroy the Islamic world, and that the Jews control the world’s media, finance and US foreign policy.

So why should Labour Party members who support the Palestinians with their agenda of Holocaust denial, attacks on Judaism and unhinged conspiracy theories about Jewish power, now be so shocked that Labour Party members are themselves coming out with Holocaust denial, attacks on Judaism and unhinged conspiracy theories about Jewish power?

Antisemitism, which is always with us, is kept down only by unequivocal social disapproval. Support for Palestinianism, however, has served to legitimize it. This has not just encouraged its brazen expression on the Left. It has also created a climate which has emboldened neo-Nazis and their ilk to crawl out from under their stone.

There are of course other reasons behind the epidemic of antisemitism: cultures that are fragmenting or dying, a Western world that has lost confidence in modernity and reason, and a Europe that cannot bear the guilt of the Holocaust.

Ultimately, though, the scapegoating of the Jews signals a fundamental loss of moral compass. That this is now taking place across the world should terrify not just Jews but everyone.

NYTs: To Argue for the Abolition of the Jewish Homeland Flirts with Anti-Semitism

There's nothing anti-Semitic about sympathy for the Palestinian cause or support of Palestinian statehood. But where anti-Zionism crosses into anti-Semitism should be obvious: dehumanizing or demonizing Jews and propagating the myth of their sinister omnipotence; accusing Jews of double loyalties as a means to suggest their national belonging is of lesser worth; denying the Jewish people's right to self-determination; blaming through conflation all Jews for the policies of the Israeli government; pursuing the systematic "Nazification" of Israel; turning Zionism into a synonym of racism.

The denial of the millennial Jewish link to the Holy Land and the dismissal of the legal basis for the modern Jewish state in UN Resolution 181 of 1947 (Arab armies went to war against its Palestinian-Jewish territorial compromise and lost) as a means to argue for the abolition of the Jewish homeland and portray it as an immoral, colonial exercise in theft often flirts with anti-Semitism. It is at its most egregious when it issues from Europeans who seem to have forgotten where the Holocaust was perpetrated. Once in the gas chambers was enough for the Jews.

The fundamental link between European anti-Semitism and the decision of Jews to embrace Zionism in the conviction that only a Jewish homeland could keep them safe is something contemporary European theorists of a demonic Israel prefer to forget.

03/01 Links Pt1: Believing in our right to the Land of Israel doesn’t make anyone a fascist; Glick: Israel’s Deep State Takes Aim at Netanyahu; UNHRC Derided as ‘Dangerous Joke’ After Issuing Anti-Israel Report on Gaza Border Violence

From Ian:

Believing in our right to the Land of Israel doesn’t make anyone a fascist

Words delivered at the memorial service for Ariel and Lily Sharon, February 15, 2019.

Many straight lines can pass through two points. We all agree on the future point, the goal we want to reach: a good life in Israel for the Jewish people and for those who tied their fate to ours. What we don’t agree on is the way to arrive at that point. And that’s fine. Some people want to get there from the Right, others believe the best way is to come from the Left, the far Right, or the far Left. They’re all legitimate directions, all straight lines. So we argue, we vote, and we move forward together.

Rows upon rows of headstones stand over the graves of soldiers in the military cemeteries. Not one of them indicates whether the soldier lying silently in the ground below was right- or left-wing, religious or secular, lived in the city or the country. Every option is represented there.

We are surrounded by millions who hate us and want to see us dead, and they couldn’t care less about our political opinions. To them, we’re all the same. And if, heaven forbid, they should succeed, we will all share the same fate.

The problem the extremists on both sides suffer from can be summed up in no more than a few words. Those on the Left, who consider themselves liberal, are indeed liberal – as long as you agree with them. Those on my side sometimes feel they have first-hand knowledge of God’s will, so that anyone who disputes them is automatically an enemy of God.

Believing in our right to the Land of Israel doesn’t make anyone a fascist, and being willing to make do with less of that land doesn’t make anyone a traitor. They are all patriots who love the country, each in their own way.

Who owns West Bank property once owned by Jews?

The question of Jewish property and assets turned over to Arabs in the West Bank after the 1948 Jordanian occupation is a thorny one. The Israeli government has decided to leave this particular can of worms unopened. In this paper, Russell A Shalev concludes that Israel should not fear the repercussions of restituting former Jewish property to its rightful owners. (With thanks: Colin)

A view of Hebron
This paper explored the status of the former Jewish properties in Judea and Samaria that were seized by Jordan in 1948. The Israeli Supreme Court in Valero ruled that the transfer of the property to Jordanian custodianship eliminated any ties between the previous Jewish owner s and the property. Contrary to the Supreme Court's ruling in2011, this paper concluded that Israel legally can, and should, return the property to its former owners,without regards to a comprehensive peace agreement settling all claims between Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab states.This conclusion relies on the following justifications:

•Recognizing confiscated Jewish assets as Jordanian state property would be a violation of the principle of ex injuria jus non oritur, unjust acts cannot create law. The Jordanian seizure was illegal,was the result of Jordanian aggression and unrecognized annexation of the territory, and thus should be seen as invalid.
Jordan cannot enjoy rights to property gained through its illegal invasion in 1948.

The Status of Former Jewish Assets in Judea and Samaria are sui generis, ie.a unique historical and legal phenomenon, and they do not depend on a parallel comprehensive solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.The Palestinians have repeatedly rejected an internationally-accepted solution for the refugee crisis–resettlement in host countries. Instead, they have insisted on the"right of return." The repatriation of thousands of Palestinian Arabs would cause massive disruption and chaos in Israel, upending public order and seriously threatening societal cohesion. By contrast, the return of a small amount of Jewish property owners in Judea and Samaria could hardly be considered a threat to public order, especially considering that Israelis are able to purchase land and build homes over the Green Line.
Read paper in full

Dore Gold Says Countries Should Help Israel Fight "Fake History"

Countries should help Israel fight "fake history" that seeks to disconnect a Jewish - and by extension Christian - connection to Jerusalem, Dore Gold, who heads the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, told the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington on Thursday. Israel "needs your help to defeat the diplomatic assaults Jerusalem faces today. We need your help to fight the fake history. We need your help to fight for truth."

Gold - a former Israeli ambassador to the UN and director-general of the Foreign Ministry - quoted Yasser Arafat telling former president Bill Clinton that there was never a Temple in Jerusalem, to which Clinton responded, "not only the Jews, but I too, believe that under the surface there are remains of Solomon's temple."

"What is clear today, more than ever, is that the only force that will protect Jerusalem for all the great faiths is the modern State of Israel, which has not forgotten how its enemies sought to forcibly cut its connection with the Holy City in the past."

Cartoon of the Day

Since I'm going to Israel next week, I'm going to spread my newly captioned New Yorker cartoons to one a day.

Some have been tweeted, some haven't.

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J-Street styles itself as "pro-Israel, pro-peace."

The first part is obviously not true, since J-Street's political positions are consistently on the side of the Palestinian positions and against that of the elected Israeli government, and even most Israelis who identify as centrist or left wing.

But what about the second part? Is J-Street pro-peace?

The answer can be seen in what is - and what is not - on its website.

The most remarkable achievement under Netanyahu's leadership has been Israel's improving relationships with nations around the world, including Muslim-majority countries in Africa and the Arab world.

Yet when Netanyahu met with Oman's Sultan Qaboos bin Said in Oman, a stunning event, J-Street was silent.

When Netanyahu met directly with Arab leaders and top ministers in Warsaw this month, J-Street was silent.

When pressure forced the UAE to allow Israeli athletes to participate in events there, and an Israeli minister sang Hatikva when Israel won a gold medal and publicly toured the nation, J-Street was silent.

When Israel openly works with Qatar to bring aid in to Gaza, J-Street is silent.

While Israel improves relationships with Sudan, Chad, Bahrain and many other nations, J-Street is silent.

Shouldn't a "pro-peace" organization be jubilant at each one of these stories?

The irony increases when you see that J-Street does say positive things about regional peace initiatives - but only in context of the Saudi driven Arab peace initiative, in a section of its site written during the Obama administration:

Even more broadly, the Arab Peace Initiative still provides a potential game-changing template for conflict resolution yielding dividends not just for Israel, but for the region as a whole in trade, commerce, security and more. Given the perception of the weakness of the political leadership on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides and the fact that so many of the issues (security, Jerusalem, refugees) that are on the table actually have regional dimensions, reconceiving the effort to resolve the conflict in a broader regional context seems to us an important new approach to consider.

Accordingly J Street highlights for policymakers the benefits of adopting a regional approach to resolving the conflict and works with partners in Israel and in the Arab world to explore the possibilities of building on the Arab Peace Initiative.

What happened to J-Street's support of adopting a "regional approach" to peace?

Ah, that was only when it seemed impossible to have regional peace without the Palestinian issue being solved first, which was the conventional wisdom for decades.

Netanyahu, and Trump, have shown that there is another avenue to regional peace. They have shown that it was the Palestinians that are the roadblock to regional peace, not the prerequisite. The Arab world knows that Palestinians could have had a state when it was offered to them in 2000, 2001, 2008 and they rejected it. The Arab world knows this and it is finally dispensing with the conventional wisdom of first a Palestinian state and only then regional peace.

J-Street hates this idea. They built their entire organization on the failed approach of Israel giving more and more concessions to those who want to destroy it in the name of "peace."

J-Street also hates Trump. They hate Netanyahu. Their fundraising emails are based on that hate, getting funds from likeminded haters.

And the idea that under Netanyahu and Trump, Israel is friendlier with the Arab and Muslim worlds than it ever was under Obama just disgusts them.

If J-Street was "pro-peace," it would have shown cautious support for the Trump peace initiative when it was announced. It didn't. On the contrary, they have been trying to sabotage the Trump peace initiative before anyone knew what it was going to be.

J-Street ignores the many positive moves towards peace that occurred in recent years - even while they defend the rights of Israel boycotters.

The conclusion: J-Street is not pro-peace.

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The Untouchable Ilhan Omar (ElderToons)

Jewish Insider reports that Ilhan Omar, Minnesota representative in Congress, said some more outrageous antisemitic stuff.

First, the usual "Jews are attacking my antisemitic statements because I'm a Muslim and I'm only criticizing Israel:"

Rep. Omar elaborated that when she hears her Jewish constituents offer criticisms of Palestinians, she doesn’t automatically equate them as Islamophobic but is “fearful” that people are painting her as anti-Semitic because she is a Muslim. Omar continued, “What I’m fearful of — because Rashida and I are Muslim — that a lot of our Jewish colleagues, a lot of our constituents, a lot of our allies, go to thinking that everything we say about Israel to be anti-Semitic because we are Muslim,” she explained.

No, she is being "painted" as antisemitic because she intimates Jewish control over Congress and Jews hypnotizing the world.

But then comes the real hypocrisy:

“To me, it’s something that becomes designed to end the debate because you get in this space of – yes, I know what intolerance looks like and I’m sensitive when someone says, ‘The words you used Ilhan, are resemblance of intolerance.’ And I am cautious of that and I feel pained by that. But it’s almost as if, every single time we say something regardless of what it is we say…we get to be labeled something. And that ends the discussion. Because we end up defending that and nobody ever gets to have the broader debate of what is happening with Palestine.”

“So for me, I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay to push for allegiance to a foreign country,” Rep. Omar exclaimed, seeming to suggest, as Tlaib had in a tweet of her own, dual loyalty among a particular group of Americans. Loud rounds of applause and shouts of affirmation punctuated the event’s heavy focus on Israel.

If she was only criticizing Israel then no one would say anything about antisemitism.

But look what she does here: first she implies that Jews who criticize her are Islamophobic and then she says another blatantly antisemitic statement, that Jews have allegiance to Israel above the United States - and she can proudly say that to her leftist fans because she already inoculated herself by suggesting that her critics are Islamophobic!

It isn't the false accusations of antisemitism that are shutting down debate about Israel. It is false accusations of Islamophobia, and racism, and misogyny, that is shutting down Democratic debate about her consistent habit of using antisemitic tropes!

In other words:

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02/28 Links Pt2: Anti-Israel Democrats Defend Past Comments At Anti-Israel Restaurant; Omar on Anti-Semitic Tweets: I Did Not Apologize for Being Anti-Semitic; Guardian employs ‘What would Jesus think?’ trope to sell anti-Israel narrative

From Ian:

Anti-Israel Democrats Defend Past Comments At Anti-Israel Restaurant

Freshman Democratic congresswomen Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) defended their comments on Israel and its influence in the United States on Wednesday night at Busboys and Poets, a restaurant owned by a man who himself has said the United States takes "marching orders from Tel Aviv."

The Washington, D.C., restaurant was filled to capacity for the "Progressive Town Hall," which also included representatives Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.) and Mark Pocan (D., Wis.), who heads the influential Progressive Caucus in the House. The members were introduced by restaurant owner Andy Shallal, an activist who in addition to arguing that the United States takes orders from Israel has accused the Jewish state of "terrorizing" the Middle East.

Omar, a Somalian-born Muslim from Minnesota, has found herself apologizing for comments she made about Israel that have been deemed anti-Semitic, but on Wednesday night defended her criticism of Israel and said the criticism comes just because of her religion.

"What I am fearful of, because both Rashida and I are Muslim, is that a lot of our Jewish colleagues and constituents go to thinking that everything we say about Israel is anti-Semitic because we are Muslim," Omar said. "It's something designed to end the debate."

"It's almost as if every time we say something that is supposed to be about foreign policy, or advocacy about ending oppression, or the freeing of every human life, we get to be labeled and that ends the discussion," she said. "We end up defending that and nobody gets to have the broader debate about what is happening with Palestine."

Omar Grins After Audience Member Celebrates ‘All About the Benjamins’ Tweet

As Omar was about to speak next, an audience member shouted out, "It is about the Benjamins," a reference to Omar's tweet earlier this month that said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) wanted to punish her and Tlaib's anti-Israel rhetoric because he was being paid off.

Omar grinned, and Tlaib looked to the side and smiled while taking a drink, seemingly suggesting she agreed with the sentiment, in a moment noted by Jewish Insider.

Omar also tweeted this month that AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, was paying off politicians to support Israel. She was eventually forced to apologize, although she said this week it was about how she made people feel, not about being anti-Semitic.

Tlaib has suggested pro-Israel politicians have dual loyalties, a classic anti-Semitic canard, and Omar has repeatedly been dogged by anti-Semitic controversies, before and since taking office. She tweeted in 2012 Israel had "hypnotized" the world with its "evil" actions, declared it's amusing to her that the Jewish state is considered a democracy, and supported BDS, which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has called anti-Semitism in action.

Top Four Reasons Why Rep. Ilhan Omar is Wrong about AIPAC, Israel and the Palestinians

4. Omar’s “evil doings” of Israel are actually “evil doings” of the Arabs and the Palestinians

The evil doings of Israel that Omar refers to include first and foremost Israel’s supposed refusal to permit a Palestinian state. Yet history shows it is the Arabs and the Palestinians who have stood in the way of a Palestinian state, not Israel. Opportunities for a Palestinian state were rejected by the Palestinians and the Arab states multiple times, including:

In 1947 UNGA 181, the so-called Partition Resolution called for creation of a Jewish and an Arab state out of the territory of the British Mandate for Palestine. The Jews accepted the compromise, while the Arabs rejected it and promised to annihilate the Jewish state the moment the British withdrew. While the Palestinians and five Arab states attacked Israel and expected to win easily, in the end the Israelis, at great cost, beat back the invaders and survived the war. The Arab states made no effort to create a Palestinian state in the Mandate territory that they occupied after the war. For example, Jordan’s King Abdullah annexed the West Bank to his kingdom.

In 2000 President Clinton hosted Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli leader Ehud Barak for intensive talks at Camp David. After grueling negotiations Israel accepted the so-called Clinton parameters, but Arafat and the Palestinians rejected them. The Saudi representative to the talks, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, memorably said “If Arafat does not accept what is available now, it won’t be a tragedy, it will be a crime.”
But Arafat did turn down the Clinton parameters and instead returned home and triggered the so-called Second Intifadah, which included numerous Palestinian suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks in which over a thousand Israelis were killed.

In 2008, after extensive talks, then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and presented a comprehensive peace plan. Olmert’s plan would have annexed the major Israeli settlements to Israel and in return given equivalent Israeli territory to the Palestinians, would have divided Jerusalem, and also included a partial Palestinian “right of return.” According to The Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl, who had previously covered the region, “Olmert’s peace offer was more generous to the Palestinians than either that of Bush or Bill Clinton; it’s almost impossible to imagine Obama, or any Israeli government, going further.” Despite this, Abbas admitted to Diehl that he walked away.

Rep. Omar has got it exactly backwards. If there have been evil doings against the Palestinians, the perpetrators she should be upset with are the Arab and Palestinian leaders, especially Yasir Arafat and Mahmud Abbas, who did their best to nurture and perpetrate the conflict, rather than ending it on an honorable basis, all at the expense of the ordinary Palestinians Ilhan Omar claims to care about.

Omar on Anti-Semitic Tweets: I Did Not Apologize for Being Anti-Semitic

Commenting on anti-Semitic tweets she wrote earlier this month, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) said she did not apologize for being anti-Semitic during an interview with The Intercept released on Thursday.

"You've since apologized unequivocally for the tweet. You've said rightly that anti-Semitism is real. But just to be clear, I mean we're a few weeks on now, what were you apologizing for? Was it a badly worded tweet that you were apologizing for? Or was it for being anti-Semitic, wittingly or unwittingly?" host Mehdi Hasan asked around the 12:45 mark of the audio at the link above.

"Oh absolutely not," Omar responded. "I apologized for the way that my words made people feel. Oftentimes, you know, we are in places where someone will say something, and they might not know how it makes you feel and it's not acceptable, that once you express to them that this is hurtful, that you have felt attacked by their words, they should acknowledge how you feel, they should speak to that, they should apologize and figure out a way to remedy that situation."

"That's why you apologized?" Hasan asked.

"That's why I apologized," Omar said.

"And is that why you deleted your tweets this week?" Hasan asked. "The chairwoman of the Republican Party is all over Twitter suggesting that was some sort of … bad faith move on your part."

"I mean for a Republican who always makes a bad faith move to call someone out on that is laughable … The reason and the purpose of the apology was to make sure that the people who were hurt felt understood and heard, and leaving the tweets up no longer would be part of that," Omar said.

I mentioned on Sunday that four men were sentenced to prison in Libya for forming a Hamas cell there.

The specific charges were that the four had acquired and shipped arms to Hamas from Libya through the Sinai and then through tunnels to Gaza.

Hamas is not denying that they are members. They merely say that they should be released because they "have never entered into any of Libya's internal affairs, and did not tamper with its security."

Which is pretty much an admission that they were smuggling weapons.

Their families say Libya should release them because there is fear that they will be extradited to Israel, which seems highly improbable.

Islamic Jihad issued a statement today supporting them, saying "Resistance is not a crime, it is an honor and pride for all those who support it."

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse. – Osama bin Laden

All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer. – Niccolò Machiavelli

It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that anti-Jewish expression of all kinds – ordinary Jew-hatred, antisemitic violence, and anti-Zionism – throughout the world are at their highest levels since the end of the Second World War.

Theodor Herzl and others thought that the normalization of the Jewish people – the change from “rootless cosmopolitans” living in other peoples’ homelands to a settled people in its own land – would bring about an end to the phenomenon of Jew-hatred.

It did not. People didn’t hate Jews any less, and the Jewish state simply provided another focus for hatred and another target for violent antisemitism.

It was also thought that if the traumatic events of the Holocaust and their historical roots in Jew-hatred were known throughout the world, there would be a wave of moral revulsion that would put an end to antisemitism. In simple terms, 1) Jew-hatred leads to mass murder, 2) mass murder is bad, 3) therefore, Jew-hatred is bad. So Holocaust museums were built, educational programs mandated, films made, and so forth.

This may have had some temporary effect, at least on overt expressions of Jew-hatred, which became socially unacceptable for a time. But it did not change hearts, and now, some years later, even the effect on overt expressions of hatred has dissipated.

For those who like to put the entire blame for the Holocaust on Hitler, the Nazis, or even Germany, I note that many British officials acted – before, during, and after the war – as though they would rather see Jews dead than in Palestine. Similar observations apply to the actions of US President Roosevelt, who had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do the minimum possible on behalf of Hitler’s victims. I don’t know or care what was in the hearts of these people, but they were aware of the Holocaust and their actions were deliberate.

Jew-hatred, both the individual kind and the kind that expresses itself as hatred of the Jewish state, is dangerous to the continued survival of the Jewish people. Indeed, many of its practitioners are acting consciously with the destruction of our people as a goal. They know what they are doing and are effectively using modern technology and psychological techniques to attack us.

As Jews, we have two general options: we can acquiesce to the disappearance of the Jews as a distinct people through a combination of violent oppression and suicidal assimilation, or we can try to preserve it.

I take it as a given that the Jewish people should survive as a people, and I place my obligation to the Jewish people ahead of my obligation to humankind in general, just as I prioritize my family over the other inhabitants of my neighborhood. These are moral axioms, first premises; if you don’t agree with me, I have no further arguments to convince you of them (and probably you should stop reading).

I wish to present a general framework for the preservation of the Jewish people. I am not proposing specific tactics, or even overall strategies – just some general principles, inspired by the writings of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Kenneth Levin, Niccolò Machiavelli, and others: I call it the Strong Jew Doctrine. I introduced the concept here, and it has application both in the schoolyards and college campuses of the West, and on the battlefields of the Middle East.

It’s based on the idea that honor, respect, and deterrence are critical for survival, and these properties – which actually inhere in those that meet and confront us, friends and enemies – depend on our use of power or our hesitance to do so.

The Jewish people have both gained and lost from their diaspora experience; but during centuries as a powerless minority, it developed an inferiority complex which interferes with its use of power, now that we have it. Over the years, Jews became accustomed to trying to buy safety with money, negotiating from a position of weakness, depending on the protection of others, and developing the capability to suffer. These strategies sometimes succeed in saving our skins and sometimes not, but they worked against obtaining the respect of others, especially our enemies. They reinforced the antisemitic conception of the Jew as weak, sneaky, and contemptible – and as someone it is permissible to attack.

We don’t have to use those methods anymore. Today we are a people with an economically and militarily powerful homeland.

When challenged, whether by a neighborhood antisemite, the UN, or Hezbollah, a Jew or a Jewish state should respond in a way that takes into account not only meeting the particular challenge, but also maximizing the respect and deterrence that accrues as a result of our actions (our enemies, in particular, should experience fear and be deterred from future attacks). In this way, we not only hurt our enemies, but become the “strong horse.” The objective should be to obtain respect, not pity.

Sometimes what we must do to maximize respect is not consistent with European understandings of humanistic morality or international law. These are hard decisions, and there is no definitive general answer. Is it more important to avoid being accused of war crimes – which will happen regardless of what we do – or to reduce the risks faced by our ground troops in urban combat? This very question regularly comes up when the IDF is forced to enter Gaza or Arab towns in Judea/Samaria, and the army bends over backwards in the humanitarian direction. We would reduce the number of violent confrontations and our own casualties if we acted more aggressively when they did occur.

Here are some principles that either derive from or are consistent with the Strong Jew Doctrine, along with some examples of their application in personal and geopolitical situations:

1.      Self-reliance is better than dependence. Accepting American military aid may seem to be advantageous for Israel, but we can do without it, it makes us dependent on an unreliable partner, and has numerous other deleterious effects.

2.      It’s good to have passive defenses against aggression, but only an active response can provide a non-temporary solution. You can prevent a bully from hitting you by keeping your guard up, but you can only make him stop by hitting him back. Iron dome can protect a city, but it doesn’t motivate the enemy to stop firing rockets (indeed, it encourages him to fire more rockets in an attempt to overwhelm the system).

3.      Never pay tribute or ransom. Some Israeli “security” officials argue that improving the humanitarian situation in Gaza or helping the PA meet payrolls helps prevent conflicts. Wrong: paying our enemies or introducing aid of any kind frees up funds for military purposes and sends a message of weakness. They are enemies.

4.      Take revenge when appropriate. We live in the Middle East. Allowing members of other tribes to kill our people and to receive relatively mild penalties send the message that killing us is permissible. Allowing the PA to pay terrorists in our prisons encourages terrorism.

5.      Restraint is not an indicator of strength. It is often the opposite. Letting Hamas burn southern Israel sends the message that we are too weak to stop them.

6.      Use collective punishments when appropriate. Polls consistently show that the majority of residents of Gaza and the PA support violence against Israel. Many towns in the PA are dominated by clans associated with Fatah or Hamas. They provide direct support for terrorists. Why shouldn’t they pay a price?

7.      Reprisals should always be disproportionate. When a bully hits you, hit him back harder. As Machiavelli recommended, when you have to hurt someone, hurt him so badly that he will not be able to get revenge.

8.      Messaging should emphasize our strength, not our victimhood. Reports of terror attacks should stress that all the terrorists were eliminated on the spot (and they should be!), not how painful the attack was for us.

9.      Never make threats that we are not prepared to carry out.

It may seem paradoxical, but the more aggressive we are, the less Jew-hatred there will be. People and nations give lip service to meekness, but honor comes from boldness and exercise of power. At the end of the day, it’s the strong horse that gets respect.

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02/28 Links Pt1: The Palestinians' Automatic "No" to Peace; Gaslighting Gaza: Initial Analysis of UN Commission of Inquiry on Gaza Riots; Netanyahu to stand trial for bribery and breach of trust

From Ian:

The Palestinians' Automatic "No" to Peace

The Palestinian issue—once at the heart of Arab political discourse in our region—has been pushed to the margins. Mahmoud Abbas might still be able to extract a promise out of the elderly Saudi king not to go "behind the Palestinians' backs," but the entire world knows about the business his son conducts with Israel. The Arab world has a hard time understanding what the Palestinians want, and why they allow themselves to continue managing their affairs in such a failed manner.

"If you want to free all of Palestine—ahlan wasahlan ('welcome'), but you need to unite. If you want a state alongside Israel, why do you keep saying 'no' again and again when offered one?" one Egyptian TV anchor wondered.

Since automatic Palestinian refusal is a given, what exactly motivates Jared Kushner, Trump's point man on the peace process? Is he still hoping the Palestinians change their minds when they learn the details of the plan? Probably not. He didn't even bother giving an interview to a Palestinian media outlet, and instead directed his comments to the Arab world, mostly the Gulf nations (Sky Arabic, to which he gave the interview, is funded by the United Arab Emirates). In other words: he's thinking about the day after the Palestinian "no," when Arab countries could come to them and say: "You once again rejected a generous proposal, we won't remain hostages to your intransigence."

It seems farfetched, but work preparing the Arab street for relations with Israel that could be defined as "on the scale of normalization" has been going on for a few years.

"If the Palestinian leadership used the money donated by the Arabs since 1948 for Palestine, it would've already built 50 cities like Tel Aviv, 40 cities like Dubai and 30 cities like Riyadh," tweeted an Iraqi journalist this week —and got a shower of likes.

PMW: PA will cut all Palestinian salaries, except for terrorists and their families

Impending PA financial crisis follows Abbas decision to not accept Israeli transfers of approx. 670 million shekels/month after Israel decided to deduct 41 million shekels/month from PA tax money equivalent to the amount PA pays terrorist prisoners

“PA Minister of Finance announced that the [PA] government will pay the salaries of the public employees on time, but they are likely to be partial, other than the pension stipends and the allowances of the families of the Martyrs, the wounded, and the prisoners, which will be paid in full.”

PA TV: “Our Martyrs and prisoners (i.e., terrorists and murderers) are the source of our glory and pride. They are more honorable than all of us.”

PA Prime Minister: “The payment of the money to the prisoners and Martyrs' families is our responsibility, not a gift or grant but rather an inseparable part of the social contract between the state and its citizens.”

PA Minister of Finance: “There is an official decision... not to accept the tax money if even a single penny is missing from it."

PA Minister of Finance explains pay cuts: Terrorists keep a full salary, but public employees and private sector must sacrifice

Read more about this here: https://t.co/Rq7o6vB61W pic.twitter.com/aLTHrXGZSm
— Pal Media Watch (@palwatch) February 27, 2019