To counteract BDS it’s not enough merely to condemn the movement’s lies, Nelson writes. In a series of chapters interspersed throughout Israel Denial, Nelson shows his commitment to the imperfect yet inspiring reality of Israel, giving his own ideas about increasing peace between Israelis and Palestinians through a series of trust-building Israeli concessions like ceding parts of the West Bank’s Area C to the Palestinian Authority. The point is to create a two-state dynamic even without a peace deal. He describes his own practice of “teaching for empathy” by presenting Jewish and Palestinian poets together. Nelson’s Israel is not the mythic realm of demons fantasized by BDS advocates but an actual place that contains signs of hope.
Yet professors and students like Nelson are often denied chances to share their experiences. Instead they are silenced by BDS, which seeks to advance their agenda not through reasoned debate but by a full-frontal assault on free speech. BDS adherents have in the last few years tried to shut down 90 mostly Israeli speakers, some of whom were bona fide leftists. Tactically, the BDS movement uses violence and extreme pressure to forcefully prevent reasoned discussion about Israel on campus, and make university faculty, administrators, and students afraid.
It is in the context of the BDS movement’s campaign of continuous pressure and often violent intimidation against those who hold more nuanced, fact-based views that the apparatus of academic BDS publications and conferences should properly be understood. The jargon of po-mo theory, words like “apartheid,” and baldfaced lies about organ harvesting and biological warfare are intended to intimidate while serving as a fig leaf for the eliminationist fantasies they are intended to justify. Even when the facts are wrong, the fact that books are published and conferences are held allows nervous administrators to pretend that the BDS movement is somehow observing normal rules of academic discourse, rather than violating them.
Yet perhaps because of these social pressure tactics, BDS gets a free ride in much of the mainstream media. Their violent heckling of speakers, their traffic in disinformation, and their opposition to dialogue and open debate are nowhere mentioned, for example, in a recent New York Times Magazine piece by Nathan Thrall. When BDS looks in the mirror, what it sees is the noble faces of crusaders against injustice—but that’s because the mirror is cracked, too.
These days, American universities give awards to student BDS organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, which dutifully parrot the hateful nonsense spewed by their professors, in a grotesque parody of what a humanistic education should look like. Instead, the academy ought to follow the German Bundestag, which declared on May 17 that “the pattern of argument and the methods of BDS are anti-Semitic,” and, the Bundestag added, clearly reminiscent of Nazi-era anti-Jewish boycotts. It’s time that these words became as commonly accepted in America as they are in Germany.
In greeting DeSantis, Minister Erdan said, “Governor DeSantis has been one of the greatest and most consistent friends of Israel and of the U.S.-Israel alliance. Governor DeSantis promised that under his leadership, Florida would be the most pro-Israel state in America and he has kept his promise. In the name of the government and people of Israel, I want to thank Governor DeSantis for all that he has done.”
DeSantis’s decision to include the trip to Judea in his itinerary demonstrated two key facts.
First, elections matter. While it is true that Gillum tried to distance himself from his ties to BDS groups once they became an election issue, the fact is that he enjoyed long-standing, close ties to these groups. Gallium also harshly criticized President Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, and Israel’s steps to defend its border with Gaza from penetration by Hamas-organized mobs.
Had Gillum been elected, there is little chance Florida would today be leading the campaign to protect U.S. business, academic and cultural ties with Israel and defeating BDS campaigns to criminalize and discriminate Jews in the U.S. or in any part of Israel.
The second lesson from DeSantis’s visit is that the Palestinians are right about one thing: if Jewish life can be delegitimized in any part of Israel, then it will inevitably be delegitimized in all parts of Israel. You cannot defend Israel’s right to exist in general while claiming Jews are criminals for living or working or building in specific parts of the country.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced that he has decided to remove Airbnb from the state’s blacklist after it renounced its decision not to advertise apartments in Judea and Samaria.
“As governor, I have an obligation to oppose policies that unfairly target Israel,” DeSantis wrote on his Twitter account. “Once @Airbnb ended their discriminatory policy toward Israel, we decided to remove them from the @FloridaSBA Scrutinized Companies List.”
Florida sanctioned the global vacation website in January after it announced a decision to boycott West Bank settlements.
The state was able to make the move because, according to Florida law, any company that engages in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) actions can be placed on the Scrutinized Companies List. The state of Florida is prohibited from investing in publicly traded companies on that list or contracting with them for services. But such companies can still engage in commercial activities in the state.
In April, Airbnb announced it would back off of its plan to remove Jewish rentals in Judea and Samaria from its rental listings, to end lawsuits brought by hosts and potential hosts.
Argentina’s embassies in 20 cities around the world will mark the 25th anniversary of the terrorist bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center in Buenos Aires in a joint initiative with the World Jewish Congress.
The July 18, 1994 blast killed 85 people and injured more than 300.
The international commemorations began on Monday in Santiago, Chile, and are scheduled to continue this week in Berlin. Some of the other cities that will hold events through July 18 are New York, London, Madrid, Moscow, Brasilia, Canberra, Tel Aviv, Rome, and the United Nations Human Rights Committee in Geneva.
On Monday in Santiago the president of the local Jewish community, Gerardo Gorodischer, remembered the Chileans that were killed in the attack: Carlos Avendaño Bobadilla and Susana Kreiman.
The Argentinean ambassador to Chile, Jose Octavio Bordon, called for international cooperation from “the democratic countries of the world to put on trial in Argentina the Iranian citizens that are under an international arrest warrant” for their alleged responsibility in the attack.
No one yet has been convicted of the bombing, though Argentina – and Israel – have long pointed the finger at Tehran, implicating several former Iranian officials, and Hezbollah in the AMIA attack and also in the March 17, 1992 terrorist attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires.
🆕PODCAST: Lyn Julius’ book, Uprooted: 3,000 years of Jewish life vanished overnight
▶️A total rebuke to @georgegalloway’s #ApartheidIsrael tropes
▶️inc @HillelNeuer’s “Where are your Jews?”@UNHumanRights with his personal permission
▶️Mizrahi history
Malki with her father Arnold.
Detail from a family group photo taken on Arnold’s birthday in January 2001
The faces of some terror
victims stay in your mind and in your heart, for instance the face of Malki
Roth. In part it’s the outrage of the act: that someone could steal away a
beautiful young girl with so much promise and talent. But it’s also her smile in
the photos, with that soft sweetness, radiating what you’re positive was an
inner beauty to match the exterior.
What happened on August
9, 2001, at the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem, was and remains unspeakable.
But what is truly
unbearable is this: Ahlam Tamimi, the woman behind the murder of Malki Roth and
so many others, lives free and clear in Jordan. Tamimi was released from an
Israeli prison in the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange in 2011. Since that time
she has married, raised a family, and built a career on her status as a hero for
masterminding the murder of Jewish children. Of this she is proud. Of this she brags.
Here is an interview with Malki’s
father, Arnold Roth:
Varda Epstein: Tell us about
that day. How did you find out? How long until you knew?
Arnold Roth: Most people know
that the truly life-changing things that happen to us come when we least expect
them. This was a hot August Thursday at a busy time for me. I was chief
executive of a drug technology company based in one of Jerusalem’s science and
technology campuses and we had a lot on our plates, most of it very good.
I went to lunch with the same
friends as usual and got back just in time to receive a frantic call from
Frimet, my wife. “There’s been a pigua and I can’t reach the children.”
I went directly into calm-husband-and-father mode, trying to say what I really
believed: “Don’t reach for the worst. Give the kids time to call in and
reassure us.” But the call ended while I was in mid-sentence.
Jerusalem had been free of
major terrorist attacks for years at that point and the grim reality of armed
guards emplaced outside supermarkets and restaurants had not yet been
instituted. But the massacre at Tel Aviv’s Dolphinarium
had happened in June and the raging terrorism that the more ideological parts
of the media repulsively called the Second Intifada had gotten started almost a
year before. In the capital, we were living on borrowed time but we didn’t
realize it.
Frimet and I phoned back and
forth several times over the next two hours. Malki was the fourth of our
children, the oldest of our daughters, and at 15 busy, energetic and independent.
Her older brothers all checked in by phone during the early afternoon.
As a rising sense of something
awful started settling in, I phoned Malki’s cell a couple of times, begging her
to call back as soon as she could. I imagine Frimet did the same.
Around 4:00 pm, and although I
had a string of meetings and conference calls to deal with, I left my desk to
go home. Frimet called me just before that to say she couldn’t bear waiting at
home, was going mad from the worry and stress and needed to do something, go
somewhere. We have a very disabled youngest child who needs constant care so
Frimet leaving the house meant I needed to be there in her place.
I think of myself as
religiously observant and believe hashgacha pratit—divine providence at
the personal, individual level—is a real thing. I was trying to negotiate private
deals with the Almighty as I walked to the bus.
Let her phone be broken. Please
let her be in an area where there is no reception. Let her be mildly concussed.
I no longer remember the scenarios. But I was hoping desperately that I could
offer something that, if it were only accepted above, would let us off the hook
that started to feel more and more real.
There was no relief at home. At
first, I was alone with our daughter whose disabilities are extreme and
profound. We didn’t know how to communicate with her at that stage in her life.
So she was not part of the anxieties; rather she was part of the normalcy.
One by one, the children
arrived home and then so did Frimet, accompanied by one of our sons who had
started his compulsory military service the previous day and was sent home to
help with the emerging crisis. He and Frimet, it turned out, had been at one of
Jerusalem’s hospitals looking for whatever there was to look for. But before
Frimet left our street to get there, she encountered Avivah, our neighbor.
Avivah’s daughter Michal, it turned out, was with our Malki from early that
morning. The mothers went to the hospital together and then split up to search.
Frimet and our son found no sign or word of Malki and came home.
We all, in our separate private
nightmares, did our praying and hoping and deal-making in the ensuing hours. As
night fell, a neighbor struggled up the stairs, ashen-faced, to tell me at the
open door that Michal’s name had just been reported on the news as one of those
killed at Sbarro five hours earlier. The world, already deeply grim, now looked
a lot blacker.
Malki and the girl next door,
Michal Raziel, 2001. The closest of friends from when we moved into the
building in 1993. The girls were standing side by side when the Hamas human
bomb--a young religious zealot with an explosive-packed guitar case on his
back--walked unchallenged into Sbarro and exploded next to them. This photo
shows the two girls a few weeks before they were murdered. They are buried in
adjoining graves in Jerusalem.
Another neighbor, at the time a
department head at Hadassah Ein Karem who had been working the phones to tap
into his network of doctor contacts, walked in and told me to get ready to go
with him. “I was told there’s a teenage girl on the operating table. I’ll drive
you there.”
It turned out not to be Malki.
But as we stood there in the miyun (emergency room) area, surrounded by people
who looked like I felt, a medical colleague of his took in the situation and as
he rushed to deal with yet another emergency case, he may have said to my
friend: “I don’t know what to tell you” or something else guarded and careful. But
in the memory of the man I now am, nearly eighteen years later, what I remember
him saying is: “Check over there in that cubicle. There’s a girl we’re about to
operate on and another one who’s dead. One might be yours.”
That’s how one of life’s
hardest moments is engraved in my memory.
We didn’t find Malki anywhere.
A hospital social worker having what was surely one of her own most challenging
days, walked over to me and, under huge stress herself, said without much
ceremony: “If you’re looking for a child here and can’t find her, and it’s now
nine hours after the bombing, you need to go to Abu Kabir. Now.”
I understood what she meant but
demurred. “I will ask one of my sons to go. At this point, it will be better if
I go back and stay with my wife at home.” As I left, the social worker calmly
did exactly what was needed: arranged for a taxi and a social worker to collect
two of my sons and bring them to Israel’s only center for performing autopsies and
identifying terror victims. It’s known as Abu Kabir after the Jaffa
neighborhood where it is located.
My two older sons phoned from
there at two on Friday morning, exactly twelve hours after the Battle of Sbarro
Pizzeria started and ended. They had found their sister. I recited the brief
and awful prayer that’s said on learning of a death and was aware of my wife
starting to scream as she ran out the front door and into the night.
April 2001: Malki with her mother
Frimet
Varda Epstein: For many
years now, you and your wife Frimet have been raising awareness of what
happened to your daughter, and the injustice of subsequent events regarding her
murderer. But what was it like in the early days, after the shiva was over?
What was it like waking up in the morning and just getting through the days?
How long was it before you found a way forward?
Arnold Roth: The first seven
days are a blur. Many people—a thousand, maybe more—passed through our hot and
bustling apartment to observe the shiva with us, to bring us comfort and
distraction. Many were people who didn’t know us at all—just reaching out
because of the enormity of the tragedy and a sense of what else is there I can
do?
Almost all the interactions
that were important to me during the first year were within the family and are
intimate to the point where I believe there’s nothing I can or want to share.
Except to observe something quite uncomfortable: that we lost friends during
this period—people whose social circle we felt ourselves to be part of and who now,
in some cases, crossed the street as we got closer or whose small talk steered
carefully away from any mention of Malki and the murder that took her from us.
I can’t say I don’t judge people. But I believe we’re all to blame for how ill-prepared
most of us are for comforting others in the wake of a violent, terror-driven
death of a loved one and especially, especially, especially (no other way to
make the point) of a child.
One aspect of this sticks out
in particular and because something constructive eventually emerged, I want to
touch on it here. Schools, even in Israel, even in Jerusalem which was
Ground Zero for murderous terror attacks during the ensuing few years, were
absolutely unprepared for dealing with the impact on school mates and
especially on siblings. This caused very considerable personal suffering for
thousands of individuals and families—almost all of it unnecessary and
avoidable. Too many people were asleep at the wheel. Things are better now (and
I credit my wife’s activism for some of why it’s better). But my impression
remains that at least some of those who were ill-equipped to deal with it
remain just as ill-equipped today. Let’s hope they’re never put to the test
again.
Malki and her family, June 2001:
The scene is at the batmitzvah of her younger sister Rivka, the last family
celebration before Malki was killed two months later.
Varda Epstein:What do you think Malki would be doing today, had
she lived to fulfill her potential?
Arnold Roth: Because she was
taken from us with such sudden finality and trauma, it’s always been hard to
think of Malki grown up. She packed an amazing amount of goodness into her
life, much of it unobserved or barely known to us. Since we modeled the Malki Foundation on those parts of her life
that we wanted very much to be remembered, I will mention that she was always
ready to help people who are struggling with challenges; that she approached
practically every situation in life with a smile; that she felt especially
close to her own catastrophically-disabled little sister and did things for her
when it was clear she would get nothing back, other than satisfaction and
contentment.
Malki was modest and friendly.
The positive impact of her life is reinforced by the messages we got then and
over the years since from age-mates, from friends in the community, from little
girls who are grown up now and who were in her charge when she was a youth
leader (madricha) in Israel’s Ezra youth movement.
So what would she be doing if
she had been spared? She would be making herself helpful and well-loved
wherever she would be and in whatever she would be doing.
Malki adored her catastrophically
disabled, blind and brain-damaged little sister Haya Elisheva. This was taken
in April 2001.
Varda Epstein:What does it feel like to have Jordan refuse to
extradite the murderer? What does it say about Jordanian values, about
Jordanian society?
Arnold Roth: The appalling woman,
a barbarian in every sense of the word, who masterminded the Sbarro massacre is
living a fabulous life. The government of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has
put its strategic ties with the United States at risk by pretending, via its
highest court, that it doesn’t have to extradite her to Washington.
Malki had American citizenship
and we have made serious, little-publicized efforts to bring Ahlam Tamimi
before a US Federal court to face terrorism charges. This is not going well for
us but it’s far from over.
Varda Epstein:Do you have reason to hope that if you keep up
the fight, Tamimi will be brought to justice?
Arnold Roth: At this point, as
well as the challenges, we have some concrete achievements: Tamimi has been
charged under US law; there is a $5 million reward for information leading to
her arrest and conviction; the US has invoked its 1995 extradition treaty with
Jordan and says it expects her to be handed over. There is a wealth of detail
and complexity behind each of these ‘achievements’ and far more to tell than an
interview like this can bear.
I will only add that I think
there will be wide surprise and disappointment among those reading this once
they know who is with us in this pursuit of justice and who is blocking the
process. Since it’s very much a work in progress, I will say no more—other than
to observe that Ahlam Tamimi does not live in hiding today, has never been in
hiding for a single hour since she was freed—over our vociferous objections—from
her Israeli prison cell and from her 16 life terms, and sent back to her
homeland, Jordan. She lives free as a bird in Amman today.
Tamimi may be the first mass murderer
in history to be given her own television program, to have operated freely for
years under her own name on Facebook and Twitter, and to be interviewed
regularly in the Arabic media—special mention here of the Aljazeera Network—without
her crimes, the people she killed, ever being mentioned.
FBI wanted poster of Ahlam Tamimi
Varda Epstein: Tamimi is someone who takes joy in murdering children. How
can this be, that she roams the streets of Jordan, free?
Arnold Roth: The question is a
cornerstone for understanding the vast gulf between the two sides of the global
debate over terrorism. One of the many professional consultants who has
traveled to Jordan on behalf of the US government (there are far more of them
than most people would guess) helped me understand this. Though we were
strangers when I reached out to her, she was kind enough to provide me with real-time
feedback during her time in Amman.
She told me the Jordanians with
whom she was conferring and working—high-achievers, intelligent and well-educated
people, movers, shakers, up-and-comers in Jordanian society—see Tamimi as a
national hero. You won’t find this is in any English-language publication or in
anything directly controlled by the Jordanian government. But black-and-white
evidence of the sentiment is only too easy to find even if you don’t go there.
They utterly reject the notion,
she told me, that just because Tamimi blew up a pizzeria and all the children
and families inside that they ought to think of her as a terrorist. She’s doing
resistance. She’s a figure of wide admiration.
If Tamimi, as I believe, is a
litmus test of Arab society’s willingness to come to terms with the reality of
Israel and with the challenge of living at peace with Israelis at some future
point… well, you don’t need me to finish the sentence.
Varda Epstein: You showed me
a blog you wrote about your Aunt Feiga. Can you tell the readers about her, the
photo you received, and Malki’s reaction to that photo?
Arnold Roth: I was born in Melbourne.
It’s an unusual and very special place to be from for several reasons.
The one I want to emphasize is
that almost all my friends, growing up, were just like me: children of “refos”—European
Jews, by far most of them from Poland, who were issued papers in and after 1947
(a change of government led to a major turn-around in Australia’s notoriously
closed approach to immigration) to come as refugees and rebuild their lives as
far away from the European killing fields as you could go.
Almost none of us had any
grandparents. Few of us had more than one sibling. All of us had parents who shared
some major dimensions: working hard, getting ahead, making a good life, giving
their children the best, and having frequent and noisy nightmares of the
Holocaust years that stole their youth, their schooling, their families, their
health.
My father’s life, the details
of which are still in some ways a mystery to me, included some special drama.
Dad was one of seventeen children, a Hassidic family from a small town in
Galicia, of whom only two, maybe three, survived the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
That sentence contains practically everything I knew up to when Dad passed away
in 1982.
Among the many stunning
discoveries that came after Dad was no longer available for me to consult him
was a cluster of four photocopies of Nazi census forms. They are from the
Krakow Ghetto, all dated August 1940, all filled in by handwriting (my father’s
was familiar to me), all with passport-style photos. Up until these papers came
into my hands, which was in 2000, I had never seen a portrait of my father as
he looked before ending up as a survivor.
The other three were of women,
one of them a sister of my father, the sum total of whose existence until that
moment was a name on a family tree that I made after holding Dad down long
enough to disclose things he was never comfortable disclosing.
The sister’s name was Feiga;
she did not survive. The census picture shows a woman of 26, a striking beauty
with distinctive eyes and eyebrows.
Malki’s eyes and
eyebrows.
Malki noticed the resemblance
immediately. It triggered some discussion, and perhaps some deeper thoughts,
about Jewish history, about irreparable loss, about family. Malki was taken
from us a little more than a year later.
Feiga (Malki’s aunt whom she never
knew--she perished at the hands of the Nazis) and Malki
Varda Epstein: What should
we learn as Jews from the story of Malka Chana Roth, HY”D?
Arnold Roth: It was always
clear to us that if we didn’t take steps to preserve a memory of Malki’s
beautiful life, that in the nature of things her murder would be reduced to a
statistic. Sounds cruel but from the perspective of Israeli society, it’s far
truer than not.
As a family, we took a few
minutes during the shiva, after the last of the visitors had departed on one of
the evenings, to consider our options. We decided to create a charity that
would give practical expression to Malki’s passion for helping children with
extreme special needs. This of course was something that fit well with the
wonderful devotion she showed for the very challenging needs of her own little
sister. But it went beyond that.
The anecdotes are many but two
stand out.
One—in the summer of 2000, a
year before she was taken from us—Malki decided to apply what she had learned
in helping her mother look after Haya, our youngest, by knocking on nearby
doors to see if there was someone else’s mother who needed a volunteer helper
with her skills. She found Ro’ei and his mother Devorah just a few streets
away.
Ro’ei, confined to a
wheelchair, non-verbal, fed by tube, a gorgeous little boy with a smiley face—had
the version of Canavan Disease whose outcome is depressingly known well in
advance. Malki loved being with him daily, cleaning him up, cheering him up,
sharing some of the overwhelmed young single mother’s load, making herself
helpful. She embraced the self-imposed mission like others of her age embrace
going to the beach. (Ro’ei outlived Malki by a few months.)
In August 2001, partnered by
Rachel, a school-friend, she insisted her way into the annual summer camp held
by Etgarim, a wonderful nonprofit that provides
summer sports, camping and the best of outdoors activity for youngsters with
special needs, both cognitive and physical. Malki told us that Etgarim wasn’t
geared up to take volunteers but that somehow the girls broke through the
resistance and became part of the team. The photos we later saw show Malki
smiling from ear to ear as she poses with campers.
We found an old disposable 35 mm
film camera in the house about 2 years ago. It turned out to be Malki’s. We
developed and printed the photos and this one turned out one of the loveliest
we have. Malki went on a walking tiyul around the Old City she so loved.
Most of what we know about
those few days we learned after the Sbarro bombing which happened just a couple
of days after Malki came home from the north. The stories they shared with us
are unbearably touching.
We named the new entity the
Malki Foundation: in Hebrew, Keren Malki [www.malkifoundation.org].
Almost eighteen years on, it has a terrific record of quiet, modest achievement,
empowering thousands of parents of children with extreme special needs—children
from every part of Israeli society without regard for religion, political
outlook, national identification or economic capability—who have made the
decision to embrace the challenge of raising their child with special needs at
home and withstanding the pressure to institutionalize the child.
We avoid intruding into the
family’s life or second-guessing them on decisions about which non-medical therapies
they feel will most benefit their child. We support physical therapy, speech
therapy, hydrotherapy, therapeutic horse riding and occupational therapy. They
choose the therapist and the times and the frequency; we pay. We want them to
feel empowered. It’s a successful model.
We also provide home-care and
mobility equipment, and for families living in the periphery—Israel’s far north
and far south—we send our own therapists right into the home. For many of them,
we could provide an open check for therapy services and they would be unable to
spend the money. Israel seriously lets such families down.
Associating tragedy, personal
loss, grief and pain with good, constructive deeds is a respected and
time-honored Jewish response. We call those deeds hesed. I don’t intend
to wax poetical in explaining why the family created the Malki Foundation but
want simply to say: it gives me the opportunity, often and before audiences I
would not otherwise reach, of saying: There was a very special young woman
called Malki and we are all poorer for her having been taken from us.
Malki will never be a statistic
but an inspiration. And in remembering her, we also realize that she and the
savage who engineered her death are not—as several dull journalists said to me
at various points in the weeks after the massacre—two sides of the same coin.
Quite the opposite: their ways will never be and never were our ways. Sounds
simple but surprisingly few public figures—diplomats, politicians, editors,
religious leaders—seem to actually understand it.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Continuing my series of re-captioning single panel comics...
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
The Palestinians should send a delegation to Bahrain and participate in the meetings. They can make their demands and propose changes in the U.S. plan. There is no good reason for them not to participate. They can object to what President Trump has done and even demand that it be undone, but their objections will have no credibility if they continue to be no-shows.
One reality should be clear to the Palestinian leadership at this point if they want a state rather than a "cause" they will never get through any means other than direct negotiations with Israel. They will not get a state from the United Nations, from the European Union, from Russia, from Iran or even from the United States. Nor will they get it as a result of BDS or university protests. They will certainly not get it through military conquest or terrorism. Only by negotiating with Israel will they achieve statehood. And it won't be on the 1967 lines or without any other compromises, such as to the so-called right of return, despite dozens of meaningless one-sided resolutions, including the one engineered by outgoing President Barack Obama during his final days in office. Both sides will have to make painful compromises. Israel has already shown its willingness to do so by twice offering compromise plans. Prime Minister Netanyahu has recognized the need for Israel to make compromises. So must the Palestinian leadership.
Israel's current political deadlock, with new elections scheduled for September, will inevitably postpone any real progress toward peace. The Palestinian leadership should take advantage of this delay to attend the meeting without having to make any concessions. They can listen and propose, knowing that no final decisions are likely to be made until Israel forms a new government in the fall.
If the Palestinian leadership persists in its refusal to sit down and negotiate, they will only have themselves to blame for the lack of statehood. President Abbas himself has bemoaned the failure of Palestinian leadership to accept prior peace proposals. Now he is the leader in charge, at least in theory. He should learn the lessons of the past, come to Bahrain and begin a process of negotiation that may be the only remaining road to Palestinian statehood.
When I started to work together with Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin on ways to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the early 1980s, the first thing we did was to speak to Palestinian leaders, businessmen, and journalists. One of our first questions was whether Israel should simply withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza. The answer we got was devastating. "We Palestinians will first kill each other, and then we will start to kill you."
Israel has repeatedly offered ways and means to establish a prosperous State of Palestine, living in good neighborly relations beside Israel. Alas, internal Palestinian divisions, conflicting external influences, and the conviction that Israel is not here to stay have prevented the establishment of a state of their own.
In Shimon Peres' memoir, Battling for Peace, he expressed Israeli fears, writing: "In our view, a Palestinian state, though demilitarized at first, would over time inevitably strive to build up a military strength of its own, and the international community, depending upon massive Second and Third World support at the United Nations, would do nothing to stop it. That army, eventually, would be deployed at the very gates of Jerusalem and down the entire, narrow length of Israel. It would pose a constant threat to our security and to the peace and stability of the region."
In October 1993, Yassir Arafat's brother, Dr. Fathi Arafat, suggested the building of working committees for "people-to-people" activities, aiming to lay the foundations of good neighborly relations. Joint teams worked for 14 months on a wide range of programs. Then the PLO decided on an "anti-normalization" strategy that meant that any Palestinian who cooperated with Israelis would be castigated. The major message understood by Israeli society was that good neighborly relations were not part of the deal, even if this would undermine Palestinian well-being and prosperity.
In October 1995, a small group of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators prepared what is known as the Beilin-Abu Mazen Understanding, which was a blueprint for a Permanent Status Agreement. In the summer of 2000, Abu Mazen (Mohammad Abbas) publicly withdrew his consent. When we phoned him, he answered in his own voice, telling us that he was not at home.
The PA has decided to stop paying for the successful cancer treatment of a 7-year-old Palestinian child Majed Muhammad Majed Ah-Sha'er in Israeli Ichilov Hospital, in order to keep paying salaries for terrorists. The decision was made despite the fact that Ichilov is the first hospital outside the United States using a new cancer treatment "that holds promise for lymphoma and leukemia patients."
According to the boy’s father Majed Muhammad was diagnosed with Leukemia in 2015, and was sent for treatment in Israel:
"He has been transferred to hospitals in the occupied interior (i.e., Israel) since the outbreak of the disease. He added that he has received full treatment and that the response [to the treatment] has been good. He also said that the doctors have emphasized that check-ups need to be made every six months in order to complete the treatment and necessary medical tests." [Donia Al-Watan, independent Palestinian news agency, May 28, 2019]
Majed's father explained that the new request for approval of his son's next trip was submitted "to the relevant bodies in Ramallah, but his referral to Ichilov Hospital was not approved and the doctors have said that he is expected to be referred to a different hospital in the occupied West Bank."
He added, "The reason that the referral to the hospital in the occupied interior (i.e., Israel) was not approved is that the president [Abbas] has decided to stop the referrals to the Israeli hospitals but there are sick people who are still being treated in the occupied interior."
With Israel's dramatic victory in the 1967 Six Day War, Jewish progressives faced their greatest challenge. The New Left, splintering along racial and ideological lines, grew critical of the Jewish State, equating its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the evil imperialist impulses of the United States in the Cold War. Many in the New Left rejected Zionism, labeling it a chauvinistic, even racist, manifestation of nationalism.
At the 1967 Conference for a New Politics held in Chicago, for example, African American delegates pressed for passage of a resolution that characterized the June 1967 conflict as an "imperialist Zionist war." As Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael said at a 1968 convention of the Organization of American Students, "We have begun to see the evil of Zionism and we will fight to wipe it out wherever it exists, be it in the Ghetto of the United States or in the Middle East."
Jewish New Leftists in Berkeley responded by creating the Committee for a Progressive Middle East in March, 1969. The Committee intended to strike a balance between the strident anti-Zionist influences growing with the New Left and the much less critical Zionist voices of Hillel and other Jewish groups. Radical Jewish Zionists, despite their attempts to locate progressive Zionism within the boundaries of the New Left, failed to re-unite Jewish leftists with an ever more radical, and anti-Zionist, movement.
The rise of Black Power also alienated Jews from the New Left, which had, by the mid-1960s, come to locate black militancy in its movement's vanguard. The rise of ethnic nationalism ended the inter-racial civil rights movement of the Martin Luther King, Jr., years. Jews, once valued as liberal America's most committed social reform advocates, faced a Black Power-inspired critique that labeled them white oppressors.
When Jewish New Leftists sought a strategic alliance with Oakland's Black Panther Party, for example, they were rebuffed. As one Jewish New Leftist explained, "Even if I were a superaltruistic liberal and campaigned among the Jews to support the Panthers' program, I would justifiably be tarred and feathered for giving aid and comfort to enemies of the Jews. I would rather it were not this way, but it was you who disowned us, not we who betrayed you." The end of the civil rights movement at home combined with Jewish concerns over the New Left's critique of Israel when, in 1969, Eldridge Cleaver told a New York Times reporter that "the Black Panther Party in the United States fully supports Arab Guerillas in the Middle East."
By the early 1970s, the New Left lost most of its earlier Jewish influence. Jews, weary of anti-Zionism, occasional antisemitism, and the rise of ethnic and racial consciousness, turned inward, applying many of the New Left's political strategies to Jewish communal concerns [such as freeing Soviet Jews].
Doesn't the radical wing of the New Left sound like the "progressives" and socialists of today? And J-Street sounds like the group of people who tried and failed to bridge the gap between the insane hateful Leftists and accepting the state of Israel.
Just as in the UK now with the Labour Party, the obvious antisemitism of the Left finally pushed the Jewish liberals too far as they realized that there was no place for them. American Jews who support the Left have not yet reached that point. And some of them are too far gone, as they have subsumed their Jewish identity to their new religion of progressivism.
Here's an interesting JTA article from 1972 showing a debate about the New Left at the time, and again the arguments sound familiar:
Participants in the American Jewish Congress’ tenth annual American-Israel Dialogue debated vigorously today whether the New Left was good for the Jews, Zionism and Israel. The debate was launched Monday night by Foreign Minister Abba Eban, who assailed the New Left, and continued yesterday by Histadrut Secretary General Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, who disagreed with Eban, but with reservations.
“We assume that anti-Semitism on the left can be rectified,” said Marie Syrkin of New York, Zionist editor of the Herzl Press. “It’s a myth to say the New Left is anti-Jewish,” countered Paul Jacobs of San Francisco, who once ran for the Senate on Black militant Eldridge Cleaver’s Peace and Freedom ticket. Leftist anti-Semitism can be purged more easily than rightist anti-Semitism, Miss Syrkin claimed. “There’s a wide spectrum of belief among the New Left.” retorted Jacobs, citing Noam Chomsky and I.F. Stone as non anti-Zionist New Leftists.
Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg. AJ Congress president, said the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel had led Jews to desert the political right. Prof. Theodore Draper of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University suggested that Jews would be better off if they did not “mortgage” their future to either side.
Some speakers took pains to deny any anti-Semitism in the New Left. Others sought to discredit the notion that anti-Semitism was the brainchild of either modern socialism or the American Jewish New Left. Prof. Abraham Udovitch of Princeton pointed out that anti-Semitic tendencies had cropped up in “all redemptive movements” of Christian Europe, a full 600 years before the advent of socialism. (Yesterday, Ben-Aharon claimed that anti-Semites were omnipresent in the Old Left.) Prof. Henry Feingold of City College, New York, insisted that anti-Semitism had been “tacked on” after the New Left adopted its political views.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
If this plan never sees the light of day, we won’t shed any tears. At J Street, we’ve been 100 percent clear that the effort led by Jared Kushner and David Friedman is not a good-faith attempt to bring about a peaceful, lasting and viable resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
How do they know? They just do!
Instead, it’s designed to punish and alienate the Palestinians while embracing the hardline positions of the settlement movement -- helping the Israeli right to entrench the occupation and prevent the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
How do they know? They just do!
Whether or not the world ever sees the details of their proposal, we know that everything this White House has already said and done has exacerbated the conflict and imperiled the long-term future of both peoples.
How has the conflict been exacerbated? Were the Palestinians negotiating with Israel during the Obama years?
How has the long term future of both peoples been imperiled? They just know!
From slashing humanitarian aid to the Palestinians and unilaterally recognizing Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, to refusing to support the two-state solution or even recognize the existence of the occupation, the Trump administration has empowered creeping annexation in the West Bank and undercut the prospects for peace.
How do they know that Israeli building in areas that everyone knows would remain Israeli undercuts the prospects for peace? They just do!
The number of assumptions made by so many people who regard themselves as pro-Israel centrists is astounding. They just know that two states would end the conflict. They just know that Palestinians will abandon support for terror. They just know that calling Israel a Jewish state makes peace less likely. They just know that Palestinians aren't serious about the "right of return" for millions of the descendants of those who left in 1948.
The underlying assumption behind all of these assumptions is that they just know that the Palestinian decision makers are rational actors.
Are the Palestinian leaders rational?
They have rejected peace plans (and an Obama peace framework) numerous times. These would have led to a state and they said no. Doesn't that prove that they don't really want a state?
They have said that their top economic priority is to pay the people who have killed or tried to kill Jews as well as the families of the terrorists. Doesn't that prove that they really don't care about peace?
They have rejected US aid and Israeli tax dollars that are absolutely needed for their people. Doesn't that prove that the Palestinian leaders don't care about their own people?
But every time the Palestinians do something outrageous like these and many other examples, these "pro-Israel" liberals fall over themselves to justify the indefensible. The peace plans were an insult to their dignity, even though they went to (and beyond) 100% of the land area of the territories. The payments to terrorists are just like social security. They cannot accept aid with strings attached because they have pride.
Even if these excuses were true, it shows that Palestinians are not rational actors. They do not prioritize real peace and a state side by side with Israel. They do not teach peace to their children. They lionize terrorists. The list goes on and on.
If the Palestinian leaders are not rational now, isn't it the height of stupidity to assume that they will suddenly become rational and act the way Westerners do if they are rewarded with a state? What evidence is there that any of the assumptions about how they would act after an agreement will pan out?
A two state solution, which the entire world agrees is desirable, is the biggest case of wishful thinking in history. Assumptions with no basis in fact are tossed around as if they are proven true. Anyone who doubts it is vilified as being against peace or being Islamophobic or racist or whatever.
From everything we are hearing from Jared Kushner, he went into this by not making any of the assumptions that have not panned out. He looked at it with eyes that were not blinded by decades of conventional wisdom. And he is trying to find a solution that will make both sides as happy as both sides could be given the nature of the conflict.
It probably will fail, but not one diplomat in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been as clear-eyed and objective as Kushner has been. (The main reason the "pro-Israel" liberals don't believe this is because he is a religious Jew. Yes, that is stereotyping, and it is yet another false assumption from the "experts."
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
The Resolutions Committee of the California Democratic Party has substantially rewritten six resolutions, deleting or softening language harshly critical of Israel.
On Friday, at the party’s state convention in San Francisco, the committee passed five of the resolutions as rewritten, prompting the original authors to withdraw their names and co-sponsors. One other resolution was withdrawn.
The resolutions dealt with a variety of issues related to anti-Semitism, Israel, Palestine and American involvement in the region. One included original language that required the Democratic Party to oppose “all efforts to stigmatize and suppress support for Palestinian human rights by falsely conflating it with anti-Semitism.” Another suggested Israel has a legacy of “settler colonialism,” while still another would have required elected party officials to include equal-time visits to Palestinian territories whenever visiting Israel, and should contact the state party’s Progressive Caucus or Arab-American Caucus to plan those trips. Another demanded a Palestinian “right of return,” which mandates descendants of Palestinians who fled what is now Israel during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence be allowed to return to Israel and to their original homes. Two resolutions supported returning the Golan Heights to Syria.
All such language was removed from the resolutions.
Supporters of Israel considered it a total victory.
While the revised resolutions are much better than those originally proposed, their texts show that there are still significant problems - problems that the mainstream Democratic party do not consider to be problems at all.
Possibly the worst one is 18-11.39L, "Fight Antisemitism, and Identify it Correctly." The "Identify It correctly" is an addition to the original resolution.
Let's look at it a paragraph at a time:
WHEREAS the recent murders of 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue bear witness to an 2 alarming re-emergence of virulent antisemitism that is a core element of historical and currently resurgent white supremacy in the United States and around the world, whose adherents aim their toxic verbal and violent hate also at a wide variety of other scapegoats – Muslims, refugees, Latinos, indigenous people, immigrants, Blacks, Arabs, LGBTQ-identified people and women, among others, and at the left in general – all in an effort to install and bolster regimes that promote nationalism, racism and sexism to suppress democracy, worker rights and movements to save our planet; and
Much like how Congress watered down its antisemitism resolution aimed at Ilhan Omar's offensive statements to make it a meaningless resolution against all bigotry, the CDP did the same here - in a resolution whose title says it is about antisemitism.
Not only that, it conflates vicious attacks in Jews as in Pittsburgh with anyone on the right criticizing anyone on the Left!
This is not a victory. It is an insult.
WHEREAS the current U.S. regime and its growing coterie of look-alikes worldwide are fast establishing a pattern of tolerating and giving succor to antisemites, racists and promoters of other forms of white supremacist ideology; while Israel’s government, along with some of its U.S. backers, have welcomed support for Netanyahu from ultra-right groups in the United States and abroad, dangerously ignoring their deeply rooted antisemitism while aligning with their virulent Islamophobia; and
This paragraph is saying (among other things) that Netanyahu is accepting support from white supremacists in the US. This is an absolute lie, unless you define ALL Zionist groups as Islamophobic white supremacists - something that we see socialist supporters of Democrats do often.
WHEREAS in the wake of the Pittsburgh murders there has been an increase in the volume of Trumpian, Charlottesville-style “both sides-ism,” citing “antisemitism of the right and the left” -- the latter raising a false conflation of support for Palestine with anti-Jewish hatred, which has fueled ongoing legislative and other initiatives to redefine antisemitism as including criticism of Israeli policies and unconstitutional attempts to suppress and even criminalize boycotts aimed at promoting Palestinian rights.
Also, no one ever claimed that all criticism of Israel is antisemitic. The IHRA definition of antisemitism is clear on when criticism of Israel crosses the line into antisemitism: "Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic."
The California Democrats are effectively denying the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
Moreover, it mischaracterizes legislation against targeting Israel for boycotts as unconstitutional and a free speech issue - which they are not. They are discrimination based on national origin. They are not "aimed at promoting Palestinian rights" but at denying Jewish national rights.
THEREFORE be it resolved that the California Democratic Party rededicates itself, along with all decent people, to exposing, confronting and defeating antisemitism along with all forms of racism, each with its unique sordid history; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that CDP recognizes these phenomena today as overwhelmingly a function of dangerous fascist and white supremacist movements, plus their enabling by too many figures in the Trump administration and in Congress.
Its earlier denial of any antisemitism on the Left shows this resolution to be hollow - instead of being against antisemitism it is against right-wing antisemitism, turning the issue into a political and partisan issue instead of a universal human rights issue.
Even though news coverage of the story claimed that the original drafters of the resolutions took their names off the revised ones, it isn't true. This one still lists as authors and sponsors David Mandel - of the JVP - and Iyad Afalqa, who recently said that fellow Democrat Chuck Schumer was a “shmuck,” a “traitor” and a member of a “fascist Israel lobby.”
Yeah, that's a real expert on antisemitism.
(UPDATE: Apparently they did remove their names but the names are still listed in the documentation.)
The other resolutions have significant problems as well.
If the California Democrats who are supporters of Israel consider this a total victory, then they have become the useful idiots of the ascendant, radical, anti-Israel Democrats.
This isn't victory. This is surrender to the most extreme anti-Israel forces in the party.
(h/t Daled Amos)
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
The Highland Park, NJ library was scheduled to have a public reading of the book "P is for Palestine" last month. The reading was sponsored by the anti-Zionist "Jewish Voice for Peace."
Book author Goldbarg Bashi said her book does not promote violence or anti-Semitism, but simply celebrates Palestinian culture. The word “intifada” has been unfairly linked to violence, she said.
It really means “resistance,” which has mostly been peaceful, she added. Intifada can include wearing embroidered Palestinian-style dresses or cooking a Palestinian dish; or for Americans, marching in the Women’s March, she argued.
In fact, its main meaning in today's vernacular - both English and Arabic - is almost exclusively the deadly terror sprees that Palestinians unleashed on Israeli Jews in the late 1980s and early 2000s.
This is easy to prove. An image search on the Arabic word "Intifada," "الانتفاضة" shows lots of photos of masked Palestinians rioting, hurling rocks and setting off firebombs.
No pictures of people wearing embroidered dresses or cooking food.
An English search for "intifada" shows a very similar set of photos of violence.
Anyone who believes that the literal meaning of intifada, "shaking off," is the actual meaning of how it is used nowadays is a fool. (It is a similar argument to those who claim that Arabs cannot be antisemitic because they are supposedly Semites, too. It is like saying that "terrible" and "terrific" have identical meanings due to the same etymology.)
There are other significant problems with the book, like "M is for Miftah," the ubiquitous keys that symbolize the Palestinian desire to destroy Israel by "return" of millions of Arabs who never lived there.
The heavily Jewish community of Highland Park protested to the library about the offensive book, and the library postponed the scheduled public reading and agreed to have a hearing about the topic Wednesday night.
Israel-haters have been lying, as usual, and saying that postponing the reading is "censorship." It is not censorship to not have a public reading of a book that is offensive to the members of the community. No one is saying that the library cannot keep copies of the book to be lent out, or that the publisher cannot sell the book.
Groups who despise Israel like CAIR have been circulating a petition to allow the reading, falsely calling the postponement of the reading a "ban."
It was announced on Tuesday night (according to emails sent out by area synagogues) that the hearing was canceled because of fear of violence. I don't think they were worried about Jewish residents of Highland Park starting a riot in their own hometown.
But hundreds of people who support the idea of intifada were going to be coming from other communities to pressure the library. That is what alarmed the library.
The outrageous thing is that the library announced a compromise that is no compromise. They said that they would schedule a reading for "P is for Palestine" and then schedule a separate reading of a pro-Israel children's book.
This is not a solution.
A public library will have a reading of a book that glorifies terror, even if that glorification is implicit. Every Arabic speaker knows that someone means when they use the word "intifada" - and it ain't cooking. It is violence, and Arabic websites routinely glorify the suicide bombers of the Second Intifada, when over a thousand Jews were killed and many more injured.
The Highland Park Library - and the mayor - should be told that a public reading of a book that is hurtful and offensive to so many people is never acceptable and no amount of counter-programming can remove that insult.
You can email the Board of Trustees (trustees@hpplnj.org) and the Library Director (director@hpplnj.org), as well as the mayor Gayle Brill Mittler (brillmittlerhp@gmail.com).
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Glick puts high hopes in Trump’s ability to reduce the area’s tensions. A peace plan drafted by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was due out this month — until Israel’s politics were scrambled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inability to form a government, requiring a new election. Even though details of the U.S. plan are yet to be released, Glick praises Trump for offering “another model” that provides financial incentives as well as “human rights, human dignity and civil rights” for Palestinians. Glick personally suggests something along the lines of a confederacy or a demilitarized Palestinian state one day — once Palestinian terrorism is reined in.
Palestinians, however, have largely rebuffed Trump’s plan as little more than a bribe. “You are literally asking a nation to forget about their right to be a nation,” says A’wad, who believes “building trust and understanding” must come first.
In the micro sense, Glick does that every day he goes on his village visits. But thinking bigger, Glick champions more “integration” in Judea and Samaria as the way to peace. “I honestly believe if there were 100,000 more Jews in Hebron, they would get along with the Palestinians, just as they get along in Tel Aviv and Haifa right now,” he says.
In the Old City of Hebron, some 800 ideologically driven Jewish settlers live within the Palestinian city of 100,000 under heavy — and, according to Palestinian locals, brutal — military protection. “It can be hard to convince other Palestinians not to commit violence because the settler project is based on violence. The occupation is a form of violence,” says A’wad, who advocates for nonviolence.
Talks of “integration” by Glick will continue to face criticism from activist Palestinians and the international left, not to mention the Israeli far-right, some of whom want to simply expel the Arab population. But in Glick’s daily interactions with Palestinian patients and friends, there is a shared feeling about the basic nature of his actions — good. During those heartwarming moments with patients, the prospect of Israelis and Palestinians living together doesn’t seem simply possible to Glick. It’s already reality.
As Glick leaves her home, the Palestinian grandmother with diabetes showers him with praise. “Bless you, Doctor!” she exclaims. “You are a good man. Please come back with your wife for tea sometime!” (h/t Zvi)
TO SAY that “there’s a kind of calming feeling” you get when you “think of the Holocaust” is worse than antisemitic; it’s positively sick. Just imagine if someone had said the same of slavery. The offensiveness of these words should be clear to anyone, certainly someone who has been accused by Jews of bigotry. It should be yet more apparent to someone, like Tlaib, who decries that assessment as wrong.
Generally, I wouldn’t have made a fuss over her near miss on saying that Americans “celebrated” the Holocaust on Yom Hashoah. In light of her other verbal “slip” – her “calming feelings” on the Holocaust – I’m inclined to believe that there’s meaning in both. Accidental indecency doesn’t strike the same sentence twice.
Worse than her sick choice of words were her historical distortions. Tlaib claimed that her ancestors provided Jews with a “safe haven” around the time of the Holocaust. The truth is that both before, during and after the Holocaust, many Palestinian Arabs worked to make the land of Israel into a death trap.
Before the Holocaust, as tens of thousands of Jews sought refuge in Israel from the persecutions and pogroms of Eastern Europe, Palestinian Arabs didn’t provide much in the way of safety. Many, on the contrary, made a habit of massacring their Jewish neighbors. In April 1920, five innocent Jews were murdered by rioting Arabs in Jerusalem. Eleven months later, 47 more innocent Jews would be slaughtered by rioting Arabs, this time in Jaffa. Worst of all was the pogrom of August 1929, wherein an astounding 133 innocent Jews would be killed by Arab rioters in Safed, Jaffa and most famously, Hebron.
In a letter sent to U.S. lawmakers on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a strong rebuke of Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), saying the two were “the antithesis to the strong support for Israel” on Capitol Hill.
The letter was in response to a letter signed by a group of U.S. Congress members who had asked him to intervene in the case of Omar Shakir, the regional director of Human Rights Watch and an activist in the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
Shakir was denied an extension of his visa because he was actively engaged in anti-Israel propaganda during his stay in Israel. The Supreme Court recently issued a temporary injunction to prevent Shakir’s deportation and will make a final ruling in the coming days.
Netanyahu said that he was not going to heed the lawmakers’ request because Shakir had shown “active support for anti-Israel boycotts.”
Netanyahu further stressed that Shakir had failed to demonstrate that he was not using his stay in Israel for propaganda purposes as part of the BDS movement against Israel.
He added that he was “surprised” that two of the lawmakers who joined the request, referring to Tlaib and Omar, were “two BDS supporters.” Omar and Tlaib have come under fire in recent months after making controversial remarks against Israel’s actions and even calling for punishing the Jewish state. Omar has recently become embroiled in controversy after some of her tweets were deemed anti-Semitic.
Netanyahu did not mention the two by name but made it obvious that he was referring to them.
Mohamed Salah is on top of the soccer world right now. The Liverpool starlet hailing from Nagrig, a small Egyptian village, scored the winning goal of the UEFA Champions League--the premier club soccer competition--in just the second minute of the match. Doing so, he by and large paved the path to victory for his side against rivals Tottenham Hotspurs. The 26-year-old Salah’s premier form throughout the Champions League campaign was capped off by his stellar performance in the final, warranting adulation from the nearly 200 million-person television audience. But behind his famed scraggly-haired, smiling disposition and unparalleled soccer talent is a history of bigotry and anti-Semitic behavior slipping under the radar as celebrations unfold.
Salah’s public record of discriminatory action began in a 2014 two-legged match against Maccabi Tel Aviv. Salah, at the time a part of FC Basel, refused to shake the hands of the Israeli players prior to the match. The first meeting between the Israeli side and Basel saw Salah attempt to play off not shaking hands by feigning tying his shoe; however when the snub happened once more, this time in Tel Aviv, fans recognized the hostile act and proceeded to boo Salah harshly. Initially, Salah had plans to boycott the match altogether, though was later persuaded by team officials to put politics and bigotry aside for the sake of the game.
Salah’s efforts at undermining the validity of Israel’s existence were furthered when he bashed the Jewish state in a pre-game interview ahead of a match in Netanya:
“In my thoughts I am going to play in Palestine and not Israel, and I am also going to score and win there. The Zionist flag won’t be shown in the Champions League.”
If his ‘tying my shoes’ facade in 2014 wasn’t unsportsmanlike enough, his firebrand anti-Zionist comments and refusal to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist display Salah’s grotesque views on the conflict--a stark difference from his golden boy public perception in the wake of the Champions League final.
In a final triumphant act at the expense of Israeli soccer fans and all standards of fair play, Salah used his powerful position and newfound stardom at Liverpool to issue an ultimatum to Liverpool management that he would refuse to play alongside Moanes Dabour, a 27-year-old Israeli striker now at Spanish club Sevilla whom Liverpool took interest in. Dabour was never signed by the Reds, with widespread speculation that Salah’s threats caused management to avoid moving forward with Dabour.
As Salah is feted for his impressive feat in the UEFA Champions League game, his politicization and aggressive anti-Zionist stance ought to have no place in the international sports arena. Both the UEFA and FIFA--the largest soccer governing bodies globally--espouse publicly their commitment to rejecting discrimination, racism, and other bigoted behavior from the sport altogether, especially after a long and checkered past of such actions. Salah’s clout and physical adroitness shouldn’t exempt him from accountability for his clearly bigoted and discriminatory actions.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Eid al Fitr, the holiday following Ramadan, is declared when the crescent moon is seen, much like how Jews used to declare the new month in Temple times.
Unlike the Jews of ancient Israel and Judah, there is no centralized Muslim system for who determines the date that the new moon is seen.
In Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen the completion of the month of Ramadan for the Muslim year 1440 has been declared over and today is the first day of Eid al-Fitr, since they saw the crescent moon.
However, for Egypt and Jordan (and the Palestinian territories), they did not see the crescent, so Tuesday is the end of Ramadan, and Wednesday, June 5, is the first day of Eid.
Jews created a fixed calendar in order to avoid these types of issues during the first millennium of the common era.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Nechama Rivlin, the wife of President Reuven Rivlin, died Tuesday morning at the age of 73, the President’s Residence said in a statement.
The statement said Rivlin died on the eve of her 74th birthday at Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva, where she was being treated after relapsing following a lung transplant in March.
“Three months after a lung transplant, Nechama Rivlin died this morning,” Beilinson Hospital said in a statement. “To our regret, the medical efforts to stabilize her over time during the complicated rehabilitation period after the transplant did not succeed.”
The president posted a picture of his wife on Facebook along with the words “My Nechama.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered his condolences to the Rivlin family.
President Reuven Rivlin and his wife Nechama at a cruise in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam on March 22, 2017.(Kobi Gideon / GPO)
“Along with all the citizens of Israel, my wife Sara and I feel deep sorrow at the death of the president’s wife, Nechama Rivlin,” Netanyahu said in a brief statement.
“We all prayed for her recovery during the recent period during which she fought bravely and intensely for her life. We extend our heartfelt condolences to the president and to all his family,” he said.
Rivlin, 73, suffered from pulmonary fibrosis, a condition in which scar tissue accumulates in the lungs and makes it difficult to breathe. In the years before the transplant, she had usually been seen in public with a portable oxygen tank, including at official ceremonies.
The lung transplant was declared successful when it was completed on March 12, but doctors cautioned that her condition remained tenuous and that she faced a long road to recovery.
Since the end of the 2014 Gaza war, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Gaza have launched rockets against Israeli civilian targets and provoked Israeli air strikes in retaliation in eight rounds of escalation that are part of one long war. Both sides realize that this kind of war cannot lead to a significant change in the reality concerning Gaza.
Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad believe that the rounds of escalation serve their interests and are important in their own merit as they help demonstrate their commitment to the struggle against Israel. The escalations enable them to boast of their military capabilities, mobilize the population to the cause of fighting Zionism, distract the Gaza population from their daily miseries, and gain economic assistance from Qatar, while blaming Mahmoud Abbas for the difficulties in Gaza and pressuring the PA, Egypt, Qatar and Israel to improve living conditions in Gaza.
Israel remains committed to a policy of trying to maintain a balance in which Hamas serves as the Gaza entity strong enough to maintain a monopoly over the use of force from the territory it governs, and at the same time remains weak and deterred enough to be restrained from firing on Israel.
The continuing rounds of conflict raise doubts regarding the ability of Hamas to fulfill this role. It appears that PIJ and militant elements within Hamas are emboldened enough to challenge the Hamas leadership from time to time. Yet Hamas is always able to restore discipline and restraint, which means that the Israeli policy has not lost its relevance. The alternative to this policy is regarded as very costly both in the short and long term, and this is why Israel prefers to stick to its current path.
In the latest round, Israel raised the price for the Palestinians, while also showing greater readiness to improve their living conditions. If this strategy convinces the Palestinians in Gaza to reach an agreement that will guarantee an extended period of calm, then the policy will have been successful. But if it fails and there is another round of the war, and if the harassment of the Israeli population along the Gaza border continues, Israel may be forced to consider other options.
The fundamental problem is that the population of Gaza is comprised primarily of descendants of Palestinian refugees who have been indoctrinated by their leadership to believe that they are duty-bound to fight against Zionism until they can return to their ancestral homes in Israel. This narrative perpetuates the conflict and makes a political solution nearly impossible.
This means that the slogans that call for Israel to reach a political solution to the conflict are, unfortunately, detached from reality. Palestinians in Gaza truly desire and deserve to live better lives. Regrettably, they and their leadership do not see this goal as more vital than the struggle against the State of Israel.
This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
Weekend long read
-
1) The ITIC reports on documents found in the Gaza Strip showing Iranian
support for Hamas. “Hamas documents captured by IDF forces during the...
The pos...
Weekend long read
-
1) The ITIC reports on documents found in the Gaza Strip showing Iranian
support for Hamas. “Hamas documents captured by IDF forces during the...
The pos...
Censor the Internet to Save the Planet
-
“Governments Should Act Now to Curb Climate Disinformation” demands a
letter backed by Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Center
for Count...
A Friend Indeed
-
[image: Dry Bones cartoon, Trump, MAGA, President, Jerusalem, Embassy,
America, Huckabee,]
Welcome Ambassador Huckabee!
* * * And *IT'S TIME FOR YOU TO MAK...
▶ What Is the Crisis at CBS News?
-
View this post on Instagram A post shared by HonestReporting
(@honestreporting) From employing a Gaza producer with terror ties to
forcing journalists ...
An open letter to the police and CPS
-
To the police and CPS. With reference to complaints made by Gabriel
Kanter-Webber about Rupert Nathan. I understand that the matter has now
been referred...
7 Biggest Dungeons In Elder Scrolls Games
-
Please verify your email address. Labyrinthian in Skyrim is a maze of
Nordic ruins with fiends to battle and treasures to find. Sundercliff Watch
in Oblivi...
Gaza: A Brief Modern History Outline
-
Pre-1917 - Gaza part of the Ottoman Empire
1917 - Gaza conquered by British Army and subsequently becomes part of
Mandate Palestine
1948 - Gaza conquere...
One Choice: Fight to Win
-
Yesterday Israel preempted a potentially disastrous attack by Hezbollah on
the center of the country. Thirty minutes before launch time, our aircraft
destr...
Yom Hashoah 5784 – 2024
-
Israel’s Yom Hashoah began at sundown this evening with the annual ceremony
at Yad Vashem with torches lit in memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of
the...
Closing Jews Down Under Website
-
With a heavyish heart I am closing down the website after ten years.
It is and it isn’t an easy decision after 10 years of constant work. The
past...
‘Test & Trace’ is a mirage
-
Lockdown II thoughts: Day 1 Opposition politicians have been banging on
about the need for a ‘working’ Test & Trace system even more loudly than
the govern...
Wednesday, June 05, 2019
