Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, June 06, 2019

06/06 Links: Six Decades After Robert F. Kennedy Was Assassinated, His Legacy Is Attacked… By Democrats; De Blasio says anti-Semitism is strictly a ‘right-wing movement’

From Ian:

(Internet problems, so just one set of links today, blame the Russians.)

Six Decades After Robert F. Kennedy Was Assassinated, His Legacy Is Attacked… By Democrats

It’s possible to assassinate a great man twice — once while he lives, once when what he stood for is trampled upon. Fifty-one years ago today, in Los Angeles, hours after he won the California presidential primary, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, a Jerusalem-born Christian Arab who had three motivations: hatred of Israel, hatred of Jews, and hatred of Senator Kennedy, who was a good friend of both.

In what seemed like an attempt to destroy a piece of RFK’s legacy 51 years after his death, the California Democratic Party’s State Convention Resolutions Committee considered six vicious resolutions that were overtly anti-Israel and some antisemitic. It rejected them only after a protracted, headline-grabbing debate.

One resolution accused Israel of genocidal “settler colonialism.” Another urged California’s elected officials not to visit Israel unless they spent equal time visiting “Palestinian villages.” A third demanded the Palestinian “right of return” to Israel, which would be a death warrant for the Jewish state. Two more urged return of the Golan Heights to war criminal and mass-murderer Bashar Assad. The last resolution brazenly linked Israel with the murder of 11 Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life Synagogue last October. Jewish state legislator David Mandel alleged that the “Israeli government, along with some of its US backers … welcomed support from Christian fundamentalist and ultra-right groups in the United States and abroad, dangerously ignoring their deeply rooted antisemitism while aligning with their virulent Islamophobia.”

The moving force behind this sickening verbiage was the Arab American Caucus of the California Democratic Party, whose chairman Iyad Afalqa a few months ago demonized Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Facebook, labeling him a “shmuck,” a “traitor,” and a member of the “fascist Israel lobby.” Mandel said the set of resolutions were a “team effort,” praising colleagues Chris Yatooma, Kari Khoury, Yassar Dahbour, Murad Sarama, and Afalqa.

Mandel’s resolutions parallel other overtly antisemitic and anti-Israel actions by Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. What better way to slander the multi-ethnic Jewish state than to compare it with Apartheid South Africa and accuse American Jewish leaders of aligning themselves with American “white supremacy.” No greater libel can be imagined in the wake of the Pittsburgh and Poway synagogue murders.

Caroline Glick: Mark Levin and the New York Times' 120-year War Against the Jews

In his newest book, Unfreedom of the Press, Mark Levin demonstrates how the media in the United States have used their power not to provide the news but to shape political agendas to advance their progressive ideology.

Levin’s main contention in Unfreedom is that as presently constituted, the so-called mainstream media, which views itself as an activist media – that is, a partisan and ideological actor in public affairs in the United States rather than a neutral observer and recorder of events.

Given the progressive, activist media’s effective control over the public discourse in the U.S., today it acts not as the guarantor of freedom of expression, but as the most powerful bar to freedom of expression in America.

By determining what is “racist” and what is not racist, what is “politically correct” and what is unacceptable politically and culturally, the media do not serve as a vehicle for informing the public about the issues of the day and the state of the country and the world. Rather, they serve as indoctrination nodes, instructing the public what they can say and what they cannot say; what they can think, and what they cannot think; who can be accepted as legitimate and who must be ostracized and shamed as illegitimate.

One of the most significant chapters in Levin’s book appears at first glance to be out of place in his overall narrative. Most of the book is a discussion of the historical development of the media starting from the revolutionary period and continuing through the present day. He demonstrates how, beginning in the late 19th century, the media began presenting themselves not as partisans and champions of specific political factions and causes, but as objective observers whose function is to inform the public of current events. Their self-declared objectivity, however, was never entirely real. Indeed, it was deliberately dishonest. Because it was in this period that the media began to accept the terms of the progressive movement — which viewed the media, with its self-professed objectivity, as a central tool for advancing the movement’s radical agendas.

Understanding the Real Origin of that New York Times Cartoon

The outrage the Times’ cartoon produced was appropriate, but interpretations of what had happened fell short. Was the cartoon truly a lineal descendant of the anti-Semitic propaganda published in Der Stürmer, as some reflexively opined? To stop there was to accept the possibility that the offices of the New York Times’ international edition are packed with white supremacists. Even if a single production editor was responsible for the incident, as the paper asserted, the publisher’s decision to put the entire staff through sensitivity training to address “unconscious biases” would suggest that senior management was worried others in the company might be similarly infected. Yet the idea that the Times is infested with neo-Nazis seems patently silly.

What makes more sense is the possibility that the cartoon made it into print because the paper’s staff—whether singular or plural—saw it as “a political issue and not religious,” in the words of António Moreira Antunes, the artist who drew it. Like the slogan on the Soviet May Day parade installation, the face of the Israeli prime minister must have signaled to the New York Times staff that the cartoon was about Israel and therefore political—anti-Zionist perhaps, but not anti-Semitic.

Yet the conventional wisdom on the left that anti-Zionism is easily distinguishable from anti-Semitism has run into some obvious practical difficulties in recent months as the Women’s March, the U.K. Labour Party, Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, Marc Lamont Hill, and AJ+ Arabic, Al Jazeera’s popular online platform, have all shown an inability to distinguish between what they consider to be anti-Zionist political positions and overt anti-Semitism.

So if anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are not the same, why is the left doing such a poor job of distinguishing between the two? How is it that the side of the political spectrum that makes anti-racism one of the central tenets of its platform repeatedly stumbles into espousing such vile hatred?

The left would be less confused if it were able to soften temporarily its ahistorical, ideologically driven focus on the right as the sole source of anti-Semitism and devote some time to studying its own rich history of the same. In particular, it should look at the Cold War-era Soviet Union, which for decades not only practiced politically weaponized anti-Zionism but also exported it abroad. Many of the core tropes that animate the anti-Zionist left today are carbon copies of ideas that the KGB and the Department of Propaganda’s ideologues developed, weaponized, and popularized with particular intensity in the wake of the Six-Day War. It is there, not among the Nazi oeuvre, that the direct precursors to the New York Times cartoon and similar such efforts, in which the European press has been awash for the past two decades, are to be found.

Israeli Pundits Lament Lack Of Hipster Coffee Shops In Which To Overhear Statements That Confirm Their Biases (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Tel Aviv, June 6 - Journalists from some of the major media outlets in the country expressed frustration and disappointment today at the relative paucity of retail hot beverage establishments catering to a young, woke crowd where they can sit and eavesdrop on conversations that dovetail with the journalists' pre-existing worldview, and then present those remarks as illuminating or groundbreaking.

Reporters and columnists for Haaretz, Channel Ten, Kann radio, Galei Tzahal, and several other news operations came together this week to discuss Israel's shortage of hipster coffee shops, venues that elsewhere appear to function as a breeding-ground for overheard statements that either cast those who differ ideologically from the journalists in a negative light, or purport to indicate a shift in popular perceptions that heralds the onset of a newfound appreciation for the rightness and virtue of the journalists' own Weltanschauüng.

"We have lots and lots of coffee shops, and lots and lots of hipsters," acknowledged Rogel Alpher of Haaretz. "We even have lots of hispters who frequent coffee shops. What we don't seem to have - and this is obviously a result of the far-right demagoguery of Netanyahu and his minions - is a critical mass of hipsters in coffee shops upon whom we can rely to supply us with quotable, indicative remarks that confirm what we, in our superior wisdom, already know but must find a condescending way to convey to our readers."

"Twenty years ago coffee shops were barely a thing in Israel," observed Ilana Dayan, a television presenter. "We always had some people who fit the description 'hipster' though. I guess things didn't develop the same way in Israel as elsewhere, and that's a shame, because I'd love to be able to sit in a coffee shop booth within earshot of some hipsters and record the bits and pieces of what they say, with an eye toward doing a whole segment on how things are going to hell in a handbasket as indicated by snippets of overheard hipster conversations. Or maybe just tweet about it."

Not all the journalists present agreed that the lack of hipster coffee shops in Israel poses an insurmountable problem. "Come on, guys," urged Gideon Levy. "Since when do you need to actually overhear someone saying something in a coffee shop to make it true? Heck, since when do something have to even be true for us to claim it's true? It's like none of you have ever read a single word I've written."

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.

Land for peace doesn't have a great track record

While Israel's peace agreement with Egypt has remained pretty solid, major parts of the Sinai that Israel withdrew from have since become strongholds for ISIS-associated Islamist terror groups.

The parts of Lebanon that Israel withdrew from in 2000 were immediately taken over by the Islamist terror group Hezbollah.

The Gaza Strip, which Israel withdrew from for peace in 2005, was soon taken over by the Islamist terror group Hamas.

There is a pattern here, and it isn't "land for peace." It is "land for terrorists."

But everyone "knows" that the only path for peace is for Israel to do the exact same thing, again. The supposedly peaceful Palestinian Authority, which couldn't hold onto Gaza, is going to be strong enough to stop Hamas - which defeated it in the last elections.

Mahmoud Abbas, the man of peace, is the leader of Fatah that still has armed terror groups he promised to dismantle years ago, under the umbrella Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. Here they are in Gaza this week:

Not to mention that Abbas prioritizes paying terrorists over taking care of his own people.

The people who believe in Oslo-style peace are like cult members who discard all critical thinking skills to remain members. They worship the word "peace" while disconnecting it from its actual meaning. Previous failures are ignored or redirected into blaming Israel for Palestinian refusal to compromise or accept peace plans.

Even an intifada wasn't enough to wake up the world.

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.

Meanwhile, Israeli and Palestinian business owners are meeting and cooperating - and upsetting Palestinian leaders

Al Resalah quotes a story in Makor Rishon about a recent initiative between Israeli and Palestinian businesspeople.

While Palestinians are boycotting the Israeli approach of economic peace at the Bahrain workshop, there is another place where economic cooperation between the two sides is taking place.

The work was taking place through the Joint Chamber of Commerce in the West Bank, which is managed by Avi Sherman of the Ariel settlement and Ashraf al-Jabari of Hebron, who are conducting joint US-sponsored commercial deals.

Jabari is the only Palestinian businessman who has accepted the US invitation to attend the Bahrain summit. He claimed that other Palestinian businessmen will come to the summit and he will not be alone in it.

Jabari said, "The Bahrain summit is not part of the American peace plan, so the king of Bahrain informed me, and I trust him. We are facing an economic event only. If there are any political implications, I will not participate in it," he said.

"A US call was made to the joint Palestinian-Israeli Chamber of Commerce, and it is preferable for Palestinian businessmen and traders to participate in the Bahrain summit," Sherman said.

Jabari, a 45-year-old Palestinian businessman, founded last month a new political party preparing to run in the upcoming Palestinian elections, if they actually happen, and does not hide his desire to be close to Israel. His name is present in all initiatives between Palestinians and settlers, although he and a number of his comrades recently received threats from Fatah.

Three months ago, the Palestinian-Israeli Chamber of Commerce organized a two-day conference at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, attended by prominent Palestinian businessmen, US delegates and heads of settlement communities.

Saleh Abu Mayla, a businessman who participated in the conference, said he owned a factory to produce military boots for IDF soldiers, and he sees no reason to remove the Jews from the city of Hebron.

Khaldoun al-Husseini from Shu'fat in Jerusalem and a member of the Chamber of Commerce had breakfast with Senator Johnston at Beit Ja'abari in Hebron. Participants included the chairman of the Shomron settlement Yossi Dagan.

He has a factory in Ramallah and his distributors are deployed in most of the West Bank cities of Jenin, Nablus and Ramallah. There are more than 250 Palestinian businessmen with membership in the joint Palestinian-Israeli Chamber of Commerce, along with the same number of Israelis, he said.

The meeting in February between Jews - many from Judea and Samaria - and Palestinian businessmen did not receive very much coverage, in line with the media taking their cues from Palestinian officials in what should and shouldn't be covered. However, hundreds of Arab and Jewish business owners participated.

Here's a video about that conference, including interviews with some Arab attendees:

And much more detail as to the goals of the Chamber of Commerce in this press conference from February:

The real scandal isn't that the two groups are cooperating, but the opposition to initiatives like this both from Palestinian leaders and Westerners who pretend to care about Palestinian welfare.

To their mind, Jews in Judea and Samaria are so uniquely evil that even talking to them is a betrayal and somehow antithetical to peace.

Too many people have forgotten what the word "peace" means, thinking that it means "Oslo."

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 DC Dyke March this Friday says:

Dyke Marches are community-driven, grassroots, and meant to bring together all who identify as dykes through marching as an act of visibility and protest. It is non-Pride affiliated, with no corporate sponsors, permits, or cops - our goal is to encourage activism within our community and center trans people, queers, lesbians, and other dyke identities who are oft-marginalized by the mainstream LGBTQ movement.

Please bring signs, noise makers, banners, money to donate - this march is not a parade, but a public act of protest & celebration of the diversity of our dyke community.

Invite all the dykes you know! This is an INCLUSIVE space for ALL who identify as dykes. Hatred of any kind will not be tolerated.

But A Wider Bridge reports:

Through inquiries, Dyke March leadership indicated that Israeli flags and related national symbols are not welcome. When pressed about the need to create an inclusive environment for all queer women––including the many Jewish Dykes who wish to carry Jewish pride flags, representing both pieces of their inherent identities, and including the many Jewish and non-Jewish Dykes who consider Israel to be the rightful homeland of the Jewish people––organizers declared via Facebook that ‘participants [may] not bring pro-Israel paraphernalia’ including Israeli flags and pride flags with the Star of David on them. When pressed on flags and national symbols from other countries, it became clear Israel had been singled out.

This policy is reminiscent of the controversy surrounding the Chicago Dyke March two years ago, in which three marchers with a Jewish pride flag were asked to leave.

There's a lot of pushback on its Facebook page.

The Dyke March has no problem with Muslims, as it advertised an Iftar dinner for Muslims for Progressive Values last week. But it seems to have a problem with Jews.

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.

How to win back the squandered gift of 1967 (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

Recently I watched a short (10 minutes), very powerful video about Israel’s victory in the Six Days War. The film suggests that the victory was literally miraculous. It may well have been so, although miracles like the destruction of the enemy air forces or the capture of the Old City only happen when divine intervention is combined with careful preparation, struggle, and sacrifice by humans.

The film made me enormously proud of the accomplishments of the Jewish people, state, and army. And while I don’t believe in direct divine intervention in human affairs, this victory – along with the survival of the Jewish people since biblical times – made me wonder if I could be wrong about that.

So what’s the problem?

It seems to me that we have taken the gift that was given to us by Hashem and the IDF and little by little, through ignorance and weakness of will, squandered it.

The Sinai peninsula, conquered in 1967, is back in Egyptian hands. Yes, I know that we gained “peace” in return, but a better description of that peace would be that the US bribed the Egyptians to leave us alone with billions in aid, including military aid that translated into weapons that could only have been useful against us. Today Egypt has a government that sees its advantage in maintaining the cold peace; but if the Muslim Brotherhood that came to power for a short time (2012-13) with the help of Barack Obama had been more competent, we would be facing hostility no less bitter than in the days of Nasser. For this, we gave up natural resources including oil, but more important, the one thing that Israel lacks above all else, and the one lack that is most difficult to compensate for with high-tech cleverness: strategic depth.

The Gaza Strip, too, has reverted to Arab control. It is now to all intents and purposes a sovereign state, under control of Hamas, which bitterly oppresses the Arab population and uses it as a human shield in a permanent war of attrition against Israel. This came about as a result of Israel’s voluntary, unilateral abandonment of its settlements and military installations there. Gaza serves as a base for Hamas’ military activities and an excuse for international condemnation of Israel, which from time to time must defend herself against rocket attacks, incendiary and explosive devices carried by kites and balloons, and attempted incursions by terrorists, either over the border fence or by way of tunnels.

And the holiest spot in the world for the Jewish people? The very day after the conquest of the Old City, Moshe Dayan ordered the Israeli flag removed from the Dome of the Rock and gave administrative control of the Temple Mount to the Arab waqf. A “status quo” was created, in which Muslims and Jews would both be able to visit their sacred sites. However, in practice, Jewish rights were eroded little by little. Today, Jews can visit only at restricted times, can enter through just one gate, are forbidden to pray, carry objects (even water bottles), or even use water faucets dedicated to Muslim hand-washing. They are often exposed to harassment from hostile Muslims. There are few limitations on Muslims, and Arab children sometimes play football on the Mount, despite a court order forbidding it. The waqf has built several mosques on and under the Mount, and in the process destroyed or lost irreplaceable archaeologically valuable artifacts. Agreements call for archaeological supervision of construction work, but this requirement is ignored by the waqf.

As far as the rest of Judea and Samaria is concerned, the “international community,” in mortal fear of PLO terrorism and the Arab oil weapon, has been pushing and shoving at Israel ever since the 1967 war to abandon the territories that she liberated from Jordanian occupation. But it took Israel’s own Shimon Peres, in pursuit of a chimerical “New Middle East,” to stupidly bring our worst enemy, Yasser Arafat, back from exile where his organization was growing old and feeble, and allow him to establish his terrorist base in the biblical heartland of the Jewish state. We even gave him money and guns! We paid a steep price for this fashla during the Second Intifada, and we continue to pay today when Jews are murdered at random by the generation of young people raised under the educational system of Arafat and his successor, the porcine Mahmoud Abbas.

Although we can’t blame anyone but ourselves for the Oslo Accords – even US President Clinton was taken by surprise – the hostile European Union has made use of Oslo to advance its objective of forcing Israel out of the territories. In the guise of “humanitarian” aid to the Palestinian Authority, the EU today ignores Israeli zoning and building regulations and constructs public buildings to create facts on the ground in areas that, according to Oslo, are under Israeli control.

How did we allow all this to happen?

There are multiple reasons. One is that we don’t know how to negotiate. We like to think, “we are strong, we can afford to give up (whatever) in the interest of peace. The other side will appreciate our generosity.” Wrong. Whatever we give up, the Arabs take, and then ask for more. They don’t understand “generosity” – they see weakness. The negotiating process is like a ratchet: it can go in one direction – toward the Arabs – but can’t go in the other.

Another reason, often noted, is that we assume that everyone else is like us. We want peace, so Palestinian Arabs must want peace. We care about security, economic development, a good life for our children. They, on the other hand, want to get rid of us; it doesn’t matter if they would have a better life if they cooperate with us. We want an independent nation-state, but they are strongly loyal to their clans. We look for win-win solutions, but it is always more important to them to hurt Jews than to help Arabs.

Finally, the Arabs are always ready to use the “heckler’s veto,” or more correctly in this case, the “terrorist’s veto:” give us what we want or there will be no peace. What Israeli politician wants to be accused of being responsible for the unrest that follows standing up for ourselves?

What can we do differently? Unfortunately, we need to become less generous. We need to become tougher. We need to set limits, and stick to them. The EU is funding illegal construction in Judea and Samaria? Demolish it. Start with Khan al Ahmar, which even Israel’s left-leaning Supreme Court agrees must go, and which PM Netanyahu promised to remove months ago. We need to take back what we have given up, little by little, and strike hard against the “terrorist’s veto.” We are not going to get the Sinai back – and at this stage, I doubt that we want it. But the situation in and around Gaza can and must change radically. There must be a price paid for incendiary balloons, a price so high that they won’t want to pay it more than once.

The same goes for the Temple Mount. A bit at a time, the way we lost it, we must get it back. Of course there will be a reaction (i.e., a riot). But the reactions happen because the Arabs know they can get away with them. They know we will always back down, as we did with the metal detectors at the gates. They know we are afraid of confrontation, so they just push harder.

It’s a long process, and it will be painful. The Arabs are in the habit of winning; it will be hard to get them used to losing. But there are no win-win solutions for the Middle East. In this neighborhood, all the games are zero-sum.

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.

06/05 Links Pt2: BDS: The Big Lie; Glick: Ron DeSantis Takes on the BDS Movement; How Ancient Coins and Seals Prove the Jewish Connection to Jerusalem

From Ian:

BDS: The Big Lie

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.

Caroline Glick: Ron DeSantis Takes on the BDS Movement

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’s DeSantis removes Airbnb from state blacklist

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 embassies to mark 25 years since AMIA Jewish center bombing

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

🎧 https://t.co/UX3XTzzeMO pic.twitter.com/YNFZLrGETe
— Jonny Gould (@jonnygould) June 4, 2019

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.

Cartoon of the Day: From the river to the sea....

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.

06/05 Links Pt1: Dershowitz: The Palestinians Miss Yet Another Opportunity; PA: Salaries for terrorists more important than cancer treatment for 7-year-old

From Ian:

Alan M. Dershowitz: The Palestinians Miss Yet Another Opportunity

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.

How the Palestinians Failed to Move toward a State during Oslo

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.

PMW: PA: Salaries for terrorists more important than cancer treatment for 7-year-old

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."