Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, May 27, 2019

05/27 Links Pt1: German paper to print cutout kippah in solidarity with Jews; Israel Destroyed Syria's Nuclear Potential. What Would The World Look Like Now If They Hadn't?; Fauxtography: Gaza Pink T-Shirt Scam?

From Ian:

Top German paper to print cutout kippah in solidarity with Jews

The editor of Bild, Germany’s largest newspaper, on Sunday said he will print a Jewish skullcap on the front page of the Monday paper so that Germans can cut it out and wear it in solidarity with the local Jewish community.

The protest comes days after the government official in charge of fighting anti-Semitism said he wouldn’t advise Jews to wear the traditional Jewish head-covering in parts of the country.

“If even one person in our country can’t wear a kippah without putting themselves in danger, the only answer is that we all wear a kippah,” Bild’s editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt tweeted. “The kippah belongs to Germany! That’s why tomorrow the kippah will be printed for cutting out on page one.”

Reichelt tweeted a photo of the mockup of the Monday morning edition cover page, which features an editorial and the stylized Star of David skullcap, called a kippah in Hebrew.

On Saturday, German anti-Semitism czar Felix Klein said his “opinion has unfortunately changed compared with what it used to be” on the matter. He said: “I cannot recommend to Jews that they wear the skullcap at all times everywhere in Germany.” He did not elaborate on what places and times might pose a danger.

U.S. ambassador urges Jews in Germany to wear kippot and not conceal identity

The US government’s most high-profile ambassador in Europe, Richard Grenell, said Jews in Germany should not conceal their religious identity, and urged them to wear kippot in defiance of a statement from Germany’s commissioner to combat antisemitism that Jews should avoid wearing kippot in public.

“The opposite is true,” tweeted Grenell, the US ambassador to Germany. “Wear your kippa. Wear your friend’s kippa. Borrow a kippa and wear it for our Jewish neighbors. Educate people that we are a diverse society.”

On Saturday, Felix Klein, the federal government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism, told the Funk media group, “My opinion on the matter has changed following the ongoing brutalization in German society. I can no longer recommend Jews wear a kippah at every time and place in Germany.”

President Reuven Rivlin reacted on Sunday, saying “The statement of the German government’s antisemitism commissioner – that it would be preferable for Jews not to wear a kippah in Germany out of fear for their safety – shocked me deeply. Responsibility for the welfare, the freedom and the right to religious belief of every member of the German Jewish community, is in the hands of the German government and its law enforcement agencies. We acknowledge and appreciate the moral position of the German government, and its commitment to the Jewish community that lives there, but fears about the security of German Jews are a capitulation to antisemitism and an admittance that, again, Jews are not safe on German soil.

“We will never submit, will never lower our gaze, and will never react to antisemitism with defeatism – and we expect and demand our allies act in the same way.”

German chancellor Merkel commits to ensuring security for Jews with kippahs

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman on Monday stressed the country’s responsibility to ensure security for all Jews wearing kippahs anywhere in the country without having to fear an anti-Semitic attack.

“It’s the job of the state to ensure that anybody can move around securely with a skullcap in any place of our country,” Steffen Seibert said.

The comments came after the government’s anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, said he wouldn’t advise Jews to wear the traditional Jewish head-covering in parts of the country.

Felix Klein said his “opinion has unfortunately changed compared with what it used to be” on the matter. He said: “I cannot recommend to Jews that they wear the skullcap at all times everywhere in Germany.” He did not elaborate on what places and times might pose a danger.

Government statistics released earlier this month showed that the number of anti-Semitic and anti-foreigner incidents rose in Germany last year, despite an overall drop in politically motivated crimes.

Arabs pathetically keep trying to play the "Arab street" card

From Al Jazeera:

As the announcement of the deal of the century approaches, the Arab world is growing increasingly tense. Widespread rumours about the contents of the proposal have fuelled public outrage across the region.

This is a very old and discredited talking point. There was no mass uprising by the vaunted Arab street against the US Embassy move to Jerusalem or the US recognizing the Golan Heights as being under Israeli rule - notwithstanding the dire warnings from the "experts."

Arabs will pay lip service to the Palestinian cause, but by and large they don't care. They know that the Palestinians have only themselves to blame, and the decade old Fatah-Hamas split has disgusted the Arab world.

The interesting thing about this op-ed, though, is that the threat of the Arab/Muslim street is not directed to the West, as it had been so many times over the past 150 years. It's directed at the Arab regimes themselves who are interested in the Trump/Kushner plan.

What the deal of the century will ultimately do is erase what little legitimacy Arab leaders have left and undermine their corrupt regimes. And just like in 2011, sooner or later, Arab anger will boil over and sweep through the region in yet another wave of uprisings which neither Israel, nor its western and regional allies will be able to control.

The idea that Arabs will rise up and topple their regimes is always a possibility. The thought that they will do it in support of Palestinians is sheer fantasy.

Notably, in the wake of Al Jazeera's AJ+ antisemtism scandal, they are still publishing Ramzy Baroud, who is an unapologetic supporter of murdering Jews.

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Palestinian leaders choose to hurt their people - just like in 1946

In 1946, the Arab League declared a boycott of Jewish businesses and services in Palestine.

Arabs in Palestine were instructed to not buy from Jewish merchants, not get services from Jews, not to go to Jewish doctors - even though there were not nearly enough Arab doctors to treat the Arab population.

The following articles show some of the trajectory of the boycott through 1946. Immediately, Jewish manufacturers and farmers looked to open up their markets to overseas customers, in Europe and the United States, and while some industries were somewhat hurt in the beginning, altogether Jewish exports rose significantly in 1946 compared to 1945.

Meanwhile, Arab League nations pretty much ignored the boycott themselves when there were goods they wanted. Arab boycotters started intercepting truckfuls of Jewish goods headed to Lebanon (and were arrested by the British for theft.)

Arabs in Palestine also mostly ignored the boycott, causing self-appointed enforcers to hreaten and injure (including with bombs) businesses that ignored the boycott.

Yet as two of these stories show, even the leaders of the boycott used Jewish goods when it suited them.

A boycott that was meant to hurt Jews ended up hurting only Palestinian Arabs. The people were the victims of the selfish decisions of their so-called "leaders" who themselves often ignored the boycott.

Bnai Brith Messenger, Friday, January 04, 1946

Bnai Brith Messenger, Friday, January 11, 1946

The Palestine Post, Tuesday, March 05, 1946

The Palestine Post, Monday, April 01, 1946;

The Palestine Post, Tuesday, July 23, 1946

The Palestine Post, Monday, August 26, 1946

The Palestine Post, Thursday, October 24, 1946; Page: 4

A similar thing is happening today. Palestinian Arab leaders are saying that they will boycott a conference that is meant to help their people economically. The people who are most affected by not attending don't get a say - they are pawns just as they were in the past. Just as in 1946, if any speak up, they are risking their lives. Just as in 1946, many of them certainly want to gain the benefits of working with Jews and massive investment that would help everyone - but their newspapers will not print their stories.

The main difference between then and is that so much of the world hates Trump and Israel that many people who pretend to want to help Palestinians are taking the side of their corrupt leaders over the actual Palestinian Arabs who will be hurt by not attending the conference.

Remember, attending the conference in Bahrain does not place any political obligation on Palestinians at all. It is purely meant for their benefit, with no downside - and their leaders refuse, anyway.

The only people who actually are showing interest in helping the day to day lives of Palestinian Arabs are the Trump team and Israel.

Of course there is an ulterior motive - people who are in better shape economically are less likely to become terrorists or support terror. Which means that those who opposed or disparage the conference are tacitly saying that they prefer terror to economic peace.

This is crazy. But this is the world we live in. And the people who pay the price, as always, are the Palestinian Arabs themselves.

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From Times of Israel:

The Israel Fire and Rescue Service on Sunday said it suspects arson as the cause of a fire that broke out on Thursday at Ben Shemen Forest and burned down almost the entire adjacent community of Mevo Modi’im in central Israel.

Fueled by the scorching weather, more than a thousand fires devastated towns and forests across the country from Thursday to Saturday, forcing thousands of people out of their homes.

After an investigation into the Mevo Modiim blaze, the fire service determined it was sparked in several different spots, raising suspicion of arson.

And:

Fires broke out Sunday evening in a wooded area between the Jewish neighborhood of Pisgat Zeev and the Shuafat Palestinian refugee camp in East Jerusalem, Israel Police said in a statement.

Hebrew media reported that the fires, in a valley alongside Eliyahu Meridor Street, were caused by Molotov cocktails.

An additional Molotov cocktail was thrown at firefighters as they battled to prevent the flames, the Kan public broadcaster reported.

There is a long history of Arab terrorist fires (both forest fires and against factories and residences) in Israel that pre-dates 1948.

July 24, 1939:

In September 1945, a JNF official wrote an article that touched on the constant arson the organization had to fight:

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Sydney, Australia man planned to stab Jewish students wearing Kippot

From Australian Jewish News:

A CONVICTED terrorist who stabbed a man in Sydney’s south-west had plans to kill Jewish students at the University of Sydney as a “revenge” attack, a court has heard.

Taking to the witness box, Ihsas Khan told a sentencing hearing he had bought the knife used in the 2016 attack to target students wearing kippahs.

“I was planning on using it on Jewish students in the university to kill them. Just people wearing the Jewish head gear, the kippah,” he said.

“I was filled with hatred … It was revenge for what was happening in Palestine.”

People from certain leftist groups would find that last line to be a valid excuse for wanting to kill Jews, as long as the terrorist remembers next time to say that he only wanted to target "Zionists."

(h/t PookieSaurus)

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05/26 Links: Western aversion to Israel is really self-hatred; PA PM: Palestinians may revoke recognition of Israel; Jewish Teens Don't Regret Helping Save Man With Swastika Tattoo

From Ian:

Western aversion to Israel is really self-hatred

The recent Conservatism Conference in Jerusalem, sponsored by the Tikvah Fund, was notable in a number of respects. Besides being a gathering of almost 800 like minded people who share a moral and intellectual clarity about critical political and philosophical issues, the Conference cast both a direct and a reflected light on some of the most pressing issues confronting the West.

Yoram Hazony, one of Israel’s greatest minds, made the exhilarating point that much of the world not only respects Israel, but wants to emulate Israel. Hazony believes that foreign observers applaud our traditionalism: our traditional values, our engagement if not observance with religion, our respect for the family, community and nation.

British political commentator Douglas Murray went on to contrast attitudes in Israel with those in Europe, finding that Israelis were more comfortable embracing nationalism, patriotism, and a respect for national borders than their European counterparts.

Murray made the provocative point that guilt was driving much of the European behavior towards migrants, and this was perhaps a reason for their adopting policies that he depicted as suicidal.

While the two men seemingly contradicted each other, I think they were actually describing two sides of the same coin.

In Murray’s view, the West has been untethered from the values and the mindset that made it the West. He detects a lurking fear of reverting to 20th century behavior, much as a recovering addict fears slippage back into his own self-destructive behavior.

This fear is the product of an expansive guilt, not just of German genocidal evil, but guilt about Colonialism. Murray astutely noted this feeling in England which once “controlled much of the world,” but also noted its widespread existence in Sweden, “which never controlled anything.”

The Rage Less Traveled

On December 18, 2010, two female friends – one Christian and the other Jewish - were hiking together in the hills of Jerusalem when they were accosted by a pair of members from a Palestinian terror cell. Both women were bound and hacked with machetes until the Christian, Kristine Luken, was dead and the other seemingly so.

But in an incredible display of a bottomless will to live, Kay Wilson – with thirteen machete wounds, a crushed sternum, multiple rib fractures, bone splinters in her lungs, a dislocated shoulder and broken shoulder blade – got up and walked over a mile barefoot, bound, and bleeding until she reached help. She survived to testify against her assailants in court. The reason the pair was caught was that Wilson had managed to stab one in the groin with a penknife during the assault, and investigators linked him to the DNA in his blood on her clothing. The two monsters, who were convicted of other crimes as well, including stabbing another Jewish woman to death earlier that same year, were imprisoned for life.

The Rage Less Traveled: A Memoir of Surviving a Machete Attack is Kay Wilson’s relentlessly gripping, intensely personal story. You can find it on Amazon here (and here on audiobook) where the book has racked up dozens of exclusively 5-star reviews. Simultaneously raw and poetic, transcendent and unsentimental, The Rage Less Traveled is not a predictable book about learning to forgive your attackers or seeking interfaith dialogue with members of a Jew-hating ideology. The book acknowledges that evil exists and that there can be no coexistence with it. It is a story about the tortuous road through survival into the light. As Wilson said in her 2019 AIPAC address, “My story is Israel’s story.”

Ms. Wilson kindly agreed to answer some questions about the book and her shocking experience.

PMW: Boy taught to shoot at Jews – “the enemy” - in special Ramadan series on PA TV about Arab village

During the current month of Ramadan, official Palestinian Authority TV is broadcasting a series called Children of the Village Chief. The series portrays Arab life around the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and afterwards in a village in what was until the Six-Day War in 1967, the "West Bank" of the Kingdom of Jordan.
The poster of the series

The first program starts with the so-called Palestinian "Nakba" - the "catastrophe" of the creation of Israel - and continues until the 1980s. In the series, which deals primarily with daily life during this period, attitudes to Israel and Jews are likewise expressed.

In one episode, a boy around the age of 10 asks his uncle to teach him how to use a rifle because he wants to shoot at "the Jews." The uncle willingly answers his nephew's request, explaining that he should only aim at "your enemy," who the boy then identifies as "the Jews":
Nephew Fares: "Uncle Ibrahim, I want you to teach me how to use the rifle"
Uncle Ibrahim: "Why do you want to learn to shoot?"
Fares: "So that if the Jews come to the village, I'll shoot them like you shot them at Khirbet Al-Loz." ...
Ibrahim: "Fares, your weapon will only be pointed at your enemy, and you know who your enemy is."
Fares: "The Jews, who removed us from our land and our homes, like they removed us from Khirbet Al-Loz."
Ibrahim: "Therefore, Fares, immediately when you see your target, aim at it well and shoot it. Are you ready?"
Fares: "Ready!"
Ibrahim: "Go ahead, hero."
[Official PA TV, Children of the Village Chief, May 11, 2019]

Cartoon of the Day: Tikkun Olam vs. Judaism

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

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Arabs freak out over the word "Shalom" showing up in Medina

Israel in Arabic tweeted about a sign in the Muslim-holy city of Medinah. Saudi Arabia. welcoming visitors in many languages - including "Shalom" in Hebrew (for some reason shown off the coast of Africa.)

Palestine Today put out a video about it which I don't understand but the announcer clearly is very concerned over how four Hebrew letters could defile a Muslim holy place.

Responses in Arabic to the tweet ranged from outrage to shoulder shrugging.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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Jordanian newspaper seen as close to royal family says Palestinians should go to Bahrain conference

This was surprising, from the Jordan Times:

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is pouring cold water on the US plan to convene a conference in Bahrain on June 25-26 to promote investment and business opportunities for the West Bank and Gaza, for fear it is part of the dreaded ”deal of the century” that President Donald Trump is contemplating for the Palestinians.

Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh flatly rejected the idea, saying that his government was not even consulted on it. Palestinian Social Development Minister Ahmed Majdalani went even further after a Cabinet meeting by declaring that “there will be no Palestinian participation in the Manama workshop. Any Palestinian who would take part would be nothing but a collaborator for the Americans and Israelis”. Hamas followed suit. Hamas official Fawzi Barhoum emphasised that “we reject any economic and political steps that aim to implement the deal of the century or to normalise ties with the Israeli enemy”.

These are strong words from the PA and Hamas against an investment conference that business leaders and executives from Europe, the Middle East, the US and Asia are expected to attend. This premature negativism is unwarranted and has become a familiar pattern in the Palestinian thought that made things worse for the Palestinian people.

For starters, no one, including the Palestinians, knows for sure what this suspicious ”deal of the century” really looks like. Without having an inkling of what the US proposal for peace between the Palestinians and Israelis would look like, the Palestinians have rushed to reject it in toto.

Besides, a meeting to promote the economy of the Palestinian territories by inviting investments from the US, Europe and Asia could be as benign as it sounds. The Palestinians may welcome this initiative after all without endorsing the wider political implications. The Palestinian side would be better advised not to rush into taking positions that may hurt them, especially when the projected Manama conference as such is only a forum for considering improving the Palestinian economies in the West Bank and Gaza.

Welcoming the conference in Bahrain, or at least not impeding it, would provide the Palestinians with an opportunity to test the full implications of the initiative. Breathing life into the lifeless Palestinian economy cannot in itself be so bad after all. The Palestinian leadership cannot go on saying “no” to everything offered to them before examining the full implications.

The Manama initiative may not be such a bad idea before exploring it.

Given how former diplomats who were so invested in the Oslo process have been so vocal in disparaging the Bahrain conference before even knowing what it is about, this is a refreshing opinion - and one that makes a lot of sense.

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05/25 Links: Al Jazeera Writes Another Chapter in Its Own Ugly History; Little Help From American Jews During the Holocaust; The Left is mainstreaming Palestinian Marxist terrorists

From Ian:

Al Jazeera Writes Another Chapter in Its Own Ugly History

Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the former host of the show, has been banned from the U.S., Britain, and France for his extremist views, which include praise of Adolf Hitler and an insistence that the killing of American soldiers is a “religious obligation.” Al-Qaradawi has been considered the intellectual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his status as a respected imam in Qatar is secure despite his retiring from television.

Sunni preachers such as al-Qaradawi are Al Jazeera’s go-to experts on political subjects, all the better to offer the Muslim world an anti-establishment, Islamist alternative to other state-run outlets, which the network seems to suggest have weakened their respective countries. The Nation’s Kristen Gillespie wrote in 2007 that the “clear, underlying message” of the field reports is that the way out of the humiliation of the Muslim world by the West is “political Islam.” After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Al Jazeera’s secular Baghdad bureau chief was replaced by Wadah Khanfar, an Islamist sympathizer who former employees note was responsible for the hiring of hard-line Islamists as his assistants.

In July 2008, Al Jazeera’s flagship Arabic channel threw Samir Kantar, a Lebanese man who killed three Israelis — including a four-year-old girl — in 1979, a party upon his repatriation in a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hezbollah. “Brother Samir, we wish to celebrate with you,” Ghassan Ben Jeddo, then the network’s Beirut bureau chief, was filmed exclaiming during the party, which aired on the channel, and included a cake with Kantar’s picture on it. Wadah Khanfar, by then Al Jazeera’s director general, later apologized for the incident, writing in a letter that the broadcast violated the outlet’s code of ethics. He also assured the public that he had ordered the channel’s programming director to take measures that would prevent similar incidents in the future.

Evidently, whatever measures were taken — if any were taken — have failed. As last weekend’s video showed, Al Jazeera continues to rely on conspiratorial anti-Semitic tropes and Islamist rhetoric to fan the sectarian flames in the Middle East. The damage it does should not be underestimated: It appears in the channel listings of every home with Arabic-language satellite television, in the Middle East and the West. Its English-language affiliate offers slick propaganda to appeal to progressives in hopes of sugarcoating the sinister political aims of its Qatari corporate overlords. This latest controversy is just the tip of a very large iceberg.

Gil Hoffman: John Hagee’s Juggernaut

The CUFI founder and Texas megachurch pastor reflects on his organization’s membership reaching six million.

When entering the offices of Christians United for Israel (CUFI) in San Antonio, the first sight seen is the Western Wall.

The model of the Kotel is no coincidence.

A visit to the site in Jerusalem more than 40 years ago inspired CUFI founder and chairman Pastor John Hagee to become America’s leading Christian Israel advocate and arguably the world’s most successful builder of support for the Jewish state.

A year ago, Hagee delivered the benediction at the US Embassy opening in Jerusalem, in which he called Israel “the lone torch of freedom in the Middle East” and said the message of the embassy move should be heard by every Islamic terrorist in the halls of the United Nations and at the presidential palace in Iran.

Hagee celebrated the one-year anniversary of the embassy opening by announcing that CUFI had reached the symbolic figure of six million members, less than six months after the organization reached five million, and 13 years after it began with 400.

He said antisemitism becoming more mainstream in America has made CUFI more vital than ever. The six million number was not CUFI’s only recent achievement.

The embassy opening happened after more than 135,000 CUFI members emailed the White House asking US President Donald Trump to keep his pledge to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital.

In March 2018, after a 15-month lobbying campaign, including more than one million emails sent to elected officials by CUFI members, the Taylor Force Act became law, threatening to freeze State Department funds to the Palestinian Authority unless it ends its longstanding practice of compensating terrorists and the families of terrorists convicted in Israeli courts.

CUFI also claims credit for Trump’s cutting all US funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in August 2018, and Trump formally recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights in March.

Little Help From American Jews During the Holocaust

American public opinion before World War II was deeply divided about what to do about Nazi Germany, and even less interested in the fate of German Jews under the Nazi regime.

Those are two of the conclusions that emerge from recent examinations of the period, which were highlighted last week at a program in Atlanta, “What Were We Watching? American’s Responses through Cinema, Radio and Media.” It was presented at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in downtown Atlanta by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The program featured Daniel Greene, a distinguished historian and curator of a major new exhibit at the Holocaust museum in Washington, “Americans and The Holocaust,” which opened last year. The exhibit details how many of the issues that America wrestled with in the Depression years of the 1930s shaped the response to the rise of Nazis. Issues such as how to cope with isolationism, racism and extremism on the left and right made it difficult for Americans to come to terms with anti-Semitism in America, much less what was happening in Europe.

Greene spoke about America’s response to Kristallnacht, the German attack on Jews in November of 1938. While Roosevelt condemned the attack and recalled America’s ambassador to Germany, he kept a firm lid on Jewish immigration to America, Greene said.

“There was no political will to liberalize the immigration system.”

In a 1939 poll, two-thirds of Americans were even against taking in any refugee children threatened with annihilation.
Eddie Cantor, the popular Jewish-American entertainer, lost his radio program’s sponsor when he spoke out about the Nazis in 1939.

“It was Southern Democrats led by Sen. Robert Reynolds of North Carolina, who argued that American children had their own problems and we needed to take care of American children.”

05/24 Links Pt2: Hen Mazzig: Who Gets to Speak for Mizrahi Jews?; Irish Citizens Could Go to Prison for Shopping in Pre-1967 Israel; Save a Child’s Heart performs its 5,000th life-saving surgery

From Ian:

James Kirchick (LAT): The world faces many tragedies. The lack of a Palestinian state ranks low on the list

By investing the Palestinian cause with such monumental importance, politicians and polemicists mistake a regional quarrel for a global struggle. Even before the state of Israel was founded more than 70 years ago, Arab regimes and their Western sympathizers began pushing a narrative that the proverbial “Arab street” is stirred by nothing more deeply than the fate of Palestine. Yet, as the so-called “Arab Spring” demonstrated, what really motivates the Arab masses are not Israeli settlements in the West Bank but the daily indignities of their own lives, blame for which lies with their rulers, not the Jews. And as for those rulers, Shia Iran’s growing assertiveness on a variety of fronts — a nuclear program on the threshold of weaponization, suborning the genocidal Assad regime, fueling the ruinous war in Yemen — has led the Sunni Arab states to reach a historic realignment with the nation they used to lambaste as “the Zionist entity.”

The human cost of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is also marginal compared with other contemporaneous world conflicts. Since five Arab armies invaded the nascent Jewish state in 1948, the total number of casualties incurred on both sides pales in comparison to the lives lost in the Congolese civil war, the Russian carpet-bombing of Chechnya, or North Korea’s politically engineered famines. As you read this, some 1 million Uighur Muslims are languishing in Chinese reeducation camps, suffering a fate far more heinous than that endured by the average Palestinian.

The amount of global resources heaped upon the Palestinians appears wholly disproportionate when contrasted to the measly efforts expended upon other stateless peoples, like the Tibetans and Kurds, whose claims are at least as justified and whose tactics have been nowhere near as morally objectionable. (It was the Palestinians, after all, who pioneered the scourge of terrorism in the 1960s and ’70s.) And as for the argument that U.S. military aid to Israel validates heightened attention to the conflict, a comparison with U.S. commitments — in actual blood and treasure — to treaty allies in Europe and Asia renders it hollow.

That the Palestinians lack a state is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy largely of their own making. More than once have they been presented with the opportunity to create a sovereign country alongside Israel; each and every time they responded with violence. On the long and growing list of world problems, the absence of a Palestinian state ranks somewhere between the conflicts over Transnistria and Western Sahara, neither of which you are likely to read about on newspaper front pages.

Hen Mazzig: Who Gets to Speak for Mizrahi Jews?

When they arrived in Israel, my grandparents did not see themselves as Palestinian Jews—they had never before lived in Mandatory Palestine. They saw themselves as Jews of Iraqi descent returning to the ancient homeland they and their ancestors had dreamed of and prayed of for thousands of years, the land from which they were once expelled and to which they were overjoyed to return. And they also understood themselves to be distinct from their Ashkenazi brothers and sisters: They were all Jews, but my grandparents were proud of their Mizrahi heritage just as the 200,000 Israelis of Ethiopian descent are proud of theirs.

Lamont Hill ignores all that. He also turns the imperial narrative on its head, accusing Israel of the crimes that were, in reality, committed by its Arab neighbors in the name of pan-Arabism. Since the 20th-century rise of pan-Arabism, leaders advocated Arabization policies of indigenous national groups—whether the Kurds, the Berbers, the Arameans, or the Sudanese—and sought to permanently reduce the status and power of indigenous religious groups, such as the Copts and Maronites, across the region. This sort of abuse goes on: Two decades ago, there were 1.4 million Christians living in Iraq; today, there are fewer than 250,000, an 80% drop. It’s precisely the same imperialist policy, intolerant of minorities, that drove my grandparents out all these decades ago.

You’d think that Lamont Hill, a self-proclaimed researcher of these topics, would know these facts. And you’d think that, as a self-described progressive, he’d at least listen to me as I shared my personal family history with him. He did not: In response to my article, Hill merely claimed that he studied Mizrahi Jews, and thus he knows better than me about my own community. It’s a statement that would make any decent person cringe. Imagine if I claimed that I studied racism and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and had the right to make any claim I wanted about the African American community, lecturing it about its own history. Lamont Hill, I suspect, would be rightly outraged, and yet he and many of his allies on the anti-Israel left expect the Jewish people to sit back and listen to him—a man who doesn’t speak the language, hasn’t lived in the region, and doesn’t understand the culture—lecture us on our history and our identity.

In the wake of some of Lamont Hill’s recent controversial statements about Israel, several leading Jewish voices, including Peter Beinart, rushed to defend Lamont Hill against charges of anti-Semitism. It is hard, however, to see how distorting Jewish history and silencing Jewish voices to promote a vicious and false charge could be construed as anything but.

Irish Citizens Could Go to Prison for Shopping in Pre-1967 Israel if This New Anti-Israel Law Passes

A new bill pending approval by the Irish government is just a few steps away from becoming law.

The proposed law would make it illegal for Irish citizens to buy goods and services from Israeli citizens in what they define as the occupied territories. That would make it illegal to buy an ice cream, a postcard or a bottle of water in the old city of Jerusalem.

Irish citizens Karen and Norman Ievers along with their twins Natalie and Nathaniel visit Israel often and would be significantly affected by the law

“We bought ice cream and we bought water here in the old city next to the Jaffa Gate and if this bill passes what we just did would be illegal,” Karen told CBN News.

“It’s an infringement upon our freedoms,” Normal added. “I just hope it won’t hurt anybody and that it won’t hurt Ireland.”

The bill is called the “Control of Economic Activity (in) Occupied Territories”. If convicted under the bill, an Irish citizen could be fined more than a quarter of a million dollars and spend up to five years in jail.

“The proposed Irish law is the most extreme anti-Israel legislation proposed anywhere outside the Arab league,” said Prof. Eugene Kontorovich. “If you come to the holy city and you buy some holy water, if you buy a Jewish prayer shawl or religious books and bring them back to Ireland, bang, jail.”

Prof. Kontorovich says the bill targets Israel.

“What’s shocking about this law is that it’s clearly discriminatory in nature. So, they say, ‘We consider this occupied territory. We have a problem with occupied territory.’ But other than the fact that it’s not occupied territory, the law does not apply to any other people or group other than Jews in their biblical homeland.”

At least the poor, thirsty Gazans have....swimming pools

Aussie Dave at Israellycool has had a long standing feature showing luxury hotels, restaurants and tourists spots in Gaza (I used to do that as well, but he does a better job!)

Most recently he has shown some private chalets available to rent in Gaza.

Many of them have swimming pools.

Doesn't Gaza have a water crisis?

Don't Israel haters love to claim that Israeli "settlements" steal all the water for their pools, while Palestinians don't get any water?

These pools don't look like they are filled with sewage.

It's almost as if the reporters from Gaza are not telling us the whole story about water.

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USA Today has an op-ed by Jason Kimelman-Block, who is a rabbi and Director of the "progressive" Bend the Arc Jewish Action.

The article pretends to be against weaponizing antisemitism from the Right. He has a point, but he undermines it by doing exactly what he blames the Right for doing - politicizing antisemitism instead of acknowledging it. In so doing, he is downplaying the experiences and alienating millions of Jewish Americans who are the victims of both left and right wing antisemitism.

...The pattern is by now quite clear. A Muslim member of Congress makes remarks about Israel. A conservative media outlet cherry picks a phrase, a couple of words, spinning opinion into news. Republican members of Congress — like Liz Cheney, Lee Zeldin, and Steve Scalise — launch disingenuous attacks on Twitter or in press releases. Conservative media —like Breitbart and The Federalist — pile on with front-page articles amplifying their blatantly false claims of anti-Semitism.

Then mainstream media outlets get in on the act, with more traditional platforms reporting on on the false accusations, lending them undue legitimacy. Even seemingly neutral headlines further the idea that the member of Congress has sparked a controversy, or is suddenly embattled, while allowing conservative voices to speak on behalf of the Jewish community. All that is before President Donald Trump jumps in with a tweet, continuing his offensive effort to push Jewish Americans to abandon the Democratic Party with fear-mongering and divisive rhetoric.

When Ilhan Omar made her comments about the "Benjamins," she was not referring to Israel. She was referring to American Jews controlling Congress. She then went on to accuse Jews of having more loyalty to Israel than to America. Those, plus her "hypnotizing the world" statement, were undoubtedly antisemitic dog-whistles at the very least. To say that this is part of a pattern of remarks about Israel being treated falsely as antisemitism is a lie. To downplay them is to deny Jews the agency to decide for ourselves what is offensive to us - not viewed through the lens of partisanship but the reality of Omar's statements.

A Jew offering support for Omar after three distinct offensive statements takes himself out of the community of Jews.

Tlaib's comment about the Holocaust was not antisemitic - but it was offensive to most Jews, nonetheless. She lied about a major event in Jewish history and downplayed her people's complicity in historic Jew-hatred. The Arab hatred of Jews has cost the lives of tens of thousands of people. Historical revisionism is not something to be dismissed so readily.

Ignoring these real concerns about the statements from members of Congress is insulting.

Here’s how the distraction works: when the waters are muddied, we can no longer see clearly. When threats are everywhere, they are nowhere, and fear can be sown about anyone. Fingers will often point to Muslim or Black leaders, people who have long been scapegoated as a source of danger in our society, and who are thus easy targets for people’s fear.

This is really offensive. If I find someone saying something that insults me as a Jew, I will call it out - no matter what the color, religion, gender or party of the person who says it.

Kimelman-Block is accusing anyone who feels the way I do of being a bigot. Yet he is the one who is saying that the color of a person affects how we should respond to their words.

If racism is treating people differently because of their color, Kimelman-Block is the racist here.

In this way our attention can be shifted from the people responsible for unleashing a wave of white supremacist violence targeting our communities. That’s why within 24 hours of the shooting at Chabad of Poway there were members of Congress and conservative pundits who obscured the shooter’s white nationalist manifesto by directing blame on a Muslim member of Congress and a cartoon in the New York Times International Edition.

...Ultimately, all the faux outrage and manufactured smears have real life consequences: they reduce the time, attention, and resources devoted to tackling the real sources of anti-Semitism that are actively putting my community and others at greater and greater risk.

The best way to respond is to keep the focus where it belongs, on the radical ideology of white nationalism and its normalization in our politics, and to reject efforts to divide our communities from each other.

If anyone actually blamed the New York Times for Poway they are obviously wrong. But notice that Kimelman-Block doesn't even characterize the NYT cartoon as antisemitic. His inability to even hint that there might be antisemitism outside the Right makes his entire essay an exercise in partisanship. It isn't about antisemitism at all.

I care about the safety of Jews more than I care about American politics. There is no question that right-wing antisemitism is an immediate danger to Jewish lives - usually, only right-wingers have guns. But left-wing, black and Muslim antisemitism are each real and toxic in their own ways. All of them feed Jew-hatred throughout the nation and makes Jews feel marginalized. This includes those who single out the Jewish state for criticism that is out of proportion to even the worst crimes anyone can accuse it of. It is all the same unhinged hate and it should all be exposed for what it is, no matter who the perpetrator is.

Kimelman-Block is not speaking as a Jew, no matter where he got his rabbinical ordination from. He is speaking as a leftist. He is purposefully downplaying and ignoring the other threats to Jews because they do not come from the far-Right. He does not talk about the near-daily attacks on religious Jews in New York City by blacks. He does not even acknowledge the existence of antisemitism in left-wing circles, even though at the grassroots level it is quite loud and obvious, both in the US and overseas - the far-Left and the far-Right are virtually indistinguishable in Jew-hatred.

Arab and Muslim antisemitism is endemic - and roundly ignored by Kimelman-Block and the Left. The only reason there have not been more Pittsburghs and Poways is because the FBI manages to foil an Islamic extremist plot to blow up synagogues every couple of years. (They tend to favor bombings rather than shootings.)

Not only that, but left-wing hatred of Israel directly fuels right-wing antisemitism - they routinely use biased Leftist sources like Max Blumenthal or Electronic Intifada to justify their own hate of Jews. The far-Right has embraced BDS just as enthusiastically as the Left. Pretending that the Right's hate of Israel is somehow antisemitic while the exact same language from the Left is merely political is yet another example of Leftist blindness to the hate on its own side. The loathing of Israel by leftists is psychologically indistinguishable from the loathing of Jews by the neo-Nazis, and to think that they don't have the same common denominator is to fool oneself.

Beyond that. Jews on campus feel real fear from the Israel-haters who intimidate them and who sometimes break out into violence. Kimelman-Block is minimizing and trashing the feelings of fear of hundreds of thousands of Jews for his own partisan reasons.

Kimelman-Block is weaponizing antisemitism just as much as he accuses the Right of doing, by implicitly saying that Jews who feel victimized by antisemitism from Muslims, BDSers, blacks or Arabs are actually making it all up or secretly in bed with Republicans or some other nonsense. Both sides are politicizing antisemitism, and the only victims are Jews who are being used as pawns for each side and whose actual concerns are being ignored by the parties who are guilty of whitewashing the hate on their own sides. This essay is just as much a whitewash and a politicization of Jew hatred as anything Trump has done.

If this leftist rabbi actually cared about Jews, this article would not be a polemic defending leftist antisemitism of Ilhan Omar, denying the historical revisionism of Rashida Tlaib, and minimizing the real fear of Jews who live in Brooklyn and Manhattan and on campus - while only going after his side's political opponents.

Kimelman-Block is using his title of a rabbi not to defend Jews but to alienate them and to push his own politics. Don't pretend to be speaking as a Jew when all you care about is hating Republicans and not caring about Jews.

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05/24 Links Pt1: U.S. Middle East Initiative, while Futile, Is Also a Breath of Fresh Air; What Would a Palestinian State Actually Look Like?; Dershowitz: Why is The NYTs Trying to Abort the Trump Peace Plan?

From Ian:

Jonathan S. Tobin: U.S. Middle East Initiative, while Futile, Is Also a Breath of Fresh Air

The Palestinian Authority has already made clear that it won't negotiate on the basis of the new U.S. peace initiative. Under the current circumstances, Palestinian leadership and the political culture that sustains them simply won't allow it. But that is not the only way to look at the plan.

By sticking to a plan that puts economics first and refusing to prioritize pandering to Palestinian intransigence, the U.S. is creating a template for peace that makes sense, one that is being welcomed by most of the Arab world. That means that even after they torpedo progress toward peace, it will be the Palestinians who will be more isolated than ever, not the U.S. Convening an economic summit in which Israelis and Arab states will openly work toward greater cooperation will enhance America's standing in the region.

The Palestinians have already repeatedly rejected peace deals that would have given them statehood in almost all of the West Bank, Gaza, and a share of Jerusalem in 2000, 2001, and 2008. What's more, they refused to negotiate seriously during Obama's eight years in office despite his nonstop efforts to tilt the diplomatic playing field in the Palestinians' direction.

The notion that the Sunni Arab states will blame the U.S. for trying to make a peace that the Palestinians will again reject is absurd. When the dust settles from the rollout of the American plan, the Arab states will be firmly in America's corner no matter what the Palestinians do.

What Would a Palestinian State Actually Look Like?

What would a Palestinian state actually look like? There have been four Palestinian quasi-states that provide ample data - in Jordan (1968-1970); in Lebanon (1970-1982); the Palestinian Authority in parts of the West Bank and Gaza (1993-onward); and the Hamas regime in Gaza (2007-onward). To the extent that the Palestinian movement has gained any semblance of self-rule and territorial control, it has built quasi-states that are militant and dictatorial - much to the detriment of the Palestinian people themselves.

Whenever the Palestinian movement has attained a modicum of self-rule over a stretch of territory, it has subjugated its own people and waged war against Israel. No honest error or inexperience with governance can explain this pattern. It reflects the ideas animating the leading factions of the Palestinian movement.

Some argue that we should suspend judgment until a sovereign, independent Palestinian state is realized. That's absurd. Why expect that handing authoritarians and theocrats more political power will convert them into champions of individual freedom? The idea of national self-determination cannot be a license to subjugate. No self-identified national community has the moral right to create a tyrannical regime.

Melanie Phillips: How are our new best friends in Saudi Arabia doing these days?

After last year's grisly murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, it looked like it might be curtains for Saudi reformist crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, known as MBS, who was accused of ordering his killing. As I revealed last October, however, Khashoggi was no reformer but an Islamist extremist. A one-time friend of Osama bin Laden, he called on all Arabs to join the "resistance" against Israel; and he opposed MBS because he wasn't jihadi enough. My own sources suggested the Khashoggi killing was an attempt by MBS to kidnap him back to Saudi Arabia that went badly wrong.

Until recently, Saudi Arabia was the principal exporter to the world of the Wahhabi strain of Islamic extremism, which has radicalized countless millions to the jihadi cause. Now, the kingdom is no longer trying so hard to do so. It has been almost completely replaced by Qatar as the main source of funding for global Islamist education, and Saudi newspapers regularly publish diatribes against Islamist extremism.

Does the Saudi thaw toward Israel go any deeper than a tactical alliance against a common foe - Iran? Some of what is now being said in the kingdom, necessarily with the tacit consent of its regime, goes further than might be expected from merely tactical considerations. During the most recent rocket onslaught from Gaza, several prominent Saudi journalists and intellectuals expressed support for Israel that went beyond merely blaming Turkey and Iran for being behind the attacks.

Saudi reform is moving at a glacial pace. With a population and culture steeped in Islamist fundamentalism and anti-Semitism, to move too fast would produce a violent backlash. But Saudi Arabia is inching in a direction that until very recently would have been thought utterly impossible. And that is a big deal. The writer is a columnist for The Times (UK).